Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, page 827
But to him especially, the truant and the scapegrace, the contrast came home with severity. In Lay Morals he unfolds some of the details of his experience in recounting ‘ a few pages out of a young man’s life.’
‘ He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous, flighty, as variable as youth itself, but always with some high motions, and on the search for higher thoughts of life. . . . But he got hold of some unsettling works, the New Testament among others, and this loosened his views of life and led him into many perplexities. As 1 At the ‘Spec.,’ on 12th November 1872, he read an essay on ‘Two Questions on the relations between Christ’s teaching and Modern Christianity.’ But on 24th November 1871 he spoke against Communism being a maintainable theory. In March 1871 he voted a want of confidence in Mr. Gladstone’s Ministry, and probably throughout his life would, if compelled to vote, have always supported the Conservative candidate.
2 Virginibus Puerisque, .
3 ‘ The Foreigner at Home’: Memories and Portraits, .
VOL. I. F
he was the son of a man in a certain position, and well off, my friend had enjoyed from the first the advantages of education, nay, he had been kept alive through a sickly childhood by constant watchfulness, comforts, and change of air, for all of which he was indebted to his father’s wealth.
‘ At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who followed the plough in summer-time to pay their fees in winter; and this inequality struck him with some force. He was at that age of a conversible temper, and insatiably curious in the aspects of life; and he spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of man- and woman-kind. In this way he came upon many depressed ambitions and intelligences stunted for want of opportunity; and this also struck him. He began to perceive that life was a handicap upon strange, wrong-sided principles; and not, as he had been told, a fair and equal race. He began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly favoured, when he saw all the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort closed against so many of his competitors and equals, and held unwearyingly open before so idle, desultory, and so dissolute a being as himself. . . . My friend was only unsettled and discouraged, and filled full with that trumpeting anger with which young men regard injustices in the first blush of youth; although in a few years they will tamely acquiesce in their existence, and knowingly profit by their complications. Yet all this while he suffered many indignant pangs. And once when he put on his boots, like any other unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was his best consolation, that he was now, at a single plunge, to free himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his, and to do battle equally against his fellows in the warfare of life.’
Unfortunately the well-meant action of his parents added to his unhappiness a touch of squalor. They were generosity itself; they provided for their son all that they thought a young man could possibly want. So long as he cared for such entertainments, they gave dinners and dances to his friends, whom they welcomed (if thought suitable) on all occasions to their house; for his health and education there was nothing they were not ready to do. One thing only was wanting to him, and that was liberty, or rather the means of using it. They knew how generous he was by nature, probably they guessed how open-handed he was likely to be, and until he was three- and-twenty they restricted him — as others of his friends also were restricted — to half-a-crown or, at the most, five shillings a week as pocket-money. The result was that the lad went his own way, and frequented places which consorted with his means. This may have extended the future novelist’s knowledge of man and woman and of the many aspects of human life, but it was scarcely a successful policy in his father’s eyes (had he but known) which placed his son’s headquarters at a tobacconist’s shop,1 and sent him to the Lothian Road and a succession of such hostelries as ‘ The Green Elephant,’ The Twinkling Eye,’ and ‘ The Gay Japanee.’
Stevenson’s own account of it ran thus: —
41 was always kept poor in my youth, to my great indignation at the time, but since then with my complete approval. Twelve pounds a year was my allowance up to twenty-three [which was indeed far too little]2, and though I amplified it by a very consistent embezzlement from my mother, I never had enough to be lavish. My monthly pound was usually spent before the evening of the day on which I received it; as often as not, it was forestalled; and for the rest of the time I was in rare fortune if I had five shillings at once in my possession. Hence my acquaintance was of what would be called a 1 ‘ Although tobacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious in themselves.’— ‘An Apology for Idlers’: Virginibus Puerisque, .
2 The words in brackets are added in pencil.
very low order. Looking back upon it, 1 am surprised at the courage with which I first ventured alone into the societies in which I moved; I was the companion of seamen, chimney-sweeps, and thieves; my circle was being continually changed by the action of the police magistrate. I see now the little sanded kitchen, where Velvet Coat (for such was the name I went by) has spent days together, generally in silence and making sonnets in a penny version-book; and rough as the material may appear, I do not believe these days were among the least happy I have spent. I was distinctly petted and respected; the women were most gentle and kind to me; I might have left all my money for a month, and they would have returned every farthing of it. Such indeed was my celebrity, that when the proprietor and his mistress came to inspect the establishment, I was invited to tea with them; and it is still a grisly thought to me, that I have since seen that mistress, then gorgeous in velvet and gold chains, an old, toothless, ragged woman, with hardly voice enough to welcome me by my old name of Velvet Coat/
These were the days when there was most truth in the analogy that Stevenson loved to trace between himself and Robert Fergusson, the forerunner of Burns: the poor Edinburgh lad, who ‘ died in his acute, painful youth, and left models of the great things that were to come’:1 ‘so clever a boy, so wild, of such a mixed strain, so unfortunate, born in the same town with me, and as I always felt, rather by express intimation than from evidence, so like myself.’2 So far indeed did he carry this sympathy that, in writing from Samoa, he expressed his conviction that in him Fergusson lived again.3
The days were the days of green-sickness, and they were often miserable. Many a time he leaned over the great bridge which connects the New Town with the Old, and watched the trains smoking out from under him, 1 Letters, ii. 223. 2 lb., ii. 329. 3 lb., ii. 223.
and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies.1 Often he haunted the station itself, envying the passengers; and again,’ in the hot fits of youth,’ he went to the Calton burying-ground, ‘to be unhappy.’ ‘Poor soul,’ he says of himself, ‘ I remember how much he was cast down at times, and how life (which had not yet begun) seemed already at an end, and hope quite dead, and misfortune and dishonour, like physical presences, dogging him as he went.’
Yet the days were the days of youth, and often they were days of happiness. The clouds rolled away in their season; most of the troubles were subjective, and though they were acutely felt, yet their ultimate solution was certain.
The one difficulty most immediately affecting his outer life — the pursuit of engineering — was, however, among the first to be solved. On April 8, 1871, Louis told his father of his extreme disinclination for the work, and asked to be allowed to follow literature. It must have come as a heavy disappointment to Thomas Stevenson, who, as we have seen, was devoted to the practice of his calling. Moreover, only twelve days previously Louis had read before the Royal Scottish Society of Arts his first and only contribution to the literature of his profession, a paper on a New Form of Intermittent Light, which was afterwards judged ‘well worthy of the favourable consideration of the Society, and highly creditable to so young an author.’2 The father felt the blow, but he must to some extent have been prepared for it by his son’s entire lack of interest in the solution of problems which to him were the most entrancing in the world. He seems to have met the request with calm; his wife’s diary records that he was ‘ wonderfully resigned’; and 1 Picturesque Notes, .
8 The proposed light has never been constructed in consequence of several mechanical difficulties, as I am informed by Mr. D. A. Stevenson, the present head of the firm and Engineer to the Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses.
the matter was compromised without difficulty or delay. Engineering was to be given up forthwith, but lest Louis should find himself with no other profession than that of ‘ failed author,5 he was to read Law and to be called to the Scottish Bar. If he chose to practise, he would have his profession; his necessary legal and historical studies would add more or less to his general culture, and he would be able during his preparation to carry on the literary training that was already occupying so large a portion of his time.
The general alleviation of his position was more gradual, but of this he has left an account, the fragment of a larger scheme of biography written in San Francisco in the beginning of 1880.1
‘ I had a happy afternoon scrambling with Bob upon the banks of the Water of Leith above Slateford. And so I may leave this part of my life and take it up in another direction. At last I am now done with morbidity and can wash my hands.
‘BOOK III. — FROM JEST TO EARNEST
11 date my new departure from three circumstances: natural growth, the coming of friends, and the study of Walt Whitman. The order or degree of their effectiveness I shall not seek to distinguish. But I shall first say something of my friends.
‘ My cousin Bob,2 who had now, after a long absence, returned to Edinburgh, is the man likest and most unlike to me that I have ever met. Our likeness was one of tastes and passions, and, for many years at least, it amounted in these particulars to an identity. He had the most indefatigable, feverish mind I have ever known; he had acquired a smattering of almost every knowledge and art; he would surprise you by his playing, his 1 For Book I., vide page 44 n. Of Book II. only the last lines survive, and the fragment on .
2 The late R. A. M. Stevenson, vide page 88 n.
painting, his writing, his criticism, his knowledge of philosophy, and above all, by a sort of vague, disconnected and totally inexplicable erudition. What was specially his, and genuine, was his faculty for turning over a subject in a conversation.1 There was an insane lucidity in his conclusions; a singular, humorous eloquence in his language, and a power of method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject under hand; none of which I have ever heard equalled or even approached by any other talker. I am sure that he and I together have, in a brief, conspectory manner, turned over the stuff of a year’s reading in one half- hour of talk. He was the most valuable man to talk to, above all in his younger days; for he twisted like a serpent, changed like the patterns in a kaleidoscope, transmigrated (it is the only word) from one point of view to another with a swiftness and completeness that left a stupid and merely logical mind panting in the rear; and so, in an incredibly brief space of time, helped you to view a question upon every side. In sheer trenchancy of mind, I have ever been his humble and distant follower. The multiplicity and swiftness of his apprehensions, if they do not bewilder, at least paralyse his mind. He is utterly without measure. He will spend a week in regulating the expenses of an imaginary navy; and then in ten minutes crush a subtle fallacy or create a new vein of criticism. We have perhaps only one moral quality in common: a desire to do justice to those with whom we are at enmity. I am now in my thirtieth year, and I have found sufficient excuses for all whom I think to have injured me but two; and for one of these I still hope to do the like. As for the other, I give him up to obscene furies; duck him where Stinchar2 flows; it was he who 1 Cf. ‘Talk and Talkers’: Memories and Portraits, .
2 A river in Ayrshire, at the mouth of which is Ballantrae. Cf. Bums’s song: s Behind yon hills where Stinchar flows.’
first taught me, in my twenty-seventh year, to be’ieve that it was possible for man to be evil with premeditation; and that was perhaps an evil enough service in itself.1 But in this particular Bob so far outstrips or (may I say?) outshines me, that I have sometimes been put to the blush by the largeness and freedom of his allowances for others.2
‘ The next friend who came to me (I take them in the order of time) was, I think, Charles Baxter. I cannot characterise a personality so unusual in the little space that I can here afford. I have never known one of so mingled a strain. As a companion, when in spirits, he stands without an equal in my experience. He is the only man I ever heard of who could give and take in 1 Cf. Memoir of FleemingJenkin, .
2 Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson was born in Edinburgh, 25th March 1847, and died 18th April 1900. He was educated at Windermere College and at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He then studied painting chiefly at Antwerp and in France, but became an art critic about 1885, and from 1885 to 1889 was Professor of Fine Arts at University College, Liverpool. ‘The Art of Velasquez’ and the monograph on Rubens in the Portfolio series are the chief works he has left behind him, but, like Gerard de Nerval, ‘ il a verse plus d’une urne dans le tonneau sans fond du jour- nalisme.’ These notes and the subsequent essay in Memories and Portraits give some idea of his talk as it was at this time — perhaps the most brilliant in England. In the Pall Mall Magazine for July 1900 Mr. Henley describes its mellowing, and says of such copiousness and intolerance as ever distinguished ‘ Spring-Heel’d Jack: ‘ ’Tis a good ten years since I saw the last of that exorbitant and amazing person — a person, be it noted, ever, for all his amazingness and for all his exorbitancy — »ever, I may insist, an influence for the best, alike in morals and in art; and I can say with a certain assurance that the younger men knew nothing of him. What they got in his room was a some one, bright-eyed, a little flushed, ever courteous, ever kindly, ever humorous, taking any bit of the universe as his theme, descanting upon it as if he had a prescriptive right in it, and delighting every one who listened by the unfailing excellence, wisdom, sanity (however insane it seemed at times) of what he had to say.’ And another of his friends, writing in the Saturday Review (28 th April 1900), says: ‘We know what the joy was of the “ Mermaid” since we have known him.’
Of these earlier days he wrote to Louis as long ago as 1874: ‘ We used to think we were like no one else about certain things, but that was a real phase too.’
conversation with the wit and polish of style that we find in Congreve’s comedies.1 He is likewise the only person I ever knew who could advise, or, to explain more perfectly my meaning, who could both make helpful suggestions and at the same time hold his tongue when he had none to offer.
‘ The next was James Walter Ferrier. It is only now when I come to describe them that I perceive how strange a crew were my associates; but Ferrier’s strangeness was of a tragic character. The grandson of old Wilson, the son of Ferrier the metaphysician, he was gifted with very considerable abilities; he was by nature the most complete and gentle gentleman (I must risk the pleonasm) I have known.
‘ I never knew any man so superior to himself. The best of him only came as a vision, like Corsica from the Corniche. He never gave his measure either morally or intellectually. The curse was on him. Even his friends did not know him but by fits. I have passed hours with him when he was so wise, good, and sweet, that I never knew the like of it in any other.2
‘ The fourth of these friends was Sir Walter Simpson, son of Sir James who gave chloroform to the world. He was, I think, the eldest of my associates; yet he must have been of a more deliberate growth, for when we encountered, I believe we were about equal in intellectual development. His was a slow fighting mind. You would see him, at times, wrestle for a minute at a time with a refractory jest, and perhaps fail to throw it at the end. I think his special character was a profound shyness, 1 He was, even then, as a letter from R. L. S. in 1894 reminds him, ‘a great maker of reminiscences,5 and to his influence, perhaps, it was partly due that Stevenson turned so early and so frequently to the past.
2 I have here substituted a portion of a letter which Stevenson wrote upon hearing of the death of Ferrier {Letters, i. 281) for the original ms., which says nearly the same things in a more halting fashion, and is generally less suitable for quotation. For the finished study, pitched in a loftier key, the reader is referred to ‘ Old Mortality’ in Memories and Portraits.
a shyness which was not so much exhibited in society as it ruled in his own dealings with himself. He was shy of his own virtues and talents, and above all of the former. He was even ashamed of his own sincere desire to do the right. More than half the man, as you first knew him, was a humbug; and that was utterly the worser part. But this very foible served to keep clean and wholesome the unusual intimacy which united him, Baxter, and myself; for he would permit no protestations and scarce any civility between us. It is odd that this had to be dropped in time; for, as we went on in life and became more seriously involved, we found it then more necessary to be kind. Then, indeed, Simpson could show himself not only kind but full of exceptional delicacies. Some of them I did not appreciate till years after they were done and perhaps forgotten by him. I have said his mind was slow, and in this he was an opposite and perhaps an antidote to Bob. I have known him battle a question sometimes with himself, sometimes with me, month after month for years; he had an honest stubbornness in thinking, and would neither let himself be beat nor cry victory.
