Memories and Portraits
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> Memories and Portraits
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But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted chiefly. The
lighthouse settlement scarce encroached beyond its fences; over the
top of the first brae the ground was all virgin, the world all shut
out, the face of things unchanged by any of man's doings. Here was
no living presence, save for the limpets on the rocks, for some
old, gray, rain-beaten ram that I might rouse out of a ferny den
betwixt two boulders, or for the haunting and the piping of the
gulls. It was older than man; it was found so by incoming Celts,
and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's priests. The earthy savour
of the bog-plants, the rude disorder of the boulders, the
inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the iodine,
the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden springing
up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the isle,
all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt
with scarce a difference. I steeped myself in open air and in past
ages.
"Delightful would it be to me to be in UCHD AILIUN
On the pinnacle of a rock,
That I might often see
The face of the ocean;
That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds,
Source of happiness;
That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves
Upon the rocks:
At times at work without compulsion -
This would be delightful;
At times plucking dulse from the rocks
At times at fishing."
So, about the next island of Iona, sang Columba himself twelve
hundred years before. And so might I have sung of Earraid.
And all the while I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and
sun-burning was for me but a holiday. In that year cannon were
roaring for days together on French battlefields; and I would sit
in my isle (I call it mine, after the use of lovers) and think upon
the war, and the loudness of these far-away battles, and the pain
of the men's wounds, and the weariness of their marching. And I
would think too of that other war which is as old as mankind, and
is indeed the life of man: the unsparing war, the grinding slavery
of competition; the toil of seventy years, dear-bought bread,
precarious honour, the perils and pitfalls, and the poor rewards.
It was a long look forward; the future summoned me as with trumpet
calls, it warned me back as with a voice of weeping and beseeching;
and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a childish
bather on the beach.
There was another young man on Earraid in these days, and we were
much together, bathing, clambering on the boulders, trying to sail
a boat and spinning round instead in the oily whirlpools of the
roost. But the most part of the time we spoke of the great
uncharted desert of our futures; wondering together what should
there befall us; hearing with surprise the sound of our own voices
in the empty vestibule of youth. As far, and as hard, as it seemed
then to look forward to the grave, so far it seems now to look
backward upon these emotions; so hard to recall justly that loath
submission, as of the sacrificial bull, with which we stooped our
necks under the yoke of destiny. I met my old companion but the
other day; I cannot tell of course what he was thinking; but, upon
my part, I was wondering to see us both so much at home, and so
composed and sedentary in the world; and how much we had gained,
and how much we had lost, to attain to that composure; and which
had been upon the whole our best estate: when we sat there prating
sensibly like men of some experience, or when we shared our
timorous and hopeful counsels in a western islet.
CHAPTER IX. THOMAS STEVENSON - CIVIL ENGINEER
THE death of Thomas Stevenson will mean not very much to the
general reader. His service to mankind took on forms of which the
public knows little and understands less. He came seldom to
London, and then only as a task, remaining always a stranger and a
convinced provincial; putting up for years at the same hotel where
his father had gone before him; faithful for long to the same
restaurant, the same church, and the same theatre, chosen simply
for propinquity; steadfastly refusing to dine out. He had a circle
of his own, indeed, at home; few men were more beloved in
Edinburgh, where he breathed an air that pleased him; and wherever
he went, in railway carriages or hotel smoking-rooms, his strange,
humorous vein of talk, and his transparent honesty, raised him up
friends and admirers. But to the general public and the world of
London, except about the parliamentary committee-rooms, he remained
unknown. All the time, his lights were in every part of the world,
guiding the mariner; his firm were consulting engineers to the
Indian, the New Zealand, and the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, so
that Edinburgh was a world centre for that branch of applied
science; in Germany, he had been called "the Nestor of lighthouse
illumination"; even in France, where his claims were long denied,
he was at last, on the occasion of the late Exposition, recognised
and medalled. And to show by one instance the inverted nature of
his reputation, comparatively small at home, yet filling the world,
a friend of mine was this winter on a visit to the Spanish main,
and was asked by a Peruvian if he "knew Mr. Stevenson the author,
because his works were much esteemed in Peru?" My friend supposed
the reference was to the writer of tales; but the Peruvian had
never heard of DR. JEKYLL; what he had in his eye, what was
esteemed in Peru, where the volumes of the engineer.
Thomas Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in the year 1818, the
grandson of Thomas Smith, first engineer to the Board of Northern
Lights, son of Robert Stevenson, brother of Alan and David; so that
his nephew, David Alan Stevenson, joined with him at the time of
his death in the engineership, is the sixth of the family who has
held, successively or conjointly, that office. The Bell Rock, his
father's great triumph, was finished before he was born; but he
served under his brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore, the
noblest of all extant deep-sea lights; and, in conjunction with his
brother David, he added two - the Chickens and Dhu Heartach - to
that small number of man's extreme outposts in the ocean. Of shore
lights, the two brothers last named erected no fewer than twenty-
seven; of beacons, (4) about twenty-five. Many harbours were
successfully carried out: one, the harbour of Wick, the chief
disaster of my father's life, was a failure; the sea proved too
strong for man's arts; and after expedients hitherto unthought of,
and on a scale hyper-cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now
stands a ruin in that bleak, God-forsaken bay, ten miles from John-
o'-Groat's. In the improvement of rivers the brothers were
likewise in a large way of practice over both England and Scotland,
nor had any British engineer anything approaching their experience.
It was about this nucleus of his professional labours that all my
father's scientific inquiries and inventions centred; these
proceeded from, and acted back upon, his daily business. Thus it
was as a harbour engineer that he became interested in the
propagation and reduction of waves; a difficult subject in regard
to which he has left behind him much suggestive matter and some
valuable approximate results. Storms were his sworn adversaries,
and it was through the study of storms that he approached that of
meteorology at large. Many who knew him not otherwise, knew -
perhaps have in their gardens - his louvre-boarded screen for
instruments. But the great achievement of his life was, of course,
in optics as applied to lighthouse illumination. Fresnel had done
much; Fresnel had settled the fixed light apparatus on a principle
that still seems unimprovable; and when Thomas Stevenson stepped in
and brought to a comparable perfection the revolving light, a not
unnatural jealousy and much painful controversy rose in France. It
had its hour; and, as I have told already, even in France it has
blown by. Had it not, it would have mattered the less, since all
through his life my father continued to justify his claim by fresh
advances. New apparatus for lights in new situations was
continually being designed with the same unwearied search after
perfection, the same nice ingenuity of means; and though the
holophotal revolving light perhaps still remains his most elegant
contrivance, it is difficult to give it the palm over the much
later condensing system, with its thousand possible modifications.
The number and the value of these improvements entitle their author
to the name of one of mankind's benefactors. In all parts of the
world a safer landfall awaits the mariner. Two things must be
said: and, first, that Thomas Stevenson was no mathematician.
Natural shrewdness, a sentiment of optical laws, and a great
intensity of consideration led him to just conclusions; but to
calculate the necessary formulae for the instruments he had
conceived was often beyond him, and he must fall back on the help
of others, notably on that of his cousin and lifelong intimate
friend, EMERITUS Professor Swan, of St. Andrews, and his later
friend, Professor P. G. Tait. It is a curious enough circumstance,
and a great encouragement to others, that a man so ill equipped
should have succeeded in one of the most abstract and arduous walks
of applied science. The second remark is one that applies to the
whole family, and only particularly to Thomas Stevenson from the
great number and importance of his inventions: holding as the
Stevensons did a Government appointment they regarded their
original work as something due already to the nation, and none of
them has ever taken out a patent. It is another cause of the
comparative obscurity of the name: for a patent not only brings in
money, it infallibly spreads reputation; and my father's
instruments enter anonymously into a hundred light-rooms, and are
passed anonymously over in a hundred reports, where the least
considerable patent would stand out and tell its author's story.
But the life-work of Thomas Stevenson remains; what we have lost,
what we now rather try to recall, is the friend and companion. He
was a man of a somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness
and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat
bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition
and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in
company; shrewd and childish; passionately attached, passionately
prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no
very stable foothold for himself among life's troubles. Yet he was
a wise adviser; many men, and these not inconsiderable, took
counsel with him habitually. "I sat at his feet," writes one of
these, "when I asked his advice, and when the broad brow was set in
thought and the firm mouth said his say, I always knew that no man
could add to the worth of the conclusion." He had excellent taste,
though whimsical and partial; collected old furniture and delighted
specially in sunflowers long before the days of Mr. Wilde; took a
lasting pleasure in prints and pictures; was a devout admirer of
Thomson of Duddingston at a time when few shared the taste; and
though he read little, was constant to his favourite books. He had
never any Greek; Latin he happily re-taught himself after he had
left school, where he was a mere consistent idler: happily, I say,
for Lactantius, Vossius, and Cardinal Bona were his chief authors.
The first he must have read for twenty years uninterruptedly,
keeping it near him in his study, and carrying it in his bag on
journeys. Another old theologian, Brown of Wamphray, was often in
his hands. When he was indisposed, he had two books, GUY MANNERING
and THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT, of which he never wearied. He was a
strong Conservative, or, as he preferred to call himself, a Tory;
except in so far as his views were modified by a hot-headed
chivalrous sentiment for women. He was actually in favour of a
marriage law under which any woman might have a divorce for the
asking, and no man on any ground whatever; and the same sentiment
found another expression in a Magdalen Mission in Edinburgh,
founded and largely supported by himself. This was but one of the
many channels of his public generosity; his private was equally
unstrained. The Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines
(though in a sense of his own) and to which he bore a clansman's
loyalty, profited often by his time and money; and though, from a
morbid sense of his own unworthiness, he would never consent to be
an office-bearer, his advice was often sought, and he served the
Church on many committees. What he perhaps valued highest in his
work were his contributions to the defence of Christianity; one of
which, in particular, was praised by Hutchinson Stirling and
reprinted at the request of Professor Crawford.
His sense of his own unworthiness I have called morbid; morbid,
too, were his sense of the fleetingness of life and his concern for
death. He had never accepted the conditions of man's life or his
own character; and his inmost thoughts were ever tinged with the
Celtic melancholy. Cases of conscience were sometimes grievous to
him, and that delicate employment of a scientific witness cost him
many qualms. But he found respite from these troublesome humours
in his work, in his lifelong study of natural science, in the
society of those he loved, and in his daily walks, which now would
carry him far into the country with some congenial friend, and now
keep him dangling about the town from one old book-shop to another,
and scraping romantic acquaintance with every dog that passed. His
talk, compounded of so much sterling sense and so much freakish
humour, and clothed in language so apt, droll, and emphatic, was a
perpetual delight to all who knew him before the clouds began to
settle on his mind. His use of language was both just and
picturesque; and when at the beginning of his illness he began to
feel the ebbing of this power, it was strange and painful to hear
him reject one word after another as inadequate, and at length
desist from the search and leave his phrase unfinished rather than
finish it without propriety. It was perhaps another Celtic trait
that his affections and emotions, passionate as these were, and
liable to passionate ups and downs, found the most eloquent
expression both in words and gestures. Love, anger, and
indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery, like what
we read of Southern races. For all these emotional extremes, and
in spite of the melancholy ground of his character, he had upon the
whole a happy life; nor was he less fortunate in his death, which
at the last came to him unaware.
CHAPTER X. TALK AND TALKERS
Sir, we had a good talk. - JOHNSON.
As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle
silence. - FRANKLIN.
THERE can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be
affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought,
or an illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the
flight of time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great
international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are
first declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of
public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right.
No measure comes before Parliament but it has been long ago
prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no book is written that
has not been largely composed by their assistance. Literature in
many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but
the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and
effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking,
comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid,
tentative, continually "in further search and progress"; while
written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found
wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber
of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with
linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man,
talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. Talk has none
of the freezing immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it
would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature.
A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and
speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open
fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of
school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and
ourselves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is
his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious
speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures.
It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our
education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed
at any age and in almost any state of health.
The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a
kind of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in
our lot, we must continually face some other person, eye to eye,
and wrestle a fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force
of body, or power of character or intellect, that we attain to
worthy pleasures. Men and women contend for each other in the
lists of love, like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit decide
their challenges in the sports of the body; and the sedentary sit
down to chess or conversation. All sluggish and pacific pleasures
are, to the same degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable
band between human beings is founded in or heightened by some
element of competition. Now, the relation that has the least root
in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and hence, I
suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among friends.
Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship. It
is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy
that amicable counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge
of relations and the sport of life.
A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humours must first be
accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and
circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject,
the quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the
wood. Not that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he
has all and more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows
the stream of conversation as an angler follows the windings of a
brook, not dallying where he fails to "kill." He trusts implicitly
to hazard; and he is rewarded by continual variety, continual
pleasure, and those changing prospects of the truth that are the
best of education. There is nothing in a subject, so called, that
we should regard it as an idol, or follow it beyond the promptings
of desire. Indeed, there are few subjects; and so far as they are
truly talkable, more than the half of them may be reduced to three:
that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other people
dimly understood to be not quite the same as either. Wherever talk
may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal lines. The
theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument; asserts
and justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and
opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and
the admiration of his adversary. All natural talk is a festival of
ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the
vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay
ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that
we swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion. For
talkers, once launched, begin to overflow the limits of their
ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their secret
pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, pious,
musical and wise, that in their most shining moments they aspire to
be. So they weave for themselves with words and for a while
inhabit a palace of delights, temple at once and theatre, where
they fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast with the
gods, exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes his
way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing
clouds of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie,
not in a moment, but by slow declension. I remember, in the
ENTR'ACTE of an afternoon performance, coming forth into the
sunshine, in a beautiful green, gardened corner of a romantic city;
and as I sat and smoked, the music moving in my blood, I seemed to
sit there and evaporate THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (for it was that I had
been hearing) with a wonderful sense of life, warmth, well-being
and pride; and the noises of the city, voices, bells and marching
feet, fell together in my ears like a symphonious orchestra. In
the same way, the excitement of a good talk lives for a long while
after in the blood, the heart still hot within you, the brain still
simmering, and the physical earth swimming around you with the
colours of the sunset.
Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of
life, rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of
experience, anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical
instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and
in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and
from every degree of mental elevation and abasement - these are the
material with which talk is fortified, the food on which the
talkers thrive. Such argument as is proper to the exercise should
still be brief and seizing. Talk should proceed by instances; by
the apposite, not the expository. It should keep close along the
lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses of men, at the
level where history, fiction and experience intersect and
illuminate each other. I am I, and You are You, with all my heart;
but conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten when,
instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the
spirit housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering
voices to corroborate the story in the face. Not less surprising
is the change when we leave off to speak of generalities - the bad,
the good, the miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus - and
call up other men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and
feature; or trading on a common knowledge, toss each other famous
names, still glowing with the hues of life. Communication is no
longer by words, but by the instancing of whole biographies, epics,
systems of philosophy, and epochs of history, in bulk. That which
is understood excels that which is spoken in quantity and quality
alike; ideas thus figured and personified, change hands, as we may
say, like coin; and the speakers imply without effort the most
obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a large common
ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the
grapple of genuine converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon,
Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they
can leave generalities and begin at once to speak by figures.
Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and
that embrace the widest range of facts. A few pleasures bear
discussion for their own sake, but only those which are most social
or most radically human; and even these can only be discussed among
their devotees. A technicality is always welcome to the expert,
whether in athletics, art or law; I have heard the best kind of
talk on technicalities from such rare and happy persons as both
know and love their business. No human being ever spoke of scenery
for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear too
much of it in literature. The weather is regarded as the very
nadir and scoff of conversational topics. And yet the weather, the
dramatic element in scenery, is far more tractable in language, and
far more human both in import and suggestion than the stable
features of the landscape. Sailors and shepherds, and the people
generally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is often
excitingly presented in literature. But the tendency of all living
talk draws it back and back into the common focus of humanity.
Talk is a creature of the street and market-place, feeding on
gossip; and its last resort is still in a discussion on morals.
That is the heroic form of gossip; heroic in virtue of its high
pretensions; but still gossip, because it turns on personalities.
You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen at all, off moral or
theological discussion. These are to all the world what law is to
lawyers; they are everybody's technicalities; the medium through
which all consider life, and the dialect in which they express
their judgments. I knew three young men who walked together daily
for some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in
cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and
yet scarce wandered that whole time beyond two subjects - theology
and love. And perhaps neither a court of love nor an assembly of
divines would have granted their premisses or welcomed their
conclusions.
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