Book: Robert Louis Stevenson
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E. Blantyre Simpson >> Robert Louis Stevenson
ACROSS THE SEAS
As an advocate, Stevenson found ample time to pursue his chosen
profession of letters, for, during the winters in Edinburgh, he
wrote much, and gradually his essays, etc., appeared in magazines,
and are now gathered into happily named volumes. He spent the long
vacations, when the Courts had risen, abroad, mostly frequenting an
artist-colony in Fontainebleau. At that time he was full of a
project, in company with some congenial spirits, to form a
peripatetic club, buy a barge, and glide leisurely through Europe by
calm waterways. He had gone yachting one summer with a sea-loving
brother advocate up the west coast of Scotland. The memory of that
trip inhabited his mind, and he made his hero, David Balfour, when
"Kidnapped" sail by the self-same islands and seas. Louis was
persuaded by his boating friend, the following season, to embark
with him on a canoe trip through Belgium; and the log of that tour
became immortalised as An Inland Voyage, Stevenson's first book. His
travels did not end when he left his frail craft at Pontoise, for,
returning to Gretz, on the skirts of Fontainebleau, he first met his
future wife, and that led a few years later to his following her to
San Francisco, when she was free to remarry.
He crossed the Atlantic and America as an Emigrant. That mode of
life proved too hard for him. He had sailed and paddled without hurt
in his fleet and footless beast of burden, the Arethusa. In the
ensuing year (1877), he travelled "Through the Cevennes with a
Donkey," slept under starry skies, or camped in plumping rain. Often
at home he buckled on his knapsack and tramped along the open road,
but in these trips, as in his two longer outdoor journeys, he had
the heavens above him. The Emigrant was crowded with his fellows, so
Louis arrived sick and sorry on the other side of the Atlantic,
where he had to support himself, having left his home against his
father's wishes. The rising author found his market value in America
low-priced, and his curiosity as to how it felt to be ill and
penniless was satisfied. After his marriage in 1880, Louis, his
wife, and her son became "Silverado Squatters," which proved a
happier venture, both for purse and constitution, than being an
"Amateur Emmigrant"; also, Mr Stevenson generously settled an income
on his son.
In a perpetual pursuit of health, the writer and his hostages to
fortune rambled from the snows of Switzerland to the vineyards of
France, and finally settled for three years at Bournemouth.
Stevenson's undermined health grew worse; but he laboured on at his
work, from his sick bed. Some summers he spent in Scotland, and at
Braemar wrote Treasure Island: then Jekyll and Hyde brought him
notoriety. He was anxious to return to his Alma Mater, and be there
a Professor of History. A house in the cup-like dell of Colinton,
where every twig had a chorister, would have sheltered him from the
purgatorial climate; and the College, like the Courts, allowed long
vacations, spring and summer, to journey off to bask in the South.
But this plan, like the barge one, came to naught, for he was not
elected. The tales of tropic islands in the South Seas--"beautiful
places green for ever, perfect climate, perfect shapes of men and
women with red flowers in their hair and nothing to do but study
oratory and etiquette, sit in the sun and pick up the fruits as they
fall,"--remained in his tenacious memory. A guest at his father's in
1874 spoke of them, and the young Stevenson had stored the
description away in his mind, to be unearthed when he willed, as was
his habit. When first he heard of those favored spots, he had two
anchors which kept him bound to Edinburgh--his parents. The good
engineer died in 1887; and the other anchor, his mother, he found
could be lifted, and became the best of ballast. When he elected to
become a world wanderer, she left her Edinburgh home and, without
hesitation, went off with her son and his household when they turned
their backs on Europe in 1887. Her journal to her sister tells of
these travels "From Saranac to Marquesas." She simply but racily
describes their course, which ended in the cruise on the Casco. In
her book we enjoy genuine glimpses of the author, not so much as the
man who has written himself into fame, but her happy-tempered, hero-
hearted, eager-minded boy, who for forty-five years was all the
world to her. The invigorating cold of the Adirondacks had its
drawbacks, as had Davos; and Stevenson, who, a few years before had
felt the sharp pinch of poverty at San Francisco, now chartered from
there a ship of his own, and sailed away out of the Golden Gate, on
his South Sea Odyssey, to those islands he had heard of years
before, little thinking, as he listened "till he was sick with
desire to go there," that talk was to be as a sign-post to him where
to travel to. "For Louis' sake," his mother explains in her racy
journal letters, speaking of having chartered the Casco, "I can't
but be glad, for his heart has so long been set upon it, it must
surely be good for his health to have such a desire granted." Louis
warned his mother years before she had a nomad for a son, but she
had never objected, and sat knitting on deck, well content not to be
"in turret pent," but to go forth with the bright sword she had
forged. "She adapted herself," her brother says, "to her strange
surroundings, went about barefoot, found no heat too great for her,
and at an age when her sisters at home were old ladies, learnt to
ride!" After many wanderings through the warm ocean waters, with
"green days in forest and blue days at sea," the yachters finally
saw Samoa, and to the author it was the El Dorado of his dreams.
"When the Casco cast anchor," he avers, "my soul went down with
these moorings, whence no windless may extract nor any diver fish it
up." It was indeed a unique experience for one of the master workers
of the world, one whose subtle mintage of words had made his readers
his friends, to settle in an uttermost isle of the Pacific. He
throve there, and was able to enjoy the flavour of the life of
adventure he had craved for, and to look into the bright face of
danger. He built for himself a palace in the wild named Vailima.
From Edinburgh came out the familiar furniture he had been brought
up among, which had been the stage scenery of his chimney-corner
days, when the back bed-room chairs became a ship, and the sofa-back
was his hunter's camp. At Vailima he, like Ibsen's Peer Gynt,
received "a race gift from his childhood's home." He had in olden
times played at being a minister like his grandfather, to wile away
a toyless Sunday. When he grew into his unorthodox dark shirt and
velvet-jacket stage, he had been a rebellious, rather atheistical
youth; but at Samoa, maybe to please his truly good, uncanting
mother, or the sight of the belongings from his old home, made him
bethink himself of his father's reverent conducting of family
worship. He would have the same, but set to work and composed
prayers for himself. Beautifully worded they are, full of his gospel
of kindliness and gladness, and he read them with effective fervour
in the hall of Vailima, with his betartaned servants gathered round.
These devotional exercises of his have been quoted by the "unco
guid" to make him into what Henley severely styled "a Seraph in
Chocolate, a barley-sugar effigy of a real man." The religious faith
of Stevenson was the same as Ben Adhem's in Leigh Hunt's poem, who,
when he found his name was not among those who loved the Lord,
cheerily asked the angel to write him as one who loved his fellow-
men. The heavenly messenger returned
"And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,"
And "lo! Ben Adhem's led all the rest"
To Stevenson, throughout his life, all the world was truly a stage.
He went gaily along playing his part, and when he came to Samoa, he,
on whose brows the dews of youth still sparkled, gleefully revelled
in the pomp and circumstance which allow him to make believe he was
a chieftain. He could go flower-bedecked and garlanded without
comment in among his adopted subjects. He paid deference to Samoan
codes of manners, a thing he had scorned to do in his native land.
All his life he indulged in too few relaxations. The grim Scots
divines, whose "damnatory creed" Louis objected to so strongly, in
their studies, we read, reserved a corner for rod and gun. In his
library there was never a sign of sporting tools, not even a golf-
club. He was not effeminate; in fact, if "the man had been dowered
with better health, we would have lost the author," says one speaker
of him; but he simply never let go the pen, and, doubtless, his
singleness of purpose, his want of toil-resting hobbies, was
hampering to his health. Walking-tours, during which he was busy all
the while taking mental notes for some article, was no brain
holiday. In Samoa, he enjoyed the purest of pleasures, gardening.
"Nothing is so interesting," he says, in his VAILIMA LETTERS, "as
weeding, clearing, and path-making. It does make you feel so well."
But despite warring with weeds and forest rides, in an enervating
country, he wrote persistently through the swooningly hot days of
damp heat.
"I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius, that I have almost
forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it
long of coming," he wrote; and shortly after, in December 1894, it
came and smote him down to the earth with merciful painlessness. His
wife, his step-children, and his mother were beside him when, at the
highest water-mark his craftsmanship had reached, he paid the debt
to overstrain, and laid him down with a will. The closing act of his
life's drama befitted his instinct for effective staging. As he lay
shrouded in his nation's flag, the Samoans, who loved him, came to
pay their tribute and take farewell of their honey-tongued playmate
and counsellor, Tusitala. They counted it an honour to be asked to
hew a track through the tropic forest up which they bore him to his
chosen resting-place on the mountain top of Vaea, overlooking
Vailima, There a table tombstone, like that over the martyrs' graves
on the hills of home, marks where this kindly Scot is laid, with the
Pacific for ever booming his dirge. Samoa, heretofore, to most was
but a speck on a great ocean of another hemisphere. Stevenson
transformed it into a "Mecca of the Mind," where pilgrims, bearing
his name in remembrance, send their thoughts to do reverence at that
shrine where,
"High on his Patmos of the Southern Seas,
Our Northern dreamer sleeps"
no longer separated from his own country and kindred by a world of
waters, but, as another friend and poet said, divided from us now
only by the unbridged river of Death.
Of his writings the list is long and varied, and forms a goodly
heritage. Like himself, they are compounded of many parts, for he
was essayist, poet, novelist, traveller, moralist, biographer, and
historian, and a Master of his Tools at all. Beside his own books,
through many of which we may make his intimate acquaintance, his
letters, and others telling the story of his life, form many
volumes. Stevenson advised every one to read often, not only the
Waverley Novels, but the biography of good Sir Walter. "His life,"
he affirmed, "was perhaps more unique than his work," and that
remark applies to R. L. S. himself, as well as to his great
predecessor. Having burned his immature efforts when he was
following his own "private determination to be an author," when
ostensibly studying engineering, there are but two pamphlets,
printed in his boyhood, which are not written when he had acquired
his finished style. Louis' last creation, Weir of Hermiston, he
himself thought was his master-piece, and he was always his own
surest and severest critic. The portrait of the judge on whom he
modelled Hermiston, i.e., Braxfield, was not in Stevenson's advocate
days bequeathed to the Parliament House, but he had seen it in a
Raeburn Exhibition he reviewed. He recollected the outward semblance
of the man in his receptive memory till he resurrected Braxfield as
Hermiston. The half-told tale is in itself a monument which,
unfinished though it be, shows us how clever an artificer Louis had
become.
And what manner of man to the outward eye was this gypsily-inclined
descendant of square-headed Scottish engineers? With his dark eyes
looking as if they had drunk in the sunshine in some southern land,
his uncut hair, his odd, shabby clothes clinging to his attenuated
frame, his elaborate manners and habit of gesticulating as he spoke,
he was often mistaken for a starving musician or foreign mountebank.
It is not surprising that continental officials doubted his
passport's statement that he was a Briton. In France he was
imprisoned, and he complains he could not pass a frontier or visit a
bank without suspicion. "A slender, boyish presence, with a
graceful, somewhat fantastic bearing, and a singular power of
attraction in the eyes and a smile were the first things that
impressed you," says his biographer. Like his mother, he remained to
the end of his life perennially young in appearance and spirits. The
burden of years never weighed him down or dimmed his outlook. His
face kindled and flushed with pleasure when he heard of a doughty
deed, a spice of wit, or some tale to his liking. Few drew him on
canvas in his lifetime, though he summered among artists. Sargent,
in 1885, did a small full-length portrait of him, which "is said to
verge on caricature, and is in Boston. W. B. Richmond, R. A., about
the same time, at Bournemouth, began another in oils, not much more
than laid in in two sittings." Louis sat to an Italian, Count Nerli,
in Samoa; but in this last portrait he looks painfully haggard,
reminding us of his own words, "the practice of letters is miserably
harassing." Because of the too brilliant light elsewhere in Vailima,
he was painted in a room which was close, and the air fatigued him.
While sitting, he wiled away an hour by making doggerel lines all to
rhyme with the artist's name, Nerli. The portrait was bought by a
Scotch-woman travelling in New Zeal and, where, after the author's
death, it had remained unsold. His mother, on returning to Scotland
when bereft of her boy, asked to see the picture again. She had
disapproved of it in Samoa, as it was over true a likeness,
representing him sadly emaciated. Seeing it again, she revoked her
former judgment, and wished to possess it, but the purchaser also
had grown to prize it. So it hangs in her drawing-room, near by
where the Eildons stand sentinel over Scott's resting-place. This
picture of him who lies on Vaea's crest looks down with a slightly
quizzical expression, as if amused at finding himself ensconced in a
place of honour in the house of strangers on Tweedside. Photographs
there are in plenty of Stevenson, and one snapshot, enlarged in the
Edinburgh Edition, recalls him looking up with "long, hatchet face,
black hair, and haunting gaze, that follows as you move about the
room." But his likeness was as difficult for the photographer, or
the sun, to catch, as for the painter to put on canvas, for the
peculiar fascination of the living man lay in himself, in the
elusive charm of his smile, and in his manner of speech. However,
his contemporaries have left their printed records of his appearance
and his peculiar personality. Henley's perfect description in verse
is too well known to need quotation. Ugly, Stevenson called himself,
but this was not so. He was original in looks and mind, his lank
brown hair straggled over his high forehead, and framed his thin,
high-cheeked, sallow, oval face. His brown eyes and full red lips
gave a dash of colour to his features. His schoolmate, Mr. Baildon,
says truly, "his eyes were always genial, however gaily the lights
danced in them; but about the mouth there was something of trickery
and mocking, as of a spirit that had already peeped behind the
scenes of Life's pageant, and more than guessed its unrealities."
Repose he never tasted of, for his zest in life, his adventurous
inclination to explore, his insatiable curiosity, kept him ever
moving at topmost speed. To understand the mainspring which affected
the man's character--the machinery that supplied him with an
inexhaustible nerve force and vitality--Mr Colvin explains, "besides
humour, which kept wholesome laughter always ready at his lips, was
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." He marvelled, on his way through the Pilgrim's
Progress, why the man with the muck-rake grovelled in straws and
dust, and never looked up to the glittering crown held out for his
acceptance. This mulish blindness puzzled the boy, and when he grew
up, he opened the eyes, and illumined by his work and his example
the dreary-hearted who wasted their opportunities, not seeing the
number of beautiful things which made the world into a royal
pleasance. With tuneful words he persuaded those who plodded with
dusty feet along the high-road to pause for a while and saunter
among the greener fields of earth, and through the stimulating
courage that shone through every chapter he wrote, he, like his
sires, "the ready and the strong of word," has, by his works, left
lights to shine upon the paths of men.