From 1864 to 1867 Stevenson's education was conducted chiefly at Mr.
Thomson's private school in Frederick Street, Edinburgh, and by private
tutors in various places to which he travelled for his own or his
parents' health. These travels included frequent visits to such Scottish
health resorts as Bridge of Allan, Dunoon, Rothesay, North Berwick,
Lasswade, and Peebles, and occasional excursions with his father on his
nearer professional rounds to the Scottish coasts and lighthouses. From
1867 the family life became more settled between Edinburgh and Swanston
Cottage, Lothianburn, a country home in the Pentlands which Mr.
Stevenson first rented in that year, and the scenery and associations of
which sank deeply into the young man's spirit, and vitally affected his
after thoughts and his art.
By this time Louis Stevenson seemed to show signs of outgrowing his
early infirmities of health. He was a lover, to a degree even beyond his
strength, of outdoor life and exercise (though not of sports), and it
began to be hoped that as he grew up he would be fit to enter the family
profession of civil engineer. He was accordingly entered as a student at
Edinburgh University, and for several winters attended classes there
with such regularity as his health and inclinations permitted. This was
in truth but small. The mind on fire with its own imaginations, and
eager to acquire its own experiences in its own way, does not take
kindly to the routine of classes and repetitions, nor could the
desultory mode of schooling enforced upon him by ill-health answer much
purpose by way of discipline. According to his own account he was at
college, as he had been at school, an inveterate idler and truant. But
outside the field of school and college routine he showed an eager
curiosity and activity of mind. "He was of a conversable temper," so he
says of himself, "and insatiably curious in the aspects of life, and
spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of men and
womenkind." Of one class indeed, and that was his own, he had soon had
enough, at least in so far as it was to be studied at the dinners,
dances, and other polite entertainments of ordinary Edinburgh society.
Of these he early wearied. At home he made himself pleasant to all
comers, but for his own resort chose out a very few houses, mostly those
of intimate college companions, into which he could go without
constraint, and where his inexhaustible flow of poetic, imaginative, and
laughing talk seems generally to have rather puzzled his hearers than
impressed them. On the other hand, during his endless private rambles
and excursions, whether among the streets and slums, the gardens and
graveyards of the city, or farther afield among the Pentland hills or on
the shores of Forth, he was never tired of studying character and
seeking acquaintance among the classes more nearly exposed to the pinch
and stress of life.
In the eyes of anxious elders, such vagrant ways naturally take on the
colours of idleness and a love of low company. Stevenson was, however,
in his own fashion an eager student of books as well as of man and
nature. He read precociously and omnivorously in the _belles-lettres_,
including a very wide range of English poetry, fiction, and essays, and
a fairly wide range of French; and was a genuine student of Scottish
history, especially from the time of the persecutions down, and to some
extent of history in general. The art of literature was already his
private passion, and something within him even already told him that it
was to be his life's work. On all his truantries he went pencil and
copybook in hand, trying to fit his impression of the scene to words, to
compose original rhymes, tales, dialogues, and dramas, or to imitate the
style and cadences of the author he at the moment preferred. For three
or four years, nevertheless, he tried dutifully, if half-heartedly, to
prepare himself for the family profession. In 1868, the year when the
following correspondence opens, he went to watch the works of the firm
in progress first at Anstruther on the coast of Fife, and afterwards at
Wick. In 1869 he made the tour of the Orkneys and Shetlands on board the
steam yacht of the Commissioners of Northern Lights, and in 1870 the
tour of the Western Islands, preceded by a stay on the isle of Earraid,
where the works of the Dhu Heartach lighthouse were then in progress. He
was a favourite, although a very irregular, pupil of the professor of
engineering, Fleeming Jenkin, whose friendship and that of Mrs. Jenkin
were of great value to him, and whose life he afterwards wrote; and must
have shown some aptitude for the family calling, inasmuch as in 1871 he
received the silver medal of the Edinburgh Society of Arts for a paper
on a suggested improvement in lighthouse apparatus. The outdoor and
seafaring parts of an engineer's life were in fact wholly to his taste.
But he looked instinctively at the powers and phenomena of waves and
tide, of storm and current, reef, cliff, and rock, with the eye of the
poet and artist, and not those of the practician and calculator. For
desk work and office routine he had an unconquerable aversion; and his
physical powers, had they remained at their best, must have proved quite
unequal to the workshop training necessary to the practical engineer.
Accordingly in 1871 it was agreed, not without natural reluctance on his
father's part, that he should give up the hereditary vocation and read
for the bar: literature, on which his heart was set, and in which his
early attempts had been encouraged, being held to be by itself no
profession, or at least one altogether too irregular and undefined. For
the next several years, therefore, he attended law classes instead of
engineering and science classes in the University, giving to the subject
a certain amount of serious, although fitful, attention until he was
called to the bar in 1875.
So much for the course of Stevenson's outward life during these days at
Edinburgh. To tell the story of his inner life would be a far more
complicated task, and cannot here be attempted even briefly. The ferment
of youth was more acute and more prolonged in him than in most men even
of genius. In the Introduction I have tried to give some notion of the
many various strains and elements which met in him, and which were in
these days pulling one against another in his half-formed being, at a
great expense of spirit and body. Add the storms, which from time to
time attacked him, of shivering repulsion from the climate and
conditions of life in the city which he yet deeply and imaginatively
loved; the moods of spiritual revolt against the harsh doctrines of the
creed in which he had been brought up, and to which his parents were
deeply, his father even passionately, attached; the seasons of
temptation, to which he was exposed alike by temperament and
circumstance, to seek solace among the crude allurements of the city
streets.
In the later and maturer correspondence which will appear in these
volumes, the agitations of the writer's early days are often enough
referred to in retrospect. In the boyish letters to his parents, which
make up the chief part of this first section, they naturally find no
expression at all; nor will these letters be found to differ much in
any way from those of any other lively and observant lad who is also
something of a reader and has some natural gift of writing. At the end
of the section I have indeed printed one cry of the heart, written not
to his parents, but about them, and telling of the strain which matters
of religious difference for a while brought into his home relations. The
attachment between the father and son from childhood was exceptionally
strong. But the father was staunchly wedded to the hereditary creeds and
dogmas of Scottish Calvinistic Christianity; while the course of the
young man's reading, with the spirit of the generation in which he grew
up, had loosed him from the bonds of that theology, and even of dogmatic
Christianity in general, and had taught him to respect all creeds alike
as expressions of the cravings and conjectures of the human spirit in
face of the unsolved mystery of things, rather than to cling to any one
of them as a revelation of ultimate truth. The shock to the father was
great when his son's opinions came to his knowledge; and there ensued a
time of extremely painful discussion and private tension between them.
In due time this cloud upon a family life otherwise very harmonious and
affectionate passed quite away. But the greater the love, the greater
the pain; when I first knew Stevenson this trouble gave him no peace,
and it has left a strong trace upon his mind and work. See particularly
the parable called "The House of Eld," in his collection of _Fables_,
and the many studies of difficult paternal and filial relations which
are to be found in _The Story of a Lie_, _The Misadventures of John
Nicholson_, _The Wrecker_, and _Weir of Hermiston_.