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Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial

by Alexander H. Japp · English · Gutenberg #590 · 384,999 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial

Author: Alexander H. Japp


        
Release date: July 1, 1996 [eBook #590]
                Most recently updated: May 5, 2007

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/590

Credits: Transcribed from the Charles Scribner's Sons 1905 edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: A RECORD, AN ESTIMATE, AND A MEMORIAL ***




Transcribed from the Charles Scribner's Sons 1905 edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org





ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
A RECORD, AN ESTIMATE, AND A MEMORIAL


BY ALEXANDER H. JAPP, LL.D., F.R.S.E

AUTHOR OF "THOREAU: HIS LIFE AND AIMS"; "MEMOIR OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY";
"DE QUINCEY MEMORIALS," ETC., ETC.

WITH HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED LETTERS FROM R. L. STEVENSON IN FACSIMILIE . .
.

SECOND EDITION

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
153-157 FIFTH AVENUE
1905

_Printed in Great Britain_.

{Robert Louis Stevenson, from a sketch in oils by Sir William B.
Richmond, K.G.B., R.A.: p0.jpg}

Dedicated to
C. A. LICHTENBERG, ESQ.
AND
Mrs LICHTENBERG,
OF VILLA MARGHERITA, TREVISO,
WITH MOST GRATEFUL REGARDS,

ALEXANDER H. JAPP.

19_th_ _December_ 1904.




PREFACE


A few words may here be allowed me to explain one or two points.  First,
about the facsimile of last page of Preface to _Familiar Studies of Men
and Books_.  Stevenson was in Davos when the greater portion of that work
went through the press.  He felt so much the disadvantage of being there
in the circumstances (both himself and his wife ill) that he begged me to
read the proofs of the Preface for him.  This illness has record in the
letter from him (pp. 28-29).  The printers, of course, had directions to
send the copy and proofs of the Preface to me.  Hence I am able now to
give this facsimile.

With regard to the letter at p. 19, of which facsimile is also given,
what Stevenson there meant is not the "three last" of that batch, but the
three last sent to me before--though that was an error on his part--he
only then sent two chapters, making the "eleven chapters now"--sent to me
by post.

Another point on which I might have dwelt and illustrated by many
instances is this, that though Stevenson was fond of hob-nobbing with all
sorts and conditions of men, this desire of wide contact and intercourse
has little show in his novels--the ordinary fibre of commonplace human
beings not receiving much celebration from him there; another case in
which his private bent and sympathies received little illustration in his
novels.  But the fact lies implicit in much I have written.

I have to thank many authors for permission to quote extracts I have
used.

ALEXANDER H. JAPP.




CONTENTS


I.      INTRODUCTION AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS
II.     _TREASURE ISLAND_ AND SOME REMINISCENCES
III.    THE CHILD FATHER OF THE MAN
IV.     HEREDITY ILLUSTRATED
V.      TRAVELS
VI.     SOME EARLIER LETTERS
VII.    THE VAILIMA LETTERS
VIII.   WORK OF LATER YEARS
IX.     SOME CHARACTERISTICS
X.      A SAMOAN MEMORIAL OF R. L. STEVENSON
XI.     MISS STUBBS' RECORD OF A PILGRIMAGE
XII.    HIS GENIUS AND METHODS
XIII.   PREACHER AND MYSTIC FABULIST
XIV.    STEVENSON AS DRAMATIST
XV.     THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL
XVI.    STEVENSON'S GLOOM
XVII.   PROOFS OF GROWTH
XVIII.  EARLIER DETERMINATIONS AND RESULTS
XIX.    MR EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN'S ESTIMATE
XX.     EGOTISTIC ELEMENT AND ITS EFFECTS
XXI.    UNITY IN STEVENSON'S STORIES
XXII.   PERSONAL CHEERFULNESS AND INVENTED GLOOM
XXIII.  EDINBURGH REVIEWERS' DICTA INAPPLICABLE TO LATER WORK
XXIV.   MR HENLEY'S SPITEFUL PERVERSIONS
XXV.    MR CHRISTIE MURRAY'S IMPRESSIONS
XXVI.   HERO-VILLAINS
XXVII.  MR G. MOORE, MR MARRIOTT WATSON, AND OTHERS
XXVIII. UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS
XXIX.   LOVE OF VAGABONDS
XXX.    LORD ROSEBERY'S CASE
XXXI.   MR GOSSE AND MS. OF _TREASURE ISLAND_
XXXII.  STEVENSON PORTRAITS
XXXIII. LAPSES AND ERRORS IN CRITICISM
XXXIV.  LETTERS AND POEMS IN TESTIMONY
APPENDIX




CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTION AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS


My little effort to make Thoreau better known in England had one result
that I am pleased to think of.  It brought me into personal association
with R. L. Stevenson, who had written and published in _The Cornhill
Magazine_ an essay on Thoreau, in whom he had for some time taken an
interest.  He found in Thoreau not only a rare character for originality,
courage, and indefatigable independence, but also a master of style, to
whom, on this account, as much as any, he was inclined to play the part
of the "sedulous ape," as he had acknowledged doing to many others--a
later exercise, perhaps in some ways as fruitful as any that had gone
before.  A recent poet, having had some seeds of plants sent to him from
Northern Scotland to the South, celebrated his setting of them beside
those native to the Surrey slope on which he dwelt, with the lines--

   "And when the Northern seeds are growing,
   Another beauty then bestowing,
   We shall be fine, and North to South
   Be giving kisses, mouth to mouth."

So the Thoreau influence on Stevenson was as if a tart American
wild-apple had been grafted on an English pippin, and produced a wholly
new kind with the flavours of both; and here wild America and England
kissed each other mouth to mouth.

The direct result was the essay in _The Cornhill_, but the indirect
results were many and less easily assessed, as Stevenson himself, as we
shall see, was ever ready to admit.  The essay on Thoreau was written in
America, which further, perhaps, bears out my point.

One of the authorities, quoted by Mr Hammerton, in _Stevensoniana_ says
of the circumstances in which he found our author, when he was busily
engaged on that bit of work:

   "I have visited him in a lonely lodging in California, it was previous
   to his happy marriage, and found him submerged in billows of
   bed-clothes; about him floated the scattered volumes of a complete set
   of Thoreau; he was preparing an essay on that worthy, and he looked at
   the moment like a half-drowned man, yet he was not cast down.  His
   work, an endless task, was better than a straw to him.  It was to
   become his life-preserver and to prolong his years.  I feel convinced
   that without it he must have surrendered long since.  I found
   Stevenson a man of the frailest physique, though most unaccountably
   tenacious of life; a man whose pen was indefatigable, whose brain was
   never at rest, who, as far as I am able to judge, looked upon
   everybody and everything from a supremely intellectual point of view."
   {1}

We remember the common belief in Yorkshire and other parts that a man
could not die so long as he could stand up--a belief on which poor
Branwell Bronte was fain to act and to illustrate, but R. L. Stevenson
illustrated it, as this writer shows, in a better, calmer, and healthier
way, despite his lack of health.

On some little points of fact, however, Stevenson was wrong; and I wrote
to the Editor of _The Spectator_ a letter, titled, I think, "Thoreau's
Pity and Humour," which he inserted.  This brought me a private letter
from Stevenson, who expressed the wish to see me, and have some talk with
me on that and other matters.  To this letter I at once replied,
directing to 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, saying that, as I was soon to be
in that City, it might be possible for me to see him there.  In reply to
this letter Mr Stevenson wrote:

   "THE COTTAGE, CASTLETON OF BRAEMAR,
   _Sunday_, _August_ (? _th_), 1881.

   "MY DEAR SIR,--I should long ago have written to thank you for your
   kind and frank letter; but, in my state of health, papers are apt to
   get mislaid, and your letter has been vainly hunted for until this
   (Sunday) morning.

   "I must first say a word as to not quoting your book by name.  It was
   the consciousness that we disagreed which led me, I daresay, wrongly,
   to suppress _all_ references throughout the paper.  But you may be
   certain a proper reference will now be introduced.

   "I regret I shall not be able to see you in Edinburgh: one visit to
   Edinburgh has already cost me too dear in that invaluable particular,
   health; but if it should be at all possible for you to pass by
   Braemar, I believe you would find an attentive listener, and I can
   offer you a bed, a drive, and necessary food.

   "If, however, you should not be able to come thus far, I can promise
   two things.  First, I shall religiously revise what I have written,
   and bring out more clearly the point of view from which I regarded
   Thoreau.  Second, I shall in the preface record your objection.

   "The point of view (and I must ask you not to forget that any such
   short paper is essentially only a _section through_ a man) was this: I
   desired to look at the man through his books.  Thus, for instance,
   when I mentioned his return to the pencil-making, I did it only in
   passing (perhaps I was wrong), because it seemed to me not an
   illustration of his principles, but a brave departure from them.
   Thousands of such there were I do not doubt; still they might be
   hardly to my purpose; though, as you say so, I suppose some of them
   would be.

   "Our difference as to 'pity,' I suspect, was a logomachy of my making.
   No pitiful acts, on his part, would surprise me: I know he would be
   more pitiful in practice than most of the whiners; but the spirit of
   that practice would still seem to me to be unjustly described by the
   word pity.

   "When I try to be measured, I find myself usually suspected of a
   sneaking unkindness for my subject, but you may be sure, sir, I would
   give up most other things to be as good a man as Thoreau.  Even my
   knowledge of him leads me thus far.

   "Should you find yourself able to push on so far--it may even lie on
   your way--believe me your visit will be very welcome.  The weather is
   cruel, but the place is, as I daresay you know, the very _wale_ of
   Scotland--bar Tummelside.--Yours very sincerely,

   ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."

{Manuscript letter by R.L.S.: p6.jpg}

Some delay took place in my leaving London for Scotland, and hence what
seemed a hitch.  I wrote mentioning the reason of my delay, and
expressing the fear that I might have to forego the prospect of seeing
him in Braemar, as his circumstances might have altered in the meantime.
In answer came this note, like so many, if not most of his, indeed,
without date:--

   THE COTTAGE, CASTLETON OF BRAEMAR.
   (_No date_.)

   "MY DEAR SIR,--I am here as yet a fixture, and beg you to come our
   way.  Would Tuesday or Wednesday suit you by any chance?  We shall
   then, I believe, be empty: a thing favourable to talks.  You get here
   in time for dinner.  I stay till near the end of September, unless, as
   may very well be, the weather drive me forth.--Yours very sincerely,
   ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."

I accordingly went to Braemar, where he and his wife and her son were
staying with his father and mother.

These were red-letter days in my calendar alike on account of pleasant
intercourse with his honoured father and himself.  Here is my pen-and-ink
portrait of R. L. Stevenson, thrown down at the time:

Mr Stevenson's is, indeed, a very picturesque and striking figure.  Not
so tall probably as he seems at first sight from his extreme thinness,
but the pose and air could not be otherwise described than as
distinguished.  Head of fine type, carried well on the shoulders and in
walking with the impression of being a little thrown back; long brown
hair, falling from under a broadish-brimmed Spanish form of soft felt
hat, Rembrandtesque; loose kind of Inverness cape when walking, and
invariable velvet jacket inside the house.  You would say at first sight,
wherever you saw him, that he was a man of intellect, artistic and
individual, wholly out of the common.  His face is sensitive, full of
expression, though it could not be called strictly beautiful.  It is
longish, especially seen in profile, and features a little irregular; the
brow at once high and broad.  A hint of vagary, and just a hint in the
expression, is qualified by the eyes, which are set rather far apart from
each other as seems, and with a most wistful, and at the same time
possibly a merry impish expression arising over that, yet frank and
clear, piercing, but at the same time steady, and fall on you with a
gentle radiance and animation as he speaks.  Romance, if with an
indescribable _soupcon_ of whimsicality, is marked upon him; sometimes he
has the look as of the Ancient Mariner, and could fix you with his
glittering e'e, and he would, as he points his sentences with a movement
of his thin white forefinger, when this is not monopolised with the
almost incessant cigarette.  There is a faint suggestion of a
hair-brained sentimental trace on his countenance, but controlled, after
all, by good Scotch sense and shrewdness.  In conversation he is very
animated, and likes to ask questions.  A favourite and characteristic
attitude with him was to put his foot on a chair or stool and rest his
elbow on his knee, with his chin on his hand; or to sit, or rather to
half sit, half lean, on the corner of a table or desk, one of his legs
swinging freely, and when anything that tickled him was said he would
laugh in the heartiest manner, even at the risk of bringing on his cough,
which at that time was troublesome.  Often when he got animated he rose
and walked about as he spoke, as if movement aided thought and
expression.  Though he loved Edinburgh, which was full of associations
for him, he had no good word for its east winds, which to him were as
death.  Yet he passed one winter as a "Silverado squatter," the story of
which he has inimitably told in the volume titled _The Silverado
Squatters_; and he afterwards spent several winters at Davos Platz,
where, as he said to me, he not only breathed good air, but learned to
know with closest intimacy John Addington Symonds, who "though his books
were good, was far finer and more interesting than any of his books."  He
needed a good deal of nursery attentions, but his invalidism was never
obtrusively brought before one in any sympathy-seeking way by himself; on
the contrary, a very manly, self-sustaining spirit was evident; and the
amount of work which he managed to turn out even when at his worst was
truly surprising.

His wife, an American lady, is highly cultured, and is herself an author.
In her speech there is just the slightest suggestion of the American
accent, which only made it the more pleasing to my ear.  She is heart and
soul devoted to her husband, proud of his achievements, and her delight
is the consciousness of substantially aiding him in his enterprises.

They then had with them a boy of eleven or twelve, Samuel Lloyd Osbourne,
to be much referred to later (a son of Mrs Stevenson by a former
marriage), whose delight was to draw the oddest, but perhaps half
intentional or unintentional caricatures, funny, in some cases, beyond
expression.  His room was designated the picture-gallery, and on entering
I could scarce refrain from bursting into laughter, even at the general
effect, and, noticing this, and that I was putting some restraint on
myself out of respect for the host's feelings, Stevenson said to me with
a sly wink and a gentle dig in the ribs, "It's laugh and be thankful
here."  On Lloyd's account simple engraving materials, types, and a small
printing-press had been procured; and it was Stevenson's delight to make
funny poems, stories, and morals for the engravings executed, and all
would be duly printed together.  Stevenson's thorough enjoyment of the
picture-gallery, and his goodness to Lloyd, becoming himself a very boy
for the nonce, were delightful to witness and in degree to share.
Wherever they were--at Braemar, in Edinburgh, at Davos Platz, or even at
Silverado--the engraving and printing went on.  The mention of the
picture-gallery suggests that it was out of his interest in the colour-
drawing and the picture-gallery that his first published story, _Treasure
Island_, grew, as we shall see.

I have some copies of the rude printing-press productions, inexpressibly
quaint, grotesque, a kind of literary horse-play, yet with a certain
squint-eyed, sprawling genius in it, and innocent childish Rabelaisian
mirth of a sort.  At all events I cannot look at the slight memorials of
that time, which I still possess, without laughing afresh till my eyes
are dewy.  Stevenson, as I understood, began _Treasure Island_ more to
entertain Lloyd Osbourne than anything else; the chapters being regularly
read to the family circle as they were written, and with scarcely a
purpose beyond.  The lad became Stevenson's trusted companion and
collaborator--clearly with a touch of genius.

I have before me as I write some of these funny momentoes of that time,
carefully kept, often looked at.  One of them is, "_The Black Canyon_;
_or_, _Wild Adventures in the Far West_: a Tale of Instruction and
Amusement for the Young, by Samuel L. Osbourne, printed by the author;
Davos Platz," with the most remarkable cuts.  It would not do some of the
sensationalists anything but good to read it even at this day, since many
points in their art are absurdly caricatured.  Another is "_Moral
Emblems_; _a Collection of Cuts and Verses_, by R. L. Stevenson, author
of the _Blue Scalper_, etc., etc.  Printers, S. L. Osbourne and Company,
Davos Platz."  Here are the lines to a rare piece of grotesque, titled _A
Peak in Darien_--

   "Broad-gazing on untrodden lands,
   See where adventurous Cortez stands,
   While in the heavens above his head,
   The eagle seeks its daily bread.
   How aptly fact to fact replies,
   Heroes and eagles, hills and skies.
   Ye, who contemn the fatted slave,
   Look on this emblem and be brave."

Another, _The Elephant_, has these lines--

   "See in the print how, moved by whim,
   Trumpeting Jumbo, great and grim,
   Adjusts his trunk, like a cravat,
   To noose that individual's hat;
   The Sacred Ibis in the distance,
   Joys to observe his bold resistance."

R. L. Stevenson wrote from Davos Platz, in sending me _The Black Canyon_:

   "Sam sends as a present a work of his own.  I hope you feel flattered,
   for _this is simply the first time he has ever given one away_.  I
   have to buy my own works, I can tell you."

Later he said, in sending a second:

   "I own I have delayed this letter till I could forward the enclosed.
   Remembering the night at Braemar, when we visited the picture-gallery,
   I hope it may amuse you: you see we do some publishing hereaway."

Delightfully suggestive and highly enjoyable, too, were the meetings in
the little drawing-room after dinner, when the contrasted traits of
father and son came into full play--when R. L. Stevenson would sometimes
draw out a new view by bold, half-paradoxical assertion, or compel
advance on the point from a new quarter by a searching question couched
in the simplest language, or reveal his own latest conviction finally, by
a few sentences as nicely rounded off as though they had been written,
while he rose and gently moved about, as his habit was, in the course of
those more extended remarks.  Then a chapter or two of _The Sea-Cook_
would be read, with due pronouncement on the main points by one or other
of the family audience.

The reading of the book is one thing.  It was quite another thing to hear
Stevenson as he stood reading it aloud, with his hand stretched out
holding the manuscript, and his body gently swaying as a kind of
rhythmical commentary on the story.  His fine voice, clear and keen it
some of its tones, had a wonderful power of inflection and variation, and
when he came to stand in the place of Silver you could almost have
imagined you saw the great one-legged John Silver, joyous-eyed, on the
rolling sea.  Yes, to read it in print was good, but better yet to hear
Stevenson read it.




CHAPTER II--_TREASURE ISLAND_ AND SOME REMINISCENCES


When I left Braemar, I carried with me a considerable portion of the MS.
of _Treasure Island_, with an outline of the rest of the story.  It
originally bore the odd title of _The Sea-Cook_, and, as I have told
before, I showed it to Mr Henderson, the proprietor of the _Young Folks'
Paper_, who came to an arrangement with Mr Stevenson, and the story duly
appeared in its pages, as well as the two which succeeded it.

Stevenson himself in his article in _The Idler_ for August 1894
(reprinted in _My First Book_ volume and in a late volume of the
_Edinburgh Edition_) has recalled some of the circumstances connected
with this visit of mine to Braemar, as it bore on the destination of
_Treasure Island_:

   "And now, who should come dropping in, _ex machina_, but Dr Japp, like
   the disguised prince, who is to bring down the curtain upon peace and
   happiness in the last act; for he carried in his pocket, not a horn or
   a talisman, but a publisher, in fact, ready to unearth new writers for
   my old friend Mr Henderson's _Young Folks_.  Even the ruthlessness of
   a united family recoiled before the extreme measure of inflicting on
   our guest the mutilated members of _The Sea-Cook_; at the same time,
   we would by no means stop our readings, and accordingly the tale was
   begun again at the beginning, and solemnly redelivered for the benefit
   of Dr Japp.  From that moment on, I have thought highly of his
   critical faculty; for when he left us, he carried away the manuscript
   in his portmanteau.

   "_Treasure Island_--it was Mr Henderson who deleted the first title,
   _The Sea-Cook_--appeared duly in _Young Folks_, where it figured in
   the ignoble midst without woodcuts, and attracted not the least
   attention.  I did not care.  I liked the tale myself, for much the
   same reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind of
   picturesque.  I was not a little proud of John Silver also; and to
   this day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer.  What
   was infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark.  I had
   finished a tale and written The End upon my manuscript, as I had not
   done since _The Pentland Rising_, when I was a boy of sixteen, not yet
   at college.  In truth, it was so by a lucky set of accidents: had not
   Dr Japp come on his visit, had not the tale flowed from me with
   singular ease, it must have been laid aside, like its predecessors,
   and found a circuitous and unlamented way to the fire.  Purists may
   suggest it would have been better so.  I am not of that mind.  The
   tale seems to have given much pleasure, and it brought (or was the
   means of bringing) fire, food, and wine to a deserving family in which
   I took an interest.  I need scarcely say I mean my own."

He himself gives a goodly list of the predecessors which had found a
circuitous and unlamented way to the fire

   "As soon as I was able to write, I became a good friend to the paper-
   makers.  Reams upon reams must have gone to the making of _Rathillet_,
   _The Pentland Rising_, _The King's Pardon_ (otherwise _Park
   Whitehead_), _Edward Daven_, _A Country Dance_, and _A Vendetta in the
   West_.  _Rathillet_ was attempted before fifteen, _The Vendetta_ at
   twenty-nine, and the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till I was
   thirty-one."

Another thing I carried from Braemar with me which I greatly prize--this
was a copy of _Christianity confirmed by Jewish and Heathen Testimony_,
by Mr Stevenson's father, with his autograph signature and many of his
own marginal notes.  He had thought deeply on many subjects--theological,
scientific, and social--and had recorded, I am afraid, but the smaller
half of his thoughts and speculations.  Several days in the mornings,
before R. L. Stevenson was able to face the somewhat "snell" air of the
hills, I had long walks with the old gentleman, when we also had long
talks on many subjects--the liberalising of the Scottish Church,
educational reform, etc.; and, on one occasion, a statement of his
reason, because of the subscription, for never having become an elder.
That he had in some small measure enjoyed my society, as I certainly had
much enjoyed his, was borne out by a letter which I received from the son
in reply to one I had written, saying that surely his father had never
meant to present me at the last moment on my leaving by coach with that
volume, with his name on it, and with pencilled notes here and there, but
had merely given it me to read and return.  In the circumstances I may
perhaps be excused quoting from a letter dated Castleton of Braemar,
September 1881, in illustration of what I have said--

   "MY DEAR DR JAPP,--My father has gone, but I think I may take it upon
   me to ask you to keep the book.  Of all things you could do to endear
   yourself to me you have done the best, for, from your letter, you have
   taken a fancy to my father.

   "I do not know how to thank you for your kind trouble in the matter of
   _The Sea-Cook_, but I am not unmindful.  My health is still poorly,
   and I have added intercostal rheumatism--a new attraction, which sewed
   me up nearly double for two days, and still gives me 'a list to
   starboard'--let us be ever nautical. . . . I do not think with the
   start I have, there will be any difficulty in letting Mr Henderson go
   ahead whenever he likes.  I will write my story up to its legitimate
   conclusion, and then we shall be in a position to judge whether a
   sequel would be desirable, and I myself would then know better about
   its practicability from the story-telling point of view.--Yours very
   sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."

A little later came the following:--

   "THE COTTAGE, CASTLETON OF BRAEMAR.
   (_No date_.)

   "MY DEAR DR JAPP,--Herewith go nine chapters.  I have been a little
   seedy; and the two last that I have written seem to me on a false
   venue; hence the smallness of the batch.  I have now, I hope, in the
   three last sent, turned the corner, with no great amount of dulness.

   "The map, with all its names, notes, soundings, and things, should
   make, I believe, an admirable advertisement for the story.  Eh?

   "I hope you got a telegram and letter I forwarded after you to
   Dinnat.--Believe me, yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."

In the afternoon, if fine and dry, we went walking, and Stevenson would
sometimes tell us stories of his short experience at the Scottish Bar,
and of his first and only brief.  I remember him contrasting that with
his experiences as an engineer with Bob Bain, who, as manager, was then
superintending the building of a breakwater.  Of that time, too, he told
the choicest stories, and especially of how, against all orders, he
bribed Bob with five shillings to let him go down in the diver's dress.
He gave us a splendid description--finer, I think, than even that in his
_Memories_--of his sensations on the sea-bottom, which seems to have
interested him as deeply, and suggested as many strange fancies, as
anything which he ever came across on the surface.  But the possibility
of enterprises of this sort ended--Stevenson lost his interest in
engineering.

{Manuscript letter by R.L.S.: p20.jpg}

Stevenson's father had, indeed, been much exercised in his day by
theological questions and difficulties, and though he remained a staunch
adherent of the Established Church of Scotland he knew well and
practically what is meant by the term "accommodation," as it is used by
theologians in reference to creeds and formulas; for he had over and over
again, because of the strict character of the subscription required from
elders of the Scottish Church declined, as I have said, to accept the
office.  In a very express sense you could see that he bore the marks of
his past in many ways--a quick, sensitive, in some ways even a fantastic-
minded man, yet with a strange solidity and common-sense amid it all,
just as though ferns with the veritable fairies' seed were to grow out of
a common stone wall.  He looked like a man who had not been without
sleepless nights--without troubles, sorrows, and perplexities, and even
yet, had not wholly risen above some of them, or the results of them.  His
voice was "low and sweet"--with just a possibility in it of rising to a
shrillish key.  A sincere and faithful man, who had walked very demurely
through life, though with a touch of sudden, bright, quiet humour and
fancy, every now and then crossing the grey of his characteristic
pensiveness or melancholy, and drawing effect from it.  He was most frank
and genial with me, and I greatly honour his memory. {2}

Thomas Stevenson, with a strange, sad smile, told me how much of a
disappointment, in the first stage, at all events, Louis (he always
called his son Louis at home), had caused him, by failing to follow up
his profession at the Scottish Bar.  How much he had looked forward,
after the engineering was abandoned, to his devoting himself to the work
of the Parliament House (as the Hall of the Chief Court is called in
Scotland, from the building having been while yet there was a Scottish
Parliament the place where it sat), though truly one cannot help feeling
how much Stevenson's very air and figure would have been out of keeping
among the bewigged, pushing, sharp-set, hard-featured, and even red-faced
and red-nosed (some of them, at any rate) company, who daily walked the
Parliament House, and talked and gossiped there, often of other things
than law and equity.  "Well, yes, perhaps it was all for the best," he
said, with a sigh, on my having interjected the remark that R. L.
Stevenson was wielding far more influence than he ever could have done as
a Scottish counsel, even though he had risen rapidly in his profession,
and become Lord-Advocate or even a judge.

There was, indeed, a very pathetic kind of harking back on the might-have-
beens when I talked with him on this subject.  He had reconciled himself
in a way to the inevitable, and, like a sensible man, was now inclined to
make the most and the best of it.  The marriage, which, on the report of
it, had been but a new disappointment to him, had, as if by magic, been
transformed into a blessing in his mind and his wife's by personal
contact with Fanny Van der Griff Stevenson, which no one who ever met her
could wonder at; but, nevertheless, his dream of seeing his only son
walking in the pathways of the Stevensons, and adorning a profession in
Edinburgh, and so winning new and welcome laurels for the family and the
name, was still present with him constantly, and by contrast, he was
depressed with contemplation of the real state of the case, when, as I
have said, I pointed out to him, as more than once I did, what an
influence his son was wielding now, not only over those near to him, but
throughout the world, compared with what could have come to him as a
lighthouse engineer, however successful, or it may be as a briefless
advocate or barrister, walking, hardly in glory and in joy, the Hall of
the Edinburgh Parliament House.  And when I pictured the yet greater
influence that was sure to come to him, he only shook his head with that
smile which tells of hopes long-cherished and lost at last, and of
resignation gained, as though at stern duty's call and an honest desire
for the good of those near and dear to him.  It moved me more than I can
say, and always in the midst of it he adroitly, and somewhat abruptly,
changed the subject.  Such penalties do parents often pay for the honour
of giving geniuses to the world.  Here, again, it may be true, "the
individual withers but the world is more and more."

The impression of a kind of tragic fatality was but added to when
Stevenson would speak of his father in such terms of love and admiration
as quite moved one, of his desire to please him, of his highest respect
and gratitude to him, and pride in having such a father.  It was most
characteristic that when, in his travels in America, he met a gentleman
who expressed plainly his keen disappointment on learning that he had but
been introduced to the son and not to the father--to the as yet but
budding author--and not to the builder of the great lighthouse beacons
that constantly saved mariners from shipwreck round many stormy coasts,
he should record the incident, as his readers will remember, with such a
strange mixture of a pride and filial gratitude, and half humorous
humiliation.  Such is the penalty a son of genius often pays in heart-
throbs for the inability to do aught else but follow his destiny--follow
his star, even though as Dante says:--

   "Se tu segui tua stella
   Non puoi fallire a glorioso porto." {3}

What added a keen thrill as of quivering flesh exposed, was that Thomas
Stevenson on one side was exactly the man to appreciate such attainments
and work in another, and I often wondered how far the sense of Edinburgh
propriety and worldly estimates did weigh with him here.

Mr Stevenson mentioned to me a peculiar fact which has since been noted
by his son, that, notwithstanding the kind of work he had so successfully
engaged in, he was no mathematician, and had to submit his calculations
to another to be worked out in definite mathematical formulae.  Thomas
Stevenson gave one the impression of a remarkably sweet, great
personality, grave, anxious, almost morbidly forecasting, yet full of
childlike hope and ready affection, but, perhaps, so earnestly taken up
with some points as to exaggerate their importance and be too
self-conscious and easily offended in respect to them.  But there was no
affectation in him.  He was simple-minded, sincere to the core; most
kindly, homely, hospitable, much intent on brotherly offices.  He had the
Scottish _perfervidum_ too--he could tolerate nothing mean or creeping;
and his eye would lighten and glance in a striking manner when such was
spoken of.  I have since heard that his charities were very extensive,
and dispensed in the most hidden and secret ways.  He acted here on the
Scripture direction, "Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand
doeth."  He was much exercised when I saw him about some defects, as he
held, in the methods of Scotch education (for he was a true lover of
youth, and cared more for character being formed than for heads being
merely crammed).  Sagacious, with fine forecast, with a high ideal, and
yet up to a certain point a most tolerant temper, he was a fine specimen
of the Scottish gentleman.  His son tells that, as he was engaged in work
calculated to benefit the world and to save life, he would not for long
take out a patent for his inventions, and thus lost immense sums.  I can
well believe that: it seems quite in keeping with my impressions of the
man.  There was nothing stolid or selfishly absorbed in him.  He bore the
marks of deep, true, honest feeling, true benevolence, and open-handed
generosity, and despite the son's great pen-craft, and inventive power,
would have forgiven my saying that sometimes I have had a doubt whether
the father was not, after all, the greater man of the two, though
certainly not, like the hero of _In Memoriam_, moulded "in colossal
calm."

In theological matters, in which Thomas Stevenson had been much and
deeply exercised, he held very strong views, leading decisively to ultra-
Calvinism; but, as I myself could well sympathise with such views, if I
did not hold them, knowing well the strange ways in which they had gone
to form grand, if sometimes sternly forbidding characters, there were no
cross-purposes as there might have been with some on that subject.  And
always I felt I had an original character and a most interesting one to
study.

This is another very characteristic letter to me from Davos Platz:

   "CHALET BUOL, DAVOS, GRISONS,
   SWITZERLAND.  (_No date_.)

   "MY DEAR DR JAPP,--You must think me a forgetful rogue, as indeed I
   am; for I have but now told my publisher to send you a copy of the
   _Familiar Studies_.  However, I own I have delayed this letter till I
   could send you the enclosed.  Remembering the night at Braemar, when
   we visited the picture-gallery, I hoped they might amuse you.

   "You see we do some publishing hereaway.

   "With kind regards, believe me, always yours faithfully,

   ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."

   "I shall hope to see you in town in May."

The enclosed was the second series of _Moral Emblems_, by R. L.
Stevenson, printed by Samuel Osbourne.  My answer to this letter brought
the following:

   "CHALET-BUOL, DAVOS,
   _April_ 1_st_, 1882.

   "MY DEAR DR JAPP,--A good day to date this letter, which is, in fact,
   a confession of incapacity.  During my wife's wretched illness--or I
   should say the worst of it, for she is not yet rightly well--I
   somewhat lost my head, and entirely lost a great quire of corrected
   proofs.  This is one of the results: I hope there are none more
   serious.  I was never so sick of any volume as I was of that; I was
   continually receiving fresh proofs with fresh infinitesimal
   difficulties.  I was ill; I did really fear, for my wife was worse
   than ill.  Well, 'tis out now; and though I have already observed
   several carelessnesses myself, and now here is another of your
   finding--of which indeed, I ought to be ashamed--it will only justify
   the sweeping humility of the preface.

   "Symonds was actually dining with us when your letter came, and I
   communicated your remarks, which pleased him.  He is a far better and
   more interesting thing than his books.

   "The elephant was my wife's, so she is proportionately elate you
   should have picked it out for praise from a collection, let us add, so
   replete with the highest qualities of art.

   "My wicked carcass, as John Knox calls it, holds together wonderfully.
   In addition to many other things, and a volume of travel, I find I
   have written since December ninety Cornhill pp. of Magazine
   work--essays and stories--40,000 words; and I am none the worse--I am
   better.  I begin to hope I may, if not outlive this wolverine upon my
   shoulders, at least carry him bravely like Symonds or Alexander Pope.
   I begin to take a pride in that hope.

   "I shall be much interested to see your criticisms: you might perhaps
   send them on to me.  I believe you know that I am not dangerous--one
   folly I have not--I am not touchy under criticism.

   "Sam and my wife both beg to be remembered, and Sam also sends as a
   present a work of his own.--Yours very sincerely,

   ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON."

As indicating the estimate of many of the good Edinburgh people of
Stevenson and the Stevensons that still held sway up to so late a date as
1893, I will here extract two characteristic passages from the letters of
the friend and correspondent of these days just referred to, and to whom
I had sent a copy of the _Atalanta_ Magazine, with an article of mine on
Stevenson.

   "If you can excuse the garrulity of age, I can tell you one or two
   things about Louis Stevenson, his father and even his grandfather,
   which you may work up some other day, as you have so deftly embedded
   in the _Atalanta_ article that small remark on his acting.  Your paper
   is pleasant and modest: most of R. L. Stevenson's admirers are
   inclined to lay it on far too thick.  That he is a genius we all
   admit; but his genius, if fine, is limited.  For example, he cannot
   paint (or at least he never has painted) a woman.  No more could
   Fettes Douglas, skilful artist though he was in his own special line,
   and I shall tell you a remark of Russel's thereon some day. {4}  There
   are women in his books, but there is none of the beauty and subtlety
   of womanhood in them.

   "R. L. Stevenson I knew well as a lad and often met him and talked
   with him.  He acted in private theatricals got up by the late
   Professor Fleeming Jenkin.  But he had then, as always, a pretty guid
   conceit o' himsel'--which his clique have done nothing to check.  His
   father and his grandfather (I have danced with his mother before her
   marriage) I knew better; but 'the family theologian,' as some of R. L.
   Stevenson's friends dabbed his father, was a very touchy theologian,
   and denounced any one who in the least differed from his extreme
   Calvinistic views.  I came under his lash most unwittingly in this way
   myself.  But for this twist, he was a good fellow--kind and
   hospitable--and a really able man in his profession.  His father-in-
   law, R. L. Stevenson's maternal grandfather, was the Rev. Dr Balfour,
   minister of Colinton--one of the finest-looking old men I ever
   saw--tall, upright, and ruddy at eighty.  But he was marvellously
   feeble as a preacher, and often said things that were deliciously,
   unconsciously, unintentionally laughable, if not witty.  We were near
   Colinton for some years; and Mr Russell (of the _Scotsman_), who once
   attended the Parish Church with us, was greatly tickled by Balfour
   discoursing on the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, remarking that
   Mrs P-'s conduct was 'highly improper'!"

The estimate of R. L. Stevenson was not and could not be final in this
case, for _Weir of Hermiston_ and _Catriona_ were yet unwritten, not to
speak of others, but the passages reflect a certain side of Edinburgh
opinion, illustrating the old Scripture doctrine that a prophet has
honour everywhere but in his own country.  And the passages themselves
bear evidence that I violate no confidence then, for they were given to
me to be worked into any after-effort I might make on Stevenson.  My
friend was a good and an acute critic who had done some acceptable
literary work in his day.




CHAPTER III--THE CHILD FATHER OF THE MAN


R. L. Stevenson was born on 13th November 1850, the very year of the
death of his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, whom he has so finely
celebrated.  As a mere child he gave token of his character.  As soon as
he could read, he was keen for books, and, before very long, had read all
the story-books he could lay hands on; and, when the stock ran out, he
would go and look in at all the shop windows within reach, and try to
piece out the stories from the bits exposed in open pages and the
woodcuts.

He had a nurse of very remarkable character--evidently a paragon--who
deeply influenced him and did much to form his young mind--Alison
Cunningham, who, in his juvenile lingo, became "Cumy," and who not only
was never forgotten, but to the end was treated as his "second mother."
In his dedication of his _Child's Garden of Verses_ to her, he says:

   "My second mother, my first wife,
   The angel of my infant life."

Her copy of _Kidnapped_ was inscribed to her by the hand of Stevenson,
thus:

   "TO CUMY, FROM HER BOY, THE AUTHOR.
   SKERRYVORE, 18_th_ _July_ 1888."

Skerryvore was the name of Stevenson's Bournemouth home, so named after
one of the Stevenson lighthouses.  His first volume, _An Inland Voyage_
has this pretty dedication, inscribed in a neat, small hand:

   "MY DEAR CUMY,--If you had not taken so much trouble with me all the
   years of my childhood, this little book would never have been written.
   Many a long night you sat up with me when I was ill.  I wish I could
   hope, by way of return, to amuse a single evening for you with my
   little book.  But whatever you think of it, I know you will think
   kindly of

   THE AUTHOR."

"Cumy" was perhaps the most influential teacher Stevenson had.  What she
and his mother taught took effect and abode with him, which was hardly
the case with any other of his teachers.

   "In contrast to Goethe," says Mr Baildon, "Stevenson was but little
   affected by his relations to women, and, when this point is fully gone
   into, it will probably be found that his mother and nurse in
   childhood, and his wife and step-daughter in later life, are about the
   only women who seriously influenced either his character or his art."
   (p. 32).

When Mr Kelman is celebrating Stevenson for the consistency and
continuity of his undogmatic religion, he is almost throughout
celebrating "Cumy" and her influence, though unconsciously.  Here, again,
we have an apt and yet more striking illustration, after that of the good
Lord Shaftesbury and many others, of the deep and lasting effect a good
and earnest woman, of whom the world may never hear, may have had upon a
youngster of whom all the world shall hear.  When Mr Kelman says that
"the religious element in Stevenson was not a thing of late growth, but
an integral part and vital interest of his life," he but points us back
to the earlier religious influences to which he had been effectually
subject.  "His faith was not for himself alone, and the phases of
Christianity which it has asserted are peculiarly suited to the spiritual
needs of many in the present time."

We should not lay so much weight as Mr Kelman does on the mere number of
times "the Divine name" is found in Stevenson's writings, but there is
something in such confessions as the following to his father, when he
was, amid hardship and illness, in Paris in 1878:

   "Still I believe in myself and my fellow-men and the God who made us
   all. . . . I am lonely and sick and out of heart.  Well, I still hope;
   I still believe; I still see the good in the inch, and cling to it.  It
   is not much, perhaps, but it is always something."

Yes, "Cumy" was a very effective teacher, whose influence and teaching
long remained.  His other teachers, however famous and highly gifted, did
not attain to such success with him.  And because of this non-success
they blamed him, as is usual.  He was fond of playing truant--declared,
indeed, that he was about as methodic a truant as ever could have
existed.  He much loved to go on long wanderings by himself on the
Pentland Hills and read about the Covenanters, and while yet a youth of
sixteen he wrote _The Pentland Rising_--a pamphlet in size and a piece of
fine work--which was duly published, is now scarce, and fetches a high
price.  He had made himself thoroughly familiar with all the odd old
corners of Edinburgh--John Knox's haunts and so on, all which he has
turned to account in essays, descriptions and in stories--especially in
_Catriona_.  When a mere youth at school, as he tells us himself, he had
little or no desire to carry off prizes and do just as other boys did; he
was always wishing to observe, and to see, and try things for
himself--was, in fact, in the eyes of schoolmasters and tutors something
of an _idler_, with splendid gifts which he would not rightly apply.  He
was applying them rightly, though not in their way.  It is not only in
his _Apology for Idlers_ that this confession is made, but elsewhere, as
in his essay on _A College Magazine_, where he says, "I was always busy
on my own private end, which was to learn to write.  I kept always two
books in my pocket, one to read and one to write in!"

When he went to College it was still the same--he tells us in the
funniest way how he managed to wheedle a certificate for Greek out of
Professor Blackie, though the Professor owned "his face was not familiar
to him"!  He fared very differently when, afterwards his father, eager
that he should follow his profession, got him to enter the civil
engineering class under Professor Fleeming Jenkin.  He still stuck to his
old courses--wandering about, and, in sheltered corners, writing in the
open air, and was not present in class more than a dozen times.  When the
session was ended he went up to try for a certificate from Fleeming
Jenkin.  "No, no, Mr Stevenson," said the Professor; "I might give it in
a doubtful case, but yours is not doubtful: you have not kept my
classes."  And the most characteristic thing--honourable to both men--is
to come; for this was the beginning of a friendship which grew and
strengthened and is finally celebrated in the younger man's sketch of the
elder.  He learned from Professor Fleeming Jenkin, perhaps unconsciously,
more of the _humaniores_, than consciously he did of engineering.  A
friend of mine, who knew well both the Stevenson family and the Balfours,
to which R. L. Stevenson's mother belonged, recalls, as we have seen, his
acting in the private theatricals that were got up by the Professor, and
adds, "He was then a very handsome fellow, and looked splendidly as Sir
Charles Pomander, and essayed, not wholly without success, Sir Peter
Teazle," which one can well believe, no less than that he acted such
parts splendidly as well as looked them.

_Longman's Magazine_, immediately after his death, published the
following poem, which took a very pathetic touch from the circumstances
of its appearance--the more that, while it imaginatively and finely
commemorated these days of truant wanderings, it showed the ruling
passion for home and the old haunts, strongly and vividly, even not
unnigh to death:

   "The tropics vanish, and meseems that I,
   From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir,
   Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again.
   Far set in fields and woods, the town I see
   Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke,
   Cragg'd, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort
   Beflagg'd.  About, on seaward drooping hills,
   New folds of city glitter.  Last, the Forth
   Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles,
   And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns,
   There, on the sunny frontage of a hill,
   Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead,
   My dead, the ready and the strong of word.
   Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive;
   The sea bombards their founded towers; the night
   Thrills pierced with their strong lamps.  The artificers,
   One after one, here in this grated cell,
   Where the rain erases and the rust consumes,
   Fell upon lasting silence.  Continents
   And continental oceans intervene;
   A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle,
   Environs and confines their wandering child
   In vain.  The voice of generations dead
   Summons me, sitting distant, to arise,
   My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace,
   And all mutation over, stretch me down
   In that denoted city of the dead."




CHAPTER IV--HEREDITY ILLUSTRATED


At first sight it would seem hard to trace any illustration of the
doctrine of heredity in the case of this master of romance.  George
Eliot's dictum that we are, each one of us, but an omnibus carrying down
the traits of our ancestors, does not appear at all to hold here.  This
fanciful realist, this naive-wistful humorist, this dreamy mystical
casuist, crossed by the innocent bohemian, this serious and genial
essayist, in whom the deep thought was hidden by the gracious play of wit
and phantasy, came, on the father's side, of a stock of what the world
regarded as a quiet, ingenious, demure, practical, home-keeping people.
In his rich colour, originality, and graceful air, it is almost as though
the bloom of japonica came on a rich old orchard apple-tree, all out of
season too.  Those who go hard on heredity would say, perhaps, that he
was the result of some strange back-stroke.  But, on closer examination,
we need not go so far.  His grandfather, Robert Stevenson, the great
lighthouse-builder, the man who reared the iron-bound pillar on the
destructive Bell Rock, and set life-saving lights there, was very intent
on his professional work, yet he had his ideal, and romantic, and
adventurous side.  In the delightful sketch which his famous grandson
gave of him, does he not tell of the joy Robert Stevenson had on the
annual voyage in the _Lighthouse Yacht_--how it was looked forward to,
yearned for, and how, when he had Walter Scott on board, his fund of
story and reminiscence all through the tour never failed--how Scott drew
upon it in _The Pirate_ and the notes to _The Pirate_, and with what
pride Robert Stevenson preserved the lines Scott wrote in the lighthouse
album at the Bell Rock on that occasion:

   "PHAROS LOQUITUR

   "Far in the bosom of the deep
   O'er these wild shelves my watch I keep,
   A ruddy gem of changeful light
   Bound on the dusky brow of night.
   The seaman bids my lustre hail,
   And scorns to strike his timorous sail."

And how in 1850 the old man, drawing nigh unto death, was with the utmost
difficulty dissuaded from going the voyage once more, and was found
furtively in his room packing his portmanteau in spite of the protests of
all his family, and would have gone but for the utter weakness of death.

His father was also a splendid engineer; was full of invention and
devoted to his profession, but he, too, was not without his romances, and
even vagaries.  He loved a story, was a fine teller of stories, used to
sit at night and spin the most wondrous yarns, a man of much reserve, yet
also of much power in discourse, with an aptness and felicity in the use
of phrases--so much so, as his son tells, that on his deathbed, when his
power of speech was passing from him, and he couldn't articulate the
right word, he was silent rather than use the wrong one.  I shall never
forget how in these early morning walks at Braemar, finding me
sympathetic, he unbent with the air of a man who had unexpectedly found
something he had sought, and was fairly confidential.

On the mother's side our author came of ministers.  His maternal
grandfather, the Rev. Dr Balfour of Colinton, was a man of handsome
presence, tall, venerable-looking, and not without a mingled authority
and humour of his own--no very great preacher, I have heard, but would
sometimes bring a smile to the faces of his hearers by very naive and
original ways of putting things.  R. L. Stevenson quaintly tells a story
of how his grandfather when he had physic to take, and was indulged in a
sweet afterwards, yet would not allow the child to have a sweet because
he had not had the physic.  A veritable Calvinist in daily action--from
him, no doubt, our subject drew much of his interest in certain
directions--John Knox, Scottish history, the '15 and the '45, and no
doubt much that justifies the line "something of shorter-catechist," as
applied by Henley to Stevenson among very contrasted traits indeed.

But strange truly are the interblendings of race, and the way in which
traits of ancestors reappear, modifying and transforming each other.  The
gardener knows what can be done by grafts and buddings; but more
wonderful far than anything there, are the mysterious blendings and
outbursts of what is old and forgotten, along with what is wholly new and
strange, and all going to produce often what we call sometimes
eccentricity, and sometimes originality and genius.

Mr J. F. George, in _Scottish Notes and Queries_, wrote as follows on
Stevenson's inheritances and indebtedness to certain of his ancestors:

   "About 1650, James Balfour, one of the Principal Clerks of the Court
   of Session, married Bridget, daughter of Chalmers of Balbaithan,
   Keithhall, and that estate was for some time in the name of Balfour.
   His son, James Balfour of Balbaithan, Merchant and Magistrate of
   Edinburgh, paid poll-tax in 1696, but by 1699 the land had been sold.
   This was probably due to the fact that Balfour was one of the
   Governors of the Darien Company.  His grandson, James Balfour of
   Pilrig (1705-1795), sometime Professor of Moral Philosophy in
   Edinburgh University, whose portrait is sketched in _Catriona_, also
   made a Garioch [Aberdeenshire district] marriage, his wife being
   Cecilia, fifth daughter of Sir John Elphinstone, second baronet of
   Logie (Elphinstone) and Sheriff of Aberdeen, by Mary, daughter of Sir
   Gilbert Elliot, first baronet of Minto.

   "Referring to the Minto descent, Stevenson claims to have 'shaken a
   spear in the Debatable Land and shouted the slogan of the Elliots.'  He
   evidently knew little or nothing of his relations on the Elphinstone
   side.  The Logie Elphinstones were a cadet branch of Glack, an estate
   acquired by Nicholas Elphinstone in 1499.  William Elphinstone, a
   younger son of James of Glack, and Elizabeth Wood of Bonnyton, married
   Margaret Forbes, and was father of Sir James Elphinstone, Bart., of
   Logie, so created in 1701. . . .

   "Stevenson would have been delighted to acknowledge his relationship,
   remote though it was, to 'the Wolf of Badenoch,' who burned Elgin
   Cathedral without the Earl of Kildare's excuse that he thought the
   Bishop was in it; and to the Wolf's son, the Victor of Harlaw [and] to
   his nephew 'John O'Coull,' Constable of France. . . . Also among
   Tusitala's kin may be noted, in addition to the later Gordons of
   Gight, the Tiger Earl of Crawford, familiarly known as 'Earl Beardie,'
   the 'Wicked Master' of the same line, who was fatally stabbed by a
   Dundee cobbler 'for taking a stoup of drink from him'; Lady Jean
   Lindsay, who ran away with 'a common jockey with the horn,' and
   latterly became a beggar; David Lindsay, the last Laird of Edzell [a
   lichtsome Lindsay fallen on evil days], who ended his days as hostler
   at a Kirkwall inn, and 'Mussel Mou'ed Charlie,' the Jacobite ballad-
   singer.

   "Stevenson always believed that he had a strong spiritual affinity to
   Robert Fergusson.  It is more than probable that there was a distant
   maternal affinity as well.  Margaret Forbes, the mother of Sir James
   Elphinstone, the purchaser of Logie, has not been identified, but it
   is probable she was of the branch of the Tolquhon Forbeses who
   previously owned Logie.  Fergusson's mother, Elizabeth Forbes, was the
   daughter of a Kildrummy tacksman, who by constant tradition is stated
   to have been of the house of Tolquhon.  It would certainly be
   interesting if this suggested connection could be proved." {5}

   "From his Highland ancestors," says the _Quarterly Review_, "Louis
   drew the strain of Celtic melancholy with all its perils and
   possibilities, and its kinship, to the mood of day-dreaming, which has
   flung over so many of his pages now the vivid light wherein figures
   imagined grew as real as flesh and blood, and yet, again, the ghostly,
   strange, lonesome, and stinging mist under whose spell we see the
   world bewitched, and every object quickens with a throb of infectious
   terror."

Here, as in many other cases, we see how the traits of ancestry reappear
and transform other strains, strangely the more remote often being the
strongest and most persistent and wonderful.

"It is through his father, strange as it may seem," says Mr Baildon,
"that Stevenson gets the Celtic elements so marked in his person,
character, and genius; for his father's pedigree runs back to the
Highland clan Macgregor, the kin of Rob Roy.  Stevenson thus drew in
Celtic strains from both sides--from the Balfours and the Stevensons
alike--and in his strange, dreamy, beautiful, and often far-removed
fancies we have the finest and most effective witness of it."

Mr William Archer, in his own characteristic way, has brought the
inheritances from the two sides of the house into more direct contact and
contrast in an article he wrote in _The Daily Chronicle_ on the
appearance of the _Letters to Family and Friends_.

   "These letters show," he says, "that Stevenson's was not one of those
   sunflower temperaments which turn by instinct, not effort, towards the
   light, and are, as Mr Francis Thompson puts it, 'heartless and happy,
   lackeying their god.'  The strains of his heredity were very
   curiously, but very clearly, mingled.  It may surprise some readers to
   find him speaking of 'the family evil, despondency,' but he spoke with
   knowledge.  He inherited from his father not only a stern Scottish
   intentness on the moral aspect of life ('I would rise from the dead to
   preach'), but a marked disposition to melancholy and hypochondria.
   From his mother, on the other hand, he derived, along with his
   physical frailty, a resolute and cheery stoicism.  These two elements
   in his nature fought many a hard fight, and the besieging forces from
   without--ill-health, poverty, and at one time family dissensions--were
   by no means without allies in the inner citadel of his soul.  His
   spirit was courageous in the truest sense of the word: by effort and
   conviction, not by temperamental insensibility to fear.  It is clear
   that there was a period in his life (and that before the worst of his
   bodily ills came upon him) when he was often within measurable
   distance of Carlylean gloom.  He was twenty-four when he wrote thus,
   from Swanston, to Mrs Sitwell:

   "'It is warmer a bit; but my body is most decrepit, and I can just
   manage to be cheery and tread down hypochondria under foot by work.  I
   lead such a funny life, utterly without interest or pleasure outside
   of my work: nothing, indeed, but work all day long, except a short
   walk alone on the cold hills, and meals, and a couple of pipes with my
   father in the evening.  It is surprising how it suits me, and how
   happy I keep.'

   "This is the serenity which arises, not from the absence of fuliginous
   elements in the character, but from a potent smoke-consuming faculty,
   and an inflexible will to use it.  Nine years later he thus admonishes
   his backsliding parent:

   "'MY DEAR MOTHER,--I give my father up.  I give him a parable: that
   the Waverley novels are better reading for every day than the tragic
   _Life_.  And he takes it back-side foremost, and shakes his head, and
   is gloomier than ever.  Tell him that I give him up.  I don't want no
   such a parent.  This is not the man for my money.  I do not call that
   by the name of religion which fills a man with bile.  I write him a
   whole letter, bidding him beware of extremes, and telling him that his
   gloom is gallows-worthy; and I get back an answer--.  Perish the
   thought of it.

   "'Here am I on the threshold of another year, when, according to all
   human foresight, I should long ago have been resolved into my
   elements: here am I, who you were persuaded was born to disgrace
   you--and, I will do you the justice to add, on no such insufficient
   grounds--no very burning discredit when all is done; here am I
   married, and the marriage recognised to be a blessing of the first
   order.  A1 at Lloyd's.  There is he, at his not first youth, able to
   take more exercise than I at thirty-three, and gaining a stone's
   weight, a thing of which I am incapable.  There are you; has the man
   no gratitude? . . .

   "'Even the Shorter Catechism, not the merriest epitome of religion,
   and a work exactly as pious although not quite so true as the
   multiplication table--even that dry-as-dust epitome begins with a
   heroic note.  What is man's chief end?  Let him study that; and ask
   himself if to refuse to enjoy God's kindest gifts is in the spirit
   indicated.'

   "As may be judged from this half-playful, half-serious remonstrance,
   Stevenson's relation to his parents was eminently human and beautiful.
   The family dissensions above alluded to belonged only to a short but
   painful period, when the father could not reconcile himself to the
   discovery that the son had ceased to accept the formulas of Scottish
   Calvinism.  In the eyes of the older man such heterodoxy was for the
   moment indistinguishable from atheism; but he soon arrived at a better
   understanding of his son's position.  Nothing appears more
   unmistakably in these letters than the ingrained theism of Stevenson's
   way of thought.  The poet, the romancer within him, revolted from the
   conception of formless force.  A personal deity was a necessary
   character in the drama, as he conceived it.  And his morality, though
   (or inasmuch as) it dwelt more on positive kindness than on negative
   lawlessness, was, as he often insisted, very much akin to the morality
   of the New Testament."

Anyway it is clear that much in the interminglings of blood we _can_
trace, may go to account for not a little in Stevenson.  His peculiar
interest in the enormities of old-time feuds, the excesses, the
jealousies, the queer psychological puzzles, the desire to work on the
outlying and morbid, and even the unallowed and unhallowed, for purposes
of romance--the delight in dealing with revelations of primitive feeling
and the out-bursts of the mere natural man always strangely checked and
diverted by the uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable,
vague, weird and horrible.  There was the undoubted Celtic element in him
underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of conventionality in
one phase, and the falling under it in another--the reaction and the
retreat from what had attracted and interested him, and then the return
upon it, as with added zest because of the retreat.  The confessed
Hedonist, enjoying life and boasting of it just a little, and yet the
Puritan in him, as it were, all the time eyeing himself as from some
loophole of retreat, and then commenting on his own behaviour as a
Hedonist and Bohemian.  This clearly was not what most struck Beerbohm
Tree, during the time he was in close contact with Stevenson, while
arranging the production of _Beau Austin_ at the Haymarket Theatre, for
he sees, or confesses to seeing, only one side, and that the most
assertive, and in a sense, unreal one:

   "Stevenson," says Mr Tree, "always seemed to me an epicure in life.  He
   was always intent on extracting the last drop of honey from every
   flower that came in his way.  He was absorbed in the business of the
   moment, however trivial.  As a companion, he was delightfully witty;
   as a personality, as much a creature of romance as his own creations."

This is simple, and it looks sincere; but it does not touch 'tother side,
or hint at, not to say, solve the problem of Stevenson's personality.  Had
he been the mere Hedonist he could never have done the work he did.  Mr
Beerbohm Tree certainly did not there see far or all round.

Miss Simpson says:

   "Mr Henley recalls him to Edinburgh folk as he was and as the true
   Stevenson would have wished to be known--a queer, inexplicable
   creature, his Celtic blood showing like a vein of unknown metal in the
   stolid, steady rock of his sure-founded Stevensonian pedigree.  His
   cousin and model, 'Bob' Stevenson, the art critic, showed that this
   foreign element came from the men who lit our guiding lights for
   seamen, not from the gentle-blooded Balfours.

   "Mr Henley is right in saying that the gifted boy had not much humour.
   When the joke was against himself he was very thin-skinned and had a
   want of balance.  This made him feel his honest father's sensible
   remarks like the sting of a whip."

Miss Simpson then proceeds to say:

   "The R. L. Stevenson of old Edinburgh days was a conceited,
   egotistical youth, but a true and honest one: a youth full of fire and
   sentiment, protesting he was misunderstood, though he was not.  Posing
   as 'Velvet Coat' among the slums, he did no good to himself.  He had
   not the Dickens aptitude for depicting the ways of life of his adopted
   friends.  When with refined judgment he wanted a figure for a novel,
   he went back to the Bar he scorned in his callow days and then drew in
   _Weir of Hermiston_."




CHAPTER V--TRAVELS


His interest in engineering soon went--his mind full of stories and
fancies and human nature.  As he had told his mother: he did not care
about finding what was "the strain on a bridge," he wanted to know
something of human beings.

No doubt, much to the disappointment and grief of his father, who wished
him as an only son to carry on the traditions of the family, though he
had written two engineering essays of utmost promise, the engineering was
given up, and he consented to study law.  He had already contributed to
College Magazines, and had had even a short spell of editing one; of one
of these he has given a racy account.  Very soon after his call to the
Bar articles and essays from his pen began to appear in _Macmillan's_,
and later, more regularly in the _Cornhill_.  Careful readers soon began
to note here the presence of a new force.  He had gone on the _Inland
Voyage_ and an account of it was in hand; and had done that tour in the
Cevennes which he has described under the title _Travels with a Donkey in
the Cevennes_, with Modestine, sometimes doubting which was the donkey,
but on that tour a chill caught either developed a germ of lung disease
already present, or produced it; and the results unfortunately remained.

He never practised at the Bar, though he tells facetiously of his one
brief.  He had chosen his own vocation, which was literature, and the
years which followed were, despite the delicacy which showed itself, very
busy years.  He produced volume on volume.  He had written many stories
which had never seen the light, but, as he says, passed through the
ordeal of the fire by more or less circuitous ways.

By this time some trouble and cause for anxiety had arisen about the
lungs, and trials of various places had been made.  _Ordered South_
suggests the Mediterranean, sunny Italy, the Riviera.  Then a sea-trip to
America was recommended and undertaken.  Unfortunately, he got worse
there, his original cause of trouble was complicated with others, and the
medical treatment given was stupid, and exaggerated some of the symptoms
instead of removing them, All along--up, at all events, to the time of
his settlement in Samoa--Stevenson was more or less of an invalid.

Indeed, were I ever to write an essay on the art of wisely "laying-to,"
as the sailors say, I would point it by a reference to R. L. Stevenson.
For there is a wise way of "laying-to" that does not imply inaction, but
discreet, well-directed effort, against contrary winds and rough seas,
that is, amid obstacles and drawbacks, and even ill-health, where passive
and active may balance and give effect to each other.  Stevenson was by
native instinct and temperament a rover--a lover of adventure, of strange
by-ways, errant tracts (as seen in his _Inland Voyage_ and _Travels with
a Donkey through the Cevennes_--seen yet more, perhaps, in a certain
account of a voyage to America as a steerage passenger), lofty mountain-
tops, with stronger air, and strange and novel surroundings.  He would
fain, like Ulysses, be at home in foreign lands, making acquaintance with
outlying races, with

            "Cities of men,
   And manners, climates, councils, governments:
   Myself not least, but honoured of them all,
   Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy."

If he could not move about as he would, he would invent, make fancy serve
him instead of experience.  We thus owe something to the staying and
restraining forces in him, and a wise "laying-to"--for his works, which
are, in large part, finely-healthy, objective, and in almost everything
unlike the work of an invalid, yet, in some degree, were but the devices
to beguile the burdens of an invalid's days.  Instead of remaining in our
climate, it might be, to lie listless and helpless half the day, with no
companion but his own thoughts and fancies (not always so pleasant
either, if, like Frankenstein's monster, or, better still like the imp in
the bottle in the _Arabian Nights_, you cannot, once for all liberate
them, and set them adrift on their own charges to visit other people), he
made a home in the sweeter air and more steady climate of the South
Pacific, where, under the Southern Cross, he could safely and
beneficially be as active as he would be involuntarily idle at home, or
work only under pressure of hampering conditions.  That was surely an
illustration of the true "laying-to" with an unaffectedly brave, bright
resolution in it.




CHAPTER VI--SOME EARLIER LETTERS


Carlyle was wont to say that, next to a faithful portrait, familiar
letters were the best medium to reveal a man.  The letters must have been
written with no idea of being used for this end, however--free, artless,
the unstudied self-revealings of mind and heart.  Now, these letters of
R. L. Stevenson, written to his friends in England, have a vast value in
this way--they reveal the man--reveal him in his strength and his
weakness--his ready gift in pleasing and adapting himself to those with
whom he corresponded, and his great power at once of adapting himself to
his circumstances and of humorously rising superior to them.  When he was
ill and almost penniless in San Francisco, he could give Mr Colvin this
account of his daily routine:

   "Any time between eight and half-past nine in the morning a slender
   gentleman in an ulster, with a volume buttoned into the breast of it,
   maybe observed leaving No. 608 Bush and descending Powell with an
   active step.  The gentleman is R. L. Stevenson; the volume relates to
   Benjamin Franklin, on whom he meditates one of his charming essays.  He
   descends Powell, crosses Market, and descends in Sixth on a branch of
   the original Pine Street Coffee-House, no less. . . . He seats himself
   at a table covered with waxcloth, and a pampered menial of High-Dutch
   extraction, and, indeed, as yet only partially extracted, lays before
   him a cup of coffee, a roll, and a pat of butter, all, to quote the
   deity, very good.  A while ago, and R. L. Stevenson used to find the
   supply of butter insufficient; but he has now learned the art to
   exactitude, and butter and roll expire at the same moment.  For this
   rejection he pays ten cents, or fivepence sterling (0 pounds 0s. 5d.).

   "Half an hour later, the inhabitants of Bush Street observed the same
   slender gentleman armed, like George Washington, with his little
   hatchet, splitting kindling, and breaking coal for his fire.  He does
   this quasi-publicly upon the window-sill; but this is not to be
   attributed to any love of notoriety, though he is indeed vain of his
   prowess with the hatchet (which he persists in calling an axe), and
   daily surprised at the perpetuation of his fingers.  The reason is
   this: That the sill is a strong supporting beam, and that blows of the
   same emphasis in other parts of his room might knock the entire shanty
   into hell.  Thenceforth, for from three hours, he is engaged darkly
   with an ink-bottle.  Yet he is not blacking his boots, for the only
   pair that he possesses are innocent of lustre, and wear the natural
   hue of the material turned up with caked and venerable slush.  The
   youngest child of his landlady remarks several times a day, as this
   strange occupant enters or quits the house, 'Dere's de author.'  Can
   it be that this bright-haired innocent has found the true clue to the
   mystery?  The being in question is, at least, poor enough to belong to
   that honourable craft."

Here are a few letters belonging to the winter of 1887-88, nearly all
written from Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks, celebrated by Emerson, and
now a most popular holiday resort in the United States, and were
originally published in _Scribner's Magazine_. . . "It should be said
that, after his long spell of weakness at Bournemouth, Stevenson had gone
West in search of health among the bleak hill summits--'on the Canadian
border of New York State, very unsettled and primitive and cold.'  He had
made the voyage in an ocean tramp, the _Ludgate Hill_, the sort of craft
which any person not a born child of the sea would shun in horror.
Stevenson, however, had 'the finest time conceivable on board the
"strange floating menagerie."'"  Thus he describes it in a letter to Mr
Henry James:

   "Stallions and monkeys and matches made our cargo; and the vast
   continent of these incongruities rolled the while like a haystack; and
   the stallions stood hypnotised by the motion, looking through the port
   at our dinner-table, and winked when the crockery was broken; and the
   little monkeys stared at each other in their cages, and were thrown
   overboard like little bluish babies; and the big monkey, Jacko,
   scoured about the ship and rested willingly in my arms, to the ruin of
   my clothing; and the man of the stallions made a bower of the black
   tarpaulin, and sat therein at the feet of a raddled divinity, like a
   picture on a box of chocolates; and the other passengers, when they
   were not sick, looked on and laughed.  Take all this picture, and make
   it roll till the bell shall sound unexpected notes and the fittings
   shall break loose in our stateroom, and you have the voyage of the
   _Ludgate Hill_.  She arrived in the port of New York without beer,
   porter, soda-water, curacoa, fresh meat, or fresh water; and yet we
   lived, and we regret her."

He discovered this that there is no joy in the Universe comparable to
life on a villainous ocean tramp, rolling through a horrible sea in
company with a cargo of cattle.

   "I have got one good thing of my sea voyage; it is proved the sea
   agrees heartily with me, and my mother likes it; so if I get any
   better, or no worse, my mother will likely hire a yacht for a month or
   so in the summer.  Good Lord! what fun!  Wealth is only useful for two
   things: a yacht and a string quartette.  For these two I will sell my
   soul.  Except for these I hold that 700 pounds a year is as much as
   anybody can possibly want; and I have had more, so I know, for the
   extra coins were of no use, excepting for illness, which damns
   everything.  I was so happy on board that ship, I could not have
   believed it possible; we had the beastliest weather, and many
   discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp ship gave us many
   comforts.  We could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the
   wheel-house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at
   sea.  And truly there is nothing else.  I had literally forgotten what
   happiness was, and the full mind--full of external and physical
   things, not full of cares and labours, and rot about a fellow's
   behaviour.  My heart literally sang; I truly care for nothing so much
   as for that.

   "To go ashore for your letters and hang about the pier among the
   holiday yachtsmen--that's fame, that's glory--and nobody can take it
   away."

At Saranac Lake the Stevensons lived in a "wind-beleaguered hill-top hat-
box of a house," which suited the invalid, but, on the other hand,
invalided his wife.  Soon after getting there he plunged into _The Master
of Ballantrae_.

   "No thought have I now apart from it, and I have got along up to page
   ninety-two of the draught with great interest.  It is to me a most
   seizing tale: there are some fantastic elements, the most is a dead
   genuine human problem--human tragedy, I should say rather.  It will be
   about as long, I imagine, as _Kidnapped_. . . . I have done most of
   the big work, the quarrel, duel between the brothers, and the
   announcement of the death to Clementina and my Lord--Clementina,
   Henry, and Mackellar (nicknamed Squaretoes) are really very fine
   fellows; the Master is all I know of the devil; I have known hints of
   him, in the world, but always cowards: he is as bold as a lion, but
   with the same deadly, causeless duplicity I have watched with so much
   surprise in my two cowards.  'Tis true, I saw a hint of the same
   nature in another man who was not a coward; but he had other things to
   attend to; the Master has nothing else but his devilry."

His wife grows seriously ill, and Stevenson has to turn to household
work.

   "Lloyd and I get breakfast; I have now, 10.15, just got the dishes
   washed and the kitchen all clean, and sit down to give you as much
   news as I have spirit for, after such an engagement.  Glass is a thing
   that really breaks my spirit; and I do not like to fail, and with
   glass I cannot reach the work of my high calling--the artist's."

In the midst of such domestic tasks and entanglements he writes _The
Master_, and very characteristically gets dissatisfied with the last
parts, "which shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning."

Of Mr Kipling this is his judgment--in the year 1890:

   "Kipling is by far the most promising young man who has appeared
   since--ahem--I appeared.  He amazes me by his precocity and various
   endowments.  But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste.  He should
   shield his fire with both hands, 'and draw up all his strength and
   sweetness in one ball.'  ('Draw all his strength and all his sweetness
   up into one ball'?  I cannot remember Marvell's words.)  So the
   critics have been saying to me; but I was never capable of--and surely
   never guilty of--such a debauch of production.  At this rate his works
   will soon fill the habitable globe, and surely he was armed for better
   conflicts than these succinct sketches and flying leaves of verse?  I
   look on, I admire, I rejoice for myself; but in a kind of ambition we
   all have for our tongue and literature I am wounded.  If I had this
   man's fertility and courage, it seems to me I could heave a pyramid.

   "Well, we begin to be the old fogies now, and it was high time
   _something_ rose to take our places.  Certainly Kipling has the gifts;
   the fairy godmothers were all tipsy at his christening.  What will he
   do with them?"

Of the rest of Stevenson's career we cannot speak at length, nor is it
needful.  How in steady succession came his triumphs: came, too, his
trials from ill-health--how he spent winters at Davos Platz, Bournemouth,
and tried other places in America; and how, at last, good fortune led him
to the South Pacific.  After many voyagings and wanderings among the
islands, he settled near Apia, in Samoa, early in 1890, cleared some four
hundred acres, and built a house; where, while he wrote what delighted
the English-speaking race, he took on himself the defence of the natives
against foreign interlopers, writing under the title _A Footnote to
History_, the most powerful _expose_ of the mischief they had done and
were doing there.  He was the beloved of the natives, as he made himself
the friend of all with whom he came in contact.  There, as at home, he
worked--worked with the same determination and in the enjoyment of better
health.  The obtaining idea with him, up to the end, as it had been from
early life, was a brave, resolute, cheerful endeavour to make the best of
it.

"I chose Samoa instead of Honolulu," he told Mr W. H. Trigg, who reports
the talk in _Cassells' Magazine_, "for the simple and eminently
satisfactory reason that it is less civilised.  Can you not conceive that
it is awful fun?"  His house was called "Vailima," which means Five
Waters in the Samoan, and indicates the number of streams that flow by
the spot.




CHAPTER VII--THE VAILIMA LETTERS


The Vailima Letters, written to Mr Sidney Colvin and other friends, are
in their way delightful if not inimitable: and this, in spite of the idea
having occurred to him, that some use might hereafter be made of these
letters for publication purposes.  There is, indeed, as little trace of
any change in the style through this as well could be--the utterly
familiar, easy, almost child-like flow remains, unmarred by
self-consciousness or tendency "to put it on."

In June, 1892, Stevenson says:

   "It came over me the other day suddenly that this diary of mine to you
   would make good pickings after I am dead, and a man could make some
   kind of a book out of it, without much trouble.  So for God's sake
   don't lose them, and they will prove a piece of provision for 'my
   floor old family,' as Simele calls it."

But their great charm remains: they are as free and gracious and serious
and playful and informal as before.  Stevenson's traits of character are
all here: his largeness of heart, his delicacy, his sympathy, his fun,
his pathos, his boylike frolicsomeness, his fine courage, his love of the
sea (for he was by nature a sailor), his passion for action and adventure
despite his ill-health, his great patience with others and fine
adaptability to their temper (he says that he never gets out of temper
with those he has to do with), his unbounded, big-hearted hopefulness,
and fine perseverance in face of difficulties.  What could be better than
the way in which he tells that in January, 1892, when he had a bout of
influenza and was dictating _St Ives_ to his stepdaughter, Mrs Strong, he
was "reduced to dictating to her in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet"?--and
goes on:

   "The amanuensis has her head quite turned, and believes herself to be
   the author of this novel [_and is to some extent_.--A.M.] and as the
   creature (!) has not been wholly useless in the matter [_I told you
   so_!--A.M.] I propose to foster her vanity by a little commemoration
   gift! . . . I shall tell you on some other occasion, and when the A.M.
   is out of hearing, how _very_ much I propose to invest in this
   testimonial; but I may as well inform you at once that I intend it to
   be cheap, sir--damned cheap!  My idea of running amanuenses is by
   praise, not pudding, flattery, and not coins."

Truly, a rare and rich nature which could thus draw sunshine out of its
trials!--which, by aid of the true philosopher's stone of cheerfulness
and courage, could transmute the heavy dust and clay to gold.

His interests are so wide that he is sometimes pulled in different and
conflicting directions, as in the contest between his desire to aid
Mataafa and the other chiefs, and his literary work--between letters to
the _Times_ about Samoan politics, and, say, _David Balfour_.  Here is a
characteristic bit in that strain:

   "I have a good dose of the devil in my pipestem atomy; I have had my
   little holiday outing in my kick at _The Young Chevalier_, and I guess
   I can settle to _David Balfour_, to-morrow or Friday like a little
   man.  I wonder if any one had ever more energy upon so little
   strength?  I know there is a frost; . . . but I mean to break that
   frost inside two years, and pull off a big success, and Vanity
   whispers in my ear that I have the strength.  If I haven't, whistle
   owre the lave o't!  I can do without glory, and perhaps the time is
   not far off when I can do without corn.  It is a time coming soon
   enough, anyway; and I have endured some two and forty years without
   public shame, and had a good time as I did it.  If only I could secure
   a violent death, what a fine success!  I wish to die in my boots; no
   more Land of Counterpane for me.  To be drowned, to be shot, to be
   thrown from a horse--ay, to be hanged, rather than pass again through
   that slow dissolution."

He would not consent to act the invalid unless the spring ran down
altogether; was keen for exercise and for mixing among men--his native
servants if no others were near by.  Here is a bit of confession and
casuistry quite _a la_ Stevenson:

   "To come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after
   some hours in the bush, change, rub down, and take a chair in the
   verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience.  And the strange thing that
   I mark is this: If I go out and make sixpence, bossing my labourers
   and plying the cutlass or the spade, idiot conscience applauds me; if
   I sit in the house and make twenty pounds, idiot conscience wails over
   my neglect and the day wasted."

His relish for companionship is indeed strong.  At one place he says:

   "God knows I don't care who I chum with perhaps I like sailors best,
   but to go round and sue and sneak to keep a crowd together--never!"

If Stevenson's natural bent was to be an explorer, a mountain-climber, or
a sailor--to sail wide seas, or to range on mountain-tops to gain free
and extensive views--yet he inclines well to farmer work, and indeed, has
to confess it has a rare attraction for him.

   "I went crazy over outdoor work," he says at one place, "and had at
   last to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by
   the board.  _Nothing_ is so interesting as weeding, clearing, and path-
   making: the oversight of labourers becomes a disease.  It is quite an
   effort not to drop into the farmer; and it does make you feel so
   well."

The odd ways of these Samoans, their pride of position, their vices,
their virtues, their vanities, their small thefts, their tricks, their
delightful _insouciance_ sometimes, all amused him.  He found in them a
fine field of study and observation--a source of fun and fund of
humanity--as this bit about the theft of some piglings will sufficiently
prove:

   "Last night three piglings were stolen from one of our pig-pens.  The
   great Lafaele appeared to my wife uneasy, so she engaged him in
   conversation on the subject, and played upon him the following
   engaging trick: You advance your two forefingers towards the sitter's
   eyes; he closes them, whereupon you substitute (on his eyelids) the
   fore and middle fingers of the left hand, and with your right (which
   he supposes engaged) you tap him on the head and back.  When you let
   him open his eyes, he sees you withdrawing the two forefingers.  'What
   that?' asked Lafaele.  'My devil,' says Fanny.  'I wake um, my devil.
   All right now.  He go catch the man that catch my pig.'  About an hour
   afterwards Lafaele came for further particulars.  'Oh, all right,' my
   wife says.  'By-and-by that man be sleep, devil go sleep same place.
   By-and-by that man plenty sick.  I no care.  What for he take my pig?'
   Lafaele cares plenty; I don't think he is the man, though he may be;
   but he knows him, and most likely will eat some of that pig to-night.
   He will not eat with relish.'"

Yet in spite of this R. L. Stevenson declares that:

   "They are a perfectly honest people: nothing of value has ever been
   taken from our house, where doors and windows are always wide open;
   and upon one occasion when white ants attacked the silver chest, the
   whole of my family treasure lay spread upon the floor of the hall for
   two days unguarded."

Here is a bit on a work of peace, a reflection on a day's weeding at
Vailima--in its way almost as touching as any:

   "I wonder if any one had ever the same attitude to Nature as I hold,
   and have held for so long?  This business fascinates me like a tune or
   a passion; yet all the while I thrill with a strong distaste.  The
   horror of the thing, objective and subjective, is always present to my
   mind; the horror of creeping things, a superstitious horror of the
   void and the powers about me, the horror of my own devastation and
   continual murders.  The life of the plants comes through my finger-
   tips, their struggles go to my heart like supplications.  I feel
   myself blood-boltered; then I look back on my cleared grass, and count
   myself an ally in a fair quarrel, and make stout my heart."

Here, again, is the way in which he celebrates an act of friendly
kindness on the part of Mr Gosse:

   "MY DEAR GOSSE,--Your letter was to me such a bright spot that I
   answer it right away to the prejudice of other correspondents or--dants
   (don't know how to spell it) who have prior claims. . . . It is the
   history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable.  If
   it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind
   letters, multiplying, spreading, making one happy through another and
   bringing forth benefits, some thirty, some fifty, some a thousandfold,
   I should be tempted to think our life a practical jest in the worst
   possible spirit.  So your four pages have confirmed my philosophy as
   well as consoled my heart in these ill hours."




CHAPTER VIII--WORK OF LATER YEARS


Mr Hammerton, in his _Stevensoniana_ (pp. 323-4), has given the humorous
inscriptions on the volumes of his works which Stevenson presented to Dr
Trudeau, who attended him when he was in Saranac in 1887-88--very
characteristic in every way, and showing fully Stevenson's fine
appreciation of any attention or service.  On the _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_
volume he wrote:

   "Trudeau was all the winter at my side:
   I never saw the nose of Mr Hyde."

And on _Kidnapped_ is this:

   "Here is the one sound page of all my writing,
   The one I'm proud of and that I delight in."

Stevenson was exquisite in this class of efforts, and were they all
collected they would form indeed, a fine supplement and illustration of
the leading lesson of his essays--the true art of pleasing others, and of
truly pleasing one's self at the same time.  To my thinking the finest of
all in this line is the legal (?) deed by which he conveyed his birthday
to little Miss Annie Ide, the daughter of Mr H. C. Ide, a well-known
American, who was for several years a resident of Upolo, in Samoa, first
as Land Commissioner, and later as Chief Justice under the joint
appointment of England, Germany, and the United States.  While living at
Apia, Mr Ide and his family were very intimate with the family of R. L.
Stevenson.  Little Annie was a special pet and protege of Stevenson and
his wife.  After the return of the Ides to their American home, Stevenson
"deeded" to Annie his birthday in the following unique document:

   I, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, advocate of the Scots Bar, author of _The
   Master of Ballantrae_ and _Moral Emblems_, civil engineer, sole owner
   and patentee of the palace and plantation known as Vailima, in the
   island of Upolo, Samoa, a British subject, being in sound mind, and
   pretty well, I thank you, in mind and body;

   In consideration that Miss Annie H. Ide, daughter of H. C. Ide, in the
   town of Saint Johnsbury, in the County of Caledonia, in the State of
   Vermont, United States of America, was born, out of all reason, upon
   Christmas Day, and is, therefore, out of all justice, denied the
   consolation and profit of a proper birthday;

   And considering that I, the said Robert Louis Stevenson, have attained
   the age when we never mention it, and that I have now no further use
   for a birthday of any description;

   And in consideration that I have met H. C. Ide, the father of the said
   Annie H. Ide, and found him as white a land commissioner as I require,
   I have transferred, and do hereby transfer, to the said Annie H. Ide,
   all and whole of my rights and privileges in the 13th day of November,
   formerly my birthday, now, hereby and henceforth, the birthday of the
   said Annie H. Ide, to have, hold, exercise, and enjoy the same in the
   customary manner, by the sporting of fine raiment, eating of rich
   meats, and receipt of gifts, compliments, and copies of verse,
   according to the manner of our ancestors;

   And I direct the said Annie H. Ide to add to the said name of Annie H.
   Ide the name of Louisa--at least in private--and I charge her to use
   my said birthday with moderation and humanity, _et tamquam bona filia
   familias_, the said birthday not being so young as it once was and
   having carried me in a very satisfactory manner since I can remember;

   And in case the said Annie H. Ide shall neglect or contravene either
   of the above conditions, I hereby revoke the donation and transfer my
   rights in the said birthday to the President of the United States of
   America for the time being.

   In witness whereof I have hereto set my hand and seal this 19th day of
   June, in the year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-one.

   ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. [Seal.]

   _Witness_, LLOYD OSBOURNE.

   _Witness_, HAROLD WATTS.

He died in Samoa in December 1894--not from phthisis or anything directly
connected with it, but from the bursting of a blood-vessel and suffusion
of blood on the brain.  He had up to the moment almost of his sudden and
unexpected death been busy on _Weir of Hermiston_ and _St Ives_, which he
left unfinished--the latter having been brought to a conclusion by Mr
Quiller-Couch.




CHAPTER IX--SOME CHARACTERISTICS


In Stevenson we lost one of the most powerful writers of our day, as well
as the most varied in theme and style.  When I use the word "powerful," I
do not mean merely the producing of the most striking or sensational
results, nor the facility of weaving a fascinating or blood-curdling
plot; I mean the writer who seemed always to have most in reserve--a
secret fund of power and fascination which always pointed beyond the
printed page, and set before the attentive and careful reader a strange
but fascinating _personality_.  Other authors have done that in measure.
There was Hawthorne, behind whose writings there is always the wistful,
cold, far-withdrawn spectator of human nature--eerie, inquisitive, and, I
had almost said, inquisitorial--a little bloodless, eerie, weird, and
cobwebby.  There was Dr Wendell Holmes, with his problems of heredity, of
race-mixture and weird inoculation, as in _Elsie Venner_ and _The
Guardian Angel_, and there were Poe and Charles Whitehead.  Stevenson, in
a few of his writings--in one of the _Merry Men_ chapters and in _Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, and, to some extent, in _The Master of
Ballantrae_--showed that he could enter on the obscure and, in a sense,
weird and metaphysical elements in human life; though always there was,
too, a touch at least of gloomy suggestion, from which, as it seemed, he
could not there wholly escape.  But always, too, there was a touch that
suggests the universal.

Even in the stories that would be classed as those of incident and
adventure merely, _Treasure Island_, _Kidnapped_, and the rest, there is
a sense as of some unaffected but fine symbolism that somehow touches
something of possibility in yourself as you read.  The simplest narrative
from his hand proclaimed itself a deep study in human nature--its motives
tendencies, and possibilities.  In these stories there is promise at once
of the most realistic imagination, the most fantastic romance, keen
insights into some sides of human nature, and weird fancies, as well as
the most delicate and dainty pictures of character.  And this is
precisely what we have--always with a vein of the finest autobiography--a
kind of select and indirect self-revelation--often with a touch of
quaintness, a subdued humour, and sweet-blooded vagary, if we may be
allowed the word, which make you feel towards the writer as towards a
friend.  He was too much an artist to overdo this, and his strength lies
there, that generally he suggests and turns away at the right point, with
a smile, as you ask for _more_.  Look how he sets, half slyly, these
words into the mouth of David Balfour on his first meeting with Catriona
in one of the steep wynds or closes off the High Street of Edinburgh:

   "There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman
   fits in a man's mind, and stays there, and he never could tell you
   why: it just seems it was the thing he wanted."

Take this alongside of his remark made to his mother while still a
youth--"that he did not care to understand the strain on a bridge" (when
he tried to study engineering); what he wanted was something with human
nature in it.  His style, in his essays, etc., where he writes in his own
person, is most polished, full of phrases finely drawn; when he speaks
through others, as in _Kidnapped_ and _David Balfour_, it is still fine
and effective, and generally it is fairly true to the character, with
cunning glimpses, nevertheless, of his own temper and feeling too.  He
makes us feel his confidants and friends, as has been said.  One could
almost construct a biography from his essays and his novels--the one
would give us the facts of his life suffused with fancy and ideal colour,
humour and fine observation not wanting; the other would give us the
history of his mental and moral being and development, and of the traits
and determinations which he drew from along a lengthened line of
progenitors.  How characteristic it is of him--a man who for so many
years suffered as an invalid--that he should lay it down that the two
great virtues, including all others, were cheerfulness and delight in
labour.

One writer has very well said on this feature in Stevenson:

   "Other authors have struggled bravely against physical weakness, but
   their work has not usually been of a creative order, dependent for its
   success on high animal spirits.  They have written histories, essays,
   contemplative or didactic poems, works which may more or less be
   regarded as 'dull narcotics numbing pain.'  But who, in so fragile a
   frame as Robert Louis Stevenson's, has retained such indomitable
   elasticity, such fertility of invention, such unflagging energy, not
   merely to collect and arrange, but to project and body forth?  Has any
   true 'maker' been such an incessant sufferer?  From his childhood, as
   he himself said apropos of the _Child's Garden_, he could 'speak with
   less authority of gardens than of that other "land of counterpane."'
   There were, indeed, a few years of adolescence during which his health
   was tolerable, but they were years of apprenticeship to life and art
   ('pioching,' as he called it), not of serious production.  Though he
   was a precocious child, his genius ripened slowly, and it was just
   reaching maturity when the 'wolverine,' as he called his disease,
   fixed its fangs in his flesh.  From that time forward not only did he
   live with death at his elbow in an almost literal sense (he used to
   carry his left arm in a sling lest a too sudden movement should bring
   on a haemorrhage), but he had ever-recurring intervals of weeks and
   months during which he was totally unfit for work; while even at the
   best of times he had to husband his strength most jealously.  Add to
   all this that he was a slow and laborious writer, who would take more
   pains with a phrase than Scott with a chapter--then look at the
   stately shelf of his works, brimful of impulse, initiative, and the
   joy of life, and say whether it be an exaggeration to call his
   tenacity and fortitude unique!"

Samoa, with its fine climate, prolonged his life--we had fain hoped that
in that air he found so favourable he might have lived for many years, to
add to the precious stock of innocent delight he has given to the
world--to do yet more and greater.  It was not to be.  They buried him,
with full native honours as to a chief, on the top of Vaea mountain, 1300
feet high--a road for the coffin to pass being cut through the woods on
the slopes of the hill.  There he has a resting-place not all unfit--for
he sought the pure and clearer air on the heights from whence there are
widest prospects; yet not in the spot he would have chosen--for his heart
was at home, and not very long before his death he sang, surely with
pathetic reference now:

   "Spring shall come, come again, calling up the moorfowl,
   Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers,
   Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley,
   Soft flow the stream thro' the even-flowing hours;
   Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood--
      Fair shine the day on the house with open door;
   Birds come and cry there, and twitter in the chimney--
      But I go for ever and come again no more."




CHAPTER X--A SAMOAN MEMORIAL OF R. L. STEVENSON


A few weeks after his death, the mail from Samoa, brought to Stevenson's
friends, myself among the number, a precious, if pathetic, memorial of
the master.  It is in the form of "A Letter to Mr Stevenson's Friends,"
by his stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, and bears the motto from Walt Whitman,
"I have been waiting for you these many years.  Give me your hand and
welcome."  Mr Osbourne gives a full account of the last hours.

   "He wrote hard all that morning of the last day; his half-finished
   book, _Hermiston_, he judged the best he had ever written, and the
   sense of successful effort made him buoyant and happy as nothing else
   could.  In the afternoon the mail fell to be answered--not business
   correspondence, for this was left till later--but replies to the long,
   kindly letters of distant friends received but two days since, and
   still bright in memory.  At sunset he came downstairs; rallied his
   wife about the forebodings she could not shake off; talked of a
   lecturing tour to America that he was eager to make, 'as he was now so
   well'; and played a game of cards with her to drive away her
   melancholy.  He said he was hungry; begged her assistance to help him
   make a salad for the evening meal; and, to enhance the little feast he
   brought up a bottle of old Burgundy from the cellar.  He was helping
   his wife on the verandah, and gaily talking, when suddenly he put both
   hands to his head and cried out, 'What's that?'  Then he asked
   quickly, 'Do I look strange?'  Even as he did so he fell on his knees
   beside her.  He was helped into the great hall, between his wife and
   his body-servant, Sosimo, losing consciousness instantly as he lay
   back in the armchair that had once been his grandfather's.  Little
   time was lost in bringing the doctors--Anderson of the man-of-war, and
   his friend, Dr Funk.  They looked at him and shook their heads; they
   laboured strenuously, and left nothing undone.  But he had passed the
   bounds of human skill.  He had grown so well and strong, that his
   wasted lungs were unable to bear the stress of returning health."

Then 'tis told how the Rev. Mr Clarke came and prayed by him; and how,
soon after, the chiefs were summoned, and came, bringing their fine mats,
which, laid on the body, almost hid the Union jack in which it had been
wrapped.  One of the old Mataafa chiefs, who had been in prison, and who
had been one of those who worked on the making of the "Road of the Loving
Heart" (the road of gratitude which the chiefs had made up to Mr
Stevenson's house as a mark of their appreciation of his efforts on their
behalf), came and crouched beside the body and said:

   "I am only a poor Samoan, and ignorant.  Others are rich, and can give
   Tusitala {6} the parting presents of rich, fine mats; I am poor, and
   can give nothing this last day he receives his friends.  Yet I am not
   afraid to come and look the last time in my friend's face, never to
   see him more till we meet with God.  Behold!  Tusitala is dead;
   Mataafa is also dead.  These two great friends have been taken by God.
   When Mataafa was taken, who was our support but Tusitala?  We were in
   prison, and he cared for us.  We were sick, and he made us well.  We
   were hungry, and he fed us.  The day was no longer than his kindness.
   You are great people, and full of love.  Yet who among you is so great
   as Tusitala?  What is your love to his love?  Our clan was Mataafa's
   clan, for whom I speak this day; therein was Tusitala also.  We mourn
   them both."

A select company of Samoans would not be deterred, and watched by the
body all night, chanting songs, with bits of Catholic prayers; and in the
morning the work began of clearing a path through the wood on the hill to
the spot on the crown where Mr Stevenson had expressed a wish to be
buried.  The following prayer, which Mr Stevenson had written and read
aloud to his family only the night before, was read by Mr Clarke in the
service:

   "We beseech thee, Lord, to behold us with favour, folk of many
   families and nations, gathered together in the peace of this roof;
   weak men and women, subsisting under the covert of Thy patience.  Be
   patient still; suffer us yet a while longer--with our broken purposes
   of good, with our idle endeavours against evil--suffer us a while
   longer to endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better.  Bless to
   us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be
   taken, have us play the man under affliction.  Be with our friends; be
   with ourselves.  Go with each of us to rest: if any awake, temper to
   them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns to us, our
   Sun and Comforter, call us up with morning faces and with morning
   hearts--eager to labour--eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our
   portion; and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.

   "We thank Thee and praise Thee, and in the words of Him to whom this
   day is sacred, close our oblations."

Mr Bazzet M. Haggard, H.B.M., Land-Commissioner, tells, by way of
reminiscence, the story of "The Road of Good Heart," how it came to be
built, and of the great feast Mr Stevenson gave at the close of the work,
at which, in the course of his speech, he said:

   "You are all aware in some degree of what has happened.  You know
   those chiefs to have been prisoners; you perhaps know that during the
   term of their confinement I had it in my power to do them certain
   favours.  One thing some of you cannot know, that they were
   immediately repaid by answering attentions.  They were liberated by
   the new Administration. . . .  As soon as they were free men--owing no
   man anything--instead of going home to their own places and families,
   they came to me.  They offered to do this work (to make this road) for
   me as a free gift, without hire, without supplies, and I was tempted
   at first to refuse their offer.  I knew the country to be poor; I knew
   famine threatening; I knew their families long disorganised for want
   of supervision.  Yet I accepted, because I thought the lesson of that
   road might be more useful to Samoa than a thousand bread-fruit trees,
   and because to myself it was an exquisite pleasure to receive that
   which was so handsomely offered.  It is now done; you have trod it to-
   day in coming hither.  It has been made for me by chiefs; some of them
   old, some sick, all newly delivered from a harassing confinement, and
   in spite of weather unusually hot and insalubrious.  I have seen these
   chiefs labour valiantly with their own hands upon the work, and I have
   set up over it, now that it is finished the name of 'The Road of
   Gratitude' (the road of loving hearts), and the names of those that
   built it.  'In perpetuam memoriam,' we say, and speak idly.  At least,
   as long as my own life shall be spared it shall be here perpetuated;
   partly for my pleasure and in my gratitude; partly for others
   continually to publish the lesson of this road."

And turning to the chiefs, Mr Stevenson said:

   "I will tell you, chiefs, that when I saw you working on that road, my
   heart grew warm; not with gratitude only, but with hope.  It seemed to
   me that I read the promise of something good for Samoa; it seemed to
   me as I looked at you that you were a company of warriors in a battle,
   fighting for the defence of our common country against all aggression.
   For there is a time to fight and a time to dig.  You Samoans may
   fight, you may conquer twenty times, and thirty times, and all will be
   in vain.  There is but one way to defend Samoa.  Hear it, before it is
   too late.  It is to make roads and gardens, and care for your trees,
   and sell their produce wisely; and, in one word, to occupy and use
   your country.  If you do not, others will. . . .

   "I love Samoa and her people.  I love the land.  I have chosen it to
   be my home while I live, and my grave after I am dead, and I love the
   people, and have chosen them to be my people, to live and die with.
   And I see that the day is come now of the great battle; of the great
   and the last opportunity by which it shall be decided whether you are
   to pass away like those other races of which I have been speaking, or
   to stand fast and have your children living on and honouring your
   memory in the land you received of your fathers."

Mr James H. Mulligan, U.S. Consul, told of the feast of Thanksgiving Day
on the 29th November prior to Mr Stevenson's death, and how at great
pains he had procured for it the necessary turkey, and how Mrs Stevenson
had found a fair substitute for the pudding.  In the course of his speech
in reply to an unexpected proposal of "The Host," Mr Stevenson said:

   "There on my right sits she who has but lately from our own loved
   native land come back to me--she to whom, with no lessening of
   affection to those others to whom I cling, I love better than all the
   world besides--my mother.  From the opposite end of the table, my
   wife, who has been all in all to me, when the days were very dark,
   looks to-night into my eyes--while we have both grown a bit older--with
   undiminished and undiminishing affection.

   "Childless, yet on either side of me sits that good woman, my
   daughter, and the stalwart man, my son, and both have been and are
   more than son and daughter to me, and have brought into my life mirth
   and beauty.  Nor is this all.  There sits the bright boy dear to my
   heart, full of the flow and the spirits of boyhood, so that I can even
   know that for a time at least we have still the voice of a child in
   the house."

Mr A. W. Mackay gives an account of the funeral and a description of the
burial-place, ending:

   "Tofa Tusitala!  Sleep peacefully! on thy mountain-top, alone in
   Nature's sanctity, where the wooddove's note, the moaning of the waves
   as they break unceasingly on the distant reef, and the sighing of the
   winds in the distant tavai trees chant their requiem."

The Rev. Mr Clarke tells of the constant and active interest Mr Stevenson
took in the missionaries and their work, often aiding them by his advice
and fine insight into the character of the natives; and a translation
follows of a dirge by one of the chiefs, so fine that we must give it:

   I.

   "Listen, O this world, as I tell of the disaster
   That befell in the late afternoon;
   That broke like a wave of the sea
   Suddenly and swiftly, blinding our eyes.
   Alas for Loia who speaks tears in his voice!

   _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, in its sorrow.
   Alas for Tusitala, who rests in the forest!
   Aimlessly we wait, and sorrowing.  Will he again return?
   Lament, O Vailima, waiting and ever waiting!
   Let us search and inquire of the captain of ships,
   'Be not angry, but has not Tusitala come?'

   II.

   "Teuila, sorrowing one, come thou hither!
   Prepare me a letter, and I will carry it.
   Let her Majesty Victoria be told
   That Tusitala, the loving one, has been taken hence.

   _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.

   III.

   "Alas! my heart weeps with anxious grief
   As I think of the days before us:
   Of the white men gathering for the Christmas assembly!
   Alas for Aolele! left in her loneliness,
   And the men of Vailima, who weep together
   Their leader--their leader being taken.

   _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.

   IV.

   "Alas! O my heart! it weeps unceasingly
   When I think of his illness
   Coming upon him with fatal swiftness.
   Would that it waited a glance or a word from him,
   Or some token, some token from us of our love.

   _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc.

   V.

   "Grieve, O my heart!  I cannot bear to look on
   All the chiefs who are there now assembling:
   Alas, Tusitala! Thou art not here!
   I look hither and thither in vain for thee.

   _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc."

And the little booklet closes with Mr Stevenson's own lines:

   "REQUIEM.

   Under the wide and starry sky,
   Dig the grave and let me lie;
   Glad did I live and gladly die,
   And I laid me down with a will.
   This be the verse you grave for me:
   'Here he lies where he longed to be;
   Home is the sailor, home from sea;
   And the hunter home from the hill.'"

Every touch tells here was a man, with heart and head, with soul and mind
intent on the loftiest things; simple, great,

   "Like one of the simple great ones gone
   For ever and ever by.

His character towered after all far above his books; great and beautiful
though they were.  Ready for friendship; from all meanness free.  So,
too, the Samoans felt.  This, surely, was what Goethe meant when he
wrote:

   "The clear head and stout heart,
   However far they roam,
   Yet in every truth have part,
   Are everywhere at home."

His manliness, his width of sympathy, his practicality, his range of
interests were in nothing more seen than in his contributions to the
history of Samoa, as specially exhibited in _A Footnote to History_ and
his letters to the _Times_.  He was, on this side, in no sense a dreamer,
but a man of acute observation and quick eye for passing events and the
characters that were in them with sympathy equal to his discernments.  His
portraits of certain Germans and others in these writings, and his power
of tracing effects to remote and underlying causes, show sufficiently
what he might have done in the field of history, had not higher voices
called him.  His adaptation to the life in Samoa, and his assumption of
the semi-patriarchal character in his own sphere there, were only tokens
of the presence of the same traits as have just been dwelt on.




CHAPTER XI--MISS STUBBS' RECORD OF A PILGRIMAGE


Mrs Strong, in her chapter of _Table Talk in Memories of Vailima_, tells
a story of the natives' love for Stevenson.  "The other day the cook was
away," she writes, "and Louis, who was busy writing, took his meals in
his room.  Knowing there was no one to cook his lunch, he told Sosimo to
bring him some bread and cheese.  To his surprise he was served with an
excellent meal--an omelette, a good salad, and perfect coffee.  'Who
cooked this?' asked Louis in Samoan.  'I did,' said Sosimo.  'Well,' said
Louis, 'great is your wisdom.'  Sosimo bowed and corrected him--'Great is
my love!'"

Miss Stubbs, in her _Stevenson's Shrine_; _the Record of a Pilgrimage_,
illustrates the same devotion.  On the top of Mount Vaea, she writes, is
the massive sarcophagus, "not an ideal structure by any means, not even
beautiful, and yet in its massive ruggedness it somehow suited the man
and the place."

"The wind sighed softly in the branches of the 'Tavau' trees, from out
the green recesses of the 'Toi' came the plaintive coo of the
wood-pigeon.  In and out of the branches of the magnificent 'Fau' tree,
which overhangs the grave, a king-fisher, sea-blue, iridescent, flitted
to and fro, whilst a scarlet hibiscus, in full flower, showed up royally
against the gray lichened cement.  All around was light and life and
colour, and I said to myself, 'He is made one with nature'; he is now,
body and soul and spirit, commingled with the loveliness around.  He who
longed in life to scale the height, he who attained his wish only in
death, has become in himself a parable of fulfilment.  No need now for
that heart-sick cry:--

   "'Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
   Say, could that lad be I?'

No need now for the despairing finality of:

   "'I have trod the upward and the downward slope,
   I have endured and done in the days of yore,
   I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope,
   And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.'

   "Death has set his seal of peace on the unequal conflict of mind and
   matter; the All-Mother has gathered him to herself.

   "In years to come, when his grave is perchance forgotten, a rugged
   ruin, home of the lizard and the bat, Tusitala--the story-teller--'the
   man with a heart of gold' (as I so often heard him designated in the
   Islands), will live, when it may be his tales have ceased to interest,
   in the tender remembrance of those whose lives he beautified, and
   whose hearts he warmed into gratitude."

The chiefs have prohibited the use of firearms or other weapons on Mount
Vaea, "in order that the birds may live there undisturbed and unafraid,
and build their nests in the trees around Tusitala's grave."

Miss Stubbs has many records of the impression produced on those he came
in contact with in Samoa--white men and women as well as natives.  She
met a certain Austrian Count, who adored Stevenson's memory.  Over his
camp bed was a framed photograph of R. L. Stevenson.

   "So," he said, "I keep him there, for he was my saviour, and I wish
   'good-night' and 'good-morning,' every day, both to himself and to his
   old home."  The Count then told us that when he was stopping at
   Vailima he used to have his bath daily on the verandah below his room.
   One lovely morning he got up very early, got into the bath, and
   splashed and sang, feeling very well and very happy, and at last
   beginning to sing very loudly, he forgot Mr Stevenson altogether.  All
   at once there was Stevenson himself, his hair all ruffled up, his eyes
   full of anger.  "Man," he said, "you and your infernal row have cost
   me more than two hundred pounds in ideas," and with that he was gone,
   but he did not address the Count again the whole of that day.  Next
   morning he had forgotten the Count's offence and was just as friendly
   as ever, but--the noise was never repeated!

Another of the Count's stories greatly amused the visitors:

   "An English lord came all the way to Samoa in his yacht to see Mr
   Stevenson, and found him in his cool Kimino sitting with the ladies,
   and drinking tea on his verandah; the whole party had their feet bare.
   The English lord thought that he must have called at the wrong time,
   and offered to go away, but Mr Stevenson called out to him, and
   brought him back, and made him stay to dinner.  They all went away to
   dress, and the guest was left sitting alone in the verandah.  Soon
   they came back, Mr Osbourne and Mr Stevenson wearing the form of dress
   most usual in that hot climate a white mess jacket, and white
   trousers, but their feet were still bare.  The guest put up his
   eyeglass and stared for a bit, then he looked down upon his own
   beautifully shod feet, and sighed.  They all talked and laughed until
   the ladies came in, the ladies in silk dresses, befrilled with lace,
   but still with bare feet, and the guest took a covert look through his
   eyeglass and gasped, but when he noticed that there were gold bangles
   on Mrs Strong's ankles and rings upon her toes, he could bear no more
   and dropped his eyeglass on the ground of the verandah breaking it all
   to bits."

Miss Stubbs met on the other side of the island a photographer who told
her this:

   "I had but recently come to Samoa," he said, "and was standing one day
   in my shop when Mr Stevenson came in and spoke.  'Man,' he said, 'I
   tak ye to be a Scotsman like mysel'.'

   "I would I could have claimed a kinship," deplored the photographer,
   "but, alas!  I am English to the backbone, with never a drop of Scotch
   blood in my veins, and I told him this, regretting the absence of the
   blood tie."

   "'I could have sworn your back was the back of a Scotsman,' was his
   comment, 'but,' and he held out his hand, 'you look sick, and there is
   a fellowship in sickness not to be denied.' I said I was not strong,
   and had come to the Island on account of my health.  'Well, then,'
   replied Mr Stevenson, 'it shall be my business to help you to get
   well; come to Vailima whenever you like, and if I am out, ask for
   refreshment, and wait until I come in, you will always find a welcome
   there.'"

   At this point my informant turned away, and there was a break in his
   voice as he exclaimed, "Ah, the years go on, and I don't miss him
   less, but more; next to my mother he was the best friend I ever had: a
   man with a heart of gold; his house was a second home to me."

Stevenson's experience shows how easy it is with a certain type of man,
to restore the old feudal conditions of service and relationship.
Stevenson did this in essentials in Samoa.  He tells us how he managed to
get good service out of the Samoans (who are accredited with great
unwillingness to work); and this he _did_ by firm, but generous, kindly,
almost brotherly treatment, reviving, as it were, a kind of clan
life--giving a livery of certain colours--symbol of all this.  A little
fellow of eight, he tells, had been taken into the household, made a pet
of by Mrs Strong, his stepdaughter, and had had a dress given to him,
like that of the men; and, when one day he had strolled down by himself
as far as the hotel, and the master of it, seeing him, called out in
Samoan, "Hi, youngster, who are you?"  The eight-year-old replied, "Why,
don't you see for yourself?  I am one of the Vailima men!"

The story of the _Road of the Loving Heart_ was but another fine
attestation of it.




CHAPTER XII--HIS GENIUS AND METHODS


To have created a school of idolaters, who will out and out swear by
everything, and as though by necessity, at the same time, a school of
studious detractors, who will suspiciously question everything, or throw
out suggestions of disparagement, is at all events, a proof of greatness,
the countersign of undoubted genius, and an assurance of lasting fame.  R.
L. Stevenson has certainly secured this.  Time will tell what of virtue
there is with either party.  For me, who knew Stevenson, and loved him,
as finding in the sweet-tempered, brave, and in some things, most
generous man, what gave at once tone and elevation to the artist, I would
fain indicate here my impressions of him and his genius--impressions that
remain almost wholly uninfluenced by the vast mass of matter about him
that the press now turns out.  Books, not to speak of articles, pour
forth about him--about his style, his art, his humour and his
characters--aye, and even about his religion.

Miss Simpson follows Mr Bellyse Baildon with the _Edinburgh Days_, Miss
Moyes Black comes on with her picture in the _Famous Scots_, and
Professor Raleigh succeeds her; Mr Graham Balfour follows with his_
Life_; Mr Kelman's volume about his Religion comes next, and that is
reinforced by more familiar letters and _Table Talk_, by Lloyd Osbourne
and Mrs Strong, his step-children; Mr J. Hammerton then comes on handily
with _Stevensoniana_--fruit lovingly gathered from many and far fields,
and garnered with not a little tact and taste, and catholicity; Miss
Laura Stubbs then presents us with her touching _Stevenson's Shrine_:
_the Record of a Pilgrimage_; and Mr Sidney Colvin is now busily at work
on his _Life of Stevenson_, which must do not a little to enlighten and
to settle many questions.

Curiosity and interest grow as time passes; and the places connected with
Stevenson, hitherto obscure many of them, are now touched with light if
not with romance, and are known, by name at all events, to every reader
of books.  Yes; every place he lived in, or touched at, is worthy of full
description if only on account of its associations with him.  If there is
not a land of Stevenson, as there is a land of Scott, or of Burns, it is
due to the fact that he was far-travelled, and in his works painted many
scenes: but there are at home--Edinburgh, and Halkerside and Allermuir,
Caerketton, Swanston, and Colinton, and Maw Moss and Rullion Green and
Tummel, "the _wale_ of Scotland," as he named it to me, and the
Castletown of Braemar--Braemar in his view coming a good second to
Tummel, for starting-points to any curious worshipper who would go the
round in Scotland and miss nothing.  Mr Geddie's work on _The Home
Country of Stevenson_ may be found very helpful here.

1. It is impossible to separate Stevenson from his work, because of the
imperious personal element in it; and so I shall not now strive to gain
the appearance of cleverness by affecting any distinction here.  The
first thing I would say is, that he was when I knew him--what pretty much
to the end he remained--a youth.  His outlook on life was boyishly genial
and free, despite all his sufferings from ill-health--it was the pride of
action, the joy of endurance, the revelry of high spirits, and the sense
of victory that most fascinated him; and his theory of life was to take
pleasure and give pleasure, without calculation or stint--a kind of
boyish grace and bounty never to be overcome or disturbed by outer
accident or change.  If he was sometimes haunted with the thought of
changes through changed conditions or circumstances, as my very old
friend, Mr Charles Lowe, has told even of the College days that he was
always supposing things to undergo some sea-change into something else,
if not "into something rich and strange," this was but to add to his
sense of enjoyment, and the power of conferring delight, and the luxuries
of variety, as boys do when they let fancy loose.  And this always had,
with him, an individual reference or return.  He was thus constantly, and
latterly, half-consciously, trying to interpret himself somehow through
all the things which engaged him, and which he so transmogrified--things
that especially attracted him and took his fancy.  Thus, if it must be
confessed, that even in his highest moments, there lingers a touch--if no
more than a touch--of self-consciousness which will not allow him to
forget manner in matter, it is also true that he is cunningly conveying
traits in himself; and the sense of this is often at the root of his
sweet, gentle, naive humour.  There is, therefore, some truth in the
criticisms which assert that even "long John Silver," that fine pirate,
with his one leg, was, after all, a shadow of Stevenson himself--the
genial buccaneer who did his tremendous murdering with a smile on his
face was but Stevenson thrown into new circumstances, or, as one has
said, Stevenson-cum-Henley, so thrown as was also Archer in _Weir of
Hermiston_, and more than this, that his most successful women-folk--like
Miss Grant and Catriona--are studies of himself, and that in all his
heroes, and even heroines, was an unmistakable touch of R. L. Stevenson.
Even Mr Baildon rather maladroitly admits that in Miss Grant, the Lord
Advocate's daughter, _there is a good deal of the author himself
disguised in petticoats_.  I have thought of Stevenson in many suits,
beside that which included the velvet jacket, but--petticoats!

Youth is autocratic, and can show a grand indifferency: it goes for what
it likes, and ignores all else--it fondly magnifies its favourites, and,
after all, to a great extent, it is but analysing, dealing with and
presenting itself to us, if we only watch well.  This is the secret of
all prevailing romance: it is the secret of all stories of adventure and
chivalry of the simpler and more primitive order; and in one aspect it is
true that R. L. Stevenson loved and clung to the primitive and elemental,
if it may not be said, as one distinguished writer has said, that he even
loved savagery in itself.  But hardly could it be seriously held, as Mr
I. Zangwill held:

   "That women did not cut any figure in his books springs from this same
   interest in the elemental.  Women are not born, but made.  They are a
   social product of infinite complexity and delicacy.  For a like reason
   Stevenson was no interpreter of the modern. . . . A child to the end,
   always playing at 'make-believe,' dying young, as those whom the gods
   love, and, as he would have died had he achieved his centenary, he was
   the natural exponent in literature of the child."

But there were subtly qualifying elements beyond what Mr Zangwill here
recognises and reinforces.  That is just about as correct and true as
this other deliverance:

   "His Scotch romances have been as over-praised by the zealous Scotsmen
   who cry 'genius' at the sight of a kilt, and who lose their heads at a
   waft from the heather, as his other books have been under-praised.  The
   best of all, _The Master of Ballantrae_, ends in a bog; and where the
   author aspires to exceptional subtlety of character-drawing he befogs
   us or himself altogether.  We are so long weighing the brothers
   Ballantrae in the balance, watching it incline now this way, now that,
   scrupulously removing a particle of our sympathy from the one brother
   to the other, to restore it again in the next chapter, that we end
   with a conception of them as confusing as Mr Gilbert's conception of
   Hamlet, who was idiotically sane with lucid intervals of lunacy."

If Stevenson was, as Mr Zangwill holds, "the child to the end," and the
child only, then if we may not say what Carlyle said of De Quincey:
"_Eccovi_, that child has been in hell," we may say, "_Eccovi_, that
child has been in unchildlike haunts, and can't forget the memory of
them."  In a sense every romancer is a child--such was Ludwig Tieck, such
was Scott, such was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd.  But each is
something more--he has been touched with the wand of a fairy, and knows,
at least, some of Elfin Land as well as of childhood's home.

The sense of Stevenson's youthfulness seems to have struck every one who
had intimacy with him.  Mr Baildon writes (p. 21 of his book):

   I would now give much to possess but one of Stevenson's gifts--namely,
   that extraordinary vividness of recollection by which he could so
   astonishingly recall, not only the doings, but the very thoughts and
   emotions of his youth.  For, often as we must have communed together,
   with all the shameless candour of boys, hardly any remark has stuck to
   me except the opinion already alluded to, which struck me--his elder
   by some fifteen months--as very amusing, that at sixteen 'we should be
   men.'  _He of all mortals_, _who was_, _in a sense_, _always still a
   boy_!"

Mr Gosse tells us:

   "He had retained a great deal of the temperament of a child, and it
   was his philosophy to encourage it.  In his dreary passages of bed,
   when his illness was more than commonly heavy on him, he used to
   contrive little amusements for himself.  He played on the flute, or he
   modelled little groups and figures in clay."

2. One of the qualifying elements unnoted by Mr Zangwill is simply this,
that R. L. Stevenson never lost the strange tint imparted to his youth by
the religious influences to which he was subject, and which left their
impress and colour on him and all that he did.  Henley, in his striking
sonnet, hit it when he wrote:

   "A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
   Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,
   _And something of the Shorter Catechist_."

_Something_! he was a great deal of Shorter Catechist!  Scotch Calvinism,
its metaphysic, and all the strange whims, perversities, and questionings
of "Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," which it inevitably
awakens, was much with him--the sense of reprobation and the gloom born
of it, as well as the abounding joy in the sense of the elect--the
Covenanters and their wild resolutions, the moss-troopers and their dare-
devilries--Pentland Risings and fights of Rullion Green; he not only
never forgot them, but they mixed themselves as in his very breath of
life, and made him a great questioner.  How would I have borne myself in
this or in that?  Supposing I had been there, how would it have been--the
same, or different from what it was with those that were there?  His work
is throughout at bottom a series of problems that almost all trace to
this root, directly or indirectly.  "There, but for the grace of God,
goes John Bradford," said the famous Puritan on seeing a felon led to
execution; so with Stevenson.  Hence his fondness for tramps, for scamps
(he even bestowed special attention and pains on Villon, the poet-scamp);
he was rather impatient with poor Thoreau, because he was a purist
solitary, and had too little of vice, and, as Stevenson held, narrow in
sympathy, and too self-satisfied, and bent only on self-improvement.  He
held a brief for the honest villain, and leaned to him brotherly.  Even
the anecdotes he most prizes have a fine look this way--a hunger for
completion in achievement, even in the violation of fine humane feeling
or morality, and all the time a sense of submission to God's will.
"Doctor," said the dying gravedigger in _Old Mortality_, "I hae laid
three hunner an' fower score in that kirkyaird, an' had it been His
wull," indicating Heaven, "I wad hae likeit weel to hae made oot the
fower hunner."  That took Stevenson.  Listen to what Mr Edmond Gosse
tells of his talk, when he found him in a private hotel in Finsbury
Circus, London, ready to be put on board a steamer for America, on 21st
August, 1887:

   "It was church time, and there was some talk of my witnessing his
   will, which I could not do because there could be found no other
   reputable witness, the whole crew of the hotel being at church.
   'This,' he said, 'is the way in which our valuable city hotels--packed
   no doubt with gems and jewellery--are deserted on a Sunday morning.
   Some bold piratical fellow, defying the spirit of Sabbatarianism,
   might make a handsome revenue by sacking the derelict hotels between
   the hours of ten and twelve.  One hotel a week would enable such a man
   to retire in course of a year.  A mask might perhaps be worn for the
   mere fancy of the thing, and to terrify kitchen-maids, but no real
   disguise would be needful.'"

I would rather agree with Mr Chesterton than with Mr Zangwill here:

   "Stevenson's enormous capacity for joy flowed directly out of his
   profoundly religious temperament.  He conceived himself as an
   unimportant guest at one eternal and uproarious banquet, and instead
   of grumbling at the soup, he accepted it with careless gratitude. . .
   . His gaiety was neither the gaiety of the pagan, nor the gaiety of
   the _bon vivant_.  It was the greater gaiety of the mystic.  He could
   enjoy trifles because there was to him no such thing as a trifle.  He
   was a child who respected his dolls because they were the images of
   the image of God, portraits at only two removes."

Here, then, we have the child crossed by the dreamer and the mystic, bred
of Calvinism and speculation on human fate and chance, and on the mystery
of temperament and inheritance, and all that flows from
these--reprobation, with its dire shadows, assured Election with its
joys, etc., etc.

3. If such a combination is in favour of the story-teller up to a certain
point, it is not favourable to the highest flights, and it is alien to
dramatic presentation pure and simple.  This implies detachment from
moods and characters, high as well as low, that complete justice in
presentation may be done to all alike, and the one balance that obtains
in life grasped and repeated with emphasis.  But towards his leading
characters Stevenson is unconsciously biassed, because they are more or
less shadowy projections of himself, or images through which he would
reveal one or other side or aspect of his own personality.  Attwater is a
confessed failure, because it, more than any other, testifies this: he is
but a mouth-piece for one side or tendency in Stevenson.  If the same
thing is not more decisively felt in some other cases, it is because
Stevenson there showed the better art o' hidin', and not because he was
any more truly detached or dramatic.  "Of Hamlet most of all," wrote
Henley in his sonnet.  The Hamlet in Stevenson--the self-questioning,
egotistic, moralising Hamlet--was, and to the end remained, a something
alien to bold, dramatic, creative freedom.  He is great as an artist, as
a man bent on giving to all that he did the best and most distinguished
form possible, but not great as a free creator of dramatic power.
"Mother," he said as a mere child, "I've drawed a man.  Now, will I draw
his soul?"  He was to the end all too fond to essay a picture of the
soul, separate and peculiar.  All the Jekyll and Hyde and even Ballantrae
conceptions came out of that--and what is more, he always mixed his own
soul with the other soul, and could not help doing so.

4. When; therefore, I find Mr Pinero, in lecturing at Edinburgh, deciding
in favour of Stevenson as possessed of rare dramatic power, and wondering
why he did not more effectively employ it, I can't agree with him; and
this because of the presence of a certain atmosphere in the novels, alien
to free play of the individualities presented.  Like Hawthorne's, like
the works of our great symbolists, they are restricted by a sense of some
obtaining conception, some weird metaphysical _weird_ or preconception.
This is the ground "Ian MacLaren" has for saying that "his kinship is not
with Boccaccio and Rabelais, but with Dante and Spenser"--the ground for
many remarks by critics to the effect that they still crave from him
"less symbol and more individuality"--the ground for the Rev. W. J.
Dawson's remark that "he has a powerful and persistent sense of the
spiritual forces which move behind the painted shows of life; that he
writes not only as a realist but as a prophet, his meanest stage being
set with eternity as a background."

Such expressions are fullest justification for what we have here said: it
adds, and can only add, to our admiration of Stevenson, as a thinker,
seer, or mystic, but the asserting sense of such power can only end in
lessening the height to which he could attain as a dramatic artist; and
there is much indeed against Mr Pinero's own view that, in the dramas, he
finds that "fine speeches" are ruinous to them as acting plays.  In the
strict sense overfine speeches are yet almost everywhere.  David Balfour
could never have writ some speeches attributed to him--they are just R.
L. Stevenson with a very superficial difference that, when once detected,
renders them curious and quaint and interesting, but not dramatic.




CHAPTER XIII--PREACHER AND MYSTIC FABULIST


In reality, Stevenson is always directly or indirectly preaching a
sermon--enforcing a moral--as though he could not help it.  "He would
rise from the dead to preach a sermon."  He wrote some first-rate fables,
and might indeed have figured to effect as a moralist-fabulist, as truly
he was from beginning to end.  There was a bit of Bunyan in him as well
as of AEsop and Rousseau and Thoreau--the mixture that found coherency in
his most peculiarly patient and forbearing temper is what gives at once
the quaintness, the freedom, and yet the odd didactic something that is
never wanting.  I remember a fable about the Devil that might well be
brought in to illustrate this here--careful readers who neglect nothing
that Stevenson wrote will remember it also and perhaps bear me out here.

But for the sake of the young folks who may yet have some leeway to make
up, I shall indulge myself a little by quoting it: and, since I am on
that tack, follow it by another which presents Stevenson in his favourite
guise of quizzing his own characters, if not for his own advantage
certainly for ours, if we would in the least understand the fine moralist-
casuistical qualities of his mind and fancy:

   THE DEVIL AND THE INNKEEPER

   Once upon a time the devil stayed at an inn, where no one knew him,
   for they were people whose education had been neglected.  He was bent
   on mischief, and for a time kept everybody by the ears.  But at last
   the innkeeper set a watch upon the devil and took him in the act.

   The innkeeper got a rope's end.

   "Now I am going to thrash you," said the inn-keeper.

   "You have no right to be angry with me," said the devil.  "I am only
   the devil, and it is my nature to do wrong."

   "Is that so?" asked the innkeeper.

   "Fact, I assure you," said the devil.

   "You really cannot help doing ill?" asked the innkeeper.

   "Not in the smallest," said the devil, "it would be useless cruelty to
   thrash a thing like me."

   "It would indeed," said the innkeeper.

   And he made a noose and hanged the devil.

   "There!" said the innkeeper.

The deeper Stevenson goes, the more happily is he inspired.  We could
scarcely cite anything more Stevensonian, alike in its humour and its
philosophy, than the dialogue between Captain Smollett and Long John
Silver, entitled _The Persons of the Tale_.  After chapter xxxii. of
_Treasure Island_, these two puppets "strolled out to have a pipe before
business should begin again, and met in an open space not far from the
story."  After a few preliminaries:

   "You're a damned rogue, my man," said the Captain.

   "Come, come, Cap'n, be just," returned the other.  "There's no call to
   be angry with me in earnest.  I'm on'y a character in a sea story.  I
   don't really exist."

   "Well, I don't really exist either," says the Captain, "which seems to
   meet that."

   "I wouldn't set no limits to what a virtuous character might consider
   argument," responded Silver.  "But I'm the villain of the tale, I am;
   and speaking as one seafaring man to another, what I want to know is,
   what's the odds?"

   "Were you never taught your catechism?" said the Captain.  "Don't you
   know there's such a thing as an Author?"

   "Such a thing as a Author?" returned John, derisively.  "And who
   better'n me?  And the p'int is, if the Author made you, he made Long
   John, and he made Hands, and Pew, and George Merry--not that George is
   up to much, for he's little more'n a name; and he made Flint, what
   there is of him; and he made this here mutiny, you keep such a work
   about; and he had Tom Redruth shot; and--well, if that's a Author,
   give me Pew!"

   "Don't you believe in a future state?" said Smollett.  "Do you think
   there's nothing but the present sorty-paper?"

   " I don't rightly know for that," said Silver, "and I don't see what
   it's got to do with it, anyway.  What I know is this: if there is sich
   a thing as a Author, I'm his favourite chara'ter.  He does me fathoms
   better'n he does you--fathoms, he does.  And he likes doing me.  He
   keeps me on deck mostly all the time, crutch and all; and he leaves
   you measling in the hold, where nobody can't see you, nor wants to,
   and you may lay to that!  If there is a Author, by thunder, but he's
   on my side, and you may lay to it!"

   "I see he's giving you a long rope," said the Captain. . . .

Stevenson's stories--one and all--are too closely the illustrations by
characters of which his essays furnish the texts.  You shall not read the
one wholly apart from the other without losing something--without losing
much of the quaint, often childish, and always insinuating personality of
the writer.  It is this if fully perceived which would justify one
writer, Mr Zangwill, if I don't forget, in saying, as he did say, that
Stevenson would hold his place by his essays and not by his novels.  Hence
there is a unity in all, but a unity found in a root which is ultimately
inimical to what is strictly free dramatic creation--creation, broad,
natural and unmoral in the highest sense just as nature is, as it is to
us, for example, when we speak of Shakespeare, or even Scott, or of
Cervantes or Fielding.  If Mr Henley in his irruptive if not spiteful
_Pall Mall Magazine_ article had made this clear from the high critical
ground, then some of his derogatory remarks would not have been quite so
personal and offensive as they are.

Stevenson's bohemianism was always restrained and coloured by this.  He
is a casuistic moralist, if not a Shorter Catechist, as Mr Henley put it
in his clever sonnet.  He is constantly asking himself about moral laws
and how they work themselves out in character, especially as these
suggest and involve the casuistries of human nature.  He is often a
little like Nathaniel Hawthorne, but he hardly follows them far enough
and rests on his own preconceptions and predilections, only he does not,
like him, get into or remain long in the cobwebby corners--his love of
the open air and exercise derived from generations of active lighthouse
engineers, out at all times on sea or land, or from Scottish ministers
who were fond of composing their sermons and reflecting on the
backwardness of human nature as they walked in their gardens or along the
hillsides even among mists and storms, did something to save him here,
reinforcing natural cheerfulness and the warm desire to give pleasure.
His excessive elaboration of style, which grew upon him more and more,
giving throughout often a sense of extreme artificiality and of the self-
consciousness usually bred of it, is but another incidental proof of
this.  And let no reader think that I wish here to decry R. L. Stevenson.
I only desire faithfully to try to understand him, and to indicate the
class or group to which his genius and temperament really belong.  He is
from first to last the idealistic dreamy or mystical romancer, and not
the true idealist or dealer direct with life or character for its own
sake.  The very beauty and sweetness of his spirit in one way militated
against his dramatic success--he really did not believe in villains, and
always made them better than they should have been, and that, too, on the
very side where wickedness--their natural wickedness--is most
available--on the stage.  The dreamer of dreams and the Shorter
Catechist, strangely united together, were here directly at odds with the
creative power, and crossed and misdirected it, and the casuist came in
and manoeuvred the limelight--all too like the old devil of the mediaeval
drama, who was made only to be laughed at and taken lightly, a buffoon
and a laughing-stock indeed.  And while he could unveil villainy, as is
the case pre-eminently in Huish in the _Ebb-Tide_, he shrank from
inflicting the punishments for which untutored human nature looks, and
thus he lost one great aid to crude dramatic effect.  As to his poems,
they are intimately personal in his happiest moments: he deals with
separate moods and sentiments, and scarcely ever touches those of a type
alien to his own.  The defect of his child poems is distinctly that he is
everywhere strictly recalling and reproducing his own quaint and wholly
exceptional childhood; and children, ordinary, normal, healthy children,
will not take to these poems (though grown-ups largely do so), as they
would to, say, the _Lilliput Levee_ of my old friend, W. B. Rands.  Rands
showed a great deal of true dramatic play there within his own very
narrow limits, as, at all events, adults must conceive them.

Even in his greatest works, in _The Master of Ballantrae_ and _Weir of
Hermiston_, the special power in Stevenson really lies in subduing his
characters at the most critical point for action, to make them prove or
sustain his thesis; and in this way the rare effect that he might have
secured _dramatically_ is largely lost and make-believe substituted, as
in the Treasure Search in the end of _The Master of Ballantrae_.  The
powerful dramatic effect he might have had in his _denouement_ is thus
completely sacrificed.  The essence of the drama for the stage is that
the work is for this and this alone--dialogue and everything being only
worked rightly when it bears on, aids, and finally secures this in happy
completeness.

In a word, you always, in view of true dramatic effect, see Stevenson
himself too clearly behind his characters.  The "fine speeches" Mr Pinero
referred to trace to the intrusion behind the glass of a
part-quicksilvered portion, which cunningly shows, when the glass is
moved about, Stevenson himself behind the character, as we have said
already.  For long he shied dealing with women, as though by a true
instinct.  Unfortunately for him his image was as clear behind
_Catriona_, with the discerning, as anywhere else; and this, alas! too
far undid her as an independent, individual character, though traits like
those in her author were attractive.  The constant effort to relieve the
sense of this affords him the most admirable openings for the display of
his exquisite style, of which he seldom or never fails to make the very
most in this regard; but the necessity laid upon him to aim at securing a
sense of relief by this is precisely the same as led him to write the
overfine speeches in the plays, as Mr Pinero found and pointed out at
Edinburgh: both defeat the true end, but in the written book mere art of
style and a naivete and a certain sweetness of temper conceal the lack of
nature and creative spontaneity; while on the stage the descriptions,
saving reflections and fine asides, are ruthlessly cut away under sheer
stage necessities, or, if left, but hinder the action; and art of this
kind does not there suffice to conceal the lack of nature.

More clearly to bring out my meaning here and draw aid from comparative
illustration, let me take my old friend of many years, Charles Gibbon.
Gibbon was poor, very poor, in intellectual subtlety compared with
Stevenson; he had none of his sweet, quaint, original fancy; he was no
casuist; he was utterly void of power in the subdued humorous twinkle or
genial by-play in which Stevenson excelled.  But he has more of dramatic
power, pure and simple, than Stevenson had--his novels--the best of
them--would far more easily yield themselves to the ordinary purposes of
the ordinary playwright.  Along with conscientiousness, perception,
penetration, with the dramatist must go a certain indescribable common-
sense commonplaceness--if I may name it so--protection against vagary and
that over-refined egotism and self-confession which is inimical to the
drama and in which the Stevensonian type all too largely abounds for
successful dramatic production.  Mr Henley perhaps put it too strongly
when he said that what was supremely of interest to R. L. Stevenson was
Stevenson himself; but he indicates the tendency, and that tendency is
inimical to strong, broad, effective and varied dramatic presentation.
Water cannot rise above its own level; nor can minds of this type go
freely out of themselves in a grandly healthy, unconscious, and
unaffected way, and this is the secret of the dramatic spirit, if it be
not, as Shelley said, the secret of morals, which Stevenson, when he
passed away, was but on the way to attain.  As we shall see, he had risen
so far above it, subdued it, triumphed over it, that we really cannot
guess what he might have attained had but more years been given him.  For
the last attainment of the loftiest and truest genius is precisely
this--to gain such insight of the real that all else becomes subsidiary.
True simplicity and the abiding relief and enduring power of true art
with all classes lies here and not elsewhere.  Cleverness, refinement,
fancy, and invention, even sublety of intellect, are practically nowhere
in this sphere without this.




CHAPTER XIV--STEVENSON AS DRAMATIST


In opposition to Mr Pinero, therefore, I assert that Stevenson's defect
in spontaneous dramatic presentation is seen clearly in his novels as
well as in his plays proper.

In writing to my good friend, Mr Thomas M'Kie, Advocate, Edinburgh,
telling him of my work on R. L. Stevenson and the results, I thus
gathered up in little the broad reflections on this point, and I may
perhaps be excused quoting the following passages, as they reinforce by a
new reference or illustration or two what has just been said:

   "Considering his great keenness and force on some sides, I find R. L.
   Stevenson markedly deficient in grip on other sides--common sides,
   after all, of human nature.  This was so far largely due to a dreamy,
   mystical, so far perverted and, so to say, often even inverted
   casuistical, fatalistic morality, which would not allow him scope in
   what Carlyle would have called a healthy hatred of fools and
   scoundrels; with both of which classes--vagabonds in strictness--he
   had rather too much of a sneaking sympathy.  Mr Pinero was
   wrong--totally and incomprehensibly wrong--when he told the good folks
   of Edinburgh at the Philosophical Institution, and afterwards at the
   London Birkbeck Institution, that it was lack of concentration and
   care that made R. L. Stevenson a failure as a dramatist.  No: it was
   here and not elsewhere that the failure lay.  R. L. Stevenson was
   himself an unconscious paradox--and sometimes he realised it--his
   great weakness from this point of view being that he wished to show
   strong and original by making the villain the hero of the piece as
   well.  Now, _that_, if it may, by clever manipulation and dexterity,
   be made to do in a novel, most certainly it will not do on the
   stage--more especially if it is done consciously and, as it were, of
   _malice prepense_; because, for one thing, there is in the theatre a
   very varied yet united audience which has to give a simultaneous and
   immediate verdict--an audience not inclined to some kinds of
   overwrought subtleties and casuistries, however clever the technique.
   If _The Master of Ballantrae_ (which has some highly dramatic scenes
   and situations, if it is not in itself substantially a drama) were to
   be put on the stage, the playwright, if wisely determined for success,
   would really have--not in details, but in essential conception--to
   kick R. L. Stevenson in his most personal aim out of it, and take and
   present a more definite moral view of the two villain-heroes
   (brothers, too); improve and elevate the one a bit if he lowered the
   other, and not wobble in sympathy and try to make the audience wobble
   in sympathy also, as R. L. Stevenson certainly does.  As for _Beau
   Austin_, it most emphatically, in view of this, should be re-writ--re-
   writ especially towards the ending--and the scandalous Beau tarred and
   feathered, metaphorically speaking, instead of walking off at the end
   in a sneaking, mincing sort of way, with no more than a little
   momentary twinge of discomfort at the wreck and ruin he has wrought,
   for having acted as a selfish, snivelling poltroon and coward, though
   in fine clothes and with fine ways and fine manners, which only, from
   our point of view, make matters worse.  It is, with variations I
   admit, much the same all through: R. L. Stevenson felt it and
   confessed it about the _Ebb-Tide_, and Huish, the cockney hero and
   villain; but the sense of healthy disgust, even at the vile Huish, is
   not emphasised in the book as it would have demanded to be for the
   stage--the audience would not have stood it, and the more mixed and
   varied, the less would it have stood it--not at all; and his relief of
   style and fine or finished speeches would not _there_ in the least
   have told.  This is demanded of the drama--that at once it satisfies a
   certain crude something subsisting under all outward glosses and
   veneers that might be in some a lively sense of right and wrong--the
   uprisal of a conscience, in fact, or in others a vague instinct of
   proper reward or punishment, which will even cover and sanction
   certain kinds of revenge or retaliation.  The one feeling will emerge
   most among the cultured, and the other among the ruder and more
   ignorant; but both meet immediately on beholding action and the limits
   of action on the demand for some clear leading to what may be called
   Providential equity--each man undoubtedly rewarded or punished,
   roughly, according to his deserts, if not outwardly then certainly in
   the inner torments that so often lead to confessions.  There it is--a
   radical fact of human nature--as radical as any reading of trait or
   determination of character presented--seen in the Greek drama as well
   as in Shakespeare and the great Elizabethan dramatists, and in the
   drama-transpontine and others of to-day.  R. L. Stevenson was all too
   casuistical (though not in the exclusively bad sense) for this; and so
   he was not dramatic, though _Weir of Hermiston_ promised something
   like an advance to it, and _St Ives_ did, in my idea, yet more."

The one essential of a _dramatic_ piece is that, by the interaction of
character and incident (one or other may be preponderating, according to
the type and intention of the writer) all naturally leads up to a crisis
in which the moral motives, appealed to or awakened by the presentation
of the play, are justified.  Where this is wanting the true leading and
the definite justification are wanting.  Goethe failed in this in his
_Faust_, resourceful and far-seeing though he was--he failed because a
certain sympathy is awakened for Mephistopheles in being, so to say,
chivied out of his bargain, when he had complied with the terms of the
contract by Faust; and Gounod in his opera does exactly for "immediate
dramatic effect," what we hold it would be necessary to do for R. L.
Stevenson.  Goethe, with his casuistries which led him to allegory and
all manner of overdone symbolisms and perversions in the Second Part, is
set aside and a true crisis and close is found by Gounod through simply
sending Marguerite above and Faust below, as, indeed, Faust had agreed by
solemn compact with Mephistopheles that it should be.  And to come to
another illustration from our own times, Mr Bernard Shaw's very clever
and all too ingenious and over-subtle _Man and Superman_ would, in my
idea, and for much the same reason, be an utterly ineffective and weak
piece on the stage, however carefully handled and however clever the
setting--the reason lying in the egotistic upsetting of the "personal
equation" and the theory of life that lies behind all--tinting it with
strange and even _outre_ colours.  Much the same has to be said of most
of what are problem-plays--several of Ibsen's among the rest.

Those who remember the Fairy opera of _Hansel and Gretel_ on the stage in
London, will not have forgotten in the witching memory of all the charms
of scenery and setting, how the scene where the witch of the wood, who
was planning out the baking of the little hero and heroine in her oven,
having "fatted" them up well, to make sweet her eating of them, was by
the coolness and cleverness of the heroine locked in her own oven and
baked there, literally brought down the house.  She received exactly what
she had planned to give those children, whom their own cruel parents had
unwittingly, by losing the children in the wood, put into her hands.
Quaint, naive, half-grotesque it was in conception, yet the truth of all
drama was there actively exhibited, and all casuistic pleading of excuses
of some sort, even of justification for the witch (that it was her
nature; heredity in her aworking, etc., etc.) would have not only been
out of place, but hotly resented by that audience.  Now, Stevenson, if he
could have made up his mind to have the witch locked in her own oven,
would most assuredly have tried some device to get her out by some fairy
witch-device or magic slide at the far end of it, and have proceeded to
paint for us the changed character that she was after she had been so
outwitted by a child, and her witchdom proved after all of little effect.
He would have put probably some of the most effective moralities into her
mouth if indeed he would not after all have made the witch a triumph on
his early principle of bad-heartedness being strength.  If this is the
sort of falsification which the play demands, and is of all tastes the
most ungrateful, then, it is clear, that for full effect of the drama it
is essential to it; but what is primary in it is the direct answering to
certain immediate and instinctive demands in common human nature, the
doing of which is far more effective than no end of deep philosophy to
show how much better human nature would be if it were not just quite thus
constituted.  "Concentration," says Mr Pinero, "is first, second, and
last in it," and he goes on thus, as reported in the _Scotsman_, to show
Stevenson's defect and mistake and, as is not, of course, unnatural, to
magnify the greatness and grandeur of the style of work in which he has
himself been so successful.

   "If Stevenson had ever mastered that art--and I do not question that
   if he had properly conceived it he had it in him to master it--he
   might have found the stage a gold mine, but he would have found, too,
   that it is a gold mine which cannot be worked in a smiling, sportive,
   half-contemptuous spirit, but only in the sweat of the brain, and with
   every mental nerve and sinew strained to its uttermost.  He would have
   known that no ingots are to be got out of this mine, save after
   sleepless nights, days of gloom and discouragement, and other days,
   again, of feverish toil, the result of which proves in the end to be
   misapplied and has to be thrown to the winds. . . . When you take up a
   play-book (if ever you do take one up) it strikes you as being a very
   trifling thing--a mere insubstantial pamphlet beside the imposing bulk
   of the latest six-shilling novel.  Little do you guess that every page
   of the play has cost more care, severer mental tension, if not more
   actual manual labour, than any chapter of a novel, though it be fifty
   pages long.  It is the height of the author's art, according to the
   old maxim, that the ordinary spectator should never be clearly
   conscious of the skill and travail that have gone to the making of the
   finished product.  But the artist who would achieve a like feat must
   realise its difficulties, or what are his chances of success?"

But what I should, in little, be inclined to say, in answer to the
"concentration" idea is that, unless you have first some firm hold on the
broad bed-rock facts of human nature specially appealed to or called
forth by the drama, you may concentrate as much as you please, but you
will not write a successful acting drama, not to speak of a great one.  Mr
Pinero's magnifications of the immense effort demanded from him must in
the end come to mean that he himself does not instinctively and with
natural ease and spontaneity secure this, but secures it only after great
conscious effort; and hence, perhaps, it is that he as well as so many
other modern playwrights fall so far behind alike in the amount turned
out, and also in its quality as compared with the products of many
playwrights in the past.

The problem drama, in every phase and turn of it, endeavours to dispense
with these fundamental demands implied in the common and instinctive
sense or consciousness of the mass of men and women, and to substitute
for that interest something which will artificially supersede it, or, at
any rate, take its place.  The interest is transferred from the crises
necessarily worked up to in the one case, with all of situation and
dialogue directed to it, and without which it would not be strictly
explicable, to something abnormal, odd, artificial or inverted, or
exceptional in the characters themselves.  Having thus, instead of
natural process and sequence, if we may put it so, the problem dramatist
has a double task--he must gain what unity he can, and reach such crises
as he may by artificial aids and inventions which the more he uses the
more makes natural simplicity unattainable; and next he must reduce and
hide as far as he can the abnormality he has, after all, in the long run,
created and presented.  He cannot maintain it to the full, else his work
would become a mere medical or psychological treatise under the poorest
of disguises; and the very necessity for the action and reaction of
characters upon each other is a further element against him.  In a word
no one character can stand alone, and cannot escape influencing others,
and also the action.  Thus it is that he cannot isolate as a doctor does
his patient for scientific examination.  The healthy and normal must come
in to modify on all sides what is presented of unhealthy and abnormal,
and by its very presence expose the other, while at the same time it, by
its very presence, ministers improvement, exactly as the sunlight
disperses mist and all unhealthy vapours, germs, and microbes.

The problem dramatist, in place of broad effect and truth to nature, must
find it in stress of invention and resource of that kind.  Thus care and
concentration must be all in all with him--he must never let himself go,
or get so interested and taken with his characters that _they_, in a
sense, control or direct him.  He is all too conscious a "maker" and must
pay for his originality by what in the end is really painful and
overweighted work.  This, I take it, is the reason why so many of the
modern dramatists find their work so hard, and are, comparatively, so
slow in the production of it, while they would fain, by many devices,
secure the general impression or appeal made to all classes alike by the
natural or what we may call spontaneous drama, they are yet, by the
necessity of subject matter and methods of dealing with it, limited to
the real interest of a special class--to whom is finally given up what
was meant for mankind--and the troublesome and trying task laid on them,
to try as best they may to reconcile two really conflicting tendencies
which cannot even by art be reconciled but really point different ways
and tend to different ends.  As the impressionist and the pre-Raphaelite,
in the sister-art of painting cannot be combined and reconciled in one
painter--so it is here; by conception and methods they go different ways,
and if they _seek_ the same end, it is by opposing processes--the
original conception alike of nature and of art dictating the process.

As for Stevenson, it was no lack of care or concentration in anything
that he touched; these two were never lacking, but because his subtlety,
mystical bias and dreaminess, and theorising on human nature made this to
him impossible.  He might have concentrated as much as he pleased,
concentrated as much as even Mr Pinero desires, but he would not have
made a successful drama, because he was Robert Louis Stevenson, and not
Mr Pinero, and too long, as he himself confessed, had a tendency to think
bad-heartedness was strength; while the only true and enduring joy
attainable in this world--whether by deduction from life itself, or from
_impressions_ of art or of the drama, is simply the steady, unassailable,
and triumphant consciousness that it is not so, but the reverse, that
goodness and self-sacrifice and self-surrender are the only strength in
the universe.  Just as Byron had it with patriotism:--

   "Freedom's battle once begun,
   Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son,
   Tho' baffled oft is ever won."

To go consciously either in fiction or in the drama for bad-heartedness
as strength, is to court failure--the broad, healthy, human heart, thank
Heaven, is so made as to resent the doctrine; and if a fiction or a play
based on this idea for the moment succeeds, it can only be because of
strength in other elements, or because of partial blindness and partially
paralysed moral sense in the case of those who accept it and joy in it.
If Mr Pinero directly disputes this, then he and I have no common
standing-ground, and I need not follow the matter any further.  Of
course, the dramatist may, under mistaken sympathy and in the midst of
complex and bewildering concatenations, give wrong readings to his
audience, but he must not be always doing even that, or doing it on
principle or system, else his work, however careful and concentrated,
will before long share the fate of the Stevenson-Henley dramas
confessedly wrought when the authors all too definitely held
bad-heartedness was strength.




CHAPTER XV--THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL


We have not hitherto concerned ourselves, in any express sense, with the
ethical elements involved in the tendency now dwelt on, though they are,
of necessity, of a very vital character.  We have shown only as yet the
effect of this mood of mind on dramatic intention and effort.  The
position is simply that there is, broadly speaking, the endeavour to
eliminate an element which is essential to successful dramatic
presentation.  That element is the eternal distinction, speaking broadly,
between good and evil--between right and wrong--between the secret
consciousness of having done right, and the consciousness of mere
strength and force in certain other ways.

Nothing else will make up for vagueness and cloudiness here--no technical
skill, no apt dialogue nor concentration, any more than "fine speeches,"
as Mr Pinero calls them.  Now the dramatic demand and the ethical demand
here meet and take each other's hands, and will not be separated.  This
is why Mr Stevenson and Mr Henley--young men of great talent,
failed--utterly failed--they thought they could make a hero out of a
shady and dare-devil yet really cowardly villain generally--and failed.

The spirit of this is of the clever youth type--all too ready to forego
the moral for the sake of the fun any day of the week, and the unthinking
selfishness and self-enjoyment of youth--whose tender mercies are often
cruel, are transcendent in it.  As Stevenson himself said, they were
young men then and fancied bad-heartedness was strength.  Perhaps it was
a sense of this that made R. L. Stevenson speak as he did of the _Ebb-
Tide_ with Huish the cockney in it, after he was powerless to recall it;
which made him say, as we have seen, that the closing chapters of _The
Master of Ballantrae_ "_shame_, _and perhaps degrade_, _the beginning_."
He himself came to see then the great error; but, alas! it was too late
to remedy it--he could but go forward to essay new tales, not backward to
put right errors in what was done.

Did Mr William Archer have anything of this in his mind and the
far-reaching effects on this side, when he wrote the following:

   "Let me add that the omission with which, in 1885, I mildly reproached
   him--the omission to tell what he knew to be an essential part of the
   truth about life--was abundantly made good in his later writings.  It
   is true that even in his final philosophy he still seems to me to
   underrate, or rather to shirk, the significance of that most
   compendious parable which he thus relates in a letter to Mr Henry
   James:--'Do you know the story of the man who found a button in his
   hash, and called the waiter?  "What do you call that?" says he.
   "Well," said the waiter, "what d'you expect?  Expect to find a gold
   watch and chain?"  Heavenly apologue, is it not?'  Heavenly, by all
   means; but I think Stevenson relished the humour of it so much that he
   'smiling passed the moral by.'  In his enjoyment of the waiter's
   effrontery, he forgot to sympathise with the man (even though it was
   himself) who had broken his teeth upon the harmful, unnecessary
   button.  He forgot that all the apologetics in the world are based
   upon just this audacious paralogism."

Many writers have done the same--and not a few critics have hinted at
this: I do not think any writer has got at the radical truth of it more
directly, decisively, and clearly than "J. F. M.," in a monthly magazine,
about the time of Stevenson's death; and the whole is so good and clear
that I must quote it--the writer was not thinking of the drama specially;
only of prose fiction, and this but makes the passage the more effective
and apt to my point.

   "In the outburst of regret which followed the death of Robert Louis
   Stevenson, one leading journal dwelt on his too early removal in
   middle life 'with only half his message delivered.'  Such a phrase may
   have been used in the mere cant of modern journalism.  Still it set
   one questioning what was Stevenson's message, or at least that part of
   it which we had time given us to hear.

   "Wonderful as was the popularity of the dead author, we are inclined
   to doubt whether the right appreciation of him was half as wide.  To a
   certain section of the public he seemed a successful writer of boys'
   books, which yet held captive older people.  Now, undoubtedly there
   was an element (not the highest) in his work which fascinated boys.  It
   gratified their yearning for adventure.  To too large a number of his
   readers, we suspect, this remains Stevenson's chief charm; though even
   of those there were many able to recognise and be thankful for the
   literary power and grace which could serve up their sanguinary diet so
   daintily.

   "Most of Stevenson's titles, too, like _Treasure Island_, _Kidnapped_,
   and_ The Master of Ballantrae_, tended to foster delusion in this
   direction.  The books were largely bought for gifts by maiden aunts,
   and bestowed as school prizes, when it might not have been so had
   their titles given more indication of their real scope and tendency.

   "All this, it seems to us, has somewhat obscured Stevenson's true
   power, which is surely that of an arch-delineator of 'human nature'
   and of the devious ways of men.  As we read him we feel that we have
   our finger on the pulse of the cruel politics of the world.  He has
   the Shakespearean gift which makes us recognise that his pirates and
   his statesmen, with their violence and their murders and their
   perversions of justice, are swayed by the same interests and are
   pulling the same strings and playing on the same passions which are at
   work in quieter methods around ourselves.  The vast crimes and the
   reckless bloodshed are nothing more nor less than stage effects used
   to accentuate for the common eye what the seer can detect without
   them.

   "And reading him from this standpoint, Stevenson's 'message' (so far
   as it was delivered) appears to be that of utter gloom--the creed that
   good is always overcome by evil.  We do not mean in the sense that
   good always suffers through evil and is frequently crucified by evil.
   That is only the sowing of the martyr's blood, which is, we know, the
   seed of the Church.  We should not have marvelled in the least that a
   genius like Stevenson should rebel against mere external 'happy
   endings,' which, being in flat contradiction to the ordinary ways of
   Providence, are little short of thoughtless blasphemy against
   Providence.  But the terrible thing about the Stevenson philosophy of
   life is that it seems to make evil overcome good in the sense of
   absorbing it, or perverting it, or at best lowering it.  When good and
   evil come in conflict in one person, Dr Jekyll vanishes into Mr Hyde.
   The awful Master of Ballantrae drags down his brother, though he seems
   to fight for his soul at every step.  The sequel to _Kidnapped_ shows
   David Balfour ready at last to be hail-fellow-well-met with the supple
   Prestongrange and the other intriguers, even though they had forcibly
   made him a partner to their shedding of innocent blood.

   "Is it possible that this was what Stevenson's experience of real life
   had brought him?  Fortunate himself in so many respects, he was yet
   one of those who turn aside from the smooth and sunny paths of life,
   to enter into brotherly sympathy and fellowship with the disinherited.
   Is this, then, what he found on those darker levels?  Did he discover
   that triumphant hypocrisy treads down souls as well as lives?

   "We cannot doubt that it often does so; and it is well that we should
   see this sometimes, to make us strong to contend with evil before it
   works out this, its worst mischief, and to rouse us from the easy
   optimist laziness which sits idle while others are being wronged, and
   bids them believe 'that all will come right in the end,' when it is
   our direct duty to do our utmost to make it 'come right' to-day.

   "But to show us nothing but the gloomy side, nothing but the weakness
   of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not inspire us to
   contend for the right, does not inform us of the powers and weapons
   with which we might so contend.  To gaze at unqualified and inevitable
   moral defeat will but leave us to the still worse laziness of
   pessimism, uttering its discouraging and blasphemous cry, 'It does not
   matter; nothing will ever come right!'

   "Shakespeare has shown us--and never so nobly as in his last great
   creation of _The Tempest_--that a man has one stronghold which none
   but himself can deliver over to the enemy--that citadel of his own
   conduct and character, from which he can smile supreme upon the foe,
   who may have conquered all down the line, but must finally make pause
   there.

   "We must remember that _The Tempest_ was Shakespeare's last work.  The
   genuine consciousness of the possible triumph of the moral nature
   against every assault is probably reserved for the later years of
   life, when, somewhat withdrawn from the passions of its struggle, we
   become those lookers-on who see most of the game.  Strange fate is it
   that so much of our genius vanishes into the great silence before
   those later years are reached!"

Stevenson was too late in awakening fully to the tragic error to which
short-sighted youth is apt to wander that "bad-heartedness is strength."
And so, from this point of view, to our sorrow, he too much verified
Goethe's saw that "simplicity (not artifice) and repose are the acme of
art, and therefore no youth can be a master."  In fact, he might very
well from another side, have taken one of Goethe's fine sayings as a
motto for himself:

   "Greatest saints were ever most kindly-hearted to sinners;
   Here I'm a saint with the best; sinners I never could hate." {7}

Stevenson's own verdict on _Deacon Brodie_ given to a _New York Herald_
reporter on the author's arrival in New York in September 1887, on the
_Ludgate Hill_, is thus very near the precise truth: "The piece has been
all overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will please an
audience, I don't think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it.  _But we
were both young men when we did that_, _and I think we had an idea that
bad-heartedness was strength_."

If Mr Henley in any way confirmed R. L. Stevenson in this perversion, as
I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson has much to thank him
for, whatever claims he may have fancied he had to Stevenson's eternal
gratitude.  He did Stevenson about the very worst turn he could have
done, and aided and abetted in robbing us and the world of yet greater
works than we have had from his hands.  He was but condemning himself
when he wrote some of the detractory things he did in the _Pall Mall
Magazine_ about the _Edinburgh Edition_, etc.  Men are mirrors in which
they see each other: Henley, after all, painted himself much more
effectively in that now notorious _Pall Mall Magazine_ article than he
did R. L. Stevenson.  Such is the penalty men too often pay for wreaking
paltry revenges--writing under morbid memories and narrow and petty
grievances--they not only fail in truth and impartiality, but inscribe a
kind of grotesque parody of themselves in their effort to make their
subject ridiculous, as he did, for example, about the name Lewis=Louis,
and various other things.

R. L. Stevenson's fate was to be a casuistic and mystic moralist at
bottom, and could not help it; while, owing to some kink or twist, due,
perhaps, mainly to his earlier sufferings, and the teachings he then
received, he could not help giving it always a turn to what he himself
called "tail-foremost" or inverted morality; and it was not till near the
close that he fully awakened to the fact that here he was false to the
truest canons at once of morality and life and art, and that if he
pursued this course his doom was, and would be, to make his endings
"disgrace, or perhaps, degrade his beginnings," and that no true and
effective dramatic unity and effect and climax was to be gained.  Pity
that he did so much on this perverted view of life and world and art: and
well it is that he came to perceive it, even though almost too
late:--certainly too late for that full presentment of that awful yet
gladdening presence of a God's power and equity in this seeming tangled
web of a world, the idea which inspired Robert Browning as well as
Wordsworth, when he wrote, and gathered it up into a few lines in _Pippa
Passes_:

   "The year's at the spring,
   And day's at the morn;
   Morning's at seven;
   The hillsides dew-pearled;

   The lark's on the wing;
   The snail's on the thorn:
   God's in His heaven,
   All's right with the world.

   . . . . . . . . . . . .

   "All service ranks the same with God,
   If now, as formerly he trod
   Paradise, His presence fills
   Our earth, each only as God wills
   Can work--God's puppets best and worst,
   Are we; there is no last or first."

It shows what he might have accomplished, had longer life been but
allowed him.




CHAPTER XVI--STEVENSON'S GLOOM


The problem of Stevenson's gloom cannot be solved by any commonplace cut-
and-dried process.  It will remain a problem only unless (1) his original
dreamy tendency crossed, if not warped, by the fatalistic Calvinism which
was drummed into him by father, mother, and nurse in his tender years, is
taken fully into account; then (2) the peculiar action on such a nature
of the unsatisfying and, on the whole, distracting effect of the bohemian
and hail-fellow-well-met sort of ideal to which he yielded, and which has
to be charged with much; and (3) the conflict in him of a keenly social
animus with a very strong egotistical effusiveness, fed by fancy, and
nourished by the enforced solitariness inevitable in the case of one who,
from early years up, suffered from painful, and even crushing, disease.

His text and his sermon--which may be shortly summed in the following
sentence--be kind, for in kindness to others lies the only true pleasure
to be gained in life; be cheerful, even to the point of egotistic self-
satisfaction, for through cheerfulness only is the flow of this incessant
kindliness of thought and service possible.  He was not in harmony with
the actual effect of much of his creative work, though he illustrated
this in his life, as few men have done.  He regarded it as the highest
duty of life to give pleasure to others; his art in his own idea thus
became in an unostentatious way consecrated, and while he would not have
claimed to be a seer, any more than he would have claimed to be a saint,
as he would have held in contempt a mere sybarite, most certainly a vein
of unblamable hedonism pervaded his whole philosophy of life.  Suffering
constantly, he still was always kindly.  He encouraged, as Mr Gosse has
said, this philosophy by every resource open to him.  In practical life,
all who knew him declared that he was brightness, naive fancy, and
sunshine personified, and yet he could not help always, somehow, infusing
into his fiction a pronounced, and sometimes almost fatal, element of
gloom.  Even in his own case they were not pleasure-giving and failed
thus in essence.  Some wise critic has said that no man can ever write
well creatively of that in which in his early youth he had no knowledge.
Always behind Stevenson's latest exercises lies the shadow of this as an
unshifting background, which by art may be relieved, but never refined
away wholly.  He cannot escape from it if he would.  Here, too, as George
MacDonald has neatly and nicely said: We are the victims of our own past,
and often a hand is put forth upon us from behind and draws us into life
backward.  Here was Stevenson, with his half-hedonistic theories of life,
the duty of giving pleasure, of making eyes brighter, and casting
sunshine around one wherever one went, yet the creator of gloom for us,
when all the world was before him where to choose.  This fateful shadow
pursued him to the end, often giving us, as it were, the very
justificative ground for his own father's despondency and gloom, which
the son rather too decisively reproved, while he might have sympathised
with it in a stranger, and in that most characteristic letter to his
mother, which we have quoted, said that it made his father often seem, to
him, to be ungrateful--"_Has the man no gratitude_?"  Two selves thus
persistently and constantly struggled in Stevenson.  He was from this
point of view, indeed, his own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the buoyant, self-
enjoying, because pleasure-conferring, man, and at the same time the
helpless yet fascinating "dark interpreter" of the gloomy and
gloom-inspiring side of life, viewed from the point of view of dominating
character and inherited influence.  When he reached out his hand with
desire of pleasure-conferring, lo and behold, as he wrote, a hand from
his forefathers was stretched out, and he was pulled backward; so that,
as he has confessed, his endings were apt to shame, perhaps to degrade,
the beginnings.  Here is something pointing to the hidden and secret
springs that feed the deeper will and bend it to their service.
Individuality itself is but a mirror, which by its inequalities
transforms things to odd shapes.  Hawthorne confessed to something of
this sort.  He, like Stevenson, suffered much in youth, if not from
disease then through accident, which kept him long from youthful company.
At a time when he should have been running free with other boys, he had
to be lonely, reading what books he could lay his hands on, mostly
mournful and puritanic, by the borders of lone Sebago Lake.  He that hath
once in youth been touched by this Marah-rod of bitterness will not
easily escape from it, when he essays in later years to paint life and
the world as he sees them; nay, the hand, when he deems himself freest,
will be laid upon him from behind, if not to pull him, as MacDonald has
said, into life backward, then to make him a mournful witness of having
once been touched by the Marah-rod, whose bitterness again declares
itself and wells out its bitterness when set even in the rising and the
stirring of the waters.

Such is our view of the "gloom" of Stevenson--a gloom which well might
have justified something of his father's despondency.  He struggles in
vain to escape from it--it narrows, it fatefully hampers and limits the
free field of his art, lays upon it a strange atmosphere, fascinating,
but not favourable to true dramatic breadth and force, and spontaneous
natural simplicity, invariably lending a certain touch of weakness,
inconsistency, and inconclusiveness to his endings; so that he himself
could too often speak of them afterwards as apt to "shame, perhaps to
degrade, the beginnings."  This is what true dramatic art should never
do.  In the ending all that may raise legitimate question in the
process--all that is confusing, perplexing in the separate parts--is met,
solved, reconciled, at least in a way satisfactory to the general, or
ordinary mind; and thus such unity is by it so gained and sealed, that in
no case can the true artist, whatever faults may lie in portions of the
process-work, say of his endings that "they shame, perhaps degrade, the
beginning."  Wherever this is the case there will be "gloom," and there
will also be a sad, tormenting sense of something wanting.  "The evening
brings a 'hame';" so should it be here--should it especially be in a
dramatic work.  If not, "We start; for soul is wanting there;" or, if not
soul, then the last halo of the soul's serene triumph.  From this side,
too, there is another cause for the undramatic character, in the stricter
sense of Stevenson's work generally: it is, after all, distressful,
unsatisfying, egotistic, for fancy is led at the beck of some
pre-established disharmony which throws back an abiding and irremovable
gloom on all that went before; and the free spontaneous grace of natural
creation which ensures natural simplicity is, as said already, not quite
attained.

It was well pointed out in _Hammerton_, by an unanonymous author there
quoted (pp. 22, 23), that while in the story, Hyde, the worse one, wins,
in Stevenson himself--in his real life--Jekyll won, and not Mr Hyde.  This
writer, too, might have added that the Master of Ballantrae also wins as
well as Beau Austin and Deacon Brodie.  R. L. Stevenson's dramatic art
and a good deal of his fiction, then, was untrue to his life, and on one
side was a lie--it was not in consonance with his own practice or his
belief as expressed in life.

In some other matters the test laid down here is not difficult of
application.  Stevenson, at the time he wrote _The Foreigner at Home_,
had seen a good deal; he had been abroad; he had already had experiences;
he had had differences with his father about Calvinism and some other
things; and yet just see how he applies the standard of his earlier
knowledge and observation to England--and by doing so, cannot help
exaggerating the outstanding differences, always with an almost
provincial accent of unwavering conviction due to his early associations
and knowledge.  He cannot help paying an excessive tribute to the
Calvinism he had formally rejected, in so far as, according to him, it
goes to form character--even national character, at all events, in its
production of types; and he never in any really effective way glances at
what Mr Matthew Arnold called "Scottish manners, Scottish drink" as
elements in any way radically qualifying.  It is not, of course, that I,
as a Scotsman, well acquainted with rural life in some parts of England,
as with rural life in many parts of Scotland in my youth, do not heartily
agree with him--the point is that, when he comes to this sort of
comparison and contrast, he writes exactly as his father would or might
have done, with a full consciousness, after all, of the tribute he was
paying to the practical outcome on character of the Calvinism in which he
so thoroughly believed.  It is, in its way, a very peculiar thing--and
had I space, and did I believe it would prove interesting to readers in
general, I might write an essay on it, with instances--in which case the
Address to the Scottish Clergy would come in for more notice, citation
and application than it has yet received.  But meanwhile just take this
little snippet--very characteristic and very suggestive in its own
way--and tell me whether it does not justify and bear out fully what I
have now said as illustrating a certain side and a strange uncertain
limitation in Stevenson:

   "But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England
   foreign.  The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire,
   surprise and even pain us.  The dull neglected peasant, sunk in
   matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast to our
   own long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-loving ploughman.  A
   week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotsman gasping.  It
   seems impossible that within the boundaries of his own island a class
   should have been thus forgotten.  Even the educated and intelligent
   who hold our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold
   them with a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all
   things with less interest and conviction.  The first shock of English
   society is like a cold plunge." {8}

As there was a great deal of the "John Bull element" {9} in the little
dreamer De Quincey, so there was a great deal, after all, of the rather
conceited Calvinistic Scot in R. L. Stevenson, and it is to be traced as
clearly in certain of his fictions as anywhere, though he himself would
not perhaps have seen it and acknowledged it, as I am here forced now to
see it, and to acknowledge it for him.




CHAPTER XVII--PROOFS OF GROWTH


Once again I quote Goethe:

   "Natural simplicity and repose are the acme of art, and hence it
   follows no youth can be a master."

It has to be confessed that seldom, if ever, does Stevenson naturally and
by sheer enthusiasm for subject and characters attain this natural
simplicity, if he often attained the counterfeit presentment--artistic
and graceful euphony, and new, subtle, and often unexpected
concatenations of phrase.  Style is much; but it is not everything.  We
often love Scott the more that he shows loosenesses and lapses here, for,
in spite of them, he gains natural simplicity, while not seldom
Stevenson, with all his art and fine sense of verbal music, rather misses
it.  _The Sedulous Ape_ sometimes disenchants as well as charms; for
occasionally a word, a touch, a turn, sends us off too directly in search
of the model; and this operates against the interest as introducing a new
and alien series of associations, where, for full effect, it should not
be so.  And this distraction will be the more insistent, the more
knowledge the reader has and the more he remembers; and since Stevenson's
first appeal, both by his spirit and his methods, is to the cultured and
well read, rather than to the great mass, his "sedulous apehood" only the
more directly wars against him as regards deep, continuous, and lasting
impression; where he should be most simple, natural and spontaneous; he
also is most artificial and involved.  If the story-writer is not so much
in earnest, not so possessed by his matter that this is allowed to him,
how is it to be hoped that we shall be possessed in the reading of it?
More than once in _Catriona_ we must own we had this experience, directly
warring against full possession by the story, and certain passages about
Simon Lovat were especially marked by this; if even the first
introduction to Catriona herself was not so.  As for Miss Barbara Grant,
of whom so much has been made by many admirers, she is decidedly clever,
indeed too clever by half, and yet her doom is to be a mere _deus ex
machina_, and never do more than just pay a little tribute to Stevenson's
own power of _persiflage_, or, if you like, to pay a penalty, poor lass,
for the too perfect doing of hat, and really, really, I could not help
saying this much, though, I do believe that she deserved just a wee bit
better fate than that.

But we have proofs of great growth, and nowhere are they greater than at
the very close.  Stevenson died young: in some phases he was but a youth
to the last.  To a true critic then, the problem is, having already
attained so much--a grand style, grasp of a limited group of characters,
with fancy, sincerity, and imagination,--what would Stevenson have
attained in another ten years had such been but allotted him?  It has
over and over again been said that, for long he _shied_ presenting women
altogether.  This is not quite true: _Thrawn Janet_ was an earlier
effort; and if there the problem is persistent, the woman is real.  Here
also he was on the right road--the advance road.  The sex-question was
coming forward as inevitably a part of life, and could not be left out in
any broad and true picture.  This element was effectively revived in
_Weir of Hermiston_, and "Weir" has been well said to be sadder, if it
does not go deeper than _Denis Duval_ or _Edwin Drood_.  We know what
Dickens and Thackeray could do there; we can but guess now what Stevenson
would have done.  "Weir" is but a fragment; but, to a wisely critical and
unprejudiced mind, it suffices to show not only what the complete work
would have been, but what would have inevitably followed it.  It shows
the turning-point, and the way that was to be followed at the
cross-roads--the way into a bigger, realer, grander world, where realism,
freed from the dream, and fancy, and prejudice of youth, would glory in
achieving the more enduring romance of manhood, maturity and humanity.

Yes; there was growth--undoubted growth.  The questioning and severely
moral element mainly due to the Shorter Catechism--the tendency to
casuistry, and to problems, and wistful introspection--which had so
coloured Stevenson's art up to the date of _The Master of Ballantrae_,
and made him a great essayist, was passing in the satisfaction of assured
insight into life itself.  The art would gradually have been transformed
also.  The problem, pure and simple, would have been subdued in face of
the great facts of life; if not lost

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