Transcribed from the 1906 Methuen and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
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THE LETTERS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
TO HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS
SELECTED AND EDITED WITH
NOTES AND INTRODUCTIONS BY
SIDNEY COLVIN
VOLUME I
LONDON
METHUEN AND CO.
36 ESSEX STREET
Seventh Edition
| First Published | November 1899 |
| Second Edition | November 1899 |
| Third Edition | April 1900 |
| Fourth Edition | November 1900 |
| Fifth Edition | January 1901 |
| Sixth Edition | October 1902 |
| Seventh Edition | December 1906 |
In the present edition, several minor errors and misprints have been corrected, and three new letters have been printed, one addressed to Mr. Austin Dobson (vol. i. p. [340]), one to Mr. Rudyard Kipling (vol. ii. p. 215), and one to Mr. George Meredith (vol. ii. p. 302). The two former replace other letters which seemed of less interest; the last is an addition to the book.
S. C.
CONTENTS
| PAGE |
INTRODUCTION | [xv]–xliv |
I STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH | |
Introductory | |
letters:— | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To Mrs. Churchill Babington | |
To Alison Cunningham | |
To Charles Baxter | |
To the Same | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To Thomas Stevenson | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Charles Baxter | |
STUDENTDAYS—continued | |
Letters:— | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To the Same | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To the Same | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
III ADVOCATE AND AUTHOR | |
Letters:— | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Charles Baxter | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To Mrs. de Mattos | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To the Same | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To A. Patchett Martin | |
To the Same | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To the Same | |
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To the Same | |
To Charles Baxter. | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
IV THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT | |
letters:— | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To the Same | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To the Same | |
To P. G. Hamerton | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To the Same | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To Dr. W. Bamford | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To C. W. Stoddard | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
V ALPINE WINTERS | |
Letters:— | |
To A. G. Dew-Smith | |
To Thomas Stevenson | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To the Same | |
To C. W. Stoddard | |
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Horatio F. Brown | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Professor Æneas Mackay | |
To the Same | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To the Same | |
To P. G. Hamerton | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To the Same | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Dr. Alexander Japp | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Dr. Alexander Japp | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Thomas Stevenson | |
To P. G. Hamerton | |
To Charles Baxter | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Alison Cunningham | |
To Charles Baxter | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To the Same | |
To Alexander Ireland | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To Dr. Alexander Japp | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Mrs. T. Stevenson | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To the Same | |
To W. E. Henley | |
VI MARSEILLES ANDHYÈRES | |
Letters:— |
|
To the Editor of the New YorkTribune | |
To R. A. M. Stevenson | |
To Thomas Stevenson | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Charles Baxter | |
To Alison Cunningham | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Thomas Stevenson | |
To Mrs. Sitwell | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To the Same | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To the Same | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To the Same | |
To Alison Cunningham | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To W. H. Low | |
To R. A. M. Stevenson | |
To Thomas Stevenson | |
To W. H. Low | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Mrs. Milne | |
To Miss Ferrier | |
To W. H. Low | |
To Thomas Stevenson | |
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Mr. Dick | |
To Cosmo Monkhouse | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To Miss Ferrier | |
To W. H. Low | |
To Thomas Stevenson | |
To Cosmo Monkhouse | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
VII LIFE AT BOURNEMOUTH | |
Letters:— |
|
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To the Rev. Professor Lewis Campbell | |
To Andrew Chatto | |
To W. H. Low | |
To Thomas Stevenson | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To Thomas Stevenson | |
To Charles Baxter | |
To the Same | |
To Miss Ferrier | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To Austin Dobson | |
To Henry James | |
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To the Same | |
To H. A. Jones | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To Thomas Stevenson | |
To Sidney Colvin | |
To the Same | |
To Edmund Gosse | |
To W. H. Low | |
To P. G. Hamerton | |
To William Archer | |
To Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin | |
To the Same | |
To W. H. Low | |
To W. E. Henley | |
To William Archer | |
To Thomas Stevenson | |
To Henry James | |
To William Archer | |
To the Same | |
To W. H. Low | |
Frontispiece—PORTRAIT OF R. L. STEVENSON, æt. 35
From a photograph by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne
INTRODUCTION
One day in the autumn of 1888, in the island of Tahiti, during an illness which he supposed might be his last, Stevenson put into the hands of his stepson, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, a sealed paper with the request that it should be opened after his death. He recovered, as every one knows, and had strength enough to enjoy six years more of active life and work in the Pacific Islands. When the end came, and the paper was opened, it was found to contain, among other things, the expression of his wish that I should be asked to prepare for publication ‘a selection of his letters and a sketch of his life.’ The journal letters written to myself from his Samoan home, subsequently to the date of the request, offered the readiest material towards fulfilling promptly a part at least of the duty thus laid upon me; and a selection from these was accordingly published in the autumn following his death. [xv]
The scanty leisure of an official life (chiefly employed as it was for several years in seeing my friend’s collected and posthumous works through the press) did not allow me to complete the remainder of my task without considerable delay. For one thing, the body of correspondence which came in from various quarters turned out much larger than had been anticipated, and the labour of sifting and arranging it much greater. The author of Treasure Island and Across the Plains and Weir of Hermiston did not love writing letters, and will be found somewhere in the following pages referring to himself as one ‘essentially and originally incapable of the art epistolary.’ That he was a bad correspondent had even come to be an accepted view among his friends; but in truth it was only during one particular period of his life (see below, vol. i. p. 103) that he at all deserved such a reproach. At other times, as is now apparent, he had shown a degree of industry and spirit in letter-writing extraordinary considering his health and occupations, and especially considering his declared aversion for the task. His letters, it is true, were often the most informal in the world, and he generally neglected to date them, a habit which is the despair of editors; but after his own whim and fashion he wrote a vast number; so that for every one here included some half-a-dozen at least have had to be rejected.
In considering the scale and plan on which my friend’s instruction should be carried out, it seemed necessary to take into account, not his own always modest opinion of himself, but the place which, as time went on, he seemed likely to take ultimately in the world’s regard. The four or five years following the death of a writer much applauded in his lifetime are generally the years when the decline of his reputation begins, if it is going to suffer decline at all. At present, certainly, Stevenson’s name seems in no danger of going down. On the stream of daily literary reference and allusion it floats more actively than ever. In another sense its vitality is confirmed by the material test of continued sales and of the market. Since we have lost him other writers, whose beginnings he watched with sympathetic interest, have come to fill a greater immediate place in public attention; one especially has struck notes which appeal to dominant fibres in our Anglo-Saxon stock with irresistible force; but none has exercised Stevenson’s peculiar and personal power to charm, to attach, and to inspirit. By his study of perfection in form and style—qualities for which his countrymen in general have been apt to care little—he might seem destined to give pleasure chiefly to the fastidious and the artistically minded. But as to its matter, the main appeal of his work is not to any mental tastes and fashions of the few; it is rather to universal, hereditary instincts, to the primitive sources of imaginative excitement and entertainment in the race.
By virtue, then, of this double appeal of form and matter; by his especial hold upon the young, in whose spirit so much of his best work was done; by his undecaying influence on other writers; by the spell which he still exercises from the grave, and exercises most strongly on those who are most familiar with the best company whether of the living or the dead, Stevenson’s name and memory, so far as can be judged at present, seem destined not to dwindle, but to grow. The voice of the advocatus diaboli has been heard against him, as it is right and proper that it should be heard against any man before his reputation can be held fully established. One such advocate in this country has thought to dispose of him by the charge of ‘externality.’ But the reader who remembers things like the sea-frenzy of Gordon Darnaway, or the dialogue of Markheim with his other self in the house of murder, or the re-baptism of the spirit of Seraphina in the forest dews, or the failure of Herrick to find in the waters of the island lagoon a last release from dishonour, or the death of Goguelat, or the appeal of Kirstie Elliot in the midnight chamber—such a reader can only smile at a criticism like this and put it by. These and a score of other passages breathe the essential poetry and significance of things as they reveal themselves to true masters only—are instinct at once with the morality and the romance which lie deep together at the soul of nature and experience. Not in vain had Stevenson read the lesson of the Lantern-Bearers, and hearkened to the music of the pipes of Pan. He was feeling his way all his life towards a fuller mastery of his means, preferring always to leave unexpressed what he felt that he could not express perfectly; and in much of his work was content merely to amuse himself and others. But even when he is playing most fancifully with his art and his readers, as in the shudders, tempered with laughter, of the Suicide Club, or the airy sentimental comedy of Providence and the Guitar, or the schoolboy historical inventions of Dickon Crookback and the old sailor Arblaster, a writer of his quality cannot help striking notes from the heart of life and the inwardness of things deeper than will ever be struck, or even apprehended, by another who labours, with never a smile either of his own or of his reader’s, upon the most solemn enterprises of realistic fiction, but is born without the magician’s touch and insight.
Another advocate on the same side, in the United States, has made much of the supposed dependence of this author on his models, and classed him among writers whose inspiration is imitative and second-hand. But this, surely, is to be quite misled by the well-known passage of Stevenson’s own, in which he speaks of himself as having in his prentice years played the ‘sedulous ape’ to many writers of different styles and periods. In doing this he was not seeking inspiration, but simply practising the use of the tools which were to help him to express his own inspirations. Truly he was always much of a reader; but it was life, not books, that always in the first degree allured and taught him.
‘He loved of life the myriad sides,
Pain, prayer, or pleasure, act or sleep,
As wallowing narwhals love the deep’—
so with just self-knowledge he wrote of himself; and the books which he most cared for and lived with were those of which the writers seemed—to quote again a phrase of his own—to have been ‘eavesdropping at the door of his heart’; those which told of moods, impressions, experiences or cravings after experience, pains, pleasures, opinions or conflicts of the spirit, which in the eagerness of youthful living and thinking had already been his own. No man, in fact, was ever less inclined to take anything at second-hand. The root of all originality was in him, in the shape of an extreme natural vividness of perception, imagination, and feeling. An instinctive and inbred unwillingness to accept the accepted and conform to the conventional was of the essence of his character, whether in life or art, and was a source to him both of strength and weakness. He would not follow a general rule—least of all if it was a prudential rule—of conduct unless he was clear that it was right according to his private conscience; nor would he join, in youth, in the ordinary social amusements of his class when he had once found out that they did not amuse him; nor wear their clothes if he could not feel at ease and be himself in them; nor use, whether in speech or writing, any trite or inanimate form of words that did not faithfully and livingly express his thought. A readier acceptance of current usages might have been better for him, but was simply not in his nature. ‘Damp gingerbread puppets’ were to him the persons who lived and thought and felt and acted only as was expected of them. ‘To see people skipping all round us with their eyes sealed up with indifference, knowing nothing of the earth or man or woman, going automatically to offices and saying they are happy or unhappy, out of a sense of duty I suppose, surely at least from no sense of happiness or unhappiness, unless perhaps they have a tooth that twinges—is it not like a bad dream?’ No reader of this book will close it, I am sure, without feeling that he has been throughout in the company of a spirit various indeed and many-mooded, but profoundly sincere and real. Ways that in another might easily have been mere signs of affectation were in him the true expression of a nature ten times more spontaneously itself and individually alive than that of others. Self-consciousness, in many characters that possess it, deflects and falsifies conduct; and so does the dramatic instinct. Stevenson was self-conscious in a high degree, but only as a part of his general activity of mind; only in so far as he could not help being an extremely intelligent spectator of his own doings and feelings; these themselves came from springs of character and impulse much too deep and strong to be diverted. He loved also, with a child’s or actor’s gusto, to play a part and make a drama out of life; [xxi] but the part was always for the moment his very own: he had it not in him to pose for anything but what he truly was.
When a man so constituted had once mastered his craft of letters, he might take up whatever instrument he pleased with the instinctive and just confidence that he would play upon it to a tune and with a manner of his own. This is indeed the true mark and test of his originality. He has no need to be, or to seem, especially original in the form and mode of literature which he attempts. By his choice of these he may at any time give himself and his reader the pleasure of recalling, like a familiar air, some strain of literary association; but in so doing he only adds a secondary charm to his work; the vision, the temperament, the mode of conceiving and handling, are in every case strongly personal to himself. He may try his hand in youth at a Sentimental Journey, but R. L. S. cannot choose but be at the opposite pole of human character and feeling from Laurence Sterne. In tales of mystery, allegorical or other, he may bear in mind the precedent of Edgar Poe, and yet there is nothing in style and temper much wider apart than Markheim and Jekyll and Hyde are from the Murders in the Rue Morgue or William Wilson. He may set out to tell a pirate story for boys ‘exactly in the ancient way,’ and it will come from him not in the ancient way at all, but re-minted; marked with a sharpness and saliency in the characters, a private stamp of buccaneering ferocity combined with smiling humour, an energy of vision and happy vividness of presentment, which are shiningly his own. Another time, he may desert the paths of Kingston and Ballantyne the brave for those of Sir Walter Scott; but literature presents few stronger contrasts than between any scene of Waverley or Redgauntlet and any scene of the Master of Ballantrae or Catriona, whether in their strength or weakness: and it is the most loyal lovers of the older master who take the greatest pleasure in reading the work of the younger, so much less opulently gifted as is probable—though we must remember that Stevenson died at the age when Scott wrote Waverley—so infinitely more careful of his gift. Stevenson may even blow upon the pipe of Burns, and yet his tune will be no echo, but one which utters the heart and mind of a Scots poet who has his own outlook on life, his own special and profitable vein of smiling or satirical contemplation.
Not by reason, then, of ‘externality,’ for sure, nor yet of imitativeness, will this writer lose his hold on the attention and regard of his countrymen. The debate, before his place in literature is settled, must rather turn on other points: as whether the genial essayist and egoist or the romantic inventor and narrator was the stronger in him—whether the Montaigne and Pepys elements prevailed in his literary composition or the Scott and Dumas elements—a question indeed which among those who care for him most has always been at issue. Or again, what degree of true inspiring and illuminating power belongs to the gospel, or gospels, airily encouraging or gravely didactic, which are set forth in the essays with so captivating a grace? Or whether in romance and tale he had a power of happily inventing and soundly constructing a whole fable comparable to his unquestionable power of conceiving and presenting single scenes and situations in a manner which stamps them indelibly on the reader’s mind. And whether his figures are sustained continuously by the true, large, spontaneous breath of creation, or are but transitorily animated at critical and happy moments by flashes of spiritual and dramatic insight, aided by the conscious devices of his singularly adroit and spirited art? This is a question which no criticism but that of time can solve; it takes the consenting instinct of generations to feel whether the creatures of fiction, however powerfully they may strike at first, are durably and equably, or ephemerally and fitfully, alive. To contend, as some do, that strong creative impulse, and so keen an artistic self-consciousness as Stevenson’s was, cannot exist together, is quite idle. The truth, of course, is that the deep-seated energies of imaginative creation are found sometimes in combination, and sometimes not in combination, with an artistic intelligence thus keenly conscious of its own purpose and watchful of its own working.
Once more, it may be questioned whether, among the many varieties of work which Stevenson has left, all touched with genius, all charming and stimulating to the literary sense, all distinguished by a grace and precision of workmanship which are the rarest qualities in English art, there are any which can be pointed to as absolute masterpieces, such as the future cannot be expected to let die. Let the future decide. What is certain is that posterity must either be very well, or very ill, occupied if it can consent to give up so much sound entertainment, and better than entertainment, as this writer afforded his contemporaries. In the meantime, among judicious readers on both sides of the Atlantic, Stevenson stands, I think it may safely be said, as a true master of English prose; unsurpassed for the union of lenity and lucidity with suggestive pregnancy and poetic animation; for harmony of cadence and the well-knit structure of sentences; and for the art of imparting to words the vital quality of things, and making them convey the precise—sometimes, let it be granted, the too curiously precise—expression of the very shade and colour of the thought, feeling, or vision in his mind. He stands, moreover, as the writer who, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, has handled with the most of freshness and inspiriting power the widest range of established literary forms—the moral, critical, and personal essay, travels sentimental and other, romances and short tales both historical and modern, parables and tales of mystery, boys’ stories of adventure, memoirs—nor let lyrical and meditative verse both English and Scottish, and especially nursery verse, a new vein for genius to work in, be forgotten. To some of these forms Stevenson gave quite new life; through all alike he expressed vividly an extremely personal way of seeing and being, a sense of nature and romance, of the aspects of human existence and problems of human conduct, which was essentially his own. And in so doing he contrived to make friends and even lovers of his readers. Those whom he attracts at all (and there is no writer who attracts every one) are drawn to him over and over again, finding familiarity not lessen but increase the charm of his work, and desiring ever closer intimacy with the spirit and personality which they divine behind it.
As to the fitting scale, then, on which to treat the memory of a man who fills five years after his death such a place as this in the public regard, the words ‘selection’ and ‘sketch’ have evidently to be given a pretty liberal interpretation. Readers, it must be supposed, will scarce be content without both a fairly full biography, and the opportunity of a fairly ample intercourse with the man as he was accustomed to reveal himself in writing to his familiars. As to form—Stevenson’s own words and the nature of the material alike seem to indicate that the Life and the Letters should be kept separate. There are some kinds of correspondence which can conveniently be woven into the body and texture of a biography, though indeed I think it is a plan to which biographers are much too partial. Nothing, surely, more checks the flow of a narrative than its interruption by stationary blocks of correspondence; nothing more disconcerts the reader than a too frequent or too abrupt alternation of voices between the subject of a biography speaking in his letters and the writer of it speaking in his narrative. At least it is only when letters are occupied, as Macaulay’s for instance were, almost entirely with facts and events, that they can without difficulty be handled in this way. But events and facts, ‘sordid facts,’ as he called them, were not very often suffered to intrude into Stevenson’s correspondence. ‘I deny,’ he writes, ‘that letters should contain news (I mean mine; those of other people should). But mine should contain appropriate sentiments and humorous nonsense, or nonsense without the humour.’ Business letters, letters of information, and letters of courtesy he had sometimes to write: but when he wrote best was under the influence of the affection or impression, or the mere whim or mood, of the moment; pouring himself out in all manner of rhapsodical confessions and speculations, grave or gay, notes of observation and criticism, snatches of remembrance and autobiography, moralisings on matters uppermost for the hour in his mind, comments on his own work or other people’s, or mere idle fun and foolery.
With a letter-writer of this character, as it seems to me, a judicious reader desires to be left as much alone as possible. What he wants is to relish the correspondence by itself, or with only just so much in the way of notes and introductions as may serve to make allusions and situations clear. Two volumes, then, of letters so edited, to be preceded by a separate introductory volume of narrative and critical memoir, or étude—such was to be the memorial to my friend which I had planned, and hoped by this time to have ready. Unfortunately, the needful leisure has hitherto failed me, and might fail me for some time yet, to complete the separate volume of biography. That is now, at the wish of the family, to be undertaken by Stevenson’s cousin and my friend, Mr. Graham Balfour. Meanwhile the Letters, with introductions and notes somewhat extended from the original plan, are herewith presented as a substantive work by themselves.
The book will enable those who know and love their Stevenson already to know him more intimately, and, as I hope, to love him more. It contains, certainly, much that is most essentially characteristic of the man. To some, perhaps, that very lack of art as a correspondent of which we have found him above accusing himself may give the reading an added charm and flavour. What he could do as an artist we know—what a telling power and heightened thrill he could give to all his effects, in so many different modes of expression and composition, by calculated skill and the deliberate exercise of a perfectly trained faculty. This is the quality which nobody denies him, and which so deeply impressed his fellow-craftsmen of all kinds. I remember the late Sir John Millais, a shrewd and very independent judge of books, calling across to me at a dinner-table, ‘You know Stevenson, don’t you?’ and then going on, ‘Well, I wish you would tell him from me, if he cares to know, that to my mind he is the very first of living artists. I don’t mean writers merely, but painters and all of us: nobody living can see with such an eye as that fellow, and nobody is such a master of his tools.’ Now in his letters, excepting a few written in youth, and having more or less the character of exercises, and a few in after years which were intended for the public eye, Stevenson the deliberate artist is scarcely forthcoming at all. He does not care a fig for order or logical sequence or congruity, or for striking a key of expression and keeping it, but becomes simply the most spontaneous and unstudied of human beings. He will write with the most distinguished elegance on one day, with simple good sense and good feeling on a second, with flat triviality on another, and with the most slashing, often ultra-colloquial, vehemence on a fourth, or will vary through all these moods and more in one and the same letter. He has at his command the whole vocabularies of the English and Scottish languages, classical and slang, with good stores of the French, and tosses and tumbles them about irresponsibly to convey the impression or affection, the mood or freak of the moment. Passages or phrases of the craziest schoolboy or seafaring slang come tumbling after and capping others of classical cadence and purity, of poetical and heartfelt eloquence. By this medley of moods and manners, Stevenson’s letters at their best—the pick, let us say, of those in the following volumes which were written from Hyères or Bournemouth—come nearer than anything else to the full-blooded charm and variety of his conversation.
Nearer, yet not quite near; for it was in company only that this genial spirit rose to his very best. Those whom his writings charm or impress, but who never knew him, can but imagine how doubly they would have been charmed and impressed by his presence. Few men probably, certainly none that I have ever seen or read of, have had about them such a richness and variety of human nature; and few can ever have been better gifted than he was to express the play of being that was in him by means of the apt, expressive word and the animated look and gesture. Divers et ondoyant, in the words of Montaigne, beyond other men, he seemed to contain within himself a whole troop of singularly assorted characters—the poet and artist, the moralist and preacher, the humourist and jester, the man of great heart and tender conscience, the man of eager appetite and curiosity, the Bohemian, impatient of restraints and shams, the adventurer and lover of travel and of action: characters, several of them, not rare separately, especially among his Scottish fellow-countrymen, but rare indeed to be found united, and each in such fulness and intensity, within the bounds of a single personality.
Before all things Stevenson was a born poet, to whom the world was full of enchantment and of latent romance, only waiting to take shape and substance in the forms art. It was his birthright—
‘to hear
The great bell beating far and near—
The odd, unknown, enchanted gong
That on the road hales men along,
That from the mountain calls afar,
That lures the vessel from a star,
And with a still, aerial sound
Makes all the earth enchanted ground.’
At the same time, he was not less a born preacher and moralist after his fashion. A true son of the Covenanters, he had about him little spirit of social or other conformity; but an active and searching private conscience kept him for ever calling in question both the grounds of his own conduct and the validity of the accepted codes and compromises of society. He must try to work out a scheme of morality suitable to his own case and temperament, which found the prohibitory law of Moses chill and uninspiring, but in the Sermon on the Mount a strong incentive to all those impulses of pity and charity to which his heart was prone. In youth his sense of social injustice and the inequalities of human opportunity made him inwardly much of a rebel, who would have embraced and acted on theories of socialism or communism, could he have found any that did not seem to him at variance with ineradicable instincts of human nature. [xxx] All his life the artist and the moralist in him alike were in rebellion against the bourgeois spirit,—against timid, negative, and shuffling substitutes for active and courageous well-doing,—and declined to worship at the shrine of what he called the bestial goddesses Comfort and Respectability. The moralist in him helped the artist by backing with the force of a highly sensitive conscience his instinctive love of perfection in his work. The poet and artist qualified the moralist by discountenancing any preference for the harsh, the sour, or the self-mortifying forms of virtue, and encouraging the love for all tender or heroic, glowing, generous and cheerful forms.
In another aspect of his many-sided being Stevenson was not less a born adventurer and practical experimentalist in life. Many poets are content to dream, and many, perhaps most, moralists to preach; but Stevenson must ever be doing and undergoing. He was no sentimentalist, to pay himself with fine feelings whether for mean action or slack inaction. He had an insatiable zest for all experiences, not the pleasurable only, but including even the more harsh and biting—those that bring home to a man the pinch and sting of existence as it is realised by the disinherited of the world, and excluding only what he thought the prim, the conventional, the dead-alive, and the cut-and-dry. On occasion the experimentalist and man of adventure in him would enter into special partnership with the moralist and man of conscience; he loved to find himself in difficult social passes and ethical dilemmas for the sake of trying to behave in them to the utmost according to his own personal sense of the obligations of honour, duty, and kindness. In yet another part of his being, he cherished, as his great countryman Scott had done before him, an intense underlying longing for the life of action, danger, and command. ‘Action, Colvin, action,’ I remember his crying eagerly to me with his hand on my arm as we lay basking for his health’s sake in a boat off the scented shores of the Cap St. Martin. Another time—this was on his way to a winter cure at Davos—some friend had given him General Hamley’s Operations of War:—‘in which,’ he writes to his father, ‘I am drowned a thousand fathoms deep, and O that I had been a soldier is still my cry.’ In so frail a tabernacle was it that the aspirations of the artist, the unconventional moralist, the lover of all experience, and the lover of daring action had to learn to reconcile themselves as best they might. Frail as it was, it contained withal a strong animal nature, and he was as much exposed to the storms and solicitations of sense as to the cravings and questionings of the spirit. Fortunately, with all these ardent and divers instincts, there were present two invaluable gifts besides—that of humour, which for all his stress of being and vivid consciousness of self saved him from ever seeing himself for long together out of a just proportion, and kept wholesome laughter always ready at his lips; and that of 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. In the end, lack of health determined his career, giving the chief part in his life to the artist and man of imagination, and keeping the man of action a prisoner in the sickroom until, by a singular turn of destiny, he was able to wring a real, prolonged, and romantically successful adventure out of that voyage to the Pacific which had been, in its origin, the last despairing resource of the invalid.
To take this multiple personality from another point of view, it was part of his genius that he never seemed to be cramped like the rest of us, at any given time of life, within the limits of his proper age, but to be child, boy, young man, and old man all at once. There was never a time in his life when Stevenson had to say with St. Augustine, ‘Behold! my childhood is dead, but I am alive.’ The child, as his Garden of Verses vividly attests, and as will be seen by abundant evidence in the course of the following pages, lived on always in him, not in memory only, but in real survival, with all its freshness of perception unimpaired, and none of its play instincts in the least degree extinguished or made ashamed. As for the perennial boy in Stevenson, that is too apparent to need remark. It was as a boy for boys that he wrote the best known of his books, Treasure Island; with all boys that he met, provided they were really boys and not prigs nor puppies, he was instantly at home; and the ideal of a career which he most inwardly and longingly cherished, the ideals of practical adventure and romance, of desirable predicaments and gratifying modes of escape from them, were from first to last those of a boy. At the same time, even when I first knew him, there were about him occasional traits and glimpses of old sagacity, of premature life-wisdom and experience, such as find expression, for instance, in the essay Virginibus Puerisque, among other matter more according with his then age of twenty-six.
Again, it is said that in every poet there must be something of the woman—the receptivity, the emotional nature. If to be impressionable in the extreme, quick in sympathy and feeling, ardent in attachment, and full of pity for the weak and suffering, is to be womanly, Stevenson was certainly all those; he was even like a woman in being ἀρτίδακρυς, easily moved to tears at the touch of pity or affection, or even at any specially poignant impression of art or beauty. But yet, if any one word were to be chosen for the predominant quality of his character and example, I suppose that word would be manly. In all his habits and instincts he was the least effeminate of men; and effeminacy, or aught approaching sexlessness, was perhaps the only quality in man with which he had no patience. In his gentle and complying nature there were strains of iron tenacity and will. He had both kinds of physical courage—the active, delighting in danger, and the passive, unshaken in endurance. In the moral courage of facing situations and consequences, of cheerful self-discipline and readiness to pay for faults committed, of outspokenness, admitting no ambiguous relations and clearing away the clouds from human intercourse, I have not known his equal. His great countryman Scott, as this book will prove, was not more manfully free from artistic jealousy or the least shade of irritability under criticism, or more modestly and unfeignedly inclined to exaggerate the qualities of other people’s work and to underrate those of his own. His severest critic was always himself; the next most severe, those of his own household and intimacy, whose love made them jealous lest he should fall short of his best; for he lived in an atmosphere of love, indeed, but not of flattery. Of the humorous and engaging parts of vanity and egoism, which led him to make infinite talk and fun about himself, and use his own experiences as a key for unlocking the confidences of others, Stevenson had plenty; but of the morose and fretful parts never a shade. ‘A little Irish girl,’ he wrote once during a painful crisis of his life, ‘is now reading my book aloud to her sister at my elbow; they chuckle, and I feel flattered.—Yours, R. L. S. P.S. Now they yawn, and I am indifferent. Such a wisely conceived thing is vanity.’ If only vanity so conceived were commoner! And whatever might be the abstract and philosophical value of that somewhat grimly stoical conception of the universe, of conduct and duty, at which in mature years he had arrived, want of manliness is certainly not its fault. Nor is any such want to be found in the practice which he founded on or combined with it; in his invincible gaiety and sweetness under sufferings and deprivations the most galling to him; in the temper which made his presence in health or sickness a perpetual sunshine to those about him. Take the kind of maxims of life which he was accustomed to forge for himself and to act by:—‘Acts may be forgiven; not even God can forgive the hanger-back.’ ‘Choose the best, if you can; or choose the worst; that which hangs in the wind dangles from a gibbet.’ ‘“Shall I?” said Feeble-mind; and the echo said, “Fie!”’ ‘“Do I love?” said Loveless; and the echo laughed.’ ‘A fault known is a fault cured to the strong; but to the weak it is a fetter riveted.’ ‘The mean man doubts, the great-hearted is deceived.’ ‘Great-heart was deceived. “Very well,” said Great-heart.’ ‘“I have not forgotten my umbrella,” said the careful man; but the lightning struck him.’ ‘Nullity wanted nothing; so he supposed he wanted advice.’ ‘Evil was called Youth till he was old, and then he was called Habit.’ ‘Fear kept the house; and still he must pay taxes.’ ‘Shame had a fine bed, but where was slumber? Once he was in jail he slept.’ With this moralist maxims meant actions; and where shall we easily find a much manlier spirit of wisdom than this?
There was yet another and very different side to Stevenson which struck others more than it struck myself, namely, that of the perfectly freakish, not perfectly human, irresponsible madcap or jester which sometimes appeared in him. It is true that his demoniac quickness of wit and intelligence suggested occasionally a ‘spirit of air and fire’ rather than one of earth; that he was abundantly given to all kinds of quirk and laughter; and that there was no jest (saving the unkind) he would not make and relish. In the streets of Edinburgh he had certainly been known for queer pranks and mystifications in youth; and up to middle life there seemed to some of his friends to be much, if not of the Puck, at least of the Ariel, about him. The late Mr. J. A. Symonds always called him Sprite; qualifying the name, however, by the epithets ‘most fantastic, but most human.’ To me the essential humanity was always the thing most apparent. In a fire well nourished of seasoned ship-timber, the flames glance fantastically and of many colours, but the glow at heart is ever deep and strong; it was at such a glow that the friends of Stevenson were accustomed to warm their hands, while they admired and were entertained by the shifting lights.
It was only in talk, as I have said, that all the many lights and colours of this richly compounded spirit could be seen in full play. He would begin no matter how—in early days often with a jest at his own absurd garments, or with the recitation, in his vibrating voice and full Scotch accent, of some snatch of poetry that was haunting him, or with a rhapsody of analytic delight over some minute accident of beauty or expressiveness that had struck his observation, and would have escaped that of everybody else, in man, woman, child, or external nature. And forthwith the floodgates would be opened, and the talk would stream on in endless, never importunate, flood and variety. A hundred fictitious characters would be invented, differentiated, and launched on their imaginary careers; a hundred ingenious problems of conduct and cases of honour would be set and solved, in a manner often quite opposed to conventional precept; romantic voyages would be planned and followed out in vision, with a thousand incidents, to all the corners of our own planet and of others; the possibilities of life and art would be illuminated with glancing search-lights of bewildering range and penetration, the most sober argument alternating with the maddest freaks of fancy, high poetic eloquence with coruscations of insanely apposite slang—the earthiest jape anon shooting up into the empyrean and changing into the most ethereal fantasy—the stalest and most vulgarised forms of speech gaining brilliancy and illuminating power from some hitherto undreamt-of application—and all the while an atmosphere of goodwill diffusing itself from the speaker, a glow of eager benignity and affectionate laughter emanating from his presence, till every one about him seemed to catch something of his own gift and inspiration. This sympathetic power of inspiring others was the special and distinguishing note of Stevenson’s conversation. He would keep a houseful or a single companion entertained all day, and day after day and half the nights, yet never seemed to dominate the talk or absorb it; rather he helped every one about him to discover and to exercise unexpected powers of their own. The point could hardly be better brought out than it is in a fragment which I borrow from Mr. Henley of an unpublished character-sketch of his friend: ‘I leave his praise in this direction (the telling of Scottish vernacular stories) to others. It is more to my purpose to note that he will discourse with you of morals, music, marbles, men, manners, metaphysics, medicine, mangold-wurzel—que scays-je?—with equal insight into essentials and equal pregnancy and felicity of utterance; and that he will stop with you to make mud pies in the first gutter, range in your company whatever heights of thought and feeling you have found accessible, and end by guiding you to altitudes far nearer the stars than you have ever dreamed of footing it; and that at the last he makes you wonder which to admire the more—his easy familiarity with the Eternal Veracities or the brilliant flashes of imbecility with which his excursions into the Infinite are sometimes diversified. He radiates talk, as the sun does light and heat; and after an evening—or a week—with him, you come forth with a sense of satisfaction in your own capacity which somehow proves superior even to the inevitable conclusion that your brilliance was but the reflection of his own, and that all the while you were only playing the part of Rubinstein’s piano or Sarasate’s violin.’
All this the reader should imagine as helped by the most speaking of presences: a steady, penetrating fire in the wide-set eyes, a compelling power and sweetness in the smile; courteous, waving gestures of the arms and long, nervous hands, a lit cigarette generally held between the fingers; continual rapid shiftings and pacings to and fro as he conversed: rapid, but not flurried nor awkward, for there was a grace in his attenuated but well-carried figure, and his movements were light, deft, and full of spring. When I first knew him he was passing through a period of neatness between two of Bohemian carelessness as to dress; so that the effect of his charm was immediate. At other times of his youth there was something for strangers, and even for friends, to get over in the odd garments which it was his whim to wear—the badge, as they always seemed to me, partly of a genuine carelessness, certainly of a genuine lack of cash (the little he had was always absolutely at the disposal of his friends), partly of a deliberate detachment from any particular social class or caste, partly of his love of pickles and adventures, which he thought befel a man thus attired more readily than another. But this slender, slovenly, nondescript apparition, long-visaged and long-haired, had only to speak in order to be recognised in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman, and within the first five for a master spirit and man of genius. There were, indeed, certain stolidly conventional and superciliously official kinds of persons, both at home and abroad, who were incapable of looking beyond the clothes, and eyed him always with frozen suspicion. This attitude used sometimes in youth to drive him into fits of flaming anger, which put him helplessly at a disadvantage unless, or until, he could call the sense of humour to his help. For the rest, his human charm was the same for all kinds of people, without the least distinction of class or caste; for worldly wise old great ladies, whom he reminded of famous poets in their youth; for his brother artists and men of letters, perhaps, above all; for the ordinary clubman; for his physicians, who could never do enough for him; for domestic servants, who adored him; for the English policeman even, on whom he often tried, quite in vain, to pass himself as one of the criminal classes; for the common seaman, the shepherd, the street arab, or the tramp. Even in the imposed silence and restraint of extreme sickness the magnetic power and attraction of the man made itself felt, and there seemed to be more vitality and fire of the spirit in him as he lay exhausted and speechless in bed than in an ordinary roomful of people in health.
But I have strayed from my purpose, which is only to indicate that in the best of these letters of Stevenson’s you have some echo, far away indeed, but yet the nearest, of his talk—talk which could never be taken down, and has left only an ineffaceable impression in the memory of his friends. The letters, it should be added, do not represent him at all fully until about the thirtieth year of his age, the beginning of the settled and married period of his life. From then onwards, and especially from the beginning of Part VI. (the Hyères period), they present a pretty full and complete autobiography, if not of doings, at any rate of moods and feelings. In the earlier periods, his correspondence for the most part expresses his real self either too little or else one-sidedly. I have omitted very many letters of his boyish and student days as being too immature or uninteresting; and many of the confidences and confessions of his later youth, though they are those of a beautiful spirit, whether as too intimate, or as giving a disproportionate prominence to passing troubles. When he is found in these days writing in a melancholy or minor key, it must be remembered that at the same moment, in direct intercourse with any friend, his spirits would instantly rise, and he would be found the gayest of laughing companions. Very many letters or snatches of letters of nearly all dates to his familiars have also been omitted as not intelligible without a knowledge of the current jests, codes, and catchwords of conversation between him and them. At one very interesting period of his life, from about his twenty-fifth to his twenty-ninth year, he disused the habit of letter-writing almost entirely.
In choosing from among what remained I have used the best discretion that I could. Stevenson’s feelings and relations throughout life were in almost all directions so warm and kindly, that next to nothing had to be suppressed from fear of giving pain. On the other hand, he drew people towards him with so much confidence and affection, and met their openness with so much of his own, that an editor could not but feel the frequent risk of inviting readers to trespass too far on purely private affairs and feelings, including those of the living. This was a point upon which in his lifetime he felt strongly. That excellent critic, Mr. Walter Raleigh, has noticed, as one of the merits of Stevenson’s personal essays and accounts of travel, that few men have written more or more attractively of themselves without ever taking the public unduly into familiarity or overstepping proper bounds of reticence. Public prying into private lives, the propagation of gossip by the press, and printing of private letters during the writer’s lifetime, were things he hated. Once, indeed, he very superfluously gave himself a dangerous cold by dancing before a bonfire in his garden at the news of a ‘society’ editor having been committed to prison; and the only approach to a difference he ever had with one of his lifelong friends arose from the publication, without permission, of one of his letters written on his first Pacific voyage (see below, vol. ii. p. 121).
How far, then, must I regard his instructions about publication as authorising me to go after his death beyond the limits which he had been so careful in observing and desiring others to observe in life? How much may now fairly become public of that which had been held sacred and hitherto private among his friends? To cut out all that is strictly personal and intimate were to leave his story untold and half the charm of his character unrevealed; to put in too much were to break all bonds of that privacy which he so carefully regarded while he lived. I know not if I have at all been able to hit the mean, and to succeed in making these letters, as it has been my object to make them, present, without offence or intrusion, a just, a living, and a proportionate picture of the man, so far as they will yield it. There is one respect in which his own practice and principle has had to be in some degree violated, if the work was to be done at all. Except in the single case of the essay ‘Ordered South,’ he would never in writing for the public adopt the invalid point of view, or invite any attention to his infirmities. ‘To me,’ he says, ‘the medicine bottles on my chimney and the blood on my handkerchief are accidents; they do not colour my view of life; and I should think myself a trifler and in bad taste if I introduced the world to these unimportant privacies.’ But from his letters to his family and friends, these matters could not possibly be quite left out. The tale of his life, in the years when he was most of a correspondent, was in truth a tale of daily and nightly battle against weakness and physical distress and danger. To those who loved him, the incidents of this battle were communicated, sometimes gravely, sometimes laughingly. I have very greatly cut down such bulletins, but could not manage to omit them altogether. Generally speaking, I have used the editorial privilege of omission without scruple where I thought it desirable. And in regard to the text, I have not held myself bound to reproduce all the author’s minor eccentricities of spelling and the like. As all his friends are aware, to spell in a quite accurate and grown-up manner was a thing which this master of English letters was never able to learn; but to reproduce such trivial slips in print is, I think, to distract the reader’s attention from the main matter. A normal orthography has therefore been adopted throughout.
Lastly, I have to express my thanks to my friend Mr. George Smith, proprietor of the Dictionary of National Biography, for permission to reprint in this and in following sectional introductions a few paragraphs from that work.
S. C.
August 1899.
I
STUDENT DAYS AT EDINBURGH
TRAVELS AND EXCURSIONS
1868–1873
INTRODUCTION.
The following section consists chiefly of extracts from the correspondence and journals addressed by Louis Stevenson, as a lad of eighteen to twenty-two, to his father and mother during summer excursions to the Scottish coast or to the continent. There exist enough of them to fill a volume; but it is not in letters of this kind to his family that a young man unbosoms himself most freely, and these are perhaps not quite devoid of the qualities of the guide-book and the descriptive exercise. Nevertheless, they seem to me to contain enough signs of the future master-writer, enough of character, observation, and skill in expression, to make a few worth giving by way of an opening chapter to the present book. Among them are interspersed one or two of a different character addressed to other correspondents.
But, first, it is desirable that readers not acquainted with the circumstances and conditions of Stevenson’s parentage and early life should be here, as briefly as possible, informed of them. On both sides of the house he came of capable and cultivated stock. His grandfather was Robert Stevenson, civil engineer, highly distinguished as the builder of the Bell Rock lighthouse. By this Robert Stevenson, his three sons, and two of his grandsons now living, the business of civil engineers in general, and of official engineers to the Commissioners of Northern Lights in particular, has been carried on at Edinburgh with high credit and public utility for almost a century. Thomas Stevenson, the youngest of the three sons of the original Robert, was Robert Louis Stevenson’s father. He was a man not only of mark, zeal, and inventiveness in his profession, but of a singularly interesting personality; a staunch friend and sagacious adviser, trenchant in judgment and demonstrative in emotion, outspoken, dogmatic,—despotic, even, in little things, but withal essentially chivalrous and soft-hearted; apt to pass with the swiftest transition from moods of gloom or sternness to those of tender or freakish gaiety, and commanding a gift of humorous and figurative speech second only to that of his more famous son.
Thomas Stevenson was married to Margaret Isabella, youngest daughter of the Rev. Lewis Balfour, for many years minister of the parish of Colinton in Midlothian. This Mr. Balfour (described by his grandson in the essay called ‘The Manse’) was of the stock of the Balfours of Pilrig, and grandson to that James Balfour, professor first of moral philosophy, and afterwards of the law of nature and of nations, who was held in particular esteem as a philosophical controversialist by David Hume. His wife, Henrietta Smith, a daughter of the Rev. George Smith of Galston, to whose gift as a preacher Burns refers scoffingly in the Holy Fair, is said to have been a woman of uncommon beauty and charm of manner. Their daughter, Mrs. Thomas Stevenson, suffered in early and middle life from chest and nerve troubles, and her son may have inherited from her some of his constitutional weakness as well as of his social and intellectual vivacity and his taste for letters. Robert Louis (baptized Robert Lewis Balfour) Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850, at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, and was the only child of his parents. His health was infirm from the first, and he was with difficulty kept alive by the combined care of a capable and watchful mother and a perfectly devoted nurse, Alison Cunningham; to whom his lifelong gratitude will be found touchingly expressed in the course of the following letters. In 1858 he was near dying of a gastric fever, and was at all times subject to acute catarrhal and bronchial affections and extreme nervous excitability. In January 1853 his parents moved to 1 Inverleith Terrace, and in May 1857 to 17 Heriot Row, which continued to be their Edinburgh home until the death of Thomas Stevenson in 1887. Much of his time was also spent in the manse of Colinton on the Water of Leith, the home of his maternal grandfather. Of this place his childish recollections were happy and idyllic, while those of city life were coloured rather by impressions of sickness, fever, and nocturnal terrors. If, however, he suffered much as a child from the distresses, he also enjoyed to the full the pleasures, of imagination. Illness confined him much within the house, but imagination kept him always content and busy. In the days of the Crimean war some one gave the child a cheap toy sword; and when his father depreciated it, he said, ‘I tell you, the sword is of gold, and the sheath of silver, and the boy is very well off and quite contented.’ As disabilities closed in on him in after life, he would never grumble at any gift, however niggardly, of fortune, and the anecdote is as characteristic of the man as of the child. He was eager and full of invention in every kind of play, whether solitary or sociable, and seems to have been treated as something of a small, sickly prince among a whole cousinhood of playmates of both the Balfour and the Stevenson connections. He was also a greedy reader, or rather listener to reading; for it was not until his eighth year that he began to read easily or habitually to himself. He has recorded how his first conscious impression of pleasure from the sound and cadence of words was received from certain passages in M‘Cheyne’s hymns as recited to him by his nurse. Bible stories, the Pilgrim’s Progress, and Mayne Reid’s tales were especially, and it would seem equally, his delight. He began early to take pleasure in attempts at composition of his own. A history of Moses, dictated in his sixth year, and an account of travels in Perth, in his ninth, are still extant. Ill health prevented him getting much regular or continuous schooling. He attended first (1858–61) a preparatory school kept by a Mr. Henderson in India Street; and next (at intervals for some time after the autumn of 1861) the Edinburgh Academy. One of his tutors at the former school writes: ‘He was the most delightful boy I ever knew; full of fun, full of tender feeling, ready for his lessons, ready for a story, ready for fun.’ From very early days, both as child and boy, he must have had something of that power to charm which distinguished him above other men in after life. ‘I loike that bo-o-o-o-y,’ a heavy Dutchman was heard saying to himself over and over again, whom at the age of about thirteen he had held in amused conversation during a whole passage from Ostend. The same quality, with the signs which he always showed of quick natural intelligence when he chose to learn, must have helped to spare him many punishments from teachers which he earned by persistent and ingenious truantry. ‘I think,’ remarks his mother, ‘they liked talking to him better than teaching him.’
For a few months in the autumn of 1863, when his parents had been ordered to winter at Mentone for the sake of his mother’s health, he was sent to a boarding-school kept by a Mr. Wyatt at Spring Grove, near London. It is not my intention to treat the reader to the series of childish and boyish letters of these days which parental fondness has preserved. But here is one written from his English school when he was about thirteen, which is both amusing in itself and had a certain influence on his destiny, inasmuch as his appeal led to his being taken out to join his parents on the French Riviera; which from that day forward he never ceased to love, and for which the longing, amid the gloom of Edinburgh winters, often afterwards gripped him by the heart.
Spring Grove School, 12th November 1863.
MA CHERE MAMAN,—Jai recu votre lettre Aujourdhui et comme le jour prochaine est mon jour de naisance je vous écrit ce lettre. Ma grande gatteaux est arrivé il leve 12 livres et demi le prix etait 17 shillings. Sur la soirée de Monseigneur Faux il y etait quelques belles feux d’artifice. Mais les polissons entrent dans notre champ et nos feux d’artifice et handkerchiefs disappeared quickly, but we charged them out of the field. Je suis presque driven mad par une bruit terrible tous les garcons kik up comme grand un bruit qu’ll est possible. I hope you will find your house at Mentone nice. I have been obliged to stop from writing by the want of a pen, but now I have one, so I will continue.
My dear papa, you told me to tell you whenever I was miserable. I do not feel well, and I wish to get home.
Do take me with you.
R. Stevenson.
2 Sulyarde Terrace, Torquay, Thursday (April 1866).
RESPECTED PATERNAL RELATIVE,—I write to make a request of the most moderate nature. Every year I have cost you an enormous—nay, elephantine—sum of money for drugs and physician’s fees, and the most expensive time of the twelve months was March.
But this year the biting Oriental blasts, the howling tempests, and the general ailments of the human race have been successfully braved by yours truly.
Does not this deserve remuneration?
I appeal to your charity, I appeal to your generosity, I appeal to your justice, I appeal to your accounts, I appeal, in fine, to your purse.
My sense of generosity forbids the receipt of more—my sense of justice forbids the receipt of less—than half-a-crown.—Greeting from, Sir, your most affectionate and needy son,
R. Stevenson.
to Mrs. Thomas Stevenson
Wick, Friday, September 11, 1868.
MY DEAR MOTHER,—. . . Wick lies at the end or elbow of an open triangular bay, hemmed on either side by shores, either cliff or steep earth-bank, of no great height. The grey houses of Pulteney extend along the southerly shore almost to the cape; and it is about half-way down this shore—no, six-sevenths way down—that the new breakwater extends athwart the bay.
Certainly Wick in itself possesses no beauty: bare, grey shores, grim grey houses, grim grey sea; not even the gleam of red tiles; not even the greenness of a tree. The southerly heights, when I came here, were black with people, fishers waiting on wind and night. Now all the S.Y.S. (Stornoway boats) have beaten out of the bay, and the Wick men stay indoors or wrangle on the quays with dissatisfied fish-curers, knee-high in brine, mud, and herring refuse. The day when the boats put out to go home to the Hebrides, the girl here told me there was ‘a black wind’; and on going out, I found the epithet as justifiable as it was picturesque. A cold, black southerly wind, with occasional rising showers of rain; it was a fine sight to see the boats beat out a-teeth of it.
In Wick I have never heard any one greet his neighbour with the usual ‘Fine day’ or ‘Good morning.’ Both come shaking their heads, and both say, ‘Breezy, breezy!’ And such is the atrocious quality of the climate, that the remark is almost invariably justified by the fact.
The streets are full of the Highland fishers, lubberly, stupid, inconceivably lazy and heavy to move. You bruise against them, tumble over them, elbow them against the wall—all to no purpose; they will not budge; and you are forced to leave the pavement every step.
To the south, however, is as fine a piece of coast scenery as I ever saw. Great black chasms, huge black cliffs, rugged and over-hung gullies, natural arches, and deep green pools below them, almost too deep to let you see the gleam of sand among the darker weed: there are deep caves too. In one of these lives a tribe of gipsies. The men are always drunk, simply and truthfully always. From morning to evening the great villainous-looking fellows are either sleeping off the last debauch, or hulking about the cove ‘in the horrors.’ The cave is deep, high, and airy, and might be made comfortable enough. But they just live among heaped boulders, damp with continual droppings from above, with no more furniture than two or three tin pans, a truss of rotten straw, and a few ragged cloaks. In winter the surf bursts into the mouth and often forces them to abandon it.
An émeute of disappointed fishers was feared, and two ships of war are in the bay to render assistance to the municipal authorities. This is the ides; and, to all intents and purposes, said ides are passed. Still there is a good deal of disturbance, many drunk men, and a double supply of police. I saw them sent for by some people and enter an inn, in a pretty good hurry: what it was for I do not know.
You would see by papa’s letter about the carpenter who fell off the staging: I don’t think I was ever so much excited in my life. The man was back at his work, and I asked him how he was; but he was a Highlander, and—need I add it?—dickens a word could I understand of his answer. What is still worse, I find the people here-about—that is to say, the Highlanders, not the northmen—don’t understand me.
I have lost a shilling’s worth of postage stamps, which has damped my ardour for buying big lots of ’em: I’ll buy them one at a time as I want ’em for the future.
The Free Church minister and I got quite thick. He left last night about two in the morning, when I went to turn in. He gave me the enclosed.—I remain your affectionate son,
R. L. Stevenson.