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Robert Louis Stevenson, A Record, An Estimate, A Memorial

A >> A. H. Japp >> Robert Louis Stevenson, A Record, An Estimate, A Memorial





"PHAROS LOQUITUR

"Far in the bosom of the deep
O'er these wild shelves my watch I keep,
A ruddy gem of changeful light
Bound on the dusky brow of night.
The seaman bids my lustre hail,
And scorns to strike his timorous sail."


And how in 1850 the old man, drawing nigh unto death, was with the
utmost difficulty dissuaded from going the voyage once more, and
was found furtively in his room packing his portmanteau in spite of
the protests of all his family, and would have gone but for the
utter weakness of death.

His father was also a splendid engineer; was full of invention and
devoted to his profession, but he, too, was not without his
romances, and even vagaries. He loved a story, was a fine teller
of stories, used to sit at night and spin the most wondrous yarns,
a man of much reserve, yet also of much power in discourse, with an
aptness and felicity in the use of phrases - so much so, as his son
tells, that on his deathbed, when his power of speech was passing
from him, and he couldn't articulate the right word, he was silent
rather than use the wrong one. I shall never forget how in these
early morning walks at Braemar, finding me sympathetic, he unbent
with the air of a man who had unexpectedly found something he had
sought, and was fairly confidential.

On the mother's side our author came of ministers. His maternal
grandfather, the Rev. Dr Balfour of Colinton, was a man of handsome
presence, tall, venerable-looking, and not without a mingled
authority and humour of his own - no very great preacher, I have
heard, but would sometimes bring a smile to the faces of his
hearers by very naive and original ways of putting things. R. L.
Stevenson quaintly tells a story of how his grandfather when he had
physic to take, and was indulged in a sweet afterwards, yet would
not allow the child to have a sweet because he had not had the
physic. A veritable Calvinist in daily action - from him, no
doubt, our subject drew much of his interest in certain directions
- John Knox, Scottish history, the '15 and the '45, and no doubt
much that justifies the line "something of shorter-catechist," as
applied by Henley to Stevenson among very contrasted traits indeed.

But strange truly are the interblendings of race, and the way in
which traits of ancestors reappear, modifying and transforming each
other. The gardener knows what can be done by grafts and buddings;
but more wonderful far than anything there, are the mysterious
blendings and outbursts of what is old and forgotten, along with
what is wholly new and strange, and all going to produce often what
we call sometimes eccentricity, and sometimes originality and
genius.

Mr J. F. George, in SCOTTISH NOTES AND QUERIES, wrote as follows on
Stevenson's inheritances and indebtedness to certain of his
ancestors:


"About 1650, James Balfour, one of the Principal Clerks of the
Court of Session, married Bridget, daughter of Chalmers of
Balbaithan, Keithhall, and that estate was for some time in the
name of Balfour. His son, James Balfour of Balbaithan, Merchant
and Magistrate of Edinburgh, paid poll-tax in 1696, but by 1699 the
land had been sold. This was probably due to the fact that Balfour
was one of the Governors of the Darien Company. His grandson,
James Balfour of Pilrig (1705 - 1795), sometime Professor of Moral
Philosophy in Edinburgh University, whose portrait is sketched in
CATRIONA, also made a Garioch [Aberdeenshire district] marriage,
his wife being Cecilia, fifth daughter of Sir John Elphinstone,
second baronet of Logie (Elphinstone) and Sheriff of Aberdeen, by
Mary, daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, first baronet of Minto.

"Referring to the Minto descent, Stevenson claims to have 'shaken a
spear in the Debatable Land and shouted the slogan of the Elliots.'
He evidently knew little or nothing of his relations on the
Elphinstone side. The Logie Elphinstones were a cadet branch of
Glack, an estate acquired by Nicholas Elphinstone in 1499. William
Elphinstone, a younger son of James of Glack, and Elizabeth Wood of
Bonnyton, married Margaret Forbes, and was father of Sir James
Elphinstone, Bart., of Logie, so created in 1701. . . .

"Stevenson would have been delighted to acknowledge his
relationship, remote though it was, to 'the Wolf of Badenoch,' who
burned Elgin Cathedral without the Earl of Kildare's excuse that he
thought the Bishop was in it; and to the Wolf's son, the Victor of
Harlaw [and] to his nephew 'John O'Coull,' Constable of France. . .
. Also among Tusitala's kin may be noted, in addition to the later
Gordons of Gight, the Tiger Earl of Crawford, familiarly known as
'Earl Beardie,' the 'Wicked Master' of the same line, who was
fatally stabbed by a Dundee cobbler 'for taking a stoup of drink
from him'; Lady Jean Lindsay, who ran away with 'a common jockey
with the horn,' and latterly became a beggar; David Lindsay, the
last Laird of Edzell [a lichtsome Lindsay fallen on evil days], who
ended his days as hostler at a Kirkwall inn, and 'Mussel Mou'ed
Charlie,' the Jacobite ballad-singer.

"Stevenson always believed that he had a strong spiritual affinity
to Robert Fergusson. It is more than probable that there was a
distant maternal affinity as well. Margaret Forbes, the mother of
Sir James Elphinstone, the purchaser of Logie, has not been
identified, but it is probable she was of the branch of the
Tolquhon Forbeses who previously owned Logie. Fergusson's mother,
Elizabeth Forbes, was the daughter of a Kildrummy tacksman, who by
constant tradition is stated to have been of the house of Tolquhon.
It would certainly be interesting if this suggested connection
could be proved." (5)


"From his Highland ancestors," says the QUARTERLY REVIEW, "Louis
drew the strain of Celtic melancholy with all its perils and
possibilities, and its kinship, to the mood of day-dreaming, which
has flung over so many of his pages now the vivid light wherein
figures imagined grew as real as flesh and blood, and yet, again,
the ghostly, strange, lonesome, and stinging mist under whose spell
we see the world bewitched, and every object quickens with a throb
of infectious terror."

Here, as in many other cases, we see how the traits of ancestry
reappear and transform other strains, strangely the more remote
often being the strongest and most persistent and wonderful.

"It is through his father, strange as it may seem," says Mr
Baildon, "that Stevenson gets the Celtic elements so marked in his
person, character, and genius; for his father's pedigree runs back
to the Highland clan Macgregor, the kin of Rob Roy. Stevenson thus
drew in Celtic strains from both sides - from the Balfours and the
Stevensons alike - and in his strange, dreamy, beautiful, and often
far-removed fancies we have the finest and most effective witness
of it."

Mr William Archer, in his own characteristic way, has brought the
inheritances from the two sides of the house into more direct
contact and contrast in an article he wrote in THE DAILY CHRONICLE
on the appearance of the LETTERS TO FAMILY AND FRIENDS.


"These letters show," he says, "that Stevenson's was not one of
those sunflower temperaments which turn by instinct, not effort,
towards the light, and are, as Mr Francis Thompson puts it,
'heartless and happy, lackeying their god.' The strains of his
heredity were very curiously, but very clearly, mingled. It may
surprise some readers to find him speaking of 'the family evil,
despondency,' but he spoke with knowledge. He inherited from his
father not only a stern Scottish intentness on the moral aspect of
life ('I would rise from the dead to preach'), but a marked
disposition to melancholy and hypochondria. From his mother, on
the other hand, he derived, along with his physical frailty, a
resolute and cheery stoicism. These two elements in his nature
fought many a hard fight, and the besieging forces from without -
ill-health, poverty, and at one time family dissensions - were by
no means without allies in the inner citadel of his soul. His
spirit was courageous in the truest sense of the word: by effort
and conviction, not by temperamental insensibility to fear. It is
clear that there was a period in his life (and that before the
worst of his bodily ills came upon him) when he was often within
measurable distance of Carlylean gloom. He was twenty-four when he
wrote thus, from Swanston, to Mrs Sitwell:

"'It is warmer a bit; but my body is most decrepit, and I can just
manage to be cheery and tread down hypochondria under foot by work.
I lead such a funny life, utterly without interest or pleasure
outside of my work: nothing, indeed, but work all day long, except
a short walk alone on the cold hills, and meals, and a couple of
pipes with my father in the evening. It is surprising how it suits
me, and how happy I keep.'


"This is the serenity which arises, not from the absence of
fuliginous elements in the character, but from a potent smoke-
consuming faculty, and an inflexible will to use it. Nine years
later he thus admonishes his backsliding parent:


"'MY DEAR MOTHER, - I give my father up. I give him a parable:
that the Waverley novels are better reading for every day than the
tragic LIFE. And he takes it back-side foremost, and shakes his
head, and is gloomier than ever. Tell him that I give him up. I
don't want no such a parent. This is not the man for my money. I
do not call that by the name of religion which fills a man with
bile. I write him a whole letter, bidding him beware of extremes,
and telling him that his gloom is gallows-worthy; and I get back an
answer -. Perish the thought of it.

"'Here am I on the threshold of another year, when, according to
all human foresight, I should long ago have been resolved into my
elements: here am I, who you were persuaded was born to disgrace
you - and, I will do you the justice to add, on no such
insufficient grounds - no very burning discredit when all is done;
here am I married, and the marriage recognised to be a blessing of
the first order. A1 at Lloyd's. There is he, at his not first
youth, able to take more exercise than I at thirty-three, and
gaining a stone's weight, a thing of which I am incapable. There
are you; has the man no gratitude? . . .

"'Even the Shorter Catechism, not the merriest epitome of religion,
and a work exactly as pious although not quite so true as the
multiplication table - even that dry-as-dust epitome begins with a
heroic note. What is man's chief end? Let him study that; and ask
himself if to refuse to enjoy God's kindest gifts is in the spirit
indicated.'


"As may be judged from this half-playful, half-serious
remonstrance, Stevenson's relation to his parents was eminently
human and beautiful. The family dissensions above alluded to
belonged only to a short but painful period, when the father could
not reconcile himself to the discovery that the son had ceased to
accept the formulas of Scottish Calvinism. In the eyes of the
older man such heterodoxy was for the moment indistinguishable from
atheism; but he soon arrived at a better understanding of his son's
position. Nothing appears more unmistakably in these letters than
the ingrained theism of Stevenson's way of thought. The poet, the
romancer within him, revolted from the conception of formless
force. A personal deity was a necessary character in the drama, as
he conceived it. And his morality, though (or inasmuch as) it
dwelt more on positive kindness than on negative lawlessness, was,
as he often insisted, very much akin to the morality of the New
Testament."


Anyway it is clear that much in the interminglings of blood we CAN
trace, may go to account for not a little in Stevenson. His
peculiar interest in the enormities of old-time feuds, the
excesses, the jealousies, the queer psychological puzzles, the
desire to work on the outlying and morbid, and even the unallowed
and unhallowed, for purposes of romance - the delight in dealing
with revelations of primitive feeling and the out-bursts of the
mere natural man always strangely checked and diverted by the
uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable, vague, weird
and horrible. There was the undoubted Celtic element in him
underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of
conventionality in one phase, and the falling under it in another -
the reaction and the retreat from what had attracted and interested
him, and then the return upon it, as with added zest because of the
retreat. The confessed Hedonist, enjoying life and boasting of it
just a little, and yet the Puritan in him, as it were, all the time
eyeing himself as from some loophole of retreat, and then
commenting on his own behaviour as a Hedonist and Bohemian. This
clearly was not what most struck Beerbohm Tree, during the time he
was in close contact with Stevenson, while arranging the production
of BEAU AUSTIN at the Haymarket Theatre, for he sees, or confesses
to seeing, only one side, and that the most assertive, and in a
sense, unreal one:


"Stevenson," says Mr Tree, "always seemed to me an epicure in life.
He was always intent on extracting the last drop of honey from
every flower that came in his way. He was absorbed in the business
of the moment, however trivial. As a companion, he was
delightfully witty; as a personality, as much a creature of romance
as his own creations."


This is simple, and it looks sincere; but it does not touch 'tother
side, or hint at, not to say, solve the problem of Stevenson's
personality. Had he been the mere Hedonist he could never have
done the work he did. Mr Beerbohm Tree certainly did not there see
far or all round.

Miss Simpson says:


"Mr Henley recalls him to Edinburgh folk as he was and as the true
Stevenson would have wished to be known - a queer, inexplicable
creature, his Celtic blood showing like a vein of unknown metal in
the stolid, steady rock of his sure-founded Stevensonian pedigree.
His cousin and model, 'Bob' Stevenson, the art critic, showed that
this foreign element came from the men who lit our guiding lights
for seamen, not from the gentle-blooded Balfours.

"Mr Henley is right in saying that the gifted boy had not much
humour. When the joke was against himself he was very thin-skinned
and had a want of balance. This made him feel his honest father's
sensible remarks like the sting of a whip."


Miss Simpson then proceeds to say:


"The R. L. Stevenson of old Edinburgh days was a conceited,
egotistical youth, but a true and honest one: a youth full of fire
and sentiment, protesting he was misunderstood, though he was not.
Posing as 'Velvet Coat' among the slums, he did no good to himself.
He had not the Dickens aptitude for depicting the ways of life of
his adopted friends. When with refined judgment he wanted a figure
for a novel, he went back to the Bar he scorned in his callow days
and then drew in WEIR OF HERMISTON."



CHAPTER V - TRAVELS



HIS interest in engineering soon went - his mind full of stories
and fancies and human nature. As he had told his mother: he did
not care about finding what was "the strain on a bridge," he wanted
to know something of human beings.

No doubt, much to the disappointment and grief of his father, who
wished him as an only son to carry on the traditions of the family,
though he had written two engineering essays of utmost promise, the
engineering was given up, and he consented to study law. He had
already contributed to College Magazines, and had had even a short
spell of editing one; of one of these he has given a racy account.
Very soon after his call to the Bar articles and essays from his
pen began to appear in MACMILLAN'S, and later, more regularly in
the CORNHILL. Careful readers soon began to note here the presence
of a new force. He had gone on the INLAND VOYAGE and an account of
it was in hand; and had done that tour in the Cevennes which he has
described under the title TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES,
with Modestine, sometimes doubting which was the donkey, but on
that tour a chill caught either developed a germ of lung disease
already present, or produced it; and the results unfortunately
remained.

He never practised at the Bar, though he tells facetiously of his
one brief. He had chosen his own vocation, which was literature,
and the years which followed were, despite the delicacy which
showed itself, very busy years. He produced volume on volume. He
had written many stories which had never seen the light, but, as he
says, passed through the ordeal of the fire by more or less
circuitous ways.

By this time some trouble and cause for anxiety had arisen about
the lungs, and trials of various places had been made. ORDERED
SOUTH suggests the Mediterranean, sunny Italy, the Riviera. Then a
sea-trip to America was recommended and undertaken. Unfortunately,
he got worse there, his original cause of trouble was complicated
with others, and the medical treatment given was stupid, and
exaggerated some of the symptoms instead of removing them, All
along - up, at all events, to the time of his settlement in Samoa -
Stevenson was more or less of an invalid.

Indeed, were I ever to write an essay on the art of wisely "laying-
to," as the sailors say, I would point it by a reference to R. L.
Stevenson. For there is a wise way of "laying-to" that does not
imply inaction, but discreet, well-directed effort, against
contrary winds and rough seas, that is, amid obstacles and
drawbacks, and even ill-health, where passive and active may
balance and give effect to each other. Stevenson was by native
instinct and temperament a rover - a lover of adventure, of strange
by-ways, errant tracts (as seen in his INLAND VOYAGE and TRAVELS
WITH A DONKEY THROUGH THE CEVENNES - seen yet more, perhaps, in a
certain account of a voyage to America as a steerage passenger),
lofty mountain-tops, with stronger air, and strange and novel
surroundings. He would fain, like Ulysses, be at home in foreign
lands, making acquaintance with outlying races, with


"Cities of men,
And manners, climates, councils, governments:
Myself not least, but honoured of them all,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy."


If he could not move about as he would, he would invent, make fancy
serve him instead of experience. We thus owe something to the
staying and restraining forces in him, and a wise "laying-to" - for
his works, which are, in large part, finely-healthy, objective, and
in almost everything unlike the work of an invalid, yet, in some
degree, were but the devices to beguile the burdens of an invalid's
days. Instead of remaining in our climate, it might be, to lie
listless and helpless half the day, with no companion but his own
thoughts and fancies (not always so pleasant either, if, like
Frankenstein's monster, or, better still like the imp in the bottle
in the ARABIAN NIGHTS, you cannot, once for all liberate them, and
set them adrift on their own charges to visit other people), he
made a home in the sweeter air and more steady climate of the South
Pacific, where, under the Southern Cross, he could safely and
beneficially be as active as he would be involuntarily idle at
home, or work only under pressure of hampering conditions. That
was surely an illustration of the true "laying-to" with an
unaffectedly brave, bright resolution in it.



CHAPTER VI - SOME EARLIER LETTERS



CARLYLE was wont to say that, next to a faithful portrait, familiar
letters were the best medium to reveal a man. The letters must
have been written with no idea of being used for this end, however
- free, artless, the unstudied self-revealings of mind and heart.
Now, these letters of R. L. Stevenson, written to his friends in
England, have a vast value in this way - they reveal the man -
reveal him in his strength and his weakness - his ready gift in
pleasing and adapting himself to those with whom he corresponded,
and his great power at once of adapting himself to his
circumstances and of humorously rising superior to them. When he
was ill and almost penniless in San Francisco, he could give Mr
Colvin this account of his daily routine:


"Any time between eight and half-past nine in the morning a slender
gentleman in an ulster, with a volume buttoned into the breast of
it, maybe observed leaving No. 608 Bush and descending Powell with
an active step. The gentleman is R. L. Stevenson; the volume
relates to Benjamin Franklin, on whom he meditates one of his
charming essays. He descends Powell, crosses Market, and descends
in Sixth on a branch of the original Pine Street Coffee-House, no
less. . . . He seats himself at a table covered with waxcloth, and
a pampered menial of High-Dutch extraction, and, indeed, as yet
only partially extracted, lays before him a cup of coffee, a roll,
and a pat of butter, all, to quote the deity, very good. A while
ago, and R. L. Stevenson used to find the supply of butter
insufficient; but he has now learned the art to exactitude, and
butter and roll expire at the same moment. For this rejection he
pays ten cents, or fivepence sterling.

"Half an hour later, the inhabitants of Bush Street observed the
same slender gentleman armed, like George Washington, with his
little hatchet, splitting kindling, and breaking coal for his fire.
He does this quasi-publicly upon the window-sill; but this is not
to be attributed to any love of notoriety, though he is indeed vain
of his prowess with the hatchet (which he persists in calling an
axe), and daily surprised at the perpetuation of his fingers. The
reason is this: That the sill is a strong supporting beam, and
that blows of the same emphasis in other parts of his room might
knock the entire shanty into hell. Thenceforth, for from three
hours, he is engaged darkly with an ink-bottle. Yet he is not
blacking his boots, for the only pair that he possesses are
innocent of lustre, and wear the natural hue of the material turned
up with caked and venerable slush. The youngest child of his
landlady remarks several times a day, as this strange occupant
enters or quits the house, 'Dere's de author.' Can it be that this
bright-haired innocent has found the true clue to the mystery? The
being in question is, at least, poor enough to belong to that
honourable craft."


Here are a few letters belonging to the winter of 1887-88, nearly
all written from Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks, celebrated by
Emerson, and now a most popular holiday resort in the United
States, and were originally published in SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE. . .
"It should be said that, after his long spell of weakness at
Bournemouth, Stevenson had gone West in search of health among the
bleak hill summits - 'on the Canadian border of New York State,
very unsettled and primitive and cold.' He had made the voyage in
an ocean tramp, the LUDGATE HILL, the sort of craft which any
person not a born child of the sea would shun in horror.
Stevenson, however, had 'the finest time conceivable on board the
"strange floating menagerie."'" Thus he describes it in a letter
to Mr Henry James:


"Stallions and monkeys and matches made our cargo; and the vast
continent of these incongruities rolled the while like a haystack;
and the stallions stood hypnotised by the motion, looking through
the port at our dinner-table, and winked when the crockery was
broken; and the little monkeys stared at each other in their cages,
and were thrown overboard like little bluish babies; and the big
monkey, Jacko, scoured about the ship and rested willingly in my
arms, to the ruin of my clothing; and the man of the stallions made
a bower of the black tarpaulin, and sat therein at the feet of a
raddled divinity, like a picture on a box of chocolates; and the
other passengers, when they were not sick, looked on and laughed.
Take all this picture, and make it roll till the bell shall sound
unexpected notes and the fittings shall break loose in our
stateroom, and you have the voyage of the LUDGATE HILL. She
arrived in the port of New York without beer, porter, soda-water,
curacoa, fresh meat, or fresh water; and yet we lived, and we
regret her."


He discovered this that there is no joy in the Universe comparable
to life on a villainous ocean tramp, rolling through a horrible sea
in company with a cargo of cattle.


"I have got one good thing of my sea voyage; it is proved the sea
agrees heartily with me, and my mother likes it; so if I get any
better, or no worse, my mother will likely hire a yacht for a month
or so in the summer. Good Lord! what fun! Wealth is only useful
for two things: a yacht and a string quartette. For these two I
will sell my soul. Except for these I hold that 700 pounds a year
is as much as anybody can possibly want; and I have had more, so I
know, for the extra coins were of no use, excepting for illness,
which damns everything. I was so happy on board that ship, I could
not have believed it possible; we had the beastliest weather, and
many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp ship gave
us many comforts. We could cut about with the men and officers,
stay in the wheel-house, discuss all manner of things, and really
be a little at sea. And truly there is nothing else. I had
literally forgotten what happiness was, and the full mind - full of
external and physical things, not full of cares and labours, and
rot about a fellow's behaviour. My heart literally sang; I truly
care for nothing so much as for that.

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