ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
"As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the window of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play."
--"Child's Garden of Verses."
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born at No. 8 Howard Place,
Edinburgh, Scotland, November 13, 1850.
In 1852 the family moved from Howard Place to Inverleith Terrace, and
two years later to No. 17 Heriot Row, which remained their home for many
years.
As a child Louis was very delicate and often ill, for years hardly a
winter passed that he did not spend many days in bed.
Edinburgh in winter is extremely damp and he tells us: "Many winters I
never crossed the threshold, but used to lie on my face on the nursery
floor, chalking or painting in water-colors the pictures in the
illustrated newspapers; or sit up in bed with a little shawl pinned
about my shoulders, to play with bricks or what not."
The diverting history of "Hop-O'-My-Thumb" and the "Seven-League Boots,"
"Little Arthur's History of England," "Peter Parley's Historical Tales,"
and "Harry's Ladder to Learning" were books which he delighted to pore
over and their pages bore many traces of his skill with the pencil and
paint-brush.
Those who have read the "Child's Garden of Verses" already know the
doings of his childish days, for although those rhymes were not written
until he was a grown man he was "one of the few who do not forget their
own lives" and "through the windows of this book" gives us a vivid and
living picture of the boy who dwelt so much in a world of his own with
his quaint thoughts.
If his body was frail his spirit was strong and his power of
imagination so great that he cheered himself through many a weary day by
playing he was "captain of a tidy little ship," a soldier, a fierce
pirate, an Indian chief, or an explorer in foreign lands. Miles he
travelled in his little bed.
"I have just to shut my eyes,
To go sailing through the skies--
To go sailing far away
To the pleasant Land of Play"
he says.
[Illustration: No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Stevenson's birthplace]
In spite of his power for amusing himself, days like these would have
gone far harder had it not been for two devoted people, his mother and
his nurse, Alison Cunningham or "Cummie" as he called her. His mother
was devoted to him in every way and encouraged his love for reading and
story-making. She kept a diary of his progress from day to day, and
treasured every picture he drew or scrap he wrote. Cummie came to him as
a Torryburn lassie when he was eighteen months old and was like a second
mother to him. She not only cared for his bodily comforts but was his
friend and comrade as well. She sang for him, danced for him, spun fine
tales of pirates and smugglers, and read to him so dramatically that his
mind was fired then and there with a longing for travel and adventure
which he never lost. When they took their walks through the streets
together Cummie had many stories to tell him of Scotland and Edinburgh
in the old days. For Edinburgh is a wonderful old city with a wonderful
history full of tales of stirring adventure and romance. "For centuries
it was a capitol thatched with heather and more than once, in the evil
days of English invasion, it has gone up in flames to Heaven, a beacon
to ships at sea.... It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles, not
only on Greenside or by the King's Stables, where set tournaments were
fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the royal
presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords.... In
the town, in one of those little shops plastered like so many swallows'
nests among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that familiar autocrat
James VI. would gladly share a bottle of wine with George Heriot the
goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly look down on the
castle with the city lying in waves around it, those mad and dismal
fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure on the moors,
sat day and night 'with tearful psalms.'... In the Grassmarket,
stiff-necked covenanting heroes offered up the often unnecessary, but
not less honorable, sacrifice of their lives, and bade eloquent farewell
to sun, moon and stars and earthly friendships, or died silent to the
roll of the drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahame of Claverhouse and
his thirty dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind their horses'
tails--a sorry handful thus riding for their lives, but with a man at
their head who was to return in a different temper, make a bold dash
that staggered Scotland, and die happily in the thick of the fight....
"The palace of Holyrood is a house of many memories.... Great people of
yore, kings and queens, buffoons and grave ambassadors played their
stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing
has lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chambers.
There Prince Charlie held his phantom levées and in a very gallant
manner represented a fallen dynasty for some hours....
"There is an old story of the subterranean passage between the castle
and Holyrood and a bold Highland piper who volunteered to explore its
windings. He made his entrance by the upper end, playing a strathspey;
the curious footed it after him down the street, following his descent
by the sound of the chanter from below; until all of a sudden, about the
level of St. Giles the music came abruptly to an end, and the people in
the street stood at fault with hands uplifted. Whether he choked with
gases, or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily by the Evil One,
remains a point of doubt, but the piper has never again been seen or
heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the land
of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may take
a thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a strange
moment for the cabmen on the stands beside St. Giles, when they hear the
crone of his pipes reascending from the earth below their horses' feet."
In Edinburgh to-day there are armed men and cannon in the castle high up
on the great rock above you: "You may see the troops marshalled on the
high parade, and at night after the early winter evenfall and in the
morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over
Edinburgh the sounds of drums and bugles." (Stevenson, "Essay on
Edinburgh.")
Long before Louis could write he made up verses and stories for himself,
and Cummie wrote them down for him. "I thought they were rare nonsense
then," she said, little dreaming that these same bits of "rare
nonsense" were the beginnings of what was to make "her boy" famous
across two seas in years to come.
He writes of her when speaking of long nights he lay awake unable to
sleep because of a troublesome cough: "How well I remember her lifting
me out of bed, carrying me to the window and showing me one or two lit
windows up in Queen Street across the dark belt of garden, where also,
we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses
waiting, like us, for the morning."
Her devotion to him had its reward in the love he gave her all his life.
One of his early essays written when he was twenty and published in the
_Juvenilia_ was called "Nurses." Fifteen years later came the
publication of the "Child's Garden of Verses" with a splendid tribute to
her as a dedication. He sent her copies of all his books, wrote letters
to her, and invited her to visit him. She herself tells that the last
time she ever saw him he said to her, "before a room full of people,
'It's _you_ that gave me a passion for the drama, Cummie,' 'Me, Master
Lou,' I said, 'I never put foot inside a playhouse in my life.' 'Ay,
woman,' said he, 'but it was the good dramatic way ye had of reciting
the hymns.'"
When he was six years old his Uncle David offered a Bible picture-book
as a prize to the nephews who could write the best history of Moses.
This was Louis's first real literary attempt. He was not able to write
himself, but dictated to his mother and illustrated the story and its
cover with pictures which he designed and painted himself.
He won the prize and from that time, his mother says, "it was the desire
of his heart to be an author."
During the winter of 1856-57 his favorite cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray
Stevenson, usually called Bob, visited them; a great treat for Louis,
not only because his ill health kept him from making many companions of
his own age, but because Bob loved many of the same things he did and to
"make believe" was as much a part of his life as Louis's. Many fine
games they had together; built toy theatres, the scenery and characters
for which they bought for a "penny plain and twopence colored," and were
never tired of dressing up. One of their chief delights, he says, was in
"rival kingdoms of our own invention--Nosingtonia and Encyclopædia, of
which we were perpetually drawing maps." Even the eating of porridge at
breakfast became a game. Bob ate his with sugar and said it was an
island covered with snow with here a mountain and there a valley; while
Louis's was an island flooded by milk which gradually disappeared bit by
bit.
In the spring and summer his mother took him for short trips to the
watering-places near Edinburgh. But the spot unlike all others for a
real visit was at Colinton Manse, the home of his grandfather, the
Reverend Lewis Balfour, at Colinton, on the Water of Leith, five miles
southwest of Edinburgh. Here he spent glorious days. Not only was there
the house and garden, both rare spots for one of an exploring turn of
mind, but, best of all, there were the numerous cousins of his own age
sent out from India, where their parents were, to be nursed and educated
under the loving eye of Aunt Jane Balfour, for whom he wrote:
"Chief of our aunts--not only I,
But all the dozen nurslings cry--
What did the other children do?
And what was childhood, wanting you?"
[Illustration: Colinton Manse]
If Louis lacked brothers and sisters he had no dearth of cousins, fifty
in all they numbered, many of them near his own age. Alan Stevenson,
Henrietta and Willie Traquair seem to have been his favorite chums at
Colinton.
Of his grandfather Balfour he says: "We children admired him, partly for
his beautiful face and silver hair ... partly for the solemn light in
which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers in the
pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, of old
age, slow blood, and settled habits, oppressed us with a kind of terror.
When not abroad, he sat much alone writing sermons or letters to his
scattered family.... The study had a redeeming grace in many Indian
pictures gaudily colored and dear to young eyes.... When I was once sent
in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear,
but at the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might
reward me with an Indian picture."
"There were two ways of entering the Manse garden," he says, "one the
two-winged gate that admitted the old phaeton and the other a door for
pedestrians on the side next the kirk.... On the left hand were the
stables, coach-houses and washing houses, clustered around a small,
paved court.... Once past the stable you were fairly within the garden.
On summer afternoons the sloping lawn was literally _steeped_ in
sunshine....
"The wall of the church faces the manse, but the church yard is on a
level with the top of the wall ... and the tombstones are visible from
the enclosure of the manse.... Under the retaining wall was a somewhat
dark pathway, extending from the stable to the far end of the garden,
and called the 'witches' walk' from a game we used to play in it....
Even out of the 'witches' walk' you saw the Manse facing toward you,
with its back to the river and the wooded bank, and the bright
flower-plots and stretches of comfortable vegetables in front and on
each side of it; flower plots and vegetable borders, by the way, on
which it was almost death to set foot, and about which we held a curious
belief,--namely, that my grandfather went round and measured any
footprints that he saw, to compare the measurement at night with the
boots put out for brushing; to avoid which we were accustomed, by a
strategic movement of the foot to make the mark longer....
"So much for the garden; now follow me into the house. On entering the
door you had before you a stone paved lobby.... There stood a case of
foreign birds, two or three marble deities from India and a lily of the
Nile in a pot, and at the far end the stairs shut in the view. With how
many games of 'tig' or brick-building in the forenoon is the long low
dining room connected in my mind! The storeroom was a most voluptuous
place, with its piles of biscuit boxes and spice tins, the rack for
buttered eggs, the little window that let in the sunshine and the
flickering shadows of leaves, and the strong sweet odor of everything
that pleaseth the taste of men....
"Opposite the study was the parlor, a small room crammed full of
furniture and covered with portraits, with a cabinet at the side full of
foreign curiosities, and a sort of anatomical trophy on the top. During
a grand cleaning of the apartment I remember all the furniture was
ranged on a circular grass plot between the churchyard and the house. It
was a lovely still summer evening, and I stayed out, climbing among the
chairs and sofas. Falling on a large bone or skull, I asked what it was.
Part of an albatross, auntie told me. 'What is an albatross?' I asked,
and then she described to me this great bird nearly as big as a house,
that you saw out miles away from any land, sleeping above the vast and
desolate ocean. She told me that the _Ancient Mariner_ was all about
one; and quoted with great _verve_ (she had a duster in her hand, I
recollect)--
'With my crossbow
I shot the albatross.'
... Willie had a crossbow, but up to this date I had never envied him
its possession. After this, however, it became one of the objects of my
life."
With many playmates, free to roam and romp as he chose, his illness
forgotten, it is no wonder he says he felt as if he led two lives, one
belonging to Edinburgh and one to the country, and that Colinton ever
remained an enchanted spot to which it was always hard to say good-by.