Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, page 825
Yet nowhere, so far as I know, did Louis allude to any of the more famous towns he then visited, as if they had come within his personal ken. Mr. Horatio Brown frequently discussed Venice with him at Davos, but without even discovering that he had ever set foot in Italy. Rome meant to Stevenson in after-life a great deal: the Roman Empire was far more of a reality to him than to many better scholars and many frequenters of the city of Rome. Yet Mr. Lloyd Osbourne tells me that the only reference he ever heard his step-father make to this time was on one occasion when he recalled with delight the picturesque appearance of their military escort in horsemen’s cloaks riding through the Papal States. Five years later his correspondence proves him already a keen observer, and yet half an hour with a guidebook would have furnished him with all the knowledge of Italian cities that he ever displayed.
With the country it was otherwise. ‘ The Rhone is the River of Angels,’ he wrote to Mr. Low, * I have adored it since I was twelve and first saw it from the train.’ And the scenery of Will d the Mill was taken in part from the Brenner Pass, which he never saw again after 1863.
But if his stores of experience were but little increased by these changes of scene, at least the boy was learning to exercise the savoir-faire which came very naturally to his disposition. At hotels he used to go to the table- d’hote alone, if necessary, and made friends freely with strangers. On his return from Homburg, he made great friends on the steamer with a Dutchman, who kept saying over to himself,’ I loike this booy.’ His French master at Mentone on his second visit gave him no regular lessons, but merely talked to him in French, teaching him piquet and card tricks, introducing him to various French people, and taking him to convents and other places. So his mother remarks of his other masters at home, * I think they found it pleasanter to talk to him than to teach him.’ Of the other side of his character, of the solitary, dreamy, rather unhappy child, but little record survives, or little evidence which can be assigned with certainty to these years. He speaks in his essay on Pepys of the egotism of children and their delight in the anticipations of memory, as of an experience of his own. 41 can remember to have written in the fly-leaf of more than one book the date and the place where I then was — if, for instance, I was ill in bed or sitting in a certain garden; these were jottings for my future self; if I should chance on such a note in after years, I thought it would cause me a particular thrill to recognise myself across the intervening distance.’1
In one of his books he touches a chord which thrills with a personal emotion in describing ‘a malady most incident to only sons.’ ‘ He flew his private signal and none heeded it; it seemed he was abroad in a world from which the very hope of intimacy was banished.’2 It was a slightly older lad of whom he was thinking at the moment, but the malady begins at an early age, and tends unfortunately to be chronic.
Of his appearance at this time Mr. Baildon says: 4 Stevenson calls himself “ ugly “ in his student days, but I think this is a term that never at any time fitted him. Certainly to him as a boy of about fourteen (with the creed which he propounded to me that at sixteen one was a man) it would not apply. In body he was assuredly badly set up. His limbs were long, lean, and spidery, and his chest flat, so as almost to suggest some malnutrition, such sharp corners did his joints make under his clothes. But in his face this was belied. His brow was oval and full, over soft brown eyes that seemed already to have drunk the sunlight under southern vines. The whole face had a tendency to an oval Madonna-like type. But about the mouth and in the mirthful mocking 1 ‘ Pepys,’ Familiar Studies of Men and Books, .
2 Weir of Hermiston, .
light of the eyes there lingered ever a ready Autolycus roguery that rather suggested sly Hermes masquerading as a mortal. The eyes were always genial, however gaily the lights danced in them, but about the mouth there was something a little tricksy and mocking, as of a spirit that already peeped behind the scenes of life’s pageant and more than guessed its unrealities.’
His reading progressed: for the date of his first introduction to Shakespeare there seems to be no evidence, and but for the strength of its impression it may have belonged to the earlier period. 41 never supposed that a book was to command me until, one disastrous day of storm, the heaven full of turbulent vapours, the street full of the squalling of the gale, the windows resounding under bucketfuls of rain, my mother read aloud to me Macbeth. I cannot say I thought the experience agreeable; I far preferred the ditch-water stories that a child could dip and skip and doze over, stealing at times materials for play; it was something new and shocking to be thus ravished by a giant, and I shrank under the brutal grasp. But the spot in memory is still sensitive; nor do I ever read that tragedy but I hear the gale howling up the valley of the Leith.’1
His first acquaintance with Dumas began in 1863 With the study of certain illustrated dessert plates in a hotel at Nice:2 his first enthusiasm for Scott’s novels belongs with certainty to the time when he had begun to select his books for himself.
‘ My father’s library was a spot of some austerity; the proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divinity, cyclopaedias, physical science, and, above all, optics, held the chief place upon the shelves, and it was only in holes and corners that anything really legible existed as by accident. The Parents Assistant, Rob Roy, Waver ley, and Guy Mannering, the Voyages of Captain Woodes Rogers, 1 Scribner’s Magazine, July 1888, .
2 Memories and Portraits, .
Fuller’s and Bunyan’s Holy Wars, The Reflections of Robinson Crusoe,x The Female Bluebeard, G. Sand’s Mare au Diable (how came it in that grave assembly!), Ains- worth’s Tower of London, and four old volumes of Punch — these were the chief exceptions. In these latter, which made for years the chief of my diet, I very early fell in love (almost as soon as I could spell) with the Snob Papers. I knew them almost by heart, particularly the visit to the Pontos; and I remember my surprise when I found, long afterwards, that they were famous, and signed with a famous name; to me, as I read and admired them, they were the works of Mr. Punch. Time and again I tried to read Rob Royf with whom, of course, I was acquainted from the Tales of a Grandfather; time and again the early part with Rashleigh and (think of it!) the adorable Diana, choked me off; and I shall never forget the pleasure and surprise with which, lying on the floor one summer evening, I struck of a sudden into the first scene with Andrew Fairservice. “ The worthy Dr. Light- foot”—” mistrysted with a bogle “— “a wheen green trash “—” Jenny, lass, I think I ha’e her “; from that day to this the phrases have been unforgotten. I read on, I need scarce say; I came to Glasgow, I bided tryst on Glasgow Bridge, I met Rob Roy and the Bailie in the Tolbooth, all with transporting pleasure; and then the clouds gathered once more about my path; and I dozed and skipped until I stumbled half-asleep into the Clachan of Aberfoyle, and the voices of Ivetach and Galbraith recalled me to myself. With that scene and the defeat of Captain Thornton the book concluded; Helen and her sons shocked even the little schoolboy of nine or ten with their unreality; I read no more, or I did not grasp what I was reading; and years elapsed before I consciously met Diana and her father among the hills, 1 Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The third part of Robinson Crusoe, by Defoe, containing moral reflections only.
or saw Rashleigh dying in the chair. When I think of that novel and that evening, I am impatient with all others; they seem but shadows and impostors; they cannot satisfy the appetite which this awakened.’1
What neither instruction nor travel could do for him was none the less coming about; the boy was educating himself; learning to write patiently, persistently, without brilliance or any apparent prospect of success. The History of Moses of 1856 had been followed the next year by a History of Joseph, after a brief interval devoted to a story ‘ in slavish imitation of Mayne Reid.’ Two years later came an account (still dictated) of his travels in Perth. Before thirteen he wrote a description of the inhabitants of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs. When he was fourteen he developed a facility for extemporising doggerel rhymes, and composed the libretto of an opera called The Baneful Potato, of which only the names of two characters survive — 4 Dig-him-up-o,’ the gardener, and ‘ Seek-him-out-o,’ the policeman, and the first line of an aria sung by the heroine,’ My own dear casement window.’
At his last school and in his home circle he was always starting magazines. These were all in manuscript, generally illustrated with profusion of colour, and were sometimes circulated at a charge of one penny for reading. The Schoolboys’ Magazine of 1863, of which one number survives, contained four stories, and its readers must have been hard to satisfy if they did not have their fill of horrors. In the first tale,’ The Adventures of Jan van Steen,’ the hero is left hidden in a boiler under which a fire is lit. The second is 4 A Ghost Story’ of robbers in a deserted castle in ‘ one of those barren places called plains in the north of Norway.’ A traveller finds a man, ‘half killed with several wounds,’ hidden under the floor, who dresses up as a ghost. The third story is called, by a curious anticipation,’ The Wreckers.’
1 ‘ Rosa quo Locorum’: Juvenilia, .
VOL. I. E
On the shore at North Berwick ‘were two men. The older and stronger of the two was a tall, ill-looking man with grizzled hair and a red nose. He was dressed in a tarnished gold-laced blue coat, a red waistcoat,and leggings. The other, who might have been a fisherman except for the fact that from each of the pockets of his pea-jacket there projected a pistol. He was a more villainous-looking fellow than the other. “ Dan,” said the first, “what is that clinging to that mast?” “I think,” said the other, “it is a sailor. You had better go and secure him.”’ Last and not least terrible is ‘ Creek Island, or Adventures in the South Seas.’ A line-of-battle ship called the Shark is wrecked in the Southern Ocean on its way to India, and two midshipmen fall into the hands of the Indians. ‘ They had a council which pronounced death, but which death would we have to suffer? It was to be burned alive. . . . Next morning very early we had to get up and prepare to be burned alive. When we arrived at the place of execution, we shuddered to think of being killed so soon. But I forgot to tell you that I had made love to [sic] beautiful girl even in one day, and from all I knew she loved me. The next thing they did was to build round us sticks and rubbish of all kinds till we could hardly see what they were doing. At last they finished. They then set fire to it, and after it had got hold well, they began to dance, which is called a war-dance. (To be continued.)’
‘ I forgot to tell you that I had made love to beautiful girl! * Was ever woman in this humour wooed?’ At least the author remembered his own boyish taste, when heroines were excluded from Treasure Island. And yet this was the hand that at the last drew Barbara Grant and the two Kirstie Elliotts.
The Schoolboys Magazine is, to say the least, lively reading; not so much may be claimed for ‘ The Sunbeam Magazine, an illustrated Miscellany of Fact, Fiction, and Fun, edited by R. L. Stevenson,’ which expired in the middle of its third number in March, 1866. Each number contained several stories and articles, some evidently by other hands. The chief story, ‘The Banker’s Ward, a modern tale,’ is clearly by the editor, but is a dreary and unpromising narrative of middle-class life.
In these days he had endless talks with Mr. Baildon, who seems to have been the first of his friends in whom he found a kindred interest in letters, and at one of these discussions he produced a drama which was apparently the earliest draft of Deacon Brodie. The story was familiar to him from childhood, as a cabinet made by the Deacon himself formed part of the furniture of his nursery. His deepest and most lasting interest was, however, centred in the Covenanters, of whom he had first learned from his nurse. He has told us how his attention was fixed on Hackston of Rathillet, who sat on horseback ‘ with the cloak about his mouth,’ watching the assassination of Archbishop Sharp, in which he would take no part, lest it should be attributed to his private quarrel. Stevenson’s first novel on the subject was attempted before he was fifteen, and ‘reams of paper,’ then and at a later date, were devoted to it in vain.1
A similar fate attended a novel on the Pentland Rising — an episode well known to him from his infancy, as the Covenanters had spent the night before their defeat in the village of Colinton.
This last composition, however, was not wholly without result. Though the novel was destroyed, his studies issued in a small green pamphlet, entitled, The Pentland Rising: a Page of History, 1666, published anonymously, in 1866, by Andrew Elliot in Edinburgh.2
Miss Jane Balfour writes: ‘ I was at Heriot Row in 1866 from the 29th October to 23rd November, and Louis was busily altering the Pentland Rising then to please his father. He had made a story of it, and by so doing, 1 Additional Memories, .
2 List of Stevenson’s works, Appendix F, vol. ii. .
had, in his father’s opinion, spoiled it It was printed not long after in a small edition, and Mr. Stevenson very soon bought all the copies in, as far as was possible.’
Thus the period closes somewhat surprisingly with Stevenson’s first appearance as a printed author. The foundations were being well laid, but the structure raised upon them was premature. The publication was probably due to his father’s approval of the subject-matter rather than to any belief in the literary ripeness of the style. At the same time, it was the best work that he had yet done, and the plentiful quotations from the pages of Wodrow and Kirkton, and of their opponent, Sir James Turner, are interesting in view of Stevenson’s confession in Samoa,14 My style is from the Covenanting writers.’
1 Letters, ii. 312.
CHAPTER V
STUDENT DAYS — 1867-73
1 Light foot, and tight foot, And green grass spread, Early in the morning, But hope is on ahead.’
R. L. S.
The time had come for the boy to leave school, and for his education to be shaped in some conformity with the profession supposed to lie before him. What this would be was never for a moment in doubt. Father and sons, the Stevensons were civil engineers, and to the grandsons naturally, in course of time, the business would be transferred. The family capacity for the work, though undeniable, was very elusive, consisting chiefly of a sort of instinct for dealing with the forces of nature, and seldom manifested clearly till called forth in actual practice. The latest recruit had certainly shown no conspicuous powers at any of his schools, but to such a criterion no one could have attached less value than his father. That he did possess the family gift was proved before he left the profession; but even had he never written his paper ‘On a New Form of Intermittent Light,’ no one could reasonably have condemned on his behalf the choice of this career.
Accordingly, the next three and a half years were devoted to his preparation for this employment. He spent the winter and sometimes the summer sessions at the University of Edinburgh, working for a Science degree, and saw something of the practical work of engineering during the other summer months.
For the first two years he attended the Latin class, Greek being abandoned as hopeless after the first session; to Natural Philosophy he was constant, so far as his constancy in such matters ever went; Mathematics then replaced Greek, and Civil Engineering took the room of Latin. But all this was none of his real education. Although he remembered that ‘the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability’ (one of the few facts recorded in a still surviving notebook), and that ‘ Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime,’ and would not willingly part with such scraps of science, he never ‘ set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that he came by in the open street while he was playing truant.’ The last word recurs with every reference to his education. In fact, as far as the University was concerned, he ‘ acted upon an extensive and highly rational system of truantry, which cost him a great deal of trouble to put in exercise’; and ‘ no one ever played the truant with more deliberate care, and none ever had more certificates (of attendance) for less education.’
Nor was the attention he bestowed on engineering any more assiduous. As for his practical instruction, he followed out his father’s views on training — that it was waste of time for an engineer to attempt to be a craftsman in any one trade, but that he should become familiar in ‘ shops’ and yards with the materials used in his work, and should learn their employment in practice.
In the summer of 1868 Stevenson spent the month of July at Anstruther, and the six weeks following at Wick: records of which he has left in various letters written to his parents at the time, and in the essay on ‘Random Memories’ entitled ‘ The Education of an Engineer.’ In the first-named place he was privileged to hear it said of him for the first time, ‘That’s the man that’s in charge.’
At Wick, besides his descent in a diving-suit (• one of the best things I got from my education as an engineer’), an accident afforded him one of those opportunities for prompt action, of which his life contained all too few. It comes as the postscript to a short business letter to his father.
‘September 1868.
‘PS. — I was forgetting my only news. A man fell off the staging this forenoon. I heard crying, and ran out to the end. By that time a rope had been lowered and the man was holding himself up by it, and of course wearing himself out. Some were away for a boat. “ Hold on, Angus,” they cried. “ I can NOT do it,” he said, with wonderful composure. I told them to lower a plank; everybody was too busy giving advice to listen to me; meantime the man was drowning. I was desperate, and could have knocked another dozen off. One fellow, Bain, a diver, listened to me. We got the plank out and a rope round it; but they would not help us to lower it down. At last we got assistance, and were just about to lower it down, when some one cried, “ Hold your hand, lads! Here comes the boat.” And Angus was borne safely in. But my hand shook so, that I could not draw for some time after with the excitement. — R. S.’
