The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson — Volume 1
by Robert Louis Stevenson · English · Gutenberg #622 · 663,063 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson — Volume 1
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release date: August 1, 1996 [eBook #622]
Most recently updated: August 25, 2019
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/622
Credits: Transcribed from the 1906 Methuen and Co. edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON — VOLUME 1 ***
Transcribed from the 1906 Methuen and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Book cover]
[Picture: Robert Louis Stevenson]
THE LETTERS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
TO HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS
SELECTED AND EDITED WITH
NOTES AND INTRODUCTIONS BY
SIDNEY COLVIN
VOLUME I
* * * * *
LONDON
METHUEN AND CO.
36 ESSEX STREET
_Seventh Edition_
* * * * *
_First Published_ _November 1899_
_Second Edition_ _November 1899_
_Third Edition_ _April 1900_
_Fourth Edition_ _November 1900_
_Fifth Edition_ _January 1901_
_Sixth Edition_ _October 1902_
_Seventh Edition_ _December 1906_
* * * * *
IN the present edition, several minor errors and misprints have been
corrected, and three new letters have been printed, one addressed to Mr.
Austin Dobson (vol. i. p. 340), one to Mr. Rudyard Kipling (vol. ii. p.
215), and one to Mr. George Meredith (vol. ii. p. 302). The two former
replace other letters which seemed of less interest; the last is an
addition to the book.
S. C.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION xv–xliv
I
STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH
TRAVELS AND EXCURSIONS
INTRODUCTORY 3
LETTERS:—
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 15
To the Same 17
To the Same 19
To the Same 20
To Mrs. Churchill Babington 24
To Alison Cunningham 26
To Charles Baxter 27
To the Same 29
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 30
To the Same 32
To the Same 33
To Thomas Stevenson 36
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 38
To Charles Baxter 40
II
STUDENT DAYS—_continued_
ORDERED SOUTH
LETTERS:—
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 48
To Mrs. Sitwell 49
To the Same 51
To the Same 53
To the Same 57
To the Same 61
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 62
To Mrs. Sitwell 65
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 67
To the Same 69
To Mrs. Sitwell 71
To the Same 73
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 74
To Mrs. Sitwell 75
To the Same 77
To the Same 79
To the Same 81
To the Same 83
To Sidney Colvin 84
To Mrs. Sitwell 85
To Sidney Colvin 87
To Mrs. Sitwell 88
To the Same 88
To the Same 91
To the Same 92
To the Same 95
To the Same 95
III
ADVOCATE AND AUTHOR
EDINBURGH—PARIS—FONTAINEBLEAU
LETTERS:—
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 104
To Mrs. Sitwell 104
To Sidney Colvin 106
To Charles Baxter 109
To Sidney Colvin 110
To Mrs. Sitwell 111
To Mrs. de Mattos 112
To Mrs. Sitwell 114
To Sidney Colvin 115
To the Same 115
To Mrs. Sitwell 116
To W. E. Henley 117
To Mrs. Sitwell 118
To Sidney Colvin 119
To Mrs. Sitwell 120
To A. Patchett Martin 121
To the Same 122
To Sidney Colvin 124
To the Same 125
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 126
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 126
To the Same 127
To W. E. Henley 128
To Charles Baxter. 128
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 129
To W. E. Henley 129
To Edmund Gosse 130
To W. E. Henley 132
To Edmund Gosse 134
To Sidney Colvin 136
To Edmund Gosse 136
IV
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
MONTEREY AND SAN FRANCISCO
LETTERS:—
To Sidney Colvin 144
To the Same 144
To W. E. Henley 146
To Sidney Colvin 147
To the Same 148
To the Same 149
To Edmund Gosse 150
To W. E. Henley 151
To the Same 152
To P. G. Hamerton 155
To Edmund Gosse 156
To Sidney Colvin 157
To Edmund Gosse 158
To Sidney Colvin 160
To the Same 162
To Charles Baxter 164
To Sidney Colvin 165
To W. E. Henley 167
To Sidney Colvin 169
To Edmund Gosse 169
To Dr. W. Bamford 170
To Sidney Colvin 171
To the Same 171
To the Same 172
To C. W. Stoddard 173
To Sidney Colvin 174
V
ALPINE WINTERS
AND HIGHLAND SUMMERS
LETTERS:—
To A. G. Dew-Smith 185
To Thomas Stevenson 187
To Edmund Gosse 188
To the Same 189
To C. W. Stoddard 191
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 192
To Sidney Colvin 194
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 195
To Sidney Colvin 197
To Horatio F. Brown 199
To the Same 200
To the Same 200
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 201
To Edmund Gosse 202
To Sidney Colvin 204
To Professor Æneas Mackay 205
To the Same 205
To Edmund Gosse 206
To the Same 207
To P. G. Hamerton 208
To Sidney Colvin 209
To W. E. Henley 211
To the Same 212
To Sidney Colvin 213
To Dr. Alexander Japp 215
To Mrs. Sitwell 216
To Edmund Gosse 217
To the Same 218
To the Same 219
To W. E. Henley 219
To Dr. Alexander Japp 221
To W. E. Henley 222
To Thomas Stevenson 223
To P. G. Hamerton 224
To Charles Baxter 226
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 227
To Alison Cunningham 228
To Charles Baxter 228
To W. E. Henley 229
To the Same 230
To Alexander Ireland 233
To Edmund Gosse 235
To Dr. Alexander Japp 236
To the Same 236
To W. E. Henley 238
To Mrs. T. Stevenson 240
To Edmund Gosse 241
To the Same 242
To W. E. Henley 242
VI
MARSEILLES AND HYÈRES
LETTERS:—
To the Editor of the _New York 251
Tribune_
To R. A. M. Stevenson 252
To Thomas Stevenson 253
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 254
To Charles Baxter 254
To Alison Cunningham 256
To W. E. Henley 257
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 261
To Thomas Stevenson 262
To Mrs. Sitwell 263
To Edmund Gosse 265
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 266
To the Same 267
To Edmund Gosse 268
To the Same 269
To W. E. Henley 270
To the Same 271
To the Same 272
To the Same 273
To the Same 274
To Alison Cunningham 275
To W. E. Henley 277
To Edmund Gosse 278
To W. E. Henley 279
To Edmund Gosse 283
To Sidney Colvin 284
To W. H. Low 286
To R. A. M. Stevenson 288
To Thomas Stevenson 291
To W. H. Low 292
To W. E. Henley 294
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 295
To Sidney Colvin 296
To Mrs. Milne 297
To Miss Ferrier 299
To W. H. Low 300
To Thomas Stevenson 301
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 302
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 303
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 304
To Sidney Colvin 305
To Mr. Dick 308
To Cosmo Monkhouse 310
To Edmund Gosse 312
To Miss Ferrier 313
To W. H. Low 314
To Thomas Stevenson 315
To Cosmo Monkhouse 316
To W. E. Henley 318
To Edmund Gosse 319
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 320
To Sidney Colvin 321
VII
LIFE AT BOURNEMOUTH
LETTERS:—
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 328
To W. E. Henley 328
To the Rev. Professor Lewis Campbell 330
To Andrew Chatto 331
To W. H. Low 332
To Thomas Stevenson 334
To W. E. Henley 335
To Thomas Stevenson 335
To Charles Baxter 337
To the Same 337
To Miss Ferrier 338
To Edmund Gosse 339
To Austin Dobson 340
To Henry James 341
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 343
To W. E. Henley 344
To the Same 345
To H. A. Jones 346
To Sidney Colvin 346
To Thomas Stevenson 347
To Sidney Colvin 348
To the Same 349
To J. A. Symonds 350
To Edmund Gosse 352
To W. H. Low 354
To P. G. Hamerton 356
To William Archer 358
To Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin 359
To the Same 360
To W. H. Low 361
To W. E. Henley 363
To William Archer 364
To Thomas Stevenson 367
To Henry James 368
To William Archer 369
To the Same 371
To W. H. Low 374
_Frontispiece_—PORTRAIT OF R. L. STEVENSON, _æt._ 35
_From a photograph by_ Mr. LLOYD OSBOURNE
INTRODUCTION
ONE day in the autumn of 1888, in the island of Tahiti, during an illness
which he supposed might be his last, Stevenson put into the hands of his
stepson, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, a sealed paper with the request that it
should be opened after his death. He recovered, as every one knows, and
had strength enough to enjoy six years more of active life and work in
the Pacific Islands. When the end came, and the paper was opened, it was
found to contain, among other things, the expression of his wish that I
should be asked to prepare for publication ‘a selection of his letters
and a sketch of his life.’ The journal letters written to myself from
his Samoan home, subsequently to the date of the request, offered the
readiest material towards fulfilling promptly a part at least of the duty
thus laid upon me; and a selection from these was accordingly published
in the autumn following his death. {xv}
The scanty leisure of an official life (chiefly employed as it was for
several years in seeing my friend’s collected and posthumous works
through the press) did not allow me to complete the remainder of my task
without considerable delay. For one thing, the body of correspondence
which came in from various quarters turned out much larger than had been
anticipated, and the labour of sifting and arranging it much greater.
The author of _Treasure Island_ and _Across the Plains_ and _Weir of
Hermiston_ did not love writing letters, and will be found somewhere in
the following pages referring to himself as one ‘essentially and
originally incapable of the art epistolary.’ That he was a bad
correspondent had even come to be an accepted view among his friends; but
in truth it was only during one particular period of his life (see below,
vol. i. p. 103) that he at all deserved such a reproach. At other times,
as is now apparent, he had shown a degree of industry and spirit in
letter-writing extraordinary considering his health and occupations, and
especially considering his declared aversion for the task. His letters,
it is true, were often the most informal in the world, and he generally
neglected to date them, a habit which is the despair of editors; but
after his own whim and fashion he wrote a vast number; so that for every
one here included some half-a-dozen at least have had to be rejected.
In considering the scale and plan on which my friend’s instruction should
be carried out, it seemed necessary to take into account, not his own
always modest opinion of himself, but the place which, as time went on,
he seemed likely to take ultimately in the world’s regard. The four or
five years following the death of a writer much applauded in his lifetime
are generally the years when the decline of his reputation begins, if it
is going to suffer decline at all. At present, certainly, Stevenson’s
name seems in no danger of going down. On the stream of daily literary
reference and allusion it floats more actively than ever. In another
sense its vitality is confirmed by the material test of continued sales
and of the market. Since we have lost him other writers, whose
beginnings he watched with sympathetic interest, have come to fill a
greater immediate place in public attention; one especially has struck
notes which appeal to dominant fibres in our Anglo-Saxon stock with
irresistible force; but none has exercised Stevenson’s peculiar and
personal power to charm, to attach, and to inspirit. By his study of
perfection in form and style—qualities for which his countrymen in
general have been apt to care little—he might seem destined to give
pleasure chiefly to the fastidious and the artistically minded. But as
to its matter, the main appeal of his work is not to any mental tastes
and fashions of the few; it is rather to universal, hereditary instincts,
to the primitive sources of imaginative excitement and entertainment in
the race.
By virtue, then, of this double appeal of form and matter; by his
especial hold upon the young, in whose spirit so much of his best work
was done; by his undecaying influence on other writers; by the spell
which he still exercises from the grave, and exercises most strongly on
those who are most familiar with the best company whether of the living
or the dead, Stevenson’s name and memory, so far as can be judged at
present, seem destined not to dwindle, but to grow. The voice of the
_advocatus diaboli_ has been heard against him, as it is right and proper
that it should be heard against any man before his reputation can be held
fully established. One such advocate in this country has thought to
dispose of him by the charge of ‘externality.’ But the reader who
remembers things like the sea-frenzy of Gordon Darnaway, or the dialogue
of Markheim with his other self in the house of murder, or the re-baptism
of the spirit of Seraphina in the forest dews, or the failure of Herrick
to find in the waters of the island lagoon a last release from dishonour,
or the death of Goguelat, or the appeal of Kirstie Elliot in the midnight
chamber—such a reader can only smile at a criticism like this and put it
by. These and a score of other passages breathe the essential poetry and
significance of things as they reveal themselves to true masters only—are
instinct at once with the morality and the romance which lie deep
together at the soul of nature and experience. Not in vain had Stevenson
read the lesson of the Lantern-Bearers, and hearkened to the music of the
pipes of Pan. He was feeling his way all his life towards a fuller
mastery of his means, preferring always to leave unexpressed what he felt
that he could not express perfectly; and in much of his work was content
merely to amuse himself and others. But even when he is playing most
fancifully with his art and his readers, as in the shudders, tempered
with laughter, of the Suicide Club, or the airy sentimental comedy of
Providence and the Guitar, or the schoolboy historical inventions of
Dickon Crookback and the old sailor Arblaster, a writer of his quality
cannot help striking notes from the heart of life and the inwardness of
things deeper than will ever be struck, or even apprehended, by another
who labours, with never a smile either of his own or of his reader’s,
upon the most solemn enterprises of realistic fiction, but is born
without the magician’s touch and insight.
Another advocate on the same side, in the United States, has made much of
the supposed dependence of this author on his models, and classed him
among writers whose inspiration is imitative and second-hand. But this,
surely, is to be quite misled by the well-known passage of Stevenson’s
own, in which he speaks of himself as having in his prentice years played
the ‘sedulous ape’ to many writers of different styles and periods. In
doing this he was not seeking inspiration, but simply practising the use
of the tools which were to help him to express his own inspirations.
Truly he was always much of a reader; but it was life, not books, that
always in the first degree allured and taught him.
‘He loved of life the myriad sides,
Pain, prayer, or pleasure, act or sleep,
As wallowing narwhals love the deep’—
so with just self-knowledge he wrote of himself; and the books which he
most cared for and lived with were those of which the writers seemed—to
quote again a phrase of his own—to have been ‘eavesdropping at the door
of his heart’; those which told of moods, impressions, experiences or
cravings after experience, pains, pleasures, opinions or conflicts of the
spirit, which in the eagerness of youthful living and thinking had
already been his own. No man, in fact, was ever less inclined to take
anything at second-hand. The root of all originality was in him, in the
shape of an extreme natural vividness of perception, imagination, and
feeling. An instinctive and inbred unwillingness to accept the accepted
and conform to the conventional was of the essence of his character,
whether in life or art, and was a source to him both of strength and
weakness. He would not follow a general rule—least of all if it was a
prudential rule—of conduct unless he was clear that it was right
according to his private conscience; nor would he join, in youth, in the
ordinary social amusements of his class when he had once found out that
they did not amuse _him_; nor wear their clothes if he could not feel at
ease and be himself in them; nor use, whether in speech or writing, any
trite or inanimate form of words that did not faithfully and livingly
express his thought. A readier acceptance of current usages might have
been better for him, but was simply not in his nature. ‘Damp gingerbread
puppets’ were to him the persons who lived and thought and felt and acted
only as was expected of them. ‘To see people skipping all round us with
their eyes sealed up with indifference, knowing nothing of the earth or
man or woman, going automatically to offices and saying they are happy or
unhappy, out of a sense of duty I suppose, surely at least from no sense
of happiness or unhappiness, unless perhaps they have a tooth that
twinges—is it not like a bad dream?’ No reader of this book will close
it, I am sure, without feeling that he has been throughout in the company
of a spirit various indeed and many-mooded, but profoundly sincere and
real. Ways that in another might easily have been mere signs of
affectation were in him the true expression of a nature ten times more
spontaneously itself and individually alive than that of others.
Self-consciousness, in many characters that possess it, deflects and
falsifies conduct; and so does the dramatic instinct. Stevenson was
self-conscious in a high degree, but only as a part of his general
activity of mind; only in so far as he could not help being an extremely
intelligent spectator of his own doings and feelings; these themselves
came from springs of character and impulse much too deep and strong to be
diverted. He loved also, with a child’s or actor’s gusto, to play a part
and make a drama out of life; {xxi} but the part was always for the
moment his very own: he had it not in him to pose for anything but what
he truly was.
When a man so constituted had once mastered his craft of letters, he
might take up whatever instrument he pleased with the instinctive and
just confidence that he would play upon it to a tune and with a manner of
his own. This is indeed the true mark and test of his originality. He
has no need to be, or to seem, especially original in the form and mode
of literature which he attempts. By his choice of these he may at any
time give himself and his reader the pleasure of recalling, like a
familiar air, some strain of literary association; but in so doing he
only adds a secondary charm to his work; the vision, the temperament, the
mode of conceiving and handling, are in every case strongly personal to
himself. He may try his hand in youth at a Sentimental Journey, but R.
L. S. cannot choose but be at the opposite pole of human character and
feeling from Laurence Sterne. In tales of mystery, allegorical or other,
he may bear in mind the precedent of Edgar Poe, and yet there is nothing
in style and temper much wider apart than _Markheim_ and _Jekyll and
Hyde_ are from the _Murders in the Rue Morgue_ or _William Wilson_. He
may set out to tell a pirate story for boys ‘exactly in the ancient way,’
and it will come from him not in the ancient way at all, but re-minted;
marked with a sharpness and saliency in the characters, a private stamp
of buccaneering ferocity combined with smiling humour, an energy of
vision and happy vividness of presentment, which are shiningly his own.
Another time, he may desert the paths of Kingston and Ballantyne the
brave for those of Sir Walter Scott; but literature presents few stronger
contrasts than between any scene of _Waverley_ or _Redgauntlet_ and any
scene of the _Master of Ballantrae_ or _Catriona_, whether in their
strength or weakness: and it is the most loyal lovers of the older master
who take the greatest pleasure in reading the work of the younger, so
much less opulently gifted as is probable—though we must remember that
Stevenson died at the age when Scott wrote _Waverley_—so infinitely more
careful of his gift. Stevenson may even blow upon the pipe of Burns, and
yet his tune will be no echo, but one which utters the heart and mind of
a Scots poet who has his own outlook on life, his own special and
profitable vein of smiling or satirical contemplation.
Not by reason, then, of ‘externality,’ for sure, nor yet of
imitativeness, will this writer lose his hold on the attention and regard
of his countrymen. The debate, before his place in literature is
settled, must rather turn on other points: as whether the genial essayist
and egoist or the romantic inventor and narrator was the stronger in
him—whether the Montaigne and Pepys elements prevailed in his literary
composition or the Scott and Dumas elements—a question indeed which among
those who care for him most has always been at issue. Or again, what
degree of true inspiring and illuminating power belongs to the gospel, or
gospels, airily encouraging or gravely didactic, which are set forth in
the essays with so captivating a grace? Or whether in romance and tale
he had a power of happily inventing and soundly constructing a whole
fable comparable to his unquestionable power of conceiving and presenting
single scenes and situations in a manner which stamps them indelibly on
the reader’s mind. And whether his figures are sustained continuously by
the true, large, spontaneous breath of creation, or are but transitorily
animated at critical and happy moments by flashes of spiritual and
dramatic insight, aided by the conscious devices of his singularly adroit
and spirited art? This is a question which no criticism but that of time
can solve; it takes the consenting instinct of generations to feel
whether the creatures of fiction, however powerfully they may strike at
first, are durably and equably, or ephemerally and fitfully, alive. To
contend, as some do, that strong creative impulse, and so keen an
artistic self-consciousness as Stevenson’s was, cannot exist together, is
quite idle. The truth, of course, is that the deep-seated energies of
imaginative creation are found sometimes in combination, and sometimes
not in combination, with an artistic intelligence thus keenly conscious
of its own purpose and watchful of its own working.
Once more, it may be questioned whether, among the many varieties of work
which Stevenson has left, all touched with genius, all charming and
stimulating to the literary sense, all distinguished by a grace and
precision of workmanship which are the rarest qualities in English art,
there are any which can be pointed to as absolute masterpieces, such as
the future cannot be expected to let die. Let the future decide. What
is certain is that posterity must either be very well, or very ill,
occupied if it can consent to give up so much sound entertainment, and
better than entertainment, as this writer afforded his contemporaries.
In the meantime, among judicious readers on both sides of the Atlantic,
Stevenson stands, I think it may safely be said, as a true master of
English prose; unsurpassed for the union of lenity and lucidity with
suggestive pregnancy and poetic animation; for harmony of cadence and the
well-knit structure of sentences; and for the art of imparting to words
the vital quality of things, and making them convey the
precise—sometimes, let it be granted, the too curiously
precise—expression of the very shade and colour of the thought, feeling,
or vision in his mind. He stands, moreover, as the writer who, in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century, has handled with the most of
freshness and inspiriting power the widest range of established literary
forms—the moral, critical, and personal essay, travels sentimental and
other, romances and short tales both historical and modern, parables and
tales of mystery, boys’ stories of adventure, memoirs—nor let lyrical and
meditative verse both English and Scottish, and especially nursery verse,
a new vein for genius to work in, be forgotten. To some of these forms
Stevenson gave quite new life; through all alike he expressed vividly an
extremely personal way of seeing and being, a sense of nature and
romance, of the aspects of human existence and problems of human conduct,
which was essentially his own. And in so doing he contrived to make
friends and even lovers of his readers. Those whom he attracts at all
(and there is no writer who attracts every one) are drawn to him over and
over again, finding familiarity not lessen but increase the charm of his
work, and desiring ever closer intimacy with the spirit and personality
which they divine behind it.
As to the fitting scale, then, on which to treat the memory of a man who
fills five years after his death such a place as this in the public
regard, the words ‘selection’ and ‘sketch’ have evidently to be given a
pretty liberal interpretation. Readers, it must be supposed, will scarce
be content without both a fairly full biography, and the opportunity of a
fairly ample intercourse with the man as he was accustomed to reveal
himself in writing to his familiars. As to form—Stevenson’s own words
and the nature of the material alike seem to indicate that the _Life_ and
the _Letters_ should be kept separate. There are some kinds of
correspondence which can conveniently be woven into the body and texture
of a biography, though indeed I think it is a plan to which biographers
are much too partial. Nothing, surely, more checks the flow of a
narrative than its interruption by stationary blocks of correspondence;
nothing more disconcerts the reader than a too frequent or too abrupt
alternation of voices between the subject of a biography speaking in his
letters and the writer of it speaking in his narrative. At least it is
only when letters are occupied, as Macaulay’s for instance were, almost
entirely with facts and events, that they can without difficulty be
handled in this way. But events and facts, ‘sordid facts,’ as he called
them, were not very often suffered to intrude into Stevenson’s
correspondence. ‘I deny,’ he writes, ‘that letters should contain news
(I mean mine; those of other people should). But mine should contain
appropriate sentiments and humorous nonsense, or nonsense without the
humour.’ Business letters, letters of information, and letters of
courtesy he had sometimes to write: but when he wrote best was under the
influence of the affection or impression, or the mere whim or mood, of
the moment; pouring himself out in all manner of rhapsodical confessions
and speculations, grave or gay, notes of observation and criticism,
snatches of remembrance and autobiography, moralisings on matters
uppermost for the hour in his mind, comments on his own work or other
people’s, or mere idle fun and foolery.
With a letter-writer of this character, as it seems to me, a judicious
reader desires to be left as much alone as possible. What he wants is to
relish the correspondence by itself, or with only just so much in the way
of notes and introductions as may serve to make allusions and situations
clear. Two volumes, then, of letters so edited, to be preceded by a
separate introductory volume of narrative and critical memoir, or
_étude_—such was to be the memorial to my friend which I had planned, and
hoped by this time to have ready. Unfortunately, the needful leisure has
hitherto failed me, and might fail me for some time yet, to complete the
separate volume of biography. That is now, at the wish of the family, to
be undertaken by Stevenson’s cousin and my friend, Mr. Graham Balfour.
Meanwhile the _Letters_, with introductions and notes somewhat extended
from the original plan, are herewith presented as a substantive work by
themselves.
The book will enable those who know and love their Stevenson already to
know him more intimately, and, as I hope, to love him more. It contains,
certainly, much that is most essentially characteristic of the man. To
some, perhaps, that very lack of art as a correspondent of which we have
found him above accusing himself may give the reading an added charm and
flavour. What he could do as an artist we know—what a telling power and
heightened thrill he could give to all his effects, in so many different
modes of expression and composition, by calculated skill and the
deliberate exercise of a perfectly trained faculty. This is the quality
which nobody denies him, and which so deeply impressed his
fellow-craftsmen of all kinds. I remember the late Sir John Millais, a
shrewd and very independent judge of books, calling across to me at a
dinner-table, ‘You know Stevenson, don’t you?’ and then going on, ‘Well,
I wish you would tell him from me, if he cares to know, that to my mind
he is the very first of living artists. I don’t mean writers merely, but
painters and all of us: nobody living can see with such an eye as that
fellow, and nobody is such a master of his tools.’ Now in his letters,
excepting a few written in youth, and having more or less the character
of exercises, and a few in after years which were intended for the public
eye, Stevenson the deliberate artist is scarcely forthcoming at all. He
does not care a fig for order or logical sequence or congruity, or for
striking a key of expression and keeping it, but becomes simply the most
spontaneous and unstudied of human beings. He will write with the most
distinguished elegance on one day, with simple good sense and good
feeling on a second, with flat triviality on another, and with the most
slashing, often ultra-colloquial, vehemence on a fourth, or will vary
through all these moods and more in one and the same letter. He has at
his command the whole vocabularies of the English and Scottish languages,
classical and slang, with good stores of the French, and tosses and
tumbles them about irresponsibly to convey the impression or affection,
the mood or freak of the moment. Passages or phrases of the craziest
schoolboy or seafaring slang come tumbling after and capping others of
classical cadence and purity, of poetical and heartfelt eloquence. By
this medley of moods and manners, Stevenson’s letters at their best—the
pick, let us say, of those in the following volumes which were written
from Hyères or Bournemouth—come nearer than anything else to the
full-blooded charm and variety of his conversation.
Nearer, yet not quite near; for it was in company only that this genial
spirit rose to his very best. Those whom his writings charm or impress,
but who never knew him, can but imagine how doubly they would have been
charmed and impressed by his presence. Few men probably, certainly none
that I have ever seen or read of, have had about them such a richness and
variety of human nature; and few can ever have been better gifted than he
was to express the play of being that was in him by means of the apt,
expressive word and the animated look and gesture. _Divers et ondoyant_,
in the words of Montaigne, beyond other men, he seemed to contain within
himself a whole troop of singularly assorted characters—the poet and
artist, the moralist and preacher, the humourist and jester, the man of
great heart and tender conscience, the man of eager appetite and
curiosity, the Bohemian, impatient of restraints and shams, the
adventurer and lover of travel and of action: characters, several of
them, not rare separately, especially among his Scottish
fellow-countrymen, but rare indeed to be found united, and each in such
fulness and intensity, within the bounds of a single personality.
Before all things Stevenson was a born poet, to whom the world was full
of enchantment and of latent romance, only waiting to take shape and
substance in the forms art. It was his birthright—
‘to hear
The great bell beating far and near—
The odd, unknown, enchanted gong
That on the road hales men along,
That from the mountain calls afar,
That lures the vessel from a star,
And with a still, aerial sound
Makes all the earth enchanted ground.’
At the same time, he was not less a born preacher and moralist after his
fashion. A true son of the Covenanters, he had about him little spirit
of social or other conformity; but an active and searching private
conscience kept him for ever calling in question both the grounds of his
own conduct and the validity of the accepted codes and compromises of
society. He must try to work out a scheme of morality suitable to his
own case and temperament, which found the prohibitory law of Moses chill
and uninspiring, but in the Sermon on the Mount a strong incentive to all
those impulses of pity and charity to which his heart was prone. In
youth his sense of social injustice and the inequalities of human
opportunity made him inwardly much of a rebel, who would have embraced
and acted on theories of socialism or communism, could he have found any
that did not seem to him at variance with ineradicable instincts of human
nature. {xxx} All his life the artist and the moralist in him alike were
in rebellion against the bourgeois spirit,—against timid, negative, and
shuffling substitutes for active and courageous well-doing,—and declined
to worship at the shrine of what he called the bestial goddesses Comfort
and Respectability. The moralist in him helped the artist by backing
with the force of a highly sensitive conscience his instinctive love of
perfection in his work. The poet and artist qualified the moralist by
discountenancing any preference for the harsh, the sour, or the
self-mortifying forms of virtue, and encouraging the love for all tender
or heroic, glowing, generous and cheerful forms.
In another aspect of his many-sided being Stevenson was not less a born
adventurer and practical experimentalist in life. Many poets are content
to dream, and many, perhaps most, moralists to preach; but Stevenson must
ever be doing and undergoing. He was no sentimentalist, to pay himself
with fine feelings whether for mean action or slack inaction. He had an
insatiable zest for all experiences, not the pleasurable only, but
including even the more harsh and biting—those that bring home to a man
the pinch and sting of existence as it is realised by the disinherited of
the world, and excluding only what he thought the prim, the conventional,
the dead-alive, and the cut-and-dry. On occasion the experimentalist and
man of adventure in him would enter into special partnership with the
moralist and man of conscience; he loved to find himself in difficult
social passes and ethical dilemmas for the sake of trying to behave in
them to the utmost according to his own personal sense of the obligations
of honour, duty, and kindness. In yet another part of his being, he
cherished, as his great countryman Scott had done before him, an intense
underlying longing for the life of action, danger, and command. ‘Action,
Colvin, action,’ I remember his crying eagerly to me with his hand on my
arm as we lay basking for his health’s sake in a boat off the scented
shores of the Cap St. Martin. Another time—this was on his way to a
winter cure at Davos—some friend had given him General Hamley’s
_Operations of War_:—‘in which,’ he writes to his father, ‘I am drowned a
thousand fathoms deep, and O that I had been a soldier is still my cry.’
In so frail a tabernacle was it that the aspirations of the artist, the
unconventional moralist, the lover of all experience, and the lover of
daring action had to learn to reconcile themselves as best they might.
Frail as it was, it contained withal a strong animal nature, and he was
as much exposed to the storms and solicitations of sense as to the
cravings and questionings of the spirit. Fortunately, with all these
ardent and divers instincts, there were present two invaluable gifts
besides—that of humour, which for all his stress of being and vivid
consciousness of self saved him from ever seeing himself for long
together out of a just proportion, and kept wholesome laughter always
ready at his lips; and that of a perfectly warm, loyal, and tender heart,
which through all his experiments and agitations made the law of kindness
the one ruling law of his life. In the end, lack of health determined
his career, giving the chief part in his life to the artist and man of
imagination, and keeping the man of action a prisoner in the sickroom
until, by a singular turn of destiny, he was able to wring a real,
prolonged, and romantically successful adventure out of that voyage to
the Pacific which had been, in its origin, the last despairing resource
of the invalid.
To take this multiple personality from another point of view, it was part
of his genius that he never seemed to be cramped like the rest of us, at
any given time of life, within the limits of his proper age, but to be
child, boy, young man, and old man all at once. There was never a time
in his life when Stevenson had to say with St. Augustine, ‘Behold! my
childhood is dead, but I am alive.’ The child, as his _Garden of Verses_
vividly attests, and as will be seen by abundant evidence in the course
of the following pages, lived on always in him, not in memory only, but
in real survival, with all its freshness of perception unimpaired, and
none of its play instincts in the least degree extinguished or made
ashamed. As for the perennial boy in Stevenson, that is too apparent to
need remark. It was as a boy for boys that he wrote the best known of
his books, _Treasure Island_; with all boys that he met, provided they
were really boys and not prigs nor puppies, he was instantly at home; and
the ideal of a career which he most inwardly and longingly cherished, the
ideals of practical adventure and romance, of desirable predicaments and
gratifying modes of escape from them, were from first to last those of a
boy. At the same time, even when I first knew him, there were about him
occasional traits and glimpses of old sagacity, of premature life-wisdom
and experience, such as find expression, for instance, in the essay
_Virginibus Puerisque_, among other matter more according with his then
age of twenty-six.
Again, it is said that in every poet there must be something of the
woman—the receptivity, the emotional nature. If to be impressionable in
the extreme, quick in sympathy and feeling, ardent in attachment, and
full of pity for the weak and suffering, is to be womanly, Stevenson was
certainly all those; he was even like a woman in being _ἀρτίδακρυς_,
easily moved to tears at the touch of pity or affection, or even at any
specially poignant impression of art or beauty. But yet, if any one word
were to be chosen for the predominant quality of his character and
example, I suppose that word would be manly. In all his habits and
instincts he was the least effeminate of men; and effeminacy, or aught
approaching sexlessness, was perhaps the only quality in man with which
he had no patience. In his gentle and complying nature there were
strains of iron tenacity and will. He had both kinds of physical
courage—the active, delighting in danger, and the passive, unshaken in
endurance. In the moral courage of facing situations and consequences,
of cheerful self-discipline and readiness to pay for faults committed, of
outspokenness, admitting no ambiguous relations and clearing away the
clouds from human intercourse, I have not known his equal. His great
countryman Scott, as this book will prove, was not more manfully free
from artistic jealousy or the least shade of irritability under
criticism, or more modestly and unfeignedly inclined to exaggerate the
qualities of other people’s work and to underrate those of his own. His
severest critic was always himself; the next most severe, those of his
own household and intimacy, whose love made them jealous lest he should
fall short of his best; for he lived in an atmosphere of love, indeed,
but not of flattery. Of the humorous and engaging parts of vanity and
egoism, which led him to make infinite talk and fun about himself, and
use his own experiences as a key for unlocking the confidences of others,
Stevenson had plenty; but of the morose and fretful parts never a shade.
‘A little Irish girl,’ he wrote once during a painful crisis of his life,
‘is now reading my book aloud to her sister at my elbow; they chuckle,
and I feel flattered.—Yours, R. L. S. _P.S._ Now they yawn, and I am
indifferent. Such a wisely conceived thing is vanity.’ If only vanity
so conceived were commoner! And whatever might be the abstract and
philosophical value of that somewhat grimly stoical conception of the
universe, of conduct and duty, at which in mature years he had arrived,
want of manliness is certainly not its fault. Nor is any such want to be
found in the practice which he founded on or combined with it; in his
invincible gaiety and sweetness under sufferings and deprivations the
most galling to him; in the temper which made his presence in health or
sickness a perpetual sunshine to those about him. Take the kind of
maxims of life which he was accustomed to forge for himself and to act
by:—‘Acts may be forgiven; not even God can forgive the hanger-back.’
‘Choose the best, if you can; or choose the worst; that which hangs in
the wind dangles from a gibbet.’ ‘“Shall I?” said Feeble-mind; and the
echo said, “Fie!”’ ‘“Do I love?” said Loveless; and the echo laughed.’
‘A fault known is a fault cured to the strong; but to the weak it is a
fetter riveted.’ ‘The mean man doubts, the great-hearted is deceived.’
‘Great-heart was deceived. “Very well,” said Great-heart.’ ‘“I have not
forgotten my umbrella,” said the careful man; but the lightning struck
him.’ ‘Nullity wanted nothing; so he supposed he wanted advice.’ ‘Evil
was called Youth till he was old, and then he was called Habit.’ ‘Fear
kept the house; and still he must pay taxes.’ ‘Shame had a fine bed, but
where was slumber? Once he was in jail he slept.’ With this moralist
maxims meant actions; and where shall we easily find a much manlier
spirit of wisdom than this?
There was yet another and very different side to Stevenson which struck
others more than it struck myself, namely, that of the perfectly
freakish, not perfectly human, irresponsible madcap or jester which
sometimes appeared in him. It is true that his demoniac quickness of wit
and intelligence suggested occasionally a ‘spirit of air and fire’ rather
than one of earth; that he was abundantly given to all kinds of quirk and
laughter; and that there was no jest (saving the unkind) he would not
make and relish. In the streets of Edinburgh he had certainly been known
for queer pranks and mystifications in youth; and up to middle life there
seemed to some of his friends to be much, if not of the Puck, at least of
the Ariel, about him. The late Mr. J. A. Symonds always called him
Sprite; qualifying the name, however, by the epithets ‘most fantastic,
but most human.’ To me the essential humanity was always the thing most
apparent. In a fire well nourished of seasoned ship-timber, the flames
glance fantastically and of many colours, but the glow at heart is ever
deep and strong; it was at such a glow that the friends of Stevenson were
accustomed to warm their hands, while they admired and were entertained
by the shifting lights.
It was only in talk, as I have said, that all the many lights and colours
of this richly compounded spirit could be seen in full play. He would
begin no matter how—in early days often with a jest at his own absurd
garments, or with the recitation, in his vibrating voice and full Scotch
accent, of some snatch of poetry that was haunting him, or with a
rhapsody of analytic delight over some minute accident of beauty or
expressiveness that had struck his observation, and would have escaped
that of everybody else, in man, woman, child, or external nature. And
forthwith the floodgates would be opened, and the talk would stream on in
endless, never importunate, flood and variety. A hundred fictitious
characters would be invented, differentiated, and launched on their
imaginary careers; a hundred ingenious problems of conduct and cases of
honour would be set and solved, in a manner often quite opposed to
conventional precept; romantic voyages would be planned and followed out
in vision, with a thousand incidents, to all the corners of our own
planet and of others; the possibilities of life and art would be
illuminated with glancing search-lights of bewildering range and
penetration, the most sober argument alternating with the maddest freaks
of fancy, high poetic eloquence with coruscations of insanely apposite
slang—the earthiest jape anon shooting up into the empyrean and changing
into the most ethereal fantasy—the stalest and most vulgarised forms of
speech gaining brilliancy and illuminating power from some hitherto
undreamt-of application—and all the while an atmosphere of goodwill
diffusing itself from the speaker, a glow of eager benignity and
affectionate laughter emanating from his presence, till every one about
him seemed to catch something of his own gift and inspiration. This
sympathetic power of inspiring others was the special and distinguishing
note of Stevenson’s conversation. He would keep a houseful or a single
companion entertained all day, and day after day and half the nights, yet
never seemed to dominate the talk or absorb it; rather he helped every
one about him to discover and to exercise unexpected powers of their own.
The point could hardly be better brought out than it is in a fragment
which I borrow from Mr. Henley of an unpublished character-sketch of his
friend: ‘I leave his praise in this direction (the telling of Scottish
vernacular stories) to others. It is more to my purpose to note that he
will discourse with you of morals, music, marbles, men, manners,
metaphysics, medicine, mangold-wurzel—_que scays-je_?—with equal insight
into essentials and equal pregnancy and felicity of utterance; and that
he will stop with you to make mud pies in the first gutter, range in your
company whatever heights of thought and feeling you have found
accessible, and end by guiding you to altitudes far nearer the stars than
you have ever dreamed of footing it; and that at the last he makes you
wonder which to admire the more—his easy familiarity with the Eternal
Veracities or the brilliant flashes of imbecility with which his
excursions into the Infinite are sometimes diversified. He radiates
talk, as the sun does light and heat; and after an evening—or a week—with
him, you come forth with a sense of satisfaction in your own capacity
which somehow proves superior even to the inevitable conclusion that your
brilliance was but the reflection of his own, and that all the while you
were only playing the part of Rubinstein’s piano or Sarasate’s violin.’
All this the reader should imagine as helped by the most speaking of
presences: a steady, penetrating fire in the wide-set eyes, a compelling
power and sweetness in the smile; courteous, waving gestures of the arms
and long, nervous hands, a lit cigarette generally held between the
fingers; continual rapid shiftings and pacings to and fro as he
conversed: rapid, but not flurried nor awkward, for there was a grace in
his attenuated but well-carried figure, and his movements were light,
deft, and full of spring. When I first knew him he was passing through a
period of neatness between two of Bohemian carelessness as to dress; so
that the effect of his charm was immediate. At other times of his youth
there was something for strangers, and even for friends, to get over in
the odd garments which it was his whim to wear—the badge, as they always
seemed to me, partly of a genuine carelessness, certainly of a genuine
lack of cash (the little he had was always absolutely at the disposal of
his friends), partly of a deliberate detachment from any particular
social class or caste, partly of his love of pickles and adventures,
which he thought befel a man thus attired more readily than another. But
this slender, slovenly, nondescript apparition, long-visaged and
long-haired, had only to speak in order to be recognised in the first
minute for a witty and charming gentleman, and within the first five for
a master spirit and man of genius. There were, indeed, certain stolidly
conventional and superciliously official kinds of persons, both at home
and abroad, who were incapable of looking beyond the clothes, and eyed
him always with frozen suspicion. This attitude used sometimes in youth
to drive him into fits of flaming anger, which put him helplessly at a
disadvantage unless, or until, he could call the sense of humour to his
help. For the rest, his human charm was the same for all kinds of
people, without the least distinction of class or caste; for worldly wise
old great ladies, whom he reminded of famous poets in their youth; for
his brother artists and men of letters, perhaps, above all; for the
ordinary clubman; for his physicians, who could never do enough for him;
for domestic servants, who adored him; for the English policeman even, on
whom he often tried, quite in vain, to pass himself as one of the
criminal classes; for the common seaman, the shepherd, the street arab,
or the tramp. Even in the imposed silence and restraint of extreme
sickness the magnetic power and attraction of the man made itself felt,
and there seemed to be more vitality and fire of the spirit in him as he
lay exhausted and speechless in bed than in an ordinary roomful of people
in health.
But I have strayed from my purpose, which is only to indicate that in the
best of these letters of Stevenson’s you have some echo, far away indeed,
but yet the nearest, of his talk—talk which could never be taken down,
and has left only an ineffaceable impression in the memory of his
friends. The letters, it should be added, do not represent him at all
fully until about the thirtieth year of his age, the beginning of the
settled and married period of his life. From then onwards, and
especially from the beginning of Part VI. (the Hyères period), they
present a pretty full and complete autobiography, if not of doings, at
any rate of moods and feelings. In the earlier periods, his
correspondence for the most part expresses his real self either too
little or else one-sidedly. I have omitted very many letters of his
boyish and student days as being too immature or uninteresting; and many
of the confidences and confessions of his later youth, though they are
those of a beautiful spirit, whether as too intimate, or as giving a
disproportionate prominence to passing troubles. When he is found in
these days writing in a melancholy or minor key, it must be remembered
that at the same moment, in direct intercourse with any friend, his
spirits would instantly rise, and he would be found the gayest of
laughing companions. Very many letters or snatches of letters of nearly
all dates to his familiars have also been omitted as not intelligible
without a knowledge of the current jests, codes, and catchwords of
conversation between him and them. At one very interesting period of his
life, from about his twenty-fifth to his twenty-ninth year, he disused
the habit of letter-writing almost entirely.
In choosing from among what remained I have used the best discretion that
I could. Stevenson’s feelings and relations throughout life were in
almost all directions so warm and kindly, that next to nothing had to be
suppressed from fear of giving pain. On the other hand, he drew people
towards him with so much confidence and affection, and met their openness
with so much of his own, that an editor could not but feel the frequent
risk of inviting readers to trespass too far on purely private affairs
and feelings, including those of the living. This was a point upon which
in his lifetime he felt strongly. That excellent critic, Mr. Walter
Raleigh, has noticed, as one of the merits of Stevenson’s personal essays
and accounts of travel, that few men have written more or more
attractively of themselves without ever taking the public unduly into
familiarity or overstepping proper bounds of reticence. Public prying
into private lives, the propagation of gossip by the press, and printing
of private letters during the writer’s lifetime, were things he hated.
Once, indeed, he very superfluously gave himself a dangerous cold by
dancing before a bonfire in his garden at the news of a ‘society’ editor
having been committed to prison; and the only approach to a difference he
ever had with one of his lifelong friends arose from the publication,
without permission, of one of his letters written on his first Pacific
voyage (see below, vol. ii. p. 121).
How far, then, must I regard his instructions about publication as
authorising me to go after his death beyond the limits which he had been
so careful in observing and desiring others to observe in life? How much
may now fairly become public of that which had been held sacred and
hitherto private among his friends? To cut out all that is strictly
personal and intimate were to leave his story untold and half the charm
of his character unrevealed; to put in too much were to break all bonds
of that privacy which he so carefully regarded while he lived. I know
not if I have at all been able to hit the mean, and to succeed in making
these letters, as it has been my object to make them, present, without
offence or intrusion, a just, a living, and a proportionate picture of
the man, so far as they will yield it. There is one respect in which his
own practice and principle has had to be in some degree violated, if the
work was to be done at all. Except in the single case of the essay
‘Ordered South,’ he would never in writing for the public adopt the
invalid point of view, or invite any attention to his infirmities. ‘To
me,’ he says, ‘the medicine bottles on my chimney and the blood on my
handkerchief are accidents; they do not colour my view of life; and I
should think myself a trifler and in bad taste if I introduced the world
to these unimportant privacies.’ But from his letters to his family and
friends, these matters could not possibly be quite left out. The tale of
his life, in the years when he was most of a correspondent, was in truth
a tale of daily and nightly battle against weakness and physical distress
and danger. To those who loved him, the incidents of this battle were
communicated, sometimes gravely, sometimes laughingly. I have very
greatly cut down such bulletins, but could not manage to omit them
altogether. Generally speaking, I have used the editorial privilege of
omission without scruple where I thought it desirable. And in regard to
the text, I have not held myself bound to reproduce all the author’s
minor eccentricities of spelling and the like. As all his friends are
aware, to spell in a quite accurate and grown-up manner was a thing which
this master of English letters was never able to learn; but to reproduce
such trivial slips in print is, I think, to distract the reader’s
attention from the main matter. A normal orthography has therefore been
adopted throughout.
Lastly, I have to express my thanks to my friend Mr. George Smith,
proprietor of the _Dictionary of National Biography_, for permission to
reprint in this and in following sectional introductions a few paragraphs
from that work.
S. C.
_August_ 1899.
I
STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH
TRAVELS AND EXCURSIONS
1868–1873
INTRODUCTION.
THE following section consists chiefly of extracts from the
correspondence and journals addressed by Louis Stevenson, as a lad of
eighteen to twenty-two, to his father and mother during summer excursions
to the Scottish coast or to the continent. There exist enough of them to
fill a volume; but it is not in letters of this kind to his family that a
young man unbosoms himself most freely, and these are perhaps not quite
devoid of the qualities of the guide-book and the descriptive exercise.
Nevertheless, they seem to me to contain enough signs of the future
master-writer, enough of character, observation, and skill in expression,
to make a few worth giving by way of an opening chapter to the present
book. Among them are interspersed one or two of a different character
addressed to other correspondents.
But, first, it is desirable that readers not acquainted with the
circumstances and conditions of Stevenson’s parentage and early life
should be here, as briefly as possible, informed of them. On both sides
of the house he came of capable and cultivated stock. His grandfather
was Robert Stevenson, civil engineer, highly distinguished as the builder
of the Bell Rock lighthouse. By this Robert Stevenson, his three sons,
and two of his grandsons now living, the business of civil engineers in
general, and of official engineers to the Commissioners of Northern
Lights in particular, has been carried on at Edinburgh with high credit
and public utility for almost a century. Thomas Stevenson, the youngest
of the three sons of the original Robert, was Robert Louis Stevenson’s
father. He was a man not only of mark, zeal, and inventiveness in his
profession, but of a singularly interesting personality; a staunch friend
and sagacious adviser, trenchant in judgment and demonstrative in
emotion, outspoken, dogmatic,—despotic, even, in little things, but
withal essentially chivalrous and soft-hearted; apt to pass with the
swiftest transition from moods of gloom or sternness to those of tender
or freakish gaiety, and commanding a gift of humorous and figurative
speech second only to that of his more famous son.
Thomas Stevenson was married to Margaret Isabella, youngest daughter of
the Rev. Lewis Balfour, for many years minister of the parish of Colinton
in Midlothian. This Mr. Balfour (described by his grandson in the essay
called ‘The Manse’) was of the stock of the Balfours of Pilrig, and
grandson to that James Balfour, professor first of moral philosophy, and
afterwards of the law of nature and of nations, who was held in
particular esteem as a philosophical controversialist by David Hume. His
wife, Henrietta Smith, a daughter of the Rev. George Smith of Galston, to
whose gift as a preacher Burns refers scoffingly in the _Holy Fair_, is
said to have been a woman of uncommon beauty and charm of manner. Their
daughter, Mrs. Thomas Stevenson, suffered in early and middle life from
chest and nerve troubles, and her son may have inherited from her some of
his constitutional weakness as well as of his social and intellectual
vivacity and his taste for letters. Robert Louis (baptized Robert Lewis
Balfour) Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850, at 8 Howard Place,
Edinburgh, and was the only child of his parents. His health was infirm
from the first, and he was with difficulty kept alive by the combined
care of a capable and watchful mother and a perfectly devoted nurse,
Alison Cunningham; to whom his lifelong gratitude will be found
touchingly expressed in the course of the following letters. In 1858 he
was near dying of a gastric fever, and was at all times subject to acute
catarrhal and bronchial affections and extreme nervous excitability. In
January 1853 his parents moved to 1 Inverleith Terrace, and in May 1857
to 17 Heriot Row, which continued to be their Edinburgh home until the
death of Thomas Stevenson in 1887. Much of his time was also spent in
the manse of Colinton on the Water of Leith, the home of his maternal
grandfather. Of this place his childish recollections were happy and
idyllic, while those of city life were coloured rather by impressions of
sickness, fever, and nocturnal terrors. If, however, he suffered much as
a child from the distresses, he also enjoyed to the full the pleasures,
of imagination. Illness confined him much within the house, but
imagination kept him always content and busy. In the days of the Crimean
war some one gave the child a cheap toy sword; and when his father
depreciated it, he said, ‘I tell you, the sword is of gold, and the
sheath of silver, and the boy is very well off and quite contented.’ As
disabilities closed in on him in after life, he would never grumble at
any gift, however niggardly, of fortune, and the anecdote is as
characteristic of the man as of the child. He was eager and full of
invention in every kind of play, whether solitary or sociable, and seems
to have been treated as something of a small, sickly prince among a whole
cousinhood of playmates of both the Balfour and the Stevenson
connections. He was also a greedy reader, or rather listener to reading;
for it was not until his eighth year that he began to read easily or
habitually to himself. He has recorded how his first conscious
impression of pleasure from the sound and cadence of words was received
from certain passages in M‘Cheyne’s hymns as recited to him by his nurse.
Bible stories, the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, and Mayne Reid’s tales were
especially, and it would seem equally, his delight. He began early to
take pleasure in attempts at composition of his own. A history of Moses,
dictated in his sixth year, and an account of travels in Perth, in his
ninth, are still extant. Ill health prevented him getting much regular
or continuous schooling. He attended first (1858–61) a preparatory
school kept by a Mr. Henderson in India Street; and next (at intervals
for some time after the autumn of 1861) the Edinburgh Academy. One of
his tutors at the former school writes: ‘He was the most delightful boy I
ever knew; full of fun, full of tender feeling, ready for his lessons,
ready for a story, ready for fun.’ From very early days, both as child
and boy, he must have had something of that power to charm which
distinguished him above other men in after life. ‘I loike that
bo-o-o-o-y,’ a heavy Dutchman was heard saying to himself over and over
again, whom at the age of about thirteen he had held in amused
conversation during a whole passage from Ostend. The same quality, with
the signs which he always showed of quick natural intelligence when he
chose to learn, must have helped to spare him many punishments from
teachers which he earned by persistent and ingenious truantry. ‘I
think,’ remarks his mother, ‘they liked talking to him better than
teaching him.’
For a few months in the autumn of 1863, when his parents had been ordered
to winter at Mentone for the sake of his mother’s health, he was sent to
a boarding-school kept by a Mr. Wyatt at Spring Grove, near London. It
is not my intention to treat the reader to the series of childish and
boyish letters of these days which parental fondness has preserved. But
here is one written from his English school when he was about thirteen,
which is both amusing in itself and had a certain influence on his
destiny, inasmuch as his appeal led to his being taken out to join his
parents on the French Riviera; which from that day forward he never
ceased to love, and for which the longing, amid the gloom of Edinburgh
winters, often afterwards gripped him by the heart.
_Spring Grove School_, 12_th_ _November_ 1863.
MA CHERE MAMAN,—Jai recu votre lettre Aujourdhui et comme le jour
prochaine est mon jour de naisance je vous écrit ce lettre. Ma grande
gatteaux est arrivé il leve 12 livres et demi le prix etait 17 shillings.
Sur la soirée de Monseigneur Faux il y etait quelques belles feux
d’artifice. Mais les polissons entrent dans notre champ et nos feux
d’artifice et handkerchiefs disappeared quickly, but we charged them out
of the field. Je suis presque driven mad par une bruit terrible tous les
garcons kik up comme grand un bruit qu’ll est possible. I hope you will
find your house at Mentone nice. I have been obliged to stop from
writing by the want of a pen, but now I have one, so I will continue.
My dear papa, you told me to tell you whenever I was miserable. I do not
feel well, and I wish to get home.
Do take me with you.
R. STEVENSON.
2 _Sulyarde Terrace_, _Torquay_, _Thursday_ (_April_ 1866).
RESPECTED PATERNAL RELATIVE,—I write to make a request of the most
moderate nature. Every year I have cost you an enormous—nay,
elephantine—sum of money for drugs and physician’s fees, and the most
expensive time of the twelve months was March.
But this year the biting Oriental blasts, the howling tempests, and the
general ailments of the human race have been successfully braved by yours
truly.
Does not this deserve remuneration?
I appeal to your charity, I appeal to your generosity, I appeal to your
justice, I appeal to your accounts, I appeal, in fine, to your purse.
My sense of generosity forbids the receipt of more—my sense of justice
forbids the receipt of less—than half-a-crown.—Greeting from, Sir, your
most affectionate and needy son,
R. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Wick_, _Friday_, _September_ 11, 1868.
MY DEAR MOTHER,—. . . Wick lies at the end or elbow of an open triangular
bay, hemmed on either side by shores, either cliff or steep earth-bank,
of no great height. The grey houses of Pulteney extend along the
southerly shore almost to the cape; and it is about half-way down this
shore—no, six-sevenths way down—that the new breakwater extends athwart
the bay.
Certainly Wick in itself possesses no beauty: bare, grey shores, grim
grey houses, grim grey sea; not even the gleam of red tiles; not even the
greenness of a tree. The southerly heights, when I came here, were black
with people, fishers waiting on wind and night. Now all the S.Y.S.
(Stornoway boats) have beaten out of the bay, and the Wick men stay
indoors or wrangle on the quays with dissatisfied fish-curers, knee-high
in brine, mud, and herring refuse. The day when the boats put out to go
home to the Hebrides, the girl here told me there was ‘a black wind’; and
on going out, I found the epithet as justifiable as it was picturesque.
A cold, _black_ southerly wind, with occasional rising showers of rain;
it was a fine sight to see the boats beat out a-teeth of it.
In Wick I have never heard any one greet his neighbour with the usual
‘Fine day’ or ‘Good morning.’ Both come shaking their heads, and both
say, ‘Breezy, breezy!’ And such is the atrocious quality of the climate,
that the remark is almost invariably justified by the fact.
The streets are full of the Highland fishers, lubberly, stupid,
inconceivably lazy and heavy to move. You bruise against them, tumble
over them, elbow them against the wall—all to no purpose; they will not
budge; and you are forced to leave the pavement every step.
To the south, however, is as fine a piece of coast scenery as I ever saw.
Great black chasms, huge black cliffs, rugged and over-hung gullies,
natural arches, and deep green pools below them, almost too deep to let
you see the gleam of sand among the darker weed: there are deep caves
too. In one of these lives a tribe of gipsies. The men are _always_
drunk, simply and truthfully always. From morning to evening the great
villainous-looking fellows are either sleeping off the last debauch, or
hulking about the cove ‘in the horrors.’ The cave is deep, high, and
airy, and might be made comfortable enough. But they just live among
heaped boulders, damp with continual droppings from above, with no more
furniture than two or three tin pans, a truss of rotten straw, and a few
ragged cloaks. In winter the surf bursts into the mouth and often forces
them to abandon it.
An _émeute_ of disappointed fishers was feared, and two ships of war are
in the bay to render assistance to the municipal authorities. This is
the ides; and, to all intents and purposes, said ides are passed. Still
there is a good deal of disturbance, many drunk men, and a double supply
of police. I saw them sent for by some people and enter an inn, in a
pretty good hurry: what it was for I do not know.
You would see by papa’s letter about the carpenter who fell off the
staging: I don’t think I was ever so much excited in my life. The man
was back at his work, and I asked him how he was; but he was a
Highlander, and—need I add it?—dickens a word could I understand of his
answer. What is still worse, I find the people here-about—that is to
say, the Highlanders, not the northmen—don’t understand _me_.
I have lost a shilling’s worth of postage stamps, which has damped my
ardour for buying big lots of ’em: I’ll buy them one at a time as I want
’em for the future.
The Free Church minister and I got quite thick. He left last night about
two in the morning, when I went to turn in. He gave me the enclosed.—I
remain your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Wick_, September 5, 1868. _Monday_.
MY DEAR MAMMA,—This morning I got a delightful haul: your letter of the
fourth (surely mis-dated); Papa’s of same day; Virgil’s _Bucolics_, very
thankfully received; and Aikman’s _Annals_, {17} a precious and most
acceptable donation, for which I tender my most ebullient thanksgivings.
I almost forgot to drink my tea and eat mine egg.
It contains more detailed accounts than anything I ever saw, except
Wodrow, without being so portentously tiresome and so desperately
overborne with footnotes, proclamations, acts of Parliament, and
citations as that last history.
I have been reading a good deal of Herbert. He’s a clever and a devout
cove; but in places awfully twaddley (if I may use the word). Oughtn’t
this to rejoice Papa’s heart—
‘Carve or discourse; do not a famine fear.
Who carves is kind to two, who talks to all.’
You understand? The ‘fearing a famine’ is applied to people gulping down
solid vivers without a word, as if the ten lean kine began to-morrow.
Do you remember condemning something of mine for being too obtrusively
didactic. Listen to Herbert—
‘Is it not verse except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lover’s loves?
_Must all be veiled_, _while he that reads divines_
_Catching the sense at two removes_?’
You see, ‘except’ was used for ‘unless’ before 1630.
* * * * *
_Tuesday_.—The riots were a hum. No more has been heard; and one of the
war-steamers has deserted in disgust.
The _Moonstone_ is frightfully interesting: isn’t the detective prime?
Don’t say anything about the plot; for I have only read on to the end of
Betteredge’s narrative, so don’t know anything about it yet.
I thought to have gone on to Thurso to-night, but the coach was full; so
I go to-morrow instead.
To-day I had a grouse: great glorification.
There is a drunken brute in the house who disturbed my rest last night.
He’s a very respectable man in general, but when on the ‘spree’ a most
consummate fool. When he came in he stood on the top of the stairs and
preached in the dark with great solemnity and no audience from 12 P.M. to
half-past one. At last I opened my door. ‘Are we to have no sleep at
all for that _drunken brute_?’ I said. As I hoped, it had the desired
effect. ‘Drunken brute!’ he howled, in much indignation; then after a
pause, in a voice of some contrition, ‘Well, if I am a drunken brute,
it’s only once in the twelvemonth!’ And that was the end of him; the
insult rankled in his mind; and he retired to rest. He is a fish-curer,
a man over fifty, and pretty rich too. He’s as bad again to-day; but
I’ll be shot if he keeps me awake, I’ll douse him with water if he makes
a row.—Ever your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Wick_, _September_ 1868. _Saturday_, 10 A.M.
MY DEAR MOTHER,—The last two days have been dreadfully hard, and I was so
tired in the evenings that I could not write. In fact, last night I went
to sleep immediately after dinner, or very nearly so. My hours have been
10–2 and 3–7 out in the lighter or the small boat, in a long, heavy roll
from the nor’-east. When the dog was taken out, he got awfully ill; one
of the men, Geordie Grant by name and surname, followed _shoot_ with
considerable _éclat_; but, wonderful to relate! I kept well. My hands
are all skinned, blistered, discoloured, and engrained with tar, some of
which latter has established itself under my nails in a position of such
natural strength that it defies all my efforts to dislodge it. The worst
work I had was when David (MacDonald’s eldest) and I took the charge
ourselves. He remained in the lighter to tighten or slacken the guys as
we raised the pole towards the perpendicular, with two men. I was with
four men in the boat. We dropped an anchor out a good bit, then tied a
cord to the pole, took a turn round the sternmost thwart with it, and
pulled on the anchor line. As the great, big, wet hawser came in it
soaked you to the skin: I was the sternest (used, by way of variety, for
sternmost) of the lot, and had to coil it—a work which involved, from
_its_ being so stiff and _your_ being busy pulling with all your might,
no little trouble and an extra ducking. We got it up; and, just as we
were going to sing ‘Victory!’ one of the guys slipped in, the pole
tottered—went over on its side again like a shot, and behold the end of
our labour.
You see, I have been roughing it; and though some parts of the letter may
be neither very comprehensible nor very interesting to _you_, I think
that perhaps it might amuse Willie Traquair, who delights in all such
dirty jobs.
The first day, I forgot to mention, was like mid-winter for cold, and
rained incessantly so hard that the livid white of our cold-pinched faces
wore a sort of inflamed rash on the windward side.
I am not a bit the worse of it, except fore-mentioned state of hands, a
slight crick in my neck from the rain running down, and general stiffness
from pulling, hauling, and tugging for dear life.
We have got double weights at the guys, and hope to get it up like a
shot.
What fun you three must be having! I hope the cold don’t disagree with
you.—I remain, my dear mother, your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Pulteney_, _Wick_, _Sunday_, _September_ 1868.
MY DEAR MOTHER,—Another storm: wind higher, rain thicker: the wind still
rising as the night closes in and the sea slowly rising along with it; it
looks like a three days’ gale.
Last week has been a blank one: always too much sea.
I enjoyed myself very much last night at the R.’s. There was a little
dancing, much singing and supper.
Are you not well that you do not write? I haven’t heard from you for
more than a fortnight.
The wind fell yesterday and rose again to-day; it is a dreadful evening;
but the wind is keeping the sea down as yet. Of course, nothing more has
been done to the poles; and I can’t tell when I shall be able to leave,
not for a fortnight yet, I fear, at the earliest, for the winds are
persistent. Where’s Murra? Is Cummie struck dumb about the boots? I
wish you would get somebody to write an interesting letter and say how
you are, for you’re on the broad of your back I see. There hath arrived
an inroad of farmers to-night; and I go to avoid them to M— if he’s
disengaged, to the R.’s if not.
* * * * *
_Sunday_ (_later_).—Storm without: wind and rain: a confused mass of
wind-driven rain-squalls, wind-ragged mist, foam, spray, and great, grey
waves. Of this hereafter; in the meantime let us follow the due course
of historic narrative.
Seven P.M. found me at Breadalbane Terrace, clad in spotless blacks,
white tie, shirt, et cætera, and finished off below with a pair of
navvies’ boots. How true that the devil is betrayed by his feet! A
message to Cummy at last. Why, O treacherous woman! were my dress boots
withheld?
Dramatis personæ: père R., amusing, long-winded, in many points like
papa; mère R., nice, delicate, likes hymns, knew Aunt Margaret (’t’ould
man knew Uncle Alan); fille R., nommée Sara (no h), rather nice, lights
up well, good voice, _interested_ face; Miss L., nice also, washed out a
little, and, I think, a trifle sentimental; fils R., in a Leith office,
smart, full of happy epithet, amusing. They are very nice and very kind,
asked me to come back—‘any night you feel dull; and any night doesn’t
mean no night: we’ll be so glad to see you.’ _Cest la mère qui parle_.
I was back there again to-night. There was hymn-singing, and general
religious controversy till eight, after which talk was secular. Mrs. S.
was deeply distressed about the boot business. She consoled me by saying
that many would be glad to have such feet whatever shoes they had on.
Unfortunately, fishers and seafaring men are too facile to be compared
with! This looks like enjoyment: better speck than Anster.
I have done with frivolity. This morning I was awakened by Mrs. S. at
the door. ‘There’s a ship ashore at Shaltigoe!’ As my senses slowly
flooded, I heard the whistling and the roaring of wind, and the lashing
of gust-blown and uncertain flaws of rain. I got up, dressed, and went
out. The mizzled sky and rain blinded you.
[Picture: Diagram]
C D is the new pier.
A the schooner ashore. B the salmon house.
She was a Norwegian: coming in she saw our first gauge-pole, standing at
point E. Norse skipper thought it was a sunk smack, and dropped his
anchor in full drift of sea: chain broke: schooner came ashore. Insured
laden with wood: skipper owner of vessel and cargo bottom out.
I was in a great fright at first lest we should be liable; but it seems
that’s all right.
Some of the waves were twenty feet high. The spray rose eighty feet at
the new pier. Some wood has come ashore, and the roadway seems carried
away. There is something fishy at the far end where the cross wall is
building; but till we are able to get along, all speculation is vain.
I am so sleepy I am writing nonsense.
I stood a long while on the cope watching the sea below me; I hear its
dull, monotonous roar at this moment below the shrieking of the wind; and
there came ever recurring to my mind the verse I am so fond of:—
‘But yet the Lord that is on high
Is more of might by far
Than noise of many waters is
Or great sea-billows are.’
The thunder at the wall when it first struck—the rush along ever growing
higher—the great jet of snow-white spray some forty feet above you—and
the ‘noise of many waters,’ the roar, the hiss, the ‘shrieking’ among the
shingle as it fell head over heels at your feet. I watched if it threw
the big stones at the wall; but it never moved them.
* * * * *
_Monday_.—The end of the work displays gaps, cairns of ten ton blocks,
stones torn from their places and turned right round. The damage above
water is comparatively little: what there may be below, _on ne sait pas
encore_. The roadway is torn away, cross heads, broken planks tossed
here and there, planks gnawn and mumbled as if a starved bear had been
trying to eat them, planks with spales lifted from them as if they had
been dressed with a rugged plane, one pile swaying to and fro clear of
the bottom, the rails in one place sunk a foot at least. This was not a
great storm, the waves were light and short. Yet when we are standing at
the office, I felt the ground beneath me _quail_ as a huge roller
thundered on the work at the last year’s cross wall.
How could _noster amicus Q. maximus_ appreciate a storm at Wick? It
requires a little of the artistic temperament, of which Mr. T. S., {24}
C.E., possesses some, whatever he may say. I can’t look at it
practically however: that will come, I suppose, like grey hair or coffin
nails.
Our pole is snapped: a fortnight’s work and the loss of the Norse
schooner all for nothing!—except experience and dirty clothes.—Your
affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. CHURCHILL BABINGTON
[_Swanston Cottage_, _Lothianburn_, _Summer_ 1871.]
MY DEAR MAUD,—If you have forgotten the hand-writing—as is like
enough—you will find the name of a former correspondent (don’t know how
to spell that word) at the end. I have begun to write to you before now,
but always stuck somehow, and left it to drown in a drawerful of like
fiascos. This time I am determined to carry through, though I have
nothing specially to say.
We look fairly like summer this morning; the trees are blackening out of
their spring greens; the warmer suns have melted the hoarfrost of daisies
of the paddock; and the blackbird, I fear, already beginning to ‘stint
his pipe of mellower days’—which is very apposite (I can’t spell anything
to-day—_one_ p or _two_?) and pretty. All the same, we have been having
shocking weather—cold winds and grey skies.
I have been reading heaps of nice books; but I can’t go back so far. I
am reading Clarendon’s _Hist. Rebell._ at present, with which I am more
pleased than I expected, which is saying a good deal. It is a pet idea
of mine that one gets more real truth out of one avowed partisan than out
of a dozen of your sham impartialists—wolves in sheep’s
clothing—simpering honesty as they suppress documents. After all, what
one wants to know is not what people did, but why they did it—or rather,
why they _thought_ they did it; and to learn that, you should go to the
men themselves. Their very falsehood is often more than another man’s
truth.
I have possessed myself of Mrs. Hutchinson, which, of course, I admire,
etc. But is there not an irritating deliberation and correctness about
her and everybody connected with her? If she would only write bad
grammar, or forget to finish a sentence, or do something or other that
looks fallible, it would be a relief. I sometimes wish the old Colonel
had got drunk and beaten her, in the bitterness of my spirit. I know I
felt a weight taken off my heart when I heard he was extravagant. It is
quite possible to be too good for this evil world; and unquestionably,
Mrs. Hutchinson was. The way in which she talks of herself makes one’s
blood run cold. There—I am glad to have got that out—but don’t say it to
anybody—seal of secrecy.
Please tell Mr. Babington that I have never forgotten one of his
drawings—a Rubens, I think—a woman holding up a model ship. That woman
had more life in her than ninety per cent. of the lame humans that you
see crippling about this earth.
By the way, that is a feature in art which seems to have come in with the
Italians. Your old Greek statues have scarce enough vitality in them to
keep their monstrous bodies fresh withal. A shrewd country attorney, in
a turned white neckcloth and rusty blacks, would just take one of these
Agamemnons and Ajaxes quietly by his beautiful, strong arm, trot the
unresisting statue down a little gallery of legal shams, and turn the
poor fellow out at the other end, ‘naked, as from the earth he came.’
There is more latent life, more of the coiled spring in the sleeping dog,
about a recumbent figure of Michael Angelo’s than about the most excited
of Greek statues. The very marble seems to wrinkle with a wild energy
that we never feel except in dreams.
I think this letter has turned into a sermon, but I had nothing
interesting to talk about.
I do wish you and Mr. Babington would think better of it and come north
this summer. We should be so glad to see you both. _Do_ reconsider
it.—Believe me, my dear Maud, ever your most affectionate cousin,
LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM
1871?
MY DEAR CUMMY,—I was greatly pleased by your letter in many ways. Of
course, I was glad to hear from you; you know, you and I have so many old
stories between us, that even if there was nothing else, even if there
was not a very sincere respect and affection, we should always be glad to
pass a nod. I say ‘even if there was not.’ But you know right well
there is. Do not suppose that I shall ever forget those long, bitter
nights, when I coughed and coughed and was so unhappy, and you were so
patient and loving with a poor, sick child. Indeed, Cummy, I wish I
might become a man worth talking of, if it were only that you should not
have thrown away your pains.
Happily, it is not the result of our acts that makes them brave and
noble, but the acts themselves and the unselfish love that moved us to do
them. ‘Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these.’ My
dear old nurse, and you know there is nothing a man can say nearer his
heart except his mother or his wife—my dear old nurse, God will make good
to you all the good that you have done, and mercifully forgive you all
the evil. And next time when the spring comes round, and everything is
beginning once again, if you should happen to think that you might have
had a child of your own, and that it was hard you should have spent so
many years taking care of some one else’s prodigal, just you think
this—you have been for a great deal in my life; you have made much that
there is in me, just as surely as if you had conceived me; and there are
sons who are more ungrateful to their own mothers than I am to you. For
I am not ungrateful, my dear Cummy, and it is with a very sincere emotion
that I write myself your little boy,
LOUIS.
TO CHARLES BAXTER
_Dunblane_, _Friday_, 5_th_ _March_ 1872.
MY DEAR BAXTER,—By the date you may perhaps understand the purport of my
letter without any words wasted about the matter. I cannot walk with you
to-morrow, and you must not expect me. I came yesterday afternoon to
Bridge of Allan, and have been very happy ever since, as every place is
sanctified by the eighth sense, Memory. I walked up here this morning
(three miles, _tu-dieu_! a good stretch for me), and passed one of my
favourite places in the world, and one that I very much affect in spirit
when the body is tied down and brought immovably to anchor on a sickbed.
It is a meadow and bank on a corner on the river, and is connected in my
mind inseparably with Virgil’s _Eclogues_. _Hic corulis mistos inter
consedimus ulmos_, or something very like that, the passage begins (only
I know my short-winded Latinity must have come to grief over even this
much of quotation); and here, to a wish, is just such a cavern as
Menalcas might shelter himself withal from the bright noon, and, with his
lips curled backward, pipe himself blue in the face, while _Messieurs les
Arcadiens_ would roll out those cloying hexameters that sing themselves
in one’s mouth to such a curious lifting chant.
In such weather one has the bird’s need to whistle; and I, who am
specially incompetent in this art, must content myself by chattering away
to you on this bit of paper. All the way along I was thanking God that
he had made me and the birds and everything just as they are and not
otherwise; for although there was no sun, the air was so thrilled with
robins and blackbirds that it made the heart tremble with joy, and the
leaves are far enough forward on the underwood to give a fine promise for
the future. Even myself, as I say, I would not have had changed in one
_iota_ this forenoon, in spite of all my idleness and Guthrie’s lost
paper, which is ever present with me—a horrible phantom.
No one can be alone at home or in a quite new place. Memory and you must
go hand in hand with (at least) decent weather if you wish to cook up a
proper dish of solitude. It is in these little flights of mine that I
get more pleasure than in anything else. Now, at present, I am supremely
uneasy and restless—almost to the extent of pain; but O! how I enjoy it,
and how I _shall_ enjoy it afterwards (please God), if I get years enough
allotted to me for the thing to ripen in. When I am a very old and very
respectable citizen with white hair and bland manners and a gold watch, I
shall hear three crows cawing in my heart, as I heard them this morning:
I vote for old age and eighty years of retrospect. Yet, after all, I
dare say, a short shrift and a nice green grave are about as desirable.
Poor devil! how I am wearying you! Cheer up. Two pages more, and my
letter reaches its term, for I have no more paper. What delightful
things inns and waiters and bagmen are! If we didn’t travel now and
then, we should forget what the feeling of life is. The very cushion of
a railway carriage—‘the things restorative to the touch.’ I can’t write,
confound it! That’s because I am so tired with my walk. Believe me,
ever your affectionate friend,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO CHARLES BAXTER
_Dunblane_, _Tuesday_, 9_th_ _April_ 1872.
MY DEAR BAXTER,—I don’t know what you mean. I know nothing about the
Standing Committee of the Spec., did not know that such a body existed,
and even if it doth exist, must sadly repudiate all association with such
‘goodly fellowship.’ I am a ‘Rural Voluptuary’ at present. _That_ is
what is the matter with me. The Spec. may go whistle. As for ‘C.
Baxter, Esq.,’ who is he? ‘One Baxter, or Bagster, a secretary,’ I say
to mine acquaintance, ‘is at present disquieting my leisure with certain
illegal, uncharitable, unchristian, and unconstitutional documents called
_Business Letters_: _The affair is in the hands of the Police_.’ Do you
hear _that_, you evildoer? Sending business letters is surely a far more
hateful and slimy degree of wickedness than sending threatening letters;
the man who throws grenades and torpedoes is less malicious; the Devil in
red-hot hell rubs his hands with glee as he reckons up the number that go
forth spreading pain and anxiety with each delivery of the post.
I have been walking to-day by a colonnade of beeches along the brawling
Allan. My character for sanity is quite gone, seeing that I cheered my
lonely way with the following, in a triumphant chaunt: ‘Thank God for the
grass, and the fir-trees, and the crows, and the sheep, and the sunshine,
and the shadows of the fir-trees.’ I hold that he is a poor mean devil
who can walk alone, in such a place and in such weather, and doesn’t set
up his lungs and cry back to the birds and the river. Follow, follow,
follow me. Come hither, come hither, come hither—here shall you see—no
enemy—except a very slight remnant of winter and its rough weather. My
bedroom, when I awoke this morning, was full of bird-songs, which is the
greatest pleasure in life. Come hither, come hither, come hither, and
when you come bring the third part of the _Earthly Paradise_; you can get
it for me in Elliot’s for two and tenpence (2s. 10d.) (_business
habits_). Also bring an ounce of honeydew from Wilson’s.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Brussels_, _Thursday_, 25_th July_ 1872.
MY DEAR MOTHER,—I am here at last, sitting in my room, without coat or
waistcoat, and with both window and door open, and yet perspiring like a
terra-cotta jug or a Gruyère cheese.
We had a very good passage, which we certainly deserved, in compensation
for having to sleep on cabin floor, and finding absolutely nothing fit
for human food in the whole filthy embarkation. We made up for lost time
by sleeping on deck a good part of the forenoon. When I woke, Simpson
was still sleeping the sleep of the just, on a coil of ropes and (as
appeared afterwards) his own hat; so I got a bottle of Bass and a pipe
and laid hold of an old Frenchman of somewhat filthy aspect (_fiat_
_experimentum in corpore vili_) to try my French upon. I made very heavy
weather of it. The Frenchman had a very pretty young wife; but my French
always deserted me entirely when I had to answer her, and so she soon
drew away and left me to her lord, who talked of French politics, Africa,
and domestic economy with great vivacity. From Ostend a smoking-hot
journey to Brussels. At Brussels we went off after dinner to the Parc.
If any person wants to be happy, I should advise the Parc. You sit
drinking iced drinks and smoking penny cigars under great old trees. The
band place, covered walks, etc., are all lit up. And you can’t fancy how
beautiful was the contrast of the great masses of lamplit foliage and the
dark sapphire night sky with just one blue star set overhead in the
middle of the largest patch. In the dark walks, too, there are crowds of
people whose faces you cannot see, and here and there a colossal white
statue at the corner of an alley that gives the place a nice,
_artificial_, eighteenth century sentiment. There was a good deal of
summer lightning blinking overhead, and the black avenues and white
statues leapt out every minute into short-lived distinctness.
I get up to add one thing more. There is in the hotel a boy in whom I
take the deepest interest. I cannot tell you his age, but the very first
time I saw him (when I was at dinner yesterday) I was very much struck
with his appearance. There is something very leonine in his face, with a
dash of the negro especially, if I remember aright, in the mouth. He has
a great quantity of dark hair, curling in great rolls, not in little
corkscrews, and a pair of large, dark, and very steady, bold, bright
eyes. His manners are those of a prince. I felt like an overgrown
ploughboy beside him. He speaks English perfectly, but with, I think,
sufficient foreign accent to stamp him as a Russian, especially when his
manners are taken into account. I don’t think I ever saw any one who
looked like a hero before. After breakfast this morning I was talking to
him in the court, when he mentioned casually that he had caught a snake
in the Riesengebirge. ‘I have it here,’ he said; ‘would you like to see
it?’ I said yes; and putting his hand into his breast-pocket, he drew
forth not a dried serpent skin, but the head and neck of the reptile
writhing and shooting out its horrible tongue in my face. You may
conceive what a fright I got. I send off this single sheet just now in
order to let you know I am safe across; but you must not expect letters
often.
R. L. STEVENSON.
_P.S._—The snake was about a yard long, but harmless, and now, he says,
quite tame.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Hotel Landsberg_, _Frankfurt_, _Monday_, 29_th_ _July_ 1872.
. . . LAST night I met with rather an amusing adventurette. Seeing a
church door open, I went in, and was led by most importunate finger-bills
up a long stair to the top of the tower. The father smoking at the door,
the mother and the three daughters received me as if I was a friend of
the family and had come in for an evening visit. The youngest daughter
(about thirteen, I suppose, and a pretty little girl) had been learning
English at the school, and was anxious to play it off upon a real,
veritable Englander; so we had a long talk, and I was shown photographs,
etc., Marie and I talking, and the others looking on with evident delight
at having such a linguist in the family. As all my remarks were duly
translated and communicated to the rest, it was quite a good German
lesson. There was only one contretemps during the whole interview—the
arrival of another visitor, in the shape (surely) the last of God’s
creatures, a wood-worm of the most unnatural and hideous appearance, with
one great striped horn sticking out of his nose like a boltsprit. If
there are many wood-worms in Germany, I shall come home. The most
courageous men in the world must be entomologists. I had rather be a
lion-tamer.
To-day I got rather a curiosity—_Lieder und Balladen von Robert Burns_,
translated by one Silbergleit, and not so ill done either. Armed with
which, I had a swim in the Main, and then bread and cheese and Bavarian
beer in a sort of café, or at least the German substitute for a café; but
what a falling off after the heavenly forenoons in Brussels!
I have bought a meerschaum out of local sentiment, and am now very low
and nervous about the bargain, having paid dearer than I should in
England, and got a worse article, if I can form a judgment.
Do write some more, somebody. To-morrow I expect I shall go into
lodgings, as this hotel work makes the money disappear like butter in a
furnace.—Meanwhile believe me, ever your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Hotel Landsberg_, _Thursday_, 1_st_ _August_ 1872.
. . . YESTERDAY I walked to Eckenheim, a village a little way out of
Frankfurt, and turned into the alehouse. In the room, which was just
such as it would have been in Scotland, were the landlady, two
neighbours, and an old peasant eating raw sausage at the far end. I soon
got into conversation; and was astonished when the landlady, having asked
whether I were an Englishman, and received an answer in the affirmative,
proceeded to inquire further whether I were not also a Scotchman. It
turned out that a Scotch doctor—a professor—a poet—who wrote books—_gross
wie das_—had come nearly every day out of Frankfurt to the _Eckenheimer
Wirthschaft_, and had left behind him a most savoury memory in the hearts
of all its customers. One man ran out to find his name for me, and
returned with the news that it was _Cobie_ (Scobie, I suspect); and
during his absence the rest were pouring into my ears the fame and
acquirements of my countryman. He was, in some undecipherable manner,
connected with the Queen of England and one of the Princesses. He had
been in Turkey, and had there married a wife of immense wealth. They
could find apparently no measure adequate to express the size of his
books. In one way or another, he had amassed a princely fortune, and had
apparently only one sorrow, his daughter to wit, who had absconded into a
_kloster_, with a considerable slice of the mother’s _geld_. I told them
we had no klosters in Scotland, with a certain feeling of superiority.
No more had they, I was told—‘_Hier ist unser Kloster_!’ and the speaker
motioned with both arms round the taproom. Although the first torrent
was exhausted, yet the Doctor came up again in all sorts of ways, and
with or without occasion, throughout the whole interview; as, for
example, when one man, taking his pipe out of his mouth and shaking his
head, remarked _àpropos_ of nothing and with almost defiant conviction,
‘_Er war ein feiner Mann_, _der Herr Doctor_,’ and was answered by
another with ‘_Yaw_, _yaw_, _und trank immer rothen Wein_.’
Setting aside the Doctor, who had evidently turned the brains of the
entire village, they were intelligent people. One thing in particular
struck me, their honesty in admitting that here they spoke bad German,
and advising me to go to Coburg or Leipsic for German.—‘_Sie sprechen da
rein_’ (clean), said one; and they all nodded their heads together like
as many mandarins, and repeated _rein_, _so rein_ in chorus.
Of course we got upon Scotland. The hostess said, ‘_Die Schottländer
trinken gern Schnapps_,’ which may be freely translated, ‘Scotchmen are
horrid fond of whisky.’ It was impossible, of course, to combat such a
truism; and so I proceeded to explain the construction of toddy,
interrupted by a cry of horror when I mentioned the _hot_ water; and
thence, as I find is always the case, to the most ghastly romancing about
Scottish scenery and manners, the Highland dress, and everything national
or local that I could lay my hands upon. Now that I have got my German
Burns, I lean a good deal upon him for opening a conversation, and read a
few translations to every yawning audience that I can gather. I am grown
most insufferably national, you see. I fancy it is a punishment for my
want of it at ordinary times. Now, what do you think, there was a waiter
in this very hotel, but, alas! he is now gone, who sang (from morning to
night, as my informant said with a shrug at the recollection) what but
_‘s ist lange her_, the German version of Auld Lang Syne; so you see,
madame, the finest lyric ever written will make its way out of whatsoever
corner of patois it found its birth in.
‘_Meitz Herz ist im Hochland_, _mean Herz ist nicht hier_,
_Mein Herz ist im Hochland im grünen Revier_.
_Im grünen Reviere zu jagen das Reh_;
_Mein Herz ist im Hochland_, _wo immer ich geh_.’
I don’t think I need translate that for you.
There is one thing that burthens me a good deal in my patriotic
garrulage, and that is the black ignorance in which I grope about
everything, as, for example, when I gave yesterday a full and, I fancy, a
startlingly incorrect account of Scotch education to a very stolid German
on a garden bench: he sat and perspired under it, however with much
composure. I am generally glad enough to fall back again, after these
political interludes, upon Burns, toddy, and the Highlands.
I go every night to the theatre, except when there is no opera. I cannot
stand a play yet; but I am already very much improved, and can understand
a good deal of what goes on.
_Friday_, _August_ 2, 1872.—In the evening, at the theatre, I had a great
laugh. Lord Allcash in _Fra Diavolo_, with his white hat, red
guide-books, and bad German, was the _pièce-de-résistance_ from a
humorous point of view; and I had the satisfaction of knowing that in my
own small way I could minister the same amusement whenever I chose to
open my mouth.
I am just going off to do some German with Simpson.—Your affectionate
son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO THOMAS STEVENSON
_Frankfurt_, _Rosengasse_ 13, _August_ 4, 1872.
MY DEAR FATHER,—You will perceive by the head of this page that we have
at last got into lodgings, and powerfully mean ones too. If I were to
call the street anything but _shady_, I should be boasting. The people
sit at their doors in shirt-sleeves, smoking as they do in Seven Dials of
a Sunday.
Last night we went to bed about ten, for the first time _householders_ in
Germany—real Teutons, with no deception, spring, or false bottom. About
half-past one there began such a trumpeting, shouting, pealing of bells,
and scurrying hither and thither of feet as woke every person in
Frankfurt out of their first sleep with a vague sort of apprehension that
the last day was at hand. The whole street was alive, and we could hear
people talking in their rooms, or crying to passers-by from their
windows, all around us. At last I made out what a man was saying in the
next room. It was a fire in Sachsenhausen, he said (Sachsenhausen is the
suburb on the other side of the Main), and he wound up with one of the
most tremendous falsehoods on record, ‘_Hier alles ruht_—here all is
still.’ If it can be said to be still in an engine factory, or in the
stomach of a volcano when it is meditating an eruption, he might have
been justified in what he said, but not otherwise. The tumult continued
unabated for near an hour; but as one grew used to it, it gradually
resolved itself into three bells, answering each other at short intervals
across the town, a man shouting, at ever shorter intervals and with
superhuman energy, ‘_Feuer_,—_im Sachsenhausen_, and the almost
continuous winding of all manner of bugles and trumpets, sometimes in
stirring flourishes, and sometimes in mere tuneless wails. Occasionally
there was another rush of feet past the window, and once there was a
mighty drumming, down between us and the river, as though the soldiery
were turning out to keep the peace. This was all we had of the fire,
except a great cloud, all flushed red with the glare, above the roofs on
the other side of the Gasse; but it was quite enough to put me entirely
off my sleep and make me keenly alive to three or four gentlemen who were
strolling leisurely about my person, and every here and there leaving me
somewhat as a keepsake. . . . However, everything has its compensation,
and when day came at last, and the sparrows awoke with trills and
_carol-ets_, the dawn seemed to fall on me like a sleeping draught. I
went to the window and saw the sparrows about the eaves, and a great
troop of doves go strolling up the paven Gasse, seeking what they may
devour. And so to sleep, despite fleas and fire-alarms and clocks
chiming the hours out of neighbouring houses at all sorts of odd times
and with the most charming want of unanimity.
We have got settled down in Frankfurt, and like the place very much.
Simpson and I seem to get on very well together. We suit each other
capitally; and it is an awful joke to be living (two would-be advocates,
and one a baronet) in this supremely mean abode.
The abode is, however, a great improvement on the hotel, and I think we
shall grow quite fond of it.—Ever your affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
13 _Rosengasse_, _Frankfurt_, _Tuesday Morning_, _August_ 1872.
. . . Last night I was at the theatre and heard _Die Judin_ (_La Juive_),
and was thereby terribly excited. At last, in the middle of the fifth
act, which was perfectly beastly, I had to slope. I could stand even
seeing the cauldron with the sham fire beneath, and the two hateful
executioners in red; but when at last the girl’s courage breaks down,
and, grasping her father’s arm, she cries out—O so shudderfully!—I
thought it high time to be out of that _galère_, and so I do not know yet
whether it ends well or ill; but if I ever afterwards find that they do
carry things to the extremity, I shall think more meanly of my species.
It was raining and cold outside, so I went into a _Bierhalle_, and sat
and brooded over a _Schnitt_ (half-glass) for nearly an hour. An opera
is far more _real_ than real life to me. It seems as if stage illusion,
and particularly this hardest to swallow and most conventional illusion
of them all—an opera—would never stale upon me. I wish that life was an
opera. I should like to _live_ in one; but I don’t know in what quarter
of the globe I shall find a society so constituted. Besides, it would
soon pall: imagine asking for three-kreuzer cigars in recitative, or
giving the washerwoman the inventory of your dirty clothes in a sustained
and _flourishous_ aria.
I am in a right good mood this morning to sit here and write to you; but
not to give you news. There is a great stir of life, in a quiet, almost
country fashion, all about us here. Some one is hammering a beef-steak
in the _rez-de-chaussée_: there is a great clink of pitchers and noise of
the pump-handle at the public well in the little square-kin round the
corner. The children, all seemingly within a month, and certainly none
above five, that always go halting and stumbling up and down the roadway,
are ordinarily very quiet, and sit sedately puddling in the gutter,
trying, I suppose, poor little devils! to understand their
_Muttersprache_; but they, too, make themselves heard from time to time
in little incomprehensible antiphonies, about the drift that comes down
to them by their rivers from the strange lands higher up the Gasse.
Above all, there is here such a twittering of canaries (I can see twelve
out of our window), and such continual visitation of grey doves and
big-nosed sparrows, as make our little bye-street into a perfect aviary.
I look across the Gasse at our opposite neighbour, as he dandles his baby
about, and occasionally takes a spoonful or two of some pale slimy
nastiness that looks like _dead porridge_, if you can take the
conception. These two are his only occupations. All day long you can
hear him singing over the brat when he is not eating; or see him eating
when he is not keeping baby. Besides which, there comes into his house a
continual round of visitors that puts me in mind of the luncheon hour at
home. As he has thus no ostensible avocation, we have named him ‘the
W.S.’ to give a flavour of respectability to the street.
Enough of the Gasse. The weather is here much colder. It rained a good
deal yesterday; and though it is fair and sunshiny again to-day, and we
can still sit, of course, with our windows open, yet there is no more
excuse for the siesta; and the bathe in the river, except for
cleanliness, is no longer a necessity of life. The Main is very swift.
In one part of the baths it is next door to impossible to swim against
it, and I suspect that, out in the open, it would be quite
impossible.—Adieu, my dear mother, and believe me, ever your affectionate
son,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
(_Rentier_).
TO CHARLES BAXTER
17 _Heriot Row_, _Edinburgh_, _Sunday_, _February_ 2, 1873.
MY DEAR BAXTER,—The thunderbolt has fallen with a vengeance now. On
Friday night after leaving you, in the course of conversation, my father
put me one or two questions as to beliefs, which I candidly answered. I
really hate all lying so much now—a new found honesty that has somehow
come out of my late illness—that I could not so much as hesitate at the
time; but if I had foreseen the real hell of everything since, I think I
should have lied, as I have done so often before. I so far thought of my
father, but I had forgotten my mother. And now! they are both ill, both
silent, both as down in the mouth as if—I can find no simile. You may
fancy how happy it is for me. If it were not too late, I think I could
almost find it in my heart to retract, but it is too late; and again, am
I to live my whole life as one falsehood? Of course, it is rougher than
hell upon my father, but can I help it? They don’t see either that my
game is not the light-hearted scoffer; that I am not (as they call me) a
careless infidel. I believe as much as they do, only generally in the
inverse ratio: I am, I think, as honest as they can be in what I hold. I
have not come hastily to my views. I reserve (as I told them) many
points until I acquire fuller information, and do not think I am thus
justly to be called ‘horrible atheist.’
Now, what is to take place? What a curse I am to my parents! O Lord,
what a pleasant thing it is to have just _damned_ the happiness of
(probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the world.
What is my life to be at this rate? What, you rascal? Answer—I have a
pistol at your throat. If all that I hold true and most desire to spread
is to be such death, and a worse than death, in the eyes of my father and
mother, what the _devil_ am I to do?
Here is a good heavy cross with a vengeance, and all rough with rusty
nails that tear your fingers, only it is not I that have to carry it
alone; I hold the light end, but the heavy burden falls on these two.
Don’t—I don’t know what I was going to say. I am an abject idiot, which,
all things considered, is not remarkable.—Ever your affectionate and
horrible atheist,
R. L. STEVENSON.
II
STUDENT DAYS—_Continued_
ORDERED SOUTH
SEPTEMBER 1873-JULY 1875
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Cockfield Rectory_, _Sudbury_, _Suffolk_,
_Tuesday_, _July_ 28, 1873.
MY DEAR MOTHER,—I am too happy to be much of a correspondent. Yesterday
we were away to Melford and Lavenham, both exceptionally placid,
beautiful old English towns. Melford scattered all round a big green,
with an Elizabethan Hall and Park, great screens of trees that seem twice
as high as trees should seem, and everything else like what ought to be
in a novel, and what one never expects to see in reality, made me cry out
how good we were to live in Scotland, for the many hundredth time. I
cannot get over my astonishment—indeed, it increases every day—at the
hopeless gulf that there is between England and Scotland, and English and
Scotch. Nothing is the same; and I feel as strange and outlandish here
as I do in France or Germany. Everything by the wayside, in the houses,
or about the people, strikes me with an unexpected unfamiliarity: I walk
among surprises, for just where you think you have them, something wrong
turns up.
I got a little Law read yesterday, and some German this morning, but on
the whole there are too many amusements going for much work; as for
correspondence, I have neither heart nor time for it to-day.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
17 _Heriot Row_, _Edinburgh_,
_Saturday_, _September_ 6, 1873.
I HAVE been to-day a very long walk with my father through some of the
most beautiful ways hereabouts; the day was cold with an iron, windy sky,
and only glorified now and then with autumn sunlight. For it is fully
autumn with us, with a blight already over the greens, and a keen wind in
the morning that makes one rather timid of one’s tub when it finds its
way indoors.
I was out this evening to call on a friend, and, coming back through the
wet, crowded, lamp-lit streets, was singing after my own fashion, _Du
hast Diamanten und_ _Perlen_, when I heard a poor cripple man in the
gutter wailing over a pitiful Scotch air, his club-foot supported on the
other knee, and his whole woebegone body propped sideways against a
crutch. The nearest lamp threw a strong light on his worn, sordid face
and the three boxes of lucifer matches that he held for sale. My own
false notes stuck in my chest. How well off I am! is the burthen of my
songs all day long—_Drum ist so wohl mir in der Welt_! and the ugly
reality of the cripple man was an intrusion on the beautiful world in
which I was walking. He could no more sing than I could; and his voice
was cracked and rusty, and altogether perished. To think that that wreck
may have walked the streets some night years ago, as glad at heart as I
was, and promising himself a future as golden and honourable!
_Sunday_, 11.20 _a.m._—I wonder what you are doing now?—in church likely,
at the _Te Deum_. Everything here is utterly silent. I can hear men’s
footfalls streets away; the whole life of Edinburgh has been sucked into
sundry pious edifices; the gardens below my windows are steeped in a
diffused sunlight, and every tree seems standing on tiptoes, strained and
silent, as though to get its head above its neighbour’s and _listen_.
You know what I mean, don’t you? How trees do seem silently to assert
themselves on an occasion! I have been trying to write _Roads_ until I
feel as if I were standing on my head; but I mean _Roads_, and shall do
something to them.
I wish I could make you feel the hush that is over everything, only made
the more perfect by rare interruptions; and the rich, placid light, and
the still, autumnal foliage. Houses, you know, stand all about our
gardens: solid, steady blocks of houses; all look empty and asleep.
_Monday night_.—The drums and fifes up in the Castle are sounding the
guard-call through the dark, and there is a great rattle of carriages
without. I have had (I must tell you) my bed taken out of this room, so
that I am alone in it with my books and two tables, and two chairs, and a
coal-skuttle (or _scuttle_) (?) and a _débris_ of broken pipes in a
corner, and my old school play-box, so full of papers and books that the
lid will not shut down, standing reproachfully in the midst. There is
something in it that is still a little gaunt and vacant; it needs a
little populous disorder over it to give it the feel of homeliness, and
perhaps a bit more furniture, just to take the edge off the sense of
illimitable space, eternity, and a future state, and the like, that is
brought home to one, even in this small attic, by the wide, empty floor.
You would require to know, what only I can ever know, many grim and many
maudlin passages out of my past life to feel how great a change has been
made for me by this past summer. Let me be ever so poor and thread-paper
a soul, I am going to try for the best.
These good booksellers of mine have at last got a _Werther_ without
illustrations. I want you to like Charlotte. Werther himself has every
feebleness and vice that could tend to make his suicide a most virtuous
and commendable action; and yet I like Werther too—I don’t know why,
except that he has written the most delightful letters in the world.
Note, by the way, the passage under date June 21st not far from the
beginning; it finds a voice for a great deal of dumb, uneasy, pleasurable
longing that we have all had, times without number. I looked that up the
other day for _Roads_, so I know the reference; but you will find it a
garden of flowers from beginning to end. All through the passion keeps
steadily rising, from the thunderstorm at the country-house—there was
thunder in that story too—up to the last wild delirious interview; either
Lotte was no good at all, or else Werther should have remained alive
after that; either he knew his woman too well, or else he was
precipitate. But an idiot like that is hopeless; and yet, he wasn’t an
idiot—I make reparation, and will offer eighteen pounds of best wax at
his tomb. Poor devil! he was only the weakest—or, at least, a very weak
strong man.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
17 _Heriot Row_, _Edinburgh_,
_Friday_, _September_ 12, 1873.
. . . I WAS over last night, contrary to my own wish, in Leven, Fife; and
this morning I had a conversation of which, I think, some account might
interest you. I was up with a cousin who was fishing in a mill-lade, and
a shower of rain drove me for shelter into a tumbledown steading attached
to the mill. There I found a labourer cleaning a byre, with whom I fell
into talk. The man was to all appearance as heavy, as _hébété_, as any
English clodhopper; but I knew I was in Scotland, and launched out
forthright into Education and Politics and the aims of one’s life. I
told him how I had found the peasantry in Suffolk, and added that their
state had made me feel quite pained and down-hearted. ‘It but to do
that,’ he said, ‘to onybody that thinks at a’!’ Then, again, he said
that he could not conceive how anything could daunt or cast down a man
who had an aim in life. ‘They that have had a guid schoolin’ and do nae
mair, whatever they do, they have done; but him that has aye something
ayont need never be weary.’ I have had to mutilate the dialect much, so
that it might be comprehensible to you; but I think the sentiment will
keep, even through a change of words, something of the heartsome ring of
encouragement that it had for me: and that from a man cleaning a byre!
You see what John Knox and his schools have done.
_Saturday_.—This has been a charming day for me from morning to now (5
P.M.). First, I found your letter, and went down and read it on a seat
in those Public Gardens of which you have heard already. After lunch, my
father and I went down to the coast and walked a little way along the
shore between Granton and Cramond. This has always been with me a very
favourite walk. The Firth closes gradually together before you, the
coast runs in a series of the most beautifully moulded bays, hill after
hill, wooded and softly outlined, trends away in front till the two
shores join together. When the tide is out there are great, gleaming
flats of wet sand, over which the gulls go flying and crying; and every
cape runs down into them with its little spit of wall and trees. We lay
together a long time on the beach; the sea just babbled among the stones;
and at one time we heard the hollow, sturdy beat of the paddles of an
unseen steamer somewhere round the cape. I am glad to say that the peace
of the day and scenery was not marred by any unpleasantness between us
two.
I am, unhappily, off my style, and can do nothing well; indeed, I fear I
have marred _Roads_ finally by patching at it when I was out of the
humour. Only, I am beginning to see something great about John Knox and
Queen Mary: I like them both so much, that I feel as if I could write the
history fairly.
I have finished _Roads_ to-day, and send it off to you to see. The Lord
knows whether it is worth anything!—some of it pleases me a good deal,
but I fear it is quite unfit for any possible magazine. However, I wish
you to see it, as you know the humour in which it was conceived, walking
alone and very happily about the Suffolk highways and byeways on several
splendid sunny afternoons.—Believe me, ever your faithful friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
_Monday_.—I have looked over _Roads_ again, and I am aghast at its
feebleness. It is the trial of a very ‘’prentice hand’ indeed. Shall I
ever learn to do anything well? However, it shall go to you, for the
reasons given above.
TO MRS. SITWELL
_Edinburgh_, _Tuesday_, _September_ 16, 1873.
. . . I MUST be very strong to have all this vexation and still to be
well. I was weighed the other day, and the gross weight of my large
person was eight stone six! Does it not seem surprising that I can keep
the lamp alight, through all this gusty weather, in so frail a lantern?
And yet it burns cheerily.
My mother is leaving for the country this morning, and my father and I
will be alone for the best part of the week in this house. Then on
Friday I go south to Dumfries till Monday. I must write small, or I
shall have a tremendous budget by then.
7.20 _p.m._—I must tell you a thing I saw to-day. I was going down to
Portobello in the train, when there came into the next compartment (third
class) an artisan, strongly marked with smallpox, and with sunken, heavy
eyes—a face hard and unkind, and without anything lovely. There was a
woman on the platform seeing him off. At first sight, with her one eye
blind and the whole cast of her features strongly plebeian, and even
vicious, she seemed as unpleasant as the man; but there was something
beautifully soft, a sort of light of tenderness, as on some Dutch
Madonna, that came over her face when she looked at the man. They talked
for a while together through the window; the man seemed to have been
asking money. ‘Ye ken the last time,’ she said, ‘I gave ye two shillin’s
for your ludgin’, and ye said—’ it died off into whisper. Plainly
Falstaff and Dame Quickly over again. The man laughed unpleasantly, even
cruelly, and said something; and the woman turned her back on the
carriage and stood a long while so, and, do what I might, I could catch
no glimpse of her expression, although I thought I saw the heave of a sob
in her shoulders. At last, after the train was already in motion, she
turned round and put two shillings into his hand. I saw her stand and
look after us with a perfect heaven of love on her face—this poor
one-eyed Madonna—until the train was out of sight; but the man, sordidly
happy with his gains, did not put himself to the inconvenience of one
glance to thank her for her ill-deserved kindness.
I have been up at the Spec. and looked out a reference I wanted. The
whole town is drowned in white, wet vapour off the sea. Everything drips
and soaks. The very statues seem wet to the skin. I cannot pretend to
be very cheerful; I did not see one contented face in the streets; and
the poor did look so helplessly chill and dripping, without a stitch to
change, or so much as a fire to dry themselves at, or perhaps money to
buy a meal, or perhaps even a bed. My heart shivers for them.
* * * * *
_Dumfries_, _Friday_.—All my thirst for a little warmth, a little sun, a
little corner of blue sky avails nothing. Without, the rain falls with a
long drawn _swish_, and the night is as dark as a vault. There is no
wind indeed, and that is a blessed change after the unruly, bedlamite
gusts that have been charging against one round street corners and
utterly abolishing and destroying all that is peaceful in life. Nothing
sours my temper like these coarse termagant winds. I hate practical
joking; and your vulgarest practical joker is your flaw of wind.
I have tried to write some verses; but I find I have nothing to say that
has not been already perfectly said and perfectly sung in _Adelaïde_. I
have so perfect an idea out of that song! The great Alps, a wonder in
the starlight—the river, strong from the hills, and turbulent, and loudly
audible at night—the country, a scented _Frühlingsgarten_ of orchards and
deep wood where the nightingales harbour—a sort of German flavour over
all—and this love-drunken man, wandering on by sleeping village and
silent town, pours out of his full heart, _Einst_, _O Wunder_, _einst_,
etc. I wonder if I am wrong about this being the most beautiful and
perfect thing in the world—the only marriage of really accordant words
and music—both drunk with the same poignant, unutterable sentiment.
To-day in Glasgow my father went off on some business, and my mother and
I wandered about for two hours. We had lunch together, and were very
merry over what the people at the restaurant would think of us—mother and
son they could not suppose us to be.
_Saturday_.—And to-day it came—warmth, sunlight, and a strong, hearty
living wind among the trees. I found myself a new being. My father and
I went off a long walk, through a country most beautifully wooded and
various, under a range of hills. You should have seen one place where
the wood suddenly fell away in front of us down a long, steep hill
between a double row of trees, with one small fair-haired child framed in
shadow in the foreground; and when we got to the foot there was the
little kirk and kirkyard of Irongray, among broken fields and woods by
the side of the bright, rapid river. In the kirkyard there was a
wonderful congregation of tombstones, upright and recumbent on four legs
(after our Scotch fashion), and of flat-armed fir-trees. One gravestone
was erected by Scott (at a cost, I learn, of £70) to the poor woman who
served him as heroine in the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the inscription
in its stiff, Jedediah Cleishbotham fashion is not without something
touching. {56} We went up the stream a little further to where two
Covenanters lie buried in an oakwood; the tombstone (as the custom is)
containing the details of their grim little tragedy in funnily bad rhyme,
one verse of which sticks in my memory:—
‘We died, their furious rage to stay,
Near to the kirk of Iron-gray.’
We then fetched a long compass round about through Holywood Kirk and
Lincluden ruins to Dumfries. But the walk came sadly to grief as a
pleasure excursion before our return . . .
_Sunday_.—Another beautiful day. My father and I walked into Dumfries to
church. When the service was done I noted the two halberts laid against
the pillar of the churchyard gate; and as I had not seen the little
weekly pomp of civic dignitaries in our Scotch country towns for some
years, I made my father wait. You should have seen the provost and three
bailies going stately away down the sunlit street, and the two town
servants strutting in front of them, in red coats and cocked hats, and
with the halberts most conspicuously shouldered. We saw Burns’s house—a
place that made me deeply sad—and spent the afternoon down the banks of
the Nith. I had not spent a day by a river since we lunched in the
meadows near Sudbury. The air was as pure and clear and sparkling as
spring water; beautiful, graceful outlines of hill and wood shut us in on
every side; and the swift, brown river fled smoothly away from before our
eyes, rippled over with oily eddies and dimples. White gulls had come up
from the sea to fish, and hovered and flew hither and thither among the
loops of the stream. By good fortune, too, it was a dead calm between my
father and me.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
[_Edinburgh_], _Saturday_, _October_ 4, 1873.
IT is a little sharp to-day; but bright and sunny with a sparkle in the
air, which is delightful after four days of unintermitting rain. In the
streets I saw two men meet after a long separation, it was plain. They
came forward with a little run and _leaped_ at each other’s hands. You
never saw such bright eyes as they both had. It put one in a good humour
to see it.
* * * * *
8 _p.m._—I made a little more out of my work than I have made for a long
while back; though even now I cannot make things fall into sentences—they
only sprawl over the paper in bald orphan clauses. Then I was about in
the afternoon with Baxter; and we had a good deal of fun, first rhyming
on the names of all the shops we passed, and afterwards buying needles
and quack drugs from open-air vendors, and taking much pleasure in their
inexhaustible eloquence. Every now and then as we went, Arthur’s Seat
showed its head at the end of a street. Now, to-day the blue sky and the
sunshine were both entirely wintry; and there was about the hill, in
these glimpses, a sort of thin, unreal, crystalline distinctness that I
have not often seen excelled. As the sun began to go down over the
valley between the new town and the old, the evening grew resplendent;
all the gardens and low-lying buildings sank back and became almost
invisible in a mist of wonderful sun, and the Castle stood up against the
sky, as thin and sharp in outline as a castle cut out of paper. Baxter
made a good remark about Princes Street, that it was the most elastic
street for length that he knew; sometimes it looks, as it looked
to-night, interminable, a way leading right into the heart of the red
sundown; sometimes, again, it shrinks together, as if for warmth, on one
of the withering, clear east-windy days, until it seems to lie underneath
your feet.
I want to let you see these verses from an _Ode to the Cuckoo_, written
by one of the ministers of Leith in the middle of last century—the palmy
days of Edinburgh—who was a friend of Hume and Adam Smith and the whole
constellation. The authorship of these beautiful verses has been most
truculently fought about; but whoever wrote them (and it seems as if this
Logan had) they are lovely—
‘What time the pea puts on the bloom,
Thou fliest the vocal vale,
An annual guest, in other lands
Another spring to hail.
Sweet bird! thy bower is ever green,
Thy sky is ever clear;
Thou hast no sorrow in thy song,
No winter in thy year.
O could I fly, I’d fly with thee!
We’d make on joyful wing
Our annual visit o’er the globe,
Companions of the spring.’
_Sunday_.—I have been at church with my mother, where we heard ‘Arise,
shine,’ sung excellently well, and my mother was so much upset with it
that she nearly had to leave church. This was the antidote, however, to
fifty minutes of solid sermon, varra heavy. I have been sticking in to
Walt Whitman; nor do I think I have ever laboured so hard to attain so
small a success. Still, the thing is taking shape, I think; I know a
little better what I want to say all through; and in process of time,
possibly I shall manage to say it. I must say I am a very bad workman,
_mais j’ai du courage_; I am indefatigable at rewriting and bettering,
and surely that humble quality should get me on a little.
_Monday_, _October_ 6.—It is a magnificent glimmering moonlight night,
with a wild, great west wind abroad, flapping above one like an immense
banner, and every now and again swooping furiously against my windows.
The wind is too strong perhaps, and the trees are certainly too leafless
for much of that wide rustle that we both remember; there is only a
sharp, angry, sibilant hiss, like breath drawn with the strength of the
elements through shut teeth, that one hears between the gusts only. I am
in excellent humour with myself, for I have worked hard and not
altogether fruitlessly; and I wished before I turned in just to tell you
that things were so. My dear friend, I feel so happy when I think that
you remember me kindly. I have been up to-night lecturing to a friend on
life and duties and what a man could do; a coal off the altar had been
laid on my lips, and I talked quite above my average, and hope I spread,
what you would wish to see spread, into one person’s heart; and with a
new light upon it.
I shall tell you a story. Last Friday I went down to Portobello, in the
heavy rain, with an uneasy wind blowing _par rafales_ off the sea (or
‘_en rafales_’ should it be? or what?). As I got down near the beach a
poor woman, oldish, and seemingly, lately at least, respectable, followed
me and made signs. She was drenched to the skin, and looked wretched
below wretchedness. You know, I did not like to look back at her; it
seemed as if she might misunderstand and be terribly hurt and slighted;
so I stood at the end of the street—there was no one else within sight in
the wet—and lifted up my hand very high with some money in it. I heard
her steps draw heavily near behind me, and, when she was near enough to
see, I let the money fall in the mud and went off at my best walk without
ever turning round. There is nothing in the story; and yet you will
understand how much there is, if one chose to set it forth. You see, she
was so ugly; and you know there is something terribly, miserably pathetic
in a certain smile, a certain sodden aspect of invitation on such faces.
It is so terrible, that it is in a way sacred; it means the outside of
degradation and (what is worst of all in life) false position. I hope
you understand me rightly.—Ever your faithful friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO MRS. SITWELL
[_Edinburgh_], _Tuesday_, _October_ 14, 1873.
MY father has returned in better health, and I am more delighted than I
can well tell you. The one trouble that I can see no way through is that
his health, or my mother’s, should give way. To-night, as I was walking
along Princes Street, I heard the bugles sound the recall. I do not
think I had ever remarked it before; there is something of unspeakable
appeal in the cadence. I felt as if something yearningly cried to me out
of the darkness overhead to come thither and find rest; one felt as if
there must be warm hearts and bright fires waiting for one up there,
where the buglers stood on the damp pavement and sounded their friendly
invitation forth into the night.
* * * * *
_Wednesday_.—I may as well tell you exactly about my health. I am not at
all ill; have quite recovered; only I am what _MM. les médecins_ call
below par; which, in plain English, is that I am weak. With tonics,
decent weather, and a little cheerfulness, that will go away in its turn,
and I shall be all right again.
I am glad to hear what you say about the Exam.; until quite lately I have
treated that pretty cavalierly, for I say honestly that I do not mind
being plucked; I shall just have to go up again. We travelled with the
Lord Advocate the other day, and he strongly advised me in my father’s
hearing to go to the English Bar; and the Lord Advocate’s advice goes a
long way in Scotland. It is a sort of special legal revelation. Don’t
misunderstand me. I don’t, of course, want to be plucked; but so far as
my style of knowledge suits them, I cannot make much betterment on it in
a month. If they wish scholarship more exact, I must take a new lease
altogether.
* * * * *
_Thursday_.—My head and eyes both gave in this morning, and I had to take
a day of complete idleness. I was in the open air all day, and did no
thought that I could avoid, and I think I have got my head between my
shoulders again; however, I am not going to do much. I don’t want you to
run away with any fancy about my being ill. Given a person weak and in
some trouble, and working longer hours than he is used to, and you have
the matter in a nutshell. You should have seen the sunshine on the hill
to-day; it has lost now that crystalline clearness, as if the medium were
spring-water (you see, I am stupid!); but it retains that wonderful
thinness of outline that makes the delicate shape and hue savour better
in one’s mouth, like fine wine out of a finely-blown glass. The birds
are all silent now but the crows. I sat a long time on the stairs that
lead down to Duddingston Loch—a place as busy as a great town during
frost, but now solitary and silent; and when I shut my eyes I heard
nothing but the wind in the trees; and you know all that went through me,
I dare say, without my saying it.
II.—I am now all right. I do not expect any tic to-night, and shall be
at work again to-morrow. I have had a day of open air, only a little
modified by _Le Capitaine Fracasse_ before the dining-room fire. I must
write no more, for I am sleepy after two nights, and to quote my book,
‘_sinon blanches_, _du moins grises_’; and so I must go to bed and
faithfully, hoggishly slumber.—Your faithful
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Mentone_, _November_ 13, 1873.
MY DEAR MOTHER,—The _Place_ is not where I thought; it is about where the
old Post Office was. The Hotel de Londres is no more an hotel. I have
found a charming room in the Hotel du Pavillon, just across the road from
the Prince’s Villa; it has one window to the south and one to the east,
with a superb view of Mentone and the hills, to which I move this
afternoon. In the old great _Place_ there is a kiosque for the sale of
newspapers; a string of omnibuses (perhaps thirty) go up and down under
the plane-trees of the Turin Road on the occasion of each train; the
Promenade has crossed both streams, and bids fair to reach the Cap St.
Martin. The old chapel near Freeman’s house at the entrance to the
Gorbio valley is now entirely submerged under a shining new villa, with
Pavilion annexed; over which, in all the pride of oak and chestnut and
divers coloured marbles, I was shown this morning by the obliging
proprietor. The Prince’s Palace itself is rehabilitated, and shines afar
with white window-curtains from the midst of a garden, all trim borders
and greenhouses and carefully kept walks. On the other side, the villas
are more thronged together, and they have arranged themselves, shelf
after shelf, behind each other. I see the glimmer of new buildings, too,
as far eastward as Grimaldi; and a viaduct carries (I suppose) the
railway past the mouth of the bone caves. F. Bacon (Lord Chancellor)
made the remark that ‘Time was the greatest innovator’; it is perhaps as
meaningless a remark as was ever made; but as Bacon made it, I suppose it
is better than any that I could make. Does it not seem as if things were
fluid? They are displaced and altered in ten years so that one has
difficulty, even with a memory so very vivid and retentive for that sort
of thing as mine, in identifying places where one lived a long while in
the past, and which one has kept piously in mind during all the interval.
Nevertheless, the hills, I am glad to say, are unaltered; though I dare
say the torrents have given them many a shrewd scar, and the rains and
thaws dislodged many a boulder from their heights, if one were only keen
enough to perceive it. The sea makes the same noise in the shingle; and
the lemon and orange gardens still discharge in the still air their fresh
perfume; and the people have still brown comely faces; and the Pharmacie
Gros still dispenses English medicines; and the invalids (eheu!) still
sit on the promenade and trifle with their fingers in the fringes of
shawls and wrappers; and the shop of Pascal Amarante still, in its
present bright consummate flower of aggrandisement and new paint, offers
everything that it has entered into people’s hearts to wish for in the
idleness of a sanatorium; and the ‘Château des Morts’ is still at the top
of the town; and the fort and the jetty are still at the foot, only there
are now two jetties; and—I am out of breath. (To be continued in our
next.)
For myself, I have come famously through the journey; and as I have
written this letter (for the first time for ever so long) with ease and
even pleasure, I think my head must be better. I am still no good at
coming down hills or stairs; and my feet are more consistently cold than
is quite comfortable. But, these apart, I feel well; and in good spirits
all round.
I have written to Nice for letters, and hope to get them to-night.
Continue to address Poste Restante. Take care of yourselves.
This is my birthday, by the way—O, I said that before. Adieu.—Ever your
affectionate son,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. SITWELL
_Mentone_, _Sunday_, _November_ 1873.
MY DEAR FRIEND,—I sat a long while up among the olive yards to-day at a
favourite corner, where one has a fair view down the valley and on to the
blue floor of the sea. I had a Horace with me, and read a little; but
Horace, when you try to read him fairly under the open heaven, sounds
urban, and you find something of the escaped townsman in his descriptions
of the country, just as somebody said that Morris’s sea-pieces were all
taken from the coast. I tried for long to hit upon some language that
might catch ever so faintly the indefinable shifting colour of olive
leaves; and, above all, the changes and little silverings that pass over
them, like blushes over a face, when the wind tosses great branches to
and fro; but the Muse was not favourable. A few birds scattered here and
there at wide intervals on either side of the valley sang the little
broken songs of late autumn and there was a great stir of insect life in
the grass at my feet. The path up to this coign of vantage, where I
think I shall make it a habit to ensconce myself a while of a morning, is
for a little while common to the peasant and a little clear brooklet. It
is pleasant, in the tempered grey daylight of the olive shadows, to see
the people picking their way among the stones and the water and the
brambles; the women especially, with the weights poised on their heads
and walking all from the hips with a certain graceful deliberation.
_Tuesday_.—I have been to Nice to-day to see Dr. Bennet; he agrees with
Clark that there is no disease; but I finished up my day with a
lamentable exhibition of weakness. I could not remember French, or at
least I was afraid to go into any place lest I should not be able to
remember it, and so could not tell when the train went. At last I
crawled up to the station and sat down on the steps, and just steeped
myself there in the sunshine until the evening began to fall and the air
to grow chilly. This long rest put me all right; and I came home here
triumphantly and ate dinner well. There is the full, true, and
particular account of the worst day I have had since I left London. I
shall not go to Nice again for some time to come.
_Thursday_.—I am to-day quite recovered, and got into Mentone to-day for
a book, which is quite a creditable walk. As an intellectual being I
have not yet begun to re-exist; my immortal soul is still very nearly
extinct; but we must hope the best. Now, do take warning by me. I am
set up by a beneficent providence at the corner of the road, to warn you
to flee from the hebetude that is to follow. Being sent to the South is
not much good unless you take your soul with you, you see; and my soul is
rarely with me here. I don’t see much beauty. I have lost the key; I
can only be placid and inert, and see the bright days go past uselessly
one after another; therefore don’t talk foolishly with your mouth any
more about getting liberty by being ill and going south _viâ_ the
sickbed. It is not the old free-born bird that gets thus to freedom; but
I know not what manacled and hide-bound spirit, incapable of pleasure,
the clay of a man. Go south! Why, I saw more beauty with my eyes
healthfully alert to see in two wet windy February afternoons in Scotland
than I can see in my beautiful olive gardens and grey hills in a whole
week in my low and lost estate, as the Shorter Catechism puts it
somewhere. It is a pitiable blindness, this blindness of the soul; I
hope it may not be long with me. So remember to keep well; and remember
rather anything than not to keep well; and again I say, _anything_ rather
than not to keep well.
Not that I am unhappy, mind you. I have found the words already—placid
and inert, that is what I am. I sit in the sun and enjoy the tingle all
over me, and I am cheerfully ready to concur with any one who says that
this is a beautiful place, and I have a sneaking partiality for the
newspapers, which would be all very well, if one had not fallen from
heaven and were not troubled with some reminiscence of the _ineffable
aurore_.
To sit by the sea and to be conscious of nothing but the sound of the
waves, and the sunshine over all your body, is not unpleasant; but I was
an Archangel once.
_Friday_.—If you knew how old I felt! I am sure this is what age brings
with it—this carelessness, this disenchantment, this continual bodily
weariness. I am a man of seventy: O Medea, kill me, or make me young
again! {67}
To-day has been cloudy and mild; and I have lain a great while on a bench
outside the garden wall (my usual place now) and looked at the
dove-coloured sea and the broken roof of cloud, but there was no seeing
in my eye. Let us hope to-morrow will be more profitable.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Hotel Mirabeau_, _Mentone_, _Sunday_, _January_ 4, 1874.
MY DEAR MOTHER,—We have here fallen on the very pink of hotels. I do not
say that it is more pleasantly conducted than the Pavillon, for that were
impossible; but the rooms are so cheery and bright and new, and then the
food! I never, I think, so fully appreciated the phrase ‘the fat of the
land’ as I have done since I have been here installed. There was a dish
of eggs at _déjeûner_ the other day, over the memory of which I lick my
lips in the silent watches.
Now that the cold has gone again, I continue to keep well in body, and
already I begin to walk a little more. My head is still a very feeble
implement, and easily set a-spinning; and I can do nothing in the way of
work beyond reading books that may, I hope, be of some use to me
afterwards.
I was very glad to see that M‘Laren was sat upon, and principally for the
reason why. Deploring as I do much of the action of the Trades Unions,
these conspiracy clauses and the whole partiality of the Master and
Servant Act are a disgrace to our equal laws. Equal laws become a
byeword when what is legal for one class becomes a criminal offence for
another. It did my heart good to hear that man tell M‘Laren how, as he
had talked much of getting the franchise for working men, he must now be
content to see them use it now they had got it. This is a smooth stone
well planted in the foreheads of certain dilettanti radicals, after
M‘Laren’s fashion, who are willing to give the working men words and
wind, and votes and the like, and yet think to keep all the advantages,
just or unjust, of the wealthier classes without abatement. I do hope
wise men will not attempt to fight the working men on the head of this
notorious injustice. Any such step will only precipitate the action of
the newly enfranchised classes, and irritate them into acting hastily;
when what we ought to desire should be that they should act warily and
little for many years to come, until education and habit may make them
the more fit.
All this (intended for my father) is much after the fashion of his own
correspondence. I confess it has left my own head exhausted; I hope it
may not produce the same effect on yours. But I want him to look really
into this question (both sides of it, and not the representations of
rabid middle-class newspapers, sworn to support all the little tyrannies
of wealth), and I know he will be convinced that this is a case of unjust
law; and that, however desirable the end may seem to him, he will not be
Jesuit enough to think that any end will justify an unjust law.
Here ends the political sermon of your affectionate (and somewhat
dogmatical) son,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
_Mentone_, _January_ 7, 1874.
MY DEAR MOTHER,—I received yesterday two most charming letters—the nicest
I have had since I left—December 26th and January 1st: this morning I got
January 3rd.
Into the bargain with Marie, the American girl, who is grace itself, and
comes leaping and dancing simply like a wave—like nothing else, and who
yesterday was Queen out of the Epiphany cake and chose Robinet (the
French Painter) as her _favori_ with the most pretty confusion
possible—into the bargain with Marie, we have two little Russian girls,
with the youngest of whom, a little polyglot button of a three-year old,
I had the most laughable little scene at lunch to-day. I was watching
her being fed with great amusement, her face being as broad as it is
long, and her mouth capable of unlimited extension; when suddenly, her
eye catching mine, the fashion of her countenance was changed, and
regarding me with a really admirable appearance of offended dignity, she
said something in Italian which made everybody laugh much. It was
explained to me that she had said I was very _polisson_ to stare at her.
After this she was somewhat taken up with me, and after some examination
she announced emphatically to the whole table, in German, that I was a
_Mädchen_; which word she repeated with shrill emphasis, as though
fearing that her proposition would be called in question—_Mädchen_,
_Mädchen_, _Mädchen_, _Mädchen_. This hasty conclusion as to my sex she
was led afterwards to revise, I am informed; but her new opinion (which
seems to have been something nearer the truth) was announced in a third
language quite unknown to me, and probably Russian. To complete the
scroll of her accomplishments, she was brought round the table after the
meal was over, and said good-bye to me in very commendable English.
The weather I shall say nothing about, as I am incapable of explaining my
sentiments upon that subject before a lady. But my health is really
greatly improved: I begin to recognise myself occasionally now and again,
not without satisfaction.
Please remember me very kindly to Professor Swan; I wish I had a story to
send him; but story, Lord bless you, I have none to tell, sir, unless it
is the foregoing adventure with the little polyglot. The best of that
depends on the significance of _polisson_, which is beautifully out of
place.
* * * * *
_Saturday_, 10_th_ _January_.—The little Russian kid is only two and a
half: she speaks six languages. She and her sister (æt. 8) and May
Johnstone (æt. 8) are the delight of my life. Last night I saw them all
dancing—O it was jolly; kids are what is the matter with me. After the
dancing, we all—that is the two Russian ladies, Robinet the French
painter, Mr. and Mrs. Johnstone, two governesses, and fitful kids joining
us at intervals—played a game of the stool of repentance in the Gallic
idiom.
O—I have not told you that Colvin is gone; however, he is coming back
again; he has left clothes in pawn to me.—Ever your affectionate son,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO MRS. SITWELL
_Mentone_, _Tuesday_, 13_th_ _January_ 1874.
. . . I LOST a Philipine to little Mary Johnstone last night; so to-day I
sent her a rubbishing doll’s toilet, and a little note with it, with some
verses telling how happy children made every one near them happy also,
and advising her to keep the lines, and some day, when she was ‘grown a
stately demoiselle,’ it would make her ‘glad to know she gave pleasure
long ago,’ all in a very lame fashion, with just a note of prose at the
end, telling her to mind her doll and the dog, and not trouble her little
head just now to understand the bad verses; for some time when she was
ill, as I am now, they would be plain to her and make her happy. She has
just been here to thank me, and has left me very happy. Children are
certainly too good to be true.
Yesterday I walked too far, and spent all the afternoon on the outside of
my bed; went finally to rest at nine, and slept nearly twelve hours on
the stretch. Bennet (the doctor), when told of it this morning, augured
well for my recovery; he said youth must be putting in strong; of course
I ought not to have slept at all. As it was, I dreamed _horridly_; but
not my usual dreams of social miseries and misunderstandings and all
sorts of crucifixions of the spirit; but of good, cheery, physical
things—of long successions of vaulted, dimly lit cellars full of black
water, in which I went swimming among toads and unutterable, cold, blind
fishes. Now and then these cellars opened up into sort of domed
music-hall places, where one could land for a little on the slope of the
orchestra, but a sort of horror prevented one from staying long, and made
one plunge back again into the dead waters. Then my dream changed, and I
was a sort of Siamese pirate, on a very high deck with several others.
The ship was almost captured, and we were fighting desperately. The
hideous engines we used and the perfectly incredible carnage that we
effected by means of them kept me cheery, as you may imagine; especially
as I felt all the time my sympathy with the boarders, and knew that I was
only a prisoner with these horrid Malays. Then I saw a signal being
given, and knew they were going to blow up the ship. I leaped right off,
and heard my captors splash in the water after me as thick as pebbles
when a bit of river bank has given way beneath the foot. I never heard
the ship blow up; but I spent the rest of the night swimming about some
piles with the whole sea full of Malays, searching for me with knives in
their mouths. They could swim any distance under water, and every now
and again, just as I was beginning to reckon myself safe, a cold hand
would be laid on my ankle—ugh!
However, my long sleep, troubled as it was, put me all right again, and I
was able to work acceptably this morning and be very jolly all day. This
evening I have had a great deal of talk with both the Russian ladies;
they talked very nicely, and are bright, likable women both. They come
from Georgia.
* * * * *
_Wednesday_, 10.30.—We have all been to tea to-night at the Russians’
villa. Tea was made out of a samovar, which is something like a small
steam engine, and whose principal advantage is that it burns the fingers
of all who lay their profane touch upon it. After tea Madame Z. played
Russian airs, very plaintive and pretty; so the evening was Muscovite
from beginning to end. Madame G.’s daughter danced a tarantella, which
was very pretty.
Whenever Nelitchka cries—and she never cries except from pain—all that
one has to do is to start ‘Malbrook s’en va-t-en guerre.’ She cannot
resist the attraction; she is drawn through her sobs into the air; and in
a moment there is Nelly singing, with the glad look that comes into her
face always when she sings, and all the tears and pain forgotten.
It is wonderful, before I shut this up, how that child remains ever
interesting to me. Nothing can stale her infinite variety; and yet it is
not very various. You see her thinking what she is to do or to say next,
with a funny grave air of reserve, and then the face breaks up into a
smile, and it is probably ‘Berecchino!’ said with that sudden little jump
of the voice that one knows in children, as the escape of a
jack-in-the-box, and, somehow, I am quite happy after that!
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
[_Mentone_, _January_ 1874.]
. . . LAST night I had a quarrel with the American on politics. It is
odd how it irritates you to hear certain political statements made. He
was excited, and he began suddenly to abuse our conduct to America. I,
of course, admitted right and left that we had behaved disgracefully (as
we had); until somehow I got tired of turning alternate cheeks and
getting duly buffeted; and when he said that the Alabama money had not
wiped out the injury, I suggested, in language (I remember) of admirable
directness and force, that it was a pity they had taken the money in that
case. He lost his temper at once, and cried out that his dearest wish
was a war with England; whereupon I also lost my temper, and, thundering
at the pitch of my voice, I left him and went away by myself to another
part of the garden. A very tender reconciliation took place, and I think
there will come no more harm out of it. We are both of us nervous
people, and he had had a very long walk and a good deal of beer at
dinner: that explains the scene a little. But I regret having employed
so much of the voice with which I have been endowed, as I fear every
person in the hotel was taken into confidence as to my sentiments, just
at the very juncture when neither the sentiments nor (perhaps) the
language had been sufficiently considered.
* * * * *
_Friday_.—You have not yet heard of my book?—_Four Great Scotsmen_—John
Knox, David Hume, Robert Burns, Walter Scott. These, their lives, their
work, the social media in which they lived and worked, with, if I can so
make it, the strong current of the race making itself felt underneath and
throughout—this is my idea. You must tell me what you think of it. The
Knox will really be new matter, as his life hitherto has been
disgracefully written, and the events are romantic and rapid; the
character very strong, salient, and worthy; much interest as to the
future of Scotland, and as to that part of him which was truly modern
under his Hebrew disguise. Hume, of course, the urbane, cheerful,
gentlemanly, letter-writing eighteenth century, full of attraction, and
much that I don’t yet know as to his work. Burns, the sentimental side
that there is in most Scotsmen, his poor troubled existence, how far his
poems were his personally, and how far national, the question of the
framework of society in Scotland, and its fatal effect upon the finest
natures. Scott again, the ever delightful man, sane, courageous,
admirable; the birth of Romance, in a dawn that was a sunset; snobbery,
conservatism, the wrong thread in History, and notably in that of his own
land. _Voilà_, _madame_, _le menu_. _Comment le trouvez-vous_? _Il y
a_ _de la bonne viando_, _si on parvient à la cuire convenablement_.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON
[_Mentone_, _March_ 28, 1874.]
MY DEAR MOTHER,—Beautiful weather, perfect weather; sun, pleasant cooling
winds; health very good; only incapacity to write.
The only new cloud on my horizon (I mean this in no menacing sense) is
the Prince. I have philosophical and artistic discussions with the
Prince. He is capable of talking for two hours upon end, developing his
theory of everything under Heaven from his first position, which is that
there is no straight line. Doesn’t that sound like a game of my
father’s—I beg your pardon, you haven’t read it—I don’t mean _my_ father,
I mean Tristram Shandy’s. He is very clever, and it is an immense joke
to hear him unrolling all the problems of life—philosophy, science, what
you will—in this charmingly cut-and-dry, here-we-are-again kind of
manner. He is better to listen to than to argue withal. When you differ
from him, he lifts up his voice and thunders; and you know that the
thunder of an excited foreigner often miscarries. One stands aghast,
marvelling how such a colossus of a man, in such a great commotion of
spirit, can open his mouth so much and emit such a still small voice at
the hinder end of it all. All this while he walks about the room, smokes
cigarettes, occupies divers chairs for divers brief spaces, and casts his
huge arms to the four winds like the sails of a mill. He is a most
sportive Prince.
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
[_Swanston_], _May_ 1874, _Monday_.
WE are now at Swanston Cottage, Lothianburn, Edinburgh. The garden is
but little clothed yet, for, you know, here we are six hundred feet above
the sea. It is very cold, and has sleeted this morning. Everything
wintry. I am very jolly, however, having finished Victor Hugo, and just
looking round to see what I should next take up. I have been reading
Roman Law and Calvin this morning.
* * * * *
_Evening_.—I went up the hill a little this afternoon. The air was
invigorating, but it was so cold that my scalp was sore. With this high
wintry wind, and the grey sky, and faint northern daylight, it was quite
wonderful to hear such a clamour of blackbirds coming up to me out of the
woods, and the bleating of sheep being shorn in a field near the garden,
and to see golden patches of blossom already on the furze, and delicate
green shoots upright and beginning to frond out, among last year’s russet
bracken. Flights of crows were passing continually between the wintry
leaden sky and the wintry cold-looking hills. It was the oddest conflict
of seasons. A wee rabbit—this year’s making, beyond question—ran out
from under my feet, and was in a pretty perturbation, until he hit upon a
lucky juniper and blotted himself there promptly. Evidently this
gentleman had not had much experience of life.
I have made an arrangement with my people: I am to have £84 a year—I only
asked for £80 on mature reflection—and as I should soon make a good bit
by my pen, I shall be very comfortable. We are all as jolly as can be
together, so that is a great thing gained.
* * * * *
_Wednesday_.—Yesterday I received a letter that gave me much pleasure
from a poor fellow-student of mine, who has been all winter very ill, and
seems to be but little better even now. He seems very much pleased with
_Ordered South_. ‘A month ago,’ he says, ‘I could scarcely have ventured
to read it; to-day I felt on reading it as I did on the first day that I
was able to sun myself a little in the open air.’ And much more to the
like effect. It is very gratifying.—Ever your faithful friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO MRS. SITWELL
_Swanston_, _Wednesday_, _May_ 1874.
STRUGGLING away at _Fables in Song_. I am much afraid I am going to make
a real failure; the time is so short, and I am so out of the humour.
Otherwise very calm and jolly: cold still _impossible_.
_Thursday_.—I feel happier about the _Fables_, and 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.
_Saturday_.—I have received such a nice long letter (four sides) from
Leslie Stephen to-day about my Victor Hugo. It is accepted. This ought
to have made me gay, but it hasn’t. I am not likely to be much of a
tonic to-night. I have been very cynical over myself to-day, partly,
perhaps, because I have just finished some of the deedest rubbish about
Lord Lytton’s fables that an intelligent editor ever shot into his
wastepaper basket. If Morley prints it I shall be glad, but my respect
for him will be shaken.
_Tuesday_.—Another cold day; yet I have been along the hillside,
wondering much at idiotic sheep, and raising partridges at every second
step. One little plover is the object of my firm adherence. I pass his
nest every day, and if you saw how he files by me, and almost into my
face, crying and flapping his wings, to direct my attention from his
little treasure, you would have as kind a heart to him as I. To-day I
saw him not, although I took my usual way; and I am afraid that some
person has abused his simple wiliness and harried (as we say in Scotland)
the nest. I feel much righteous indignation against such imaginary
aggressor. However, one must not be too chary of the lower forms.
To-day I sat down on a tree-stump at the skirt of a little strip of
planting, and thoughtlessly began to dig out the touchwood with an end of
twig. I found I had carried ruin, death, and universal consternation
into a little community of ants; and this set me a-thinking of how close
we are environed with frail lives, so that we can do nothing without
spreading havoc over all manner of perishable homes and interests and
affections; and so on to my favourite mood of an holy terror for all
action and all inaction equally—a sort of shuddering revulsion from the
necessary responsibilities of life. We must not be too scrupulous of
others, or we shall die. Conscientiousness is a sort of moral opium; an
excitant in small doses, perhaps, but at bottom a strong narcotic.
* * * * *
_Saturday_.—I have been two days in Edinburgh, and so had not the
occasion to write to you. Morley has accepted the _Fables_, and I have
seen it in proof, and think less of it than ever. However, of course, I
shall send you a copy of the _Magazine_ without fail, and you can be as
disappointed as you like, or the reverse if you can. I would willingly
recall it if I could.
Try, by way of change, Byron’s _Mazeppa_; you will be astonished. It is
grand and no mistake, and one sees through it a fire, and a passion, and
a rapid intuition of genius, that makes one rather sorry for one’s own
generation of better writers, and—I don’t know what to say; I was going
to say ‘smaller men’; but that’s not right; read it, and you will feel
what I cannot express. Don’t be put out by the beginning; persevere, and
you will find yourself thrilled before you are at an end with it.—Ever
your faithful friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO MRS. SITWELL
_Train between Edinburgh and Chester_, _August_ 8, 1874.
MY father and mother reading. I think I shall talk to you for a moment
or two. This morning at Swanston, the birds, poor creatures, had the
most troubled hour or two; evidently there was a hawk in the
neighbourhood; not one sang; and the whole garden thrilled with little
notes of warning and terror. I did not know before that the voice of
birds could be so tragically expressive. I had always heard them before
express their trivial satisfaction with the blue sky and the return of
daylight. Really, they almost frightened me; I could hear mothers and
wives in terror for those who were dear to them; it was easy to
translate, I wish it were as easy to write; but it is very hard in this
flying train, or I would write you more.
_Chester_.—I like this place much; but somehow I feel glad when I get
among the quiet eighteenth century buildings, in cosy places with some
elbow room about them, after the older architecture. This other is
bedevilled and furtive; it seems to stoop; I am afraid of trap-doors, and
could not go pleasantly into such houses. I don’t know how much of this
is legitimately the effect of the architecture; little enough possibly;
possibly far the most part of it comes from bad historical novels and the
disquieting statuary that garnishes some façades.
On the way, to-day, I passed through my dear Cumberland country. Nowhere
to as great a degree can one find the combination of lowland and highland
beauties; the outline of the blue hills is broken by the outline of many
tumultuous tree-clumps; and the broad spaces of moorland are balanced by
a network of deep hedgerows that might rival Suffolk, in the
foreground.—How a railway journey shakes and discomposes one, mind and
body! I grow blacker and blacker in humour as the day goes on; and when
at last I am let out, and have the fresh air about me, it is as though I
were born again, and the sick fancies flee away from my mind like swans
in spring.
I want to come back on what I have said about eighteenth century and
middle-age houses: I do not know if I have yet explained to you the sort
of loyalty, of urbanity, that there is about the one to my mind; the
spirit of a country orderly and prosperous, a flavour of the presence of
magistrates and well-to-do merchants in bag-wigs, the clink of glasses at
night in fire-lit parlours, something certain and civic and domestic, is
all about these quiet, staid, shapely houses, with no character but their
exceeding shapeliness, and the comely external utterance that they make
of their internal comfort. Now the others are, as I have said, both
furtive and bedevilled; they are sly and grotesque; they combine their
sort of feverish grandeur with their sort of secretive baseness, after
the manner of a Charles the Ninth. They are peopled for me with persons
of the same fashion. Dwarfs and sinister people in cloaks are about
them; and I seem to divine crypts, and, as I said, trap-doors. O God be
praised that we live in this good daylight and this good peace.
* * * * *
_Barmouth_, _August_ 9_th_.—To-day we saw the cathedral at Chester; and,
far more delightful, saw and heard a certain inimitable verger who took
us round. He was full of a certain recondite, far-away humour that did
not quite make you laugh at the time, but was somehow laughable to
recollect. Moreover, he had so far a just imagination, and could put one
in the right humour for seeing an old place, very much as, according to
my favourite text, Scott’s novels and poems do for one. His account of
the monks in the Scriptorium, with their cowls over their heads, in a
certain sheltered angle of the cloister where the big Cathedral building
kept the sun off the parchments, was all that could be wished; and so too
was what he added of the others pacing solemnly behind them and dropping,
ever and again, on their knees before a little shrine there is in the
wall, ‘to keep ’em in the frame of mind.’ You will begin to think me
unduly biassed in this verger’s favour if I go on to tell you his opinion
of me. We got into a little side chapel, whence we could hear the choir
children at practice, and I stopped a moment listening to them, with, I
dare say, a very bright face, for the sound was delightful to me. ‘Ah,’
says he, ‘you’re _very_ fond of music.’ I said I was. ‘Yes, I could
tell that by your head,’ he answered. ‘There’s a deal in that head.’
And he shook his own solemnly. I said it might be so, but I found it
hard, at least, to get it out. Then my father cut in brutally, said
anyway I had no ear, and left the verger so distressed and shaken in the
foundations of his creed that, I hear, he got my father aside afterwards
and said he was sure there was something in my face, and wanted to know
what it was, if not music. He was relieved when he heard that I occupied
myself with litterature (which word, note here, I do not spell
correctly). Good-night, and here’s the verger’s health!
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
_Swanston_, _Wednesday_, [_Autumn_] 1874.
I HAVE been hard at work all yesterday, and besides had to write a long
letter to Bob, so I found no time until quite late, and then was sleepy.
Last night it blew a fearful gale; I was kept awake about a couple of
hours, and could not get to sleep for the horror of the wind’s noise; the
whole house shook; and, mind you, our house _is_ a house, a great castle
of jointed stone that would weigh up a street of English houses; so that
when it quakes, as it did last night, it means something. But the
quaking was not what put me about; it was the horrible howl of the wind
round the corner; the audible haunting of an incarnate anger about the
house; the evil spirit that was abroad; and, above all, the shuddering
silent pauses when the storm’s heart stands dreadfully still for a
moment. O how I hate a storm at night! They have been a great influence
in my life, I am sure; for I can remember them so far back—long before I
was six at least, for we left the house in which I remember listening to
them times without number when I was six. And in those days the storm
had for me a perfect impersonation, as durable and unvarying as any
heathen deity. I always heard it, as a horseman riding past with his
cloak about his head, and somehow always carried away, and riding past
again, and being baffled yet once more, _ad infinitum_, all night long.
I think I wanted him to get past, but I am not sure; I know only that I
had some interest either for or against in the matter; and I used to lie
and hold my breath, not quite frightened, but in a state of miserable
exaltation.
My first John Knox is in proof, and my second is on the anvil. It is
very good of me so to do; for I want so much to get to my real tour and
my sham tour, the real tour first: it is always working in my head, and
if I can only turn on the right sort of style at the right moment, I am
not much afraid of it. One thing bothers me; what with hammering at this
J. K., and writing necessary letters, and taking necessary exercise (that
even not enough, the weather is so repulsive to me, cold and windy), I
find I have no time for reading except times of fatigue, when I wish
merely to relax myself. O—and I read over again for this purpose
Flaubert’s _Tentation de St. Antoine_; it struck me a good deal at first,
but this second time it has fetched me immensely. I am but just done
with it, so you will know the large proportion of salt to take with my
present statement, that it’s the finest thing I ever read! Of course, it
isn’t that, it’s full of _longueurs_, and is not quite ‘redd up,’ as we
say in Scotland, not quite articulated; but there are splendid things in
it.
I say, _do_ take your maccaroni with oil: _do_, _please_. It’s _beastly_
with butter.—Ever your faithful friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO MRS. SITWELL
[_Edinburgh_], _December_ 23, 1874.
_Monday_.—I have come from a concert, and the concert was rather a
disappointment. Not so my afternoon skating—Duddingston, our big loch,
is bearing; and I wish you could have seen it this afternoon, covered
with people, in thin driving snow flurries, the big hill grim and white
and alpine overhead in the thick air, and the road up the gorge, as it
were into the heart of it, dotted black with traffic. Moreover, I _can_
skate a little bit; and what one can do is always pleasant to do.
_Tuesday_.—I got your letter to-day, and was so glad thereof. It was of
good omen to me also. I worked from ten to one (my classes are suspended
now for Xmas holidays), and wrote four or five Portfolio pages of my
Buckinghamshire affair. Then I went to Duddingston and skated all
afternoon. If you had seen the moon rising, a perfect sphere of smoky
gold, in the dark air above the trees, and the white loch thick with
skaters, and the great hill, snow-sprinkled, overhead! It was a sight
for a king.
_Wednesday_.—I stayed on Duddingston to-day till after nightfall. The
little booths that hucksters set up round the edge were marked each one
by its little lamp. There were some fires too; and the light, and the
shadows of the people who stood round them to warm themselves, made a
strange pattern all round on the snow-covered ice. A few people with
torches began to travel up and down the ice, a lit circle travelling
along with them over the snow. A gigantic moon rose, meanwhile, over the
trees and the kirk on the promontory, among perturbed and vacillating
clouds.
The walk home was very solemn and strange. Once, through a broken gorge,
we had a glimpse of a little space of mackerel sky, moon-litten, on the
other side of the hill; the broken ridges standing grey and spectral
between; and the hilltop over all, snow-white, and strangely magnified in
size.
This must go to you to-morrow, so that you may read it on Christmas Day
for company. I hope it may be good company to you.
_Thursday_.—Outside, it snows thick and steadily. The gardens before our
house are now a wonderful fairy forest. And O, this whiteness of things,
how I love it, how it sends the blood about my body! Maurice de Guérin
hated snow; what a fool he must have been! Somebody tried to put me out
of conceit with it by saying that people were lost in it. As if people
don’t get lost in love, too, and die of devotion to art; as if everything
worth were not an occasion to some people’s end.
What a wintry letter this is! Only I think it is winter seen from the
inside of a warm greatcoat. And there is, at least, a warm heart about
it somewhere. Do you know, what they say in Xmas stories is true? I
think one loves their friends more dearly at this season.—Ever your
faithful friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
17 _Heriot Road_, _Edinburgh_ [_January_ 1875].
MY DEAR COLVIN,—I have worked too hard; I have given myself one day of
rest, and that was not enough; so I am giving myself another. I shall go
to bed again likewise so soon as this is done, and slumber most potently.
9 P.M., slept all afternoon like a lamb.
About my coming south, I think the still small unanswerable voice of
coins will make it impossible until the session is over (end of March);
but for all that, I think I shall hold out jolly. I do not want you to
come and bother yourself; indeed, it is still not quite certain whether
my father will be quite fit for you, although I have now no fear of that
really. Now don’t take up this wrongly; I wish you could come; and I do
not know anything that would make me happier, but I see that it is wrong
to expect it, and so I resign myself: some time after. I offered
Appleton a series of papers on the modern French school—the Parnassiens,
I think they call them—de Banville, Coppée, Soulary, and Sully Prudhomme.
But he has not deigned to answer my letter.
I shall have another Portfolio paper so soon as I am done with this
story, that has played me out; the story is to be called _When the Devil
was well_: scene, Italy, Renaissance; colour, purely imaginary of course,
my own unregenerate idea of what Italy then was. O, when shall I find
the story of my dreams, that shall never halt nor wander nor step aside,
but go ever before its face, and ever swifter and louder, until the pit
receives it, roaring? The Portfolio paper will be about Scotland and
England.—Ever yours,
R. L. STEVENSON.
TO MRS. SITWELL
_Edinburgh_, _Tuesday_ [_February_ 1875].
I GOT your nice long gossiping letter to-day—I mean by that that there
was more news in it than usual—and so, of course, I am pretty jolly. I
am in the house, however, with such a beastly cold in the head. Our east
winds begin already to be very cold.
O, I have such a longing for children of my own; and yet I do not think I
could bear it if I had one. I fancy I must feel more like a woman than
like a man about that. I sometimes hate the children I see on the
street—you know what I mean by hate—wish they were somewhere else, and
not there to mock me; and sometimes, again, I don’t know how to go by
them for the love of them, especially the very wee ones.
_Thursday_.—I have been still in the house since I wrote, and I _have_
worked. I finished the Italian story; not well, but as well as I can
just now; I must go all over it again, some time soon, when I feel in the
humour to better and perfect it. And now I have taken up an old story,
begun years ago; and I have now re-written all I had written of it then,
and mean to finish it. What I have lost and gained is odd. As far as
regards simple writing, of course, I am in another world now; but in some
things, though more clumsy, I seem to have been freer and more plucky:
this is a lesson I have taken to heart. I have got a jolly new name for
my old story. I am going to call it _A Country Dance_; the two heroes
keep changing places, you know; and the chapter where the most of this
changing goes on is to be called ‘Up the middle, down the middle.’ It
will be in six, or (perhaps) seven chapters. I have never worked harder
in my life than these last four days. If I can only keep it up.
_Saturday_.—Yesterday, Leslie Stephen, who was down here to lecture,
called on me and took me up to see a poor fellow, a poet who writes for
him, and who has been eighteen months in our infirmary, and may be, for
all I know, eighteen months more. It was very sad to see him there, in a
little room with two beds, and a couple of sick children in the other
bed; a girl came in to visit the children, and played dominoes on the
counterpane with them; the gas flared and crackled, the fire burned in a
dull economical way; Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the
poor fellow sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and
talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a King’s palace, or the great
King’s palace of the blue air. He has taught himself two languages since
he has been lying there. I shall try to be of use to him.
We have had two beautiful spring days, mild as milk, windy withal, and
the sun hot. I dreamed last night I was walking by moonlight round the
place where the scene of my story is laid; it was all so quiet and sweet,
and the blackbirds were singing as if it was day; it made my heart very
cool and happy.—Ever yours,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
TO SIDNEY COLVIN
_February_ 8, 1875.
MY DEAR COLVIN,—Forgive my bothering you. Here is the proof of my second
_Knox_. Glance it over, like a good fellow, and if there’s anything very
flagrant send it to me marked. I have no confidence in myself; I feel
such an ass. What have I been doing? As near as I can calculate,
nothing. And yet I have worked all this month from three to five hours a
day, that is to say, from one to three hours more than my doctor allows
me; positively no result.
No, I can write no article just now; I am _pioching_, like a madman, at
my stories, and can make nothing of them; my simplicity is tame and
dull—my passion tinsel, boyish, hysterical. Never mind—ten years hence,
if I live, I shall have learned, so help me God. I know one must work,
in the meantime (so says Balzac) _comme le mineur enfoui sous un
éboulement_.
_J’y parviendrai_, _nom de nom de nom_! But it’s a long look
forward.—Ever yours,
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
[_Barbizon_, _April_ 1875.]
MY DEAR FRIEND,—This is just a line to say I am well and happy. I am
here in my dear forest all day in the open air. It is very be—no, not
beautiful exactly, just now, but very bright and living. There are one
or two song birds and a cuckoo; all the fruit-trees are in flower, and
the beeches make sunshine in a shady place, I begin to go all right; you
need not be vexed about my health; I really was ill at first, as bad as I
have been for nearly a year; but the forest begins to work, and the air,
and the sun, and the smell of the pines. If I could stay a month here, I
should be as right as possible. Thanks for your letter.—Your faithful
R. L. S.
TO MRS. SITWELL
17 _Heriot Row_, _Edinburgh_, _Sunday_ [_April_ 1875].
HERE is my long story: yesterday night, after having supped, I grew so
restless that I was obliged to go out in search of some excitement.
There was a half-moon lying over on its back, and incredibly bright in
the midst of a faint grey sky set with faint stars: a very inartistic
moon, that would have damned a picture.
At the most populous place of the city I found a little boy, three years
old perhaps, half frantic with terror, and crying to every one for his
‘Mammy.’ This was about eleven, mark you. People stopped and spoke to
him, and then went on, leaving him more frightened than before. But I
and a good-humoured mechanic came up together; and I instantly developed
a latent faculty for setting the hearts of children at rest. Master
Tommy Murphy (such was his name) soon stopped crying, and allowed me to
take him up and carry him; and the mechanic and I trudged away along
Princes Street to find his parents. I was soon so tired that I had to
ask the mechanic to carry the bairn; and you should have seen the puzzled
contempt with which he looked at me, for knocking in so soon. He was a
good fellow, however, although very impracticable and sentimental; and he
soon bethought him that Master Murphy might catch cold after his
excitement, so we wrapped him up in my greatcoat. ‘Tobauga (Tobago)
Street’ was the address he gave us; and we deposited him in a little
grocer’s shop and went through all the houses in the street without being
able to find any one of the name of Murphy. Then I set off to the head
police office, leaving my greatcoat in pawn about Master Murphy’s person.
As I went down one of the lowest streets in the town, I saw a little bit
of life that struck me. It was now half-past twelve, a little shop stood
still half-open, and a boy of four or five years old was walking up and
down before it imitating cockcrow. He was the only living creature
within sight.
At the police offices no word of Master Murphy’s parents; so I went back
empty-handed. The good groceress, who had kept her shop open all this
time, could keep the child no longer; her father, bad with bronchitis,
said he must forth. So I got a large scone with currants in it, wrapped
my coat about Tommy, got him up on my arm, and away to the police office
with him: not very easy in my mind, for the poor child, young as he
was—he could scarce speak—was full of terror for the ‘office,’ as he
called it. He was now very grave and quiet and communicative with me;
told me how his father thrashed him, and divers household matters.
Whenever he saw a woman on our way he looked after her over my shoulder
and then gave his judgment: ‘That’s no _her_,’ adding sometimes, ‘She has
a wean wi’ her.’ Meantime I was telling him how I was going to take him
to a gentleman who would find out his mother for him quicker than ever I
could, and how he must not be afraid of him, but be brave, as he had been
with me. We had just arrived at our destination—we were just under the
lamp—when he looked me in the face and said appealingly, ‘He’ll no put—me
in the office?’ And I had to assure him that he would not, even as I
pushed open the door and took him in.
The serjeant was very nice, and I got Tommy comfortably seated on a
bench, and spirited him up with good words and the scone with the
currants in it; and then, telling him I was just going out to look for
Mammy, I got my greatcoat and slipped away.
Poor little boy! he was not called for, I learn, until ten this morning.
This is very ill written, and I’ve missed half that was picturesque in
it; but to say truth, I am very tired and sleepy: it was two before I got
to bed. However, you see, I had my excitement.
* * * * *
_Monday_.—I have written nothing all morning; I cannot settle to it.
Yes—I _will_ though.
* * * * *
10.45.—And I did. I want to say something more to you about the three
women. I wonder so much why they should have been _women_, and halt
between two opinions in the matter. Sometimes I think it is because they
were made by a man for men; sometimes, again, I think there is an
abstract reason for it, and there is something more substantive about a
woman than ever there can be about a man. I can conceive a great
mythical woman, living alone among inaccessible mountain-tops or in some
lost island in the pagan seas, and ask no more. Whereas if I hear of a
Hercules, I ask after Iole or Dejanira. I cannot think him a man without
women. But I can think of these three deep-breasted women, living out
all their days on remote hilltops, seeing the white dawn and the purple
even, and the world outspread before them for ever, and no more to them
for ever than a sight of the eyes, a hearing of the ears, a far-away
interest of the inflexible heart, not pausing, not pitying, but austere
with a holy austerity, rigid with a calm and passionless rigidity; and I
find them none the less women to the end.
And think, if one could love a woman like that once, see her once grow
pale with passion, and once wring your lips out upon hers, would it not
be a small thing to die? Not that there is not a passion of a quite
other sort, much less epic, far more dramatic and intimate, that comes
out of the very frailty of perishable women; out of the lines of
suffering that we see written about their eyes, and that we may wipe out
if it were but for a moment; out of the thin hands, wrought and tempered
in agony to a fineness of perception, that the indifferent or the merely
happy cannot know; out of the tragedy that lies about such a love, and
the pathetic incompleteness. This is another thing, and perhaps it is a
higher. I look over my shoulder at the three great headless Madonnas,
and they look back at me and do not move; see me, and through and over
me, the foul life of the city dying to its embers already as the night
draws on; and over miles and miles of silent country, set here and there
with lit towns, thundered through here and there with night expresses
scattering fire and
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