Transcribed from the 1912 Chatto and Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
MEMORIES AND
PORTRAITS
* * * * *
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
[Picture: Graphic]
FINE-PAPER EDITION
* * * * *
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1912
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
* * * * *
TO
MY MOTHER
IN THE
NAME OF PAST JOY AND PRESENT SORROW
_I DEDICATE_
THESE MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
_S.S._ “_Ludgate Hill_”
_within sight of Cape Race_
NOTE
This volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to read
through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random. A certain
thread of meaning binds them. Memories of childhood and youth, portraits
of those who have gone before us in the battle—taken together, they build
up a face that “I have loved long since and lost awhile,” the face of
what was once myself. This has come by accident; I had no design at
first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the charm of beloved
memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and when my own young
face (which is a face of the dead also) began to appear in the well as by
a kind of magic, I was the first to be surprised at the occurrence.
My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental
youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed. Of their descendant, the
person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret: not because I love him
better, but because, with him, I am still in a business partnership, and
cannot divide interests.
Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already in
_The Cornhill_, _Longman’s_, _Scribner_, _The English Illustrated_, _The
Magazine of Art_, _The Contemporary Review_; three are here in print for
the first time; and two others have enjoyed only what may he regarded as
a private circulation.
R. L S.
CONTENTS
I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
II. SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES
III. OLD MORALITY
IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE
V. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER
VI. PASTORAL
VII. THE MANSE
VIII. MEMORIES OF AN ISLET
IX. THOMAS STEVENSON
X. TALK AND TALKERS: FIRST PAPER
XI. TALK AND TALKERS: SECOND PAPER
XII. THE CHARACTER OF DOGS
XIII. “A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED”
XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS’S
XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE
XVI. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE
CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME
“This is no my ain house;
I ken by the biggin’ o’t.”
Two recent books {1} one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by
the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people thinking
on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts should arise with
particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United Kingdom,
peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many different
dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts, from the
busiest over-population to the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country
to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the seas that we go
abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has
conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands
whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains still
cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but the other day
that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show in Mousehole, on
St. Michael’s Bay, the house of the last Cornish-speaking woman. English
itself, which will now frank the traveller through the most of North
America, through the greater South Sea Islands, in India, along much of
the coast of Africa, and in the ports of China and Japan, is still to be
heard, in its home country, in half a hundred varying stages of
transition. You may go all over the States, and—setting aside the actual
intrusion and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese—you
shall scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty
miles between Edinburgh and Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred
miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Book English has gone round the
world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms of our fathers, and
every county, in some parts every dale, has its own quality of speech,
vocal or verbal. In like manner, local custom and prejudice, even local
religion and local law, linger on into the latter end of the nineteenth
century—_imperia in imperio_, foreign things at home.
In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his neighbours
is the character of the typical John Bull. His is a domineering nature,
steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither curious nor quick
about the life of others. In French colonies, and still more in the
Dutch, I have read that there is an immediate and lively contact between
the dominant and the dominated race, that a certain sympathy is begotten,
or at the least a transfusion of prejudices, making life easier for both.
But the Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and ignorance. He
figures among his vassals in the hour of peace with the same disdainful
air that led him on to victory. A passing enthusiasm for some foreign
art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot impose upon his
intimates. He may be amused by a foreigner as by a monkey, but he will
never condescend to study him with any patience. Miss Bird, an authoress
with whom I profess myself in love, declares all the viands of Japan to
be uneatable—a staggering pretension. So, when the Prince of Wales’s
marriage was celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it was
proposed to give them solid English fare—roast beef and plum pudding, and
no tomfoolery. Here we have either pole of the Britannic folly. We will
not eat the food of any foreigner; nor, when we have the chance, will we
suffer him to eat of it himself. The same spirit inspired Miss Bird’s
American missionaries, who had come thousands of miles to change the
faith of Japan, and openly professed their ignorance of the religions
they were trying to supplant.
I quote an American in this connection without scruple. Uncle Sam is
better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick. For Mr.
Grant White the States are the New England States and nothing more. He
wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let him try San Francisco.
He wittily reproves English ignorance as to the status of women in
America; but has he not himself forgotten Wyoming? The name Yankee, of
which he is so tenacious, is used over the most of the great Union as a
term of reproach. The Yankee States, of which he is so staunch a
subject, are but a drop in the bucket. And we find in his book a vast
virgin ignorance of the life and prospects of America; every view
partial, parochial, not raised to the horizon; the moral feeling proper,
at the largest, to a clique of states; and the whole scope and atmosphere
not American, but merely Yankee. I will go far beyond him in reprobating
the assumption and the incivility of my countryfolk to their cousins from
beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the silly rudeness of our
newspaper articles; and I do not know where to look when I find myself in
company with an American and see my countrymen unbending to him as to a
performing dog. But in the case of Mr. Grant White example were better
than precept. Wyoming is, after all, more readily accessible to Mr.
White than Boston to the English, and the New England self-sufficiency no
better justified than the Britannic.
It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most
ignorant of the foreigners at home. John Bull is ignorant of the States;
he is probably ignorant of India; but considering his opportunities, he
is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own door. There is one
country, for instance—its frontier not so far from London, its people
closely akin, its language the same in all essentials with the English—of
which I will go bail he knows nothing. His ignorance of the sister
kingdom cannot be described; it can only be illustrated by anecdote. I
once travelled with a man of plausible manners and good intelligence—a
University man, as the phrase goes—a man, besides, who had taken his
degree in life and knew a thing or two about the age we live in. We were
deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London; among other
things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice he had
recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things were not
so in Scotland. “I beg your pardon,” said he, “this is a matter of law.”
He had never heard of the Scots law; nor did he choose to be informed.
The law was the same for the whole country, he told me roundly; every
child knew that. At last, to settle matters, I explained to him that I
was a member of a Scottish legal body, and had stood the brunt of an
examination in the very law in question. Thereupon he looked me for a
moment full in the face and dropped the conversation. This is a
monstrous instance, if you like, but it does not stand alone in the
experience of Scots.
England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in religion, in
education, and in the very look of nature and men’s faces, not always
widely, but always trenchantly. Many particulars that struck Mr. Grant
White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less forcibly; he and I felt
ourselves foreigners on many common provocations. A Scotchman may tramp
the better part of Europe and the United States, and never again receive
so vivid an impression of foreign travel and strange lands and manners as
on his first excursion into England. The change from a hilly to a level
country strikes him with delighted wonder. Along the flat horizon there
arise the frequent venerable towers of churches. He sees at the end of
airy vistas the revolution of the windmill sails. He may go where he
pleases in the future; he may see Alps, and Pyramids, and lions; but it
will be hard to beat the pleasure of that moment. There are, indeed, few
merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together in a
fresh breeze over a woody country; their halting alacrity of movement,
their pleasant business, making bread all day with uncouth
gesticulations, their air, gigantically human, as of a creature half
alive, put a spirit of romance into the tamest landscape. When the
Scotch child sees them first he falls immediately in love; and from that
time forward windmills keep turning in his dreams. And so, in their
degree, with every feature of the life and landscape. The warm,
habitable age of towns and hamlets, the green, settled, ancient look of
the country; the lush hedgerows, stiles, and privy path-ways in the
fields; the sluggish, brimming rivers; chalk and smock-frocks; chimes of
bells and the rapid, pertly-sounding English speech—they are all new to
the curiosity; they are all set to English airs in the child’s story that
he tells himself at night. The sharp edge of novelty wears off; the
feeling is scotched, but I doubt whether it is ever killed. Rather it
keeps returning, ever the more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes
to which you have been long accustomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish
to enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation.
One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman’s eye—the
domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the quaint,
venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm colouring of all. We
have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, above all in country
places; and those that we have are all of hewn or harled masonry. Wood
has been sparingly used in their construction; the window-frames are
sunken in the wall, not flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are
steeper-pitched; even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and
permanent appearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look of
cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the Scotchman
never becomes used. His eye can never rest consciously on one of these
brick houses—rickles of brick, as he might call them—or on one of these
flat-chested streets, but he is instantly reminded where he is, and
instantly travels back in fancy to his home. “This is no my ain house; I
ken by the biggin’ o’t.” And yet perhaps it is his own, bought with his
own money, the key of it long polished in his pocket; but it has not yet,
and never will be, thoroughly adopted by his imagination; nor does he
cease to remember that, in the whole length and breadth of his native
country, there was no building even distantly resembling it.
But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England
foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire,
surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected peasant, sunk in matter,
insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast with our own
long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-quoting ploughman. A week or
two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotchman gasping. It seems
incredible that within the boundaries of his own island a class should
have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent, who hold
our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with a
difference or, from another reason, and to speak on all things with less
interest and conviction. The first shock of English society is like a
cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot comes looking for too much,
and to be sure his first experiment will be in the wrong direction. Yet
surely his complaint is grounded; surely the speech of Englishmen is too
often lacking in generous ardour, the better part of the man too often
withheld from the social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind
evaded as with terror. A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of
his own experience. He will not put you by with conversational counters
and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one
interested in life and man’s chief end. A Scotchman is vain, interested
in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts and
experience in the best light. The egoism of the Englishman is
self-contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He takes no interest
in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does
not care to justify his indifference. Give him the wages of going on and
being an Englishman, that is all he asks; and in the meantime, while you
continue to associate, he would rather not be reminded of your baser
origin. Compared with the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his
demeanour, the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and
immodest. That you should continually try to establish human and serious
relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull, and
desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue something more
awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you in the attitude of a
suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the lowest class of the educated
English towers over a Scotchman by the head and shoulders.
Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English youth
begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and gather up those
first apprehensions which are the material of future thought and, to a
great extent, the rule of future conduct. I have been to school in both
countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once
rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a
greater habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and
on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy of
the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to
games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily transported
by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in mind and body,
more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser and a less romantic
sense of life and of the future, and more immersed in present
circumstances. And certainly, for one thing, English boys are younger
for their age. Sabbath observance makes a series of grim, and perhaps
serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scotch boyhood—days of great
stillness and solitude for the rebellious mind, when in the dearth of
books and play, and in the intervals of studying the Shorter Catechism,
the intellect and senses prey upon and test each other. The typical
English Sunday, with the huge midday dinner and the plethoric afternoon,
leads perhaps to different results. About the very cradle of the Scot
there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity; and the whole of two divergent
systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two first questions
of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquiring, “What is your
name?” the Scottish striking at the very roots of life with, “What is the
chief end of man?” and answering nobly, if obscurely, “To glorify God and
to enjoy Him for ever.” I do not wish to make an idol of the Shorter
Catechism; but the fact of such a question being asked opens to us Scotch
a great field of speculation; and the fact that it is asked of all of us,
from the peer to the ploughboy, binds us more nearly together. No
Englishman of Byron’s age, character, and history would have had patience
for long theological discussions on the way to fight for Greece; but the
daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days kept their influence to
the end. We have spoken of the material conditions; nor need much more
be said of these: of the land lying everywhere more exposed, of the wind
always louder and bleaker, of the black, roaring winters, of the gloom of
high-lying, old stone cities, imminent on the windy seaboard; compared
with the level streets, the warm colouring of the brick, the domestic
quaintness of the architecture, among which English children begin to
grow up and come to themselves in life. As the stage of the University
approaches, the contrast becomes more express. The English lad goes to
Oxford or Cambridge; there, in an ideal world of gardens, to lead a
semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by proctors. Nor is
this to be regarded merely as a stage of education; it is a piece of
privilege besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of
his compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly
different experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a
bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the
public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has been
wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of restraint, and
nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no quiet clique of the
exclusive, studious and cultured; no rotten borough of the arts. All
classes rub shoulders on the greasy benches. The raffish young gentleman
in gloves must measure his scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie
from the parish school. They separate, at the session’s end, one to
smoke cigars about a watering-place, the other to resume the labours of
the field beside his peasant family. The first muster of a college class
in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest; so many lads,
fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment,
ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the
sound of their own rustic voices. It was in these early days, I think,
that Professor Blackie won the affection of his pupils, putting these
uncouth, umbrageous students at their ease with ready human geniality.
Thus, at least, we have a healthy democratic atmosphere to breathe in
while at work; even when there is no cordiality there is always a
juxtaposition of the different classes, and in the competition of study
the intellectual power of each is plainly demonstrated to the other. Our
tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the humming,
lamplit city. At five o’clock you may see the last of us hiving from the
college gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer
of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in
wait to intercept us; till the bell sounds again, we are the masters of
the world; and some portion of our lives is always Saturday, _la trêve de
Dieu_.
Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his country’s
history gradually growing in the child’s mind from story and from
observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, outlying iron
skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; much of heathery
mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to him in
song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories
in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of
oat-meal, who rode so swiftly and lived so sparely on their raids.
Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, and constant resolution are the fibres of
the legend of his country’s history. The heroes and kings of Scotland
have been tragically fated; the most marking incidents in Scottish
history—Flodden, Darien, or the Forty-five—were still either failures or
defeats; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the Bruce
combine with the very smallness of the country to teach rather a moral
than a material criterion for life. Britain is altogether small, the
mere taproot of her extended empire: Scotland, again, which alone the
Scottish boy adopts in his imagination, is but a little part of that, and
avowedly cold, sterile and unpopulous. It is not so for nothing. I once
seemed to have perceived in an American boy a greater readiness of
sympathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing, like his own.
It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish romance,
that I had lacked penetration to divine. But the error serves the
purpose of my argument; for I am sure, at least, that the heart of young
Scotland will be always touched more nearly by paucity of number and
Spartan poverty of life.
So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained. That Shorter
Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was yet composed
in the city of Westminster. The division of races is more sharply marked
within the borders of Scotland itself than between the countries.
Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, are like foreign parts; yet
you may choose a man from any of them, and, ten to one, he shall prove to
have the headmark of a Scot. A century and a half ago the Highlander
wore a different costume, spoke a different language, worshipped in
another church, held different morals, and obeyed a different social
constitution from his fellow-countrymen either of the south or north.
Even the English, it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and the
Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the Scotch.
Yet the Highlander felt himself a Scot. He would willingly raid into the
Scotch lowlands; but his courage failed him at the border, and he
regarded England as a perilous, unhomely land. When the Black Watch,
after years of foreign service, returned to Scotland, veterans leaped out
and kissed the earth at Port Patrick. They had been in Ireland,
stationed among men of their own race and language, where they were well
liked and treated with affection; but it was the soil of Galloway that
they kissed at the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among a people
who did not understand their speech, and who had hated, harried, and
hanged them since the dawn of history. Last, and perhaps most curious,
the sons of chieftains were often educated on the continent of Europe.
They went abroad speaking Gaelic; they returned speaking, not English,
but the broad dialect of Scotland. Now, what idea had they in their
minds when they thus, in thought, identified themselves with their
ancestral enemies? What was the sense in which they were Scotch and not
English, or Scotch and not Irish? Can a bare name be thus influential on
the minds and affections of men, and a political aggregation blind them
to the nature of facts? The story of the Austrian Empire would seem to
answer, NO; the far more galling business of Ireland clenches the
negative from nearer home. Is it common education, common morals, a
common language or a common faith, that join men into nations? There
were practically none of these in the case we are considering.
The fact remains: in spite of the difference of blood and language, the
Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the Highlander.
When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other’s necks in spirit; even
at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy in their talk. But from his
compatriot in the south the Lowlander stands consciously apart. He has
had a different training; he obeys different laws; he makes his will in
other terms, is otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at home
in an English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues to
remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the
Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scotch accent of the mind.