At evening parties he always looked like a martyr in the dismal black coat and white tie, which he described as a mixture of the livery of a waiter and the mourning of an undertaker. At dances, he propped himself against a wall, in a doorway or in some coign of vantage about the staircase, looking limp and miserable, but keenly observant all the time. When he found a congenial soul, whether man or woman, to talk to, he brightened, the limpness vanished, and his quick flow of wit and fancy streamed on in a delightful river of talk which touched on grave and gay with equal ease, and was exactly what a poet describes, as—

'His talk was like a stream that runs With rapid change from rocks to roses, It skipped from politics to puns, It passed from Mahomet to Moses. Beginning with the laws that keep The planets in their rapid courses, And ending with a precept deep For stewing eels or shoeing horses.'

Although he looked so unhappy at dances or 'at homes,' at dinners, if the guests were fitly chosen, he was thoroughly at his ease and exceedingly amusing. With his few intimate friends too he was seen at his best; but in general society he was usually as bored as he looked.

The Edinburgh of that day was very pleasant socially. Its world seemed somewhat smaller than it is now, less ostentatiously rich, more seriously cultured; or so at least it appeared to the young folk who belonged to the old-fashioned law and professional set in which the Stevensons largely had their acquaintance. People in that set still lived, more than they do to-day, eastwards or northwards of Heriot Row, in the large old houses which were so homelike and so comfortable. The centre of things was in those grand grey houses from Heriot Row upwards to Charlotte Square, westwards to Randolph Cliff and a little way over the Dean Bridge. Drumsheugh Gardens was an innovation. The terraces, Royal, Regent, and Carlton, that 'west end of the east,' were still fashionable, and few people had, as yet, migrated southwards to

'That proud part of Morningside, Where houses girt with gardens Do stretch down far and wide.'

It was not a very large world, but it was a very agreeable one, and one which had its notabilities. Lord Neaves with his delightful songs, and the other old-time judges were still with us. Sir David Brewster was not so very long dead; Sir James Y. Simpson was yet a very recent memory. Professor Blackie was in the zenith of his fame. Sir Daniel Macnee told his wonderful stories; Professor, now Sir, Douglas Maclagan sang his delightful songs. Mr Sam Bough's hearty laugh rang out among the artists, and Sir R. Christison, and Syme, and Keith, and Lister, had made the Edinburgh medical world famous. Professors Masson, Tait, Kelland, Crum-Brown, Fleeming-Jenkin—in whose theatricals R. L. Stevenson took a picturesque part—and a host of other well-known names were among the guests at dinners, and most beloved personality of all, perhaps, Dr John Brown, accompanied by his 'doggies' still nodded to us out of his carriage window, or left wonderful scraps of drawings on the hall tables as he passed out from seeing a patient. And everywhere in that pleasant world the Stevenson family were welcome and well known.

By the host of young people who are now in turn taking the busy work of life, from which so many of the elders are resting for ever, parties at 17 Heriot Row and at Swanston were much appreciated. Dinner parties for young people were not then so common as now, and the delightful ones given by Mr and Mrs Thomas Stevenson were greatly enjoyed. The guests were carefully chosen, and limited to ten or twelve, so that conversation at dinner was general. And how amusing that conversation was! The humour of father and son as they drew each other out was wonderful, they capped each other's good things, and somehow made less gifted folk shine in the conversation also in a way peculiar to them and which was fully shared by Mrs Thomas Stevenson, who made the most charming of hostesses. Father and son on these occasions were simply full of jests and jollity, everything started an argument, and every argument lent itself to fun. It is odd that nothing definite of those clever sayings of theirs seems to return to one; it is only, as it were, the memory of an aroma that filled the air sweetly at the time, and is still faintly present with one that remains; the actual 'bon-mots' have unhappily passed away. It is consoling to find that Mr Edmund Gosse, who in Kit-Cats writes delightfully of his friend Louis Stevenson, notes the same intangible character of his talk.

After the little dinners there were delightful informal dances, to which nephews, nieces, friends, and neighbours came as well as the dinner guests, and one can still remember with a smile, perilously near to tears, Mr Thomas Stevenson driving his unwilling son to dance the old-time dance 'Sir Roger de Coverley,' which the elder man loved and the younger professed to scorn even while he entered with a zeal that finally satisfied his father into the performance of it, that always ended an informal evening at 17 Heriot Row.

Music, too, was a pleasant feature of those little parties, and one still recalls, especially, the songs and the lovely voice of a favourite niece of Mrs Stevenson, whose early death made the first break in the home at 'The Turret,' too soon to be followed by the passing away of all save one of that happy household. Even now, after the lapse of so many years, one seems to see Mr Thomas Stevenson leaning eagerly forward as she sang such sweet old songs as 'My Mother bids me bind my Hair,' and 'She wore a wreath of Roses,' or Robert Louis applauding his favourites, 'I shot an Arrow into the Air,' and 'The Sea hath its Pearls.'

On one occasion one of these merry parties was enlivened by the presence of some young Japanese engineer students, who were on tour in Edinburgh, and who had brought introductions to the distinguished engineer, who made them very cordially welcome. It was not then very common to meet Japanese, and these quiet dignified young men, in their gracefully flowing black garments, interested the Stevenson family and their youthful guests greatly.



CHAPTER VI

HIS CHOICE OF A LITERARY LIFE AND HIS EARLIER BOOKS

'A clerk foredoom'd his father's soul to cross, Who pens a stanza when he should engross.' —POPE'S Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot.

His son's refusal to become a civil engineer, and to take his natural position in the family business, was undoubtedly a great trial to a man of Mr Thomas Stevenson's character and professional traditions. That business had in it not only wealth, honour, and success, but, to every Stevenson, the glamour of romance, the fascination of adventure, and to the father his firm's history appealed strongly. Therefore the blow that fell upon him during that memorable walk, when his son at last found courage to confess to him that he could not persevere in the traditional path which he was expected to tread, must have been a crushing one, and it said much for the strength of his fatherly affection that he received it as he did. It was a painful decision for the son to make, and an equally painful one for the parents to hear.

Mrs Thomas Stevenson as well as her husband felt it a keen disappointment that her son could not walk in his father's footsteps. To them, as to all parents of their position and very natural social prejudices, it seemed a foolish thing for a man to turn seriously to literature as a means of winning his daily bread. The Edinburgh of that day did not think much of the profession of letters, and although the memory of Sir Walter Scott, the 'Edinburgh Reviewers,' and the literary lights of an earlier time was still green, all parents held the opinion that, although a few authors had made for themselves fame and fortune, literature was but a beggarly trade at the best, and one to which no wise man would apprentice his son.

Only those who knew the elder Mr Stevenson's nature well could fully understand how great a trial to him was his son's decision; and only those very near and dear to him could quite appreciate the depth of the father's love, the tenderness of the father's heart, which permitted no tinge of bitterness, no lasting shadow of repining, to darken his relations with his son or to lessen in the slightest his overwhelming affection for him. Sensitive in the extreme, the son in his turn could not fail to feel his father's disappointment, almost to exaggerate its effect on the older man in his own tender-hearted remorse that he was unable to fulfil his destiny in any other way than by following literature, which was calling him with no uncertain voice. It was good, therefore, to hear from the lips of the wife and mother, who was so fully in the confidence of both, that no abiding cloud remained between the father and the son, and that both quietly accepted the inevitable when law, like engineering, was also laid aside to allow Louis to fulfil his one strong desire. Lovingly and unselfishly the parents finally accepted the fact that genius must have its way, and that in the dainty book lined study, in travel by ways quaint and unusual, in prolonged sojourns in search of health in distant lands, the younger Stevenson's life-work was to be done.

When he found that his son would not be an engineer, Mr Thomas Stevenson very naturally wished him to have a profession to fall back upon should literature not prove a success, and it was agreed that he should read for the Bar. Louis, therefore, about the end of 1871, entered the office of the firm which is now known as Messrs Skene, Edwards, & Garson, W.S. The late Mr Skene, LL.D., was then senior partner of the firm. Another partner was the father of Mr J. R. P. Edwards, who has kindly supplied the following very interesting facts about Robert Louis Stevenson while he was undergoing his legal training in his office.

'Mr Stevenson entered the office, which was then in 18 Hill Street, in 1871, and left it about the middle of the year 1873, and was afterwards called to the Bar. His position in the office was neither that of a clerk nor of an apprentice, but merely of a person gaining some knowledge of business. He never received any salary, and, as is usual with aspirants for the Bar, his position was in no way subject to the ordinary office discipline. After searching through papers which were written in the office during the time Stevenson was in the office, I find a good many papers which were written by him, but they are all merely copies of documents, and I can find no trace of any deeds which were actually drawn up by him. This is no doubt accounted for, firstly, because he was not experienced enough in the drafting of deeds, and, secondly, because he may have found the somewhat dry intricacies of conveyancing, which are for the most part governed by hard and fast rules of law, foreign to his marvellous imagination.

'I have not been able to trace any of the staff of the office who were in it with Robert Louis Stevenson, with the exception of two men, who seem to remember little about him, but they said that he was very reserved and kept very much to himself. One of the men did not even know that he was the great Stevenson. The other man, however, said that he remembered that Stevenson had, as he described it to me, "an awful notion of the Pentland hills, and was that fond of talking about them." I believe he was very fond of scribbling pieces of writing on odd pieces of paper in his spare moments, but, unfortunately, I can find no trace of these; but that is not to be wondered at, as the firm have removed to two different houses since Stevenson was in the office.

'Mr Skene, who was head partner of the firm during the time that Stevenson was in the office, had always a great admiration for his writings, and shortly before his (Mr Skene's) death he said that it was a great regret to him that he had not known him better, and recognised in him a brother in letters. My father, who saw a good deal more of Stevenson, says that he struck him as being a very shy and nervous man, or rather, as he then was, a boy. My father also states that Stevenson was a tremendous walker, and that he used often to come into the office in the morning in the somewhat unprofessional garb of walking kit, having covered a good many miles before breakfast.'

The office staff in 1871 consisted of ten men. Six of them have died, two cannot now be traced, and the remaining two mentioned by Mr Edwards are very old men.

Mr Edwards also says that in one deed which was written by Louis Stevenson there are five errors on two short pages, so that although the handwriting in it is neat, round, and clear, it is evident that his thoughts were not on his work, and that he was no more diligent in law than he had been in engineering. His handwriting, although neat and distinct, can hardly be called pretty, he seemed to use a good deal of ink in those days as the down strokes are all black and heavy. In spite of his lack of interest in his office work he passed advocate with credit on 14th July 1875, was called to the Bar on the 15th, and had his first brief on the 23rd.

He duly donned a wig and gown during the following session, and the delicate face that was so grave and refined looked very picturesque with the luminous eyes gleaming out from under the grey horse-hair. He joined the ranks of those 'Briefless Barristers' whose business it is to walk the hall of the Parliament House in search of clients. He had either one or two briefs, but he gave them away as he never acted as an advocate. His mother treasured the shillings he got for them among her relics of his early days.

Although his connection with the Parliament House was totally devoid of that professional success that ultimately leads to a seat on the Bench—but for which Mr Stevenson had no desire—it was not without its uses as an education for that other success by reason of which very many people who have never seen his face know and love him to-day. If his sojourn within those venerable halls was useless for law it was fruitful for literature, and one can imagine that as he now and then haunted the courts and listened to the advocates and the judges he was already, from a study of the Bench of the present, laying the foundation for those brilliant pictures of the judges of a ruder past which he gives us in Lord Prestongrange or Lord Hermiston. It is not very fair or very complimentary to the judges of 1875 to compare them with such a creation as Lord Hermiston, but it was not much more than half a century, before their day, that customs and manners like his were possible.

The robes, the forms, the etiquette, and the procedure of the Court of Session are still a sufficiently picturesque survival of an older time; and to a mind like Mr Stevenson's that short association with the historic Parliament House, with its far-reaching traditions and with the acting majesty of the law in Scotland that is so old and so unchanged an institution, which to-day employs the very words and phrases of bygone centuries, and still holds, in many points, to the structure of the ancient Roman Law, could not fail to be interesting and useful. Like Sir Walter Scott, when he too walked in the Advocates' Hall, he no doubt found much that was worth studying in the old law procedure as well as in the men and manners of his own day, and appreciated to the full the magnificent library in its dark and silent rooms that are such a contrast to the bustle of the courts, and every corner of which is teeming with history.

But his heart was not in the Law Courts, and already in that book-lined study at 17 Heriot Row, the window of which looked over the Forth to Fife, and the walls of which were so temptingly covered with books, his real life work had begun. No treat was greater, no honour more esteemed, than a visit to that study and a learned disquisition there on its owner's favourite books or methods of work.

Walking up and down with the hands thrown out in gesticulations, semi-foreign but eminently natural—for did not the child of three do it while repeating hymns on that walk to Broughton!—Mr Stevenson gave his opinions on matters grave and gay. Possibly he even produced his note-books, and with a slim finger between the leaves showed us the practice which he considered necessary for the creation of an author and the making of a style, breaking off in the middle of his disquisition to quote some master of the art or to take from the shelves a favourite book and read aloud a pertinent illustration of the subject in hand.

Boswell's Life of Johnson, Borrow's Bible in Spain, the Bible itself, Butler's Hudibras, George Meredith's novels, then less appreciated than now, were all books for a better knowledge of which some of us had to thank those visits to the study: on the shelves too were Bulwer Lytton, Sir Walter Scott, the old dramatists, ballads, and chapbooks, and innumerable favourites that had a place in his heart as well as in his bookcase.

Keen and clever were the criticisms he made on them—criticisms that come back to one with the pathos of 'a voice that is still' when one reads in his Gossip on Romance and A Humble Remonstrance his delight in Boswell, his pleasure in All Sorts and Conditions of Men, and his admiration for Scott as a Prince of Romance writers, for whose style he had not one good word to say!

He had early edited and written for amateur magazines, and when only sixteen he wrote a pamphlet on the Pentland Rising of 1666,[4] which is still in existence but a great rarity; the same subject inspired a romance, and another romance was composed about Hackston of Rathillet, that sombre and impressive witness of the murder of Archbishop Sharp, whose conscientious refusal either to take part for or against the victim had from childhood appealed to Mr Stevenson as pathetic and picturesque. He also wrote in those days a poetical play, some dramatic dialogues, and a pamphlet called An Appeal to the Church of Scotland, in which his father was keenly interested. The style in his early letters and notes of travel was excellent, but he destroyed most of his writings at that time as he worked for practice rather than for publication. He contributed frequently about 1871 to the University Magazine, in which, as he kindly lent it to us, some of us had the pleasure of reading An Old Gardener and A Pastoral, two papers of much promise, very full of outdoor life, the caller air of the Pentland hills and the scent of the old-fashioned flowers in the Swanston garden.

Edinburgh, as a picturesque, historic city, he loved with a life's devotion; Edinburgh, as a frivolous social centre, he despised; so some of the strictures he made on it in Picturesque Edinburgh, published in 1879, and beautifully illustrated by Mr Sam Bough and Mr Lockhart, gave dire offence at the time to the denizens of 'Auld Reekie,' and are in some quarters hardly pardoned even now when death and fame have made Scotland's capital value her gifted son at his true worth.

In 1873 Mr Stevenson made the acquaintance of Mr Sydney Colvin and a life-long friendship ensued. The older man was of great use in many ways to the younger, whose genius he early discovered, and whose leaning to literature he encouraged. In the interesting preface to The Vailima Letters Mr Colvin tells of his help in that time of trial, and that he used his influence to persuade the parents that Louis had found his real vocation in literature, and ought to follow it. No doubt when the large and full Life of Mr Stevenson, which Mr Colvin is preparing, appears, he will have much of interest to tell of that turning-point in the young man's life. He was of service also in introducing his friend to editors, and Mr Stevenson's first serious appearance in literature was an essay on Roads sent by Mr Colvin to Mr Hamerton, the editor of The Portfolio, in 1873. It appeared shortly, and was followed by more work there and elsewhere; Cornhill, Longmans, and Macmillan having all before long printed papers by the new writer. In Macmillan the paper Ordered South appeared in April 1874, and had a pathetic interest as it was an account of the first of its author's many pilgrimages in search of health, which, after he grew to manhood, were to make up so much of his life's experience.

In Fraser's, Scribner's, The New Amphion, The Magazine of Art, his early work also found acceptance, and he occasionally contributed to The Contemporary Review and The English Illustrated, a list of well-known magazines in the home country which makes the more remarkable the refusal of the American papers to use his contributions largely, during his stay in San Francisco and Monterey.

Of that charming dreamy sketch of those days, Will o' the Mill, which appeared in Cornhill, Mr Hamerton wrote in the highest terms of praise. Most of these early essays, sketches, and tales have been republished, and in the beautiful Edinburgh Edition of his works, presently being seen through the press by Mr Colvin and Mr Baxter, and all but completed, his many admirers will be able to read all that came from his busy and graceful pen.

In 1878 Mr Stevenson's first book, An Inland Voyage, was published by Messrs Chatto & Windus. It is a bright, fresh account of a trip in canoes, 'The Arethusa' and 'The Cigarette,' made by Mr Stevenson and his friend the late Sir Walter G. Simpson up the Oise and the Sambre. The travellers had unique opportunities of observing people and scenery, and of these the writer made the most, consequently the book is full of pretty pictures of scenery and quaint touches of human life which make it charming reading.

'There is nothing,' he says, 'so quiet and so much alive as a woodland. And surely of all smells in the world the smell of many trees is sweetest and most satisfying.'

These are the reflections of a man to whom the teeming silence of the woods was very dear, and who, in Prince Otto, afterwards wrote a prose poem on the mystery of the woods which Thoreau himself could not have excelled.

'If we were charged so much a head for sunsets, or if God sent round a drum before the hawthorns came into flower, what a work we should make about their beauty. But these things, like good companions, stupid people early cease to observe;' a state of affairs fortunately incomprehensible to Mr Stevenson, who had not only a keen perception of the beauty of the world but 'that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude' that enabled him to recall and reproduce from memory these pleasures of the past.

The volume which ends with the statement that 'The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek,' is from its first page to its last brightly readable and full of pleasant and graceful thoughts and fancies. Its style is more mannered and less excellent than that of his later work, but it already appealed to that cultured public who welcomed the appearance of a new writer likely to make his mark as a 'maker' of English style.

In 1895 An Inland Voyage had run into its seventh edition; it was followed by the even more popular Travels in the Cevennes with a Donkey, which the same publishers sent out in 1879, and which in 1895 had reached a ninth edition.

On this occasion Mr Stevenson travelled alone. He had been living for a time in the little town of Le Monastier, fifteen miles from Le Puy, and here, in the late autumn, he bought an ass which he called 'Modestine,' and with it, to the great interest of his simple neighbours, started on a tour in the Cevennes. The pair set forth speeded on their way by many good wishes and, in spite of a slow pace and not a few misfortunes with the baggage and the pack-saddle, the tour was most successful. As to Modestine's pace her master describes it as being 'as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run'!

The experiences of the traveller in the crisp, bright autumn weather and the perfect scenery of the Cevennes were thoroughly enjoyable. The simple peasantry and the homely innkeepers proved more friendly and agreeable than those along the route of the canoeists had done. In the monastery of 'Our Lady of the Snows' he had a kindly welcome from the Trappist monks, who seemed to have found it possible to break their stern rule of silence in their eagerness to convert him to Roman Catholicism. Among themselves this rule of silence and the poorest diet is rigidly enforced, and as the traveller left their hospitable doors he 'blessed God that he was free to wander, free to hope, and free to love.'

In the country of the Camisards—that little sect of persecuted religionists whose fierce brief struggle against the tyranny of the Church of Rome he so graphically describes—the descendant of Scotch Covenanters found himself at home, and at 'Pont de Montvert' his heart beat in a certain stern sympathy with the persecuted remnant, who here slew Du Chayla, and with that strange weird prophet Spirit Seguir, who, after the deed was done, and he was about to suffer death for it at the stake, said: 'My soul is like a garden full of shelter and fountains.'

The rising took place on 24th July 1702, and Mr Stevenson says of it:

''Tis a wild night's work with its accompaniment of psalms; and it seems as if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that town upon the Tarn.'

There is a delightful description of a night among the firs in which the very spirit of nature breathes through his words, and his reason for travelling as he does is happy and convincing.

'I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move, to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off the feather bed of civilisation and find the globe granite under foot and stern with cutting flints. Alas! as we get up in life and are more pre-occupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing to be worked for.'

Many people have all through life a closer acquaintance with 'the globe granite under foot' than with 'the feather bed of civilisation,' and daily bread even more than a holiday is a thing to be worked for. But Mr Stevenson's lines had hitherto fallen in very pleasant places, and he had not as yet entered as seriously as he had to do later into the bitter battle of life.

After twelve days together he sold Modestine at St Jean du Gard and made his return journey by diligence. This book, like the first, was widely read and heartily appreciated as soon as it appeared.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] This is to be found reprinted in the Edinburgh Edition, in which are also published for the first time the Amateur Emigrant in full, a fragmentary romance, The Great North Road, and other papers and letters, &c., not hitherto known to the public.



CHAPTER VII

WANDERINGS IN SEARCH OF HEALTH

'Know how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong.'—LONGFELLOW.

Mr Stevenson's health, although always a cause of more or less anxiety, was from time to time somewhat better; else he could hardly have learned the practical work of a brass foundry, superintended the building of light towers and harbours, and taken such very active holidays as An Inland Voyage, and the tour Through the Cevennes with a Donkey. Nevertheless the delicacy was there, and it not only increased in 1873 but culminated in the autumn of that year in the first of those serious attacks of illness which afterwards frequently caused himself so much suffering and his friends such keen distress all through the life that, in spite of them, he lived so bravely.

In the October of 1873 the doctors took so grave a view of his indisposition that they ordered him south for the winter, and on the 5th of November he started on the first of those pilgrimages in search of health of which he says, somewhat sadly, in writing of his grandfather, in his paper on The Old Manse:

'He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight; I have sought it in both hemispheres, but whereas he found it and kept it, I am still on the quest.'

The anxiety and distress of his parents during that winter were naturally intense, and there is something tragic in the dates so carefully preserved:

'Lou started on 5th November 1873.'

'He returned to Heriot Row on 26th April 1874.'

Ordered South appeared in Macmillan for that same April, and in its very beauty there is a most painful pathos. The polish of its style, its exquisitely chosen words, give to it something of the sadness of the brilliant autumn tints on a wood, the red gold and the glory of decay. It is a brave paper and it is an intensely sad one, the sadness in which goes straight to the reader's heart, while the courage takes his respect by storm. No wonder it calls forth universal sympathy; too many homes have been darkened by the dread sentence 'Ordered South,' too many sufferers have obeyed it in life's gay noonday, or in its sunny prime, and few, alas! very few, have even returned to face the long struggle with fate that Mr Stevenson fought so heroically! This was the first, for him, of many journeys 'South'; for although the winter in the Riviera sent him back somewhat stronger, the inherent delicacy was still there, and time after time, in the twenty years and eleven months that he lived after the November morning when he set out on that melancholy journey, the recurrence of the graver symptoms of his malady obliged him to seek sunnier skies and warmer climates.

Scotland which he loved, the grey skies, the greyer mists, the snell winds,—that even in his happy Samoan life his exile's heart hungered for to the last,—were fatal to his delicate lungs, and year by year he was compelled to live less and less in his old Edinburgh home.

In 1880 when he brought his wife to Scotland to visit his parents his health was so precarious that he had to hurry abroad before the winter, and he and his wife and stepson went to Davos where they met and formed a pleasant friendship with Mr J. A. Symonds and his family. On their return it was hoped that the climate of the south of England might suit Mr Stevenson and be conveniently near London for literary business and literary friendships, so he, and his wife and son settled at Bournemouth in a house called Skerryvore, after the famous lighthouse so dear to all the Stevensons. Here too, alas! his enemy found him out; and chronic, indifferent health, with not infrequent attacks of lung disease in its more serious forms, finally obliged him about 1887 to take another journey to America in the hope that it might do him good.

Through all his life the shadow of death was never quite out of sight for him or for those who loved him; the skeleton hand was continually beckoning to him. When we think what that means, in a man's life, we realise with amazement his charming cheerfulness, his wonderful courage, and the magnitude of his work, the exactitude of his methods, the carefulness of his research, appeal to us as something positively heroic in one so handicapped by adverse fate.

When many men in despair would have given in he fought on; and the sum of his work, the length of his years—comparatively short as these were—witness to the truth that will can do many things. He willed to fight, he willed to live, he scorned to drop by the wayside, or to die one day before the battle was hopeless, and he fought his fight with a smiling face and a gay courage that was as fine a thing in its way as an act which has won a Victoria Cross; nay, finer, perhaps, for the struggle was not of minutes, or of hours, but of a lifetime, a stern prolonged tussle with death, in which he was never selfish, never peevish, always thoughtful of others, invariably merry and bright, with a wonderful sparkling whimsical mirth that had in it no touch of bitterness or of cynicism. Even the last years of life, when the need to work hard for an income that would sufficiently maintain his household, made brain work, under conditions of physical weakness, often peculiarly trying, were largely full of the same marvellous pluck and illumined by the same sunny temperament.

In the years between 1873 and 1879, in the summer of which he went to San Francisco, he had sought health in many places with a varying degree of success. He had seen much of life and, as he was an excellent linguist, had everywhere formed friendships with men of all nationalities, and was thus enabled to study at his leisure continental life and manners. He frequently stayed at Fontainbleau, where he had a Stevenson cousin studying art, and the pleasant unconventional life of the student settlement at Brabazon was very attractive to a man of Mr Stevenson's temperament. His first visit to the artist colony was paid in 1875, and it was often repeated.

His wanderings had unfortunately brought no permanent improvement to his health so, for that and other reasons, it occurred to him in 1879 to go to San Francisco to see if the Californian climate would be of benefit to him. Eager as ever to study life in all its phases and from every point of view he took his passage in an emigrant ship—where he tells us he posed as a mason and played his part but indifferently well!—and at New York resolved to continue his journey across America by emigrant train.

In the graphic account of his experiences, in the volume of essays entitled Across the Plains, and in The Amateur Emigrant, he describes what must have been a very trying time to a man of his refined upbringing and frail constitution. But he looks, here as elsewhere, at the bright side of people and things; and even for the Chinaman, from whom the other emigrants hold themselves aloof, he has a good word to say. He keenly observed everything from his fellow-passengers, the character of the newsboys on the cars, and the petty oppressions of the railway officials to the glories of the scenery on that marvellous journey of which Joaquin Miller says:—

'We glide through golden seas of grain, We shoot, a shining comet, through The mountain range, against the blue, And then, below the walls of snow, We blow the desert dust amain, We see the orange groves below, We rest beneath the oaks, and we Have cleft a continent in twain.'

After the long rush across the plains, Mr Stevenson's heart bounded with joy when he caught a glimpse of 'a huge pine-forested ravine, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.'

'You will scarce believe it,' he says, 'how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting one's wife. I had come home again—home from unsightly deserts to the green and habitable corners of the earth.'

By the afternoon they had reached Sacramento, which he writes of as 'a city of gardens in a plain of corn,' and before the dawn of the next day the train was drawn up at the Oaklands side of San Francisco Bay. The day broke as they crossed the ferry, and he says:

'The fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was perfect, not a ripple, scarce a stain upon its blue expanse, everything was waiting breathless for the sun.

'A spot of gold first lit upon the head of Talampais and then widened downwards on its shapely shoulder' ... and by-and-bye

'The tall hills Titan discovered,'

'and the city of San Francisco and the bay of gold and corn were lit from end to end with summer daylight.'

In The Old Pacific Capital he writes delightfully of San Francisco and the surge of its 'toss'd and tumbled sea,' that echoes forever around Monterey and its woods of oaks and pines and cedars. He has much that is interesting to tell of the curious contrast between San Francisco, modern and American, and Monterey, the 'Old Pacific Capital,' so full of a pathetic and a half-forgotten history. He has a deep sympathy with its refined and impoverished Spanish gentle-folk and their unpractical ideas of what is honourable; and he predicts that the people who do not consider it etiquette to look through an important paper before signing it are, in spite of America's assertions that they are well able to take care of themselves, little likely to survive long in a world of Yankee sharpness and smartness.

He revelled in the beautiful woods so often devastated by forest fires. On one occasion, he says, he came perilously near lynching, for he applied a match to the dry moss which clings to the bark of the trees to see if it were so peculiarly ignitable as to be an important factor in the rapid spread of a fire. In a moment flames broke out all over the tree, and he found to his horror that he had started a fresh fire of his own very difficult to put out, and exceedingly likely to arouse the indignation of the men who were struggling to beat out the existing conflagration, to the point of lynching the too officious stranger.

The solemn boom of the Pacific was a constant delight to him, and he gloried in the ever-changing lights and shadows on the sea. If he did not attain to permanent good health while at San Francisco and Monterey he at least found there something else which made for the lasting happiness of his life, as it was there that he married his wife.

After spending about seven years of married life at Bournemouth he again, in 1887, tried a visit to America. His health, however, did not improve, and, during the winter of 1887 and 1888, when he was at Saranac Lake, he speaks of himself, in The Vailima Letters, as having been—in the graphic Scots words—'far through'; and the idea occurred to him of chartering a yacht and going for a voyage in the South Seas. His mother on this occasion accompanied the family party, and between 1888 and 1890 they sailed about among the lovely islands of the South Sea, visiting Honolulu, and finally touching at Apia in Samoa, where they promptly fell in love with the beauty of the scenery and the charm of the climate.

On this voyage, as always, Mr Stevenson made friends wherever he went, and had much pleasant intercourse with wandering Europeans, missionaries and natives.

On her return to Edinburgh, after this cruise with him, his mother used to give most entertaining accounts of the feasts given in their honour by the native kings and chiefs, and of the quaint gifts bestowed on them. At an afternoon tea-party at 17 Heriot Row, shortly before the home there was finally broken up, she put on for our benefit the wreath—still wonderfully green—that had been given to her to wear at one of those island festivities. She had promised the sable majesty who gave it to her to be photographed with it on, and to send him one of the copies. One of these photographs is beside me now, and is an excellent likeness. Close to it is the graceful one of her son, taken at Bournemouth, wearing his hair long, and one of the velvet coats that he loved, and it is a most curious contrast to the sturdy Scotsman, his father, who looks out at it from his frame, in conventional broadcloth and with the earnest gravity so characteristic of his face in repose.

Innumerable photographs, pictures, and busts, were taken of Robert Louis Stevenson, but not one of them has ever been a very real or a very satisfying likeness. In recent years one rarely sees an Academy Exhibition without one or more representations of the mobile face, the expression of which has, alas! eluded the grasp of even the best of artists.

The Stevenson party had been so charmed with Samoa, that, as the climate suited Louis admirably, they resolved to give up the Bournemouth home, buy some ground in Samoa, and finally settle there. So sometime about 1890 Vailima was bought, and building and reclaiming operations were begun, and, save for occasional visits to Sydney or Honolulu, Mr Stevenson and his household gave up personal communication with the busy and civilised world, and happily settled themselves in a peaceful life among the palms and the sunshine of the tropics and the friendly Samoan natives, who grew to be so deeply attached to them, and so proud of 'Tusitala.'



CHAPTER VIII

HIS MARRIAGE AND FRIENDSHIPS

... 'What we seek is but our other self Other and higher, neither wholly like Nor wholly different, the half life the gods Retained when half was given—one the man And one the woman.'...—Epic of Hades. L. MORRIS.

'Old friends are best, old coats that fit.' —ROBERT RICHARDSON.

It was naturally to be supposed that a man of Mr Stevenson's temperament, before whose eyes from his earliest childhood there had been present a woman good enough to give him the very highest ideal of womanhood, would not easily or lightly give his heart away. He knew that he longed for the best, and to nothing less than the best could he give his soul's worship. That he did not find his ideal in the beaten track of everyday social life, or among the gay and agreeable girls whom he met in his young manhood, is not surprising.

The element of romance, as well as the longing for what was noblest in womanhood, was in him; and romance for him was not embodied in a pretty young woman in a ball gown. Possibly he considered that the amusing advice as to matrimony which he gives in Virginibus Puerisque, was as applicable to a man as to a woman, and that 'the bright' girl of Society was as apt to be a wearisome and an exacting helpmate as her brother, 'the bright boy of fiction,' against whom as a husband his essay warns the woman in search of marriage to whom he recommends, as a more comfortable partner, the man old enough to have loved before, and to have undergone something of an apprenticeship in devotion. Very pertinent also is his advice to men in the same essay, that kindred tastes are more likely to ensure lasting happiness than a fair face or an acceptable dowry.

Beneath the easy brightness of thought and style that make the essay so amusing and so readable, one sees that its writer knows his world well, and has given graver thought to matters matrimonial than at a first reading one is inclined to believe.

Holding firmly the faith that 'all things come to him who knows how to wait,' Mr Stevenson was in no hurry to realise his ideal, and it was not until he was between twenty-seven and thirty that he met the woman whom he chose for his wife. That there was an element of romance in their acquaintance altogether removed from everyday love stories made it all the more fitting an ending to that watchful waiting for what fate had to give him.

When Mr Stevenson arrived in San Francisco in 1879, there was living with her sister, at Monterey, Mrs Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne of Indiana. Mrs Osbourne had been married when very young, and her domestic experience was so unhappy that she had to obtain a divorce from her husband. She had, with her son and daughter, lived for some time in that student colony at Fontainbleau which Mr Stevenson knew and loved so well, and in after years they must have had in common many pleasant memories of people and places dear to both, so that his ideal of matrimony described in Virginibus Puerisque was realised, and he and his wife had 'many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale.'

At a party at San Francisco Mr Stevenson much admired Mrs Osbourne and her daughter Belle, who married a Mr Strong, and who afterwards, in the Vailima days, became her step-father's secretary. The young girl he found very fresh and sweet with the gay brightness of youth, but of her mother his impression was much deeper, and he always spoke and wrote of her as the most beautiful and the most charming woman whom he had ever seen. Although she was several years his senior she was then in the very prime of a womanly beauty which, to judge from the photographs taken at Vailima more than ten years later, was only at its ripest when other women are beginning to think of growing old. No one who had even once looked into her dark eyes could fail to endorse Mr Stevenson's verdict, to realise her charm of person, or doubt for a moment the loveliness of nature and the nobility of soul to which these strange deep eyes were the index. She was indeed charming, and it was no wonder that such a nature as Mr Stevenson's found in her that 'other half of the old Platonic tradition, the fortunate finding of which can alone make a marriage perfect.

The romantic and the unusual in the story comes in when, at the request of his doctor, Mrs Osbourne gave willingly of her kindness and her skill in nursing to the young man who was lying at point of death alone in a far land. The child of the people with whom he was boarding had been very ill, and when other folk left the house of sickness, Mr Stevenson, who had liked his little playfellow, remained to help the parents with the nursing, and wore himself out in their service as only a man of his rare human sympathy and tenderness of heart would have done. The child recovered, and long years afterwards when the monument to his memory was erected at San Francisco, the mother laid a wreath at its base in remembrance of that unforgotten kindness. Unfortunately, already far from well and suffering much from the effects of the journey by emigrant ship and train and the stern experience of 'roughing it' which that had entailed, Mr Stevenson was quite unfit for the fatigue of nursing and he became so ill that the doctor despaired of his life. This doctor, who then and afterwards proved a very real friend, was greatly distressed about his patient, especially as the danger of his illness was greatly increased by the lack of that skilled nursing which was there very difficult to obtain. In such a case the physician could do much, but a good nurse could do far more, so the doctor, in his anxiety, recollected that Mrs Osbourne was, like himself, interested in the talented young Scotsman, and was also possessed of a rare and womanly gift of nursing, and he begged her to do what she could for his patient. She responded to his appeal, and with her sister showed the invalid a kindness so great that it did more to help his recovery than the best of drugs could have done. He was restored to a certain measure of health, and it may thus be said that he owed his life to his future wife, but he owed her much more for her unselfish devotion in his time of weakness and loneliness, as a stranger in a strange land, glorified to him all womanhood in her person, and the man who knew what it was to have an ideal mother was so peculiarly fortunate as to find an ideal wife also. Two such natures as theirs were inevitably attracted to each other, and it is not surprising that their friendship deepened into love, or that in later years he says of her:

'Teacher, tender comrade, wife, A fellow-farer true through life, Heart-whole and soul-free, The august Father Gave to me.'

At San Francisco, on the 19th of May 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne were married, and there began for them that perfect life together which anxiety and illness could not cloud, and which found its earthly termination when in that awful and sudden moment in December 1894 Mr Stevenson entered into 'the Rest Eternal.'

Belle Osbourne became Mrs Strong, and by-and-bye she and her little boy Austin joined the Stevensons in their home life. 'Sam,' as Mr Lloyd Osbourne was called in those days, accompanied them to England when they made their home at Bournemouth. He was a bright, eager boy when he used to appear in Edinburgh, and one who was very welcome to the elder Stevensons at Heriot Row. By-and-bye he went to the Edinburgh University and there he was full of life and interest, keen on pleasures, keen on friendships, interested in classes, and even then there was something of the same earnestness, the same humour and brightness in him that characterised his stepfather and which made him, by-and-bye, with no small measure of the same gifts, his collaborator and friend. A friendship that was begun in very early days when the two told each other stories and issued romances from a toy printing-press, and when the junior received that delightful dedication of Treasure Island in which he is described as 'a young American gentleman' to whose taste the tale appeals.

Shortly after their marriage Mr and Mrs R. L. Stevenson had had the quaint experience of housekeeping so charmingly described in Silvarado Squatters, but their first real home was at Skerryvore, and Bournemouth was the headquarters of the household until the necessities of Mr Stevenson's health again made them wanderers; and that move in 1887 finally ended in the purchase of Vailima, and the pitching of their camp in far Samoa.

The curtest mention of their Bournemouth life would be incomplete without some notice of the many friends who found it so easy to reach from London and so pleasant to visit, and who, themselves well known in the literary world, so greatly appreciated the genius of Mr Stevenson. Among old Edinburgh friends of long standing were his many Balfour and Stevenson cousins and his old comrades of early days, and among the latter Mr Charles Baxter and the late Sir Walter G. Simpson held a principal place in his regard. Mr Sydney Colvin he had first met in 1873, Mr Henley he first knew in Edinburgh about the end of 1874, and Mr Edmund Gosse was another much valued friend of long standing. Mr Colvin was to the last one of the friends highest in his regard, and to him were written The Vailima Letters.

His wonderful attire, at the Savile Club and elsewhere in orthodox London, at first astonished and somewhat repelled literary men accustomed to a more conventional garb than the velvet coats, the long loose hair, and the marvellous ties Mr Stevenson delighted in; but very soon they found out the charm of the personality that lay behind a certain eccentricity of appearance, and Mr Leslie Stephen, Mr James Payn, Dr Appleton, Professor Clifford, Mr Cosmo Monkhouse, and Mr George Meredith, whom he met in 1878 and whose work he so much admired, were numbered among his life-long friends. Mr Henley's description of him in these days is better than any picture:

'Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, Neat-footed, 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.'

Another friend of those days, Mr Andrew Lang, also lets his friendship run into rhyme, and sends across the seas to the author of The Master of Ballantrae a quaint greeting in the best of Southland Doric:

'Whan Suthern winds gar spindrift flee Abune the clachan, faddumes hie, Whan for the cluds I canna see The bonny lift, I'd fain indite an odd to thee Had I the gift!...

... 'O Louis, you that writes in Scots, Ye're far awa' frae stirks and stots, Wi' drookit herdies, tails in knots, An unco way! My mirth's like thorns aneth the pots In Ballantrae!'

To this Mr Stevenson promptly replied in equally fine Doric, and with a playful allusion to the early 'grizzelled' hair which gives to Mr Andrew Lang an appearance venerable beyond his years.

Mr Crockett, in the delightful dedication to The Stickit Minister, celebrates his friendship with Mr Stevenson; and among the younger school of writers, for whose work he had so generous an appreciation, he had many friends as well as admirers. Mr Barrie, Mr Rudyard Kipling, Mr Le Galliene, and a host of others loved him as a friend, as well as looked up to him as a literary leader. To many of them he wrote charming letters, although in several cases no actual meeting had ever taken place. It was a keen disappointment to both men that circumstances prevented Mr Rudyard Kipling from paying a visit to Samoa.

In his island home he was not forgetful of his 'own romantic town,' nor of the interests of one, at least, of its publishing firms, whose travellers and agents he introduced to new fields of usefulness in India and the South Seas. One of his own favourite books was Coral Island, by Mr R. M. Ballantyne, published by the Messrs Nelson.

But Stevenson, whose charm of personality was even greater than his fame, had other friends, whose friendship is not measured by the intellect but by the heart. Little children and young folk everywhere loved the man whose Child's Garden of Verses shows such a marvellous insight into the hearts of children.

The ass Modestine, the Samoan horse Jack, well knew that the indignant flow of language meant nothing, and that their master's heart was altogether in the right place, although, when they were too provoking, his words might be very unparliamentary.

For dogs he had as great an attraction as they had for him, and the master of Coolin the wise, and Woggs, or Bogue, the gallant, discourses as few men could do about canine thoughts and feelings in his essay The Character of Dogs.

No fear of his being among the foolish people who remark that 'they like dogs in their proper place,' and, as he stingingly adds, say, '"Poo' fellow! Poo' fellow!" and are themselves far poorer!' He knew, because he had taken the trouble to study him, that 'to the dog of gentlemanly feelings, theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices.'



CHAPTER IX

HIS ESSAYS AND POEMS

'Golden thoughts that ever will resound, And be re-echoed to the utmost parts of land and sea.' —R. S. MUTCH.

Mr Stevenson inherited both from the Stevenson and Balfour families some measure of literary talent. His father and his grandfather had written with considerable acceptance on the subject of their profession. His father also wrote on religious matters, and at least one of these pamphlets was believed to be of lasting value by competent judges. On scientific and engineering subjects his work was thought so excellent, and was so well known, that R. L. Stevenson tells, with some amusement, that he was surprised to find in the New World it was his father and not himself who was considered the important author. The Life of Robert Stevenson, of Bell Rock fame, written by David Stevenson, is a very interesting book.

Among his mother's relatives the gift of fluent and graceful expression is also widely diffused, and in common with Mrs Thomas Stevenson and her son, not a few of the Balfour connection have been very charming letter writers, in the days when letters were worth receiving, and not the hurried and uncharacteristic scraps which do duty for present-day correspondence.

He himself considered that he inherited his literary talent largely from his father's family, but there is interesting proof that even in his grandfather's day it was inherent also in his Balfour ancestors. The minister of Colinton wrote verses in his youth, and a sonnet preserved by his surviving son and daughter is interesting as a proof of his earnest mind and his literary skill. It was written on the fly-leaf of a folio copy of Pearson on the Creed, presented to him by his friend, the Reverend Patrick Macfarlane, who became, about 1832, minister of the West Church at Greenock, and is dated 18th May 1801.

'My friend, my Patrick, let me boast the name, For my breast glows with no inferior flame, This gift was thine, expressive of thy love, Which spurning earthborn joys for those above Would teach my friend in sacred lore to grow, And feel the truths impressive as they flow. While with our faith our kindred bosoms glow, And love to God directs our life below, One view of things now seen, and things to come, But pilgrims here, a future state our home, Nor time, nor death, our friendship shall impair, Begun below, but rendered perfect there.'

More than one of the old gentleman's family inherited his talent for graceful and forcible writing. His son, Dr George W. Balfour, has written two well-known medical books which have brought to him a large measure of fame. These are Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Heart, and the even more popular The Senile Heart. About the latter he tells an excellent story. A well-known literary critic, seeing the book lying on the table, thought it a work of fiction with an admirable and unique title, carried it off for review, and found to his disgust it was a learned medical treatise. Dr John Balfour, an elder son of the manse, wrote papers in The Indian Annals and The Edinburgh Medical Journal, which were very highly esteemed.

In the younger generation, a cousin of Mr R. L. Stevenson, Mrs Beckwith Sitwell, has written much and pleasantly, principally for young people. Another cousin, Mrs Marie Clothilde Balfour, whose father was a son of the Colinton manse, who died young, and who is married to her cousin—a son of Dr G. W. Balfour, who can also, like his father, write acceptably on medical and other subjects—has already gained for herself no inconsiderable repute as a novelist, her third book, The Fall of the Sparrow, having been considered by competent critics one of the notable books of last year.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the bent towards literature which appears in both families should in Robert Louis Stevenson have been developed into that rare gift which men call genius. While he was still a careless student of twenty, his papers in The Edinburgh University Magazine possessed a peculiar attraction, and appealed to cultured minds with a charm not often found in the work of so young a writer.

An Old Gardener and A Pastoral especially had much of the depth of thought and the finish of style which so largely characterised Mr Stevenson's later work. Interesting and delightful as he is as a story-teller, there is in his essays a graceful fascination which makes them for many of his readers infinitely more satisfying than the most brilliant of his tales. In the essays you seem to meet the man face to face, to listen to his spoken thoughts, to see the grave and the gay reflections of his mind, to enjoy with him 'the feast of reason and the flow of soul' provided by the writers into whose company he takes you, or to return with him to his boyhood, and, in The Old Manse and Random Memories see familiar places and people touched by the light of genius, and made as wonderful to your own commonplace understanding as to the intense and high-souled boy who wandered about among them, hearing and seeing the everyday things of life as only the romancist and the poet can hear and see them.

His style, too—strong and virile as it is in his tales—attains, one almost fancies, its full perfection in his essays. The thoughts, both grave and gay, are presented in a dainty dress that is peculiarly fitted to do them justice. There is room in this quiet writing, disturbed by no exigencies of plot, to give perfect scope to the grace and the leisure which are the great charms of Mr Stevenson's work. One can take up a volume of the essays or a slim book of verses at any time and dip into it as one would into some clear and cold mountain well, full of refreshment for the weary wayfarer, and, like the well, it is sure to give one an invigorating sense of keen enjoyment, to take one far from the dusty highways of life and plunge one into the depth and coolness of the wide silence of nature, or to fill one's mind with strong and worthy thoughts gleaned from the world of men and books.

In his Familiar Studies of Men and Books, published, in one volume, by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1882, with a charming dedication to his father, Mr Stevenson gives in the preface a most interesting account of his own fuller point of view regarding the studies which had originally appeared in the New Quarterly, Macmillan, and Cornhill. The essays deal with such well-known men as Knox, Burns, Thoreau, Charles of Orleans, Samuel Pepys, and others, and are always fresh and agreeable reading. The papers on Knox and Burns have an especial interest for Mr Stevenson's fellow-countrymen who naturally appreciate the judgment of a later day genius on the character and work of the two men who have had so wide an influence on Scottish life and feeling.

To John Knox Scotland largely owes her reformed religion, her rigid presbyterianism, and it is, to many people, a new and an interesting phase of the character of the great Reformer—who so enjoyed brow-beating Queen Mary—that Mr Stevenson shows, when he depicts Knox as the confidential friend of the religious women of his day, writing letters to them, comforting them in domestic trials, even shedding tears with them, and keeping up, through a harassed and busy life, these friendships which seem to have been as great a source of pleasure to the Reformer as to the ladies.

Of Robert Burns, the peasant poet, whose songs did as much to bring back the sunshine into everyday Scotch life as the Reformer's homilies did to banish it, Mr Stevenson writes with sympathy and tenderness. For the work he is full of admiration; for the man, whose circumstances and temperament made his whole life a difficult walking in slippery places where the best of men could hardly have refrained from falling, he has a gentle understanding, a manly pity. There was much in the poet's life and temperament repellent to a nature like Mr Stevenson's, but there was far more where the human feeling of man to man and of soul to soul could touch with comprehension, so that in his paper, and more especially in his preface, we find him giving to Scotland's national bard an ungrudging admiration in his struggles after the right, and no petty condemnation when he lapsed and fell from his own higher ideals.

Of Walt Whitman and Thoreau, both most interesting studies in the volume, he has much that is stimulating to say; and many readers, who may not have time or opportunity for deep personal research, will find his essays on Villon, Victor Hugo's Romances, Samuel Pepys, Yoshida Torajiro and Charles of Orleans a very pleasant means of obtaining a great deal of information in a very limited space.

In the early essays, republished in volume form in 1881 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, under the title Virginibus Puerisque, Mr Stevenson discourses delightfully on many things, touching, for instance, with a light hand but a wise heart on matrimony and love-making, and the little things, so small in themselves, so large as they bulk for happiness or misery, that go to make peace or discord in married life. It is all done with a pointed pen and a smiling face; but its lightness covers wisdom, and it is full of sound counsel and makes wiser reading for young men and maidens than many books of more apparent gravity.

That pathos always lay close behind his playful mockeries and was never far away from the man whose paper on Ordered South is like the bravely repressed cry of all his fellow-sufferers the companion paper on El Dorado proves convincingly. Under its graceful phrases there lies deep and strong sympathy for toil, for hope deferred and longed for, for the disappointment of attainment, for the labour that after all has so often to be its own reward.

Between 1880 and 1885 Mr Stevenson collaborated with Mr Henley in the writing of four plays which were privately printed, Deacon Brodie in 1880, Beau Austin in 1884, Admiral Guinea in 1884, and Robert Macaire in 1885—the whole being finally published in volume form in an edition limited to 250 copies, in 1896. Beau Austin was acted in 1890 at The Haymarket, and quite recently Admiral Guinea has been played with Mr Sydney Valentine in the part of David Pew, but in spite of the literary distinction of the collaborators the plays have not been a great success on the stage.

In the later papers, 'A Christmas Sermon,' 'A Letter to a Young Gentleman,' and 'Pulvis et Umbra,' in the volume of collected essays called Across the Plains, the note of pathos which appears now and then in Virginibus Puerisque is even more forcibly struck. The writer is older, he has known more of life and of suffering, he has more than once looked death closely in the face, and, though his splendid courage is there all the time, the sadness of humanity is more apparent than in most of his work. The other essays in this volume are very pleasant reading, and Across the Plains and The Old and New Pacific Capitals give most graphic descriptions of the life and scenery on the shore of the Pacific, and of the journey to get there.

In 'Random Memories' in the same volume, he goes back to his boyhood, and we meet him at home beside the 'Scottish Sea,' under grey Edinburgh skies, larking with his fellow-boys in their autumn holidays, touring with his father in The Pharos round the coast of Fife, and later inspecting harbours at Anstruther, and on the bleak shores of Caithness, an apprentice engineer, for whom, apart from the open air and the romance of a harbour or a light tower, his profession had no charms.

Not the least pleasant of his volumes of Essays is that called Memories and Portraits, published by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1887, and dedicated to his mother, whom his father's death in the May of that year had so recently made a widow. In it there is a most interesting paper entitled 'Thomas Stevenson,' in which he writes very appreciatively of that father who was so great a man in the profession which the son admired although he could not follow it. Here, too, are papers on 'The Manse,' that old home of his grandfather at Colinton which he when a child loved so well; on the old gardener at Swanston, who so lovingly tended the vegetables of which he remarked to his mistress, when told to send in something choice for the pot, that 'it was mair blessed to give than to receive,' but gave her of his best all the same, and who loved the old-fashioned flowers, and gave a place to

'Gardener's garters, shepherd's purse, Batchelors' buttons, lady's smock, And the Lady Hollyhock.'

In this book also are 'A Pastoral,' in which we learn to know John Todd, that typical shepherd of the Pentlands, and his dogs; the charming paper on 'The Character of Dogs,' and four literary essays beginning with an account of his early purchases in the old book shop in Leith Walk, and ending in 'A Humble Remonstrance,' with a summary of his views on romance writing, and what it really ought to be.

Somewhat of the nature too of essays or sketches is that delightful volume, made up of different chapters in a most ideal life, The Silvarado Squatters, published in 1883, in which Mr Stevenson gives a brilliant description of the very primitive existence he and his wife with Mr Lloyd Osbourne, then a very small boy indeed, led shortly after their marriage, in a disused miner's house—if one can by courtesy call a house the three-roomed shed, into which sunlight and air poured through the gaping boards and the shattered windows!—on the slope of Mount Saint Helena, where once had been the Silvarado silver mine.

Primitive in the extreme, the life must nevertheless have been delightful; and, given congenial companionship and the perfect climate of a Californian summer, one can imagine no more blissful experience than 'roughing it' in that sheltered canon on the mountain side with the ravine close below, and the most marvellous stretch of earth, and sea, and sky, hill and plain, spread out like an ever-changing picture before the eyes, while to the ears there came no sound more harsh than the shrill notes of the woodland birds. There came also the noise of the rattlesnake very often, Mr Stevenson says, but they did not realise its sinister significance until almost the end of their sojourn there, when their attention was drawn to it, and certainly no evil befell them.

Silvarado Squatters, like The Vailima Letters, shows to perfection how simple and how busy, with the most primitive household details, the Stevensons often were on their wanderings, and how supremely happy people, whose tastes and habits suit each other, can be without the artificial surroundings and luxuries of society and civilisation that most folk consider well-nigh necessary to their salvation.

One of the most beautiful descriptions of nature in all Mr Stevenson's books, is that of the sea mist rising from the Pacific, and seen from above, like a vast white billowy ocean, by the squatters on their mountain ledge. Bret Harte, for whom and for whose works Mr Stevenson had a sincere admiration, also alludes graphically to the curious scenic effects of the mist rising from the Pacific. Very interesting, too, are the papers on wine and wine-growers, and the two vineyards on the mountain side; and Scotch hearts, warm even to the Scotch tramp who looked in at the door, and to the various fellow-countrymen who arrived to shake hands with Mr Stevenson because he was a Scot and like themselves, an alien from the grey skies and the clanging church bells of home.

'From the dim sheiling on the misty island Mountains divide us and a world of seas, Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,'

he quotes and adds—

'And Highland and Lowland all our hearts are Scotch.'[5]

One last notice of his prose is connected with Edinburgh, and very probably with a church charity, for to help some such sale as churches patronise he wrote The Charity Bazaar: a Dialogue, which was given to me by its author at 17 Heriot Row one day very long ago, and which, rather frayed and yellow, is still safely pasted in my Everyday Book with the initials 'R. L. S.' in strong black writing at the end of it.

Mr Stevenson has done so much in prose that the general reader is very prone to forget those four thin volumes of verse which alone would have done much to establish his fame as an author. The first published in 1885 was The Child's Garden of Verses, and anything more dainty than the style and the composition of that really wonderful little book cannot be imagined, nor has there ever been written anything, in prose or in verse, more true to the thoughts and the feelings of an imaginative child.

Ballads, published in 1890 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, the firm who have published all the essays, is a collection of very interesting narrative poems. The first two, 'Rahero, a Legend of Tahiti' and 'The Feast of Famine, Marquesan Manners,' deal with native life in the sunny islands of the tropics, and show, with the same graphic and powerful touch as his South Sea tales do, that human life, love, hatred, and revenge are as fierce and as terrible there as in the sterner north. With the north are associated the old and curious Scotch legends, Ticonderoga and Heather Ale. The first gives in easily flowing lines a Highland slaying, the rather mean appeal of the slayer for protection to the dead man's brother and the honourable fashion in which the living Cameron elects to stand by his oath to the stranger in spite of the three times repeated complaint and curse of his dead brother. The spectre tells him that he will die at a place called Ticonderoga, but such a word is known to no man, and yet, when Pitt sends a Highland regiment, in which Captain Cameron is an officer, to the East, the doomed man sees his own wraith look at him from the water, and knows, when he hears the place is Ticonderoga, he will be the first to fall in battle there.

The Heather Ale is a Galloway legend which tells how the last Pict on the Galloway moors prefers to see his son drowned and to die himself rather than sell his honour and betray his secret to the King.

Christmas at Sea is a sad little tale of how, when all men are glad on board the labouring ship—that stormy Christmas Day—that she has at last cleared the dangerous headland and is safely out at sea, the lad who has left the old folk to run away to be a sailor can only see the lighted home behind the coastguard's house,

'The pleasant room, the pleasant faces there, My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair ... ... And oh the wicked fool I seemed in every kind of way To be here hauling frozen ropes on Blessed Christmas Day ... ... They heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me, As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea. But all that I could think of in the darkness and the cold Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.'

Underwoods was published by the same firm in 1887, and is most touchingly dedicated to all the many doctors of whose skill and kindness Mr Stevenson had had such frequent need. The verses in it were written at different times and in different places, and while many of them are full of the early freshness of youth some of them give as pleasantly and quaintly the riper wisdom of manhood.

Several of the verses are written to friends or relatives, some very charming lines are to his father.

Eight lines called 'The Requiem' seem the very perfection of his own idea of a last resting-place, and are almost prophetic of that lone hill-top where he lies.

Book II. of Underwoods is 'In Scots,' very forcible and graphic Scots too, but as to the dialect Mr Stevenson himself disarms criticism. He find his words, he says, in all localities; he spells them, he allows, sometimes with a compromise.

'I have stuck for the most part to the proper spelling,' he writes; and again—

'To some the situation is exhilarating; as for me I give one bubbling cry and sink. The compromise at which I have arrived is indefensible, and I have no thought of trying to defend it.'

And indeed he has no need of it; it is good, forcible 'Scots' after all, and the thoughts he clothes in it are as 'hame-ower' and as pithy as the words.

The Maker to Posterity, Ille Terrarum, A Blast, A Counterblast, and The Counterblast Ironical, are all excellent; and one can point to no prettier picture of a Scottish Sunday than A Lowden Sabbath Morn, which has recently been published alone in book form very nicely illustrated, while he pokes some, not undeserved, fun at our Scottish good opinion of ourselves and our religious privileges in Embro, her Kirk, and The Scotsman's Return from Abroad. Surely nowhere is there Scots more musical or lines more true to the sad experience which life brings to us all than these with which the book ends:

'It's an owercome sooth for age and youth, And it brooks wi' nae denial, That the dearest friends are the auldest friends And the young are just on trial.

'There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld, And it's him that has bereft me, For the surest friends are the auldest friends And the maist o' mine hae left me.'...

The last volume of verses, Songs of Travel, has a pathos all its own, for, like St Ives and Weir of Hermiston, the author never saw it in print. The verses were sent home shortly before his death, and in the note appended to them Mr Sydney Colvin says they were to be finally printed as Book III. of Underwoods, but meantime were given to the world in their present form in 1896.

They were written at different periods, and they show their author in varying moods; but they incline rather to the sadder spirit of the last two years of his life, and have left something if not of the courage for the fight, at least of the gaiety of living behind them. Two of them are written to his wife, many of them to friends; some of them have the lilt and the brightness of songs, others, like If this were Faith and The Woodman, are filled with the gravity of life and the bitterness of the whole world's struggle for existence.

In The Vagabond he is still in love with the open air life and the freedom of the tramp. In his exile he longs to rest at last beside those he loves; he feels the weariness of life, he writes—

'I have trod the upward and the downward slope; I have endured and done in days before; I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope; And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.'

After that one feels no surprise that he is waiting for the final summons, and one has only a sense of the eternal fitness of things when in the last words of the book he says—

'I hear the signal, Lord,—I understand The night at Thy command Comes. I will eat and sleep, and will not question more.'

FOOTNOTE:

[5] Mr Stevenson was very fond of this quotation, which appeals so truly to Caledonia's sons and daughters. He found it in an old volume of Good Words, and never knew its source. Like many other people he quoted it incorrectly. According to information kindly supplied by Mr W. Keith Leask, the lines, which have an interesting history, stand thus in the original—

'From the lone sheiling on the misty island Mountains divide us and a waste of seas, Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.'

In Tait's Magazine for 1849 it is given as 'Canadian Boat Song, from the Gaelic.' The author of the English version was Burns' 'Sodger Hugh,' the 12th Earl of Eglinton, who was M.P. for Ayrshire from 1784 to 1789, and was the great-grandfather of the present Earl. When in Canada the author is said to have heard a song of lament sung by evicted Hebridean crofters in Manitoba, which gave him the idea for his verses—the first four lines, and chorus, of which are—

'Listen to me as when we heard our father Sing long ago the song of other shores; Listen to me, and then in chorus gather All your deep voices as ye pull your oars. Chorus—Fair the broad meads, these hoary woods are grand, But we are exiles from our fathers' land.'

Professor Mackinnon believes that the Gaelic version, known in the Highlands to this day, is founded upon the Earl of Eglinton's lines, and is not, as might be supposed, an earlier form of the poem which is known and loved by Scotch folk all the world over.



CHAPTER X

HIS STORIES

'... Thy genius mingles strength with grace, ... 'Neath thy spell the world grows fair; Our hearts revive, our inmost souls are stirred, And all our English race awaits thy latest word.' —Sir L. MORRIS' Birthday Ode to the late Lord Tennyson.

Beginning his literary career as a writer of such quaint books of travel as An Inland Voyage and Through the Cevennes with a Donkey, such charming essays as Roads, Ordered South, El Dorado, and many others, Mr Stevenson was not long in entering the arena as a story-teller. His first printed stories were A Lodging for the Night, which appeared in Temple Bar in October 1877; The Sire de Maletroit's Door, in the same magazine in January 1878; and Will o' the Mill, in Cornhill, also in January 1878.

In Cornhill, in 1876 had appeared the series of essays republished as Virginibus Puerisque, and in 1877 and 1878 those afterwards collected under the title Familiar Studies of Men and Books. There also began, now and then, to be short stories from his pen in Cornhill, Macmillan, Longmans, Mr H. Norman's Christmas Annual, The Court and Society Review, and other magazines. These, as they added originality and a certain weirdness of plot to his already recognised beauty of style, still further attracted that cultured public which had at once accepted his earlier work as that of a master of English. As already stated, it was Will o' the Mill, a charmingly written story of still life, with a quiet philosophy all its own, that Mr Hamerton had pronounced a masterpiece of style. Markheim was a graphic, but very unpleasant, story of a murder; Olalla, a horrible, but powerfully written, sketch of hereditary insanity, with a beautiful setting of Italian scenery to relieve the gloomy picture.

Thrawn Janet which, with most of the tales in The Merry Men, was written at Pitlochry, appeared in Cornhill in 1880. Mr Stevenson himself considered it one of his best stories, and thought it an excellent piece of dialect writing. It is weird and impressive in the extreme, and no one who has read it is likely to forget the minister of Balweary in the vale of Dull, and his terrible experiences in the matter of a housekeeper; the 'het lowin' wind' and the coppery sky of that day on which he met the black man coming down by Dull water, and knew that he had spoken with the enemy of souls himself; or the awful storm, in which Satan finally came for all that was left of Thrawn Janet. Into this story of a few pages are condensed a power of forcible expression and a weirdness of theme which have not been surpassed in any of the larger books.

The Merry Men is a story of wreck and wickedness on a desolate West Highland island where the rocks called 'the Merry Men,' as the tides boil and foam among them, make, as it were, an undercurrent of mad laughter that forms a fitting accompaniment to the hideous passions of greed and murder and the dead level of human misery that are the prevailing atmosphere of the tale. It is one of the best of the stories forming the volume, to which it gives its name, published by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1887.

In another collection of short tales Mr Stevenson also deals with the seamy side of life, and The New Arabian Nights published in 1882, and which contains the reprint of such stories as The Suicide Club, The Rajah's Diamond, The Sire de Maletroit's Door, and The Pavilion on the Links, is quite as gruesome and by no means less interesting than The Merry Men.

The Sire de Maletroit's Door and The Pavilion on the Links, are most graphically written, especially the latter with its splendid description of the dreary sea and the wide and wind-swept stretch of drearier links where the curious characters play their mysterious parts. It is interesting to know that Mr Stevenson wrote The Pavilion on the Links while he was very ill in California. All the stories in the two volumes are favourites, and many readers give a preference to The Suicide Club, The Rajah's Diamond, or Prince Florizel.

Providence and the Guitar is also one of his best stories. Prince Otto, the first draft of which was written at Monterey, is the peculiar but very beautifully written story of a prince with no fancy for princedom and no talent for governing, who leaves his vain young wife and his unscrupulous prime minister in power and goes roaming among his subjects only to hear some far from complimentary opinions of himself. In the end both prince and princess learn love and wisdom and find happiness in spite of the revolution that drives them from their tiny kingdom. It is a fanciful tale, the charm of which lies less in the rather vague characters, who have the haziness of motive and of personality of the figures in some old play, than in the absolute perfection of style and of description that make it a book to read and re-read with infinite pleasure.

Mr Stevenson says, in its dedicatory preface, that he meant to make of it a masterpiece; if he did not succeed in doing so, as a story, he certainly gave in it a picture of the woods so true to nature and so exquisite in style and in expression that it will live as among his best work.

Good as this earlier writing was he had not yet found in it his full inspiration, and it hardly appealed to so wide a public as the fresh and delightful stories of adventure to which he finally turned his attention. In connection with Mr Stevenson's fiction, it is interesting to note that in his boyhood he greatly enjoyed the stories of a novelist called Smythe, who at that time contributed to the London Journal, and whose work had its influence on the boy's future tales. Smythe's novels were full of stirring adventures, and many lads of that day, besides the aspiring novelist, were much impressed by them, and can even now recall incidents in them read so long ago as 1868!