Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  The Advocates’ Library in the Parliament House is the best in Scotland; and here Stevenson hoped to get some of his literary work done, while he was waiting for briefs. But the division of interests and the attractive company of his fellows were too unsettling; he soon returned to his own upper room in his father’s house, and came no more to the Salle des Pas Perdus.

  But although, after he abandoned Parliament House, he was no longer confined to the city of his birth, it was still his home and the point of return from his wanderings in England or abroad. Three of the first 1 I.e. make a purely formal motion that it be replaced in the list, in order to prevent it from lapsing.

  four friends named in the preceding chapter were, like himself, now released from the necessity of living constantly in Edinburgh, yet their connection with it was maintained, and they continued more or less frequently to visit it; while Professor Jenkin and Mr. Baxter remained resident there as before.

  Nor did Stevenson’s manner of life, at the times when he was in Edinburgh, suffer any sudden change. We must think of him in Scotland at this time as living chiefly in the society of a few intimates, still wandering about the city and its neighbourhood, ‘scraping acquaintance with all classes of man- and woman-kind,’ travelling deliberately through his ages and getting the heart out of his own liberal education, still to some extent in bonds to himself, though he had escaped in a degree from circumstance. No longer as a supplement to professional studies, but now as his avowed business, he wrote and rewrote, he blotted and recast his essays, tales, verses and plays as before, and accomplished much solid work. From general society he still held aloof, and it was in 1875 that he last took part in the Jenkins’ theatricals, acting the Duke in Twelfth Night.

  ‘ He played no character on the stage as he could play himself among his friends’ was his verdict upon Jenkin, and it was even more applicable to himself where his own friends were concerned; but as yet he could not modify his attitude towards the burgess or the Philistine, or forgo the intolerance of youth.

  All this did not heighten his popularity or the estimation in which he was held, nor was he generally looked upon at this time as likely ever to bring honour to his native city. The brilliance and diversity of his talk appealed to few of his fellow-citizens, whether old or young, and merely disconcerted those whose minds ran in narrower grooves. Mostly they perceived little more than the exterior of the lad, with his dilapidated clothes, his long hair, and distaste for office life. The companions who knew him best did not spare their criticism or laughter, and it was at this time that names like Flibbertigibbet and Mr. Fastidious Brisk were aimed at his volubility and exaggeration on the one hand, and a supposed tendency to sprightliness and affectation of phrase upon the other.

  It is a keen eye which can discern in a young man the difference between the belief in gifts which he does not possess, and his consciousness of powers as yet undeveloped, until Time, which tries all, reduces the one and justifies the other. It was chiefly the older men who looked with a kindly glance upon the manifestations of his youth, such as old Mr. Baxter, who had for him as warm an appreciation as his son Charles had found in turn at the hands of Thomas Stevenson; Mr. J. T. Mowbray, the family lawyer, a grim, dry, warm-hearted old bachelor, whom I have always fancied to be the original of Mr. Utterson in Jekyll and Hyde; Mr. Robert Hunter, of whom Stevenson has left a speaking portrait in the second part of Talk and Talkers; and other friendly veterans. These seem best to have realised the good that was in him, and indeed the husk is hardly noticeable to those who can read (as his contemporaries could not) how the frail lad found a lost child of three crying in the street in the middle of the night, and carried him half over Edinburgh, wrapped in his own greatcoat, while he sought in vain for the missing parents.1

  And still, as in his childhood and as in most of his books, happiness came to him chiefly in the country. Long walks in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh; summer evenings in the garden at Swanston, or on Caerketton or Allermuir; days passed in canoeing on the Forth at Queensferry, or skating upon Duddingston Loch — these were the chief part of his outdoor life, and the last of his time that was spent amid the scenery of his boyish days.

  1 Letters, i. 89.

  In August 1874 he was yachting for a month with Sir Walter Simpson and Mr. T. Barclay, on the West coast of Scotland — a happy experience not to be renewed for many a long year. The Heron, a fore and aft schooner of sixteen tons, had two Devon men as crew, and their labours were supplemented by the help of the owners and their friends. Stevenson lived a hard, open-air life, and throve upon it. * My health is a miracle. I expose myself to rain, and walk, and row, and over-eat myself. I eat, I drink, I bathe in the briny, I sleep.’ His return to Swanston was characteristically announced: * I left my pipe on board the yacht, my umbrella in the dog-cart, and my portmanteau by the way,’ and he reached home without his luggage, in a hat borrowed from one of his friends and a coat belonging to another.

  In the following winter there came to him a new friendshi Yesterday,1 Leslie Stephen, who was down here to lecture, called on me and took me up to see a poor fellow, a poet who writes for him, and who has been eighteen months in our infirmary, and may be, for all I know, eighteen months more. It was very sad to see him there in a little room with two beds, and a couple of sick children in the other bed; a girl came in to visit the children, and played dominoes on the counterpane with them; the gas flared and crackled, the fire burned in a dull, economical way; Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king’s palace, or the great King’s palace of the blue air.’

  Here was no ordinary patient: the poet was Mr. W. E. Henley, who had come to Edinburgh to be under the care of Lister. The cheerful talk was but the first of many; if we may treat Stevenson’s essays2 as autobiographical, for a part of his youth he was wont to ‘ avoid 1 13th February 1875. Letters, i. .

  2 ‘ Old Mortality,’ Memories and Portraits, .

  the hospital doors, the pale faces, the sweet whiff of chloroform/ but that time was now past. Here was a man of kindred spirit to himself, in need of the companionship that none could better give, and from that time forth Stevenson was his friend, and placed himself and all that he had at his disposal. He soon returned, bringing books, piles of Balzac, ‘big yellow books, quite impudently French,’1 and with the books he brought Mr. Baxter and others of his friends. In return, he found a friendship based on common tastes in literature and music, the talk of a true poet, the insight of one of the freshest and clearest and strongest of critics, whose training had been free from academic limitations, and whose influence was different in kind from the criticism on which the younger man had learned to rely, though not less full of stimulation and force.

  In these years he first discovered that taste for classical music which was afterwards fostered by successive friends. The revelation dated from a concert in Edinburgh for which some one had given him a ticket, and to which he went with reluctance. It was a Beethoven quartet, I think, that then burst upon him for the first time, and on that day he permanently added another to the many pleasures he so keenly enjoyed, although it was some years before he attempted to make any music for himself.

  To London in these years he paid frequent visits, and several times stayed with Mr. Colvin at Cambridge, besides spending a week or two with him at Hampstead in June 1874. This last occasion, however, and a return to the same place in the autumn of that year were practically indistinguishable from his life in London. On June 3, 1874, after only six weeks’ delay, he was elected a member of the Savile Club,2 which had been 1 Book of Verses, , by William Ernest Henley.

  2 Mr. Colvin proposed him, and he was supported by Mr. Andrew Lang, Prof. Fleeming Jenkin, Mr. Basil Champneys, Prof. W. K. Clifford, and Mr. C. B. B. M’Laren.

  founded five years before, and was still in its original house, 15 Savile Row. This was for the next five years the centre
of his London life, and though it would probably be a mistake to speak as if it were at once to him all that it afterwards became, yet, since he was of all men the most clubbable, from the beginning it gave him ample opportunities of acquaintance with men of various tastes, many of them,of great ability, even if they had not yet achieved or were not achieving a reputation. Some of the members he already knew. Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Andrew Lang he had previously met in the Riviera; Professor Masson was an Edinburgh friend of the family; to Dr. Appleton, editor of the Academy, and Mr. Walter Pollock, editor of the Saturday Review, he was soon introduced; but it would be long to enumerate the friends, and idle to recapitulate the acquaintances, that Stevenson soon made within those walls.

  Into formal society nothing would ever have induced him to go in London any more than in Edinburgh; he invariably refused the opportunities which presented themselves to him, as they sooner or later have always presented themselves to young men with any reputation for social gifts and original conversation. In 1874, when he came to London for the first time under new auspices, he seems to have met a few well-known people; to have been taken to see Burne-Jones’s pictures, then strictly withheld from any chance of public recognition; to have met Miss Thackeray, Mrs. Lynn Linton, and a few other ladies, chiefly at the house of Mr. Leslie Stephen, to whom he had been introduced by Mr. Colvin. His great and natural desire to see Carlyle was frustrated, for Mr. Stephen, on whose kind offices he depended, found the sage in one of his darker moods and at a moment of irritation; and when Stevenson was mentioned as a young Scot who was most anxious to meet him, and who had taken to the study of Knox, the senior would only say that he did not see why anybody should want either to see his ‘ wretched old carcase’ or to say anything more about Knox, and that the young man had better apply when he had put his studies into an articulate shape. So Stevenson never met his fellow-countryman, who was perhaps the closest connecting link between himself and Scott.

  Besides the visits to London and Cambridge there were many journeys and excursions j1 and the importance of such travel to him in these days may be estimated by the degree in which it formed the topic of his early writings. Between 1871 and 1876 no less than nine of his papers deal with travel or the external appearance of places known to him; and it is scarcely necessary to remind the reader that his first three books were the Inland Voyage, the Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh, and the Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.

  In the autumn of 1874 he joined his parents in an expedition to Chester and Barmouth, and in October took the walk in Buckinghamshire described the following spring in the Portfolio under the title of ‘An Autumn Effect.’ This ended, as a matter of fact, with his only visit to Oxford;2 but Oxford and Cambridge left no more trace in his work than, at an earlier age, Rome or Naples or Venice. A reference to the chimes of the one, a conversation (in an unpublished novel) carried on at the other, and a few general remarks about the contrast between Scotch and English universities are all that is to be found about them in his writings.

  In 1875 came the walk up the valley of the Loing with Sir Walter Simpson, in which Stevenson’s costume 1 A pencil list of towns in which he had slept, compiled about 1886, to relieve the tedium of illness, gives the following totals: — England, 46 towns — 19 more than once; Scotland, 50 — 23 more than once; France, 74 — 31 more than once; the rest of Europe, 40 — 16 more than once.

  3 Unless it were another time when he visited Mr. Lang at Merton. The visit to Oxford is not mentioned in the Portfolio, but in a letter to his mother.

  led to the incarceration described in An Epilogue to fin Inland Voyage, and this trip being cut short, he joined his parents, as he had intended, at Wiesbaden, and went with them to Homburg and Mainz.

  In 1876 he spent the second week in January walking in Carrick and Galloway,1 when he slept a night at Ballantrae, and later in the year, after a visit in August to the Jenkins near Loch Carron, he joined Sir Walter Simpson again and took the canoe journey of the Inland Voyage from Antwerp to Brussels, and then from the French frontier by the Oise almost to the Seine.

  These journeys and the general change in Stevenson’s life were rendered possible, as I have said, by the liberality of his father (some ten years later he wrote, ‘ I fall always on my feet; but I am constrained to add that the best part of my legs seems to be my father),’2 yet it must not be supposed that Stevenson even now was often in funds. He was open-handed to a fault; and he had many wants of his own which often went unsatisfied. It is to this period that a story belongs which he was fond of telling against himself. He was staying in London, and had protracted his visit to the extreme limit of his resources. On his way back to the North he arrived at the station with a sum barely sufficient for the cheapest ticket, available only by a night journey, and a newly bought copy of Mr. Swinburne’s Queen Mother and Rosamond. On learning his deficiency, he tried his best powers of persuasion on the booking-clerk, but in vain: the man, in his blindness, refused to accept the book as any part of the payment, and, if I remember right, Stevenson passed the day in the station without food, and reached home next morning in a famished condition.

  Thus, as we have seen, with the exception of his release from law, and the friendship with Mr. Henley, conditions in Edinburgh remained much the same; the Savile and 1 fuvenilia, . 3 May 1885.

  the people he met there were, together with Mr. Colvin’s advice and help, the principal feature of his life in England; it is to France that we must turn for the other influences chiefly affecting him, and for the circumstances of most importance in determining his development at this period. In the winter of 1873-74 he had, as we have seen, renewed acquaintance with the Riviera, which in later days was to become yet more familiar. For the present he returned to that neighbourhood no more, but there was no year from 1874 to l%79 ln which he did not pay one or more visits of several weeks’ duration to another part of France. Except for the time that he was in the Cevennes and on his cruise down the Oise, he stayed mostly in the outskirts of the forest of Fontainebleau, in the valley of the Loing, or in Paris itself. Sometimes, as at Monastier, he was alone; sometimes, as at Nemours or at Cernay la Ville, he was with his cousin Bob or Sir Walter Simpson; but for the most part he lived in familiar intercourse with the artists who frequented his favourite resorts. The life was congenial to him, and his companions understood his temperament, if they did not necessarily appreciate his passion for letters; French was the only foreign tongue he ever mastered, and in that he acquired real proficiency. His knowledge of the language and literature was considerable, and its influence on his work was entirely for good, as it increased the delicacy and clearness of his style, and yet left his originality unimpaired.

  It was the country again which seems to have affected him most and not the city; in both he lived with the same intimates, but though Paris might be the more exciting, yet at Fontainebleau he came with lasting results under the influence of the forest, and from it he carried away many vital memories.1

  When his friends were painting, he often betook himself to lonely walks and meditations among the heaths 1 ‘Forest Notes’: Juvenilia, . and woods, but company and conversation counted for a great deal. ‘ 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.’1

  His earliest and perhaps his most frequent haunt was Barbizon. It had been the home of Millet, and its fields were the scene of the Angelus. In the village there existed an inn which was reserved for the artists, a strange society compounded of all nationalities, in which French, English, and Americans predominated. Stevenson himself has described it in an essay.2

  ‘ I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian; et ego in Arcadia vixi it was a pleasant season; and that noiseless hamlet lying close among the borders of the wood is for me, as for so many others, a green spot in memory. The great Millet
was just dead; the green shutters of his modest house were closed; his daughters were in mourning. The date of my first verse was thus an epoch in the history of art.

  4 Siron’s inn, that excellent artists’ barrack, was managed upon easy principles. At any hour of the night, when you returned from wandering in the forest, you went to the billiard-room and helped yourself to liquors, or descended to the cellar and returned laden with beer or wine. The Sirons were all locked in slumber; there was none to check your inroads; only at the week’s end a computation was made, the gross sum was divided, and a varying share set down to every lodger’s name under the rubric, estrats. Upon the more long-suffering the larger tax was levied; and your bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness of your disposition. At any hour of the morning, again, you could get your coffee or cold milk and set forth into the 1 Talk and Talkers, . 2 Later Essays-. Fontainebleau, . VOL. I. I

  forest. The doves had perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and on the threshold of the inn you were met by the aroma of the forest. Close by were the great aisles, the mossy boulders, the interminable field of forest shadow. There you were free to dream and wander. And at noon, and again at six o’clock, a good meal awaited you on Siron’s table. The whole of your accommodation, set aside that varying item of the estrats, cost you five francs a day; your bill was never offered you until you asked for it; and if you were out of luck’s way, you might depart for where you pleased and leave it pending.