Carlyle was wont to say that, next to a faithful portrait, familiar
letters were the best medium to reveal a man. The letters must have been
written with no idea of being used for this end, however--free, artless,
the unstudied self-revealings of mind and heart. Now, these letters of
R. L. Stevenson, written to his friends in England, have a vast value in
this way--they reveal the man--reveal him in his strength and his
weakness--his ready gift in pleasing and adapting himself to those with
whom he corresponded, and his great power at once of adapting himself to
his circumstances and of humorously rising superior to them. When he was
ill and almost penniless in San Francisco, he could give Mr Colvin this
account of his daily routine:
"Any time between eight and half-past nine in the morning a slender
gentleman in an ulster, with a volume buttoned into the breast of it,
maybe observed leaving No. 608 Bush and descending Powell with an
active step. The gentleman is R. L. Stevenson; the volume relates to
Benjamin Franklin, on whom he meditates one of his charming essays. He
descends Powell, crosses Market, and descends in Sixth on a branch of
the original Pine Street Coffee-House, no less. . . . He seats himself
at a table covered with waxcloth, and a pampered menial of High-Dutch
extraction, and, indeed, as yet only partially extracted, lays before
him a cup of coffee, a roll, and a pat of butter, all, to quote the
deity, very good. A while ago, and R. L. Stevenson used to find the
supply of butter insufficient; but he has now learned the art to
exactitude, and butter and roll expire at the same moment. For this
rejection he pays ten cents, or fivepence sterling (0 pounds 0s. 5d.).
"Half an hour later, the inhabitants of Bush Street observed the same
slender gentleman armed, like George Washington, with his little
hatchet, splitting kindling, and breaking coal for his fire. He does
this quasi-publicly upon the window-sill; but this is not to be
attributed to any love of notoriety, though he is indeed vain of his
prowess with the hatchet (which he persists in calling an axe), and
daily surprised at the perpetuation of his fingers. The reason is
this: That the sill is a strong supporting beam, and that blows of the
same emphasis in other parts of his room might knock the entire shanty
into hell. Thenceforth, for from three hours, he is engaged darkly
with an ink-bottle. Yet he is not blacking his boots, for the only
pair that he possesses are innocent of lustre, and wear the natural
hue of the material turned up with caked and venerable slush. The
youngest child of his landlady remarks several times a day, as this
strange occupant enters or quits the house, 'Dere's de author.' Can
it be that this bright-haired innocent has found the true clue to the
mystery? The being in question is, at least, poor enough to belong to
that honourable craft."
Here are a few letters belonging to the winter of 1887-88, nearly all
written from Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks, celebrated by Emerson, and
now a most popular holiday resort in the United States, and were
originally published in _Scribner's Magazine_. . . "It should be said
that, after his long spell of weakness at Bournemouth, Stevenson had gone
West in search of health among the bleak hill summits--'on the Canadian
border of New York State, very unsettled and primitive and cold.' He had
made the voyage in an ocean tramp, the _Ludgate Hill_, the sort of craft
which any person not a born child of the sea would shun in horror.
Stevenson, however, had 'the finest time conceivable on board the
"strange floating menagerie."'" Thus he describes it in a letter to Mr
Henry James:
"Stallions and monkeys and matches made our cargo; and the vast
continent of these incongruities rolled the while like a haystack; and
the stallions stood hypnotised by the motion, looking through the port
at our dinner-table, and winked when the crockery was broken; and the
little monkeys stared at each other in their cages, and were thrown
overboard like little bluish babies; and the big monkey, Jacko,
scoured about the ship and rested willingly in my arms, to the ruin of
my clothing; and the man of the stallions made a bower of the black
tarpaulin, and sat therein at the feet of a raddled divinity, like a
picture on a box of chocolates; and the other passengers, when they
were not sick, looked on and laughed. Take all this picture, and make
it roll till the bell shall sound unexpected notes and the fittings
shall break loose in our stateroom, and you have the voyage of the
_Ludgate Hill_. She arrived in the port of New York without beer,
porter, soda-water, curacoa, fresh meat, or fresh water; and yet we
lived, and we regret her."
He discovered this that there is no joy in the Universe comparable to
life on a villainous ocean tramp, rolling through a horrible sea in
company with a cargo of cattle.
"I have got one good thing of my sea voyage; it is proved the sea
agrees heartily with me, and my mother likes it; so if I get any
better, or no worse, my mother will likely hire a yacht for a month or
so in the summer. Good Lord! what fun! Wealth is only useful for two
things: a yacht and a string quartette. For these two I will sell my
soul. Except for these I hold that 700 pounds a year is as much as
anybody can possibly want; and I have had more, so I know, for the
extra coins were of no use, excepting for illness, which damns
everything. I was so happy on board that ship, I could not have
believed it possible; we had the beastliest weather, and many
discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp ship gave us many
comforts. We could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the
wheel-house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at
sea. And truly there is nothing else. I had literally forgotten what
happiness was, and the full mind--full of external and physical
things, not full of cares and labours, and rot about a fellow's
behaviour. My heart literally sang; I truly care for nothing so much
as for that.
"To go ashore for your letters and hang about the pier among the
holiday yachtsmen--that's fame, that's glory--and nobody can take it
away."
At Saranac Lake the Stevensons lived in a "wind-beleaguered hill-top hat-
box of a house," which suited the invalid, but, on the other hand,
invalided his wife. Soon after getting there he plunged into _The Master
of Ballantrae_.
"No thought have I now apart from it, and I have got along up to page
ninety-two of the draught with great interest. It is to me a most
seizing tale: there are some fantastic elements, the most is a dead
genuine human problem--human tragedy, I should say rather. It will be
about as long, I imagine, as _Kidnapped_. . . . I have done most of
the big work, the quarrel, duel between the brothers, and the
announcement of the death to Clementina and my Lord--Clementina,
Henry, and Mackellar (nicknamed Squaretoes) are really very fine
fellows; the Master is all I know of the devil; I have known hints of
him, in the world, but always cowards: he is as bold as a lion, but
with the same deadly, causeless duplicity I have watched with so much
surprise in my two cowards. 'Tis true, I saw a hint of the same
nature in another man who was not a coward; but he had other things to
attend to; the Master has nothing else but his devilry."
His wife grows seriously ill, and Stevenson has to turn to household
work.
"Lloyd and I get breakfast; I have now, 10.15, just got the dishes
washed and the kitchen all clean, and sit down to give you as much
news as I have spirit for, after such an engagement. Glass is a thing
that really breaks my spirit; and I do not like to fail, and with
glass I cannot reach the work of my high calling--the artist's."
In the midst of such domestic tasks and entanglements he writes _The
Master_, and very characteristically gets dissatisfied with the last
parts, "which shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning."
Of Mr Kipling this is his judgment--in the year 1890:
"Kipling is by far the most promising young man who has appeared
since--ahem--I appeared. He amazes me by his precocity and various
endowments. But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste. He should
shield his fire with both hands, 'and draw up all his strength and
sweetness in one ball.' ('Draw all his strength and all his sweetness
up into one ball'? I cannot remember Marvell's words.) So the
critics have been saying to me; but I was never capable of--and surely
never guilty of--such a debauch of production. At this rate his works
will soon fill the habitable globe, and surely he was armed for better
conflicts than these succinct sketches and flying leaves of verse? I
look on, I admire, I rejoice for myself; but in a kind of ambition we
all have for our tongue and literature I am wounded. If I had this
man's fertility and courage, it seems to me I could heave a pyramid.
"Well, we begin to be the old fogies now, and it was high time
_something_ rose to take our places. Certainly Kipling has the gifts;
the fairy godmothers were all tipsy at his christening. What will he
do with them?"
Of the rest of Stevenson's career we cannot speak at length, nor is it
needful. How in steady succession came his triumphs: came, too, his
trials from ill-health--how he spent winters at Davos Platz, Bournemouth,
and tried other places in America; and how, at last, good fortune led him
to the South Pacific. After many voyagings and wanderings among the
islands, he settled near Apia, in Samoa, early in 1890, cleared some four
hundred acres, and built a house; where, while he wrote what delighted
the English-speaking race, he took on himself the defence of the natives
against foreign interlopers, writing under the title _A Footnote to
History_, the most powerful _expose_ of the mischief they had done and
were doing there. He was the beloved of the natives, as he made himself
the friend of all with whom he came in contact. There, as at home, he
worked--worked with the same determination and in the enjoyment of better
health. The obtaining idea with him, up to the end, as it had been from
early life, was a brave, resolute, cheerful endeavour to make the best of
it.
"I chose Samoa instead of Honolulu," he told Mr W. H. Trigg, who reports
the talk in _Cassells' Magazine_, "for the simple and eminently
satisfactory reason that it is less civilised. Can you not conceive that
it is awful fun?" His house was called "Vailima," which means Five
Waters in the Samoan, and indicates the number of streams that flow by
the spot.