R. L. Stevenson

by Frank Swinnerton

II

Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850; and he died, almost exactly forty-four years later, on December 3, 1894. His first literary work, undertaken at the age of six, was an essay upon the history of Moses. This he dictated to his mother, and was rewarded for it by the gift of a Bible picture book. It is from the date of that triumph that Stevenson’s desire to be a writer must be calculated. A history of Joseph followed, and later on, apparently at the age of nine, he again dictated an account of certain travels in Perth. His first published work was a pamphlet on The Pentland Rising, written (but full of quotations) at the age of sixteen. His first “regular or paid contribution to periodical literature” was the essay called Roads (now included in Essays of Travel), which was written when the author was between twenty-two and twenty-three. The first actual book to be published was An Inland Voyage (1878), written when Stevenson was twenty-seven; but all the essays which ultimately formed the volumes entitled Virginibus Puerisque (1881) and Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882) are the product of 1874 and onwards. These, indicated very roughly, are the beginnings of his literary career. Of course there were many other contributary facts which led to his turning author; and there is probably no writer whose childhood is so fully “documented” as Stevenson’s. He claimed to be one of those who do not forget their own lives, and, in accordance with his practice, he has supplied us with numerous essays in which we may trace his growth and his experiences. That he was an only child and a delicate one we all know; so, too, we know that his grandfather was that Robert Stevenson who built the Bell Rock lighthouse. In the few chapters contributed by Robert Louis to A Family of Engineers we shall find an account, some of it fanciful, but some of it also perfectly accurate, of the Stevenson family and of Robert Stevenson, the grandfather, in particular. In Memories and Portraits is included a sketch of Thomas Stevenson, the father of Robert Louis; and in Mr. Balfour’s “Life” there is ample information for those who wish to study the influences of heredity.

For our own purpose it may be interesting to note three points in this connection. As a boy, and even as a youth, Stevenson was expected by his father to be an engineer and to carry on the family tradition. His early training therefore brought him much to the sea, with rather special facilities for appreciating the more active relations of man to the sea. The second point is that the Stevensons had always been, true to their Scots instincts, very strict religious disciplinarians (Robert Stevenson the elder is very illuminating on this); but that they were also very shrewd and determined men of action. Finally, another grandfather of Robert Louis, this time on the Balfour side, was in fact a clergyman. Stevenson significantly admits that he may have inherited from this grandfather the love of sermonising, which is as noticeable in An Inland Voyage and in Virginibus Puerisque as it is in his latest non-fictional work. We cannot forget that his contribution to festivities marking the anniversary of his marriage was upon one occasion a sermon on St. Jacob’s Oil, delivered from a pulpit carried as part-cargo by the “Janet Nichol.” From his mother, too, he is said to have inherited that constitutional delicacy which made him subject throughout his life to periods of serious illness, and which eventually led to his early death.

There was one other influence upon his childhood which must not be neglected as long as the pendulum of thought association swings steadily from heredity to environment. That influence was the influence exercised by his nurse, Alison Cunningham. It is admitted to have been enormous, and I am not sure that it is desirable to repeat in this place what is so much common knowledge. But it is perhaps worth while to emphasise the fact that, while Alison Cunningham was not only a devoted nurse, night and day, to the delicate child, she actually was in many ways responsible for the peculiar bent of Stevenson’s mind. She it was who read to him, who declaimed to him, the sounds of fine words which he loved so well in after life. The meaning of the words he sometimes did not grasp; the sounds—so admirable, it would seem, was her delivery—were his deep delight. Not only that: she introduced him thus early to the Covenanting writers upon whom he claimed to have based his sense of style; and, however lightly we may regard his various affirmations as to the source of his “style,” and as to the principles upon which we might expect to find it based, the sense of style, which is quite another thing, was almost certainly awakened in him by these means. Sense of style, I think, is a much greater point in Stevenson’s equipment than the actual “style.” The style varies; the sense of style is constant, as it must be in any writer who is not a Freeman. Alison Cunningham, being herself possessed of this sense, or of the savour of words, impressed it upon “her boy”; and the result we may see. All Stevenson’s subsequent “learning” was so much exercise: no man learns how to write solely by observation and imitation.

From being a lonely and delicate child spinning fancies and hearing stirring words and stories and sermons in the nursery, Stevenson became a lonely and delicate child in many places. One of them was the Manse at Colinton, the home of his clerical grandfather. Another was the house in Heriot Row, Edinburgh, where he played with his brilliant cousin R. A. M. Stevenson. R. A. M. was not his only cousin—there were many others; but the personality of R. A. M. is such that one could wish to know the whole of it, so attractive are the references in Stevenson’s essays and letters, and in Mr. Balfour’s biography. I imagine, although I cannot be sure, that it was with R. A. M. that Stevenson played at producing plays on toy-stages. We shall see later how impossible he found it, when he came to consider the drama as a literary field, to shake off the influence of Skelt’s drama; but anybody who has played with toy-stages will respond to the enthusiasm discovered in A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured, and will sympathise with the delight which Stevenson must later have felt on being able to revive in Mr. Lloyd Osbourne’s company the old Skeltian joys.

School followed in due course, the attendances broken by sickness and possibly by the incurable idleness which one supposes to have been due to lassitude rather than to mischief. Mr. Balfour details the components of Stevenson’s education, from Latin and French and German, to bathing and dancing. Football is also mentioned, while riding seems to have developed into a sort of reckless horsemanship. When he was eleven or twelve Stevenson came first to London, and went with his father to Homburg. Later he went twice with Mrs. Stevenson to Mentone, travelling, besides, on the first occasion, through Italy, and returning by way of Germany and the Rhine. It is, however, remarkable that he does not seem to have retained much memory of so interesting an experience; a fact which would suggest that, although he was able at this time to store for future use ample impressions of his own feelings and his own habits, he had not yet awakened to any very lively or precise observation of the external world. That observation began with the determination to write, and Stevenson then lost no opportunity of setting down exactly his impressions of things seen.

In 1867—that is, after the publication, and after the withdrawal, of The Pentland Rising—Stevenson began his training as a civil engineer, working for a Science degree at Edinburgh University. One may learn something of his experience there from Memories and Portraits and even from The Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin. It was now that he met Charles Baxter (the letters to whom are the jolliest and apparently most candid of any he wrote), James Walter Ferrier, Sir Walter Simpson (the real hero of An Inland Voyage), and Fleeming Jenkin, whose wife mistook Stevenson for a poet. Here, too, he joined the “Speculative Society,” of which presently he became an unimportant president. Moreover, the friendships formed at the University led to the foundation of a mysterious society of six members, called the L.J.R. (signifying Liberty, Justice, Reverence), which has been the occasion of much comment on account of the secrecy with which the meaning of the initials has been guarded.

It was while he was at the University that his desire to write became acute. By his own account, he went everywhere with two little books, one to read, and one to write in. He read a great deal, talked a great deal, made friends, and charmed everybody very much. In 1868, 1869, and 1870 he spent some time on the West Coast of Scotland, watching the work which was being carried on by his father’s firm at Anstruther, Wick, and finally at Earraid (an island introduced into Catriona and The Merry Men). In 1871 he received from the Scottish Society of Arts a silver medal for a paper (A New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses); and two years later another paper, On the Thermal Influence of Forests, was communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. But it was in 1871 that Stevenson gave up, and induced his father most unwillingly to give up, the plans hitherto regarded as definite for his future career. He could not become a civil engineer; but determined that he must make his way by letters. A compromise was effected, by the terms of which he read for the Bar; and he passed his preliminary examination in 1872.