A list of his writings will be found in the appendix, arranged under separate years. It is therefore unnecessary in this place to do more than record his general progress, adding merely a detached note on any point of interest as it arises, or quoting his own criticisms, which, for the most part, are singularly shrewd and free from bias.
In September 1873 he wrote: ‘There is no word of “Roads”; I suspect the Saturday Review must have looked darkly upon it — so be it; we must just try to do something better/ And so, as we have seen, the article appeared in the Portfolio for December. Three weeks later, in a letter to his mother, he expressed the opinion that ‘it is quite the best thing I have ever done, to my taste. There are things expressed in it far harder to express than in anything else I ever had; and that, after all, is the great point. As for style, ga viendra peut-etre.’
In 1874 he had five articles in four different magazines: these included ‘ Ordered South’ in Macmillarts, and, still more important, the paper on ‘ Victor Hugo’s Romances’ in the Cornhill. The former, which took him three months to write, was his first work ever republished in its original form; the latter, which was anonymous, but afterwards reappeared in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, marked, in his own judgment, the beginning of his command of style. Long afterwards in Samoa, in answer to a question, he told me that in this essay he had first found himself able to say several things in the way in which he felt they should be said. It may also be noticed that this was his first appearance in the magazine which by the discernment of Mr. Leslie Stephen did so much for him in taking his early work.
This year he proposed to himself, and began to read for, a book on four great Scotsmen — Knox, Hume, Burns, and Scott. All that ever came of it, and he had the subjects a long time in his mind, were the essays on Burns and Knox, which dealt only with one aspect of either character At this time he was working at an essay on Walt Whitman, but his views did not find expression till 1878. The papers on Knox were read before the Speculative Society in November 1874 and January 1875. Late in the former year he was making another assault upon the stronghold of the Novel with a tale called ‘When the Devil was Well,’ dealing with the adventures of an Italian sculptor of the fifteenth century. It was finished the next year, and the unfavourable opinion of his friends was accepted as final.
1875 saw nothing published except two double articles, the ‘Autumn Effect’ and ‘ Knox,’ the notice of B£ranger in the Encyclopedia Britannica,, and the pamphlet entitled An Appeal to the Clergy of the Church of Scotland. This last had been set up in type the preceding autumn, and was an appeal to the Scottish clergy to use the Church Patronage Act of 1874 as an opportunity for effacing differences between their own communion and the dissenting bodies, and to do all in their power to restore religious unity.
In January 1875 Stevenson proposed to The Academy a series of papers on the Parnassiens — de Banville, Coppee, Soulary, and Prudhomme — and when this was not accepted, he devoted a good deal of his time to the study of the French literature of the fifteenth century, which resulted in the articles on Villon and Charles of Orleans. He was filled with enthusiasm for Joan of Arc, a devotion and also a cool-headed admiration which he never lost. He projected a series of articles which should include the Maid, Louis XI., and Ren£ of Anjou. The same reading led to the experiments in the French verse metres of that date which were almost contemporary with the work of Mr. Andrew Lang and Mr. Austin Dobson, who brought the Ballade and Rondeau back to favour in England. Stevenson, however, never published any of these attempts, and except two translations published in the Letters, and one set preserved by Mr. Lang, I believe the characteristic verses at the head of this chapter are the only finished piece which survives.
A prose poem on ‘ The Spirit of the Spring’ unfortunately went astray, but one or two short studies of the same date and in a similar vein indicate that it was no masterpiece. After the Italian story was finished, he took up one of his old tales called The Country Dance, which likewise came to nothing; and also wrote The Story of King Matthias’ Hunting Horn, of which I only know that it was ‘ wild and fantastic.’
As the result of a condensation of Burns’s life and a criticism of his works for the Encyclopedia Britannica, the famous Scotsmen had now become ‘ Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns.’ The editor of the Encyclopedia found the Burns too critical, and too much at variance with the accepted Scottish tradition, and though payment was made for it, it was not used. Stevenson wrote: ‘ 8th June 1876. — I suppose you are perfectly right in saying there was a want of enthusiasm about the article. To say truth, I had, I fancy, an exaggerated idea of the gravity of an encyclopaedia, and wished to give mere bones, and to make no statements that should seem even warm. And perhaps also, I may have a little latent cynicism, which comes out when I am at work. I believe you are right in saying I had not said enough of what is highest and best in him. Such a topic is disheartening; the clay feet are easier dealt with than the golden head.’
To 1876 we owe the only piece of dramatic criticism that Stevenson ever published, and four articles in the Cornhill Magazine, which from this time onward marked all his contributions to its pages with the initials R. L. S. The full names of a few very eminent authors had been given from the commencement; but about the beginning of Mr. Leslie Stephen’s editorship, in 1871, a second rank of distinction was established by allowing an equally small number of writers to denote their articles by their initials. All Stevenson’s papers except the first (1874J were thus distinguished; and though the R L. S. caused them at first to be frequently attributed to the editor, yet it was under these initials that Stevenson first won recognition in the select circle which knew and appreciated literature.
A novel, The Hair Trunk, or The Ideal Commonwealth, was begun and partly carried out at this time. A party of friends meeting at Cambridge proposes to form a colony, which is to be established in ‘ Navigator’s Island ‘ — Samoa, of all places — of which the author had heard only the year before from his connection, the Hon. J. Seed, formerly Secretary to the Customs and Marine Departments of New Zealand,1 who had been sent to report upon the islands by the New Zealand Government. In the Windbound Arethusa was another attempt of the same date which attained no better result.
The year 1876 thrice saw the rejection of the article on ‘ Some Portraits by Raeburn,’ afterwards included in Virginibus Puerisque. It was refused in turn by the Cornhill the Pall Mall Gazette, and Blackwoods Magazine, though it is only fair to Mr. Stephen to say that he helped the author in trying to place it elsewhere. It was seldom that Stevenson either continued, or was driven, to try his fortune elsewhere with a rejected article. But this case is all the more interesting because he tried again and again, and was clearly in the right. Editors cannot always follow their judgment or their inclinations, but articles such as the Raeburn seldom come their way.
The event of the year was, of course, the canoe voyage. Stevenson, as we have already seen, had for some time shared his friends’ taste for navigating the Firth of Forth in these craft, which the enthusiasm of ‘Rob Roy’ Macgregor had made popular ten years before. A good deal of time was spent, as we have seen, on the river at Grez, and canoes were introduced there by the English colony, headed by Sir Walter Simpson and his brother, 1 Letters, i. 95.
and by R. A. M. Stevenson, who devised a leather canoe of his own ‘ with a niche for everything/ and, as his friends said,’ a place for nothing.’ Mr. Warington Baden-Powell had published in the pages of the Cornhill Magazine in 1870 the log of the Nautilus and Isis canoes on a journey through Sweden and on the Baltic. But the idea of the journey itself seems to have been suggested by Our Autumn Holiday on French Rivers, by Mr. J. L. Molloy, published in 1874, the account of a journey up the Seine and down the Loire in a four-oared outrigger.
That the cruise itself was on the whole rather a cheerless experience is seen by the following letter, in which Stevenson lets us behind the scenes, and for once even grumbles a little.
1
Comptigne, 9th Sept. 1876. [Canoe Voyage.]
4 We have had deplorable weather quite steady ever since the start; not one day without heavy showers; and generally much wind and cold wind forby. ... I must say it has sometimes required a stout heart; and sometimes one could not help sympathising inwardly with the French folk who hold up their hands in astonishment over our pleasure journey. Indeed I do not know that I would have stuck to it as I have done, if it had not been for professional purposes; for an easy book may be written and sold, with mighty little brains about it, where the journey is of a certain seriousness and can be named. I mean, a book about a journey from York to London must be clever; a book about the Caucasus may be what you will. Now I mean to make this journey at least a curious one; it won’t be finished these vacations.
‘ Hitherto a curious one it has been; and above all in its influence on S. and me. I wake at six every morning; and we are generally in bed and asleep before half-past nine. Last night I found my way to my room with a dark cloud of sleep over my shoulders, so thick that the candle burnt red at about the hour of 8.40. If that isn’t healthy, egad, I wonder what is.’
CHAPTER VII
TRANSITION — 1876-79
‘ You may paddle all day long; but it is when you come back at nightfall, and look in at the familiar room, that you find Love or Death awaiting you beside the stove; and the most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.’ The concluding words of ‘An Inland Voyage
The next three years of Stevenson’s life were so closely similar to the three preceding, that at first sight, but for his own selection of the age of five-and-twenty as the limit of youth, it might seem almost unnecessary to mark any division between them. He continued to spend his time between France, London, and Edinburgh, to lead a more or less independent life, and to give the best of his talents and industry to his now recognised profession. The year 1877 was marked by the acceptance of the first of his stories ever printed — A Lodging for the Night — and from that date his fiction began to take its place beside, and gradually to supersede, the essays with which his career had opened. The month of May 1878 saw not only the appearance of his first book — An Inland Voyage — but also the beginning of his two first serial publications — the New Arabian Nights and the Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh; and they were followed at the end of the year by the Edinburgh in book form, and in June 1879 by the Travels with a Donkey. All these, however, were but a measure of the author’s growing reputation, and of the facility with which he could now find a publisher.
Original as these writings were, and unlike the work of his contemporaries, none of them constituted any new departure in his life or any alteration in his attitude to the world: and the change that now came arrived from another quarter. His friendships, as we have seen, counted for a great deal with Stevenson, and though the roll of them was not yet closed, and ended indeed only at his death, it was at the beginning of this period that he made the acquaintance which affected him more than any other — he now met for the first time the lady who was afterwards to be his wife.
Already it is becoming difficult to realise that there was a time not long distant when study for all the professions, including that of art, was hedged about with arbitrary restrictions for women. At the date of which I am speaking these limitations had been removed to some extent in Paris as far as the studios were concerned, but the natural consequences had not yet followed in country quarters, and women artists were as yet unknown in any of the colonies about Fontainebleau. Hitherto these societies had been nearly as free from the female element as were afterwards the early novels of Stevenson himself: the landlady, the chambermaid, the peasant girl passed across the stage, but the leading rdles were filled by men alone. But when Stevenson and Sir Walter Simpson, the ‘ Arethusa’ and the ‘ Cigarette/ returned from the Inland Voyage to their quarters at Grez, they found the colony in trepidation at the expected arrival of the invader.
The new-comers, however, were neither numerous nor formidable; being only an American lady and her two children — a young girl and a boy. Mrs. Osbourne had seen her domestic happiness break up in California, and had come to France for the education of her family. She and her daughter had thrown themselves with ardour into the pursuit of painting, and thus became acquainted with some of the English and American artists in Paris.
After profiting by the opportunities afforded them in the capital, they were in search of country lodgings, and accordingly, having taken counsel with their artist friends, they came to Grez.
So here for the first time Stevenson saw the woman whom Fate had brought half-way across the world to meet him. He straightway fell in love; he knew his own mind, and in spite of all dissuasions and difficulties, his choice never wavered. The difficulties were so great and hope so remote that nothing was said to his parents or to any but two or three of his closest friends. But in the meantime life took on a cheerful hue, and the autumn passed brightly for them all until the middle of October,1 when Stevenson must return to Edinburgh, there to spend the winter.
In January 1877 he came to London for a fortnight, and first met Mr. Gosse, who, being immediately added to the ranks of his intimate friends, has given us a most vivid and charming description of the effect produced on strangers at that time by Stevenson.
‘It was in 1877,2 or late that I was presented to Stevenson, at the old Savile Club, by Mr. Sidney Colvin, who thereupon left us to our devices. We went downstairs and lunched together, and then we adjourned to the smoking-room. As twilight came on I tore myself away, but Stevenson walked with me across Hyde Park, and nearly to my house. He had an engagement, and so had I, but I walked a mile or two back with him. The fountains of talk had been unsealed, and they drowned the conventions. I came home dazzled with my new friend, saying, as Constance does of Arthur, “ Was ever such a gracious creature born?”
. . Those who have written about him from later
1 To the next year belongs the charcoal drawing made’by Mrs. Osbourne of her future husband, which has been redrawn by Mr. T. Blake Wirgman, and stands at the beginning of this volume.
2 Critical Kitcats: London, William Heinemann, 1896, p. 278.
impressions than those ot which I speak, seem to me to give insufficient prominence to the gaiety of Stevenson. It was his cardinal quality in those early days. A childlike mirth leaped and danced in him; he-seemed to skip upon the hills of life. He was simply bubbling with quips and jests; his inherent earnestness or passion about abstract things was incessantly relieved by jocosity; and when he had built one of his intellectual castles in the sand, a wave of humour was certain to sweep in and destroy it. I cannot, for the life of me, recall any of his jokes; and written down in cold blood, they might not be funny if I did. They were not wit so much as humanity, the many-sided outlook upon life. I am anxious that his laughter-loving mood should not be forgotten, because later on it was partly, but I think never wholly, quenched by ill-health, responsibility, and the advance of years. He was often, in the old days, excessively and delightfully silly — silly with the silliness of an inspired schoolboy; and I am afraid that our laughter sometimes sounded ill in the ears of age. . . .
‘My experience of Stevenson during these first years was confined to London, upon which he would make sudden piratical descents, staying a few days or weeks, and melting into air again. He was much at my house; and it must be told that my wife and I, as young married people, had possessed ourselves of a house too large for our slender means immediately to furnish. The one person who thoroughly approved of our great, bare, absurd drawing-room was Louis, who very earnestly dealt with us on the immorality of chairs and tables, and desired us to sit always, as he delighted to sit, upon hassocks on the floor. Nevertheless, as armchairs and settees straggled into existence, he handsomely consented to use them, although never in the usual way, but with his legs thrown sideways over the arms of them, or the head of a sofa treated as a perch. In particular, a certain shelf, with cupboards below, attached to a book
case, is worn with the person of Stevenson, who would spend half an evening while passionately discussing some great question of morality or literature, leaping sideways in a seated posture to the length of this shelf, and then back again. He was eminently peripatetic, too, and never better company than walking in the street, this exercise seeming to inflame his fancy.’
It was in these years especially that he gave the impression of something transitory and unreal, sometimes almost inhuman.
cHe was careful, as I have hardly known any other man to be, not to allow himself to be burdened by the weight of material things. It was quite a jest with us that he never acquired any possessions. In the midst of those who produced books, pictures, prints, bric-a-brac, none of these things ever stuck to Stevenson. There are some deep-sea creatures, the early part of whose life is spent dancing through the waters; at length some sucker or tentacle touches a rock, adheres, pulls down more tentacles, until the creature is caught there, stationary for the remainder of its existence. So it happens to men, and Stevenson’s friends caught the ground with a house, a fixed employment, a ‘stake in life’; he alone kept dancing in the free element, unattached.’1
These were the days when he most frequented the Savile Club, and the lightest and most vivacious part of him there came to the surface. He might spend the morning in work or business, and would then come to the Club for luncheon. If he were so fortunate as to find any congenial companions disengaged, or to induce them to throw over their engagements, he would lead them off to the smoking-room, and there spend an afternoon in the highest spirits and the most brilliant and audacious talk.
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Page 824
