Robert Louis Stevenson

by E. Blantyre Simpson

When bodily ailments held Stevenson as a captive in bonds, his keen sight pierced through the obstructions which held him caged. We are not left in doubt, when we read his books, as to whether his gaze was earthwards or to heaven's distant lamps. He taught others to see with his clear vision, and he expounded his gospel in so taking a manner, even if the import of it had savoured more of mud than stars, it would have been studied for its style. He had the true artist soul within him. He wished to create or represent what came within the range of those brilliant dark eyes of his, so, with infinite care and effort, he strove to attune his words to the even cadence and harmony with which he wished to amaze us, for, as A.J. Balfour said, "he was a man of the finest and most delicate imagination, a style which, for grace and suppleness, for its power of being at once turned to any purpose which the author desired, has seldom been matched." It is difficult for those who knew him before he had, by pure hard work, won his way to fame, to realise how one physically so fragile, of so light-somely versatile and whimsical a nature, apparently so ready to be diverted from the main high-road by a desire to explore any brambly lane, had in him the deliberate goal-winning gait of the tortoise. His stubborn tenacity of purpose he owed to his antecedents. The Scot's inalienable prerogative of pedigree exercised an influence over him, though he appeared as a foreign ingraft upon his Scotch family tree. In his record of his father's kinsfolk, A Family of Engineers, and in many of his essays, he engages his readers' attention by confiding to them his own and his forebears' history. "I am a rogue at egotism myself; and to be plain, I have rarely or never liked any man who was not," he says.

This Benjamin of Edinburgh's literary sons, the youngest, not the least, was born in the very middle of last century, 1850. This babe, that was to do Edinburgh honour yet, had been named after his two grandfathers, Robert Lewis. He was a mixture of both, the inevitable result of their diverse qualities, which he inherited. The Robert (a name he was seldom known by in his youth) was from the Stevenson side. They were a race of men of sterling metal, who lit our Northern Lights, and from the besieging sea wrung footholds for harbours. From them Robert Louis Stevenson inherited that tenacity of purpose which made him write and rewrite chapters till his phrases concisely expressed his meaning, and toilsomely labour till his work was perfected. His minister grandfather he etched with the "Old Manse." All his mother's people, the Balfours, were of a sanguine, hopeful strain, retaining an elasticity of spirit which never lessened under the burden of years. Stevenson writes of "that wise youth, my uncle," who was a grey-bearded doctor when his nephew thus referred to him. So from the daughter of the Herd of Men at Colinton he inherited his perennial youthfulness. "He was ever the spirit of boyhood," says Barrie, "tugging at the skirts of this old world, and compelling it to come back and play."

It was well for the boy that his mother had gifted him with her hopeful nature, for his father had Celtic traits in his character, and was oppressed with a morbid sense of his own unworthiness. It is Carlyle who vouches for the fact "that wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its power of endurance." Little store of bodily vigour had Robert Lewis; but with his buoyant, enthusiastic, inquisitive spirit he accomplished a strong man's task, "weaving his garlands when his mood was gay, mocking his sorrows with a solemn jest." This treasured only son, worshipped by his doting parents and his nurse, Alison Cunningham, who was a second mother to him, reports himself to have been a good child. He also says he had a covenanting childhood. In the mid-Victorian era, a stricter discipline reigned over nurseries in Scotland's capital than now. "The serviceable pause" in the week's work on Sunday was not without real benefits, for the children of these times, if sermons were long and the Sabbath devoid of toys, learned to sit still and to endure, and very useful lessons they were to R. L. S. and others. Despite being an extra model little soul, "eminently religious," he says, he was much like other children. His nurse tells how, during one of the many feverish, wakeful nights he suffered from, when he lay wearying for the carts coming (a sign to him of morning), she read to him for hours at his request the Bible. He fell asleep, soothed by her kind voice, to awake when the sun was bright on the window pane. Again he commanded, "Read to me, Cummie." "And what chapter would my laddie like?" she asked. "Why, it's daylight now," he answered; "I'm not afraid any longer; put away the Bible, and go on with Ballantyne's story."

"I am one of the few people in the world who do not forget their own lives," he boasted. His Garden of Verses testifies to the truth of this statement. When he was a man over thirty, he bridged the gulf of years, and wrote of the golden days of childhood. Not only do the little people joy to hear his piping, but those who sit in the elders' seat hearken to these happy songs of merry cheer coming to them as echoes from the well-nigh forgotten past. His father often sat by his sick-bed, and beguiled his small son from fears and pains by tales "of ship-wreck on outlying iron skerries' pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights, clothed in language apt, droll and emphatic." His mother and Cummie read to him day and night. Thus early the instinct of authorship was fired within him.

One evening the young Stevenson realised that the printed page was intelligible to him. It was as if a rock that barred his entrance into the cave of treasure had melted, or swung back at his command. Till then Louis had been keen, like other youngsters, on adopting many professions when he grew up. Soldiering, even in the Crimean War time, did not appeal to the girlishly gentle little chap, for, as he shrewdly remarked, he neither wanted to kill anybody nor be killed himself. When he learned to read, he saw before him all the rows of books which he was told had finer stirring stories in them than even those his father told him, and he resolved he, too, would be a maker of tales.

Those wide apart but penetrating eyes of his had caught sight of an ideal guiding star to follow, viz., Literature. His juvenile ambition to be a "Leerie licht the lamp" faded. To reach the gleam which had enamoured him, he knew he must build with care and patience, like his family of engineers, a tower to enclose or a ladder to reach to this will-o'-the-wisp which inveigled him upward. His mind teemed with ideas; but he saw he would have to serve an apprenticeship to learn to weave smoothly together the web of his fancy, till, in his verbal fabric, he had the charm of all the muses flowering in a single word.

He describes to us how he became a skilled artificer with his pen, and how with obstinate persistence he taught himself daintiness of diction. In his first book of travels he mentions how the branch of a tree caught him, and the flooded Oise bereft him of his canoe. "On my tomb, if ever I have one," he wrote, "I mean to get these words inscribed, HE CLUNG TO HIS PADDLE." The paddle he chose was his pen. It was the motive power which forwarded him along the river of life, through shoals and rapids. When but a wee toddling bairn, he drew his nurse aside and commanded her to write, as he had a story to tell. He dictated to his mother, too, when a boy of six, an essay on Moses. As a housebound child, he had to amuse himself. Skelt's dramas were then his delight; but the life of every child is a prophecy for those who know how to interpret it. His mother was prescient, and fore-told her white-faced Louis had the light of genius in those windows of the soul—the eyes. "Talent," she knew, "was the result of human labor and culture." He dreamed, when but four, he "heard the noise of pens writing." She took it and his childish "Songstries" he sung as an earnest of his future.

Louis' father, despite being, like Dr. John Brown's Rab, "fu' o' seriousness," had odd whims, among others, an objection to schools and lessons, so he raised no objection to his son's regulation school-days being intermittent. When barely in his teens, Stevenson was ordered South, and spent two winters abroad. He was a pupil at Edinburgh Academy for a few years. Andrew Lang was there at the same time; but, he explains, the future Tusitala,—"the lover of children, the teller of tales, giver of counsel, and dreams, a wonder, a world's delight,"—and he did not meet there, for Louis was "but a little whey-faced urchin, the despicable member of some lower class," when his future brother author was "an elderly boy of seventeen." The pity was that the cosseted only son never rubbed against his compatriot children in the discipline of the play-fields, but in some of his summer holidays he tasted of the doubtful pleasures of lantern-bearing and other boyish "glories of existence."

When the lad was seventeen, his parents leased Swanston Cottage, which became their summer home, and a big factor in their boy's education. It is a spot peculiarly secluded, to be within sight and sound of Edinburgh, lying hidden in the lap of the hills, sheltered "frae nirly nippin' Eas'lan' breeze and haar o' seas." It was there Stevenson began deliberately to educate himself to become the Master Stylist—the "Virgil of prose" of his contemporaries. These Pentlands were to him always the hills of home. He lifted his eyes to them from the old manse of Colinton, when he played there in his grandfather's garden. He longingly, in gaps between the tall, grey houses, looked for their familiar outline when winter prisoned him in Auld Reekie.

These pastoral hills, with their sweeps of heathy moorlands, appear from first to last in his works. Two of his initial Memories and Portraits depict his hill-folk neighbors, the Shepherd and the Gardener. It was at a church "atween the muckle Pentland's knees" that Archie Weir of Hermiston noted young Kirsty, and that same "little cruciform place" was the scene of his "PETIT POEME EN PROSE," where we can all spend a peaceful "Lowden Sabbath morning" with his "living Scotch" sounding in our ears. However far away Louis Stevenson roved, there was mirrored on the tablets of his memory his own country, its speech, its very atmosphere. He wrote a New Arabian Nights, but from the old (he tells us how his minister grandfather envied him his first reading thereof) he had acquired the secret of the magic carpet, and could be transported at will from the tropics back to where the curlews and the plovers wailed and swooped above the whins and the heather on his hills of sheep.