Cover art

Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson

Painting by W. Hatherell.

"Took down the folds of her hair—shook it
round her face and the pool repeated her
thus veiled."

Prince Otto.

Prince Otto
Prince Otto

A DAY WITH
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON

BY MAURICE CLARE

LONDON
HODDER & STOUGHTON
1910

In the same Series.
    Dickens.
    Thackeray.

A DAY WITH STEVENSON.

Catriona
Catriona

Stevenson was desirous to "get free of this prison-yard of the abominably ugly, where I take my daily exercise with my contemporaries." Possibly he recognised that the amazing popularity of Jekyll had been due to the morbid attractiveness of its subject, rather than to its merits of craftsmanship; for, as he had averred, "I know that good work sometimes hits; but, with my hand on my heart, I think it is an accident." But now he was at liberty to give play to his infinite variety upon a true boys' book,—a story to satisfy the inveterate boyishness of his own heart. "Of the romance of boyhood and adolescence, it has been said, he is an unsurpassed master ... the philosophy of life developed in both his essays and romances is that rather of a gifted boy than a mature man." (J. W. Mackail.) And even the girls of Stevenson's imagination have been accused of being "boys in petticoats." The phrase has reason. "I have never admired a girl," he wrote, and again, "I have never pleased myself with any women of mine." The other sex remained for him, throughout, a mystery which he hardly cared to solve,—a sealed book which he was not desirous to open. "Of the two eternal factors in the destiny of man, warfare and love," although he allowed that "to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden," he preferred to deal almost exclusively with the warfare.

And yet one women had played a very important part in Stevenson's life: and it was practically with his marriage that the tide of his fortunes had changed. His wife,—"trusty, dusky, vivid, true," was his very alter ego: with "a character" (to quote Mr. Sidney Colvin) "as strong, interesting, and romantic almost as his own: an inseparable sharer of all his thoughts, the most shrewd and stimulating of critics: and in sickness, despite her own precarious health, the most devoted and most efficient of nurses." To while away the weary hours of illness, Mrs. Stevenson made up stories to amuse him,—and subsequently the husband and wife would write them out together. She, with her "eyes of gold and bramble-dew," was literally all-in-all to him as companion, helpmate, friend;—and far—how infinitely far!—above the ideal wife whom he had described so adroitly,—in his bachelor days,—that woman who should have "a fine touch for the affections," and who should at least be sufficiently talented to avoid boring her life-long comrade. The character of the ideal wife, as there indicated,—apt at gracious compromises, possessor of a cheerful fluent tongue,—was very obviously set forth by a man who had never yet been stirred by the sharp throbs of an imperative emotion. And now that Stevenson realised what love in its depth and breadth might mean, it held a certain sanctity for him,—he was loth to speak of it, as to write of it. It was a marvel that had befallen him personally: but for other people, it might still perhaps, be no more than that gentle domesticated affection which he had portrayed with such amiable humour. But there was one point in which he, consciously or unconsciously insisted, in his desiderata of the female character.

"It always warms a man," he had declared, "to see a woman brave," and he saw it daily in his wife. Therefore it came about, that, unversed in women—as Stevenson unquestionably was, he was able to endow his heroines with a touch of gallant boyishness, a hint of the heroic—and if they failed in flesh-and-blood-vraisemblance, they had that "steel-true, blade-straight" quality which he adored in the women he had chosen.

You will notice this courageous virtue in all of them, rich and poor; from Catriona, that "tall, pretty, tender figure of a maiden, when, having assured her father's escape from prison by a bold stratagem, she arrives a fugitive and an exile at Helvoetsluys, and lands from the staggering side of the Rose into the little boat below;—when, in David Balfour's words:

"I began to think I had made a fool's bargain, that it was merely impossible Catriona should be got on board to me, and that I stood to be set ashore in Helvoet all by myself ... But this was to reckon without the lass's courage ... Up she stood on the bulwarks and held by a stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats, which made the enterprise more dangerous, and gave us rather more a view of her stockings than would be thought genteel in cities"—(Catriona.)

to Seraphina in Prince Otto, still inherently valorous in that desperate flight through the forest: where:

"At length when she was well weary, she came upon a wide and shallow pool. Stones stood in it, like islands; bulrushes fringed the coast; the floor was paved with pine needles; and the pines themselves, whose roots made promontories, looked down silently on their green images. She crept to the margin and beheld herself with wonder, a hollow and bright-eyed phantom, in the ruins of her palace robe ... She addressed herself to make a toilette by that forest mirror, washed herself pure from all the stains of her adventure, took off her jewels and wrapped them in her handkerchief, re-arranged the tatters of her dress, and took down the folds of her hair. She shook it round her face, and the pool repeated her thus veiled." (Prince Otto.)

Clara Huddlestone, in the Pavilion on the Links, repeats the same undauntable note: Olalla is inexorable in moral courage of renunciation, even the weeping Blanche, in the Sieur de MalÉtroit's Door, has the mettle of some small creature at bay.

The charm of Stevenson's heroines is, in short, a cold charm; nor does he often accord them the assistance of a personal description. But they are finely tempered, of the best Toledo steel, and owing to their boyish character, there is no very obvious gap in those novels where they are conspicuously absent, such as The Ebb Tide, The Wreckers, and The Master of Ballantrae. In the latter, indeed, there is a slight "female interest," but a stronger personality in the heroine must inevitably have changed or coloured the whole course of the book: and one cannot but detect a certain vacuum, where at least some emotion might have lifted a haggard head, in the character of Mrs. Henry,—even in that scene, surcharged with hidden explosive possibilities, when the author describes how:

"The Master played upon that little ballad, and upon those who heard him, like an instrument, and seemed now upon the point of failing, and now to conquer his distress, so that the words and music seemed to pour out of his own heart and his own past, and to be aimed directly at Mrs. Henry.... When it came to an end we all sat silent for a time: he had chosen the dusk of the afternoon, so that none could see his neighbour's face: but it seemed as if we held our breathing: only my old lord cleared his throat. The first to move was the singer, who got to his feet suddenly and softly, and went and walked softly to and fro in the low end of the hall." (The Master of Ballantrae.)

But Mrs. Henry plays a very minor part in the marring or making, here, of two men's lives: it is a rÔle of vis inertiÆ at best. And, indeed, when all is said, what shall a petticoat be if not irrelevant, among the clash of steel and smoke of pistols, in an atmosphere permeated by Spanish doubloons or illicit piratical treasure? Stevenson's infallible artistic instinct led him to keep the adventure-story pendant upon the deeds of men, and the eager mistakes of boys; and a certain curious penchant for the squalid, the submerged, the picturesque, brought him by choice into such company as no heroine should enter—that of Villon, for instance, and John Silver, and Herrick the cockney vagabond. "The spice of life is battle," he said; and his life, and his books, were brimful of battles with foes or with fortune.

Painting by W. Hatherell.

"'The words and music seemed to pour out of
his own heart and his own past and to be
aimed directly at Mrs. Henry."

Master of Ballantrae.

Master of Ballantrae
Master of Ballantrae

The open-air life which he had perforce abandoned, the joy of physical strength and hair-breadth 'scape, could still be his by proxy. He revelled in delineating his ideal man:

"Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. 'A peerage or Westminster Abbey!' cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner. These are great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain satisfaction of living, of being about their business in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumbling-blocks of prudence." (Virginibus Puerisque.)

The tramp of horse-hoofs, the clank of the capstan, the door ajar—a thousand sights and sounds were but symbolisms to him of some mysterious by-way of adventure to be followed up, quick with latent possibilities of romance; and from one word, one name, he could evolve a whole intricate plot. With the simplest of sentences, he could electrify the startled reader, as when in The Wrecker, where the desperate castaways sit gambling on the desert island, and one suddenly cries aloud, "Sail ho!"

"All turned at the cry,—and there, in the wild light of the morning, heading straight for Midway Reef, was the brig Flying Scud of Hull." (The Wrecker.)

On that moment the whole tale hangs as on a pivot. All its involution and evolution, all its intricate and tangled clues, lead—backwards or forwards—to this one swift breathless sight.

His morning's work accomplished, the tall gaunt man came downstairs, literally to play awhile. After weeks, it might be, of enforced seclusion in his room, his eye rested pleasurably upon the various attractive objects which almost seemed like new to him. Stevenson,—the avowed evader of personal property, the rolling-stone that had so long refused to gather moss,—was now, under a woman's tender surveillance, surrounded with charm and comfort. "Our drawing room," he maintained, "is a place so beautiful that it's like eating to sit down in it. No other room is so lovely in the world ... I blush for the figure I cut in such a bower." The garden, Mrs. Stevenson's special pleasure, but one in which her husband did not share, was very lovely, with a lawn, and heather-bank, and a half-acre of land, where a little stream ran down a "chine" full of rhododendrons. A large dovecot figured in the garden; and there also "Boguey," the Stevensons' dog, was buried, to whom no other dog had ever been deemed a worthy successor.

Stevenson, his clothes hanging loosely on his emaciated figure, and his hands—"wonderful hands—long and fragile, like those in the early portraits of Velasquez," lingered lovingly over the keys. For a while he amused himself by picking out, note by note, the old-world dance measures of Lully and Rameau; those gavottes, rigadoons and minuets, which conveyed to him the indefinable pot-pourri-like, flavour of his favourite eighteenth century, embued with a certain stately dignity, "the periwig feeling," he called it, as of lords and ladies treading courtly measures. Stevenson was passionately fond of classical music, but he had never attained to any facility of execution. And when he grew tired with his efforts as an interpreter of Lully, he turned to "pickling," as he called it—composing, that is to say, after a fashion, with "the manly and melodious forefinger." The fact that he had invariably failed to master the rudiments of theory, in no wise deterred him; on the contrary, difficulties rather enhanced his delight. "Books are of no use," he avowed, "they tell you how to write in four parts, and that cannot be done by man." So he continued to "pickle" with a light heart, and to enjoy consecutive fifths and other theoretical delinquencies with an enthusiasm worthy of the most modern composer.

Nothing but the lunch hour brought his musical experiments to a close. Stevenson, who had, in his own words, "been obliged to strip himself, one after another, of all the pleasures that he had chosen, except smoking" (and indeed, he was smoking cigarettes all day long) by no means disdained the pleasures of the table. Not, perhaps, in the role of a gourmet—but as an artist in the more recondite delicacies of taste and smell. "To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human perfection than to find beauty in the colours of a sunset," he observed; he coupled the flavour of wine with the beauty of the dawn, and declared that we do not recognise at its full value the great part in life that is played by eating and drinking. "There is a romance about the matter after all," he observed. "Probably the table has more devotees than love; and I am sure food is more generally entertaining than scenery." It was the "romance of the matter" that appealed to him; especially the colour, and savour, and poetical tradition of wine. "Books, and tobacco jars, and some old Burgundy as red as a November sunset, and as fragrant as a violet in April"—these, he thought, should suffice the most luxurious.

After lunch, if he anticipated an exhausting evening, he went to sleep—at a moment's notice—and after a short, sound repose, was as eager as ever to resume his pianoforte amusements; which he continued until friends arrived.

At the age of four-and-twenty, Stevenson had noted down his three chief wishes. "First, good health: secondly, a small competence: thirdly, O Du lieber Gott! friends." The first: wish was irrevocably denied: the second was only just beginning to be granted, the guerdon of unresting toil: the third petition had been abundantly answered. Never was a man more happy in his friends; or one who made them so instantaneously and without effort. "He had only to speak," said one friend, "in order to be recognised in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman, and in the second, for a man of genius." Some, indeed, like Mr. Edmund Gosse, came home dazzled and astounded, saying, as Constance does of Arthur, "Was ever such a gracious creature born?" His expression, of mingled tenderness and mirth, his "scholarly and eclectic presence"—together with his picturesque, velvet-coated appearance, and his flashing flow of words, combined to make a man so attractive and so unique as could command all love at will. And the friends were very many and very notable, who haunted Skerryvore. First and foremost was "Bob," Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, the poet's first cousin, the brilliant art critic: "the man likest and most unlike to me," as R.L.S. described him. "Bob's" sister, Mrs. de Mattos, and her child were frequent visitors; then there were celebrities from London: such as Sargent the painter, William Archer, Sidney Colvin, W. E. Henley, Henry James; and again friends residing in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth; the poet Sir Henry Taylor, and his family; Sir Percy Shelley and his wife. These latter, indeed, regarded Stevenson almost in the light of a son. He struck them as bearing an extraordinary resemblance to Percy Bysshe Shelley; less, perhaps, in lineaments than in figure and in mind; and in consequence of this similarity, they held him very dear.

But to all he was the same bewildering charming host, the man who variously displayed, to quote W. E. Henley:

"A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,—"

And combined with these curiously versatile fruits, "something of the Shorter Catechist."

Generous in criticism, kind in praise, grave and humorous in rapid transition, the amazing scope and variety of Stevenson's writings were excelled by the scope and variety of his talk. "There was no part of the writer that was not visibly present in the man." (Graham Balfour.) He had laid down his opinion that "there can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome." But none save those who were privileged to hear him, as with quick, impetuous gestures, like a Southern foreigner, he emphasised his phrases, could realise the power, the versatility, the inexpressible, irrepressible charm with which the author could fulfil his "fair ambition."

When the visitors had severally taken their departure, the strong resonant voice, with its Scottish accent and rich, full tones still ringing in their ears,—Stevenson had suffered no abatement in the stream of his exuberant mental vitality. The excitement of conversation had, if anything, keyed him up; and presently, for the writing of a few unavoidable letters, he betook himself to his study; "the study where a smiling God beholds each day my stage of labour trod," and sate himself down there with reluctance.

Painting by W. Hatherell.

"All turned at the cry, and there in the wild
light of the morning heaving straight for
midway reef was the brig Flying Scud of
Hull."

The Wrecker.

The Wrecker
The Wrecker

Correspondence, as a rule, he found but an irksome affair; unless conducted upon his own whimsical lines. "I deny that letters should contain news—I mean mine—those of other people should," was his theory; and he boasted himself of a "willingness to pour forth unmitigated rot, which constitutes in me the true spirit of correspondence." For all that, his letters, grave or gay, remain among the most delightful reading in existence; flavoured with his quaintest conceits, endowed with his most delicate turns of phrase, and often tempered with that "something of the Shorter Catechist" to which Henley had alluded.

For, undoubtedly, as time went on, although Stevenson continued to "combine the face of a boy with the distinguished bearing of a man of the world," he was gradually exchanging the "streak of Puck" and the capricious unconventions of the born Bohemian, for something graver and more mature,—a tendency almost towards the didactic. "'Tis a strange world indeed," he had commented, "but there is a manifest God for those who care to look for Him." And now, "with the passing of years," he observed, "there grows more and more upon me that belief in the kindness of this scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an excellent and pacifying compensation." He was suffering, and in all probability would perpetually suffer, from "that sharp ferule of calamity under which we are all God's scholars till we die": but his patience was impregnable, and his desire to leave a brave example bore him constant company. "To suffer," said he, "sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable," and he prepared to enjoy with equal zest all pleasures which were still permitted to him.

As he put away his writing materials, and descended once more to his beloved piano, his father and mother came in. They were living in Bournemouth to be near their only son. The old lighthouse engineer, whose father had built the Bell Rock, who had served under his brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore, "the noblest of all extant sea-lights," who had himself erected Dhu Heartach, was now palpably failing. The spectacle of a stern and honest man slowly evacuating all that he had held of personal strength, was, to his son Louis, a poignantly pathetic one. Their disagreements had been very many and deep-rooted, dating from even before that "dreadful evening walk" in Stevenson's youth, when, "on being tightly cross-questioned," the lad who had been trained for a civil engineer, and had "worked in a carpenter's shop and had a brass foundry, and hung about wood-yards and the like," confessed that he cared for nothing but literature,—"no profession!" as his father contemptuously replied. They had differed on almost every conceivable topic open to their discussion,—yet here, in the fulness of time, they were at peace together,—the austere old man in his second childhood, and the chronic invalid who "must live as though he were walking on eggs." Innumerable ineffaceable traits of similarity bound one to the other; at bottom of all the bygone angers lay a permanent bedrock of mutual love. And perhaps the nearing vision of death which terminated all vistas for both of them, exercised its usual effect, of calm, and laisser-faire, and the equalisation of things: for it is probable that no man has a just sense of proportionate values until he stands in the presence of death.

Stevenson had often alluded, as a matter of personal knowledge, to his constant prescience of mortality, and how it affected a man's thoughts of life. Very seldom has the view of the confirmed invalid, the doomed consumptive, been put forth to the world with the frankness with which Stevenson invested it. He has been sometimes charged with a certain lack of reticence: but in this matter, unquestionably, his candour was to the benefitting of mankind: to whom these close views of the inevitable end are rarely possible under such deliberate and clear-headed conditions.

There is nothing maudlin, nothing hypochondriacal, about Stevenson's treatment of this subject: the same cheerful philosophy bears him up, the same vitality of joy. It is hardly to be wondered at, that some critics handled him seriously, on account of his lightheartedness in the august shadow of the last enemy,—and his inveterate optimism in the face of all calamities. "He jests at scars who never felt a wound," they practically told him,—and could hardly be persuaded to credit the paradox that the man who preached in season and out of season, the gospel of that "cheery old Pagan, Hope," was not a denizen of the open-air,—healthy, athletic, vigorous, incapable of realising the maladies incident to man,—instead of an emaciated, bed-ridden creature, whose smallest pleasures must be measured, so to speak, in a medicine-glass. But, "It is something after all," he has said, "to leave a brave example": and in that he triumphantly succeeded. For the opportunities of meteoric heroisms are few and far between; but every hour beholds the need of those obscurer braveries which may be born of pain and suffering....

In Ordered South and other well-known essays, he shows the gradual relaxation of the ties which bind a man to terrestrial things,—and the curiously significant alteration in his regard for the facts of life,—from the sower in the dank spring furrows, to the sight of little children with their long possibilities before them.

Stevenson had no children of his own. His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, then at school in Bournemouth, was destined to become his friend and collaborator: but it is doubtful that he cared for children as such. The average small folk, "dragged about in a pleasing stupor by nurses," were very far remote from that superabundant vitality nursed in an attenuated physique, which had sat up with a shawl over its shoulders, so many tedious months in childhood, when its principal habitat was "The Land of Counterpane" and other regions mapped out in the great and glorious world of Make-Believe.

Painting by W. Hatherell.

ST. IVES DESCENDS FROM EDINBURGH CASTLE.

"The whole forces of my mind were so consumed
with losing hold and getting it again, that I
could scarce have told whether I was going up
or coming down."

St. Ives.

St. Ives
St. Ives

For this reason, the Child's Garden of Verses is not, in any real sense of the word, a child's book at all. It contains the exquisite imaginations of childhood as the grown-up man remembers them: to him they have the charm of the vanished past, they are the utterances of one who has also lived in Arcadia. But to the child, they are the very commonplaces of existence. To sway to and fro in a swing, "the pleasantest thing a child can do,"—to bring home treasures from field and wood, nuts and wooden whistles, and some all-precious unidentifiable stone, "though father denies it, I'm sure it is gold,"—these are everyday affairs to the country-child,—just as watching the lamplighter is to the town child. To read verses about them is but a waste of time, when one might be actively engaged in similar avocations. But to the grown-man who can never play with wooden soldiers in the garden, never be a pirate any more,—these reminiscences of Stevenson's are a delight unfailing. No one else has ever worded them quite so accurately, quite so simply: and, taken all for all, they are in themselves a summing-up of that most excellent philosophy of this author, "The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings!" The world was indeed full of a number of things to R.L.S. and,—passed through the crucible of his own astonishing personality,—they were all, bad or good, transmogrified into things that make for joy.

After eight o'clock dinner was over, the old folks bade good-night,—the father, with touching affection, kissing Louis as though he were a child, and murmuring, "You'll see me in the morning, dearie," as if still addressing that little feeble creature who had been kept alive with such difficulty in the old days at Edinburgh.

The younger man returned to the piano-forte; it drew him like a magnet. For a short time he indulged in his desultory music-making, relishing to the uttermost every success of sound which he achieved: and the happiness, which was his theory of life, radiated in warm abundance from his richly-tinted face and glowing eyes. "It's a fine life," he exclaimed.

At last the day's supply of energy succumbed before the imperious demands of this "fiery threadpaper of a man," and in deference to his wife's suggestion he betook himself to bed. Not necessarily to rest; for even in his dreams his busy brain was working, and his "Brownies," as he termed them, bringing him fresh material for plots. Dr. Jekyll had been thus evolved from three scenes dreamed successively in detail, from which the dreamer waked with cries of horror.

But he did not flinch before the coming night, and anything that it might bring of sickness or unrest. He thought alone upon the past delightful day, fraught with strenuous work and simple pleasures; and he petitioned, in his own words:

"If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness;
If I have moved along my race
And shown no glorious morning face;
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:—
Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake!"
                                                (Underwoods.)

His wife hovered around him with gentle ministrations, as suddenly out-wearied, Robert Louis Stevenson extended his long, lean form to a possible repose. There was not, perhaps, a cheerfuller man that night in England.

The sea hummed at the foot of the chine, with that soft and dove-like purring of the South-coast sea; the doves made answer with a vibrant cooing in the middle distance of the twilight garden. Spring buds of pear-trees and cherry-trees globed themselves stealthily into blossom; a delicate latent energy was consciously present in the air—the rising of sap and revivification of seed, all the mysterious hidden progresses of April. And the man whose ways were set in a perpetual convergence towards the doors of death, waved, so to speak, a blithe recognition to the myriad hosts of life.

"O toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is labour." (Virginibus Puerisque.)

The author desires to acknowledge the kindness of Messrs. Cassell & Co., in allowing short extracts to be made from The Master of Ballantrae, The Wrecker, and Catriona; also to thank Mr. William Heinemann for a similar courtesy with regard to St. Ives, and Messrs. Chatto & Windus for their permission to include various quotations from Virginibus Puerisque, Underwoods, and Prince Otto.

Printed by The Bushey Colour Press (AndrÉ & Sleigh, Ltd.),
Bushey, Herts., England.

Rear cover
Rear cover