Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  “The morning of the 4th of December broke cool and sunny, a beautiful day, rare at this season of the year. More fine mats were brought, until the Union Jack lay nigh concealed beneath them. Among the newcomers was an old Mataafa chief, one of the builders of the ‘Road of the Loving Heart,’ a man who had spent many days in prison for participation in the rebellion. ‘I am only a poor Samoan, and ignorant,’ said he, as he crouched beside the body. ‘ Others are rich and can give Tusitala the parting presents of rich fine mats; 1 am poor and can give nothing this last day he receives his friends. Yet I am not afraid to come and look the last time in my friend’s face, never to see him more till we meet with God. Behold! Tusitala is dead; Mataafa is also dead to us. These two great friends have been taken by God. When Mataafa was taken, who was our support but Tusitala? We were in prison, and he cared for us. We were sick, and he made us well. We were hungry, and he fed us. The day was no longer than his kindness. You are great people and full of love. Yet who among you is so great as Tusitala? What is your love to his love? Our clan was Mataafa’s clan, for whom 1 speak this day; therein was Tusitala also. We mourn them both.’

  “A meeting of chiefs was held to apportion the work and divide the men into parties. Forty were sent with knives and axes to cut a path up the steep face of the mountain, and the writer himself led another party to the summit — men chosen from the immediate family — to dig the grave on a spot where it was Mr. Stevenson’s wish that he should lie. Nothing more picturesque can be imagined than the narrow ledge that forms the summit of Vaea, a place no wider than a room, and flat as a table. On either side the land descends precipi- tously; in front lie the vast ocean and the surf-swept reefs; to the right and left, green mountains rise, densely covered with the primeval forest. Two hundred years ago the eyes of another man turned towards that same peak of Vaea, as the spot that should ultimately receive his war-worn body: Soalu, a famous chief.

  “All the morning Samoans were arriving with flowers; few of these were white, for they have not learned our foreign custom, and the room glowed with the many colours. There were no strangers on that day, no acquaintances; those only were called who would deeply feel the loss. At one o’clock a body of powerful Samoans bore away the coffin, hid beneath a tattered red ensign that had flown above his vessel in many a remote corner of the South Seas. A path so steep and rugged taxed their strength to the utmost, for not only was the journey difficult in itself, but extreme care was requisite to carry the coffin shoulder-high.

  “Half an hour later the rest of his friends followed. It was a formidable ascent, and tried them hard. Nineteen Europeans and some sixty Samoans reached the summit. After a short rest the Rev. W. E. Clarke read the burial service of the Church of England, interposing a prayer that Mr. Stevenson had written and had read aloud to his family only the evening before his death:

  “We beseech Thee, Lord, to behold us with favour, folk of many families and nations gathered together in the peace of this roof, weak men and women subsisting under the covert of Thy patience.

  “Be patient still; suffer us yet awhile longer; — 186

  with our broken purposes of good, with our idle endeavours against evil, suffer us awhile longer to endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, brace us to play the man under affliction. Be with our friends, be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns, return to us, our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts — eager to labour — eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion — and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it.

  “We thank Thee and praise Thee; and in the words of Him to whom this day is sacred, close our oblation.

  “Another old friend, the Rev. J. E. Newell, who had risen from a sick-bed to come, made an address in the Samoan language.

  “No stranger’s hand touched him. It was his body- servant that interlocked his fingers and arranged his hands in the attitude of prayer. Those who loved him carried him to his last home; even the coffin was the work of an old friend. The grave was dug by his own men.”

  So there he was laid to rest, and in after-time a large tomb in the Samoan fashion, built of great blocks of cement, was placed upon the grave. On either side there is a bronze plate: the one bearing the words in Samoan, “The Tomb of Tusitala,” followed by the speech of Ruth to Naomi, taken from the Samoan Bible: —

  “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will 1 die, and there will 1 be buried.”

  At the sides of the inscription were placed a thistle and a hibiscus flower.

  Upon the other panel, in English, is his own Requiem: —

  A ROBERT LOUIS Q 1850 STEVENSON. 1894

  Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie.

  Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.

  This be the verse you grave for me:

  Here be lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, borne from sea, And the hunter homefrom the bill.

  Since his death the chiefs have tabooed the use of firearms upon the hillside where he lies, that the birds may live there undisturbed, and raise about his grave the songs he loved so well.

  The proposal that a memorial pillar should be erected on the hill to serve as a sea-mark was abandoned. Besides the difficulties of transport and of keeping the summit always clear of trees, there was the real danger of the slight but frequent shocks of earthquake by which any kind of column would sooner or later have been overthrown.

  In 1897 a monument to Stevenson was erected by 188

  public subscription in the Plaza of San Francisco. It is a granite pedestal supporting a bronze galleon, designed by Mr. Bruce Porter, who also with Mr. Gelett Burgess is responsible for the plates of the monument in Samoa.

  A large and most enthusiastic meeting was held in Edinburgh in December, 1896. Committees were formed in most of the chief cities of Great Britain, and finally Mr. St. Gaudens was requested to produce a monument to be placed upon the walls of the Cathedral Church of St. Giles in Edinburgh.

  R. L. S.

  Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face —

  Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race, Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, The brown eyes radiant with vivacity —

  There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace Of passion, impudence, and energy.

  Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist:

  A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, And something of the Shorter-Catechist.

  A Book of Verses, p. 41, by W. E. Henley, published by D. Nutt, 1888.

  Of Stevenson’s personal aspect and bodily powers it may be fitting here to make mention. Of his appearance the best portraits and photographs give a fair idea, if each be considered as the rendering of only one expression. The frontispiece of Volume I. is from a charcoal head drawn by Mrs. Stevenson at Grez as long ago as 1877, and redrawn for this book by Mr. T. Blake Wirgman. It will be seen that the eyes were the most striking feature of the face; they were of the deepest brown in colour, set extraordinarily wide apart. At most times they had a shy, quick glance that was most attractive, but when he was moved to anger or any fierce emotion, they seemed literally to blaze and glow with a fiery light. His hair was fair and even yellow in colour until he wasfive-and-twenty; after that it rapidly deepened, and in later years was quite dark, but of course without any touch of black. When he reached the tropics, and the fear of taking cold was to some extent removed, he wore it short once more, to his own great satisfaction and comfort. His complexion was brown and always high, even in the confinemen
t of the sickroom; the only phrase for it is the “ rich-tinted “ used by Mr. Henley in the spirited and vivid lines he has kindly permitted me to quote.

  In height he was about five feet ten, slender in figure, and thin to the last degree. In all his movements he was most graceful: every gesture was full of an unconscious beauty, and his restless and supple gait has been well compared to the pacing to and fro of some wild forest animal. To this unusual and most un-English grace it was principally due that he was so often taken for a foreigner. We have seen that Mr. Lang found his appearance at three-and-twenty like anything but that of a Scotsman, and the same difficulty pursued Stevenson through life, more especially on the Continent of Europe. “ It is a great thing, believe me,” he wrote in the Inland Voyage, “to present a good normal type of the nation you belong to “; and as he says in the same chapter, “ I might come from any part of the globe, it seems, except from where I do.” In France he was sometimes taken fora Frenchman from some other province; he has recorded his imprisonment as a German spy; and at a later date he wrote, “I have found out what is wrong with me — I look like a Pole.”

  This difficulty, of course, was not smoothed by the clothes he used to wear, which often in early days were extremely unconventional, and of which he then took so little notice that at times they were even ragged. In cool climates he often used a velveteen smoking-jacket; in undress at Vailima he wore flannels or pyjamas, with sometimes a light Japanese kimono for dressing-gown. On public occasions in Samoa he used the white drill that constitutes full dress in the tropics, with perhaps light breeches and boots if he had been riding.

  Considering his fragility, his muscular strength was considerable, and his constitution clearly had great powers of resistance. Perhaps what helped him as much as anything was the faculty he had under ordinary circumstances of going to sleep at a moment’s notice. Thus, if he anticipated fatigue in the evening, he would take a quarter of an hour’s sound sleep in the course of the afternoon.

  His speech was distinctly marked with a Scottish intonation, that seemed to every one both pleasing and appropriate, and this, when he chose, he could broaden to the widest limits of the vernacular. His voice was always of a surprising strength and resonance, even- when phthisis had laid its hand most heavily upon him. It was the one gift he really possessed for the stage, and in reading aloud he was unsurpassed. In his full rich tones there was a sympathetic quality that seemed to play directly on the heart-strings like the notes of a violin. Mrs. Stevenson writes: “ I shall never forget Louis reading Walt Whitman’s Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, followed by O Captain, my Captain, to a room full of people, some of whom had said that Whitman lacked sentiment and tenderness. All alike, men and women, sat spellbound during the reading, and I have never seen any audience so deeply moved.” Nor for my part shall I forget his rendering of the Duke of Wellington Ode on the evening after the news of Tennyson’s death had arrived at Vailima.

  When his attention was given to objects or persons, his observation was singularly keen and accurate, but for the most part his memory for the faces of his acquaintance was positively bad. In Apia he seldom could tell the name of a native, and on his last visit to Honolulu I remember that he walked the streets in dread lest he should disappoint any who expected to be remembered and to receive his greeting. In a letter speaking of the death of a lady whom he had not met probably for twenty years, he says, “I partly see her face, and entirely and perfectly hear her voice at this moment — a thing not usual with me.”

  His hearing was singularly acute, although the appreciation of the exact pitch of musical notes was wanting. But between delicate shades of pronunciation he could discriminate with great precision. I can give an instance in point. The vowels in Polynesian languages are pronounced as in Italian, and the diphthongs retain the sounds of the separate vowels, more or less slurred together. Thus it can be understood that the difference between ae and ai at the end of a word in rapid conversation is of the very slightest, and in Samoa they are practically indistinguishable. In the Marquesas Stevenson was able to separate them. At Vailima one day we were making trial of these and other subtleties of sound; in almost every case his ear was exactly correct. Nothing more shook his admiration for Herman Melville than that writer’s inability to approximate to the native names of the Marquesas and Tahiti, and in his own delicate hearing lay perhaps the root of his devotion to style.

  CHAPTER XVII

  R. L. S.

  “Who is it that says most? which can say more

  Than this rich praise, — that you alone are you?”

  For any who have read the foregoing pages it should be unnecessary here to dwell upon the sources of many qualities which distinguished Stevenson throughout his life, or the degree to which they were called forth in turn or affected by the many variations of his environment. A Scot born, we have seen how Edinburgh and Swanston set the seal upon his nationality, and how from father and mother he drew diverse elements of temperament and character. We have seen the effect of his schooling, such as it was, and the prolonged leisure of his boyhood; of the influence of his friends and his reading; the results of his training as an engineer and as an advocate; of his wanderings in France, his breakdown in America, and the happiness of his married life.

  In several respects it must be owned that he was fortunate. His long preludes and painful apprenticeship would clearly have proved impossible had it been necessary for him to make money at an early age, and even the history of his maturity would have been materially changed if he had been compelled to rely solely upon his writing to meet the expenses of his household. His late beginning had, again, this advantage: tardy in some ways as he was, he had left behind him the ignobler elements of youth before his voice was heard or recognised. The green-sickness of immaturity was over, at the worst only one or two touches of self- consciousness remained, and even in his earliest published essays there rings out the note of high spirit and cheerfulness which issued from the sick-room of later years, deceived for a time the most penetrating of critics, and was perhaps the best part of his message to a world that had fallen on weary days.

  In regarding Stevenson both as man and writer we find that the most unusual fact about him was the coupling of the infinite variety of his character and intellect with the extraordinary degree in which he was moved by every thought and every feeling. Few men are acted upon by so wide a range of emotions and ideas; few men hold even two or three ideas or feel even a few emotions with nearly as much intensity as compelled him under all. When we have considered both number and degree, we shall find other gifts no less remarkable and even more characteristic — the unfailing spirit of chivalry and the combination of qualities that went to make up his peculiar and individual charm. Though it is inevitable thus to take him piecemeal and to dwell upon one side at a time to the exclusion of the others he so rapidly turned upon us, we must never allow this process to efface in our minds what is far more essential — the image of the living whole.

  I have spoken of him at once as a man and a writer, for in his case there was no part of the writer which was not visibly present in the man. There are authors whose work bears so little apparent relation to themselves, that we either wonder how they came to write so good a book, or else in our hearts we wish their books more worthy of the men. To neither of these classes does Stevenson belong. His works are “ signed all over,” and despite the chameleon-like nature of his style,1 but few consecutive sentences on any page of his could have been written by any other person. Authorship provided him with a field for his energies and brought him the rewards of success, but did not otherwise change him from what he was, nor did it even exercise the whole of his faculties or exhaust the supply of his ideas.

  If I have failed to produce a correct impression of his intense energy, 1 have quoted him and written to little purpose. The child with his “fury of play”; the boy walking by himself in the black night and exulting in the consciousness of the bull’s-eye beneath his
coat; the lad already possessed with the invincible resolve of learning to write, which for the time overcame the desire of all other action: these were but the father of the man. So vehement were his emotions, his own breast was too small to contain them. He paid a visit at nineteen to a place he had not seen since childhood. “ As I felt myself on the road at last that I had been dreaming of for these many days before, a perfect intoxication of joy took hold upon me; and I was so pleased at my own happiness that I could let none past me till I had taken them into my confidence.”2

  It is useless to go on quoting: through life he did the 1 Appendix G. 2 Juvenilia, p. 96. thing he was doing as if it were the one thing in the world that was worth being done. I will give but one more example, premising that its essence lies in its very triviality: the smaller the matter at stake, the more surprising is the blaze of energy displayed. One day he was talking to a lady in his house at Bournemouth, at a time when he was recovering from hemorrhage, and visitors and conversation were both strictly forbidden. A book of Charles Reade’s — Griffith Gaunt, I think — was mentioned, and nothing would serve Stevenson but that he should run to a cold room at the top of the house to get the volume. His visitor first tried to prevent it, then refused to wait for his return, and was only dissuaded from her resolve by being told (and she knew it to be true) that if he heard that she had left the house he would certainly run after her down the drive without waiting for either hat or coat.

  “The formal man is the slave of words,” he said; and as a consequence of his own fiery intensity, no man was ever less imposed upon by the formulas of other people. His railing against the burgess, for example, was no catchword, but the inmost and original feeling of his heart. Consequently, whenever he uttered a commonplace, it will be usually found that he had rediscovered the truth of it for himself, did not say it merely because he had heard it from somebody else, and generally invested it with some fresh quality of his own. Perhaps his most emphatic utterance in this respect, and that most resembling his conversation in certain moods, is the Lay Morals, all the more outspoken because it was never finished for press. It abounds in sayings such as these: “ It is easy to be an ass and to follow tne multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am well aware, is what you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest.” “ It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and its fixed design of righteousness, that the better part of moral and religious education is directed; not only that of words and doctors, but the sharp ferule of calamity under which we are all God’s scholars till we die.” “ Respectability: the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid on men.” “ I have only to read books, to think ... the mass of people are merely speaking in their sleep.”