The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 23
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Title: The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 23
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release date: January 8, 2010 [eBook #30894]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON - SWANSTON EDITION, VOL. 23 ***
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THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
SWANSTON EDITION
VOLUME XXIII
_Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five
Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies
have been printed, of which only Two Thousand
Copies are for sale._
_This is No._ .......
[Illustration: (signed)]
THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON
VOLUME TWENTY-THREE
LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND
WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL
AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM
HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN
AND COMPANY MDCCCCXII
_For permission to use the_ LETTERS _in the_
SWANSTON EDITION OF STEVENSON'S WORKS
_the Publishers are indebted to the kindness of_
MESSRS. METHUEN & CO., LTD.
_ALL RIGHTS RESERVED_
THE LETTERS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
EDITED BY
SIDNEY COLVIN
PARTS I--VI
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION xvii
I.--STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH
TRAVELS AND EXCURSIONS
INTRODUCTORY 3
LETTERS--
To Thomas Stevenson 13
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 14
To the Same 15
To the Same 17
To the Same 19
To the Same 21
To the Same 24
To Mrs. Churchill Babington 30
To Alison Cunningham 32
To Charles Baxter 33
To the Same 35
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 36
To the Same 38
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 39
To Thomas Stevenson 42
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 44
To Charles Baxter 46
To Charles Baxter 49
To the Same 52
II.--STUDENT DAYS--_continued_
NEW FRIENDSHIPS--ORDERED SOUTH
INTRODUCTORY 54
LETTERS--
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 56
To Mrs. Sitwell 57
To the Same 58
To the Same 61
To the Same 63
To the Same 66
To the Same 68
To the Same 71
To the Same 74
To Sidney Colvin 76
To the Same 76
To Mrs. Sitwell 77
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 81
To Mrs. Sitwell 83
To the Same 83
To the Same 86
To Charles Baxter 89
To Mrs. Sitwell 91
To the Same 93
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 94
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 96
To the Same 97
To the Same 99
To Mrs. Sitwell 101
To the Same 103
To the Same 104
To Sidney Colvin 105
To the Same 106
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 107
To Sidney Colvin 108
To Mrs. Sitwell 110
To Thomas Stevenson 111
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 112
To Thomas Stevenson 113
To Mrs. Sitwell 115
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 116
To the Same 117
To the Same 118
To the Same 118
To the Same 120
To Mrs. Sitwell 121
III.--STUDENT DAYS--_concluded_
HOME AGAIN--LITERATURE AND LAW
INTRODUCTORY 123
LETTERS--
To Sidney Colvin 124
To Mrs. Sitwell 125
To Sidney Colvin 127
To Mrs. Sitwell 127
To Sidney Colvin 129
To Mrs. Sitwell 131
To the Same 133
To the Same 137
To the Same 139
To Sidney Colvin 140
To Mrs. Sitwell 140
To Sidney Colvin 141
To the Same 143
To Mrs. Sitwell 144
To the Same 148
To the Same 149
To the Same 151
To the Same 153
To the Same 155
To the Same 156
To Sidney Colvin 157
To Mrs. Sitwell 158
To the Same 161
To the Same 164
To the Same 166
To Sidney Colvin 167
To Mrs. Sitwell 168
To Sidney Colvin 169
To Mrs. Sitwell 171
To Sidney Colvin 173
To Mrs. Sitwell 174
To the Same 174
To the Same 175
To the Same 177
To Sidney Colvin 178
To the Same 178
To Mrs. Sitwell 179
To the Same 180
To the Same 181
IV.--ADVOCATE AND AUTHOR
EDINBURGH--PARIS--FONTAINEBLEAU
INTRODUCTORY 182
LETTERS--
To Sidney Colvin 186
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 187
To Mrs. Sitwell 187
To the Same 189
To Sidney Colvin 191
To Charles Baxter 193
To Sidney Colvin 195
To the Same 196
To Mrs. Sitwell 197
To the Same 198
To Mrs. de Mattos 199
To Mrs. Sitwell 200
To Sidney Colvin 201
To the Same 202
To Mrs. Sitwell 203
To W. E. Henley 204
To Mrs. Sitwell 205
To Sidney Colvin 206
To Mrs. Sitwell 207
To A. Patchett Martin 208
To the Same 209
To Sidney Colvin 211
To the Same 212
To Thomas Stevenson 213
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 215
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 215
To the Same 216
To W. E. Henley 217
To Charles Baxter 217
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 218
To W. E. Henley 219
To Edmund Gosse 219
To W. E. Henley 221
To Miss Jane Balfour 223
To Edmund Gosse 224
To Sidney Colvin 225
To Edmund Gosse 226
V.--THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
_S.S. DEVONIA_--MONTEREY AND SAN FRANCISCO--MARRIAGE
INTRODUCTORY 228
LETTERS--
To Sidney Colvin 230
To the Same 232
To W. E. Henley 233
To Sidney Colvin 234
To the Same 235
To Edmund Gosse 236
To W. E. Henley 238
To the Same 238
To Sidney Colvin 241
To P. G. Hamerton 242
To Edmund Gosse 243
To Sidney Colvin 244
To Edmund Gosse 245
To Sidney Colvin 247
To W. E. Henley 249
To Sidney Colvin 251
To the Same 253
To W. E. Henley 255
To the Same 256
To Sidney Colvin 258
To Edmund Gosse 260
To Charles Baxter 262
To Professor Meiklejohn 263
To W. E. Henley 265
To Sidney Colvin 267
To the Same 269
To J. W. Ferrier 269
To Edmund Gosse 271
To Dr. W. Bamford 272
To Sidney Colvin 272
To the Same 273
To the Same 274
To C. W. Stoddard 275
To Sidney Colvin 276
VI.--ALPINE WINTERS AND HIGHLAND SUMMERS
INTRODUCTORY 279
LETTERS--
To Sidney Colvin 284
To Charles Baxter 285
To Isobel Strong 286
To A. G. Dew-Smith 287
To Thomas Stevenson 290
To Sidney Colvin 291
To Edmund Gosse 292
To the Same 293
To Charles Warren Stoddard 294
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 296
To Sidney Colvin 297
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 298
To Sidney Colvin 300
To Horatio F. Brown 303
To the Same 303
To the Same 304
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 305
To Edmund Gosse 306
To Sidney Colvin 308
To Professor Æneas Mackay 309
To the Same 309
To Sidney Colvin 310
To Edmund Gosse 311
To Charles J. Guthrie 312
To the Same 312
To Edmund Gosse 313
To P. G. Hamerton 314
To Sidney Colvin 316
To W. E. Henley 317
To the Same 319
To Sidney Colvin 320
To Dr. Alexander Japp 321
To Mrs. Sitwell 323
To Edmund Gosse 324
To the Same 325
To the Same 325
To W. E. Henley 326
To Dr. Alexander Japp 327
To W. E. Henley 328
To the Same 330
To Thomas Stevenson 331
To Edmund Gosse 332
To W. E. Henley 333
To P. G. Hamerton 335
To Charles Baxter 336
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 337
To Edmund Gosse 338
To Sidney Colvin 339
To Alison Cunningham 340
To Charles Baxter 341
To W. E. Henley 341
To the Same 342
To Alexander Ireland 345
To Mrs. Gosse 347
To Sidney Colvin 349
To Edmund Gosse 350
To Dr. Alexander Japp 351
To the Same 351
To W. E. Henley 352
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 354
To R. A. M. Stevenson 356
To Trevor Haddon 357
To Edmund Gosse 359
To Trevor Haddon 360
To Edmund Gosse 360
To W. E. Henley 361
INTRODUCTION
The circumstances which have made me responsible for selecting and
editing the correspondence of Robert Louis Stevenson are the following.
He was for many years my closest friend. We first met in 1873, when he
was in his twenty-third year and I in my twenty-ninth, at the place and
in the manner mentioned at page 54 of this volume. It was my good
fortune then to be of use to him, partly by such technical hints as even
the most brilliant beginner may take from an older hand, partly by
recommending him to editors--first, if I remember right, to Mr. Hamerton
and Mr. Richmond Seeley, of the Portfolio, then in succession to Mr.
George Grove (Macmillan's Magazine), Mr. Leslie Stephen (Cornhill), and
Dr. Appleton (the Academy); and somewhat, lastly, by helping to raise
him in the estimation of parents who loved but for the moment failed to
understand him. It belonged to the richness of his nature to repay in
all things much for little, [Greek: hekatomboi enneaboiôn], and from
these early relations sprang the affection and confidence, to me
inestimable, of which the following correspondence bears evidence.
One day in the autumn of 1888, in the island of Tahiti, during an
illness which he supposed might be his last, Stevenson put into the
hands of his stepson, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, a sealed paper with a request
that it might be opened after his death. He recovered, and had strength
enough to enjoy six years more of active life and work in the Pacific
Islands. When the end came, the paper was opened and found to contain,
among other things, the expression of his wish that I should prepare for
publication "a selection of his letters and a sketch of his life." I had
already, in 1892, when he was anxious--needlessly, as it turned out--as
to the provision he might be able to leave for his family, received from
him a suggestion that "some kind of a book" might be made out of the
monthly journal-letters which he had been in the habit of writing me
from Samoa: letters begun at first with no thought of publication and
simply in order to maintain our intimacy, so far as might be,
undiminished by separation. This part of his wishes I was able to carry
out promptly, and the result appeared under the title _Vailima Letters_
in the autumn following his death (1895). Lack of leisure delayed the
execution of the remaining part. For one thing, the body of
correspondence which came in from various quarters turned out much
larger than had been anticipated. He did not love writing letters, and
will be found somewhere in the following pages referring to himself as
one "essentially and originally incapable of the art epistolary." That
he was a bad correspondent had come to be an accepted view among his
friends; but in truth it was only during one period of his life that he
at all deserved such a reproach.[1] At other times, as became apparent
after his death, he had shown a degree of industry and spirit in
letter-writing extraordinary considering his health and his occupations.
It was indeed he and not his friends, as will abundantly appear in the
course of these volumes, who oftenest had cause to complain of answers
neglected or delayed. His letters, it is true, were often the most
informal in the world, and he generally neglected to date them, a habit
which is the despair of editors: but after his own whim and fashion he
wrote a vast number, so that the work of sifting, copying, and arranging
was long and laborious. It was not until the autumn of 1899 that the
_Letters to his Family and Friends_ were ready for publication, and in
the meantime the task of writing the _Life_ had been taken over by his
cousin and my friend, Mr. Graham Balfour, who completed it two years
later.
"In considering the scale and plan on which my friend's instruction
should be carried out" (I quote, with the change of a word or two, from
my Introduction of 1899), "it seemed necessary to take into account, not
his own always modest opinion of himself, but the place which he seemed
likely to take ultimately in the world's regard. The four or five years
following the death of a writer much applauded in his lifetime are
generally the years when the decline of his reputation begins, if it is
going to suffer decline at all. At present, certainly, Stevenson's name
seems in no danger of going down. On the stream of daily literary
reference and allusion it floats more actively than ever. In another
sense its vitality is confirmed by the material test of continued sales
and of the market. Since we have lost him other writers, whose
beginnings he watched with sympathetic interest, have come to fill a
greater immediate place in public attention; but none has exercised
Stevenson's peculiar and personal power to charm, to attach, and to
inspirit. By his study of perfection in form and style--qualities for
which his countrymen in general have been apt to care little--he might
seem destined to give pleasure chiefly to the fastidious and the
artistically minded. But as to its matter, the main appeal of his work
is not to any mental tastes and fashions of the few; it is rather to
universal, hereditary instincts, to the primitive sources of imaginative
excitement and entertainment in the race.
"The voice of the _advocatus diaboli_ has been heard against him, as it
is right and proper that it should be heard against any man before his
reputation can be held fully established. One such advocate in this
country has thought to dispose of him by the charge of 'externality.'
But the reader who remembers things like the sea-frenzy of Gordon
Darnaway, or the dialogue of Markheim with his other self in the house
of murder, or the re-baptism of the spirit of Seraphina in the forest
dews, or the failure of Herrick to find in the waters of the island
lagoon a last release from dishonour, or the death of Goguelat, or the
appeal of Kirstie Elliot in the midnight chamber--such a reader can only
smile at a criticism like this and put it by. These and a score of other
passages breathe the essential poetry and significance of things as they
reveal themselves to true masters only: they are instinct at once with
the morality and the romance which lie deep together at the soul of
nature and experience. Not in vain had Stevenson read the lesson of the
Lantern-Bearers, and hearkened to the music of the pipes of Pan. He was
feeling his way all his life towards a fuller mastery of his means,
preferring always to leave unexpressed what he felt that he could not
express adequately; and in much of his work was content merely to amuse
himself and others. But even when he is playing most fancifully with his
art and his readers, as in the shudders, tempered with laughter, of the
_Suicide Club_, or the airy sentimental comedy of _Providence and the
Guitar_, or the schoolboy historical inventions of Dickon Crookback and
the old sailor Arblaster, a writer of his quality cannot help striking
notes from the heart of life and the inwardness of things deeper than
will ever be struck, or even apprehended, by another who labours, with
never a smile either of his own or of his reader's, upon the most solemn
enterprises of realistic fiction, but is born without the magician's
touch and insight.
"Another advocate on the same side, in the United States, has made much
of the supposed dependence of this author on his models, and classed him
among writers whose inspiration is imitative and second-hand. But this
is to be quite misled by the well-known passage of Stevenson's own, in
which he speaks of himself as having in his prentice years played the
'sedulous ape' to many writers of different styles and periods. In doing
this he was not seeking inspiration, but simply practising the use of
the tools which were to help him to express his own inspirations. Truly
he was always much of a reader: but it was life, not books, that always
in the first degree allured and taught him.
'He loved of life the myriad sides,
Pain, prayer, or pleasure, act or sleep,
As wallowing narwhals love the deep'--
so with just self-knowledge he wrote of himself; and the books which he
most cared for and lived with were those of which the writers seemed--to
quote again a phrase of his own--to have been 'eavesdropping at the door
of his heart': those which told of experiences or cravings after
experience, pains, pleasures, or conflicts of the spirit, which in the
eagerness of youthful living and thinking had already been his own. No
man, in fact, was ever less inclined to take anything at second-hand.
The root of all originality was in him, in the shape of an extreme
natural vividness of perception, imagination, and feeling. An
instinctive and inbred unwillingness to accept the accepted and conform
to the conventional was of the essence of his character, whether in life
or art, and was a source to him both of strength and weakness. He would
not follow a general rule--least of all if it was a prudential rule--of
conduct unless he was clear that it was right according to his private
conscience; nor would he join, in youth, in the ordinary social
amusements of his class when he had once found out that they did not
amuse _him_; nor wear their clothes if he could not feel at ease and be
himself in them; nor use, whether in speech or writing, any trite or
inanimate form of words that did not faithfully and livingly express his
thought. A readier acceptance alike of current usages and current
phrases might have been better for him, but was simply not in his
nature. No reader of this book will close it, I am sure, without feeling
that he has been throughout in the company of a spirit various indeed
and many-mooded, but profoundly sincere and real. Ways that in another
might easily have been mere signs of affectation were in him the true
expression of a nature ten times more spontaneously itself and
individually alive than that of others. Self-consciousness, in many
characters that possess it, deflects and falsifies conduct; and so does
the dramatic instinct. Stevenson was self-conscious in a high degree,
but only as a part of his general activity of mind; only in so far as he
could not help being an extremely intelligent spectator of his own
doings and feelings: these themselves came from springs of character and
impulse much too deep and strong to be diverted. He loved also, with a
child's or actor's gusto, to play a part and make a drama out of life:
but the part was always for the moment his very own: he had it not in
him to pose for anything but what he truly was.
"When a man so constituted had once mastered his craft of letters, he
might take up whatever instrument he pleased with the instinctive and
just confidence that he would play upon it to a tune and with a manner
of his own. This is indeed the true mark and test of his originality. He
has no need to be, or to seem, especially original in the form and mode
of literature which he attempts. By his choice of these he may at any
time give himself and his reader the pleasure of recalling, like a
familiar air, some strain of literary association; but in so doing he
only adds a secondary charm to his work; the vision, the temperament,
the mode of conceiving and handling, are in every case personal to
himself. He may try his hand in youth at a _Sentimental Journey_, but R.
L. S. cannot choose but be at the opposite pole of human character and
feeling from Laurence Sterne. In tales of mystery, allegorical or other,
he may bear in mind the precedent of Edgar Poe, and yet there is nothing
in style and temper much wider apart than _Markheim_ and _Jekyll and
Hyde_ are from the _Murders in the Rue Morgue_ or _William Wilson_. He
may set out to tell a pirate story for boys 'exactly in the ancient
way,' and it will come from him not in the ancient way at all, but
re-minted; marked with a sharpness and saliency in the characters, a
private stamp of buccaneering ferocity combined with smiling humour, an
energy of vision and happy vividness of presentment, which are shiningly
his own. Another time, he may desert the paths of Kingston and
Ballantyne for those of Sir Walter Scott; but literature presents few
stronger contrasts than between any scene of _Waverley_ or _Redgauntlet_
and any scene of the _Master of Ballantrae_ or _Catriona_, whether in
their strength or weakness: and it is the most loyal lovers of the older
master who take the greatest pleasure in reading the work of the
younger, so much less opulently gifted as is probable--though we must
remember that Stevenson died at the age when Scott wrote _Waverley_--so
infinitely more careful of his gift. Stevenson may even blow upon the
pipe of Burns and yet his tune will be no echo, but one which utters the
heart and mind of a Scots maker who has his own outlook on life, his own
special and profitable vein of smiling or satirical contemplation.
"Not by reason, then, of 'externality,' for sure, nor yet of
imitativeness, will this writer lose his hold on the attention and
regard of his countrymen. The debate, before his place in literature is
settled, must rather turn on other points: as whether the genial
essayist and egoist or the romantic inventor and narrator was the
stronger in him--whether the Montaigne and Pepys elements prevailed in
his literary composition or the Scott and Dumas elements--a question
indeed which among those who care for him most has always been at issue.
Or again, what degree of true inspiring and illuminating power belongs
to the gospel, or gospels, airily encouraging or gravely didactic, which
are set forth in the essays with so captivating a grace? Or whether in
romance and tale he had a power of inventing and constructing a whole
fable comparable to his admitted power of conceiving and presenting
single scenes and situations in a manner which stamps them indelibly on
the reader's mind? And whether his figures are sustained continuously by
the true spontaneous breath of creation, or are but transitorily
animated at happy moments by flashes of spiritual and dramatic insight,
aided by the conscious devices of his singularly adroit and spirited
art? These are questions which no criticism but that of time can solve.
To contend, as some do, that strong creative impulse and so keen an
artistic self-consciousness as Stevenson's was cannot exist together, is
quite idle. The truth, of course, is that the deep-seated energies of
imaginative creation are found sometimes in combination, and sometimes
not in combination, with an artistic intelligence thus keenly conscious
of its own purpose and watchful of its own working.
"Once more, it may be questioned whether, among the many varieties of
work which Stevenson has left, all distinguished by a grace and
precision of workmanship which are the rarest qualities in English art,
there are any which can be pointed to as absolute masterpieces, such as
the future cannot be expected to let die. Let the future decide. What is
certain is that posterity must either be very well or very ill occupied
if it can consent to give up so much sound entertainment, and better
than entertainment, as this writer afforded his contemporaries. In the
meantime, among judicious readers on both sides of the Atlantic,
Stevenson stands, I think it may safely be said, as a true master of
English prose; scarcely surpassed for the union of lenity and lucidity
with suggestive pregnancy and poetic animation; for harmony of cadence
and the well-knit structure of sentences; and for the art of imparting
to words the vital quality of things, and making them convey the
precise--sometimes, let it be granted, the too curiously
precise--expression of the very shade and colour of the thought,
feeling, or vision in his mind. He stands, moreover, as the writer who,
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, has handled with the most
of freshness and inspiriting power the widest range of established
literary forms--the moral, critical, and personal essay, travels
sentimental and other, romances and short tales both historical and
modern, parables and tales of mystery, boys' stories of adventure,
memoirs--nor let lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish,
and especially nursery verse, a new vein for genius to work in, be
forgotten. To some of these forms Stevenson gave quite new life; through
all alike he expressed vividly an extremely personal way of seeing and
being, a sense of nature and romance, of the aspects of human existence
and problems of human conduct, which was essentially his own. And in so
doing he contrived to make friends and even lovers of his readers. Those
whom he attracts at all (and there is no writer who attracts every one)
are drawn to him over and over again, finding familiarity not lessen but
increase the charm of his work, and desiring ever closer intimacy with
the spirit and personality which they divine behind it.
"As to the fitting scale, then, on which to treat the memory of a man
who fills five years after his death such a place as this in the general
regard, and who has desired that a selection from his letters shall be
made public, the word 'selection' has evidently to be given a pretty
liberal interpretation. Readers, it must be supposed, will scarce be
content without the opportunity of a fairly ample intercourse with such
a man as he was accustomed to reveal himself in writing to his
familiars. In choosing from among the material before me" (I still quote
from the Introduction of 1899), "I have used the best discretion that I
could. Stevenson's feelings and relations throughout life were in almost
all directions so warm and kindly, that very little had to be suppressed
from fear of giving pain.[2] On the other hand, he drew people towards
him with so much confidence and affection, and met their openness with
so much of his own, that an editor could not but feel the frequent risk
of inviting readers to trespass too far on purely private affairs and
feelings, including those of the living. This was a point upon which in
his lifetime he felt strongly. That excellent critic, Mr. Walter
Raleigh, has noticed, as one of the merits of Stevenson's personal
essays and accounts of travel, that few men have written more or more
attractively of themselves without ever taking the public unduly into
familiarity or overstepping proper bounds of reticence. Public prying
into private lives, the propagation of gossip by the press, and printing
of private letters during the writer's lifetime, were things he hated.
Once, indeed, he very superfluously gave himself a dangerous cold, by
dancing before a bonfire in his garden at the news of a 'society' editor
having been committed to prison; and the only approach to a difference
he ever had with one of his lifelong friends arose from the publication,
without permission, of one of his letters written during his first
Pacific voyage.
"How far, then, must I regard his instructions about publication as
authorising me to go after his death beyond the limits which he had been
so careful in observing and desiring others to observe in life? How much
may now fairly become public of that which had been held sacred and
hitherto private among his friends? To cut out all that is strictly
personal and intimate were to leave his story untold and half the charm
of his character unrevealed: to put in too much were to break all bonds
of that privacy which he so carefully regarded while he lived. I know
not if I have at all been able to hit the mean, and to succeed in making
these letters, as it has been my object to make them, present, without
offence or intrusion, a just, a living, and proportionate picture of the
man as far as they will yield it. There is one respect in which his own
practice and principle has had to be in some degree violated, if the
work was to be done at all. Except in the single case of the essay
_Ordered South_, he would never in writing for the public adopt the
invalid point of view, or invite any attention to his infirmities. 'To
me,' he says, 'the medicine bottles on my chimney and the blood on my
handkerchief are accidents; they do not colour my view of life; and I
should think myself a trifler and in bad taste if I introduced the world
to these unimportant privacies.' But from his letters to his family and
friends these matters could not possibly be left out. The tale of his
life, in the years when he was most of a correspondent, was in truth a
tale of daily and nightly battle against weakness and physical distress
and danger. To those who loved him, the incidents of this battle were
communicated, sometimes gravely, sometimes laughingly. I have greatly
cut down such bulletins, but could not possibly omit them altogether."
In 1911, twelve years after the above words were written, the estimate
expressed in them of Stevenson's qualities as a writer, and of the place
he seemed likely to maintain in the affections of English readers all
the world over, had been amply confirmed by the lapse of time. The sale
of his works kept increasing rather than diminishing. Editions kept
multiplying. A new generation of readers had found life and letters,
nature and human nature, touched by him at so many points with so
vivifying and illuminating a charm that it had become scarcely possible
to take up any newspaper or magazine and not find some reference to his
work and name. Both series of letters--even one mainly concerned, as the
_Vailima Letters_ are, with matters of interest both remote and
transitory--had been read in edition after edition: and readers had been
and were continually asking for more. The time was thought to have come
for a new and definitive edition, in which the two series of letters
already published should be thrown into one, and as much new material
added as could be found suitable. The task of carrying out this scheme
fell again upon me. The new edition constituted in effect a nearly
complete epistolary autobiography. It contained not less than a hundred
and fifty of Stevenson's letters hitherto unpublished. They dated from
all periods of his life, those written in the brilliant and troubled
days of his youth predominating, and giving a picture, perhaps unique in
its kind, of a character and talent in the making. The present edition
is a reprint of the edition of 1911, with a few errors of transcription
and one or two of date corrected, and with a very few new letters added.
Much, of course, remains and ought to remain unprinted. Some of the
outpourings of the early time are too sacred and intimate for publicity.
Many of the letters of his maturer years are dry business letters of no
general interest: many others are mere scraps tossed in jest to his
familiars and full of catchwords and code-words current in their talk
but meaningless to outsiders. Above all, many have to be omitted because
they deal with the intimate affairs of private persons. Stevenson has
been sometimes called an egoist, as though he had been one in the
practical sense as well as in the sense of taking a lively interest in
his own moods and doings. Nothing can be more untrue. The letters
printed in these volumes are indeed for the most part about himself: but
it was of himself that his correspondents of all things most cared to
hear. If the letters concerned with the private affairs of other people
could be printed, as of course they cannot, the balance would come more
than even. We should see him throwing himself with sympathetic ardour
and without thought of self into the cares and interests of his
correspondents, and should learn to recognise him as having been truly
the helper in many a relation where he might naturally have been taken
for the person helped.
As to the form in which the Letters are now presented, they fill three
volumes instead of the four of the 1911 edition, the division into
fourteen sections according to date being retained. As to the text, it
is faithful to the original except in so far as I have freely used the
editorial privilege of omission when I thought it desirable, and as I
have not felt myself bound to reproduce slips and oddities, however
characteristic, of spelling. In formal matters like the use of
quote-marks, italics, and so forth, I have adopted a more uniform
practice than his, which was very casual and variable.
To some readers, perhaps--(from this point I again resume my
Introduction of 1899, but with more correction and abridgment)--to some,
perhaps, the very lack of art as a correspondent to which Stevenson, as
above quoted, pleads guilty may give the reading an added charm and
flavour. What he could do as an artist in letters we know. I remember
Sir John Millais, a shrewd and very independent judge of books, calling
across to me at a dinner-table, "You know Stevenson, don't you?" and
then going on, "Well, I wish you would tell him from me, if he cares to
know, that to my mind he is the very first of living artists. I don't
mean writers merely, but painters and all of us. Nobody living can see
with such an eye as that fellow, and nobody is such a master of his
tools." But in his letters, excepting a few written in youth and having
more or less the character of exercises, and a few in after years which
were intended for the public eye, Stevenson the deliberate artist is
scarcely forthcoming at all. He does not care a fig for order or logical
sequence or congruity, or for striking a key of expression and keeping
it, but becomes simply the most spontaneous and unstudied of human
beings. He has at his command the whole vocabularies of the English and
Scottish languages, classical and slang, with good stores of the French,
and tosses and tumbles them about irresponsibly to convey the impression
or affection, the mood or freak of the moment; pouring himself out in
all manner of rhapsodical confessions and speculations, grave or gay,
notes of observation and criticism, snatches of remembrance and
autobiography, moralisings on matters uppermost for the hour in his
mind, comments on his own work or other people's, or mere idle fun and
foolery.
By this medley of moods and manners, Stevenson's letters at their best
come nearer than anything else to the full-blooded charm and variety of
his conversation. Nearer, yet not quite near; for it was in company only
that his genial spirit rose to his very best. Few men probably have had
in them such a richness and variety of human nature; and few can ever
have been better gifted than he was to express the play of being that
was in him by means of the apt, expressive word and the animated look
and gesture. _Divers et ondoyant_, in the words of Montaigne, beyond
other men, he seemed to contain within himself a whole troop of
singularly assorted characters. Though prose was his chosen medium of
expression, he was by temperament a born poet, to whom the world was
full of enchantment and of latent romance, only waiting to take shape
and substance in the forms of art. It was his birthright--
"to hear
The great bell beating far and near--
The odd, unknown, enchanted gong
That on the road hales men along,
That from the mountain calls afar,
That lures the vessel from a star,
And with a still, aerial sound
Makes all the earth enchanted ground."
He had not only the poet's mind but the poet's senses: in youth ginger
was only too hot in his mouth, and the chimes at midnight only too
favourite a music. At the same time he was not less a born preacher and
moralist and son of the Covenanters after his fashion. He had about him,
as has been said, little spirit of social or other conformity; but an
active and searching private conscience kept him for ever calling in
question both the grounds of his own conduct and the validity of the
accepted codes and compromises of society. He must try to work out a
scheme of morality suitable to his own case and temperament, which found
the prohibitory law of Moses chill and uninspiring, but in the Sermon on
the Mount a strong incentive to all those impulses of pity and charity
to which his heart was prone. In early days his sense of social
injustice and the inequalities of human opportunity made him inwardly
much of a rebel, who would have embraced and acted on theories of
socialism or communism, could he have found any that did not seem to him
at variance with ineradicable instincts of human nature. All his life
the artist and the moralist in him alike were in rebellion against the
bourgeois spirit,--against timid, negative, and shuffling substitutes
for active and courageous well-doing,--and declined to worship at the
shrine of what he called the bestial goddesses Comfort and
Respectability. The moralist in him helped the artist by backing with
the force of a highly sensitive conscience his instinctive love of
perfection in his work. The artist qualified the moralist by
discountenancing any preference for the harsh, the sour, or the
self-mortifying forms of virtue, and encouraging the love for all tender
or heroic, glowing, generous, and cheerful forms.
Above all things, perhaps, Stevenson was by instinct an adventurer and
practical experimentalist in life. Many poets are content to dream, and
many, perhaps most, moralists to preach: Stevenson must ever be doing
and undergoing. He was no sentimentalist, to pay himself with fine
feelings whether for mean action or slack inaction. He had an insatiable
zest for all experiences, not the pleasurable only, but including the
more harsh and biting--those that bring home to a man the pinch and
sting of existence as it is realised by the disinherited of the world,
and excluding only what he thought the prim, the conventional, the
dead-alive, and the cut-and-dry. On occasion the experimentalist and man
of adventure in him would enter into special partnership with the
moralist and man of conscience: he was prone to plunge into difficult
social passes and ethical dilemmas, which he might sometimes more wisely
have avoided, for the sake of trying to behave in them to the utmost
according to his own personal sense of the obligations of honour, duty,
and kindness. In yet another part of his being he cherished, as his
great countryman Scott had done before him, an intense underlying
longing for the life of action, danger and command. "Action, Colvin,
action," I remember his crying eagerly to me with his hand on my arm as
we lay basking for his health's sake in a boat off the scented shores of
the Cap Martin. Another time--this was on his way to a winter cure at
Davos--some friend had given him General Hamley's _Operations of
War_:--"in which," he writes to his father, "I am drowned a thousand
fathoms deep, and O that I had been a soldier is still my cry."
Fortunately, with all these ardent and divers instincts, there were
present two invaluable gifts besides: that of humour, which for all his
stress of being and vivid consciousness of self saved him from ever
seeing himself for long together out of a just proportion, and kept
wholesome laughter always ready at his lips; and that of a most tender
and loyal heart, which through all his experiments and agitations made
the law of kindness the one ruling law of his life. In the end, lack of
health determined his career, giving the chief part in his life to the
artist and man of imagination, and keeping the man of action a prisoner
in the sickroom until, by a singular turn of destiny, he was able to
wring a real prolonged and romantically successful adventure out of that
voyage to the Pacific which had been, in its origin, the last despairing
resource of the invalid.
Again, it was characteristic of this multiple personality that he never
seemed to be cramped like the rest of us, at any given time of life,
within the limits of his proper age, but to be child, boy, young man,
and old man all at once. There was never a time in his life when
Stevenson had to say with St. Augustine, "Behold! my childhood is dead,
but I am alive." The child lived on always in him, not in memory only,
but in real survival, with all its freshness of perception unimpaired,
and none of its play instincts in the least degree extinguished or made
ashamed. As for the perennial boy in Stevenson, that is too apparent to
need remark. It was as a boy for boys that he wrote the best known of
his books, _Treasure Island_, and with all boys that he met, provided
they were really boys and not prigs nor puppies, he was instantly and
delightedly at home. At the same time, even when I first knew him, he
showed already surprising occasional traits and glimpses of old
sagacity, of premature life-wisdom and experience.
Once more, it is said that in every poet there must be something of the
woman. If to be quick in sympathy and feeling, ardent in attachment, and
full of pity for the weak and suffering, is to be womanly, Stevenson was
certainly all those; he was even like a woman in being [Greek:
artidakrus], easily moved to tears at the touch of pity or affection, or
even at any specially poignant impression of art or beauty. But yet, if
any one word were to be chosen for the predominant quality of his
character and example, I suppose that word would be manly. In his gentle
and complying nature there were strains of iron tenacity and will:
occasionally even, let it be admitted, of perversity and Scottish
"thrawnness." He had both kinds of physical courage--the active,
delighting in danger, and the passive, unshaken in endurance. In the
moral courage of facing situations and consequences, of readiness to pay
for faults committed, of outspokenness, admitting no ambiguous relations
and clearing away the clouds from human intercourse, I have not known
his equal. The great Sir Walter himself, as this book will prove, was
not more manfully free from artistic jealousy or irritability under
criticism, or more unfeignedly inclined to exaggerate the qualities of
other people's work and to underrate those of his own. Of the humorous
and engaging parts of vanity and egoism, which led him to make infinite
talk and fun about himself, and use his own experiences as a key for
unlocking the confidences of others, Stevenson had plenty; but of the
morose and fretful parts never a shade. "A little Irish girl," he wrote
once during a painful crisis of his life, "is now reading my book aloud
to her sister at my elbow; they chuckle, and I feel flattered.--Yours,
R. L. S. _P.S._--Now they yawn, and I am indifferent. Such a wisely
conceived thing is vanity." If only vanity so conceived were commoner!
And whatever might be the abstract and philosophical value of that
somewhat grimly stoical conception of the universe, of conduct and duty,
at which in mature years he had arrived, want of manliness is certainly
not its fault. Take the kind of maxims which he was accustomed to forge
for his own guidance:--"Acts may be forgiven; not even God can forgive
the hanger-back." "Choose the best, if you can; or choose the worst;
that which hangs in the wind dangles from a gibbet." "'Shall I?' said
Feeble-mind; and the echo said, 'Fie!'" "'Do I love?' said Loveless; and
the echo laughed." "A fault known is a fault cured to the strong; but to
the weak it is a fetter riveted." "The mean man doubts, the
great-hearted is deceived." "Great-heart was deceived. 'Very well,' said
Great-heart." "'I have not forgotten my umbrella,' said the careful man;
but the lightning struck him." "Shame had a fine bed, but where was
slumber? Once he was in jail he slept." With this moralist maxims meant
actions; and where shall we easily find a much manlier spirit of wisdom
than this?
There was yet another and very different side to Stevenson which struck
others more than it struck myself, namely, that of the freakish or
elvish, irresponsible madcap or jester which sometimes appeared in him.
It is true that his demoniac quickness of wit and intelligence suggested
occasionally a "spirit of air and fire" rather than one of earth; that
he was abundantly given to all kinds of quirk and laughter; and that
there was no jest (saving the unkind) he would not make and relish. The
late Mr. J. A. Symonds always called him Sprite; qualifying the name,
however, by the epithets "most fantastic, but most human." To me the
essential humanity was always the thing most apparent. In a fire well
nourished of seasoned ship-timber, the flames glance fantastically and
of many colours, but the glow at heart is ever deep and strong; it was
at such a glow that the friends of Stevenson were accustomed to warm
their hands, while they admired and were entertained by the shifting
lights.
It was only in company, as I have said, that all these many lights and
colours could be seen in full play. He would begin no matter
how--perhaps with a jest at some absurd adventure of his own, perhaps
with the recitation, in his vibrating voice and full Scotch accent, of
some snatch of poetry that was haunting him, perhaps with a rhapsody of
analytic delight over some minute accident of beauty or expressiveness
that had struck him in man, woman, child, or external nature. And
forthwith the floodgates would be opened, and the talk would stream on
in endless, never importunate, flood and variety. A hundred fictitious
characters would be invented and launched on their imaginary careers; a
hundred ingenious problems of conduct and cases of honour would be set
and solved; romantic voyages would be planned and followed out in
vision, with a thousand incidents; the possibilities of life and art
would be illuminated with search-lights of bewildering range and
penetration, sober argument and high poetic eloquence alternating with
coruscations of insanely apposite slang--the earthiest jape anon
shooting up into the empyrean and changing into the most ethereal
fantasy--the stalest and most vulgarised forms of speech gaining
brilliancy and illuminating power from some hitherto undreamt-of
application--and all the while an atmosphere of goodwill diffusing
itself from the speaker, a glow of eager benignity and affectionate
laughter emanating from his presence, till every one about him seemed to
catch something of his own gift and inspiration. This sympathetic power
of inspiring others was the special and distinguishing note of
Stevenson's conversation. He would keep a houseful or a single companion
entertained all day, and day after day and half the nights, yet never
seemed to monopolise the talk or absorb it; rather he helped every one
about him to discover and to exercise unexpected powers of their own.
Imagine all this helped by the most speaking of presences: a steady,
penetrating fire in the brown, wide-set eyes, a compelling power and
richness in the smile; courteous, waving gestures of the arms and long,
nervous hands, a lit cigarette generally held between the fingers;
continual rapid shiftings and pacings to and fro as he conversed: rapid,
but not flurried nor awkward, for there was a grace in his attenuated
but well-carried figure, and his movements were light, deft, and full of
spring. There was something for strangers, and even for friends, to get
over in the queer garments which in youth it was his whim to wear--the
badge, as they always seemed to me, partly of a genuine carelessness,
certainly of a genuine lack of cash (the little he had was always
absolutely at the disposal of his friends), partly of a deliberate
detachment from any particular social class or caste, partly of his love
of pickles and adventures, which he thought befel a man thus attired
more readily than another. But this slender, slovenly, nondescript
apparition, long-visaged and long-haired, had only to speak in order to
be recognised in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman,
and within the first five for a master spirit and man of genius. There
were, indeed, certain stolidly conventional and superciliously official
kinds of persons, both at home and abroad, who were incapable of looking
beyond the clothes, and eyed him always with frozen suspicion. This
attitude used sometimes in youth to drive him into fits of flaming
anger, which put him helplessly at a disadvantage unless, or until, he
could call the sense of humour to his help. Apart from these his human
charm was the same for all kinds of people, without distinction of class
or caste; for worldly-wise old great ladies, whom he reminded of famous
poets in their youth; for his brother artists and men of letters,
perhaps, above all; for the ordinary clubman; for his physicians, who
could never do enough for him; for domestic servants, who adored him;
for the English policeman even, on whom he often tried, quite in vain,
to pass himself as one of the criminal classes; for the shepherd, the
street arab, or the tramp, the common seaman, the beach-comber, or the
Polynesian high-chief. Even in the imposed silence and restraint of
extreme sickness the power and attraction of the man made themselves
felt, and there seemed to be more vitality and fire of the spirit in
him as he lay exhausted and speechless in bed than in an ordinary
roomful of people in health.
But I have strayed from my purpose, which was only to indicate that in
the best of these letters of Stevenson's you have some echo, far away
indeed, but yet the nearest, of his talk--talk which could not possibly
be taken down, and of which nothing remains save in the memory of his
friends an impression magical and never to be effaced.
SIDNEY COLVIN.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] From 1876 to 1879--see p. 185.
[2] The point was one on which Stevenson himself felt strongly. In a
letter of instructions to his wife found among his posthumous papers
he writes: "It is never worth while to inflict pain upon a snail for
any literary purpose; and where events may appear to be favourable
to me and contrary to others, I would rather be misunderstood than
cause a pang to any one whom I have known, far less whom I have
loved." Whether an editor or biographer would be justified in
carrying out this principle to the full may perhaps be doubted.
THE LETTERS
OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
1868-1882
THE LETTERS
OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
I
STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH
TRAVELS AND EXCURSIONS
1868-1873
The following section consists chiefly of extracts from the
correspondence and journals addressed by Louis Stevenson, as a lad of
eighteen to twenty-two, to his father and mother during summer
excursions to the Scottish coast or to the Continent. There exist enough
of them to fill a volume; but it is not in letters of this kind to his
family that a young man unbosoms himself most freely, and these are
perhaps not quite devoid of the qualities of the guide-book and the
descriptive exercise. Nevertheless they seem to me to contain enough
signs of the future master-writer, enough of character, observation, and
skill in expression, to make a certain number worth giving by way of an
opening chapter to the present book. Among them are interspersed four or
five of a different character addressed to other correspondents, and
chiefly to his lifelong friend and intimate, Mr. Charles Baxter.
On both sides of the house Stevenson came of interesting stock. His
grandfather was Robert Stevenson, civil engineer, highly distinguished
as the builder of the Bell Rock lighthouse. By this Robert Stevenson,
his three sons, and two of his grandsons now living, the business of
civil engineers in general, and of official engineers to the
Commissioners of Northern Lights in particular, has been carried on at
Edinburgh with high credit and public utility for almost a century.
Thomas Stevenson, the youngest of the three sons of the original Robert,
was Robert Louis Stevenson's father. He was a man not only of mark,
zeal, and inventiveness in his profession, but of a strong and singular
personality; a staunch friend and sagacious adviser, trenchant in
judgment and demonstrative in emotion, outspoken, dogmatic,--despotic,
even, in little things, but withal essentially chivalrous and
soft-hearted; apt to pass with the swiftest transition from moods of
gloom or sternness to those of tender or freakish gaiety, and commanding
a gift of humorous and figurative speech second only to that of his more
famous son.
Thomas Stevenson was married to Margaret Isabella, youngest daughter of
the Rev. Lewis Balfour, for many years minister of the parish of
Colinton in Midlothian. This Mr. Balfour (described by his grandson in
the essay called _The Manse_) was of the stock of the Balfours of
Pilrig, and grandson to that James Balfour, professor first of moral
philosophy and afterwards of the law of nature and of nations, who was
held in particular esteem as a philosophical controversialist by David
Hume. His wife, Henrietta Smith, a daughter of the Rev. George Smith of
Galston, to whose gift as a preacher Burns refers scoffingly in the
_Holy Fair_, is said to have been a woman of uncommon beauty and charm
of manner. Their daughter, Mrs. Thomas Stevenson, suffered in early and
middle life from chest and nerve troubles, and her son may have
inherited from her some of his constitutional weakness. Capable,
cultivated, companionable, affectionate, she was a determined looker at
the bright side of things, and hence better skilled, perhaps, to shut
her eyes to troubles or differences among those she loved than
understandingly to compose or heal them. Conventionally minded one might
have thought her, but for the surprising readiness with which in later
life she adapted herself to conditions of life and travel the most
unconventional possible. The son and only child of these two, Robert
Louis (baptized Robert Lewis Balfour[3]), was born on November 13, 1850,
at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh. His health was infirm from the first, and
he was with difficulty kept alive by the combined care of his mother and
a most devoted nurse, Alison Cunningham; to whom his lifelong gratitude
will be found touchingly expressed in the course of the following
letters. In 1858 he was near dying of a gastric fever, and was at all
times subject to acute catarrhal and bronchial affections and extreme
nervous excitability.
In January 1853 Stevenson's parents moved to Inverleith Terrace, and in
May 1857 to 17 Heriot Row, which continued to be their Edinburgh home
until the death of Thomas Stevenson in 1887. Much of the boy's time was
also spent in the manse of Colinton on the Water of Leith, the home of
his maternal grandfather. Ill-health prevented him getting much regular
or continuous schooling. He attended first (1858-61) a preparatory
school kept by a Mr. Henderson in India Street; and next (at intervals
for some time after the autumn of 1861) the Edinburgh Academy.
Schooling was interrupted in the end of 1862 and first half of 1863 by
excursions with his parents to Germany, the Riviera, and Italy. The love
of wandering, which was a rooted passion in Stevenson's nature, thus
began early to find satisfaction. For a few months in the autumn of
1863, when his parents had been ordered for a second time to Mentone for
the sake of his mother's health, he was sent to a boarding-school kept
by a Mr. Wyatt at Spring Grove, near London. It is not my intention to
treat the reader to the series of childish and boyish letters of these
days which parental fondness has preserved. But here is one written from
his English school when he was about thirteen, which is both amusing in
itself and had a certain influence on his destiny, inasmuch as his
appeal led to his being taken out to join his parents on the French
Riviera; which from these days of his boyhood he never ceased to love,
and for which the longing, amid the gloom of Edinburgh winters, often
afterwards gripped him by the heart.
_Spring Grove School, 12th November 1863._
MA CHERE MAMAN,--Jai recu votre lettre Aujourdhui et comme le jour
prochaine est mon jour de naisance je vous écrit ce lettre. Ma grande
gatteaux est arrivé il leve 12 livres et demi le prix etait 17
shillings. Sur la soirée de Monseigneur Faux il y etait quelques belles
feux d'artifice. Mais les polissons entrent dans notre champ et nos feux
d'artifice et handkerchiefs disappeared quickly, but we charged them out
of the field. Je suis presque driven mad par une bruit terrible tous les
garcons kik up comme grand un bruit qu'il est possible. I hope you will
find your house at Mentone nice. I have been obliged to stop from
writing by the want of a pen, but now I have one, so I will continue.
My dear papa, you told me to tell you whenever I was miserable. I do not
feel well, and I wish to get home. Do take me with you.
R. STEVENSON.
This young French scholar has yet, it will be discerned, a good way to
travel; in later days he acquired a complete reading and speaking, with
a less complete writing, mastery of the language, and was as much at
home with French ways of thought and life as with English.
For one more specimen of his boyish style, it may be not amiss to give
the text of another appeal which dates from two and a half years later,
and is also typical of much in his life's conditions both then and
later:--
_2 Sulgarde Terrace, Torquay, Thursday [April 1866]._
RESPECTED PATERNAL RELATIVE,--I write to make a request of the most
moderate nature. Every year I have cost you an enormous--nay,
elephantine--sum of money for drugs and physician's fees, and the most
expensive time of the twelve months was March.
But this year the biting Oriental blasts, the howling tempests, and the
general ailments of the human race have been successfully braved by
yours truly.
Does not this deserve remuneration?
I appeal to your charity, I appeal to your generosity, I appeal to your
justice, I appeal to your accounts, I appeal, in fine, to your purse.
My sense of generosity forbids the receipt of more--my sense of justice
forbids the receipt of less--than half-a-crown.--Greeting from, Sir,
your most affectionate and needy son,
R. STEVENSON.
From 1864 to 1867 Stevenson's education was conducted chiefly at Mr.
Thomson's private school in Frederick Street, Edinburgh, and by private
tutors in various places to which he travelled for his own or his
parents' health. These travels included frequent visits to such Scottish
health resorts as Bridge of Allan, Dunoon, Rothesay, North Berwick,
Lasswade, and Peebles, and occasional excursions with his father on his
nearer professional rounds to the Scottish coasts and lighthouses. From
1867 the family life became more settled between Edinburgh and Swanston
Cottage, Lothianburn, a country home in the Pentlands which Mr.
Stevenson first rented in that year, and the scenery and associations of
which sank deeply into the young man's spirit, and vitally affected his
after thoughts and his art.
By this time Louis Stevenson seemed to show signs of outgrowing his
early infirmities of health. He was a lover, to a degree even beyond his
strength, of outdoor life and exercise (though not of sports), and it
began to be hoped that as he grew up he would be fit to enter the family
profession of civil engineer. He was accordingly entered as a student at
Edinburgh University, and for several winters attended classes there
with such regularity as his health and inclinations permitted. This was
in truth but small. The mind on fire with its own imaginations, and
eager to acquire its own experiences in its own way, does not take
kindly to the routine of classes and repetitions, nor could the
desultory mode of schooling enforced upon him by ill-health answer much
purpose by way of discipline. According to his own account he was at
college, as he had been at school, an inveterate idler and truant. But
outside the field of school and college routine he showed an eager
curiosity and activity of mind. "He was of a conversable temper," so he
says of himself, "and insatiably curious in the aspects of life, and
spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of men and
womenkind." Of one class indeed, and that was his own, he had soon had
enough, at least in so far as it was to be studied at the dinners,
dances, and other polite entertainments of ordinary Edinburgh society.
Of these he early wearied. At home he made himself pleasant to all
comers, but for his own resort chose out a very few houses, mostly those
of intimate college companions, into which he could go without
constraint, and where his inexhaustible flow of poetic, imaginative, and
laughing talk seems generally to have rather puzzled his hearers than
impressed them. On the other hand, during his endless private rambles
and excursions, whether among the streets and slums, the gardens and
graveyards of the city, or farther afield among the Pentland hills or on
the shores of Forth, he was never tired of studying character and
seeking acquaintance among the classes more nearly exposed to the pinch
and stress of life.
In the eyes of anxious elders, such vagrant ways naturally take on the
colours of idleness and a love of low company. Stevenson was, however,
in his own fashion an eager student of books as well as of man and
nature. He read precociously and omnivorously in the _belles-lettres_,
including a very wide range of English poetry, fiction, and essays, and
a fairly wide range of French; and was a genuine student of Scottish
history, especially from the time of the persecutions down, and to some
extent of history in general. The art of literature was already his
private passion, and something within him even already told him that it
was to be his life's work. On all his truantries he went pencil and
copybook in hand, trying to fit his impression of the scene to words, to
compose original rhymes, tales, dialogues, and dramas, or to imitate the
style and cadences of the author he at the moment preferred. For three
or four years, nevertheless, he tried dutifully, if half-heartedly, to
prepare himself for the family profession. In 1868, the year when the
following correspondence opens, he went to watch the works of the firm
in progress first at Anstruther on the coast of Fife, and afterwards at
Wick. In 1869 he made the tour of the Orkneys and Shetlands on board the
steam yacht of the Commissioners of Northern Lights, and in 1870 the
tour of the Western Islands, preceded by a stay on the isle of Earraid,
where the works of the Dhu Heartach lighthouse were then in progress. He
was a favourite, although a very irregular, pupil of the professor of
engineering, Fleeming Jenkin, whose friendship and that of Mrs. Jenkin
were of great value to him, and whose life he afterwards wrote; and must
have shown some aptitude for the family calling, inasmuch as in 1871 he
received the silver medal of the Edinburgh Society of Arts for a paper
on a suggested improvement in lighthouse apparatus. The outdoor and
seafaring parts of an engineer's life were in fact wholly to his taste.
But he looked instinctively at the powers and phenomena of waves and
tide, of storm and current, reef, cliff, and rock, with the eye of the
poet and artist, and not those of the practician and calculator. For
desk work and office routine he had an unconquerable aversion; and his
physical powers, had they remained at their best, must have proved quite
unequal to the workshop training necessary to the practical engineer.
Accordingly in 1871 it was agreed, not without natural reluctance on his
father's part, that he should give up the hereditary vocation and read
for the bar: literature, on which his heart was set, and in which his
early attempts had been encouraged, being held to be by itself no
profession, or at least one altogether too irregular and undefined. For
the next several years, therefore, he attended law classes instead of
engineering and science classes in the University, giving to the subject
a certain amount of serious, although fitful, attention until he was
called to the bar in 1875.
So much for the course of Stevenson's outward life during these days at
Edinburgh. To tell the story of his inner life would be a far more
complicated task, and cannot here be attempted even briefly. The ferment
of youth was more acute and more prolonged in him than in most men even
of genius. In the Introduction I have tried to give some notion of the
many various strains and elements which met in him, and which were in
these days pulling one against another in his half-formed being, at a
great expense of spirit and body. Add the storms, which from time to
time attacked him, of shivering repulsion from the climate and
conditions of life in the city which he yet deeply and imaginatively
loved; the moods of spiritual revolt against the harsh doctrines of the
creed in which he had been brought up, and to which his parents were
deeply, his father even passionately, attached; the seasons of
temptation, to which he was exposed alike by temperament and
circumstance, to seek solace among the crude allurements of the city
streets.
In the later and maturer correspondence which will appear in these
volumes, the agitations of the writer's early days are often enough
referred to in retrospect. In the boyish letters to his parents, which
make up the chief part of this first section, they naturally find no
expression at all; nor will these letters be found to differ much in
any way from those of any other lively and observant lad who is also
something of a reader and has some natural gift of writing. At the end
of the section I have indeed printed one cry of the heart, written not
to his parents, but about them, and telling of the strain which matters
of religious difference for a while brought into his home relations. The
attachment between the father and son from childhood was exceptionally
strong. But the father was staunchly wedded to the hereditary creeds and
dogmas of Scottish Calvinistic Christianity; while the course of the
young man's reading, with the spirit of the generation in which he grew
up, had loosed him from the bonds of that theology, and even of dogmatic
Christianity in general, and had taught him to respect all creeds alike
as expressions of the cravings and conjectures of the human spirit in
face of the unsolved mystery of things, rather than to cling to any one
of them as a revelation of ultimate truth. The shock to the father was
great when his son's opinions came to his knowledge; and there ensued a
time of extremely painful discussion and private tension between them.
In due time this cloud upon a family life otherwise very harmonious and
affectionate passed quite away. But the greater the love, the greater
the pain; when I first knew Stevenson this trouble gave him no peace,
and it has left a strong trace upon his mind and work. See particularly
the parable called "The House of Eld," in his collection of _Fables_,
and the many studies of difficult paternal and filial relations which
are to be found in _The Story of a Lie_, _The Misadventures of John
Nicholson_, _The Wrecker_, and _Weir of Hermiston_.
TO THOMAS STEVENSON
In July 1868 R. L. S. went to watch the harbour works at Anstruther
and afterwards those at Wick. Of his private moods and occupations in
the Anstruther days he has told in retrospect in the essay _Random
Memories: the Coast of Fife_. Here are some passages from letters
written at the time to his parents. "Travellers" and "jennies" are,
of course, terms of engineering.
_'Kenzie House or whatever it is called, Anstruther. [July 1868.]_
First sheet: Thursday.
Second sheet: Friday.
MY DEAR FATHER,--My lodgings are very nice, and I don't think there are
any children. There is a box of mignonette in the window and a factory
of dried rose-leaves, which make the atmosphere a trifle heavy, but very
pleasant.
When you come, bring also my paint-box--I forgot it. I am going to try
the travellers and jennies, and have made a sketch of them and begun the
drawing. After that I'll do the staging.
Mrs. Brown "has suffered herself from her stommick, and that makes her
kind of think for other people." She is a motherly lot. Her mothering
and thought for others displays itself in advice against hard-boiled
eggs, well-done meat, and late dinners, these being my only requests.
Fancy--I am the only person in Anstruther who dines in the afternoon.
If you could bring me some wine when you come, 'twould be a good move: I
fear _vin d'Anstruther_; and having procured myself a severe attack of
gripes by two days' total abstinence on chilly table beer I have been
forced to purchase Green Ginger ("Somebody or other's 'celebrated'"),
for the benefit of my stomach, like St. Paul.
There is little or nothing doing here to be seen. By heightening the
corner in a hurry to support the staging they have let the masons get
ahead of the divers and wait till they can overtake them. I wish you
would write and put me up to the sort of things to ask and find out. I
received your registered letter with the £5; it will last for ever.
To-morrow I will watch the masons at the pier-foot and see how long they
take to work that Fifeness stone you ask about; they get sixpence an
hour; so that is the only datum required.
It is awful how slowly I draw, and how ill: I am not nearly done with
the travellers, and have not thought of the jennies yet. When I'm
drawing I find out something I have not measured, or, having measured,
have not noted, or, having noted, cannot find; and so I have to trudge
to the pier again ere I can go farther with my noble design.
Love to all.--Your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_'Kenzie House, Anstruther [later in July, 1868]._
MY DEAR MOTHER,--To-night I went with the youngest M. to see a strolling
band of players in the townhall. A large table placed below the gallery
with a print curtain on either side of the most limited dimensions was
at once the scenery and the proscenium. The manager told us that his
scenes were sixteen by sixty-four, and so could not be got in. Though I
knew, or at least felt sure, that there were no such scenes in the poor
man's possession, I could not laugh, as did the major part of the
audience, at this shift to escape criticism. We saw a wretched farce,
and some comic songs were sung. The manager sang one, but it came grimly
from his throat. The whole receipt of the evening was 5s. and 3d., out
of which had to come room, gas, and town drummer. We left soon; and I
must say came out as sad as I have been for ever so long: I think that
manager had a soul above comic songs. I said this to young M., who is a
"Phillistine" (Matthew Arnold's Philistine you understand), and he
replied, "How much happier would he be as a common working-man!" I told
him I thought he would be less happy earning a comfortable living as a
shoemaker than he was starving as an actor, with such artistic work as
he had to do. But the Phillistine wouldn't see it. You observe that I
spell Philistine time about with one and two l's.
As we went home we heard singing, and went into the porch of the
schoolhouse to listen. A fisherman entered and told us to go in. It was
a psalmody class. One of the girls had a glorious voice. We stayed for
half an hour.
_Tuesday._--I am utterly sick of this grey, grim, sea-beaten hole. I
have a little cold in my head, which makes my eyes sore; and you can't
tell how utterly sick I am, and how anxious to get back among trees and
flowers and something less meaningless than this bleak fertility.
Papa need not imagine that I have a bad cold or am stone-blind from this
description, which is the whole truth.
Last night Mr. and Mrs. Fortune called in a dog-cart, Fortune's beard
and Mrs. F.'s brow glittering with mist-drops, to ask me to come next
Saturday. Conditionally, I accepted. Do you think I can cut it? I am
only anxious to go slick home on the Saturday. Write by return of post
and tell me what to do. If possible, I should like to cut the business
and come right slick out to Swanston.--I remain, your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
An early Portfolio paper On _the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places_, as
well as the second part of the _Random Memories_ essay, written
twenty years later, refer to the same experiences as the following
letters. Stevenson lodged during his stay at Wick in a private hotel
on the Harbour Brae, kept by a Mr. Sutherland.[4]
_Wick, Friday, September 11, 1868._
MY DEAR MOTHER,-- ... Wick lies at the end or elbow of an open
triangular bay, hemmed on either side by shores, either cliff or steep
earth-bank, of no great height. The grey houses of Pulteney extend along
the southerly shore almost to the cape; and it is about half-way down
this shore--no, six-sevenths way down--that the new breakwater extends
athwart the bay.
Certainly Wick in itself possesses no beauty: bare, grey shores, grim
grey houses, grim grey sea; not even the gleam of red tiles; not even
the greenness of a tree. The southerly heights, when I came here, were
black with people, fishers waiting on wind and night. Now all the S.Y.S.
(Stornoway boats) have beaten out of the bay, and the Wick men stay
indoors or wrangle on the quays with dissatisfied fish-curers, knee-high
in brine, mud, and herring refuse. The day when the boats put out to go
home to the Hebrides, the girl here told me there was "a black wind";
and on going out, I found the epithet as justifiable as it was
picturesque. A cold, _black_ southerly wind, with occasional rising
showers of rain; it was a fine sight to see the boats beat out a-teeth
of it.
In Wick I have never heard any one greet his neighbour with the usual
"Fine day" or "Good morning." Both come shaking their heads, and both
say, "Breezy, breezy!" And such is the atrocious quality of the climate,
that the remark is almost invariably justified by the fact.
The streets are full of the Highland fishers, lubberly, stupid,
inconceivably lazy and heavy to move. You bruise against them, tumble
over them, elbow them against the wall--all to no purpose; they will not
budge; and you are forced to leave the pavement every step.
To the south, however, is as fine a piece of coast scenery as I ever
saw. Great black chasms, huge black cliffs, rugged and over-hung
gullies, natural arches, and deep green pools below them, almost too
deep to let you see the gleam of sand among the darker weed: there are
deep caves too. In one of these lives a tribe of gipsies. The men are
_always_ drunk, simply and truthfully always. From morning to evening
the great villainous-looking fellows are either sleeping off the last
debauch, or hulking about the cove "in the horrors." The cave is deep,
high, and airy, and might be made comfortable enough. But they just live
among heaped boulders, damp with continual droppings from above, with no
more furniture than two or three tin pans, a truss of rotten straw, and
a few ragged cloaks. In winter the surf bursts into the mouth and often
forces them to abandon it.
An _émeute_ of disappointed fishers was feared, and two ships of war are
in the bay to render assistance to the municipal authorities. This is
the ides; and, to all intents and purposes, said ides are passed. Still
there is a good deal of disturbance, many drunk men, and a double supply
of police. I saw them sent for by some people and enter an inn, in a
pretty good hurry: what it was for I do not know.
You would see by papa's letter about the carpenter who fell off the
staging: I don't think I was ever so much excited in my life. The man
was back at his work, and I asked him how he was; but he was a
Highlander, and--need I add it?--dickens a word could I understand of
his answer. What is still worse, I find the people here-about--that is
to say, the Highlanders, not the northmen--don't understand _me_.
I have lost a shilling's worth of postage stamps, which has damped my
ardour for buying big lots of 'em: I'll buy them one at a time as I want
'em for the future.
The Free Church minister and I got quite thick. He left last night about
two in the morning, when I went to turn in. He gave me the enclosed.--I
remain your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Wick, September 5, 1868. Monday._
MY DEAR MAMMA,--This morning I got a delightful haul: your letter of the
fourth (surely mis-dated); papa's of same day; Virgil's _Bucolics_,
very thankfully received; and Aikman's _Annals_,[5] a precious and most
acceptable donation, for which I tender my most ebullient thanksgivings.
I almost forgot to drink my tea and eat mine egg.
It contains more detailed accounts than anything I ever saw, except
Wodrow, without being so portentously tiresome and so desperately
overborne with footnotes, proclamations, acts of Parliament, and
citations as that last history.
I have been reading a good deal of Herbert. He's a clever and a devout
cove; but in places awfully twaddley (if I may use the word). Oughtn't
this to rejoice papa's heart--
"Carve or discourse; do not a famine fear.
Who carves is kind to two, who talks to all."
You understand? The "fearing a famine" is applied to people gulping down
solid vivers without a word, as if the ten lean kine began to-morrow.
Do you remember condemning something of mine for being too obtrusively
didactic. Listen to Herbert--
"Is it not verse except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lover's loves?
_Must all be veiled, while he that reads divines
Catching the sense at two removes_?"
You see, "except" was used for "unless" before 1630.
_Tuesday._--The riots were a hum. No more has been heard; and one of the
war-steamers has deserted in disgust.
The _Moonstone_ is frightfully interesting: isn't the detective prime?
Don't say anything about the plot; for I have only read on to the end of
Betteredge's narrative, so don't know anything about it yet.
I thought to have gone on to Thurso to-night, but the coach was full;
so I go to-morrow instead.
To-day I had a grouse: great glorification.
There is a drunken brute in the house who disturbed my rest last night.
He's a very respectable man in general, but when on the "spree" a most
consummate fool. When he came in he stood on the top of the stairs and
preached in the dark with great solemnity and no audience from 12 P.M.
to half-past one. At last I opened my door. "Are we to have no sleep at
all for that _drunken brute?_" I said. As I hoped, it had the desired
effect. "Drunken brute!" he howled, in much indignation; then after a
pause, in a voice of some contrition, "Well, if I am a drunken brute,
it's only once in the twelvemonth!" And that was the end of him; the
insult rankled in his mind; and he retired to rest. He is a fish-curer,
a man over fifty, and pretty rich too. He's as bad again to-day; but
I'll be shot if he keeps me awake, I'll douse him with water if he makes
a row.--Ever your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
To MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
The Macdonald father and son here mentioned were engineers attached
to the Stevenson firm and in charge of the harbour works.
_Wick, September 1868. Saturday, 10 A.M._
MY DEAR MOTHER,--The last two days have been dreadfully hard, and I was
so tired in the evenings that I could not write. In fact, last night I
went to sleep immediately after dinner, or very nearly so. My hours have
been 10-2 and 3-7 out in the lighter or the small boat, in a long, heavy
roll from the nor'-east. When the dog was taken out, he got awfully ill;
one of the men, Geordie Grant by name and surname, followed _shoot_ with
considerable _éclat_; but, wonderful to relate! I kept well. My hands
are all skinned, blistered, discoloured, and engrained with tar, some
of which latter has established itself under my nails in a position of
such natural strength that it defies all my efforts to dislodge it. The
worst work I had was when David (Macdonald's eldest) and I took the
charge ourselves. He remained in the lighter to tighten or slacken the
guys as we raised the pole towards the perpendicular, with two men. I
was with four men in the boat. We dropped an anchor out a good bit, then
tied a cord to the pole, took a turn round the sternmost thwart with it,
and pulled on the anchor line. As the great, big, wet hawser came in it
soaked you to the skin: I was the sternest (used, by way of variety, for
sternmost) of the lot, and had to coil it--a work which involved, from
_its_ being so stiff and _your_ being busy pulling with all your might,
no little trouble and an extra ducking. We got it up; and, just as we
were going to sing "Victory!" one of the guys slipped in, the pole
tottered--went over on its side again like a shot, and behold the end of
our labour.
You see, I have been roughing it; and though some parts of the letter
may be neither very comprehensible nor very interesting to _you_, I
think that perhaps it might amuse Willie Traquair, who delights in all
such dirty jobs.
The first day, I forgot to mention, was like mid-winter for cold, and
rained incessantly so hard that the livid white of our cold-pinched
faces wore a sort of inflamed rash on the windward side.
I am not a bit the worse of it, except fore-mentioned state of hands, a
slight crick in my neck from the rain running down, and general
stiffness from pulling, hauling, and tugging for dear life.
We have got double weights at the guys, and hope to get it up like a
shot.
What fun you three must be having! I hope the cold don't disagree with
you.--I remain, my dear mother, your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
The following will help the reader to understand the passage
referring to this undertaking in Stevenson's biographical essay on
his father where he has told how in the end "the sea proved too
strong for men's arts, and after expedients hitherto unthought of,
and on a scale hyper-Cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now
stands a ruin in that bleak, God-forsaken bay." The Russels herein
mentioned are the family of Sheriff Russel. The tombstone of Miss
Sara Russel is to be seen in Wick cemetery.
_Pulteney, Wick, Sunday, September 1868._
MY DEAR MOTHER,--Another storm: wind higher, rain thicker: the wind
still rising as the night closes in and the sea slowly rising along with
it; it looks like a three days' gale.
Last week has been a blank one: always too much sea.
I enjoyed myself very much last night at the Russels'. There was a
little dancing, much singing and supper.
Are you not well that you do not write? I haven't heard from you for
more than a fortnight.
The wind fell yesterday and rose again to-day; it is a dreadful evening;
but the wind is keeping the sea down as yet. Of course, nothing more has
been done to the poles; and I can't tell when I shall be able to leave,
not for a fortnight yet, I fear, at the earliest, for the winds are
persistent. Where's Murra? Is Cummy struck dumb about the boots? I wish
you would get somebody to write an interesting letter and say how you
are, for you're on the broad of your back I see. There hath arrived an
inroad of farmers to-night; and I go to avoid them to Macdonald if he's
disengaged, to the Russels if not.
_Sunday_ (_later_).--Storm without: wind and rain: a confused mass of
wind-driven rain-squalls, wind-ragged mist, foam, spray, and great, grey
waves. Of this hereafter; in the meantime let us follow the due course
of historic narrative.
Seven P.M. found me at Breadalbane Terrace, clad in spotless blacks,
white tie, shirt, et cætera, and finished off below with a pair of
navvies' boots. How true that the devil is betrayed by his feet! A
message to Cummy at last. Why, O treacherous woman! were my dress boots
withheld?
Dramatis personæ: père Russel, amusing, long-winded, in many points like
papa; mère Russel, nice, delicate, likes hymns, knew Aunt Margaret
('t'ould man knew Uncle Alan); fille Russel, nominée Sara (no h), rather
nice, lights up well, good voice, _interested_ face; Miss L., nice also,
washed out a little, and, I think, a trifle sentimental; fils Russel, in
a Leith office, smart, full of happy epithet, amusing. They are very
nice and very kind, asked me to come back--"any night you feel dull: and
any night doesn't mean no night: we'll be so glad to see you." _C'est la
mère qui parle._
I was back there again to-night. There was hymn-singing, and general
religious controversy till eight, after which talk was secular. Mrs.
Sutherland was deeply distressed about the boot business. She consoled
me by saying that many would be glad to have such feet whatever shoes
they had on. Unfortunately, fishers and seafaring men are too facile to
be compared with! This looks like enjoyment! better speck than Anster.
I have done with frivolity. This morning I was awakened by Mrs.
Sutherland at the door. "There's a ship ashore at Shaltigoe!" As my
senses slowly flooded, I heard the whistling and the roaring of wind,
and the lashing of gust-blown and uncertain flaws of rain. I got up,
dressed, and went out. The mizzled sky and rain blinded you.
She was a Norwegian: coming in she saw our first gauge-pole, standing at
point E. Norse skipper thought it was a sunk smack, and dropped his
anchor in full drift of sea: chain broke: schooner came ashore. Insured:
laden with wood: skipper owner of vessel and cargo: bottom out.
I was in a great fright at first lest we should be liable; but it seems
that's all right.
[Illustration]
C D is the new pier.
A the schooner ashore. B the salmon house.
Some of the waves were twenty feet high. The spray rose eighty feet at
the new pier. Some wood has come ashore, and the roadway seems carried
away. There is something fishy at the far end where the cross wall is
building; but till we are able to get along, all speculation is vain.
I am so sleepy I am writing nonsense.
I stood a long while on the cope watching the sea below me; I hear its
dull, monotonous roar at this moment below the shrieking of the wind;
and there came ever recurring to my mind the verse I am so fond of:--
"But yet the Lord that is on high
Is more of might by far
Than noise of many waters is
Or great sea-billows are."
The thunder at the wall when it first struck--the rush along ever
growing higher--the great jet of snow-white spray some forty feet above
you--and the "noise of many waters," the roar, the hiss, the "shrieking"
among the shingle as it fell head over heels at your feet. I watched if
it threw the big stones at the wall; but it never moved them.
_Monday._--The end of the work displays gaps, cairns of ten ton blocks,
stones torn from their places and turned right round. The damage above
water is comparatively little: what there may be below, on _ne sait pas
encore_. The roadway is torn away, cross-heads, broken planks tossed
here and there, planks gnawn and mumbled as if a starved bear had been
trying to eat them, planks with spates lifted from them as if they had
been dressed with a rugged plane, one pile swaying to and fro clear of
the bottom, the rails in one place sunk a foot at least. This was not a
great storm, the waves were light and short. Yet when we are standing at
the office, I felt the ground beneath me _quail_ as a huge roller
thundered on the work at the last year's cross wall.
How could _noster amicus Q. maximus_ appreciate a storm at Wick? It
requires a little of the artistic temperament, of which Mr. T. S.,[6]
C.E., possesses some, whatever he may say. I can't look at it
practically however: that will come, I suppose, like grey hair or coffin
nails.
Our pole is snapped: a fortnight's work and the loss of the Norse
schooner all for nothing!--except experience and dirty clothes.--Your
affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
I omit the letters of 1869, which describe at great length, and not
very interestingly, a summer trip on board the lighthouse steamer to
the Orkneys, Shetlands, and the Fair Isle. The following of 1870 I
give (by consent of the lady who figures as a youthful character in
the narrative) both for the sake of its lively social
sketches--including that of the able painter and singular personage,
the late Sam Bough,--and because it is dated from the Isle of
Earraid, celebrated alike in _Kidnapped_ and in the essay _Memoirs of
an Islet_.
_Earraid, Thursday, August 5th, 1870._
MY DEAR MOTHER,--I have so much to say, that needs must I take a large
sheet; for the notepaper brings with it a chilling brevity of style.
Indeed, I think pleasant writing is proportional to the size of the
material you write withal.
From Edinburgh to Greenock, I had the ex-secretary of the E.U.
Conservative Club, Murdoch. At Greenock I spent a dismal evening, though
I found a pretty walk. Next day on board the _Iona_, I had Maggie
Thomson to Tarbet; Craig, a well-read, pleasant medical, to Ardrishaig;
and Professor, Mrs., and all the little Fleeming Jenkinseses to Oban.
At Oban, that night, it was delicious. Mr. Stephenson's yacht lay in the
bay, and a splendid band on board played delightfully. The waters of the
bay were as smooth as a mill-pond; and, in the dusk, the black shadows
of the hills stretched across to our very feet and the lights were
reflected in long lines. At intervals, blue lights were burned on the
water; and rockets were sent up. Sometimes great stars of clear fire
fell from them, until the bay received and quenched them. I hired a boat
and skulled round the yacht in the dark. When I came in, a very pleasant
Englishman on the steps fell into talk with me, till it was time to go
to bed.
Next morning I slept on or I should have gone to Glencoe. As it was, it
was blazing hot; so I hired a boat, pulled all forenoon along the coast
and had a delicious bathe on a beautiful white beach. Coming home, I
_cotogai'd_ my Englishman, lunched alongside of him and his sister, and
took a walk with him in the afternoon, during which I find that he was
travelling with a servant, kept horses, _et cetera_. At dinner he wished
me to sit beside him and his sister; but there was no room. When he came
out he told me why he was so _empressé_ on this point. He had found out
my name, and that I was connected with lighthouses, and his sister
wished to know if I were any relative of the Stevenson in Ballantyne's
_Lighthouse_. All evening, he, his sister, I, and Mr. Hargrove, of
Hargrove and Fowler, sate in front of the hotel. I asked Mr. H. if he
knew who my friend was. "Yes," he said; "I never met him before: but my
partner knows him. He is a man of old family; and the solicitor of
highest standing about Sheffield." At night he said, "Now if you're down
in my neighbourhood, you must pay me a visit. I am very fond of young
men about me; and I should like a visit from you very much. I can take
you through any factory in Sheffield and I'll drive you all about the
_Dookeries_." He then wrote me down his address; and we parted huge
friends, he still keeping me up to visiting him.
Hitherto, I had enjoyed myself amazingly; but to-day has been the crown.
In the morning I met Bough on board, with whom I am both surprised and
delighted. He and I have read the same books, and discuss Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Marlowe, Fletcher, Webster, and all the old authors. He can
quote verses by the page, and has really a very pretty literary taste.
Altogether, with all his roughness and buffoonery, a more pleasant,
clever fellow you may seldom see. I was very much surprised with him;
and he with me. "Where the devil did you read all these books?" says he;
and in my heart, I echo the question. One amusing thing I must say. We
were both talking about travelling; and I said I was so fond of
travelling alone, from the people one met and grew friendly with. "Ah,"
says he, "but you've such a pleasant manner, you know--quite captivated
my old woman, you did--she couldn't talk of anything else." Here was a
compliment, even in Sam Bough's sneering tones, that rather tickled my
vanity; and really, my social successes of the last few days, the best
of which is yet to come, are enough to turn anybody's head. To continue,
after a little go in with Samuel, he going up on the bridge, I looked
about me to see who there was; and mine eye lighted on two girls, one of
whom was sweet and pretty, talking to an old gentleman. "_Eh bien_,"
says I to myself, "that seems the best investment on board." So I sidled
up to the old gentleman, got into conversation with him and so with the
damsel; and thereupon, having used the patriarch as a ladder, I kicked
him down behind me. Who should my damsel prove, but Amy Sinclair,
daughter of Sir Tollemache. She certainly was the simplest, most naïve
specimen of girlhood ever I saw. By getting brandy and biscuit and
generally coaching up her cousin, who was sick, I ingratiated myself;
and so kept her the whole way to Iona, taking her into the cave at
Staffa and generally making myself as gallant as possible. I was never
so much pleased with anything in my life, as her amusing absence of
_mauvaise honte_: she was so sorry I wasn't going on to Oban again:
didn't know how she could have enjoyed herself if I hadn't been there;
and was so sorry we hadn't met on the Crinan. When we came back from
Staffa, she and her aunt went down to have lunch; and a minute after up
comes Miss Amy to ask me if I wouldn't think better of it, and take some
lunch with them. I couldn't resist that, of course; so down I went; and
there she displayed the full extent of her innocence. I must be sure to
come to Thurso Castle the next time I was in Caithness, and Upper
Norwood (whence she would take me all over the Crystal Palace) when I
was near London; and (most complete of all) she offered to call on us in
Edinburgh! Wasn't it delicious?--she is a girl of sixteen or seventeen,
too, and the latter I think. I never yet saw a girl so innocent and
fresh, so perfectly modest without the least trace of prudery.
Coming off Staffa, Sam Bough (who had been in huge force the whole time,
drawing in Miss Amy's sketchbook and making himself agreeable or
otherwise to everybody) pointed me out to a parson and said, "That's
him." This was Alexander Ross and his wife.
The last stage of the steamer now approached, Miss Amy and I lamenting
pathetically that Iona was so near. "People meet in this way," quoth
she, "and then lose sight of one another so soon." We all landed
together, Bough and I and the Rosses with our baggage; and went
together over the ruins. I was here left with the cousin and the aunt,
during which I learned that said cousin sees me _every Sunday_ in St.
Stephen's. Oho! thought I, at the "every." The aunt was very anxious to
know who that strange, wild man was? (didn't I wish Samuel in Tophet!).
Of course, in reply, I drew it strong about eccentric genius and my
never having known him before, and a good deal that was perhaps
"strained to the extremest limit of the fact."
The steamer left, and Miss Amy and her cousin waved their handkerchiefs,
until my arm in answering them was nearly broken. I believe women's arms
must be better made for this exercise: mine ache still; and I regretted
at the time that the handkerchief had seen service. Altogether, however,
I was left in a pleasant frame of mind.
Being thus left alone, Bough, I, the Rosses, Professor Blackie, and an
Englishman called M----: these people were going to remain the night,
except the Professor, who is resident there at present. They were going
to dine _en compagnie_ and wished us to join the party; but we had
already committed ourselves by mistake to the wrong hotel, and besides,
we wished to be off as soon as wind and tide were against us to Earraid.
We went up; Bough selected a place for sketching and blocked in the
sketch for Mrs. R.; and we all talked together. Bough told us his family
history and a lot of strange things about old Cumberland life; among
others, how he had known "John Peel" of pleasant memory in song, and of
how that worthy hunted. At five, down we go to the Argyll Hotel, and
wait dinner. Broth--"nice broth"--fresh herrings, and fowl had been
promised. At 5.50, I get the shovel and tongs and drum them at the
stair-head till a response comes from below that the nice broth is at
hand. I boast of my engineering, and Bough compares me to the Abbot of
Arbroath who originated the Inchcape Bell. At last, in comes the tureen
and the hand-maid lifts the cover. "Rice soup!" I yell; "O no! none o'
that for me!"--"Yes," says Bough savagely; "but Miss Amy didn't take
_me_ downstairs to eat salmon." Accordingly he is helped. How his face
fell. "I imagine myself in the accident ward of the Infirmary," quoth
he. It was, purely and simply, rice and water. After this, we have
another weary pause, and then herrings in a state of mash and potatoes
like iron. "Send the potatoes out to Prussia for grape-shot," was the
suggestion. I dined off broken herrings and dry bread. At last "the
supreme moment comes," and the fowl in a lordly dish is carried in. On
the cover being raised, there is something so forlorn and miserable
about the aspect of the animal that we both roar with laughter. Then
Bough, taking up knife and fork, turns the "swarry" over and over,
shaking doubtfully his head. "There's an aspect of quiet resistance
about the beggar," says he, "that looks bad." However, to work he falls
until the sweat stands on his brow and a dismembered leg falls, dull and
leaden-like, on to my dish. To eat it was simply impossible. I did not
know before that flesh could be so tough. "The strongest jaws in
England," says Bough piteously, harpooning his dry morsel, "couldn't eat
this leg in less than twelve hours." Nothing for it now, but to order
boat and bill. "That fowl," says Bough to the landlady, "is of a breed I
know. I knew the cut of its jib whenever it was put down. That was the
grandmother of the cock that frightened Peter."--"I thought it was a
historical animal," says I. "What a shame to kill it. It's as bad as
eating Whittington's cat or the Dog of Montargis."--"Na--na, it's no so
old," says the landlady, "but it eats hard."--"Eats!" I cry, "where do
you find that? Very little of that verb with us." So with more raillery,
we pay six shillings for our festival and run over to Earraid, shaking
the dust of the Argyll Hotel from off our feet.
I can write no more just now, and I hope you will be able to decipher
so much; for it contains matter. Really, the whole of yesterday's work
would do in a novel without one little bit of embellishment; and,
indeed, few novels are so amusing. Bough, Miss Amy, Mrs. Ross, Blackie,
M---- the parson--all these were such distinct characters, the incidents
were so entertaining, and the scenery so fine, that the whole would have
made a novelist's fortune.
MY DEAR FATHER,--No landing to-day, as the sea runs high on the rock.
They are at the second course of the first story on the rock. I have as
yet had no time here; so this is [Greek: a] and [Greek: ô] of my
business news.--Your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. CHURCHILL BABINGTON
This is addressed to a favourite cousin of the Balfour clan, married
to a Cambridge colleague of mine, Professor Churchill Babington of
learned and amiable memory, whose home was at the college living of
Cockfield near Bury St. Edmunds. Here Stevenson had visited them in
the previous year. "Mrs. Hutchinson" is, of course, Lucy Hutchinson's
famous _Life_ of her husband the regicide.
[_Swanston Cottage, Lothianburn, Summer 1871._]
MY DEAR MAUD,--If you have forgotten the handwriting--as is like
enough--you will find the name of a former correspondent (don't know how
to spell that word) at the end. I have begun to write to you before now,
but always stuck somehow, and left it to drown in a drawerful of like
fiascos. This time I am determined to carry through, though I have
nothing specially to say.
We look fairly like summer this morning; the trees are blackening out of
their spring greens; the warmer suns have melted the hoarfrost of
daisies of the paddock; and the blackbird, I fear, already beginning to
"stint his pipe of mellower days"--which is very apposite (I can't spell
anything to-day--_one_ p or _two_?) and pretty. All the same, we have
been having shocking weather--cold winds and grey skies.
I have been reading heaps of nice books; but I can't go back so far. I
am reading Clarendon's _Hist. Rebell._ at present, with which I am more
pleased than I expected, which is saying a good deal. It is a pet idea
of mine that one gets more real truth out of one avowed partisan than
out of a dozen of your sham impartialists--wolves in sheep's
clothing--simpering honesty as they suppress documents. After all, what
one wants to know is not what people did, but why they did it--or
rather, why they _thought_ they did it; and to learn that, you should go
to the men themselves. Their very falsehood is often more than another
man's truth.
I have possessed myself of Mrs. Hutchinson, which, of course, I admire,
etc. But is there not an irritating deliberation and correctness about
her and everybody connected with her? If she would only write bad
grammar, or forget to finish a sentence, or do something or other that
looks fallible, it would be a relief. I sometimes wish the old Colonel
had got drunk and beaten her, in the bitterness of my spirit. I know I
felt a weight taken off my heart when I heard he was extravagant. It is
quite possible to be too good for this evil world; and unquestionably,
Mrs. Hutchinson was. The way in which she talks of herself makes one's
blood run cold. There--I am glad to have got that out--but don't say it
to anybody--seal of secrecy.
Please tell Mr. Babington that I have never forgotten one of his
drawings--a Rubens, I think--a woman holding up a model ship. That woman
had more life in her than ninety per cent. of the lame humans that you
see crippling about this earth.
By the way, that is a feature in art which seems to have come in with
the Italians. Your old Greek statues have scarce enough vitality in them
to keep their monstrous bodies fresh withal. A shrewd country attorney,
in a turned white neckcloth and rusty blacks, would just take one of
these Agamemnons and Ajaxes quietly by his beautiful, strong arm, trot
the unresisting statue down a little gallery of legal shams, and turn
the poor fellow out at the other end, "naked, as from the earth he
came." There is more latent life, more of the coiled spring in the
sleeping dog, about a recumbent figure of Michael Angelo's than about
the most excited of Greek statues. The very marble seems to wrinkle with
a wild energy that we never feel except in dreams.
I think this letter has turned into a sermon, but I had nothing
interesting to talk about.
I do wish you and Mr. Babington would think better of it and come north
this summer. We should be so glad to see you both. _Do_ reconsider
it.--Believe me, my dear Maud, ever your most affectionate cousin,
LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM
The following is the first which has been preserved of many letters
to the admirable nurse whose care, during his ailing childhood, had
done so much both to preserve Stevenson's life and awaken his love of
tales and poetry, and of whom until his death he thought with the
utmost constancy of affection. The letter bears no sign of date or
place, but by the handwriting would seem to belong to this year:--
1871?
MY DEAR CUMMY,--I was greatly pleased by your letter in many ways. Of
course, I was glad to hear from you; you know, you and I have so many
old stories between us, that even if there was nothing else, even if
there was not a very sincere respect and affection, we should always be
glad to pass a nod. I say, "even if there was not." But you know right
well there is. Do not suppose that I shall ever forget those long,
bitter nights, when I coughed and coughed and was so unhappy, and you
were so patient and loving with a poor, sick child. Indeed, Cummy, I
wish I might become a man worth talking of, if it were only that you
should not have thrown away your pains.
Happily, it is not the result of our acts that makes them brave and
noble, but the acts themselves and the unselfish love that moved us to
do them. "Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these."
My dear old nurse, and you know there is nothing a man can say nearer
his heart except his mother or his wife--my dear old nurse, God will
make good to you all the good that you have done, and mercifully forgive
you all the evil. And next time when the spring comes round, and
everything is beginning once again, if you should happen to think that
you might have had a child of your own, and that it was hard you should
have spent so many years taking care of some one else's prodigal, just
you think this--you have been for a great deal in my life; you have made
much that there is in me, just as surely as if you had conceived me; and
there are sons who are more ungrateful to their own mothers than I am to
you. For I am not ungrateful, my dear Cummy, and it is with a very
sincere emotion that I write myself your little boy,
LOUIS.
TO CHARLES BAXTER
After a winter of troubled health, Stevenson had gone to Dunblane for
a change in early spring; and thence writes to his college companion
and lifelong friend, Mr. Charles Baxter:--
_Dunblane, Friday, 5th March 1872._
MY DEAR BAXTER,--By the date you may perhaps understand the purport of
my letter without any words wasted about the matter. I cannot walk with
you to-morrow, and you must not expect me. I came yesterday afternoon to
Bridge of Allan, and have been very happy ever since, as every place is
sanctified by the eighth sense, Memory. I walked up here this morning
(three miles, _tu-dieu!_ a good stretch for me), and passed one of my
favourite places in the world, and one that I very much affect in spirit
when the body is tied down and brought immovably to anchor on a sickbed.
It is a meadow and bank on a corner on the river, and is connected in my
mind inseparably with Virgil's _Eclogues. Hic corulis mistos inter
consedimus ulmos_, or something very like that, the passage begins (only
I know my short-winded Latinity must have come to grief over even this
much of quotation); and here, to a wish, is just such a cavern as
Menalcas might shelter himself withal from the bright noon, and, with
his lips curled backward, pipe himself blue in the face, while
_Messieurs les Arcadiens_ would roll out those cloying hexameters that
sing themselves in one's mouth to such a curious lilting chant.
In such weather one has the bird's need to whistle; and I, who am
specially incompetent in this art, must content myself by chattering
away to you on this bit of paper. All the way along I was thanking God
that he had made me and the birds and everything just as they are and
not otherwise; for although there was no sun, the air was so thrilled
with robins and blackbirds that it made the heart tremble with joy, and
the leaves are far enough forward on the underwood to give a fine
promise for the future. Even myself, as I say, I would not have had
changed in one _iota_ this forenoon, in spite of all my idleness and
Guthrie's lost paper, which is ever present with me--a horrible phantom.
No one can be alone at home or in a quite new place. Memory and you must
go hand in hand with (at least) decent weather if you wish to cook up a
proper dish of solitude. It is in these little flights of mine that I
get more pleasure than in anything else. Now, at present, I am supremely
uneasy and restless--almost to the extent of pain; but O! how I enjoy
it, and how I _shall_ enjoy it afterwards (please God), if I get years
enough allotted to me for the thing to ripen in. When I am a very old
and very respectable citizen with white hair and bland manners and a
gold watch, I shall hear three crows cawing in my heart, as I heard them
this morning: I vote for old age and eighty years of retrospect. Yet,
after all, I dare say, a short shrift and a nice green grave are about
as desirable.
Poor devil! how I am wearying you! Cheer up. Two pages more, and my
letter reaches its term, for I have no more paper. What delightful
things inns and waiters and bagmen are! If we didn't travel now and
then, we should forget what the feeling of life is. The very cushion of
a railway carriage--"the things restorative to the touch." I can't
write, confound it! That's because I am so tired with my walk....
Believe me, ever your affectionate friend,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO CHARLES BAXTER
The "Spec." is, of course, the famous and historical debating society
(the Speculative Society) of Edinburgh University, to which Stevenson
had been elected on the strength of his conversational powers, and to
whose meetings he contributed several essays.
_Dunblane, Tuesday, 9th April 1872._
MY DEAR BAXTER,--I don't know what you mean. I know nothing about the
Standing Committee of the Spec., did not know that such a body existed,
and even if it doth exist, must sadly repudiate all association with
such "goodly fellowship." I am a "Rural Voluptuary" at present. _That_
is what is the matter with me. The Spec. may go whistle. As for "C.
Baxter, Esq.," who is he? "One Baxter, or Bagster, a secretary," I say
to mine acquaintance, "is at present disquieting my leisure with certain
illegal, uncharitable, unchristian, and unconstitutional documents
called _Business Letters: The affair is in the hands of the Police_." Do
you hear _that_, you evildoer? Sending business letters is surely a far
more hateful and slimy degree of wickedness than sending threatening
letters; the man who throws grenades and torpedoes is less malicious;
the Devil in red-hot hell rubs his hands with glee as he reckons up the
number that go forth spreading pain and anxiety with each delivery of
the post.
I have been walking to-day by a colonnade of beeches along the brawling
Allan. My character for sanity is quite gone, seeing that I cheered my
lonely way with the following, in a triumphant chaunt: "Thank God for
the grass, and the fir-trees, and the crows, and the sheep, and the
sunshine, and the shadows of the fir-trees." I hold that he is a poor
mean devil who can walk alone, in such a place and in such weather, and
doesn't set up his lungs and cry back to the birds and the river.
Follow, follow, follow me. Come hither, come hither, come hither--here
shall you see--no enemy--except a very slight remnant of winter and its
rough weather. My bedroom, when I awoke this morning, was full of
bird-songs, which is the greatest pleasure in life. Come hither, come
hither, come hither, and when you come bring the third part of the
_Earthly Paradise_; you can get it for me in Elliot's for two and
tenpence (2s. 10d.) (_business habits_). Also bring an ounce of honeydew
from Wilson's.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
In the previous year, 1871, it had become apparent that Stevenson was
neither fitted by bodily health nor by inclination for the family
profession of civil engineer. Accordingly his summer excursions were
no longer to the harbour works and lighthouses of Scotland, but to
the ordinary scenes of holiday travel abroad.
_Brussels, Thursday, 25th July 1872._
MY DEAR MOTHER,--I am here at last, sitting in my room, without coat or
waistcoat, and with both window and door open, and yet perspiring like a
terra-cotta jug or a Gruyère cheese.
We had a very good passage, which we certainly deserved, in
compensation for having to sleep on the cabin floor, and finding
absolutely nothing fit for human food in the whole filthy embarkation.
We made up for lost time by sleeping on deck a good part of the
forenoon. When I woke, Simpson was still sleeping the sleep of the just,
on a coil of ropes and (as appeared afterwards) his own hat; so I got a
bottle of Bass and a pipe and laid hold of an old Frenchman of somewhat
filthy aspect (_fiat experimentum in corpore vili_) to try my French
upon. I made very heavy weather of it. The Frenchman had a very pretty
young wife; but my French always deserted me entirely when I had to
answer her, and so she soon drew away and left me to her lord, who
talked of French politics, Africa, and domestic economy with great
vivacity. From Ostend a smoking-hot journey to Brussels. At Brussels we
went off after dinner to the Parc. If any person wants to be happy, I
should advise the Parc. You sit drinking iced drinks and smoking penny
cigars under great old trees. The band place, covered walks, etc., are
all lit up. And you can't fancy how beautiful was the contrast of the
great masses of lamplit foliage and the dark sapphire night sky with
just one blue star set overhead in the middle of the largest patch. In
the dark walks, too, there are crowds of people whose faces you cannot
see, and here and there a colossal white statue at the corner of an
alley that gives the place a nice, _artificial_, eighteenth century
sentiment. There was a good deal of summer lightning blinking overhead,
and the black avenues and white statues leapt out every minute into
short-lived distinctness.
I get up to add one thing more. There is in the hotel a boy in whom I
take the deepest interest. I cannot tell you his age, but the very first
time I saw him (when I was at dinner yesterday) I was very much struck
with his appearance. There is something very leonine in his face, with a
dash of the negro especially, if I remember aright, in the mouth. He has
a great quantity of dark hair, curling in great rolls, not in little
corkscrews, and a pair of large, dark, and very steady, bold, bright
eyes. His manners are those of a prince. I felt like an overgrown
ploughboy beside him. He speaks English perfectly, but with, I think,
sufficient foreign accent to stamp him as a Russian, especially when his
manners are taken into account. I don't think I ever saw any one who
looked like a hero before. After breakfast this morning I was talking to
him in the court, when he mentioned casually that he had caught a snake
in the Riesengebirge. "I have it here," he said; "would you like to see
it?" I said yes; and putting his hand into his breast-pocket, he drew
forth not a dried serpent skin, but the head and neck of the reptile
writhing and shooting out its horrible tongue in my face. You may
conceive what a fright I got. I send off this single sheet just now in
order to let you know I am safe across; but you must not expect letters
often.
R. L. STEVENSON.
_P.S._--The snake was about a yard long, but harmless, and now, he
says, quite tame.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Hotel Landsberg, Frankfurt, Monday, 29th July 1872._
... Last night I met with rather an amusing adventurette. Seeing a
church door open, I went in, and was led by most importunate
finger-bills up a long stair to the top of the tower. The father smoking
at the door, the mother and the three daughters received me as if I was
a friend of the family and had come in for an evening visit. The
youngest daughter (about thirteen, I suppose, and a pretty little girl)
had been learning English at the school, and was anxious to play it off
upon a real, veritable Englander; so we had a long talk, and I was shown
photographs, etc., Marie and I talking, and the others looking on with
evident delight at having such a linguist in the family. As all my
remarks were duly translated and communicated to the rest, it was quite
a good German lesson. There was only one contretemps during the whole
interview--the arrival of another visitor, in the shape (surely) the
last of God's creatures, a wood-worm of the most unnatural and hideous
appearance, with one great striped horn sticking out of his nose like a
boltsprit. If there are many wood-worms in Germany, I shall come home.
The most courageous men in the world must be entomologists. I had rather
be a lion-tamer.
To-day I got rather a curiosity--_Lieder und Balladen von Robert Burns_,
translated by one Silbergleit, and not so ill done either. Armed with
which, I had a swim in the Main, and then bread and cheese and Bavarian
beer in a sort of café, or at least the German substitute for a café;
but what a falling off after the heavenly forenoons in Brussels!
I have bought a meerschaum out of local sentiment, and am now very low
and nervous about the bargain, having paid dearer than I should in
England, and got a worse article, if I can form a judgment.
Do write some more, somebody. To-morrow I expect I shall go into
lodgings, as this hotel work makes the money disappear like butter in a
furnace.--Meanwhile believe me, ever your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Hotel Landsberg, Thursday, 1st August 1872._
... Yesterday I walked to Eckenheim, a village a little way out of
Frankfurt, and turned into the alehouse. In the room, which was just
such as it would have been in Scotland, were the landlady, two
neighbours, and an old peasant eating raw sausage at the far end. I soon
got into conversation; and was astonished when the landlady, having
asked whether I were an Englishman, and received an answer in the
affirmative, proceeded to inquire further whether I were not also a
Scotchman. It turned out that a Scotch doctor--a professor--a poet--who
wrote books--_gross wie das_--had come nearly every day out of Frankfurt
to the _Eckenheimer Wirthschaft_, and had left behind him a most savoury
memory in the hearts of all its customers. One man ran out to find his
name for me, and returned with the news that it was _Cobie_ (Scobie, I
suspect); and during his absence the rest were pouring into my ears the
fame and acquirements of my countryman. He was, in some undecipherable
manner, connected with the Queen of England and one of the Princesses.
He had been in Turkey, and had there married a wife of immense wealth.
They could find apparently no measure adequate to express the size of
his books. In one way or another, he had amassed a princely fortune, and
had apparently only one sorrow, his daughter to wit, who had absconded
into a _Kloster_, with a considerable slice of the mother's _Geld_. I
told them we had no Klosters in Scotland, with a certain feeling of
superiority. No more had they, I was told--"_Hier ist unser Kloster!_"
and the speaker motioned with both arms round the taproom. Although the
first torrent was exhausted, yet the Doctor came up again in all sorts
of ways, and with or without occasion, throughout the whole interview;
as, for example, when one man, taking his pipe out of his mouth and
shaking his head, remarked _àpropos_ of nothing and with almost defiant
conviction, "_Er war ein feiner Mann, der Herr Doctor_," and was
answered by another with "_Yaw, yaw, und trank immer rothen Wein_."
Setting aside the Doctor, who had evidently turned the brains of the
entire village, they were intelligent people. One thing in particular
struck me, their honesty in admitting that here they spoke bad German,
and advising me to go to Coburg or Leipsic for German.--"_Sie sprechen
da_ _rein_" (clean), said one; and they all nodded their heads together
like as many mandarins, and repeated _rein, so rein_ in chorus.
Of course we got upon Scotland. The hostess said, "_Die Schottländer
trinken gern Schnapps_," which may be freely translated, "Scotchmen are
horrid fond of whisky." It was impossible, of course, to combat such a
truism; and so I proceeded to explain the construction of toddy,
interrupted by a cry of horror when I mentioned the _hot_ water; and
thence, as I find is always the case, to the most ghastly romancing
about Scottish scenery and manners, the Highland dress, and everything
national or local that I could lay my hands upon. Now that I have got my
German Burns, I lean a good deal upon him for opening a conversation,
and read a few translations to every yawning audience that I can gather.
I am grown most insufferably national, you see. I fancy it is a
punishment for my want of it at ordinary times. Now, what do you think,
there was a waiter in this very hotel, but, alas! he is now gone, who
sang (from morning to night, as my informant said with a shrug at the
recollection) what but _'s ist lange her_, the German version of Auld
Lang Syne; so you see, madame, the finest lyric ever written _will_ make
its way out of whatsoever corner of patois it found its birth in.
"_Mein Herz ist im Hochland, mein Herz ist nicht hier,
Mein Herz ist im Hochland im grünen Revier.
Im grünen Reviere zu jagen das Reh;
Mein Herz ist im Hochland, wo immer ich geh._"
I don't think I need translate that for you.
There is one thing that burthens me a good deal in my patriotic
garrulage, and that is the black ignorance in which I grope about
everything, as, for example, when I gave yesterday a full and, I fancy,
a startlingly incorrect account of Scotch education to a very stolid
German on a garden bench: he sat and perspired under it, however, with
much composure. I am generally glad enough to fall back again, after
these political interludes, upon Burns, toddy, and the Highlands.
I go every night to the theatre, except when there is no opera. I cannot
stand a play yet; but I am already very much improved, and can
understand a good deal of what goes on.
_Friday, August 2, 1872._--In the evening, at the theatre, I had a great
laugh. Lord Allcash in _Fra Diavolo_, with his white hat, red
guide-books, and bad German, was the _pièce-de-résistance_ from a
humorous point of view; and I had the satisfaction of knowing that in my
own small way I could minister the same amusement whenever I chose to
open my mouth.
I am just going off to do some German with Simpson.--Your affectionate
son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO THOMAS STEVENSON
_Frankfurt, Rosengasse 13, August 4, 1872._
MY DEAR FATHER,--You will perceive by the head of this page that we have
at last got into lodgings, and powerfully mean ones too. If I were to
call the street anything but _shady_, I should be boasting. The people
sit at their doors in shirt-sleeves, smoking as they do in Seven Dials
of a Sunday.
Last night we went to bed about ten, for the first time _householders_
in Germany--real Teutons, with no deception, spring, or false bottom.
About half-past one there began such a trumpeting, shouting, pealing of
bells, and scurrying hither and thither of feet as woke every person in
Frankfurt out of their first sleep with a vague sort of apprehension
that the last day was at hand. The whole street was alive, and we could
hear people talking in their rooms, or crying to passers-by from their
windows, all around us. At last I made out what a man was saying in the
next room. It was a fire in Sachsenhausen, he said (Sachsenhausen is the
suburb on the other side of the Main), and he wound up with one of the
most tremendous falsehoods on record, "_Hier alles ruht_--here all is
still." If it can be said to be still in an engine factory, or in the
stomach of a volcano when it is meditating an eruption, he might have
been justified in what he said, but not otherwise. The tumult continued
unabated for near an hour; but as one grew used to it, it gradually
resolved itself into three bells, answering each other at short
intervals across the town, a man shouting at ever shorter intervals and
with superhuman energy, "_Feuer--im Sachsenhausen_," and the almost
continuous winding of all manner of bugles and trumpets, sometimes in
stirring flourishes, and sometimes in mere tuneless wails. Occasionally
there was another rush of feet past the window, and once there was a
mighty drumming, down between us and the river, as though the soldiery
were turning out to keep the peace. This was all we had of the fire,
except a great cloud, all flushed red with the glare, above the roofs on
the other side of the Gasse; but it was quite enough to put me entirely
off my sleep and make me keenly alive to three or four gentlemen who
were strolling leisurely about my person, and every here and there
leaving me somewhat as a keepsake.... However, everything has its
compensation, and when day came at last, and the sparrows awoke with
trills and _carol-ets_, the dawn seemed to fall on me like a sleeping
draught. I went to the window and saw the sparrows about the eaves, and
a great troop of doves go strolling up the paven Gasse, seeking what
they may devour. And so to sleep, despite fleas and fire-alarms, and
clocks chiming the hours out of neighbouring houses at all sorts of odd
times and with the most charming want of unanimity.
We have got settled down in Frankfurt, and like the place very much.
Simpson and I seem to get on very well together. We suit each other
capitally; and it is an awful joke to be living (two would-be
advocates, and one a baronet) in this supremely mean abode.
The abode is, however, a great improvement on the hotel, and I think we
shall grow quite fond of it.--Ever your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_13 Rosengasse, Frankfurt, Tuesday Morning, August 1872._
... Last night I was at the theatre and heard _Die Judin_ (_La Juive_),
and was thereby terribly excited. At last, in the middle of the fifth
act, which was perfectly beastly, I had to slope. I could stand even
seeing the cauldron with the sham fire beneath, and the two hateful
executioners in red; but when at last the girl's courage breaks down,
and, grasping her father's arm, she cries out--O so shudderfully!--I
thought it high time to be out of that _galère_, and so I do not know
yet whether it ends well or ill; but if I ever afterwards find that they
do carry things to the extremity, I shall think more meanly of my
species. It was raining and cold outside, so I went into a _Bierhalle_,
and sat and brooded over a _Schnitt_ (half-glass) for nearly an hour. An
opera is far more _real_ than real life to me. It seems as if stage
illusion, and particularly this hardest to swallow and most conventional
illusion of them all--an opera--would never stale upon me. I wish that
life was an opera. I should like to _live_ in one; but I don't know in
what quarter of the globe I shall find a society so constituted.
Besides, it would soon pall: imagine asking for three-kreuzer cigars in
recitative, or giving the washerwoman the inventory of your dirty
clothes in a sustained and _flourishous_ aria.
I am in a right good mood this morning to sit here and write to you; but
not to give you news. There is a great stir of life, in a quiet, almost
country fashion, all about us here. Some one is hammering a beef-steak
in the _rez-de-chaussée_: there is a great clink of pitchers and noise
of the pump-handle at the public well in the little square-kin round the
corner. The children, all seemingly within a month, and certainly none
above five, that always go halting and stumbling up and down the
roadway, are ordinarily very quiet, and sit sedately puddling in the
gutter, trying, I suppose, poor little devils! to understand their
_Muttersprache_; but they, too, make themselves heard from time to time
in little incomprehensible antiphonies, about the drift that comes down
to them by their rivers from the strange lands higher up the Gasse.
Above all, there is here such a twittering of canaries (I can see twelve
out of our window), and such continual visitation of grey doves and
big-nosed sparrows, as make our little bye-street into a perfect aviary.
I look across the Gasse at our opposite neighbour, as he dandles his
baby about, and occasionally takes a spoonful or two of some pale slimy
nastiness that looks like _dead porridge_, if you can take the
conception. These two are his only occupations. All day long you can
hear him singing over the brat when he is not eating; or see him eating
when he is not keeping baby. Besides which, there comes into his house a
continual round of visitors that puts me in mind of the luncheon hour at
home. As he has thus no ostensible avocation, we have named him "the
W.S." to give a flavour of respectability to the street.
Enough of the Gasse. The weather is here much colder. It rained a good
deal yesterday; and though it is fair and sunshiny again to-day, and we
can still sit, of course, with our windows open, yet there is no more
excuse for the siesta; and the bathe in the river, except for
cleanliness, is no longer a necessity of life. The Main is very swift.
In one part of the baths it is next door to impossible to swim against
it, and I suspect that, out in the open, it would be quite
impossible.--Adieu, my dear mother, and believe me, ever your
affectionate son,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
(_Rentier_).
TO CHARLES BAXTER
On the way home with Sir Walter Simpson from Germany. The L.J.R.
herein mentioned was a short-lived Essay Club of only six members;
its meetings were held in a public-house in Advocate's Close; the
meaning of its initials (as recently divulged by Mr. Baxter) was
Liberty, Justice, Reverence; no doubt understood by the members in
some fresh and esoteric sense of their own.
_Boulogne Sur Mer, Wednesday, 3rd or 4th September 1872._
Blame me not that this epistle
Is the first you have from me.
Idleness has held me fettered,
But at last the times are bettered
And once more I wet my whistle
Here, in France beside the sea.
All the green and idle weather
I have had in sun and shower,
Such an easy warm subsistence,
Such an indolent existence
I should find it hard to sever
Day from day and hour from hour.
Many a tract-provided ranter
May upbraid me, dark and sour,
Many a bland Utilitarian
Or excited Millenarian,
--"_Pereunt et imputantur_
You must speak to every hour."
But (the very term's deceptive)
You at least, my friend, will see,
That in sunny grassy meadows
Trailed across by moving shadows
To be actively receptive
Is as much as man can be.
He that all the winter grapples
Difficulties, thrust and ward--
Needs to cheer him thro' his duty
Memories of sun and beauty
Orchards with the russet apples
Lying scattered on the sward.
Many such I keep in prison,
Keep them here at heart unseen,
Till my muse again rehearses
Long years hence, and in my verses
You shall meet them rearisen
Ever comely, ever green.
You know how they never perish,
How, in time of later art,
Memories consecrate and sweeten
These defaced and tempest-beaten
Flowers of former years we cherish,
Half a life, against our heart.
Most, those love-fruits withered greenly,
Those frail, sickly amourettes,
How they brighten with the distance
Take new strength and new existence
Till we see them sitting queenly
Crowned and courted by regrets!
All that loveliest and best is,
Aureole-fashion round their head,
They that looked in life but plainly,
How they stir our spirits vainly
When they come to us Alcestis-
like returning from the dead!
Not the old love but another,
Bright she comes at Memory's call
Our forgotten vows reviving
To a newer, livelier living,
As the dead child to the mother
Seems the fairest child of all.
Thus our Goethe, sacred master,
Travelling backward thro' his youth,
Surely wandered wrong in trying
To renew the old, undying
Loves that cling in memory faster
Than they ever lived in truth.
So; _en voilà assez de mauvais vers._ Let us finish with a word or two
in honest prose, tho' indeed I shall so soon be back again and, if you
be in town as I hope, so soon get linked again down the Lothian road by
a cigar or two and a liquor, that it is perhaps scarce worth the postage
to send my letter on before me. I have just been long enough away to be
satisfied and even anxious to get home again and talk the matter over
with my friends. I shall have plenty to tell you; and principally plenty
that I do not care to write; and I daresay, you, too, will have a lot of
gossip. What about Ferrier? Is the L.J.R. think you to go naked and
unashamed this winter? He with his charming idiosyncrasy was in my eyes
the vine-leaf that preserved our self-respect. All the rest of us are
such shadows, compared to his full-flavoured personality; but I must not
spoil my own _début_. I am trenching upon one of the essayettes which I
propose to introduce as a novelty this year before that august assembly.
For we must not let it die. It is a sickly baby, but what with nursing,
and pap, and the like, I do not see why it should not have a stout
manhood after all, and perhaps a green old age. Eh! when we are old (if
we ever should be) that too will be one of those cherished memories I
have been so rhapsodizing over. We must consecrate our room. We must
make it a museum of bright recollections; so that we may go back there
white-headed, and say "Vixi." After all, new countries, sun, music, and
all the rest can never take down our gusty, rainy, smoky, grim old city
out of the first place that it has been making for itself in the bottom
of my soul, by all pleasant and hard things that have befallen me for
these past twenty years or so. My heart is buried there--say, in
Advocate's Close!
Simpson and I got on very well together, and made a very suitable pair.
I like him much better than I did when I started which was almost more
than I hoped for.
If you should chance to see Bob, give him my news or if you have the
letter about you, let him see it.--Ever your Affct. friend,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO CHARLES BAXTER
Through the jesting tenor of this letter is to be discerned a vein of
more than half serious thinking very characteristic of R. L. S. alike
as youth and man.
_17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, October 1872._
MY DEAR BAXTER,--I am gum-boiled and face swollen to an unprecedented
degree. It is very depressing to suffer from gibber that cannot be
brought to a head. I cannot speak it, because my face is so swollen and
stiff that enunciation must be deliberate--a thing your true gibberer
cannot hold up his head under; and writ gibber is somehow not gibber at
all, it does not come forth, does not _flow_, with that fine irrational
freedom that it loves in speech--it does not afford relief to the packed
bosom.
Hence I am suffering from _suppressed gibber_--an uneasy complaint; and
like all cases of suppressed humours, this hath a nasty tendency to the
brain. Therefore (the more confused I get, the more I lean on Thus's and
Hences and Therefores) you must not be down upon me, most noble Festus,
altho' this letter should smack of some infirmity of judgment. I speak
the words of soberness and truth; and would you were not almost but
altogether as I am, except this swelling. Lord, Lord, if we could change
personalities how we should hate it. How I should rebel at the office,
repugn under the Ulster coat, and repudiate your monkish humours thus
unjustly and suddenly thrust upon poor, infidel me! And as for you--why,
my dear Charles, "a mouse that hath its lodging in a cat's ear" would
not be so uneasy as you in your new conditions. I do not see how your
temperament would come thro' the feverish longings to do things that
cannot then (or perhaps ever) be accomplished, the feverish unrests and
damnable indecisions, that it takes all my easy-going spirits to come
through. A vane can live out anything in the shape of a wind; and that
is how I can be, and am, a more serious person than you. Just as the
light French seemed very serious to Sterne, light L. Stevenson can
afford to bob about over the top of any deep sea of prospect or
retrospect, where ironclad C. Baxter would incontinently go down with
all hands. A fool is generally the wisest person out. The wise man must
shut his eyes to all the perils and horrors that lie round him; but the
cap and bells can go bobbing along the most slippery ledges and the
bauble will not stir up sleeping lions. Hurray! for motley, for a good
sound _insouciance_, for a healthy philosophic carelessness!
My dear Baxter, a word in your ear--"<sc>DON'T YOU WISH YOU WERE A FOOL</sc>?"
How easy the world would go on with you--literally on castors. The only
reason a wise man can assign for getting drunk is that he wishes to
enjoy for a while the blessed immunities and sunshiny weather of the
land of fooldom. But a fool, who dwells ever there, has no excuse at
all. _That_ is a happy land, if you like--and not so far away either.
Take a fool's advice and let us strive without ceasing to get into it.
Hark in your ear again: "THEY ALLOW PEOPLE TO REASON IN THAT LAND." I
wish I could take you by the hand and lead you away into its pleasant
boundaries. There is no custom-house on the frontier, and you may take
in what books you will. There are no manners and customs; but men and
women grow up, like trees in a still, well-walled garden, "at their own
sweet will." There is no prescribed or customary folly--no motley, cap,
or bauble: out of the well of each one's own innate absurdity he is
allowed and encouraged freely to draw and to communicate; and it is a
strange thing how this natural fooling comes so nigh to one's better
thoughts of wisdom; and stranger still, that all this discord of people
speaking in their own natural moods and keys, masses itself into a far
more perfect harmony than all the dismal, official unison in which they
sing in other countries. Part-singing seems best all the world over.
I who live in England must wear the hackneyed symbols of the profession,
to show that I have (at least) consular immunities, coming as I do out
of another land, where they are not so wise as they are here, but fancy
that God likes what he makes and is not best pleased with us when we
deface and dissemble all that he has given us and put about us to one
common standard of----Highty-Tighty!--when was a jester obliged to
finish his sentence? I cut so strong a pirouette that all my bells
jingle, and come down in an attitude, with one hand upon my hip. The
evening's entertainment is over,--"and if our kyind friends----"
Hurrah! I feel relieved. I have put out my gibber, and if you have read
thus far, you will have taken it in. I wonder if you will ever come this
length. I shall try a trap for you, and insult you here, on this last
page. "O Baxter what a damned humbug you are!" There,--shall this insult
bloom and die unseen, or will you come toward me, when next we meet,
with a face deformed with anger and demand speedy and bloody
satisfaction. _Nous verrons_, which is French.
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO CHARLES BAXTER
In the winter of 1872-73 Stevenson was out of health again; and by
the beginning of spring there began the trouble which for the next
twelve months clouded his home life. The following shows exactly in
what spirit he took it:--
_17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, Sunday, February 2, 1873._
MY DEAR BAXTER,--The thunderbolt has fallen with a vengeance now. On
Friday night after leaving you, in the course of conversation, my father
put me one or two questions as to beliefs, which I candidly answered. I
really hate all lying so much now--a new found honesty that has somehow
come out of my late illness--that I could not so much as hesitate at the
time; but if I had foreseen the real hell of everything since, I think I
should have lied, as I have done so often before. I so far thought of my
father, but I had forgotten my mother. And now! they are both ill, both
silent, both as down in the mouth as if--I can find no simile. You may
fancy how happy it is for me. If it were not too late, I think I could
almost find it in my heart to retract, but it is too late; and again, am
I to live my whole life as one falsehood? Of course, it is rougher than
hell upon my father, but can I help it? They don't see either that my
game is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a
careless infidel. I believe as much as they do, only generally in the
inverse ratio: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold. I
have not come hastily to my views. I reserve (as I told them) many
points until I acquire fuller information, and do not think I am thus
justly to be called "horrible atheist."
Now, what is to take place? What a curse I am to my parents! O Lord,
what a pleasant thing it is to have just _damned_ the happiness of
(probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the world.
What is my life to be at this rate? What, you rascal? Answer--I have a
pistol at your throat. If all that I hold true and most desire to spread
is to be such death, and worse than death, in the eyes of my father and
mother, what the _devil_ am I to do?
Here is a good heavy cross with a vengeance, and all rough with rusty
nails that tear your fingers, only it is not I that have to carry it
alone; I hold the light end, but the heavy burden falls on these two.
Don't--I don't know what I was going to say. I am an abject idiot,
which, all things considered, is not remarkable.--Ever your affectionate
and horrible atheist,
R. L. STEVENSON.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] It was the father who, from dislike of a certain Edinburgh
Lewis, changed the sound and spelling of his son's second name to
Louis (spoken always with the "s" sounded), and it was the son
himself who about his eighteenth year dropped the use of his third
name and initial altogether.
[4] See a paper on _R. L. Stevenson in Wick_, by Margaret H. Roberton,
in Magazine of Wick Literary Society, Christmas 1903.
[5] Aikman's _Annals of the Persecution in Scotland_.
[6] Thomas Stevenson.
II
STUDENT DAYS--_Continued_
NEW FRIENDSHIPS--ORDERED SOUTH
JULY 1873-MAY 1874
The year 1873 was a critical one in Stevenson's life. Late in July he
went for the second time to pay a visit to Cockfield Rectory, the
pleasant Suffolk home of his cousin Mrs. Churchill Babington and her
husband. Another guest at the same time was Mrs. Sitwell--now my
wife--an intimate friend and connection by marriage of the hostess. I
was shortly due to join the party, when Mrs. Sitwell wrote telling me of
the "fine young spirit" she had found under her friend's roof, and
suggesting that I should hasten my visit so as to make his acquaintance
before he left. I came accordingly, and from that time on the fine young
spirit became a leading interest both in her life and mine. He had
thrown himself on her sympathies, in that troubled hour of his youth,
with entire dependence almost from the first, and clung to her devotedly
for the next two years as to an inspirer, consoler, and guide. Under her
influence he began for the first time to see his way in life, and to
believe hopefully and manfully in his own powers and future. To
encourage such hopes further, and to lend what hand one could towards
their fulfilment, became quickly one of the first of cares and
pleasures. It was impossible not to recognise, in this very
un-academical type of Scottish youth, a spirit the most interesting and
full of promise. His social charm was already at its height, and quite
irresistible; but inwardly he was full of trouble and self-doubt. If he
could steer himself or be steered safely through the difficulties of
youth, and if he could learn to write with half the charm and genius
that shone from his presence and conversation, there seemed room to hope
for the highest from him. He went back to Edinburgh in the beginning of
September full of new hope and heart. It had been agreed that while
still reading, as his parents desired, for the bar, he should try
seriously to get ready for publication some essays which he had already
on hand--one on Walt Whitman, one on John Knox, one on Roads and the
Spirit of the Road--and should so far as possible avoid topics of
dispute in the home circle.
But after a while the news of him was not favourable. Those differences
with his father, which had been weighing almost morbidly upon his
high-strung nature, were renewed. By mid-October his letters told of
failing health. He came to London, and instead of presenting himself, as
had been proposed, to be examined for admission to one of the London
Inns of Court, he was forced to consult the late Sir Andrew Clark, who
found him suffering from acute nerve exhaustion, with some threat of
danger to the lungs. He was ordered to break at once with Edinburgh for
a time, and to spend the winter in a more soothing climate and
surroundings. He went accordingly to Mentone, a place he had delighted
in as a boy ten years before, and during a stay of six months made a
slow, but for the time being a pretty complete, recovery. I visited him
twice during the winter, and the second time found him coming fairly to
himself again in the southern peace and sunshine. He was busy with the
essay _Ordered South_, and with that on _Victor Hugo's Romances_, which
was afterwards his first contribution to the Cornhill Magazine; was full
of a thousand dreams and projects for future work; and was passing his
invalid days pleasantly meanwhile in the companionship of two kind and
accomplished Russian ladies, who took to him warmly, and of their
children. The following record of the time is drawn from his
correspondence partly with his parents and partly with myself, but
chiefly from the journal-letters, containing a full and intimate record
of his daily moods and doings, which he was accustomed to send off
weekly or oftener to Mrs. Sitwell.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
This is from his cousin's house in Suffolk. Some of the impressions
then received of the contrasts between Scotland and England were
later worked out in the essay _The Foreigner at Home_, printed at the
head of _Memories and Portraits_:--
_Cockfield Rectory, Sudbury, Suffolk, Tuesday, July 28, 1873._
MY DEAR MOTHER,--I am too happy to be much of a correspondent. Yesterday
we were away to Melford and Lavenham, both exceptionally placid,
beautiful old English towns. Melford scattered all round a big green,
with an Elizabethan Hall and Park, great screens of trees that seem
twice as high as trees should seem, and everything else like what ought
to be in a novel, and what one never expects to see in reality, made me
cry out how good we were to live in Scotland, for the many hundredth
time. I cannot get over my astonishment--indeed, it increases every
day--at the hopeless gulf that there is between England and Scotland,
and English and Scotch. Nothing is the same; and I feel as strange and
outlandish here as I do in France or Germany. Everything by the
wayside, in the houses, or about the people, strikes me with an
unexpected unfamiliarity: I walk among surprises, for just where you
think you have them, something wrong turns up.
I got a little Law read yesterday, and some German this morning, but on
the whole there are too many amusements going for much work; as for
correspondence, I have neither heart nor time for it to-day.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
After leaving Cockfield Stevenson spent a few days in London and a
few with me in a cottage I then had at Norwood. This and the
following letters were written in the next days after his return
home. "Bob" in the last paragraph is Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson,
an elder cousin to whom Louis had been from boyhood devotedly
attached: afterwards known as the brilliant painter-critic and author
of _Velasquez_, etc.
_17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, Monday, September 1st, 1873._
I have arrived, as you see, without accident; but I never had a more
wretched journey in my life. I could not settle to read anything; I
bought Darwin's last book in despair, for I knew I could generally read
Darwin, but it was a failure. However, the book served me in good stead;
for when a couple of children got in at Newcastle, I struck up a great
friendship with them on the strength of the illustrations. These two
children (a girl of nine and a boy of six) had never before travelled in
a railway, so that everything was a glory to them, and they were never
tired of watching the telegraph posts and trees and hedges go racing
past us to the tail of the train; and the girl I found quite entered
into the most daring personifications that I could make. A little way
on, about Alnmouth, they had their first sight of the sea; and it was
wonderful how loath they were to believe that what they saw was water;
indeed it was very still and grey and solid-looking under a sky to
match. It was worth the fare, yet a little farther on, to see the
delight of the girl when she passed into "another country," with the
black Tweed under our feet, crossed by the lamps of the passenger
bridge. I remember the first time I had gone into "another country,"
over the same river from the other side.
Bob was not at the station when I arrived; but a friend of his brought
me a letter; and he is to be in the first thing to-morrow. Do you know,
I think yesterday and the day before were the two happiest days of my
life? I would not have missed last month for eternity.--Ever yours,
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
The paper on _Roads_ herein mentioned had been planned during walks
at Cockfield; was offered to and rejected by the Saturday Review and
ultimately accepted by Mr. Hamerton for the Portfolio; and was the
first regular or paid contribution of Stevenson to periodical
literature.
_17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, Saturday, September 6, 1873._
I have been to-day a very long walk with my father through some of the
most beautiful ways hereabouts; the day was cold with an iron, windy
sky, and only glorified now and then with autumn sunlight. For it is
fully autumn with us, with a blight already over the greens, and a keen
wind in the morning that makes one rather timid of one's tub when it
finds its way indoors.
I was out this evening to call on a friend, and, coming back through the
wet, crowded, lamp-lit streets, was singing after my own fashion, "_Du
hast Diamanten und Perlen_," when I heard a poor cripple man in the
gutter wailing over a pitiful Scotch air, his club-foot supported on the
other knee, and his whole woebegone body propped sideways against a
crutch. The nearest lamp threw a strong light on his worn, sordid face
and the three boxes of lucifer matches that he held for sale. My own
false notes stuck in my chest. How well off I am! is the burthen of my
songs all day long--"_Drum ist so wohl mir in der Welt!_" and the ugly
reality of the cripple man was an intrusion on the beautiful world in
which I was walking. He could no more sing than I could; and his voice
was cracked and rusty, and altogether perished. To think that that wreck
may have walked the streets some night years ago, as glad at heart as I
was, and promising himself a future as golden and honourable!
_Sunday_, 11.20 _a.m._--I wonder what you are doing now?--in church
likely, at the _Te Deum_. Everything here is utterly silent. I can hear
men's footfalls streets away; the whole life of Edinburgh has been
sucked into sundry pious edifices; the gardens below my windows are
steeped in a diffused sunlight, and every tree seems standing on
tiptoes, strained and silent, as though to get its head above its
neighbour's and _listen_. You know what I mean, don't you? How trees do
seem silently to assert themselves on an occasion! I have been trying to
write _Roads_ until I feel as if I were standing on my head; but I mean
_Roads_, and shall do something to them.
I wish I could make you feel the hush that is over everything, only made
the more perfect by rare interruptions; and the rich, placid light, and
the still autumnal foliage. Houses, you know, stand all about our
gardens: solid, steady blocks of houses; all look empty and asleep.
_Monday night._--The drums and fifes up in the castle are sounding the
guard-call through the dark, and there is a great rattle of carriages
without. I have had (I must tell you) my bed taken out of this room, so
that I am alone in it with my books and two tables, and two chairs, and
a coal-skuttle (or _scuttle_) (?) and a _débris_ of broken pipes in a
corner, and my old school play-box, so full of papers and books that the
lid will not shut down, standing reproachfully in the midst. There is
something in it that is still a little gaunt and vacant; it needs a
little populous disorder over it to give it the feel of homeliness, and
perhaps a bit more furniture, just to take the edge off the sense of
illimitable space, eternity, and a future state, and the like, that is
brought home to one, even in this small attic, by the wide, empty floor.
You would require to know, what only I can ever know, many grim and many
maudlin passages out of my past life to feel how great a change has been
made for me by this past summer. Let me be ever so poor and thread-paper
a soul, I am going to try for the best.
These good booksellers of mine have at last got a _Werther_ without
illustrations. I want you to like Charlotte. Werther himself has every
feebleness and vice that could tend to make his suicide a most virtuous
and commendable action; and yet I like Werther too--I don't know why,
except that he has written the most delightful letters in the world.
Note, by the way, the passage under date June 21st not far from the
beginning; it finds a voice for a great deal of dumb, uneasy,
pleasurable longing that we have all had, times without number. I looked
that up the other day for _Roads_, so I know the reference; but you will
find it a garden of flowers from beginning to end. All through the
passion keeps steadily rising, from the thunderstorm at the
country-house--there was thunder in that story too--up to the last wild
delirious interview; either Lotte was no good at all, or else Werther
should have remained alive after that; either he knew his woman too
well, or else he was precipitate. But an idiot like that is hopeless;
and yet, he wasn't an idiot--I make reparation, and will offer eighteen
pounds of best wax at his tomb. Poor devil! he was only the weakest--or,
at least, a very weak strong man.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
_17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, Friday, September 12, 1873._
... I was over last night, contrary to my own wish, in Leven, Fife; and
this morning I had a conversation of which, I think, some account might
interest you. I was up with a cousin who was fishing in a mill-lade, and
a shower of rain drove me for shelter into a tumble-down steading
attached to the mill. There I found a labourer cleaning a byre, with
whom I fell into talk. The man was to all appearance as heavy, as
_hébété_, as any English clodhopper; but I knew I was in Scotland, and
launched out forthright into Education and Politics and the aims of
one's life. I told him how I had found the peasantry in Suffolk, and
added that their state had made me feel quite pained and down-hearted.
"It but to do that," he said, "to onybody that thinks at a'!" Then,
again, he said that he could not conceive how anything could daunt or
cast down a man who had an aim in life. "They that have had a guid
schoolin' and do nae mair, whatever they do, they have done; but him
that has aye something ayont need never be weary." I have had to
mutilate the dialect much, so that it might be comprehensible to you;
but I think the sentiment will keep, even through a change of words,
something of the heartsome ring of encouragement that it had for me: and
that from a man cleaning a byre! You see what John Knox and his schools
have done.
_Saturday._--This has been a charming day for me from morning to now (5
P.M.). First, I found your letter, and went down and read it on a seat
in those Public Gardens of which you have heard already. After lunch, my
father and I went down to the coast and walked a little way along the
shore between Granton and Cramond. This has always been with me a very
favourite walk. The Firth closes gradually together before you, the
coast runs in a series of the most beautifully moulded bays, hill after
hill, wooded and softly outlined, trends away in front till the two
shores join together. When the tide is out there are great, gleaming
flats of wet sand, over which the gulls go flying and crying; and every
cape runs down into them with its little spit of wall and trees. We lay
together a long time on the beach; the sea just babbled among the
stones; and at one time we heard the hollow, sturdy beat of the paddles
of an unseen steamer somewhere round the cape. I am glad to say that the
peace of the day and scenery was not marred by any unpleasantness
between us two.
I am, unhappily, off my style, and can do nothing well; indeed, I fear I
have marred _Roads_ finally by patching at it when I was out of the
humour. Only, I am beginning to see something great about John Knox and
Queen Mary; I like them both so much, that I feel as if I could write
the history fairly.
_Sunday._--It has rained and blown chilly out of the East all day. This
was my first visit to church since the last Sunday at Cockfield. I was
alone, and read the minor prophets and thought of the past all the time;
a sentimental Calvinist preached--a very odd animal, as you may
fancy--and to him I did not attend very closely. All afternoon I worked
until half-past four, when I went out under an umbrella, and cruised
about the empty, wet, glimmering streets until near dinner time.
I have finished _Roads_ to-day, and send it off to you to see. The Lord
knows whether it is worth anything!--some of it pleases me a good deal,
but I fear it is quite unfit for any possible magazine. However, I wish
you to see it, as you know the humour in which it was conceived, walking
alone and very happily about the Suffolk highways and byeways on several
splendid sunny afternoons.--Believe me, ever your faithful friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
_Monday._--I have looked over _Roads_ again, and I am aghast at its
feebleness. It is the trial of a very "'prentice hand" indeed. Shall I
ever learn to do anything _well_? However, it shall go to you, for the
reasons given above.
TO MRS SITWELL
After an outpouring about difficulties at home.
_Edinburgh, Tuesday, September 16, 1873._
... I must be very strong to have all this vexation and still to be
well. I was weighed the other day, and the gross weight of my large
person was eight stone six! Does it not seem surprising that I can keep
the lamp alight, through all this gusty weather, in so frail a lantern?
And yet it burns cheerily.
My mother is leaving for the country this morning, and my father and I
will be alone for the best part of the week in this house. Then on
Friday I go south to Dumfries till Monday. I must write small, or I
shall have a tremendous budget by then.
7.20 _p.m._--I must tell you a thing I saw to-day. I was going down to
Portobello in the train, when there came into the next compartment
(third class) an artisan, strongly marked with smallpox, and with
sunken, heavy eyes--a face hard and unkind, and without anything lovely.
There was a woman on the platform seeing him off. At first sight, with
her one eye blind and the whole cast of her features strongly plebeian,
and even vicious, she seemed as unpleasant as the man; but there was
something beautifully soft, a sort of light of tenderness, as on some
Dutch Madonna, that came over her face when she looked at the man. They
talked for a while together through the window; the man seemed to have
been asking money. "Ye ken the last time," she said, "I gave ye two
shillin's for your ludgin', and ye said----" it died off into whisper.
Plainly Falstaff and Dame Quickly over again. The man laughed
unpleasantly, even cruelly, and said something; and the woman turned
her back on the carriage and stood a long while so, and, do what I
might, I could catch no glimpse of her expression, although I thought I
saw the heave of a sob in her shoulders. At last, after the train was
already in motion, she turned round and put two shillings into his hand.
I saw her stand and look after us with a perfect heaven of love on her
face--this poor one-eyed Madonna--until the train was out of sight; but
the man, sordidly happy with his gains, did not put himself to the
inconvenience of one glance to thank her for her ill-deserved kindness.
I have been up at the Spec. and looked out a reference I wanted. The
whole town is drowned in white, wet vapour off the sea. Everything drips
and soaks. The very statues seem wet to the skin. I cannot pretend to be
very cheerful; I did not see one contented face in the streets; and the
poor did look so helplessly chill and dripping, without a stitch to
change, or so much as a fire to dry themselves at, or perhaps money to
buy a meal, or perhaps even a bed. My heart shivers for them.
_Dumfries, Friday._--All my thirst for a little warmth, a little sun, a
little corner of blue sky avails nothing. Without, the rain falls with a
long drawn _swish_, and the night is as dark as a vault. There is no
wind indeed, and that is a blessed change after the unruly, bedlamite
gusts that have been charging against one round street corners and
utterly abolishing and destroying all that is peaceful in life. Nothing
sours my temper like these coarse termagant winds. I hate practical
joking; and your vulgarest practical joker is your flaw of wind.
I have tried to write some verses; but I find I have nothing to say that
has not been already perfectly said and perfectly sung in _Adelaïde_. I
have so perfect an idea out of that song! The great Alps, a wonder in
the star-light--the river, strong from the hills, and turbulent, and
loudly audible at night--the country, a scented _Frühlingsgarten_ of
orchards and deep wood where the nightingales harbour--a sort of German
flavour over all--and this love-drunken man, wandering on by sleeping
village and silent town, pours out of his full heart, _Einst, O Wunder,
einst_, etc. I wonder if I am wrong about this being the most beautiful
and perfect thing in the world--the only marriage of really accordant
words and music--both drunk with the same poignant, unutterable
sentiment.
To-day in Glasgow my father went off on some business, and my mother and
I wandered about for two hours. We had lunch together, and were very
merry over what the people at the restaurant would think of us--mother
and son they could not suppose us to be.
_Saturday._--And to-day it came--warmth, sunlight, and a strong, hearty
living wind among the trees. I found myself a new being. My father and I
went off a long walk, through a country most beautifully wooded and
various, under a range of hills. You should have seen one place where
the wood suddenly fell away in front of us down a long, steep hill
between a double row of trees, with one small fair-haired child framed
in shadow in the foreground; and when we got to the foot there was the
little kirk and kirkyard of Irongray, among broken fields and woods by
the side of the bright, rapid river. In the kirkyard there was a
wonderful congregation of tombstones, upright and recumbent on four legs
(after our Scotch fashion), and of flat-armed fir-trees. One gravestone
was erected by Scott (at a cost, I learn, of £70) to the poor woman who
served him as heroine in the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the inscription
in its stiff, Jedediah Cleishbotham fashion is not without something
touching.[7] We went up the stream a little further to where two
Covenanters lie buried in an oak-wood; the tombstone (as the custom is)
containing the details of their grim little tragedy in funnily bad
rhyme, one verse of which sticks in my memory:--
"We died, their furious rage to stay,
Near to the kirk of Iron-gray."
We then fetched a long compass round about through Holywood Kirk and
Lincluden ruins to Dumfries. But the walk came sadly to grief as a
pleasure excursion before our return....
_Sunday._--Another beautiful day. My father and I walked into Dumfries
to church. When the service was done I noted the two halberts laid
against the pillar of the churchyard gate; and as I had not seen the
little weekly pomp of civic dignitaries in our Scotch country towns for
some years, I made my father wait. You should have seen the provost and
three bailies going stately away down the sunlit street, and the two
town servants strutting in front of them, in red coats and cocked hats,
and with the halberts most conspicuously shouldered. We saw Burns's
house--a place that made me deeply sad--and spent the afternoon down the
banks of the Nith. I had not spent a day by a river since we lunched in
the meadows near Sudbury. The air was as pure and clear and sparkling as
spring water; beautiful, graceful outlines of hill and wood shut us in
on every side; and the swift, brown river fled smoothly away from before
our eyes, rippled over with oily eddies and dimples. White gulls had
come up from the sea to fish, and hovered and flew hither and thither
among the loops of the stream. By good fortune, too, it was a dead calm
between my father and me. Do you know, I find these rows harder on me
than ever. I get a funny swimming in the head when they come on that I
had not before--and the like when I think of them.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
_[Edinburgh], Monday, 22nd September 1873._
I have just had another disagreeable to-night. It is difficult indeed to
steer steady among the breakers: I am always touching ground; generally
it is my own blame, for I cannot help getting friendly with my father
(whom I _do_ love), and so speaking foolishly with my mouth. I have yet
to learn in ordinary conversation that reserve and silence that I must
try to unlearn in the matter of the feelings.
The news that _Roads_ would do reached me in good season; I had begun
utterly to despair of doing anything. Certainly I do not think I should
be in a hurry to commit myself about the Covenanters; the whole subject
turns round about me and so branches out to this side and that, that I
grow bewildered; and one cannot write discreetly about any one little
corner of an historical period, until one has an organic view of the
whole. I have, however--given life and health--great hope of my
Covenanters; indeed, there is a lot of precious dust to be beaten out of
that stack even by a very infirm hand.
_Much later._--I can scarcely see to write just now; so please excuse.
We have had an awful scene. All that my father had to say has been put
forth--not that it was anything new; only it is the devil to hear. I
don't know what to do--the world goes hopelessly round about me; there
is no more possibility of doing, living, being anything but a _beast_,
and there's the end of it.
It is eleven, I think, for a clock struck. O Lord, there has been a deal
of time through our hands since I went down to supper! All this has come
from my own folly; I somehow could not think the gulf so impassable, and
I read him some notes on the Duke of Argyll[8]--I thought he would agree
so far, and that we might have some rational discussion on the rest. And
now--after some hours--he has told me that he is a weak man, and that I
am driving him too far, and that I know not what I am doing. O dear God,
this is bad work!
I have lit a pipe and feel calmer. I say, my dear friend, I am killing
my father--he told me to-night (by the way) that I alienated utterly my
mother--and this is the result of my attempt to start fair and fresh
and to do my best for all of them.
I must wait till to-morrow ere I finish. I am to-night too excited.
_Tuesday._--The sun is shining to-day, which is a great matter, and
altogether the gale having blown off again, I live in a precarious lull.
On the whole I am not displeased with last night; I kept my eyes open
through it all, and, I think, not only avoided saying anything that
could make matters worse in the future, but said something that _may_ do
good. But a little better or a little worse is a trifle. I lay in bed
this morning awake, for I was tired and cold and in no special hurry to
rise, and heard my father go out for the papers; and then I lay and
wished--O, if he would only _whistle_ when he comes in again! But of
course he did not. I have stopped that pipe.
Now, you see, I have written to you this time and sent it off, for both
of which God forgive me.--Ever your faithful friend, R. L. S.
My father and I together can put about a year through in half an hour.
Look here, you mustn't take this too much to heart. I shall be all right
in a few hours. It's impossible to depress me. And of course, when you
can't do anything, there's no need of being depressed. It's all waste
tissue.
L.
TO MRS. SITWELL
_[Edinburgh], Wednesday, September 24th 1873._
I have found another "flowering isle." All this beautiful, quiet, sunlit
day, I have been out in the country; down by the sea on my favourite
coast between Granton and Queensferry. There was a delicate, delicious
haze over the firth and sands on one side, and on the other was the
shadow of the woods all riven with great golden rifts of sunshine. A
little faint talk of waves upon the beach; the wild strange crying of
seagulls over the sea; and the hoarse wood-pigeons and shrill, sweet
robins full of their autumn love-making among the trees, made up a
delectable concerto of peaceful noises. I spent the whole afternoon
among these sights and sounds with Simpson. And we came home from
Queensferry on the outside of the coach and four, along a beautiful way
full of ups and downs among woody, uneven country, laid out (fifty years
ago, I suppose) by my grandfather, on the notion of Hogarth's line of
beauty. You see my taste for roads is hereditary.
_Friday._--I was wakened this morning by a long flourish of bugles and a
roll upon the drums--the _réveillé_ at the Castle. I went to the window;
it was a grey, quiet dawn, a few people passed already up the street
between the gardens, already I heard the noise of an early cab somewhere
in the distance, most of the lamps had been extinguished but not all,
and there were two or three lit windows in the opposite façade that
showed where sick people and watchers had been awake all night and knew
not yet of the new, cool day. This appealed to me with a special
sadness: how often in the old times my nurse and I had looked across at
these, and sympathised!
I wish you would read Michelet's _Louis Quatorze et la Révocation de
l'Édit de Nantes_. I read it out in the garden, and the autumnal trees
and weather, and my own autumnal humour, and the pitiable prolonged
tragedies of Madame and of Molière, as they look, darkling and sombre,
out of their niches in the great gingerbread façade of the _Grand Âge_,
go wonderfully hand in hand.
I wonder if my revised paper has pleased the Saturday? If it has not, I
shall be rather sorry--no, very sorry indeed--but not surprised and
certainly not hurt. It will be a great disappointment; but I am glad to
say that, among all my queasy, troublesome feelings, I have not a
sensitive vanity. Not that I am not as conceited as you know me to be;
only I go easy over the coals in that matter.
I have been out reading Hallam in the garden; and have been talking with
my old friend the gardener, a man of singularly hard favour and few
teeth. He consulted me this afternoon on the choice of books, premising
that his taste ran mainly on war and travel. On travel I had to own at
once my ignorance. I suggested Kinglake, but he had read that; and so,
finding myself here unhorsed, I turned about and at last recollected
Southey's _Lives of the Admirals_, and the volumes of Macaulay
containing the wars of William. Can you think of any other for this
worthy man? I believe him to hold me in as high an esteem as any one can
do; and I reciprocate his respect, for he is quite an intelligent
companion.
On Saturday morning I read Morley's article aloud to Bob in one of the
walks of the public garden. I was full of it and read most excitedly;
and we were ever, as we went to and fro, passing a bench where a man sat
reading the Bible aloud to a small circle of the devout. This man is
well known to me, sits there all day, sometimes reading, sometimes
singing, sometimes distributing tracts. Bob laughed much at the
opposition preachers--I never noticed it till he called my attention to
the other; but it did not seem to me like opposition--does it to
you?--each in his way was teaching what he thought best.
Last night, after reading Walt Whitman a long while for my attempt to
write about him, I got _tête-montée_, rushed out up to M. S., came in,
took out _Leaves of Grass_, and without giving the poor unbeliever time
to object, proceeded to wade into him with favourite passages. I had at
least this triumph, that he swore he must read some more of him.--Ever
your faithful friend,
LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO MRS. SITWELL
On the question of the authorship of the _Ode to the Cuckoo_, which
Burke thought the most beautiful lyric in our language, the debate
was between the claims of John Logan, minister of South Leith
(1745-1785), and his friend and fellow-worker Michael Bruce. Those of
Logan have, I believe, been now vindicated past doubt.
_[Edinburgh], Saturday, October 4, 1873._
It is a little sharp to-day; but bright and sunny with a sparkle in the
air, which is delightful after four days of unintermitting rain. In the
streets I saw two men meet after a long separation, it was plain. They
came forward with a little run and _leaped_ at each other's hands. You
never saw such bright eyes as they both had. It put one in a good humour
to see it.
_8 p.m._--I made a little more out of my work than I have made for a
long while back; though even now I cannot make things fall into
sentences--they only sprawl over the paper in bald orphan clauses. Then
I was about in the afternoon with Baxter; and we had a good deal of fun,
first rhyming on the names of all the shops we passed, and afterwards
buying needles and quack drugs from open-air vendors, and taking much
pleasure in their inexhaustible eloquence. Every now and then as we
went, Arthur's Seat showed its head at the end of a street. Now, to-day
the blue sky and the sunshine were both entirely wintry; and there was
about the hill, in these glimpses, a sort of thin, unreal, crystalline
distinctness that I have not often seen excelled. As the sun began to go
down over the valley between the new town and the old, the evening grew
resplendent; all the gardens and low-lying buildings sank back and
became almost invisible in a mist of wonderful sun, and the Castle stood
up against the sky, as thin and sharp in outline as a castle cut out of
paper. Baxter made a good remark about Princes Street, that it was the
most elastic street for length that he knew; sometimes it looks, as it
looked to-night, interminable, a way leading right into the heart of
the red sundown; sometimes, again, it shrinks together, as if for
warmth, on one of the withering, clear east-windy days, until it seems
to lie underneath your feet.
I want to let you see these verses from an _Ode to the Cuckoo_ written
by one of the ministers of Leith in the middle of last century--the
palmy days of Edinburgh--who was a friend of Hume and Adam Smith and the
whole constellation. The authorship of these beautiful verses has been
most truculently fought about; but whoever wrote them (and it seems as
if this Logan had) they are lovely--
"What time the pea puts on the bloom,
Thou fliest the vocal vale,
An annual guest, in other lands
Another spring to hail.
Sweet bird! thy bower is ever green,
Thy sky is ever clear;
Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
No winter in thy year.
O could I fly, I'd fly with thee!
We'd make on joyful wing
Our annual visit o'er the globe,
Companions of the spring."
_Sunday._--I have been at church with my mother, where we heard "Arise,
shine," sung excellently well, and my mother was so much upset with it
that she nearly had to leave church. This was the antidote, however, to
fifty minutes of solid sermon, varra heavy. I have been sticking in to
Walt Whitman; nor do I think I have ever laboured so hard to attain so
small a success. Still, the thing is taking shape, I think; I know a
little better what I want to say all through; and in process of time,
possibly I shall manage to say it. I must say I am a very bad workman,
_mais j'ai du courage_: I am indefatigable at rewriting and bettering,
and surely that humble quality should get me on a little.
_Monday, October 6._--It is a magnificent glimmering moonlight night,
with a wild, great west wind abroad, flapping above one like an immense
banner, and every now and again swooping furiously against my windows.
The wind is too strong perhaps, and the trees are certainly too leafless
for much of that wide rustle that we both remember; there is only a
sharp, angry, sibilant hiss, like breath drawn with the strength of the
elements through shut teeth, that one hears between the gusts only. I am
in excellent humour with myself, for I have worked hard and not
altogether fruitlessly; and I wished before I turned in just to tell you
that things were so. My dear friend, I feel so happy when I think that
you remember me kindly. I have been up to-night lecturing to a friend on
life and duties and what a man could do; a coal off the altar had been
laid on my lips, and I talked quite above my average, and hope I spread,
what you would wish to see spread, into one person's heart; and with a
new light upon it.
I shall tell you a story. Last Friday I went down to Portobello, in the
heavy rain, with an uneasy wind blowing _par rafales_ off the sea (or
"_en rafales_" should it be? or what?). As I got down near the beach a
poor woman, oldish, and seemingly, lately at least, respectable,
followed me and made signs. She was drenched to the skin, and looked
wretched below wretchedness. You know, I did not like to look back at
her; it seemed as if she might misunderstand and be terribly hurt and
slighted; so I stood at the end of the street--there was no one else
within sight in the wet--and lifted up my hand very high with some money
in it. I heard her steps draw heavily near behind me, and, when she was
near enough to see, I let the money fall in the mud and went off at my
best walk without ever turning round. There is nothing in the story; and
yet you will understand how much there is, if one chose to set it
forth. You see, she was so ugly; and you know there is something
terribly, miserably pathetic in a certain smile, a certain sodden aspect
of invitation on such faces. It is so terrible, that it is in a way
sacred; it means the outside of degradation and (what is worst of all in
life) false position. I hope you understand me rightly.--Ever your
faithful friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO MRS. SITWELL
_[Edinburgh], Tuesday, October 14, 1873._
My father has returned in better health, and I am more delighted than I
can well tell you. The one trouble that I can see no way through is that
his health, or my mother's, should give way. To-night, as I was walking
along Princes Street, I heard the bugles sound the recall. I do not
think I had ever remarked it before; there is something of unspeakable
appeal in the cadence. I felt as if something yearningly cried to me out
of the darkness overhead to come thither and find rest; one felt as if
there must be warm hearts and bright fires waiting for one up there,
where the buglers stood on the damp pavement and sounded their friendly
invitation forth into the night.
_Wednesday._--I may as well tell you exactly about my health. I am not
at all ill; have quite recovered; only I am what _MM. les médecins_ call
below par; which, in plain English, is that I am weak. With tonics,
decent weather, and a little cheerfulness, that will go away in its
turn, and I shall be all right again.
I am glad to hear what you say about the Exam.; until quite lately I
have treated that pretty cavalierly, for I say honestly that I do not
mind being plucked; I shall just have to go up again. We travelled with
the Lord Advocate the other day, and he strongly advised me in my
father's hearing to go to the English Bar; and the Lord Advocate's
advice goes a long way in Scotland. It is a sort of special legal
revelation. Don't misunderstand me. I don't, of course, want to be
plucked; but so far as my style of knowledge suits them, I cannot make
much betterment on it in a month. If they wish scholarship more exact, I
must take a new lease altogether.
_Thursday._--My head and eyes both gave in this morning, and I had to
take a day of complete idleness. I was in the open air all day, and did
no thought that I could avoid, and I think I have got my head between my
shoulders again; however, I am not going to do much. I don't want you to
run away with any fancy about my being ill. Given a person weak and in
some trouble, and working longer hours than he is used to, and you have
the matter in a nutshell. You should have seen the sunshine on the hill
to-day; it has lost now that crystalline clearness, as if the medium
were spring-water (you see, I am stupid!); but it retains that wonderful
thinness of outline that makes the delicate shape and hue savour better
in one's mouth, like fine wine out of a finely-blown glass. The birds
are all silent now but the crows. I sat a long time on the stairs that
lead down to Duddingston Loch--a place as busy as a great town during
frost, but now solitary and silent; and when I shut my eyes I heard
nothing but the wind in the trees; and you know all that went through
me, I dare say, without my saying it.
11.--I am now all right. I do not expect any tic to-night, and shall be
at work again to-morrow. I have had a day of open air, only a little
modified by _Le Capitaine Fracasse_ before the dining-room fire. I must
write no more, for I am sleepy after two nights, to quote my book,
"_sinon blanches, du moins grises_"; and so I must go to bed and
faithfully, hoggishly slumber.--Your faithful
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
On the advice of the Lord Advocate it had been agreed that Stevenson
should present himself for admission as a student at one of the
London Inns of Court and should come to town after the middle of
October to be examined for that purpose. The following two letters
refer to this purpose and to the formalities required for effecting
it:--
_[Edinburgh, Oct. 15, 1873], Wednesday._
MY DEAR COLVIN,--Of course I knew as well as you that I was merely
running before an illness; but I thought I should be in time to escape.
However I was knocked over on Monday night with a bad sore throat,
fever, rheumatism, and a threatening of pleurisy, which last is, I
think, gone. I still hope to be able to get away early next week, though
I am not very clear as to how I shall manage the journey. If I don't get
away on Wednesday at latest, I lose my excuse for going at all, and I do
wish to escape a little while.
I shall see about the form when I get home, which I hope will be
to-morrow (I was taken ill in a friend's house and have not yet been
moved).
How could a broken-down engineer expect to make anything of _Roads_.
Requiescant. When we get well (and if we get well), we shall do
something better.--Yours sincerely,
R. L. STEVENSON.
Ye couche of pain.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
_[Edinburgh, October 16, 1873], Thursday._
MY DEAR COLVIN,--I am at my wits' end about this abominable form of
admission. I don't know what the devil it is; I haven't got one even if
I did, and so can't sign.
Monday night is the very earliest on which (even if I go on mending at
the very great pace I have made already) I can hope to be in London
myself. But possibly it is only intimation that requires to be made on
Tuesday morning; and one may possess oneself of a form of admission up
to the eleventh hour. I send herewith a letter which I must ask you to
cherish, as I count it a sort of talisman. Perhaps you may understand
it, I don't.
If you don't understand it, please do not trouble and we must just hope
that Tuesday morning will be early enough to do all. Of course I fear
the exam. will spin me; indeed after this bodily and spiritual crisis I
should not dream of coming up at all; only that I require it as a
pretext for a moment's escape, which I want much.
I am so glad that _Roads_ has got in. I had almost as soon have it in
the Portfolio as the Saturday; the P. is so nicely printed and I am
_gourmet_ in type. I don't know how to thank you for your continual
kindness to me; and I am afraid I do not even feel grateful enough--you
have let your kindnesses come on me so easily.--Yours sincerely,
LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO MRS. SITWELL
When Stevenson a few days later came to London, it was before the
physicians and not the lawyers that he must present himself; and the
result of an examination by Sir Andrew Clark was his prompt and
peremptory despatch to Mentone for a winter's rest and sunshine at a
distance from all causes of mental agitation. This episode of his
life gave occasion to the essay _Ordered South_, the only one of his
writings in which he took the invalid point of view or allowed his
health troubles in any degree to colour his work. Travelling south by
slow stages, he wrote on the way a long diary-letter from which
extracts follow:--
_Avignon [November 1873]._
I have just read your letter upon the top of the hill beside the church
and castle. The whole air was filled with sunset and the sound of bells;
and I wish I could give you the least notion of the _southernness_ and
_Provençality_ of all that I saw.
I cannot write while I am travelling; _c'est un défaut_; but so it is. I
must have a certain feeling of being at home, and my head must have time
to settle. The new images oppress me, and I have a fever of restlessness
on me. You must not be disappointed at such shabby letters; and besides,
remember my poor head and the fanciful crawling in the spine.
I am back again in the stage of thinking there is nothing the matter
with me, which is a good sign; but I am wretchedly nervous. Anything
like rudeness I am simply babyishly afraid of; and noises, and
especially the sounds of certain voices, are the devil to me. A blind
poet whom I found selling his immortal works in the streets of Sens,
captivated me with the remarkable equable strength and sweetness of his
voice; and I listened a long while and bought some of the poems; and now
this voice, after I had thus got it thoroughly into my head, proved
false metal and a really bad and horrible voice at bottom. It haunted me
some time, but I think I am done with it now.
I hope you don't dislike reading bad style like this as much as I do
writing it: it hurts me when neither words nor clauses fall into their
places, much as it would hurt you to sing when you had a bad cold and
your voice deceived you and missed every other note. I do feel so
inclined to break the pen and write no more; and here _àpropos_ begins
my back.
_After dinner._--It blows to-night from the north down the valley of the
Rhone, and everything is so cold that I have been obliged to indulge in
a fire. There is a fine crackle and roar of burning wood in the chimney
which is very homely and companionable, though it does seem to postulate
a town all white with snow outside.
I have bought Sainte-Beuve's Chateaubriand and am immensely delighted
with the critic. Chateaubriand is more antipathetic to me than anyone
else in the world.
I begin to wish myself arrived to-night. Travelling, when one is not
quite well, has a good deal of unpleasantness. One is easily upset by
cross incidents, and wants that _belle humeur_ and spirit of adventure
that makes a pleasure out of what is unpleasant.
_Tuesday, November 11th._--There! There's a date for you. I shall be in
Mentone for my birthday, with plenty of nice letters to read. I went
away across the Rhone and up the hill on the other side that I might see
the town from a distance. Avignon followed me with its bells and drums
and bugles; for the old city has no equal for multitude of such noises.
Crossing the bridge and seeing the brown turbid water foam and eddy
about the piers, one could scarce believe one's eyes when one looked
down upon the stream and saw the smooth blue mirroring tree and hill.
Over on the other side, the sun beat down so furiously on the white road
that I was glad to keep in the shadow and, when the occasion offered, to
turn aside among the olive-yards. It was nine years and six months since
I had been in an olive-yard. I found myself much changed, not so gay,
but wiser and more happy. I read your letter again, and sat awhile
looking down over the tawny plain and at the fantastic outline of the
city. The hills seemed just fainting into the sky; even the great peak
above Carpentras (Lord knows how many metres above the sea) seemed
unsubstantial and thin in the breadth and potency of the sunshine.
I should like to stay longer here but I can't. I am driven forward by
restlessness, and leave this afternoon about two. I am just going out
now to visit again the church, castle, and hill, for the sake of the
magnificent panorama, and besides, because it is the friendliest spot in
all Avignon to me.
_Later._--You cannot picture to yourself anything more steeped in hard
bright sunshine than the view from the hill. The immovable inky shadow
of the old bridge on the fleeting surface of the yellow river seemed
more solid than the bridge itself. Just in the place where I sat
yesterday evening a shaven man in a velvet cap was studying
music--evidently one of the singers for _La Muette de Portici_ at the
theatre to-night. I turned back as I went away: the white Christ stood
out in strong relief on his brown cross against the blue sky, and the
four kneeling angels and lanterns grouped themselves about the foot with
a symmetry that was almost laughable; the musician read on at his music,
and counted time with his hand on the stone step.
_Menton, November 12th._--My first enthusiasm was on rising at Orange
and throwing open the shutters. Such a great living flood of sunshine
poured in upon me, that I confess to having danced and expressed my
satisfaction aloud; in the middle of which the boots came to the door
with hot water, to my great confusion.
To-day has been one long delight, coming to a magnificent climax on my
arrival here. I gave up my baggage to an hotel porter and set off to
walk at once. I was somewhat confused as yet as to my directions, for
the station of course was new to me, and the hills had not sufficiently
opened out to let me recognise the peaks. Suddenly, as I was going
forward slowly in this confusion of mind, I was met by a great volley of
odours out of the lemon and orange gardens, and the past linked on to
the present, and in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the whole
scene fell before me into order, and I was at home. I nearly danced
again.
I suppose I must send off this to-night to notify my arrival in safety
and good-humour and, I think, in good health, before relapsing into the
old weekly vein. I hope this time to send you a weekly dose of sunshine
from the south, instead of the jet of _snell_ Edinburgh east wind that
used to was.--Ever your faithful friend,
R. L. S.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Hôtel du Pavillon, Menton, November 13, 1873._
MY DEAR MOTHER,--The _Place_ is not where I thought; it is about where
the old Post Office was. The Hôtel de Londres is no more an hotel. I
have found a charming room in the Hôtel du Pavillon, just across the
road from the Prince's Villa; it has one window to the south and one to
the east, with a superb view of Mentone and the hills, to which I move
this afternoon. In the old great _Place_ there is a kiosque for the sale
of newspapers; a string of omnibuses (perhaps thirty) go up and down
under the plane-trees of the Turin Road on the occasion of each train;
the Promenade has crossed both streams, and bids fair to reach the Cap
Martin. The old chapel near Freeman's house at the entrance to the
Gorbio valley is now entirely submerged under a shining new villa, with
pavilion annexed; over which, in all the pride of oak and chestnut and
divers coloured marbles, I was shown this morning by the obliging
proprietor. The Prince's Palace itself is rehabilitated, and shines afar
with white window-curtains from the midst of a garden, all trim borders
and greenhouses and carefully kept walks. On the other side, the villas
are more thronged together, and they have arranged themselves, shelf
after shelf, behind each other. I see the glimmer of new buildings, too,
as far eastward as Grimaldi; and a viaduct carries (I suppose) the
railway past the mouth of the bone caves. F. Bacon (Lord Chancellor)
made the remark that "Time was the greatest innovator"; it is perhaps as
meaningless a remark as was ever made; but as Bacon made it, I suppose
it is better than any that I could make. Does it not seem as if things
were fluid? They are displaced and altered in ten years so that one has
difficulty, even with a memory so very vivid and retentive for that sort
of thing as mine, in identifying places where one lived a long while in
the past, and which one has kept piously in mind during all the
interval. Nevertheless, the hills, I am glad to say, are unaltered;
though I dare say the torrents have given them many a shrewd scar, and
the rains and thaws dislodged many a boulder from their heights, if one
were only keen enough to perceive it. The sea makes the same noise in
the shingle; and the lemon and orange gardens still discharge in the
still air their fresh perfume; and the people have still brown comely
faces; and the Pharmacie Gros still dispenses English medicines; and the
invalids (eheu!) still sit on the promenade and trifle with their
fingers in the fringes of shawls and wrappers; and the shop of Pascal
Amarante still, in its present bright consummate flower of
aggrandisement and new paint, offers everything that it has entered into
people's hearts to wish for in the idleness of a sanatorium; and the
"Château des Morts" is still at the top of the town; and the fort and
the jetty are still at the foot, only there are now two jetties; and--I
am out of breath. (To be continued in our next.)
For myself, I have come famously through the journey; and as I have
written this letter (for the first time for ever so long) with ease and
even pleasure, I think my head must be better. I am still no good at
coming down hills or stairs; and my feet are more consistently cold than
is quite comfortable. But, these apart, I feel well; and in good spirits
all round.
I have written to Nice for letters, and hope to get them to-night.
Continue to address Poste Restante. Take care of yourselves.
This is my birthday, by the way--O, I said that before. Adieu.--Ever
your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. SITWELL,
_Menton, November 13, 1873._
I must pour out my disgust at th
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