Robert Louis Stevenson Part 8

In the younger generation, a cousin of Mr R. L. Stevenson, Mrs Beckwith Sitwell, has written much and pleasantly, princ.i.p.ally 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, Th.o.r.eau, 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 hara.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Th.o.r.eau, 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 s.p.a.ce.

In the early essays, republished in volume form in 1881 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, under the t.i.tle _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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.es 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 ent.i.tled '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' b.u.t.tons, 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 p.r.o.ne 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 a.s.sociated 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 ill.u.s.trated, 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--