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SPIRIT OF THE AGE SERIES: NO. II.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON:
BY E. BLANTYRE SIMPSON
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
BY E. BLANTYRE SIMPSON
JOHN W. LUCE & CO. BOSTON AND LONDON 1906
Copyright, 1906,
by JOHN W. LUCE & COMPANY Boston,
Mass., IT. S. A.
All rights reserved
Lakeview Press Boston and South Framingham U. S. A.
ILLUSTRATIONS
1875 AS ADVOCATE frontispiece
AN EDINBURGH STUDENT page thirty-two
THE TELLER OF TALES page forty-eight
1892 PORTRAIT PAINTED BY COUNT NERLI IN SAMOA
Reproduced by kind permission of Mrs. Turnbull page sixty-four
SPIRIT OF THE AGE SERIES
The publishers desire to announce that it is their purpose to
comprise in this series a collection of little books uniform in
general style and appearance to the present volume and having for
their subjects men and women, whose work and influence, in whatever
field of literature or art was their chosen one, may be said to
faintly reflect the spirit or tendencies of cultivated thought at
the present time.
The treatment of the subject matter will not be conventional, the
chief aim being to present to the readers a living, marching
personality breathing with the individuality characteristic of the
person.
Volume I of this series is Whistler
by Haldane Macfall
Volume II, Robert Louis Stevenson
by Eve Blantyre Simpson
Additional volumes to be announced shortly.
"A spirit all sunshine, graceful from
every gladness, useful because
bright." Carlyle.
The mother of Robert Louis Stevenson, when asked to inscribe a motto
on a guest list, wrote:--
"The world is so full of a number of things,
I am sure we should all be happy as kings."
"That," she said, "includes the whole gospel of R. L. S." These
lines are certainly a concise statement of the spirit in which her
son undertook to expound the benefits to be derived from "performing
our petty round of irritating concerns and duties with laughter and
kind faces." Before he could walk steadily, it had been discovered
he was heavily handicapped by the burden of ill-health. Still the
good fairy who came to his christening endowed him with "sweet
content," a gift which carried him triumphantly through all
hampering difficulties. He never faltered in the task he set
himself--the task of happiness. He began to preach his gospel as a
child. He would not have his tawdry toy sword disparaged even by his
father. "I tell you," he said, "the sword is of gold, the sheath of
silver, and the boy who has it is quite contented." In the same
manner he transformed a coddling shawl into a wrap fit for a soldier
on a night march. To the end of his days he was eager to be happy.
We are told
"Two men looked out from prison bars;
One saw mud, the other stars."
When bodily ailments held Stevenson as a captive in bonds, his keen
sight pierced through the obstructions which held him caged. We are
not left in doubt, when we read his books, as to whether his gaze
was earthwards or to heaven's distant lamps. He taught others to see
with his clear vision, and he expounded his gospel in so taking a
manner, even if the import of it had savoured more of mud than
stars, it would have been studied for its style. He had the true
artist soul within him. He wished to create or represent what came
within the range of those brilliant dark eyes of his, so, with
infinite care and effort, he strove to attune his words to the even
cadence and harmony with which he wished to amaze us, for, as A.J.
Balfour said, "he was a man of the finest and most delicate
imagination, a style which, for grace and suppleness, for its power
of being at once turned to any purpose which the author desired, has
seldom been matched." It is difficult for those who knew him before
he had, by pure hard work, won his way to fame, to realise how one
physically so fragile, of so light-somely versatile and whimsical a
nature, apparently so ready to be diverted from the main high-road
by a desire to explore any brambly lane, had in him the deliberate
goal-winning gait of the tortoise. His stubborn tenacity of purpose
he owed to his antecedents. The Scot's inalienable prerogative of
pedigree exercised an influence over him, though he appeared as a
foreign ingraft upon his Scotch family tree. In his record of his
father's kinsfolk, A Family of Engineers, and in many of his essays,
he engages his readers' attention by confiding to them his own and
his forebears' history. "I am a rogue at egotism myself; and to be
plain, I have rarely or never liked any man who was not," he says.
This Benjamin of Edinburgh's literary sons, the youngest, not the
least, was born in the very middle of last century, 1850. This babe,
that was to do Edinburgh honour yet, had been named after his two
grandfathers, Robert Lewis. He was a mixture of both, the inevitable
result of their diverse qualities, which he inherited. The Robert (a
name he was seldom known by in his youth) was from the Stevenson
side. They were a race of men of sterling metal, who lit our
Northern Lights, and from the besieging sea wrung footholds for
harbours. From them Robert Louis Stevenson inherited that tenacity
of purpose which made him write and rewrite chapters till his
phrases concisely expressed his meaning, and toilsomely labour till
his work was perfected. His minister grandfather he etched with the
"Old Manse." All his mother's people, the Balfours, were of a
sanguine, hopeful strain, retaining an elasticity of spirit which
never lessened under the burden of years. Stevenson writes of "that
wise youth, my uncle," who was a grey-bearded doctor when his nephew
thus referred to him. So from the daughter of the Herd of Men at
Colinton he inherited his perennial youthfulness. "He was ever the
spirit of boyhood," says Barrie, "tugging at the skirts of this old
world, and compelling it to come back and play."
It was well for the boy that his mother had gifted him with her
hopeful nature, for his father had Celtic traits in his character,
and was oppressed with a morbid sense of his own unworthiness. It is
Carlyle who vouches for the fact "that wondrous is the strength of
cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its power of endurance."
Little store of bodily vigour had Robert Lewis; but with his
buoyant, enthusiastic, inquisitive spirit he accomplished a strong
man's task, "weaving his garlands when his mood was gay, mocking his
sorrows with a solemn jest." This treasured only son, worshipped by
his doting parents and his nurse, Alison Cunningham, who was a
second mother to him, reports himself to have been a good child. He
also says he had a covenanting childhood. In the mid-Victorian era,
a stricter discipline reigned over nurseries in Scotland's capital
than now. "The serviceable pause" in the week's work on Sunday was
not without real benefits, for the children of these times, if
sermons were long and the Sabbath devoid of toys, learned to sit
still and to endure, and very useful lessons they were to R. L. S.
and others. Despite being an extra model little soul," eminently
religious," he says, he was much like other children. His nurse
tells how, during one of the many feverish, wakeful nights he
suffered from, when he lay wearying for the carts coming (a sign to
him of morning), she read to him for hours at his request the Bible.
He fell asleep, soothed by her kind voice, to awake when the sun was
bright on the window pane. Again he commanded, "Read to me, Cummie."
"And what chapter would my laddie like?" she asked. "Why, it's
daylight now," he answered; "I'm not afraid any longer; put away the
Bible, and go on with Ballantyne's story."
"I am one of the few people in the world who do not forget their own
lives," he boasted. His Garden of Verses testifies to the truth of
this statement. When he was a man over thirty, he bridged the gulf
of years, and wrote of the golden days of childhood. Not only do the
little people joy to hear his piping, but those who sit in the
elders' seat hearken to these happy songs of merry cheer coming to
them as echoes from the well-nigh forgotten past. His father often
sat by his sick-bed, and beguiled his small son from fears and pains
by tales "of ship-wreck on outlying iron skerries' pitiless
breakers, and great sea-lights, clothed in language apt, droll and
emphatic." His mother and Cummie read to him day and night. Thus
early the instinct of authorship was fired within him.
One evening the young Stevenson realised that the printed page was
intelligible to him. It was as if a rock that barred his entrance
into the cave of treasure had melted, or swung back at his command.
Till then Louis had been keen, like other youngsters, on adopting
many professions when he grew up. Soldiering, even in the Crimean
War time, did not appeal to the girlishly gentle little chap, for,
as he shrewdly remarked, he neither wanted to kill anybody nor be
killed himself. When he learned to read, he saw before him all the
rows of books which he was told had finer stirring stories in them
than even those his father told him, and he resolved he, too, would
be a maker of tales.
Those wide apart but penetrating eyes of his had caught sight of an
ideal guiding star to follow, viz., Literature. His juvenile
ambition to be a "Leerie licht the lamp" faded. To reach the gleam
which had enamoured him, he knew he must build with care and
patience, like his family of engineers, a tower to enclose or a
ladder to reach to this will-o'-the-wisp which inveigled him upward.
His mind teemed with ideas; but he saw he would have to serve an
apprenticeship to learn to weave smoothly together the web of his
fancy, till, in his verbal fabric, he had the charm of all the muses
flowering in a single word.
He describes to us how he became a skilled artificer with his pen,
and how with obstinate persistence he taught himself daintiness of
diction. In his first book of travels he mentions how the branch of
a tree caught him, and the flooded Oise bereft him of his canoe. "On
my tomb, if ever I have one," he wrote, "I mean to get these words
inscribed, HE CLUNG TO HIS PADDLE." The paddle he chose was his pen.
It was the motive power which forwarded him along the river of life,
through shoals and rapids. When but a wee toddling bairn, he drew
his nurse aside and commanded her to write, as he had a story to
tell. He dictated to his mother, too, when a boy of six, an essay on
Moses. As a housebound child, he had to amuse himself. Skelt's
dramas were then his delight; but the life of every child is a
prophecy for those who know how to interpret it. His mother was
prescient, and fore-told her white-faced Louis had the light of
genius in those windows of the soul--the eyes. "Talent," she knew,
"was the result of human labor and culture." He dreamed, when but
four, he "heard the noise of pens writing." She took it and his
childish "Songstries" he sung as an earnest of his future.
Louis' father, despite being, like Dr. John Brown's Rab, "fu' o'
seriousness," had odd whims, among others, an objection to schools
and lessons, so he raised no objection to his son's regulation
school-days being intermittent. When barely in his teens, Stevenson
was ordered South, and spent two winters abroad. He was a pupil at
Edinburgh Academy for a few years. Andrew Lang was there at the same
time; but, he explains, the future Tusitala,--"the lover of
children, the teller of tales, giver of counsel, and dreams, a
wonder, a world's delight,"--and he did not meet there, for Louis
was "but a little whey-faced urchin, the despicable member of some
lower class," when his future brother author was "an elderly boy of
seventeen." The pity was that the cosseted only son never rubbed
against his compatriot children in the discipline of the play-
fields, but in some of his summer holidays he tasted of the doubtful
pleasures of lantern-bearing and other boyish "glories of
existence."
When the lad was seventeen, his parents leased Swanston Cottage,
which became their summer home, and a big factor in their boy's
education. It is a spot peculiarly secluded, to be within sight and
sound of Edinburgh, lying hidden in the lap of the hills, sheltered
"frae nirly nippin' Eas'lan' breeze and haar o' seas." It was there
Stevenson began deliberately to educate himself to become the Master
Stylist--the "Virgil of prose" of his contemporaries. These
Pentlands were to him always the hills of home. He lifted his eyes
to them from the old manse of Colinton, when he played there in his
grandfather's garden. He longingly, in gaps between the tall, grey
houses, looked for their familiar outline when winter prisoned him
in Auld Reekie.
These pastoral hills, with their sweeps of heathy moorlands, appear
from first to last in his works. Two of his initial Memories and
Portraits depict his hill-folk neighbors, the Shepherd and the
Gardener. It was at a church "atween the muckle Pentland's knees"
that Archie Weir of Hermiston noted young Kirsty, and that same
"little cruciform place" was the scene of his "PETIT POEME EN
PROSE," where we can all spend a peaceful "Lowden Sabbath morning"
with his "living Scotch" sounding in our ears. However far away
Louis Stevenson roved, there was mirrored on the tablets of his
memory his own country, its speech, its very atmosphere. He wrote a
New Arabian Nights, but from the old (he tells us how his minister
grandfather envied him his first reading thereof) he had acquired
the secret of the magic carpet, and could be transported at will
from the tropics back to where the curlews and the plovers wailed
and swooped above the whins and the heather on his hills of sheep.
STEVENSON'S APPRENTICESHIP
In his early days, Louis was sociable, pleased when he met
compatriot children, ready to be dressed and go to parties. But
after he left school, his mood changed. He had been completely
sheltered from rebuffs, so, when he stood in the "palace porch of
life," and the peculiar accents of his mind were jeered at, he, who
had never tasted of a whipping, felt the smart of humankind, and
suffered sorely from "maladies incident to only sons." In the
"coiled perplexities of youth" he "sorrowed, sobbed, and feared"
alone. Blackford's uncultured breast had been meet nurse for Sir
Walter when he roamed a truant boy, but further south of the
becastled capital, topmost Allermuir or steep Caerketton became the
cradle of the next poet and master of Romance that Edinburgh reared.
There, in woody folds of the hills, he found, as he said, "bright is
the ring of words," and there he taught himself to be the right man
to ring them. When Swanston became the Stevensons' summer home, the
undisciplined Robert kicked with his fullest vigour against what he
called the Bastille of Civilisation and the bowing down before "the
bestial Goddesses, Comfort and Respectability." He was loudly
rebellious, and too impatient to follow the ordinary rules of life
or the sage advice, "Jowk and let the jaw gae by."
An impression has arisen, because of his revolt in these years
against convention and creeds, that he was thwarted and
unappreciated in his home and its surroundings. On the contrary, he
was at liberty to indulge his Bohemian tastes and do much as he
listed. His father gave him a seemingly inadequate allowance. Yet
Thomas Stevenson was not a miserly man. He begged his son to go to
his tailor's, for he disapproved of the youth's scuffy, mounte-
bankish appearance. He supplied him with an allowance for travel--in
fact, R. L. S. had all his bills paid, and his own study in a very
hospitable home. R, L. S. owned books, and jewels were the only
things he felt tempted to buy. The 1 pound a month allowance, when
he left school, raised soon after to 82 pounds a year, was to keep
the money from dropping out of that hole in the pocket of his ragged
jacket, which never seemed to get sewed up. Books he had in plenty,
but his parents naturally did not treat him to strings of flashing
stones to wear over his shabby velvet coat, or twine round his
battered straw hat. His money affairs, like the table of Weir of
Hermiston, were likely all his life "just mismanaged." By the time
he settled in Samoa, his literary earnings were thousands a year;
and by then his quiet-living, hard-working father was dead, leaving
an ample fortune. Still he seemed haunted by fear of lack of means.
Louis' love and admiration for his father was deep and sincere. At
his home, when guests gathered round the engineer's table, the boy,
with his eyes sparkling, listened to his father's "strange, humorous
vein of talk," then glanced round with a smile of expectation to see
how much others appreciated their host's well-told tales. "My father
was always my dearest," he wrote. This was a high certificate of
appreciation, when we remember he had the most devoted of mothers.
It hurt the son to the quick to deal his "dearest" a staggering
blow, and decline to follow his hereditary profession. Louis had
tried to be an engineer. He liked the swinging, smoking seas on
which they struggled for a site for sheltering masonry. As in the
case of other Stevensons, the romance of the work was welcome to
him, but the office stool frightened him. When the would-be author
had refused to follow in his kinsmen's footsteps, he promised to
study as an advocate to satisfy his father, who urged his son to
follow a recognised profession. Owing to his easy-going schooling
and lack of a settled course of study, the law classes were
excellent training for the erratic, mercurial-notioned youth.
Stevenson had the good fortune in 1869 to be elected a member of the
Speculative, the famed Debating Society where Jeffrey first met
Scott. There Stevenson encountered his contemporaries in years and
social standing, his superiors in debate, and he, "the lean, ugly,
idle, unpopular student," as he calls himself, enjoyed "its
atmosphere of good-fellowship, its vivid and varied interests, its
traditions of honourable labour and success." "Speculative
evenings," says R. L. S., "form pretty salient milestones on our
intellectual journey." He had gripped a deal of the foundations of
his hereditary trade when seemingly but a consistent idler. He
mastered the intricacies of law, and took to the abhorred office
stool so as to learn the better the workings of its slow machinery.
He tells us he only obtained the mastery of his pen by toiling
faithfully, but inborn in him was the art of talking. Even as a
petti-coated child, we read he gesticulated to aid his glib tongue.
W. E. Henley (whose acquaintance Louis made about 1875, and who
helped Stevenson with his chary praise and frank criticism) says of
his friend, "He radiates talk. He will discourse with you of morals,
music, marbles, men, manners, meta-physics, medicine, mangold-
wurzel, with equal insight into essentials and equal pregnancy and
felicity of utterance."
Along with this ready affluence of speech, the youth had what good
talkers often lack, viz., the patience to hearken to others.
Stevenson shone best in what he called a little committee of
talkers, though his father and he used to argue a question together
for days; but, in the Speculative, he had at first to be a listener.
A candid fellow-member says, "I cannot remember that Stevenson was
ever anything as a speaker. He was nervous and ineffective, and had
no power of debate; but his papers were successful." In one of his
essays, touching on this select assemblage, Louis sketches what the
editor of the History of the Speculative Society, just published,
calls "a little Dutch picture; it focuses in vivid colour the
associations which rise in the memory at the name of the Spec.--the
stately old room aglow with many candles, the books, the portraits,
the pious commemoration of the dead,--famous men and our fathers
that begat us." "Stevenson," Mr Dickson goes on to say, "is the most
famous man of letters who has belonged to the Society since Scott.
No more interesting personality has ever been of our number, and no
one has in the public eye been more closely identified with the
Society." "Oh, I do think the Spec, is about the best thing in
Edinburgh," Louis exclaims, and twice he was President of the
"worshipful society."
A contemporary of Stevenson's, Sheriff Guthrie, wrote in 1899, "I
knew Louis first in the Speculative Society; second, as a fellow
student in the University Law Classes; third, being called to the
Scottish Bar about the same time as a brother-in-law; and last, as a
friend with many interests in common. In the Speculative he spoke
frequently, and read some papers. We recognised his brilliancy, and
we delighted in his vivacity; but we misread the horoscope of his
future. We voted him a light horseman, lacking two essentials for
success--diligence and health. We wondered where he had got the
deftness and rhythm of his style, not knowing that the labour out of
which it was evoked was of itself sufficient to refute our estimate
of his powers of work. As to his health, we forgot behind that
slender, angular frame was not only a father's iron constitution and
a mother's nervous vitality, but his own cheerful spirit and
indomitable will." The Sheriff, in this letter to me, recalls
several reminiscences of Stevenson-some in a playful or contrariwise
vein, and another memory illustrates, he says, "the sweet
reasonableness which mingled with his wayward Bohemianism"; but
space does not allow me to quote more than how, "It seems but
yesterday that I met Louis in the Parliament House, and said I heard
he had got a case. And I seem to see the twinkle in his eye and the
toss of his arms as he answered, 'Yes, my boy, you'll see how I'll
stick in, now that I've tasted blood.'"
Louis' mother showed this friend, Mr. Guthrie, a succession of her
boy's photographs, ending in wig and gown as an advocate. "That is
what I call from Baby to Bar," she said; and then added, beginning
with a smile, and ending with a break in her voice, "I said to Louis
once that the next collection would be from Bar to Baronet, and he
replied, 'It will be from Bar to Burial.'" Except at the "dear old
Spec.," he mixed little his equals in Edinburgh. As a writer in
Blackwood points out, at the period he had grown into swallow-tails,
Edinburgh was by no means devoid of intellectual company, which even
a famed Robert Louis need not have despised. But he abhorred
constraint and codes of rules. He was a born adventurer and
practical experimentist in life, and he explains he spent much of
his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of men and
womenkind. His insatiable curiosity made him thirst to taste of the
bitter as well as the sweet, to be pricked by the thorn as well as
smell the rose. He was quick to see the humorous side of a tale or
episode, but he was tenderly sensitive to ridicule. When he appeared
among his legal brothers-in-law in the Parliament House, a wit there
among the unemployed advocates in the old hall called him the Gifted
Boy. He winced under the laugh, and fled from "the interminable
patter of legal feet." He had cultivated notoriety by his shabby
dress and lank locks. He did not realise, as an American says, "If
you look as if you had slept in your clothes most men will jump to
the conclusion that you have, and you will never get to know them
well enough to explain that your head is so full of noble thoughts
that you haven't time to bother with the dandruff on your
shoulders." In a corridor in the Parliament House, where the men
called to the Bar keep open-mouthed boxes for documents to be
slipped in, one bore on its plate the inscription R. L. Stevenson.
When that alien-looking advocate with unsuspected gifts had cast off
the wig and gown, and had busied himself for years filling up reams
of paper with his thoughts and studies on people, places, and
things, sightseers going through the Courts would be shown this
unused box, which remained so empty while those around it of his old
rivals at the Spec, were full, as they were scaling the heights
which lead to titles and the Bench.
Stevenson wrote of Edinburgh and her climate in a carping spirit,
nevertheless he accorded due praise to her unsurpassed beauty. "No
place so brands a man," he declared; and, in his turn, Stevenson
left his brand on the romantic city of his birth, for now no book on
Scotland's capital is written without mention of the haunts and
homes of that changeling-looking son of hers. The door-plate of 17
Heriot Row bore the inscription of R. L. Stevenson, Advocate. No
blue-bag laden clerk dropped briefs then into its letter-box. In one
of its sun-facing drawing-room windows there stood a big Australian
vine, carefully tended and trained. It was behind it, in the far
window, the eighteen-year-old lad sat when, in the winter's
gloamin', Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin, calling on his mother, was startled
by his voice joining in the conversation. The visitor says, "I
listened in perplexity and arnasement. Who was this son who talked
as Charles Lamb wrote? this young Heine with the Scotch accent? When
I came away the unseen converser came down with me to the front door
to let me out. As he opened it, the light of the gas lamp outside
('For we are very lucky with a lamp before the door,' he says) fell
on him, and I saw a slender, brown, long-haired lad, with great dark
eyes, a brilliant smile, and a gentle, deprecating bend of the head.
I asked him to come and see us. He said, 'Shall I come to-morrow?'"
He called next day, for Louis grasped at anything or any person that
he felt drawn to. He took part in their theatricals, but otherwise
eschewed social functions in Edinburgh. An old friend of his
father's asked him to come to fill a gap at his table, though his
own son had informed him Louis never went to prearranged feasts.
Louis himself replied to this invitation: "C. is textually correct,
only there are exceptions everywhere to prove the rule. I do not
hate dining at your house. At seven, on Wednesday, his temples
wreathed with some appropriate garland, you will behold the victim
come smiling to the altar." The last words are characteristic of his
attitude when he was lured into society,--he went a willing victim,
with no affectation of martyrdom. The few who met him in Edinburgh
drawing-rooms found him prodigal of tongue, somewhat puzzling with
his wholesale enthusiasms, absurd flights of fancy, theories he had
to propound, and ever ready to change like a chameleon to tone with
his surroundings. The spritish, fantastic youth impressed those he
encountered, even when he was one of the unfledged eaglets hatched
in the ancient eyrie of his precipitous city, whom Browning tells us
are not counted "till there is a rush of wings, and lo! they are
flown," "What was so taking in him, and how is one to analyse that
dazzling surface of pleasantry, that changeful, shining humour, wit,
wisdom, recklessness, beneath which beat the most kind and tolerant
of hearts?" asks Andrew Lang. But not only through the magnetism of
his personal presence did he attract even strangers, but through his
pen has he held in thrall all the reading public who liked his work.
"He has put into his books a great deal of all that went to the
making of his life," wrote his cousin, "though he had the art of
confiding a good deal, but not telling everything." It would have
been interesting to see, if Stevenson had taken it into his elfin-
locked head to learn to shine in debate, and, instead of incubating
a budding Scott, as he said, "the Spec." had trained an able
advocate, if the glamour of his personality would have extended to
the judges, and made him, with his well-chosen words, a successful
pleader. The boards of the Parliament House were too well worn a
road for so tramp-blooded a man. The tune "Over the Hills and Far
Away" was for ever humming in his head. He left the venerable city
of his birth, which he vowed he must always think of as home, and
steered a course on his way to fame "far ayont the muckle sea" which
led him from the Bar to Burial.