ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON BY L. COPE CORNFORD M NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1900 TWO COPIES RECfilVEO, ^^^'('^ IJbrarf of C^omgfM^ a ^^ ©fUcn &i the .'^ ^ti Copyright, 1899 By Dodd, Mead and Company A II rights reserved 2antbersttg ^rrss John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A. PREFACE. As I have always been an eager student of Robert Louis Stevenson's work, so it was with peculiar pleasure that I entered upon the study of his finished achievement, and of his person- ality and temperament as expressed in that achievement. For, such were the terms of my ambition: and they may serve (at least) to define the limits of this essay. Beyond those limits it was not mine to adventure. That Mr Sidney Colvin has in preparation the authorised biography of Stevenson, is matter of common knowledge; and this consideration naturally prevented me from recording aught of the main facts of Stevenson's career, that has not been made public property already; and, for the same reason, I have abstained from making any use of the series of Stevenson's Letters which have recently been published in a monthly magazine. VI PREFACE. With the name of Robert Louis Stevenson is indissolubly connected the name of William Ernest Henley: and I delight to acknowledge, with the liveliest gratitude, the help which Mr Henley has given me in the making of this essay towards a just appreciation of his old comrade. And to John William Simpson, my old master in a noble and difficult art, I would render thanks for the service he did me in sign of our common admiration for Stevenson, the artist. L. COPE CORNFORD. OviNGDEAN Grange, near Brighton, September, 1899. CONTENTS. Pack I. Prologue: His Heritage i II. His Ancestry 13 III. Outline of His Life 27 IV. The Moralist 79 V. The Artist 107 VI. The Romantic 115 VII. The Novelist 149 VIII. The Limner of Landscape 166 IX. His Style 184 X. Epilogue 195 INDEX 199 APPARITION. Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably^ Neat-footed and weak-fingered : in his face — Lean, large-botied, 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 and impudence and energy. Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, Most vain, most generous, sternly critical. Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist : A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all. And something of the Shorter-Catechist. W. E. Henley, Rhymes and Rhythms. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. I. PROLOGUE: HIS HERITAGE. Do you remember — can we e'er forget? — How, in the coiled perplexities of youth, In our wild climate, in our scowling town, We gloomed and shivered, sorrowed, sobbed, and feared ? The belching winter wind, the missile rain, The rare and welcome silence of the snows. The laggard mom, the haggard day, the night. The grimy spell of the nocturnal town, Do you remember ? — Ah, could one forget t — R. L. S., To my Familiars. When Robert Louis Stevenson, some five-and- twenty years since, went to and fro to his studies in the University of that city which was his birthplace and his home, and which always re- mained to him as the image of " the dear city of Zeus," the old Scots order, giving place to the new, was even then suffering the last processes I 2 R. L. STEVENSON. of dissolution. In what the old order consisted, in ancient Edina, a " city of clubs and talk and good-fellowship, a city of harlotry and high jinks, a city (above all) of drink," ^ it is hard for an Englishman rightly to comprehend. It is odds but he will never attain to a true conception of the old society; he must content himself with mere hints and adumbrations. Let us turn, for instance, to Sir Walter's discreetly ^ jovial pages. When Colonel Mannering went seeking Mr Pleydell the advocate in Edinburgh, his con- ductor, the Highland chairman, " suddenly dived with him into a very steep paved lane. Turning to the right, they entered a scale stair- case, as it is called, the state of which, so far as it could be judged of by one of his senses, annoyed Mannering's delicacy not a little." It was up this wynd, atop of this foul scale stair- case, that the prosperous advocate had his dwell- ing. But it was Saturday at e'en; and, says the chairman, " His honour will be at Clerihugh's about this time — Hersel could hae tell'd ye that, but she thought ye wanted to see his house." So to Clerihugh's they go accordingly, together 1 W. E. Henley, Essay on Robert Burns, <5^f. ' " Discreetly " : I use the word advisedly ; for, it was for just such a club as that which Mr Paulas Pleydell presided, that Burns made the famous collection of sculduddery which is known as The Merry Muses of Caledonia. PROLOGUE: HIS HERITAGE. 3 with the great Dandle Dinmont, who "divided the press, shouldering from him, by the mere weight and impetus of his motion, both drunk and sober passengers." The causeway, you observe, is thronged with brither Scots in their accustomed Saturday-at-e'en altitudes. The party turns "into a dark alley — then up a dark stair — and then into an open door . . . Mannering looked around him, and could hardly conceive how a gentleman of a liberal profession and good society should choose such a scene for social indulgence . . . The passage in which they stood had a window to the close, which admitted a little light during the daytime, and a villanous compound of smells at all times, but more especially towards evening." The tavern, in fact, owns premises even more disreputable than the private flat in the " land." And here " men and women, half undressed, were busied in baking, broiling, roasting oysters, and pre- paring devils on the gridiron ; " while, in the next room, Mr Counsellor Pleydell and his fel- low-counsellors, highly flushed with claret and brandy, were rioting at " the ancient and now forgotten pastime of High Jinks . . . Mr Counsellor Pleydell, such as we have described him, was enthroned, as a monarch, in an elbow- chair placed on the dining-table, his scratch-wig 4 R. L. STEVENSON. on one side, his head crowned with a bottle-slider, his eye leering with an expression betwixt fun and the effects of wine, while his court around him resounded with such crambo scraps of verse as these : — ' Where is Gerunto now ? and what's become of him ? Gerunto's drowned because he could not swim, &c., &c.' Such, O Themis," adds Sir Walter, "v/ere anciently the sports of thy Scottish children ! " Liquor and letters, in fact, but especially liquor. I have quoted the incident^ somewhat at length, because it seems to me entirely typical. And observe, that upon the entrance of the visitors, it is the visitors who are dismayed. Mr Pleydell does, indeed, blush " a little " ; but Dinmont, the wild Borderer, stands " aghast." ' " Deil o' the like o' that ever I saw ! " ' says he. And on Sunday morning, behold our reveller in " a nicely-dressed bob-wig, upon every hair of which a zealous and careful barber had bestowed its proper allowance of powder; a well-brushed black suit, with very clean shoes and gold buckles and stock-buckle; a manner rather reserved and formal than intrusive," walking demurely through the blinded streets (which remained unswept on the Sabbath) to hear and 1 Guy Manner ing, vol. ii. PROLOGUE: HIS HERITAGE. 5 digest, with a solemn and perfectly sincere gusto, a sermon " in which the Calvinism of the Kirk of Scotland was ably supported, yet made the basis of a sound system of practical morals." Sir Walter, sane, humorous, kindly, is content to do no more than indicate the condition of manners. One may compare the observations of Mr Edward Burt, who " made a tour " in Scotland and the Highlands about the middle of the last century — a feat, in those days, sufficient to justify the writing of a book. " But when persons of fortune will suffer their Houses to be worse than Hog-sties, I do not see how they differ, in that particular, from Hottentots," says the fastidious Englishman. And, " I have often admired at the zeal of a pretty well-dressed Jacobite, when I have seen her go down one of the narrow steep Wytidcs in Edinburgh, through an Accumulation of the worst Kind of Filth, and whip up a blind Stair-case almost as foul, yet with an Air as degage, as if she was going to meet a favourite Lover in some poetic Bower." ^ The Pleydells and Nicol Jarvies of Sir Walter were douce religious citizens ; let us set beside their portraits a sketch limned by the elder poet, Allan Ramsay, in his Elegy on Maggy Johnston, who died mmo 1 7 1 1 . 1 Burt's Letters, 1755. 6 R. L. STEVENSON. " To tell the Truth, now Maggy dang, Of Customers she had a bang; For Lairds and Souters a' did gang To drink bedeen ; The Barn and Yard was aft sae thrang, We took the Green. And there by Dizens we lay down, Syne sweetly ca'd the Healths arown, To bonny Lasses black or brown, As we loo'd best ; In Bumpers we dull cares did drown, And took our Rest. When in our Poutch we fand some Clinks, And took a turn o'er Brunesfield Links, Aften in Maggy's at Hy jinks. We guzl'd Scuds, Till we could scarce, wi' hale out Drinks, Cast aff our Duds. We drank and drew, and fill'd again, O wow ! but we were blyth and fain ; When ony had their Court mistain, O it was nice To hear us a' cry, Pike your Bain, And spell yer Dice. For close we us'd to drink and rant, Until we did baith glowr and gaunt, Right swash I trow ; Then of auld Stories we did cant When we were fou." And so on, and so forth. The lust of drink, you see, is described in terms of unmistakable PROLOGUE: HIS HERITAGE. J enthusiasm; an enthusiasm whose shadow sur- vives to this day among a certain class in the North, although hard drinking be the fashion there no longer. Drink and talk and secret licence were, it seems, the compensations de- manded by human nature for the grievous oppressions of the Kirk, which had long exer- cised a tyranny nigh impossible of apprehen- sion by the English mind. Some half-century later we find Robert Fergusson (to name but him), Ramsay's direct heir in the descending heritage of letters, versifying upon the old theme. When the Scotch eighteenth-century makers treat of other themes, the result is frequently bald, meaningless, and conventional. But take liquor or sculduddery, and you shall find the Muse, with loins girded and lamp briskly burn- ing, ready to discourse with eloquence and fire. " Auld Reekie ! thou'rt the canty hole ; A bield for mony a cauldrife soul, Who snugly at thine ingle loll, Baith warm and couth ; While round they gar the bicker roll. To weet their mouth." ^ Thus Fergusson. And — " An' frae ilk corner o' the nation, We've lasses eke o' recreation, 1 R. Fergusson, 77^1? Daft Days. 8 R. L. STEVENSON. That at close-mou's tak' up their station By ten o'clock. The Lord deliver frae temptation A' honest fowk! "^ The poet is not superfluous to mark the time of day ; it was at ten o'clock P.M. — so the dis- gusted Burt informs us — that the windows were opened, and the refuse of the many-storeyed " lands" was poured bodily into the street. Although Robert Fergusson died seventy-six years ere Robert Louis Stevenson was born, and although, in the interval, the star of Robert Burns had risen and burned and fallen in ashes, and Sir Walter had founded his imperishable monument, the mention of " Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Burns's model," ^ brings us directly to Stevenson; if only for Stevenson's strange fancy — notorious now to every reader of the daily newspaper — that by some esoteric process of transmigration, whose secret was hidden in the heavens, Fer- gusson's spirit lived again within him. And as in Robert Burns we have the last expression, the final avatar, of the "old Scots peasant-world," ^ so, I think, in Robert Louis Stevenson we have ^ R. Fergusson, Answer to Mr J. S.''s Epistle. ^ R. L. S., Picturesque Azotes on Edinburgh. • "The poor-living, lewd, grimy, free-spoken, ribald, old Scots peasant-world came to a full, brilliant, even majestic close in his work." — W. E. Henley, Essay on Robert Burns, ^c. PROLOGUE: HIS HERITAGE. 9 the consummation of the old Scots middle-class civic tradition — the tradition of letters, of talk, of free-living, and of theology. Stevenson was born into a city and a time when the old manners and customs and opinions were changing every day, giving place to the " Anglified " modern polity we know ; the face of the old city was fast losing its ancient linea- ments ; and the last of old Edinburgh, observed, when he was still a youth, with Stevenson's romantic vision and chronicled in his golden phrase, lives very fitly in the pages of his Picturesque Notes on EdinbiirgJi. The book is written from the romantic point of view through- out. There was none of that indefinable quality which we have agreed to call romance in Fer- gusson — none in Allan Ramsay, none (as Mr Henley has demonstrated) in Burns. Realism there was in plenty in these urban poets ; but, for romance, we must look to another spiritual an- cestor, Sir Walter Scott, the Borderer. And in Stevenson we find the two qualities curiously conjoined. Upon this point, we may note that M. Marcel Schwob has the following obser- vation in an acutely analytical essay, which is even more interesting in the light it throws upon the predilections of the author, as a French contemporary artist profoundly versed 10 R. L. STEVENSON. in English literature, than in its " explication '* of Stevenson : — Nous avions trouv6 chez bien des ^crivains le pouvoir de hausser la reality par la couleur des mots ; je ne sais pas si on trouverait ailleurs des images qui, sans I'aide des mots, sont plus violentes que les images r^elles. Ce sont des images romantiques, puisqu'elles sont destinies a accroitre I'^clat de Taction par le d^cor; ce sont des images irr^elles, puisqu'aucun ceil humain ne saurait les voir dans le monde que nous connaissons. Et cependant elles sont, a proprement parler, la quintessence de la r^alit^.^ Upon which there falls one remark to be made — that the " ceil humain " of Stevenson did, in efTect, behold these vivid images. Who save Stevenson could have written the following description of an Edinburgh relic? — The tallest of these lands, as they are locally termed, have long since been burned out ; but to this day it is not uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a flight ; and the cliff of building which hangs imminent over Waverley Bridge would still put many natural preci- pices to shame. The cellars are already high above the gazer's head, planted on the steep hill-side ; as for the garret, all the furniture may be in the pawn-shop, but it commands a famous prospect to the Highland hills. The poor man may roost up there in the 1 Marcel Schwob, " R. L. S.," New Review, February 1896. PROLOGUE: HIS HERITAGE. II centre of Edinburgh, and yet have a peep of the green country from his window ; he shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with their broad squares and gardens ; he shall have nothing overhead but a few spires, the stone top- gallants of the city ; and perhaps the wind may reach him with a rustic pureness, and bring a smack of the sea, or of flowering lilacs in the spring . . . Times are changed. In one house, perhaps, two score families herd together; and, perhaps, not one of them is wholly out of the reach of want. The great hotel is given over to discomfort from the foundation to the chimney-tops ; everywhere a pinch- ing, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of sluttish- ness and dirt. In the first room there is a birth, in another a death, in a third a sordid drinking bout, and the detective and the Bible-reader cross upon the stairs . . . One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was abed but the policeman, and stopped by hazard before a tall land. The moon touched upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on the upper windows : there was no light anywhere in the great bulk of building; but as I stood there it seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from the interior ; doubtless there were many clocks ticking, and people snoring on their backs. And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within made itself faintly audible in my ears, family after family contributing its quota to the general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to its timepieces, 12 R. L. STEVENSON. like a great disordered heart ... It is true that over- population was at least as dense in the epoch of lords and ladies, and that nowadays some customs which made Edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortu- nately pretermitted . , . But an aggregation of comfort is not distasteful like an aggregation of the reverse [not thus would that adventurous traveller, Mr Burt, have written]. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and divines and lawyers, may have been crowded into these houses in the past — perhaps the more the merrier . . . [But], the Bedouins camp within Pharaoh's palace-walls, and the old war-ship is given over to the rats. We are already a far way from the days when powdered heads were plentiful in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine faces under- neath . . .^ A far way indeed, O graceful moralist ! were it only by the modern touch observable in every line of your picture, we should remember that. A far way, but the end of the road is near ; and the sentimental youth who stands elegantly moralising beneath the " stone top-gallants " of the immemorial city, savouring the tang of the sea that lies beyond, with a vagrant thought upon the " flowering lilacs in the spring," is presently to decorate, with a surprising variety of charming sculptures, the cenotaph of Old Scotland. ^ R. L. S., Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. II. HIS ANCESTRY. Peace and her huge invasion to these shores Puts daily home ; innumerable sails Dawn on the far horizon and draw near; Innumerable loves, uncounted hopes To our wild coasts, not darkling now, approach : Not now obscure, since thou and thine are there, And bright on the lone isle, the foundered reef. The long, resounding foreland. Pharos stands. — R. L. S., To my Father. Underwoods. As I have tried to indicate, however lightly, the drift of that broad tide in human affairs which shaped the destinies of Robert Louis Stevenson, so I would endeavour to trace, as briefly as pos- sible, the influences which flowed to him by the directer current of heredity. In his little history, A Family of Engine erSy and his portrait of Thomas Stevenson} himself has told us all that we need to know. Alan Stevenson, great-grandfather of Robert 1 R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 14 R. L. STEVENSON. Louis, and his brother Hugh, were West Indian merchants, Alan managing the business at home, Hugh abroad. Both brothers died young; and Alan left a widow, and a son, Robert Stevenson. The bereaved wife, Jean, was the daughter of one David Lillie, " a builder in Glasgow, and several times * Deacon of the Wrights ' " ; and so in him we note a craftsman linked to that family which was presently to be renowned throughout the world for cunning craftsmanship. When her son Robert was fifteen, Jean Lillie married Thomas Smith, merchant burgher of Edinburgh ; and thus we come to a second craftsman, who was also something of an inventor, and some- thing of a commercial force. He appears [says Stevenson] as a man, ardent, pas- sionate, practical, designed for affairs and prospering in them far beyond the average. He founded a solid business in lamps and oils, and was the sole pro- prietor of a concern called the Greenside Company's Works . . . He was also, it seems, a shipowner and underwriter. He built himself " a land " — Nos. i and 2 Baxter's Place, then [within the present century] no such unfashionable neighbourhood — and died, leaving his only son in easy circumstances, and giving to his three surviving daughters portions of five thousand pounds and upwards. There is no standard of suc- cess in life [remarks the biographer] ; but in one of its meanings, this is to succeed. HIS ANCESTRY. 1 5 In 1786 Thomas Smith was appointed engineer to the newly-formed Board of Northern Light- houses (the superiority of his proposed lamp and reflectors over open fires of coal secured his ap- pointment) ; and thus begins the famous tradition which indissolubly connects the name of Steven- son with sea-lights and beacons all the world over. For Robert Stevenson, Thomas Smith's stepson, became the engineer's assistant, and later his partner, and in due time, " by an extra- ordinary arrangement, in which it is hard not to suspect the managing hand of a mother, Jean Smith became the wife of Robert Stevenson," The women of this double household, we are told, were immersed in such extremes of piety that the men — scrupulous, godly, honest, indus- trious, even heroical souls as they were — appear to have depressed these elect females as some- thing worldly. That strange, artificial cleavage between things human and things divine, which the English mind (consciously or unconsciously) rejects as something deformed, begins already to appear in the Stevensonian annals. Cunning of brain and art of hand already con- trive to co-exist with arrogant theology; and in the mind of Robert Stevenson, the real founder of the family, a fine working compromise was effected, such a compromise as may so often be l6 R. L. STEVENSON. observed in kindly, simple natures, unaffectedly in love with their calling. Were it not for such gentle, illogical reasonableness, the world must surely have ceased to spin upon its axis long ago. Robert Stevenson did a man's work in the world, and left an enduring inheritance. The seas into which his labours carried the new engineer were still scarce charted, the coasts still dark ; his way on shore was often far beyond the convenience of any road ; the isles in which he must sojourn were still partly savage. He must toss much in boats ; he must often adventure on horseback by the dubious bridle-track through unfrequented wilder- nesses ; he must sometimes plant his lighthouse in the very camp of wreckers ; and he was continually exposed to the vicissitudes of out-door life. The joy of my grandfather in this career [continues R. L. S. with an evident access of sympathy] was strong as the love of woman. It lasted him through youth and man- hood, it burned strong in age, and at the approach of death his last yearning was to renew these loved experiences. What he felt himself he continued to attribute to all around him. And to this supposed sentiment in others I find him continually, almost pathetically, appealing : often in vain. In 1807, upon the retirement of his stepfather, Thomas Smith, Robert Stevenson became sole engineer to the Board of Northern Lights ; and in the same year he began the building of the HIS ANCESTRY. 1 7 Bell Rock Lighthouse. Himself has written the history of that notable achieven ent ; and his grandson has appended an abric ^ment to his Family of Engineers. It is enough ^r my purpose to remark, in this narration, the c Id man's con- stant delight in the picturesque side of his work, a delight which was only subordinate to the inde- fatigable industry and unsleeping vigilance of a master-craftsman ; an industry and a vigilance which carried to accomplishment an extremely hazardous task, extending over four years, with- out a single mishap which might have been foreseen or prevented. Here, for instance, is an extract from Robert Stevenson's journal, in which he preserved a very full and minute record of these laborious years : — The incident just noticed [says the engineer — that of the waves pouring suddenly upon his head, over the new walls, then fifty-eight feet high, of the rising lighthouse] — the incident just noticed did not create more surprise in the mind of the writer than the sublime appearance of the waves as they rolled majestically over the rock. This scene he greatly enjoyed while sitting at his cabin-window; each wave approached the beacon like a vast scroll un- folding ; and in passing discharged a quantity of air, which he not only distinctly felt, but was even sufficient to lift the leaves of a book which lay before him.^ ^ R. L. S., A Family of Engineers, 1 8 R. L. STEVENSON. With this same vision would his grandson have looked forth of the cabin-window ; in the same spirit — though not precisely in the same terms — would he have chronicled his observation. And again : — To windward, the sprays fell from the height above noticed [sixty-four feet above the rock] in the most wonderful cascades, and streamed down the walls of the building in froth as white as snow. To leeward of the lighthouse the colUsion or meeting of the waves produced a pure white kind of drift ; it rose about thirty feet in height, like a fine downy mist, which in its fall felt upon the face and hands more like a dry powder than a liquid substance.^ Compare his grandson's description of the breakers — " the Merry Men " — in the Roost of Aros : — On such a night, ... he peers upon a world of blackness, where the waters wheel and boil, where" the waves joust together with the noise of an explosion, and the foam towers and vanishes in the twinkling of an eye . . . The fury, height, and transiency of their spoutings was a thing to be seen and not recounted. High over our heads on the cliif rose their white columns in the darkness; and at the same instant, like phantoms, they were gone. Sometimes three at a time would thus aspire and vanish ; sometimes a 1 R. L. S., A Family of Engineers. HIS ANCESTRY. I9 gust took them, and the spray would fall about us, heavy as a wave.^ Every stone of that tall building on the Bell Rock, which with the leaping waves makes so fine a picture to the architect, as he sits observ- ant at his cabin-window, was cut out with his own hands " in the model; and the manner in which the courses were fitted, joggled, trenailed, wedged, and the bond broken, is intricate as a puzzle and beautiful by ingenuity." And the same artist " grew to be the familiar of members of Parlia- ment, judges of the Court of Session, and ' landed gentlemen ' ; learned a ready address, had a flow of interesting conversation, and when he was re- ferred to as ' a highly respectable bourgeois' re- sented the description." 2 With all that, "no servant of the Northern Lights came to Edin- burgh but he was entertained at Baxter's Place to breakfast. There, at his own table, my grandfather sat down delightedly with his broad- spoken homespun officers."^ Moreover, as In- spector of Lighthouses, Robert Stevenson shows himself, in his reports and letters, as an unflinch- ing martinet; he was "king in the service to his finger-tips. All should go in his way, from 1 R. L. S., The Merry Men. ■^ R. L. S., ^ Family of Engineers. " Ibid. 20 R. L. STEVENSON. the principal lightkeeper's coat to the assist- ants' fender, from the gravel in the garden- walks to the bad smell in the kitchen, or the oil-spots on the store-room floor. . . . His whole relation to the service was, in fact, patriarchal." ^ Here, then, we have the picture of a man who is, before all things, a maker and a contriver; who is also of a strongly adventurous turn, a shrewd judge of character — as any man must be whose relations with any given body of men are "patriarchal" — a man of humour, of natural piety, of great kindness of heart, of an unbending sense of duty, and a man, withal, owning some- thing of a bias towards the romantic and pictur- esque, which he loved to express, not without some obscure sense of pleasure in the pomp and sound of language. This man, then, marries Jean Smith, daughter of his stepfather, the first lighthouse engineer ; and of this union comes a family, of whom three sons, Alan, David, and Thomas, were all, successively or conjointly, engineers to the Board of Northern Lights. " Thomas Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in the year i8r8. . . . The Bell Rock, his father's great triumph, was finished before he was born ; but he served under his brother Alan in 1 R. L. S., A Fa7nily of Enghteers. HIS ANCESTRY. 21 the building of Skerryvore, the noblest of all extant deep-sea lights." ^ The tradition, so nobly begun, was nobly carried forward; the firm of Stevenson " were consulting engineers to the Indian, the New Zealand, and the Jap- anese Lighthouse Boards, so that Edinburgh was a world-centre for that branch of applied science." ^ Upon the character of Thomas Stevenson I cannot do better than quote the words of his son, Robert Louis. It is curious to note, in that portrait, the mingled features of his father who was before him, and those of his son, Robert Louis, who came after him, and whose works we know- He was a man [says Stevenson] of a somewhat antique strain : with a blended sternness and soft- ness that was wholly Scottish, and at first somewhat bewildering ; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company ; shrewd and childish ; passionately attached, passionately prejudiced ; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life's troubles. Yet he was a wise adviser ; many men, and these not in- considerable, took counsel with him habitually . . . He had excellent taste, though whimsical and partial ^ R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. ^ Ibid. 22 R. L. STEVENSON. . . . and though he read Httle, was constant to his favourite books . . . Lactantius, Vossius, and Car- dinal Bona were his chief authors . . . When he was indisposed, he had two books, Guy Mannering and The Parent's Assistant, of which he never wearied . . . The Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines (though in a sense of his own [mark the saving clause]) and to which he bore a clansman's loyalty, profited often by his time and money . . . His sense of his own un- worthiness I have called morbid ; morbid, too, were his sense of the fleetingness of life and his concern for death. He had never accepted the conditions of man's life or his own character; and his inmost thoughts were ever tinged with the Celtic melan- choly . . . His talk, compounded of so much sterling sense and so much freakish humour, and clothed in language so apt, droll, and emphatic, was a perpetual delight to all who knew him before the clouds began to settle on his mind. His use of language was both just and picturesque ; and when at the beginning of his illness he began to feel the ebbing of this power, it was strange and painful to hear him reject one word after another as inadequate, and at length desist from the search and leave his phrase unfinished rather than finish it without propriety. It was perhaps another Celtic trait that his affections and emotions, passionate as these were, and liable to passionate ups and downs, found the most eloquent expression both in words HIS ANCESTRY. 23 and gestures. Love, anger, and indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery, like what we read of in Southern races. And when Stevenson is writing Treasure Island, he tells us that his " father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness of his original nature. His own stories, that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and commercial travellers before the era of steam. "^ And this, be it noted, was the man who " wrote also in defence of Christianity, and his work was highly praised by many learned authorities. His Layman s Sermoji is to be found in a volume of his Life and Work." ' Altogether a striking figure; one to command respect, to call forth affection and admiration. And when Thomas Stevenson married the daughter of Dr Balfour the divine, an ingre- dient of theology again tinctures the family strain, and again from the female side. * ^ R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. 2 R. L. S., Essays and Fragme7tts. 8 E. Blantyre Simpson, Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh Days. * And there came more than that. At past sixty, after a life- time of conventional Edinburgh, this lady broke up the house in Heriot Row, removed herself and her belongings to Apia, learned 24 R- L. STEVENSON. " Now I often wonder," says Stevenson, dis- coursing in his pleasantly egoistic vein, " what I have inherited from this old minister. I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them." Well, it may seem to us now, looking back upon the history of the country of his birth, and the mingled charactery of his ancestors, that a scion of the nature of Robert Louis Stevenson might have been predicted with some assurance. We have the old Scottish tradition of letters, free-living, and theology; the first and last elements, the love of learning and of theology, are marked in the Stevensonian line ; the second element, of (what I have called) free-living, seems counteracted by a strong and religious char- acter; we have, in addition, in the Stevensons and the Smiths, the inherited faculty of inven- tion, the romantic bias, the insight into char- acter, the delight in words for their own sake, and, above all, the austere devotion, as a point of honour, to perfect craftsmanship. Assume, for the nonce, that the Stevenson to ride bare-backed and to go bare-footed, and took on the life at Vailima and the life of Tusitala's native friends with equal gusto and intelligence. Stevenson was fond of calling himself a tramp and a gipsy; and that he could do so with justice was owing to the fact that his mother was Margaret Balfour. HIS ANCESTRY 2$ whom we know through his work is strangely- compounded of these elements ; a thesis which it is my business to exemplify in the pages that follow : assume, I say, that he had a certain scholarship, and loved preaching, and romance, and the infinite diversity of the creature ; that with a keen vision and a faculty of ingenious invention he joined incomparable workmanship : assume all this, and I must still remark two main distinctions betwixt Stevenson and his immediate forebears. And first, in the records of the engineers his forefathers, we find no trace of, what are called, irregular courses of life, which are among the commonest influences of the time in which they lived and worked. But, how should Stevenson, such as he was, born into the last decaying period of the old order of things, escape its influence? I cannot but think that the old Scottish grossness, how transfigured and de- corated soever, reappears in the gruesome and ugly elements of which he makes such striking use in his work. And for my second distinction : these engi- neers were men of strong body, who, in health and vigour, accomplished an amazing amount of work. " He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight," says Robert Louis Stevenson, 26 R. L. STEVENSON. gossiping of his mother's father, " and I have sought it in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept it, I am still on the quest." He was still, courageous seeker, upon the quest when death took him ; and in considering his work, with all its brilliancy and variety and charm, we must still bear in mind that it is the work of a man of frail constitution, often beset by sickness, often indomitably toiling — indeed, so intense was his need of self-expression, that I had almost written "amusing himself" — in the very clutch of the enemy. III. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. Say not of me that weakly I declined The labours of my sires, and fled the sea, The towers we founded and the lamps we lit, To play at home with paper like a child. But rather say : In the afternoon of tit/ie A streniiojis family dusted from its hands The sand of granite, and beholding far Along the sounding coast its pyramids And tall memorials catch the dying stin. Smiled well content, and to this childish task Around the fire addressed its evening hours. R. L. S., Underwoods. There never came a Fool out of Scotland. Old Saiu. Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, the only child of Thomas Stevenson, civil engineer, and Margaret Isabella his wife, youngest daughter of James Balfour, minister of the parish of Colinton in Mid-Lothian, was born on the 13th of November 1S50, at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh. From about his eighteenth year he chose to sign himself Robert Louis Steven- 28 R. L. STEVENSON. son.^ Robert Louis seems to have been a child of a vain, delicate, and excitable temperament, suffering frequently from illness ; and, not less frequently, from the penalties of a romantic im- agination. As his works, both by accident and design, reflect and chronicle the history of him- self from stage to stage of his career in a manner peculiarly his own among writers, so we may learn all we need to know of his childhood — the childhood of a born romantic — as of his later life, from his own verses and essays. Hence, in A Child's Garden of Verses, Child's Play, Random Memories, The Manse, id. Plain, 2d. Coloured, and A Chapter on Dreams, we seem to disengage the picture of an eager, frail little boy, with remarkable eyes, lustrous and brown, dwelling largely in a world of his own invention ; loving to read, or to hear read, books of the romantic order; and even desirous, with infantine zeal, to write them. Mr Sidney Colvin tells us that " A ' History of Moses,' dictated in his sixth year, and an account of 'Travels in Perth' in his ninth, are still extant;"^ 1 Louis, because there was a certain Bailie extant whose poli- tical opinions revolted young Stevenson's soul, and whose sur-' name was (insolently) Lewis. But Stevenson's friends continued to pronounce his name Lewis to the end. 2 Dictionary of National Biography: art., " Stevenson, Robert Louis." OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 29 and in Miss E. Blantyre Simpson's account of Stevenson's childish days^ we find him engaged one winter, together with his cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson, witli a series of adventures which happened upon a fabulous island. Robert Louis's island was called Noseingdale, the island of R. A. M. Stevenson, Encyclopaedia, and each chieftain illustrated his island's history. Many children begin so, it is true, and afterwards they change. The point is, that as it was in the beginning with Stevenson, so it was with him to the end. In May, 1857, Mr and Mrs Stevenson, after an intermediate sojourn of four years at No. i Inverleith Terrace, took up their abode at 17 Heriot Row, which remained the family head- quarters until the death of Thomas Stevenson in 1887. When he was eight years old, the boy Robert Louis was put to a preparatory school kept by a Mr Henderson, in India Street, where he remained for two or three years; in his eleventh year he began an attendance at the Edinburgh Academy (" a junior rival to the High School where Scott was educated""), which lasted, at intervals, for some time. Here ^ E. Blantyre Simpson, Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh Days. 2 Ibid. 30 R. L. STEVENSON. ^ he started a school magazine in manuscript, TJie Swibeani, which seems to have been almost en- tirely written, edited, and illustrated by himself.^ When he was thirteen he went for a few months to a boarding-school kept by a Mr Wyatt at Spring Grove, near London. Coming home again to Edinburgh, he was sent next year to Mr Thompson's private school in Frederick Street, where he remained until his seventeenth year. And here, in his fifteenth year, he showed to his schoolmate Baildon a drama based upon the history of Deacon Brodie, the genesis of the play written, fourteen years later, in collabora- tion with Mr Henley.^ Would we learn what manner of schoolboy was little Robert Louis, we may turn to his own description: — Many writers [he says] have vigorously described the pains of the first day or the first night at school ; to a boy of any enterprise I believe they are more often agreeably exciting. Misery — or at least misery unrelieved — is confined to another period, to the days of suspense and the "dreadful looking-for" of de- parture ; when the old life is running to an end, and the new life, with its new interests, not yet begun ; and to the pain of an imminent parting, there is added the unrest of a state of conscious pre-existence. The 1 E. Blantyre Simpson, Robert Louis Sievettson^s Edinburgh Days. 2 Ibid. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 31 area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of semi-suburban tan-pits, the song of the church-bells upon a Sunday, the thin high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field — what a sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each familiar circumstance ! The assaults of sorrow come not from within, as it seems to him, but from without. I was proud and glad to go to school ; had I been let alone I could have borne up like any hero ; but there was around me, in all my native town, a conspiracy of lamentation: "Poor little boy, he is going away — unkind little boy, he is going to leave us " ; so the unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with yearn- ing and reproach. And at length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a place where it seems to me, looking back, it must be always autumn and generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all 1 saw — the long empty road, the lines of the tali houses, the church upon the hill, the woody hillside garden — a look of such a piercing sadness that my heart died ; and seating myself on a door-step, I shed tears of miserable sympathy. A benevolent cat cumbered me the while with consolations — we two were alone in all that was visible of the London Road : two poor waifs who had each tasted sorrow — and she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled for his entertainment, watching the efifect, it seemed, with motherly eyes. For the sake of the cat, God bless her ! I confessed at home the story of my weakness ... It was judged, 32 R. L. STEVENSON. if I had thus brimmed over on the pubUc highway, some change of scene was (in the medical sense) indicated; my father at the time was visiting the harbour lights of Scotland ; and it was decided that he should take me along with him around a portion of the shores of Fife ; my first professional tour, my first journey in the complete character of man, without the help of petticoats.^ Doubtless some change of scene — in the medi- cal sense — was indicated; but no migration might change the acutely sensitive, romantic- ally sentimental, egoistic temperament, which was able, not only to receive so vivid and picturesque an impression in early boyhood — a faculty which is, after all, no uncommon char- acteristic of that golden age — but, to retain it for some years in all its pristine freshness, and then gracefully to set the memory in words. And with that excursion to Fife, Robert Louis Steven- son's education may be said to have begun ; from that time forth, from choice or necessity, he became a traveller and a wanderer. And so, while he was yet at Mr Thompson's school, he made " frequent visits to health-resorts in Scotland ; occasional excursions with his father on his nearer professional rounds — d?. ^., to the coasts and lighthouses of Fife in 1864; and also 1 R. L. S., Random Memories. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 33 longer journeys — to Germany and Holland in 1862, to Italy in 1863, to the Riviera in the spring of 1864, and to Torquay in 1865 ^^^ 1866;"^ and although we learn, also, that he enjoyed the privilege of instruction from private tutors upon most of these occasions, it was then, as always, the things which lay aside from the common road of knowledge which counted in his education. We have his own (oft-quoted) statement of the matter: "All through my boy- hood and youth I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet." he adds, " I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write." ^ At the age of seventeen Robert Louis Stevenson was entered as a student at Edinburgh University; and during the time of his attendance at the classes there, we have the same story: "Indeed, I denied myself many opportunities ; acting upon an ex- tensive and highly rational system of truantry, which cost me a great deal of trouble to put in exercise — perhaps as much as would have taught me Greek — and sent me forth into the world and the profession of letters with the merest shadow of an education." ^ ^ Dictionary of National Bio,::;rapJ7y •■ art., " Steveuson, Robert Louis." - R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. ^ Ibid. 3 34 R- L. STEVENSON. " At the same time," says Mr Colvin, " 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." ^ Later in life, he devoted much time to the study of the history of the Highlands, French history of the fifteenth cen- tury, and to the records of the First Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington. At the time when Robert Louis left school, his father bought Swanston Cottage, which, lying in the Pentland Hills, three miles from Edinburgh, became the country residence of the family. Here Steven- son made acquaintance with John Todd, the shepherd, as related in the Pastoral ;^ and it was from John Todd, I am told, that he ac- quired at first-hand much of his knowledge of the classic vernacular. Originally intended for the family profession, Stevenson, while at the University, was at first a pupil of Fleeming Jenkin, Professor of Engineering, whose bio- graphy, in course of time, he came to write. Here is an extract from the Memoir of that singular, admirable being, Fleeming Jenkin, which discovers to us (as biographies are apt 1 Dictionary of National Biography : art., " Stevenson, Robert Louis." 2 R. L. S., Memories and Portraits, OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 35 to do) at least as much of the author as of his hero. I was incUned [says Stevenson] to regard any pro- fessor as a joke, and Fleeming as a particularly good joke, perhaps the broadest in the vast pleasantry of my curriculum. I was not able to follow his lectures ; I somehow dared not misconduct myself, as was my customary solace ; and I refrained from attending. This brought me at the end of the session into a relation with my contemned professor that completely opened my eyes. During the year, bad student as I was, he had shown a certain leaning to my society ; I had been to his house ; he had asked me to take a humble part in his theatricals ; I was a master in the art of extracting a certificate even at the cannon's mouth ; and I was under no apprehension. But when I approached Fleeming I found myself in another world ; he would have naught of me. " It is quite useless {or you to come to me, Mr Stevenson. There may be doubtful cases, there is no doubt about yours. You have simply no^ attended my class." The docu- ment was necessary to me for family considerations ; and presently I stooped to such pleadings and rose to such adjurations as make my ears burn to remember. He was quite unmoved ; he had no pity for me. " You are no fool," said he, " and you chose your course." I showed him that he had misconceived his duty, that certificates were things of form, attend- ance a matter of taste. Two things, he replied, had been required for graduation : a certain competency 36 R. L. STEVENSON. proved in the final trials, and a certain period of genuine training proved by certificate ; if he did as I desired, not less than if he gave me hints for an examination, he was aiding me to steal a degree. " You see, Mr Stevenson, these are the laws and I am here to apply tliem," said he. I could not say but that this view was tenable, though it was new to me ; I changed my attack : it was only for my father's eye that I required his signature, it need never go to the Senatus, I had already certificates enough to justify my year's attendance. " Bring them to me ; I cannot take your word for that," said he. "Then I will consider." The next day I came charged with my certificates, a humble assortment. And when he had satisfied himself, " Remember," said he, " that I can promise nothing, but I will try to find a form of words." He did find one, and I am still ashamed when I think of his shame in giving me that paper. He made no reproach in speech, but his manner was the more eloquent ; it told me plainly what a dirty business we were on ; and I went from his presence, with my certificate indeed in my possession, but with no answerable sense of triumph. That was the bitter beginning of my love for Fleeming ; I never thought lightly of him afterwards.'^ This little story strikes the English reader, unused to the traditions of a Scottish university, with a mild amaze. A student, bone-idle and quite irresponsible, comes, first to demand, and 1 R. L. S., Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 37 then to beg, from his professor a certificate of at- tendance at classes which he did not attend. It is necessary to him, he says, for family consider- ations — not a new proposition, but sufficiently intelligible. The student is astonished to find that his professor considers himself in justice bound to refuse that prayer. Thereupon he pleads with the professor as with one labouring under singular misconceptions ; and he actually prevails ; and, finally, when he writes that professor's memoir many years afterwards, he cites the whole incident (careless of his own character) as an example of the extraordinary probity (or what?) of the said professor. The summer vacations of Stevenson's eigh- teenth and two following years were devoted to visiting the works of his father's firm, which were in progress at various points on the Scottish coast. And all the while [he says, when upon one of these expeditions] I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and sun-burning was for me but a holiday. In that year cannon were roaring for days together on French battlefields ; and I would sit in my isle (I call it mine, after the use of lovers) and think upon the war, and the loudness of these far-away battles, and the pain of the men's wounds, and the weariness of their marching. And I would think too of that other war which is as 38 R. L. STEVENSON. old as mankind, and is indeed the life of man : the unsparing war, the grinding slavery of competition; the toil of seventy years, dear-bought bread, precarious honour, the perils and pitfalls, and the poor rewards. It was a long look forward ; the future summoned me as with trumpet-calls, it warned me back as with a voice of weeping and beseeching ; and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a childish bather on the beach, -^ Whatever these sentiments denote, they hardly denote the point of view of the heaven-born engineer, such as the essayist's father and grandfather were before him. This was [he says in another place] when I came as a young man to glean engineering experience from the building of the breakwater. What I gleaned, I am sure I do not know ; but indeed I had already my own private determination to be an author; I loved the art of words and the appearances of life ; and travellers, and headers, and rubble, and polished ashlar, and pierres perdues, and even the thrilling question of the string-course, interested me only (if they interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as words to add to my vocabulary . . . My only industry was in the hours when I was not on duty . . . Then it was that I wrote Voces Fidelium, a series of dramatic monologues in verse ; then that I indited 1 R. L. S., Memories and Portraits. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 39 the bulk of a Covenanting novel — like so many others, never finished.^ Plainly, this dilettante young man was not made of the fibre which the generations of Stevensons had been accustomed to look for in the making of a civil engineer. I was educated [he says, in a letter to a friend] for a civil engineer on my father's design, and was at the building of harbours and lighthouses, and worked in a carpenter's shop and a brass foundry, and hung about wood-yards and the like. Then it came out I was learning nothing, and, on being tightly cross- questioned during a dreadful evening walk, I owned I cared for nothing but literature. My father said that was no profession, but I might be called to the Bar if I chose. At the age of twenty-one I began to study law.** From childhood, Stevenson had been con- stantly writing: writing verse, and essays, and romances and plays, and imitations — everything — for the sake of practice in literary gymnastic. Of these studies. The Peiitland Rising, written in the author's sixteenth year, was first published as a pamphlet (which, as he increased in re- nown, became a treasure desired of collectors), and again, among the collected works in the ^ R. L. S., Afefnories and Portraits. 2 E. Blantyre Simpson, Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh Days. 40 R. L. STEVENSON. Edinburgh Edition, together with two or three other juvenile pieces. It is curious, and encour- aging to the aspirant, to note how little natural facility of expression is manifested in it. There is nothing in the essay to distinguish it from the performance of any other bookish youth of six- teen ; and that one born so " weak-fingered " should eventually attain to the mastery of a singular opulence of diction, argues fine qualities of perseverance and tenacity of mind — " broken tenacity of mind " is his own expression.^ Among all the perplexities and changing aims and fancies of youth, he seems to have held an unswerving course to this one clear bourne — he would learn to write. He read for the Bar, and in due time, at the age of five-and-twenty, " on 14th July 1875, he passed his final examination with credit, and was called to the Bar on the i6th"; ^ but all the legal erudition was by the way. During the four or five years from the time he abandoned the engineering profession to his call to the Bar, Stevenson was really graduating, in many ways, for the profession of letters. To begin with, he was still writing, and again writ- ing, and always writing. 1 R. L. S., Vailima Letters. 2 Dictionary oj National Biography : art, " Stevenson, Robert Louis." OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 4I I must have had some disposition to learn [he says of himself — confidential as usual — at this period of his life], for I clear-sightedly condemned my own per- formances. I liked doing them indeed ; but when they were done, I could see they were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them even to my friends ; and such friends as I chose to be my con- fidants. I must have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain with me. " Padding," said one. Another wrote : " I cannot understand why you do lyrics so badly." No more could I ! Thrice I put myself in the way of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine. These were re- turned ; and I was not surprised, or even pained. If they had not been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case, there was no good in repeating the experiment ; if they had been looked at — well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on learning and living.^ One remarks, first of all, the admirable seri- ousness with which the apprentice takes his chosen trade. Names are familiar to us whose owners were authors of repute, and glibly earn- ing quite comfortable little incomes at an age when Stevenson is still "clear-sightedly" (and probably with perfect justice) condemning his own performances ; and yet, in the end, he has outstripped the most of his contemporaries 1 R. L. S ., Ilfetnories and Poj-traits. 42 R. L. STEVENSON. But, one remarks in addition, that the aspirant has begun at last to suspect that the manner of literature is not entirely and absolutely every- thing necessary to the perfect author, but that the matter, also, counts for a little : " I must keep on learning and living^' he says. And it was during those four or five years of his life, from his twentieth year to his twenty- fifth, that the Stevenson whom we know upon the narrow stage of literary history was making himself. In the beginning of these years, to the vain, introspective, hyper-sensitive youth of The Pent land Rising, The Wreath of Immor- telles, and the rest — the valetudinarian boy who spent much of his time in the seclusion of his bed-chamber, heaped about with manu- scripts — there came his cousin, the same with whom he had once played at the game of magic islands in the nursery, Mr R. A. M. Stevenson, recently emancipated from the Uni- versity of Cambridge. Mr R. A. M. Stevenson was the elder of the two, and he forthwith under- took (it seems) the education of his cousin Louis, in the modern city where the dying light of the old order still smouldered among discredited ashes. To know what you like [says Stevenson, writing in middle life,] is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 43 Youth is vvholl}^ experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and dehghtful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life. These two unknowns the young man brings together again and again, now in the airiest touch, now with a bitter hug ; now with exquisite pleasure, now with cutting pain ; but never with in- difference, to which he is a total stranger, and never with that near kinsman of indifference, contentment. ... It is not beauty that he loves, nor pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so ; his design and his sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste the variety of human fate.^ And in verifying his own existence and tasting the variety of human fate — whatever these ex- pressions may connote — did Stevenson, together with his senior, spend the next two or three years : a period whose inner records were written in the sand, and survive not the waves of time.^ ^ R. L. S., Later Essays. 2 Mr Colvin's reference to these years {Dictionary of National Biography, art, " Stevenson, Robert Louis ") is, perhaps, a little misleading. No doubt the differences of which they were com- pounded were not all reputable. But it was a time of walking and canoeing as well as of drink and "jink" and the " L. J. R." (that mysterious and strange society ! ) ; and it took our author out of himself, it brought him face to face with life and character, it taught him to be something other than the " sedulous ape " of some one else, and (for his intimates were all talkers and moral- ists) it initiated and developed a practice of discussion and debate which left no theme of speculation unattempted nor many unex- hausted.— W. E. H. 44 R- L- STEVENSON. Among his friends at this period were Mr Charles Baxter, the late Sir Walter Grindlay Simpson, Fleeming Jenkin, and James Walter Ferrier. Later, he came to know Mr Sidney Colvin ; and, a year or two afterwards, in the early days of 1875, he first met Mr W. E. Henley, who was then a patient in the Edin- burgh Old Infirmary. In the lines which I am so fortunate as to be allowed to print at the beginning of this volume, Mr Henley has deline- ated Robert Louis Stevenson as he knew him, in the beginning of a friendship which lasted long. And in his essay on Talk and Talkers (the first series) Stevenson has left a picture of the society of his friends. Their identity is masked under pseudonyms in the text ; but the matter is an open secret; and there is now no breach of confidence in discovering Burly as Mr W. E. Henley, Spring;- Hee I'd Jack as Mr R. A. M. Stevenson, Athelred and Cockshot as the late Sir W. G. Simpson and Fleeming Jenkin. In this society Stevenson learned to talk ; and it is upon record that he became a proficient in the art. At this time, too, he was a member of the Edinburgh Speculative Society. The Speculative Society [he says] is a body of some antiquity, and has counted among' its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant, OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE 45 Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings of the University of Edinburgh : a hall, Turkey-carpeted, hung with pic- tures, looking, when lighted up at night with fire and candle, like some goodly dining-room ; a passage-like library, walled with books in their wire cages ; and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former secretary. Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read ; here, in defiance of the Senatus-consults, he can smoke. ^ And here it was that the Edinburgh University Magazine was founded by James Walter Ferrier, Robert Glasgow Brown, Stevenson himself, and another. Stevenson contributed six papers to the magazine, which are included in the Edin- burgh edition. The sixth, and last, An Old Scots Gardener, is included in his Memories and Portraits. The piece is highly tentative ; but to us (who know, 'tis true, the sequel) it seems to carry a promise of much greater things. It is, ^ R. L. S., Mevtories and Portraits. And, " In the early seventies," says Miss Simpson, " Louis was twice president of the 'Speculative.' He wrote several papers for this society: The Influence of the Cmenanting Perseaition on the Scottish Mind (1S71) ; lYotes on ^Paradise Lost'' (1872); A'otes on the Nirteteenth Century, Two Questions in the Relations between Christ's Teaching and Modern Christianity (1873) ; Law and Free Will — Notes on the Duke of Argyll ^^ 46 R. L. STEVENSON. at least, a considerable advance on the earlier attempts included in \htjiruenilia. Stevenson first appeared before the greater world in a little essay on Roads, which, after being refused by the Saturday Review, was pub- lished in the Portfolio for December 1893, and which was signed L. S. Stoneveit} By this time he had visited London, and had there become acquainted with writers whose names are familiar to us. And, by this time, in the intervals of his legal studies, he was already at work upon the first of those essays which were after- wards collected under the title of Familiar Studies of Men and Books. In 1875, in his twenty-fifth year, he went to France for a time, to the forest of Fontainebleau, where Mr R. A. M. Stevenson was then living in the painter-settlements. The visit was the first of several, and in his Fontainebleau'^ (and, inci- dentally, in The Wrecker) he has made a picture of these "village communities of painters"; and there is in Paris a. certain cafe, which owns a little room lined with paintings and opening upon the river, where M. Stevenson is still remembered. 1 E. Blantyre Simpson, Robert' Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh Days. 2 R. L. S., Later Essays. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 47 The charm of Fontainebleau [he says] is a thing apart. It is a place that people love even more than they admire. The vigorous forest air, the silence, the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of tumbled boulders, the great age and dignity of certain groves — these are but ingredients, they are not the secret of the philtre. The place is sanative ; the air, the light, the perfumes, and the shapes of things con- cord in happy harmony. The artist may be idle and not fear the " blues." He may dally with his life . . . I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian ; ei ego in Arcadia vixi ; it was a pleasant season ; and that noiseless hamlet lying close among the borders of the wood is for me, as for so many others, a green spot in memory. The great Millet was just dead ; the green shutters of his modest house were closed ; his daughters were in mourning. The date of my first visit was thus an epoch in the history of art : in a lesser way it was an epoch in the history of the Latin Quarter. The Petit C/nacle was dead and buried ; Murger and his crew of sponging vagabonds were all at rest from their expedients ; the tradition of their real life was nearly lost ; and the petrified legend of the Vie de Bohcme had become a sort of gospel, and still gave the clue to zealous imitators.^ In the summer of the same year, 1875, Steven- son was called to the Bar, had a brass door-plate (at 17 Heriot Row) engraved with the legend " Robert Louis Stevenson, Advocate," and began ^ R. L. S., Later Essays. 48 R. L. STEVENSON. to pace the Parliament House in the mornings, according to the Scots custom in use among briefless advocates. Among the legal fry of Scotland, to whom he was known as " The Gifted Boy," Stevenson seems to have walked apart and solitary, nursing his soul. At this point, one , may observe that he was never popular in his native city. The society of Edinburgh courted him not, neither in his inglorious youth, nor his middle age of renown. "Edinburgh" . . . he says, " is a metropolitan small town ; where college professors and the lawyers of the Parliament House give the tone, and persons of leisure, attracted by educational advantages, make up much of the bulk of society." ^ He was not of that society, and that society knew it, as he knew it. Indeed, it is probable that the little fellowship I have enumerated made the whole of his visiting acquaintance in Edinburgh. Since the facts are common property, I need have no scruple in re- ferring to them. The coteries which had been accustomed to regard the Stevenson family with respect and esteem, declined to recognise the wil- ful eccentric who elected to drive down Princes Street (that classic thoroughfare) clothed in boat- ing flannels and a straw hat, upon a summer's ^ R. L. S., Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 49 afternoon ; ^ whose chosen attire in mid-winter was a pork-pie hat embroidered with silver, a velvet jacket, and a Spanish cloak ; ^ who wore his hair curling below the bottom of his advo- cate's wig ; who attended evening parties in a blue-black flannel shirt; and who (it is upon record) delighted to outrage the decorous con- ventions which govern " Anglified " Edinburgh. Stevenson did not waste overmuch time in the Parliament House. If he ever held a brief, which seems doubtful, he held but one ; for by this time he was fast wedded to literature. And, in 1876, we behold the Scot emancipated. In the publication of the Virginibus Ptierisque essays, Stevenson emerges at last from the difficult obscurity of his long probation, and unfurls his flag upon the capital city of his own peculiar country. The years have done their work ; by what way soever the young man travelled to his 1 Margaret Moyes Black, R. Louis Stevenson. 2 He came to an informal evening in these garments, and, in their lemoval, appeared in a dress-coat, a blue flannel shirt, a knitted tie, pepper-and-salt trousers, silk socks, and patent leather shoes (he was exceeding vain of his foot, which was neat and ele- gant). His hair fell to his collar; he waltzed, he talked, he ex- ploded, he was altogether wonderful. And the women (this would have touched him, had he known it) were in fits of laughter till — a whole Romantic Movement in his cloak and turban — he departed. To dream (it may be) over a sentence of Sir Thomas Browne's and a gin-and-ginger at Rutherford's. — W. E. H. 4 50 R. L. STEVENSON. own, he came to his own at last. As he was born a Stevenson and a Balfour, so he was born a theologian, a moralist, and a sectary — in a word, a " Shorter Catechist." And a Shorter Catechist he remains to the end, though he came to wear his rue with a difference. In the Vir- ginibus Puerisque essays, which might well be called, as the author thought at first of calling them, Zz/^ at Tzve7ity-Five,\h& sectary has broken his bonds and cast away his cords, has faced to the right-about, and is found laying down the law in gay contradiction. He is still, you ob- serve, promulgating morality — a morality with a difference — still a theologian and a moralist; and, to the last day of his life, the " Shorter Catechist" with inextinguishable zest, was em- ployed in finding and formulating a rule of con- duct — for himself and others, and for others still more than himself. And Virginihiis Puerisque, of which I shall have more to say, contains work of Stevenson's which remains unsurpassed by any- thing achieved by the artist in later life; and from that point he went straight forward. In the spring of this year (1876), he made the canoe trip through Belgium with Sir Walter Simpson, as related in An Inland Voyage ; and in the autumn he travelled in the Cevennes, as re- lated in the Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 5 1 Neither of these two excellent little books brought profit to their author, nor did they, at the first, extend his fame beyond the immediate circle of his friends. During this year, also, Stevenson contributed to the Academy, Vanity Fair, and London, a weekly review founded in Sir Walter Simpson's rooms by Robert Glasgow Brown, and invented largely, if not wholly, by Stevenson and W. E. Henley. Soon afterwards, upon Brown's untimely death at Mentone, Mr Henley suc- ceeded to the conduct of the journal ; and it was during his reign that Stevenson contributed to London the brilliant series of TJie New Arabian Nights : a series which was supposed, by more than one of the proprietors of London, sufficiently to account for the unpopularity of their paper. Meanwhile, the essays of Familiar Studies of Meii and Books, and Stevenson's first published stories, A Lodging for the NigJit {Temple Bar), The Sire de Maletroifs Door (Temple Bar), and Providence and the Guitar (London), had appeared. About this time, also, the play Deacon Brodie was written in col- laboration with Mr Henley; and when he was seven- or eight - and -twenty, Stevenson wrote Will d the Mill, which remains, to the mind of the present writer at least, his highest achievement in literature. And early in 1879 52 R. L. STEVENSON. (in his twenty-ninth year), while he was still in Edinburgh, he drafted (as Mr Colvin tells us), " but afterwards laid by, four chapters on ethics (a study to which he once referred as being al- ways his ' veiled mistress ') under the name of Lay Morals,'' which have been included in the Edinburgh Edition. In the summer of the same year, Stevenson found himself compelled to dififer from his father upon the crucial question of his mar- riage; and, in consequence of that unfortu- nate difference, he was left, for the first time, to gain his living by his own exertions. As yet, as I have said, outside the minority of persons interested in literature, the work of Stevenson, brilliant and personal as it was, went almost un- regarded ; and the prospects of the young author, who had by this time finally abandoned the law, were highly discouraging. The lady, an Ameri- can by birth, whom he desired to make his wife, Mrs Osbourne {n(fe Van de Grift), and whose ac- quaintance he had made in France, had returned to California. To the West, then, Stevenson resolved to go; and thither he went, travelling as an emigrant, by emigrant ship and emigrant train — a rude but satisfying experience for a romantic gentleman nurtured in comfort, and sufferinsf from uncertain health. Thus did OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 53 he begin those travels and voyages which landed him at last, a lifelong exile, upon that " ultimate island " where he died. In The Ama- teur Emigrant he has written of his experi- ences : — As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers, ... I began for the first time to understand the nature of emigration. Day by day throughout the passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to the shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy. Emi- gration, from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound most dismally in my ear. It came, indeed, to sound most dismally ere the author arrived at his journey's end, for the misery and discomfort set a heavy strain upon his frail constitution. But he spent his time in making acquaintance with his fellow-passengers, in studying them, and sitting down to moralise his observations on paper, and making pictur- esque notes of the voyage, until the deserts are crossed, and " few people have praised God more happily than I did," he says. And — The day was breaking as we crossed the ferry ; 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, 54 R- L. STEVENSON. ^ for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold lit first upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened downward on its shapely shoulder ; the air seemed to awaken, and began to sparkle ; and suddenly " 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. The Amateur Emigrant knows how to write a piece of description — a landscape in sunrise — ■ you perceive. Nevertheless, he had but scant suc- cess in obtaining work upon the American jour- nals. " On the whole, his work was not thought up to Californian standards,"^ says Mr Colvifi, with cutting irony. During the eight months v^hich Stevenson spent " partly at Monterey and partly at San Francisco," ^ he fell a victim to one of those severe attacks of illness to which he was thenceforward liable ; yet, with the strenuous courage which was a main virtue of Stevenson's character, he " managed, nevertheless, to write the story of The Pavilion on the Links, two or three essays for the Cornhill Magazine, ... a first draft of the romance of Prince Otto, and the two parts of The Amateur Emigrant!' ^ ^ Dictmiary of A^ational Biography: art., "Stevenson, Robert Louis." 2 Ibid. 8 iifid. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 55 In the meantime, Mrs Osbourne had obtained a divorce from her husband; and in the spring of 1880, when Stevenson was in his thirty-first year, Mrs Van de Grift was married to him. With the boy Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, Mrs Stevenson's son, the two went to live for a time at Juan Silverado, the site of an old mining- camp above Calistoga, in the Californian coast range. Here, from TJie Silverado Squatters^ is Stevenson's description of the place : — For about a furlong we followed a good road along the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that road widened out and came abruptly to an end. A canon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, v/as here walled across by a clump of rolling stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in height. A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet. It was down this that they poured the precious ore ; and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it mill-ward down the mountain. The whole cailon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude guerilla fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder, fixed in the hillside. These led us round the farther corner of the clump ; and when they were at an end we still persevered over loose rubble and wading deep in poison-oak, till we struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold projections 56 R. L. STEVENSON. of the mountain. Only in front the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon tree-tops and hill-tops, and far and near on wild and varied country. The place still stood as on the day it was deserted : a line of iron rails with a bifurcation ; a truck in working order ; a world of lumber, old wood, old iron ; a black- smith's forge on one side, half-buried in the leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown wooden house . . ? How Stevenson and his wife and stepson lived in that old brovi^n vi^ooden house for several sunny months, may be read at length in T/ie Silverado Squatters. Meanwhile, the family difference before referred to was brought to a happy conclu- sion, and in August of the same year, 1880, the Stevensons came home to Scotland. Six weeks later, for health's sake, they went to Davos. Here they made acquaintance with John Ad- din gton Symonds (the Opal stein of Talk and Talkers') and his family; and here it was that Stevenson and his stepson amused themselves by designing, and printing upon a little press of their own, such trifles as the Not /, and other Poems, the Black Canyon, the Moral Emblems, now included in the supplementary volume to the Edinburgh Edition. ^ R. L. S., The Silverado Squatters. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 57 In May of next year, 188 r, the Stevensons again returned to Scotland, living, for four months, at Pitlochry and Braemar. At this time Stevenson wrote TJira'W}i Janet, one of the grisliest of his short stories, and a first draft of The Merry Men. In August, acting in part upon the advice of the retiring Professor of History and Constitutional Law in Edinburgh, Sheriff ^neas Mackay, he became a candidate for the vacant chair; but his candidature was declined. And at this time also he began Treasure Island, which remains, in some ways, the best of his longer works, even as its writing marked a defi- nite stage in his career. It was far indeed from being my first book, for I am not a novelist alone [says he, writing in a popular magazine some twelve years later]. But I am well aware that my paymaster, the Great Public, regards what else I have written with indifference, if not aver- sion . . . Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a novel. It seems vain to ask why . . . although I had attempted the thing with vigour not less than ten or twelve times, I had not yet written a novel. All — all my pretty ones — had gone for a little, and then stopped inexorably like a schoolboy's watch. I might be compared to a cricketer of many years' standing who should never have made a run ... In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother at . . . Braemar. 58 R. L. STEVENSON. There it blew a good deal and rained in a proportion ; my native air was more unkind than man's ingratitude, and I must consent to pass a good deal of my time between four walls in a house lugubriously known as the Late Miss McGregor's Cottage. And now admire the finger of predestination. There was a schoolboy '■ in the Late Miss McGregor's Cottage, home from the holidays, and much in want of " something craggy to break his mind upon." He had no thought of litera- ture ; it was the art of Raphael that received his fleeting suffrages ; and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of water-colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture-gallery. My imme- diate duty towards the gallery was to be showman ; but I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in a generous emulation, making coloured draw- ings. On one of these occasions I made the map of an island ; it was elaborately and (I thought) beauti- fully coloured ; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression ; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets ; and, with the unconsciousness of the predes- tined, I ticketed my performance " Treasure Island " . . . No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of " Treasure Island," the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods ; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon 1 Samuel Lloyd Osbourne. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 59 me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters ... It seems as though a full-grown experienced man of letters might engage to turn out Treasure Island at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight. But, alas ! this was not my case. Fifteen days I stuck to it, and turned out fifteen chapters ; and then, in the early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. My mouth was empty ; there was not one word of Treasure Island in my bosom ; and here were the proofs of the beginning already waiting me at the " Hand and Spear." Then I corrected them, living for the most part alone, walk- ing on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn morn- ings, a good deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I can depict to you in words at what remained for me to do. I was thirty-one ; I was the head of a family ; I had lost my health ; I had never yet paid my way, never yet made ;^200 a- year ; my father had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book * that was judged a failure : was this to be another and last fiasco ? I was indeed very close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard, and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, had the resolution to think of other things and bury myself in the novels of M. du Boisgobey. Arrived at my destination, down I sat one morning to the un- finished tale ; and behold ! it flowed from me like ^ The Amateur Emigrant. 60 R. L. STEVENSON. small-talk ; and in a second tide of delighted industry, and again at the rate of a chapter a-day, I finished Treasure Jsla?id} Thus the author, writing, in the days of his success, of the days when he was yet unknown to fame. These confidential reminiscences seem better fitted for the pages of a private letter than for the columns of a popular magazine. But there these records are ; and, such as they are, we find them interesting, and significant of the writer's character. The singular lack of reti- cence which induced a man of letters of Steven- son's eminence thus to respond to the request of a popular magazine for a piece of private history, and the curious fitful working — the "broken tenacity" — of a mind whose talent lay always in dealing with episode, never with a lengthy and complicated narrative, which are here revealed, discover to us two essential char- acteristics of the man's temperament. Stevenson finished Treasnre Island at Davos during the winter of 1881-82; in the following summer he returned to Scotland, whence he journeyed south for the winter, taking up his quarters near Marseilles. In January 1883 he removed his household to a chdlet, " Chalet la Solitude," near Hyeres. Meanwhile Treasure ^ R. L. S., Juvenilia, &'c. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 6l Island had run its serial course in Voting Folks' Paper (at thirty shillings a chapter, I am told), and had appeared as a volume. The book made Stevenson's first popular success^ — one of those sudden, extraordinary popular successes which so often perplex and confound the critical ; but, in this case, every one bought the book for the adequate reason that it was good story, brilliantly told. While he lived in the south, Stevenson wrote the Treasiire of Franchard, a short story which seems, to me, to express one aspect of a many- sided temperament as completely as Will d the Mill gives expression to another ; and The Black Arrow, a story of adventure written to succeed Treasure Island in Yonng Folks' Paper. The readers of Yonng Folks' Paper, it is said, cared little for Treasure Island ; but they were thought to like The Black Arrow. In the eyes of readers who thought less than nothing of Treasure Island [says the author, in one of those dedications which afford a perennial pleasure to read]. The Black Arroiv was supposed to mark a clear advance. Those who read volumes and those who read story papers belong to different worlds. The verdict on Treasure Island was reversed in the other court : I wonder, will it be the same with its successor? 1 It enchanted the proprietor of The Times, and drew a post- card from Mr Gladstone. 62 R. L. STEVENSON. The verdict was reversed — so variable a thing is the thermometer of popular taste. At this time, also, Stevenson was writing essays for The Corn- hill (in which periodical the Virginibiis Puerisque series had first appeared), and for The Magazine of Art, which was then edited by Mr Hen- ley. He was, also, preparing for serial publi- cation Pri^tce Otto, which had been drafted two or three years before. His work suffered an interruption during almost the whole of the ensuing year, 1884, for, while still in the south, Stevenson was again attacked by serious illness ; and returning to England, he settled in the autumn at Bournemouth. There, in divers lodg- ings, he wrote the first and best of his Child's Garden, together with his share of Beau Austin and Admiral Guinea. And then, early in 1885, his father presented him with the house in which he lived until 1887, and which he called Skerry- vore, after the noble and beautiful lighthouse designed and built by his uncle, Alan Stevenson. For love of lovely words, and for the sake Of those, my kinsmen and my countrymen. Who early and late in the windy ocean toiled To plant a star for seamen, where was then The surfy haunt of seals and cormorants : I, on the lintel of this cot, inscribe The name of a strong tovver.i 1 R. L. S., Utiderivoods. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 63 The while he dwelt in Skerryvore, " he was never," says Mr Colvin, " free for many weeks together from fits of haemorrhage and prostra- tion." At this time, again, it seems that he must work under the disabilities of the invalid. Nevertheless, he continued to pursue his vocation with " unfaltering and delighted industry." In this year (the thirty-fifth of his age) he completed The Child's Garden of Verses, and stringently revised Prince Otto (it had been written six or seven times ere it got into Longman' s Magazine^) before the final appearance of the story as a volume. He began The Great North Road, a promising fragment which is in- cluded in the Edinburgh Edition ; he wrote, with Mrs Stevenson, the second series of The New Arabiafi Nights ; he wrote sundry essays ; several Christmas stories — stories, that is to say, which appeared in Christmas numbers of various peri- odicals — The Body Snatcher (not republished), Olalla, The Misadvetitures of John Nicholson, and Markheim ; and about this period he and Mr Henley remodelled Deacon Brodie and wrote 1 And, even after so much revision, there may be found in the text of Longman' s Magazine a deal of blank verse : which leads us to remark that blank verse written in the place of prose is, not necessarily the result of careless workmanship (as some have vainly dreamed), nor even of fatigue but, merely the natural outcome of strong emotion. 64 R- L. STEVENSON. Robert Macaire. His books, meanwhile, had brought him scant increase of fame or profit. (Mr Colvin tells us that, until 1886, his thirty- sixth year, Stevenson had never earned much more than ^^300 a-year: a record one would commend to the literary aspirant for his par- ticular consideration.) But, in 1886, he achieved a second popular victory, in The Sirajige Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. That extraordinary little work incidentally appealed, not only to that side of the British temperament which demands entertainment but, to the moral, or religious, element inherent in the national character, — that element to which no appeal, high or low, righteous or fantastic or hysterical, is ever wholly vain. The clergy at large espied another opportunity for pressing a secular phe- nomenon into the service of the sanctuary; and Dr Jekyll was captured and turned to great account as a pulpit metaphor. And there was one ingenious gentleman at least, who, living at Bournemouth, profited by a number of sermons which he never heard. For, every one bought and read Dr Jekyll; and, together with Kidnapped, reprinted from Young Folks Paper about the same time, the little book considerably increased Ste- venson's reputation. His name, as such, became of monetary value, a signature coveted of pub- OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 65 lishers; and, from henceforth, his income was largely augmented. Of Stevenson's comrades of Edinburgh days, days from which, by time and chance and change, he was already far removed, several had gone the way of all men ; in Old Mortality, he had already commemorated James Walter Ferrier; and now, in 1886, he came to write the biography of Professor Fleeming Jenkin, Then, in May of the following year, his father died ; and the death of Thomas Stevenson made one of the reasons which sent him upon his second long exile, which his own death ended. His ill-health made another; and, says Mr Colvin, " his wife's connections pointing to the west, he thought of Colorado, persuaded his mother to join them, and with his whole household — mother, wife, and stepson — sailed for New York on 17 Aug. 1887." At first the family stayed at Newport, then they settled for a time at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, then Stevenson came to New York for a little while, and then, leaving the city, he " went for some weeks boating to Manasquan on the New Jersey coast." ^ During this time, from August 1887 to May 1888, he had written Ticonderoga, 1 Dictionary of A^ational BiograJ^ky : art., " Stevenson, Robert Louis." 66 R. L. STEVENSON. and a series of twelve essays for Scribner's Magazine, had begun The Master of Ballajiirae, and had completed, together with his stepson Mr Lloyd Osbourne, the narrative farce, The Wrong Box. Writing to Mr Colvin upon the aspect of Piilvis et Umbra and the didactic pieces among the Scribner essays, Stevenson says : " I agree with you the lights seem a little turned down ; the truth is I was far through, and came none too soon to the South Seas, where I was to recover peace of body and mind. And how- ever low the lights, the stuff is true." ^ If the lights were low, they burned with radiance — a radiance which can only be described as lurid; but as to that I shall have more to say. And, in a fragment of an essay, written four or five years later, the author tells us how he came to begin The Master of Ballantrae, that sinister, disjointed, powerful work: — I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter ; the night was very dark ; the air extra- ordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of forests. From a good way below, the river was to be heard contending with ice and boulders : a few lights ^ R. L. S., Across the Plains. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 6/ appeared, scattered unevenly among the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation. For the making of a story here were fine conditions. I was, besides, moved with the spirit of emulation, for I had just finished my third or fourth perusal of The Phantom Ship. " Come," said I to my engine, " let us make a tale, a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation ; a story that shall have the same large features, and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you have been reading and admiring "... There cropped up in my memory a singular case of a buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle of mine, then lately dead, Inspector- General John Balfour. On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer below zero, the brain works with much vivacity ; and the next moment I had seen the circum- stance transplanted from India and the tropics to the Adirondack wilderness and the stringent cold of the Canadian border. Here then, almost before I began my story, I had two countries, two of the ends of the earth involved ; and thus though the notion of the resuscitated man failed entirely on the score of general acceptation, or even (as I have since found) accep- tability, it fitted at once with my design of a tale of many lands ; and this decided me to consider further of its possibihties.i Now, in the spring of 1888 (when Stevenson 1 R. L. 'ii., Juvenilia, ^c. 68 R. L. STEVENSON. was in his thirty-eighth year), comes Mr S. S. McClure, the American publisher, offering Ste- venson ^2000 to cruise in the South Seas, and to write the story of his voyages in a series of letters. He accepted the offer; and in June the Stevenson family set sail from San Francisco in the schooner yacht Casco, Captain Otis, for the Marquesas Islands ; thence to the Paumotus ; thence to the Society Islands ; and thence northward to Honolulu. The whole cruise lasted about six months. Here, from The Wrecker (which work was begun at sea about this time), is Stevenson's picture of his first sailing into those desired waters: — I love to recall the glad monotony of a Pacific voyage, when the trades are not stinted, and the ship, day after day, goes free. The mountain scenery of trade- wind clouds, watched . . . under every vicis- situde of light — blotting stars, withering in the moon's glory, barring the scarlet eve, lying across the dawn collapsed into the unfeatured morning bank, or at noon raising their snowy summits between the blue roof of heaven and the blue floor of sea; the small, busy, and deliberate world of the schooner, with its unfa- miliar scenes, the spearing of dolphin from the bowsprit end, the holy war on sharks, the cook making bread on the main hatch ; reefing down before a violent squall, with the men hanging out on the foot-ropes ; the squall itself, the catch at the heart, the opened sluices OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 69 of the sky; and the relief, the renewed loveliness of life, when all is over, the sun forth again, and our out- fought enemy only a blot upon the leeward sea. I love to recall, and would that I could reproduce that life, the unforgettable, the unrememberable. The mem- ory, which shows so wise a backwardness in regis- tering pain, is besides an imperfect recorder of ex- tended pleasures ; and a long-continued wellbeing escapes (as it were, by its mass) our petty methods of commemoration. On a part of our life's map there lies a roseate, undecipherable haze, and that is all. Of one thing, if I am at all to trust my own annals, I was delightedly conscious. Day after day, in the sun- gilded cabin, the whisky-dealer's thermometer stood at 84°. Day after day the air had the same indescribable liveliness and sweetness, soft and nimble, and cool as the cheek of health. Day after day the sun flamed ; night after night the moon beaconed, or the stars paraded their lustrous regiment. I was aware of a spiritual change, or, perhaps, rather a molecular re- constitution. My bones were sweeter to me. I had come home to my own climate, and looked back with pity on those damp and wintry zones miscalled the temperate.'^ The Stevensons remained at Honolulu for some six months, and during this time Ste- venson made a visit to the leper island of Molokai. From Honolulu they set sail upon 1 R. L. S., The Wrecker. 70 R. L. STEVENSON. a second cruise, just a year from the time they started from San Francisco. Hence [says Stevenson], lacking courage to return to my old life of the house and sick-room, I set forth to leeward in a trading schooner, the Equator, of a little over seventy tons, spent four months among the atolls (low coral islands) oi the Gilbert group, and reached Samoa towards the close of '89. By that time grati- tude and habit were beginning to attach me to the islands ; I had gained a competency of strength ; I had made friends ; I had learned new interests ; the time of my voyages had passed hke days in fairyland ; and I decided to remain.^ So, for another six months, the Equator tramps among the islands, visiting the Gilberts, and fetching up about Christmas time, 1889, at Apia near Samoa, where the Stevensons stayed for some weeks. Here Stevenson bought an estate of some four hundred acres, and called it Vailima; and here he wrote The Bottle Imp, the first of his Pacific yarns. Thence, they sailed to Sydney, where Stevenson, falling ill again, lost for a time his new-found health. While at Sydney, he wrote the Open Letter"^ (printed in that Scots Observer, which, during its conduct by Mr Henley, established a new * R. L. S., In the South Seas. 2 R. L. S., Later Essays. OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 7 1 tradition in literature, in criticism, and in journalism ; and contended, single-handed, for certain ideals which the nation, though it draws from changed sources which claim the inspiration as their own, is at last adopting) to the Reverend Dr Hyde of Honolulu in which that clergyman receives an unsparing casti- gation. Dr Hyde had — or Stevenson thought he had, for, after all, the matter seems a shade doubtful — written a letter to a brother ecclesi- astic, containing gross imputations upon the character of Father Damien, the leper evan- gelist, which awoke Stevenson to vengeful indig- nation, and moved him to produce a piece of capital invective. A happier reminiscence of Sydney, for whose record I am indebted to the kindness of Mr Rudyard Kipling, remains in the letters ad- dressed by Mr Alan Breck Stuart to one Ter- ence Mulvaney. The fame of the said Terence Mulvaney has reached Mr Stuart (he says) even in that antipodean city; Mr Mulvaney is in the service, as it appears to Mr Stuart, of a man with a strange name, to whom (Mr Stuart is of opinion) he was sent directly from the Almighty. To this flattering effusion Mr Mulvaney re- sponded in suitable terms ; whereupon Mr Stuart incontinently despatches a cartel to Mr Mul- 72 R. L. STEVENSON. vaney: he challenges him to make music or to fight — to pipes or broadswords — or both ; and if both, then the pipes first and broadswords after, or broadswords first and (if the parties survive) pipes after; just whichever Mr Mulvaney pleases; although — so far as Mr Stuart is able to make out — Mr Mulvaney is not of the dtiaine-uasal (^Anglice, of gentle rank), nor does he hold His Majesty's commission; and therefore, he is scarce of a rank with Alan Breck, who bears a king's name. Nevertheless, having in mind Mr Mulvaney's indubitable prowess, and the fact of his bearing honourable service to the man of the strange name aforesaid, Mr Stuart, for the pleasure of meeting Mr Mulvaney, is willing (as he says) to overlook these disabilities. From Sydney, in April 1890, the Stevensons sailed again in the trading steamer Janet Nicoll. Aboard the Janet Nicoll, Stevenson began the series of letters for Mr McClure, which were eventually published in the New York Sun, and, in England, in Black and White, selections from them being presented in the Edinburgh Edition in In the South Seas. They exhibit the Scot abroad in a somewhat dreary aspect. They are pictur- esque and skilfully written, as all of Stevenson's work must be ; yet the author seems wilfully to ignore all of Polynesian life which might not have OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 73 been set forth by a missionary discoursing at a tea-party. It is hard to beHeve that In the South Seas was written by the same hand which indited the earHer Stevensonian essays and stories — the hand, even, that wrote The Beach of Falcsd about the same time. In truth, it is likely that a vision of more humane and catholic comprehen- sion was requisite in dealing with the Islanders than was possessed by the " Shorter Catechist" in his austerer middle age. Instead of the man whose eyes had been opened, it is " John Calvin come alive again," and patrolling the isles of the blest. During the summer of 1890, the Janet Nicoll carried the Stevensons from Sydney and Auck- land to the Penrhyn Islands, thence to the Union Islands, the Ellice Islands, and north- ward to the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, thence back again by New Caledonia, Sydney, and Auckland to Apia, where they landed in September. There, upon his estate of Vailima, Stevenson settled with his family. During his voyages, he had completed The Master of Bal- lantrae, had written sundry verses (included in Songs of Travel^ two dreary ballads of Poly- nesian legend, The Song of RaJiero and The Feast of Famine, had produced (at Samoa) The Bottle Imp, and (at Sydney) the Letter to Dr 74 R- L- STEVENSON. Hyde, had begun the South Sea Letters, and, with Mr Lloyd Osbourne, TJie Wrecker. When he entered upon his residence at Samoa the Letters and TJie Wrecker were still unfinished ; while upon the new estate there were clear- ing and planting, and the completion of the house to be superintended ; and how he settled down to cope with these labours, may be read at large in the Vailijiia Letters addressed to Mr Sidney Colvin, and published in the Edin- burgh Edition. In the following spring (1891), Mrs Stevenson the elder became a member of the Stevensonian household ; Stevenson's step- daughter, Mrs Strong, had joined the party two years before ; and thus, with his mother, wife, stepdaughter, and stepson, with two serious tasks to complete, an estate to lay out and a house to build, we behold Stevenson cheerfully entering upon those four arduous years in the Pacific which were the last of his life. At first, his health seemed almost entirely restored to him, and he accomplished a really amazing amount of work without distress. He writes for six or eight hours a-day, pioneers his estate, rides, boats, and lavishly entertains the island population generally, both brown and white. They called him Tusitala, the teller of tales ; and indeed, albeit his knowledge of South OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 75 Sea life and the South Sea tongues was never more than a smattering, he liked to pose as a kind of a bard, and feudal chieftain. And in the summer of 1891, when the political troubles of the island, the offspring of German officialism and native intrigue, began to threaten war, Stevenson, plunging gaily into that vexed and complicated business, drew his sword upon the side of the oppressed in his letters to The Times} There was none to outvie the practised writer in that exercise; and, in consequence of his exposures, the three treaty Powers (Great Britain, the United States, and Germany) were constrained to withdraw from their protectorate the Chief Justice, Mr Cedercrantz, and the Presi- dent of the Council, Baron Senfift von Pilsach. The whole story of shifty diplomacy and native civil war may be read in Stevenson's Footnote to History, a monograph which, on the top of all his other enterprises, he thought it his duty to undertake during 1892; and a curious and in- structive work it is. The methods of the histo- rian and of the novelist, as Stevenson himself somewhere observes, are often, ultimately, very much the same; and the professional historian, ostensibly recording chronicles, sometimes sets forth what is neither more nor less than a novel 1 R. L. S., Letters from Samoa. 'j6 R. L. STEVENSON. in disguise. And, in A Footnote to History we observe the professional novelist engaged in writ- ing history in little, with results highly charac- teristic of the writer. In 1 891 The Wrecker was completed, and, later in the year, the South Sea Letters. Besides writ- ing the Footnote to History during the ensuing year, Stevenson began Catriona, the sequel to Kidnapped, which had been written six years before; The Ebb-Tide, in collaboration with Mr Lloyd Osbourne; Heathercat} The Young CJieva- lier} Weir of Hermiston} and A Family of Engi- neers} a short biography of the Stevenson ancestry. Of these, only Catriona and The Ebb-Tide were completed. It is evident from the Vailima Letters that, by this time, Stevenson was habitually overworking himself. To certain temperaments, working under certain conditions, there comes a time when they cannot stop ; to rest is no longer in their power; and only death will bring cessation. Moreover, though Stevenson was earning an in- come which, for a man of letters, was large, his expenses, by his own account, continued to keep pace with his earnings. And, besides his proper work, this fiery thread-paper of a man was build- 1 R. L. S., Weir of Hermiston and other Fragments. ^ R. L. S., A Family of Engineers, OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE. 7/ ing, farming, colonising, working with his hands, and dabbling in politics — a highly exhausting dissipation. And, one way and another, the Vailima Letters inevitably disengage the impres- sion that the man was driven, that — whether by habit or by need, for what cause soever — Stevenson, in these last years, was toiling under the lash. His work cost him more than he had any right to give, more than, in his earlier years, he would ever have consented to give. Besides, as a man of letters, he had no super- fluous strength wherewith to drive two or three other trades. That the estate of Vailima would come in time to yield a sufficient main- tenance, thus releasing him from the imme- diate necessity for toil, was his constant hope. Meanwhile — I must own [he writes in December 1893] "that I have overworked bitterly — overworked — there, that 's legible. My hand is a thing that was, and in the meanwhile so are my brains. And here, in the very midst, comes a plausible scheme to make Vaihma pay, which will perhaps let me into considerable expense just when I don't want it.^ In the previous January (1893) Stevenson's health had again suffered severely from an attack of influenza, from which, in all probability, it ^ R. L. S., Vailima Letters. 78 R. L. STEVENSON. never fully recovered. Prostrated by sickness, he began to dictate St Ives from his bed; and when his voice failed, he continued to dictate upon his fingers. Taking into consideration the circumstances in which it was composed, St Ives is a piece of heroism. It might be supposed that a novelist and man of letters of established repute would, at forty-three, begin to take a little ease. Stevenson never did. Whatever the reason in the background, he conceived it his duty to spur his ailing flesh to the last ounce; and, to his honour be it said, he fulfilled that conception to the letter. In the winter of 1894 he turned from St Ives to continue Weir of Heruiiston ; and the last sentence of that fragment contains the last words he ever wrote. " On the afternoon of 4 Dec. 1894, he was talking gaily with his wife, when the sudden rupture of a blood-vessel in the brain laid him at her feet, and within two hours all was over." ^ So Robert Louis Stevenson, whose first pub- lished essay was rejected by the Saturday Review, came into his own peculiar kingdom at last; and died ; and was buried upon the summit of Mount Vaea, in the island of his last exile, 1 Dictionary of National Biography : art., " Stevenson, Robert Louis." IV. THE MORALIST. . . . Life, my old shipmate, life, at any moment and in any view, is as dangerous as a sinking ship ; and yet it is man's hand- some fashion to carry umbrellas, to wear indiarubber overshoes, to begin vast works, and to conduct himself in every way as if he might hope to be eternal. And for my own poor part I should despise the man who, even on board a sinking ship, should omit to take a pill or to wind up his watch. That, my friend, would not be the human attitude. — R. L. S., Fables. Doctor Desprez always rose early. Before the smoke arose, before the first cart rattled over the bridge to the day's labour in the fields, he was to be found wandering in his garden. Now he would pick a bunch of grapes ; now he would eat a big pear under the trellis ; now he would draw all sorts of fancies on the path with the end of his cane ; now he would go down and watch the river running endlessly past the timber landing-place at which he moored his boat. There was no time, he used to say, for making theories like the early morning. — R. L. S., The Treasure of Franchard. There is no time, indeed, for making theories like the early morning. In his early youth Stevenson acquired that seductive habit, which remained a passion with him to the end. And the method of his philosophy was ever the same. " When I was a boy," said his Will o' the Mill, ■80 R. L. STEVENSON. " I was a bit puzzled, and hardly knew whether it was myself or the world that was curious and worth looking into. Now, I know it is myself, and stick to that." Stevenson wrote Will , Ii2, 163, 165. Edinburgh Days, R. L. Steven- son's, by E. B. Simpson, 23, 29, 30. 39. 45- Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes on, 8-12. Edinburgh University Magazine, 45- Engineers, A Family of, 13 ^/ seq., 17 et seq., 76, II2. Epilogue to An Inland Voyage,^. Essays and Fragments, 23. Essays, Later, 43, 46, 70, 96, 98, loi, 108, 114, 190. Essays Speculative and Sugges- tive, J. A. Symonds's, 167. Fables, 79, 102 et seq., 106. Faith, Half-Faith, and No Faith at all, 102, 104. Familiar Studies of Men and Boo'ks, 46, 51, 125. Fatnily of Engineers, A, i^ et seq., 17 et seq., 76, 1 12. Fergusson, Robert, The Daft Days, by, 7. Fleemitig Jenkin, Memoir of, 34, 48, 65. Fontatnebleau, 46. Footnote to History, A, 75, 82. Garden of Verses, A Child's, 28, 62, 63, \i6 et seq. Great North Road, The, 63, 160 et seq. Guy Mannering, 2, 4. 200 INDEX. Heathercat, 76. Henley, W. E., Essay on Burns, by, 2, 8 — biographical foot- note by, 43, 49. History of Moses, A, 28. House of Eld, The, 102, 103. In the South Seas, 70, 72. Inland Voyage, An, 50, 86, 95, 172. Island Nights' Entertainments, 183. Juvenilia, 60, 67, 84, 96, 168 et seq. Kidnapped, 64, 140. Later Essays, 43, 46, 70, 96, 98, loi, 108, 114, 190. Lay Morals, 52, 96. Letter to a Young Gentleman, &c., 108 et seq., 113. Letters, Burt's, 5. Letters from Samoa, 75. Lodging for the Night, A, 51, 129. Manse, The, 28. Markheim, 63, 143. Master of Ballanirae, 66, 73, 141, 145, 181, 189, 191, 193. Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, 34, 48, 65. Memories and Portraits, \t, et seq., 21, 33, 34, 38, 39, 45, 85 et seq., 125, 150, 166, 186, 191. Merry Men, The, 18, 57, 137, 192. Misadventures of John Nicholson, 63. 143- Moral Emblems, 56. Morality of the Profession of Letters, 108. New Arabian Nights, The, 51, 63, 132 et seq., 157, 189. Not I, and other Poems, 56. Olalla, 63, 143. Old Mortality, 65. Opeti Letter to Dr Hyde, 70, 73. Pavilion on the Links, The, 54, 152, 175- Pentland Rising, The, 39, 42. Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh, 8-12. Pritice Otto, 54, 62, 63, 145, 160, 176, 177 et seq. Providence and the Guitar, 51, 151- Pulvts et Umbra, 96, 97, 99. Raleigh, W. A., R. L. Stevenson, by, 106, 126, 149. Ramsay, Allan, " Elegy on Maggy Johnston," 5. Randovi Memories, 28, 32. Roads, essay on, 46. Robert Macaire, 64. Schwob, M. Marcel, criticism of Stevenson by, 10, 130. Scott, Guy Mannering, 2, 4. Silverado Squatters, The, 55. Simpson, E. B., Stevenson's Edinburgh Days, by, 23, 29, 30. 39. 45- Sirede Malitroifs Door, The, 51, 1 29 et seq. So7nething in It, 105. Songs of Travel, 73, 122. South Sea Letters, 74-76. Stevenson, R. L., Memoir by M.M. Black, 49 — Monograph by Professor Raleigh, 106, 126, 149 — Marcel Schwob on, 130. St Ives, 78. Story of a Lie, The, 152. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The, 64, 142, 179. Symonds, J. A., Essays Specula- tive and Suggestive, by, 167. Talk and Talkers, 44, 191. Thrawn Janet, 57, 137. Ticonderoga, 65. INDEX. 201 Travels in Perth, 28. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevemies, 50, 86, 95, 193. Treasure Island, 23, 57, 60, 61, 126, 140, 141, 153, 176. Treasure of Franchard, 61, 79) 80, 93. Underwoods, 62, 115. Vailima Letters, 40, 74, 77, 82, in, 125, 197. Virginibus Puerisque, 49, 50, 85 et seq., 100, 189, 192. Voces Fidelium, 38. Weir of Hermiston, 76, 78, 113, 148, 164, 165. Will d" the Mill, 51, 80, 89 et seq., 131. Wreath of Immortelles, The, 42, 82. Wrecker, The, 46, 68, 74, 76, 158, 182. Wrong Box, The, 66, 141, 144. Yellow Paint, The, 102, 103. Young Chevalier, The, 76, 146. 3W7-7 Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide Treatment Date: May 2009 PreservationTechnologies A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATIOI 111 Thomson Park Drive Cranberry Township, PA 16066