Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  ‘ I never knew any man so superior to himself. The best of him only came as a vision, like Corsica from the Corniche. He never gave his measure either morally or intellectually. The curse was on him. Even his friends did not know him but by fits. I have passed hours with him when he was so wise, good, and sweet, that I never knew the like of it in any other.2

  ‘ The fourth of these friends was Sir Walter Simpson, son of Sir James who gave chloroform to the world. He was, I think, the eldest of my associates; yet he must have been of a more deliberate growth, for when we encountered, I believe we were about equal in intellectual development. His was a slow fighting mind. You would see him, at times, wrestle for a minute at a time with a refractory jest, and perhaps fail to throw it at the end. I think his special character was a profound shyness, 1 He was, even then, as a letter from R. L. S. in 1894 reminds him, ‘a great maker of reminiscences,5 and to his influence, perhaps, it was partly due that Stevenson turned so early and so frequently to the past.

  2 I have here substituted a portion of a letter which Stevenson wrote upon hearing of the death of Ferrier {Letters, i. 281) for the original ms., which says nearly the same things in a more halting fashion, and is generally less suitable for quotation. For the finished study, pitched in a loftier key, the reader is referred to ‘ Old Mortality’ in Memories and Portraits.

  a shyness which was not so much exhibited in society as it ruled in his own dealings with himself. He was shy of his own virtues and talents, and above all of the former. He was even ashamed of his own sincere desire to do the right. More than half the man, as you first knew him, was a humbug; and that was utterly the worser part. But this very foible served to keep clean and wholesome the unusual intimacy which united him, Baxter, and myself; for he would permit no protestations and scarce any civility between us. It is odd that this had to be dropped in time; for, as we went on in life and became more seriously involved, we found it then more necessary to be kind. Then, indeed, Simpson could show himself not only kind but full of exceptional delicacies. Some of them I did not appreciate till years after they were done and perhaps forgotten by him. I have said his mind was slow, and in this he was an opposite and perhaps an antidote to Bob. I have known him battle a question sometimes with himself, sometimes with me, month after month for years; he had an honest stubbornness in thinking, and would neither let himself be beat nor cry victory.

  ‘ The mere return of Bob changed at once and for ever the course of my life; I can give you an idea of my relief only by saying that I was at last able to breathe. The miserable isolation in which I had languished was no more in season, and I began to be happy.1 To have no one to whom you can speak your thoughts is but a slight trial; for a month or two at a time, I can support it almost without regret; but to be young, to be daily 1 At this point it may be as well to mention the L. J. R., ‘ that mysterious society.’ It consisted of six members, and its meetings, of which only five took place, were held at a public-house situated, I believe, in Advocates’ Close, which had apparently been visited by Burns. Its complete name was concealed with a mystery as deep and not less important than that which broods over the Greek letter societies of American colleges. Its principles, generally speaking, were liberty of thought and freedom from prejudice. The abolition of the House of Lords was, it is said, one of its tenets.

  making fresh discoveries and fabricating new theories of life, to be full of flimsy, whimsical, overpowering humours, that seem to leave you no alternative but to confide them or to die, and not only not to have, but never to have had a confidant, is an astounding misery. I now understand it best by recognising my delight when that period was ended. I thought I minded for nothing when I had found my Faithful; my heart was like a bird’s; I was done with the sullens for good; there was an end of green-sickness for my life as soon as I had got a friend to laugh with. Laughter was at that time our principal affair, and I doubt if we could have had a better. It is true we debated many things from the first, above all, problems of art, in which we advanced wonderfully; and it is also true that under all this mirth-making, there kept growing up and strengthening a serious, angry, and at length a downright hostile criticism of the life around us. This time we call, in looking back, the period of Jink.

  ‘ Jink was a word of our own; for we had a language, compounded of many slangs and languages in which we expressed indifferently common things that had already a much better name in English, and the new or half understood ideas for which there were no names, or none with which we were acquainted.

  ‘As a rule of conduct, Jink consisted in doing the most absurd acts for the sake of their absurdity and the consequent laughter. I will give an instance of the colossal jests which we used to enact, and of which this at least is to be said, that if they were silly, they were never cruel. One of us was once travelling from Wales to Edinburgh, strangely dilapidated as usual in the matter of coin; and when he got to Crewe, he was stopped before the booking-office for a paltry half-crown. There were fifteen minutes to spare before the train started. He opened his portmanteau on the platform, got out a pair of dress-trousers, ran into the town, stumbled straight on a pawnbroker’s shop, got his half- crown, and was back in time to book and get a seat. But when the hurry was over he began to wonder over a circumstance in this little comedy. When asked his name by the pawnbroker, he had replied instantly and without conscious thought, “John Libbel,” and when further questioned as to the spelling, had rapped out in the same swift and perfectly mechanical way, “ Two B’s.” On his return the matter was discussed. It seemed to us, I remember, a case of plenary inspiration; and we agreed, at last, that it must have been so, because the name was so suitable for one who pawned. It seemed to us, and it seems to me still, a mean, hungry, slinking sort of name; hence we thought that all of us should use it as a name to pawn under; and hence germinated the great idea of Libbelism. A large, growing, pushing society of men should go all over the world and continually pawn articles under the name of John Libbel; until at length, when some great German statist took it into his blockhead to examine the books of pawnbrokers, it would gradually dawn upon him that, in all lands and for year after year, innumerable persons all answering to this one name of John Libbel were daily engaged in the act of pawning, and yet when he turned his eyes outward on the world to follow the conduct of these persons in a different sphere, behold there would be no John Libbel, no, not one. We exulted over the mystification of the German statist. To pawn anything under this name was to perform an “ act of Libbelism.”

  ‘ I remember these words from the “ Corpus totius Juris Libbelismi” which I drew up: “vel si rem suam, vel si rem alienam, maxime quidem si rem alienam.”

  ‘ But the idea did not rest here: we had tasted blood, and soon began to find out other ways of building up evidence of this imaginary person’s existence. We bought some type for marking pocket-handkerchiefs one day at the corner of North College Street, and retiring to a public-house, printed off, with incredible patience, many hundred visiting-cards with the name of “Mr. Libbel.” The type being worthless, and the printing being done without a press, and amateur at that, you may conceive the aspect of the cards. These began to be handed about Edinburgh at a great rate, sometimes with manuscript additions which did not tend to improve the moral character of Mr. Libbel. A whole street would suddenly be flooded from end to end with Mr. Libbel’s visiting-cards; or one would be softly pressed into the hand of a gentleman going by. Parcels, containing nothing, “ With Mr. Libbel’s compliments,” were handed into houses. Letters from Mr. Libbel to leading citizens were carried by the unconscious postman. I have spent whole days going from lodging-house to lodging-house inquiring anxiously, “ If Mr. Libbel had come yet? “ and when the servant or a landlady had told us “ No,” assuring her that he would come soon, and leaving a mysterious message. And at last — crowning-point of the edifice — there came the Libbel Succession. Wherever we went, we had a notebook in our hand; we would put questions, look at each oth
er, purse our lips, and gradually let it escape to our auditor, as if by accident, that we were agents looking for the heir to the great Libbel fortune. We tried to get an advertisement into the Scotsman newspaper, but the clerk plainly smelling a hoax, we were ejected from the office. Did we labour in vain from first to last? After all this apostledom, was there not one disciple? Did no two of our victims ever take counsel together, and after comparing notes, cry out: “ But who the devil is this Libbel? “ We can never know now; but we were disinterested, we required none of the encouragement of success, we pursued our joke, our mystification, our blague for its own sake, and had a good time.

  ‘ Yet for this and other mad pranks of a like order, we were rewarded in a strange way, by one flash of infernal glory. This is so odd in itself that I must tell it with every particularity One afternoon, hunting round for the absurd, we entered the shop of a jeweller called Bargany on Street, rather low down, and there proceeded for about quarter of an hour to pass off some piece of vaulting absurdity on the shopman. Suddenly the man’s eye took fire, and he started back. “ I know who you are,” he cried; “ you ‘re the two Stevensons.” We were dumbfounded. “ Oh,” he went on, “ Bargany’s been dying to see you. He ‘11 be so vexed that he was out. Oh, he’s heard of your ongoings.” And the man shouted with laughter again and again. He told us to come back later in the afternoon, or any other afternoon, and have tea in the backshop with Bargany and his sister, who had also heard of us, and desired to make our acquaintance. And I must say if our reputation did us any justice, that sister was a liberal lady. Would you believe it? we never went back.

  4 To tell what else we did would be interminable and, besides, extremely tedious. As Bob said, we did nothing obvious; the least joke was spiced to us by being imbedded in mountains of monotony.’

  Here the manuscript breaks off. Some notes on an earlier page enable us to learn in what direction it might have been continued. ‘ Whitman: humanity: L. J. R.: love of mankind: sense of inequality: justification of art: decline of religion: I take to the New Testament: change startling: growing desire for truth: Spencer: should have done better with the New Test.’

  Thus the coming of happiness was due partly to his friends and partly to his reading. To the list of the former there is still an addition to be made — the name of Fleeming Jenkin. It was in 1868 that Jenkin came to Edinburgh as Professor of Engineering, and it was first in the character of a truant that Stevenson came under his notice.1 The professor was fifteen years older than his pupil — a difference in age which is often difficult 1 Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, p. 155.

  to surmount. But besides his boundless energy and vitality, there was about Jenkin a perpetual boyishness, which showed itself not least in this, that his development continued to the end of his life. His delight in all that was high-minded and heroic, his fiery enthusiasm, his extraordinary readiness and spirit, were just the qualities to win and to stimulate the younger man. Moreover, at the time that Stevenson fell under his influence, the detachment and independence of Jenkin’s religious views rendered that influence of far greater weight than if he had been content to yield a lifeless assent to established observances and conventional creeds. Stevenson was in revolt, or meditating an outbreak. Here was a man, ready to question everything, exercising a clear-sighted judgment, and yet full of earnestness and piety, who 4 saw life very simple,’ who did not love refinements, but was 4 a friend to much conformity in unessentials.’ And about Jenkin there were these further points which distinguished him from Stevenson’s other friends, and gave him a great advantage. He was the only one who had already fought the battle of life, and not only was victorious but knew how to carry his success.1 Moreover, he was the first of Stevenson’s friends who was already married. Perhaps the most charming passages in the Memoir of Fleeming fenkin are those which suggest rather than describe the infinite tenderness and romance which marriage brought into his life and made his house all it was to those who loved him. And so to Stevenson it was from the first a double friendship, renewed each spring in Edinburgh by the theatricals in which he took part, and also by a long visit to the family in their country quarters. To Jenkin he resorted in many of his troubles, and from him and his wife he never failed to obtain the sympathy and wise counsel of which he stood in need. Mrs. Jenkin, writing in 1895, says that her husband loved him best of all his friends, and Stevenson, 1 Letters, ii. 80.

  when he came to write Jenkin’s biography, records what mingled pain and pleasure it was ‘ to dig into the past of a dead friend, and find him, at every spadeful, shine brighter.’1

  Stevenson’s numerous and characteristic letters to Jenkin were returned to their writer after his friend’s death, and, in the confusion of the departure from Bournemouth, they were unfortunately destroyed. Of his first introduction to Mrs. Jenkin, she has herself given an account.

  Late on a winter afternoon in 1868 she paid her first visit to 17 Heriot Row, and there found Mrs. Stevenson sitting by the firelight, apparently alone. They began to talk, when ‘ suddenly, from out of a dark corner beyond the fireplace, came a voice, peculiar, vibrating; a boy’s voice, I thought at first. “Oh!” said Mrs. Stevenson, “ I forgot that my son was in the room. Let me introduce him to you.” The voice went on: I listened in perplexity and amazement. Who was this son who talked as Charles Lamb wrote? this young Heine with the Scottish accent? I stayed long, and when I came away the unseen converser came down with me to the front-door to let me out. As he opened it,* the light of the gas-lamp outside (“ For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,” he sings) fell on him, and I saw a slender, brown, long-haired lad, with great dark eyes, a brilliant smile, and a gentle, deprecating bend of the head. “ A boy of sixteen,” I said to myself. But he was eighteen, looking then, as he always did, younger than his age. I asked him to come and see us. He said, “Shall I come to-morrow?” I said “ Yes,” and ran home. As I sat down to dinner I announced, “I have made the acquaintance of a poet!” He came on the morrow, and from that day forward we saw him constantly. From that day forward too, our affection and our admiration for him, and our delight in his company, grew.’

  1 Letters, ii. 13.

  Thus much of his friends and their influence. There was also the other continual and stimulating influence of books, and though Stevenson was never a scholar in the strict and more arid sense, few men ever brought so great an enthusiasm to the studies of their choice. His ardour was now at its height. Twenty years later he wrote: 41 have really enjoyed this book as I — almost as I — used to enjoy books when I was going twenty — twenty-three; and these are the years for reading.’1

  ‘Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon the minds of young men the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance, and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least.’2

  Besides his books at home, he had always access to the Advocates’ Library, the great public library of Edinburgh, which is entitled to receive a copy of everything published in the kingdom. But for the present the question is of those works with which a man lives, which for the time become an intimate part of himself, and closer than any friend. Such were to Stevenson the three already mentioned, the New Testament, Walt Whitman,3 and Herbert Spencer. Of the first he says but little, and of that I have already spoken: to Whitman he has done a measure of justice in one of the Familiar Studies, and also in a paper on ‘Books which have influenced me.’4 In the latter, too, Mr. Herbert Spencer also 1 Letters, ii. 246. 2 Memories and Portraits, p. 112.

  3 ‘ His book . . . should be in the hands of all parents and guardians as a specific for the distressing malady of being seventeen years old. Greensickness yields to his treatment as to a charm of magic; and the youth, after a short course of reading, ceases to carry the world upon his shoulders’ (ibid. p. 108).

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sp; 4 Republished in his Later Essays, in the Edinburgh edition.

  * I come next to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and having thus shaken my VOL. I. G

  receives his meed of gratitude, and to him succeed Shakespeare, Dumas, Bunyan, Montaigne, and many others in rapid sequence, until the writer was manifestly overwhelmed in returning thanks to the whole world of books which brought him so much wisdom and happiness.1

  But learning to write — there was the business of life. Although the description of the method by which he taught himself this most difficult of arts has been quoted again and again, and has long ago become classical, I have no alternative and no desire but to give it in this place. The process described had long begun, when this period opened, as it continued after its close; but to these years it chiefly refers — a space of protracted and laborious application without encouragement or immediate reward.2

  tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues.

  . . Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive Rabbi exists, and few better. . . . His words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol, but still joyful; and the reader will find there a caput mortuum of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two qualities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer.’ — ’Books which have influenced me,’ Later Essays, 1 In a notebook of 1871-72 I find this Catalogus Librorum Carissimorum: —

  Scott, strange to say, does not appear, but though Stevenson now and again said hard things of Sir Walter, they were all upon the technical side, and his incomparable merits perhaps no one ever better understood. Not all books, however, were of service: elsewhere he bewails the inhumanity of Obermann (Memories and Portraits, p. 112) and counts Moll Flanders and The Country Wife more wholesome reading.