Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  This was the preoccupied, unhappy young man whom Leslie Stephen took with him to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary one day in February 1875. Stephen was in the city to give two lectures on the Alps and had decided to pay a visit not only to ‘Colvin’s friend’, but to another young contributor to the Cornhill who was at that time a long-term patient at the Infirmary. William Ernest Henley, a twenty-six-year-old would-be writer suffering from necrosis of the bone, had arrived in Edinburgh eighteen months earlier. He had already had his left leg amputated below the knee (as a result of tuberculosis), and had been told the second foot was beyond cure, but Henley had heard of the pioneering work of the Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Lister, and came north in 1873 to be treated by him. Lister’s controversial belief was that antiseptics could be used to prevent as well as treat putrefaction, and under his care, with several operations and whole years of bed rest, Henley’s condition was gradually stabilising.

  Stephen had been touched by the pathos of Henley’s situation and decided to take Stevenson along with him on his second visit to the gloomy old hospital in the hope that ‘Colvin’s friend’ might be able to lend Henley books and visit him. It was a judicious move: Stevenson was deeply impressed by Henley and wrote enthusiastically to Mrs Sitwell about the ‘bit of a poet’ he had just met:

  It was very sad to see him there, in a little room with two beds, and a couple of sick children in the other bed; a girl came in to visit the children and played dominoes on the counterpane with them; the gas flared and crackled, the fire burned in a dull economical way; Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs and the poor fellow sat up in his bed, with his hair and his beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a King’s Palace, or the great King’s Palace of the blue air. He has taught himself two languages since he has been lying there. I shall try to be of use to him.64

  Henley’s intellectual energy, his enormous pleasure in talk and company, were evident from the first, as was his spirited response to his dire predicament and his tormentingly long stay in the hospital. Here was someone whom Louis could help, someone much worse off than himself, seriously ill, and without family or money. But the taint of patronage, which coloured the whole relationship, is also there from the start, with that rather priggish ‘I shall try to be of use to him.’ Stevenson’s second mention of Henley in his letters is to ‘my poet’, to Bob he called him ‘a poor ass in the infirmary’,65 and only a year later he was describing Henley to a woman he wanted to impress as his ‘pensioner in the hospital’.

  The ‘poor ass’ had been writing some remarkable poems while laid up. Henley became famous later for poems that addressed the nation’s hunger for moral uplift, providing it with a classic text, ‘Invictus’, whose strongly accented rhythms and bracing sentiments have burned themselves into the popular imagination in the same way that Kipling’s ‘If –’ began to do two decades later:

  It matters not how strait the gate

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate

  I am the captain of my soul.

  ‘Invictus’ was written in 1875 (and Stevenson must have been one of its first readers, for he was already quoting from it that year66), but the ‘In Hospital’ sequence, written at approximately the same time, was very different. ‘In Hospital’ included free-verse portraits of Dr Lister, the nurses, the house-surgeon, the ‘scrubber’ and others, and impressionistic poems such as ‘Waiting’ and ‘Interior’. The dismal experience of being a long-term patient in a dark backroom, where the dripping cistern is the only indication of time passing, is perfectly conveyed in ‘Pastoral’, ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Vigil’:

  Lived on one’s back,

  In the long hours of repose

  Life is a practical nightmare

  Hideous asleep or awake.67

  For the 1870s, when they were written, these poems were truly innovative, though by the time they were published in book form in 1888 Henley had given up writing in this vein.

  One of the sequence, a sonnet called ‘Apparition’, is Henley’s often-quoted portrait of Stevenson that begins ‘Thin-legged! thinchested! slight unspeakably’, and ends:

  A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,

  Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,

  And something of the Shorter Catechist.68

  But another of Henley’s poems about Stevenson, ‘Ballade, R.L.S.’, not published until 1974, gives a rather more intimate portrait of

  An Ariel quick through all his veins

  With sex and temperament and style;

  All eloquence and balls and brains;

  Heroic and also infantile.

  The affectionately bantering tone carries right through the poem to ‘Wise, passionate, swaggering, puerile’ in the last stanza. The forthright, critical spirit that Henley displays here was the very thing that attracted Stevenson to him. Opinionated, quarrelsome, with his huge laugh and super-sized vitality, Henley was like a sharper and more inventive Baxter, a boon companion whose restless intelligence was a match for Stevenson’s own.

  The friendship was cemented by Stevenson’s inspired plan to take Henley out of hospital on a couple of occasions in a carriage (probably the swanky Stevenson barouche, of which Thomas was very proud). To a passer-by it must have been peculiar to see the stick-thin, boyish Stevenson carrying a burly, bearded one-legged man down the long staircase of the Infirmary and staggering out to where the vehicle waited. They drove out of the city to see the new spring greenery and the cherry blossom, stopping on bridges ‘to let him enjoy the great cry of green that goes up to Heaven out of the river beds’:

  he asked (more than once) ‘What noise is that?’ – ‘The water.’ – ‘O’ almost incredulously; and then quite a long while after: ‘Do you know the noise of the water astonished me very much.’69

  Henley remembered these drives all his life with intense happiness, and celebrated them in the last poem of his ‘In Hospital’ sequence, ‘Discharged’:

  Carry me out

  Into the wind and the sunshine,

  Into the beautiful world.

  O, the wonder, the spell of the streets!

  The stature and strength of the horses,

  The rustle and echo of footfalls,

  The flat roar and rattle of wheels!

  A swift tram floats huge on us …

  It’s a dream?

  The smell of the mud in my nostrils

  Blows brave – like a breath of the sea!

  [ … ] These are the streets …

  Each is an avenue leading

  Whither I will!

  Free …!

  Dizzy, hysterical, faint,

  I sit, and the carriage rolls on with me

  Into the wonderful world.

  Henley went to live in digs in Portobello when he was finally discharged that spring, and Stevenson helped get him work on the research staff of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the eighth edition of which was being published in Edinburgh, and for which Stevenson had been commissioned to write articles on Burns and Béranger. Henley was in love with a woman called Anna Boyle, whom he had met when she was visiting her brother in the bed next to his at the Infirmary. Henley wanted to establish some income in order to marry (which he and Anna did three years later), though it was almost impossible to earn a living wage on the sort of hack-work he got. Stevenson came to admire enormously his determination and hard work, and Henley became the new focus of the old LJR group, a confidant of Stevenson, Baxter, Ferrier and Bob, whom he renamed the Four Musketeers.

  Meeting Henley had been the one bright spot in an otherwise miserable winter for Stevenson. Although there are no references in his letters or his mother’s diary notes to the lung problem he is thought to have suffered from at this stage of his life, his nervous troubles – triggered by the bleak conspiracy of broken heart and enforced study – were evident again. ‘My vitality is low in every way,’ he wrote to Mrs Sitwell at the end of February 1875, ‘although I am not a
t all ill – all I want is a little warmth, a little sun, a little of the life I have when I am by you.’70 He got his wish soon after, for in early March, as his mother recorded, ‘Louis quite breaks down and is giddy.’71 Uncle George ordered him off for a holiday, and the patient sprang back to life at the news, crowing to Mrs Sitwell the same day: ‘Victory! Victory! Victory!’ He met Bob in Paris and together they went on to Barbizon, the artists’ colony Bob had been visiting for some seven years.

  Barbizon had become a centre for the plein air school, precursors of the Impressionists, in the previous decade. When Louis arrived the first time, Jean-François Millet, the central figure in the group, had just died and the shutters of his house were closed up. The artists who gathered there in the summer were mostly French, British and a few Americans, including a fellow student with Bob at the atelier of Carolus-Duran,* Will Low, who was to become Stevenson’s lifelong friend. They lodged at Siron’s Inn, evoked in Louis’s subsequent essay for the Cornhill:

  To the door [ … ] half a dozen, or maybe half a score, of people have brought out chairs, and now sit sunning themselves, and waiting the omnibus from Melun. If you go on into the court you will find as many more, some in the billiard-room over absinthe and a match of corks, some without over a last cigar and a vermouth. The doves coo and flutter from the dovecote; Hortense is drawing water from the well; and as all the rooms open into the court, you can see the white-capped cook over the furnace in the kitchen, and some idle painter, who has stored his canvases and washed his brushes, jangling a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano in the salle-à-manger.72

  While the others painted, or discussed pigments with the salesman from Fontainebleau, Louis spent whole days on his own walking and reading in the forest, which was so close to the village that the last houses on the street were already among the trees. In the evenings at Siron’s there would be couples dancing by candlelight to the music of the rickety piano, and ‘so much eating goes forward, so much drinking, so much jabbering in French and English, that it would do your heart good merely to peep and listen at the door’.73 The company was as quirky as Louis could have wanted: young men in tattered frock-coats and fezes, in striped stockings (like Bob’s) or extravagant hats, covered in paint, or wax, or wine stains. Walter Simpson’s younger brother Willie was there, with his bull terrier Taureau, to whom he used to feed saucers of absinthe, vermouth, coffee and champagne, and an American youth who ‘always wore expensive rings so as to have the extreme enjoyment of pawning them’.74 There was also Hiram Bloomer, a genuinely poor and shabby little man who was once refused admission to the Luxembourg Gallery on account of his raggedness. Louis fell in gratefully with this society: they were all big drinkers, voluble talkers and despisers of bourgeois life.

  When Barbizon threatened to be attracting too many lady water-colourists that summer, Bob began to look for an even quieter venue, fixing on the tiny village of Grez-sur-Loing on the other side of the Fontainebleau forest. Grez was entirely rural: the one roughly-cobbled street was flanked with deep smelly ditches and littered with hay from passing loads. There was a lichened church and a row of grey stone houses, but the main draw was the commodious old stone inn at the end of the street, run by Monsieur and Madame Chevillon and their buxom daughter. The old archway opened into a low wide hall, and behind the inn a lovely garden sloped down to the Loing, with a ruined castle and old bridge downriver, ideal for landscapes. Soon Bob and his friends were in semi-permanent residence at Chevillons’, and the irregular stone flags of the courtyard were strewn with cigarette stubs and dead match stalks.75

  The Latin Quarter of Paris was Bob’s other milieu, and his rooms in the rue Racine were permanently available to Louis as a bolt-hole during this period. Louis sited his narrator Loudon Dodd in ‘an ungainly, ill-smelling hotel’ in the same street in his 1892 novel The Wrecker, in which he evoked the magnetic attraction of the vie bohème to rebellious young men of the time:

  I dined, I say, at a poor restaurant and lived in a poor hotel; and this was not from need, but sentiment. My father gave me a profuse allowance, and I might have lived (had I chosen) in the Quartier de l’Étoile and driven to my studies daily. Had I done so, the glamour must have fled: I should still have been but Loudon Dodd; whereas now I was a Latin Quarter student, Murger’s successor, living in flesh and blood the life of one of those romances I had loved to read, and re-read, and to dream over, among the woods of Muskegon.76

  Louis and Bob had perfected some fine bohemian traits. One was to travel without any baggage at all except perhaps a toothbrush. Ridding oneself of material attachments was a sign of spiritual maturity, they said: a portmanteau was no better than a massive shackle. Unfortunately, travelling without linen proved expensive, as a new shirt had to be bought every couple of days and an almost-new one thrown away, and lack of a comb meant paying a barber. But it was worth it to the ‘two mad Stevensons’ for a day or two, for the humour of the thing, and its anecdotal value. Someone like Bloomer wouldn’t have been able to keep it up at all.

  The contrast when Louis got back to Edinburgh was painful, and he was instantly plunged into ‘the most cold, desolate recollections of my past life here’.77 ‘I was glad to try and think of the forest, and warm my hands at the thought of it.’ He had plans to go south again as soon as his exams were over, telling his mother, ‘I shall go in for a year for health before all things. Try and be as much as possible a year in the open air.’78 Still, no one in these years recollected Stevenson as an invalid. Alfred Ewing described him as enjoying ‘excellent health’ in 1877 and 1878;79 Lord Dunedin said that ill-health was ‘not yet upon him, and he was very cheerful and lively’,80 and Will Low thought his new acquaintance at Barbizon ‘apparently as robust as any of us’.81 But the ‘health’ card was still the only reliable one to play at home. In the summer of 1875, Stevenson seems to have been planning to use it and his promised thousand pounds to get well away from his parents, Edinburgh and any possibility of becoming an advocate.

  Despite the months of studying, the Bar exams proved traumatic. Louis only discovered the existence of French grammar the day before he was to be examined in the subject, but was allowed to pass, as his spoken French was excellent: ‘the examiner devised some special form of report’,82 Graham Balfour believed. One fellow student later claimed that Stevenson only passed his exams because he had ‘been told, or had somehow got to know’ the questions in advance,83 but the scholar himself recalled a subtler technique. Asked by the Professor of Moral Philosophy a question on one of the textbooks, Louis said he didn’t understand the phraseology. When told it came from the textbook, he replied, ‘Yes, but you couldn’t expect me to read so poor a book as that.’ The professor, fortunately, found this amusing and ‘laughed like a hunchback’.

  So, miraculously, Stevenson passed advocate on 14 July 1875. The family drove in from Swanston in the barouche to get the results, and came away in triumph, Louis insisting on sitting up on the folded cover of the carriage, with his feet on the seat between his parents. ‘He kept waving his hat,’ his cousin Etta Balfour recalled, ‘and calling out to people he passed, whether known or unknown, just like a man gone quite mad.’84

  The history of Stevenson’s career at the Bar was short, as he intended it to be. After a second trip to Barbizon in the summer of 1875 with Walter Simpson and Bob, followed by a walking tour with Simpson, a stay in Paris and a holiday in Wiesbaden with his parents, he had to come back to Edinburgh and go through the motions of being a lawyer. What had happened to the thousand pounds is a mystery, as he complains all winter of not having any cash: perhaps it had been invested for him. His days took on a strange somnolent quality, as he described to Colvin:

  I idle finely. I read Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Martin’s History of France, Allen Ramsay, Olivier Basselin, all sorts of rubbish a propos of Burns, Comines, Juvenal des Ursins etc.; I walk about the Parliament House five forenoons a week, in wig and gown; I have either a five or six mile walk, or an hour or
two hard skating on the rink, every afternoon, without fail; and – well, this is not so good perhaps but it is a part of my system – I sit up late at night and sometimes wet my whistle.85

  Promenading at the Parliament House was the standard way for young advocates to pick up briefs, but Stevenson was only ever offered two, both of which, according to his cousin Etta, he refused, ‘much to his father’s sorrow’.86 He only appeared in court once, and that was under farcical circumstances. He had received a brief to perform the formality of ‘reviving’ a certain case the next day; this involved merely turning up to hear the case mentioned, and no special knowledge was necessary. He expected the court to be empty, but when he arrived found it packed with his friends, who had got wind of the reluctant advocate’s maiden appearance (one can guess via Baxter, who was a practising Writer to the Signet by then) and came ‘to see how he would acquit himself’.87 Unfortunately, the judge that morning happened to be one whom Stevenson had seen the evening before going into a dive and to whom he had mischievously given the ‘Bar Salute’. This was a piece of effrontery (and potentially embarrassing knowledge) which his lordship was unlikely to forgive; on top of this, the court was full of grinning youths clearly up to some lark. Instead of passing quickly through the formal procedure, the judge asked who Stevenson was, and proceeded to quiz him on the case, about which of course the young man knew nothing whatever. Hamming desperately for some minutes, Stevenson eventually caught sight of the solicitor, who had been keeping ‘well out of the way’, and referred the judge to him for all further facts. And thus, in a welter of suppressed laughter and mugging to the gallery, he began and ended his legal career. Thomas and Margaret Stevenson had a doorplate fixed to 17 Heriot Row that bore the inscription ‘R.L. Stevenson, Advocate’,88 and years later, sightseers would be shown the empty document box in the corridor of the Parliament House that was similarly marked. In the meantime, ‘RLS’ the writer was already far away.