The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson — Volume 1

by Robert Louis Stevenson

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 TRAVELS AND EXCURSIONS
Introductory	[3]
letters:—
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[15]
To the Same	[17]
To the Same	[19]
To the Same	[20]
To Mrs. Churchill Babington	[24]
To Alison Cunningham	[26]
To Charles Baxter	[27]
To the Same	[29]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[30]
To the Same	[32]
To the Same	[33]
To Thomas Stevenson	[36]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[38]
To Charles Baxter	[40]
II STUDENTDAYS—continued ORDERED SOUTH
Letters:—
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[48]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[49]
To the Same	[51]
To the Same	[53]
To the Same	[57]
To the Same	[61]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[62]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[65]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[67]
To the Same	[69]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[71]
To the Same	[73]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[74]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[75]
To the Same	[77]
To the Same	[79]
To the Same	[81]
To the Same	[83]
To Sidney Colvin	[84]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[85]
To Sidney Colvin	[87]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[88]
To the Same	[88]
To the Same	[91]
To the Same	[92]
To the Same	[95]
To the Same	[95]
III ADVOCATE AND AUTHOR EDINBURGH—PARIS—FONTAINEBLEAU
Letters:—
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[104]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[104]
To Sidney Colvin	[106]
To Charles Baxter	[109]
To Sidney Colvin	[110]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[111]
To Mrs. de Mattos	[112]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[114]
To Sidney Colvin	[115]
To the Same	[115]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[116]
To W. E. Henley	[117]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[118]
To Sidney Colvin	[119]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[120]
To A. Patchett Martin	[121]
To the Same	[122]
To Sidney Colvin	[124]
To the Same	[125]
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[126]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[126]
To the Same	[127]
To W. E. Henley	[128]
To Charles Baxter.	[128]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[129]
To W. E. Henley	[129]
To Edmund Gosse	[130]
To W. E. Henley	[132]
To Edmund Gosse	[134]
To Sidney Colvin	[136]
To Edmund Gosse	[136]
IV THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT MONTEREY AND SANFRANCISCO
letters:—
To Sidney Colvin	[144]
To the Same	[144]
To W. E. Henley	[146]
To Sidney Colvin	[147]
To the Same	[148]
To the Same	[149]
To Edmund Gosse	[150]
To W. E. Henley	[151]
To the Same	[152]
To P. G. Hamerton	[155]
To Edmund Gosse	[156]
To Sidney Colvin	[157]
To Edmund Gosse	[158]
To Sidney Colvin	[160]
To the Same	[162]
To Charles Baxter	[164]
To Sidney Colvin	[165]
To W. E. Henley	[167]
To Sidney Colvin	[169]
To Edmund Gosse	[169]
To Dr. W. Bamford	[170]
To Sidney Colvin	[171]
To the Same	[171]
To the Same	[172]
To C. W. Stoddard	[173]
To Sidney Colvin	[174]
V ALPINE WINTERS AND HIGHLAND SUMMERS
Letters:—
To A. G. Dew-Smith	[185]
To Thomas Stevenson	[187]
To Edmund Gosse	[188]
To the Same	[189]
To C. W. Stoddard	[191]
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[192]
To Sidney Colvin	[194]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[195]
To Sidney Colvin	[197]
To Horatio F. Brown	[199]
To the Same	[200]
To the Same	[200]
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[201]
To Edmund Gosse	[202]
To Sidney Colvin	[204]
To Professor Æneas Mackay	[205]
To the Same	[205]
To Edmund Gosse	[206]
To the Same	[207]
To P. G. Hamerton	[208]
To Sidney Colvin	[209]
To W. E. Henley	[211]
To the Same	[212]
To Sidney Colvin	[213]
To Dr. Alexander Japp	[215]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[216]
To Edmund Gosse	[217]
To the Same	[218]
To the Same	[219]
To W. E. Henley	[219]
To Dr. Alexander Japp	[221]
To W. E. Henley	[222]
To Thomas Stevenson	[223]
To P. G. Hamerton	[224]
To Charles Baxter	[226]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[227]
To Alison Cunningham	[228]
To Charles Baxter	[228]
To W. E. Henley	[229]
To the Same	[230]
To Alexander Ireland	[233]
To Edmund Gosse	[235]
To Dr. Alexander Japp	[236]
To the Same	[236]
To W. E. Henley	[238]
To Mrs. T. Stevenson	[240]
To Edmund Gosse	[241]
To the Same	[242]
To W. E. Henley	[242]
VI MARSEILLES ANDHYÈRES
Letters:—
To the Editor of the New YorkTribune	[251]
To R. A. M. Stevenson	[252]
To Thomas Stevenson	[253]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[254]
To Charles Baxter	[254]
To Alison Cunningham	[256]
To W. E. Henley	[257]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[261]
To Thomas Stevenson	[262]
To Mrs. Sitwell	[263]
To Edmund Gosse	[265]
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[266]
To the Same	[267]
To Edmund Gosse	[268]
To the Same	[269]
To W. E. Henley	[270]
To the Same	[271]
To the Same	[272]
To the Same	[273]
To the Same	[274]
To Alison Cunningham	[275]
To W. E. Henley	[277]
To Edmund Gosse	[278]
To W. E. Henley	[279]
To Edmund Gosse	[283]
To Sidney Colvin	[284]
To W. H. Low	[286]
To R. A. M. Stevenson	[288]
To Thomas Stevenson	[291]
To W. H. Low	[292]
To W. E. Henley	[294]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[295]
To Sidney Colvin	[296]
To Mrs. Milne	[297]
To Miss Ferrier	[299]
To W. H. Low	[300]
To Thomas Stevenson	[301]
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[302]
To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[303]
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[304]
To Sidney Colvin	[305]
To Mr. Dick	[308]
To Cosmo Monkhouse	[310]
To Edmund Gosse	[312]
To Miss Ferrier	[313]
To W. H. Low	[314]
To Thomas Stevenson	[315]
To Cosmo Monkhouse	[316]
To W. E. Henley	[318]
To Edmund Gosse	[319]
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[320]
To Sidney Colvin	[321]
VII LIFE AT BOURNEMOUTH
Letters:—
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[328]
To W. E. Henley	[328]
To the Rev. Professor Lewis Campbell	[330]
To Andrew Chatto	[331]
To W. H. Low	[332]
To Thomas Stevenson	[334]
To W. E. Henley	[335]
To Thomas Stevenson	[335]
To Charles Baxter	[337]
To the Same	[337]
To Miss Ferrier	[338]
To Edmund Gosse	[339]
To Austin Dobson	[340]
To Henry James	[341]
To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson	[343]
To W. E. Henley	[344]
To the Same	[345]
To H. A. Jones	[346]
To Sidney Colvin	[346]
To Thomas Stevenson	[347]
To Sidney Colvin	[348]
To the Same	[349]
To J. A. Symonds	[350]
To Edmund Gosse	[352]
To W. H. Low	[354]
To P. G. Hamerton	[356]
To William Archer	[358]
To Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin	[359]
To the Same	[360]
To W. H. Low	[361]
To W. E. Henley	[363]
To William Archer	[364]
To Thomas Stevenson	[367]
To Henry James	[368]
To William Archer	[369]
To the Same	[371]
To W. H. Low	[374]

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.