‘I am one of the few people in the world who do not forget their own lives.’ — R. L. S., Letters, ii. 107.
Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born at No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, on the 13th November 1850, and a few days after his birth was baptized by his grandfather, the minister of Colinton, according to the Scots custom, in his father’s house. He was called after his two grandfathers, and to their names that of his mother’s family was added.1
1 It was as Robert Louis Stevenson that he was known to all the world, and the earlier variations of his name, remembered but by few, are of small importance. Nevertheless it may be as well to set them down here.
His birthplace was the home which Thomas Stevenson had prepared for his bride two years before; a small, unpretentious, comfortable stone house, forming part of a row still standing, situated on low ground just to the north of the Water of Leith. Two and a half years later this was changed for No. I Inverleith Terrace, a more commodious dwelling on the other side of the same road; but that, having three outside walls, proved too cold for the delicate boy. Accordingly, in 1857, the little family of three — for Louis remained an only child — moved half a mile further south into what was then the centre of the New Town, and occupied No. 17 Heriot Row, which continued to be their home in Edinburgh for thirty years. This was a substantial house of grey stone, built with the solidity so customary in Scotland and so unusual in the South, looking across the Queen Street Gardens, where the lilacs bloomed in spring and the pipe of the blackbird might be heard; while from its back windows could be seen the hills of ‘ the kingdom of Fife.’
For the first year of his life the infant seemed healthy and made satisfactory progress. He climbed a stair of eighteen steps at nine months, at eleven months walked freely, and in two months more called people by their names. But with his mother’s brightness of disposition he had unfortunately inherited also from her a weakness of chest and a susceptibility to cold, which affected the whole course of his life. When he was a little over two he had a severe attack of croup, and from that time until he was eleven, there was no year in which he was not many days in bed from illness — bronchitis, pneumonia, feverish cold, or chills affecting his digestion, as well as one severe gastric fever, and all the ordinary maladies of childhood in rapid succession. In the summer months he kept fairly well, and was then for most of his time away from Edinburgh at Portobello, Lasswade, Bridge of Allan, Burntisland, North Berwick, Aberdour, or some other of the Edinburgh summer resorts as yet frequented by few visitors. It was to the manse at Colinton, however, that he most frequently went until the death of his grandfather in 1860, and it was here, as we shall see, that the happiest days of his childhood were passed.
Of his earliest memories he speaks thus: —
‘I remember with particular pleasure running upstairs in Inverleith Terrace with my mother — herself little more than a girl — to the top flat of this our second house, both of us singing as best we could “We’ll all go up to Gatty’s room, to Gatty’s room, etc.,” ad lib.; Gatty being contracted for Grandpapa, my mother’s father, who was coming to stay with us. I mention that because it stands out in stronger relief than any other recollection of the same age. I have a great belief in these vivid recollections: things that impress us so forcibly as to become stereotyped for life have not done so for nothing.
‘Ibelieve I was what is called a good child: I learned large passages of Scripture and hymns, and recited them, I understand, with very good action and emphasis. After I was in bed I used to be heard lying awake and repeating to myself — crooning over to myself in the dark — certain curious rambling effusions, which I called my “ songstries.” One of these, which was taken down by my father, who stood outside the door for the purpose, I have seen; it was in a sort of rhythmic prose, curiously approximating to ten-syllable blank verse, and was religious in its bearing; I think it is now lost.’1
The following appears to be the songstry in question:2 it is dated April 23rd, 1857: —
‘ Had not an angel got the pride of man, No evil thought, no hardened heart would have been seen.
No hell to go to, but a heaven so pure; That angel was the Devil.
Had not that angel got the pride, there would have been no need For Jesus Christ to die upon the cross.
‘ That I was eminently religious, there can be no doubt. I had an extreme terror of Hell, implanted in me, I suppose, by my good nurse, which used to haunt me terribly on stormy nights, when the wind had broken loose and was going about the town like a bedlamite. I remember that the noises on such occasions always grouped themselves for me into the sound of a horseman, or rather a succession of horsemen, riding furiously past the bottom of the street and away up the hill into town; I think even now that I hear the terrible howl of his passage, and the clinking that I used to attribute to his bit arid stirrups. On such nights I would lie awake and pray and cry, until I prayed and cried myself asleep; and if I can form any notion of what an earnest prayer should be, I imagine that mine were such.3 . . .
‘ All this time, be it borne in mind, my health was of
1 Unpublished ms., dated 18th May 1873.
2 There is a singular parallel at an even earlier age in the Life of Charles Kingsley.
3 Cf. ‘ Nuits Blanches,’ Juvenilia, p. 35.
the most precarious description. Many winters I never crossed the threshold; but used to lie on my face on the nursery floor, chalking or painting in water-colours the pictures in the illustrated newspapers; or sit up in bed, with a little shawl pinned about my shoulders, to play with bricks or whatnot. I remember the pleasant maternal casuistry by which I was allowed to retain my playthings of a Sunday, when a pack was sewn on to the back of one of the wooden figures, and I had then duly promised to play at nothing but “Pilgrim’s Progress.” . . . Although I was never done drawing and painting, and even kept on doing so until I was seventeen or eighteen, I never had any real pictorial vision, and instead of trying to represent what I saw, was merely imitating the general appearance of other people’s representations. I never drew a picture of anything that was before me, but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I beautifully illustrated my lack of real feeling for art, by a very early speech, which I have had repeated to me by my mother: “ Mamma,” said I, “ I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?”
‘My ill-health principally chronicles itself by the terrible long nights that I lay awake, troubled continually with a hacking, exhausting cough, and praying for sleep or morning from the bottom of my shaken little body. I principally connect these nights, however, with our third house, in Heriot Row; and cannot mention them without a grateful testimony to the unwearied sympathy and long- suffering displayed to me on a hundred such occasions by my good nurse. It seems to me that I should have died if I had been left there alone to cough and weary in the darkness. How well I remember her lifting me out of bed, carrying me to the window, and showing me one or two lit windows up in Queen Street across the dark belt of gardens; where also, we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses waiting, like us, for the morning.1 Other night scenes connected with my ill-health were the little sallies of delirium that used to waken me out of a feverish sleep, in such agony of terror as, thank God, I have never suffered since. My father had generally to come up and sit by my bedside, and feign conversations with guards or coachmen or innkeepers, until I was gradually quieted and brought to myself; but it was long after one of those paroxysms before I could bear to be left alone.’
When Louis was a little child, he accidentally locked himself into a room alone one day. He could not turn the key again as he was directed; darkness was coming on, and his terror became extreme. His father sent for a locksmith to open the door, and during the period of waiting talked to Louis through the keyhole, the child becoming so engrossed by the charm of his father’s conversation that he forgot all his fears.
His nurse was, it will already be seen, even m
ore than is usual with children, an important factor in his life. When he was eighteen months old, Alison Cunningham — ’ Cummie’ to him for the rest of his days — came to him and watched over his childhood with the most intense devotion. She refused, it is said, an offer of marriage, that she might not have to leave her charge, and she remained with the family long after the care of him had passed out of women’s hands, never taking another
1 Cf. Underwoods, No. xxvi., ‘The Sick Child.’
place, as indeed she had no need to do. Her true reward has been a monument of gratitude for which a parallel is hard to find. At twenty (an age when young men are not generally very tender to such memories) Louis wrote the paper on Nurses printed in Juvenilia. Fifteen years later the dedication of the Child’s Garden was ‘ To Alison Cunningham, From Her Boy/ and this was but the preface to one of the happiest sets of verses in one of the happiest of books. Alison Hastie, the lass at Limekilns, who put David Balfour and Alan Breck across the Forth, was, he told her, an ancestress of hers, just as David was a kinsman of his own. Of all his works he sent her copies; throughout his life he wrote letters to her; when he had a house, he had her to stay with him, and even proposed to bring her out on a visit to Samoa. In another fragment of autobiography he has again described her services: 4 My recollection of the long nights when I was kept awake by coughing are only relieved by the thought of the tenderness of my nurse and second mother (for my first will not be jealous), Alison Cunningham. She was more patient than I can suppose of an angel; hours together she would help and console me . . . till the whole sorrow of the night was at an end with the arrival of the first of that long string of country carts, that in the dark hours of the morning, with the neighing of horses, the cracking of the whips, the shouts of drivers, and a hundred other wholesome noises, creaked, rolled, and pounded past my window.’
Thus she tended his bodily life, watchfully and un- weariedly: to his spiritual welfare, as she conceived it, she gave, if possible, even greater care. His father and mother were both genuinely religious people: the former clung, with a desperate intensity, to the rigid tenets of his faith; the latter was a true ‘ child of the manse,’ and visited and befriended churches and missions wherever she went. But if Louis spent, as he tells us,’ a Covenanting childhood,’ it was to Cummie that this was due.
Besides the Bible and the Shorter Catechism, which he had also from his mother, Cummie filled him with a love of her own favourite authors, M’Cheyne and others, Presbyterians of the straitest doctrine. It was she, in all probability, who first introduced him to 4 The Cameronian Dream.’1 That poem, he afterwards told Mr. Gosse, made the most indelible impression on his fancy, and was the earliest piece of literature which awakened in him the sentiment of romantic Scottish history.
From her, too, he first heard some of the writings of the Covenanters, Wodrow, Peden, and others, who directly influenced his choice of subjects, and according to his own testimony (Letters, ii. 312) had a great share in the formation of his style. A special favourite also was an old copy of A Cloud of Witnesses, which had belonged to his nurse’s grandmother.
In matters of conduct Cummie was for no half-measures. Cards were the Devil’s books. Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson played whist, decorous family whist — the mother had the keenest zest for all games — and Louis could remember praying fervently with his nurse that it might not be visited on them to their perdition. The novel and the playhouse were alike anathema to her; and this would seem no very likely opening for the career of one who was to be a novelist and write plays as well. For her pupil entered fully into the spirit of her ordinances, and insisted on a most rigorous observance of her code.
‘ I was brought up on Casselfs Family Paper,’ he wrote, ‘but the lady who was kind enough to read the tales aloud to me was subject to sharp attacks of conscience. She took the Family Paper on confidence; the tales it contained being Family Tales, not novels. But every now and then, something would occur to alarm her finer sense; she would express a well-grounded fear that the 1 This poem of fourteen stanzas was written by James Hyslop (1798-1827), originally a herdboy in the Cameronian country, and may be found in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature (3rd edition, vol. ii. p. 216).
current fiction was | going to turn out a regular novel,” and the Family Paper> with my pious approval, would be dropped. Yet neither she nor I were wholly stoical; and when Saturday came round, we would study the windows of the stationer, and try to fish out of subsequent woodcuts and their legends the further adventures of our favourites/1
In spite of her restrictions, Cummie was full of life and merriment. She danced and sang to her boy, and read to him most dramatically. She herself tells how, the last time she ever saw him, he said to her 4 before a room full of people, “ It’s you that gave me a passion for the drama, Cummie.” “ Me, Master Lou,” I said; “ I never put foot inside a playhouse in my life.” “ Ay, woman,” said he; “but it was the grand dramatic way ye had of reciting the hymns.”‘
When he was just three, his mother’s diary contains this entry: —
4 Mr. Swan at dinner. Smout recited the first four lines of “On Linden” in great style, waving his hand and making a splendid bow at the end. This is Cummie’s teaching.’ And no doubt the trick of gesture, partly inherited from his father, which accompanied his conversation through life, received some of its emphasis from his nurse.
The diary just quoted records somewhat irregularly the development of the boy’s powers and tastes and the working of his mind in childhood, but the nature and interest of the entries are fairly represented by the following extracts: —
k 26th July 1853. — Smout’s favourite occupation is making a church; he makes a pulpit with a chair and a stool; reads sitting, and then stands up and sings by turns.
st October 1853. — He is a great chatterbox, and speaks very distinctly; he knows many stories out of 1 Scribner’s Magazine, July 1888.
the Bible, and about half of the letters of the alphabet, but he is not so fond of hymns as he used to be.
‘6th November 1853. — I read the story of Samson once or twice out of the Bible to Smout, and was much surprised by his repeating it almost word for word.
48th December 1854. — Lou said, “You can never be good unless you pray.” When asked how he knew, he said with great emphasis, “ Because I’ve tried it.”
122nd December 1854. — Lou prays every night of his own accord that God would bless “ the poor soldiers that are fighting at Sebastopol.”
‘25th December 1854. — Smout gets a sword for his Christmas present. When his father was disparaging it, he said, “ I can tell you, papa, it’s a silver sword and a gold sheath, and the boy’s very well off and quite contented.”
‘9th January 1855. — When made to wear a shawl above his sword, he was in distress for fear it would not look like a soldier, and then said, “ Do you think it will look like a night-march, mama?”
l6th February 1855. — Lou dreamed that he heard “the noise of pens writing.”
‘I*]th February 1855, Sunday. — When I asked Lou what he had been doing, he said, “ I’ve been playing all day,” and then when I looked at him, he added, “at least, I’ve been making myself cheerful.”
‘1 Sth April 1856. — Smout can’t understand the days getting longer, and says he “ would rather go to bed at the seven o’clock that used to be.”
i lyth July 1856. — I heard to-day that what had made Smout so ill on the 5th was that he and Billy had been eating buttercups, which are poisonous; both were ill, so we may be thankful that they were not worse. Billy confessed, and Smout acknowledged whenever he was asked.’ (Mrs. Stevenson, however, omits the true explanation — that the boys were shipwrecked sailors, and could get no other food to support life.)
It was in the end of 1856 that Louis was for the first time experiencing ‘ the toils and vigils and distresses’ of composition. His uncle, David Stevenson, offered to his children and nephews a prize for the best his
tory of Moses. Louis was allowed to try for it by dictating his version to his mother, and to this he devoted five successive Sunday evenings. A Bible picture-book was given to him as an extra prize, and, adds his mother,’ from that time forward it was the desire of his heart to be an author.’
For this he had already a qualification, which children either seldom possess, or of which at any rate they but seldom remember the possession. In a late reminiscence1 he greatly applauds his nurse’s ear and speaks of her reading to him ‘the works of others as a poet would scarce dare to read his own; gloating on the rhythm, dwelling with delight on the assonances and alliterations.’ So he tells us of the delight he already took in words for their own sake, and of the thrill which the mere sound of ‘ Jehovah Tsidkenu’ produced in him without reference to any possible meaning. To the same source I must refer for his account of the imagery called up in his mind from local surroundings by the metrical version of the twenty- third Psalm; the ‘ pastures green’ being stubble-fields by the Water of Leith, and ‘death’s dark vale’ a certain archway in the Warriston Cemetery.
But in these suburbs only a part of his childhood was spent. Of other and happier playing-places he has left two records; the one a brief reference, with which the first description of his Edinburgh life, already quoted, terminates; the other, much more detailed, was written probably about 1872, and was manifestly the quarry from which was drawn most of the material for ‘The Manse’ in Memories and Portraits.
From these two essays it may be seen that Stevenson, alike at two-and-twenty and at five-and-thirty, remembered his childhood as it is given to few grown men 1 ‘ Rosa quo Locorum5: Juvenilia, pp. 303, 308.
and women to remember, and both papers contain the raw material or perhaps rather the prose version of many passages in the Child’s Garden of Verses.
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Page 813