Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  On August 2nd the party left for Braemar; on the journey, Stevenson first conceived the family of Durris- deer and the earlier part of The Master of Ballantrae, though both as yet were nameless, and it was six years and more before he began to set any word of it on paper.

  At Braemar, having more accommodation, they were able to enjoy the society of some of their friends — Mr. Colvin, Mr. Baxter and others. One of the first who arrived was Dr. Alexander Hay Japp, a new acquaintance, invited to discuss Thoreau, and to set Stevenson right upon one or two points in his history. Thoreau was duly discussed, but before the visitor left, he heard the first eight or ten chapters of Treasure Island then newly written, and carried off the fair copy of the manuscript, as far as it went, that he might offer it to a publisher. Stevenson himself has told the history of the book, his first book of which the public ever heard, in one of those articles of reminiscence condemned by his critics as premature, that now seem only too few and too short for all of us. Having first drawn the chart of an island (charts being to him ‘ of all books the least wearisome to read and the richest in matter’), he then from the names, marked at random, constructed a story in order to please his schoolboy stepson, who asked him to try and write ‘something interesting’; his father, another schoolboy in disguise, took fire at this and urged him on, helping him with lists and suggestions; uncon

  scious memory came to his aid, and Treasure Island was half written.1

  Mr. Gosse immediately succeeded Dr. Japp as the family visitor, and under his congenial influence the story, which at first was called The Sea Cook, grew at the rate of a chapter a day; before Stevenson left Braemar, nineteen chapters had been written.2 As soon as the idea of publication occurred, the book had been intended for Messrs. Routledge, but by Dr. Japp’s good offices it was accepted for Young Folks by Mr. Henderson, the proprietor, when he saw the opening chapters and heard an outline of the story.

  In this summer Stevenson first began to write the verses for children, which were afterwards published in the Child’s Garden. His mother tells how she had Miss Kate Greenaway’s Birthday Book for Children, with verses by Mrs. Sale Barker, then newly published, and how Louis took it up one day, and saying, ‘ These are rather nice rhymes, and I don’t think they would be difficult to do,’ proceeded to try his hand. About fourteen numbers seem to have been written in the Highlands, and apparently after three more had been added, they were then discontinued for a time.

  But in the meanwhile the weather grew suddenly bad; Stevenson made a hurried flight (in a respirator) from Braemar on September 23rd, and after a few days in Edinburgh, passed on to London. Here he called on his new publisher; ‘a very amusing visit indeed; ordered away by the clerks, who refused loudly to believe I had any business; and at last received most kindly by Mr. Henderson.’

  From London they passed to Paris and so to Davos, which they reached on October 18th. This year they had taken for the winter a chalet belonging to the Hotel 1 {My First Book’: Juvenilia, .

  2 I am greatly obliged both to Mr. Gosse and to Dr. Japp for their recollections of this time. See also the Academy, lviii., p, 209, 237.

  Buol, where Symonds was still living; they hired a servant of their own, and only occasionally took meals in the hotel.

  This winter differed considerably from the last. Stevenson was in better health, and being accustomed to the climate, and also less subject to interruption, produced a great deal more work, though, as before, a certain proportion of his labours was futile. Symonds was anxious that he should write an essay or essays on the Characters of Theophrastus, but Treasure Island was already beginning its serial course, with the latter half of it yet unwritten. Fortunately the inspiration that had failed the author returned, the last fourteen chapters took but a fortnight, and at the second wave the book was finished as easily as it was begun.

  Again he started eagerly upon a new book, a Life of Hazlitt, he had long been wanting to write. There is a legend which is significant, although it cannot now be verified, that he had applied for a commission for this subject in some biographical series, but was refused on the ground that neither he nor his theme was of sufficient importance to justify their inclusion. Now he writes gleefully to his father: ‘ I am in treaty with Bentley (Colvin again) for a Hazlitt! Is not that splendid? There will be piles of labour, but the book should be good. This will please you, will it not? Biography anyway, and a very interesting and sad one.’ He had long made a favourite study of the essays of his author, whose paper ‘On the Spirit of Obligations’ had ‘been a turning-point’ in his life. From no writer does he quote more freely, and he couples Hazlitt with Sterne and Heine as the best of companions on a walking tour. But a wider study of his writings produced a cooler feeling, and the Liber Amoris is said to have created a fiftal distaste, which rendered any continued investigation or sympathetic treatment impossible.

  Treasure Island, by ‘ Captain George North,’ had been VOL. 1. N running an obscure career in the pages of its magazine from October to January, openly mocked at by more than one indignant reader. On its completion Stevenson announced to his father his intention of rewriting ‘the whole latter part, lightening and siccating throughout.’ But it did not make its appearance as a book till nearly two years later.

  The Scottish history had fallen into abeyance, or had come down to an article on ‘ Burt, Boswell, Mrs. Grant, and Scott,’ and a paper on the Glenure murder, afterwards the central incident in Kidnapped, but neither of these was even begun. The volume of Familiar Studies was prepared for press, and the critical preface was written. The two papers on Knox the author now found dull, and he even hesitated about keeping them back as material for a new life of the great Scottish statesman and Reformer.

  About this time also he had a good deal of correspondence with Mr. Gosse on a work he had proposed they should undertake in collaboration—’ a re-telling, in choice literary form, of the most picturesque murder cases of the last hundred years. We were to visit the scenes of these crimes,’ says Mr. Gosse, ‘and turn over the evidence. The great thing, Louis said, was not to begin to write until we were thoroughly alarmed. “ These things must be done, my boy, under the very shudder of the goose- flesh.” We were to begin with the “ Story of the Red Barn,” which is indeed a tale pre-eminently worthy to be retold by Stevenson. But the scene never came off, and is another of the dead leaves in his Vallombrosa.’1

  In January Stevenson gives an irresistible description of himself: ‘ I dawdle on the balcony, read and write, and have fits of conscience and indigestion. The ingenious human mind, face to face with something it downright ought to do, does something else. But the relief is temporary.’

  1 Critical Kit cat sy .

  Temporary also was the idleness. The Silverado Squatters, the record of the circumstances of his honeymoon, was written, and no less than five magazine articles, including the first part of ‘Talk and Talkers’ and the ‘ Gossip on Romance.’ Still this did not satisfy him. He wrote to his mother: ‘ I work, work away, and get nothing or but little done; it is slow, slow, slow; but I sit from four to five hours at it, and read all the rest of the time for Hazlitt.’ And to Charles Baxter a little later he wrote: ‘ I am getting a slow, steady, sluggish stream of ink over paper, and shall do better this year than last.’ Before April he can say: ‘ I have written something like thirty-five thousand words since I have been here, which shows at least I have been industrious.’1

  To this time apparently belong the verses called ‘ The Celestial Surgeon,’ which are as characteristic of Stevenson as anything he ever wrote. An eloquent modern preacher treating of the deadly sin of accidie, ‘gloom and sloth and irritation,’ the opposite of ‘the vertue that is called fortitude or strength,’ quotes these ‘ graceful, noble lines’ at length, and says,’ Surely no poet of the present day, and none, perhaps, since Dante, has so truly told of the inner character of accidie, or touched more skilfully the secret of its sinfulness.’2

  Whether in spite or in c
onsequence of his harder work, his health continued to improve, notwithstanding great anxiety about his wife, who was affected by the high elevation. Early in December she was sent to Zurich and then to Berne with indifferent results. Finally, Stevenson went down and brought her home on Christmas Day, the party travelling seven hours in an open sleigh in the snow, but fortunately nobody was the worse. Though frequently ailing, she managed with two short changes 1 Cf. Letters, i. 237.

  2 The Right Rev. Dr. Paget, Bishop of Oxford. The Spirit of Discipline: Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1891.

  to stay out the necessary season, but was fit for little, and quite unable to take charge of the house. To cheer her depression, Symonds and her husband, and sometimes Mr. Horatio Brown, would forego their walk and spend the afternoon at her bedside. Stevenson would fling himself upon the bed with his feet to the pillow, and the hours passed in the most animated and varied discussion. Symonds, it will be remembered, was the Opalstein of ‘Talk and Talkers.’ On the first reading of that essay he affected indignation: ‘ Louis Stevenson, what do you mean by describing me as a moonlight serenader?’ The sketch, however, gives, I believe, a real impression of the qualities of his talk, and it is only to be regretted that he has nowhere done the same for his companion.

  Housekeeping was a burden and a doubtful economy, but the chalet in other respects was a great success. For one thing, it got the sun an hour sooner, and kept it an hour later than the hotels; for another, it provided its master with a spot where he was at liberty to create and develop for himself the amusement which pleased him best of all — the game of war. His childish enthusiasm about the army in the Crimea will be remembered, though it was but the common feeling of the children of this country at the time. Deeds of arms would always raise a thrill in his breast, but so far as I know there was no outward sign of this interest in warfare or strategy during his youth or early manhood. In December 1878 he wrote from the Savile Club: ‘ I am in such glee about Peiwar.1 I declared yesterday I was going to add the name to mine, and be Mr. Peiwar Stevenson for the future.’ In October 1880, an old general who was a friend of the family came to see him in London, and brought as a present Sir Edward Hamley’s Operations of War. R. A. M. Stevenson was there at the time, and both cousins were transported with enthusiasm. ‘ I 1 Lord Roberts’s brilliant victory over the Afghans.

  am drowned in it a thousand fathom deep/ wrote Louis, ‘and “O that I had been a soldier” is still my cry.’ He had never made any affectation of abandoning a pursuit he was supposed to have outgrown. He clung to the colouring of prints and to childish paintings long after most boys of his age have given up the diversions of the nursery. A large part of the winter of 1877 he spent in building with toy-bricks in his room at Heriot Row, and regretted that he had not been an architect. As Bishop Earle said of a child,’ We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game is our earnest’: it often is not wisdom, but dul- ness, that keeps men from joining in the livelier fancies of children. Stevenson, deterred by no false shame, extracted from toys much of the zest of reality, and raised their employment almost to the intensity of active life. And now, beginning to help his schoolboy with games, he became absorbed in the pursuit, and developed a kriegspiel of his own, adapted to the conditions under which, of necessity, he played. While it was impossible for him to secure the services of an umpire, this very independence allowed the operations to be protracted for any length of time needed for the completion of an entire campaign. But his enthusiasm and the thoroughness and ingenuity he exhibited are best described in the account given by his adversary, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne:— ‘The abiding spirit of the child in him was seldom shown in more lively fashion than during those days of exile at Davos, where he brought a boy’s eagerness, a man’s intellect, a novelist’s imagination, into the varied business of my holiday hours; the printing-press, the toy- theatre, the tin soldiers, all engaged his attention. Of these, however, the tin soldiers most took his fancy; and the war game was constantly improved and elaborated, until, from a few hours, a “war” took weeks to play, and the critical operations in the attic monopolised half our thoughts. This attic was a most chilly and dismal spot, reached by a crazy ladder, and unlit save for a single frosted window; so low at the eaves and so dark that we could seldom stand upright, nor see without a candle. Upon the attic floor a map was roughly drawn in chalks of different colours, with mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, and roads of two classes. Here we would play by the hour, with tingling fingers and stiffening knees, and an intentness, zest, and excitement that I shall never forget. The mimic battalions marched and counter-marched, changed by measured evolutions from column formation into line, with cavalry screens in front and massed supports behind, in the most approved military fashion of to-day. It was war in miniature, even to the making and destruction of bridges, the intrenching of camps; good and bad weather, with corresponding influence on the roads; siege and horse artillery, proportionately slow, as compared to the speed of unimpeded foot, and proportionately expensive in the upkeep; and an exacting commissariat added the last touch of verisimilitude. Four men formed the regiment or unit, and our shots were in proportion to our units and amount of our ammunition. The troops carried carts of printers’ “ems” — twenty “ ems “ to each cart — and for every shot taken an “ em “ had to be paid into the base, from which fresh supplies could be slowly drawn in empty carts returned for the purpose.’1

  The strength of the enemy in any given spot could only be ascertained according to strictly defined regulations, and an attempt was even made to mark certain districts as unhealthy and to settle by the hazard of the dice-box the losses incurred by all troops passing through them.

  During one war Stevenson chronicled the operations in a series of extracts from the Glendarule Times and the Yallobally Record, until the editor of the latter sheet was hanged by order of General Osbourne and its place supplied by the less offensive Herald.

  1 Scribbler’s Magazine, December 1898, .

  Year after year he reverted to the game, and even in Samoa there was a campaign room with the map coloured on the floor, although the painful realities of actual warfare, either present or imminent, occupied all our thoughts for the closing period of Stevenson’s life.

  But busy as he was this winter, he had time not only for this game, but also, turning aside to help young Osbourne with his printing, he first wrote verses for the toy-press, and then, getting hold of a bit of rough wood, began to design and cut illustrations for his text, or in some cases to create pictures which a text must elucidate.

  In February he sent to his parents 1 two woodcuts of my own cutting; they are moral emblems; one represents “ anger,” the other “ pride scorning poverty.” They will appear among others, accompanied by verses, in my new work published by S. L. Osbourne. If my father does not enjoy these, he is no true man.’ And to his mother: ‘Wood-engraving has suddenly drave between me and the sun. I dote on wood-engraving. I’m a made man for life. I’ve an amusement at last.’

  Of these blocks about two dozen in all were cut, most of them by Stevenson’s own hands, though the elephant, at any rate, was due to his wife, and 1 the sacred ibis in the distance’ was merely the result of an accident turned to advantage. He had in his boyhood received a few lessons in drawing as a polite accomplishment: later he found great difficulty in the mechanical work of his original profession, in which of course he had been specially trained. Thus, in 1868, he wrote to his mother, ‘ It is awful how slowly I draw and how ill. Barbizon seemed to rouse in him no tendency to express himself in line or colour, and it was not till he was alone at Monastier in 1878 that he made for his own pleasure such sketches as any grown man with no technical education might attempt.

  Art criticism is for the expert; I will only say that to me these sketches seem to show an excellent eye for the configuration of the country. But after this Stevenson seems to have drawn no more landscape until, his camera being lost, he tried his hand at representing some of the coast scenery
in the Marquesas, and his sketch, redrawn by Mr. Charles Wyllie, gives me a very vivid impression of the scenery of an island I have never visited.

  It would be very easy to overrate not merely the importance but even the interest of these blocks. Stevenson soon obtained some pear-wood, and then, after he returned to Scotland, he procured box; on this latter material the illustrations of The Graver and the Pen were cut, but their merits are impaired rather than heightened by the improved technique.

  That Stevenson had an eye for country, as I have said, for clouds, for water, and for the action of the human figure, the cuts are a clear proof. The most ridiculous of his puppets are full of life, from the ‘industrious pirate’ with his spyglass, to Robin ‘who has that Abbot stuck as the red hunter spears the buck.’ One and all, they show in their rough state a touch full of spirit and original quality, that teaching might have refined away.1

  In April again the family quitted the Alps, but this year with welcome news. ‘ We now leave Davos for good, I trust, Dr. Ruedi giving me leave to live in France, fifteen miles as the crow flies from the sea, and if possible near a fir wood. This is a great blessing: I hope I am grateful.’

  They crossed the Channel with little delay; Louis stayed first at Weybridge, and then at Burford Bridge, where he renewed his friendship with Mr. George Meredith. By May 20th he was in Edinburgh, and there spent most of June, though he made a week’s expedition with his father to Lochearnhead, hard by the Braes of Balquhidder. Here he made inquiries about 1 The Studio, Winter number, 1896-97. Robert Louis Stevenson, Illustrator. By Joseph Pennell. With twelve illustrations.

  the Appin murder, perpetrated only forty miles away, and was successful in finding some local traditions about the murderer still extant.1

  The flow of work at the beginning of the year was followed by a long period of unproductiveness after he returned to this country. He had an article in each number of the Cornhill from April to August, but except the second part of ‘Talk and Talkers’ these had been written at Davos. After this his connection with the magazine came to an end. During the past seven years its readers had grown accustomed to look eagerly every month in hope of finding an article by R. L. S., and all its rivals have, by comparison, ever since seemed conventional and dull. Mr. Leslie Stephen resigned the editorship in 1883 to the late James Payn, who was no less a friend of Stevenson and an admirer of his work, but the price of the magazine was reduced and its character somewhat modified. In August the New Arabian Nights, long withheld by the advice of an experienced publisher, were issued in two volumes by Messrs. Chatto and Windus, and reached a second edition before the end of the year.