Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

Around the university, Stevenson and Baxter made a comical duo in manner and appearance: Baxter was tall, fair and square-built ‘with what seemed to be an aggressively confident deportment’, as one fellow student, John Geddie, recalled;3 ‘one was somehow reminded of a slim and graceful spaniel with a big bull-dog, jowled and “pop-eyed”, trotting in its wake’.4 The pair would sit together near the exit of the lecture hall, poised for escape, or stage stunts in class guaranteed to disquiet the lecturer, coming in late, sitting down for as long as it took for the class to resume, staring about them ‘with a serious and faintly speculative air’, then getting up again and leaving.

  Louis’s most regular appearances were at meetings of the Spec on Tuesday evenings, and he was often found loafing in the society’s library and rooms the rest of the week. Stevenson loved its exclusivity and gentlemen’s club comforts, but also the fact that no one took it too seriously. Guthrie remembers him ‘always in high spirits and always good-tempered, more often standing than sitting (and, when sitting, on any part of the chair except the seat), chaffing and being chaffed, capping one good story with another’.5 Stevenson was prepared to talk casually about any subject under the sun, it seemed (apart from the law), but the papers which he read to the Spec still harped on religious themes. The influence of the Covenanting prosecution on the Scotch mind, John Knox, Paradise Lost, the relation (or lack of it, we can guess) of Christ’s teaching to modern Christianity: these were the topics upon which Stevenson held forth to his fellow would-be advocates. The little minister vein was still running strong in him, though it would have been hard to ascertain his attitude to the Church from his behaviour in public. One minute he would be mocking and provocative, as when, in Baxter’s company, he mischievously interrupted three ministers sitting down to dinner at a hotel and forced a long, elaborate grace on them; the next he would be in deadly earnest, stopping a group of colliers on a Sunday to harangue them for Sabbath-breaking.

  Stevenson was fortunate to have found a mentor and surrogate father at this time in Fleeming Jenkin, the professor whose painful duty it had been to oversee his engineering studies. Jenkin had recognised something in the truant (remarkably enough), and drew him into his circle of friends. The Jenkin coterie was the most lively and entertaining in Edinburgh, ‘a haven, an oasis in a desert of convention and prejudice’, as one of Jenkin’s colleagues, Alfred Ewing, put it.6 Jenkin was only sixteen years Louis’s senior and had arrived at Edinburgh University from London in 1868 with his wife Anne, a striking and talented woman, with whom he organised elaborate private theatricals every year in their house on Great Stuart Street. The repertoire was eclectic – Shakespeare, Sheridan, Aeschylus, Charles Reade – and each play had five performances, preceded by weeks of strenuous rehearsal, directed and stage managed by Fleeming. Jenkin’s ingenuity was enormous; he researched and designed costumes, went to the lengths of learning beard-making ‘from an ancient Jew’,7 and engineered the wall between the dining room and the children’s playroom to pivot back on hinges to form a stage, so that the dining room became an auditorium. Louis, a favourite of both the professor and his charismatic wife, was soon part of the company (as was Charles Baxter), and took part in several productions.

  Jenkin was as unlike Thomas Stevenson as two men in the same profession and the same Church could be; he was an intellectual, an inventor and a teacher as well as a marvellously versatile electrical engineer, responsible for laying miles of cable under the sea and doing the preliminary work on modes of electrical transportation (which he called ‘telpherage’). He had run an engineering business in London and built his own steam yacht for touring the coast with his wife and children.8 Ten years after Stevenson first met him, Fleeming developed a passionate interest in Edison’s new phonograph, which had not yet been manufactured or even exhibited outside the United States. With only a report in The Times to go on, he was able to replicate two versions of a machine like Edison’s, which he showed at a fund-raising bazaar for the university cricket club. Mrs Jenkin was established in one booth, charging two and six for a view and trial of the new marvel, Jenkin and his friend Ewing were in another, taking turns to lecture every half hour. A farmer visiting the bazaar and trying his voice on the phonograph prepared for the ordeal by rolling up his sleeves. His address to the machine was short and eulogistic: ‘What a wonderrrful instrrrument y’arrre!’, but when the recording was played back to him, he turned and fled at the sound of his own voice, exclaiming ‘It’s no canny!’9 When Louis got the chance to play with the amazing gadget, he and his friend W.B. Hole recorded ‘various shades of Scotch accent’ onto its tremulous tinfoil ‘with unscientific laughter’.10

  Louis’s enthusiasm for the ‘new science’ of the evolutionists may well have been inspired by Jenkin, a keen follower of current controversies, who had a little-known but highly significant correspondence with Charles Darwin following the publication of the first edition of On the Origin of Species. Jenkin made the point to Darwin that his theory implied not a concentration or winnowing effect in the inheritance of characteristics, but a dilution or blending – quite the opposite of what Darwin was seeking to prove. This anomaly exercised the scientist for decades and was partly answered in later editions of his work. Jenkin had made another of his brilliant coups.

  No doubt the unspoken rivalry between Jenkin and Thomas Stevenson (present in Louis’s mind, if nowhere else) worked itself into the contentions between father and son over what was becoming known as the Higher Criticism (though Thomas Stevenson would never have called it that). It is highly unlikely that Thomas Stevenson had read the works of Charles Darwin or Herbert Spencer when he attacked evolutionary theory in his stolid little pamphlet, but his son had read them and found Spencer in particular a revelation: ‘no more persuasive rabbi exists’.11 In an incident recalled by Archibald Bisset, Louis held forth once about Spencer’s Theory of Evolution on a walk to Cramond with his father and the tutor:

  At length his father said, ‘I think, Louis, you’ve got Evolution on the brain. I wish you would define what the word means.’ ‘Well, here it is verbatim. Evolution is a continuous change from indefinite incoherent homogeneity to definite coherent heterogeneity of structure and function through successive differentiations and integrations.’ ‘I think,’ said his father, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, ‘your friend Mr Herbert Spencer must be a very skilful writer of polysyllabic nonsense.’12

  Louis had plenty of other ‘friends’, including Spinoza, part of whose Tractatus Theologico-Politicus he had read in a pamphlet picked up at a bookstall.13 These were some of the ‘unsettling works’ which he later said ‘loosened his views of life and led him into many perplexities’.14 One of the most unsettling works of all was the New Testament, especially the gospel of Saint Matthew, which demonstrated to the young man that what was called Christianity had little to do with Christ’s teaching. ‘What he taught [ … ] was not a code of rules, but a ruling spirit; not truths, but a spirit of truth [ … ] What he showed us was an attitude of mind,’ Stevenson wrote in ‘Lay Morals’; the ethics of Christians, he said satirically, were far nearer those of Benjamin Franklin than Christ.

  Another ‘gospel’ he was deeply affected by was that of Walt Whitman, whose poetry was treated with either caution or derision by the majority of the reading public in the 1870s. Stevenson had discovered Leaves of Grass soon after its publication in 1867, and kept a copy hidden at the tobacconist’s shop that was his equivalent of a poste restante. While he acknowledged Whitman’s want of ‘literary tact’ – the quality Stevenson himself had spent years trying to perfect – Stevenson admired, even venerated, the poet’s philosophy and hugely ambitious design. He later described Whitman as ‘a teacher who at a crucial moment of his youthful life had helped him to discover the right line of conduct’,15 and echoes of the electric bard can be heard all through the essays of the 1870s and eighties that gained Stevenson his reputation as an ‘aggressive optimist’:

  Life is a business we are all apt
to mismanage, either living recklessly from day to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our moments by the inanities of custom. [ … ] It is the duty of the poet to induce [ … ] moments of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of all living by reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking, of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in which we coin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years.16

  Stevenson was looking for a new definition of ‘the spiritual’ as he began to detach himself from the established Church, and he became one of the first members of the Psychological Society of Edinburgh, precursor of the Spiritualist Society, made up mostly of medical men, artists and university students. Bob was also a member (later vice-president), Stevenson himself was secretary briefly, and in 1873 he planned an article on spiritualism, probably to read to the Spec.17 When he told his parents later that he had not come lightly to his views about religion, he hardly did justice to the rigour he had applied during these years to questions of belief and ethics. It turned out to be a lifetime’s preoccupation, and at no point did he warrant his father’s intemperate description of him as merely ‘a careless infidel’.

  The atmosphere at Heriot Row struck some observers as rather lax: both Thomas Stevenson and his son were loud, domineering talkers, and Louis shocked one set of visitors by ‘contradicting his father flatly before every one at table’.18 At a dinner party in the early 1870s, Flora Masson, daughter of Jenkin’s friend Professor David Masson, remembered being placed between the father and son and being amazed (and perhaps a little wearied) at how they took exactly opposing views on every subject. Louis’s talk that evening was ‘almost incessant’ (it was clearly one of his hyperactive days): ‘I felt quite dazed at the amount of intellection he expended on each subject, however trivial in itself,’ she wrote. ‘The father’s face at certain times was a study; an indescribable mixture of vexation, fatherly pride and admiration, and sheer bewilderment at his son’s brilliant flippancies and the quick young thrusts of his wit and criticism.’19

  Flora was a fellow member of the Jenkins’ theatrical group, but remembered meeting Louis first (in the early 1870s) on a skating expedition with the professor and his family to Duddingston Loch, just to the south of Arthur’s Seat. She noted how the Jenkins always stayed in a couple, while Louis skated alone, ‘a slender, dark figure with a muffler about his neck; [ … ] disappearing and reappearing like a melancholy minnow among the tall reeds that fringe the Loch’.20 Perhaps he was auditioning for Hamlet. At the Jenkins’ theatricals Stevenson never managed to bag a major role. One year he was the prompt, another a bit player in Taming of the Shrew, another time he played the part of the dandy Sir Charles Pomander in Charles Reade and Thomas Taylor’s sentimental comedy Masks and Faces with ‘a gay insolence which made his representation [ … ] most convincing’.21 The highlight of his acting career came in 1875 as Orsino in Twelfth Night, but though the Heriot Row servants were mightily impressed with his appearance, and Margaret Stevenson glowed with maternal pride, the actor himself knew that in the process of being allotted a role of substance ‘one more illusion’ had been lost.22

  Even though he wasn’t able to command it through acting ability, Stevenson was always likely to make a bid to arrest attention at the Jenkin plays. One time when he was in charge of the curtain, he mischievously raised it while two members of the cast were larking around on stage just after finishing a particularly intense tragic scene. Though some of the audience laughed, Stevenson didn’t escape a sharp reprimand from Jenkin. Flora, an intelligent young woman who later wrote novels and became the friend of both Browning and Florence Nightingale, seems to have escaped Stevenson’s notice even though she was put in his way so regularly by their mutual friends. But she was watching him, and remarked how he liked to keep his costume on as long as possible after a performance (preferably right through supper). She also remembered once seeing him walk up and down the Jenkins’ drawing room, watching himself in a mirror ‘in a dreamy, detached way’, ‘as if he were acting to himself being an actor’.23

  His parents’ watchfulness grew more intense as Louis grew up and their hold over him loosened. His health became the language in which the family communicated, and was fussed over continually; uncle George Balfour, Mrs Stevenson’s distinguished doctor-brother, was always being sought for out-of-hours opinions, and several times prescribed his nephew short breaks at the Bridge of Allan or Swanston. ‘Rest’ was the favoured cure, though from what malady is hard to tell, apart from the perennial threat of ‘weakness’. Louis was very susceptible to catching viruses, and was always appallingly thin; today his appearance would suggest an immune deficiency syndrome. But when he was well, he bubbled over with vitality; his bright-eyed look, ready wit and endless appetite for talk were all legend. The collapses, when they came, were as often to do with depressed spirits as anything else.

  Nevertheless, levels of fearfulness ran high in the household, and on hearing that her son wished to spend the summer of 1872 in Germany improving his knowledge of the language, Margaret Stevenson went into hysterics, saying she might never see him again. The plan was duly modified, and when Louis set out for Frankfurt that July in the company of Walter Simpson, it was for a three-week holiday, made over into another invalid tour by a rendezvous with his parents afterwards at Baden-Baden. Margaret’s fears seem to have been much more to do with Louis becoming independent than becoming ill.

  This tightening of parental concern may have been a response to the new friendships that Louis was enjoying, mostly with lively law students like Baxter, and people in the Jenkin circle, from which his parents were excluded. Added to this was the return to Edinburgh from Cambridge of Bob Stevenson in the summer of 1871. Bob’s aimless brilliance and energy were a tonic to his younger cousin, who immediately drew him into the group of friends – Louis, Baxter, Simpson and Ferrier – who together formed a society called ‘LJR’. The initials stood for ‘Liberty – Justice – Reverence’, fervent discussion of which – over many rounds of drinks in Advocates’ Close – was one of their raisons d’être. (A manuscript note by Stevenson links ‘LJR’ with ‘Whitman: humanity: [ … ] love of mankind: sense of inequality: justification of art: decline of religion’.) More often, though, the members of LJR were to be found planning elaborate practical jokes, and devised a term, ‘Jink’, to describe their activities: ‘as a rule of conduct, Jink consisted in doing the most absurd acts for the sake of their absurdity and the consequent laughter’.24 They invented a character called John Libbel in whose name they carried out fake correspondences with prominent Edinburgh citizens, and for whom they printed calling cards: ‘I have spent whole days going from lodging-house to lodging-house inquiring anxiously, “If Mr Libbel had come yet?”’, Stevenson related, ‘and when the servant or a landlady had told us “No”, assuring her that he would come soon, and leaving a mysterious message.’25 On another occasion, they started a rumour that Libbel had inherited a fortune and that they were agents of the estate. ‘Libbelism’ was really a form of subversive performance art, and ‘Jink’ a kind of Dadaism avant la lettre, set in 1870s Edinburgh. Stevenson’s own remarks corroborate this, with their echo of ‘art for art’s sake’: ‘we were disinterested, we required none of the encouragement of success, we pursued our joke, our mystification, our blague for its own sake’.

  Once, to their amazement, Louis and Bob were caught out by a jeweller in whose shop they had been attempting to act out ‘some piece of vaulting absurdity’.26 The shopman’s eyes lit up when he realised what was going on: ‘“I know who you are,” he cried; “you’re the two Stevensons.”’ The man said that his colleague would be vexed; he’d been dying to see them in action. Would the young men come back later for tea? And thus, bested by one of their own victims and astonished that their real names were known to anyone, the cousins beat a hasty retreat. Just as Libbelism anticipates some of the fantastic plots of Stevenson’s New ArabianNights, so this scene in the jeweller’s is like a comic vers
ion of his story ‘Markheim’. ‘Jink’ was an imaginative release in more ways than one.

  At this date, Bob was living at home in the Portobello district of Edinburgh with his widowed mother and sisters and studying at the city’s School of Art. He was going to be an artist, and had been travelling in France for the past few summers with other painter-friends. He had always been a hero-figure to Louis, and now seemed more fortunate than ever: of the two youths, Bob was by far the more attractive, with his fine tall figure and well-grown moustaches (Louis’s weedy lip-hair was the butt of jokes for years). Women all fell for him at a glance, and men loved him for his exuberant erudition and excitable character. The word ‘genius’ was often applied, especially with regard to his talk, though Louis’s characterisation of it perhaps better suggests the description ‘manic’: ‘the strange scale of language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell [ … ] the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all luminous in the admired disorder of their combination’.27 But this sort of wild verbal exhibitionism had another charm for Louis; as he said in the same essay, ‘there are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tentative, continually “in further search and progress”.’28 In other words, impromptu, collaborative, and always To be continued.

  Thomas and Margaret Stevenson had less reason to delight in their nephew’s return to Edinburgh. With his flagrant pursuit of something that hardly had a name yet – la vie bohème – his art studies, his affectations of dress and his insolent wordiness, Bob must have looked like the least appropriate companion possible for their son. The parents didn’t know, of course, about the long drinking sessions in Advocates’ Close, the excesses of Libbelism or the long walks on which Louis and Bob behaved like a couple of mad tramps, singing and dancing on the moonlit roads out of sheer high spirits. They also, presumably, hadn’t heard the story which went about a few years later, that Bob had divided his patrimony into ten equal parts and was going to allot himself one part a year for a decade, at the end of which he would commit suicide.29 But they knew enough to be worried, and when Thomas Stevenson, snooping among his son’s papers, came upon the comically-intended ‘constitution’ of the LJR – beginning ‘Ignore everything that our parents have taught us’ – he was thrown into a state of angry panic. This was presumably before the evening (31 January 1873) when Thomas decided to challenge his son with some straight questions about his beliefs.