[_Vailima_, _September_ 1894.]
DEAR BOB,—You are in error about the Picts. They were a Gaelic race,
spoke a Celtic tongue, and we have no evidence that I know of that they
were blacker than other Celts. The Balfours, I take it, were plainly
Celts; their name shows it—the ‘cold croft,’ it means; so does their
country. Where the _black_ Scotch come from nobody knows; but I
recognise with you the fact that the whole of Britain is rapidly and
progressively becoming more pigmented; already in one man’s life I can
decidedly trace a difference in the children about a school door. But
colour is not an essential part of a man or a race. Take my Polynesians,
an Asiatic people probably from the neighbourhood of the Persian gulf.
They range through any amount of shades, from the burnt hue of the Low
Archipelago islander, which seems half negro, to the ‘bleached’ pretty
women of the Marquesas (close by on the map), who come out for a festival
no darker than an Italian; their colour seems to vary directly with the
degree of exposure to the sun. And, as with negroes, the babes are born
white; only it should seem a _little sack_ of pigment at the lower part
of the spine, which presently spreads over the whole field. Very
puzzling. But to return. The Picts furnish to-day perhaps a third of
the population of Scotland, say another third for Scots and Britons, and
the third for Norse and Angles is a bad third. Edinburgh was a Pictish
place. But the fact is, we don’t know their frontiers. Tell some of
your journalist friends with a good style to popularise old Skene; or say
your prayers, and read him for yourself; he was a Great Historian, and I
was his blessed clerk, and did not know it; and you will not be in a
state of grace about the Picts till you have studied him. J. Horne
Stevenson (do you know him?) is working this up with me, and the fact
is—it’s not interesting to the public—but it’s interesting, and very
interesting, in itself, and just now very embarrassing—this rural parish
supplied Glasgow with such a quantity of Stevensons in the beginning of
last century! There is just a link wanting; and we might be able to go
back to the eleventh century, always undistinguished, but clearly
traceable. When I say just a link, I guess I may be taken to mean a
dozen. What a singular thing is this undistinguished perpetuation of a
family throughout the centuries, and the sudden bursting forth of
character and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on
in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get
used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing;
the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of
life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or mænadic—foundations, form a
spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and ‘I could wish my days to
be bound each to each’ by the same open-mouthed wonder. They _are_
anyway, and whether I wish it or not.
I remember very well your attitude to life, this conventional surface of
it. You had none of that curiosity for the social stage directions, the
trivial _ficelles_ of the business; it is simian, but that is how the
wild youth of man is captured; you wouldn’t imitate, hence you kept
free—a wild dog, outside the kennel—and came dam’ near starving for your
pains. The key to the business is of course the belly; difficult as it
is to keep that in view in the zone of three miraculous meals a day in
which we were brought up. Civilisation has become reflex with us; you
might think that hunger was the name of the best sauce; but hunger to the
cold solitary under a bush of a rainy night is the name of something
quite different. I defend civilisation for the thing it is, for the
thing it has _come_ to be, the standpoint of a real old Tory. My ideal
would be the Female Clan. But how can you turn these crowding dumb
multitudes _back_? They don’t do anything _because_; they do things,
write able articles, stitch shoes, dig, from the purely simian impulse.
Go and reason with monkeys!
No, I am right about Jean Lillie. Jean Lillie, our double
great-grandmother, the daughter of David Lillie, sometime Deacon of the
Wrights, married, first, Alan Stevenson, who died May 26, 1774, ‘at Santt
Kittes of a fiver,’ by whom she had Robert Stevenson, born 8th June 1772;
and, second, in May or June 1787, Thomas Smith, a widower, and already
the father of our grandmother. This improbable double connection always
tends to confuse a student of the family, Thomas Smith being doubly our
great-grandfather.
I looked on the perpetuation of our honoured name with veneration. My
mother collared one of the photos, of course; the other is stuck up on my
wall as the chief of our sept. Do you know any of the Gaelic-Celtic
sharps? you might ask what the name means. It puzzles me. I find a
_M‘Stein_ and a _MacStephane_; and our own great-grandfather always
called himself Steenson, though he wrote it Stevenson. There are at
least three _places_ called Stevenson—_Stevenson_ in Cunningham,
_Stevenson_ in Peebles, and _Stevenson_ in Haddington. And it was not
the Celtic trick, I understand, to call places after people. I am going
to write to Sir Herbert Maxwell about the name, but you might find some
one.
Get the Anglo-Saxon heresy out of your head; they superimposed their
language, they scarce modified the race; only in Berwickshire and
Roxburgh have they very largely affected the place names. The
Scandinavians did much more to Scotland than the Angles. The Saxons
didn’t come.
Enough of this sham antiquarianism. Yes, it is in the matter of the
book, {359} of course, that collaboration shows; as for the manner, it is
superficially all mine, in the sense that the last copy is all in my
hand. Lloyd did not even put pen to paper in the Paris scenes or the
Barbizon scene; it was no good; he wrote and often rewrote all the rest;
I had the best service from him on the character of Nares. You see, we
had been just meeting the man, and his memory was full of the man’s words
and ways. And Lloyd is an impressionist, pure and simple. The great
difficulty of collaboration is that you can’t explain what you mean. I
know what kind of effect I mean a character to give—what kind of _tache_
he is to make; but how am I to tell my collaborator in words? Hence it
was necessary to say, ‘Make him So-and-so’; and this was all right for
Nares and Pinkerton and Loudon Dodd, whom we both knew, but for Bellairs,
for instance—a man with whom I passed ten minutes fifteen years ago—what
was I to say? and what could Lloyd do? I, as a personal artist, can
begin a character with only a haze in my head, but how if I have to
translate the haze into words before I begin? In our manner of
collaboration (which I think the only possible—I mean that of one person
being responsible, and giving the _coup de pouce_ to every part of the
work) I was spared the obviously hopeless business of trying to explain
to my collaborator what _style_ I wished a passage to be treated in.
These are the times that illustrate to a man the inadequacy of spoken
language. Now—to be just to written language—I can (or could) find a
language for my every mood, but how could I _tell_ any one beforehand
what this effect was to be, which it would take every art that I
possessed, and hours and hours of deliberate labour and selection and
rejection, to produce? These are the impossibilities of collaboration.
Its immediate advantage is to focus two minds together on the stuff, and
to produce in consequence an extraordinarily greater richness of purview,
consideration, and invention. The hardest chapter of all was ‘Cross
Questions and Crooked Answers.’ You would not believe what that cost us
before it assumed the least unity and colour. Lloyd wrote it at least
thrice, and I at least five times—this is from memory. And was that last
chapter worth the trouble it cost? Alas, that I should ask the question!
Two classes of men—the artist and the educationalist—are sworn, on soul
and conscience, not to ask it. You get an ordinary, grinning, red-headed
boy, and you have to educate him. Faith supports you; you give your
valuable hours, the boy does not seem to profit, but that way your duty
lies, for which you are paid, and you must persevere. Education has
always seemed to me one of the few possible and dignified ways of life.
A sailor, a shepherd, a schoolmaster—to a less degree, a soldier—and (I
don’t know why, upon my soul, except as a sort of schoolmaster’s
unofficial assistant, and a kind of acrobat in tights) an artist, almost
exhaust the category.
If I had to begin again—I know not—_si jeunesse savait_, _si vieillesse
pouvait_ . . . I know not at all—I believe I should try to honour Sex
more religiously. The worst of our education is that Christianity does
not recognise and hallow Sex. It looks askance at it, over its shoulder,
oppressed as it is by reminiscences of hermits and Asiatic self-tortures.
It is a terrible hiatus in our modern religions that they cannot see and
make venerable that which they ought to see first and hallow most. Well,
it is so; I cannot be wiser than my generation.
But no doubt there is something great in the half-success that has
attended the effort of turning into an emotional religion, Bald Conduct,
without any appeal, or almost none, to the figurative, mysterious, and
constitutive facts of life. Not that conduct is not constitutive, but
dear! it’s dreary! On the whole, conduct is better dealt with on the
cast-iron ‘gentleman’ and duty formula, with as little fervour and poetry
as possible; stoical and short.
. . . There is a new something or other in the wind, which exercises me
hugely: anarchy,—I mean, anarchism. People who (for pity’s sake) commit
dastardly murders very basely, die like saints, and leave beautiful
letters behind ’em (did you see Vaillant to his daughter? it was the New
Testament over again); people whose conduct is inexplicable to me, and
yet their spiritual life higher than that of most. This is just what the
early Christians must have seemed to the Romans. Is this, then, a new
_drive_ {361} among the monkeys? Mind you, Bob, if they go on being
martyred a few years more, the gross, dull, not unkindly bourgeois may
get tired or ashamed or afraid of going on martyring; and the anarchists
come out at the top just like the early Christians. That is, of course,
they will step into power as a _personnel_, but God knows what they may
believe when they come to do so; it can’t be stranger or more improbable
than what Christianity had come to be by the same time.
Your letter was easily read, the pagination presented no difficulty, and
I read it with much edification and gusto. To look back, and to
stereotype one bygone humour—what a hopeless thing! The mind runs ever
in a thousand eddies like a river between cliffs. You (the ego) are
always spinning round in it, east, west, north, and south. You are
twenty years old, and forty, and five, and the next moment you are
freezing at an imaginary eighty; you are never the plain forty-four that
you should be by dates. (The most philosophical language is the Gaelic,
which has _no present tense_—and the most useless.) How, then, to choose
some former age, and stick there?