Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)

by Robert Louis Stevenson

His private thoughts and prospects must often have been of the gloomiest, but he seems to have borne his 1 Critical Kitcats: London, William Heinemann, 1896, p. 300.

  unhappiness with a courage as high as he ever afterwards displayed, and with a show of levity which imposed on his friends and often ended by carrying him out of himself.

  The whim of independence to which Mr. Gosse refers was carried out to an extreme by the two Stevenson cousins, about this time, in one of their visits to Paris, an experience which Louis afterwards transferred to the pages of The Wrecker. f Stennis’, it may be explained, was the nearest approach to their name possible to Barbizon, and accordingly it was as Stennis aint and Stennis frere that the pair were always known.

  ‘The two Stennises had come from London, it appeared, a week before with nothing but greatcoats and toothbrushes. It was expensive, to be sure, for every time you had to comb your hair a barber must be paid, and every time you changed your linen one shirt must be bought and another thrown away; but anything was better, argued these young gentlemen, than to be the slaves of haversacks. “ A fellow has to get rid gradually of all material attachments: that was manhood,” said they; “ and as long as you were bound down to anything — house, umbrella, or portmanteau — you were still tethered by the umbilical cord.”‘1

  When he broke through this rule, his inconsistency was equally original and unexpected.

  4 Paris, Jan. 1878. — I have become a bird fancier. I carry six little creatures no bigger than my thumb about with me almost all the day long; they are so pretty; and it is so nice to waken in the morning and hear them sing.’ Six or seven years later he again alludes to these or to other similar pets. ‘ There is only one sort of bird that I can tolerate caged, though even then I think it hard, and that is what is called in France the Bec-d’Argent. I once had two of these pigmies in captivity; and in the quiet, bare house upon a silent street where I was then 1 The Wrecker, i. p. 73.

  living, their song, which was not much louder than a bee’s, but airily musical, kept me in a perpetual good- humour. I put the cage upon my table when I worked, carried it with me when I went for meals, and kept it by my head at night: the first thing in the morning, these maestrini would pipe up.’

  The following letter written from Paris has preserved a record of one of the thousand little kind and thoughtful acts, which were so characteristic of Stevenson. Most of them are nameless and unremembered, but this — thanks to his perception of its humour — has been handed down to us.

  41 st Feb. 1877, Paris. — My dear Mother, — I have ordered a picture. There is magnificence for you. Poor is, as usual, hard up, and I knew wanted to make me a present of a sketch; so I took the first word and offered him 5of. for one. You should have seen us. I was so embarrassed that I could not finish a single phrase, and kept beginning, “ You know,” and “ You understand,”

  and “ Look here, ,” and ending in pitiful intervals of silence. I was perspiring all over. Suddenly I saw

  begin to break out all over in a silvery dew; and he just made a dive at me and took me in his arms — in a kind of champion comique style, you know, but with genuine feeling.’

  This letter is also an indirect confirmation of what has been said in the preceding chapter as to Stevenson’s poverty. About this time, however, his father followed the precedent set in his own case, and paid to Louis as an instalment of his patrimony a considerable sum, amounting, I believe, to not less than a thousand pounds. The fact is certain, the date and exact details have been lost. In the end Stevenson derived small benefit himself. ‘ The little money he had,’ as Mr. Colvin says, ‘was always absolutely at the disposal of his friends.’ In 1877 he had still £800, but, owing to misfortunes befalling his friends, in none of which was he under any obliga

  tion to intervene, within less than two years nothing of it remained. His income from writing was as yet extremely small, the payment for his essays amounting to a guinea a page, so that until 1878 he probably from all sources had never made £50 in any one year.

  As to his work, the actual output of 1877 was no more than one contribution to Temple Bar and three Cornhill articles, of which the Apology for Idlers had been rejected for Macmillaris the year before. The Temple Bar story — A Lodging for the Night already mentioned — was the outcome of his studies for the essay on Villon in the Cornhill for August, and the last result of his attention to French mediaeval literature. But of his acumen and insight into Villon’s character (on which recent discoveries have thrown fresh light), the specialists can hardly find enough to say.1

  If this year had little to show, it was only because much of it was spent in preparing for the next year’s harvest. 1878 was at once in quantity and in quality the richest year he had yet known. An Inland Voyage was published in May: the journey with the donkey was taken, and an elaborate diary of it kept: there were four essays and a story in Cornhill; three essays, a story, and the New Arabian Nights in London; a story in Temple Bar; while Picturesque Notes of Edinburgh ran in the Portfolio from June till December, and then came out in book form.

  London was a weekly journal, founded by Robert Glasgow Brown, Stevenson’s colleague on the Edinburgh University Magazine,2 and after December 1877 edited by Mr. Henley, who some time before had left Edinburgh.

  It was in page and type not unlike the World, and to the omniscience necessary to an ordinary weekly paper it added a strong flavour of literature. Much of Mr. Henley’s lighter verse appeared first in its columns, and 1 Letter of M. Marcel Schwob to Mr. Colvin, Literature, Nov. 4, 1899.

  2 Memories and Portraits, p. 128.

  among its less irregular contributors were Mr. Andrew Lang, and the late Grant Allen and James Runciman. It was a staunch opponent of Mr. Gladstone and all his works, and won the favourable notice of Lord Beacons- field. But the foundations of its finance were laid in sand, and it survived its originator little more than a year. It was the first paper edited by Mr. Henley, but though he never admitted to his columns work more brilliant of its kind, the Arabian Nights series was supposed by more than one of the proprietors sufficiently to account for the unpopularity of their journal.1

  The conception of these stories is recorded in a letter to R. A. M. Stevenson. ‘The first idea of all was the hansom cabs, which I communicated to you in your mother’s drawing-room in Chelsea. The same afternoon the Prince de Galles and the Suicide Club were invented, and several more now forgotten.’ The first half was actually written partly at Burford Bridge, partly at Swanston, while the Rajah!s Diamond was written at Monastier, before the author set out with his dnesse. The Sire de Maletroits Door (Door being substituted for the original ‘ Mousetrap’) was invented in France, first told over the fire one evening in Paris, and ultimately written at Penzance.

  Providence and the Guitar was based upon a story told by a strolling French actor and his Bulgarian wife, who had stayed at Grez. The man had played inferior parts at a good theatre, and the woman also had been on the stage. They were quiet, innocent creatures, who spent all the daytime in fishing in the river. They had their meals on a bare table in the kitchen, and in the evening they sang in the dining-room and had a little ‘tombola’ as in the story. They made the best of the most hideous poverty, but the worst of it was that they were forced to leave their only child with a peasant woman, while 1 L. Cope Cornford, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 51. W. Blackwood and Sons: 1899.

  they were tramping from village to village. She had let the child fall, and it was in consequence a hunchback. Stevenson had much talk with them, taking great pleasure in their company and delight in hearing of their experiences. But there is no further foundation for the legend that he went strolling with them, or ever acted to a French audience.

  When the story appeared he sent to the pair the money it brought him, and he received a most charming letter of thanks, which unfortunately has disappeared.

  In 1877 Stevenson having spent part of February and of June and July in France, returned there again from August to No
vember. He did not carry out his original project of another canoe voyage by the Loing, the Loire, the Saone, and the Rh6ne to the Mediterranean, but spent some time with Sir Walter Simpson either at Nemours or at Moret where the Loing joins the Seine. Their experience of the Oise had suggested the charms of the life on board a barge, their imagination was kindled, nothing would content them but to acquire such a vessel for themselves, well found in all things they could desire, picturesque and romantic as craft had never yet been; and in this fashion they should make a leisurely progress along the waterways of Europe.

  ‘ There should be no white fresher, and no green more emerald than ours, in all the navy of the canals. There should be books in the cabin, and tobacco jars, and some old Burgundy as red as a November sunset, and as fragrant as a violet in April.’

  The Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne was ‘ procured and christened,’ but on that cruise and under that flag she never started. A financial difficulty arose, and both barge and canoes alike had to be sold. So Stevenson’s only other travelling this year was a trip with his parents to Cornwall, when he went as far as the Scilly Islands with his mother.

  In 1878 he seems to have spent no more than a fort

  night in Scotland until December, although he was in London four or five times. In April he stayed with his parents at the inn at Burford Bridge, under Box Hill, ‘with its arbours and green garden and silent, eddying river,’ ‘known already as the place where Keats wrote some of his Endymion, and Nelson parted from his Emma,’ and connected hereafter, it may be, with the New Arabian Nights, and the friendship between Stevenson and Mr. George Meredith, of which this visit saw the beginning. All this summer he was acting as private secretary to Professor Fleeming Jenkin, who was a juror at the International Exhibition at Paris; the only post approaching any regular position or employment that Stevenson ever held.

  This intimate association with his friend was a great delight to them both, and in no respect more than in the indulgence of their taste for the theatre.

  ‘ Another unalloyed dramatic pleasure, which Fleeming and I shared in the year of the Paris Exposition, was the Marquis de Villemer, that blameless play, performed by Madeleine Brohan, Delaunay, Worms, and Broisat — an actress, in such parts at least, to whom I have never seen full justice rendered. He had his fill of weeping on that occasion; and when the piece was at an end, in front of a cafe in the mild midnight air, we had our fill of talk about the art of acting.’1

  Of an earlier experience in the same year, Stevenson writes: —

  ‘ I have been to see Salvini, and I now know more about him; no diminution of respect, rather an increase, from being able to compare him with the Frangais people, but a more critical vein. I notice, above all, the insufficiency, the scholastic key of his gestures, as compared with the incomparable freedom and inspiration of his intonations. As for Sarah Bernhardt, although her fame is only now beginning to reach England, and is now 1 Memoir of Fleeming fenkin, p. 145.

  greater than ever in France, she is but the ghost of herself; and those who have not seen her before will never see her again — never see her at all, I mean/

  Meanwhile he was working hard, in spite of a touch of illness for which the doctor nearly ordered him to leave Paris for the South of France. An Inland Voyage had been accepted by Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. at the beginning of the year; and on the 17th February we find the author writing from Paris: ‘I have now been four days writing a — preface, a weary preface.’ But it was that which stands before the Inland Voyage, and his readers have little reason to regret the amount of time so employed.

  A week later he says: ‘ I am getting a lot of work ready in my mind, and as soon as I am able to square my elbows, I shall put it through my hands rapidly. What a blessing work is! I don’t think I could face life without it; and how glad I am I took to literature! It helps me so much.’

  In the whirl of Paris, during the same month, he wrote this letter to his father, sitting at a cafe in the Quartier Latin: —

  Cafe de la Source, Bd. St. Michel, Paris, 15 th Feb. 1878.

  ‘A thought has come into my head which I think would interest you. Christianity is, among other things, a very wise, noble, and strange doctrine of life. Nothing so difficult to specify as the position it occupies with regard to asceticism. It is not ascetic. Christ was of all doctors (if you will let me use the word) one of the least ascetic. And yet there is a theory of living in the gospels which is curiously indefinable, and leans towards asceticism on one side, although it leans away from it on the other. In fact, asceticism is used therein as a means, not as an end. The wisdom of this world consists in making oneself very little in order to avoid many knocks; in preferring others, in order that, even when we lose, we shall find some pleasure in the event; in putting our desires outside of ourselves, in another ship, so to speak, so that, when the worst happens, there will be something left. You see, I speak of it as a doctrine of life, and as a wisdom for this world. People must be themselves, I suppose. I feel every day as if religion had a greater interest for me; but that interest is still centred on the little rough-and-tumble world in which our fortunes are cast for the moment. I cannot transfer my interests, not even my religious interests, to any different sphere. ... I have had some sharp lessons and some very acute sufferings in these last seven-and- twenty years — more even than you would guess. I begin to grow an old man; a little sharp, I fear, and a little close and unfriendly; but still I have a good heart, and believe in myself and my fellow-men and the God who made us all. . . . There are not many sadder people in the world, perhaps, than I. I have my eye on a sick-bed j1 I have written letters to-day that it hurt me to write, and I fear it will hurt others to receive; I am lonely and sick and out of heart. Well, I still hope; I still believe; I still see the good in the inch, and cling to it. It is not much, perhaps, but it is always something.

  ‘ I find I have wandered a thousand miles from what I meant. It was this: of all passages bearing on Christianity in that form of a worldly wisdom, the most Christian, and, so to speak, the key of the whole position, is the Christian doctrine of revenge. And it appears that this came into the world through Paul! There is a fact for you. It was to speak of this that I began this letter; but I have got into deep seas and must go on.

  ‘ There is a fine text in the Bible, I don’t know where, to the effect that all things work together for good to those who love the Lord. . . . Strange as it may seem to you, everything has been, in one way or the other, bringing me a little nearer to what I think you would 1 R. Glasgow Brown lay dying in the Riviera.

  like me to be. Tis a strange world, indeed, but there is a manifest God for those who care to look for him.

  ‘This is a very solemn letter for my surroundings in this busy cafe; but I had it on my heart to write it; and, indeed, I was out of the humour for anything lighter. — Ever your affectionate son, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson.

  ‘P.S.. — While I am writing gravely, let me say one word more. I have taken a step towards more intimate relations with you. But don’t expect too much of me. . . . Try to take me as I am. This is a rare moment, and I have profited by it; but take it as a rare moment. Usually I hate to speak of what I really feel, to that extent that when I find myself cornered, I have a tendency to say the reverse. R. L. S.’

  This graver tone was beginning to grow upon him, for all his spirits and light-heartedness. It seemed, indeed, as if happiness had shown him her face only that he might be filled with inextinguishable longing and regret. Mrs. Osbourne had hitherto remained in France, but this year she returned to California. All was dark before them. She was not free to follow her inclination, and though the step of seeking a divorce was open to her, yet the interests and feelings of others had to be considered, and for the present all idea of a union was impossible. Stevenson, on his side, was still far from earning his own livelihood, and could not expect his parents to give their assistance or even their consent to the marriage. So there came the pain of par
ting without prospect of return, and he who was afterwards so long an exile from his friends, now suffered separation from his dearest by the breadth of a continent and an ocean.

  At first he continued to lead his life as if nothing had happened. After his Exhibition work was over, he went to Monastier, a mountain town near the sources of the Loire, and there occupied himself with a strenuous effort in completing both the New Arabian Nights and the Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh, both at this time in their serial career. There seems an irony in the fact that, having lived most of his life in Edinburgh, more or less against his will, he should retire to France only to write about it. But, as if by way of protest against realism, he never drew his native country or his countrymen better than when he was absent from Scotland.

  At Monastier he spent some three weeks and completed his work, finding time also for some pencil sketches of the country and of the people, and obtaining, as always, a pleasant footing among the inhabitants, most of whom probably had never seen an Englishman (or Scotchman) in their lives.1

  On September 23rd he set out with his donkey on his eleven days’ journey through the Cevennes, but here too his thoughts pursued him.

  41 heard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old, endless ballad not far off. It seemed to be about love and a bel amoureux, her handsome sweetheart; and I wished I could have taken up the strain and answered her, as I went on upon my invisible woodland way, weaving, like Pippa in the poem, my own thoughts with hers. What could I have told her? Little enough; and yet all the heart requires. How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden; and 44 hope, which comes to all,” outwears the accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond the grave and death. Easy to say: yea, but also, by God’s mercy, both easy and grateful to believe!’2

  The Inland Voyage had been published in May 1878, producing no more sensation than a small book, written for the sake of style by an unknown author, was likely to produce among the public, although the 1 The Studio: Winter Number, 1896-97; Juvenilia, p. 216.