Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  ‘ Theoretically, the house was open to all comers; practically, it was a kind of club. The guests protected themselves, and, in so doing, they protected Siron. Formal manners being laid aside, essential courtesy was the more rigidly exacted; the new arrival had to feel the pulse of the society; and a breach of its undefined observances was promptly punished. A man might be as plain, as dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he desired; but to a touch of presumption or a word of hectoring these free Barbizonians were as sensitive as a tea-party of maiden ladies. I have seen people driven forth from Barbizon; it would be difficult to say in words what they had done, but they deserved their fate. They had shown themselves unworthy to enjoy these corporate freedoms; they had pushed themselves; they had “ made their head”; they wanted tact to appreciate the “ fine shades “ of Barbizonian etiquette. And, once they were condemned, the process of extrusion was ruthless in its cruelty: after one evening with the formidable Bodmer, the Bailly of our commonwealth, the erring stranger was beheld no more; he rose exceeding early the next day, and the first coach conveyed him from the scene of his discomfiture. These sentences of banishment were never, in my knowledge, delivered against an artist; such would, I believe, have been illegal; but the odd and pleasant fact is this, that they were never needed. Painters, sculptors, writers, singers, I have seen all of these in Barbizon, and some were sulky, and some were blatant and inane; but one and all entered into the spirit of the association. . . .

  ‘Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full of high spirits, of laughter, and of the initiative of youth. The few elder men who joined us were still young at heart, and took the key from their companions. We returned from long stations in the fortifying air, our blood renewed by the sunshine, our spirits refreshed by the silence of the forest; the Babel of loud voices sounded good; we fell to eat and play like the natural man; and in the high inn chamber, panelled with indifferent pictures, and lit by candles guttering in the night air, the talk and laughter sounded far into the night. It was a good place and a good life for any naturally minded youth; better yet for the student of painting, and perhaps best of all for the student of letters. He, too, was saturated in this atmosphere of style; he was shut out from the disturbing currents of the world; he might forget that there existed other and more pressing interests than that of art. But, in such a place, it was hardly possible to write; he could not drug his conscience, like the painter, by the production of listless studies; he saw himself idle among many who were apparently, and some who were really, employed; and what with the impulse of increasing health and the continual provocation of romantic scenes, he became tormented with the desire to work. He enjoyed a strenuous idleness full of visions, hearty meals, long, sweltering walks, mirth among companions; and, still floating like music through his brain, foresights of great works that Shakespeare might be proud to have conceived, headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas, and words that were alive with import. . . . We were all artists; almost all in the age of illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to the strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were happy!’

  Barbizon, however, was by no means the only resort of painters in this neighbourhood, nor the only one which Stevenson frequented: in the same paper he enumerates its rivals from his full knowledge. Marlotte, Montigny,1 and Chailly-en-Biere he knew; Cernay la Ville was a favourite of his cousin Bob; but it was Grez which, in spite of an unpromising introduction, was his favourite quarters, and has the most important place in his history.

  (Bar&izon, Summer’’ 75.

  ‘ MY DEAR MOTHER, — I have been three days at a place called Grez, a pretty and very melancholy village on the plain. A low bridge, with many arches choked with sedge; green fields of white and yellow water-lilies; poplars and willows innumerable; and about it all such an atmosphere of sadness and slackness, one could do nothing but get into the boat and out of it again, and yawn for bedtime. ... I was very glad to be back again in this dear place, and smell the wet forest in the morning.’

  But later he wrote how delightful it was 4 to awake in Grez, to go down the green inn-garden, to find the river streaming through the bridge, and to see the dawn begin across the poplared level. The meals are laid in the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves. The splash of oars and bathers, the bathing costumes, out to dry, the trim canoes beside the jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure. There is “something to do” at Grez. Perhaps, for that very reason, I can recall no such enduring ardours, no such glories of exhilaration, as among the solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon. This “ something to do “ is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out of it; you wreak your high spirits on some cut-and-dry employment, and behold them gone!

  1 Where Mr. W. H. Low’s quarters summed up the delights of the ‘ Envoy’ to Underwoods.

  But Grez is a merry place after its kind: pretty to see, merry to inhabit. The course of its pellucid river, whether up or down, is full of attractions for the navigator; the mirrored and inverted images of trees; lilies, and mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs. And of all noble sweeps of roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, than the highroad to Nemours between its lines of talking poplar.1’

  Nemours itself he knew well, and there he often stayed. His first visit is described in a letter to his mother in 1875: —

  ‘ Nemours is a beautiful little town, watered by a great canal and a little river. The river is crossed by an infinity of little bridges, and the houses have courts and gardens, and come down in stairs to the very brim; and washerwomen sit everywhere in curious little penthouses and sheds. A sort of reminiscence of Amsterdam, The old castle turned now into a ballroom and cheap theatre; the seats of the pit (the places are if. and 2fs. in this theatre) are covered with old Gobelins tapestry; one can still see heads in helmets. In the actors’ dressing- room are curious old Henry Fourth looking-glasses. On the other hand, the old manacles are now kept laid by in a box, with a lot of flower-pots on the top of it, in a room with four canary birds.’

  If the country had the more influence in the end, Paris provided more variety and more diversion. There Stevenson stayed, in all manner of lodgings, varying from Meurice’s Hotel (which was little to his liking) to students’ accommodation in the Quartier Latin, and scattered throughout a region extending from Mont- martre on the north to Mont Parnasse on the south.

  At one time he writes: ‘ I am in a new quarter, and jldne about in a leisurely way. I dine every day in a cr£merie with a party of Americans, an Irishman, and sometimes an English lady.’ Again: 41 am living along 1 Later Essays: Fontainebleau, ; cf. Juvenilia, .

  with some fellows, and we partly make our own food, and have great fun marketing.’ Another time: 41 have been engaged in a wild hunt for books — all forenoon, all afternoon, with occasional returns to Rue Racine with an armful. I have spent nearly all my money; and if I have luck in to-day’s hunt, I believe I shall lay my head on the pillow to-night a beggar. But I have had goodish luck, and a heap of nice books. Please advance me £10 of my allowance. . . . Heaps of articles growing before me. Hurray.’ An attempt to work in some of the public libraries of Paris failed: the face of officialism was too daunting. ‘They are worse than banks — if that be possible. ... In public offices of all kinds I feel like Esther before Ahasuerus. I suspect there was some truth in my father’s turkeying;1 for the vice has descended to me.’

  This was the period when his letters were least frequent and least satisfactory, but of his sojourns in Paris no other memorial survives except the first chapters of The Wrecker, which partly in detail and wholly in spirit are drawn from Stevenson’s recollections of these years. In addition I have collected a few fragments of letters and papers, which may help to eke out the scanty material for a picture of that time.

  The first is a letter to his mother, describing a student’s entertainment in the studio which was afterwards depicted in Trilby.

  ‘ my dear mother, — I was out last night at a party in a
fellow’s studio over in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs. Some of the people were in costume. One girl was so pretty and looked so happy that it did your heart good to see her. The studio looked very strange, lit with Chinese lanterns and a couple of strange lamps. The floor had been rubbed with candles, and was very slippery. O’Meara, in his character of young Donny-

  1 .

  brook, tumbled about like a pair of old boots, and , for all he is so little, managed to fall into the arms of every girl he danced with, as he went round in the last figure of the quadrille. There was nothing to eat but sweet biscuits, and nothing to drink but syrup and water. It was a rum event/

  The next was a typical holiday.

  ‘ nth October, Paris. — Here I am so far on my way home. . . . Yesterday I had a splendid day. Luxembourg in the morning. Breakfast. Bob, Gaudes the sculptor, Low and I: hours of very good talk in the French idiom. All afternoon in the Louvre, till they turned us out unwilling. At night, the Fran^ais, Rome Vaincue, an impossible play, with Sarah Bernhardt as the blind grandmother, most sublime to behold. At breakfast we had lobster mayonnaise, kidneys, brochet, and tomates farcies, with lots of Carton. Dinner was a mere hurried sustentation of the immortal spirit before exposing it to another excitement. A splendid day, but two running would not do.’

  The theatre was a source of great delight to him. Although he had read (and written) plays from his early years, had revelled in the melodramas of the toy-theatre, and had acted with the Jenkins and in other private theatricals, I find no reference to his having visited a theatre before December 1874, when he found Irving’s Hamlet4 interesting (for it is really studied) but not good’; and there is no sign of his having been really impressed until he saw Salvini as Macbeth at Edinburgh in the spring of 1876. Of this performance he wrote a criticism for the Academy, which he afterwards condemned as dealing with a subject that was still beyond the resources of his art.1 He himself, I am told, was never a tolerable actor, and certainly was never allotted a part of any importance. But his enthusiasm for the drama was great, and during these years was heightened and 1 Memoir of Fleeming Jenkirt, .

  instructed by the two chief friends who shared his taste — Professor Jenkin and Mr. Henley.

  He used to speak with delight of Delaunay’s performance in a play by Alexandre Dumas, Mademoiselle de Belleisle, declaring that in calling out through a window on the stage to some one supposed to be in the castle-court below, Delaunay had succeeded in so modulating his voice as ‘ to make you feel the cold night air and the moonlight.’

  One of his visits to the theatre led to a very characteristic scene, described long afterwards in a letter to Mr. Archer. The play had been the De7ni-Monde of Dumas Jils} in the last act of which Olivier de Jalin employs an unworthy stratagem against the woman who had been his mistress.

  ‘ I came forth from that performance in a breathing heat of indignation. . . . On my way down the Frangais stairs, I trod on an old gentleman’s toes, whereupon, with that suavity which so well becomes me, I turned about to apologise, and on the instant, repenting me of that intention, stopped the apology midway, and added something in French to this effect: ‘ No, you are one of the laches who have been applauding that piece. I retract my apology.’ Said the old Frenchman, laying his hand on my arm, and with a smile that was truly heavenly in temperance, irony, good-nature, and knowledge of the world, ‘Ah, monsieur, vous etes bien jeune,’1

  To this time also belongs the story reported by Mr. Andrew Lang.2 Stevenson, one day at a caf£, hearing a Frenchman say that the English were cowards, promptly hit him across the face. ‘Monsieur, vous m’avez frapp£!’ said the Gaul. ‘A ce qu’il parait,’ said the Scot, and there the incident ended. It is an instance the more of his fearlessness; for, besides his physical weakness, although he would never have hesitated, he was quite incompetent to fight a duel with either pistol or sword.

  1 Letters, ii. 94. 2 North American Review, Feb. 1895.

  The effect produced upon outsiders must sometimes have been rather bewildering. He used to tell how one day he and his cousin Bob, happening to be rather more in funds than usual, went to dine in one of the cafes of the Palais Royal. 4 The cafe was not very full/ so I remember the story,’and there was nobody near us, but presently a gentleman and his wife came in and sat down at the next table. They were evidently people of good position, well dressed and distinguished in appearance. But they were talking French, and we paid not the slightest attention to them. We had lately got hold of the works of Thomas Aquinas, and our conversation was on the most extraordinary medley of subjects — on men, women, and things, with a very large leaven of mediaeval theology, and on all we spoke in English with the most startling frankness and with the most bewildering transitions. Bob is the best talker in the world; I never knew him more brilliant, and I did my best.

  ‘ Those people sat and had their dinner and took not the slightest notice of us, but talked quietly to one another in Parisian French. Just before they got up to go, the gentleman turned to his wife and said to her in English without a trace of accent, “ My dear, won’t you take anything more? “ I have often wondered who they were, and what on earth they thought of us.’

  His deficiencies in letter-writing and his protracted absences from home led very naturally to protests from his parents and especially from his mother. The answer was characteristic.

  Euston Hotel, 16th Oct. 1874.

  4 You must not be vexed at my absences. You must understand that I shall be a nomad, more or less, until my days be done. You don’t know how much I used to long for it in old days; how I used to go and look at the trains leaving, and wish to go with them. And now, you know, that I have a little more that is solid under my feet, you must take my nomadic habits as a part of me.

  Just wait till I am in swing, and you will see that I shall pass more of my life with you than elsewhere; only take me as I am, and give me time. I must be a bit of a vagabond; it’s your own fault, after all, isn’t it? You shouldn’t have had a tramp for a son.’

  While the man was in the making during these years, the writer also was passing through the stages of a development which was unusually protracted. The perfecting of his style was necessarily a work of time, but in the meanwhile, if he had seen his way to use the gifts at his command, his love of romance, his imagination, and his vivid interest in life might well have enabled him to produce work which would have secured him immediate popularity and reward.

  Nothing of the sort, however, was accomplished, and, high as his standard always was, this delay may well have been a gain for his ultimate success. During the six years between his first appearance as a printed and paid author and the publication of the Travels with a Donkey, his published work consisted of some six-and- twenty magazine articles, chiefly critical and social essays, just half of which were in the Cornhill Magazine; two small books of travel; two books in serial instalments, afterwards reprinted; and five short stories also in periodicals. There were besides a few rejected articles, a certain amount of journalism, and at least eight stories or novels, none of which ever saw the light, as well as a play or two and some verses, a small part of which were ultimately included in his published works.

  By this time Stevenson had left behind him the early stages of apprenticeship, and far as he still was from satisfying his own taste and aims, there is no longer any possibility of pointing out the definite stages through which he passed year by year, or the methods of work which he employed.

  A list of his writings will be found in the appendix, arranged under separate years. It is therefore unnecessary in this place to do more than record his general progress, adding merely a detached note on any point of interest as it arises, or quoting his own criticisms, which, for the most part, are singularly shrewd and free from bias.

  In September 1873 he wrote: ‘There is no word of “Roads”; I suspect the Saturday Review must have looked darkly upon it — so be it; we must just try to do something better/ And so, as we have seen, the article ap
peared in the Portfolio for December. Three weeks later, in a letter to his mother, he expressed the opinion that ‘it is quite the best thing I have ever done, to my taste. There are things expressed in it far harder to express than in anything else I ever had; and that, after all, is the great point. As for style, ga viendra peut-etre.’

  In 1874 he had five articles in four different magazines: these included ‘ Ordered South’ in Macmillarts, and, still more important, the paper on ‘ Victor Hugo’s Romances’ in the Cornhill. The former, which took him three months to write, was his first work ever republished in its original form; the latter, which was anonymous, but afterwards reappeared in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, marked, in his own judgment, the beginning of his command of style. Long afterwards in Samoa, in answer to a question, he told me that in this essay he had first found himself able to say several things in the way in which he felt they should be said. It may also be noticed that this was his first appearance in the magazine which by the discernment of Mr. Leslie Stephen did so much for him in taking his early work.

  This year he proposed to himself, and began to read for, a book on four great Scotsmen — Knox, Hume, Burns, and Scott. All that ever came of it, and he had the subjects a long time in his mind, were the essays on Burns and Knox, which dealt only with one aspect of either character At this time he was working at an essay on Walt Whitman, but his views did not find expression till 1878. The papers on Knox were read before the Speculative Society in November 1874 and January 1875. Late in the former year he was making another assault upon the stronghold of the Novel with a tale called ‘When the Devil was Well,’ dealing with the adventures of an Italian sculptor of the fifteenth century. It was finished the next year, and the unfavourable opinion of his friends was accepted as final.