indisposition that they ordered him south for the winter, and on the 5th
of November he started on the first of those pilgrimages in search of
health of which he says, somewhat sadly, in writing of his grandfather,
in his paper on _The Old Manse_:
'He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight; I have sought it
in both hemispheres, but whereas he found it and kept it, I am still on
the quest.'
The anxiety and distress of his parents during that winter were
naturally intense, and there is something tragic in the dates so
carefully preserved:
'Lou started on 5th November 1873.'
'He returned to Heriot Row on 26th April 1874.'
_Ordered South_ appeared in _Macmillan_ for that same April, and in its
very beauty there is a most painful pathos. The polish of its style, its
exquisitely chosen words, give to it something of the sadness of the
brilliant autumn tints on a wood, the red gold and the glory of decay.
It is a brave paper and it is an intensely sad one, the sadness in which
goes straight to the reader's heart, while the courage takes his respect
by storm. No wonder it calls forth universal sympathy; too many homes
have been darkened by the dread sentence 'Ordered South,' too many
sufferers have obeyed it in life's gay noonday, or in its sunny prime,
and few, alas! very few, have even returned to face the long struggle
with fate that Mr Stevenson fought so heroically! This was the first,
for him, of many journeys 'South'; for although the winter in the
Riviera sent him back somewhat stronger, the inherent delicacy was still
there, and time after time, in the twenty years and eleven months that
he lived after the November morning when he set out on that melancholy
journey, the recurrence of the graver symptoms of his malady obliged him
to seek sunnier skies and warmer climates.
Scotland which he loved, the grey skies, the greyer mists, the snell
winds,--that even in his happy Samoan life his exile's heart hungered
for to the last,--were fatal to his delicate lungs, and year by year he
was compelled to live less and less in his old Edinburgh home.
In 1880 when he brought his wife to Scotland to visit his parents his
health was so precarious that he had to hurry abroad before the winter,
and he and his wife and stepson went to Davos where they met and formed
a pleasant friendship with Mr J. A. Symonds and his family. On their
return it was hoped that the climate of the south of England might suit
Mr Stevenson and be conveniently near London for literary business and
literary friendships, so he, and his wife and son settled at Bournemouth
in a house called Skerryvore, after the famous lighthouse so dear to all
the Stevensons. Here too, alas! his enemy found him out; and chronic,
indifferent health, with not infrequent attacks of lung disease in its
more serious forms, finally obliged him about 1887 to take another
journey to America in the hope that it might do him good.
Through all his life the shadow of death was never quite out of sight
for him or for those who loved him; the skeleton hand was continually
beckoning to him. When we think what that means, in a man's life, we
realise with amazement his charming cheerfulness, his wonderful courage,
and the magnitude of his work, the exactitude of his methods, the
carefulness of his research, appeal to us as something positively heroic
in one so handicapped by adverse fate.
When many men in despair would have given in he fought on; and the sum
of his work, the length of his years--comparatively short as these
were--witness to the truth that _will_ can do many things. He willed to
fight, he willed to live, he scorned to drop by the wayside, or to die
one day before the battle was hopeless, and he fought his fight with a
smiling face and a gay courage that was as fine a thing in its way as an
act which has won a Victoria Cross; nay, finer, perhaps, for the
struggle was not of minutes, or of hours, but of a lifetime, a stern
prolonged tussle with death, in which he was never selfish, never
peevish, always thoughtful of others, invariably merry and bright, with
a wonderful sparkling whimsical mirth that had in it no touch of
bitterness or of cynicism. Even the last years of life, when the need to
work hard for an income that would sufficiently maintain his household,
made brain work, under conditions of physical weakness, often peculiarly
trying, were largely full of the same marvellous pluck and illumined by
the same sunny temperament.
In the years between 1873 and 1879, in the summer of which he went to
San Francisco, he had sought health in many places with a varying degree
of success. He had seen much of life and, as he was an excellent
linguist, had everywhere formed friendships with men of all
nationalities, and was thus enabled to study at his leisure continental
life and manners. He frequently stayed at Fontainbleau, where he had a
Stevenson cousin studying art, and the pleasant unconventional life of
the student settlement at Brabazon was very attractive to a man of Mr
Stevenson's temperament. His first visit to the artist colony was paid
in 1875, and it was often repeated.
His wanderings had unfortunately brought no permanent improvement to his
health so, for that and other reasons, it occurred to him in 1879 to go
to San Francisco to see if the Californian climate would be of benefit
to him. Eager as ever to study life in all its phases and from every
point of view he took his passage in an emigrant ship--where he tells us
he posed as a mason and played his part but indifferently well!--and at
New York resolved to continue his journey across America by emigrant
train.
In the graphic account of his experiences, in the volume of essays
entitled _Across the Plains_, and in _The Amateur Emigrant_, he
describes what must have been a very trying time to a man of his refined
upbringing and frail constitution. But he looks, here as elsewhere, at
the bright side of people and things; and even for the Chinaman, from
whom the other emigrants hold themselves aloof, he has a good word to
say. He keenly observed everything from his fellow-passengers, the
character of the newsboys on the cars, and the petty oppressions of the
railway officials to the glories of the scenery on that marvellous
journey of which Joaquin Miller says:--
'We glide through golden seas of grain,
We shoot, a shining comet, through
The mountain range, against the blue,
And then, below the walls of snow,
We blow the desert dust amain,
We see the orange groves below,
We rest beneath the oaks, and we
Have cleft a continent in twain.'
After the long rush across the plains, Mr Stevenson's heart bounded with
joy when he caught a glimpse of 'a huge pine-forested ravine, a foaming
river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.'
'You will scarce believe it,' he says, 'how my heart leaped at this. It
was like meeting one's wife. I had come home again--home from unsightly
deserts to the green and habitable corners of the earth.'
By the afternoon they had reached Sacramento, which he writes of as 'a
city of gardens in a plain of corn,' and before the dawn of the next day
the train was drawn up at the Oaklands side of San Francisco Bay. The
day broke as they crossed the ferry, and he says:
'The fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was
perfect, not a ripple, scarce a stain upon its blue expanse, everything
was waiting breathless for the sun.
'A spot of gold first lit upon the head of Talampais and then widened
downwards on its shapely shoulder' ... and by-and-bye
'The tall hills Titan discovered,'
'and the city of San Francisco and the bay of gold and corn were lit
from end to end with summer daylight.'
In _The Old Pacific Capital_ he writes delightfully of San Francisco and
the surge of its 'toss'd and tumbled sea,' that echoes forever around
Monterey and its woods of oaks and pines and cedars. He has much that is
interesting to tell of the curious contrast between San Francisco,
modern and American, and Monterey, the 'Old Pacific Capital,' so full of
a pathetic and a half-forgotten history. He has a deep sympathy with its
refined and impoverished Spanish gentle-folk and their unpractical ideas
of what is honourable; and he predicts that the people who do not
consider it etiquette to look through an important paper before signing
it are, in spite of America's assertions that they are well able to take
care of themselves, little likely to survive long in a world of Yankee
sharpness and smartness.
He revelled in the beautiful woods so often devastated by forest fires.
On one occasion, he says, he came perilously near lynching, for he
applied a match to the dry moss which clings to the bark of the trees to
see if it were so peculiarly ignitable as to be an important factor in
the rapid spread of a fire. In a moment flames broke out all over the
tree, and he found to his horror that he had started a fresh fire of his
own very difficult to put out, and exceedingly likely to arouse the
indignation of the men who were struggling to beat out the existing
conflagration, to the point of lynching the too officious stranger.
The solemn boom of the Pacific was a constant delight to him, and he
gloried in the ever-changing lights and shadows on the sea. If he did
not attain to permanent good health while at San Francisco and Monterey
he at least found there something else which made for the lasting
happiness of his life, as it was there that he married his wife.
After spending about seven years of married life at Bournemouth he
again, in 1887, tried a visit to America. His health, however, did not
improve, and, during the winter of 1887 and 1888, when he was at Saranac
Lake, he speaks of himself, in _The Vailima Letters_, as having been--in
the graphic Scots words--'far through'; and the idea occurred to him of
chartering a yacht and going for a voyage in the South Seas. His mother
on this occasion accompanied the family party, and between 1888 and
1890 they sailed about among the lovely islands of the South Sea,
visiting Honolulu, and finally touching at Apia in Samoa, where they
promptly fell in love with the beauty of the scenery and the charm of
the climate.
On this voyage, as always, Mr Stevenson made friends wherever he went,
and had much pleasant intercourse with wandering Europeans, missionaries
and natives.
On her return to Edinburgh, after this cruise with him, his mother used
to give most entertaining accounts of the feasts given in their honour
by the native kings and chiefs, and of the quaint gifts bestowed on
them. At an afternoon tea-party at 17 Heriot Row, shortly before the
home there was finally broken up, she put on for our benefit the
wreath--still wonderfully green--that had been given to her to wear at
one of those island festivities. She had promised the sable majesty who
gave it to her to be photographed with it on, and to send him one of the
copies. One of these photographs is beside me now, and is an excellent
likeness. Close to it is the graceful one of her son, taken at
Bournemouth, wearing his hair long, and one of the velvet coats that he
loved, and it is a most curious contrast to the sturdy Scotsman, his
father, who looks out at it from his frame, in conventional broadcloth
and with the earnest gravity so characteristic of his face in repose.
Innumerable photographs, pictures, and busts, were taken of Robert Louis
Stevenson, but not one of them has ever been a very real or a very
satisfying likeness. In recent years one rarely sees an Academy
Exhibition without one or more representations of the mobile face, the
expression of which has, alas! eluded the grasp of even the best of
artists.
The Stevenson party had been so charmed with Samoa, that, as the climate
suited Louis admirably, they resolved to give up the Bournemouth home,
buy some ground in Samoa, and finally settle there. So sometime about
1890 Vailima was bought, and building and reclaiming operations were
begun, and, save for occasional visits to Sydney or Honolulu, Mr
Stevenson and his household gave up personal communication with the busy
and civilised world, and happily settled themselves in a peaceful life
among the palms and the sunshine of the tropics and the friendly Samoan
natives, who grew to be so deeply attached to them, and so proud of
'Tusitala.'
CHAPTER VIII
HIS MARRIAGE AND FRIENDSHIPS
... 'What we seek is but our other self
Other and higher, neither wholly like
Nor wholly different, the half life the gods
Retained when half was given--one the man
And one the woman.'...--_Epic of Hades_.
L. MORRIS.
'Old friends are best, old coats that fit.'
--ROBERT RICHARDSON.
It was naturally to be supposed that a man of Mr Stevenson's
temperament, before whose eyes from his earliest childhood there had
been present a woman good enough to give him the very highest ideal of
womanhood, would not easily or lightly give his heart away. He knew that
he longed for the best, and to nothing less than the best could he give
his soul's worship. That he did not find his ideal in the beaten track
of everyday social life, or among the gay and agreeable girls whom he
met in his young manhood, is not surprising.
The element of romance, as well as the longing for what was noblest in
womanhood, was in him; and romance for him was not embodied in a pretty
young woman in a ball gown. Possibly he considered that the amusing
advice as to matrimony which he gives in _Virginibus Puerisque_, was as
applicable to a man as to a woman, and that 'the bright' girl of Society
was as apt to be a wearisome and an exacting helpmate as her brother,
'the bright boy of fiction,' against whom as a husband his essay warns
the woman in search of marriage to whom he recommends, as a more
comfortable partner, the man old enough to have loved before, and to
have undergone something of an apprenticeship in devotion. Very
pertinent also is his advice to men in the same essay, that kindred
tastes are more likely to ensure lasting happiness than a fair face or
an acceptable dowry.
Beneath the easy brightness of thought and style that make the essay so
amusing and so readable, one sees that its writer knows his world well,
and has given graver thought to matters matrimonial than at a first
reading one is inclined to believe.
Holding firmly the faith that 'all things come to him who knows how to
wait,' Mr Stevenson was in no hurry to realise his ideal, and it was not
until he was between twenty-seven and thirty that he met the woman whom
he chose for his wife. That there was an element of romance in their
acquaintance altogether removed from everyday love stories made it all
the more fitting an ending to that watchful waiting for what fate had to
give him.
When Mr Stevenson arrived in San Francisco in 1879, there was living
with her sister, at Monterey, Mrs Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne of
Indiana. Mrs Osbourne had been married when very young, and her domestic
experience was so unhappy that she had to obtain a divorce from her
husband. She had, with her son and daughter, lived for some time in
that student colony at Fontainbleau which Mr Stevenson knew and loved so
well, and in after years they must have had in common many pleasant
memories of people and places dear to both, so that his ideal of
matrimony described in _Virginibus Puerisque_ was realised, and he and
his wife had 'many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor
custom stale.'
At a party at San Francisco Mr Stevenson much admired Mrs Osbourne and
her daughter Belle, who married a Mr Strong, and who afterwards, in the
Vailima days, became her step-father's secretary. The young girl he
found very fresh and sweet with the gay brightness of youth, but of her
mother his impression was much deeper, and he always spoke and wrote of
her as the most beautiful and the most charming woman whom he had ever
seen. Although she was several years his senior she was then in the very
prime of a womanly beauty which, to judge from the photographs taken at
Vailima more than ten years later, was only at its ripest when other
women are beginning to think of growing old. No one who had even once
looked into her dark eyes could fail to endorse Mr Stevenson's verdict,
to realise her charm of person, or doubt for a moment the loveliness of
nature and the nobility of soul to which these strange deep eyes were
the index. She was indeed charming, and it was no wonder that such a
nature as Mr Stevenson's found in her that 'other half of the old
Platonic tradition, the fortunate finding of which can alone make a
marriage perfect.
The romantic and the unusual in the story comes in when, at the request
of his doctor, Mrs Osbourne gave willingly of her kindness and her
skill in nursing to the young man who was lying at point of death alone
in a far land. The child of the people with whom he was boarding had
been very ill, and when other folk left the house of sickness, Mr
Stevenson, who had liked his little playfellow, remained to help the
parents with the nursing, and wore himself out in their service as only
a man of his rare human sympathy and tenderness of heart would have
done. The child recovered, and long years afterwards when the monument
to his memory was erected at San Francisco, the mother laid a wreath at
its base in remembrance of that unforgotten kindness. Unfortunately,
already far from well and suffering much from the effects of the journey
by emigrant ship and train and the stern experience of 'roughing it'
which that had entailed, Mr Stevenson was quite unfit for the fatigue of
nursing and he became so ill that the doctor despaired of his life. This
doctor, who then and afterwards proved a very real friend, was greatly
distressed about his patient, especially as the danger of his illness
was greatly increased by the lack of that skilled nursing which was
there very difficult to obtain. In such a case the physician could do
much, but a good nurse could do far more, so the doctor, in his anxiety,
recollected that Mrs Osbourne was, like himself, interested in the
talented young Scotsman, and was also possessed of a rare and womanly
gift of nursing, and he begged her to do what she could for his patient.
She responded to his appeal, and with her sister showed the invalid a
kindness so great that it did more to help his recovery than the best of
drugs could have done. He was restored to a certain measure of health,
and it may thus be said that he owed his life to his future wife, but
he owed her much more for her unselfish devotion in his time of weakness
and loneliness, as a stranger in a strange land, glorified to him all
womanhood in her person, and the man who knew what it was to have an
ideal mother was so peculiarly fortunate as to find an ideal wife also.
Two such natures as theirs were inevitably attracted to each other, and
it is not surprising that their friendship deepened into love, or that
in later years he says of her:
'Teacher, tender comrade, wife,
A fellow-farer true through life,
Heart-whole and soul-free,
The august Father
Gave to me.'
At San Francisco, on the 19th of May 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson and
Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne were married, and there began for them that
perfect life together which anxiety and illness could not cloud, and
which found its earthly termination when in that awful and sudden moment
in December 1894 Mr Stevenson entered into 'the Rest Eternal.'
Belle Osbourne became Mrs Strong, and by-and-bye she and her little boy
Austin joined the Stevensons in their home life. 'Sam,' as Mr Lloyd
Osbourne was called in those days, accompanied them to England when they
made their home at Bournemouth. He was a bright, eager boy when he used
to appear in Edinburgh, and one who was very welcome to the elder
Stevensons at Heriot Row. By-and-bye he went to the Edinburgh University
and there he was full of life and interest, keen on pleasures, keen on
friendships, interested in classes, and even then there was something
of the same earnestness, the same humour and brightness in him that
characterised his stepfather and which made him, by-and-bye, with no
small measure of the same gifts, his collaborator and friend. A
friendship that was begun in very early days when the two told each
other stories and issued romances from a toy printing-press, and when
the junior received that delightful dedication of _Treasure Island_ in
which he is described as 'a young American gentleman' to whose taste the
tale appeals.
Shortly after their marriage Mr and Mrs R. L. Stevenson had had the
quaint experience of housekeeping so charmingly described in _Silvarado
Squatters_, but their first real home was at Skerryvore, and Bournemouth
was the headquarters of the household until the necessities of Mr
Stevenson's health again made them wanderers; and that move in 1887
finally ended in the purchase of Vailima, and the pitching of their camp
in far Samoa.
The curtest mention of their Bournemouth life would be incomplete
without some notice of the many friends who found it so easy to reach
from London and so pleasant to visit, and who, themselves well known in
the literary world, so greatly appreciated the genius of Mr Stevenson.
Among old Edinburgh friends of long standing were his many Balfour and
Stevenson cousins and his old comrades of early days, and among the
latter Mr Charles Baxter and the late Sir Walter G. Simpson held a
principal place in his regard. Mr Sydney Colvin he had first met in
1873, Mr Henley he first knew in Edinburgh about the end of 1874, and Mr
Edmund Gosse was another much valued friend of long standing. Mr Colvin
was to the last one of the friends highest in his regard, and to him
were written _The Vailima Letters_.
His wonderful attire, at the Savile Club and elsewhere in orthodox
London, at first astonished and somewhat repelled literary men
accustomed to a more conventional garb than the velvet coats, the long
loose hair, and the marvellous ties Mr Stevenson delighted in; but very
soon they found out the charm of the personality that lay behind a
certain eccentricity of appearance, and Mr Leslie Stephen, Mr James
Payn, Dr Appleton, Professor Clifford, Mr Cosmo Monkhouse, and Mr George
Meredith, whom he met in 1878 and whose work he so much admired, were
numbered among his life-long friends. Mr Henley's description of him in
these days is better than any picture:
'Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,
Neat-footed, weak-fingered, in his face,--
Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race,
Bold-lipped, rich tinted, mutable as the sea,
The brown eyes radiant with vivacity,--
There shines a brilliant and romantic grace,
A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace
Of passion, impudence, and energy.'
Another friend of those days, Mr Andrew Lang, also lets his friendship
run into rhyme, and sends across the seas to the author of _The Master
of Ballantrae_ a quaint greeting in the best of Southland Doric:
'Whan Suthern winds gar spindrift flee
Abune the clachan, faddumes hie,
Whan for the cluds I canna see
The bonny lift,
I'd fain indite an odd to thee
Had I the gift!...
... 'O Louis, you that writes in Scots,
Ye're far awa' frae stirks and stots,
Wi' drookit herdies, tails in knots,
An unco way!
My mirth's like thorns aneth the pots
In Ballantrae!'
To this Mr Stevenson promptly replied in equally fine Doric, and with a
playful allusion to the early 'grizzelled' hair which gives to Mr Andrew
Lang an appearance venerable beyond his years.
Mr Crockett, in the delightful dedication to _The Stickit Minister_,
celebrates his friendship with Mr Stevenson; and among the younger
school of writers, for whose work he had so generous an appreciation, he
had many friends as well as admirers. Mr Barrie, Mr Rudyard Kipling, Mr
Le Galliene, and a host of others loved him as a friend, as well as
looked up to him as a literary leader. To many of them he wrote charming
letters, although in several cases no actual meeting had ever taken
place. It was a keen disappointment to both men that circumstances
prevented Mr Rudyard Kipling from paying a visit to Samoa.
In his island home he was not forgetful of his 'own romantic town,' nor
of the interests of one, at least, of its publishing firms, whose
travellers and agents he introduced to new fields of usefulness in India
and the South Seas. One of his own favourite books was _Coral Island_,
by Mr R. M. Ballantyne, published by the Messrs Nelson.
But Stevenson, whose charm of personality was even greater than his
fame, had other friends, whose friendship is not measured by the
intellect but by the heart. Little children and young folk everywhere
loved the man whose _Child's Garden of Verses_ shows such a marvellous
insight into the hearts of children.
The ass Modestine, the Samoan horse Jack, well knew that the indignant
flow of language meant nothing, and that their master's heart was
altogether in the right place, although, when they were too provoking,
his words might be very unparliamentary.
For dogs he had as great an attraction as they had for him, and the
master of Coolin the wise, and Woggs, or Bogue, the gallant, discourses
as few men could do about canine thoughts and feelings in his essay _The
Character of Dogs_.
No fear of his being among the foolish people who remark that 'they like
dogs in their proper place,' and, as he stingingly adds, say, '"Poo'
fellow! Poo' fellow!" and are themselves far poorer!' He knew, because
he had taken the trouble to study him, that 'to the dog of gentlemanly
feelings, theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices.'
CHAPTER IX
HIS ESSAYS AND POEMS
'Golden thoughts that ever will resound,
And be re-echoed to the utmost parts of land and sea.'
--R. S. MUTCH.
Mr Stevenson inherited both from the Stevenson and Balfour families some
measure of literary talent. His father and his grandfather had written
with considerable acceptance on the subject of their profession. His
father also wrote on religious matters, and at least one of these
pamphlets was believed to be of lasting value by competent judges. On
scientific and engineering subjects his work was thought so excellent,
and was so well known, that R. L. Stevenson tells, with some amusement,
that he was surprised to find in the New World it was his father and not
himself who was considered the important author. _The Life of Robert
Stevenson_, of Bell Rock fame, written by David Stevenson, is a very
interesting book.
Among his mother's relatives the gift of fluent and graceful expression
is also widely diffused, and in common with Mrs Thomas Stevenson and her
son, not a few of the Balfour connection have been very charming letter
writers, in the days when letters were worth receiving, and not the
hurried and uncharacteristic scraps which do duty for present-day
correspondence.
He himself considered that he inherited his literary talent largely
from his father's family, but there is interesting proof that even in
his grandfather's day it was inherent also in his Balfour ancestors. The
minister of Colinton wrote verses in his youth, and a sonnet preserved
by his surviving son and daughter is interesting as a proof of his
earnest mind and his literary skill. It was written on the fly-leaf of a
folio copy of _Pearson on the Creed_, presented to him by his friend,
the Reverend Patrick Macfarlane, who became, about 1832, minister of the
West Church at Greenock, and is dated 18th May 1801.
'My friend, my Patrick, let me boast the name,
For my breast glows with no inferior flame,
This gift was thine, expressive of thy love,
Which spurning earthborn joys for those above
Would teach my friend in sacred lore to grow,
And feel the truths impressive as they flow.
While with our faith our kindred bosoms glow,
And love to God directs our life below,
One view of things now seen, and things to come,
But pilgrims here, a future state our home,
Nor time, nor death, our friendship shall impair,
Begun below, but rendered perfect there.'
More than one of the old gentleman's family inherited his talent for
graceful and forcible writing. His son, Dr George W. Balfour, has
written two well-known medical books which have brought to him a large
measure of fame. These are _Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Heart_,
and the even more popular _The Senile Heart_. About the latter he tells
an excellent story. A well-known literary critic, seeing the book lying
on the table, thought it a work of fiction with an admirable and unique
title, carried it off for review, and found to his disgust it was a
learned medical treatise. Dr John Balfour, an elder son of the manse,
wrote papers in _The Indian Annals_ and _The Edinburgh Medical Journal_,
which were very highly esteemed.
In the younger generation, a cousin of Mr R. L. Stevenson, Mrs Beckwith
Sitwell, has written much and pleasantly, principally for young people.
Another cousin, Mrs Marie Clothilde Balfour, whose father was a son of
the Colinton manse, who died young, and who is married to her cousin--a
son of Dr G. W. Balfour, who can also, like his father, write acceptably
on medical and other subjects--has already gained for herself no
inconsiderable repute as a novelist, her third book, _The Fall of the
Sparrow_, having been considered by competent critics one of the notable
books of last year.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the bent towards literature which
appears in both families should in Robert Louis Stevenson have been
developed into that rare gift which men call genius. While he was still
a careless student of twenty, his papers in _The Edinburgh University
Magazine_ possessed a peculiar attraction, and appealed to cultured
minds with a charm not often found in the work of so young a writer.
_An Old Gardener_ and _A Pastoral_ especially had much of the depth of
thought and the finish of style which so largely characterised Mr
Stevenson's later work. Interesting and delightful as he is as a
story-teller, there is in his essays a graceful fascination which makes
them for many of his readers infinitely more satisfying than the most
brilliant of his tales. In the essays you seem to meet the man face to
face, to listen to his spoken thoughts, to see the grave and the gay
reflections of his mind, to enjoy with him 'the feast of reason and the
flow of soul' provided by the writers into whose company he takes you,
or to return with him to his boyhood, and, in _The Old Manse_ and
_Random Memories_ see familiar places and people touched by the light of
genius, and made as wonderful to your own commonplace understanding as
to the intense and high-souled boy who wandered about among them,
hearing and seeing the everyday things of life as only the romancist and
the poet can hear and see them.
His style, too--strong and virile as it is in his tales--attains, one
almost fancies, its full perfection in his essays. The thoughts, both
grave and gay, are presented in a dainty dress that is peculiarly fitted
to do them justice. There is room in this quiet writing, disturbed by no
exigencies of plot, to give perfect scope to the grace and the leisure
which are the great charms of Mr Stevenson's work. One can take up a
volume of the essays or a slim book of verses at any time and dip into
it as one would into some clear and cold mountain well, full of
refreshment for the weary wayfarer, and, like the well, it is sure to
give one an invigorating sense of keen enjoyment, to take one far from
the dusty highways of life and plunge one into the depth and coolness of
the wide silence of nature, or to fill one's mind with strong and worthy
thoughts gleaned from the world of men and books.
In his _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_, published, in one volume,
by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1882, with a charming dedication to his
father, Mr Stevenson gives in the preface a most interesting account of
his own fuller point of view regarding the studies which had originally
appeared in the _New Quarterly_, _Macmillan_, and _Cornhill_. The essays
deal with such well-known men as Knox, Burns, Thoreau, Charles of
Orleans, Samuel Pepys, and others, and are always fresh and agreeable
reading. The papers on Knox and Burns have an especial interest for Mr
Stevenson's fellow-countrymen who naturally appreciate the judgment of a
later day genius on the character and work of the two men who have had
so wide an influence on Scottish life and feeling.
To John Knox Scotland largely owes her reformed religion, her rigid
presbyterianism, and it is, to many people, a new and an interesting
phase of the character of the great Reformer--who so enjoyed
brow-beating Queen Mary--that Mr Stevenson shows, when he depicts Knox
as the confidential friend of the religious women of his day, writing
letters to them, comforting them in domestic trials, even shedding tears
with them, and keeping up, through a harassed and busy life, these
friendships which seem to have been as great a source of pleasure to the
Reformer as to the ladies.
Of Robert Burns, the peasant poet, whose songs did as much to bring back
the sunshine into everyday Scotch life as the Reformer's homilies did to
banish it, Mr Stevenson writes with sympathy and tenderness. For the
work he is full of admiration; for the man, whose circumstances and
temperament made his whole life a difficult walking in slippery places
where the best of men could hardly have refrained from falling, he has a
gentle understanding, a manly pity. There was much in the poet's life
and temperament repellent to a nature like Mr Stevenson's, but there was
far more where the human feeling of man to man and of soul to soul could
touch with comprehension, so that in his paper, and more especially in
his preface, we find him giving to Scotland's national bard an
ungrudging admiration in his struggles after the right, and no petty
condemnation when he lapsed and fell from his own higher ideals.
Of Walt Whitman and Thoreau, both most interesting studies in the
volume, he has much that is stimulating to say; and many readers, who
may not have time or opportunity for deep personal research, will find
his essays on _Villon_, _Victor Hugo's Romances_, _Samuel Pepys_,
_Yoshida Torajiro_ and _Charles of Orleans_ a very pleasant means of
obtaining a great deal of information in a very limited space.
In the early essays, republished in volume form in 1881 by Messrs Chatto
& Windus, under the title _Virginibus Puerisque_, Mr Stevenson
discourses delightfully on many things, touching, for instance, with a
light hand but a wise heart on matrimony and love-making, and the little
things, so small in themselves, so large as they bulk for happiness or
misery, that go to make peace or discord in married life. It is all done
with a pointed pen and a smiling face; but its lightness covers wisdom,
and it is full of sound counsel and makes wiser reading for young men
and maidens than many books of more apparent gravity.
That pathos always lay close behind his playful mockeries and was never
far away from the man whose paper on _Ordered South_ is like the bravely
repressed cry of all his fellow-sufferers the companion paper on _El
Dorado_ proves convincingly. Under its graceful phrases there lies deep
and strong sympathy for toil, for hope deferred and longed for, for the
disappointment of attainment, for the labour that after all has so often
to be its own reward.
Between 1880 and 1885 Mr Stevenson collaborated with Mr Henley in the
writing of four plays which were privately printed, _Deacon Brodie_ in
1880, _Beau Austin_ in 1884, _Admiral Guinea_ in 1884, and _Robert
Macaire_ in 1885--the whole being finally published in volume form in an
edition limited to 250 copies, in 1896. _Beau Austin_ was acted in 1890
at The Haymarket, and quite recently _Admiral Guinea_ has been played
with Mr Sydney Valentine in the part of David Pew, but in spite of the
literary distinction of the collaborators the plays have not been a
great success on the stage.
In the later papers, 'A Christmas Sermon,' 'A Letter to a Young
Gentleman,' and 'Pulvis et Umbra,' in the volume of collected essays
called _Across the Plains_, the note of pathos which appears now and
then in _Virginibus Puerisque_ is even more forcibly struck. The writer
is older, he has known more of life and of suffering, he has more than
once looked death closely in the face, and, though his splendid courage
is there all the time, the sadness of humanity is more apparent than in
most of his work. The other essays in this volume are very pleasant
reading, and _Across the Plains_ and _The Old and New Pacific Capitals_
give most graphic descriptions of the life and scenery on the shore of
the Pacific, and of the journey to get there.
In 'Random Memories' in the same volume, he goes back to his boyhood,
and we meet him at home beside the 'Scottish Sea,' under grey Edinburgh
skies, larking with his fellow-boys in their autumn holidays, touring
with his father in _The Pharos_ round the coast of Fife, and later
inspecting harbours at Anstruther, and on the bleak shores of Caithness,
an apprentice engineer, for whom, apart from the open air and the
romance of a harbour or a light tower, his profession had no charms.
Not the least pleasant of his volumes of _Essays_ is that called
_Memories and Portraits_, published by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1887,
and dedicated to his mother, whom his father's death in the May of that
year had so recently made a widow. In it there is a most interesting
paper entitled 'Thomas Stevenson,' in which he writes very
appreciatively of that father who was so great a man in the profession
which the son admired although he could not follow it. Here, too, are
papers on 'The Manse,' that old home of his grandfather at Colinton
which he when a child loved so well; on the old gardener at Swanston,
who so lovingly tended the vegetables of which he remarked to his
mistress, when told to send in something choice for the pot, that 'it
was mair blessed to give than to receive,' but gave her of his best all
the same, and who loved the old-fashioned flowers, and gave a place to
'Gardener's garters, shepherd's purse,
Batchelors' buttons, lady's smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.'
In this book also are 'A Pastoral,' in which we learn to know John Todd,
that typical shepherd of the Pentlands, and his dogs; the charming paper
on 'The Character of Dogs,' and four literary essays beginning with an
account of his early purchases in the old book shop in Leith Walk, and
ending in 'A Humble Remonstrance,' with a summary of his views on
romance writing, and what it really ought to be.
Somewhat of the nature too of essays or sketches is that delightful
volume, made up of different chapters in a most ideal life, _The
Silvarado Squatters_, published in 1883, in which Mr Stevenson gives a
brilliant description of the very primitive existence he and his wife
with Mr Lloyd Osbourne, then a very small boy indeed, led shortly after
their marriage, in a disused miner's house--if one can by courtesy call
a _house_ the three-roomed shed, into which sunlight and air poured
through the gaping boards and the shattered windows!--on the slope of
Mount Saint Helena, where once had been the Silvarado silver mine.
Primitive in the extreme, the life must nevertheless have been
delightful; and, given congenial companionship and the perfect climate
of a Californian summer, one can imagine no more blissful experience
than 'roughing it' in that sheltered canon on the mountain side with
the ravine close below, and the most marvellous stretch of earth, and
sea, and sky, hill and plain, spread out like an ever-changing picture
before the eyes, while to the ears there came no sound more harsh than
the shrill notes of the woodland birds. There came also the noise of the
rattlesnake very often, Mr Stevenson says, but they did not realise its
sinister significance until almost the end of their sojourn there, when
their attention was drawn to it, and certainly no evil befell them.
_Silvarado Squatters_, like _The Vailima Letters_, shows to perfection
how simple and how busy, with the most primitive household details, the
Stevensons often were on their wanderings, and how supremely happy
people, whose tastes and habits suit each other, can be without the
artificial surroundings and luxuries of society and civilisation that
most folk consider well-nigh necessary to their salvation.
One of the most beautiful descriptions of nature in all Mr Stevenson's
books, is that of the sea mist rising from the Pacific, and seen from
above, like a vast white billowy ocean, by the squatters on their
mountain ledge. Bret Harte, for whom and for whose works Mr Stevenson
had a sincere admiration, also alludes graphically to the curious scenic
effects of the mist rising from the Pacific. Very interesting, too, are
the papers on wine and wine-growers, and the two vineyards on the
mountain side; and Scotch hearts, warm even to the Scotch tramp who
looked in at the door, and to the various fellow-countrymen who arrived
to shake hands with Mr Stevenson because he was a Scot and like
themselves, an alien from the grey skies and the clanging church bells
of home.
'From the dim sheiling on the misty island
Mountains divide us and a world of seas,
Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,'
he quotes and adds--
'And Highland and Lowland all our hearts are Scotch.'[5]
One last notice of his prose is connected with Edinburgh, and very
probably with a church charity, for to help some such sale as churches
patronise he wrote _The Charity Bazaar: a Dialogue_, which was given to
me by its author at 17 Heriot Row one day very long ago, and which,
rather frayed and yellow, is still safely pasted in my Everyday Book
with the initials 'R. L. S.' in strong black writing at the end of it.
Mr Stevenson has done so much in prose that the general reader is very
prone to forget those four thin volumes of verse which alone would have
done much to establish his fame as an author. The first published in
1885 was _The Child's Garden of Verses_, and anything more dainty than
the style and the composition of that really wonderful little book
cannot be imagined, nor has there ever been written anything, in prose
or in verse, more true to the thoughts and the feelings of an
imaginative child.
_Ballads_, published in 1890 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, the firm who
have published all the essays, is a collection of very interesting
narrative poems. The first two, 'Rahero, a Legend of Tahiti' and 'The
Feast of Famine, Marquesan Manners,' deal with native life in the sunny
islands of the tropics, and show, with the same graphic and powerful
touch as his South Sea tales do, that human life, love, hatred, and
revenge are as fierce and as terrible there as in the sterner north.
With the north are associated the old and curious Scotch legends,
_Ticonderoga_ and _Heather Ale_. The first gives in easily flowing lines
a Highland slaying, the rather mean appeal of the slayer for protection
to the dead man's brother and the honourable fashion in which the
living Cameron elects to stand by his oath to the stranger in spite of
the three times repeated complaint and curse of his dead brother. The
spectre tells him that he will die at a place called Ticonderoga, but
such a word is known to no man, and yet, when Pitt sends a Highland
regiment, in which Captain Cameron is an officer, to the East, the
doomed man sees his own wraith look at him from the water, and knows,
when he hears the place is Ticonderoga, he will be the first to fall in
battle there.
The _Heather Ale_ is a Galloway legend which tells how the last Pict on
the Galloway moors prefers to see his son drowned and to die himself
rather than sell his honour and betray his secret to the King.
_Christmas at Sea_ is a sad little tale of how, when all men are glad on
board the labouring ship--that stormy Christmas Day--that she has at
last cleared the dangerous headland and is safely out at sea, the lad
who has left the old folk to run away to be a sailor can only see the
lighted home behind the coastguard's house,
'The pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair ...
... And oh the wicked fool I seemed in every kind of way
To be here hauling frozen ropes on Blessed Christmas Day ...
... They heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea.
But all that I could think of in the darkness and the cold
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.'
_Underwoods_ was published by the same firm in 1887, and is most
touchingly dedicated to all the many doctors of whose skill and kindness
Mr Stevenson had had such frequent need. The verses in it were written
at different times and in different places, and while many of them are
full of the early freshness of youth some of them give as pleasantly and
quaintly the riper wisdom of manhood.
Several of the verses are written to friends or relatives, some very
charming lines are to his father.
Eight lines called 'The Requiem' seem the very perfection of his own
idea of a last resting-place, and are almost prophetic of that lone
hill-top where he lies.
Book II. of _Underwoods_ is 'In Scots,' very forcible and graphic Scots
too, but as to the dialect Mr Stevenson himself disarms criticism. He
find his words, he says, in all localities; he spells them, he allows,
sometimes with a compromise.
'I have stuck for the most part to the proper spelling,' he writes; and
again--
'To some the situation is exhilarating; as for me I give one bubbling
cry and sink. The compromise at which I have arrived is indefensible,
and I have no thought of trying to defend it.'
And indeed he has no need of it; it is good, forcible 'Scots' after all,
and the thoughts he clothes in it are as 'hame-ower' and as pithy as the
words.
_The Maker to Posterity_, _Ille Terrarum, A Blast_, _A Counterblast_,
and _The Counterblast Ironical_, are all excellent; and one can point to
no prettier picture of a Scottish Sunday than _A Lowden Sabbath Morn_,
which has recently been published alone in book form very nicely
illustrated, while he pokes some, not undeserved, fun at our Scottish
good opinion of ourselves and our religious privileges in _Embro, her
Kirk_, and _The Scotsman's Return from Abroad_. Surely nowhere is there
Scots more musical or lines more true to the sad experience which life
brings to us all than these with which the book ends:
'It's an owercome sooth for age and youth,
And it brooks wi' nae denial,
That the dearest friends are the auldest friends
And the young are just on trial.
'There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld,
And it's him that has bereft me,
For the surest friends are the auldest friends
And the maist o' mine hae left me.'...
The last volume of verses, _Songs of Travel_, has a pathos all its own,
for, like _St Ives_ and _Weir of Hermiston_, the author never saw it in
print. The verses were sent home shortly before his death, and in the
note appended to them Mr Sydney Colvin says they were to be finally
printed as Book III. of _Underwoods_, but meantime were given to the
world in their present form in 1896.
They were written at different periods, and they show their author in
varying moods; but they incline rather to the sadder spirit of the last
two years of his life, and have left something if not of the courage for
the fight, at least of the gaiety of living behind them. Two of them are
written to his wife, many of them to friends; some of them have the lilt
and the brightness of songs, others, like _If this were Faith_ and _The
Woodman_, are filled with the gravity of life and the bitterness of the
whole world's struggle for existence.
In _The Vagabond_ he is still in love with the open air life and the
freedom of the tramp. In his exile he longs to rest at last beside those
he loves; he feels the weariness of life, he writes--
'I have trod the upward and the downward slope;
I have endured and done in days before;
I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope;
And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.'
After that one feels no surprise that he is waiting for the final
summons, and one has only a sense of the eternal fitness of things when
in the last words of the book he says--
'I hear the signal, Lord,--I understand
The night at Thy command
Comes. I will eat and sleep, and will not question more.'
FOOTNOTE:
[5] Mr Stevenson was very fond of this quotation, which appeals
so truly to Caledonia's sons and daughters. He found it in an old volume
of _Good Words_, and never knew its source. Like many other people he
quoted it incorrectly. According to information kindly supplied by Mr W.
Keith Leask, the lines, which have an interesting history, stand thus in
the original--
'From the lone sheiling on the misty island
Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.'
In _Tait's Magazine_ for 1849 it is given as 'Canadian Boat Song, from
the Gaelic.' The author of the English version was Burns' 'Sodger Hugh,'
the 12th Earl of Eglinton, who was M.P. for Ayrshire from 1784 to 1789,
and was the great-grandfather of the present Earl. When in Canada the
author is said to have heard a song of lament sung by evicted Hebridean
crofters in Manitoba, which gave him the idea for his verses--the first
four lines, and chorus, of which are--
'Listen to me as when we heard our father
Sing long ago the song of other shores;
Listen to me, and then in chorus gather
All your deep voices as ye pull your oars.
_Chorus_--Fair the broad meads, these hoary woods are grand,
But we are exiles from our fathers' land.'
Professor Mackinnon believes that the Gaelic version, known in the
Highlands to this day, is founded upon the Earl of Eglinton's lines, and
is not, as might be supposed, an earlier form of the poem which is known
and loved by Scotch folk all the world over.
CHAPTER X
HIS STORIES
'... Thy genius mingles strength with grace,
... 'Neath thy spell the world grows fair;
Our hearts revive, our inmost souls are stirred,
And all our English race awaits thy latest word.'
--Sir L. MORRIS'
Birthday Ode to the late Lord Tennyson.
Beginning his literary career as a writer of such quaint books of travel
as _An Inland Voyage_ and _Through the Cevennes with a Donkey_, such
charming essays as _Roads_, _Ordered South_, _El Dorado_, and many
others, Mr Stevenson was not long in entering the arena as a
story-teller. His first printed stories were _A Lodging for the Night_,
which appeared in _Temple Bar_ in October 1877; _The Sire de Maletroit's
Door_, in the same magazine in January 1878; and _Will o' the Mill_, in
_Cornhill_, also in January 1878.
In _Cornhill_, in 1876 had appeared the series of essays republished as
_Virginibus Puerisque_, and in 1877 and 1878 those afterwards collected
under the title _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_. There also began,
now and then, to be short stories from his pen in _Cornhill_,
_Macmillan_, _Longmans_, Mr H. Norman's _Christmas Annual_, _The Court
and Society Review,_ and other magazines. These, as they added
originality and a certain weirdness of plot to his already recognised
beauty of style, still further attracted that cultured public which had
at once accepted his earlier work as that of a master of English. As
already stated, it was _Will o' the Mill_, a charmingly written story of
still life, with a quiet philosophy all its own, that Mr Hamerton had
pronounced a masterpiece of style. _Markheim_ was a graphic, but very
unpleasant, story of a murder; _Olalla_, a horrible, but powerfully
written, sketch of hereditary insanity, with a beautiful setting of
Italian scenery to relieve the gloomy picture.
_Thrawn Janet_ which, with most of the tales in _The Merry Men_, was
written at Pitlochry, appeared in _Cornhill_ in 1880. Mr Stevenson
himself considered it one of his best stories, and thought it an
excellent piece of dialect writing. It is weird and impressive in the
extreme, and no one who has read it is likely to forget the minister of
Balweary in the vale of Dull, and his terrible experiences in the matter
of a housekeeper; the 'het lowin' wind' and the coppery sky of that day
on which he met the black man coming down by Dull water, and knew that
he had spoken with the enemy of souls himself; or the awful storm, in
which Satan finally came for all that was left of Thrawn Janet. Into
this story of a few pages are condensed a power of forcible expression
and a weirdness of theme which have not been surpassed in any of the
larger books.
_The Merry Men_ is a story of wreck and wickedness on a desolate West
Highland island where the rocks called 'the Merry Men,' as the tides
boil and foam among them, make, as it were, an undercurrent of mad
laughter that forms a fitting accompaniment to the hideous passions of
greed and murder and the dead level of human misery that are the
prevailing atmosphere of the tale. It is one of the best of the stories
forming the volume, to which it gives its name, published by Messrs
Chatto & Windus in 1887.
In another collection of short tales Mr Stevenson also deals with the
seamy side of life, and _The New Arabian Nights_ published in 1882, and
which contains the reprint of such stories as _The Suicide Club_, _The
Rajah's Diamond_, _The Sire de Maletroit's Door_, and _The Pavilion on
the Links_, is quite as gruesome and by no means less interesting than
_The Merry Men_.
_The Sire de Maletroit's Door_ and _The Pavilion on the Links_, are most
graphically written, especially the latter with its splendid description
of the dreary sea and the wide and wind-swept stretch of drearier links
where the curious characters play their mysterious parts. It is
interesting to know that Mr Stevenson wrote _The Pavilion on the Links_
while he was very ill in California. All the stories in the two volumes
are favourites, and many readers give a preference to _The Suicide
Club_, _The Rajah's Diamond_, or _Prince Florizel_.
_Providence and the Guitar_ is also one of his best stories. _Prince
Otto_, the first draft of which was written at Monterey, is the peculiar
but very beautifully written story of a prince with no fancy for
princedom and no talent for governing, who leaves his vain young wife
and his unscrupulous prime minister in power and goes roaming among his
subjects only to hear some far from complimentary opinions of himself.
In the end both prince and princess learn love and wisdom and find
happiness in spite of the revolution that drives them from their tiny
kingdom. It is a fanciful tale, the charm of which lies less in the
rather vague characters, who have the haziness of motive and of
personality of the figures in some old play, than in the absolute
perfection of style and of description that make it a book to read and
re-read with infinite pleasure.
Mr Stevenson says, in its dedicatory preface, that he meant to make of
it a masterpiece; if he did not succeed in doing so, as a story, he
certainly gave in it a picture of the woods so true to nature and so
exquisite in style and in expression that it will live as among his best
work.
Good as this earlier writing was he had not yet found in it his full
inspiration, and it hardly appealed to so wide a public as the fresh and
delightful stories of adventure to which he finally turned his
attention. In connection with Mr Stevenson's fiction, it is interesting
to note that in his boyhood he greatly enjoyed the stories of a novelist
called Smythe, who at that time contributed to the _London Journal_, and
whose work had its influence on the boy's future tales. Smythe's novels
were full of stirring adventures, and many lads of that day, besides the
aspiring novelist, were much impressed by them, and can even now recall
incidents in them read so long ago as 1868!
He had applied for work to Mr Henderson, the Scotch editor of _Young
Folks_, and to the acceptance of this application the world owes
_Treasure Island_ and the charming stories which followed it. The editor
of _Young Folks_, who offered to take a story from him, showed him a
treasure-hunting tale by Mr Peace, and asked him to give him something
on the same lines. The result was _The Sea Cook_, which appeared in the
paper in the autumn of 1881, and was not very highly paid for. It was
written under the nom-de-plume of Captain North to give the idea the
author was a sailor; it was not given a very important place in the
paper and it had no very marked success as a serial. It was, with very
little alteration, published by Messrs Cassell & Co. in 1883, under the
name of _Treasure Island_, and it had an instant and well-deserved
success. It is an excellent book for boys, full of stirring adventure,
in the old-time fashion of fifty years ago, but it is much more; it is a
book that grown-up folk, whose taste is still fresh enough to enjoy a
good tale of the sea, delight in as heartily as the juniors. It was
written while the Stevenson family were staying for a time at Braemar,
and Mr Thomas Stevenson gave his son valuable help in it from his own
experiences at sea while on his cruises of inspection round the coasts.
_The Black Arrow_ also appeared in _Young Folks_ during 1883 as by
Captain North; it is said to have been very successful as a serial, but
it has not been a great favourite in book form, and is one of the least
interesting of his stories.
_Kidnapped_ came out in 1886 in the same paper and was the first to be
signed as by Robert Louis Stevenson. In its serial form it was not
highly paid for but it had, when Messrs Cassell & Co. published it as a
book, a large and an immediate success. It forms the first instalment of
the delightful experiences of David Balfour, that somewhat pawky young
Scot who, from the moment he leaves 'The Hawes Inn' at Queensferry and
embarks on his adventures with Alan Breck and other strange worthies in
Appin and elsewhere till we finally bid him good-bye on the last page of
_Catriona_, never fails at odd times and places to remind one of Mr
Stevenson himself at David's age and of what he might have been and done
had David Balfour's fate been his in those early days of plot and
turmoil in which his part is played.
_Catriona_, which is a continuation of _Kidnapped_, at first appeared in
_Atalanta_, and was published in book form by Messrs Cassell & Co. in
1893. In the recent edition of 1898 both volumes are brought out as _The
History of David Balfour_, and are beautifully illustrated. _Catriona_
is a charming book, full of life and action, and the breezy, outdoor
existence, in the picturing of which its author excels. The Edinburgh of
the last half of the eighteenth century, with its quaint closes, and
quainter manners, is admirably portrayed, and the old lady with whom
Catriona lives, and Lord Prestongrange and his daughters, are very
clever pictures from a bygone day. Indeed, Miss Grant is one of the best
drawn women in all Mr Stevenson's books; she has life and reality in a
greater degree than most of his female characters. She is true to
feminine human nature in any age, and as she makes eyes at David Balfour
from under her plumed hat, and flirts with him across the narrow close,
she is very woman, and alive enough to be some later day judge's
daughter of modern Edinburgh, coquetting with Mr Stevenson himself,
while she playfully adjusts her becoming head-gear, and lets her long
feathers droop to the best advantage.
She and the two Kirsties in the unfinished _Weir of Hermiston_ stand out
alone among all the heroines in Mr Stevenson's books as real breathing,
living women. They are natural, they are possible, they have life and
interest; all the rest are more or less lay figures put in because a
heroine is necessary--the more's the pity evidently from the author's
point of view!--and drawn somewhat perfunctorily by their creator, with
but a limited knowledge of the virtues, the faults, the failings, and,
above all, the 'little ways,' which go to make up the ordinary woman.
The women are undoubtedly a weakness in the author's work. It looks as
if he had known intimately only exceptional women,--who, possibly, had
left behind them, before he knew them well, most of a young girl's
faults and follies, and some of her attractions also,--and had never
found other women worth studying deeply, so that the girls in his books
do not read _real_ enough to interest one greatly, and it is almost a
relief to take up _Treasure Island_, _The Wrecker_, or _The Ebb Tide_,
in which there is very little about them. Lady Violet Greville, in a
recent article, expresses much the same opinion. She says, 'The late
Robert Louis Stevenson had no opinion of women writers, he said they
were incapable of grasping the essential facts of life. He was a great
master of style, but I doubt if he had much knowledge of feminine
character'--a dictum in which many women will agree with her. She goes
on to say that there is some truth in what he says of women writers,
because women and men regard as essential quite different facts in life;
and she explains it by saying that it is the difference of personality
and of point of view. Certainly Mr Stevenson's point of view in regard
to his heroines is not a satisfying one to most women.
Many men have drawn excellent female characters, just as a few women
have given us life-like heroes. These exceptions, one imagines, must
have been to some extent better able to appreciate the other sex
thoroughly than most writers; but it strikes one as odd that Mr
Stevenson, who had in himself so much of gentleness and of the
essentially feminine, should have so continually failed to give a living
interest to his heroines. Possibly had he lived longer, and had the
maturing of his powers, so evident in _Weir of Hermiston_, been
accompanied by a measure of improved health, the women of his later
books might all have been as powerful creations as the two Kirsties
promised to be.
His heroes are all that heart can desire, manly, brave, and natural; his
villains make villainy interesting; so it may be forgiven him that
scarcely one of his feminine characters lives in the reader's memory.
One of the most widely known of his books is that curious story,
published in 1886, called _The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_,
the popularity of which, especially in America, was immense. It deals
with man's dual nature, and while Dr Jekyll embodies the good side of
it, Mr Hyde, with whom he is compelled continually to exchange bodies,
as well as souls, is the evil side, and commits crimes so atrocious,
that the miserable doctor is well-nigh driven to despair. It is a
powerful subject, powerfully treated, and contains in its small compass
more moral teaching than a hundred sermons. It has, particularly in
America, been used by many clergymen as the foundation of their
homilies.
_The Master of Ballantrae_, a weird and striking tale of the times of
'the forty-five,' is extraordinarily graphic both in its descriptions of
places and of people. The gloomy house of Durrisdeer, with its stately
panelled hall, the fine grounds so carefully laid out, the thick
shrubberies, the spot where the duel was fought on the hard, frozen
ground by the light of the flickering candles in the tall silver
candlesticks, the wave-beaten point where the smuggling luggers land
goods and passengers, and finally the awful journey through the
uncleared woods of America, make a fit setting, in our memories, for the
splendidly drawn pictures of the three Duries, the old father, the
unappreciated Henry, the mocking master, their faithful land-steward,
Mackellar, and the more shadowy personalities of the Frenchman, the
lady, and the children. The tale is one of unrelieved horror, but it is
a masterpiece nevertheless, and it has had a very large sale.
With his wife Mr Stevenson in _More New Arabian Nights_ and _The
Dynamiter_ did some work of considerable interest, and with his stepson,
Mr Lloyd Osbourne, he wrote that quaint tale, _The Wrong Box_. In
collaboration also with Mr Lloyd Osbourne he wrote _The Wrecker_ and
_The Ebb Tide_.
_The Wrecker_ is a wild and interesting story which had a large success.
It originally appeared in _Scribner's Magazine_ from August 1891 to July
1892, and was republished in book form by Messrs Cassell & Co. The scene
is constantly changing in it, and the hero visits Edinburgh, stays in
the students' quarter in Paris, personally conducts speculative picnics
at San Francisco, distinguishes himself at the wreck on the lonely reef
in mid-ocean, and finally, after appearing in England and Fontainbleau,
tells his wonderful story to a friendly trader in the south seas. There
is plenty of life and of action in the tale, and there are also some
delightful descriptions of the Pacific and of the wonderful glamour
lagoons and palm trees throw over the spirit of the man who learns to
know and to love the beautiful South Sea islands.
_The Ebb Tide_, originally published in Mr Jerome K. Jerome's magazine
_To-day_ from November 1893 to February 1894, was republished in book
form by Mr W. Heinemann in 1894. Like _Treasure Island_ it is a tale
without a heroine, almost, indeed, without the mention of a woman except
Attwater's statuesque native servant and the shadowy personalities of
Herrick's mother and fiancee in London, and Captain Davis's wife and his
little girl, who died before she got the doll he had so carefully bought
for her, and the memory of whom is the one soft spot in his dark soul.
They are merely mentioned, however, and take no actual part in the
story. It is not a pleasant tale, everyone in it is more or less bad;
more by preference rather than less!--and for no one in it can one feel
the slightest sympathy. There are villains and villains in fiction, and
for some of them, for instance, Bret Harte's Jack Hamlin, or even the
Master himself in _The Master of Ballantrae_, one can feel a sincere
affection or at least have a grudging sort of admiration, but it is not
possible to even faintly like or hesitatingly pity a cowardly Robert
Herrick, whose self-pity is so strong, and who from first to last is, as
his creator intended him to be, a thorough inefficient. Half-hearted in
his wickedness, self-saving in his repentance, he somehow fails to
interest one; and even his lower-class associates, the horrible Huish
and the American captain, are almost less detestable. Huish is quite
diabolical, but he, at least, has the courage of his iniquities.
Attwater is not attractive either as villain or as religious enthusiast,
but he is a fairly possible character and at least a degree less
unpleasant than the American captain after his conversion. Captain
Davis's effort to save Herrick's soul, given in the last paragraph of
the book, is disagreeably profane in its familiarity with things sacred.
Altogether it is not an attractive book, although it is an undoubtedly
clever one; it has some redeeming features in the really lovely
descriptions of the island and the lagoon; and the appearance of the
divers in full working costume remind one of Mr Stevenson's own early
experience in a diver's dress.
Without collaboration Mr Stevenson wrote the three pretty little tales
of South Sea life reprinted, as _Island Nights' Entertainments_, in book
form about 1893. _The Beach of Falesa_ was published in _The Illustrated
London News_ from July 2nd to August 6th, 1892. _The Bottle Imp_
appeared in _Black and White_ from March 28th to April 4th, 1891, and
_The Isle of Voices_ was in _The National Observer_ between 4th and 25th
February of 1893.
They are charming stories, rich in local colour, and in all of them one
sees that Mr Stevenson's quick eye for the essential in life has shown
to him that among these simple islanders are to be found just the same
elements of romance as among more highly civilised peoples, the same
motives make and influence character there as elsewhere. So in
Wiltshire and his relations with the islanders, in the curious stories
of _The Bottle Imp_ and _The Isle of Voices_, we are interested in a new
set of people in fresh surroundings, and can in a large measure
sympathise with the pleasure that the Samoans had in reading these tales
of island life in their own tongue. _The Bottle Imp_ was the first story
ever read by the Samoans in their native language, and it raised their
affection for 'Tusitala, the Teller of Stories' to positive enthusiasm.
_St Ives_ is a bright story of adventure which Mr Stevenson had almost
completed, and which Mr Quiller Couch was enabled very skilfully to
finish with the assistance of the author's step-daughter, Mrs Strong,
who had, besides being its amanuensis, helped Mr Stevenson with this
story and been much in his confidence regarding it. It appeared first in
_The Windsor Magazine_ where it was received with favour. It is the
history of a French prisoner in Edinburgh Castle during the wars of the
great Napoleon. He makes, like the other prisoners, little carved
ornaments for sale, and Flora, the heroine, has so touched him while
buying these that he falls in love with her and presents her with a
carved lion. She returns his sentiment of admiration, and after his
escape she and her brother, a natural gentlemanly lad, hide Mr St Ives
in the henhouse at Swanston Cottage where they live with a stern old
aunt. The aunt is a well-drawn type of old-fashioned Scotchwoman,
infinitely more natural and more interesting than the niece. In
Edinburgh and round Mr Stevenson's own country home Swanston, the
interest at first largely centres, and the writer gives a very graphic
description of the home garden and the cottage and its outhouses,
'Marvellous places though handy to home.'
One imagines the tales of John Todd the shepherd must have helped much
in his splendid description of the escape into England with the drovers
by the solitary drove roads, at one point of which the escaping prisoner
has the honour of meeting and conversing with 'The Shirra,' so well
loved on Tweed side and elsewhere. After many and marvellous adventures,
Mr St Ives returns a free and pardoned man to sue, not in vain, for the
hand of Flora.
Last, but, if one may judge by its powerful beginning, which is, alas!
all that the master-hand had left of it, certainly best of Mr
Stevenson's work is _Weir of Hermiston_. In the few perfectly finished
chapters there is a fulness of power and a perfection of style that
promised great things. As one read the description of the fierce old
judge, his gentle artistic son, the cunning dandified friend, the two
Kirsties, and the four black Elliot brothers, one felt that here indeed
was congenial matter; and that in the tragedy of fierce human passion
about to be played out amid wild moorland surroundings, Mr Stevenson
would rise to a greater perfection and a nobler success than he had yet
attained to.... It was not to be, the busy brain stopped
instantaneously, the pen that had worked so happily all the morning was
laid by for ever; and the world is infinitely the poorer for the sudden
catastrophe of that sad December evening which left the home at Vailima
desolate.
* * * * *
The beautiful _Edinburgh Edition_ of Mr Stevenson's works--which his
friends Mr Colvin and Mr Baxter have been seeing through the press--is
almost completed; one, or at most, two volumes only being now
unpublished. It consists of an edition of 1035 copies, and includes the
plays and everything of interest that he has written, and it will number
twenty-seven or perhaps twenty-eight volumes. While this book has been
passing through the press, volume twenty-seventh has been issued. It
contains _St Ives_, and practically completes the edition; but Mr
Stevenson's widow and Mr Sydney Colvin, who are acting as his executor
and his editor, have gratuitously given to the subscribers to this
_Edinburgh Edition_ a twenty-eighth volume, consisting of various odds
and ends not hitherto made public. Of this, 'A New Form of Intermittent
Light for Lighthouses' and 'The Thermal Influence of Forests,' recall
the period of his engineering and scientific training; and the
interesting facsimile reproductions of the quaint 'Moral Emblems,'
written by him at Davos in 1880 and 1882, and printed with illustrations
on a toy printing press by the then very youthful Mr Lloyd Osbourne, are
yet another proof that even in his time of acute invalidism he was
busily and cheerily employed.
CHAPTER XI
HIS LIFE IN SAMOA
'Sometimes I am hopeful as the spring,
And up my fluttering heart is borne aloft
As high and gladsome as the lark at sunrise,
And then as though some fowler's shaft had pierced it
It comes plumb down in such a dead, dead fall.'
--FROM _Philip Van Artevelde_.
Mr Thomas Stevenson died early in May 1887, having lived long enough to
see his son's fame as an author firmly established. Not very long
afterwards Mrs Thomas Stevenson joined her son and his wife and with
them went to America, and on that yachting tour among the South Sea
islands, which finally resulted in the purchase, by Robert Louis, of the
little property on the slope of the Vaea mountain, above the town of
Apia, in Samoa, which he called by the musical name of Vailima, and
where, in 1890, he finally made his home.
His mother returned to Scotland for some months in 1889, arriving in the
June of that year and remaining till the October of 1890, when she
joined her son and his wife in their Samoan home. In 1893 she again
visited Edinburgh to see her relatives there, and to arrange for the
breaking up of the home at 17 Heriot Row, the sale of the house and of
such things as she did not care to keep or to take with her to that new
home which she also intended to make her headquarters. She remained on
this occasion almost a year, and left for London, en route for Samoa, on
the 5th of March 1894, promising her relatives and her friends, who so
greatly grudged her to her son and his household, that she would pay a
visit to Scotland once every five years.
Alas! in less than one year her son had followed his father into the
Life Eternal, and she was left that most desolate of all mourners 'a
widow and childless.' She remained for a little time with her
daughter-in-law and the sorrow-stricken Vailima household, and on 1st
June 1895 she arrived in Edinburgh to make her home with her sister,
Miss Balfour, as that sister so touchingly expresses it, 'a desolate
woman.'
Much was left to her in the love of relatives and friends, and in her
own bright spirit, which, while it recalled the happiness of the past,
never repined at the emptiness of the present; but so much of her heart
lay buried in her two graves that one dared not murmur, nay, one could
hardly fail to rejoice for her, when, early in May 1897, she too passed
into her rest, most deeply mourned by all who had so dearly loved her,
and not least by the little children who had held so warm a place in her
affections, and whose spontaneous offering of flowers so touched and
comforted the sad hearts of her sorrowing relatives.
In his mother's letters to her sister and to other members of her
family--so often kindly read to friends--one had almost as graphic an
account of Mr Stevenson's Samoan home as in the delightful volume of
_Vailima Letters_ itself. Gifted also with a fluent pen and a keen
interest in the details which make up life, the mother like the son
wrote charmingly; and one laughed, as one does in _The Vailima Letters_,
over such misfortunes as the raid of the little pigs among the young
corn; the more or less serious peccadilloes of the childlike Samoan
servants; and that crowning catastrophe, so comically described by Mr
Stevenson, when the carpenter's horse put its foot into a nest of
fourteen eggs, and 'made an omelette of all their hopes'!
Nothing could have, been more delightful or more amusing than that
unconventional sunny life to people who like the Stevensons were
perfectly happy among themselves, and, in spite of the often serious
anxieties and worries incident on their settling in the new home,
absolutely contented with their surroundings. The out-of-door existence,
the free, untrammelled life, was dear to all of them, and especially
good for Mr Stevenson; and far from the hurry and bustle of towns they
found, under the unclouded blue of the Samoan sky, the rest and the
peace their souls had longed for.
The climate worked wonders for Mr Stevenson, and it seemed hardly
possible to believe that the pale shadow of the Bournemouth days was the
active owner of Vailima, who himself worked untiringly in clearing the
scrub, and making the rank, tropical bush give place to the ordered
beauties of civilisation. Not only he but his wife cheerfully took a
turn in weeding, and, hot, tired, and with skins blistered by the
poisonous plants with which war had to be waged by hand, they themselves
did as much as, if not more than, their Samoan assistants to eradicate
the noxious growths and make the precious blades of grass spring up in
their place. Yet glad as they were to welcome the grass, Mr Stevenson,
as he pulled the weeds up, hated to cause their death, and felt that
they were victims in the great war of life against life of which the
world is full.
Existence at Vailima was simple and patriarchal in the extreme. The
Samoans, who found in its owner so kind and so staunch a friend, had the
warm hearts, the natural good qualities of children, but they had some
of the vices of untrained children also, and petty thefts and tiresome
acts of disobedience, gave their master and mistress abundant trouble,
and often necessitated a species of impromptu court of justice, in which
Mr Stevenson distributed reproofs and meted out punishments to the
offenders in the midst of a full gathering of the domestic staff, both
indoor and out, who all looked up to him much as one fancies the desert
herdsmen did to Abraham, or as in later days the Highland clansmen
feared and yet worshipped their chief, whose word was law.
His wife's ready wit on at least one occasion showed itself by utilising
the native superstition to bring home the enormity of the offence to the
possible stealer of a young pig. The fear of an 'Aitu,' or wicked
woman-spirit of the woods, and the general dread of devils, has far more
effect on the Samoan conscience than more civilised methods of warning
and reproof. So when Mrs Stevenson, by a clever imitation of native
conjuring, made Lafaele believe that 'her devil,' or divining spirit,
would tell her where the missing pig was, it is probable that Lafaele,
even if innocent himself, shared the feast with his friends with
trembling.
The master and mistress had the kindest interest in all their native
servants, and it is a quaint thing to read of the great writer, for
whose books publishers and public impatiently waited, not only giving Mr
Strong's little boy, Austin, history lessons, but spending hours over
teaching Henry, the Samoan chief, who was his native overseer. Very
strange, too, it is to realise that he carried his interest in missions
and missionaries to so practical a point as for a time at least to teach
Sunday school himself. His stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, shared to the
full his interest in these things, and both of them must have been very
comforting to the missionaries in Samoa, one of whom especially, Mr
Clark, was so valued a friend of the whole Vailima household. The Roman
Catholic priests, many of whom are doing devoted work in the islands,
were also welcome visitors at Vailima.
Never bound by creeds or forms, Mr Stevenson had a thoroughly practical
religion, calculated to do infinitely more good in the world than all
the theological disputes and hair splittings that ever were penned in
ponderous volumes or thundered solemnly from orthodox pulpits.
Of his political work in Samoa, his earnestness for the good government
of its people, his anxiety that they should have a just control and a
due freedom, it is unnecessary to speak fully here, as his letters in
the home press at the time and the volume _Footnotes to History_ brought
the knowledge of his views and actions within reach of all. Nothing
could have been more unselfish than the attitude of the writer, to whom
politics were abhorrent, who, nevertheless, from sheer humanity entered,
at some personal risk, into the petty struggle with excellent results
for the Samoans. And certainly nothing more courageous can be imagined
than the man, whose tender heart winced at the sight of suffering and
bloodshed, going down into the hospitals during the brief war, and
himself helping to tend and comfort the wounded and the dying. In his
interest in native affairs he had, as in all else that made up life for
him, the thorough sympathy of his wife, and also of the other members of
his most united household.
It was a very happy party in spite of some misfortunes and anxieties,
occasional visits of the influenza, and the dread of ruin from rain or
hurricane; and after their first difficulties as to house-building were
over, it was to a very spacious and pleasant house that they welcomed
the elder Mrs Stevenson when she returned to Samoa in 1893. The scrub
still, however, required much clearing, and we find in _The Vailima
Letters_ Mr Stevenson dividing his day into so many hours of literary
work and so many hours of weeding!
The day began early, and Mr Stevenson, after the first breakfast, did
his literary work, until the sound of a conch summoned the family to a
lunch, or second breakfast, about eleven o'clock. After this there was
rest and music till four, and then outdoor work or play, lawn-tennis
being a very favourite pastime, and in the evening they had more music,
and a game at cards. It was a simple, natural life, and one that made
far more for health, mental and physical, to those whose constitutions
suited the climate, than the bustle and the clamour of cities. Visitors,
too, often came up the hill to Vailima, sometimes the residents in Apia,
sometimes home friends or distinguished strangers, who were glad to
visit the much-loved author in his distant retreat, and to all was
given the same cordial welcome, to all there remains the memory of
delightful hours in the company of those who knew so well how to make
time pass bewitchingly.
The household by this time consisted of Mr Stevenson, his wife, his
mother, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, his sister, Mrs Strong, who acted as her
stepfather's amanuensis, her little boy, Austin, who went to school in
California in 1892, and Mr Graham Balfour, a cousin of Mr Stevenson's.
Until he left for school, Mr Stevenson gave Austin his lessons, and, as
his uncle Lloyd had done, the boy considered the teacher only a larger
playfellow.
A very pretty picture of the home life is given in a note-book of Mrs
Thomas Stevenson's, in which she describes a birthday feast in her
honour, at which little Austin Strong recited some verses made for the
occasion by her son. Very amusing the verses are, and in them the small
scholar repeats with pride what strides in knowledge he had made under
the able tuition of his step-grandfather. It is not a little comic to
think that Mr Stevenson had at this time a well-grown step-grandchild,
and had, indeed, held the honourable and venerable position of a
step-grandparent shortly after he was thirty.
Very amusing features of the letters that Mrs Thomas Stevenson sent home
were the funny illustrations of daily life enclosed in them, and which
were drawn by a clever pencil in the household. Like the old plays in
the Leith Walk shop the youthful Louis once so frequently visited, they
were _A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured_. Sometimes they were mere
outlines of domestic processions, sometimes they were gay with paint in
shades of brown and green and blue. In them all the members of the
family were represented, and now and then there appeared the dusky
semblance of a Samoan domestic Faauma, 'the bronze candlestick,' or
Lafaele, the amiable and the willing. As one recalls them one sees again
a verandah, with long chairs and lazy loungers, Mr Stevenson pretending
to play his flageolet, but too comfortable actually to begin; the rest
in attitudes more or less suggestive of that warmth and satisfaction
which we in colder climes can only dream of; or in another a few bold
strokes pictured the ladies of the family on household cares intent,
domestic service of the humblest, cooking, dusting, bed-making, and all
the trivial daily doings that were so mirthfully treated both by pen and
pencil.
Mr Stevenson and his wife took a keen interest in their garden, which
stood so high above sea-level, that they could have the pleasure of
trying to grow in it some British flowers, fruits, and vegetables, as
well as those native to the tropics. This endeavour to naturalise the
products of the old home in the new one was a great pleasure to Mrs
Stevenson, and one fully shared by her husband, who was so often, in
spite of his delight in the soft airs, the blue skies, heart-sick for
the cold grey ones of the old country, and who was reminded on a fresh
wet morning after a storm, of the West Highlands, near Callander, and
'The smell of bog, myrtle and peat,'
by the rain dashing on the roof, and trickling down the window panes, of
far-off misty Scotland, where
'On the moors the whaups are calling.'
The Samoan days were very full of work, and much was done, and still
more was planned in them by Mr Stevenson's busy brain and untiring
activity. Here was written _Catriona_, _The Master of Ballantrae_, a
part of those annals of the Stevenson family which he hoped to give to
the public, _The Beach of Falesa_, _The Bottle Imp_, and _The Isle of
Voices_; and with Mr Lloyd Osbourne was completed _The Ebb Tide_ and
_The Wrecker_, the ideas for which had occurred to them when at sea.
_Father Damien_, _An Open letter_, had been already written, but here
was composed _A Footnote to History_, and both show to perfection their
writer's interest in suffering humanity. Here, saddest of all, were
planned many works never to be accomplished--among them that powerful
fragment _Weir of Hermiston_ and _St Ives_--the latter finished all but
the last portion, which Mrs Strong, who had helped much with this story,
could supply to Mr Quiller Couch, so that he was enabled to complete it.
Mr Stevenson, like his father, found his relaxation in a change of work,
so to this period also belong the fugitive verses collected under the
title, _Songs of Travel_, published after his death.
In spite of the apparent improvement in his health, Mr Stevenson had
had, especially when for a short time at Sydney and Honolulu, serious
returns of illness, and after one attack of influenza, the old foe
hemorrhage briefly reappeared. Not yet, however, would he own himself
beaten, and in spite of some anxiety on the part of his doctors, he
assured his friends he was very well. His friends' fears were not so
easily silenced. In the last year of his life his bright mood varied,
and his letters often caused grave anxiety to those at home. He had
times of despondency and of undue distress as to his monetary future and
his literary success, which were scarcely justified by the facts.
Although always gentle and gay with his own family circle, the little
strain of worry showed itself repeatedly in his correspondence with his
friends and caused them a keen foreboding of evil, so unlike was it to
the old, sunny, cheery spirit with which he had fought bad health, and
gained for himself so high a place in the world of letters and so warm a
niche in the heart of his public.
CHAPTER XII
HIS DEATH
'Gone to thy rest--no doubt, no fear, no strife;
Men whispering call it death--God calls it life.'
ROBERT RICHARDSON.
As the months of 1894 slipped away, the unusual despondency and worry,
noticeable so especially in Mr Stevenson's correspondence, increased,
while it seemed that his literary work, which had hitherto been his
greatest pleasure, had now become a strain and a weariness to him.
By fits and starts the joy of working still visited him it is true.
_Weir of Hermiston_ he felt to be his very best--St Ives now and then
went gaily. But the dark moods were only dormant not dead, and anxiety
for the future of his family, and a longing to be able to cease working
for daily bread, grew upon him greatly.
That, for a time after the settlement in Samoa, monetary anxieties may
have been somewhat pressing, is not only possible, but probable. No
moving of 'the household gods,' however small, or for however short a
distance, can be managed without considerable cost and trouble, and the
expense invariably exceeds the estimate made, for unforeseen outlays and
difficulties crop up that entail added expenditure with its consequent
anxiety.
If this is so in ordinary cases, how much more would it be so when the
pulling up of stakes meant a move to the antipodes and the change of
home included the purchase of uncleared land in Samoa, the building of a
house and the laying out of an estate, which its owner felt certain
could not repay the money spent upon it for at least five or six years.
All great changes and large undertakings are fraught with difficulty,
and the Vailima venture was no exception to the rule. The Samoan home
meant much pleasure to its owner, but it entailed keen anxiety also.
Nevertheless the mental worry of those later months was by no means
justified by the facts. Mr Stevenson's literary work had long been paid
according to its merits, so that each book brought him in a satisfactory
sum; while the future of the _Edinburgh Edition_ of his works gave cause
for sincere satisfaction to the friends who were seeing it through the
press, and whose letters gave assurance of its success. The cloud was
therefore due to internal, not to external causes, and in the state of
Mr Stevenson's health was, alas! to be found the explanation of this sad
change from the gay bravery with which he had hitherto faced the world.
Suspected by his doctors, feared by his friends, but unknown to himself,
for at this time he constantly wrote of his improved health, a new
development in his illness was nearing its fatal crisis, and these
symptoms of mental distress and irritation were only the foreshadowing
of the end.
In these last days his life had many pleasures; he was enjoying the
Samoan climate and the free unconventional existence to the full; he was
surrounded by all his loved home circle; and in the October of 1894, two
months before his death, the Samoan chiefs, in whose imprisonment he had
proved his friendship to them, gave him a tribute of their love and
gratitude which was peculiarly pleasing and valuable to him. An account
of this and of the very beautiful speech he made in return appeared in
the home papers at the time, and are to be found in an appendix to _The
Vailima Letters_. The chiefs, who knew how much store he set by
road-making as a civilising element in Samoa, as elsewhere, themselves
went to him and offered their services to make a road to join his
property to the main highway. They, as well as their young men, worked
at it with picks and spades, and when it was finished they presented it
to their beloved 'Tusitala' as an abiding remembrance of their grateful
regard. It was a noble tribute to a noble nature, and one the value of
which can only be fully appreciated by those who realise what the
personal manual labour meant to these proud island chiefs so wholly
unaccustomed to exertion of any kind, and so imbued with the idea that
all labour was derogatory to their dignity. Their loving service touched
Mr Stevenson and all his family very deeply, and this bright memory
gladdened the last weeks of his life, and must be a very pleasant one to
recall for those of the Vailima household who still survive him.
At the celebration of his birthday on 13th November he had received
also a tribute of kindly appreciation from the European and American
residents in Apia. On the occasion of a 'Thanksgiving' feast in that
same November, he made a speech, in which he said he had always liked
_that_ day, for he felt that he had had so much for which to be
thankful. He especially mentioned the pleasure he had in his mother
being with him, and said that to America--where he had married his
wife--he owed the chief blessing of his life.
In spite of his assurances that he was very well, he was exceedingly
thin and wasted in those days, and later Samoan photographs show a
melancholy change in him. On the morning of the 3rd December, however,
he felt particularly well and wrote for several hours. It is very
pleasant to know, from _A Letter to Mr Stevenson's Friends_, sent to the
_Times_ after his stepfather's death by Mr Lloyd Osbourne as an
acknowledgment of the vast amount of sympathy expressed, and so
impossible to be otherwise answered, that he had enjoyed his work on
_Weir of Hermiston_, and felt all the buoyancy of successful effort on
that last morning of his life.
Letters for the mail were due to be written in the afternoon, and he
spent his time penning long and kindly greetings to absent friends.
'At sunset,' Mr Osbourne says, 'he came downstairs, rallied his wife
about the forebodings she could not shake off; talked of a lecturing
tour in America he was eager to make, "as he was so well," and played a
game of cards with her to drive away her melancholy.'
By-and-bye he said that he was hungry, and proposed a little feast, for
which he produced a bottle of old Burgundy, and went to help her to
prepare a salad, talking gaily all the while. As they were on the
verandah, he suddenly cried out, 'What is that?' put his hands to his
head, and asked, 'Do I look strange?' In a moment he had fallen down
beside her.
His wife called for help, and she and his body-servant Sosima carried
him into the great hall, where he had known so much happiness, and
placed him in the old arm-chair which had been his grandfather's.
Medical aid was quickly obtained, but he had already lost consciousness,
and, in spite of every effort, he never regained it. His mother's
letters written after his death touchingly describe how, although called
at once, she yet reached the hall too late to find him conscious, as by
that time he was leaning back in his chair breathing heavily. The
family, with an agony of grief, quickly realised that there was no hope.
A little bed was brought, and he was placed on it in the middle of the
hall, and there, with those he loved close about him, and his faithful
Samoan servants seated round him on the floor, he quietly passed away.
The deep breaths came at ever longer intervals, the sleep of
unconsciousness was never broken, and as his loved and valued friend,
the Reverend Mr Clark, prayed beside him, his spirit took its flight
into eternity. He died as he had wished, quickly and well-nigh
painlessly. He had known so much of lingering illness, he dreaded _that_
greatly, but of death he had no fear, and peacefully and suddenly he
passed into the Unseen.
His death took place at a little past eight o'clock on the evening of
the 3rd December at the early age of forty-four.
When the news was cabled to England, it was received by many people with
grave doubts. His relatives and friends dreaded its truth, but could not
at first believe it. Many exaggerated newspaper reports, copied
especially from the more sensational American press, had from time to
time caused needless distress and anxiety to those who loved him, so
that it was possible to allow oneself the shadow of a hope, particularly
as his uncle, Dr George W. Balfour, who had at first received the news
somewhat vaguely worded, doubted it also, and wrote to the _Scotsman_
expressing his unbelief.
Too soon, unfortunately, all such hopes were proved false, and eager
eyes scanning the morning papers on the 23d December 1894 read this sad
corroboration of the news that had been posted in London on the 17th of
the same month.
'SAN FRANCISCO (no date).
BALFOUR, 17 Walker Street, Edinburgh.
LOUIS died suddenly third. Tell friends.
STEVENSON.'
The telegram was from his mother in answer to one from his uncle asking
for true particulars as to the earlier report, and on its receipt and
publication relatives and friends knew that hope was dead, and there
remained only a sad waiting for further particulars. These by-and-bye
came in letters from his mother to her relatives and friends in
Scotland, in letters to his literary friends and in that 'Letter' to the
_Times_ from his friend and stepson Mr Lloyd Osbourne to the vast mass
of acquaintances and readers who all claimed him as a loved personal
friend.
From all these sources the manner of his death, and the touching final
tragedy of his pathetic funeral became known to the world of
English-speaking people everywhere, who each and all mourned
individually for the loved and lost author as one near and dear in their
personal regard.
He had always expressed a wish to be buried on the Vaea mountain which
rises immediately behind Vailima, and the summit of which commands a
wide prospect of land and sea and sky. In the spring of 1894, he had
suggested the making of a road, and the planting of the spot which he
had chosen for his resting-place, but, as the idea was painful to his
family, nothing was done in the matter. As soon as he had passed away,
those whom he loved hastened to give effect to his wishes, and Mr Lloyd
Osbourne planned and courageously carried out in an incredibly short
time the forming of a road which made it possible to carry him to the
summit of Vaea, and lay him on the spot that he had chosen. Forty
Samoans with knives and axes cut a path up the mountain side, and Mr
Lloyd Osbourne, with a few specially chosen dependents, dug the grave in
which he was to lie.
Meantime, his body covered with the Union Jack rested in the Samoan home
that he had loved so well, surrounded by the furniture of the old Scotch
home around which his childish feet had played, and on which his
father, and possibly his father's fathers, had daily looked, for his
mother had taken with her to Vailima all that had most of memory and of
family tradition from the house in Heriot Row.
His family lingered in the dear presence, the heartbroken Samoans knelt
and kissed his hands, and at the request of his favourite servant,
Sosima, who was a Romanist, the solemn and touching prayers of the
Church of Rome were, with a certain fitness, repeated over the man who
had been the champion of Father Damien, and among whose friends were
numbered the earnest and faithful Roman Catholic missionary priests of
the South Sea Islands.
On his coffin was laid the 'Red Ensign' that had floated from his mast
on many a cruise, and he was carried up the steep path by those who
loved him. Europeans as well as Samoans toiled up that difficult ascent
to place him with reverent hands in that grave which was so fitting a
resting-place for the man who had loved, above all things, the freedom
of the open air, the glory of the sea and the sky, the sighing of God's
winds among the trees, and the silent companionship of the stars.
* * * * *
Life for those who remained in the Samoan home became an impossible
thing without him, and so Mrs Stevenson, with her son and daughter,
by-and-bye left Vailima, and the home of so much happiness is now
falling into ruin, the cleared ground lapsing back to the bush. And
perhaps it is best so; without him Vailima is like a body without a
soul; and he who so dearly loved nature would hardly have regretted that
the place he loved should return to the mother heart of the earth and
become once more a solitude--a green place of birds and trees.
CHAPTER XIII
HIS LIFE-WORK
'Art's life, and when we live we suffer and toil.'
--MRS BARRETT BROWNING.
'A healthful hunger for the great idea,
The beauty and the blessedness of life.'
--JEAN INGELOW.
It is perhaps impossible for those who knew Mr Stevenson and came under
the influence of the rare attraction of his charming personality, to
assign to him and to his work a suitable place in the world of letters.
Probably it is still too early for anyone to say what rank will in the
future be held by the man who in his life-time assuredly stood among the
masters of his craft. Fame, while he lived, was his, and, better than
fame, such love as is seldom given by the public to the writer whose
books delight it.
Deservedly popular as the books are, the man was still more popular; and
the personality that to his friends was so unique and so delightful,
made friends of his readers also. He was so frank, so human, in his
relations with his public.
His dedications not only gave pleasure to the members of his family, or
to the many friends to whom he wrote them, they, as it were, took his
readers into his confidence also, and let them share in the warmth of
his heart. His prefaces are delightfully autobiographical, and are
valuable in proportion to the glimpses they give of one of the most
amiable and most widely sympathetic natures imaginable.
His methods of work were singularly conscientious; even in the days
when, as a truant lad, he carried in his pocket one book to read, and
another to write in, he was slowly perfecting that style which was to
give to his literary work a distinction all its own. He spared himself
no trouble in ensuring the accuracy of all that he wrote.
It may be interesting to recall in this connection the letters written
by two of his readers to the _Scotsman_ expressing some doubt as to
there having been shops in Princes Street at the date of his story _St
Ives_--Mr Stevenson mentions shops in _St Ives_. In reply to the letters
of enquiry, his uncle, Dr G. W. Balfour, wrote to the _Scotsman_ on 26th
November 1897:--
'Sir,--It may interest your correspondents "J. W. G." and "J. C.
P." to know that Louis Stevenson always took care to verify his
statements before making them, and that his correspondent, to whom
he applied for information as to the existence of shops in Princes
Street at the early date referred to, took the only legitimate
means open to him of ascertaining this by consulting the
directories of the date.'
And, as a matter of fact, it was conclusively proved that Mr Stevenson
was correct, by the name and number of at least one well-known shop, of
that date, being given by another correspondent in the paper very
shortly afterwards.
No minute observation was too trying for Mr Stevenson, no careful
research too tedious for him; no historical fact apparently too
insignificant or obscure for him to verify. He was never weary of
reading books dealing with the periods in which the action of his
stories takes place.
Costume, dialect, scenery, were all thoroughly studied, and when himself
distant from the scenes of his tales, he is to be found constantly
writing from Vailima to friends in London or in Edinburgh for the books
and the information he required. In the period between 1745 and 1816, in
which the plots of _Kidnapped_, _Catriona_, _The Master of Ballantrae_,
_Weir of Hermiston_, and _St Ives_ are laid, he is especially at home,
and old record rolls, books on manners and on costume, are all
laboriously studied to give to his stories that accuracy and truth to
life which he considered to be absolutely necessary. To such good effect
did he study volumes of old Parliament House trials, that the dress of
Alan Breck, in _Kidnapped_, is literally transcribed from that of a
prisoner of Alan's period, whose trial he had perused.
Nor did his conscientiousness stop here; he wrote and re-wrote
everything, sometimes as often as five times, and no page ever left his
hands which had not been elaborately pruned and polished. No wonder,
therefore, that his work was welcome to his publishers, and that he was
never among the complaining authors who think themselves underpaid and
unappreciated by the firms with whom they deal.
He gave of his best, good honest hard work, and he received in return
not only money but regard and consideration; and his own verdict was
that it was difficult to choose among his publishers which should have
a new book, for all of them were so good to him. A pleasant state of
matters that goes far to prove that, where work is conscientious and
author and publisher honourable and sensible, there need be little or no
friction between them. In this, as in the care which he bestowed on his
work, the long and earnest apprenticeship he served to the profession of
letters, he sets an example to his fellow-authors quite as impressive as
that which he showed to his fellow-men in the patience with which he
bore his heavy burden of bad health, and the courage with which he rose
above his sufferings and looked the world in the face smiling.
In an age when a realism so strong as to be unpleasant has tinged too
much of latter-day fiction Mr Stevenson stood altogether apart from the
school of the realists. His nature, fresh and boyish to the end,
troubled itself not at all with social questions, so he dipped his pen
into the wells of old romance and painted for us characters so alive
with strength and with humour that they live with us as friends and
comrades when the creations of the problem novelists have died out of
our memories with the problems they propound and worry over.
His books are bright, breezy, cheerful, rich in idealism, full of
chivalry, and they have in them a glamour of genius, a power of
imagination, and a spirit of purity, which makes them peculiarly
valuable in an age when these things are too often conspicuous by their
absence from the novel of the day.
His essays are full of a quaint, delightful humour, his verses have a
dainty charm, and in his tales he has given us a little picture gallery
of characters and landscapes which have a fascination all their own.
Like Sir Walter Scott he had to contend with the disadvantages of a
delicate childhood which interfered with settled work; and yet, in both
cases, one is tempted to think that that enforced early leisure was of
far more ultimate benefit to the life-work than years of dutiful
attendance at school and college. Like Sir Walter Scott, also, he has
drawn much of his inspiration from 'Caledonia, stern and wild'; and none
of her literary sons, save Burns and 'The Wizard of the North' himself,
has Caledonia loved so well or mourned so deeply.
Cosmopolite in culture, in breadth of view, in openness of mind, Mr
Stevenson was yet before all things a Scotsman, and one to whom Scotland
and his native Edinburgh were peculiarly dear. Condemned by his delicate
and uncertain health to make his dwelling-place far from the grey skies
and the biting east winds of his boyhood's home, these grey Scotch
skies, these bitter winds, still haunt him and appear in his books with
the strange charm they have for the sons and daughters of the north who,
even while they revile them, love them, and in far lands long for them
with a heart-hunger that no cloudless sky, no gentle zephyr, no
unshadowed sunshine of the alien shore can appease.[6]
In all his wanderings his heart turned fondly to the old home, to the
noble profession of his fathers, and on smiling seas and amid sunny
islands he never forgot the bleak coasts of Scotland, that his
ancestors' hands had lighted from headland to headland, and his heart
'In dreams (beheld) the Hebrides.'
A Scot of whom Edinburgh and Scotland are justly proud, he was a man
whose life and faith did credit to the stern religion and the old
traditions of his covenanting forefathers, and although, like so many
men and women of earnest minds and broad culture in the present day, he
early left behind him much of the narrowness of churches and of creeds,
he held closely to 'the one thing needful,' a humble and a trusting
belief in God that filled all his soul with strength and patience, and
gave to him that marvellous sympathy with humanity which made him a
power among men, whether they were the learned and the cultured, or
simple children of nature like the Samoans, who so truly understood and
loved him.
The books undoubtedly are great, but the man is greater; and it is not
only as a writer of no small renown that he will be revered and
remembered but as a man among men whose patience and courage gave to his
too short life a pathos and a value. Among his friends he was beloved in
a manner quite unique, he had a peculiar place of his own in their
regard. By the younger school of writers, whose work he so fully and so
generously appreciated, he was regarded as a master; and one of the
pleasures to be enjoyed on the publication of that _Life_, which Mr
Sydney Colvin presently has in preparation, will be to learn more about
his agreeable relations with his literary juniors.
Of his sacred home life no outsider can speak; but it is the truest test
of perfect manhood when the man who is not unknown in the great world
shows himself at his best in the smaller world of home, and has a
brighter and a sweeter side of his nature to display to wife and mother
and close fireside circle than he has to his admiring public. Mr
Stevenson never despised the trivial things of life, and the everyday
courtesies, the little unselfishnesses--which are often so much more
difficult to practise than the great virtues--were never forgotten all
through the years in which so much of pain and of weariness might have
made occasional repining, occasional forgetfulness of others, almost
pardonable.
Eager in his own work, untiring in his literary activity, he was equally
eager to toil in the great vineyard, to do something for God and for
man, to make his faith active and not passive. This was his attitude
through life; he would always have 'tholed his paiks' that the poor
might 'enjoy their play,' the imprisoned go free; and the position which
he took up in regard to Samoan troubles was a practical proof that he
was, as he called himself, 'a ready soldier,' willing to spend and be
spent for others. Of one whose position was that of 'the ready soldier,'
no more fitting concluding words can be said than those in his mother's
note-book, and written to her by the wife of the Rev. Mr Clark, his
Samoan friend, in November 1895:--
... 'So few knew your dear son's best side--his Christian character. Of
course, men don't write often on that subject, and to many he was the
author, and they only knew him as such. To me his lovely character was
one of the wonderful things, so full of love and the desire to do good.
I love to think of him.' ...
That the man and his work are appreciated is amply proved by the
monument already erected to his memory in San Francisco by the zeal of
the American Committee, and by the enthusiastic meeting in his own
Edinburgh, presided over by Lord Rosebery, in the autumn of 1896, at
which Mr J. M. Barrie made an interesting and an appreciative speech;
and by the equally enthusiastic gathering in Dundee in the spring of
1897.
At these meetings it was proposed to receive subscriptions, and to erect
a Stevenson memorial in some form to be afterwards decided on. The
suggestion was largely responded to, but it is probable the response
would have been even more cordial had it been determined that the
memorial should take a practical rather than an ornamental form.
Monuments are cold things whereby to perpetuate love and admiration; an
'arbour of Corinthian columns,' which one paper recently suggested,
would have appealed to Mr Stevenson himself only as an atrocity in
stone. His sole sympathy with stone was when it served the noble purpose
to which his father had put it, and, as lighthouse or harbour,
contributed to the service of man. If the memorial might have been too
costly in the form of a small shore-light, a lifeboat seemed a thing
that would have been dear to his own heart. And as, in years to come,
men read of rescues by the _Robert Louis Stevenson_, on some
wreck-strewn, rock-bound corner of our coasts, the memory of the man
who loved the sea, and of the race who toiled to save life in its
storms, would have been handed down to future generations in a fitting
fashion.
The memorial is to take the form of a mural monument with a medallion
portrait of his head in high relief. It is to be placed in the Moray
Aisle of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh, which it is thought might be a
suitable 'Poets' Corner' for Scotland. If there is sufficient money, and
if the necessary permission is obtained, a stone seat may also be
erected on the Calton Hill at the point from which Mr Stevenson so
greatly admired the view. The medallion is to be entrusted to Mr A.
Saint Gaudens, an American sculptor of repute, who studied in France,
and who had the great advantage of personally knowing Mr Stevenson in
America in 1887 and 1888, and at that time getting him to sit for a
medallion, which is considered by his widow and family to be the best
likeness of him that they have seen. It is satisfactory that at last
someone has been found who can do justice to the quaint, mobile face,
and give to the memorial some of the living charm of the man. It is also
pleasant to know that Mrs Stevenson and her family have expressed
themselves perfectly satisfied with the choice of a sculptor.
The San Francisco monument is in the form of a sixteenth century ship,
of thirty guns, careening to the west, with golden sails full spread,
and with a figure of Pallas, looking towards the setting sun, in its
prow. The ship is about five feet high, and behind it, on a simple
granite plinth, is engraved the famous passage from his Christmas
sermon:--'To be honest, to be kind; to earn a little, to spend a little
less; to keep a few friends, and these without capitulations.'
On one surface of the plinth is a spigot and a cup, and underneath a
drip-stone, where thirsty dogs can drink. The drinking place is
assuredly a part of the monument that would have commended itself to the
man who loved his canine friends and all other animals so truly.
Even if a monument has about it something of the commonplace, it is well
that the memory of the man and of his work should be perpetuated; but of
all memorials of him, the Samoan 'Road of Gratitude' is likely to be for
ever remembered as the most suitable and the most perfect.
FOOTNOTE:
[6] It is on record that Mr Stevenson, who always talked to a
compatriot when he could, was, _a propos_ of his home in Samoa, told by
a sailor with whom he was having a chat, that he 'would rather gang hame
an' be hanged in auld Scotland than come an' live in this ---- hole.' No
doubt, Mr Stevenson appreciated the sturdy mariner's patriotism,
although it was expressed in language more forcible than polite!
End of Project Gutenberg's Robert Louis Stevenson, by Margaret Moyes Black