Correspondence, as a rule, he found but an irksome affair; unless conducted upon his own whimsical lines. "I deny that letters should contain news—I mean mine—those of other people should," was his theory; and he boasted himself of a "willingness to pour forth unmitigated rot, which constitutes in me the true spirit of correspondence." For all that, his letters, grave or gay, remain among the most delightful reading in existence; flavoured with his quaintest conceits, endowed with his most delicate turns of phrase, and often tempered with that "something of the Shorter Catechist" to which Henley had alluded.
For, undoubtedly, as time went on, although Stevenson continued to "combine the face of a boy with the distinguished bearing of a man of the world," he was gradually exchanging the "streak of Puck" and the capricious unconventions of the born Bohemian, for something graver and more mature,—a tendency almost towards the didactic. "'Tis a strange world indeed," he had commented, "but there is a manifest God for those who care to look for Him." And now, "with the passing of years," he observed, "there grows more and more upon me that belief in the kindness of this scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an excellent and pacifying compensation." He was suffering, and in all probability would perpetually suffer, from "that sharp ferule of calamity under which we are all God's scholars till we die": but his patience was impregnable, and his desire to leave a brave example bore him constant company. "To suffer," said he, "sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable," and he prepared to enjoy with equal zest all pleasures which were still permitted to him.
As he put away his writing materials, and descended once more to his beloved piano, his father and mother came in. They were living in Bournemouth to be near their only son. The old lighthouse engineer, whose father had built the Bell Rock, who had served under his brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore, "the noblest of all extant sea-lights," who had himself erected Dhu Heartach, was now palpably failing. The spectacle of a stern and honest man slowly evacuating all that he had held of personal strength, was, to his son Louis, a poignantly pathetic one. Their disagreements had been very many and deep-rooted, dating from even before that "dreadful evening walk" in Stevenson's youth, when, "on being tightly cross-questioned," the lad who had been trained for a civil engineer, and had "worked in a carpenter's shop and had a brass foundry, and hung about wood-yards and the like," confessed that he cared for nothing but literature,—"no profession!" as his father contemptuously replied. They had differed on almost every conceivable topic open to their discussion,—yet here, in the fulness of time, they were at peace together,—the austere old man in his second childhood, and the chronic invalid who "must live as though he were walking on eggs." Innumerable ineffaceable traits of similarity bound one to the other; at bottom of all the bygone angers lay a permanent bedrock of mutual love. And perhaps the nearing vision of death which terminated all vistas for both of them, exercised its usual effect, of calm, and laisser-faire, and the equalisation of things: for it is probable that no man has a just sense of proportionate values until he stands in the presence of death.
Stevenson had often alluded, as a matter of personal knowledge, to his constant prescience of mortality, and how it affected a man's thoughts of life. Very seldom has the view of the confirmed invalid, the doomed consumptive, been put forth to the world with the frankness with which Stevenson invested it. He has been sometimes charged with a certain lack of reticence: but in this matter, unquestionably, his candour was to the benefitting of mankind: to whom these close views of the inevitable end are rarely possible under such deliberate and clear-headed conditions.
There is nothing maudlin, nothing hypochondriacal, about Stevenson's treatment of this subject: the same cheerful philosophy bears him up, the same vitality of joy. It is hardly to be wondered at, that some critics handled him seriously, on account of his lightheartedness in the august shadow of the last enemy,—and his inveterate optimism in the face of all calamities. "He jests at scars who never felt a wound," they practically told him,—and could hardly be persuaded to credit the paradox that the man who preached in season and out of season, the gospel of that "cheery old Pagan, Hope," was not a denizen of the open-air,—healthy, athletic, vigorous, incapable of realising the maladies incident to man,—instead of an emaciated, bed-ridden creature, whose smallest pleasures must be measured, so to speak, in a medicine-glass. But, "It is something after all," he has said, "to leave a brave example": and in that he triumphantly succeeded. For the opportunities of meteoric heroisms are few and far between; but every hour beholds the need of those obscurer braveries which may be born of pain and suffering....
In Ordered South and other well-known essays, he shows the gradual relaxation of the ties which bind a man to terrestrial things,—and the curiously significant alteration in his regard for the facts of life,—from the sower in the dank spring furrows, to the sight of little children with their long possibilities before them.
Stevenson had no children of his own. His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, then at school in Bournemouth, was destined to become his friend and collaborator: but it is doubtful that he cared for children as such. The average small folk, "dragged about in a pleasing stupor by nurses," were very far remote from that superabundant vitality nursed in an attenuated physique, which had sat up with a shawl over its shoulders, so many tedious months in childhood, when its principal habitat was "The Land of Counterpane" and other regions mapped out in the great and glorious world of Make-Believe.
Painting by W. Hatherell.
ST. IVES DESCENDS FROM EDINBURGH CASTLE.
"The whole forces of my mind were so consumed
with losing hold and getting it again, that I
could scarce have told whether I was going up
or coming down."