Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  He had some rough experience, but was apparently none the worse for it. ‘ Wick, September 1868. — I have had a long, hard day’s work in cold, wind, and almost incessant rain. . . . We got a lighter and a boat, and were out till half-past seven, doing labourers’ work, pulling, hauling, and tugging. It was past eight before I got dinner, as I was soaking, and bathed with mud to the ears; but, beyond being tired with the unusual exertion, I am all right now.’

  The following year he went with his father in the Pharos, the steamer of the Commissioners of Northern Lights, to Shetland, a part of the same cruise as that on which his grandfather had attended Sir Walter Scott.

  He treasured the memories of this time, but the record contained in his letters is somewhat disappointing. It was years afterwards that mentioning a boat-cloak, the use of which belonged chiefly to these days, he said: 4 The proudest moments of my life have been passed in the stern-sheets of a boat with that romantic garment about my shoulders. This, without prejudice to one glorious day when, standing upon some water-stairs at Lerwick, I signalled with a pocket-handkerchief for a boat to come ashore for me. I was then aged fifteen or sixteen [eighteen]. Conceive my glory.’

  In 1870, besides a week at Dunoon, to look after some work that was being done there, and one or two expeditions with the University Engineering class, he spent three weeks on the little island of Earraid, off Mull, the scene of David Balfour’s shipwreck, commemorated also in Memories and Portraits, but then in use as headquarters for the building of the deep-sea lighthouse of Dhu Heartach.

  All this was the attractive part of his work. ‘ As a way of life,’ he wrote, ‘ I wish to speak with sympathy of my education as an engineer. It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour-sides, which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if he ever had one) for the miserable life of cities. And when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him in an office. From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes 1 to the pretty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be 1 This also was his own experience.

  sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and, for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.’1

  But even the open-air life had only a very slight hold upon him, as far as it was devoted to professional work. Nothing could be more convincing than the little picture of his father and himself, given in the Family of Engineers.2

  ‘ My father would pass hours on the beach, brooding over the waves, counting them, noting their least deflection, noting when they broke. On Tweedside, or by Lyne and Manor, we have spent together whole afternoons; to me, at the time, extremely wearisome; to him, as I am now sorry to think, extremely mortifying. The river was to me a pretty and various spectacle; I could not see — I could not be made to see — it otherwise. To my father it was a chequer-board of lively forces, which he traced from pool to shallow with minute appreciation and enduring interest. “ That bank was being undercut,” he might say. “ Why? Suppose you were to put a groin out here, would not the filum fluminis be cast abruptly off across the channel? and where would it impinge upon the other shore? and what would be the result? Or suppose you were to blast that boulder, what would happen? Follow it — use the eyes that God has given you: can you not see that a great deal of land would be reclaimed upon this side? “ It was to me like school in holidays; but to him, until I had worn him out with my invincible triviality, a delight.’

  Meanwhile his life was surrounded by the ordinary material comforts belonging to his class, and the customary diversions of society were open to him, had he found them at all to his taste.

  In Heriot Row he had now for his own use the two rooms on the top floor of his father’s house, which had been his nurseries. The smaller chamber, to the east, 1 Additional Memories and Portraits, . 2 P. 266.

  was his bedroom, while the other held his hooks, and was used as his study as long as he lived in Edinburgh.1

  At the beginning of this period a change was made in the household arrangements, which was of material service both to his health and also to his subsequent work. In May 1867 his father took the lease of a house known as Swanston Cottage, lying in a nook at the foot of the Pentland Hills,2 at a distance of some five miles from Edinburgh and two and a half from the boy’s paradise of Colinton.

  This was afterwards the home of the heroine of St. Ives, and in the Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh its situation and history were described.

  ‘ Upon the main slope of the Pentlands ... a bouquet of old trees stands round a white farmhouse; and from a neighbouring dell you can see smoke rising and leaves rustling in the breeze. Straight above, the hills climb a thousand feet into the air. The neighbourhood, about the time of lambs, is clamorous with the bleating of flocks; and you will be awakened in the grey of early summer mornings by the barking of a dog, or the voice of a shepherd shouting to the echoes. This, with the hamlet lying behind unseen, is Swanston. . . . Long ago, this sheltered field was purchased by the Edinburgh magistrates for the sake of the springs that rise or gather there. After they had built their water-house and laid their pipes, it occurred to them that the place was suitable for junketing. . . . The dell was turned into a garden; and on the knoll that shelters it from the plain and the sea winds, they built a cottage looking to the hills. They brought crockets and gargoyles from old 1 The roof was raised and the front of the two rooms improved about 1873.

  2 41 have been on a good many Scotch hills; but the competitors for the first prize are only four: Ben Lomond, Goatfell, Demyet, and Swanston (Cairketton), the eastmost of the Pentlands. . . . Considering the beauty of Edinburgh, and the dignity imparted to scenery by objects of importance, I am rather inclined to give the palm to that Pentland.’ — Lord Cockburn, Circuit Journeys, 12th September 1842.

  St. Giles’, which they were then restoring, and disposed them on the gables and over the door and about the garden; and the quarry which had supplied them with building material, they draped with clematis and carpeted with beds of roses. In process of time the trees grew higher, and gave shade to the cottage, and the evergreens sprang up and turned the dell into a thicket.’1

  Here for the next fourteen years the family spent a large part of their summers in place of taking a furnished house at North Berwick or elsewhere.

  Hither at all seasons Louis would often retire alone or in the company of a friend; here he gained a knowledge of the Pentlands only to be acquired by living among them; here he saw something of the country folk, and enriched his vocabulary of Lallan; here made the acquaintance of John Todd the shepherd, and Robert Young the gardener, and the military beggarman who had a taste for Keats. This was to him ille terrarum angulus of Underwoods; on the hill above Swanston there lies the tiny pool, overhung by a rock, where he ‘ loved to sit and make bad verses,’ and to this spot he asked his old nurse, four months before he finally left England, ‘ some day to climb Halkerside for me (I am never likely to do it for myself), and sprinkle some of the well water on the turf.’

  Here one winter-tide he read Dumas again. ‘ I would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the shepherd: a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly retriever scurry upstairs to fetch my slippers; and I would sit down with the Vicomte de Bragelonne for a long, silent, solitary, lamplit evening by the fire. ... I would rise from my book and pull the blind aside, and see the snow and the glittering hollies chequer a Scottish garden, and the winter moonlight brighten the white hills.’2

  1 Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh, .

  2 Memories and Portraits, . />
  Now he joined in various sports; at first he rode a good deal, and was even known to follow the hounds. At this time he skated, chiefly from Edinburgh, at Duddingston Loch. It was in these years that he was in Glenogil, in Mr. Barrie’s country, and there caught as many as three dozen trout in one day, and forthwith forswore fishing.1 Now he made his first acquaintance with canoes, which at this time were introduced by Mr. Baxter on the Firth of Forth. Sir Walter Simpson, the companion of the Inland Voyage, was another pioneer, and owned a large double canoe that often carried Stevenson, who had no boat of his own. His more experienced friends had no high opinion of his skill, but he occasionally joined them at Granton, and later at Queensferry, and spent many an afternoon in the fresh air of the Forth and the healthful employment of his paddle.

  Conventional persons and conventional entertainments never had any attraction for him, and from general society in Edinburgh he was not long in withdrawing himself. There were exceptions of course; for several years after 1871 he took part in the private theatricals at Professor Fleeming Jenkin’s house: at first as prompter, and afterwards in some minor parts, for he never was proficient as an actor. But mostly he preferred to see his friends apart from general company, and as for his clothes, of which a great deal has been said — he dressed to please himself. It would be impossible to record the varying phases in which a certain vanity, a need of economy, and a love of ease were combined. The top- hat and frock-coat of convention became him extremely ill, and were finally abandoned after 1878, when as Jenkin’s secretary he adopted them in Paris only to be referred to by the hotel clerk as a gentleman who knew all about Mabille. The notorious ‘ black shirt’ which was his favourite wear, dated, I believe, from his engineering 1 Letters, ii. 345.

  days, and was made of dark blue flannel. It was only a little care that was needed in selecting for him appropriate garments, but it was just this trouble he never was willing to take.

  His father’s was ever a hospitable house, and Louis was there able to entertain his friends. He joined the University Conservative Club, an organisation for elections, and made his first speech at its dinner; he dined with his Academy class for several years; and — more important than any of these — he was elected to the * Speculative Society’ — that * Spec.’ of which the fame has gone abroad in the world largely by means of his writings.

  * It is a body of some antiquity, and has counted among its members Scott, Jeffrey, Horner, Benjamin Constant, Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings of the University of Edinburgh: a hall, Turkey - carpeted, hung with pictures, looking, when lighted up with fire and candle, like some goodly dining-room, a passage-like library, walled with books in their wire cages; and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former secretary. Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read; here, in defiance of Senatus-consults, he can smoke.’1

  The Society is limited to thirty ordinary members, who acquire honorary privileges at the end of four years. Meetings are held once a week from November to March; first an essay is read and criticised, and then a motion is debated. The roll is called thrice on each of these evenings, and at each call every ordinary member is bound to be present; an elaborate system of procedure has grown up, fenced in with penalties and fines. Stevenson was elected a member on 16th February, 1869, 1 Memories and Portraits, .

  and in the proceedings he took an increasing interest. During his first complete session he attended six, during the next eight, and during the third session thirteen out of nineteen meetings. And in 1873 he wrote to one of his fellow-members: ‘ O, I do think the Spec, is about the best thing in Edinburgh.’1

  The records of the Society contain several entries of interest, even if we do not press too closely the opinions advanced by a student in the heat of debate or the exhilaration of paradox.

  The scene in Weir of Hermiston where the son of the Lord Justice-Clerk moves the abolition of Capital Punishment appears to have been not wholly imaginary. On March 1, 1870, Stevenson himself opened in the affirmative a debate on the question, ‘ Is the Abolition of Capital Punishment desirable?’ Like his hero, he found no seconder; but if he ever held the opinion, it certainly found no favour with him in after-life. The first essay he read before the Society (March 8, 1870) was on ‘The Influence of the Covenanting Persecution on the Scotch Mind,’ showing how closely this part of the national history occupied his attention. His opinion of the literature of the day was not high; in 1870 he moved that the revival of Letters which took place early in the century is on the wane, and two years later he supported the view that American literature could compare favourably with the contemporaneous literature of England.

  The ‘ Spec.’ was probably the first place where Stevenson came into contact and rivalry with contemporaries who, being his equals, were not necessarily the friends of his own choice; and upon the members in general he seems to have made small impression. He 1 I must take this opportunity of expressing my thanks to the Society for kindly allowing me to have the necessary extracts made from their records, and especially to Mr. J. R. N. Macphail for obtaining this permission and giving up his time to the task.

  was elected one of the five Presidents of the Society in 1872, but was at the bottom of the list and had only seven votes, whereas the first received eighteen, and the man next above him had thirteen supporters. In 1873 he was re-elected apparently without a contest; in his valedictory address, delivered in the same year, there is an amusing picture of the members, ending with a sketch of himself:—’ Mr. Stevenson engaged in explaining to the other members that he is the cleverest person of his age and weight between this and California., ‘ It is good for boys to be violent and unruly, and to hate all constituted authority/ he wrote before he himself had yet ceased to be a student,4 for it is of such boys that good citizens are made.’ And in 1870 he himself, as a riotous student, fell into the hands of the police. He must have chafed at his own inaction and the injustice of the arrest, for, on that occasion at any rate, he was but a looker-on at one of the traditional snowball fights between the University and the Town. The magistrates, however, behaved with great discretion, inflicted light sentences, and merely bound Stevenson over to keep the peace.

  But while the external course of his life seemed smooth, the deeper current had far more troubled a stream. For one thing, as we have seen, he was not interested in engineering, and all the time he could spare from it was given up to the pursuit which had taken firm possession of him. The art of writing was his one concern, and to learn this he was giving all his real self. In later life, when a master of his craft, he sometimes doubted whether he would not have preferred a life of action, had that been possible to him. But it was not for any reason of health that he gave up engineering, but because his impulse to letters was at this time overpowering, and admitted of neither substitute nor rival.

  There were, however, besides the misspending of his time and the misdirection of his labour, other difficulties that were far more grave. He had begun to work out for himself his own views of life: his religion and his ethics, his relations to society and his own place in the universe. He was following out the needs of his mind and nature: strictly sincere with himself, he could never see things in their merely conventional aspect. He was * young in youth/ and travelling at the fiery pace of his age and temperament; his senses were importunate, his intellect inquiring, and he must either find his own way, or, as he well might have done, lose it altogether.

  When a young man with all the impetuosity of youth is involved in doubts as to the truth of religion, the constitution of society, and the contending claims of different duties, and further is bound to the service of a profession to which he is indifferent, while eagerly yearning after the practice of an art absorbing his whole powers, it is at once impossible he should be happy, and highly improbable that he should satisfy his paren
ts.

  Of all Stevenson’s difficulties those concerned with religion were the most important, if for no other reason than that they alone affected his relations with his father. The one was questioning dogmas and observances which the other regarded it as impious to examine; and no sacrifice was too great for the father, no duty too arduous, if it could only avert from his child the doom of the freethinker. On the other hand, sooner than be tied to the doctrines of Calvinism, the lad called himself an atheist — such is ever the youthful formula of independence. Of the precise nature of his difficulties at this time he has left no record. He was revolting generally against doctrines held with severity and intolerance, and struggling for that wider view and larger conception of life, which he afterwards found to be less incompatible than he thought with the lessons of his earliest years.

  He speaks of the startling effect that the Gospel of St. Matthew produced on him,1 but this seems to have been chiefly upon the social side. He was never at any 1 Juvenilia, . Later Essays, .

  time prone to compromise, and the discrepancy between Christ’s teaching and the practice of Christian societies he was neither ready to explain away nor able to ignore.1 As in religion he designated himself for the moment an atheist, so he seems in economics, if not in politics, to have become ‘a red-hot Socialist.’2 The direction of his views was no doubt partly due to the * healthy democratic atmosphere’ of the Scottish University system.

  ‘At an early age the Scottish lad begins his . . . experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of restraint, and nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no quiet clique of the exclusive, studious, and cultured; no rotten borough of the arts. All classes rub shoulders on the greasy benches. The raffish young gentleman in gloves must measure his scholarship with the plain, clever, clownish laddie from the parish school.’3