Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  This first winter Stevenson produced but little. He arrived full of eagerness to begin his Scottish history, but a little study and reflection, following upon his newfound enthusiasm for the parts of Scotland where he had been staying, had fixed his attention exclusively upon one section of his original subject, and for the time he limited his view to a history of the Highlands extending from 1715 to his own day. ‘I breathe after this Highland business,’ he wrote in December, ‘feeling a real, fresh, lively, and modern subject, full of romance and scientific interest in front of me. It is likely it will turn into a long essay.’

  Even this, it seemed, was beyond his powers for the present. The doctor in a few weeks spoke hopefully of his case, but the climate, though beneficial in the long run, was not at first conducive to any deliberate effort. Of the sensations produced in himself, Stevenson has left an analysis2 that may be contrasted with the moods of the convalescent in Ordered South.

  ‘. . . In many ways it is a trying business to reside upon the Alps.. . . But one thing is undeniable — that in the rare air, clear, cold, and blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes a certain troubled delight in his existence, which can nowhere else be paralleled. He is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive. It does not, perhaps, come out of him in work or exercise, yet he feels an enthusiasm of the blood unknown in more temperate climates. It may not be health, but it is fun.

  ‘There is nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joyousness of spirits. You wake every 1 Dictionary of National Biography, sub 1 Symonds.’

  2 Pall Mall Gazette, 5th March 1881,4 The Stimulation of the Alps.’

  morning, see the gold upon the snow-peaks, become tilled with courage, and bless God for your prolonged existence. The valleys are but a stride to you; you cast your shoe over the hill-tops; your ears and your heart sing; in the words of an unverified quotation from the Scotch psalms, you feel yourself fit “on the wings of all the winds” to “ come flying all abroad.” Europe and your mind are too narrow for that flood of energy. Yet it is notable that you are hard to root out of your bed; that you start forth singing, indeed, on your walk, yet are unusually ready to turn home again; that the best of you is volatile; and that although the restlessness remains till night, the strength is early at an end. With all these heady jollities, you are half conscious of an underlying languor in the body; you prove not to be so well as you had fancied; you weary before you have well begun; and though you mount at morning with the lark, that is not precisely a song-bird’s heart that you bring back with you when you return with aching limbs and peevish temper to your inn.

  ‘ It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of Alpine winters is its own reward. Baseless, in a sense, it is more than worth more permanent improvements. The dream of health is perfect while it lasts; and if, in trying to realise it, you speedily wear out the dear hallucination, still every day, and many times a day, you are conscious of a strength you scarce possess, and a delight in living as merry as it proves to be transient. The brightness — heaven and earth conspiring to be bright — the levity and quiet of the air; the odd, stirring silence — more stirring than a tumult; the snow, the frost, the enchanted landscape: all have their part in the effect on the memory, tons vous tapent sur la tete; and yet when you have enumerated all, you have gone no nearer to explain or even to qualify the delicate exhilaration that you feel — delicate, you may say, and yet excessive, greater than can be said in prose, almost greater than an invalid can bear. There is a certain wine of France, known in England in some gaseous disguise, but when drunk in the land of its nativity, still as a pool, clean as river water, and as heady as verse. It is more than probable that in its noble natural condition this was the very wine of Anjou so beloved by Athos in the Musketeers. Now if the reader has ever washed down a liberal second breakfast with the wine in question, and gone forth, on the back of these dilutions, into a sultry, sparkling noontide, he will have felt an influence almost as genial, although strangely grosser, than this fairy titillation of the nerves among the snow and sunshine of the Alps. That also is a mode, we need not say of intoxication, but of insobriety. Thus also a man walks in a strong sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insubstantial meditations. And whether he be really so clever or so strong as he supposes, in either case he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts.

  ‘ The influence of this giddy air displays itself in many secondary ways. People utter their judgments with a cannonade of syllables; a big word is as good as a meal to them; and the turn of a phrase goes further than humour or wisdom. By the professional writer many sad vicissitudes have to be undergone. At first, he cannot write at all. The heart, it appears, is unequal to the pressure of business, and the brain, left without nourishment, goes into a mild decline. Next, some power of work returns to him, accompanied by jumping headaches. Last, the spring is opened, and there pours at once from his pen a world of blatant, hustling polysyllables. He writes them in good faith and with a sense of inspiration; it is only when he comes to read what he has written that surprise and disquiet seize upon his mind. What is he to do, poor man? All his little fishes talk like whales. This yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting architecture of the sentence, have come upon him while he slept; and it is not he, it is the Alps who are to blame. He is not, perhaps, alone, which somewhat comforts him. Nor is the ill without a remedy. Some day, when the spring returns, he shall go down a little lower in this world, and remember quieter inflections and more modest language. . . .

  ‘ Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of the brain? It is a sort of congestion, perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all goes well, to face the new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness. It is certainly congestion that makes night hideous with visions; all the chambers of a many-storeyed caravanserai haunted with vociferous nightmares, and many wakeful people come down late for breakfast in the morning. Upon that theory the cynic may explain the whole affair — exhilaration, nightmares, pomp of tongue and all. But on the other hand, the peculiar blessedness of boyhood may itself be but a symptom of the same complaint, for the two effects are strangely similar; and the frame of mind of the invalid upon the Alps is a sort of intermittent youth, with periods of lassitude. The fountain of Juventus does not play steadily in these parts; but there it plays, and possibly nowhere else.’

  Apart from this exhilaration, there was much that he disliked in Davos, more especially the cut-and-dry walks alone possible to him, the monotonous river, the snow (in which he could see no colour), and the confinement to a single valley. ‘ The mountains are about you like a trap/ he wrote; ‘you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and corners, and can change only one for the other/

  The drawbacks of hotel life seem to have affected him but little; he had the company of his wife, and a constant interest in his stepson, who, having brought the toy- press given him the previous spring in California and used at Silverado, now devoted to printing all the time he could secure from lessons with his tutor.

  A characteristic story which I have from Mrs. Stevenson belongs to this period. When they were leaving for Davos, her father-in-law, warned by the experiences of Louis in California, made her promise that she would let him know if at any time they were in want of money.

  ‘ The time came,’ she says, * when Louis had influenza and did need more, but he would not let me tell his father. I used every argument. At last I said, “ What do you think should be done with the money your father has so carefully laid by for the use of his family?” “ It should be given,” said Louis, “to some young man of talent, who is in poor health and could not otherwise afford to get a necessary change of climate.” “ Oh, very well,” said I, “ I shall appeal to your father at once in the case of a young man named Stevenson, who is in just that position.” At this Louis could only laugh, and I wrote the story to his father, who was much amused by it, and of course sent the
necessary supplies.’

  In these days, and indeed throughout his life, he was often unreasonable, but this very unreason seems always to have had a quality and a charm of its own, which only endeared Stevenson the more to those who suffered under its caprice, as two other anecdotes of Davos may serve to show. A young Church of England parson, who knew him but slightly, was roused one morning about six o’clock by a message that Stevenson wanted to see him immediately. Knowing how ill his friend was, he threw on his clothes and rushed to Stevenson’s room, only to see a haggard face gazing from the bed-clothes, and to hear an agonised voice say, 4 For God’s sake, , have you got a Horace?’

  Another friend had received from Italy a present of some Christmas roses, to which particular associations gave a personal sentiment and value. Stevenson was seeking high and low for some flowers — the occasion, I think, was the birthday of a girl who could never live to see another — he heard of the arrival of these. He came, he stated the paramount necessity of depriving his friend, and he bore the flowers away. The two stories might end here, and show Stevenson in rather an unamiable light: their point is that neithei of his friends ever dreamed of resenting his conduct or regarding it with any other feeling but affectionate amusement.

  Often in the evening he would turn into the billiard- room, and there his talk might be heard at its best. A fellow-visitor has given a spirited and sympathetic description of him in those days, and adds: ‘ Once only do I remember seeing him play a game of billiards, and a truly remarkable performance it was. He played with all the fire and dramatic intensity that he was apt to put into things. The balls flew wildly about, on or off the table as the case might be, but seldom indeed ever threatened a pocket or got within a hand’s-breadth of a cannon. “ What a fine thing a game of billiards is,” he remarked to the astonished onlookers, “ — once a year or so!”‘1

  When he was well, Stevenson had to be out of doors a good deal, and spent the time mostly in walks, often with his dog for a companion.

  ‘15th December 1880. — My dear Mother, — I shall tell you about this morning. When I got out with Woggs about half-past seven, the sky was low and grey; the Tinzenhorn and the other high peaks were covered. It had snowed all night, a fine, soft snow; and all the ground had a gloss, almost a burnish, from the new coating. The woods were elaborately powdered grey — not a needle but must have had a crystal. In the road immediately below me, a long train of sack-laden sledges was going by, drawn by four horses, with an indescribable smoothness of motion, and no sound save that of the bells. On the other road, across the river, four or five empty sledges were returning towards Platz, some of the drivers sitting down, some standing up in their vehicles; they glided forward without a jolt or a tremor, not like anything real, but like cardboard figures on a toy-theatre. I wonder if you can understand how odd this looked/ 1 Mr. Harold Vallings in Temple Bar, February 1901, p. 25.

  Occasionally he joined in skating and more frequently in the tobogganing then newly introduced. The latter experiences, as in all sports in which he ever took part were delightful to him chiefly for the surroundings, and quite apart from all rivalry or competition, since, as he says in the Inland Voyage, he ‘ held all racing as a creature of the devil/ The following passage shows how he extracted the keenest pleasure both from the exercise itself and the romantic conditions with which he was able to invest it: —

  ‘Perhaps the true way to toboggan is alone and at night. First comes the tedious climb, dragging your instrument behind you. Next a long breathing space, alone with snow and pine woods, cold, silent, and solemn to the heart. Then you push off; the toboggan fetches way; she begins to feel the hill, to glide, to swim, to gallop. In a breath you are out from under the pine- trees, and a whole heavenful of stars reels and flashes overhead. Then comes a vicious effort; for by this time your wooden steed is speeding like the wind, and you are spinning round a corner, and the whole glittering valley and all the lights in all the great hotels lie for a moment at your feet; and the next you are racing once more in the shadow of the night, with close shut teeth and beating heart. Yet a little while and you will be landed on the highroad by the door of your own hotel. This, in an atmosphere tingling with forty degrees of frost, in a night made luminous with stars and snow, and girt with strange white mountains, teaches the pulse an unaccustomed tune, and adds a new excitement to the life of man upon his planet/1

  In the meanwhile he was allowed to work two hours in the morning, and one, if he wished, in the afternoon, and this time was not wholly without result. The first edition of Virginibus Puerisque — his earliest volume of collected papers — was prepared for the press, and the 1 ‘Alpine Diversions,’ Pall Mall Gazette, 26th February 1881.

  second essay in that book and the thrice-rejected article on Raeburn were there printed for the first time. The essay on Pepys was written, and a paper for the Fortnightly, but this was all the prose that he succeeded in finishing before his departure, except the four articles on Davos, which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette. The last were mere impressions, anonymous, unfinished, and unrevised: yet no one can doubt for a moment the authorship of the extracts I have given.

  Chiefly for his own amusement during the winter, he wrote also a good deal of familiar verse, the>best of which was in Scots dialect, and included the lines addressed to the author of Rab and his Friends. In a series of octosyllabic stanzas he denounced certain dishonest tradesmen of Davos, and he also wrote a sequence of sonnets — almost his only use of this metrical form — their subject being one Peter Brash, a publican of Edinburgh, who had been the subject of his early jokes.

  An outline of the Highland history may be found in the Letters} but the book itself remained unwritten, and is never likely now to become what Stevenson could have made of it. But he spent some time in preparatory reading, and even began to learn Gaelic for the purpose, though he never got beyond the rudiments of the language.

  A health-resort, from its very conditions, often casts upon a visitor shadows of death and bereavement, but this year the Stevensons were affected with the deepest sympathy for a loss that touched them nearly; their friend Mrs. Sitwell arrived unexpectedly with her son, who was already in the last stages of a swift consumption, and before the end came in April, there were but the alternations of despair and of hoping against hope until the blow fell.

  Shortly afterwards Stevenson and his wife set out for France, accompanied only by Woggs, for the boy had 1 Letters, vol. i. p. 187.

  gone to England to school. They spent several weeks, first at Barbizon; then in Paris, whence they were driven by drains; and at St. Germain, where Stevenson for the first time in his life heard a nightingale sing, and, having proclaimed that no sounds in nature could equal his favourite blackbird, forthwith surrendered all prejudice and fell into an ecstasy. They found themselves in straits at St. Germain, owing to the failure of supplies and the general suspicious appearance of Stevenson’s wardrobe; being suddenly delivered from insults, they left their landlord, as Mrs. Stevenson alleged, in the belief that he had turned from his doors the eccentric son of a wealthy English nobleman.

  They reached Edinburgh on May 30th, and three days later started with his mother for Pitlochry, where they spent two months at Kinnaird Cottage: his father coming to them as often as business permitted. Louis had written to his parents that for country quarters his desiderata were these: ‘ A house, not an inn, at least not an hotel; a burn within reach; heather and a fir or two. If these can be combined, I shall be pretty happy.’ These requisites he found, and indeed the man would be hard to satisfy who asked more of any stream — ’ a little green glen with a burn, a wonderful burn, gold and green and snow-white, singing loud and low in different steps of its career, now pouring over miniature crags, now fretting itself to death in a maze of rocky stairs and pots; never was so sweet a little river. Behind, great purple moorlands reaching to Ben Vrackie.’1

  He had thus his heart’s desire, and in return, if (as he was always urging) man i
s but a steward on parole, he did not fail to repay mankind for this season of delight. For in these two months he wrote ‘ Thrawn Janet’ and the ‘ Merry Men.’ ‘ The Body Snatcher’ belongs to the same time, all three being intended for a volume of tales of the supernatural. For ‘Thrawn Janet’ Stevenson after- 1 Letters, vol. i. p. 204.

  wards claimed that if he had never written anything but this tale and the story of 4 Tod Lapraik’ in Catriona, he would yet have been a writer.1 It was the outcome of a study of the Scotch literature of witchcraft, and is hardly open to any other criticism than that which its author himself found against it. ‘“Thrawn Janet” has two defects; it is true only historically, true for a hill parish in Scotland in old days, not true for mankind and the world. Poor Mr. Soulis’ faults we may eagerly recognise as virtues, and we feel that by his conversion he was merely worsened; and this, although the story carries me away every time I read it, leaves a painful impression on my mind.’ Even from the days of the Edinburgh University Magazine he had attached great importance to the names of his characters, and was never weary of improvising new lists for his amusement. ‘My own uncle/ he wrote to Mr. Barrie,’ has simply the finest name in the world, Ramsay Traquair. Beat that you cannot.’ But I can remember his saying to me one day with a tone of deep regret,’ I have already used up the best name in all the world — Mr. Soulis.’

  The ‘ Merry Men’ was always one of his favourites, rather on account of the sentiment and the style than for the actual story. It was, as he put it,’ a fantasia, or vision of the sea/ and was designed to express the feeling of the West coast of Scotland as he conceived it in accordance with the memories of his engineering days, especially the weeks spent upon the island of Earraid.

  He had now found his powers in dialect, in which hitherto he had written only a few verses and recorded but a few remembered phrases in his sketches or essays. But from this time much of the speech of his strongest novels was in Scotch, more or less broad, and the fame of Stevenson as a novelist is inseparably connected with his mastery over the common tongue of his own country. It may, perhaps, be added that the work done at Pit- 1 Vaitima Letters, p. 241.