ACROSS THE SEAS
As an advocate, Stevenson found ample time to pursue his chosen profession of letters, for, during the winters in Edinburgh, he wrote much, and gradually his essays, etc., appeared in magazines, and are now gathered into happily named volumes. He spent the long vacations, when the Courts had risen, abroad, mostly frequenting an artist-colony in Fontainebleau. At that time he was full of a project, in company with some congenial spirits, to form a peripatetic club, buy a barge, and glide leisurely through Europe by calm waterways. He had gone yachting one summer with a sea-loving brother advocate up the west coast of Scotland. The memory of that trip inhabited his mind, and he made his hero, David Balfour, when "Kidnapped" sail by the self-same islands and seas. Louis was persuaded by his boating friend, the following season, to embark with him on a canoe trip through Belgium; and the log of that tour became immortalised as An Inland Voyage, Stevenson's first book. His travels did not end when he left his frail craft at Pontoise, for, returning to Gretz, on the skirts of Fontainebleau, he first met his future wife, and that led a few years later to his following her to San Francisco, when she was free to remarry.
He crossed the Atlantic and America as an Emigrant. That mode of life proved too hard for him. He had sailed and paddled without hurt in his fleet and footless beast of burden, the Arethusa. In the ensuing year (1877), he travelled "Through the Cevennes with a Donkey," slept under starry skies, or camped in plumping rain. Often at home he buckled on his knapsack and tramped along the open road, but in these trips, as in his two longer outdoor journeys, he had the heavens above him. The Emigrant was crowded with his fellows, so Louis arrived sick and sorry on the other side of the Atlantic, where he had to support himself, having left his home against his father's wishes. The rising author found his market value in America low-priced, and his curiosity as to how it felt to be ill and penniless was satisfied. After his marriage in 1880, Louis, his wife, and her son became "Silverado Squatters," which proved a happier venture, both for purse and constitution, than being an "Amateur Emmigrant"; also, Mr Stevenson generously settled an income on his son.
In a perpetual pursuit of health, the writer and his hostages to fortune rambled from the snows of Switzerland to the vineyards of France, and finally settled for three years at Bournemouth. Stevenson's undermined health grew worse; but he laboured on at his work, from his sick bed. Some summers he spent in Scotland, and at Braemar wrote Treasure Island: then Jekyll and Hyde brought him notoriety. He was anxious to return to his Alma Mater, and be there a Professor of History. A house in the cup-like dell of Colinton, where every twig had a chorister, would have sheltered him from the purgatorial climate; and the College, like the Courts, allowed long vacations, spring and summer, to journey off to bask in the South. But this plan, like the barge one, came to naught, for he was not elected. The tales of tropic islands in the South Seas—"beautiful places green for ever, perfect climate, perfect shapes of men and women with red flowers in their hair and nothing to do but study oratory and etiquette, sit in the sun and pick up the fruits as they fall,"—remained in his tenacious memory. A guest at his father's in 1874 spoke of them, and the young Stevenson had stored the description away in his mind, to be unearthed when he willed, as was his habit. When first he heard of those favored spots, he had two anchors which kept him bound to Edinburgh—his parents. The good engineer died in 1887; and the other anchor, his mother, he found could be lifted, and became the best of ballast. When he elected to become a world wanderer, she left her Edinburgh home and, without hesitation, went off with her son and his household when they turned their backs on Europe in 1887. Her journal to her sister tells of these travels "From Saranac to Marquesas." She simply but racily describes their course, which ended in the cruise on the Casco. In her book we enjoy genuine glimpses of the author, not so much as the man who has written himself into fame, but her happy-tempered, hero-hearted, eager-minded boy, who for forty-five years was all the world to her. The invigorating cold of the Adirondacks had its drawbacks, as had Davos; and Stevenson, who, a few years before had felt the sharp pinch of poverty at San Francisco, now chartered from there a ship of his own, and sailed away out of the Golden Gate, on his South Sea Odyssey, to those islands he had heard of years before, little thinking, as he listened "till he was sick with desire to go there," that talk was to be as a sign-post to him where to travel to. "For Louis' sake," his mother explains in her racy journal letters, speaking of having chartered the Casco, "I can't but be glad, for his heart has so long been set upon it, it must surely be good for his health to have such a desire granted." Louis warned his mother years before she had a nomad for a son, but she had never objected, and sat knitting on deck, well content not to be "in turret pent," but to go forth with the bright sword she had forged. "She adapted herself," her brother says, "to her strange surroundings, went about barefoot, found no heat too great for her, and at an age when her sisters at home were old ladies, learnt to ride!" After many wanderings through the warm ocean waters, with "green days in forest and blue days at sea," the yachters finally saw Samoa, and to the author it was the El Dorado of his dreams. "When the Casco cast anchor," he avers, "my soul went down with these moorings, whence no windless may extract nor any diver fish it up." It was indeed a unique experience for one of the master workers of the world, one whose subtle mintage of words had made his readers his friends, to settle in an uttermost isle of the Pacific. He throve there, and was able to enjoy the flavour of the life of adventure he had craved for, and to look into the bright face of danger. He built for himself a palace in the wild named Vailima. From Edinburgh came out the familiar furniture he had been brought up among, which had been the stage scenery of his chimney-corner days, when the back bed-room chairs became a ship, and the sofa-back was his hunter's camp. At Vailima he, like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, received "a race gift from his childhood's home." He had in olden times played at being a minister like his grandfather, to wile away a toyless Sunday. When he grew into his unorthodox dark shirt and velvet-jacket stage, he had been a rebellious, rather atheistical youth; but at Samoa, maybe to please his truly good, uncanting mother, or the sight of the belongings from his old home, made him bethink himself of his father's reverent conducting of family worship. He would have the same, but set to work and composed prayers for himself. Beautifully worded they are, full of his gospel of kindliness and gladness, and he read them with effective fervour in the hall of Vailima, with his betartaned servants gathered round. These devotional exercises of his have been quoted by the "unco guid" to make him into what Henley severely styled "a Seraph in Chocolate, a barley-sugar effigy of a real man." The religious faith of Stevenson was the same as Ben Adhem's in Leigh Hunt's poem, who, when he found his name was not among those who loved the Lord, cheerily asked the angel to write him as one who loved his fellow-men. The heavenly messenger returned
"And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,"
And "lo! Ben Adhem's led all the rest"
To Stevenson, throughout his life, all the world was truly a stage. He went gaily along playing his part, and when he came to Samoa, he, on whose brows the dews of youth still sparkled, gleefully revelled in the pomp and circumstance which allow him to make believe he was a chieftain. He could go flower-bedecked and garlanded without comment in among his adopted subjects. He paid deference to Samoan codes of manners, a thing he had scorned to do in his native land.
All his life he indulged in too few relaxations. The grim Scots divines, whose "damnatory creed" Louis objected to so strongly, in their studies, we read, reserved a corner for rod and gun. In his library there was never a sign of sporting tools, not even a golf-club. He was not effeminate; in fact, if "the man had been dowered with better health, we would have lost the author," says one speaker of him; but he simply never let go the pen, and, doubtless, his singleness of purpose, his want of toil-resting hobbies, was hampering to his health. Walking-tours, during which he was busy all the while taking mental notes for some article, was no brain holiday. In Samoa, he enjoyed the purest of pleasures, gardening. "Nothing is so interesting," he says, in his VAILIMA LETTERS, "as weeding, clearing, and path-making. It does make you feel so well." But despite warring with weeds and forest rides, in an enervating country, he wrote persistently through the swooningly hot days of damp heat.
"I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius, that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming," he wrote; and shortly after, in December 1894, it came and smote him down to the earth with merciful painlessness. His wife, his step-children, and his mother were beside him when, at the highest water-mark his craftsmanship had reached, he paid the debt to overstrain, and laid him down with a will. The closing act of his life's drama befitted his instinct for effective staging. As he lay shrouded in his nation's flag, the Samoans, who loved him, came to pay their tribute and take farewell of their honey-tongued playmate and counsellor, Tusitala. They counted it an honour to be asked to hew a track through the tropic forest up which they bore him to his chosen resting-place on the mountain top of Vaea, overlooking Vailima, There a table tombstone, like that over the martyrs' graves on the hills of home, marks where this kindly Scot is laid, with the Pacific for ever booming his dirge. Samoa, heretofore, to most was but a speck on a great ocean of another hemisphere. Stevenson transformed it into a "Mecca of the Mind," where pilgrims, bearing his name in remembrance, send their thoughts to do reverence at that shrine where,
"High on his Patmos of the Southern Seas,
Our Northern dreamer sleeps"
no longer separated from his own country and kindred by a world of waters, but, as another friend and poet said, divided from us now only by the unbridged river of Death.
Of his writings the list is long and varied, and forms a goodly heritage. Like himself, they are compounded of many parts, for he was essayist, poet, novelist, traveller, moralist, biographer, and historian, and a Master of his Tools at all. Beside his own books, through many of which we may make his intimate acquaintance, his letters, and others telling the story of his life, form many volumes. Stevenson advised every one to read often, not only the Waverley Novels, but the biography of good Sir Walter. "His life," he affirmed, "was perhaps more unique than his work," and that remark applies to R. L. S. himself, as well as to his great predecessor. Having burned his immature efforts when he was following his own "private determination to be an author," when ostensibly studying engineering, there are but two pamphlets, printed in his boyhood, which are not written when he had acquired his finished style. Louis' last creation, Weir of Hermiston, he himself thought was his master-piece, and he was always his own surest and severest critic. The portrait of the judge on whom he modelled Hermiston, i.e., Braxfield, was not in Stevenson's advocate days bequeathed to the Parliament House, but he had seen it in a Raeburn Exhibition he reviewed. He recollected the outward semblance of the man in his receptive memory till he resurrected Braxfield as Hermiston. The half-told tale is in itself a monument which, unfinished though it be, shows us how clever an artificer Louis had become.
And what manner of man to the outward eye was this gypsily-inclined descendant of square-headed Scottish engineers? With his dark eyes looking as if they had drunk in the sunshine in some southern land, his uncut hair, his odd, shabby clothes clinging to his attenuated frame, his elaborate manners and habit of gesticulating as he spoke, he was often mistaken for a starving musician or foreign mountebank. It is not surprising that continental officials doubted his passport's statement that he was a Briton. In France he was imprisoned, and he complains he could not pass a frontier or visit a bank without suspicion. "A slender, boyish presence, with a graceful, somewhat fantastic bearing, and a singular power of attraction in the eyes and a smile were the first things that impressed you," says his biographer. Like his mother, he remained to the end of his life perennially young in appearance and spirits. The burden of years never weighed him down or dimmed his outlook. His face kindled and flushed with pleasure when he heard of a doughty deed, a spice of wit, or some tale to his liking. Few drew him on canvas in his lifetime, though he summered among artists. Sargent, in 1885, did a small full-length portrait of him, which "is said to verge on caricature, and is in Boston. W. B. Richmond, R. A., about the same time, at Bournemouth, began another in oils, not much more than laid in in two sittings." Louis sat to an Italian, Count Nerli, in Samoa; but in this last portrait he looks painfully haggard, reminding us of his own words, "the practice of letters is miserably harassing." Because of the too brilliant light elsewhere in Vailima, he was painted in a room which was close, and the air fatigued him. While sitting, he wiled away an hour by making doggerel lines all to rhyme with the artist's name, Nerli. The portrait was bought by a Scotch-woman travelling in New Zeal and, where, after the author's death, it had remained unsold. His mother, on returning to Scotland when bereft of her boy, asked to see the picture again. She had disapproved of it in Samoa, as it was over true a likeness, representing him sadly emaciated. Seeing it again, she revoked her former judgment, and wished to possess it, but the purchaser also had grown to prize it. So it hangs in her drawing-room, near by where the Eildons stand sentinel over Scott's resting-place. This picture of him who lies on Vaea's crest looks down with a slightly quizzical expression, as if amused at finding himself ensconced in a place of honour in the house of strangers on Tweedside. Photographs there are in plenty of Stevenson, and one snapshot, enlarged in the Edinburgh Edition, recalls him looking up with "long, hatchet face, black hair, and haunting gaze, that follows as you move about the room." But his likeness was as difficult for the photographer, or the sun, to catch, as for the painter to put on canvas, for the peculiar fascination of the living man lay in himself, in the elusive charm of his smile, and in his manner of speech. However, his contemporaries have left their printed records of his appearance and his peculiar personality. Henley's perfect description in verse is too well known to need quotation. Ugly, Stevenson called himself, but this was not so. He was original in looks and mind, his lank brown hair straggled over his high forehead, and framed his thin, high-cheeked, sallow, oval face. His brown eyes and full red lips gave a dash of colour to his features. His schoolmate, Mr. Baildon, says truly, "his eyes were always genial, however gaily the lights danced in them; but about the mouth there was something of trickery and mocking, as of a spirit that had already peeped behind the scenes of Life's pageant, and more than guessed its unrealities."
Repose he never tasted of, for his zest in life, his adventurous inclination to explore, his insatiable curiosity, kept him ever moving at topmost speed. To understand the mainspring which affected the man's character—the machinery that supplied him with an inexhaustible nerve force and vitality—Mr Colvin explains, "besides humour, which kept wholesome laughter always ready at his lips, was a perfectly warm, loyal, and tender heart, which, through all his experiments and agitations, made the law of kindness the one ruling law of his life." He marvelled, on his way through the Pilgrim's Progress, why the man with the muck-rake grovelled in straws and dust, and never looked up to the glittering crown held out for his acceptance. This mulish blindness puzzled the boy, and when he grew up, he opened the eyes, and illumined by his work and his example the dreary-hearted who wasted their opportunities, not seeing the number of beautiful things which made the world into a royal pleasance. With tuneful words he persuaded those who plodded with dusty feet along the high-road to pause for a while and saunter among the greener fields of earth, and through the stimulating courage that shone through every chapter he wrote, he, like his sires, "the ready and the strong of word," has, by his works, left lights to shine upon the paths of men.