Robert Louis Stevenson

by E. Blantyre Simpson

STEVENSON'S APPRENTICESHIP

In his early days, Louis was sociable, pleased when he met compatriot children, ready to be dressed and go to parties. But after he left school, his mood changed. He had been completely sheltered from rebuffs, so, when he stood in the "palace porch of life," and the peculiar accents of his mind were jeered at, he, who had never tasted of a whipping, felt the smart of humankind, and suffered sorely from "maladies incident to only sons." In the "coiled perplexities of youth" he "sorrowed, sobbed, and feared" alone. Blackford's uncultured breast had been meet nurse for Sir Walter when he roamed a truant boy, but further south of the becastled capital, topmost Allermuir or steep Caerketton became the cradle of the next poet and master of Romance that Edinburgh reared. There, in woody folds of the hills, he found, as he said, "bright is the ring of words," and there he taught himself to be the right man to ring them. When Swanston became the Stevensons' summer home, the undisciplined Robert kicked with his fullest vigour against what he called the Bastille of Civilisation and the bowing down before "the bestial Goddesses, Comfort and Respectability." He was loudly rebellious, and too impatient to follow the ordinary rules of life or the sage advice, "Jowk and let the jaw gae by."

An impression has arisen, because of his revolt in these years against convention and creeds, that he was thwarted and unappreciated in his home and its surroundings. On the contrary, he was at liberty to indulge his Bohemian tastes and do much as he listed. His father gave him a seemingly inadequate allowance. Yet Thomas Stevenson was not a miserly man. He begged his son to go to his tailor's, for he disapproved of the youth's scuffy, mounte-bankish appearance. He supplied him with an allowance for travel—in fact, R. L. S. had all his bills paid, and his own study in a very hospitable home. R, L. S. owned books, and jewels were the only things he felt tempted to buy. The 1 pound a month allowance, when he left school, raised soon after to 82 pounds a year, was to keep the money from dropping out of that hole in the pocket of his ragged jacket, which never seemed to get sewed up. Books he had in plenty, but his parents naturally did not treat him to strings of flashing stones to wear over his shabby velvet coat, or twine round his battered straw hat. His money affairs, like the table of Weir of Hermiston, were likely all his life "just mismanaged." By the time he settled in Samoa, his literary earnings were thousands a year; and by then his quiet-living, hard-working father was dead, leaving an ample fortune. Still he seemed haunted by fear of lack of means.

Louis' love and admiration for his father was deep and sincere. At his home, when guests gathered round the engineer's table, the boy, with his eyes sparkling, listened to his father's "strange, humorous vein of talk," then glanced round with a smile of expectation to see how much others appreciated their host's well-told tales. "My father was always my dearest," he wrote. This was a high certificate of appreciation, when we remember he had the most devoted of mothers. It hurt the son to the quick to deal his "dearest" a staggering blow, and decline to follow his hereditary profession. Louis had tried to be an engineer. He liked the swinging, smoking seas on which they struggled for a site for sheltering masonry. As in the case of other Stevensons, the romance of the work was welcome to him, but the office stool frightened him. When the would-be author had refused to follow in his kinsmen's footsteps, he promised to study as an advocate to satisfy his father, who urged his son to follow a recognised profession. Owing to his easy-going schooling and lack of a settled course of study, the law classes were excellent training for the erratic, mercurial-notioned youth. Stevenson had the good fortune in 1869 to be elected a member of the Speculative, the famed Debating Society where Jeffrey first met Scott. There Stevenson encountered his contemporaries in years and social standing, his superiors in debate, and he, "the lean, ugly, idle, unpopular student," as he calls himself, enjoyed "its atmosphere of good-fellowship, its vivid and varied interests, its traditions of honourable labour and success." "Speculative evenings," says R. L. S., "form pretty salient milestones on our intellectual journey." He had gripped a deal of the foundations of his hereditary trade when seemingly but a consistent idler. He mastered the intricacies of law, and took to the abhorred office stool so as to learn the better the workings of its slow machinery. He tells us he only obtained the mastery of his pen by toiling faithfully, but inborn in him was the art of talking. Even as a petti-coated child, we read he gesticulated to aid his glib tongue. W. E. Henley (whose acquaintance Louis made about 1875, and who helped Stevenson with his chary praise and frank criticism) says of his friend, "He radiates talk. He will discourse with you of morals, music, marbles, men, manners, meta-physics, medicine, mangold-wurzel, with equal insight into essentials and equal pregnancy and felicity of utterance."

Along with this ready affluence of speech, the youth had what good talkers often lack, viz., the patience to hearken to others. Stevenson shone best in what he called a little committee of talkers, though his father and he used to argue a question together for days; but, in the Speculative, he had at first to be a listener. A candid fellow-member says, "I cannot remember that Stevenson was ever anything as a speaker. He was nervous and ineffective, and had no power of debate; but his papers were successful." In one of his essays, touching on this select assemblage, Louis sketches what the editor of the History of the Speculative Society, just published, calls "a little Dutch picture; it focuses in vivid colour the associations which rise in the memory at the name of the Spec.—the stately old room aglow with many candles, the books, the portraits, the pious commemoration of the dead,—famous men and our fathers that begat us." "Stevenson," Mr Dickson goes on to say, "is the most famous man of letters who has belonged to the Society since Scott. No more interesting personality has ever been of our number, and no one has in the public eye been more closely identified with the Society." "Oh, I do think the Spec, is about the best thing in Edinburgh," Louis exclaims, and twice he was President of the "worshipful society."

A contemporary of Stevenson's, Sheriff Guthrie, wrote in 1899, "I knew Louis first in the Speculative Society; second, as a fellow student in the University Law Classes; third, being called to the Scottish Bar about the same time as a brother-in-law; and last, as a friend with many interests in common. In the Speculative he spoke frequently, and read some papers. We recognised his brilliancy, and we delighted in his vivacity; but we misread the horoscope of his future. We voted him a light horseman, lacking two essentials for success—diligence and health. We wondered where he had got the deftness and rhythm of his style, not knowing that the labour out of which it was evoked was of itself sufficient to refute our estimate of his powers of work. As to his health, we forgot behind that slender, angular frame was not only a father's iron constitution and a mother's nervous vitality, but his own cheerful spirit and indomitable will." The Sheriff, in this letter to me, recalls several reminiscences of Stevenson-some in a playful or contrariwise vein, and another memory illustrates, he says, "the sweet reasonableness which mingled with his wayward Bohemianism"; but space does not allow me to quote more than how, "It seems but yesterday that I met Louis in the Parliament House, and said I heard he had got a case. And I seem to see the twinkle in his eye and the toss of his arms as he answered, 'Yes, my boy, you'll see how I'll stick in, now that I've tasted blood.'"

Louis' mother showed this friend, Mr. Guthrie, a succession of her boy's photographs, ending in wig and gown as an advocate. "That is what I call from Baby to Bar," she said; and then added, beginning with a smile, and ending with a break in her voice, "I said to Louis once that the next collection would be from Bar to Baronet, and he replied, 'It will be from Bar to Burial.'" Except at the "dear old Spec.," he mixed little his equals in Edinburgh. As a writer in Blackwood points out, at the period he had grown into swallow-tails, Edinburgh was by no means devoid of intellectual company, which even a famed Robert Louis need not have despised. But he abhorred constraint and codes of rules. He was a born adventurer and practical experimentist in life, and he explains he spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of men and womenkind. His insatiable curiosity made him thirst to taste of the bitter as well as the sweet, to be pricked by the thorn as well as smell the rose. He was quick to see the humorous side of a tale or episode, but he was tenderly sensitive to ridicule. When he appeared among his legal brothers-in-law in the Parliament House, a wit there among the unemployed advocates in the old hall called him the Gifted Boy. He winced under the laugh, and fled from "the interminable patter of legal feet." He had cultivated notoriety by his shabby dress and lank locks. He did not realise, as an American says, "If you look as if you had slept in your clothes most men will jump to the conclusion that you have, and you will never get to know them well enough to explain that your head is so full of noble thoughts that you haven't time to bother with the dandruff on your shoulders." In a corridor in the Parliament House, where the men called to the Bar keep open-mouthed boxes for documents to be slipped in, one bore on its plate the inscription R. L. Stevenson. When that alien-looking advocate with unsuspected gifts had cast off the wig and gown, and had busied himself for years filling up reams of paper with his thoughts and studies on people, places, and things, sightseers going through the Courts would be shown this unused box, which remained so empty while those around it of his old rivals at the Spec, were full, as they were scaling the heights which lead to titles and the Bench.

Stevenson wrote of Edinburgh and her climate in a carping spirit, nevertheless he accorded due praise to her unsurpassed beauty. "No place so brands a man," he declared; and, in his turn, Stevenson left his brand on the romantic city of his birth, for now no book on Scotland's capital is written without mention of the haunts and homes of that changeling-looking son of hers. The door-plate of 17 Heriot Row bore the inscription of R. L. Stevenson, Advocate. No blue-bag laden clerk dropped briefs then into its letter-box. In one of its sun-facing drawing-room windows there stood a big Australian vine, carefully tended and trained. It was behind it, in the far window, the eighteen-year-old lad sat when, in the winter's gloamin', Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin, calling on his mother, was startled by his voice joining in the conversation. The visitor says, "I listened in perplexity and amasement. Who was this son who talked as Charles Lamb wrote? this young Heine with the Scotch accent? When I came away the unseen converser came down with me to the front door to let me out. As he opened it, the light of the gas lamp outside ('For we are very lucky with a lamp before the door,' he says) fell on him, and I saw a slender, brown, long-haired lad, with great dark eyes, a brilliant smile, and a gentle, deprecating bend of the head. I asked him to come and see us. He said, 'Shall I come to-morrow?'" He called next day, for Louis grasped at anything or any person that he felt drawn to. He took part in their theatricals, but otherwise eschewed social functions in Edinburgh. An old friend of his father's asked him to come to fill a gap at his table, though his own son had informed him Louis never went to prearranged feasts. Louis himself replied to this invitation: "C. is textually correct, only there are exceptions everywhere to prove the rule. I do not hate dining at your house. At seven, on Wednesday, his temples wreathed with some appropriate garland, you will behold the victim come smiling to the altar." The last words are characteristic of his attitude when he was lured into society,—he went a willing victim, with no affectation of martyrdom. The few who met him in Edinburgh drawing-rooms found him prodigal of tongue, somewhat puzzling with his wholesale enthusiasms, absurd flights of fancy, theories he had to propound, and ever ready to change like a chameleon to tone with his surroundings. The spritish, fantastic youth impressed those he encountered, even when he was one of the unfledged eaglets hatched in the ancient eyrie of his precipitous city, whom Browning tells us are not counted "till there is a rush of wings, and lo! they are flown," "What was so taking in him, and how is one to analyse that dazzling surface of pleasantry, that changeful, shining humour, wit, wisdom, recklessness, beneath which beat the most kind and tolerant of hearts?" asks Andrew Lang. But not only through the magnetism of his personal presence did he attract even strangers, but through his pen has he held in thrall all the reading public who liked his work. "He has put into his books a great deal of all that went to the making of his life," wrote his cousin, "though he had the art of confiding a good deal, but not telling everything." It would have been interesting to see, if Stevenson had taken it into his elfin-locked head to learn to shine in debate, and, instead of incubating a budding Scott, as he said, "the Spec." had trained an able advocate, if the glamour of his personality would have extended to the judges, and made him, with his well-chosen words, a successful pleader. The boards of the Parliament House were too well worn a road for so tramp-blooded a man. The tune "Over the Hills and Far Away" was for ever humming in his head. He left the venerable city of his birth, which he vowed he must always think of as home, and steered a course on his way to fame "far ayont the muckle sea" which led him from the Bar to Burial.