‘ We lived together in a purely visionary state,’ wrote Louis, ‘and were never tired of dressing up.’ One of their chief delights was in the rival kingdoms of their own invention — Nosingtonia and Encyclopaedia, of which they were perpetually drawing maps. Nosingtonia was ‘ shaped a little like Ireland’; Encyclopaedia, Louis’ island, ‘lay diagonally across the paper like a large tip-cat.’ I have before me a state-paper of the period; the Latin must be the elder boy’s, as Louis had not yet been to school: ‘ Received by me from Rex Encyclo- paediae: patent thickness 1 Air Gun of Grundrungia cloth and 1000 yards therefore in exchange for the Pine Islands. — R. Stevenson, Rex Nozzinton.’
1 c Child’s Play,’ Virginibus Puerisque, p. 162.
2 P. 167. See this volume, p. 88 n.
VOL. I. D
It was during this winter and in this company that Louis, at the age of six, first entered the realms of gold described in ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’ (.Memories and Portraits), the region of the toy-theatre and the ‘scenery of Skeltdom.’ The romance of purchasing the plays for himself came a little later, for during these months he could hardly leave the house; but now began the delight in the book and the dramatis persona. Years afterwards he described himself as ‘ no melodramatist, but a Skelt-drunken boy; the man who went out to find the Eldorado of romantic comedy.’ Now also began the joys of illumination. Now he painted the characters ‘with crimson-lake (hark to the sound of it — crimson-lake! — the horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear) — with crimson-lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be compounded, which, for cloaks especially, Titian could not equal.’
The last of his reminiscences of childish days that I have to give was written in Samoa, and describes with all the resources of his perfected art a state of mind more subtle and tragic than any that we are accustomed to associate with the confines of infancy. From any one who less accurately remembered the sensations of his earliest years, it might seem fanciful and unreal; to those who know the truthfulness with which its author has depicted the successive stages through which he passed, it will be as convincing as it is delightful. On this page also we first meet his sentiment for the venerable city which to the end he thought of as his home.
‘ I was born within the walls of that dear city of Zeus,1 of which the lightest and (when he chooses) the tenderest singer of my generation sings so well. I was born likewise within the bounds of an earthly city, illustrious for 1 The reference is to 4 Seekers for a City’ in the volume of poems by Mr. Andrew Lang, entitled Grass of Parnassus (London: Longmans & Co., 1888). The quotation prefixed to the poem is from the 1 Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,’ iv. 19. 1 The poet says, dear city of Cecrops, and wilt not thou say, dear city of ZeusV
her beauty, her tragic and picturesque associations, and for the credit of some of her brave sons. Writing as I do in a strange quarter of the world, and a late day of my age, I can still behold the profile of her towers and chimneys, and the long trail of her smoke against the sunset; I can still hear those strains of martial music that she goes to bed with, ending each day, like an act of an opera, to the notes of bugles; still recall, with a grateful effort of memory, any one of a thousand beautiful and specious circumstances that pleased me, and that must have pleased any one, in my half-remembered past. It is the beautiful that I thus actively recall: the august airs of the castle on its rock, nocturnal passages of lights and trees, the sudden song of the blackbird in a suburban lane, rosy and dusky winter sunsets, the uninhabited splendours of the early dawn, the building up of the city on a misty day, house above house, spire above spire, until it was received into a sky of softly glowing clouds, and seemed to pass on and upwards, by fresh grades and rises, city beyond city, a New Jerusalem, bodily scaling heaven. . . .
‘ Memory supplies me, unsolicited, with a mass of other material, where there is nothing to call beauty, nothing to attract — often a great deal to disgust. There are trite street corners, commonplace, well-to-do houses, shabby suburban tan-fields, rainy beggarly slums, taken in at a gulp nigh forty years ago, and surviving to-day, complete sensations, concrete, poignant and essential to the genius of the place. From the melancholy of these remembrances I might suppose them to belong to the wild and bitterly unhappy days of my youth. But it is not so; they date, most of them, from early childhood; they were observed as I walked with my nurse, gaping on the universe, and striving vainly to piece together in words my inarticulate but profound impressions. I seem to have been born with a sentiment of something moving in things, of an infinite attraction and horror coupled.’
CHAPTER IV
BOYHOOD — 1859-1867
‘ Not all roads lead to Rome — only that you have begun to travel.’ — R. L. S.
It was not till 1859 that the boy’s continuous schooling began, but to his formal education little or no importance attaches. The changes of his teachers were frequent, his absences from school innumerable, but both were due almost entirely to his health, and especially his susceptibility to colds. In the autumn of 1857 he had gone to Mr. Henderson’s preparatory school in India Street, in the near neighbourhood of his home, as all his day-schools were. After a few weeks he had to give it up, and did not return there till October 1859. In x86i he was transferred to the Edinburgh Academy, then, as now, the leading school of Edinburgh; there he spent a year and a half under Mr. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, author of Day-Dreams of a Schoolmaster and other works, a teacher with views far in advance of his day, and now for many years Professor of Greek in the Queen’s College, Galway. Then for one term, his mother being abroad, he was sent to an English boarding-school at Spring Grove, Isleworth, in Middlesex. Finally, in 1864, he was again shifted — to a day-school kept by Mr. Thomson in Frederick Street, Edinburgh, which he attended with more or less regularity until he went to the University in 1867.
Besides his ordinary classes he had many tutors for longer or shorter periods, in Edinburgh and elsewhere, both when he was unable to leave the house, and also in order to supplement and help his school-work, a custom prevalent in Scotland.
It is only of his experiences at his last two schools that anything definite seems to be remembered. The Spring Grove establishment has little interest for us beyond having been his only boarding-school and the source of his remarks on English schoolboys in ‘ The Foreigner at Home.’1 He left home for Isleworth with mixed feelings, and of his breakdown before he went, and of ‘the benevolent cat’ that ‘cumbered him with consolations’ on a doorstep, he has told us in ‘ Random Memories.’2 His misgivings were on the whole justified by the event, for the school seems to have been rather a nondescript place. A list given in one of his letters includes two parlour-boarders, three big boys, six of ‘ midling size,’ of whom ‘ Stevenson’ was one, and the enumeration ends with ‘small-fry lots.’ For the only time in his life he joined in games, he collected coins, and he wrote letters to his parents full of drawings, eked out with fragments of Latin exercises and attempts at French. His aunt had left Colinton, and was now living at Spring Grove, in charge of other nephews who attended the same school, and to her house he was often allowed to go. But he had been told to let his father know if he were not happy, and although he stayed to the end of the quarter, he then secured a promise that he should not again be sent from home.
Of Mr. Thomson’s school we have an account from Mr. H. Bellyse Baildon,3 who was a pupil there during the same years.4
‘ I do not think there were at this little seminary more 1 The first paper in Memories and Portraits. 2 Ibid., p. 289.
8 Sometime Lecturer on the English Language and Literature in the University of Vienna.
4 Temple Bar, March 1895; also Robert Louis Stevenson: a Life Study in Criticism, by H. Bellyse Baildon (Chatto and Windus, 1901).
than a dozen boys, ranging in ages from nine 01 ten to fourteen or fifteen, and our intellectual calibre varied fully as much as our years. For some of us were sent there for reasons of health, and others because they had no
t made that progress with their studies which their fond parents had hoped. Others were there, I fancy, because the scheme of education upon which the proprietor, Mr. Robert Thomson, proceeded fell in with the views of our parents. The main feature of this system was, so far as I can recollect, that we had no home lessons, but learned, in the two or three hours of afternoon school, what we were expected to remember next day.
‘Our freedom from home tasks gave us leisure for literary activities which would otherwise have been tabooed as waste of time. Perhaps with some of us they were, but not with Stevenson. For even then he had a fixed idea that literature was his calling, and a marvellously mature conception of the course of self-education through which he required to put himself in order to succeed. Among other things we were encouraged to make verse translations, and for some reason or other, I specially well remember a passage of Ovid, which he rendered in Scott-like octosyllabics, and I in heroic couplets, which I probably thought commendably like those of Mr. Pope. But, even then, Stevenson showed impatience of the trammels of verse, and longed for the compass and ductility of prose.’
The teachers who gave him private lessons spoke of his intelligence in high terms, but in large classes he evaded the eye of the master and drew on himself as little notice as possible. The Reverend Peter Rutherford, who taught him when he was at Mr. Henderson’s, says: ‘ He was without exception the most delightful boy I ever knew; full of fun, full of tender feeling; ready for his lessons, ready for a story, ready for fun’; and the master of the Burgh School at Peebles, who gave him lessons in 1864, found him the most intelligent and best informed boy in all his experience. A glowing interest in any subject that took his fancy marked his earliest boyhood no less than his later years. But if he was bright and ready when he was interested, his attention was often short-lived, and to many of the subjects in his curriculum it never was given at all. In every language that he ever learned, the rules of it$ grammar remained unknown to him, however correctly he might use its idioms, and the spelling of his own tongue was dark to him to the very last. Latin, French, and mathematics seem to have been everywhere the staple of his education. German he began with a private tutor in 1865 at Torquay, where he also received his only lessons in ordinary drawing. The only prize that ever fell to him was at Mr. Henderson’s school for his reading, which was commended, as he tells us, with the criticism: 4 Robert’s voice, though not strong, is impressive.’1
On the physical side of his education, dancing, despite the Covenanters, was persistently taught him with but scanty success: riding he learned chiefly in the summers of 1865 and 1866, though he first had a pony in 1856. In 1860 and 1864 he was bathing with great enjoyment, and in the latter year he was also rowing on the Tweed. But of games proper there is little mention. From Spring Grove he wrote: 4 Yesterday I was playing at football. I have never played at cricket, so papa may comfort himself with that. I like football very much.’ Against this we have to set his confession that even at football41 knew at least one little boy who was mightily exercised about the presence of the ball, and had to spirit” himself up, whenever he came to play, with an elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a sort of talisman bandied about in conflict between two Arabian nations.’2 And at North Berwick he says: 1 Juvenilia, p. 308. 2 4 Child’s Play,’ p. 168.
‘ You might golf if you wanted, but I seem to have been better employed.’1
But if his health were unequal to constant school-work or severe exercise, it greatly improved after 1863, and did not disable him from other boyish pursuits. Already, in 1857, his mother had written: ‘ Louis is getting very wild and like a boy.’ In 1864 she records that ‘Whatever there was in him of “ Puck “2 came very much to the front this summer. He was the leader of a number of boys who went about playing tricks on all the neighbours on Springhill, tapping on their windows after nightfall,’ and all manner of wild freaks. The following year at Peebles he became a reckless rider. A girl companion of those days recollects the time ‘ when my brother Bob, Louis, and I used to ride together. Bob had a black pony, and Louis called it “ Hell”; his own was brown, and was called “Purgatory”; while mine was named “Heaven.” Once the two boys galloped right through the Tweed on the way to Innerleithen, and I had to follow in fear of my life — poor “ Heaven” had the worst of it on that occasion.’
‘ In this year, too,’ says Louis himself, ‘at the ripe age of fourteen years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it, and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal, radiating pure romance — still but a puppet in the hand of Skelt.’3
Nor was another element wanting. He speaks of Neidpath Castle in the close vicinity of Peebles, ‘bosomed in hills on a green promontory: Tweed at its base running through the gamut of a busy river, from the pouring shallow to the brown pool. In the days when I was thereabouts, that part of the earth was made a heaven to me by many things now lost, by boats and bathing, and the fascination of streams, and the delights 1 Additional Memories and Portraits, p. 349.
2 See vol. ii. p. 160.
3 * A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured,’ p. 232.
of comradeship and those (surely the prettiest and simplest) of a boy and girl romance.’1
Earlier experiences belonging to North Berwick and the autumn of 1862 are described in Memories and Portraits2; these included fishing, bathing, wading, and < ‘crusoeing’ — ’a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air: digging, perhaps, a house under the margin of the links, kindling a fire of the sea-ware and cooking apples there.’ But the crown of all was the business of the lantern-bearers, a sport which was afterwards to Stevenson the type of all that was anti-realist and romantic.
4 Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull’s-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull’s-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting thoughts of; and we certainly had an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, to certain story-books in which we had 1 Scribner’s Magazine, July, 1888, p. 125.
2 Pp. 349, 353-
found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.
‘When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious “ Have you got your lantern?” and a gratified “ Yes.” That was the shibboleth, and very needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognise a lantern-bearer, unless (like a polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them — for the cabin was usually locked — or choose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. There the coats would be unbuttoned and the bull’s-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight themselves with inappropriate talk.
‘Woe is me that I may not give some specimens — some of their foresights of life, or deep inquiries into t
he rudiments of man and nature — these were so fiery and so innocent, they were so richly silly, so romantically young. But the talk, at any rate, was but a condiment; and these gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool’s heart, to know you had a bull’s-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.’
Meanwhile, apart from his schools, the boy was gaining a wider knowledge of the world and having his first experiences of travel In Scotland his long summer holidays were spent in the country much as before, until the Manse at Colinton began to ‘ shield a stranger race.’ Now at some time he paid a visit to one of his uncles in the parish of Stow, on which, perhaps, he afterwards drew in Weir of Hermiston for his knowledge of the Lammer- muirs. In 1857 he had crossed the Border with his parents for the first time, and visited the English Lakes. In 1862, the year of the second International Exhibition, his father’s health brought the family to London and the South of England, and Louis saw not only the sights of the capital, but also Salisbury, Stonehenge, and the Isle of Wight. In July, the same cause took them all for a month to Homburg, which Louis liked very well, though he wearied sorely for the company of other boys. But this was only the beginning of his wanderings: in the winter of the same year Mrs. Stevenson was ordered to Mentone, and it was decided that her husband, her son, and a niece of Mr. Stevenson’s should accompany her. Thither they went in January, and there they stayed two months. In March they made a tour through Genoa, Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice, and Innsbruck, returning home by the Rhine. His mother stayed behind in England, and Louis travelled from London by himself for the first time, reaching Edinburgh on the 29th of May.
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Page 815