July 1875-July 1879
Having on the 14th of July 1875 passed with credit his examination for the Bar at Edinburgh, Stevenson thenceforth enjoyed whatever status and consideration attaches to the title of Advocate. But he made no serious attempt to practise, and by the 25th of the same month had started with Sir Walter Simpson for France. Here he lived and tramped for several weeks among the artist haunts of Fontainebleau and the neighbourhood, occupying himself chiefly with studies of the French poets and poetry of the fifteenth century, which afterwards bore fruit in his papers on Charles of Orleans and François Villon. Thence he travelled to join his parents at Wiesbaden and Homburg. Returning in the autumn to Scotland, he made, to please them, an effort to live the ordinary life of an Edinburgh advocate—attending trials and spending his mornings in wig and gown at the Parliament House. But this attempt was before long abandoned as tending to waste of time and being incompatible with his real occupation of literature. Through the next winter and spring he remained in Edinburgh, except for a short winter walking tour in Ayrshire and Galloway, and a month spent among his friends in London. In the late summer of 1876, after a visit to the West Highlands, he made the canoe trip with Sir Walter Simpson which furnished the subject of the Inland Voyage, followed by a prolonged autumn stay at Grez and Barbizon. The life, atmosphere, and scenery of these forest haunts had charmed and soothed him, as we have seen, since he was first introduced to them by his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, in the spring of 1875. An unfettered, unconventional, open-air existence, passed face to face with nature and in the company of congenial people engaged, like himself, in grappling with the problems and difficulties of an art, had been what he had longed for most consistently through all the agitations of his youth. And now he had found just such an existence, and with it, as he thought, peace of mind, health, and the spirit of unimpeded work.
But peace of mind was not to be his for long. What indeed awaited him in the forest was something different and more momentous: it was his fate: the romance which decided his life, and the companion whom he resolved to make his own at all hazards. But of this hereafter. To continue briefly the annals of the time: the year 1877 was again spent between Edinburgh, London, the Fontainebleau region, and several different temporary abodes in the artists’ and other quarters of Paris; with an excursion in the company of his parents to the Land’s End in August. In 1878 a similar general mode of life was varied by a visit with his parents in March to Burford Bridge, where he made warm friends with a senior to whom he had long looked up from a distance, Mr. George Meredith; by a spell of secretarial work under Professor Fleeming Jenkin, who was serving as a juror on the Paris Exhibition; and lastly, by the autumn tramp through the Cévennes, afterwards recounted with so much charm in Travels with a Donkey. The first half of 1879 was again spent between London, Scotland, and France.
During these four years, it should be added, Stevenson’s health was very passable. It often, indeed, threatened to give way after any prolonged residence in Edinburgh, but was generally soon restored by open-air excursions (during which he was capable of fairly vigorous and sustained daily exercise), or by a spell of life among the woods of Fontainebleau. They were also the years in which he settled for good into his chosen profession of letters. He worked rather desultorily for the first twelve months after his call to the Bar, but afterwards with ever-growing industry and success, winning from the critical a full measure of recognition, though relatively little, so far, from the general public. In 1875 and 1876 he contributed as a journalist, though not frequently, to the Academy and Vanity Fair, and in 1877 more abundantly to London, a weekly review founded by Mr. Glasgow Brown, an acquaintance of Edinburgh Speculative days, and carried on, after the failure of that gentleman’s health, by Mr. Henley. But he had no great gift or liking for journalism, or for any work not calling for the best literary form and finish he could give. Where he found special scope for such work was in the Cornhill Magazine under the editorship of Mr. Leslie Stephen. Here he continued his critical papers on men and books, already begun in 1874 with Victor Hugo, and began in 1876 the series of papers afterwards collected in Virginibus Puerisque. They were continued in 1877, and in greater number throughout 1878. His first published stories appeared as follows:—A Lodging for the Night, Temple Bar, October 1877; The Sire de Malétroit’s Door, Temple Bar, January 1878; and Will o’ the Mill, Cornhill Magazine, January 1878. In May 1878 followed his first travel book, The Inland Voyage, containing the account of his canoe trip from Antwerp to Grez. This was to Stevenson a year of great and various productiveness. Besides six or eight characteristic essays of the Virginibus Puerisque series, there appeared in London the set of fantastic modern tales called the New Arabian Nights, conceived and written in an entirely different key from any of his previous work, as well as the kindly, sentimental comedy of French artist life, Providence and the Guitar; and in the Portfolio the Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh, republished at the end of the year in book form. During the autumn and winter of this year he wrote Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, and was much and eagerly engaged in the planning of plays in collaboration with Mr. Henley; of which one, Deacon Brodie, was finished in the spring of 1879. In the same spring he drafted in Edinburgh, but afterwards laid by, four chapters on ethics, a study of which he once spoke as being always his “veiled mistress,” under the name of Lay Morals.
But abounding in good work as this period was, and momentous as it was in regard to Stevenson’s future life, it is a period which figures but meagrely in his correspondence, and in this book must fill disproportionately little space. Without the least breach of friendship, or even of intimate confidence on occasion, Stevenson had begun, as was natural and necessary, to wean himself from his entire dependence on his friend and counsellor of the last two years; to take his life more into his own hands; and to intermit the regularity of his correspondence with her. A few new correspondents appear; but to none of us in these days did he write more than scantily. Partly his growing absorption by the complications of his life and the interests of his work left him little time or inclination for letter-writing; partly his greater freedom of movement made it unnecessary. On his way backwards and forwards between Scotland and France, his friends in London had the chance of seeing him much more frequently than of yore. He avoided formal and dress-coated society; but in the company of congenial friends, whether men or women, and in places like the Savile Club (his favourite haunt), he was as brilliant and stimulating as ever, and however acute his inward preoccupations, his visits were always a delight.
To Sidney Colvin
[Edinburgh, end of July 1875.]
MY DEAR COLVIN,—Herewith you receive the rest of Henley’s hospital work. He was much pleased by what you said of him, and asked me to forward these to you for your opinion. One poem, the Spring Sorrow, seems to me the most beautiful. I thank God for this petit bout de consolation, that by Henley’s own account, this one more lovely thing in the world is not altogether without some trace of my influence: let me say that I have been something sympathetic which the mother found and contemplated while she yet carried it in her womb. This, in my profound discouragement, is a great thing for me; if I cannot do good with myself, at least, it seems, I can help others better inspired; I am at least a skilful accoucheur. My discouragement is from many causes: among others the re-reading of my Italian story. Forgive me, Colvin, but I cannot agree with you; it seems green fruit to me, if not really unwholesome; it is profoundly feeble, damn its weakness! Moreover I stick over my Fontainebleau, it presents difficulties to me that I surmount slowly.
I am very busy with Béranger for the Britannica. Shall be up in town on Friday or Saturday.—Ever yours,