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Robert Rudder - "The Life of Lazarillo of Tormes, Parts One and Two"

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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




"To go ashore for your letters and hang about the pier among the
holiday yachtsmen - that's fame, that's glory - and nobody can take
it away."


At Saranac Lake the Stevensons lived in a "wind-beleaguered hill-
top hat-box of a house," which suited the invalid, but, on the
other hand, invalided his wife. Soon after getting there he
plunged into THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE.


"No thought have I now apart from it, and I have got along up to
page ninety-two of the draught with great interest. It is to me a
most seizing tale: there are some fantastic elements, the most is
a dead genuine human problem - human tragedy, I should say rather.
It will be about as long, I imagine, as KIDNAPPED. . . . I have
done most of the big work, the quarrel, duel between the brothers,
and the announcement of the death to Clementina and my Lord -
Clementina, Henry, and Mackellar (nicknamed Squaretoes) are really
very fine fellows; the Master is all I know of the devil; I have
known hints of him, in the world, but always cowards: he is as
bold as a lion, but with the same deadly, causeless duplicity I
have watched with so much surprise in my two cowards. 'Tis true, I
saw a hint of the same nature in another man who was not a coward;
but he had other things to attend to; the Master has nothing else
but his devilry."


His wife grows seriously ill, and Stevenson has to turn to
household work.


"Lloyd and I get breakfast; I have now, 10.15, just got the dishes
washed and the kitchen all clean, and sit down to give you as much
news as I have spirit for, after such an engagement. Glass is a
thing that really breaks my spirit; and I do not like to fail, and
with glass I cannot reach the work of my high calling - the
artist's."


In the midst of such domestic tasks and entanglements he writes THE
MASTER, and very characteristically gets dissatisfied with the last
parts, "which shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning."

Of Mr Kipling this is his judgment - in the year 1890:


"Kipling is by far the most promising young man who has appeared
since - ahem - I appeared. He amazes me by his precocity and
various endowments. But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste.
He should shield his fire with both hands, 'and draw up all his
strength and sweetness in one ball.' ('Draw all his strength and
all his sweetness up into one ball'? I cannot remember Marvell's
words.) So the critics have been saying to me; but I was never
capable of - and surely never guilty of - such a debauch of
production. At this rate his works will soon fill the habitable
globe, and surely he was armed for better conflicts than these
succinct sketches and flying leaves of verse? I look on, I admire,
I rejoice for myself; but in a kind of ambition we all have for our
tongue and literature I am wounded. If I had this man's fertility
and courage, it seems to me I could heave a pyramid.

"Well, we begin to be the old fogies now, and it was high time
SOMETHING rose to take our places. Certainly Kipling has the
gifts; the fairy godmothers were all tipsy at his christening.
What will he do with them?"


Of the rest of Stevenson's career we cannot speak at length, nor is
it needful. How in steady succession came his triumphs: came,
too, his trials from ill-health - how he spent winters at Davos
Platz, Bournemouth, and tried other places in America; and how, at
last, good fortune led him to the South Pacific. After many
voyagings and wanderings among the islands, he settled near Apia,
in Samoa, early in 1890, cleared some four hundred acres, and built
a house; where, while he wrote what delighted the English-speaking
race, he took on himself the defence of the natives against foreign
interlopers, writing under the title A FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY, the
most powerful EXPOSE of the mischief they had done and were doing
there. He was the beloved of the natives, as he made himself the
friend of all with whom he came in contact. There, as at home, he
worked - worked with the same determination and in the enjoyment of
better health. The obtaining idea with him, up to the end, as it
had been from early life, was a brave, resolute, cheerful endeavour
to make the best of it.

"I chose Samoa instead of Honolulu," he told Mr W. H. Trigg, who
reports the talk in CASSELLS' MAGAZINE, "for the simple and
eminently satisfactory reason that it is less civilised. Can you
not conceive that it is awful fun?" His house was called
"Vailima," which means Five Waters in the Samoan, and indicates the
number of streams that flow by the spot.



CHAPTER VII - THE VAILIMA LETTERS



THE Vailima Letters, written to Mr Sidney Colvin and other friends,
are in their way delightful if not inimitable: and this, in spite
of the idea having occurred to him, that some use might hereafter
be made of these letters for publication purposes. There is,
indeed, as little trace of any change in the style through this as
well could be - the utterly familiar, easy, almost child-like flow
remains, unmarred by self-consciousness or tendency "to put it on."

In June, 1892, Stevenson says:


"It came over me the other day suddenly that this diary of mine to
you would make good pickings after I am dead, and a man could make
some kind of a book out of it, without much trouble. So for God's
sake don't lose them, and they will prove a piece of provision for
'my floor old family,' as Simele calls it."


But their great charm remains: they are as free and gracious and
serious and playful and informal as before. Stevenson's traits of
character are all here: his largeness of heart, his delicacy, his
sympathy, his fun, his pathos, his boylike frolicsomeness, his fine
courage, his love of the sea (for he was by nature a sailor), his
passion for action and adventure despite his ill-health, his great
patience with others and fine adaptability to their temper (he says
that he never gets out of temper with those he has to do with), his
unbounded, big-hearted hopefulness, and fine perseverance in face
of difficulties. What could be better than the way in which he
tells that in January, 1892, when he had a bout of influenza and
was dictating ST IVES to his stepdaughter, Mrs Strong, he was
"reduced to dictating to her in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet"? - and
goes on:


"The amanuensis has her head quite turned, and believes herself to
be the author of this novel [AND IS TO SOME EXTENT. - A.M.] and as
the creature (!) has not been wholly useless in the matter [I TOLD
YOU SO! - A.M.] I propose to foster her vanity by a little
commemoration gift! . . . I shall tell you on some other occasion,
and when the A.M. is out of hearing, how VERY much I propose to
invest in this testimonial; but I may as well inform you at once
that I intend it to be cheap, sir - damned cheap! My idea of
running amanuenses is by praise, not pudding, flattery, and not
coins."


Truly, a rare and rich nature which could thus draw sunshine out of
its trials! - which, by aid of the true philosopher's stone of
cheerfulness and courage, could transmute the heavy dust and clay
to gold.

His interests are so wide that he is sometimes pulled in different
and conflicting directions, as in the contest between his desire to
aid Mataafa and the other chiefs, and his literary work - between
letters to the TIMES about Samoan politics, and, say, DAVID
BALFOUR. Here is a characteristic bit in that strain:


"I have a good dose of the devil in my pipestem atomy; I have had
my little holiday outing in my kick at THE YOUNG CHEVALIER, and I
guess I can settle to DAVID BALFOUR, to-morrow or Friday like a
little man. I wonder if any one had ever more energy upon so
little strength? I know there is a frost; . . . but I mean to
break that frost inside two years, and pull off a big success, and
Vanity whispers in my ear that I have the strength. If I haven't,
whistle owre the lave o't! I can do without glory, and perhaps the
time is not far off when I can do without corn. It is a time
coming soon enough, anyway; and I have endured some two and forty
years without public shame, and had a good time as I did it. If
only I could secure a violent death, what a fine success! I wish
to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be
drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse - ay, to be hanged,
rather than pass again through that slow dissolution."


He would not consent to act the invalid unless the spring ran down
altogether; was keen for exercise and for mixing among men - his
native servants if no others were near by. Here is a bit of
confession and casuistry quite A LA Stevenson:


"To come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain
after some hours in the bush, change, rub down, and take a chair in
the verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience. And the strange
thing that I mark is this: If I go out and make sixpence, bossing
my labourers and plying the cutlass or the spade, idiot conscience
applauds me; if I sit in the house and make twenty pounds, idiot
conscience wails over my neglect and the day wasted."


His relish for companionship is indeed strong. At one place he
says:


"God knows I don't care who I chum with perhaps I like sailors
best, but to go round and sue and sneak to keep a crowd together -
never!"


If Stevenson's natural bent was to be an explorer, a mountain-
climber, or a sailor - to sail wide seas, or to range on mountain-
tops to gain free and extensive views - yet he inclines well to
farmer work, and indeed, has to confess it has a rare attraction
for him.


"I went crazy over outdoor work," he says at one place, "and had at
last to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone
by the board. NOTHING is so interesting as weeding, clearing, and
path-making: the oversight of labourers becomes a disease. It is
quite an effort not to drop into the farmer; and it does make you
feel so well."


The odd ways of these Samoans, their pride of position, their
vices, their virtues, their vanities, their small thefts, their
tricks, their delightful INSOUCIANCE sometimes, all amused him. He
found in them a fine field of study and observation - a source of
fun and fund of humanity - as this bit about the theft of some
piglings will sufficiently prove:


"Last night three piglings were stolen from one of our pig-pens.
The great Lafaele appeared to my wife uneasy, so she engaged him in
conversation on the subject, and played upon him the following
engaging trick: You advance your two forefingers towards the
sitter's eyes; he closes them, whereupon you substitute (on his
eyelids) the fore and middle fingers of the left hand, and with
your right (which he supposes engaged) you tap him on the head and
back. When you let him open his eyes, he sees you withdrawing the
two forefingers. 'What that?' asked Lafaele. 'My devil,' says
Fanny. 'I wake um, my devil. All right now. He go catch the man
that catch my pig.' About an hour afterwards Lafaele came for
further particulars. 'Oh, all right,' my wife says. 'By-and-by
that man be sleep, devil go sleep same place. By-and-by that man
plenty sick. I no care. What for he take my pig?' Lafaele cares
plenty; I don't think he is the man, though he may be; but he knows
him, and most likely will eat some of that pig to-night. He will
not eat with relish.'"


Yet in spite of this R. L. Stevenson declares that:


"They are a perfectly honest people: nothing of value has ever
been taken from our house, where doors and windows are always wide
open; and upon one occasion when white ants attacked the silver
chest, the whole of my family treasure lay spread upon the floor of
the hall for two days unguarded."


Here is a bit on a work of peace, a reflection on a day's weeding
at Vailima - in its way almost as touching as any:


"I wonder if any one had ever the same attitude to Nature as I
hold, and have held for so long? This business fascinates me like
a tune or a passion; yet all the while I thrill with a strong
distaste. The horror of the thing, objective and subjective, is
always present to my mind; the horror of creeping things, a
superstitious horror of the void and the powers about me, the
horror of my own devastation and continual murders. The life of
the plants comes through my finger-tips, their struggles go to my
heart like supplications. I feel myself blood-boltered; then I
look back on my cleared grass, and count myself an ally in a fair
quarrel, and make stout my heart."


Here, again, is the way in which he celebrates an act of friendly
kindness on the part of Mr Gosse:


"MY DEAR GOSSE, - Your letter was to me such a bright spot that I
answer it right away to the prejudice of other correspondents or -
dants (don't know how to spell it) who have prior claims. . . . It
is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world
tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words,
kind looks, kind letters, multiplying, spreading, making one happy
through another and bringing forth benefits, some thirty, some
fifty, some a thousandfold, I should be tempted to think our life a
practical jest in the worst possible spirit. So your four pages
have confirmed my philosophy as well as consoled my heart in these
ill hours."



CHAPTER VIII - WORK OF LATER YEARS



MR HAMMERTON, in his STEVENSONIANA (pp. 323-4), has given the
humorous inscriptions on the volumes of his works which Stevenson
presented to Dr Trudeau, who attended him when he was in Saranac in
1887-88 - very characteristic in every way, and showing fully
Stevenson's fine appreciation of any attention or service. On the
DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE volume he wrote:


"Trudeau was all the winter at my side:
I never saw the nose of Mr Hyde."


And on KIDNAPPED is this:


"Here is the one sound page of all my writing,
The one I'm proud of and that I delight in."


Stevenson was exquisite in this class of efforts, and were they all
collected they would form indeed, a fine supplement and
illustration of the leading lesson of his essays - the true art of
pleasing others, and of truly pleasing one's self at the same time.
To my thinking the finest of all in this line is the legal (?) deed
by which he conveyed his birthday to little Miss Annie Ide, the
daughter of Mr H. C. Ide, a well-known American, who was for
several years a resident of Upolo, in Samoa, first as Land
Commissioner, and later as Chief Justice under the joint
appointment of England, Germany, and the United States. While
living at Apia, Mr Ide and his family were very intimate with the
family of R. L. Stevenson. Little Annie was a special pet and
protege of Stevenson and his wife. After the return of the Ides to
their American home, Stevenson "deeded" to Annie his birthday in
the following unique document:


I, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, advocate of the Scots Bar, author of THE
MASTER OF BALLANTRAE and MORAL EMBLEMS, civil engineer, sole owner
and patentee of the palace and plantation known as Vailima, in the
island of Upolo, Samoa, a British subject, being in sound mind, and
pretty well, I thank you, in mind and body;

In consideration that Miss Annie H. Ide, daughter of H. C. Ide, in
the town of Saint Johnsbury, in the County of Caledonia, in the
State of Vermont, United States of America, was born, out of all
reason, upon Christmas Day, and is, therefore, out of all justice,
denied the consolation and profit of a proper birthday;

And considering that I, the said Robert Louis Stevenson, have
attained the age when we never mention it, and that I have now no
further use for a birthday of any description;

And in consideration that I have met H. C. Ide, the father of the
said Annie H. Ide, and found him as white a land commissioner as I
require, I have transferred, and do hereby transfer, to the said
Annie H. Ide, all and whole of my rights and privileges in the 13th
day of November, formerly my birthday, now, hereby and henceforth,
the birthday of the said Annie H. Ide, to have, hold, exercise, and
enjoy the same in the customary manner, by the sporting of fine
raiment, eating of rich meats, and receipt of gifts, compliments,
and copies of verse, according to the manner of our ancestors;

And I direct the said Annie H. Ide to add to the said name of Annie
H. Ide the name of Louisa - at least in private - and I charge her
to use my said birthday with moderation and humanity, ET TAMQUAM
BONA FILIA FAMILIAS, the said birthday not being so young as it
once was and having carried me in a very satisfactory manner since
I can remember;

And in case the said Annie H. Ide shall neglect or contravene
either of the above conditions, I hereby revoke the donation and
transfer my rights in the said birthday to the President of the
United States of America for the time being.

In witness whereof I have hereto set my hand and seal this 19th day
of June, in the year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-one.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. [Seal.]
WITNESS, LLOYD OSBOURNE.
WITNESS, HAROLD WATTS.


He died in Samoa in December 1894 - not from phthisis or anything
directly connected with it, but from the bursting of a blood-vessel
and suffusion of blood on the brain. He had up to the moment
almost of his sudden and unexpected death been busy on WEIR OF
HERMISTON and ST IVES, which he left unfinished - the latter having
been brought to a conclusion by Mr Quiller-Couch.



CHAPTER IX - SOME CHARACTERISTICS



IN Stevenson we lost one of the most powerful writers of our day,
as well as the most varied in theme and style. When I use the word
"powerful," I do not mean merely the producing of the most striking
or sensational results, nor the facility of weaving a fascinating
or blood-curdling plot; I mean the writer who seemed always to have
most in reserve - a secret fund of power and fascination which
always pointed beyond the printed page, and set before the
attentive and careful reader a strange but fascinating PERSONALITY.
Other authors have done that in measure. There was Hawthorne,
behind whose writings there is always the wistful, cold, far-
withdrawn spectator of human nature - eerie, inquisitive, and, I
had almost said, inquisitorial - a little bloodless, eerie, weird,
and cobwebby. There was Dr Wendell Holmes, with his problems of
heredity, of race-mixture and weird inoculation, as in ELSIE VENNER
and THE GUARDIAN ANGEL, and there were Poe and Charles Whitehead.
Stevenson, in a few of his writings - in one of the MERRY MEN
chapters and in DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE, and, to some extent, in THE
MASTER OF BALLANTRAE - showed that he could enter on the obscure
and, in a sense, weird and metaphysical elements in human life;
though always there was, too, a touch at least of gloomy
suggestion, from which, as it seemed, he could not there wholly
escape. But always, too, there was a touch that suggests the
universal.

Even in the stories that would be classed as those of incident and
adventure merely, TREASURE ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, and the rest, there
is a sense as of some unaffected but fine symbolism that somehow
touches something of possibility in yourself as you read. The
simplest narrative from his hand proclaimed itself a deep study in
human nature - its motives tendencies, and possibilities. In these
stories there is promise at once of the most realistic imagination,
the most fantastic romance, keen insights into some sides of human
nature, and weird fancies, as well as the most delicate and dainty
pictures of character. And this is precisely what we have - always
with a vein of the finest autobiography - a kind of select and
indirect self-revelation - often with a touch of quaintness, a
subdued humour, and sweet-blooded vagary, if we may be allowed the
word, which make you feel towards the writer as towards a friend.
He was too much an artist to overdo this, and his strength lies
there, that generally he suggests and turns away at the right
point, with a smile, as you ask for MORE. Look how he sets, half
slyly, these words into the mouth of David Balfour on his first
meeting with Catriona in one of the steep wynds or closes off the
High Street of Edinburgh:


"There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman
fits in a man's mind, and stays there, and he never could tell you
why: it just seems it was the thing he wanted."


Take this alongside of his remark made to his mother while still a
youth - "that he did not care to understand the strain on a bridge"
(when he tried to study engineering); what he wanted was something
with human nature in it. His style, in his essays, etc., where he
writes in his own person, is most polished, full of phrases finely
drawn; when he speaks through others, as in KIDNAPPED and DAVID
BALFOUR, it is still fine and effective, and generally it is fairly
true to the character, with cunning glimpses, nevertheless, of his
own temper and feeling too. He makes us feel his confidants and
friends, as has been said. One could almost construct a biography
from his essays and his novels - the one would give us the facts of
his life suffused with fancy and ideal colour, humour and fine
observation not wanting; the other would give us the history of his
mental and moral being and development, and of the traits and
determinations which he drew from along a lengthened line of
progenitors. How characteristic it is of him - a man who for so
many years suffered as an invalid - that he should lay it down that
the two great virtues, including all others, were cheerfulness and
delight in labour.

One writer has very well said on this feature in Stevenson:


"Other authors have struggled bravely against physical weakness,
but their work has not usually been of a creative order, dependent
for its success on high animal spirits. They have written
histories, essays, contemplative or didactic poems, works which may
more or less be regarded as 'dull narcotics numbing pain.' But
who, in so fragile a frame as Robert Louis Stevenson's, has
retained such indomitable elasticity, such fertility of invention,
such unflagging energy, not merely to collect and arrange, but to
project and body forth? Has any true 'maker' been such an
incessant sufferer? From his childhood, as he himself said apropos
of the CHILD'S GARDEN, he could 'speak with less authority of
gardens than of that other "land of counterpane."' There were,
indeed, a few years of adolescence during which his health was
tolerable, but they were years of apprenticeship to life and art
('pioching,' as he called it), not of serious production. Though
he was a precocious child, his genius ripened slowly, and it was
just reaching maturity when the 'wolverine,' as he called his
disease, fixed its fangs in his flesh. From that time forward not
only did he live with death at his elbow in an almost literal sense
(he used to carry his left arm in a sling lest a too sudden
movement should bring on a haemorrhage), but he had ever-recurring
intervals of weeks and months during which he was totally unfit for
work; while even at the best of times he had to husband his
strength most jealously. Add to all this that he was a slow and
laborious writer, who would take more pains with a phrase than
Scott with a chapter - then look at the stately shelf of his works,
brimful of impulse, initiative, and the joy of life, and say
whether it be an exaggeration to call his tenacity and fortitude
unique!"


Samoa, with its fine climate, prolonged his life - we had fain
hoped that in that air he found so favourable he might have lived
for many years, to add to the precious stock of innocent delight he
has given to the world - to do yet more and greater. It was not to
be. They buried him, with full native honours as to a chief, on
the top of Vaea mountain, 1300 feet high - a road for the coffin to
pass being cut through the woods on the slopes of the hill. There
he has a resting-place not all unfit - for he sought the pure and
clearer air on the heights from whence there are widest prospects;
yet not in the spot he would have chosen - for his heart was at
home, and not very long before his death he sang, surely with
pathetic reference now:


"Spring shall come, come again, calling up the moorfowl,
Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers,
Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley,
Soft flow the stream thro' the even-flowing hours;
Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood -
Fair shine the day on the house with open door;
Birds come and cry there, and twitter in the chimney -
But I go for ever and come again no more."



CHAPTER X - A SAMOAN MEMORIAL OF R. L. STEVENSON



A FEW weeks after his death, the mail from Samoa, brought to
Stevenson's friends, myself among the number, a precious, if
pathetic, memorial of the master. It is in the form of "A Letter
to Mr Stevenson's Friends," by his stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, and
bears the motto from Walt Whitman, "I have been waiting for you
these many years. Give me your hand and welcome." Mr Osbourne
gives a full account of the last hours.

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