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 Simelé 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 à 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 (p-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 atten
tion 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 protégé 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 hæmorrhage), 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:
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson Page 863