LOUIS STEVENSON was born in 8 Howard Place, then an outlying
suburban street between Edinburgh and the sea; and the substantial
but unpretending house with its small plot of garden in front will
doubtless be visited with interest in future by those who like to look
on the birthplaces of famous men.
17 Heriot Row, on one of Edinburgh’s level terraces between the steep
hills, “from which you see a perspective of a mile or so of falling
street,” became his home before he was out of velvet tunics and socks,
but as his mother was delicate, they lived when the weather was genial
“in the green lap of the Rutland Hills,” at Swanston, a few miles from
Edinburgh. He, however, spent his winters at Heriot Row, when he
grew into an Academy boy, though not a specially brilliant scholar.
His doubtful health would often stand as an excuse, when the rain
splattered on the panes, or the square gardens opposite were hid in a
scowling “haur,” for the small Louis to remain and “Child Play” beside
his pretty mother. No doubt, too, the truant spirit was strong within
him when he trotted down hill to school, “rasping his clachan[1] on the
area railings” as he made an Edinburgh hero of his do. We first knew
Louis Stevenson when his schooldays and teens were past, and he was
facing what he called “the equinoctial gales of youth,” and beginning
to put his self-taught art of writing into print. He had great railings
against his native town in these days, which were somewhere in the
heart of the seventies. The “meteorological purgatory” of its climate
embittered him, as his frail frame suffered sorely from the bleak
blasts. He vowed his fellow-townsmen had a list to one side by reason
of having to struggle against the East wind. He gave his spleen vent in
“Picturesque Notes of Edinburgh,” yet by way of apology he says, “the
place establishes an interest in people’s hearts; go where they will,
they find no city of the same distinction, go where they will, they
take a pride in their old home.” No one could clothe the historical
tales of Edinburgh in more graphic words than this slim son of hers.
Often he would talk thereon, and he speaks of his joy, as a lad, in
finding “a nugget of cottages at Broughton;” and any bit of old village
embedded in the modern town, he espied and rejoiced over. He would
frequently drop in to dinner with us, and of an evening he had the run
of our smoking-room. After 10 P. M., when a stern old servant went to
bed, the “open sesame” to our door was a rattle on the letter-box. He
liked this admittance by secret sign, and we liked to hear his special
rat-a-tat, for we knew we would then enjoy an hour or two of talk
which, he said, “is the harmonious speech of two or more, and is by far
the most accessible of pleasures.” He always adhered to the same dress
for all entertainments, a shabby, short, velveteen jacket, a loose,
Byronic, collared shirt (for a brief space he adopted black flannel
ones), and meagre, shabby-looking trousers. His straight hair he wore
long, and he looked like an unsuccessful artist, or a poorly-clad but
eager student. He was then fragile in figure and, to use a Scottish
expression, _shilpit_ looking. There is no English equivalent for
_shilpit_, being lean, starveling, ill-thriven, in one. His dark,
bright eyes were his most noticeable and attractive feature,—wide
apart, almost Japanese in their shape, and above them a fine brow.
He was pale and sallow, and there was a foreign, almost gypsy look
about him, despite his long-headed Scotch ancestry. In the “Inland
Voyage,” he complains, he “never succeeded in persuading a single
official abroad of his nationality.” I do not wonder he was suspected
of being a spy with false passports, for he had a very un-British
smack about him; but, slim and pinched-looking though he was, he
still commanded notice by his unique appearance and his vivacity of
expression. His manners, too, had a foreign air with waving gestures,
elaborate bows, and a graceful nimbleness of action.
By our library fire, on the winter evenings, he planned the canoe trip
with my brother, and told us in the following season how the record of
this “Inland Voyage” progressed. He was also laying future plans for a
further trip, as he said, smiling with fun, with another donkey,—this
time to the Cevennes. After the “Inland Voyage,” Louis was full of a
project to buy a barge and saunter through the canals of Europe, Venice
being the far-off terminus. A few select shareholders in this scheme
were chosen, mostly artists, for the barge plan was projected in the
mellow autumnal days at Fontainebleau Forest where artists abounded.
Robert A. Stevenson, Louis’s cousin, then a wielder of the brush, was
to be of the company. He, too, though he came of the shrewd Scottish
civil engineer stock, had, like his kinsman, a foreign look and a
strong touch of Bohemianism in him. He, also, with these alien looks,
had his cousin’s attractive power of speech and fertile imagination.
The barge company were then all in the hey-day of their youth. They
were to paint fame-enduring pictures, as they leisurely sailed through
life and Europe, and when bowed, gray-bearded, bald-headed men, they
were to cease their journeyings at Venice. There, before St. Marks, a
crowd of clamorously eager picture-dealers and lovers of art were to
be waiting to purchase the wonderful work of the wanderers. The scene
in the piazza of St. Marks on the barge’s arrival, and the excited
throng of anxious buyers, the hoary-headed artists, tottering under the
weight of canvases, was pictured in glowing colors by their author,
when the forest was smelling of the “ripe breath of autumn.” The barge
was purchased, but bankruptcy presently stared its shareholders in
the face. The picture-dealers of that day were not thirsting to buy
shareholders’ pictures. The man of the pen had only ventured on an
“Inland Voyage,” and as yet no golden harvest for his work lined the
pockets of his velveteen coat. The barge was arrested and, with it, the
canoes which have earned an everlasting fame through the “Arethusa’s”
pen. They were rescued, the barge sold, and the company wound up.
We saw most of Louis Stevenson in winter, when studies and rough
weather held him in Edinburgh. In summer he was off to the country,
abroad, or yachting on the West coast, for in his posthumous song he
truly says:—
“Merry of soul he sailed on a day
Over the sea to Skye.”
As a talker by the winter’s fireside in these unknown-to-fame days,
we give him the crown for being the king of speakers. His reading,
his thoughts thereon, his plans, he described with a graphic and
nimble tongue, accompanied by the queer, flourishing gesticulations
and the “speaking gestures” of his thin, sensitive hands. We teased
him unmercifully for his peculiarities in dress and manner. It did not
become a youth of his years, we held, to affect a bizarre style, and
he held he lived in a free country, and could exercise his own taste
at will. Nothing annoyed him more than to affirm his shabby clothes,
his long cloak, which he wore instead of an orthodox great-coat, were
eccentricities of genius. He certainly liked to be noticed, for he was
full of the self-absorbed conceit of youth. If he was not the central
figure, he took what we called Stevensonian ways of attracting notice
to himself. He would spring up full of a novel notion he had to expound
(and his brain teemed with them), or he vowed he could not speak
trammelled by a coat, and asked leave to talk in his shirt-sleeves. For
all these mannerisms he had to stand a good deal of chaff, which he
never resented, though he vehemently defended himself or fell squashed
for a brief space in a limp mass into a veritable back seat.
Looking back through the mellowing vista of years these little
eccentric whims were all very harmless and guileless, and I own we were
hard on the susceptible lad, but, as we told him, it was for his good,
and if he had been like ourselves, with a band of brothers, egotisms
would have been stamped out in the nursery. He would, after a severe
shower of chaff, put out his cigarette, wind himself in his cloak and
silently, with an elaborate bow, go off; but, to his credit be it said,
he bore no ill-will. His very sensitiveness was to his tormentors
conceit. He wrote of himself later that he was “a very humble-minded
youth, though it was a virtue he never had much credit for.” He is
credited now with it, for as the then “uncharted desert of the future”
lies mapped out, we see that his fantastic ways were not affectations,
but second nature, to which the life he chose in the subtle south was
an appropriate setting. We never, though we gibed him sorely, found
fault with his enthusiasm; it was so infectious and refreshing. He was
always brimful of new ideas, new ventures, full of sweeping changes,
a rabid radical, a religious doubter; though with him, as with many
others, there was more “belief in honest doubt than half their
creeds.” He had an almost child-like fund of insatiable curiosity. He
thirsted to know how it would feel to be in other people’s shoes, from
those of a king to a beggar, and he smoked on the hearth rug an endless
succession of cigarettes and put his imaginations thereof into words.
He was very sore and somewhat rebellious over writing not being
considered a profession, and having to bend to his good father in so
far as to join the Scottish bar. For long “R. L. Stevenson, Advocate,”
was on the door-plate of 17 Heriot Row. The Parliament House saw
him seldom, never therein to practise his bewigged profession. We
frightened him much by avowing that a clerk was hunting for him, and
even the rich library below the trampling advocate’s feet could not
wile him into the old Hall for some time after that false scare. He
also heard he had been dubbed “That Gifted Boy and the New Chatterton”
by an idle legal wit. That name more nearly persuaded him to have
his hair shorn to an orthodox length than any other entreaty. Like
all people with character, he had animosities, but he was very just
and tolerant in belaboring an adversary with his tongue, which,
considering he was in the full bloom of the critical self-satisfiedness
of youth, showed a just mind and kindliness of heart. When he had
fallen foul of and had hurled some sarcasms at the stupid dulness
of people, he next, in his queer inquisitive way, fell to wondering
what it would be like to be inside their torpid minds and view things
from their dead level. He was fond of travel, of boating, of walking
tours, but he was no sportsman, and not even a lover of the Gentle
Art. Though his friends were all golfers (and golf then was mostly
confined to Scotland), I do not think he ever took a club in hand. His
eyes, when outside, were wholly occupied enjoying his surroundings
and painting them in words. “Even in the thickest of our streets,”
he noted, “the country hill-tops find out a young man’s eyes and set
his heart beating for travel and pure air.” He loved to wander round
his native city. Duddingstone was one favorite haunt, Queensferry was
another, and the Hawes Inn there, now grown into a villafied hotel,
with the hawthorn hedges still in its garden, had attractions for him.
From it Davie Balfour was “kidnapped,” and Rest-And-Be-Thankful on
Corstorphine Hill, where Allan and Davie part after their adventures,
we often walked to on Sundays, and all the while he was busy talking
and full of plans and projects. The Jekyll and Hyde plot he had in his
brain, and told us of in those days. Burke and Hare had a fascination
for him. A novel called the “Great North Road” was another plot in his
mind. His “Virginibus Puerisque” is dedicated to W. E. Henley, of whom
I heard Stevenson speak when he had first discovered him an invalid in
the Edinburgh Infirmary. He came in glowing with delight at the genius
he had found and began ransacking our shelves for books for him. A
few days later he was bristling with indignation because some people
who visited the sick objected to the advanced and foreign literary
food Stevenson had fed his new acquaintance on, and left a new supply
of tract literature in their stead. In the preface of “Virginibus
Puerisque,” which is dedicated to Mr. Henley, Stevenson says: “These
papers are like milestones on the wayside of my life.” To those who
knew him in these past days to re-read these papers seem to travel the
same road again in the same good company. They recall the slight,
boyish-looking youth they knew, and to those who live under the stars
which Stevenson thought shone so bright—the Edinburgh street lamps—he
was not so much the famous author, as the sympathetic comrade, the
unique, ideal talker we welcomed of yore. As he truly said, “The powers
and the ground of friendship are a mystery,” but looking back I can
discern in part we loved the thing he was, for some shadow of what he
was to be.