Stevensoniana Part 3

In the Pacific air it sprang; it grew Among the silence of the Alpine air; In Scottish heather blossomed; and at last, By that unshapen sapphire, in whose face Spain, Italy, France, Algiers, and Tunis view Their introverted mountains, came to fruit.

Back now, my booklet, on the diving ship, And posting on the rails to home, return Home, and the friends whose honouring name you bear.

--_The Sketch, Feb. 26, 1896_

STEVENSON AND HAZLITT

Of the many books which Robert Louis Stevenson planned and discussed with his friends in his correspondence there is none, perhaps, which would have been more valued than the biography of William Hazlitt. Whenever Stevenson refers to Hazlitt, whether in his essay on "Walking Tours" or in his letters, he makes one wish he would say more. This is what he writes to Mr. Hammerton:

_"I am in treaty with Bentley for a Life of Hazlitt; I hope it will not fall through as I love the subject, and appear to have found a publisher who loves it also. That, I think, makes things more pleasant. You know I am a fervent Hazlitt.i.te; I mean regarding him as the English writer who has had the scantiest justice. Besides which, I am anxious to write biography; really, if I understand myself in quest of profit, I think it must be good to live with another man from birth to death. You have tried it, and know."_

If the qualification of a biographer is to understand his subject, Stevenson may be said to have been well qualified to write on Hazlitt. Mr.

Leslie Stephen has given us a fine critical estimate of Hazlitt the writer, and the late Mr. Ireland's prefatory memoir to his admirable selection from the Essays, with its enforced limitations, is an excellent piece of biographical condensation, but the life of the essayist has yet to be written. The subject has been tried by many others, but no one has quite captured the spirit of Hazlitt. Had the details of Hazlitt's life, with his pa.s.sionate hates and loves, been told by himself in the manner of his beloved Rousseau, he might have produced a book which for interest would have rivalled the _Confessions_, but failing such a work one must deplore that Stevenson was not encouraged to write on the subject.

_I. R., in London Academy._

ON BERANGER

_From the article by Robert Louis Stevenson in the Encyclopaedia Britannica._

....He worked deliberately, never wrote more than fifteen songs a year and often less, and was so fastidious that he has not preserved a quarter of what he finished. "I am a good little bit of a poet," he says himself, "clever in the craft, and a conscientious worker, to whom old airs and a modest choice of subjects (_le coin ou je me suis confine_), have brought some success." Nevertheless, he makes a figure of importance in literary history. When he first began to cultivate the _chanson_, this minor form lay under some contempt, and was restricted to slight subjects and a humorous guise of treatment. Gradually he filled these little chiseled toys of verbal perfection with ever more and more sentiment. From a date comparatively early he had determined to sing for the people. It was for this reason that he fled, as far as possible, the houses of his influential friends, and came back gladly to the garret and the street corner. Thus it was, also, that he came to acknowledge obligations to Emile Debraux, who had often stood between him and the ma.s.ses as interpreter, and given him the key-note of the popular humour. Now, he had observed in the songs of sailors, and all who labour, a prevailing tone of sadness; and so, as he grew more masterful in this sort of expression, he sought more and more after what is deep, serious, and constant in the thoughts of common men. The evolution was slow; and we can see in his own works examples of every stage, from that of witty indifference in fifty pieces of the first collection, to that of grave and even tragic feeling in _Les Souvenirs du Peuple_ or _Le Vieux Vagabond_. And this innovation involved another, which was as a sort of prelude to the great romantic movement. For the _chanson_, as he says himself, opened up to him a path in which his genius could develop itself at ease; he escaped, by this literary postern, from strict academical requirements, and had at his disposal the whole dictionary, four-fifths of which, according to La Harpe, were forbidden to the use of more regular and pretentious poetry.

If he still kept some of the old vocabulary, some of the old imagery, he was yet accustoming people to hear moving subjects treated in a manner more free and simple than heretofore; so that his was a sort of conservative reform, preceding the violent revolution of Victor Hugo and his army of uncompromising romantics. He seems himself to have had glimmerings of some such idea; but he withheld his full approval from the new movement on two grounds:--first, because the romantic school misused somewhat brutally the delicate organism of the French language; and second, as he wrote to Sainte-Beuve in 1832, because they adopted the motto of "Art for art," and set no object of public usefulness before them as they wrote. For himself (and this is the third point of importance) he had a strong sense of political responsibility. Public interest took a far higher place in his estimation than any private pa.s.sion or favour. He had little toleration for those erotic poets who sing their own loves and not the common sorrows of mankind, "who forget," to quote his own words, "forget beside their mistress those who labour before the Lord."...

STEVENSON OF THE LETTERS.

Long, hatchet face, black hair, and haunting gaze, That follows, as you move about the room, Ah, this is he who trod the darkening ways, And plucked the flowers upon the edge of doom.

The bright, sweet-scented flowers that star the road To death's dim dwelling, others heed them not, With sad eyes fixed upon that drear abode, Weeping, and wailing their unhappy lot.

But he went laughing down the shadowed way, The boy's heart leaping still within his breast, Weaving his garlands when his mood was gay, Mocking his sorrows with a solemn jest.

The high G.o.ds gave him wine to drink; a cup Of strong desire, of knowledge, and of pain, He set it to his lips and drank it up, Then smiling, turned unto his flowers again.

These are the flowers of that immortal strain, Which, when the hand that plucked them drops and dies, Still keep their radiant beauty free from stain, And breathe their fragrance through the centuries.

B. PAUL NEWMAN.

APROPOS VAILIMA LETTERS.

The account of an interview with Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, published in a San Francisco paper, is somewhat distressing reading. It raises over again the old question of the prudence of publishing a dead man's letters, when his widow is still alive, without her sanction. Mrs. Stevenson says that her late husband's friends--if such she still holds them to be--have hastened to make money out of the sc.r.a.ps and scrawls he sent them. The charge reads as an ugly one. But a moment's reflection supplies its modifications. Has Mr. Henley rushed into the market-place with his dead friend's letters? Has Mr. Charles Baxter? That was the old trio renowned in song and famous in fable. Of the newer friends--friends such as those he made in Bournemouth, Lady Sh.e.l.ley and the Misses Ashworth Taylor, the most attached a man ever had--not one has brought out of his or her treasury the delightful letters of "R. L. S." We have the Vailima Letters, it is true, but surely these must be published by the consent of Mrs. Stevenson and at her profit? We had also that letter which Mr. Gosse sent to the _Times_. And, as for that, it was, obviously given and not "sold"? In this particular letter, which was written in acknowledgment of a dedication of Mr. Gosse's poems to him, Stevenson congratulated his correspondent on the prospect of an old age mitigated by the society of his descendants. To heighten the picture, the man who had learned his craft so well, and could hardly elude it in his least-considered letters, introduced his own figure as a sort of foil--he was childless. That word, uttered with regret, has, perhaps, a pang which the heart of a widow might imagine she should be spared. Again, in one of the Vailima Letters, Stevenson refers to his having been happy only once in his life, and that, too, on the chance of its misinterpretation, may be ashes in Mrs.

Stevenson's mouth. Yet who does not know "R. L. S." as a man of moods? He is that, and nothing else, in some of his letters. And no chance phrase of his will ever be read to the discredit of Mrs. Stevenson--she may take the English reader's oath on that.

In one of his Vailima Letters Stevenson speaks of the "incredible" pains he has given to the first chapter of "Weir of Hermiston." Yet, after that even he remodelled it. It was worth the trouble, and the other seven and a bit are worthy of it. The very t.i.tle was a serious trouble to him.

"Braxfield" he would have liked it to be, but the judge of that name was not treated with enough historical care to warrant the adoption of it.

Another name, "The Hanging Judge," he abandoned; also "The Lord Justice Clerk," also "The Two Kirsties of Cauldstaneship," and "The Four Black Brothers." No doubt in choosing "Weir of Hermiston"--with some of the sound-romance of Dobell's "Keiths of Revelston" about it--he chose finally for the best.--_The Sketch._

[Ill.u.s.tration:

NOTICE OF A NEW FORM OF INTERMITTENT LIGHT FOR LIGHTHOUSES.

BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

_From the Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, Vol. VIII._, 1870-1871

EDINBURGH PRINTED BY NEILL AND COMPANY 1871]

A VISIT TO STEVENSON'S PACIFIC ISLE

It is a curious fact that Stevenson, whom we all regarded at home as being the personification of Samoa--indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that the average Englishman's idea of Samoa was "some island or other in the Pacific where Stevenson lives,"--has left very little behind him in the way of tradition or story in the island he loved so well. He lived in the midst of a society which, outside his immediate family surroundings, must have been eminently uncongenial to a man of his refined nature, yet he damaged his fame here, at least, by meddling in the petty squabbles which agitate the beach at Apia, and his "Footnote to History" has made him a host of enemies, notably among the German colony, who, by the mouth of one of their many prophets, condemned him to me as a writer of "stupid stinks!" And therefore he may have made a mistake in imagining himself a factor in the insoluble equation of Samoan affairs. It is to the natives that he was more attached than to the vague ideals which form their so-called political future. To them he was a great chief, "Tusitala Talmita" by name, and many a native I have spoken to mentioned him with real affection as a good friend and a man with a golden heart. Perhaps this is the praise he himself would have chosen rather than that of the white colony.

It is not my purpose, however, to dilate on his life in Samoa, nor indeed would it be possible to gather, from the ma.s.s of conflicting evidence, any rational account of his doings in his island home. It is of a pilgrimage which I made to visit his library that I would give some short account.

The room was walled from floor to ceiling with books, and I began to inspect them. To the left of the door were some "yellow backs," but few, nor did I see in his library much trash of any description. Next came books of travel in almost every country in the world, the bulk of them, however, dealing with the Pacific. From Capt. Cook down, it would be hard to name a Pacific travel book that has not found itself on the shelves at Vailima. Next, I am bound to say, came my first disappointment. I had always thought that Stevenson must have been a good cla.s.sical scholar, and had an idea formed, I know not how or whence, that a great style--and surely his may be justly called so--necessitated a close and intimate acquaintance with those cla.s.sical authors who--

"Upon the stretched forefinger of all Time Sparkle forever."

Yet I found cla.s.sics, indeed, but, alas! in Mr. Bohn's edition, while on the shelf beneath lay the originals uncut. It came to me as a positive blow to find the pages of the "Odyssey" uncared for and unread, save in some translation. Of Horace he had many and good editions, and they seemed read and used; but of the Greek tragedians I found only "Sophocles" in Prof. Campbell's translation, and no edition of his plays save a small "OEdipus the King." This was a great shock to me, for even supposing that Stevenson was only "a maker of phrases" (as many people will tell you, above all here, "for a prophet is not without honor," etc.), still phrases must have some basis in education, and a man who is evidently careless of his masters of ancient language is not likely to prove a brilliant coiner of words.

Turning with regret from this shelf, I came next upon a fine collection of French works, beginning with a complete edition of Balzac, which had evidently been read with care. Much French fiction was here--Daudet's "Tartarin," "Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine," "Les Rois en Exil," Guy de Maupa.s.sant, Prosper Merimee and a complete Victor Hugo, besides a swarm of the more ephemeral novels. Here, too, was a fine and complete edition of "Wellington's Dispatches" and several military treatises. Next to these came a good collection (be it always remembered that I speak of Samoa in Samoa, and 14,000 miles from the home of English and French publishing and printing) of historical works; Gibbon, of course, Milman, Von Ranke and many of the old French chroniclers--Philippe de Comines especially--read and marked, no doubt, when Stevenson was writing "The Black Arrow." One pa.s.sage so marked struck me as curious. Surely Stevenson was a man whom, from his writings, one would imagine to be practically without enemies; yet, in the light of events at Apia, and from what I have heard here, the quotation seems apposite; "Je scay bien que ma lange m'a porte grande hommage, aussi m'a-t-elle fait quelques fois de plaisir beaucoup, toutesfois c'est raison que je repare l'amende." Now these are almost the exact words which conclude the preface to the only deplorable book Stevenson ever wrote--his "Footnote to History," which has made him many enemies, and, I think, no friends--in fact, nothing but the vigorous description of the hurricane saves it from worthlessness. As history it is not trustworthy, and as a footnote it was ridiculous. However, to return to the books. There was a very complete collection of modern poets, hardly any of note being omitted. I even saw a copy of "J. K. S.'s" "Lapsus Calami," which surprised me, for Stevenson was neither a Cambridge nor a public school man.

Such, then, in brief, is a rough summary of the library of this remarkable man; many of the editions de luxe were packed away, but I believe what I saw was his working stock. We now opened a little gla.s.s door leading from the room into Stevenson's sanctum, where he dictated almost all his work.

It was quite a small room, lighted by two windows; and in one corner lay a bed with a mat "Samoan fashion" spread thereon, while beside it was a table with a bunch of withered flowers (the last he ever looked on), and which Mr. Chatfield has very properly never permitted to be removed. Here, in one corner, stood a small bookcase with editions of his own works; the walls were hung with engravings of ancestors--the only sign of his Scotch origin I noted in the house--while above the chimney-piece (the only chimney-pieces and fire-places in Samoa are at Vailima), were a lovely series of drawings of Gordon Browne, to ill.u.s.trate one of his later books, "The Island Nights' Adventures." These pictures, though only in black and white, breathe the spirit of the islands in a marvellous manner, especially remarkable being the ill.u.s.tration, "The Beach of Falesa." In a small bookcase over the head of the bed were some of his own books, a Shakespeare, and, what was more curious, "A Record of Remarkable Crimes and Criminals." I heard that Stevenson was fond of "supping full of horrors," and that would, of course, account for the inevitable murder or bloodshed which haunts his books; he was an avid reader of murders and crimes of all sorts. His mind was of a curious cast. Mr. Chatfield told me that on some days he was the most charming of companions--brilliant, witty and fascinating; on others, dull and morose beyond description, hardly uttering a word, and giving no sign of the wealth of tenderness and genial kindness that lurked within. As a host, it is agreed on all hands he was incomparable. His entertainment catered for the tastes of all, and in the sunshine of his delightful company all sorts and conditions of men were happy.

We left this room with a feeling of depression, and pa.s.sing through the other to the door, my eye fell on what I had not before noticed, the original of the delightful map which is the frontispiece to Treasure Island--a most beautiful piece of drawing, reminding me, in its quaint accompaniments of spouting dolphins and horn-blowing Tritons, as much as in its pretended accuracy, of those strange maps in the earlier editions of Gulliver, where Brobdingnag, Laputa, etc., are all laid out with geographical detail of lat.i.tude and longitude. The curious, sprawling writing of Flint and Billy Bones were in contrast to the fine workmanship of the rest of the map, which, save for some slight coa.r.s.eness in the shading of the steeper side of "Spygla.s.s Hill," might have been engraved.

The last thing I saw in the library was perhaps the most curious of all.

It was a navigating chart constructed by the natives of the Wallis Islands for their own use and guidance. I have since learned that such charts are used by the traders also who navigate these lat.i.tudes. The form of the charts is a parallelogram constructed on a framework of cane or other light wood. Across this parallelogram run vertically convex pieces of wood bent to show the general run or set of the wind and waves; cross currents are marked with cross pieces of wood showing their direction, and their force and variation are indicated on the slips of wood themselves (which are not half an inch wide) by means of signs and curious marks.

Islands are denoted on this wonderful piece of native work by cowrie sh.e.l.ls fastened to the framework. I suppose Stevenson must have picked this up on his travels among the islands, and I believe that although these charts are universally used in the Wallis group and are found perfectly correct, very few specimens of the kind have emerged as yet from those islands. I puzzled a long time to guess what it was, Mrs. Chatfield enjoying my mystification, which she herself had experienced when she first saw this remarkable map. One more fact I must mention about the library. In a corner I found a number of quarto volumes, well bound, containing apparently a continuous day-book of some of Stevenson's many voyages. It is to be hoped that these journals may some day be given to the world. Many and curious were the scenes he witnessed; various and entertaining the personages he must have met on his travels. He seems to have visited most of the many groups of islets with which the Pacific is so plentifully sprinkled.