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13583	----	THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS CARLYLE AND RALPH WALDO EMERSON 1834-1872 VOLUME I. "To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give, and of me to receive."--Emerson "What the writer did actually mean, the thing he then thought of, the thing he then was."--Carlyle EDITORIAL NOTE The trust of editing the following Correspondence, committed to me several years since by the writers, has been of easy fulfilment. The whole Correspondence, so far as it is known to exist, is here printed, with the exception of a few notes of introduction, and one or two essentially duplicate letters. I cannot but hope that some of the letters now missing may hereafter come to light. In printing, a dash has been substituted here and there for a proper name, and some passages, mostly relating to details of business transactions, have been omitted. These omissions are distinctly designated. The punctuation and orthography of the original letters have been in the main exactly followed. I have thought best to print much concerning dealings with publishers, as illustrative of the material conditions of literature during the middle of the century, as well as of the relations of the two friends. The notes in the two volumes are mine. My best thanks and those of the readers of this Correspondence are due to Mr. Moncure D. Conway, for his energetic and successful effort to recover some of Emerson's early letters which had fallen into strange hands. --Charles Eliot Norton Cambridge, Massachusetts January 29, 1883 --------- NOTE TO REVISED EDITION The hope that some of the letters missing from it when this correspondence was first published might come to light, has been fulfilled by the recovery of thirteen letters of Carlyle, and of four of Emerson. Besides these, the rough drafts of one or two of Emerson's letters, of which the copies sent have gone astray, have been found. Comparatively few gaps in the Correspondence remain to be filled. The letters and drafts of letters now first printed are those numbered as follows:-- Vol. I. XXXVI. Carlyle XLI. Emerson XLII. Carlyle XLVI. " XLVII. " LXVIII. " Vol. II. C. Emerson CIV. Carlyle CV. " CVI. " CVII. " CVIII. " CIX. " CXII. " CXVI. " CXLIX. Emerson CLII. " CLXV. " CLXXXVI. " Emerson's letter of 1 May, 1859 (CLXIV.), of which only fragments were printed in the former edition, is now printed complete, and the extract from his Diary accompanying it appears in the form in which it seems to have been sent to Carlyle. --C.E.N. December 31, 1884 ----------- CONTENTS OF VOLUME I. Introduction. Emerson's early recognition of Carlyle's genius. --His visit at Craigenputtock, in 1833.--Extracts concerning it from letter of Carlyle, from letter of Emerson, and from English Traits. I. Emerson. Boston, 14 May, 1834. First acquaintance with Carlyle's writings.--Visit to Craigenputtock.--_Sartor Resartus,_ its contents, its diction.--Gift of Webster's _Speeches_ and Sampson Reed's _Growth of the Mind._ II. Carlyle. Chelsea, 12 August, 1834. Significance of Emerson's gift and visit.--Sampson Reed.--Webster.-- Teufelsdrockh, its sorry reception.--Removal to London.--Article on the Diamond Necklace.--Preparation for book on the French Revolution.--Death of Coleridge. III. Emerson. Concord, 20 November, 1834. Death of his brother Edward.--Consolation in Carlyle's friendship.--Pleasure in receiving stitched copy of Teufelsdrockh.--Goethe.-- Swedenborgianism.--Of himself.--Hope of Carlyle's coming to America.--Gift of various publications. IV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 3 February, 1835. Acknowledgments and inquiries.--Sympathy for death of Edward Emerson.--Unitarianism. --Emerson's position and pursuits.--Goethe.-Volume of French Revolution finished.--Condition of literature.--Lecturing in America.--Mrs. Austin. V. Emerson. Concord, 12 March, 1835. Appreciation of Sartor. --Dr. Channing.--Prospect of Carlyle's visit to America.--His own approaching marriage.--Plan of a journal of Philosophy in Boston.--Encouragement of Carlyle. VI. Emerson. Concord, 30 April, 1835. Apathy of English public toward Carlyle.--Hope of his visit to America.--Lectures and lecturers in Boston.--Estimate of receipts and expenses.--Esteem of Carlyle in America. VII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 13 May, 1835. Emerson's marriage. --Astonishing reception of Teufelsdrockh in New England. --Boston Transcendentalism.--Destruction of manuscript of first volume of _French Revolution._--Result of a year's life in London.--Wordsworth.--Southey. VIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 27 June, 1835. Visit to America questionable.--John Carlyle.--Tired out with rewriting _French Revolution._--A London rout.--O'Connell.--Longfellow.--Emerson and Unitarianism. IX. Emerson. Concord, 7 October, 1835. Mrs. Child.--Public addresses.--Marriage.--Destruction of manuscript of _French Revolution._--Notice of _Sartor_ in _North American Review._ --Politics.--Charles Emerson. X. Emerson. Concord, 8 April, 1836. Concern at Carlyle's silence.--American reprint of _Sartor._--Carlyle's projected visit.--Lecturing in New England. XI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 29 April, 1836. Weariness over _French Revolution._--Visit to Scotland.--Charm of London.--Letter from James Freeman Clarke.--Article on _Sartor_ in _North American Review._--Quatrain from Voss. XII. Emerson. Concord, 17 September,1836. Death of Charles Emerson.--Solicitude concerning Carlyle.--Urgency to him to come to Concord.--Sends _Nature_ to him.--Reflections. XIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 5 November, 1836. Charles Emerson's death.--Concord.--His own condition.--_French Revolution_ almost ended.--Character of the book.--Weariness.--London and its people.--Plans for rest.--John Sterling.--Articles on Mirabeau and the _Diamond Necklace._--Mill's _London_ Review.--Thanks for American Teufelsdrockh.--Mrs. Carlyle.--Might and Right, Canst and Shalt.--Books about Goethe. XIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 13 February, 1837. Teufelsdrockh in America and England.--_Nature._--Miss Martineau on Emerson. --Mammon.--Completion of _French Revolution._--Scheme of Lecturing in London.--America fading into the background. XV. Emerson. Concord, 31 March, 1837. Receipt of the Mirabeau and Diamond Necklace.--Their substance and style.--Proof-sheet of _French Revolution._--Society in America.--Renewed invitation. --Mrs. Carlyle.--His son Waldo.--Bronson Alcott.--Second edition of _Sartor._ XVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 1 June, 1837. Lectures on German Literature.--Copy of _French Revolution_ sent.--Review of himself in _Christian Examiner._--George Ripley.--Miss Martineau and her book on America.--Plans. XVII. Emerson. Concord, 13 September, 1837. _The French Revolution._--Sale of Carlyle's books.--Lectures. XVIII. Emerson. Concord, 2 November, 1837. Introduction given to Charles Sumner.--Reprint of _French Revolution._--Lectures. XIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 December, 1837. Visit to Scotland. --Mrs. Carlyle's ill-health.--His own need of rest.--John Sterling; his regard for Emerson.--Emerson's Oration on the American Scholar.--Proposed collection of his own Miscellanies. XX. Emerson. Concord, 9 February, 1838. Lectures on Human Culture.--Carlyle's praise of his Oration.--John Sterling. --Reprint of _French Revolution._--Profits from it.--American selection and edition of Carlyle's _Miscellanies._ XXI. Emerson. Boston, 12 March, 1838. Sale of _French Revolution._--Arrangements concerning American edition of _Miscellanies._ XXII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 16 March, 1838. Prospect of cash from Yankee-land.--Poverty.--American and English reprints of _Miscellanies._--Sterling's _Crystals from a Cavern._--Miss Martineau on Emerson.--Lectures.--Plans. XXIII. Emerson. Concord, 10 May, 1838. American edition of _Miscellanies._--Invitation to Concord.--His means and mode of life.--Sterling.--Miss Martineau.--Carlyle's poverty. XXIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 15 June, 1838. American _French Revolution._--London edition of Teufelsdrockh.--Miscellanies. --Lectures, their money result.--Plans.--Emerson's Oration. --Mrs. Child's _Philothea._ XXV. Emerson. Boston, 30 July, 1838. Encloses bill for L50. --_Miscellanies_ published. XXVI. Emerson. Concord, 6 August, 1838. Publication of _Miscellanies._--Two more volumes proposed.--Orations at Theological School, Cambridge, and at Dartmouth College.--Carlyle desired in America. XXVII. Carlyle. Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, 25 September, 1838. Visit to his Mother.--Remittance from Emerson of L50.-- _Miscellanies_ again.--Another Course of Lectures.--Sterling.-- Miss Martineau. XXVIII. Emerson. Concord, 17 October, 1838. Business.--Outcry against address to Divinity College.--Injury to Carlyle's repute in America from association with him.--Article in _Quarterly_ on German Religious Writers.--Sterling. XXIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 7 November, 1838. Emerson's letters.-- Dyspepsia.--Use of money from America.--Arrangements concerning publication of _Miscellanies._--Emerson's Orations.--Tempest in a washbowl concerning Divinity School Address.--John Carlyle-- Postscript by Mrs. Carlyle. XXX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 15 November, 1838. Arrangements concerning Miscellanies.--Employments, outlooks.--Concord not forgotten, but Emerson to come first to England.--John Carlyle. --Miss Martineau and her books. XXXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 2 December, 1838. Arrival of American reprint of _Miscellanies._--English and American bookselling.-- Proposed second edition of _French Revolution._--Reading Horace Walpole.--Sumner.--Dartmouth Oration.--Sterling.--Dwight's German Translations. XXXII. Emerson. Concord, 13 January, 1839. Business.-- Remittance of L100.--Lectures on Human Life.--Dr. Carlyle. XXXIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 February, 1839. Acknowledgment of remittance.--Arrangements for new edition of _French Revolution._--London.--Wish for quiet.--Ill-health.--Suggestion of writing on Cromwell.--Mr. Joseph Coolidge.--Divinity School Address.--Mrs. Carlyle.--Gladstone cites from Emerson in his Church and State. XXXIV. Emerson. Concord, 15 March, 1839. Account of sales.-- Second series of _Miscellanies._--Ill wind raised by Address blown over.--Lectures.--Birth of daughter.--_The Onyx Ring._ --Alcott. XXXV. Emerson. Concord, 19 March, 1839. Need of copy to fill out second series of _Miscellanies._--John S. Dwight. XXXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 13 April, 1839. Solicitude on account of Emerson's silence.--Gift to Mrs. Emerson.--Book business. --New edition of _French Revolution._--New lectures.--Better circumstances, better health.--Arthur Buller urges a visit to America.--Milnes.--Emerson's growing popularity. XXXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 17 April, 1839. Nothing in manuscript fit for _Miscellanies._--Essay on Varnhagen.--Translation of Goethe's _Mahrchen._--Cruthers and Jonson.--Dwight's book. --Lectures.--Discontent among working people. XXXVIII. Emerson. Boston, 20 April, 1839. Proposals of publishers concerning _French Revolution._--Introduction of Miss Sedgwick. XXXIX. Emerson. Concord, 25 April, 1839. Account.--Sales of books. XL. Emerson. Concord, 28 April, 1839. Proposals of publishers and accounts. XLI. Emerson. Concord, 15 May, 1839. Arrangements with publishers.--Matter for completion of fourth volume of _Miscellanies._--Stearns Wheelers faithful labor.--Arthur Buller's good witnessing.--Plans for Carlyle's visit to America. --Milnes.--Copy of _Nature_ for him. XLII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 29 May, 1839. Lectures happily over.-- Sansculottism.--Horse must be had.--Extempore speaking an art.-- Must lecture in America or write a book.--Wordsworth.--Sterling. --Messages. XLIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 24 June, 1839. Delay in arrival of _Miscellanies._--Custom-house rapacities.--Accounts..--No longer poor.--Emerson's work.--Miss Sedgwick.--Daniel Webster.--Proposed visit to Scotland.--Sinking of the Vengeur. XLIV. Emerson. Concord, 4 July, 1839. Proof-sheet of new edition of _French Revolution_ received.--Gift to Mrs. Emerson of engraving of Guido's Aurora.--Publishers' accounts.--Sterling.-- Occupations.--Margaret Fuller. XLV. Emerson. Concord, 8 August, 1839. _Miscellanies_ sent. --Daniel Webster.--Alcott.--Thoreau. XLVI. Carlyle. Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, 4 September, 1839. Rusticating.--Arrival of _Miscellanies._--Errata.--Reprint of _Wilhelm Meister._--Estimate of the book.--Copies of _French Revolution_ sent.--Eager expectation of Emerson's book.-- Sterling.--Plans. XLVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 December, 1839. Long silence.--Stay in Scotland.--Chartism.--Reprint of _Miscellanies._--Stearns Wheeler.--_Wilhelm Meister._--Boston steamers.--Speculations about Hegira into New England.--Visitor from America who had never seen Emerson.--Miss Martineau.--Silence and speech.-- Sterling.--Southey.--No longer desperately poor. XLVIII. Emerson. Concord, 12 December, 1839. Copies of _French Revolution_ arrived.--Lectures on the Present Age.--Letter from Sterling, his paper on Carlyle.--Friends. XLIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 6 January, 1840. _Chartism._-- Sterling.--Monckton Milnes, paper by him on Emerson. L. Carlyle. Chelsea, 17 January, 1840. Export and import of books.--New editions.--Books sent to Emerson.--Cromwell as a subject for writing.--No appetite for lecturing.--Madame Necker on Emerson. LI. Emerson. New York, 18 March, 1840. New York.--Loss of faith on entering cities.--Margaret Fuller to edit a journal.--Lectures on the Present Age.--His children.--Renewed invitation. LII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 1 April, 1840. Count D'Orsay, his portrait of Carlyle.--Wages for books, due to Emerson.--Milnes's review.--Heraud.--Landor.--Lectures in prospect on Heroes and Hero-worship. LIII. Emerson. Concord, 21 April, 1840. Introduction of Mr. Grinnell.--Chartism.--Reprint of it.--At work on a book.-- Booksellers' accounts.--_The Dial._--Alcott. LIV. Emerson. Concord, 30 June, 1840. _Wilhelm Meister_ received.--Landor.--Letter to Milnes.--Lithograph of Concord. --_The Dial,_ No. 1. LV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 2 July, 1840. Bibliopoliana.--Lectures about Great Men.--Lecturing in America.--Milnes and his _Poems._ --Controversial volume from Ripley. LVI. Emerson. Concord, 30 August, 1840. Booksellers' accounts. --Faith cold concerning Carlyle's coming to America.-- Transcendentalism and _The Dial._--Social problems.--Character of his writing.--Charles Sumner. LVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 26 September, 1840. Not to go to America for the present.--_Heroes and Hero-Worship._--Journey on horseback.--Reading on Cromwell.--_Dial_ No. 1.--Puseyism.--Dr. Sewell on Carlyle.--Landor.--Sterling. LVIII. Emerson. Concord, 30 October, 1840. Booksellers' accounts.--Projects of social reform.--Studies unproductive. --Hopes to print a book of essays. LIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 9 December, 1840. Booksellers' carelessness and accounts.--Puseyism.--Dial No. 2.--Goethe. --Miss Martineau's _Hour and Man._--Working in Cromwellism. LX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 21 February, 1841. To Mrs. Emerson.-- London transmuted by her alchemy.--Hope of seeing Concord. --Miss Martineau.--Toussaint l'Ouverture.--Sheets of _Heroes and Hero-worship_ sent to Emerson. LXI. Emerson. Concord, 28 February, 1841. Accounts.--Essays soon to appear.--Lecture on Reform. LXII. Emerson. Boston, 30 April, 1841. Remittance of L100.-- Accounts.--Piratical reprint of _Heroes and Hero-worship._-- _Dial_ No. 4. LXIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 May, 1841. Visit to Milnes.--To his Mother.--Emerson's _Essays._--His own condition. LXIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 21 May, 1841. Acknowledgment of remittance of L100.--Unauthorized American reprint of _Heroes and Hero-worship._--Improvement in circumstances.--Desire for solitude.--Article on Emerson in _Fraser's Magazine._ LXV. Emerson. Concord, 30 May, 1841. Accounts.--Book by Jones Very.--_Heroes and Hero-worship._--Thoreau. LXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 25 June, 1841. Proposed stay at Annan. --Motives for it.--London reprint of Emerson's Essays.--Rio. LXVII. Emerson. Concord, 31 July, 1841. London reprint of _Essays._--Carlyle in his own land.--Writing an oration. LXVIII. Carlyle. Newby, Annan, Scotland, 18 August, 1841. Speedy receipt of letter.--Stay in Scotland.--Seclusion and sadness.--Reprint of Emerson's _Essays._--Shipwreck. LXIX. Emerson. Concord, 30 October, 1841. Pleasure in English reprint of _Essays._--Lectures on the Times.--Opportunities of the Lecture-room.--Accounts. LXX. Emerson. Concord, 14 November, 1841. Remittance of L40.-- His banker.--Gambardella.--Preparation for lectures on the Times. LXXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 19 November, 1841. Gambardella.-- Lawrence's portrait.--Emerson's Essays in England.--Address at Waterville College.--_The Dial._--Emerson's criticism on Landor. LXXII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 6 December, 1841. Acknowledgment of remittance of L40.--American funds.--Landor.--Emerson's Lectures. LXXIII. Emerson. New York, 28 February, 1842. Remittance of L48.--American investments.--Death of his son.--Alcott going to England. LXXIV. Carlyle. Templand, 28 March, 1842. Sympathy, with Emerson.--Death of Mrs. Carlyle's mother.--At Templand to settle affairs.--Life there.--A book on Cromwell begun. LXXV. Emerson. Concord, 31 March, 1842. Bereavement.--Alcott going to England.--Editorship of _Dial._--Mr. Henry Lee.-- Lectures in New York. --------------------- CORRESPONDENCE OF CARLYLE AND EMERSON At the beginning of his "English Traits," Mr. Emerson, writing of his visit to England in 1833, when he was thirty years old, says that it was mainly the attraction of three or four writers, of whom Carlyle was one, that had led him to Europe. Carlyle's name was not then generally known, and it illustrates Emerson's mental attitude that he should have thus early recognized his genius, and felt sympathy with it. The decade from 1820 to 1830 was a period of unusual dulness in English thought and imagination. All the great literary reputations belonged to the beginning of the century, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, had said their say. The intellectual life of the new generation had not yet found expression. But toward the end of this time a series of articles, mostly on German literature, appearing in the Edinburgh and in the Foreign Quarterly Review, an essay on Burns, another on Voltaire, still more a paper entitled "Characteristics," displayed the hand of a master, and a spirit in full sympathy with the hitherto unexpressed tendencies and aspirations of its time, and capable of giving them expression. Here was a writer whose convictions were based upon principles, and whose words stood for realities. His power was slowly acknowledged. As yet Carlyle had received hardly a token of recognition from his contemporaries. He was living solitary, poor, independent, in "desperate hope," at Craigenputtock. On August 24,1833, he makes entry in his Journal as follows: "I am left here the solitariest, stranded, most helpless creature that I have been for many years..... Nobody asks me to work at articles. The thing I want to write is quite other than an article... In _all_ times there is a word which spoken to men; to the actual generation of men, would thrill their inmost soul. But the way to find that word? The way to speak it when found?" The next entry in his Journal shows that Carlyle had found the word. It is the name "Ralph Waldo Emerson," the record of Emerson's unexpected visit. "I shall never forget the visitor," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, long afterwards, "who years ago, in the Desert, descended on us, out of the clouds as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only one day." At the time of this memorable visit Emerson was morally not less solitary than Carlyle; he was still less known; his name had been unheard by his host in the desert. But his voice was soon to become also the voice of a leader. With temperaments sharply contrasted, with traditions, inheritances, and circumstances radically different, with views of life and of the universe widely at variance, the souls of these two young men were yet in sympathy, for their characters were based upon the same foundation of principle. In their independence and their sincerity they were alike; they were united in their faith in spiritual truth, and their reverence for it. Their modes of thought of expression were not merely dissimilar, but divergent, and yet, though parted by an ever widening cleft of difference, they knew, as Carlyle said, that beneath it "the rock-strata, miles deep, united again, and their two souls were at one" Two days after Emerson's visit Carlyle wrote to his mother:-- "Three little happinesses have befallen us: first, a piano-tuner, procured for five shillings and sixpence, has been here, entirely reforming the piano, so that I can hear a little music now, which does me no little good. Secondly, Major Irving, of Gribton, who used at this season of the year to live and shoot at Craigenvey, came in one day to us, and after some clatter offered us a rent of five pounds for the right to shoot here, and even tabled the cash that moment, and would not pocket it again. Money easilier won never sat in my pocket; money for delivering us from a great nuisance, for now I will tell every gunner applicant, 'I cannot, sir; it is let.' Our third happiness was the arrival of a certain young unknown friend, named Emerson, from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so far from his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here! He had an introduction from Mill, and a Frenchman (Baron d'Eichthal's nephew) whom John knew at Rome. Of course we could do no other than welcome him; the rather as he seemed to be one of the most lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed till next day with us, and talked and heard talk to his heart's content, and left us all really sad to part with him. Jane says it is the first journey since Noah's Deluge undertaken to Craigenputtock for such a purpose. In any case, we had a cheerful day from it, and ought to be thankful." On the next Sunday, a week after his visit, Emerson wrote the following account of it to his friend, Mr. Alexander Ireland. "I found him one of the most simple and frank of men, and became acquainted with him at once. We walked over several miles of hills, and talked upon all the great questions that interest us most. The comfort of meeting a man is that he speaks sincerely; that he feels himself to be so rich, that he is above the meanness of pretending to knowledge which he has not, and Carlyle does not pretend to have solved the great problems, but rather to be an observer of their solution as it goes forward in the world. I asked him at what religious development the concluding passage in his piece in the Edinburgh Review upon German literature (say five years ago), and some passages in the piece called 'Characteristics,' pointed. He replied that he was not competent to state even to himself,--he waited rather to see. My own feeling was that I had met with men of far less power who had got greater insight into religious truth. He is, as you might guess from his papers, the most catholic of philosophers; he forgives and loves everybody, and wishes each to struggle on in his own place and arrive at his own ends. But his respect for eminent men, or rather his scale of eminence, is about the reverse of the popular scale. Scott, Mackintosh, Jeffrey, Gibbon,--even Bacon, --are no heroes of his; stranger yet, he hardly admires Socrates, the glory of the Greek world; but Burns, and Samuel Johnson, and Mirabeau, he said interested him, and I suppose whoever else has given himself with all his heart to a leading instinct, and has not calculated too much. But I cannot think of sketching even his opinions, or repeating his conversations here. I will cheerfully do it when you visit me here in America. He talks finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and I loved him very much at once. I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but I could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in his wife, and I hope he will not leave the moors; 't is so much better for a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of city society." * ------------- * _Ralph Waldo Emerson. Recollections of his Visits to England_ By Alexander Ireland. London, 1882, p. 58. ------------ Twenty-three years later, in his "English Traits," Emerson once more describes his visit, and tells of his impressions of Carlyle. "From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On my return I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own terms what is best in London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humor which floated everything he looked upon. His talk, playfully exalting the most familiar objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology. Few were the objects and lonely the man, 'not a person to speak to within sixteen miles, except the minister of Dunscore'; so that books inevitably made his topics. "He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his discourse. Blackwood's was the 'sand magazine'; Fraser's nearer approach to possibility of life was the 'mud magazine'; a piece of road near by that marked some failed enterprise was 'the grave of the last sixpence.' When too much praise of any genius annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by his pig. He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his Pen; but pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that, he still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero's death, _Qualis artifex pereo!_ better than most history. He worships a man that will manifest any truth to him. At one time he had inquired and read a good deal about America. Landor's principle was mere rebellion, and _that,_ he feared, was the American principle. The best thing he knew of that country was, that in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had read in Stewart's book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he had been shown across the street, and had found Mungo in his own house dining on roast turkey. "We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he disparaged Socrates; and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to the new. His own reading had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy was one of his first books after Robinson Crusoe and Robertson's America, an early favorite. Rousseau's Confessions had discovered to him that he was not a dunce; and it was now ten years since he had learned German, by the advice of a man who told him he would find in that language what he wanted. "He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this moment; recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the great booksellers for puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on the eve of bankruptcy. "He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the selfish abdication by public men of all that public persons should perform. 'Government should direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors; my dame makes it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his wants to the next house. But here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to the moor and till it. They burned the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.' "We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then without his cap, and down into Wordsworth's country. There we sat down and talked of the immortality of the soul. It was not Carlyle's fault that we talked on that topic, for he has the natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step can be taken. But he was honest and true, and cognizant of the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how every event affects all the future. 'Christ died on the tree that built Dunscore kirk yonder: that brought you and me together. Time has only a relative existence.' "He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar's appreciation. London is the heart of the world, he said, wonderful only from the mass of human beings. He liked the huge machine. Each keeps its own round. The baker's boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. But it turned out good men. He named certain individuals, especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom London had well served." Such is the record of the beginnings of the friendship between Carlyle and Emerson. What place this friendship held in the lives of both, the following Correspondence shows. --------- I. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, Massachusetts, 14 May, 1884 My Dear Sir,--There are some purposes we delay long to execute simply because we have them more at heart than others, and such an one has been for many weeks, I may say months, my design of writing you an epistle. Some chance wind of Fame blew your name to me, perhaps two years ago, as the author of papers which I had already distinguished (as indeed it was very easy to do) from the mass of English periodical criticism as by far the most original and profound essays of the day,--the works of a man of Faith as well as Intellect, sportive as well as learned, and who, belonging to the despairing and deriding class of philosophers, was not ashamed to hope and to speak sincerely. Like somebody in _Wilhelm Meister_, I said: This person has come under obligations to me and to all whom he has enlightened. He knows not how deeply I should grieve at his fall, if, in that exposed England where genius always hears the Devil's whisper, "All these kingdoms will I give thee," his virtue also should be an initial growth put off with age. When therefore I found myself in Europe, I went to your house only to say, "Faint not,--the word you utter is heard, though in the ends of the earth and by humblest men; it works, prevails." Drawn by strong regard to one of my teachers I went to see his person, and as he might say his environment at Craigenputtock. Yet it was to fulfil my duty, finish my mission, not with much hope of gratifying him,--in the spirit of "If I love you, what is that to you?" Well, it happened to me that I was delighted with my visit, justified to myself in my respect, and many a time upon the sea in my homeward voyage I remembered with joy the favored condition of my lonely philosopher, his happiest wedlock, his fortunate temper, his steadfast simplicity, his all means of happiness;--not that I had the remotest hope that he should so far depart from his theories as to expect happiness. On my arrival at home I rehearsed to several attentive ears what I had seen and heard, and they with joy received it. In Liverpool I wrote to Mr. Fraser to send me Magazine, and I have now received four numbers of the _Sartor Resartus,_ for whose light thanks evermore. I am glad that one living scholar is self-centred, and will be true to himself though none ever were before; who, as Montaigne says, "puts his ear close by himself, and holds his breath and listens." And none can be offended with the self-subsistency of one so catholic and jocund. And 't is good to have a new eye inspect our mouldy social forms, our politics, and schools, and religion. I say _our,_ for it cannot have escaped you that a lecture upon these topics written for England may be read to America. Evermore thanks for the brave stand you have made for Spiritualism in these writings. But has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle chosen to convey this treasure? I delight in the contents; the form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion. And yet did ever wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction? As if society were not sufficiently shy of truth without providing it beforehand with an objection to the form. Can it be that this humor proceeds from a despair of finding a contemporary audience, and so the Prophet feels at liberty to utter his message in droll sounds. Did you not tell me, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, sitting upon one of your broad hills, that it was Jesus Christ built Dunscore Kirk yonder? If you love such sequences, then admit, as you will, that no poet is sent into the world before his time; that all the departed thinkers and actors have paved your way; that (at least when you surrender yourself) nations and ages do guide your pen, yes, and common goose-quills as well as your diamond graver. Believe then that harp and ear are formed by one revolution of the wheel; that men are waiting to hear your epical song; and so be pleased to skip those excursive involved glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of variations. At least in some of your prefaces you should give us the theory of your rhetoric. I comprehend not why you should lavish in that spendthrift style of yours celestial truths. Bacon and Plato have something too solid to say than that they can afford to be humorists. You are dispensing that which is rarest, namely, the simplest truths,--truths which lie next to consciousness, and which only the Platos and Goethes perceive. I look for the hour with impatience when the vehicle will be worthy of the spirit,--when the word will be as simple, and so as resistless, as the thought,--and, in short, when your words will be one with things. I have no hope that you will find suddenly a large audience. Says not the sarcasm, "Truth hath the plague in his house"? Yet all men are _potentially_ (as Mr. Coleridge would say) your audience, and if you will not in very Mephistophelism repel and defy them, shall be actually;* and whatever the great or the small may say about the charm of diabolism, a true and majestic genius can afford to despise it. ------------ * This year, 1882, seventy thousand copies of a sixpenny edition of _Sartor Resartus_ have been sold. ------------- I venture to amuse you with this homiletic criticism because it is the sense of uncritical truth seekers, to whom you are no more than Hecuba, whose instincts assure them that there is Wisdom in this grotesque Teutonic apocalyptic strain of yours, but that 't is hence hindered in its effect. And though with all my heart I would stand well with my Poet, yet if I offend I shall quietly retreat into my Universal relations, wherefrom I affectionately espy you as a man, myself as another. And yet before I come to the end of my letter I may repent of my temerity and unsay my charge. For are not all our circlets of will as so many little eddies rounded in by the great Circle of Necessity, and _could_ the Truth-speaker, perhaps now the best Thinker of the Saxon race, have written otherwise? And must not we say that Drunkenness is a virtue rather than that Cato has erred? I wish I could gratify you with any pleasing news of the regeneration, education, prospects, of man in this continent. But your philanthropy is so patient, so far-sighted, that present evils give you less solicitude. In the last six years government in the United States has been fast becoming a job, like great charities. A most unfit person in the Presidency has been doing the worst things; and the worse he grew, the more popular. Now things seem to mend. Webster, a good man and as strong as if he were a sinner, begins to find himself the centre of a great and enlarging party and his eloquence incarnated and enacted by them; yet men dare not hope that the majority shall be suddenly unseated. I send herewith a volume of Webster's that you may see his speech on Foot's Resolutions, a speech which the Americans have never done praising. I have great doubts whether the book reaches you, as I know not my agents. I shall put with it the little book of my Swedenborgian druggist,* of whom I told you. And if, which is hardly to be hoped, any good book should be thrown out of our vortex of trade and politics, I shall not fail to give it the same direction. -------------- * _Observations on the Growth of the Mind,_ by Sampson Reed, first published in 1825. A fifth edition of this thoughtful little treatise was published in 1865. Mr. Reed was a graduate of Harvard College in 1818; he died in 1880, at the age of eighty. --------------- I need not tell you, my dear sir, what pleasure a letter from you would give me when you have a few moments to spare to so remote a friend. If any word in my letter should provoke you to a reply, I shall rejoice in my sauciness. I am spending the summer in the country, but my address is Boston, care of Barnard, Adams, & Co. Care of O. Rich, London. Please do make my affectionate respects to Mrs. Carlyle, whose kindness I shall always gratefully remember. I depend upon her intercession to insure your writing to me. May God grant you both his best blessing. Your friend, R. Waldo Emerson II. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 12 August, 1834 My Dear Sir,--Some two weeks ago I received your kind gift from Fraser. To say that it was welcome would be saying little: is it not as a voice of affectionate remembrance, coming from beyond the Ocean waters, first decisively announcing for me that a whole New Continent _exists,_--that I too have part and lot there! "Not till we can think that here and there one is thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste Earth become a peopled Garden." Among the figures I can recollect as visiting our Nithsdale hermitage,--all like _Apparitions_ now, bringing with them airs from Heaven or else blasts from the other region,--there is perhaps not one of a more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself: so pure and still, with intents so charitable; and then vanishing too so soon into the azure Inane, as an Apparition should! Never has your Address in my Notebook met my eye but with a friendly influence. Judge if I am glad to know that there, in Infinite Space, you still hold by me. I have read in both your books at leisure times, and now nearly finished the smaller one. He is a faithful thinker, that Swedenborgian Druggist of yours, with really deep ideas, who makes me too pause and think, were it only to consider what manner of man he must be, and what manner of thing, after all, Swedenborgianism must be. "Through the smallest window look well, and you can look out into the Infinite." Webster also I can recognize a sufficient, effectual man, whom one must wish well to, and prophesy well of. The sound of him is nowise poetic-rhythmic; it is clear, one-toned, you might say metallic, yet distinct, significant, not without melody. In his face, above all, I discern that "indignation" which, if it do not make "verses," makes _useful_ way in the world. The higher such a man rises, the better pleased I shall be. And so here, looking over the water, let me repeat once more what I believe is already dimly the sentiment of all Englishmen, Cisoceanic and Transoceanic, that we and you are not two countries, and cannot for the life of us be; but only two _parishes_ of one country, with such wholesome parish hospitalities, and dirty temporary parish feuds, as we see; both of which brave parishes _Vivant! vivant!_ And among the glories of _both_ be Yankee-doodle-doo, and the Felling of the Western Forest, proudly remembered; and for the rest, by way of parish constable, let each cheerfully take such George Washington or George Guelph as it can get, and bless Heaven! I am weary of hearing it said, "We love the Americans," "We wish well," &c., &c. What in God's name should we do else? You thank me for _Teufelsdrockh;_ how much more ought I to thank you for your hearty, genuine, though extravagant acknowledgment of it! Blessed is the voice that amid dispiritment, stupidity, and contradiction proclaims to us, _Euge!_ Nothing ever was more ungenial than the soil this poor Teufelsdrockhish seed-corn has been thrown on here; none cries, Good speed to it; the sorriest nettle or hemlock seed, one would think, had been more welcome. For indeed our British periodical critics, and especially the public of _Fraser's_ Magazine (which I believe I have now done with), exceed all speech; require not even contempt, only oblivion. Poor Teufelsdrockh!--Creature of mischance, miscalculation, and thousand-fold obstruction! Here nevertheless he is, as you see; has struggled across the Stygian marshes, and now, as a stitched pamphlet "for Friends," cannot be _burnt_ or lost before his time. I send you one copy for your own behoof; three others you yourself can perhaps find fit readers for: as you spoke in the plural number, I thought there might be three; more would rather surprise me. From the British side of the water I have met simply one intelligent response,--clear, true, though almost enthusiastic as your own. My British Friend too is utterly a stranger, whose very name I know not, who did not print, but only write, and to an unknown third party.* Shall I say then, "In the mouth of two witnesses"? In any case, God be thanked, I am done with it; can wash my hands of it, and send it forth; sure that the Devil will get his full share of it, and not a whit more, clutch as he may. But as for you, my Transoceanic brothers, read this earnestly, for it _was_ earnestly meant and written, and contains no _voluntary_ falsehood of mine. For the rest, if you dislike it, say that I wrote it four years ago, and could not now so write it, and on the whole (as Fritz the Only said) "will do better another time." With regard to style and so forth, what you call your "saucy" objections are not only most intelligible to me, but welcome and instructive. You say well that I take up that attitude because I have no known public, am alone under the heavens, speaking into friendly or unfriendly space; add only, that I will not defend such attitude, that I call it questionable, tentative, and only the best that I, in these mad times, could conveniently hit upon. For you are to know, my view is that now at last we have lived to see all manner of Poetics and Rhetorics and Sermonics, and one may say generally all manner of _Pulpits_ for addressing mankind from, as good as broken and abolished: alas, yes! if you have any earnest meaning which demands to be not only listened to, but _believed_ and _done,_ you cannot (at least I cannot) utter it _there,_ but the sound sticks in my throat, as when a solemnity were _felt_ to have become a mummery; and so one leaves the pasteboard coulisses, and three unities, and Blair's Lectures, quite behind; and feels only that there is _nothing sacred,_ then, but the _Speech of Man_ to believing Men! This, come what will, was, is, and forever must be _sacred;_ and will one day, doubtless, anew environ itself with fit modes; with solemnities that are _not_ mummeries. Meanwhile, however, is it not pitiable? For though Teufelsdrockh exclaims, "Pulpit! canst thou not make a pulpit by simply _inverting the nearest tub?_" yet, alas! he does not sufficiently reflect that it is still only a tub, that the most inspired utterance will come from _it,_ inconceivable, misconceivable, to the million; questionable (not of _ascertained_ significance) even to the few. Pity us therefore; and with your just shake of the head join a sympathetic, even a hopeful smile. Since I saw you I have been trying, am still trying, other methods, and shall surely get nearer the truth, as I honestly strive for it. Meanwhile, I know no method of much consequence, except that of _believing,_ of being _sincere:_ from Homer and the Bible down to the poorest Burns's Song, I find no other Art that promises to be perennial. --------- * In his Diary, July 26, 1834, Carlyle writes--"In the midst of innumerable discouragements, all men indifferent or finding fault, let me mention two small circumstances that are comfortable. The first is a letter from some nameless Irishman in Cork to another here, (Fraser read it to me without names,) actually containing a _true_ and one of the friendliest possible recognitions of me. One mortal, then, says I am _not_ utterly wrong. Blessings on him for it! The second is a letter I got today from Emerson, of Boston in America; sincere, not baseless, of most exaggerated estimation. Precious is man to man." Fifteen years later, in his _Reminiscences of My Irish Journey,_ he enters, under date of July 16, 1849: "Near eleven o'clock [at night] announces himself 'Father O'Shea'! (who I thought had been _dead_); to my astonishment enter a little gray-haired, intelligent-and-bred-looking man, with much gesticulation, boundless loyal welcome, red with dinner and some wine, engages that we are to meet tomorrow,--and again with explosions of welcomes goes his way. This Father O'Shea, some fifteen years ago, had been, with Emerson of America, one of the _two_ sons of Adam who encouraged poor bookseller Fraser, and didn't discourage him, to go on with Teufelsdrockh. I had often remembered him since; had not long before _re_-inquired his name, but understood somehow that he was dead--and now." --------------- But now quitting theoretics, let me explain what you long to know, how it is that I date from London. Yes, my friend, it is even so: Craigenputtock now stands solitary in the wilderness, with none but an old woman and foolish grouse-destroyers in it; and we for the last ten weeks, after a fierce universal disruption, are here with our household gods. Censure not; I came to London for the best of all reasons,--to seek bread and work. So it literally stands; and so do I literally stand with the hugest, gloomiest Future before me, which in all sane moments I good-humoredly defy. A strange element this, and I as good as an Alien in it. I care not for Radicalism, for Toryism, for Church, Tithes, or the "Confusion" of useful Knowledge. Much as I can speak and hear, I am alone, alone. My brave Father, now victorious from his toil, was wont to pray in evening worship: "Might we say, We are not alone, for God is with us!" Amen! Amen! I brought a manuscript with me of another curious sort, entitled _The Diamond Necklace._ Perhaps it will be printed soon as an Article, or even as a separate Booklet,--a _queer_ production, which you shall see. Finally, I am busy, constantly studying with my whole might for a Book on the French Revolution. It is part of my creed that the Only Poetry is History, could we tell it right. This truth (if it prove one) I have not yet got to the limitations of; and shall in no way except by _trying_ it in practice. The story of the Necklace was the first attempt at an experiment. My sheet is nearly done; and I have still to complain of you for telling me nothing of yourself except that you are in the country. Believe that I want to know much and all. My wife too remembers you with unmixed friendliness; bids me send you her kindest wishes. Understand too that your old bed stands in a new room here, and the old welcome at the door. Surely we shall see you in London one day. Or who knows but Mahomet may go to the mountain? It occasionally rises like a mad prophetic dream in me, that I might end in the Western Woods! From Germany I get letters, messages, and even visits; but now no tidings, no influences, of moment. Goethe's Posthumous Works are all published; and Radicalism (poor hungry, yet inevitable Radicalism!) is the order of the day. The like, and even more, from France. Gustave d'Eichthal (did you hear?) has gone over to Greece, and become some kind of Manager under King Otho.* ----------- * Gustave d'Eichthal, whose acquaintance Emerson had made at Rome, and who had given him an introduction to Carlyle, was one of a family of rich Jewish bankers at Paris. He was an ardent follower of Saint-Simon, and an associate of Enfantin. After the dispersion of the Saint-Simonians in 1832, he traveled much, and continued to devote himself to the improvement of society. ---------- Continue to love me, you and my other friends; and as packets sail so swiftly, let me know it frequently. All good be with you! Most faithfully, T. Carlyle Coleridge, as you doubtless hear, is gone. How great a Possibility, how small a realized Result! They are delivering Orations about him, and emitting other kinds of froth, _ut mos est._ What hurt can it do? III. Emerson to Carlyle * Concord, Mass., 20 November, 1834 My Dear Sir,--Your letter, which I received last week, made a bright light in a solitary and saddened place. I had quite recently received the news of the death of a brother** in the island of Porto Rico, whose loss to me will be a lifelong sorrow. As he passes out of sight, come to me visible as well as spiritual tokens of a fraternal friendliness which, by its own law, transcends the tedious barriers of custom and nation; and opens its way to the heart. This is a true consolation, and I thanked my jealous [Greek] for the godsend so significantly timed. It, for the moment, realizes the hope to which I have clung with both hands, through each disappointment, that I might converse with a man whose ear of faith was not stopped, and whose argument I could not predict. May I use the word, "I thank my God whenever I call you to remembrance." ---------- * This letter was printed in the _Athenaeum,_ London, June 24, 1882. It, as well as three others which appeared in the same journal, is now reprinted, through the courtesy of its editor, from the original. ** Edward Bliss Emerson, his next younger brother, "brother of the brief but blazing star," of whom Emerson wrote _In Memoriam:_-- "There is no record left on earth, Save in tablets of the heart, Of the rich, inherent worth, Of the grace that on him shone, Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit; He could not frame a word unfit, An act unworthy to be done. On his young promise Beauty smiled, Drew his free homage unbeguiled, And prosperous Age held out his hand, And richly his large future planned, And troops of friends enjoyed the tide,-- All, all was given, and only health denied." ---------- I receive with great pleasure the wonderful Professor now that first the decent limbs of Osiris are collected.* We greet him well to Cape Cod and Boston Bay. The rigid laws of matter prohibit that the soul imprisoned within the strait edges of these types should add one syllable thereto, or we had adjured the Sage by every name of veneration to take possession by so much as a Salve! of his Western World, but he remained inexorable for any new communications. ------------- * The four copies of _Sartor_ which Carlyle had sent were a "stitched pamphlet," with a title-page bearing the words: "Sartor Resartus: in Three Books. Reprinted for Friends, from Fraser's Magazine. London, 1834." ------------- I feel like congratulating you upon the cold welcome which you say Teufelsdrockh* has met. As it is not earthly happy, it is marked of a high sacred sort. I like it a great deal better than ever, and before it was all published I had eaten nearly all my words of objection. But do not think it shall lack a present popularity. That it should not be known seems possible, for if a memoir of Laplace had been thrown into that muck-heap of Fraser's Magazine, who would be the wiser? But this has too much wit and imagination not to strike a class who would not care for it as a faithful mirror of this very Hour. But you know the proverb, "To be fortunate, be not too wise." The great men of the day are on a plane so low as to be thoroughly intelligible to the vulgar. Nevertheless, as God maketh the world forevermore, whatever the devils may seem to do, so the thoughts of the best minds always become the last opinion of Society. Truth is ever born in a manger, but is compensated by living till it has all souls for its kingdom. Far, far better seems to me the unpopularity of this Philosophical Poem (shall I call it?) than the adulation that followed your eminent friend Goethe. With him I am becoming better acquainted, but mine must be a qualified admiration. It is a singular piece of good-nature in you to apotheosize him. I cannot but regard it as his misfortune, with conspicuous bad influence on his genius, that velvet life he led. What incongruity for genius, whose fit ornaments and reliefs are poverty and hatred, to repose fifty years on chairs of state and what pity that his Duke did not cut off his head to save him from the mean end (forgive) of retiring from the municipal incense "to arrange tastefully his gifts and medals"! Then the Puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in such as he. We can tolerate vice in a splendid nature whilst that nature is battling with the brute majority in defence of some human principle. The sympathy his manhood and his misfortunes call out adopts even his faults; but genius pampered, acknowledged, crowned, can only retain our sympathy by turning the same force once expended against outward enemies now against inward, and carrying forward and planting the standard of Oromasdes so many leagues farther on into the envious Dark. Failing this, it loses its nature and becomes talent, according to the definition,--mere skill in attaining vulgar ends. A certain wonderful friend of mine said that "a false priest is the falsest of false things." But what makes the priest? A cassock? O Diogenes! Or the power (and thence the call) to teach man's duties as they flow from the Superhuman? Is not he who perceives and proclaims the Superhumanities, he who has once intelligently pronounced the words "Self-Renouncement," "Invisible Leader," "Heavenly Powers of Sorrow," and so on, forever the liege of the same? ------------ * Emerson uniformly spells this name "Teufelsdroch." ------------ Then to write luxuriously is not the same thing as to live so, but a new and worse offence. It implies an intellectual defect also, the not perceiving that the present corrupt condition of human nature (which condition this harlot muse helps to perpetuate) is a temporary or superficial state. The good word lasts forever: the impure word can only buoy itself in the gross gas that now envelops us, and will sink altogether to ground as that works itself clear in the everlasting effort of God. May I not call it temporary? for when I ascend into the pure region of truth (or under my undermost garment, as Epictetus and Teufelsdrockh would say), I see that to abide inviolate, although all men fall away from it; yea, though the whole generation of Adam should be healed as a sore off the face of the creation. So, my friend, live Socrates and Milton, those starch Puritans, for evermore! Strange is it to me that you should not sympathize (yet so you said) with Socrates, so ironical, so true, and who "tramped in the mire with wooden shoes whenever they would force him into the clouds." I seem to see him offering the hand to you across the ages which some time you will grasp. I am glad you like Sampson Reed, and that he has inspired some curiosity respecting his Church. Swedenborgianism, if you should be fortunate in your first meetings, has many points of attraction for you: for instance, this article, "The poetry of the Old Church is the reality of the New," which is to be literally understood, for they esteem, in common with all the Trismegisti, the Natural World as strictly the symbol or exponent of the Spiritual, and part for part; the animals to be the incarnations of certain affections; and scarce a popular expression esteemed figurative, but they affirm to be the simplest statement of fact. Then is their whole theory of social relations--both in and out of the body--most philosophical, and, though at variance with the popular theology, self-evident. It is only when they come to their descriptive theism, if I may say so, and then to their drollest heaven, and to some autocratic not moral decrees of God, that the mythus loses me. In general, too, they receive the fable instead of the moral of their Aesop. They are to me, however, deeply interesting, as a sect which I think must contribute more than all other sects to the new faith which must arise out of all. You express a desire to know something of myself. Account me "a drop in the ocean seeking another drop," or God-ward, striving to keep so true a sphericity as to receive the due ray from every point of the concave heaven. Since my return home, I have been left very much at leisure. It were long to tell all my speculations on my profession and my doings thereon; but, possessing my liberty, I am determined to keep it, at the risk of uselessness (which risk God can very well abide), until such duties offer themselves as I can with integrity discharge. One thing I believe,--that Utterance is place enough: and should I attain through any inward revelation to a more clear perception of my assigned task, I shall embrace it with joy and praise. I shall not esteem it a low place, for instance, if I could strengthen your hands by true expressions of the hope and pleasure which your writings communicate to me and to some of my countrymen. Yet the best poem of the Poet is his own mind, and more even than in any of the works I rejoice in the promise of the workman. Now I am only reading and musing, and when I have any news to tell of myself, you shall hear them. Now as to the welcome hint that you might come to America, it shall be to me a joyful hope. Come and found a new Academy that shall be church and school and Parnassus, as a true Poet's house should be. I dare not say that wit has better chance here than in England of winning world-wages, but it can always live, and it can scarce find competition. Indeed, indeed, you shall have the continent to yourself were it only as Crusoe was king. If you cared to read literary lectures, our people have vast curiosity, and the apparatus is very easy to set agoing. Such 'pulpit' as you pleased to erect would at least find no hindrance in the building. A friend of mine and of yours remarked, when I expressed the wish that you would come here, "that people were not here, as in England, sacramented to organized schools of opinion, but were a far more convertible audience." If at all you can think of coming here, I would send you any and all particulars of information with cheerfulest speed. I have written a very long letter, yet have said nothing of much that I would say upon chapters of the _Sartor._ I must keep that, and the thoughts I had upon 'poetry in history',' for another letter, or (might it be!) for a dialogue face to face. Let me not fail of _The Diamond Necklace._ I found three greedy receivers of Teufelsdrockh, who also radiate its light. For the sake of your knowing what manner of men you move, I send you two pieces writ by one of them, Frederic Henry Hedge, the article on Swedenborg and that on Phrenology. And as you like Sampson Reed, here are one or two more of his papers. Do read them. And since you study French history do not fail to look at our Yankee portrait of Lafayette. Present my best remembrances to Mrs. Carlyle, whom that stern and blessed solitude has armed and sublimed out of all reach of the littleness and unreason of London. If I thought we could win her to the American shore, I would send her the story of those godly women, the contemporaries of John Knox's daughter, who came out hither to enjoy the worship of God amidst wild men and wild beasts. Your friend and servant, R. Waldo Emerson IV. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 3 February, 1835 My Dear Sir,--I owe you a speedy answer as well as a grateful one; for, in spite of the swift ships of the Americans, our communings pass too slowly. Your letter, written in November, did not reach me till a few days ago; your Books or Papers have not yet come,--though the ever-punctual Rich, I can hope, will now soon get them for me. He showed me his _way-bill_ or invoice, and the consignment of these friendly effects "to another gentleman," and undertook with an air of great fidelity to bring all to a right bearing. On the whole, as the Atlantic is so broad and deep, ought we not rather to esteem it a beneficent miracle that messages can arrive at all; that a little slip of paper will skim over all these weltering floods, and other inextricable confusions, and come at last, in the hand of the Twopenny Postman, safe to your lurking-place, like green leaf in the bill of Noah's Dove? Let us be grateful for mercies; let us use them while they are granted us. Time was when "they that feared the Lord spake _often_ one to another." A friendly thought is the purest gift that man can afford to man. "Speech" also, they say, "is cheerfuler than light itself." The date of your letter gives me unhappily no idea but that of Space and Time. As you know my whereabout, will you throw a little light on your own? I can imagine Boston, and have often seen the musket volleys on Bunker Hill; but in this new spot there is nothing for me save sky and earth, the chance of retirement, peace, and winter seclusion. Alas! I can too well fancy one other thing: the bereavement you allude to, the sorrow that will so long be painful before it can become merely sad and sacred. Brothers, especially in these days, are much to us: had one no brother, one could hardly understand what it was to have a Friend; they are the Friends whom Nature chose for us; Society and Fortune, as things now go, are scarcely compatible with Friendship, and contrive to get along, miserably enough, without it. Yet sorrow not above measure for him that is gone. He is, in very deed and truth, with God,--_where_ you and I both are. What a thin film it is that divides the Living from the Dead! In still nights, as Jean Paul says, "the limbs of my Buried Ones touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands heal eruptions of the skin." Let us turn back into Life. That you sit there bethinking yourself, and have yet taken no course of activity, and can without inward or outward hurt so sit, is on the whole rather pleasing news to me. It is a great truth which you say, that Providence can well afford to have one sit: another great truth which you feel without saying it is that a course wherein clear faith cannot go with you may be worse than none; if clear faith go never so slightly against it, then it is certainly worse than none. To speak with perhaps ill-bred candor, I like as well to fancy you _not_ preaching to Unitarians a Gospel after their heart. I will say farther, that you are the only man I ever met with of that persuasion whom I could unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen were all a kind of halfway-house characters, who, I thought, should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in unbelief; in "faint possible Theism," which I like considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel, deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat.... Nay, who knows but it is doubts of the like kind in your own mind that keep you for a time inactive even now? For the rest, that you have liberty to choose by your own will merely, is a great blessing: too rare for those that could use it so well; nay, often it is difficult to use. But till _ill health_ of body or of mind warns you that the moving, not the sitting, position is essential, _sit_ still, contented in conscience; understanding well that no man, that God only knows _what_ we are working, and will show it one day; that such and such a one, who filled the whole Earth with his hammering and troweling, and would not let men pass for his rubbish, turns out to have built of mere coagulated froth, and vanishes with his edifice, traceless, silently, or amid hootings illimitable; while again that other still man, by the word of his mouth, by the very look of his face, was scattering influences, as _seeds_ are scattered, "to be found flourishing as a banyan grove after a thousand years." I beg your pardon for all this preaching, if it be superfluous impute it to no miserable motive. Your objections to Goethe are very natural, and even bring you nearer me: nevertheless, I am by no means sure that it were not your wisdom, at this moment, to set about learning the German Language, with a view towards studying _him_ mainly! I do not assert this; but the truth of it would not surprise me. Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so: but John Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable _fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also Duty was _infinite,_--Knox would have passed on, wondering not reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like Goethe: his is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent, that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it was he that first convincingly proclaimed to me (convincingly, for I saw it _done_): Behold, even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that Man be a Man! For which last Evangel, the confirmation and rehabilitation of all other Evangels whatsoever, how can I be too grateful? On the whole, I suspect you yet know only Goethe the Heathen (Ethnic); but you will know Goethe the Christian by and by, and like that one far better. Rich showed me a Compilation* in green cloth boards that you had beckoned across the water: pray read the fourth volume of that, and let a man of your clearness of feeling say whether that was a Parasite or a Prophet.--And then as to "misery" and the other dark ground on which you love to see genius paint itself,--alas! consider whether misery is not _ill health_ too; also whether good fortune is not worse to bear than bad; and on the whole whether the glorious serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane,--as Light, the Naturalists say, is stronger a thousand times than Lightning. And so I appeal to Philip sober;--and indeed have hardly said as much about Goethe since I saw you, for nothing reigns here but twilight delusion (falser for the time than midnight darkness) on that subject, and I feel that the most suffer nothing thereby, having properly nothing or little to do with such a matter but with you, who are not "seeking recipes for happiness," but something far higher, it is not so, and _therefore_ I have spoken and appealed; and hope the new curiosity, if I have awakened any, will do you no mischief. ------------ * Obviously Carlyle's _Specimens of German Romance,_ of which the fourth volume was devoted to Goethe. ------------ But now as to myself; for you will grumble at a sheet of speculation sent so far: I am here still, as Rob Roy was on Glasgow Bridge, _biding tryste;_ busy extremely, with work that will not profit me at all in some senses; suffering rather in health and nerves; and still with nothing like dawn on any quarter of my horizon. _The Diamond Necklace_ has not been printed, but will be, were this _French Revolution_ out; which latter, however, drags itself along in a way that would fill your benevolent heart with pity. I am for three small volumes now, and have one done. It is the dreadfulest labor (with these nerves, this liver) I ever undertook; all is so inaccurate, superficial, vague, in the numberless books I consult; and without accuracy at least, what other good is possible? Add to this that I have no hope about the thing, except only that I _shall be done with it:_ I can reasonably expect nothing from any considerable class here, but at _best_ to be scolded and reproached; perhaps to be left standing "on my own basis," without note or comment of any kind, save from the Bookseller, who will lose his printing. The hope I have however is sure: if life is lent me, I shall be _done with_ the business; I will write this "History of Sansculottism," the notablest phenomenon I meet with since the time of the Crusades or earlier; after which my part is played. As for the future, I heed it little when so busy; but it often seems to me as if one thing were becoming indisputable: that I must seek another craft than literature for these years that may remain to me. Surely, I often say, if ever man had a finger-of-Providence shown him, thou hast it; literature will neither yield thee bread, nor a stomach to digest bread with: quit it in God's name, shouldst thou take spade and mattock instead. The truth is, I believe literature to be as good as dead and gone in all parts of Europe at this moment, and nothing but hungry Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps three generations; I do not see how a man can honestly live by writing in another dialect than that, in England at least; so that if you determine on not living dishonestly, it will behove you to look several things full in the face, and ascertain what is what with some distinctness. I suffer also terribly from the solitary existence I have all along had; it is becoming a kind of passion with me, to feel myself among my brothers. And then, How? Alas! I care not a doit for Radicalism, nay I feel it to be a wretched necessity, unfit for me; Conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet these two are the grand Categories under which all English spiritual activity that so much as thinks remuneration possible must range itself. I look around accordingly on a most wonderful vortex of things; and pray to God only, that as my day, is so my strength may be. What will come out of it is wholly uncertain: for I have possibilities too; the possibilities of London are far from exhausted yet: I have a brave brother, who invites me to come and be quiet with him in Rome; a brave friend (known to you) who opens the door of a new Western world,--and so we will stand considering and consulting, at least till the Book be over. Are all these things interesting to you? I know they are. As for America and Lecturing, it is a thing I do sometimes turn over, but never yet with any seriousness. What your friend says of the people being more persuadable, so far, as having no Tithe-controversy, &c., &c. will go, I can most readily understand it. But apart from that, I should rather fancy America mainly a new Commercial England, with a fuller pantry,--little more or little less. The same unquenchable, almost frightfully unresting spirit of endeavor, directed (woe is me!) to the making of money, or money's worth; namely, food finer and finer, and gigmanic renown higher and higher: nay, must not your gigmanity be a _purse_-gigmanity, some half-shade worse than a purse-and-pedigree one? Or perhaps it is not a whit worse; only rougher, more substantial; on the whole better? At all events ours is fast becoming identical with it; for the pedigree ingredient is as near as may be gone: _Gagnez de l'argent, et ne vous faites pas pendre,_ this is very nearly the whole Law, first Table and second. So that you see, when I set foot on American land, it will be on no Utopia; but on a _conditional_ piece of ground where some things are to be expected and other things not. I may say, on the other hand, that Lecturing (or I would rather it were _speaking_) is a thing I have always had some hankering after: it seems to me I could really _swim_ in that element, were I once thrown into it; that in fact it would develop several things in me which struggle violently for development. The great want I have towards such an enterprise is one you may guess at: want of a _rubric,_ of a title to name my speech by. Could any one but appoint me Lecturing Professor of Teufelsdrockh's science,-- "Things in general"! To discourse of Poets and Poetry in the Hazlitt style, or talk stuff about the Spirit of the Age, were most unedifying: one knows not what to call himself. However, there is no doubt that were the child born it _might_ be christened; wherefore I will really request you to take the business into your consideration, and give me in the most rigorous sober manner you can some scheme of it. How many Discourses; what Towns; the probable Expenses, the probable net Income, the Time, &c., &c.: all that you can suppose a man wholly ignorant might want to know about it. America I should like well enough to visit, much as I should another part of my native country: it is, as you see, distinctly possible that such a thing might be; we will keep it hanging, to solace ourselves with it, till the time decide. Have I involved you in double postage by this loquacity? or What is your American rule? I did not intend it when I began; but today my confusion of head is very great and words must be multiplied with only a given quantity of meaning. My wife, who is just gone out to spend the day with a certain "celebrated Mrs. Austin," (called also the "celebrated Translatress of Puckler-Muskau,") charged me very specially to send you her love, her good wishes and thanks: I assure you there is no hypocrisy in that. She votes often for taking the Transatlantic scheme into contemplation; declares farther that my Book and Books must and will indisputably prosper (at some future era), and takes the world beside me--as a good wife and daughter of John Knox should. Speaking of "celebrated" persons here, let me mention that I have learned by stern experience, as children do with fire, to keep in general quite out of the way of celebrated persons, more especially celebrated women. This Mrs. Austin, who is half ruined by celebrity (of a kind), is the only woman I have seen not wholly ruined by it. Men, strong men, I have seen die of it, or go mad by it. _Good_ fortune is far worse than bad! Will you write with all despatch, my dear sir; fancy me a fellow-wayfarer, who cordially bids you God-speed, and would fain keep in sight of you, within sound of you. Yours with great sincerity, T. Carlyle V. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 12 March, 1838 My Dear Sir,--I am glad of the opportunity of Mr. Barnard's* visit to say health and peace be with you. I esteem it the best sign that has shone in my little section of space for many days, that some thirty or more intelligent persons understand and highly appreciate the _Sartor._ Dr. Channing sent to me for it the other day, and I have since heard that he had read it with great interest. As soon as I go into town I shall see him and measure his love. I know his genius does not and cannot engage your attention much. He possesses the mysterious endowment of natural eloquence, whose effect, however intense, is limited, of course, to personal communication. I can see myself that his writings, without his voice, may be meagre and feeble. But please love his catholicism, that at his age can relish the _Sartor,_ born and inveterated as he is in old books. Moreover, he lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue a journal, to be called _The Transcendentalist,_ as the organ of a spiritual philosophy. So much for our gossip of today. --------- * Mr. Henry Barnard, of Hartford, Connecticut, to whom Emerson had given a note of introduction to Carlyle. --------- But my errand is yet to tell. Some friends here are very desirous that Mr. Fraser should send out to a bookseller here fifty or a hundred copies of the _Sartor._ So many we want very much; they would be sold at once. If we knew that two or three hundred would be taken up, we should reprint it now. But we think it better to satisfy the known inquirers for the book first, and when they have extended the demand for it, then to reproduce it, a naturalized Yankee. The lovers of Teufelsdrockh here are sufficiently enthusiastic. I am an icicle to them. They think England must be blind and deaf if the Professor makes no more impression there than yet appears. I, with the most affectionate wishes for Thomas Carlyle's fame, am mainly bent on securing the medicinal virtues of his book for my young neighbors. The good people think he overpraises Goethe. There I give him up to their wrath. But I bid them mark his unsleeping moral sentiment; that every other moralist occasionally nods, becomes complaisant and traditional; but this man is without interval on the side of equity and humanity! I am grieved for you, O wise friend, that you cannot put in your own contemptuous disclaimer of such puritanical pleas as are set up for you; but each creature and Levite must do after his kind. Yet do not imagine that I will hurt you in this unseen domain of yours by any Boswellism. Every suffrage you get here is fairly your own. Nobody is coaxed to admire you, and you have won friends whom I should be proud to show you, and honorable women not a few. And cannot you renew and confirm your suggestion touching your appearance in this continent? Ah, if I could give your intimation the binding force of an oracular word!--in a few months, please God, at most, I shall have wife, house, and home wherewith and wherein to return your former hospitality. And if I could draw my prophet and his prophetess to brighten and immortalize my lodge, and make it the window through which for a summer you should look out on a field which Columbus and Berkeley and Lafayette did not scorn to sow, my sun should shine clearer and life would promise something better than peace. There is a part of ethics, or in Schleiermacher's distribution it might be physics, which possesses all attraction for me; to wit, the compensations of the Universe, the equality and the coexistence of action and reaction, that all prayers are granted, that every debt is paid. And the skill with which the great All maketh clean work as it goes along, leaves no rag, consumes its smoke,-- will I hope make a chapter in your thesis. I intimated above that we aspire to have a work on the First Philosophy in Boston. I hope, or wish rather. Those that are forward in it debate upon the name. I doubt not in the least its reception if the material that should fill it existed. Through the thickest understanding will the reason throw itself instantly into relation with the truth that is its object, whenever that appears. But how seldom is the pure loadstone produced! Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds: Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which yet they never enter, and with their hand on the door-latch they die outside. Always excepting my wonderful Professor, who among the living has thrown any memorable truths into circulation? So live and rejoice and work, my friend, and God you aid, for the profit of many more than your mortal eyes shall see. Especially seek with recruited and never-tired vision to bring back yet higher and truer report from your Mount of Communion of the Spirit that dwells there and creates all. Have you received a letter from me with a pamphlet sent in December? Fail not, I beg of you, to remember me to Mrs. Carlyle. Can you not have some _Sartors_ sent? Hilliard, Gray, & Co. are the best publishers in Boston. Or Mr. Rich has connections with Burdett in Boston. Yours with respect and affection, R. Waldo Emerson VI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 April, 1835 My Dear Sir,--I received your letter of the 3d of February on the 20th instant, and am sorry that hitherto we have not been able to command a more mercantile promptitude in the transmission of these light sheets. If desire of a letter before it arrived, or gladness when it came, could speed its journey, I should have it the day it was written. But, being come, it makes me sad and glad by turns. I admire at the alleged state of your English reading public without comprehending it, and with a hoping scepticism touching the facts. I hear my Prophet deplore, as his predecessors did, the deaf ear and the gross heart of his people, and threaten to shut his lips; but, happily, this he cannot do, any more than could they. The word of the Lord _will_ be spoken. But I shall not much grieve that the English people and you are not of the same mind if that apathy or antipathy can by any means be the occasion of your visiting America. The hope of this is so pleasant to me, that I have thought of little else for the week past, and having conferred with some friends on the matter, I shall try, in obedience to your request, to give you a statement of our capabilities, without indulging my penchant for the favorable side. Your picture of America is faithful enough: yet Boston contains some genuine taste for literature, and a good deal of traditional reverence for it. For a few years past, we have had, every winter, several courses of lectures, scientific, political, miscellaneous, and even some purely literary, which were well attended. Some lectures on Shakespeare were crowded; and even I found much indulgence in reading, last winter, some Biographical Lectures, which were meant for theories or portraits of Luther, Michelangelo, Milton, George Fox, Burke. These courses are really given under the auspices of Societies, as "Natural History Society," "Mechanics' Institutes," "Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," &c., &c., and the fee to the lecturer is inconsiderable, usually $20 for each lecture. But in a few instances individuals have undertaken courses of lectures, and have been well paid. Dr. Spurzheim* received probably $3,000 in the few months that he lived here. Mr. Silliman, a Professor of Yale College, has lately received something more than that for a course of fifteen or sixteen lectures on Geology. Private projects of this sort are, however, always attended with a degree of uncertainty. The favor of my townsmen is often sudden and spasmodic, and Mr. Silliman, who has had more success than ever any before him, might not find a handful of hearers another winter. But it is the opinion of many friends whose judgment I value, that a person of so many claims upon the ear and imagination of our fashionable populace as the "author of the _Life of Schiller,_" "the reviewer of _Burns's Life,_" the live "contributor to the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign_ Reviews," nay, the "worshipful Teufelsdrockh," the "personal friend of Goethe," would, for at least one season, batter down opposition, and command all ears on whatever topic pleased him, and that, quite independently of the merit of his lectures, merely for so many names' sake. ----------- * The memory of Dr. Spurzheim has faded, but his name is still known to men of science on both sides of the Atlantic as that of the most ardent and accomplished advocate of the doctrine of Phrenology. He came to the United States in 1832 to advance the cause he had at heart, but he had been only a short time in the country when he died at Boston of a fever. ------------- But the subject, you say, does not yet define itself. Whilst it is "gathering to a god," we who wait will only say, that we know enough here of Goethe and Schiller to have some interest in German literature. A respectable German here, Dr. Follen, has given lectures to a good class upon Schiller. I am quite sure that Goethe's name would now stimulate the curiosity of scores of persons. On English literature, a much larger class would have some preparedness. But whatever topics you might choose, I need not say you must leave under them scope for your narrative and pictorial powers; yes, and space to let out all the length of all the reins of your eloquence of moral sentiment. What "Lay Sermons" might you not preach! or methinks "Lectures on Europe" were a sea big enough for you to swim in. The only condition our adolescent ear insists upon is, that the English as it is spoken by the unlearned shall be the bridge between our teacher and our tympanum. _Income and Expenses._--All our lectures are usually delivered in the same hall, built for the purpose. It will hold 1,200 persons; 900 are thought a large assembly. The expenses of rent, lights, doorkeeper, &c. for this hall, would be $12 each lecture. The price of $3 is the least that might be demanded for a single ticket of admission to the course,--perhaps $4; $5 for a ticket admitting a gentleman and lady. So let us suppose we have 900 persons paying $3 each, or $2,700. If it should happen, as did in Prof. Silliman's case, that many more than 900 tickets were sold, it would be easy to give the course in the day and in the evening, an expedient sometimes practised to divide an audience, and because it is a great convenience to many to choose their time. If the lectures succeed in Boston, their success is insured at Salem, a town thirteen miles off, with a population of 15,000. They might, perhaps, be repeated at Cambridge, three miles from Boston, and probably at Philadelphia, thirty-six hours distant. At New York anything literary has hitherto had no favor. The lectures might be fifteen or sixteen in number, of about an hour each. They might be delivered, one or two in each week. And if they met with sudden success, it would be easy to carry on the course simultaneously at Salem, and Cambridge, and in the city. They must be delivered in the winter. Another plan suggested in addition to this. A gentleman here is giving a course of lectures on English literature to a private class of ladies, at $10 to each subscriber. There is no doubt, were you so disposed, you might turn to account any writings in the bottom of your portfolio, by reading lectures to such a class, or, still better, by speaking. _Expense of Living._--You may travel in this country for $4 to $4.50 a day. You may board in Boston in a "gigmanic" style for $8 per week, including all domestic expenses. Eight dollars per week is the board paid by the permanent residents at the Tremont House,--probably the best hotel in North America. There, and at the best hotels in New York, the lodger for a few days pays at the rate of $1.50 per day. Twice eight dollars would provide a gentleman and lady with board, chamber, and private parlor, at a fashionable boardinghouse. In the country, of course, the expenses are two thirds less. These are rates of expense where economy is not studied. I think the Liverpool and New York packets demand $150 of the passenger, and their accommodations are perfect. (N.B.--I set down all sums in dollars. You may commonly reckon a pound sterling worth $4.80.) "The man is certain of success," say those I talk with, "for one winter, but not afterwards." That supposes no extraordinary merit in the lectures, and only regards you in your leonine aspect. However, it was suggested that, if Mr. C. would undertake a Journal of which we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced, he would do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it could be made to secure him a support. It is that project which I mentioned to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard,--a book to be called _The Transcendentalist,_ or _The Spiritual Inquirer,_ or the like, and of which F.H. Hedge* was to be editor. Those who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous contributions to its pages, until its success could be assured. Hedge is just leaving our neighborhood to be settled as a minister two hundred and fifty miles off, in Maine, and entreats that you will edit the journal. He will write, and I please myself with thinking I shall be able to write under such auspices. Then you might (though I know not the laws respecting literary property) collect some of your own writings and reprint them here. I think the _Sartor_ would now be sure of a sale. Your _Life of Schiller,_ and _Wilhelm Meister,_ have been long reprinted here. At worst, if you wholly disliked us, and preferred Old England to New, you can judge of the suggestion of a knowing man, that you might see Niagara, get a new stock of health, and pay all your expenses by printing in England a book of travels in America. ---------- *Now the Rev. Dr. Hedge, late Professor of German and of Ecclesiastical History in Harvard College. ------------ I wish you to know that we do not depend for your _eclat_ on your being already known to rich men here. You are not. Nothing has ever been published here designating you by name. But Dr. Channing reads and respects you. That is a fact of importance to our project. Several clergymen, Messrs. Frothingham, Ripley, Francis, all of them scholars and Spiritualists, (some of them, unluckily, called Unitarian,) love you dearly, and will work heartily in your behalf. Mr. Frothing ham, a worthy and accomplished man, more like Erasmus than Luther, said to me on parting, the other day, "You cannot express in terms too extravagant my desire that he should come." George Ripley, having heard, through your letter to me, that nobody in England had responded to the _Sartor,_ had secretly written you a most reverential letter, which, by dint of coaxing, be read to me, though he said there was but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. I prayed him, though I thought the letter did him no justice, save to his heart, to send you it or another; and he says he will. He is a very able young man, even if his letter should not show it.* He said he could, and would, bring many persons to hear you, and you should be sure of his utmost aid. Dr. Bradford, a medical man, is of good courage. Mr. Loring,** a lawyer, said,"--Invite Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle to spend a couple of months at my house," (I assured him I was too selfish for that,) "and if our people," he said, "cannot find out his worth, I will subscribe, with, others, to make him whole of any expense he shall incur in coming." Hedge promised more than he ought. There are several persons beside, known to me, who feel a warm interest in this thing. Mr. Furness, a popular and excellent minister in Philadelphia, at whose house Harriet Martineau was spending a few days, I learned the other day "was feeding Miss Martineau with the _Sartor._" And here some of the best women I know are warm friends of yours, and are much of Mrs. Carlyle's opinion when she says, Your books shall prosper. ----------- * Emerson's estimate of Mr. Ripley was justified as the years went on. His _Life,_ by Mr. Octavius Frothingham,--like his father, "a worthy and accomplished, man," but more like Luther than Erasmus,--forms one of the most attractive volumes of the series of _Lives of American Men of Letters._ ** The late Ellis Gray Loring, a man of high character, well esteemed in his profession, and widely respected. ---------- On the other hand, I make no doubt you shall be sure of some opposition. Andrews Norton, one of our best heads, once a theological professor, and a destroying critic, lives upon a rich estate at Cambridge, and frigidly excludes the Diderot paper from a _Select Journal_ edited by him, with the remark, "Another paper of the Teufelsdrockh School." The University perhaps, and much that is conservative in literature and religion, I apprehend, will give you its cordial opposition, and what eccentricity can be collected from the Obituary Notice on Goethe, or from the _Sartor,_ shall be mustered to demolish you. Nor yet do I feel quite certain of this. If we get a good tide with us, we shall sweep away the whole inertia, which is the whole force of these gentlemen, except Norton. That you do not like the Unitarians will never hurt you at all, if possibly you do like the Calvinists. If you have any friendly relations to your native Church, fail not to bring a letter from a Scottish Calvinist to a Calvinist here, and your fortune is made. But that were too good to happen. Since things are so, can you not, my dear sir, finish your new work and cross the great water in September or October, and try the experiment of a winter in America? I cannot but think that if we do not make out a case strong enough to make you build your house, at least you should pitch your tent among us. The country is, as you say, worth visiting, and to give much pleasure to a few persons will be some inducement to you. I am afraid to press this matter. To me, as you can divine, it would be an unspeakable comfort; and the more, that I hope before that time so far to settle my own affairs as to have a wife and a house to receive you. Tell Mrs. Carlyle, with my affectionate regards, that some friends whom she does not yet know do hope with me to have her company for the next winter at our house, and shall not cease to hope it until you come. I have many things to say upon the topics of your letter, but my letter is already so immeasurably long, it must stop. Long as it is, I regret I have not more facts. Dr. Channing is in New York, or I think, despite your negligence of him, I should have visited him on account of his interest in you. Could you see him you would like him. I shall write you immediately on learning anything new bearing on this business. I intended to have despatched this letter a day or two sooner, that it might go by the packet of the 1st of May from New York. Now it will go by that of the 8th, and ought to reach you in thirty days. Send me your thoughts upon it as soon as you can. I _jalouse_ of that new book. I fear its success may mar my project. Yours affectionately, R. Waldo Emerson VII. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 13 May, 1835 Thanks, my kind friend, for the news you again send me. Good news, good new friends; nothing that is not good comes to me across these waters. As if the "Golden West" seen by Poets were no longer a mere optical phenomenon, but growing a reality, and coining itself into solid blessings! To me it seems very strange; as indeed generally this whole Existence here below more and more does. We have seen your Barnard: a most modest, intelligent, compact, hopeful-looking man, who will not revisit you without conquests from his expedition hither. We expect to see much more of him; to instruct him, to learn of him: especially about that real-imaginary locality of "Concord," where a kindly-speaking voice lives incarnated, there is much to learn. That you will take to yourself a wife is the cheerfulest tidings you could send us. It is in no wise meet for man to be alone; and indeed the beneficent Heavens, in creating Eve, did mercifully guard against that. May it prove blessed, this new arrangement! I delight to prophesy for you peaceful days in it; peaceful, not idle; filled rather with that best activity which is the stillest. To the future, or perhaps at this hour actual Mrs. Emerson, will you offer true wishes from two British Friends; who have not seen her with their eyes, but whose thoughts need not be strangers to the Home she will make for you. Nay, you add the most chivalrous summons: which who knows but one day we may actually stir ourselves to obey! It may hover for the present among the gentlest of our day-dreams; mild-lustrous; an impossible possibility. May all go well with you, my worthy Countryman, Kinsman, and brother Man! This so astonishing reception of Teufelsdrockh in your New England circle seems to me not only astonishing, but questionable; not, however, to be quarreled with. I may say: If the New. England cup is dangerously sweet, there are here in Old England whole antiseptic floods of good _hop_-decoction; therein let it mingle; work wholesomely towards what clear benefit it can. Your young ones too, as all exaggeration is transient, and exaggerated love almost itself a blessing, will get through it without damage. As for Fraser, however, the idea of a new Edition is frightful to him; or rather ludicrous, unimaginable. Of him no man has inquired for a _Sartor:_ in his whole wonderful world of Tory Pamphleteers, Conservative Younger-brothers, Regent-Street Loungers, Crockford Gamblers, Irish Jesuits, drunken Reporters, and miscellaneous unclean persons (whom nitre and much soap will not wash clean), not a soul has expressed the smallest wish that way. He shrieks at the idea. Accordingly I realized these four copies from [him,] all he will surrender; and can do no more. Take them with my blessing. I beg you will present one to the honorablest of those "honorable women"; say to her that her (unknown) image as she reads shall be to me a bright faultless vision, textured out of mere sunbeams; to be loved and worshiped; the best of all Transatlantic women! Do at any rate, in a more business like style, offer my respectful regards to Dr. Channing, whom certainly I could not count on for a reader, or other than a grieved condemnatory one; for I reckoned tolerance had its limits. His own faithful, long-continued striving towards what is Best, I knew and honored; that he will let me go my own way thitherward, with a God-speed from him, is surely a new honor to us both. Finally, on behalf of the British world (which is not all contained in Fraser's shop) I should tell you that various persons, some of them in a dialect not to be doubted of, have privately expressed their recognition of this poor Rhapsody, the best the poor Clothes-Professor could produce in the circumstances; nay, I have Scottish Presbyterian Elders who read, and thank. So true is what you say about the aptitude of all natural hearts for receiving what is from the heart spoken to them. As face answereth to face! Brother, if thou wish me to believe, do thou thyself believe first: this is as true as that of the _flere_ and _dolendum;_ perhaps truer. Wherefore, putting all things together, cannot I feel that I have washed my hands of this business in a quite tolerable manner? Let a man be thankful; and on the whole go along, while he has strength left to go. This Boston _Transcendentalist,_ whatever the fate or merit of it prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom. There must be things not dreamt of, over in that Transoceanic Parish! I shall cordially wish well to this thing; and hail it as the sure forerunner of things better. The Visible becomes the Bestial when it rests not on the Invisible. Innumerable tumults of Metaphysic must be struggled through (whole generations perishing by the way), and at last Transcendentalism evolve itself (if I construe aright), as the _Euthanasia_ of Metaphysic altogether. May it be sure, may it be speedy! Thou shalt open thy _eyes,_ O Son of Adam; thou shalt _look,_ and not forever jargon about _laws_ of Optics and the making of spectacles! For myself, I rejoice very much that I seem to be flinging aside innumerable sets of spectacles (could I but _lay_ them aside,--with gentleness!) and hope one day actually to see a thing or two. Man _lives_ by Belief (as it was well written of old); by logic he can only at best long to live. Oh, I am dreadfully, afflicted with Logic here, and wish often (in my haste) that I had the besom of destruction to lay to it for a little! "Why? and WHEREFORE? God wot, simply THEREFORE! Ask not WHY; 't is SITH thou hast to care for." Since I wrote last to you, (which seems some three months ago,) there has a great mischance befallen me: the saddest, I think, of the kind called Accidents I ever had to front. By dint of continual endeavor for many weary weeks, I had got the first volume of that miserable _French Revolution_ rather handsomely finished: from amid infinite contradictions I felt as if my head were fairly above water, and I could go on writing my poor Book, defying the Devil and the World, with a certain degree of assurance, and even of joy. A Friend borrowed this volume of Manuscript,--a kind Friend but a careless one,--to write notes on it, which he was well qualified to do. One evening about two months ago he came in on us, "distraction (literally) in his aspect"; the Manuscript, left carelessly out, had been torn up as waste paper, and all but three or four tatters was clean gone! I could not complain, or the poor man seemed as if he would have shot himself: we had to gather ourselves together, and show a smooth front to it; which happily, though difficult, was not impossible to do. I began again at the beginning; to such a wretched paralyzing torpedo of a task as my hand never found to do: at which I have worn myself these two months to the hue of saffron, to the humor of incipient desperation; and now, four days ago, perceiving well that I was like a man swimming in an element that grew ever rarer, till at last it became vacuum (think of that!) I with a new effort of self-denial sealed up all the paper fragments, and said to myself: In this mood thou makest no way, writest _nothing_ that requires not to be erased again; lay it by for one complete week! And so it lies, under lock and key. I have digested the whole misery; I say, if thou canst _never_ write this thing, why then never do write it: God's Universe will go along _better_--without it. My Belief in a special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable: however, you see all the mad increase of entanglement I have got to strive with, and will pity me in it. Bodily exhaustion (and "Diana in the shape of bile")* I will at least try to exclude from the controversy. By God's blessing, perhaps the Book shall yet be written; but I find it will not do, by sheer direct force; only by gentler side-methods. I have much else to write too: I feel often as if with one year of health and peace I could write something considerable;--the image of which sails dim and great through my head. Which year of health and peace, God, if He see meet, will give me yet; or withhold from me, as shall be for the best. --------- * This allusion to Diana as an obstruction was a favorite one with Carlyle. "Sir Hudibras, according to Butler, was about to do a dreadful homicide,--an all-important catastrophe,--and had drawn his pistol with that full intent, and would decidedly have done it, had not, says Butler, 'Diana in the shape of rust' imperatively intervened. A miracle she has occasionally wrought upon me in other shapes." So wrote Carlyle in a letter in 1874. --------- I have dwelt and swum now for about a year in this World-Maelstrom of London; with much pain, which however has given me many thoughts, more than a counterbalance for that. Hitherto there is no outlook, but confusion, darkness, innumerable things against which a man must "set his face like a flint." Madness rules the world, as it has generally done: one cannot, unhappily, without loss, say to it, Rule then; and yet must say it.--However, in two months more I expect my good Brother from Italy (a brave fellow, who is a great comfort to me); we are then for Scotland to gather a little health, to consider ourselves a little. I must have this Book done before anything else will prosper with me. Your American Pamphlets got to hand only a few days ago; worthy old Rich had them not originally; seemed since to have been oblivious, out of Town, perhaps unwell. I called one day, and unearthed them. Those papers you marked I have read. Genuine endeavor; which may the Heavens forward!--In this poor Country all is swallowed up in the barren Chaos of Politics: Ministries tumbled out, Ministries tumbled in; all things (a fearful substratum of "Ignorance and Hunger" weltering and heaving under them) apparently in rapid progress towards--the melting-pot. There will be news from England by and by: many things have reached their term; Destiny "with lame foot" has overtaken them, and there will be a reckoning. O blessed are you where, what jargoning soever there be at Washington, the poor man (_un_governed can govern himself) shoulders his age, and walks into the Western Woods, sure of a nourishing Earth and an overarching Sky! It is verily the Door of Hope to distracted Europe; which otherwise I should see crumbling down into blackness of darkness.--That too shall be for good. I wish I had anything to send you besides these four poor Pamphlets; but I fear there is nothing going. Our Ex-Chancellor has been promulgating triticalities (significant as novelties, when _he_ with his wig and lordhood utters them) against the Aristocracy; whereat the upper circles are terribly scandalized. In Literature, except a promised or obtained (but to me still unknown) volume of Wordsworth, nothing nameworthy doing.--Did I tell you that I _saw_ Wordsworth this winter? Twice, at considerable length; with almost no disappointment. He is a _natural_ man (which means whole immensities here and now); flows like a natural well yielding mere wholesomeness,--though, as it would not but seem to me, in _small_ quantity, and astonishingly _diluted._ Franker utterance of mere garrulities and even platitudes I never heard from any man; at least never, whom I could _honor_ for uttering them. I am thankful for Wordsworth; as in great darkness and perpetual _sky-rockets_ and _coruscations,_ one were for the smallest clear-burning farthing candle. Southey also I saw; a far _cleverer_ man in speech, yet a considerably smaller man. Shovel-hatted; the shovel-hat is _grown_ to him: one must take him as he is. The second leaf is done; I must not venture on another. God bless you, my worthy Friend; you and her who is to be yours! My Wife bids me send heartiest wishes and regards from her too across the Sea. Perhaps we shall all meet one another some day, --if not Here, then Yonder! Faithfully always, T. Carlyle VIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 27 June, 1835 My Dear Friend,--Your very kind Letter has been in my hand these four weeks,--the subject of much meditation, which has not yet cleared itself into anything like a definite practical issue. Indeed, the conditions of the case are still not wholly before me: for if the American side of it, thanks to your perspicuous minuteness, is now tolerably plain, the European side continues dubious, too dim for a decision. So much in my own position here is vague, not to be measured; then there is a Brother, coming home to me from Italy, almost daily expected now; whose ulterior resolutions cannot but be influential on mine; for we are Brothers in the old good sense, and have one heart and one interest and object, and even one purse; and Jack is a _good man,_ for whom I daily thank Heaven, as for one of its principal mercies. He is Traveling Physician to the Countess of Clare, well entreated by her and hers; but, I think, weary of that inane element of "the English Abroad," and as good as determined to have done with it; to seek _work_ (he sees not well how), if possible, with wages; but even almost _without,_ or with the lowest endurable, if need be. Work and wages: the two prime necessities of man! It is pity they should ever be disjoined; yet of the two, if one _must,_ in this mad Earth, be dispensed with, it is really wise to say at all hazards, Be it the wages then. This Brother (if the Heavens have been kind to me) must be in Paris one of these days; then here speedily; and "the House must resolve itself into a Committee"--of ways and means. Add to all this, that I myself have been and am one of the stupidest of living men; in one of my vacant, interlunar conditions, unfit for deciding on anything: were I to give you my actual _view_ of this case, it were a view such as Satan had from the pavilion of the Anarch old. Alas! it is all too like Chaos: confusion of dense and rare: I also know what it is to drop _plumb,_ fluttering my pennons vain,--for a series of weeks. One point only is clear: that you, my Friend, are very friendly to me; that New England is as much my country and home as Old England. Very singular and very pleasant it is to me to feel as if I had a _house of my own_ in that far country: so many leagues and geographical degrees of wild-weltering "unfruitful brine"; and then the hospitable hearth and the smiles of brethren awaiting one there! What with railways, steamships, printing presses, it has surely become a most _monstrous_ "tissue," this life of ours; if evil and confusion in the one Hemisphere, then good and order in the other, a man knows not how: and so it rustles forth, immeasurable, from "that roaring Loom of Time,"--miraculous ever as of old! To Ralph Waldo Emerson, however, and those that love me as he, be thanks always, and a sure place in the sanctuary of the mind. Long shall we remember that Autumn Sunday that landed him (out of Infinite Space) on the Craigenputtock wilderness, not to leave us as he found us. My Wife says, whatever I decide on, I cannot thank you too heartily;--which really is very sound doctrine. I write to tell you so much; and that you shall hear from me again when there is more to tell. It does seem next to certain to me that I could preach a very considerable quantity of things from that Boston Pulpit, such as it is,--were I once fairly started. If so, what an unspeakable relief were it too! Of the whole mountain of miseries one grumbles at in this life, the central and parent one, as I often say, is that you cannot utter yourself. The poor soul sits struggling, impatient, longing vehemently out towards all corners of the Universe, and cannot get its hest delivered, not even so far as the voice might do it. Imprisoned, enchanted, like the Arabian Prince with half his body marble: it is really bad work. Then comes bodily sickness; to act and react, and double the imbroglio. Till at last, I suppose, one does rise, like Eliphaz the Temanite; states that his inner man is bursting (as if filled with carbonic acid and new wine), that by the favor of Heaven he will speak a word or two. Would it were come so far,-- if it be ever to come! On the whole I think the odds are that I shall some time or other get over to you; but that for this winter I ought not to go. My London expedition is not decided hitherto; I have begun various relations and arrangements, which it were questionable to cut short so soon. That beggarly Book, were there nothing else, hampers me every way. To fling it once for all into the fire were perhaps the best; yet I grudge to do that. To finish it, on the other hand, is denied me for the present, or even so much as to work at it. What am I to do? When my Brother arrives, we go all back to Scotland for some weeks: there, in seclusion, with such calmness as I can find or create, the plan for the winter must be settled. You shall hear from me then; let us hope something more reasonable than I can write at present. For about a month I have gone to and fro utterly _idle:_ understand that, and I need explain no more. The wearied machine refused to be urged any farther; after long spasmodic struggling comes collapse. The burning of that wretched Manuscript has really been a sore business for me. Nevertheless that too shall clear itself, and prove a _favor_ of the Upper Powers: _tomorrow_ to fresh fields and pastures new! This monstrous London has taught me several things during the past year; for if its Wisdom be of the most uninstructive ever heard of by that name of wisdom, its Folly abounds with lessons,--which one ought to learn. I feel (with my burnt manuscript) as if defeated in this campaign; defeated, yet not altogether disgraced. As the great Fritz said, when the battle had gone against him, "Another time we will do better." As to Literature, Politics, and the whole multiplex aspect of existence here, expect me not to say one word. We are a singular people, in a singular condition. Not many nights ago, in one of those phenomenal assemblages named routs, whither we had gone to see the countenance of O'Connell and Company (the Tail was a Peacock's tail, with blonde muslin women and heroic Parliamentary men), one of the company, a "distinguished female" (as we call them), informed my Wife "O'Connell was the master-spirit of this age." If so, then for what we have received let us be thankful, --and enjoy it _without_ criticism.--It often painfully seems to me as if much were coming fast to a crisis here; as if the crown-wheel had given way, and the whole horologe were rushing rapidly down, down, to its end! Wreckage is swift; rebuilding is slow and distant. Happily another than we has charge of it. My new American Friends have come and gone. Barnard went off northward some fortnight ago, furnished with such guidance and furtherance as I could give him. Professor Longfellow went about the same time; to Sweden, then to Berlin and Germany: we saw him twice or thrice, and his ladies, with great pleasure; as one sees worthy souls from a far country, who cannot abide with you, who throw you a kind greeting as they pass. I inquired considerably about Concord, and a certain man there; one of the fair pilgrims told me several comfortable things. By the bye, how very good you are, in regard to this of Unitarianism! I declare, I am ashamed of my intolerance:--and yet you have ceased to be a Teacher of theirs, have you not? I mean to address you this time by the secular title of Esquire; as if I liked you better so. But truly, in black clothes or in white, by this style or by that, the man himself can never be other than welcome to me. You will further allow me to fancy that you are now wedded; and offer our united congratulations and kindest good wishes to that new fair Friend of ours, whom one day we shall surely know more of,--if the Fates smile. My sheet is ending, and I must not burden you with double postage for such stuff as this. By dint of some inquiry I have learnt the law of the American Letter-carrying; and I now mention it for our mutual benefit. There are from New York to London three packets monthly (on the 1st, on the 10th, on the 20th); the masters of these carry Letters gratis for all men; and put the same into the Post-Office; there are some pence charged on the score of "Ship-letter" there, and after that, the regular postage of the country, if the Letter has to go farther. I put this, for example, into a place called North and South American Coffee-house in the City here, and pay twopence for it, and it flies. Doubtless there is some similar receiving-house with its "leather bag" somewhere in New York, and fixed days (probably the same as our days) for emptying, or rather for tying and despatching, said leather bag: if you deal with the London Packets (so long as I am here) in preference to the Liverpool ones, it will all be well. As for the next Letter, (if you write as I hope you may before hearing from me again,) pray direct it, "Care of John Mill, Esq., India House, London"; and he will forward it directly, should I even be still absent in the North.--Now will you write? and pray write something about yourself. We both love you here, and send you all good prayers. _Vale faveque!_ Yours ever, T. Carlyle IX. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, 7 October, 1835 My Dear Friend,--Please God I will never again sit six weeks of this short human life over a letter of yours without answering it. ----------- * The original of this letter is missing; what is printed here is from the rough draft. ----------- I received in August your letter of June, and just then hearing that a lady, a little lady with a mighty heart, Mrs. Child,* whom I scarcely know but do much respect, was about to visit England (invited thither for work's sake by the African or Abolition Society) and that she begged an introduction to you, I used the occasion to say the godsend was come, and that I would acknowledge it as soon as three then impending tasks were ended. I have now learned that Mrs. Child was detained for weeks in New York and did not sail. Only last night I received your letter written in May, with the four copies of the _Sartor,_ which by a strange oversight have been lying weeks, probably months, in the Custom-House. On such provocation I can sit still no longer. ------------ * The excellent Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, whose romance of _Philothea_ was published in this year, 1835. "If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then, 'T is but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen." says Lowell, in his _Fable for Critics._ ----------- The three tasks were, a literary address; a historical discourse on the two-hundredth anniversary of our little town of Concord* (my first adventure in print, which I shall send you); the third, my marriage, now happily consummated. All three, from the least to the greatest, trod so fast upon each other's heel as to leave me, who am a slow and awkward workman, no interstice big enough for a letter that should hope to convey any information. Again I waited that the Discourse might go in his new jacket to show how busy I had been, but the creeping country press has not dressed it yet. Now congratulate me, my friend, as indeed you have already done, that I live with my wife in my own house, waiting on the good future. The house is not large, but convenient and very elastic. The more hearts (specially great hearts) it holds, the better it looks and feels. I have not had so much leisure yet but that the fact of having ample space to spread my books and blotted paper is still gratifying. So know now that your rooms in America wait for you, and that my wife is making ready a closet for Mrs. Carlyle. ---------- * "A Historical Discourse, delivered before the Citizens of Concord, 12th September, 1835, on the Second Centennial Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. Published by Request. Concord: G.F. Bemis, Printer. 1835." 8vo, pp. 52.--A discourse worthy of the author and of the town. It is reprinted in the eleventh volume of Emerson's Works, Boston, 1883. ----------- I could cry at the disaster that has befallen you in the loss of the book. My brother Charles says the only thing the friend could do on such an occasion was to shoot himself, and wishes to know if he have done so. Such mischance might well quicken one's curiosity to know what Oversight there is of us, and I greet you well upon your faith and the resolution issuing out of it. You have certainly found a right manly consolation, and can afford to faint and rest a month or two on the laurels of such endeavor. I trust ere this you have re-collected the entire creation out of the secret cells where, under the smiles of every Muse, it first took life. Believe, when you are weary, that you who stimulate and rejoice virtuous young men do not write a line in vain. And whatever betide us in the inexorable future, what is better than to have awaked in many men the sweet sense of beauty, and to double the courage of virtue. So do not, as you will not, let the imps from all the fens of weariness and apathy have a minute too much. To die of feeding the fires of others were sweet, since it were not death but multiplication. And yet I hold to a more orthodox immortality too. This morning in happiest time I have a letter from George Ripley, who tells me you have written him, and that you say pretty confidently you will come next summer. _Io paean!_ He tells me also that Alexander Everett (brother of Edward) has sent you the friendly notice that has just appeared in the _North American Review,_ with a letter.* All which I hope you have received. I am delighted, for this man represents a clique to which I am a stranger, and which I supposed might not love you. It must be you shall succeed when Saul prophesies. Indeed, I have heard that you may hear the _Sartor_ preached from some of our best pulpits and lecture-rooms. Don't think I speak of myself, for I cherish carefully a salutary horror at the German style, and hold off my admiration as long as ever I can. But all my importance is quite at an end. For now that Doctors of Divinity and the solemn Review itself have broke silence to praise you, I have quite lost my plume as your harbinger. ----------- * Mr. A.H. Everett's paper on _Sartor Resartus_ was published in the _North American Review_ for October, 1835. ----------- I read with interest what you say of the political omens in England. I could wish our country a better comprehension of its felicity. But government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world should last his day. We have had in different parts of the country mobs and moblike legislation, and even moblike judicature, which have betrayed an almost godless state of society; so that I begin to think even here it behoves every man to quit his dependency on society as much as he can, as he would learn to go without crutches that will be soon plucked away from him, and settle with himself the principles he can stand upon, happen what may. There is reading, and public lecturing too, in this country, that I could recommend as medicine to any gentleman who finds the love of life too strong in him. If virtue and friendship have not yet become fables, do believe we keep your face for the living type. I was very glad to hear of the brother you describe, for I have one too, and know what it is to have presence in two places. Charles Chauncy Emerson is a lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I believe, no better Lord Hamlet was ever. He is our Doctor on all questions of taste, manners, or action. And one of the pure pleasures I promise myself in the months to come is to make you two gentlemen know each other. X. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, Mass., 8 April, 1856 My Dear Friend,--I am concerned at not hearing from you. I have written you two letters, one in October, one in November, I believe, since I had any tidings of you.* Your last letter is dated 27 June, 1835. I have counted all the chances of delay and miscarriage, and still am anxious lest you are ill, or have forgotten us. I have looked at the advertising sheet of the booksellers, but it promised nothing of the _History._ I thought I had made the happiest truce with sorrow in having the promise of your coming,--I was to take possession of a new kingdom of virtue and friendship. Let not the new wine mourn. Speak to me out of the wide silence. Many friends inquire of me concerning you, and you must write some word immediately on receipt of this sheet. ------------ * One in August by Mrs. Child, apparently not delivered, and one, the preceding, in October. ----------- With it goes an American reprint of the _Sartor._ Five hundred copies only make the edition, at one dollar a copy. About one hundred and fifty copies are subscribed for. How it will be received I know not. I am not very sanguine, for I often hear and read somewhat concerning its repulsive style. Certainly, I tell them, it is very odd. Yet I read a chapter lately with great pleasure. I send you also, with Dr. Channing's regards and good wishes, a copy of his little work, lately published, on our great local question of Slavery. You must have written me since July. I have reckoned upon your projected visit the ensuing summer or autumn, and have conjectured the starlike influences of a new spiritual element. Especially Lectures. My own experiments for one or two winters, and the readiness with which you embrace the work, have led me to think much and to expect much from this mode of addressing men. In New England the Lyceum, as we call it, is already a great institution. Beside the more elaborate courses of lectures in the cities, every country town has its weekly evening meeting, called a Lyceum, and every professional man in the place is called upon, in the course of the winter, to entertain his fellow-citizens with a discourse on whatever topic. The topics are miscellaneous as heart can wish. But in Boston, Lowell, Salem, courses are given by individuals. I see not why this is not the most flexible of all organs of opinion, from its popularity and from its newness permitting you to say what you think, without any shackles of prescription. The pulpit in our age certainly gives forth an obstructed and uncertain sound, and the faith of those in it, if men of genius, may differ so much from that of those under it, as to embarrass the conscience of the speaker, because so much is attributed to him from the fact of standing there. In the Lyceum nothing is presupposed. The orator is only responsible for what his lips articulate. Then what scope it allows! You may handle every member and relation of humanity. What could Homer, Socrates, or St. Paul say that cannot be said here? The audience is of all classes, and its character will be determined always by the name of the lecturer. Why may you not give the reins to your wit, your pathos, your philosophy, and become that good despot which the virtuous orator is? Another thing. I am persuaded that, if a man speak well, he shall find this a well-rewarded work in New England. I have written this year ten lectures; I had written as many last year. And for reading both these and those at places whither I was invited, I have received this last winter about three hundred and fifty dollars. Had I, in lieu of receiving a lecturer's fee, myself advertised that I would deliver these in certain places, these receipts would have been greatly increased. I insert all this because my prayers for you in this country are quite of a commercial spirit. If you lose no dollar by us, I shall joyfully trust your genius and virtue for your satisfaction on all other points. I cannot remember that there are any other mouthpieces that are specially vital at this time except Criticism and Parliamentary Debate. I think this of ours would possess in the hands of a great genius great advantages over both. But what avail any commendations of the form, until I know that the man is alive and well? If you love them that love you, write me straightway of your welfare. My wife desires to add to mine her friendliest greetings to Mrs. Carlyle and to yourself. Yours affectionately, R. Waldo Emerson I ought to say that Le-Baron Russell, a worthy young man who studies Engineering, did cause the republication of Teufelsdrockh.* I trust you shall yet see a better American review of it than the _North American._ ------------ * This first edition of _Sartor_ as an independent volume was published by James Munroe and Company, Boston. Emerson, at Mr. (now Dr.) Russell's request, wrote a Preface for the book. He told Dr. Russell that his brother Charles was not pleased with the Preface, thinking it "too commonplace, too much like all prefaces." ----------- XI. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 29 April, 1836 My Dear Emerson,--Barnard is returning across the water, and must not go back without a flying salutation for you. These many weeks I have had your letter by me; these many weeks I have felt always that it deserved and demanded a grateful answer; and, alas! also that I could give it none. It is impossible for you to figure what mood I am in. One sole thought, That Book! that weary Book! occupies me continually: wreck and confusion of all kinds go tumbling and falling around me, within me; but to wreck and growth, to confusion and order, to the world at large, I turn a deaf ear; and have life only for this one thing,--which also in general I feel to be one of the pitifulest that ever man went about possessed with. Have compassion for me! It is really very miserable: but it will end. Some months more, and it is _ended;_ and I am done with _French Revolution,_ and with Revolution and Revolt in general; and look once more with free eyes over this Earth, where are other things than mean internecine work of that kind: things fitter for me, under the bright Sun, on this green Mother's-bosom (though the Devil does dwell in it)! For the present, really, it is like a Nessus' shirt, burning you into madness, this wretched Enterprise; nay, it is also like a kind of Panoply, rendering you invulnerable, insensible, to all _other_ mischiefs. I got the fatal First Volume finished (in the miserablest way, after great efforts) in October last; my head was all in a whirl; I fled to Scotland and my Mother for a month of rest. Rest is nowhere for the Son of Adam: all looked so "spectral" to me in my old-familiar Birthland; Hades itself could not have seemed stranger; Annandale also was part of the kingdom of TIME. Since November I have worked again as I could; a second volume got wrapped up and sealed out of my sight within the last three days. There is but a Third now: one pull more, and then! It seems to me, I will fly into some obscurest cranny of the world, and lie silent there for a twelvemonth. The mind is weary, the body is very sick; a little black speck dances to and fro in the left eye (part of the retina protesting against the liver, and striking work): I cannot help it; it must flutter and dance there, like a signal of distress, unanswered till I be done. My familiar friends tell me farther that the Book is all wrong, style cramp, &c., &c.: my friends, I answer, you are very right; but this also, Heaven be my witness, I cannot help.--In such sort do I live here; all this I had to write you, if I wrote at all. For the rest I cannot say that this huge blind monster of a City is without some sort of charm for me. It leaves one alone, to go his own road unmolested. Deep in your soul you take up your protest against it, defy it, and even despise it; but need not divide yourself from it for that. Worthy individuals are glad to hear your thought, if it have any sincerity; they do not exasperate themselves or you about it; they have not even time for such a thing. Nay, in stupidity itself on a scale of this magnitude, there is an impressiveness, almost a sublimity; one thinks how, in the words of Schiller, "the very Gods fight against it in vain"; how it lies on its unfathomable foundations there, inert yet peptic; nay, eupeptic; and is a _Fact_ in the world, let theory object as it will. Brown-stout, in quantities that would float a seventy-four, goes down the throats of men; and the roaring flood of life pours on;--over which Philosophy and Theory are but a poor shriek of remonstrance, which oftenest were wiser, perhaps, to hold its peace. I grow daily to honor Facts more and more, and Theory less and less. A Fact, it seems to me, is a great thing: a Sentence printed if not by God, then at least by the Devil;--neither Jeremy Bentham nor Lytton Bulwer had a hand in _that._ There are two or three of the best souls here I have known for long: I feel less alone with them; and yet one is alone,--a stranger and a pilgrim. These friends expect mainly that the Church of England is not dead but asleep; that the leather coaches, with their gilt panels, can be peopled again with a living Aristocracy, instead of the simulacra of such. I must altogether hold my peace to this, as I do to much. Coleridge is the Father of all these. _Ay de mi!_ But to look across the "divine salt-sea." A letter reached me, some two months ago, from Mobile, Alabama; the writer, a kind friend of mine, signs himself James Freeman Clarke.* I have mislaid, not lost his Letter; and do not at present know his permanent address (for he seemed to be only on a visit at Mobile); but you, doubtless, do know it. Will you therefore take or even find an opportunity to tell this good Friend that it is not the wreckage of the Liverpool ship he wrote by, nor insensibility on my part, that prevents his hearing direct from me; that I see him, and love him in this Letter; and hope we shall meet one day under the Sun, shall live under it, at any rate, with many a kind thought towards one another. ---------- * Now the Rev. Dr. Clarke, of Boston. ---------- The _North American Review_ you spoke of never came (I mean that copy of it with the Note in it); but another copy became rather public here, to the amusement of some. I read the article myself: surely this Reviewer, who does not want in [sense]* otherwise, is an original: either a _thrice_-plied quiz (_Sartor's_ "Editor" a twice-plied one); or else opening on you a grandeur of still Dulness, rarely to be met with on earth. ------------- * The words supplied here were lost under the seal of the letter. ------------- My friend! I must end here. Forgive me till I get done with this Book. Can you have the generosity to write, _without_ an answer? Well, if you can_not,_ I will answer. Do not forget me. My love and my Wife's to your good Lady, to your Brother, and all friends. Tell me what you do; what your world does. As for my world, take this (which I rendered from the German Voss, a tough old-Teutonic fellow) for the best I can say of it:-- "As journeys this Earth, her eye on a Sun, through the heavenly spaces, And, radiant in azure, or Sunless, swallowed in tempests, Falters not, alters not; journeying equal, sunlit or stormgirt So thou, Son of Earth, who hast Force, Goal, and Time, go still onwards." Adieu, my dear friend! Believe me ever Yours, Thomas Carlyle XII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, Massachusetts, 17 September, 1836 My Dear Friend,--I hope you do not measure my love by the tardiness of my messages. I have few pleasures like that of receiving your kind and eloquent letters. I should be most impatient of the long interval between one and another, but that they savor always of Eternity, and promise me a friendship and friendly inspiration not reckoned or ended by days or years. Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your first. I have lost out of this world my brother Charles,* of whom I have spoken to you,--the friend and companion of many years, the inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born to speak well, and whose conversation for these last years has treated every grave question of humanity, and has been my daily bread. I have put so much dependence on his gifts that we made but one man together; for I needed never to do what he could do by noble nature much better than I. He was to have been married in this month, and at the time of his sickness and sudden death I was adding apartments to my house for his permanent accommodation. I wish that you could have known him. At twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation. He built his foundation so large that it needed the full age of man to make evident the plan and proportions of his character. He postponed always a particular to a final and absolute success, so that his life was a silent appeal to the great and generous. But some time I shall see you and speak of him. --------- * Charles Chauncy Emerson,--died May 9, 1836,--whose memory still survives fresh and beautiful in the hearts of the few who remain who knew him in life. A few papers of his published in the _Dial_ show to others what he was and what he might have become. ----------- We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without, and they serve us in every thought we think. I find now I must hold faster the remaining jewels of my social belt. And of you I think much and anxiously since Mrs. Channing, amidst her delight at what she calls the happiest hour of her absence, in her acquaintance with you and your family, expresses much uneasiness respecting your untempered devotion to study. I am the more disturbed by her fears, because your letters avow a self-devotion to your work, and I know there is no gentle dulness in your temperament to counteract the mischief. I fear Nature has not inlaid fat earth enough into your texture to keep the ethereal blade from whetting it through. I write to implore you to be careful of your health. You are the property of all whom you rejoice in art and soul, and you must not deal with your body as your own. O my friend, if you would come here and let me nurse you and pasture you in my nook of this long continent, I will thank God and you therefor morning and evening, and doubt not to give you, in a quarter of a year, sound eyes, round cheeks, and joyful spirits. My wife has been lately an invalid, but she loves you thoroughly, and hardly stores a barrel of flour or lays her new carpet without some hopeful reference to Mrs. Carlyle. And in good earnest, why cannot you come here forthwith, and deliver in lectures to the solid men of Boston the _History of the French Revolution_ before it is published,--or at least whilst it is publishing in England, and before it is published here. There is no doubt of the perfect success of such a course now that the _five hundred copies of the Sartor are all sold,_ and read with great delight by many persons. This I suggest if you too must feel the vulgar necessity of _doing;_ but if you will be governed by your friend, you shall come into the meadows, and rest and talk with your friend in my country pasture. If you will come here like a noble brother, you shall have your solid day undisturbed, except at the hours of eating and walking; and as I will abstain from you myself, so I will defend you from others. I entreat Mrs. Carlyle, with my affectionate remembrances, to second me in this proposition, and not suffer the wayward man to think that in these space-destroying days a prayer from Boston, Massachusetts, is any less worthy of serious and prompt granting than one from Edinburgh or Oxford. I send you a little book I have just now published, as an entering wedge, I hope, for something more worthy and significant.* This is only a naming of topics on which I would gladly speak and gladlier hear. I am mortified to learn the ill fate of my former packet containing the _Sartor_ and Dr. Channing's work. My mercantile friend is vexed, for he says accurate orders were given to send it as a packet, not as a letter. I shall endeavor before despatching this sheet to obtain another copy of our American edition. ----------- * This was _Nature,_ the first clear manifesto of Emerson's genius. ----------- I wish I could come to you instead of sending this sheet of paper. I think I should persuade you to get into a ship this Autumn, quit all study for a time, and follow the setting sun. I have many, many things to learn of you. How melancholy to think how much we need confession!...* Yet the great truths are always at hand, and all the tragedy of individual life is separated how thinly from that universal nature which obliterates all ranks, all evils, all individualities. How little of you is in your _will!_ Above your will how intimately are you related to all of us! In God we meet. Therein we _are,_ thence we descend upon Time and these infinitesimal facts of Christendom, and Trade, and England Old and New. Wake the soul now drunk with a sleep, and we overleap at a bound the obstructions, the griefs, the mistakes, of years, and the air we breathe is so vital that the Past serves to contribute nothing to the result. ----------- ** Some words appear to be lost here. ----------- I read Goethe, and now lately the posthumous volumes, with a great interest. A friend of mine who studies his life with care would gladly know what records there are of his first ten years after his settlement at Weimar, and what Books there are in Germany about him beside what Mrs. Austin has collected and Heine. Can you tell me? Write me of your health, or else come. Yours ever, R.W. Emerson. P.S.--I learn that an acquaintance is going to England, so send the packet by him. XIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 5 November, 1836 My Dear Friend,--You are very good to write to me in my silence, in the mood you must be in. My silence you may well judge is not forgetfulness; it is a forced silence; which this kind Letter enforces into words. I write the day after your letter comes, lest the morrow bring forth something new to hinder me. What a bereavement, my Friend, is this that has overtaken you! Such a Brother, with such a Life opening around him, like a blooming garden where he was to labor and gather, all vanished suddenly like frostwork, and hidden from your eye! It is a loss, a sore loss; which God had appointed you. I do not tell you not to mourn: I mourn with you, and could wish all mourners the spirit you have in this sorrow. Oh, I know it well! Often enough in this noisy Inanity of a vision where _we_ still linger, I say to myself, Perhaps thy Buried Ones are not far from thee, are with thee; they are in Eternity, which is a Now and HERE! And yet Nature will have her right; Memory would feel desecrated if she could forget. Many times in the crowded din of the Living, some sight, some feature of a face, will recall to you the Loved Face; and in these turmoiling streets you see the little silent Churchyard, the green grave that lies there so silent, inexpressibly _wae._ O, perhaps we _shall_ all meet YONDER, and the tears be wiped from all eyes! One thing is no Perhaps: surely we _shall_ all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of us. If it be not His will,--then is it not better so? Silence,--since in these days we have no speech! Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, in any day. You inquire so earnestly about my welfare; hold open still the hospitable door for me. Truly Concord, which I have sought out on the Map, seems worthy of its name: no dissonance comes to me from that side; but grief itself has acquired a harmony: in joy or grief a voice says to me, Behold there is one that loves thee; in thy loneliness, in thy darkness, see how a hospitable candle shines from far over seas, how a friendly heart watches! It is very good, and precious for me. As for my health, be under no apprehension. I am always sick; I am sicker and worse in body and mind, a little, for the present; but it has no deep significance: it is _weariness_ merely; and now, by the bounty of Heaven, I am as it were within sight of land. In two months more, this unblessed Book will be _finished;_ at Newyearday we begin printing: before the end of March, the thing is out; and I am a free man! Few happinesses I have ever known will equal that, as it seems to me. And yet I ought not to call the poor Book unblessed: no, it has girdled me round like a panoply these two years; kept me invulnerable, indifferent, to innumerable things. The poorest man in London has perhaps been one of the freest: the roaring press of gigs and gigmen, with their gold blazonry and fierce gig-wheels, have little incommoded him; they going their way, he going his.--As for the results of the Book, I can rationally promise myself, on the economical, pecuniary, or otherwise worldly side, simply _zero._ It is a Book contradicting all rules of Formalism, that have not a Reality within them, which so few have;--testifying, the more quietly the worse, internecine war with Quacks high and low. My good Brother, who was with me out of Italy in summer, declared himself shocked, and almost terror-struck: "Jack," I answered, "innumerable men give their lives cheerfully to defend Falsehoods and Half-Falsehoods; why should not one writer give his life cheerfully to say, in plain Scotch-English, in the hearing of God and man, To me they seem false and half-false? At all events, thou seest, I cannot help it. It is the nature of the beast." So that, on the whole, I suppose there is no more unpromotable, unappointable man now living in England than I. Literature also, the miscellaneous place of refuge, seems done here, unless you will take the Devil's wages for it; which one does not incline to do. A _disjectum membrum;_ cut off from relations with men? Verily so; and now forty years of age; and extremely dyspeptical: a hopeless-looking man. Yet full of what I call desperate-hope! One does verily stand on the Earth, a Star-dome encompassing one; seemingly accoutred and enlisted and sent to battle, with rations good, indifferent, or bad,--what can one do but in the name of Odin, Tuisco, Hertha, Horsa, and all Saxon and Hebrew Gods, fight it out?--This surely is very idle talk. As to the Book, I do say seriously that it is a wild, savage, ruleless, very bad Book; which even you will not be able to like; much less any other man. Yet it contains strange things; sincerities drawn out of the heart of a man very strangely situated; reverent of nothing but what is reverable in all ages and places: so we will print it, and be done with it;--and try a new turn next time. What I am to do, were the thing done, you see therefore, is most uncertain. How gladly would I run to Concord! And if I were there, be sure the do-nothing arrangement is the only conceivable one for me. That my sick existence subside again, this is the first condition; that quiet vision be restored me. It is frightful what an impatience I have got for many kinds of fellow-creatures. Their jargon really hurts me like the shrieking of inarticulate creatures that ought to articulate. There is no resource but to say: Brother, thou surely art not hateful; thou art lovable, at lowest pitiable;-- alas! in my case, thou art dreadfully wearisome, unedifying: go thy ways, with my blessing. There are hardly three people among these two millions, whom I care much to exchange words with, in the humor I have. Nevertheless, at bottom, it is not my purpose to quit London finally till I have as it were _seen it out._ In the very hugeness of the monstrous City, contradiction cancelling contradiction, one finds a sort of composure for one's self that is not to be met with elsewhere perhaps in the world: people tolerate you, were it only that they have not time to trouble themselves with you. Some individuals even love me here; there are one or two whom I have even learned to love,--though, for the present, cross circumstances have snatched them out of my orbit again mostly. Wherefore, if you ask me, What I am to do?--the answer is clear so far, "Rest myself awhile"; and all farther is as dark as Chaos. Now for resting, taking that by itself, my Brother, who has gone back to Rome with some thoughts of settling as a Physician there, presses me to come thither, and rest in Rome. On the other hand, a certain John Sterling (the best man I have found in these regions) has been driven to Bordeaux lately for his health; he will have it that I must come to him, and walk through the South of France to Dauphine, Avignon, and over the Alps next spring!* Thirdly, my Mother will have me return to Annandale, and lie quiet in her little habitation;--which I incline to think were the wisest course of all. And lastly from over the Atlantic comes my good Emerson's voice. We will settle nothing, except that all shall remain unsettled. _Die Zukunft decket Schmerzen and Glucke._ ------------ * In his _Life of Sterling,_ Carlyle prints a letter from Sterling to himself, dated Bordeaux, October 26, 1836, in which Sterling urges him to come "in the first fine days of spring." It must have reached him a few days before he wrote this letter to Emerson. --------- I ought to say, however, that about New-year's-day I will send you an Article on _Mirabeau,_ which they have printed here (for a thing called the _London Review_), and some kind of Note to escort it. I think Pamphlets travel as Letters in New England, provided you leave the ends of them open: if I be mistaken, pray instruct Messrs. Barnard to _refuse_ the thing, for it has small value. _The Diamond Necklace_ is to be printed also, in _Fraser;_ inconceivable hawking that poor Paper has had; till now Fraser takes it--for L50: not being able to get it for nothing. The _Mirabeau_ was written at the passionate request of John Mill; and likewise for needful lucre. I think it is the first shilling of money I have earned by my craft these four years: where the money I have lived on has come from while I sat here scribbling gratis, amazes me to think; yet surely it has come (for I am still here), and Heaven only to thank for it, which is a great fact. As for Mill's _London Review_ (for he is quasi-editor), I do not recommend it to you. Hide-bound Radicalism; a to me well-nigh insupportable thing! Open it not: a breath as of Sahara and the Infinite Sterile comes from every page of it. A young Radical Baronet* has laid out L3,000 on getting the world instructed in that manner: it is very curious to see.--Alas! the bottom of the sheet! Take my hurried but kindest thanks for the prospect of your second Teufelsdrockh: the _first_ too is now in my possession; Brother John went to the Post-Office, and worked it out for a ten shillings. It is a beautiful little Book; and a Preface to it such as no kindest friend could have improved. Thank my kind Editor** very heartily from me. --------- * Sir William Molesworth. In his _Autobiography_ Mill gives an interesting account of the founding of this _Review,_ and his quasi-editorial relations to it. "In the beginning," he says, "it did not, as a whole, by any means represent my opinion." ** Dr. Le-Baron Russell --------- My wife was in Scotland in summer, driven thither by ill health; she is stronger since her return, though not yet strong; she sends over to Concord her kindest wishes. If I fly to the Alps or the Ocean, her Mother and she must keep one another company, we think, till there be better news of me. You are to thank Dr. Channing also for his valued gift. I read the Discourse, and other friends of his read it, with great estimation; but the _end_ of that black question lies beyond my ken. I suppose, as usual, Might and Right will have to make themselves synonymous in some way. CANST and SHALT, if they are _very_ well understood, mean the same thing under this Sun of ours. Adieu, my dear Emerson. _Gehab' Dich wohl!_ Many affectionate regards to the Lady Wife: it is far within the verge of Probabilities that I shall see her face, and eat of her bread, one day. But she must not get sick! It is a dreadful thing, sickness; really a thing which I begin frequently to think _criminal_--at least in myself. Nay, in myself it really is criminal; wherefore I determine to be well one day. Good be with you and Yours. T. Carlyle As to Goethe and your Friend: I know not anything out of Goethe's own works (which have many notices in them) that treats specially of those ten years. Doubtless your Friend knows Jordens's _Lexicon_ (which dates all the writings, for one thing), the _Conversations-Lexicon Supplement,_ and such like. There is an essay by one Schubarth which has reputation; but it is critical and ethical mainly. The Letters to Zelter, and the Letters to Schiller, will do nothing for those years, but are essential to see. Perhaps in some late number of the _Zeitgenossen_ there may be something? Blackguard Heine is worth very little; Mentzel is duller, decenter, not much wiser. A very curious Book is Eckermann's _Conversations with Goethe,_ just published. No room more!* ----------- * Concerning this letter Emerson wrote in his Diary: "January 7, 1837. Received day before yesterday a letter from Thomas Carlyle, dated 5 November;--as ever, a cordial influence. Strong he is, upright, noble, and sweet, and makes good how much of our human nature. Quite in consonance with my delight in his eloquent letters I read in Bacon this afternoon this sentence (of Letters): 'And such as are written from wise men are of all the words of men, in my judgment, the best; for they are more natural than orations, public speeches, and more advised than conferences or present speeches.'" ------------- XIV. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, 13 February, 1837 My Dear Emerson,--You had promise of a letter to be despatched you about New-year's-day; which promise I was myself in a condition to fulfil at the time set, but delayed it, owing to delays of printers and certain "Articles" that were to go with it. Six weeks have not yet entirely brought up these laggard animals: however, I will delay no longer for them. Nay, it seems the Articles, were they never so ready, cannot go with the Letter; but must fare round by Liverpool or Portsmouth, in a separate conveyance. We will leave them to the bounty of Time. Your little Book and the Copy of _Teufelsdrockh_ came safely; soon after I had written. The _Teufelsdrockh_ I instantaneously despatched to Hamburg, to a Scottish merchant there, to whom there is an allusion in the Book; who used to be my _Speditor_ (one of the politest extant though totally a stranger) in my missions and packages to and from Weimar.* The other, former Copy, more specially yours, had already been, as I think I told you, delivered out of durance; and got itself placed in the bookshelf, as _the_ Teufelsdrockh. George Ripley tells me you are printing another edition; much good may it do you! There is now also a kind of whisper and whimper rising _here_ about printing one. I said to myself once, when Bookseller Fraser shrieked so loud at a certain message you sent him: "Perhaps after all they will print this poor rag of a thing into a Book, after I am dead it may be,--if so seem good to them. _Either_ way!" As it is, we leave the poor orphan to its destiny, all the more cheerfully. Ripley says farther he has sent me a critique of it by a better hand than the _North American:_ I expect it, but have not got it Yet.** The _North American_ seems to say that he too sent me one. It never came to hand, nor any hint of it,--except I think once before through you. It was not at all an unfriendly review; but had an opacity, of matter-of-fact in it that filled one with amazement. Since the Irish Bishop who said there were some things in _Gulliver_ on which he for one would keep his belief _suspended,_ nothing equal to it, on that side, has come athwart me. However, he _has_ made out that Teufelsdrockh is, in all human probability, a fictitious character; which is always something, for an Inquirer into Truth.--Will you, finally, thank Friend Ripley in my name, till I have time to write to him and thank him. ----------- * The allusion referred to is the following: "By the kindness of a Scottish Hamburg merchant, whose name, known to the whole mercantile world, he must not mention; but whose honorable courtesy, now and before spontaneously manifested to him, a mere literary stranger, he cannot soon forget,--the bulky Weissnichtwo packet, with all its Custom-house seals, foreign hieroglyphs, and miscellaneous tokens of travel, arrived here in perfect safety, and free of cost."--_Sartor Resartus,_ Book I. ch. xi. ** An article by the Rev. N.L. Frothingham in the _Christian Examiner._ ---------- Your little azure-colored Nature gave me true satisfaction. I read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintance that had a sense for such things; from whom a similar verdict always came back. You say it is the first chapter of something greater. I call it rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build. It is the true Apocalypse, this when the "Open Secret" becomes revealed to a man. I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul with which you look out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours and mine--with an ear for the _Ewigen Melodien,_ which pipe in the winds round us, and utter themselves forth in all sounds and sights and things: not to be written down by gamut-machinery; but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down. You will see what the years will bring you. It is not one of your smallest qualities in my mind, that you can wait so quietly and let the years do their best. He that cannot keep himself quiet is of a morbid nature; and the thing he yields us will be like him in that, whatever else it be. Miss Martineau (for I have seen her since I wrote) tells me you "are the only man in America" who has quietly set himself down on a competency to follow his own path, and do the work his own will prescribes for him. Pity that you were the only one! But be one, nevertheless; be the first, and there will come a second and a third. It is a poor country where all men are _sold_ to Mammon, and can make nothing but Railways and Bursts of Parliamentary Eloquence! And yet your New England here too has the upper hand of our Old England, of our Old Europe: we too are sold to Mammon, soul, body, and spirit; but (mark that, I pray you, with double pity) Mammon will not _pay_ us,--we, are "Two Million three hundred thousand in Ireland that have not potatoes enough"! I declare, in History I find nothing more tragical. I find also that it will alter; that for me as one it has altered. Me Mammon will _pay_ or not as he finds convenient; buy me he will not.--In fine, I say, sit still at Concord, with such spirit as you are of; under the blessed skyey influences, with an open sense, with the great Book of Existence open round you: we shall see whether you too get not something blessed to read us from it. The Paper is declining fast, and all is yet speculation. Along with these two "Articles" (to be sent by Liverpool; there are two of them, _Diamond Necklace_ and _Mirabeau_), you will very probably get some stray Proofsheet--of the unutterable _French Revolution!_ It is actually at Press; two Printers working at separate Volumes of it,--though still too slow. In not many weeks, my hands will be washed of it! You, I hope, can have little conception of the feeling with which I wrote the last word of it, one night in early January, when the clock was striking ten, and our frugal Scotch supper coming in! I did not cry; nor I did not pray but could have done both. No such _spell_ shall get itself fixed on me for some while to come! A beggarly Distortion; that will please no mortal, not even myself; of which I know not whether the fire were not after all the due place! And yet I ought not to say so: there is a great blessing in a man's doing what he utterly can, in the case he is in. Perhaps great quantities of dross are burnt out of me by this calcination I have had; perhaps I shall be far quieter and healthier of mind and body than I have ever been since boyhood. The world, though no man had ever less empire in it, seems to me a thing lying _under_ my feet; a mean imbroglio, which I never more shall fear, or court, or disturb myself with: welcome and welcome to go wholly _its own way;_ I wholly clear for going mine. Through the summer months I am, somewhere or other, to rest myself, in the deepest possible sleep. The residue is vague as the wind,--unheeded as the wind. Some way it will turn out that a poor, well-meaning Son of Adam has bread growing for him too, better or worse: _any_ way,--or even _no_ way, if that be it,--I shall be content. There is a scheme here among Friends for my Lecturing in a thing they call Royal Institution; but it will not do there, I think. The instant two or three are gathered together under any terms, who want to learn something I can teach them,--then we will, most readily, as Burns says, "loose our tinkler jaw"; but not I think till then; were the Institution even Imperial. America has faded considerably into the background of late: indeed, to say truth, whenever I think of myself in America, it is as in the Backwoods, with a rifle in my hand, God's sky over my head, and this accursed Lazar-house of quacks and blockheads, 'and sin and misery (now near a head) lying all behind me forevermore. A thing, you see, which is and can be at bottom but a daydream! To rest through the summer: that is my only fixed wisdom; a resolution taken; only the place where uncertain.-- What a pity this poor sheet is done! I had innumerable things to tell you about people whom I have seen, about books,--Miss Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Butler, Southey, Influenza, Parliament, Literature and the Life of Man,--the whole of which must lie over till next time. Write to me; do not forget me. My Wife, who is sitting by me, in very poor health (this long while), sends "kindest remembrances," "compliments" she expressly does not send. Good be with you always, my dear Friend! --T. Carlyle We send our felicitation to the Mother and little Boy; which latter you had better tell us the name of. XV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, Mass., 31 March, 1837 My Dear Friend,--Last night, I said I would write to you forthwith. This morning I received your letter of February 13th, and _with it_ the _Diamond Necklace,_ the _Mirabeau,_ and the olive leaf of a proof-sheet. I write out the sum of my debt as the best acknowledgment I can make. I had already received, about New-Year's-Day, the preceding letter. It came in the midst of my washbowl-storm of a course of Lectures on the Philosophy of History. For all these gifts and pledges,--thanks. Over the finished _History,_ joy and evergreen laurels. I embrace you with all my heart. I solace myself with the noble nature God has given you, and in you to me, and to all. I had read the _Diamond Necklace_ three weeks ago at the Boston Athenaeum, and the _Mirabeau_ I had just read when my copy came. But the proof-sheet was virgin gold. The _Mirabeau_ I forebode is to establish your kingdom in England. That is genuine thunder, which nobody that wears ears can affect to mistake for the rumbling of cart-wheels. I please myself with thinking that my Angelo has blocked a Colossus which may stand in the public square to defy all competitors. To be sure, that is its least merit,--that nobody can do the like,--yet is it a gag to Cerberus. Its better merit is that it inspires self-trust, by teaching the immense resources that are in human nature; so I sent it to be read by a brave man who is poor and decried. The doctrine is indeed true and grand which you preach as by cannonade, that God made a man, and it were as well to stand by and see what is in him, and, if he act ever from his impulses, believe that he has his own checks, and, however extravagant, will keep his orbit, and return from far; a faith that draws confirmation from the sempiternal ignorance and stationariness of society, and the sempiternal growth of all the individuals. The _Diamond Necklace_ I read with joy, whilst I read with my own eyes. When I read with English or New-English eyes, my joy is marred by the roaring of the opposition. I doubt not the exact story is there told as it fell out, and told for the first time; but the eye of your readers, as you will easily guess, will be bewildered by the multitude of brilliant-colored hieroglyphics whereby the meaning is conveyed. And for the Gig,--the Gig,--it is fairly worn out, and such a cloud-compeller must mock that particular symbol no more. I thought as I read this piece that your strange genius was the instant fruit of your London. It is the aroma of Babylon. Such as the great metropolis, such is this style: so vast, enormous, related to all the world, and so endless in details. I think you see as pictures every street, church, parliament-house, barrack, baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, and ship, and whatever stands, creeps, rolls, or swims thereabouts, and make all your own. Hence your encyclopediacal allusion to all knowables, and the virtues and vices of your panoramic pages. Well, it is your own; and it is English; and every word stands for somewhat; and it cheers and fortifies me. And what more can a man ask of his writing fellow-man? Why, all things; inasmuch as a good mind creates wants at every stroke. The proof-sheet rhymes well with _Mirabeau,_ and has abated my fears from your own and your brother's account of the new book. I greet it well. Auspicious Babe, be born! The first good of the book is that it makes you free, and as I anxiously hope makes your body sound. A possible good is that it will cause me to see your face. But I seemed to read in _Mirabeau_ what you intimate in your letter, that you will not come westward. Old England is to find you out, and then the New will have no charm. For me it will be the worst; for you, not. A man, a few men, cannot be to you (with your ministering eyes) that which you should travel far to find. Moreover, I observe that America looks, to those who come hither, as unromantic and unexciting as the Dutch canals. I see plainly that our Society, for the most part, is as bigoted to the _respectabilities_ of religion and education as yours; that there is no more appetite for a revelation here than elsewhere; and the educated class are, of course, less fair-minded than others. Yet, in the moments when my eyes are open, I see that here are rich materials for the philosopher and poet, and, what is more to your purpose as an artist, that we have had in these parts no one philosopher or poet to put a sickle to the prairie wheat. I have really never believed that you would do us that crowning grace of coming hither, yet if God should be kinder to us than our belief, I meant and mean to hold you fast in my little meadows on the Musketaquid (now Concord) River, and show you (as in this country we can anywhere) an America in miniature in the April or November town meeting. Therein should you conveniently study and master the whole of our hemispherical politics reduced to a nutshell, and have a new version of Oxenstiern's little wit; and yet be consoled by seeing that here the farmers patient as their bulls of head-boards--provided for them in relation to distant national objects, by kind editors of newspapers--do yet their will, and a good will, in their own parish. If a wise man would pass by New York, and be content to sit still in this village a few months, he should get a thorough native knowledge which no foreigner has yet acquired. So I leave you with God, and if any oracle in the great Delphos should say "Go," why fly to us instantly. Come and spend a year with me, and see if I cannot respect your retirements. I must love you for your interest in me and my way of life, and the more that we only look for good-nature in the creative class. They pay the tag of grandeur, and, attracted irresistibly to make, their living is usually weak and hapless. But you are so companionable--God has made you Man as well as Poet--that I lament the three thousand miles of mountainous water. Burns might have added a better verse to his poem, importing that one might write Iliads or Hamlets, and yet come short of Truth by infinity, as every written word must; but "the man's the gowd for a' that." And I heartily thank the Lady for her good-will. Please God she may be already well. We all grieve to know of her ill health. People who have seen her never stop with _Mr._ Carlyle, but count him thrice blest in her. My wife believes in nothing for her but the American voyage. I shall never cease to expect you both until you come. My boy is five months old, he is called Waldo,--a lovely wonder that made the Universe look friendlier to me. My Wife, one of your best lovers, sends her affectionate regards to Mrs. Carlyle, and says that she takes exception in your letters only to that sentence that she would go to Scotland if you came here. My Wife beseeches her to come and possess her new-dressed chamber. Do not cease to write whenever you can spare me an hour. A man named Bronson Alcott is great, and one of the jewels we have to show you. Good bye. --R.W. Emerson The second edition of _Sartor_ is out and sells well. I learned the other day that twenty-five copies of it were ordered for England. It was very amiable of you, that word about it in _Mirabeau._* ---------- * This refers to Carlyle's introducing, in his paper on _Mirabeau,_ a citation from _Sartor,_ with the words, "We quote from a New England Book." ---------- XVI. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, 1 June, 1857 My Dear Friend,--A word must go to Concord in answer to your last kind word. It reached me, that word of yours, on the morning of a most unspeakable day; the day when I, half dead with fret, agitation, and exasperation, was to address extempore an audience of London quality people on the subject of German Literature! The heart's wish of me was that I might be left in deepest oblivion, wrapped in blankets and silence, not speaking, not spoken to, for a twelvemonth to come. My Printers had only let me go, out of their Treadmill, the day before. However, all that is over now; and I am still here alive to write to you, and hope for better days. Almost a month ago there went a copy of a Book called _French Revolution,_ with your address on it, over to Red-Lion Square, and thence, as old Rich declared, himself now _emeritus,_ back to one Kennet (I think) near Covent Garden; who professes to correspond with Hilliard and Company, Boston, and undertook the service. The Book is not gone yet, I understand; but Kennet engages that it shall leave Liverpool infallibly on the 5th of June. I wish you a happy reading of it, therefore: it is the only copy of my sending that has crossed the water. Ill printed (there are many errors, one or two gross ones), ill written, ill thought! But in fine it _is_ off my hands: that is a fact worth all others. As to its reception here or elsewhere, I anticipate nothing or little. Gabble, gabble, the astonishment of the dull public brain is likely to be considerable, and its ejaculations unedifying. We will let it go its way. Beat this thing, I say always, under thy dull hoofs, O dull Public! trample it and tumble it into all sinks and kennels; if thou canst kill it, kill it in God's name: if thou canst not kill it, why then thou wilt not. By the by, speaking of dull Publics, I ought to say that I have seen a review of myself in the _Christian Examiner_ (I think that is it) of Boston; the author of which, if you know him, I desire you to thank on my part. For if a dull million is good, then withal a seeing unit or two is also good. This man images back a beautiful idealized Clothes-Philosopher, very satisfactory to look upon; in whose beatified features I did verily detect more similitude to what I myself meant to be, than in any or all the other criticisms I have yet seen written of me. That a man see himself reflected from the soul of his brother-man in this brotherly improved way: there surely is one of the most legitimate joys of existence. Friend Ripley took the trouble to send me this Review, in which I detected an Article of his own; there came also some Discourses of his much to be approved of; a Newspaper passage-of-fence with a Philistine of yours; and a set of Essays on Progress-of-the-species and such like by a man whom I grieved to see confusing himself with that. Progress of the species is a thing I can get no good of at all. These Books, which Miss Martineau has borrowed from me, did not arrive till three weeks ago or less. I pray you to thank Ripley for them very kindly; which at present I still have not time to do. He seems to me a good man, with good aims; with considerable natural health of mind, wherein all goodness is likely to grow better, all clearness to grow clearer. Miss Martineau laments that he does not fling himself, or not with the due impetuosity, into the Black Controversy; a thing lamentable in the extreme, when one considers what a world this is, and how perfect it would be could Mungo once get his stupid case rectified, and eat his squash as a stupid _Apprentice_ instead of stupid _Slave!_ Miss Martineau's Book on America is out, here and with you. I have read it for the good Authoress's sake, whom I love much. She is one of the strangest phenomena to me. A genuine little Poetess, buckramed, swathed like a mummy into Socinian and Political-Economy formulas; and yet verily alive in the inside of that! "God has given a Prophet to every People in its own speech," say the Arabs. Even the English Unitarians were one day to have their Poet, and the best that could be said for them too was to be said. I admire this good lady's integrity, sincerity; her quick, sharp discernment to the depth it goes: her love also is great; nay, in fact it is too great: the host of illustrious obscure mortals whom she produces on you, of Preachers, Pamphleteers, Antislavers, Able Editors, and other Atlases bearing (unknown to us) the world on their shoulder, is absolutely more than enough. What they say to her Book here I do not well know. I fancy the general reception will be good, and even brilliant. I saw Mrs. Butler* last night, "in an ocean of blonde and broadcloth," one of those oceans common at present. Ach Gott! They are not of Persons, these soirdes, but of Cloth Figures. ---------- * Mrs Fanny Kemble Butler. ---------- I mean to retreat into Scotland very soon, to repose myself as I intended. My Wife continues here with her Mother; here at least till the weather grow too hot, or a journey to join me seem otherwise advisable for her. She is gathering strength, but continues still weak enough. I rest myself "on the sunny side of hedges" in native Annandale, one of the obscurest regions; no man shall speak to me, I will speak to no man; but have dialogues yonder with the old dumb crags, of the most unfathomable sort. Once rested, I think of returning to London for another season. Several things are beginning which I ought to see end before taking up my staff again. In this enormous Chaos the very multitude of conflicting perversions produces something more like a _calm_ than you can elsewhere meet with. Men let you alone, which is an immense thing: they do it even because they have no time to meddle with you. London, or else the Backwoods of America, or Craigenputtock! We shall see. I still beg the comfort of hearing from you. I am sick of soul and body, but not incurable; the loving word of a Waldo Emerson is as balm to me, medicinal now more than ever. My Wife earnestly joins me in love to the Concord Household. May a blessing be in it, on one and all! I do nowise give up the idea of sojourning there one time yet. On the contrary, it seems almost certain that I shall. Good be with you. Yours always, T. Carlyle* ----------- * Emerson wrote in his Diary, July 27, 1837: "A letter today from Carlyle rejoiced me. Pleasant would life be with such companions. But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms you cannot have them. If not the Deity but our wilfulness hews and shapes the new relations, their sweetness escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor by cultivation." ---------- XVII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 13 September, 1837 My Dear Friend,--Such a gift as the _French Revolution_ demanded a speedier acknowledgment. But you mountaineers that can scale Andes before breakfast for an airing have no measures for the performance of lowlanders and valetudinarians. I am ashamed to think, and will not tell, what little things have kept me silent. The _French Revolution_ did not reach me until three weeks ago, having had at least two long pauses by the way, as I find, since landing. Between many visits received, and some literary haranguing done, I have read two volumes and half the third and I think you a very good giant; disporting yourself with an original and vast ambition of fun: pleasure and peace not being strong enough for you, you choose to suck pain also, and teach fever and famine to dance and sing. I think you have written a wonderful book, which will last a very long time. I see that you have created a history, which the world will own to be such. You have recognized the existence of other persons than officers, and of other relations than civism. You have broken away from all books, and written a mind. It is a brave experiment, and the success is great. We have men in your story and not names merely; always men, though I may doubt sometimes whether I have the historic men. We have great facts--and selected facts--truly set down. We have always the co-presence of Humanity along with the imperfect damaged individuals. The soul's right of wonder is still left to us; and we have righteous praise and doom awarded, assuredly without cant. Yes, comfort yourself on that particular, O ungodliest divine man! thou cantest never. Finally we have not--a dull word. Never was there a style so rapid as yours,--which no reader can outrun; and so it is for the most intelligent. I suppose nothing will astonish more than the audacious wit and cheerfulness which no tragedy and no magnitude of events can overpower or daunt. Henry VIII loved a Man, and I see with joy my bard always equal to the crisis he represents. And so I thank you for your labor, and feel that your contemporaries ought to say, All hail, Brother! live forever: not only in the great Soul which thou largely inhalest, but also as a named, person in this thy definite deed. I will tell you more of the book when I have once got it at focal distance,--if that can ever be, and muster my objections when I am sure of their ground. I insist, of course, that it might be more simple, less Gothically efflorescent. You will say no rules for the illumination of windows can apply to the Aurora borealis. However, I find refreshment when every now and then a special fact slips into the narrative couched in sharp and businesslike terms. This character-drawing in the book is certainly admirable; the lines are ploughed furrows; but there was cake and ale before, though thou be virtuous. Clarendon surely drew sharp outlines for me in Falkland, Hampden, and the rest, without defiance or sky-vaulting. I wish I could talk with you face to face for one day, and know what your uttermost frankness would say concerning the book. I feel assured of its good reception in this country. I learned last Saturday that in all eleven hundred and sixty-six copies of _Sartor_ have been sold. I have told the publisher of that book that he must not print the _History_ until some space has been given to people to import British copies. I have ordered Hilliard, Gray, & Co. to import twenty copies as an experiment. At the present very high rate of exchange, which makes a shilling worth thirty cents, they think, with freight and duties, the book would be too costly here for sale, but we confide in a speedy fall of Exchange; then my books shall come. I am ashamed that you should educate our young men, and that we should pirate your books. One day we will have a better law, or perhaps you will make our law yours. I had your letter long before your book. Very good work you have done in your lifetime, and very generously you adorn and cheer this pilgrimage of mine by your love. I find my highest prayer granted in calling a just and wise man my friend. Your profuse benefaction of genius in so few years makes me feel very poor and useless. I see that I must go on trust to you and to all the brave for some longer time, hoping yet to prove one day my truth and love. There are in this country so few scholars, that the services of each studious person are needed to do what he can for the circulation of thoughts, to the end of making some counterweight to the money force, and to give such food as he may to the nigh starving youth. So I religiously read lectures every winter, and at other times whenever summoned. Last year, "the Philosophy of History," twelve lectures; and now I meditate a course on what I call "Ethics." I peddle out all the wit I can gather from Time or from Nature, and am pained at heart to see how thankfully that little is received. Write to me, good friend, tell me if you went to Scotland,--what you do, and will do,--tell me that your wife is strong and well again as when I saw her at Craigenputtock. I desire to be affectionately remembered to her. Tell me when you will come hither. I called together a little club a week ago, who spent a day with me,--counting fifteen souls,--each one of whom warmly loves you. So if the _French Revolution_ does not convert the "dull public" of your native Nineveh, I see not but you must shake their dust from your shoes and cross the Atlantic to a New England. Yours in love and honor. --R. Waldo Emerson May I trouble you with a commission when you are in the City? You mention being at the shop of Rich in Red-Lion Square. Will you say to him that he sent me some books two or three years ago without any account of prices annexed? I wrote him once myself, once through S. Burdett, bookseller, and since through C.P. Curtis, Esq., who professes to be his attorney in Boston,--three times,--to ask for this account. No answer has ever come. I wish he would send me the account, that I may settle it. If he persist in his self-denying contumacy, I think you may immortalize him as a bookseller of the gods. I shall send you an Oration presently, delivered before a literary society here, which is now being printed.* Gladly I hear of the Carlylet--so they say--in the new Westminster. --------- * This was Emerson's famous Oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837, on "The American Scholar." In his admirable essay on Thoreau,--an essay which might serve as introduction and comment to the letters of Carlyle and Emerson during these years,--Lowell speaks of the impression made by this remarkable discourse. It "was an event without any former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearances of Schelling."--_My Study Windows,_ p. 197 --------- XVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 2 November, 1837 My Dear Friend,--Mr. Charles Sumner, a lawyer of high standing for his age, and editor or one editor of a journal called _The Jurist,_ and withal a lover of your writings, tells me he is going to Paris and thence to London, and sets out in a few days. I cannot, of course, resist his request for a letter to you, nor let pass the occasion of a greeting. Health, Joy, and Peace be with you! I hope you sit still yet, and do not hastily meditate new labors. Phidias need not be always tinkering. Sit still like an Egyptian. Somebody told me the other day that your friends here might have made a sum for the author by publishing _Sartor_ themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller. Instantly I wondered why I had never such a thought before, and went straight to Boston, and have made a bargain with a bookseller to print the _French Revolution._ It is to be printed in two volumes of the size of our American _Sartor,_ one thousand copies, the estimate making the cost of the book say (in dollars and cents) $1.18 a copy, and the price $2.50. The bookseller contracts with me to sell the book at a commission of twenty percent on that selling price, allowing me however to take at cost as many copies as I can find subscribers for. There is yet, I believe, no other copy in the country than mine: so I gave him the first volume, and the printing is begun. I shall take care that your friends here shall know my contract with the bookseller, and so shall give me their names. Then, if so good a book can have a tolerable sale, (almost contrary to the nature of a good book, I know,) I shall sustain with great glee the new relation of being your banker and attorney. They have had the wit in the London _Examiner,_ I find, to praise at last; and I mean that our public shall have the entire benefit of that page. The _Westminster_ they can read themselves. The printers think they can get the book out by Christmas. So it must be long before I can tell you what cheer. Meantime do you tell me, I entreat you, what speed it has had at home. The best, I hope, with the wise and good withal. I have nothing to tell you and no thoughts. I have promised a course of Lectures for December, and am far from knowing what I am to say; but the way to make sure of fighting into the new continent is to burn your ships. The "tender ears," as George Fox said, of young men are always an effectual call to me ignorant to speak. I find myself so much more and freer on the platform of the lecture-room than in the pulpit, that I shall not much more use the last; and do now only in a little country chapel at the request of simple men to whom I sustain no other relation than that of preacher. But I preach in the Lecture-Room and then it tells, for there is no prescription. You may laugh, weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius. It is the new pulpit, and very much in vogue with my northern countrymen. This winter, in Boston, we shall have more than ever: two or three every night of the week. When will you come and redeem your pledge? The day before yesterday my little boy was a year old,--no, the day before that,--and I cannot tell you what delight and what study I find in this little bud of God, which I heartily desire you also should see. Good, wise, kind friend, I shall see you one day. Let me hear, when you can write, that Mrs. Carlyle is well again. --R. Waldo Emerson XIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 8 December, 1837 My Dear Emerson,--How long it is since you last heard of me I do not very accurately know; but it is too long. A very long, ugly, inert, and unproductive chapter of my own history seems to have passed since then. Whenever I delay writing, be sure matters go not well with me; and do you in that case write to me, were it again and over again,--unweariable in pity. I did go to Scotland, for almost three months; leaving my Wife here with her Mother. The poor Wife had fallen so weak that she gave me real terror in the spring-time, and made the Doctor look very grave indeed: she continued too weak for traveling: I was worn out as I had never in my life been. So, on the longest day of June, I got back to my Mother's cottage; threw myself down, I may say, into what we may call the "frightfulest _magnetic sleep,_" and lay there avoiding the intercourse of men. Most wearisome had their gabble become; almost unearthly. But indeed all was unearthly in that humor. The gushing of my native brooks, the _sough_ of the old solitary woods, the great roar of old native Solway (billowing fresh out of your Atlantic, drawn by the Moon): all this was a kind of unearthly music to me; I cannot tell you how unearthly. It did not bring me to rest; yet _towards_ rest I do think at all events, the time had come when I behoved to quit it again. I have been here since September evidently another little "chapter" or paragraph, _not_ altogether inert, is getting forward. But I must not speak of these things. How can I speak of them on a miserable scrap of blue paper? Looking into your kind-eyes with my eyes, I could speak: not here. Pity me, my friend, my brother; yet hope well of me: if I can (in all senses) _rightly hold my peace,_ I think much will yet be well with me. SILENCE is the great thing I worship at present; almost the sole tenant of my Pantheon. Let a man know rightly how to hold his peace. I love to repeat to myself, "Silence is of Eternity." Ah me, I think how I could rejoice to quit these jarring discords and jargonings of Babel, and go far, far away! I do believe, if I had the smallest competence of money to get "food and warmth" with, I would shake the mud of London from my feet, and go and bury myself in some green place, and never print any syllable more. Perhaps it is better as it is. But quitting this, we will actually speak (under favor of "Silence") one very small thing; a pleasant piece of news. There is a man here called John Sterling (_Reverend_ John of the Church of England too), whom I love better than anybody I have met with, since a certain sky-messenger alighted to me at Craigenputtock, and vanished in the Blue again. This Sterling has written; but what is far better, he has lived, he is alive. Across several unsuitable wrappages, of Church-of-Englandism and others, my heart loves the man. He is one, and the best, of a small class extant here, who, nigh drowning in a black wreck of Infidelity (lighted up by some glare of Radicalism only, now growing _dim_ too) and about to perish, saved themselves into a Coleridgian Shovel-hattedness, or determination to _preach,_ to preach peace, were it only the spent _echo_ of a peace once preached. He is still only about thirty; young; and I think will shed the shovel-hat yet perhaps. Do you ever read _Blackwood?_ This John Sterling is the "New Contributor" whom Wilson makes such a rout about, in the November and prior month "Crystals from a Cavern," &c., which it is well worth your while to see. Well, and what then, cry you?--Why then, this John Sterling has fallen overhead in love with a certain Waldo Emerson; that is all. He saw the little Book _Nature_ lying here; and, across a whole _silva silvarum_ of prejudices, discerned what was in it; took it to his heart,--and indeed into his pocket; and has carried it off to Madeira with him; whither unhappily (though now with good hope and expectation) the Doctors have ordered him. This is the small piece of pleasant news, that two sky-messengers (such they were both of them to me) have met and recognized each other; and by God's blessing there shall one day be a trio of us: call you that nothing? And so now by a direct transition I am got to the _Oration._ My friend! you know not what you have done for me there. It was long decades of years that I had heard nothing but the infinite jangling and jabbering, and inarticulate twittering and screeching, and my soul had sunk down sorrowful, and said there is no articulate speaking then any more, and thou art solitary among stranger-creatures? and lo, out of the West comes a clear utterance, clearly recognizable as a _man's_ voice, and I _have_ a kinsman and brother: God be thanked for it! I could have _wept_ to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling through my heart;--I said to my wife, "There, woman!" She read; and returned, and charges me to return for answer, "that there had been nothing met with like it since Schiller went silent." My brave Emerson! And all this has been lying silent, quite tranquil in him, these seven years, and the "vociferous platitude" dinning his ears on all sides, and he quietly answering no word; and a whole world of Thought has silently built itself in these calm depths, and, the day being come, says quite softly, as if it were a common thing, "Yes, I _am_ here too." Miss Martineau tells me, "Some say it is inspired, some say it is mad." Exactly so; no say could be suitabler. But for you, my dear friend, I say and pray heartily: May God grant you strength; for you have a _fearful_ work to do! Fearful I call it; and yet it is great, and the greatest. O for God's sake _keep yourself still quiet!_ Do not hasten to write; you cannot be too slow about it. Give no ear to any man's praise or censure; know that that is _not_ it: on the one side is as Heaven if you have strength to keep silent, and climb unseen; yet on the other side, yawning always at one's right-hand and one's left, is the frightfulest Abyss and Pandemonium! See Fenimore Cooper;--poor Cooper, he is _down in it;_ and had a climbing faculty too. Be steady, be quiet, be in no haste; and God speed you well! My space is done. And so adieu, for this time. You must write soon again. My copy of the _Oration_ has never come: how is this? I could dispose of a dozen well.--They say I am to lecture again in Spring, _Ay de mi!_ The "Book" is babbled about sufficiently in several dialects: Fraser wants to print my scattered Reviews and Articles; a pregnant sign. Teufelsdrockh to precede. The man "screamed" once at the name of it in a very musical manner. He shall not print a line; unless he give me money for it, more or less. I have had enough of printing for one while,--thrown into "magnetic sleep" by it! Farewell my brother. --T. Carlyle O. Rich, it seems, is in Spain. His representative assured me, some weeks since, that the Account was now sent. There is an Article on Sir W. Scott: shocking; invitissima Minerva!* ---------- *Carlyle's article on Scott published in the _London and Westminster Review,_ No. 12. Reprinted in his _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays._ ---------- Miss Martineau charges me to send kind remembrances to you and your Lady: her words were kinder than I have room for here.--Can you not, in defect or delay of Letter, send me a Massachusetts Newspaper? I think it costs little or almost nothing now; and I shall know your hand. XX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 9 February, 1838 My Dear Friend,--It is ten days now--ten cold days--that your last letter has kept my heart warm, and I have not been able to write before. I have just finished--Wednesday evening--a course of lectures which I ambitiously baptized "Human Culture," and read once a week to the curious in Boston. I could write nothing else the while, for weariness of the week's stated scribbling. Now I am free as a wood-bird, and can take up the pen without fretting or fear. Your letter should, and nearly did, make me jump for joy,--fine things about our poor speech at Cambridge,-- fine things from CARLYLE. Scarcely could we maintain a decorous gravity on the occasion. And then news of a friend, who is also Carlyle's friend. What has life better to offer than such tidings? You may suppose I went directly and got me _Blackwood,_ and read the prose and the verse of John Sterling, and saw that my man had a head and a heart, and spent an hour or two very happily in spelling his biography out of his own hand;--a species of palmistry in which I have a perfect reliance. I found many incidents grave and gay and beautiful, and have determined to love him very much. In this romancing of the gentle affections we are children evermore. We forget the age of life, the barriers so thin yet so adamantean of space and circumstance; and I have had the rarest poems self-singing in my head of brave men that work and conspire in a perfect intelligence across seas and conditions--and meet at last. I heartily pray that the Sea and its vineyards may cheer with warm medicinal breath a Voyager so kind and noble. For the _Oration,_ I am so elated with your goodwill that I begin to fear your heart has betrayed your head this time, and so the praise is not good on Parnassus but only in friendship. I sent it diffidently (I did send it through bookselling Munroe) to you, and was not a little surprised by your generous commendations. Yet here it interested young men a good deal for an academical performance, and an edition of five hundred was disposed of in a month. A new edition is now printing, and I will send you some copies presently to give to anybody who you think will read. I have a little budget of news myself. I hope you had my letter --sent by young Sumner--saying that we meant to print the _French Revolution_ here for the Author's benefit. It was published on the 25th of December. It is published at my risk, the booksellers agreeing to let me have at cost all the copies I can get subscriptions for. All the rest they are to sell and to have twenty percent on the retail price for their commission. The selling price of the book is $2.50; the cost of a copy, $1.26; the bookseller's commission, 50 cts.; so that T.C. only gains 74 cts. on each copy they sell. But we have two hundred subscribers, and on each copy they buy you have $1.26, except in cases where the distant residence of subscribers makes a cost of freight. You ought to have three or four quarters of a dollar more on each copy, but we put the lowest price on the book in terror of the Philistines, and to secure its accessibleness to the economical Public. We printed one thousand copies: of these, five hundred are already sold, in six weeks; and Brown the bookseller talks, as I think, much too modestly, of getting rid of the whole edition in one year. I say six months. The printing, &c. is to be paid and a settlement made in six months from the day of publication; and I hope the settlement will be the final one. And I confide in sending you seven hundred dollars at least, as a certificate that you have so many readers in the West. Yet, I own, I shake a little at the thought of the bookseller's account. Whenever I have seen that species of document, it was strange how the hopefulest ideal dwindled away to a dwarfish actual. But you may be assured I shall on this occasion summon to the bargain all the Yankee in my constitution, and multiply and divide like a lion. The book has the best success with the best. Young men say it is the only history they have ever read. The middle-aged and the old shake their heads, and cannot make anything of it. In short, it has the success of a book which, as people have not fashioned, has to fashion the people. It will take some time to win all, but it wins and will win. I sent a notice of it to the _Christian Examiner,_ but the editor sent it all back to me except the first and last paragraphs; those he printed. And the editor of the _North American_ declined giving a place to a paper from another friend of yours. But we shall see. I am glad you are to print your _Miscellanies;_ but--forgive our Transatlantic effrontery--we are beforehand of you, and we are already selecting a couple of volumes from the same, and shall print them on the same plan as the _History,_ and hope so to turn a penny for our friend again. I surely should not do this thing without consulting you as to the selection but that I had no choice. If I waited, the bookseller would have done it himself, and carried off the profit. I sent you (to Kennet) a copy of the _French Revolution._ I regret exceedingly the printer's blunder about the numbering the Books in the volumes, but he had warranted me in a literal, punctual reprint of the copy without its leaving his office, and I trusted him. I am told there are many errors. I am going to see for myself. I have filled my paper, and not yet said a word of how many things. You tell me how ill was Mrs. C., and you do not tell me that she is well again. But I see plainly that I must take speedily another sheet. I love you always. --R.W. Emerson XXI. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, 12 March, 1838 My Dear Friend,--Here in a bookseller's shop I have secured a stool and corner to say a swift benison. Mr. Bancroft told me that the presence of English Lord Gosford in town would give me a safe conveyance of pamphlets to you, so I send some _Orations_ of which you said so kind and cheering words. Give them to any one who will read them. I have written names in three. You have, I hope, got the letter sent nearly a month ago, giving account of our reprint of the _French Revolution,_ and have received a copy of the same. I learn from the bookseller today that six hundred and fifty copies are sold, and the book continues to sell. So I hope that our settlement at the end of six months will be final, or nearly so. I had nearly closed my agreement the other day with a publisher for the emission of _Carlyle's Miscellanies,_ when just in the last hour comes word from E.G. Loring that he has an authentic catalogue from the Bard himself. Now I have that, and could wish Loring had communicated his plan to me at first, or that I had bad wit enough to have undertaken this matter long ago and conferred with you. I designed nothing for you or your friends; but merely a lucrative book for our daily market that would have yielded a pecuniary compensation to you, such as we are all bound to make, and have bought our Socrates a cloak. Loring contemplated something quite different,--a "Complete Works," etc.,--and now clamors for the same thing, and I do not know but I shall have to gratify him and others at the risk of injury to this my vulgar hope of dollars,--that innate idea of the American mind. This I shall settle in a few days. No copyright can be secured here for an English book unless it contain original matter: But my moments are going, and I can only promise to write you quickly, at home and at leisure, for I have just been reading the _History_ again with many, many thoughts, and I revere, wonder at, and love you. --R. Waldo Emerson XXII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 16 March, 1838 My Dear Emerson,--Your letter through Sumner was sent by him from Paris about a month ago; the man himself has not yet made his appearance, or been heard of in these parts: he shall be very welcome to me, arrive when he will. The February letter came yesterday, by direct conveyance from Dartmouth. I answer it today rather than tomorrow; I may not for long have a day freer than this. _Fronte capillata, post est occasio calva:_ true either in Latin or English! You send me good news, as usual. You have been very brisk and helpful in this business of the _Revolution_ Book, and I give you many thanks and commendations. It will be a very brave day when cash actually reaches me, no matter what the _number_ of the coins, whether seven or seven hundred, out of Yankee-land; and strange enough, what is not unlikely, if it be the _first_ cash I realize for that piece of work,--Angle-land continuing still _in_solvent to me! Well, it is a wide Motherland we have here, or are getting to have, from Bass's Straits all round to Columbia River, already almost circling the Globe: it must be hard with a man if somewhere or other he find not some one or other to take his part, and stand by him a little! Blessings on you, my brother: nay, your work is already twice blessed.--I believe after all, with the aid of my Scotch thrift, I shall not be absolutely thrown into the streets here, or reduced to borrow, and become the slave of somebody, for a morsel of bread. Thank God, no! Nay, of late I begin entirely to despise that whole matter, so as I never hitherto despised it: "Thou beggarliest Spectre of Beggary that hast chased me ever since I was man, come on then, in the Devil's name, let us see what is in thee! Will the Soul of a man, with Eternity within a few years of it, quail before _thee?_" Better, however, is my good pious Mother's version of it: "They cannot take God's Providence from thee; thou hast never wanted yet."* ---------- * In his Diary, May 9, 1838, Emerson wrote: "A letter this morning from T. Carlyle. How should he be so poor? It is the most creditable poverty I know of." ---------- But to go on with business; and the republication of books in that Transoceanic England, New and improved Edition of England. In January last, if I recollect right, Miss Martineau, in the name of a certain Mr. Loring, applied to me for a correct List of all my fugitive Papers; the said Mr. Loring meaning to publish them for my behoof. This List she, though not without solicitation, for I had small hope in it, did at last obtain, and send, coupled with a request from me that you should be consulted in the matter. Now it appears you had of yourself previously determined on something of the same sort, and probably are far on with the printing of your Two select volumes. I confess myself greatly better pleased with it on that footing than on another. Who Mr. Loring may be I know not, with any certainty, at first hand; but who Waldo Emerson is I do know; and more than one god from the machine is not necessary. I pray you, thank Mr. Loring for his goodness towards me (his intents are evidently charitable and not wicked); but consider yourself as in nowise bound at all by that blotted Paper he has, but do the best you can for me, consulting with him or not taking any counsel just as you see to be fittest on the spot. And so Heaven prosper you, both in your "aroused Yankee" state, and in all others;--and let us for the present consider that we have enough about Books and Guineas. I must add, however, that Fraser and I have yet made no bargain. We found, on computing, that there would be five good volumes, including _Teufelsdrockh._ For an edition of Seven hundred and Fifty I demanded L50 a volume, and Fraser refused: the poor man then fell dangerously ill, and there could not be a word farther said on the subject; till very lately, when it again became possible, but has not yet been put in practice. All the world cries out, Why _do you_ publish with Fraser? "Because my soul is sick of Booksellers, and of trade, and deception, and 'need and greed' altogether; and this poor Fraser, not worse than the rest of them, has in some sort grown less hideous to me by custom." I fancy, however, either Fraser will publish these things before long; or some Samaritan here will take me to some bolder brother of the trade that will. Great Samuel Johnson assisted at the beginning of Bibliopoly; small Thomas Carlyle assists at the ending of it: both are sorrowful seasons for a man. For the rest, people here continue to receive that _Revolution_ very much as you say they do _there:_ I am right well quit of it; and the elderly gentlemen on both sides of the water may take comfort, they will not soon have to suffer the like again. But really England is wonderfully changed within these ten years; the old gentlemen all shrunk into nooks, some of them even voting with the young.--The American ill-printed Two and-a-half-dollars Copy shall, for Emerson's sake, be welcomest to me of all. Kennet will send it when it comes. The _Oration_ did arrive, with my name on it, one snowy night in January. It is off to Madeira; probably there now. I can dispose of a score of copies to good advantage. Friend Sterling has done the best of all his things in the current _Blackwood,_-- "Crystals from a Cavern,"--which see. He writes kind things of you from Madeira, in expectation of the Speech. I will gratify him with your message; he is to be here in May; better, we hope, and in the way towards safety. Miss Martineau has given you a luminous section in her new Book about America; you are one of the American "Originals,"--the good Harriet! And now I have but one thing to add and to repeat: Be quiet, be quiet! The fire that is in one's own stomach is enough, without foreign bellows to blow it ever and anon. My whole heart shudders at the thrice-wretched self-combustion into which I see all manner of poor paper-lanterns go up, the wind of "popularity" puffing at them, and nothing left erelong but ashes and sooty wreck. It is sad, most sad. I shun all such persons and circles, as much as possible; and pray the gods to make me a brick layer's hodbearer rather. O the "cabriolets, neatflies," and blue twaddlers of both sexes therein, that drive many a poor Mrs. Rigmarole to the Devil!*--As for me, I continue doing as nearly nothing as I can manage. I decline all invitations of society that are declinable: a London rout is one of the maddest things under the moon; a London dinner makes me sicker for a week, and I say often, It is better to be even dull than to be witty, better to be silent than to speak. -------- * This sentence is a variation on one at the beginning of the article on Scott. -------- Curious: your Course of Lectures "on Human Culture" seems to be on the very subject I am to discourse upon here in May coming; but I am to call it "on the History of Literature," and _speak_ it, not write it. While you read this, I shall be in the agonies! Ah me! often when I think of the matter, how my one sole wish is to be left to hold my tongue, and by what bayonets of Necessity clapt to my back I am driven into that Lecture-room, and in what mood, and ordered to speak or die, I feel as if my only utterance should be a flood of tears and blubbering! But that, clearly, will not do. Then again I think it is perhaps better so; who knows? At all events, we will try what is in this Lecturing in London. If something, well; if nothing, why also well. But I do want to get out of these coils for a tune. My Brother is to be home again in May; if he go back to Italy, if our Lecturing proved productive, why might we not all set off thitherward for the winter coming? There is a dream to that effect. It would suit my wife, too: she was alarmingly weak this time twelvemonth; and I can only yet tell you that she is stronger, not strong: she has not ventured out except at midday, and rarely then, since Autumn last; she sits here patiently waiting Summer, and charges me to send you her love.--America also always lies in the background: I do believe, if I live long, I shall get to Concord one day. Your wife must love me. If the little Boy be a well-behaved fellow, he shall ride on my back yet: if not, tell him I will have nothing to do with him, the riotous little imp that he is. And so God bless you always, my dear friend! Your affectionate, --T. Carlyle XXIII. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, 10 May, 1838 My Dear Friend,--Yesterday I had your letter of March. It quickens my purpose (always all but ripe) to write to you. If it had come earlier I should have been confirmed in my original purpose of publishing _Select Miscellanies of T.C._ As it is, we are far on in the printing of the first two volumes (to make 900 pages) of the papers as they stand in your list. And now I find we shall only get as far as the seventeenth or eighteenth article. I regret it, because this book will not embrace those papers I chiefly desire to provide people with, and it may be some time, in these years of bankruptcy and famine, before we shall think it prudent to publish two volumes more. But Loring is a good man, and thinks that many desire to see the sources of Nile. I, for my part, fancy that to meet the taste of the readers we should publish _from the last_ backwards, beginning with the paper on Scott, which has had the best reception ever known. Carlyleism is becoming so fashionable that the most austere Seniors are glad to qualify their reprobation by applauding this review. I have agreed with the bookseller publishing the _Miscellanies_ that he is to guarantee to you one dollar on every copy he sells; and you are to have the total profit on every copy subscribed for. The retail price [is] to be $2.50. The cost of the work is not yet precisely ascertained. The work will probably appear in six or seven weeks. We print one thousand copies. So whenever it is sold you shall have one thousand dollars. ---------- * Printed in the _Athenaeum,_ July 8, 1882. ---------- The _French Revolution_ continues to find friends and purchasers. It has gone to New Orleans, to Nashville, to Vicksburg. I have not been in Boston lately, but have determined that nearly or quite eight hundred copies should be gone. On the 1st of July I shall make up accounts with the booksellers, and I hope to make you the most favorable returns. I shall use the advice of Barnard, Adams, & Co. in regard to remittances. When you publish your next book I think you must send it out to me in sheets, and let us print it here contemporaneously with the English edition. The _eclat_ of so new a book would help the sale very much. But a better device would be, that you should embark in the "Victoria" steamer, and come in a fortnight to New York, and in twenty-four hours more to Concord. Your study arm-chair, fireplace, and bed, long vacant, auguring expect you. Then you shall revise your proofs and dictate wit and learning to the New World. Think of it in good earnest. In aid of your friendliest purpose, I will set down some of the facts. I occupy, or _improve,_ as we Yankees say, two acres only of God's earth; on which is my house, my kitchen-garden, my orchard of thirty young trees, my empty barn. My house is now a very good one for comfort, and abounding in room. Besides my house, I have, I believe, $22,000, whose income in ordinary years is six percent. I have no other tithe or glebe except the income of my winter lectures, which was last winter $800. Well, with this income, here at home, I am a rich man. I stay at home and go abroad at my own instance. I have food, warmth, leisure, books, friends. Go away from home, I am rich no longer. I never have a dollar to spend on a fancy. As no wise man, I suppose, ever was rich in the sense of _freedom to spend,_ because of the inundation of claims, so neither am I, who am not wise. But at home, I am rich,--rich enough for ten brothers. My wife Lidian is an incarnation of Christianity,--I call her Asia,--and keeps my philosophy from Antinomianism; my mother, whitest, mildest, most conservative of ladies, whose only exception to her universal preference for old things is her son; my boy, a piece of love and sunshine, well worth my watching from morning to night;--these, and three domestic women, who cook and sew and run for us, make all my household. Here I sit and read and write, with very little system, and, as far as regards composition, with the most fragmentary result: paragraphs incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle. In summer, with the aid of a neighbor, I manage my garden; and a week ago I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees to protect me or my son from the wind of January. The ornament of the place is the occasional presence of some ten or twelve persons, good and wise, who visit us in the course of the year.--But my story is too long already. God grant that you will come and bring that blessed wife, whose protracted illness we heartily grieve to learn, and whom a voyage and my wife's and my mother's nursing would in less than a twelvemonth restore to blooming health. My wife sends to her this message: "Come, and I will be to you a sister." What have you to do with Italy? Your genius tendeth to the New, to the West. Come and live with me a year, and if you do not like New England well enough to stay, one of these years (when the _History_ has passed its ten editions, and been translated into as many languages) I will come and dwell with you. I gladly hear what you say of Sterling. I am foolish enough to be delighted with being an object of kindness to a man I have never seen, and who has not seen me. I have not yet got the _Blackwood_ for March, which I long to see, but the other three papers I have read with great satisfaction. They lie here on my table. But he must get well. As to Miss Martineau, I know not well what to say. Meaning to do me a signal kindness (and a kindness quite out of all measure of justice) she does me a great annoyance,--to take away from me my privacy and thrust me before my time (if ever there be a time) into the arena of the gladiators to be stared at. I was ashamed to read, and am ashamed to remember. Yet, as you see her, I would not be wanting in gratitude to a gifted and generous lady who so liberally transfigures our demerits. So you shall tell her, if you please, that I read all her book with pleasure but that part, and if ever I shall travel West or South, I think she has furnished me with the eyes. Farewell, dear wise man. I think your poverty honorable above the common brightness of that thorn-crown of the great. It earns you the love of men and the praise of a thousand years. Yet I hope the angelical Beldame, all-helping, all-hated, has given you her last lessons, and, finding you so striding a proficient, will dismiss you to a hundred editions and the adoration of the booksellers. --R.W. Emerson I have never heard from Rich, who, you wrote, had sent his account to me. Let him direct to me at Concord. A young engineer in Cambridge, by name McKean,* volunteers his services in correcting the proofs of the _Miscellanies,_--and he has your errata,--for the love of the reading. Shall we have anthracite coal or wood in your chamber? My old mother is glad you are coming. ----------- * The late Mr. Henry S. McKean, a son of Professor McKean, and a graduate of Harvard College in 1828. ----------- XXIV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 15 June, 1838 My Dear Emerson,--Our correspondence has fallen into a raveled state; which would doubtless clear itself could I afford to wait for your next Letter, probably tumbling over the Atlantic brine about this very moment: but I cannot afford to wait; I must write straightway. Your answer to this will bring matters round again. I have had two irregular Notes of your writing, or perhaps three; two dated March, one by Mr. Bancroft's Parcel,-- bringing Twelve _Orations_ withal; then some ten days later, just in this very time, another Note by Mr. Sumner, whom I have not yet succeeded in seeing, though I have attempted it, and hope soon to do it. The Letter he forwarded me from Paris was acknowledged already, I think. And now if the Atlantic will but float me in safe that other promised Letter! I got your American _French Revolution_ a good while ago. It seems to me a very pretty Book indeed, wonderfully so for the money; neither does it seem what we can call _incorrectly_ printed so far as I have seen; compared with the last _Sartor_ it is correctness itself. Many thanks to you, my Friend, and much good may it do us all! Should there be any more reprinting, I will request you to rectify at least the three following errors, copied out of the English text indeed; nay, mark them in your own New-English copy, whether there be reprinting or not: Vol. I. p. 81, last paragraph, _for_ September _read_ August; Vol. II. p. 344, first line, _for_ book of prayer _read_ look of prayer; p. 357, _for_ blank _read_ black (2d paragraph, "all black "). And so _basta._ And let us be well content about this F.R. on both sides of the water, yours as well as mine. "Too many cooks"! the Proverb says: it is pity if this new apparition of a Mr. Loring should spoil the broth. But I calculate you will adjust it well and smoothly between you, some way or other. How you shall adjust it, or have adjusted it, is what I am practically anxious now to learn. For you are to understand that our English Edition has come to depend partly on yours. After long higgling with the foolish Fraser, I have quitted him, quite quietly, and given "Saunders and Ottley, Conduit Street," the privilege of printing a small edition of _Teufelsdrockh_ (Five Hundred copies), with a prospect of the "Miscellaneous Writings" soon following. Saunders and Ottley are at least more reputable persons, they are useful to me also in the business of Lecturing. _Teufelsdrockh_ is at Press, to be out very soon; I will send you a correct copy, the only one in America I fancy. The enterprise here too is on the "half-profits" plan, which I compute generally to mean equal partition of the oyster-shells and a net result of zero. But the thing will be economically useful to me otherwise; as a publication of the "Miscellaneous" also would be; which latter, however, I confess myself extremely unwilling to undertake the trouble of for _nothing._ To me they are grown or fast growing _obsolete,_ these Miscellanies, for most part; if money lie not in them, what does lie for me? Now it strikes me you will infallibly edit these things, at least as well as I, and are doing it at any rate; your printing too would seem to be cheaper than ours: I said to Saunders and Ottley, Why not have two hundred or three hundred of this American Edition struck off with "London: Saunders and Ottley, Conduit Street," on the title-page, and sent over hither in sheets at what price they have cost my friends yonder? Saunders of course threw cold water on this project, but was obliged to admit that there would be some profit in it, and that for me it would be far easier. The grand profit for me is that people would understand better what I mean, and come better about me if I lectured again, which seems the only way of getting any wages at all for me here at present. Pray meditate my project, if it be not already too late, hear what your Booksellers say about it, and understand that I will not in any case set to printing till I hear from you in answer to this. How my sheet is filling with dull talk about mere economics! I must still add that the _Lecturing_ I talked of, last time, is verily over now; and well over. The superfine people listened to the rough utterance with patience, with favor, increasing to the last. I sent you a Newspaper once, to indicate that it was in progress. I know not yet what the money result is; but I suppose it will enable us to exist here thriftily another year; not without hope of at worst doing the like again when the time comes. It is a great novelty in my lot; felt as a very considerable blessing; and really it has arrived, if it have arrived, in _due_ time, for I had begun to get quite impatient of the other method. Poverty and Youth may do; Poverty and Age go badly together.--For the rest, I feel fretted to fiddle-strings; my head and heart all heated, sick,--ah me! The question as ever is: Rest. But then where? My Brother invites us to come to Rome for the winter; my poor sick Wife might perhaps profit by it; as for me, Natty Leatherstocking's lodge in the Western Wood, I think, were welcomer still. I have a great mind, too, to run off and see my Mother, by the new railways. What we shall do, whether not stay quietly here, must remain uncertain for a week or two. Write you always hither, till you hear otherwise. The _Orations_ were right welcome; my _Madeira_ one, returned thence with Sterling, was circulating over the West of England. Sterling and Harriet stretched out the right hand with wreathed smiles. I have read, a second or third time. Robert Southey has got a copy, for his own behoof and that of _Lake_land: if he keep his word as to _me,_ he may do as much for you, or more. Copies are at Cambridge; among the Oxonians too; I have with stingy discretion distributed all my copies but two. Old Rogers, a grim old Dilettante, full of sardonic sense, was heard saying, "It is German Poetry given out in American Prose." Friend Emerson ought to be content;--and has now above all things, as I said, to _be in no haste._ Slow fire does make sweet malt: how true, how true! Also his next work ought to be a _concrete_ thing; not _theory_ any longer, but _deed._ Let him "live it," as he says; that is the way to come to "painting of it." Geometry and the art of Design being once well over, take the brush, and _andar con Dios!_ Mrs. Child has sent me a Book, _Philothea,_ and a most magnanimous epistle. I have answered as I could. The Book is beautiful, but of a _hectic_ beauty; to me not pleasant, even fatal looking. Such things grow not in the ground, on Mother Earth's honest bosom, but in hothouses,--Sentimental-Calvinist fire traceable underneath! Bancroft also is of the hothouse partly: I have a Note to send him by Sumner; do you thank him meanwhile, and say nothing about _hothouses!_ But, on the whole, men ought in New England, too to "swallow their formulas";* there is no freedom till then: yet hitherto I find only one man there who seems fairly on the way towards that, or arrived at that. Good speed to _him._ I had to send my Wife's love: she is not dangerously ill; but always feeble, and has to _struggle_ to keep erect; the summer always improves her, and this summer too. Adieu, dear Friend; may Good always be with you and yours. --T. Carlyle ----------- * This was the saying of the old Marquis de Mirabeau concerning his son, _Il a hume toutes les formules,_ and is used as a text by Carlyle in his article on Mirabeau. "Of inexpressible advantage is it that a man have 'an eye instead of a pair of spectacles merely'; that, seeing through the formulas of things and even 'making away' with many a formula, he see into the thing itself, and so know it and be master of it!" ---------- XXV. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, 30 July, 1838 My Dear Sir,--I am in town today to get what money the booksellers will relinquish from their faithful gripe, and have succeeded now in obtaining a first instalment, however small. I enclose to you a bill of exchange for fifty pounds sterling, which costs here exactly $242.22, the rate of exchange being nine percent. I shall not today trouble you with any account, for my letter must be quickly ready to go by the steam-packet. An exact account has been rendered to me, which, though its present balance in our favor is less than I expected, yet, as far as I understand it, agrees well with all that has been promised: at least the balance in our favor when the edition is sold, which the booksellers assure me will assuredly be done within a year from the publication, must be seven hundred and sixty dollars, and what more Heaven and the subscribers may grant. I shall follow this letter and bill by a duplicate of the bill in the next packet. The _Miscellanies_ is published in two volumes, a copy of which goes to you immediately. Munroe tells me that two hundred and fifty copies of it are already sold. Writing in a bookshop, my dear friend, I have no power to say aught than that I am heartily and always, Yours, R. Waldo Emerson XXVI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 6 August, 1838 My Dear Friend,--The swift ships are slow when they carry our letters. Your letter dated the 15th of June arrived here last Friday, the 3d of August. That day I was in Boston, and I have only now got the information necessary to answer it. You have probably already learned from my letter sent by the "Royal William" (enclosing a bill of exchange for L50), that our first two volumes of the _Miscellanies_ are published. I have sent you a copy. The edition consists of one thousand copies. Of these five hundred are bound, five hundred remain in sheets. The title-pages, of course, are all printed alike; but the publishers assure me that new title-pages can be struck off at a trifling expense, with the imprint of Saunders and Ottley. The cost of a copy in sheets or "folded" (if that means somewhat more?) is eighty-nine cents; and bound is $1.15. The retail price is $2.50 a copy; and the author's profit, $1; and the bookseller's, 35 cents per copy; according to my understanding of the written contract. Here I believe you have all the material facts. I think there is no doubt that the book will sell very well here. But if, for the reasons you suggest, you wish any part of it, you can have it as soon as ships can bring your will. When you see your copy, you will perceive that we have printed half the matter. I should presently begin to print the remainder, inclusive of the Article on Lockhart's Scott, in two more volumes; but now I think I shall wait until I hear from you. Of those books we will print a larger edition, say twelve hundred and fifty or fifteen hundred, if you want a part of it in London. For I feel confident now that our public here is one thousand strong. Write me therefore _by the steam packet_ your wishes. I am sure you will like our edition. It has been most carefully corrected by two young gentlemen who successively volunteered their services, (the second when the first was called away,) and who, residing in Cambridge, where the book was printed, could easilier oversee it. They are Henry S. McBean, an engineer, and Charles Stearns Wheeler, a Divinity student,--working both for love of you. To one other gentleman I have brought you in debt, --Rev. Convers Francis* (brother of Mrs. Child), who supplied from his library all the numbers of the _Foreign Review_ from which we printed the work. We could not have done without his books, and he is a noble-hearted man, who rejoices in you. I have sent to all three copies of the work as from you, and I shall be glad if you will remember to sanction this expressly in your next letter. ---------- * This worthy man and lover of good books was, from 1842 till his death in 1863, Professor in the Divinity School of Harvard University. ---------- Thanks for the letter: thanks for your friendliest seeking of friends for the poor _Oration._ Poor little pamphlet, to have gone so far and so high! I am ashamed. I shall however send you a couple more of the thin gentry presently, maugre all your hopes and cautions. I have written and read a kind of sermon to the Senior Class of our Cambridge Theological School a fortnight ago; and an address to the Literary Societies of Dartmouth College;* for though I hate American pleniloquence, I cannot easily say No to young men who bid me speak also. And both these are now in press. The first I hear is very offensive. I will now try to hold my tongue until next winter. But I am asked continually when you will come to Boston. Your lectures are boldly and joyfully expected by brave young men. So do not forget us: and if ever the scale-beam trembles, I beseech you, let the love of me decide for America. I will not dare to tease you on a matter of so many relations, and so important, and especially as I have written out, I believe, my requests in a letter sent two or three months ago,--but I must see you somewhere, somehow, may it please God! I grieve to hear no better news of your wife. I hoped she was sound and strong ere this, and can only hope still. My wife and I send her our hearty love. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson ----------- * The Address at the Cambridge Divinity School was delivered on the 15th of July, and that at Dartmouth College on the 24th of the same month. The title of the latter was "Literary Ethics." Both are reprinted in Emerson's _Miscellanies._ These remarkable discourses excited deep interest and wide attention. They established Emerson's position as the leader of what was known as the Transcendental movement. They were the expressions of his inmost convictions and his matured thought. The Address at the Divinity School gave rise to a storm of controversy which did not disturb the serenity of its author. "It was," said Theodore Parker, "the noblest, the most inspiring strain I ever listened to." To others it seemed "neither good divinity nor good sense." The Address at Dartmouth College set forth the high ideals of intellectual life with an eloquence made irresistible by the character of the speaker. From this time Emerson's influence upon thought in America was acknowledged. ---------- XXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, (Annandale, Scotland) 25 September, 1838 My Dear Emerson,--There cannot any right answer be written you here and now; yet I must write such answer as I can. You said, "by steamship"; and it strikes me with a kind of remorse, on this my first day of leisure and composure, that I have delayed so long. For you must know, this is my Mother's house,--a place to me unutterable as Hades and the Land of Spectres were; likewise that my Brother is just home from Italy, and on the wing thitherward or somewhither swiftly again; in a word, that all is confusion and flutter with me here,--fit only for _silence!_ My Wife sent me off hitherward, very sickly and unhappy, out of the London dust, several weeks ago; I lingered in Fifeshire, I was in Edinburgh, in Roxburghshire; have some calls to Cumberland, which I believe I must refuse; and prepare to creep homeward again, refreshed in health, but with a head and heart all seething and tumbling (as the wont is, in such cases), and averse to pens beyond all earthly implements. But my Brother is off for Dumfries this morning; you before all others deserve an hour of my solitude. I will abide by business; one must write about that. Your Bill and duplicate of a Bill for L50, with the two Letters that accompanied them, you are to know then, did duly arrive at Chelsea; and the larger Letter (of the 6th of August) was forwarded to me hither some two weeks ago. I had also, long before that, one of the friendliest of Letters from you, with a clear and most inviting description of the Concord Household, its inmates and appurtenances; and the announcement, evidently authentic, that an apartment and heart's welcome was ready there for my Wife and me; that we were to come quickly, and stay for a twelvemonth. Surely no man has such friends as I. We ought to say, May the Heavens give us thankful hearts! For, in truth, there are blessings which do, like sun-gleams in wild weather, make this rough life beautiful with rainbows here and there. Indicating, I suppose, that there is a Sun, and general Heart of Goodness, behind all that;--for which, as I say again, let us be thankful evermore. My Wife says she received your American Bill of so many pounds sterling for the Revolution Book, with a "pathetic feeling" which brought "tears" to her eyes. From beyond the waters there is a hand held out; beyond the waters too live brothers. I would only the Book were an Epic, a _Dante,_ or undying thing, that New England might boast in after times of this feat of hers; and put stupid, poundless, and penniless Old England to the blush about it! But after all, that is no matter; the feebler the well- meant Book is, the more "pathetic" is the whole transaction: and so we will go on, fuller than ever of "desperate hope" (if you know what that is), with a feeling one would not give and could not get for several money-bags; and say or think, Long live true friends and Emersons, and (in Scotch phrase) "May ne'er waur be amang us!"--I will buy something permanent, I think, out of this L50, and call it either _Ebenezer_ or _Yankee-doodle-doo._ May good be repaid you manifold, my kind Brother! may good be ever with you, my kind Friends all! But now as to this edition of the _Miscellanies_ (poor things), I really think my Wife is wisest, who says I ought to leave you altogether to your own resources with it, America having an art of making money out of my Books which England is unfortunately altogether without. Besides, till I once see the Two Volumes now under way, and can let a Bookseller see them, there could no bargain be made on the subject. We will let it rest there, therefore. Go on with your second Two Volumes, as if there were no England extant, according to your own good judgment. When I get to London, I will consult some of the blockheads with the Book in my hand: if we do want Two Hundred copies, you can give us them with a trifling loss. It is possible they may make some better proposal about an Edition here: that depends on the fate of _Sartor_ here, at present trying itself; which I have not in the least ascertained. For the present, thank as is meet all friends in your world that have interested themselves for me. Alas! I have nothing to give them but thanks. Henry McKean, Charles Wheeler, Convers Francis; these Names shall, if it please Heaven, become Persons for me, one day. Well!--But I will say nothing more. That too is of the things on which all Words are poor to Silence. Good to the Good and Kind! A Letter from me must have crossed that _descriptive_ Concord one, on the Ocean, I think. Our correspondence is now standing on its feet. I will write to you again, whether I hear from you or not, so soon as my hand finds its cunning again in London,--so soon as I can see there what is to be done or said. All goes decidedly better, I think. My Wife was and is much healthier than last year, than in any late year. I myself get visibly quieter my preternatural _Meditations in Hades,_ apropos of this Annandale of mine, are calm compared with those of last year. By another Course of Lectures I have a fair prospect of living for another season; nay, people call it a "new profession" I have devised for myself, and say I may live by it as many years as I like. This too is partly the fruit of my poor Book; one should not say that it was worth nothing to me even in money. Last year I fancied my Audience mainly the readers of it; drawn round me, in spite of many things, by force of it. Let us be content. I have Jesuits, Swedenborgians, old Quakeresses, _omne cum Proteus,_ --God help me, no man ever had so confused a public!--I salute you, my dear Friend, and your hospitable circle. May blessings be on your kind household, on your kind hearts! --T. Carlyle A copy of the English _Teufelsdrockh_ has lain with your name on it these two months in Chelsea; waiting an opportunity. It is worth nothing to you: a dingy, ill-managed edition; but correct or nearly correct as to printing; it is right that such should be in your hands in case of need. The New England Pamphlets will be greedily expected. More than one inquires of me, Has that Emerson of yours written nothing else? And I have lent them the little Book _Nature,_ till it is nearly thumbed to pieces. Sterling is gone to Italy for the winter since I left town; swift as a flash! I cannot teach him the great art of _sitting still;_ his fine qualities are really like to waste for want of that. I read your paragraph to Miss Martineau; she received it, as she was bound, with a good grace. But I doubt, I doubt, O Ralph Waldo Emerson, thou hast not been sufficiently ecstatic about her,--thou graceless exception, confirmatory of a rule! In truth there _are_ bores, of the first and of all lower magnitudes. Patience and shuffle the cards. XXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 17 October, 1838 My Dear Friend,--I am quite uneasy that I do not hear from you. On the 21st of July I wrote to you and enclosed a remittance of L50 by a Bill of Exchange on Baring Brothers, drawn by Chandler, Howard, & Co., which was sent in the steamer "Royal William." On the 2d of August I received your letter of inquiry respecting our edition of the _Miscellanies,_ and wrote a few days later in reply, that we could send you out two or three hundred copies of our first two volumes, in sheets, at eighty-nine cents per copy of two volumes, and the small additional price of the new title- page. I said also that I would wait until I heard from you before commencing the printing of the last two volumes of the _Miscellanies,_ and, if you desired it, would print any number of copies with a title-page for London. This letter went in a steamer--he "Great Western" probably--about the 10th or 12th of August. (Perhaps I misremember the names [of the steamers], and the first should be last.) I have heard nothing from you since. I trust my letters have not miscarried. (A third was sent also by another channel inclosing a duplicate of the Bill of Exchange.) With more fervency, I trust that all goes well in the house of my friend,--and I suppose that you are absent on some salutary errand of repairs and recreation. _Use, I pray you, your earliest_ hour in certifying me of the facts. One word more in regard to business. I believe I expressed some surprise, in the July letter, that the booksellers should have no greater balance for us at this settlement. I have since studied the account better, and see that we shall not be disappointed in the year of obtaining at least the sum first promised,--seven hundred and sixty dollars; but the whole expense of the edition is paid out of the copies first sold, and our profits depend on the last sales. The edition is almost gone, and you shall have an account at the end of the year. In a letter within a twelvemonth I have urged you to pay us a visit in America, and in Concord. I have believed that you would come one day, and do believe it. But if, on your part, you have been generous and affectionate enough to your friends here--or curious enough concerning our society--to wish to come, I think you must postpone, for the present, the satisfaction of your friendship and your curiosity. At this moment I would not have you here, on any account. The publication of my _Address to the Divinity College_ (copies of which I sent you) has been the occasion of an outcry in all our leading local newspapers against my "infidelity," "pantheism," and "atheism." The writers warn all and sundry against me, and against whatever is supposed to be related to my connection of opinion, &c.; against Transcendentalism, Goethe, and _Carlyle._ I am heartily sorry to see this last aspect of the storm in our washbowl. For, as Carlyle is nowise guilty, and has unpopularities of his own, I do not wish to embroil him in my parish differences. You were getting to be a great favorite with us all here, and are daily a greater with the American public, but just now, _in Boston,_ where I am known as your editor, I fear you lose by the association. Now it is indispensable to your right influence here, that you should never come before our people as one of a clique, but as a detached, that is, universally associated man; so I am happy, as I could not have thought, that you have not yielded yourself to my entreaties. Let us wait a little until this foolish clamor be overblown. My position is fortunately such as to put me quite out of the reach of any real inconvenience from the panic-strikers or the panic-struck; and, indeed, so far as this uneasiness is a necessary result of mere inaction of mind, it seems very clear to me that, if I live, my neighbors must look for a great many more shocks, and perhaps harder to bear. The article on German Religious Writers in the last _Foreign Quarterly Review_ suits our meridian as well as yours; as is plainly signified by the circumstance that our newspapers copy into their columns the opening tirade and _no more._ Who wrote that paper? And who wrote the paper on Montaigne in the _Westminster?_ I read with great satisfaction the Poems and Thoughts of Archaeus in _Blackwood._ "The Sexton's Daughter" is a beautiful poem: and I recognize in them all _the_ Soul, with joy and love. Tell me of the author's health and welfare; or, will not he love me so much as to write me a letter with his own hand? And tell me of yourself, what task of love and wisdom the Muses impose; and what happiness the good God sends to you and yours. I hope your wife has not forgotten me. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson The _Miscellanies,_ Vols. I. and II., are a popular book. About five hundred copies have been sold. The second article on Jean Paul works with might on the inner man of young men. I hate to write you letters on business and facts like this. There are so few Friends that I think some time I shall meet you nearer, for I love you more than is fit to say. W.H. Channing has written a critique on you, which I suppose he has sent you, in the _Boston Review._ XXIX. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London 7 November, 1838 My Dear Friend,--It is all right; all your Letters with their inclosures have arrived in due succession: the last, inquiring after the fate of the others, came this morning. I was in Scotland, as you partly conjecture; I wrote to you already (though not without blamable delay), from my Mother's house in Annandale, a confused scrawl, which I hope has already got to hand, and quieted your kind anxieties. I am as well as usual in health, my Wife better than usual; nothing is amiss, except my negligence and indolence, which has put you to this superfluous solicitude on my account. However, I have an additional Letter by it; you must pardon me, you must not grudge me that undeserved pleasure, the reward of evil-doing. I may well say, you are a blessing to me on this Earth; no Letter comes from you with other than good tidings,--or can come while you live there to love me. The Bill was thrust duly into Baring's brass slit "for acceptance," on my return hither some three weeks ago; and will, no doubt, were the days of grace run, come out in the shape of Fifty Pounds Sterling; a very curious product indeed. Do you know what I think of doing with it? _Dyspepsia,_ my constant attendant in London, is incapable of help in my case by any medicine or appliance except one only, Riding on horseback. With a good horse to whirl me over the world for two hours daily, I used to keep myself supportably well. Here, the maintenance of a Horse far transcends my means; yet it seems hard I should not for a little while be in a kind of approximate health in this Babylon where I have my bread to seek it is like swimming with a millstone round your neck,--ah me! In brief, I am about half resolved to buy myself a sharp little nag with Twenty of these Transatlantic Pounds, and ride him till the other Thirty be eaten: I will call the creature "Yankee," and kind thoughts of those far away shall be with me every time I mount him. Will not that do? My Wife says it is the best plan I have had for years, and strongly urges it on. My kind friends! As to those copies of the Carlyle Miscellanies, I unfortunately still can say nothing, except what was said in the former (Scotch) letter, that you must proceed in the business with an eye to America and not to us. My Booksellers, Saunders and Ottley, have no money for me, no definite offer in money to make for those Two Hundred copies, of which you seem likely to make money if we simply leave them alone. I have asked these Booksellers, I have asked Fraser too: What will you _give me in ready money_ for Two Hundred and Fifty copies of that work, sell it afterwards as you can? They answer always, We must see it first. Now the copy long ago sent me has never come to hand; I have asked for it of Kennet, but without success; I have nothing for it but to wait the winds and chances. Meanwhile Saunders and Ottley want forsooth a _Sketches of German Literature_ in three volumes: then a _Miscellanies_ in three volumes: that is their plan of publishing an English edition; and the outlook they hold out for me is certain trouble in this matter, and recompense entirely uncertain. I think on the whole it is extremely likely I shall apply to you for Two Hundred and Fifty copies (that is their favorite number) of these four volumes, (nay, if it be of any moment, you can bind me down to it _now,_ and take it for sure,) but I cannot yet send you the title-page; no bookseller purchasing till "we see it first." But after all, will it suit America to print an _unequal_ number of your two pairs of volumes? Do not the two together make one work? On the whole, consider that I shall in all likelihood want Two Hundred and Fifty copies, and consider it certain if that will serve the enterprise: we must leave it here today. I will stir in it now, however, and take no rest till in one way or other you do get a title-page from me, or some definite deliverance on the matter. O Athenians, what a trouble I _give,_ having _got_ your applauses! Kennet the Bookseller gave me yesterday (on my way to "the City" with that Brother of mine, the Italian Doctor who is here at present and a great lover of yours) ten copies of your Dartmouth Oration: we read it over dinner in a chop-house in Bucklersbury, amid the clatter of some fifty stand of knives and forks; and a second time more leisurely at Chelsea here. A right brave Speech; announcing, in its own way, with emphasis of full conviction, to all whom it may concern, that great forgotten truth, _Man is still man._ May it awaken a pulsation under the ribs of Death! I believe the time is come for such a Gospel. They must speak it out who have it,--with what audience there may be. I have given away two copies this morning; I will take care of the rest. Go on, and speed.--And now where is the heterodox Divinity one, which awakens such "tempest in a washbowl," brings Goethe, Transcendentalism, and Carlyle into question, and on the whole evinces "what [difference] New England also makes between _Pan_-theism and _Pot_-theism"? I long to see that; I expect to congratulate you on that too. Meanwhile we will let the washbowl storm itself out; and Emerson at Concord shall recognize it for a washbowl storming, and hold on his way. As to my share in it, grieve not for half an instant. Pantheism, Pottheism, Mydoxy, Thydoxy, are nothing at all to me; a weariness the whole jargon, which I avoid speaking of, decline listening to: _Live,_ for God's sake, with what Faith thou couldst get; leave off _speaking_ about Faith! Thou knowest it not. Be _silent,_ do not speak.--As to you, my friend, you are even to go on, giving still harder shocks if need be; and should I come into censure by means of you, there or here, think that I am proud of my company; that, as the boy Hazlitt said after hearing Coleridge, "I will go with that man"; or, as our wild Burns has it, "Wi' sic as he, where'er he be, May I be saved or damned!" Oime! what a foolish goose of a world this is! If it were not [for] here and there an articulate-speaking man, one would be all-too lonely. This is nothing at all like the letter I meant to write you; but I will write again, I trust, in few days, and the first paragraph shall, if possible, hold all the business. I have much to tell you, which perhaps is as well not written. O that I did see you face to face! But the time shall come, if Heaven will. Why not you come over, since I cannot? There is a room here, there is welcome here, and two friends always. It must be done one way or the other. I will take, care of your messages to Sterling. He is in Florence; he was the Author of _Montaigne._* The _Foreign Quarterly_ Reviewer of _Strauss_ I take to be one Blackie, an Advocate in Edinburgh, a frothy, semi-confused disciple of mine and other men's; I guess this, but I have not read the Article: the man Blackie is from Aberdeen, has been roaming over Europe, and carries more sail than ballast. Brother John, spoken of above, is knocking at the door even now; he is for Italy again, we expect, in few days, on a better appointment: know that you have a third friend in him under this roof,--a man who quarrels with me all day in a small way, and loves me with the whole soul of him. My Wife demanded to have "room for one line." What she is to write I know not, except it be what she has said, holding up the pamphlet, "Is it not a noble thing? None of them all but he," &c., &c. I will write again without delay when the stray volumes arrive; before that if they linger. Commend me to all the kind household of Concord: Wife, Mother, and Son. Ever yours, T. Carlyle --------- * See _ante,_ p. 184. Sterling's essay on Montaigne was his first contribution, in 1837, to the _London and Westminster Review._ It is reprinted in "Essays and Tales, by John Sterling, collected and edited, with a Memoir of his Life, by Julius Charles Hare," London, 1848, Vol. I. p. 129. ---------- _"Forgotten you?"_ O, no indeed! If there were nothing else to remember you by, I should never forget the Visitor, who years ago in the Desert descended on us, out of the clouds as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only _one_ day. When I think of America, it is of you,--neither Harriet Martineau nor any one else succeeds in giving me a more extended idea of it. When I wish to see America it is still you, and those that are yours. I read all that you write with an interest which I feel in no other writing but my Husband's,--or it were nearer the truth to say there is no other writing of living men but yours and his that I _can_ read. God Bless you and Weib and Kind. Surely I shall some day see you all. Your affectionate Jane Carlyle XXX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 15 November, 1835 Dear Emerson,--Hardly above a week ago, I wrote you in immediate answer to some friendly inquiries produced by negligence of mine: the Letter is probably tumbling on the salt waves at this hour, in the belly of the "Great Western"; or perhaps it may be still on firm land waiting, in which case this will go along with it. I had written before out of Scotland a Letter of mere acknowledgment and postponement; you must have received that before now, I imagine. Our small piece of business is now become articulate, and I will despatch it in a paragraph. Pity my stupidity that I did not put the thing on this footing long ago! It never struck me till the other day that though no copy of our _Miscellanies_ would turn up for inspection here, and no Bookseller would bargain for a thing unseen, I myself might bargain, and leave their hesitations resting on their own basis. In fine, I have rejected all their schemes of printing _Miscellaneous Works_ here, printing _Sketches of German Literature,_ or printing anything whatever on the "half-profits system," which is like toilsomely scattering seed into the sea: and I settled yesterday with Fraser to give him the American sheets, and let them sell _themselves,_ on clear principles, or remain unsold if they like. I find it infinitely the best plan, and to all appearance the profitablest as to money that could have been devised for me. What you have to do therefore is to get Two Hundred and Fifty copies (_in sheets_) of the whole Four Volumes, so soon as the second two are printed, and have them, with the proper title- page, sent off hither to Fraser's address; the sooner the better. The American title-page, instead of "Boston," &c. at the bottom, will require to bear, in three lines "London: / James Fraser, 215 Regent Street, / 1839." Fraser is anxious that you should not spell him with a z; your man can look on the Magazine and beware. I suppose also you should print _labels_ for the backs of the four volumes, to be used by the _half_-binder; they do the books in that way here now: but if it occasion any difficulty, never mind this; it was not spoken of to Fraser, and is my own conjecture merely; the thing can be managed in various other ways. Two Hundred and Fifty copies, then, of the entire book: there is nothing else to be attended to that you do not understand as well as I. Fraser will announce it in his Magazine: the eager, select public will wait. Probably, there is no chance before the middle of March or so? Do not hurry yourselves, or at all change your rate for _us:_ but so soon as the work is ready in the course of Nature, the earliest conveyance to the Port of London will bring a little cargo which one will welcome with a strange feeling! I declare myself delighted with the plan; an altogether romantic kind of plan, of romance and reality: fancy me riding on _Yankee_ withal, at the time, and considering what a curious world this is, that bakes bread for one beyond the great Ocean-stream, and how a poor man is not left after all to be trodden into the gutters, though the fight went sore against him, and he saw no backing anywhere. _Allah akbar!_ God is great; no saying truer than that.--And so now, by the blessing of Heaven, we will talk no more of business this day. My employments, my outlooks, condition, and history here, were a long chapter; on which I could like so well to talk with you face to face; but as for writing of them, it is a mere mockery. In these four years, so full of pain and toil, I seem to have lived four decades. By degrees, the creature gets accustomed to its element; the salamander learns to live in fire, and be of the same temperature with it. Ah me! I feel as if grown old innumerable things are become weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable. And yet perhaps I am not old, only wearied, and there is a stroke or two of work in me yet. For the rest, the fret and agitation of this Babylon wears me down: it is the most unspeakable life; of sunbeams and miry clay; a contradiction which no head can reconcile. Pain and poverty are not wholesome; but praise and flattery along with them are poison: God deliver us from that; it carries madness in the very breath of it! On the whole, I say to myself, what thing is there so good as _rest?_ A sad case it is and a frequent one in my circle, to be entirely cherubic, _all_ face and wings. "Mes enfans," said a French gentleman to the cherubs in the Picture, "Mes enfans, asseyez-vous?"--"Monseigneur," answer they, "il n'y a pas de quoi!" I rejoice rather in my laziness; proving that I _can_ sit.--But, after all, ought I not to be thankful? I positively can, in some sort, exist here for the while; a thing I had been for many years ambitious of to no purpose. I shall have to lecture again in spring, Heaven knows on what; it will be a wretched fever for me; but once through it there will be board wages for another year. The wild Ishmael can hunt in _this_ desert too, it would seem. I say, I will be thankful; and wait quietly what farther is to come, or whether anything farther. But indeed, to speak candidly, I do feel sometimes as if another Book were growing in me,--though I almost tremble to think of it. Not for this winter, O no! I will write an Article merely, or some such thing, and read trash if better be not. This, I do believe, is my horoscope for the next season: an Article on something about New-Year's-day (the Westminster Editor, a good- natured, admiring swan-goose from the North Country, will not let me rest); then Lectures; then--what? I am for some practical subject too; none of your pictures in the air, or _aesthetisches Zeug_ (as Mullner's wife called it, Mullner of the _Midnight Blade_): nay, I cannot get up the steam on any such best; it is extremely irksome as well as fruitless at present. In the next _Westminster Review,_ therefore, if you see a small scrub of a paper signed "S.P." on one Varnhagen a German, say that it is by "Simon Pure," or by "Scissars and Paste," or even by "Soaped Pig"--whom no man shall _catch!_ Truly it is a secret which you must not mention: I was driven to it by the Swan-goose above mentioned, not Mill but another. Let this suffice for my winter's history: may the summer be more productive. As for Concord and New England, alas! my Friend, I should but deface your Idyllion with an ugly contradiction, did I come in such mood as mine is. I am older in years than you; but in humor I am older by centuries. What a hope is in that ever young heart, cheerful, healthful as the morning! And as for me, you have no conception what a crabbed, sulky piece of sorrow and dyspepsia I am grown; and growing, if I do not draw bridle. Let me gather heart a little! I have not forgotten Concord or the West; no, it lies always beautiful in the blue of the horizon, afar off and yet attainable; it is a great possession to me; should it even never be attained. But I have got to consider lately that it is you who are coming hither first. That is the right way, is it not? New England is becoming more than ever part of Old England; why, you are nearer to us now than Yorkshire was a hundred years ago; this is literally a fact: you can come _without_ making your will. It is one of my calculations that all Englishmen from all zones and hemispheres will, for a good while yet, resort occasionally to the Mother- Babel, and see a thing or two there. Come if you dare; I said there was a room, house-room and heart-room, constantly waiting you here, and you shall see blockheads by the million. _Pickwick_ himself shall be visible; innocent young Dickens reserved for a questionable fate. The great Wordsworth shall talk till you yourself pronounce him to be a bore. Southey's complexion is still healthy mahogany-brown, with a fleece of white hair, and eyes that seem running at full gallop. Leigh Hunt, "man of genius in the shape of a Cockney," is my near neighbor, full of quips and cranks, with good humor and no common sense. Old Rogers with his pale head, white, bare, and cold as snow, will work on you with those large blue eyes, cruel, sorrowful, and that sardonic shelf-chin:--This is the Man, O Rogers, that wrote the German Poetry in American Prose; consider him well!--But whither am I running? My sheet is done! My Brother John returns again almost immediately to Italy. He has got appointed Traveling Doctor to a certain Duke of Buccleuch, the chief of our Scotch Dukes: an excellent position for him as far as externals go. His departure will leave me lonelier; but I must reckon it for the best: especially I must begin working. Harriet Martineau is coming hither this evening; with beautiful enthusiasm for the Blacks and others. She is writing a Novel. The first American book proved generally rather wearisome, the second not so; we have since been taught (not I) "How to observe." Suppose you and I promulgate a treatise next, "How to see"? The old plan was, to have a pair of _eyes _first of all, and then to open them: and endeavor with your whole strength to _look._ The good Harriet! But "God," as the Arabs say, "has given to every people a Prophet (or Poet) in its own speech": and behold now Unitarian mechanical Formalism was to have its Poetess too; and stragglings of genius were to spring up even through that like grass through a Macadam highway!--Adieu, my Friend, I wait still for your heterodox Speech; and love you always. --T. Carlyle An English _Sartor_ goes off to you this day; through Kennet, to C.C. Little and J. Brown of Boston; the likeliest conveyance. It is correctly printed, and that is all. Its fate here (the fate of the publication, I mean) remains unknown; "unknown and unimportant." XXXI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 2 December, 1838 My Dear Emerson,--Almost the very day after my last Letter went off, the long-expected two volumes of _Miscellanies_ arrived. The heterodox pamphlet has never yet come to hand. I am now to write you again about that _Miscellany_ concern the fourth letter, I do believe; but it is confirmatory of the foregoing three, and will be the last, we may hope. Fraser is charmed with the look of your two volumes; declares them unsurpassable by art of his; and wishes (what is the main part of this message) that you would send his cargo in the _bound_ state, bound and lettered as these are, with the sole difference that the leaves be _not_ cut, or shaved on the sides, our English fashion being to have them _rough._ He is impatient that the Book were here; desires further that it be sent to the Port of London rather than another Port, and that it be packed in _boxes_ "to keep the covers of the volumes safe,"--all which I doubt not the Packers and the Shippers of New England have dexterity enough to manage for the best, without desire of his. If you have printed off nothing yet, I will desire for my own behoof that Two hundred and _Sixty_ be the number sent; I find I shall need some ten to give away: if your first sheet is printed off, let the number stand as it was. It would be an improvement if you could print our title-pages on paper a little stronger; that would stand ink, I mean: the fly leaves in the same, if you have such paper convenient; if not, not. Farther as to the matter of the title-page, it seems to me your Printer might give a bolder and a broader type to the words "Critical and Miscellaneous," and add after "Essays" with a colon (:), the line "Collected and Republished," with a colon also; then the "By," &c. "In Four Volumes, Vol. I.," &c. I mean that we want, in general, a little more ink and decisiveness: show your man the title-page of the English _French Revolution,_ or look at it your self, and you will know. R.W.E.'s "Advertisement," friendly and good, as all his dealings are to me ward, will of course be suppressed in the English copies. I see not that with propriety I can say anything by way of substitute: silence and the New England _imprint_ will tell the story as eloquently as there is need. For the rest you must tell Mr. Loring, and all men who had a hand in it along with you, that I am altogether right well pleased with this edition, and find it far beyond my expectation. To my two young Friends, Henry S. McKean (be so good as write these names more indisputably for me) and Charles Stearns Wheeler, in particular, I will beg you to express emphatically my gratitude; they have stood by me with right faithfulness, and made the correctest printing; a _great_ service had I known that there were such eyes and heads acting in behalf of me there, I would have scraped out the Editorial blotches too (notes of admiration, dashes, "We think"s, &c., &c., common in Jeffrey's time in the _Edinburgh Review_) and London misprints; which are almost the only deformities that remain now. It is _extremely_ correct printing wherever I have looked, and many things are silently amended; it is the most fundamental service of all. I have not the other _Articles_ by me at present; I think they are of themselves a little more correct; at all events there are nothing but _misprints_ to deal with;--the Editors, by this time, had got bound up to let me alone. In the _Life of Scott,_ fourth page of it (p. 296 of our edition), there is a sentence to be deleted. "It will tell us, say they, little new and nothing pleasing to know": out with this, for it is nonsense, and was marked for erasure in the manuscript, I dare say. I know with certainty no more at present. Fraser is to sell the Four Volumes at Two Guineas here. On studying accurately your program of the American mercantile method, I stood amazed to contrast it with our English one. The Bookseller here admits that he could, by diligent bargaining, get up such a book for something like the same cost or a _little_ more; but the "laws of the trade" deduct from the very front of the selling price--how much think you--_forty percent_ and odd, when your man has only _fifteen;_ for the mere act of vending! To cover all, they charge that enormous price. (A man, while I stood consulting with Fraser, came in and asked for Carlyle's _Revolution;_ they showed it him, he asked the price; and exclaimed, "Guinea and a half! I can get it from America for nine shillings!" and indignantly went his way; not without reason.) There are "laws of the trade" which ought to be _repealed;_ which I will take the liberty of contravening to all lengths by all opportunities--if I had but the power! But if this joint-stock American plan prosper, it will answer rarely. Fraser's first _French Revolution,_ for instance, will be done, he calculates, about New-Year's-day; and a second edition wanted; mine to do with what I like. If you in America wanted more also--? I leave you to think of this.--And now enough, enough! My Brother went from us last Tuesday; ought to be in Paris yesterday. I am yet writing nothing; feel forsaken, sad, sick, --not unhappy. In general Death seems beautiful to me; sweet and great. But Life also is beautiful, is great and divine, were it never to be joyful any more. I read Books, my wife sewing by me, with the light of a sinumbra, in a little apartment made snug against the winter; and am happiest when all men leave me alone, or nearly all,--though many men love me rather, ungrateful that I am. My present book is _Horace Walpole;_ I get endless stuff out of it; epic, tragic, lyrical, didactic: all inarticulate indeed. An old blind Schoolmaster in Annan used to ask with endless anxiety when a new scholar was offered him, "But are ye sure _he's not a Dunce?_" It is really the one thing needful in a man; for indeed (if we will candidly understand it) all else is presupposed in that. Horace Walpole is no dunce, not a fibre of him is duncish. Your Friend Sumner was here yesterday, a good while, for the first time: an ingenious, cultivated, courteous man; a little sensitive or so, and with no other fault that I discerned. He borrowed my copy of your Dartmouth business, and bound himself over to return with it soon. Some approve of that here, some condemn: my Wife and another lady call it better even than the former, I not so good. And now the Heterodox, the Heterodox, where is that? Adieu, my dear Friend. Commend me to the Concord Household; to the little Boy, to his Grandmother, and Mother, and Father; we must all meet some day,--or _some no-day_ then (as it shall please God)! My Wife heartily greets you all. Ever yours, T. Carlyle I sent your book, message, and address to Sterling; he is in Florence or Rome. Read the article _Simonides_ by him in the _London and Westminster_--brilliant prose, translations--wooden? His signature is L (Pounds Sterling!).--_Now_ you are to write _soon?_ I always forgot to tell you, there came long since two packages evidently in your hand, marked "One printed sheet," and "one Newspaper," for which the Postman demanded about Fifteen shillings: _rejected._ After considerable correspondence the Newspaper was again offered me at _ten pence;_ the _sheet_ unattainable altogether: "No," even at tenpence. The fact is, it was wrong wrapped, that Newspaper. Leave it open at the ends, and try me again, once; I think it will come almost gratis. Steam and Iron are making all the Planet into one Village.--A Mr. Dwight wrote to me about the dedicating of some German translations: _Yes._ What are they or he?*--Your _Sartor_ is off through Kennet. Could you send me two copies of the American _Life of Schiller,_ if the thing is fit for making a present of, and easy to be got? If not, do not mind it at all.--Addio! ------------- * Mr. John S. Dwight, whose volume of _Select Minor Poems from the German of Goethe and Schiller,_ published in 1839, was dedicated to Carlyle. It was the third volume of _Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, edited by George Ripley. Beside Mr. Dwight's own excellent versions, it contained translations by Mr. Bancroft, Dr. Hedge, Dr. Frothingham, and others. For many years Mr. Dwight rendered a notable public service as the editor of _Dwight's Journal of Music,_--a publication which did more than any other to raise and to maintain high the standard of musical taste and culture in America. --------- XXXII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 13 January, 1839 My Dear Friend,--I am not now in any Condition to write a letter, having neither the facts from the booksellers which you would know touching our future plans, nor yet a satisfactory account balanced and settled of our past dealings; and lastly, no time to write what I would say,--as my poor lectures are in full course, and absorb all my wits; but as the "Royal William" will not wait, and as I have a hundred pounds to send on account of the sales of the _French Revolution,_ I must steal a few minutes to send my salutation. I have received all your four good letters: and you are a good and generous man to write so many. Two came on the 2d and 3d of January, and the last on the 9th. If the bookselling Munroe had answered me yesterday, as he ought, I should be able to satisfy you as to the time when to expect our cargo of _Miscellanies._ The third and fourth volumes are now printing: 't is a fortnight since we began. You shall have two hundred and fifty copies,--I am not quite sure you can have more,--bound, and _entitled,_ and directed as you desire, at least according to the best ability of our printer as far as the typography is concerned, and we will speed the work as fast as we can; but as we have but a single copy of _Fraser's Magazine_--we do not get on rapidly. The _French Revolution_ was all sold more than a month since. We should be glad of more copies, but the bookseller thinks not of enough copies to justify a new edition yet. I should not be surprised, however, to see that some bold brother of the trade had undertaken it. Now, what does your question point at in reference to your new edition, asking "if we want more"? Could you send us out a part of your edition at American prices, and at the same time to your advantage? I wish I knew the precise answer to this question, then perhaps I could keep all pirates out of our bay. I shall convey in two days your message to Stearns Wheeler, who is now busy in correcting the new volumes. He is now Greek Tutor in Harvard College.*--Kindest thanks to Jane Carlyle for her generous remembrances, which I will study to deserve. Has the heterodoxy arrived in Chelsea, and quite destroyed us even in the charity of our friend? I am sorry to have worried you so often about the summer letter. Now am I your debtor four times. The parish commotion, too, has long ago subsided here, and my course of Lectures on "Human Life" finds a full attendance. I wait for the coming of the _Westminster,_ which has not quite yet arrived here, though I have seen the London advertisement. It sounds prosperously in my ear what you say of Dr. Carlyle's appointments. I was once very near the man in Rome, but did not see him. I will atone as soon as I can for this truncated epistle. You must answer it immediately, so far as to acknowledge the receipt of the enclosed bill of exchange, and soon I will send you the long promised _account_ of the _French Revolution,_ and also such moral account of the same as is over due. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson --------- * This promising young scholar edited with English notes the first American edition of Herodotus. He went to Europe to pursue his studies, and died, greatly regretted, at Rome, of a fever, in 1848. --------- XXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 8 February, 1859 My Dear Friend,--Your welcome little Letter, with the astonishing inclosure, arrived safe four days ago; right welcome, as all your Letters are, and bringing as these usually do the best news I get here. The miraculous draught of Paper I have just sent to a sure hand in Liverpool, there to lie till in due time it have ripened into a crop of a hundred gold sovereigns! On this subject, which gives room for so many thoughts, there is little that can be said, that were not an impertinence more or less. The matter grows serious to me, enjoins me to be silent and reflect. I will say, at any rate, there never came money into my hands I was so proud of; the promise of a blessing looks from the face of it; nay, it _will_ be _twice_ blessed. So I will ejaculate, with the Arabs, _Allah akbar!_ and walk silent by the shore of the many-sounding Babel-tumult, meditating on much. Thanks to the mysterious all-bounteous Guide of men, and to you my true Brother, far over the sea!--For the rest, I showed Fraser this Nehemiah document, and said I hoped he would blush very deep;--which indeed the poor creature did, till I was absolutely sorry for him. But now first as to this question, What I mean? You must know poor Fraser, a punctual but most pusillanimous mortal, has been talking louder and louder lately of a "second edition" here; whereupon, as labor-wages are not higher here than with you, and printing-work, if well bargained for, ought to be about the same price, it struck me that, as in the case of the _Miscellanies,_ so here inversely the supply of both the New and the Old England might be profitably combined. Whether aught can come of this, now that it is got close upon us, I yet know not. Fraser has only seventy-five copies left; but when these will be done his prophecy comprehends not,--"surely within the year"! For the present I have set him to ascertain, and will otherwise ascertain for myself, what the exact cost of _stereotyping_ the Book were, in the same letter and style as yours; it is not so much more than printing, they tell me: I should then have done with it forever and a day. You on your side, and we on ours, might have as many copies as were wanted for all time coming. This is, in these very days, under inquisition; but there are many points to be settled before the issue. I have not yet succeeded in finding a Bookseller of any fitness, but am waiting for one always. And even had I found such a one, I mean an energetic seller that would sell on other terms than forty percent for his trouble, it were still a question whether one ought to venture on such a speculation: "quitting the old highways," as I say, "in indignation at the excessive tolls, with hope that you will arrive cheaper in the steeple-chase way!" It is clear, however, that said highways are of the corduroy sort, said tolls an anomaly that must be remedied soon; and also that in all England there is no Book in a likelier case to adventure it with than this same,--which did not sell at all for two months, as I hear, which all Booksellers got terrified for, and which has crept along mainly by its own gravitation ever since. We will consider well, we shall see. You can understand that such a thing, for your market too, is in agitation; if any pirate step in before us in the meanwhile, we cannot help it. Thanks again for your swift attention to the _Miscellanies;_ poor Fraser is in great haste to see them; hoping for his forty- per-cent division of the spoil. If you have not yet got to the very end with your printing, I will add a few errata; if they come too late, never mind; they are of small moment.... This foggy Babylon tumbles along as it was wont; and, as for my particular case, uses me not worse, but better, than of old. Nay, there are many in it that have a real friendliness for me. For example, the other night, a massive portmanteau of Books, sent according to my written list, from the Cambridge University Library, from certain friends there whom I have never seen; a gratifying arrival. For we have no Library here, from which we can borrow books home; and are only in these weeks striving to get one:* think of that! The worst is the sore tear and wear of this huge roaring Niagara of things on such a poor excitable set of nerves as mine. The velocity of all things, of the very word you hear on the streets, is at railway rate: joy itself is unenjoyable, to be avoided like pain; there is no wish one has so pressing as for quiet. Ah me! I often swear I will be buried at least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub, where Fate tethers me in life! If Fate always tether me;--but if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I will fly this whirlpool as I would the Lake of _Malebolge,_ and only visit it now and then! Yet perhaps it is the proper place after all, seeing all places are improper: who knows? Meanwhile I lead a most dyspeptic, solitary, self-shrouded life: consuming, if possible in silence, my considerable daily allotment of pain; glad when any strength is left in me for working, which is the only use I can see in myself,--too rare a case of late. The ground of my existence is black as Death; too black, when all void too but at times there paint themselves on it pictures of gold and rainbow and lightning; all the brighter for the black ground, I suppose. Withal I am very much of a fool.--Some people will have me write on _Cromwell,_ which I have been talking about. I do read on that and English subjects, finding that I know nothing and that nobody knows anything of that: but whether anything will come of it remains to be seen. Mill, the _Westminster_ friend, is gone in bad health to the Continent, and has left a rude Aberdeen Longear, a great admirer of mine too, with whom I conjecture I cannot act at all: so good-bye to that. The wisest of all, I do believe, were that I bought my nag _Yankee_ and set to galloping about the elevated places here! A certain Mr. Coolidge,** a Boston man of clear iron visage and character, came down to me the other day with Sumner; he left a newspaper fragment, containing "the Socinian Pope's denunciation of Emerson." --------- * The beginning of the London Library, a most useful institution, from which books may be borrowed. It served Carlyle well in later years, and for a long time he was President of it. ** The late Mr. Joseph Coolidge. --------- The thing denounced had not then arrived, though often asked for at Kennet's; it did not arrive till yesterday, but had lain buried in bales of I know not what. We have read it only once, and are not yet at the bottom of it. Meanwhile, as I judge, the Socinian "tempest in a washbowl" is all according to nature, and will be profitable to you, not hurtful. A man is called to let his light shine before men; but he ought to understand better and better what medium it is through, what retinas it falls on: wherefore look _there._ I find in this, as in the two other Speeches, that noblest self-assertion, and believing originality, which is like sacred fire, the _beginning_ of whatsoever is to flame and work; and for young men especially one sees not what could be more vivifying. Speak, therefore, while you feel called to do it; and when you feel called. But for yourself, my friend, I prophesy it will not do always: a faculty is in you for a _sort_ of speech which is itself _action,_ an artistic sort. You _tell_ us with piercing emphasis that man's soul is great; _show_ us a great soul of a man, in some work symbolic of such: this is the seal of such a message, and you will feel by and by that you are called to this. I long to see some concrete Thing, some Event, Man's Life, American Forest, or piece of Creation, which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well _Emersonized,_ depictured by Emerson, filled with the life of Emerson, and cast forth from him then to live by itself. If these Orations balk me of this, how profitable soever they be for others. I will not love them.--And yet, what am I saying? How do I know what is good for _you,_ what authentically makes your own heart glad to work in it? I speak from _without,_ the friendliest voice must speak from without; and a man's ultimate monition comes only from _within._ Forgive me, and love me, and write soon. _A Dieu!_ --T. Carlyle My Wife, very proud of your salutation, sends a sick return of greeting. After a winter of unusual strength, she took cold the other day, and coughs again; though she will not call it serious yet. One likes none of these things. She has a brisk heart and a stout, but too weak a frame for this rough life of mine. I will not get sad about it. One of the strangest things about these New England Orations is a fact I have heard, but not yet seen, that a certain W. Gladstone, an Oxford crack Scholar, Tory M.P., and devout Churchman of great talent and hope, has contrived to insert a piece of you (_first_ Oration it must be) in a work of his on _Church and State,_ which makes some figure at present! I know him for a solid, serious, silent-minded man; but how with his Coleridge Shovel-Hattism he has contrived to relate himself to _you,_ there is the mystery. True men of all creeds, it _would_ seem, are Brothers. To write soon! XXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, 15 March, 1839 My Dear Friend,--I will spare you my apologies for not writing, they are so many. You have been very generous, I very promising and dilatory. I desired to send you an Account of the sales of the _History,_ thinking that the details might be more intelligible to you than to me, and might give you some insight into literary and social, as well as bibliopolical relations. But many details of this account will not yet settle themselves into sure facts, but do dance and mystify me as one green in ledgers. Bookseller says nine hundred and ninety-one copies came from Binder, nine remaining imperfect, and so not bound. But in all my reckonings of the particulars of distribution I make either more or less than nine hundred and ninety-one copies. And some of my accounts are with private individuals at a distance, and they have their uncertainties and misrememberings also. But the facts will soon show themselves, and I count confidently on a small balance against the world to your credit. ---------- * This letter appeared in the _Athenaeum,_ July 22, 1882. ---------- The _Miscellanies_ go forward too slowly, at about the rate of seventy-two pages a week, as I understand. Of the _Fraser_ articles and of some others we have but a single copy, (such are the tough limits of some English immortalities and editorial renowns,) but we expect the end of the printing in six weeks. The first two volumes, with title-pages, are gone to the binder-- two hundred and sixty copies--with strait directions; and I presume will go to sea very soon. We shall send the last two volumes by a later ship. You will pay nothing for the books we send except freight. We shall deduct the cost of the books from the credit side of your account here. We print of the second series twelve hundred and fifty copies, with the intention of printing a second edition of the first series of five hundred, if we see fit hereafter to supply the place of the emigrating portion of the first. You express some surprise at the cheapness of our work. The publishers, I believe, generally get more profits. They grumbled a little at the face of the account on the 1st of January; so in the new contract for the new volumes I have allowed them nine cents more on each copy sold by them. So that you should receive ninety-one cents on a copy instead of one dollar. When the two hundred and fifty copies of our first two volumes are gone to you, I think they will have but about one hundred copies more to sell. Your books are read. I hear, I think, more gratitude expressed for the _Miscellanies_ than for the _History._ Young men at all our colleges study them in closets, and the Copernican is eradicating the Ptolemaic lore. I have frequent and cordial testimonies to the good working of the leaven, and continual inquiry whether the man will come hither. _Speriamo._ I was a fool to tell you once you must not come if I did tell you so. I knew better at the time, and did steadily believe, as far as I was concerned, that no polemical mud, however much was thrown, could by any possibility stick to me; for I was purely an observer; had not the smallest personal or _partial_ interest; and merely spoke to the question as a historian; and I knew whoever could see me must see that. But, at the moment, the little pamphlet made much stir and excitement in the newspapers; and the whole thousand copies were bought up. The ill wind has blown over. I advertised, as usual, my winter course of Lectures, and it prospered very well. Ten Lectures: I. Doctrine of the Soul; II. Home; III. The School; IV. Love; V. Genius; VI. The Protest; VII. Tragedy; VIII. Comedy; IX. Duty; X. Demonology. I designed to add two more, but my lungs played me false with unseasonable inflammation, so I discoursed no more on "Human Life." Now I am well again.--But, as I said, as I could not hurt myself, it was foolish to flatter myself that I could mix your cause with mine and hurt you. Nothing is more certain than that you shall have all our ears, whenever you wish for them, and free from that partial position which I deprecated. Yet I cannot regret my letter, which procured me so affectionate and magnanimous a reply. Thanks, too, for your friendliest invitation. But I have a new reason why I should not come to England,--a blessed babe, named Ellen, almost three weeks old,--a little, fair, soft lump of contented humanity, incessantly sleeping, and with an air of incurious security that says she has come to stay, has come to be loved, which has nothing mean, and quite piques me. Yet how gladly should I be near you for a time. The months and years make me more desirous of an unlimited conversation with you; and one day, I think, the God will grant it, after whatever way is best. I am lately taken with _The Onyx Ring,_ which seemed to me full of knowledge, and good, bold, true drawing. Very saucy, was it not? in John Sterling to paint Collins; and what intrepid iconoclasm in this new Alcibiades to break in among your Lares and disfigure your sacred Hermes himself in Walsingham.* To me, a profane man, it was good sport to see the Olympic lover of Frederica, Lili, and so forth, lampooned. And by Alcibiades too, over whom the wrath of Pericles must pause and brood ere it falls. I delight in this Sterling, but now that I know him better I shall no longer expect him to write to me. I wish I could talk to you on the grave questions, graver than all literature, which the trifles of each day open. Our doing seems to be a gaudy screen or popinjay to divert the eye from our nondoing. I wish, too, you could know my friends here. A man named Bronson Alcott is a majestic soul, with whom conversation is possible. He is capable of truth, and gives me the same glad astonishment that he should exist which the world does. -------- * Collins and Walsingham, two characters in _The Onyx Ring,_ are partly drawn, not very felicitously, from Carlyle and Goethe. In his _Life of Sterling,_ Carlyle says of the story: "A tale still worth reading, in which, among the imaginary characters, various friends of Sterling's are shadowed forth not always in the truest manner." It is reprinted in the second volume of Sterling's Essays and Tales, edited by Julius Hare. --------- As I hear not yet of your reception of the bill of exchange, which went by the "Royal William" in January, I enclose the duplicate. And now all success to the Lectures of April or May! A new Kingdom with new extravagances of power and splendor I know. Unless you can keep your own secret better in _Rahel,_ &c., you must not give it me to keep. The London _Sartor_ arrived in my hands March 5th, dated the 15th of November, so long is the way from Kennet to Little & Co. The book is welcome, and awakens a sort of nepotism in me,--my brother's child. --R.W. Emerson I rejoice in the good accounts you give me of your household; in your wife's health; in your brother's position. My wife wishes to be affectionately remembered to you and yours. And the lady must continue to love her _old_ Transatlantic friend. XXXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 19 March, 1839 My Dear Friend,--Only last Saturday I despatched a letter to you containing a duplicate of the bill of exchange sent in January, and all the facts I knew of our books; and now comes to me a note from Wheeler, at Cambridge, saying that the printers, on reckoning up their amount of copy, find that nowise can they make 450 pages per volume, as they have promised, for these two last of the _Miscellanies._ They end the third volume with page 390, and they have not but 350 or less pages for the fourth. They ask, What shall be done? Nothing is known to me but to give them _Rahel,_ though I grudge it, for I vastly prefer to end with _Scott._ _Rahel,_ I fancy, cost you no night and no morning, but was writ in that gentle after-dinner hour so friendly to good digestion. Stearns Wheeler dreams that it is possible to draw at this eleventh hour some possible manuscript out of the unedited treasures of Teufelsdrockh's cabinets. If the manuscripts were ready, all fairly copied out by foreseeing scribes in your sanctuary at Chelsea, the good goblin of steam would--with the least waiting, perhaps a few days--bring the packet to our types in time. I have little hope, almost none, from a sally so desperate on possible portfolios; but neither will I be wanting to my sanguine co-editor, your good friend. So I told him I would give you as instant notice as Mr. Rogers at the Merchants' Exchange Bar can contrive, and tell you plainly that we shall proceed to print _Rahel_ when we come so far on; and with that paper end; unless we shall receive some contrary word from you. And if we can obtain any manuscript from you before we have actually bound our book, we will cancel our last sheets and insert it. And so may the friendly Heaven grant a speedy passage to my letter and to yours! I fear the possibility of our success is still further reduced by the season of the year, as the Lectures must shortly be on foot. Well, the best speed to them also. When I think of you as speaking and not writing them, I remember Luther's words, "He that can speak well, the same is a man." I hope you liked John Dwight's translations of Goethe, and his notes. He is a good, susceptible, yearning soul, not so apt to create as to receive with the freest allowance, but I like his books very much. Do think to say in a letter whether you received _from me_ a copy of our edition of your _French Revolution._ I ordered a copy sent to you,--probably wrote your name in it,--but it does not appear in the bookseller's account. Farewell. --R.W. Emerson XXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 13 April, 1839 My Dear Emerson,--Has anything gone wrong with you? How is it that you do not write to me? These three or four weeks, I know not whether _duly_ or not so long, I have been in daily hope of some sign from you; but none comes; not even a Newspaper,--open at the ends. The German Translator, Mr. Dwight, mentioned, at the end of a Letter I had not long ago, that you had given a brilliant course of Lectures at Boston, but had been obliged to _intermit it on account of illness._ Bad news indeed, that latter clause; at the same time, it was thrown in so cursorily I would not let myself be much alarmed; and since that, various New England friends have assured me here that there was nothing of great moment in it, that the business was all well over now, and you safe at Concord again. Yet how is it that I do not hear? I will tell you my guess is that those Boston Carlylean _Miscellanies_ are to blame. The Printer is slack and lazy as Printers are; and you do not wish to write till you can send some news of him? I will hope and believe that only this is it, till I hear worse. I sent you a Dumfries Newspaper the other week, for a sign of my existence and anxiety. A certain Mr. Ellis of Boston is this day packing up a very small memorial of me to your Wife; a poor Print rolled about a bit of wood: let her receive it graciously in defect of better. It comes under your address. Nay, properly it is my Wife's memorial to your Wife. It is to be hung up in the Concord drawing-room. The two Households, divided by wide seas, are to understand always that they are united nevertheless. My special cause for writing this day rather than another is the old story, book business. You have brought that upon yourself, my friend; and must do the best you can with it. After all, why should not Letters be on business too? Many a kind thought, uniting man with man, in gratitude and helpfulness, is founded on business. The speaker at Dartmouth College seems to think it ought to be so. Nor do I dissent.--But the case is this, Fraser and I are just about bargaining for a second edition of the _Revolution._ He will print fifteen hundred for the English market, in a somewhat closer style, and sell them here at twenty- four shillings a copy. His first edition is all gone but some handful; and the man is in haste, and has taken into a mood of hope,--for he is weak and aguish, alternating from hot to cold; otherwise, I find, a very accurate creature, and deals in his unjust trade as justly as any other will. He has settled with me; his half-profits amount to some L130, which by charging me for every presentation copy he cuts down to somewhere about L110; _not_ the lion's share in the gross produce, yet a great share compared with an expectancy no higher than _zero!_ We continue on the same system for this second adventure; I cannot go hawking about in search of new terms; I might go farther and fare worse. And now comes your part of the affair; in which I would fain have had your counsel; but must ask your help, proceeding with my own light alone. After Fraser's fifteen hundred are printed off, the types remain standing, and I for my own behoof throw off five hundred more, designed for your market. Whether five hundred are too many or too few, I can only guess; if too many, we can retain them here and turn them to account; if too few, there is no remedy. At all events, costing me only the paper and press-work, there is surely no Pirate in the Union that can _undersell_ us! Nay, it seems they have a drawback on our taxed paper, sufficient or nearly so to land the cargo at Boston without more charge. You see, therefore, how it is. Can you find me a Bookseller, as for yourself; he and you can fix what price the ware will carry when you see it. Meanwhile I must have his Title-page; I must have his directions (if any be needed); nay, for that matter, you might write a Preface if you liked,--though I see not what you have to say, and recommend silence rather! The book is to be in three volumes duodecimo, and we will take care it be fit to show its face in your market. A few errors of the press; and one correction (about the sinking of the _Vengeur,_ which I find lately to be an indisputable falsehood); these are all the changes. We are to have done printing, Fraser predicts, "in two months";--say two and a half! I suppose you decipher the matter out of this plastering and smearing; and will do what is needful in it. "Great inquiry" is made for the _Miscellanies,_ Fraser says; though he suspects it may perhaps be but one or two men inquiring _often,_--the dog! I am again upon the threshold of extempore lecturing: on "the Revolutions of Modern Europe"; Protestantism, 2 lectures; Puritanism, 2; French Revolution, 2. I almost regret that I had undertaken the thing this year at all, for I am no longer driven by Poverty as heretofore. Nay, I am richer than I have been for ten years; and have a kind of prospect, for the first time this great while, of being allowed to subsist in this world for the future: a great blessing, perhaps the greatest, when it comes as a novelty! However, I thought it right to keep this Lecture business open, come what might. I care less about it than I did; it is not agony and wretched trembling to the marrow of the bone, as it was the last two times. I believe, in spite of all my perpetual indigestions and nervous woes, I am actually getting into better health; the weary heart of me is quieter; I wait in silence for the new chapter,--feeling truly that we are at the end of one period here. I count it _two_ in my autobiography: we shall see what the _third_ is; [if] third there be. But I am in small haste for a third. How true is that of the old Prophets, "The _word of the Lord_ came unto" such and such a one! When it does not come, both Prophet and Prosaist ought to be thankful (after a sort), and rigorously hold their tongue.--Lord Durham's people have come over with golden reports of the Americans, and their brotherly feelings. One Arthur Buller preaches to me, with emphasis, on a quite personal topic till one explodes in laughter to hear him, the good soul: That I, namely, am the most esteemed, &c., and ought to go over and Lecture in all great towns of the Union, and make, &c., &c.! I really do begin to think of it in this interregnum that I am in. But then my Lectures must be written; but then I must become a _hawker, --ach Gott!_ The people are beginning to quote you here: _tant pis pour eux!_ I have found you in two Cambridge books. A certain Mr. Richard M. Milnes, M.P., a beautiful little Tory dilettante poet and politician whom I love much, applied to me for _Nature_ (the others he has) that he might write upon it. Somebody has stolen _Nature_ from me, or many have thumbed it to pieces; I could not find a copy. Send me one, the first chance you have. And see Miss Martineau in the last _Westminster Review:_--these things you are old enough to stand? They are even of benefit? Emerson is not without a select public, the root of a select public on this side of the water too.--Popular Sumner is off to Italy, the most popular of men,--inoffensive, like a worn sixpence that has no physiognomy left. We preferred Coolidge to him in this circle; a square-cut iron man, yet with clear symptoms of a heart in him. Your people will come more and more to their maternal Babylon, will they not, by the steamers?-- Adieu, my dear friend. My Wife joins me in all good prayers for you and yours. --Thomas Carlyle XXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 17 April, 1839 Dear Friend,--Some four days ago I wrote you a long Letter, rather expressive of anxiety about you; it will probably come to hand along with this. I had heard vaguely that you were unwell, and wondered why you did not write. Happily, that point is as good as settled now, even by your silence about it. I have, half an hour ago, received your Concord Letter of the 19th of March. The Letter you speak of there as "written last Saturday" has not yet made its appearance, but may be looked for now shortly: as there is no mention here of any mischance, except the shortcoming of Printers' copy, I infer that all else is in a tolerably correct state; I wait patiently for the "last Saturday" tidings, and will answer as to the matters of copy, in good heart, without loss of a moment. There is nothing of the manuscript sort in Teufelsdrockh's repositories that would suit you well; nothing at all in a completed state, except a long rigmarole dissertation (in a crabbed sardonic vein) about the early history of the Teutonic Kindred, wriggling itself along not in the best style through Proverb lore, and I know not what, till it end (if my memory serve) in a kind of Essay on the _Minnesingers._ It was written almost ten years ago, and never contented me well. It formed part of a lucklessly projected _History of German Literature,_ subsequent portions of which, the _Nibelungen_ and _Reinecke Fox,_ you have already printed. The unfortunate "_Cabinet Library_ Editor," or whatever his title was, broke down; and I let him off,--without paying me; and this alone remains of the misventure; a thing not fit for you, nor indeed at bottom for anybody, though I have never burnt it yet. My other Manuscripts are scratchings and scrawlings;--children's _infant_ souls weeping because they never could be born, but were left there whimpering _in limine primo!_ On this side, therefore, is no help. Nevertheless, it seems to me, otherwise there is. _Varnhagen_ may be printed I think without offence, since there is need of it: if that will make up your fourth volume to a due size, why not? It is the last faint murmur one gives in Periodical Literature, and may indicate the approach of silence and slumber. I know no errors of the Press in _Varnhagen:_ there is one thing about Jean Paul F. Richter's _want_ of humor in his _speech,_ which somehow I could like to have the opportunity of uttering a word on, though _what_ word I see not very well. My notion is partly that V. overstates the thing, taking a Berlin _propos de salon_ for a scientifically accurate record; and partly farther that the defect (if any) was _creditable_ to Jean Paul, indicating that he talked from the abundance of the heart, not burning himself off in miserable perpetual sputter like a Town-wit, but speaking what he had to say, were it dull, were it not dull,--for his own satisfaction first of all! If you in a line or two could express at the right point something of that sort, it were well; yet on the whole, if not, then is almost no matter. Let the whole stand then as the commencement of slumber and stertorous breathing! Varnhagen himself will not bring up your fourth volume to the right size; hardly beyond 380 pages, I should think; yet what more can be done? Do you remember Fraser's Magazine for October, 1832, and a Translation there, with Notes, of a thing called Goethe's Mahrchen? It is by me; I regard it as a most remarkable piece, well worthy of perusal, especially by all readers of mine. The printing of your third volume will of course be finished before this letter arrive; nevertheless I have a plan: that you (as might be done, I suppose, by cancelling and reprinting the concluding leaf or leaves) append the said Translated Tale, in a smaller type, to that volume. It is 21 or 22 pages of _Fraser,_ and will perhaps bring yours up to the mark. Nay, indeed there are two other little Translations from Goethe which I reckon good, though of far less interest than the _Mahrchen;_ I think they are in the Frasers almost immediately preceding; one of them is called _Fragment from Goethe_ (if I remember); in his _Works,_ it is _Novelle;_ it treats of a visit by some princely household to a strange Mountain ruin or castle, and the catastrophe is the escape of a show-lion from its booth in the neighboring Market-Town. I have not the thing here,--alas, sinner that I am, it now strikes me that the "two other things" are this one thing, which my treacherous memory is making into two! This however you will find in the Number immediately, or not far from immediately, preceding that of the _Mahrchen;_ along with which, in the same type with which, it would give us letter-press enough. It ought to stand _before_ the _Mahrchen:_ read it, and say whether it is worthy or not worthy. Will this _Appendix_ do, then? I should really rather like the _Mahrchen_ to be printed, and had thoughts of putting [it] at the end of the English _Sartor._ The other I care not for, intrinsically, but think it very beautiful in its kind.--Some rubbish of my own, in small quantity, exists here and there in _Fraser;_ one story, entitled _Cruthers and Jonson,_* was written sixteen years ago, and printed somewhere early (probably the second year) in that rubbish heap, with several gross errors of the press (mares for maces was one!): it is the first thing I wrote, or among the very first;--otherwise a thing to be kept rather secret, except from the like of you! This or any other of the "original" immaturities I will _not_ recommend as an Appendix; I hope the _Mahrchen,_ or the _Novelle_ and _Mahrchen,_ will suffice. But on the whole, to thee, O Friend, and thy judgment and decision, without appeal, I leave it altogether. Say Yes, say No; do what seemeth good to thee.--Nay now, writing with the speed of light, another consideration strikes me: Why should Volume Third be interfered with if it is finished? Why will not this _Appendix_ do, these _Appendixes,_ to hang to the skirts of Volume Four as well? Perhaps better! the _Mahrchen_ in any case closing the rear. I leave it all to Emerson and Stearns Wheeler, my more than kind Editors: E. knows it better than I; be his decision irrevocable. ----------- * "Cruthers and Jonson; or, The Outskirts of Life. A True Story." _Fraser's Magazine,_ January, 1831. ------------ This letter is far too long, but I had not time to make it shorter.--I got your _French Revolution,_ and have seen no other: my name is on it in your hand. I received Dwight's Book, liked it, and have answered him: a good youth, of the kind you describe; no Englishman, to my knowledge, has yet uttered as much sense about Goethe and German things. I go this day to settle with Fraser about printers and a second edition of the _Revolution_ Book,--as specified in the other Letter: five hundred copies for America, which are to cost he computes about 2/7, and _your_ Bookseller will bind them, and defy Piracy. My Lectures come on, this day two weeks: O Heaven! I cannot "speak"; I can only gasp and writhe and stutter, a spectacle to gods and fashionables,--being forced to it by want of money. In five weeks I shall be free, and then--! Shall it be Switzerland, shall it be Scotland, nay, shall it be America and Concord? Ever your affectionate T. Carlyle All love from both of us to the Mother and Boy. My Wife is better than usual; rejoices in the promise of summer now at last visible after a spring like Greenland. Scarcity, discontent, fast ripening towards desperation, extends far and wide among our working people. God help them! In man as yet is small help. There will be work yet, before that account is liquidated; a generation or two of work! Miss Martineau is gone to Switzerland, after emitting _Deerwood_ [sic], a Novel.* How do you like it? people ask. To which there are serious answers returnable, but few so good as none. Ah me! Lady Bulwer too has written a Novel, in satire of her Husband. I saw the Husband not long since; one of the wretchedest Phantasms, it seemed to me, I had yet fallen in with,--many, many, as they are here. The L100 Sterling Bill came, in due time, in perfect order; and will be payable one of these days. I forget dates; but had well calculated that before the 19th of March this piece of news and my gratitude for it had reached you. -------- * _Deerbrook_ -------- XXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, 20 April, 1839 My Dear Friend,--Learning here in town that letters may go today to the "Great Western," I seize the hour to communicate a bookseller's message. I told Brown, of C.C. Little & Co., that you think of stereotyping the _History._ He says that he can make it profitable to himself and to you to use your plates here in this manner (which he desires may be kept secret here, and I suppose with you also). You are to get your plates made and proved, then you are to send them out here to him, having first insured them in London, and he is to pay you a price for every copy he prints from them. As soon as he has printed a supply for our market,--and we want, he says, five hundred copies now,--he will send them back to you. I told him I thought he had better fix the price per copy to be paid by him, and I would send it to you as his offer. He is willing to do so, but not today. It was only this morning I informed him of your plan. I think in a fortnight I shall need to write again,--probably to introduce to you my countrywoman, Miss Sedgwick, the writer of affectionate New England tales and the like, who is about to go to Europe for a year or more. I will then get somewhat definite from Brown as to rates and prices. Brown thought you might better send the plates here first, as we are in immediate want of copies; and afterwards print with them in London. He is quite sure that it would be more profitable to print them in this manner than to try to import and sell here the books after being manufactured in London. On the 30th of April we shall ship at New York the first two volumes of the _Miscellanies,_ two hundred and sixty copies. In four weeks, the second two volumes will be finished, unless we wait for something to be added by yourself, agreeably to a suggestion of Wheeler's and mine. Two copies of _Schiller's Life_ will go in the same box. We send them to the port of London. When these are gone, only one hundred copies remain unsold of the first two volumes (_Miscellanies_). Brown said it was important that the plates should be proved correct at London by striking off impressions before they were sent hither. This is the whole of my present message. I shall have somewhat presently to reply to your last letter, received three weeks since. And may health and peace dwell with you and yours! --R.W. Emerson XXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 25 April, 1839 My Dear Friend,--Behold my account! A very simple thing, is it not! A very mouse, after such months, almost years, of promise! Despise it not, however; for such is my extreme dulness at figures and statements that this nothing has been a fear to me, a long time, how to extract it from the bookseller's promiscuous account with me, and from obscure records of my own. You see that it promises yet to pay you between $60 and $70 more, if Mr. Fuller (a gentleman of Providence, who procured many _subscribers_ for us there) and Mr. Owen (who owes us also for copies subscribed for) will pay us our demand. They have both been lately reminded of their delinquency. Herrick and Noyes, you will see credited for eight copies, $18. They are booksellers who supplied eight subscribers, and charged us $2 for their trouble and some alleged damage to a copy. One copy you will see is sold to Ann Pomeroy for $3. This lady bought the copy of me, and preferred sending me $3 to sending $2.50 for so good a book. You will notice one or two other variations in the prices, in each of which I aimed to use a friend's discretion. Add lastly, that you must revise all my figures, as I am a hopeless blunderer, and quite lately made a brilliant mistake in regard to the amount of 9 multiplied by 12. Have I asked you whether you received from me a copy of the _History?_ I designated a copy to go, and the bookseller's boy thinks he sent one, but there is none charged in their account. The account of the _Miscellanies_ does not prosper quite so well.... Thanks for your too friendly and generous expectations from my wit. Alas! my friend, I can do no such gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of literature, the reporters; suburban men. But in God we are all great, all rich, each entitled to say, All is mine. I hope the advancing season has restored health to your wife, and, if benedictions will help her, tell her we send them on every west wind. My wife and babes are well. --R.W.E. XL. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 28 April, 1839 My Dear Friend,--I received last night C.C. Little & Co.'s proposition in reference to the stereotyping the _History._ Their offer is based on my statement that you proposed to print the book in two volumes similar to ours. They say, "We should be willing to pay three hundred dollars for the use of plates for striking off five hundred copies of the two volumes, with the farther agreement that, if we wished to strike off another five hundred in nine months after the publication of the first five hundred, we should have the liberty to do so, paying the same again; that is, another three hundred dollars for the privilege of printing another five hundred copies;--the plates to be furnished us ready for use and free of expense." They add, "Should Mr. Carlyle send the plates to this country, he should be particular to ship them to _this port direct._" I am no judge of the liberality of this offer, as I know nothing of the expense of the plates. The men, Little and Brown, are fair in their dealings, and the most respectable book-selling firm in Boston. When you have considered the matter, I hope you will send me as early an answer as you can. For as we have no protection from pirates we must use speed. I ought to have added to my account and statement sent by Miss Sedgwick one explanation. You will find in the account a credit of $13.75, agreed on with Little & Co., as compensation for lost subscribers. We had a little book, kept in the bookshop, into which were transferred the names of subscribers from all lists which were returned from various places. These names amounted to two hundred, more or less. When we came to settle the account, this book could not be found. They expressed much regret, and made much vain searching. Their account with me recorded only one hundred and thirty-four copies delivered to subscribers. Thus, a large number, say sixty-six, had been sold by them to our subscribers, and our half-dollar on each copy put in their pocket as commission, expressly contrary to treaty! With some ado, I mustered fifty-five names of subscribers known to me as such, not recorded on their books as having received copies, and demanded $27.50. They replied that they also had claims; that they had sent the books to distant subscribers in various States, and had charged no freight (with one or two exceptions, when the books went alone); that other booksellers had, no doubt, in many cases, sold the copies to subscribers for which I claimed the half-dollar; and lastly, which is indeed the moving reason, that they had sent twenty copies up the Mississippi to a bookseller (in Vicksburg, I think), who had made them no return. On these grounds they proposed that they should pay half my demand, and so compromise. They said, however, that, if I insisted, they would pay the whole. I was so glad to close the affair with mutual goodwill that I said with the unjust steward, write $13.75. So are we all pleased at your expense. [Greek] I think I will not give you any more historiettes,--they take too much room; but as I write this time only on business, you are welcome to this from your friend, --R.W. Emerson XLI. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, 15 May, 1839. My Dear Friend,--Last Saturday, 11th instant, I had your two letters of 13th and 17th April. Before now, you must have one or two notes of mine touching the stereotype plates: a proposition superseded by your new plan. I have also despatched one or two sheets lately containing accounts. Now for the new matter. I was in Boston yesterday, and saw Brown, the bookseller. He accedes gladly, to the project of five hundred American copies of the _History._ He says, that the duty is the same on books in sheets and books in boards; and desires, therefore, that the books may come out _bound._ You bind yours in cloth? Put up his in the same style as those for your market, only a little more strongly than is the custom with London books, as it will only cost a little more. He would be glad also to have his name added in the titlepage (London: Published by J. Fraser; and Boston: by C.C. Little and James Brown, 112 Washington St.), or is not this the right way? He only said he should like to have his name added. He threatens to charge me 20 percent commission. If, as he computes from your hint of 2/7, the work costs you, say, 70 cents per copy, unbound; he reckons it at a dollar, when bound; then 75 cents duty in Boston, $1.75. He thinks we cannot set a higher price on it than $3.50, _because_ we sold our former edition for $2.50. On that price, his commissions would be 70 cents; and $1.05 per copy will to you. If when we see the book, we venture to put a higher price on it, your remainder shall be more. I confess, when I set this forth on paper, it looks as bad as your English trade,--this barefaced 20 percent; but their plea is, We guarantee the sales; we advertise; we pay you when it is sold, though we give our customers six months' credit. I have made no final bargain with the man, and perhaps before the books arrive I shall be better advised, and may get better terms from him. Meantime, give me the best advice you can; and despatch the books with all speed, and if you send six hundred, I think, we will sell them. ------------ * In the first edition of this Correspondence a portion of this letter was printed from a rough draft, such as Emerson was accustomed to make of his letters to Carlyle. I owe the original to the kindness of the editor of the _Athenaeum,_ in the pages of which it was printed. ----------- I went to the _Athenaeum,_ and procured the _Frasers'_ and will print the _Novelle_ and the _Mahrchen_ at the end of the Fourth Volume, which has been loitering under one workman for a week or two past, awaiting this arrival. Now we will finish at once. _Cruthers and Jonson_ I read gladly. It is indispensable to such as would see the fountains of Nile: but I incline to what seems your opinion, that it will be better in the final edition of your Works than in this present First Collection of them. I believe I could find more matter now of yours if we should be pinched again. The Cat-Raphael? and _Mirabeau_ and _Macaulay?_ Stearns Wheeler is very faithful in his loving labor,--has taken a world of pains with the sweetest smile. We are very fortunate in having him to friend.--For the _Miscellanies_ once more, the two boxes containing two hundred and sixty copies of the first series went to sea in the "St. James," Captain Sebor, addressed to Mr. Fraser. (I hope rightly addressed; yet I saw a memorandum at Munroe's in which he was named _John_ Fraser.) Arthur Buller has my hearty thanks for his good and true witnessing. And now that our old advice is indorsed by John Bull himself, you will believe and come. Nothing can be better. As soon as the lectures are over, let the trunks be packed. Only my wife and my blessed sister dear--Elizabeth Hoar, betrothed in better times to my brother Charles,--my wife and this lovely nun do say that Mrs. Carlyle must come hither also; that it will make her strong, and lengthen her days on the earth, and cheer theirs also. Come, and make a home with me; and let us make a truth that is better than dreams. From this farm-house of mine you shall sally forth as God shall invite you, and "lecture in the great cities." You shall do it by proclamation of your own, or by the mediation of a committee, which will readily be found. Wife, mother, and sister shall nurse thy wife meantime, and you shall bring your republican laurels home so fast that she shall not sigh for the Old England. Eyes here do sparkle at the very thought. And my little placid Musketaquid River looked gayer today in the sun. In very sooth and love, my friend, I shall look for you in August. If aught that we know not must forbid your wife at present, you will still come. In October, you shall lecture in Boston; in November, in New York; in December, in Philadelphia; in January, in Washington. I can show you three or four great natures, as yet unsung by Harriet Martineau or Anna Jameson, that content the heart and provoke the mind. And for yourself, you shall be as cynical and headstrong and fantastical as you can be. I rejoice in what you say of better health and better prospects. I was glad to hear of Milnes, whose _Poems_ already lay on my table when your letter came. Since the little _Nature_ book is not quite dead, I have sent you a few copies, and wish you would offer one to Mr. Milnes with my respects. I hope before a great while I may have somewhat better to send him. I am ashamed that my little books should be "quoted" as you say. My affectionate salutations to Mrs. Carlyle, who is to sanction and enforce all I have written on the migration. In the prospect of your coming I feel it to be foolish to write. I have very much to say to you. But now only Good Bye. --R.W. Emerson XLII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 29 May, 1839 My Dear Emerson,--Your Letter, dated Boston, 20th April, has been here for some two weeks. Miss Sedgwick, whom it taught us to expect in "about a fortnight," has yet given no note of herself, but shall be right welcome whenever she appears. Miss Martineau's absence (she is in Switzerland this summer) will probably be a loss to the fair Pilgrim;--which of course the rest of us ought to exert ourselves to make good.... My Lectures are happily over ten days ago; with "success" enough, as it is called; the only _valuable_ part of which is some L200, gained with great pain, but also with great brevity:--economical respite for another solar year! The people were boundlessly tolerant; my agitation beforehand was less this year, my remorse afterwards proportionally greater. There was but one moderately good Lecture, the last,--on Sausculottism, to an audience mostly Tory, and rustling with the beautifulest quality silks! Two things I find: first that _I ought to have had a horse;_ I had only three incidental rides or gallops, hired rides; my horse _Yankee_ is never yet purchased, but it shall be, for I cannot live, except in great pain, without a horse. It was sweet beyond measure to escape out of the dustwhirlpool here, and _fly,_ in solitude, through the ocean of verdure and splendor, as far as Harrow and back again; and one's nerves were _clear_ next day, and words lying in one like water in a well. But the _second_ thing I found was, that extempore speaking, especially in the way of Lecture, is an _art_ or craft, and requires an apprenticeship, which I have never served. Repeatedly it has come into my head that I should go to America, this very Fall, and belecture you from North to South till I learn it! Such a thing does lie in the bottom-scenes, should hard come to hard; and looks pleasant enough.--On the whole, I say sometimes, I must either begin a Book, or do it. Books are the lasting thing; Lectures are like corn ground into flour; there are loaves for today, but no wheat harvests for next year. Rudiments of a new Book (thank Heaven!) do sometimes disclose themselves in me. _Festina lente._ It ought to be better than the _French Revolution;_ I mean better written. The greater part of that Book, as I read proof-sheets of it in these weeks, does nothing but _disgust_ me. And yet it was, as nearly as was good, the utmost that lay in me. I should not like to be nearer killed with any other Book!--Books too are a triviality. Life alone is great; with its infinite spaces, its everlasting times, with its Death, with its Heaven and its Hell. Ah me! Wordsworth is here at present; a garrulous, rather watery, not wearisome old man. There is a freshness as of brooks and mountain breezes in him; one says of him: Thou art not great, but thou art genuine; well speed _thou._ Sterling is home from Italy, recovered in health, indeed very well could he but _sit still._ He is for Clifton, near Bristol, for the next three months. I hear him speak of some sonnet or other he means to address to you: as for me he knows well that I call his verses timber toned, without true melody either in thought, phrase or sound. The good John! Did you ever see such a vacant turnip-lantern as that Walsingham Goethe? Iconoclast Collins strikes his wooden shoe through him, and passes on, saying almost nothing.--My space is done! I greet the little _maidkin,_ and bid her welcome to this unutterable world. Commend her, poor little thing, to her little Brother, to her Mother and Father;-- Nature, I suppose, has sent her strong letters of recommendation, without our help, to them all. Where I shall be in six weeks is not very certain; likeliest in Scotland, whither our whole household, servant and all, is pressingly invited, where they have provided horses and gigs. Letters sent hither will still find me, or lie waiting for me, safe: but perhaps the _speediest_ address will be "Care of Fraser, 215 Regent Street." My Brother wants me to the Tyrol and Vienna; but I think I shall not go. Adieu, dear friend. It is a great treasure to me that I have you in this world. My Wife salutes you all.-- Yours ever and ever, T. Carlyle XLIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 24 June, 1833 Dear Friend,--Two Letters from you were brought hither by Miss Sedgwick last week. The series of post Letters is a little embroiled in my head; but I have a conviction that all hitherto due have arrived; that up to the date of my last despatch (a _Proof-sheet_ and a Letter), which ought to be getting into your hands in these very days, our correspondence is clear. That Letter and Proof-sheet, two separate pieces, were sent to Liverpool some three weeks ago, to be despatched by the first conveyance thence; as I say, they are probably in Boston about this time. The Proof-sheet was one of the forty-seven such which the new _French Revolution_ is to consist of: with this, as with a correct sample, you were to act upon some Boston Bookseller, and make a bargain for me,--or at least report that none was to be made. A bad bargain will content me now, my hopes are not at all high. For the present, I am to announce on the part of Bookseller Fraser that the First Portion of our celebrated _Miscellanies_ have been hovering about on these coasts for several weeks, have lain safe "in the River" for some two weeks, and ought at last to be safe in Fraser's shop today or else to morrow. I will ask there, and verify, before this Letter go. The reason of these "two weeks in the river" is that the packages were addressed "_John_ Fraser, London," and the people had tried all the Frasers in London before they attempted the right individual, James, of 215 Regent Street. Of course, the like mistake in the second case will be avoided. A Letter, put ashore at Falmouth, and properly addressed, but without any _signature,_ had first of all announced that the thing was at the door, and so with this "John Fraser," it has been knocking ever since, finding difficult admission. In the present instance, such delay has done no ill, for Fraser will not sell till the Second Portion come; and with this the mistake will be avoided. What has shocked poor James much more is a circumstance which your Boston Booksellers have no power to avoid: the "enormousness" of the charges in our Port here! He sends me the account of them last Saturday, with eyes-- such as drew Priam's curtains: L31 and odd silver, whereof L28 as duty on Books at L5 per cwt. is charged by the rapacious Custom-house alone! What help, O James? I answer: we cannot bombard the British Custom-house, and sack it, and explode it; we must yield, and pay it the money; thankful for what is still left.--On the whole, one has to learn by trying. This notable finance-expedient, of printing in the one country what is to be sold in the other, did not take Vandalic custom-houses into view, which nevertheless do seem to exist. We must persist in it for the present reciprocal pair of times, having started in it for these: but on future occasions always, we can ask the past; and _see_ whether it be not better to let each side of the water stand on its own basis. As for your "accounts," my Friend, I find them clear as day, verifiable to the uttermost farthing. You are a good man to conquer your horror of arithmetic; and, like hydrophobic Peter of Russia making himself a sailor, become an Accountant for my sake. But now will you forgive me if I never do verify this same account, or look at it more in this world except as a memento of affection, its arithmetical ciphers so many hierograms, really _sacred_ to me! A reflection I cannot but make is that at bottom this money was all yours; not a penny of it belonged to me by any law except that of helpful Friendship. I feel as if I could not examine it without a kind of crime. For the rest, you may rejoice to think that, thanks to you and the Books, and to Heaven over all, I am for the present no longer poor; but have a reasonable prospect of existing, which, as I calculate, is literally the most that money can do for a man. Not for these twelve years, never since I had a house to maintain with money, have I had as much money in my possession as even now. _Allah kerim!_ We will hope all that is good on that side. And herewith enough of _it._ You tell me you are but "a reporter": I like you for thinking so. And you will never know that it is _not true,_ till you have tried. Meanwhile, far be it from me to urge you to a trial before your time come. Ah, it will come, and soon enough; much better, perhaps, if it never came!--A man has "_such_ a baptism to be baptized withal," no easy baptism; and is "straitened till it be accomplished." As for me I honor peace before all things; the silence of a great soul is to me greater than anything it will ever say, it ever can say. Be tranquil, my friend; utter no word till you cannot help it;--and think yourself a "reporter," till you find (not with any great joy) that you are not altogether that! We have not yet seen Miss Sedgwick: your Letters with her card were sent hither by post we went up next day, but she was out; no meeting could be arranged earlier than tomorrow evening, when we look for her here. Her reception, I have no doubt, will be abundantly flattering in this England. American Notabilities are daily becoming notabler among us; the ties of the two Parishes, Mother and Daughter, getting closer and closer knit. Indissoluble ties:--I reckon that this huge smoky Wen may, for some centuries yet, be the best Mycale for our Saxon _Panionium,_ a yearly meeting-place of "All the Saxons," from beyond the Atlantic, from the Antipodes, or wherever the restless wanderers dwell and toil. After centuries, if Boston, if New York, have become the most convenient _"All-Saxondom,"_ we will right cheerfully go thither to hold such festival, and leave the Wen.-- Not many days ago I saw at breakfast the notabest of all your Notabilities, Daniel Webster. He is a magnificent specimen; you might say to all the world, This is your Yankee Englishman, such Limbs _we_ make in Yankeeland! As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be _blown;_ the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed:--I have not traced as much of _silent Berserkir-rage,_ that I remember of, in any other man. "I guess I should not like to be your nigger!"-- Webster is not loquacious, but he is pertinent, conclusive; a dignified, perfectly bred man, though not English in breeding: a man worthy of the best reception from us; and meeting such, I understand. He did not speak much with me that morning, but seemed not at all to dislike me: I meditate whether it is fit or not fit that I should seek out his residence, and leave _my_ card too, before I go? Probably not; for the man is political, seemingly altogether; has been at the Queen's levee, &c., &c.: it is simply as a mastiff-mouthed _man_ that he is interesting to me, and not otherwise at all. In about seven days hence we go to Scotland till the July heats be over. That is our resolution after all. Our address there, probably till the end of August, is "Templand, Thornhill, Dumfries, N. B.,"--the residence of my Mother-in-law, within a day's drive of my Mother's. Any Letter of yours sent by the old constant address (Cheyne Row, Chelsea) will still find me there; but the other, for that time, will be a day or two shorter. We all go, servant and all. I am bent on writing _something;_ but have no faith that I shall be able. I _must_ try. There is a thing of mine in _Fraser_ for July, of no account, about the "sinking of the _Vengeur_" as you will see. The _French Revolution_ printing is not to stop; two thirds of it are done; at this present rate, it ought to finish, and the whole be ready, within three weeks hence. A Letter will be here from you about that time, I think: I will print no title-page for the Five Hundred till it do come. "Published by _Fraser and_ Little" would, I suppose, be unobjectionable, though Fraser is the most nervous of creatures: but why put _him_ in at all, since these Five hundred copies are wholly Little's and yours? Adieu, my Friend. Our blessings are with you and your house. My wife grows better with the hot weather; I, always worse. Yours ever, T. Carlyle I say not a word about America or Lecturing at present; because I mean to consider it intently in Scotland, and there to decide. My Brother is to be at Ischl (not far from Salzburg) during Summer: he was anxious to have me there, and I to have gone; but--but--Adieu. _Fraser's Shop._ Books not yet come, but known to be safe, and expected soon. Nay, the dexterous Fraser has argued away L15 of the duty, he says! All is right therefore. N.B. he says you are to send the second Portion _in sheets,_ the weight will be less. This if it be still time.--_Basta._ --T.C. XLIV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 4 July, 1839 I hear tonight, O excellent man! that, unless I send a letter to Boston tomorrow with the peep of day, it will miss the Liverpool steamer, which sails earlier than I dreamed of. O foolish Steamer! I am not ready to write. The facts are not yet ripe, though on the turn of the blush. Couldst not wait a little? Hurry is for slaves;--and Aristotle, if I rightly remember only that little from my college lesson, affirmed that the high-minded man never walked fast. O foolish Steamer! wait but a week, and we will style thee Megalopsyche, and hang thee by the Argo in the stars. Meantime I will not deny the dear and admirable man the fragments of intelligence I have. Be it known unto you then, Thomas Carlyle, that I received yesterday morning your letter by the "Liverpool" with great contentment of heart and mind, in all respects, saving that the American Hegira, so often predicted on your side and prayed on ours, is treated with a most unbecoming levity and oblivion; and, moreover, that you do not seem to have received all the letters I seem to have sent. With the letter came the proof-sheet safe, and shall be presently exhibited to Little and Brown. You must have already the result of our first colloquy on that matter. I can now bring the thing nearer to certainty. But you must print their names as before advised on the title-page. Nearly four weeks ago Ellis sent me the noble Italian print for my wife.* She is in Boston at this time, and I believe will be glad that I have written without her aid or word this time, for she was so deeply pleased with the gift that she said she never could write to you. It came timely to me at least. It is a right morning thought, full of health and flowing genius, and I rejoice in it. It is fitly framed and tomorrow is to be hung in the parlor. -------- * Morghen's engraving of Guido's Aurora. -------- Our Munroe's press, you must believe, was of Aristotle's category of the high-minded and slow. Chiding would do no good. They still said, "We have but one copy, and so but one hand at work"! At last, on the 1st of July, the book appeared in the market, but does not come from the binder fast enough to supply the instant demand; and therefore your two hundred and sixty copies cannot part from New York until the 20th of July. They will be on board the London packet which sails on that day. The publisher has his instructions to bind the volumes to match the old ones. Our year since the publication of the Vols. I. and II. is just complete, and I have set the man on the account, but doubt if I get it before twelve or fourteen days. All the edition is gone except forty copies, he told me; and asked me if I would not begin to print a small edition of this First Series, five hundred, as we have five hundred of the new Series too many, with that view. But I am now so old a fox that I suspend majestically my answer until I have his account. For on the 21st of July I am to pay $462 for the paper of this new book: and by and by the printer's bill,--whose amount I do not yet know; and it is better to be "slow and high-minded" a little more, since we have been so much, and not go deeper into these men's debt until we have tasted somewhat of their credit. We are to get, as you know, by contract, near a thousand dollars from these first two volumes; yet a month ago I was forced to borrow two hundred dollars for you on interest, such advances had the account required. But the coming account will enlighten us all. I am very happy in the "success" of the London lectures. I have no word to add tonight, only that Sterling is not timber-toned, that I love his poetry, that I admire his prose with reservations here and there. What he knows he writes manly and well. Now and then he puts in a pasteboard man; but all our readers here take _Blackwood_ for his sake, and lately seek him in vain. I am getting on with some studies of mine prosperously for me, have got three essays nearly done, and who knows but in the autumn I shall have a book? Meantime my little boy and maid, my mother and wife, are well, and the two ladies send to you and yours affectionate regards,--they would fain say urgent invitations. My mother sends tonight, my wife always. I shall send you presently a copy of a translation published here of Eckermann, by Margaret Fuller, a friend of mine and of yours, for the sake of its preface mainly. She is a most accomplished lady, and her culture belongs rather to Europe than to America. Good bye. --R.W. Emerson XLV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 8 August, 1839 Dear Friend,--This day came the letter dated 24 June, with "steam packet" written by you on the outside, but no paddles wheeled it through the sea. It is forty-five days old, and too old to do its errand even had it come twenty days sooner--so far as printer and bookbinder are concerned. I am truly grieved for the mischance of the _John_ Fraser, and will duly lecture the sinning bookseller. I noticed the misnomer in a letter of his New York correspondent, and, I believe, mentioned to you in a letter my fear of such a mischance. I am more sorry for the costliness of this adventure to you, though in a gracious note to me you cut down the fine one half. The new books, tardily printed, were tardily bound and tardily put to sea on the packet ship "Ontario," which left New York for London on the 1st of August. At least this was the promise of Munroe & Co. I stood over the boxes in which they were packing them in the latter days of July. I hope they have not gone to John again, but you must keep an eye to both names.... I cannot tell you how glad I am that you have seen my brave Senator, and seen him as I see him. All my days I have wished that he should go to England, and never more than when I listened two or three times to debates in the House of Commons. We send out usually mean persons as public agents, mere partisans, for whom I can only hope that no man with eyes will meet them; and now those thirsty eyes, those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine, those fatal perceptions, have fallen full on the great forehead which I followed about all my young days, from court-house to senate-chamber, from caucus to street. He has his own sins no doubt, is no saint, is a prodigal. He has drunk this rum of Party too so long, that his strong head is soaked, sometimes even like the soft sponges, but the "man's a man for a' that." Better, he is a great boy,--as wilful, as nonchalant and good-humored. But you must hear him speak, not a show speech which he never does well, but _with cause_ he can strike a stroke like a smith. I owe to him a hundred fine hours and two or three moments of Eloquence. His voice in a great house is admirable. I am sorry if you decided not to visit him. He loves a _man,_ too. I do not know him, but my brother Edward read law with him, and loved him, and afterwards in sick and unfortunate days received the steadiest kindness from him. Well, I am glad you are to think in earnest in Scotland of our Cisatlantic claims. We shall have more rights over the wise and brave, I believe before many years or months. We shall have more men and a better cause than has yet moved on our stagnant waters. I think our Church, so called, must presently vanish. There is a universal timidity, conformity, and rage; and on the other hand the most resolute realism in the young. The man Alcott bides his time. I have a young poet in this village named Thoreau, who writes the truest verses. I pine to show you my treasures; and tell your wife, we have women who deserve to know her. --R.W. Emerson The Yankees read and study the new volumes of _Miscellanies_ even more than the old. The "Sam Johnson" and "Scott" are great favorites. Stearns Wheeler corrected proofs affectionately to the last. Truth and Health be with you alway! XLVI. Carlyle to Emerson Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, 4 September, 1839 Dear Emerson,--A cheerful and right welcome Letter of yours, dated 4th July, reached me here, duly forwarded, some three weeks ago; I delayed answering till there could some definite statement, as to bales of literature shipped or landed, or other matter of business forwarded a stage, be made. I am here, with my Wife, rusticating again, these two months; amid diluvian rains, Chartism, Teetotalism, deficient harvest, and general complaint and confusion; which not being able to mend, all that I can do is to heed them as little as possible. "What care I for the house? I am only a lodger." On the whole, I have sat under the wing of Saint Swithin; uncheery, sluggish, murky, as the wettest of his Days;--hoping always, nevertheless, that blue sky, figurative and real, does exist, and will demonstrate itself by and by. I have been the stupidest and laziest of men. I could not write even to you, till some palpable call told me I must. Yesternight, however, there arrives a despatch from Fraser, apprising me that the American _Miscellanies,_ second cargo, are announced from Portsmouth, and "will probably be in the River tomorrow"; where accordingly they in all likelihood now are, a fair landing and good welcome to them! Fraser "knows not whether they are bound or not"; but will soon know. The first cargo, of which I have a specimen here, contented him extremely; only there was one fatality, the cloth of the binding was multiplex, party-colored, some sets done in green, others in red, blue, perhaps skyblue! Now if the second cargo were not multiplex, party-colored, nay multiplex, _in exact concordance with the first,_ as seemed almost impossible--?--Alas, in that case, one could not well predict the issue!--Seriously, it is a most handsome Book you have made; and I have nothing to return but thanks and again thanks. By the bye, if you do print a small second edition of the First Portion, I might have had a small set of errata ready: but _where are they?_ The Book only came into my hand here a few days ago; and I have been whipt from post to pillar without will of my own, without energy to form a will! The only glaring error I recollect at this moment is one somewhere in the second article on _Jean Paul:_ "Osion" (I think, or some such thing) instead of "Orson": it is not an original American error, but copied from the English; if the Printer get his eye upon it, let him rectify; if not, not, I _deserve_ to have it stand against me there. Fraser's joy, should the Books prove either unbound or multiplex in the right way, will be great and unalloyed; he calculates on selling all the copies very soon. He has begun reprinting Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_ too, the _Apprenticeship_ and _Travels_ under one; and hopes to remunerate himself for that by and by: whether there will then remain any small peculium for me is but uncertain; meanwhile I correct the press, nothing doubting. One of these I call my best Translation, the other my worst; I have read that latter, the _Apprenticeship,_ again in these weeks; not without surprise, disappointment, nay, aversion here and there, yet on the whole with ever new esteem. I find I can pardon _all_ things in a man except purblindness, falseness of vision,--for, indeed, does not that presuppose every other kind of falseness? But let me hasten to say that the _French Revolution,_ five hundred strong for the New England market, is also, as Fraser advises, "to go to sea in three days." It is bound in red cloth, gilt; a pretty book, James says; which he will sell for twenty-five shillings here;--nay, the London brotherhood have "subscribed" for one hundred and eighty at once, which he considers great work. I directed him to consign to Little and Brown in Boston, the _property_ of the thing _yours,_ with such phraseology and formalities as they use in those cases. I paid him for it yesterday (to save discount) L95; that is the whole cost to me, twenty or thirty pounds more than was once calculated on. Do the best with it you can, my friend; and never mind the result. If the thing fail, as is likely enough, we will simply quit that transport trade, and my experience must be _paid for._ The Title-page was "Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown," then in a second line and smaller type, "London James Fraser"; to which arrangement James made not the slightest objection, or indeed rather seemed to like it.--So much for trade matters: is it not _enough?_ I declare I blush sometimes, and wonder where the good Emerson gets all his patience. We shall be through the affair one day, and find something better to speak about than dollars and pounds. And yet, as you will say, why not even of dollars? Ah, there are leaden-worded [bills] of exchange I have seen which have had an almost sacred character to me! _Pauca verba._ Doubt not your new utterances are eagerly waited for here; above all things the "Book" is what I want to see. You might have told me what it was about. We shall see by and by. A man that has discerned somewhat, and knows it for himself, let him speak it out, and thank Heaven. I pray that they do not confuse you by praises; their blame will do no harm at all. Praise is sweet to all men; and yet alas, alas, if the light of one's own heart go out, bedimmed with poor vapors and sickly false glitterings and flashings, what profit is it! Happier in darkness, in all manner of mere outward darkness, misfortune and neglect, "so that _thou canst endure,_"--which however one cannot to all lengths. God speed you, my Brother! I hope all good things of you; and wonder whether like Phoebus Apollo you are destined to be a youth forever.--Sterling will be right glad to hear your praises; not unmerited, for he is a man among millions that John of mine, though his perpetual mobility wears me out at times. Did he ever write to you? His latest speculation was that he should and would; but I fancy it is among the clouds again. I hear from him the other day, out of Welsh villages where he passed his boyhood, &c., all in a flow of "lyrical recognition," hope, faith, and sanguine unrest; I have even some thoughts of returning by Bristol (in a week or so, that must be), and seeing him. The dog has been reviewing me, he says, and it is coming out in the next _Westminster!_ He hates terribly my doctrine of _"Silence."_ As to America and lecturing, I cannot in this torpid condition venture to say one word. Really it is not impossible; and yet lecturing is a thing I shall never grow to like; still less lionizing, Martineau-ing: _Ach Gott!_ My Wife sends a thousand regards; _she_ will never get across the ocean, you must come to her; she was almost _dead_ crossing from Liverpool hither, and declares she will never go to sea for any purpose whatsoever again. Never till next time! My good old Mother is here, my Brother John (home with his Duke from Italy); all send blessings and affection to you and yours. Adieu till I get to London. Yours ever, T. Carlyle XLVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 8 December, 1839 My Dear Emerson,--What a time since we have written to one another! was it you that defalcated? Alas, I fear it was myself; I have had a feeling these nine or ten weeks that you were expecting to hear from me; that I absolutely could not write. Your kind gift of Fuller's _Eckermann_* was handed in to our Hackney coach, in Regent Street, as we wended homewards from the railway and Scotland, on perhaps the 8th of September last; a welcome memorial of distant friends and doings: nay, perhaps there was a Letter two weeks prior to that:--I am a great sinner! But the truth is, I could not write; and now I can and do it! ---------- * "Conversations with Goethe. Translated from the German of Eckermann. By S.M. Fuller." Boston, 1839. This was the fourth volume in the series of "Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature," edited by George Ripley. The book has a characteristic Preface by Miss Fuller, in which she speaks of Carlyle as "the only competent English critic" of Goethe. ---------- Our sojourn in Scotland was stagnant, sad; but tranquil, _well let alone,_--an indispensable blessing to a poor creature fretted to fiddle-strings, as I grow to be in this Babylon, take it as I will. We had eight weeks of desolate rain; with about eight days bright as diamonds intercalated in that black monotony of bad weather. The old Hills are the same; the old Streams go gushing along as in past years, in past ages; but he that looks on them is no longer the same: and the old Friends, where are they? I walk silent through my old haunts in that country; sunk usually in inexpressible reflections, in an immeasurable chaos of musings and mopings that cannot be reflected or articulated. The only work I had on hand was one that would not prosper with me: an Article for the _Quarterly Review_ on the state of the Working Classes here. The thoughts were familiar to me, old, many years old; but the utterance of them, in what spoken dialect to utter them! The _Quarterly Review_ was not an eligible vehicle, and yet the eligiblest; of Whigs, abandoned to Dilettantism and withered sceptical conventionality, there was no hope at all; the _London-and-Westminster_ Radicals, wedded to their Benthamee Formulas, and tremulous at their own shadows, expressly rejected my proposal many months ago: Tories alone remained; Tories I often think have more stuff in them, in spite of their blindness, than any other class we have;--Walter Scott's _sympathy_ with his fellow creatures, what is it compared with Sydney Smith's, with a Poor Law Commissioner's! Well: this thing would not prosper with me in Scotland at all; nor here at all, where nevertheless I had to persist writing; writing and burning, and cursing my destiny, and then again writing. Finally the thing came out, as an Essay on _Chartism;_ was shown to Lockhart, according to agreement; was praised by him, but was also found unsuitable by him; suitable to _explode_ a whole fleet of Quarterlies into sky-rockets in these times! And now Fraser publishes it himself, with some additions, as a little Volume; and it will go forth in a week or two on its own footing; and England will see what she has to say to it, whether something or nothing; and one man, as usual, is right glad that he has nothing more to do with it. This is the reason why I could not write. I mean to send you the Proof-sheets of this thing, to do with as you see cause; there will be but some five or six, I think. It is probable my New England brothers may approve some portions of it; may be curious to see it reprinted; you ought to say Yes or No in regard to that. I think I will send all the sheets together; or at farthest, at two times. Fraser, when we returned hither, had already received his _Miscellanies;_ had about despatched his five hundred _French Revolutions,_ insured and so, forth, consigned, I suppose, to your protection and the proper booksellers; probably they have got over from New York into your neighborhood before now. Much good may they do you! The _Miscellanies,_ with their variegated binding, proved to be in perfect order; and are now all sold; with much regret from poor James that we had not a thousand more of them! This thousand he now sets about providing by his own industry, poor man; I am revising the American copy in these days; the printer is to proceed forthwith. I admire the good Stearns Wheeler as I proceed; I write to him my thanks by this post, and send him by Kennet a copy of Goethe's _Meister,_ for symbol of acknowledgment. Another copy goes off for you, to the care of Little and Company. Fraser has got it out two weeks ago; a respectable enough book, now that the version is corrected somewhat. Tell me whether you dislike it less; what you do think of it? By the by, have you not learned to read German now? I rather think you have. It is three months spent well, if ever months were, for a thinking Englishman of this age.--I hope Kennet will use more despatch than he sometimes does. Thank Heaven for these Boston Steamers they project! May the Nereids and Poseidon favor them! They will bring us a thousand miles nearer, at one step; by and by we shall be of one parish after all. During Autumn I speculated often about a Hegira into New England this very year: but alas! my horror of _Lecturing_ continues great; and what else is there for me to do there? These several years I have had no wish so pressing as to hold my peace. I begin again to feel some use in articulate speech; perhaps I shall one day have something that I want to utter even in your side of the water. We shall see. Patience, and shuffle the cards.--I saw no more of Webster; did not even learn well where he was, till lately I noticed in the Newspapers that he had gone home again. A certain Mr. Brown (I think) brought me a letter from you, not long since; I forwarded him to Cambridge and Scotland: a modest inoffensive man. He said he had never personally met with Emerson. My Wife recalled to him the story of the Scotch Traveler on the top of Vesuvius: "Never saw so beautiful a scene in the world!"--"Nor I," replied a stranger standing there, "except once; on the top of Dunmiot, in the Ochil Hills in Scotland."--"Good Heavens! That is a part of my Estate, and I was never there! I will go thither." Yes, do!--We have seen no other Transoceanic that I remember. We expect your _Book_ soon! We know the subject of your Winter Lectures too; at least Miss Martineau thinks she does, and makes us think so. Heaven speed the work! Heaven send my good Emerson a clear utterance, in all right ways, of the nobleness that dwells in him! He knows what silence means; let him know speech also, in its season the two are like canvas and pigment, like darkness and light-image painted thereon; the one is essential to the other, not possible without the other. Poor Miss Martineau is in Newcastle-on-Tyne this winter; sick, painfully not dangerously; with a surgical brother-in-law. Her meagre didacticalities afflict me no more; but also her blithe friendly presence cheers me no more. We wish she were back. This silence, I calculate, forced silence, will do her much good. If I were a Legislator, I would order every man, once a week or so, to lock his lips together, and utter no vocable at all for four-and-twenty hours: it would do him an immense benefit, poor fellow. Such racket, and cackle of mere hearsay and sincere-cant, grows at last entirely deafening, enough to drive one mad, --like the voice of mere infinite rookeries answering your voice! Silence, silence! Sterling sent you a Letter from Clifton, which I set under way here, having added the address. He is not well again, the good Sterling; talks of Madeira this season again: but I hope otherwise. You of course read his sublime "article"? I tell him it was--a thing untellable! Mr. Southey has fallen, it seems, into a mournful condition: oblivion, mute hebetation, loss of all faculty. He suffered greatly, nursing his former wife in her insanity, for years till her relief by death; suffered, worked, and made no moan; the brunt of the task over, he sank into collapse in the hands of a new wife he had just wedded. What a lot for him; for her especially! The most excitable but most methodic man I have ever seen. [Greek] that is a word that awaits us all.--I have my brother here at present; though talking of Lisbon with his Buccleuchs. My Wife seems better than of late winters. I actually had a Horse, nay actually have it, though it has gone to the country till the mud abate again! It did me perceptible good; I mean to try it farther. I am no longer so desperately poor as I have been for twelve years back; sentence of starvation or beggary seems revoked at last, a blessedness really very considerable. Thanks, thanks! We send a thousand regards to the two little ones, to the two mothers. _Valete nostrum memores._ --T. Carlyle XLVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 12 December, 1839 My Dear Friend,--Not until the 29th of November did the five hundred copies of the _French Revolution_ arrive in Boston. Fraser unhappily sent them to New York, whence they came not without long delays. They came in perfectly good order, not in the pretty red you told us of, but in a sober green;--not so handsome and salable a back, our booksellers said, as their own; but in every other respect a good book. The duties at the New York Custom House on these and a quantity of other books sent by Fraser amounted to $400.36, whereof, I understand, the _French Revolution_ pays for its share $243. No bill has been brought us for freight, so we conclude that you have paid it. I confided the book very much to the conscience and discretion of Little and Brown, and after some ciphering they settle to sell it at $3.75 per copy, wherefrom you are to get the cost of the book, and (say) $1.10 per copy profit, and no more. The booksellers eat the rest. The book is rather too dear for our market of cheap manufactures, and therefore we are obliged to give the booksellers a good percentage to get it off at all: for we stand in daily danger of a cheap edition from some rival neighbor. I hope to give you good news of its sale soon, although I have been assured today that no book sells, the times are so bad. Brown had disposed of fifty or sixty copies to the trade, and twelve at retail. He doubted not to sell them all in six months.... Several persons have asked me to get some copies of the _German Romance_ sent over here for sale. Last week a gentleman desired me to say he wanted four copies, and today I have been charged to procure another. I think, if you will send me by Little and Brown, through Longman, six copies, we can find an immediate market. It gives me great joy to write to my friend once more, slow as you may think me to use the privilege. For a good while I dared believe you were coming hither, and why should I write?--and now for weeks I have been absorbed in my foolish lectures, of which only two are yet delivered and ended. There should be eight more; subject, "The Present Age." Out of these follies I remember you with glad heart. Lately I had Sterling's letter, which, since I have read his article on you, I am determined to answer speedily. I delighted in the spirit of that paper, loving you so well and accusing you so conscientiously. What does he at Clifton? If you communicate with him, tell him I thank him for his letter, and hold him dear. I am very happy lately in adding one or two new friends to my little circle, and you may be sure every friend of mine is a friend of yours. So when you come here you shall not be lonely. A new person is always to me a great event, and will not let me sleep.--I believe I was not wise to volunteer myself to this fever fit of lecturing again. I ought to have written instead in silence and serenity. Yet I work better under this base necessity, and then I have a certain delight (base also?) in speaking to a multitude. But my joy in friends, those sacred people, is my consolation for the mishaps of the adventure, and they for the most part come to me from this _publication_ of myself.--After ten or twelve weeks I think I shall address myself earnestly to writing, and give some form to my formless scripture. I beg you will write to me and tell me what you do, and give me good news of your wife and your brother. Can they not see the necessity of your coming to look after your American interests? My wife and mother love both you and them. A young man of New York told me the other day he was about getting you an invitation from an Association in that city to give them a course of lectures on such terms as would at least make you whole in the expenses of coming thither. We could easily do that in Boston. --R.W. Emerson What manner of person is Heraud? Do you read Landor, or know him, O seeing man? Farewell! XLIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 6 January, 1840 My Dear Emerson,--It is you, I surely think, that are in my debt now;* nevertheless I must fling you another word: may it cross one from you coming hither--as near the _Lizard Point_ as it likes! --------- * The preceding letter had not yet arrived. --------- Some four sheets making a Pamphlet called _Chartism_ addressed to you at Concord are, I suppose, snorting along through the waters this morning, part of the Cargo of the "British Queen." At least I gave them to Mr. Brown (your unseen friend) about ten days ago, who promised to dispose of them; the "British Queen," he said, was the earliest chance. The Pamphlet itself (or rather booklet, for Fraser has gilt it, &c., and asks five shillings for it as a Book) is out since then; radicals and others yelping considerably in a discordant manner about it; I have nothing other to say to _you_ about it than what I said last time, that the sheets were _yours_ to do with as you saw good,--to burn if you reckoned that fittest. It is not entirely a Political Pamphlet; nay, there are one or two things in it which my American Friends specially may like: but the interests discussed are altogether English, and cannot be considered as likely to concern New-Englishmen very much. However, it will probably be itself in your hand before this sheet, and you will have determined what is fit. A copy of _Wilhelm Meister,_ two copies, one for Stearns Wheeler, are probably in some of the "Line Ships" at this time too: good voyage to them! The _French Revolutions_ were all shipped, invoiced, &c.; they have, I will suppose, arrived safe, as we shall hear by and by. What freightages, landings, and embarkments! For only two days ago I sent you off, through Kennet, another Book: John Sterling's _Poems,_ which he has collected into a volume. Poor John has overworked himself again, or the climate without fault on his side has proved too hard for him: he sails for Madeira again next week! His Doctors tell me there is no intrinsic danger; but they judge the measure safe as one of precaution. It is very mortifying he had nestled himself down at Clifton, thinking he might now hope to continue there; and lo! he has to fly again.--Did you get his letter? The address to him now will be, for three months to come, "_Edward_ Sterling, Esq., South Place, Knightsbridge, London," his Father's designation. Farther I must not omit to say that Richard Monckton Milnes purposes, through the strength of Heaven, to _review_ you! In the next Number of the _London and Westminster,_ the courageous youth will do this feat, if they let him. Nay, he has already done it, the Paper being actually written he employed me last week in negotiating with the Editors about it; and their answer was, "Send us the Paper, it promises very well." We shall see whether it comes out or not; keeping silence till then. Milnes is a _Tory_ Member of Parliament; think of that! For the rest, he describes his religion in these terms: "I profess to be a Crypto-Catholic." Conceive the man! A most bland-smiling, semi- quizzical, affectionate, high-bred, Italianized little man, who has long olive-blond hair, a dimple, next to no chin, and flings his arm round your neck when he addresses you in public society! Let us hear now what he will say, of the American _Vates._* --------- * The end of this letter has been cut off. --------- L. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 17 January, 1840 Dear Emerson,--Your Letter of the 12th of December, greatly, to my satisfaction, has arrived; the struggling Steamship, in spite of all hurricanes, has brought it safe across the waters to me. I find it good to write you a word in return straightway; though I think there are already two, or perhaps even three, messages of mine to you flying about unacknowledged somewhere under the moon; nay, the last of them perhaps may go by the same packet as this, --having been forwarded, as this will be, to _Liverpool,_ after the "British Queen" sailed from London. Your account of the _French Revolution_ packages, and prognosis of what Little and Brown will do with them, is altogether as it should be. I apprised Fraser instantly of his invoiceless Books, &c.; he answers, that order has been taken in that long since, "instructions" sent, and, I conclude, arrangements for _bills_ least of all forgotten. I mentioned what share of the duty was his; and that your men meant to draw on him for it. That is all right. As to the _French Revolution,_ I agree with your Booksellers altogether about it; the American Edition actually pleases myself better for looking at; nor do I know that this new English one has much superiority for use: it is despicably printed, I fear, so far as false spellings and other slovenlinesses can go. Fraser "finds the people like it"; _credat Judaeus;_--as for me, I have told him I will _not print any more_ with that man, but with some other man. Curious enough, the price Little and Brown have fixed upon was the price I remember guessing at beforehand, and the result they propose to realize for me corresponds closely with my prophecy too. Thanks, a thousand thanks, for all the trouble you never grudge to take. We shall get ourselves handsomely out of this export and import speculation; and know, taught at a rather _cheap_ rate, not to embark in the like again. There went off a _Wilhelm Meister_ for you, and a letter to announce it, several weeks ago; that was message first. Your traveling neighbor, Brown, took charge of a Pamphlet named _Chartism,_ to be put into the "British Queen's" Letter-bag (where I hope, and doubt not, he did put it, though I have seen nothing of him since); that and a letter in reference to it was message second. Thirdly, I sent off a volume of _Poems_ by Sterling, likewise announced in that letter. And now this that I actually write is the fourth (it turns out to be) and last of all the messages. Let us take Arithmetic along with us in all things.--Of _Chartism_ I have nothing farther to say, except that Fraser is striking off another One Thousand copies to be called Second Edition; and that the people accuse me, not of being an incendiary and speculative Sansculotte threatening to become practical, but of being a Tory,--thank Heaven. The _Miscellanies_ are at press; at _two_ presses; to be out, as Hope asseverates, in March: five volumes, without _Chartism;_ with Hoffmann and Tieck from German Romance, stuck in somewhere as Appendix; with some other trifles stuck in elsewhere, chiefly as Appendix; and no essential change from the Boston Edition. Fraser, "overwhelmed with business," does not yet send me his net result of those Two Hundred and Fifty Copies sold off some time ago; so soon as he does, you shall hear of it for your satisfaction.--As to _German Romance,_ tell my friends that it has been out of print these ten years; procurable, of late not without difficulty, only in the Old-Bookshops. The comfort is that the best part of it stands in the new _Wilhelm Meister:_ Fraser and I had some thought of adding Tieck's and Richter's parts, had they suited for a volume; the rest may without detriment to anybody perish. Such press-correctings and arrangings waste my time here, not in the agreeablest way. I begin, though in as sulky a state of health as ever, to look again towards some new kind of work. I have often thought of Cromwell and Puritans; but do not see how the subject can be presented still alive. A subject dead is not worth presenting. Meanwhile I read rubbish of Books; Eichhorn, Grimm, &c.; very considerable rubbish; one grain in the cart load worth pocketing. It is pity I have no appetite for lecturing! Many applications have been made to me here;--none more touching to me than one, the day before yesterday, by a fine, innocent-looking Scotch lad, in the name of himself and certain other Booksellers' shopmen eastward in the City! I cannot get them out of my head. Poor fellows! they have nobody to say an honest word to them, in this articulate-speaking world, and they apply to _me._--For you, good friend, I account you luckier; I do verily: lecture there what innumerable things you have got to say on "The Present Age";--yet withal do not forget to _write_ either, for that is the lasting plan after all. I have a curious Note, sent me for inspection the other day; it is addressed to a Scotch Mr. Erskine (famed among the saints here) by a Madame Necker, Madame de Stael's kinswoman, to whom he, the said Mr. Erskine, had lent your first Pamphlet at Geneva. She regards you with a certain love, yet a _shuddering_ love. She says, "Cela sent l'Americain qui apres avoir abattu les forets a coup de hache, croit qu'on doit de meme conquerir le monde intellectuel"! What R.M. Milnes will say of you we hope also to see.--I know both Heraud and Landor; but alas, what room is here! Another sheet with less of "Arithmetic" in it will soon be allowed me. Adieu, dear friend. Yours, ever and ever, T. Carlyle LI. Emerson to Carlyle* New York, 18 March, 1840 My Dear Friend,--I have just seen the steamer "British Queen" enter the harbor from sea, and here lies the "Great Western," to sail tomorrow. I will not resist hints so broad upon my long procrastinations. You shall have at least a tardy acknowledgment that I received in January your letter of December, which I should have answered at once had it not found me absorbed in writing foolish lectures which were then in high tide. I had written you, a little earlier, tidings of the receipt of your _French Revolution._ Your letter was very welcome, as all your letters are. I have since seen tidings of the _Essay on Chartism_ in an English periodical, but have not yet got my proof-sheets. They are probably still rolling somewhere outside of this port, for all our packetships have had the longest passages: only one has come in for many a week. We will be as patient as we can. -------- * This letter appeared in the _Athenaeum,_ for July 22, 1882 -------- I am here on a visit to my brother, who is a lawyer in this city, and lives at Staten Island, at a distance of half an hour's sail. The city has such immense natural advantages and such capabilities of boundless growth, and such varied and ever increasing accommodations and appliances for eye and ear, for memory and wit, for locomotion and lavation, and all manner of delectation, that I see that the poor fellows that live here do get some compensation for the sale of their souls. And how they multiply! They estimate the population today at 350,000, and forty years ago, it is said, there were but 20,000. But I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities. They are great conspiracies; the parties are all maskers, who have taken mutual oaths of silence not to betray each other's secret and each to keep the other's madness in countenance. You can scarce drive any craft here that does not seem a subornation of the treason. I believe in the spade and an acre of good ground. Whoso cuts a straight path to his own bread, by the help of God in the sun and rain and sprouting of the grain, seems to me an _universal_ workman. He solves the problem of life, not for one, but for all men of sound body. I wish I may one day send you word, or, better, show you the fact, that I live by my hands without loss of memory or of hope. And yet I am of such a puny constitution, as far as concerns bodily labor, that perhaps I never shall. We will see. Did I tell you that we hope shortly to send you some American verses and prose of good intent? My vivacious friend Margaret Fuller is to edit a journal whose first number she promises for the 1st of July next, which I think will be written with a good will if written at all. I saw some poetical fragments which charmed me,--if only the writer consents to give them to the public. I believe I have yet little to tell you of myself. I ended in the middle of February my ten lectures on the Present Age. They are attended by four hundred and fifty to five hundred people, and the young people are so attentive; and out of the hall ask me so many questions, that I assume all the airs of Age and Sapience. I am very happy in the sympathy and society of from six to a dozen persons, who teach me to hope and expect everything from my countrymen. We shall have many Richmonds in the field presently. I turn my face homeward to-morrow, and this summer I mean to resume my endeavor to make some presentable book of Essays out of my mountain of manuscript, were it only for the sake of clearance. I left my wife, and boy, and girl,--the softest, gracefulest little maiden alive, creeping like a turtle with head erect all about the house,--well at home a week ago. The boy has two deep blue wells for eyes, into which I gladly peer when I am tired. Ellen, they say, has no such depth of orb, but I believe I love her better than ever I did the boy. I brought my mother with me here to spend the summer with William Emerson and his wife and ruddy boy of four years. All these persons love and honour you in proportion to their knowledge and years. My letter will find you, I suppose, meditating new lectures for your London disciples. May love and truth inspire them! I can see easily that my predictions are coming to pass, and that. having waited until your Fame wag in the floodtide, we shall not now see you at all on western shores. Our saintly Dr. T---, I am told, had a letter within a year from Lord Byron's daughter, _informing_ the good man of the appearance of a certain wonderful genius in London named Thomas Carlyle, and all his astonishing workings on her own and her friends' brains, and him the very monster whom the Doctor had been honoring with his best dread and consternation these five years. But do come in one of Mr. Cunard's ships as soon as the booksellers have made you rich. If they fail to do so, come and read lectures which the Yankees will pay for. Give my love and hope and perpetual remembrance to your wife, and my wife's also, who bears her in her kindest heart, and who resolves every now and then to write to her, that she may thank her for the beautiful Guido. You told me to send you no more accounts. But I certainly shall, as our financial relations are grown more complex, and I wish at least to relieve myself of this unwonted burden of booksellers' accounts and long delays, by sharing them. I have had one of their estimates by me a year, waiting to send. Farewell. --R.W.E. LII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 1 April, 1840 My Dear Emerson,--A Letter has been due to you from me, if not by palpable law of reciprocity, yet by other law and right, for some week or two. I meant to write, so soon as Fraser and I had got a settlement effected. The traveling Sumner being about to return into your neighborhood, I gladly accept his offer to take a message to you. I wish I had anything beyond a dull Letter to send! But unless, as my Wife suggests, I go and get you a D'Orsay _Portrait_ of myself, I see not what there is! Do you read German or not? I now and then fall in with a curious German volume, not perhaps so easily accessible in the Western world. Tell me. Or do you ever mean to learn it? I decidedly wish you would.--As to the D'Orsay Portrait, it is a real curiosity: Count D'Orsay the emperor of European Dandies portraying the Prophet of spiritual Sansculottism! He came rolling down hither one day, many months ago, in his sun-chariot, to the bedazzlement of all bystanders; found me in dusty gray-plaid dressing-gown, grim as the spirit of Presbyterianism (my Wife said), and contrived to get along well enough with me. I found him a man worth talking to, once and away; a man of decided natural gifts; every utterance of his containing in it a wild caricature _likeness_ of some object or other; a dashing man, who might, some twenty years sooner born, have become one of Bonaparte's Marshals, and _is,_ alas,--Count D'Orsay! The Portrait he dashed off in some twenty minutes (I was dining there, to meet Landor); we have not chanced to meet together since, and I refuse to undergo any more eight-o'clock dinners for such an object.--Now if I do not send you the Portrait, after all? Fraser's account of the _Miscellanies_ stood legibly extended over large spaces of paper, and was in several senses amazing to look upon. I trouble _you_ only with the result. Two Hundred and forty-eight copies (for there were some one or two "imperfect"): all these he had sold, at two guineas each; and sold swiftly, for I recollect in December, or perhaps November, he told me he was "holding back," not to run entirely out. Well, of the L500 and odd so realized for these Books, the portion that belonged to me was L239,--the L261 had been the expense of handing the ware to Emerson over the counter, and drawing in the coin for it! "Rules of the Trade";--it is a Trade, one would surmise, in which the Devil has a large interest. However,--not to spend an instant polluting one's eyesight with that side of it,--let me feel joyfully, with thanks to Heaven and America, that I do receive such a sum in the shape of wages, by decidedly the noblest method in which wages could come to a man. Without Friendship, without Ralph Waldo Emerson, there had been no sixpence of that money here. Thanks, and again thanks. This earth is not an unmingled ball of Mud, after all. Sunbeams visit it;--mud _and_ sunbeams are the stuff it has from of old consisted of.--I hasten away from the Ledger, with the mere good- news that James is altogether content with the "progress" of all these Books, including even the well-abused _Chartism_ Book. We are just on the point of finishing our English reprint of the _Miscellanies;_ of which I hope to send you a copy before long. And now why do not _you_ write to me? Your Lectures must be done long ago. Or are you perhaps writing a Book? I shall be right glad to hear of that; and withal to hear that you do not hurry yourself, but strive with deliberate energy to produce what in you is best. Certainly, I think, a right Book does lie in the man! It is to be remembered also always that the true value is determined by what we _do not_ write! There is nothing truer than that now all but forgotten truth; it is eternally true. He whom it concerns can consider it.--You have doubtless seen Milnes's review of you. I know not that you will find it to strike direct upon the secret of _Emerson,_ to hit the nail on the head, anywhere at all; I rather think not. But it is gently, not unlovingly done;--and lays the first plank of a kind of pulpit for you here and throughout all Saxondom: a thing rather to be thankful for. It on the whole surpassed my expectations. Milnes tells me he is sending you a copy and a Note, by Sumner. He is really a pretty little robin-redbreast of a man. You asked me about Landor and Heraud. Before my paper entirely vanish, let me put down a word about them. Heraud is a loquacious scribacious little man, of middle age, of parboiled greasy aspect, whom Leigh Hunt describes as "wavering in the most astonishing manner between being Something and Nothing." To me he is chiefly remarkable as being still--with his entirely enormous vanity and very small stock of faculty--out of Bedlam. He picked up a notion or two from Coleridge many years ago; and has ever since been rattling them in his head, like peas in an empty bladder, and calling on the world to "List the Music of the spheres." He escapes _assassination,_ as I calculate, chiefly by being the cheerfulest best-natured little creature extant.--You cannot kill him he laughs so softly, even when he is like killing you. John Mill said, "I forgive him freely for interpreting the Universe, now when I find he cannot pronounce the _h's!_" Really this is no caricature; you have not seen the match of Heraud in your days. I mentioned to him once that Novalis had said, "The highest problem of Authorship is the writing of a Bible."-- "That is precisely what I am doing!" answered the aspiring, unaspirating.*--Of Landor I have not got much benefit either. We met first, some four years ago, on Cheyne Walk here: a tall, broad, burly man, with gray hair, and large, fierce-rolling eyes; of the most restless, impetuous vivacity, not to be held in by the most perfect breeding,--expressing itself in high-colored superlatives, indeed in reckless exaggeration, now and then in a dry sharp laugh not of sport but of mockery; a wild man, whom no extent of culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or the other of the object; and _sides_ of an object are all that he sees. He is not an original man; in most cases one but sighs over the spectacle of common place torn to rags. I find him painful as a writer; like a soul ever promising to take wing into the Aether, yet never doing it, ever splashing webfooted in the terrene mud, and only splashing the worse the more he strives! Two new tragedies of his that I read lately are the fatalest stuff I have seen for long: not an ingot; ah no, a distracted coil of wire-drawings salable in no market. Poor Landor has left his Wife (who is said to be a fool) in Italy, with his children, who would not quit her; but it seems he has honestly surrendered all his money to her, except a bare annuity for furnished lodgings; and now lives at Bath, a solitary sexagenarian, in that manner. He visits London in May; but says always it would kill him soon: alas, I can well believe that! They say he has a kind heart; nor does it seem unlikely: a perfectly honest heart, free and fearless, dwelling amid such hallucinations, excitations, tempestuous confusions, I can see he has. Enough of him! Me he likes well enough, more thanks to him; but two hours of such speech as his leave me giddy and undone. I have seen some other Lions, and Lion's-_providers;_ but consider them a worthless species.--When will you write, then? Consider my frightful outlook with a Course of Lectures to give "On Heroes and Hero-worship,"--from Odin to Robert Burns! My Wife salutes you all. Good be in the Concord Household! Yours ever, T. Carlyle -------- * There is an account of Heraud by an admirer in the _Dial_ for October, 1842, p. 241. It contrasts curiously and instructively with Carlyle's sketch. -------- LIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 21 April, 1840 My Dear Friend,--Three weeks ago I received a letter from you following another in the week before, which I should have immediately acknowledged but that I was promised a private opportunity for the 25th of April, by which time I promised myself to send you sheets of accounts. I had also written you from New York about the middle of March. But now I suppose Mr. Grinnell--a hospitable, humane, modest gentleman in Providence, R.I., a merchant, much beloved by all his townspeople, and, though no scholar, yet very fond of silently listening to such-- is packing his trunk to go to England. He offered to carry any letters for me, and as at his house during my visit to Providence I was eagerly catechised by all comers concerning Thomas Carlyle, I thought it behoved me to offer him for his brethren, sisters, and companions' sake, the joy of seeing the living face of that wonderful man. Let him see thy face and pass on his way. I who cannot see it, nor hear the voice that comes forth of it, must even betake me to this paper to repay the best I can the love of the Scottish man, and in the hope to deserve more. Your letter announces _Wilhelm Meister,_ Sterling's _Poems,_ and _Chartism._ I am very rich, or am to be. But Kennet is no Mercury. _Wilhelm_ and _Sterling_ have not yet made their appearance, though diligently inquired after by Stearns Wheeler and me. Little and Brown now correspond with Longman, not with Kennet. But they will come soon, perhaps are already arrived. _Chartism_ arrived at Concord by mail not until one of the last days of March, though dated by you, I think, the 21st of December. I returned home on the 3d of April, and found it waiting. All that is therein said is well and strongly said, and as the words are barbed and feathered the memory of men cannot choose but carry them whithersoever men go. And yet I thought the book itself instructed me to look for more. We seemed to have a right to an answer less concise to a question so grave and humane, and put with energy and eloquence. I mean that whatever probabilities or possibilities of solution occurred should have been opened to us in some detail. But now it stands as a preliminary word, and you will one day, when the fact itself is riper; write the Second Lesson; or those whom you have influenced will. I read the book twice hastily through, and sent it directly to press, fearing to be forestalled, for the London book was in Boston already. Little and Brown are to print it. Their estimate is:-- Printing page for page with copy ....... $63.35 Paper .....................................44.00 Binding .................................. 90.00 Total .................................... $197.35 Costing say twenty cents per copy for one thousand copies bound. The book to sell for fifty cents: the Bookseller's commission twenty percent on the Retail price. The author's profit fifteen cents per copy. They intend, if a cheap edition is published,-- no unlikely event,--to stitch the book as pamphlet, and sell it at thirty-eight cents. I expect it from the press in a few days. I shall not on this sheet break into the other accounts, as I am expecting hourly from Munroe's clerk an entire account of R.W.E. with T.C., of which I have furnished him with all the facts I had, and he is to write it out in the manner of his craft. I did not give it to him until I had made some unsuccessful experiments myself. I am here at work now for a fortnight to spin some single cord out of my thousand and one strands of every color and texture that lie raveled around me in old snarls. We need to be possessed with a mountainous conviction of the value of our advice to our contemporaries, if we will take such pains to find what that is. But no, it is the pleasure of the spinning that betrays poor spinners into the loss of so much good time. I shall work with the more diligence on this book to-be of mine, that you inform me again and again that my penny tracts are still extant; nay, that, beside friendly men, learned and poetic men read and even review them. I am like Scholasticus of the Greek Primer, who was ashamed to bring out so small a dead child before such grand people. Pygmalion shall try if he cannot fashion a better, certainly a bigger.--I am sad to hear that Sterling sails again for his health. I am ungrateful not to have written to him, as his letter was very welcome to me. I will not promise again until I do it. I received a note last week forwarded by Mr. Hume from New York, and instantly replied to greet the good messenger to our Babylonian city, and sent him letters to a few friends of mine there. But my brother writes me that he had left New York for Washington when he went to seek him at his lodgings. I hope he will come northward presently, and let us see his face. _22 April._--Last evening came true the promised account drawn up by Munroe's clerk, Chapman. I have studied it with more zeal than success. An account seems an ingenious way of burying facts: it asks wit equal to his who hid them to find them. I am far as yet from being master of this statement, yet, as I have promised it so long, I will send it now, and study a copy of it at my leisure. It is intended to begin where the last account I sent you, viz. of _French Revolution,_ ended, with a balance of $9.53 in your favor.... I send you also a paper which Munroe drew up a long time ago by way of satisfying me that, so far as the first and second volumes [of the _Miscellanies_] were concerned, the result had accorded with the promise that you should have $1,000 profit from the edition. We prosper marvelously on paper, but the realized benefit loiters. Will you now set some friend of yours in Fraser's shop at work on this paper, and see if this statement is true and transparent. I trust the Munroe firm,-- chiefly Nichols, the clerical partner,--and yet it is a duty to understand one's own affair. When I ask, at each six months' reckoning, why we should always be in debt to them, they still remind me of new and newer printing, and promise correspondent profits at last. By sending you this account I make it entirely an affair between you and them. You will have all the facts which any of us know. I am only concerned as having advanced the sums which are charged in the account for the payment of paper and printing, and which promise to liquidate themselves soon, for Munroe declares he shall have $550 to pay me in a few days. For the benefit of all parties bid your clerk sift them. One word more and I have done with this matter, which shall not be weary if it comes to good,--the account of the London five hundred _French Revolution_ is not yet six months old, and so does not come in. Neither does that of the second edition of the first and second volumes of the _Miscellanies,_ for the same reason. They will come in due time. I have very good hope that my friend Margaret Fuller's Journal--after many false baptisms now saying it will be called _The Dial,_ and which is to appear in July-- will give you a better knowledge of our young people than any you have had. I will see that it goes to you when the sun first shines on its face. You asked me if I read German, and I forget if I have answered. I have contrived to read almost every volume of Goethe, and I have fifty-five, but I have read nothing else: but I have not now looked even into Goethe for a long time. There is no great need that I should discourse to you on books, least of all on _his_ books; but in a lecture on Literature, in my course last winter, I blurted all my nonsense on that subject, and who knows but Margaret Fuller may be glad to print it and send it to you? I know not. A Bronson Alcott, who is a great man if he cannot write well, has come to Concord with his wife and three children and taken a cottage and an acre of ground to get his living by the help of God and his own spade. I see that some of the Education people in England have a school called "Alcott House" after my friend. At home here he is despised and rejected of men as much as was ever Pestalozzi. But the creature thinks and talks, and I am glad and proud of my neighbor. He is interested more than need is in the Editor Heraud. So do not fail to tell me of him. Of Landor I would gladly know your knowledge. And now I think I will release your eyes. Yours always, R.W. Emerson LIV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 June, 1840 My Dear Carlyle,--Since I wrote a couple of letters to you,--I know not exactly when, but in near succession many weeks ago,-- there has come to me _Wilhelm Meister_ in three volumes, goodly to see, good to read,--indeed quite irresistible;--for though I thought I knew it all, I began at the beginning and read to the end of the _Apprenticeship,_ and no doubt shall despatch the _Travels,_ on the earliest holiday. My conclusions and inferences therefrom I will spare you now, since I appended them to a piece I had been copying fairly for Margaret Fuller's _Dial,_--"Thoughts on Modern Literature," and which is the substance of a lecture in my last winter's course. But I learn that my paper is crowded out of the first Number, and is not to appear until October. I will not reckon the accidents that threaten the ghost of an article through three months of pre- existence! Meantime, I rest your glad debtor for the good book. With it came Sterling's _Poems,_ which, in the interim, I have acknowledged in a letter to him. Sumner has since brought me a gay letter from yourself, concerning, in part, Landor and Heraud; in which as I know justice is not done to the one I suppose it is not done to the other. But Heraud I give up freely to your tender mercies: I have no wish to save him. Landor can be shorn of all that is false and foolish, and yet leave a great deal for me to admire. Many years ago I have read a hundred fine memorable things in the _Imaginary Conversations,_ though I know well the faults of that book, and the _Pericles_ and _Aspasia_ within two years has given me delight. I was introduced to the man Landor when I was in Florence, and he was very kind to me in answering a multitude of questions. His speech, I remember, was below his writing. I love the rich variety of his mind, his proud taste, his penetrating glances, and the poetic loftiness of his sentiment, which rises now and then to the meridian, though with the flight, I own, rather of a rocket than an orb, and terminated sometimes by a sudden tumble. I suspect you of very short and dashing reading in his books; and yet I should think you would like him,--both of you such glorious haters of cant. Forgive me, I have put you two together twenty times in my thought as the only writers who have the old briskness and vivacity. But you must leave me to my bad taste and my perverse and whimsical combinations. I have written to Mr. Milnes who sent me by Sumner a copy of his article with a note. I addressed my letter to him at "London,"-- no more. Will it ever reach him? I told him that if I should print more he would find me worse than ever with my rash, unwhipped generalization. For my journals, which I dot here at home day by day, are full of disjointed dreams, audacities, unsystematic irresponsible lampoons of systems, and all manner of rambling reveries, the poor drupes and berries I find in my basket after endless and aimless rambles in woods and pastures. I ask constantly of all men whether life may not be poetic as well as stupid? I shall try and persuade Mr. Calvert, who has sent to me for a letter to you, to find room in his trunk for a poor lithograph portrait of our Concord "Battle-field," so called, and village, that you may see the faint effigy of the fields and houses in which we walk and love you. The view includes my Grandfather's house (under the trees near the Monument), in which I lived for a time until I married and bought my present house, which is not in the scope of this drawing. I will roll up two of them, and, as Sterling seems to be more nomadic than you, I beg you will send him also this particle of foreign parts. With this, or presently after it, I shall send a copy of the _Dial._ It is not yet much; indeed, though no copy has come to me, I know it is far short of what it should be, for they have suffered puffs and dulness to creep in for the sake of the complement of pages; but it is better than anything we had; and I have some poetry communicated to me for the next number which I wish Sterling and Milnes to see. In this number what say you to the _Elegy_ written by a youth who grew up in this town and lives near me,--Henry Thoreau? A criticism on Persius is his also. From the papers of my brother Charles, I gave them the fragments on Homer, Shakespeare, Burke: and my brother Edward wrote the little _Farewell,_ when last he left his home. The Address of the Editors to the Readers is all the prose that is mine, and whether they have printed a few verses for me I do not know. I am daily expecting an account for you from Little and Brown. They promised it at this time. It will speedily follow this sheet, if it do not accompany it. But I am determined, if I can, to send one letter which is not on business. Send me some word of the Lectures. I have yet seen only the initial notices. Surely you will send me some time the D'Orsay portrait. Sumner thinks Mrs. Carlyle was very well when he saw her last, which makes me glad.--I wish you both to love me, as I am affectionately Yours, --R.W. Emerson LV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 2 July, 1840 My Dear Emerson,--Surely I am a sinful man to neglect so long making any acknowledgment of the benevolent and beneficent Arithmetic you sent me! It is many weeks, perhaps it is months, since the worthy citizen--your Host as I understood you in some of your Northern States--stept in here, one mild evening, with his mild honest face and manners; presented me your Bookseller Accounts; talked for half an hour, and then went his way into France. Much has come and gone since then; Letters of yours, beautiful Disciples of yours:--I pray you forgive me! I have been lecturing; I have been sick; I have been beaten about in all ways. Nay, at bottom, it was only three days ago that I got the _Bibliopoliana_ back from Fraser; to whom, as you recommended, I, totally inadequate like yourself to understand such things, had straightway handed them for examination. I always put off writing till Fraser should have spoken. I did not urge him, or he would have spoken any day: there is my sin. Fraser declares the Accounts to be made out in the most beautiful manner; intelligible to any human capacity; correct so far as he sees, and promising to yield by and by a beautiful return of money. A precious crop, which we must not cut in the blade; mere time will ripen it into yellow nutritive ears yet. So he thinks. The only point on which I heard him make any criticism was on what he called, if I remember, "the number of Copies _delivered,_"--that is to say, delivered by the Printer and Binder as actually available for sale. The edition being of a Thousand, there have only 984 come bodily forth; 16 are "waste." Our Printers, it appears, are in the habit of _adding_ one for every fifty beforehand, whereby the _waste_ is usually made good, and more; so that in One Thousand there will usually be some dozen called "Author's copies" over and above. Fraser supposes your Printers have a different custom. That is all. The rest is apparently every-way _right;_ is to be received with faith; with faith, charity, and even hope,--and packed into the bottom of one's drawer, never to be looked at more except on the outside, as a memorial of one of the best and helpfulest of men! In that capacity it shall lie there. My Lectures were in May, about _Great Men._ The misery of it was hardly equal to that of former years, yet still was very hateful. I had got to a certain feeling of superiority over my audience; as if I had something to tell them, and would tell it them. At times I felt as if I could, in the end, learn to speak. The beautiful people listened with boundless tolerance, eager attention. I meant to tell them, among other things, that man was still alive, Nature not dead or like to die; that all true men continued true to this hour,--Odin himself true, and the Grand Lama of Thibet himself not wholly a lie. The Lecture on Mahomet ("the Hero as Prophet") astonished my worthy friends beyond measure. It seems then this Mahomet was not a quack? Not a bit of him! That he is a better Christian, with his "bastard Christianity," than the most of us shovel-hatted? I guess than almost any of you!--Not so much as Oliver Cromwell ("the Hero as King") would I allow to have been a Quack. All quacks I asserted to be and to have been Nothing, _chaff_ that would not grow: my poor Mahomet "was _wheat_ with barn sweepings"; Nature had tolerantly hidden the barn sweepings; and as to the _wheat,_ behold she had said Yes to it, and it was growing!--On the whole, I fear I did little but confuse my esteemed audience: I was amazed, after all their reading of me, to be understood so ill;-- gratified nevertheless to see how the rudest _speech_ of a man's heart goes into men's hearts, and is the welcomest thing there. Withal I regretted that I had not six months of preaching, whereby to learn to preach, and explain things fully! In the fire of the moment I had all but decided on setting out for America this autumn, and preaching far and wide like a very lion there. Quit your paper formulas, my brethren,--equivalent to old wooden idols, _un_divine as they: in the name of God, understand that you are alive, and that God is alive! Did the Upholsterer make this Universe? Were you created by the Tailor? I tell you, and conjure you to believe me literally, No, a thousand times No! Thus did I mean to preach, on "Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic"; in America too. Alas! the fire of determination died away again: all that I did resolve upon was to write these Lectures down, and in some way promulgate them farther. Two of them accordingly are actually written; the Third to be begun on Monday: it is my chief work here, ever since the end of May. Whether I go to preach them a second time extempore in America rests once more with the Destinies. It is a shame to talk so much about a thing, and have it still hang _in nubibus:_ but I was, and perhaps am, really nearer doing it than I had ever before been. A month or two now, I suppose, will bring us back to the old nonentity again. Is there, at bottom, in the world or out of it, anything one would like so well, with one's whole heart _well,_ as PEACE? Is lecturing and noise the way to get at that? Popular lecturer! Popular writer! If they would undertake in Chancery, or Heaven's Chancery, to make a wise man Mahomet Second and Greater, "Mahomet of Saxondom," not reviewed only, but worshiped for twelve centuries by all Bulldom, Yankee- doodle-doodom, Felondom New Zealand, under the Tropics and in part of Flanders,--would he not rather answer: Thank you; but in a few years I shall be dead, twelve Centuries will have become Eternity; part of Flanders Immensity: we will sit still here if you please, and consider what quieter thing we can do! Enough of this. Richard Milnes had a Letter from you, one morning lately, when I met him at old Rogers's. He is brisk as ever; his kindly _Dilettantism_ looking sometimes as if it would grow a sort of Earnest by and by. He has a new volume of Poems out: I advised him to try Prose; he admitted that Poetry would not be generally read again in these ages,--but pleaded, "It was so convenient for veiling commonplace!" The honest little heart!--We did not know what to make of the bright Miss --- here; she fell in love with my wife;--the _contrary,_ I doubt, with me: my hard realism jarred upon her beautiful rose-pink dreams. Is not all that very morbid,--unworthy the children of Odin, not to speak of Luther, Knox, and the other Brave? I can do nothing with vapors, but wish them _condensed._ Kennet had a copy of the English _Miscellanies_ for you a good many weeks ago: indeed, it was just a day or two _before_ your advice to try Green henceforth. Has the _Meister_ ever arrived? I received a Controversial Volume from Mr. Ripley: pray thank him very kindly. Somebody borrowed the Book from me; I have not yet read it. I did read a Pamphlet which seems now to have been made part of it. Norton* surely is a chimera; but what has the whole business they are jarring about become? As healthy _worshiping_ Paganism is to Seneca and Company, so is healthy worshiping Christianity to--I had rather not work the sum!--Send me some swift news of yourself, dear Emerson. We salute you and yours, in all heartiness of brotherhood. Yours ever and always-- T. Carlyle --------- * Professor Andrews Norton. The controversy was that occasioned by Professor Norton's Discourse on "The Latest Form of Infidelity." --------- LVI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 August, 1840 My Dear Carlyle,--I fear, nay I know, that when I wrote last to you, about the 1st of July, I promised to follow my sheet immediately with a bookseller's account. The bookseller did presently after render his account, but on its face appeared the fact--which with many and by me unanswerable reasons they supported--that the balance thereon credited to you was not payable until the 1st of October. The account is footed "Net sales of _French Revolution_ to 1 July, 1840, due October 1, $249.77." Let us hope then that we shall get, not only a new page of statement, but also some small payment in money a month hence. Having no better story to tell, I told nothing. But I will not let the second of the Cunard boats leave Boston without a word to you. Since I wrote by Calvert came your letter describing your lectures and their success: very welcome news, for a good London newspaper, which I consulted, promised reports, but gave none. I have heard so oft of your projected trip to America, that my ear would now be dull, and my faith cold, but that I wish it so much. My friend, your audience still waits for you here willing and eager, and greatly larger no doubt than it would have been when the matter was first debated. Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism, and the _Dial,_ poor little thing, whose first number contains scarce anything considerable or even visible, is just now honored by attacks from almost every newspaper and magazine; which at least betrays the irritability and the instincts of the good public. But they would hardly be able to fasten on so huge a man as you are any party badge. We must all hear you for ourselves. But beside my own hunger to see and know you, and to hear you speak at ease and at large under my own roof, I have a growing desire to present you to three or four friends, and them to you. Almost all my life has been passed alone. Within three or four years I have been drawing nearer to a few men and women whose love gives me in these days more happiness than I can write of. How gladly I would bring your Jovial light upon this friendly constellation, and make you too know my distant riches! We have our own problems to solve also, and a good deal of movement and tendency emerging into sight every day in church and state, in social modes and in letters. I sometimes fancy our cipher is larger and easier to read than that of your English society. You will naturally ask me if I try my hand at the history of all this,--I who have leisure, and write. No, not in the near and practical way in which they seem to invite. I incline to write philosophy, poetry, possibility,--anything but history. And yet this phantom of the next age limns himself sometimes so large and plain that every feature is apprehensible, and challenges a painter. I can brag little of my diligence or achievement this summer. I dot evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature; but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a brick kiln instead of a house.--Consider, however, that all summer I see a good deal of company,--so near as my fields are to the city. But next winter I think to omit lectures, and write more faithfully. Hope for me that I shall get a book ready to send you by New-Year's-day. Sumner came to see me the other day. I was glad to learn all the little that he knew of you and yours. I do not wonder you set so lightly by my talkative countryman. He has brought nothing home but names, dates, and prefaces. At Cambridge last week I saw Brown for the first time. I had little opportunity to learn what he knew. Mr. Hume has never yet shown his face here. He sent me his Poems from New York, and then went South, and I know no more of him. My Mother and Wife send you kind regards and best wishes,--to you and all your house. Tell your wife that I hate to hear that she cannot sail the seas. Perhaps now she is stronger she will be a better sailor. For the sake of America will she not try the trip to Leith again? It is only twelve days from Liverpool to Boston. Love, truth, and power abide with you always! --R.W.E. LVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 26 September, 1840 My Dear Emerson,--Two Letters of yours are here, the latest of them for above a week: I am a great sinner not to have answered sooner. My way of life has been a thing of petty confusions, uncertainties; I did not till a short while ago see any definite highway, through the multitude of byelanes that opened out on me, even for the next few months. Partly I was busy; partly too, as my wont is, I was half asleep:--perhaps you do not know the _combination_ of these two predicables in one and the same unfortunate human subject! Seeing my course now for a little, I must speak. According to your prognosis, it becomes at length manifest that I do _not_ go to America for the present. Alas, no! It was but a dream of the fancy; projected, like the French shoemaker's fairy shoes, "in a moment of enthusiasm." The nervous flutter of May Lecturing has subsided into stagnancy; into the feeling that, of all things in the world, public speaking is the hatefulest for me; that I ought devoutly to thank Heaven there is no absolute compulsion laid on me at present to speak! My notion in general was but an absurd one: I fancied I might go across the sea, open my lips wide; go raging and lecturing over the Union like a very lion (too like a frothy mountebank) for several months;--till I had gained, say a thousand pounds; therewith to retire to some small, quiet cottage by the shore of the sea, at least three hundred miles from this, and sit silent there for ten years to come, or forever and a day perhaps! That was my poor little day dream;--incapable of being realized. It appears, I have to stay here, in this brick Babylon; tugging at my chains, which will not break for me: the less I tug, the better. Ah me! On the whole, I have written down my last course of lectures, and shall probably print them; and you, with the aid of proof-sheets, may again print them; that will be the easiest way of lecturing to America! It is truly very weak to speak about that matter so often and long, that matter of coming to you; and never to come. _Frey ist das Herz,_ as Goethe says, _doch ist der Fuss gebunden._ After innumerable projects, and invitations towards all the four winds, for this summer, I have ended about a week ago by--simply going nowhither, not even to see my dear aged Mother, but sitting still here under the Autumn sky such as I have it; in these vacant streets I am lonelier than elsewhere, have more chance for composure than elsewhere! With Sterne's starling I repeat to myself, "I can't get out."--Well, hang it, stay in then; and let people alone of it! I have parted with my horse; after an experiment of seven or eight months, most assiduously prosecuted, I came to the conclusion that, though it did me some good, there was not _enough_ of good to warrant such equestrianism: so I plunged out, into green England, in the end of July, for a whole week of riding, an _explosion_ of riding, therewith to end the business, and send off my poor quadruped for sale. I rode over Surrey,-- with a leather valise behind me and a mackintosh before; very singular to see: over Sussex, down to Pevensey where the Norman Bastard landed; I saw Julius Hare (whose _Guesses at Truth_ you perhaps know), saw Saint Dunstan's stithy and hammer, at Mayfield, and the very tongs with which he took the Devil by the nose;--finally I got home again, a right wearied man; sent my horse off to be sold, as I say; and finished the writing of my Lectures on Heroes. This is all the rustication I have had, or am like to have. I am now over head and ears in _Cromwellian_ Books; studying, for perhaps the fourth time in my life, to see if it be possible to get any credible face-to-face acquaintance with our English Puritan period; or whether it must be left forever a mere hearsay and echo to one. Books equal in dulness were at no epoch of the world penned by unassisted man. Nevertheless, courage! I have got, within the last twelve months, actually, as it were, to _see_ that this Cromwell was one of the greatest souls ever born of the English kin; a great amorphous semi-articulate _Baresark;_ very interesting to me. I grope in the dark vacuity of Baxters, Neales; thankful for here a glimpse and there a glimpse. This is to be my reading for some time. The _Dial_ No. 1 came duly: of course I read it with interest; it is an utterance of what is purest, youngest in your land; pure, ethereal, as the voices of the Morning! And yet--you know me--for me it is _too_ ethereal, speculative, theoretic: all theory becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue, unsatisfactory, almost a kind of mockery to me! I will have all things condense themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy. I have a _body_ myself; in the brown leaf, sport of the Autumn winds, I find what mocks all prophesyings, even Hebrew ones,--Royal Societies, and Scientific Associations eating venison at Glasgow, not once reckoned in! Nevertheless go on with this, my Brothers. The world has many most strange utterances of a prophetic nature in it at the present time; and this surely is worth listening to among the rest. Do you know English Puseyism? Good Heavens! in the whole circle of History is there the parallel of that,--a true worship rising at this hour of the day for Bands and the Shovel-hat? Distraction surely, incipience of the "final deliration" enters upon the poor old English Formulism that has called itself for some two centuries a Church. No likelier symptom of its being soon about to leave the world has come to light in my time. As if King Macready should quit Covent-Garden, go down to St. Stephen's, and insist on saying, _Le roi le veut!_--I read last night the wonderfulest article to that effect, in the shape of a criticism on myself, in the _Quarterly Review._ It seems to be by one Sewell, an Oxford doctor of note, one of the chief men among the Pusey-and-Newman Corporation. A good man, and with good notions, whom I have noted for some years back. He finds me a very worthy fellow; "true, most true,"--except where I part from Puseyism, and reckon the shovel-hat to be an old bit of felt; then I am false, most false. As the Turks say, _Allah akbar!_ I forget altogether what I said of Landor; but I hope I did not put him in the Heraud category: a cockney windbag is one thing; a scholar and bred man, though incontinent, explosive, half-true, is another. He has not been in town, this year; Milnes describes him as _eating_ greatly at Bath, and perhaps even cooking! Milnes did get your Letter: I told you? Sterling has the Concord landscape; mine is to go upon the wall here, and remind me of many things. Sterling is busy writing; he is to make Falmouth do, this winter, and try to dispense with Italy. He cannot away with my doctrine of _Silence;_ the good John. My Wife has been better than usual all summer; she begins to shiver again as winter draws nigh. Adieu, dear Emerson. Good be with you and yours. I must be far gone when I cease to love you. "The stars are above us, the graves are under us." Adieu. --T. Carlyle LVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 October, 1840 My Dear Friend,--My hope is that you may live until this creeping bookseller's balance shall incline at last to your side. My rude ciphering, based on the last account of this kind which I sent you in April from J. Munroe & Co., had convinced me that I was to be in debt to you at this time L40 or more; so that I actually bought L40 the day before the "Caledonia" sailed to send you; but on giving my new accounts to J.M. & Co., to bring the statement up to this time, they astonished me with the above written result. I professed absolute incredulity, but Nichols* labored to show me the rise and progress of all my blunders. Please to send the account with the last to your Fraser, and have it sifted. That I paid, a few weeks since, $481.34, and again, $28.12, for printing and paper respectively, is true.--C.C. Little & Co. acknowledge the sale of 82 more copies of the London Edition _French Revolution_ since the 187 copies of July 1; but these they do not get paid for until January 1, and we it seems must wait as long. We will see if the New-Year's-day will bring us more pence. --------- * Partner in the firm of J. Munroe & Co. --------- I received by the "Acadia" a letter from you, which I acknowledge now, lest I should not answer it more at large on another sheet, which I think to do. If you do not despair of American booksellers send the new proofs of the Lectures when they are in type to me by John Green, 121 Newgate Street (I believe), to the care of J. Munroe & Co. He sends a box to Munroe by every steamer. I sent a _Dial,_ No. 2, for you, to Green. Kennet, I hear, has failed. I hope he did not give his creditors my _Miscellanies,_ which you told me were there. I shall be glad if you will draw Cromwell, though if I should choose it would be Carlyle. You will not feel that you have done your work until those devouring eyes and that portraying hand have achieved England in the Nineteenth Century. Perhaps you cannot do it until you have made your American visit. I assure you the view of Britain is excellent from New England. We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.* One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the State; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope. ----------- * Preliminary to the experiment of Brook Farm, in 1841. ----------- I am ashamed to tell you, though it seems most due, anything of my own studies, they seem so desultory, idle, and unproductive. I still hope to print a book of essays this winter, but it cannot be very large. I write myself into letters, the last few months, to three or four dear and beautiful persons, my country-men and women here. I lit my candle at both ends, but will now be colder and scholastic. I mean to write no lectures this winter. I hear gladly of your wife's better health; and a letter of Jane Tuckerman's, which I saw, gave the happiest tidings of her. We do not despair of seeing her yet in Concord, since it is now but twelve and a half days to you. I had a letter from Sterling, which I will answer. In all love and good hope for you and yours, your affectionate --R.W. Emerson LIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 9 December, 1840 Dear Emerson,--My answer on this occasion has been delayed above two weeks by a rigorous, searching investigation into the procedure of the hapless Book-conveyer, Kennet, in reference to that copy of the _Miscellanies._ I was deceived by hopes of a conclusive response from day to day; not till yesterday did any come. My first step, taken long ago, was to address a new copy of the Book, not to you, luckless man, but to _Lydia_ Emerson, the fortunate wife; this copy Green now has lying by him, waiting for the January Steamer (we sail only once a month in this season); before the New Year has got out of infancy the Lady will be graciously pleased to make a few inches of room on her bookshelves for this celebrated performance. And now as to Kennet, take the brief outcome of some dozen visitations, judicial interrogatories, searches of documents, and other piercing work on the part of methodic Fraser, attended with demurrers, pleadings, false denials, false affirmings, on the part of innocent chaotic Kennet: namely, that the said Kennet, so urged, did in the end of the last week, fish up from his repositories your very identical Book directed to Munroe's care, duly booked and engaged for, in May last, but left to repose itself in the Covent-Garden crypts ever since without disturbance from gods or men! Fraser has brought back the Book, and you have lost it;--and the Library of my native village in Scotland is to get it; and not Kennet any more in this world, but Green ever henceforth is to be our Book Carrier. There is a history. Green, it seems, addresses also to Munroe; but the thing, I suppose, will now shift for itself without watching. As to the bibliopolic Accounts, my Friend! we will trust them, with a faith known only in the purer ages of Roman Catholicism,-- when Papacy had indeed become a Dubiety, but was not yet a Quackery and Falsehood, was a thing _as_ true as it could manage to be! That really may be the fact of this too. In any case what signifies it much? Money were still useful; but it is not now so indispensable. Booksellers by their knavery or their fidelity cannot kill us or cure us. Of the truth of Waldo Emerson's heart to me, there is, God be thanked for it, no doubt at all. My Hero-Lectures lie still in Manuscript. Fraser offers no amount of cash adequate to be an outward motive; and inwardly there is as yet none altogether clear, though I rather feel of late as if it were clearing. To fly in the teeth of English Puseyism, and risk such shrill welcome as I am pretty sure of, is questionable: yet at bottom why not? Dost thou not as entirely reject this new Distraction of a Puseyism as man can reject a thing,--and couldst utterly abjure it, and even abhor it,--were the shadow of a cobweb ever likely to become momentous, the cobweb itself being _beheaded,_ with axe and block on Tower Hill, two centuries ago? I think it were as well to _tell_ Puseyism that it has something of good, but also much of bad and even worst. We shall see. If I print the thing, we shall surely take in America again; either by stereotype or in some other way. Fear not that!--Do you attend at all to this new _Laudism_ of ours? It spreads far and wide among our Clergy in these days; a most notable symptom, very cheering to me many ways; whether or not one of the fatalest our poor Church of England has ever exhibited, and betokening swifter ruin to it than any other, I do not inquire. Thank God, men do discover at last that there is still a God present in their affairs, and must be, or their affairs are of the Devil, naught, and worthy of being sent to the Devil! This once given, I find that all is given; daily History, in Kingdom and in Parish, is an _experimentum crucis_ to show what is the Devil's and what not. But on the whole are we not the _formalest_ people ever created under this Sun? Cased and overgrown with Formulas, like very lobsters with their shells, from birth upwards; so that in the man we see only his breeches, and believe and swear that wherever a pair of old breeches are there is a man! I declare I could both laugh and cry. These poor good men, merciful, zealous, with many sympathies and thoughts, there do they vehemently appeal to me, _Et tu, Brute?_ Brother, wilt thou too insist on the breeches being old,--not ply a needle among us here?--To the naked Caliban, gigantic, for whom such breeches would not be a glove, who is stalking and groping there in search of new breeches and accoutrements, sure to get them, and to tread into nonentity whoever hinders him in the search,--they are blind as if they had no eyes. Sartorial men; ninth-parts of a man:--enough of them. The second Number of the _Dial_ has also arrived some days ago. I like it decidedly better than the first; in fact, it is right well worth being put on paper, and sent circulating;--I find only, as before that it is still too much of a soul for circulating as it should. I wish you could in future contrive to mark at the end of each Article who writes it, or give me some general key for knowing. I recognize Emerson readily; the rest are of [Greek] for most part. But it is all good and very good as a _soul;_ wants only a body, which want means a great deal! Your Paper on Literature is incomparably the worthiest thing hitherto; a thing I read with delight. Speak out, my brave Emerson; there are many good men that listen! Even what you say of Goethe gratifies me; it is one of the few things yet spoken of him from personal insight, the sole kind of things that should be spoken! You call him _actual,_ not _ideal;_ there is truth in that too; and yet at bottom is not the whole truth rather this: The actual well-seen _is_ the ideal? The _actual,_ what really is and exists: the past, the present, the future no less, do all lie there! Ah yes! one day you will find that this sunny-looking, courtly Goethe held veiled in him a Prophetic sorrow deep as Dante's,--all the nobler to me and to you, that he _could_ so hold it. I believe this; no man can _see_ as he sees, that has not suffered and striven as man seldom did.-- Apropos of _this,_ Have you got Miss Martineau's _Hour and Man?_ How curious it were to have the real History of the Negro Toussaint, and his _black_ Sansculottism in Saint Domingo,--the most atrocious form Sansculottism could or can assume! This of a "black Wilberforce-Washington," as Sterling calls it, is decidedly something. Adieu, dear Emerson: time presses, paper is done. Commend me to your good wife, your good Mother, and love me as well as you can. Peace and health under clear winter skies be with you all. --T. Carlyle My Wife rebukes me sharply that I have "forgot her love." She is much better this winter than of old. Having mentioned Sterling I should say that he is at Torquay (Devonshire) for the winter, meditating new publication of Poems. I work still in Cromwellism; all but desperate of any feasible issue worth naming. I "enjoy bad health" too, considerably! LX. Carlyle to Mrs. Emerson Chelsea, London, 21 February, 1841 Dear Mrs. Emerson,--Your Husband's Letter shall have answer when some moment of leisure is granted me; he will wait till then, and must. But the beautiful utterance which you send over to me; melodious as the voice of flutes, of Aeolian Harps borne on the rude winds so _far,_--this must have answer, some word or growl of answer, be there leisure or none! The "Acadia," it seems, is to return from Liverpool the day after tomorrow. I shove my paper-whirlpools aside for a little, and grumble in pleased response. You are an enthusiast; make Arabian Nights out of dull foggy London Days; with your beautiful female imagination, shape burnished copper Castles out of London Fog! It is very beautiful of you;--nay, it is not foolish either, it is wise. I have a guess what of truth there may be in that; and you the fair Alchemist, are you not all the richer and better that you know the _essential_ gold, and will not have it called pewter or spelter, though in the shops it is only such? I honor such Alchemy, and love it; and have myself done something in that kind. Long may the talent abide with you; long may I abide to have it exercised on me! Except the Annandale Farm where my good Mother still lives, there is no House in all this world which I should be gladder to see than the one at Concord. It seems to stand as only over the hill, in the next Parish to me, familiar from boyhood. Alas! and wide-waste Atlantics roll between; and I cannot walk over of an evening!--I never give up the hope of getting thither some time. Were I a little richer, were I a little healthier; were I this and that--!--One has no Fortunatus' "Time-annihilating" or even "Space-annihilating Hat": it were a thing worth having in this world. My Wife unites with me in all kindest acknowledgments: she is getting stronger these last two years; but is still such a _sailor_ as the Island hardly parallels: had she the _Space- annihilating Hat,_ she too were soon with you. Your message shall reach Miss Martineau; my Dame will send it in her first Letter. The good Harriet is not well; but keeps a very courageous heart. She lives by the shore of the beautiful blue Northumbrian Sea; a "many-sounding" solitude which I often envy her. She writes unweariedly, has many friends visiting her. You saw her _Toussaint l'Ouverture:_ how she has made such a beautiful "black Washington," or "Washington-Christ-Macready," as I have heard some call it, of a rough-handed, hard-headed, semi- articulate gabbling Negro; and of the horriblest phasis that "Sansculottism" _can_ exhibit, of a Black Sansculottism, a musical Opera or Oratorio in pink stockings! It is very beautiful. Beautiful as a child's heart,--and in so shrewd a head as that. She is now writing express Children's-Tales, which I calculate I shall find more perfect. Some ten days ago there went from me to Liverpool, perhaps there will arrive at Concord by this very "Acadia," a bundle of Printed Sheets directed to your Husband: pray apprise the man of that. They are sheets of a Volume called _Lectures on Heroes;_ the Concord Hero gets them without direction or advice of any kind. I have got some four sheets more ready for him here; shall perhaps send them too, along with this. Some four again more will complete the thing. I know not what he will make of it;-- perhaps wry faces at it? Adieu, dear Mrs. Emerson. We salute you from this house. May all good which the Heavens grant to a kind heart, and the good which they never _refuse_ to one such, abide with you always. I commend myself to your and Emerson's good Mother, to the mischievous Boys and--all the Household. Peace and fair Spring- weather be there! Yours with great regard, T. Carlyle LXI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 28 February, 1841 My Dear Carlyle,--Behold Mr. George Nichols's new digest and exegesis of his October accounts. The letter seems to me the most intelligible of the two papers, but I have long been that man's victim, semi-annually, and never dare to make head against his figures. You are a brave man, and out of the ring of his enchantments, and withal have magicians of your own who can give spell for spell, and read his incantations backward. I entreat you to set them on the work, and convict his figures if you can. He has really taken pains, and is quite proud of his establishment of his accounts. In a month it will be April, and be will have a new one to fender. Little and Brown also in April promise a payment on _French Revolution,_--and I suppose something is due from _Chartism._ We will hope that a Bill of Exchange will yet cross from us to you, before our booksellers fail. I hoped before this to have reached my last proofsheet, but shall have two or three more yet. In a fortnight or three weeks my little raft will be afloat.* Expect nothing more of my powers of construction,--no shipbuilding, no clipper, smack, nor skiff even, only boards and logs tied together. I read to some Mechanics' Apprentices a long lecture on Reform, one evening, a little while ago. They asked me to print it, but Margaret Fuller asked it also, and I preferred the _Dial,_ which shall have the dubious sermon, and I will send it to you in that.--You see the bookseller reverendizes me notwithstanding your laudable perseverance to adorn me with profane titles, on the one hand, and the growing habit of the majority of my correspondents to clip my name of all titles on the other. I desire that you and your wife will keep your kindness for --R. W. Emerson ---------- * The first series of _Essays._ ---------- LXII. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, 30 April, 1841 My Dear Carlyle,--Above you have a bill of exchange for one hundred pounds sterling drawn by T.W. Ward & Co. on the Messrs. Barings, payable at sight. Let us hope it is but the first of a long series. I have vainly endeavored to get your account to be rendered by Munroe & Co. to the date of the 1st of April. It was conditionally promised for the day of the last steamer (15 April). It is not ready for that which sails tomorrow and carries this. Little & Co. acknowledge a debt of $607.90 due to you 1st of April, and just now paid me; and regret that their sales have been so slow, which they attribute to the dulness of all trade among us for the last two years. You shall have the particulars of their account from Munroe's statement of the account between you and me. Munroe & Co. have a long apology for not rendering their own account; their book keeper left them at a critical moment, they were without one six weeks, &c.;--but they add, if we could give you it, to what use, since we should be utterly unable to make you any payment at this time? To what use, surely? I am too much used to similar statements from our booksellers and others in the last few years to be much surprised; nor do I doubt their readiness or their power to pay all their debts at last; but a great deal of mutual concession and accommodation has been the familiar resort of our tradesmen now for a good while, a vice which they are all fain to lay at the doors of the Government, whilst it belongs in the first instance, no doubt, to the rashness of the individual traders. These men I believe to be prudent, honest, and solvent, and that we shall get all our debt from them at last. They are not reckoned as rich as Little and Brown. By the next steamer they think they can promise to have their account ready. I am sorry to find that we have been driven from the market by the New York Pirates in the affair of the Six Lectures.* The book was received from London and for sale in New York and Boston before my last sheets arrived by the "Columbia." Appleton in New York braved us and printed it, and furthermore told us that he intends to print in future everything of yours that shall be printed in London,--complaining in rude terms of the monopoly your publishers here exercise, and the small commissions they allow to the trade, &c., &c. Munroe showed me the letter, which certainly was not an amiable one. In this distress, then, I beg you, when you have more histories and lectures to print, to have the manuscript copied by a scrivener before you print at home, and send it out to me, and I will keep all Appletons and Corsairs whatsoever out of the lists. Not only these men made a book (of which, by the by, Munroe sends you by this steamer a copy, which you will find at John Green's, Newgate Street), but the New York newspapers print the book in chapters, and you circulate for six cents per newspaper at the corners of all streets in New York and Boston; gaining in fame what you lose in coin.--The book is a good book, and goes to make men brave and happy. I bear glad witness to its cheering and arming quality. --------- * "Heroes and Hero-Worship." --------- I have put into Munroe's box which goes to Green a _Dial_ No. 4 also, which I could heartily wish were a better book. But Margaret Fuller, who is a noble woman, is not in sufficiently vigorous health to do this editing work as she would and should, and there is no other who can and will. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson LXIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 8 May, 1841 My Dear Emerson,--Your last letter found me on the southern border of Yorkshire, whither Richard Milnes had persuaded me with him, for the time they call "Easter Holidays" here. I was to shake off the remnants of an ugly _Influenza_ which still hung about me; my little portmanteau, unexpectedly driven in again by perverse accidents, had stood packed, its cowardly owner, the worst of all travelers, standing dubious the while, for two weeks or more; Milnes offering to take me as under his cloak, I went with Milnes. The mild, cordial, though something dilettante nature of the man distinguishes him for me among men, as men go. For ten days I rode or sauntered among Yorkshire fields and knolls; the sight of the young Spring, new to me these seven years, was beautiful, or better than beauty. Solitude itself, the great Silence of the Earth, was as balm to this weary, sick heart of mine; not Dragons of Wantley (so they call Lord Wharncliffe, the wooden Tory man), not babbling itinerant Barrister people, fox-hunting Aristocracy, nor Yeomanry Captains cultivating milk-white mustachios, nor the perpetual racket, and "dinner at eight o'clock," could altogether countervail the fact that green Earth was around one and unadulterated sky overhead, and the voice of waters and birds,--not the foolish speech of Cockneys at _all_ times!--On the last morning, as Richard and I drove off towards the railway, your Letter came in, just in time; and Richard, who loves you well, hearing from whom it was, asked with such an air to see it that I could not refuse him. We parted at the "station," flying each his several way on the wings of Steam; and have not yet met again. I went over to Leeds, staid two days with its steeple-chimneys and smoke-volcano still in view; then hurried over to native Annandale, to see my aged excellent Mother yet again in this world while she is spared to me. My birth-land is always as the Cave of Trophonius to me; I return from it with a haste to which the speed of Steam is slow, --with no smile on my face; avoiding all speech with men! It is not yet eight-and-forty hours since I got back; your Letter is among the first I answer, even with a line; your new Book--But we will not yet speak of that.... My Friend, I _thank_ you for this Volume of yours; not for the copy alone which you send to me, but for writing and printing such a Book. _Euge!_ say I, from afar. The voice of one crying in the desert;--it is once more the voice of a _man._ Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world there were still but this one voice that responded intelligently to my own; as if the rest were all hearsays, melodious or unmelodious echoes; as if this alone were true and alive. My blessing on you, good Ralph Waldo! I read the Book all yesterday; my Wife scarcely yet done with telling me her news. It has rebuked me, it has aroused and comforted me. Objections of all kinds I might make, how many objections to superficies and detail, to a dialect of thought and speech as yet imperfect enough, a hundred-fold too narrow for the Infinitude it strives to speak: but what were all that? It is an Infinitude, the real vision and belief of one, seen face to face: a "voice of the heart of Nature" is here once more. This is the one fact for me, which absorbs all others whatsoever. Persist, persist; you have much to say and to do. These voices of yours which I likened to unembodied souls, and censure sometimes for having no body,--how can they have a body? They are light-rays darting upwards in the East; they will yet make much and much to have a body! You are a new era, my man, in your new huge country: God give you strength, and speaking and silent faculty, to do such a work as seems possible now for you! And if the Devil will be pleased to set all the Popularities _against_ you and evermore against you,--perhaps that is of all things the very kindest any _Angel_ could do. Of myself I have nothing good to report. Years of sick idleness and barrenness have grown wearisome to me. I do nothing. I waver and hover, and painfully speculate even now as to health, and where I shall spend the summer out of London! I am a very poor fellow;--but hope to grow better by and by. Then this _alluvies_ of foul lazy stuff that has long swum over me may perhaps yield the better harvest. _Esperons!_--Hail to all of you from both of us. Yours ever, T. Carlyle LXIV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 21 May, 1841 My Dear Emerson,--About a week ago I wrote to you, after too long a silence. Since that there has another Letter come, with a Draft of L100 in it, and other comfortable items not pecuniary; a line in acknowledgment of the money is again very clearly among my duties. Yesterday, on my first expedition up to Town, I gave the Paper to Fraser; who is to present the result to me in the shape of cash tomorrow. Thanks, and again thanks. This L100, I think, nearly clears off for me the outlay of the second _French Revolution;_ an ill-printed, ill-conditioned publication, the prime cost of which, once all lying saved from the Atlantic whirlpools and hard and fast in my own hand, it was not perhaps well done to venture thitherward again. To the new trouble of my friends withal! We will now let the rest of the game play itself out as it can; and my friends, and my one friend, must not take more trouble than their own kind feelings towards me will reward. The Books, the _Dial_ No. 4, and Appleton's pirated _Lectures,_ are still expected from Green. In a day or two he will send them: if not, we will jog him into wakefulness, and remind him of the _Parcels Delivery Company,_ which carries luggage of all kinds, like mere letters, many times a day, over all corners of our Babylon. In this, in the universal British _Penny Post,_ and a thing or two of that sort, men begin to take advantage of their crowded ever-whirling condition in these days, which brings such enormous disadvantages along with it _un_sought for.-- Bibliopolist Appleton does not seem to be a "Hero,"--except after his own fashion. He is one of those of whom the Scotch say, "Thou wouldst do little for God if the Devil were dead!" The Devil is unhappily dead, in that international bibliopolic province, and little hope of his reviving for some time; whereupon this is what Squire Appleton does. My respects to him even in the Bedouin department, I like to see a complete man, a clear decisive Bedouin. For the rest, there is one man who ought to be apprised that I can now stand robbery a little better; that I am no longer so very poor as I once was. In Fraser himself there do now lie vestiges of money! I feel it a great relief to see, for a year or two at least, the despicable bugbear of Beggary driven out of my sight; for _which_ small mercy, at any rate, be the Heavens thanked. Fraser himself, for these two editions, One thousand copies each, of the Lectures and _Sartor,_ pays me down on the nail L150; consider that miracle! Of the other Books which he is selling on a joint-stock basis, the poor man likewise promises something, though as yet, ever since New-Year's-day, I cannot learn what, owing to a grievous sickness of his,--for which otherwise I cannot but be sorry, poor Fraser within the Cockney limits being really a worthy, accurate, and rather friendly creature. So you see me here provided with bread and water for a season,--it is but for a season one needs either water or bread, --and rejoice with me accordingly. It is the one useful, nay, I will say the one _innoxious,_ result of all this trumpeting, reviewing, and dinner-invitationing; from which I feel it indispensable to withdraw myself more and more resolutely, and altogether count it as a thing not there. Solitude is what I long and pray for. In the babble of men my own soul goes all to babble: like soil you were forever _screening,_ tumbling over with shovels and riddles; in _which_ soil no fruit can grow! My trust in Heaven is, I shall yet get away "to some cottage by the sea-shore"; far enough from all the mad and mad making things that dance round me here, which I shall then look on only as a theatrical phantasmagory, with an eye only to the _meaning_ that lies hidden in it. You, friend Emerson, are to be a Farmer, you say, and dig Earth for your living? Well; I envy you that as much as any other of your blessednesses. Meanwhile, I sit shrunk together here in a small _dressing-closet,_ aloft in the back part of the house, excluding all cackle and cockneys; and, looking out over the similitude of a May grove (with little brick in it, and only the minarets of Westminster and gilt cross of St. Paul's visible in the distance, and the enormous roar of London softened into an enormous hum), endeavor to await what will betide. I am busy with Luther in one Marheinecke's very long- winded Book. I think of innumerable things; steal out westward at sunset among the Kensington lanes; would this _May_ weather last, I might be as well here as in any attainable place. But June comes; the rabid dogs get muzzles; all is brown-parched, dusty, suffocating, desperate, and I shall have to run! Enough of all that. On my paper there comes, or promises to come, as yet simply nothing at all. Patience;--and yet who can be patient? Had you the happiness to see yourself not long ago, in _Fraser's Magazine,_ classed _nominatim_ by an emphatic earnest man, not without a kind of splay-footed strength and sincerity,--among the chief Heresiarchs of the--world? Perfectly right. Fraser was very anxious to know what I thought of the Paper,--"by an entirely unknown man in the country." I counseled "that there was something in him, which he ought to improve by holding his peace for the next five years." Adieu, dear Emerson; there is not a scrap more of Paper. All copies of your _Essays_ are out at use; with what result we shall perhaps see. As for me I love the Book and man, and their noble rustic herohood and manhood:--one voice as of a living man amid such jabberings of galvanized corpses: _Ach Gott!_ Yours evermore, T. Carlyle LXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 80 May, 1841 My Dear Friend,--In my letter written to you on the 1st of May (enclosing a bill of exchange of L100 sterling, which, I hope, arrived safely) I believe I promised to send you by the next steamer an account for April. But the false tardy Munroe & Co. did not send it to me until one day too late. Here it is, as they render it, compiled from Little and Brown's statement and their own. I have never yet heard whether you have received their _Analysis_ or explanation of the last abstract they drew up of the mutual claims between the great houses of T.C. and R.W.E., and I am impatient to know whether you have caused it to be examined, and whether it was satisfactory. This new one is based on that, and if that was incorrect, this must be also. I am daily looking for some letter from you, which is perhaps near at hand. If you have not written, write me exactly and immediately on this subject, I entreat you. You will see that in this sheet I am charged with a debt to you of $184.29. I shall tomorrow morning pay to Mr. James Brown (of Little and Brown), who should be the bearer of this letter, $185.00, which sum he will pay you in its equivalent of English coin. I give Mr. Brown an introductory letter to you, and you must not let slip the opportunity to make the man explain his own accounts, if any darkness hang on them. In due time, perhaps, we can send you Munroe, and Nichols also, and so all your factors shall render direct account of themselves to you. I believe I shall also make Brown the bearer of a little book written some time since by a young friend of mine in a very peculiar frame of mind,--thought by most persons to be mad,--and of the publication of which I took the charge.* Mr. Very requested me to send you a copy.--I had a letter from Sterling, lately, which rejoiced me in all but the dark picture it gave of his health. I earnestly wish good news of him. When you see him, show him these poems, and ask him if they have not a grandeur. --------- * _Essays and Poems,_ by Jones Very,--a little volume, the work of an exquisite spirit. Some of the poems it contains are as if written by a George Herbert who had studied Shakespeare, read Wordsworth, and lived in America. --------- When I wrote last, I believe all the sheets of the Six Lectures had not come to me. They all arrived safely, although the last package not until our American pirated copy was just out of press in New York. My private reading was not less happy for this robbery whereby the eager public were supplied. Odin was all new to me; and Mahomet, for the most part; and it was all good to read, abounding in truth and nobleness. Yet, as I read these pages, I dream that your audience in London are less prepared to hear, than is our New England one. I judge only from the tone. I think I know many persons here who accept thoughts of this vein so readily now, that, if you were speaking on this shore, you would not feel that emphasis you use to be necessary. I have been feeble and almost sick during all the spring, and have been in Boston but once or twice, and know nothing of the reception the book meets from the Catholic Carlylian Church. One reader and friend of yours dwells now in my house, and, as I hope, for a twelvemonth to come,--Henry Thoreau,--a poet whom you may one day be proud of;--a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and inventions. We work together day by day in my garden, and I grow well and strong. My mother, my wife, my boy and girl, are all in usual health, and according to their several ability salute you and yours. Do not cease to tell me of the health of your wife and of the learned and friendly physician. Yours, R.W. Emerson LXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 25 June, 1841 Dear Emerson,--Now that there begins again to be some program possible of my future motions for some time, I hastily despatch you some needful outline of the same. After infinite confused uncertainty, I learn yesternight that there has been a kind of country-house got for us, at a place called Annan, on the north shore of the Solway Frith, in my native County of Dumfries. You passed through the little Burgh, I suppose, in your way homeward from Craigenputtock: it stands about midway, on the great road, between Dumfries and Carlisle. It is the place where I got my schooling;--consider what a _preter_natural significance such a scene has now got for me! It is within eight miles of my aged Mother's dwelling-place; within riding distance, in fact, of almost all the Kindred I have in the world.--The house, which is built since my time, and was never yet seen by me, is said to be a reasonable kind of house. We get it for a small sum in proportion to its value (thanks to kind accident); the three hundred miles of travel, very hateful to me, will at least entirely obliterate all traces of _this_ Dust- Babel; the place too being naturally almost ugly, as far as a green leafy place in sight of sea and mountains can be so nicknamed, the whole gang of picturesque Tourists, Cockney friends of Nature, &c., &c., who penetrate now by steam, in shoals every autumn, into the very centre of the Scotch Highlands, will be safe over the horizon! In short, we are all bound thitherward in few days; must cobble up some kind of gypsy establishment; and bless Heaven for solitude, for the sight of green fields, heathy moors; for a silent sky over one's head, and air to breathe which does not consist of coal-smoke, finely powdered flint, and other beautiful _etceteras_ of that kind among others! God knows I have need enough to be left altogether alone for some considerable while (_forever,_ as it at present seems to me), to get my inner world, and my poor bodily nerves, both all torn to pieces, set in order a little again! After much vain reluctance therefore; disregarding many considerations,-- disregarding _finance_ in the front of these,--I am off; and calculate on staying till I am heartily _sated_ with country, till at least the last gleam of summer weather has departed. My way of life has all along hitherto been a resolute _staying at home:_ I find now, however, that I must alter my habits, cost what it may; that I cannot live all the year round in London, under pain of dying or going rabid;--that I must, in fact, learn to travel, as others do, and be hanged to me! Wherefore, in brief, my Friend, our address for the next two or three months is "Newington Lodge, Annan, Scotland,"--where a letter from Emerson will be a right pleasant visitor! _Faustum sit._ My second piece of news, not less interesting I hope, is that _Emerson's Essays,_ the Book so called, is to be reprinted here; nay, I think, is even now at press,--in the hands of that invaluable Printer, Robson, who did the _Miscellanies._ Fraser undertakes it, "on _half-profits_";--T. Carlyle writing a Preface,*--which accordingly he did (in rather sullen humor,--not with you!) last night and the foregoing days. Robson will stand by the text to the very utmost; and I also am to read the Proof sheets. The edition is of Seven Hundred and Fifty; which Fraser thinks he will sell. With what joy shall I then sack up the small Ten Pounds Sterling perhaps of "Half-Profits," and remit them to the man Emerson; saying: There, Man! Tit for tat, the reciprocity _not_ all on one side!--I ought to say, moreover, that this was a volunteer scheme of Fraser's; the risk is all his, the origin of it was with him: I advised him to have it reviewed, as being a really noteworthy Book; "Write you a Preface," said he, "and I will reprint it";--to which, after due delay and meditation; I consented. Let me add only, on this subject, the story of a certain Rio,** a French Breton, with long, distracted, black hair. He found your Book at Richard Milnes's, a borrowed copy, and could not borrow it; whereupon he appeals passionately to me; carries off my Wife's copy, this distracted Rio; and is to "read it _four_ times" during this current autumn, at Quimperle, in his native Celtdom! The man withal is a _Catholic,_ eats fish on Friday;--a great lion here when he visits us; one of the _naivest_ men in the world: concerning whom nevertheless, among fashionables, there is a controversy, "Whether he is an Angel, or partially a Windbag and _Humbug?_" Such is the lot of loveliness in the World! A truer man I never saw; how _wind_less, how windy, I will not compute at present. Me he likes greatly (in spite of my unspeakable contempt for his fish on Friday); likes,--but withal is apt to bore. ---------- * The greater part of this interesting Preface is reprinted in Mr. George Willis Cooke's excellent book on the _Life, Writings, and Philosophy of Emerson,_ Boston, 1881, p. 109. ** The author of a book once much admired, _De 'l'Art Chretien._ In a later work entitled _Epilogue a l'Art Chretien,_ but actually a sort of autobiography, written in the naivest spirit of personal conceit and pious sentimentalism, M. Rio gives an exceedingly entertaining account of his intercourse with Carlyle. ---------- Enough, dear Emerson; and more than enough for a day so hurried. Our Island is all in a ferment electioneering: Tories to come in;--perhaps not to come in; at all events not to stay long, without altering their figure much! I sometimes ask myself rather earnestly, What is the duty of a citizen? To be as I have been hitherto, a pacific _Alien?_ That is the _easiest,_ with my humor!--Our brave Dame here, just rallying for the _remove,_ sends loving salutations. Good be with you all always. Adieu, dear Emerson. --T. Carlyle Appleton's Book of _Hero-Worship_ has come; for which pray thank Mr. Munroe for me: it is smart on the surface; but printed altogether scandalously! LXVII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 July, 1841 My Dear Carlyle,--Eight days ago--when I had gone to Nantasket Beach, to sit by the sea and inhale its air and refresh this puny body of mine--came to me your letter, all bounteous as all your letters are, generous to a fault, generous to the shaming of me, cold, fastidious, ebbing person that I am. Already in a former letter you had said too much good of my poor little arid book,-- which is as sand to my eyes,--and now in this you tell me it shall be printed in London, and graced with a preface from the man of men. I can only say that I heartily wish the book were better, and I must try and deserve so much favor from the kind gods by a bolder and truer living in the months to come; such as may perchance one day relax and invigorate this cramp hand of mine, and teach it to draw some grand and adequate strokes, which other men may find their own account and not their good-nature in repeating. Yet I think I shall never be killed by my ambition. I behold my failures and shortcomings there in writing, wherein it would give me much joy to thrive, with an equanimity which my worst enemy might be glad to see. And yet it is not that I am occupied with better things. One could well leave to others the record, who was absorbed in the life. But I have done nothing. I think the branch of the "tree of life" which headed to a bud in me, curtailed me somehow of a drop or two of sap, and so dwarfed all my florets and drupes. Yet as I tell you I am very easy in my mind, and never dream of suicide. My whole philosophy--which is very real--teaches acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet--for any spiritualist--in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue. I have sometimes fancied I was to catch sympathetic activity from contact with noble persons; that you would come and see me; that I should form stricter habits of love and conversation with some men and women here who are already dear to me,--and at some rate get off the numb palsy, and feel the new blood sting and tingle in my fingers' ends. Well, sure I am that the right word will be spoken though I cut out my tongue. Thanks, too, to your munificent Fraser for his liberal intention to divide the profits of the _Essays._ I wish, for the encouragement of such a bookseller, there were to be profits to divide. But I have no faith in your public for their heed to a mere book like mine. There are things I should like to say to them, in a lecture-room or in a "steeple house," if I were there. Seven hundred and fifty copies! Ah no! And so my dear brother has quitted the roaring city, and gone back in peace to his own land,--not the man he left it, but richer every way, chiefly in the sense of having done something valiantly and well, which the land, and the lands, and all that wide elastic English race in all their dispersion, will know and thank him for. The holy gifts of nature and solitude be showered upon you! Do you not believe that the fields and woods have their proper virtue, and that there are good and great things which will not be spoken in the city? I give you joy in your new and rightful home, and the same greetings to Jane Carlyle! with thanks and hopes and loves to you both. --R.W. Emerson As usual at this season of the year, I, incorrigible spouting Yankee, am writing an oration to deliver to the boys in one of our little country colleges, nine days hence.* You will say I do not deserve the aid of any Muse. O but if you knew how natural it is to me to run to these places! Besides, I always am lured on by the hope of saying something which shall stick by the good boys. I hope Brown did not fail to find you, with thirty-eight sovereigns (I believe) which he should carry you. ---------- * "The Method of Nature. An Address to the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, August 11, 1841." ---------- LXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Newby, Annan, Scotland, 18 August, 1841 My Dear Emerson,--Two days ago your Letter, direct from Liverpool, reached me here; only fifteen days after date on the other side of the Ocean: one of the swiftest messengers that have yet come from you. Steamers have been known to come, they say, in nine days. By and by we shall visibly be, what I always say we virtually are, members of neighboring Parishes; paying continual visits to one another. What is to hinder huge London from being to universal Saxondom what small Mycale was to the Tribes of Greece,--a place to hold your [Greek] in? A meeting of _All the English_ ought to be as good as one of All the Ionians; --and as Homeric "equal ships" are to Bristol steamers, so, or somewhat so, may New York and New Holland be to Ephesus and Crete, with their distances, relations, and etceteras!--Few things on this Earth look to me greater than the Future of that Family of Men. It is some two months since I got into this region; my Wife followed me with her maid and equipments some five weeks ago. Newington Lodge, when I came to inspect it with eyes, proved to be too rough an undertaking: upholsterers, expense and confusion,--the Cynic snarled, "Give me a whole Tub rather! I want nothing but shelter from the elements, and to be let alone of all men." After a little groping, this little furnished cottage, close by the beach of the Solway Frith, was got hold of: here we have been, in absolute seclusion, for a month,--no company but the corn-fields and the everlasting sands and brine; mountains, and thousand-voiced memories on all hands, sending their regards to one, from the distance. Daily (sometimes even nightly!) I have swashed about in the sea; I have been perfectly idle, at least inarticulate; I fancy I feel myself considerably sounder of body and of mind. Deeply do I agree with you in the great unfathomable meaning of a colloquy with the dumb Ocean, with the dumb Earth, and their eloquence! A Legislator would prescribe some weeks of that annually as a religious duty for all mortals, if he could. A Legislator will prescribe it for himself, since he can! You too have been at Nantasket; my Friend, this great rough purple sea-flood that roars under my little garret-window here, this too comes from Nantasket and farther,--swung hitherward by the Moon and the Sun. It cannot be said that I feel "happy" here, which means joyful;-- as far as possible from that. The Cave of Trophonius could not be grimmer for one than this old Land of Graves. But it is a sadness worth any hundred "happinesses." _N'en parlons plus._ By the way, have you ever clearly remarked withal what a despicable function "view-hunting" is. Analogous to "philanthropy," "pleasures of virtue," &c., &c. I for my part, in these singular circumstances, often find an honestly ugly country the preferable one. Black eternal peat-bog, or these waste-howling sands with mews and seagulls: you meet at least no Cockney to exclaim, "How charming it is!" One of the last things I did in London was to pocket Bookseller Brown's L38: a very honest-looking man, that Brown; whom I was sorry I could not manage to welcome better. You asked in that Letter about some other item of business,--Munroe's or Brown's account to acknowledge?--something or other that I was to _do:_ I only remember vaguely that it seemed to me I had as good as done it. Your Letter is not here now, but at Chelsea. Three sheets of the _Essays_ lay waiting me at my Mother's, for correction; needing as good as none. The type and shape is the same as that of late _Lectures on Heroes._ Robson the Printer, who is a very punctual intelligent man, a scholar withal, undertook to be himself the corrector of the other sheets. I hope you will find them "exactly conformable to the text, _minus_ mere Typographical blunders and the more salient American spellings (labor for labour, &c.)." The Book is perhaps just getting itself subscribed in these very days. It should have been out before now: but poor Fraser is in the country, dangerously ill, which perhaps retards it a little; and the season, at any rate, is at the very dullest. By the first conveyance I will send a certain Lady two copies of it. Little danger but the Edition will sell; Fraser knows his own Trade well enough, and is as much a "desperado" as poor Attila Schmelzle was! Poor James, I wish he were well again; but really at times I am very anxious about him.--The Book will sell; will be liked and disliked. Harriet Martineau, whom I saw in passing hitherward, writes with her accustomed enthusiasm about it. Richard Milnes too is very warm. John Sterling scolds and kisses it (as the manner of the man is), and concludes by inquiring, whether there is any procurable Likeness of Emerson? Emerson himself can answer. There ought to be. --Good Heavens! Here came my Wife, all in tears, pointing out to me a poor ship, just tumbled over on a sand-bank on the Cumberland coast; men still said to be alive on it,--a Belfast steamer doing all it can to get in contact with it! Moments are precious (say the people on the beach), the flood runs ten miles an hour. Thank God, the steamer's boat is out: "eleven men," says a person with a glass, "are saved: it is an American timber-ship, coming up without a Pilot." And now--in ten minutes more--there lies the melancholy mass alone among the waters, wreck-boats all hastening towards it, like birds of prey; the poor Canadians all up and away towards Annan. What an end for my Letter, which nevertheless must end! Adieu, dear Emerson. Address to Chelsea next time. I can say no more. Yours ever, T.C. LXIX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 October, 1841 My Dear Carlyle,--I was in Boston yesterday, and found at Munroe's your promised packet of the two London Books. They are very handsome,--that for my wife is beautiful,--and I am not so old or so cold but that I can feel the hope and the pleasure that lie in this gift. It seems I am to speak in England--great England--fortified by the good word of one whose word is fame. Well, it is a lasting joy to be indebted to the wise and generous; and I am well contented that my little boat should swim, whilst it can, beside your great galleys, nor will I allow my discontent with the great faults of the book, which the rich English dress cannot hide, to spoil my joy in this fine little romance of friendship and hope. I am determined--so help me all Muses--to send you something better another day. But no more printing for me at present. I have just decided to go to Boston once more, with a course of lectures, which I will perhaps baptize "On the Times," by way of making once again the experiment whether I cannot, not only speak the truth, but speak it truly, or in proportion. I fancy I need more than another to speak, with such a formidable tendency to the lapidary style. I build my house of boulders; somebody asked me "if I built of medals." Besides, I am always haunted with brave dreams of what might be accomplished in the lecture-room,--so free and so unpretending a platform,--a Delos not yet made fast. I imagine an eloquence of infinite variety,--rich as conversation can be, with anecdote, joke, tragedy, epics and pindarics, argument and confession. I should love myself wonderfully better if I could arm myself to go, as you go, with the word in the heart and not in a paper. When I was in Boston I saw the booksellers, the children of Tantalus,--no, but they who trust in them are. This time, Little and Brown render us their credit account to T.C. $366 (I think it was), payable in three months from 1 October. They had sold all the London _French Revolutions_ but fifteen copies. May we all live until 1 January. J. Munroe & Co. acknowledge about $180 due and now rightfully payable to T.C., but, unhappily, not yet paid. By the help of brokers, I will send that sum more or less in some English Currency, by the next steamship, which sails in about a fortnight, and will address it, as you last bade me, to Chelsea. What news, my dear friend, from your study? what designs ripened or executed? what thoughts? what hopes? you can say nothing of yourself that will not greatly interest us all. Harriet Martineau, whose sicknesses may it please God to heal! wrote me a kind, cheerful letter, and the most agreeable notice of your health and spirit on a visit at her house. My little boy is five years old today, and almost old enough to send you his love. With kindest greetings to Jane Carlyle, I am her and your friend, --R.W.E. LXX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 14 November, 1841 My Dear Carlyle,--Above, you have a bill of exchange for forty pounds sterling, with which sum you must credit the Munroe account. The bill, I must not fail to notice, is drawn by a lover of yours who expresses great satisfaction in doing us this courtesy; and courtesy I must think it when he gives me a bill at sight, whilst of all other merchants I have got only one payable at some remote day. ---- is a beautiful and noble youth, of a most subtle and magnetic nature, made for an artist, a painter, and in his art has made admirable sketches, but his criticism, I fancy, was too keen for his poetry (shall I say?); he sacrificed to Despair, and threw away his pencil. For the present, he buys and sells. I wrote you some sort of letter a fortnight ago, promising to send a paper like this. The hour when this should be despatched finds me by chance very busy with little affairs. I sent you by an Italian, Signor Gambardella,*-- who took a letter to you with good intent to persuade you to sit to him for your portrait,--a _Dial,_ and some copies of an oration I printed lately. If you should have any opportunity to send one of them to Harriet Martineau, my debts to her are great, and I wish to acknowledge her abounding kindness by a letter, as I must. I am now in the rage of preparation for my Lectures "On the Times;" which begin in a fortnight. There shall be eight, but I cannot yet accurately divide the topics. If it were eighty, I could better. In fear lest this sheet should not safely and timely reach its man, I must now write some duplicate. Farewell, dear friend. R.W. Emerson -------- * Spiridione Gambardella was born at Naples. He was a refugee from Italy, having escaped, the story was, on board an American man-of-war. He had been educated as a public singer, but he had a facile genius, and turned readily to painting as a means of livelihood. He painted some excellent portraits in Boston, between 1835 and 1840, among them one of Dr. Channing, and one of Dr. Follen; both of these were engraved. He had some success for a time as a portrait-painter in London. ---------- LXXI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 19 November, 1841 Dear Emerson,--Since that going down of the American Timber-ship on one of the Banks of the Solway under my window, I do not remember that you have heard a word of me. I only added that the men were all saved, and the beach all in agitation, certain women not far from hysterics;--and there ended. I did design to send you some announcement of our return hither; but fear there is no chance that I did it! About ten days ago the Signor Gambardella arrived, with a Note and Books from you: and here now is your Letter of October 30th; which, arriving at a moment when I have a little leisure, draws forth an answer almost instantly. The Signor Gambardella, whom we are to see a second time tonight or tomorrow, amuses and interests us not a little. His face is the very image of the Classic God Pan's; with horns, and cloven feet, we feel that he would make a perfect wood-god;--really, some of Poussin's Satyrs are almost portraits of this brave Gambardella. I will warrant him a right glowing mass of Southern-Italian vitality,--full of laughter, wild insight, caricature, and every sort of energy and joyous savagery: a most profitable element to get introduced (in moderate quantity), I should say, into the general current of your Puritan blood over in New England there! Gambardella has behaved with magnanimity in that matter of the Portrait: I have already sat, to men in the like case, some four times, and Gambardella knows it is a dreadful weariness; I directed him, accordingly, to my last painter, one Laurence, a man of real parts, whom I wished Gambardella to know,--and whom I wished to know Gambardella withal, that he might tell me whether there was any probability of a _good_ picture by him in case one did decide on encountering the weariness. Well: Gambardella returns with a magnanimous report that Laurence's picture far transcends any capability of his; that whoever in America or elsewhere will have a likeness of the said individual must apply to Laurence, not to Gambardella,--which latter artist heroically throws down his brush, and says, Be it far from me! The brave Gambardella! if I can get him this night to dilate a little farther on his Visit to the _Community of Shakers,_ and the things he saw and felt there, it will be a most true benefit to me. Inextinguishable laughter seemed to me to lie in Gambardella's vision of that Phenomenon,-- the sight and the seer, but we broke out too loud all at once, and he was afraid to continue.--Alas! there is almost no laughter going in the world at present. True laughter is as rare as any other truth,--the sham of it frequent and detestable, like all other shams. I know nothing wholesomer; but it is rarer even than Christmas, which comes but once a year, and does always come once. Your satisfactions and reflections at sight of your English Book are such as I too am very thankful for. I understand them well. May worse guest never visit the Drawing-room at Concord than that bound Book. Tell the good Wife to rejoice in it: she has all the pleasure;--to her poor Husband it will be increase of pain withal: nay, let us call it increase of valiant labor and endeavor; no evil for a man, if he be fit for it! A man must learn to digest praise too, and not be poisoned with it: some of it _is_ wholesome to the system under certain circumstances; the most of it a healthy system will learn by and by to throw into the slop-basin, harmlessly, without any _trial_ to digest it. A thinker, I take it, in the long run finds that essentially he must ever be and continue _alone;--alone:_ "silent, rest over him the stars, and under him the graves"! The clatter of the world, be it a friendly, be it a hostile world, shall not intermeddle with him much. The Book of _Essays,_ however, does decidedly "speak to England," in its way, in these months; and even makes what one may call a kind of appropriate "sensation" here. Reviews of it are many, in all notes of the gamut;--of small value mostly; as you might see by the two Newspaper specimens I sent you. (Did you get those two Newspapers?) The worst enemy admits that there are piercing radiances of perverse insight in it; the highest friends, some few, go to a very high point indeed. Newspapers are busy with extracts;--much complaining that it is "abstruse," neological, hard to get the meaning of. All which is very proper. Still better,--though poor Fraser, alas, is dead, (poor Fraser!), and no help could come from industries of the Bookshop, and Books indeed it seems were never selling worse than of late months,--I learn that the "sale of the Essays goes very steadily forward," and will wind itself handsomely up in due time, we may believe! So Emerson henceforth has a real Public in Old England as well as New. And finally, my Friend, do _not_ disturb yourself about turning better, &c., &c.; write as it is given you, and not till it be given you, and never mind it a whit. The new _Adelphi_ piece seems to me, as a piece of Composition, the best _written_ of them all. People cry over it: "Whitherward? What, What?" In fact, I do again desiderate some _concretion_ of these beautiful _abstracta._ It seems to me they will never be _right_ otherwise; that otherwise they are but as prophecies yet, not fulfilments. The Dial too, it is all spirit-like, aeriform, aurora-borealis like. Will no _Angel_ body himself out of that; no stalwart Yankee _man,_ with color in the cheeks of him, and a coat on his back! These things I _say:_ and yet, very true, you alone can decide what practical meaning is in them. Write you always _as_ it is given you,_ be it in the solid, in the aeriform, or whatsoever way. There is no other rule given among men.--I have sent the criticism on Landor* to an Editorial Friend of L.'s, by whom I expect it will be put into the Newspapers here, for the benefit of Walter Savage; he is not often so well praised among us, and deserves a little good praise. -------- * From the Dial for October, 1841. -------- You propose again to send me Moneys,--surprising man! I am glad also to hear that that beggarly misprinted _French Revolution_ is nearly out among you. I only hope farther your Booksellers will have an eye on that rascal Appleton, and not let _him_ reprint and deface, if more copies of the Book turn out to be wanted. Adieu, dear Emerson! Good speed to you at Boston, and in all true things. I hope to write soon again. Yours ever, T. Carlyle LXXII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 6 December, 1841 Dear Emerson,--Though I wrote to you very lately, and am in great haste today, I must lose no time in announcing that the Letter with the L40 draught came to hand some mornings ago; and now, this same morning, a second Letter round by Dumfriesshire, which had been sent as a duplicate, or substitute in case of accident, for the former. It is all right, my friend ----'s paper has got itself changed into forty gold sovereigns, and lies here waiting use; thanks, many thanks! Sums of that kind come always upon me like manna out of the sky; surely they, more emphatically than any others, are the gift of Heaven. Let us receive, use, and be thankful. I am not so poor now at all; Heaven be praised: indeed, I do not know, now and then when I reflect on it, whether being rich were not a considerably harder problem. With the wealth of Rothschild what farther good thing could one get,--if not perhaps some but to live in, under free skies, in the country, with a horse to ride and have a little less pain on? _Angulus ille ridet!_--I will add, for practical purposes in the future, that it is in general of little or no moment whether an American Bill be at sight or after a great many days; that the paper can wait as conveniently here as the cash can,--if your New England House and Baring of Old England will forbear bankruptcy in the mean while. By the bye, will you tell me some time or other in _what_ American funds it is that your funded money, you once gave me note of, now lies? I too am creditor to America,-- State of Illinois or some such State: one thousand dollars of mine, which some years ago I had no use for, now lies there, paying I suppose for canals, in a very obstructed condition! My Brother here is continually telling me that I shall lose it all, --which is not so bad; but lose it all by my own unreason,--which is very bad. It struck me I would ask where Emerson's money lies, and lay mine there too, let it live or perish as it likes! Your _Adelphi_ went straightway off to Miss Martineau with a message. Richard Milnes has another; John Sterling is to have a third,--had certain other parties seen it first. For the man Emerson is become a person to be _seen_ in these times. I also gave a _Morning-Chronicle_ Editor your brave eulogy on Landor, with instructions that it were well worth publishing there, for Landor's and others' sake. Landor deserves more praise than he gets at present; the world too, what is far more, should hear of him oftener than it does. A brave man after his kind,--though considerably "flamed on from the Hell beneath." He speaks notable things; and at lowest and worst has the faculty too of holding his peace. The "Lectures on the Times" are even now in progress? Good speed to the Speaker, to the Speech. Your Country is luckier than most at this time; it has still real Preaching; the tongue of man is not, whensoever it begins wagging, entirely sure to emit babblement, twaddlement, sincere--cant, and other noises which awaken the passionate wish for silence! That must alter everywhere the human tongue is no wooden watchman's-rattle or other _obsolete_ implement; it continues forever new and useful, nay indispensable. As for me and my doings--_Ay de mi!_* ------- * The signature has been cut off. ------- LXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle New York, 28 February, 1842 My Dear Friend,--I enclose a bill of exchange for forty-eight pounds sterling, payable by Baring Brothers & Co. after sixty days from the 25th of February. This Sum is part of a payment from Little and Brown on account of sales of your London _French Revolution and of Chartism._ As another part of their payment they asked me if they might not draw on the estate of James Fraser for a balance due from his house to them, and pay you so. I, perhaps unwisely, consented to make the proffer to you, with the distinct stipulation, however, that if it should not prove perfectly agreeable to you, and exactly as available as another form of money, you should instantly return it to me, and they shall pay me the amount, $41.57, or L8 12s. 5d. in cash. My mercantile friend, Abel Adams, did not admire my wisdom in accepting this bill of Little and Brown; so I told them I should probably bring it back to them, and if there is a shadow of inconvenience in it you will send it back to me by the next steamer. For they have no claims on us. I decide not to enclose the Little and Brown bill in this sheet,--but to let it accompany this letter in the same packet. I grieve to hear that you have bought any of our wretched Southern Stocks. In New England all Southern and Southwestern debt is usually regarded as hopeless, unless the debtor is personally known. Massachusetts stock is in the best credit of any public stock. Ward told me that it would be safest for you to keep your Illinois stock, although he could say nothing very good of it. Our city banks in Boston are in better credit than the banks in any other city here, yet one in which a large part of my own property is invested has failed, for the two last half-years, to pay any dividend, and I am a poor man until next April, when, I hope, it will not fail me again. If you wish to invest money here, my friend Abel Adams, who is the principal partner in one of our best houses, Barnard, Adams, & Co., will know how to give you the best assistance and action the case admits. My dear friend, you should have had this letter and these messages by the last steamer; but when it sailed, my son, a perfect little boy of five years and three months, had ended his earthly life.* You can never sympathize with me; you can never know how much of me such a young child can take away. A few weeks ago I accounted myself a very rich man, and now the poorest of all. What would it avail to tell you anecdotes of a sweet and wonderful boy, such as we solace and sadden ourselves with at home every morning and evening? From a perfect health and as happy a life and as happy influences as ever child enjoyed, he was hurried out of my arms in three short days by Scarlatina.--We have two babes yet,--one girl of three years, and one girl of three months and a week, but a promise like that Boy's I shall never see. How often I have pleased myself that one day I should send to you this Morning Star of mine, and stay at home so gladly behind such a representative. I dare not fathom the Invisible and Untold to inquire what relations to my Departed ones I yet sustain. Lidian, the poor Lidian, moans at home by day and by night. You too will grieve for us, afar. I believe I have two letters from you since I wrote last. I shall write again soon, for Bronson Alcott will probably go to London in about a month, and him I shall surely send to you, hoping to atone by his great nature for many smaller one, that have craved to see you. Give me early advice of receiving these Bills of Exchange. --------- * The memory of this Boy, "born for the future, to the future lost;" is enshrined in the heart of every lover of childhood and of poetry by his father's impassioned _Threnody._ ----------- Tell Jane Carlyle our sorrowing story with much love, and with all good hope for her health and happiness. Tell us when you write, with as much particularity as you can, how it stands with you, and all your household; with the Doctor, and the friends; what you do, and propose to do, and whether you will yet come to America, one good day? Yours with love, R. Waldo Emerson LXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson Templand, Thornhill, Dumfries, Scotland 28 March, 1842 My Dear Friend,--This is heavy news that you send me; the heaviest outward bereavement that can befall a man has overtaken you. Your calm tone of deep, quiet sorrow, coming in on the rear of poor trivial worldly businesses, all punctually despatched and recorded too, as if the Higher and Highest had not been busy with you, tells me a sad tale. What can we say in these cases? There is nothing to be said,--nothing but what the wild son of Ishmael, and every thinking heart, from of old have learned to say: God is great! He is terrible and stern; but we know also He is good. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Your bright little Boy, chief of your possessions here below, is rapt away from you; but of very truth he is with God, even as we that yet live are,--and surely in the way that was best for him, and for you, and for all of us.--Poor Lidian Emerson, poor Mother! To her I have no word. Such poignant unspeakable grief, I believe, visits no creature as that of a Mother bereft of her child. The poor sparrow in the bush affects one with pity, mourning for its young; how much more the human soul of one's Friend! I cannot bid her be of comfort; for there is as yet no comfort. May good Influences watch over her, bring her some assuagement. As the Hebrew David said, "We shall go to him, he will not return to us." I also am here in a house rendered vacant and sacred by Death. A sore calamity has fallen on us, or rather has fallen on my poor Wife (for what am I but like a spectator in comparison?): she has lost unexpectedly her good Mother, her sole surviving Parent, and almost only relative of much value that was left to her. The manner too was almost tragic. We had heard of illness here, but only of commonplace illness, and had no alarm. The Doctor himself, specially applied to, made answer as if there was no danger: his poor Patient, in whose character the like of that intimately lay, had rigorously charged him to do so: her poor Daughter was far off, confined to her room by illness of her own; why alarm her, make her wretched? The danger itself did seem over; the Doctor accordingly obeyed. Our first intimation of alarm was despatched on the very day which proved the final one. My poor Wife, casting sickness behind her, got instantly ready, set off by the first railway train: traveling all night, on the morrow morning at her Uncle's door in Liverpool she is met by tidings that all is already ended. She broke down there; she is now home again at Chelsea, a cheery, amiable younger Jane Welsh to nurse her: the tone of her Letters is still full of disconsolateness. I had to proceed hither, and have to stay here till this establishment can be abolished, and all the sad wrecks of it in some seemly manner swept away. It is above three weeks that I have been here; not till eight days ago could I so much as manage to command solitude, to be left altogether alone. I lead a strange life; full of sadness, of solemnity, not without a kind of blessedness. I say it is right and fitting that one be left entirely alone now and then, alone with one's own griefs and sins, with the mysterious ancient Earth round one, the everlasting Heaven over one, and what one can make of these. Poor rustic businesses, subletting of Farms, disposal of houses, household goods: these strangely intervene, like matter upon spirit, every day;--wholesome this too perhaps. It is many years since I have stood so in close contact face to face with the reality of Earth, with its haggard ugliness, its divine beauty, its depths of Death and of Life. Yesterday, one of, the stillest Sundays, I sat long by the side of the swift river Nith; sauntered among woods all vocal only with rooks and pairing birds.* The hills are often white with snow-powder, black brief spring-tempests rush fiercely down from them, and then again the sky looks forth with a pale pure brightness,--like Eternity from behind Time. The _Sky,_ when one thinks of it, is _always_ blue, pure changeless azure; rains and tempests are only for the little dwellings where men abide. Let us think of this too. Think of this, thou sorrowing Mother! Thy Boy has escaped many showers. --------- * "Templand has a very fine situation; old Walter's walk, at the south end of the house, was one of the most picturesque and pretty to be found in the world. Nith valley (river half a mile off, winding through green holms, now in its border of clean shingle, now lost in pleasant woods and rushes) lay patent to the South. "Carlyle's Reminiscences," Vol. II. p. 137. --------- In some three weeks I shall probably be back at Chelsea. Write thitherward so soon as you have opportunity; I will write again before long, even if I do not hear from you. The moneys, &c. are all safe here as you describe: if Fraser's' Executors make any demur, your Bookseller shall soon hear of it. I had begun to write some Book on Cromwell: I have often begun, but know not how to set about it; the most unutterable of all subjects I ever felt much meaning to lie in. There is risk yet that, with the loss of still farther labor, I may have to abandon it;--and then the great dumb Oliver may lie unspoken forever; gathered to the mighty _Silent_ of the Earth; for, I think, there will hardly ever live another man that will believe in him and his Puritanism as I do. To _him_ small matter. Adieu, my good kind Friend, ever dear to me, dearer now in sorrow. My Wife when she hears of your affliction will send a true thought over to you also. The poor Lidian!--John Sterling is driven off again, setting out I think this very day for Gibraltar, Malta, and Naples. Farewell, and better days to us. Your affectionate T. Carlyle LXXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 81 March, 1842 My Dear Carlyle,--I wrote you a letter from my brother's office in New York nearly a month ago to tell you how hardly it had fared with me here at home, that the eye of my home was plucked out when that little innocent boy departed in his beauty and perfection from my sight. Well, I have come back hither to my work and my play, but he comes not back, and I must simply suffer it. Doubtless the day will come which will resolve this, as everything gets resolved, into light, but not yet. I write now to tell you of a piece of life. I wish you to know that there is shortly coming to you a man by the name of Bronson Alcott. If you have heard his name before, forget what you have heard. Especially if you have ever read anything to which this name was attached, be sure to forget that; and, inasmuch as in you lies, permit this stranger when he arrives at your gate to make a new and primary impression. I do not wish to bespeak any courtesies or good or bad opinion concerning him. You may love him, or hate him, or apathetically pass by him, as your genius shall dictate; only I entreat this, that you do not let him go quite out of your reach until you are sure you have seen him and know for certain the nature of the man. And so I leave contentedly my pilgrim to his fate. I should tell you that my friend Margaret Fuller, who has edited our little _Dial_ with such dubious approbation on the part of you and other men, has suddenly decided a few days ago that she will edit it no more. The second volume was just closing; shall it live for a third year? You should know that, if its interior and spiritual life has been ill fed, its outward and bibliopolic existence has been worse managed. Its publishers failed, its short list of subscribers became shorter, and it has never paid its laborious editor, who has been very generous of her time and labor, the smallest remuneration. Unhappily, to me alone could the question be put whether the little aspiring starveling should be reprieved for another year. I had not the cruelty to kill it, and so must answer with my own proper care and nursing for its new life. Perhaps it is a great folly in me who have little adroitness in turning off work to assume this sure vexation, but the _Dial_ has certain charms to me as an opportunity, which I grudge to destroy. Lately at New York I found it to be to a certain class of men and women, though few, an object of tenderness and religion. You cannot believe it? Mr. Lee,* who brings you this letter, is the son of one of the best men in Massachusetts, a man whose name is a proverb among merchants for his probity, for his sense and his information. The son, who bears his father's name, is a favorite among all the young people for his sense and spirit, and has lived always with good people. --------- * Mr. Henry Lee. -------- I have read at New York six out of eight lectures on the Times which I read this winter in Boston. I found a very intelligent and friendly audience. The penny papers reported my lectures, somewhat to my chagrin when I tried to read them; many persons came and talked with me, and I felt when I came away that New York is open to me henceforward whenever my Boston parish is not large enough. This summer, I must try to set in order a few more chapters from these rambling lectures, one on "The Poet" and one on "Character" at least. And now will you not tell me what you read and write? Is it Cromwell still? For I supposed from the _Westminster_ piece that the laborer must be in that quarter. I send herewith a new _Dial,_ No. 8, and the last of this dispensation. I hope you have received every number. They have been sent in order. I have written no line in this Number. I send a letter for Sterling, as I do not know whether his address is still at Falmouth. Is he now a preacher? By the "Acadia" you should have received a letter of exchange on the Barings, and another on James Fraser's estate. With constant good hope for yourself and for your wife, I am your friend, --R.W. Emerson End of Vol. I. 
13660	----	THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS CARLYLE AND RALPH WALDO EMERSON 1834-1872 VOLUME II "To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give, and of me to receive."--Emerson "What the writer did actually mean, the thing he then thought of, the thing he then was."--Carlyle CONTENTS OF VOLUME II LXXVI. Emerson. Concord, 1 July, 1842. Remittance of L51.-- Alcott.--Editorship of the _Dial._--Projected essay on Poetry.-- Stearns Wheeler. LXXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 19 July, 1842. Acknowledgment of remittance.--Change of publishers.--Work on _Cromwell._-- Sterling.--Alcott. LXXVIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 29 August, 1842. Impotence of speech.--Heart-sick for his own generation.--Transcendentalism of the _Dial._ LXXIX. Emerson. Concord, 15 October, 1842. The coming book on Cromwell.--Alcott.--The _Dial_ and its sins.--Booksellers' accounts. LXXX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 17 November, 1842. Accounts.--Alcott.-- Sect-founders.--Man the Reformer.--James Stephen.--Gambardella. LXXXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 11 March, 1843. _Past and Present._-- How to prevent pirated republication.--The _Dial._--Alcott's English Tail. LXXXII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 1 April, 1843. Copy of _Past and Present_ forwarded.--Prospect of pirated edition. LXXXIII. Emerson. Concord, 29 April, 1843. Carlyle's star.-- Lectures on "New England" at Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York.--Politics in Washington.--_Past and Present._--Effect of cheap press in America.--Reprint of the book.--The _Dial_ does not pay expenses. Extract from Emerson's Diary concerning _Past and Present._ LXXXIV. Carlyle. 27 August, 1843. Introduction of Mr. Macready. LXXXV. Emerson. Concord, 30 October, 1843. Remittance of L25.-- Piratical reprint of _Past and Present._--E.P. Clark, a Carlylese, to be asked to take charge of accounts.--Henry James. --Ellery Channing's Poems. LXXXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 31 October, 1843. Summer wanderings. --The _Dial_ at the London Library.--Growth of Emerson's public in England.--Piratical reprint of his Essays in London.--of _Past and Present_ in America.--Criticism of Carlyle in the Dial.--Dr. Russell.--Theodore Parker.--Book about Cromwell.-- _Commons Journals._ LXXXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 17 November, 1843. Receipt of L25.-- E.P. Clark.--Henry James.--Channing's Poems.--Reverend W.H. Channing.--"Progress of the Species."--Emerson.--The Cromwell business. LXXXVIII. Emerson. Concord, 31 December, 1843. Macready.-- Railroad to Concord.--Margaret Fuller's Review of Sterling's Poems in the _Dial._--Remittance of L32. LXXXIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 31 January, 1844. Remittance received and made.--Criticism of Emerson by Gilfillan.--John Sterling.-- Cromwell book.--Hexameters from Voss. XC. Emerson. Concord, 29 February, 1844. Acknowledgment of remittance.--A new collection of Essays.--Faith in Writers as a class.--Remittance of L36.--Proposal concerning publication in America of _Cromwell._ XCI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 3 April, 1844. Acknowledgment of remittance.--Piratical reprints.--Professor Ferrier. XCII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 5 August, 1844. Fear for Sterling.-- Tennyson.--Work on _Cromwell_ frightful. XCIII. Emerson. Concord, 1 September, 1844. Sends proof sheets of new book of Essays.--Sterling. XCIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 29 September, 1844. Death of Sterling. XCV. Emerson. Concord, 30 September, 1844. Remittance of L30-- Sterling.--Tennyson.--Regrets having troubled Carlyle about proof-sheets.--Birth of Edward Emerson.--Purchase of land on Walden Pond. XCVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 3 November, 1844. Thanks for remittance.--London edition of _Essays,_ Second Series.-- Criticism on them. XCVII. Emerson. Concord, 31 December, 1844. Sterling's death.-- London edition of _Essays._--Carlyle's Preface and strictures. XCVIII. Emerson. Concord, 31 January, 1845. Bargain about _Miscellanies_ with Carey and Hart.--Portrait of Carlyle desired.--E.P. Clark's "Illustrations of Carlyle". XCIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 16 February, 1845. Bargain with Carey & Co.--Portrait.--Emerson's public in England.--Work on Cromwell. C. Emerson. Concord, 29 June, 1845. Death of Mr. Carey.-- Portrait.--His own occupations.--Preparing to print _Poems._-- Lectures in prospect. CI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 29 August, 1845. _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_ finished.--Nature of the book.--New book from Emerson welcome.--Imperfection of all modes of utterance.--Forbids further plague with booksellers. CII. Emerson. Concord, 15 September, 1845. Payment sure from Carey and Hart.--Lectures on "Representative Men". CIII. Emerson. Concord, 30 September, 1845. Congratulations on completion of _Cromwell_ book.--Clark. CIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 11 November, 1845. Cromwell book sent.-- Visit to Scotland.--Changes there.--His mother.--Impatience with the times.--Weariness with the Cromwell book.--Visit to the Ashburtons. CV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 3 January, 1846. Thanks to Mr. Hart, Mr. Furness, and others.--_Cromwell proves popular.--New letters of Cromwell. CVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 3 February, 1846. Second edition of Cromwell.--Emerson to do what he will concerning republication.-- Anti-Corn-Law.--Aristocracy and Millocracy. CVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 3 March, 1846. Cromwell lumber.--Sheets of new edition sent.-Essay on Emerson in an Edinburgh Magazine.-- Mr. Everett.--Jargon in Newspapers and Parliament. CVIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 18 April, 1846. Arrangements concerning reprint of _Cromwell._--Promise of Daguerrotype likeness.--Fifty years old.--Rides.--Emerson's voice wholly human.--Blessedness in work. CIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 30 April, 1846. Photograph sent.-- Arrangements with Wiley and Putnam for republication of _Cromwell_ and other books.--Photographs of Emerson and himself. --Remembrance of Craigenputtock. CX. Emerson. Concord, 14 May, 1846. Daguerrotype likeness.-- Wood-lot on Walden Pond. CXI. Emerson. Concord, 31 May, 1846. Photograph of Carlyle received.--One of himself sent in return.--Bargain with Wiley and Putnam. CXII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 18 June, 1846. Bargain with Wiley and Putnam.--Emerson's photograph expected. CXIII. Emerson. Concord, 15 July, 1846. Wiley and Putnam.-- Dealings with booksellers.--Accounts.--E.P. Clark and his Illustrations of Carlyle's Writings.--Margaret Fuller going to Europe. CXIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 17 July, 1846. Photograph of Emerson unsatisfactory.--Revision of his own books.--Spleen against books.--Going to Scotland.--Reading in American history.-- Marshall and Sparks.--Michelet.--Beriah Green. CXV. Emerson. Concord, 31 July, 1846. Thanks for copy of new edition of Cromwell.--Margaret Fuller.--Desires Carlyle to see her. CXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 18 December, 1846. Long silence.-- Disconsolate two months in Scotland.--Visit to Ireland.--A country cast into the melting-pot.--O'Connell.--Young Ireland.-- Returned home sad.--Miss Fuller; estimate of her.--What she thought of Carlyle.--Emerson's Poems. CXVII. Emerson. Concord, 31 January, 1847. Margaret Fuller's visit to Chelsea.--Speculates on going to England to lecture.-- His _Poems._ CXVIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 2 March, 1847. Visit to Hampshire.-- Emerson's _Poems._--Prospect of Emerson's Lectures in England.-- Miss Fuller. CXIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 18 March, 1847. Remittance received.-- Alexander Ireland.--Advice concerning lectures. CXX. Emerson. Concord, 30 April, 1847. Prospect of lecturing in England.--Works in garden and orchard. CXXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 18 May, 1847. Thoreau's Lecture on Carlyle.--Visit from E.R. Hoar.--Emerson's visit to England. CXXII. Emerson. Concord, 4 June, 1847. Prospect of visit to England.--F.H. Hedge. CXXIII. Emerson. Concord, 31 July, 1847. Visit to England decided upon.--Portrait of Sterling. CXXIV. Carlyle. Rawdon, Yorkshire, 31 August, 1847. Journeyings.--Emerson's expected visit.--Hedge.--Dr. Jacobson.-- Quaker hosts. CXXV. Emerson. Concord, 30 September, 1847. Plans for England. CXXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 15 October, 1847. Delay of Emerson's letter announcing his coming.--Welcome to Chelsea. Emerson--Extracts from his Diary concerning Carlyle. CXXVIl. Emerson. Manchester, 5 November, 1847. His reception and occupations. CXXVIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 13 November, 1847. Messages.-- Occupations.--Bancroft. CXXIX. Carlyle. Chelsea., 30 November, 1847. Messages.--Mr. Forster, &c. CXXX. Emerson. Manchester, 28 December, 1847. Message from Miss Fuller.--Hospitality shown him.--The English. CXXXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 30 December, 1847. The Pepolis.-- Milnes.--Tennyson.--Idleness.--Visit to Hampshire.--Massachusetts Review. CXXXII. Emerson. Ambleside, 26 February, 1848. At Miss Martineau's.--Wordsworth.--Proposed return to Chelsea. CXXXIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 28 February, 1848. Welcome ready at Chelsea.--His own conditions.--The new French Republic. CXXXIV. Emerson. Manchester, 2 March, 1848. Return to London. CXXXV. Emerson. [London,] 19 June, 1848. Proposed call with Mrs. Crowe. CXXXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 20 June, 1848. Mrs. Crowe.--Luncheon with the Duchess. CXXXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 23 June, 1848. Invitation to dinner. CXXXVIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 6 December, 1848. Long silence.-- Questions concerning Indian meal.--Death of Charles Buller, and of Lord Ashburton's mother.--Neuberg and others. CXXXIX. Emerson. Boston, 23 January, 1849. John Carlyle's translation of the Inferno.--Indian corn.--Clough's Bothie. CXL. Carlyle. Chelsea, 19 April, 1849. Indian corn from Concord; trial of it, reflections upon it.--No writing at present.--Macaulay's _History._--Political outlook.--Clough.-- Sterling Club. CXLI. Carlyle. Scotsbrig, 13 August, 1849. Indian corn again.-- Tour in Ireland.--Letter from Miss Fuller.--Message to Thoreau. CXLII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 19 July, 1850. A year's silence.-- Latter Day Pamphlets.--Divergence from Emerson.--_Representative Men._--Prescott lionized. CXLIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 14 November, 1850. "Eighteen million bores."--Emerson on Latter Day Pamphlets.--Autumn Journey.-- Disordered nerves. CXLIV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 July, 1851. Appeal for news.--_Life of Sterling._--Crystal Palace.--Bossu's _Journal,_ Bartram's _Travels._--Margaret Fuller.--Mazzini.--Dr. Carlyle. CXLV. Emerson. Concord, 28 July, 1851. Story of the year.-- Journey in the West.--Memoir of Margaret Fuller.--_Life of Sterling._--English friends. CXLVI. Carlyle. Great Malvern, 25 August, 1851. _Life of Sterling._--Bossu's _Journal._--Water-cure.--Twisleton.--Milnes married.--Tennyson.--Browning on Miss Fuller. CXLVII. Emerson. Concord, 14 April, 1852. Browning's Reminiscences of Margaret Fuller.--Books on the Indians.--_Life of Sterling._ CXLVIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 7 May, 1852. Correspondence must be revived.--Margaret Fuller.--Memoirs of her. CXLIX. Emerson. Concord, May, 1852. Relations with Carlyle.-- Carlyle's genius and his own.--Margaret Fuller. CL. Carlyle. Chelsea, 25 June, 1852. Emerson and himself.-- Reading about Frederick the Great. CLI. Emerson. Concord, 19 April, 1853. Excuses for not writing.--Chapter on Fate.--Visit to the West.--Conditions of American life.--Clough. CLII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 13 May, 1853. Blessing of letters from Emerson.--Coming on of old age.--Modern democracy.--Visit to Germany.--Still reading about Fritz. CLIIa. Emerson. Concord, 10 August, 1853. Slowness to write.-- Regret at Clough's return to England.--Miss Bacon.--Carlyle's visit to Germany.--Thackeray in America.--New York and its society. CLIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 9 September, 1853. Regrets for old days.--Not left town.--A new top story.--Miss Bacon, her Quixotic enterprise.--Clough.--Thackeray.--To Concord? CLIV. Emerson. Concord, 11 March, 1854. Laurence, the artist.-- Reading Latter Day Pamphlets.--Death of Carlyle's, and of Emerson's mother.--Miss Bacon.--His English Notes.--Lecturing tour in the West.--Speed _Frederick!_ CLV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 April, 1854. Thankful for Emerson's letter.--Death of his mother.--Makes no way in Prussian History. --The insuperable difficulty with _Frederick._--Literature in these days.--Emerson's picture of America.--Battle of Freedom and Slavery.--Emerson's book on England desired.--Miss Bacon. CLVI. Emerson. Concord, 17 April, 1855. Excuses for not writing.--Unchanged feeling for Carlyle.--The American.--True measure of life.--Musings of indolence. CLVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 13 May, 1855. Emerson's letters indispensable; his complete understanding of Carlyle.--A grim and lonely year.--Never had such a business as _Frederick._-- Frederick himself.--"Balaklava."--Persistence of the English.-- Urges Emerson to print his book on England. CLVIII. Emerson. Concord, 6 May, 1856. Letter-writing.--Leaves of Grass.--Mrs. ---. CLIX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 20 July, 1856. Emerson's letter welcome.--Life a burden.--Going to Scotland.--_Life of Frederick_ to go to press.--Mrs. ---.--Miss Bacon.--Browning. CLX. Carlyle. The Gill, Cummertrees, Annan, 28 August, 1856. The debt of America to Emerson.--_English Traits_ will be welcome.--Grateful for whatever Emerson may have said of himself.--In retreat in Annan. CLXI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 2 December, 1856. Close of negotiations for printing a complete edition of his Works in America.-- _English Traits._--Its excellence. CLXII. Emerson. Concord, 17 May, 1858. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Longworth.--Inquires for the _Frederick._--Desires a _liber veritatis._--Friendship of old gentlemen. CLXIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 2 June, 1858. Emerson's letter and friends welcome.--First two volumes of Frederick just ready.-- Ugliness of the job.--Occasional tone of Emerson in the Magazines.--Health.--Separation of Dickens from his wife. CLXIII.* Carlyle. Chelsea, 9 April, 1859. Copy of _Frederick_ sent to Emerson.--Nearly choked by the job.--Self-pity.-- Emerson's speech on Burns. CLXIV. Emerson. Concord, I May, 1859. Arrival of first volumes of _Frederick._--Illusion of children.--His own children.--A correspondent of twenty-five years not to be disused. Extracts from Emerson's Diary respecting the _Frederick._ CLXV. Emerson. Concord, 16 April, 1860. Mr. O.W. Wight's new edition of the _Miscellanies._--Sight at Toronto of two nephews of Carlyle.--Carlyle commended to the Gods. CLXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 30 April, 1860. Encouragement from Emerson's words about _Frederick._--Message to Mr. Wight. CLXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 29 January, 1861. Emerson's _Conduct of Life._--Still twelve months from end of his task; nearly worn out. CLXVIII. Emerson. Concord, 16 April, 1861. Thanks for last note.--_Frederick._ CLXIX. Emerson. Concord, 8 December, 1862. The third volume of _Frederick._--The manner of it.--The war in America--Death of Clough. CLXX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 8 March, 1864. Introduction of the Hon. Lyulph Stanley.--Mrs. Carlyle's ill-health. CLXXI. Emerson. Concord, 26 September, 1864. Sympathy.--Fourth volume of Frederick.--Nature of the war in America--Mr. Stanley. CLXXII. Carlyle. Annandale, Scotland, 14 June, 1865. Completion of _Frederick._--Saunterings.--Stay in Annandale.--Mrs. Carlyle. --Photographs.--Mr. M.D. Conway.--The American Peacock. CLXXIII. Emerson. Concord, 7 January, 1866. The last volumes of Friedrich.--America.--Conduct of Americans in war and in peace.-- Photographs.--Little to tell of himself. CLXXIV. Emerson. Concord, 16 May, 1866. Mrs. Carlyle's death. CLXXV. Carlyle. Mentone, 27 January, 1867. Sad interval since last writing.--His condition.--Mrs. Carlye's death.--Solace in writing reminiscences.--Visit in Kent during summer.--Tennyson's _Idyls._--Emerson's _English Traits._--Mentone. CLXXVI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 18 November, 1869. Long abeyance of correspondence.--Plan of bequeathing books to New England.-- Emerson's counsel desired.--His own condition. CLXXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 4 January, 1870. Arrangements respecting bequest of books to Harvard College. CLXXVIII. Emerson. Concord, 23 January, 1870. Apologies for delay.--Writing new book.--Delight in proposed bequest.--Advice concerning. CLXXIX. Carlyle. Melchet Court, Romsey, 14 February, 1870. Acknowledgment of letter. CLXXX. Carlyle. Chelsea, 24 February, 1870. Ending of the Harvard business. CLXXXI. Emerson. Concord, 21 March, 1870. Visit to President Eliot concerning the bequest to Harvard.--Reflections on the gift.--Speech about it to others.--Must renew correspondence.-- His own children. CLXXXII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 24 March, 1870. Possible delay of his last letter.--Society and Solitude not received. CLXXXIII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 6 April, 1870. Emerson's letter received.--Thankful for the conclusion of the little Transaction.--Reflections on it.--Regrets that it has been spoken of.--_Society and Solitude._--News from Concord.--The night cometh. CLXXXIV. Emerson. Concord, 17 June, 1870. Excuses for delay in writing.--Lectures on Philosophy.--Steps taken to secure privacy in regard to bequest.--Chapman's Homer.--Error in address of books.--Report of Carlyle's coming to America. CLXXXV. Carlyle. Chelsea, 28 September, 1870. Delay in receiving Emerson's last letter.--Correction of error in address of books.--Emerson's lectures.--Philosophies.--Too late for him to come to America. CLXXXVI. Emerson. Concord, 15 October, 1870. The victim of miscellany.--Library Edition of Carlyle's Works received.-- Invitation.--The privilege of genius.--E.R. Hoar.--J.M. Forbes.-- The growing youth.--The Lowell race. CLXXXVIa. Emerson. Concord, 10 April, 1871. Account of himself and his work.--Introduction to Plutarch's _Morals._--Oration before the New England Society in New York.--Lectures at Cambridge.--Reprint of early writings.--About to go to California. CLXXXVII. Carlyle. Chelsea, 4 June, 1871. Gap in correspondence.--Unfriendly winter.--Completion of Library Edition of his Works.--Significance of piracy of Emerson.-- Conditions in America.--Anti-Anarchy.--J. Lee Bliss.--Finis of the Copper Captaincy. CLXXXVIII. Emerson. Concord, 30 June, 1871. Return from California.--California.--The plains.--Brigham Young.--Lucy Garbett.--Carlyle's ill-health. CLXXXIX. Emerson. Concord, 4 September, 1871. Introduction of his son Edward. CXC. Emerson. Baltimore, 5 January, 1872. Last instalment of Library Edition of Carlyle's Works received.--Felicitations on this completion.--Happiness in having been Carlyle's contemporary and friend.--Carlyle's perversities.--Proposes to "retire and read the authors."--Carlyle's talk. CXCI. Carlyle. Chelsea, 2 April, 1872. Excuses for silence.-- Ill-health.--Emerson's letter about the West.--Aspect and meaning of that Western World.--Ruskin.--Froude.--Write. ----------- CORRESPONDENCE OF CARLYLE AND EMERSON LXXVI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 1 July, 1842 My Dear Carlyle,--I have lately received from our slow friends, James Munroe & Co., $246 on account of their sales of the _Miscellanies,_--and I enclose a bill of Exchange for L51, which cost $246.50. It is a long time since I sent you any sketch of the account itself, and indeed a long time since it was posted, as the booksellers say; but I will find a time and a clerk also for this. I have had no word from you for a long space. You wrote me a letter from Scotland after the death of your wife's mother, and full of pity for me also; and since, I have heard nothing. I confide that all has gone well and prosperously with you; that the iron Puritan is emerging from the Past, in shape and stature as he lived; and you are recruited by sympathy and content with your picture; and that the sure repairs of time and love and active duty have brought peace to the orphan daughter's heart. My friend Alcott must also have visited you before this, and you have seen whether any relation could subsist betwixt men so differently excellent. His wife here has heard of his arrival on your coast,--no more. I submitted to what seemed a necessity of petty literary patriotism,--I know not what else to call it,--and took charge of our thankless little _Dial,_ here, without subscribers enough to pay even a publisher, much less any laborer; it has no penny for editor or contributor, nothing but abuse in the newspapers, or, at best, silence; but it serves as a sort of portfolio, to carry about a few poems or sentences which would otherwise be transcribed and circulated; and always we are waiting when somebody shall come and make it good. But I took it, as I said, and it took me, and a great deal of good time, to a small purpose. I am ashamed to compute how many hours and days these chores consume for me. I had it fully in my heart to write at large leisure in noble mornings opened by prayer or by readings of Plato or whomsoever else is dearest to the Morning Muse, a chapter on Poetry, for which all readings, all studies, are but preparation; but now it is July, and my chapter is rudest beginnings. Yet when I go out of doors in the summer night, and see how high the stars are, I am persuaded that there is time enough, here or somewhere, for all that I must do; and the good world manifests very little impatience. Stearns Wheeler, the Cambridge tutor, a good Grecian, and the editor, you will remember, of your American Editions, is going to London in August probably, and on to Heidelberg, &c. He means, I believe, to spend two years in Germany, and will come to see you on his way; a man whose too facile and good-natured manners do some injustice to his virtues, to his great industry and real knowledge. He has been corresponding with your Tennyson, and editing his Poems here. My mother, my wife, my two little girls, are well; the youngest, Edith, is the comfort of my days. Peace and love be with you, with you both, and all that is yours. --R. W. Emerson In our present ignorance of Mr. Alcott's address I advised his wife to write to your care, as he was also charged to keep you informed of his place. You may therefore receive letters for him with this. LXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 19 July, 1842 My Dear Emerson,--Lest Opportunity again escape me, I will take her, this time, by the forelock, and write while the matter is still hot. You have been too long without hearing of me; far longer, at least, than I meant. Here is a second Letter from you, besides various intermediate Notes by the hands of Friends, since that Templand Letter of mine: the Letter arrived yesterday; my answer shall get under way today. First under the head of business let it be authenticated that the Letter enclosed a Draft for L51; a new, unexpected munificence out of America; which is ever and anon dropping gifts upon me,-- to be received, as indeed they partly are, like Manna dropped out of the sky; the gift of unseen Divinities! The last money I got from you changed itself in the usual soft manner from dollars into sovereigns, and was what they call "all right,"--all except the little Bill (of Eight Pounds and odds, I think) drawn on Fraser's Executors by Brown (Little and Brown?); which Bill the said Executors having refused for I know not what reason, I returned it to Brown with note of the dishonor done it, and so the sum still stands on his Books in our favor. Fraser's people are not now my Booksellers, except in the matter of your _Essays_ and a second edition of _Sartor;_ the other Books I got transferred to a certain pair of people named "Chapman and Hall, 186 Strand"; which operation, though (I understand) it was transacted with great and vehement reluctance on the part of the Fraser people, yet produced no _quarrel_ between them and me, and they still forward parcels, &c., and are full of civility when I see them:--so that whether this had any effect or none in their treatment of Brown and his Bill I never knew; nor indeed, having as you explained it no concern with Brown's and their affairs, did I ever happen to inquire. I avoid all Booksellers; see them rarely, the blockheads; study never to think of them at all. Book-sales, reputation, profit, &c., &c.; all this at present is really of the nature of an encumbrance to me; which I study, not without success, to sweep almost altogether out of my head. One good is still possible to me in Life, one only: To screw a little more work out of myself, my miserable, despicable, yet living, acting, and so far imperial and celestial _self;_ and this, God knows, is difficulty enough without any foreign one! You ask after _Cromwell:_ ask not of him; he is like to drive me mad. There he lies, shining clear enough to me, nay glowing, or painfully burning; but far down; sunk under two hundred years of Cant, Oblivion, Unbelief, and Triviality of every kind: through all which, and to the top of all which, what mortal industry or energy will avail to raise him! A thousand times I have rued that my poor activity ever took that direction. The likelihood still is that I may abandon the task undone. I have bored through the dreariest mountains of rubbish; I have visited Naseby Field, and how many other unintelligible fields and places; I have &c., &c.:--alas, what a talent have I for getting into the Impossible! Meanwhile my studies still proceed; I even take a ghoulish kind of pleasure in raking through these old bone-houses and burial-aisles now; I have the strangest fellowship with that huge Genius of DEATH (universal president there), and catch sometimes, through some chink or other, glimpses into blessed _ulterior_ regions,--blessed, but as yet altogether _silent._ There is no use of writing of things past, unless they can be made in fact things present: not yesterday at all, but simply today and what it holds of fulfilment and of promises is _ours:_ the dead ought to bury their dead, ought they not? In short, I am very unfortunate, and deserve your prayers,--in a quiet kind of way! If you lose tidings of me altogether, and never hear of me more,--consider simply that I have gone to my natal element, that the Mud Nymphs have sucked me in; as they have done several in their time! Sterling was here about the time your Letters to him came: your American reprint of his pieces was naturally gratifying him much.* He seems getting yearly more restless; necessitated to find an outlet for himself, unable as yet to do it well. I think he will now write Review articles for a while; which craft is really, perhaps, the one he is fittest for hitherto. I love Sterling: a radiant creature; but very restless;--incapable either of rest or of effectual motion: aurora borealis and sheet lightning; which if it could but _concentrate_ itself, as I [say] always--!--We had much talk; but, on the whole, even his talk is not much better for me than silence at present. _Me miserum!_ -------- * "The Poetical Works of John Sterling," Philadelphia, 1842. -------- Directly about the time of Sterling's departure came Alcott, some two weeks after I had heard of his arrival on these shores. He has been twice here, at considerable length; the second time, all night. He is a genial, innocent, simple-hearted man, of much natural intelligence and goodness, with an air of rusticity, veracity, and dignity withal, which in many ways appeals to one. The good Alcott: with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a kind of venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can even laugh at without loving!.... My poor Wife is still weak, overshadowed with sorrow: her loss is great, the loss almost as of the widow's mite; for except her good Mother she had almost no kindred left; and as for friends-- they are not rife in this world.--God be thanked withal they are not entirely non-extant! Have I not a Friend, and Friends, though they too are in sorrow? Good be with you all. --T. Carlyle. By far the valuablest thing that Alcott brought me was the Newspaper report of Emerson's last Lectures in New York. Really a right wholesome thing; radiant, fresh as the _morning;_ a thing _worth_ reading; which accordingly I clipped from the Newspaper, and have in a state of assiduous circulation to the comfort of many.--I cannot bid you quit the _Dial,_ though it, too, alas, is Antinomian somewhat! _Perge, perge,_ nevertheless. --And so now an end. --T. C. LXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 29 August, 1842 My Dear. Emerson,--This, morning your new Letter, of the 15th August, has arrived;* exactly one fortnight old: thanks to the gods and steam-demons! I already, perhaps six weeks ago, answered your former Letter,--acknowledging the manna-gift of the L51, and other things; nor do I think the Letter can have been lost, for I remember putting it into the Post-Office myself. Today I am on the eve of an expedition into Suffolk, and full of petty business: however, I will throw you one word, were it only to lighten my own heart a little. You are a kind friend to me, and a precious;--and when I mourn over the impotence of Human Speech, and how each of us, speak or write as he will, has to stand _dumb,_ cased up in his own unutterabilities, before his unutterable Brother, I feel always as if Emerson were the man I could soonest _try_ to speak with,--were I within reach of him! Well; we must be content. A pen is a pen, and worth something; though it expresses about as much of a _man's_ meaning perhaps as the stamping of a hoof will express of a horse's meaning; a very poor expression indeed! --------- * This letter of 15th August is missing. --------- Your bibliopolic advice about Cromwell or my next Book shall be carefully attended, if I live ever to write another Book! But I have again got down into primeval Night; and live alone and mute with the _Manes,_ as you say; uncertain whether I shall ever more see day. I am partly ashamed of myself; but cannot help it. One of my grand difficulties I suspect to be that I cannot write _two Books at once;_ cannot be in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth at one and the same moment; a feat which excels even that of the Irishman's bird: "Nobody but a bird can be in two places at once!" For my heart is sick and sore in behalf of my own poor generation; nay, I feel withal as if the one hope of help for it consisted in the possibility of new Cromwells and new Puritans: thus do the two centuries stand related to me, the seventeenth _worthless_ except precisely in so far as it can be made the nineteenth; and yet let anybody try that enterprise! Heaven help me.--I believe at least that I ought _to hold my tongue;_ more especially at present. Thanks for asking me to write you a word in the _Dial._ Had such a purpose struck me long ago, there have been many things passing through my head,--march-marching as they ever do, in long drawn, scandalous Falstaff-regiments (a man ashamed to be seen passing through Coventry with such a set!)--some one of which, snatched out of the ragged rank, and dressed and drilled a little, might perhaps fitly have been saved from Chaos, and sent to the _Dial._ In future we shall be on the outlook. I love your _Dial,_ and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem to me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this present Universe, in which alone, ugly as it is, can I find any anchorage, and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, Revelations, and such like,--into perilous altitudes, as I think; beyond the curve of perpetual frost, for one thing! I know not how to utter what impression you give me; take the above as some stamping of the fore-hoof. Surely I could wish you _returned_ into your own poor nineteenth century, its follies and maladies, its blind or half-blind, but gigantic toilings, its laughter and its tears, and trying to evolve in some measure the hidden Godlike that lies in it;--that seems to me the kind of feat for literary men. Alas, it is so easy to screw one's self up into high and ever higher altitudes of Transcendentalism, and see nothing under one but the everlasting snows of Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for _you,_ for me: but whither does it lead? I dread always, To inanity and mere injuring of the lungs!--"Stamp, Stamp, Stamp!"-- Well, I do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, "Be damned!" It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you;--and so for the present will "stamp" no more.... Adieu, my friend; I must not add a word more. My Wife is out on a visit; it is to bring her back that I am now setting forth for Suffolk. I hope to see Ely too, and St. Ives, and Huntingdon, and various _Cromwelliana._ My blessings on the Concord Household now and always. Commend me expressly to your Wife and your Mother. Farewell, dear friend. --T. Carlyle LXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 15 October, 1842 My Dear Carlyle,--I am in your debt for at least two letters since I sent you any word. I should be well content to receive one of these stringent epistles of bark and steel and mellow wine with every day's post, but as there is no hope that more will be sent without my writing to signify that these have come, I hereby certify that I love you well and prize all your messages. I read with special interest what you say of these English studies, and I doubt not the Book is in steady progress again. We shall see what change the changed position of the author will make in the book. The first _History_ expected its public; the second is written to an expecting people. The tone of the first was proud,--to defiance; we will see if applauses have mitigated the master's temper. This time he has a hero, and we shall have a sort of standard to try, by the hero who fights, the hero who writes. Well; may grand and friendly spirits assist the work in all hours; may impulses and presences from that profound world which makes and embraces the whole of humanity, keep your feet on the Mount of Vision which commands the Centuries, and the book shall be an indispensable Benefit to men, which is the surest fame. Let me know all that can be told of your progress in it. You shall see in the last _Dial_ a certain shadow or mask of yours, "another Richmond," who has read your lectures and profited thereby.* Alcott sent me the paper from London, but I do not know the name of the writer. As for Alcott, you have discharged your conscience of him manfully and knightly; I absolve you well... He is a great man and was made for what is greatest, but I now fear that he has already touched what best he can, and through his more than a prophet's egotism, and the absence of all useful reconciling talents, will bring nothing to pass, and be but a voice in the wilderness. As you do not seem to have seen in him his pure and noble intellect, I fear that it lies under some new and denser clouds. -------- * An article on Cromwell, in the _Dial_ for October, 1842. -------- For the _Dial_ and its sins, I have no defence to set up. We write as we can, and we know very little about it. If the direction of these speculations is to be deplored, it is yet a fact for literary history, that all the bright boys and girls in New England, quite ignorant of each other, take the world so, and come and make confession to fathers and mothers,--the boys that they do not wish to go into trade, the girls that they do not like morning calls and evening parties. They are all religious, but hate the churches; they reject all the ways of living of other men, but have none to offer in their stead. Perhaps, one of these days, a great Yankee shall come, who will easily do the unknown deed. The booksellers have sent me accounts lately, but--I know not why--no money. Little and Brown from January to July had sold very few books. I inquired of them concerning the bill of exchange on Fraser's Estate, which you mention, and they said it had not been returned to them, but only some information, as I think, demanded by Fraser's administrator, which they had sent, and, as they heard nothing again, they suppose that it is allowed and paid to you. Inform me on this matter. Munroe & Co. allow some credits, but charge more debits for binding, &c., and also allege few sales in the hard times. I have got a good friend of yours, a banking man, to promise that he will sift all the account and see if the booksellers have kept their promises. But I have never yet got all the papers in readiness for him. I am looking to see if I have matter for new lectures, having left behind me last spring some half-promises in New York. If you can remember it, tell me who writes about Loyola and Xavier in the _Edinburgh._ Sterling's papers--if he is near you--are all in Mr. Russell's hands.* I played my part of Fadladeen with great rigor, and sent my results to Russell, but have not now written to J. S. Yours, R.W.E. ---------- * Mr. A.L. Russell, who had been instrumental in procuring the American edition of Sterling's _Poetical Works._ --------- LXXX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 19 November, 1842 My Dear Emerson,--Your Letter finds me here today; busied with many things, but not likely to be soon more at leisure; wherefore I may as well give myself the pleasure of answering it on the spot. The Fraser Bill by Brown and Little has come all right; the Dumfries Banker apprises me lately that he has got the cash into his hands. Pray do not pester yourself with these Bookseller unintelligibilities: I suppose their accounts are all reasonably correct, the cheating, such as it is, done according to rule: what signifies it at any rate? I am no longer in any vital want of money; alas, the want that presses far heavier on me is a want of faculty, a want of _sense;_ and the feeling of that renders one comparatively very indifferent to money! I reflect many times that the wealth of the Indies, the fame of ten Shakespeares or ten Mahomets, would at bottom do me no good at all. Let us leave these poor slaves of the Ingot and slaves of the Lamp to their own courses,--within a _certain_ extent of halter! What you say of Alcott seems to me altogether just. He is a man who has got into the Highest intellectual region,--if that be the Highest (though in that too there are many stages) wherein a man can believe and discern for himself, without need of help from any other, and even in opposition to all others: but I consider him entirely unlikely to accomplish anything considerable, except some kind of crabbed, semi-perverse, though still manful existence of his own; which indeed is no despicable thing. His "more than prophetic egoism,"--alas, yes! It is of such material that Thebaid Eremites, Sect-founders, and all manner of cross-grained fanatical monstrosities have fashioned themselves, --in very _high,_ and in the highest regions, for that matter. Sect-founders withal are a class I do not like. No truly great man, from Jesus Christ downwards, as I often say, ever founded a Sect,--I mean wilfully intended founding one. What a view must a man have of this Universe, who thinks "_he_ can swallow it all," who is not doubly and trebly happy that he can keep it from swallowing him! On the whole, I sometimes hope we have now done with Fanatics and Agonistic Posture-makers in this poor world: it will be an immense improvement on the Past; and the "New Ideas," as Alcott calls them, will prosper greatly the better on that account! The old gloomy Gothic Cathedrals were good; but the great blue Dome that hangs over all is better than any Cologne one.--On the whole, do not tell the good Alcott a word of all this; but let him love me as he can, and live on vegetables in peace; as I, living _partly_ on vegetables, will continue to love him! The best thing Alcott did while he staid among us was to circulate some copies of your _Man the Reformer._* I did not get a copy; I applied for one, so soon as I knew the right fountain; but Alcott, I think, was already gone. And now mark,--for this I think is a novelty, if you do not already know it: Certain Radicals have reprinted your Essay in Lancashire, and it is freely circulating there, and here, as a cheap pamphlet, with excellent acceptance so far as I discern. Various Newspaper reviews of it have come athwart me: all favorable, but all too shallow for sending to you. I myself consider it a _truly excellent_ utterance; one of the best words you have ever spoken. Speak many more such. And whosoever will distort them into any "vegetable" or other crotchet,--let it be at his own peril; for the word itself is _true;_ and will have to make itself a _fact_ therefore; though not a distracted _abortive_ fact, I hope! _Words_ of that kind are not born into Facts in the _seventh month;_ well if they see the light full-grown (they and their adjuncts) in the _second century;_ for old Time is a most deliberate breeder!--But to speak without figure, I have been very much delighted with the clearness, simplicity, quiet energy and veracity of this discourse; and also with the fact of its spontaneous appearance here among us. The prime mover of the Printing, I find, is one Thomas Ballantyne, editor of a Manchester Newspaper, a very good, cheery little fellow, once a Paisley weaver as he informs me,--a great admirer of all worthy things. ---------- * "A Lecture read before the Mechanics' Apprentices' Library Association, Boston, January 25, 1841." ---------- My paper is so fast failing, let me tell you of the writer on Loyola. He is a James Stephen, Head Under-Secretary of the Colonial Office,--that is to say, I believe, real governor of the British Colonies, so far as they have any governing. He is of Wilberforce's creed, of Wilberforce's kin; a man past middle age, yet still in full vigor; reckoned an enormous fellow for "despatch of business," &c., especially by Taylor (_van Artevelde_) and others who are with him or under him in Downing Street.... I regard the man as standing on the confines of Genius and Dilettantism,--a man of many really good qualities, and excellent at the despatch of business. There we will leave him. --A Mrs. Lee of Brookline near you has made a pleasant Book about Jean Paul, chiefly by excerpting.* I am sorry to find Gunderode & Co. a decided weariness!** Cromwell--Cromwell? Do not mention such a word, if you love me! And yet--Farewell, my Friend, tonight! Yours ever, T. Carlyle I will apprise Sterling before long: he is at Falmouth, and well; urging me much to start a Periodical here! Gambardella promises to become a real Painter; there is a glow of real fire in the wild southern man: next to no _articulate_ intellect or the like, but of inarticulate much, or I mistake. He has tried to paint _me_ for you; but cannot, he says! --------- * "Life of Jean Paul Frederic Richter. Compiled from various Sources. Together with his Autobiography. Translated from the German." In Two Volumes. Boston, 1842. This book, which is one of the best in English concerning Jean Paul, was the work of the late Mrs. Thomas (Eliza Buckminster) Lee. ** In the _Dial,_ for January, 1842, is an article by Miss Fuller on "Bettine Brentano and Gunderode,"--a decided weariness. The Canoness Gunderode was a friend of Bettine's, older and not much wiser than herself. --------- LXXXI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 11 March, 1848 Dear Emerson,--I know not whose turn it is to write; though a suspicion has long attended me that it was yours, and above all an indisputable wish that you would do it: but this present is a cursory line, all on business,--and as usual all on business of my own. I have finished a Book, and just set the Printer to it; one solid volume (rather bigger than one of the _French Revolution_ Volumes, as I compute); it is a somewhat fiery and questionable "Tract for the Times," _not_ by a Puseyite, which the terrible aspect of things here has forced from me,--I know not whether as preliminary to _Oliver_ or not; but it had gradually grown to be the preliminary of anything possible for me: so there it is written; and I am a very sick, but withal a comparatively very free man. The Title of the thing is to be _Past and Present:_ it is divided into Four Books, "Book I. Proem," "Book II. The Ancient Monk," "Book III. The Modern Worker," and "Book IV. Horoscope" (or some such thing):--the size of it I guessed at above. The practical business, accordingly, is: How to cut out that New York scoundrel, who fancies that because there is no gallows it is permitted to steal? I have a distinct desire to do that;-- altogether apart from the money to be gained thereby. A friend's goodness ought not to be frustrated by a scoundrel destitute of gallows.--You told me long since how to do the operation; and here, according to the best way I had of fitting your scheme into my materials, is my way of attempting it. The Book will not be out here for six good weeks from this date; it could be kept back for a week or two longer, if that were indispensable: but I hope it may not. In three weeks, half of it will be printed; I, in the meanwhile, get a correct manuscript Copy of the latter half made ready: joining the printed sheets and this manuscript, your Bookseller will have a three weeks' start of any rival, if I instantly despatch the Parcel to him. Will this do? this with the announcement of the Title as given above? Pray write to me straightway, and say. Your answer will be here before we can publish; and the Packet of Proof-sheets and Manuscript may go off whether there be word from you or none.--And so enough of _Past and Present._ And indeed enough of all things, for my haste is excessive in these hours. The last _Dial_ came to me about three weeks ago _as a Post-Letter,_ charged something like a guinea of postage, if I remember; so it had to be rejected, and I have not yet seen that Number; but will when my leeway is once brought up a little again. The two preceding Numbers were, to a marked extent, more like life than anything I had seen before of the _Dial._ There was not indeed anything, except the Emersonian Papers alone, which I know by the first ring of them on the tympanum of the mind, that I properly speaking _liked;_ but there was much that I did not dislike, and did half like; and I say, "_I fausto pede;_ that will decidedly do better!" By the bye, it were as well if you kept rather a strict outlook on Alcott and his English _Tail,_--I mean so far as we here have any business with it. Bottomless imbeciles ought not to be seen in company with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who has already men listening to him on this side of the water. The "Tail" has an individual or two of that genus,--and the rest is mainly yet undecided. For example, I knew old --- myself; and can testify, if you will believe me, that few greater blockheads (if "blockhead" may mean "exasperated imbecile" and the ninth part of a thinker) broke the world's bread in his day. Have a care of such! I say always to myself, --and to you, which you forgive me. Adieu, my dear Emerson. May a good Genius guide you; for you are _alone, alone;_ and have a steep pilgrimage to make,-- leading _high,_ if you do not slip or stumble! Ever your affectionate, T. Carlyle LXXXII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 1 April, 1843 My Dear Carlyle,--Along with this Letter there will go from Liverpool, on the 4th instant, the promised Parcel, complete Copy of the Book called _Past and Present,_ of which you already had two simultaneous announcements.* The name of the Steam Packet, I understand, is the "Britannia." I have addressed the Parcel to the care of "Messrs. Little and Brown, Booksellers, Boston," with your name atop: I calculate it will arrive safe enough. --------- * The letter making the second announcement, being very similar to the preceding, is omitted. --------- About one hundred pages of the Manuscript Copy have proved superfluous, the text being there also in a printed shape; I had misestimated the Printer's velocity; I was anxious too that there should be no failure as to time. The Manuscript is very indifferent in that section of it; the damage therefore is smaller: your press-corrector can acquaint himself with the _hand,_ &c. by means of it. A poor young governess, confined to a horizontal posture, and many sad thoughts, by a disease of the spine, was our artist in that part of the business: her writing is none of the distinctest; but it was a work of Charity to give it her. I hope the thing is all as correct as I could make it. I do not bethink me of anything farther I have to add in the way of explanation. In fact, my prophecy rather is at present that the gibbetless thief at New York, will beat us after all! Never mind if be do. To say truth, I myself shall almost be glad: there has been a botheration in this anxious arrangement of parts correcting of scrawly manuscript copies of what you never wished to read more, and insane terror withal of having your own Manuscript burnt or lost,--that has exceeded my computation. Not to speak of this trouble in which I involve you, my Friend; which, I truly declare, makes me ashamed! True one _is_ bound to resist the Devil in all shapes; if a man come to steal from you, you will put on what locks and padlocks are at hand, and not on the whole say, "Steal, then!" But if the locks prove insufficient, and the thief do break through,--that side of the alternative also will suit you very well; and, with perhaps a faint prayer for gibbets when they are necessary, you will say to him, next time, "_Macte virtute,_ my man." All is in a whirl with me here today; no other topic but this very poor one can be entered upon. I hope for a letter from your own hand soon, and some news about still more interesting matters. Adieu, my Friend; I feel still as if, in several senses, you stood alone with me under the sky at present!* ----------- * The signature to this letter has been cut off. ----------- LXXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 29 April, 1843 My Dear Carlyle,--It is a pleasure to set your name once more at the head of a sheet. It signifies how much gladness, how much wealth of being, that the good, wise, man-cheering, man-helping friend, though unseen, lives there yonder, just out of sight. Your star burns there just below our eastern horizon, and fills the lower and upper air with splendid and splendescent auroras. By some refraction which new lenses or else steamships shall operate, shall I not yet one day see again the disk of benign Phosphorus? It is a solid joy to me, that whilst you work for all, you work for me and with me, even if I have little to write, and seldom write your name. Since I last wrote to you, I found it needful, if only for the household's sake, to set some new lectures in order, and go to new congregations of men. I live so much alone, shrinking almost cowardly from the contact of worldly and public men, that I need more than others to quit home sometimes, and roll with the river of travelers, and live in hotels. I went to Baltimore, where I had an invitation, and read two lectures on New England. On my return, I stopped at Philadelphia, and, my Course being now grown to four lectures, read them there. At New York, my snowball was larger, and I read five lectures on New England. 1. Religion; 2. Trade; 3. Genius, Manners and Customs; 4. Recent literary and spiritual influences from abroad; 5. Domestic spiritual history.--Perhaps I have not quite done with them yet, but may make them the block of a new and somewhat larger structure for Boston, next winter. The newspaper reports of them in New York were such offensive misstatements, that I could not send you, as I wished, a sketch. Between my two speeches at Baltimore, I went to Washington, thirty-seven miles, and spent four days. The two poles of an enormous political battery, galvanic coil on coil, self-increased by series on series of plates from Mexico to Canada, and from the sea westward to the Rocky Mountains, here meet and play, and make the air electric and violent. Yet one feels how little, more than how much, man is represented there. I think, in the higher societies of the Universe, it will turn out that the angels are molecules, as the devils were always Titans, since the dulness of the world needs such mountainous demonstration, and the virtue is so modest and concentrating. But I must not delay to acknowledge the arrival of your Book. It came ten or eleven days ago, in the "Britannia," with the three letters of different dates announcing it.--I have read the superfluous hundred pages of manuscript, and find it only too popular. Beside its abundance of brilliant points and proverbs, there is a deep, steady tide taking in, either by hope or by fear, all the great classes of society,--and the philosophic minority also, by the powerful lights which are shed on the phenomenon. It is true contemporary history, which other books are not, and you have fairly set solid London city aloft, afloat in bright mirage in the air. I quarrel only with the popular assumption, which is perhaps a condition of the Humor itself, that the state of society is a new state, and was not the same thing in the days of Rabelais and of Aristophanes, as of Carlyle. Orators always allow something to masses, out of love to their own art, whilst austere philosophy will only know the particles. This were of no importance, if the historian did not so come to mix himself in some manner with his erring and grieving nations, and so saddens the picture; for health is always private and original, and its essence is in its unmixableness.--But this Book, with all its affluence of wit, of insight, and of daring hints, is born for a longevity which I will not now compute.--In one respect, as I hinted above, it is only too good, so sure of success, I mean, that you are no longer secure of any respect to your property in our freebooting America. You must know that the cheap press has, within a few months, made a total change in our book markets. Every English book of any name or credit is instantly converted into a newspaper or coarse pamphlet, and hawked by a hundred boys in the streets of all of our cities for 25, 18, or 12 cents; Dickens's Notes for 12 cents, _Blackwood's Magazine_ for 18 cents, and so on. Three or four great New York and Philadelphia printing-houses do this work, with hot competition. One prints Bulwer's novel yesterday, for 35 cents; and already, in twenty-four hours, another has a coarser edition of it for 18 cents, in all thoroughfares.--What to do with my sealed parcel of manuscripts and proofs? No bookseller would in these perilous circumstances offer a dollar for my precious parcel. I inquired of the lawyers whether I could not by a copyright protect my edition from piracy until an English copy arrived, and so secure a sale of a few weeks. They said, no; yet advised the taking a certificate of copyright, that we might try the case if we wished. After much consulting and balancing for a few hours, I decided to print, as heretofore, on our own account, an edition, but cheap, to make the temptation less, to retail at seventy-five cents. I print fifteen hundred copies, and announce to the public that it is your edition, and all good men must buy this. I have written to the great Reprinters, namely to Park Benjamin, and to the Harpers, of New York, to request their forbearance; and have engaged Little and Brown to publish, because, I think, they have something more of weight with Booksellers, and are a little less likely to be invaded than Munroe. If we sell a thousand copies at seventy-five cents, it will only yield you about two hundred dollars; if we should be invaded, we can then afford to sell the other five hundred copies at twenty-five cents, without loss. In thus doing, I involve you in some risk; but it was the best course that occurred.--Hitherto, the _Miscellanies_ have not been reprinted in the cheap forms; and in the last year, James Munroe & Co. have sold few copies; all books but the cheapest being unsold in the hard times; something has however accrued to your credit there. J.M. & Co. fear that, if the new book is pirated at New York and the pirate prospers, instantly the _Miscellanies_ will be plundered. We will hope better, or at least exult in that which remains, to wit, a Worth unplunderable, yet infinitely communicable. I have hardly space left to say what I would concerning the _Dial._ I heartily hoped I had done with it, when lately our poor, good, publishing Miss Peabody,... wrote me that its subscription would not pay its expenses (we all writing for love). But certain friends are very unwilling it should die, and I a little unwilling, though very unwilling to be the life of it, as editor. And now that you are safely through your book, and before the greater Sequel rushes to its conclusion, send me, I pray you, that short chapter which hovers yet in the limbo of contingency, in solid letters and points. Let it be, if that is readiest, a criticism on the _Dial,_ and this too Elysian race, not blood, and yet not ichor.--Let Jane Carlyle be on my part, and, watchful of his hours, urge the poet in the golden one. I think to send you a duplicate of the last number of the _Dial_ by Mr. Mann,* who with his bride (sister of the above-mentioned Miss Peabody) is going to London and so to Prussia. He is little known to me, but greatly valued as a philanthropist in this State. I must go to work a little more methodically this summer, and let something grow to a tree in my wide straggling shrubbery. With your letters came a letter from Sterling, who was too noble to allude to his books and manuscript sent hither, and which Russell all this time has delayed to print; I know not why, but discouraged, I suppose, in these times by booksellers. I must know precisely, and write presently to J.S. Farewell. R.W. Emerson** ----------- * The late Horace Mann. ** The following passages from Emerson's Diary relating to _Past and Present_ seem to have been written a few days after the preceding letter:--"How many things this book of Carlyle gives us to think! It is a brave grappling with the problem of the times, no luxurious holding aloof, as is the custom of men of letters, who are usually bachelors and not husbands in the state, but Literature here has thrown off his gown and descended into the open lists. The gods are come among us in the likeness of men. An honest Iliad of English woes. Who is he that can trust himself in the fray? Only such as cannot be familiarized, but nearest seen and touched is not seen and touched, but remains inviolate, inaccessible, because a higher interest, the politics of a higher sphere, bring him here and environ him, as the Ambassador carries his country with him. Love protects him from profanation. What a book this in its relation to English privileged estates! How shall Queen Victoria read this? how the Primate and Bishops of England? how the Lords? how the Colleges? how the rich? and how the poor? Here is a book as full of treason as an egg is full of meat, and every lord and lordship and high form and ceremony of English conservatism tossed like a football into the air, and kept in the air with merciless rebounds and kicks, and yet not a word in the book is punishable by statute. The wit has eluded all official zeal, and yet these dire jokes, these cunning thrusts,--this flaming sword of cherubim waved high in air illuminates the whole horizon and shows to the eyes of the Universe every wound it inflicts. Worst of all for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all sympathy by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane conservation and impressing the reader with the conviction that Carlyle himself has the truest love for everything old and excellent, and a genuine respect for the basis of truth in those whom he exposes. Gulliver among the Lilliputians... "Carlyle must write thus or nohow, like a drunken man who can run, but cannot walk. What a man's book is that! no prudences, no compromises, but a thorough independence. A masterly criticism on the times. Fault perhaps the excess of importance given to the circumstance of today. The poet is here for this, to dwarf and destroy all merely temporary circumstance, and to glorify the perpetual circumstance of men, e.g. dwarf British Debt and raise Nature and social life. "But everything must be done well once; even bulletins and almanacs must have one excellent and immortal bulletin and almanac. So let Carlyle's be the immortal newspaper." ---------- LXXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson 27 August, 1843 Dear Emerson,--The bearer of this is Mr. Macready, our celebrated Actor, now on a journey to America, who wishes to know you. In the pauses of a feverish occupation which he strives honestly to make a noble one, this Artist, become once more a man, would like well to meet here and there a true American man. He loves Heroes as few do; and can recognize them, you will find, whether they have on the _Cothurnus_ or not. I recommend him to you; bid you forward him as you have opportunity, in this department of his pilgrimage. Mr. Macready's deserts to the English Drama are notable here to all the world; but his dignified, generous, and every-way honorable deportment in private life is known fully, I believe, only to a few friends. I have often said, looking at him as a manager of great London theatres, "This Man, presiding over the unstablest, most chaotic province of English things, is the one public man among us who has dared to take his stand on what he understood to be _the truth,_ and expect victory from that: he puts to shame our Bishops and Archbishops." It is literally so. With continued kind wishes, yours as of old. T. Carlyle LXXXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 October, 1843 My Dear Friend,--I seize the occasion of having this morsel of paper for twenty-five pounds sterling from the booksellers to send you, (and which fail not to find enclosed, as clerks say,) to inquire whether you still exist in Chelsea, London, and what is the reason that my generous correspondent has become dumb for weary months. I must go far back to resume my thread. I think in April last I received your Manuscript, &c. of the Book, which I forthwith proceeded to print, after some perplexing debate with the booksellers, as I fully informed you in my letter of April or beginning of May. Since that time I have had no line or word from you. I must think that my letter did not reach you, or that you have written what has never come to me. I assure myself that no harm has befallen you, not only because you do not live in a corner, and what chances in your dwelling will come at least to my ears, but because I have read with great pleasure the story of Dr. Francia,* which gave the best report of your health and vivacity. ---------- * Carlyle's article on Dr. Francia in the _Foreign Quarterly Review,_ No. 62. Reprinted in his _Miscellanies._ ---------- I wrote you in April or May an account of the new state of things which the cheap press has wrought in our book market, and specially what difficulties it put in the way of our edition of _Past and Present._ For a few weeks I believed that the letters I had written to the principal New York and Philadelphia booksellers, and the Preface, had succeeded in repelling the pirates. But in the fourth or fifth week appeared a mean edition in New York, published by one Collyer (an unknown person and supposed to be a mask of some other bookseller), sold for twelve and one half cents, and of this wretched copy several thousands were sold, whilst our seventy-five cents edition went off slower. There was no remedy, and we must be content that there was no expense from our edition, which before September had paid all its cost, and since that time has been earning a little, I believe. I am not fairly entitled to an account of the book from the publishers until the 1st of January.... I have never yet done what I have thought this other last week seriously to do, namely, to charge the good and faithful E.P. Clark, a man of accounts as he is a cashier in a bank, with the total auditing and analyzing of these accounts of yours. My hesitation has grown from the imperfect materials which I have to offer him to make up so long a story. But he is a good man, and, do you know it? a Carlylese of that intensity that I have often heard he has collected a sort of album of several volumes, containing illustrations of every kind, historical, critical, &c., to the _Sartor._ I must go to Boston and challenge him. Once when I asked him, he seemed willing to assume it. No more of accounts tonight. I send you by this ship a volume of translations from Dante, by Doctor Parsons of Boston, a practising dentist and the son of a dentist. It is his gift to you. Lately went Henry James to you with a letter from me. He is a fine companion from his intelligence, valor, and worth, and is and has been a very beneficent person as I learn. He carried a volume of poems from my friend and nearest neighbor, W. Ellery Channing, whereof give me, I pray you, the best opinion you can. I am determined he shall be a poet, and you must find him such.* I have too many things to tell you to begin at the end of this sheet, which after all this waiting I have been compelled to scribble in a corner, with company waiting for me. Send me instant word of yourself if you love me, and of those whom you love, and so God keep you and yours. --R. Waldo Emerson ---------- * In the second number of the _Dial,_ in October, 1840, Emerson had published, under the title of "New Poetry," an article warmly commending Mr. Channing's then unpublished poems. ---------- LXXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 31 October, 1843 My Dear Emerson,--It is a long weary time since I have had the satisfaction of the smallest dialogue with you. The blame is all my own; the reasons would be difficult to give,--alas, they are properly no-reasons, children not of _Something,_ but of mere Idleness, Confusion, Inaction, Inarticulation, of _Nothing_ in short! Let us leave them there, and profit by the hour which yet is. I ran away from London into Bristol and, South Wales, when the heats grew violent, at the end of June. South Wales, North Wales, Lancashire, Scotland: I roved about everywhere seeking some Jacob's-pillow on which to lay my head, and dream of things heavenly;--yes, that at bottom was my modest prayer, though I disguised it from myself and the result was, I could find no pillow at all; but sank into ever meaner restlessness, blacker and blacker biliary gloom, and returned in the beginning of September thoroughly eclipsed and worn out, probably the weariest of all men living under the sky. Sure enough I have a fatal talent of converting all Nature into Preternaturalism for myself: a truly horrible Phantasm-Reality it is to me; what of heavenly radiances it has, blended in close neighborhood, in intimate union, with the hideousness of Death and Chaos;--a very ghastly business indeed! On the whole, it is better to hold one's peace about it. I flung myself down on sofas here,--for my little Wife had trimmed up our little dwelling-place into quite glorious order in my absence, and I had only to lie down: there, in reading books, and other make-believe employments, I could at least keep silence, which was an infinite relief. Nay, gradually, as indeed I anticipated, the black vortexes and deluges have subsided; and now that it is past, I begin to feel myself better for my travels after all. For one thing, articulate speech having returned to me,--you see what use I make of it. On the table of the London Library, voted in by some unknown benefactor whom I found afterwards to be Richard Milnes, there lay one thing highly gratifying to me: the last two Numbers of the _Dial._ It is to be one of our Periodicals henceforth; the current Number lies on the Table till the next arrive; then the former goes to the Binder; we have already, in a bound volume, all of it that Emerson has had the editing of. This is right. Nay, in Edinburgh, and indeed wherever ingenuous inquisitive minds were met with, I have to report that the said Emerson could number a select and most loving public; select, and I should say fast growing: for good and indifferent reasons it may behove the man to assure himself of this. Farther, to the horror of poor Nickerson (Bookseller Fraser's Successor), a certain scoundrel interloper here has reprinted _Emerson's Essays_ on grayish paper, to be sold at two shillings,--distracting Nickerson with the fear of change! I was glad at this, if also angry: it indicates several things. Nickerson has taken his measures, will reduce the price of his remaining copies; indeed, he informs me the best part of his edition was already sold, and he has even some color of money due from England to Emerson through me! With pride enough will I transmit this mournful, noble peculium: and after that, as I perceive, such chivalrous international doings must cease between us. _Past and Present,_ some one told me, was, in spite of all your precautions, straightway sent forth in modest gray, and your benevolent speculation ruined. Here too, you see, it is the same. Such chivalries, therefore, are now impossible; for myself I say, "Well, let them cease; thank God they once were, the Memory of that can never cease with us!" In this last Number of the _Dial_ which by the bye your Bookseller never forwarded to me, I found one little Essay, a criticism on myself,* which, if it should do me mischief, may the gods forgive you for! It is considerably the most dangerous thing I have read for some years. A decided likeness of myself recognizable in it, as in the celestial mirror of a friend's heart; but so enlarged, exaggerated, all _transfigured,_--the most delicious, the most dangerous thing! Well, I suppose I must try to assimilate it also, to turn it also to good, if I be able. Eulogies, dyslogies, in which one finds no features of one's own natural face, are easily dealt with; easily left unread, as stuff for lighting fires, such is the insipidity, the wearisome _non_entity of pabulum like that: but here is another sort of matter! "The beautifulest piece of criticism I have read for many a day," says every one that speaks of it. May the gods forgive you!--I have purchased a copy for three shillings, and sent it to my Mother: one of the _indubitablest_ benefits I could think of in regard to it. --------- * A criticism by Emerson of _Past and Present,_ in the _Dial_ for July, 1843. It embodies a great part of the extract from Emerson's Diary given in a preceding note, and is well worth reading in full for its appreciation of Carlyle's powers and defects. --------- There have been two friends of yours here in these very days: Dr. Russell, just returning from Paris; Mr. Parker, just bound thither.* We have seen them rather oftener than common, Sterling being in town withal. They are the best figures of strangers we have had for a long time; possessions, both of them, to fall in with in this pilgrimage of life. Russell carries friendliness in his eyes, a most courteous, modest, intelligent man; an English intelligence too, as I read, the best of it lying unspoken, not as a logic but as an instinct. Parker is a most hardy, compact, clever little fellow, full of decisive utterance, with humor and good humor; whom I like much. They shine like suns, these two, amid multitudes of watery comets and tenebrific constellations, too sorrowful without such admixture on occasion! ------------ * Dr. Le Baron Russell; Theodore Parker. ------------ As for myself, dear Emerson, you must ask me no questions till-- alas, till I know not when! After four weary years of the most unreadable reading, the painfulest poking and delving, I have come at last to the conclusion--that I must write a Book on Cromwell; that there is no rest for me till I do it. This point fixed, another is not less fixed hitherto, That a Book on Cromwell is _impossible._ Literally so: you would weep for me if you saw how, between these two adamantine certainties, I am whirled and tumbled. God only knows what will become of me in the business. Patience, Patience! By the bye, do you know a "Massachusetts Historical Society," and a James Bowdoin, seemingly of Boston? In "Vol. II. third series" of their _Collections,_ lately I met with a disappointment almost ludicrous. Bowdoin, in a kind of dancing, embarrassed style, gives long-winded, painfully minute account of certain precious volumes, containing "Notes of the Long Parliament," which now stand in the New York Library; poises them in his assaying balance, speculates, prophesies, inquires concerning them: to me it was like news of the lost Decades of Livy. Good Heavens, it soon became manifest that these precious Volumes are nothing whatever but a wretched broken old dead manuscript copy of part of our printed _Commons Journals!_ printed since 1745, and known to all barbers! If the Historical Society desired it, any Member of Parliament could procure them the whole stock, _Lords and Commons,_ a wheelbarrowful or more, with no cost but the carriage. Every Member has the right to demand a copy, and few do it, few will let such a mass cross their door-threshold! This of Bowdoin's is a platitude of some magnitude.--Adieu, dear Emerson. Rest not, haste not; you have work to do. --T. Carlyle LXXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 17 November, 1843 Dear Emerson,--About this time probably you will be reading a Letter I hurried off for you by Dr. Russell in the last steamer; and your friendly anxieties will partly be set at rest. Had I kept silence so very long? I knew it was a long while; but my vague remorse had kept no date! It behoves me now to write again without delay; to certify with all distinctness that I have safely received your Letter of the 30th October, safely the Bill for L25 it contained;--that you are a brave, friendly man, of most serene, beneficient way of life; and that I--God help me!-- By all means appoint this Mr. Clark to the honorary office of Account-keeper--if he will accept it! By Parker's list of questions from him, and by earlier reminiscences recalled on that occasion, I can discern that he is a man of lynx eyesight, of an all-investigating curiosity: if he will accept this sublime appointment, it will be the clearest case of elective affinity. Accounts to you must be horrible; as they are to me: indeed, I seldom read beyond the _last_ line of them, if I can find the last; and one of the insupportabilities of Bookseller Accounts is that nobody but a wizard, or regular adept in such matters, can tell where the last line, and final net result of the whole accursed babblement, is to be found! By all means solicit Clark;--at all events, do you give it up, I pray you, and let the Booksellers do their own wise way. It really is not material; let the poor fellows have length of halter. Every new Bill from America comes to me like a kind of heavenly miracle; a reaping where I never sowed, and did not expect to reap: the quantity of it is a thing I can never bring in question.--For your English account with Nickerson I can yet say nothing more; perhaps about Newyear's-day the poor man will enable me to say something. I hear however that the Pirate has sold off, or nearly so, his Two-shillings edition of the _Essays,_ and is preparing to print another; this, directly in the teeth of Cash and double-entry book-keeping, I take to be good news. James is a very good fellow, better and better as we see him more. Something shy and skittish in the man; but a brave heart intrinsically, with sound, earnest sense, with plenty of insight and even humor. He confirms an observation of mine, which indeed I find is hundreds of years old, that a stammering man is never a worthless one. Physiology can tell you why. It is an excess of delicacy, excess of sensibility to the presence of his fellow-creature, that makes him stammer. Hammond l'Estrange says, "Who ever heard of a stammering man that was a fool?" Really there is something in that.--James is now off to the Isle of Wight; will see Sterling at Ventnor there; see whether such an Isle or France will suit better for a winter residence. W.E. Channing's _Poems_ are also a kind gift from you. I have read the pieces _you had cut up for me:_ worthy indeed of reading! That Poem _on Death_ is the utterance of a valiant, noble heart, which in rhyme or prose I shall expect more news of by and by. But at bottom "Poetry" is a most suspicious affair for me at present! You cannot fancy the oceans of Twaddle that human Creatures emit upon me, in these times; as if, when the lines had a jingle in them, a Nothing could be Something, and the point were gained! It is becoming a horror to me,--as all speech without meaning more and more is. I said to Richard Milnes, "Now in honesty what is the use of putting your accusative _before_ the verb, and otherwise entangling the syntax; if there really is an image of any object, thought, or thing within you, for God's sake let me have it the _shortest_ way, and I will so cheerfully excuse the _omission_ of the jingle at the end: cannot I do without that!"--Milnes answered, "Ah, my dear fellow, it is because we have no thought, or almost none; a little thought goes a great way when you put it into rhyme!" Let a man try to the very uttermost to _speak_ what he means, before _singing_ is had recourse to. Singing, in our curt English speech, contrived expressly and almost exclusively for "despatch of business," is terribly difficult. Alfred Tennyson, alone of our time, has proved it to be possible in some measure. If Channing will persist in melting such obdurate speech into music he shall have my true wishes,--my augury that it will take an enormous _heat_ from him!--Another Channing,* whom I once saw here, sends me a Progress-of-the-Species Periodical from New York. _Ach Gott!_ These people and their affairs seem all "melting" rapidly enough, into thaw-slush or one knows not what. Considerable madness is visible in them. _Stare super antiquas vias:_ "No," they say, "we cannot stand, or walk, or do any good whatever there; by God's blessing, we will fly,--will not you!-- here goes!" And their _flight,_ it is as the flight of the unwinged,--of oxen endeavoring to fly with the "wings" of an ox! By such flying, universally practised, the "ancient ways" are really like to become very deep before long. In short, I am terribly sick of all that;--and wish it would stay at home at Fruitland, or where there is good pasture for it. Friend Emerson, alone of all voices, out of America, has sphere-music in him for me,--alone of them all hitherto; and is a prophecy and sure dayspring in the East; immeasurably cheering to me. God long prosper him; keep him duly apart from that bottomless hubbub which is not, at all cheering! And so ends my Litany for this day. -------- * The Reverend William Henry Channing. -------- The Cromwell business, though I punch daily at it with all manner of levers, remains immovable as Ailsa Crag. Heaven alone knows what I shall do with it. I see and say to myself, It is heroical; Troy Town was probably not a more heroic business; and this belongs to thee, to thy own people,--must it be dead forever?--Perhaps yes,--and kill me too into the bargain. Really I think it very shocking that we run to Greece, to Italy, to &c., &c., and leave all at home lying buried as a nonentity. Were I absolute Sovereign and Chief Pontiff here, there should be a study of the Old _English_ ages first of all. I will pit Odin against any Jupiter of them; find Sea-kings that would have given Jason a Roland for his Oliver! We are, as you sometimes say, a book-ridden people,--a phantom-ridden people.--All this small household is well; salutes you and yours with love old and new. Accept this hasty messenger; accept my friendliest farewell, dear Emerson. Yours ever, T. Carlyle LXXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 December, 1843 My Dear Friend,--I have had two good letters from you, and it is fully my turn to write, so you shall have a token on this latest day of the year. I rejoice in this good will you bear to so many friends of mine,--if they will go to you, you must thank yourself. Best when you are mutually contented. I wished lately I might serve Mr. Macready, who sent me your letter.--I called on him and introduced him to Sam G. Ward, my friend and the best man in the city, and, besides all his personal merits, a master of all the offices of hospitality. Ward was to keep himself informed of Macready's times, and bring me to him when there was opportunity. But he stayed but a few days in Boston, and, Ward said, was in very good hands, and promised to see us when he returns by and by. I saw him in Hamlet, but should much prefer to see him as Macready. I must try to entice Mr. Macready out here into my pines and alder bushes. Just now the moon is shining on snow-drifts, four, five, and six feet high, but, before his return, they will melt; and already this my not native but ancestral village, which I came to live in nearly ten years ago because it was the quietest of farming towns, and off the road, is found to lie on the directest line of road from Boston to Montreal, a railroad is a-building through our secretest woodlands, and, tomorrow morning, our people go to Boston in two hours instead of three, and, next June, in one. This petty revolution in our country matters was very odious to me when it began, but it is hard to resist the joy of all one's neighbors, and I must be contented to be carted like a chattel in the cars and be glad to see the forest fall. This rushing on your journey is plainly a capital invention for our spacious America, but it is more dignified and man-like to walk barefoot.--But do you not see that we are getting to be neighbors? a day from London to Liverpool; twelve or eleven to Boston; and an hour to Concord; and you have owed me a visit these ten years. I mean to send with your January _Dial_ a copy of the number for Sterling, as it contains a review of his tragedy and poems, by Margaret Fuller. I have not yet seen the article, and the lady affirms that it is very bad, as she was ill all the time she was writing; but I hope and believe better. She, Margaret Fuller, is an admirable person, whose writing gives feeble account of her. But I was to say that I shall send this _Dial_ for J.S. to your care, as I know not the way to the Isle of Wight. Enclosed in this letter I send a bill of exchange for L32 8s. 2d. payable by Baring & Co. It happens to represent an exact balance on Munroe's books, and that slow mortal should have paid it before. I have not yet got to Clark, I who am a slow mortal, but have my eye fixed on him. Remember me and mine with kindest salutations to your wife and brother. Ever yours, R.W. Emerson LXXXIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 31 January, 1844 Dear Emerson, Some ten days ago came your Letter with a new Draft of L32 and odd money in it: all safe; the Draft now gone into the City to ripen into gold and silver, the Letter to be acknowledged by some hasty response now and here. America, I say to myself looking at these money drafts, is a strange place; the highest comes out of it and the lowest! Sydney Smith is singing dolefully about doleful American repudiation, "_dis_owning of the soft impeachment"; and here on the other hand is an American man, in virtue of whom America has become definable withal as a place from which fall heavenly manna-showers upon certain men, at certain seasons of history, when perhaps manna-showers were not the unneedfulest things!--We will take the good and the evil, here as elsewhere, and heartily bless Heaven. But now for the Draft at the top of this leaf. One Colman,* a kind of Agricultural Missionary, much in vogue here at present, has given it me; it is Emerson's, the net produce hitherto (all but two cents) of _Emerson's Essays._ I enclose farther the Bookseller's hieroglyph papers; unintelligible as all such are; but sent over to you for scrutiny by the expert. I gather only that there are some Five Hundred and odd of the dear-priced edition sold, some Two Hundred and odd still to sell, which the Bookseller says are (in spite of pirates) slowly selling; and that the half profit upon the whole adventure up to this date has been L24 15s. 11d. sterling,--equal, as I am taught, at $4.88 per pound sterling, to $121.02, for which, all but the cents, here is a draft on Boston, payable at sight. Pray have yourself straightway _paid;_ that if there be any mistake or delay I may rectify it while time yet is.--I add, for the intelligence of the Bookseller-Papers, that Fraser, with whom the bargain originally stood, was succeeded by Nickerson; these are the names of the parties. And so, dear Friend; accept this munificent sum of Money; and expect a blessing with it if good wishes from the heart of man can give one. So much for that. --------- * The Reverend Henry Colman. --------- Did you receive a Dumfries Newspaper with a criticism in it? The author is one Gilfillan, a young Dissenting Minister in Dundee; a person of great talent, ingenuousness, enthusiasm, and other virtues; whose position as a Preacher of bare old Calvinism under penalty of death sometimes makes me tremble for him. He has written in that same Newspaper about all the notablest men of his time; Godwin, Corn-law Elliott and I know not all whom: if he publish the Book, I will take care to send it you.* I saw the man for the first time last autumn, at Dumfries; as I said, his being a Calvinist Dissenting Minister, economically fixed, and spiritually with such germinations in him, forces me to be very reserved to him. ----------- * The sketches were published the next year in a volume under the title of _The Gallery of Literary Portraits._ ----------- John Sterling's _Dial_ shall be forwarded to Ventnor in the Isle of Wight, whenever it arrives. He was here, as probably I told you, about two months ago, the old unresting brilliantly radiating man. He is now much richer in money than he was, and poorer by the loss of a good Mother and good Wife: I understand he is building himself a brave house, and also busy writing a poem. He flings too much "sheet-lightning" and unrest into me when we meet in these low moods of mine; and yet one always longs for him back again: "No doing with him or without him," the dog! My thrice unfortunate Book on Cromwell,--it is a real descent to Hades, to Golgotha and Chaos! I feel oftenest as if it were possibler to die one's self than to bring it into life. Besides, my health is in general altogether despicable, my "spirits" equal to those of the ninth part of a dyspeptic tailor! One needs to be able to go on in all kinds of spirits, in climate sunny or sunless, or it will never do. The planet Earth, says Voss,--take four hexameters from Voss: Journeys this Earth, her eye on a Sun, through the heavenly spaces; Joyous in radiance, or joyless by fits and swallowed in tempests; Falters not, alters not, equal advancing, home at the due hour: So thou, weather-proof, constant, may, equal with day, March! I have not a moment more tonight;--and besides am inclined to write unprofitables if I persist. Adieu, my friend; all blessings be with you always. Yours ever truly, T. Carlyle XC. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 29 February, 1844 My Dear Carlyle,--I received by the last steamer your letter, and its prefixed order for one hundred and twenty-one dollars, which order I sent to Ward, who turned it at once into money. Thanks, dear friend, for your care and activity, which have brought me this pleasing and most unlooked for result. And I beg you, if you know any family representative of Mr. Fraser, to express my sense of obligation to that departed man. I feel a kindness not without some wonder for those good-natured five hundred Englishmen who could buy and read my miscellany. I shall not fail to send them a new collection, which I hope they will like better. My faith in the Writers, as an organic class, increases daily, and in the possibility to a faithful man of arriving at statements for which he shall not feel responsible, but which shall be parallel with nature. Yet without any effort I fancy I make progress also in the doctrine of Indifferency, and am certain and content that the truth can very well spare me, and have itself spoken by another without leaving it or me the worse. Enough if we have learned that music exists, that it is proper to us, and that we cannot go forth of it. Our pipes, however shrill and squeaking, certify this our faith in Tune, and the eternal Amelioration may one day reach our ears and instruments. It is a poor second thought, this literary activity. Perhaps I am not made obnoxious to much suffering, but I have had happy hours enough in gazing from afar at the splendors of the Intellectual Law, to overpay me for any pains I know. Existence may go on to be better, and, if it have such insights, it never can be bad. You sometimes charge me with I know not what sky- blue, sky-void idealism. As far as it is a partiality, I fear I may be more deeply infected than you think me. I have very joyful dreams which I cannot bring to paper, much less to any approach to practice, and I blame myself not at all for my reveries, but that they have not yet got possession of my house and barn. But I shall not lose my love for books. I only worship Eternal Buddh in the retirements and intermissions of Brahma.--But I must not egotize and generalize to the end of my sheet, as I have a message or two to declare. I enclose a bill of exchange on the Barings for thirty-six pounds; which is the sum of two recent payments of Munroe and of Little and Brown, whereof I do not despair you shall yet have some account in booksellers' figures. I have got so far with Clark as to have his consent to audit the accounts when I shall get energy and time enough to compile them out of my ridiculous Journal. Munroe begs me to say what possibly I have already asked for him, that, when the _History of Cromwell_ is ready to be seen of men, you will have an entire copy of the Manuscript taken, and sent over to us. Then will he print a cheap edition such as no one will undersell, and secure such a share of profit to the author as the cheap press allows. Perhaps only thirty or forty pounds would make it worth while to take the trouble. A valued friend of mine wishes to know who wrote (perhaps three years ago) a series of metaphysical articles in _Blackwood_ on Consciousness. Can you remember and tell me? And now I commend you to the good God, you and your History, and the true kind wife who is always good to the eager Yankees, and am yours heartily, --R.W. Emerson XCI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 8 April, 1844 Dear Emerson,--Till within five minutes of the limit of my time, I had forgotten that this was the 3d of the Month; that I had a Letter to write acknowledging even money! Take the acknowledgment, given in all haste, not without a gratitude that will last longer: the Thirty-six pounds and odd shillings came safe in your Letter, a new unlooked-for Gift. America, I think, is like an amiable family teapot; you think it is all out long since, and lo, the valuable implement yields you another cup, and another! Many thanks to you, who are the heart of America to me. Republishing for one's friend's sake, I find on consulting my Bookseller, is out here; we have Pirates waiting for every American thing of mark, as you have for every British; to the tender mercies of these, on both sides, I fancy the business must be committed. They do good too; as all does, even carrion: they send you _faster_ abroad, if the world have any use for you;--oftenest it only thinks it has. Your _Essays,_ the Pirated _Essays,_ make an ugly yellow tatter of a Pamphlet, price 1s. 6d.; but the edition is all sold, I understand: and even Nickerson has not entirely ceased to sell. The same Pirate who pounced upon you made an attempt the other day on my poor _Life of Schiller,_ but I put the due spoke in his wheel. They have sent me Lowell's _Poems;_ they are bringing out Jean Paul's Life, &c., &c.; the hungry _Canaille._ It is strange that men should feel themselves so entirely at liberty to steal, simply because there is no gallows to hang them for doing it. Your new Book will be eagerly waited for by that class of persons; and also by another class which is daily increasing here. The only other thing I am "not to forget" is that of the _Essay on Consciousness_ in _Blackwood._ The writer of those Papers is one Ferrier, a Nephew of the Edinburgh Miss Ferrier who wrote _Marriage_ and some other Novels; Nephew also of Professor Wilson (Christopher North), and married to one of his daughters. A man of perhaps five-and-thirty; I remember him in boyhood, while he was boarded with an Annandale Clergyman; I have seen him since manhood, and liked him well: a solid, square-visaged, dark kind of man, more like your Theodore Parker than any mutual specimen I can recollect. He got the usual education of an Edinburgh Advocate; but found no practice at the Bar, nor sought any with due anxiety, I believe; addicted himself to logical meditations;--became, the other year, Professor of Universal History, or some such thing, in the Edinburgh University, and lectures with hardly any audience: a certain _young_ public wanted me to be that Professor there, but I knew better,--Is this enough about Ferrier? I will not add another word; the time being _past,_ irretrievable except by half-running! Write us your Book; and be well and happy always!* ------- * The signature has been cut off. ------- XCII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 5 August, 1844 Dear Emerson,--There had been a long time without direct news from you, till four days ago your Letter arrived. This day I understand to be the ultimate limit of the American Mail; yesterday, had it not been Sunday, would have been the limit: I write a line, therefore, though in very great haste. Poor Sterling, even I now begin to fear, is in a very bad way. He had two successive attacks of spitting of blood, some three months ago or more; the second attack of such violence, and his previous condition then so weak, that the Doctor as good as gave up hope,--the poor Patient himself had from the first given it up. Our poor Friend has had so many attacks of that nature, and so rapidly always rallied from them, I gave no ear to these sinister prognostics; but now that I see the summer influences passing over him without visible improvement, and our good weather looking towards a close without so much strength added as will authorize even a new voyage to Madeira;--I too am at last joining in the general discouragement; all the sadder to me that I shut it out so long. Sir James Clark, our best-accredited Physician for such diseases, declares that Life, for certain months, may linger, with great pain; but that recovery is not to be expected. Great part of the lungs, it appears, is totally unserviceable for respiration; from the remainder, especially in times of coughing, it is with the greatest difficulty that breath enough is obtained. Our poor Patient passes the night in a sitting posture; cannot lie down: that fact sticks with me ever since I heard it! He is very weak, very pale; still "writes a great deal daily"; but does not wish to see anybody; declines to "see even Carlyle," who offered to go to him. His only Brother, Anthony Sterling, a hardy soldier, lately withdrawn from the Army, and settled in this quarter, whom we often communicate with, is about going down to the Isle of Wight this week: he saw John four days ago, and brings nothing but bad news,--of which indeed this removal of his to the neighborhood of the scene is a practical testimony. The old Father, a Widower for the last two years, and very lonely and dispirited, seems getting feebler and feebler: he was here yesterday: a pathetic kind of spectacle to us. Alas, alas! But what can be said? I say Nothing; I have written only one Note to Sterling: I feel it probable that I shall never see him more,--nor his like again in this world. His disease, as I have from of old construed it, is a burning of him up by his own fire. The restless vehemence of the man, struggling in all ways these many years to find a legitimate outlet, and finding, except for transitory, unsatisfactory coruscations, none, has undermined its Clay Prison in the weakest point (which proves to be the lungs), and will make outlet _there._ My poor Sterling! It is an old tragedy; and very stern whenever it repeats itself of new. Today I get answer about Alfred Tennyson: all is right on that side. Moxon informs me that the Russell Books and Letter arrived duly, and were duly forwarded and safely received; nay, farther, that Tennyson is now in Town, and means to come and see me. Of this latter result I shall be very glad: Alfred is one of the few British or Foreign Figures (a not increasing number I think!) who are and remain beautiful to me;--a true human soul, or some authentic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul can say, Brother!--However, I doubt he will not come; he often skips me, in these brief visits to Town; skips everybody indeed; being a man solitary and sad, as certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom,--carrying a bit of Chaos about him, in short, which he is manufacturing into Cosmos! Alfred is the son of a Lincolnshire Gentleman Farmer, I think; indeed, you see in his verses that he is a native of "moated granges," and green, fat pastures, not of mountains and their torrents and storms. He had his breeding at Cambridge, as if for the Law or Church; being master of a small annuity on his Father's decease, he preferred clubbing with his Mother and some Sisters, to live unpromoted and write Poems. In this way he lives still, now here, now there; the family always within reach of London, never in it; he himself making rare and brief visits, lodging in some old comrade's rooms. I think he must be under forty, not much under it. One of the finest-looking men in the world. A great shock of rough dusty-dark hair; bright-laughing hazel eyes; massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; of sallow-brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy;--smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical metallic,--fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; speech, and speculation free and plenteous: I do not meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe!--We shall see what he will grow to. He is often unwell; very chaotic,--his way is through Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon. (O Paper!) I trust there is now joy in place of pain in the House at Concord, and a certain Mother grateful again to the Supreme Powers! We are all in our customary health here, or nearly so; my Wife has been in Lancashire, among her kindred there, for a month lately: our swollen City is getting empty and still; we think of trying an Autumn _here_ this time.--Get your Book ready; there are readers ready for it! And be busy and victorious! Ever Yours, T. Carlyle My _History_ is frightful! If I live, it is like to be completed; but whether I shall live, and not rather be buried alive, broken-hearted, in the Serbonian Quagmires of English Stupidity, and so sleep beside Cromwell, often seems uncertain. Erebus has no uglier, brutaler element. Let us say nothing of it. Let us do it, or leave it to the Devils. _Ay de mi!_ XCIII. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, 1 September, 1844 My Dear Carlyle,--I have just learned that in an hour Mr. Wilmer's mail-bag for London, by the "Acadia," closes, and I will not lose the occasion of sending you a hasty line: though I had designed to write you from home on sundry matters, which now must wait. I send by this steamer some sheets, to the bookseller John Chapman,--proofsheets of my new book of Essays. Chapman wrote to me by the last steamer, urging me to send him some manuscript that had not yet been published in America, and he thought he could make an advantage from printing it, and even, in some conditions, procure a copyright, and he would publish for me on the plan of half-profits. The request was so timely, since I was not only printing a book, but also a pamphlet (an Address to citizens of some thirteen towns who celebrated in Concord the negro Emancipation on 1st August last), that I came to town yesterday, and hastened the printers, and have now sent him proofs of all the Address, and of more than half the book. If you can give Chapman any counsel, or save me from any nonsense by enjoining on him careful correction, you shall. I looked eagerly for a letter from you by the last steamer, to give me exact tidings of Sterling. None came; but I received a short note from Sterling himself, which intimated that he had but a few more days to live. It is gloomy news. I beg you will write me everything you can relate of him, by the next mail. If you can learn from his friends whether the packet of his Manuscripts and printed papers, returned by Russell and sent by me through Harnden's Express to Ventnor, arrived safely, it would be a satisfaction. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson XCIV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 29 September, 1844 Dear Emerson,--There should a Letter have come for you by that Steamer; for I wrote one duly, and posted it in good time myself: I will hope therefore it was but some delay of some subaltern official, such as I am told occasionally chances, and that you got the Letter after all in a day or two. It would give you notice, more or less, up to its date, of all the points you had inquired about there is now little to be added; except concerning the main point, That the catastrophe has arrived there as we foresaw, and all is ended. John Sterling died at his house in Ventnor on the night of Wednesday, 18th September, about eleven o'clock; unexpectedly at last, and to appearance without pain. His Sister-in-law, Mrs. Maurice; had gone down to him from this place about a week before; other friends were waiting as it were in view of him; but he wished generally to be alone, to continue to the last setting his house and his heart more and more in order for the Great Journey. For about a fortnight back he had ceased to have himself formally dressed; had sat only in his dressing-gown, but I believe was still daily wheeled into his Library, and sat very calmly sorting and working there. He sent me two Notes, and various messages, and gifts of little keepsakes to my Wife and myself: the Notes were brief, stern and loving; altogether noble; never to be forgotten in this world. His Brother Anthony, who had been in the Isle of Wight within call for several weeks, had now come up to Town again; but, after about a week, decided that he would run down again, and look. He arrived on the Wednesday night, about nine o'clock; found no visible change; the brave Patient calm as ever, ready to speak as ever, --to say, in direct words which he would often do, or indirectly as his whole speech and conduct did, "God is Great." Anthony and he talked for a while, then took leave for the night; in few minutes more, Anthony was summoned to the bedside, and at eleven o'clock, as I said, the curtain dropt, and it was all ended.--_Euge!_ Whether the American _Manuscripts_ had arrived I do not yet know, but probably shall before this Letter goes; for Anthony is to return hither on Tuesday, and I will inquire. Our Friend is buried in Ventnor Churchyard; four big Elms overshadow the little spot; it is situated on the southeast side of that green Island, on the slope of steep hills (as I understand it) that look toward the Sun, and are close within sight and hearing of the Sea. There shall he rest, and have fit lullaby, this brave one. He has died as a man should; like an old Roman, yet with the Christian Bibles and all newest revelations present to him. He refused to see friends; men whom I think he loved as well as any,--me for one when I obliquely proposed it, he refused. He was even a little stern on his nearest relatives when they came to him: Do I need your help to die? Phocion-like he seemed to feel degraded by physical decay; to feel that he ought to wrap his mantle round him, and say, "I come, Persephoneia; it is not I that linger!"--His Sister-in-law, Anthony's Wife, probably about a month ago, while they were still in Wight, had begged that she might see him yet once; her husband would be there too, she engaged not to speak. Anthony had not yet persuaded him, when she, finding the door half open, went in: his pale changed countenance almost made her shriek; she stept forward silently, kissed his brow in silence; he burst into tears. Let us speak no more of this.--A great quantity of papers, I understand, are left for my determination; what is to be done with them I will sacredly endeavor to do. I have visited your Bookseller Chapman; seen the Proof-sheets lying on his table; taken order that the reprint shall be well corrected,--indeed, I am to read every sheet myself, and in that way get acquainted with it, before it go into stereotype. Chapman is a tall, lank youth of five-and-twenty; full of good will, but of what other equipment time must yet try. By a little Book of his, which I looked at some months ago, he seemed to me sunk very deep in the dust-hole of extinct Socinianism; a painful predicament for a man! He is not sure of saving much copyright for you; but he will do honestly what in that respect is doable; and he will print the Book correctly, and publish it decently, I saying _imprimatur_ if occasion be,--and your ever- increasing little congregation here will do with the new word what they can. I add no more today; reserving a little nook for the answer I hope to get two days hence. Adieu, my Friend: it is silent Sunday; the populace not yet admitted to their beer- shops, till the respectabilities conclude their rubric- mummeries,--a much more audacious feat than beer! We have wet wind at Northeast, and a sky somewhat of the dreariest:-- Courage! a _little_ way above it reigns mere blue, and sunshine eternally!--T.C. _Wednesday, October 2d._--The Letter had to wait till today, and is still in time. Anthony Sterling, who is yet at Ventnor, apprises me this morning that according to his and the Governess's belief the Russell Manuscripts arrived duly, and were spoken of more than once by our Friend.--On Monday I received from this same Anthony a big packet by Post; it contains among other things all your Letters to John, wrapt up carefully, and addressed in his hand, "Emerson's Letters, to be returned through the hands of Carlyle": they shall go towards you next week, by Mr. James, who is about returning. Among the other Papers was one containing seven stanzas of verse addressed to T. Carlyle, 14th September; full of love and enthusiasm;--the Friday before his death: I was visiting the old City of Winchester that day, among the tombs of Canutes and eldest noble ones: you may judge how sacred the memory of those hours now is! I have read your Slavery Address; this morning the first _half_- sheet, in Proof, of the _Essays_ has come: perfectly correct, and right good reading. Yours ever, T. Carlyle XCV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 September, 1844 My Dear Friend,--I enclose a bill of exchange for thirty pounds sterling which I procured in town today at $5 each pound, or $150; so high, it seems, is the rate at present, higher, they said, than for years. It is good booksellers' money from Little and Brown, and James Munroe & Co., in unequal proportions. If you wish for more accurate information and have a great deal of patience, there is still hope that you may obtain it before death; for I this day met E.P. Clark in Washington Street, and he reported some progress in auditing of accounts, and said that when presently his family should return to town for the winter, he would see to the end of them, i.e. the accounts. I received with great satisfaction your letter of July, which came by a later steamer than it was written for, but gave me exact and solid information on what I most wished to know. May you live forever, and may your reports of men and things be accessible to me whilst I live! Even if, as now in Sterling's case, the news are the worst, or nearly so, yet let whatever comes for knowledge be precise, for the direst tragedy that is accurately true must share the blessing of the Universe. I have no later tidings from Sterling, and I must still look to you to tell me what you can. I dread that the story should be short. May you have much good to tell of him, and for many a day to come! The sketch you drew of Tennyson was right welcome, for he is an old favorite of mine,--I owned his book before I saw your face;--though I love him with allowance. O cherish him with love and praise, and draw from him whole books full of new verses yet. The only point on which you never give precise intelligence is your own book; but you shall have your will in that; so only you arrive on the shores of light at last, with your mystic freight fished partly out of the seas of time, and partly out of the empyrean deeps. I have much regretted a sudden note I wrote you just before the steamer of 1 September sailed, entreating you to cumber yourself about my proofsheets sent to the London bookseller. I heartily absolve you from all such vexations. Nothing could be more inconsiderate. Mr. Chapman is undoubtedly amply competent to ordinary correction, and I much prefer to send you my little book in decent trim than in rags and stains and deformities more than its own. I have just corrected and sent to the steamer the last sheets for Mr. Chapman, who is to find English readers if he can. I shall ask Mr. Chapman to send you a copy, for his edition will be more correct than mine. What can I tell you better? Why even this, that this house rejoices in a brave boy, now near three months old. Edward we call him, and my wife calls him Edward Waldo. When shall I show him to you? And when shall I show you a pretty pasture and wood-lot which I bought last week on the borders of a lake which is the chief ornament of this town, called Walden Pond? One of these days, if I should have any money, I may build me a cabin or a turret there high as the tree- tops, and spend my nights as well as days in the midst of a beauty which never fades for me. Yours with love, R.W. Emerson XCVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 3 November, 1844 Dear Emerson,--By the clearest law I am bound to write you a word today, were my haste even greater than it is. The last American fleet or ship, about the middle of last month, brought me a Draft for Thirty Pounds; which I converted into ready cash, and have here,--and am now your grateful debtor for, as of old. There seems to be no end to those Boston Booksellers! I think the well is dry; and straightway it begins to run again. Thanks to you: --it is, I dare say, a thing you too are grateful for. We will recognize it among the good things of this rather indifferent world.--By the way, if that good Clark _like_ his business, let him go on with it; but if not, stop him, poor fellow! It is to me a matter of really small moment whether those Booksellers' accounts be ever audited in this world, or left over to the General Day of Audit. I myself shudder at the sight of such things; and make my bargain here so always as to have no trade with them, but to be _netto_ from the first. Why should I plague poor Clark with them, if it be any plague to him? The Booksellers will never _know_ but we examine them! The very terror of Clark's name will be as the bark of chained Mastiff,-- and no need for actual biting! Have due pity on the man. Your English volume of _Essays,_ as Chapman probably informs you by this Post, was advertised yesterday, "with a Preface from me." That is hardly accurate, that latter clause. My "Preface" consists only of a certificate that the Book is correctly printed, and sent forth by a Publisher of your appointment, whom therefore all readers of yours ought to regard accordingly. Nothing more. There proves, I believe, no visible real vestige of a copyright obtainable here; only Chapman asserts that he _has_ obtained one, and that he will take all contraveners into Chancery,--which has a terrible sound; and indeed the Act he founds on is of so distracted, inextricable a character, it may mean anything and all things, and no Sergeant Talfourd whom we could consult durst take upon him to say that it meant almost anything whatever. The sound of "Chancery," the stereotype character of this volume, and its cheap price, may perhaps deter pirates,--who are but a weak body in this country as yet. I judged it right to help in that; and impertinent, at this stage of affairs, to go any farther. The Book is very fairly printed, onward. at least to the Essay _New England Politics,_ where my "perfect-copy" of the sheets as yet stops. I did not read any of the Proofs except two; finding it quite superfluous, and a sad waste of time to the hurried Chapman himself. I have found yet but one error, and that a very correctable one, "narvest" for "harvest";--no other that I recollect at present. The work itself falling on me by driblets has not the right chance yet--not till I get it in the bound state, and read it all at once--to produce its due impression on me. But I will say already of it, It is a _sermon_ to me, as all your other deliberate utterances are; a real _word,_ which I feel to be such,--alas, almost or altogether the one such, in a world all full of jargons, hearsays, echoes, and vain noises, which cannot pass with me for _words!_ This is a praise far beyond any "literary" one; literary praises are not worth repeating in comparison. For the rest, I have to object still (what you will call objecting against the Law of Nature) that we find you a Speaker indeed, but as it were a _Soliloquizer_ on the eternal mountain-tops only, in vast solitudes where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a very dim remoteness; and only the man and the stars and the earth are visible,--whom, so fine a fellow seems he, we could perpetually punch into, and say, "Why won't you come and help us then? We have terrible need of one man like you down among us! It is cold and vacant up there; nothing paintable but rainbows and emotions; come down, and you shall do life-pictures, passions, facts,--which _transcend_ all thought, and leave it stuttering and stammering! To which he answers that he won't, can't, and doesn't want to (as the Cockneys have it): and so I leave him, and say, "You Western Gymnosophist! Well, we can afford one man for that too. But--!--By the bye, I ought to say, the sentences are very _brief;_ and did not, in my sheet reading, always entirely cohere for me. Pure genuine Saxon; strong and simple; of a clearness, of a beauty--But they did not, sometimes, rightly stick to their foregoers and their followers: the paragraph not as a beaten ingot, but as a beautiful square _bag of duck-shot_ held together by canvas! I will try them again, with the Book deliberately before me.--There are also one or two utterances about "Jesus," "immortality," and so forth, which will produce wide-eyes here and there. I do not say it was wrong to utter them; a man obeys his own Daemon in these cases as his supreme law. I dare say you are a little bored occasionally with "Jesus," &c.,--as I confess I myself am, when I discern what a beggarly Twaddle they have made of all that, what a greasy Cataplasm to lay to their own poltrooneries;- -and an impatient person may exclaim with Voltaire, in serious moments: "_Au nom de Dieu, ne me parlez plus de cet homme-la!_ I have had enough of him;--I tell you I am alive too!" Well, I have scribbled at a great rate; regardless of Time's flight!--My Wife thanks many times for M. Fuller's Book. I sent by Mr. James a small Packet of _your_ letters--which will make you sad to look at them! Adieu, dear friend. --T. Carlyle XCVII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 December, 1844 My Dear Friend,--I have long owed you a letter and have much to acknowledge. Your two letters containing tidings, the first of the mortal illness, and the second of the death of Sterling, I had no heart to answer. I had nothing to say. Alas! as in so many instances heretofore, I knew not what to think. Life is somewhat customary and usual; and death is the unusual and astonishing; it kills in so far the survivor also, when it ravishes from him friendship and the most noble and admirable qualities. That which we call faith seems somewhat stoical and selfish, if we use it as a retreat from the pangs this ravishment inflicts. I had never seen him, but I held him fast; now I see him not, but I can no longer hold him. Who can say what he yet is and will be to me? The most just and generous can best divine that. I have written in vain to James to visit me, or to send me tidings. He sent me, without any note, the parcel you confided to him, and has gone to Albany, or I know not whither. I have your notes of the progress of my London printing, and, at last, the book itself. It was thoughtless in me to ask your attention to the book at all in the proof state; the printer might have been fully trusted with corrected printed pages before him. Nor should Chapman have taxed you for an advertisement; only, I doubt not he was glad of a chance to have business with you; and, of course, was too thankful for any Preface. Thanks to you for the kind thought of a "Notice," and for its friendly wit. You shall not do this thing again, if I should send you any more books. A Preface from you is a sort of banner or oriflamme, a little too splendid for my occasion, and misleads. I fancy my readers to be a very quiet, plain, even obscure class,--men and women of some religious culture and aspirations, young, or else mystical, and by no means including the great literary and fashionable army, which no man can count, who now read your books. If you introduce me, your readers and the literary papers try to read me, and with false expectations. I had rather have fewer readers and only such as belong to me. I doubt not your stricture on the book as sometimes unconnected and inconsecutive is just. Your words are very gentle. I should describe it much more harshly. My knowledge of the defects of these things I write is all but sufficient to hinder me from writing at all. I am only a sort of lieutenant here in the deplorable absence of captains, and write the laws ill as thinking it a better homage than universal silence. You Londoners know little of the dignities and duties of country lyceums. But of what you say now and heretofore respecting the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do not know what it means. If I can at any time express the law and the ideal right, that should satisfy me without measuring the divergence from it of the last act of Congress. And though I sometimes accept a popular call, and preach on Temperance or the Abolition of Slavery, as lately on the 1st of August, I am sure to feel, before I have done with it, what an intrusion it is into another sphere, and so much loss of virtue in my own. Since I am not to see you from year to year, is there never an Englishman who knows you well, who comes to America, and whom you can send to me to answer all my questions? Health and love and joy to you and yours. --R.W. Emerson XCVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 January, 1845 My Dear Carlyle,--Carey and Hart of Philadelphia, booksellers, have lately proposed to buy the remainder of our Boston edition of your _Miscellanies,_ or to give you a bonus for sanctioning an edition of the same, which they propose to publish. On inquiry, I have found that only thirteen entire sets of four volumes remain to us unsold; whilst we have 226 copies of Volume III., and 243 copies of Volume IV., remaining. In replying to Mr. Carey, I proposed that, besides the proposed bonus, he should buy of me these old volumes, which are not bound but folded, at 25 cents a volume, (Monroe having roughly computed the cost at 40 cents a volume,) but this he declines to do, and offers fifty pounds sterling for his bonus. I decided at once to accept his offer, thinking it a more favorable winding up of our account than I could otherwise look for; as Mr. Carey knows much better how to defend himself from pirates than I do. So I am to publish that his edition is edited with your concurrence. Our own remaining copies of entire sets I shall sell at once to Monroe, at a reduced price, and the odd volumes I think to dispose of by giving them a new and independent title-page. In the circumstances of the trade here, I think Mr. Carey's offer a very liberal one, and he is reputed in his dealings eminently just and generous. My friend William Furness, who has corresponded with me on Carey's behalf, has added now another letter to say that Mr. Carey wishes to procure a picture of Mr. Carlyle to be engraved for this edition. "He understands there is a good head by Laurence, and he wishes to employ some London artist to make a copy of it in oil or water colors, or in any way that will suffice for the engraver; and he proposes to apply to Mr. Carlyle for permission through Inman the American artist who is now in England." Furness goes on to ask for my "good word" with you in furtherance of this design. Well, I heartily hope you will not resist so much good nature and true love; for Mr. Furness and Mr. Griswold, and others who compose a sort of advising committee to Mr. Carey, are sincere lovers of yours. One more opportunity this crisis in our accounts will give to that truest of all Carlylians, E.P. Clark, to make his report. I called at his house two nights ago, in Boston; he promised immediate attention, but quickly drew me aside to his "Illustrations of Carlyle," an endless train of books, and portfolios, and boxes of prints, in which every precious word of that master is explained or confirmed. Affectionately yours, R.W. Emerson XCIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 16 February, 1845 Dear Emerson,--By the last Packet, which sailed on the 3d of the month, I forgot to write to you, though already in your debt one Letter; and there now has another Letter arrived, which on the footing of mere business demands to be answered. I write straightway; not knowing how the Post-Office people will contrive the conveyance, or whether it can be sooner than by the next Steam ship, but willing to give them a chance. You have made another brave bargain for me with the Philadelphia people; to all of which I can say nothing but _"Euge! Papae!"_ It seems to me strange, in the present state of Copyright, how my sanction or the contrary can be worth L50 to any American Bookseller; but so it is, to all appearance; let it be so, therefore, with thanks and surprise. The Messrs. Carey and Lea distinguish themselves by the beauty of their Editions; a poor Author does not go abroad among his friends in dirty paper, full of misprints, under their guidance; this is as handsome an item of the business as any. As to the Portrait too, I will be as "amiable" as heart could wish; truly it will be worth my while to take a little pains that the kind Philadelphia Editors do once for all get a faithful Portrait of me, since they are about it, and so prevent counterfeits from getting into circulation. I will endeavor to do in that matter whatsoever they require of me; to the extent even of sitting two days for a Crayon Sketch such as may be engraved,--though this new sacrifice of patience will not be needed as matters are. It stands thus: there is no Painter, of the numbers who have wasted my time and their own with trying, that has indicated any capability of catching a true Likeness, but one Samuel Lawrence; a young Painter of real talent, not quite so young now, but still only struggling for complete mastership in the management of colors. He does crayon sketches in a way to please almost himself; but his oil paintings, at least till within a year or two, have indicated only a great faculty still crude in that particular. His oil portrait of me, which you speak of, is almost terrible to behold! It has the look of a Jotun, of a Scandinavian Demon, grim, sad, as the angel of Death;--and the coloring is so _brick_ish, the finishing so coarse, it reminds you withal of a flayed horse's head! _"Dinna speak o't."_ But the preparatory crayon-sketch of this, still in existence, is admired by some judges; poor John Sterling bought it from the Painter, and it is now here in the hands of his Brother, who will readily allow any authorized person to take a drawing of it. Lawrence himself, I imagine, would be the fittest man to employ; or your Mr. Ingham [Inman], if he be here and a capable person: one or both of these might superintend the Engraving of it here, and not part with the plate till it were pronounced satisfactory. In short, I am willing to do "anything in reason"! Only if a Portrait is to be, I confess I should rather avoid going abroad under the hands of bunglers, at least of bunglers sanctioned by myself. There is a Portrait of me in some miserable farrago called _Spirit of the Age;_* a farrago unknown to me, but a Portrait known, for poor Lawrence brought it down to me with sorrow in his face; it professes to be from his painting; is a "Lais _without_ the beauty" (as Charles Lamb used to say); a flayed horse's head without the spiritualism, good or bad,--and simply figures on my mind as a detestability; which I had much rather never have seen. These poor _Spirit of the Age_ people applied to me; I described myself as "busy," &c.; shoved them off me; and this monster of iniquity, resembling Nothing in the Earth or under it, is the result. In short, I am willing, I am willing; and so let us not waste another drop of ink on it at present!--On the whole, are not you a strange fellow? You apologize as if with real pain for "trouble" I had, or indeed am falsely supposed to have had, with Chapman here; and forthwith engage again in correspondences, in speculations, and negotiations, and I know not what, on my behalf! For shame, for shame! Nay, you have done one very ingenious thing; to set Clark upon the Boston Booksellers' accounts: it is excellent; Michael Scott setting the Devil to twist ropes of sand, "There, my brave one; see if you don't find work there for a while!" I never think of this Clark without love and laughter. Once more, _Euge!_ Chapman is fast selling your Books here; striking off a new Five Hundred from his Stereotypes. You are wrong as to your Public in this Country; it is a very pretty public; extends pretty much, I believe, through all ranks, and is a growing one,--and a truly _aristocratic,_ being of the bravest inquiring minds we have. All things are breaking up here, like Swedish Frost in the end of March; _gachis epouvantable._ Deep, very serious eternal instincts, are at work; but as yet no serious word at all that I hear, except what reaches me from Concord at intervals. Forward, forward! And you do not know what I mean by calling you "unpractical," "theoretic." _0 caeca corda!_ But I have no room for such a theme at present. ---------- * "A new Spirit of the Age. Edited by R.H. Horne." In Two Volumes. London, 1844. ---------- The reason I tell you nothing about Cromwell is, alas, that there is nothing to be told. I am day and night, these long months and years, very miserable about it,--nigh broken-hearted often. Such a scandalous accumulation of Human Stupidity in every form never lay before on such a subject. No history of it can be written to this wretched, fleering, sneering, canting, twaddling, God- forgetting generation. How can you explain men to Apes by the Dead Sea?* And I am very sickly too, and my Wife is ill all this cold weather,--and I am sunk in the bowels of Chaos, and scarce once in the three months or so see so much as a possibility of ever getting out! Cromwell's own _Letters and Speeches_ I have gathered together, and washed clean from a thousand ordures: these I do sometimes think of bringing out in a legible shape;-- perhaps soon. Adieu, dear friend, with blessings always. --T. Carlyle Poor Sydney Smith is understood to be dying; water on the chest; past hope of Doctors. Alas! --------- * The dwellers by the Dead Sea who were changed to apes are referred to in various places by Carlyle. He tells the story of the metamorphosis, which he got from the introduction to Sale's Koran, in _Past and Present,_ Book III. Ch. 3. --------- C. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, June 29, 1845 My Dear Friend,--I grieve to think of my slackness in writing, which suffers steamer after steamer to go without a letter. But I have still hoped, before each of the late packets sailed, that I should have a message to send that would enforce a letter. I wrote you some time ago of Mr. Carey's liberal proposition in relation to your _Miscellanies._ I wrote, of course, to Furness, through whom it was made to me, accepting the proposition; and I forwarded to Mr. Carey a letter from me to be printed at the beginning of the book, signifying your good-will to the edition, and acknowledging the justice and liberality of the publishers. I have heard no more from them, and now, a fortnight since, the newspaper announces the death of Mr. Carey. He died very suddenly, though always an invalid and extremely crippled. His death is very much regretted in the Philadelphia papers, where he bore the reputation of a most liberal patron of good and fine arts. I have not heard from Mr. Furness, and have thought I should still expect a letter from him. I hope our correspondence will stand as a contract which Mr. Carey's representatives will feel bound to execute. They had sent me a little earlier a copy of Mr. Sartain's engraving from their water-color copy of Laurence's head of you. They were eager to have the engraving pronounced a good likeness. I showed it to Sumner, and Russell, and Theodore Parker, who have seen you long since I had, and they shook their heads unanimously and declared that D'Orsay's profile was much more like. --------- ** From the rough draft. --------- I creep along the roads and fields of this town as I have done from year to year. When my garden is shamefully overgrown with weeds, I pull up some of them. I prune my apples and pears. I have a few friends who gild many hours of the year. I sometimes write verses. I tell you with some unwillingness, as knowing your distaste for such things, that I have received so many applications from readers and printers for a volume of poems that I have seriously taken in hand the collection, transcription, or scription of such a volume, and may do the enormity before New Year's day. Fear not, dear friend, you shall not have to read one line. Perhaps I shall send you an official copy, but I shall appeal to the tenderness of Jane Carlyle, and excuse your formidable self, for the benefit of us both. Where all writing is such a caricature of the subject, what signifies whether the form is a little more or less ornate and luxurious? Meantime, I think to set a few heads before me, as good texts for winter evening entertainments. I wrote a deal about Napoleon a few months ago, after reading a library of memoirs. Now I have Plato, Montaigne, and Swedenborg, and more in the clouds behind. What news of Naseby and Worcester? CI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 29 August, 1845 Dear Emerson,--Your Letter, which had been very long expected, has been in my hand above a month now; and still no answer sent to it. I thought of answering straightway; but the day went by, days went by;--and at length I decided to wait till my insupportable Burden (the "Stupidity of Two Centuries" as I call it, which is a heavy load for one man!) were rolled off my shoulders, and I could resume the habit of writing Letters, which has almost left me for many months. By the unspeakable blessing of Heaven that consummation has now arrived, about four days ago I wrote my last word on _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches;_ and one of the earliest uses I make of my recovered freedom is to salute you again. The Book is nearly printed: two big volumes; about a half of it, I think, my own; the real utterances of the man Oliver Cromwell once more legible to earnest men. Legible really to an unexpected extent: for the Book took quite an unexpected figure in my hands; and is now a kind of Life of Oliver, the best that circumstances would permit me to do:-- whether either I or England shall be, in my time, fit for a better, remains submitted to the Destinies at present. I have tied up the whole Puritan Paper-Litter (considerable masses of it still unburnt) with tight strings, and hidden it at the bottom of my deepest repositories: there shall _it,_ if Heaven please, lie dormant for a time and times. Such an element as I have been in, no human tongue can give account of. The disgust of my Soul has been great; a really _pious_ labor: worth very little when I have done it; but the best I could do; and that is quite enough. I feel the liveliest gratitude to the gods that I have got out of it alive. The Book is very dull, but it is actually legible: all the ingenious faculty I had, and ten times as much would have been useful there, has been employed in elucidation; in saying, and chiefly in forbearing to say,--in annihilating continents of brutal wreck and dung: _Ach Gott!_--But in fact you will see it by and by; and then form your own conclusions about it. They are going to publish it in October, I find: I tried hard to get you a complete copy of the sheets by this Steamer; but it proves to be flatly impossible;--perhaps luckily; for I think you would have been bothering yourself with some new Bookseller negotiation about it; and that, as copyright and other matters now stand, is a thing I cannot recommend. --Enough of it now: only let all my silences and other shortcomings be explained thereby. I am now off for the North Country, for a snatch still at the small remnants of Summer, and a little free air and sunshine. I am really far from well, though I have been riding diligently for three months back, and doing what I could to help myself. Very glad shall I be, my Friend, to have some new utterances from you either in verse or in prose! What you say about the vast _imperfection_ of all modes of utterance is most true indeed. Let a man speak and sing, and do, and sputter and gesticulate as he may,--the meaning of him is most ineffectually shown forth, poor fellow; rather _indicated_ as if by straggling symbols, than _spoken_ or visually expressed! Poor fellow! So the great rule is, That he _have_ a good manful meaning, and then that he take what "mode of utterance" is honestly the readiest for him.-- I wish you would take an American Hero, one whom you really love; and give us a History of him,--make an artistic bronze statue (in good _words_) of his Life and him! I do indeed.--But speak of what you will, you are welcome to me. Once more I say, No other voice in this wide waste world seems to my sad ear to be _speaking_ at all at present. The more is the pity for us. I forbid you to plague yourself any farther with those Philadelphia or other Booksellers. If you could hinder them to promulgate any copy of that frightful picture by Lawrence, or indeed any picture at all, I had rather stand as a shadow than as a falsity in the minds of my American friends: but this too we are prepared to encounter. And as for the money of these men,-- if they will pay it, good and welcome; if they will not pay it, let them keep it with what blessing there may be in it! I have your noble offices in that and in other such matters already unforgetably sure to me; and, in real fact, that is almost exactly the whole of valuable that could exist for me in the affair. Adieu, dear Friend. Write to me again; I will write again at more leisure. Yours always, T. Carlyle CII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 15 September, 1845 My Dear Friend,--I have seen Furness of Philadelphia, who was, last week, in Boston, and inquired of him what account I should send you of the new Philadelphia edition. "Has not Mr. Carey paid you?" he said.--No. "Then has he not paid Carlyle directly?" No, as I believe, or I should have heard of it.-- Furness replied, that the promised fifty pounds were sure, and that the debt would have been settled before this time, if Mr. Carey had lived. So as this is no longer a Three Blind Callenders' business of Arabian Nights, I shall rest secure. I have doubted whether the bad name which Philadelphia has gotten in these times would not have disquieted you in this long delay. If you have ever heard directly from Carey and Hart, you will inform me. I am to read to a society in Boston presently some lectures, --on Plato, or the Philosopher; Swedenborg, or the Mystic; Montaigne, or the Sceptic; Shakespeare, or the Poet; Napoleon, or the Man of the World;--if I dare, and much lecturing makes us incorrigibly rash. Perhaps, before I end it, my list will be longer, and the measure of presumption overflowed. I may take names less reverend than some of these,--but six lectures I have promised. I find this obligation usually a good spur to the sides of that dull horse I have charge of. But many of its advantages must be regarded at a long distance. I have heard nothing from you for a long time,--so may your writing prosper the more. I wish to hear, however, concerning you, and your house, and your studies, when there is little to tell. The steamers come so fast--to exchange cards would not be nothing. My wife and children and my mother are well. Peace and love to your household. --R.W. Emerson CIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 September, 1845 My Dear Friend,--I had hardly sent away my letter by the last steamer, when yours full of good news arrived. I greet you heartily on the achievement of your task, and the new days of freedom obtained and deserved. Happiest, first, that you can work, which seems the privilege of the great, and then, also, that thereby you can come at the sweetness of victory and rest. Yes, flee to the country, ride, run, leap, sit, spread yourself at large; and in all ways celebrate the immense benevolence of the Universe towards you; and never complain again of dyspepsia, crosses, or the folly of men; for in giving you this potent concentration, what has been withholden? I am glad with all men that a new book is made, that the gentle creation as well as the grosser goes ever on. Another month will bring it to me, and I shall know the secrets of these late silent years. Welcome the child of my friend! Why should I regret that I see you not, when you are forced thus intimately to discover yourself beyond the intimacy of conversation? But you should have sent me out the sheets by the last steamer, or a manuscript copy of the book. I do not know but Munroe would have printed it at once, and defied the penny press. And slow Time might have brought in his hands a most modest reward. I wrote you the other day the little I had to say on affairs. Clark, the financial Conscience, has never yet made any report, though often he promised. Half the year he lives out of Boston, and unless I go to his Bank I never see his face. I think he will not die till he have disburdened himself of this piece of arithmetic. I pray you to send me my copy of this book at the earliest hour, and to offer my glad congratulations to Jane Carlyle, on an occasion, I am sure, of great peace and relief to her spirit. And so farewell. --R.W. Emerson CIV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 11 November, 1846 My Dear Emerson,--I have had two Letters from you since I wrote any; the latest of them was lying here for me when I returned, about three weeks ago; the other I had received in Scotland: it was only the last that demanded a special answer;--which, alas, I meant faithfully to give it, but did not succeed! With meet despatch I made the Bookseller get ready for you a Copy of the unpublished _Cromwell_ Book; hardly complete as yet, it was nevertheless put together, and even some kind of odious rudiments of a _Portrait_ were bound up with it; and the Packet inscribed with your address was put into Wiley and Putnam's hands in time for the Mail Steamer;--and I hope has duly arrived? If it have not, pray set the Booksellers a-hunting. Wiley and Putnam was the Carrier's name; this is all the indication I can give, but this, I hope, if indeed any prove needful, will be enough. One may hope you have the Book already in your hands, a fortnight before this reaches you, a month before any other Copy can reach America. In which case the Parcel, _without_ any Letter, must have seemed a little enigmatic to you! The reason was this: I miscounted the day of the month, unlucky that I was. Sitting down one morning with full purpose to write at large, and all my tools round me, I discover that it is no longer the third of November; that it is already the _fourth,_ and the American Mail-Packet has already lifted anchor! Irrevocable, irremediable! Nothing remained but to wait for the 18th;--and now, as you see, to take Time by the forelock,-- _queue,_ as we all know, he has none. My visit to Scotland was wholesome for me, tho' full of sadness, as the like always is. Thirty years mow away a Generation of Men. The old Hills, the old Brooks and Houses, are still there; but the Population has marched away, almost all; it is not there any more. I cannot enter into light talk with the survivors and successors; I withdraw into silence, and converse with the old dumb crags rather, in a melancholy and abstruse manner.--Thank God, my good old Mother is still there; old and frail, but still young of heart; as young and strong _there,_ I think, as ever. It is beautiful to see affection survive where all else is submitting to decay; the altar with its sacred fire still burning when the outer walls are all slowly crumbling; material Fate saying, "_They_ are mine!"--I read some insignificant Books; smoked a great deal of tobacco; and went moping about among the hills and hollow water-courses, somewhat like a shade in Hades. The Gospel which this World of Fact does preach to one differs considerably from the sugary twaddle one gets the offer of in Exeter-Hall and other Spouting-places! Of which, in fact, I am getting more and more weary; sometimes really impatient. It seems to me the reign of Cant and Spoonyism has about lasted long enough. Alas, in many respects, in this England I too often feel myself sorrowfully in a "minority of one";--if in the whole world, it amount to a minority of two, that is something! These words of Goethe often come into my mind, _"Verachtung ja Nicht- achtung."_ Lancashire, with its Titanic Industries, with its smoke and dirt, and brutal stupor to all but money and the five mechanical Powers, did not excite much admiration in me; considerably less, I think, than ever! Patience, and shuffle the cards! The Book on Cromwell is not to come out till the 22d of this month. For many weeks it has been a real weariness to me; my hope, always disappointed, that now is the last time I shall have any trade with it. Even since I began writing, there has been an Engraver here, requiring new indoctrination,--poor fellow! Nay, in about ten days it _must_ be over: let us not complain. I feel it well to be worth _nothing,_ except for the little fractions or intermittent fits of pious industry there really were in it; and my one wish is that the human species would be pleased to take it off my hands, and honestly let me hear no more about it! If it please Heaven, I will rest awhile still, and then try something better. In three days hence, my Wife and I are off to the Hampshire coast for a winter visit to kind friends there, if in such a place it will prosper long with us. The climate there is greatly better than ours; they are excellent people, well affected to us; and can be lived with, though of high temper and ways! They are the Lord Ashburtons, in fact; more properly the younger stratum of that house; partly a kind of American people,--who know Waldo Emerson, among other fine things, very well! I think we are to stay some three weeks: the bustle of moving is already begun. You promise us a new Book soon? Let it be soon, then. There are many persons here that will welcome it now. To one man here it is ever as an _articulate voice_ amid the infinite cackling and cawing. That remains my best definition of the effect it has on me. Adieu, my friend. Good be with you and your Household always. _Vale._ --T.C. CV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 3 January, 1846 Dear Emerson,--I received your Letter* by the last Packet three or four days ago: this is the last day of answering, the monthly Packet sails towards you again from Liverpool tomorrow morning; and I am in great pressure with many writings, elsewhither and thither: therefore I must be very brief. I have just written to Mr. Hart of Philadelphia; his Draft (as I judge clearly by the Banker's speech and silence) is accepted, all right; and in fact, means _money_ at this time: for which I have written to thank him heartily. Do you very heartily thank Mr. Furness for me;--Furness and various friends, as Transatlantic matters now are, must accept a _silent_ gratitude from me. The speech of men and American hero-worshipers is grown such a babblement: in very truth, _silence_ is the thing that chiefly has meaning,--there or here.... --------- * Missing --------- To my very great astonishment, the Book _Cromwell_ proves popular here; and there is to be another edition very soon. Edition with improvements--for some fifty or so of new (not _all_ insignificant) Letters have turned up, and I must try to do something rational with them;--with which painful operation I am again busy. It will make the two volumes about _equal_ perhaps, --which will be one benefit! If any American possibility lie in this, I will take better care of it.--Alas, I have not got one word with you yet! Tell me of your Lectures;--of all things. Ever yours, T. Carlyle We returned from Hampshire exactly a week ago; never passed six so totally idle weeks in our lives.--Better in health a little? Perhaps. CVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 3 February, 1848 Dear Emerson,--One word to you before the Packet sail;--on business of my own, once more; in such a state of _haste_ as could hardly be greater. The Printers are upon me, and I have not a moment. Contrary to all human expectation, this Book on Cromwell proves salable to mankind here, and a second Edition is now going forward with all speed. The publication of the First has brought out from their recesses a _new_ heap of Cromwell Letters;--which have been a huge embarrassment to me; for they are highly unimportant for most part, and do not tend to alter or materially modify anything. Some Fifty or Sixty new Letters in all (many of them from Printed Books that had escaped me) the great majority, with others yet that may come in future time, I determine to print simply as an Appendix; but several too, I think about twenty in all, are to be fitted into the Text, chiefly in the early part of the First Volume, as tending to bring some matters into greater clearness there. I am busy with that even now; sunk deep into the Dust-abysses again!--Of course I have made what provision I could for printing a Supplement, &c. to the possessors of the First Edition: but I find this Second will be the _Final_ standing Edition of the Book; decidedly preferable to the First; not to be touched by me _again,_ except on very good cause indeed. New letters, except they expressly contradict me, shall go at once into the back apartment, or Appendix, in future. The Printers have sent me some five or six sheets, they send me hitherto a sheet daily; but perhaps there are not above three or two in a perfect state: so I trouble you with none of them by this Packet. But by next Packet (3d of March), unless I hear to the contrary, I will send you all the Sheets that are ready; and so by the following Packets, till we are out of it;--that you, on the scene there, may do with them once for all whatsoever you like. If _nothing_ can be done with them, believe me I shall be very glad of that result. But if you can so much as oblige any honest Bookseller of your or my acquaintance by the gift of them, let it be done; let Pirates and ravenous Bipeds of Prey be excluded from participating: that of itself will be a comfortable and a proper thing!--You are hereby authorized to promulgate in any way you please, That the Second Edition will be augmented, corrected, as aforesaid; and that Mr. (Any Son of Adam you please to name) is, so far as I have any voice in the matter, appointed by me, to the exclusion of all and sundry others on what pretext soever, to print and vend the same to my American Friends. And so it stands; and the Sheets (probably near thirty in number) will be out with the March Packet:-- and if nothing can come of it, I for one shall be very glad! The Book is to be in Three Volumes now; the first ends at p. 403, Vol. I.; the third begins at p. 155, Vol. II., of the present edition. What are you doing? Write to me: how the Lectures went, how all things went and go! We are over head and ears in Anti-Corn-Law here; the Aristocracy struck almost with a kind of horror at sight of that terrible Millocracy, rising like a huge hideous Frankenstein up in Lancashire,--seemingly with boundless ready- money in its pocket, and a very fierce humor in its stomach! To me it is as yet almost uglier than the Aristocracy; and I will not fire guns when this small victory is gained; I will recommend a day of Fasting rather, that such a victory required such gaining. Adieu, my Friend. Is it likely we shall meet in "Oregon," think you? That would be a beautiful affair, on the part of the most enlightened Nation! Yours ever, T. Carlyle CVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 3 March, 1846 Dear Emerson,--I must write you a word before this Packet go, tho' my haste is very great. I received your two Newspapers (price only twopence); by the same Ship there came, and reached me some days later, a Letter from Mr. Everett enclosing the _Cromwell_ portions of the same printed-matter, clipt out by scissors; written, it appeared, by Mr. Everett's nephew; some of whose remarks, especially his wish that I might once be in New England, and see people "praying," amused me much! The Cotton Letter, &c., I have now got to the bottom of; Birch's copy is in the Museum here,--a better edition than I had. Of "Levered" and the other small American Documents--alas, I get cartloads of the like or better tumbled down at my door, and my chief duty is to front them resolutely with a _shovel._ "Ten thousand tons" is but a small estimate for the quantity of loose and indurated lumber I have had to send sounding, on each hand of me, down, down to the eternal deeps, never to trouble _me_ more! The jingle of it, as it did at last get under way, and go down, was almost my one consolation in those unutterable operations.--I am again over head and ears; but shall be out soon: never to return more. By this Packet, according to volunteer contract, there goes out by the favor of your Chapman a number of sheets, how many I do not exactly know, of the New Edition: Chapman First and Chapman Second (yours and mine) have undertaken to manage the affair for this month and for the following months;--many thanks to them both for taking it out of my hands. What you are to do with the Article you already know. If no other customer present himself, can you signify to Mr. Hart of Philadelphia that the sheets are much at his service,--his conduct on another occasion having given him right to such an acknowledgment from me? Or at any rate, _you_ will want a new Copy of this Book; and can retain the sheets for that object.--Enough of them. From Mr. Everett I learn that your Boston Lectures have been attended with renown enough: when are the Lectures themselves to get to print? I read, last night, an Essay on you, by a kind of "Young Scotland," as we might call it, in an Edinburgh Magazine; very fond of you, but shocked that you were Antichristian:-- really not so bad. The stupidities of men go crossing one another; and miles down, at the bottom of all, there is a little veinlet of sense found running at last! If you see Mr. Everett, will you thank him for his kind remembrance of me, till I find leisure (as I have vainly hoped today to do) to thank him more in form. A dignified, compact kind of man; whom I remember with real pleasure. Jargon abounds in our Newspapers and Parliament Houses at present;--with which "the present Editor," and indeed I think the Public at large, takes little concern, beyond the regret of being _bored_ by it. The Corn-Laws are going very quietly the way of all deliriums; and then there will at least be one delirium less, and we shall start upon new ones. Not a word more today, but my blessings and regards. God be with you and yours always. Ever your affectionate, T. Carlyle CVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 18 April, 1846 Dear Emerson,--Your two Letters* have both come to hand, the last of them only three days ago. One word in answer before the Packet sail; one very hasty word, rather than none. ----------- * Missing. ---------- You have made the best of Bargains for me; once again, with the freest contempt of trouble on my behalf; which I cannot sufficiently wonder at! Apparently it is a fixed-idea of yours that the Bibliopolic Genus shall not cheat me; and you are decided to make it good. Very well: let it be so, in as far as the Fates will. Certainly I will conform in all points to this Wiley-and-Putnam Treaty, and faithfully observe the same. The London Wileys have not yet sent me any tidings; but when they do, I will say Your terms on the other side of the sea are the Law to us, and it is a finished thing.--No sheets, I think, will go by this mid-month Packet, the Printer and Bookseller were bidden not mind that: but by the Packet of May 3d, I hope the Second Volume will go complete; and, if the Printers make speed, almost the whole remainder may go by the June one. There is to be a "Supplement to the First Edition," containing all the new matter that is _separable:_ of this too the Wileys shall have their due Copy to reprint: it is what I could do to keep my faith with purchasers of the First Edition here; but, on the whole, there will be no emulating of the Second Edition except by a reprint of the whole of it; changes great and small have had to introduce themselves everywhere, as these new Letters were woven in.--I hope before May 3d I shall have ascertained whether it will not be the simplest way (as with my present light it clearly appears) to give the sheets direct to the Wiley and Putnam here, and let _them_ send them? In any case, the cargo shall come one way or other. Furthermore,--Yes, you shall have that sun-shadow, a Daguerreotype likeness, as the sun shall please to paint it: there has often been talk of getting me to that establishment, but I never yet could go. If it be possible, we will have this also ready for the 3d of May. _Provided_ you, as you promise, go and do likewise! A strange moment that, when I look upon your dead shadow again; instead of the living face, which remains unchanged within me, enveloped in beautiful clouds, and emerging now and then into strange clearness! Has your head grown grayish? On me are "gray hairs here and there,"--and I do "know it." I have lived half a century in this world, fifty years complete on the 4th of December last: that is a solemn fact for me! Few and evil have been the days of the years of thy servant,--few for any good that was ever done in them. _Ay de mi!_ Within late weeks I have got my Horse again; go riding through the loud torrent of vehiculatory discords, till I get into the fields, into the green lanes; which is intrinsically a great medicine to me. Most comfortless riding it is, with a horse of such _kangaroo_ disposition, till I do get to the sight of my old ever-young green-mantled mother again; but for an hour there, it is a real blessing to me. I have company sometimes, but generally prefer solitude, and a dialogue with the trees and clouds. Alas, the speech of men, especially the witty-speech of men, is oftentimes afflictive to me: "in the wide Earth," I say sometimes with a sigh, "there is none but Emerson that responds to me with a voice wholly human!" All "Literature" too is become I cannot tell you how contemptible to me. On the whole, one's blessedness is to do as Oliver: Work while the sun is up; work _well_ as if Eternities depended on it; and then sleep,--if under the guano-mountains of Human Stupor, if handsomely _forgotten_ all at once, that latter is the handsome thing! I have often thought what W. Shakespeare would say, were he to sit one night in a "Shakespeare Society," and listen to the empty twaddle and other long-eared melody about him there!--Adieu, my Friend. I fear I have forgotten many things: at all events, I have forgotten the inexorable flight of the minutes, which are numbered out to me at present. Ever yours, T. Carlyle I think I recognize the Inspector of Wild-beasts, in the little Boston Newspaper you send!* A small hatchet-faced, gray- eyed, good-humored Inspector, who came with a Translated Lafontaine; and took his survey not without satisfaction? Comfortable too how rapidly he fathomed the animal, having just poked him up a little. _Ach Gott!_ Man is forever interesting to men;--and all men, even Hatchet-faces, are globular and complete! --------- * This probably refers to a letter of Mr. Elizur Wright's, describing a visit to Carlyle. --------- CIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 30 April, 1846 Dear Emerson,--Here is the _Photograph_ going off for you by Bookseller Munroe of Boston; the Sheets of _Cromwell,_ all the second and part of the last volume, are to go direct to New York: both Parcels by the Putnam conveyance. For Putnam has been here since I wrote, making large confirmations of what you conveyed to me; and large Proposals of an ulterior scope,--which will involve you in new trouble for me. But it is trouble you will not grudge, inasmuch as it promises to have some issue of moment; at all events the negotiation is laid entirely into your hands: therefore I must with all despatch explain to you the essentials of it, that you may know what Wiley says when he writes to you from New York. Mr. Putnam, really a very intelligent, modest, and reputable- looking little fellow, got at last to sight of me about a week ago;--explained with much earnestness how the whole origin of the mistake about the First Edition of _Cromwell_ had lain with Chapman, my own Bookseller (which in fact I had already perceived to be the case); and farther set forth, what was much more important, that he and his Partner were, and had been, ready and desirous to _make good_ said mistake, in the amplest, most satisfactory manner,--by the ready method of paying me _now_ ten percent on the selling-price of all the copies of _Cromwell_ sent into the market by them; and had (as I knew already) covenanted with you to do so, in a clear, _bona-fide,_ and to you satisfactory manner, in regard to that First Edition: in consequence of which you had made a bargain with them of like tenor in regard to the Second. To all which I could only answer, that such conduct was that of men of honor, and would, in all manner of respects, be satisfactory to me. Wherefore the new Sheets of _Cromwell_ should now go by _his_ Package direct to New York, and the other little Parcel for you he could send to Munroe:--that as one consequence? "Yes, surely," intimated he; but there were other consequences, of more moment, behind that. Namely, that they wanted (the Wiley & Putnam house did) to publish certain other Books of mine, the List of which I do not now recollect; under similar conditions: viz. that I was to certify, in a line or two prefixable to each Book, that I had read it over in preparation for their Printer, and did authorize them to print and sell it;--in return for which Ten percent on the sale-price (and all manner of facilities, volunteered to convince even Clark of Boston, the Lynx-eyed Friend now busy for me looking through millstones, that all was straight, and said Ten percent actually paid on every copy sold); This was Putnam's Offer, stated with all transparency, and in a way not to be misunderstood by either of us. To which I answered that the terms seemed clear and square and every way good, and such as I could comply with heartily,--so far as I was at liberty, but not farther. Not farther: for example, there was Hart of Philadelphia (I think the Wileys do not want the _Miscellanies_), there were Munroe, Little and Brown, &c.;-- in short, there was R.W. Emerson, who knew in all ways how far I was free and not free, and who would take care of my integrity and interest at once, and do what was just and prudent; and to _him_ I would refer the whole question, and whatever he engaged for, that and no other than that I would do. So that you see how it is, and what a coil you have again got into! Mr. Putnam would have had some "Letter," some "exchange of Letters," to the effect above-stated: but I answered, "It was better we did not write at all till the matter was clear and liquid with you, and then we could very swiftly write,--and act. I would apprise you how the matter stood, and expect your answer, and bid you covenant with Mr. Wiley what you found good, prompt I to fulfil whatever _you_ undertook for me."--This _is_ a true picture of the affair, the very truest I can write in haste; and so I leave it with you-- _Ach Gott!_ If your Photograph succeed as well as mine, I shall be almost _tragically_ glad of it. This of me is far beyond all pictures; really very like: I got Laurence the Painter to go with me, and he would not let the people off till they had actually made a likeness. My Wife has got another, which she asserts to be much "more amiable-looking," and even liker!* O my Friend, it is a strange Phantasmagory of a Fact, this huge, tremendous World of ours, Life of ours! Do you bethink you of Craigenputtock, and the still evening there? I could burst into tears, if I had that habit: but it is of no use. The Cromwell business will be ended about the end of May,--I do hope! You say not a word of your own affairs: I have vaguely been taught to look for some Book shortly;--what of it? We are well, or tolerably well, and the summer is come: adieu. Blessings on you and yours. --T.C. ---------- * The engraved portrait in the first volume of this Correspondence is from a photograph taken from this daguerrotype. ---------- CX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 14 May, 1846 Dear Friend,--I daily expect the picture, and wonder--so long as I have wished it--I had never asked it before. I was in Boston the other day, and went to the best reputed Daguerreotypist, but though I brought home three transcripts of my face, the house- mates voted them rueful, supremely ridiculous. I must sit again; or, as true Elizabeth Hoar said, I must not sit again, not being of the right complexion which Daguerre and iodine delight in. I am minded to try once more, and if the sun will not take me, I must sit to a good crayon sketcher, Mr. Cheney, and send you his draught.... Good rides to you and the longest escapes from London streets. I too have a new plaything, the best I ever had,--a wood-lot. Last fall I bought a piece of more than forty acres, on the border of a little lake half a mile wide and more, called Walden Pond,--a place to which my feet have for years been accustomed to bring me once or twice a week at all seasons. My lot to be sure is on the further side of the water, not so familiar to me as the nearer shore. Some of the wood is an old growth, but most of it has been cut off within twenty years and is growing thriftily. In these May days, when maples, poplars, oaks, birches, walnut, and pine are in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon, and cut with my hatchet an Indian path through the thicket all along the bold shore, and open the finest pictures. My two little girls know the road now, though it is nearly two miles from my house, and find their way to the spring at the foot of a pine grove, and with some awe to the ruins of a village of shanties, all overgrown with mullein, which the Irish who built the railroad left behind them. At a good distance in from the shore the land rises to a rocky head, perhaps sixty feet above the water. Thereon I think to place a hut; perhaps it will have two stories and be a petty tower, looking out to Monadnoc and other New Hampshire Mountains. There I hope to go with book and pen when good hours come. I shall think there, a fortnight might bring you from London to Walden Pond.--Life wears on, and do you say the gray hairs appear? Few can so well afford them. The black have not hung over a vacant brain, as England and America know; nor, white or black, will it give itself any Sabbath for many a day henceforward, as I believe. What have we to do with old age? Our existence looks to me more than ever initial. We have come to see the ground and look up materials and tools. The men who have any positive quality are a flying advance party for reconnoitring. We shall yet have a right work, and kings for competitors. With ever affectionate remembrance to your wife, your friend, --R.W. Emerson CXI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 May, 1846 My Dear Friend,--It is late at night and I have postponed writing not knowing but that my parcel would be ready to go,--and now a public meeting and the speech of a rarely honest and eloquent man have left me but a span of time for the morning's messenger. The photograph came safely, to my thorough content. I have what I have wished. This head is to me out of comparison more satisfying than any picture. I confirm my recollections and I make new observations; it is life to life. Thanks to the Sun. This artist remembers what every other forgets to report, and what I wish to know, the true sculpture of the features, the angles, the special organism, the rooting of the hair, the form and the placing of the head. I am accustomed to expect of the English a securing of the essentials in their work, and the sun does that, and you have done it in this portrait, which gives me much to think and feel.* I was instantly stirred to an emulation of your love and punctuality, and, last Monday, which was my forty-third birthday, I went to a new Daguerreotypist, who took much pains to make his picture right. I brought home three shadows not agreeable to my own eyes. The machine has a bad effect on me. My wife protests against the imprints as slanderous. My friends say they look ten years older, and, as I think, with the air of a decayed gentleman touched with his first paralysis. However I got yesterday a trusty vote or two for sending one of them to you, on the ground that I am not likely to get a better. But it now seems probable that it will not get cased and into the hands of Harnden in time for the steamer tomorrow. It will then go by that of the 16th. --------- * From Emerson's Diary, May 23, 1846:--"In Carlyle's head (photograph), which came last night, how much appears! How unattainable this truth to any painter! Here have I the inevitable traits which the sun forgets not to copy, and which I thirst to see, but which no painter remembers to give me. Here have I the exact sculpture, the form of the head, the rooting of the hair, thickness of the lips, the man that God made. And all the Laurences and D'Orsays now serve me well as illustration. I have the form and organism, and can better spare the expression and color. What would I not give for a head of Shakespeare by the same artist? of Plato? of Demosthenes? Here I have the jutting brow, and the excellent shape of the head. And here the organism of the eye full of England, the valid eye, in which I see the strong executive talent which has made his thought available to the nations, whilst others as intellectual as he are pale and powerless. The photograph comes dated 25 April, 1846, and he writes, 'I am fifty years old."' --------- I am heartily glad that you are in direct communication with these really energetic booksellers, Wiley and Putnam. I understood from Wiley's letter to me, weeks ago, that their ambition was not less than to have a monopoly of your books. I answered, it is very desirable for us too; saving always the rights of Mr. Hart in Philadelphia.--I told him you had no interest in Munroe's _Sartor,_ which from the first was his own adventure, and Little and Brown had never reprinted _Past and Present_ or _Chartism._ The _French Revolution, Past and Present, Chartism,_ and the _Sartor,_ I see no reason why they should not have. Munroe and L. & B. have no real claims, and I will speak to them. But there is one good particular in Putnam's proffer to you, which Wiley has not established in his (first and last) agreement with me, namely, that you shall have an interest in what is already sold of their first edition of _Cromwell._ By all means close with Putnam of the good mind, exempting only Hart's interest. I have no recent correspondence with Wiley and Putnam. And I greatly prefer that they should deal directly with you. Yet it were best to leave an American reference open for audit and umpirage to the stanch E.P. Clark of the New England Bank. Ever yours, R.W. Emerson CXII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 18 June, 1846 Dear Emerson,--I have had two letters of yours, the last of them (31st May) only two days, and have seen a third written to Wiley of New York. Yesterday Putnam was here, and we made our bargain,--and are to have it signed this day at his Shop: two copies, one of which I mean to insert along with this, and give up to your or E.P. Clark's keeping. For, as you will see, I have appointed Clark my representative, economic plenipotentiary and factotum, if he will consent to act in that sublime capacity,-- subject always to your advice, to your control in all _ultra_- economic respects, of which you alone are cognizant of the circumstances or competent to give a judgment. Pray explain this with all lucidity to Mr. Clark: and endeavor to impress upon him that it is (to all appearance) a real affair of business we are now engaged in; that I would have him satisfy his own sharp eyes (by such methods as he finds convenient and sufficient, by examination at New York or how he can) that the conditions of this bargain _are_ fairly complied with by the New York Booksellers,--who promise "every facility for ascertaining _how many_ copies are printed," &c., &c.; and profess to be of the integrity of Israelites indeed, in all respects whatever! If so, it may be really useful to us. And I would have Mr. Clark, if he will allow me to look upon him as my _man of business_ in this affair, take reasonable pains, be at any reasonable expense, &c. (by himself or by deputy) to ascertain that it is so in very fact! In that case, if something come of it, we shall get the something and be thankful; if nothing come of it, we shall have the pleasure of caring nothing about it.--I have given Putnam two Books (_Heroes_ and _Sartor_) ready, corrected; the others I think will follow in the course of next month;--F. _Revolution_ waits only for an Index which my man is now busy with. The _Cromwell,_ Supplement and all, he has now got,--published two days ago, after sorrowful delays. Your Copy will be ready _this afternoon,_--too late, I fear, by just one day: it will lie, in that case, for a fortnight, and then come. Wiley will find that he has no resource but to reprint the Book; he will reprint the Supplement too, in justice to former purchasers; but this is the _final_ form of the Book, this second edition; and to this all readers of it will come at last. We expect the Daguerreotype by next Steamer; but you take good care not to prepossess us on its behalf! In fact, I believe, the only satisfactory course will be to get a Sketch done too; if you have any Painter that can manage it tolerably, pray set about that, as the true solution of the business--out of the two together we shall make a likeness for ourselves that will do. Let the Lady Wife be satisfied with it; then we shall pronounce it genuine!-- I envy you your forest-work, your summer umbrages, and clear silent lakes. The weather here is getting insupportable to us for heat. Indeed, if rain do not come within two weeks, I believe we must wind up our affairs, and make for some shady place direct:--Scotland is perhaps likeliest; but nothing yet is fixed: you shall duly hear.--Directly after this, I set off for Putnam's in Waterloo Place; sign his paper there; stick one copy under a cover for you, and despatch.--Send me word about all that you are doing and thinking. Be busy, be still and happy. Yours ever, T. Carlyle CXIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 15 July, 1846 My Dear Carlyle,--I received by the last steamer your letter with the copy of the covenant with Wiley and Putnam, which seems unexceptionable. I like the English side of those men very well; that is, Putnam seems eager to stand well and rightly with his fellow-men. Wiley at New York it was who provoked me, last winter, to write him an angry letter when he declared his intention to reprint our new matter without paying for it. When he thought better of it, and came to terms, I had not got so far as to be affectionate, and have never yet resumed the correspondence I had with him a year ago, about my own books. I hope you found my letter to them, though I do not remember which, properly cross. I believe I only enumerated difficulties. I have talked with Little and Brown about their editions of _Chartism,_ and _Past and Present;_ they have made no new sales of the books since they were printed on by the pirates, and say that the books lie still on their shelves, as also do a few copies of the London and Boston edition of _French Revolution._ I prayed them immediately to dispose of these things by auction, or at their trade sales, at whatever prices would sell them, and leave the market open for W. & P.; which they promise to do. To Munroe I went, and learn that he has bought the stereotype- plates of the New York pirate edition of _Sartor,_ and means to print it immediately. He is willing to stop if W. & P. will buy of him his plates at their cost. I wrote so to them, but they say no. And I have not spoken again with Munroe. I was in town yesterday, and carried the copy of the Covenant to E.P. Clark, and read him your message. His Bank occupies him entirely just now, for his President is gone to Europe, and Clark's duties are the more onerous. But finding that the new responsibilities delegated to him are light and tolerable, and, at any rate, involve no retrospection, he very cheerfully signified his readiness to serve you, and I graciously forbore all allusions to my heap of booksellers' accounts which he has had in keeping now --for years, I believe. He told me that he hopes at no distant day to have a house of his own,--he and his wife are always at board,--and, whenever that happens, he intends to devote a chamber in it to his "Illustrations of Mr. Carlyle's Writings," which, I believe, I have told you before, are a very large and extraordinary collection of prints, pictures, books, and manuscripts. I sent you the promised Daguerrotype with all unwillingness, by the steamer, I think of 16 June. On 1 August, Margaret Fuller goes to England and the Continent; and I shall not fail to write to you by her, and you must not fail to give a good and faithful interview to this wise, sincere, accomplished, and most entertaining of women. I wish to bespeak Jane Carlyle's friendliest ear to one of the noblest of women. We shall send you no other such. I was lately inquired of again by an agent of a huge Boston society of young men, whether Mr. Carlyle would not come to America and read Lectures, on some terms which they could propose. I advised them to make him an offer, and a better one than they had in view. Joy and Peace to you in your new freedom. --R.W.E. CXIV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 17 July, 1846 Dear Emerson,--Since I wrote last to you, I think, with the Wiley-and-Putnam Covenant enclosed,--the Photograph, after some days of loitering at the Liverpool Custom-house, came safe to hand. Many thanks to you for this punctuality: this poor Shadow, it is all you could do at present in that matter! But it must not rest there, no. This Image is altogether unsatisfactory, illusive, and even in some measure tragical to me! First of all, it is a bad Photograph; no _eyes_ discernible, at least one of the eyes not, except in rare favorable lights then, alas, Time itself and Oblivion must have been busy. I could not at first, nor can I yet with perfect decisiveness, bring out any feature completely recalling to me the old Emerson, that lighted on us from the Blue, at Craigenputtock, long ago,--_eheu!_ Here is a genial, smiling, energetic face, full of sunny strength, intelligence, integrity, good humor; but it lies imprisoned in baleful shades, as of the valley of Death; seems smiling on me as if in mockery. "Dost know me, friend? I am dead, thou seest, and distant, and forever hidden from thee;--I belong already to the Eternities, and thou recognizest me not!" On the whole, it is the strangest feeling I have:--and practically the thing will be, that you get us by the earliest opportunity some _living_ pictorial sketch, chalk- drawing or the like, from a trustworthy hand; and send _it_ hither to represent you. Out of the two I shall compile for myself a likeness by degrees: but as for this present, we cannot put up with it at all; to my Wife and me, and to sundry other parties far and near that have interest in it, there is no satisfaction in this. So there will be nothing for you but compliance, by the first fair chance you have: furthermore, I bargain that the _Lady_ Emerson have, within reasonable limits, a royal veto in the business (not absolute, if that threaten extinction to the enterprise, but absolute within the limits of possibility); and that she take our case in hand, and graciously consider what can and shall be done. That will answer, I think. Of late weeks I have been either idle, or sunk in the sorrowfulest cobbling of old shoes again; sorrowfully reading over old Books for the Putnams and Chapmans, namely. It is really painful, looking in one's own old face; said "old face" no longer a thing extant now!--Happily I have at last finished it; the whole Lumber-troop with clothes duly brushed (_French Revolution_ has even got an Index too) travels to New York in the Steamer that brings you this. _Quod faustum sit:_--or indeed I do not much care whether it be faustum or not; I grow to care about an astonishingly small number of things as times turn with me! Man, all men seem radically _dumb;_ jabbering mere jargons and noises from the teeth outwards; the inner meaning of them,-- of them and of me, poor devils,--remaining shut, buried forever. If almost all Books were burnt (my own laid next the coal), I sometimes in my spleen feel as if it really would be better with us! Certainly could one generation of men be forced to live without rhetoric, babblement, hearsay, in short with the tongue well cut out of them altogether,--their fortunate successors would find a most improved world to start upon! For Cant does lie piled on us, high as the zenith; an Augean Stable with the poisonous confusion piled so high: which, simply if there once could be nothing said, would mostly dwindle like summer snow gradually about its business, and leave us free to use our eyes again! When I see painful Professors of Greek, poring in their sumptuous Oxfords over dead _Greek_ for a thousand years or more, and leaving live _English_ all the while to develop itself under charge of Pickwicks and Sam Wellers, as if it were nothing and the other were all things: this, and the like of it everywhere, fills me with reflections! Good Heavens, will the people not come out of their wretched Old-Clothes Monmouth-Streets, Hebrew and other; but lie there dying of the basest pestilence,--dying and as good as dead! On the whole, I am very weary of most "Literature":--and indeed, in very sorrowful, abstruse humor otherwise at present. For remedy to which I am, in these very hours, preparing for a sally into the green Country and deep silence; I know not altogether how or whitherward as yet; only that I must tend towards Lancashire; towards Scotland at last. My Wife already waits me in Lancashire; went off, in rather poor case, much burnt by the hot Town, some ten days ago; and does not yet report much improvement. I will write to you somewhere in my wanderings. The address, "Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, N.B.," if you chance to write directly or soon after this arrives, will, likely, be the shortest: at any rate, that, or "Cheyne Row" either, is always sure enough to find me in a day or two after trying. By a kind of accident I have fallen considerably into American History in these days; and am even looking out for American Geography to help me. Jared Sparks, Marshall, &c. are hickory and buckskin; but I do catch a credible trait of human life from them here and there; Michelet's genial champagne _froth,_--alas, I could find no fact in it that would stand handling; and so have broken down in the middle of _La France,_ and run over to hickory and Jared for shelter! Do you know Beriah Green?* A body of Albany newspapers represent to me the people quarreling in my name, in a very vague manner, as to the propriety of being "governed," and Beriah's is the only rational voice among them. Farewell, dear Friend. Speedy news of you! --T. Carlyle --------- * The Reverend Beriah Green, President for some years of Oneida Institute, a manual-labor school at Whitesboro, N.Y. He was an active reformer, and a leading member of the National Convention which met in Philadelphia, December 4th, 1833, to form the American Antislavery Society. He died in 1874, seventy-nine years old. --------- CXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 July, 1846 My Dear Friend,--The new edition of _Cromwell_ in its perfect form and in excellent dress, and the copy of the Appendix, came munificently safe by the last steamer. When thought is best, then is there most,--is a faith of which you alone among writing men at this day will give me experience. If it is the right frankincense and sandal-wood, it is so good and heavenly to give me a basketful and not a pinch. I read proudly, a little at a time, and have not yet got through the new matter. But I think neither the new letters nor the commentary could be spared. Wiley and Putnam shall do what they can, and we will see if New England will not come to reckon this the best chapter in her Pentateuch. I send this letter by Margaret Fuller, of whose approach I believe I wrote you some word. There is no foretelling how you visited and crowded English will like our few educated men or women, and in your learned populace my luminaries may easily be overlooked. But of all the travelers whom you have so kindly received from me, I think of none, since Alcott went to England, whom I so much desired that you should see and like, as this dear old friend of mine. For two years now I have scarcely seen her, as she has been at New York, engaged by Horace Greeley as a literary editor of his _Tribune_ newspaper. This employment was made acceptable to her by good pay, great local and personal conveniences of all kinds, and unbounded confidence and respect from Greeley himself, and all other parties connected with this influential journal (of 30,000 subscribers, I believe). And Margaret Fuller's work as critic of all new books, critic of the drama, of music, and good arts in New York, has been honorable to her. Still this employment is not satisfactory to me. She is full of all nobleness, and with the generosity native to her mind and character appears to me an exotic in New England, a foreigner from some more sultry and expansive climate. She is, I suppose, the earliest reader and lover of Goethe in this Country, and nobody here knows him so well. Her love too of whatever is good in French, and specially in Italian genius, give her the best title to travel. In short, she is our citizen of the world by quite special diploma. And I am heartily glad that she has an opportunity of going abroad that pleases her. Mr. Spring, a merchant of great moral merits, (and, as I am informed, an assiduous reader of your books,) has grown rich, and resolves to see the world with his wife and son, and has wisely invited Miss Fuller to show it to him. Now, in the first place, I wish you to see Margaret when you are in special good humor, and have an hour of boundless leisure. And I entreat Jane Carlyle to abet and exalt and secure this satisfaction to me. I need not, and yet perhaps I need say, that M.F. is the safest of all possible persons who ever took pen in hand. Prince Metternich's closet not closer or half so honorable. In the next place, I should be glad if you can easily manage to show her the faces of Tennyson and of Browning. She has a sort of right to them both, not only because she likes their poetry, but because she has made their merits widely known among our young people. And be it known to my friend Jane Carlyle, whom, if I cannot see, I delight to name, that her visitor is an immense favorite in the parlor, as well as in the library, in all good houses where she is known. And so I commend her to you. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson CXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 18 December, 1846 Dear Emerson,--This is the 18th of the month, and it is a frightful length of time, I know not how long, since I wrote to you,--sinner that I am! Truly we are in no case for paying debts at present, being all sick more or less, from the hard cold weather, and in a state of great temporary puddle but, as the adage says, "one should own debt, and crave days";--therefore accept a word from me, such as it may be. I went, as usual, to the North Country in the Autumn; passed some two extremely disconsolate months,--for all things distress a wretched thin-skinned creature like me,--in that old region, which is at once an Earth and a Hades to me, an unutterable place, now that I have become mostly a _ghost_ there! I saw Ireland too on my return, saw black potato-fields, a ragged noisy population, that has long in a headlong baleful manner followed the _Devil's_ leading, listened namely to blustering shallow- violent Impostors and Children of Darkness, saying, "Yes, we know _you,_ you are Children of Light!"--and so has fallen all out at elbows in body and in soul; and now having lost its _potatoes_ is come as it were to a crisis; all its windy nonsense cracking suddenly to pieces under its feet: a very pregnant crisis indeed! A country cast suddenly into the melting-pot,--say into the Medea's-Caldron; to be boiled into horrid _dissolution;_ whether into new _youth,_ into sound healthy life, or into eternal death and annihilation, one does not yet know! Daniel O'Connell stood bodily before me, in his green Mullaghmart Cap; haranguing his retinue of Dupables: certainly the most _sordid_ Humbug I have ever seen in this world; the emblem to me, he and his talk and the worship and credence it found, of all the miseries that can befall a Nation. I also conversed with Young Ireland in a confidential manner; for Young Ireland, really meaning what it says, is worth a little talk: the Heroism and Patriotism of a new generation; welling fresh and new from the breasts of Nature; and already poisoned by O'Connellism and the _Old_ Irish atmosphere of bluster, falsity, fatuity, into one knows not what. Very sad to see. On the whole, no man ought, for any cause, to speak lies, or have anything to do with _lies;_ but either hold his tongue, or speak a bit of the truth: that is the meaning of a _tongue,_ people used to know!--Ireland was not the place to console my sorrows. I returned home very sad out of Ireland;--and indeed have remained one of the saddest, idlest, most useless of Adam's sons ever since; and do still remain so. I care not to _write_ anything more,--so it seems to me at present. I am in my vacant interlunar cave (I suppose that is the truth);--and I ought to wrap my mantle round me, and lie, if dark, _silent_ also. But, alas, I have wasted almost all your poor sheet first!-- Miss Fuller came duly as you announced; was welcomed for your sake and her own. A high-soaring, clear, enthusiast soul; in whose speech there is much of all that one wants to find in speech. A sharp, subtle intellect too; and less of that shoreless Asiatic dreaminess than I have sometimes met with in her writings. We liked one another very well, I think, and the Springs too were favorites. But, on the whole, it could not be concealed, least of all from the sharp female intellect, that this Carlyle was a dreadfully heterodox, not to say a dreadfully savage fellow, at heart; believing no syllable of all that Gospel of Fraternity, Benevolence, and _new_ Heaven-on-Earth, preached forth by all manner of "advanced" creatures, from George Sand to Elihu Burritt, in these days; that in fact the said Carlyle not only disbelieved all that, but treated it as poisonous cant,--_sweetness_ of sugar-of-lead,--a detestable _phosphorescence_ from the dead body of a Christianity, that would not admit itself to be dead, and lie buried with all its unspeakable putrescences, as a venerable dead one ought!--Surely detestable enough.--To all which Margaret listened with much good nature; though of course with sad reflections not a few.*--She is coming back to us, she promises. Her dialect is very vernacular,--extremely exotic in the London climate. If she do not gravitate too irresistibly towards that class of New-Era people (which includes whatsoever we have of prurient, esurient, morbid, flimsy, and in fact pitiable and unprofitable, and is at a sad discount among men of sense), she may get into good tracks of inquiry and connection here, and be very useful to herself and others. I could not show her Alfred (he has been here since) nor Landor: but surely if I can I will,--that or a hundred times as much as that,--when she returns.--They tell me you are about collecting your Poems. Well, though I do not approve of rhyme at all, yet it is impossible Emerson in rhyme or prose can put down any thought that was in his heart but I should wish to get into mine. So let me have the Book as fast as may be. And do others like it if you will take circumbendibuses for sound's sake! And excuse the Critic who seems to you so unmusical; and say, It is the nature of beast! Adieu, dear Friend: write to me, write to me. Yours ever, T. Carlyle -------- * Miss Fullers impressions of Carlyle, much to this effect, may be found in the "Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli," Boston, 1852, Vol. II. pp. 184-190. --------- CXVII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 January, 1847 My Dear Carlyle,--Your letter came with a blessing last week. I had already learned from Margaret Fuller, at Paris, that you had been very good and gentle to her;--brilliant and prevailing, of course, but, I inferred, had actually restrained the volleys and modulated the thunder, out of true courtesy and goodness of nature, which was worthy of all praise in a spoiled conqueror at this time of day. Especially, too, she expressed a true recognition and love of Jane Carlyle; and thus her visit proved a solid satisfaction; to me, also, who think that few people have so well earned their pleasures as she. She wrote me a long letter; she has been very happy in England, and her time and strength fully employed. Her description of you and your discourse (which I read with lively curiosity also) was the best I have had on that subject. I tried hard to write you by the December steamer, to tell you how forward was my book of Poems; but a little affair makes me much writing. I chanced to have three or four items of business to despatch, when the steamer was ready to go, and you escaped hearing of them. I am the trustee of Charles Lane, who came out here with Alcott and bought land, which, though sold, is not paid for. Somebody or somebodies in Liverpool and Manchester* have proposed once or twice, with more or less specification, that I should come to those cities to lecture. And who knows but I may come one day? Steam is strong, and Liverpool is near. I should find my account in the strong inducement of a new audience to finish pieces which have lain waiting with little hope for months or years. ---------- * Mr. Alexander Ireland, who had made the acquaintance of Emerson at Edinburgh, in 1833, was his Manchester correspondent. His memorial volume on Emerson contains an interesting record of their relations. ---------- Ah then, if I dared, I should be well content to add some golden hours to my life in seeing you, now all full-grown and acknowledged amidst your own people,--to hear and to speak is so little yet so much. But life is dangerous and delicate. I should like to see your solid England. The map of Britain is good reading for me. Then I have a very ignorant love of pictures, and a curiosity about the Greek statues and stumps in the British Museum. So beware of me, for on that distant day when I get ready I shall come. Long before this time you ought to have received from John Chapman a copy of Emerson's Poems, so called, which he was directed to send you. Poor man, you need not open them. I know all you can say. I printed them, not because I was deceived into a belief that they were poems, but because of the softness or hardness of heart of many friends here who have made it a point to have them circulated.* Once having set out to print, I obeyed the solicitations of John Chapman, of an ill-omened street in London, to send him the book in manuscript, for the better securing of copyright. In printing them here I have corrected the most unpardonable negligences, which negligences must be all stereotyped under his fair London covers and gilt paper to the eyes of any curious London reader; from which recollection I strive to turn away. --------- * In the rough draft the following sentence comes in here "I reckon myself a good beginning of a poet, very urgent and decided in my bent, and in some coming millennium I shall yet sing." --------- Little and Brown have just rendered me an account, by which it appears that we are not quite so well off as was thought last summer, when they said they had sold at auction the balance of your books which had been lying unsold. It seems now that the books supposed to be sold were not all taken, and are returned to them; one hundred _Chartism,_ sixty-three _Past and Present._ Yet we are to have some eighty-three dollars ($83.68), which you shall probably have by the next steamer. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson CXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 2 March, 1847 Dear Emerson,--The Steamer goes tomorrow; I must, though in a very dim condition, have a little word for you conveyed by it. In the miscellaneous maw of that strange Steamer shall lie, among other things, a friendly _word!_ Your very kind Letter lay waiting me here, some ten days ago; doubly welcome, after so long a silence. We had been in Hampshire, with the Barings, where we were last year;--some four weeks or more; totally idle: our winter had been, and indeed still is, unusually severe; my Wife's health in consequence was sadly deranged; but this idleness, these Isle-of-Wight sea- breezes, have brought matters well round again; so we cannot grudge the visit or the idleness, which otherwise too might have its uses. Alas, at this time my normal state is to be altogether _idle,_ to look out upon a very lonely universe, full of grim sorrow, full of splendor too; and not to know at all, for the moment, on what side I am to attack it again!--I read your Book of Poems all faithfully, at Bay House (our Hampshire quarters); where the obstinate people,--with whom you are otherwise, in prose, a first favorite,--foolishly _refused_ to let me read aloud; foolishly, for I would have made it mostly all plain by commentary:--so I had to read for myself; and can say, in spite of my hard-heartedness, I did gain, though under impediments, a real satisfaction and some tone of the Eternal Melodies sounding, afar off, ever and anon, in my ear! This is fact; a truth in Natural History; from which you are welcome to draw inferences. A grand View of the Universe, everywhere the sound (unhappily _far of,_ as it were) of a valiant, genuine Human Soul: this, even under rhyme, is a satisfaction worth some struggling for. But indeed you are very perverse; and through this perplexed undiaphanous element, you do not fall on me like radiant summer rainbows, like floods of sunlight, but with thin piercing radiances which affect me like the light of the _stars._ It is so: I wish you would become _concrete,_ and write in prose the straightest way; but under any form I must put up with you; that is my lot.--Chapman's edition, as you probably know, is very beautiful. I believe there are enough of ardent silent seekers in England to buy up this edition from him, and resolutely study the same: as for the review multitude, they dare not exactly call it "unintelligible moonshine," and so will probably hold their tongue. It is my fixed opinion that we are all at sea as to what is called Poetry, Art, &c., in these times; laboring under a dreadful incubus of _Tradition,_ and mere "Cant heaped balefully on us up to the very Zenith," as men, in nearly all other provinces of their Life, except perhaps the railway province, do now labor and stagger;--in a word, that Goethe-and- Schiller's _"Kunst"_ has far more brotherhood with Pusey-and- Newman's _Shovelhattery,_ and other the like deplorable phenomena, than it is in the least aware of! I beg you take warning: I am more serious in this than you suppose. But no, you will not; you whistle lightly over my prophecies, and go your own stiff-necked road. Unfortunate man!-- I had read in the Newspapers, and even heard in speech from Manchester people, that you were certainly coming this very summer to lecture among us: but now it seems, in your Letter, all postponed into the vague again. I do not personally know your Manchester negotiators, but I know in general that they are men of respectability, insight, and activity; much connected with the lecturing department, which is a very growing one, especially in Lancashire, at present;--men likely, for the rest, to _fulfil_ whatsoever they may become engaged for to you. My own ignorant though confident guess, moreover, is, that you would, in all senses of the word, _succeed_ there; I think, also rather confidently, we could promise you an audience of British aristocracy in London here,--and of British commonalty all manner of audiences that you liked to stoop to. I heard an ignorant blockhead (or mainly so) called --- bow-wowing here, some months ago, to an audience of several thousands, in the City, one evening,--upon Universal Peace, or some other field of balderdash; which the poor people seemed very patient of. In a word, I do not see what is to hinder you to come whenever you can resolve upon it. The adventure is perfectly promising: an adventure familiar to you withal; for Lecturing is with us fundamentally just what it is with you: Much prurient curiosity, with some ingenuous love of wisdom, an element of real reverence for the same: everywhere a perfect openness to any man speaking in any measure things manful. Come, therefore; gird yourself together, and come. With little or no peradventure, you will realize what your modest hope is, and more;--and I, for my share of it, shall see you once again under this Sun! O Heavens, there _might_ be some good in that! Nay, if you will travel like a private quiet person, who knows but I, the most unlocomotive of mortals, might be able to escort you up and down a little; to look at many a thing along with you, and even to open my long- closed heart and speak about the same?--There is a spare-room always in this House for you,--in this heart, in these two hearts, the like: bid me hope in this enterprise, in all manner of ways where I can; and on the whole, get it rightly put together, and embark on it, and arrive! The good Miss Fuller has painted us all _en beau,_ and your smiling imagination has added new colors. We have not a triumphant life here; very far indeed from that, _ach Gott!_--as you shall see. But Margaret is an excellent soul: in real regard with both of us here. Since she went, I have been reading some of her Papers in a new Book we have got: greatly superior to all I knew before; in fact the undeniable utterances (now first undeniable to me) of a true heroic mind;--altogether unique, so far as I know, among the Writing Women of this generation; rare enough too, God knows, among the writing Men. She is very narrow, sometimes; but she is truly high: honor to Margaret, and more and more good-speed to her.--Adieu dear Emerson. I am ever yours, --T.C. CXIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 18 March, 1847 Dear Emerson,--Yesterday morning, setting out to breakfast with Richard Milnes (Milnes's breakfast is a thing you will yet have to experience) I met, by the sunny shore of the Thames, a benevolent Son of Adam in blue coat and red collar, who thrust into my hand a Letter from you. A truly miraculous Son of Adam in red collar, in the Sunny Spring Morning!--The Bill of Seventeen Pounds is already far on its way to Dumfries, there to be kneaded into gold by the due artists: today is American Post- day; and already in huge hurry about many things, I am scribbling you some word of answer.... The night _before_ Milnes's morning, I had furthermore seen your Manchester Correspondent, Ireland,--an old Edinborough acquaintance too, as I found. A solid, dark, broad, rather heavy man; full of energy, and broad sagacity and practicality;--infinitely well affected to the man Emerson too. It was our clear opinion that you might come at any time with ample assurance of "succeeding," so far as wages went, and otherwise; that you ought to come, and must, and would,--as he, Ireland, would farther write to you. There is only one thing I have to add of my own, and beg you to bear in mind,--a date merely. _Videlicet,_ That the time for lecturing to the London West-End, I was given everywhere to understand, is _from the latter end of April_ (or say April altogether) _to the end of May:_ this is a fixed Statistic fact, all men told me: of this you are in all arrangements to keep mind. For it will actually do your heart good to look into the faces, and speak into minds, of really Aristocratic Persons,-- being one yourself, you Sinner,--and perhaps indeed this will be the greatest of all the _novelties_ that await you in your voyage. Not to be seen, I believe, at least never seen by me in any perfection, except in London only. From April to the end of May; during those weeks you must be _here,_ and free: remember that date. Will you come in Winter then, next Winter,--or when? Ireland professed to know you by the Photograph too; which I never yet can.--I wrote by last Packet: enough here. Your friend Cunningham has not presented himself; shall be right welcome when he does,--as all that in the least belong to you may well hope to be. Adieu. Our love to you all. Ever Yours, T. Carlyle CXX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 April, 1847 My Dear Carlyle,--I have two good letters from you, and until now you have had no acknowledgment. Especially I ought to have told you how much pleasure your noble invitation in March gave me. This pleasing dream of going to England dances before me sometimes. It would be, I then fancy, that stimulation which my capricious, languid, and languescent study needs. At home, no man makes any proper demand on me, and the audience I address is a handful of men and women too widely scattered than that they can dictate to me that which they are justly entitled to say. Whether supercilious or respectful, they do not say anything that can be heard. Of course, I have only myself to please, and my work is slighted as soon as it has lost its first attraction. It is to be hoped, if one should cross the sea, that the terror of your English culture would scare the most desultory of Yankees into precision and fidelity; and perhaps I am not yet too old to be animated by what would have seemed to my youth a proud privilege. If you shall fright me into labor and concentration, I shall win my game; for I can well afford to pay any price to get my work well done. For the rest, I hesitate, of course, to rush rudely on persons that have been so long invisible angels to me. No reasonable man but must hold these bounds in awe:--I-- much more,--who am of a solitary habit, from my childhood until now.--I hear nothing again from Mr. Ireland. So I will let the English Voyage hang as an afternoon rainbow in the East, and mind my apples and pears for the present. You are to know that in these days I lay out a patch of orchard near my house, very much to the improvement, as all the household affirm, of our homestead. Though I have little skill in these things, and must borrow that of my neighbors, yet the works of the garden and orchard at this season are fascinating, and will eat up days and weeks, and a brave scholar should shun it like gambling, and take refuge in cities and hotels from these pernicious enchantments. For the present, I stay in the new orchard. Duyckinck, a literary man in New York, who advises Wiley and Putnam in their publishing enterprises, wrote me lately, that they had $600 for you, from _Cromwell._ So may it be. Yours, R.W.E. CXXI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 18 May, 1847 Dear Emerson,--....My time is nearly up today; but I write a word to acknowledge your last Letter (30 April), and various other things. For example, you must tell Mr. Thoreau (is that the exact name? for I have lent away the printed pages) that his Philadelphia Magazine with the _Lecture_* in two pieces was faithfully delivered here, about a fortnight ago; and carefully read, as beseemed, with due entertainment and recognition. A vigorous Mr. Thoreau,--who has formed himself a good deal upon one Emerson, but does not want abundant fire and stamina of his own;--recognizes us, and various other things, in a most admiring great-hearted manner; for which, as for _part_ of the confused voice from the jury bog (not yet summed into a verdict, nor likely to be summed till Doomsday, nor needful to sum), the poor prisoner at the bar may justly express himself thankful! In plain prose, I like Mr. Thoreau very well; and hope yet to hear good and better news of him:--only let him not "turn to foolishness"; which seems to me to be terribly easy, at present, both in New England and Old! May the Lord deliver us all from _Cant;_ may the Lord, whatever else he do or forbear, teach us to look Facts honestly in the face, and to beware (with a kind of shudder) of smearing _them_ over with our despicable and damnable palaver, into irrecognizability, and so _falsifying_ the Lord's own Gospels to his unhappy blockheads of children, all staggering down to Gehenna and the everlasting Swine's-trough for _want_ of Gospels.--O Heaven, it is the most accursed sin of man; and done everywhere, at present, on the streets and high places, at noonday! Very seriously I say, and pray as my chief orison, May the Lord deliver us from it.-- ---------- * On Carlyle, published in _Graham's Magazine_ in March and April, 1847. ---------- About a week ago there came your neighbor Hoar; a solid, sensible, effectual-looking man, of whom I hope to see much more. So soon as possible I got him under way for Oxford, where I suppose he was, last week;--_both_ Universities was too much for the limits of his time; so he preferred Oxford;--and now, this very day, I think, he was to set out for the Continent; not to return till the beginning of July, when he promises to call here again. There was something really pleasant to me in this Mr. Hoar: and I had innumerable things to ask him about Concord, concerning which topic we had hardly got a word said when our first interview had to end. I sincerely hope he will not fail to keep his time in returning. You do very well, my Friend, to plant orchards; and fair fruit shall they grow (if it please Heaven) for your grandchildren to pluck;--a beautiful occupation for the son of man, in all patriarchal and paternal times (which latter are patriarchal too)! But you are to understand withal that your coming hither to lecture is taken as a settled point by all your friends here; and for my share I do not reckon upon the smallest doubt about the _essential_ fact of it, simply on some calculation and adjustment about the circumstantials. Of Ireland, who I surmise is busy in the problem even now, you will hear by and by, probably in more definite terms: I did not see him again after my first notice of him to you; but there is no doubt concerning his determinations (for all manner of reasons) to get you to Lancashire, to England;--and in fact it is an adventure which I think you ought to contemplate as _fixed,_--say for this year and the beginning of next? Ireland will help you to fix the dates; and there is nothing else, I think, which should need fixing.-- Unquestionably you would get an immense quantity of food for ideas, though perhaps not at all in the way you anticipate, in looking about among us: nay, if you even thought us _stupid,_ there is something in the godlike indifference with which London will accept and sanction even that verdict,--something highly instructive at least! And in short, for the truth must be told, London is properly your Mother City too,--verily you have about as much to do with it, in spite of Polk and Q. Victory, as I had! And you ought to come and look at it, beyond doubt; and say to this land, "Old Mother, how are you getting on at all?" To which the Mother will answer, "Thankee, young son, and you?"--in a way useful to both parties! That is truth. Adieu, dear Emerson; good be with you always. Hoar gave me your _American_ Poems: thanks. _Vale et me ama._ --T. Carlyle CXXII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 4 June, 1847 Dear Carlyle,--I have just got your friendliest letter of May 18, with its varied news and new invitations. Really you are a dangerous correspondent with your solid and urgent ways of speaking. No affairs and no studies of mine, I fear, will be able to make any head against these bribes. Well, I will adorn the brow of the coming months with this fine hope; then if the rich God at last refuses the jewel, no doubt he will give something better--to both of us. But thinking on this project lately, I see one thing plainly, that I must not come to London as a lecturer. If the plan proceed, I will come and see you,-- thankful to Heaven for that mercy, should such a romance looking reality come to pass,--I will come and see you and Jane Carlyle, and will hear what you have to say. You shall even show me, if you will, such other men and women as will suffer themselves to be seen and heard, asking for nothing again. Then I will depart in peace, as I came. At Mr. Ireland's "Institutes," I will read lectures; and possibly in London too, if, when there, you looking with your clear eyes shall say that it is desired by persons who ought to be gratified. But I wish such lecturing to be a mere contingency, and nowise a settled purpose. I had rather stay at home, and forego the happiness of seeing you, and the excitement of England, than to have the smallest pains taken to collect an audience for me. So now we will leave this egg in the desert for the ostrich Time to hatch it or not. It seems you are not tired of pale Americans, or will not own it. You have sent our Country-Senator* where he wanted to go, and to the best hospitalities as we learn today directly from him. I cannot avoid sending you another of a different stamp. Henry Hedge is a recluse but Catholic scholar in our remote Bangor, who reads German and smokes in his solitary study through nearly eight months of snow in the year, and deals out, every Sunday, his witty apothegms to the lumber-merchants and township-owners of Penobscot River, who have actually grown intelligent interpreters of his riddles by long hearkening after them. They have shown themselves very loving and generous lately, in making a quite munificent provision for his traveling. Hedge has a true and mellow heart,... and I hope you will like him. -------- * The Hon. E. Rockwood Hoar. -------- I have seen lately a Texan, ardent and vigorous, who assured me that Carlyle's Writings were read with eagerness on the banks of the Colorado. There was more to tell, but it is too late. Ever yours, R.W. Emerson CXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 31 July, 1847 Dear Carlyle,--In my old age I am coming to see you. I have written this day, in answer to sundry letters brought me by the last steamer, from Mr. Ireland and Mr. Hudson of Leeds, that I mean in good earnest to sail for Liverpool or for London about the first of October; and I am disposing my astonished household--astonished at such a Somerset of the sedentary master --with that view. My brother William was here this week from New York, and will come again to carry my mother home with him for the winter; my wife and children three are combining for and against me; at all events, I am to have my visit. I pray you to cherish your good nature, your mercy. Let your wife cherish it,--that I may see, I indolent, this incredible worker, whose toil has been long since my pride and wonder,--that I may see him benign and unexacting,-- he shall not be at the crisis of some over-labor. I shall not stay but an hour. What do I care for his fame? Ah! how gladly I hoped once to see Sterling as mediator and amalgam, when my turn should come to see the Saxon gods at home: Sterling, who had certain American qualities in his genius;--and now you send me his shade. I found at Munroe's shop the effigy, which, he said, Cunningham, whom I have not seen or heard from, had left there for me; a front face, and a profile, both--especially the first --a very welcome satisfaction to my sad curiosity, the face very national, certainly, but how thoughtful and how friendly! What more belongs to this print--whether you are editing his books, or yourself drawing his lineaments--I know not. I find my friends have laid out much work for me in Yorkshire and Lancashire. What part of it I shall do, I cannot yet tell. As soon as I know how to arrange my journey best, I shall write you again. Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson CXXIV. Carlyle to Emerson Rawdon, Near Leeds, Yorkshire 31 August, 1847 Dear Emerson,--Almost ever since your last Letter reached me, I have been wandering over the country, enveloped either in a restless whirl of locomotives, view-hunting, &c., or sunk in the deepest torpor of total idleness and laziness, forgetting, and striving to forget, that there was any world but that of dreams; --and though at intervals the reproachful remembrance has arisen sharply enough on me, that I ought, on all accounts high and low, to have written you an answer, never till today have I been able to take pen in hand, and actually begin that operation! Such is the naked fact. My Wife is with me; we leave no household behind us but a servant; the face of England, with its mad electioneerings, vacant tourist dilettantings, with its shady woods, green yellow harvest-fields and dingy mill-chimneys, so new and old, so beautiful and ugly, every way so _abstruse_ and _un_speakable, invites to silence; the whole world, fruitful yet disgusting to this human soul of mine, invites me to silence; to sleep, and dreams, and stagnant indifference, as if for the time one had _got_ into the country of the Lotos-Eaters, and it made no matter what became of anything and all things. In good truth, it is a wearied man, at least a dreadfully slothful and slumberous man, eager for _sleep_ in any quantity, that now addresses you! Be thankful for a few half-dreaming words, till we awake again. As to your visit to us, there is but one thing to be said and repeated: That a prophet's chamber is ready for you in Chelsea, and a brotherly and sisterly welcome, on whatever day at whatever hour you arrive: this, which is all of the Practical that I can properly take charge of, is to be considered a given quantity always. With regard to Lecturing, &c., Ireland, with whom I suppose you to be in correspondence, seems to have awakened all this North Country into the fixed hope of hearing you,--and God knows they have need enough to hear a man with sense in his head;--it was but the other day I read in one of their Newspapers, "We understand that Mr. Emerson the distinguished &c. is certainly &c. this winter," all in due Newspaper phrase, and I think they settled your arrival for "October" next. May it prove so! But on the whole there _is_ no doubt of your coming; that is a great fact. And if so, I should say, Why not come at once, even as the Editor surmises? You will evidently do no other considerable enterprise till this voyage to England is achieved. Come therefore;--and we shall see; we shall hear and speak! I do not know another man in all the world to whom I can _speak_ with clear hope of getting adequate response from him: if I speak to you, it will be a breaking of my silence for the last time perhaps,--perhaps for the first time, on some points! _Allons._ I shall not always be so roadweary, lifeweary, sleepy, and stony as at present. I even think there is yet another Book in me; "Exodus from Houndsditch" (I think it might be called), a peeling off of fetid _Jewhood_ in every sense from myself and my poor bewildered brethren: one other Book; and, if it were a right one, rest after that, the deeper the better, forevermore. _Ach Gott!_-- Hedge is one of the sturdiest little fellows I have come across for many a day. A face like a rock; a voice like a howitzer; only his honest kind gray eyes reassure you a little. We have met only once; but hope (mutually, I flatter myself) it may be often by and by. That hardy little fellow too, what has he to do with "Semitic tradition" and the "dust-hole of extinct Socinianism," George-Sandism, and the Twaddle of a thousand Magazines? Thor and his Hammer, even, seem to me a little more respectable; at least, "My dear Sir, endeavor to clear your mind of Cant." Oh, we are all sunk, much deeper than any of us imagines. And our worship of "beautiful sentiments," &c., &c. is as contemptible a form of long-ears as any other, perhaps the most so of any. It is in fact damnable.--We will say no more of it at present. Hedge came to me with tall lank Chapman at his side,--an innocent flail of a creature, with considerable impetus in him: the two when they stood up together looked like a circle and tangent,--in more senses than one. Jacobson, the Oxford Doctor, who welcomed your Concord Senator in that City, writes to me that he has received (with blushes, &c.) some grand "Gift for his Child" from that Traveler; whom I am accordingly to thank, and blush to,--Jacobson not knowing his address at present. The "address" of course is still more unknown to _me_ at present: but we shall know it, and the man it indicates, I hope, again before long. So, much for that. And now, dear Emerson, Adieu. Will your next Letter tell us the _when?_ O my Friend! We are here with Quakers, or Ex-Quakers rather; a very curious people, "like water from the crystal well"; in a very curious country too, most beautiful and very ugly: but why write of it, or of anything more, while half asleep and lotos-eating! Adieu, my Friend; come soon, and let us meet again under this Sun. Yours, T. Carlyle CXXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 September, 1847 My Dear Carlyle,--The last steamer brought, as ever, good tidings from you, though certainly from a new habitat, at Leeds, or near it. If Leeds will only keep you a little in its precinct, I will search for you there; for it is one of the parishes in the diocese which Mr. Ireland and his friends have carved out for me on the map of England. I have taken a berth in the packet-ship "Washington Irving," which leaves Boston for Liverpool next week, 5 October; having decided, after a little demurring and advising, to follow my inclination in shunning the steamer. The owners will almost take oath that their ship cannot be out of a port twenty days. At Liverpool and Manchester I shall take advice of Ireland and his officers of the "Institutes," and perhaps shall remain for some time in that region, if my courage and my head are equal to the work they offer me. I will write you what befalls me in the strange city. Who knows but I may have adventures--I who had never one, as I have just had occasion to write to Mrs. Howitt, who inquired what mine were? Well, if I survive Liverpool, and Manchester, and Leeds, or rather my errands thither, I shall come some fine day to see you in your burly city, you in the centre of the world, and sun me a little in your British heart. It seems a lively passage that I am entering in the old Dream World, and perhaps the slumbers are lighter and the Morning is near. Softly, dear shadows, do not scatter yet. Knit your panorama close and well, till these rare figures just before me draw near, and are greeted and known. But there is no more time in this late night--and what need? since I shall see you and yours soon. Ever yours, R.W.E. CXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 15 October, 1847 My Dear Emerson,--Your Letter from Concord, of the 31st of July, had arrived duly in London; been duly forwarded to my transient address at Buxton in Derbyshire,--and there, by the faithless Postmaster, _retained_ among his lumber, instead of given to me when I called on him! We staid in Buxton only one day and night; two Newspapers, as I recollect, the Postmaster did deliver to me on my demand; but your Letter he, with scandalous carelessness, kept back, and left me to travel forwards without: there accordingly it lay, week after week, for a month or more; and only by half-accident and the extraordinary diligence and accuracy of our Chelsea Postman, was it recovered at all, not many days ago, after my Wife's return hither. Consider what kind of fact this was and has been for us! For now, if all have gone right, you are approaching the coast of England; Chelsea and your fraternal House _hidden_ under a disastrous cloud to you; and I know not so much as whitherward to write, and send you a word of solution. It is one of the most unpleasant mistakes that ever befell me; I have no resource but to enclose this Note to Mr. Ireland, and charge him by the strongest adjurations to have it ready for you the first thing when you set foot upon our shores.* ------------ * Mr. Ireland, in his Recollections of Emerson's Visit to England, p. 59, prints Carlyle's note to himself, enclosing this letter, and adds: "The ship reached Liverpool on the 22d of October, and Mr. Emerson at once proceeded to Manchester. After spending a few hours in friendly talk, he was 'shot up,' as Carlyle had desired, to Chelsea, and at the end of a week returned to Manchester, to begin his lectures." --------- Know then, my Friend, that in verity your Home while in England is _here;_ and all other places, whither work or amusement may call you, are but inns and temporary lodgings. I have returned hither a day or two ago, and free from any urgent calls or businesses of any kind; my Wife has your room all ready;--and here surely, if anywhere in the wide Earth, there ought to be a brother's welcome and kind home waiting you! Yes, by Allah!--An "Express Train" leaves Liverpool every afternoon; and in some six hours will set you down here. I know not what your engagements are; but I say to myself, Why not come at once, and rest a little from your sea-changes, before going farther? In six hours you can be out of the unstable waters, and sitting in your own room here. You shall not be bothered with talk till you repose; and you shall have plenty of it, hot and hot, when the appetite does arise in you. "No. 5 Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea": come to the "London Terminus," from any side; say these magic words to any Cabman, and by night or by day you are a welcome apparition here,--foul befall us otherwise! This is the fact: what more can I say? I make my affidavit of the same; and require you in the name of all Lares and Penates, and Household Gods ancient and modern which are sacred to men, to consider it and take brotherly account of it!-- Shall we hear of you, then, in a day or two: shall we not perhaps see you in a day or two! That depends on the winds and the chances; but our affection is independent of such. Adieu; _au revoir,_ it now is! Come soon; come at once. Ever yours, T. Carlyle Extracts from Emerson's Diary October, 1847 "I found at Liverpool, after a couple of days, a letter which had been seeking me, from Carlyle, addressed to 'R.W.E. on the instant when he lands in England,' conveying the heartiest welcome and urgent invitation to house and hearth. And finding that I should not be wanted for a week in the Lecture-rooms I came down to London on Monday, and, at ten at night, the door was opened by Jane Carlyle, and the man himself was behind her with a lamp in the hall. They were very little changed from their old selves of fourteen years ago (in August), when I left them at Craigenputtock. 'Well,' said Carlyle, 'here we are shoveled together again.' The floodgates of his talk are quickly opened, and the river is a plentiful stream. We had a wide talk that night until nearly one o'clock, and at breakfast next morning again. At noon or later we walked forth to Hyde Park and the Palaces, about two miles from here, to the National Gallery, and to the Strand, Carlyle melting all Westminster and London into his talk and laughter, as he goes. Here, in his house, we breakfast about nine, and Carlyle is very prone, his wife says, to sleep till ten or eleven, if he has no company. An immense talker, and altogether as extraordinary in that as in his writing; I think, even more so; you will never discover his real vigor and range, or how much more he might do than he has ever done, without seeing him. My few hours discourse with him, long ago, in Scotland, gave me not enough knowledge of him; and I have now at last been taken by surprise by him." "C. and his wife live on beautiful terms. Their ways are very engaging, and, in her bookcase, all his books are inscribed to her, as they came from year to year, each with some significant lines." "I had a good talk with C. last night. He says over and over, for months, for years, the same thing. Yet his guiding genius is his moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and justice; and he, too, says that there is properly no religion in England. He is quite contemptuous about _'Kunst,'_ also, in Germans, or English, or Americans;* and has a huge respect for the Duke of Wellington, as the only Englishman, or the only one in the Aristocracy, who will have nothing to do with any manner of lie." ---------- * See _English Traits,_ Ch. XVI.; and _Life of Sterling,_ Part II. Ch. VII. "Among the windy gospels addressed to our poor century there are few louder than this of Art." ---------- The following sentences are of later date than the preceding:-- "Carlyle had all the _kleinstadtlich_ traits of an islander and a Scotsman, and reprimanded with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a vast continent which made light of the British Islands." "Carlyle has a hairy strength which makes his literary vocation a mere chance, and what seems very contemptible to him. I could think only of an enormous trip-hammer with an 'Aeolian attachment."' "In Carlyle as in Byron, one is more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter. He has manly superiority rather than intellectuality, and so makes good hard hits all the time. There is more character than intellect in every sentence, herein strongly resembling Samuel Johnson." "England makes what a step from Dr. Johnson to Carlyle! what wealth of thought and science, what expansion of views and profounder resources does the genius and performance of this last imply! If she can make another step as large, what new ages open!" CXXVII. Emerson to Carlyle Mrs. Massey's, Manchester, 2 Fenny Place, Fenny St. November 5, 1847 Ah! my dear friend, all these days have gone, and you have had no word from me, when the shuttles fly so swiftly in your English loom, and in so few hours we may have tidings of the best that live. At last, and only this day for the first day, I am stablished in my own lodgings on English ground, and have a fair parlor and chamber, into both of which the sun and moon shine, into which friendly people have already entered. Hitherto I have been the victim of trifles,--which is the fate and the chief objection to traveling. Days are absorbed in precious nothings. But now that I am in some sort a citizen, of Manchester, and also of Liverpool (for there also I am to enter on lodgings tomorrow, at 56 Stafford Street, Islington), perhaps the social heart of this English world will include me also in its strong and healthful circulations. I get the best letters from home by the last steamers, and was much occupied in Liverpool yesterday in seeing Dr. Nichol of Glasgow, who was to sail in the "Acadia," and in giving him credentials to some Americans. I find here a very kind reception from your friends, as they emphatically are,--Ireland, Espinasse, Miss Jewsbury, Dr. Hodgson, and a circle expanding on all sides outward,--and Mrs. Paulet at Liverpool. I am learning there also to know friendly faces, and a certain Roscoe Club has complimented me with its privileges. The oddest part of my new position is my alarming penny correspondence, which, what with welcomes, invitations to lecture, proffers of hospitality, suggestions from good Swedenborgists and others for my better guidance touching the titles of my discourses, &c., &c., all requiring answers, threaten to eat up a day like a cherry. In this fog and miscellany, and until the heavenly sun shall give me one beam, will not you, friend and joy of so many years, send me a quiet line or two now and then to say that you still smoke your pipe in peace, side by side with wife and brother also well and smoking, or able to smoke? Now that I have in some measure calmed down the astonishment and consternation of seeing your dreams change into realities, I mean, at my next approximation or perihelion, to behold you with the most serene and sceptical calmness. So give my thanks and true affectionate remembrance to Jane Carlyle, and my regards also to Dr. Carlyle, whose precise address please also to send me. Ever your loving R.W.E. The address at the top of this note is the best for the present, as I mean to make this my centre. CXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 13 November, 1847 Dear Emerson,--Your Book-parcels were faithfully sent off, directly after your departure: in regard to one of them I had a pleasant visit from the proprietor in person,--the young Swedenborgian Doctor, whom to my surprise I found quite an agreeable, accomplished secular young gentleman, much given to "progress of the species," &c., &c.; from whom I suppose you have yourself heard. The wandering umbrella, still short of an owner, hangs upon its peg here, without definite outlook. Of yourself there have come news, by your own Letter, and by various excerpts from Manchester Newspapers. _Gluck zu!_-- This Morning I received the Enclosed, and send it off to you without farther response. Mudie, if I mistake not, is some small Bookseller in the Russell-Square region; pray answer him, if you think him worthy of answer. A dim suspicion haunts me that perhaps he was the Republisher (or Pirate) of your first set of _Essays:_ but probably he regards this as a mere office of untutored friendship on his part. Or possibly I do the poor man wrong by misremembrance? Chapman could tell. I am sunk deep here, in effete Manuscripts, in abstruse meditations, in confusions old and new; sinking, as I may describe myself, through stratum after stratum of the Inane,-- down to one knows not what depth! I unfortunately belong to the Opposition Party in many points, and am in a minority of one. To keep silence, therefore, is among the principal duties at present. We had a call from Bancroft, the other evening. A tough Yankee man; of many worthy qualities more tough than musical; among which it gratified me to find a certain small under-current of genial _humor,_ or as it were _hidden laughter,_ not noticed heretofore. My Wife and all the rest of us are well; and do all salute you with our true wishes, and the hope to have you here again before long. Do not bother yourself with other than voluntary writing to me, while there is so much otherwise that you are obliged to write. If on any point you want advice, information, or other help that lies within the limits of my strength, command me, now and always. And so Good be with you; and a happy meeting to us soon again. Yours ever truly, T. Carlyle CXXIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 30 November, 1847 Dear Emerson,--Here is a word for you from Miss Fuller; I send you the Cover also, though I think there is little or nothing in that. It contained another little Note for Mazzini; who is wandering in foreign parts, on paths unknown to me at present. Pray send my regards to Miss Fuller, when you write. We hear of you pretty often, and of your successes with the Northern populations. We hope for you in London again before long.--I am busy, if at all, altogether _inarticulately_ in these days. My respect for _silence,_ my distrust of _Speech,_ seem to grow upon me. There is a time for both, says Solomon; but we, in our poor generation, have forgotten one of the "times." Here is a Mr. Forster* of Rawdon, or Bradford, in Yorkshire; our late host in the Autumn time; who expects and longs to be yours when you come into those parts. I am busy with William Conqueror's _Domesday Book_ and with the commentaries of various blockheads on it:--Ah me! All good be with you, and happy news from those dear to you. Yours ever, T. Carlyle ----------- * Now the Rt. Hon. W E. Forster, M.P. ----------- CXXX. Emerson to Carlyle 2 Fenny Street, Higher Broughton, Manchester 28 December, 1847 Dear Carlyle,--I am concerned to discover that Margaret Fuller in the letter which you forwarded prays me to ask you and Mrs. Carlyle respecting the Count and Countess Pepoli, who are in Rome for the winter, whether they would be good for her to know?--That is pretty nearly the form of her question. As one third of the winter is gone, and one half will be, before her question can be answered, I fear, it will have lost some of its pertinence. Well, it will serve as a token to pass between us, which will please me if it do not Margaret.--I have had nothing to send you tidings of. Yet I get the best accounts from home of wife and babes and friends. I am seeing this England more thoroughly than I had thought was possible to me. I find this lecturing a key which opens all doors. I have received everywhere the kindest hospitality from a great variety of persons. I see many intelligent and well-informed persons, and some fine geniuses. I have every day a better opinion of the English, who are a very handsome and satisfactory race of men, and, in the point of material performance, altogether incomparable. I have made some vain attempts to end my lectures, but must go on a little longer. With kindest regards to the Lady Jane, Your friend, R.W.E. Margaret Fuller's address, if anything is to be written, is, Care of Maquay, Pakenham & Co., Rome. CXXXI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 30 December, 1847 My Dear Emerson,--We are very glad to see your handwriting again, and learn that you are well, and doing well. Our news of you hitherto, from the dim Lecture-element, had been satisfactory indeed, but vague. Go on and prosper. I do not much think Miss Fuller would do any great good with the Pepolis,--even if they are still in Rome, and not at Bologna as our advices here seemed to indicate. Madam Pepoli is an elderly Scotch lady, of excellent commonplace vernacular qualities, hardly of more; the Count, some years younger, and a much airier man, is on all sides a beautiful _Dilettante,_--little suitable, I fear, to the serious mind that can recognize him as such! However, if the people are still in Rome, Miss Fuller can easily try: Bid Miss Fuller present my Wife's compliments, or mine, or even _yours_ (for they know all our domesticities here, and are very intimate, especially Madam with _My_ dame); upon which the acquaintance is at once made, and can be continued if useful. This morning Richard Milnes writes to me for your address; which I have sent. He is just returned out of Spain; home swiftly to "vote for the Jew Bill"; is doing hospitalities at Woburn Abbey; and I suppose will be in Yorkshire (home, near Pontefract) before long. See him if you have opportunity: a man very easy to _see_ and get into flowing talk with; a man of much sharpness of faculty, well tempered by several inches of "Christian _fat_" he has upon his ribs for covering. One of the idlest, cheeriest, most gifted of fat little men. Tennyson has been here for three weeks; dining daily till he is near dead;--setting out a Poem withal. He came in to us on Sunday evening last, and on the preceding Sunday: a truly interesting Son of Earth, and Son of Heaven,--who has almost lost his way, among the will-o'-wisps, I doubt; and may flounder ever deeper, over neck and nose at last, among the quagmires that abound! I like him well; but can do next to nothing for him. Milnes, with general co-operation, got him a Pension; and he has bread and tobacco: but that is a poor outfit for such a soul. He wants a _task;_ and, alas, that of spinning rhymes, and naming it "Art" and "high Art," in a Time like ours, will never furnish him. For myself I have been entirely _idle,_--I dare not even say, too abstrusely _occupied;_ for I have merely been _looking_ at the Chaos even, not by any means working in it. I have not even read a Book,--that I liked. All "Literature" has grown inexpressibly unsatisfactory to me. Better be silent than talk farther in this mood. We are going off, on Saturday come a week, into Hampshire, to certain Friends you have heard me speak of. Our address, till the beginning of February, is "Hon. W.B. Baring, Alverstoke, Gosport, Hants." My Wife sends you many kind regards; remember us across the Ocean too;--and be well and busy till we meet. Yours ever, T. Carlyle Last night there arrived No. 1 of the _Massachusetts Review:_ beautiful paper and print; and very promising otherwise. In the Introduction I well recognized the hand; in the first Article too,--not in any of the others. _Faustum sit._ CXXXII. Emerson to Carlyle Ambleside, 26 February, 1848 My Dear Carlyle,--I am here in Miss Martineau's house, and having seen a good deal of England, and lately a good deal of Scotland too, I am tomorrow to set forth again for Manchester, and presently for London. Yesterday, I saw Wordsworth for a good hour and a half, which he did not seem to grudge, for he talked freely and fast, and--bating his cramping Toryism and what belongs to it--wisely enough. He is in rude health, and, though seventy-seven years old, says he does not feel his age in any particular. Miss Martineau is in excellent health and spirits, though just now annoyed by the hesitations of Murray to publish her book;* but she confides infinitely in her book, which is the best fortune. But I please myself not a little that I shall in a few days see you again, and I will give you an account of my journey. I have heard almost nothing of your late weeks,--but that is my fault,--only I heard with sorrow that your wife had been ill, and could not go with you on your Christmas holidays. Now may her good days have come again! I say I have heard nothing of your late days; of your early days, of your genius, of your influence, I cease not to hear and to see continually, yea, often am called upon to resist the same with might and main. But I will not pester you with it now.--Miss Martineau, who is most happily placed here, and a model of housekeeping, sends kindest remembrances to you both. Yours ever, R. W. Emerson. --------- * "Eastern Life, Past and Present." --------- CXXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 28 February, 1848 Dear Emerson,--We are delighted to hear of you again at first hand: our last traditions represented you at Edinburgh, and left the prospect of your return hither very vague. I have only time for one word tonight: to say that your room is standing vacant ever since you quitted it,--ready to be lighted up with all manner of physical and moral _fires_ that the place will yield; and is in fact _your_ room, and expects to be accounted such.--I know not specially what your operations in this quarter are to be; but whatever they are, or the arrangements necessary for them, surely it is here that you must alight again in the big Babel, and deliberately adjust what farther is to be done. Write to us what day you are to arrive; and the rest is all already managed. Jane has never yet got out since the cold took her; but she has at no time been so ill as is frequent with her in these winter disorders; she is now steadily improving, and we expect will come out with the sun and the green leaves,--as she usually does. I too caught an ugly cold, and, what is very uncommon with me, a kind of cough, while down in Hampshire; which, with other inarticulate matters, has kept me in a very mute abstruse condition all this while; so that, for many weeks past, I have properly had no history,--except such as trees in winter, and other merely passive objects may have. That is not an agreeable side of the page; but I find it indissolubly attached to the other: no historical leaf with me but has them _both!_ Reading does next to nothing for me at present, neither will thinking or even dreaming rightly prosper; of no province can I be quite master except of the _silent_ one, in such a case. One feels there, at last, as if quite annihilated; and takes up arms again (the poor goose-quill is no great things of a weapon to arm with!) as if in a kind of sacred despair. All people are in a sort of joy-dom over the new French Republic, which has descended suddenly (or shall we say, _ascended_ alas?) out of the Immensities upon us; showing once again that the righteous Gods do yet live and reign! It is long years since I have felt any such deep-seated pious satisfaction at a public event. Adieu: come soon; and warn us when. Yours ever, T. Carlyle CXXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle 2 Fenny St., Manchester, 2 March, Thursday [1848] Dear Friend,--I hope to set forward today for London, and to arrive there some time tonight. I am to go first to Chapman's house, where I shall lodge for a time. If it is too noisy, I shall move westward. But I hope you are to be at home tomorrow, for if I prosper, I shall come and beg a dinner with you,--is it not at five o'clock? I am sorry you have no better news to tell me of your health,--your own and your wife's. Tell her I shall surely report you to Alcott, who will have his revenge. Thanks that you keep the door so wide open for me still. I shall always come in. Ever yours, R.W.E. CXXXV. Emerson to Carlyle Monday, P.M., 19 June, 1848 Dear Carlyle,--Mrs. Crowe of Edinburgh, an excellent lady, known to you and to many good people, wishes me to go to you with her. I tell her that I believe you relax the reins of labor as early as one hour after noon, and I propose one o'clock on Thursday for the invasion. If you are otherwise engaged, you must send me word. Otherwise, we shall come. It was sad to hear no good news last evening from Jane Carlyle. I heartily hope the night brought sleep, and the morning better health to her. Yours always, R.W. Emerson CXXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 20 June, 1848 Dear Emerson,--We shall be very glad to become acquainted with Mrs. Crowe, of whom already by report we know many favorable things. Brown (of Portobello, Edinburgh) had given us intimation of her kind purposes towards Chelsea; and now on Thursday you (please the Pigs) shall see the adventure achieved. Two o'clock, not one, is the hour when labor ceases here,--if, alas, there be any "labor" so much as got begun; which latter is often enough the sad case. But at either hour we shall be ready for you. I hope you penetrated the Armida Palace, and did your devoir to the sublime Duchess and her Luncheon yesterday! I cannot without a certain internal amusement (foreign enough to my present humor) represent to myself such a conjunction of opposite stars! But you carry a new image off with you, and are a gainer, you. _Allons._ My Papers here are in a state of distraction, state of despair! I see not what is to become of them and me. Yours ever truly, T. Carlyle My Wife arose without headache on Monday morning; but feels still a good deal beaten;--has not had "such a headache" for several years. CXXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, Friday [23 June, 1848] Dear Emerson,--I forgot to say, last night, that you are to dine with us on Sunday; that after our call on the Lady Harriet* we will take a stroll through the Park, look at the Sunday population, and find ourselves here at five o'clock for the above important object. Pray remember, therefore, and no excuse! In haste. Yours ever truly, T. Carlyle ------------- * Lady Ashburton ------------- CXXXVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 6 December, 1848 Dear Emerson,--We received your Letter* duly, some time ago, with many welcomes; and have as you see been too remiss in answering it. Not from forgetfulness, if you will take my word; no, but from many causes, too complicated to articulate, and justly producing an indisposition to put pen to paper at all! Never was I more silent than in these very months; and, with reason too, for the world at large, and my own share of it in small, are both getting more and more unspeakable with any convenience! In health we of this household are about as well as usual;--and look across to the woods of Concord with more light than we had, realizing for ourselves a most mild and friendly picture there. Perhaps it is quite as well that you are left alone of foreign interference, even of a Letter from Chelsea, till you get your huge bale of English reminiscences assorted a little. Nobody except me seems to have heard from you; at least the rest, in these parts, all plead destitution when I ask for news. What you saw and suffered and enjoyed here will, if you had once got it properly warehoused, be new wealth to you for many years. Of one impression we fail not here: admiration of your pacific virtues, of gentle and noble tolerance, often sorely tried in this place! Forgive me my ferocities; you do not quite know what I suffer in these latitudes, or perhaps it would be even easier for you. Peace for me, in a Mother of Dead Dogs like this, there is not, was not, will not be,--till the battle itself end; which, however, is a sure outlook, and daily growing a nearer one. ---------- * The letter is missing, but a fragment of the rough draft of it exists, dated Concord, 2 October, 1848. Emerson had returned home in July, and he begins: "'T is high time, no doubt, long since, that you heard from me, and if there were good news in America for you, you would be sure to hear. All goes at heavy trot with us... I fell again quickly into my obscure habits, more fit for me than the fine things I had seen. I made my best endeavor to praise the rich country I had seen, and its excellent, energetic, polished people. And it is very easy for me to do so. England is the country of success, and success has a great charm for me, more than for those I talk with at home. But they were obstinate to know if the English were superior to their possessions, and if the old religion warmed their hearts, and lifted a little the mountain of wealth. So I enumerated the list of brilliant persons I had seen, and the [break in MS.]. But the question returned. Did you find kings and priests? Did you find sanctities and beauties that took away your memory, and sent you home a changed man with new aims, and with a discontent of your old pastures?" Here the fragment ends. Emerson's answer to these questions may be found in the chapter entitled "Results," in his _English Traits._ ---------- Nay, there is another practical question,--but it is from the female side of the house to the female side,--and in fact concerns Indian meal, upon which Mrs. Emerson, or you, or the Miller of Concord (if he have any tincture of philosophy) are now to instruct us! The fact is, potatoes having vanished here, we are again, with motives large and small, trying to learn the use of Indian meal; and indeed do eat it daily to meat at dinner, though hitherto with considerable despair. Question _first,_ therefore: Is there by nature a _bitter_ final taste, which makes the throat smart, and disheartens much the apprentice in Indian meal;--or is it accidental, and to be avoided? We surely anticipate the latter answer; but do not yet see how. At first we were taught the meal, all ground on your side of the water, had got fusty, _raw;_ an effect we are well used to in oaten and other meals but, last year, we had a bushel of it ground _here,_ and the bitter taste was there as before (with the addition of much dirt and sand, our millstones I suppose being too soft);-- whereupon we incline to surmise that there is, perhaps, as in the case of oats, some pellicle or hull that ought to be _rejected_ in making the meal? Pray ask some philosophic Miller, if Mrs. Emerson or you do not know;--and as a corollary this _second_ question: What is the essential difference between _white_ (or brown-gray-white) Indian Meal and _yellow_ (the kind we now have; beautiful as new Guineas, but with an ineffaceable tastekin of _soot_ in it)?--And question _third,_ which includes all: How to cook _mush_ rightly, at least without bitter? _Long_-continued boiling seems to help the bitterness, but does not cure it. Let some oracle speak! I tell all people, our staff of life is in the Mississippi Valley henceforth;--and one of the truest benefactors were an American Minerva who could teach us to cook this meal; which our people at present (I included) are unanimous in finding nigh uneatable, and loudly exclaimable against! Elihu Burritt had a string of recipes that went through all newspapers three years ago; but never sang there oracle of longer ears than that,--totally destitute of practical significance to any creature here! And now enough of questioning. Alas, alas, I have a quite other batch of sad and saddest considerations,--on which I must not so much as enter at present! Death has been very busy in this little circle of ours within these few days. You remember Charles Buller, to whom I brought you over that night at the Barings' in Stanhope Street? He died this day week, almost quite unexpectedly; a sore loss to all that knew him personally, and his gladdening sunny presence in many circles here; a sore loss to the political people too, for he was far the cleverest of all Whig men, and indeed the only genial soul one can remember in that department of things.* We buried him yesterday; and now see what new thing has come. Lord Ashburton, who had left his mother well in Hampshire ten hours before, is summoned from poor Buller's funeral by telegraph; hurries back, finds his mother, whom he loved much, already dead! She was a Miss Bingham, I think, from Pennsylvania, perhaps from Philadelphia itself. You saw her; but the first sight by no means told one all or the best worth that was in that good Lady. We are quite bewildered by our own regrets, and by the far painfuler sorrow of those closely related to these sudden sorrows. Of which let me be silent for the present;--and indeed of all things else, for _speech,_ inadequate mockery of one's poor meaning, is quite a burden to me just now! --------- * The reader of Carlyle's _Reminiscences,_ and of Froude's volumes of his biography, is familiar with the close relations that had existed between Buller and Carlyle. ---------- Neuberg* comes hither sometimes; a welcome, wise kind of man. Poor little Espinasse still toils cheerily at the oar, and various friends of yours are about us. Brother John did send through Chapman all the _Dante,_ which we calculate you have received long ago: he is now come to Town; doing a Preface, &c., which also will be sent to you, and just about publishing.-- Helps, who has been alarmingly ill, and touring on the Rhine since we were his guests, writes to me yesterday from Hampshire about sending you a new Book of his. I instructed him How. Adieu, dear Emerson; do not forget us, or forget to think as kindly as you can of us, while we continue in this world together. Yours ever affectionately, T. Carlyle --------- * Mr. Ireland, in his _Recollections,_ p. 62, gives an interesting account of Mr. Neuberg,--a highly cultivated German, who assisted Carlyle in some of the later literary labors of his life. Neuberg died in 1867, and in a letter to his sister of that year Carlyle says: "No kinder friend had I in this world; no man of my day, I believe, had so faithful, loyal, and willing a helper as he generously was to me for the last twenty or more years." ----------- CXXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle Boston, 28 January, 1849 My Dear Carlyle,--Here in Boston for the day, though in no fit place for writing, you shall have, since the steamer goes tomorrow, a hasty answer to at least one of your questions.... You tell me heavy news of your friends, and of those who were friendly to me for your sake. And I have found farther particulars concerning them in the newspapers. Buller I have known by name ever since he was in America with Lord Durham, and I well remember his face and figure at Mr. Baring's. Even England cannot spare an accomplished man. Since I had your letter, and, I believe, by the same steamer, your brother's _Dante,_* complete within and without, has come to me, most welcome. I heartily thank him. 'T is a most workmanlike book, bearing every mark of honest value. I thank him for myself, and I thank him, in advance, for our people, who are sure to learn their debt to him, in the coming months and years. I sent the book, after short examination, the same day, to New York, to the Harpers, lest their edition should come out without Prolegomena. But they answered, the next day, that they had already received directly the same matter;--yet have not up to this time returned my book. For the Indian corn,--I have been to see Dr. Charles T. Jackson (my wife's brother, and our best chemist, inventor of etherization), who tells me that the reason your meal is bitter is, that all the corn sent to you from us is kiln-dried here, usually at a heat of three hundred degrees, which effectually kills the starch or diastase (?) which would otherwise become sugar. This drying is thought necessary to prevent the corn from becoming musty in the contingency of a long voyage. He says, if it should go in the steamer, it would arrive sound without previous drying. I think I will try that experiment, shortly on a box or a barrel of our Concord maize, as Lidian Emerson confidently engages to send you accurate recipes for johnny-cake, mush, and hominy. --------- * The _Inferno_ of Dante, a translation in prose by John Carlyle; an excellent piece of work, still in demand. --------- Why did you not send me word of Clough's hexameter poem, which I have now received and read with much joy.* But no, you will never forgive him his metres. He is a stout, solid, reliable man and friend,--I knew well; but this fine poem has taken me by surprise. I cannot find that your journals have yet discovered its existence. With kindest remembrances to Jane Carlyle, and new thanks to John Carlyle, your friend, --R.W. Emerson ---------- * "The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich." ---------- CXL. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 19 April, 1849 My Dear Emerson,--Today is American Postday; and by every rule and law,--even if all laws but those of Cocker were abolished from this universe,--a word from me is due to you! Twice I have heard since I spoke last: prompt response about the Philadelphia Bill; exact performance of your voluntary promise,--Indian Corn itself is now here for a week past.... Still more interesting is the barrel of genuine Corn ears,-- Indian Cobs of edible grain, from the Barn of Emerson himself! It came all safe and right, according to your charitable program; without cost or trouble to us of any kind; not without curious interest and satisfaction! The recipes contained in the precedent letter, duly weighed by the competent jury of housewives (at least by my own Wife and Lady Ashburton), were judged to be of decided promise, reasonable-looking every one of them; and now that the stuff itself is come, I am happy to assure you that it forms a new epoch for us all in the Maize department: we find the grain _sweet,_ among the sweetest, with a touch even of the taste of _nuts_ in it, and profess with contrition that properly we have never tasted Indian Corn before. Millers of due faculty (with millstones of _iron_) being scarce in the Cockney region, and even cooks liable to err, the Ashburtons have on their resources undertaken the brunt of the problem one of their own Surrey or Hampshire millers is to grind the stuff, and their own cook, a Frenchman commander of a whole squadron, is to undertake the dressing according to the rules. Yesterday the Barrel went off to their country place in Surrey,-- a small Bag of select ears being retained here, for our own private experimenting;--and so by and by we shall see what comes of it.--I on my side have already drawn up a fit proclamation of the excellences of this invaluable corn, and admonitions as to the benighted state of English eaters in regard to it;--to appear in _Fraser's Magazine,_ or I know not where, very soon. It is really a small contribution towards World-History, this small act of yours and ours: there is no doubt to me, now that I taste the real grain, but all Europe will henceforth have to rely more and more upon your Western Valleys and this article. How beautiful to think of lean tough Yankee settlers, tough as gutta-percha, with most occult unsubduable fire in their belly, steering over the Western Mountains, to annihilate the jungle, and bring bacon and corn out of it for the Posterity of Adam! The Pigs in about a year eat up all the rattlesnakes for miles round: a most judicious function on the part of the Pigs. Behind the Pigs comes Jonathan with his all-conquering ploughshare,--glory to him too! Oh, if we were not a set of Cant-ridden blockheads, there is no _Myth_ of Athene or Herakles equal to this _fact;_--which I suppose _will_ find its real "Poets" some day or other; when once the Greek, Semitic, and multifarious other Cobwebs are swept away a little! Well, we must wait.--For the rest, if this skillful Naturalist and you will make any more experiments on Indian Corn for us, might I not ask that you would try for a method of preserving _the meal_ in a sound state for us? Oatmeal, which would spoil directly too, is preserved all year by kiln-drying the grain before it is ground,--parching it till it is almost _brown,_ sometimes the Scotch Highlanders, by intense parching, can keep their oatmeal good for a series of years. No Miller here at present is likely to produce such beautiful meal as some of the American specimens I have seen:--if possible, we must learn to get the grain over in the shape of proper durable meal. At all events, let your Friend charitably make some inquiry into the process of millerage, the possibilities of it for meeting our case;--and send us the result some day, on a separate bit of paper. With which let us end, for the present. Alas, I have yet written nothing; am yet a long way off writing, I fear! Not for want of matter, perhaps, but for redundance of it; I feel as if I had the whole world to write yet, with the day fast bending downwards on me, and did not know where to begin,--in what manner to address the deep-sunk populations of the Theban Land. Any way my Life is very _grim,_ on these terms, and is like to be; God only knows what farther quantity of braying in the mortar this foolish clay of mine may yet need!-- They are printing a third Edition of _Cromwell;_ that bothered me for some weeks, but now I am over with that, and the Printer wholly has it: a sorrowful, not now or ever a joyful thing to me, that. The _stupor_ of my fellow blockheads, for Centuries back, presses too heavy upon that,--as upon many things, O Heavens! People are about setting up some _Statue of Cromwell,_ at St. Ives, or elsewhere: the King-Hudson Statue is never yet set up; and the King himself (as you may have heard) has been _discovered_ swindling. I advise all men not to erect a statue for Cromwell just now. Macaulay's _History_ is also out, running through the fourth edition: did I tell you last time that I had read it,--with wonder and amazement? Finally, it seems likely Lord John Russell will shortly walk out (forever, it is hoped), and Sir R. Peel come in; to make what effort is in him towards delivering us from the _pedant_ method of treating Ireland. The _beginning,_ as I think, of salvation (if he can prosper a little) to England, and to all Europe as well. For they will all have to learn that man does need government, and that an able- bodied starving beggar is and remains (whatever Exeter Hall may say to it) a _Slave_ destitute of a _Master;_ of which facts England, and convulsed Europe, are fallen foundly ignorant in these bad ages, and will plunge ever deeper till they rediscover the same. Alas, alas, the Future for us is not to be made of _butter,_ as the Platforms prophesy; I think it will be harder than steel for some ages! No noble age was ever a soft one, nor ever will or can be.--Your beautiful curious little discourse (report of a discourse) about the English was sent me by Neuberg; I thought it, in my private heart, one of the best words (for _hidden_ genius lodged in it) I had ever heard; so sent it to the _Examiner,_ from which it went to the _Times_ and all the other Papers: an excellent sly little word. Clough has gone to Italy; I have seen him twice,--could not manage his hexameters, though I like the man himself, and hope much of him. "Infidelity" has broken out in Oxford itself,--immense emotion in certain quarters in consequence, virulent outcries about a certain "Sterling Club," altogether a secular society! Adieu, dear Emerson; I had much more to say, but there is no room. O, forgive me, forgive me all trespasses,--and love me what you can! Yours ever, T. Carlyle CXLI. Carlyle to Emerson Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, N.B., 13 August, 1849 Dear Emerson,--By all laws of human computation, I owe you a letter, and have owed, any time these seven weeks: let me now pay a little, and explain. Your _second_ Barrel of Indian Corn arrived also perfectly fresh, and of admirable taste and quality; the very bag of new-ground meal was perfect; and the "popped corn" ditto, when it came to be discovered: with the whole of which admirable materials such order was taken as promised to secure "the greatest happiness to the greatest number"; and due silent thanks were tendered to the beneficence of the unwearied Sender:--but all this, you shall observe, had to be done in the thick of a universal packing and household bustle; I just on the wing for a "Tour in Ireland," my Wife too contemplating a run to Scotland shortly after, there to meet me on my return. All this was seven good weeks ago: I hoped somewhere in my Irish wayfarings to fling you off a Letter; but alas, I reckoned there quite without my host (strict "host," called _Time_), finding nowhere half a minute left to me; and so now, having got home to my Mother, not to see my Wife yet for some days, it is my _earliest_ leisure, after all, that I employ in this purpose. I have been terribly knocked about too,--jolted in Irish cars, bothered almost to madness with Irish balderdash, above all kept on dreadfully short allowance of sleep;--so that now first, when fairly down to rest, all aches and bruises begin to be fairly sensible; and my clearest feeling at this present is the uncomfortable one, "that I am not Caliban, but a Cramp": terribly cramped indeed, if I could tell you everything! What the other results of this Irish Tour are to be for me I cannot in the least specify. For one thing, I seem to be farther from _speech_ on any subject than ever: such masses of chaotic ruin everywhere fronted me, the general fruit of long-continued universal falsity and folly; and such mountains of delusion yet possessing all hearts and tongues I could do little that was not even _noxious,_ except _admire_ in silence the general "Bankruptcy of Imposture" as one there finds and sees it come to pass, and think with infinite sorrow of the tribulations, futile wrestlings, tumults, and disasters which yet await that unfortunate section of Adam's Posterity before any real improvement can take place among them. Alas, alas! The Gospels of Political Economy, of _Laissez-faire,_ No-Government, Paradise to all comers, and so many fatal Gospels,--generally, one may say, all the Gospels of this blessed "New Era,"--will first have to be tried, and found wanting. With a quantity of written and uttered nonsense, and of suffered and inflicted misery, which one sinks fairly dumb to estimate! A kind of comfort it is, however, to see that "Imposture" _has_ fallen openly "bankrupt," here as everywhere else in our old world; that no dexterity of human tinkering, with all the Parliamentary Eloquence and Elective Franchises in nature, will ever set it on its feet again, to go many yards more; but that _its_ goings and currencies in this Earth have as good as ceased for ever and ever! God is great; all Lies do now, as from the first, travel incessantly towards Chaos, and there at length lodge! In some parts of Ireland (the Western "insolvent Unions," some twenty-seven of them in all), within a trifle of _one half_ of the whole population are on Poor-Law rations (furnished by the British Government, L1,100 a week furnished here, L1,300 there, L800 there); the houses stand roofless, the lands unstocked, uncultivated, the landlords hidden from bailiffs, living sometimes "on the hares of their domain": such a state of things was never witnessed under this sky before; and, one would humbly expect, cannot last long!--What is to be done? asks every one; incapable of _hearing_ any answer, were there even one ready for imparting to him. "_Blacklead_ these two million idle beggars," I sometimes advised, "and sell them in Brazil as Niggers,--perhaps Parliament, on sweet constraint, will allow you to advance them to be Niggers!" In fact, the Emancipation Societies should send over a deputation or two to look at _these_ immortal Irish "Freemen," the _ne plus ultra_ of their class it would perhaps moderate the windpipe of much eloquence one hears on that subject! Is not this the most illustrious of all "ages"; making progress of the species at a grand rate indeed? Peace be with it. Waiting for me here, there was a Letter from Miss Fuller in Rome, written about a month ago; a dignified and interesting Letter; requesting help with Booksellers for some "History of the late Italian Revolution" she is about writing; and elegiacally recognizing the worth of Mazzini and other cognate persons and things. I instantly set about doing what little seemed in my power towards this object,--with what result is yet hidden, and have written to the heroic Margaret: "More power to her elbow!" as the Irish say. She has a beautiful enthusiasm; and is perhaps in the right stage of insight for doing that piece of business well.--Of other persons or interests I will say nothing till a calmer opportunity; which surely cannot be very long in coming. In four days I am to rejoin my wife; after which some bits of visits are to be paid in this North Country; necessary most of them, not likely to be profitable almost any. In perhaps a month I expect to be back in Chelsea; whither direct a word if you are still beneficent enough to think of such a Castaway! Yours ever, T. Carlyle I got Thoreau's Book; and meant well to read it, but have not yet succeeded, though it went with me through all Ireland: tell him so, please. Too Jean-Paulish, I found it hitherto. CXLII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 19 July, 1850 My Dear Emerson, My Friend, my Friend,--You behold before you a remorseful man! It is well-nigh a year now since I despatched some hurried rag of paper to you out of Scotland, indicating doubtless that I would speedily follow it with a longer letter; and here, when gray Autumn is at hand again, I have still written nothing to you, heard nothing from you! It is miserable to think of:--and yet it is a fact, and there is no denying of it; and so we must let it lie. If it please Heaven, the like shall not occur again. "Ohone Arooh!" as the Irish taught me to say, "Ohone Arooh!" The fact is, my life has been black with care and toil,--labor above board and far worse labor below;--I have hardly had a heavier year (overloaded too with a kind of "health" which may be called frightful): to "burn my own smoke" in some measure, has really been all I was up to; and except on sheer immediate compulsion I have not written a word to any creature.-- Yesternight I finished the last of these extraordinary _Pamphlets;_ am about running off somewhither into the deserts, of Wales or Scotland, Scandinavia or still remoter deserts;--and my first signal of revived reminiscence is to you. Nay I have not at any time forgotten you, be that justice done the unfortunate: and though I see well enough what a great deep cleft divides us, in our ways of practically looking at this world,--I see also (as probably you do yourself) where the rock- strata, miles deep, unite again; and the two poor souls are at one. Poor devils!--Nay if there were no point of agreement at all, and I were more intolerant "of ways of thinking" than I even am,--yet has not the man Emerson, from old years, been a Human Friend to me? Can I ever forget, or think otherwise than lovingly of the man Emerson? No more of this. Write to me in your first good hour; and say that there is still a brother-soul left to me alive in this world, and a kind thought surviving far over the sea!--Chapman, with due punctuality at the time of publication, sent me the _Representative Men;_ which I read in the becoming manner: you now get the Book offered you for a shilling, at all railway stations; and indeed I perceive the word "representative man"' (as applied to the late tragic loss we have had in Sir Robert Peel) has been adopted by the Able- Editors, and circulates through Newspapers as an appropriate household word, which is some compensation to you for the piracy you suffer from the Typographic Letter-of-marque men here. I found the Book a most finished clear and perfect set of _Engravings in the line manner;_ portraitures full of _likeness,_ and abounding in instruction and materials for reflection to me: thanks always for such a Book; and Heaven send us many more of them. _Plato,_ I think, though it is the most admired by many, did least for me: little save Socrates with his clogs and big ears remains alive with me from it. _Swedenborg_ is excellent in _likeness;_ excellent in many respects;--yet I said to myself, on reaching your general conclusion about the man and his struggles: "_Missed_ the consummate flower and divine ultimate elixir of Philosophy, say you? By Heaven, in clutching at _it,_ and almost getting it, he has tumbled into Bedlam,--which is a terrible _miss,_ if it were never so _near!_ A miss fully as good as a mile, I should say!" --In fact, I generally dissented a little about the _end_ of all these Essays; which was notable, and not without instructive interest to me, as I had so lustily shouted "Hear, hear!" all the way from the beginning up to that stage.--On the whole, let us have another Book with your earliest convenience: that is the modest request one makes of you on shutting this. I know not what I am now going to set about: the horrible barking of the universal dog-kennel (awakened by these _Pamphlets_) must still itself again; my poor nerves must recover themselves a little:--I have much more to say; and by Heaven's blessing must try to get it said in some way if I live.-- Bostonian Prescott is here, infinitely _lionized_ by a mob of gentlemen; I have seen him in two places or three (but forbore speech): the Johnny-cake is good, the twopence worth of currants in it too are good; but if you offer it as a bit of baked Ambrosia, _Ach Gott!_-- Adieu, dear Emerson, forgive, and love me a little. Yours ever, T. Carlyle CXLIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 14 November, 1850 Dear Emerson,--You are often enough present to my thoughts; but yesterday there came a little incident which has brought you rather vividly upon the scene for me. A certain "Mr. ---" from Boston sends us, yesterday morning by post, a Note of yours addressed to Mazzini, whom he cannot find; and indicates that he retains a similar one addressed to myself, and (in the most courteous, kindly, and dignified manner, if Mercy prevent not) is about carrying it off with him again to America! To give Mercy a chance, I by the first opportunity get under way for Morley's Hotel, the address of Mr. ---; find there that Mr.--, since morning, _has been_ on the road towards Liverpool and America, and that the function of Mercy is quite extinct in this instance! My reflections as I wandered home again were none of the pleasantest. Of this Mr. --- I had heard some tradition, as of an intelligent, accomplished, and superior man; such a man's acquaintance, of whatever complexion he be, is and was always a precious thing to me, well worth acquiring where possible; not to say that any friend of yours, whatever his qualities otherwise, carries with him an imperative key to all bolts and locks of mine, real or imaginary. In fact I felt punished;--and who knows, if the case were seen into, whether I deserve it? What "business" it was that deprived me of a call from Mr. ---, or of the possibility of calling on him, I know very well,--and ---, the little dog, and others know! But the fact in that matter is very far different indeed from the superficial semblance; and I appeal to all the _gentlemen_ that are in America for a candid interpretation of the same. "Eighteen million bores,"--good Heavens don't I know how many of that species we also have; and how with us, as with you, the difference between them and the Eighteen thousand noble-men and non-bores is immeasurable and inconceivable; and how, with us as with you, the _latter_ small company, sons of the Empyrean, will have to fling the former huge one, sons of Mammon and Mud, into some kind of chains again, reduce them to some kind of silence again,--unless the old Mud-Demons are to rise and devour us all? Truly it is so I construe it: and if --- and the Eighteen millions are well justified in their anger at me, and the Eighteen thousand owe me thanks and new love. That is my decided opinion, in spite of you all! And so, along with ---, probably in the same ship with him, there shall go my protest against the conduct of ---; and the declaration that to the last I will protest! Which will wind up the matter (without any word of yours on it) at this time.--For the rest, though --- sent me his Pamphlet, it is a fact I have not read a word of it, nor shall ever read. My Wife read it; but I was away, with far other things in my head; and it was "lent to various persons" till it died!--Enough and ten times more than enough of all that. Let me on this last slip of paper give you some response to the Letter* I got in Scotland, under the silence of the bright autumn sun, in my Mother's house, and read there. -------- * This letter is missing. -------- You are bountiful abundantly in your reception of those _Latter Day Pamphlets;_ and right in all you say of them;--and yet withal you are not right, my Friend, but I am! Truly it does behove a man to know the inmost resources of this universe, and, for the sake both of his peace and of his dignity, to possess his soul in patience, and look nothing doubting (nothing wincing even, if that be his humor) upon all things. For it is most indubitable there is good in all;--and if you even see an Oliver Cromwell assassinated, it is certain you may get a cartload of turnips from his carcass. Ah me, and I suppose we had too much forgotten all this, or there had not been a man like you sent to show it us so emphatically! Let us well remember it; and yet remember too that it is _not_ good always, or ever, to be "at ease in Zion"; good often to be in fierce rage in Zion; and that the vile Pythons of this Mud-World do verily require to have sun-arrows shot into them and red-hot pokers struck through them, according to occasion: woe to the man that carries either of these weapons, and does not use it in their presence! Here, at this moment, a miserable Italian organ-grinder has struck up the _Marseillaise_ under my window, for example: was the _Marseillaise_ fought out on a bed of down, or is it worth nothing when fought? On those wretched _Pamphlets_ I set no value at all, or even less than none: to me their one benefit is, my own heart is clear of them (a benefit not to be despised, I assure you!)--and in the Public, athwart this storm of curses, and emptyings of vessels of dishonor, I can already perceive that it is all well enough there too in reference to them; and the controversy of the Eighteen millions _versus_ the Eighteen thousands, or Eighteen units, is going on very handsomely in that quarter of it, for aught I can see! And so, Peace to the brave that are departed; and, Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new!-- I was in Wales, as well as Scotland, during Autumn time; lived three weeks within wind of St. Germanus's old "College" (Fourteen Hundred years of age or so) and also not far from _Merthyr Tydvil,_ Cyclops' Hell, sootiest and horridest avatar of the Industrial Mammon I had ever anywhere seen; went through the Severn Valley; at Bath stayed a night with Landor (a proud and high old man, who charged me with express remembrances for you); saw Tennyson too, in Cumberland, with his new Wife; and other beautiful recommendable and 'questionable things;--and was dreadfully tossed about, and torn almost to tatters by the manifold brambles of my way: and so at length am here, a much- lamed man indeed! Oh my Friend, have tolerance for me, have sympathy with me; you know not quite (I imagine) what a burden mine is, or perhaps you would find this duty, which you always do, a little easier done! Be happy, be busy beside your still waters, and think kindly of me there. My nerves, health I call them, are in a sad state of disorder: alas, that is nine tenths of all the battle in this world. Courage, courage!--My Wife sends salutations to you and yours. Good be with you all always. Your affectionate, T. Carlyle CXLIV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 8 July, 1851 Dear Emerson,--Don't you still remember very well that there is such a man? I know you do, and will do. But it is a ruinously long while since we have heard a word from each other;--a state of matters that ought immediately to _cease._ It was your turn, I think, to write? It was somebody's turn! Nay I heard lately you complained of bad eyes; and were grown abstinent of writing. Pray contradict me this. I cannot do without some regard from you while we are both here. Spite of your many sins, you are among the most human of all the beings I now know in the world;-- who are a very select set, and are growing ever more so, I can inform you! In late months, feeling greatly broken and without heart for anything weighty, I have been upon a _Life of John Sterling;_ which will not be good for much, but will as usual gratify me by taking itself off my hands: it was one of the things I felt a kind of obligation to do, and so am thankful to have done. Here is a patch of it lying by me, if you will look at a specimen. There are four hundred or more pages (prophesies the Printer), a good many _Letters_ and Excerpts in the latter portion of the volume. Already half printed, wholly written; but not to come out for a couple of months yet,--all trade being at a stand till this sublime "Crystal Palace" go its ways again.--And now since we are upon the business, I wish you would mention it to E.P. Clark (is not that the name?) next time you go to Boston: if that friendly clear-eyed man have anything to say in reference to it and American Booksellers, let him say and do; he may have a Copy for anybody in about a month: if _he_ have nothing to say, then let there be nothing anywhere said. For, mark O Philosopher, I expressly and with emphasis prohibit _you_ at this stage of our history, and henceforth, unless I grow poor again. Indeed, indeed, the commercial mandate of the thing (Nature's little order on that behalf) being once fulfilled (by speaking to Clark), I do not care a snuff of tobacco how it goes, and will prefer, here as elsewhere, my night's rest to any amount of superfluous money. This summer, as you may conjecture, has been very noisy with us, and productive of little,--the "Wind-dust-ry of all Nations" involving everything in one inane tornado. The very shopkeepers complain that there is no trade. Such a sanhedrim of windy fools from all countries of the Globe were surely never gathered in one city before. But they will go their ways again, they surely will! One sits quiet in that faith;--nay, looks abroad with a kind of pathetic grandfatherly feeling over this universal Children's Ball which the British Nation in these extraordinary circumstances is giving it self! Silence above all, silence is very behoveful! I read lately a small old brown French duodecimo, which I mean to send you by the first chance there is. The writer is a Capitaine Bossu; the production, a Journal of his experiences in "La Louisiane," "Oyo" (_Ohio_), and those regions, which looks very genuine, and has a strange interest to me, like some fractional Odyssey or letter.* Only a hundred years ago, and the Mississippi has changed as never valley did: in 1751 older and stranger, looked at from its present date, than Balbec or Nineveh! Say what we will, Jonathan is doing miracles (of a sort) under the sun in these times now passing.--Do you know _Bartram's Travels?_ This is of the Seventies (1770) or so; treats of _Florida_ chiefly, has a wondrous kind of floundering eloquence in it; and has also grown immeasurably _old._ All American libraries ought to provide themselves with that kind of book; and keep them as a kind of future _biblical_ article.-- Finally on this head, can you tell me of any _good_ Book on California? Good: I have read several bad. But that too is worthy of some wonder; that too, like the Old Bucaniers, hungers and thirsts (in ingenuous minds) to have some true record and description given of it. ---------- * Bossu wrote two books which are known to the student of the history of the settlement of America; one, "Nouveaux Voyages aux Indes occidentales," Paris, 1768; the other, "Nouveaux Voyages dans l'Amerique septentrionale," Amsterdam (Paris), 1777. ---------- And poor Miss Fuller, was there any _Life_ ever published of her? or is any competent hand engaged on it? Poor Margaret, I often remember her; and think how she is asleep now under the surges of the sea. Mazzini, as you perhaps know, is with us this summer; comes across once in the week or so, and tells me, or at least my Wife, all his news. The Roman revolution has made a man of him,--quite brightened up ever since;--and the best friend _he_ ever saw, I believe, was that same Quack-President of France, who relieved him while it was still time. My Brother is in Annandale, working hard over _Dante_ at last; talks of coming up hither shortly; I am myself very ill and miserable in the _liver_ regions; very tough otherwise,--though I have now got spectacles for small print in the twilight. _Eheu fugaces,_--and yet why _Eheu?_ In fact it is better to be silent.--Adieu, dear Emerson; I expect to get a great deal brisker by and by,--and in the first place to have a Missive from Boston again. My Wife sends you many regards. I am as ever,-- affectionately Yours, --T. Carlyle CXLV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 28 July, 1851 My Dear Carlyle,--You must always thank me for silence, be it never so long, and must put on it the most generous interpretations. For I am too sure of your genius and goodness, and too glad that they shine steadily for all, to importune you to make assurance sure by a private beam very often. There is very little in this village to be said to you, and, with all my love of your letters, I think it the kind part to defend you from our imbecilities,--my own, and other men's. Besides, my eyes are bad, and prone to mutiny at any hint of white paper. And yet I owe you all my story, if story I have. I have been something of a traveler the last year, and went down the Ohio River to its mouth; walked nine miles into, and nine miles out of the Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky,--walked or sailed, for we crossed small underground streams,--and lost one day's light; then steamed up the Mississippi, five days, to Galena. In the Upper Mississippi, you are always in a lake with many islands. "The Far West" is the right name for these verdant deserts. On all the shores, interminable silent forest. If you land, there is prairie behind prairie, forest behind forest, sites of nations, no nations. The raw bullion of nature; what we call "moral" value not yet stamped on it. But in a thousand miles the immense material values will show twenty or fifty Californias; that a good ciphering head will make one where he is. Thus at Pittsburg, on the Ohio, the "Iron" City, whither, from want of railroads, few Yankees have penetrated, every acre of land has three or four bottoms; first of rich soil; then nine feet of bituminous coal; a little lower, fourteen feet of coal; then iron, or salt; salt springs, with a valuable oil called petroleum floating on their surface. Yet this acre sells for the price of any tillage acre in Massachusetts; and, in a year, the railroads will reach it, east and west.--I came home by the great Northern Lakes and Niagara. No books, a few lectures, each winter, I write and read. In the spring, the abomination of our Fugitive Slave Bill drove me to some writing and speech-making, without hope of effect, but to clear my own skirts. I am sorry I did not print whilst it was yet time. I am now told that the time will come again, more's the pity. Now I am trying to make a sort of memoir of Margaret Fuller, or my part in one;--for Channing and Ward are to do theirs. Without either beauty or genius, she had a certain wealth and generosity of nature which have left a kind of claim on our consciences to build her a cairn. And this reminds me that I am to write a note to Mazzini on this matter; and, as you say you see him, you must charge yourself with delivering it. What we do must be ended by October. You too are working for Sterling. It is right and kind. I learned so much from the New York _Tribune,_ and, a few days after, was on the point of writing to you, provoked by a foolish paragraph which appeared in Rufus Griswold's Journal, (New York,) purporting that R.W.E. possessed important letters of Sterling, without which Thomas Carlyle could not write the Life. What scrap of hearsay about contents of Sterling's letters to me, or that I had letters, this paltry journalist swelled into this puff-ball, I know not. He once came to my house, and, since that time, may have known Margaret Fuller in New York; but probably never saw any letter of Sterling's or heard the contents of any. I have not read again Sterling's letters, which I keep as good Lares in a special niche, but I have no recollection of anything that would be valuable to you. For the American Public for the Book, I think it important that you should take the precise step of sending Phillips and Sampson the early copy, and at the earliest. I saw them, and also E.P. Clark, and put them in communication, and Clark is to write you at once. Having got so far in my writing to you, I do not know but I shall gain heart, and write more letters over sea. You will think my sloth suicidal enough. So many men as I learned to value in your country,--so many as offered me opportunities of intercourse,-- and I lose them all by silence. Arthur Helps is a chief benefactor of mine. I wrote him a letter by Ward,--who brought the letter back. I ought to thank John Carlyle, not only for me, but for a multitude of good men and women here who read his _Inferno_ duly. W.E. Forster sent me his Penn Pamphlet; I sent it to Bancroft, who liked it well, only he thought Forster might have made a still stronger case. Clough I prize at a high rate, the man and his poetry, but write not. Wilkinson I thought a man of prodigious talent, who somehow held it and so taught others to hold it cheap, as we do one of those bushel-basket memories which school-boys and school-girls often show,--and we stop their mouths lest they be troublesome with their alarming profusion. But there is no need of beginning to count the long catalogue. Kindest, kindest remembrance to my benefactress, also in your house, and health and strength and victory to you. Your affectionate, Waldo Emerson CXLVI. Carlyle to Emerson Great Malvern, Worcestershire, 25 August, 1851 Dear Emerson,--Many thanks for your Letter, which found me here about a week ago, and gave a full solution to my bibliopolic difficulties. However sore your eyes, or however taciturn your mood, there is no delay of writing when any service is to be done by it! In fact you are very good to me, and always were, in all manner of ways; for which I do, as I ought, thank the Upper Powers and you. That truly has been and is one of the possessions of my life in this perverse epoch of the world.... I have sent off by John Chapman a Copy of the _Life of Sterling,_ which is all printed and ready, but is not to appear till the first week of October.... Along with the _Sheets_ was a poor little French Book for you,--Book of a poor Naval _Mississippi_ Frenchman, one "Bossu," I think; written only a Century ago, yet which already seemed old as the Pyramids in reference to those strange fast-growing countries. I read it as a kind of defaced _romance;_ very thin and lean, but all _true,_ and very marvelous as such. It is above three weeks since my Wife and I left London, (the Printer having done,) and came hither with the purpose of a month of what is called "Water Cure"; for which this place, otherwise extremely pleasant and wholesome, has become celebrated of late years. Dr. Gully, the pontiff of the business in our Island, warmly encouraged my purpose so soon as he heard of it; nay, urgently offered at once that both of us should become his own guests till the experiment were tried: and here accordingly we are; I water-curing, assiduously walking on the sunny mountains, drinking of the clear wells, not to speak of wet wrappages, solitary sad _steepages,_ and other singular procedures; my Wife not meddling for her own behoof, but only seeing me do it. These have been three of the idlest weeks I ever spent, and there is still one to come: after which we go northward to Lancashire, and across the Border where my good old Mother still expects me; and so, after some little visiting and dawdling, hope to find ourselves home again before September end, and the inexpressible Glass Palace with its noisy inanity have taken itself quite away again. It was no increase of ill-health that drove me hither, rather the reverse; but I have long been minded to try this thing: and now I think the result will be,--_zero_ pretty nearly, and one imagination the less. My long walks, my strenuous idleness, have certainly done me good; nor has the "water" done me any _ill,_ which perhaps is much to say of it. For the rest, it is a strange quasi-monastic--godless and yet _devotional_--way of life which human creatures have here, and useful to them beyond doubt. I foresee, this "Water Cure," under better forms, will become the _Ramadhan_ of the overworked unbelieving English in time coming; an institution they were dreadfully in want of, this long while!--We had Twisleton* here (often speaking of you), who is off to America again; will sail, I think, along with this Letter; a semi-articulate but solid- minded worthy man. We have other officials and other _litterateurs_ (T.B. Macaulay in his hired villa for one): but the mind rather shuns than seeks them, one finds solitary quasi- devotion preferable, and [Greek], as Pindar had it! ----------- * The late Hon. Edward Twisleton, a man of high character and large attainments, and with a personal disposition that won the respect and affection of a wide circle of friends on both sides of the Atlantic. He was the author of a curious and learned treatise entitled "The Tongue not Essential to Speech," and his remarkable volume on "The Handwriting of Junius" seems to have effectually closed a long controversy. --------- Richard Milnes is married, about two weeks ago, and gone to Vienna for a jaunt. His wife, a Miss Crewe (Lord Crewe's sister), about forty, pleasant, intelligent, and rather rich: that is the end of Richard's long first act. Alfred Tennyson, perhaps you heard, is gone to Italy with his wife: their baby died or was dead-born; they found England wearisome: Alfred has been taken up on the top of the wave, and a good deal jumbled about since you were here. Item Thackeray; who is coming over to lecture to you: a mad world, my Masters! Your Letter to Mazzini was duly despatched; and we hear from him that he will write to you, on the subject required, without delay. Browning and his wife, home from Florence, are both in London at present; mean to live in Paris henceforth for some time. They had seen something both of Margaret and her d'Ossoli, and appeared to have a true and lively interest in them; Browning spoke a long while to me, with emphasis, on the subject: I think it was I that had introduced poor Margaret to them. I said he ought to send these reminiscences to America,--that was the night before we left London, three weeks ago; his answer gave me the impression there had been some hindrance somewhere. Accordingly, when your Letter and Mazzini's reached me here, I wrote to Browning urgently on the subject: but he informs me that they _have_ sent all their reminiscences, at the request of Mr. Story; so that it is already all well.--Dear Emerson, you see I am at the bottom of my paper. I will write to you again before long; we cannot let you lie fallow in that manner altogether. Have you got proper _spectacles_ for your eyes? I have adopted that beautiful symbol of old age, and feel myself very venerable: take care of your eyes! Yours ever, T. Carlyle CXLVII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 14 April, 1852 My Dear Carlyle,--I have not grown so callous by my sulky habit, but that I know where my friends are, and who can help me, in time of need. And I have to crave your good offices today, and in a matter relating once more to Margaret Fuller.... You were so kind as to interest yourself, many months ago, to set Mazzini and Browning on writing their Reminiscences for us. But we never heard from either of them. Lately I have learned, by way of Sam Longfellow, in Paris, brother of our poet Longfellow, that Browning assured him that he did write and send a memoir to this country,--to whom, I know not. It never arrived at the hands of the Fullers, nor of Story, Channing, or me;--though the book was delayed in the hope of such help. I hate that his paper should be lost. The little French _Voyage,_ &c. of Bossu, I got safely, and compared its pictures with my own, at the Mississippi, the Illinois, and Chicago. It is curious and true enough, no doubt, though its Indians are rather dim and vague, and "Messieurs Sauvages" Good Indians we have in Alexander Henry's _Travels in Canada,_ and in our modern Catlin, and the best Western America, perhaps, in F.A. Michaux, _Voyage a l'ouest des monts Alleghanis,_ and in Fremont. But it was California I believe you asked about, and, after looking at Taylor, Parkman, and the rest, I saw that the only course is to read them all, and every private letter that gets into the newspapers. So there was nothing to say. I rejoiced with the rest of mankind in the _Life of Sterling,_ and now peace will be to his Manes, down in this lower sphere. Yet I see well that I should have held to his opinion, in all those conferences where you have so quietly assumed the palms. It is said: here, that you work upon Frederick the Great?? However that be, health, strength, love, joy, and victory to you. --R.W. Emerson CXLVIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 7 May, 1852 Dear Emerson,--I was delighted at the sight of your hand again. My manifold sins against you, involuntary all of them I may well say, are often enough present to my sad thoughts; and a kind of remorse is mixed with the other sorrow,--as if I could have _helped_ growing to be, by aid of time and destiny, the grim Ishmaelite I am, and so shocking your serenity by my ferocities! I admit you were like an angel to me, and absorbed in the beautifulest manner all thunder-clouds into the depths of your immeasurable a ether;--and it is indubitable I love you very well, and have long done, and mean to do. And on the whole you will have to rally yourself into some kind of Correspondence with me again; I believe you will find that also to be a commanded duty by and by! To me at any rate, I can say, it is a great want, and adds perceptibly to the sternness of these years: deep as is my dissent from your Gymnosophist view of Heaven and Earth, I find an agreement that swallows up all conceivable dissents; in the whole world I hardly get, to my spoken human word, any other word of response which is authentically _human._ God help us, this is growing a very lonely place, this distracted dog- kennel of a world! And it is no joy to me to see it about to have its throat cut for its immeasurable devilries; that is not a pleasant process to be concerned in either more or less,-- considering above all how many centuries, base and dismal all of them, it is like to take! Nevertheless _Marchons,_--and swift too, if we have any speed, for the sun is sinking.... Poor Margaret, that is a strange tragedy that history of hers; and has many traits of the Heroic in it, though it is wild as the prophecy of a Sibyl. Such a predetermination to _eat_ this big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul. Her "mountain me" indeed:-- but her courage too is high and clear, her chivalrous nobleness indeed is great; her veracity, in its deepest sense, _a toute epreuve._--Your Copy of the Book* came to me at last (to my joy): I had already read it; there was considerable notice taken of it here; and one half-volume of it (and I grieve to say only one, written by a man called Emerson) was completely approved by me and innumerable judges. The rest of the Book is not without considerable geniality and merits; but one wanted a clear concise Narrative beyond all other merits; and if you ask here (except in that half-volume) about any fact, you are answered (so to speak) not in words, but by a symbolic tune on the bagpipe, symbolic burst of wind-music from the brass band;--which is not the plan at all!--What can have become of Mazzini's Letter, which he certainly did write and despatched to you, is not easily conceivable. Still less in the case of Browning: for Browning and his Wife did also write; I myself in the end of last July, having heard him talk kindly and well of poor Margaret and her Husband, took the liberty on your behalf of asking him to put something down on paper; and he informed me, then and repeatedly since, he had already done it,--at the request of Mrs. Story, I think. His address at present is, "No. 138 Avenue des Champs Elysees, a Paris," if your American travelers still thought of inquiring.--Adieu, dear Emerson, till next week. Yours ever, T. Carlyle -------- * "The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli." -------- CXLIX. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, May [?], 1852 You make me happy with your loving thoughts and meanings towards me. I have always thanked the good star which made us early neighbors, in some sort, in time and space. And the beam is twice warmed by your vigorous good-will, which has steadily kept clear, kind eyes on me. -------- * From an imperfect rough draft. -------- It is good to be born in good air and outlook, and not less with a civilization, that is, with one poet still living in the world. O yes, and I feel all the solemnity and vital cheer of the benefit.--If only the mountains of water and of land and the steeper mountains of blighted and apathized moods would permit a word to pass now and then. It is very fine for you to tax yourself with all those incompatibilities. I like that Thor should make comets and thunder, as well as Iduna apples, or Heimdal his rainbow bridge, and your wrath and satire has all too much realism in it, than that we can flatter ourselves by disposing of you as partial and heated. Nor is it your fault that you do a hero's work, nor do we love you less if we cannot help you in it. Pity me, O strong man! I am of a puny constitution half made up, and as I from childhood knew,--not a poet but a lover of poetry, and poets, and merely serving as writer, &c. in this empty America, before the arrival of the poets. You must not misconstrue my silences, but thank me for them all, as a true homage to your diligence which I love to defend... She* had such reverence and love for Landor that I do not know but at any moment in her natural life she would have sunk in the sea, for an ode from him; and now this most propitious cake is offered to her Manes. The loss of the notes of Browning and of Mazzini, which you confirm, astonishes me. --------- * Margaret Fuller. The break in continuity is in the rough draft. --------- CL. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 25 June, 1852 Dear Emerson...... You are a born _enthusiast,_ as quiet as you are; and it will continue so, at intervals, to the end. I admire your sly low-voiced sarcasm too;--in short, I love the sternly-gentle close-buttoned man very well, as I have always done, and intend to continue doing!--Pray observe therefore, and lay it to heart as a practical fact, that you are bound to persevere in writing to me from time to time; and will never get it given up, how sulky soever you grow, while we both remain in this world. Do not I very well understand all that you say about "apathized moods," &c.? The gloom of approaching old age (approaching, nay arriving with some of us) is very considerable upon a man; and on the whole one contrives to take the very ugliest view, now and then, of all beautifulest things; and to shut one's lips with a kind of grim defiance, a kind of imperial sorrow which is almost like felicity,--so completely and composedly wretched, one is equal to the very gods! These too are necessary, moods to a man. But the Earth withal is verdant, sun-beshone; and the Son of Adam has his place on it, and his tasks and recompenses in it, to the close;--as one remembers by and by, too. On the whole, I am infinitely solitary; but not more heavy laden than I have all along been, perhaps rather less so; I could fancy even old age to be beautiful, and to have a real divineness: for the rest, I say always, I cannot part with you, however it go; and so, in brief, you must get into the way of holding yourself obliged as formerly to a kind of _dialogue_ with me; and speak, on paper since not otherwise, the oftenest you can. Let that be a point settled. I am not _writing_ on Frederic the Great; nor at all practically contemplating to do so. But, being in a reading mood after those furious _Pamphlets_ (which have procured me showers of abuse from all the extensive genus Stupid in this country, and not done me any other mischief, but perhaps good), and not being capable of reading except in a train and _about_ some object of interest to me,--I took to reading, near a year ago, about Frederick, as I had twice in my life done before; and have, in a loose way, tumbled up an immense quantity of shot rubbish on that field, and still continue. Not with much decisive approach to Frederick's _self,_ I am still afraid! The man looks brilliant and noble to me; but how _love_ him, or the sad wreck he lived and worked in? I do not even yet _see_ him clearly; and to try making others see him--?--Yet Voltaire and he _are_ the celestial element of the poor Eighteenth Century; poor souls. I confess also to a real love for Frederick's dumb followers: the Prussian _Soldiery._--I often say to myself, "Were not _here_ the real priests and virtuous martyrs of that loud-babbling rotten generation!" And so it goes on; when to end, or in what to end, God knows. Adieu, dear Emerson. A blockhead (by mistake) has been let in, and has consumed all my time. Good be ever with you and yours. --T. Carlyle CLI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 19 April, 1853 My Dear Friend,--As I find I never write a letter except at the dunning of the Penny Post,--which is the pest of the century,--I have thought lately of crossing to England to excuse to you my negligence of your injunction, which so flattered me by its affectionateness a year ago. I was to write once a month. My own disobedience is wonderful, and explains to me all the sins of omission of the whole world. The levity with which we can let fall into disuse such a sacrament as the exchange of greeting at short periods, is a kind of magnanimity, and should be an astonishing argument of the "Immortality"; and I wonder how it has escaped the notice of philosophers. But what had I, dear wise man, to tell you? What, but that life was still tolerable; still absurdly sweet; still promising, promising, to credulous idleness;--but step of mine taken in a true direction, or clear solution of any the least secret,--none whatever. I scribble always a little,--much less than formerly,--and I did within a year or eighteen months write a chapter on Fate, which--if we all live long enough, that is, you, and I, and the chapter--I hope to send you in fair print. Comfort yourself--as you will--you will survive the reading, and will be a sure proof that the nut is not cracked. For when we find out what Fate is, I suppose, the Sphinx and we are done for; and Sphinx, Oedipus, and world ought, by good rights, to roll down the steep into the sea. But I was going to say, my neglect of your request will show you how little saliency is in my weeks and months. They are hardly distinguished in memory other than as a running web out of a loom, a bright stripe for day, a dark stripe for night, and, when it goes faster, even these run together into endless gray... I went lately to St. Louis and saw the Mississippi again. The powers of the River, the insatiate craving for nations of men to reap and cure its harvests, the conditions it imposes,--for it yields to no engineering,--are interesting enough. The Prairie exists to yield the greatest possible quantity of adipocere. For corn makes pig, pig is the export of all the land, and you shall see the instant dependence of aristocracy and civility on the fat four legs. Workingmen, ability to do the work of the River, abounded. Nothing higher was to be thought of. America is incomplete. Room for us all, since it has not ended, nor given sign of ending, in bard or hero. 'T is a wild democracy, the riot of mediocrities, and none of your selfish Italies and Englands, where an age sublimates into a genius, and the whole population is made into Paddies to feed his porcelain veins, by transfusion from their brick arteries. Our few fine persons are apt to die. Horatio Greenough, a sculptor, whose tongue was far cunninger in talk than his chisel to carve, and who inspired great hopes, died two months ago at forty-seven years. Nature has only so much vital force, and must dilute it, if it is to be multiplied into millions. "The beautiful is never plentiful." On the whole, I say to myself, that our conditions in America are not easier or less expensive than the European. For the poor scholar everywhere must be compromise or alternation, and, after many remorses, the consoling himself that there has been pecuniary honesty, and that things might have been worse. But no; we must think much better things than these. Let Lazarus believe that Heaven does not corrupt into maggots, and that heroes do not succumb. Clough is here, and comes to spend a Sunday with me, now and then. He begins to have pupils, and, if his courage holds out, will have as many as he wants.... I have written hundreds of pages about England and America, and may send them to you in print. And now be good and write me once more, and I think I will never cease to write again. And give my homage to Jane Carlyle. Ever yours, R.W. Emerson CLII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 13 May, 1853 Dear Emerson,--The sight of your handwriting was a real blessing to me, after so long an abstinence. You shall not know all the sad reflections I have made upon your silence within the last year. I never doubted your fidelity of heart; your genial deep and friendly recognition of my bits of merits, and my bits of sufferings, difficulties and obstructions; your forgiveness of my faults; or in fact that you ever would forget me, or cease to think kindly of me: but it seemed as if practically _Old Age_ had come upon the scene here too; and as if upon the whole one must make up one's mind to know that all this likewise had fallen silent, and could be possessed henceforth only on those new terms. Alas, there goes much over, year after year, into the regions of the Immortals; inexpressibly beautiful, but also inexpressibly sad. I have not many voices to commune with in the world. In fact I have properly no voice at all; and yours, I have often said, was the _unique_ among my fellow-creatures, from which came full response, and discourse of reason: the _solitude_ one lives in, if one has any spiritual thought at all, is very great in these epochs!--The truth is, moreover, I bought spectacles to myself about two years ago (bad print in candle- light having fairly become troublesome to me); much may lie in that! "The buying of your first pair of spectacles," I said to an old Scotch gentleman, "is an important epoch; like the buying of your first razor."--"Yes," answered he, "but not quite so joyful perhaps!"--Well, well, I have heard from you again; and you promise to be again constant in writing. Shall I believe you, this time? Do it, and shame the Devil! I really am persuaded it will do yourself good; and to me I know right well, and have always known, what it will do. The gaunt lonesomeness of this Midnight Hour, in the ugly universal _snoring_ hum of the overfilled deep-sunk Posterity of Adam, renders an articulate speaker precious indeed! Watchman, what sayest thou, then? Watchman, what of the night?-- Your glimpses of the huge unmanageable Mississippi, of the huge ditto Model Republic, have here and there something of the _epic_ in them,--_ganz nach meinem Sinne._ I see you do not dissent from me in regard to that latter enormous Phenomenon, except on the outer surface, and in the way of peaceably instead of _un_peaceably accepting the same. Alas, all the world is a "republic of the Mediocrities," and always was;--you may see what _its_ "universal suffrage" is and has been, by looking into all the ugly mud-ocean (with some old weathercocks atop) that now _is:_ the world wholly (if we think of it) is the exact stamp of men wholly, and of the _sincerest_ heart-tongue-and-hand "suffrage" they could give about it, poor devils!--I was much struck with Plato, last year, and his notions about Democracy: mere Latter-Day Pamphlet _saxa et faces_ (read _faeces,_ if you like) refined into empyrean radiance and lightning of the gods!-- I, for my own part, perceive the use of all this too, the inevitability of all this; but perceive it (at the present height it has attained) to be disastrous withal, to be horrible and even damnable. That Judas Iscariot should come and slap Jesus Christ on the shoulder in a familiar manner; that all heavenliest nobleness should be flung out into the muddy streets there to jostle elbows with all thickest-skinned denizens of chaos, and get itself at every turn trampled into the gutters and annihilated:--alas, the _reverse_ of all this was, is, and ever will be, the strenuous effort and most solemn heart-purpose of every good citizen in every country of the world,--and will _reappear_ conspicuously as such (in New England and in Old, first of all, as I calculate), when once this malodorous melancholy "Uncle Tommery" is got all well put by! Which will take some time yet, I think.--And so we will leave it. I went to Germany last autumn; not _seeking_ anything very definite; rather merely flying from certain troops of carpenters, painters, bricklayers, &c., &c., who had made a lodgment in this poor house; and have not even yet got their incalculable riot quite concluded. Sorrow on them,--and no return to these poor premises of mine till I have quite left!--In Germany I found but little; and suffered, from six weeks of sleeplessness in German beds, &c., &c., a great deal. Indeed I seem to myself never yet to have quite recovered. The Rhine which I honestly ascended from Rotterdam to Frankfort was, as I now find, my chief Conquest the beautifulest river in the Earth, I do believe; and my first idea of a World-river. It is many fathoms deep, broader twice over than the Thames here at high water; and rolls along, mirror-smooth (except that, in looking close, you will find ten thousand little eddies in it), voiceless, swift, with trim banks, through the heart of Europe, and of the Middle Ages wedded to the Present Age: such an image of calm _power_ (to say nothing of its other properties) I find I had never seen before. The old Cities too are a little beautiful to me, in spite of my state of nerves; honest, kindly people too, but sadly short of our and your _despatch-of-business_ talents,--a really painful defect in the long run. I was on two of Fritz's Battle-fields, moreover: Lobositz in Bohemia, and Kunersdorf by Frankfurt on the Oder; but did not, especially in the latter case, make much of that. Schiller's death-chamber, Goethe's sad Court-environment; above all, Luther's little room in the _Wartburg_ (I believe I actually had tears in my eyes there, and kissed the old oak-table, being in a very flurried state of nerves), my belief was that under the Canopy there was not at present so _holy_ a spot as that same. Of human souls I found none specially beautiful to me at all, at all,--such my sad fate! Of learned professors, I saw little, and that little was more than enough. Tieck at Berlin, an old man, lame on a Sofa, I did love, and do; he is an exception, could I have seen much of him. But on the whole _Universal Puseyism_ seemed to me the humor of German, especially of Berlin thinkers;--and I had some quite portentous specimens of that kind,--unconscious specimens of four hundred quack power! Truly and really the Prussian Soldiers, with their intelligent _silence,_ with the touches of effective Spartanism I saw or fancied in them, were the class of people that pleased me best. But see, my sheet is out! I am still reading, reading, most nightmare Books about Fritz; but as to writing,--_Ach Gott!_ Never, never.--Clough is coming home, I hope.--Write soon, if you be not enchanted! Yours ever, T. Carlyle CLIIa. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 10 August, 1853 My Dear Carlyle,--Your kindest letter, whose date I dare not count back to,--perhaps it was May,--I have just read again, to be deeply touched by its noble tragic tone of goodness to me, not without new wonder at my perversity, and terror at what both may be a-forging to strike me. My slowness to write is a distemper that reaches all my correspondence, and not that with you only, though the circumstance is not worth stating, because, if I ceased to write to all the rest, there would yet be good reason for writing to you. I believe the reason of this recusancy is the fear of disgusting my friends, as with a book open always at the same page. For I have some experiences, that my interest in thoughts--and to an end, perhaps, only of new thoughts and thinking--outlasts that of all my reasonable neighbors, and offends, no doubt, by unhealthy pertinacity. But though rebuked by a daily reduction to an absurd solitude, and by a score of disappointments with intellectual people, and in the face of a special hell provided for me in the Swedenborg Universe, I am yet confirmed in my madness by the scope and satisfaction I find in a conversation once or twice in five years, if so often; and so we find or pick what we call our proper path, though it be only from stone to stone, or from island to island, in a very rude, stilted, and violent fashion. With such solitariness and frigidities, you may judge I was glad to see Clough here, with whom I had established some kind of robust working-friendship, and who had some great permanent values for me. Had he not taken me by surprise and fled in a night, I should have done what I could to block his way. I am too sure he will not return. The first months comprise all the shocks of disappointment that are likely to disgust a new-comer. The sphere of opportunity opens slowly, but to a man of his abilities and culture--rare enough here--with the sureness of chemistry. The Giraffe entering Paris wore the label, "Eh bien, messieurs, il n'y a qu'une bete de plus!" And Oxonians are cheap in London; but here, the eternal economy of sending things where they are wanted makes a commanding claim. Do not suffer him to relapse into London. He had made himself already cordially welcome to many good people, and would have soon made his own place. He had just established his valise at my house, and was to come--the gay deceiver--once a fortnight for his Sunday; and his individualities and his nationalities are alike valuable to me. I beseech you not to commend his unheroic retreat. I have lately made, one or two drafts on your goodness,--which I hate to do, both because you meet them so generously, and because you never give me an opportunity of revenge,--and mainly in the case of Miss Bacon, who has a private history that entitles her to high respect, and who could be helped only by facilitating her Shakespeare studies, in which she has the faith and ardor of a discoverer. Bancroft was to have given her letters to Hallam, but gave one to Sir H. Ellis. Everett, I believe, gave her one to Mr. Grote; and when I told her what I remembered hearing of Spedding, she was eager to see him; which access I knew not how to secure, except through you. She wrote me that she prospers in all things, and had just received at once a summons to meet Spedding at your house. But do not fancy that I send any one to you heedlessly; for I value your time at its rate to nations, and refuse many more letters than I give. I shall not send you any more people without good reason. Your visit to Germany will stand you in stead, when the annoyances of the journey are forgotten, and, in spite of your disclaimers, I am preparing to read your history of Frederic. You are an inveterate European, and rightfully stand for your polity and antiquities and culture: and I have long since forborne to importune you with America, as if it were a humorous repetition of Johnson's visit to Scotland. And yet since Thackeray's adventure, I have often thought how you would bear the pains and penalties; and have painted out your march triumphal. I was at New York, lately, for a few days, and fell into some traces of Thackeray, who has made a good mark in this country by a certain manly blurting out of his opinion in various companies, where so much honesty was rare and useful. I am sorry never once to have been in the same town with him whilst he was here. I hope to see him, if he comes again. New York would interest you, as I am told it did him; you both less and more. The "society" there is at least self-pleased, and its own; it has a contempt of Boston, and a very modest opinion of London. There is already all the play and fury that belong to great wealth. A new fortune drops into the city every day; no end is to palaces, none to diamonds, none to dinners and suppers. All Spanish America discovers that only in the U. States, of all the continent, is safe investment; and money gravitates therefore to New York. The Southern naphtha, too, comes in as an ingredient, and lubricates manners and tastes to that degree, that Boston is hated for stiffness, and excellence in luxury is rapidly attained. Of course, dining, dancing, equipaging, etc. are the exclusive beatitudes,--and Thackeray will not cure us of this distemper. Have you a physician that can? Are you a physician, and will you come? If you will come, cities will go out to meet you. And now I see I have so much to say to you that I ought to write once a month, and I must begin at this point again incontinently. Ever yours, R.W. Emerson CLIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 9 September, 1853 Dear Emerson,--Your Letter came ten days ago; very kind, and however late, surely right welcome! You ought to stir yourself up a little, and actually begin to speak to me again. If we are getting old, that is no reason why we should fall silent, and entirely abstruse to one another. Alas, I do not find as I grow older that the number of articulate-speaking human souls increases around me, in proportion to the inarticulate and palavering species! I am often abundantly solitary in heart; and regret the old days when we used to speak oftener together. I have not quitted Town this year at all; have resisted calls to Scotland both of a gay and a sad description (for the Ashburtons are gone to John of Groat's House, or the Scottish _Thule,_ to rusticate and hunt; and, alas, in poor old Annandale a tragedy seems preparing for me, and the thing I have dreaded all my days is perhaps now drawing nigh, ah me!)--I felt so utterly broken and disgusted with the jangle of last year's locomotion, I judged it would be better to sit obstinately still, and let my thoughts _settle_ (into sediment and into clearness, as it might be); and so, in spite of great and peculiar noises moreover, here I am and remain. London is not a bad place at all in these months,--with its long clean streets, green parks, and nobody in them, or nobody one has ever seen before. Out of La Trappe, which does not suit a Protestant man, there is perhaps no place where one can be so perfectly alone. I might study even but, as I said, there are noises going on; a _last_ desperate spasmodic effort of building,--a new top-story to the house, out of which is to be made one "spacious room" (so they call it, though it is under twenty feet square) where there shall be air _ad libitum,_ light from the sky, and no _sound,_ not even that of the Cremorne Cannons, shall find access to me any more! Such is the prophecy; may the gods grant it! We shall see now in about a month;--then adieu to mortar-tubs to all Eternity:--I endure the thing, meanwhile, as well as I can; might run to a certain rural retreat near by, if I liked at any time; but do not yet: the worst uproar here is but a trifle to that of German inns, and horrible squeaking, choking railway trains; and one does not go to seek this, _this_ is here of its own will, and for a purpose! Seriously, I had for twelve years had such a sound-proof inaccessible apartment schemed out in my head; and last year, under a poor, helpless builder, had finally given it up: but Chelsea, as London generally, swelling out as if it were mad, grows every year noisier; a _good_ builder turned up, and with a last paroxysm of enthusiasm I set him to. My notion is, he will succeed; in which case, it will be a great possession to me for the rest of my life. Alas, this is not the kind of _silence_ I could have coveted, and could once get,--with green fields and clear skies to accompany it! But one must take such as can be had,--and thank the gods. Even so, my friend. In the course of about a year of that garret sanctuary, I hope to have swept away much litter from my existence: in fact I am already, by dint of mere obstinate quiescence in such circumstances as there are, intrinsically growing fairly sounder in nerves. What a business a poor human being has with those nerves of his, with that crazy clay tabernacle of his! Enough, enough; there will be all Eternity to rest in, as Arnauld said: "Why in such a fuss, little sir?" You "apologize" for sending people to me: O you of little faith! Never dream of such a thing nay, whom _did_ you send? The Cincinnati Lecturer* I had provided for with Owen; they would have been glad to hear him, on the Cedar forests, on the pigs making rattlesnakes into bacon, and the general adipocere question, under any form, at the Albemarle Street rooms;--and he never came to hand. As for Miss Bacon, we find her, with her modest shy dignity, with her solid character and strange enterprise, a real acquisition; and hope we shall now see more of her, now that she has come nearer to us to lodge. I have not in my life seen anything so tragically _quixotic_ as her Shakespeare enterprise: alas, alas, there can be nothing but sorrow, toil, and utter disappointment in it for her! I do cheerfully what I can;--which is far more than she _asks_ of me (for I have not seen a prouder silent soul);--but there is not the least possibility of truth in the notion she has taken up: and the hope of ever proving it, or finding the least document that countenances it, is equal to that of vanquishing the windmills by stroke of lance. I am often truly sorry about the poor lady: but she troubles nobody with her difficulties, with her theories; she must try the matter to the end, and charitable souls must further her so far. --------- * Mr. O.M. Mitchell, the astronomer. --------- Clough is settled in his Office; gets familiarized to it rapidly (he says), and seems to be doing well. I see little of him hitherto; I did not, and will not, try to influence him in his choice of countries; but I think he is now likely to continue here, and here too he may do us some good. Of America, at least of New England, I can perceive he has brought away an altogether kindly, almost filial impression,--especially of a certain man who lives in that section of the Earth. More power to his elbow!--Thackeray has very rarely come athwart me since his return: he is a big fellow, soul and body; of many gifts and qualities (particularly in the Hogarth line, with a dash of Sterne superadded), of enormous _appetite_ withal, and very uncertain and chaotic in all points except his _outer breeding,_ which is fixed enough, and _perfect_ according to the modern English style. I rather dread explosions in his history. A _big,_ fierce, weeping, hungry man; not a strong one. _Ay de mi!_ But I must end, I must end. Your Letter awakened in me, while reading it, one mad notion. I said to myself: Well, if I live to finish this Frederic impossibility, or even to fling it fairly into the fire, why should not I go, in my old days, and see Concord, Yankeeland, and that man again, after all!--Adieu, dear friend; all good be with you and yours always. --T. Carlyle CLIV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 11 March, 1854 My Dear Carlyle,--The sight of Mr. Samuel Laurence, the day before yesterday, in New York, and of your head among his sketches, set me on thinking which had some pain where should be only cheer. For Mr. Laurence I hailed his arrival, on every account. I wish to see a good man whom you prize; and I like to have good Englishmen come to America, which, of all countries, after their own, has the best claim to them. He promises to come and see me, and has begun most propitiously in New York. For you,--I have too much constitutional regard and ---, not to feel remorse for my short-comings and slow-comings, and I remember the maxim which the French stole from our Indians,--and it was worth stealing,--"Let not the grass grow on the path of friendship." Ah! my brave giant, you can never understand the silence and forbearances of such as are not giants. To those to whom we owe affection, let us be dumb until we are strong, though we should never be strong. I hate mumped and measled lovers. I hate cramp in all men,--most in myself. And yet I should have been pushed to write without Samuel Laurence; for I lately looked into _Jesuitism,_ a Latter-Day Pamphlet, and found why you like those papers so well. I think you have cleared your skirts; it is a pretty good minority of one, enunciating with brilliant malice what shall be the universal opinion of the next edition of mankind. And the sanity was so manifest, that I felt that the over-gods had cleared their skirts also to this generation, in not leaving themselves without witness, though without this single voice perhaps I should not acquit them. Also I pardon the world that reads the book as though it read it not, when I see your inveterated humors. It required courage and required conditions that feuilletonists are not the persons to name or qualify, this writing Rabelais in 1850. And to do this alone.--You must even pitch your tune to suit yourself. We must let Arctic Navigators and deepsea divers wear what astonishing coats, and eat what meats--wheat or whale-- they like, without criticism. I read further, sidewise and backwards, in these pamphlets, without exhausting them. I have not ceased to think of the great warm heart that sends them forth, and which I, with others, sometimes tag with satire, and with not being warm enough for this poor world;--I too,--though I know its meltings to-me-ward. Then I learned that the newspapers had announced the death of your mother (which I heard of casually on the Rock River, Illinois), and that you and your brother John had been with her in Scotland. I remembered what you had once and again said of her to me, and your apprehensions of the event which has come. I can well believe you were grieved. The best son is not enough a son. My mother died in my house in November, who had lived with me all my life, and kept her heart and mind clear, and her own, until the end. It is very necessary that we should have mothers,--we that read and write,--to keep us from becoming paper. I had found that age did not make that she should die without causing me pain. In my journeying lately, when I think of home the heart is taken out. Miss Bacon wrote me in joyful fulness of the cordial kindness and aid she had found at your hands, and at your wife's; and I have never thanked you, and much less acknowledged her copious letter,--copious with desired details. Clough, too, wrote about you, and I have not written to him since his return to England. You will see how total is my ossification. Meantime I have nothing to tell you that can explain this mild palsy. I worked for a time on my English Notes with a view of printing, but was forced to leave them to go read some lectures in Philadelphia and some Western towns. I went out Northwest to great countries which I had not visited before; rode one day, fault of broken railroads, in a sleigh, sixty-five miles through the snow, by Lake Michigan, (seeing how prairies and oak-openings look in winter,) to reach Milwaukee; "the world there was done up in large lots," as a settler told me. The farmer, as he is now a colonist and has drawn from his local necessities great doses of energy, is interesting, and makes the heroic age for Wisconsin. He lives on venison and quails. I was made much of, as the only man of the pen within five hundred miles, and by rarity worth more than venison and quails. Greeley of the _New York Tribune_ is the right spiritual father of all this region; he prints and disperses one hundred and ten thousand newspapers in one day,--multitudes of them in these very parts. He had preceded me, by a few days, and people had flocked together, coming thirty and forty miles to hear him speak; as was right, for he does all their thinking and theory for them, for two dollars a year. Other than Colonists, I saw no man. "There are no singing birds in the prairie," I truly heard. All the life of the land and water had distilled no thought. Younger and better, I had no doubt been tormented to read and speak their sense for them. Now I only gazed at them and their boundless land. One good word closed your letter in September, which ought to have had an instant reply, namely, that you might come westward when Frederic was disposed of. Speed Frederic, then, for all reasons and for this! America is growing furiously, town and state; new Kansas, new Nebraska looming up in these days, vicious politicians seething a wretched destiny for them already at Washington. The politicians shall be sodden, the States escape, please God! The fight of slave and freeman drawing nearer, the question is sharply, whether slavery or whether freedom shall be abolished. Come and see. Wealth, which is always interesting, for from wealth power refuses to be divorced, is on a new scale. Californian quartz mountains dumped down in New York to be repiled architecturally along shore from Canada to Cuba, and thence west to California again. John Bull interests you at home, and is all your subject. Come and see the Jonathanization of John. What, you scorn all this? Well, then, come and see a few good people, impossible to be seen on any other shore, who heartily and always greet you. There is a very serious welcome for you here. And I too shall wake from sleep. My wife entreats that an invitation shall go from her to you. Faithfully yours, R.W. Emerson CLV. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 8 April, 1854 Dear Emerson,--It was a morning not like any other which lay round it, a morning to be marked white, that one, about a week ago, when your Letter came to me; a word from you yet again, after so long a silence! On the whole, I perceive you will not utterly give up answering me, but will rouse yourself now and then to a word of human brotherhood on my behalf, so long as we both continue in this Planet. And I declare, the Heavens will reward you; and as to me, I will be thankful for what I get, and submissive to delays and to all things: all things are good compared with flat want in that respect. It remains true, and will remain, what I have often told you, that properly there is no voice in this world which is completely human to me, which fully understands all I say and with clear sympathy and sense answers to me, but your voice only. That is a curious fact, and not quite a joyful one to me. The solitude, the silence of my poor soul, in the centre of this roaring whirlpool called Universe, is great, always, and sometimes strange and almost awful. I have two million talking bipeds without feathers, close at my elbow, too; and of these it is often hard for me to say whether the so-called "wise" or the almost professedly foolish are the more inexpressibly unproductive to me. "Silence, Silence!" I often say to myself: "Be silent, thou poor fool; and prepare for that Divine Silence which is now not far!"--On the whole, write to me whenever you can; and be not weary of well-doing. I have had sad things to do and see since I wrote to you: the loss of my dear and good old Mother, which could not be spared me forever, has come more like a kind of total bankruptcy upon me than might have been expected, considering her age and mine. Oh those last two days, that last Christmas Sunday! She was a true, pious, brave, and noble Mother to me; and it is now all over; and the Past has all become pale and sad and sacred;--and the all-devouring potency of Death, what we call Death, has never looked so strange, cruel and unspeakable to me. Nay not _cruel_ altogether, let me say: huge, profound, _unspeakable,_ that is the word.--You too have lost your good old Mother, who stayed with you like mine, clear to the last: alas, alas, it is the oldest Law of Nature; and it comes on every one of us with a strange originality, as if it had never happened before.-- Forward, however; and no more lamenting; no more than cannot be helped. "Paradise is under the shadow of our swords," said the Emir: "Forward!"-- I make no way in my Prussian History; I bore and dig toilsomely through the unutterablest mass of dead rubbish, which is not even English, which is German and inhuman; and hardly from ten tons of learned inanity is there to be riddled one old rusty nail. For I have been back as far as Pytheas who, first of speaking creatures, beheld the Teutonic Countries; and have questioned all manner of extinct German shadows,--who answer nothing but mumblings. And on the whole Fritz himself is not sufficiently divine to me, far from it; and I am getting old, and heavy of heart;--and in short, it oftenest seems to me I shall never write any word about that matter; and have again fairly got into the element of the IMPOSSIBLE. Very well: could I help it? I can at least be honestly silent; and "bear my indigence with dignity," as you once said. The insuperable difficulty of _Frederic_ is, that he, the genuine little ray of Veritable and Eternal that was in him, lay imbedded in the putrid Eighteenth Century, such an Ocean of sordid nothingness, shams, and scandalous hypocrisies, as never weltered in the world before; and that in everything I can find yet written or recorded of him, he still, to all intents and purposes, most tragically _lies_ THERE;--and ought not to lie there, if any use is ever to be had of him, or at least of _writing_ about him; for as to him, he with his work is safe enough to us, far elsewhere.--Pity me, pity me; I know not on what hand to turn; and have such a Chaos filling all my Earth and Heaven as was seldom seen in British or Foreign Literature! Add to which, the Sacred Entity, Literature itself, is not growing more venerable to me, but less and ever less: good Heavens, I feel often as if there were no madder set of bladders tumbling on the billows of the general Bedlam at this moment than even the Literary ones,--dear at twopence a gross, I should say, unless one could _annihilate_ them by purchase on those easy terms! But do not tell this in Gath; let it be a sad family secret. I smile, with a kind of grave joy, over your American speculations, and wild dashing portraitures of things as they are with you; and recognize well, under your light caricature, the outlines of a right true picture, which has often made me sad and grim in late years. Yes, I consider that the "Battle of Freedom and Slavery" is very far from ended; and that the fate of poor "Freedom" in the quarrel is very questionable indeed! Alas, there is but one _Slavery,_ as I wrote somewhere; and that, I think, is mounting towards a height, which may bring strokes to bear upon it again! Meanwhile, patience; for us there is nothing else appointed.--Tell me, however, what has become of your Book on England? We shall really be obliged to you for that. A piece of it went through all the Newspapers, some years ago; which was really unique for its quaint kindly insight, humor, and other qualities; like an etching by Hollar or Durer, amid the continents of vile smearing which are called "pictures" at present. Come on, Come on; give us the Book, and don't loiter!-- Miss Bacon has fled away to _St. Alban's_ (the _Great_ Bacon's place) five or six months ago; and is there working out her Shakespeare Problem, from the depths of her own mind, disdainful apparently, or desperate and careless, of all _evidence_ from Museums or Archives; I have not had an answer from her since before Christmas, and have now lost her address. Poor Lady: I sometimes silently wish she were safe home again; for truly there can no madder enterprise than her present one be well figured. Adieu, my Friend; I must stop short here. Write soon, if you have any charity. Good be with you ever. --T. Carlyle CLVI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 17 April, 1855 My Dear Friend,--On this delicious spring day, I will obey the beautiful voices of the winds, long disobeyed, and address you; nor cloud the hour by looking at the letters in my drawer to know if a twelvemonth has been allowed to elapse since this tardy writing was due. Mr. Everett sent me one day a letter he had received from you, containing a kind message to me, which gave me pleasure and pain. I returned the letter with thanks, and with promises I would sin no more. Instantly, I was whisked, by "the stormy wing of Fate," out of my chain, and whirled, like a dry leaf, through the State of New York. Now at home again, I read English Newspapers, with all the world, and claim an imaginary privilege over my compatriots, that I revolve therein my friend's large part. Ward said to me yesterday, that Carlyle's star was daily rising. For C. had said years ago, when all men thought him mad, that which the rest of mortals, including the Times Newspaper, have at last got near enough to see with eyes, and therefore to believe. And one day, in Philadelphia, you should have heard the wise young Philip Randolph defend you against objections of mine. But when I have such testimony, I say to myself, the high-seeing austerely exigent friend whom I elected, and who elected me, twenty years and more ago, finds me heavy and silent, when all the world elects and loves him. Yet I have not changed. I have the same pride in his genius, the same sympathy with the Genius that governs his, the old love with the old limitations, though love and limitation be all untold. And I see well what a piece of Providence he is, how material he is to the times, which must always have a solo Soprano to balance the roar of the Orchestra. The solo sings the theme; the orchestra roars antagonistically but follows.--And have I not put him into my Chapter of "English Spiritual Tendencies," with all thankfulness to the Eternal Creator,--though the chapter lie unborn in a trunk? 'T is fine for us to excuse ourselves, and patch with promises. We shall do as before, and science is a fatalist. I follow, I find, the fortunes of my Country, in my privatest ways. An American is pioneer and man of all work, and reads up his newspaper on Saturday night, as farmers and foresters do. We admire the [Greek], and mean to give our boys the grand habit; but we only sketch what they may do. No leisure except for the strong, the nimble have none.--I ought to tell you what I do, or I ought to have to tell you what I have done. But what can I? the same concession to the levity of the times, the noise of America comes again. I have even run on wrong topics for my parsimonious Muse, and waste my time from my true studies. England I see as a roaring volcano of Fate, which threatens to roast or smother the poor literary Plinys that come too near for mere purpose of reporting. I have even fancied you did me a harm by the valued gift of Antony Wood;--which, and the like of which, I take a lotophagous pleasure in eating. Yet this is measuring after appearance, measuring on hours and days; the true measure is quite other, for life takes its color and quality not from the days, but the dawns. The lucid intervals are like drowning men's moments, equivalent to the foregoing years. Besides, Nature uses us. We live but little for ourselves, a good deal for our children, and strangers. Each man is one more lump of clay to hold the world together. It is in the power of the Spirit meantime to make him rich reprisals,--which he confides will somewhere be done.--Ah, my friend, you have better things to send me word of, than these musings of indolence. Is Frederic recreated? Is Frederic the Great? Forget my short-comings and write to me. Miss Bacon sends me word, again and again, of your goodness. Against hope and sight she must be making a remarkable book. I have a letter from her, a few days ago, written in perfect assurance of success! Kindest remembrances to your wife and to your brother. Yours faithfully, R.W. Emerson CLVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 18 May, 1855 Dear Emerson,--Last Sunday, Clough was here; and we were speaking about you, (much to your discredit, you need not doubt,) and how stingy in the way of Letters you were grown; when, next morning, your Letter itself made its appearance. Thanks, thanks. You know not in the least, I perceive, nor can be made to understand at all, how indispensable your Letters are to me. How you are, and have for a long time been, the one of all the sons of Adam who, I felt, completely understood what I was saying; and answered with a truly _human_ voice,--inexpressibly consolatory to a poor man, in his lonesome pilgrimage, towards the evening of the day! So many voices are not human; but more or less bovine, porcine, canine; and one's soul dies away in sorrow in the sound of them, and is reduced to a dialogue with the "Silences," which is of a very abstruse nature!--Well, whether you write to me or not, I reserve to myself the privilege of writing to you, so long as we both continue in this world! As the beneficent Presences vanish from me, one after the other, those that remain are the more precious, and I will not part with them, not with the chief of them, beyond all. This last year has been a grimmer lonelier one with me than any I can recollect for a long time. I did not go to the Country at all in summer or winter; refused even my Christmas at The Grange with the Ashburtons,--it was too sad an anniversary for me;--I have sat here in my garret, wriggling and wrestling on the worst terms with a Task that I cannot do, that generally seems to me not worth doing, and yet _must_ be _done._ These are truly the terms. I never had such a business in my life before. Frederick himself is a pretty little man to me, veracious, courageous, invincible in his small sphere; but he does not rise into the empyrean regions, or kindle my heart round him at all; and his history, upon which there are wagon-loads of dull bad books, is the most dislocated, unmanageably incoherent, altogether dusty, barren and beggarly production of the modern Muses as given hitherto. No man of _genius_ ever saw him with eyes, except twice Mirabeau, for half an hour each time. And the wretched Books have no _indexes,_ no precision of detail; and I am far away from Berlin and the seat of information;--and, in brief, shall be beaten miserably with this unwise enterprise in my old days; _and_ (in fine) will consent to be so, and get through it if I can before I die. This of obstinacy is the one quality I still show; all my other qualities (hope, among them) often seem to have pretty much taken leave of me; but it is necessary to hold by this last. Pray for me; I will complain no more at present. General Washington gained the freedom of America-- chiefly by this respectable quality I talk of; nor can a history of Frederick be written, in Chelsea in the year 1855, except as _against_ hope, and by planting yourself upon it in an extremely dogged manner. We are all wool-gathering here, with wide eyes and astonished minds, at a singular rate, since you heard last from me! "Balaklava," I can perceive, is likely to be a substantive in the English language henceforth: it in truth expresses compendiously what an earnest mind will experience everywhere in English life; if his soul rise at all above cotton and scrip, a man has to pronounce it all a _Balaklava_ these many years. A Balaklava now _yielding,_ under the pressure of rains and unexpected transit of heavy wagons; champing itself down into mere mud-gulfs,--towards the bottomless Pool, if some flooring be not found. To me it is not intrinsically a new phenomenon, only an extremely hideous one. _Altum Silentium,_ what else can I reply to it at present? The Turk War, undertaken under pressure of the mere mobility, seemed to me an enterprise worthy of Bedlam from the first; and this method of carrying it on, _without_ any general, or with a mere sash and cocked-hat for one, is of the same block of stuff. _Ach Gott!_ Is not Anarchy, and parliamentary eloquence instead of work, continued for half a century everywhere, a beautiful piece of business? We are in alliance with Louis Napoleon (a gentleman who has shown only _housebreaker_ qualities hitherto, and is required now to show heroic ones, _or_ go to the Devil); and under Marechal Saint-Arnaud (who was once a dancing-master in this city, and continued a _thief_ in all cities), a Commander of the Playactor-Pirate description, resembling a _General_ as Alexander Dumas does Dante Alighieri,--we have got into a very strange problem indeed!--But there is something almost grand in the stubborn thickside patience and persistence of this English People; and I do not question but they will work themselves through in one fashion or another; nay probably, get a great deal of benefit out of this astonishing slap on the nose to their self-complacency before all the world. They have not _done_ yet, I calculate, by any manner of means: they are, however, admonished in an ignominious and convincing manner, amid the laughter of nations, that they are altogether on the wrong road this great while (two hundred years, as I have been calculating often),--and I shudder to think of the plunging and struggle they will have to get into the approximately right one again. Pray for them also, poor stupid overfed heavy-laden souls!--Before my paper quite end, I must in my own name, and that of a select company of others, inquire rigorously of R.W.E. why he does not _give_ us that little Book on England he has promised so long? I am very serious in saying, I myself want much to see it;--and that I can see no reason why we all should not, without delay. Bring it out, I say, and print it, _tale quale._ You will never get it in the least like what _you_ wish it, clearly no! But I venture to warrant, it is good enough,--far too good for the readers that are to get it. Such a pack of blockheads, and disloyal and bewildered unfortunates who know not their right hand from their left, as fill me with astonishment, and are more and more forfeiting all respect from me. Publish the Book, I say; let us have it and so have done! Adieu, my dear friend, for this time. I had a thousand things more to write, but have wasted my sheet, and must end. I will take another before long, whatever you do. In my lonely thoughts you are never long absent: _Valete_ all of you at Concord! --T. Carlyle CLVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 6 May, 1856 Dear Carlyle,--There is no escape from the forces of time and life, and we do not write letters to the gods or to our friends, but only to attorneys, landlords, and tenants. But the planes and platforms on which all stand remain the same, and we are ever expecting the descent of the heavens, which is to put us into familiarity with the first named. When I ceased to write to you for a long time, I said to myself,--If anything really good should happen here,--any stroke of good sense or virtue in our politics, or of great sense in a book,--I will send it on the instant to the formidable man; but I will not repeat to him every month, that there are no news. Thank me for my resolution, and for keeping it through the long night.--One book, last summer, came out in New York, a nondescript monster which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American,--which I thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with the few to whom I showed it, and wanted good morals so much, that I never did. Yet I believe now again, I shall. It is called _Leaves of Grass,_--was written and printed by a journeyman printer in Brooklyn, New York, named Walter Whitman; and after you have looked into it, if you think, as you may, that it is only an auctioneer's inventory of a warehouse, you can light your pipe with it. By tomorrow's steamer goes Mrs. --- to Liverpool, and to Switzerland and Germany, by the advice of physicians, and I cannot let her go without praying you to drop your pen, and shut up German history for an hour, and extend your walk to her chambers, wherever they may be. _There's_ a piece of republicanism for you to see and hear! That person was, ten or fifteen years ago, the loveliest of women, and her speech and manners may still give you some report of the same. She has always lived with good people, and in her position is a centre of what is called good society, wherein her large heart makes a certain glory and refinement. She is one of nature's ladies, and when I hear her tell I know not what stories of her friends, or her children, or her pensioners, I find a pathetic eloquence which I know not where to match. But I suppose you shall never hear it. Every American is a little displaced in London, and, no doubt, her company has grown to her. Her husband is a banker connected in business with your ---, and is a man of elegant genius and tastes, and his house is a resort for fine people. Thorwaldsen distinguished Mrs. --- in Rome, formerly, by his attentions. Powers the sculptor made an admirable bust of her; Clough and Thackeray will tell you of her. Jenny Lind, like the rest, was captivated by her, and was married at her house. Is not Henry James in London? he knows her well. If Tennyson comes to London, whilst she is there, he should see her for his "Lays of Good Women." Now please to read these things to the wise and kind ears of Jane Carlyle, and ask her if I have done wrong in giving my friend a letter to her? I could not ask more than that each of those ladies might appear to the other what each has appeared to me. I saw Thackeray, in the winter, and he said he would come and see me here, in April or May; but he is still, I believe, in the South and West. Do not believe me for my reticency less hungry for letters. I grieve at the want and loss, and am about writing again, that I may hear from you. Ever affectionately yours, R.W. Emerson CLIX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 20 July, 1856 Dear Emerson;--Welcome was your Letter to me, after the long interval; as welcome as any human Letter could now well be. These many months and years I have been sunk in what disastrous vortexes of foreign wreck you know, till I am fallen sick and almost broken-hearted, and my life (if it were not this one interest, of doing a problem which I see to be impossible, and of smallish value if found doable!) is burdensome and without meaning to me. It is so rarely I hear the voice of a magnanimous Brother Man addressing any word to me: ninety-nine hundredths of the Letters I get are impertinent clutchings of me by the button, concerning which the one business is, How to get handsomely loose again; What to say that shall soonest _end_ the intrusion,--if saying Nothing will not be the best way. Which last I often in my sorrow have recourse to, at what ever known risks. "We must pay our tribute to Time": ah yes, yes;--and yet I will believe, so long as we continue together in this sphere of things there will always be a _potential_ Letter coming out of New England for me, and the world not fallen irretrievably dumb.--The best is, I am about going into Scotland, in two days, into deep solitude, for a couple of months beside the Solway sea: I absolutely need to have the dust blown out of me, and my mad nerves rested (there is nothing else quite gone wrong): this unblest _Life of Frederick_ is now actually to get along into the Printer's hand; --a good Book being impossible upon it, there shall a bad one be done, and one's poor existence rid of it:--for which great object two months of voluntary torpor are considered the fair preliminary. In another year's time, (if the Fates allow me to live,) I expect to have got a great deal of rubbish swept into chaos again. Unlucky it should ever have been dug up, much of it!-- Your Mrs. --- should have had our best welcome, for the sake of him who sent her, had there been nothing more: but the Lady never showed face at all; nor could I for a long time get any trace--and then it was a most faint and distant one as if by _double_ reflex--of her whereabout: too distant, too difficult for me, who do not make a call once in the six months lately. I did mean to go in quest (never had an _address_); but had not yet rallied for the Enterprise, when Mrs. --- herself wrote that she had been unwell, that she was going directly for Paris, and would see us on her return. So be it:--pray only I may not be absent next! I have not seen or distinctly heard of Miss Bacon for a year and half past: I often ask myself, what has become of that poor Lady, and wish I knew of her being safe among her friends again. I have even lost the address (which at any rate was probably not a lasting one); perhaps I could find it by the eye,--but it is five miles away; and my _non-plus-ultra_ for years past is not above half that distance. Heigho! My time is all up and more; and Chaos come again is lying round me, in the shape of "packing," in a thousand shapes!--Browning is coming tonight to take leave. Do you know Browning at all? He is abstruse, but worth knowing.--And what of the _Discourse on England_ by a certain man? Shame! We always hear of it again as "out"; and it continues obstinately _in._ Adieu, my friend. Ever yours, T. Carlyle CLX. Carlyle to Emerson The Gill, Cummertrees, Annan, N.B. 28 August, 1856 Dear Emerson,--Your Letter alighted here yesterday;* like a winged Mercury, bringing "airs from Heaven" (in a sense) along with his news. I understand very well your indisposition to write; we must conform to it, as to the law of _Chronos_ (oldest of the gods); but I will murmur always, "It is such a pity as of almost no other man!"--You are citizen of a "Republic," and perhaps fancy yourself republican in an eminent degree: nevertheless I have remarked there is no man of whom I am so certain always to get something _kingly:_--and whenever your huge inarticulate America gets settled into _kingdoms,_ of the New Model, fit for these Ages which are all upon the _Moult_ just now, and dreadfully like going to the Devil in the interim,--then will America, and all nations through her, owe the man Emerson a _debt,_ far greater than either they or he are in the least aware of at present! That I consider (for myself) to be an ascertained fact. For which I myself at least am thankful and have long been. --------- * It is missing now. --------- It pleases me much to know that this English [book], so long twinkling in our expectations and always drawn back again, is at last verily to appear: I wish I could get hold of my copy: there is no Book that would suit me better just now. But we must wait for four weeks till we get back to Chelsea,--unless I call find some trusty hand to extract it from the rubbish that will have accumulated there, and forward it by post. You speak as if there were something dreadful said of my own sacred self in that Book: Courage, my Friend, it will be a most miraculous occurrence to meet with anything said by you that does me _ill;_ whether the immediate taste of it be sweet or bitter, I will take it with gratitude, you may depend,--nay even with pleasure, what perhaps is still more incredible. But an old man deluged for half a century with the brutally nonsensical vocables of his fellow-creatures (which he grows to regard soon as _rain,_ "rain of frogs" or the like, and lifts his umbrella against with indifference),--such an old gentleman, I assure you, is grateful for a word that he can recognize perennial sense in; as in this case is his sure hope. And so be the little Book thrice welcome; and let all England understand (as some choice portion of England will) that there has not been a man talking about us these very many years whose words are worth the least attention in comparison. "Post passing!" I must end, in mid-course; so much still untouched upon. Thanks for Sampson & Co., and let them go their course upon me. If I can see Mrs. --- about the end of September or after, I shall be right glad:--but I fear she will have fled before that?-- I am here in my native Country, riding, seabathing, living on country diet,--uttering no word,--now into the fifth week; have had such a "retreat" as no La Trappe hardly could have offered me. A "retreat" _without cilices,_ thistle-mattresses; and with _silent_ devotions (if any) instead of blockhead spoken ones to the Virgin and others! There is still an Excursion to the Highlands ahead, which cannot be avoided;--then home again to _peine forte et dure._ Good be with you always, dear friend. --T. Carlyle CLXI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 2 December, 1856 Dear Emerson,--I am really grieved to have hurt the feelings of Mr. Phillips;* a gentleman to whom I, on my side, had no feelings but those of respect and good will! I pray you smooth him down again, by all wise methods, into at least good-natured indifference to me. He may depend upon it I could not mean to irritate him; there lay no gain for me in that! Nor is there anything of business left now between us. It is doubly and trebly evident those Stereotype Plates are not to him worth their prime cost here, still less, their prime cost plus any vestige of definite motive for me to concern myself in them:--whereupon the Project falls on its face, and vanishes forever, with apologies all round. For as to that other method, that is a game I never thought, and never should think of playing at! You may also tell him this little Biographical fact, if you think it will any way help. Some ten or more years ago, I made a similar Bargain with a New York House (known to you, and now I believe extinct): "10" or something "percent," of selling price on the Copies Printed, was to be my return--not for four or five hundred pounds money laid out, but for various things I did, which gratis would by no means have been done; in fine, it was their own Offer, made and accepted in due form; "10 percent on the copies printed." --------- * This refers to a proposed arrangement, which fell through, for the publication in America by Messrs. Phillips and Sampson, of Boston, of a complete edition of Carlyle's works, to be printed from the stereotype plates of the English edition then in course of issue by Messrs. Chapman and Hall. --------- And how many were "printed," thinks Mr. Phillips? I saw one set; dreadfully ugly Books, errors in every page;--and to this hour I have never heard of any other! The amount remains zero net; and it would appear there was simply one copy "printed," the ugly one sent to myself, which I instantly despatched again somewhither! On second thought perhaps you had better _not_ tell Mr. Phillips this story, at least not in this way. _His_ integrity I would not even question by insinuation, nor need I, at the point where we now are. I perceive he sees in extraordinary brilliancy of illumination his own side of the bargain; and thinks me ignorant of several things which I am well enough informed about. In brief, make a perfect peace between us, O friend, and man of peace; and let the wampums be all wrapped up, and especially the tomahawks entirely buried, and the thing end forever! To you also I owe apologies; but not to you do I pay them, knowing from of old what you are to me. Enough, enough! I got your Book by post in the Highlands; and had such a day over it as falls rarely to my lot! Not for seven years and more have I got hold of such a Book;--Book by a real man, with eyes in his head; nobleness, wisdom, humor, and many other things, in the heart of him. Such Books do not turn up often in the decade, in the century. In fact I believe it to be worth all the Books ever written by New England upon Old. Franklin might have written such a thing (in his own way); no other since! We do very well with it here, and the wise part of us _best._ That Chapter on the Church is inimitable; "the Bishop asking a troublesome gentleman to take wine,"--you should see the kind of grin it awakens here on our best kind of faces. Excellent the manner of that, and the matter too dreadfully _true_ in every part. I do not much seize your idea in regard to "Literature," though I do details of it, and will try again. Glad of that too, even in its half state; not "sorry" at _any_ part of it,--you Sceptic! On the whole, write _again,_ and ever again at greater length: there lies your only fault to me. And yet I know, that also is a right noble one, and rare in our day. O my friend, save always for me some corner in your memory; I am very lonely in these months and years,--sunk to the centre of the Earth, like to be throttled by the Pythons and Mudgods in my old days;--but shall get out again, too; and be a better boy! No "hurry" equals mine, and it is in permanence. Yours ever, T. Carlyle CLXII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 17 May, 1858 My Dear Carlyle,--I see no way for you to avoid the Americans but to come to America. For, first or last, we are all embarking, and all steering straight to your door. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Longworth of Cincinnati are going abroad on their travels. Possibly, the name is not quite unknown to you. Their father, Nicholas Longworth, is one of the founders of the city of Cincinnati, a bigger town than Boston, where he is a huge land lord and planter, and patron of sculptors and painters. And his family are most favorably known to all dwellers and strangers, in the Ohio Valley, as people who have well used their great wealth. His chief merit is to have introduced a systematic culture of the wine-grape and wine manufacture, by the importing and settlement of German planters in that region, and the trade is thriving to the general benefit. His son Joseph is a well-bred gentleman of literary tastes, whose position and good heart make him largely hospitable. His wife is a very attractive and excellent woman, and they are good friends of mine. It seems I have at some former time told her that, when she went to England, she should see you. And they are going abroad, soon, for the first time. If you are in London, you must be seen of them. But I hailed even this need of taxing once more your often taxed courtesy, as a means to break up my long contumacy to-you-ward. Please let not the wires be rusted out, so that we cannot weld them again, and let me feel the subtle fluid streaming strong. Tell me what is become of _Frederic,_ for whose appearance I have watched every week for months? I am better ready for him, since one or two books about Voltaire, Maupertuis, and company, fell in my way. Yet that book will not come which I most wish to read, namely, the culled results, the quintessence of private conviction, a _liber veritatis,_ a few sentences, hints of the final moral you drew from so much penetrating inquest into past and present men. All writing is necessitated to be exoteric, and written to a human should instead of to the terrible is. And I say this to you, because you are the truest and bravest of writers. Every writer is a skater, who must go partly where he would, and partly, where the skates carry him; or a sailor, who can only land where sails can be safely blown. The variations to be allowed for in the surveyor's compass are nothing like so large as those that must be allowed for in every book. And a friendship of old gentlemen who have got rid of many illusions, survived their ambition, and blushes, and passion for euphony, and surface harmonies, and tenderness for their accidental literary stores, but have kept all their curiosity and awe touching the problems of man and fate and the Cause of causes,--a friendship of old gentlemen of this fortune is looking more comely and profitable than anything I have read of love. Such a dream flatters my incapacities for conversation, for we can all play at monosyllables, who cannot attempt the gay pictorial panoramic styles. So, if ever I hear that you have betrayed the first symptom of age, that your back is bent a twentieth of an inch from the perpendicular, I shall hasten to believe you are shearing your prodigal overgrowths, and are calling in your troops to the citadel, and I may come in the first steamer to drop in of evenings and hear the central monosyllables. Be good now again, and send me quickly--though it be the shortest autograph certificate of....* -------- * The end of this letter is lost. -------- CLXIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 2 June, 1858 Dear Emerson,--Glad indeed I am to hear of you on any terms, on any subject. For the last eighteen months I have pretty much ceased all human correspondence,--writing no Note that was not in a sense wrung from me; my one society the _Nightmares_ (Prussian and other) all that while:--but often and often the image of you, and the thoughts of old days between us, has risen sad upon me; and I have waited to get loose from the Nightmares to appeal to you again,--to edacious Time and you. Most likely in a couple of weeks you would have heard from me again at any rate.--Your friends shall be welcome to me; no friend of yours can be other at any time. Nor in fact did anybody ever sent by you prove other than pleasant in this house, so pray no apologies on that small score.--If only these Cincinnati Patricians can find me here when they come? For I am off to the deepest solitudes discoverable (native Scotland probably) so soon as I can shake the final tag rags of Printer people off me;--"surely within three weeks now!" I say to myself. But I shall be back, too, if all prosper; and your Longworths will be back; and Madam will stand to her point, I hope. That book on Friedrich of Prussia--first half of it, two swoln unlovely volumes, which treat mainly of his Father, &c., and leave him at his accession--is just getting out of my hands. One packet more of Proofs, and I have done with it,--thanks to all the gods! No job approaching in ugliness to it was ever cut out for me; nor had I any motive to go on, except the sad negative one, "Shall we be beaten in our old days, then?"--But it has thoroughly humbled me,--trampled me down into the _mud,_ there to wrestle with the accumulated stupidities of Mankind, German, English, French, and other, for _all_ have borne a hand in these sad centuries;--and here I emerge at last, not _killed,_ but almost as good. Seek not to look at the Book,--nay in fact it is "not to be _published_ till September" (so the man of affairs settles with me yesterday, "owing to the political &c., to the season," &c.); my only stipulation was that in ten days I should be utterly out of it,--not to hear of it again till the Day of Judgment, and if possible not even then! In fact it is a bad book, poor, misshapen, feeble, _nearly_ worthless (thanks to _past_ generations and to me); and my one excuse is, I could not make it better, all the world having played such a game with it. Well, well!--How true is that you say about the skater; and the rider too depending on his vehicles, on his roads, on his et ceteras! Dismally true have I a thousand times felt it, in these late operations; never in any so much. And in short the business of writing has altogether become contemptible to me; and I am become confirmed in the notion that nobody ought to write,--unless sheer Fate force him to do it;--and then he ought (if _not_ of the mountebank genus) to beg to be shot rather. That is deliberately my opinion,--or far nearer it than you will believe. Once or twice I caught some tone of you in some American Magazine; utterances highly noteworthy to me; in a sense, the only thing that is _speech_ at all among my fellow-creatures in this time. For the years that remain, I suppose we must continue to grumble out some occasional utterance of that kind: what can we do, at this late stage? But in the _real_ "Model Republic," it would have been different with two good boys of this kind!-- Though shattered and trampled down to an immense degree, I do not think any bones are broken yet,--though age truly is here, and you may engage your berth in the steamer whenever you like. In a few months I expect to be sensibly improved; but my poor Wife suffers sadly the last two winters; and I am much distressed by that item of our affairs. Adieu, dear Emerson: I have lost many things; let me not lose you till I must in some way! Yours ever, T. Carlyle P.S. If you read the Newspapers (which I carefully abstain from doing) they will babble to you about Dickens's "Separation from Wife," &c., &c.; fact of Separation I believe is true; but all the rest is mere lies and nonsense. No crime or misdemeanor specifiable on either side; _unhappy_ together, these good many years past, and they at length end it.--Sulzer said, "Men are by nature _good._" "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer, Er kennt nicht diese verdammte Race," ejaculated Fritz, at hearing such an axiom. CLXIII.* Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 9 April, 1859 Dear Emerson,--Long months ago there was sent off for you a copy of _Friedrich_ of Prussia, two big red volumes (for which Chapman the Publisher had found some "safe, swift" vehicle); and _now_ I have reason to fear they are still loitering somewhere, or at least have long loitered sorrow on them! This is to say: If you have not _yet_ got them, address a line to "Saml. F. Flower, Esq, Librarian of Antiquarian Society, _Worcester,_ Mass." (forty miles from you, they say), and that will at once bring them. In the Devil's name! I never in my life was so near choked; swimming in this mother of Dead Dogs, and a long spell of it still ahead! I profoundly _pity myself_ (if no one else does). You shall hear of me again if I survive,--but really that is getting beyond a joke with me, and I ought to hold my peace (even to you), and swim what I can. Your little touch of Human Speech on _Burns'_* was charming; had got into the papers here (and been clipt out by me) before your copy came, and has gone far and wide since. Newberg was to give it me in German, from the _Allgemeine Zeitung,_ but lost the leaf. Adieu, my Friend; very dear to me, tho' dumb. --T. Carlyle (in such haste as seldom was).** --------- * Emerson's fine speech was made at the celebration of the Burns Centenary, Boston, January 25, 1859. See his _Miscellanies_ (Works, vol. xi.), p. 363. ** The preceding letter was discovered in 1893, in a little package of letters put aside by Mr. Emerson and marked "Autographs." --------- CLXIV. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, 1 May, 1859 Dear Carlyle,--Some three weeks ago came to me a note from Mr. Haven of Worcester, announcing the arrival there of "King Friedrich," and, after a fortnight, the good book came to my door. A week later, your letter arrived. I was heartily glad to get the crimson Book itself. I had looked for it with the first ships. As it came not, I had made up my mind to that hap also. It was quite fair: I had disentitled myself. He, the true friend, had every right to punish me for my sluggish contumacy,-- backsliding, too, after penitence. So I read with resignation our blue American reprint, and I enclose to you a leaf from my journal at the time, which leaf I read afterwards in one of my lectures at the Music Hall in Boston. But the book came from the man himself. He did not punish me. He is loyal, but royal as well, and, I have always noted, has a whim for dealing _en grand monarque._ The book came, with its irresistible inscription, so that I am all tenderness and all but tears. The book too is sovereignly written. I think you the true inventor of the stereoscope, as having exhibited that art in style, long before we had heard of it in drawing. ------- * This letter and the Extract from the Diary are printed from a copy of the original supplied to me by the kindness of Mr. Alexander Ireland, who first printed a portion of the letter in his "Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Biographical Sketch," London, 1882. One or two words missing in the copy are inserted from the rough draft, which, as usual, varies in minor points from the letter as sent. -------- The letter came also. Every child of mine knows from far that handwriting, and brings it home with speed. I read without alarm the pathetical hints of your sad plight in the German labyrinth. I know too well what invitations and assurance brought you in there, to fear any lack of guides to bring you out. More presence of mind and easy change from the microscopic to the telescopic view does not exist. I await peacefully your issue from your pretended afflictions. What to tell you of my coop and byre? Ah! you are a very poor fellow, and must be left with your glory. You hug yourself on missing the illusion of children, and must be pitied as having one glittering toy the less. I am a victim all my days to certain graces of form and behavior, and can never come into equilibrium. Now I am fooled by my own young people, and grow old contented. The heedless children suddenly take the keenest hold on life, and foolish papas cling to the world on their account, as never on their own. Out of sympathy, we _make believe_ to value the prizes of their ambition and hope. My, two girls, pupils once or now of Agassiz, are good, healthy, apprehensive, decided young people, who love life. My boy divides his time between Cicero and cricket, knows his boat, the birds, and Walter Scott--verse and prose, through and through,-- and will go to College next year. Sam Ward and I tickled each other the other day, in looking over a very good company of young people, by finding in the new comers a marked improvement on their parents. There, I flatter myself, I see some emerging of our people from the prison of their politics. The insolvency of slavery shows and stares, and we shall perhaps live to see that putrid Black-vomit extirpated by mere dying and planting. I am so glad to find myself speaking once more to you, that I mean to persist in the practice. Be as glad as you have been. You and I shall not know each other on this platform as long as we have known. A correspondence even of twenty-five years should not be disused unless through some fatal event. Life is too short, and, with all our poetry and morals, too indigent to allow such sacrifices. Eyes so old and wary, and which have learned to look on so much, are gathering an hourly harvest,--and I cannot spare what on noble terms is offered me. With congratulations to Jane Carlyle on the grandeur of the Book, Yours affectionately, R.W. Emerson Extract From Diary* Here has come into the country, three or four months ago, a _History of Frederick,_ infinitely the wittiest book that ever was written,--a book that one would think the English people would rise up in mass and thank the author for, by cordial acclamation, and signify, by crowning him with oakleaves, their joy that such a head existed among them, and sympathizing and much-reading America would make a new treaty or send a Minister Extraordinary to offer congratulation of honoring delight to England, in acknowledgment of this donation,--a book holding so many memorable and heroic facts, working directly on practice; with new heroes, things unvoiced before;--the German Plutarch (now that we have exhausted the Greek and Roman and British Plutarchs), with a range, too, of thought and wisdom so large and so elastic, not so much applying as inosculating to every need and sensibility of man, that we do not read a stereotype page, rather we see the eyes of the writer looking into ours, mark his behavior, humming, chuckling, with under-tones and trumpet-tones and shrugs, and long-commanding glances, stereoscoping every figure that passes, and every hill, river, road, hummock, and pebble in the long perspective. With its wonderful new system of mnemonics, whereby great and insignificant men are ineffaceably ticketed and marked and modeled in memory by what they were, had, and did; and withal a book that is a Judgment Day, for its moral verdict on the men and nations and manners of modern times. --------- * In the first edition, this extract was printed from the original Diary; it is now printed according to the copy sent abroad. -------- And this book makes no noise; I have hardly seen a notice of it in any newspaper or journal, and you would think there was no such book. I am not aware that Mr. Buchanan has sent a special messenger to Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea, or that Mr. Dallas has been instructed to assure Mr. Carlyle of his distinguished consideration. But the secret wits and hearts of men take note of it, not the less surely. They have said nothing lately in praise of the air, or of fire, or of the blessing of love, and yet, I suppose, they are sensible of these, and not less of this book, which is like these. CLXV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 16 April, 1860 My Dear Carlyle,--Can booksellers break the seal which the gods do not, and put me in communication again with the loyalest of men? On the ground of Mr. Wight's honest proposal to give you a benefit from his edition,* I, though unwilling, allowed him to copy the Daguerre of your head. The publishers ask also some expression of your good will to their work.... -------- * Mr. O.W. Wight of New York, an upright "able editor," who, had just made arrangements for the publication of a very satisfactory edition of Carlyle's _Miscellaneous Essays._ -------- I commend you to the gods who love and uphold you, and who do not like to make their great gifts vain, but teach us that the best life-insurance is a great task. I hold you to be one of those to whom all is permitted, and who carry the laws in their hand. Continue to be good to your old friends. 'T is no matter whether they write to you or not. If not, they save your time. When _Friedrich_ is once despatched to gods and men, there was once some talk that you should come to America! You shall have an ovation such, and on such sincerity, as none have had. Ever affectionately yours, R.W. Emerson I do not know Mr. Wight, but he sends his open letter, which I fear is already old, for me to write in: and I will not keep it, lest it lose another steamer. CLXVI. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, London, 30 April, 1860 Dear Emerson,--It is a special favor of Heaven to me that I hear of you again by this accident; and am made to answer a word _de Profundis._ It is constantly among the fairest of the few hopes that remain for me on the other side of this Stygian Abyss of a _Friedrich_ (should I ever get through it alive) that I _shall then_ begin writing to you again, who knows if not see you in the body before quite taking wing! For I feel always, what I have some times written, that there is (in a sense) but one completely human voice to me in the world; and that you are it, and have been,--thanks to you, whether you speak or not! Let me say also, while I am at it, that the few words you sent me about those first Two volumes are present with me in the far more frightful darknesses of these last Two; and indeed are often almost my one encouragement. That is a fact, and not exaggerated, though you think it is. I read some criticisms of my wretched Book, and hundreds of others I in the gross refused to read; they were in praise, they were in blame; but not one of them looked into the eyes of the object, and in genuine human fashion responded to its human strivings, and recognized it,--completely right, though with generous exaggeration! That was well done, I can tell you: a human voice, far out in the waste deeps, among the inarticulate sea-krakens and obscene monsters, loud-roaring, inexpressibly ugly, dooming you as if to eternal solitude by way of wages,-- "hath exceeding much refreshment in it," as my friend Oliver used to say. Having not one spare moment at present, I will answer to _you_ only the whole contents of that letter; you in your charity will convey to Mr. Wight what portion belongs to him. Wight, if you have a chance of him, is worth knowing; a genuine bit of metal, too thin and ringing for my tastes (hammered, in fact, upon the Yankee anvils), but recognizably of steel and with a keen fire- edge. Pray signify to him that he has done a thing agreeable to me, and that it will be pleasant if I find it will not hurt _him._ Profit to me out of it, except to keep his own soul clear and sound (to his own sense, as it always will be to mine), is perfectly indifferent; and on the whole I thank him heartily for showing me a chivalrous human brother, instead of the usual vulturous, malodorous, and much avoidable phenomenon, in Transatlantic Bibliopoly! This is accurately true; and so far as his publisher and he can extract encouragement from this, in the face of vested interests which I cannot judge of, it is theirs without reserve.... Adieu, my friend; I have not written so much in the Letter way, not, I think, since you last heard of me. In my despair it often seems as if I should never write more; but be sunk here, and perish miserably in the most undoable, least worthy, most disgusting and heart breaking of all the labors I ever had. But perhaps also not, not quite. In which case-- Yours ever truly at any rate, T. Carlyle No time to re-read. I suppose you can decipher. CLXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 29 January, 1861 Dear Emerson,--The sight of my hand-writing will, I know, be welcome again. Though I literally do not write the smallest Note once in a month, or converse with anything but Prussian Nightmares of a hideous [nature], and with my Horse (who is human in comparison), and with my poor Wife (who is altogether human, and heroically cheerful to me, in her poor weak state),--I must use the five minutes, which have fallen to me today, in acknowledgment, _du_e by all laws terrestrial and celestial, of the last Book* that has come from you. -------- * "The Conduct of Life." -------- I read it a great while ago, mostly in sheets, and again read it in the finely printed form,--I can tell you, if you do not already guess, with a satisfaction given me by the Books of no other living mortal. I predicted to your English Bookseller a great sale even, reckoning it the best of all your Books. What the sale was or is I nowhere learned; but the basis of my prophecy remains like the rocks, and will remain. Indeed, except from my Brother John, I have heard no criticism that had much rationality,--some of them incredibly irrational (if that matter had not altogether become a barking of dogs among us);--but I always believe there are in the mute state a great number of thinking English souls, who can recognize a Thinker and a Sayer, of perennially human type and welcome him as the rarest of miracles, in "such a spread of knowledge" as there now is:--one English soul of that kind there indubitably is; and I certify hereby, notarially if you like, that such is emphatically his view of the matter. You have grown older, more pungent, piercing;--I never read from you before such lightning-gleams of meaning as are to be found here. The finale of all, that of "Illusions" falling on us like snow-showers, but again of "the gods sitting steadfast on their thrones" all the while,--what a _Fiat Lux_ is there, into the deeps of a philosophy, which the vulgar has not, which hardly three men living have, yet dreamt of! _Well done,_ I say; and so let that matter rest. I am still twelve months or so from the end of my Task; very uncertain often whether I can, even at this snail's pace, hold out so long. In my life I was never worn nearly so low, and seem to get _weaker_ monthly. Courage! If I do get through, you shall hear of me, again. Yours forever, T. Carlyle CLXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 16 April, 1861 My Dear Carlyle,--...I have to thank you for the cordial note which brought me joy, many weeks ago. It was noble and welcome in all but its boding account of yourself and your task. But I have had experience of your labors, and these deplorations I have long since learned to distrust. We have settled it in America, as I doubt not it is settled in England, that _Frederick_ is a history which a beneficent Providence is not very likely to interrupt. And may every kind and tender influence near you and over you keep the best head in England from all harm. Affectionately, R.W. Emerson CLXIX. Emerson to Carlyle* Concord, 8 December, 1862 My Dear Friend,--Long ago, as soon as swift steamers could bring the new book across the sea, I received the third volume of _Friedrich,_ with your autograph inscription, and read it with joy. Not a word went to the beloved author, for I do not write or think. I would wait perhaps for happier days, as our President Lincoln will not even emancipate slaves, until on the heels of a victory, or the semblance of such. But he waited in vain for his triumph, nor dare I in my heavy months expect bright days. The book was heartily grateful, and square to the author's imperial scale. You have lighted the glooms, and engineered away the pits, whereof you poetically pleased yourself with complaining, in your sometime letter to me, clean out of it, according to the high Italian rule, and have let sunshine and pure air enfold the scene. First, I read it honestly through for the history; then I pause and speculate on the Muse that inspires, and the friend that reports it. 'T is sovereignly written, above all literature, dictating to all mortals what they shall accept as fated and final for their salvation. It is Mankind's Bill of Rights and Duties, the royal proclamation of Intellect ascending the throne, announcing its good pleasure, that, hereafter, _as heretofore,_ and now once for all, the World shall be governed by Common Sense and law of Morals, or shall go to ruin. --------- * Portions of this and of the following letter of Emerson have been printed by Mr. Alexander Ireland in his "Ralph Waldo Emerson: Recollections of his Visits to England," &c. London, 1882. ---------- But the manner of it!--the author sitting as Demiurgus, trotting out his manikins, coaxing and bantering them, amused with their good performance, patting them on the back, and rating the naughty dolls when they misbehave; and communicating his mind ever in measure, just as much as the young public can understand; hinting the future, when it would be useful; recalling now and then illustrative antecedents of the actor, impressing, the reader that he is in possession of the entire history centrally seen, that his investigation has been exhaustive, and that he descends too on the petty plot of Prussia from higher and cosmical surveys. Better I like the sound sense and the absolute independence of the tone, which may put kings in fear. And, as the reader shares, according to his intelligence, the haughty _coup d'oeil_ of this genius, and shares it with delight, I recommend to all governors, English, French, Austrian, and other, to double their guards, and look carefully to the censorship of the press. I find, as ever in your books, that one man has deserved well of mankind for restoring the Scholar's profession to its highest use and dignity.* I find also that you are very wilful, and have made a covenant with your eyes that they shall not see anything you do not wish they should. But I was heartily glad to read somewhere that your book was nearly finished in the manuscript, for I could wish you to sit and taste your fame, if that were not contrary to law of Olympus. My joints ache to think of your rugged labor. Now that you have conquered to yourself such a huge kingdom among men, can you not give yourself breath, and chat a little, an Emeritus in the eternal university, and write a gossiping letter to an old American friend or so? Alas, I own that I have no right to say this last,--I who write never. -------- * As long before as 1843 Emerson wrote in his Diary: "Carlyle in his new book" (_Past and Present_), "as everywhere, is a continuer of the great line of scholars in the world, of Horace, Varro, Pliny, Erasmus, Scaliger, Milton, and well sustains their office in ample credit and honor." --------- Here we read no books. The war is our sole and doleful instructor. All our bright young men go into it, to be misused and sacrificed hitherto by incapable leaders. One lesson they all learn,--to hate slavery, _teterrima causa._ But the issue does not yet appear. We must get ourselves morally right. Nobody can help us. 'T is of no account what England or France may do. Unless backed by our profligate parties, their action would be nugatory, and, if so backed, the worst. But even the war is better than the degrading and descending politics that preceded it for decades of years, and our legislation has made great strides, and if we can stave off that fury of trade which rushes to peace at the cost of replacing the South in the _status ante bellum,_ we can, with something more of courage, leave the problem to another score of years,--free labor to fight with the Beast, and see if bales and barrels and baskets cannot find out that they pass more commodiously and surely to their ports through free hands, than through barbarians. I grieved that the good Clough, the generous, susceptible scholar, should die. I read over his _Bothie_ again, full of the wine of youth at Oxford. I delight in Matthew Arnold's fine criticism in two little books. Give affectionate remembrances from me to Jane Carlyle, whom ---'s happiness and accurate reporting restored to me in brightest image. Always faithfully yours, R.W. Emerson CLXX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 8 March, 1864 Dear Emerson,--This will be delivered to you by the Hon. Lyulph Stanley, an excellent, intelligent young gentleman whom I have known ever since his infancy,--his father and mother being among my very oldest friends in London; "Lord and Lady Stanley of Alderley" (not of Knowesley, but a cadet branch of it), whom perhaps you did not meet while here. My young Friend is coming to look with his own eyes at your huge and hugely travailing Country;--and I think will agree with you, better than he does with me, in regard to that latest phenomenon. At all events, he regards "Emerson" as intelligent Englishmen all do; and you will please me much by giving him your friendliest reception and furtherance,--which I can certify that he deserves for his own sake, not counting mine at all. Probably _he_ may deliver you the Vol. IV. of _Frederic;_ he will tell you our news (part of which, what regards my poor Wife, is very bad, though God be thanked not yet the worst);--and, in some six months, he may bring me back some human tidings from Concord, a place which always inhabits my memory,--though it is so dumb latterly! Yours ever, T. Carlyle CLXXI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 26 September, 1864 Dear Carlyle,--Your friend, young Stanley, brought me your letter now too many days ago. It contained heavy news of your household,--yet such as in these our autumnal days we must await with what firmness we can. I hear with pain that your Wife, whom I have only seen beaming goodness and intelligence, has suffered and suffers so severely. I recall my first visit to your house, when I pronounced you wise and fortunate in relations wherein best men are often neither wise nor fortunate. I had already heard rumors of her serious illness. Send me word, I pray you, that there is better health and hope. For the rest, the Colonna motto would fit your letter, "Though sad, I am strong." I had received in July, forwarded by Stanley, on his flight through Boston, the fourth Volume of _Friedrich,_ and it was my best reading in the summer, and for weeks my only reading: One fact was paramount in all the good I drew from it, that whomsoever many years had used and worn, they had not yet broken any fibre of your force:--a pure joy to me, who abhor the inroads which time makes on me and on my friends. To live too long is the capital misfortune, and I sometimes think, if we shall not parry it by better art of living, we shall learn to include in our morals some bolder control of the facts. I read once, that Jacobi declared that he had some thoughts which--if he should entertain them--would put him to death: and perhaps we have weapons in our intellectual armory that are to save us from disgrace and impertinent relation to the world we live in. But this book will excuse you from any unseemly haste to make up your accounts, nay, holds you to fulfil your career with all amplitude and calmness. I found joy and pride in it, and discerned a golden chain of continuity not often seen in the works of men, apprising me that one good head and great heart remained in England,--immovable, superior to his own eccentricities and perversities, nay, wearing these, I can well believe, as a jaunty coat or red cockade to defy or mislead idlers, for the better securing his own peace, and the very ends which the idlers fancy he resists. England's lease of power is good during his days. I have in these last years lamented that you had not made the visit to America, which in earlier years you projected or favored. It would have made it impossible that your name should be cited for one moment on the side of the enemies of mankind. Ten days' residence in this country would have made you the organ of the sanity of England and of Europe to us and to them, and have shown you the necessities and aspirations which struggle up in our Free States, which, as yet, have no organ to others, and are ill and unsteadily articulated here. In our today's division of Republican and Democrat, it is certain that the American nationality lies in the Republican party (mixed and multiform though that party be); and I hold it not less certain, that, viewing all the nationalities of the world, the battle for Humanity is, at this hour, in America. A few days here would show you the disgusting composition of the Party which within the Union resists the national action. Take from it the wild Irish element, imported in the last twenty-five year's into this country, and led by Romish Priests, who sympathize, of course, with despotism, and you would bereave it of all its numerical strength. A man intelligent and virtuous is not to be found on that side. Ah! how gladly I would enlist you, with your thunderbolt, on our part! How gladly enlist the wise, thoughtful, efficient pens and voices of England! We want England and Europe to hold our people stanch to their best tendency. Are English of this day incapable of a great sentiment? Can they not leave caviling at petty failures, and bad manners, and at the dunce part (always the largest part in human affairs), and leap to the suggestions and finger-pointings of the gods, which, above the understanding, feed the hopes and guide the wills of men? This war has been conducted over the heads of all the actors in it; and the foolish terrors, "What shall we do with the negro?" "The entire black population is coming North to be fed," &c., have strangely ended in the fact that the black refuses to leave his climate; gets his living and the living of his employers there, as he has always done; is the natural ally and soldier of the Republic, in that climate; now takes the place of two hundred thousand white soldiers; and will be, as the conquest of the country proceeds, its garrison, till peace, without slavery, returns. Slaveholders in London have filled English ears with their wishes and perhaps beliefs; and our people, generals, and politicians have carried the like, at first, to the war, until corrected by irresistible experience. I shall always respect War hereafter. The cost of life, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of Eternal Life, Eternal Law, reconstructing and uplifting Society, --breaks up the old horizon, and we see through the rifts a wider. The dismal Malthus, the dismal DeBow, have had their night. Our Census of 1860, and the War, are poems, which will, in the next age, inspire a genius like your own. I hate to write you a newspaper, but, in these times, 't is wonderful what sublime lessons I have once and again read on the Bulletin-boards in the streets. Everybody has been wrong in his guess, except good women, who never despair of an Ideal right. I thank you for sending to me so gracious a gentleman as Mr. Stanley, who interested us in every manner, by his elegance, his accurate information of that we wished to know, and his surprising acquaintance with the camp and military politics on our frontier. I regretted that I could see him so little. He has used his time to the best purpose, and I should gladly have learned all his adventures from so competent a witness. Forgive this long writing, and keep the old kindness which I prize above words. My kindest salutations to the dear invalid! --R.W. Emerson CLXXII. Carlyle to Emerson Cummertrees, Annan, Scotland, 14 June, 1865 Dear Emerson,--Though my hand is shaking (as you sadly notice) I determine to write you a little Note today. What a severance there has been these many sad years past!--In the first days of February I ended my weary Book; a totally worn-out man, got to shore again after far the ugliest sea he had ever swam in. In April or the end of March, when the book was published, I duly handed out a Copy for Concord and you; it was to be sent by mail; but, as my Publisher (a _new_ Chapman, very unlike the _old_) discloses to me lately an incredible negligence on such points, it is quite possible the dog may _not,_ for a long while, have put it in the Post-Office (though he faithfully charged me the postage of it, and was paid), and that the poor waif may never yet have reached you! Patience: it will come soon enough,--there are two thick volumes, and they will stand you a great deal of reading; stiff rather than "light." Since February last, I have been sauntering about in Devonshire, in Chelsea, hither, thither; idle as a dry bone, in fact, a creature sinking into deeper and deeper _collapse,_ after twelve years of such mulish pulling and pushing; creature now good for nothing seemingly, and much indifferent to being so in permanence, if that be the arrangement come upon by the Powers that made us. Some three or four weeks ago, I came rolling down hither, into this old nook of my Birthland, to see poor old Annandale again with eyes, and the poor remnants of kindred and loved ones still left me there; I was not at first very lucky (lost sleep, &c.); but am now doing better, pretty much got adjusted to my new element, new to me since about six years past,--the longest absence I ever had from it before. My Work was getting desperate at that time; and I silently said to myself, "We won't return till _it_ is done, or _you_ are done, my man!" This is my eldest living sister's house; one of the most rustic Farmhouses in the world, but abounding in all that is needful to me, especially in the truest, _silently_-active affection, the humble generosity of which is itself medicine and balm. The place is airy, on dry waving knolls cheerfully (with such _water_ as I never drank elsewhere, except at Malvern) all round me are the Mountains, Cheviot and Galloway (three to fifteen miles off), Cumberland and Yorkshire (say forty and fifty, with the Solway brine and sands intervening). I live in total solitude, sauntering moodily in thin checkered woods, galloping about, once daily, by old lanes and roads, oftenest latterly on the wide expanses of Solway shore (when the tide is _out!_) where I see bright busy Cottages far off, houses over even in Cumberland, and the beautifulest amphitheatre of eternal Hills,--but meet no living creature; and have endless thoughts as loving and as sad and sombre as I like. My youngest Brother (whom on the whole I like best, a rustic man, the express image of my Father in his ways of living and thinking) is within ten miles of me; Brother John "the Doctor" has come down to Dumfries to a sister (twelve miles off), and runs over to me by rail now and then in few minutes. I have Books; but can hardly be troubled with them. Pitiful temporary babble and balderdash, in comparison to what the Silences can say to one. Enough of all that: you perceive me sufficiently at this point of my Pilgrimage, as withdrawn to _Hades_ for the time being; intending a month's walk there, till the muddy semi-solutions settle into sediment according to what laws they have, and there be perhaps a partial restoration of clearness. I have to go deeper into Scotland by and by, perhaps to try _sailing,_ which generally agrees with me; but till the end of September I hope there will be no London farther. My poor Wife, who is again poorly since I left (and has had frightful sufferings, last year especially) will probably join me in this region before I leave it. And see here, This is authentically the way we figure in the eye of the Sun; and something like what your spectacles, could they reach across the Ocean into these nooks, would teach you of us. There are three Photographs which I reckon fairly _like;_ _these_ are properly what I had to send you today,--little thinking that so much surplusage would accumulate about them; to which I now at once put an end. Your friend Conway,* who is a boundless admirer of yours, used to come our way regularly now and then; and we always liked him well. A man of most gentlemanly, ingenious ways; turn of thought always loyal and manly, though tending to be rather _winged_ than solidly ambulatory. He talked of coming to Scotland too; but it seems uncertain whether we shall meet. He is clearly rather a favorite among the London people,--and tries to explain America to them; I know not if with any success. As for me, I have entirely lost count and reckoning of your enormous element, and its enormous affairs and procedures for some time past; and can only wish (which no man more heartily does) that all may issue in as blessed a way as you hope. Fat--(if you know and his fat commonplace at all) amused me much by a thing he had heard of yours in some lecture a year or two ago. "The American Eagle is a mighty bird; but what is he to the American Peacock." At which all the audience had exploded into laughter. Very good. Adieu, old Friend. Yours ever, T. Carlyle --------- * Mr. Moncure D. Conway. --------- CLXXIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 7 January, 1866 Dear Carlyle,--Is it too late to send a letter to your door to claim an old right to enter, and to scatter all your convictions that I had passed under the earth? You had not to learn what a sluggish pen mine is. Of course, the sluggishness grows on me, and even such a trumpet at my gate as a letter from you heralding-in noble books, whilst it gives me joy, cannot heal the paralysis. Yet your letter deeply interested me, with the account of your rest so well earned. You had fought your great battle, and might roll in the grass, or ride your pony, or shout to the Cumberland or Scotland echoes, with largest leave of men and gods. My lethargies have not dulled my delight in good books. I read these in the bright days of our new peace, which added a lustre to every genial work. Now first we had a right to read, for the very bookworms were driven out of doors whilst the war lasted. I found in the book no trace of age, which your letter so impressively claimed. In the book, the hand does not shake, the mind is ubiquitous. The treatment is so spontaneous, self-respecting, defiant,--liberties with your hero as if he were your client, or your son, and you were proud of him, and yet can check and chide him, and even put him in the corner when he is not a good boy, freedoms with kings, and reputations, and nations, yes, and with principles too,--that each reader, I suppose, feels complimented by the confidences with which he is honored by this free-tongued, masterful Hermes.--Who knows what the [Greek] will say next? This humor of telling the story in a gale,--bantering, scoffing, at the hero, at the enemy, at the learned reporters,--is a perpetual flattery to the admiring student,--the author abusing the whole world as mad dunces,--all but you and I, reader! Ellery Channing borrowed my Volumes V. and VI., worked slowly through them,--midway came to me for Volumes I., II., III., IV., which he had long already read, and at last returned all with this word, "If you write to Mr. Carlyle, you may say to him, that I _have_ read these books, and they have made it impossible for me to read any other books but his." 'T is a good proof of their penetrative force, the influence on the new Stirling, who writes "The Secret of Hegel." He is quite as much a student of Carlyle to learn treatment, as of Hegel for his matter, and plays the same game on his essence-dividing German, which he has learned of you on _Friedrich._ I have read a good deal in this book of Stirling's, and have not done with it. One or two errata I noticed in the last volumes of _Friedrich,_ though the books are now lent, and I cannot indicate the pages. Fort Pulaski, which is near Savannah, is set down as near Charleston. Charleston, South Carolina, your printer has twice called Charlestown, which is the name of the town in Massachusetts in which Bunker Hill stands.--Bancroft told me that the letters of Montcalm are spurious. We always write and say Ticonderoga. I am sorry that Jonathan looks so unamiable seen from your island. Yet I have too much respect for the writing profession to complain of it. It is a necessity of rhetoric that there should be shades, and, I suppose, geography and government always determine, even for the greatest wits, where they shall lay their shadows. But I have always 'the belief that a trip across the sea would have abated your despair of us. The world is laid out here in large lots, and the swing of natural laws is shared by the population, as it is not--or not as much--in your feudal Europe. My countrymen do not content me, but they are susceptible of inspirations. In the war it was humanity that showed itself to advantage,--the leaders were prompted and corrected by the intuitions of the people, they still demanding the more generous and decisive measure, and giving their sons and their estates as we had no example before. In this heat, they had sharper perceptions of policy, of the ways and means and the life of nations, and on every side we read or heard fate-words, in private letters, in railway cars, or in the journals. We were proud of the people and believed they would not go down from this height. But Peace came, and every one ran back into his shop again, and can hardly be won to patriotism more, even to the point of chasing away the thieves that are stealing not only the public gold, but the newly won rights of the slave, and the new muzzles we had contrived to keep the planter from sucking his blood. Very welcome to me were the photographs,--your own, and Jane Carlyle's. Hers, now seen here for the first time, was closely scanned, and confirmed the better accounts that had come of her improved health. Your earlier tidings of her had not been encouraging. I recognized still erect the wise, friendly presence first seen at Craigenputtock. Of your own--the hatted head is good, but more can be read in the head leaning on the hand, and the one in a cloak. At the end of much writing, I have little to tell you of myself. I am a bad subject for autobiography. As I adjourn letters, so I adjourn my best tasks.... My wife joins me in very kind regards to Mrs. Carlyle. Use your old magnanimity to me, and punish my stony ingratitudes by new letters from time to time. Ever affectionately and gratefully yours, R.W. Emerson CLXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 16 May, 1866 My Dear Carlyle,--I have just been shown a private letter from Moncure Conway to one of his friends here, giving some tidings of your sad return to an empty home. We had the first news last week. And so it is. The stroke long threatened has fallen at last, in the mildest form to its victim, and relieved to you by long and repeated reprieves. I must think her fortunate also in this gentle departure, as she had been in her serene and honored career. We would not for ourselves count covetously the descending steps after we have passed the top of the mount, or grudge to spare some of the days of decay. And you will have the peace of knowing her safe, and no longer a victim. I have found myself recalling an old verse which one utters to the parting soul,-- "For thou hast passed all chance of human life, And not again to thee shall beauty die." It is thirty-three years in July, I believe, since I first saw her, and her conversation and faultless manners gave assurance of a good and happy future. As I have not witnessed any decline, I can hardly believe in any, and still recall vividly the youthful wife, and her blithe account of her letters and homages from Goethe, and the details she gave of her intended visit to Weimar, and its disappointment. Her goodness to me and to my friends was ever perfect, and all Americans have agreed in her praise. Elizabeth Hoar remembers her with entire sympathy and regard. I could heartily wish to see you for an hour in these lonely days. Your friends, I know, will approach you as tenderly as friends can; and I can believe that labor--all whose precious secrets you know--will prove a consoler,--though it cannot quite avail, for she was the rest that rewarded labor. It is good that you are strong, and built for endurance. Nor will you shun to consult the awful oracles which in these hours of tenderness are sometimes vouchsafed. If to any, to you. I rejoice that she stayed to enjoy the knowledge of your good day at Edinburgh, which is a leaf we would not spare from your book of life. It was a right manly speech to be so made, and is a voucher of unbroken strength,--and the surroundings, as I learn, were all the happiest,--with no hint of change. I pray you bear in mind your own counsels. Long years you must still achieve, and, I hope, neither grief nor weariness will let you "join the dim choir of the bards that have been," until you have written the book I wish and wait for,--the sincerest confessions of your best hours. My wife prays to be remembered to you with sympathy and affection. Ever yours faithfully, R.W. Emerson CLXXV. Carlyle to Emerson Mentone, France, Alpes Maritimes 27 January, 1867 My Dear Emerson,--It is along time since I last wrote to you; and a long distance in space and in fortune,--from the shores of the Solway in summer 1865, to this niche of the Alps and Mediterranean today, after what has befallen me in the interim. A longer interval, I think, and surely by far a sadder, than ever occurred between us before, since we first met in the Scotch moors, some five and thirty years ago. You have written me various Notes, too, and Letters, all good and cheering to me,-- almost the only truly human speech I have heard from anybody living;--and still my stony silence could not be broken; not till now, though often looking forward to it, could I resolve on such a thing. You will think me far gone, and much bankrupt in hope and heart;--and indeed I am; as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily serious, silent, and sad old man; gazing into the final chasm of things, in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and Eternity" (dialogue _mute_ on _both_ sides!), not caring to discourse with poor articulate-speaking fellow creatures on their sorts of topics. It is right of me; and yet also it is not right. I often feel that I had better be dead than thus indifferent, contemptuous, disgusted with the world and its roaring nonsense, which I have no thought farther of lifting a finger to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my door against. But the truth is, I was nearly killed by that hideous Book on Friedrich,--twelve years in continuous wrestle with the nightmares and the subterranean hydras;--nearly _killed,_ and had often thought I should be altogether, and must die leaving the monster not so much as finished! This is one truth, not so evident to any friend or onlooker as it is to myself: and then there is another, known to myself alone, as it were; and of which I am best not to speak to others, or to speak to them no farther. By the calamity of April last, I lost my little all in this world; and have no soul left who can make any corner of this world into a _home_ for me any more. Bright, heroic, tender, true and noble was that lost treasure of my heart, who faithfully accompanied me in all the rocky ways and climbings; and I am forever poor without her. She was snatched from me in a moment,--as by a death from the gods. Very beautiful her death was; radiantly beautiful (to those who understand it) had all her life been _quid plura?_ I should be among the dullest and stupidest, if I were not among the saddest of all men. But not a word more on all this. All summer last, my one solacement in the form of work was writing, and sorting of old documents and recollections; summoning out again into clearness old scenes that had now closed on me without return. Sad, and in a sense sacred; it was like a kind of _worship;_ the only _devout_ time I had had for a great while past. These things I have half or wholly the intention to burn out of the way before I myself die:--but such continues still mainly my employment,--so many hours every forenoon; what I call the "work" of my day;--to me, if to no other, it is useful; to reduce matters to writing means that you shall know them, see them in their origins and sequences, in their essential lineaments, considerably better than you ever did before. To set about writing my own _Life_ would be no less than horrible to me; and shall of a certainty never be done. The common impious vulgar of this earth, what has it to do with my life or me? Let dignified oblivion, silence, and the vacant azure of Eternity swallow _me;_ for my share of it, that, verily, is the handsomest, or one handsome way, of settling my poor account with the _canaille_ of mankind extant and to come. "Immortal glory," is not that a beautiful thing, in the Shakespeare Clubs and Literary Gazettes of our improved Epoch?--I did not leave London, except for fourteen days in August, to a fine and high old Lady- friend's in Kent; where, riding about the woods and by the sea- beaches and chalk cliffs, in utter silence, I felt sadder than ever, though a little less _miserably_ so, than in the intrusive babblements of London, which I could not quite lock out of doors. We read, at first, Tennyson's _Idyls,_ with profound recognition of the finely elaborated execution, and also of the inward perfection of _vacancy,_--and, to say truth, with considerable impatience at being treated so very like infants, though the lollipops were so superlative. We gladly changed for one Emerson's _English Traits;_ and read that, with increasing and ever increasing satisfaction every evening; blessing Heaven that there were still Books for grown-up people too! That truly is a Book all full of thoughts like winged arrows (thanks to the Bowyer from us both):--my Lady-friend's name is Miss Davenport Bromley; it was at Wooton, in her Grandfather's House, in Staffordshire, that Rousseau took shelter in 1760; and one hundred and six years later she was reading Emerson to me with a recognition that would have pleased the man, had he seen it. About that same time my health and humors being evidently so, the Dowager Lady Ashburton (not the high Lady you saw, but a Successor of Mackenzie-Highland type), who wanders mostly about the Continent since her widowhood, for the sake of a child's health, began pressing and inviting me to spend the blade months of Winter here in her Villa with her;--all friends warmly seconding and urging; by one of whom I was at last snatched off, as if by the hair of the head, (in spite of my violent No, no!) on the eve of Christmas last, and have been here ever since,-- really with improved omens. The place is beautiful as a very picture, the climate superlative (today a sun and sky like very June); the _hospitality_ of usage beyond example. It is likely I shall be here another six weeks, or longer. If you please to write me, the address is on the margin; and I will answer. Adieu. --T. Carlyle CLXXVI. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 18 November, 1869 Dear Emerson,--It is near three years since I last wrote to you; from Mentone, under the Ligurian Olive and Orange trees, and their sombre foreign shadows, and still more sombre suggestings and promptings; the saddest, probably, of all living men. That you made no answer I know right well means only, "Alas, what can I say to him of consolatory that he does not himself know!" Far from a fault, or perhaps even a mistake on your part;--nor have I felt it otherwise. Sure enough, among the lights that have gone out for me, and are still going, one after one, under the inexorable Decree, in this now dusky and lonely world, I count with frequent regret that our Correspondence (not by absolute hest of Fate) should have fallen extinct, or into such abeyance: but I interpret it as you see; and my love and brotherhood to you remain alive, and will while I myself do. Enough of this. By lucky chance, as you perceive, you are again to get one written Letter from me, and I a reply from you, before the final Silence come. The case is this. For many years back, a thought, which I used to check again as fond and silly, has been occasionally present to me,--Of testifying my gratitude to New England (New England, acting mainly through one of her Sons called Waldo Emerson), _by bequeathing to it my poor Falstaf Regiment, latterly two Falstaf Regiments of Books,_ those I purchased and used in writing _Cromwell,_ and ditto those on _Friedrich the Great._ "This could be done," I often said to myself; "this _could_ perhaps; and this would be a real satisfaction to me. But who then would march through Coventry with such a set!" The extreme insignificance of the Gift, this and nothing else, always gave me pause. Last Summer, I was lucky enough to meet with your friend C.E. Norton, and renew many old Massachusetts recollections, in free talk with [him]....; to him I spoke of the affair; candidly describing it, especially the above questionable feature of it, so far as I could; and his answer, then, and more deliberately afterwards, was so hopeful, hearty, and decisive, that--in effect it has decided me; and I am this day writing to him that such is the poor fact, and that I need farther instructions on it so soon as you two have taken counsel together. To say more about the infinitesimally small value of the Books would be superfluous: nay, in truth, many or most of them are not without intrinsic value, one or two are even excellent as Books; and all of them, it may perhaps be said, have a kind of _symbolic_ or _biographic_ value; and testify (a thing not useless) _on what slender commissariat stores_ considerable campaigns, twelve years long or so, may be carried on in this world. Perhaps you already knew of me, what the _Cromwell_ and _Friedrich_ collection might itself intimate, that much _buying_ of Books was never a habit of mine,--far the reverse, even to this day! Well, my Friend, you will have a meeting with Norton so soon as handy; and let me know what is next to be done. And that, in your official capacity, is all I have to say to you at present. Unofficially there were much,--much that is mournful, but perhaps also something that is good and blessed, and though the saddest, also the highest, the lovingest and best; as beseems Time's sunset, now coming nigh. At present I will say only that, in bodily health, I am not to be called Ill, for a man who will be seventy-four next month; nor, on the spiritual side, has anything been laid upon me that is quite beyond my strength. More miserable I have often been; though as solitary, soft of heart, and sad, of course never. Publisher Chapman, when I question him whether you for certain _get_ your Monthly Volume of what they call "The Library Edition," assures me that "it is beyond doubt":--I confess I should still like to be _better_ assured. If all is _right,_ you should, by the time this Letter arrives, be receiving or have received your thirteenth Volume, last of the _Miscellanies._ Adieu, my Friend. Ever truly yours, T. Carlyle CLXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 4 January, 1870 Dear Emerson,--A month ago or more I wrote, by the same post, to you and to Norton about those Books for Harvard College; and in late days have been expecting your joint answer. From Norton yesternight I receive what is here copied for your perusal; it has come round by Florence as you see, and given me real pleasure and instruction. From you, who are possibly also away from home, I have yet nothing; but expect now soon to have a few words. There did arrive, one evening lately, your two pretty _volumes_ of _Collected Works,_ a pleasant salutation from you--which set me upon reading again what I thought I knew well before:--but the Letter is still to come. Norton's hints are such a complete instruction to me that I see my way straight through the business, and might, by Note of "Bequest" and memorandum for the Barings, finish it in half an hour: nevertheless I will wait for your Letter, and punctually do nothing till your directions too are before me. Pray write, therefore; all is lying ready here. Since you heard last, I have got two Catalogues made out, approximately correct; one is to lie here till the Bequest be executed; the other I thought of sending to you against the day? This is my own invention in regard to the affair since I wrote last. Approve of it, and you shall have your copy by Book-post at once. "_Approximately_ correct"; absolutely I cannot get it to be. But I need not doubt the Pious Purpose will be piously and even sacredly fulfilled;--and your Catalogue will be a kind of evidence that it is. Adieu, dear Emerson, till your Letter come. Yours ever, Thomas Carlyle CLXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 23 January, 1870* My Dear Carlyle,--'T is a sad apology that I have to offer for delays which no apology can retrieve. I received your first letter with pure joy, but in the midst of extreme inefficiency. I had suddenly yielded to a proposition of Fields & Co. to manufacture a book for a given day. The book was planned, and going on passably, when it was found better to divide the matter, and separate, and postpone the purely literary portion (criticism chiefly), and therefore to modify and swell the elected part. The attempt proved more difficult than I had believed, for I only write by spasms, and these ever more rare,--and daemons that have no ears. Meantime the publication day was announced, and the printer at the door. Then came your letter in the shortening days. When I drudged to keep my word, _invita Minerva._ --------- * This letter is printed from an imperfect rough draft. --------- I could not write in my book, and I could not write a letter. Tomorrow and many morrows made things worse, for we have indifferent health in the house, and, as it chanced, unusual strain of affairs,--which always come when they should not. For one thing--I have just sold a house which I once built opposite my own. But I will leave the bad month, which I hope will not match itself in my lifetime. Only 't is pathetic and remorseful to me that any purpose of yours, especially, a purpose so inspired, should find me imbecile. Heartily I delight in your proposed disposition of the books. It has every charm of surprise, and nobleness, and large affection. The act will deeply gratify a multitude of good men, who will see in it your real sympathy with the welfare of the country. I hate that there should be a moment of delay in the completing of your provisions,--and that I of all men should be the cause! Norton's letter is perfect on his part, and needs no addition, I believe, from me. You had not in your first letter named _Cambridge,_ and I had been meditating that he would probably have divided your attention between Harvard and the Boston Public Library,--now the richest in the country, at first founded by the gifts of Joshua Bates (of London), and since enriched by the city and private donors, Theodore Parker among them. But after conversation with two or three friends, I had decided that Harvard College was the right beneficiary, as being the mother real or adoptive of a great number of your lovers and readers in America, and because a College is a seat of sentiment and cosmical relations. The Library is outgrown by other libraries in the Country, counts only 119,000 bound volumes in 1868; the several departments of Divinity, Law, Medicine, and Natural Science in the University having special libraries, that together add some 40,000 more. The College is newly active (with its new President Eliot, a cousin of Norton's) and expansive in all directions. And the Library will be relieved through subscriptions now being collected among the Alumni with the special purpose of securing to it an adequate fund for annual increase. I shall then write to Norton at once that I concur with him in the destination of the books to Harvard College, and approve entirely his advices in regard to details. And so soon as you send me the Catalogue I shall, if you permit, communicate your design to President Eliot and the Corporation. One thing I shall add to the Catalogue now or later (perhaps only by bequest), your own prized gift to me, in 1848, of Wood's _Athenae Oxonienses,_ which I have lately had rebound, and in which every pen and pencil mark of yours is notable. The stately books of the New Edition have duly come from the unforgetting friend. I have _Sartor, Schiller, French Revolution,_ 3 vols., _Miscellanies,_ Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,--ten volumes in all, excellently printed and dressed, and full of memories and electricity. I have much to say, but of things not opportune at this moment, and in spite of my long contumacy dare believe that I shall quickly write again my proper letter to my friend, whose every word I watchfully read and remember. CLXXIX. Carlyle to Emerson Melchet Court, Romsey, 14 February, 1870 Dear Emerson,--Three days ago I at last received your Letter; with very great pleasure and thankfulness, as you may suppose. Indeed, it is quite strangely interesting to see face to face my old Emerson again, not a feature of him changed, whom I have known all the best part of my life. I am very glad, withal, to find that you agree completely with Norton and myself in regard to that small Harvard matter. This is not Chelsea, as you perceive, this is a hospitable mansion in Hampshire; but I expect to be in Chelsea within about a week; once there, I shall immediately despatch to you one of the three Catalogues I have, with a more deliberate letter than I at present have the means of writing or dictating. Yours ever truly, T. Carlyle CLXXX. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 24 February, 1870 Dear Emerson,--At length I have got home from those sumptuous tumults ("Melchet Court" is the Dowager Lady Ashburton's House, whose late Husband, an estimable friend of mine, and _half American,_ you may remember here); and I devote to ending of our small Harvard Business, small enough, but true and kindly,--the first quiet hour I have. Your Copy of the Catalogue, which accompanies by Book-Post of today, is the correctest I could manage to get done; all the Books mentioned in it I believe to be now here (and indeed, except five or six _tiny_ articles, have _seen_ them all, in one or other of the three rooms where my Books now stand, and where I believe the insignificant trifle of "tinies" to be): all these I can expect will be punctually attended to when the time comes, and proceeded with according to Norton's scheme and yours;--and if any more "tinies," which I could not even remember, should turn up (which I hardly think there will), these also will _class_ themselves (as _Cromwelliana_ or _Fredericana_), and be faith fully sent on with the others. For benefit of my _Survivors_ and _Representatives_ here, I retain an exact _Copy_ of the Catalogue now put into your keeping; so that everything may fall out square between them and you when the Time shall arrive. I mean to conform in every particular to the plan sketched out by Norton and you,--unless, in your next Letter, you have something other or farther to advise:--and so soon as I hear from you that Harvard accepts my poor widow's mite of a _Bequest,_ I will proceed to put it down in due form, and so finish this small matter, which for long years has hovered in my thoughts as a thing I should like to do. And so enough for this time. I meant to write a longish Letter, touching on many other points,--though you see I am reduced to _pencil,_ and "write" with such difficulty (never yet could learn to "dictate," though my little Niece here is promptitude itself, and is so swift and legible,--useful here as a cheerful rushlight in this now sombre element, sombre, sad, but also beautiful and tenderly solemn more and more, in which she bears me company, good little "Mary"!). But, in bar of all such purposes, Publisher Chapman has come in, with Cromwell Engravings and their hindrances, with money accounts, &c., &c.; and has not even left me a moment of time, were nothing else needed! Vol. XIV. (_Cromwell,_ I.) ought to be at Concord about as soon as this. In our Newspapers I notice your Book announced, "half of the Essays new,"--which I hope to get _quam primum,_ and illuminate some evenings with,--_so_ as nothing else can, in my present common mood. Adieu, dear old Friend. I am and remain yours always, --T. Carlyle CLXXXI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 21 March, 1870 My Dear Carlyle,--On receiving your letter and catalogue I wrote out a little history of the benefaction and carried it last Tuesday to President Eliot at Cambridge, who was heartily gratified, and saw everything rightly, and expressed an anxiety (most becoming in my eyes after my odious shortcomings) that there should be no moment of delay on our part. "The Corporation would not meet again for a fortnight:--but he would not wait,-- would call a special meeting this week to make the communication to them." He did so: the meeting was held on Saturday and I have received this (Monday) morning from him enclosed letter and record. It is very amiable and noble in you to have kept this surprise for us in your older days. Did you mean to show us that you could not be old, but immortally young? and having kept us all murmuring at your satires and sharp homilies, will now melt us with this manly and heart-warming embrace? Nobody could predict and none could better it. And you shall even go your own gait henceforward with a blessing from us all, and a trust exceptional and unique. I do not longer hesitate to talk to such good men as I see of this gift, and it has in every ear a gladdening effect. People like to see character in a gift, and from rare character the gift is more precious. I wish it may be twice blest in continuing to give you the comfort it will give us. I think I must mend myself by reclaiming my old right to send you letters. I doubt not I shall have much to tell you, could I overcome the hesitation to attempt a reasonable letter when one is driven to write so many sheets of mere routine as sixty-six (nearly sixty-seven) years enforce. I shall have to prate of my daughters;--Edith Forbes, with her two children at Milton; Ellen Emerson at home, herself a godsend to this house day by day; and my son Edward studying medicine in Boston,--whom I have ever meant and still mean to send that he may see your face when that professional curriculum winds up. I manage to read a few books and look into more. Herman Grimm sent me lately a good one, Goethe's _Unterhaltungen_ with Muller,--which set me on Varnhagen and others. My wife sends old regards, and her joy in this occasion. Yours ever, R.W. Emerson P.S. Mr. Eliot took my rough counting of Volumes as correct. When he sends me back the catalogue, I will make it exact.--I sent you last week a little book by book-post. CLXXXII. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 24 March, 1870 My Dear Emerson,--The day before yesterday, I heard incidentally of an unfortunate Mail Steamer, bound for America, which had lost its screw or some essential part of it; and so had, instead of carrying its Letters forward to America, been drifting about like a helpless log on the shores of Ireland till some three days ago, when its Letters and Passengers were taken out, and actually forwarded, thither. By industrious calculation, it appears probable to us here that my Letter to you may have been tumbling about in that helpless Steamer, instead of getting to Concord; where, if so, said Letter cannot now arrive till the lingering of it have created some astonishment there. I hastily write this, however, to say that a Letter was duly forwarded a few days after yours [of January 23] arrived,-- enclosing the _Harvard Catalogue,_ with all necessary _et ceteras;_ indorsing all your proposals; and signifying that the matter should be authentically completed the instant I should hear from you again. I may add now that the thing is essentially completed,--all signed and put on paper, or all but a word or two, which, for form's sake, waits the actual arrival of your Letter. I have never yet received your Book;* and, if it linger only a few days more, mean to provide myself with a copy such as the Sampson and Low people have on sale everywhere. I had from Norton, the other day, a very kind and friendly Letter. This is all of essential that I had to say. I write in utmost haste. But am always, dear Emerson, Yours sincerely, T. Carlyle -------- * "Society and Solitude." -------- CLXXXIII. Carlyle to Emerson Chelsea, 6 April, 1870 Dear Emerson,--The day before yesterday your welcome Letter came to hand, with the welcome news in it; yesterday I put into my poor Document here the few words still needed; locked everything into its still repository (your Letter, President Eliot's, Norton's, &c., &c.); and walked out into the sunshine, piously thankful that a poor little whim, which had long lain fondly in my heart, had realized itself with an emphasis I could never hope, and was become (thanks to generous enthusiasm on New England's part) a beautiful little fact, lying done there, so far as I had to do with it. Truly your account of matters threw a glow of _life_ into my thoughts which is very rare there now; altogether a gratifying little Transaction to me,--and I must add a surprising, for the enthusiasm of good-will is evidently great, and the occasion is almost infinitesimally small! Well, well; it is all finished off and completed,--(you can tell Mr. Eliot, with many thanks from me, that I did introduce the proper style, "President and Fellows," &c., and have forgotten nothing of what he said, or of what he _did_);--and so we will say only, _Faustum sit,_ as our last word on the subject;--and to me it will be, for some days yet, under these vernal skies, something that is itself connected with THE SPRING in a still higher sense; a little white and red-lipped bit of _Daisy_ pure and poor, scattered into TIME's Seedfield, and struggling above ground there, uttering _its_ bit of prophecy withal, among the ox-hoofs and big jungles that are everywhere about and not prophetic of much!-- One thing only I regret, that you _have_ spoken of the affair! For God's sake don't; and those kindly people to whom you have,- -swear them to silence for love of me! The poor little _Daisy_kin will get into the Newspapers, and become the nastiest of Cabbages:--silence, silence, I beg of you to the utmost stretch of your power! Or is the case already irremediable? I will hope not. Talk about such things, especially Penny Editor's talk, is like vile coal-smoke filling your poor little world; silence alone is azure, and has a _sky_ to it.--But, enough now. The "little Book" never came; and, I doubt, never will: it is a fate that seems to await three fourths of the Books that attempt to reach me by the American Post; owing to some _informality in wrapping_ (I have heard);--it never gave me any notable _regret_ till now. However, I had already bought myself an English copy, rather gaudy little volume (probably intended for the _railways,_ as if _it_ were a Book to be read there), but perfectly printed, ready to be read anywhere by the open eye and earnest mind;-- which I read here, accordingly, with great attention, clear assent for most part, and admiring recognition. It seems to me you are all your old self here, and something _more._ A calm insight, piercing to the very centre; a beautiful sympathy, a beautiful _epic_ humor; a soul peaceably irrefragable in this loud-jangling world, of which it sees the ugliness, but _notices_ only the huge new _opulences_ (still so anarchic); knows the electric telegraph, with all its vulgar botherations and impertinences, accurately for what it is, and ditto ditto the oldest eternal Theologies of men. All this belongs to the Highest Class of thought (you may depend upon it); and again seemed to me as, in several respects, the one perfectly Human Voice I had heard among my fellow-creatures for a long time. And then the "style," the treatment and expression,--yes, it is inimitable, best--Emersonian throughout. Such brevity, simplicity, softness, homely grace; with such a penetrating meaning, _soft_ enough, but irresistible, going down to the depths and up to the heights, as _silent electricity_ goes. You have done _very well;_ and many will know it ever better by degrees.--Only one thing farther I will note: How you go as if altogether on the "Over-Soul," the Ideal, the Perfect or Universal and Eternal in this life of ours; and take so little heed of the frightful quantities of _friction_ and perverse impediment there everywhere are; the reflections upon which in my own poor life made me now and then very sad, as I read you. Ah me, ah me; what a vista it is, mournful, beautiful, _unfathomable_ as Eternity itself, these last fifty years of Time to me.-- Let me not forget to thank you for that _fourth_ page of your Note; I should say it was almost the most interesting of all. News from yourself at first hand; a momentary glimpse into the actual Household at Concord, face to face, as in years of old! True, I get vague news of you from time to time; but what are these in comparison?--If you _will,_ at the eleventh hour, turn over a new leaf, and write me Letters again,--but I doubt _you won't._ And yet were it not worth while, think you? [Greek]-- will be here _anon._--My kindest regards to your wife. Adieu, my ever-kind Old Friend. Yours faithfully always, T. Carlyle CLXXXIV. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 17 June, 1870 My Dear Carlyle,--Two* unanswered letters filled and fragrant and potent with goodness will not let me procrastinate another minute, or I shall sink and deserve to sink into my dormouse condition. You are of the Anakim, and know nothing of the debility and postponement of the blonde constitution. Well, if you shame us by your reservoir inexhaustible of force, you indemnify and cheer some of us, or one of us, by charges of electricity. -------- * One seems to be missing. -------- Your letter of April came, as ever-more than ever, if possible-- full of kindness, and making much of our small doings and writings, and seemed to drive me to instant acknowledgment; but the oppressive engagement of writing and reading eighteen lectures on Philosophy to a class of graduates in the College, and these in six successive weeks, was a task a little more formidable in prospect and in practice than any foregoing one. Of course, it made me a prisoner, took away all rights of friendship, honor, and justice, and held me to such frantic devotion to my work as must spoil that also. Well, it is now ended, and has no shining side but this one, that materials are collected and a possibility shown me how a repetition of the course next year--which is appointed--will enable me partly out of these materials, and partly by large rejection of these, and by large addition to them, to construct a fair report of what I have read and thought on the subject. I doubt the experts in Philosophy will not praise my discourses;-- but the topics give me room for my guesses, criticism, admirations and experiences with the accepted masters, and also the lessons I have learned from the hidden great. I have the fancy that a realist is a good corrector of formalism, no matter how incapable of syllogism or continuous linked statement. To great results of thought and morals the steps are not many, and it is not the masters who spin the ostentatious continuity. I am glad to hear that the last sent book from me arrived safely. You were too tender and generous in your first notice of it, I fear. But with whatever deductions for your partiality, I know well the unique value of Carlyle's praise. Many things crowd to be said on this little paper. Though I could see no harm in the making known the bequest of books to Cambridge,--no harm, but sincere pleasure, and honor of the donor from all good men,--yet on receipt of your letter touching that, I went back to President Eliot, and told him your opinion on newspapers. He said it was necessarily communicated to the seven persons composing the Corporation, but otherwise he had been very cautious, and it would not go into print. You are sending me a book, and Chapman's Homer it is? Are you bound by your Arabian bounty to a largess whenever you think of your friend? And you decry the book too. 'T-is long since I read it, or in it, but the apotheosis of Homer, in the dedication to Prince Henry, "Thousands of years attending," &c., is one of my lasting inspirations. The book has not arrived yet, as the letter always travels faster, but shall be watched and received and announced. But since you are all bounty and care for me, where are the new volumes of the Library Edition of Carlyle? I received duly, as I wrote you in a former letter, nine Volumes,--_Sartor; Life of Schiller;_ five Vols. of _Miscellanies; French Revolution;_ these books oddly addressed to my name, but at _Cincinnati,_ Massachusetts. Whether they went to Ohio, and came back to Boston, I know not. Two volumes came later, duplicates of two already received, and were returned at my request by Fields & Co. with an explanation. But no following volume has come. I write all this because you said in one letter that Mr. Chapman assured you that every month a book was despatched to my address. But what do I read in our Boston Newspapers twice in the last three days? That "Thomas Carlyle is coming to America," and the tidings cordially greeted by the editors; though I had just received your letter silent to any such point. Make that story true, though it had never a verisimilitude since thirty odd years ago, and you shall make many souls happy and perhaps show you so many needs and opportunities for beneficent power that you cannot be allowed to grow old or withdraw. Was I not once promised a visit? This house entreats you earnestly and lovingly to come and dwell in it. My wife and Ellen and Edward E. are thoroughly acquainted with your greatness and your loveliness. And it is but ten days of healthy sea to pass. So wishes heartily and affectionately, R.W. Emerson CLXXXV. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 28 September, 1870 Dear Emerson,--Your Letter, dated 15 June, never got to me till about ten days ago; when my little Niece and I returned out of Scotland, and a long, rather empty Visit there! It had missed me here only by two or three days; and my highly _in_felicitous Selectress of Letters to be forwarded had left _it_ carefully aside as undeserving that honor,--good faithful old Woman, one hopes she is greatly stronger on some sides than in this literary-selective one. Certainly no Letter was forwarded that had the hundredth part of the right to be so; certainly, of all the Letters that came to me, or were left waiting here, this was, in comparison, the one which might _not_ with propriety have been left to lie stranded forever, or to wander on the winds forever!-- One of my first journeys was to Chapman, with vehement _rebuke_ of this inconceivable "Cincinnati-Massachusetts" business. _Stupiditas stupiditatum;_ I never in my life, not even in that unpunctual House, fell in with anything that equaled it. Instant amendment was at once undertaken for, nay it seems had been already in part performed: "Ten volumes, following the nine you already had, were despatched in Field & Co.'s box above two months ago," so Chapman solemnly said and asseverated to me; so that by this time you ought actually to have in hand nineteen volumes; and the twentieth (first of _Friedrich_), which came out ten days ago, is to go in Field & Co.'s Box this week, and ought, not many days after the arrival of this Letter, to be in Boston waiting for you there. The _Chapman's Homer_ (two volumes) had gone with that first Field Packet; and would be handed to you along with the ten volumes which were overdue. All this was solemnly declared to me as on Affidavit; Chapman also took extract of the Massachusetts passage in your Letter, in order to pour it like ice-cold water on the head of his stupid old Chief-Clerk, the instant the poor creature got back from his rustication: alas, I am by no means certain that it will make a new man of him, nor, in fact, that the whole of this amendatory programme will get itself performed to equal satisfaction! But you must write to me at once if it is not so; and done it shall be in spite of human stupidity itself. Note, withal, these things: Chapman sends no Books to America _except_ through Field & Co.; he does not regularly send a Box at the middle of the month; but he does "almost monthly send one Bog"; so that if your monthly Volume do not start from London about the 15th, it is due by the very _next_ Chapman-Field box; and if it at any time don't come, I beg of you very much to make instant complaint through Field & Co., or what would be still more effectual, direct to myself. My malison on all Blockheadisms and torpid stupidities and infidelities; of which this world is full!-- Your Letter had been anxiously enough waited for, a month before my departure; but we will not mention the delay in presence of what you were engaged with then. _Faustum sit;_ that truly was and will be a Work worth doing your best upon; and I, if alive, can promise you at least one reader that will do his best upon your Work. I myself, often think of the Philosophies precisely in that manner. To say truth, they do not otherwise rise in esteem with me at all, but rather sink. The last thing I read of that kind was a piece by Hegel, in an excellent Translation by Stirling, right well translated, I could see, for every bit of it was intelligible to me; but my feeling at the end of it was, "Good Heavens, I have walked this road before many a good time; but never with a Cannon-ball at each ankle before!" Science also, Science falsely so called, is--But I will not enter upon that with you just now. The Visit to America, alas, alas, is pure Moonshine. Never had I, in late years, the least shadow of intention to undertake that adventure; and I am quite at a loss to understand how the rumor originated. One Boston Gentleman (a kind of universal Undertaker, or Lion's Provider of Lecturers I think) informed me that _"the Cable"_ had told him; and I had to remark, "And who the devil told the Cable?" Alas, no, I fear I shall never dare to undertake that big Voyage; which has so much of romance and of reality behind it to me; _zu spat, zu spat._ I do sometimes talk dreamily of a long Sea-Voyage, and the good the Sea has often done me,--in times when good was still possible. It may have been some vague folly of that kind that originated this rumor; for rumors are like dandelion-seeds; and _the Cable_ I dare say welcomes them all that have a guinea in their pocket. Thank you for blocking up that Harvard matter; provided it don't go into the Newspapers, all is right. Thank you a thousand times for that thrice-kind potential welcome, and flinging wide open your doors and your hearts to me at Concord. The gleam of it is like sunshine in a subterranean place. Ah me, Ah me! May God be with you all, dear Emerson. Yours ever, T. Carlyle CLXXXVI. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 15 October, 1870 My Dear Carlyle,--I am the ignoblest of all men in my perpetual short-comings to you. There is no example of constancy like yours, and it always stings my stupor into temporary recovery and wonderful resolution to accept the noble challenge. But "the strong hours conquer us," and I am the victim of miscellany,-- miscellany of designs, vast debility, and procrastination. Already many days before your letter came, Fields sent me a package from you, which he said he had found a little late, because they were covered up in a box of printed sheets of other character, and this treasure was not at first discovered. They are,--_Life of Sterling; Latter Day Pamphlets; Past and Present; Heroes;_ 5 Vols. _Cromwell's Letters and Speeches._ Unhappily, Vol. II. of _Cromwell_ is wanting, and there is a duplicate of Vol. V. instead of it. Now, two days ago came your letter, and tells me that the good old gods have also inspired you to send me Chapman's Homer! and that it came--heroes with heroes--in the same enchanted box. I went to Fields yesterday and demanded the book. He ignored all,--even to the books he had already sent me; called Osgood to council, and they agreed that it must be that all these came in a bog of sheets of Dickens from Chapman, which was sent to the Stereotypers at Cambridge; and the box shall be instantly explored. We will see what tomorrow shall find. As to the duplicates, I will say here, that I have received two: first, the above-mentioned Vol. II. of _Cromwell;_ and, second, long before, a second copy of _Sartor Resartus,_ apparently instead of the Vol. I. of the _French Revolution,_ which did not come. I proposed to Fields to send back to Chapman these two duplicates. But he said, "No, it will cost as much as the price of the books." I shall try to find in New York who represents Chapman and sells these books, and put them to his credit there, in exchange for the volumes I lack. Meantime, my serious thanks for all these treasures go to you,--steadily good to my youth and my age. Your letter was most welcome, and most in that I thought I read, in what you say of not making the long-promised visit hither, a little willingness to come. Think again, I pray you, of that Ocean Voyage, which is probably the best medicine and restorative which remains to us at your age and mine. Nine or ten days will bring you (and commonly with unexpected comfort and easements on the way) to Boston. Every reading person in America holds you in exceptional regard, and will rejoice in your arrival. They have forgotten your scarlet sins before or during the war. I have long ceased to apologize for or explain your savage sayings about American or other republics or publics, and am willing that anointed men bearing with them authentic charters shall be laws to themselves as Plato willed. Genius is but a large infusion of Deity, and so brings a prerogative all its own. It has a right and duty to affront and amaze men by carrying out its perceptions defiantly, knowing well that time and fate will verify and explain what time and fate have through them said. We must not suggest to Michel Angelo, or Machiavel, or Rabelais, or Voltaire, or John Brown of Osawatomie (a great man), or Carlyle, how they shall suppress their paradoxes and check their huge gait to keep accurate step with the procession on the street sidewalk. They are privileged persons, and may have their own swing for me. I did not mean to chatter so much, but I wish you would come out hither and read our possibilities now being daily disclosed, and our actualities which are not nothing. I shall like to show you my near neighbors, topographically or practically. A near neighbor and friend, E. Rockwood Hoar, whom you saw in his youth, is now an inestimable citizen in this State, and lately, in President Grant's Cabinet, Attorney-General of the United States. He lives in this town and carries it in his hand. Another is John M. Forbes, a strictly private citizen, of great executive ability, and noblest affections, a motive power and regulator essential to our City, refusing all office, but impossible to spare; and these are men whom to name the voice breaks and the eye is wet. A multitude of young men are growing up here of high promise, and I compare gladly the social poverty of my youth with the power on which these draw. The Lowell race, again, in our War yielded three or four martyrs so able and tender and true, that James Russell Lowell cannot allude to them in verse or prose but the public is melted anew. Well, all these know you well, have read and will read you, yes, and will prize and use your benefaction to the College; and I believe it would add hope, health, and strength to you to come and see them. In my much writing I believe I have left the chief things unsaid. But come! I and my house wait for you. Affectionately, R.W. Emerson CLXXXVIa. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 10 April, 1871 My Dear Friend,--I fear there is no pardon from you, none from myself, for this immense new gap in our correspondence. Yet no hour came from month to month to write a letter, since whatever deliverance I got from one web in the last year served only to throw me into another web as pitiless. Yet what gossamer these tasks of mine must appear to your might! Believe that the American climate is unmanning, or that one American whom you know is severely taxed by Lilliput labors. The last hot summer enfeebled me till my young people coaxed me to go with Edward to the White Hills, and we climbed or were dragged up Agiocochook, in August, and its sleet and snowy air nerved me again for the time. But the booksellers, whom I had long ago urged to reprint Plutarch's _Morals,_ claimed some forgotten promise, and set me on reading the old patriarch again, and writing a few pages about him, which no doubt cost me as much time and pottering as it would cost you to write a History. Then an "Oration" was due to the New England Society in New York, on the 250th anniversary of the Plymouth Landing,--as I thought myself familiar with the story, and holding also some opinions thereupon. But in the Libraries I found alcoves full of books and documents reckoned essential; and, at New York, after reading for an hour to the great assembly out of my massy manuscript, I refused to print a line until I could revise and complete my papers;--risking, of course, the nonsense of their newspaper reporters. This pill swallowed and forgotten, it was already time for my Second "Course on Philosophy" at Cambridge,--which I had accepted again that I might repair the faults of the last year. But here were eighteen lectures, each to be read sixteen miles away from my house, to go and come,--and the same work and journey twice in each week,--and I have just got through the doleful ordeal. I have abundance of good readings and some honest writing on the leading topics,--but in haste and confusion they are misplaced and spoiled. I hope the ruin of no young man's soul will here or hereafter be charged to me as having wasted his time or confounded his reason. Now I come to the raid of a London bookseller, Hotten, (of whom I believe I never told you,) on my forgotten papers in the old _Dials,_ and other pamphlets here. Conway wrote me that he could not be resisted,--would certainly steal good and bad,--but might be guided in the selection. I replied that the act was odious to me, and I promised to denounce the man and his theft to any friends I might have in England; but if, instead of printing then, he would wait a year, I would make my own selection, with the addition of some later critical papers, and permit the book. Mr. Ireland in Manchester, and Conway in London, took the affair kindly in hand, and Hotten acceded to my change. And that is the next task that threatens my imbecility. But now, ten days ago or less, my friend John M. Forbes has come to me with a proposition to carry me off to California, the Yosemite, the Mammoth trees, and the Pacific, and, after much resistance, I have surrendered for six weeks, and we set out tomorrow. And hence this sheet of confession,--that I may not drag a lengthening chain. Meantime, you have been monthly loading me with good for evil. I have just counted twenty-three volumes of Carlyle's Library Edition, in order on my shelves, besides two, or perhaps three, which Ellery Channing has borrowed. Add, that the precious Chapman's _Homer_ came safely, though not till months after you had told me of its departure, and shall be guarded henceforward with joy. _Wednesday, 13, Chicago._--Arrived here and can bring this little sheet to the post-office here. My daughter Edith Forbes, and her husband William H. Forbes, and three other friends, accompany me, and we shall overtake Mr. Forbes senior tomorrow at Burlington, Iowa. The widow of one of the noblest of our young martyrs in the War, Col. Lowell,* cousin [nephew] of James Russell Lowell, sends me word that she wishes me to give her a note of introduction to you, confiding to me that she has once written a letter to you which procured her the happiest reply from you, and I shall obey her, and you will see her and own her rights. Still continue to be magnanimous to your friend, --R.W. Emerson --------- * Charles Russell Lowell, to be remembered always with honor in company with his brother James Jackson Lowell and his cousin William Lowell Putnam,--a shining group among the youths who have died for their country. --------- CLXXXVII. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 4 June, 1871 Dear Emerson,--Your Letter gave me great pleasure. A gleam of sunshine after a long tract of lowering weather. It is not you that are to blame for this sad gap in our correspondence; it is I, or rather it is my misfortunes, and miserable inabilities, broken resolutions, etc., etc. The truth is, the winter here was very unfriendly to me; broke ruinously into my sleep; and through that into every other department of my businesses, spiritual and temporal; so that from about New-Year's Day last I have been, in a manner, good for nothing,--nor am yet, though I do again feel as if the beautiful Summer weather might perhaps do something for me. This it was that choked every enterprise; and postponed your Letter, week after week, through so many months. Let us not speak of it farther! Note, meanwhile, I have no disease about me; nothing but the gradual decay of any poor digestive faculty I latterly had,--or indeed ever had since I was three and twenty years of age. Let us be quiet with it; accept it as a mode of exit, of which always there must be _some_ mode. I have got done with all my press-correctings, editionings, and paltry bother of that kind: Vol. 30 will embark for you about the middle of this month; there are then to follow ("uniform," as the printers call it, though in smaller type) a little volume called _General Index;_ and three more volumes of _Translations from the German;_ after which we two will reckon and count; and if there is any _lacuna_ on the Concord shelf, at once make it good. Enough, enough on that score. The Hotten who has got hold of you here is a dirty little pirate, who snatches at everybody grown fat enough to yield him a bite (paltry, unhanged creature); so that in fact he is a symbol to you of your visible rise in the world here; and, with Conway's vigilance to help, will do you good and not evil. Glad am I, in any case, to see so much new spiritual produce still ripening around you; and you ought to be glad, too. Pray Heaven you may long _keep your right hand_ steady: you, too, I can perceive, will never, any more than myself, learn to "write by dictation" in a manner that will be supportable to you. I rejoice, also, to hear of such a magnificent adventure as that you are now upon. Climbing the backbone of America; looking into the Pacific Ocean too, and the gigantic wonders going on there. I fear you won't see Brigham Young, however? He also to me is one of the products out there;--and indeed I may confess to you that the doings in that region are not only of a big character, but of a great;--and that in my occasional explosions against "Anarchy," and my inextinguishable hatred of _it,_ I privately whisper to myself, "Could any Friedrich Wilhelm, now, or Friedrich, or most perfect Governor you could hope to realize, guide forward what is America's essential task at present faster or more completely than 'anarchic America' herself is now doing?" _Such_ "Anarchy" has a great deal to say for itself,--(would to Heaven ours of England had as much!)--and points towards grand _anti_-Anarchies in the future; in fact, I can already discern in it huge quantities of Anti-Anarchy in the "impalpable-powder" condition; and hope, with the aid of centuries, immense things from it, in my private mind! Good Mrs. --- has never yet made her appearance; but shall be welcome whenever she does. Did you ever hear the name of an aged, or elderly, fantastic fellow-citizen of yours, called J. Lee Bliss, who designates himself O.F. and A.K., i.e. "Old Fogey" and "Amiable Kuss"? He sent me, the other night, a wonderful miscellany of symbolical shreds and patches; which considerably amused me; and withal indicated good-will on the man's part; who is not without humor, in sight, and serious intention or disposition. If you ever did hear of him, say a word on the subject next time you write. And above all things _write._ The instant you get home from California, or see this, let me hear from you what your adventures have been and what the next are to be. Adieu, dear Emerson. Yours ever affectionately, T. Carlyle Mrs. --- sends a note from Piccadilly this new morning (June 5th); _call_ to be made there today by Niece Mary, card left, etc., etc. Promises to be an agreeable Lady. Did you ever hear of such a thing as this suicidal Finis of the French "Copper Captaincy"; gratuitous Attack on Germany, and ditto Blowing-up of Paris by its own hand! An event with meanings unspeakable,--deep as the. _Abyss._-- If you ever write to C. Norton in Italy, send him my kind remembrances. --T. C. (with about the velocity of Engraving--on lead!)* --------- * The letter was dictated, but the postscript, from the first signature, was written in a tremulous hand by Carlyle himself. --------- CLXXXVIII. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 30 June, 1871 My Dear Carlyle,--'T is more than time that you should hear from me whose debts to you always accumulate. But my long journey to California ended in many distractions on my return home. I found Varioloid in my house... and I was not permitted to enter it for many days, and could only talk with wife, son, and daughter from the yard.... I had crowded and closed my Cambridge lectures in haste, and went to the land of Flowers invited by John M. Forbes, one of my most valued friends, father of my daughter Edith's husband. With him and his family and one or two chosen guests, the trip was made under the best conditions of safety, comfort, and company, I measuring for the first time one entire line of the Country. California surprises with a geography, climate, vegetation, beasts, birds, fishes even, unlike ours; the land immense; the Pacific sea; Steam brings the near neighborhood of Asia; and South America at your feet; the mountains reaching the altitude of Mont Blanc; the State in its six hundred miles of latitude producing all our Northern fruits, and also the fig, orange, and banana. But the climate chiefly surprised me. The Almanac said April; but the day said June;--and day after day for six weeks uninterrupted sunshine. November and December are the rainy months. The whole Country, was covered with flowers, and all of them unknown to us except in greenhouses. Every bird that I know at home is represented here, but in gayer plumes. On the plains we saw multitudes of antelopes, hares, gophers,-- even elks, and one pair of wolves on the plains; the grizzly bear only in a cage. We crossed one region of the buffalo, but only saw one captive. We found Indians at every railroad station,--the squaws and papooses begging, and the "bucks," as they wickedly call them, lounging. On our way out, we left the Pacific Railroad for twenty-four hours to visit Salt Lake; called on Brigham Young--just seventy years old--who received us with quiet uncommitting courtesy, at first,--a strong-built, self-possessed, sufficient man with plain manners. He took early occasion to remark that "the one-man-power really meant all- men's-power." Our interview was peaceable enough, and rather mended my impression of the man; and, after our visit, I read in the Descret newspaper his Speech to his people on the previous Sunday. It avoided religion, but was full of Franklinian good sense. In one point, he says: "Your fear of the Indians is nonsense. The Indians like the white men's food. Feed them well, and they will surely die." He is clearly a sufficient ruler, and perhaps civilizer of his kingdom of blockheads ad interim; but I found that the San Franciscans believe that this exceptional power cannot survive Brigham. I have been surprised--but it is months ago--by a letter from Lacy Garbett, the Architect, whom I do not know, but one of whose books, about "Design in Architecture," I have always valued. This letter, asking of me that Americans shall join Englishmen in a Petition to Parliament against pulling down Ancient Saxon buildings, is written in a way so wild as to suggest insanity, and I have not known how to answer it. At my "Saturday Club" in Boston I sat at dinner by an English lord,--whose name I have forgotten,--from whom I tried to learn what laws Parliament had passed for the repairs of old religious Foundations, that could make them the victims of covetous Architects. But he assured me there were none such, and that he himself was President of a Society in his own County for the protection of such buildings. So that I am left entirely in the dark in regard to the fact and Garbett's letter. He claims to speak both for Ruskin and himself. I grieve to hear no better account of your health than your last letter gives. The only contradiction of it, namely, the power of your pen in this reproduction of thirty books,--and such books,-- is very important and very consoling to me. A great work to be done is the best insurance, and I sleep quietly, notwithstanding these sad bulletins,--believing that you cannot be spared. Fare well, dear friend, R.W. Emerson CLXXXIX. Emerson to Carlyle Concord, 4 September, 1871 My Dear Carlyle,--I hope you will have returned safely from the Orkneys in time to let my son Edward W.E. see your face on his way through London to Germany, whither he goes to finish his medical studies,--no, not finish, but prosecute. Give him your blessing, and tell him what he should look for in his few days in London, and what in your Prussia. He is a good youth, and we can spare him only for this necessity. I should like well to accompany him as far as to your hearthstone, if only so I could persuade you that it is but a ten-days ride for you thence to mine,--a little farther than the Orkneys, and the outskirts of land as good, and bigger. I read gladly in your letters some relentings toward America,--deeper ones in your dealing with Harvard College; and I know you could not see without interest the immense and varied blossoming of our possibilities here,--of all nationalities, too, besides our own. I have heard from Mrs. --- twice lately, who exults in your kindness to her. Always affectionately, Yours, R.W. Emerson CXC. Emerson to Carlyle Baltimore, Md., 5 January, 1872 My Dear Carlyle,--I received from you through Mr. Chapman, just before Christmas, the last rich instalment of your Library Edition; viz. Vols. IV.-X. _Life of Friedrich;_ Vols. L-III. _Translations from German;_ one volume General Index; eleven volumes in all,--and now my stately collection is perfect. Perfect too is your Victory. But I clatter my chains with joy, as I did forty years ago, at your earliest gifts. Happy man you should be, to whom the Heaven has allowed such masterly completion. You shall wear your crown at the Pan-Saxon Games with no equal or approaching competitor in sight,--well earned by genius and exhaustive labor, and with nations for your pupils and praisers. I count it my eminent happiness to have been so nearly your contemporary, and your friend,--permitted to detect by its rare light the new star almost before the Easterners had seen it, and to have found no disappointment, but joyful confirmation rather, in coming close to its orb. Rest, rest, now for a time; I pray you, and be thankful. Meantime, I know well all your perversities, and give them a wide berth. They seriously annoy a great many worthy readers, nations of readers sometimes,--but I heap them all as style, and read them as I read Rabelais's gigantic humors which astonish in order to force attention, and by and by are seen to be the rhetoric of a highly virtuous gentleman who _swears._ I have been quite too busy with fast succeeding _jobs_ (I may well call them), in the last year, to have read much in these proud books; but I begin to see daylight coming through my fogs, and I have not lost in the least my appetite for reading,--resolve, with my old Harvard professor, "to retire and read the Authors." I am impatient to deserve your grand Volumes by reading in them with all the haughty airs that belong to seventy years which I shall count if I live till May, 1873. Meantime I see well that you have lost none of your power, and I wish that you would let in some good Eckermann to dine with you day by day, and competent to report your opinions,--for you can speak as well as you can write, and what the world to come should know... Affectionately, R.W. Emerson CXCI. Carlyle to Emerson 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 2 April, 1872 Dear Emerson,--I am covered with confusion, astonishment, and shame to think of my long silence. You wrote me two beautiful letters; none friendlier, brighter, wiser could come to me from any quarter of the world; and I have not answered even by a sign. Promptly and punctually my poor heart did answer; but to do it outwardly,--as if there had lain some enchantment on me,-- was beyond my power. The one thing I can say in excuse or explanation is, that ever since Summer last, I have been in an unusually dyspeptic, peaking, pining, and dispirited condition; and have no right hand of my own for writing, nor, for several months, had any other that was altogether agreeable to me. But in fine I don't believe you lay any blame or anger on me at all; and I will say no more about it, but only try to repent and do better next time. Your letter from the Far West was charmingly vivid and free; one seemed to attend you personally, and see with one's own eyes the _notabilia,_ human and other, of those huge regions, in your swift flight through them to and from. I retain your little etching of Brigham Young as a bit of real likeness; I have often thought of your transit through Chicago since poor Chicago itself vanished out of the world on wings of fire. There is something huge, painful, and almost appalling to me in that wild Western World of yours;--and especially I wonder at the gold-nuggeting there, while plainly every gold-nuggeter is no other than a criminal to Human Society, and has to _steal_ the exact value of his gold nugget from the pockets of all the posterity of Adam, now and for some time to come, in this world. I conclude it is a bait used by All-wise Providence to attract your people out thither, there to build towns, make roads, fell forests (or plant forests), and make ready a Dwelling-place for new Nations, who will find themselves called to quite other than nugget-hunting. In the hideous stew of Anarchy, in which all English Populations present themselves to my dismal contemplation at this day, it is a solid consolation that there will verily, in another fifty years, be above a hundred million men and women on this Planet who can all read Shakespeare and the English Bible and the (also for a long time biblical and noble) history of their Mother Country,--and proceed again to do, unless the Devil be in them, as their Forebears did, or better, if they have the heart!-- Except that you are a thousand times too kind to me, your second Letter also was altogether charming.... Do you read Ruskin's _Fors Clavigera,_ which he cheerily tells me gets itself reprinted in America? If you don't, _do,_ I advise you. Also his _Munera Pulveris,_ Oxford-_Lectures_ on Art, and whatever else he is now writing,--if you can manage to get them (which is difficult here, owing to the ways he has towards the bibliopolic world!). There is nothing going on among us as notable to me as those fierce lightning-bolts Ruskin is copiously and desperately pouring into the black world of Anarchy all around him. No other man in England that I meet has in him the divine rage against iniquity, falsity, and baseness that Ruskin has, and that every man ought to have. Unhappily he is not a strong man; one might say a weak man rather; and has not the least prudence of management; though if he can hold out for another fifteen years or so, he may produce, even in this way, a great effect. God grant it, say I. Froude is coming to you in October. You will find him a most clear, friendly, ingenious, solid, and excellent man; and I am very glad to find you among those who are to take care of him when he comes to your new Country. Do your best and wisest towards him, for my sake, withal. He is the valuablest Friend I now have in England, nearly though not quite altogether the one man in talking with whom I can get any real profit or comfort. Alas, alas, here is the end of the paper, dear Emerson; and I had still a whole wilderness of things to say. Write to me, or even do not write, and I will surely write again. I remain as ever Your Affectionate Friend, T. Carlyle In November, 1872, Emerson went to England, and the two friends met again. After a short stay he proceeded to the Continent and Egypt, returning to London in the spring of 1873. For the last time Carlyle and he saw each other. In May, Emerson returned home. After this time no letters passed between him and Carlyle. They were both old men. Writing had become difficult to them; and little was left to say. Carlyle died, eighty-five years old, on the 5th of February, 1881. Emerson died, seventy-nine years old, on the 27th of April, 1882. ------------- 
32626	----	THOMAS CARLYLE * * * * * FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES _The following Volumes are now ready_:-- THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson. ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton. HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Leask. JOHN KNOX. By A. Taylor Innes. ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun. THE BALLADISTS. By John Geddie. RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless. SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson. THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden Blaikie. JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Leask. TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By Oliphant Smeaton. FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. Omond. THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir George Douglas. NORMAN MACLEOD. By John Wellwood. SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor Saintsbury. KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By Louis A. Barbé. ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. Grosart. JAMES THOMSON. By William Bayne. MUNGO PARK. By T. Banks Maclachlan. DAVID HUME. By Professor Calderwood. * * * * * THOMAS CARLYLE by HECTOR C MACPHERSON Famous Scots Series Published by Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier Edinburgh and London The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr Joseph Brown, and the printing from the press of Messrs Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh. Second Edition completing Seventh Thousand. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Of the writing of books on Carlyle there is no end. Why, then, it may pertinently be asked, add another stone to the Carlylean cairn? The reply is obvious. In a series dealing with famous Scotsmen, Carlyle has a rightful claim to a niche in the temple of Fame. While prominence has been given in the book to the Scottish side of Carlyle's life, the fact has not been lost sight of that Carlyle owed much to Germany; indeed, if we could imagine the spirit of a German philosopher inhabiting the body of a Covenanter of dyspeptic and sceptical tendencies, a good idea would be had of Thomas Carlyle. Needless to say, I have been largely indebted to the biography by Mr Froude, and to Carlyle's _Reminiscences_. After all has been said, the fact remains that Froude's portrait, though truthful in the main, is somewhat deficient in light and shade--qualities which the student will find admirably supplied in Professor Masson's charming little book, "Carlyle Personally, and in his Writings." To the Professor I am under deep obligation for the interest he has shown in the book. In the course of his perusal of the proofs, Professor Masson made valuable corrections and suggestions, which deserve more than a formal acknowledgment. To Mr Haldane, M.P., my thanks are also due for his suggestive criticism of the chapter on German thought, upon which he is an acknowledged authority. I have also to express my deep obligations to Mr John Morley, who, in the midst of pressing engagements, kindly found time to read the proof sheets. In a private note Mr Morley has been good enough to express his general sympathy and concurrence with my estimate of Carlyle. _EDINBURGH, October 1897._ CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I EARLY LIFE 9 CHAPTER II CRAIGENPUTTOCK--LITERARY EFFORTS 29 CHAPTER III CARLYLE'S MENTAL DEVELOPMENT 42 CHAPTER IV LIFE IN LONDON 65 CHAPTER V HOLIDAY JOURNEYINGS--LITERARY WORK 79 CHAPTER VI RECTORIAL ADDRESS--DEATH OF MRS CARLYLE 112 CHAPTER VII LAST YEARS AND DEATH OF CARLYLE 129 CHAPTER VIII CARLYLE AS A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKER 138 CHAPTER IX CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRATIONAL FORCE 152 THOMAS CARLYLE CHAPTER I EARLY LIFE 'A great man,' says Hegel, 'condemns the world to the task of explaining him.' Emphatically does the remark apply to Thomas Carlyle. When he began to leave his impress in literature, he was treated as a confusing and inexplicable element. Opinion oscillated between the view of James Mill, that Carlyle was an insane rhapsodist, and that of Jeffrey, that he was afflicted with a chronic craze for singularity. Jeffrey's verdict sums up pretty effectively the attitude of the critics of the time to the new writer:--'I suppose that you will treat me as something worse than an ass, when I say that I am firmly persuaded the great source of your extravagance, and all that makes your writings intolerable to many and ridiculous to not a few, is not so much any real peculiarity of opinion, as an unlucky ambition to appear more original than you are.' The blunder made by Jeffrey in regard both to Carlyle and Wordsworth emphasises the truth which critics seem reluctant to bear in mind, that, before the great man can be explained, he must be appreciated. Emphatically true of Carlyle it is that he creates the standard by which he is judged. Carlyle resembles those products of the natural world which biologists call 'sports'--products which, springing up in a spontaneous and apparently erratic way, for a time defy classification. The time is appropriate for an attempt to classify the great thinker, whose birth took place one hundred years ago. Towards the close of the last century a stone-mason, named James Carlyle, started business on his own account in the village of Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. He was an excellent tradesman, and frugal withal; and in the year 1791 he married a distant kinswoman of his own, Janet Carlyle, who died after giving birth to a son. In the beginning of 1795 he married one Margaret Aitken, a worthy, intelligent woman; and on the 4th of December following a son was born, whom they called Thomas, after his paternal grandfather. This child was destined to be the most original writer of his time. Little Thomas was early taught to read by his mother, and at the age of five he learnt to 'count' from his father. He was then sent to the village school; and in his seventh year he was reported to be 'complete' in English. As the schoolmaster was weak in the classics, Tom was taught the rudiments of Latin by the burgher minister, of which strict sect James Carlyle was a zealous member. One summer morning, in 1806, his father took him to Annan Academy. 'It was a bright morning,' he wrote long years thereafter, 'and to me full of moment, of fluttering boundless Hopes, saddened by parting with Mother, with Home, and which afterwards were cruelly disappointed.' At that 'doleful and hateful Academy,' to use his own words, Thomas Carlyle spent three years, learning to read French and Latin, and the Greek alphabet, as well as acquiring a smattering of geometry and algebra. It was in the Academy that he got his first glimpse of Edward Irving--probably in April or May 1808--who had called to pay his respects to his old teacher, Mr Hope. Thomas's impression of him was that of a 'flourishing slip of a youth, with coal-black hair, swarthy clear complexion, very straight on his feet, and except for the glaring squint alone, decidedly handsome.' Years passed before young Carlyle saw Irving's face again. James Carlyle, although an austere man, and the reverse of demonstrative, was bound up in his son, sparing no expense upon the youth's education. On one occasion he exclaimed, with an unwonted outburst of glee, 'Tom, I do not grudge thy schooling, now when thy Uncle Frank owns thee to be a better Arithmetician than himself.' Early recognising the natural talent and aptitude of his son, he determined to send him to the nearest university, with a view to Thomas studying for the ministry. One crisp winter's morning, in 1809, found Thomas Carlyle on his way to Edinburgh, trudging the entire distance--one hundred miles or so. He went through the usual university course, attended the divinity classes, and delivered the customary discourses in English and Latin. But Tom was not destined to 'wag his head in a pulpit,' for he had conscientious objections which parental control in no way interfered with. Referring to this vital period of his life, Carlyle wrote: 'His [father's] tolerance for me, his trust in me, was great. When I declined going forward into the Church (though his heart was set upon it), he respected my scruples, my volition, and patiently let me have my way.' Carlyle never looked back to his university life with satisfaction. In his interesting recollections Mr Moncure Conway represents Carlyle, describing his experiences as follows:--'Very little help did I get from anybody in those years, and, as I may say, no sympathy at all in all this old town. And if there was any difference, it was found least where I might most have hoped for it. There was Professor ----. For years I attended his lectures, in all weathers and all hours. Many and many a time, when the class was called together, it was found to consist of one individual--to wit, of him now speaking; and still oftener, when others were present, the only person who had at all looked into the lesson assigned was the same humble individual. I remember no instance in which these facts elicited any note or comment from that instructor. He once requested me to translate a mathematical paper, and I worked through it the whole of one Sunday, and it was laid before him, and it was received without remark or thanks. After such long years, I came to part with him, and to get my certificate. Without a word, he wrote on a bit of paper: "I certify that Mr Thomas Carlyle has been in my class during his college course, and has made good progress in his studies." Then he rang a bell, and ordered a servant to open the front door for me. Not the slightest sign that I was a person whom he could have distinguished in any crowd. And so I parted from old ----.' Professor Masson, who in loving, painstaking style has ferreted all the facts about Carlyle's university life, sums up in these words: 'Without assuming that he meant the university described in _Sartor Resartus_ to stand literally for Edinburgh University, of his own experience, we have seen enough to show that any specific training of much value he considered himself to owe to his four years in the Arts classes in Edinburgh University, was the culture of his mathematical faculty under Leslie, and that for the rest he acknowledged merely a certain benefit from being in so many class-rooms where matters intellectual were professedly in the atmosphere, and where he learned to take advantage of books.' As Carlyle put it in his Rectorial Address of 1866, 'What I have found the university did for me is that it taught me to read in various languages, in various sciences, so that I go into the books which treated of these things, and gradually penetrate into any department I wanted to make myself master of, as I found it suit me.' In 1814, Carlyle obtained the mathematical tutorship at Annan. Out of his slender salary of £60 or £70 he was able to save something, so that he was practically independent. By and by James Carlyle gave up his trade, and settled on a small farm at Mainhill, about two miles from Ecclefechan. Thither Thomas hied with unfeigned delight at holiday time, for he led the life of a recluse at Annan, his books being his sole companions. Edward Irving, to whom Carlyle was introduced in college days, was now settled as a dominie in Kirkcaldy. His teaching was not favourably viewed by some of the parents, who started a rival school, and resolved to import a second master, with the result that Carlyle was selected. Irving, with great magnanimity, gave him a cordial welcome to the 'Lang Toon,' and the two Annandale natives became fast friends. The elder placed his well-selected library at the disposal of the younger, and together they explored the whole countryside. Short visits to Edinburgh had a special attraction for both, where they met with a few kindred spirits. On one of those visits, Carlyle, who had not cut off his connection with the university, called at the Divinity Hall to put down his name formally on the annual register. In his own words: 'Old Dr Ritchie "not at home" when I called to enter myself. "Good!" answered I; "_let the omen be fulfilled_."' Carlyle's studies in Kirkcaldy made him eager to contribute to the fulfilment of the omen. Among the authors which he read out of the Edinburgh University library was Gibbon, who pushed Carlyle's sceptical questionings to a definite point. In a conversation with Professor Masson, Carlyle stated that to his reading of Gibbon he dated the extirpation from his mind of the last remnant that had been left in it of the orthodox belief in miracles. In the space of two years, Carlyle and Irving 'got tired of schoolmastering and its mean contradictions and poor results.' They bade Kirkcaldy farewell and made for Edinburgh,--Irving to lodge in Bristo Street, 'more expensive rooms than mine,' naively remarks Carlyle, where he gave breakfasts to 'Intellectualities he fell in with, I often a guest with them. They were but stupid Intellectualities, etc.' As for their prospects, this is what Carlyle says: 'Irving's outlooks in Edinburgh were not of the best, considerably checkered with dubiety, opposition, or even flat disfavour in some quarters; but at least they were far superior to mine, and indeed, I was beginning my four or five most miserable, dark, sick, and heavy-laden years; Irving, after some staggerings aback, his seven or eight healthiest and brightest. He had, I should guess, as one item several good hundreds of money to wait upon. My _peculium_ I don't recollect, but it could not have exceeded £100. I was without friends, experience, or connection in the sphere of human business, was of shy humour, proud enough and to spare, and had begun my long curriculum of _dyspepsia_ which has never ended since!'[1] Carlyle's intention was to study for the Bar, if perchance he could eke out a livelihood by private teaching. He obtained one or two pupils, wrote a stray article or so for the 'Encyclopædias'; but as he barely managed to pay his way, he speedily gave up his law studies. He was at this time--the winter of 1819--'advancing,' as he phrases it, 'towards huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this my Edinburgh purgatory.' It was about a couple of years thereafter ere Carlyle went through what he has described as his 'spiritual new birth.' When Carlyle was in diligent search for congenial employment, a certain Captain Basil Hall crossed his path, to whom Edward Irving had given lessons in mathematics. The 'small lion,' as he calls the captain, came to Carlyle, and wished the latter to go out with him 'to Dunglas,' and there do 'lunars' in his name, he looking on and learning of Carlyle 'what would come of its own will.' The said 'lunars' meanwhile were to go to the Admiralty, 'testifying there what a careful studious Captain he was, and help to get him promotion, so the little wretch smilingly told me.' Carlyle adds: 'I remember the figure of him in my dim lodging as a gay, crackling, sniggering spectre, one dusk, endeavouring to seduce me by affability in lieu of liberal wages into this adventure. Wages, I think, were to be smallish ("so poor are we"), but then the great Playfair is coming on visit. "You will see Professor Playfair." I had not the least notion of such an enterprise on these shining terms, and Captain Basil with his great Playfair _in posse_ vanished for me into the shades of dusk for good.'[2] When private teaching would not come Carlyle's way, he timorously aimed towards 'literature.' He had taken to the study of German, and conscious of his own powers in that direction, he applied in vain to more than one London bookseller, proposing a complete translation of Schiller. Irving not only did his utmost to comfort Carlyle in his spiritual wrestlings, but he tried to find him employment. The two friends continued to make pleasant excursions, and in June 1821 Irving brought Carlyle to Haddington, an event which was destined to colour all his subsequent life; for it was then and there he first saw Jane Welsh, a sight, he acknowledged, for ever memorable to him. 'In the ancient County Town of Haddington, July 14, 1801, there was born,' wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1869, 'to a lately wedded pair, not natives of the place but already reckoned among the best class of people there, a little Daughter whom they named _Jane Baillie Welsh_, and whose subsequent and final name (her own common signature for many years) was _Jane Welsh Carlyle_, and now so stands, now that she is mine in death only, on her and her Father's Tombstone in the Abbey Kirk of that Town. July 14th, 1801; I was then in my sixth year, far away in every sense, now near and infinitely concerned, trying doubtfully after some three years' sad cunctation, if there is anything that I can profitably put on record of her altogether bright, beneficent and modest little Life, and Her, as my final task in this world.'[3] The picture was never completed by the master-hand; the 'effort was too distressing'; so all his notes and letters were handed over to a literary executor. At the time of Carlyle's introduction to Miss Welsh, she was living with her widowed mother. Her father, Dr John Welsh, came of a good family, and was a popular country physician. Her mother was Grace Welsh of Capelgill, and was reckoned a beautiful, but haughty woman. Their marriage took place in 1800, and their only child, Jane, was born, as we have seen, the year following. Her most intimate friend, Miss Geraldine Jewsbury, tells us that Miss Welsh had 'a graceful and beautifully-formed figure, upright and supple, a delicate complexion of creamy white, with a pale rose tint in the cheeks, lovely eyes full of fire and softness, and with great depths of meaning.' She had a musical voice, was a good talker, extremely witty, and so fascinating in every way that a relative of hers told Miss Jewsbury that every man who spoke to her for five minutes felt impelled to make her an offer of marriage. Be that as it may, it _is_ certain that Miss Jane Welsh had troops of suitors in and around the quiet country town. She always spoke of her mother with deep affection and great admiration. Her father she reverenced, and he was the only person during her girlhood who had any real influence over her. This, then, was the young lady of whom Thomas Carlyle carried back to Edinburgh a sweet and lasting impression. They corresponded at intervals, and Thomas was permitted to send her books occasionally. Edward Irving used to live in Dr Welsh's house when he taught in the local school, and he led Jeannie--a winsome, wilful lass--to take an interest in the classics. She entertained a girlish passion for the handsome youth, and there can be little doubt that they would have ultimately been married, were it not that the eldest daughter of a Kirkcaldy parson, Miss Martin, had 'managed to charm Irving for the time being,' and an engagement followed. Before Carlyle had drifted into Edinburgh he had, of course, heard of the fame of Francis Jeffrey. He heard him once speaking in the General Assembly 'on some poor cause.' Jeffrey's pleading seemed to Carlyle 'abundantly clear, full of liveliness, free flowing ingenuity.' 'My admiration,' he adds, 'went frankly with that of others, but I think it was hardly of very deep character.' When Carlyle was in the 'slough of despond,' he bethought him of Jeffrey, this time as editor of the _Edinburgh Review_. He resolved to try the 'great man' with an actual contribution. The subject was a condemnation of a new French book, in which a mechanical theory of gravitation was elaborately worked out by the author. He got 'a certain feeble but enquiring quasi-disciple' of his own to act as amanuensis, from whom he kept his ulterior purpose quite secret. Looking back through the dim vista of seven-and-forty years, this is what Carlyle says of that anxious time: 'Well do I remember those dreary evenings in Bristo Street; oh, what ghastly passages and dismal successive spasms of attempt at "literary enterprise"!... My "Review of Pictet" all fairly written out in George Dalgliesh's good clerk hand, I penned some brief polite Note to the great Editor, and walked off with the small Parcel one night to his address in George Street. I very well remember leaving it with his valet there, and disappearing in the night with various thoughts and doubts! My hopes had never risen high, or in fact risen at all; but for a fortnight or so they did not quite die out, and then it was in absolute zero; no answer, no return of MS., absolutely no notice taken, which was a form of catastrophe more complete than even I had anticipated! There rose in my head a pungent little Note which might be written to the great man, with neatly cutting considerations offered him from the small unknown ditto; but I wisely judged it was still more dignified to let the matter lie as it was, and take what I had got for my own benefit only. Nor did I ever mention it to almost anybody, least of all to Jeffrey in subsequent changed times, when at anyrate it was fallen extinct.'[4] Carlyle's star was, however, in the ascendant, for in 1822 he became tutor to the two sons of a wealthy lady, Mrs Charles Buller, at a salary of £200 a year. It was through Irving that this appointment came. The young lads boarded with 'a good old Dr Fleming' in George Square, whither Carlyle went daily from his lodgings at[5]3 Moray Street, Pilrig Street. The Bullers finally returned to London, Carlyle staying at his father's little homestead of Mainhill to finish a translation of 'Wilhelm Meister.' He followed the Bullers to London, where he resigned the tutorship in the hope of getting some literary work. Irving introduced him to the proprietor of the _London Magazine_, who offered Carlyle sixteen guineas a sheet for a series of 'Portraits of Men of Genius and Character.' The first was to be a life of Schiller, which appeared in that periodical in 1823-4. Mr Boyd, the Edinburgh publisher, accepted the translation of 'Wilhelm Meister.' 'Two years before,' wrote Carlyle in his _Reminiscences_, 'I had at length, after some repulsions, got into the heart of "Wilhelm Meister," and eagerly read it through; my sally out, after finishing, along the vacant streets of Edinburgh, (a windless, Scotch-misty Saturday night), is still vivid to me. "Grand, surely, harmoniously built together, far-seeing, wise, and true: when, for many years, or almost in my life before, have I read such a book?"' A short letter from Goethe in Weimar, in acknowledgment of a copy of his 'Wilhelm Meister,' was peculiarly gratifying to Carlyle. Carlyle was not happy in London; dyspepsia and 'the noises' sorely troubled him. He was anxious to be gone. To the surprise of Irving--who was now settled in the metropolis--and everybody else, he resolutely decided to return to Annandale, where his father had leased for him a compact little farm at Hoddam Hill, three miles from Mainhill, and visible from the fields at the back of it. 'Perhaps it was the very day before my departure,' wrote Carlyle, 'at least it is the last I recollect of him [Irving], we were walking in the streets multifariously discoursing; a dim grey day, but dry and airy;--at the corner of Cockspur Street we paused for a moment, meeting Sir John Sinclair ("Statistical Account of Scotland" etc.), whom I had never seen before and never saw again. A lean old man, tall but stooping, in tartan cloak, face very wrinkly, nose blue, physiognomy vague and with distinction as one might have expected it to be. He spoke to Irving with benignant respect, whether to me at all I don't recollect.' Carlyle shook the dust of London from off his feet, and by easy stages made his way northwards. Arrived at Ecclefechan, within two miles of his father's house, while the coach was changing horses, Carlyle noticed through the window his little sister Jean earnestly looking up for him. She, with Jenny, the youngest of the family, was at school in the village, and had come out daily to inspect the coach in hope of seeing him. 'Her bonny little blush and radiancy of look when I let down the window and suddenly disclosed myself,' wrote Carlyle in 1867, 'are still present to me.' On the 26th of May 1825, he established himself at Hoddam Hill, and set about 'German Romance.' His brother Alick managed the farm, and his mother, with one of the girls, was generally there to look after his comforts. During the intervening years, Carlyle's intimacy with Miss Jane Welsh gradually increased, with occasional differences. She had promised to marry him if he could 'achieve independence.' Carlyle's idea was that after their marriage they should settle upon the farm of Craigenputtock, which had been in the possession of the Welsh family for generations, and devote himself to literary work. By and by Miss Welsh accepted his offer of marriage, but not until she had acquainted him of the Irving incident. The wedding took place on the 17th of October 1825, and the young couple took up housekeeping in a quiet cottage at Comely Bank, Edinburgh. Of his life at this period, the best description is given by Carlyle himself, in a letter to Mrs Basil Montague, dated Christmas Day 1826:-- 'In spite of ill-health I reckon myself moderately happy here, much happier than men usually are, or than such a fool as I deserve to be. My good wife exceeds all my hopes, and is, in truth, I believe, among the best women that the world contains. The philosophy of the heart is far better than that of the understanding. She loves me with her whole soul, and this one sentiment has taught her much that I have long been vainly at the schools to learn.... On the whole, what I chiefly want is occupation; which, when the times grow better, or my own genius gets more alert and thorough-going, will not fail, I suppose, to present itself.... Some day--oh, that the day were here!--I shall surely speak out those things that are lying in me, and give me no sleep till they are spoken! Or else, if the Fates would be so kind as to shew me--that I had nothing to say! This, perhaps, is the real secret of it after all; a hard result, yet not intolerable, were it once clear and certain. Literature, it seems, is to be my trade, but the present aspects of it among us seem to me peculiarly perplexed and uninviting.'[6]Here, as in undertone, we discover what Professor Masson calls the constitutional sadness of Carlyle--a sadness which, along with indifferent health, led him to be impatient at trifles, morbid, proud, and at times needlessly aggressive in speech and demeanour. These traits, however, in the early years of married life were not specially visible; and on the whole the Comely Bank period may be described as one of calm happiness. Carlyle's forecast was correct. Literature was to be his trade. In the following spring came a letter to Carlyle from Procter (Barry Cornwall), whom he had met in London, offering to introduce him formally to Jeffrey, whom he certified to be a 'very fine fellow.' One evening Carlyle sallied forth from Comely Bank for Jeffrey's house in George Street, armed with Procter's letter. He was shown into the study. 'Fire, pair of candles,' he relates, 'were cheerfully burning, in the light of which sate my famous little gentleman; laid aside his work, cheerfully invited me to sit, and began talking in a perfectly human manner.' The interview lasted for about twenty minutes, during which time Jeffrey had made kind enquiries what his visitor was doing and what he had published; adding, 'We must give you a lift,' an offer, Carlyle says, which in 'some complimentary way' he managed to Jeffrey's satisfaction to decline. Jeffrey returned Carlyle's call, when he was captivated by Mrs Carlyle. The intimacy rapidly increased, and a short paper by Carlyle on Jean Paul appeared in the very next issue of the _Edinburgh Review_. 'It made,' says the author, 'what they call a sensation among the Edinburgh buckrams; which was greatly heightened next Number by the more elaborate and grave article on "German Literature" generally, which set many tongues wagging, and some few brains considering, _what_ this strange monster could be that was come to disturb their quiescence and the established order of Nature! Some Newspapers or Newspaper took to denouncing "the Mystic School," which my bright little Woman declared to consist of me alone, or of her and me, and for a long while after merrily used to designate us by that title.' Mrs Carlyle proved an admirable hostess; Jeffrey became a frequent visitor at Comely Bank, and they discovered 'mutual old cousinships' by the maternal side. Jeffrey's friendship was an immense acquisition to Carlyle, and everybody regarded it as his highest good fortune. The _literati_ of Edinburgh came to see her, and 'listen to her husband's astonishing monologues.' To Carlyle's regret, Jeffrey would not talk in their frequent rambles of his experiences in the world, 'nor of things concrete and current,' but was 'theoretic generally'; and seemed bent on converting Carlyle from his 'German mysticism,' back merely, as the latter could perceive, into 'dead Edinburgh Whiggism, scepticism, and materialism'; 'what I felt,' says Carlyle, 'to be a forever impossible enterprise.' They had long discussions, 'parryings, and thrustings,' which 'I have known continue night after night,' relates Carlyle, 'till two or three in the morning (when I was his guest at Craigcrook, as once or twice happened in coming years); there he went on in brisk logical exercise with all the rest of the house asleep, and parted usually in good humour, though after a game which was hardly worth the candle. I found him infinitely witty, ingenious, sharp of fence, but not in any sense deep; and used without difficulty to hold my own with him.' Jeffrey did everything in his power to further Carlyle's prospects and projects. He tried to obtain for him the professorship of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews University, vacated by Dr Chalmers. Testimonials were given by Irving, Brewster, Buller, Wilson, Jeffrey, and Goethe. They failed, however, in consequence of the opposition of the Principal, Dr Nicol. To Carlyle, doubtless, the most memorable incidents of the Edinburgh period was his correspondence with Goethe. The magnetic spell thrown over Carlyle by Goethe will ever remain a mystery. Between the two men there was no intellectual affinity. One would have expected Goethe the Pagan to have repelled Carlyle the Puritan, unless we have recourse to the philosophy of opposites, and conclude that the tumultuous soul of Carlyle found congenial repose in the Greek-like restfulness of Goethe. The great German had been deeply impressed by the profound grasp which Carlyle was displaying of German literature. After reading a letter which he had received from Walter Scott, Goethe remarked to Eckermann: 'I almost wonder that Walter Scott does not say a word about Carlyle, who has so decided a German tendency that he must certainly be known to him. It is admirable in Carlyle, that, in his judgment of our German authors, he has especially in view the _mental and moral core_ as that which is really influential. Carlyle is a _moral force of great importance_; there is in him much for the future and we cannot foresee what he will produce and effect.' FOOTNOTES: [1] _Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 141. [2] _Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 142. [3] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. 69. [4] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. pp. 18, 19. [5] Now 2 Spey Street. [6] Masson's 'Edinburgh Sketches and Memories,' pp. 329-30. CHAPTER II CRAIGENPUTTOCK--LITERARY EFFORTS Carlyle was feeling the force of Scott's remark that literature was a bad crutch--his prospects being far from bright. The Carlyles had been a little over eighteen months at Comely Bank, when their extensive circle of friends were surprised to hear of their intended withdrawal to Craigenputtock. Efforts were made to dissuade Carlyle from pursuing what at the time appeared a suicidal course. He was the intimate associate of the brilliant Jeffrey; he was within the charmed circle of Edinburgh Reviewers; he had laid the foundation of a literary reputation. Outwardly all seemed well with Carlyle; but 'the step,' himself says, 'had been well meditated, saw itself to be founded on irrefragable considerations of health, _finance_, &c., &c., unknown to bystanders, and could not be forborne or altered.' Next to his marriage with Miss Welsh, Carlyle's retirement to the howling wilds of Craigenputtock at that juncture was the most momentous step in his long life. He was conscious of his own powers, and he clearly discerned how those powers could best be utilised and developed. Hence his determination to bid adieu to Edinburgh. And in that resolve he was fortified by the loyal support of his wife. Jeffrey promised to visit the Carlyles at Craigenputtock as soon as they got settled. Meanwhile, they stayed a week at his own house in Moray Place, after their furniture was on the road, and they were waiting till it should arrive and 'render a new home possible amid the moors and the mountains.' 'Of our history at Craigenputtock,' says Carlyle, 'there might a great deal be written which might amuse the curious; for it was in fact a very singular scene and arena for such a pair as my Darling and me, with such a Life ahead.... It is a History I by no means intend to write, with such or with any object. To me there is a _sacredness_ of interest in it consistent only with _silence_. It was the field of endless nobleness and beautiful talent and virtue in Her who is now gone; also of good industry, and many loving and blessed thoughts in myself, while living there by her side. Poverty and mean Obstruction had given origin to it, and continued to preside over it, but were transformed by human valour of various sorts into a kind of victory and royalty: something of high and great dwelt in it, though nothing could be smaller and lower than very many of the details.'[7] The Jeffreys were not slow in appearing at Craigenputtock. Their 'big Carriage,' narrates the humorous host, 'climbed our rugged Hill-roads, landed the Three Guests--young Charlotte ("Sharlie"), with Pa and Ma--and the clever old Valet maid that waited on them; ... but I remember nothing so well as the consummate art with which my Dear One played the domestic field-marshal, and spread out our exiguous resources, without fuss or bustle; to cover everything with a coat of hospitality and even elegance and abundance. I have been in houses ten times, nay, a hundred times, as rich, where things went not so well. Though never bred to this, but brought up in opulent plenty by a mother that could bear no partnership in housekeeping, she, finding it become necessary, loyally applied herself to it, and soon surpassed in it all the women I have ever seen.'[8] Of Mrs Carlyle's frankness her husband gives this amusing glimpse: 'One day at dinner, I remember, Jeffrey admired the fritters or bits of pancake he was eating, and she let him know, not without some vestige of shock to him, that she had made them. "What, you! twirl up the frying-pan, and catch them in the air?" Even so, my high friend, and you may turn it over in your mind!' When the Jeffreys were leaving, 'I remarked,' says Carlyle, that they 'carried off our little temporary paradise; ... to which bit of pathos Jeffrey answered by a friendly little sniff of quasi-mockery or laughter through the nose, and rolled prosperously away.' The Carlyles in course of time visited the Jeffreys at Craigcrook, the last occasion being for about a fortnight. Carlyle says it was 'a shining sort of affair, but did not in effect accomplish much for any of us. Perhaps, for one thing, we stayed too long, Jeffrey was beginning to be seriously incommoded in health, had bad sleep, cared not how late he sat, and we had now more than ever a series of sharp fencing bouts, night after night, which could decide nothing for either of us, except our radical incompatibility in respect of World Theory, and the incurable divergence of our opinions on the most important matters. "You are so dreadfully in earnest!" said he to me once or oftener. Besides, I own now I was deficient in reverence to him, and had not then, nor, alas! have ever acquired, in my solitary and mostly silent existence, the art of gently saying strong things, or of insinuating my dissent, instead of uttering it right out at the risk of offence or otherwise.' Then he adds: 'These "stormy sittings," as Mrs Jeffrey laughingly called them, did not improve our relation to one another. But these were the last we had of that nature. In other respects Edinburgh had been barren; effulgences of "Edinburgh Society," big dinners, parties, we in due measure had; but nothing there was very interesting either to _Her_ or to me, and all of it passed away as an obliging pageant merely. Well do I remember our return to Craigenputtock, after nightfall, amid the clammy yellow leaves and desolate rains with the clink of Alick's stithy alone audible of human.'[9] It was during his first two years' residence at Craigenputtock that Carlyle wrote his famous essay on Burns; but his principal work was upon German literature, especially upon Goethe. His magazine writings being his only means of support, and as he devoted much time to them, it is not surprising that financial matters worried him. About this time Jeffrey, to whom doubtless he confided his trouble, generously offered to confer upon him an annuity of £100, which Carlyle declined to accept. Jeffrey repeated the offer on two subsequent occasions, with a like result. Carlyle in his _Reminiscences_ says that he could not doubt but Jeffrey had intended an act of real generosity; and yet Carlyle penned the ungracious remark, that 'perhaps there was something in the manner of it that savoured of consciousness and of screwing one's self up to the point; less of god-like pity for a fine fellow and his struggles, than of human determination to do a fine action of one's own, which might add to the promptitude of my refusal.' It is not surprising, therefore, to find Carlyle suspecting that Jeffrey's feelings were cooling towards him. Jeffrey had powers of penetration as well as the friend whom he was anxious to assist. By the month of February 1831, Carlyle's finances fell so low that he had only £5 in his possession, and expected no more for months. Then he borrowed £100 from Jeffrey, as his 'pitiful bits of periodical literature incomings,' as he puts it, 'having gone awry (as they were liable to do), but was able, I still remember with what satisfaction, to repay punctually within a few weeks'; adding, 'and this was all of pecuniary chivalry _we_ two ever had between us.' The chivalry was all on the one side--of Jeffrey. The outcome of his labours at Craigenputtock, in addition to the fragmentary articles already referred to, was the essays which form the first three volumes of the 'Miscellanies.' They appeared chiefly in the _Edinburgh Review_, the _Foreign Review_, and _Fraser's Magazine_. Jeffrey's resignation of the editorship of the 'Review' was a great disappointment to Carlyle, because it stopped a regular source of income. German literature, of which Carlyle had begun a history, not being a 'marketable commodity,' he cut it up into articles. 'My last considerable bit of _Writing_ at Craigenputtock,' says Carlyle, 'was "Sartor Resartus"; done, I think, between January and August 1830; (my sister Margaret had died while it was going on). I well remember where and how (at Templand one morning) the _germ_ of it rose above ground. "Nine months," I used to say, "it had cost me in writing." Had the perpetual fluctuation, the uncertainty and unintelligible whimsicality of Review Editors not proved so intolerable, we might have lingered longer at Craigenputtock, perfectly left alone, and able to do _more_ work, beyond doubt, than elsewhere. But a Book did seem to promise some _respite_ from that, and perhaps further advantages. Teufelsdröckh was ready; and (first days of August) I decided to make for London. Night before going, how I still remember it! I was lying on my back on the sofa in the drawing-room; she sitting by the table (late at night, packing all done, I suppose); her words had a guise of sport, but were profoundly plaintive in meaning. "About to part, who knows for how long; and what may have come in the interim!" this was her thought, and she was evidently much out of spirits. "Courage, Dearie, only for a month!" I would say to her in some form or other. I went next morning early.'[10] Jeffrey, who was by that time Lord Advocate, Carlyle found much preoccupied in London, but willing to assist him with Murray, the bookseller. Jeffrey, with his wife and daughter, lived in Jermyn Street in lodgings, 'in melancholy contrast to the beautiful tenements and perfect equipments they had left in the north.' 'If,' says Carlyle, 'I called in the morning, in quest perhaps of Letters (though I don't recollect much troubling _him_ in that way), I would find the family still at breakfast, ten A.M. or later; and have seen poor Jeffrey emerge in flowered dressing-gown, with a most boiled and suffering expression of face, like one who had slept miserably, and now awoke mainly to paltry misery and bother; poor Official man! "I am made a mere Post-Office of!" I heard him once grumble, after tearing open several Packets, not one of which was internally for himself.'[11] Mrs Carlyle joined her husband on the 1st of October 1831, and they took lodgings at 4 Ampton Street, Gray's Inn Lane, with a family of the name of Miles, belonging to Irving's congregation. Jeffrey was a frequent visitor there, and sometimes the Carlyles called at Jermyn Street. Carlyle says that they were at first rather surprised that Jeffrey did not introduce him to some of his 'grand literary figures,' or try in some way to be of help to one for whom he evidently had a value. The explanation, Carlyle thinks, was that he himself 'expressed no trace of aspiration that way'; that Jeffrey's 'grand literary or other figures' were clearly by no means 'so adorable to the rustic hopelessly Germanised soul as an introducer of one might have wished.' Besides, Jeffrey was so 'heartily miserable,' as to think Carlyle and his other fellow-creatures happy in comparison, and to have no care left to bestow upon them. Here is a characteristic outburst in the 'Reminiscences': 'The beggarly history of poor "Sartor" _among the blockheadisms_ is not worth my recording or remembering--least of all here! In short, finding that whereas I had got £100 (if memory serve) for "Schiller" six or seven years before, and for "Sartor," at least _thrice_ as good, I could not only _not_ get £200, but even get no Murray, or the like, to publish it on half-profits (Murray, a most stupendous object to me; tumbling about, eyeless, with the evidently strong wish to say "yes and no"; my first signal experience of that sad human predicament); I said, "We will make it No, then; wrap up our MS.; wait till this Reform Bill uproar abate."'[12] On Tuesday, January 26th, 1832, Carlyle received tidings of the death of his father. He departed on the Sunday morning previous 'almost without a struggle,' wrote his favourite sister Jane. It was a heavy stroke for Carlyle. 'Natural tears,' he exclaimed shortly afterwards, 'have come to my relief. I can look at my dear Father, and that section of the Past which he has made alive for me, in a certain sacred, sanctified light, and give way to what thoughts rise in me without feeling that they are weak and useless.' Carlyle determined that the time till the funeral was past (Friday) should be spent with his wife only. All others were excluded. He walked 'far and much,' chiefly in the Regent's Park, and considered about many things, his object being to see clearly what his calamity meant--what he lost, and what lesson that loss was to teach him. Carlyle considered his father as one of the most interesting men he had known. 'Were you to ask me,' he said, 'which had the greater natural faculty,' Robert Burns or my father, 'I might, perhaps, actually pause before replying. Burns had an infinitely wider Education, my Father a far wholesomer. Besides, the one was a man of Musical Utterance; the other wholly a man of Action, even with Speech subservient thereto. Never, of all the men I have seen, has one come personally in my way in whom the endowment from Nature and the Arena from Fortune were so utterly out of all proportion. I have said this often, and partly _know_ it. As a man of Speculation--had Culture ever unfolded him--he must have gone wild and desperate as Burns; but he was a man of Conduct, and Work keeps all right. What strange shapeable creatures we are!'[13] Nothing that the elder Carlyle undertook to do but he did it faithfully, and like a true man. 'I shall look,' said his distinguished son, 'on the houses he built with a certain proud interest. They stand firm and sound to the heart all over his little district. No one that comes after him will ever say, "Here was the finger of a hollow eye-servant." They are little texts for me of the gospel of man's free will. Nor will his deeds and sayings in any case be found unworthy--not false and barren, but genuine and fit. Nay, am not I also the humble James Carlyle's work? I owe him much more than existence; I owe him a noble inspiring example (now that I can read it in that rustic character). It was he _exclusively_ that determined on _educating_ me; that from his small hard-earned funds sent me to school and college, and made me whatever I am or may become. Let me not mourn for my father, let me do worthily of him. So shall he still live even here in me, and his worth plant itself honourably forth into new generations.'[14] One of the wise men about Ecclefechan told James Carlyle: 'Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents.' His father once told Carlyle this, and added: 'Thou hast not done so; God be thanked for it.' When James Carlyle first entered his son's house at Craigenputtock, Mrs Carlyle was greatly struck with him, 'and still farther,' says her husband, 'opened my eyes to the treasure I possessed in a father.' The last time Carlyle saw his father was a few days before leaving for London. 'He was very kind,' wrote Carlyle, 'seemed prouder of me than ever. What he had never done the like of before, he said, on hearing me express something which he admired, "Man, it's surely a pity that thou should sit yonder with nothing but the eye of Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a gift to speak."' In closing his affectionate tribute, Carlyle exclaims: 'Thank Heaven, I know and have known what it is to be a _son_; to _love_ a father, as spirit can love spirit.' The last days of March 1832 found the Carlyles back at Craigenputtock. A new tenant occupied the farm, and their days were lonelier than ever. Meanwhile 'Sartor Resartus' was appearing in _Fraser's Magazine_. The Editor reported that it 'excited the most unqualified disapprobation.' Nothing daunted, Carlyle pursued the 'noiseless tenor of his way,' throwing off articles on various subjects. Finding that Mrs Carlyle's health suffered from the gloom and solitude of Craigenputtock, they removed to Edinburgh in January 1833. Jeffrey was absent in 'official regions,' and Carlyle notes that they found a 'most dreary contemptible kind of element' in Edinburgh. But their stay there was not without its uses, for in the Advocates' Library Carlyle found books which had a great effect upon his line of study. He collected materials for his articles upon 'Cagliostro' and the 'Diamond Necklace.' At the end of four months, the Carlyles were back again at Craigenputtock. August was a bright month for Thomas Carlyle, for it was then that Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him at his rural retreat. The Carlyles thought him 'one of the most lovable creatures' they had ever seen, and an unbroken friendship of nearly fifty years was begun. As winter approached, Carlyle's prospects were not very bright, and he once more turned his eyes towards London, where the remainder of his life was to be spent. Before following him thither, it may be well to turn from the outer to the inner side of Carlyle's life, and study the forces which went to the making of his unique personality. FOOTNOTES: [7] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. 30. [8] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. 31. [9] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. pp. 40, 41. [10] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. pp. 161, 162. [11] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. 47. [12] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. p. 162. [13] _Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 19. [14] _Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 6. CHAPTER III CARLYLE'S MENTAL DEVELOPMENT Through all the material struggles Carlyle's mind at Craigenputtock was gradually shaping itself round a theory of the Universe and Man, from which he drew inspiration in his future life work. Through his contributions to Magazines and Reviews there is traceable an original vein of thought and feeling which had its origin in the study of German literature. Carlyle's studies and musings took coherent, or, as some would say incoherent, shape in _Sartor Resartus_,--a book which appropriately was written in the stern solitude of Craigenputtock. In order to acquire an adequate understanding of Carlyle as a thinker, attention has to be paid to the two dominating influences of his mental life--his early home training and German literature. In regard to the former, ancestry with Carlyle counts for much. He came of a sturdy Covenanting stock. Carlyle himself has left a graphic description of the religious environment of the Burghers, to which sect his father belonged. The congregation, under the ministry of a certain John Johnston, who taught Carlyle his first Latin, worshipped in a little house thatched with heath. Of the simple faith, the stern piety and the rugged heroism of the old Seceders, Carlyle himself has left a photograph: 'Very venerable are those old Seceder clergy to me now when I look back.... Most figures of them in my time were hoary old men; men so like evangelists in modern vesture and poor scholars and gentlemen of Christ I have nowhere met with among Protestant or Papal clergy in any country in the world.... Strangely vivid are some twelve or twenty of those old faces whom I used to see every Sunday, whose names, employments or precise dwellingplaces I never knew, but whose portraits are yet clear to me as in a mirror. Their heavy-laden, patient, ever-attentive faces, fallen solitary most of them, children all away, wife away for ever, or, it might be, wife still there and constant like a shadow and grown very like the old man, the thrifty cleanly poverty of these good people, their well-saved coarse old clothes, tailed waistcoats down to mid-thigh--all this I occasionally see as with eyes sixty or sixty-five years off, and hear the very voice of my mother upon it, whom sometimes I would be questioning about these persons of the drama and endeavouring to describe and identify them.' And what a glimpse we have into the inmost heart of the primitive Covenanting religion in the portrait drawn by Carlyle of old David Hope, the farmer who refused to postpone family worship in order to take in his grain. David was putting on his spectacles when somebody rushed in with the words: 'Such a raging wind risen will drive the stooks into the sea if let alone.' 'Wind!' answered David, 'wind canna get ae straw that has been appointed mine. Sit down and let us worship God.' Far away from the simple Covenanting creed of his father and mother Carlyle wandered, but to the last the feeling of life's mystery and solemnity remained vivid with him, though fed from quite other sources than the Bible and the _Shorter Catechism_. Much has been said of Carlyle's father, but it is highly probable that to his mother he owed most during his early years. The temperament of the Covenanter was of the non-conductor type. Men like James Carlyle were essentially stern, self-centred, unemotional. Fighting like the Jews, with sword in one hand and trowel in the other, they had no time for cultivating the softer side of human nature. Ready to go to the stake on behalf of religious liberty, they exercised a repressive, not to say despotic, influence in their own households. With them education meant not the unfolding of the individual powers of the children, but the ruthless crushing of them into a theological mould. Religion in such an atmosphere became loveless rather than lovely, and might have had serious influences of a reactionary nature but for the caressing tenderness of the mother. With a heart which overflowed the ordinary theological boundaries, the mother in many sweet and hidden ways supplied the emotional element, which had been crushed out of the father by a narrow conception of life and duty. Carlyle's experience may be judged from his references to his parents. He always speaks of his father with profound respect and admiration; towards his mother his heart goes forth with a devotion which became stronger as the years rolled on. Carlyle's love of his mother was as beautiful as it was sacred. Long after Carlyle had parted with the creed of his childhood, his heart tremulously responded to the old symbols. His system of thought, indeed, might well be defined as Calvinism minus Christianity. Had Carlyle not come into contact with German thought, he would probably have jogged along the path of literature in more or less conventional fashion. In fact, nothing is more remarkable than the comparatively commonplace nature of Carlyle's early contributions to literature. Germany touched the deepest chords of his nature. With German ideas and emotions his mind was saturated, and _Sartor Resartus_ was the outcome. To that book students must go for a glance into Carlyle's mind while he was wrestling with the great mysteries of Existence. In June 1821, as Mr Froude tells us, took place what may be called Carlyle's conversion--his triumph over his doubts, and the beginning of a new life. To understand this phase of Carlyle's life, we must pause for a little to consider German literature, whence Carlyle derived spiritual relief and consolation. What, then, was the nature of the message of peace which Germany, through Kant, Fichte, and Goethe, brought to the storm-tossed soul of Carlyle? When Carlyle began to think seriously, two antagonistic conceptions of life, the orthodox and the rationalist, were struggling for mastery in the field of thought. The orthodox conception, into which he had been born, and with which his father and mother had fronted the Eternities, had given way under the solvent of modern thought. Carlyle's belief in Christianity as a revelation seems to have dropped from him without much of a struggle, somewhat after the style of George Eliot. His mental tortures appear to have arisen from spiritual hunger, from an inability to fill the place vacated by the old beliefs. Had he lived fifty years earlier, Carlyle would have been invited to find salvation in the easy-going, drawing-room rationalism of Hume and Gibbon, or to content himself with the ecclesiastical placidity known as Moderatism. Much had occurred since the arm-chair philosophers of Edinburgh taught that this was the best possible world, and that the highest wisdom consisted in frowning upon enthusiasm and cultivating the comfortable. The French Revolution had revolutionised men's thoughts and feelings. There had been revealed to man the inadequacy of the old Deistical or Mechanical philosophy, which, spreading from England to France, had done so much to hasten the revolutionary epoch. Carlyle could find no spiritual sustenance in the purely mechanical theory of life which was offered as the substitute for the theory of the Churches. There was another theory, which had its rise in Germany, and to which Carlyle clung when he could no longer keep hold of the Supernatural. In Transcendentalism, Carlyle found salvation. What are the leading conceptions of the German form of salvation? The answer to this will give the key to _Sartor Resartus_, and to Carlyle's whole mental outlook. In the eyes of thinkers like Carlyle, the great objection to Christianity was the breach it made between the natural and the supernatural. Between them there was a great gulf which could only fitfully and temporarily be bridged by the miraculous. Students who were being inoculated with scientific ideas of law and order, were bewildered by a theory of life which had no organic relation to the great germinal ideas of the day. In their desire to abolish the supernatural, the French thinkers constructed a theory of Nature in which everything, from the movements of solar masses to the movements of the soul, were interpreted in terms of matter. By adopting a mechanical view of the Universe, the French thinkers robbed Nature of much of its charm, and stunted the emotions on the side of wonder and admiration. The world was reduced to a vast machine, man himself being simply a temporary embodiment of material particles in a highly complex and unique form. Instead of being what it was to the Greeks, a temple of beauty, the Universe to the materialist resembled a prison in which the walls gradually closed upon the poor wretch till he was crushed under the ruins. Goethe has left on record the impression made upon him by the materialistic view of life. As he says, 'The materialistic theory, which reduces all things to matter and motion, appeared to me so grey, so Cimmerian, and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost.' _Sartor Resartus_ is studded with vigorous protests against the mechanical view of Nature and Man. Just as distasteful to Carlyle, and equally mechanical in spirit, was the Deistical conception of Nature as a huge clock, under the superintendence of a Divine clock-maker, whose duty consisted in seeing that the clock kept good time and was in all respects thoroughly reliable. The Germans attacked the problem from the other side. They did not abolish the supernatural with the materialists, or seek it in another world with the theologians; they found the supernatural in the natural. To the materialists, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Goethe had one reply:--Reduce matter to its constituent atoms, they argued, and you never seize the principle of life; it evades you like a spirit; in this principle everything lives and moves and has its being. German philosophy from Kant has been occupied in attempts to trace the spiritual principle in the great process of cosmic evolution. In poetry, Goethe attempted to represent this as the energising principle of life and duty. The spiritual cannot be weighed in the scales of logic; it refuses to be put upon the dissecting-table. As a consequence, the truth of things is best seen by the poet. The owl-like logic-chopper, from his mechanical and utilitarian standpoint, sees not the Divine vision. This has been called Pantheism. Call it what we please, it is contradictory to Deism and Materialism, and is the root thought of _Sartor Resartus_, which may be taken as Carlyle's Confession of Faith. A few extracts will justify the foregoing analysis. The transcendental view of Nature is expressed by Carlyle thus:--'Atheistic science babbles poorly of it with scientific nomenclature, experiments and what not, as if it were a poor dead thing, to be bottled up in Leyden jars, and sold over counter; but the native sense of man in all times, if he will himself apply his sense, proclaims it to be a living thing--ah, an unspeakable, God-like thing, towards which the best attitude for us, after never so much science, is awe, devout prostration and humility of soul, worship, if not in words, then in silence.' Here, again, is a passage quite Hegelian in its tone: 'For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit; the manifestation of Spirit, were it never so honourable, can it be more? The thing Visible, nay, the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher celestial Invisible, unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright.' The defects of Carlyle, and they are many, take their root in his speculative view of the Universe--a view which demands careful analysis if the student hopes to understand Carlyle's strength and weakness. It is not meant that Carlyle's mind remained anchored to the philosophic idealism of _Sartor_. In later days he professed contempt for transcendental moonshine, but his contempt was for the form and jargon of the schools, not for the spirit, which dominated Carlyle to the end. After Carlyle passed the early poetic stage, his views took more and more an anthropomorphic mould, till in many of his writings he seems practically a Theist. But at root Carlyle's thought was more Pantheistical than Deistical. What, then, is the German conception of the Ultimate Reality? The German answer grew out of an attempt to get rid of the difficulties propounded by Hume. Hume, the father of all the Empiricists, in giving logical effect to Berkeleyism, concluded that just as we know nothing of the outer world beyond sense impressions, so of the inner world of mind we know nothing beyond mental impressions. We can combine and recombine these impressions as we choose, but from them we cannot deduce any ultimate laws, either of the world or of mind. Hume would not sanction belief in causation as a universal law. All that could be said was that certain things happened in a certain manner so frequently as to give rise to a law of expectation. But this is not to solve, but to evade the problem? We are still driven to ask, What is matter? What is motion? What is force? How do we get our knowledge of the material world, and is that knowledge reliable? These are wide questions that cannot be adequately handled here. It was a favourite argument of Comte and his followers, that man's first conceptions of Nature were necessarily erroneous, because they were anthropomorphic. Theology was, therefore, dethroned without ceremony. But science is as anthropomorphic as theology. We have no guarantee that the great facts of Nature are as we think them. We talk of Force, but our idea of Force is taken from experiences which may have no counterpart in Nature. It is well known, for example, that the secondary qualities of objects, colour, &c., do not exist in Nature. Our personality is so inextricably mixed with the material universe that it is impossible to formulate a philosophy like Naturalism, which makes mind a product of Nature, and which sharply defines the provinces of the two. But what Naturalism fails to do, Idealism or Transcendentalism promises to perform. Idealism is simply Materialism turned upside down. The only difference between the evolution of Spencer and of Hegel is that the one puts matter, the other mind, first. For all practical purposes, it signifies little whether mind is the temporary embodiment of an idea, or the temporary product of a highly specialised form of matter. In either case, man has no more freedom than the bubble upon the surface of the stream. We may discourse of the bubble as poetically or as practically as we please, the result is the same--absorption in the universal. Hegelianism as much as Naturalism leaves man a prisoner in the hands of Fate. The only difference is, that while Naturalism puts round the prisoner's neck a plain, unpretentious noose, Hegelianism adds fringes and embroidery. If there is no appeal from Nature's dread sentence, the less poetry and embroidery there is about the doleful business the better. In _Sartor Resartus_, Carlyle talks finely but vaguely, of the peace which came over his soul when he discovered that the universe was not mechanical but Divine. The peace was not of long duration. What consolation Carlyle derived from Idealism did not appear in his life. What a contrast between the poetic optimism of _Sartor_ and the heavily-charged pessimism of old age, when Carlyle, with wailing pathos, exclaims that God does nothing. Carlyle's life abundantly illustrates the fact that whenever it leaves cloudland, Idealism sinks into scepticism more bitter and gloomy than the unbelief of Naturalism. Carlyle approached the question of the Ultimate Reality from the wrong standpoint. He had no reasoned philosophic creed. A poet, he had the poetic dread of analysis, and his spirit revolted at the spectacle of Nature on the dissecting-table. He waged a life-long warfare against science. As the present writer has elsewhere remarked:--'Carlyle never could tolerate the evolution theory. He always spoke with the utmost contempt of Darwin, and everything pertaining to the development doctrines. It is somewhat startling to find that Carlyle was an evolutionist without knowing it. The antagonism between Carlyle and Spencer disappears on closer inspection. When Carlyle speaks of the universe as in very truth the star-domed city of God, and reminds us that through every crystal and through every grass blade, but most through every living soul, the glory of a present God still beams, he is simply saying in the language of poetry what Spencer says in the language of science, that the world of phenomena is sustained and energised by an infinite Eternal Power. Evolution is as emphatic as Carlyle on the absolute distinction between right and wrong. Carlyle and all the German school confront the evolutionary ethics with the Kantian categorical imperative. Surely the Evolutionists in the matter of an imperative out-rival the Intuitionalists, when, in addition to the dictates of conscience, they can call as a witness and sanction to morality the testimony of all-embracing experience. In his famous saying, Might is Right, Carlyle was unconsciously formulating one aspect of evolutionary ethics. Carlyle did not mean anything so silly as that brute force and ethical sanctions are identical; what he meant was that in the long run Righteousness will prove the mightiest force in the universe. What is this but another version of the Spencerian doctrine of the survival of the fittest, which, in the most highly evolved state of society, will mean the survival of the best? In the highest social state the only Might that will survive will be the Might which is rooted in Right. Carlyle's contemptuous attitude towards science is deeply to be deplored. He waged bitter warfare against the evolution theory, quite oblivious of the fact that by means of it there was revealed a deeper insight into the Power behind Nature, and into the ethical constitution of the universe, than ever entered into the minds of transcendental philosophers.' It is taken for granted that Carlyle's thoughts have no organic unity. He is looked upon as a stimulating, but confused, writer, as a thinker of original, but incoherent, power. True, he has not a logical mind, and pays no deference to the canons of the schools or the market-place. But there is a method in Carlyle's apparent caprice. When analysed, his thoughts are discovered to have unity. His transcendentalism embraces the ethic as well as the cosmic side of life. In the sphere of morals, as of science, his writings are one long tumultuous protest against the mechanical philosophy and the utilitarian theory of morals. From his essay on Voltaire we take the following:--'It is contended by many that our mere love of personal Pleasure or Happiness, as it is called, acting in every individual with such clearness as he may easily have, will of itself lead him to respect the rights of others, and wisely employ his own.... Without some belief in the necessary eternal, or, which is the same thing, in the supra mundane divine nature of Virtue existing in each individual, could the moral judgment of a thousand or a thousand thousand individuals avail us'? More picturesquely, Carlyle denounces the utilitarian system in these words: 'What then? Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some passion, some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction others profit by? I know not; only this I know. If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion, man may front much. But what in these dull, unimaginative days are the terrors of conscience to the diseases of the Liver? Not on Morality, but on Cookery, let us build our stronghold: there, brandishing our frying-pan as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things _he_ has provided for his Elect'! The exponent of such a theory of ethics will have a natural distaste for the rational or calculating side of conduct. He will depreciate the mechanical, and give undue emphasis to the inspirational. His heroes will be not men of placid temperament, methodical habits, and utilitarian aims, but men of mystical and passionate natures, spasmodic in action, and guided by ideas not easily justified at the bar of utility. Just as in the sphere of speculative thought, he has profound contempt for the Diderots and Voltaires, with their mechanical views of the Universe, so in practical affairs Carlyle has contempt for the men who endeavour to further their aims by appealing to commonplace motives by means of commonplace methods. Specially opposed is he to the tendency of the age to rely for progress, not upon appeals to the great elemental forces of human nature, but upon organisations, committees, and all kinds of mechanism. In his remarkable essay, 'Signs of the Times,' we have ample verification of our exposition. After talking depreciatingly of the mechanical tendency of the prevailing philosophies, Carlyle comments upon the mechanical nature of the reforming agencies of civilisation. The intense Egoism of his nature rebels against any kind of Socialism or Collectivism. He says: 'Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not a Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Heroic Age, but, above all, the Mechanical Age. It is the age of machinery in every outward and inward sense of that word.... Men are grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force of any kind.... We may trace this tendency in all the great manifestations of our time: in its intellectual aspect, the studies it most favours, and its manner of conducting them; in its practical aspects, its politics, art, religious work; in the whole sources, and throughout the whole current of its spiritual, no less than its material, activity.' With Carlyle the secrets of Nature and Life were discoverable, not so much by the intellect as by the heart. The man with the large heart, rather than the clear head, saw furthest into the nature of things. The history of German thought is strewn with the wreck of systems based upon the Carlylian doctrine of intuition. Schelling and Hegel showed the puerility to which great men are driven when they started to construct science out of their own intuitions, instead of patiently and humbly sitting down to study Nature. Tyndall has left on record his gratitude to Carlyle. Tyndall had grip of the scientific method, and was able to allow Carlyle's inspiration to play upon his mind without fear of harm; but how many waverers has Carlyle driven from the path of reason into the bogs of mysticism? Carlyle's impatience with reasoning and his determination to follow the promptings of _a priori_ conceptions gave his system of ethics a one-sided cast, and made him needlessly aggressive towards what in his day was called Utilitarianism, but what has now come to be known as Evolutionary Ethics. What is the chief end of man considered as a moral agent? The answer of the Christian religion is as intelligible as it is comprehensive. Man's duty consists in obeying the laws of God revealed in Nature and in the Bible. But apart from revelation, where is the basis of ethical authority? Debarred from accepting the Christian view, and instinctively repelled from Utilitarianism, Carlyle found refuge in the Fichtean and similar systems of ethics. By substituting Blessedness for Happiness as the aim of ethical endeavour, Carlyle endeavoured to preserve the heroic attitude which was associated with Supernaturalism. In his view, it was more consistent with human dignity to trust for inspiration to a light within than painfully to piece together fragments of human experience and ponder the inferences to be drawn therefrom. In his 'Data of Ethics,' Herbert Spencer shows the hollowness of Carlyle's distinction between Blessedness and Happiness. As Spencer puts it: 'Obviously the implication is that Blessedness is not a kind of Happiness, and this implication at once suggests the question, What mode of feeling is this? If it is a state of consciousness at all, it is necessarily one of three states--painful, indifferent, or pleasurable.... If the pleasurable states are in excess, then the blessed life can be distinguished from any other pleasurable life only by the relative amount or the quality of its pleasures. It is a life which makes happiness of a certain kind and degree its end, and the assumption that blessedness is not a form of happiness lapses.... In brief, blessedness has for its necessary condition of existence increased happiness, positive or negative in some consciousness or other; and disappears utterly if we assume that the actions called blessed are known to cause decrease of happiness in others as well as in the actor.' To German philosophy and literature Carlyle owed his critical method, by which he all but revolutionised criticism as understood by his Edinburgh and London contemporaries. Carlyle began his apprenticeship with the Edinburgh Reviewers, in whose hand criticism never lost its political bias. Apart from that, criticism up till the time of Carlyle was mainly statical. The critic was a kind of literary book-keeper who went upon the double-entry system. On one page were noted excellences, on the other defects, and when the two columns were _totalled_ the debtor and creditor side of the transaction was set forth. Where, as in the cases of Burns and Byron, genius was complicated with moral aberration, anything like a correct estimate was impossible. The result was that in Scotland criticism oscillated between the ethical severity of the pulpit and the daring laxity of free thought. As the Edinburgh Reviewers could not afford to set the clergy at defiance, they had to pay due respect to conventional tastes and standards. Carlyle faced the question from a different standpoint. He introduced into criticism the dynamic principle which he found in the Germans, particularly in Goethe. In contemplating a work of Art, the Germans talk much of the importance of seizing upon the creative spirit, what Hegel called the Idea. The thought of Goethe and Hegel, though differently expressed, resolves itself into the conception of a life principle which shapes materials into harmony with innate forms. In the sphere of life the determining factors are the inner vitalities, which, however, are susceptible to the environment. The critic who would realise his ideal does not go about with literary and ethical tape-lines: he seeks to understand the spirit which animated the author as shewn in his works and his life, and then studies the influence of his environment. That this is a correct description of Carlyle's critical method is evidenced by his own remarks in his essay on Burns. He says: 'If an individual is really of consequence enough to have his life and character recorded for public remembrance, we have always been of opinion that the public ought to be made acquainted with all the springs and relations of his character. How did the world and man's life from his particular position represent themselves to his mind? How did co-existing circumstances modify him from without: how did he modify these from within?' This attention to the inner springs of character gives the key to Carlyle's critical work. How fruitful this was is seen in his essay on Burns. He steered an even course between the stern moralists, whose indignation at the sins of Burns the man blinded them to the genius of Burns the poet, and the flippant Bohemians, who thought that by bidding defiance to the conventionalities and moralities Burns proved his title to the name of genius, and whose voices are yet unduly with us in much spirituous devotion and rhymeless doggerel at the return of each 25th of January. While laying bare the springs of Burns' genius, Carlyle, with unerring precision, also puts his finger on the weak point in the poet's moral nature. So faithfully did Carlyle apply his critical method that he may be considered to have said the final word about Burns. When Goethe spoke of Carlyle as a great moral force he must have had in his mind the ethical tone of Carlyle's critical writing--a tone which had its roots in the idea that judgment upon a man should be determined, not by isolated deviations from conventional or even ethical standards, but by consideration of the deep springs of character from which flow aspirations and ideals. In his _Heroes and Hero-Worship_ Carlyle elaborates his critical theory thus: 'On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who is called there "the man according to God's own heart?" David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough--blackest crimes--there was no want of sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask: Is this your man according to God's heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. What are faults? What are the outward details of a life, if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten?... The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin: that is death.... David's life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below.' This canon faithfully applied enabled Carlyle to invest with a new and living interest large sections of literary criticism. Burns, Johnson, Cromwell and others of like calibre, were rescued by Carlyle from the hands of Pedants and Pharisees. To readers wearied with the facile criticism of conventional reviewers, it was a revelation to come into contact with a writer like Carlyle, who not only gave to the mind great inspirational impetus, but also a larger critical outlook; it was like stepping out of a museum, or a dissecting-room into the free, fresh, breezy air of Nature. Moreover, Carlyle's interest in the soul is not of an antiquarian nature; he studies his heroes as if they were ancestors of the Carlyle family. He broods over their letters as if they were the letters of his own flesh and blood, and his comments resemble the soliloquisings of a pathos stricken kinsman rather than the conscious reflections of a literary man. It is noteworthy that Carlyle's critical powers are limited by his sympathies. His method, though suggestive of scientific criticism, is largely influenced by the personal equation. Face to face with writers like Scott and Voltaire, he flounders in helpless incompetency. He tries Scott, the writer of novels, by purely Puritan standards. Because there is in Scott no signs of soul-struggles, no conscious devotion to heroic ends, no introspective torturings, Carlyle sets himself to a process of belittling. So with Voltaire. Carlyle's failure in this sphere was due to the fact that he overdid the ethical side of criticism and became a pulpiteer; he was false to his own principle of endeavouring to seize the dominant idea. Because Scott and Voltaire were not dominated by the Covenanting idea, Carlyle dealt with them in a tone of disparagement. Carlyle admired Goethe, but he certainly made no attempt to cultivate Goethe's catholicity. Let us not fall into Carlyle's mistake, and condemn him for qualities which were incompatible with his temperament. After all has been said, English literature stands largely indebted to Carlyle the critic. CHAPTER IV LIFE IN LONDON Mrs Carlyle entered heartily into her husband's proposal to remove to London. 'Burn our ships!' she gaily said to him one day (_i.e._, dismantle our house); 'carry all our furniture with us'; which they accordingly did. 'At sight of London,' Carlyle wrote, 'I remember humming to myself a ballad-stanza of "Johnnie o' Braidislea," which my dear old mother used to sing, "For there's seven foresters in yon forest; And them I want to see, see, And them I want to _see_ (and shoot down)!" Carlyle lodged at Ampton Street again; but presently did 'immense stretches of walking in search of houses.' He found his way to Chelsea and there secured a small old-fashioned house at 5 (now numbered 24) Cheyne Row, at a rent of £35 a year. Mrs Carlyle followed in a short time and approved of his choice. They took possession on the 10th June 1834, and Carlyle recounts the 'cheerful gipsy life' they had there 'among the litter and carpenters for three incipient days.' Leigh Hunt was in the next street 'sending kind, _un_practical messages,' dropping in to see them in the evenings. When in London on a former occasion, Carlyle became acquainted with John Stuart Mill, and the intimacy was kept alive by correspondence to and from Craigenputtock. It was through Mill's letters that Carlyle's thoughts were turned towards the French Revolution. When he returned to London, Mill was very useful to him, lending him a fine collection of books on that subject. Mill's evenings in Cheyne Row were 'sensibly agreeable for most part,' remarks Carlyle. 'Talk rather wintry ("sawdustish," as old Sterling once called it), but always well-informed and sincere.' Carlyle was making rapid progress with the first volume of his _French Revolution_. Stern necessity gave a spurt to his pen, for in February 1835 he notes that 'some twenty-three months' had passed since he earned a single penny by the 'craft of literature.' The volume was completed and he lent the only copy to Mill. The MS. was unfortunately burnt by a servant-maid. 'How well do I still remember,' writes Carlyle in his _Reminiscences_, 'that night when he came to tell us, pale as Hector's ghost.... It was like _half_ sentence of death to us both, and we had to pretend to take it lightly, so dismal and ghastly was _his_ horror at it, and try to talk of other matters. He stayed three mortal hours or so; his departure quite a relief to us. Oh, the burst of sympathy my poor darling then gave me, flinging her arms round my neck, and openly lamenting, condoling, and encouraging like a nobler second self! Under heaven is nothing beautifuller. We sat talking till late; '_shall_ be written again,' my fixed word and resolution to her. Which proved to be such a task as I never tried before or since. I wrote out "Feast of Pikes" (Vol. II.), and then went at it. Found it fairly _impossible_ for about a fortnight; passed three weeks (reading Marryat's novels), tried, cautious-cautiously, as on ice paper-thin, once more; and in short had a job more like breaking my heart than any other in my experience. Jeannie, alone of beings, burnt like a steady lamp beside me. I forget how much of money we still had. I think there was at first something like £300, perhaps £280, to front London with. Nor can I in the least remember where we had gathered such a sum, except that it was our own, no part of it borrowed or _given us_ by anybody. "Fit to last till _French Revolution_ is ready!" and she had no misgivings at all. Mill was penitently liberal; sent me £200 (in a day or two), of which I kept £100 (actual cost of house while I had written burnt volume); upon which he bought me "Biographie Universelle," which I got bound, and still have. Wish I could find a way of getting the now much macerated, changed, and fanaticised John Stuart Mill to take that £100 back; but I fear there is no way.'[15] Carlyle went diligently to work at the _French Revolution_. Some conviction he had that the book was worth something. Once or twice among the flood of equipages at Hyde Park Corner, when taking his afternoon stroll, he thought to himself, 'Perhaps none of _you_ could do what I am at!' But generally his feeling was, 'I will finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle and spade, and withdraw to the Transatlantic Wildernesses, far from human beggaries and basenesses!' 'This,' he says, 'had a kind of comfort to me; yet I always knew too, in the background, that this would not practically do. In short, my nervous system had got dreadfully irritated and inflamed before I quite ended, and my desire was _intense_, beyond words, to have done with it.' Then he adds: 'The _last_ paragraph I well remember writing upstairs in the drawing-room that now is, which was then my writing-room; beside _her_ there in a grey evening (summer, I suppose), soon after tea (perhaps); and thereupon, with her dear blessing on me, going out to walk. I had said before going out, "What they will do with this book, none knows, my Jeannie, lass; but they have not had, for a two hundred years, any book that came more truly from a man's very heart, and so let them trample it under foot and hoof as _they_ see best!" "Pooh, pooh! they cannot trample that!" she would cheerily answer; for her own approval (I think she had read always regularly behind me) especially in Vol. III., was strong and decided.' Mrs Carlyle was right. No critic or clique of critics could trample the _French Revolution_. A month before the completion of the first book of the _French Revolution_, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'My first friend Edward Irving is dead. I am friendless here or as good as that.' In a week or two thereafter he met Southey, whom he describes as a 'lean, grey-white-headed man of dusky complexion, unexpectedly tall when he rises and still leaner then--the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman nose, small carelined brow, huge brush of white-grey-hair on high crown and projecting on all sides, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes I have ever seen--a well-read, honest, limited (straitlaced even), kindly-hearted, most irritable man. We parted kindly, with no great purpose on either side, I imagine, to meet again.'[16] Later on Carlyle admits to his brother John that his prospects in London were not brightening; which fact left him gloomy and morose. During his enforced leisure after the destruction of the first book of the _French Revolution_, Carlyle saw more of his friends, among whom he numbered John Sterling, fresh from Cambridge and newly ordained a clergyman. Sterling was of a 'vehement but most noble nature,' and he was one of the few who had studied _Sartor Resartus_ seriously. He had been also caught by the Radical epidemic on the spiritual side. Although dissenting from much of what Carlyle taught, Sterling recognised in him 'a man not only brilliantly gifted, but differing from the common run of people in this, that he would not lie, that he would not equivocate, that he would say always what he actually thought, careless whether he pleased or offended.' He introduced Carlyle to his father, who was then the 'guiding genius' of the _Times_, and who offered Carlyle work there on the usual conditions. 'Carlyle,' says Froude, 'though with poverty at his door, and entire penury visible in the near future, turned away from a proposal which might have tempted men who had less excuse for yielding to it. He was already the sworn soldier of another chief. His allegiance from first to last was to _truth_, truth as it presented itself to his own intellect and his own conscience.' On the 16th of February 1835 Carlyle wrote to his brother John: 'I positively do not care that periodical literature shuts her fist against me in these months. Let her keep it shut for ever, and go to the devil, which she mostly belongs to. The matter had better be brought to a crisis. There is perhaps a finger of Providence in it.... My only new scheme, since last letter, is a hypothesis--little more yet--about National Education. The newspapers had an advertisement about a Glasgow "Educational Association" which wants a man that would found a Normal School, first going over England and into Germany to get light on that matter. I wrote to that Glasgow Association afar off, enquiring who they were, what manner of man they expected, testifying myself very friendly to their project, and so forth--no answer as yet. It is likely they will want, as Jane says, a "Chalmers and Welsh" kind of character, in which case _Va ben, felice notte_. If otherwise, and they (almost by miracle) had the heart, I am the man for them. Perhaps my name is so heterodox in that circle, I shall not hear at all.'[17] Carlyle also remarks, in the same letter, that John Stuart Mill is very friendly: 'He is the nearest approach to a real man that I find here--nay, as far as negativeness goes, he _is_ that man, but unhappily not very satisfactory much farther.' Not long thereafter Carlyle met Wordsworth. 'I did not expect much,' he said in a letter, 'but got mostly what I expected. The old man has a fine shrewdness and naturalness in his expression of face, a long Cumberland figure; one finds also a kind of _sincerity_ in his speech. But for prolixity, thinness, endless dilution, it excels all the other speech I had heard from mortals. A genuine man, which is much, but also essentially a small, genuine man.' Early in October 1835 Carlyle started for his old home. His mother-in-law had arrived on a visit at Cheyne Row, and remained there with her daughter during Carlyle's absence in Scotland. He returned improved in health and spirits. Nothing came of the National Education scheme. Carlyle was not a person to push himself into notice, remarks Froude; and his friends did not exert themselves for him, or they tried and failed; 'governments, in fact, do not look out for servants among men who are speculating about the nature of the Universe. Then, as always, the doors leading into regular employment remained closed.' Shortly after his return from the North, he was offered the editorship of a newspaper at Lichfield. This was unaccepted for the same reason that weighed with him when he refused a post on the _Times_. In the following summer money matters had become so pressing that Carlyle wrote the article on Mirabeau, now printed among the _Miscellanies_, for Mill's review, which brought him £50. Mrs Carlyle's health began to suffer, and a visit to Annandale became imperative. She returned 'mended in spirits.' Writing of her arrival in London, she said: 'I had my luggage put on the backs of two porters, and walked on to Cheapside, when I presently found a Chelsea omnibus. By-and-bye the omnibus stopped, and amid cries of "No room, sir; can't get in," Carlyle's face, beautifully set off by a broad-brimmed white hat, gazed in at the door like the peri "who, at the gate of heaven, stood disconsolate." In hurrying along the Strand, his eye had lighted on my trunk packed on the top of the omnibus, and had recognised it. This seems to me one of the most indubitable proofs of genius which he ever manifested.' On the 22nd of January 1837 Carlyle wrote to his mother: 'The book [_French Revolution_] is actually done; all written to the last line; and now, after much higgling and maffling, the printers have got fairly afloat, and we are to go on with the wind and the sea.' But no money could be expected from the book for a considerable time. Meanwhile, Miss Harriet Martineau (who had introduced herself into Cheyne Row), and Miss Wilson, another accomplished friend, thought that Carlyle should begin a course of lectures in London, and thereby raise a little money. Carlyle, it seems, gave 'a grumbling consent.' Nothing daunted, the ladies found two hundred persons ready each to subscribe a guinea to hear a course of lectures from him. The end of it was that he delivered six discourses on German literature, which were 'excellent in themselves, and delivered with strange impressiveness,' and £135 went into his purse. In the summer the _French Revolution_ appeared. The sale at first was slow, almost nothing, for it was not 'subscribed for' among the booksellers. Alluding to the criticisms which appeared, Carlyle said: 'Some condemn me, as is very natural, for affectation; others are hearty, even passionate, in their estimation; on the whole, it strikes me as not unlikely that the book may take some hold of the English people, and do them and itself a little good.' He was right. Other historians have described the Revolution: Carlyle reproduces the Revolution. He approaches history like a dramatist. Give him, as in the French Revolution, a weird, tragic, awe-inspiring theme, and he will utilise his characters, scenes, and circumstances in artistic subordination to the central idea. Carlyle might be called a subjective dramatist--that is to say, his own spirit, thoughts, and reflections get so mixed up with the history that it is difficult to imagine the one without the other. Every now and then the dramatist interrupts the tragedy to interject his own reflections; in the history the Carlylean philosophy plays the part of a Greek chorus. As an example of Carlyle's genius for a dramatic situation, take his opening of the great drama with the death scene of Louis XV. Who does not feel, in reading that scene, as if the Furies were not far off? who does not detect in the grotesque jostling of the comedy and tragedy of life premonitions of the coming storm? 'But figure his thought, when Death is now clutching at his own heart-strings; unlooked for, inexorable! Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. No palace walls or lifeguards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out; but he is here, here at thy very life-breath, and will extinguish it. Thou, whose whole existence hitherto was a chimera and scenic show, at length becomest a reality; sumptuous Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void Immensity: Time is done, and all the scaffolding of Time falls wrecked with hideous clangour round thy soul: the pale Kingdoms yawn open; there must thou enter, naked, all unking'd, and await what is appointed thee!... There are nods and sagacious glances, go-betweens, silk dowagers mysteriously gliding, with smiles for this constellation, sighs for that: there is tremor, of hope or desperation, in several hearts. There is the pale, grinning Shadow of Death, ceremoniously ushered along by another grinning Shadow, of Etiquette; at intervals the growl of Chapel Organs, like prayer by machinery; proclaiming, as in a kind of horrid diabolic horse-laughter, _Vanity of vanities, all is Vanity!_' At every stage in the narrative, the reader is impressed with the dramatic texture of Carlyle's mind. No dramatic writer surpasses him in the art of producing effects by contrasts. In the midst of a vigorous description of the storming of the Bastille, he rings down the curtain for a moment in order to introduce the following scene of idyllic beauty: 'O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on Balls at the Orangerie of Versailles, where high-rouged Dames of the Palace are even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar officers;--and also on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hotel-de-Ville!' Equally effective is Carlyle in rendering vivid the doings of the individual actors in the drama. For photographic minuteness and startling realism what can equal the following:--'But see Camille Desmoulins, from the Café de Foy, rushing out, sibylline in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He springs to a table: the police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him, not they alive him alive. This time he speaks without stammering:--Friends! shall we die like hunted hares? Like sheep hounded into their pinfold; bleating for mercy, where is no mercy, but only a whetted knife? The hour is come, the supreme hour of Frenchman and Man; when Oppressors are to try conclusions with Oppressed; and the word is, swift Death, or Deliverance forever. Let such hour be _well_-come! Us, meseems, one cry only befits: To Arms! Let universal Paris, universal France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound only: To arms!--"To arms!" yell responsive the innumerable voices; like one great voice, as of a Demon yelling from the air: for all faces wax fire-eyed, all hearts burn up into madness. In such, or fitter words does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers, in this great moment--"Friends," continues Camille, "some rallying-sign! Cockades; green ones--the colour of Hope!"--As with the flight of locusts, these green tree-leaves; green ribands from the neighbouring shops: all green things are snatched, and made cockades of. Camille descends from his table; "stifled with embraces, wetted with tears;" has a bit of green riband handed him; sticks it in his hat. And now to Curtius' Image-shop there; to the Boulevards; to the four winds, and rest not till France be on fire!' As a historical work, the _French Revolution_ is unique. It is precisely the kind of book Isaiah would have written had there been a like Revolution in the Jewish kingdom; and just as we go to Isaiah, not for sociological guidance, but for ethical inspiration, so we turn to the _French Revolution_ when the mind and heart are in a state of torpor in order to get a series of shocks from the Carlylean electric battery. From a historian a student expects light as well as heat, guidance as well as inspiration. It is not enough to have the great French explosion vividly photographed before his eyes; it is equally necessary to know the causes which led to the catastrophe. Here, as a historian, Carlyle is conspicuously weak. His habit of looking for dramatic situations, his passion for making commonplace incidents and commonplace men merely the satellites of commanding personalities, in a word, his theory that history should deal with the doings of great men, prevents Carlyle from dwelling upon the politico-economic side of national life. So absorbed is he in painting the Revolution, that he forgets to explain the Revolution. We have abundance of vague declamations against shams in high places, plenty of talk about God's judgments, in the style of the Hebrew prophets, but of patient diagnosis, there is none. As Mr Morley puts it in his luminous essay on Carlyle: 'To the question whether mankind gained or lost by the French Revolution, Carlyle nowhere gives a clear answer; indeed, on this subject more than any other, he clings closely to his favourite method of simple presentation, streaked with dramatic irony.... He draws its general moral lesson from the Revolution, and with clangorous note warns all whom it concerns from King to Church that imposture must come to an end. But for the precise amount and kind of dissolution which the West owes to it, for the political meaning of it, as distinguished from its moral or its dramatic significance, we seek in vain, finding no word on the subject, nor even evidence of consciousness that such word is needed.' Had Carlyle, in addition to his genius as a historical dramatist, possessed the patient diagnosing power of the writers and thinkers whom he derided, his _French Revolution_ would have taken its place in historical literature as an epoch-making book. As it stands, the reader who desires to have an intelligible knowledge of the subject, is compelled to shake himself free of the Carlylean mesmerism, and have recourse to those writers whom Carlyle, under the opprobrious names of 'logic-choppers' and 'dry-as-dusts,' held up to public ridicule. FOOTNOTES: [15] _Reminiscences_, vol. ii. pp. 178-79. [16] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. p. 20. [17] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. p. 24. CHAPTER V HOLIDAY JOURNEYINGS--LITERARY WORK Carlyle was so broken down with his efforts upon the _French Revolution_ that a trip to Annandale became necessary. He stayed at Scotsbrig two months, 'wholly idle, reading novels, smoking pipes in the garden with his mother, hearing notices of his book from a distance, but not looking for them or caring about them.' Autumn brought Carlyle back to Cheyne Row, when he found his wife in better health, delighted to have him again at her side. She knew, as Froude points out, though Carlyle, so little vain was he, had failed as yet to understand it, that he had returned to a changed position, that he was no longer lonely and neglected, but had taken his natural place among the great writers of his day. He sent bright accounts of himself to Scotsbrig. 'I find John Sterling here, and many friends, all kinder each than the other to me. With talk and locomotion the days pass cheerfully till I rest and gird myself together again. They make a great talk about the book, which seems to have succeeded in a far higher degree than I looked for. Everybody is astonished at every other body's being pleased with this wonderful performance.'[18] Carlyle did nothing all the winter except to write his essay on Sir Walter Scott. His next task was to prepare for a second course of lectures in the spring on 'Heroes.' The course ended with 'a blaze of fire-works--people weeping at the passionately earnest tone in which for once they heard themselves addressed.' The effort brought Carlyle £300 after all expenses had been paid. 'A great blessing,' he remarked, 'to a man that had been haunted by the squalid spectre of beggary.' Carlyle had no intention of visiting Scotland that autumn, but having received a pressing invitation from old friends at Kirkcaldy, he took steamer to Leith in August. While at Kirkcaldy he crossed to Edinburgh and called on Jeffrey. 'He sat,' says Carlyle, 'waiting for me at Moray Place. We talked long in the style of literary and philosophic clitter-clatter. Finally it was settled that I should go out to dinner with him at Craigcrook, and not return to Fife till the morrow.' They dined and abstained from contradicting each other, Carlyle admitting that Jeffrey was becoming an amiable old fribble, 'very cheerful, very heartless, very forgettable and tolerable.' On his return to London, equal to work again, Carlyle found all well. He was gratified to hear that the eighth edition of the _French Revolution_ was almost sold, and that another would be called for, while there were numerous applications from review editors for articles if he would please to supply them. Mill about this time asked him to contribute a paper on Cromwell to the _London and Westminster Review_. Carlyle agreed, and was preparing to begin when the negotiations were broken off. Mill had gone abroad, leaving a Mr Robertson to manage the _Review_. Robertson coolly wrote to say that he need not go on with the article, 'for he meant to do Cromwell himself.' Carlyle was wroth, and that incident determined him to 'throw himself seriously into the history of the Commonwealth, and to expose himself no more to cavalier treatment from "able editors."' But for that task he required books. Then it was that the idea of founding a London library occurred to him. Men of position took up the matter warmly, and Carlyle's object was accomplished. 'Let the tens of thousands,' says Mr Froude, 'who, it is to be hoped, "are made better and wiser" by the books collected there, remember that they owe the privilege entirely to Carlyle.' One of Carlyle's new acquaintances was Monckton Milnes, who asked him to breakfast. Carlyle used to say that if Christ were again on earth Milnes would ask Him to breakfast, and the clubs would all be talking of the 'good things' that Christ had said. He also became familiar with Mr Baring, afterwards Lord Ashburton, and his accomplished wife, who in course of time exercised a disturbing influence over the Carlyle household. It would not tend to edification to dwell upon the domestic misunderstandings at Cheyne Row; besides, are not they to be found detailed at great length in Froude's _Life_, the _Reminiscences_, and _Letters and Memorials_? Although Carlyle was taking life somewhat easy, he was making preparations for his third course of lectures, his subject being the 'Revolutions of Modern Europe.' They did not please the lecturer, but the audiences were as enthusiastic as ever, and he made a clear gain of £200. About this time Emerson was pressing him to go to Boston on a lecturing tour. But Carlyle thought better of it. More important work awaited him in London. 'All his life,' says Froude, 'he had been meditating on the problem of the working-man's existence in this country at the present epoch.... He had seen the Glasgow riots in 1819. He had heard his father talk of the poor masons, dining silently upon water and water-cresses. His letters are full of reflections on such things, sad or indignant, as the humour might be. He was himself a working-man's son. He had been bred in a peasant home, and all his sympathies were with his own class. He was not a revolutionist; he knew well that violence would be no remedy; that there lay only madness and deeper misery. But the fact remained, portending frightful issues. The Reform Bill was to have mended matters but the Reform Bill had gone by and the poor were none the happier. The power of the State had been shifted from the aristocracy to the mill-owners, and merchants, and shopkeepers. That was all. The handicraftsman remained where he was, or was sinking, rather, into an unowned Arab, to whom "freedom" meant freedom to work if the employer had work to offer him conveniently to himself, or else freedom to starve. The fruit of such a state of society as this was the Sansculottism on which he had been lecturing, and he felt that he must put his thoughts upon it in a permanent form. He had no faith in political remedies, in extended suffrages, recognition of "the rights of man," etc.--absolutely none. That was the road on which the French had gone; and, if tried in England, it would end as it ended with them--in anarchy, and hunger, and fury. The root of the mischief was the forgetfulness on the part of the upper classes, increasing now to flat denial, that they owed any duty to those under them beyond the payment of contract wages at the market price. The Liberal theory, as formulated in Political Economy, was that every one should attend exclusively to his own interests, and that the best of all possible worlds would be the certain result. His own conviction was that the result would be the worst of all possible worlds, a world in which human life, such a life as _human_ beings ought to live, would become impossible.'[19] He wrote to his brother when his lectures were over: "Guess what immediate project I am on; that of writing an article on the working-classes for the "Quarterly." It is verily so. I offered to do the thing for Mill about a year ago. He durst not. I felt a kind of call and monition of duty to do it, wrote to Lockhart accordingly, was altogether invitingly answered, had a long interview with the man yesterday, found him a person of sense, good-breeding, even kindness, and great consentaneity of opinion with myself on the matter. Am to get books from him to-morrow, and so shall forthwith set about telling the Conservatives a thing or two about the claims, condition, rights, and mights of the working order of men." When the annual exodus from London came, the Carlyles went north for a holiday. They returned much refreshed at the end of two months. His presence, moreover, was required in London, as _Wilhelm Meister_ was now to be republished. He set about finishing his article for the "Quarterly," but as he progressed he felt some misgiving as to its ever appearing in that magazine. "I have finished," he wrote on November 8, 1839, "a long review article, thick pamphlet, or little volume, entitled "Chartism." Lockhart has it, for it was partly promised to him; at least the refusal of it was, and that, I conjecture, will be all he will enjoy of it." Lockhart sent it back, 'seemingly not without reluctance,' saying he dared not. Mill was shown the pamphlet and was 'unexpectedly delighted with it.' He was willing to publish it, but Carlyle's wife and brother insisted that the thing was too good for a magazine article. Fraser undertook to print it, and before the close of the year _Chartism_ was in the hands of the public. The sale was rapid, an edition of a thousand copies being sold immediately. 'Chartism,' Froude narrates, was loudly noticed: "considerable reviewing, but very daft reviewing." Men wondered; how could they choose but wonder, when a writer of evident power stripped bare the social disease, told them that their remedies were quack remedies, and their progress was progress to dissolution? The Liberal journals, finding their "formulas" disbelieved in, clamoured that Carlyle was unorthodox; no Radical, but a wolf in sheep's clothing. Yet what he said was true, and could not be denied to be true. "They approve generally," he said, "but regret very much that I am a Tory. Stranger Tory, in my opinion, has not been fallen in with in these later generations." Again a few weeks later (February 11): "The people are beginning to discover that I am not a Tory. Ah, no! but one of the deepest, though perhaps the quietest, of all the Radicals now extant in the world--a thing productive of small comfort to several persons. They have said, and they will say, and let them say." His final course of lectures now confronted him, and these he entitled _Heroes and Hero Worship_. He tells his mother (May 26, 1840): 'The lecturing business went off with sufficient _éclat_. The course was generally judged, and I rather join therein myself, to be the bad _best_ I have yet given. On the last day--Friday last--I went to speak of Cromwell with a head _full of air_; you know that wretched physical feeling; I had been concerned with drugs, had awakened at five, etc. It is absolute martyrdom. My tongue would hardly wag at all when I got done. Yet the good people sate breathless, or broke out into all kinds of testimonies of goodwill.... In a word, we got right handsomely through.' That was Carlyle's last appearance as a public lecturer. He was now the observed of all observers in London society; but he was weary of lionising and junketings. 'What,' he notes in his journal on June 15, 1840, 'are lords coming to call on one and fill one's head with whims? They ask you to go among champagne, bright glitter, semi-poisonous excitements which you do not like even for the moment, and you are sick for a week after. As old Tom White said of whisky, "Keep it--Deevil a ever I'se better than when there's no a drop on't i' my weam." So say I of dinner popularity, lords and lionism--Keep it; give it to those that like it.' Carlyle was much refreshed at this period by visits from Tennyson. Here is what he says of the poet: 'A fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-coloured, shaggy-headed man is Alfred; dusty, smoky, free and easy, who swims outwardly and inwardly with great composure in an inarticulate element of tranquil chaos and tobacco smoke. Great now and then when he does emerge--a most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted man.' In a note to his brother John on September 11, 1840, he says: 'I have again some notions towards writing a book--let us see what comes of that. It is the one use of living, for me. Enough to-day.' The book he had in view was _Cromwell_. Journalising on the day after Christmas he laments--'Oliver Cromwell will not prosper with me at all. I began reading about that subject some four months ago. I learn almost nothing by reading, yet cannot as yet heartily begin to write. Nothing on paper yet. I know not where to begin.' At the end of the year Mrs Carlyle wrote: 'Carlyle is reading voraciously, preparatory to writing a new book. For the rest, he growls away much in the old style. But one gets to feel a certain indifference to his growling; if one did not, it would be the worse for one.' A month or two later, Carlyle writes: 'Think not hardly of me, dear Jeannie. In the mutual misery we often are in, we do not know how dear we are to one another. By the help of Heaven, I shall get a little better, and somewhat of it shall abate. Last night, at dinner, Richard Milnes made them all laugh with a saying of yours. "When the wife has influenza, it is _a slight cold_--when the man has it, it is, &c., &c."' Writing to Sterling he exclaims, 'I shall verily fly to Craigenputtock again before long. Yet I know what solitude is, and imprisonment among black cattle and peat bogs. The truth is, we are never right as we are. "Oh, the devil burn it"! said the Irish drummer flogging his countryman; "there's no pleasing of you, strike where one will."' Milnes prevailed on Carlyle, instead of flying to the bleak expanse of Craigenputtock, to accompany him to his father's house at Fryston, in Yorkshire, whence he sent a series of affectionate and graphic letters to Mrs Carlyle. Being so far north, he took a run to Dumfriesshire to see his mother, who had been slightly ailing. He was back in London, however, in May, but not improved in mind or body. It was a hot summer, and the Carlyles went to Scotsbrig, and took a cottage at Newby, close to Annan. By the end of September, Carlyle was back in Cheyne Row. His latest hero still troubled him. 'Ought I,' he asks, 'to write now of Oliver Cromwell?... I cannot yet see clearly.' Carlyle at one time had a hankering after a Scottish professorship, but the 'door had been shut in his face,' sometimes contemptuously. He was now famous, and the young Edinburgh students, having looked into his lectures on Heroes, began to think that, whatever might be the opinions of the authorities and patrons, they for their part must consider lectures such as these a good exchange for what was provided for them. A 'History Chair' was about to be established. A party of them, represented by a Mr Dunipace, presented a requisition to the Faculty of Advocates to appoint Carlyle. When asked his consent to be nominated, Carlyle replied: 'Accept my kind thanks, you and all your associates, for your zeal to serve me.... Ten years ago such an invitation might perhaps have been decisive of much for me, but it is too late now; too late for many reasons, which I need not trouble you with at present.' A very severe blow now fell upon Mrs Carlyle, who received news from Templand that her mother had been struck by apoplexy, and was dangerously ill. Although unfit for travelling, she caught the first train from Euston Square to Liverpool, but at her uncle's house there she learnt that all was over. Mrs Carlyle lay ill in Liverpool, unable to stir. After a while she was able to go back to London, where Carlyle joined her in the month of May. It was on his return journey that he paid a visit to Dr Arnold at Rugby, when he had an opportunity, under his host's genial guidance, to explore the field of Naseby. His sad occupations in Scotland, and the sad thoughts they suggested, made Carlyle disinclined for society. He had a room arranged for him at the top of his house, and there he sate and smoked, and read books on Cromwell, 'the sight of Naseby having brought the subject back out of "the abysses."' Meanwhile he had a pleasant trip to Ostend with Mr Stephen Spring Rice, Commissioner of Customs, of which he wrote vivid descriptions. On October 25, 1842, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'For many months there has been no writing here. Alas! what was there to write? About myself, nothing; or less, if that was possible. I have not got one word to stand upon paper in regard to Oliver. The beginnings of work are even more formidable than the executing of it.' But another subject was to engross his attention for a little while. The distress of the poor became intense; less in London, however, than in other large towns. 'I declare,' he wrote to his mother early in January 1843, 'I declare I begin to feel as if I should not hold my peace any longer, as if I should perhaps open my mouth in a way that some of them are not expecting--we shall see if this book were done.' On the 20th he wrote: 'I hope it will be a rather useful kind of book.' He could not go on with Cromwell till he had unburdened his soul. 'The look of the world,' he said, 'is really quite oppressive to me. Eleven thousand souls in Paisley alone living on threehalfpence a day, and the governors of the land all busy shooting partridges and passing corn-laws the while! It is a thing no man with a speaking tongue in his head is entitled to be silent about.' The outcome of all his soul-burnings and cogitations was _Past and Present_, which appeared at the beginning of April. The reviewers set to work, 'wondering, admiring, blaming, chiefly the last.' Carlyle then undertook several journeys, chiefly in order to visit Cromwellian battlefields, the sight of which made the Oliver enterprise no longer impossible. He found a renovated house on his return, and Mrs Carlyle writing on November 28th, describes him as 'over head and ears in Cromwell,' and 'lost to humanity for the time being.' Six months later, he makes this admission in his journal--'My progress in "Cromwell" is frightful. I am no day absolutely idle, but the confusions that lie in my way require far more fire of energy than I can muster on most days, and I sit not so much working as painfully looking on work.' Four months later, when _Cromwell_ was progressing slowly, Carlyle suffered a severe personal loss by the death of John Sterling. 'Sterling,' says Froude, 'had been his spiritual pupil, his first, and also his noblest and best. Consumption had set its fatal mark upon him.' Carlyle drowned his sorrow in hard work, and in July 1845 the end of _Cromwell_ was coming definitely in sight. In his journal under date August 26th, is to be found this entry: 'I have this moment _ended_ Oliver; hang it! He is ended, thrums and all. I have nothing more to write on the subject, only mountains of wreck to burn. Not (any more) up to the chin in paper clippings and chaotic litter, hatefuller to me than most. I _am_ to have a swept floor now again.' And thus the herculean labours of five years were ended. His desire was to be in Scotland, and he made his way northwards by the usual sea route to Annan and Scotsbrig. He did not remain long away, and upon his return _Cromwell_ was just issuing from the press. It was received with great favour, the sale was rapid, and additional materials came from unexpected quarters. In February 1846 a new edition was needed in order to insert fresh letters of Oliver according to date; a process, Carlyle said 'requiring one's most excellent talent, as of shoe-cobbling, really that kind of talent carried to a high pitch.' When completed, Carlyle presented a copy of it to the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, a step he never took before or after with any of his writings,--a compliment which Peel gracefully acknowledged. Carlyle's plans for the summer of 1846 were, a visit to his mother and a run across to Ireland. Charles Gavan Duffy of the _Nation_ newspaper saw him in London in consequence of what he had written in _Chartism_ about misgovernment in Ireland. He had promised to go over and see what the 'Young Ireland' movement was doing. On the 31st of August he left Scotsbrig, and landed in due course at Belfast, where he was to have been met by John Mitchel and Gavan Duffy and driven to Drogheda. He missed his two friends through a mistake at the post-office, and hurried on by railway to Dublin. He met them at Dundrum, and was there entertained at a large dinner-party. Next day he dined at Mitchel's. His stay was remarkably short. He took steamer at Kingstown, and in the early morning of September 10th 'he was sitting smoking a cigar before the door of his wife's uncle's house in Liverpool till the household should awake and let him in.' In June 1847 Carlyle relates that they had a flying visit from Jeffrey. 'A much more interesting visitor than Jeffrey was old Dr Chalmers, who came down to us also last week, whom I had not seen before for, I think, five-and-twenty years. It was a pathetic meeting. The good old man is grown white-headed, but is otherwise wonderfully little altered--grave, deliberate, very gentle in his deportment, but with plenty too of soft energy; full of interest still for all serious things, full of real kindliness, and sensible even to honest mirth in a fair measure. He sate with us an hour and a half, went away with our blessings and affections. It is long since I have spoken to so _good_ and really pious-hearted and beautiful old man.' In a week or two Chalmers was suddenly called away. 'I believe,' wrote Carlyle to his mother, 'there is not in all Scotland, or all Europe, any such Christian priest left. It will long be memorable to us, the little visit we had from him.' Early in 1848, the Jew Bill was before Parliament, and the fate of it doubtful, narrates Mr Froude. Baron Rothschild wrote to ask Carlyle to write a pamphlet in its favour, and intimated that he might name any sum which he liked to ask as payment. Froude enquired how he answered. 'Well,' he said, 'I had to tell him it couldn't be; but I observed, too, that I could not conceive why he and his friends, who were supposed to be looking out for the coming of Shiloh, should be seeking seats in a Gentile legislature.' Froude asked what the Baron said to that. 'Why,' said Carlyle, 'he seemed to think the coming of Shiloh was a dubious business, and that meanwhile, etc., etc.' On February 9, 1848, Carlyle wrote in his journal: 'Chapman's money [Chapman & Hall were his publishers] all paid, lodged now in the Dumfries Bank. New edition of "Sartor" to be wanted soon. My poor books of late have yielded me a certain fluctuating annual income; at all events, I am quite at my ease as to money, and that on such low terms. I often wonder at the luxurious ways of the age. Some £1500, I think, is what has accumulated in the bank. Of fixed income (from Craigenputtock) £150 a year. Perhaps as much from my books may lie fixed amid the huge fluctuation (last year, for instance, it was £800: the year before, £100; the year before that, about £700; this year, again, it is like to be £100; the next perhaps nothing--very fluctuating indeed)--some £300 in all, and that amply suffices me. For my wife is the best of housewives; noble, too, in reference to the property, which is _hers_, which she has never once in the most distant way seemed to know to be hers. Be this noted and remembered; my thrifty little lady--every inch a lady--ah me! In short, I authentically feel indifferent to money; would not go this way or that to gain more money.'[20] The Revolution of February 24th at Paris surprised Carlyle less than most of his contemporaries, as it confirmed what he had been saying for years. He did not believe, we are told, in immediate convulsion in England; but he did believe that, unless England took warning and mended her ways, her turn would come. The excitement in London was intense, and leading men expressed themselves freely, but Carlyle's general thoughts were uttered in a lengthy letter to Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, for whom he entertained a warm regard. On March 14 he met Macaulay at Lord Mahon's at breakfast; 'Niagara of eloquent commonplace talk,' he says, 'from Macaulay. "Very good-natured man"; man cased in official mail of proof; stood my impatient fire-explosions with much patience, merely hissing a little steam up, and continued his Niagara--supply and demand; power ruinous to powerful himself; _im_possibility of Government doing more than keep the peace; suicidal distraction of new French Republic, etc. Essentially irremediable, commonplace nature of the man; all that was in him now gone to the tongue; a squat, thickset, low-browed, short, grizzled little man of fifty.' One of the few men Carlyle was anxious to see was Sir Robert Peel. He was introduced by the Barings at a dinner at Bath House. Carlyle sat next to Peel, whom he describes as 'a finely-made man of strong, not heavy, rather of elegant, stature; stands straight, head slightly thrown back, and eyelids modestly drooping; every way mild and gentle, yet with less of that fixed smile than the portraits give him. He is towards sixty, and, though not broken at all, carries, especially in his complexion, when you are _near_ him, marks of that age; clear, strong blue eyes which kindle on occasion, voice extremely good, low-toned, something of _cooing_ in it, rustic, affectionate, honest, mildly persuasive. Spoke about French Revolutions new and old; well read in all that; had seen General Dumouriez; reserved seemingly by nature, obtrudes nothing of _diplomatic_ reserve. On the contrary, a vein of mild _fun_ in him, real sensibility to the ludicrous, which feature I liked best of all.... I consider him by far our first public man--which, indeed, is saying little--and hope that England in these frightful times may still get some good of him. N.B.--This night with Peel was the night in which Berlin city executed its last terrible battle, (19th of March to Sunday morning the 20th, five o'clock.) While we sate there the streets of Berlin city were all blazing with grape-shot and the war of enraged men. What is to become of all that? I have a book to write about it. Alas! We hear of a great Chartist petition to be presented by 200,000 men. People here keep up their foolish levity in speaking of these things; but considerate persons find them to be very grave; and indeed all, even the laughers, are in considerable secret alarm.'[21] At such a time Carlyle knew that he, the author of _Chartism_, ought to say something. Foolish people, too, came pressing for his opinions. Not seeing his way to a book upon 'Democracy,' he wrote a good many newspaper articles, chiefly in the _Examiner_ and the _Spectator_, to deliver his soul. Even Fonblanque and Rintoul (the editors), remarks Froude, friendly though they were to him, could not allow him his full swing. 'There is no established journal,' complained Carlyle, 'that can stand my articles, no single one they would not blow the bottom out of.' On July 12 occurs this entry in his journal: 'Chartist concern, and Irish Repeal concern, and French Republic concern have all gone a bad way since the March entry--April 20 (immortal day already dead), day of Chartist monster petition; 200,000 special constables swore themselves in, etc., and Chartism came to nothing. Riots since, but the leaders all lodged in gaol, tried, imprisoned for two years, etc., and so ends Chartism for the present. Irish Mitchel, poor fellow! is now in Bermuda as a felon; letter from him, letter to him, letter to and from Lord Clarendon--was really sorry for poor Mitchel. But what help? French Republic _cannonaded_ by General Cavaignac; a sad outlook there.'[22] Carlyle's _Cromwell_ had created a set of enthusiastic admirers who were bent on having a statue of the great Protector set up. Carlyle was asked to give his sanction to the proposal. Writing to his mother, he said: 'The people having subscribed £25,000 for a memorial to an ugly bullock of a Hudson, who did not even pretend to have any merit except that of being suddenly rich, and who is now discovered to be little other than at heart a horse-coper and dishonest fellow, I think they ought to leave Cromwell alone of their memorials, and try to honour him in some more profitable way--by learning to be honest men like him, for example. But we shall see what comes of all this Cromwell work--a thing not without value either.'[23] 'Ireland,' says Froude, 'of all the topics on which Carlyle had meditated writing, remained painfully fascinating. He had looked at the beggarly scene, he had seen the blighted fields, the ragged misery of the wretched race who were suffering for other's sins as well as for their own. Since that brief visit of his, the famine had been followed by the famine-fever, and the flight of millions from a land which was smitten with a curse. Those ardent young men with whom he had dined at Dundrum were working as felons in the docks at Bermuda. Gavan Duffy, after a near escape from the same fate, had been a guest in Cheyne Row; and the story which he had to tell of cabins torn down by crowbars, and shivering families, turned out of their miserable homes, dying in the ditches by the roadside, had touched Carlyle to the very heart. He was furious at the economical commonplaces with which England was consoling itself. He regarded Ireland as "the breaking-point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society then was."'[24] Carlyle paid a second visit to Ireland. He was anxious to write a book on the subject. He noted down what he had seen, and 'then dismissed the unhappy subject from his mind,' giving his manuscript to a friend, which was published after his death. The 7th of August found Carlyle among his 'ain folk' at Scotsbrig, and this was his soliloquy: 'Thank Heaven for the sight of real human industry, with human fruits from it, once more. The sight of fenced fields, weeded crops, and human creatures with whole clothes on their back--it was as if one had got into spring water out of dunghill puddles.' Mrs Carlyle had also gone to Scotland, and 'wandered like a returned spirit about the home of her childhood.' Of her numerous lively letters, room must be found for a characteristic epistle to her brother-in-law, John Carlyle. His translation of Dante's _Inferno_ was just out, and her uncle's family at Auchtertool Manse, in Fife, where she was staying, were busy reading and discussing it. 'We had been talking about you,' she says, 'and had sunk silent. Suddenly my uncle turned his head to me and said, shaking it gravely, "He has made an awesome plooster o' that place." "Who? What place, uncle?" "Whew! the place ye'll maybe gang to, if ye dinna tak' care." I really believe he considers all those circles of your invention. Walter [a cousin, just ordained] performed the marriage service over a couple of colliers the day after I came. I happened to be in his study when they came in, and asked leave to remain. The man was a good-looking man enough, dreadfully agitated, partly with the business he was come on, partly with drink. He had evidently taken a glass too much to keep his heart up. The girl had one very large inflamed eye and one little one, which looked perfectly composed, while the large eye stared wildly, and had a tear in it. Walter married them very well indeed; and his affecting words, together with the bridegroom's pale, excited face, and the bride's ugliness, and the poverty, penury, and want imprinted on the whole business, and above all fellow-feeling with the poor wretches then rushing on their fate--all that so overcame me that I fell crying as desperately as if I had been getting married to the collier myself, and, when the ceremony was over, extended my hand to the unfortunates, and actually (in such an enthusiasm of pity did I find myself) I presented the new husband with a snuff-box which I happened to have in my hand, being just about presenting it to Walter when the creatures came in. This unexpected _Himmelsendung_ finished turning the man's head; he wrung my hand over and over, leaving his mark for some hours after, and ended his grateful speeches with, "Oh, Miss! Oh, Liddy! may ye hae mair comfort and pleasure in your life than ever you have had yet!" which might easily be.' Carlyle was full of wrath at what he considered the cant about the condition of the wage-earners in Manchester and elsewhere, and his indignation found vent in the _Latter-day Pamphlets_. Froude once asked him if he had ever thought of going into Parliament, for the former knew that the opportunity must have been offered him. 'Well,' he said, 'I did think of it at the time of the "Latter-day Pamphlets." I felt that nothing could prevent me from getting up in the House and saying all that.' 'He was powerful,' adds Froude, 'but he was not powerful _enough_ to have discharged with his single voice the vast volume of conventional electricity with which the collective wisdom of the nation was, and remains charged. It is better that his thoughts should have been committed to enduring print, where they remain to be reviewed hereafter by the light of fact.'[25] The printing of the _Pamphlets_ commenced at the beginning of 1850, and went on month after month, each separately published, no magazine daring to become responsible for them. When the _Pamphlets_ appeared, they were received with 'astonished indignation.' 'Carlyle taken to whisky,' was the popular impression--or perhaps he had gone mad. '_Punch_,' says Froude, 'the most friendly to him of all the London periodicals, protested affectionately. The delinquent was brought up for trial before him, I think for injuring his reputation. He was admonished, but stood impenitent, and even "called the worthy magistrate a windbag and a sham." I suppose it was Thackeray who wrote this; or some other kind friend, who feared, like Emerson, "that the world would turn its back on him." He was under no illusion himself as to the effect which he was producing.'[26] Amid the general storm, Carlyle was 'agreeably surprised' to receive an invitation to dine with Peel at Whitehall Gardens, where he met a select company. 'After all the servants but the butler were gone,' narrates Carlyle, 'we began to hear a little of Peel's quiet talk across the table, unimportant, distinguished by its sense of the ludicrous shining through a strong official _rationality_ and even seriousness of temper. Distracted _address_ of a letter from somebody to Queen Victoria; "The most noble George Victoria, Queen of England, Knight and Baronet," or something like that. A man had once written to Peel himself, while secretary, "that he was weary of life, that if any gentleman wanted for his park-woods a hermit, he, etc.", all of which was very pretty and human as Peel gave it us.'[27] Carlyle was driven home by the Bishop of Oxford, 'Soapy Sam' Wilberforce, whom he had probably met before at the Ashburton's. The Bishop once told Froude that he considered Carlyle a most eminently religious man. 'Ah, Sam,' said Carlyle to Froude one day, 'he is a very clever fellow; I do not hate him near as much as I fear I ought to do.' Carlyle and Peel met once more, at Bath House, and there, too, he was first introduced to the Duke of Wellington. Writing at the time, Carlyle said: 'I had never seen till now how beautiful, and what an expression of graceful simplicity, veracity, and nobleness there is about the old hero when you see him close at hand.... Except for Dr Chalmers, I have not for many years seen so beautiful an old man.' Carlyle intended, some time or other, writing a 'Life of Sterling,' but meanwhile he accepted an invitation to visit South Wales. Thence he made his way to Scotsbrig. On the 27th September 1850, he 'parted sorrowfully with his mother.' When he reached London, the autumn quarterlies were reviewing the _Pamphlets_, and the 'shrieking tone was considerably modified.' 'A review of them,' says Froude, 'by Masson in the _North British_ distinctly pleased Carlyle. A review in the _Dublin_ he found "excellently serious," and conjectured that it came from some Anglican pervert or convert. It was written, I believe, by Dr Ward.' After a few more wanderings, Carlyle set about the _Life of Sterling_, and on April 5, 1851, he informs his mother: 'I told the Doctor about "John Sterling's Life," a small, insignificant book or pamphlet I have been writing. The booksellers got it away from me the other morning, to see how much there is of it, in the first place. I know not altogether myself whether it is worth printing or not, but rather think it will be the end of it whether or not. It has cost little trouble, and need not do much ill, if it do no great amount of good.' Another visit had to be paid to Scotsbrig, where he read the "Life of Chalmers." 'An excellent Christian man,' he said. 'About as great a contrast to himself in all ways as could be found in these epochs under the same sky.' When he got back to Cheyne Row, he took to reading the "Seven Years' War," with a view to another book. He determined to go to Germany, and on August 30, 1852, Carlyle embarked 'on board the greasy little wretch of a Leith steamer, laden to the water's edge with pig-iron and herrings.' The journey over, he set to work on 'Frederick,' but was driven almost to despair by the cock-crowing in his neighbourhood. Writing to Mrs Carlyle, he says: 'I foresee in general these cocks will require to be abolished, entirely silenced, whether we build the new room or not. I would cheerfully shoot them, and pay the price if discovered, but I have no gun, should be unsafe for hitting, and indeed seldom see the wretched animals.' He took refuge at the Ashburton's house, the Grange, but on the 20th of December, news came that his mother was seriously ill, and could not last long. He hurried off to Scotsbrig, and reached there in time to see her once more alive. In his journal, this passage is to be found under date January 8, 1854: 'The stroke has fallen. My dear old mother is gone from me, and in the winter of the year, confusedly under darkness of weather and of mind, the stern final epoch--_epoch of old age_--is beginning to unfold itself for me.... It is matter of perennial thankfulness to me, and beyond my desert in that matter very far, that I found my dear old mother still alive; able to recognise me with a faint joy; her former _self_ still strangely visible there in all its lineaments, though worn to the uttermost thread. The brave old mother and the good, whom to lose had been my fear ever since intelligence awoke in me in this world, arrived now at the final bourn.... She was about 84 years of age, and could not with advantage to any side remain with us longer. Surely it was a good Power that gave us such a mother; and good though stern that took her away from amid such grief and labour by a death beautiful to one's thoughts. "All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come." This they heard her muttering, and many other less frequent pious texts and passages. Amen, Amen! Sunday, December 25, 1853--a day henceforth for ever memorable to me.... To live for the shorter or longer remainder of my days with the simple bravery, veracity, and piety of her that is gone: that would be a right learning from her death, and a right honouring of her memory. But alas all is yet _frozen_ within me; even as it is without me at present, and I have made little or no way. God be helpful to me! I myself am very weak, confused, fatigued, entangled in poor _worldlinesses_ too. Newspaper paragraphs, even as this sacred and peculiar thing, are not indifferent to me. Weak soul! and I am fifty-eight years old, and the tasks I have on hand, Frederick, &c., are most ungainly, incongruous with my mood--and the night cometh, for me too is not distant, which for her is come. I must try, I must try. Poor brother Jack! Will he do his Dante now? For him also I am sad; and surely he has deserved gratitude in these last years from us all.'[28] When he returned to London, Carlyle lived in strict seclusion, making repeated efforts at work on what he called 'the unexecutable book,' _Frederick_. In the spring of 1854, tidings reached Carlyle of the death of Professor Wilson. Between them there had never been any cordial relation, says Froude. 'They had met in Edinburgh in the old days; on Carlyle's part there had been no backwardness, and Wilson was not unconscious of Carlyle's extraordinary powers. But he had been shy of Carlyle, and Carlyle had resented it, and now this April the news came that Wilson was gone, and Carlyle had to write his epitaph. 'I knew his figure well,' wrote Carlyle in his journal on April 29; 'remember well first seeing him in Princes Street on a bright April afternoon--probably 1814--exactly forty years ago.... A tall ruddy figure, with plenteous blonde hair, with bright blue eyes, fixed, as if in haste towards some distant object, strode rapidly along, clearing the press to the left of us, close by the railings, near where Blackwood's shop now is. Westward he in haste; we slowly eastward. Campbell whispered me, "That is Wilson of the _Isle of Palms_," which poem I had not read, being then quite mathematical, scientific, &c., for extraneous reasons, as I now see them to have been. The broad-shouldered stately bulk of the man struck me; his flashing eye, copious, dishevelled head of hair, and rapid, unconcerned progress, like that of a plough through stubble. I really liked him, but only from the distance, and thought no more of him. It must have been fourteen years later before I once saw his figure again, and began to have some distant straggling acquaintance of a personal kind with him. Glad could I have been to be better and more familiarly acquainted; but though I liked much in him, and he somewhat in me, it would not do. He was always very kind to me, but seemed to have a feeling I should--could--not become wholly his, in which he was right, and that on other terms he could not have me; so we let it so remain, and for many years--indeed, even after quitting Edinburgh--I had no acquaintance with him; occasionally got symptoms of his ill-humour with me--ink-spurts in _Blackwood_, read or heard of, which I, in a surly, silent manner, strove to consider _flattering_ rather.... So far as I can recollect, he was once in my house (Comely Bank, with a testimonial, poor fellow!), and I once in his, De Quincey, &c., a little while one afternoon.'[29] On September 16, 1854, Carlyle breaks out in his journal: '"The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."' What a fearful word! I cannot find how to take up that miserable "Frederick," or what on earth to do with it.' He worked hard at it, nevertheless, for eighteen months, and by the end of May 1858, the first instalment was all in type. Froude remarks that a fine critic once said to him that Carlyle's Friedrich Wilhelm was as peculiar and original as Sterne's Tristram Shandy; certainly as distinct a personality as exists in English fiction. Carlyle made a second journey to Germany. Shortly after his return, the already finished volumes of _Frederick_ appeared, and they met with an immediate welcome. The success was great; 2000 copies were sold at the first issue, and a second 2000 were disposed of almost as rapidly, and a third 2000 followed. Mrs Carlyle's health being unsatisfactory, Carlyle took a house for the summer at Humbie, near Aberdour in Fife. They returned to Cheyne Row in October, neither of them benefited by their holiday in the north. While many of Carlyle's intimate friends were passing away, he formed Ruskin's acquaintance, which turned out mutually satisfactory. On the 23rd April 1861, Carlyle writes to his brother John: 'Friday last I was persuaded--in fact had unwarily compelled myself, as it were--to a lecture of Ruskin's at the Institution, Albemarle Street. Lecture on Tree Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral, symbolical objects. A crammed house, but tolerable to me even in the gallery. The lecture was thought to "break down," and indeed it quite did "_as a lecture_"; but only did from _embarras des richesses_--a rare case. Ruskin did blow asunder as by gunpowder explosions his leaf notions, which were manifold, curious, genial; and, in fact, I do not recollect to have heard in that place any neatest thing I liked so well as this chaotic one.'[30] _Frederick_ was progressing, though slowly, as he found the ore in the German material at his disposal "nowhere smelted out of it." The third volume was finished and published in the summer of 1862; the fourth volume was getting into type; and the fifth and last was finished in January 1865. 'It nearly killed me,' Carlyle writes in his journal, 'it, and my poor Jane's dreadful illness, now happily over. No sympathy could be found on earth for those horrid struggles of twelve years, nor happily was any needed. On Sunday evening in the end of January (1865) I walked out, with the multiplex feeling--joy not very prominent in it, but a kind of solemn thankfulness traceable, that I had written the last sentence of that unutterable book, and, contrary to many forebodings in bad hours, had actually got done with it for ever.' In England it was at once admitted, says Froude, that a splendid addition had been made to the national literature. 'The book contained, if nothing else, a gallery of historical figures executed with a skill which placed Carlyle at the head of literary portrait painters.... No critic, after the completion of _Frederick_, challenged Carlyle's right to a place beside the greatest of English authors, past or present.' The work was translated instantly into German, calling forth the warmest appreciation. FOOTNOTES: [18] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. p. 115. [19] Froude's "Life in London," vol. i. pp. 161-62. [20] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. p. 420. [21] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. pp. 433-4. [22] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. p. 441. [23] Ibid., vol. i. p. 451. [24] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. i. p. 456. [25] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 26. [26] Ibid., vol. ii. p. 36. [27] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 43. [28] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. pp. 142-45. [29] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. pp. 156-7. [30] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 245. CHAPTER VI RECTORIAL ADDRESS--DEATH OF MRS CARLYLE After a round of holiday visits, including one to Annandale, the Carlyles settled down once more at Cheyne Row in the summer of 1865. 'The great outward event of Carlyle's own life,' observes Froude, 'Scotland's public recognition of him, was now lying close ahead. This his wife was to live to witness as her final happiness in this world.' Here is an eloquent passage from the same pen: 'I had been at Edinburgh,' writes Froude, 'and had heard Gladstone make his great oration on Homer there, on retiring from office as Rector. It was a grand display. I never recognised before what oratory could do; the audience being kept for three hours in a state of electric tension, bursting every moment into applause. Nothing was said which seemed of moment when read deliberately afterwards; but the voice was like enchantment, and the street, when we left the building, was ringing with a prolongation of cheers. Perhaps in all Britain there was not a man whose views on all subjects, in heaven and earth, less resembled Gladstone's than those of the man whom this same applauding multitude elected to take his place. The students too, perhaps, were ignorant how wide the contradiction was; but if they had been aware of it they need not have acted differently. Carlyle had been one of themselves. He had risen from among them--not by birth or favour, not on the ladder of any established profession, but only by the internal force that was in him--to the highest place as a modern man of letters. In _Frederick_ he had given the finish to his reputation; he stood now at the summit of his fame; and the Edinburgh students desired to mark their admiration in some signal way. He had been mentioned before, but he had declined to be nominated, for a party only were then in his favour. On this occasion, the students were unanimous, or nearly so. His own consent was all that was wanting.'[31] This consent was obtained, and Carlyle was chosen Rector of Edinburgh University. But the Address troubled him. He resolved, however, as his father used to say, to 'gar himself go through with the thing,' or at least to try. Froude says he was very miserable, but that Mrs Carlyle 'kept up his spirits, made fun of his fears, bantered him, encouraged him, herself at heart as much alarmed as he was, but conscious, too, of the ridiculous side of it.' She thought of accompanying him, but her health would not permit of the effort. Both Huxley and Tyndall were going down, and Tyndall promised Mrs Carlyle to take care of her husband. On Monday morning, the 29th of March, 1866, Carlyle and his wife parted. 'The last I saw of her,' he said, 'was as she stood with her back to the parlour door to bid me good-bye. She kissed me twice, she me once, I her a second time.' They parted for ever. Edinburgh was reached in due course, and what happened there had best be told by an eye-witness, Professor Masson. 'On the night following Carlyle's arrival in town,' he says, 'after he had settled himself in Mr Erskine of Linlathen's house, where he was to stay during his visit, he and his brother John came to my house in Rosebery Crescent, that they might have a quiet smoke and talk over matters. They sat with me an hour or more, Carlyle as placid and hearty as could be, talking most pleasantly, a little dubious, indeed, as to how he might get through his Address, but for the rest unperturbed. As to the Address itself, when the old man stood up in the Music Hall before the assembled crowd, and threw off his Rectorial robes, and proceeded to speak, slowly, connectedly, and nobly raising his left hand at the end of each section or paragraph to stroke the back of his head as he cogitated what he was to say next, the crowd listening as they had never listened to a speaker before, and reverent even in those parts of the hall where he was least audible,--who that was present will ever forget that sight? That day, and on the subsequent days of his stay, there were, of course, dinners and other gatherings in Carlyle's honour. One such dinner, followed by a larger evening gathering, was in my house. Then, too, he was in the best of possible spirits, courteous in manner and in speech to all, and throwing himself heartily into whatever turned up. At the dinner-table, I remember, Lord Neaves favoured us with one or two of his humorous songs or recitatives, including his clever quiz called "Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter," written to the tune of "Roy's wife of Aldivalloch." No one enjoyed the thing more than Carlyle; and he surprised me by doing what I had never heard him do before,--actually joining with his own voice in the chorus. "Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter, Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter," he chaunted laughingly along with Lord Neaves every time the chorus came round, beating time in the air emphatically with his fist. It was hardly otherwise, or only otherwise inasmuch as the affair was more ceremonious and stately, at the dinner given to him in the Douglas Hotel by the Senatus Academicus, and in which his old friend Sir David Brewster presided. There, too, while dignified and serene, Carlyle was thoroughly sympathetic and convivial. Especially I remember how he relished and applauded the songs of our academic laureate and matchless chief in such things, Professor Douglas Maclagan, and how, before we broke up, he expressly complimented Professor Maclagan on having "contributed so greatly to the hilarity of the evening."'[32] The most graphic account of Carlyle's installation as Lord Rector is that by Alexander Smith, the author of 'A Life Drama,' 'Summer in Skye,' &c., &c., whose lamented death took place a few months after that event. 'Curious stories,' he wrote, 'are told of the eagerness on every side manifested to hear Mr Carlyle. Country clergymen from beyond Aberdeen came to Edinburgh for the sole purpose of hearing and seeing. Gentlemen came down from London by train the night before, and returned to London by train the night after. Nay, it was even said that an enthusiast, dwelling in the remote west of Ireland, intimated to the officials who had charge of the distribution, that if a ticket should be reserved for him, he would gladly come the whole way to Edinburgh. Let us hope a ticket _was_ reserved. On the day of the address, the doors of the Music Hall were besieged long before the hour of opening had arrived; and loitering about there on the outskirts of the crowd, one could not help glancing curiously down Pitt Street, towards the "lang toun of Kirkcaldy," dimly seen beyond the Forth; for on the sands there, in the early years of the century, Edward Irving was accustomed to pace up and down solitarily, and "as if the sands were his own," people say, who remember, when they were boys, seeing the tall, ardent, black-haired, swift-gestured, squinting man, often enough. And to Kirkcaldy, too, ... came young Carlyle from Edinburgh College, wildly in love with German and mathematics; and the schoolroom in which these men taught, although incorporated in Provost Swan's manufactory, is yet kept sacred and intact, and but little changed these fifty years--an act of hero-worship for which the present and other generations may be thankful. It seemed to me that so glancing Fife-wards, and thinking of that noble friendship--of the David and Jonathan of so many years agone--was the best preparation for the man I was to see, and the speech I was to hear. David and Jonathan! Jonathan stumbled and fell on the dark hills, not of Gilboa, but of Vanity; and David sang his funeral song: "But for him I had never known what the communion of man with man means. His was the freest, brotherliest, bravest human soul mine ever came in contact with. I call him, on the whole, the best man I have ever, after trial enough, found in this world, or now hope to find." 'In a very few minutes after the doors were opened, the large hall was filled in every part; and when up the central passage the Principal, the Lord Rector, the Members of the Senate, and other gentlemen advanced towards the platform, the cheering was vociferous and hearty. The Principal occupied the chair, of course; the Lord Rector on his right, the Lord Provost on his left. When the platform gentlemen had taken their seats, every eye was fixed on the Rector. To all appearance, as he sat, time and labour had dealt tenderly with him. His face had not yet lost the country bronze which he brought up with him from Dumfriesshire as a student, fifty-six years ago. His long residence in London had not touched his Annandale look, nor had it--as we soon learned--touched his Annandale accent. His countenance was striking, homely, sincere, truthful--the countenance of a man on whom "the burden of the unintelligible world" had weighed more heavily than on most. His hair was yet almost dark; his moustache and short beard were iron-grey. His eyes were wide, melancholy, sorrowful; and seemed as if they had been at times a-weary of the sun. Altogether, in his aspect there was something aboriginal, as of a piece of unhewn granite, which had never been polished to any approved pattern, whose natural and original vitality had never been tampered with. In a word, there seemed no passivity about Mr Carlyle; he was the diamond, and the world was his pane of glass; he was a graving tool, rather than a thing graven upon--a man to set his mark on the world--a man on whom the world could not set _its_ mark.... The proceedings began by the conferring of the degree of LL.D. on Mr Erskine of Linlathen--an old friend of Mr Carlyle's--on Professors Huxley, Tyndall, and Ramsay, and on Dr Rae, the Arctic explorer. That done, amid a tempest of cheering and hats enthusiastically waved, Mr Carlyle, slipping off his Rectorial robe--which must have been a very shirt of Nessus to him--advanced to the table, and began to speak in low, wavering, melancholy tones, which were in accordance with the melancholy eyes, and in the Annandale accent with which his play-fellows must have been familiar long ago. So self-centred was he, so impregnable to outward influences, that all his years of Edinburgh and London life could not impair, even in the slightest degree, _that_. The opening sentences were lost in the applause, and when it subsided, the low, plaintive, quavering voice was heard going on: "Your enthusiasm towards me is very beautiful in itself, however undeserved it may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling honourable to all men, and one well known to myself when in a position analogous to your own." And then came the Carlylean utterance, with its far-reaching reminiscence and sigh over old graves--Father's and Mother's, Edward Irving's, John Sterling's, Charles Buller's, and all the noble known in past time--and with its flash of melancholy scorn. "There are now fifty-six years gone, last November, since I first entered your city, a boy of not quite fourteen--fifty-six years ago--to attend classes here, and gain knowledge of all kinds, I knew not what--with feelings of wonder and awe-struck expectation; and now, after a long, long course, this is what we have come to.... There is something touching and tragic, and yet at the same time beautiful, to see the third generation, as it were, of my dear old native land, rising up, and saying: Well, you are not altogether an unworthy labourer in the vineyard. You have toiled through a great variety of fortunes, and have had many judges." And thereafter, without aid of notes, or paper preparation of any kind, in the same wistful, earnest, hesitating voice, and with many a touch of quaint humour by the way, which came in upon his subject like glimpses of pleasant sunshine, the old man talked to his vast audience about the origin and function of Universities, the Old Greeks and Romans, Oliver Cromwell, John Knox, the excellence of silence as compared with speech, the value of courage and truthfulness, and the supreme importance of taking care of one's health. "There is no kind of achievement you could make in the world that is equal to perfect health. What to it are nuggets and millions? The French financier said, 'Alas! why is there no sleep to be sold?' Sleep was not in the market at any quotation." But what need of quoting a speech which by this time has been read by everybody? Appraise it as you please, it was a thing _per se_. Just as, if you wish a purple dye, you must fish up the Murex; if you wish ivory, you must go to the East; so if you desire an address such as Edinburgh listened to the other day, you must go to Chelsea for it. It may not be quite to your taste, but, in any case, there is no other intellectual warehouse in which that kind of article is kept in stock.'[33] Another eye-witness, Mr Moncure D. Conway, says: 'When Carlyle sat down there was an audible sound, as of breath long held, by all present; then a cry from the students, an exultation; they rose up, all arose, waving their arms excitedly; some pressed forward, as if wishing to embrace him, or to clasp his knees; others were weeping; what had been heard that day was more than could be reported; it was the ineffable spirit that went forth from the deeps of a great heart and from the ages stored up in it, and deep answered unto deep.' Immediately after the delivery of the address, Tyndall telegraphed to Mrs Carlyle this brief message, 'A perfect triumph.' That evening she dined at Forster's, where she met Dickens and Wilkie Collins. They drank Carlyle's health, and to her it was 'a good joy.' It was Carlyle's intention to have returned at once to London, but he changed his mind, and went for a few quiet days at Scotsbrig. When Tyndall was back in London Mrs Carlyle got all the particulars of the rectorial address from him, and was made perfectly happy about it. Numberless congratulations poured in upon Mrs Carlyle, and for Saturday, April 21st, she had arranged a small tea-party. In the morning she wrote her daily letter to Carlyle, and in the afternoon she went out in her brougham for a drive, taking her little dog with her. When near Victoria Gate, Hyde Park, she put the dog out to run. 'A passing carriage,' says Froude, 'went over its foot.... She sprang out, caught the dog in her arms, took it with her into the brougham, and was never more seen alive. The coachman went twice round the drive, by Marble Arch down to Stanhope Gate, along the Serpentine and round again. Coming a second time near to the Achilles statue, and surprised to receive no directions, he turned round, saw indistinctly that something was wrong, and asked a gentleman near to look into the carriage. The gentleman told him briefly to take the lady to St. George's Hospital, which was not 200 yards distant. She was sitting with her hands folded in her lap _dead_.'[34] At the hour she died Carlyle was enjoying the 'green solitudes and fresh spring breezes' of Annandale, 'quietly but far from happily.' About nine o'clock the same night his brother-in-law, Mr Aitken, broke the news to him. 'I was sitting in sister Jean's at Dumfries,' Carlyle wrote a fortnight after, 'thinking of my railway journey to Chelsea on Monday, and perhaps of a sprained ankle I had got at Scotsbrig two weeks or so before, when the fatal telegrams, two of them in succession, came. It had a kind of _stunning_ effect upon me. Not for above two days could I estimate the immeasurable depths of it, or the infinite sorrow which had peeled my life all bare, and in a moment shattered my poor world to universal ruin. They took me out next day to wander, as was medically needful, in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and ever and anon there rose from my sick heart the ejaculation, "My poor little woman!" but no full gust of tears came to my relief, nor has yet come. Will it ever? A stony "Woe's me, woe's me!" sometimes with infinite tenderness and pity, not for myself, is my habitual mood hitherto.'[35] On Monday morning Carlyle and his brother John set off for London. On the Wednesday he was on his way to Haddington with the remains, his brother and John Forster accompanying him. At 1 P.M. on Thursday the funeral took place. 'In the nave of the old Abbey Kirk,' wrote her disconsolate husband, 'long a ruin, now being saved from further decay, with the skies looking down on her, there sleeps my little Jeannie, and the light of her face will never shine on me more.' When Mr Conway saw him on his return to Cheyne Row, Carlyle said, 'Whatever triumph there may have been in that now so darkly overcast day, was indeed _hers_. Long, long years ago, she took her place by the side of a poor man of humblest condition, against all other provisions for her, undertook to share his lot for weal or woe; and in that office what she has been to him and done for him, how she has placed, as it were, velvet between him and all the sharp angularities of existence, remains now only in the knowledge of one man, and will presently be finally hid in his grave.' As he touchingly expressed it in the beautiful epitaph he wrote, the 'light of his life' had assuredly 'gone out.' Universal sympathy was felt for the bereaved husband, and he was very much affected by 'a delicate, graceful, and even affectionate' message from the Queen, conveyed by Lady Augusta Stanley through his brother John. One who knew Mrs Carlyle intimately thus speaks of her: 'Her intellect was as clear and incisive as his, yet altogether womanly in character; her heart was as truthful, and her courage as unswerving. She was a wife in the noblest sense of that sacred name. She had a gift of literary expression as unique as his; as tender a sympathy with human sorrow and need; as clear an eye for all conventional hypocrisies and folly; as vivid powers of description and illustration; and also, it must be confessed, when the spirit of mockery was strong upon her, as keen an edge to her flashing wit and humour, and as scornful a disregard of the conventional proprieties. But she was no literary hermaphrodite. She never intellectually strode forth before the world upon masculine stilts; nor, in private life, did she frowardly push to the front, in the vanity of showing she was as clever and considerable as her husband. She longed, with a true woman's longing heart, to be appreciated by him, and by those she loved; and, for her, all extraneous applause might whistle with the wind. But if her husband was a king in literature, so might she have been a queen. Her influence with him for good cannot be questioned by any one having eyes to discern. And if she sacrificed her own vanity for personal distinction, in order to make his work possible for him, who shall say she did not choose the nobler and better part?'[36] On the other hand, Carlyle was too exacting, and when domestic differences arose he abstained from paying those little attentions which a delicate and sensitive woman might naturally expect from a husband who was so lavish of terms of endearment in the letters he wrote to her when away from her side. 'Even with that mother whom he so dearly loved,' observes Mrs Ireland, 'the intercourse was mainly composed of a silent sitting by the fireside of an evening in the old "houseplace," with a tranquillising pipe of tobacco, or of his returning from his long rambles to a simple meal, partaken of in comparative silence; and now and then, at meeting or parting, some pious and earnest words from the good soul to her son.'[37] And it never occurred to Carlyle to act differently with his wife, who was pining for his society. In addition to all that, we have Froude's brief but accurate diagnosis of Carlyle's character. 'If,' he wrote, 'matters went well with himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any one else; and, on the other hand, if he was uncomfortable, he required everybody to be uncomfortable along with him.' There was a strong element of selfishness in that phase of Carlyle's nature; and throughout his letters and journal he appears wholly wrapt up in himself and in his literary projects, without even a passing allusion to the courageous woman who had shared his lot. Now and again we alight upon a passage where special mention is made of her efforts, but these have all a direct or indirect bearing upon _his_ work, _his_ plans, _his_ comforts.[38] Carlyle never fully realised what his wife had been to him until she was suddenly snatched from his side. And this was his testimony: 'I say deliberately, her part in the stern battle, and except myself none knows how stern, was brighter and braver than my own.' In one of those terrible moments of self-upbraiding the grief-stricken husband exclaims: 'Blind and deaf that we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust-clouds and idle dissonances of the moment, and all be at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, _when it is too late_!' In a pamphlet quoted by Mrs Ireland we have a pathetic picture of Carlyle in his lonely old age. A Mr Swinton, an American gentleman on a visit to this country, went to see the grave of Mrs Carlyle. In conversation the grave-digger said: 'Mr Carlyle comes here from London now and then to see this grave. He is a gaunt, shaggy, weird kind of old man, looking very old the last time he was here.' 'He is eighty-six now,' said I. 'Ay,' he repeated, 'eighty-six, and comes here to this grave all the way from London.' And I told him that Carlyle was a great man, the greatest man of the age in books, and that his name was known all over the world; but he thought there were other great men lying near at hand, though I told him their fame did not reach beyond the graveyard, and brought him back to talk of Carlyle. 'Mr Carlyle himself,' said the gravedigger softly, 'is to be brought here to be buried with his wife. Ay, he comes here lonesome and alone,' continued the gravedigger, 'when he visits the wife's grave. His niece keeps him company to the gate, but he leaves her there, and she stays there for him. The last time he was here I got a sight of him, and he was bowed down under his white hairs, and he took his way up by that ruined wall of the old cathedral, and round there and in here by the gateway, and he tottered up here to this spot.' Softly spake the gravedigger, and paused. Softer still, in the broad dialect of the Lothians, he proceeded:--"And he stood here awhile in the grass, and then he kneeled down and stayed on his knees at the grave; then he bent over and I saw him kiss the ground--ay, he kissed it again and again, and he kept kneeling, and it was a long time before he rose and tottered out of the cathedral, and wandered through the graveyard to the gate, where his niece was waiting for him." This is the epitaph composed by Carlyle, and engraved on the tombstone of Dr John Welsh in the chancel of Haddington Church:-- 'HERE LIKEWISE NOW RESTS JANE WELSH CARLYLE, SPOUSE OF THOMAS CARLYLE, CHELSEA, LONDON. SHE WAS BORN AT HADDINGTON, 14TH JULY 1801, ONLY DAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE JOHN WELSH, AND OF GRACE WELSH, CAPELGILL, DUMFRIESSHIRE, HIS WIFE. IN HER BRIGHT EXISTENCE SHE HAD MORE SORROWS THAN ARE COMMON; BUT ALSO A SOFT INVINCIBILITY, A CLEARNESS OF DISCERNMENT, AND A NOBLE LOYALTY OF HEART WHICH ARE RARE. FOR FORTY YEARS SHE WAS THE TRUE AND EVER-LOVING HELPMATE OF HER HUSBAND, AND, BY ACT AND WORD, UNWEARIEDLY FORWARDED HIM AS NONE ELSE COULD, IN ALL OF WORTHY THAT HE DID OR ATTEMPTED. SHE DIED AT LONDON, 21ST APRIL 1866, SUDDENLY SNATCHED AWAY FROM HIM, AND THE LIGHT OF HIS LIFE AS IF GONE OUT.' FOOTNOTES: [31] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 295. [32] Masson's 'Carlyle Personally and in his Writings,' pp. 27-9. [33] Alexander Smith's 'Sketches and Criticisms,' pp. 101-8. [34] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 312. [35] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 314. [36] Larkin's 'Carlyle and the Open Secret of his Life,' pp. 334-5. [37] 'Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle,' pp. 191-2. [38] After reading the above estimate in the proof sheets, Professor Masson writes to me as follows:-- 'May I hint that, in the passage about his character and domestic relations, you seem hardly to do justice to the depths of real kindness and tenderness in him, and the actual _couthiness_ of his manner and fireside conversation in his most genial hours? He was delightful and loveable at such hours, with a fund of the raciest Scottish humour.' This is a side of Carlyle's nature which would naturally be hidden from the general reader, and from Mr Froude. It is easy to imagine how Carlyle's genial humour, frozen at its source in the company of the solemnly pessimistic Froude, should be thawed by the presence of 'a brither Scot.' CHAPTER VII LAST YEARS AND DEATH OF CARLYLE In presence of the pathetically tragic spectacle of Carlyle in his old age, who can have the heart to enter into his domestic life and weigh with pedantic scales the old man's blameworthiness? Carlyle survived his wife fifteen years. His brother John, himself a widower, was anxious that they should live together, but it was otherwise arranged. John returned to Scotland, and Carlyle remained alone in Cheyne Row. He was prevailed on to visit Ripple Court, near Walmer, and on his return to London he wrote, 'My home is very gaunt and lonesome; but such is my allotment henceforth in this world. I have taken loyally to my vacant circumstances, and will try to do my best with them.' Carlyle's first public appearance after his sore bereavement was as chairman of the Eyre Committee as a protest against Governor Eyre's recall. 'Poor Eyre!' he wrote to a correspondent, 'I am heartily sorry for him, and for the English nation, which makes such a dismal fool of itself. Eyre, it seems, has fallen suddenly from £6000 a year into almost zero, and has a large family and needy kindred dependent on him. Such his reward for saving the West Indies, and hanging one incendiary mulatto, well worth the gallows, if I can judge.' Carlyle accepted a pressing invitation to stay with the Ashburtons at Mentone, and on the 22nd of December he started thither with Professor Tyndall. He was greatly benefited in health, and at intervals made some progress with his _Reminiscences_. He returned to London in March, and on the 4th of April 1867 he writes in his journal: 'Idle! Idle! My employments mere trifles of business, and that of dwelling on the days that culminated on the 21st of last year.' About this time his thoughts were directed to the estate of Craigenputtock, of which he became absolute owner at his wife's death. All her relations on the father's side were dead, and as Carlyle thought that it ought not to lapse to his own family, he determined to leave it to the University of Edinburgh, 'the rents of it to be laid out in supporting poor and meritorious students there, under the title of "the John Welsh Bursaries." Her name he could not give, because she had taken his own. Therefore he gave her father's.' On June 22nd, he writes in his journal: 'Finished off on Thursday last, at three p.m. 20th of June, my poor _bequest_ of Craigenputtock to Edinburgh University for bursaries. All quite ready there, Forster and Froude as witnesses; the good Professor Masson, who had taken endless pains, alike friendly and wise, being at the very last objected to in the character of "witness," as "a party interested," said the Edinburgh lawyer. I a little regretted this circumstance; so I think did Masson secretly. He read us the deed with sonorous emphasis, bringing every word and note of it home to us. Then I signed; then they two--Masson witnessing only with his eyes and mind. I was deeply moved, as I well might be, but held my peace and shed no tears. _Tears_ I think I have done with; never, except for moments together, have I wept for that catastrophe of April 21, to which whole days of weeping would have been in other times a blessed relief.... This is my poor "Sweetheart Abbey," "Cor Dulce," or New Abbey, a sacred casket and _tomb_ for the sweetest "heart" which, in this bad, bitter world, was all my own. Darling, darling! and in a little while we shall _both_ be at rest, and the Great God will have done with us what was His will.'[39] When the Tories were preparing to 'dish the Whigs' over the Reform Bill, Carlyle felt impelled to write a pamphlet, which he called _Shooting Niagara, and After_. It was his final utterance on British politics. Proof sheets and revisions for new editions of his works engrossed his attention for some time. He went annually to Scotland, and devoted a great deal of time on his return to Chelsea to the sorting and annotating of his wife's letters. Early in 1869 the Queen expressed a wish, through Dean Stanley, to become personally acquainted with Carlyle. The meeting took place at Westminster Deanery: 'The Queen,' Carlyle said, 'was really very gracious and pretty in her demeanour throughout; rose greatly in my esteem by everything that happened; did not fall in any point. The interview was quietly very mournful to me; the one point of real interest, a sombre thought: "Alas! how would it have cheered her, bright soul, for my sake, had she been there!"' When Carlyle was in constant expectation of his end, he--in June 1871--brought to Mr Froude's house a large parcel of papers. 'He put it in my hands,' says Froude. 'He told me to take it simply and absolutely as my own, without reference to any other person or persons, and to do with it as I pleased after he was gone. He explained, when he saw me surprised, that it was an account of his wife's history, that it was incomplete, that he could himself form no opinion whether it ought to be published or not, that he could do no more to it, and must pass it over to me. He wished never to hear of it again. I must judge. I must publish it, the whole, or part--or else destroy it all, if I thought that this would be the wiser thing to do.'[40] Three years later Carlyle sent to Froude his own and his wife's private papers, journals, correspondence, reminiscences, and other documents. 'Take them,' he said to Froude, 'and do what you can with them. All I can say to you is, Burn freely. If you have any affection for me, the more you burn the better.' Mr Froude burnt nothing, and it was well, he says, that he did not, for a year before his death he desired him, when he had done with the MSS., to give them to his niece. 'The new task which had been laid upon me,' writes Froude in his biography of Carlyle, 'complicated the problem of the "Letters and Memorials." My first hope was, that, in the absence of further definite instructions from himself, I might interweave parts of Mrs Carlyle's letters with his own correspondence in an ordinary narrative, passing lightly over the rest, and touching the dangerous places only so far as was unavoidable. In this view I wrote at leisure the greatest part of "the first forty years" of his life. The evasion of the difficulty was perhaps cowardly, but it was not unnatural. I was forced back, however, into the straighter and better course.' The outcome of it all is too well-known to call for recapitulation here. In February 1874, the Emperor of Germany conferred upon Carlyle the Order of Merit which the great Frederick had himself founded. He could not refuse it, but he remarked, 'Were it ever so well meant, it can be of no value to me whatever. Do thee neither ill na gude.' Ten months later, Mr Disraeli, then Premier, offered him the Grand Cross of the Bath along with a pension. Carlyle gracefully declined both. Upon his 80th birthday, Carlyle was presented with a gold medal from Scottish friends and admirers, and with a letter from Prince Bismarck, both of which he valued highly. His last public act was to write a letter of three or four lines to the _Times_, which he explains to his brother in this fashion: 'After much urgency and with a dead-lift effort, I have this day [5th May 1877] got issued through the _Times_ a small indispensable deliverance on the Turk and Dizzy question. Dizzy, it appears, to the horror of those who have any interest in him and his proceedings, has decided to have a new war for the Turk against all mankind; and this letter hopes to drive a nail through his mad and maddest speculations on that side.' Froude tells us that Carlyle continued to read the Bible, 'the significance of which' he found 'deep and wonderful almost as much as it ever used to be.' The Bible and Shakespeare remained 'the best books' to him that were ever written. The death of his brother John was a severe shock to Carlyle, for they were deeply attached to each other. When he bequeathed Craigenputtock to the University of Edinburgh, John Carlyle settled a handsome sum for medical bursaries there, to encourage poor students. 'These two brothers,' Froude remarks, 'born in a peasant's home in Annandale, owing little themselves to an Alma Mater which had missed discovering their merits, were doing for Scotland's chief University what Scotland's peers and merchants, with their palaces and deer forests and social splendour, had, for some cause, too imperfectly supplied.' In the autumn of 1880, Carlyle became very infirm; in January he was visibly sinking; and on the 5th of February 1881, he passed away in his eighty-fifth year. In accordance with his expressed wishes, they buried him in the old kirkyard of Ecclefechan with his own people. At his death Carlyle's fame was at its zenith. A revulsion of feeling was caused by the publication of Froude's _Life of Carlyle_ and the _Reminiscences_. In regard to the former, great dissatisfaction was created by the somewhat unflattering portrait painted by Froude. Was Froude justified in presenting to the public Carlyle in all grim realism? The answer to this depends upon one's notions of literary ethics. The view of the average biographer is that he must suppress faults and give prominence to virtues. The result is that the majority of biographies are simply expanded funeral sermons; instead of a life-like portrait we have a glorified mummy. Boswell's _Johnson_ stands at the head of biographies; but, if Boswell had followed the conventional method, his book would long since have passed into obscurity. It is open to dispute whether Froude has not overdone the sombre elements in Carlyle's life. Readers of Professor Masson's little book, which shows Carlyle in a more genially human mood, have good reason to suspect that Froude has given too much emphasis to the Rembrandtesque element in Carlyle's life. In the main, however, Froude's conception of biography was more correct than that of his critics. In dealing with the reputation of a great man it is not enough to consider the feelings of contemporaries; regard should be had to the rights of posterity. In his usual forcible manner Johnson goes to the heart of this question when he says in the _Rambler_:--'If the biographer writes from personal knowledge, and makes haste to gratify the public curiosity, there is danger lest his interest, his fear, his gratitude, or his tenderness overpower his fidelity, and tempt him to conceal, if not to invent. There are many who think it an act of piety to hide the faults or failings of their friends, even when they can no longer suffer by their detection; we therefore see whole ranks of characters adorned with uniform panegyric and not to be known from one another, but by extrinsic and casual circumstances. If we have regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.' When Johnson's own biography came to be written, Boswell, in spite of the expostulation of friends, resolved to be guided closely by the literary ethics of his great hero. In reply to Hannah More who begged that he would mitigate some of the asperities of Johnson, Boswell said, 'he would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat, to please anybody.' Some critics have insinuated that Froude took a curious kind of pleasure in smirching the idol. The insinuation is as unworthy as it is false. Froude had resolved to paint Carlyle as he was, warts and all, and all that can be said is that in his anxiety to avoid the charge of idealism he has given the warts undue prominence. FOOTNOTES: [39] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. p. 346. [40] Froude's 'Life in London,' vol. ii. pp. 408-9. CHAPTER VIII CARLYLE AS A SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THINKER In his essay on Carlyle, Mr John Morley utters a protest against the habit of labelling great men with names. After making every allowance for the waywardness of the men of intuitive and poetic insight, it remains true that between the speculative and the practical sides of a great thinker's mind there is a potent, though subtle, connection. For those who take the trouble of searching, there is discoverable such a connection between the speculative ideas of Carlyle and his practical outlook upon civilisation. Given a thinker who lays stress upon the emotional side of progress, and we have a thinker who will take for heroes men of mystical tendencies, of strong dominating passions, a thinker who will value progress not by the increase of worldly comfort, but by the increase in the number of magnetic, epoch-making personalities. Naturally, we hear Carlyle remark that the history of the world is at bottom the history of its great men. Carlyle's fanatical adoption of intuitionalism has told banefully upon his work in sociology. Trusting to his inner light, to what we might call Mystical Quakerism, Carlyle has dispensed with a rational theory of progress. Before a sociological problem, his attitude is not that of the patient thinker, but of the hysterical prophet, whose emotions find outlet in declamatory denunciation. Like the prophets of old, Carlyle tends towards Pessimism. His golden age is in the past. When _Past and Present_ appeared, many earnest-minded men, captivated by the style and spirit of the book, hailed Carlyle as a social reformer. As an attempt to solve the social problem, _Past and Present_ is not a success. Carlyle could do no more than tell the modern to return to the spirit of the feudal period, when the people were led by the aristocracy. It showed considerable audacity on Carlyle's part to come to the interpretation of history with no theory of progress, no message to the world beyond the vaguely declamatory one that those nations will be turned into hell which forget God. Of what value is such writing as this, taken from the introduction to his _Cromwell_?:--'Here of our own land and lineage in English shape were heroes on the earth once more, who knew in every fibre and with heroic daring laid to heart that an Almighty Justice does verily rule this world, that it is good to fight on God's side, and bad to fight on the Devil's side! The essence of all heroism and veracities that have been or will be.' This is simply a reproduction of Jewish theocratic ideas; indeed, except for the details, Carlyle might as readily have written a life of Moses as of Cromwell. In the eyes of Carlyle, human life was what it was to Bunyan, a kind of pilgrim's progress; only in the Carlylean creed it is all battle and no victory, all Valley of Humiliation and no Delectable Mountain. Naturally, where no stress is laid upon collective action, where individual reason is depreciated, progress is associated with the rise of abnormal individualities, men of strong wills like Cromwell and Frederick. With Rousseau, Carlyle appears to look upon civilisation as a disease. In one of his essays, _Characteristics_, he goes near the Roussean idea when he declaims against self-consciousness, and deliberately gives a preference to instinct. The uses of great men are to lead humanity away from introspection back to energetic, rude, instinctive action. When humanity will not listen to the voice of the prophets, it must be treated to whip and scorpion. It never dawned upon Carlyle that the highest life, individual and collective, has roots in physical laws, that politico-economic forces must be reckoned with before social harmony can be reached. Just as Carlyle's Idealism drove him into opposition to the utilitarian theory of morals, so it drove him into opposition to the utilitarian theory of society. Out of his idealistic way of looking upon life there flowed a curious result. As early as _Sartor Resartus_ we find Carlyle anticipating the evolutionary conception of society. Spencer has familiarised us with the idea that society is an organism. The idea which he received from the Germans that Nature is not a mere mechanical collection of atoms, but the materialised expression of a spiritual unity--that idea Carlyle extended to society. As he puts it in _Sartor Resartus_: 'Yes, truly, if Nature is one, and a living indivisible whole, much more is Mankind, the Image that reflects and creates Nature, without which Nature were not.... Noteworthy also, and serviceable for the progress of this same individual, wilt thou find his subdivisions into Generations. Generations are as the Days of toilsome Mankind; Death and Birth are the vesper and the matin bells, that summon Mankind to sleep, and to rise refreshed for new advancement. What the Father has made, the Son can make and enjoy; but has also work of his own appointed him. Thus all things wax and roll onwards.... Find mankind where thou wilt, thou findest it in living movement, in progress faster or slower; the Phoenix soars aloft, hovers with outstretched wings, filling Earth with her music; or as now, she sinks, and with spheral swan-song immolates herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and sing the clearer.' Philosophies of civilisation have a tendency to beget Fatalism. Bent upon watching the resistless play of general laws, philosophers, in their admiration of the products, are apt to ignore the frightful suffering and waste involved in the process. Society being an organism, a thing of development, the duty of thinkers is to demonstrate the nature of sociological laws, and allow them free scope for operation. To this is due much of the apparent hardness of Eighteenth Century political speculation, which, beginning with the French Physiocratic School, culminated in the works of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, and the two Mills. With those thinkers, the one palpable lesson of the past was the duty of abstaining from interference with the general process of social development. Give man liberty, said the Utilitarian Radicals, and he will work out his own salvation: from the play of individual self-interest, social harmony will result. Carlyle is frequently thought of as a Conservative force in politics. In some respects he was more Radical than the Benthams and the Mills. His deeper ideal conception of society intensified his dissatisfaction with society as it existed. In fact, to Carlyle's attack upon those institutions, beliefs and ceremonies which had no better basis than mere unreasoning authority, most of the Radicalism of the early 'forties' was due. Conceive what effect language like this must have had upon thoughtful, high-souled young men: 'Call ye that a Society, where there is no longer any Social Idea extant; not so much as the Idea of a common Home, but only of a common overcrowded Lodging-house? Where each, isolated, regardless of his neighbour, turned against his neighbour, clutches what he can get, and cries "Mine!" and calls it Peace because, in the cut-purse and cut-throat Scramble, no steel knives, but only a far cunninger sort, can be employed? Where Friendship, Communion, has become an incredible tradition; and your holiest Sacramental Supper is a smoking Tavern Dinner, with Cook for Evangelist? Where your Priest has no tongue but for plate-licking; and your high Guides and Governors cannot guide; but on all hands hear it passionately proclaimed: _Laissez faire_; leave us alone of your guidance, such light is darker than darkness; eat your wages and sleep. Thus, too, must an observant eye discern everywhere that saddest spectacle: the Poor perishing, like neglected, foundered Draught-Cattle, of Hunger and Overwork; the Rich, still more wretchedly, of Idleness, Satiety, and Overgrowth. The Highest in rank, at length, without honour from the Lowest; scarcely, with a little mouth-honour, as from tavern-waiters who expect to put it in the bill. Once sacred Symbols fluttering as empty Pageants, whereof men grudge even the expense; a World becoming dismantled: in one word, the CHURCH fallen speechless, from obesity and apoplexy; the STATE shrunken into a Police-Office, straitened to get its pay!' It was when suggesting a remedy that Carlyle's Idealistic Radicalism parted company with Utilitarian Radicalism. Failing to see that society was in a transition period, a period so well described by Herbert Spencer as the movement from Militarism to Industrialism, in which there was a severe conflict of ideals, opinions, and interests, Carlyle sought for the remedy in a return to a form of society which had been outgrown. There was surely something pathetically absurd in the spectacle of a great teacher endeavouring to cure social and political diseases by preaching the resuscitation of Puritanism at a time when the intellect of the day was parting company with theocratic conceptions. Equally absurd was it to offer as a remedy for social anarchy the despotism of ambitious rulers at a time when society was suffering from the effects of previous despotism. Equally irrelevant was the attempt in _Past and Present_ to get reformers to model modern institutions on those of the Middle Ages. Carlyle's remedy for the evils of liberty was a return to the apron-strings of despotism. Carlyle, in fact, forgot his conception of society as a developing organism; he endeavoured to arrest progress at the autocratic stage, because of his ignorance of the laws of progress and his lack of sympathy with democratic ideas. Still, the value of Carlyle's political writings should not be overlooked. The Utilitarian Radicals laid themselves open to the charge of intellectual superstition. They worshipped human nature as a fetish. Lacking clear views of social evolution, they overlooked the relativity of political terms. Ignorant of the conception of human nature to which Spencer has accustomed us, the old Radicals treated it as a constant quantity which only needed liberty for its proper development. In their eagerness to discard theology, they discarded the truth of man's depravity which finds expression in the creed of the Churches. We have changed all that. We now realise the fact that political institutions are good or bad, not as they stand or fall when tested by the first principles of a rationalistic philosophy, but as they harmonise or conflict with existing phases of human nature. If in the sphere of industrialism Carlyle as a guide is untrustworthy, great is his merit as an inspirer. His influence was needed to counteract the cold prosaic narrowness of the Utilitarian teaching. He called attention to an aspect of the economic question which the Utilitarian Radicals ignored, namely, the inadequacy of self-interest as a social bond. To Carlyle is largely due the higher ethical conceptions and quickened sympathies which now exist in the spheres of social and industrial relationships. Unhappily his implicit faith in intuitionalism led him to deride political economy and everything pertaining to man's material life. Much there was in the writings of the economists to call for severe criticism, and if Carlyle had treated the subject with discrimination he would have been a power for good; but he chose to pour the vials of his contempt upon political economy as a science, and upon modern industrial arrangements, with the result that many of the most intelligent students of sociology have been repelled from his writings. In this respect he contrasts very unfavourably with Mill, who, notwithstanding the temptations to intellectual arrogance from his one-sided training, with quite a chivalrous regard for truth, was ever ready to accept light and leading from thinkers who differed from him in temperament and methods. There may be conflicting opinions as to which of the two men was intellectually the greater, but there can be no doubt that Mill dwelt in an atmosphere of intellectual serenity and nobility far removed from the foggy turbulence in which Carlyle lived, moved, and had his being. Between the saintly apostle of Progress and the barbaric representative of Reaction there was a great gulf fixed. As was natural, the _Latter-day Pamphlets_ were treated as a series of political ravings. For that estimate Carlyle himself was largely responsible. He deprived himself of the sympathy of intelligent readers by the violence of his invective and the lack of discrimination in his abuse. Much of what Carlyle said is to be found in Mill's _Representative Government_, said, too, in a quiet, rational style, which commands attention and respect. Mill, no more than Carlyle, was a believer in mob rule. He did not think that the highest wisdom was to be had by the counting of heads. Thinkers like Mill and Spencer did not deem it necessary to pour contempt on modern tendencies. They suggested remedies on the lines of these tendencies. They did not try to put back the hands on the clock of time; they sought to remove perturbing influences. Much of the evil has arisen from men trying to do by political methods what should not be done by these methods. Carlyle's idea that Government should do this, that, and the other thing has wrought mischief, inasmuch as it has led to an undue belief in the virtues of Government interference. His writings are largely responsible for the evils he predicted. It is curious to notice how, with all his belief in individualism, Carlyle, in political matters, was unconsciously driven in the direction of socialism. Get your great man, worship him, and render him obedience--such was the Carlylean recipe for modern diseases. Suppose the great man found, how is he to proceed? In these democratic days, he can only proceed by ruling despotically with the popular consent; in other words, there will follow a regime of paternalism and fraternalism, the practical outcome of which would be Socialism. Carlyle himself never suspected how childish was his conception of national life. He wrote of his Great Man theory as if it was a discovery, whereas the most advanced races had long since passed through it, and those which were not advanced were precisely those which had not been able to shake themselves free of paternal despotism. On this point the criticism of the late Professor Minto goes to the heart of the matter: 'Carlyle's doctrines are the first suggestions of an earnest man, adhered to with unreasoning tenacity. As a rule, with no exception, that is worth naming, they take account mainly of one side of a case. He was too impatient of difficulties, and had too little respect for the wisdom and experience of others to submit to be corrected: opposition rather confirmed him in his own opinion. Most of his practical suggestions had already been made before, and judged impracticable upon grounds which he could not, or would not, understand. His modes of dealing with pauperism and crime were in full operation under the despotism of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. His theory of a hero-king, which means in practice an accidentally good and able man in a series of indifferent or bad despots, had been more frequently tried than any other political system; Asia at this moment contains no government that is not despotic. His views in other departments of knowledge are also chiefly determined by the strength of his unreasoning impulses.' In his interesting _Recollections_ Mr Espinasse states that during the time that Carlyle was writing on the labour question, not a single blue-book was visible on his table! To Carlyle's influence must be traced much of the sentimental treatment of social and industrial questions which has followed the unpopularity of political economy. It is only fair to Carlyle to note, that at times he had qualms as to the superiority of his paternal theory of government over Laissez Faire. In one place he admits that even Frederick could not have superintended the great emigration movement to such good effect as was done by the spontaneous efforts of nature. In the social sphere Carlyle was false to his doctrine of spontaneity. In his early essays he was perpetually condemning mechanical interference with society, and contending that free play should be given to the dynamic agencies. Untrue to himself and his creed, Carlyle in his later books was constantly denouncing Government for neglecting to apply mechanical remedies for social diseases. In his view, the duty of a ruler was not to work in harmony with social impulses, but to cut and carve institutions in harmony with the ideas of great men. Puritanism under Cromwell failed because it was forgotten that society is an organism, not a piece of clay, to be moulded according to the notions of heroic potters. Strictly speaking, _Frederick_ and _Cromwell_ should be classed with the _Latter Day Pamphlets_. In the _Pamphlets_ Carlyle declaims against democratic methods, and in _Frederick_ and _Cromwell_ we are presented with incarnations of autocratic methods. Of all the critics of Carlyle, no one has surpassed Mr Morley in indicating the mischievous effects which flow from the elevation of mere will power and emotional force into guides in social and political questions. As Mr Morley says: 'The dictates of a kind heart are of superior force to the maxims of political economy; swift and peremptory resolution is a safer guide than a balancing judgment. If the will works easily and surely, we may assume the rectitude of the moving impulse. All this is no caricature of a system which sets sentiment, sometimes hard sentiment, above reason and method. In other words, the writer who in these days has done more than anybody else to fire men's hearts with a feeling for right, and an eager desire for social activity, has, with deliberate contempt, thrust away from him the only instruments by which we can make sure what right is, and that our social action is effective. A born poet, only wanting perhaps a clearer feeling for form and a more delicate spiritual self-possession to have added another name to the illustrious band of English singers, he has been driven by the impetuosity of his sympathies to attack the scientific side of social questions in an imaginative and highly emotional manner.' Had Carlyle confined himself to description of social, industrial, and political diseases, he would have had an unsullied reputation in the sphere of spiritual dynamics, but flaws immediately appeared when he endeavoured to prescribe remedies. Many of his remedies were too vague to be of use; where they were specific, they were so Quixotic as to be useless. His proposals for dealing with labour and pauperism never imposed on any sensible man on this side of cloud-land. CHAPTER IX CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRATIONAL FORCE It is the misfortune of the critic, the historian, and the sociologist to be superseded. In the march of events the specialist is fated to be left behind. The influence of the inspirationalist is ever-enduring. As the present writer has elsewhere said:--Carlyle has been called a prophet. The word in these days has only a vague meaning. Probably Carlyle earned the name in consequence of the oracular and denunciatory elements in his later writings. Then, again, the word prophet has come to be associated with the thought of a foreteller of future events. A prophet in the true sense of the word is not one who foretells the future, but one who revives and keeps alive in the minds of his contemporaries a vivid sense of the great elemental facts of life. Why is it that the Bible attracts to its pages men of all kinds of temperament and all degrees of culture? Because in it, especially in the Psalms, Job, and the writings of Isaiah and his brother prophets, serious people are brought face to face with the great mysteries, God, Nature, Man, Death, etc.--mysteries, however, which only rush in upon the soul of man in full force on special occasions, in hours of lonely meditation, or by the side of an open grave. In the hurly-burly of life the sense of what Carlyle calls the Immensities, Eternities, and Silences, become so weak that even good men have sorrowfully to admit that they live lives of practical materialism. As Arnold puts it: "Each day brings its petty dust Our soon-choked souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will." The mission of the Hebrew prophet was by passionate utterance to keep alive in the minds of his countrymen a deep, abiding sense of life's mystery, sacredness, and solemnity. What Isaiah did for his day, Carlyle did for the moderns. In the whole range of modern literature, it is impossible to match Carlyle's magnificent passages in _Sartor Resartus_, in which, under a biographical guise, he deals with the great primal emotions, wonder, awe, admiration, love, which form the warp and woof of human life. Nothing can be finer than the following rebuke to those mechanical scientists who imagine that Nature can be measured by tape-lines, and duly labelled in museums:-- 'System of Nature! To the wisest man, wide as is his vision, Nature remains of quite _infinite_ depth, of quite infinite expansion; and all Experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square-miles. The course of Nature's phases, on this our little fraction of a Planet, is partially known to us; but who knows what deeper courses these depend on; what infinitely larger Cycle (of causes) our little Epicycle revolves on? To the Minnow every cranny and pebble, and quality and accident, of its little native Creek may have become familiar: but does the Minnow understand the Ocean Tides and periodic Currents, the Trade-winds, and Monsoons, and Moon's eclipses; by all which the condition of its little Creek is regulated, and may, from time (_un_miraculously enough), be quite overset and reversed? Such a minnow is Man; his Creek this Planet Earth; his Ocean the immeasurable All; his Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious Course of Providence through Æons of Æons. We speak of the Volume of Nature: and truly a Volume it is,--whose Author and Writer is God.' Agree or disagree with Carlyle's views of the Ultimate Reality as we may, there can be nothing but harmony with the spirit which breathes in the following:-- 'Nature? Ha! Why do I not name thee God? Art not thou the "Living Garment of God"? O Heavens, is it in very deed, He, then, that ever speaks through thee; that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me? 'Fore-shadows, call them rather fore-splendours, of that Truth, and Beginning of Truths, fell mysteriously over my soul. Sweeter than Dayspring to the Shipwrecked in Nova Zembla; ah! like the mother's voice to her little child that strays bewildered, weeping in unknown tumults; like soft streamings of celestial music to my too-exasperated heart, came that Evangel. The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres; but godlike, and my Father's!' The mystery and fleetingness of life with its awful counterpart death, are the commonplaces of every hour, but who but Carlyle has rendered them with such inspirational power? 'Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a Body; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed to pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow:--and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage; can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence?--O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God. 'We _are such stuff_ As Dreams are made of, and our little Life Is rounded with a sleep?' A fervid perception of the evanescence and sorrows of life is the root of Carlyle's pathos, which is unsurpassed in literature. It leads him to some beautiful contrasts between childhood and manhood, positively idyllic in their charm. 'Happy season of Childhood!' exclaims Teufelsdröckh: 'Kind Nature, that art to all a bountiful mother; that visitest the poor man's hut with auroral radiance; and for thy Nurseling hast provided a soft swathing of Love and infinite Hope, wherein he waxes and slumbers, danced-round (_umgäukelt_) by sweetest Dreams! If the paternal Cottage still shuts us in, its roof still screens us; with a Father we have as yet a prophet, priest and king, and an Obedience that makes us Free. The young spirit has awakened out of Eternity, and knows not what we mean by Time; as yet Time is no fast-hurrying stream, but a sportful sunlit ocean; years to the child are as ages; ah! the secret of Vicissitude, of that slower or quicker decay and ceaseless down-rushing of the universal World-fabric, from the granite mountain to the man or day-moth, is yet unknown; and in a motionless Universe, we taste, what afterwards in this quick-whirling Universe is forever denied us, the balm of Rest. Sleep on, thou fair Child, for thy long rough journey is at hand! A little while, and thou too shalt sleep no more, but thy very dreams shall be mimic battles; thou too, with old Arnauld, must say in stern patience: "Rest? Rest? Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in?" Celestial Nepenthe! though a Pyrrhus conquer empires, and an Alexander sack the world, he finds thee not; and thou hast once fallen gently, of thy own accord, on the eyelids, on the heart of every mother's child. For, as yet, sleep and waking are one: the fair Life-garden rustles infinite around, and everywhere is dewy fragrance, and the budding of Hope; which budding, if in youth, too frostnipt, it grow to flowers, will in manhood yield no fruit, but a prickly, bitter-rinded stone fruit, of which the fewest can find the kernel.' Carlyle's pathos touches its most sombre mood when he is dwelling upon the common incidents of daily life as painted on the background of Eternity. In his '_Cromwell_,' he breaks forth in a beautiful meditation while dealing with a commonplace reference in one of the letters of Cromwell:--'Mrs St John came down to breakfast every morning in that summer visit of the year 1638, and Sir William said grave grace, and they spake polite devout things to one another, and they are vanished, they and their things and speeches,--all silent like the echoes of the old nightingales that sang that season, like the blossoms of the old roses. O Death! O Time!' Severe comment has been made upon Carlyle's attitude towards science. There was this excuse for his contemptuous attitude--science in its early days fell into the hands of Dryasdusts. So absorbed were these men in analysing Nature, that they missed the sense of mystery and beauty which is the essence of all poetry and all religion. In the hands of the Dryasdusts, Nature was converted into a museum in which everything was duly labelled. During the mania for analysis, it was forgotten that there is a great difference between the description and the explanation of phenomena. In _Sartor Resartus_ Carlyle rescues science from the grip of the pedant and restores it to the poet. 'Wonder, is the basis of Worship; the reign of wonder is perennial, indestructible in Man; only at certain stages (as the present), it is, for some short season, a reign _in partibus infidelium_.' That progress of Science, which is to destroy Wonder, and in its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration, finds small favour with Teufelsdröckh, much as he otherwise venerates these two latter processes. 'Shall your Science,' exclaims he, 'proceed in the small chink-lighted, or even oil-lighted, underground workshop of Logic alone; and man's mind become an Arithmetical Mill, whereof Memory is the Hopper, and mere Tables of Sines and Tangents, Codification, and Treatises of what you call Political Economy, are the Meal? And what is that Science, which the scientific head alone, were it screwed off, and (like the Doctor's in the Arabian Tale) set in a basin to keep it alive, could prosecute without shadow of a heart,--but one other of the mechanical and menial handicrafts, for which the Scientific Head (having a Soul in it) is too noble an organ? I mean that Thought without Reverence is barren, perhaps poisonous; at best, dies like Cookery with the day that called it forth; does not live, like sowing, in successive tilths and wider-spreading harvests, bringing food and plenteous increase to all Time.' * * * * * 'The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and worship), were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole _Mécanique Céleste_ and _Hegel's Philosophy_, and the epitome of all Laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single head,--is but a pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those who have Eyes look through him, then he may be useful.' In the sphere of ethics, Carlyle's influence has been inspirational in the highest sense. To a generation which had to choose between the ethics of a conventional theology and the ethics of a cold, prosaic utilitarianism, Carlyle's treatment of the whole subject of duty came as a revelation. If in the sphere of social relationships he did not contribute to the settlement of the theoretic side of complex problems, he did what was equally important--he roused earnest minds to a sense of the urgency and magnitude of the problem, awakened the feeling of individual responsibility, and quickened the sense of social duty which had grown weak during the reign of _laissez faire_. If Carlyle had no final message for mankind, if he brought no gospel of glad tidings, he nevertheless did a work which was as important as it was pressing. In the form of a modern John the Baptist, the Chelsea Prophet with not a little of the wilderness atmosphere about him, preached in grimly defiant mood to a pleasure-loving generation the great doctrines which lie at the root of all religions--the doctrines of Repentance, Righteousness, and Retribution. 
22294	----	ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES _The following Volumes are now ready:--_ THOMAS CARLYLE. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON. ALLAN RAMSAY. By OLIPHANT SMEATON. HUGH MILLER. By W. KEITH LEASK. JOHN KNOX. By A. TAYLOR INNES. ROBERT BURNS. By GABRIEL SETOUN. THE BALLADISTS. By JOHN GEDDIE. RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor HERKLESS. SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON. THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. GARDEN BLAIKIE. JAMES BOSWELL. By W. KEITH LEASK. TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By OLIPHANT SMEATON. FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. OMOND. THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir GEORGE DOUGLAS. NORMAN MACLEOD. By JOHN WELLWOOD. SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor SAINTSBURY. KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By LOUIS A. BARBÉ. ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. GROSART. JAMES THOMSON. By WILLIAM BAYNE. MUNGO PARK. By T. BANKS MACLACHLAN. DAVID HUME. By Professor CALDERWOOD. WILLIAM DUNBAR. By OLIPHANT SMEATON. SIR WILLIAM WALLACE. By Professor MURISON. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. By MARGARET MOYES BLACK. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON BY MARGARET MOYES BLACK FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK PREFACE AND DEDICATION In so small a volume it would be somewhat hopeless to attempt an exhaustive notice of R. L. Stevenson, nor would it be desirable. The only possible full biography of him will be the _Life_ in preparation by his intimate friend Mr Sydney Colvin, and for it his friends and his public look eagerly. This little book is only a reminiscence and an appreciation by one who, in the old days between 1869 and 1880, knew him and his home circle well. My earlier and later knowledge has been derived from his mother and those other members of his mother's family with whom it was a pleasure to talk of him, and to exchange news of his sayings and doings. In the actual writing of this volume, I have received most kind help for which I return grateful thanks to the givers. For the verification of dates and a few other particulars I am indebted to Mr Colvin's able article in the _Dictionary of National Biography_. It is dedicated, in the first instance, to the memory of Mr and Mrs Thomas Stevenson and their son, and, in the second, to all the dearly prized friends of the Balfour connection who have either, like the household at 17 Heriot Row, passed into the 'Silent Land,' or who are still here to gladden life with their friendship. MARGARET MOYES BLACK. _August_ 1898. CONTENTS CHAPTER I Page HEREDITY AND ANTECEDENTS 9 CHAPTER II CHILDHOOD 22 CHAPTER III BOYHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 33 CHAPTER IV AS I FIRST KNEW HIM 45 CHAPTER V HIS HOME LIFE 57 CHAPTER VI HIS CHOICE OF A LITERARY LIFE AND HIS EARLY BOOKS 70 CHAPTER VII WANDERINGS IN SEARCH OF HEALTH 83 CHAPTER VIII HIS MARRIAGE AND FRIENDSHIPS 92 CHAPTER IX HIS ESSAYS AND VERSES 101 CHAPTER X HIS STORIES 117 CHAPTER XI HIS LIFE IN SAMOA 131 CHAPTER XII HIS DEATH 141 CHAPTER XIII HIS LIFE-WORK 150 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON CHAPTER I HEREDITY AND ANTECEDENTS 'These are thy works, O father, these thy crown, Whether on high the air be pure they shine Along the yellowing sunset, and all night Among the unnumbered stars of God they shine. Or whether fogs arise, and far and wide The low sea-level drown--each finds a tongue, And all night long the tolling bell resounds. So shine so toll till night be overpast, Till the stars vanish, till the sun return, And in the haven rides the fleet at last.' --R. L. STEVENSON. In no country in the world is heredity more respected than in Scotland, and her hard-working sons freely acknowledge the debt they owe, for the successes of to-day, to the brave struggle with sterner conditions of life their ancestors waged from generation to generation. We of the present are 'the heirs of all the ages'; but we are also in no small degree the clay from the potter's hands, moulded and kneaded by the natures, physical and mental, of those who have gone before us, and whose lives and circumstances have made us what we are. Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson--for so the writer whom the world knows as Robert Louis Stevenson, was baptised--valued greatly this doctrine of heredity, and always bore enthusiastic testimony to the influence his ancestry and antecedents had exercised in moulding his temperament and character. He was proud of that ancestry, with no foolish pride, but rather with that appreciation of all that was noble and worthy in his forefathers, which made him desire to be, in his own widely differing life-work, as good a man as they. ... 'And I--can I be base?'--he says; 'I must arise, O father, and to port Some lost complaining seaman pilot home.' He had reason to think highly of the honourable name which he received from his father's family. Britain and the whole world has much for which to thank the Stevensons; not only all along our rough north coasts, but in every part of the world where the mariner rejoices to see their beacon's blaze have the firm, who are consulting engineers to the Indian, the New Zealand, and the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, lit those lights of which Rudyard Kipling in his 'Songs of the English,' sings-- 'Our brows are bound with spindrift, and the weed is on our knees; Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas; From reef and rock and skerry, over headland, ness, and voe, The coastguard lights of England watch the ships of England go.' Wild and wind-swept are the isles and headlands of the northern half of the sister kingdoms, but from their dreariest points the lights that have been kindled by Robert Stevenson, the hero of Bell Rock fame, and his descendants flash and flame across the sea, and make the name of Stevenson a word of blessing to the storm-tossed sailor. The author was third in descent from that Robert Stevenson, who, by skill and heroism, planted the lighthouse on the wave-swept Bell Rock--only uncovered for the possibility of work for a short time at low tides--and made safety on the North Sea, where before there had been death and danger, from the cruel cliffs that guard that iron coast. What child has not thrilled and shivered over the ballad of 'Ralph the Rover,' who, hoping doubtless that the wrecked ships might fall into his own piratical hands, cut the bell which the good monks of Aberbrothock had placed on the fatal rock, and who, by merited justice, was for lack of the bell himself, on his return voyage, lost on that very spot! What boy has not loved the story of one of the greatest engineering feats that patience and skill has ever accomplished! If other young folk so loved it what a depth of interest must not that noble story have had for the grandson of the hero, whose childish soul was full of chivalry and romance, and whose boyish eyes saw visions of the future and pictures of the past as no ordinary child could see them, for his was the gift of genius, and even the commonplace things of life were glorified to him. Alan Stevenson, who was the father of Robert, died of fever when in the island of St Christopher on a visit to his brother, who managed the foreign business of the Glasgow West India house with which they were connected. The brother unfortunately dying of the same fever, business matters were somewhat complicated, and Alan's widow and little boy had to endure straitened circumstances. The mother strained every nerve to have her boy, whom she intended for the ministry, well educated, and the lad profited by her self-denial. Her second marriage, however, very fortunately changed her plans for Robert, for her second husband, Mr Smith, had a mechanical bent which led him to make many researches on the subject of lighting and lighthouses, and finding that his stepson shared his tastes, he encouraged him in his engineering and mechanical studies. The satisfactory results of Mr Smith's researches caused the first Board of Northern Lights to make him their engineer, and he designed Kinnaird Head, the first light they exhibited, and illuminated it in 1787. He was ultimately succeeded as engineer to the Board by his stepson, of Bell Rock fame, and his descendant, Mr David Alan Stevenson, who now holds the post, is the sixth in the family who has done so. Young Stevenson not only became his stepfather's partner but married his eldest daughter, and with her founded a home that was evidently a happy one, for the great engineer was a most unselfish character, and made an excellent husband and father. He was a notable volunteer in the days when a French invasion was greatly feared, and all his life he took a keen interest in the volunteering movement. Like his son Thomas, Mr Robert Stevenson was a man of much intellect and humour, though of a grave and serious character. He was also a keen Conservative and a loving member of the Established Church of Scotland. He was warmly beloved and his society was greatly sought after by his friends; a voyage of inspection with him on his tours round the coast was much appreciated. On one occasion Sir Walter Scott made one of the party which accompanied him. Mr Robert Stevenson died in July 1850, a few months before the birth of his grandson, Robert Louis. That this grandson held in high esteem the deeds and sterling qualities of his grandfather is amply proved by his Samoan Letters to Mr Sydney Colvin, published in 1895. In many of them he speaks of the history of his family, which he intended to write, and into which he evidently felt that he could put his best work. Alas! like so much that the brave spirit and the busy brain planned, it was not to be, and the writer passed to his rest without leaving behind him a full record of the workers who had made his name famous.[1] Mr Alan, Mr David, and Mr Thomas Stevenson worthily handed on the traditions of their father, and in its second generation the lustre of the great engineering family shone undimmed; while now the sons of Alan Stevenson maintain the reputation of their forefathers, and the Stevenson name is still one to conjure with wherever their saving lights shine out across the sea. Mr Thomas Stevenson served under his brother Alan in building the famous lighthouse of 'Skerryvore,' and with his brother David he built 'The Chickens,' 'Dhu Heartach,' and many 'shore lights' and harbours. He was a notable engineer, widely known and greatly honoured at home and abroad, besides being a very typical Scotsman. When one thinks of his grand rugged face, and remembers how the stern eyes used to light up with humour and soften with tenderness, as their glance fell on his wife and his son, one realises what a very perfect picture of such a character in its outward sternness and its inward gentleness, lies in those lines of Mr William Watson's, in which he speaks of 'The fierceness that from tenderness is never far.' Mr Stevenson's broad shoulders, his massive head, his powerful face, reminded one of that enduring grey Scotch stone from which he and his ancestors raised round all our coasts, their lighthouses and harbours. Strong, grey, silent, these solid blocks resist winds and waves, and so one felt would that powerful reticent nature stand steadfast in life's battle, a tower of strength to those who trusted him. Like his own 'Beacon Lights,' on cliff and headland brilliant gleams of humour bright gems of genius flashed out now and then from the silence. One felt too that safe as the ships in his splendid harbours, would rest family and friends in the strong yet loving heart that could hold secure all that it valued through the tests and changes of time and the conflicts of varying thoughts and opposing opinions. A man of strong prejudices, a man too of varying moods, Mr Stevenson knew what it was at times to endure hours of depression, to suffer from an almost morbidly religious conscience, but he always kept a courageous hold on life and found the best cure for a shadowed soul lay in constant and varied work. The charming dedication of _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_ is a delightful tribute from the gifted son to the strength and nobility of his father's character. Highly favoured in his paternal heredity Mr R. L. Stevenson was no less fortunate in his mother and his mother's family. If strength and force of intellect characterised Mr Thomas Stevenson, his wife, Margaret Balfour, had no less powerful an individuality; in beauty of person, in grace of manner, in the brilliance of a quick and flashing feminine intelligence--that was deep as well as bright--she was a fitting helpmate for her husband, and the very mother to sympathise with and encourage a son whose genius showed itself in quaint sayings, in dainty ways, and in chivalrous thoughts almost from his infancy. Mrs Stevenson was the youngest daughter of the Rev. Dr Lewis Balfour, from 1823 to 1860 minister of Colinton, and of Henrietta Scott Smith, daughter of the minister of Galston. There had been thirteen children in the manse of Colinton, and father and mother had made of the picturesque old house a home in truth as well as in name. Many of these children survived long enough, two of them indeed are still living, to carry the sacred traditions of that happy home out into a world where they made honourable positions for themselves. After the death of the mother her place was taken by her daughter Jane, that aunt of whom Robert Louis Stevenson wrote so sweetly in his _Child's Garden of Verses_-- 'Chief of our Aunts not only I But all your other nurslings cry, What did the other children do? And what were childhood wanting you?' To other 'motherless bairns,' as well as to her own brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, that most motherly heart and gentle and beautiful soul has been a comfort and a refuge on the thorny highway of life, and many whose love she has earned by the tenderness of her sympathy still call Miss Balfour blessed. She was a true helper to her father in the motherless home and in his parish work, and in spite of much bad health filled the mother's place in the house and won for herself the undying affection and regard not only of her own family but of her father's parishioners and friends. A testimony to the high esteem in which her father's memory and hers, and indeed that of all the Balfour family, is still held in Colinton, was given to me a few years ago by the old beadle there. Fond as he was of Dr Lockhart, to speak to him of the Balfours, whom he remembered in his younger days, at once won his attention and regard. On my saying to him it was for their sakes I wished to see the inside of the church he queried with a brightening face: 'Ye'll no be ane o' them, will ye?' 'No' was the reply, 'but they have been so long known and loved they seem like my "ain folk" to me.' 'Aweel come awa' an' see the kirk. Will ye mind o' him?' Alas! no; for the minister of Colinton had died seven years before my friendship with the Balfours began. 'Eh!' was all the old man said, but that and the shake of his head eloquently expressed what a loss that was for me! 'But ye'll ken _her_?' meaning Miss Balfour, he queried again, and as I said I did and well, the face brightened with a great brightness. So, having found a friend in common, together we went over the church and the manse grounds, but, as Dr Lockhart was away from home, I resisted his persuasion to ask leave to go through the house and contented myself with a pleasant talk with him of Dr John Balfour, who had fought the mutineers in India and the cholera at Davidson's Mains, Slateford, and Leven; of Dr George, who is still fighting the ills that flesh is heir to, in Edinburgh; of the sons and daughters of the manse who had gone to their rest; of Mrs Stevenson, then in Samoa with her son, and whose charm of personality made her dear to the old man, and lastly of 'the clivir lad,' her son, who had spent such happy days in the old manse garden. Of all the children in that large family Maggie, the youngest, was perhaps especially her sister's charge; and one knows, from that elder sister's description, how sweet, and good, and bright the little girl was, and how charming was the face, and how loving the heart of the mother of Robert Louis Stevenson when she too was a child at play in the manse garden. The mother's beauty and that dainty refinement of face and voice which she bequeathed to her son came to her in a long and honourable descent from a family that had for many centuries been noted for the beauty and the sincere goodness of its women, for the godliness and the manliness of its men. The Rev. Dr Lewis Balfour of Colinton was the third son of Mr Balfour, the Laird of Pilrig. The quaint old house of Pilrig stands a little back from Leith Walk, the date on it is 1638; and the text inscribed on its door-stone, 'For we know, that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved we have a building of God, an house not made with hands eternal in the heavens,' is a fitting motto for a race whose first prominent ancestor was that James Balfour of Reformation times, who not only was a cousin of Melville the Reformer, but who married one of the Melville family. This double tie to those so entwined with the very life of that great period in Scotland's history brought Mr James Balfour into very close communion with such men as Erskine of Dun, the Rev. John Durie, and many others of the Reforming ministers and gentlemen, with whom a member of the Pilrig family, the late James Balfour-Melville, Esq., W.S., in his interesting pamphlet dealing with his family says, that his ancestor had much godly conversation and communing. The early promise of the race was not belied in its later descendants, and the Balfours were noted for their zeal in religion, and in their country's affairs, as well as for an honourable and prudent application to the business of life on their own account. Andrew Balfour, the minister of Kirknewton, signed the protestation for the Kirk in 1617, and was imprisoned for it. His son James was called to the Scotch Bar, and was a Clerk of Session in Cromwell's time. A son of his was a Governor of the Darien Company, and his son, in turn, purchased the estate of Pilrig where his descendants kept up the godly and honourable traditions of the house, and dispensed a pleasant and a kindly hospitality to their friends in Edinburgh, from whom, at that time, their pretty old home was somewhat distant in the country! With such an ancestry on both sides one can easily understand the bent of Robert Louis Stevenson's mind towards old things, the curious traditions of Scotch family history and the lone wild moorlands, 'Where about the graves of the martyrs The whaups are calling,' one can comprehend, too, the attraction for him of the power and the mystery of the sea. All these things came to him as a natural inheritance from those who had gone before, and in the characters who people his books, in _Kidnapped_, in _Catriona_, in _Weir of Hermiston_, we see live again, the folk of that older Edinburgh, whom those bygone Balfours knew. In the fresh salt breeze that, as it were, blows keen from the sea in _Treasure Island_, in _The Merry Men_, and about the sad house of Durrisdeer in _The Master of Ballantrae_, we recognise the magic wooing of the mighty ocean that made of the Stevensons builders of lighthouses and harbours, and masters of the rough, wild coasts where the waves beat and the spray dashes, and the sea draws all who love it to ride upon its breast in ships. From the union of two families who have been so long and so honourably known in their different ways, there came much happiness, and one feels somewhat sorry that when Louis Stevenson signed his name to the books by which he is so lovingly remembered, he did not write it in full and spell 'Lewis' in the old-time fashion that was good enough for our Scotch ancestors in the days when many a 'Lewis' drew sword for Gustavus Adolphus, or served as a gentleman volunteer in the wars of France or the Netherlands, and when 'O, send Lewie Gordon hame' rang full of pathos to the Scotch ears, to which the old spelling was familiar. Mr Stevenson's Balfour relatives naturally regret the alteration of the older spelling and the omission of his mother's family name from his signature. With regard to the latter, he himself assured his mother that having merely dropped out the Balfour to shorten a very long name, he greatly regretted having done so, after it was too late, and he had won his literary fame as 'Robert Louis Stevenson,' and much wished that he had invariably written his name as R. L. Balfour Stevenson. The spelling of Lewis he altered when he was about eighteen, in deference to a wish of his father's, as at one time the elder Mr Stevenson had a prejudice against the name of Lewis, so his son thereafter signed himself Louis. That he may have himself also preferred it is very possible; he was fond of all things French, and he may have liked the link to that far off ancestor, the French barber-surgeon who landed at St Andrews to be one of the suite of Cardinal Beaton! In spite of the belief on the part of Robert Louis, who had a fancy to the contrary, the name in the Balfour family was _invariably_ spelt Lewis. His grandfather was christened Lewis, and so the entry of his name remains to this day in the old family Bible at Pilrig; so also it is spelt in that, already mentioned, most interesting pamphlet for private circulation, written by the late James Balfour-Melville, Esq., who gives the name of his uncle, the minister of Colinton, as Lewis Balfour, and so the old clergyman signed himself all his life. FOOTNOTE: [1] The portion of this family history--_Family of Engineers_--which Mr Stevenson had completed, at the time of his death, is to be found in 'The Edinburgh Edition' of his works. CHAPTER II CHILDHOOD ... 'With love divine My mother's fingers folded mine.' --FROM VERSES IN AN AMERICAN PAPER. 'We built a ship upon the stairs, All made of the back bedroom chairs; And filled it full of sofa pillows, To go a-sailing on the billows.' --R. L. STEVENSON. Mr and Mrs Thomas Stevenson, who were married in 1848, made their first home at 8 Howard Place, and there, on 13th November 1850, Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born. In 1853 they moved to a house in Inverleith Terrace, and in 1857, when Louis was about seven years old, they took possession of 17 Heriot Row, the house so long and so intimately associated with them in the minds of their many friends. The little Louis was from his earliest babyhood a very delicate child, and only the most constant and tender care of his devoted mother and nurse enabled him to survive those first years which must have been so full of anxiety to his parents. In _The Child's Garden of Verses_ there are some lines called 'The Land of Counterpane,' the picture heading of which is a tiny child propped up against his bed pillows, and with all his toys scattered on the coverlet. Beneath it are four verses that give a wonderfully graphic description of the life the little boy too often led. In the last verse he was a giant who saw before him all 'the pleasant land of counterpane,' and in the very word 'pleasant' the temperament of the child shows itself. How many children would have found anything 'pleasant' in the enforced days of lie-a-bed quietness, and would have made no murmurs over the hard fate which forbade to them the active joys of other boys and girls? But this small lad had a sweet temper and an unselfish, contented disposition, and so he bore the burden of his bad health as bravely in those days as he did in after years, and made for himself plays and pleasures with his nimble brain while his weary body was often tired and restless in that bed whereof he had so much. His mother used to describe, with the same graphic touch that gives life to all her son wrote, the bright games the little fellow invented for himself when he was well enough to be up and about, and tell how, in a corner of the room, he made for himself a wonder-world all his own, in which heroes and heroines of romance loved and fought and walked and talked at the bidding of the wizard in frock and pinafore. It was not all indoor life happily, and if there were many bad days there were some good and glad ones also, when he was well and allowed to be out and at play in the world of outdoor life he always loved so dearly. Two quaint pictures of the child as he was in those days have been supplied by his aunt, Miss Balfour. One of them is from a note-book of his mother's, in which she had jotted down a few things that had been said or written of him. The first interesting description is that given by a very dear old friend of the family, and is an exceedingly early one, for it was written in October 1853, when Louis was barely three, and the family had just settled in Inverleith Terrace. 'One day,' she says, 'I called and missed you, and found Cummie' (the valued nurse) 'and Louis just starting for town, so we walked up together by Canonmills, keeping the middle of the road all the way.' Louis, she continues, was dressed in a navy blue pelisse trimmed with fur, a beaver hat, a fur ruff, and white gloves. A very quaint little figure he must have been with the thin delicate face and the wonderfully bright eyes, so luminous and far-seeing even then! The tiny mite repeated hymns all the way, 'emphasising so prettily,' the friend goes on to say, 'with the dear little baby hands. All of a sudden, when near St Mary's Church he stood still, and looking in my face, said: '"But by-the-bye did I ever give you my likeness?" '"No," was the reply, "have you got your likeness?" '"Oh! yes, I will give it you; I will send it by the _real_ post to-morrow."' 'It seemed,' the lady adds, 'as if the wonderful little mind had been considering what other kind thing he could do besides repeating the hymns.' The whole incident is an excellent example of his sweetness of disposition, and his innate thoughtfulness for others. It is pleasant to know that the pretty promise was fulfilled, Mrs Stevenson herself acting 'postman,' and taking the likeness to her friend next day. The second picture is from the memory of Miss Balfour herself. She too describes the blue pelisse trimmed with grey astrakhan, which he wore in the winter of 1853 and '54. In the spring of 1854 she went to the Stevensons' house to tell her sister that their father had been given the degree of Doctor of Divinity. The small Louis, on hearing his grandfather spoken of as 'Doctor,' immediately said: 'Now that grandpapa is a doctor, surely you'll have him instead of Dr Hunter?' A wonderfully quick thought and old-fashioned remark from a child not four years old, but a suggestively sad one too; he already knew so well the necessity of a doctor to help human bodies, although he could not yet comprehend the use of one for the 'cure' of human souls! When he heard that his aunt was going to see a relative in Saxe Coburg Place, he begged to be allowed to go with her, and, the permission granted, started off in great pride on his very first expedition without his nurse, that faithful friend of the Stevenson family having promised to follow later to take him home. The aunt at least had cause to remember that walk! He had started gloveless, and would not go back for his gloves, but popped his cold hands under the cape of his pelisse, and even then, unconventional as to clothing, said cheerfully: 'That will keep them from John Frost.' So the pair set out on what proved a chilly and prolonged excursion; for, in spite of all remonstrances, the child calmly sat down on every doorstep and rested till he felt inclined to go on again, to the no small dismay of his aunt, who knew how serious a thing the taking of a cold was to the placid little personage smiling at her from the steps. During the Crimean war, while he was still a very tiny mite, he, entirely of his own accord, always prayed for the soldiers. When asked by his mother if he would like to be a soldier, his answer was-- 'I would neither like to kill nor to be killed,'--a very sensible reason to have been thought out by so young a child. His aunt says of him-- 'I never knew so sweet a child.' And his mother always said of him that his sweetness and patience were beautiful. On one subject only mother and child sometimes differed. Louis wished her to agree with him that grandpapa's home was the nicest in the world, but the mother maintained their own home was best. Until his grandfather died in 1860, when he was ten years old, the manse at Colinton was the little boy's favourite abiding place. Here 'Auntie' lived, and near here, too, was the home of the 'sister-cousin,' and her brother who grew up with him, and who, of all the much loved cousins of that large connection, were nearest and dearest in his child-life, and to whom he sings-- 'If two may read aright These rhymes of old delight, And house and garden play You two, my cousins, and you only may. 'You in a garden green, With me were king and queen, Were soldier, hunter, tar, And all the thousand things that children are.' With these two cousins the favourite game was the fleeing from, conquering, and finally slaying a huge giant called Bunker, invented by Louis, who, the trio believed, haunted the manse garden, and required continual killing. One time, on the Bonaly Road, they were shipwrecked hungry sailors, who ate so many buttercups that the little boys were poisoned and became very ill, and the little girl only escaped because she found the flowers too bitter to eat! In the 'Redford burn of happy memories' they sailed ships richly laden with whin pods for vanilla, and yellow lichen for gold. They always hoped to see ghosts, or corpse candles, and were much disappointed they never saw anything more terrible, in the gruesome place where the sexton kept his tools, than a swaying branch of ivy. Of the tall, pale, venerable grandfather, with his snowy hair, Louis stood a good deal in awe; and he tells us in his charming paper, 'The Manse,' in _Memories and Portraits_, that he had not much in common with the old man although he felt honoured by his connection with a person reverend enough to enter the pulpit and preach the sermon every Sunday. So many Balfours were scattered over the world, in India and the Colonies, that the old rooms at the manse were full of eastern curiosities and nick-nacks from distant lands dear to the hearts of little folks. And, while the garden was a bower of delight, the house was a veritable treasure trove to the grandchildren from far and near who played in it. To Robert Louis Stevenson, with his mind full of romance, it must have been a paradise indeed, and one that he admirably pictures in the verses addressed to an Anglo-Indian cousin who, as a married woman, has returned to the India of her birth. It is worth mentioning--as a note by the way which illustrates that abiding boyishness in Mr Stevenson, so well known to all who knew him--that four particularly hideous Indian idols stood guard at the hall door of 'The Turret,' the house of his uncle, John Balfour, at Leven. Two of them were life-size with their hands discreetly folded in prayer, two of them were smaller and made in a kneeling posture, and, as something rattled if you shook them, it was our juvenile belief that treasure was concealed inside their bodies. This idea Mr R. L. Stevenson eagerly fostered in the slightly younger generation, and, with the love of harmless mischief natural to him, implored us to 'rattle them _soundly_ when we were about it!' In the manse garden at Colinton there was a mysterious and delightful gap that gave egress to the Water of Leith, and to pass through this and stray, out of safe and guarded precincts, into a wide and wet world beyond was a keen pleasure to the little boy whose gipsy instincts were already loudly calling to him to take 'the road' his wandering soul so dearly loved. 'Keepsake Mill' is a charming tribute to the joys of those illicit escapes and to the memories of the cousin playfellows now scattered in far lands, or for ever at rest from life's labour, who played in the garden where the delicate bright-eyed lad was the inventor and leader in their games. One sweet fancy of the imaginative child, who all his life had a fine mental and physical courage in spite of his delicacy, is still recalled by his 'sister-cousin'; the graveyard wall was at one place high above the garden it partially enclosed, and the little boy, afflicted with no superstitious terrors, had an idea that the souls of the dead people at rest in 'God's acre,' peeped out at him from the chinks of the wall. And one feels sure that here as all through his life, shadowed by so much of suffering, he held fast, after a fashion of his own, the belief that goes deeper than his playful rendering of it in _The Unseen Playmate_ seems at first to infer: 'Whene'er you're happy and cannot tell why, The Friend of the children is sure to be by.' A faith that was taught him by an earnest father and by the loving voice of a mother who held it fast through her own happy childhood and the joys and sorrows that as wife and mother came to her in later years. After the death of the Rev. Dr Balfour, in April 1860, the manse ceased to be the second home of Louis Stevenson, and in the November of that year his aunt, Miss Balfour, and the nephews and nieces who stayed with her moved to a house in Howard Place. In 1858 he went to school, and from 1860 to 1861 he and his cousin, Lewis Charles Balfour, were together at Mr Henderson's preparatory school in India Street from which both went to the Academy in 1861. Of Lewis Stevenson,--who in later life was always called Louis or Lou by his family and friends,--Mr Henderson reports: 'Robert's reading is not loud, but impressive.' In July he was in bed with scarlet fever on his examination day, which was a great disappointment to him. He had a first prize for reading that year; but his zeal over school and lessons was very short-lived, and he never hungered for scholastic honours. As a child he did not learn quickly, and he was in his eighth year before he could read fluently for himself. Nevertheless his especial bent showed itself early, and when in his sixth year he dictated a _History of Moses_, which he illustrated, giving the men pipes in their mouths. This, and an account of _Travels in Perth_, composed in his ninth year, are still in existence. The _History of Moses_ was written because an uncle had offered a prize to his own children for the best paper on the subject, and the little Louis was so disappointed at not being asked to compete that he was finally included among the competitors, and did a paper which though not best was still good and which was given a prize. He had begun to print it for himself, with much toil, but his mother offered to write it out from his dictation. Another composition of this time was a fierce story of shipwreck and fighting with savages. In 1863 he was sent for a few months to a boarding school kept by a Mr Wyatt at Spring Grove, near London. Life at a boarding school was misery to a lad so fond of wandering at his own sweet will as the small Louis, and he was full of distress at the prospect of leaving home. In _Random Memories_ he gives his ideas as to going to school, and expresses his belief that it is not so much the first night or day at school that is so terrible to a courageous child, as the dismay at the thought of leaving home with its familiar life and surroundings, and the painful suspense for some days before the plunge into the new world of school is taken. It was, he says, this miserable feeling of suspense that made him share his sorrows with a desolate, but amiable cat in the Easter Road, which mingled its woes with his and as it purred against him consoled him. His tender-hearted parents were so touched by his evident affliction, and especially by the little story of the cat that his father took him a trip round the coast of Fife in _The Pharos_ and he thus made an early and delightful acquaintance with some of the lights and harbours which his father had gone to inspect. Although the cousin, Lewis Charles Balfour, who had been his schoolfellow in Edinburgh, and two of his younger brothers were day pupils at the Spring Grove School, and his aunt, Miss Balfour, was living near, he became very homesick and unhappy, and the regular school work, with its impositions and punishments, fretted him and made him so ill, that in December his father, who had been at Mentone with his mother, hastily returned and took him away from school. It was too late, however, the few months had been too great a trial for his health, and he had a serious illness, during which, Dr Henry Bennett prescribed some very bracing treatment of which the youthful patient highly disapproved. Of the home where so much consideration was shown to a child's health and feelings, no better description can be given than the graphic one of a little Stevenson cousin who had gone with his parents to stay there, and who thus spoke of it: 'A child who never cries, a nurse who is never cross, and late dinners.' Can one imagine a dignified, childish paradise that could go much further! Nor were the joys of books awanting to the happy small boy who describes himself as in early days being carried off by his nurse 'To bed with backward looks, At my dear world of story books.' As soon as he had learned to read he was an eager and an omnivorous reader, and could, from his eighth year, pass happy hours with a book, any book so long as it did not mean lessons. He was before very long a book-buyer as well as a book-lover, and he has for ever immortalised, in the charming pages of _A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured_, that old bookshop (late J. L. Smith) at the corner of Leith Walk, where eager boys without coppers were but coldly received, but whence the fortunate capitalist could emerge, after having spent his Saturday pocket-money, the proud possessor of plays positively bristling with pirates and highwaymen. With these treasures he fled home in the gathering dusk, while 'Leerie-Light-the-Lamps' was kindling his cheery beacons along the streets, and, with pleasant terrors, devoured the weird productions, finally adding to their weirdness by the garish contents of a child's paint-box. CHAPTER III BOYHOOD AND COLLEGE DAYS 'A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' --LONGFELLOW. ... 'Strange enchantments from the past And memories of the friends of old, And strong tradition binding fast The "flying terms" with bands of gold.' --ANDREW LANG. The years 1861 and 1862 found Louis, with his childhood left behind him, a boy among other boys who sat on the forms and who played in the yards of the Academy, at which, during the greater part of the present century, many of the sons of Edinburgh men, and indeed of Scotsmen everywhere at home and abroad, have received their education. From 1864 to 1867 he was principally at a Mr Thompson's school in Frederick Street, and he studied from time to time with private tutors at the different places to which his parents went for the benefit of their own health or his. These rather uncommon educational experiences were of far more value to him in after life than a steady attendance at any one school, as they made him an excellent linguist and gave him, from very youthful years, a wide knowledge of foreign life and foreign manners. In 1862 the Stevenson family visited Holland and Germany, in 1863 they were in Italy, in 1864 in the Riviera, and at Torquay for some months during the winter of 1865 and 1866; but after 1867 the family life became more settled and was chiefly passed between Edinburgh and Swanston. In those days Louis was a lean, slim lad, inclined to be tall, and with soft, somewhat lank, brown hair and brown eyes of a shade that seemed to deepen and change with every passing impression of his quick working brain. His features were rather long, the upper part of his narrow face was delicately formed like his mother's, but the lips were full, and a more virile strength in chin and jaw faintly reminded one of his father's powerful physiognomy. He had opinions of his own in regard to education, and they by no means led him to consider a strict attendance at school or a close application to lessons as necessary for his future life-work. He read, it is true, voraciously, but it was hardly on the lines of the sternly respectable classical curriculum which his tutors or the Academy offered him. He was an historical student after a fashion of his own, dipping deep into such books of bygone romance as Sir Walter Scott had conned and loved. His geography at that time took a purely practical and somewhat limited form, and resolved itself into locating correctly the places and abodes sacred to the characters in his favourite books. In the delightful dedication of _Catriona_,--to Mr Charles Baxter, W.S., Edinburgh, who was his life-long friend--he describes those pilgrimages charmingly, and one can, in imagination, see the eager lads wandering in search of famous 'streets and numbered houses,' made historic for them by some such magic pen as that which has for ever made sacred the _Old Tolbooth_ or the _Heart of Midlothian_, from the coblestones of which, in the pavement of St Giles and near the Parliament House, one reverently steps aside lest careless feet should touch that memento of the past. One can picture too as he himself does, the romantic boys of to-day following the wanderings of David Balfour by Broughton and Silver-mills, the Water of Leith, the Hawes Inn at Queensferry, and the wind-swept shores of the Forth. But one can still more clearly see that slim, brown-eyed youth--a-quiver with the eagerness that was so conspicuous a characteristic of his,--as in these very places he remembered bygone tales and even then formed plans for, and saw visions of, his own stories yet to be. One can think of him with his eyes shining, and his face luminous, as he held forth to some choice friend, of sympathetic soul, on all these things of which his heart and brain were so full. One knows that when his walks were solitary his time was already put to a good account, and that the note-books which even then he carried in his pocket were in constant requisition. The boy, from the very first, felt a strong leading to the profession of letters, which he ultimately followed; and he describes himself as from very early boyhood having been given to make notes for possible romances, and to choose words of peculiar fitness for the purpose he had in hand, as well as to weave tales of thrilling adventure. Style was from the first a passion with him; and the lad had already begun in these juvenile note-books that careful choice of words and language which was at the very outset of his literary career to make so competent a critic as Mr Hamerton call him one of the greatest living masters of English prose. That he became something of a master in verse also those few thin volumes of deep thoughts, in a setting of fitly chosen words and rhymes, which he has published, amply prove. To return, however, to the boy who went to the Academy, or rather who did _not_ go to the Academy, for he had a faculty for playing truant which must have been extraordinarily provoking to parents and masters. No sooner was he out of the door in the morning than he could truly say-- 'I heard the winds, with unseen feet, Pass up the long and weary street, 'They say "We come from hill and glen To touch the brows of toiling men." 'That each may know and feel we bring The faint first breathings of the spring.' And the voice of the spring thus calling him as soon as it was heard, was obeyed; and, careless of the frowns that were bound to greet his return, he was off to wander on his beloved Braids and Pentlands, to lie long days among the whin and the broom, or to slip away to watch the busy shipping on the Forth, and to think deep thoughts beside the wave-washed shore of that sea which ever drew him like the voice of a familiar friend. To that intense love of Nature, and of Nature's solitude, his readers owe much, and we to-day may all say with the writer who gave such an interesting description of Swanston in _Good Words_ in the spring of 1895, that those truant hours of his educated him for his future work far better than a careful attendance at school and college could have done. The same writer says that it was this open air life that he loved so dearly which gave to Stevenson's books their large leisure, and to his style its dignity. There is much truth in the remark; but as far as the style is concerned it is the product of time and thought, and it was most carefully and diligently formed by labour so earnest and painstaking, that few authors can even conceive of it. In _Memories and Portraits_ Mr Stevenson gives a delightful account of boyish days at a seaside resort, that is evidently North Berwick, and lovingly describes adventures with bull's-eye lanterns; adventures which seem to be intimately associated with the young folk of his connection, and which repeated themselves a few years later on the other side of the Forth, where boys and girls recalled the doings of Robert Louis and his friends with bull's-eye lanterns and gunpowder, in that cheerful form known to Louis Stevenson as a 'peeoy,' and considered it a point of honour to do likewise, no matter how indignant such mischief made the authorities. As for him, he was always the inventor and prime mover in every mischievous escapade the heart of youth could glory in. The wind-swept coast about North Berwick had a strong fascination for him, and in several of his books we feel the salt breeze blowing in from the sea, across the bents, and hear the sea birds crying on the lonely shore. The autumn holidays were a great joy to him, and another epoch-making event must have been the taking of Swanston Cottage, in May 1867, to be the summer home of the Stevensons. The boy took intense pleasure in his rambles about the hills, in his dreamy rests on 'Kirk Yetton'[2] and 'Allermuir,' and in his wanderings with John Todd, the shepherd, after that worthy had ceased, as he comically puts it, to hunt him off as a dangerous sheep-scarer, and so to play 'Claverhouse to his Covenanter'! The two soon became great friends, and many a bit of strange philosophy, many a wild tale of bygone droving days the lad heard from the old man. Another great friend of early Swanston years was Robert Young, the gardener, whose austere and Puritan views of life were solemnly shared with his young master. Existence at Swanston was even more provocative of truant-playing than it had been in Edinburgh, and Louis, in his later school days and his early sessions at the University, was more than ever conspicuous by his absence from classes, more lovingly wedded to long hours among the hills, long rambles about the 'Old Town,' the Figgate Whins, the port of Leith, and the rapidly changing localities round Leith Walk, somewhat back from which, Pilrig, the ancient home of his ancestors, still stands gravely retired from the work-a-day world. In the year 1867 he went with his father to the 'Dhu Heartach' Lighthouse, and so began to develop that passion for the Western Isles and the Western seas which future voyages in _The Pharos_ were to bring to the state of fervour and perfection which gave birth of _The Merrymen_, and to those descriptions of the wild and lovely scenery of Appin and the West Highlands, in which David Balfour and Alan Breck wander through the pages of _Kidnapped_. It was his father's intention that he should follow the family profession of engineering, and with this in view he went to the Edinburgh University in the autumn of 1868. The professors in those days included Professors Kelland, Tait, Crum-Brown, Fleeming-Jenkin, Blackie, Masson, and many others whose names are still remembered as 'a sweet-smelling savour' in that Edinburgh which they and the truant student, who honoured his class attendance 'more in the breach than the observance,' loved so well. It was a stirring time at the University, and the students who warred manfully against the innovation of Dr Sophia Jex-Blake and the pioneers of the Lady Doctors' movement, were, it would seem on looking back, scarcely so mildly mannered, so peacefully inclined as those who now sit placidly beside 'the sweet girl graduates' of our day, on the class-room benches, and acknowledge the reign of the lady doctor as an accomplished fact. A torchlight procession of modern times is apparently a cheerful and picturesque function, smiled on by the authorities, and welcomed as a rather unique means of doing honour to a new Lord Rector or some famous guest of the city or the University. In Mr Stevenson's time, a torchlight procession had all the joys of 'forbidden fruit' to the merry lads who braved the police and the professors for the pleasure of marching through the streets to the final bonfire on the Calton Hill, from the scrimmage round which they emerged with clothes well oiled and singed, and faces and hands as black as much besmearing could make them; while anxious friends at home trembled lest a night in the police cells should be the reward of the ringleaders. Of one such procession, in the spring when Mr Stevenson's law studies were first interrupted by a journey south for his health, a clever student wrote an epic which was presented to me by one of Louis Stevenson's Balfour cousins as something _very precious_! The occasion was the Duke of Edinburgh's wedding, in 1874, and, yellow and faded, the _Epic_ still graces my _Every Day Book_, and, as one reads its inspiriting lines, one sees again those bygone days in which the slim figure and eager face of Louis Stevenson are always so conspicuous in every memory of the old, grey city of his birth. The following lines from the clever skit give a really excellent picture of the college life in his day. ... 'A deputation we Sent hither by the students to demand That they--that is the students--in a band May march, illumed by torches flaring bright, Along the leading streets on Friday night. Brave was the Provost, yet towards his heart The glowing life blood thrilled with sudden start; Well might he tremble at the name he heard, The Students! Kings might tremble at the word! He thought of all the terrors of the past, Of that fell row in Blackie's, April last-- Of Simpson wight, and Stirling-Maxwell too, Of Miss Jex-Blake and all her lovely crew-- He thought, "If thus these desperadoes dare To act with ladies, learned, young and fair, Old women, like the Councillors and me, To direr torments still reserved may be. The better part of valour is discretion, I'll try to soften them by prompt concession." Then coughing thrice, impression due to make And clear his throat, in accents mild he spake, "Ye have my leave, 'V.R.,' I mean 'D.V.'" The students bowed, retired, and he was free.' The High Sheriff and the Chief of Police, when they heard of the Provost's weakness, were filled with wrath and dismay, and very promptly insisted on his lordship taking back the concession, so that this historic procession was as much 'forbidden fruit' as its predecessors, and the students probably enjoyed it the more that they had as usual to dare all those in authority to carry it out. Another old-time enjoyment of that date was a snowball fight. Whether snow is less plentiful, or students are too cultured and too refined for these rough pastimes it is impossible to say, but certain it is that a really _great_ snowball fight is also a thing of the past. In those days they were Homeric combats, and a source of keen enjoyment to Robert Louis Stevenson, a very funny account of whom, on one of these occasions, was given me at the time by his cousin, Lewis Balfour, from Leven, himself a jovial medical student enjoying an active part in the melée. On the occasion of a great battle in the winter of 1869--or 1870--Mr Stevenson and one or two men, now well known in various professions, had seated themselves on a ledge in the quadrangle to watch the fight. From this vantage ground they encouraged the combatants, but took no active part in the fray. Within swarmed the students armed with snowballs, without, the lads of the town, equally active, stormed the gates. All were too intent on the battle to notice the advent of the police, who rushed into the college quadrangle and made prisoners where they could. Craning his neck too much, in his keen enjoyment, Mr Stevenson overbalanced himself, slipped from his perch and was promptly captured by 'a bobby,' and, in spite of gallant efforts for his rescue, was ignominiously marched off to the Police Office at the very moment that his blandly unconscious mother was driving up the Bridges. It was useless for his attendant friends to assert that he had been a non-combatant. Was he not taken in the very thick of the fight? The police had him and they meant to keep him for he could not produce sufficient bail from his somewhat empty pockets. His cousin and his friends, by leaving all their stray coins, their watches and other valuables, managed to secure his release so that he had not the experience--which it is possible he might have enjoyed--of passing a night in the police cells of his native city. In his introduction to the _Memoirs of Professor Fleeming-Jenkin_, he himself tells a good story of his relations with that Professor, who was always a true and appreciative friend to his clever if idle student. He had handed in so few cards at the class of Engineering that his certificate was not forthcoming until he told his friend that his father would be very vexed if he could not produce the certificate--which he never intended to _use_--whereat the tender-hearted Professor handed it to him. Another prime favourite of his among the Professors was Professor Kelland; and one can well understand the attraction which the dainty, gentle refinement of that most kind-hearted of men had for a nature so akin to it as young Stevenson's. All Professor Kelland's students loved him; this one understood him also. Professor Masson was one of the giants of those days whom he was also most capable of appreciating, and whose lectures he occasionally attended although not a member of his class; and, himself not without his amiable eccentricities, he could not fail to have a soft spot in his heart for the quaint humour and the pleasant eccentricity which endeared Professor Blackie to his class and to the public. He was a poor attender at the Greek Class, however, and when he presented himself for his certificate the keen blue eyes of the Professor looked at him critically, and the Professor's remark was that he had been so seldom present at lectures it was hardly possible to recognise his face! Many of the students of that day have taken a good place in the world; some of them have long ere now left the things of time behind them; one or two of them Mr Stevenson has pictured in his graphic pages. Several of them regarded him as an interesting personality, but very few of them suspected that he was 'the chiel amang them takin' notes' for future work that would bring world-wide fame, not only to himself, but to his University and to the city of his birth. On the 2nd March 1869 he was proposed by George Melville, Esq., Advocate, as a member of the Speculative Society, and we know from _Memories and Portraits_ how much he appreciated his membership of that Society, which has in its day included in the roll, on which his name stood No. 992, most of the men whose names are honoured in Scotland's capital, and many of whom the fame and the memory are revered in far places of the earth. That he might smoke in the hall of the Speculative, in the very stronghold of University authority, he playfully professes to have been his chief pleasure in the thing; but other men, to whom his earnest face, his eagerness in debate, made one of the pleasures of its meetings, tell another story, and it was commonly said in those days that there would always be something of interest in hand if Stevenson took a part in it. When he forsook the profession of engineering, Mr Stevenson attended the Law classes at the University, with the intention of being called to the Bar, but it is not on record that he was a more exemplary student of law than he had been of engineering, and he still found more satisfaction in his truant rambles and his meditations in old graveyards than he did in the legitimate study of his profession. FOOTNOTE: [2] Cairketton is the form used in the Ordnance Survey. CHAPTER IV AS I FIRST KNEW HIM 'Blessed are his parents in a son, so graced in face and figure And of mind so wise.' --LORD DERBY'S TRANSLATION OF _The Iliad_. That was one of the quotations by which in those days we were wont to describe Mr Stevenson. Strictly speaking, perhaps he was not a handsome man. He was too slim, too ethereal, if one may use the term, to attain to anything sufficiently commonplace to be described as merely handsome. But he was indeed 'graced in face and figure,' for he possessed that rare attribute _distinction_, and his face, with its wonderfully luminous eyes, its ever changing expression, had a beauty peculiar to itself, and one which harmonised perfectly with the quaint wisdom of his mind. That wisdom was so deep, yet so whimsical, so peculiar and so many-sided that one can only apply to its possessor another quotation half indignantly thrown at him, when he was too successful in argument, by an acquaintance of his, whose quick wit had a great charm for him. 'We gaze and still the wonder grows That one small head can carry all he knows.' He bowed to the compliment, he demurred as to the smallness of his head, and he enjoyed the quotation immensely. With the same opponent he once tried a competition in verse-making. Both showed considerable skill, but the umpire decided that Louis had won, so he bore off in triumph the prize of a bottle of olives, and was only sorry that he could not compel the loser to share his feast, which he well knew would be as abhorrent to her as it was delightful to him. With Edinburgh, wind-swept and grey, with its biting breeze, its swirling dust of March, there will always be associated in my mind certain memories of Robert Louis Stevenson, and of that happy home of the Stevenson family, 17 Heriot Row. In summer sunshine Swanston, lying cosily at the foot of the Pentlands, claimed them year by year, but every winter found them, for business or pleasure, established in that most homelike house, the windows of which, to the front, looked into the Heriot Row gardens, and at the back, from that upper flat where was the book-lined study of the son of the house, snatched a glimpse, over roofs and chimney cans, of the gold-fringed shores of Fife. Across the blue Forth in Fife, at the little seaside town of Leven, well known to golfing fame, there had settled in 1866 an uncle of R. L. Stevenson, Dr John Balfour, who was noted for his gallantry and skill throughout the Indian Mutiny, and in more than one outbreak of cholera in India and at home. Of the town and the man Mr Stevenson gives a graphic picture in _Random Memories_, when describing a visit to the Fife coast, where his father was making an inspection of lights and harbours. In 1849 when home on leave Dr Balfour volunteered to go to Davidson's Mains, in the parish of Cramond, where as a specialist in cholera symptoms he was amazed to find the outbreak as virulent and as fatal as the Asiatic cholera he had seen in India. In 1866, when another wave of cholera swept over Britain, he was asked to go to Slateford, where he coped with its ravages almost single-handed, saving life in every case after he went, except those already too far gone before his arrival. In late autumn of the same year the scourge broke out seriously in the small towns on the coast of Fife, and Dr Balfour went to Leven, where the doctor had just died of it, and a state of panic prevailed, and there too he succeeded in quickly stamping it out. Having retired from his Indian appointment he felt idle time hang heavy on hand, so he acceded to the request of the inhabitants and went to Leven to take up practice there. His wife, who was a cousin of his own, and their four children, shortly after followed him from Edinburgh, and he built a house called 'The Turret' there, where he remained until his greatly lamented death in 1887. There from childhood I grew up in intimate friendship with the young Balfours, and went out and in to the doctor's house, receiving in it such kindness from parents and children that it was regarded by me as a second home, and its inmates were looked upon as one's 'ain folk.' As one's 'ain folk,' too, by-and-bye, were regarded those other Balfour families, notably Dr George W. Balfour's household and Miss Balfour, and the nephews and nieces who had their home with her--who made of the little Fife town their holiday resort. Later an Edinburgh school and long visits to Edinburgh relatives made the Scotch capital as familiar to me as Fife; and then the Stevenson family in their home at Heriot Row were added to the little circle of friends, now, alas! so thinned by grievous blanks. Old and young have passed into 'The Silent Land,' and life is infinitely the poorer for those severed friendships--those lost regards of early days. Not a few of the old folk were notable in their time, some of the younger generation have made, or mean to make, some stir in the world. But round none of them gathers so much of romance of honour and of distinction as about Robert Louis Stevenson, who used to visit his uncle's house in Leven, doubtless from one of those expeditions to Anstruther, of which he tells us that he spent his time by day in giving a perfunctory attention to the harbour, at which his father's firm were working, and lived his real life by night scribbling romances in his lodgings. It is on record that he felt a thrill of well-merited pride when an Anstruther small boy pointed to him, as he stood beside the workmen, and said: 'There's the man that's takin' charge.' But he assuredly knew more of pleasure in his hours of scribbling than in his hours of inspection, although the out-of-door, wind-swept, wave-splashed part of engineering was never so abhorrent to him as office work. In the office he was known very little; but tradition has it that a small pile of evil spellings is still treasured there as a characteristic memento of the genius, and the thought has been known to comfort the sad hearts of other apprentice engineers afflicted with a like shakiness in their orthography, that the now much appreciated man of letters once shared their melancholy failing. Stories of all sorts were handed about in our little clique of the wondrous Robert Louis whose sayings and doings were already precious to an appreciative circle of relatives and friends. But it was not till sometime in the autumn of 1869 that he first became personally known to me. The introduction took place on a September afternoon in the drawing-room of 'The Turret,' and he inspired a great deal of awe in a youthful admirer who even then had literary aspirations, and who therefore looked up to him with much respect as someone who already wrote. From that time he was regarded as one of the quaintest, the most original and the most charming personalities among one's acquaintances. There was about him, in those days, a whimsical affectation, a touch of purely delightful vanity that never wholly left him in later life, and that far from repelling, as it would have done in any one more commonplace, was so intrinsically a part of his artistic nature that it was rather attractive than otherwise. Full of delightful humour, his idlest sayings--when he took the trouble to say anything which he frequently did not!--were teeming with the elements not only of laughter but of thought, and you wondered, long after you had talked with him, why it was that you saw new lights on things, and found food for mirth and matter for reflection where neither had suggested itself before. In those days he was not only original himself, but he had to a great degree that rare faculty of bringing to the surface in others the very smallest spark of originality, and of remembering it and appreciating it in a way that was stimulating and helpful to those who had the pleasure of knowing him. When the little seaside town was empty of visitors, and it was not time to pay Edinburgh visits for the season, in February and March, one kindness of his was very greatly prized by some of us who beguiled the tedium of the winter months by writing for and conducting an amateur magazine, called _Ours_. For this, in 1872 and 1873, Mr Stevenson gave us a short contribution, _The Nun of Aberhuern_, a trifle in his own graceful style, which, as he was even then beginning to be known in the world of letters, we valued much. Moreover, he took a friendly interest in the sheets of blue MS. paper so closely written over with our somewhat juvenile productions, and made here a criticism, there a prediction, which has not been without its effect on the future work of some of us. Mr Stevenson was always kind and always sympathetic; he laughed at your follies of course, but he did it so pleasantly that the laughter seemed almost a compliment, and the kindness was more memorable than the mirth. In one among his juniors at least, imbued like himself with a love of old-time romance and of ancient story, he inspired a passion of gratitude that abides to this day. Mr Stevenson not only never laughed, as the other boys and girls did, nor treated the memory of delightful childish plays with contempt, as was the fashion of the generation just grown up, he never even smiled over the unfeminine tastes of a child who went pirate-hunting in an upturned table with a towel for a sail and dried orange skins for provender--or whose dolls were not treated as those dainty girlish playthings ought to be, as pretty babies and gay society dames, but figured as the tattered and battered followers of Prince Charlie--himself a hero very much the worse for the wear in a plaid and a kilt!--after Culloden. Or, in gayer moods, the same dolls attended his receptions at Holyrood in garish garments, or masqueraded as Mary Queen of Scots and her four Maries in that 'turret chamber high of ancient Holyrood' where 'she summoned Rizzio with his lute and bade the minstrel play.' Mr Stevenson listened gravely to all these things. He professed a real interest in them. He even remembered the names of the puppets and the parts they had played, and so gained for himself an enduring niche in the heart that had bitterly resented the mockery of the others. It is quite possible that a nature so gentle and so appreciative as his really _felt_ the sympathy. The juniors are rarely mistaken as to the genuineness of the feelings of their elders, and his interest certainly rang true to the youthful mind. He had been himself a delicate child, so he was capable of understanding how many weary and solitary hours the romantic plays had filled pleasantly. It is not a memory of much moment, perhaps, but it shows that even at an age when most young men are too keenly concerned with themselves and their own affairs to take much trouble for those who are a few years their juniors, Mr Stevenson had thought and sympathy to spare for the small joys and sorrows, the interests, and the 'make-believes' that had amused a lonely child, and which, after all, in one form or another, make up a good deal of life to most of us. One is inclined to gather from his books, and from the statements accredited to him in magazines and newspapers, that he never took women very seriously. He may not have done so--save those who were very near and dear to him, and they were set in a sacred shrine of their own--but he certainly always treated women very charmingly; and the young girl relatives and friends, who were accustomed to be much in his home circle, had never any reason to complain of the lack of the most dainty and courtly attentions or of a most constant and spontaneous kindness from the somewhat solemn youth, who, like other youths of twenty, considered that it showed a great knowledge of the world to affect a rather cynical disdain of the feminine half of humanity. In himself there was, curiously enough, always a reminder of the feminine; an almost girlish look passed now and again, in those days, over the thin delicately-tinted face, and a womanly gentleness in voice and manner reminded one of his mother. The same ready sympathy, the same power, as it were, of putting himself into a friend's place and entering with heart and soul into the affairs of others which made him so interested a listener to a young girl's story of her childhood's plays, made him in his later years the friend of the Samoans, the champion of Samoan liberties, and, all through his life, the one man whom the men and women who knew him loved with the love that is only given to the very few, and those the few, too often, whose death in life's prime, or before it, prove them to have been among those whom the old poet tells us 'the gods love.' Nothing at this time was more remarkable in Mr Stevenson than his extraordinary youthfulness of mind. At an age when other young men affect to be blasé and world weary he was delightfully and fearlessly boyish. Boyish even in his occasional half-comic solemnity of appearance; he was boyish likewise in his charming jests and jokes, and, above all, in his hearty delight in any outdoor 'ploy' that came in his way. A comical instance of this nearness of the boy to the surface in him displayed itself one grey east-windy afternoon at Leven, when one saw quite another side to him than the literary and dilettante one displayed, with something of a mannered affectation, the day before in 'The Turret' drawing-room. He had walked down to the sands with his aunt and there were assembled various younger members of the Balfour clique, and some whom age and sex ought perhaps to have taught to despise, though it had not, the hoydenish pleasures of 'a sea-house.' A 'sea-house,' for the benefit of the uninitiated, is a deep hole dug in the sand while the tide is out, and the sand taken from the hole is built round in broad, high walls to make the fort resist as long as possible the rush of the incoming waves. It takes hours to make, but no trouble is too great, for is there not the fierce joy of adventure at the last when the waves finally win in the struggle and the huddled-together inmates of the now submerged house are thoroughly soaked with spray and salt water? The 'sea-house,' the shouts of its builders, the tempting curl on the waves, as each one came a little further, the slight rise of the wind driving the breakers hurriedly landwards, were evidently too much for Mr Stevenson. One moment the weight of his nineteen years and the duty of politeness to his aunt restrained him, the next Mrs Balfour was left standing alone, and overcome with laughter, while Louis was in the sea house scolding, praising, and exhorting all at once, but above all imploring us to 'sit it out a little longer' as wave after wave widened the breach in the ramparts of sand, and 'In every hole the sea came up, Till it could come no more,' while wetter and wetter grew the heroic few who, with Mr Stevenson 'sat it out' loyally, till it was possible to sit there no longer. Then wet--wetter indeed than ever before--the remnant crept home to be frowned upon and punished but to know no repentance; for had not Robert Louis been the ringleader, and was there any punishment invented that could take from the joy and the pride of a mischievous adventure in which _he_ had had a part! And he, with the water dripping from his trousers and 'squirching' in his boots, was perfectly and placidly happy, regardless of his aunt's dismay and the future horrors of a possible bad cold. He had been a schoolboy again for the all too brief half hour beside the grey and gurly sea, and that youthfulness, that survived through all the patient suffering of his life and that seems to laugh out of the pages of his books to the last, was in the ascendant as he walked off jauntily townwards, amiably oblivious of the lecture his aunt gave him by the way. Anything which brought him into close contact with the sea had a charm for him, even that mock combat with the waves of the autumn equinox on the flat shore of Fife. Therefore at this time although classes and study were a weariness to him his days spent in the old-fashioned town of Anstruther, or on the desolate coast of Caithness, had many pleasures; had many romances also, for everywhere he went he picked up odd and out-of-the-way knowledge, and came across strange stories and stranger characters, from the lingering tradition of the poor relic of the Spanish Armada, the Duke of Modena Sidonia,[3] who after his sojourn in Fair Isle landed at Anstruther and still glorified the quaint sea-port in the East Neuk with his ghostly dignity--to the peer of the realm, in actual flesh and blood, whom Mr Stevenson found acting as a home missionary to the present day population of the Fair Isle. All things were treasured in the note-book of his memory, or jotted down in the note-book in his pocket; and, while the engineer progressed very little in his profession, the future novelist was undergoing a training for his work almost perfect in its way and assuredly most admirably suited to the nature that loved an open air life and revelled in an existence on the sea or beside it.' Possibly not all aspiring civil engineers, certainly very few budding novelists, so test the reality of things as to go down into the ocean depths in a diver's dress and in the company of a professional diver, but this Robert Louis Stevenson actually did. His account of it, in bygone days, was gruesomely graphic, his pen-and-ink sketch of it, to be read in _Random Memories_, is not less so; and the thing itself must have been an experience well worth having to a mind like his. Well worth knowing too, both to the man and to the future creator of character, were those brave hardy sons of toil who did the rough work of his firm's harbours and lighthouses; and many a good yarn he must have heard them spin as he stood side by side with them on some solid block of granite, or on some outlying headland, or chatted and smoked with the captain and the sailors of _The Pharos_ as she made her rounds among the islands. FOOTNOTE: [3] Although Mr Stevenson spoke and wrote of this personage as 'the Duke of Modena Sidonia,' he was in reality Don Jan Gomez de Modena, who is mentioned in T. M'Crie's 'Life of Andrew Melville.' CHAPTER V HOME LIFE 'O, pleasant party round the fire.' --R. L. STEVENSON. Often a little indifferent, sometimes politely bored in general society, it was at home that Robert Louis Stevenson seemed to me to be seen to the greatest advantage. That little household of three, that delightful trio who so thoroughly appreciated each other were charming everywhere, but only quite perfect when taken together within the hospitable walls that enshrined so true a home. Not a house or an abiding place merely, whence the business or the gaieties of life could be comfortably indulged in, but a _home_ where, however much the amusements of the Scotch capital were shared in and appreciated, the truest happiness lay around the quiet fireside where the mother, father, and son loved and understood each other with a love the deeper, that the intense Scotch reticence of all made it, like a hidden jewel, the more precious because so rarely displayed to strangers' eyes. No son could be more fortunate in his parents, no parents could have given a child a more unselfish devotion, a more comprehending sympathy. His very delicacy and the anxiety it had so often caused them had drawn their hearts more tenderly to him, and, absolutely happy in each other, they were equally happy in their pride and pleasure in their son's evident genius and most original personality. In days when discontent and extravagance have done so much to lessen, at least upon the surface of things, the sacredness of home, and weaken the solemnity of marriage, it is comforting and pleasant to look back upon such a home as that was, and to realise that it is possible, in the midst of a busy life of work and of pleasure, to preserve an inner holy of holies around the domestic hearth, into which no jarring discord, no paltry worldly worry, can come, because love is there. Before love's clear gaze all that is selfish and petty and false dies away, while all that is true, good, and gentle makes for sweet peace and that perfect union of hearts which can alone create a true marriage and a perfect home life. Into the Stevenson household, as into other households, came from time to time real worry, real grief, and not infrequent anxiety. The very frailty of tenure by which their son had always held his life was in itself a daily burden to the parents. Mrs Stevenson, especially in her earlier married life, was often far from strong; to Mr Stevenson came now and then those darker moods to which the Scotch temperament, particularly when tinged with the Celtic, is liable. Personal and business disappointments were not wholly unknown, although life in these latter respects was one saved at least from monetary anxieties, and crowned with a large measure of success. But in "all the changes and chances of this mortal life" this household had a sure sheet anchor on which to depend. Love met the trials smiling, and because they loved each other they were clothed in the armour of defence. It was a home ennobled by a high ideal of what life ought to be, and hallowed by a strong and personal faith in God. Mr Stevenson's somewhat austere Calvinism gave a gravity to his character and his religion that were admirably balanced by the happy nature and the sunny active faith of his wife, whose religion was none the less real and earnest that it was bright and always cheerfully practical. Both loved the grand old Church of Scotland, with her far-reaching history and her noble traditions; both, with money and with personal interest, helped not only their own congregation of St Stephen's but the missions and schemes of the Church at large, and many private kindnesses and public charities besides evinced their liberality of heart. Mrs Stevenson, among other things, took a keen pleasure in work for the Indian Zenanas, and among his many engrossments Mr Stevenson was greatly occupied as to the public good of Edinburgh, and notably interested himself in the restoration of St Giles, that grand old landmark of national history of which, in its present condition, Scotland has every reason to be proud. In such a home as this Robert Louis Stevenson was from early childhood educated in a deeply-rooted respect for the Bible and the old solemn teachings which gave to Scotland those 'graves of the martyrs,' of which he so often writes. The Calvinism of his ancestors, inherited to a certain extent by his father, softened to him by his mother's sweetness of nature and brightness of faith, always remained with him something to be regarded with a tender reverence; and if, as he grew to manhood, the 'modern spirit' changed and modified his beliefs, so that it might be said of him, as of so many large natures and earnest souls, 'His God he cabins not in creeds,' God and religion remained very real to him; and the high ideal of duty first learned in his childhood's home guided his life to the last. Robert Fergusson's life and poems interested him greatly, and he often declared himself drawn to him by a certain spiritual affinity; while, when suffering from his frequent attacks of distressing illness, he sometimes thought with dread of Fergusson's sad fate. Pleasure as well as duty, however, was always made welcome in the Stevenson home. Mr and Mrs Thomas Stevenson held no stern views of everyday life, no gayer or brighter household could be found than theirs. None certainly existed where young folk received a warmer welcome, whether the family were established for the winter at 17 Heriot Row, or were spending the summer at Swanston, that delightful nook, nestling in the shelter of the Pentland hills, where the old-fashioned flowers had so sweet a scent, the rustic sounds of country life were so full of charming music, and where the home trio themselves loved 'Every path and every plot, Every bush of roses, Every blue forget-me-not Where the dew reposes.' Differing much in their natures, but fitting, as it were, closely into each other's souls and characters, Louis Stevenson's parents early made for him that ideal of home and of marriage that shows itself from the first in his writings, just here a line and there a sentence, which indicates how his thoughts ran, and how, whatever enjoyment he might take in poking cynicism at women in the abstract, he was full of a noble idea, a manly longing for that one woman, of whose soul and his own, he could say-- 'Once and beyond recollection, Once ere the skies were unfurled, These an immortal affection Found at the birth of the world,' a woman who would be what his mother was to his father, a something as sacred as all through his life that mother was to him. Save that Mrs Thomas Stevenson's eyes were rather hazel than blue, it might have been of her that the late Professor Blackie wrote so sweetly:-- 'True to herself and to the high ideal That God's grace gave her to inform the real, True to her kind, and to your every feeling Respondent with a power of kindliest healing She knows no falseness, even the courtliest lie; She dreams not, truth flows from her deep blue eye, And if her tongue speaks pleasant things to all, 'Tis that she loveth well both great and small, And all in her that mortals call politeness Is but the image of her bright soul's brightness.' That Stevenson home was to many of us, besides the son of the house, a picture of what a true life ought to be, and one that seemed to make the realisation of all high ideals possible in whatever fashion one's own existence might ultimately be led. There was something so strong and manly in Mr Thomas Stevenson, something so sweetly womanly in his wife. A beautiful woman always, because hers was the beauty of soul, as well as of feature, in those early seventies, one cannot imagine anyone more graceful, more gracious, or more charming than she was. It would also be difficult to imagine a wife or mother more sympathetic or more sensible. She could always see the fun of things; she never objected to clubs and men's dinners, and the excuse for a night away from the home hearth, that is so dear to the best of men. Not many weeks before her death, when we were talking of those happy days of long ago, she told me that she always took a book and contented herself, and then was ready to be interested when the truant returned with a latch-key. An example, that if closely followed, would assuredly make for domestic peace. And one fancies that the woman who said smilingly, she always much approved of 'The Evening Club,' because her husband or son could make merry there so late, that she was sound asleep, and could not miss their conversation, was likely to be a pleasant wife to live with, and an ideal mother for a son of such Bohemian tendencies as Robert Louis. Even that marvellous taste in dress which her son affected, and which would certainly have dismayed more conventional mothers, only amused her immensely. Among other jottings of hers about him in her little note-book is one which relates with much appreciation that a faithful servant says of him, 'One summer he tried to wear a frock-coat and tall hat, but after a little he laid them aside and said, "I am not going to be a swell any more," and returned to the velveteen coat and the straw hat which he preferred.' Except at a wedding, or some such solemn function, whereat he probably looked misery personified, one cannot remember him so conventionally apparelled as in the frock-coat and the tall hat. Possibly it was before this access of propriety temporarily had him in its grasp that one day we saw him in Princes Street 'taking the air' in an open cab with a Stevenson cousin, attired in like manner with himself. In those days fashionable people often walked in Princes Street in the afternoon, so what was our dismay, in the midst of quite a crowd of the gay world, to see that open cab, at a word of command from Robert Louis, draw near the pavement as we approached, when two battered straw hats were lifted to us with quite a Parisian grace. Both young men wore sailor hats with brilliant ribbon bands, both were attired in flannel cricketing jackets with broad bright stripes, and round Louis's neck was knotted a huge yellow silk handkerchief, while over both their heads one of them held an open umbrella. In days when the wearing of cricketing clothes, except in the playing fields, was in Scotland still so uncommon that it is on authentic record that an elderly unmarried lady in an east coast watering place, on meeting in its high street a young man in boating flannels, was so shocked at the innovation that she promptly went home, leaving all her shopping undone and her tea-drinking and friendly gossip forgotten, such an apparition as that in the open cab required more courage to face than people accustomed to the present-day use of gay tennis garb can easily imagine. It was fortunate that nerve to return the salutation smilingly was not wanting, or Mr Stevenson would certainly have pitilessly chaffed the timid victims of conventionality afterwards. Having borne the ordeal with such courage as we possessed, we hastened to have tea with Mrs Stevenson, whose first question was, 'Have you seen Lou?' And when we described that startling vision that was slowly creeping along Princes Street in the open cab, she laughed till her tears fell. In half an hour or so her son came in cool and unconcerned, and as punctiliously polite as if his attire had been the orthodox apparel for an afternoon tea-party. The effects of his dressing and appearance on the foreign mind is most humorously described by himself in his _Epilogue to an Inland Voyage_, where the extraordinary nature of his garments so dismayed the French police that while his friend, the late Sir Walter G. Simpson, 'The Cigarette,' was allowed to go free, 'The Arethusa' was popped into prison, kept there for an hour or two, and finally hustled off to Paris, an adventure of the two friends, who were so systematically taken for 'bagmen,' on that charming expedition, which was always told with much laughter by 'The Arethusa's' parents. One of the last memories of Mr Stevenson in Edinburgh that distinctly remains with me was finding him looking into the window of Messrs Douglas & Foulis in Castle Street on a grey, east windy day that was cold enough to make the thickest great-coat necessary. But he was visibly shivering in one of his favourite short velvet coats. It was palpably too short in the arms, and certainly the worse for wear; his long hair fell almost to his shoulders, and he wore a Tyrolese hat of soft felt. With a whimsical and appreciative glance at his garments, he offered to accompany me along Princes Street; so we set off westwards together, when, so charming was his conversation, that long before we reached the doorsteps of his relative's house, which was my destination, one had forgotten that the wind was in the east, and the sky greyer than the pavements, and only longed for the walk to begin over again, that he might talk all the way. These eccentricities of attire were merely a part of the rather attractive vanity of a clever youth, whose exuberance of spirits was, in spite of much bad health, at that time so great that he was often merry with a gaiety that was as child-like as it was amusing. In later life he gradually modified his ideas as to dress, and in the _Vailima Letters_ he writes of himself in Samoa as going to Apia to social amusements in most orthodox coats and ties. At evening parties he always looked like a martyr in the dismal black coat and white tie, which he described as a mixture of the livery of a waiter and the mourning of an undertaker. At dances, he propped himself against a wall, in a doorway or in some coign of vantage about the staircase, looking limp and miserable, but keenly observant all the time. When he found a congenial soul, whether man or woman, to talk to, he brightened, the limpness vanished, and his quick flow of wit and fancy streamed on in a delightful river of talk which touched on grave and gay with equal ease, and was exactly what a poet describes, as-- 'His talk was like a stream that runs With rapid change from rocks to roses, It skipped from politics to puns, It passed from Mahomet to Moses. Beginning with the laws that keep The planets in their rapid courses, And ending with a precept deep For stewing eels or shoeing horses.' Although he looked so unhappy at dances or 'at homes,' at dinners, if the guests were fitly chosen, he was thoroughly at his ease and exceedingly amusing. With his few intimate friends too he was seen at his best; but in general society he was usually as bored as he looked. The Edinburgh of that day was very pleasant socially. Its world seemed somewhat smaller than it is now, less ostentatiously rich, more seriously cultured; or so at least it appeared to the young folk who belonged to the old-fashioned law and professional set in which the Stevensons largely had their acquaintance. People in that set still lived, more than they do to-day, eastwards or northwards of Heriot Row, in the large old houses which were so homelike and so comfortable. The centre of things was in those grand grey houses from Heriot Row upwards to Charlotte Square, westwards to Randolph Cliff and a little way over the Dean Bridge. Drumsheugh Gardens was an innovation. The terraces, Royal, Regent, and Carlton, that 'west end of the east,' were still fashionable, and few people had, as yet, migrated southwards to 'That proud part of Morningside, Where houses girt with gardens Do stretch down far and wide.' It was not a very large world, but it was a very agreeable one, and one which had its notabilities. Lord Neaves with his delightful songs, and the other old-time judges were still with us. Sir David Brewster was not so very long dead; Sir James Y. Simpson was yet a very recent memory. Professor Blackie was in the zenith of his fame. Sir Daniel Macnee told his wonderful stories; Professor, now Sir, Douglas Maclagan sang his delightful songs. Mr Sam Bough's hearty laugh rang out among the artists, and Sir R. Christison, and Syme, and Keith, and Lister, had made the Edinburgh medical world famous. Professors Masson, Tait, Kelland, Crum-Brown, Fleeming-Jenkin--in whose theatricals R. L. Stevenson took a picturesque part--and a host of other well-known names were among the guests at dinners, and most beloved personality of all, perhaps, Dr John Brown, accompanied by his 'doggies' still nodded to us out of his carriage window, or left wonderful scraps of drawings on the hall tables as he passed out from seeing a patient. And everywhere in that pleasant world the Stevenson family were welcome and well known. By the host of young people who are now in turn taking the busy work of life, from which so many of the elders are resting for ever, parties at 17 Heriot Row and at Swanston were much appreciated. Dinner parties for young people were not then so common as now, and the delightful ones given by Mr and Mrs Thomas Stevenson were greatly enjoyed. The guests were carefully chosen, and limited to ten or twelve, so that conversation at dinner was general. And how amusing that conversation was! The humour of father and son as they drew each other out was wonderful, they capped each other's good things, and somehow made less gifted folk shine in the conversation also in a way peculiar to them and which was fully shared by Mrs Thomas Stevenson, who made the most charming of hostesses. Father and son on these occasions were simply full of jests and jollity, everything started an argument, and every argument lent itself to fun. It is odd that nothing definite of those clever sayings of theirs seems to return to one; it is only, as it were, the memory of an aroma that filled the air sweetly at the time, and is still faintly present with one that remains; the actual 'bon-mots' have unhappily passed away. It is consoling to find that Mr Edmund Gosse, who in _Kit-Cats_ writes delightfully of his friend Louis Stevenson, notes the same intangible character of his talk. After the little dinners there were delightful informal dances, to which nephews, nieces, friends, and neighbours came as well as the dinner guests, and one can still remember with a smile, perilously near to tears, Mr Thomas Stevenson driving his unwilling son to dance the old-time dance 'Sir Roger de Coverley,' which the elder man loved and the younger professed to scorn even while he entered with a zeal that finally satisfied his father into the performance of it, that always ended an informal evening at 17 Heriot Row. Music, too, was a pleasant feature of those little parties, and one still recalls, especially, the songs and the lovely voice of a favourite niece of Mrs Stevenson, whose early death made the first break in the home at 'The Turret,' too soon to be followed by the passing away of all save one of that happy household. Even now, after the lapse of so many years, one seems to see Mr Thomas Stevenson leaning eagerly forward as she sang such sweet old songs as 'My Mother bids me bind my Hair,' and 'She wore a wreath of Roses,' or Robert Louis applauding his favourites, 'I shot an Arrow into the Air,' and 'The Sea hath its Pearls.' On one occasion one of these merry parties was enlivened by the presence of some young Japanese engineer students, who were on tour in Edinburgh, and who had brought introductions to the distinguished engineer, who made them very cordially welcome. It was not then very common to meet Japanese, and these quiet dignified young men, in their gracefully flowing black garments, interested the Stevenson family and their youthful guests greatly. CHAPTER VI HIS CHOICE OF A LITERARY LIFE AND HIS EARLIER BOOKS 'A clerk foredoom'd his father's soul to cross, Who pens a stanza when he should engross.' --POPE'S _Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot_. His son's refusal to become a civil engineer, and to take his natural position in the family business, was undoubtedly a great trial to a man of Mr Thomas Stevenson's character and professional traditions. That business had in it not only wealth, honour, and success, but, to every Stevenson, the glamour of romance, the fascination of adventure, and to the father his firm's history appealed strongly. Therefore the blow that fell upon him during that memorable walk, when his son at last found courage to confess to him that he could not persevere in the traditional path which he was expected to tread, must have been a crushing one, and it said much for the strength of his fatherly affection that he received it as he did. It was a painful decision for the son to make, and an equally painful one for the parents to hear. Mrs Thomas Stevenson as well as her husband felt it a keen disappointment that her son could not walk in his father's footsteps. To them, as to all parents of their position and very natural social prejudices, it seemed a foolish thing for a man to turn seriously to literature as a means of winning his daily bread. The Edinburgh of that day did not think much of the profession of letters, and although the memory of Sir Walter Scott, the 'Edinburgh Reviewers,' and the literary lights of an earlier time was still green, all parents held the opinion that, although a few authors had made for themselves fame and fortune, literature was but a beggarly trade at the best, and one to which no wise man would apprentice his son. Only those who knew the elder Mr Stevenson's nature well could fully understand how great a trial to him was his son's decision; and only those very near and dear to him could quite appreciate the depth of the father's love, the tenderness of the father's heart, which permitted no tinge of bitterness, no lasting shadow of repining, to darken his relations with his son or to lessen in the slightest his overwhelming affection for him. Sensitive in the extreme, the son in his turn could not fail to feel his father's disappointment, almost to exaggerate its effect on the older man in his own tender-hearted remorse that he was unable to fulfil his destiny in any other way than by following literature, which was calling him with no uncertain voice. It was good, therefore, to hear from the lips of the wife and mother, who was so fully in the confidence of both, that no abiding cloud remained between the father and the son, and that both quietly accepted the inevitable when law, like engineering, was also laid aside to allow Louis to fulfil his one strong desire. Lovingly and unselfishly the parents finally accepted the fact that genius must have its way, and that in the dainty book lined study, in travel by ways quaint and unusual, in prolonged sojourns in search of health in distant lands, the younger Stevenson's life-work was to be done. When he found that his son would not be an engineer, Mr Thomas Stevenson very naturally wished him to have a profession to fall back upon should literature not prove a success, and it was agreed that he should read for the Bar. Louis, therefore, about the end of 1871, entered the office of the firm which is now known as Messrs Skene, Edwards, & Garson, W.S. The late Mr Skene, LL.D., was then senior partner of the firm. Another partner was the father of Mr J. R. P. Edwards, who has kindly supplied the following very interesting facts about Robert Louis Stevenson while he was undergoing his legal training in his office. 'Mr Stevenson entered the office, which was then in 18 Hill Street, in 1871, and left it about the middle of the year 1873, and was afterwards called to the Bar. His position in the office was neither that of a clerk nor of an apprentice, but merely of a person gaining some knowledge of business. He never received any salary, and, as is usual with aspirants for the Bar, his position was in no way subject to the ordinary office discipline. After searching through papers which were written in the office during the time Stevenson was in the office, I find a good many papers which were written by him, but they are all merely copies of documents, and I can find no trace of any deeds which were actually drawn up by him. This is no doubt accounted for, firstly, because he was not experienced enough in the drafting of deeds, and, secondly, because he may have found the somewhat dry intricacies of conveyancing, which are for the most part governed by hard and fast rules of law, foreign to his marvellous imagination. 'I have not been able to trace any of the staff of the office who were in it with Robert Louis Stevenson, with the exception of two men, who seem to remember little about him, but they said that he was very reserved and kept very much to himself. One of the men did not even know that he was the great Stevenson. The other man, however, said that he remembered that Stevenson had, as he described it to me, "an awful notion of the Pentland hills, and was that fond of talking about them." I believe he was very fond of scribbling pieces of writing on odd pieces of paper in his spare moments, but, unfortunately, I can find no trace of these; but that is not to be wondered at, as the firm have removed to two different houses since Stevenson was in the office. 'Mr Skene, who was head partner of the firm during the time that Stevenson was in the office, had always a great admiration for his writings, and shortly before his (Mr Skene's) death he said that it was a great regret to him that he had not known him better, and recognised in him a brother in letters. My father, who saw a good deal more of Stevenson, says that he struck him as being a very shy and nervous man, or rather, as he then was, a boy. My father also states that Stevenson was a tremendous walker, and that he used often to come into the office in the morning in the somewhat unprofessional garb of walking kit, having covered a good many miles before breakfast.' The office staff in 1871 consisted of ten men. Six of them have died, two cannot now be traced, and the remaining two mentioned by Mr Edwards are very old men. Mr Edwards also says that in one deed which was written by Louis Stevenson there are five errors on two short pages, so that although the handwriting in it is neat, round, and clear, it is evident that his thoughts were not on his work, and that he was no more diligent in law than he had been in engineering. His handwriting, although neat and distinct, can hardly be called pretty, he seemed to use a good deal of ink in those days as the down strokes are all black and heavy. In spite of his lack of interest in his office work he passed advocate with credit on 14th July 1875, was called to the Bar on the 15th, and had his first brief on the 23rd. He duly donned a wig and gown during the following session, and the delicate face that was so grave and refined looked very picturesque with the luminous eyes gleaming out from under the grey horse-hair. He joined the ranks of those 'Briefless Barristers' whose business it is to walk the hall of the Parliament House in search of clients. He had either one or two briefs, but he gave them away as he never acted as an advocate. His mother treasured the shillings he got for them among her relics of his early days. Although his connection with the Parliament House was totally devoid of that professional success that ultimately leads to a seat on the Bench--but for which Mr Stevenson had no desire--it was not without its uses as an education for that other success by reason of which very many people who have never seen his face know and love him to-day. If his sojourn within those venerable halls was useless for law it was fruitful for literature, and one can imagine that as he now and then haunted the courts and listened to the advocates and the judges he was already, from a study of the Bench of the present, laying the foundation for those brilliant pictures of the judges of a ruder past which he gives us in Lord Prestongrange or Lord Hermiston. It is not very fair or very complimentary to the judges of 1875 to compare them with such a creation as Lord Hermiston, but it was not much more than half a century, before their day, that customs and manners like his were possible. The robes, the forms, the etiquette, and the procedure of the Court of Session are still a sufficiently picturesque survival of an older time; and to a mind like Mr Stevenson's that short association with the historic Parliament House, with its far-reaching traditions and with the acting majesty of the law in Scotland that is so old and so unchanged an institution, which to-day employs the very words and phrases of bygone centuries, and still holds, in many points, to the structure of the ancient Roman Law, could not fail to be interesting and useful. Like Sir Walter Scott, when he too walked in the Advocates' Hall, he no doubt found much that was worth studying in the old law procedure as well as in the men and manners of his own day, and appreciated to the full the magnificent library in its dark and silent rooms that are such a contrast to the bustle of the courts, and every corner of which is teeming with history. But his heart was not in the Law Courts, and already in that book-lined study at 17 Heriot Row, the window of which looked over the Forth to Fife, and the walls of which were so temptingly covered with books, his real life work had begun. No treat was greater, no honour more esteemed, than a visit to that study and a learned disquisition there on its owner's favourite books or methods of work. Walking up and down with the hands thrown out in gesticulations, semi-foreign but eminently natural--for did not the child of three do it while repeating hymns on that walk to Broughton!--Mr Stevenson gave his opinions on matters grave and gay. Possibly he even produced his note-books, and with a slim finger between the leaves showed us the practice which he considered necessary for the creation of an author and the making of a style, breaking off in the middle of his disquisition to quote some master of the art or to take from the shelves a favourite book and read aloud a pertinent illustration of the subject in hand. Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, Borrow's _Bible in Spain_, the Bible itself, Butler's _Hudibras_, George Meredith's novels, then less appreciated than now, were all books for a better knowledge of which some of us had to thank those visits to the study: on the shelves too were Bulwer Lytton, Sir Walter Scott, the old dramatists, ballads, and chapbooks, and innumerable favourites that had a place in his heart as well as in his bookcase. Keen and clever were the criticisms he made on them--criticisms that come back to one with the pathos of 'a voice that is still' when one reads in his _Gossip on Romance_ and _A Humble Remonstrance_ his delight in Boswell, his pleasure in _All Sorts and Conditions of Men_, and his admiration for Scott as a Prince of Romance writers, for whose style he had not one good word to say! He had early edited and written for amateur magazines, and when only sixteen he wrote a pamphlet on the Pentland Rising of 1666,[4] which is still in existence but a great rarity; the same subject inspired a romance, and another romance was composed about Hackston of Rathillet, that sombre and impressive witness of the murder of Archbishop Sharp, whose conscientious refusal either to take part for or against the victim had from childhood appealed to Mr Stevenson as pathetic and picturesque. He also wrote in those days a poetical play, some dramatic dialogues, and a pamphlet called _An Appeal to the Church of Scotland_, in which his father was keenly interested. The style in his early letters and notes of travel was excellent, but he destroyed most of his writings at that time as he worked for practice rather than for publication. He contributed frequently about 1871 to the _University Magazine_, in which, as he kindly lent it to us, some of us had the pleasure of reading _An Old Gardener_ and _A Pastoral_, two papers of much promise, very full of outdoor life, the caller air of the Pentland hills and the scent of the old-fashioned flowers in the Swanston garden. Edinburgh, as a picturesque, historic city, he loved with a life's devotion; Edinburgh, as a frivolous social centre, he despised; so some of the strictures he made on it in _Picturesque Edinburgh_, published in 1879, and beautifully illustrated by Mr Sam Bough and Mr Lockhart, gave dire offence at the time to the denizens of 'Auld Reekie,' and are in some quarters hardly pardoned even now when death and fame have made Scotland's capital value her gifted son at his true worth. In 1873 Mr Stevenson made the acquaintance of Mr Sydney Colvin and a life-long friendship ensued. The older man was of great use in many ways to the younger, whose genius he early discovered, and whose leaning to literature he encouraged. In the interesting preface to _The Vailima Letters_ Mr Colvin tells of his help in that time of trial, and that he used his influence to persuade the parents that Louis had found his real vocation in literature, and ought to follow it. No doubt when the large and full _Life_ of Mr Stevenson, which Mr Colvin is preparing, appears, he will have much of interest to tell of that turning-point in the young man's life. He was of service also in introducing his friend to editors, and Mr Stevenson's first serious appearance in literature was an essay on _Roads_ sent by Mr Colvin to Mr Hamerton, the editor of _The Portfolio_, in 1873. It appeared shortly, and was followed by more work there and elsewhere; _Cornhill_, _Longmans_, and _Macmillan_ having all before long printed papers by the new writer. In Macmillan the paper _Ordered South_ appeared in April 1874, and had a pathetic interest as it was an account of the first of its author's many pilgrimages in search of health, which, after he grew to manhood, were to make up so much of his life's experience. In _Fraser's_, _Scribner's_, _The New Amphion_, _The Magazine of Art_, his early work also found acceptance, and he occasionally contributed to _The Contemporary Review_ and _The English Illustrated_, a list of well-known magazines in the home country which makes the more remarkable the refusal of the American papers to use his contributions largely, during his stay in San Francisco and Monterey. Of that charming dreamy sketch of those days, _Will o' the Mill_, which appeared in _Cornhill_, Mr Hamerton wrote in the highest terms of praise. Most of these early essays, sketches, and tales have been republished, and in the beautiful _Edinburgh Edition_ of his works, presently being seen through the press by Mr Colvin and Mr Baxter, and all but completed, his many admirers will be able to read all that came from his busy and graceful pen. In 1878 Mr Stevenson's first book, _An Inland Voyage_, was published by Messrs Chatto & Windus. It is a bright, fresh account of a trip in canoes, 'The Arethusa' and 'The Cigarette,' made by Mr Stevenson and his friend the late Sir Walter G. Simpson up the Oise and the Sambre. The travellers had unique opportunities of observing people and scenery, and of these the writer made the most, consequently the book is full of pretty pictures of scenery and quaint touches of human life which make it charming reading. 'There is nothing,' he says, 'so quiet and so much alive as a woodland. And surely of all smells in the world the smell of many trees is sweetest and most satisfying.' These are the reflections of a man to whom the teeming silence of the woods was very dear, and who, in _Prince Otto_, afterwards wrote a prose poem on the mystery of the woods which Thoreau himself could not have excelled. 'If we were charged so much a head for sunsets, or if God sent round a drum before the hawthorns came into flower, what a work we should make about their beauty. But these things, like good companions, stupid people early cease to observe;' a state of affairs fortunately incomprehensible to Mr Stevenson, who had not only a keen perception of the beauty of the world but 'that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude' that enabled him to recall and reproduce from memory these pleasures of the past. The volume which ends with the statement that 'The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek,' is from its first page to its last brightly readable and full of pleasant and graceful thoughts and fancies. Its style is more mannered and less excellent than that of his later work, but it already appealed to that cultured public who welcomed the appearance of a new writer likely to make his mark as a 'maker' of English style. In 1895 _An Inland Voyage_ had run into its seventh edition; it was followed by the even more popular _Travels in the Cevennes with a Donkey_, which the same publishers sent out in 1879, and which in 1895 had reached a ninth edition. On this occasion Mr Stevenson travelled alone. He had been living for a time in the little town of Le Monastier, fifteen miles from Le Puy, and here, in the late autumn, he bought an ass which he called 'Modestine,' and with it, to the great interest of his simple neighbours, started on a tour in the Cevennes. The pair set forth speeded on their way by many good wishes and, in spite of a slow pace and not a few misfortunes with the baggage and the pack-saddle, the tour was most successful. As to Modestine's pace her master describes it as being 'as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run'! The experiences of the traveller in the crisp, bright autumn weather and the perfect scenery of the Cevennes were thoroughly enjoyable. The simple peasantry and the homely innkeepers proved more friendly and agreeable than those along the route of the canoeists had done. In the monastery of 'Our Lady of the Snows' he had a kindly welcome from the Trappist monks, who seemed to have found it possible to break their stern rule of silence in their eagerness to convert him to Roman Catholicism. Among themselves this rule of silence and the poorest diet is rigidly enforced, and as the traveller left their hospitable doors he 'blessed God that he was free to wander, free to hope, and free to love.' In the country of the Camisards--that little sect of persecuted religionists whose fierce brief struggle against the tyranny of the Church of Rome he so graphically describes--the descendant of Scotch Covenanters found himself at home, and at 'Pont de Montvert' his heart beat in a certain stern sympathy with the persecuted remnant, who here slew Du Chayla, and with that strange weird prophet Spirit Séguir, who, after the deed was done, and he was about to suffer death for it at the stake, said: 'My soul is like a garden full of shelter and fountains.' The rising took place on 24th July 1702, and Mr Stevenson says of it: ''Tis a wild night's work with its accompaniment of psalms; and it seems as if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that town upon the Tarn.' There is a delightful description of a night among the firs in which the very spirit of nature breathes through his words, and his reason for travelling as he does is happy and convincing. 'I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move, to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off the feather bed of civilisation and find the globe granite under foot and stern with cutting flints. Alas! as we get up in life and are more pre-occupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing to be worked for.' Many people have all through life a closer acquaintance with 'the globe granite under foot' than with 'the feather bed of civilisation,' and daily bread even more than a holiday is a thing to be worked for. But Mr Stevenson's lines had hitherto fallen in very pleasant places, and he had not as yet entered as seriously as he had to do later into the bitter battle of life. After twelve days together he sold Modestine at St Jean du Gard and made his return journey by diligence. This book, like the first, was widely read and heartily appreciated as soon as it appeared. FOOTNOTE: [4] This is to be found reprinted in the Edinburgh Edition, in which are also published for the first time the _Amateur Emigrant_ in full, a fragmentary romance, _The Great North Road_, and other papers and letters, &c., not hitherto known to the public. CHAPTER VII WANDERINGS IN SEARCH OF HEALTH 'Know how sublime a thing it is To suffer and be strong.'--LONGFELLOW. Mr Stevenson's health, although always a cause of more or less anxiety, was from time to time somewhat better; else he could hardly have learned the practical work of a brass foundry, superintended the building of light towers and harbours, and taken such very active holidays as _An Inland Voyage_, and the tour _Through the Cevennes with a Donkey_. Nevertheless the delicacy was there, and it not only increased in 1873 but culminated in the autumn of that year in the first of those serious attacks of illness which afterwards frequently caused himself so much suffering and his friends such keen distress all through the life that, in spite of them, he lived so bravely. In the October of 1873 the doctors took so grave a view of his indisposition that they ordered him south for the winter, and on the 5th of November he started on the first of those pilgrimages in search of health of which he says, somewhat sadly, in writing of his grandfather, in his paper on _The Old Manse_: 'He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight; I have sought it in both hemispheres, but whereas he found it and kept it, I am still on the quest.' The anxiety and distress of his parents during that winter were naturally intense, and there is something tragic in the dates so carefully preserved: 'Lou started on 5th November 1873.' 'He returned to Heriot Row on 26th April 1874.' _Ordered South_ appeared in _Macmillan_ for that same April, and in its very beauty there is a most painful pathos. The polish of its style, its exquisitely chosen words, give to it something of the sadness of the brilliant autumn tints on a wood, the red gold and the glory of decay. It is a brave paper and it is an intensely sad one, the sadness in which goes straight to the reader's heart, while the courage takes his respect by storm. No wonder it calls forth universal sympathy; too many homes have been darkened by the dread sentence 'Ordered South,' too many sufferers have obeyed it in life's gay noonday, or in its sunny prime, and few, alas! very few, have even returned to face the long struggle with fate that Mr Stevenson fought so heroically! This was the first, for him, of many journeys 'South'; for although the winter in the Riviera sent him back somewhat stronger, the inherent delicacy was still there, and time after time, in the twenty years and eleven months that he lived after the November morning when he set out on that melancholy journey, the recurrence of the graver symptoms of his malady obliged him to seek sunnier skies and warmer climates. Scotland which he loved, the grey skies, the greyer mists, the snell winds,--that even in his happy Samoan life his exile's heart hungered for to the last,--were fatal to his delicate lungs, and year by year he was compelled to live less and less in his old Edinburgh home. In 1880 when he brought his wife to Scotland to visit his parents his health was so precarious that he had to hurry abroad before the winter, and he and his wife and stepson went to Davos where they met and formed a pleasant friendship with Mr J. A. Symonds and his family. On their return it was hoped that the climate of the south of England might suit Mr Stevenson and be conveniently near London for literary business and literary friendships, so he, and his wife and son settled at Bournemouth in a house called Skerryvore, after the famous lighthouse so dear to all the Stevensons. Here too, alas! his enemy found him out; and chronic, indifferent health, with not infrequent attacks of lung disease in its more serious forms, finally obliged him about 1887 to take another journey to America in the hope that it might do him good. Through all his life the shadow of death was never quite out of sight for him or for those who loved him; the skeleton hand was continually beckoning to him. When we think what that means, in a man's life, we realise with amazement his charming cheerfulness, his wonderful courage, and the magnitude of his work, the exactitude of his methods, the carefulness of his research, appeal to us as something positively heroic in one so handicapped by adverse fate. When many men in despair would have given in he fought on; and the sum of his work, the length of his years--comparatively short as these were--witness to the truth that _will_ can do many things. He willed to fight, he willed to live, he scorned to drop by the wayside, or to die one day before the battle was hopeless, and he fought his fight with a smiling face and a gay courage that was as fine a thing in its way as an act which has won a Victoria Cross; nay, finer, perhaps, for the struggle was not of minutes, or of hours, but of a lifetime, a stern prolonged tussle with death, in which he was never selfish, never peevish, always thoughtful of others, invariably merry and bright, with a wonderful sparkling whimsical mirth that had in it no touch of bitterness or of cynicism. Even the last years of life, when the need to work hard for an income that would sufficiently maintain his household, made brain work, under conditions of physical weakness, often peculiarly trying, were largely full of the same marvellous pluck and illumined by the same sunny temperament. In the years between 1873 and 1879, in the summer of which he went to San Francisco, he had sought health in many places with a varying degree of success. He had seen much of life and, as he was an excellent linguist, had everywhere formed friendships with men of all nationalities, and was thus enabled to study at his leisure continental life and manners. He frequently stayed at Fontainbleau, where he had a Stevenson cousin studying art, and the pleasant unconventional life of the student settlement at Brabazon was very attractive to a man of Mr Stevenson's temperament. His first visit to the artist colony was paid in 1875, and it was often repeated. His wanderings had unfortunately brought no permanent improvement to his health so, for that and other reasons, it occurred to him in 1879 to go to San Francisco to see if the Californian climate would be of benefit to him. Eager as ever to study life in all its phases and from every point of view he took his passage in an emigrant ship--where he tells us he posed as a mason and played his part but indifferently well!--and at New York resolved to continue his journey across America by emigrant train. In the graphic account of his experiences, in the volume of essays entitled _Across the Plains_, and in _The Amateur Emigrant_, he describes what must have been a very trying time to a man of his refined upbringing and frail constitution. But he looks, here as elsewhere, at the bright side of people and things; and even for the Chinaman, from whom the other emigrants hold themselves aloof, he has a good word to say. He keenly observed everything from his fellow-passengers, the character of the newsboys on the cars, and the petty oppressions of the railway officials to the glories of the scenery on that marvellous journey of which Joaquin Miller says:-- 'We glide through golden seas of grain, We shoot, a shining comet, through The mountain range, against the blue, And then, below the walls of snow, We blow the desert dust amain, We see the orange groves below, We rest beneath the oaks, and we Have cleft a continent in twain.' After the long rush across the plains, Mr Stevenson's heart bounded with joy when he caught a glimpse of 'a huge pine-forested ravine, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with the fires of dawn.' 'You will scarce believe it,' he says, 'how my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting one's wife. I had come home again--home from unsightly deserts to the green and habitable corners of the earth.' By the afternoon they had reached Sacramento, which he writes of as 'a city of gardens in a plain of corn,' and before the dawn of the next day the train was drawn up at the Oaklands side of San Francisco Bay. The day broke as they crossed the ferry, and he says: 'The fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was perfect, not a ripple, scarce a stain upon its blue expanse, everything was waiting breathless for the sun. 'A spot of gold first lit upon the head of Talampais and then widened downwards on its shapely shoulder' ... and by-and-bye 'The tall hills Titan discovered,' 'and the city of San Francisco and the bay of gold and corn were lit from end to end with summer daylight.' In _The Old Pacific Capital_ he writes delightfully of San Francisco and the surge of its 'toss'd and tumbled sea,' that echoes forever around Monterey and its woods of oaks and pines and cedars. He has much that is interesting to tell of the curious contrast between San Francisco, modern and American, and Monterey, the 'Old Pacific Capital,' so full of a pathetic and a half-forgotten history. He has a deep sympathy with its refined and impoverished Spanish gentle-folk and their unpractical ideas of what is honourable; and he predicts that the people who do not consider it etiquette to look through an important paper before signing it are, in spite of America's assertions that they are well able to take care of themselves, little likely to survive long in a world of Yankee sharpness and smartness. He revelled in the beautiful woods so often devastated by forest fires. On one occasion, he says, he came perilously near lynching, for he applied a match to the dry moss which clings to the bark of the trees to see if it were so peculiarly ignitable as to be an important factor in the rapid spread of a fire. In a moment flames broke out all over the tree, and he found to his horror that he had started a fresh fire of his own very difficult to put out, and exceedingly likely to arouse the indignation of the men who were struggling to beat out the existing conflagration, to the point of lynching the too officious stranger. The solemn boom of the Pacific was a constant delight to him, and he gloried in the ever-changing lights and shadows on the sea. If he did not attain to permanent good health while at San Francisco and Monterey he at least found there something else which made for the lasting happiness of his life, as it was there that he married his wife. After spending about seven years of married life at Bournemouth he again, in 1887, tried a visit to America. His health, however, did not improve, and, during the winter of 1887 and 1888, when he was at Saranac Lake, he speaks of himself, in _The Vailima Letters_, as having been--in the graphic Scots words--'far through'; and the idea occurred to him of chartering a yacht and going for a voyage in the South Seas. His mother on this occasion accompanied the family party, and between 1888 and 1890 they sailed about among the lovely islands of the South Sea, visiting Honolulu, and finally touching at Apia in Samoa, where they promptly fell in love with the beauty of the scenery and the charm of the climate. On this voyage, as always, Mr Stevenson made friends wherever he went, and had much pleasant intercourse with wandering Europeans, missionaries and natives. On her return to Edinburgh, after this cruise with him, his mother used to give most entertaining accounts of the feasts given in their honour by the native kings and chiefs, and of the quaint gifts bestowed on them. At an afternoon tea-party at 17 Heriot Row, shortly before the home there was finally broken up, she put on for our benefit the wreath--still wonderfully green--that had been given to her to wear at one of those island festivities. She had promised the sable majesty who gave it to her to be photographed with it on, and to send him one of the copies. One of these photographs is beside me now, and is an excellent likeness. Close to it is the graceful one of her son, taken at Bournemouth, wearing his hair long, and one of the velvet coats that he loved, and it is a most curious contrast to the sturdy Scotsman, his father, who looks out at it from his frame, in conventional broadcloth and with the earnest gravity so characteristic of his face in repose. Innumerable photographs, pictures, and busts, were taken of Robert Louis Stevenson, but not one of them has ever been a very real or a very satisfying likeness. In recent years one rarely sees an Academy Exhibition without one or more representations of the mobile face, the expression of which has, alas! eluded the grasp of even the best of artists. The Stevenson party had been so charmed with Samoa, that, as the climate suited Louis admirably, they resolved to give up the Bournemouth home, buy some ground in Samoa, and finally settle there. So sometime about 1890 Vailima was bought, and building and reclaiming operations were begun, and, save for occasional visits to Sydney or Honolulu, Mr Stevenson and his household gave up personal communication with the busy and civilised world, and happily settled themselves in a peaceful life among the palms and the sunshine of the tropics and the friendly Samoan natives, who grew to be so deeply attached to them, and so proud of 'Tusitala.' CHAPTER VIII HIS MARRIAGE AND FRIENDSHIPS ... 'What we seek is but our other self Other and higher, neither wholly like Nor wholly different, the half life the gods Retained when half was given--one the man And one the woman.'...--_Epic of Hades_. L. MORRIS. 'Old friends are best, old coats that fit.' --ROBERT RICHARDSON. It was naturally to be supposed that a man of Mr Stevenson's temperament, before whose eyes from his earliest childhood there had been present a woman good enough to give him the very highest ideal of womanhood, would not easily or lightly give his heart away. He knew that he longed for the best, and to nothing less than the best could he give his soul's worship. That he did not find his ideal in the beaten track of everyday social life, or among the gay and agreeable girls whom he met in his young manhood, is not surprising. The element of romance, as well as the longing for what was noblest in womanhood, was in him; and romance for him was not embodied in a pretty young woman in a ball gown. Possibly he considered that the amusing advice as to matrimony which he gives in _Virginibus Puerisque_, was as applicable to a man as to a woman, and that 'the bright' girl of Society was as apt to be a wearisome and an exacting helpmate as her brother, 'the bright boy of fiction,' against whom as a husband his essay warns the woman in search of marriage to whom he recommends, as a more comfortable partner, the man old enough to have loved before, and to have undergone something of an apprenticeship in devotion. Very pertinent also is his advice to men in the same essay, that kindred tastes are more likely to ensure lasting happiness than a fair face or an acceptable dowry. Beneath the easy brightness of thought and style that make the essay so amusing and so readable, one sees that its writer knows his world well, and has given graver thought to matters matrimonial than at a first reading one is inclined to believe. Holding firmly the faith that 'all things come to him who knows how to wait,' Mr Stevenson was in no hurry to realise his ideal, and it was not until he was between twenty-seven and thirty that he met the woman whom he chose for his wife. That there was an element of romance in their acquaintance altogether removed from everyday love stories made it all the more fitting an ending to that watchful waiting for what fate had to give him. When Mr Stevenson arrived in San Francisco in 1879, there was living with her sister, at Monterey, Mrs Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne of Indiana. Mrs Osbourne had been married when very young, and her domestic experience was so unhappy that she had to obtain a divorce from her husband. She had, with her son and daughter, lived for some time in that student colony at Fontainbleau which Mr Stevenson knew and loved so well, and in after years they must have had in common many pleasant memories of people and places dear to both, so that his ideal of matrimony described in _Virginibus Puerisque_ was realised, and he and his wife had 'many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale.' At a party at San Francisco Mr Stevenson much admired Mrs Osbourne and her daughter Belle, who married a Mr Strong, and who afterwards, in the Vailima days, became her step-father's secretary. The young girl he found very fresh and sweet with the gay brightness of youth, but of her mother his impression was much deeper, and he always spoke and wrote of her as the most beautiful and the most charming woman whom he had ever seen. Although she was several years his senior she was then in the very prime of a womanly beauty which, to judge from the photographs taken at Vailima more than ten years later, was only at its ripest when other women are beginning to think of growing old. No one who had even once looked into her dark eyes could fail to endorse Mr Stevenson's verdict, to realise her charm of person, or doubt for a moment the loveliness of nature and the nobility of soul to which these strange deep eyes were the index. She was indeed charming, and it was no wonder that such a nature as Mr Stevenson's found in her that 'other half of the old Platonic tradition, the fortunate finding of which can alone make a marriage perfect. The romantic and the unusual in the story comes in when, at the request of his doctor, Mrs Osbourne gave willingly of her kindness and her skill in nursing to the young man who was lying at point of death alone in a far land. The child of the people with whom he was boarding had been very ill, and when other folk left the house of sickness, Mr Stevenson, who had liked his little playfellow, remained to help the parents with the nursing, and wore himself out in their service as only a man of his rare human sympathy and tenderness of heart would have done. The child recovered, and long years afterwards when the monument to his memory was erected at San Francisco, the mother laid a wreath at its base in remembrance of that unforgotten kindness. Unfortunately, already far from well and suffering much from the effects of the journey by emigrant ship and train and the stern experience of 'roughing it' which that had entailed, Mr Stevenson was quite unfit for the fatigue of nursing and he became so ill that the doctor despaired of his life. This doctor, who then and afterwards proved a very real friend, was greatly distressed about his patient, especially as the danger of his illness was greatly increased by the lack of that skilled nursing which was there very difficult to obtain. In such a case the physician could do much, but a good nurse could do far more, so the doctor, in his anxiety, recollected that Mrs Osbourne was, like himself, interested in the talented young Scotsman, and was also possessed of a rare and womanly gift of nursing, and he begged her to do what she could for his patient. She responded to his appeal, and with her sister showed the invalid a kindness so great that it did more to help his recovery than the best of drugs could have done. He was restored to a certain measure of health, and it may thus be said that he owed his life to his future wife, but he owed her much more for her unselfish devotion in his time of weakness and loneliness, as a stranger in a strange land, glorified to him all womanhood in her person, and the man who knew what it was to have an ideal mother was so peculiarly fortunate as to find an ideal wife also. Two such natures as theirs were inevitably attracted to each other, and it is not surprising that their friendship deepened into love, or that in later years he says of her: 'Teacher, tender comrade, wife, A fellow-farer true through life, Heart-whole and soul-free, The august Father Gave to me.' At San Francisco, on the 19th of May 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne were married, and there began for them that perfect life together which anxiety and illness could not cloud, and which found its earthly termination when in that awful and sudden moment in December 1894 Mr Stevenson entered into 'the Rest Eternal.' Belle Osbourne became Mrs Strong, and by-and-bye she and her little boy Austin joined the Stevensons in their home life. 'Sam,' as Mr Lloyd Osbourne was called in those days, accompanied them to England when they made their home at Bournemouth. He was a bright, eager boy when he used to appear in Edinburgh, and one who was very welcome to the elder Stevensons at Heriot Row. By-and-bye he went to the Edinburgh University and there he was full of life and interest, keen on pleasures, keen on friendships, interested in classes, and even then there was something of the same earnestness, the same humour and brightness in him that characterised his stepfather and which made him, by-and-bye, with no small measure of the same gifts, his collaborator and friend. A friendship that was begun in very early days when the two told each other stories and issued romances from a toy printing-press, and when the junior received that delightful dedication of _Treasure Island_ in which he is described as 'a young American gentleman' to whose taste the tale appeals. Shortly after their marriage Mr and Mrs R. L. Stevenson had had the quaint experience of housekeeping so charmingly described in _Silvarado Squatters_, but their first real home was at Skerryvore, and Bournemouth was the headquarters of the household until the necessities of Mr Stevenson's health again made them wanderers; and that move in 1887 finally ended in the purchase of Vailima, and the pitching of their camp in far Samoa. The curtest mention of their Bournemouth life would be incomplete without some notice of the many friends who found it so easy to reach from London and so pleasant to visit, and who, themselves well known in the literary world, so greatly appreciated the genius of Mr Stevenson. Among old Edinburgh friends of long standing were his many Balfour and Stevenson cousins and his old comrades of early days, and among the latter Mr Charles Baxter and the late Sir Walter G. Simpson held a principal place in his regard. Mr Sydney Colvin he had first met in 1873, Mr Henley he first knew in Edinburgh about the end of 1874, and Mr Edmund Gosse was another much valued friend of long standing. Mr Colvin was to the last one of the friends highest in his regard, and to him were written _The Vailima Letters_. His wonderful attire, at the Savile Club and elsewhere in orthodox London, at first astonished and somewhat repelled literary men accustomed to a more conventional garb than the velvet coats, the long loose hair, and the marvellous ties Mr Stevenson delighted in; but very soon they found out the charm of the personality that lay behind a certain eccentricity of appearance, and Mr Leslie Stephen, Mr James Payn, Dr Appleton, Professor Clifford, Mr Cosmo Monkhouse, and Mr George Meredith, whom he met in 1878 and whose work he so much admired, were numbered among his life-long friends. Mr Henley's description of him in these days is better than any picture: 'Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, Neat-footed, weak-fingered, in his face,-- Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race, Bold-lipped, rich tinted, mutable as the sea, The brown eyes radiant with vivacity,-- There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace Of passion, impudence, and energy.' Another friend of those days, Mr Andrew Lang, also lets his friendship run into rhyme, and sends across the seas to the author of _The Master of Ballantrae_ a quaint greeting in the best of Southland Doric: 'Whan Suthern winds gar spindrift flee Abune the clachan, faddumes hie, Whan for the cluds I canna see The bonny lift, I'd fain indite an odd to thee Had I the gift!... ... 'O Louis, you that writes in Scots, Ye're far awa' frae stirks and stots, Wi' drookit herdies, tails in knots, An unco way! My mirth's like thorns aneth the pots In Ballantrae!' To this Mr Stevenson promptly replied in equally fine Doric, and with a playful allusion to the early 'grizzelled' hair which gives to Mr Andrew Lang an appearance venerable beyond his years. Mr Crockett, in the delightful dedication to _The Stickit Minister_, celebrates his friendship with Mr Stevenson; and among the younger school of writers, for whose work he had so generous an appreciation, he had many friends as well as admirers. Mr Barrie, Mr Rudyard Kipling, Mr Le Galliene, and a host of others loved him as a friend, as well as looked up to him as a literary leader. To many of them he wrote charming letters, although in several cases no actual meeting had ever taken place. It was a keen disappointment to both men that circumstances prevented Mr Rudyard Kipling from paying a visit to Samoa. In his island home he was not forgetful of his 'own romantic town,' nor of the interests of one, at least, of its publishing firms, whose travellers and agents he introduced to new fields of usefulness in India and the South Seas. One of his own favourite books was _Coral Island_, by Mr R. M. Ballantyne, published by the Messrs Nelson. But Stevenson, whose charm of personality was even greater than his fame, had other friends, whose friendship is not measured by the intellect but by the heart. Little children and young folk everywhere loved the man whose _Child's Garden of Verses_ shows such a marvellous insight into the hearts of children. The ass Modestine, the Samoan horse Jack, well knew that the indignant flow of language meant nothing, and that their master's heart was altogether in the right place, although, when they were too provoking, his words might be very unparliamentary. For dogs he had as great an attraction as they had for him, and the master of Coolin the wise, and Woggs, or Bogue, the gallant, discourses as few men could do about canine thoughts and feelings in his essay _The Character of Dogs_. No fear of his being among the foolish people who remark that 'they like dogs in their proper place,' and, as he stingingly adds, say, '"Poo' fellow! Poo' fellow!" and are themselves far poorer!' He knew, because he had taken the trouble to study him, that 'to the dog of gentlemanly feelings, theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices.' CHAPTER IX HIS ESSAYS AND POEMS 'Golden thoughts that ever will resound, And be re-echoed to the utmost parts of land and sea.' --R. S. MUTCH. Mr Stevenson inherited both from the Stevenson and Balfour families some measure of literary talent. His father and his grandfather had written with considerable acceptance on the subject of their profession. His father also wrote on religious matters, and at least one of these pamphlets was believed to be of lasting value by competent judges. On scientific and engineering subjects his work was thought so excellent, and was so well known, that R. L. Stevenson tells, with some amusement, that he was surprised to find in the New World it was his father and not himself who was considered the important author. _The Life of Robert Stevenson_, of Bell Rock fame, written by David Stevenson, is a very interesting book. Among his mother's relatives the gift of fluent and graceful expression is also widely diffused, and in common with Mrs Thomas Stevenson and her son, not a few of the Balfour connection have been very charming letter writers, in the days when letters were worth receiving, and not the hurried and uncharacteristic scraps which do duty for present-day correspondence. He himself considered that he inherited his literary talent largely from his father's family, but there is interesting proof that even in his grandfather's day it was inherent also in his Balfour ancestors. The minister of Colinton wrote verses in his youth, and a sonnet preserved by his surviving son and daughter is interesting as a proof of his earnest mind and his literary skill. It was written on the fly-leaf of a folio copy of _Pearson on the Creed_, presented to him by his friend, the Reverend Patrick Macfarlane, who became, about 1832, minister of the West Church at Greenock, and is dated 18th May 1801. 'My friend, my Patrick, let me boast the name, For my breast glows with no inferior flame, This gift was thine, expressive of thy love, Which spurning earthborn joys for those above Would teach my friend in sacred lore to grow, And feel the truths impressive as they flow. While with our faith our kindred bosoms glow, And love to God directs our life below, One view of things now seen, and things to come, But pilgrims here, a future state our home, Nor time, nor death, our friendship shall impair, Begun below, but rendered perfect there.' More than one of the old gentleman's family inherited his talent for graceful and forcible writing. His son, Dr George W. Balfour, has written two well-known medical books which have brought to him a large measure of fame. These are _Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Heart_, and the even more popular _The Senile Heart_. About the latter he tells an excellent story. A well-known literary critic, seeing the book lying on the table, thought it a work of fiction with an admirable and unique title, carried it off for review, and found to his disgust it was a learned medical treatise. Dr John Balfour, an elder son of the manse, wrote papers in _The Indian Annals_ and _The Edinburgh Medical Journal_, which were very highly esteemed. In the younger generation, a cousin of Mr R. L. Stevenson, Mrs Beckwith Sitwell, has written much and pleasantly, principally for young people. Another cousin, Mrs Marie Clothilde Balfour, whose father was a son of the Colinton manse, who died young, and who is married to her cousin--a son of Dr G. W. Balfour, who can also, like his father, write acceptably on medical and other subjects--has already gained for herself no inconsiderable repute as a novelist, her third book, _The Fall of the Sparrow_, having been considered by competent critics one of the notable books of last year. It is not surprising, therefore, that the bent towards literature which appears in both families should in Robert Louis Stevenson have been developed into that rare gift which men call genius. While he was still a careless student of twenty, his papers in _The Edinburgh University Magazine_ possessed a peculiar attraction, and appealed to cultured minds with a charm not often found in the work of so young a writer. _An Old Gardener_ and _A Pastoral_ especially had much of the depth of thought and the finish of style which so largely characterised Mr Stevenson's later work. Interesting and delightful as he is as a story-teller, there is in his essays a graceful fascination which makes them for many of his readers infinitely more satisfying than the most brilliant of his tales. In the essays you seem to meet the man face to face, to listen to his spoken thoughts, to see the grave and the gay reflections of his mind, to enjoy with him 'the feast of reason and the flow of soul' provided by the writers into whose company he takes you, or to return with him to his boyhood, and, in _The Old Manse_ and _Random Memories_ see familiar places and people touched by the light of genius, and made as wonderful to your own commonplace understanding as to the intense and high-souled boy who wandered about among them, hearing and seeing the everyday things of life as only the romancist and the poet can hear and see them. His style, too--strong and virile as it is in his tales--attains, one almost fancies, its full perfection in his essays. The thoughts, both grave and gay, are presented in a dainty dress that is peculiarly fitted to do them justice. There is room in this quiet writing, disturbed by no exigencies of plot, to give perfect scope to the grace and the leisure which are the great charms of Mr Stevenson's work. One can take up a volume of the essays or a slim book of verses at any time and dip into it as one would into some clear and cold mountain well, full of refreshment for the weary wayfarer, and, like the well, it is sure to give one an invigorating sense of keen enjoyment, to take one far from the dusty highways of life and plunge one into the depth and coolness of the wide silence of nature, or to fill one's mind with strong and worthy thoughts gleaned from the world of men and books. In his _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_, published, in one volume, by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1882, with a charming dedication to his father, Mr Stevenson gives in the preface a most interesting account of his own fuller point of view regarding the studies which had originally appeared in the _New Quarterly_, _Macmillan_, and _Cornhill_. The essays deal with such well-known men as Knox, Burns, Thoreau, Charles of Orleans, Samuel Pepys, and others, and are always fresh and agreeable reading. The papers on Knox and Burns have an especial interest for Mr Stevenson's fellow-countrymen who naturally appreciate the judgment of a later day genius on the character and work of the two men who have had so wide an influence on Scottish life and feeling. To John Knox Scotland largely owes her reformed religion, her rigid presbyterianism, and it is, to many people, a new and an interesting phase of the character of the great Reformer--who so enjoyed brow-beating Queen Mary--that Mr Stevenson shows, when he depicts Knox as the confidential friend of the religious women of his day, writing letters to them, comforting them in domestic trials, even shedding tears with them, and keeping up, through a harassed and busy life, these friendships which seem to have been as great a source of pleasure to the Reformer as to the ladies. Of Robert Burns, the peasant poet, whose songs did as much to bring back the sunshine into everyday Scotch life as the Reformer's homilies did to banish it, Mr Stevenson writes with sympathy and tenderness. For the work he is full of admiration; for the man, whose circumstances and temperament made his whole life a difficult walking in slippery places where the best of men could hardly have refrained from falling, he has a gentle understanding, a manly pity. There was much in the poet's life and temperament repellent to a nature like Mr Stevenson's, but there was far more where the human feeling of man to man and of soul to soul could touch with comprehension, so that in his paper, and more especially in his preface, we find him giving to Scotland's national bard an ungrudging admiration in his struggles after the right, and no petty condemnation when he lapsed and fell from his own higher ideals. Of Walt Whitman and Thoreau, both most interesting studies in the volume, he has much that is stimulating to say; and many readers, who may not have time or opportunity for deep personal research, will find his essays on _Villon_, _Victor Hugo's Romances_, _Samuel Pepys_, _Yoshida Torajiro_ and _Charles of Orleans_ a very pleasant means of obtaining a great deal of information in a very limited space. In the early essays, republished in volume form in 1881 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, under the title _Virginibus Puerisque_, Mr Stevenson discourses delightfully on many things, touching, for instance, with a light hand but a wise heart on matrimony and love-making, and the little things, so small in themselves, so large as they bulk for happiness or misery, that go to make peace or discord in married life. It is all done with a pointed pen and a smiling face; but its lightness covers wisdom, and it is full of sound counsel and makes wiser reading for young men and maidens than many books of more apparent gravity. That pathos always lay close behind his playful mockeries and was never far away from the man whose paper on _Ordered South_ is like the bravely repressed cry of all his fellow-sufferers the companion paper on _El Dorado_ proves convincingly. Under its graceful phrases there lies deep and strong sympathy for toil, for hope deferred and longed for, for the disappointment of attainment, for the labour that after all has so often to be its own reward. Between 1880 and 1885 Mr Stevenson collaborated with Mr Henley in the writing of four plays which were privately printed, _Deacon Brodie_ in 1880, _Beau Austin_ in 1884, _Admiral Guinea_ in 1884, and _Robert Macaire_ in 1885--the whole being finally published in volume form in an edition limited to 250 copies, in 1896. _Beau Austin_ was acted in 1890 at The Haymarket, and quite recently _Admiral Guinea_ has been played with Mr Sydney Valentine in the part of David Pew, but in spite of the literary distinction of the collaborators the plays have not been a great success on the stage. In the later papers, 'A Christmas Sermon,' 'A Letter to a Young Gentleman,' and 'Pulvis et Umbra,' in the volume of collected essays called _Across the Plains_, the note of pathos which appears now and then in _Virginibus Puerisque_ is even more forcibly struck. The writer is older, he has known more of life and of suffering, he has more than once looked death closely in the face, and, though his splendid courage is there all the time, the sadness of humanity is more apparent than in most of his work. The other essays in this volume are very pleasant reading, and _Across the Plains_ and _The Old and New Pacific Capitals_ give most graphic descriptions of the life and scenery on the shore of the Pacific, and of the journey to get there. In 'Random Memories' in the same volume, he goes back to his boyhood, and we meet him at home beside the 'Scottish Sea,' under grey Edinburgh skies, larking with his fellow-boys in their autumn holidays, touring with his father in _The Pharos_ round the coast of Fife, and later inspecting harbours at Anstruther, and on the bleak shores of Caithness, an apprentice engineer, for whom, apart from the open air and the romance of a harbour or a light tower, his profession had no charms. Not the least pleasant of his volumes of _Essays_ is that called _Memories and Portraits_, published by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1887, and dedicated to his mother, whom his father's death in the May of that year had so recently made a widow. In it there is a most interesting paper entitled 'Thomas Stevenson,' in which he writes very appreciatively of that father who was so great a man in the profession which the son admired although he could not follow it. Here, too, are papers on 'The Manse,' that old home of his grandfather at Colinton which he when a child loved so well; on the old gardener at Swanston, who so lovingly tended the vegetables of which he remarked to his mistress, when told to send in something choice for the pot, that 'it was mair blessed to give than to receive,' but gave her of his best all the same, and who loved the old-fashioned flowers, and gave a place to 'Gardener's garters, shepherd's purse, Batchelors' buttons, lady's smock, And the Lady Hollyhock.' In this book also are 'A Pastoral,' in which we learn to know John Todd, that typical shepherd of the Pentlands, and his dogs; the charming paper on 'The Character of Dogs,' and four literary essays beginning with an account of his early purchases in the old book shop in Leith Walk, and ending in 'A Humble Remonstrance,' with a summary of his views on romance writing, and what it really ought to be. Somewhat of the nature too of essays or sketches is that delightful volume, made up of different chapters in a most ideal life, _The Silvarado Squatters_, published in 1883, in which Mr Stevenson gives a brilliant description of the very primitive existence he and his wife with Mr Lloyd Osbourne, then a very small boy indeed, led shortly after their marriage, in a disused miner's house--if one can by courtesy call a _house_ the three-roomed shed, into which sunlight and air poured through the gaping boards and the shattered windows!--on the slope of Mount Saint Helena, where once had been the Silvarado silver mine. Primitive in the extreme, the life must nevertheless have been delightful; and, given congenial companionship and the perfect climate of a Californian summer, one can imagine no more blissful experience than 'roughing it' in that sheltered cañon on the mountain side with the ravine close below, and the most marvellous stretch of earth, and sea, and sky, hill and plain, spread out like an ever-changing picture before the eyes, while to the ears there came no sound more harsh than the shrill notes of the woodland birds. There came also the noise of the rattlesnake very often, Mr Stevenson says, but they did not realise its sinister significance until almost the end of their sojourn there, when their attention was drawn to it, and certainly no evil befell them. _Silvarado Squatters_, like _The Vailima Letters_, shows to perfection how simple and how busy, with the most primitive household details, the Stevensons often were on their wanderings, and how supremely happy people, whose tastes and habits suit each other, can be without the artificial surroundings and luxuries of society and civilisation that most folk consider well-nigh necessary to their salvation. One of the most beautiful descriptions of nature in all Mr Stevenson's books, is that of the sea mist rising from the Pacific, and seen from above, like a vast white billowy ocean, by the squatters on their mountain ledge. Bret Harte, for whom and for whose works Mr Stevenson had a sincere admiration, also alludes graphically to the curious scenic effects of the mist rising from the Pacific. Very interesting, too, are the papers on wine and wine-growers, and the two vineyards on the mountain side; and Scotch hearts, warm even to the Scotch tramp who looked in at the door, and to the various fellow-countrymen who arrived to shake hands with Mr Stevenson because he was a Scot and like themselves, an alien from the grey skies and the clanging church bells of home. 'From the dim sheiling on the misty island Mountains divide us and a world of seas, Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,' he quotes and adds-- 'And Highland and Lowland all our hearts are Scotch.'[5] One last notice of his prose is connected with Edinburgh, and very probably with a church charity, for to help some such sale as churches patronise he wrote _The Charity Bazaar: a Dialogue_, which was given to me by its author at 17 Heriot Row one day very long ago, and which, rather frayed and yellow, is still safely pasted in my Everyday Book with the initials 'R. L. S.' in strong black writing at the end of it. Mr Stevenson has done so much in prose that the general reader is very prone to forget those four thin volumes of verse which alone would have done much to establish his fame as an author. The first published in 1885 was _The Child's Garden of Verses_, and anything more dainty than the style and the composition of that really wonderful little book cannot be imagined, nor has there ever been written anything, in prose or in verse, more true to the thoughts and the feelings of an imaginative child. _Ballads_, published in 1890 by Messrs Chatto & Windus, the firm who have published all the essays, is a collection of very interesting narrative poems. The first two, 'Rahéro, a Legend of Tahiti' and 'The Feast of Famine, Marquesan Manners,' deal with native life in the sunny islands of the tropics, and show, with the same graphic and powerful touch as his South Sea tales do, that human life, love, hatred, and revenge are as fierce and as terrible there as in the sterner north. With the north are associated the old and curious Scotch legends, _Ticonderoga_ and _Heather Ale_. The first gives in easily flowing lines a Highland slaying, the rather mean appeal of the slayer for protection to the dead man's brother and the honourable fashion in which the living Cameron elects to stand by his oath to the stranger in spite of the three times repeated complaint and curse of his dead brother. The spectre tells him that he will die at a place called Ticonderoga, but such a word is known to no man, and yet, when Pitt sends a Highland regiment, in which Captain Cameron is an officer, to the East, the doomed man sees his own wraith look at him from the water, and knows, when he hears the place is Ticonderoga, he will be the first to fall in battle there. The _Heather Ale_ is a Galloway legend which tells how the last Pict on the Galloway moors prefers to see his son drowned and to die himself rather than sell his honour and betray his secret to the King. _Christmas at Sea_ is a sad little tale of how, when all men are glad on board the labouring ship--that stormy Christmas Day--that she has at last cleared the dangerous headland and is safely out at sea, the lad who has left the old folk to run away to be a sailor can only see the lighted home behind the coastguard's house, 'The pleasant room, the pleasant faces there, My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair ... ... And oh the wicked fool I seemed in every kind of way To be here hauling frozen ropes on Blesséd Christmas Day ... ... They heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me, As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea. But all that I could think of in the darkness and the cold Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.' _Underwoods_ was published by the same firm in 1887, and is most touchingly dedicated to all the many doctors of whose skill and kindness Mr Stevenson had had such frequent need. The verses in it were written at different times and in different places, and while many of them are full of the early freshness of youth some of them give as pleasantly and quaintly the riper wisdom of manhood. Several of the verses are written to friends or relatives, some very charming lines are to his father. Eight lines called 'The Requiem' seem the very perfection of his own idea of a last resting-place, and are almost prophetic of that lone hill-top where he lies. Book II. of _Underwoods_ is 'In Scots,' very forcible and graphic Scots too, but as to the dialect Mr Stevenson himself disarms criticism. He find his words, he says, in all localities; he spells them, he allows, sometimes with a compromise. 'I have stuck for the most part to the proper spelling,' he writes; and again-- 'To some the situation is exhilarating; as for me I give one bubbling cry and sink. The compromise at which I have arrived is indefensible, and I have no thought of trying to defend it.' And indeed he has no need of it; it is good, forcible 'Scots' after all, and the thoughts he clothes in it are as 'hame-ower' and as pithy as the words. _The Maker to Posterity_, _Ille Terrarum, A Blast_, _A Counterblast_, and _The Counterblast Ironical_, are all excellent; and one can point to no prettier picture of a Scottish Sunday than _A Lowden Sabbath Morn_, which has recently been published alone in book form very nicely illustrated, while he pokes some, not undeserved, fun at our Scottish good opinion of ourselves and our religious privileges in _Embro, her Kirk_, and _The Scotsman's Return from Abroad_. Surely nowhere is there Scots more musical or lines more true to the sad experience which life brings to us all than these with which the book ends: 'It's an owercome sooth for age and youth, And it brooks wi' nae denial, That the dearest friends are the auldest friends And the young are just on trial. 'There's a rival bauld wi' young an' auld, And it's him that has bereft me, For the surest friends are the auldest friends And the maist o' mine hae left me.'... The last volume of verses, _Songs of Travel_, has a pathos all its own, for, like _St Ives_ and _Weir of Hermiston_, the author never saw it in print. The verses were sent home shortly before his death, and in the note appended to them Mr Sydney Colvin says they were to be finally printed as Book III. of _Underwoods_, but meantime were given to the world in their present form in 1896. They were written at different periods, and they show their author in varying moods; but they incline rather to the sadder spirit of the last two years of his life, and have left something if not of the courage for the fight, at least of the gaiety of living behind them. Two of them are written to his wife, many of them to friends; some of them have the lilt and the brightness of songs, others, like _If this were Faith_ and _The Woodman_, are filled with the gravity of life and the bitterness of the whole world's struggle for existence. In _The Vagabond_ he is still in love with the open air life and the freedom of the tramp. In his exile he longs to rest at last beside those he loves; he feels the weariness of life, he writes-- 'I have trod the upward and the downward slope; I have endured and done in days before; I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope; And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.' After that one feels no surprise that he is waiting for the final summons, and one has only a sense of the eternal fitness of things when in the last words of the book he says-- 'I hear the signal, Lord,--I understand The night at Thy command Comes. I will eat and sleep, and will not question more.' FOOTNOTE: [5] Mr Stevenson was very fond of this quotation, which appeals so truly to Caledonia's sons and daughters. He found it in an old volume of _Good Words_, and never knew its source. Like many other people he quoted it incorrectly. According to information kindly supplied by Mr W. Keith Leask, the lines, which have an interesting history, stand thus in the original-- 'From the lone sheiling on the misty island Mountains divide us and a waste of seas, Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.' In _Tait's Magazine_ for 1849 it is given as 'Canadian Boat Song, from the Gaelic.' The author of the English version was Burns' 'Sodger Hugh,' the 12th Earl of Eglinton, who was M.P. for Ayrshire from 1784 to 1789, and was the great-grandfather of the present Earl. When in Canada the author is said to have heard a song of lament sung by evicted Hebridean crofters in Manitoba, which gave him the idea for his verses--the first four lines, and chorus, of which are-- 'Listen to me as when we heard our father Sing long ago the song of other shores; Listen to me, and then in chorus gather All your deep voices as ye pull your oars. _Chorus_--Fair the broad meads, these hoary woods are grand, But we are exiles from our fathers' land.' Professor Mackinnon believes that the Gaelic version, known in the Highlands to this day, is founded upon the Earl of Eglinton's lines, and is not, as might be supposed, an earlier form of the poem which is known and loved by Scotch folk all the world over. CHAPTER X HIS STORIES '... Thy genius mingles strength with grace, ... 'Neath thy spell the world grows fair; Our hearts revive, our inmost souls are stirred, And all our English race awaits thy latest word.' --Sir L. MORRIS' Birthday Ode to the late Lord Tennyson. Beginning his literary career as a writer of such quaint books of travel as _An Inland Voyage_ and _Through the Cevennes with a Donkey_, such charming essays as _Roads_, _Ordered South_, _El Dorado_, and many others, Mr Stevenson was not long in entering the arena as a story-teller. His first printed stories were _A Lodging for the Night_, which appeared in _Temple Bar_ in October 1877; _The Sire de Maletroit's Door_, in the same magazine in January 1878; and _Will o' the Mill_, in _Cornhill_, also in January 1878. In _Cornhill_, in 1876 had appeared the series of essays republished as _Virginibus Puerisque_, and in 1877 and 1878 those afterwards collected under the title _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_. There also began, now and then, to be short stories from his pen in _Cornhill_, _Macmillan_, _Longmans_, Mr H. Norman's _Christmas Annual_, _The Court and Society Review,_ and other magazines. These, as they added originality and a certain weirdness of plot to his already recognised beauty of style, still further attracted that cultured public which had at once accepted his earlier work as that of a master of English. As already stated, it was _Will o' the Mill_, a charmingly written story of still life, with a quiet philosophy all its own, that Mr Hamerton had pronounced a masterpiece of style. _Markheim_ was a graphic, but very unpleasant, story of a murder; _Olalla_, a horrible, but powerfully written, sketch of hereditary insanity, with a beautiful setting of Italian scenery to relieve the gloomy picture. _Thrawn Janet_ which, with most of the tales in _The Merry Men_, was written at Pitlochry, appeared in _Cornhill_ in 1880. Mr Stevenson himself considered it one of his best stories, and thought it an excellent piece of dialect writing. It is weird and impressive in the extreme, and no one who has read it is likely to forget the minister of Balweary in the vale of Dull, and his terrible experiences in the matter of a housekeeper; the 'het lowin' wind' and the coppery sky of that day on which he met the black man coming down by Dull water, and knew that he had spoken with the enemy of souls himself; or the awful storm, in which Satan finally came for all that was left of Thrawn Janet. Into this story of a few pages are condensed a power of forcible expression and a weirdness of theme which have not been surpassed in any of the larger books. _The Merry Men_ is a story of wreck and wickedness on a desolate West Highland island where the rocks called 'the Merry Men,' as the tides boil and foam among them, make, as it were, an undercurrent of mad laughter that forms a fitting accompaniment to the hideous passions of greed and murder and the dead level of human misery that are the prevailing atmosphere of the tale. It is one of the best of the stories forming the volume, to which it gives its name, published by Messrs Chatto & Windus in 1887. In another collection of short tales Mr Stevenson also deals with the seamy side of life, and _The New Arabian Nights_ published in 1882, and which contains the reprint of such stories as _The Suicide Club_, _The Rajah's Diamond_, _The Sire de Maletroit's Door_, and _The Pavilion on the Links_, is quite as gruesome and by no means less interesting than _The Merry Men_. _The Sire de Maletroit's Door_ and _The Pavilion on the Links_, are most graphically written, especially the latter with its splendid description of the dreary sea and the wide and wind-swept stretch of drearier links where the curious characters play their mysterious parts. It is interesting to know that Mr Stevenson wrote _The Pavilion on the Links_ while he was very ill in California. All the stories in the two volumes are favourites, and many readers give a preference to _The Suicide Club_, _The Rajah's Diamond_, or _Prince Florizel_. _Providence and the Guitar_ is also one of his best stories. _Prince Otto_, the first draft of which was written at Monterey, is the peculiar but very beautifully written story of a prince with no fancy for princedom and no talent for governing, who leaves his vain young wife and his unscrupulous prime minister in power and goes roaming among his subjects only to hear some far from complimentary opinions of himself. In the end both prince and princess learn love and wisdom and find happiness in spite of the revolution that drives them from their tiny kingdom. It is a fanciful tale, the charm of which lies less in the rather vague characters, who have the haziness of motive and of personality of the figures in some old play, than in the absolute perfection of style and of description that make it a book to read and re-read with infinite pleasure. Mr Stevenson says, in its dedicatory preface, that he meant to make of it a masterpiece; if he did not succeed in doing so, as a story, he certainly gave in it a picture of the woods so true to nature and so exquisite in style and in expression that it will live as among his best work. Good as this earlier writing was he had not yet found in it his full inspiration, and it hardly appealed to so wide a public as the fresh and delightful stories of adventure to which he finally turned his attention. In connection with Mr Stevenson's fiction, it is interesting to note that in his boyhood he greatly enjoyed the stories of a novelist called Smythe, who at that time contributed to the _London Journal_, and whose work had its influence on the boy's future tales. Smythe's novels were full of stirring adventures, and many lads of that day, besides the aspiring novelist, were much impressed by them, and can even now recall incidents in them read so long ago as 1868! He had applied for work to Mr Henderson, the Scotch editor of _Young Folks_, and to the acceptance of this application the world owes _Treasure Island_ and the charming stories which followed it. The editor of _Young Folks_, who offered to take a story from him, showed him a treasure-hunting tale by Mr Peace, and asked him to give him something on the same lines. The result was _The Sea Cook_, which appeared in the paper in the autumn of 1881, and was not very highly paid for. It was written under the nom-de-plume of Captain North to give the idea the author was a sailor; it was not given a very important place in the paper and it had no very marked success as a serial. It was, with very little alteration, published by Messrs Cassell & Co. in 1883, under the name of _Treasure Island_, and it had an instant and well-deserved success. It is an excellent book for boys, full of stirring adventure, in the old-time fashion of fifty years ago, but it is much more; it is a book that grown-up folk, whose taste is still fresh enough to enjoy a good tale of the sea, delight in as heartily as the juniors. It was written while the Stevenson family were staying for a time at Braemar, and Mr Thomas Stevenson gave his son valuable help in it from his own experiences at sea while on his cruises of inspection round the coasts. _The Black Arrow_ also appeared in _Young Folks_ during 1883 as by Captain North; it is said to have been very successful as a serial, but it has not been a great favourite in book form, and is one of the least interesting of his stories. _Kidnapped_ came out in 1886 in the same paper and was the first to be signed as by Robert Louis Stevenson. In its serial form it was not highly paid for but it had, when Messrs Cassell & Co. published it as a book, a large and an immediate success. It forms the first instalment of the delightful experiences of David Balfour, that somewhat pawky young Scot who, from the moment he leaves 'The Hawes Inn' at Queensferry and embarks on his adventures with Alan Breck and other strange worthies in Appin and elsewhere till we finally bid him good-bye on the last page of _Catriona_, never fails at odd times and places to remind one of Mr Stevenson himself at David's age and of what he might have been and done had David Balfour's fate been his in those early days of plot and turmoil in which his part is played. _Catriona_, which is a continuation of _Kidnapped_, at first appeared in _Atalanta_, and was published in book form by Messrs Cassell & Co. in 1893. In the recent edition of 1898 both volumes are brought out as _The History of David Balfour_, and are beautifully illustrated. _Catriona_ is a charming book, full of life and action, and the breezy, outdoor existence, in the picturing of which its author excels. The Edinburgh of the last half of the eighteenth century, with its quaint closes, and quainter manners, is admirably portrayed, and the old lady with whom Catriona lives, and Lord Prestongrange and his daughters, are very clever pictures from a bygone day. Indeed, Miss Grant is one of the best drawn women in all Mr Stevenson's books; she has life and reality in a greater degree than most of his female characters. She is true to feminine human nature in any age, and as she makes eyes at David Balfour from under her plumed hat, and flirts with him across the narrow close, she is very woman, and alive enough to be some later day judge's daughter of modern Edinburgh, coquetting with Mr Stevenson himself, while she playfully adjusts her becoming head-gear, and lets her long feathers droop to the best advantage. She and the two Kirsties in the unfinished _Weir of Hermiston_ stand out alone among all the heroines in Mr Stevenson's books as real breathing, living women. They are natural, they are possible, they have life and interest; all the rest are more or less lay figures put in because a heroine is necessary--the more's the pity evidently from the author's point of view!--and drawn somewhat perfunctorily by their creator, with but a limited knowledge of the virtues, the faults, the failings, and, above all, the 'little ways,' which go to make up the ordinary woman. The women are undoubtedly a weakness in the author's work. It looks as if he had known intimately only exceptional women,--who, possibly, had left behind them, before he knew them well, most of a young girl's faults and follies, and some of her attractions also,--and had never found other women worth studying deeply, so that the girls in his books do not read _real_ enough to interest one greatly, and it is almost a relief to take up _Treasure Island_, _The Wrecker_, or _The Ebb Tide_, in which there is very little about them. Lady Violet Greville, in a recent article, expresses much the same opinion. She says, 'The late Robert Louis Stevenson had no opinion of women writers, he said they were incapable of grasping the essential facts of life. He was a great master of style, but I doubt if he had much knowledge of feminine character'--a dictum in which many women will agree with her. She goes on to say that there is some truth in what he says of women writers, because women and men regard as essential quite different facts in life; and she explains it by saying that it is the difference of personality and of point of view. Certainly Mr Stevenson's point of view in regard to his heroines is not a satisfying one to most women. Many men have drawn excellent female characters, just as a few women have given us life-like heroes. These exceptions, one imagines, must have been to some extent better able to appreciate the other sex thoroughly than most writers; but it strikes one as odd that Mr Stevenson, who had in himself so much of gentleness and of the essentially feminine, should have so continually failed to give a living interest to his heroines. Possibly had he lived longer, and had the maturing of his powers, so evident in _Weir of Hermiston_, been accompanied by a measure of improved health, the women of his later books might all have been as powerful creations as the two Kirsties promised to be. His heroes are all that heart can desire, manly, brave, and natural; his villains make villainy interesting; so it may be forgiven him that scarcely one of his feminine characters lives in the reader's memory. One of the most widely known of his books is that curious story, published in 1886, called _The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, the popularity of which, especially in America, was immense. It deals with man's dual nature, and while Dr Jekyll embodies the good side of it, Mr Hyde, with whom he is compelled continually to exchange bodies, as well as souls, is the evil side, and commits crimes so atrocious, that the miserable doctor is well-nigh driven to despair. It is a powerful subject, powerfully treated, and contains in its small compass more moral teaching than a hundred sermons. It has, particularly in America, been used by many clergymen as the foundation of their homilies. _The Master of Ballantrae_, a weird and striking tale of the times of 'the forty-five,' is extraordinarily graphic both in its descriptions of places and of people. The gloomy house of Durrisdeer, with its stately panelled hall, the fine grounds so carefully laid out, the thick shrubberies, the spot where the duel was fought on the hard, frozen ground by the light of the flickering candles in the tall silver candlesticks, the wave-beaten point where the smuggling luggers land goods and passengers, and finally the awful journey through the uncleared woods of America, make a fit setting, in our memories, for the splendidly drawn pictures of the three Duries, the old father, the unappreciated Henry, the mocking master, their faithful land-steward, Mackellar, and the more shadowy personalities of the Frenchman, the lady, and the children. The tale is one of unrelieved horror, but it is a masterpiece nevertheless, and it has had a very large sale. With his wife Mr Stevenson in _More New Arabian Nights_ and _The Dynamiter_ did some work of considerable interest, and with his stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, he wrote that quaint tale, _The Wrong Box_. In collaboration also with Mr Lloyd Osbourne he wrote _The Wrecker_ and _The Ebb Tide_. _The Wrecker_ is a wild and interesting story which had a large success. It originally appeared in _Scribner's Magazine_ from August 1891 to July 1892, and was republished in book form by Messrs Cassell & Co. The scene is constantly changing in it, and the hero visits Edinburgh, stays in the students' quarter in Paris, personally conducts speculative picnics at San Francisco, distinguishes himself at the wreck on the lonely reef in mid-ocean, and finally, after appearing in England and Fontainbleau, tells his wonderful story to a friendly trader in the south seas. There is plenty of life and of action in the tale, and there are also some delightful descriptions of the Pacific and of the wonderful glamour lagoons and palm trees throw over the spirit of the man who learns to know and to love the beautiful South Sea islands. _The Ebb Tide_, originally published in Mr Jerome K. Jerome's magazine _To-day_ from November 1893 to February 1894, was republished in book form by Mr W. Heinemann in 1894. Like _Treasure Island_ it is a tale without a heroine, almost, indeed, without the mention of a woman except Attwater's statuesque native servant and the shadowy personalities of Herrick's mother and fiancée in London, and Captain Davis's wife and his little girl, who died before she got the doll he had so carefully bought for her, and the memory of whom is the one soft spot in his dark soul. They are merely mentioned, however, and take no actual part in the story. It is not a pleasant tale, everyone in it is more or less bad; more by preference rather than less!--and for no one in it can one feel the slightest sympathy. There are villains and villains in fiction, and for some of them, for instance, Bret Harte's Jack Hamlin, or even the Master himself in _The Master of Ballantrae_, one can feel a sincere affection or at least have a grudging sort of admiration, but it is not possible to even faintly like or hesitatingly pity a cowardly Robert Herrick, whose self-pity is so strong, and who from first to last is, as his creator intended him to be, a thorough inefficient. Half-hearted in his wickedness, self-saving in his repentance, he somehow fails to interest one; and even his lower-class associates, the horrible Huish and the American captain, are almost less detestable. Huish is quite diabolical, but he, at least, has the courage of his iniquities. Attwater is not attractive either as villain or as religious enthusiast, but he is a fairly possible character and at least a degree less unpleasant than the American captain after his conversion. Captain Davis's effort to save Herrick's soul, given in the last paragraph of the book, is disagreeably profane in its familiarity with things sacred. Altogether it is not an attractive book, although it is an undoubtedly clever one; it has some redeeming features in the really lovely descriptions of the island and the lagoon; and the appearance of the divers in full working costume remind one of Mr Stevenson's own early experience in a diver's dress. Without collaboration Mr Stevenson wrote the three pretty little tales of South Sea life reprinted, as _Island Nights' Entertainments_, in book form about 1893. _The Beach of Falésa_ was published in _The Illustrated London News_ from July 2nd to August 6th, 1892. _The Bottle Imp_ appeared in _Black and White_ from March 28th to April 4th, 1891, and _The Isle of Voices_ was in _The National Observer_ between 4th and 25th February of 1893. They are charming stories, rich in local colour, and in all of them one sees that Mr Stevenson's quick eye for the essential in life has shown to him that among these simple islanders are to be found just the same elements of romance as among more highly civilised peoples, the same motives make and influence character there as elsewhere. So in Wiltshire and his relations with the islanders, in the curious stories of _The Bottle Imp_ and _The Isle of Voices_, we are interested in a new set of people in fresh surroundings, and can in a large measure sympathise with the pleasure that the Samoans had in reading these tales of island life in their own tongue. _The Bottle Imp_ was the first story ever read by the Samoans in their native language, and it raised their affection for 'Tusitala, the Teller of Stories' to positive enthusiasm. _St Ives_ is a bright story of adventure which Mr Stevenson had almost completed, and which Mr Quiller Couch was enabled very skilfully to finish with the assistance of the author's step-daughter, Mrs Strong, who had, besides being its amanuensis, helped Mr Stevenson with this story and been much in his confidence regarding it. It appeared first in _The Windsor Magazine_ where it was received with favour. It is the history of a French prisoner in Edinburgh Castle during the wars of the great Napoleon. He makes, like the other prisoners, little carved ornaments for sale, and Flora, the heroine, has so touched him while buying these that he falls in love with her and presents her with a carved lion. She returns his sentiment of admiration, and after his escape she and her brother, a natural gentlemanly lad, hide Mr St Ives in the henhouse at Swanston Cottage where they live with a stern old aunt. The aunt is a well-drawn type of old-fashioned Scotchwoman, infinitely more natural and more interesting than the niece. In Edinburgh and round Mr Stevenson's own country home Swanston, the interest at first largely centres, and the writer gives a very graphic description of the home garden and the cottage and its outhouses, 'Marvellous places though handy to home.' One imagines the tales of John Todd the shepherd must have helped much in his splendid description of the escape into England with the drovers by the solitary drove roads, at one point of which the escaping prisoner has the honour of meeting and conversing with 'The Shirra,' so well loved on Tweed side and elsewhere. After many and marvellous adventures, Mr St Ives returns a free and pardoned man to sue, not in vain, for the hand of Flora. Last, but, if one may judge by its powerful beginning, which is, alas! all that the master-hand had left of it, certainly best of Mr Stevenson's work is _Weir of Hermiston_. In the few perfectly finished chapters there is a fulness of power and a perfection of style that promised great things. As one read the description of the fierce old judge, his gentle artistic son, the cunning dandified friend, the two Kirsties, and the four black Elliot brothers, one felt that here indeed was congenial matter; and that in the tragedy of fierce human passion about to be played out amid wild moorland surroundings, Mr Stevenson would rise to a greater perfection and a nobler success than he had yet attained to.... It was not to be, the busy brain stopped instantaneously, the pen that had worked so happily all the morning was laid by for ever; and the world is infinitely the poorer for the sudden catastrophe of that sad December evening which left the home at Vailima desolate. * * * * * The beautiful _Edinburgh Edition_ of Mr Stevenson's works--which his friends Mr Colvin and Mr Baxter have been seeing through the press--is almost completed; one, or at most, two volumes only being now unpublished. It consists of an edition of 1035 copies, and includes the plays and everything of interest that he has written, and it will number twenty-seven or perhaps twenty-eight volumes. While this book has been passing through the press, volume twenty-seventh has been issued. It contains _St Ives_, and practically completes the edition; but Mr Stevenson's widow and Mr Sydney Colvin, who are acting as his executor and his editor, have gratuitously given to the subscribers to this _Edinburgh Edition_ a twenty-eighth volume, consisting of various odds and ends not hitherto made public. Of this, 'A New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses' and 'The Thermal Influence of Forests,' recall the period of his engineering and scientific training; and the interesting facsimile reproductions of the quaint 'Moral Emblems,' written by him at Davos in 1880 and 1882, and printed with illustrations on a toy printing press by the then very youthful Mr Lloyd Osbourne, are yet another proof that even in his time of acute invalidism he was busily and cheerily employed. CHAPTER XI HIS LIFE IN SAMOA 'Sometimes I am hopeful as the spring, And up my fluttering heart is borne aloft As high and gladsome as the lark at sunrise, And then as though some fowler's shaft had pierced it It comes plumb down in such a dead, dead fall.' --FROM _Philip Van Artevelde_. Mr Thomas Stevenson died early in May 1887, having lived long enough to see his son's fame as an author firmly established. Not very long afterwards Mrs Thomas Stevenson joined her son and his wife and with them went to America, and on that yachting tour among the South Sea islands, which finally resulted in the purchase, by Robert Louis, of the little property on the slope of the Vaea mountain, above the town of Apia, in Samoa, which he called by the musical name of Vailima, and where, in 1890, he finally made his home. His mother returned to Scotland for some months in 1889, arriving in the June of that year and remaining till the October of 1890, when she joined her son and his wife in their Samoan home. In 1893 she again visited Edinburgh to see her relatives there, and to arrange for the breaking up of the home at 17 Heriot Row, the sale of the house and of such things as she did not care to keep or to take with her to that new home which she also intended to make her headquarters. She remained on this occasion almost a year, and left for London, en route for Samoa, on the 5th of March 1894, promising her relatives and her friends, who so greatly grudged her to her son and his household, that she would pay a visit to Scotland once every five years. Alas! in less than one year her son had followed his father into the Life Eternal, and she was left that most desolate of all mourners 'a widow and childless.' She remained for a little time with her daughter-in-law and the sorrow-stricken Vailima household, and on 1st June 1895 she arrived in Edinburgh to make her home with her sister, Miss Balfour, as that sister so touchingly expresses it, 'a desolate woman.' Much was left to her in the love of relatives and friends, and in her own bright spirit, which, while it recalled the happiness of the past, never repined at the emptiness of the present; but so much of her heart lay buried in her two graves that one dared not murmur, nay, one could hardly fail to rejoice for her, when, early in May 1897, she too passed into her rest, most deeply mourned by all who had so dearly loved her, and not least by the little children who had held so warm a place in her affections, and whose spontaneous offering of flowers so touched and comforted the sad hearts of her sorrowing relatives. In his mother's letters to her sister and to other members of her family--so often kindly read to friends--one had almost as graphic an account of Mr Stevenson's Samoan home as in the delightful volume of _Vailima Letters_ itself. Gifted also with a fluent pen and a keen interest in the details which make up life, the mother like the son wrote charmingly; and one laughed, as one does in _The Vailima Letters_, over such misfortunes as the raid of the little pigs among the young corn; the more or less serious peccadilloes of the childlike Samoan servants; and that crowning catastrophe, so comically described by Mr Stevenson, when the carpenter's horse put its foot into a nest of fourteen eggs, and 'made an omelette of all their hopes'! Nothing could have, been more delightful or more amusing than that unconventional sunny life to people who like the Stevensons were perfectly happy among themselves, and, in spite of the often serious anxieties and worries incident on their settling in the new home, absolutely contented with their surroundings. The out-of-door existence, the free, untrammelled life, was dear to all of them, and especially good for Mr Stevenson; and far from the hurry and bustle of towns they found, under the unclouded blue of the Samoan sky, the rest and the peace their souls had longed for. The climate worked wonders for Mr Stevenson, and it seemed hardly possible to believe that the pale shadow of the Bournemouth days was the active owner of Vailima, who himself worked untiringly in clearing the scrub, and making the rank, tropical bush give place to the ordered beauties of civilisation. Not only he but his wife cheerfully took a turn in weeding, and, hot, tired, and with skins blistered by the poisonous plants with which war had to be waged by hand, they themselves did as much as, if not more than, their Samoan assistants to eradicate the noxious growths and make the precious blades of grass spring up in their place. Yet glad as they were to welcome the grass, Mr Stevenson, as he pulled the weeds up, hated to cause their death, and felt that they were victims in the great war of life against life of which the world is full. Existence at Vailima was simple and patriarchal in the extreme. The Samoans, who found in its owner so kind and so staunch a friend, had the warm hearts, the natural good qualities of children, but they had some of the vices of untrained children also, and petty thefts and tiresome acts of disobedience, gave their master and mistress abundant trouble, and often necessitated a species of impromptu court of justice, in which Mr Stevenson distributed reproofs and meted out punishments to the offenders in the midst of a full gathering of the domestic staff, both indoor and out, who all looked up to him much as one fancies the desert herdsmen did to Abraham, or as in later days the Highland clansmen feared and yet worshipped their chief, whose word was law. His wife's ready wit on at least one occasion showed itself by utilising the native superstition to bring home the enormity of the offence to the possible stealer of a young pig. The fear of an 'Aitu,' or wicked woman-spirit of the woods, and the general dread of devils, has far more effect on the Samoan conscience than more civilised methods of warning and reproof. So when Mrs Stevenson, by a clever imitation of native conjuring, made Lafaele believe that 'her devil,' or divining spirit, would tell her where the missing pig was, it is probable that Lafaele, even if innocent himself, shared the feast with his friends with trembling. The master and mistress had the kindest interest in all their native servants, and it is a quaint thing to read of the great writer, for whose books publishers and public impatiently waited, not only giving Mr Strong's little boy, Austin, history lessons, but spending hours over teaching Henry, the Samoan chief, who was his native overseer. Very strange, too, it is to realise that he carried his interest in missions and missionaries to so practical a point as for a time at least to teach Sunday school himself. His stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, shared to the full his interest in these things, and both of them must have been very comforting to the missionaries in Samoa, one of whom especially, Mr Clark, was so valued a friend of the whole Vailima household. The Roman Catholic priests, many of whom are doing devoted work in the islands, were also welcome visitors at Vailima. Never bound by creeds or forms, Mr Stevenson had a thoroughly practical religion, calculated to do infinitely more good in the world than all the theological disputes and hair splittings that ever were penned in ponderous volumes or thundered solemnly from orthodox pulpits. Of his political work in Samoa, his earnestness for the good government of its people, his anxiety that they should have a just control and a due freedom, it is unnecessary to speak fully here, as his letters in the home press at the time and the volume _Footnotes to History_ brought the knowledge of his views and actions within reach of all. Nothing could have been more unselfish than the attitude of the writer, to whom politics were abhorrent, who, nevertheless, from sheer humanity entered, at some personal risk, into the petty struggle with excellent results for the Samoans. And certainly nothing more courageous can be imagined than the man, whose tender heart winced at the sight of suffering and bloodshed, going down into the hospitals during the brief war, and himself helping to tend and comfort the wounded and the dying. In his interest in native affairs he had, as in all else that made up life for him, the thorough sympathy of his wife, and also of the other members of his most united household. It was a very happy party in spite of some misfortunes and anxieties, occasional visits of the influenza, and the dread of ruin from rain or hurricane; and after their first difficulties as to house-building were over, it was to a very spacious and pleasant house that they welcomed the elder Mrs Stevenson when she returned to Samoa in 1893. The scrub still, however, required much clearing, and we find in _The Vailima Letters_ Mr Stevenson dividing his day into so many hours of literary work and so many hours of weeding! The day began early, and Mr Stevenson, after the first breakfast, did his literary work, until the sound of a conch summoned the family to a lunch, or second breakfast, about eleven o'clock. After this there was rest and music till four, and then outdoor work or play, lawn-tennis being a very favourite pastime, and in the evening they had more music, and a game at cards. It was a simple, natural life, and one that made far more for health, mental and physical, to those whose constitutions suited the climate, than the bustle and the clamour of cities. Visitors, too, often came up the hill to Vailima, sometimes the residents in Apia, sometimes home friends or distinguished strangers, who were glad to visit the much-loved author in his distant retreat, and to all was given the same cordial welcome, to all there remains the memory of delightful hours in the company of those who knew so well how to make time pass bewitchingly. The household by this time consisted of Mr Stevenson, his wife, his mother, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, his sister, Mrs Strong, who acted as her stepfather's amanuensis, her little boy, Austin, who went to school in California in 1892, and Mr Graham Balfour, a cousin of Mr Stevenson's. Until he left for school, Mr Stevenson gave Austin his lessons, and, as his uncle Lloyd had done, the boy considered the teacher only a larger playfellow. A very pretty picture of the home life is given in a note-book of Mrs Thomas Stevenson's, in which she describes a birthday feast in her honour, at which little Austin Strong recited some verses made for the occasion by her son. Very amusing the verses are, and in them the small scholar repeats with pride what strides in knowledge he had made under the able tuition of his step-grandfather. It is not a little comic to think that Mr Stevenson had at this time a well-grown step-grandchild, and had, indeed, held the honourable and venerable position of a step-grandparent shortly after he was thirty. Very amusing features of the letters that Mrs Thomas Stevenson sent home were the funny illustrations of daily life enclosed in them, and which were drawn by a clever pencil in the household. Like the old plays in the Leith Walk shop the youthful Louis once so frequently visited, they were _A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured_. Sometimes they were mere outlines of domestic processions, sometimes they were gay with paint in shades of brown and green and blue. In them all the members of the family were represented, and now and then there appeared the dusky semblance of a Samoan domestic Faauma, 'the bronze candlestick,' or Lafaele, the amiable and the willing. As one recalls them one sees again a verandah, with long chairs and lazy loungers, Mr Stevenson pretending to play his flageolet, but too comfortable actually to begin; the rest in attitudes more or less suggestive of that warmth and satisfaction which we in colder climes can only dream of; or in another a few bold strokes pictured the ladies of the family on household cares intent, domestic service of the humblest, cooking, dusting, bed-making, and all the trivial daily doings that were so mirthfully treated both by pen and pencil. Mr Stevenson and his wife took a keen interest in their garden, which stood so high above sea-level, that they could have the pleasure of trying to grow in it some British flowers, fruits, and vegetables, as well as those native to the tropics. This endeavour to naturalise the products of the old home in the new one was a great pleasure to Mrs Stevenson, and one fully shared by her husband, who was so often, in spite of his delight in the soft airs, the blue skies, heart-sick for the cold grey ones of the old country, and who was reminded on a fresh wet morning after a storm, of the West Highlands, near Callander, and 'The smell of bog, myrtle and peat,' by the rain dashing on the roof, and trickling down the window panes, of far-off misty Scotland, where 'On the moors the whaups are calling.' The Samoan days were very full of work, and much was done, and still more was planned in them by Mr Stevenson's busy brain and untiring activity. Here was written _Catriona_, _The Master of Ballantrae_, a part of those annals of the Stevenson family which he hoped to give to the public, _The Beach of Falésa_, _The Bottle Imp_, and _The Isle of Voices_; and with Mr Lloyd Osbourne was completed _The Ebb Tide_ and _The Wrecker_, the ideas for which had occurred to them when at sea. _Father Damien_, _An Open letter_, had been already written, but here was composed _A Footnote to History_, and both show to perfection their writer's interest in suffering humanity. Here, saddest of all, were planned many works never to be accomplished--among them that powerful fragment _Weir of Hermiston_ and _St Ives_--the latter finished all but the last portion, which Mrs Strong, who had helped much with this story, could supply to Mr Quiller Couch, so that he was enabled to complete it. Mr Stevenson, like his father, found his relaxation in a change of work, so to this period also belong the fugitive verses collected under the title, _Songs of Travel_, published after his death. In spite of the apparent improvement in his health, Mr Stevenson had had, especially when for a short time at Sydney and Honolulu, serious returns of illness, and after one attack of influenza, the old foe hemorrhage briefly reappeared. Not yet, however, would he own himself beaten, and in spite of some anxiety on the part of his doctors, he assured his friends he was very well. His friends' fears were not so easily silenced. In the last year of his life his bright mood varied, and his letters often caused grave anxiety to those at home. He had times of despondency and of undue distress as to his monetary future and his literary success, which were scarcely justified by the facts. Although always gentle and gay with his own family circle, the little strain of worry showed itself repeatedly in his correspondence with his friends and caused them a keen foreboding of evil, so unlike was it to the old, sunny, cheery spirit with which he had fought bad health, and gained for himself so high a place in the world of letters and so warm a niche in the heart of his public. CHAPTER XII HIS DEATH 'Gone to thy rest--no doubt, no fear, no strife; Men whispering call it death--God calls it life.' ROBERT RICHARDSON. As the months of 1894 slipped away, the unusual despondency and worry, noticeable so especially in Mr Stevenson's correspondence, increased, while it seemed that his literary work, which had hitherto been his greatest pleasure, had now become a strain and a weariness to him. By fits and starts the joy of working still visited him it is true. _Weir of Hermiston_ he felt to be his very best--St Ives now and then went gaily. But the dark moods were only dormant not dead, and anxiety for the future of his family, and a longing to be able to cease working for daily bread, grew upon him greatly. That, for a time after the settlement in Samoa, monetary anxieties may have been somewhat pressing, is not only possible, but probable. No moving of 'the household gods,' however small, or for however short a distance, can be managed without considerable cost and trouble, and the expense invariably exceeds the estimate made, for unforeseen outlays and difficulties crop up that entail added expenditure with its consequent anxiety. If this is so in ordinary cases, how much more would it be so when the pulling up of stakes meant a move to the antipodes and the change of home included the purchase of uncleared land in Samoa, the building of a house and the laying out of an estate, which its owner felt certain could not repay the money spent upon it for at least five or six years. All great changes and large undertakings are fraught with difficulty, and the Vailima venture was no exception to the rule. The Samoan home meant much pleasure to its owner, but it entailed keen anxiety also. Nevertheless the mental worry of those later months was by no means justified by the facts. Mr Stevenson's literary work had long been paid according to its merits, so that each book brought him in a satisfactory sum; while the future of the _Edinburgh Edition_ of his works gave cause for sincere satisfaction to the friends who were seeing it through the press, and whose letters gave assurance of its success. The cloud was therefore due to internal, not to external causes, and in the state of Mr Stevenson's health was, alas! to be found the explanation of this sad change from the gay bravery with which he had hitherto faced the world. Suspected by his doctors, feared by his friends, but unknown to himself, for at this time he constantly wrote of his improved health, a new development in his illness was nearing its fatal crisis, and these symptoms of mental distress and irritation were only the foreshadowing of the end. In these last days his life had many pleasures; he was enjoying the Samoan climate and the free unconventional existence to the full; he was surrounded by all his loved home circle; and in the October of 1894, two months before his death, the Samoan chiefs, in whose imprisonment he had proved his friendship to them, gave him a tribute of their love and gratitude which was peculiarly pleasing and valuable to him. An account of this and of the very beautiful speech he made in return appeared in the home papers at the time, and are to be found in an appendix to _The Vailima Letters_. The chiefs, who knew how much store he set by road-making as a civilising element in Samoa, as elsewhere, themselves went to him and offered their services to make a road to join his property to the main highway. They, as well as their young men, worked at it with picks and spades, and when it was finished they presented it to their beloved 'Tusitala' as an abiding remembrance of their grateful regard. It was a noble tribute to a noble nature, and one the value of which can only be fully appreciated by those who realise what the personal manual labour meant to these proud island chiefs so wholly unaccustomed to exertion of any kind, and so imbued with the idea that all labour was derogatory to their dignity. Their loving service touched Mr Stevenson and all his family very deeply, and this bright memory gladdened the last weeks of his life, and must be a very pleasant one to recall for those of the Vailima household who still survive him. At the celebration of his birthday on 13th November he had received also a tribute of kindly appreciation from the European and American residents in Apia. On the occasion of a 'Thanksgiving' feast in that same November, he made a speech, in which he said he had always liked _that_ day, for he felt that he had had so much for which to be thankful. He especially mentioned the pleasure he had in his mother being with him, and said that to America--where he had married his wife--he owed the chief blessing of his life. In spite of his assurances that he was very well, he was exceedingly thin and wasted in those days, and later Samoan photographs show a melancholy change in him. On the morning of the 3rd December, however, he felt particularly well and wrote for several hours. It is very pleasant to know, from _A Letter to Mr Stevenson's Friends_, sent to the _Times_ after his stepfather's death by Mr Lloyd Osbourne as an acknowledgment of the vast amount of sympathy expressed, and so impossible to be otherwise answered, that he had enjoyed his work on _Weir of Hermiston_, and felt all the buoyancy of successful effort on that last morning of his life. Letters for the mail were due to be written in the afternoon, and he spent his time penning long and kindly greetings to absent friends. 'At sunset,' Mr Osbourne says, 'he came downstairs, rallied his wife about the forebodings she could not shake off; talked of a lecturing tour in America he was eager to make, "as he was so well," and played a game of cards with her to drive away her melancholy.' By-and-bye he said that he was hungry, and proposed a little feast, for which he produced a bottle of old Burgundy, and went to help her to prepare a salad, talking gaily all the while. As they were on the verandah, he suddenly cried out, 'What is that?' put his hands to his head, and asked, 'Do I look strange?' In a moment he had fallen down beside her. His wife called for help, and she and his body-servant Sosima carried him into the great hall, where he had known so much happiness, and placed him in the old arm-chair which had been his grandfather's. Medical aid was quickly obtained, but he had already lost consciousness, and, in spite of every effort, he never regained it. His mother's letters written after his death touchingly describe how, although called at once, she yet reached the hall too late to find him conscious, as by that time he was leaning back in his chair breathing heavily. The family, with an agony of grief, quickly realised that there was no hope. A little bed was brought, and he was placed on it in the middle of the hall, and there, with those he loved close about him, and his faithful Samoan servants seated round him on the floor, he quietly passed away. The deep breaths came at ever longer intervals, the sleep of unconsciousness was never broken, and as his loved and valued friend, the Reverend Mr Clark, prayed beside him, his spirit took its flight into eternity. He died as he had wished, quickly and well-nigh painlessly. He had known so much of lingering illness, he dreaded _that_ greatly, but of death he had no fear, and peacefully and suddenly he passed into the Unseen. His death took place at a little past eight o'clock on the evening of the 3rd December at the early age of forty-four. When the news was cabled to England, it was received by many people with grave doubts. His relatives and friends dreaded its truth, but could not at first believe it. Many exaggerated newspaper reports, copied especially from the more sensational American press, had from time to time caused needless distress and anxiety to those who loved him, so that it was possible to allow oneself the shadow of a hope, particularly as his uncle, Dr George W. Balfour, who had at first received the news somewhat vaguely worded, doubted it also, and wrote to the _Scotsman_ expressing his unbelief. Too soon, unfortunately, all such hopes were proved false, and eager eyes scanning the morning papers on the 23d December 1894 read this sad corroboration of the news that had been posted in London on the 17th of the same month. 'SAN FRANCISCO (no date). BALFOUR, 17 Walker Street, Edinburgh. LOUIS died suddenly third. Tell friends. STEVENSON.' The telegram was from his mother in answer to one from his uncle asking for true particulars as to the earlier report, and on its receipt and publication relatives and friends knew that hope was dead, and there remained only a sad waiting for further particulars. These by-and-bye came in letters from his mother to her relatives and friends in Scotland, in letters to his literary friends and in that 'Letter' to the _Times_ from his friend and stepson Mr Lloyd Osbourne to the vast mass of acquaintances and readers who all claimed him as a loved personal friend. From all these sources the manner of his death, and the touching final tragedy of his pathetic funeral became known to the world of English-speaking people everywhere, who each and all mourned individually for the loved and lost author as one near and dear in their personal regard. He had always expressed a wish to be buried on the Vaea mountain which rises immediately behind Vailima, and the summit of which commands a wide prospect of land and sea and sky. In the spring of 1894, he had suggested the making of a road, and the planting of the spot which he had chosen for his resting-place, but, as the idea was painful to his family, nothing was done in the matter. As soon as he had passed away, those whom he loved hastened to give effect to his wishes, and Mr Lloyd Osbourne planned and courageously carried out in an incredibly short time the forming of a road which made it possible to carry him to the summit of Vaea, and lay him on the spot that he had chosen. Forty Samoans with knives and axes cut a path up the mountain side, and Mr Lloyd Osbourne, with a few specially chosen dependents, dug the grave in which he was to lie. Meantime, his body covered with the Union Jack rested in the Samoan home that he had loved so well, surrounded by the furniture of the old Scotch home around which his childish feet had played, and on which his father, and possibly his father's fathers, had daily looked, for his mother had taken with her to Vailima all that had most of memory and of family tradition from the house in Heriot Row. His family lingered in the dear presence, the heartbroken Samoans knelt and kissed his hands, and at the request of his favourite servant, Sosima, who was a Romanist, the solemn and touching prayers of the Church of Rome were, with a certain fitness, repeated over the man who had been the champion of Father Damien, and among whose friends were numbered the earnest and faithful Roman Catholic missionary priests of the South Sea Islands. On his coffin was laid the 'Red Ensign' that had floated from his mast on many a cruise, and he was carried up the steep path by those who loved him. Europeans as well as Samoans toiled up that difficult ascent to place him with reverent hands in that grave which was so fitting a resting-place for the man who had loved, above all things, the freedom of the open air, the glory of the sea and the sky, the sighing of God's winds among the trees, and the silent companionship of the stars. * * * * * Life for those who remained in the Samoan home became an impossible thing without him, and so Mrs Stevenson, with her son and daughter, by-and-bye left Vailima, and the home of so much happiness is now falling into ruin, the cleared ground lapsing back to the bush. And perhaps it is best so; without him Vailima is like a body without a soul; and he who so dearly loved nature would hardly have regretted that the place he loved should return to the mother heart of the earth and become once more a solitude--a green place of birds and trees. CHAPTER XIII HIS LIFE-WORK 'Art's life, and when we live we suffer and toil.' --MRS BARRETT BROWNING. 'A healthful hunger for the great idea, The beauty and the blessedness of life.' --JEAN INGELOW. It is perhaps impossible for those who knew Mr Stevenson and came under the influence of the rare attraction of his charming personality, to assign to him and to his work a suitable place in the world of letters. Probably it is still too early for anyone to say what rank will in the future be held by the man who in his life-time assuredly stood among the masters of his craft. Fame, while he lived, was his, and, better than fame, such love as is seldom given by the public to the writer whose books delight it. Deservedly popular as the books are, the man was still more popular; and the personality that to his friends was so unique and so delightful, made friends of his readers also. He was so frank, so human, in his relations with his public. His dedications not only gave pleasure to the members of his family, or to the many friends to whom he wrote them, they, as it were, took his readers into his confidence also, and let them share in the warmth of his heart. His prefaces are delightfully autobiographical, and are valuable in proportion to the glimpses they give of one of the most amiable and most widely sympathetic natures imaginable. His methods of work were singularly conscientious; even in the days when, as a truant lad, he carried in his pocket one book to read, and another to write in, he was slowly perfecting that style which was to give to his literary work a distinction all its own. He spared himself no trouble in ensuring the accuracy of all that he wrote. It may be interesting to recall in this connection the letters written by two of his readers to the _Scotsman_ expressing some doubt as to there having been shops in Princes Street at the date of his story _St Ives_--Mr Stevenson mentions shops in _St Ives_. In reply to the letters of enquiry, his uncle, Dr G. W. Balfour, wrote to the _Scotsman_ on 26th November 1897:-- 'Sir,--It may interest your correspondents "J. W. G." and "J. C. P." to know that Louis Stevenson always took care to verify his statements before making them, and that his correspondent, to whom he applied for information as to the existence of shops in Princes Street at the early date referred to, took the only legitimate means open to him of ascertaining this by consulting the directories of the date.' And, as a matter of fact, it was conclusively proved that Mr Stevenson was correct, by the name and number of at least one well-known shop, of that date, being given by another correspondent in the paper very shortly afterwards. No minute observation was too trying for Mr Stevenson, no careful research too tedious for him; no historical fact apparently too insignificant or obscure for him to verify. He was never weary of reading books dealing with the periods in which the action of his stories takes place. Costume, dialect, scenery, were all thoroughly studied, and when himself distant from the scenes of his tales, he is to be found constantly writing from Vailima to friends in London or in Edinburgh for the books and the information he required. In the period between 1745 and 1816, in which the plots of _Kidnapped_, _Catriona_, _The Master of Ballantrae_, _Weir of Hermiston_, and _St Ives_ are laid, he is especially at home, and old record rolls, books on manners and on costume, are all laboriously studied to give to his stories that accuracy and truth to life which he considered to be absolutely necessary. To such good effect did he study volumes of old Parliament House trials, that the dress of Alan Breck, in _Kidnapped_, is literally transcribed from that of a prisoner of Alan's period, whose trial he had perused. Nor did his conscientiousness stop here; he wrote and re-wrote everything, sometimes as often as five times, and no page ever left his hands which had not been elaborately pruned and polished. No wonder, therefore, that his work was welcome to his publishers, and that he was never among the complaining authors who think themselves underpaid and unappreciated by the firms with whom they deal. He gave of his best, good honest hard work, and he received in return not only money but regard and consideration; and his own verdict was that it was difficult to choose among his publishers which should have a new book, for all of them were so good to him. A pleasant state of matters that goes far to prove that, where work is conscientious and author and publisher honourable and sensible, there need be little or no friction between them. In this, as in the care which he bestowed on his work, the long and earnest apprenticeship he served to the profession of letters, he sets an example to his fellow-authors quite as impressive as that which he showed to his fellow-men in the patience with which he bore his heavy burden of bad health, and the courage with which he rose above his sufferings and looked the world in the face smiling. In an age when a realism so strong as to be unpleasant has tinged too much of latter-day fiction Mr Stevenson stood altogether apart from the school of the realists. His nature, fresh and boyish to the end, troubled itself not at all with social questions, so he dipped his pen into the wells of old romance and painted for us characters so alive with strength and with humour that they live with us as friends and comrades when the creations of the problem novelists have died out of our memories with the problems they propound and worry over. His books are bright, breezy, cheerful, rich in idealism, full of chivalry, and they have in them a glamour of genius, a power of imagination, and a spirit of purity, which makes them peculiarly valuable in an age when these things are too often conspicuous by their absence from the novel of the day. His essays are full of a quaint, delightful humour, his verses have a dainty charm, and in his tales he has given us a little picture gallery of characters and landscapes which have a fascination all their own. Like Sir Walter Scott he had to contend with the disadvantages of a delicate childhood which interfered with settled work; and yet, in both cases, one is tempted to think that that enforced early leisure was of far more ultimate benefit to the life-work than years of dutiful attendance at school and college. Like Sir Walter Scott, also, he has drawn much of his inspiration from 'Caledonia, stern and wild'; and none of her literary sons, save Burns and 'The Wizard of the North' himself, has Caledonia loved so well or mourned so deeply. Cosmopolite in culture, in breadth of view, in openness of mind, Mr Stevenson was yet before all things a Scotsman, and one to whom Scotland and his native Edinburgh were peculiarly dear. Condemned by his delicate and uncertain health to make his dwelling-place far from the grey skies and the biting east winds of his boyhood's home, these grey Scotch skies, these bitter winds, still haunt him and appear in his books with the strange charm they have for the sons and daughters of the north who, even while they revile them, love them, and in far lands long for them with a heart-hunger that no cloudless sky, no gentle zephyr, no unshadowed sunshine of the alien shore can appease.[6] In all his wanderings his heart turned fondly to the old home, to the noble profession of his fathers, and on smiling seas and amid sunny islands he never forgot the bleak coasts of Scotland, that his ancestors' hands had lighted from headland to headland, and his heart 'In dreams (beheld) the Hebrides.' A Scot of whom Edinburgh and Scotland are justly proud, he was a man whose life and faith did credit to the stern religion and the old traditions of his covenanting forefathers, and although, like so many men and women of earnest minds and broad culture in the present day, he early left behind him much of the narrowness of churches and of creeds, he held closely to 'the one thing needful,' a humble and a trusting belief in God that filled all his soul with strength and patience, and gave to him that marvellous sympathy with humanity which made him a power among men, whether they were the learned and the cultured, or simple children of nature like the Samoans, who so truly understood and loved him. The books undoubtedly are great, but the man is greater; and it is not only as a writer of no small renown that he will be revered and remembered but as a man among men whose patience and courage gave to his too short life a pathos and a value. Among his friends he was beloved in a manner quite unique, he had a peculiar place of his own in their regard. By the younger school of writers, whose work he so fully and so generously appreciated, he was regarded as a master; and one of the pleasures to be enjoyed on the publication of that _Life_, which Mr Sydney Colvin presently has in preparation, will be to learn more about his agreeable relations with his literary juniors. Of his sacred home life no outsider can speak; but it is the truest test of perfect manhood when the man who is not unknown in the great world shows himself at his best in the smaller world of home, and has a brighter and a sweeter side of his nature to display to wife and mother and close fireside circle than he has to his admiring public. Mr Stevenson never despised the trivial things of life, and the everyday courtesies, the little unselfishnesses--which are often so much more difficult to practise than the great virtues--were never forgotten all through the years in which so much of pain and of weariness might have made occasional repining, occasional forgetfulness of others, almost pardonable. Eager in his own work, untiring in his literary activity, he was equally eager to toil in the great vineyard, to do something for God and for man, to make his faith active and not passive. This was his attitude through life; he would always have 'tholed his paiks' that the poor might 'enjoy their play,' the imprisoned go free; and the position which he took up in regard to Samoan troubles was a practical proof that he was, as he called himself, 'a ready soldier,' willing to spend and be spent for others. Of one whose position was that of 'the ready soldier,' no more fitting concluding words can be said than those in his mother's note-book, and written to her by the wife of the Rev. Mr Clark, his Samoan friend, in November 1895:-- ... 'So few knew your dear son's best side--his Christian character. Of course, men don't write often on that subject, and to many he was the author, and they only knew him as such. To me his lovely character was one of the wonderful things, so full of love and the desire to do good. I love to think of him.' ... That the man and his work are appreciated is amply proved by the monument already erected to his memory in San Francisco by the zeal of the American Committee, and by the enthusiastic meeting in his own Edinburgh, presided over by Lord Rosebery, in the autumn of 1896, at which Mr J. M. Barrie made an interesting and an appreciative speech; and by the equally enthusiastic gathering in Dundee in the spring of 1897. At these meetings it was proposed to receive subscriptions, and to erect a Stevenson memorial in some form to be afterwards decided on. The suggestion was largely responded to, but it is probable the response would have been even more cordial had it been determined that the memorial should take a practical rather than an ornamental form. Monuments are cold things whereby to perpetuate love and admiration; an 'arbour of Corinthian columns,' which one paper recently suggested, would have appealed to Mr Stevenson himself only as an atrocity in stone. His sole sympathy with stone was when it served the noble purpose to which his father had put it, and, as lighthouse or harbour, contributed to the service of man. If the memorial might have been too costly in the form of a small shore-light, a lifeboat seemed a thing that would have been dear to his own heart. And as, in years to come, men read of rescues by the _Robert Louis Stevenson_, on some wreck-strewn, rock-bound corner of our coasts, the memory of the man who loved the sea, and of the race who toiled to save life in its storms, would have been handed down to future generations in a fitting fashion. The memorial is to take the form of a mural monument with a medallion portrait of his head in high relief. It is to be placed in the Moray Aisle of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh, which it is thought might be a suitable 'Poets' Corner' for Scotland. If there is sufficient money, and if the necessary permission is obtained, a stone seat may also be erected on the Calton Hill at the point from which Mr Stevenson so greatly admired the view. The medallion is to be entrusted to Mr A. Saint Gaudens, an American sculptor of repute, who studied in France, and who had the great advantage of personally knowing Mr Stevenson in America in 1887 and 1888, and at that time getting him to sit for a medallion, which is considered by his widow and family to be the best likeness of him that they have seen. It is satisfactory that at last someone has been found who can do justice to the quaint, mobile face, and give to the memorial some of the living charm of the man. It is also pleasant to know that Mrs Stevenson and her family have expressed themselves perfectly satisfied with the choice of a sculptor. The San Francisco monument is in the form of a sixteenth century ship, of thirty guns, careening to the west, with golden sails full spread, and with a figure of Pallas, looking towards the setting sun, in its prow. The ship is about five feet high, and behind it, on a simple granite plinth, is engraved the famous passage from his Christmas sermon:--'To be honest, to be kind; to earn a little, to spend a little less; to keep a few friends, and these without capitulations.' On one surface of the plinth is a spigot and a cup, and underneath a drip-stone, where thirsty dogs can drink. The drinking place is assuredly a part of the monument that would have commended itself to the man who loved his canine friends and all other animals so truly. Even if a monument has about it something of the commonplace, it is well that the memory of the man and of his work should be perpetuated; but of all memorials of him, the Samoan 'Road of Gratitude' is likely to be for ever remembered as the most suitable and the most perfect. FOOTNOTE: [6] It is on record that Mr Stevenson, who always talked to a compatriot when he could, was, _à propos_ of his home in Samoa, told by a sailor with whom he was having a chat, that he 'would rather gang hame an' be hanged in auld Scotland than come an' live in this ---- hole.' No doubt, Mr Stevenson appreciated the sturdy mariner's patriotism, although it was expressed in language more forcible than polite! 
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29615	----	JAMES BOSWELL FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES _The following Volumes are now ready:_-- THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson. ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton. HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Leask. JOHN KNOX. By A. Taylor Innes. ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun. THE BALLADISTS. By John Geddie. RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless. SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson. THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden Blaikie. JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Leask. [Illustration: JAMES BOSWELL BY W KEITH LEASK FAMOUS ·SCOTS· ·SERIES· PUBLISHED BY OLIPHANT ANDERSON & FERRIER. EDINBURGH AND LONDON ] * * * * * The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr Joseph Brown, and the printing from the press of Messrs Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh. * * * * * ~To~ GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL, D.C.L.; M.A. Pembroke (Johnson's) College, Oxford; CHIEF OF JOHNSON SCHOLARS AND EDITORS; AND HIMSELF MOST "CLUBABLE" OF MEN. * * * * * PREFACE The literature of the Johnsonian period has assumed, in spite of the lexicographer's own dislike of that adjective, prodigious dimensions. After the critical labours of Malone, Murphy, Croker, J. B. Nichols, Macaulay, Carlyle, Rogers, Fitzgerald, Dr Hill and others, it may appear hazardous to venture upon such a well-ploughed field where the pitfalls are so numerous and the materials so scattered. I cannot, however, refrain from the expression of the belief that in this biography of Boswell will be found something that is new to professed students of the period, and much to the class of general readers that may lead them to reconsider the verdict at which they may have arrived from the brilliant but totally misleading essay by Lord Macaulay. At least, the writer cherishes the hope that it will materially add to the correct understanding and the enjoyment of Boswell's great work, _the Life of Johnson_. My best thanks are due to J. Pearson & Co., 5 Pall Mall Place, London, for the use of unpublished letters by Boswell and of his boyish common-place book. And if "our Boswell" could indulge an honest pride in availing himself of a dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds, as to a person of the first eminence in his department, so may I entertain the same feeling in inscribing this sketch to Dr Hill who, amid the pressure of other Johnson labours, has yet found time to revise the proof sheets of my book. W. K. L. _ABERDEEN, December 1896._ CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I EARLY DAYS--MEETS JOHNSON--1740-63 9 CHAPTER II THE CONTINENT--CORSICA--1763-66 35 CHAPTER III EDINBURGH BAR--STRATFORD JUBILEE--1766-69 54 CHAPTER IV LOVE AFFAIRS--LITERARY CLUB--1766-73 76 CHAPTER V TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES--1773 88 CHAPTER VI EDINBURGH LIFE--DEATH OF JOHNSON--1773-84 113 CHAPTER VII THE ENGLISH BAR--DEATH--1784-95 122 CHAPTER VIII IN LITERATURE 143 JAMES BOSWELL CHAPTER I EARLY DAYS--MEETS JOHNSON. 1740-1763 'Behind yon hills, where Lugar flows.'--BURNS. 'Every Scotchman,' says Sir Walter Scott, 'has a pedigree. It is a national prerogative, as inalienable as his pride and his poverty. My birth was neither distinguished nor sordid.' What, however, was but a foible with Scott was a passion in James Boswell, who has on numerous occasions obtruded his genealogical tree in such a manner as to render necessary some acquaintance with his family and lineage. The family of Boswell, or Bosville, dates from the Normans who came with William the Conqueror to Hastings. Entering Scotland in the days of the sore saint, David I., they had spread over Berwickshire and established themselves, at least in one branch, at Balmuto in Fife. A descendant of the family, Thomas Boswell, occupies in the genealogy of the biographer the position of prominence which Wat of Harden holds in the line of the novelist. He obtained a grant of the lands in Ayrshire belonging to the ancient house of Affleck of that ilk, when they had passed by forfeiture into the hands of the king. Pitcairn, in his _Collection of Criminal Trials_ is inclined to regard this ancestor as the chief minstrel in the royal train of James IV.; but, as he fell at Flodden, this may be taken as being at least not proven, nor would the position of this first literary man in the family have been quite pleasing to the pride of race so often shewn by his descendant. A Yorkshire branch of the family, with the spelling of their name as Bosville, was settled at Gunthwait in the West Riding, and its head was hailed as 'his chief' by Bozzy, whose gregarious instincts led him to trace and claim relationship in a way even more than is national. By marriage and other ties the family in Scotland was connected with the most ancient and distinguished houses in the land. The great grandfather of the biographer was the Earl of Kincardine who is mentioned by Gilbert Burnet in his _History of His Own Time_. He had married a Dutch lady, of the noble house of Sommelsdyck who had once held princely rank in Surinam. With that branch also of the name did Boswell, in later years, establish a relationship at the time of his continental tour, when at the Hague he found the head holding 'an important charge in the Republick, and is as worthy a man as lives, and has honoured me with his correspondence these twenty years.' From the Earl Boswell boasted 'the blood of Bruce in my veins,' a descent which he seizes every opportunity of making known to his readers, and to which we find him alluding in a letter of 10th May, 1786, now before us, to Mickle, the translator of the _Lusiad_, with a promise to 'tell you what I know about our common ancestor, Robert the Bruce.' When Johnson, in the autumn of 1773, visited the ancestral seat of his friend, Boswell, 'in the glow of what, I am sensible, will in a commercial age be considered as a genealogical enthusiasm,' did not forget to remind his illustrious Mentor of his relationship to the Royal Personage, George the Third, 'whose pension had given Johnson comfort and independence.' It would have required a much greater antiquarian than Johnson, who could scarcely tell the name of his own grandfather, to have traced the well-nigh twenty generations of connecting links between Bruce and the third of the Guelph dynasty on the throne. From Veronica Sommelsdyck, the wife of this royal ancestor (whose title is now merged in the earldom of Elgin), was 'introduced into our family the saint's name,' born by Boswell's own eldest daughter, and other consequences of a much graver nature were destined to ensue. 'For this marriage,' says Ramsay of Ochtertyre, 'their posterity paid dear,' for to it was due, increased no doubt as it was through the inter-marriages in close degrees between various scions of the house, the insanity which is now recognised by all students of his writings in Boswell himself, and which made its appearance in the clearest way in the case of his second daughter. His grandfather James adopted the profession of law in which he obtained some distinction, and left three children--Alexander, the father of the subject of this sketch, John, who followed the practice of medicine, and a daughter Veronica, married to Montgomerie of Lainshaw, whose daughter became the wife of her cousin Bozzy. Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, married his cousin Euphemia Erskine. In the writings of the son the father makes a considerable figure, while his mother, 'of the family of Buchan, a woman of almost unexampled piety and goodness,' as he styles her, is but a dim name in the background, as with John Stuart Mill who has written a copious autobiography, and left it to the logical instincts of his readers to infer that he had a mother. The profession of law was adopted by the father, who, after a residence abroad at Leyden where he graduated, passed as advocate at the Scottish bar in 1729, from which, after a distinguished career, he was appointed to the sheriffdom of Wigton, and ultimately raised to the bench in 1754, with the title of Lord Auchinleck. He possessed, says his son, 'all the dignified courtesy of an old baron,' of the school of Cosmo Bradwardine as we may say, and not only was he an excellent scholar, but, from the intimacy he had cultivated with the Gronovii and other _literati_ of Leyden, he was a collector of classical manuscripts and a collator of the texts and editions of Anacreon. His library was rich in curious editions of the classics, and was in some respects not excelled by any private collection in Great Britain, and the reputation of the Auchinleck library was greatly increased by the black-letter tastes and publications of his grandson. A strong Whig and active Presbyterian, he was much esteemed in public and in private life. The son had on his northern tour the pleasure to note, both at Aberdeen and at Inverness, the high regard in which the old judge was held, and to find his name and connection a very serviceable means of introduction to the travellers in their 'transit over the Caledonian hemisphere.' Like the father of Scott, who kept the whole bead-roll of cousins and relations and loved a funeral, Lord Auchinleck bequeathed to his eldest son at least one characteristic, the attention to relatives in the remotest degree of kin. On the bench, like the judges in _Redgauntlet_, Hume, Kames, and others, he affected the racy Doric; and his 'Scots strength of sarcasm, which is peculiar to a North Briton,' was on many an occasion lamented by his son who felt it, and acknowledged by Johnson on at least one famous occasion. In the _Boswelliana_ are preserved many of old Auchinleck's stories which Lord Monboddo says he could tell well with wit and gravity--stories of the circuit and bar type of Braxfield and Eskgrove, such as Scott used to tell to the wits round the fire of the Parliament House. In his younger days he had been a beau, and his affectation of red heels to his shoes and of red stockings, when brought under the notice of his son by a friend, so affected Bozzy that he could hardly sit on his chair for laughing. A great gardener and planter like others of the race of old Scottish judges he had extended, in the classic style of architecture then in fashion, the family mansion, and had, as Johnson found, 'advanced the value of his lands with great tenderness to his tenants.' Past the older residence flowed the river Lugar, here of considerable depth, and then bordered with rocks and shaded with wood--the old castle whose 'sullen dignity' was the nurse of Boswell's devotion to the feudal principles and 'the grand scheme of subordination,' of which he lets us hear so much when he touches on 'the romantick groves of my ancestors.' James Boswell, the immortal biographer of Johnson, was born in Edinburgh on October 29, 1740. The earliest fact which is known about him is one which he himself would have described as 'a whimsical or characteristical' anecdote, and which he had told to Johnson:--'Boswell in the year 1745 was a fine boy, wore a white cockade, and prayed for King James, till one of his uncles, General Cochrane, gave him a shilling on condition that he would pray for King George, which he accordingly did. So you see that Whigs of all ages are made the same way.' It may have been these early signs of perversity that led his father to be strict in dealing with him, for we cannot doubt that Boswell in the _London Magazine_ for 1781, is giving us a picture of domestic life when he writes as follows:--'I knew a father who was a violent Whig, and used to upbraid his son with being deficient in "noble sentiments of liberty," while at the same time he made this son live under his roof in such bondage, that he was not only afraid to stir from home without leave, but durst scarcely open his mouth in his father's presence.' For some time he was privately educated under the tuition of the Rev. John Dun, who was presented in 1752 to the living of Auchinleck by the judge, and finally at the High School and the University of Edinburgh. There he met with two friends with whom, to the close of his life, he was destined to have varied and close relations. One was Henry Dundas, first Lord Melville, and by "Harry the Ninth" Bozzy, in his ceaseless attempts to secure place and promotion, constantly attempted to steer, while that Pharos of Scotland, as Lord Cockburn calls him, was as constantly inclined to be diffident of the abilities, or at least the vagaries, of his suitor. The other friend was William Johnson Temple, son of a Northumberland gentleman of good family, and grandfather of the present Archbishop of Canterbury. Temple was a little older than Boswell, who for upwards of thirty-seven years maintained an uninterrupted correspondence with him. As he is the Atticus of Boswell, we insert here a detailed account of him in order to avoid isolated references and allusions in the course of the narrative. On leaving Edinburgh he entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge; after taking the usual degrees, he was presented by Lord Lisburne to the living of Mamhead in Devon, which was followed by that of St Gluvias in Cornwall. Strangely enough for one who was an intimate friend of Boswell, he was no admirer of Johnson (whose name, by a curious coincidence, was a part of his own), and a strong Whig and water-drinker, 'a bill which,' says Bozzy humorously, 'was ever one which meets with a determined resistance and opposition in my lower house.' As the friend of Gray and of Mason, he must have been possessed of some share of ability, yet over his moral character the admirers and critics of Boswell are divided. To some he appears as the true and faithful Atticus to the Cicero of his friend, the Mentor and honest adviser in all times of danger and trial. To others he seems but to have possessed, in a minor degree, all the failings of Boswell himself, and it would appear the most natural inference to believe that, had Temple been endowed with greater force of mental or moral character, the results would have been seen in many ways upon the actions of his friend. In his wife he was unfortunate, and, at one time at least, he attempted to secure a colonial chaplaincy in order to effect a separation. He was the writer of an _Essay on the Clergy; their Studies and Recreations_, 1774; _Historical and Political Memoirs_, 1777; _Abuse of Unrestrained Power_, 1778; all of which have completely passed from the memory of man. But he lives with a fair claim to fame, as the correspondent of Boswell, who calls him 'best of friends' to 'a weak distemper'd soul that swells in sudden gusts, and sinks again in calms.' A chance memorandum by Temple, on the death of Gray, displaying considerable felicity of phrase and insight, was sent by Boswell to the _London Magazine_ of March 1772, from which it was copied by Mason in his _Life of Gray_, and in an adapted form it was used by Johnson himself in his sketch of the poet's work, in his _Lives of the Poets_. The discovery of the _Letters to Temple_ is one of the happiest accidents in literature, and without them the true life of Boswell could not be written. To neither Macaulay nor Carlyle were they known for use in their famous reviews. On the death of Temple in 1796, one year after the decease of his friend, his papers passed into the possession of his son-in-law, who retired to France, where he died. Some fifty years ago, a gentleman making purchases in a shop at Boulogne, observed that the wrapper was a scrap of a letter, which formed part of a bundle bought shortly before from a travelling hawker. On investigation, the letters were found to be the correspondence of Boswell with Temple, and all doubts as to their genuineness were conclusively set at rest by their bearing the London and Devon post marks, and the franks of well known names. But the internal evidence alone, as we shall see, would be sufficient to establish their authenticity. Published in 1857 by Bentley, under the careful editorship of Mr Francis, they constitute, along with the no less happy discovery in 1854, behind an old press in Sydney, of Campbell's _Diary of a Visit to England_--though Professor Jowett was inclined to doubt the authenticity of the latter--the most valuable accession of evidence to the Johnsonian circle of interest, and they shed on Boswell and his method a light which otherwise would leave much in darkness, or, at least, but ensure a general acceptance of the harsher features in the criticism by Macaulay. From the remark by Boswell to Temple--'remember and put my letters into a book neatly; see which of us does it first,' it has been inferred that he meditated, in some sort of altered appearance, their republication. That Temple entertained the same idea on his part we know from his own words, and from the title under which Boswell suggested their issue--_Remarks on Various Authors, in a Series of Letters to James Boswell, Esq._ But that Boswell himself ever did intend the publication of his own must be pronounced, by all that know what lies behind their printed form, a moral impossibility. The first preserved letter is dated from Edinburgh, July 29, 1758. It reveals at once the historic Boswell, such as he remained to the close, the cheerful self-confidence, the gregarious instincts, the pleasing air of moralizing, and the easy flow of style. 'Some days ago I was introduced to your friend Mr Hume; he is a most discreet affable man as ever I met with, and has really a great deal of learning, a choice collection of books ... we talk a good deal of genius, fine learning, improving our style, etc., but I am afraid solid learning is much worn out. Mr Hume is, I think, a very proper person for a young man to cultivate an acquaintance with.' Then he digresses to 'my passion for Miss W----t,' of whom, he assures his friend, he is 'excessively fond, so don't be surprised if your grave, sedate, philosophic friend who used to carry it so high, and talk with such a composed indifference of the beauteous sex, should all at once commence Don Quixote for his adorable Dulcinea.' We catch sight of him, at eighteen, going on the northern circuit with his father and Lord Hailes. There, by the advice of an Edinburgh acquaintance, Love, an old actor at Drury Lane, but then a teacher of elocution in the town, he began 'an exact journal,' and on that journey it was that Hailes made Boswell aware of the fact that was to henceforward colour the entire tide of his life, the existence of Dr Johnson as a great writer in London, 'which grew up in my fancy into a kind of mysterious veneration, by figuring to myself a state of solemn elevated abstraction, in which I supposed him to live in the immense metropolis of London.' Such were the links, the advice of this obscure player to keep a journal, and the report given to the youth by the judge in their postchaise. As early as December 1758 we hear of his having 'published now and then the production of a leisure hour in the magazines,' and of his life in Edinburgh he writes, 'from nine to ten I attend the law class; from ten to eleven study at home, and from one to two attend a class on Roman Antiquities; the afternoon and evening I always spend in study. I never walk except on Saturdays.' A full allowance, surely, all this for one who regrets his sad impotence in study, and writes the letters to Lord Hailes which we shall quote later. Even at this period he betrays the fatal defect which remains with him through life, the indulgence in 'the luxury of noble sentiments,' and the easy and irritating Micawber-like genteel roll with which he turns off a moral platitude or finely vague sentiment, in the belief that good principles constitute good character. 'As our minds improve in knowledge,' he writes, 'may the sacred flame still increase until at last we reach the glorious world above when we shall never be separated, but enjoy an everlasting society of bliss.... I hope by Divine assistance, you shall still preserve your amiable character amidst all the deceitful blandishments of vice and folly.' While still at Edinburgh he produced _The Coquettes, or the Gallant in the Closet_, by Lady Houston, but it was ruined on the third night, and found to be merely a translation of one of the feeblest plays of Thomas Corneille. This play was long believed to be by Boswell, but his part was merely the providing the translator with a prologue, nor was the fact revealed till long after by the lady herself. In November 1759 he entered the class of moral philosophy under Adam Smith at Glasgow. Perhaps his father had thought that in the more sedate capital of the West, and in close propinquity to Auchinleck, there would be less scope for the long career of eccentricities upon which he was now to enter. If such, however, had been the intention, it was destined to a rude awakening. All his life Bozzy affected the company of players, among whom he professed to find 'an animation and a relish of existence,' and at this period he tells us he was flattered by being held forth as a patron of literature. In the course of his assiduous visits to the local theatre he met with an old stage-struck army officer from Ireland, Francis Gentleman, who had sold his commission to risk his chances on the boards. By this worthy an edition of Southern's _Oroonoko_ was dedicated to Boswell, and in the epistle are found some of his qualities:-- 'But when with honest pleasure she can find Sense, taste, religion, and good nature join'd, There gladly will she raise her feeble Voice Nor fear to tell that Boswell is her Choice.' Thus early had the youthful patron of the drama blossomed into notoriety, and having also commenced attendance at the Roman Catholic Chapel he had now resolved to become a priest, though curiously enough he began this career by eloping, as we are assured by Ramsay of Ochtertyre, with a Roman Catholic actress. His father followed the pair to London, and there, it would seem, prevailed on the erratic neophyte to abandon his fair partner, whose existence would certainly have been a fatal barrier to the proposed priesthood. At least, like his friend Gibbon of later days, if he sighed as a lover, he obeyed as a son, and a compromise by which he was to enter on the profession of arms was effected. His father called on Archibald, Duke of Argyll, an old campaigner with Marlborough. 'My Lord,' said the Duke, 'I like your son; this boy must not be shot at for three shillings and sixpence a day.' This scene reads like a pre-arranged affair calculated to flatter the erratic Bozzy out of his warlike schemes, for which it is clear he was never fitted. Indeed, the true aim was really, as he confesses to Temple, a wish to be 'about court, enjoying the happiness of the _beau monde_ and the company of men of genius.' Temple had come forward with an offer of a thousand pounds to obtain a commission for him in the Guards, and Boswell assures us repeatedly, 'I had from earliest years a love for the military life.' Yet we can with equal difficulty figure 'our Bozzy' as priest or soldier. Like Hogg who hankered after the post of militia ensign with 'nerves not,' as Lockhart says, 'heroically strung,' Boswell in his own _Letter to the People of Scotland_ confesses himself 'not blest with high heroic blood, but rather I think troubled with a natural timidity of personal danger, which it costs me some philosophy to overcome.' Nor was his devotion to charmer or chapel likely to weather the dissipated life he led in London. In later life he may have had thoughts of his own feelings when he proposed to publish, from the manuscript in his possession, the life of Sir Robert Sibbald. That antiquary had been pressed by the Duke of Perth to come over to the Papists, and for some time embraced the ancient religion, until the rigid fasting led him to reconsider the controversy and he returned to Protestantism. Bozzy thought the remark of his friend, that as ladies love to see themselves in a glass, so a man likes to see and review himself in his journal, 'a very pretty allusion,' and we may be sure, in spite of his reticence, that his own case was present at the time to his mind. His distressed father enlisted the interest of Lord Hailes, who requested Dr Jortin, Prebendary of St Paul's, to take in hand the flighty youth, and to persuade him to renounce the errors of the Church of Rome for those of the Church of England, for it was plain that Boswell had broken loose from his old moorings, and some middle course might, it was hoped, prove to be possible. 'Your young gentleman,' writes Jortin to Hailes, 'called at my house. I was gone out for the day; he then left your letter and a note with it for me, promising to be with me on Saturday morning. But from that time to this I have heard nothing of him. He began, I suppose, to suspect some design upon him, and his new friends may have represented me to him as a heretic and an infidel, whom he ought to avoid as he would the plague.' More likely the Catholic fit had passed away. But what a light does this phase, erratic even among his countless vagaries, shed on his relation to Johnson! Never, we may rest assured, did he tell the sage of this hidden passage in his life; yet how often do we find him putting leading questions to his friend and Mentor on all points of Catholic doctrine and casuistry, purgatory, and the invocation of the saints, confession, and the mass! There can be no doubt that this wrench left a deep impress on the confused religious views of Boswell, and this is the clue which explains the opening conversation with Johnson at the beginning of their intimacy. 'I acknowledged,' he writes, 'that though educated strictly in the principles of religion, I had for some time been misled into a certain degree of infidelity; but I was now come to a better way of thinking, and was fully satisfied of the truth of the Christian revelation, though I was not clear as to every point considered to be orthodox.' Never in any way does he refer to this episode of his life, but the _Life of Johnson_ is, as we shall have occasion to show, the life in many ways also of its author, who says of himself that, 'from a certain peculiarly frank, open, and ostentatious disposition which he avows, his history, like that of the old Seigneur Michael de Montaigne, is to be traced in his writings.' Left to himself and the guidance of the writer Derrick, 'my first tutor in the ways of London, who shewed me the town in all its variety of departments, both literary and sportive,' he was now busily spelling through the pages of the Gull's Hornbook. From this course of idle dissipation he was saved by the interposition of an Ayrshire neighbour of the family, the Earl of Eglintoun, though were we to credit the account of the waif himself the Earl 'insisted that young Boswell should have an apartment in his house.' Certain it is that by his lordship he was taken to Newmarket and introduced to the members of the Jockey Club. He would appear to have fancied himself a regularly elected member, for here his eccentricity broke forth into a yet more violent form. Calling for pen and paper, while the sporting fraternity gathered round, he produced the _Cub at Newmarket_, which he printed and dedicated to the Duke of York in a characteristically Boswellian strain. In doggerel which defies rhyme or reason he tells how his patron 'By chance a curious cub has got On Scotia's mountains newly caught;' and then--the first of his many portraits drawn by himself, and prophetic of the lover of hospitable boards and good cheer as we know him in his works--he describes the writer as 'Not of the iron race Which sometimes Caledonia grace; Though he to combat should advance, Plumpness shone in his countenance; And belly prominent declared That he for beef and pudding cared; He had a large and ponderous head, That seemed to be composed of lead; From which hung down such stiff, lank hair, As might the crows in autumn scare.' At this time it is likely took place the escapade with which he must have convulsed the gravity of the Edinburgh _literati_ invited to meet Johnson on their return from the Hebrides. 'I told, when Dr Hugh Blair was sitting with me in the pit of Drury Lane, in a wild freak of youthful extravagance I entertained the audience _prodigiously_ by imitating the lowing of a cow. I was so successful in this boyish frolic that the universal cry of the galleries was "_encore the cow_." In the pride of my heart I attempted imitations of other animals, but with very inferior effect.' Blair's advice was, says Scott, 'Stick to the coo, man,' in his peculiar burr, but we can imagine how this unforeseen reminiscence must have confused the divine. After an ineffectual effort to enter himself at the Inner Temple, the 'cub' had to return in April 1761 to Edinburgh. Old Edinburgh was nothing if not convivial. Writing to Temple and confessing that his London life had 'not been entirely as it ought to be,' he appeals to him for pity in his present surroundings. Imagine 'a young fellow,' he cries, 'whose happiness was always centred in London, hauled away to the town of Edinburgh, obliged to conform to every Scottish custom, or be laughed at--"Will ye hae some jeel? Oh fie, oh fie!"--his flighty imagination quite cramped, and be obliged to study _Corpus Juris Civilis_ and live in his father's strict family; is there any wonder, sir, that the unlucky dog should be somewhat fretful? Yoke a Newmarket courser to a dung cart, and I'll lay my life on't he'll either caper or kick most confoundedly, or be as stupid and restive as an old battered post-horse.' Among the many clubs of the time Boswell instituted a jovial society called the _Soaping Club_ which met weekly in a tavern. The motto of the members was 'Every man soap his own beard,' a rather recondite witticism which their founder declares equivalent to the reigning phrase of 'Every man in his humour.' It may be suggested here that in this company of feeble Bacchanalians Boswell had copied the Rabelaisian _fay ce que vous voudras_ of the Franciscans of Medmenham Abbey with Sandwich, Wilkes, and others. At any rate, as their self-constituted laureate, he produced the following extraordinary song, which can be paralleled for inanity only by the stave he sang before Pitt in the Guildhall of London, as a means of attracting the notice of the Premier with a view to Parliament. The song is characteristically Boswellian. 'Boswell of Soapers the King On Tuesdays at Tom's does appear, And when he does talk or does sing, To him ne'er a one can come near. For he talks with such ease and such grace, That all charm'd to attention we sit, And he sings with so comic a face That our sides are just ready to split. Boswell is modest enough, Himself not quite Phoebus he thinks, He never does flourish with snuff, And hock is the liquor he drinks. And he owns that Ned Colquet the priest May to something of honour pretend, And he swears that he is not in jest, When he calls this same Colquet his friend. Boswell is pleasant and gay, For frolic by nature design'd; He heedlessly rattles away When the company is to his mind. "This maxim," he says, "you may see, We never can have corn without chaff;" So not a bent sixpence cares he, Whether _with_ him or _at_ him you laugh. Boswell does women adore, And never once means to deceive, He's in love with at least half a score; If they're serious he smiles in his sleeve. He has all the bright fancy of youth, With the judgment of forty and five; In short, to declare the plain truth, There is no better fellow alive.' This, it must be confessed, is sad stuff even for a laureate of twenty, and is jesting with difficulty. Every man, says Johnson, has at one time or other of his life an ambition to set up for a wag, but that a man who had completed the _Life of Johnson_ should in after years complacently refer to this character of himself and 'traits in it which time has not yet altered, that egotism and self-applause which he is still displaying, yet it would seem with a conscious smile,' is scarcely credible were it not out-distanced by graver weaknesses. For about this date he published _An Elegy upon the Death of an Amiable Young Lady_, flanked by three puffing epistles from himself and his friends, Erskine and Dempster. In the same year appeared his _Ode to Tragedy_--by a Gentleman of Scotland, with a dedication to--James Boswell, Esq.!--'for your particular kindness to me, and chiefly for the profound respect with which you have always treated me.' We hear of his 'old hock' humour, a favourite phrase with him for his Bacchanalian tastes, and we find the author limning himself as possessing 'A soul by nature formed to feel Grief sharper than the tyrant's steel, And bosom big with swelling thought From ancient lore's remembrance brought.' In 1760 had appeared a _Collection of Original Poems_, published by Donaldson in Edinburgh on the model of Dodsley's _Miscellanies_. It comprised poems by Blacklock, Beattie, and others, and a second volume was issued by Erskine as editor in 1762. To it Boswell contributed nearly thirty pieces along with Home, the author of _Douglas_, Macpherson of _Ossian_ fame or notoriety, John Maclaurin and others. The merits of the volume are beneath notice, and Boswell's contributions of Odes, Epigrams, Letters, Epistles, are of the traditional character; but _An Epistle from a London Buck to his Friend_ must have been read by his father with regret, and by his mother of 'almost unexampled piety and goodness' with shame. There is only one poem that calls for attention, the _Evening Walk in the Abbey Church of Holyrood House_, the original, perhaps, of Fergusson's lament on the state of neglect of the then deserted mansion of royalty, where 'the thistle springs In domicile of ancient Kings, Without a patriot to regret Our palace and our ancient state.' A third volume was announced for publication 'about eighteen months hence,' but the public had enough of this coagulated jargon as Carlyle would have styled it, and critics and readers are spared the task of its consideration. Yet all this time he was in the enjoyment of the best company that Edinburgh could afford; he was admitted a member of the Select Society, and his circle embraced such men as Lord Somerville, Lord Hailes, Dr Blair, Kames, Robertson, Hume, Home, Jupiter Carlyle and others. 'Lord Auchinleck,' he quaintly adds, 'took the trouble himself to give him a regular course of instruction in law, a circumstance of singular benefit, and of which Mr Boswell has ever expressed a strong and grateful sense.' But his sense was not such as to restrain him from a mock-heroic correspondence with Andrew Erskine, brother of the Earl of Kellie. Erskine must have been possessed of some parts, for he was the correspondent of Burns and was intimate with George Thomson the composer, yet we can fancy the consternation of the old judge when this farrago of the new humour was published in London in 1763. Writing from his father's house, he thus begins:--'Dear Erskine, no ceremony I beseech you! Give me your hand. How is my honest Captain Andrew? How goes it with the elegant Lady A----? the lovely, sighing Lady J----? and how, oh how, does that glorious luminary Lady B---- do? you see I retain my usual volatility. The Boswells, you know, came over from Normandy with William the Conqueror; and some of us possess the spirit of our ancestors, the French. I do, for one. A pleasant spirit it is. _Vive la bagatelle_ is the maxim. A light heart may bid defiance to fortune.' Again the old man would find 'Allow me a few more words. I live here in a remote corner of an old ruinous house, where my ancestors have been very jovial. What a solemn idea rushes on my mind! They are all gone: I must follow. Well, and what then? Let me shift about to another subject. The best I can think of is a sound sleep; so good-night.' In fact, like Sir Fretful Plagiary in the _Critic_, Bozzy was so covetous of popularity that he would rather be abused than be not mentioned at all. Little augury, too, of success at the bar could his father find in the following portrait of his son: 'the author of the _Ode to Tragedy_ is a most excellent man; he is of an ancient family in the west of Scotland, upon which he values himself not a little. At his nativity there appeared omens of his future greatness; his parts are bright, and his education has been good; he has travelled in post-chaises miles without number; he is fond of seeing much of the world; he eats of every good dish, especially apple pie; he drinks old hock; he has a very fine temper; he is somewhat of a humourist, and a little tinctured with pride; he has a good, manly countenance, and he owns himself to be amorous; he has infinite vivacity; yet is at times observed to have a melancholy cast.' Nothing but the most obtuse vanity could ever have induced Bozzy to publish all this. 'Curiosity,' he declares in the preface, 'is the most prevalent of all our passions, and the curiosity for reading letters is the most prevalent of all kinds of curiosity. Had any man in the three kingdoms found the following letters directed, sealed, and addressed, with post-marks--provided he could have done so honestly--he would have read every one of them.' There is the true Boswell in this characteristic confession, the Boswell that read in the private diaries of Johnson, and, with an eye to biographical materials, had admitted an impulse to carry them off, and never see him more. 'Why, sir,' said the doctor, 'I do not think you could have helped it.' After this it was no wonder that his father was induced to allow his return to London, 'Where a man may soap his own beard, and enjoy whatever is to be had in this transitory state of things, and every agreeable whim may be indulged without censure.' The Duke of Queensbery, the patron of Gay, was one of those to whom he was recommended now that he inclined to 'persist in his fondness for the Guards, or rather, in truth, for the metropolis,' but he suspected some arrangement between his father and the Duke by which the commission was delayed. For some months he spent a random life as the occupier of Temple's chambers in the vicinity of Johnson. Little could be expected of the friend of Churchill and Wilkes, yet Boswell now was at the turning point of his career. 'This is to me,' he writes in his great work, 'a memorable year; for in it I had the happiness to obtain the acquaintance of that extraordinary man whose memoirs I am now writing; an acquaintance which I shall ever esteem as one of the most fortunate circumstances of my life.' We have seen how Lord Hailes, had on the 1758 circuit, mentioned to him the name of Johnson; how in Glasgow Gentleman had given him a representation of 'dictionary Johnson;' how Derrick in 1760, during his first visit to London, had promised to introduce this youth of twenty to the great dictator of literature; and Sheridan, the father of the dramatist, when in Edinburgh in 1761, giving public lectures on elocution, had made a similar promise. But on his return to London at the end of 1762, Boswell had found that Sheridan had quarrelled with Johnson, and Derrick had retired to Bath as master of the ceremonies in succession to Beau Nash. Luckily Derrick had before introduced his friend to Davies, the bookseller in Covent Garden, who as 'one of the best imitators of Johnson's voice and manner' only increased the ardour of Boswell for the meeting. Now the hour was come and the man. Yet surely never could there have been a more apparently unpropitious time chosen. Number 45 of the _North Briton_ denouncing Bute and his Scotch favourites had appeared on April 23rd. The minister had bowed to the storm and resigned, while the writer of the libel had been arrested under a general warrant and discharged on the 30th of the month under appeal, either to be hanged, thought Adam Smith, or to get Bute impeached in six months. Alexander Cruden, of _Concordance_ fame, was rambling over London in his lucid interval like an inverted Old Mortality, busy with a sponge obliterating every hated '45' scrawled over the walls and every conceivable spot in the city against his country. Yet at such an hour it was that the famous meeting of Johnson and his biographer took place. 'At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr Davies' back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr Davies having perceived him through the glass door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us,--he announced his awful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, "Look, my lord, it comes." I found that I had a very perfect idea of Johnson's figure, from the portrait of him painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds.... Mr Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to him. I was much agitated; and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, "Don't tell where I come from."--"From Scotland," cried Davies roguishly. "Mr Johnson," said I, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." ... "That, sir, I find is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help." This stroke stunned me a good deal; and when we had sat down, I felt myself not a little embarrassed, and apprehensive of what might come next.... Eager to take any opening to get into conversation with him, I ventured to say, "Oh, sir, I cannot think Mr Garrick would grudge such a trifle to you." "Sir," said he, with a stern look, "I have known David Garrick longer than you have done, and I know no right you have to talk to me on the subject." Perhaps I deserved this check,' etc., etc. Next day Boswell called on Davies, who assured him that the doctor would not take it amiss if he were to visit him; and so, a week later, 'after being entertained by the witty sallies of Messieurs Thornton, Wilkes, Churchill and Lloyd,' from whom he would hear plenty of vigorous abuse of his country, and whose names we may take it as certain were not mentioned to his new friend, Boswell boldly repaired to Johnson. Nothing is more striking than the contrast between the hitherto reckless Bozzy and the easy assurance and composure with which he faces Johnson, sits up with the sage, sups at the Mitre, leads the conversation, and apparently holds his own in the discussions. Doubtless, the 'facility of manners' which Adam Smith has said was a feature of the man, was here of service to him, and no less so would have been the flattering way in which he managed to inform Johnson of his reputation over the Border. Boswell was not slow to write to Lord Hailes, knowing full well how the report of such an acquaintance and friendship would be welcome at Auchinleck as the signs of an approaching reformation. Goldsmith, whom he met shortly after, he entertained at the Mitre with a party of friends, among whom was the Rev. Dr John Ogilvie, the author of some portentous and completely forgotten epics, but who is not yet quite lost to sight as the writer of the sixty-second paraphrase of Scripture, 'Lo! in the last of days behold.' A subsequent 'evening by ourselves' he describes to Lord Hailes in the wariest manner, so as to secure his father's consent to a plan of travel. The old judge had wished his son to follow the profession of law which had now in their family become quite hereditary, and had coupled this with a scheme of study at Utrecht, after the plan he had himself followed at Leyden. A compromise had, in fact, been arranged by which this was to be pursued, and the career of arms dropped. Nothing can be more adroit than the way in which the young hopeful about to embark on the grand tour manages in his despatch to his lordship, with an eye to the Home Office, to suggest the furtherance of his own ideas under the supposed guise of Johnson's approval. 'He advises me to combat idleness as a distemper, to read five hours every day, but to let inclination direct me what to read. He is a great enemy to a stated plan of study. He advises me when abroad to go to places where there is most to be seen and learned. He is not very fond of the notion of spending a whole winter in a Dutch town. He thinks I may do much more by private study than by attending lectures. He would have me to perambulate (a word in his own style) Spain, also to visit the northern kingdoms, where more that is new is to be seen than in France or Italy, but he is not against me seeing these warmer regions.' Here, in fact, is the germ of the tour to the Baltic they had hoped when at Dunvegan one day to carry out, for which Johnson, when in his sixty-eighth year was still ready, and which Boswell thought would have made them acquainted with the King of Sweden, and the Empress of Russia. On a later day of the month he asked his friend to the Mitre to meet his uncle Dr John, 'an elegant scholar and a physician bred in the School of Boerhaave,' and George Dempster, M.P. for the Forfar Burghs. As the latter was infected with the sceptical views of Hume, there would seem to have been a scene, for in the _Life_ Johnson is made to say, 'I have not met with any man for a long time who has given me such general displeasure,' but Boswell, ever with an eye for copy, writes to Temple, 'it was a very fertile evening, and my journal is stored with its fruits.' Then to Lord Hailes he writes: '_Entre nous_ of Dempster,--Johnson had seen a pupil of Hume and Rousseau totally unsettled as to principles. I had infinite satisfaction in hearing solid truth confuting vain subtilty. I thank God that I have got acquainted with Mr Johnson. He has done me infinite service. He has assisted me to obtain peace of mind; he has assisted me to become a rational Christian; I hope I shall ever remain so.' Pleasantly all this would sound at home. There would be less now heard of his father's threat in May to disinherit him, and of the son's appeal to Lord Hailes to intercede with him--'to have patience with me for a year or two, and I may be what he pleases.' On July 15th he has had a long letter from his father, full of affection and good counsel. 'Honest man,' he writes to Temple, 'he is now happy. He insists on having my solemn promise. The only question is, how much I am to promise.' Then on the 25th he has his letters of credit and his introductions to people in Holland. 'They have been sent open for me to seal, so I have been amused to see the different modes of treating that favourite subject _myself_.' He is to be allowed £240 a year, but he is determined not to be straitened, nor to encourage the least narrowness, but to draw on his father when necessary. Wilkes had gone to France, but had let him have some franks 'to astonish a few North Britons.' Parting for a time with Temple, whose family was now in straitened circumstances, he assures him that their friendship should be 'an exalted comfort' to him in his distress, and concludes characteristically enough with advice to Temple's younger brother in the army for his establishment in 'solid notions of religion and morality.' Before he bids his native land good-night, there is a final letter to Hailes with his father, Jortin, and the actress all well in his mind's eye. 'My scepticism,' he says, 'was not owing to thinking wrong, but to not thinking at all. It is a matter of great moment to keep a sense of religion constantly impressed upon our minds. If that divine guest does not occupy part of the space, vain intruders will,'--the fine old roll of Micawber to the close. Johnson on the 5th August started with him for Harwich in the stage coach, half in hopes of visiting Holland in the summer, and accompanying Bozzy in a tour through the Netherlands. 'I must see thee out of England,' said the old man kindly. On the beach they parted, and 'as the vessel put out to sea, I kept my eyes upon him for a considerable time, while he remained rolling his majestic frame in his usual manner; and at last I perceived him walk back into the town and he disappeared.' Boswell's attendance upon his new friend had not escaped the notice of the doctor's circle. 'Who,' asked one, 'is this Scotch cur at Johnson's heels?' 'Not a cur, but a bur,' was Goldsmith's reply, 'and he has the faculty of sticking.' With what effect the world was to know. CHAPTER II THE CONTINENT--CORSICA. 1763-66 'That's from Paoli of Corsica.'--GOLDSMITH, '_The Good Natured Man_.' 'Utrecht,' writes Boswell, 'seeming at first very dull to me after the animated scenes of London, my spirits were grievously affected.' But the depression was not destined to last, and soon we hear of his having wearied of the proposed two years' course of study. The custom of legal training in some of the universities of the Continent was about this time coming to a close, though for long it had remained usual, at least with the landed classes of Scotland, to secure such an extended field of study for the bar by an attendance at some of the more developed schools of jurisprudence in Holland. Cunningham, the celebrated critic of Bentley, had given prelections in Leyden, and no reader of the _Heart of Midlothian_ will forget the laments of the inimitable Bartoline Saddletree over his not being sent to Leyden or Utrecht to study the Institutes and the Pandects. Since the days of Gilbert Jack at Leyden, the connection between Holland and the Scottish universities had been close, and the garrets of Amsterdam had been crowded before the Revolution by refugees from both Scotland and England who maintained, upon their return, the ties they had contracted in their exile. Even Fielding had been sent to Leyden for law, and just before the visit of Boswell, to which his father had consented rather as a compromise than from any practical benefit that might ensue, the law of Scotland, largely based on Roman and feudal precedents, had received fresh extensions of conveyancing and other branches of jurisprudence, through the mass of forfeited estates brought into the market after the suppression of the Jacobite Rebellions. What country, then, could so rapidly afford such a course of legal study as the Protestant and commercial Holland? The reputation of Boerhaave had drawn medical students from all quarters, and Boswell's uncle John, and the celebrated Monro _primus_ of the Edinburgh Medical School had been among the number. Goldsmith in 1755 met Irish medical students there, and some twenty years before the time we have reached Carlyle of Inveresk had found in Leyden 'an established lodging-house' where his countrymen, Gregory and Dickson, were domiciled, and numerous others, among whom he expressly mentions Charles Townshend, Askew the Greek scholar, Johnston of Westerhall, Doddeswell, afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer, and John Wilkes then entering, at eighteen, on the career of profligacy that was to render him notorious. Carlyle describes their meetings at each other's rooms twice or thrice a week, when they drank coffee, supped on Dutch red herrings, eggs and salad, and never sat beyond the decent hour of twelve. For such a style of living Boswell's annual allowance of £240 was certainly handsome in a place where the fuel, chiefly peat, was the only expensive item. But such a quiet style of life was not congenial to the lively tastes of our traveller. He soon tired of the civil law lectures of Professor Trotz, and longed for fresh woods and pastures new. He sighed to be upon his travels again. Of his life abroad some isolated notes may be gathered from the _Boswelliana_, and, as has been mentioned, he sought out his relatives at the Hague 'of the first fashion,' the Sommelsdycks, and with his facility of manners, and his father's credentials to the _literati_ and scholars of the place, his circle of acquaintance was large and influential. We hear of an intimacy with the Rev. William Brown, minister of the Scottish congregation at Utrecht, the father of Principal Laurence Brown of Marischal College, Aberdeen; and with Sir Joseph Yorke, whom he met later in Ireland, then the Ambassador at the Hague, he would appear to have been acquainted. But Sir Joseph does not seem to have welcomed the easy manners of his young friend, and the dull life of the burgomasters was little suited to Boswell who ridicules their portly figures and their clothes which they wore as if they had been 'luggage.' The two years' course of study was abruptly reduced to one. At its close we trace him at Berlin in July 1764, and in close relations with the British Envoy at the Prussian Court. Fortunately for Boswell this was both a countryman and a friend of his father's, Sir Andrew Mitchell, the late M.P. for the Banff Burghs. By the Ambassador he was introduced to the best society in the capital, and from Berlin he wrote to his father representing the urgent necessity of extending his travels, and, till the letter in reply should arrive, he proceeded into Hanover and Brunswick. On his return to Berlin towards the end of August he found a letter waiting him from Lord Auchinleck, who was naturally chagrined at the breakdown of his scheme of compromise. A visit to Paris he was prepared to allow, but the return of the wanderer to Utrecht was peremptorily commanded. The family of the Envoy was now at Spa, but next day Boswell wrote him a letter urging him to intercede with his father for the proposed extension. The letter is a very long one, and its abridgement even is impossible here, but few more Boswellian productions can be found. He has, he tells Sir Andrew, a melancholy disposition, and to escape from the gloom of dark speculation he has made excursions into the fields of folly, and in this tone of the Preacher in _Ecclesiastes_ he rambles on. The words of St Paul, 'I must see Rome,' he finds are borne in upon him, and such a journey would afford him the talk for a lifetime, the more so that he was no libertine and disclaimed all intentions of travelling as _Milord Anglois_, but simply as the scholar and the man of elegant curiosity. Did not Sir Andrew as the loved and respected friend of his father think that the son had a claim to protest before he considered any act regarding himself as passed, and would not the Envoy remonstrate or persuade the father as to the justice of his wish? No reply was sent to this, but the judge, thinking that discretion was the wiser part in circumstances where it was useless to dictate without the means to enforce compliance, yielded reluctant consent to the scheme of an Italian tour. Gravely then does Bozzy rebuke Sir Andrew and for this occasion he forgives him, 'for I just say the same to young people when I advise. Believe me,' he somewhat irrelevantly adds, 'I have a soul.' Fortune followed him wherever he turned. George, tenth Earl Marischal, and brother of Frederick the Great's general, Marshal Keith, had joined the Earl of Mar in the rising of 1715, and had made an ineffectual descent in 1719 on Glenshiel with the Spaniards. But in the '45 he had taken no part, and he revealed to the British Government the existence of the Bourbon Family Compact. In return, his attainder had been removed by George II., and on his brief visit to Scotland he had lived with Boswell's father in Ayrshire, perhaps as a friend of the Commissioners for the forfeited estates, when the occasion had been seized by Macpherson for an ode, 'attempted after the manner of Pindar,' in the fustian style of the translator of Ossian. With him or by his credentials Boswell went the round of the German courts, passing by Mannheim and Geneva, reaching the latter towards the end of December. The reader is struck with the airy assurance and self-possession which the laureate of the Soapers and the Newmarket Cub manifests on the grand tour, conducting himself at three and twenty with complete success at the courts of German princes, conversing with plenipotentiaries and dignitaries of all sorts in French and Italian, for German had not yet risen into sufficient historical or diplomatic importance to add to the linguistic burdens of mankind. Lord Marischal as the governor of Neufchatel had acted as the protector of Rousseau, and so was able to furnish his companion with a letter of introduction, hinting at his enthusiastic nature and describing him to the philosopher as a visionary hypochondriac. Voltaire he interviewed at Ferney, and he managed to please the great man by repeating--a characteristic trait of Bozzy, who believed such tale-bearing to be vastly conducive to the practice of benevolence--Johnson's criticism upon Frederick the Great's writings, 'such as you may suppose Voltaire's foot-boy to do, who has been his amanuensis.' He broached the subject of the philosophy of the unconscious, and was eager to know how ideas forgotten at the time were yet later on recollected. The other replied by a quotation from Thomson's _Winter_ with the writer's question, as to the winds, 'In what far distant region of the sky Hushed in silence sleep ye when 'tis calm?' The attempt to draw out Voltaire upon the tour to the Hebrides, which Boswell and Johnson had been vaguely talking over, produced only the rather sarcastic query if he wished him to accompany them, with a look 'as if I had talked of going to the North Pole.' Of his visit to the wild philosopher, as he styles Rousseau, we have no notice, beyond the general remark that they had agreed to differ alike in politics and religion, but that there were points _où nos âmes sont unies_. The feudal dogmas of Boswell and his rigid adherence to his pet idea of 'the grand scheme of subordination' were of course not likely to be pleasing to the sceptical _aqua fortis_ of the sombre Genevese, with his belief in the fraternity of mankind and the greatness of the untutored Indian. Boswell crossed the Alps, and either then or upon his homeward journey visited Bologna, Venice, and Mantua. He passed through Rome and, unknown to either, may have met Gibbon in the Eternal City into whose mind, some weeks before, 'as I sat musing among the ruins of the Capitol while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter,' had started the idea of writing the _Decline and Fall_. In the city he met Andrew Lumsden, the Secretary of Prince Charles Edward, but we are not informed if the young Jacobite of five, who had prayed for the exiled family now sought any opportunity of making himself known to the object of his devotion. Naples brought him into the more congenial society of Wilkes with whom, he says, he 'enjoyed many classical scenes with peculiar relish.' When Churchill had died at Boulogne in the arms of Wilkes, the latter had retired to Naples to inscribe his sorrow 'in the close style of the ancients' upon an urn of alabaster which had been the gift of Winckelmann, and in that city now he was, as the literary executor, preparing annotations on the works of Churchill. Boswell managed with his curious want of tact in such matters, fitting the man who could suggest cards to a dying friend with an uneasy conscience, to hint that the poet had 'bounced into the regions below,' and to render the _Il Bruto Inglese_, by which the papers of the land referred to Wilkes and liberty, by a version significant of the notorious ugliness of his gay acquaintance. Naples, as with Milton, was the limit of his tour, and from it he returned to Rome. He reached that city in April 1765, and dispatched a letter to Rousseau, then 'living in romantick retirement' in Switzerland, requesting his promised introduction to the Corsican general, 'which if he refused, I should certainly go without it, and probably be hanged as a spy.' The wild philosopher was as good as his word, and the letter met the traveller at Florence. 'The charms of sweet Siena detained me no longer than they should have done, I required the hardy air of Corsica to brace me, after the delights of Tuscany,' an enigmatical turn of expression upon which light is thrown later, when we discuss the love affairs of Boswell, by a reference to a dark-eyed 'signora' on whom the tender traveller had glanced. At Leghorn he was within one day's sail of Corsica. Pascal Paoli was the Garibaldi of his day. When his father in 1738 had been driven from the island by the French, he had retired with him to Naples where he entered a military college and followed the profession of arms. The way was paved for his return by the disturbances in the island in 1755, and so successful was he in his guerilla warfare as general against the Genoese, the owners of Corsica, that they were speedily driven to sue for peace. It was in a sort of lull in the storm of hostilities that our traveller made his unexpected appearance, and the adroit way in which he managed to lay his plans of action and to carry them out with such complete success calls for our admiration. In his _Tour_ he simply says that 'having resolved to pass some years abroad (this is excellent, after his letter to Sir Andrew) for my instruction and entertainment, I conceived a design of visiting the Island of Corsica. I wished for something more than just the common course of what is called the tour of Europe, and Corsica occurred to me as a place where nobody else had been.' It may have been suggested to him by Rousseau, who had been engaged in some vague scheme of philandering philanthropy by which the wild philosopher was to play the Solon and the Lycurgus of the distressed islanders, and establish a fresh code of laws upon the basis of his new fraternity, but with which 'this steady patriot of the world alone,' as Canning styles him, 'the friend of every country but his own,' managed to mix in a much more practical way some not very honourable, if characteristic, intrigues for the surrender of the island to France. Bozzy, at all events, was determined to make a bold bid for fame. Nothing like this had occurred, as an opening, during all his tour. The dangers of the plan were fully known to him, and the possibility was laid before his eyes of capture at the hands of the Barbary corsairs and a term of imprisonment at Algiers. Our adventurer waited on the commodore in command of the British squadron in the bay of Leghorn, and he was provided with a passport, the value of which against the threatened dangers does not sufficiently appear. Before he left Leghorn, his proposed visit had come to be regarded in a very serious light by Italian politicians. They saw in him an envoy from the British intrusted with powers to negotiate a treaty with Corsica, and all disclaimers of any such intention were politely treated as an evasion. Bozzy was in consequence viewed as 'a very close young man,' a trait that at no time of his life was ever applicable to James Boswell, on whom, indeed, the advice given by Sir Henry Wotton to Milton would have been thrown away. Putting out to sea in a Tuscan vessel bound for Capo Corso for wine, he had two days to spend on board in consequence of a dead calm. 'At sunset,' he says, 'all the people in the ship sang _Ave Maria_ with great devotion and some melody.' One recalls the similar circumstances under which Cardinal Newman found himself becalmed on the orange-boat in the Straits of Bonifacio. For some hours he had put himself in spirits by taking a hand at the oar, and at seven in the evening of the second day they landed in the harbour of Centuri. He delivered his credentials, and on Sunday heard a Corsican sermon, where the preacher told of Catharine of Siena who wished to be laid in the mouth of the awful pit, that she might stop it up, and so prevent the falling in of more souls. 'I confess, my brethren,' cried the friar, 'I have not such zeal, but I do what I can, I warn you how to avoid it.' At Corte, the capital of the island, he waited boldly upon the Supreme Council. He was gravely received, as befitted a supposed British envoy, and lodged in the apartment of Paoli in a Franciscan convent. Next day, the old petitioner for a commission in the Guards found the first and last military experience of his life. Three French deserters waited on him in the belief that he came to recruit soldiers for Scotland, and 'begged to have the honour of going along with me.' Nor was the idea so absurd as he seems to have viewed it, for from the _Scots Magazine_ of a somewhat later date we learn that British Volunteers and Highlanders disbanded after the wars had been enlisted in the service of Paoli. But it is not improbable that the deserters had heard of Boswell's nationality from the woman of Penrith whom he found in the island, married to a French soldier in the army of the Pretender, whose fortunes she had followed when they had passed through Carlisle on the retreat from Derby. Another feature of Boswell, one whose consideration and explanation we shall attempt later on, now for the first time meets us, his inveterate love for interviewing criminals, and accordingly, 'as I wished to see all things in Corsica,' he had a meeting with the hangman who seemed sensible of his situation. The inhabitants crowded round him at a village as he advanced, and questioned the traveller, as Coleridge at Valetta found himself similarly interrogated, as to his professing himself a Christian when he did not believe in the Pope--_e perche_, and why? The old candidate for the priesthood managed to deftly evade this query by an assurance that in Britain the people were too far off and in a theological climate of their own. He was in the highest humour, and in this unusual flow of spirits he harangued the men of Bastelica with great fluency, getting, however, at Sollacaro somewhat nervous as the interview with the Corsican leader drew nigh. Paoli lived in constant dread of assassination, and the sudden arrival of this mysterious stranger was strongly calculated to arouse suspicions. For ten minutes, in silence, he looked at Boswell, who broke in with the remark that he was a gentleman from Scotland upon his travels and had lately visited Rome from which, having seen the ruins of one brave people, he was now come to view the rise of another. The general was not quite set at ease by this sententiously balanced sentence, and years after he told Miss Burney about his impressions at the time of the mysterious stranger. It shews the ruling passion strong in life, and that Boswell, as 'the chiel' amang them takin' notes,' forgot the rules of ordinary courtesy and prudence in the gratification of his darling method. 'He came to my country sudden,' said Paoli in his broken English, 'and he fetched me some letters of recommending him. And I supposed, in my _mente_ he was in the privacy one espy; for I look away from him to my other companies, and when I look back to him I behold it in his hands his tablet, and one pencil. O, he was at the work, I give it you my honour, of writing down all what I say to some persons whatsoever in the room. I was angry enough, pretty much so. But soon I found out I was myself the monster he came to observe. O, he is a very good man Mr Boswell at the bottom, so witty, cheerful, so talkable. But at the first, Oh I was indeed _fache_ of the sufficient.' This first glimpse of Bozzy at work is delightful. He was in fact "making himself," all unknown the while, as Shortreed said of Scott over the Liddesdale raids. He dined with the general and suite. In spite of, perhaps by very reason of, his protestations of having no diplomatic mission, the highest attention was shewn him as an accredited envoy from St James'. In the morning chocolate was served up to him on a silver salver with the national arms; he rode out on the general's horse, with guards marching before him. Paoli knew sufficient English to maintain the dialogue, having picked up some slight knowledge of the tongue from Irish refugee officers in the Neapolitan service. His library was turned over by his inquisitive guest, who found among the books some odd volumes of _The Spectator_ and _The Tatler_, Pope's _Essay on Man_, _Gulliver's Travels_, and Barclay's _Apology for the Quakers_. His good humour, as it had won on the general, endeared the supposed _ambasciadore Inglese_ to the peasants, and he had a Corsican dress made for him. Of that dress--'in which I walked about with an air of true satisfaction'--every one who has heard of James Boswell has read, and it is inseparable somehow from our conceptions of the man and writer. We select from this Corsican Tour--the least known to the general reader of Boswell's three great works--what seems to us the gem of the book:--'One day they must needs hear me play upon my German flute. To have told my honest natural visitants, 'Really, gentlemen, I play very ill,' and put on such airs as we do in our genteel companies, would have been highly ridiculous. I therefore immediately complied with their request. I gave them one or two Italian airs, and then some of our beautiful old Scots tunes, _Gilderoy_, _The Lass o' Patie's Mill_, _Corn Riggs are Bonny_.' The pathetick simplicity and pastoral gaiety of the Scots musick will always please those who have the genuine feelings of nature. The Corsicans were charmed with the specimens I gave them, though I may now say that they were very indifferently performed. My good friends insisted also to have an English song from me. I endeavoured to please them in this, too. I sung them 'Hearts of Oak are our Ships, Hearts of Oak are our Men.' I translated it into Italian for them, and never did I see men so delighted as the Corsicans were. '_Cuore di querco_,' cried they, '_bravo Inglese!_' It was quite a joyous riot. I fancied myself to be a recruiting sea officer. I fancied all my chorus of Corsicans aboard the British fleet.' How admirable is the style of all this, equal quite to Goldsmith's best and lightest touch! Exquisite, too, is that picture of Bozzy, as the rollicking British stage-tar of tradition, in his rendering of Garrick's song, the gems from the Opera and the national melodies. Allan Ramsay's song in Corsica is to be equalled only by Goldsmith on _his_ tour when he played, but not for amusement, _Barbara Allan_ and _Johnny Armstrong's Good Night_ before the doors of Italian convents and Flemish homesteads. But the highstrung Bozzy had to experience a revulsion of low feelings to which he was ever prone. He is soon in a sort of Byronic fit, and he continues in a strain with which we should have not credited the 'gay classic friend of Jack Wilkes' and of that Sienese _signora_, unless he had turned evidence against himself. He declared his feelings to Paoli, as he had done to Johnson, whose curt advice had been not to confuse or resolve the common consequences of irregularity into an unalterable decree of destiny. To the general he now attributed his feeling of the vanity of life, the exhaustion in the very heat of youth of all the sweets of being, and the incapacity for taking part in active life to his 'metaphysical researches,' his reasoning beyond his depth on such subjects as it is not given to man to know. These hesitances the other wisely pushed aside with the soldierly advice to strengthen his mind by the perusal of Livy and Plutarch. In return Bozzy gave an imitation of 'my revered friend Mr Samuel Johnson,' little dreaming that all three would one day be intimate in London, and the general's house in Portman Square be always at the traveller's disposal. From the palace, as he styles it, of Paoli, Nov. 1765 he wrote to Johnson, as he had done before, 'from a kind of superstition agreeable to him as to myself,' from what he calls _loca solennia_--places of solemn interest. 'I dare to call this a spirited tour. I dare to challenge your approbation;' and, reading it twenty years later in the original which the old man had preserved, he found it full of 'generous enthusiasm.' No account of the continental travels of Boswell would be complete without the reproduction of his letter to the doctor from Wittenberg. It is one of the most important for the more subtle shades of psychology in the writer's character. '_Sunday, Sept. 30, 1764._ MY EVER DEAR AND MUCH RESPECTED SIR,--You know my solemn enthusiasm of mind. You love me for it, and I respect myself for it, because in so far I resemble Mr Johnson. You will be agreeably surprized when you learn the reason of my writing this letter. I am at Wittenberg in Saxony. I am in the old church where the Reformation was first preached, and where some of the Reformers lie interred. I cannot resist the serious pleasure of writing to Mr Johnson from the tomb of Melancthon. My paper rests upon the gravestone of that great and good man who was undoubtedly the best of all the Reformers.... At this tomb, then, my ever dear and respected friend! I vow to thee an eternal attachment. It shall be my study to do what I can to render your life happy: and if you die before me, I shall endeavour to do honour to your memory and, elevated by the remembrance of you, persist in noble piety. May God, the father of all beings, ever bless you! and may you continue to love your most affectionate friend, and devoted servant,--JAMES BOSWELL.' So early had Boswell made his resolve to be the biographer of Johnson. On the very day of his introduction to him, he had taken notes of all that had passed in Davies' back-parlour. He was none of the men that do things by halves, and blunder into a kind of success, as some of his depreciators have thought. Six weeks he had been in Corsica. The first day of December saw him land at Genoa on his return, Lyons was reached on the third day of the new year, Paris one week later. Here Rousseau who had preceded him to London had provided him with a curious commission, the bringing over into England of his mistress Therese Levasseur. The easy-going Hume thus announces the fact to his friend the Countess de Boufflers. 'Mademoiselle sets out with a friend of mine, a young gentleman, very good humoured, very agreeable, and very mad. He has such a rage for literature that I dread some event fatal to my friend's honour. For remember the story of Terentia who was first married to Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last in her old age married a young nobleman, who imagined that she must possess some secret which would convey to him eloquence and genius.' A letter he found waiting from Johnson, together with one announcing the death of his mother. No more was heard about a second year at Utrecht. He crossed to London, and was again with his old friend, who had moved from the Temple to a good house in Johnson's Court, in Fleet Street. Goldsmith was no longer the obscure writer whom he had left behind, but the author of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ and the _Traveller_. The club had been founded. He was encouraged by the sage to publish his account of his travels in Corsica--'you cannot go to the bottom, but all that you tell us will be new.' He dined at the Mitre as of old, and presented Temple to Johnson. No word about his companion across the Channel, naturally enough, reached the old man's ears, but he mentioned Rousseau; though he recognised he was now in a new moral atmosphere where every attempt was resented to 'unhinge or weaken good principles.' On a modified defence of the philosopher, whose works he professed had afforded him edification, he did venture, but thinking it enough to defend one at a time Boswell said nothing 'of my gay friend Wilkes.' In the Paris _salons_ of that winter Wilkes, Sterne, Foote, Hume, and Rousseau, had been the received lions. Hume had taken up the wild philosopher whose melodramatic Armenian dress had been the attraction at the houses of the leaders of society, the ladies who (says Horace Walpole who was there this year) 'violated all the duties of life and gave very pretty suppers.' It was the day of Anglomania on the Continent, when the name of Chatham was a name to conjure with, and Hume was expounding deism to the great ladies,--'when the footmen were in the room,' adds the shocked Horace,--lionizing Hume 'who is the only thing they believe in implicitly; which they must do, for I defy them to understand any language that he speaks,' in allusion to the broad Scottish accent of the philosopher. The fantastic attire of Rousseau may have suggested to Bozzy the Corsican dress in his valise, or he may have construed into a command, willingly enough, the hint Paoli had dropped to let them know at home how affairs were going. He waited on Chatham with it, and was received pompously but graciously, says the Earl of Buchan who was present, for a touch of melodrama was not uncongenial to the great minister, the 'Pericles of Great Britain,' as the general had styled him. Bozzy thanked him 'for the very genteel manner in which you are pleased to treat me.' In return, Chatham eulogized Paoli as one of Plutarch's men, as Cardinal de Retz had said of Montrose. He saw Auchinleck in somewhat altered circumstances from those in which, four years before, he had left his father's house, riding through Glasgow 'in a cocked hat, a brown wig, brown coat made in the court fashion, red vest, corduroy small clothes, and long military-looking boots, with his servant riding a most aristocratic distance behind.' He had left it likely to vex the soul of his father, the laureate of doggerel, threatening to be the disgrace of the family; he returned as the acquaintance, in varying degrees of intimacy, of Johnson, Wilkes, Churchill, Goldsmith, the Earl Marischal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Paoli, Chatham, and plenipotentiaries of all kinds. A wonderful list for the raw youth they had known at home; yet nowhere in all his intercourse does he show the least want of self-possession or easy bearing. The 'facility of manners' and his good humour had carried him all through his curious experiences with German courts and Italian peasants. A 'spirited tour,' truly, if perhaps the moral results had been greater. The nobility and gentry of this country were welcomed abroad with but too great avidity. Italy, the garden of Europe, Bozzy declared to be the Covent Garden, and isolated passages in his book shew that he could not claim, like Milton, to have borne himself truly 'in all these places where so many things are considered lawful.' Fox, we know, did not escape the contagion of the grand tour, and Boswell had been 'caught young.' Nor will the reader find much fault in what the adverse critics have unduly emphasized--his interviewing or forcing himself upon men. A man, as Johnson said to him when seeking an interlocutor on this point, always makes himself greater as he increases his knowledge. When he was at Dunvegan on his northern tour, and Colonel Macleod seemed to hint at this, Bozzy offers as his defence of what 'has procured me much happiness' the eagerness he ever felt to share the society of men distinguished by their rank or talents. If a man, he adds, is praised for seeking knowledge, though mountains and seas are in his way, he may be pardoned in the pursuit of the same object under difficulties as great though of a different kind. And the defence will not be refused him for the use he has made of the means. Wisdom and literature alike are justified of their children, and the masters in either are not so numerous that we can afford to quarrel with them, or wrangle over their respective merits. 'Sensation,' said Johnson, '_is_ sensation,' and the pretty general feeling now is that in his department Boswell is a master. From his first setting out, he had written down every night what he had noted during the day, 'throwing together that I might afterwards make a selection at leisure.' He was to try his 'prentice hand on his _Tour in Corsica_ before shewing his strength in his two greater works. Mrs Barbauld regarded him as no ordinary traveller, with 'Working thoughts which swelled the breast Of generous Boswell, when with noble aim And views beyond the narrow beaten track By trivial fancy trod, he turned his course From polished Gallia's soft delicious vales.' Such thoughts were perhaps really foreign to that traveller, yet Dr Hill assures us that by every Corsican of education the name of Boswell is known and honoured. One curious circumstance is given. At Pino, when Boswell fancying himself 'in a publick house' or inn, had called for things, the hostess had said _una cosa dopo un altra, signore_, 'one thing after another, sir.' This has lingered as a memento of Bozzy in Corsica, and has been found by Dr Hill to be preserved among the traditions in the Tomasi family. Translations of the book in Italian, Dutch, French, and German, spread abroad the name of the traveller who, if like a prophet without honour in his own country, has not been without it elsewhere. CHAPTER III EDINBURGH BAR--STRATFORD JUBILEE. 1766-69 'A clerk, foredoomed his father's soul to cross, Who pens a stanza, when he should engross.'--POPE. The return of the prodigal to Auchinleck would seem at first to have been attended with some satisfaction to both father and son. The father might now believe that he was entitled to consideration from the son, as a reward for his long-continued indulgence to the traveller, who might in his turn reflect on the advantages which he derived from such a protracted tour. Accordingly, in his papers of the April of this year, we find the following entry:--'My father said to me, "I am much pleased with your conduct in every respect." After all my anxiety while abroad, here is the most perfect approbation and calm of mind. I never felt such _sollid_ (_sic_) happiness.' But the philosopher, who with Paoli had compared his mind to a camera obscura, reappears unfortunately in the next entry. 'But I find I am not so happy with this approbation and this calm as I expected to be. But why do I say alas! when I really look upon this life merely as a transient state?' To this curious expression of Boswell we shall refer when we discuss at the close his religious and philosophical views, but it is distressing to find such whimsicalities colouring his sense of the old man's kindness when he writes but shortly after, 'I must stay at Auchinleck, I have there just the kind of complaining proper for me. All must complain, and I more than most of my fellow-creatures.' On the 26th July 1766 he passed advocate at the bar. On putting on his gown he remarked to his brother-advocates, as he says, that his natural propensities had led him to a military life, but now that he had been pressed by his father into the service he did not doubt but that he should shew as good results as those who had joined as volunteers. His gay friend Wilkes had declared that he would be out-distanced in the professional race by dull plodders and blockheads, but at the outset he appears to have started with a fair amount of zest. He dedicated his inaugural thesis to the son of the Earl of Bute, Lord Mountstuart, with whom he had travelled in Italy, and on whom he flattered himself he had made some impression, the first of Boswell's many ineffectual attempts to secure place and promotion, for on a seat in Parliament he had four years before set his heart. A copy of the thesis was sent to Johnson, who by this time had rather cooled over the proposed publication by his friend of a book on Corsica. 'You have no materials,' he said, 'which others have not or may not have. You have warmed your imagination. I wish there were some cure like the lover's leap for all heads of which some single idea has obtained an unreasonable and irregular possession. Mind your own affairs and leave the Corsicans to theirs.' Touching on the faulty Latinity of the essay, 'Ruddiman,' added the old man, 'is dead.' On entering his new career Bozzy began by vows for his good conduct. These, a remnant of his old Catholic days, we shall find him renewing again and again, ludicrously and pathetically enough, however, as we draw to the close. Sometimes they appear with reference to matters with which the knowledge of the unpublished parts of the letters to Temple, now in the possession of an American collector, has to deal without suggesting unduly to the more fastidious sense of the present day the vagaries and weaknesses of their writer. Johnson protested against this attempt to 'enchain his volatility' by vows. But Boswell replies that they may be useful to one 'of a variable judgment and irregular inclinations. For my part, without affecting to be a Socrates, I am sure I have a more than ordinary struggle to maintain with the Evil Principle, and all the methods I can devise are little enough to keep me tolerably steady in the paths of rectitude.' Could the doctor have read even the published correspondence he would have been at no loss for a detailed commentary on this defence. And coming events now cast their shadow before. That curious feature of Boswell's character, the mixture of religious sentiments and the Sterne vein of pietistic moralizing united with laxity in practice, appears strangely enough in the letter to Temple, dated in the February of 1767, and sent to his friend who had just been ordained to the living of Mamhead in Devon. 'I view,' he writes, 'the profession of a clergyman in an amiable and respectable light. Don't be moved by declamations against ecclesiastical history, as if that could blacken the sacred order.' He admits that ecclesiastical history is not the best field for the display of the virtues in that profession, but we are to judge of the thousands of worthy divines who have been a blessing to their parishes. He exhorts his friend to labour cheerfully in the vineyard and to leave not a tare in Mamhead. In Edinburgh it appears there were specimens; for after this pious homily he confesses quietly his own _liaison_ with 'a dear infidel' of a married woman. But the love affairs of Boswell, one of the most curious and 'characteristical' (as he would himself have phrased it) episodes in his life we shall discuss in a connected form in the next chapter, in order to secure clearness of treatment and concentration of detail. We turn, then, to his career at the bar. There can be no shadow of a doubt that with proper industry, backed as he was with very strong social and family connections, he would have secured a lucrative professional practice. In February of 1767 he is 'coming into great employment; I have this winter made sixty-five guineas, which is a considerable sum for a young man,' and the _Boswelliana_ shew him in easy intercourse with the best society in the Scottish capital. Belonging as he did to the hereditary _noblesse de la robe_, as Lockhart calls it, he was not likely, with but moderate attention, to have stood like Scott, 'an hour by the Tron, wi' deil ane to speir his price,'--Sir Walter's fee book shews for the first year a return of £24, 3s., and £57, 15s. for the second. As he had years before vowed to Lord Hailes that he would transcribe Erskine's _Institutes_ several times over till he had imprinted it on his memory, so now he was hopeful by binding up the session papers of securing a treasure of law reasoning and a collection of extraordinary facts. By March he had cleared eighty guineas, and was 'Surprised at myself, I speak with so much ease and boldness, and have already the language of the bar so much at command. I am doing nobly. I can hardly ever answer the letters of my friends.' He had quarrelled with Rousseau who had likewise broken with Hume, whose appointment as secretary to Conway had perhaps cured him of his follies over the wild philosopher. We find Boswell also designing squibs which were in the London printshops, writing verses for them and ridiculing 'The Savage' of his former idolatry. Paoli had sent him a long letter of sixteen pages. Chatham in his retirement at Bath, mystifying the court and his colleagues, could yet find time to send him a three-paged communication. In reply, the young traveller assures him that the character of the great minister had 'filled many of my best hours with the noble admiration which a disinterested soul can enjoy in the bower of philosophy.' He informs his lordship that he is preparing for publication his Tour in Corsica, that he has entered at the bar, and 'I begin to like it. I labour hard; and feel myself coming forward, and I hope to be useful to my country. Could your Lordship _find time to honour me now and then with a letter_? I have been told how favourably your Lordship has spoken of me. To correspond with a Paoli and a Chatham is enough to keep a young man ever ardent in the pursuit of a virtuous fame.' In June he expected to be busier than ever, during the week when his father sat as Judge of the Outer House, 'for you must know that the absurdity of mankind makes nineteen out of twenty employ the son of the judge before whom their case is heard,' an admission which only increases our regret at the want of professional industry on the part of the son. His addiction to the society of players only increased the more as his practice at the bar would have been thought to engross his attention. For the opening of the Canongate Theatre, on 9th December 1767, he had been induced to write a prologue to the play of _The Earl of Essex_ with which the newly licensed house started its career. Part of the opening verses, as spoken by Ross, 'a very good copy, very conciliatory' as the Earl of Mansfield styled them, runs as follows:-- 'This night, lov'd _George's_ free enlightened age Bids _Royal favour_ shield the Scottish stage; His Royal favour every bosom cheers; The drama now with dignity appears! Hard is my fate if murmurings there be Because that favour is announced by me. Anxious, alarm'd, and aw'd by every frown, May I entreat the candour of the Town? You see me here by no unworthy art; My _all_ I venture where I've fix'd my heart. Fondly ambitious of an honest fame, My humble labours your indulgence claim. I wish to hold no _Right_ but by your choice, I'll trust my patent to the Publick Voice.' The effect of this, aided by friends properly planted in different parts of the theatre, Boswell assures us was instantaneous and effectual. But the plaudits given would have been better in a strictly professional court, and it led, we can see, to the association of Boswell with but questionable society. 'The joyous crew of thunderers in the galleries,' as Robert Fergusson describes them, the vulgar cits applying to their parched lips 'thirst quenching porter,' and the notoriously irregular lives of the players, all these were ties and associations ill calculated to appease the just indignation of his father or to add to forensic reputation in Edinburgh. The Scottish Themis, says Scott, speaking from his own early experience of much higher literary pursuits, is peculiarly jealous of any flirtation with the muses on the part of those who have ranged themselves under her banners, and to them the least lingering look behind is fatal. Little wonder, then, that the paternal anger was again roused, when 'the look behind' on his part was coupled with the bitter remembrances of the laureate of the Soapers, of the Erskine Correspondence, and his own long indulgence destined at last to bear such sorry fruits. 'How unaccountable it is,' he cries impatiently to Temple, 'that my father and I should be so ill together! He is a man of sense and a man of worth; but from some unhappy turn in his disposition he is much dissatisfied with a son you know.... To give you an instance. I send you a letter I had a few days ago. I have answered in my own style; I will be myself! How galling it is to the friend of Paoli to be treated so!' He confesses his father has 'that Scots strength of sarcasm which is peculiar to a North Briton,' and that time was when it would have depressed him. But now he is firm, and, 'as my revered friend Mr Samuel Johnson used to say,' he feels the privileges of an independent human being! To add to the confusion of Lord Auchinleck his son had flung himself with all his enthusiasm into the famous Douglas Trial, the cause that figures so much to the confusion, it is to be feared, of the general reader. Of this some full account is necessary in order to explain that extraordinary trial,--perhaps the most protracted and famous that ever came before a court,--which, dragging its slow length along through a longer course than the Peloponnesian War, fills the shelves of legal libraries with eighteen portly volumes of papers and reports. In the case Boswell really held no actual brief, though were we to follow the impression he gives of his services we should infer he had been leading counsel for the plaintiff, Douglas. 'With a labour of which few are capable,' says Bozzy, many years after, 'he compressed the substance of the immense volumes of proofs and arguments into an octavo pamphlet,' to which its author believed 'we may ascribe a great share of the popularity on Mr Douglas's side.' Then he adds in a characteristic sentence, the meaning of which can be fully appreciated only by those who have followed his contributions to magazines and the press of the day, 'Mr Boswell took care to keep the newspapers and other publications incessantly warm with various writings, both in prose and in verse, all tending to touch the heart and rouse the parental and sympathetic feelings.' Lady Jane Douglas, sister to Archibald, Duke of Douglas, had been privately married in 1746 to Colonel Steuart, afterwards Sir John Steuart of Grandtully. She was then in the forty-ninth year of her age, and the marriage was not divulged till May 1748 to her brother who had not been reconciled and had in consequence suspended her allowance. At Paris, in very humble lodgings, she gave birth to male twins in the house of a Madame le Brun. The parents in 1749 returned to Scotland where one of the children died; in 1761 the Duke of Douglas had himself followed. Three claimants took the field, the Duke of Hamilton as heir male of line, the Earl of Selkirk as heir of provision under former deeds, and Archibald Steuart or Douglas. Lady Jane died in 1753, and Sir John in 1764, both on their death-beds testifying to the legitimacy of their surviving child. The Duke of Douglas, long prejudiced against this son's claim by the machinations of the Hamiltons, had revoked the deed in their favour for a settlement executed in behalf of his sister's son Archibald. But stories had become rife of that son being the child of a Nicholas Mignon and Marie Guerin from whom he had been purchased, and an action to reduce service on a plea of _partus suppositio_ was instituted by the tutors of the Duke of Hamilton who was then a minor. In France negociations were conducted, investigations made, and witnesses examined by Burnet of Monboddo, Gardenstone, Hailes, and Eskgrove, and at last in July 1767 the Court of Session issued its decision. Lord Dundas, the President, speaking first, and dwelling on the age of Lady Jane, childless by a former marriage, the secrecy of the birth, and the intrinsic valuelessness of death-bed depositions when set against pecuniary interests and family pride, recorded his vote in favour of the Hamiltons. Six days were subsequently taken up with the speeches of the other judges, and Monboddo, speaking last, voted for Douglas. The verdict was seven on each side, and by the President's vote the case in Scotland was won by the pursuers. Kames, Monboddo, and Lord Auchinleck, were in favour of the defender, Douglas. The case was at once by him appealed to the House of Lords. Douglas was favoured in Scotland, where for years the state of interest had been such that people in company used to bargain, for the maintenance of peace, that no mention of this disturbing plea should be introduced. So high did the feeling run in Edinburgh that the Hamilton party had been driven from their apartments in Holyrood Palace and their property plundered. It was fortunate that this loophole of escape to another court was opened, for before the Union such a cause would have led almost to civil broil where the rival interests of the factions, through the ramifications of marriage and other connections, extended so widely. In earlier days the strife would have ended by an appeal to the sword on the causeway. All the court influence of the Hamiltons had been bent, and bent in vain, to secure the exclusion from the bench of Lord Monboddo, counsel for Douglas, and a duel had been fought between their agent Andrew Stuart and Thurlow the opposing advocate. The excitement over the verdict of the Lords on Monday, February 27, 1769, was unprecedented. In the _Autobiography of_ Jupiter Carlyle is fortunately preserved the account of the scene, witnessed by the doctor himself, who had been successful in gaining admission to the court, where from nine in the morning till ten at night he remained, hemmed in by the crowd and overcome with the oppressive heat. Mansfield spoke over one hour, and, on his appearing to faint, the Chancellor rushed out for a bottle and glasses, the current of fresh air being felt by the crowd as a relief. Finally the verdict of the Scottish courts was reversed without a division, and a verdict found in favour of Douglas. Hume was not satisfied of the legitimacy of the pursuer, neither was Lord Shelburne, and bribery on both sides had been extensively employed, over £100,000 having been calculated to have been spent in this protracted litigation. It was on the evening of Thursday, shortly after eight, that the tidings reached Edinburgh by express. The city was at once illuminated, and next morning Dundas on his way to the Parliament House was threatened by a mob such as the town had not seen since the Porteous Riot. Two troops of dragoons were drafted at once on the same day into the capital. As usually told, the story, which is vouched for by Ramsay of Ochtertyre, is that the mob of the night before had been headed by the excited Boswell, and that the windows of his father's house were smashed. Had such been the case, it must have been by an oversight on the part of the mob, or some petulant freak of the son, for on this occasion both Boswell and his father had for once been unanimous in their belief in the legitimacy of Douglas. But there is no need for doubting Ramsay's assertion that Lord Auchinleck had, with tears in his eyes, to implore President Dundas to commit his son to the Tolbooth! Not only had Bozzy taken the field in the November of 1767 with his _Essence of the Douglas Cause_, 'which I regretted that Dr Johnson never took the trouble to study,' even though 'the question interested nations,' and the pamphlet had produced, as its writer flattered himself, considerable effect in deciding the case, but he had ventured on a breach of professional etiquette in publishing _Dorando, a Spanish Tale_. This brochure was ordered by the Court of Session to be suppressed as contempt of court, after it had run through three editions. No copy of this forlorn hope of the book hunter has ever been found, though doubtless it lurks in some library where its want of the writer's name upon the title page may have kept it from making its reappearance. Though it bore no name, yet Boswell, when writing to Temple over it, speaks of 'My publisher Wilkie,' and he seems to have been afraid that the copy sent by him should fall into the hands of strangers. In the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for July 1767, however, it is reviewed, but the value of the shilling booklet does not seem to have impressed the critic. 'The Spanish Tale,' he says, 'supposes the contests to be finally determined in favour of _Don Ferdinand_ against the family of Ardivoso--but the real question is still in dispute, having been removed by appeal to the House of Lords. The pamphlet is zealously but feebly written: the author in some places affects the sublime, and in some the pathetic; but these are the least tolerable parts of his performance.' Thus airily does the reviewer dismiss Bozzy's determined effort to rouse, as he imagined, the parental and sympathetical feelings, and it is clear at least that, however much its recovery would add to the stock of harmless pleasure among professed Boswellians and collectors, its loss cannot be said to have 'eclipsed the gaiety of nations.' During the course of the trial the _Tour in Corsica_ had been preparing. Early in 1768 it was issued from the celebrated press of Robert and Andrew Foulis in Glasgow, and the publishers were the Dillys in the Poultry, London, who were to act for him in all his literary undertakings to the end of his life. It was a lull in the storm of the Douglas crisis, and the old judge, eager enough to see his son associated with anything rational, was not unpleased with its appearing as a pledge of better things. 'Jamie,' he admitted, 'had taen a toot on a new horn.' The account of Corsica which had been made up from various sources of information ran to two hundred and thirty-nine pages; but the real interest of the volume attaches to the _Journal_ which occupies a hundred and twenty. The translations from Seneca were done by Thomas Day, then very young, the author of _Sandford and Merton_, and the creator of that constellation of excellence, Mr Barlow, whose connection in any degree with Boswell is almost provocative of a smile. The peculiar orthography of the writer is defended in the preface, for he allows himself not only such divergencies as 'tremenduous,' 'authour,' 'ambassadour,' but also 'authentick' and 'panegyrick.' The dedication of the first edition to Paoli was dated on his own birthday, and the book ran to a third edition before the October of the same year. As purchased by the Dillys for a hundred guineas it would appear to have been a profitable speculation, and the wide circulation to which it attained we shall see was not merely due to accident but to more solid qualities. 'Pray read,' says Horace Walpole to his friend Gray, 'the new account of Corsica. The author is a strange being, and has a rage of knowing everybody that ever was talked of. He forced himself upon me at Paris in spite of my teeth and my doors.' 'Mr B.'s book,' replies Gray--with a curious anticipation of the Carlylean canon of criticism--'has pleased and moved me strangely; all I mean that relates to Paoli. The pamphlet proves, what I have always maintained, that any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw _with veracity_. Of Mr B.'s book I have not the least suspicion, because I am sure he could invent nothing of the kind. The title of this part of his work is a dialogue between a Green Goose and a Hero.' But Gray was fastidious, in this case blindly so. The merits of Goldsmith he could when dying perceive, but the rollicking humour of Bozzy in this his first book was sealed to the recluse critic who 'never spoke out,' a thing that never could be safely asserted of the author of the _Tour in Corsica_. That 'authour,' however, was now bent on extracting the sanction of approval from his idol. He hastened to London, heralding his arrival, as was his wont, by a deftly contributed paragraph to the papers. The society journals of to-day have not improved on Boswell in their method of obtaining first hand information; he was a most assiduous chronicler of his own actions, and there can be no doubt that there is much Boswell 'copy' buried in the pages of the papers of the time. From the _Public Advertizer_ of February 28th we learn 'James Boswell, Esq., is expected in town,' and, on March 24th, 'yesterday James Boswell, Esq., arrived from Scotland at his lodgings in Half Moon Street, Piccadilly.' He had received no letter from Johnson since the one in which the Latinity of his thesis had been criticised, and Boswell had heard that the publication in his book of a letter from his friend had given offence to its writer. Johnson was in Oxford at the time, and thither flew Bozzy to obtain the approval of his labours and, with an eye to all future contingencies, his sanction for the publication _in his biography_ of all Johnson's letters to him. 'When I am dead, sir,' was the reply, 'you may do as you will.' 'My book,' he writes eagerly to Temple, 'has amazing celebrity. Lord Lyttelton, Mr Walpole, Mrs Macaulay, and Mr Garrick, have all written me noble letters about it. There are two Dutch translations going forward.' General Oglethorpe, an old veteran who had seen service under Prince Eugene, and the friend of Pope whose verses upon him 'I had read from my early years,' called upon him and solicited his acquaintance. He became a sort of literary lion. 'I am really the great man now,' he cries; 'I have David Hume in the forenoon, Mr Johnson in the afternoon of the same day. I give admirable dinners and good claret, and the moment I go abroad again, which will be in a day or two, I set up my chariot. This is enjoying the fruit of my labours, and appearing like the friend of Paoli.' Alas for that friend!--he confesses to his correspondent that he has been 'wild.' The form of this outbreak may be sufficiently seen by the general reader in the leading questions which at this time Boswell is found putting to Johnson; for the _Life of Johnson_, as we shall indicate in its proper place, is no less the life of the biographer, whose mind was ever seeking to shelter itself under the guidance of a stronger force, and to effect a moral anchorage or moorings behind the lee of his great friend. When Bozzy indulges in 'the luxury of noble sentiments,' he is often known to be courting an indemnity to his conscience for lax practice. Longfellow makes Miles Standish in his belligerent mood turn in the Cæsar to where the thumb-marks in the margin proclaimed that the battle was hottest; Boswell often indicates the decline and fall of the moralist by an apparently undue vein of pietistic comments. The next year was to witness the friend of Paoli in his most eccentric display--the Shakesperian Festival inaugurated by Garrick at Stratford. By this ludicrous gathering it is that Boswell is known to the mass of readers who have never cared to know more of 'Corsica Boswell' than what they can gather from the lively picture of Macaulay. There he is known only as it were in the gross, to which indeed, as Johnson said of Milton, the undramatic nature of the essayist's mind was rather prone, careless as it was or incapable of the finer shades of character. Yet, as we know, he was not the solitary masker or mummer in this extraordinary carnival, which seems not creditable to the taste of its promoters, and resembles rather the entry of a travelling circus into a provincial town than a serious commemoration of a great man. However, 'thither Mr Boswell repaired with all the enthusiasm of a poetical mind;' as he informs us, 'such an opportunity for the warbling of his Muse was not neglected.' On Wednesday, Sept. 6th, about five in the morning, says _The Scots Magazine_ for that month in its leading article, the performers from Drury Lane paraded the streets of Stratford, and serenaded the ladies with a ballad by Garrick, beginning 'Ye Warwickshire lads and ye lasses See what at our Jubilee passes; Come revel away, rejoice and be glad, For the lad of all lads was a Warwickshire lad, Warwickshire lad, All be glad, For the lad of all lads was a Warwickshire lad.' Guns were fired, the magistrates assembled, and there was a public breakfast in the town-hall. In this number of the magazine there is a letter extending to seven columns from James Boswell, Esq., on his return to London, after being 'much agitated' by 'this jubilee of genius.' He describes it as 'truly an antique idea, a Grecian thought;' the oratorio at the great Stratford church, with the music by Dr Arne, was, he admits, grand and admirable, but 'I could have wished that prayers had been read, and a short sermon preached.' Then the performance of the dedication ode by Garrick is described as 'noble and affecting, like an exhibition in Athens or Rome.' Lord Grosvenor, at the close, went up to Garrick, 'and told him that he had affected his whole frame, showing him his nerves and veins still quivering with agitation.' The masquerade our traveller, as the 'travelled thane,' affects to regard complacently as an 'entertainment not suited to the genius of the British nation, but to a warmer country, where the people have a great flow of spirits, and a readiness at repartee.' Bozzy no doubt had seen the carnival abroad, and his memories of sunnier skies would not find congenial atmosphere in the unpropitious weather when the Avon rose with the floods of rain, the lower grounds were laid under water, and a guinea for a bed was regarded as an imposition, though 'no one,' declares our hero, 'was understood to come there who had not plenty of money'--their own or their father's, presumably. The break up seems to have been effected in confusion, but the good-humoured mummer, taking one consideration with another, compares it to eating an artichoke, where 'we have some fine mouthfuls, but also swallow the leaves and the hair, which are confoundedly difficult of digestion. After all, I am highly satisfied with my artichoke.' He brought 'the warbling of his muse' with him. It is no better or worse than the staple. In the character of a Corsican, he sings-- 'From the rude banks of Golo's rapid flood, Alas! too deeply tinged with patriot blood; O'er which, dejected, injur'd Freedom bends, And sighs indignant o'er all Europe sends, Behold a Corsican! In better days Eager I sought my country's fame to raise. Now when I'm exiled from my native land I come to join this classic festal band; To soothe my soul on Avon's sacred stream, And from your joy to catch a cheering gleam.' After an apostrophe to happy Britons, on whose propitious isle propitious freedom ever deigns to smile, he closes with an appeal-- 'But let me plead for liberty distress'd, And warm for her each sympathetic breast; Amidst the splendid honours which you bear, To save a sister island be your care; With generous ardour make us also free, And give to Corsica a noble Jubilee.' Colman and Foote, of course, as comedians were there, but Goldsmith and Johnson shewed their sense by their absence. The only trace of Davy's old master was found in a Coventry ribbon put out by 'a whimsical haberdasher,' with the motto from Johnson's _Prologue_ at the opening of Drury Lane in 1747--'Each change of many colour'd life he drew.' Boswell had a free hand as a writer for the _London Magazine_, in which he had a proprietary interest. To it he contributed the following account, accompanied with a portrait--the source of much of Macaulay's indictment. 'One of the most remarkable masks upon this occasion was James Boswell, Esq., in the dress of an armed Corsican chief. He entered the amphitheatre about twelve o'clock. He wore a short dark-coloured coat of coarse cloth, scarlet waistcoat and breeches, and black spatterdashes; his cap or bonnet was of black cloth; on the front of it was embroidered in gold letters _viva la liberta_, and on one side of it was a handsome blue feather and cockade, so that it had an elegant as well as a warlike appearance. On the breast of his coat was sewed a Moor's head, the crest of Corsica, surrounded with branches of laurel. He had also a cartridge-pouch, into which was stuck a stiletto, and on his left side a pistol was hung upon the belt of his cartridge-pouch. He had a fusee slung across his shoulder, wore no powder in his hair, but had it plaited at full length with a knot of blue ribbons at the end of it. He had, by way of a staff, a very curious vine all of one piece, emblematical of the sweet bard of Avon. He wore no mask, saying it was not proper for a gallant Corsican. So soon as he came into the room he drew universal attention. The novelty of the Corsican dress, its becoming appearance, and the character of the brave nation concurred to distinguish the armed Corsican chief. He was first accosted by Mrs Garrick, with whom he had a good deal of conversation. There was an admirable dialogue between Lord Grosvenor, in the character of a Turk, and the Corsican on the different constitution of the countries so opposite to each other,--Despotism and Liberty; and Captain Thomson, of the navy, in the character of an honest tar, kept it up very well; he expressed a strong inclination to stand by the brave islanders. Mr Boswell danced both a minuet and a country dance with a very pretty lady, Mrs Sheldon, wife to Captain Sheldon, of the 38th Regiment of Foot, who was dressed in a genteel domino, and before she danced threw off her mask.' He adds a cool puff of his own verses, 'which, it is thought, are well suited to the occasion, while at the same time they preserve the true Corsican character.' About a month after this masquerade, Goldsmith dined at Boswell's lodging with Garrick, Johnson, Davies, and others, where 'Goldsmith,' says the biographer, 'strutted about, bragging of his dress, and I believe was seriously vain of it, for his mind was wonderfully prone to such impressions!' Bozzy could criticise, as on all occasions, the bloom coloured coat of 'honest Goldsmith,' yet he was eager for Garrick to fall in with the idea of the tradesmen of Stratford to make the Jubilee an annual event in the interests of local trade, and 'I flatter myself with the prospect of attending you at several more Jubilees.' Though he had again commenced in London his attendance on Johnson and note-taking, there was now a divided source of attraction. Things had gone hard with Paoli since Boswell had been in the island. In spite of his Irish brigades and his British volunteers, the overwhelming forces which the French were able to put in the field, on the cession of the island to them by the Genoese, brought to an end the stubborn resistance of the inhabitants. In the August of 1768 Boswell had raised in Scotland a subscription of £700 for ordnance furnished by the Carron Iron Work Company, and in 1769 there had issued from the press a little duodecimo, '_British Essays in favour of the Brave Corsicans_: collected and published by James Boswell, Esq.' The papers are twenty in number, some by himself, others by 'a gentleman whose name would do honour to any cause (whom we think to have been Trecothick, the successor of Beckford, as Lord Mayor of London), and the greatest part furnished by persons unknown to me.' They deal with the dangers to trade from France and the Bourbon Compact, and point at the value of Corsica as a station superior to Gibraltar or Minorca. One paper signed 'P. J.' has the undoubted Boswellian touch in dealing with the sailors thrown idle by the cessation of the along-shore Mediterranean trade. 'None are less avaricious than our honest tars, nor have they, in reality, any reason to be discontented. Every common sailor has at least five and thirty shillings a month, over and above which _he has his victuals and drink, and that in great abundance_. There is no such thing as stinting aboard a ship, unless when reduced to difficulties by stormy weather. The crew have their three meals a day regularly, and if they should be hungry between meals, _there is always a biscuit or a luncheon of something cold to be had_.' France had bought Corsica from Genoa in May 1768. Marboeuf, whom Boswell had found in the island, had been superseded, and a descent of the French under Count Vaux with 20,000 men ended the war. Paoli escaped to a ruinous convent on the shore, and, after lying there in concealment, he embarked on an English vessel bound for Leghorn. On September 20th he reached London, and the _Public Advertizer_ of October 4th, through its faithful correspondent, informed its readers how 'On Sunday last General Paoli, accompanied by James Boswell, Esq., took an airing in Hyde Park in his coach.' On the evening of the 10th he was presented by the traveller to Johnson, who was highly pleased with the lofty port of the stranger and the easy 'elegance of manners, the brand of the soldier, _l'homme d'épée_.' An impression is abroad that Boswell's books were not taken seriously. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. The Whigs were in favour of his views, and Burke, together with Frederick the Great, believed our interests would suffer by the increase of French power in the Mediterranean. Shelburne, for Chatham had resigned before November 1768, was the advocate of similar views, telling our ambassador at Versailles to remonstrate with the French court, while Junius, in his letter to the Duke of Grafton, told the country that Corsica would never have been invaded by the French, but for the sight of a weak and distracted ministry. When the hand of Napoleon was heavy on the Genoese, they remembered that their cession of the island had made their master, by his birth at Ajaccio on August 15, 1769, a Frenchman. But the nation at the time of Boswell's books was weary of war, and their influence, though great, was not visible in any actual political results. Boswell had expected to draw the sage on the subject of matrimony, having promised himself, as he says, a good deal of instructive conversation on the conduct of the married state. But the oracles were dumb. On his return to the north he was married, on the 25th November 1769, to his cousin. We find in the _Scots Magazine_ of that month the following extracts under the list of marriages:-- 'At Lainshaw, in the shire of Air, JAMES BOSWELL, Esq., of Auchinleck, advocate, to MISS PEGGY MONTGOMERY, daughter of the late DAVID MONTGOMERY of Lainshaw, Esq.' 'At Edinburgh, ALEXANDER BOSWELL, Esq., of Auchinleck, one of the Lords of Session and Justiciary, to Miss BETTY BOSWELL, second daughter of JOHN BOSWELL, Esq., of Balmuto, deceased.' His father, now past sixty, had married again, and married a cousin for the second time, like his son on the present occasion. That they were married on the same day and at different places affords a clear indication that the father and son were no longer on the best of terms. CHAPTER IV LOVE AFFAIRS--LITERARY CLUB. 1766-73 'How happy could I be with either, Were t'other dear charmer away.'--GAY. 'Love,' wrote Madame de Stael, 'is with man a thing apart, 'tis woman's whole existence.' This is not true at least of Boswell, for his love affairs fill as large a part in his life as in that of Benjamin Constant. A most confused chapter withal, and one that luckily was not known to Macaulay, whose colours would otherwise have been more brilliant. We find Bozzy paying his addresses at one and the same time to at least eight ladies, exclusive as this is of sundry minor divinities of a fleeting and more temporary nature not calling here for allusion. His first divinity was the grass-widow of Moffat, and here Temple had been compelled to remonstrate in spite of all the lover's philandering about her freedom from her husband, who had used her ill. Were she unfaithful, he declares her worthy to be 'pierced with a Corsican dagger,' but in March he has found it too much like a 'settled plan of licentiousness,' discovering her to be an ill-bred rompish girl, debasing his dignity, without refinement, though handsome and lively. Then there is the quarrel and the reconciliation, she vowing she loved him more than ever she had done her husband, but meeting with opposition from his brother David and others, who furnished the love-sick heart of her adorer with examples of her faithlessness such as made him recoil. He vows now his frailties are at an end, and he resolves to turn out an admirable member of society. He had broken with her as with the gardener's daughter a year ago--an everlasting lesson to him. By March 1767 the reigning favourite was Miss Bosville of Yorkshire. But his lot being cast in Scotland would be an objection to the beauty; then we hear of a young lady in the vicinity of whose claims Lord Auchinleck approved, because their lands lay happily together for family extension. She was just eighteen, pious, good-tempered and genteel, and for four days she had been on a visit to 'the romantick groves' of his ancestors, when suddenly the scene is changed for the Sienese _signora_ of whom we heard upon his travels. 'My Italian angel,' he cries, 'is constant; I had a letter from her but a few days ago, which made me cry.' He conjures his friend Temple to come to him, and 'on that Arthur Seat where our youthful fancies roved abroad shall we take counsel together.' The local divinity we learn is Miss Blair of Adamtown; he has been drinking her health, and aberrations from sobriety and virtue have ensued, but he thought things would be brought to a climax were Temple to visit her. A long letter of commission follows, the envoy is instructed to appear as his old friend, praising him to Miss Blair for his good qualities. Temple is adjured to dwell upon his odd, inconstant, impetuous nature, how he is accustomed to women of intrigue, and he is to ask of the fair one if she does not think there is insanity in the Boswell family. She is to hear of his travels, his acquaintance with foreign princes, Voltaire and Rousseau, his desire to have a house of his own; and then he diverges into practicality when he desires his friend to 'study the mother,' and take notes of all that passed, as it might have the effect of fixing the fate of the lover. Temple, it may be imagined, did not interpret his commission in such a literal spirit, and inconstancy and insanity could hardly be recommendations in Miss Blair's eyes. That such should be the case,--outside the confessions of Mr Rochester in _Jane Eyre_,--would appear to the commissioner an obvious fact. A silence followed on Temple's departure from the divinity. Boswell dreaded a certain nabob, 'a man of copper,' as his rival. Then he believed the fair offended by his own Spanish stateliness and gravity; and again a letter, 'written with all the warmth of Italian affection,' restores the _signora_ to the first place, from which she is deposed by a note from Miss Blair, explaining that his letter had been delayed a week at the Ayr post-office. Then fresh ravings, clouded by the belief that she is cunning and sees his weakness, for three people at Ayr have assured him she is a jilt, and he is shocked at the risk he has run, a warning for the future to him against 'indulging the least fondness for a Scotch lass.' He has, he feels, a soul of a more Southern frame, and some Englishwoman ought to be sensible of his merit, though the Dutch translator of his _Tour_, Mademoiselle de Zuyl, has been writing to him. Random talking is his dread, he must guard against it, and Miss Blair revives. 'I must have her learn the harpsichord,' he cries, 'and French; she shall be one of the finest women in the island.' Later on they have had a long meeting, of which space only prevents the inimitable reproduction,--'squeezing and kissing her fine hand, while she looked at me with those beautiful black eyes.' He meets her at the house of Lord Kames, he sees her at _Othello_--she was in tears at the affecting scenes, and 'rather leaned' to him (he thought), and 'the jealous Moor described my own soul.' But true love did never yet run smooth; he has been 'as wild as ever. Trust me in time coming; I will give you my word of honour.' Then--curious psychological trait--'to-morrow I shall be happy with my devotions.' By the beginning of 1768 he fears all is over. A rumour--a false one as it proved--had reached him that the divinity was to be married to Sir Alexander Gilmour, M.P. for Midlothian. He gets friendly with the nabob, warms him with old claret, and bewails with him their hapless devotion. They agree to propose in turn, and, being in turn rejected, he feels sure that 'a Howard, or some other of the noblest in the kingdom' is to be his fate. The Dutch translator again holds the field, to be soon dismissed for her frivolity and her infidelity. Then Miss Dick of Prestonfield reigns with solid qualifications--she lacks a fortune, but is fine, young, healthy, and amiable. A visit to Holland, to finally decide on the Mademoiselle's claims, was proposed, but his father, warned in time, would not consent. Temple, too, was against this, and 'Temple thou reasonest well,' he cries, and thinks his abnegation will be a solace to his worthy father on his circuit. Freed now from Miss Blair and the Dutch divinity, he is devoted to _la belle Irlandaise_, 'just sixteen, with the sweetest countenance and a Dublin education.' Never till now had he been so truly in love; every flower is united, and she is a rose without a thorn. Her name 'Mary Anne' he has carved upon a tree, and cutting off a lock of her hair she had promised Bozzy not to marry a lord before March, or forget him. 'Sixteen,' he says; 'innocence and gaiety make me quite a Sicilian swain.' His book had dissipated his professional energies, and he had even taken to gaming. Incidentally we learn that he had lost more than he could pay, and that Mr Sheridan had advanced enough to clear him, on a promise that he should not engage in play for three years. Mary Anne has added to his complications by her forgetfulness, and the local candidate Miss Blair reappears. Favoured as she was by his father, it would have been easy to bring things to a climax, but on her mother's part there was some not unnatural coldness over his indiscreet talk about his love of the heiress. Bozzy was a convivial knight-errant in what was called 'Saving the ladies.' At clubs and gatherings any member would toast his idol in a bumper, and then another champion would enter his peerless Dulcinea in two bumpers, to be routed by the original toper taking off four. The deepest drinker 'saved his lady,' as the phrase ran; though, says George Thomson speaking of the old concerts in St Cecilia's Hall, at the foot of Niddry's Wynd, which were maintained by noblemen and gentlemen, the bold champion had often considerable difficulty in _saving himself_ from the floor, in his efforts to regain his seat! Miss Burnet of Monboddo, celebrated by Burns, and Miss Betty Home, he describes as the reigning beauties of the time deeply involved in thus causing the fall of man. Boswell was not behind, and he ascribes his aberrations to the 'drinking habit which still prevails in Scotland,' renewing good intentions, only to be broken in the same letter that reveals the Moffat lady again, 'like a girl of eighteen, with the finest black hair,' whom he loves so much that he is in a fever. '_This_,' he adds truly enough, '_is unworthy of Paoli's friend_.' The May of 1769 saw him in Ireland, where his relations in County Down secured his entry into the best society. A dispatch to the _Public Advertizer_, of July 7th, informed the public that 'James Boswell, Esq., dined with His Grace the Duke of Leinster at his seat at Carton. He went by special invitation to meet the Lord Lieutenant; came next morning with his Excellency to the Phoenix Park, where he was present at a review of Sir Joseph Yorke's dragoons; he dined with the Lord Mayor, and is now set out on his return to Scotland.' The _belle Irlandaise_ had forgotten him, but it is to this occasion that we may refer some verses that were published by his son Sir Alexander. Chambers thinks they refer to his cousin, but the general belief tends in the direction of the notorious Margaret Caroline Rudd, the associate in later years of the brothers Perreau, who were executed for forgery. In the _Life of Johnson_ we find Boswell, in 1776, expressing to his companion a desire to be introduced to this person, so celebrated for her address and insinuation, and later on he is shewn, on his own confession, to have visited her, 'induced by the fame of her talents and irresistible power of fascination,' and to have sent an account of this interview to his wife, but to have offered its perusal first, 'as it appeared to me highly entertaining,' to Temple, who was indignant over it. It would appear, then, that Boswell did not reveal to Johnson his former flirtation with this notorious woman, but we think that the obvious marks of the brogue in the verses shew conclusively that either the feeling was imitative and based on an earlier Irish song, or that the verses were judged by Boswell's son, not too devoted, as we shall find, to his father's memory, to be free from offence. 'O Larghan Clanbrassil, how sweet is thy sound, To my tender remembrance as Love's sacred ground; For there Marg'ret Caroline first charm'd my sight, And fill'd my young heart with a flutt'ring delight. When I thought her my own, ah! too short seemed the _day_ For a jaunt to Downpatrick, or a trip on the _sea_; To express what I felt, then all language was vain, 'Twas in truth what the poets have studied to feign. But, too late, I found even she could _deceive_, And nothing was left but to sigh, weep, and _rave_; Distracted, I flew from my dear native shore, Resolved to see Larghan Clanbrassil no more. Yet still in some moments enchanted I find A ray of her fondness beams soft on my mind; While thus in bless'd fancy my angel I see, All the world is a Larghan Clanbrassil to me.' On this journey with Boswell there was a Margaret--his own cousin, and it is curious to find him in this mood of sentimental philandering, were it no worse, when we have now to see Bozzy at the end of his love affairs. When his great work was completed in 1791, its author contributed to the _European Magazine_ for May and June a little sketch of himself, in order to give a fillip to its circulation. There he describes jauntily his Irish tour, and after what we know of his erratic course, it is delightful to come across this sage chronicler of his dead wife, circulating testimonials to her excellences, to which no doubt he was oblivious in her lifetime. 'They had,' he writes, 'from their earliest years lived in the most intimate and unreserved friendship.' His love of the fair sex has been already mentioned (he had quoted the song of 'the Soapers' in our first chapter), and she was the constant yet prudent and delicate _confidante_ of all his '_egarements du coeur et de l'esprit_.' This we may doubt, and the gracefully allusive French quotation reminds us of Mr Pepys' use of that language when his wife was in his mind. This jaunt was the occasion of Mr Boswell's resolving at last to engage himself in that connection to which he had always declared himself averse. In short, he determined to become a married man. He requested her, with her excellent judgment and more sedate manners, to do him the favour of accepting him with all his faults, and though he assures his readers he had uniformly protested that a large fortune had been with him a requisite in the fair, he was yet 'willing to waive that in consideration of her peculiar merit!' Hearts are caught in the rebound, and Bozzy had solaced his loss of the _belle Irlandaise_ with the sympathy of his fellow-traveller. Having let his fancies roam so far abroad as Siena and Holland, the lover had now returned like the bird at evening to the nest from which it flew. She had no fortune, and 'the penniless lass wi' the lang pedigree,' related as she was to the Eglintoun branch and other high families, had not in the eyes of his father the landed qualifications of Miss Blair, whose property lay so convenient for the extension of the Boswell acres. This may have been the cause of the paternal anger and the separate marriages on the same day. The wives of literary men have ever been a fruitful source of disquisition to the admirers of their heroes, and Terentia, Gemma Donati, and Anne Hathaway, have divided the biographers of Cicero, Dante, and Shakespeare. To us it seems that, like his father, she had much to bear, hampered by their domestic difficulties through her husband's constant dependence on that father for his income, and eyed with undeserved suspicion by the judge and his second wife as a Mordecai in the gate, penniless and yet supposed to be the cause of Boswell's pecuniary embarrassments and indiscretions. The marriage was deferred till after the Stratford Jubilee, and the newly married pair took up their house in Chessel's Buildings in the Canongate. For a year and a half after his marriage his correspondence with Johnson underwent an entire cessation, and in the August of 1771 General Paoli made a tour in Scotland, which, for a time, called forth the best organizing abilities of his friend. From the _London Magazine_ of the day, in an account contributed by our hero, we learn how Paoli had paid 'a visit to James Boswell, Esq., who was the first gentleman of this country who visited Corsica, and whose writings have made the brave islanders and their general properly known over Europe.' Boswell waited on the exile and the Polish Ambassador at Ramsay's Inn, at the foot of St Mary's Wynd, visiting with them Linlithgow and Carron, 'where the general had a prodigious pleasure in viewing the forge where were formed the cannon and war-like stores' sent to Corsica by his Scottish admirers. At Glasgow they were entertained by the professors, and saw 'the elegant printing of the Scottish Stephani, the Messrs Foulis,' and no doubt their guide managed to remind their excellencies of a certain _Tour in Corsica_ emanating thence. Auchinleck was visited to 'the joy of my worthy father and me at seeing the Corsican Hero in our romantick groves,' as he tells Garrick, and on their return to Glasgow the freedom of the city was conferred on Paoli by Lord Provost Dunlop.[A] At Edinburgh 'the general slept under the roof of his ever grateful friend.' The whole forms a favourable specimen of Boswell's organizing capacities, and viewed in relation to the friendly intercourse he is found maintaining with prominent and influential persons, our regret is but increased that in the interests of his wife and children his abilities were not exercised in a more strictly professional channel. London he visited in the March of 1772 over an appeal to the Lords from the Court of Session. Johnson was now in good health, and was eager 'to see Beattie's College.' In the _Scots Magazine_ for February 1773 there is mentioned a masked ball, attended by seventy persons of quality, given in Edinburgh by Sir Alexander Macdonald and his wife, Miss Bosville of Yorkshire, one of Boswell's loves. Croker says that the masquerade for which he was rallied by Johnson was given by the Dowager Countess of Fife, and that Bozzy went as a dumb conjurer; but from the expression of the _Magazine_, 'an entertainment little known in this part of the Kingdom,' coupled with the words employed by Johnson, there can be no doubt that Croker is wrong, and that the host on this occasion was the churlish chief, whose inhospitable ways they were to experience in Skye. He was now near the great honour of his life, admission to that Literary Club, of which, said Sir William Jones, 'I will only say that there is no branch of human knowledge on which some of our members are not capable of giving information.' Never was honour better deserved or better repaid. Without his record the fame of that club would have passed away, surviving at best in some sort of hazy companionship with the Kit-Cat, Button's, Will's, and other clubs and assemblies. Never was there a club of which each member was better qualified to take care of his own fame with posterity. None of Johnson's associates would have hesitated in declaring an extended date of renown for the _Rambler_; and perhaps he himself would have staked the reputation assured, as Cowper said, by the tears of bards and heroes in order to immortalize the dead, on his _Rasselas_ or the _Dictionary_. Yet he and most members of that club, apart from the record of Boswell, would be but names to the literary antiquary, and be by the mass of readers entirely forgotten. He had canvassed the members. Johnson wrote, on April 23rd, to Goldsmith, who was in the chair that evening, to consider Boswell as proposed by himself in his absence. On the night of the ballot, April 30th, Boswell dined at Beauclerk's, where, after the company had gone to the club, he was left till the fate of his election should be announced. After Johnson had taken the thing in hand there was not much danger, yet poor Bozzy 'sat in a state of anxiety which even the charming conversation of Lady Di Beauclerk could not entirely dissipate.' There he received the tidings of his election, and he hastened to the place of meeting. Burke he met that night for the first time, and on his entrance, Johnson, 'with humorous formality, gave me a _charge_, pointing out the conduct expected from me as a good member of the club.' That charge we can believe Forster to be right in suspecting to be a caution against publishing abroad the proceedings and the talk of the members. In the autumn of the year, as they drew near to Monboddo, Johnson, we should think with excessive rudeness, told him 'several of the members wished to keep you out. Burke told me, he doubted if you were fit for it: but, now you are in, none of them are sorry. Burke says, that you have so much good humour naturally, it is scarce a virtue.' The faithful Bozzy replied, 'They were afraid of you, sir, as it was you who proposed me;' and the doctor was prone to admit that if the one blackball necessary to exclude had been given, they knew they never would have got in another member. Yet even from this rebuff he managed to deftly extract a compliment. Beauclerk, the doctor said, had been very earnest for the admission, and Beauclerk, replied Boswell, 'has a keenness of mind which is very uncommon.' The witty Topham, along with Reynolds, Garrick, and others, is immortalized in the pages of the man who was not thought by the wits of Gerrard Street fit for their club. [A] By the Town Clerk Depute of Glasgow, R. Renwick, Esq., we are informed that no notice of this enrolment of General Paoli was entered at the time, pursuant to the custom of the Register over honorary burgesships. CHAPTER V TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES. 1773 'Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides.'--WORDSWORTH. When Boswell was leaving London in May he called, for the last time, upon Goldsmith, round whom the clouds of misfortune were fast settling, and who was planning a _Dictionary of Arts and Sciences_ as a means of extrication from his embarrassments. In such circumstances, it was not unnatural for Goldsmith to revert to his own past travels, and to the reflection that he was unlikely again to set out upon them, unless sheltered like Johnson behind a pension. He assured Boswell that he would never be able to lug the dead weight of the Rambler through the Highlands. The enthusiastic pioneer, however, was loud in the praises of his companion; Goldsmith thought him not equal to Burke, 'who winds into a subject like a serpent.' The other, with more than wonted irrelevance, maintained that Johnson was 'the Hercules who strangled serpents in his cradle;' and with these characteristic utterances they parted, never again to meet. Throughout his great work, Boswell shews ever a curious depreciation of Goldsmith. Rivalry for the good graces of their common friend Johnson, as Scott thought, and the fear of his older acquaintance as the possible biographer made him suspicious of the merits of the poet, who figures in the pages of Boswell as a foil for his gently patronizing tone,--'honest Goldsmith.' The tour to the Hebrides had been a project which had occurred to them in the first days of their friendship. The _Description of the Western Isles of Scotland_ (1703) by Martin, had been put into Johnson's hands at a very early age by his father; and, though for long he had disappointed the expectations of his friend, he had talked of it in the spring of this year in such a way as to lead Boswell to write to Beattie, Robertson, Lord Elibank, and the chiefs of the Macdonalds and the Macleods, for invitations such as he could shew the doctor. Mrs Thrale also and others were induced to forward the scheme, and at last the Rambler set out on the 6th day of August. He was nine days upon the road, including two at Newcastle, where he picked up his friend Scott (Lord Stowell), and after passing Berwick, Dunbar and Prestonpans, the coach late in the evening deposited Johnson at Boyd's inn, _The White Horse_, in the Canongate,--the rendezvous of the old Hanoverian faction,--which occupied the site of the present building from which this volume, one hundred and twenty-three years later, is published. On the Saturday evening of his arrival a note was dispatched by him to Boswell, who flew to him, and 'exulted in the thought that I now had him actually in Caledonia.' Arm in arm they walked up the High Street to Boswell's house in James's Court, to which he had removed from the Canongate. The first impression of the Scottish capital was not pleasing, for at ten the beat of the city drums was heard; and, amid cries of _gardy loo_, what Oldham euphemistically calls 'the perils of the night,' were thrown over the windows down on the pavement, in the absence of covered sewers. When Captain Burt before this time had been in Edinburgh, a 'caddie' had preceded him on a scouting expedition with cries of 'haud your han',' and among flank and rear discharges he had passed to his quarters. A zealous Scotsman, as Boswell says, could have wished the doctor to be less gifted with the sense of smell, however much the sense of the breadth of the street and the height of the buildings impressed him. His wife had tea waiting, and they sat till two in the morning. To shew respect for the sage, Mrs Boswell had given up her own room, which her husband 'cannot but gratefully mention, as one of a thousand obligations which I owe her, since the great obligation of her being pleased to accept of me as her husband.' Next morning, on the Sunday, Mr Scott and Sir Wm. Forbes of Pitsligo breakfasted with them, and the host's heart was delighted by the 'little infantine noise' which his child Veronica made, with the appearance of listening to the great man. The fond father with a cheerful recklessness, not realized we fear, declared she should have for this five hundred pounds of additional fortune. The best society in the capital was invited to meet Johnson at breakfast and dinner--Robertson, Hailes, Gregory, Blacklock, and others. James's Court was rather a distinguished part of the city, and an improvement upon the former quarters in Chessel's Buildings. The inhabitants, says Robert Chambers, took themselves so seriously as to keep a clerk to record their proceedings, together with a scavenger of their own, and held among themselves their social meetings and balls. Hume had occupied part of the house before Johnson's visit, though three years had passed since he had moved to the new town into St David Street. Writing from his old house to Adam Smith, he is glad to 'have come within sight of you, and to have a view of Kirkcaldy from my windows;' the study of the historian, to which he turned fondly from the Parisian _salons_, is represented in _Guy Mannering_ as the library of Pleydell with its fine view from the windows, 'which commanded that incomparable prospect of the ground between Edinburgh and the sea, the Firth of Forth with its islands, and the varied shore of Fife to the northward.' Bozzy may have been reticent about the former tenant; he was 'not clear that it was right in me to keep company with him,' though he thought the man greater or better than his books. No word then was sent to him, nor to Adam Smith across the Forth to Kirkcaldy. They visited the Parliament House, where Harry Erskine was presented to Johnson, and, having made his bow, slipped a shilling into Boswell's hand, 'for the sight of his bear.' Holyrood and the University were inspected, and as they passed up the College-Wynd, where Goldsmith in his medical student days in Edinburgh had lived, Scott, as a child of two years, may have seen the party. On the 18th they set out from the capital, with the Parthian shot from Lord Auchinleck to a friend--'there's nae hope for Jamie, man; Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do you think, man? He's done wi' Paoli. He's off wi' the land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican, and whose tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, man? A dominie, an auld dominie; he keepit a schule and ca'ad it an acaadamy!' No more bitter taunt could have been levelled against Johnson, with his memories of Edial, near Lichfield; readers who may remember the munificent manner in which the heritors of their day had provided for Ruddiman, Michael Bruce, and others, will see the contempt that the old judge had felt for the past of the Rambler. Johnson had left behind him in a drawer a volume of his diary; and, as this would have been excellent copy for his projected _Life_, we feel the temptation to which Boswell was exposed. 'I wish,' he says naïvely, 'that female curiosity had been strong enough to have had it all transcribed; which might easily have been done; and I think the theft, being _pro bono publico_, might have been forgiven. But I may be wrong. My wife told me she never once had looked into it. She did not seem quite easy when we left her; but away we went!' The character-sketch of Johnson, given at the opening of the book is full of fine shading and touches; but the traveller who now follows them on the journey will hardly, in comparison with his own tourist attire, recognise what in 1773 was thought fit and convenient costume. 'He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair buttons of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings, and silver buckles. Upon this tour, when journeying, he wore boots, and a very wide brown cloth greatcoat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio _Dictionary_; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing. I remember Dr Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, instead of buckles.' A companion vignette of himself is added by Boswell. 'A gentleman of ancient blood, the pride of which was his predominant passion. He was then in his thirty-third year, and had been about four years happily married. His inclination was to be a soldier; but his father had pressed him into the profession of the law. He had travelled a good deal, and seen many varieties of human life. He had thought more than anyone had supposed, and had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge. He had rather too little, than too much prudence; and, his imagination being lively, he often said things of which the effect was very different from the intention. He resembled sometimes 'The best good man, with the worst natur'd muse.' The doctor who was thrifty over this tour had not thought it necessary to bring his own black servant; but Boswell's man, Joseph Ritter, a Bohemian, a fine stately fellow over six feet, who had been over much of Europe, was invaluable to them in their journey. For this the valiant Rambler had provided a pair of pistols, powder, and a quantity of bullets, but the assurance of their needlessness had induced him to leave them behind with the precious diary in the keeping of Mrs Boswell. Such a tour was then a feat for a man of sixty-four, in a country which, to the Englishman of his day, was as unknown as St Kilda is now to the mass of Scotchmen. The London citizen who, says Lockhart, 'makes Loch Lomond his wash-pot, and throws his shoe over Ben Nevis,' can with difficulty imagine a journey in the Hebrides with rainy weather, in open boats, or upon horseback over wild moorland and morasses, a journey that even to Voltaire sounded like a tour to the North Pole. Smollett, in _Humphrey Clinker_, says the people at the other end of the island knew as little of Scotland as they did of Japan, nor was Charing Cross, witness as it did the greatest height of 'the tide of human existence,' then bright with the autumnal trips of circular tours and Macbrayne steamers. The feeling for scenery, besides, was in its infancy, nor was it scenery but men and manners that were sought by our two travellers, to whom what would now be styled the Wordsworthian feeling had little or no interest. Gibbon has none of it, and Johnston laughed at Shenstone for not caring whether his woods and streams had anything good to eat in them, 'as if one could fill one's belly with hearing soft murmurs or looking at rough cascades.' Fleet Street to him was more delicious than Tempe, and the bare scent of the pastoral draws an angry snort from the critic. Boswell, in turn, confesses to no relish for nature; he admits he has no pencil for visible objects, but only for varieties of mind and _esprit_. The _Critical Review_ congratulated the public on a fortunate event in the annals of literature for the following account in Johnson's _Journey_--'I sat down on a bank, such as a writer of romance might have delighted to feign. I had, indeed, no trees to whisper over my head but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day was calm, the air soft, and all was rudeness, silence and solitude. Before me, and on either side, were high hills, which, if hindering the eye from ranging, forced the mind to find entertainment for itself.' This, little more than the reflections of a Cockney on a hayrick, is as far as the eighteenth century could go, nor need we wonder that the Rambler's moralizing at Iona struck so much Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, that he 'clasped his hands together, and remained for some time in an attitude of silent admiration.' Burns himself, as Prof. Veitch has rightly indicated, has little of the later feeling and regards barren nature with the unfavourable eyes of the farmer and the practical agriculturist, nor has the travelled Goldsmith more to shew. Writing from Edinburgh, he laments that 'no grove or brook lend their music to cheer the stranger,' while at Leyden, 'wherever I turned my eye, fine houses, elegant gardens, statues, grottoes, presented themselves.' Even Gray found that Mount Cenis carried the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far, and Wordsworth and Shelley would have resented the Johnsonian description of a Highland Ben as 'a considerable protuberance.' Indeed, Goldsmith's bare mention of that object, so dear to Pope and his century,--'grottoes'--reminds us we are not yet in the modern world. Yet the boldness of the sage, and the cheerfulness of Boswell, carried them through it all. 'I should,' wrote the doctor to Mrs Thrale, 'have been very sorry to have missed any of the inconveniences, to have had more light or less rain, for their co-operation crowded the scene and filled the mind.' Crossing the Firth, after landing on Inchkeith, they arrived at St Andrews which had long been an object of interest to Johnson. They passed Leuchars, Dundee, and Aberbrothick. The ruins of ecclesiastical magnificence would seem to have touched a hidden chord in Boswell's past, for we find him on the road talking of the 'Roman Catholick faith,' and leading his companion on transubstantiation; but this, being 'an awful subject, I did not then press Dr Johnson upon it.' Montrose was reached, and at the inn the waiter was called 'rascal' by the Rambler for putting sugar into the lemonade with his fingers, to the delight of Bozzy who rallied him into quietness by the assurance that the landlord was an Englishman. Monboddo was then passed, where 'the magnetism of his conversation drew us out of our way,' though the prompt action of Boswell as agent in advance really was the source of their invitation. Burnet was one of the best scholars in Scotland, and 'Johnson and my lord spoke highly of Homer.' All his paradoxes about the superiority of the ancients, the existence of men with tails, slavery and other institutions were vented, but all went well. The decrease of learning in England, which Johnson lamented, was met by Monboddo's belief in its extinction in Scotland, but Bozzy, as the old High School of Edinburgh boy, put in a word for that place of education and brought him to confess that it did well. The New Inn at Aberdeen was full. But the waiter knew Boswell by his likeness to his father who put up here on circuit--the only portrait, we believe, there is of Lord Auchinleck--and accommodation was provided. They visited King's College, where Boswell 'stepped into the chapel and looked at the tomb of its founder, Bishop Elphinstone, of whom I shall have occasion to write in my history of James IV., the patron of my family.' The freedom of the city was conferred on Johnson. Was this an honour, or an excuse for a social glass among the civic Solons of an unreformed corporation? The latter may be the case, when we reflect that none of the four universities thought of giving him an honorary degree, though Beattie at this time had received the doctorate in laws from Oxford, and Gray some years before this had declined the offer from Aberdeen. Nor can we forget the taunt of George Colman the younger about Pangloss in his _Heir at Law_, and his own recollection how, when a lad at King's College, he had been 'scarcely a week in Old Aberdeen when the Lord Provost of the New Town invited me to drink wine with him, one evening in the Town Hall;' and presented him on October 8th, 1781, with the freedom of the city. No negative inference can be established from the contemporary notices in the _Aberdeen Journal_ over the visit. Every paragraph is contemptuous in its tone; and till October 4th no notice is taken of the honour, when 'a correspondent says he is glad to find that the city of Aberdeen has presented Dr Johnson with the freedom of that place, for he has sold his freedom on this side of the Tweed for a pension.' The definition of _oats_ in the Dictionary is brought up against its author, and Bozzy is also attacked in a doggerel epigram on his Corsican Tour and his system of spelling. But the doctor easily maintained his conversational supremacy over his academic hosts, who 'started not a single mawkin for us to pursue.' Ellon, Slains Castle, and Elgin were visited. They passed Gordon Castle at Fochabers, drove over the heath where Macbeth met the witches, 'classic ground to an Englishman,' as the old editor of Shakespeare felt, and reached Nairn, where now they heard for the first time the Gælic tongue,--'one of the songs of Ossian,' quoth the justly incredulous doctor,--and saw peat fires. At Fort George they were welcomed by Sir Eyre Coote. The old military aspirations of Bozzy flared up and were soothed: 'for a little while I fancied myself a military man, and it pleased me.' As they left, the commander reminded them of the hardships by the way, in return as Boswell interposed for the rough things Johnson had said of Scotland. 'You must change your name, sir,' said Sir Eyre. 'Ay, to Dr M'Gregor,' replied Bozzy. The notion of the lexicographer's assuming the forbidden name of the bold outlaw, with 'his foot upon his native heath,' is rather comic, though later on we find him striding about with a target and broad sword, and a bonnet drawn over his wig! Though both professed profuse addiction to Jacobite sentiments, it is curious no mention is made of Culloden. It may be that Boswell, who some days later weeps over the battle, may have diplomatically avoided it, or it may have been dark as their chaise passed it, though it is not impossible that Boswell, who at St Andrews had not known where to look for John Knox's grave, and has no mention of Airsmoss where Cameron fell in his own parish of Auchinleck, was ignorant of the site. From their inn at Inverness he wrote to Garrick gleefully over his tour with Davy's old preceptor, and then begged permission to leave Johnson for a time, 'that I might run about and pay some visits to several good people,' finding much satisfaction in hearing every one speak well of his father. On Monday, August 30, they began their _equitation_; 'I would needs make a word too.' They took horses now, a third carried his man Ritter, and a fourth their portmanteaus. The scene by Loch Ness was new to the sage, and he rises in his narrative a little to it and the 'limpid waters beating their bank, and waving their surface by a gentle agitation.' Through Glenshiel, Glenmorison, Auchnasheal, they passed on to the inn at Glenelg. They made beds for themselves with fresh hay, and, like Wolfe at Quebec, they had their 'choice of difficulties;' but the philosophic Rambler maintained they might have been worse on the hillside, and buttoning himself up in his greatcoat he lay down, while Boswell had his sheets spread on the hay, and his clothes and greatcoat laid over him by way of blankets. Next day they got into a boat for Skye, reaching Armidale before one. Here occurred one of the dramatic episodes of the book. Sir Alexander Macdonald, husband of Boswell's Yorkshire cousin Miss Bosville, and the host at the masquerade in February, was on his way to Edinburgh, and met them at the house of a tenant, 'as we believe,' wrote Johnson to Mrs Thrale, 'that he might with less reproach entertain us meanly. Boswell was very angry, and reproached him with his improper parsimony. Boswell has some thoughts of collecting the stories and making a novel of his life.' In the first edition of his book something strong had clearly been written, but it was wisely suppressed at the last moment when the book was bound, for the new pages are but clumsily pasted on the guard between leaves 166 and 169. The first edition had accordingly this account, which was even toned down in the next. 'Instead of finding the head of the Macdonalds surrounded with his clan, and a festive entertainment, we had a small company and cannot boast of our cheer. The particulars are minuted in my journal, but I shall not trouble the publick with them. I shall mention but one characteristick circumstance. My shrewd and hearty friend, Sir Thomas Blackett, Lady Macdonald's uncle, who had preceded us in a visit to this chief, upon being asked by him if the punchbowl then upon the table was not a very handsome one, replied, "Yes, if it were full." Sir Alexander, having been an Eton scholar, Dr Johnson had formed an opinion of him which was much diminished when he beheld him in the Isle of Sky, where we heard heavy complaints of rents racked, and the people driven to emigration. Dr Johnson said, "it grieves me to see the chief of a great clan appear to such disadvantage. The gentleman has talents, nay, some learning; but he is totally unfit for his situation. Sir, the Highland chiefs should not be allowed to go further south than Aberdeen." I meditated an escape from this the very next day, but Dr Johnson resolved that we should weather it out till Monday.' Next day being Sunday Bozzy's spirits were cheered by the climate and the weather, but 'had I not had Dr Johnson to contemplate, I should have been sunk into dejection, but his firmness supported me. I looked at him as a man whose head is turning giddy at sea looks at a rock.' Everywhere they met signs of the parting of the ways in the Highlands. The old days of feudal power were merging in the industrial, the chiefs were now landlords and exacting ones. Emigration was rife, and the pages of the _Scots Magazine_ of the time dwell much on this. A month before, four hundred men had left Strathglass and Glengarry; in June eight hundred had sailed from Stornoway; Lochaber sent four hundred, 'the finest set of fellows in the Highlands, carrying £6000 in ready cash with them. The extravagant rents exacted by the landlords is the sole cause given for this emigration which seems to be only in its infancy.' The high price of provisions and the decrease of the linen trade in the north of Ireland sent eight hundred this year from Stromness, when we find the linen dealers thanking Boswell's old rival, as he supposed, with Miss Blair, Sir Alexander Gilmour, M.P. for Midlothian, for his efforts at providing better legislation. Rasay is one of the happiest descriptions in the tour. 'This,' said Johnson, 'is truly the patriarchal life; this is what we came to find.' They heard from home and had letters. At Kingsburgh they were welcomed by the lady of the house, 'the celebrated Miss Flora Macdonald, a little woman of genteel appearance; and uncommonly mild and well-bred.' 'I was in a cordial humour, and promoted a cheerful glass. Honest Mr M'Queen observed that I was in high glee, "my governor being gone to bed." ... The room where we lay was a celebrated one. Dr Johnson's bed was the very bed in which the grandson of the unfortunate King James the Second lay, on one of the nights after the failure of his rash attempt in 1745-6. To see Dr Samuel Johnson lying in that bed, in the Isle of Sky, in the house of Miss Flora Macdonald, struck me with such a group of ideas as it is not easy for words to describe, as they passed through the mind. The room was decorated with a great variety of maps and prints. Among others, was Hogarth's print of Wilkes grinning, with a cap of liberty on a pole by him.' Certainly Bozzy had never thought of finding a remembrance of his 'classic friend' in such circumstances. Dunvegan and the castle of the Macleods received them in hospitable style. 'Boswell,' said Johnson, in allusion to Sir Alexander's stinted ways, 'we came in at the wrong end of the island;' the memories of their visit had not been forgotten when Scott was there on his Lighthouse Tour in 1814. The Rambler 'had tasted lotus, and was in danger of forgetting he was ever to depart.' Landing at Strolimus, they proceeded to Corrichatachin, 'with but a single star to light us on our way.' There took place the scene that, though familiar, must be given in the writer's own words. A man who, for artistic setting and colour, could write it deliberately down even to his own disadvantage, and who could appeal to serious critics and readers of discernment and taste against the objections which he saw himself would be raised from the misinterpretation of others, is a figure not to be met with every day in literature. 'Dr Johnson went to bed soon. When one bowl of punch was finished, I rose, and was near the door, on my way upstairs to bed; but Corrichatachin said, it was the first time Col had been in his house, and he should have his bowl; and would not I join in drinking it? The heartiness of my honest landlord, and the desire of doing social honour to our very obliging conductor, induced me to sit down again. Col's bowl was finished; and by that time we were well warmed. A third bowl was soon made, and that too was finished. We were cordial, and merry to a high degree; but of what passed I have no recollection, with any accuracy. I remember calling _Corrichatachin_ by the familiar appellation of _Corri_ which his friends do. A fourth bowl was made, by which time Col, and young M'Kinnon, Corrichatachin's son, slipped away to bed. I continued a little time with Corri and Knockow; but at last I left them. It was near five in the morning when I got to bed. _Sunday, September 26._ I awaked at noon with a severe head-ach. I was much vexed that I should have been guilty of such a riot, and afraid of a reproof from Dr Johnson, I thought it very inconsistent with that conduct which I ought to maintain, while the companion of the Rambler. About one he came into my room, and accosted me, "What, drunk yet?" His tone of voice was not that of severe upbraiding; so I was relieved a little. "Sir," (said I), "they kept me up." He answered, "No, you kept them up, you drunken dog:"--this he said with good-humoured _English_ pleasantry. Soon afterwards, Corrichatachin, Col, and other friends assembled round my bed. Corri had a brandy bottle and glass with him, and insisted I should take a dram. "Ay," said Dr Johnson, "fill him drunk again. Do it in the morning, that we may laugh at him all day. It is a poor thing for a fellow to get drunk at night, and skulk to bed, and let his friends have no sport." Finding him thus jocular, I became quite easy; and when I offered to get up, he very good naturedly said, "You need be in no such hurry now." I took my host's advice, and drank some brandy, which I found an effectual cure for my head-ach. When I rose, I went into Dr Johnson's room, and taking up Mrs M'Kinnon's Prayer-Book, I opened it at the twentieth Sunday after Trinity, in the epistle for which I read, "And be not drunk with wine, wherein there is excess." Some would have taken this as a divine interposition.' Such is the extraordinary confession. St Augustine, Rousseau, De Quincey, have not quite equalled this. He found it had been made the subject of serious criticism and ludicrous banter. But his one object, as he tells 'serious criticks,' has been to delineate Johnson's character, and for this purpose he appeals from Philip drunk to Philip sober, and to the approbation of the discerning reader. Later on, he has laid the flattering unction to his heart, and has extracted comfort from the soul of things evil. He felt comfortable, and 'I then thought that my last night's riot was no more than such a social excess as may happen without much moral blame; and recollected that some physicians maintained, that a fever produced by it was, upon the whole, good for health: so different are our reflections on the same subject, at different periods; and such the excuses with which we palliate what we know to be wrong.' Leaving Skye, they ran before the wind to Col. 'It was very dark, and there was a heavy and incessant rain. The sparks of the burning peat flew so much about, that I dreaded the vessel might take fire. Then as _Col_ was a sportsman, and had powder on board, I figured that we might be blown up. Our vessel often lay so much on one side, that I trembled lest she should be overset, and indeed they told me afterwards that they had run her sometimes to within an inch of the water, so anxious were they to make what haste they could before the night should be worse. I now saw what I never saw before, a prodigious sea, with immense billows coming upon a vessel, so that it seemed hardly possible to escape. I am glad I have seen it once. I endeavoured to compose my mind; when I thought of those who were dearest to me, and would suffer severely, should I be lost, I upbraided myself. Piety afforded me comfort; yet I was disturbed by the objections that have been made against a particular providence, and by the arguments of those who maintain that it is in vain to hope that the petitions of an individual, or even of congregations, can have any influence with the Deity. I asked _Col_ with much earnestness what I could do. He with a happy readiness put into my hand a rope, which was fixed to the top of one of the masts, and told me to hold it till he bade me pull. If I had considered the matter, I might have seen that this could not be of the slightest service; but his object was to keep me out of the way.... Thus did I stand firm to my post, while the wind and rain beat upon me, always expecting a call to pull my rope.... They spied the harbour of Lochiern, and _Col_ cried, "Thank God, we are safe!" Dr Johnson had all this time been quiet and unconcerned. He had lain down on one of the beds, and having got free from sickness, was satisfied. The truth is, he knew nothing of the danger we were in. Once he asked whither we were going; upon being told that it was not certain whether to Mull or Col, he cried, "Col for my money!" I now went down to visit him. He was lying in philosophick tranquillity, with a greyhound of _Col's_ at his back keeping him warm.' Mull, Tobermory, Ulva's Isle, and Inch Kenneth followed. Then Iona,--'the sacred place which as long as I can remember, I had thought on with veneration.' The two friends, as they landed on the island, 'cordially embraced,' as they had done in the _White Horse_ at Edinburgh, and the mark of feeling is a note that we are yet with them in the eighteenth century. They lay in a barn with a portmanteau for a pillow, and 'when I awaked in the morning and looked round me, I could not help smiling at the idea of the chief of the Macleans, the great English moralist, and myself lying thus extended in such a situation.' The old Boswell of the Roman Catholic days appears at this time. 'Boswell,' writes Johnson to Mrs Thrale, 'who is very pious went into the chapel at night to perform his devotions, but came back in haste for fear of spectres.' Second sight was often in their thoughts and conversation on their tour; at the club Colman had jocularly to bid Boswell 'cork it up' when he was too full of his belief on the point. His fear of ghosts reminds one of Pepys in the year of the great plague, as he went through the graveyard of the church, with the bodies buried thick and high, 'frighted and much troubled.' 'I left him,' says Boswell himself, 'and Sir Allan at breakfast in our barn, and stole back again to the cathedral, to indulge in solitude and devout meditation. When contemplating the venerable ruins, _I reflected with much satisfaction_, that the solemn scenes of piety _never lose their sanctity and influence_, though the cares and follies of life may prevent us from visiting them.... I hoped that, ever after having been in this holy place, I should maintain an exemplary conduct. One has a strange propensity to fix upon some point of time from whence a better course of life may begin.' This is a revelation of the inner Boswell. On the eve of the appearance of the _Tour in Corsica_, he had written to Temple, about 'fixing some period for my perfection as far as possible. Let it be when my account of Corsica is finished. I shall then have a character to support.' On landing at Rasay, he noticed the remains of a cross on the rock, 'which had to me a pleasing vestige of religion,' and he 'could not but value the family seat more for having even the ruins of a chapel close to it. There was something comforting in the thought of being so near a piece of consecrated ground.' Oban received them with a tolerable inn. They were again on the mainland, and found papers with conjectures as to their motions in the islands. Next day they spent at Inverary. The castle of the Duke of Argyll was near, and now, for the first time on the tour, the indefatigable agent in advance was completely nonplussed. The spectre of the great Douglas Trial loomed large in the eyes of the pamphleteer and the hero of the riot. He had reason, he says, to fear hostile reprisals on the part of the Duchess, who had been Duchess of Hamilton and mother of the rival claimant, before she had become the wife of John, fifth Duke of Argyll. It is from this scene and from the Stratford Jubilee fiasco that the general reader draws his picture of poor Bozzy, and the belief remains that James Boswell was a pushing and forward interloper, half mountebank and half showman. Read in the original, as a revelation of the writer's character, the very reverse is the impression; he is there presented not in any ludicrous light but rather in a good-humoured and fussy way. He met his friend the Rev. John Macaulay, one of the ministers of Inverary, who accompanied them to the castle, where Boswell presented the doctor to the Duke. 'I shall never forget,' quaintly adds the chronicler, 'the impression made upon my fancy by some of the ladies' maids tripping about in neat morning dresses. After seeing for a long time little but rusticity, their lively manner, and gay inviting appearance, pleased me so much, that I thought, for a moment, I could have been a knight-errant for them.' This grandfather of the historian and essayist, the man who has dealt the heaviest blow to the reputation of poor Bozzy, was to encounter some warm retorts from the Rambler like his brother, Macaulay's grand-uncle, the minister at Calder. Mr Trevelyan is eager for the good name of his family, and finds it impossible to suppress a wish that the great talker had been there to avenge them. It may not be quite impossible that, mingling with the brilliant essayist's ill-will to the politics of the travellers, there was an unconscious strain of resentment at the contemptuous way in which his relations had been tossed by the doctor, and that Bozzy's own subsequent denunciations of the abolitionists and the slave trade had edged the memories in the mind of the son of Zachary Macaulay. Be this as it may, for this scene Macaulay has a keen eye, and as much of his colour is derived from it, it is but right that in some abridged form the incident be set down here in Boswell's own words-- 'I went to the castle just about the time when I supposed the ladies would be retired from dinner. I sent in my name; and, being shewn in, found the amiable Duke sitting at the head of his table with several gentlemen. I was most politely received, and gave his grace some particulars of the curious journey which I had been making with Dr Johnson.... As I was going away, the Duke said, "Mr Boswell, won't you have some tea?" I thought it best to get over the meeting with the Duchess this night; so respectfully agreed. I was conducted to the drawing-room by the Duke, who announced my name; but the duchess, who was sitting with her daughter, Lady Betty Hamilton, and some other ladies, took not the least notice of me. I should have been mortified at being thus coldly received, had I not been consoled by the obliging attention of the Duke. '_Monday, October 25._ I presented Dr Johnson to the Duke of Argyll ... the duke placed Dr Johnson next himself at table. I was in fine spirits; and though sensible of not being in favour with the duchess, I was not in the least disconcerted, and offered her grace some of the dish that was before me. It must be owned that I was in the right to be quite unconcerned, if I could. I was the Duke of Argyll's guest; and I had no reason to suppose that he adopted the prejudices and resentments of the Duchess of Hamilton. 'I knew it was the rule of modern high life not to drink to anybody; but, that I might have the satisfaction for once to look the duchess in the face, with a glass in my hand, I with a respectful air addressed her,--"My Lady Duchess, I have the honour to drink your grace's good health." I repeated the words audibly, and with a steady countenance. This was, perhaps, rather too much; but some allowance must be made for human feelings. I made some remark that seemed to imply a belief in _second sight_. The duchess said, "I fancy you will be _a methodist_." This was the only sentence her grace deigned to utter to me; and I take it for granted, she thought it a good hit on _my credulity_ in the Douglas Cause. 'We went to tea. The duke and I walked up and down the drawing-room, conversing. The duchess still continued to shew the same marked coldness for me; for which, though I suffered from it, I made every allowance, considering the very warm part that I had taken for Douglas, in the cause in which she thought her son deeply interested. Had not her grace discovered some displeasure towards me, I should have suspected her of insensibility or dissimulation. Her grace made Dr Johnson come and sit by her, and asked him why he made his journey so late in the year. "Why, madam (said he), you know Mr Boswell must attend the Court of Session, and it does not rise till the 12th of August." She said, with some sharpness, "I _know nothing_ of Mr Boswell." Poor Lady Lucy Douglas, to whom I mentioned this, observed, "She knew _too much_ of Mr Boswell." I shall make no remark on her grace's speech, etc., etc.' In all this scene it will be confessed there is nothing but rudeness on the part of the duchess, one of the beautiful Gunnings, intentional or otherwise, while the kindly touches on Boswell's part, his allowance for her supposed feelings over the trial, and his determination, for once, to look a duchess in the face, are admirable. Bozzy was by birth a gentleman, and there is not the slightest indication here of any want of breeding or taste on his side. At Dumbarton, steep as is the incline, Johnson ascended it. The _Saracen's Head_, which had welcomed Paoli before now, received the travellers. There was now no more sullen fuel or peat. 'Here am I,' soliloquized the Rambler, with a leg upon each side of the grate, 'an _Englishman_, sitting by a coal fire.' 'Jamie's aff the hooks noo;' said the old laird, as they drew near Auchinleck, 'he's bringing doon an auld dominie.' Boswell begged of his companion to avoid three topics of discourse on which he knew his father had fixed opinions--Whiggism, Presbyterianism, and Sir John Pringle. For a time all went well. They walked about 'the romantick groves of my ancestors,' and Bozzy discoursed on the antiquity and honourable alliances of the family, and on the merits of its founder, Thomas, who fell with King James at Flodden. But the storm broke, over the judge's collection of medals, where that of Oliver Cromwell brought up Charles the First and Episcopacy. All must regret that the writer's filial feelings withheld the 'interesting scene in this dramatick sketch.' It is the one _lacuna_ in the book. Sir John Pringle, as the middle term in the debate, came off without a bruise, but the honours lay with Lord Auchinleck. The man whose 'Scots strength of sarcasm' could retort on Johnson, that Cromwell was a man that let kings know they 'had a _lith_ in their neck,' was likely to open new ideas to the doctor, whose political opinions could not rank higher than prejudices. 'Thus they parted,' says the son, after his father had, with his dignified courtesy, seen Johnson into the postchaise; 'they are now in a happier state of existence, in a place where there is no room for _Whiggism_.' 'I have always said,' the doctor maintained, 'the first Whig was the Devil!' Edinburgh was reached on November 9th. Eighty-three days had passed since they left it, and for five weeks no news of them had been heard. Writing from London, on his arrival, Johnson said, 'I came home last night, without any incommodity, danger, or weariness, and am ready to begin a new journey. I know Mrs Boswell wished me well to go.' The irregular hours of her guest, and his habit of turning the candles downward when they did not burn brightly, letting the wax run upon the carpet, had not been quite to the taste of the hostess, who resented, 'what was very natural to a female mind,' the influence he possessed over the actions of her husband. We may well call this tour a spirited one, as Boswell had styled his own Corsican expedition. No better book of travels in Scotland has ever been written than Boswell's _Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides_. The accuracy of his description, his eye for scenes and dramatic effects, have all been fully borne witness to by those who have followed in their track, and the fact of the book being day by day read by Johnson, during its preparation, gives it an additional value from the perfect veracity of its contents--'as I have resolved that the very journal which Dr Johnson read shall be presented to the publick, I will not expand the text in any considerable degree.' If the way in which the Rambler roughed it, 'laughing to think of myself roving among the Hebrides at sixty, and wondering where I shall rove at four score,' is admirable, none the less so is Bozzy's imperturbable good humour. 'It is very convenient to travel with him,' writes his companion from Auchinleck to Mrs Thrale, 'for there is no house where he is not received with kindness and respect. He has better faculties than I had imagined; more justness of discernment and more fecundity of images.' They had hoped to go sailing from island to island, and had not reckoned with what Scott, who wonders they were not drowned, calls the proverbial carelessness of Hebridean boatmen. They really had come two months too late. But Boswell's attention to the old man smoothed all difficulties,--'looking on the tour as a co-partnership between Dr Johnson and myself,' he did his part faithfully, dancing reels, singing songs, and airing the scraps of Gaelic he picked up, thinking all this better than 'to play the abstract scholar.' Johnson's account of the journey is an able performance, and is written with a lighter touch and grace than is to be found in his early works. One passage from it has become famous,--his description of Iona. 'The man whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona,' rivals Macaulay's New Zealander as a stock quotation, and the whole book is not without incisive touches. But it is completely eclipsed by the _Journal_ of Boswell. From start to finish there is not a dull page, and the literary polish is, we venture to think, of a higher kind than is seen in the _Life_. The artistic opening, and the grouping of the characters, together with the wealth of archæological and historical information, the tripping style and sustained interest, all render this book of Boswell's a masterpiece. Johnson's account, published in 1775, took ten years to reach a second edition. Boswell's appeared in September, 1785; and by December 20 the issue was exhausted, a third followed on August 15, 1786, and the next year saw a German translation issued at Lubeck. There had been grave indiscretions, lack of reticence, and other faults in the book. Caricatures were rife. _Revising for the Second Edition_ shewed Sir Alexander Macdonald seizing the author by the throat, and pointing with his stick to the open book, where two leaves are marked as torn out. But Boswell, in _The Gentleman's Magazine_ for March 1786, asserts that no such applications or threats had been made. The results, however, may have added to the writer's unpopularity, as Lord Houghton suggests, at the Edinburgh bar, through the answers, replies, and other rejoinders to the strictures of Johnson, for which Boswell, as the pioneer and the introducer of the stranger, 'the chiel among them takin' notes,' may in Edinburgh society have been held as mainly responsible. To Johnson, the memories of the tour--the lone shieling and the misty island--were a source of pleasing recollection. Taken earlier, it would have removed many of his insular prejudices by wider survey and more varied conversation. 'The expedition to the Hebrides,' he wrote to Boswell some years after, 'was the most pleasant journey I ever made;' and two years later, after restless and tedious nights, he is found reverting to it and recalling the best night he had had these twenty years back, at Fort Augustus. Yet all through September they had not more than a day and a half of really good weather, and but the same during October. Out of such slight materials and uncomfortable surroundings has Boswell produced a masterpiece of descriptive writing. The memory of Johnson has lingered where that of the Jacobite Pretender has well-nigh completely passed away. Mr Gladstone, proposing a Parliamentary vote of thanks to Lord Napier for 'having planted the Standard of St George upon the mountains of Rasselas;' Sir Robert Peel, quoting, in his address to Glasgow University as Lord Rector, Johnson's description of Iona; Sir Walter Scott finding in Skye that he and his friends had in their memories, as the one typical association of the island, the ode to Mrs Thrale, all combine to shew the abiding interest attaching to the Rambler even in Abyssinia and to his foot-steps in Scotland. CHAPTER VI EDINBURGH LIFE--DEATH OF JOHNSON. 1773-1784 'My father used to protest I was born to be a strolling pedlar.'--SIR WALTER SCOTT--_Autobiography._ 'You have done Auchinleck much honour and have, I hope, overcome my father who has never forgiven your warmth for monarchy and episcopacy. I am anxious to see how your pages will operate on him.' Boswell had good grounds for thus expressing himself to Johnson over the publication of the latter's book. He had not long, it would seem, to wait for the breaking of the storm, as we find him writing to Temple in ominous language. 'My father,' he says, 'is most unhappily dissatisfied with me. He harps on my going over Scotland with a brute (think how shockingly erroneous!) and wandering, or some such phrase, to London. I always dread his making some bad settlement.' Then the old judge would grimly relate how Lord Crichton, son of the Earl of Dumfries, would go to Edinburgh, and how, when he was carried back to the family vault, the Earl, as he saw the hearse from the window, had said, 'Ay, ay, Charles, thou went without an errand: I think thou hast got one to bring thee back again.' But had the son chosen to be quite candid here, we should see how just a cause the father had for his displeasure. In the spring of 1774, he had written to Johnson suggesting a run up to London, expressing the peculiar satisfaction which he felt in celebrating Easter at St Paul's, which to his fancy was like going up to Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover. The doctor was wisely deaf to this subtle appeal. 'Edinburgh,' said he, 'is not yet exhausted,' and reminded him that his wife, having permitted him last year to ramble, had now a claim upon him at home, while to come to Iona or to Jerusalem could not be necessary, though useful. Next year, however, Boswell was in London, 'quite in my old humour,' as he tells Temple, arguing with him for concubinage and the plurality of the patriarchs, from all which we may see that the plea urged to Johnson for the visit was to be taken in a lax sense by Boswell, who made his chief excuse out of some business at the bar of the House over an election petition in Clackmannan. He waited on Temple in Devon and shocked his host by his inebriety, but 'under a solemn yew tree' he had vowed reformation. But his return to town, if it 'exalted him in piety' at St Paul's, seems to have led but to fresh dissipation. He hints at 'Asiatic multiplicity,' but this is only when he has taken too much claret. The good resolutions at Iona and the influence of the ruins had passed away, the trip is extended to two months, and he frets irritably over his old friend Henry Dundas's election as King's Advocate,--'to be sure he has strong parts, but he is a coarse unlettered dog.' Harry Dundas at least was never found philandering as we find Bozzy on this occasion, where the mixture of religion and flirtation is so confusing. 'After breakfasting with Paoli,' he writes before leaving for the north, 'and worshipping at St Paul's, I dined _tête-à-tête_ with my charming Mrs Stuart, of whom you have read in my Journal. We dined in all the elegance of two courses and a dessert, with dumb waiters, except when the second course and the dessert were served. We talked with unreserved freedom, as we had nothing to fear. We were _philosophical_, upon honour--not deep, but feeling, we were pious; we drank tea and bid each other adieu as finely as romance paints. She is my wife's dearest friend, so you see how beautiful our intimacy is.' But from Johnson's letter to Mrs Thrale we see looming ahead a crisis. 'He got two and forty guineas in fees while he was here. He has by _his wife's persuasion and mine_ taken down a present for his mother-in-law,'--an error, doubtless, for 'stepmother.' He had entered himself this time at the Temple, and Johnson was his bond. He left to be in time for practice before the General Assembly, finding 'something low and coarse in such employment, but guineas must be had'--a feeling quite different from that of Lord Cockburn who thought the aisle of St Giles had seen the best work of the best men in the kingdom since 1640. Perhaps his feelings on this point were soothed by the traveller in the coach, a Miss Silverton, an 'amiable creature who has been in France. I can unite little fondnesses with perfect conjugal love.' Alas for poor Peggie Montgomerie, 'of the ancient house of Eglintoun,' blamed by his father for not bridling the follies of his son, waiting, doubtless, anxiously for the present to the second wife of his father as a means of peace-offering! Then the secret leaks out that the father had refused Boswell's plan of being allowed £400 a year and the trial of fortune at the London bar. His debts of £1000 had been paid, and his allowance of £300 threatened with the reduction of a third. The promise under the old yew had not been kept; the one bottle of hock as a statutory limit had been exceeded, he had been 'not drunk, but was intoxicated,'--a subtle point for bacchanalian casuists, and very ill next day. He lays it on the drunken habits of the country which, he says, are very bad, and with the recollection of Burns' temptations in Dumfries we may admit that they were. His father, too, was now about to entail his estate, and Bozzy's predilection for feudal principles and heirs male brought things to a deadlock. He appealed to Lord Hailes, who admitted conscience and self formed a strong plea when found on different sides. Finally, after the judge had inserted in the deed his precautions against 'a weak, foolish and extravagant person,' the estate was entailed on Boswell. 'My father,' he tells Temple, 'is so different from me. We _divaricate_ so much, as Dr Johnson said. He has a method of treating me which makes me feel like a timid boy, which to _Boswell_ (comprehending all that my character does in my own imagination and in that of a wonderful number of mankind) is intolerable. It requires the utmost exertion of practical philosophy to keep myself quiet; but it has cost me drinking a considerable quantity of strong beer to dull my faculties.' The picture of the son drinking himself down to the level of the father is truly inimitable! He feared the final settlement. He might be disgraced by his father, and not a shilling secured to his wife and children. Then he is comforted by the thought that his father is visibly failing, and he consults his brother David with a view to a settlement, should the succession pass to him. The birth of a son, who was diplomatically called Alexander, was taken by the old man as a compliment, and we find Boswell visiting at Auchinleck, 'not long at one time, but frequent renewals of attention are agreeable,' he finds, to his father. He proposed to Johnson a tour round the English cathedrals, but a brief trip with him to Derbyshire was all that resulted. We now find for the first time in the _Life_ indications of what would ensue when the strong hand of Johnson was removed from the guidance of his weaker companion. 'As we drove back to Ashbourne,' he writes with curious frankness, 'Dr Johnson recommended to me, _as he had often done_, to drink water only,' and we meet with as curious a defence of drinking--the great difficulty of resisting it when a good man asks you to drink the wine he has had twenty years in his cellar! Benevolence calls for compliance, for, 'curst be the _spring_,' he adds with a change of Pope's verse, 'how well soe'er it flow, that tends to make one worthy man my foe!' 'I do,' he wrote in the _London Magazine_ for March 1780, 'fairly acknowledge that I love drinking; that I have a constitutional inclination to indulge in fermented liquors, and that if it were not for the restraints of reason and religion, I am afraid that I should be as constant a votary of Bacchus as any man. Drinking is in reality an occupation which employs a considerable portion of the time of many people; and to conduct it in the most rational and agreeable manner is one of the great arts of living. Were we so framed that it were possible by perpetual supplies of wine to keep ourselves for ever gay and happy, there could be no doubt that drinking would be the _summum bonum_, the chief good to find out which philosophers have been so variously busied.' It looks as if poor Bozzy, when he wrote this, had heard of the Brunonian system of medicine, and of the unfortunate exemplication of it in practice and in precept by its founder in Edinburgh. No wonder such excesses produced violent reaction to low spirits and the 'black dog' of hypochondria. He finds it, after going to prayers in Carlisle Cathedral, 'divinely cheering to have a cathedral so near Auchinleck,' one hundred and fifty miles off, as Johnson sarcastically replied. Bozzy had been writing a series of articles, 'The Hypochondriack,' in the _London Magazine_, for about two years, but he was advised not to mention his own mental diseases, or to expect for them either the praise for which there was no room, or the pity which would do him no good. The active old man was now in better health than he had been upon the Hebridean tour, and was in hopes of yet shewing himself with Boswell in some part of Europe, Asia, or Africa. 'What have you to do with liberty and necessity?' cries the doctor to his friend, who had been worrying himself and his correspondent with philosophical questions, on which some six years before he had got some light from the _Lettres Persanes_ of Montesquieu. 'Come to me, my dear Bozzy, and let us be as happy as we can. We will go again to the Mitre, and talk old times over.' Thrice during the 1781 visit to London do we see his unfortunate habits breaking out; and, when we find him saying he has unfortunately preserved none of the conversations, Miss Hannah More, who met him that day at the Bishop of St Asaph's, explains it--'I was heartily disgusted with Mr Boswell, who came upstairs after dinner much disordered with wine.' Let us hear his own confession over his conduct at the house of Lady Galway. 'Another evening Johnson's kind indulgence towards me had a pretty difficult trial. I had dined at the Duke of Montrose's with a very agreeable party, and his Grace, according to his usual custom, had circulated the bottle very freely. Lord Graham and I went together to Miss Monckton's where I certainly was in extraordinary spirits, and above all fear or awe. In the midst of a great number of persons of the first rank, amongst whom I recollect with confusion a noble lady of the most stately decorum, I placed myself next to Johnson, and thinking myself now fully his match, talked to him in a loud and boisterous manner, desirous to let the company know how I could contend with Ajax. I particularly remember pressing him upon the value of the pleasures of the imagination, and, as an illustration of my argument, asking him, "What, sir, suppose I were to fancy that the--(naming the most charming Duchess in his Majesty's dominions) were in love with me, should I not be very happy?" My friend with much address evaded my interrogatories, and kept me as quiet as possible, but it may be easily conceived how he must have felt.' His father was now dying, and a London trip, which had been planned by Boswell for 1782, found the son at the very limit of his credit. 'If you anticipate your inheritance,' he was reminded, 'you can at last inherit nothing. Poverty (added the old _impransus_ Johnson, out of the depths of his own experience), my friend, is so great an evil that I cannot but earnestly enjoin you to avoid it. Live on what you have; live, if you can, on less.' Lord Auchinleck died suddenly at Edinburgh, on August 30th, 1782; and it was unfortunate for Bozzy that neither at the death of his father nor of his mother, nor, as we shall see of Johnson, was he present. The evening of the old man's days had been, we are assured by Ramsay of Ochtertyre, clouded by the follies and eccentricities of his son. For thirty years he had been sorely tried; twice he had paid his debts, he had indulged him with a foreign tour, had provided him with every means of securing professional success at the bar, only to see that son do everything to miss it and become everything his father hated in life--a Tory, an Anglican, and a Jacobite. The new laird was anxious to display himself on a wider sphere. Johnson was now visibly failing, and was glad of someone to lean upon for little attentions. 'Boswell,' he said, 'I think I am easier with you than with almost anybody. Get as much force of mind as you can. Let your imports be more than your exports, and you'll never go far wrong.' He reverted to the old days of the tour in a hopeful strain: 'I should like to come and have a cottage in your park, toddle about, live mostly on milk, and be taken care of by Mrs Boswell. She and I are good friends now, are we not?' In 1783 Boswell appeared before the public with a _Letter to the People of Scotland_. It was on Fox's proposed bill to regulate the affairs of the East India Company. Against it he stands forth, 'as an ancient and faithful Briton, holding an estate transmitted to him by charters from a series of kings.' Guardedly Johnson admitted that 'your paper contains very considerable knowledge of history and of the constitution: it will certainly raise your character, though perhaps it may not make you a minister of state.' A copy to Pitt elicited the formal acceptance of thanks, but the exclusion of the bill Boswell took as proof of his own advocacy. He stood for Ayrshire, turning back from York when the dissolution was announced. 'Our Boswell,' wrote the doctor to Langton, 'is now said to stand for some place. Whether to wish him success his best friends hesitate.' May found him with the Rambler for the last time. 'I intend,' he writes to Dr Percy, 'to be in London about the end of this month, chiefly to attend upon Dr Johnson with respectful affection. He has for some time been very ill with dropsical asthmatical complaints, which at his age are very alarming. I wish to publish as a regale to him a neat little volume--_The Praises of Doctor Samuel Johnson, by co-temporary writers_. Will your lordship take the trouble to send me a note of the writers who have praised our much respected friend?' The attentive Bozzy had written to all the leading men in the Edinburgh School of Medicine--Cullen, Hope, Monro, and others. With the expectation that an increase of Johnson's pension would enable him to visit Italy, he consulted Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, with his approval, wrote to Thurlow the Chancellor. At the house of the painter they dined for the last time. 'I accompanied him in Sir Joshua Reynolds's coach, to the entry of Bolt Court. He asked me whether I would not go with him to his house; I declined it, from an apprehension that my spirits would sink. We bade adieu to each other affectionately in the carriage. When he had got down upon the foot-pavement he called out, "Fare you well;" and, without looking back, sprung away with a kind of pathetick briskness, if I may use that expression, which seemed to indicate a struggle to conceal uneasiness, and impressed me with a foreboding of our long, long separation.' We think of the dying Cervantes, and the student-admirer of the All Famous and the Joy of the Muses--'parting at the Toledo bridge, he turning aside to take the road to Segovia.' CHAPTER VII THE ENGLISH BAR--DEATH. 1784-1795 'Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.'--JULIUS CÆSAR, iii. 2. There is something unsatisfactory in the fact that Boswell was not with Johnson as he died. It gives to his book an air of something distinctly lacking, which is not with us as we close Lockhart's _Life of Scott_. His own account is that he was indisposed during a considerable part of the year, which may, or may not, be a euphemism for irregular habits; yet, when we consider how easily he might have been with his old friend, we must own to a feeling that Boswell's mere satisfaction at learning he was spoken of with affection by Johnson at the close does not satisfy the nature of things or the artistic sense of fitness. No literary executor had been appointed, and the materials for a biography had been mostly destroyed by Johnson's orders. This, we may be sure, had not been expected by Boswell, who set himself, however, to prepare for the press his own _Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides_, which his friend when alive had not been willing to see appear as a pendant to the _Journey_. 'Between ourselves,' he tells Temple, 'he is not apt to encourage one to share reputation with him.' Yet he felt, as he wrote to Percy on 20th March 1785, that it was a great consolation to him now that he had, as it was, collected so much of the wit and the wisdom of that wonderful man. 'I do not expect,' he adds, 'to recover from it. I gaze after him with an eager eye; and I hope again to be with him.' Now that the strong hand of Johnson was removed, 'and the light of his life as if gone out,' the rest of Boswell's life was but a downward course. He struggles with himself, and feels instinctively the lack of the curb which the powerful intellect of the Rambler had held on the weaker character of the other. We find him repeating often to himself the lines from the _Vanity of Human Wishes_:-- 'Shall helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?' The Lord Advocate had brought into the Commons a bill for the reconstruction of the Court of Session, proposing to reduce the number of judges from fifteen to ten, with a corresponding increase of salary. The occasion was wildly seized by Boswell in May 1785 to issue a half-crown pamphlet, with the title, '_A letter to the People of Scotland_, on the alarming attempt to infringe the Articles of the Union, and introduce a most pernicious innovation, by diminishing the number of the Lords of Session.' This extraordinary production, intended doubtless as a means of recommendation of the author for parliamentary honours, can hardly now be read in the light of events by any sympathetic Boswellian but with feelings of sorrow and confusion. Its publication we may be sure would never have been sanctioned by Johnson. After stating the foundation of the Court of Session, by James V. in 1532, on the model of the Parliament of Paris, he attacks Dundas for having in himself the whole power of a grand jury. 'Mr Edward Bright of Malden, the fat man whose print is in all our inns, could button seven men in his waistcoat; but the learned lord comprehends hundreds.' He calls on the Scottish people not to be cowed: 'let Lowther come forth (we cannot emulate Boswell in the plenitude and the magnitude of his capital letters and other typographical devices), he upon whom the thousands of Whitehaven depend for three of the elements.' His own opposition he proclaims is honest, because he has no wish for an office in the Court of Session; he will try his abilities in a wider sphere. Rumours of a coalition in the county of Ayr between Sir Adam Ferguson and the Earl of Eglintoun he hopes are unfounded, 'both as an enthusiast for ancient feudal attachments, and as having the honour and happiness to be married to his lordship's relation, a true Montgomerie, whom I esteem, whom I love, after fifteen years, as on the day when she gave me her hand.' He assures the people they will have their objections to the bill supported by 'my old classical companion Wilkes, with whom I pray you to excuse my keeping company, he is so pleasant;' by Mr Burke, the Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, and by 'that brave Irishman, Captain Macbride, the cousin of my wife.' In grandiose capitals he appeals to Fox and to Pitt. 'Great sir,' he cries, 'forgive my thus presumptuously, thus rashly, attempting for a moment to forge your thunder! But I conjure you--in the name of God and the King, I conjure you--to announce in your own lofty language, that there shall be a stop put to this conspiracy, which I fear might have the effect of springing a mine that would blow up your administration.' This letter 'hastily written upon the spur of the occasion is already too long,' yet he calls upon his countrymen to allow him to 'indulge a little more my own egotism and vanity, the indigenous plants of my own mind.' His whole genealogy, Flodden and all, we hear over again. 'If,' he pertinently adds, 'it should be asked what this note has to do here, I answer to illustrate the authour of the text. And to pour out all myself as old Montaigne, I wish all this to be known.' After a eulogy of himself as no time-server, and his profession of readiness 'to discuss topicks with mitred St Asaph, and others; to drink, to laugh, to converse with Quakers, Republicans, Jews and Moravians,' he exhorts his friends and countrymen, in the words of his departed Goldsmith, who gave him many Attic nights and that jewel of the finest water, the acquaintance of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'to fly from petty tyrants to the throne.' He declares himself a Tory, but no slave. He is in possession of an essay, dictated to him by Dr Johnson, on the distinction between Whig and Tory, and concludes with _eclat_, 'with one of the finest passages in John Home's noble and elegant tragedy of _Douglas_.' No condensation of this, the most 'characteristical' of all his writings, can give the reader any idea of this extraordinary production. Once only does it deviate into sense when, on the last page, we find the advertisement of the _Tour to the Hebrides_, 'which was read and liked by Dr Johnson, and will faithfully and minutely exhibit what he said was the pleasantest part of his life.' In the Hilary Term of 1786, he was called to the English bar, feeling it, as he said, 'a pity to dig in a lead mine, when he could dig in a gold one.' Johnson had always thrown cold water on the idea, though as early as February 1775, as we find from a letter of Boswell's to Strahan the printer, the idea had been proposed to him. In the May of 1786 he writes to Mickle, the translator of the _Lusiad_, that he is in a wavering state; he has the house of his friend Hoole, and he still retains the use of General Paoli's residence in Portman Square. When he did finally take up his own quarters in Cavendish Square, the result was not what he had expected. He was discouraged by the want of practice, and the prospect of any. In fact, he was to feel what, as Malone says, Lord Auchinleck had all along told his son, that it would cost him much more trouble to hide his ignorance of Scotch and English law than to shew his knowledge. He feared his own deficiencies in 'the forms, quirks and quiddities,' which he saw could be learned only by early habit. He even doubted whether he should not be satisfied with being simply baron of Auchinleck with a good income in Scotland; but he felt that such a course could not 'deaden the ambition which has raged in my veins like a fever.' The Horatian motto inscribed on the front of Auchinleck House, telling of the peace of mind dearer than all to be found everywhere, if the mind itself is in its own place, was never appreciated, however, by the new laird. His ignorance of law was soon shewn at the Lancaster assizes. Mr Leslie Stephen is inclined to view the story as being not very credible. Yet we fear the authority is indisputable. 'We found Jemmy Boswell,' writes Lord Eldon, 'lying upon the pavement--inebriated. We subscribed at supper a guinea for him and half a guinea for his clerk, and sent him next morning a brief with instructions to move for the writ of _Quare adhæsit pavimento_, with observations calculated to induce him to think that it required great learning to explain the necessity of granting it. He sent all round the town to attorneys for books, but in vain. He moved, however, for the writ, making the best use he could of the observations in the brief. The judge was astonished, and the audience amazed. The judge said, 'I never heard of such a writ--what can it be that adheres _pavimento_? Are any of you gentlemen at the bar able to explain this?' The Bar laughed. At last one of them said, 'My Lord, Mr Boswell last night _adhæsit pavimento_. There was no moving him for some time. At last he was carried to bed, and he has been dreaming about himself and the pavement.' Lord Jeffrey once assisted Bozzy to bed in similar circumstances. 'You are a promising lad,' he told him next morning, 'and if you go on as you have begun, you may be a Bozzy yourself yet.' No wonder that we find him hesitating about going on the spring northern circuit, which would cost him, he says, fifty pounds, and oblige him to be in rough company for four weeks. His only piece of promotion came from Lord Lonsdale. Pitt had been brought in by this nobleman for the pocket-borough of Appleby, and Bozzy had hopes of a Parliamentary introduction that way. Carlyle of Inveresk found this worthless patron of the unfortunate office seeker 'more detested than any man alive, as a shameless political sharper, a domestic bashaw, and an intolerable tyrant over his tenants.' Penrith and Whitehaven were in fear when he walked their streets; he defied his creditors; and the father of the poet Wordsworth died without being able to enforce his claims. The author of the _Rolliad_ describes his power as 'Even by the elements confessed, Of mines and boroughs Lonsdale stands possessed; And one sad servitude alike denotes The slave that labours and the slave that votes.' It was on this political boroughmonger and jobber that Boswell was now pinning his faith. The complete dependence of him on Lonsdale in return for the Recordership of Carlisle did not escape the notice of the wits, who now found that the writer who had been declaring over the India Bill of Fox his devotion to the throne, the Tory, but no slave, had transferred his entire loyalty and abjectest protestations to 'his king in Westmoreland.' To add to his distress, his wife was dying. A short trial of London had led her to return to Ayrshire, and her husband was lost in doubt whether to revisit her or cling to 'the great sphere of England,' the whirl of the metropolis, in hopes that the great prize would at last be drawn. In the north he found her still lingering on, but in his eagerness to obtain political influence 'I drank so freely that riding home in the dark I fell from my horse and bruised my shoulder.' From London he was again summoned, but with his curious infelicity at such times of trouble, he was not in time to witness her death: 'not till my second daughter came running out from the house and announced to us the dismal event in a burst of tears.' Remorse found vent in an agony of grief. 'She never would have left me,' he cries to Temple; 'this reflection will pursue me to my grave.' In July, the widower of a month hastened north to contest the county, only to find Sir Adam Fergusson chosen. 'Let me never impiously repine,' is his cry of distress. 'Yet as "Jesus wept" for the death of Lazarus, I hope my tears at this time are excused. The woeful circumstance of such a state of mind is that it rejects consolation; it feels an indulgence in its own wretchedness.' His hustings appearances would appear to have been at least marked by fluency, for Burns, his junior by eighteen years, declares his own inability to fight like Montgomerie or 'gab like Boswell.' As he draws to a close, the letters of Boswell improve both in form and matter. It is painful to see him on every hand seeking the Parliamentary interest out of which he was all the while doing his best to write himself. No party could or would take him seriously. His rent-roll was over £1600, a large sum in these days, and it was yearly rising. Earnestly did his brother David press upon him a return to Auchinleck and the retrenchment of his expenses. But the spell of the lights of London was on him, and 'I could not endure Edinburgh,' he tells us, 'unless I were to have a judge's place to bear me up,' and that was a thing not to be dreamed of after the publication of the _Letter_. He dispersed his family to various schools, finding the eldest of the boys beginning to oppose him, 'and no wonder,' as he bitterly adds. Then the cry is forced from him in allusion to the famous passage in Shakespeare on Wolsey's hopes and fall--a passage which, curiously enough, we have come upon in the common-place book which Boswell had kept as a boy--'O Temple, Temple, is this realizing any of the towering hopes which have so often been the subject of our letters. Yet I live much with a great man, who, upon any day that his fancy shall be inclined, may obtain for me an office.' Everywhere he casts about, trying the Lord Chancellor, not seeing the smallest opening in Westminster Hall, but buoyed up by 'the delusion that practice may come at any time.' 'We must do something for you,' Burke had said in a kindly way, 'for our own sakes.' He recommended him to General Conway, but though the place was not obtained the letter was valued by Boswell more. Writing to Mr Abercrombie in America, even as late as the July of 1793, he is found expressing 'a great wish to see that country; and I once flattered myself that I should be sent thither in a station of some importance;' and from a letter to Burke we learn that this expected post had been a commissionership in the treaty between America and Britain. Dundas was another of his hopes. 'The excellent Langton says it is disgraceful, it is utter folly in Pitt not to attach to his administration a man of my popular and pleasant talents.' Dundas, however, after having been given a margin of two months for a reply, has made no sign; 'how can I delude myself? I will tell you,' he informs Temple, 'Lord Lonsdale shews me more and more regard. Three of his members assure me that he will give me a seat at the General Election.' Then that last reed was to break. At Lowther Castle, his wig was removed from his room, as a practical joke of a coarse order on the unoffending Boswell, and all the day he was obliged to go in his nightcap, which he felt was very ill-timed to one in his situation. The loss of the wig the unsuspecting victim declares will remain as great a secret as the writer of the letters of Junius, but ere long the tyrant whom he had invoked as the man of Macedonia to help Scotland has undeceived him. 'I suppose you thought,' he roughly said, 'I was to bring you into Parliament? I never had any such intention.' It is impossible not to feel for Boswell at this crisis. 'I am down at an inn,' he writes to Temple, 'and ashamed and sunk on account of the disappointment of hopes which led me to endure such grievances. I deserve all that I suffer. I am at the same time distracted what to do in my own county. I am quite in a fever. O my old and most intimate friend, I intreat you to afford me some consolation, and pray do not divulge my mortification. I now resign my Recordership, and shall get rid of all connection with this brutal fellow.' His last Parliamentary venture was cut short by the reflection how small was his following. How curiously after all this reads his own little autobiographical sketch in the _European Magazine_! 'It was generally supposed that Mr Boswell would have had a seat in Parliament; and indeed his not being amongst the Representatives of the Commons is one of those strange things which occasionally happen in the complex operations of our mixed Government. That he has not been _brought into Parliament_ by some great man is not to be wondered at when we peruse his publick declaration.' Not to be wondered at, truly, though the writer chose to refer the wonder to his independence. Then the reader is informed how he had been a candidate at the general election for his own county of Ayr, 'where he has a very extensive property and a very fine place of which there is a view and description in Grose's _Antiquities of Scotland_.' The conclusion of the sketch relates how, at the last Lord Mayor's day, he sang with great applause a state-ballad of his own composition, entitled _The Grocer of London_. This was the last shot in the political locker. At a Guildhall dinner, given to Pitt by the worshipful company of grocers, Boswell contrived to get himself called upon for a song. He rose, and delivered himself of a catch on the model of Dibdin's 'Little cherub that sits up aloft,' prefaced and interlarded by an address to the guest of the evening. Honoured as he had been on his continental tour at the courts of Europe, yet never till to-night had he felt himself so flattered as now he was, in the presence of the minister he admired, and to whose home and foreign policy he gave a hearty, if discriminating support. Boswell for his song was encored six times, till the cold features of the minister were seen to relax in a smile, amid the general roar of plaudits and laughter! After this 'state ballad,' a copy of which was last seen at Lord Houghton's sale, Bozzy and a friend, in a state of high glee, returned to their lodgings, shouting all the way _The Grocer of London_! 'He has declared,' adds the complacent autobiographer, 'his resolution to persevere on the next vacancy.' All this time his great work was slowly advancing. At the end of the _Journal_ had appeared a notice: 'preparing for the Press, in one volume quarto, the _Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D._, by James Boswell, Esq.' The note proceeds to sketch the plan; the collecting of materials for more than twenty years, his desire to erect to him a literary monument, the interweaving of 'the most authentick accounts' that can be obtained from those who knew him, etc. To his chagrin, Mrs Thrale's volume of anecdotes had been out before him, and Sir John Hawkins had been commissioned by the London booksellers to produce a _Life_, which had duly appeared. Not even the unequivocal success and merits of the _Journal_ could induce 'the trade' to take Boswell seriously. No one had thought of him, any more than Gay would have been thought of as the biographer of the circle to which he had been admitted. Percy, even Sir William Scott, had been successively approached, but none had given a consideration to 'Johnson's Bozzy.' Such neglect, however, must have spurred him to exertion. The lively lady's anecdotage, dateless and confused, he could afford to despise as 'too void of method even for such a farrago,' as Horace Walpole said of it. But the solemn Hawkins, as an old friend and executor of Johnson's will, was a more dangerous rival. 'Observe how he talks of me,' cries Boswell querulously, 'as quite unknown.' No doubt Sir John was 'unclubable,' and by Reynolds, Dyer, Percy, and Malone he was detested. Yet his book, though eclipsed by Boswell's, is not unmeritorious; but for his allusion to 'Mr Boswell, a native of Scotland,' he has been made to pay severely by systematic castigation from his rival, who now doggedly, as Johnson would have said, set himself to the work before him. Wherever first-hand information could be had, he was constantly on the track. Miss Burney has told how she met him at the gate of the choir of St George's chapel at Windsor--'his comic-serious face having lost none of its wonted singularity, nor yet his mind and language.' She had letters from Johnson, and he must have some of the doctor's choice little notes: 'We have seen him long enough upon stilts, I want to shew him in a new light. He proposed a thousand curious expedients to get them, but I was invincible.' The approach of the king and queen broke off the interview, but next morning he was again on the watch. We must regret that they were not given, however much his indiscretions had made people chary of their confidences. 'Jemmy Boswell,' writes Lord Eldon, 'called upon me, desiring to know my definition of taste. I told him I must decline defining it, because I knew he would publish it.' To secure first-hand, sifted, and 'authentick' material this man, so long decried by sciolists as merely a fool with a note-book, would forego every rebuff or refusal. 'Boswell,' says Horace Walpole, 'that quintessence of busy-bodies called on me last week, and was let in when he should not have been. After tapping many topics, to which I made as dry answers as an unbribed oracle, he vented his errand; 'had I seen Dr Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_?' During the progress of the _Life_ he turned aside to his last literary vagary--_No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love_, 1791. This long-lost brochure has this year been rediscovered, but it will add little interest to his life, as its main tenets had long been known. A writer in the _Athenæum_ for May 9th describes it as quarto in form, and dedicated to Miss B----, whom he identifies with Miss Bagnal to be shortly mentioned. On the three topics of slavery, the Middlesex election, and America, Bozzy differed respectfully but firmly from the doctor, who drank at Oxford to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies. Accordingly he stands stoutly by the planters and the feudal scheme of subordination, whose annihilation he maintains would 'shut the gates of mercy on mankind.' For his apparent inconsistency Burke is attacked:-- 'Burke, art thou here, too? thou whose pen Can blast the fancied rights of men. Pray by what logic are those rights Allow'd to Blacks,--denied to Whites?' Others may fail their king and country, but he as a throne and altar Tory calls all to know that 'An ancient baron of the land I by my king shall ever stand.' He was now at last near the haven. The mass of his papers and materials had been arranged, after a labour which, as he tells Reynolds, was really enormous. The capacity for sustained effort, when set to it, of which he had boasted over his condensation of the evidence in the great Douglas case, stood him now in good service amid all his vexations, dissipations and follies. In February 1788 we hear of his having yet seven years of the life to write. By January 1789 he had finished the introduction and the dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds, both of which had appeared difficult, but he was confident they had been well done. To excite the interest in his coming book, or as Mr Leslie Stephen thinks, to secure copyright, he published in 1790 two quarto parts at half a guinea each--the letter to Chesterfield and the conversation of Johnson with the king. By December he has had additional matter sent him from Warren Hastings, and he hoped to be out on 8th March, but the January of the new year found him with still two hundred pages of copy, and the death not yet written. Yet many a time, as he writes Temple, had he thought of giving it up. To add to his troubles, he had indulged in landed speculations, paying £2500 for the estate of a younger branch; he had been lending money to a cousin, and if he could but raise a thousand pounds on the strength of his book, he should be inclined to hold on, or 'game with it,' as Sir Joshua said. Neither Reynolds nor Malone, however, took the hint; and at the latter's door he cast longing looks as he passed. He tells him he had been in the chair at the club, with Fox 'quoting Homer and Fielding to the astonishment of Jo. Warton.' He had bought a lottery ticket with the hopes of the prize of £5000, but--blank! The advance he needed was got elsewhere, and the property in his book saved. April finds him correcting the last sheet. He feared the result: 'I may get no profit, the public may be disappointed, I may make enemies, even have quarrels. But the very reverse of all this may happen.' Then on the 19th he writes to Dempster: 'my _magnum opus_, in two volumes quarto, is to be published on Monday, 16th May'--by a lucky chance it was the anniversary of the red day in Boswell's calendar, his meeting with Johnson eight and twenty years before! 'When it is fairly launched, I mean to stick close to Westminster Hall, and it will be truly kind if you recommend me appeals or causes of any sort.' The rest of his life is soon told. Paoli was now again in Corsica. When Mirabeau had recalled the exiles, the general had been made by Louis XVI. military commandant of the island. Johnson, also, was gone, and the two strongest checks upon the excesses of Boswell were removed. Piteous it is to find him writing to Malone: 'that most friendly fellow Courtenay, begging the pardon of an M.P. for so free an epithet,' had taken him in hand, and had taken his word that for some months his daily allowance of wine should not exceed four good glasses at dinner, and a pint after it. The qualifying adjective 'good' is dangerous, and before the time for the bill was half expired, Bozzy has closured it and the amendment. The state of his affairs, the loss of his wife bore heavily on him, together with 'the disadvantage to my children in having so wretched a father--nay, the want of absolute certainty of being happy after death, the _sure_ prospect of which is frightful.' Then a fitful gleam of the old Adam breaks out. He has heard of a Miss Bagnal, 'about seven and twenty, lively and gay, a Ranelagh girl, but of excellent principles insomuch that she reads prayers to the servants in her father's family every Sunday evening.' Another matrimonial scheme was the daughter of the late Dean of Exeter, 'a most agreeable woman _d'un certain âge_,' as he engagingly adds, 'and with a fortune of £10,000.' The preparation of a second edition of the _Life_ for July 1793 raised his spirits, but after a while he had run into excess, been knocked down and robbed. This he vows shall be a crisis in his life, and Temple's apprehension of his friend being carried off in a state of intoxication he finds awful to contemplate. Early in 1795 the end is announced by Temple's son writing to his father--'a few nights ago Mr Boswell returned from the Literary Club, quite weak and languid;' and the last letter to Temple from his correspondent of thirty-seven years is dated 8th April: 'I would fain write to you in my own hand, but really cannot.' His son James finishes the letter, to tell that the patient 'feels himself a good deal stronger to-day.' He was attended by Dr Warren, who had been with Johnson as he died. Some slight hopes of a recovery had been held out; and, with the ruling passion strong in death to interview a celebrity, he rallied in a letter to Warren Hastings. With the spirit on him of the days when he had told Chatham that his disinterested soul had enjoyed the contemplation of the great minister in the bower of philosophy, he tells him, 'the moment I am able to go abroad, I will fly to Mr Hastings and expand my soul in the purest satisfaction.' On May 19th 1795, at two in the morning, after an illness of five weeks, he died. He was in his fifty-fifth year. A life which cannot challenge the world's attention--like that of John Sterling--which perhaps does not even modestly solicit it, yet one which no less certainly will be found to reward the critic of literary history and pathology. A complex, weak, unsteady life enough, and no one did more than Boswell himself to bring into glaring prominence the faults that lie on the surface, by that frank, open, and ostentatious peculiarity which he avowed, and which he compared to the characteristics of the old seigneur, Michael de Montaigne. Never was there a franker critic of James Boswell, Esq., than himself; 'the most unscottified of mortals,' as Johnson called him, has little or none of the reserve and reticence that are generally supposed to be marks of the national character. A rare and curious _Epistle in Verse_, by the Rev. Samuel Martin of Monimail, 1795, touches on the main points of his life, and the author, who was apparently a friend of Boswell, had learned 'with affectionate concern and respect that at the end prayer was his stay.' He criticises, in rather halting and prosaic lines, 'The prison scenes, his prying into death, How felons and how saints resign their breath; How varying and conflicting passions roll, How scaffold exhibitions shew the soul.' He laments his 'injurious hilarity,' his degrading himself as 'the little bark, attendant on the huge all-bearing ark,' his political and ecclesiastical aberrations from the surer and better standpoints of his family and country. The feeling of this friend of Boswell would represent, we cannot doubt, the verdict at the time of his own circle. The 'prison scenes' are an integral part in Boswell's psychology. Never did George Selwyn attend them with greater regularity, or Wyndham run after prize fights more assiduously. In the _Public Advertizer_, April 25, 1768, we find him writing: 'I myself am never absent from a publick execution. When I first attended them, I was shocked to the greatest degree ... convulsed with pity and terror. I feel an irresistible impulse to be present at every execution, as there I behold the various effects of the near approach of death.' The parallels of Charles V., Philip II., Philip IV., Charles II. of Spain, will not escape the reader, and strangely, or rather naturally enough, Boswell is found disagreeing with the censure pronounced by Johnson on the celebration of his own obsequies in his lifetime by Charles V. In the _St James' Gazette_ of April 20, 1779, he is found actually riding in the cart to Tyburn with Hackman, the murderer of Miss Ray, and writing to the papers over the feeling of 'unusual Depression of Spirits, joined with that Pause, which so solemn a warning of the dreadful effects that the Passion of Love may produce must give all of us who have lively Sensations and warm Tempers.' But he suddenly deviates into business when he adds that 'it is very philosophically explained and illustrated in the _Hypochondriack_, a periodical Paper, peculiarly adapted to the people of England, and which comes out monthly in the _London Magazine_, etc.' In his Corsican tour we had seen him interviewing the executioner in the island, and some days before his final parting with Johnson he had witnessed the execution of fifteen men before Newgate and been clouded in his mind by doubts as to whether human life was or was not mere machinery and a chain of planned fatality. These cravings are clearly the marks of a mind morbidly affected and diseased, the result of the Dutch marriage as Ramsay believed. All through his life Boswell is conscious of his 'distempered imagination,' and the letters to Temple are scattered with irrelevances and repetitions, fatuities and inconsistencies that can be explained only on the score of mental disease. Were any doubts possible on this point, the expressions of his opinions on religion would dispel them. His 'Popish imagination,' quickened as it may have been by the escapade with the actress, was but the natural outcome of an ill-balanced mind. His feelings about consecrated places, _loca solennia_ such as Iona, and Wittenberg, Rasay and Carlisle, we have seen. He delighted, says Malone, in what he called the _mysterious_, leading Johnson on ghosts, and kindred subjects. He was a believer in second sight: 'it pleases my superstition,' he tells Temple, 'which you know is not small, and being not of the gloomy but the grand species is an enjoyment.' When his uncle John died, we learn he was 'a good scholar and affectionate relative, but had no conduct. And, do you know, he was not confined to one woman; he had a strange kind of religion, but I flatter myself he will be ere long, if he is not already, in heaven!' He comforts himself constantly over life being a mere state of purification, and looks forward to a condition of events in which 'a man can soap his own beard and enjoy whatever is to be had in this transitory state of things.' He is for ever questioning Johnson upon purgatory, 'having much curiosity to know his notions on that point.' One of the last authentic glimpses of Boswell is his being found in the company of Wilberforce, going west, with a nightcap in his pocket, on some visit to a friend such as Miss Hawkins says he was but too fond of doing,--'away to the west as the sun went down'--doubtful of future punishment, but resolute in maintaining the depravity of man. It would almost appear as if Bozzy had read himself into Butler's doctrine that our present life is a state of probation for a future one, but had forgotten the qualification 'that our future interest is now depending on ourselves.' The very influence of Johnson himself may have affected the weaker mind of Boswell injuriously. Both suffered from hypochondria, though that of the latter was far distant from the affliction of Johnson whom Dr Adams found 'in a deplorable state, sighing, groaning, talking to himself, and restlessly walking from room to room.' Temple maintained that the effect of Johnson's company had been of a depressing nature to his friend, and Sir Wm. Forbes believed that some slight tincture of superstition had been contracted from his companionship with the sage. The 'cloudy darkness,' as he himself calls it, of his mind, the weakness and the confusion of moral principles manifest enough in the Temple correspondence, are better revealed in the conversation with Johnson at Squire Dilly's, 'where there is always abundance of excellent fare and hearty welcome.' 'Being in a frame of mind which, I hope for the felicity of human nature, many experience,--in fine weather,--at the country-house of a friend,--consoled and elevated by pious exercises, I expressed myself with an unrestrained fervour to my "guide, philosopher, and friend;" My dear Sir, I would fain be a good man; and I am very good now. I fear God, and honour the King; I wish to do no ill, and to be benevolent to all mankind.' He looked at me with a benignant indulgence; but took occasion to give me wise and salutary caution. 'Do not, sir, accustom yourself to trust to _impressions_.' Boswell had surely forgotten all this when he cries bitterly to Temple that he was inclined to agree with him in thinking 'my great oracle did allow too much credit to good principles, without good practice.' Perhaps he remembered Johnson's appreciation of Campbell, the good pious man that never passed a church without pulling off his hat, all which shewed 'he has good principles.' Boswell had, unfortunately, been 'caught young' by the sceptical talk of Dempster, Hume, and Wilkes, and his extended Continental ramble had impaired the earlier views under which he had been reared. But James Boswell deserves at the hands of his readers and of critics better treatment than has been measured out to him in the contemptuous estimate of Macaulay, and, still worse, in the shrill attack of the smaller brood 'whose sails were never to the tempest given,' but who have, by the easy repetition of a few phrases and an imperfect acquaintance with the writings and character of the man they decry, come to the complacent depreciation which, as Niebuhr said, is ever so dear to the soul of mediocrity. If James Boswell was not like Goldsmith, a great man, as Johnson finely pronounced, whose frailties should not be remembered, nor was, perhaps, in any final sense a great writer, yet for twenty years he had been the tried friend of the man who at the Mitre had called out to him, 'Give me your hand, I have taken a liking to you.' A plant that, like Goldsmith also, 'flowered late,' he has created in literature and biography a revolution, and produced a work whose surpassing merits and value are known the more that it is studied. CHAPTER VIII IN LITERATURE 'Eclipse is first, the rest nowhere.'--MACAULAY. 'How delicate, decent is English Biography,' says Carlyle, 'bless its mealy mouth! A Damocles sword of Respectability hangs for ever over the poor English Life-writer (as it does over poor English Life in general), and reduces him to the verge of paralysis. Thus it has been said there are no English lives worth reading, except those of Players, who by the nature of the case have bidden Respectability good-day. The English biographer has long felt that, if in writing his man's biography he wrote down anything that could by possibility offend any man, he had written wrong.' The biographer, as Mr Froude found out for a commentary on all this, is placed between a Scylla and Charybdis, between what is due to the subject, and what is expected by the public. If something is left out of the portrait, the likeness will be imperfect; if the anxiety or the inquisitiveness of readers to know private details is left ungratified, the writer will be met by the current cant that the public has a right to know. The line is not easily drawn, and few subjects for the biographer can ever desire to be as candidly dealt with by him as Cromwell acted with Sir Peter Lely, in the request to be painted as he was, warts and all. Thus, too often the result will be but biography written _in vacuo_, 'the tragedy of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted--by particular desire.' Biography, like History, has suffered from considerations of dignity and propriety. The writers of the Hume and Robertson school of history, in their stately minuet with the historical muse, have been careful to exclude everything that seemed beneath the dignity of the sceptred pall; biographers have as consciously studied the proprieties. 'The Muse of history,' says Thackeray, 'wears the mask and speaks to measure; she too in our age busies herself with the affairs only of kings. I wonder shall history ever pull off her periwig and cease to be Court-ridden? I would have History familiar rather than heroic, and think that Mr Hogarth and Mr Fielding will give our children a much better idea of the manners of the present age in England, than the _Court Gazette_ and the newspapers which we get thence.' As the historian has striven to obscure the real nature of the Grand Monarque, by confining his action to courts and battlefields, so the biographer, in his desire of never stepping beyond the proper, has enveloped his hero in a circle of correct ideas, after the manner of George the Fourth and his multiplicity of waistcoats. Dignity and respectability have ruined alike the historian and the biographer. Lockhart foresaw that some readers would accuse him of trenching upon delicacy and propriety over his sixth and seventh chapters in the _Life of Scott_, and the circumstances were after all such as, had choice been permitted him, he might easily have omitted, considering it his duty to tell what he had to say truly and intelligibly. Of all men Macaulay had nothing to fear from any rational biography that should ever be written of him, yet has not Mr Trevelyan assured his readers that the reviewers had told him, that he would much better have consulted his uncle's reputation by the omission of passages in his letters and diaries? Such criticism, as he justly says, is to seriously misconceive the province and the duty of the biographer, and his justification is that the reading world has long extended to the man the just approbation which it so heartily extended to his books. The Latin critics assigned history,--and accordingly history in miniature, biography,--to the department of oratory. The feeling, in consequence, has long prevailed of regarding biography as the field for the display of every other feeling then veracity. It has been emotional, or it has been decorously dull. To all such writers the style adopted by Boswell would appear, and justly appear, revolutionary. The cry is raised of there being nothing sacred, of the violation of domestic privacy, of the sanctities of life being endangered, of indiscretions, and violations of confidences, by the biographer. Accordingly, just as Macaulay decided that, in general, tragedy was corrupted by eloquence, and comedy by wit, so biography and history have suffered from the dignity of Clio. Boswell was perfectly aware what he was doing, nor did he awake to find himself famous for a method into which the sciolists pretend he only unconsciously blundered. In the preface to the third edition of the _Journal_ he writes:--'Remarks have been industriously circulated in the publick prints by shallow or envious cavillers, who have endeavoured to persuade the world that Dr Johnson's character has been _lessened_ by recording such various instances of his lively wit and acute judgment, on every topick that was presented to his mind. In the opinion of every person of taste and knowledge that I have conversed with, it has been greatly _heightened_; and I will venture to predict, that this specimen of his colloquial talents will become still more valuable, when, by the lapse of time, he shall have become an _ancient_; and no other memorial of this great and good man shall remain but the following Journal.' This is not the writing of one who has been without a clear idea of what he was undertaking, and of his own qualifications for the task. 'You, my dear sir,' he tells Sir Joshua Reynolds in the dedication, 'perceived all the shades which mingled in the grand composition; all the peculiarities and slight blemishes which marked the literary Colossus.' The inclusion of the letters and of private details was an integral part of his scheme. When he introduced the subject of biography at Dr Taylor's, no doubt with his own book in his eye, he said that in writing a man's life the man's peculiarities should be mentioned because they mark his character. When he resolved on their publication, he thought it right to ask Johnson explicitly on this point, and the reply was what in 1773 the doctor had given to Macleod in Skye, when he had asked if Orrery had done wrong, to expose the defects of Swift with whom he had lived in terms of intimacy. 'Why, no, sir,' Johnson had decided, 'after the man is dead, for then it is done historically.' A biographer that would omit or disguise the relations of Nelson to Lady Hamilton, would be justly suspected of disingenuousness, and Lockhart, especially in his treatment of the political side of his subject,--for example in the notorious _Beacon_ incident--is but too open to this charge. But disingenuousness is a charge that never could have occurred to Boswell, whose veracity is the prime quality that has made him immortal. When the _Journal_ was in the press, Hannah More, studious of the name of the moralist and the sage, 'besought him to mitigate his asperities.' 'I will not,' said Boswell roughly, but wisely for posterity, 'cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please anyone.' Boswell's books are veritable books. Few books have had such a severe test applied to them. His first was dedicated to Paoli, whose sanction must be taken to guarantee every line of it. "In every narrative," he writes in the dedication to Malone of the _Journal_, "whether historical or biographical, authenticity is of the utmost consequence. Of this I have ever been so firmly persuaded that I inscribed a former work to that person who was the best judge of its truth. Of this work the manuscript was daily read by Johnson, and you have perused the original and can vouch for the strict fidelity of the present publication." His _Life of Johnson_ was as fearlessly dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds, one whose intimacy with Johnson could stamp, with assured knowledge of the subject, the credit and success of the work. Among the 'some dozen, or baker's dozen, and those chiefly of very ancient date,' of reliable biographies whose paucity Carlyle laments, the works of Boswell may be safely included. Their accuracy is confessed by workers in all fields. His _Tour_ created a type; no better volume of travels has ever been written than the _Journal_; and the critic who has dealt at the reputation of Boswell its heaviest blow has yet to confess, that Homer is no more the first of poets, Shakespeare the first of dramatists, Demosthenes the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers, with no second. How is this? Written in 1831, before Lockhart Southey and Carlyle by their biographies of Scott, Nelson, and Frederick had appeared as rivals, why is it no less true now? What singular gift or quality can account for this singular aloofness from the ordinary or extraordinary class of writers? Why does Boswell yet wear the crown of indivisible supremacy in biography? His own words will not explain it, the possession of Johnson's intimacy, the twenty years' view of his subject, his faculty for recollecting, and his assiduity in recording communications. This and more than this Lockhart possessed, the nearest rival to the biographical throne. He was the son-in-law of his subject, for whom he had as true an admiration as Boswell had for Johnson. But Boswell was only in the company of his idol some 180 days, or 276 if we include the time on the tour in Scotland, in all the twenty years of his acquaintance. Lockhart had the journals of Sir Walter, and the communications of nearly a hundred persons. A comparison in any sense, literary, social, or moral, would have been felt by Lockhart as an insult, for he clearly regards Sir Alexander Boswell as a greater man than his father. But if, like the grandsire of Hubert at Hastings, Lockhart has drawn a good bow, Boswell, like the Locksley of the novelist, has notched his shaft, and comparisons have long ceased to be instituted. Gray has attempted the explanation--a fool with a note-book. He has invented nothing, he has only reported. But every year sees that person at work, with his _First Impressions of Brittany_, _Three Weeks in Greece_, and the everlasting _Tour in Tartanland_. These are the creations of the note-book, but it has given them no permanence. The tourist puts in everything he sees, truly enough, or thinks he sees. But it is the art of Boswell to select 'the characteristical,' and the typical, to group and to dramatize. Ninety-four days he spent on the northern tour, and the result is a masterpiece. Pepys is garrulous, often vulgar, always lower-middle-class; but Boswell writes like a gentleman. Macaulay has explained it by a paradox. Goldsmith was great in spite of his weaknesses, Boswell by reason of his; if he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. He was a dunce, a parasite, a coxcomb, a Paul Pry, had a quick observation, a retentive memory, and accordingly--he has become immortal! Alas for the paucity of such immortals under so common circumstances; their number should be legion! That a fool may occasionally write interesting matter we know; but that a man should write a literary classic, graced by arrangement, selection, expression, is not even paradox but hyperbole run mad. The truth is, Macaulay had no eye for such a complex character as Boswell. Too correct himself, too prone to the cardinal virtues and consistency, to follow one who, by instinct, seemed to anticipate Wendell Holmes' advice--'Don't be consistent, but be simply _true_'--and too sound politically in the field where Boswell and the doctor abased themselves in absurd party spirit, Macaulay can no more understand sympathetically the vagaries of Boswell than Mommsen or Drumann can follow the political inconsistency of Cicero. He had no Boswellian 'delight in that intellectual chemistry which can separate good qualities from evil in the same person;' and in his essay on _Milton_ he has disclaimed explicitly all such hero-worship of the living or the dead and denounced Boswellism as the most certain mark of an ill-regulated intellect. Nor had he, or Carlyle either, before him the evidence of the letters to Temple. Carlyle, in the theory of hero-worship, has made capital use of Boswell. He sees the strong mind of Johnson leading 'the poor flimsy little soul' of James Boswell; he feels 'the devout Discipleship, the gyrating observantly round the great constellation.' He has Boswell's reiterated declarations to support him. On one side Carlyle's vindication of the biographer is successful; he errs in emphasizing the discovery by Boswell of the Rambler. In such a discovery Langton and Beauclerk had long preceded him, and the Johnson that Boswell met in Davies' parlour was the pensioned writer who had out-lived his dark days, and was the literary dictator of the day, and the associate of Burke and of Reynolds. But Carlyle comes nearer the truth when he touches on the Boswellian recipe for being graphic--the possession of an open, loving heart, and what follows from the possession of such. Like White of Selborne, with his sparrows and cockchafers, Boswell, too, has copied some true sentences from the inspired book of nature. But however this may account for his insight--the heart seeing farther than the head--it will not account for his literary qualities. Of all his contemporaries, Goldsmith and Burke excepted, no one is a greater master of a pure prose style than Boswell, and for ease of narrative, felicity of phrase, and rounded diction he is incomparable. Macaulay believed a London apprentice could detect Scotticisms in Robertson; Hume's style is often vicious by Gallicisms and Scots law phrases which nothing but his expository gifts have obscured from the critics. Beattie confesses learning English as a dead language and taking several years over the task. But Boswell, 'scarce by North Britons now esteemed a Scot,' writes with an ease that renders his style his own. 'The fact is,' says Mr Cotter Morison, 'that no dramatist or novelist of the whole century surpassed or even equalled Boswell in rounded and clear and picturesque presentation, or in real dramatic faculty.' Let us take one portrait from the Boswell gallery--the meeting of the two old Pembroke men, Johnson and Oliver Edwards. 'It was in Butcher Row that this meeting happened. Mr Edwards, who was a decent-looking elderly man in gray clothes and a wig of many curls, accosted Johnson with familiar confidence, knowing who he was, while Johnson returned his salutation with a courteous formality, as to a stranger. But as soon as Edwards had brought to his recollection their having been at Pembroke College together nine-and-forty years ago, he seemed much pleased, asked where he lived, and said he should be glad to see him in Bolt Court. EDWARDS: "Ah, sir! we are old men now." JOHNSON (who never liked to think of being old): "Don't let us discourage one another." EDWARDS: "Why, Doctor, you look stout and hearty. I am happy to see you so; for the newspapers told us you were very ill." JOHNSON: "Ay, sir, they are always telling lies of _us old fellows_." Wishing to be present at more of so singular a conversation as that between two fellow collegians, who had lived forty years in London without ever having chanced to meet, I whispered to Mr Edwards that Dr Johnson was going home, and that he had better accompany him now. So Edwards walked along with us, I eagerly assisting to keep up the conversation. Mr Edwards informed Dr Johnson that he had practised long as a solicitor in Chancery.... When we got to Dr Johnson's house and were seated in his library, the dialogue went on admirably. EDWARDS: "Sir, I remember you would not let us say _prodigious_ at College. For even then, sir (turning to me), he was delicate in language, and we all feared him." JOHNSON (to Edwards): "From your having practised the law long, sir, I presume you must be rich." EDWARDS: "No, sir; I had a good deal of money; but I had a number of poor relations to whom I gave great part of it." JOHNSON: "Sir, you have been rich in the most valuable sense of the word." EDWARDS: "But I shall not die rich." JOHNSON: "Nay, sure, sir, it is better to _live_ rich, than to _die_ rich." EDWARDS: "I wish I had continued at College." Johnson: "Why do you wish that, sir?" EDWARDS: "Because I think I should have had a much easier life than mine has been. I should have been a parson, and had a good living, like Bloxam and several others, and lived comfortably." JOHNSON: "Sir, the life of a parson, of a conscientious clergyman, is not easy. I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he is able to maintain. I would rather have Chancery suits upon my hands than the cure of souls." Here, taking himself up all of a sudden, he exclaimed, "O! Mr Edwards! I'll convince you that I recollect you. Do you remember our drinking together at an ale-house near Pembroke Gate?" ... EDWARDS: "You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in."--Mr Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr Courtenay, Mr Malone, and, indeed, all the eminent men to whom I have mentioned this, have thought it an exquisite trait of character. The truth is, that philosophy, like religion, is too generally supposed to be hard and severe, at least so grave as to exclude all gaiety. EDWARDS: "I have been twice married, Doctor. You, I suppose, have never known what it was to have a wife." JOHNSON: "Sir, I have known what it was to have a wife, and (in a solemn, tender, faltering tone) I have known what it was to _lose a wife_. It had almost broke my heart." EDWARDS: "How do you live, sir? For my part, I must have my regular meals, and a glass of good wine. I find I require it." JOHNSON: "I now drink no wine, sir. Early in life I drank wine: for many years I drank none, I then for some years drank a great deal." EDWARDS: "Some hogsheads, I warrant you." JOHNSON: "I then had a severe illness, and left it off. I am a straggler. I may leave this town and go to Grand Cairo, without being missed here or observed there." EDWARDS: "Don't you eat supper, sir?" JOHNSON: "No, sir." EDWARDS: "For my part, now, I consider supper as a turnpike through which one must pass, in order to get to bed." JOHNSON: "You are a lawyer, Mr Edwards. Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with. They have what he wants." EDWARDS: "I am grown old, I am sixty-five." JOHNSON: "I shall be sixty-eight next birthday. Come, sir, drink water, and put in for a hundred." ... Mr Edwards, when going away, again recurred to his consciousness of senility, and looking full in Johnson's face, said to him, "You'll find in Dr Young, 'O my coevals! remnants of yourselves.'" Johnson did not relish this at all; but shook his head with impatience. Edwards walked off seemingly highly pleased with the honour of having been thus noticed by Dr Johnson. When he was gone, I said to Johnson I thought him but a weak man. JOHNSON: "Why, yes, sir. Here is a man who has passed through life without experience: yet I would rather have him with me than a more sensible man who will not talk readily. This man is always willing to say what he has to say."' How admirable is the art in this scene, how numerous and fine are the strokes of character, and the easy turn of the dialogue! No fool with a note-book, no tippling reporter, as the shallow critics say, could have written this. To them there would have appeared in a chance meeting of two old men nothing worthy of notice, yet how dramatically does Boswell touch off the Philistine side of Edwards, and insert the fine shading and the inimitable remarks about the setting up for the philosopher, and supper being a turnpike to bed! This art of the biographer is what gives a memorableness to slight incidents, by the object being real and really seen; it is the 'infinitude of delineation, the intensity of conception which informs the Finite with a certain Infinitude of significance, ennobling the Actual into Idealness.' Openness of mind will do much, but there must be the seeing eye behind it. For the mental development of Boswell, there is no doubt that, as with Goldsmith, his foreign travels had done much. As Addison in the _Freeholder_ had recommended foreign travel to the fox-hunting Tory squires of his day as a purge for their provincial ideas, Boswell shares with the author of the _Traveller_ and the _Deserted Village_ cosmopolitan instincts and feelings. 'I have always stood up for the Irish,' he writes, 'in whose fine country I have been hospitably and jovially entertained, and with whom I feel myself to be congenial. In my _Tour in Corsica_ I do generous justice to the Irish, in opposition to the English and Scots.' Again, 'I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world. In my travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home; and I sincerely love every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.' This is the very antithesis to Johnson, whose frank confession was, 'for anything that I can see, foreigners are fools.' Yet Boswell's stock of learning was small. 'I have promised,' he writes in 1775, 'to Dr Johnson to read when I get to Scotland; and to keep an account of what I read. He is to buy for me a chest of books, of his choosing, off stalls, and I am to read more, and drink less--that was his counsel.' The death of his wife forces the confession, 'how much do I regret that I have not applied myself more to learning,' and he acknowledges to their common friend Langton that, if Johnson had said that Boswell and himself did not talk from books, this was because he had not read books enough to talk from them. In his manuscripts there are many misspellings. He assigns to Terence a Horatian line and, in a letter to Garrick, quotes as Horatian the standard _mens sana in corpore sano_ of Juvenal. More strange is his quoting in a note an illustration of the phrase 'Vexing thoughts,' without his being apparently aware that the words are by Rous of Pembroke, the Provost of Eton, whose portrait in the college hall he must often have seen, the writer of the Scottish Metrical Version of the Psalms. Yet his intellectual interests were keen. Late in life he has 'done a little at Greek; Lord Monboddo's _Ancient Metaphysics_ which I am reading carefully helps me to recover the language.' He has his little scraps of irritating Latinity which he loves to parade, and when he dined at Eton, at the fellows' table, he 'made a considerable figure, having certainly the art of making the most of what I know. I had my classical quotations very ready.' Besides, the easy allusiveness of Boswell to books and to matters beyond the scope of general readers, his interest in all things going forward in the Johnsonian circle, his shewing himself in some metaphysical points--predestination, for example--fully a match for Johnson, and his own words in the _Journal_--'he had thought more than anybody supposed, and had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge'--all conspire to shew that, if he had no more learning than what he could not help, James Boswell was altogether, as Dominie Sampson said of Mannering, 'a man of considerable erudition despite of his imperfect opportunities.' Nor were his entire interests Johnsonian. Scattered through his writings we find allusions to other books, in a more or less forward stage of completeness, and of which some must have been destroyed by his faithless executors. We hear of a _Life of Lord Kames_; an _Essay on the Profession of an Advocate_; _Memoirs_ of Hume when dying, 'which I may some time or other communicate to the world;' a quarto with plates on _The Beggar's Opera_; a _History of James IV._, 'the patron of my family;' a _Collection of Feudal Tenures and Charters_, 'a valuable collection made by my father, with some additions and illustrations of my own;' an _Account of my Travels_, 'for which I had a variety of materials collected;' a _Life of Sir Robert Sibbald_, 'in the original manuscript in his own writing;' a _History of the Rebellion of 1745_; an edition of _Walton's Lives_; a _Life of Thomas Ruddiman_, the Latin grammarian; a _History of Sweden_, where three of his ancestors had settled, who took service under Gustavus Adolphus; an edition of _Johnson's Poems_, 'a complete edition, in which I shall with the utmost care ascertain their authenticity, and illustrate them with notes and various readings;' a work on _Addison's Poems_, in which 'I shall probably maintain the merit of Addison's poetry, which has been very unjustly depreciated.' His _Journal_, which is unfortunately lost, he designed as the material for his own _Autobiography_. A goodly list, and a varied one, involving interest, knowledge, and research, fit to form the equipment of a professed scholar. Boswell foresaw the danger, and he justified his method of reporting conversations. 'It may be objected by some persons, as it has been by one of my friends, that he who has the power of thus exhibiting an exact transcript of conversations is not a desirable member of society. I repeat the answer which I made to that friend:--'Few, very few, need be afraid that their sayings will be recorded. Can it be imagined that I would take the trouble to gather what grows on every hedge, because I have collected such fruits as the _Nonpareil_ and the _Bon Chretien_? On the other hand, how useful is such a faculty, if well exercised! To it we owe all those interesting apophthegms and _memorabilia_ of the ancients, which Plutarch, Xenophon, and Valerius Maximus, have transmitted to us. To it we owe all those instructive and entertaining collections which the French have made under the title of _Ana_, affixed to some celebrated name. To it we owe the Table-Talk of Selden, the _Conversation_ between Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden, Spence's _Anecdotes_ of Pope, and other valuable remains in our own language. How delighted should we have been, if thus introduced into the company of Shakespeare and of Dryden, of whom we know scarcely anything but their admirable writings! What pleasure would it have given us, to have known their petty habits, their characteristick manners, their modes of composition, and their genuine opinion of preceding writers and of their contemporaries!' The world in consideration of what it has gained, and the recollection of what we should have acquired had such a reporter been found for the talk of other great men, has long since forgiven Boswell, and forgotten also his baiting the doctor with questions on all points, his rebuffs and his puttings down--'there is your _want_, sir; I will not be put to the question;' his watching 'every dawning of communication from that illuminated mind;' his eyes goggling with eagerness, the mouth dropt open to catch every syllable, his ear almost on the shoulder of the doctor, and the final burst of 'what do you do there, sir,--go to the table, sir,--come back to your place, sir.' And these conversations which he reported in his short-hand, yet 'so as to keep the substance and language of discourse?' How far did he Johnsonize the form or matter? The remark by Burke to Mackintosh, that Johnson was greater in Boswell's books than in his own, the absence of the terse and artistic touch to the sayings of the Rambler in the pages of Hawkins, Thrale, Murphy and others, suggest inevitably that they have been touched up by their reporter. The _Boswelliana_ supplies here some slight confirmation of this, for there have been preserved in that collection stories that reappear in the _Life_, and the final form in which they appear in the later book is always that of a pointed and improved nature. It would, therefore, seem that Boswell, whose imitations of Johnson Mrs Thrale declared in some respects superior to Garrick's, in his long devotion to the style and manner of his friend, 'inflated with the Johnsonian ether,' did consciously or otherwise add much to the originals, and so has denied himself a share of what would otherwise be justly, if known, set down to his credit. 'I own,' he writes in 1789 to Temple, 'I am desirous that my life should tell.' He counted doubtless on the _Autobiography_ for this purpose. 'It is a maxim with me,' said the great Bentley, 'that no man was ever written out of reputation but by himself.' At first sight it would appear that Boswell had inflicted upon his own fame an indelible blot. From whom but himself should we ever have learned those failings, of which Macaulay has deftly made so much in his unsympathetic writing down of the man, after the manner of the Johnsonian attack on Milton and Gray? In whom but himself should we detect the excrescences in his works--the permutations and combinations in shaving, the wish for a pulley in bed to raise him, his puzzle over the disproportionate wages of footmen and maidservants, his boastings, his family pride, his hastily writing in the sage's presence Johnson's parody of Hervey in the _Meditations on a Pudding_, his superstitions, and his weaknesses? It is this that has cost him so dear with the critics, and the superior people, 'empty wearisome cuckoos, and doleful monotonous owls, innumerable jays also and twittering sparrows of the housetops.' He compares his own ideas to his handwriting, irregular and sprawling; his nature to Corinthian brass, made up of an infinite variety of ingredients, and his head to a tavern which might have been full of lords drinking Burgundy, but has been invaded by low punch-drinkers whom the landlord cannot expel. Blots and inequalities there are in the great book. Cooper off the prairie, Galt out of Ayrshire, are not more untrue to themselves than is Boswell at such moments. But 'within the focus of the Lichfield lamps' he regains his strength like a Samson. Boswell, with all his experience, never attained the mellow Sadduceeism of the diner-out. As a reward, he never lost the literary conscience, the capacity for labour, the assiduity and veracity that have set his work upon a pedestal of its own. The dedication to Reynolds, a masterly piece of writing, will shew the trouble that he took over his method, 'obliged to run half over London in order to fix a date correctly.' And he knew the value of his work, which the man with the note-book never does. In his moments of self-complacency he could compare his _Johnsoniad_ with the _Odyssey_; and he will not repress his 'satisfaction in the consciousness of having largely provided for the instruction and entertainment of mankind.' Literary models before him he had none. Scott suggests the life of the philosopher Demophon in Lucian, but Boswell was not likely to have known it. He modestly himself says he has enlarged on the plan of Mason's _Life of Gray_; but his merits are his own. For the history of the period it is, as Cardinal Duperron said of Rabelais, _le livre_--_the_ book--'in worth as a book,' decides Carlyle, 'beyond any other production of the eighteenth century.' Time has dealt gently with both Johnson and Boswell. 'The chief glory of every people,' said the former in the preface to his _Dictionary_ 'arises from its authors: whether I shall add anything to the reputation of English literature must be left to time.' In the constituency of the present no dead writer addresses such an audience as Johnson does. Of Johnson Boswell might have said, as Cervantes did of his great creation Don Quixote, he and his subject were born for each other. There is no greater figure, no more familiar face in our literature than 'the old man eloquent'; and as the inseparable companion 'held in my heart of hearts, whose fidelity and tenderness I consider as a great part of the comforts which are yet left to me,' rises the figure of his biographer, the Bozzy no more of countless follies and fatuities, but Boswell, the prince of biographers, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown, now become, like his hero himself, an ancient. And they are still in the heyday of their great fame. Along the stream of time the little bark, as he hoped, sails attendant, pursues the triumph and partakes the gale. With James Boswell it has happened, as Mark Pattison says of Milton, to have passed beyond the critics into a region of his own. That 'mighty civil gentlewoman,' the mistress of the _Green Man_ at Ashbourne, M. Killingley, who waited on him with the note of introduction to his extensive acquaintance--'a singular favour conferr'd on one who has it not in her power to make any other return but her most grateful thanks, &c.,'--is but a symbol of the feelings of the readers who ever wish well to the name and the fame of James Boswell. THE END. 
535	----	Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk Second proof by Margaret Price. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson A New Impression with a Frontispiece by Walter Crane London: Chatto & Windus, 1907 [Frontispiece, by Walter Crane: front.jpg] My Dear Sidney Colvin, The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world--all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent. Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours, R. L. S. VELAY Many are the mighty things, and nought is more mighty than man. . . . He masters by his devices the tenant of the fields. SOPHOCLES. Who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass? JOB. THE DONKEY, THE PACK, AND THE PACK-SADDLE In a little place called Le Monastier, in a pleasant highland valley fifteen miles from Le Puy, I spent about a month of fine days. Monastier is notable for the making of lace, for drunkenness, for freedom of language, and for unparalleled political dissension. There are adherents of each of the four French parties--Legitimists, Orleanists, Imperialists, and Republicans--in this little mountain-town; and they all hate, loathe, decry, and calumniate each other. Except for business purposes, or to give each other the lie in a tavern brawl, they have laid aside even the civility of speech. 'Tis a mere mountain Poland. In the midst of this Babylon I found myself a rallying-point; every one was anxious to be kind and helpful to the stranger. This was not merely from the natural hospitality of mountain people, nor even from the surprise with which I was regarded as a man living of his own free will in Le Monastier, when he might just as well have lived anywhere else in this big world; it arose a good deal from my projected excursion southward through the Cevennes. A traveller of my sort was a thing hitherto unheard of in that district. I was looked upon with contempt, like a man who should project a journey to the moon, but yet with a respectful interest, like one setting forth for the inclement Pole. All were ready to help in my preparations; a crowd of sympathisers supported me at the critical moment of a bargain; not a step was taken but was heralded by glasses round and celebrated by a dinner or a breakfast. It was already hard upon October before I was ready to set forth, and at the high altitudes over which my road lay there was no Indian summer to be looked for. I was determined, if not to camp out, at least to have the means of camping out in my possession; for there is nothing more harassing to an easy mind than the necessity of reaching shelter by dusk, and the hospitality of a village inn is not always to be reckoned sure by those who trudge on foot. A tent, above all for a solitary traveller, is troublesome to pitch, and troublesome to strike again; and even on the march it forms a conspicuous feature in your baggage. A sleeping-sack, on the other hand, is always ready--you have only to get into it; it serves a double purpose--a bed by night, a portmanteau by day; and it does not advertise your intention of camping out to every curious passer- by. This is a huge point. If a camp is not secret, it is but a troubled resting-place; you become a public character; the convivial rustic visits your bedside after an early supper; and you must sleep with one eye open, and be up before the day. I decided on a sleeping-sack; and after repeated visits to Le Puy, and a deal of high living for myself and my advisers, a sleeping-sack was designed, constructed, and triumphantly brought home. This child of my invention was nearly six feet square, exclusive of two triangular flaps to serve as a pillow by night and as the top and bottom of the sack by day. I call it 'the sack,' but it was never a sack by more than courtesy: only a sort of long roll or sausage, green waterproof cart-cloth without and blue sheep's fur within. It was commodious as a valise, warm and dry for a bed. There was luxurious turning room for one; and at a pinch the thing might serve for two. I could bury myself in it up to the neck; for my head I trusted to a fur cap, with a hood to fold down over my ears and a band to pass under my nose like a respirator; and in case of heavy rain I proposed to make myself a little tent, or tentlet, with my waterproof coat, three stones, and a bent branch. It will readily be conceived that I could not carry this huge package on my own, merely human, shoulders. It remained to choose a beast of burden. Now, a horse is a fine lady among animals, flighty, timid, delicate in eating, of tender health; he is too valuable and too restive to be left alone, so that you are chained to your brute as to a fellow galley-slave; a dangerous road puts him out of his wits; in short, he's an uncertain and exacting ally, and adds thirty-fold to the troubles of the voyager. What I required was something cheap and small and hardy, and of a stolid and peaceful temper; and all these requisites pointed to a donkey. There dwelt an old man in Monastier, of rather unsound intellect according to some, much followed by street-boys, and known to fame as Father Adam. Father Adam had a cart, and to draw the cart a diminutive she-ass, not much bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse, with a kindly eye and a determined under-jaw. There was something neat and high-bred, a quakerish elegance, about the rogue that hit my fancy on the spot. Our first interview was in Monastier market-place. To prove her good temper, one child after another was set upon her back to ride, and one after another went head over heels into the air; until a want of confidence began to reign in youthful bosoms, and the experiment was discontinued from a dearth of subjects. I was already backed by a deputation of my friends; but as if this were not enough, all the buyers and sellers came round and helped me in the bargain; and the ass and I and Father Adam were the centre of a hubbub for near half an hour. At length she passed into my service for the consideration of sixty-five francs and a glass of brandy. The sack had already cost eighty francs and two glasses of beer; so that Modestine, as I instantly baptized her, was upon all accounts the cheaper article. Indeed, that was as it should be; for she was only an appurtenance of my mattress, or self-acting bedstead on four castors. I had a last interview with Father Adam in a billiard-room at the witching hour of dawn, when I administered the brandy. He professed himself greatly touched by the separation, and declared he had often bought white bread for the donkey when he had been content with black bread for himself; but this, according to the best authorities, must have been a flight of fancy. He had a name in the village for brutally misusing the ass; yet it is certain that he shed a tear, and the tear made a clean mark down one cheek. By the advice of a fallacious local saddler, a leather pad was made for me with rings to fasten on my bundle; and I thoughtfully completed my kit and arranged my toilette. By way of armoury and utensils, I took a revolver, a little spirit-lamp and pan, a lantern and some halfpenny candles, a jack-knife and a large leather flask. The main cargo consisted of two entire changes of warm clothing--besides my travelling wear of country velveteen, pilot-coat, and knitted spencer--some books, and my railway-rug, which, being also in the form of a bag, made me a double castle for cold nights. The permanent larder was represented by cakes of chocolate and tins of Bologna sausage. All this, except what I carried about my person, was easily stowed into the sheepskin bag; and by good fortune I threw in my empty knapsack, rather for convenience of carriage than from any thought that I should want it on my journey. For more immediate needs I took a leg of cold mutton, a bottle of Beaujolais, an empty bottle to carry milk, an egg-beater, and a considerable quantity of black bread and white, like Father Adam, for myself and donkey, only in my scheme of things the destinations were reversed. Monastrians, of all shades of thought in politics, had agreed in threatening me with many ludicrous misadventures, and with sudden death in many surprising forms. Cold, wolves, robbers, above all the nocturnal practical joker, were daily and eloquently forced on my attention. Yet in these vaticinations, the true, patent danger was left out. Like Christian, it was from my pack I suffered by the way. Before telling my own mishaps, let me in two words relate the lesson of my experience. If the pack is well strapped at the ends, and hung at full length--not doubled, for your life--across the pack-saddle, the traveller is safe. The saddle will certainly not fit, such is the imperfection of our transitory life; it will assuredly topple and tend to overset; but there are stones on every roadside, and a man soon learns the art of correcting any tendency to overbalance with a well-adjusted stone. On the day of my departure I was up a little after five; by six, we began to load the donkey; and ten minutes after, my hopes were in the dust. The pad would not stay on Modestine's back for half a moment. I returned it to its maker, with whom I had so contumelious a passage that the street outside was crowded from wall to wall with gossips looking on and listening. The pad changed hands with much vivacity; perhaps it would be more descriptive to say that we threw it at each other's heads; and, at any rate, we were very warm and unfriendly, and spoke with a deal of freedom. I had a common donkey pack-saddle--a barde, as they call it--fitted upon Modestine; and once more loaded her with my effects. The doubled sack, my pilot-coat (for it was warm, and I was to walk in my waistcoat), a great bar of black bread, and an open basket containing the white bread, the mutton, and the bottles, were all corded together in a very elaborate system of knots, and I looked on the result with fatuous content. In such a monstrous deck-cargo, all poised above the donkey's shoulders, with nothing below to balance, on a brand-new pack-saddle that had not yet been worn to fit the animal, and fastened with brand-new girths that might be expected to stretch and slacken by the way, even a very careless traveller should have seen disaster brewing. That elaborate system of knots, again, was the work of too many sympathisers to be very artfully designed. It is true they tightened the cords with a will; as many as three at a time would have a foot against Modestine's quarters, and be hauling with clenched teeth; but I learned afterwards that one thoughtful person, without any exercise of force, can make a more solid job than half-a-dozen heated and enthusiastic grooms. I was then but a novice; even after the misadventure of the pad nothing could disturb my security, and I went forth from the stable door as an ox goeth to the slaughter. THE GREEN DONKEY-DRIVER The bell of Monastier was just striking nine as I got quit of these preliminary troubles and descended the hill through the common. As long as I was within sight of the windows, a secret shame and the fear of some laughable defeat withheld me from tampering with Modestine. She tripped along upon her four small hoofs with a sober daintiness of gait; from time to time she shook her ears or her tail; and she looked so small under the bundle that my mind misgave me. We got across the ford without difficulty--there was no doubt about the matter, she was docility itself--and once on the other bank, where the road begins to mount through pine-woods, I took in my right hand the unhallowed staff, and with a quaking spirit applied it to the donkey. Modestine brisked up her pace for perhaps three steps, and then relapsed into her former minuet. Another application had the same effect, and so with the third. I am worthy the name of an Englishman, and it goes against my conscience to lay my hand rudely on a female. I desisted, and looked her all over from head to foot; the poor brute's knees were trembling and her breathing was distressed; it was plain that she could go no faster on a hill. God forbid, thought I, that I should brutalise this innocent creature; let her go at her own pace, and let me patiently follow. What that pace was, there is no word mean enough to describe; it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run; it kept me hanging on each foot for an incredible length of time; in five minutes it exhausted the spirit and set up a fever in all the muscles of the leg. And yet I had to keep close at hand and measure my advance exactly upon hers; for if I dropped a few yards into the rear, or went on a few yards ahead, Modestine came instantly to a halt and began to browse. The thought that this was to last from here to Alais nearly broke my heart. Of all conceivable journeys, this promised to be the most tedious. I tried to tell myself it was a lovely day; I tried to charm my foreboding spirit with tobacco; but I had a vision ever present to me of the long, long roads, up hill and down dale, and a pair of figures ever infinitesimally moving, foot by foot, a yard to the minute, and, like things enchanted in a nightmare, approaching no nearer to the goal. In the meantime there came up behind us a tall peasant, perhaps forty years of age, of an ironical snuffy countenance, and arrayed in the green tail-coat of the country. He overtook us hand over hand, and stopped to consider our pitiful advance. 'Your donkey,' says he, 'is very old?' I told him, I believed not. Then, he supposed, we had come far. I told him, we had but newly left Monastier. 'Et vous marchez comme ca!' cried he; and, throwing back his head, he laughed long and heartily. I watched him, half prepared to feel offended, until he had satisfied his mirth; and then, 'You must have no pity on these animals,' said he; and, plucking a switch out of a thicket, he began to lace Modestine about the stern-works, uttering a cry. The rogue pricked up her ears and broke into a good round pace, which she kept up without flagging, and without exhibiting the least symptom of distress, as long as the peasant kept beside us. Her former panting and shaking had been, I regret to say, a piece of comedy. My deus ex machina, before he left me, supplied some excellent, if inhumane, advice; presented me with the switch, which he declared she would feel more tenderly than my cane; and finally taught me the true cry or masonic word of donkey-drivers, 'Proot!' All the time, he regarded me with a comical, incredulous air, which was embarrassing to confront; and smiled over my donkey-driving, as I might have smiled over his orthography, or his green tail-coat. But it was not my turn for the moment. I was proud of my new lore, and thought I had learned the art to perfection. And certainly Modestine did wonders for the rest of the fore- noon, and I had a breathing space to look about me. It was Sabbath; the mountain-fields were all vacant in the sunshine; and as we came down through St. Martin de Frugeres, the church was crowded to the door, there were people kneeling without upon the steps, and the sound of the priest's chanting came forth out of the dim interior. It gave me a home feeling on the spot; for I am a countryman of the Sabbath, so to speak, and all Sabbath observances, like a Scottish accent, strike in me mixed feelings, grateful and the reverse. It is only a traveller, hurrying by like a person from another planet, who can rightly enjoy the peace and beauty of the great ascetic feast. The sight of the resting country does his spirit good. There is something better than music in the wide unusual silence; and it disposes him to amiable thoughts, like the sound of a little river or the warmth of sunlight. In this pleasant humour I came down the hill to where Goudet stands in a green end of a valley, with Chateau Beaufort opposite upon a rocky steep, and the stream, as clear as crystal, lying in a deep pool between them. Above and below, you may hear it wimpling over the stones, an amiable stripling of a river, which it seems absurd to call the Loire. On all sides, Goudet is shut in by mountains; rocky footpaths, practicable at best for donkeys, join it to the outer world of France; and the men and women drink and swear, in their green corner, or look up at the snow-clad peaks in winter from the threshold of their homes, in an isolation, you would think, like that of Homer's Cyclops. But it is not so; the postman reaches Goudet with the letter-bag; the aspiring youth of Goudet are within a day's walk of the railway at Le Puy; and here in the inn you may find an engraved portrait of the host's nephew, Regis Senac, 'Professor of Fencing and Champion of the two Americas,' a distinction gained by him, along with the sum of five hundred dollars, at Tammany Hall, New York, on the 10th April 1876. I hurried over my midday meal, and was early forth again. But, alas, as we climbed the interminable hill upon the other side, 'Proot!' seemed to have lost its virtue. I prooted like a lion, I prooted mellifluously like a sucking-dove; but Modestine would be neither softened nor intimidated. She held doggedly to her pace; nothing but a blow would move her, and that only for a second. I must follow at her heels, incessantly belabouring. A moment's pause in this ignoble toil, and she relapsed into her own private gait. I think I never heard of any one in as mean a situation. I must reach the lake of Bouchet, where I meant to camp, before sundown, and, to have even a hope of this, I must instantly maltreat this uncomplaining animal. The sound of my own blows sickened me. Once, when I looked at her, she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who formerly loaded me with kindness; and this increased my horror of my cruelty. To make matters worse, we encountered another donkey, ranging at will upon the roadside; and this other donkey chanced to be a gentleman. He and Modestine met nickering for joy, and I had to separate the pair and beat down their young romance with a renewed and feverish bastinado. If the other donkey had had the heart of a male under his hide, he would have fallen upon me tooth and hoof; and this was a kind of consolation--he was plainly unworthy of Modestine's affection. But the incident saddened me, as did everything that spoke of my donkey's sex. It was blazing hot up the valley, windless, with vehement sun upon my shoulders; and I had to labour so consistently with my stick that the sweat ran into my eyes. Every five minutes, too, the pack, the basket, and the pilot-coat would take an ugly slew to one side or the other; and I had to stop Modestine, just when I had got her to a tolerable pace of about two miles an hour, to tug, push, shoulder, and readjust the load. And at last, in the village of Ussel, saddle and all, the whole hypothec turned round and grovelled in the dust below the donkey's belly. She, none better pleased, incontinently drew up and seemed to smile; and a party of one man, two women, and two children came up, and, standing round me in a half-circle, encouraged her by their example. I had the devil's own trouble to get the thing righted; and the instant I had done so, without hesitation, it toppled and fell down upon the other side. Judge if I was hot! And yet not a hand was offered to assist me. The man, indeed, told me I ought to have a package of a different shape. I suggested, if he knew nothing better to the point in my predicament, he might hold his tongue. And the good-natured dog agreed with me smilingly. It was the most despicable fix. I must plainly content myself with the pack for Modestine, and take the following items for my own share of the portage: a cane, a quart-flask, a pilot-jacket heavily weighted in the pockets, two pounds of black bread, and an open basket full of meats and bottles. I believe I may say I am not devoid of greatness of soul; for I did not recoil from this infamous burden. I disposed it, Heaven knows how, so as to be mildly portable, and then proceeded to steer Modestine through the village. She tried, as was indeed her invariable habit, to enter every house and every courtyard in the whole length; and, encumbered as I was, without a hand to help myself, no words can render an idea of my difficulties. A priest, with six or seven others, was examining a church in process of repair, and he and his acolytes laughed loudly as they saw my plight. I remembered having laughed myself when I had seen good men struggling with adversity in the person of a jackass, and the recollection filled me with penitence. That was in my old light days, before this trouble came upon me. God knows at least that I shall never laugh again, thought I. But oh, what a cruel thing is a farce to those engaged in it! A little out of the village, Modestine, filled with the demon, set her heart upon a by-road, and positively refused to leave it. I dropped all my bundles, and, I am ashamed to say, struck the poor sinner twice across the face. It was pitiful to see her lift her head with shut eyes, as if waiting for another blow. I came very near crying; but I did a wiser thing than that, and sat squarely down by the roadside to consider my situation under the cheerful influence of tobacco and a nip of brandy. Modestine, in the meanwhile, munched some black bread with a contrite hypocritical air. It was plain that I must make a sacrifice to the gods of shipwreck. I threw away the empty bottle destined to carry milk; I threw away my own white bread, and, disdaining to act by general average, kept the black bread for Modestine; lastly, I threw away the cold leg of mutton and the egg-whisk, although this last was dear to my heart. Thus I found room for everything in the basket, and even stowed the boating- coat on the top. By means of an end of cord I slung it under one arm; and although the cord cut my shoulder, and the jacket hung almost to the ground, it was with a heart greatly lightened that I set forth again. I had now an arm free to thrash Modestine, and cruelly I chastised her. If I were to reach the lakeside before dark, she must bestir her little shanks to some tune. Already the sun had gone down into a windy-looking mist; and although there were still a few streaks of gold far off to the east on the hills and the black fir-woods, all was cold and grey about our onward path. An infinity of little country by-roads led hither and thither among the fields. It was the most pointless labyrinth. I could see my destination overhead, or rather the peak that dominates it; but choose as I pleased, the roads always ended by turning away from it, and sneaking back towards the valley, or northward along the margin of the hills. The failing light, the waning colour, the naked, unhomely, stony country through which I was travelling, threw me into some despondency. I promise you, the stick was not idle; I think every decent step that Modestine took must have cost me at least two emphatic blows. There was not another sound in the neighbourhood but that of my unwearying bastinado. Suddenly, in the midst of my toils, the load once more bit the dust, and, as by enchantment, all the cords were simultaneously loosened, and the road scattered with my dear possessions. The packing was to begin again from the beginning; and as I had to invent a new and better system, I do not doubt but I lost half an hour. It began to be dusk in earnest as I reached a wilderness of turf and stones. It had the air of being a road which should lead everywhere at the same time; and I was falling into something not unlike despair when I saw two figures stalking towards me over the stones. They walked one behind the other like tramps, but their pace was remarkable. The son led the way, a tall, ill-made, sombre, Scottish-looking man; the mother followed, all in her Sunday's best, with an elegantly embroidered ribbon to her cap, and a new felt hat atop, and proffering, as she strode along with kilted petticoats, a string of obscene and blasphemous oaths. I hailed the son, and asked him my direction. He pointed loosely west and north-west, muttered an inaudible comment, and, without slackening his pace for an instant, stalked on, as he was going, right athwart my path. The mother followed without so much as raising her head. I shouted and shouted after them, but they continued to scale the hillside, and turned a deaf ear to my outcries. At last, leaving Modestine by herself, I was constrained to run after them, hailing the while. They stopped as I drew near, the mother still cursing; and I could see she was a handsome, motherly, respectable-looking woman. The son once more answered me roughly and inaudibly, and was for setting out again. But this time I simply collared the mother, who was nearest me, and, apologising for my violence, declared that I could not let them go until they had put me on my road. They were neither of them offended--rather mollified than otherwise; told me I had only to follow them; and then the mother asked me what I wanted by the lake at such an hour. I replied, in the Scottish manner, by inquiring if she had far to go herself. She told me, with another oath, that she had an hour and a half's road before her. And then, without salutation, the pair strode forward again up the hillside in the gathering dusk. I returned for Modestine, pushed her briskly forward, and, after a sharp ascent of twenty minutes, reached the edge of a plateau. The view, looking back on my day's journey, was both wild and sad. Mount Mezenc and the peaks beyond St. Julien stood out in trenchant gloom against a cold glitter in the east; and the intervening field of hills had fallen together into one broad wash of shadow, except here and there the outline of a wooded sugar-loaf in black, here and there a white irregular patch to represent a cultivated farm, and here and there a blot where the Loire, the Gazeille, or the Laussonne wandered in a gorge. Soon we were on a high-road, and surprise seized on my mind as I beheld a village of some magnitude close at hand; for I had been told that the neighbourhood of the lake was uninhabited except by trout. The road smoked in the twilight with children driving home cattle from the fields; and a pair of mounted stride-legged women, hat and cap and all, dashed past me at a hammering trot from the canton where they had been to church and market. I asked one of the children where I was. At Bouchet St. Nicolas, he told me. Thither, about a mile south of my destination, and on the other side of a respectable summit, had these confused roads and treacherous peasantry conducted me. My shoulder was cut, so that it hurt sharply; my arm ached like toothache from perpetual beating; I gave up the lake and my design to camp, and asked for the auberge. I HAVE A GOAD The auberge of Bouchet St. Nicolas was among the least pretentious I have ever visited; but I saw many more of the like upon my journey. Indeed, it was typical of these French highlands. Imagine a cottage of two stories, with a bench before the door; the stable and kitchen in a suite, so that Modestine and I could hear each other dining; furniture of the plainest, earthern floors, a single bedchamber for travellers, and that without any convenience but beds. In the kitchen cooking and eating go forward side by side, and the family sleep at night. Any one who has a fancy to wash must do so in public at the common table. The food is sometimes spare; hard fish and omelette have been my portion more than once; the wine is of the smallest, the brandy abominable to man; and the visit of a fat sow, grouting under the table and rubbing against your legs, is no impossible accompaniment to dinner. But the people of the inn, in nine cases out of ten, show themselves friendly and considerate. As soon as you cross the doors you cease to be a stranger; and although these peasantry are rude and forbidding on the highway, they show a tincture of kind breeding when you share their hearth. At Bouchet, for instance, I uncorked my bottle of Beaujolais, and asked the host to join me. He would take but little. 'I am an amateur of such wine, do you see?' he said, 'and I am capable of leaving you not enough.' In these hedge-inns the traveller is expected to eat with his own knife; unless he ask, no other will be supplied: with a glass, a whang of bread, and an iron fork, the table is completely laid. My knife was cordially admired by the landlord of Bouchet, and the spring filled him with wonder. 'I should never have guessed that,' he said. 'I would bet,' he added, weighing it in his hand, 'that this cost you not less than five francs.' When I told him it had cost me twenty, his jaw dropped. He was a mild, handsome, sensible, friendly old man, astonishingly ignorant. His wife, who was not so pleasant in her manners, knew how to read, although I do not suppose she ever did so. She had a share of brains and spoke with a cutting emphasis, like one who ruled the roast. 'My man knows nothing,' she said, with an angry nod; 'he is like the beasts.' And the old gentleman signified acquiescence with his head. There was no contempt on her part, and no shame on his; the facts were accepted loyally, and no more about the matter. I was tightly cross-examined about my journey; and the lady understood in a moment, and sketched out what I should put into my book when I got home. 'Whether people harvest or not in such or such a place; if there were forests; studies of manners; what, for example, I and the master of the house say to you; the beauties of Nature, and all that.' And she interrogated me with a look. 'It is just that,' said I. 'You see,' she added to her husband, 'I understood that.' They were both much interested by the story of my misadventures. 'In the morning,' said the husband, 'I will make you something better than your cane. Such a beast as that feels nothing; it is in the proverb--dur comme un ane; you might beat her insensible with a cudgel, and yet you would arrive nowhere.' Something better! I little knew what he was offering. The sleeping-room was furnished with two beds. I had one; and I will own I was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife and child in the act of mounting into the other. This was my first experience of the sort; and if I am always to feel equally silly and extraneous, I pray God it be my last as well. I kept my eyes to myself, and know nothing of the woman except that she had beautiful arms, and seemed no whit embarrassed by my appearance. As a matter of fact, the situation was more trying to me than to the pair. A pair keep each other in countenance; it is the single gentleman who has to blush. But I could not help attributing my sentiments to the husband, and sought to conciliate his tolerance with a cup of brandy from my flask. He told me that he was a cooper of Alais travelling to St. Etienne in search of work, and that in his spare moments he followed the fatal calling of a maker of matches. Me he readily enough divined to be a brandy merchant. I was up first in the morning (Monday, September 23rd), and hastened my toilette guiltily, so as to leave a clear field for madam, the cooper's wife. I drank a bowl of milk, and set off to explore the neighbourhood of Bouchet. It was perishing cold, a grey, windy, wintry morning; misty clouds flew fast and low; the wind piped over the naked platform; and the only speck of colour was away behind Mount Mezenc and the eastern hills, where the sky still wore the orange of the dawn. It was five in the morning, and four thousand feet above the sea; and I had to bury my hands in my pockets and trot. People were trooping out to the labours of the field by twos and threes, and all turned round to stare upon the stranger. I had seen them coming back last night, I saw them going afield again; and there was the life of Bouchet in a nutshell. When I came back to the inn for a bit of breakfast, the landlady was in the kitchen combing out her daughter's hair; and I made her my compliments upon its beauty. 'Oh no,' said the mother; 'it is not so beautiful as it ought to be. Look, it is too fine.' Thus does a wise peasantry console itself under adverse physical circumstances, and, by a startling democratic process, the defects of the majority decide the type of beauty. 'And where,' said I, 'is monsieur?' 'The master of the house is upstairs,' she answered, 'making you a goad.' Blessed be the man who invented goads! Blessed the innkeeper of Bouchet St. Nicolas, who introduced me to their use! This plain wand, with an eighth of an inch of pin, was indeed a sceptre when he put it in my hands. Thenceforward Modestine was my slave. A prick, and she passed the most inviting stable door. A prick, and she broke forth into a gallant little trotlet that devoured the miles. It was not a remarkable speed, when all was said; and we took four hours to cover ten miles at the best of it. But what a heavenly change since yesterday! No more wielding of the ugly cudgel; no more flailing with an aching arm; no more broadsword exercise, but a discreet and gentlemanly fence. And what although now and then a drop of blood should appear on Modestine's mouse- coloured wedge-like rump? I should have preferred it otherwise, indeed; but yesterday's exploits had purged my heart of all humanity. The perverse little devil, since she would not be taken with kindness, must even go with pricking. It was bleak and bitter cold, and, except a cavalcade of stride-legged ladies and a pair of post-runners, the road was dead solitary all the way to Pradelles. I scarce remember an incident but one. A handsome foal with a bell about his neck came charging up to us upon a stretch of common, sniffed the air martially as one about to do great deeds, and suddenly thinking otherwise in his green young heart, put about and galloped off as he had come, the bell tinkling in the wind. For a long while afterwards I saw his noble attitude as he drew up, and heard the note of his bell; and when I struck the high-road, the song of the telegraph-wires seemed to continue the same music. Pradelles stands on a hillside, high above the Allier, surrounded by rich meadows. They were cutting aftermath on all sides, which gave the neighbourhood, this gusty autumn morning, an untimely smell of hay. On the opposite bank of the Allier the land kept mounting for miles to the horizon: a tanned and sallow autumn landscape, with black blots of fir- wood and white roads wandering through the hills. Over all this the clouds shed a uniform and purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing, exaggerating height and distance, and throwing into still higher relief the twisted ribbons of the highway. It was a cheerless prospect, but one stimulating to a traveller. For I was now upon the limit of Velay, and all that I beheld lay in another county--wild Gevaudan, mountainous, uncultivated, and but recently disforested from terror of the wolves. Wolves, alas, like bandits, seem to flee the traveller's advance; and you may trudge through all our comfortable Europe, and not meet with an adventure worth the name. But here, if anywhere, a man was on the frontiers of hope. For this was the land of the ever-memorable BEAST, the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves. What a career was his! He lived ten months at free quarters in Gevaudan and Vivarais; he ate women and children and 'shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty'; he pursued armed horsemen; he has been seen at broad noonday chasing a post-chaise and outrider along the king's high-road, and chaise and outrider fleeing before him at the gallop. He was placarded like a political offender, and ten thousand francs were offered for his head. And yet, when he was shot and sent to Versailles, behold! a common wolf, and even small for that. 'Though I could reach from pole to pole,' sang Alexander Pope; the Little Corporal shook Europe; and if all wolves had been as this wolf, they would have changed the history of man. M. Elie Berthet has made him the hero of a novel, which I have read, and do not wish to read again. I hurried over my lunch, and was proof against the landlady's desire that I should visit our Lady of Pradelles, 'who performed many miracles, although she was of wood'; and before three-quarters of an hour I was goading Modestine down the steep descent that leads to Langogne on the Allier. On both sides of the road, in big dusty fields, farmers were preparing for next spring. Every fifty yards a yoke of great-necked stolid oxen were patiently haling at the plough. I saw one of these mild formidable servants of the glebe, who took a sudden interest in Modestine and me. The furrow down which he was journeying lay at an angle to the road, and his head was solidly fixed to the yoke like those of caryatides below a ponderous cornice; but he screwed round his big honest eyes and followed us with a ruminating look, until his master bade him turn the plough and proceed to reascend the field. From all these furrowing ploughshares, from the feet of oxen, from a labourer here and there who was breaking the dry clods with a hoe, the wind carried away a thin dust like so much smoke. It was a fine, busy, breathing, rustic landscape; and as I continued to descend, the highlands of Gevaudan kept mounting in front of me against the sky. I had crossed the Loire the day before; now I was to cross the Allier; so near are these two confluents in their youth. Just at the bridge of Langogne, as the long-promised rain was beginning to fall, a lassie of some seven or eight addressed me in the sacramental phrase, 'D'ou'st-ce- que vous venez?' She did it with so high an air that she set me laughing; and this cut her to the quick. She was evidently one who reckoned on respect, and stood looking after me in silent dudgeon, as I crossed the bridge and entered the county of Gevaudan. UPPER GEVAUDAN The way also here was very wearisome through dirt and slabbiness; nor was there on all this ground so much as one inn or victualling-house wherein to refresh the feebler sort. PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. A CAMP IN THE DARK The next day (Tuesday, September 24th), it was two o'clock in the afternoon before I got my journal written up and my knapsack repaired, for I was determined to carry my knapsack in the future and have no more ado with baskets; and half an hour afterwards I set out for Le Cheylard l'Eveque, a place on the borders of the forest of Mercoire. A man, I was told, should walk there in an hour and a half; and I thought it scarce too ambitious to suppose that a man encumbered with a donkey might cover the same distance in four hours. All the way up the long hill from Langogne it rained and hailed alternately; the wind kept freshening steadily, although slowly; plentiful hurrying clouds--some dragging veils of straight rain-shower, others massed and luminous as though promising snow--careered out of the north and followed me along my way. I was soon out of the cultivated basin of the Allier, and away from the ploughing oxen, and such-like sights of the country. Moor, heathery marsh, tracts of rock and pines, woods of birch all jewelled with the autumn yellow, here and there a few naked cottages and bleak fields,--these were the characters of the country. Hill and valley followed valley and hill; the little green and stony cattle-tracks wandered in and out of one another, split into three or four, died away in marshy hollows, and began again sporadically on hillsides or at the borders of a wood. There was no direct road to Cheylard, and it was no easy affair to make a passage in this uneven country and through this intermittent labyrinth of tracks. It must have been about four when I struck Sagnerousse, and went on my way rejoicing in a sure point of departure. Two hours afterwards, the dusk rapidly falling, in a lull of the wind, I issued from a fir-wood where I had long been wandering, and found, not the looked-for village, but another marish bottom among rough-and-tumble hills. For some time past I had heard the ringing of cattle-bells ahead; and now, as I came out of the skirts of the wood, I saw near upon a dozen cows and perhaps as many more black figures, which I conjectured to be children, although the mist had almost unrecognisably exaggerated their forms. These were all silently following each other round and round in a circle, now taking hands, now breaking up with chains and reverences. A dance of children appeals to very innocent and lively thoughts; but, at nightfall on the marshes, the thing was eerie and fantastic to behold. Even I, who am well enough read in Herbert Spencer, felt a sort of silence fall for an instant on my mind. The next, I was pricking Modestine forward, and guiding her like an unruly ship through the open. In a path, she went doggedly ahead of her own accord, as before a fair wind; but once on the turf or among heather, and the brute became demented. The tendency of lost travellers to go round in a circle was developed in her to the degree of passion, and it took all the steering I had in me to keep even a decently straight course through a single field. While I was thus desperately tacking through the bog, children and cattle began to disperse, until only a pair of girls remained behind. From these I sought direction on my path. The peasantry in general were but little disposed to counsel a wayfarer. One old devil simply retired into his house, and barricaded the door on my approach; and I might beat and shout myself hoarse, he turned a deaf ear. Another, having given me a direction which, as I found afterwards, I had misunderstood, complacently watched me going wrong without adding a sign. He did not care a stalk of parsley if I wandered all night upon the hills! As for these two girls, they were a pair of impudent sly sluts, with not a thought but mischief. One put out her tongue at me, the other bade me follow the cows; and they both giggled and jogged each other's elbows. The Beast of Gevaudan ate about a hundred children of this district; I began to think of him with sympathy. Leaving the girls, I pushed on through the bog, and got into another wood and upon a well-marked road. It grew darker and darker. Modestine, suddenly beginning to smell mischief, bettered the pace of her own accord, and from that time forward gave me no trouble. It was the first sign of intelligence I had occasion to remark in her. At the same time, the wind freshened into half a gale, and another heavy discharge of rain came flying up out of the north. At the other side of the wood I sighted some red windows in the dusk. This was the hamlet of Fouzilhic; three houses on a hillside, near a wood of birches. Here I found a delightful old man, who came a little way with me in the rain to put me safely on the road for Cheylard. He would hear of no reward; but shook his hands above his head almost as if in menace, and refused volubly and shrilly, in unmitigated patois. All seemed right at last. My thoughts began to turn upon dinner and a fireside, and my heart was agreeably softened in my bosom. Alas, and I was on the brink of new and greater miseries! Suddenly, at a single swoop, the night fell. I have been abroad in many a black night, but never in a blacker. A glimmer of rocks, a glimmer of the track where it was well beaten, a certain fleecy density, or night within night, for a tree,--this was all that I could discriminate. The sky was simply darkness overhead; even the flying clouds pursued their way invisibly to human eyesight. I could not distinguish my hand at arm's-length from the track, nor my goad, at the same distance, from the meadows or the sky. Soon the road that I was following split, after the fashion of the country, into three or four in a piece of rocky meadow. Since Modestine had shown such a fancy for beaten roads, I tried her instinct in this predicament. But the instinct of an ass is what might be expected from the name; in half a minute she was clambering round and round among some boulders, as lost a donkey as you would wish to see. I should have camped long before had I been properly provided; but as this was to be so short a stage, I had brought no wine, no bread for myself, and little over a pound for my lady friend. Add to this, that I and Modestine were both handsomely wetted by the showers. But now, if I could have found some water, I should have camped at once in spite of all. Water, however, being entirely absent, except in the form of rain, I determined to return to Fouzilhic, and ask a guide a little farther on my way--'a little farther lend thy guiding hand.' The thing was easy to decide, hard to accomplish. In this sensible roaring blackness I was sure of nothing but the direction of the wind. To this I set my face; the road had disappeared, and I went across country, now in marshy opens, now baffled by walls unscalable to Modestine, until I came once more in sight of some red windows. This time they were differently disposed. It was not Fouzilhic, but Fouzilhac, a hamlet little distant from the other in space, but worlds away in the spirit of its inhabitants. I tied Modestine to a gate, and groped forward, stumbling among rocks, plunging mid-leg in bog, until I gained the entrance of the village. In the first lighted house there was a woman who would not open to me. She could do nothing, she cried to me through the door, being alone and lame; but if I would apply at the next house, there was a man who could help me if he had a mind. They came to the next door in force, a man, two women, and a girl, and brought a pair of lanterns to examine the wayfarer. The man was not ill- looking, but had a shifty smile. He leaned against the doorpost, and heard me state my case. All I asked was a guide as far as Cheylard. 'C'est que, voyez-vous, il fait noir,' said he. I told him that was just my reason for requiring help. 'I understand that,' said he, looking uncomfortable; 'mais--c'est--de la peine.' I was willing to pay, I said. He shook his head. I rose as high as ten francs; but he continued to shake his head. 'Name your own price, then,' said I. 'Ce n'est pas ca,' he said at length, and with evident difficulty; 'but I am not going to cross the door--mais je ne sortirai pas de la porte.' I grew a little warm, and asked him what he proposed that I should do. 'Where are you going beyond Cheylard?' he asked by way of answer. 'That is no affair of yours,' I returned, for I was not going to indulge his bestial curiosity; 'it changes nothing in my present predicament.' 'C'est vrai, ca,' he acknowledged, with a laugh; 'oui, c'est vrai. Et d'ou venez-vous?' A better man than I might have felt nettled. 'Oh,' said I, 'I am not going to answer any of your questions, so you may spare yourself the trouble of putting them. I am late enough already; I want help. If you will not guide me yourself, at least help me to find some one else who will.' 'Hold on,' he cried suddenly. 'Was it not you who passed in the meadow while it was still day?' 'Yes, yes,' said the girl, whom I had not hitherto recognised; 'it was monsieur; I told him to follow the cow.' 'As for you, mademoiselle,' said I, 'you are a farceuse.' 'And,' added the man, 'what the devil have you done to be still here?' What the devil, indeed! But there I was. 'The great thing,' said I, 'is to make an end of it'; and once more proposed that he should help me to find a guide. 'C'est que,' he said again, 'c'est que--il fait noir.' 'Very well,' said I; 'take one of your lanterns.' 'No,' he cried, drawing a thought backward, and again intrenching himself behind one of his former phrases; 'I will not cross the door.' I looked at him. I saw unaffected terror struggling on his face with unaffected shame; he was smiling pitifully and wetting his lip with his tongue, like a detected schoolboy. I drew a brief picture of my state, and asked him what I was to do. 'I don't know,' he said; 'I will not cross the door.' Here was the Beast of Gevaudan, and no mistake. 'Sir,' said I, with my most commanding manners, 'you are a coward.' And with that I turned my back upon the family party, who hastened to retire within their fortifications; and the famous door was closed again, but not till I had overheard the sound of laughter. Filia barbara pater barbarior. Let me say it in the plural: the Beasts of Gevaudan. The lanterns had somewhat dazzled me, and I ploughed distressfully among stones and rubbish-heaps. All the other houses in the village were both dark and silent; and though I knocked at here and there a door, my knocking was unanswered. It was a bad business; I gave up Fouzilhac with my curses. The rain had stopped, and the wind, which still kept rising, began to dry my coat and trousers. 'Very well,' thought I, 'water or no water, I must camp.' But the first thing was to return to Modestine. I am pretty sure I was twenty minutes groping for my lady in the dark; and if it had not been for the unkindly services of the bog, into which I once more stumbled, I might have still been groping for her at the dawn. My next business was to gain the shelter of a wood, for the wind was cold as well as boisterous. How, in this well-wooded district, I should have been so long in finding one, is another of the insoluble mysteries of this day's adventures; but I will take my oath that I put near an hour to the discovery. At last black trees began to show upon my left, and, suddenly crossing the road, made a cave of unmitigated blackness right in front. I call it a cave without exaggeration; to pass below that arch of leaves was like entering a dungeon. I felt about until my hand encountered a stout branch, and to this I tied Modestine, a haggard, drenched, desponding donkey. Then I lowered my pack, laid it along the wall on the margin of the road, and unbuckled the straps. I knew well enough where the lantern was; but where were the candles? I groped and groped among the tumbled articles, and, while I was thus groping, suddenly I touched the spirit- lamp. Salvation! This would serve my turn as well. The wind roared unwearyingly among the trees; I could hear the boughs tossing and the leaves churning through half a mile of forest; yet the scene of my encampment was not only as black as the pit, but admirably sheltered. At the second match the wick caught flame. The light was both livid and shifting; but it cut me off from the universe, and doubled the darkness of the surrounding night. I tied Modestine more conveniently for herself, and broke up half the black bread for her supper, reserving the other half against the morning. Then I gathered what I should want within reach, took off my wet boots and gaiters, which I wrapped in my waterproof, arranged my knapsack for a pillow under the flap of my sleeping-bag, insinuated my limbs into the interior, and buckled myself in like a bambino. I opened a tin of Bologna sausage and broke a cake of chocolate, and that was all I had to eat. It may sound offensive, but I ate them together, bite by bite, by way of bread and meat. All I had to wash down this revolting mixture was neat brandy: a revolting beverage in itself. But I was rare and hungry; ate well, and smoked one of the best cigarettes in my experience. Then I put a stone in my straw hat, pulled the flap of my fur cap over my neck and eyes, put my revolver ready to my hand, and snuggled well down among the sheepskins. I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind remained a stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue leaped between them, and they would no more come separate. The wind among the trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded for minutes together with a steady, even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon. Night after night, in my own bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this perturbing concert of the wind among the woods; but whether it was a difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, or because I was myself outside and in the midst of it, the fact remains that the wind sang to a different tune among these woods of Gevaudan. I hearkened and hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and subdued my thoughts and senses; but still my last waking effort was to listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state was one of wonder at the foreign clamour in my ears. Twice in the course of the dark hours--once when a stone galled me underneath the sack, and again when the poor patient Modestine, growing angry, pawed and stamped upon the road--I was recalled for a brief while to consciousness, and saw a star or two overhead, and the lace-like edge of the foliage against the sky. When I awoke for the third time (Wednesday, September 25th), the world was flooded with a blue light, the mother of the dawn. I saw the leaves labouring in the wind and the ribbon of the road; and, on turning my head, there was Modestine tied to a beech, and standing half across the path in an attitude of inimitable patience. I closed my eyes again, and set to thinking over the experience of the night. I was surprised to find how easy and pleasant it had been, even in this tempestuous weather. The stone which annoyed me would not have been there, had I not been forced to camp blindfold in the opaque night; and I had felt no other inconvenience, except when my feet encountered the lantern or the second volume of Peyrat's Pastors of the Desert among the mixed contents of my sleeping-bag; nay, more, I had felt not a touch of cold, and awakened with unusually lightsome and clear sensations. With that, I shook myself, got once more into my boots and gaiters, and, breaking up the rest of the bread for Modestine, strolled about to see in what part of the world I had awakened. Ulysses, left on Ithaca, and with a mind unsettled by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray. I have been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be found by morning in a random woodside nook in Gevaudan--not knowing north from south, as strange to my surroundings as the first man upon the earth, an inland castaway--was to find a fraction of my day-dreams realised. I was on the skirts of a little wood of birch, sprinkled with a few beeches; behind, it adjoined another wood of fir; and in front, it broke up and went down in open order into a shallow and meadowy dale. All around there were bare hilltops, some near, some far away, as the perspective closed or opened, but none apparently much higher than the rest. The wind huddled the trees. The golden specks of autumn in the birches tossed shiveringly. Overhead the sky was full of strings and shreds of vapour, flying, vanishing, reappearing, and turning about an axis like tumblers, as the wind hounded them through heaven. It was wild weather and famishing cold. I ate some chocolate, swallowed a mouthful of brandy, and smoked a cigarette before the cold should have time to disable my fingers. And by the time I had got all this done, and had made my pack and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the threshold of the east. We had not gone many steps along the lane, before the sun, still invisible to me, sent a glow of gold over some cloud mountains that lay ranged along the eastern sky. The wind had us on the stern, and hurried us bitingly forward. I buttoned myself into my coat, and walked on in a pleasant frame of mind with all men, when suddenly, at a corner, there was Fouzilhic once more in front of me. Nor only that, but there was the old gentleman who had escorted me so far the night before, running out of his house at sight of me, with hands upraised in horror. 'My poor boy!' he cried, 'what does this mean?' I told him what had happened. He beat his old hands like clappers in a mill, to think how lightly he had let me go; but when he heard of the man of Fouzilhac, anger and depression seized upon his mind. 'This time, at least,' said he, 'there shall be no mistake.' And he limped along, for he was very rheumatic, for about half a mile, and until I was almost within sight of Cheylard, the destination I had hunted for so long. CHEYLARD AND LUC Candidly, it seemed little worthy of all this searching. A few broken ends of village, with no particular street, but a succession of open places heaped with logs and fagots; a couple of tilted crosses, a shrine to Our Lady of all Graces on the summit of a little hill; and all this, upon a rattling highland river, in the corner of a naked valley. What went ye out for to see? thought I to myself. But the place had a life of its own. I found a board, commemorating the liberalities of Cheylard for the past year, hung up, like a banner, in the diminutive and tottering church. In 1877, it appeared, the inhabitants subscribed forty-eight francs ten centimes for the 'Work of the Propagation of the Faith.' Some of this, I could not help hoping, would be applied to my native land. Cheylard scrapes together halfpence for the darkened souls in Edinburgh; while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoan the ignorance of Rome. Thus, to the high entertainment of the angels, do we pelt each other with evangelists, like schoolboys bickering in the snow. The inn was again singularly unpretentious. The whole furniture of a not ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle, the clothes, the plate-rack, the meal-chest, and the photograph of the parish priest. There were five children, one of whom was set to its morning prayers at the stair-foot soon after my arrival, and a sixth would ere long be forthcoming. I was kindly received by these good folk. They were much interested in my misadventure. The wood in which I had slept belonged to them; the man of Fouzilhac they thought a monster of iniquity, and counselled me warmly to summon him at law--'because I might have died.' The good wife was horror-stricken to see me drink over a pint of uncreamed milk. 'You will do yourself an evil,' she said. 'Permit me to boil it for you.' After I had begun the morning on this delightful liquor, she having an infinity of things to arrange, I was permitted, nay requested, to make a bowl of chocolate for myself. My boots and gaiters were hung up to dry, and, seeing me trying to write my journal on my knee, the eldest daughter let down a hinged table in the chimney-corner for my convenience. Here I wrote, drank my chocolate, and finally ate an omelette before I left. The table was thick with dust; for, as they explained, it was not used except in winter weather. I had a clear look up the vent, through brown agglomerations of soot and blue vapour, to the sky; and whenever a handful of twigs was thrown on to the fire, my legs were scorched by the blaze. The husband had begun life as a muleteer, and when I came to charge Modestine showed himself full of the prudence of his art. 'You will have to change this package,' said he; 'it ought to be in two parts, and then you might have double the weight.' I explained that I wanted no more weight; and for no donkey hitherto created would I cut my sleeping-bag in two. 'It fatigues her, however,' said the innkeeper; 'it fatigues her greatly on the march. Look.' Alas, there were her two forelegs no better than raw beef on the inside, and blood was running from under her tail. They told me when I started, and I was ready to believe it, that before a few days I should come to love Modestine like a dog. Three days had passed, we had shared some misadventures, and my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my beast of burden. She was pretty enough to look at; but then she had given proof of dead stupidity, redeemed indeed by patience, but aggravated by flashes of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness. And I own this new discovery seemed another point against her. What the devil was the good of a she-ass if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a few necessaries? I saw the end of the fable rapidly approaching, when I should have to carry Modestine. AEsop was the man to know the world! I assure you I set out with heavy thoughts upon my short day's march. It was not only heavy thoughts about Modestine that weighted me upon the way; it was a leaden business altogether. For first, the wind blew so rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand from Cheylard to Luc; and second, my road lay through one of the most beggarly countries in the world. It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only worse; cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant of life. A road and some fences broke the unvarying waste, and the line of the road was marked by upright pillars, to serve in time of snow. Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my much-inventing spirit can suppose. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future? I came out at length above the Allier. A more unsightly prospect at this season of the year it would be hard to fancy. Shelving hills rose round it on all sides, here dabbled with wood and fields, there rising to peaks alternately naked and hairy with pines. The colour throughout was black or ashen, and came to a point in the ruins of the castle of Luc, which pricked up impudently from below my feet, carrying on a pinnacle a tall white statue of Our Lady, which, I heard with interest, weighed fifty quintals, and was to be dedicated on the 6th of October. Through this sorry landscape trickled the Allier and a tributary of nearly equal size, which came down to join it through a broad nude valley in Vivarais. The weather had somewhat lightened, and the clouds massed in squadron; but the fierce wind still hunted them through heaven, and cast great ungainly splashes of shadow and sunlight over the scene. Luc itself was a straggling double file of houses wedged between hill and river. It had no beauty, nor was there any notable feature, save the old castle overhead with its fifty quintals of brand-new Madonna. But the inn was clean and large. The kitchen, with its two box-beds hung with clean check curtains, with its wide stone chimney, its chimney-shelf four yards long and garnished with lanterns and religious statuettes, its array of chests and pair of ticking clocks, was the very model of what a kitchen ought to be; a melodrama kitchen, suitable for bandits or noblemen in disguise. Nor was the scene disgraced by the landlady, a handsome, silent, dark old woman, clothed and hooded in black like a nun. Even the public bedroom had a character of its own, with the long deal tables and benches, where fifty might have dined, set out as for a harvest-home, and the three box-beds along the wall. In one of these, lying on straw and covered with a pair of table-napkins, did I do penance all night long in goose-flesh and chattering teeth, and sigh, from time to time as I awakened, for my sheepskin sack and the lee of some great wood. OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS 'I behold The House, the Brotherhood austere-- And what am I, that I am here?' MATTHEW ARNOLD. FATHER APOLLINARIS Next morning (Thursday, 26th September) I took the road in a new order. The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across the saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool hanging out of either end. It was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and, as I began to see, it would ensure stability, blow high, blow low. But it was not without a pang that I had so decided. For although I had purchased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was able, I was yet jealously uneasy lest the flaps should tumble out and scatter my effects along the line of march. My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of Vivarais and Gevaudan. The hills of Gevaudan on the right were a little more naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the left, and the former had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the gorges and died out in solitary burrs upon the shoulders and the summits. Black bricks of fir-wood were plastered here and there upon both sides, and here and there were cultivated fields. A railway ran beside the river; the only bit of railway in Gevaudan, although there are many proposals afoot and surveys being made, and even, as they tell me, a station standing ready built in Mende. A year or two hence and this may be another world. The desert is beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian Wordsworth turn the sonnet into patois: 'Mountains and vales and floods, heard YE that whistle?' At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais, the modern Ardeche; for I was now come within a little way of my strange destination, the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. The sun came out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, and I beheld suddenly a fine wild landscape to the south. High rocky hills, as blue as sapphire, closed the view, and between these lay ridge upon ridge, heathery, craggy, the sun glittering on veins of rock, the underwood clambering in the hollows, as rude as God made them at the first. There was not a sign of man's hand in all the prospect; and indeed not a trace of his passage, save where generation after generation had walked in twisted footpaths, in and out among the beeches, and up and down upon the channelled slopes. The mists, which had hitherto beset me, were now broken into clouds, and fled swiftly and shone brightly in the sun. I drew a long breath. It was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene of some attraction for the human heart. I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life. But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate and inclement near at hand. A spidery cross on every hill-top marked the neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a mile beyond, the outlook southward opening out and growing bolder with every step, a white statue of the Virgin at the corner of a young plantation directed the traveller to Our Lady of the Snows. Here, then, I struck leftward, and pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me, and creaking in my secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence. I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a bell, and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the sound. I have rarely approached anything with more unaffected terror than the monastery of Our Lady of the Snows. This it is to have had a Protestant education. And suddenly, on turning a corner, fear took hold on me from head to foot--slavish, superstitious fear; and though I did not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead. For there, upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a mediaeval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday of my childhood I used to study the Hermits of Marco Sadeler--enchanting prints, full of wood and field and mediaeval landscapes, as large as a county, for the imagination to go a-travelling in; and here, sure enough, was one of Marco Sadeler's heroes. He was robed in white like any spectre, and the hood falling back, in the instancy of his contention with the barrow, disclosed a pate as bald and yellow as a skull. He might have been buried any time these thousand years, and all the lively parts of him resolved into earth and broken up with the farmer's harrow. I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address a person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing near, I doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence. He nodded back, and cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to the monastery? Who was I? An Englishman? Ah, an Irishman, then? 'No,' I said, 'a Scotsman.' A Scotsman? Ah, he had never seen a Scotsman before. And he looked me all over, his good, honest, brawny countenance shining with interest, as a boy might look upon a lion or an alligator. From him I learned with disgust that I could not be received at Our Lady of the Snows; I might get a meal, perhaps, but that was all. And then, as our talk ran on, and it turned out that I was not a pedlar, but a literary man, who drew landscapes and was going to write a book, he changed his manner of thinking as to my reception (for I fear they respect persons even in a Trappist monastery), and told me I must be sure to ask for the Father Prior, and state my case to him in full. On second thoughts he determined to go down with me himself; he thought he could manage for me better. Might he say that I was a geographer? No; I thought, in the interests of truth, he positively might not. 'Very well, then' (with disappointment), 'an author.' It appeared he had been in a seminary with six young Irishmen, all priests long since, who had received newspapers and kept him informed of the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England. And he asked me eagerly after Dr. Pusey, for whose conversion the good man had continued ever since to pray night and morning. 'I thought he was very near the truth,' he said; 'and he will reach it yet; there is so much virtue in prayer.' He must be a stiff, ungodly Protestant who can take anything but pleasure in this kind and hopeful story. While he was thus near the subject, the good father asked me if I were a Christian; and when he found I was not, or not after his way, he glossed it over with great good-will. The road which we were following, and which this stalwart father had made with his own two hands within the space of a year, came to a corner, and showed us some white buildings a little farther on beyond the wood. At the same time, the bell once more sounded abroad. We were hard upon the monastery. Father Apollinaris (for that was my companion's name) stopped me. 'I must not speak to you down there,' he said. 'Ask for the Brother Porter, and all will be well. But try to see me as you go out again through the wood, where I may speak to you. I am charmed to have made your acquaintance.' And then suddenly raising his arms, flapping his fingers, and crying out twice, 'I must not speak, I must not speak!' he ran away in front of me, and disappeared into the monastery door. I own this somewhat ghastly eccentricity went a good way to revive my terrors. But where one was so good and simple, why should not all be alike? I took heart of grace, and went forward to the gate as fast as Modestine, who seemed to have a disaffection for monasteries, would permit. It was the first door, in my acquaintance of her, which she had not shown an indecent haste to enter. I summoned the place in form, though with a quaking heart. Father Michael, the Father Hospitaller, and a pair of brown-robed brothers came to the gate and spoke with me a while. I think my sack was the great attraction; it had already beguiled the heart of poor Apollinaris, who had charged me on my life to show it to the Father Prior. But whether it was my address, or the sack, or the idea speedily published among that part of the brotherhood who attend on strangers that I was not a pedlar after all, I found no difficulty as to my reception. Modestine was led away by a layman to the stables, and I and my pack were received into Our Lady of the Snows. THE MONKS Father Michael, a pleasant, fresh-faced, smiling man, perhaps of thirty- five, took me to the pantry, and gave me a glass of liqueur to stay me until dinner. We had some talk, or rather I should say he listened to my prattle indulgently enough, but with an abstracted air, like a spirit with a thing of clay. And truly, when I remember that I descanted principally on my appetite, and that it must have been by that time more than eighteen hours since Father Michael had so much as broken bread, I can well understand that he would find an earthly savour in my conversation. But his manner, though superior, was exquisitely gracious; and I find I have a lurking curiosity as to Father Michael's past. The whet administered, I was left alone for a little in the monastery garden. This is no more than the main court, laid out in sandy paths and beds of parti-coloured dahlias, and with a fountain and a black statue of the Virgin in the centre. The buildings stand around it four-square, bleak, as yet unseasoned by the years and weather, and with no other features than a belfry and a pair of slated gables. Brothers in white, brothers in brown, passed silently along the sanded alleys; and when I first came out, three hooded monks were kneeling on the terrace at their prayers. A naked hill commands the monastery upon one side, and the wood commands it on the other. It lies exposed to wind; the snow falls off and on from October to May, and sometimes lies six weeks on end; but if they stood in Eden, with a climate like heaven's, the buildings themselves would offer the same wintry and cheerless aspect; and for my part, on this wild September day, before I was called to dinner, I felt chilly in and out. When I had eaten well and heartily, Brother Ambrose, a hearty conversible Frenchman (for all those who wait on strangers have the liberty to speak), led me to a little room in that part of the building which is set apart for MM. les retraitants. It was clean and whitewashed, and furnished with strict necessaries, a crucifix, a bust of the late Pope, the Imitation in French, a book of religious meditations, and the Life of Elizabeth Seton, evangelist, it would appear, of North America and of New England in particular. As far as my experience goes, there is a fair field for some more evangelisation in these quarters; but think of Cotton Mather! I should like to give him a reading of this little work in heaven, where I hope he dwells; but perhaps he knows all that already, and much more; and perhaps he and Mrs. Seton are the dearest friends, and gladly unite their voices in the everlasting psalm. Over the table, to conclude the inventory of the room, hung a set of regulations for MM. les retraitants: what services they should attend, when they were to tell their beads or meditate, and when they were to rise and go to rest. At the foot was a notable N.B.: 'Le temps libre est employe a l'examen de conscience, a la confession, a faire de bonnes resolutions, etc.' To make good resolutions, indeed! You might talk as fruitfully of making the hair grow on your head. I had scarce explored my niche when Brother Ambrose returned. An English boarder, it appeared, would like to speak with me. I professed my willingness, and the friar ushered in a fresh, young, little Irishman of fifty, a deacon of the Church, arrayed in strict canonicals, and wearing on his head what, in default of knowledge, I can only call the ecclesiastical shako. He had lived seven years in retreat at a convent of nuns in Belgium, and now five at Our Lady of the Snows; he never saw an English newspaper; he spoke French imperfectly, and had he spoken it like a native, there was not much chance of conversation where he dwelt. With this, he was a man eminently sociable, greedy of news, and simple- minded like a child. If I was pleased to have a guide about the monastery, he was no less delighted to see an English face and hear an English tongue. He showed me his own room, where he passed his time among breviaries, Hebrew Bibles, and the Waverley Novels. Thence he led me to the cloisters, into the chapter-house, through the vestry, where the brothers' gowns and broad straw hats were hanging up, each with his religious name upon a board--names full of legendary suavity and interest, such as Basil, Hilarion, Raphael, or Pacifique; into the library, where were all the works of Veuillot and Chateaubriand, and the Odes et Ballades, if you please, and even Moliere, to say nothing of innumerable fathers and a great variety of local and general historians. Thence my good Irishman took me round the workshops, where brothers bake bread, and make cartwheels, and take photographs; where one superintends a collection of curiosities, and another a gallery of rabbits. For in a Trappist monastery each monk has an occupation of his own choice, apart from his religious duties and the general labours of the house. Each must sing in the choir, if he has a voice and ear, and join in the haymaking if he has a hand to stir; but in his private hours, although he must be occupied, he may be occupied on what he likes. Thus I was told that one brother was engaged with literature; while Father Apollinaris busies himself in making roads, and the Abbot employs himself in binding books. It is not so long since this Abbot was consecrated, by the way; and on that occasion, by a special grace, his mother was permitted to enter the chapel and witness the ceremony of consecration. A proud day for her to have a son a mitred abbot; it makes you glad to think they let her in. In all these journeyings to and fro, many silent fathers and brethren fell in our way. Usually they paid no more regard to our passage than if we had been a cloud; but sometimes the good deacon had a permission to ask of them, and it was granted by a peculiar movement of the hands, almost like that of a dog's paws in swimming, or refused by the usual negative signs, and in either case with lowered eyelids and a certain air of contrition, as of a man who was steering very close to evil. The monks, by special grace of their Abbot, were still taking two meals a day; but it was already time for their grand fast, which begins somewhere in September and lasts till Easter, and during which they eat but once in the twenty-four hours, and that at two in the afternoon, twelve hours after they have begun the toil and vigil of the day. Their meals are scanty, but even of these they eat sparingly; and though each is allowed a small carafe of wine, many refrain from this indulgence. Without doubt, the most of mankind grossly overeat themselves; our meals serve not only for support, but as a hearty and natural diversion from the labour of life. Yet, though excess may be hurtful, I should have thought this Trappist regimen defective. And I am astonished, as I look back, at the freshness of face and cheerfulness of manner of all whom I beheld. A happier nor a healthier company I should scarce suppose that I have ever seen. As a matter of fact, on this bleak upland, and with the incessant occupation of the monks, life is of an uncertain tenure, and death no infrequent visitor, at Our Lady of the Snows. This, at least, was what was told me. But if they die easily, they must live healthily in the meantime, for they seemed all firm of flesh and high in colour; and the only morbid sign that I could observe, an unusual brilliancy of eye, was one that served rather to increase the general impression of vivacity and strength. Those with whom I spoke were singularly sweet-tempered, with what I can only call a holy cheerfulness in air and conversation. There is a note, in the direction to visitors, telling them not to be offended at the curt speech of those who wait upon them, since it is proper to monks to speak little. The note might have been spared; to a man the hospitallers were all brimming with innocent talk, and, in my experience of the monastery, it was easier to begin than to break off a conversation. With the exception of Father Michael, who was a man of the world, they showed themselves full of kind and healthy interest in all sorts of subjects--in politics, in voyages, in my sleeping-sack--and not without a certain pleasure in the sound of their own voices. As for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how they bear their solemn and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart from any view of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion of women, but in this vow of silence. I have had some experience of lay phalansteries, of an artistic, not to say a bacchanalian character; and seen more than one association easily formed and yet more easily dispersed. With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted longer. In the neighbourhood of women it is but a touch-and-go association that can be formed among defenceless men; the stronger electricity is sure to triumph; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of youth, are abandoned after an interview of ten minutes, and the arts and sciences, and professional male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet eyes and a caressing accent. And next after this, the tongue is the great divider. I am almost ashamed to pursue this worldly criticism of a religious rule; but there is yet another point in which the Trappist order appeals to me as a model of wisdom. By two in the morning the clapper goes upon the bell, and so on, hour by hour, and sometimes quarter by quarter, till eight, the hour of rest; so infinitesimally is the day divided among different occupations. The man who keeps rabbits, for example, hurries from his hutches to the chapel, the chapter-room, or the refectory, all day long: every hour he has an office to sing, a duty to perform; from two, when he rises in the dark, till eight, when he returns to receive the comfortable gift of sleep, he is upon his feet and occupied with manifold and changing business. I know many persons, worth several thousands in the year, who are not so fortunate in the disposal of their lives. Into how many houses would not the note of the monastery bell, dividing the day into manageable portions, bring peace of mind and healthful activity of body! We speak of hardships, but the true hardship is to be a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in our own dull and foolish manner. From this point of view, we may perhaps better understand the monk's existence. A long novitiate and every proof of constancy of mind and strength of body is required before admission to the order; but I could not find that many were discouraged. In the photographer's studio, which figures so strangely among the outbuildings, my eye was attracted by the portrait of a young fellow in the uniform of a private of foot. This was one of the novices, who came of the age for service, and marched and drilled and mounted guard for the proper time among the garrison of Algiers. Here was a man who had surely seen both sides of life before deciding; yet as soon as he was set free from service he returned to finish his novitiate. This austere rule entitles a man to heaven as by right. When the Trappist sickens, he quits not his habit; he lies in the bed of death as he has prayed and laboured in his frugal and silent existence; and when the Liberator comes, at the very moment, even before they have carried him in his robe to lie his little last in the chapel among continual chantings, joy-bells break forth, as if for a marriage, from the slated belfry, and proclaim throughout the neighbourhood that another soul has gone to God. At night, under the conduct of my kind Irishman, I took my place in the gallery to hear compline and Salve Regina, with which the Cistercians bring every day to a conclusion. There were none of those circumstances which strike the Protestant as childish or as tawdry in the public offices of Rome. A stern simplicity, heightened by the romance of the surroundings, spoke directly to the heart. I recall the whitewashed chapel, the hooded figures in the choir, the lights alternately occluded and revealed, the strong manly singing, the silence that ensued, the sight of cowled heads bowed in prayer, and then the clear trenchant beating of the bell, breaking in to show that the last office was over and the hour of sleep had come; and when I remember, I am not surprised that I made my escape into the court with somewhat whirling fancies, and stood like a man bewildered in the windy starry night. But I was weary; and when I had quieted my spirits with Elizabeth Seton's memoirs--a dull work--the cold and the raving of the wind among the pines (for my room was on that side of the monastery which adjoins the woods) disposed me readily to slumber. I was wakened at black midnight, as it seemed, though it was really two in the morning, by the first stroke upon the bell. All the brothers were then hurrying to the chapel; the dead in life, at this untimely hour, were already beginning the uncomforted labours of their day. The dead in life--there was a chill reflection. And the words of a French song came back into my memory, telling of the best of our mixed existence: 'Que t'as de belles filles, Girofle! Girofla! Que t'as de belles filles, L'Amour let comptera!' And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to love. THE BOARDERS But there was another side to my residence at Our Lady of the Snows. At this late season there were not many boarders; and yet I was not alone in the public part of the monastery. This itself is hard by the gate, with a small dining-room on the ground-floor and a whole corridor of cells similar to mine upstairs. I have stupidly forgotten the board for a regular retraitant; but it was somewhere between three and five francs a day, and I think most probably the first. Chance visitors like myself might give what they chose as a free-will offering, but nothing was demanded. I may mention that when I was going away, Father Michael refused twenty francs as excessive. I explained the reasoning which led me to offer him so much; but even then, from a curious point of honour, he would not accept it with his own hand. 'I have no right to refuse for the monastery,' he explained, 'but I should prefer if you would give it to one of the brothers.' I had dined alone, because I arrived late; but at supper I found two other guests. One was a country parish priest, who had walked over that morning from the seat of his cure near Mende to enjoy four days of solitude and prayer. He was a grenadier in person, with the hale colour and circular wrinkles of a peasant; and as he complained much of how he had been impeded by his skirts upon the march, I have a vivid fancy portrait of him, striding along, upright, big-boned, with kilted cassock, through the bleak hills of Gevaudan. The other was a short, grizzling, thick-set man, from forty-five to fifty, dressed in tweed with a knitted spencer, and the red ribbon of a decoration in his button-hole. This last was a hard person to classify. He was an old soldier, who had seen service and risen to the rank of commandant; and he retained some of the brisk decisive manners of the camp. On the other hand, as soon as his resignation was accepted, he had come to Our Lady of the Snows as a boarder, and, after a brief experience of its ways, had decided to remain as a novice. Already the new life was beginning to modify his appearance; already he had acquired somewhat of the quiet and smiling air of the brethren; and he was as yet neither an officer nor a Trappist, but partook of the character of each. And certainly here was a man in an interesting nick of life. Out of the noise of cannon and trumpets, he was in the act of passing into this still country bordering on the grave, where men sleep nightly in their grave-clothes, and, like phantoms, communicate by signs. At supper we talked politics. I make it my business, when I am in France, to preach political good-will and moderation, and to dwell on the example of Poland, much as some alarmists in England dwell on the example of Carthage. The priest and the commandant assured me of their sympathy with all I said, and made a heavy sighing over the bitterness of contemporary feeling. 'Why, you cannot say anything to a man with which he does not absolutely agree,' said I, 'but he flies up at you in a temper.' They both declared that such a state of things was antichristian. While we were thus agreeing, what should my tongue stumble upon but a word in praise of Gambetta's moderation. The old soldier's countenance was instantly suffused with blood; with the palms of his hands he beat the table like a naughty child. 'Comment, monsieur?' he shouted. 'Comment? Gambetta moderate? Will you dare to justify these words?' But the priest had not forgotten the tenor of our talk. And suddenly, in the height of his fury, the old soldier found a warning look directed on his face; the absurdity of his behaviour was brought home to him in a flash; and the storm came to an abrupt end, without another word. It was only in the morning, over our coffee (Friday, September 27th), that this couple found out I was a heretic. I suppose I had misled them by some admiring expressions as to the monastic life around us; and it was only by a point-blank question that the truth came out. I had been tolerantly used both by simple Father Apollinaris and astute Father Michael; and the good Irish deacon, when he heard of my religious weakness, had only patted me upon the shoulder and said, 'You must be a Catholic and come to heaven.' But I was now among a different sect of orthodox. These two men were bitter and upright and narrow, like the worst of Scotsmen, and indeed, upon my heart, I fancy they were worse. The priest snorted aloud like a battle-horse. 'Et vous pretendez mourir dans cette espece de croyance?' he demanded; and there is no type used by mortal printers large enough to qualify his accent. I humbly indicated that I had no design of changing. But he could not away with such a monstrous attitude. 'No, no,' he cried; 'you must change. You have come here, God has led you here, and you must embrace the opportunity.' I made a slip in policy; I appealed to the family affections, though I was speaking to a priest and a soldier, two classes of men circumstantially divorced from the kind and homely ties of life. 'Your father and mother?' cried the priest. 'Very well; you will convert them in their turn when you go home.' I think I see my father's face! I would rather tackle the Gaetulian lion in his den than embark on such an enterprise against the family theologian. But now the hunt was up; priest and soldier were in full cry for my conversion; and the Work of the Propagation of the Faith, for which the people of Cheylard subscribed forty-eight francs ten centimes during 1877, was being gallantly pursued against myself. It was an odd but most effective proselytising. They never sought to convince me in argument, where I might have attempted some defence; but took it for granted that I was both ashamed and terrified at my position, and urged me solely on the point of time. Now, they said, when God had led me to Our Lady of the Snows, now was the appointed hour. 'Do not be withheld by false shame,' observed the priest, for my encouragement. For one who feels very similarly to all sects of religion, and who has never been able, even for a moment, to weigh seriously the merit of this or that creed on the eternal side of things, however much he may see to praise or blame upon the secular and temporal side, the situation thus created was both unfair and painful. I committed my second fault in tact, and tried to plead that it was all the same thing in the end, and we were all drawing near by different sides to the same kind and undiscriminating Friend and Father. That, as it seems to lay spirits, would be the only gospel worthy of the name. But different men think differently; and this revolutionary aspiration brought down the priest with all the terrors of the law. He launched into harrowing details of hell. The damned, he said--on the authority of a little book which he had read not a week before, and which, to add conviction to conviction, he had fully intended to bring along with him in his pocket--were to occupy the same attitude through all eternity in the midst of dismal tortures. And as he thus expatiated, he grew in nobility of aspect with his enthusiasm. As a result the pair concluded that I should seek out the Prior, since the Abbot was from home, and lay my case immediately before him. 'C'est mon conseil comme ancien militaire,' observed the commandant; 'et celui de monsieur comme pretre.' 'Oui,' added the cure, sententiously nodding; 'comme ancien militaire--et comme pretre.' At this moment, whilst I was somewhat embarrassed how to answer, in came one of the monks, a little brown fellow, as lively as a grig, and with an Italian accent, who threw himself at once into the contention, but in a milder and more persuasive vein, as befitted one of these pleasant brethren. Look at him, he said. The rule was very hard; he would have dearly liked to stay in his own country, Italy--it was well known how beautiful it was, the beautiful Italy; but then there were no Trappists in Italy; and he had a soul to save; and here he was. I am afraid I must be at bottom, what a cheerful Indian critic has dubbed me, 'a faddling hedonist,' for this description of the brother's motives gave me somewhat of a shock. I should have preferred to think he had chosen the life for its own sake, and not for ulterior purposes; and this shows how profoundly I was out of sympathy with these good Trappists, even when I was doing my best to sympathise. But to the cure the argument seemed decisive. 'Hear that!' he cried. 'And I have seen a marquis here, a marquis, a marquis'--he repeated the holy word three times over--'and other persons high in society; and generals. And here, at your side, is this gentleman, who has been so many years in armies--decorated, an old warrior. And here he is, ready to dedicate himself to God.' I was by this time so thoroughly embarrassed that I pled cold feet, and made my escape from the apartment. It was a furious windy morning, with a sky much cleared, and long and potent intervals of sunshine; and I wandered until dinner in the wild country towards the east, sorely staggered and beaten upon by the gale, but rewarded with some striking views. At dinner the Work of the Propagation of the Faith was recommenced, and on this occasion still more distastefully to me. The priest asked me many questions as to the contemptible faith of my fathers, and received my replies with a kind of ecclesiastical titter. 'Your sect,' he said once; 'for I think you will admit it would be doing it too much honour to call it a religion.' 'As you please, monsieur,' said I. 'La parole est a vous.' At length I grew annoyed beyond endurance; and although he was on his own ground and, what is more to the purpose, an old man, and so holding a claim upon my toleration, I could not avoid a protest against this uncivil usage. He was sadly discountenanced. 'I assure you,' he said, 'I have no inclination to laugh in my heart. I have no other feeling but interest in your soul.' And there ended my conversion. Honest man! he was no dangerous deceiver; but a country parson, full of zeal and faith. Long may he tread Gevaudan with his kilted skirts--a man strong to walk and strong to comfort his parishioners in death! I daresay he would beat bravely through a snowstorm where his duty called him; and it is not always the most faithful believer who makes the cunningest apostle. UPPER GEVAUDAN (continued) The bed was made, the room was fit, By punctual eve the stars were lit; The air was still, the water ran; No need there was for maid or man, When we put up, my ass and I, At God's green caravanserai. OLD PLAY. ACROSS THE GOULET The wind fell during dinner, and the sky remained clear; so it was under better auspices that I loaded Modestine before the monastery gate. My Irish friend accompanied me so far on the way. As we came through the wood, there was Pere Apollinaire hauling his barrow; and he too quitted his labours to go with me for perhaps a hundred yards, holding my hand between both of his in front of him. I parted first from one and then from the other with unfeigned regret, but yet with the glee of the traveller who shakes off the dust of one stage before hurrying forth upon another. Then Modestine and I mounted the course of the Allier, which here led us back into Gevaudan towards its sources in the forest of Mercoire. It was but an inconsiderable burn before we left its guidance. Thence, over a hill, our way lay through a naked plateau, until we reached Chasserades at sundown. The company in the inn kitchen that night were all men employed in survey for one of the projected railways. They were intelligent and conversible, and we decided the future of France over hot wine, until the state of the clock frightened us to rest. There were four beds in the little upstairs room; and we slept six. But I had a bed to myself, and persuaded them to leave the window open. 'He, bourgeois; il est cinq heures!' was the cry that wakened me in the morning (Saturday, September 28th). The room was full of a transparent darkness, which dimly showed me the other three beds and the five different nightcaps on the pillows. But out of the window the dawn was growing ruddy in a long belt over the hill-tops, and day was about to flood the plateau. The hour was inspiriting; and there seemed a promise of calm weather, which was perfectly fulfilled. I was soon under way with Modestine. The road lay for a while over the plateau, and then descended through a precipitous village into the valley of the Chassezac. This stream ran among green meadows, well hidden from the world by its steep banks; the broom was in flower, and here and there was a hamlet sending up its smoke. At last the path crossed the Chassezac upon a bridge, and, forsaking this deep hollow, set itself to cross the mountain of La Goulet. It wound up through Lestampes by upland fields and woods of beech and birch, and with every corner brought me into an acquaintance with some new interest. Even in the gully of the Chassezac my ear had been struck by a noise like that of a great bass bell ringing at the distance of many miles; but this, as I continued to mount and draw nearer to it, seemed to change in character, and I found at length that it came from some one leading flocks afield to the note of a rural horn. The narrow street of Lestampes stood full of sheep, from wall to wall--black sheep and white, bleating with one accord like the birds in spring, and each one accompanying himself upon the sheep-bell round his neck. It made a pathetic concert, all in treble. A little higher, and I passed a pair of men in a tree with pruning-hooks, and one of them was singing the music of a bourree. Still further, and when I was already threading the birches, the crowing of cocks came cheerfully up to my ears, and along with that the voice of a flute discoursing a deliberate and plaintive air from one of the upland villages. I pictured to myself some grizzled, apple-cheeked, country schoolmaster fluting in his bit of a garden in the clear autumn sunshine. All these beautiful and interesting sounds filled my heart with an unwonted expectation; and it appeared to me that, once past this range which I was mounting, I should descend into the garden of the world. Nor was I deceived, for I was now done with rains and winds and a bleak country. The first part of my journey ended here; and this was like an induction of sweet sounds into the other and more beautiful. There are other degrees of feyness, as of punishment, besides the capital; and I was now led by my good spirits into an adventure which I relate in the interest of future donkey-drivers. The road zigzagged so widely on the hillside, that I chose a short cut by map and compass, and struck through the dwarf woods to catch the road again upon a higher level. It was my one serious conflict with Modestine. She would none of my short cut; she turned in my face; she backed, she reared; she, whom I had hitherto imagined to be dumb, actually brayed with a loud hoarse flourish, like a cock crowing for the dawn. I plied the goad with one hand; with the other, so steep was the ascent, I had to hold on the pack- saddle. Half-a-dozen times she was nearly over backwards on the top of me; half-a-dozen times, from sheer weariness of spirit, I was nearly giving it up, and leading her down again to follow the road. But I took the thing as a wager, and fought it through. I was surprised, as I went on my way again, by what appeared to be chill rain-drops falling on my hand, and more than once looked up in wonder at the cloudless sky. But it was only sweat which came dropping from my brow. Over the summit of the Goulet there was no marked road--only upright stones posted from space to space to guide the drovers. The turf underfoot was springy and well scented. I had no company but a lark or two, and met but one bullock-cart between Lestampes and Bleymard. In front of me I saw a shallow valley, and beyond that the range of the Lozere, sparsely wooded and well enough modelled in the flanks, but straight and dull in outline. There was scarce a sign of culture; only about Bleymard, the white high-road from Villefort to Mende traversed a range of meadows, set with spiry poplars, and sounding from side to side with the bells of flocks and herds. A NIGHT AMONG THE PINES From Bleymard after dinner, although it was already late, I set out to scale a portion of the Lozere. An ill-marked stony drove-road guided me forward; and I met nearly half-a-dozen bullock-carts descending from the woods, each laden with a whole pine-tree for the winter's firing. At the top of the woods, which do not climb very high upon this cold ridge, I struck leftward by a path among the pines, until I hit on a dell of green turf, where a streamlet made a little spout over some stones to serve me for a water-tap. 'In a more sacred or sequestered bower . . . nor nymph nor faunus haunted.' The trees were not old, but they grew thickly round the glade: there was no outlook, except north-eastward upon distant hill- tops, or straight upward to the sky; and the encampment felt secure and private like a room. By the time I had made my arrangements and fed Modestine, the day was already beginning to decline. I buckled myself to the knees into my sack and made a hearty meal; and as soon as the sun went down, I pulled my cap over my eyes and fell asleep. Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All night long he can hear Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, she turns and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to those who dwell in houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their feet. It is then that the cock first crows, not this time to announce the dawn, but like a cheerful watchman speeding the course of night. Cattle awake on the meadows; sheep break their fast on dewy hillsides, and change to a new lair among the ferns; and houseless men, who have lain down with the fowls, open their dim eyes and behold the beauty of the night. At what inaudible summons, at what gentle touch of Nature, are all these sleepers thus recalled in the same hour to life? Do the stars rain down an influence, or do we share some thrill of mother earth below our resting bodies? Even shepherds and old country-folk, who are the deepest read in these arcana, have not a guess as to the means or purpose of this nightly resurrection. Towards two in the morning they declare the thing takes place; and neither know nor inquire further. And at least it is a pleasant incident. We are disturbed in our slumber only, like the luxurious Montaigne, 'that we may the better and more sensibly relish it.' We have a moment to look upon the stars. And there is a special pleasure for some minds in the reflection that we share the impulse with all outdoor creatures in our neighbourhood, that we have escaped out of the Bastille of civilisation, and are become, for the time being, a mere kindly animal and a sheep of Nature's flock. When that hour came to me among the pines, I wakened thirsty. My tin was standing by me half full of water. I emptied it at a draught; and feeling broad awake after this internal cold aspersion, sat upright to make a cigarette. The stars were clear, coloured, and jewel-like, but not frosty. A faint silvery vapour stood for the Milky Way. All around me the black fir-points stood upright and stock-still. By the whiteness of the pack-saddle, I could see Modestine walking round and round at the length of her tether; I could hear her steadily munching at the sward; but there was not another sound, save the indescribable quiet talk of the runnel over the stones. I lay lazily smoking and studying the colour of the sky, as we call the void of space, from where it showed a reddish grey behind the pines to where it showed a glossy blue-black between the stars. As if to be more like a pedlar, I wear a silver ring. This I could see faintly shining as I raised or lowered the cigarette; and at each whiff the inside of my hand was illuminated, and became for a second the highest light in the landscape. A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream of air, passed down the glade from time to time; so that even in my great chamber the air was being renewed all night long. I thought with horror of the inn at Chasserades and the congregated nightcaps; with horror of the nocturnal prowesses of clerks and students, of hot theatres and pass-keys and close rooms. I have not often enjoyed a more serene possession of myself, nor felt more independent of material aids. The outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and night after night a man's bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house. I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths which are revealed to savages and hid from political economists: at the least, I had discovered a new pleasure for myself. And yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became aware of a strange lack. I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free. As I thus lay, between content and longing, a faint noise stole towards me through the pines. I thought, at first, it was the crowing of cocks or the barking of dogs at some very distant farm; but steadily and gradually it took articulate shape in my ears, until I became aware that a passenger was going by upon the high-road in the valley, and singing loudly as he went. There was more of good-will than grace in his performance; but he trolled with ample lungs; and the sound of his voice took hold upon the hillside and set the air shaking in the leafy glens. I have heard people passing by night in sleeping cities; some of them sang; one, I remember, played loudly on the bagpipes. I have heard the rattle of a cart or carriage spring up suddenly after hours of stillness, and pass, for some minutes, within the range of my hearing as I lay abed. There is a romance about all who are abroad in the black hours, and with something of a thrill we try to guess their business. But here the romance was double: first, this glad passenger, lit internally with wine, who sent up his voice in music through the night; and then I, on the other hand, buckled into my sack, and smoking alone in the pine-woods between four and five thousand feet towards the stars. When I awoke again (Sunday, 29th September), many of the stars had disappeared; only the stronger companions of the night still burned visibly overhead; and away towards the east I saw a faint haze of light upon the horizon, such as had been the Milky Way when I was last awake. Day was at hand. I lit my lantern, and by its glow-worm light put on my boots and gaiters; then I broke up some bread for Modestine, filled my can at the water-tap, and lit my spirit-lamp to boil myself some chocolate. The blue darkness lay long in the glade where I had so sweetly slumbered; but soon there was a broad streak of orange melting into gold along the mountain-tops of Vivarais. A solemn glee possessed my mind at this gradual and lovely coming in of day. I heard the runnel with delight; I looked round me for something beautiful and unexpected; but the still black pine-trees, the hollow glade, the munching ass, remained unchanged in figure. Nothing had altered but the light, and that, indeed, shed over all a spirit of life and of breathing peace, and moved me to a strange exhilaration. I drank my water-chocolate, which was hot if it was not rich, and strolled here and there, and up and down about the glade. While I was thus delaying, a gush of steady wind, as long as a heavy sigh, poured direct out of the quarter of the morning. It was cold, and set me sneezing. The trees near at hand tossed their black plumes in its passage; and I could see the thin distant spires of pine along the edge of the hill rock slightly to and fro against the golden east. Ten minutes after, the sunlight spread at a gallop along the hillside, scattering shadows and sparkles, and the day had come completely. I hastened to prepare my pack, and tackle the steep ascent that lay before me; but I had something on my mind. It was only a fancy; yet a fancy will sometimes be importunate. I had been most hospitably received and punctually served in my green caravanserai. The room was airy, the water excellent, and the dawn had called me to a moment. I say nothing of the tapestries or the inimitable ceiling, nor yet of the view which I commanded from the windows; but I felt I was in some one's debt for all this liberal entertainment. And so it pleased me, in a half-laughing way, to leave pieces of money on the turf as I went along, until I had left enough for my night's lodging. I trust they did not fall to some rich and churlish drover. THE COUNTRY OF THE CAMISARDS We travelled in the print of olden wars; Yet all the land was green; And love we found, and peace, Where fire and war had been. They pass and smile, the children of the sword-- No more the sword they wield; And O, how deep the corn Along the battlefield! W. P. BANNATYNE. ACROSS THE LOZERE The track that I had followed in the evening soon died out, and I continued to follow over a bald turf ascent a row of stone pillars, such as had conducted me across the Goulet. It was already warm. I tied my jacket on the pack, and walked in my knitted waistcoat. Modestine herself was in high spirits, and broke of her own accord, for the first time in my experience, into a jolting trot that set the oats swashing in the pocket of my coat. The view, back upon the northern Gevaudan, extended with every step; scarce a tree, scarce a house, appeared upon the fields of wild hill that ran north, east, and west, all blue and gold in the haze and sunlight of the morning. A multitude of little birds kept sweeping and twittering about my path; they perched on the stone pillars, they pecked and strutted on the turf, and I saw them circle in volleys in the blue air, and show, from time to time, translucent flickering wings between the sun and me. Almost from the first moment of my march, a faint large noise, like a distant surf, had filled my ears. Sometimes I was tempted to think it the voice of a neighbouring waterfall, and sometimes a subjective result of the utter stillness of the hill. But as I continued to advance, the noise increased, and became like the hissing of an enormous tea-urn, and at the same time breaths of cool air began to reach me from the direction of the summit. At length I understood. It was blowing stiffly from the south upon the other slope of the Lozere, and every step that I took I was drawing nearer to the wind. Although it had been long desired, it was quite unexpectedly at last that my eyes rose above the summit. A step that seemed no way more decisive than many other steps that had preceded it--and, 'like stout Cortez when, with eagle eyes, he stared on the Pacific,' I took possession, in my own name, of a new quarter of the world. For behold, instead of the gross turf rampart I had been mounting for so long, a view into the hazy air of heaven, and a land of intricate blue hills below my feet. The Lozere lies nearly east and west, cutting Gevaudan into two unequal parts; its highest point, this Pic de Finiels, on which I was then standing, rises upwards of five thousand six hundred feet above the sea, and in clear weather commands a view over all lower Languedoc to the Mediterranean Sea. I have spoken with people who either pretended or believed that they had seen, from the Pic de Finiels, white ships sailing by Montpellier and Cette. Behind was the upland northern country through which my way had lain, peopled by a dull race, without wood, without much grandeur of hill-form, and famous in the past for little beside wolves. But in front of me, half veiled in sunny haze, lay a new Gevaudan, rich, picturesque, illustrious for stirring events. Speaking largely, I was in the Cevennes at Monastier, and during all my journey; but there is a strict and local sense in which only this confused and shaggy country at my feet has any title to the name, and in this sense the peasantry employ the word. These are the Cevennes with an emphasis: the Cevennes of the Cevennes. In that undecipherable labyrinth of hills, a war of bandits, a war of wild beasts, raged for two years between the Grand Monarch with all his troops and marshals on the one hand, and a few thousand Protestant mountaineers upon the other. A hundred and eighty years ago, the Camisards held a station even on the Lozere, where I stood; they had an organisation, arsenals, a military and religious hierarchy; their affairs were 'the discourse of every coffee-house' in London; England sent fleets in their support; their leaders prophesied and murdered; with colours and drums, and the singing of old French psalms, their bands sometimes affronted daylight, marched before walled cities, and dispersed the generals of the king; and sometimes at night, or in masquerade, possessed themselves of strong castles, and avenged treachery upon their allies and cruelty upon their foes. There, a hundred and eighty years ago, was the chivalrous Roland, 'Count and Lord Roland, generalissimo of the Protestants in France,' grave, silent, imperious, pock-marked ex-dragoon, whom a lady followed in his wanderings out of love. There was Cavalier, a baker's apprentice with a genius for war, elected brigadier of Camisards at seventeen, to die at fifty-five the English governor of Jersey. There again was Castanet, a partisan leader in a voluminous peruke and with a taste for controversial divinity. Strange generals, who moved apart to take counsel with the God of Hosts, and fled or offered battle, set sentinels or slept in an unguarded camp, as the Spirit whispered to their hearts! And there, to follow these and other leaders, was the rank and file of prophets and disciples, bold, patient, indefatigable, hardy to run upon the mountains, cheering their rough life with psalms, eager to fight, eager to pray, listening devoutly to the oracles of brain-sick children, and mystically putting a grain of wheat among the pewter balls with which they charged their muskets. I had travelled hitherto through a dull district, and in the track of nothing more notable than the child-eating beast of Gevaudan, the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves. But now I was to go down into the scene of a romantic chapter--or, better, a romantic footnote in the history of the world. What was left of all this bygone dust and heroism? I was told that Protestantism still survived in this head seat of Protestant resistance; so much the priest himself had told me in the monastery parlour. But I had yet to learn if it were a bare survival, or a lively and generous tradition. Again, if in the northern Cevennes the people are narrow in religious judgments, and more filled with zeal than charity, what was I to look for in this land of persecution and reprisal--in a land where the tyranny of the Church produced the Camisard rebellion, and the terror of the Camisards threw the Catholic peasantry into legalised revolt upon the other side, so that Camisard and Florentin skulked for each other's lives among the mountains? Just on the brow of the hill, where I paused to look before me, the series of stone pillars came abruptly to an end; and only a little below, a sort of track appeared and began to go down a break-neck slope, turning like a corkscrew as it went. It led into a valley between falling hills, stubbly with rocks like a reaped field of corn, and floored farther down with green meadows. I followed the track with precipitation; the steepness of the slope, the continual agile turning of the line of the descent, and the old unwearied hope of finding something new in a new country, all conspired to lend me wings. Yet a little lower and a stream began, collecting itself together out of many fountains, and soon making a glad noise among the hills. Sometimes it would cross the track in a bit of waterfall, with a pool, in which Modestine refreshed her feet. The whole descent is like a dream to me, so rapidly was it accomplished. I had scarcely left the summit ere the valley had closed round my path, and the sun beat upon me, walking in a stagnant lowland atmosphere. The track became a road, and went up and down in easy undulations. I passed cabin after cabin, but all seemed deserted; and I saw not a human creature, nor heard any sound except that of the stream. I was, however, in a different country from the day before. The stony skeleton of the world was here vigorously displayed to sun and air. The slopes were steep and changeful. Oak-trees clung along the hills, well grown, wealthy in leaf, and touched by the autumn with strong and luminous colours. Here and there another stream would fall in from the right or the left, down a gorge of snow-white and tumultuary boulders. The river in the bottom (for it was rapidly growing a river, collecting on all hands as it trotted on its way) here foamed a while in desperate rapids, and there lay in pools of the most enchanting sea-green shot with watery browns. As far as I have gone, I have never seen a river of so changeful and delicate a hue; crystal was not more clear, the meadows were not by half so green; and at every pool I saw I felt a thrill of longing to be out of these hot, dusty, and material garments, and bathe my naked body in the mountain air and water. All the time as I went on I never forgot it was the Sabbath; the stillness was a perpetual reminder; and I heard in spirit the church-bells clamouring all over Europe, and the psalms of a thousand churches. At length a human sound struck upon my ear--a cry strangely modulated between pathos and derision; and looking across the valley, I saw a little urchin sitting in a meadow, with his hands about his knees, and dwarfed to almost comical smallness by the distance. But the rogue had picked me out as I went down the road, from oak wood on to oak wood, driving Modestine; and he made me the compliments of the new country in this tremulous high-pitched salutation. And as all noises are lovely and natural at a sufficient distance, this also, coming through so much clean hill air and crossing all the green valley, sounded pleasant to my ear, and seemed a thing rustic, like the oaks or the river. A little after, the stream that I was following fell into the Tarn at Pont de Montvert of bloody memory. PONT DE MONTVERT One of the first things I encountered in Pont de Montvert was, if I remember rightly, the Protestant temple; but this was but the type of other novelties. A subtle atmosphere distinguishes a town in England from a town in France, or even in Scotland. At Carlisle you can see you are in the one country; at Dumfries, thirty miles away, you are as sure that you are in the other. I should find it difficult to tell in what particulars Pont de Montvert differed from Monastier or Langogne, or even Bleymard; but the difference existed, and spoke eloquently to the eyes. The place, with its houses, its lanes, its glaring river-bed, wore an indescribable air of the South. All was Sunday bustle in the streets and in the public-house, as all had been Sabbath peace among the mountains. There must have been near a score of us at dinner by eleven before noon; and after I had eaten and drunken, and sat writing up my journal, I suppose as many more came dropping in one after another, or by twos and threes. In crossing the Lozere I had not only come among new natural features, but moved into the territory of a different race. These people, as they hurriedly despatched their viands in an intricate sword-play of knives, questioned and answered me with a degree of intelligence which excelled all that I had met, except among the railway folk at Chasserades. They had open telling faces, and were lively both in speech and manner. They not only entered thoroughly into the spirit of my little trip, but more than one declared, if he were rich enough, he would like to set forth on such another. Even physically there was a pleasant change. I had not seen a pretty woman since I left Monastier, and there but one. Now of the three who sat down with me to dinner, one was certainly not beautiful--a poor timid thing of forty, quite troubled at this roaring table d'hote, whom I squired and helped to wine, and pledged and tried generally to encourage, with quite a contrary effect; but the other two, both married, were both more handsome than the average of women. And Clarisse? What shall I say of Clarisse? She waited the table with a heavy placable nonchalance, like a performing cow; her great grey eyes were steeped in amorous languor; her features, although fleshy, were of an original and accurate design; her mouth had a curl; her nostril spoke of dainty pride; her cheek fell into strange and interesting lines. It was a face capable of strong emotion, and, with training, it offered the promise of delicate sentiment. It seemed pitiful to see so good a model left to country admirers and a country way of thought. Beauty should at least have touched society; then, in a moment, it throws off a weight that lay upon it, it becomes conscious of itself, it puts on an elegance, learns a gait and a carriage of the head, and, in a moment, patet dea. Before I left I assured Clarisse of my hearty admiration. She took it like milk, without embarrassment or wonder, merely looking at me steadily with her great eyes; and I own the result upon myself was some confusion. If Clarisse could read English, I should not dare to add that her figure was unworthy of her face. Hers was a case for stays; but that may perhaps grow better as she gets up in years. Pont de Montvert, or Greenhill Bridge, as we might say at home, is a place memorable in the story of the Camisards. It was here that the war broke out; here that those southern Covenanters slew their Archbishop Sharp. The persecution on the one hand, the febrile enthusiasm on the other, are almost equally difficult to understand in these quiet modern days, and with our easy modern beliefs and disbeliefs. The Protestants were one and all beside their right minds with zeal and sorrow. They were all prophets and prophetesses. Children at the breast would exhort their parents to good works. 'A child of fifteen months at Quissac spoke from its mother's arms, agitated and sobbing, distinctly and with a loud voice.' Marshal Villars has seen a town where all the women 'seemed possessed by the devil,' and had trembling fits, and uttered prophecies publicly upon the streets. A prophetess of Vivarais was hanged at Montpellier because blood flowed from her eyes and nose, and she declared that she was weeping tears of blood for the misfortunes of the Protestants. And it was not only women and children. Stalwart dangerous fellows, used to swing the sickle or to wield the forest axe, were likewise shaken with strange paroxysms, and spoke oracles with sobs and streaming tears. A persecution unsurpassed in violence had lasted near a score of years, and this was the result upon the persecuted; hanging, burning, breaking on the wheel, had been in vain; the dragoons had left their hoof-marks over all the countryside; there were men rowing in the galleys, and women pining in the prisons of the Church; and not a thought was changed in the heart of any upright Protestant. Now the head and forefront of the persecution--after Lamoignon de Bavile--Francois de Langlade du Chayla (pronounce Cheila), Archpriest of the Cevennes and Inspector of Missions in the same country, had a house in which he sometimes dwelt in the town of Pont de Montvert. He was a conscientious person, who seems to have been intended by nature for a pirate, and now fifty-five, an age by which a man has learned all the moderation of which he is capable. A missionary in his youth in China, he there suffered martyrdom, was left for dead, and only succoured and brought back to life by the charity of a pariah. We must suppose the pariah devoid of second-sight, and not purposely malicious in this act. Such an experience, it might be thought, would have cured a man of the desire to persecute; but the human spirit is a thing strangely put together; and, having been a Christian martyr, Du Chayla became a Christian persecutor. The Work of the Propagation of the Faith went roundly forward in his hands. His house in Pont de Montvert served him as a prison. There he closed the hands of his prisoners upon live coal, and plucked out the hairs of their beards, to convince them that they were deceived in their opinions. And yet had not he himself tried and proved the inefficacy of these carnal arguments among the Buddhists in China? Not only was life made intolerable in Languedoc, but flight was rigidly forbidden. One Massip, a muleteer, and well acquainted with the mountain- paths, had already guided several troops of fugitives in safety to Geneva; and on him, with another convoy, consisting mostly of women dressed as men, Du Chayla, in an evil hour for himself, laid his hands. The Sunday following, there was a conventicle of Protestants in the woods of Altefage upon Mount Bouges; where there stood up one Seguier--Spirit Seguier, as his companions called him--a wool-carder, tall, black-faced, and toothless, but a man full of prophecy. He declared, in the name of God, that the time for submission had gone by, and they must betake themselves to arms for the deliverance of their brethren and the destruction of the priests. The next night, 24th July 1702, a sound disturbed the Inspector of Missions as he sat in his prison-house at Pont de Montvert: the voices of many men upraised in psalmody drew nearer and nearer through the town. It was ten at night; he had his court about him, priests, soldiers, and servants, to the number of twelve or fifteen; and now dreading the insolence of a conventicle below his very windows, he ordered forth his soldiers to report. But the psalm-singers were already at his door, fifty strong, led by the inspired Seguier, and breathing death. To their summons, the archpriest made answer like a stout old persecutor, and bade his garrison fire upon the mob. One Camisard (for, according to some, it was in this night's work that they came by the name) fell at this discharge: his comrades burst in the door with hatchets and a beam of wood, overran the lower story of the house, set free the prisoners, and finding one of them in the vine, a sort of Scavenger's Daughter of the place and period, redoubled in fury against Du Chayla, and sought by repeated assaults to carry the upper floors. But he, on his side, had given absolution to his men, and they bravely held the staircase. 'Children of God,' cried the prophet, 'hold your hands. Let us burn the house, with the priest and the satellites of Baal.' The fire caught readily. Out of an upper window Du Chayla and his men lowered themselves into the garden by means of knotted sheets; some escaped across the river under the bullets of the insurgents; but the archpriest himself fell, broke his thigh, and could only crawl into the hedge. What were his reflections as this second martyrdom drew near? A poor, brave, besotted, hateful man, who had done his duty resolutely according to his light both in the Cevennes and China. He found at least one telling word to say in his defence; for when the roof fell in and the upbursting flames discovered his retreat, and they came and dragged him to the public place of the town, raging and calling him damned--'If I be damned,' said he, 'why should you also damn yourselves?' Here was a good reason for the last; but in the course of his inspectorship he had given many stronger which all told in a contrary direction; and these he was now to hear. One by one, Seguier first, the Camisards drew near and stabbed him. 'This,' they said, 'is for my father broken on the wheel. This for my brother in the galleys. That for my mother or my sister imprisoned in your cursed convents.' Each gave his blow and his reason; and then all kneeled and sang psalms around the body till the dawn. With the dawn, still singing, they defiled away towards Frugeres, farther up the Tarn, to pursue the work of vengeance, leaving Du Chayla's prison-house in ruins, and his body pierced with two- and-fifty wounds upon the public place. 'Tis a wild night's work, with its accompaniment of psalms; and it seems as if a psalm must always have a sound of threatening in that town upon the Tarn. But the story does not end, even so far as concerns Pont de Montvert, with the departure of the Camisards. The career of Seguier was brief and bloody. Two more priests and a whole family at Ladeveze, from the father to the servants, fell by his hand or by his orders; and yet he was but a day or two at large, and restrained all the time by the presence of the soldiery. Taken at length by a famous soldier of fortune, Captain Poul, he appeared unmoved before his judges. 'Your name?' they asked. 'Pierre Seguier.' 'Why are you called Spirit?' 'Because the Spirit of the Lord is with me.' 'Your domicile?' 'Lately in the desert, and soon in heaven.' 'Have you no remorse for your crimes?' 'I have committed none. My soul is like a garden full of shelter and of fountains.' At Pont de Montvert, on the 12th of August, he had his right hand stricken from his body, and was burned alive. And his soul was like a garden? So perhaps was the soul of Du Chayla, the Christian martyr. And perhaps if you could read in my soul, or I could read in yours, our own composure might seem little less surprising. Du Chayla's house still stands, with a new roof, beside one of the bridges of the town; and if you are curious you may see the terrace-garden into which he dropped. IN THE VALLEY OF THE TARN A new road leads from Pont de Montvert to Florac by the valley of the Tarn; a smooth sandy ledge, it runs about half-way between the summit of the cliffs and the river in the bottom of the valley; and I went in and out, as I followed it, from bays of shadow into promontories of afternoon sun. This was a pass like that of Killiecrankie; a deep turning gully in the hills, with the Tarn making a wonderful hoarse uproar far below, and craggy summits standing in the sunshine high above. A thin fringe of ash- trees ran about the hill-tops, like ivy on a ruin; but on the lower slopes, and far up every glen, the Spanish chestnut-trees stood each four- square to heaven under its tented foliage. Some were planted, each on its own terrace no larger than a bed; some, trusting in their roots, found strength to grow and prosper and be straight and large upon the rapid slopes of the valley; others, where there was a margin to the river, stood marshalled in a line and mighty like cedars of Lebanon. Yet even where they grew most thickly they were not to be thought of as a wood, but as a herd of stalwart individuals; and the dome of each tree stood forth separate and large, and as it were a little hill, from among the domes of its companions. They gave forth a faint sweet perfume which pervaded the air of the afternoon; autumn had put tints of gold and tarnish in the green; and the sun so shone through and kindled the broad foliage, that each chestnut was relieved against another, not in shadow, but in light. A humble sketcher here laid down his pencil in despair. I wish I could convey a notion of the growth of these noble trees; of how they strike out boughs like the oak, and trail sprays of drooping foliage like the willow; of how they stand on upright fluted columns like the pillars of a church; or like the olive, from the most shattered bole can put out smooth and youthful shoots, and begin a new life upon the ruins of the old. Thus they partake of the nature of many different trees; and even their prickly top-knots, seen near at hand against the sky, have a certain palm-like air that impresses the imagination. But their individuality, although compounded of so many elements, is but the richer and the more original. And to look down upon a level filled with these knolls of foliage, or to see a clan of old unconquerable chestnuts cluster 'like herded elephants' upon the spur of a mountain, is to rise to higher thoughts of the powers that are in Nature. Between Modestine's laggard humour and the beauty of the scene, we made little progress all that afternoon; and at last finding the sun, although still far from setting, was already beginning to desert the narrow valley of the Tarn, I began to cast about for a place to camp in. This was not easy to find; the terraces were too narrow, and the ground, where it was unterraced, was usually too steep for a man to lie upon. I should have slipped all night, and awakened towards morning with my feet or my head in the river. After perhaps a mile, I saw, some sixty feet above the road, a little plateau large enough to hold my sack, and securely parapeted by the trunk of an aged and enormous chestnut. Thither, with infinite trouble, I goaded and kicked the reluctant Modestine, and there I hastened to unload her. There was only room for myself upon the plateau, and I had to go nearly as high again before I found so much as standing-room for the ass. It was on a heap of rolling stones, on an artificial terrace, certainly not five feet square in all. Here I tied her to a chestnut, and having given her corn and bread and made a pile of chestnut-leaves, of which I found her greedy, I descended once more to my own encampment. The position was unpleasantly exposed. One or two carts went by upon the road; and as long as daylight lasted I concealed myself, for all the world like a hunted Camisard, behind my fortification of vast chestnut trunk; for I was passionately afraid of discovery and the visit of jocular persons in the night. Moreover, I saw that I must be early awake; for these chestnut gardens had been the scene of industry no further gone than on the day before. The slope was strewn with lopped branches, and here and there a great package of leaves was propped against a trunk; for even the leaves are serviceable, and the peasants use them in winter by way of fodder for their animals. I picked a meal in fear and trembling, half lying down to hide myself from the road; and I daresay I was as much concerned as if I had been a scout from Joani's band above upon the Lozere, or from Salomon's across the Tarn, in the old times of psalm-singing and blood. Or, indeed, perhaps more; for the Camisards had a remarkable confidence in God; and a tale comes back into my memory of how the Count of Gevaudan, riding with a party of dragoons and a notary at his saddlebow to enforce the oath of fidelity in all the country hamlets, entered a valley in the woods, and found Cavalier and his men at dinner, gaily seated on the grass, and their hats crowned with box-tree garlands, while fifteen women washed their linen in the stream. Such was a field festival in 1703; at that date Antony Watteau would be painting similar subjects. This was a very different camp from that of the night before in the cool and silent pine-woods. It was warm and even stifling in the valley. The shrill song of frogs, like the tremolo note of a whistle with a pea in it, rang up from the river-side before the sun was down. In the growing dusk, faint rustlings began to run to and fro among the fallen leaves; from time to time a faint chirping or cheeping noise would fall upon my ear; and from time to time I thought I could see the movement of something swift and indistinct between the chestnuts. A profusion of large ants swarmed upon the ground; bats whisked by, and mosquitoes droned overhead. The long boughs with their bunches of leaves hung against the sky like garlands; and those immediately above and around me had somewhat the air of a trellis which should have been wrecked and half overthrown in a gale of wind. Sleep for a long time fled my eyelids; and just as I was beginning to feel quiet stealing over my limbs, and settling densely on my mind, a noise at my head startled me broad awake again, and, I will frankly confess it, brought my heart into my mouth. It was such a noise as a person would make scratching loudly with a finger-nail; it came from under the knapsack which served me for a pillow, and it was thrice repeated before I had time to sit up and turn about. Nothing was to be seen, nothing more was to be heard, but a few of these mysterious rustlings far and near, and the ceaseless accompaniment of the river and the frogs. I learned next day that the chestnut gardens are infested by rats; rustling, chirping, and scraping were probably all due to these; but the puzzle, for the moment, was insoluble, and I had to compose myself for sleep, as best I could, in wondering uncertainty about my neighbours. I was wakened in the grey of the morning (Monday, 30th September) by the sound of foot-steps not far off upon the stones, and opening my eyes, I beheld a peasant going by among the chestnuts by a footpath that I had not hitherto observed. He turned his head neither to the right nor to the left, and disappeared in a few strides among the foliage. Here was an escape! But it was plainly more than time to be moving. The peasantry were abroad; scarce less terrible to me in my nondescript position than the soldiers of Captain Poul to an undaunted Camisard. I fed Modestine with what haste I could; but as I was returning to my sack, I saw a man and a boy come down the hillside in a direction crossing mine. They unintelligibly hailed me, and I replied with inarticulate but cheerful sounds, and hurried forward to get into my gaiters. The pair, who seemed to be father and son, came slowly up to the plateau, and stood close beside me for some time in silence. The bed was open, and I saw with regret my revolver lying patently disclosed on the blue wool. At last, after they had looked me all over, and the silence had grown laughably embarrassing, the man demanded in what seemed unfriendly tones: 'You have slept here?' 'Yes,' said I. 'As you see.' 'Why?' he asked. 'My faith,' I answered lightly, 'I was tired.' He next inquired where I was going and what I had had for dinner; and then, without the least transition, 'C'est bien,' he added, 'come along.' And he and his son, without another word, turned off to the next chestnut- tree but one, which they set to pruning. The thing had passed of more simply than I hoped. He was a grave, respectable man; and his unfriendly voice did not imply that he thought he was speaking to a criminal, but merely to an inferior. I was soon on the road, nibbling a cake of chocolate and seriously occupied with a case of conscience. Was I to pay for my night's lodging? I had slept ill, the bed was full of fleas in the shape of ants, there was no water in the room, the very dawn had neglected to call me in the morning. I might have missed a train, had there been any in the neighbourhood to catch. Clearly, I was dissatisfied with my entertainment; and I decided I should not pay unless I met a beggar. The valley looked even lovelier by morning; and soon the road descended to the level of the river. Here, in a place where many straight and prosperous chestnuts stood together, making an aisle upon a swarded terrace, I made my morning toilette in the water of the Tarn. It was marvellously clear, thrillingly cool; the soap-suds disappeared as if by magic in the swift current, and the white boulders gave one a model for cleanliness. To wash in one of God's rivers in the open air seems to me a sort of cheerful solemnity or semi-pagan act of worship. To dabble among dishes in a bedroom may perhaps make clean the body; but the imagination takes no share in such a cleansing. I went on with a light and peaceful heart, and sang psalms to the spiritual ear as I advanced. Suddenly up came an old woman, who point-blank demanded alms. 'Good,' thought I; 'here comes the waiter with the bill.' And I paid for my night's lodging on the spot. Take it how you please, but this was the first and the last beggar that I met with during all my tour. A step or two farther I was overtaken by an old man in a brown nightcap, clear-eyed, weather-beaten, with a faint excited smile. A little girl followed him, driving two sheep and a goat; but she kept in our wake, while the old man walked beside me and talked about the morning and the valley. It was not much past six; and for healthy people who have slept enough, that is an hour of expansion and of open and trustful talk. 'Connaissez-vous le Seigneur?' he said at length. I asked him what Seigneur he meant; but he only repeated the question with more emphasis and a look in his eyes denoting hope and interest. 'Ah,' said I, pointing upwards, 'I understand you now. Yes, I know Him; He is the best of acquaintances.' The old man said he was delighted. 'Hold,' he added, striking his bosom; 'it makes me happy here.' There were a few who knew the Lord in these valleys, he went on to tell me; not many, but a few. 'Many are called,' he quoted, 'and few chosen.' 'My father,' said I, 'it is not easy to say who know the Lord; and it is none of our business. Protestants and Catholics, and even those who worship stones, may know Him and be known by Him; for He has made all.' I did not know I was so good a preacher. The old man assured me he thought as I did, and repeated his expressions of pleasure at meeting me. 'We are so few,' he said. 'They call us Moravians here; but down in the Department of Gard, where there are also a good number, they are called Derbists, after an English pastor.' I began to understand that I was figuring, in questionable taste, as a member of some sect to me unknown; but I was more pleased with the pleasure of my companion than embarrassed by my own equivocal position. Indeed, I can see no dishonesty in not avowing a difference; and especially in these high matters, where we have all a sufficient assurance that, whoever may be in the wrong, we ourselves are not completely in the right. The truth is much talked about; but this old man in a brown nightcap showed himself so simple, sweet, and friendly, that I am not unwilling to profess myself his convert. He was, as a matter of fact, a Plymouth Brother. Of what that involves in the way of doctrine I have no idea nor the time to inform myself; but I know right well that we are all embarked upon a troublesome world, the children of one Father, striving in many essential points to do and to become the same. And although it was somewhat in a mistake that he shook hands with me so often and showed himself so ready to receive my words, that was a mistake of the truth-finding sort. For charity begins blindfold; and only through a series of similar misapprehensions rises at length into a settled principle of love and patience, and a firm belief in all our fellow-men. If I deceived this good old man, in the like manner I would willingly go on to deceive others. And if ever at length, out of our separate and sad ways, we should all come together into one common house, I have a hope, to which I cling dearly, that my mountain Plymouth Brother will hasten to shake hands with me again. Thus, talking like Christian and Faithful by the way, he and I came down upon a hamlet by the Tarn. It was but a humble place, called La Vernede, with less than a dozen houses, and a Protestant chapel on a knoll. Here he dwelt; and here, at the inn, I ordered my breakfast. The inn was kept by an agreeable young man, a stone-breaker on the road, and his sister, a pretty and engaging girl. The village schoolmaster dropped in to speak with the stranger. And these were all Protestants--a fact which pleased me more than I should have expected; and, what pleased me still more, they seemed all upright and simple people. The Plymouth Brother hung round me with a sort of yearning interest, and returned at least thrice to make sure I was enjoying my meal. His behaviour touched me deeply at the time, and even now moves me in recollection. He feared to intrude, but he would not willingly forego one moment of my society; and he seemed never weary of shaking me by the hand. When all the rest had drifted off to their day's work, I sat for near half an hour with the young mistress of the house, who talked pleasantly over her seam of the chestnut harvest, and the beauties of the Tarn, and old family affections, broken up when young folk go from home, yet still subsisting. Hers, I am sure, was a sweet nature, with a country plainness and much delicacy underneath; and he who takes her to his heart will doubtless be a fortunate young man. The valley below La Vernede pleased me more and more as I went forward. Now the hills approached from either hand, naked and crumbling, and walled in the river between cliffs; and now the valley widened and became green. The road led me past the old castle of Miral on a steep; past a battlemented monastery, long since broken up and turned into a church and parsonage; and past a cluster of black roofs, the village of Cocures, sitting among vineyards, and meadows, and orchards thick with red apples, and where, along the highway, they were knocking down walnuts from the roadside trees, and gathering them in sacks and baskets. The hills, however much the vale might open, were still tall and bare, with cliffy battlements and here and there a pointed summit; and the Tarn still rattled through the stones with a mountain noise. I had been led, by bagmen of a picturesque turn of mind, to expect a horrific country after the heart of Byron; but to my Scottish eyes it seemed smiling and plentiful, as the weather still gave an impression of high summer to my Scottish body; although the chestnuts were already picked out by the autumn, and the poplars, that here began to mingle with them, had turned into pale gold against the approach of winter. There was something in this landscape, smiling although wild, that explained to me the spirit of the Southern Covenanters. Those who took to the hills for conscience' sake in Scotland had all gloomy and bedevilled thoughts; for once that they received God's comfort they would be twice engaged with Satan; but the Camisards had only bright and supporting visions. They dealt much more in blood, both given and taken; yet I find no obsession of the Evil One in their records. With a light conscience, they pursued their life in these rough times and circumstances. The soul of Seguier, let us not forget, was like a garden. They knew they were on God's side, with a knowledge that has no parallel among the Scots; for the Scots, although they might be certain of the cause, could never rest confident of the person. 'We flew,' says one old Camisard, 'when we heard the sound of psalm-singing, we flew as if with wings. We felt within us an animating ardour, a transporting desire. The feeling cannot be expressed in words. It is a thing that must have been experienced to be understood. However weary we might be, we thought no more of our weariness, and grew light so soon as the psalms fell upon our ears.' The valley of the Tarn and the people whom I met at La Vernede not only explain to me this passage, but the twenty years of suffering which those, who were so stiff and so bloody when once they betook themselves to war, endured with the meekness of children and the constancy of saints and peasants. FLORAC On a branch of the Tarn stands Florac, the seat of a sub-prefecture, with an old castle, an alley of planes, many quaint street-corners, and a live fountain welling from the hill. It is notable, besides, for handsome women, and as one of the two capitals, Alais being the other, of the country of the Camisards. The landlord of the inn took me, after I had eaten, to an adjoining cafe, where I, or rather my journey, became the topic of the afternoon. Every one had some suggestion for my guidance; and the sub-prefectorial map was fetched from the sub-prefecture itself, and much thumbed among coffee- cups and glasses of liqueur. Most of these kind advisers were Protestant, though I observed that Protestant and Catholic intermingled in a very easy manner; and it surprised me to see what a lively memory still subsisted of the religious war. Among the hills of the south-west, by Mauchline, Cumnock, or Carsphairn, in isolated farms or in the manse, serious Presbyterian people still recall the days of the great persecution, and the graves of local martyrs are still piously regarded. But in towns and among the so-called better classes, I fear that these old doings have become an idle tale. If you met a mixed company in the King's Arms at Wigton, it is not likely that the talk would run on Covenanters. Nay, at Muirkirk of Glenluce, I found the beadle's wife had not so much as heard of Prophet Peden. But these Cevenols were proud of their ancestors in quite another sense; the war was their chosen topic; its exploits were their own patent of nobility; and where a man or a race has had but one adventure, and that heroic, we must expect and pardon some prolixity of reference. They told me the country was still full of legends hitherto uncollected; I heard from them about Cavalier's descendants--not direct descendants, be it understood, but only cousins or nephews--who were still prosperous people in the scene of the boy-general's exploits; and one farmer had seen the bones of old combatants dug up into the air of an afternoon in the nineteenth century, in a field where the ancestors had fought, and the great-grandchildren were peaceably ditching. Later in the day one of the Protestant pastors was so good as to visit me: a young man, intelligent and polite, with whom I passed an hour or two in talk. Florac, he told me, is part Protestant, part Catholic; and the difference in religion is usually doubled by a difference in politics. You may judge of my surprise, coming as I did from such a babbling purgatorial Poland of a place as Monastier, when I learned that the population lived together on very quiet terms; and there was even an exchange of hospitalities between households thus doubly separated. Black Camisard and White Camisard, militiaman and Miquelet and dragoon, Protestant prophet and Catholic cadet of the White Cross, they had all been sabring and shooting, burning, pillaging, and murdering, their hearts hot with indignant passion; and here, after a hundred and seventy years, Protestant is still Protestant, Catholic still Catholic, in mutual toleration and mild amity of life. But the race of man, like that indomitable nature whence it sprang, has medicating virtues of its own; the years and seasons bring various harvests; the sun returns after the rain; and mankind outlives secular animosities, as a single man awakens from the passions of a day. We judge our ancestors from a more divine position; and the dust being a little laid with several centuries, we can see both sides adorned with human virtues and fighting with a show of right. I have never thought it easy to be just, and find it daily even harder than I thought. I own I met these Protestants with a delight and a sense of coming home. I was accustomed to speak their language, in another and deeper sense of the word than that which distinguishes between French and English; for the true Babel is a divergence upon morals. And hence I could hold more free communication with the Protestants, and judge them more justly, than the Catholics. Father Apollinaris may pair off with my mountain Plymouth Brother as two guileless and devout old men; yet I ask myself if I had as ready a feeling for the virtues of the Trappist; or, had I been a Catholic, if I should have felt so warmly to the dissenter of La Vernede. With the first I was on terms of mere forbearance; but with the other, although only on a misunderstanding and by keeping on selected points, it was still possible to hold converse and exchange some honest thoughts. In this world of imperfection we gladly welcome even partial intimacies. And if we find but one to whom we can speak out of our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity without dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or God. IN THE VALLEY OF THE MIMENTE On Tuesday, 1st October, we left Florac late in the afternoon, a tired donkey and tired donkey-driver. A little way up the Tarnon, a covered bridge of wood introduced us into the valley of the Mimente. Steep rocky red mountains overhung the stream; great oaks and chestnuts grew upon the slopes or in stony terraces; here and there was a red field of millet or a few apple-trees studded with red apples; and the road passed hard by two black hamlets, one with an old castle atop to please the heart of the tourist. It was difficult here again to find a spot fit for my encampment. Even under the oaks and chestnuts the ground had not only a very rapid slope, but was heaped with loose stones; and where there was no timber the hills descended to the stream in a red precipice tufted with heather. The sun had left the highest peak in front of me, and the valley was full of the lowing sound of herdsmen's horns as they recalled the flocks into the stable, when I spied a bight of meadow some way below the roadway in an angle of the river. Thither I descended, and, tying Modestine provisionally to a tree, proceeded to investigate the neighbourhood. A grey pearly evening shadow filled the glen; objects at a little distance grew indistinct and melted bafflingly into each other; and the darkness was rising steadily like an exhalation. I approached a great oak which grew in the meadow, hard by the river's brink; when to my disgust the voices of children fell upon my ear, and I beheld a house round the angle on the other bank. I had half a mind to pack and be gone again, but the growing darkness moved me to remain. I had only to make no noise until the night was fairly come, and trust to the dawn to call me early in the morning. But it was hard to be annoyed by neighbours in such a great hotel. A hollow underneath the oak was my bed. Before I had fed Modestine and arranged my sack, three stars were already brightly shining, and the others were beginning dimly to appear. I slipped down to the river, which looked very black among its rocks, to fill my can; and dined with a good appetite in the dark, for I scrupled to light a lantern while so near a house. The moon, which I had seen a pallid crescent all afternoon, faintly illuminated the summit of the hills, but not a ray fell into the bottom of the glen where I was lying. The oak rose before me like a pillar of darkness; and overhead the heartsome stars were set in the face of the night. No one knows the stars who has not slept, as the French happily put it, a la belle etoile. He may know all their names and distances and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone concerns mankind,--their serene and gladsome influence on the mind. The greater part of poetry is about the stars; and very justly, for they are themselves the most classical of poets. These same far-away worlds, sprinkled like tapers or shaken together like a diamond dust upon the sky, had looked not otherwise to Roland or Cavalier, when, in the words of the latter, they had 'no other tent but the sky, and no other bed than my mother earth.' All night a strong wind blew up the valley, and the acorns fell pattering over me from the oak. Yet, on this first night of October, the air was as mild as May, and I slept with the fur thrown back. I was much disturbed by the barking of a dog, an animal that I fear more than any wolf. A dog is vastly braver, and is besides supported by the sense of duty. If you kill a wolf, you meet with encouragement and praise; but if you kill a dog, the sacred rights of property and the domestic affections come clamouring round you for redress. At the end of a fagging day, the sharp cruel note of a dog's bark is in itself a keen annoyance; and to a tramp like myself, he represents the sedentary and respectable world in its most hostile form. There is something of the clergyman or the lawyer about this engaging animal; and if he were not amenable to stones, the boldest man would shrink from travelling afoot. I respect dogs much in the domestic circle; but on the highway, or sleeping afield, I both detest and fear them. I was wakened next morning (Wednesday, October 2nd) by the same dog--for I knew his bark--making a charge down the bank, and then, seeing me sit up, retreating again with great alacrity. The stars were not yet quite extinguished. The heaven was of that enchanting mild grey-blue of the early morn. A still clear light began to fall, and the trees on the hillside were outlined sharply against the sky. The wind had veered more to the north, and no longer reached me in the glen; but as I was going on with my preparations, it drove a white cloud very swiftly over the hill- top; and looking up, I was surprised to see the cloud dyed with gold. In these high regions of the air, the sun was already shining as at noon. If only the clouds travelled high enough, we should see the same thing all night long. For it is always daylight in the fields of space. As I began to go up the valley, a draught of wind came down it out of the seat of the sunrise, although the clouds continued to run overhead in an almost contrary direction. A few steps farther, and I saw a whole hillside gilded with the sun; and still a little beyond, between two peaks, a centre of dazzling brilliancy appeared floating in the sky, and I was once more face to face with the big bonfire that occupies the kernel of our system. I met but one human being that forenoon, a dark military-looking wayfarer, who carried a game-bag on a baldric; but he made a remark that seems worthy of record. For when I asked him if he were Protestant or Catholic-- 'Oh,' said he, 'I make no shame of my religion. I am a Catholic.' He made no shame of it! The phrase is a piece of natural statistics; for it is the language of one in a minority. I thought with a smile of Bavile and his dragoons, and how you may ride rough-shod over a religion for a century, and leave it only the more lively for the friction. Ireland is still Catholic; the Cevennes still Protestant. It is not a basketful of law-papers, nor the hoofs and pistol-butts of a regiment of horse, that can change one tittle of a ploughman's thoughts. Outdoor rustic people have not many ideas, but such as they have are hardy plants, and thrive flourishingly in persecution. One who has grown a long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and under the stars at night, a frequenter of hills and forests, an old honest countryman, has, in the end, a sense of communion with the powers of the universe, and amicable relations towards his God. Like my mountain Plymouth Brother, he knows the Lord. His religion does not repose upon a choice of logic; it is the poetry of the man's experience, the philosophy of the history of his life. God, like a great power, like a great shining sun, has appeared to this simple fellow in the course of years, and become the ground and essence of his least reflections; and you may change creeds and dogmas by authority, or proclaim a new religion with the sound of trumpets, if you will; but here is a man who has his own thoughts, and will stubbornly adhere to them in good and evil. He is a Catholic, a Protestant, or a Plymouth Brother, in the same indefeasible sense that a man is not a woman, or a woman not a man. For he could not vary from his faith, unless he could eradicate all memory of the past, and, in a strict and not a conventional meaning, change his mind. THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY I was now drawing near to Cassagnas, a cluster of black roofs upon the hillside, in this wild valley, among chestnut gardens, and looked upon in the clear air by many rocky peaks. The road along the Mimente is yet new, nor have the mountaineers recovered their surprise when the first cart arrived at Cassagnas. But although it lay thus apart from the current of men's business, this hamlet had already made a figure in the history of France. Hard by, in caverns of the mountain, was one of the five arsenals of the Camisards; where they laid up clothes and corn and arms against necessity, forged bayonets and sabres, and made themselves gunpowder with willow charcoal and saltpetre boiled in kettles. To the same caves, amid this multifarious industry, the sick and wounded were brought up to heal; and there they were visited by the two surgeons, Chabrier and Tavan, and secretly nursed by women of the neighbourhood. Of the five legions into which the Camisards were divided, it was the oldest and the most obscure that had its magazines by Cassagnas. This was the band of Spirit Seguier; men who had joined their voices with his in the 68th Psalm as they marched down by night on the archpriest of the Cevennes. Seguier, promoted to heaven, was succeeded by Salomon Couderc, whom Cavalier treats in his memoirs as chaplain-general to the whole army of the Camisards. He was a prophet; a great reader of the heart, who admitted people to the sacrament or refused them, by 'intensively viewing every man' between the eyes; and had the most of the Scriptures off by rote. And this was surely happy; since in a surprise in August 1703, he lost his mule, his portfolios, and his Bible. It is only strange that they were not surprised more often and more effectually; for this legion of Cassagnas was truly patriarchal in its theory of war, and camped without sentries, leaving that duty to the angels of the God for whom they fought. This is a token, not only of their faith, but of the trackless country where they harboured. M. de Caladon, taking a stroll one fine day, walked without warning into their midst, as he might have walked into 'a flock of sheep in a plain,' and found some asleep and some awake and psalm-singing. A traitor had need of no recommendation to insinuate himself among their ranks, beyond 'his faculty of singing psalms'; and even the prophet Salomon 'took him into a particular friendship.' Thus, among their intricate hills, the rustic troop subsisted; and history can attribute few exploits to them but sacraments and ecstasies. People of this tough and simple stock will not, as I have just been saying, prove variable in religion; nor will they get nearer to apostasy than a mere external conformity like that of Naaman in the house of Rimmon. When Louis XVI., in the words of the edict, 'convinced by the uselessness of a century of persecutions, and rather from necessity than sympathy,' granted at last a royal grace of toleration, Cassagnas was still Protestant; and to a man, it is so to this day. There is, indeed, one family that is not Protestant, but neither is it Catholic. It is that of a Catholic cure in revolt, who has taken to his bosom a schoolmistress. And his conduct, it is worth noting, is disapproved by the Protestant villagers. 'It is a bad idea for a man,' said one, 'to go back from his engagements.' The villagers whom I saw seemed intelligent after a countrified fashion, and were all plain and dignified in manner. As a Protestant myself, I was well looked upon, and my acquaintance with history gained me further respect. For we had something not unlike a religious controversy at table, a gendarme and a merchant with whom I dined being both strangers to the place, and Catholics. The young men of the house stood round and supported me; and the whole discussion was tolerantly conducted, and surprised a man brought up among the infinitesimal and contentious differences of Scotland. The merchant, indeed, grew a little warm, and was far less pleased than some others with my historical acquirements. But the gendarme was mighty easy over it all. 'It's a bad idea for a man to change,' said he; and the remark was generally applauded. That was not the opinion of the priest and soldier at Our Lady of the Snows. But this is a different race; and perhaps the same great-heartedness that upheld them to resist, now enables them to differ in a kind spirit. For courage respects courage; but where a faith has been trodden out, we may look for a mean and narrow population. The true work of Bruce and Wallace was the union of the nations; not that they should stand apart a while longer, skirmishing upon their borders; but that, when the time came, they might unite with self-respect. The merchant was much interested in my journey, and thought it dangerous to sleep afield. 'There are the wolves,' said he; 'and then it is known you are an Englishman. The English have always long purses, and it might very well enter into some one's head to deal you an ill blow some night.' I told him I was not much afraid of such accidents; and at any rate judged it unwise to dwell upon alarms or consider small perils in the arrangement of life. Life itself, I submitted, was a far too risky business as a whole to make each additional particular of danger worth regard. 'Something,' said I, 'might burst in your inside any day of the week, and there would be an end of you, if you were locked into your room with three turns of the key.' 'Cependant,' said he, 'coucher dehors!' 'God,' said I, 'is everywhere.' 'Cependant, coucher dehors!' he repeated, and his voice was eloquent of terror. He was the only person, in all my voyage, who saw anything hardy in so simple a proceeding; although many considered it superfluous. Only one, on the other hand, professed much delight in the idea; and that was my Plymouth Brother, who cried out, when I told him I sometimes preferred sleeping under the stars to a close and noisy ale-house, 'Now I see that you know the Lord!' The merchant asked me for one of my cards as I was leaving, for he said I should be something to talk of in the future, and desired me to make a note of his request and reason; a desire with which I have thus complied. A little after two I struck across the Mimente, and took a rugged path southward up a hillside covered with loose stones and tufts of heather. At the top, as is the habit of the country, the path disappeared; and I left my she-ass munching heather, and went forward alone to seek a road. I was now on the separation of two vast water-sheds; behind me all the streams were bound for the Garonne and the Western Ocean; before me was the basin of the Rhone. Hence, as from the Lozere, you can see in clear weather the shining of the Gulf of Lyons; and perhaps from here the soldiers of Salomon may have watched for the topsails of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, and the long-promised aid from England. You may take this ridge as lying in the heart of the country of the Camisards; four of the five legions camped all round it and almost within view--Salomon and Joani to the north, Castanet and Roland to the south; and when Julien had finished his famous work, the devastation of the High Cevennes, which lasted all through October and November 1703, and during which four hundred and sixty villages and hamlets were, with fire and pickaxe, utterly subverted, a man standing on this eminence would have looked forth upon a silent, smokeless, and dispeopled land. Time and man's activity have now repaired these ruins; Cassagnas is once more roofed and sending up domestic smoke; and in the chestnut gardens, in low and leafy corners, many a prosperous farmer returns, when the day's work is done, to his children and bright hearth. And still it was perhaps the wildest view of all my journey. Peak upon peak, chain upon chain of hills ran surging southward, channelled and sculptured by the winter streams, feathered from head to foot with chestnuts, and here and there breaking out into a coronal of cliffs. The sun, which was still far from setting, sent a drift of misty gold across the hill-tops, but the valleys were already plunged in a profound and quiet shadow. A very old shepherd, hobbling on a pair of sticks, and wearing a black cap of liberty, as if in honour of his nearness to the grave, directed me to the road for St. Germain de Calberte. There was something solemn in the isolation of this infirm and ancient creature. Where he dwelt, how he got upon this high ridge, or how he proposed to get down again, were more than I could fancy. Not far off upon my right was the famous Plan de Font Morte, where Poul with his Armenian sabre slashed down the Camisards of Seguier. This, methought, might be some Rip van Winkle of the war, who had lost his comrades, fleeing before Poul, and wandered ever since upon the mountains. It might be news to him that Cavalier had surrendered, or Roland had fallen fighting with his back against an olive. And while I was thus working on my fancy, I heard him hailing in broken tones, and saw him waving me to come back with one of his two sticks. I had already got some way past him; but, leaving Modestine once more, retraced my steps. Alas, it was a very commonplace affair. The old gentleman had forgot to ask the pedlar what he sold, and wished to remedy this neglect. I told him sternly, 'Nothing.' 'Nothing?' cried he. I repeated 'Nothing,' and made off. It's odd to think of, but perhaps I thus became as inexplicable to the old man as he had been to me. The road lay under chestnuts, and though I saw a hamlet or two below me in the vale, and many lone houses of the chestnut farmers, it was a very solitary march all afternoon; and the evening began early underneath the trees. But I heard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old, endless ballad not far off. It seemed to be about love and a bel amoureux, her handsome sweetheart; and I wished I could have taken up the strain and answered her, as I went on upon my invisible woodland way, weaving, like Pippa in the poem, my own thoughts with hers. What could I have told her? Little enough; and yet all the heart requires. How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden; and 'hope, which comes to all,' outwears the accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond the grave and death. Easy to say: yea, but also, by God's mercy, both easy and grateful to believe! We struck at last into a wide white high-road carpeted with noiseless dust. The night had come; the moon had been shining for a long while upon the opposite mountain; when on turning a corner my donkey and I issued ourselves into her light. I had emptied out my brandy at Florac, for I could bear the stuff no longer, and replaced it with some generous and scented Volnay; and now I drank to the moon's sacred majesty upon the road. It was but a couple of mouthfuls; yet I became thenceforth unconscious of my limbs, and my blood flowed with luxury. Even Modestine was inspired by this purified nocturnal sunshine, and bestirred her little hoofs as to a livelier measure. The road wound and descended swiftly among masses of chestnuts. Hot dust rose from our feet and flowed away. Our two shadows--mine deformed with the knapsack, hers comically bestridden by the pack--now lay before us clearly outlined on the road, and now, as we turned a corner, went off into the ghostly distance, and sailed along the mountain like clouds. From time to time a warm wind rustled down the valley, and set all the chestnuts dangling their bunches of foliage and fruit; the ear was filled with whispering music, and the shadows danced in tune. And next moment the breeze had gone by, and in all the valley nothing moved except our travelling feet. On the opposite slope, the monstrous ribs and gullies of the mountain were faintly designed in the moonshine; and high overhead, in some lone house, there burned one lighted window, one square spark of red in the huge field of sad nocturnal colouring. At a certain point, as I went downward, turning many acute angles, the moon disappeared behind the hill; and I pursued my way in great darkness, until another turning shot me without preparation into St. Germain de Calberte. The place was asleep and silent, and buried in opaque night. Only from a single open door, some lamplight escaped upon the road to show me that I was come among men's habitations. The two last gossips of the evening, still talking by a garden wall, directed me to the inn. The landlady was getting her chicks to bed; the fire was already out, and had, not without grumbling, to be rekindled; half an hour later, and I must have gone supperless to roost. THE LAST DAY When I awoke (Thursday, 2nd October), and, hearing a great flourishing of cocks and chuckling of contented hens, betook me to the window of the clean and comfortable room where I had slept the night, I looked forth on a sunshiny morning in a deep vale of chestnut gardens. It was still early, and the cockcrows, and the slanting lights, and the long shadows encouraged me to be out and look round me. St. Germain de Calberte is a great parish nine leagues round about. At the period of the wars, and immediately before the devastation, it was inhabited by two hundred and seventy-five families, of which only nine were Catholic; and it took the cure seventeen September days to go from house to house on horseback for a census. But the place itself, although capital of a canton, is scarce larger than a hamlet. It lies terraced across a steep slope in the midst of mighty chestnuts. The Protestant chapel stands below upon a shoulder; in the midst of the town is the quaint old Catholic church. It was here that poor Du Chayla, the Christian martyr, kept his library and held a court of missionaries; here he had built his tomb, thinking to lie among a grateful population whom he had redeemed from error; and hither on the morrow of his death they brought the body, pierced with two- and-fifty wounds, to be interred. Clad in his priestly robes, he was laid out in state in the church. The cure, taking his text from Second Samuel, twentieth chapter and twelfth verse, 'And Amasa wallowed in his blood in the highway,' preached a rousing sermon, and exhorted his brethren to die each at his post, like their unhappy and illustrious superior. In the midst of this eloquence there came a breeze that Spirit Seguier was near at hand; and behold! all the assembly took to their horses' heels, some east, some west, and the cure himself as far as Alais. Strange was the position of this little Catholic metropolis, a thimbleful of Rome, in such a wild and contrary neighbourhood. On the one hand, the legion of Salomon overlooked it from Cassagnas; on the other, it was cut off from assistance by the legion of Roland at Mialet. The cure, Louvrelenil, although he took a panic at the arch-priest's funeral, and so hurriedly decamped to Alais, stood well by his isolated pulpit, and thence uttered fulminations against the crimes of the Protestants. Salomon besieged the village for an hour and a half, but was beaten back. The militiamen, on guard before the cure's door, could be heard, in the black hours, singing Protestant psalms and holding friendly talk with the insurgents. And in the morning, although not a shot had been fired, there would not be a round of powder in their flasks. Where was it gone? All handed over to the Camisards for a consideration. Untrusty guardians for an isolated priest! That these continual stirs were once busy in St. Germain de Calberte, the imagination with difficulty receives; all is now so quiet, the pulse of human life now beats so low and still in this hamlet of the mountains. Boys followed me a great way off, like a timid sort of lion-hunters; and people turned round to have a second look, or came out of their houses, as I went by. My passage was the first event, you would have fancied, since the Camisards. There was nothing rude or forward in this observation; it was but a pleased and wondering scrutiny, like that of oxen or the human infant; yet it wearied my spirits, and soon drove me from the street. I took refuge on the terraces, which are here greenly carpeted with sward, and tried to imitate with a pencil the inimitable attitudes of the chestnuts as they bear up their canopy of leaves. Ever and again a little wind went by, and the nuts dropped all around me, with a light and dull sound, upon the sward. The noise was as of a thin fall of great hailstones; but there went with it a cheerful human sentiment of an approaching harvest and farmers rejoicing in their gains. Looking up, I could see the brown nut peering through the husk, which was already gaping; and between the stems the eye embraced an amphitheatre of hill, sunlit and green with leaves. I have not often enjoyed a place more deeply. I moved in an atmosphere of pleasure, and felt light and quiet and content. But perhaps it was not the place alone that so disposed my spirit. Perhaps some one was thinking of me in another country; or perhaps some thought of my own had come and gone unnoticed, and yet done me good. For some thoughts, which sure would be the most beautiful, vanish before we can rightly scan their features; as though a god, travelling by our green highways, should but ope the door, give one smiling look into the house, and go again for ever. Was it Apollo, or Mercury, or Love with folded wings? Who shall say? But we go the lighter about our business, and feel peace and pleasure in our hearts. I dined with a pair of Catholics. They agreed in the condemnation of a young man, a Catholic, who had married a Protestant girl and gone over to the religion of his wife. A Protestant born they could understand and respect; indeed, they seemed to be of the mind of an old Catholic woman, who told me that same day there was no difference between the two sects, save that 'wrong was more wrong for the Catholic,' who had more light and guidance; but this of a man's desertion filled them with contempt. 'It is a bad idea for a man to change,' said one. It may have been accidental, but you see how this phrase pursued me; and for myself, I believe it is the current philosophy in these parts. I have some difficulty in imagining a better. It's not only a great flight of confidence for a man to change his creed and go out of his family for heaven's sake; but the odds are--nay, and the hope is--that, with all this great transition in the eyes of man, he has not changed himself a hairbreadth to the eyes of God. Honour to those who do so, for the wrench is sore. But it argues something narrow, whether of strength or weakness, whether of the prophet or the fool, in those who can take a sufficient interest in such infinitesimal and human operations, or who can quit a friendship for a doubtful process of the mind. And I think I should not leave my old creed for another, changing only words for other words; but by some brave reading, embrace it in spirit and truth, and find wrong as wrong for me as for the best of other communions. The phylloxera was in the neighbourhood; and instead of wine we drank at dinner a more economical juice of the grape--La Parisienne, they call it. It is made by putting the fruit whole into a cask with water; one by one the berries ferment and burst; what is drunk during the day is supplied at night in water: so, with ever another pitcher from the well, and ever another grape exploding and giving out its strength, one cask of Parisienne may last a family till spring. It is, as the reader will anticipate, a feeble beverage, but very pleasant to the taste. What with dinner and coffee, it was long past three before I left St. Germain de Calberte. I went down beside the Gardon of Mialet, a great glaring watercourse devoid of water, and through St. Etienne de Vallee Francaise, or Val Francesque, as they used to call it; and towards evening began to ascend the hill of St. Pierre. It was a long and steep ascent. Behind me an empty carriage returning to St. Jean du Gard kept hard upon my tracks, and near the summit overtook me. The driver, like the rest of the world, was sure I was a pedlar; but, unlike others, he was sure of what I had to sell. He had noticed the blue wool which hung out of my pack at either end; and from this he had decided, beyond my power to alter his decision, that I dealt in blue-wool collars, such as decorate the neck of the French draught-horse. I had hurried to the topmost powers of Modestine, for I dearly desired to see the view upon the other side before the day had faded. But it was night when I reached the summit; the moon was riding high and clear; and only a few grey streaks of twilight lingered in the west. A yawning valley, gulfed in blackness, lay like a hole in created nature at my feet; but the outline of the hills was sharp against the sky. There was Mount Aigoal, the stronghold of Castanet. And Castanet, not only as an active undertaking leader, deserves some mention among Camisards; for there is a spray of rose among his laurel; and he showed how, even in a public tragedy, love will have its way. In the high tide of war he married, in his mountain citadel, a young and pretty lass called Mariette. There were great rejoicings; and the bridegroom released five- and-twenty prisoners in honour of the glad event. Seven months afterwards, Mariette, the Princess of the Cevennes, as they called her in derision, fell into the hands of the authorities, where it was like to have gone hard with her. But Castanet was a man of execution, and loved his wife. He fell on Valleraugue, and got a lady there for a hostage; and for the first and last time in that war there was an exchange of prisoners. Their daughter, pledge of some starry night upon Mount Aigoal, has left descendants to this day. Modestine and I--it was our last meal together--had a snack upon the top of St. Pierre, I on a heap of stones, she standing by me in the moonlight and decorously eating bread out of my hand. The poor brute would eat more heartily in this manner; for she had a sort of affection for me, which I was soon to betray. It was a long descent upon St. Jean du Gard, and we met no one but a carter, visible afar off by the glint of the moon on his extinguished lantern. Before ten o'clock we had got in and were at supper; fifteen miles and a stiff hill in little beyond six hours! FAREWELL, MODESTINE! On examination, on the morning of October 3rd, Modestine was pronounced unfit for travel. She would need at least two days' repose, according to the ostler; but I was now eager to reach Alais for my letters; and, being in a civilised country of stage-coaches, I determined to sell my lady friend and be off by the diligence that afternoon. Our yesterday's march, with the testimony of the driver who had pursued us up the long hill of St. Pierre, spread a favourable notion of my donkey's capabilities. Intending purchasers were aware of an unrivalled opportunity. Before ten I had an offer of twenty-five francs; and before noon, after a desperate engagement, I sold her, saddle and all, for five- and-thirty. The pecuniary gain is not obvious, but I had bought freedom into the bargain. St Jean du Gard is a large place, and largely Protestant. The maire, a Protestant, asked me to help him in a small matter which is itself characteristic of the country. The young women of the Cevennes profit by the common religion and the difference of the language to go largely as governesses into England; and here was one, a native of Mialet, struggling with English circulars from two different agencies in London. I gave what help I could; and volunteered some advice, which struck me as being excellent. One thing more I note. The phylloxera has ravaged the vineyards in this neighbourhood; and in the early morning, under some chestnuts by the river, I found a party of men working with a cider-press. I could not at first make out what they were after, and asked one fellow to explain. 'Making cider,' he said. 'Oui, c'est comme ca. Comme dans le nord!' There was a ring of sarcasm in his voice: the country was going to the devil. It was not until I was fairly seated by the driver, and rattling through a rocky valley with dwarf olives, that I became aware of my bereavement. I had lost Modestine. Up to that moment I had thought I hated her; but now she was gone, 'And oh! The difference to me!' For twelve days we had been fast companions; we had travelled upwards of a hundred and twenty miles, crossed several respectable ridges, and jogged along with our six legs by many a rocky and many a boggy by-road. After the first day, although sometimes I was hurt and distant in manner, I still kept my patience; and as for her, poor soul! she had come to regard me as a god. She loved to eat out of my hand. She was patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably small. Her faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her own. Farewell, and if for ever-- Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with a stage-driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to yield to my emotion. 
333	----	Transcribed from the 1906 Edward Arnold edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON BY WALTER RALEIGH PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD AUTHOR OF 'STYLE,' 'MILTON,' 'WORDSWORTH,' ETC. _FOURTH IMPRESSION_ LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET, W. 1906 THE GREATER PART OF THIS ESSAY WAS GIVEN AS A LECTURE AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION ON THE 17TH OF MAY 1895 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON When a popular writer dies, the question it has become the fashion with a nervous generation to ask is the question, 'Will he live?' There was no idler question, none more hopelessly impossible and unprofitable to answer. It is one of the many vanities of criticism to promise immortality to the authors that it praises, to patronise a writer with the assurance that our great-grandchildren, whose time and tastes are thus frivolously mortgaged, will read his works with delight. But 'there is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all things: our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors.' Let us make sure that our sons will care for Homer before we pledge a more distant generation to a newer cult. Nevertheless, without handling the prickly question of literary immortality, it is easy to recognise that the literary reputation of Robert Louis Stevenson is made of good stuff. His fame has spread, as lasting fame is wont to do, from the few to the many. Fifteen years ago his essays and fanciful books of travel were treasured by a small and discerning company of admirers; long before he chanced to fell the British public with _Treasure Island_ and _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ he had shown himself a delicate marksman. And although large editions are nothing, standard editions, richly furnished and complete, are worthy of remark. Stevenson is one of the very few authors in our literary history who have been honoured during their lifetime by the appearance of such an edition; the best of his public, it would seem, do not only wish to read his works, but to possess them, and all of them, at the cost of many pounds, in library form. It would be easy to mention more voluminous and more popular authors than Stevenson whose publishers could not find five subscribers for an adventure like this. He has made a brave beginning in that race against Time which all must lose. It is not in the least necessary, after all, to fortify ourselves with the presumed consent of our poor descendants, who may have a world of other business to attend to, in order to establish Stevenson in the position of a great writer. Let us leave that foolish trick to the politicians, who never claim that they are right--merely that they will win at the next elections. Literary criticism has standards other than the suffrage; it is possible enough to say something of the literary quality of a work that appeared yesterday. Stevenson himself was singularly free from the vanity of fame; 'the best artist,' he says truly, 'is not the man who fixes his eye on posterity, but the one who loves the practice of his art.' He loved, if ever man did, the practice of his art; and those who find meat and drink in the delight of watching and appreciating the skilful practice of the literary art, will abandon themselves to the enjoyment of his masterstrokes without teasing their unborn and possibly illiterate posterity to answer solemn questions. Will a book live? Will a cricket match live? Perhaps not, and yet both be fine achievements. It is not easy to estimate the loss to letters by his early death. In the dedication of _Prince Otto_ he says, 'Well, we will not give in that we are finally beaten. . . . I still mean to get my health again; I still purpose, by hook or crook, this book or the next, to launch a masterpiece.' It would be a churlish or a very dainty critic who should deny that he has launched masterpieces, but whether he ever launched his masterpiece is an open question. Of the story that he was writing just before his death he is reported to have said that 'the goodness of it frightened him.' A goodness that frightened him will surely not be visible, like Banquo's ghost, to only one pair of eyes. His greatest was perhaps yet to come. Had Dryden died at his age, we should have had none of the great satires; had Scott died at his age, we should have had no Waverley Novels. Dying at the height of his power, and in the full tide of thought and activity, he seems almost to have fulfilled the aspiration and unconscious prophecy of one of the early essays: 'Does not life go down with a better grace foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas? 'When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing that they had this sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.' But we on this side are the poorer--by how much we can never know. What strengthens the conviction that he might yet have surpassed himself and dwarfed his own best work is, certainly no immaturity, for the flavour of wisdom and old experience hangs about his earliest writings, but a vague sense awakened by that brilliant series of books, so diverse in theme, so slight often in structure and occasions so gaily executed, that here was a finished literary craftsman, who had served his period of apprenticeship and was playing with his tools. The pleasure of wielding the graven tool, the itch of craftsmanship, was strong upon him, and many of the works he has left are the overflow of a laughing energy, arabesques carved on the rock in the artist's painless hours. All art, it is true, is play of a sort; the 'sport-impulse' (to translate a German phrase) is deep at the root of the artist's power; Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, and Goethe, in a very profound sense, make game of life. But to make game of life was to each of these the very loftiest and most imperative employ to be found for him on this planet; to hold the mirror up to Nature so that for the first time she may see herself; to 'be a candle-holder and look on' at the pageantry which, but for the candle-holder, would huddle along in the undistinguishable blackness, filled them with the pride of place. Stevenson had the sport-impulse at the depths of his nature, but he also had, perhaps he had inherited, an instinct for work in more blockish material, for lighthouse-building and iron-founding. In a 'Letter to a Young Artist,' contributed to a magazine years ago, he compares the artist in paint or in words to the keeper of a booth at the world's fair, dependent for his bread on his success in amusing others. In his volume of poems he almost apologises for his excellence in literature: 'Say not of me, that weakly I declined The labours of my sires, and fled the sea, The towers we founded, and the lamps we lit, To play at home with paper like a child; But rather say: _In the afternoon of time_ _A strenuous family dusted from its hands_ _The sand of granite_, _and beholding far_ _Along the sounding coasts its pyramids_ _And tall memorials catch the dying sun_, _Smiled well-content_, _and to this childish task_ _Around the fire addressed its evening hours_.' Some of his works are, no doubt, best described as paper-games. In _The Wrong Box_, for instance, there is something very like the card-game commonly called 'Old Maid'; the odd card is a superfluous corpse, and each dismayed recipient in turn assumes a disguise and a pseudonym and bravely passes on that uncomfortable inheritance. It is an admirable farce, hardly touched with grimness, unshaken by the breath of reality, full of fantastic character; the strange funeral procession is attended by shouts of glee at each of its stages, and finally melts into space. But, when all is said, it is not with work of this kind that Olympus is stormed; art must be brought closer into relation with life, these airy and delightful freaks of fancy must be subdued to a serious scheme if they are to serve as credentials for a seat among the immortals. The decorative painter, whose pencil runs so freely in limning these half- human processions of outlined fauns and wood-nymphs, is asked at last to paint an easel picture. Stevenson is best where he shows most restraint, and his peculiarly rich fancy, which ran riot at the suggestion of every passing whim, gave him, what many a modern writer sadly lacks, plenty to restrain, an exuberant field for self-denial. Here was an opportunity for art and labour; the luxuriance of the virgin forests of the West may be clipped and pruned for a lifetime with no fear of reducing them to the trim similitude of a Dutch garden. His bountiful and generous nature could profit by a spell of training that would emaciate a poorer stock. From the first, his delight in earth and the earth-born was keen and multiform; his zest in life 'put a spirit of youth in everything, That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him;' and his fancy, light and quick as a child's, made of the world around him an enchanted pleasance. The realism, as it is called, that deals only with the banalities and squalors of life, and weaves into the mesh of its story no character but would make you yawn if you passed ten minutes with him in a railway-carriage, might well take a lesson from this man, if it had the brains. Picture to yourself (it is not hard) an average suburb of London. The long rows of identical bilious brick houses, with the inevitable lace curtains, a symbol merely of the will and power to wash; the awful nondescript object, generally under glass, in the front window--the shrine of the unknown god of art; the sombre invariable citizen, whose garb gives no suggestion of his occupation or his tastes--a person, it would seem, only by courtesy; the piano-organ the music of the day, and the hideous voice of the vendor of half-penny papers the music of the night; could anything be less promising than such a row of houses for the theatre of romance? Set a realist to walk down one of these streets: he will inquire about milk-bills and servants' wages, latch-keys and Sunday avocations, and come back with a tale of small meannesses and petty respectabilities, written in the approved modern fashion. Yet Stevenson, it seems likely, could not pass along such a line of brick bandboxes without having his pulses set a-throbbing by the imaginative possibilities of the place. Of his own Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich he says: 'The succession of faces in the lamplight stirred the lieutenant's imagination; and it seemed to him as if he could walk for ever in that stimulating city atmosphere and surrounded by the mystery of four million private lives. He glanced at the houses and marvelled what was passing behind those warmly lighted windows; he looked into face after face, and saw them each intent upon some unknown interest, criminal or kindly.' It was that same evening that Prince Florizel's friend, under the name of Mr. Morris, was giving a party in one of the houses of West Kensington. In one at least of the houses of that brick wilderness human spirits were being tested as on an anvil, and most of them tossed aside. So also, in, _The Rajah's Diamond_, it was a quiet suburban garden that witnessed the sudden apparition of Mr. Harry Hartley and his treasures precipitated over the wall; it was in the same garden that the Rev. Simon Rolles suddenly, to his own surprise, became a thief. A monotony of bad building is no doubt a bad thing, but it cannot paralyse the activities or frustrate the agonies of the mind of man. To a man with Stevenson's live and searching imagination, every work of human hands became vocal with possible associations. Buildings positively chattered to him; the little inn at Queensferry, which even for Scott had meant only mutton and currant jelly, with cranberries 'vera weel preserved,' gave him the cardinal incident of _Kidnapped_. How should the world ever seem dull or sordid to one whom a railway-station would take into its confidence, to whom the very flagstones of the pavement told their story, in whose mind 'the effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean,' called up 'an army of anonymous desires and pleasures'? To have the 'golden-tongued Romance with serene lute' for a mistress and familiar is to be fortified against the assaults of tedium. His attitude towards the surprising and momentous gifts of life was one prolonged passion of praise and joy. There is none of his books that reads like the meditations of an invalid. He has the readiest sympathy for all exhibitions of impulsive energy; his heart goes out to a sailor, and leaps into ecstasy over a generous adventurer or buccaneer. Of one of his earlier books he says: 'From the negative point of view I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp. Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred pages, it contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God's universe, nor so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself.' And this was an omission that he never remedied in his later works. Indeed, his zest in life, whether lived in the back gardens of a town or on the high seas, was so great that it seems probable the writer would have been lost had the man been dowered with better health. 'Whereas my birth and spirit rather took The way that takes the town, Thou didst betray me to a ling'ring book, And wrap me in a gown,' says George Herbert, who, in his earlier ambitions, would fain have ruffled it with the best at the court of King James. But from Stevenson, although not only the town, but oceans and continents, beckoned him to deeds, no such wail escaped. His indomitable cheerfulness was never embarked in the cock-boat of his own prosperity. A high and simple courage shines through all his writings. It is supposed to be a normal human feeling for those who are hale to sympathize with others who are in pain. Stevenson reversed the position, and there is no braver spectacle in literature than to see him not asking others to lower their voices in his sick-room, but raising his own voice that he may make them feel at ease and avoid imposing his misfortunes on their notice. 'Once when I was groaning aloud with physical pain,' he says in the essay on _Child's Play_, 'a young gentleman came into the room and nonchalantly inquired if I had seen his bow and arrow. He made no account of my groans, which he accepted, as he had to accept so much else, as a piece of the inexplicable conduct of his elders; and, like a wise young gentleman, he would waste no wonder on the subject.' Was there ever a passage like this? The sympathy of the writer is wholly with the child, and the child's absolute indifference to his own sufferings. It might have been safely predicted that this man, should he ever attain to pathos, would be free from the facile, maudlin pathos of the hired sentimentalist. And so also with what Dr. Johnson has called 'metaphysical distresses.' It is striking enough to observe how differently the quiet monasteries of the Carthusian and Trappist brotherhoods affected Matthew Arnold and Robert Louis Stevenson. In his well-known elegiac stanzas Matthew Arnold likens his own state to that of the monks: 'Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these on earth I wait forlorn. Their faith, my tears, the world deride-- I come to shed them at their side.' To Stevenson, on the other hand, our Lady of the Snows is a mistaken divinity, and the place a monument of chilly error,--for once in a way he takes it on himself to be a preacher, his temperament gives voice in a creed: 'And ye, O brethren, what if God, When from Heaven's top He spies abroad, And sees on this tormented stage The noble war of mankind rage, What if His vivifying eye, O monks, should pass your corner by? For still the Lord is Lord of might; In deeds, in deeds, He takes delight; The plough, the spear, the laden barks, The field, the founded city, marks; He marks the smiler of the streets, The singer upon garden seats; He sees the climber in the rocks; To Him, the shepherd folds his flocks; For those He loves that underprop With daily virtues Heaven's top, And bear the falling sky with ease, Unfrowning Caryatides. Those He approves that ply the trade, That rock the child, that wed the maid, That with weak virtues, weaker hands, Sow gladness on the peopled lands, And still with laughter, song, and shout Spin the great wheel of earth about. But ye?--O ye who linger still Here in your fortress on the hill, With placid face, with tranquil breath, The unsought volunteers of death, Our cheerful General on high With careless looks may pass you by!' And the fact of death, which has damped and darkened the writings of so many minor poets, does not cast a pallor on his conviction. Life is of value only because it can be spent, or given; and the love of God coveted the position, and assumed mortality. If a man treasure and hug his life, one thing only is certain, that he will be robbed some day, and cut the pitiable and futile figure of one who has been saving candle-ends in a house that is on fire. Better than this to have a foolish spendthrift blaze and the loving cup going round. Stevenson speaks almost with a personal envy of the conduct of the four marines of the _Wager_. There was no room for them in the boat, and they were left on a desert island to a certain death. 'They were soldiers, they said, and knew well enough it was their business to die; and as their comrades pulled away, they stood upon the beach, gave three cheers, and cried, "God bless the King!" Now, one or two of those who were in the boat escaped, against all likelihood, to tell the story. That was a great thing for us'--even when life is extorted it may be given nobly, with ceremony and courtesy. So strong was Stevenson's admiration for heroic graces like these that in the requiem that appears in his poems he speaks of an ordinary death as of a hearty exploit, and draws his figures from lives of adventure and toil: 'Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: _Here he lies where he longed to be_, _Home is the sailor_, _home from the sea_, _And the hunter home from the hill_.' This man should surely have been honoured with the pomp and colour and music of a soldier's funeral. The most remarkable feature of the work he has left is its singular combination of style and romance. It has so happened, and the accident has gained almost the strength of a tradition, that the most assiduous followers of romance have been careless stylists. They have trusted to the efficacy of their situation and incident, and have too often cared little about the manner of its presentation. By an odd piece of irony style has been left to the cultivation of those who have little or nothing to tell. Sir Walter Scott himself, with all his splendid romantic and tragic gifts, often, in Stevenson's perfectly just phrase, 'fobs us off with languid and inarticulate twaddle.' He wrote carelessly and genially, and then breakfasted, and began the business of the day. But Stevenson, who had romance tingling in every vein of his body, set himself laboriously and patiently to train his other faculty, the faculty of style. I. STYLE.--Let no one say that 'reading and writing comes by nature,' unless he is prepared to be classed with the foolish burgess who said it first. A poet is born, not made,--so is every man,--but he is born raw. Stevenson's life was a grave devotion to the education of himself in the art of writing, 'The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering.' Those who deny the necessity, or decry the utility, of such an education, are generally deficient in a sense of what makes good literature--they are 'word-deaf,' as others are colour-blind. All writing is a kind of word-weaving; a skilful writer will make a splendid tissue out of the diverse fibres of words. But to care for words, to select them judiciously and lovingly, is not in the least essential to all writing, all speaking; for the sad fact is this, that most of us do our thinking, our writing, and our speaking in phrases, not in words. The work of a feeble writer is always a patchwork of phrases, some of them borrowed from the imperial texture of Shakespeare and Milton, others picked up from the rags in the street. We make our very kettle-holders of pieces of a king's carpet. How many overworn quotations from Shakespeare suddenly leap into meaning and brightness when they are seen in their context! 'The cry is still, "They come!"'--'More honoured in the breach than the observance,'--the sight of these phrases in the splendour of their dramatic context in _Macbeth_ and _Hamlet_ casts shame upon their daily degraded employments. But the man of affairs has neither the time to fashion his speech, nor the knowledge to choose his words, so he borrows his sentences ready-made, and applies them in rough haste to purposes that they do not exactly fit. Such a man inevitably repeats, like the cuckoo, monotonous catchwords, and lays his eggs of thought in the material that has been woven into consistency by others. It is a matter of natural taste, developed and strengthened by continual practice, to avoid being the unwitting slave of phrases. The artist in words, on the other hand, although he is a lover of fine phrases, in his word-weaving experiments uses no shoddy, but cultivates his senses of touch and sight until he can combine the raw fibres in novel and bewitching patterns. To this end he must have two things: a fine sense, in the first place, of the sound, value, meaning, and associations of individual words, and next, a sense of harmony, proportion, and effect in their combination. It is amazing what nobility a mere truism is often found to possess when it is clad with a garment thus woven. Stevenson had both these sensitive capabilities in a very high decree. His careful choice of epithet and name have even been criticised as lending to some of his narrative-writing an excessive air of deliberation. His daintiness of diction is best seen in his earlier work; thereafter his writing became more vigorous and direct, fitter for its later uses, but never unillumined by felicities that cause a thrill of pleasure to the reader. Of the value of words he had the acutest appreciation. _Virginibus Puerisque_, his first book of essays, is crowded with happy hits and subtle implications conveyed in a single word. 'We have all heard,' he says in one of these, 'of cities in South America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving gardens in the greenest corner of England.' You can feel the ground shake and see the volcano tower above you at that word '_tremendous_ neighbourhood.' Something of the same double reference to the original and acquired meanings of a word is to be found in such a phrase as 'sedate electrician,' for one who in a back office wields all the lights of a city; or in that description of one drawing near to death, who is spoken of as groping already with his hands 'on the face of the _impassable_.' The likeness of this last word to a very different word, '_impassive_,' is made to do good literary service in suggesting the sphinx-like image of death. Sometimes, as here, this subtle sense of double meanings almost leads to punning. In _Across the Plains_ Stevenson narrates how a bet was transacted at a railway-station, and subsequently, he supposes, '_liquidated_ at the bar.' This is perhaps an instance of the excess of a virtue, but it is an excess to be found plentifully in the works of Milton. His loving regard for words bears good fruit in his later and more stirring works. He has a quick ear and appreciation for live phrases on the lips of tramps, beach-combers, or Americans. In _The Beach of Falesa_ the sea-captain who introduces the new trader to the South Pacific island where the scene of the story is laid, gives a brief description of the fate of the last dealer in copra. It may serve as a single illustration of volumes of racy, humorous, and imaginative slang; '"Do you catch a bit of white there to the east'ard?" the captain continued. "That's your house. . . . When old Adams saw it, he took and shook me by the hand. 'I've dropped into a soft thing here,' says he. 'So you have,' says I. . . . Poor Johnny! I never saw him again but the once . . . and the next time we came round there he was dead and buried. I took and put up a bit of stick to him: 'John Adams, _obit_ eighteen and sixty-eight. Go thou and do likewise.' I missed that man. I never could see much harm in Johnny." '"What did he die of?" I inquired. '"Some kind of sickness," says the captain. "It appears it took him sudden. Seems he got up in the night, and filled up on Pain-Killer and Kennedy's Discovery. No go--he was booked beyond Kennedy. Then he had tried to open a case of gin. No go again: not strong enough. . . . Poor John!"' There is a world of abrupt, homely talk like this to be found in the speech of Captain Nares and of Jim Pinkerton in _The Wrecker_; and a wealth of Scottish dialect, similar in effect, in _Kidnapped_, _Catriona_, and many other stories. It was a delicate ear and a sense trained by practice that picked up these vivid turns of speech, some of them perhaps heard only once, and a mind given to dwell on words, that remembered them for years, and brought them out when occasion arose. But the praise of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a description of his use of individual words or his memory of individual phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and a style will hardly bear expatriation. Scott's sentences are, many of them, shambling, knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked further back for his models, and fed his style on the most vigorous of the prose writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the golden age of English prose. 'What English those fellows wrote!' says Fitzgerald in one of his letters; 'I cannot read the modern mechanique after them.' And he quotes a passage from Harrington's _Oceana_: 'This free-born Nation lives not upon the dole or Bounty of One Man, but distributing her Annual Magistracies and Honours with her own hand, is herself King People.' It was from writers of Harrington's time and later that Stevenson learned something of his craft. Bunyan and Defoe should be particularly mentioned, and that later excellent worthy, Captain Charles Johnson, who compiled the ever-memorable _Lives of Pirates and Highwaymen_. Mr. George Meredith is the chief of those very few modern writers whose influence may be detected in his style. However it was made, and whencesoever the material or suggestion borrowed, he came by a very admirable instrument for the telling of stories. Those touches of archaism that are so frequent with him, the slightly unusual phrasing, or unexpected inversion of the order of words, show a mind alert in its expression, and give the sting of novelty even to the commonplaces of narrative or conversation. A nimble literary tact will work its will on the phrases of current small-talk, remoulding them nearer to the heart's desire, transforming them to its own stamp. This was what Stevenson did, and the very conversations that pass between his characters have an air of distinction that is all his own. His books are full of brilliant talk--talk real and convincing enough in its purport and setting, but purged of the languors and fatuities of actual commonplace conversation. It is an enjoyment like that to be obtained from a brilliant exhibition of fencing, clean and dexterous, to assist at the talking bouts of David Balfour and Miss Grant, Captain Nares and Mr. Dodd, Alexander Mackellar and the Master of Ballantrae, Prince Otto and Sir John Crabtree, or those wholly admirable pieces of special pleading to be found in _A Lodging for the Night_ and _The Sire de Maletroit's Door_. But people do not talk like this in actual life--''tis true, 'tis pity; and pity 'tis, 'tis true.' They do not; in actual life conversation is generally so smeared and blurred with stupidities, so invaded and dominated by the spirit of dulness, so liable to swoon into meaninglessness, that to turn to Stevenson's books is like an escape into mountain air from the stagnant vapours of a morass. The exact reproduction of conversation as it occurs in life can only be undertaken by one whose natural dulness feels itself incommoded by wit and fancy as by a grit in the eye. Conversation is often no more than a nervous habit of body, like twiddling the thumbs, and to record each particular remark is as much as to describe each particular twiddle. Or in its more intellectual uses, when speech is employed, for instance, to conceal our thoughts, how often is it a world too wide for the shrunken nudity of the thought it is meant to veil, and thrown over it, formless, flabby, and black--like a tarpaulin! It is pleasant to see thought and feeling dressed for once in the trim, bright raiment Stevenson devises for them. There is an indescribable air of distinction, which is, and is not, one and the same thing with style, breathing from all his works. Even when he is least inspired, his bearing and gait could never be mistaken for another man's. All that he writes is removed by the width of the spheres from the possibility of commonplace, and he avoids most of the snares and pitfalls of genius with noble and unconscious skill. If he ever fell into one of these--which may perhaps be doubted--it was through too implicit a confidence in the powers of style. His open letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde in vindication of Father Damien is perhaps his only literary mistake. It is a matchless piece of scorn and invective, not inferior in skill to anything he ever wrote. But that it was well done is no proof that it should have been done at all. 'I remember Uzzah and am afraid,' said the wise Erasmus, when he was urged to undertake the defence of Holy Church; 'it is not every one who is permitted to support the Ark of the Covenant.' And the only disquietude suggested by Stevenson's letter is a doubt whether he really has a claim to be Father Damien's defender, whether Father Damien had need of the assistance of a literary freelance. The Saint who was bitten in the hand by a serpent shook it off into the fire and stood unharmed. As it was in the Mediterranean so it was also in the Pacific, and there is something officious in the intrusion of a spectator, something irrelevant in the plentiful pronouns of the first person singular to be found sprinkled over Stevenson's letter. The curse spoken in Eden, 'Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life,' surely covered by anticipation the case of the Rev. Dr. Hyde. II. ROMANCE.--The faculty of romance, the greatest of the gifts showered on Stevenson's cradle by the fairies, will suffer no course of development; the most that can be done with it is to preserve it on from childhood unblemished and undiminished. It is of a piece with Stevenson's romantic ability that his own childhood never ended; he could pass back into that airy world without an effort. In his stories his imagination worked on the old lines, but it became conscious of its working. And the highest note of these stories is not drama, nor character, but romance. In one of his essays he defines the highest achievement of romance to be the embodiment of 'character, thought, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye.' His essay on Victor Hugo shows how keenly conscious he was that narrative romance can catch and embody emotions and effects that are for ever out of the reach of the drama proper, and of the essay or homily, just as they are out of the reach of sculpture and painting. Now, it is precisely in these effects that the chief excellence of romance resides; it was the discovery of a world of these effects, insusceptible of treatment by the drama, neglected entirely by the character-novel, which constituted the Romantic revival of the end of last century. 'The artistic result of a romance,' says Stevenson, 'what is left upon the memory by any powerful and artistic novel, is something so complicated and refined that it is difficult to put a name upon it, and yet something as simple as nature. . . . The fact is, that art is working far ahead of language as well as of science, realizing for us, by all manner of suggestions and exaggerations, effects for which as yet we have no direct name, for the reason that these effects do not enter very largely into the necessities of life. Hence alone is that suspicion of vagueness that often hangs about the purpose of a romance; it is clear enough to us in thought, but we are not used to consider anything clear until we are able to formulate it in words, and analytical language has not been sufficiently shaped to that end.' He goes on to point out that there is an epical value about every great romance, an underlying idea, not presentable always in abstract or critical terms, in the stories of such masters of pure romance as Victor Hugo and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The progress of romance in the present century has consisted chiefly in the discovery of new exercises of imagination and new subtle effects in story. Fielding, as Stevenson says, did not understand that the nature of a landscape or the spirit of the times could count for anything in a story; all his actions consist of a few simple personal elements. With Scott vague influences that qualify a man's personality begin to make a large claim; 'the individual characters begin to occupy a comparatively small proportion of that canvas on which armies manoeuvre and great hills pile themselves upon each other's shoulders.' And the achievements of the great masters since Scott--Hugo, Dumas, Hawthorne, to name only those in Stevenson's direct line of ancestry--have added new realms to the domain of romance. What are the indescribable effects that romance, casting far beyond problems of character and conduct, seeks to realise? What is the nature of the great informing, underlying idea that animates a truly great romance--_The Bride of Lammermoor_, _Monte Cristo_, _Les Miserables_, _The Scarlet Letter_, _The Master of Ballantrae_? These questions can only be answered by de-forming the impression given by each of these works to present it in the chop-logic language of philosophy. But an approach to an answer may be made by illustration. In his _American Notebooks_ Nathaniel Hawthorne used to jot down subjects for stories as they struck him. His successive entries are like the souls of stories awaiting embodiment, which many of them never received; they bring us very near to the workings of the mind of a great master. Here are some of them: 'A sketch to be given of a modern reformer, a type of the extreme doctrines on the subject of slaves, cold water, and the like. He goes about the streets haranguing most eloquently, and is on the point of making many converts, when his labours are suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the keeper of a madhouse whence he has escaped. Much may be made of this idea.' 'The scene of a story or sketch to be laid within the light of a street lantern; the time when the lamp is near going out; and the catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam.' 'A person to be writing a tale and to find it shapes itself against his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought, and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate--he having made himself one of the personages.' 'Two persons to be expecting some occurrence and watching for the two principal actors in it, and to find that the occurrence is even then passing, and that they themselves are the two actors.' 'A satire on ambition and fame from a statue of snow.' Hawthorne used this idea in one of his sketches. 'A moral philosopher to buy a slave, or otherwise get possession of a human being, and to use him for the sake of experiment by trying the operation of a certain vice on him.' M. Bourget, the French romancer, has made use of this idea in his novel called _Le Disciple_. Only it is not a slave, but a young girl whom he pretends to love, that is the subject of the moral philosopher's experiment; and a noisy war has been waged round the book in France. Hawthorne would plainly have seized the romantic essence of the idea and would have avoided the boneyard of 'problem morality.' 'A story the principal personage of which shall seem always on the point of entering on the scene, but shall never appear.' This is the device that gives fascination to the figures of Richelieu in _Marion Delorme_, and of Captain Flint in _Treasure Island_. 'The majesty of death to be exemplified in a beggar, who, after being seen humble and cringing in the streets of a city for many years, at length by some means or other gets admittance into a rich man's mansion, and there dies--assuming state, and striking awe into the breasts of those who had looked down upon him.' These are all excellent instances of the sort of idea that gives life to a romance--of acts or attitudes that stamp themselves upon the mind's eye. Some of them appeal chiefly to the mind's eye, others are of value chiefly as symbols. But, for the most part, the romantic kernel of a story is neither pure picture nor pure allegory, it can neither be painted nor moralised. It makes its most irresistible appeal neither to the eye that searches for form and colour, nor to the reason that seeks for abstract truth, but to the blood, to all that dim instinct of danger, mystery, and sympathy in things that is man's oldest inheritance--to the superstitions of the heart. Romance vindicates the supernatural against science and rescues it from the palsied tutelage of morality. Stevenson's work is a gallery of romantic effects that haunt the memory. Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the round-house on board the brig _Covenant_; the duel between the two brothers of Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the candles from that abyss of windless night; the flight of the Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes of the wood,--all these, although they carry with them subtleties beyond the painter's art, yet have something of picture in them. But others make entrance to the corridors of the mind by blind and secret ways, and there awaken the echoes of primaeval fear. The cry of the parrot--'Pieces of eight'--the tapping of the stick of the blind pirate Pew as he draws near the inn-parlour, and the similar effects of inexplicable terror wrought by the introduction of the blind catechist in _Kidnapped_, and of the disguise of a blind leper in _The Black Arrow_, are beyond the reach of any but the literary form of romantic art. The last appearance of Pew, in the play of _Admiral Guinea_, written in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, is perhaps the masterpiece of all the scenes of terror. The blind ruffian's scream of panic fear, when he puts his groping hand into the burning flame of the candle in the room where he believed that he was unseen, and so realises that his every movement is being silently watched, is indeed 'the horrors come alive.' The animating principle or idea of Stevenson's longer stories is never to be found in their plot, which is generally built carelessly and disjointedly enough around the central romantic situation or conception. The main situation in _The Wrecker_ is a splendid product of romantic aspiration, but the structure of the story is incoherent and ineffective, so that some of the best passages in the book--the scenes in Paris, for instance--have no business there at all. The story in _Kidnapped_ and _Catriona_ wanders on in a single thread, like the pageant of a dream, and the reader feels and sympathises with the author's obvious difficulty in leading it back to the scene of the trial and execution of James Stewart. _The Master of Ballantrae_ is stamped with a magnificent unity of conception, but the story illuminates that conception by a series of scattered episodes. That lurid embodiment of fascinating evil, part vampire, part Mephistopheles, whose grand manner and heroic abilities might have made him a great and good man but for 'the malady of not wanting,' is the light and meaning of the whole book. Innocent and benevolent lives are thrown in his way that he may mock or distort or shatter them. Stevenson never came nearer than in this character to the sublime of power. But an informing principle of unity is more readily to be apprehended in the shorter stories, and it is a unity not so much of plot as of impression and atmosphere. His islands, whether situated in the Pacific or off the coast of Scotland, have each of them a climate of its own, and the character of the place seems to impose itself on the incidents that occur, dictating subordination or contrast. The events that happen within the limits of one of these magic isles could in every case be cut off from the rest of the story and framed as a separate work of art. The long starvation of David Balfour on the island of Earraid, the sharks of crime and monsters of blasphemy that break the peace of the shining tropical lagoons in _Treasure Island_ and _The Ebb Tide_, the captivity on the Bass Rock in _Catriona_, the supernatural terrors that hover and mutter over the island of _The Merry Men_--these imaginations are plainly generated by the scenery against which they are thrown; each is in some sort the genius of the place it inhabits. In his search for the treasures of romance, Stevenson adventured freely enough into the realm of the supernatural. When he is handling the superstitions of the Scottish people, he allows his humorous enjoyment of their extravagance to peep out from behind the solemn dialect in which they are dressed. The brief tale of _Thrawn Janet_, and Black Andy's story of Tod Lapraik in _Catriona_, are grotesque imaginations of the school of _Tam o' Shanter_ rather than of the school of Shakespeare, who deals in no comedy ghosts. They are turnip-lanterns swayed by a laughing urchin, proud of the fears he can awaken. Even _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ and the story of _The Bottle Imp_ are manufactured bogeys, that work on the nerves and not on the heart, whatever may be said by those who insist on seeing allegory in what is only dream-fantasy. The supernatural must be rooted deeper than these in life and experience if it is to reach an imposing stature: the true ghost is the shadow of a man. And Stevenson shows a sense of this in two of his very finest stories, the exquisite idyll of _Will o' the Mill_ and the grim history of _Markheim_. Each of these stories is the work of a poet, by no means of a goblin-fancier. The personification of Death is as old as poetry; it is wrought with moving gentleness in that last scene in the arbour of Will's inn. The wafted scent of the heliotropes, which had never been planted in the garden since Marjory's death, the light in the room that had been hers, prelude the arrival at the gate of the stranger's carriage, with the black pine tops standing above it like plumes. And Will o' the Mill makes the acquaintance of his physician and friend, and goes at last upon his travels. In the other story, Markheim meets with his own double in the house of the dealer in curiosities, whom he has murdered. It is not such a double as Rossetti prayed for to the god of Sleep: 'Ah! might I, by thy good grace, Groping in the windy stair (Darkness and the breath of space Like loud waters everywhere), Meeting mine own image there Face to face, Send it from that place to her!' but a clear-eyed critic of the murderer, not unfriendly, who lays bare before him his motives and history. At the close of that wonderful conversation, one of the most brilliant of its author's achievements, Markheim gives himself into the hands of the police. These two stories, when compared with the others, serve to show how Stevenson's imagination quickened and strengthened when it played full upon life. For his best romantic effects, like all great romance, are illuminative of life, and no mere idle games. III. MORALITY.--His genius, like the genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was doubly rich in the spirit of romance and in a wise and beautiful morality. But the irresponsible caprices of his narrative fancy prevented his tales from being the appropriate vehicles of his morality. He has left no work--unless the two short stories mentioned above be regarded as exceptions--in which romance and morality are welded into a single perfect whole, nothing that can be put beside _The Scarlet Letter_ or _The Marble Faun_ for deep insight and magic fancy joined in one. Hence his essays, containing as they do the gist of his reflective wisdom, are ranked by some critics above his stories. A novel cannot, of course, be moral as an action is moral; there is no question in art of police regulations or conformity to established codes, but rather of insight both deep and wide. Polygamy and monogamy, suttee, thuggism, and cannibalism, are all acceptable to the romancer, whose business is with the heart of a man in all times and places. He is not bound to display allegiance to particular moral laws of the kind that can be broken; he is bound to show his consciousness of that wider moral order which can no more be broken by crime than the law of gravitation can be broken by the fall of china--the morality without which life would be impossible; the relations, namely, of human beings to each other, the feelings, habits, and thoughts that are the web of society. For the appreciation of morality in this wider sense high gifts of imagination are necessary. Shakespeare could never have drawn Macbeth, and thereby made apparent the awfulness of murder, without some sympathy for the murderer--the sympathy of intelligence. These gifts of imagination and sympathy belong to Stevenson in a very high degree; in all his romances there are gleams from time to time of wise and subtle reflection upon life, from the eternal side of things, which shine the more luminously that they spring from the events and situations with no suspicion of homily. In _The Black Arrow_, Dick Shelton begs from the Duke of Gloucester the life of the old shipmaster Arblaster, whose ship he had taken and accidentally wrecked earlier in the story. The Duke of Gloucester, who, in his own words, 'loves not mercy nor mercy-mongers,' yields the favour reluctantly. Then Dick turns to Arblaster. '"Come," said Dick, "a life is a life, old shrew, and it is more than ships or liquor. Say you forgive me, for if your life is worth nothing to you, it hath cost me the beginnings of my fortune. Come, I have paid for it dearly, be not so churlish." '"An I had my ship," said Arblaster, "I would 'a' been forth and safe on the high seas--I and my man Tom. But ye took my ship, gossip, and I'm a beggar; and for my man Tom, a knave fellow in russet shot him down, 'Murrain,' quoth he, and spake never again. 'Murrain' was the last of his words, and the poor spirit of him passed. 'A will never sail no more, will my Tom." 'Dick was seized with unavailing penitence and pity; he sought to take the skipper's hand, but Arblaster avoided his touch. '"Nay," said he, "let be. Y' have played the devil with me, and let that content you." 'The words died in Richard's throat. He saw, through tears, the poor old man, bemused with liquor and sorrow, go shambling away, with bowed head, across the snow, and the unnoticed dog whimpering at his heels; and for the first time began to understand the desperate game that we play in life, and how a thing once done is not to be changed or remedied by any penitence.' A similar wisdom that goes to the heart of things is found on the lips of the spiritual visitant in Markheim. '"Murder is to me no special category," replied the other. "All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine, and feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes the pretty maid, who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself."' The wide outlook on humanity that expresses itself in passages like these is combined in Stevenson with a vivid interest in, and quick appreciation of, character. The variety of the characters that he has essayed to draw is enormous, and his successes, for the purposes of his stories, are many. Yet with all this, the number of lifelike portraits, true to a hair, that are to be found in his works is very small indeed. In the golden glow of romance, character is always subject to be idealised; it is the effect of character seen at particular angles and in special lights, natural or artificial, that Stevenson paints; he does not attempt to analyse the complexity of its elements, but boldly projects into it certain principles, and works from those. It has often been said of Scott that he could not draw a lady who was young and beautiful; the glamour of chivalry blinded him, he lowered his eyes and described his emotions and aspirations. Something of the same disability afflicted Stevenson in the presence of a ruffian. He loved heroic vice only less than he loved heroic virtue, and was always ready to idealise his villains, to make of them men who, like the Master of Ballantrae, 'lived for an idea.' Even the low and lesser villainy of Israel Hands, in the great scene where he climbs the mast to murder the hero of _Treasure Island_, breathes out its soul in a creed: '"For thirty years," he said, "I've sailed the seas, and seen good and bad, better and worse, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views--Amen, so be it."' John Silver, that memorable pirate, with a face like a ham and an eye like a fragment of glass stuck into it, leads a career of wholehearted crime that can only be described as sparkling. His unalloyed maleficence is adorned with a thousand graces of manner. Into the dark and fetid marsh that is an evil heart, where low forms of sentiency are hardly distinguishable from the all-pervading mud, Stevenson never peered, unless it were in the study of Huish in _The Ebb Tide_. Of his women, let women speak. They are traditionally accredited with an intuition of one another's hearts, although why, if woman was created for man, as the Scriptures assure us, the impression that she makes on him should not count for as much as the impression she makes on some other woman, is a question that cries for solution. Perhaps the answer is that disinterested curiosity, which is one means of approach to the knowledge of character, although only one, is a rare attitude for man to assume towards the other sex. Stevenson's curiosity was late in awaking; the heroine of _The Black Arrow_ is dressed in boy's clothes throughout the course of the story, and the novelist thus saved the trouble of describing the demeanour of a girl. Mrs. Henry, in _The Master of Ballantrae_, is a charming veiled figure, drawn in the shadow; Miss Barbara Grant and Catriona in the continuation of _Kidnapped_ are real enough to have made many suitors for their respective hands among male readers of the book;--but that is nothing, reply the critics of the other party: a walking doll will find suitors. The question must stand over until some definite principles of criticism have been discovered to guide us among these perilous passes. One character must never be passed over in an estimate of Stevenson's work. The hero of his longest work is not David Balfour, in whom the pawky Lowland lad, proud and precise, but 'a very pretty gentleman,' is transfigured at times by traits that he catches, as narrator of the story, from its author himself. But Alan Breek Stewart is a greater creation, and a fine instance of that wider morality that can seize by sympathy the soul of a wild Highland clansman. 'Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable,' a condoner of murder (for 'them that havenae dipped their hands in any little difficulty should be very mindful of the case of them that have'), a confirmed gambler, as quarrel-some as a turkey-cock, and as vain and sensitive as a child, Alan Breek is one of the most lovable characters in all literature; and his penetration--a great part of which he learned, to take his own account of it, by driving cattle 'through a throng lowland country with the black soldiers at his tail'--blossoms into the most delightful reflections upon men and things. The highest ambitions of a novelist are not easily attainable. To combine incident, character, and romance in a uniform whole, to alternate telling dramatic situation with effects of poetry and suggestion, to breathe into the entire conception a profound wisdom, construct it with absolute unity, and express it in perfect style,--this thing has never yet been done. A great part of Stevenson's subtle wisdom of life finds its readiest outlet in his essays. In these, whatever their occasion, he shows himself the clearest-eyed critic of human life, never the dupe of the phrases and pretences, the theories and conventions, that distort the vision of most writers and thinkers. He has an unerring instinct for realities, and brushes aside all else with rapid grace. In his lately published _Amateur Emigrant_ he describes one of his fellow-passengers to America: 'In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were sealed by a cheap school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the world but money and steam engines. He did not know what you meant by the word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real, like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his god and guide.' This sense of the realities of the world,--laughter, happiness, the simple emotions of childhood, and others,--makes Stevenson an admirable critic of those social pretences that ape the native qualities of the heart. The criticism on organised philanthropy contained in the essay on _Beggars_ is not exhaustive, it is expressed paradoxically, but is it untrue? 'We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented. We are all too proud to take a naked gift; we must seem to pay it, if in nothing else, then with the delights of our society. Here, then, is the pitiful fix of the rich man; here is that needle's eye in which he stuck already in the days of Christ, and still sticks to-day, firmer, if possible, than ever; that he has the money, and lacks the love which should make his money acceptable. Here and now, just as of old in Palestine, he has the rich to dinner, it is with the rich that he takes his pleasure: and when his turn comes to be charitable, he looks in vain for a recipient. His friends are not poor, they do not want; the poor are not his friends, they will not take. To whom is he to give? Where to find--note this phrase--the Deserving Poor? Charity is (what they call) centralised; offices are hired; societies founded, with secretaries paid or unpaid: the hunt of the Deserving Poor goes merrily forward. I think it will take a more than merely human secretary to disinter that character. What! a class that is to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to receive from strangers; and to be quite respectable, and at the same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play the most delicate part of friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:--and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god burgess through a needle's eye! Oh, let him stick, by all means; and let his polity tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness there can be no salvation; and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool who looks for the Deserving Poor.' An equal sense of the realities of life and death gives the force of a natural law to the pathos of _Old Mortality_, that essay in which Stevenson pays passionate tribute to the memory of his early friend, who 'had gone to ruin with a kingly abandon, like one who condescended; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom.' The whole description, down to the marvellous quotation from Bunyan that closes it, is one of the sovereign passages of modern literature; the pathos of it is pure and elemental, like the rush of a cleansing wind, or the onset of the legions commanded by 'The mighty Mahmud, Allah-breathing Lord, That all the misbelieving and black Horde Of Fears and Sorrows that infest the Soul Scatters before him with his whirlwind Sword.' Lastly, to bring to an end this imperfect review of the works of a writer who has left none greater behind him, Stevenson excels at what is perhaps the most delicate of literary tasks and the utmost test, where it is successfully encountered, of nobility,--the practice, namely, of self- revelation and self-delineation. To talk much about oneself with detail, composure, and ease, with no shadow of hypocrisy and no whiff or taint of indecent familiarity, no puling and no posing,--the shores of the sea of literature are strewn with the wrecks and forlorn properties of those who have adventured on this dangerous attempt. But a criticism of Stevenson is happy in this, that from the writer it can pass with perfect trust and perfect fluency to the man. He shares with Goldsmith and Montaigne, his own favourite, the happy privilege of making lovers among his readers. 'To be the most beloved of English writers--what a title that is for a man!' says Thackeray of Goldsmith. In such matters, a dispute for pre- eminence in the captivation of hearts would be unseemly; it is enough to say that Stevenson too has his lovers among those who have accompanied him on his _Inland Voyage_, or through the fastnesses of the Cevennes in the wake of Modestine. He is loved by those that never saw his face; and one who has sealed that dizzy height of ambition may well be content, without the impertinent assurance that, when the Japanese have taken London and revised the contents of the British Museum, the yellow scribes whom they shall set to produce a new edition of the _Biographie Universelle_ will include in their entries the following item:--'_Stevenson_, _R. L._ _A prolific writer of stories among the aborigines_. _Flourished before the Coming of the Japanese_. _His works are lost_.' THE END BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD 
33428	----	Stevensoniana [Illustration: Robert Louis Stevenson] Stevensoniana BEING A REPRINT OF VARIOUS LITERARY AND PICTORIAL MISCELLANY ASSOCIATED WITH ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON THE MAN AND HIS WORK The Bankside Press M. F. MANSFIELD, 14 WEST 22ND STREET, NEW YORK Copyright 1900 M. F. Mansfield _Contents_ Biographical 3 Scotland London The Riviera The Golden Gate The South Seas Apparition 16 Stevenson's First Book 17 Books Which Have Influenced Me 19 A Stevenson Letter 33 A Justification 33 The Davos Platz Books 40 Stevenson's Later Letters 44 A Stevenson Shrine 49 Stevenson and Hazlitt 55 On Beranger 57 Stevenson of the Letters 61 Apropos Vailima Letters 62 A Visit to Stevenson's Pacific Isle 65 A Pen Portrait 76 Appreciation and Homage 78 R. L. S. and Music 81 _Illustrations_ Frontispiece Portrait. From Etching by Hollyer Facsimile Title Page Travels With a Donkey } 17 An Inland Voyage } 17 Facsimile Title Page Not I } 40 Black Canyon } 40 Facsimile Title Page A Pentland Rising 49 Facsimile Title Page A New Form of Intermittent Light 64 _Stevensoniana_ _By Way of Introduction_ The early days of the literary career of Robert Louis Stevenson can hardly be said to have been entirely devoid of recognition, though it would appear doubtful if the world at large was willing to recognize his abilities had it not been for his wonderful personality; with a soul and an imagination far above those of his early associates he gradually drew around him the respect and admiration of that larger world of letters, the London coterie. The following biographical notes are to be considered then as a mere resumé of the various chronological periods and stages of his career as is shown by the many facts which have already become the common property of the latter day reader, but which by reason of the scattered source of supply and the extreme unlikelyhood of their being included in any authoritative life or biography, makes them at once interesting and valuable. As sponsor for the abilities of Robert Louis Stevenson, stands first and foremost, the name of William Ernest Henley a belief which was latterly endorsed by most literary critics from Gladstone to LeGallienne. Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Howard Place, Edinburgh, on the 13th of November, 1850. From his eighteenth year he seldom, if ever, signed himself aught but Robert Louis Stevenson, omitting the name Balfour therefrom. From birth he was of a slight and excitable nature and suffered keenly from chronic and frequent illness. His recognized literary labors may be said to have commenced at the immature age of six when, it is recalled, he wrote, presumably for his own amusement and that of his immediate family, "A History of Moses," and some years later an account of his "Travels in Perth." In these early years there also took shape and form in his imagination what was afterwards given forth to the world in the pages of "Treasure Island." At eight, Stevenson was at school, and at eleven entered the Academy of his native city. Here he began his first real literary labors, publishing, editing and even writing and illustrating the contents of a small school periodical. Stevenson was emphatically a bird of passage, for regardless of the ties of kindred and sentiment he was ever on the wing, and when in after years as a seeker after health he proved none the less a careful observer than he had been in his schoolboy days, small wonder it is that he was able to give to the reading world such charming and novel descriptions of things seen. In his schooldays he journeyed far into the country round about, the inevitable outcome of which was for him to ultimately to write out in his own picturesque and imaginative words a record of his observations. From "Random Memories" we learn of his pleasure at having taken a journey in company with his father around among the lighthouses of the Scottish coast, "_the first in the complete character of a man, without the help of petticoats_." And with these excursions into Fife began his wanderings so charmingly and characteristically chronicled in his later letters and reminiscences. In 1862 he went abroad to Germany and Holland, and in the next year and in that following to Italy and the Riviera. In 1865 he wintered at Torquay, an English winter resort on the south coast. At seventeen, at Edinburgh University, Stevenson became a pupil of Fleeming Jenkin, Professor of Engineering, whose biography he wrote with much pride and devotion some years later. Thus it is seen from early childhood that Stevenson was constantly putting forth the product of his pen, in Verses, Essays, Plays, Parodies, and Tales. In the "Stevenson Medley," a privately issued volume published as a sort of supplement to the "Edinburgh Edition" of his writings are to be found reprints of various of his early efforts, including the famous pamphlet "The Pentland Rising," which, in its original form, is now considered as being perhaps the rarest of all "Stevensoniana." Quoting from a letter of Stevenson's to a friend, he says: "_I owned that I cared for nothing but literature; my father saying that that was no profession but that I might be called to the Bar, if I chose * * * * so at the age of twenty-one I began to study law._" Accordingly the next few years were spent with ardous reading of Blackstone and his contemporaries, and arriving at the age of twenty-five, in 1875, Stevenson passed the examinations and was formally called a few days thereafter. During his matriculation at the law schools Stevenson was all the while perfecting himself in the profession of his heart's choice. About this time he came to know Mr. Sidney Colvin and Mr. William Ernest Henley, the beginning as the world knows, of a life long friendship with both these gentlemen. Stevenson's first introduction to the reading world at large was on the occasion of an article which appeared in the _Portfolio_ for December, 1873, with the signature L. S. Stoneven appended. Already Stevenson had begun to reap the benefit of acquaintanceship and association with the little coterie of literary folk whom he had fallen in with in London. For a time he sojourned in the artistic colony which had taken up its abode in the Forest of Fontainebleau, and has recorded its charms of life and association in the essay "Fontainebleau." He also came to know Bohemian Paris as well, and in certain circles which there exist, or did at one time exist, the memory of M. Stevenson still fondly lingers. Returning to Edinburgh Stevenson hung forth his placard at the now famous 17 Heriot Row, which read Robert Louis Stevenson, Advocate. He did not, however, hang for long between the balance of Law and Literature, and it has been said, he never tried a case. Finally it was but apparent that he was so firmly wedded to literature that, needs must, he should devote himself to it and with the publication of "Virginibus Puerisque," he is truly said to have emerged from the threatening obscurity of his early struggles. "An Inland Voyage" has recorded Stevenson's travels in Belgium in 1876, and "Travels with a Donkey in The Cevennes," chronicles another wandering in search of the picturesque, undertaken at about the same time. It is doubtful if either volume proved financially profitable at first though they proved, in connection with the volume of essays before mentioned, the means of introducing the name and work of Robert Louis Stevenson to an ever widening circle of fame. During this period Stevenson was a frequent contributor to the London literary journals, and he had also rewritten an early production in the form of a play; this in collaboration with Mr. W. E. Henley, and had also contributed his notes on "Picturesque Edinburgh" to Hamerton's _Portfolio_. In 1879 Stevenson set sail for the new world taking ship as a mere emigrant, crossing the ocean as a steerage passenger and afterwards by emigrant train, across the American continent to the Golden Gate; a rude but romantic method of travel for one who had been nurtured in comfort and a chronic sufferer from ill health; a long journey though destined to be but the beginnings of a wandering after peace and health which latterly brought him to "Vailima" by the shore of that "ultimate island where now rest the remains of the beloved "Tusitala." The "Amateur Emigrant" did not at once meet with the success it deserved in the American literary arena, though no one will deny but that praise was afterward showered upon the author's work to the full. Eight months were spent in the immediate vicinity of the Golden Gate when he succumbed to a severe illness which proved a serious draft on his powers. In 1880, Stevenson, then in his thirty-first year, was married to Mrs. Osbourne, an American lady whom he had known in France, and with his step-son Lloyd Osbourne and Mrs. Stevenson took up his abode in an abandoned mining camp at Juan Silverado, situated in the mountains of the Coast range. The life here can be no more pleasantly referred to than by recalling the record which was given to the public in "Silverado Squatters." The family remained at Silverado through the summer from whence they all journeyed to the old home in North Britain. For his health's sake, Stevenson, accompanied by his household, then betook himself to the dry and invigorating atmosphere of Davos Platz in the high Alps; and here amid the sunshine and the clear air the family settled for a winter's stay; and here it was that Stevenson, in conjunction with his step-son, concocted those ingenious and unique booklets known to collectors as the "Davos Platz Brochures." They had set up a small press and derived much pleasure in designing and printing these little books; "Black Canyon," "Not I," and "Moral Emblems," all of which are now of such extreme rarity as to be almost unobtainable in their original state. In 1881 was begun the actual labor of writing "Treasure Island," the germ of which had been lying dormant in Stevenson's brain since his early schoolboy days. After another visit to Scotland, Stevenson set his footsteps still further to the southward and domiciled himself with his family at the Chalet la Solitude, near Hyeres near Marseilles, on the shores of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, "Treasure Island" was running its course serially in the _Young Folks Paper_, and when it appeared as a volume pointed the definite way of Stevenson's popularity, the book being in every sense his first popular success. Realizing that his malady grew no better in the southland Stevenson settled at Bournemouth, a mild winter resort on the south coast of England. Here he occupied the house presented to him by his father, and which he named "Skerryvore" after the lighthouse off the coast of Scotland, designed and built by his uncle, Alan Stevenson. Stevenson continued his literary labours at this place unremittingly, though never at any one extended period was he really free from the dread grasp of his malady. Up to now writing had brought him but scant profit, and until his thirty-sixth year, says Mr. Colvin, his income had scarcely, if ever, exceeded three hundred pounds per year. His second great success was that weird tale of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and thenceforth he came to know his value as a writer of ability, and felt definitely assured that his labors would return to him a satisfying income. In 1887, after the death of his father, Stevenson again went to America, sailing for New York in August of that year, and sojourning for short periods among and with friends in the East. In the spring of 1888, when in his thirty-eighth year, Stevenson accompanied by members of his family, accepted an offer to cruise among the islands of the South Seas and write the story of his voyagings in a series of letters to a syndicate of newspapers. Arrangements were made for the charter of the schooner Casco, Captain Otis, in which he set sail from San Francisco, early in the spring, bound ostensibly for the "Marquesas." The cruise covered six months. During the voyage northward the Stevensons stayed some months at Honolulu and while there a visit was paid to the leper settlement on the island of Molokai, which ultimately called forth the "open letter" to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu, wherein that Reverend gentleman received an unmitigated scathing from Stevenson's incensed pen, an incident which is only too readily recalled for one to linger over it at this time. From Honolulu the cruise was continued southward for another six months on a trading schooner called the Equator which arrived at Apia, in Samoa, about Christmas time (1889). Here the company remained for some weeks, and here Stevenson purchased an estate of some hundreds of acres, lying on the mountainside overlooking the sea, which he called _Vailima_. The Stevensons went to Sidney, N. S. W. soon after, but again in the month of April steamed away in the trading steamer Janet Nicoll, visiting Auckland and the Penrhyn Islands, thence to the Ellis, Gilbert, and Marshall Islands and via New Caledonia, Sydney, and Auckland to Apia where they arrived again in the early autumn. They settled here upon their estate and the following spring Mrs. Stevenson, the elder, joined the household, as also Stevenson's step-daughter, Mrs. Strong; thus began the four remaining years of Stevenson's life, amid the ties of kith and kin surrounding him as he worked in his exile in a far away land. Amid these pleasant surroundings Stevenson pursued his constant and daily work, and rode about his island home entertaining the population, both native and European. He became actively interested in the political life of the islands, and when international complications came upon them in 1891, he dignified the whole proceedings by his impartial letters to the _London Times_, and later by the publication of the "Footnote to History," a monograph published in 1892. Meanwhile he was applying himself to his writing with ardous persistancy, and quoting his own words from a letter written in 1893, he was seriously overworked, "_I am overworked bitterly, and my hand is a thing that was, and in the meanwhile so are my brains._" In January of the same year he suffered from an attack of influenza from which he never fully recovered. While yet ill in bed he had begun to dictate "St. Ives" and "Weir of Hermiston." From the Dictionary of National Biography is taken the following description of the sad end. "On the afternoon of the Fourth of December he was talking gaily with his wife, when a sudden rupture of a blood-vessel in the brain laid him at her feet and within two hours all was over." * * * * * Out across the pearly Pacific on the lonely mountainside at Samoa, lies all that once was mortal of "_Tusitala, the Teller of Tales_." _APPARITION._ _"Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face-- Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race. Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, The brown eyes radiant with vivacity-- There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace Of passion and impudence and energy. Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist: A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, And something of the Shorter-Catechist."_ (W. E. HENLEY) [Illustration: FRONTISPIECE, BY WALTER CRANE, TO AN "INLAND VOYAGE." (FIRST EDITION.)] [Illustration: FRONTISPIECE, BY WALTER CRANE, TO "TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY." (FIRST EDITION.)] STEVENSON'S FIRST BOOK The publication of the Stevenson letters revived interest in his career, both as man and writer. His first published book, as our readers will remember, was "The Pentland Rising," a pamphlet of twenty pages issued in Edinburgh in the autumn of 1866, when the author was but sixteen. At the time of Stevenson's death copies of this little work were sold for upwards of £20 a piece, but the price afterwards fell considerably. In 1868, he wrote the "Charity Bazaar," a boyish skit, filling four pages quarto, and which was privately printed. His next appearance in print seems to have been in the pages of a college paper, the _Edinburgh University Magazine_, which he and three fellow-students edited, and which lived through four numbers only. These numbers were issued from January to April, 1871. He says: "A pair of little active brothers--Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a bookshop over against the University building--had been debauched to play the part of publishers." The first number was edited by all four associates, the second by Stevenson and James Walter Ferrier, the third by Stevenson alone, and of the last he says: "It has long been a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth," and then: "It would perhaps be still more difficult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked so hopefully in the Livingstones' window! Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense! And, shall I say, Poor editors? I cannot pity myself, to whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but only the wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled into half-birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night." Stevenson contributed six articles to the four numbers, one of which, "An Old Scotch Gardener," he revised and reprinted in "Memories and Portraits." It will be news to many people that Stevenson was awarded the silver of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts for a paper entitled "A Notice of a New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses." This paper was printed separately from the Transactions of the Society in a thin pamphlet, consisting of five pages of text only, beside the title-leaf. It has the headlines, "Mr. R. L. Stevenson on a New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses," and contains five illustrations in the text.--_Publishers' Circular._ BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME _By R. L. S._ The Editor has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his correspondents, the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and review that the writer awakes to find himself engaged upon something in the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, upon a chapter in the life of that little, beautiful brother whom we once all had, and whom we have all lost and mourned, the man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be. But when word has been passed (even to an editor), it should, if possible, be kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too little, and sometimes weak and say too much, the blame must lie at the door of the person who entrapped me. The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lesson of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change--that monstrous, consuming _ego_ of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our education is answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite passed away. The dying Lear had a great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous did it appear in sense so overpowering in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best friend outside of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan--the elderly D'Artagnan of the "Vicomte de Bragelonne." I know not a more human soul, nor, in his way, a finer; I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much of a pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of Musketeers. Lastly, I must name the "Pilgrim's Progress," a book that breathes of every beautiful and valuable emotion. But of works of art little can be said; their influence is profound and silent, like the influence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink them up like water, and are bettered, yet know how. It is in books more specifically didactic that we can follow out the effect, and distinguish and weigh and compare. A book which has been very influential upon me fell early into my hands, and so may stand first, though I think its influence was only sensible later on, and perhaps still keeps growing, for it is a book not easily outlived; the "Essais" of Montaigne. That temperate and general picture of life is a great gift to place in the hands of persons of to-day; they will find in these smiling pages a magazine of heroism and wisdom, all of an antique strain; they will have their "linen decencies" and excited orthodoxies fluttered, and will (if they have any gift of reading) perceive that these have not been fluttered without some excuse and ground of reason; and (again if they have any gift of reading) they will end by seeing that this old gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, and held in a dozen ways a nobler view of life, than they or their contemporaries. The next book, in order of time, to influence me, was the New Testament, and in particular the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I believe it would startle and move any one if they could make a certain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one would then be able to see in it those truths which we are all courteously supposed to know and all modestly refrain from applying. But upon this subject it is perhaps better to be silent. I come next to Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading. I will be very frank--I believe it is so with all good books, except, perhaps, fiction. The average man lives, and must live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder charges of the truth are more apt to discompose than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches the closer round that little idol of part-truths and part-conveniences which is the contemporary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, forgets what is old, and becomes truly blasphemous and indecent himself. New truth is only useful to supplement the old; rough truth is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our civil and often elegant conventions. He who cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the daily papers. There he will get little harm, and, in the first at least, some good. Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came under the influence of Herbert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi exists, and few better. How much of his vast structure will bear the touch of time, how much is clay and how much brass, it were too curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, are always manly and honest; there dwells in his pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked naked like an algebraic symbol, but still joyful; and the reader will find there a _caput-mortuum_ of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but with most of its essentials; and these two qualities make his a wholesome, as his intellectual vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to Herbert Spencer. "Goethe's Life," by Lewes, had a great importance for me when it first fell into my hands--a strange instance of the partiality of man's good and man's evil. I know no one whom I less admire than Goethe; he seems a very epitome of the sins of genius, breaking open the doors of private life, and wantonly wounding friends, in that crowning offence of "Werther," and in his own character a mere pen-and-ink Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties of superior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was conscious of the rights and duties of his office. And yet in his fine devotion to his art, in his honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, what lessons are contained! Biography, usually so false to its office, does here for once perform for us some of the work of fiction, reminding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue of man's nature, and how huge faults and shining virtues cohabit and persevere in the same character. History serves us well to this effect, but in the originals, not in the pages of the popular epitomiser, who is bound, by the very nature of his task, to make us feel the difference of epochs instead of the essential identity of man, and even in the originals only to those who can recognize their own human virtues and defects in strange forms, often inverted and under strange names, often interchanged. Martial is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to read his works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly jester's serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and self-respecting gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in reading Martial, to leave out these pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at least, until I found them for myself; and this partiality is one among a thousand things that help to build up our distorted and hysterical conception of the great Roman empire. This brings us by a natural transition to a very noble book--the "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make this book; a book quite by itself. No one can read it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely or rarely appeals to the feeling--those very mobile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its address lies farther back: its lesson comes more deeply home; when you have read, you carry away with you a memory of the man himself; it is as though you had touched a royal hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble friend; there is another bond on you thenceforth, binding you to life and to the love of virtue. Wordsworth should perhaps come next. Every one has been influenced by Wordsworth, and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight of the stars, "the silence that there is among the hills," something of the cold thrill of dawn, cling to his work and give it a particular address to what is best in us. I do not know that you learn a lesson; you need not--Mill did not--agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast. Such are the best teachers: a dogma learned is only a new error--the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is best in themselves, that they communicate. I should never forgive myself if I forgot "The Egoist." It is art, if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and from all the novels I have read (and I have read thousands) stands in a place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern David. * * * "The Egoist" is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a satire of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious mote which is engaged from first to last with that invisible beam. It is yourself that is haunted down; these are your own faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the story) came to him in an agony. "This is too bad of you," he cried. "Willoughby is me!" "No, my dear fellow," said the author, "he is all of us." I have read "The Egoist" five or six times myself, and I mean to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the anecdote--I think Willoughby an unmanly but a very serviceable exposure of myself. I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that was most influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper "On the Spirit of Obligations" was a turning point in my life, and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's "Tales of Old Japan," wherein I learned for the first time the proper attitude of any rational man to his country's laws--a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic Islands. That I should commemorate all is more than I can hope, or the editor could ask. It will be more to the point, after have said so much upon improving books, to say a word or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast intellectual endowment--a free grace, I find I must call it--by which a man rises to understand that he is not punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately; and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for him. They will see the other side of propositions and the other side of virtues. He need not change his dogma for that, but he may change his reading of that dogma, and he must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy consciences. Something that seems quite new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his author's folly, he had better take to the daily papers; he will never be a reader. And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have laid down my part-truth, I must step in with its opposite. For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited content. Not all men can read all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome to the mind. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief support; he goes on unafraid, laying down the law; and he is sure at heart that most of what he says is demonstrably false, and much of a mingled strain, and some hurtful, and very little good for service; but he is sure besides that when his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader, they will be weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits will be assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one who cannot intelligently read, they come there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had not written. A STEVENSON LETTER _Dear Madam_:--It is impossible to be more gracefully penitent: I give you leave to buy ----'s triple piracy in ---- the library; and this permission is withheld from all other living creatures, so that you alone will possess that publication without sin. I am, dear madam, Yours truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. March, 1887. A JUSTIFICATION Boston, June 5, 1900.--When Mr. Stevenson was at Saranac in the Adirondacks I sent him a short editorial on his Brownies that I had written for the Boston _Daily Advertiser_, and also a letter, saying that I owed him one dollar. I professed penitence for having bought a pirated copy of "Dr. Jekyll" for 25 cents, and promised to make good the deficit if I ever met him. He sent me the letter above. In May, eleven years later, Miss Louise Imogene Guiney invited me to meet her friend, Mrs. Virgil Williams, to be told--for print--the true story of the Stevenson marriage. I was unable to go to meet Mrs. Williams at the time appointed, but a day or two later she came by Miss Guiney's introduction to an editorial desk where I had been for eight years in the office of the Boston _Evening Transcript_, and gave me certain facts, from which the article below was written. It appeared in _The Transcript_, May 18, 1898. MINNA CAROLINE SMITH. MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, who has been ill in New York, has recovered and has gone to England for an indefinite stay. It is, however, her purpose to make her home again ultimately in San Francisco. Her presence in England is necessary, as Mr. Sidney Colvin is now engaged in writing the "Life of Stevenson," and depends upon Mrs. Stevenson for aid in compilation, and in deciding what shall be said and what shall be left out. A great deal has been said about the Stevensons which might much better have been left unsaid, for the simple reason that it is not true. Like the old story of Phillips Brooks and the boy with the "Episcopalian Kittens," some of the truthless tales are harmless. Others are less innocuous than the imaginative yarns which are always likely to be current about any bright personality, any "shining mark," like Stevenson and his accomplished wife. Now that he is dead, and Mrs. Stevenson has gone to his native Britain, it is well to deny authoritatively the absurd story which has often been revived during the past twenty years that Mrs. Stevenson's first husband, Mr. Osbourne, gave her away in marriage on the day of her wedding to Robert Louis Stevenson, and that Stevenson afterwards fraternized with his predecessor. As a matter of fact, Stevenson never in his life even saw the father of Lloyd Osbourne, who was about fourteen years of age at the time of his mother's marriage to the famous Scot. The father of Stevenson, an old-time Presbyterian gentlemen, made Lloyd Osbourne his heir, thus wholly welcoming his beloved daughter-in-law in the family, where she and her children have found happiness and where they gave so much. It is advisedly said that the elder Stevenson made Lloyd Osbourne his heir, his property to be that of his son's step-child after the death of his son and that son's wife. It is well known that Stevenson's mother was with his family in Samoa, and this dignified and conservative lady also followed the custom of the country which the family followed, in homely phrase, "going bare-footed" at home. Pictures of Stevenson in his Samoa home, enjoying the freedom of this native fashion, have been common enough. This Samoan custom seemed simple and natural to any one who saw the Stevensons in Samoa going without shoes and stockings, quite as summer girls on the Massachusetts shore have gone about without gloves or hats during recent years, an unconventionality which would once have shocked thousands. The matter would not be worth mentioning, but a curious myth about Mrs. Stevenson has sprung from it. A paragraph has been floating through contemporaries in several cities of late, to the effect that Mrs. Stevenson went out to dine in London, when first introduced there by her husband, without shoes and stockings! This little yarn really denies itself on the face of it. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Stevenson's conformity to social customs has never been found insufficient wherever she has been. She is a woman of original talents and great adaptability of talent who, for many years, was the nurse, the "guide, philosopher and friend," as well as the beloved wife of the child of genius whose name she bears. She was studying art in Paris, where she had gone with her three children, when she first met Robert Louis Stevenson, who was among the artists and literary folk at Barbizon. She returned to America with her daughter and her son--one son had died while she was in France--and readily got a divorce from Mr. Osbourne. No word concerning the father of her children has ever been uttered for publication by Mrs. Stevenson, or ever will be. He married a second time and, after a while, left his wife and disappeared. He has since been seen in South Africa. It is here repeated that Robert Louis Stevenson never saw him. Mrs. Stevenson wished to delay her second marriage for a year, but Stevenson had travelled over land and sea to California, and was ill and homesick. So, by the advice of a close friend, the marriage was not long postponed. This friend was Mrs. Virgil Williams, wife of the well-known teacher of painting in San Francisco, the founder of that pioneer art school of the West, which, since Mr. Williams's death, was munificently endowed by Mr. Searles as the Hopkins Institute. Mrs. Williams went with the pair to the house of Dr. Scott, a Presbyterian minister of San Francisco, who married Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson. Nobody else was present at the private wedding, except Mrs. Scott, the wife of the minister. This divine made Stevenson a present of a religious book of his own writing to read on the journey to Scotland, and the whimsical fear of Stevenson that he might not read it all while crossing the continent and the Atlantic was characteristic. But if he felt that this was not sufficiently light reading for a steamer journey he appreciated the gift, and in return sent Dr. Scott a book on a like topic written by his father in Scotland. "People are very much like folks"; the fairy tales which are told about the famous are very likely to need large grains of salt in the taking. The simple truth about the Stevensons was that theirs was a peculiarly fortunate and happy marriage, and that if they lived in Bohemia it was "on the airy uplands" of that land, where freedom of personal action never meant wilful foolish eccentricity or lack of conformity to the canons of true courtesy and kindness. THE DAVOS PLATZ BOOKS Mr. Joseph Pennell has contributed to _The Studio_ an account of an unpublished chapter, which is delightful reading and reveals Stevenson to the world as an illustrator and wood engraver. With the people of Le Monastier, the lace-makers, Stevenson became a popular figure and was known for miles in the country. In the town every urchin seemed to know his name, "although no living creature could pronounce it." One group of lace-makers brought out a chair whenever he went by, and insisted on having a good gossip. They would have it that the English talked French, or patois, and "of all patois they declared that mine was the most preposterous and the most jocose in sound. At each new word there was a new explosion of laughter, and some of the younger ones were glad to rise from their chairs and stamp about the streets in ecstasy." In a notice of the article, a writer in _The London Chronicle_ says: [Illustration: NOT I, And Other POEMS, _BY_ Robert Louis Stevenson, Author of _The Blue Scalper, Travels with a Donkey, etc._ PRICE 8d. BLACK CANYON _or_ Wild Adventures in the FAR WEST A Tale of Instruction and Amusement for the Young. _BY SAMUEL OSBOURNE_ ILLUSTRATED. _Printed by the Author._ Davos-Platz.] "There was a dear old lady of Monastier with whom he struck up an attachment. She passed judgment on his sketches and his heresy with a wry mouth and a twinkle of the eye that were eminently Scottish. 'She was never weary of sitting to me for her portrait, in her best cap and brigand hat, and with all her wrinkles tidily composed, and though she never failed to repudiate the result, she would always insist upon another trial. * * * "No, no," she would say, "that is not it. I am old, to be sure, but I am better looking than that. We must try again." "But the most characteristic work of Stevenson as illustrator is to be found in the quaint little woodcuts which adorned the volumes turned out by the press of Osbourne & Co. at Davos. With some very primitive type and a boundless capacity for frivoling, this 'company,' consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson and young Lloyd Osbourne, managed to while away the hours of the Swiss Winter in delightful fashion. As Mr. Pennell states in _The Studio_ these Davos editions are exceedingly hard to secure. The British Museum itself has only two copies, and there is no hint of their existence in any of the published works. One of these works was entitled 'Moral Emblems; a Collection of Cuts and Verses.' "There was also a second collection of 'Moral Emblems, an edition de luxe, in tall paper, extra fine, price tenpence, and a popular edition for the million, small paper, cuts slightly worn, a great bargain, eightpence.' Another of these volumes was entitled 'The Graver and the Pen,' of which the author asserted on the poster that it was 'a most strikingly illustrated little work, and the poetry so pleasing that when it is taken up to be read is finished before it is set down.' There were five full-page illustrations, eleven pages of poetry finely printed on superb paper, and the whole work offered a splendid chance for an energetic publisher. One of the moral emblems runs as follows: "Industrious pirate! See him sweep The lonely bosom of the deep, And daily the horizon scan From Hatteras or Matapan. Be sure, before that pirate's old, He will have made a pot of gold, And will retire from all his labors And be respected by his neighbors. You also scan your life's horizon For all that you can clap your eyes on. "Sometimes an unintentional effect was introduced into the woodcuts, as in the case of 'The Foolhardy Geographer.' We cannot tell the story, but the effect is thus described in a postscript: "A blemish in the cut appears, Alas! it cost both blood and tears. The glancing graver swerved aside, Fast flowed the artist's vital tide! And now the apologetic bard Demands indulgence for his pard." STEVENSON'S LATER LETTERS _London Bookman, Dec. 1899._ Out of these noble volumes of Stevenson letters two things come to me of new, of which the first is the more important. Before and above all else these books (with their appendage, the Vailima Correspondence) are the record of as noble a friendship as I know of in letters. And perhaps, as following from this, we have here a Stevenson without shadows. Not even a full statue, but rather a medallion in low relief--as it were the St. Gaudens bust done into printer's ink. It is difficult to say precisely what one feels, with Mr. Colvin (and long may he be spared) still in the midst of us. And yet I cannot help putting it on record that what impresses me most in these volumes, wherein are so many things lovely and of good report, is the way in which, in order that one friend may shine like a city set on a hill, the other friend consistently retires himself into deepest shade. Yet all the same Mr. Colvin is ever on the spot. You can trace him on every page--emergent only when an explanation must be made, never saying a word too much, obviously in possession of all the facts, but desirous of no reward or fame or glory to himself if only Tusitala continue to shine the first among his peers. Truly there is a love not perhaps _sur_passing the love of women, but certainly _passing_ it, in that it is different in kind and degree. Obviously, however, Mr. Colvin often wounded with the faithful wounds of a friend, and sometimes in return he was blessed, and sometimes he was banned. But always the next letter made it all right. To those outside of his family and familiars Stevenson was always a charming and sometimes a regular correspondent. To myself, with no claim upon him save that of a certain instinctive mutual liking, he wrote with the utmost punctuality every two months from 1888 to the week of his death. It is the irony of fate that about thirty of these letters lie buried somewhere beneath, above, or behind an impenetrable barrier of 25,000 books. In a certain great "flitting" conducted by village workmen these manuscripts disappeared, and have so far eluded all research. But at the next upturning of the Universe, I doubt not they will come to light and be available for Mr. Colvin's twentieth edition. It was a great grief to me that I had no more to contribute besides those few but precious documents which appear in their places in the second volume of "Letters to Family and Friends." Albeit, in spite of every such blank, here is such richness as has not been in any man's correspondence since Horace Walpole's--yet never, like his, acidly-based, never razor-edged, never, for all Stevenson's Edinburgh extraction, either west-endy or east-windy. Here in brief are two books, solid, sane, packed with wit and kindliness and filled full of the very height of living. Not all of Stevenson is here--it seems to me, not even the greater part of Stevenson. Considered from one point of view, there is more of the depths of the real Stevenson in a single chapter of Miss Eve Simpson's "Edinburgh Days," especially in the chapter entitled "Life at Twenty-five," than in any of these 750 fair pages. But with such a friend as Mr. Colvin this was inevitable. He has carried out that finest of the maxims of amity, "Censure your friend in private, praise him in public!" And, indeed, if ever man deserved to be praised it was Stevenson. So generous was he, so ready to be pleased with other men's matters, so hard to satisfy with his own, a child among children, a man among men, a king among princes. Yet, all the same, anything of the nature of a play stirred him to the shoe soles, down to that last tragic bowl of salad and bottle of old Burgundy on the night before he died. He was a fairy prince and a peasant boy in one, Aladdin with an old lamp under his arm always ready to be rubbed, while outside his window Jack's beanstalk went clambering heavenward a foot every five minutes. All the same, it gives one a heartache--even those of us who knew him least--to think that no more of these wide sheets close written and many times folded will ever come to us through the post. And what the want must be to those who knew him longer and better, to Mr. Colvin, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Henley, only they know. For myself, I am grateful for every word set down here. It is all sweet, and true, and gracious. The heaven seems kinder to the earth while we read, and in the new portrait Tusitala's large dark eyes gleam at us from beneath the penthouse of his brows with a gipsy-like and transitory suggestion. "The Sprite" some one called him. And it was a true word. For here he had no continuing city. Doubtless, though, he lightens some Farther Lands with his bright wit, and such ministering spirits as he may cross on his journeying are finding him good company. _Talofa, Tusitala_; do not go very far away! We too would follow you down the "Road of Loving Hearts." S. R. CROCKETT. [Illustration: THE PENTLAND RISING A PAGE OF HISTORY 1666 'A cloud of witnesses ly here, Who for Christ's interest did appear.' _Inscription on Battle-field at Rullion Green._ EDINBURGH ANDREW ELLIOT, 17 PRINCES STREET 1866] A STEVENSON SHRINE _By Emily Soldene_ In 1896 I strolled down Market Street, San Francisco, looking into the curio- and other shops under the Palace Hotel, when my attention was attracted by a crowd of people round one particular shop-window. Now, a crowd in San Francisco (except on political occasions) is an uncommon sight. Naturally, with the curiosity of my sex and the perseverance of the Anglo-Saxon, I took my place in the surging mass and patiently waited till the course of events, and the shoulders of my surroundings, brought me up close to the point of vantage. What came they out for to see? It was a bookseller's window. In the window was a shrine. "The Works and Portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson," proclaimed a placard all illuminated and embossed with red and purple and green and gold. In the centre of the display was an odd-looking document. This, then, was the loadstone--a letter of Stevenson's, in Stevenson's own handwriting. Many people stood and read, then turned away, sad and sorrowful-looking. "Poor fellow!" said one woman. "But he's all right now. I guess he's got more than he asked for." I stood, too, and read. Before I had finished, my eyes, unknowingly, were full of tears. This is the document. When you have read, you will not wonder at the tears. "I think now, this 5th or 6th of April, 1873, that I can see my future life. I think it will run stiller and stiller year by year, a very quiet, desultorily studious existence. If God only gives me tolerable health, I think now I shall be very happy: work and science calm the mind, and stop gnawing in the brain; and as I am glad to say that I do now recognise that I shall never be a great man, I may set myself peacefully on a smaller journey, not without hope of coming to the inn before nightfall. _O dass mein leben Nach diesem ziel ein ewig wandeln sey!_" I walked on a block or so, and, after a few minutes, when I thought my voice was steady and under control, turned back, went into the book-store, and asked the young man in attendance, "Could I be allowed to take a copy of the letter in the window?" He told me it was not, as I thought, an original document, but the printed reproduction of a memorandum found among the dead Stevenson's papers. "Then," said I, "can I not have one--can I not buy one?" And the young man shook his head. "No; they are not for sale." "Oh, I am sorry!" said I. "I would have given anything for one." "Well," said he, in a grave voice, and with a grave smile, "they are not, indeed, for sale; but have been printed for a particular purpose, and one will be given to all lovers of Stevenson." He spoke in such a low, reverent, sympathetic tone that I _knew his_ eyes must be full, and so I would not look. Next day I went to see _Mr. Doxey_ himself, who is a Stevenson enthusiast, and has one window (the window of the crowd) devoted entirely to Stevenson. All his works, all his editions--including the Edinburgh Edition--are there; and he, with the greatest kindness, showed me the treasures he had collected. In the first place, the number of portraits was astonishing. Years and conditions and circumstances, all various and changing; but the face--the face always the same. The eyes, wonderful in their keenness, their interrogative, questioning, eager gaze; the looking out, always looking out, always asking, looking ahead, far away into some distant land not given to _les autres_ to perceive. That wonderful looking out was the first thing that impressed me when I met Mr. Stevenson in Sydney in '93. Unfortunately for us, he only stayed there a short time, would not visit, was very difficult of access, not at all well, and when he went seemed to disappear, not go. Mr. Doxey had pictures of him in every possible phase--in turn-down collar, in no collar at all; his hair long, short, and middling; in oils, in water-colour, in photos, in a smoking-cap and Imperial; with a moustache, without a moustache; young, youthful, dashing, Byronic; not so youthful, middle-aged; looking in _this_ like a modern Manfred; in _that_ like an epitome of the fashions, wearing a debonair demeanour and a _degage_ tie; as a boy, as a barrister; on horseback, in a boat. There was a portrait taken by Mrs. Stevenson in 1885, and one lent by Virgil Williams; another, a water-colour, lent by Miss O'Hara; and a wonderful study of his wonderful hands. Then he was photographed in his home at Samoa, surrounded by his friends and his faithful, devoted band of young men, his Samoan followers; in the royal boat-house at Honolulu, seated side by side with his Majesty King Kalakaua; on board the _Casco_. Here, evidently anxious for a really good picture, he has taken off his hat, standing in the sun bareheaded. At a native banquet, surrounded by all the delicacies of the season, bowls of _kava_, _poi_, _palo-sami_, and much good company. Then the later ones at Vailima; in the clearing close to his house, in the verandah. Later still, writing in his bed. Coming to the "inn" he talks about in 1873--coming so close, close, unexpectedly, but not unprepared--Robert Louis Stevenson has passed the veil. Not dead, but gone before, he lives in the hearts of all people. But not so palpably, so outwardly, so proudly, as in the hearts of these people of the Sunny Land, who, standing on the extreme verge of the Western world, shading their eyes from the shining glory, watch the sunshine go out through the Golden Gate, out on its way across the pearly Pacific to the lonely Mountain of Samoa where lies the body of the man "Tusitala," whose songs and lessons and stories fill the earth, and the souls of the people thereof. On the fly-leaf of the copy of "The Silverado Squatters," sent to "Virgil Williams and Dora Norton Williams," to whom it was dedicated, is the following poem in the handwriting of the author, written at Hyeres, where, as he says in his diary, he spent the happiest days of his life-- Here, from the forelands of the tideless sea, Behold and take my offering unadorned. In the Pacific air it sprang; it grew Among the silence of the Alpine air; In Scottish heather blossomed; and at last, By that unshapen sapphire, in whose face Spain, Italy, France, Algiers, and Tunis view Their introverted mountains, came to fruit. Back now, my booklet, on the diving ship, And posting on the rails to home, return Home, and the friends whose honouring name you bear. --_The Sketch, Feb. 26, 1896_ STEVENSON AND HAZLITT Of the many books which Robert Louis Stevenson planned and discussed with his friends in his correspondence there is none, perhaps, which would have been more valued than the biography of William Hazlitt. Whenever Stevenson refers to Hazlitt, whether in his essay on "Walking Tours" or in his letters, he makes one wish he would say more. This is what he writes to Mr. Hammerton: _"I am in treaty with Bentley for a Life of Hazlitt; I hope it will not fall through as I love the subject, and appear to have found a publisher who loves it also. That, I think, makes things more pleasant. You know I am a fervent Hazlittite; I mean regarding him as the English writer who has had the scantiest justice. Besides which, I am anxious to write biography; really, if I understand myself in quest of profit, I think it must be good to live with another man from birth to death. You have tried it, and know."_ If the qualification of a biographer is to understand his subject, Stevenson may be said to have been well qualified to write on Hazlitt. Mr. Leslie Stephen has given us a fine critical estimate of Hazlitt the writer, and the late Mr. Ireland's prefatory memoir to his admirable selection from the Essays, with its enforced limitations, is an excellent piece of biographical condensation, but the life of the essayist has yet to be written. The subject has been tried by many others, but no one has quite captured the spirit of Hazlitt. Had the details of Hazlitt's life, with his passionate hates and loves, been told by himself in the manner of his beloved Rousseau, he might have produced a book which for interest would have rivalled the _Confessions_, but failing such a work one must deplore that Stevenson was not encouraged to write on the subject. _I. R., in London Academy._ ON BERANGER _From the article by Robert Louis Stevenson in the Encyclopædia Britannica._ ....He worked deliberately, never wrote more than fifteen songs a year and often less, and was so fastidious that he has not preserved a quarter of what he finished. "I am a good little bit of a poet," he says himself, "clever in the craft, and a conscientious worker, to whom old airs and a modest choice of subjects (_le coin ou je me suis confine_), have brought some success." Nevertheless, he makes a figure of importance in literary history. When he first began to cultivate the _chanson_, this minor form lay under some contempt, and was restricted to slight subjects and a humorous guise of treatment. Gradually he filled these little chiseled toys of verbal perfection with ever more and more sentiment. From a date comparatively early he had determined to sing for the people. It was for this reason that he fled, as far as possible, the houses of his influential friends, and came back gladly to the garret and the street corner. Thus it was, also, that he came to acknowledge obligations to Emile Debraux, who had often stood between him and the masses as interpreter, and given him the key-note of the popular humour. Now, he had observed in the songs of sailors, and all who labour, a prevailing tone of sadness; and so, as he grew more masterful in this sort of expression, he sought more and more after what is deep, serious, and constant in the thoughts of common men. The evolution was slow; and we can see in his own works examples of every stage, from that of witty indifference in fifty pieces of the first collection, to that of grave and even tragic feeling in _Les Souvenirs du Peuple_ or _Le Vieux Vagabond_. And this innovation involved another, which was as a sort of prelude to the great romantic movement. For the _chanson_, as he says himself, opened up to him a path in which his genius could develop itself at ease; he escaped, by this literary postern, from strict academical requirements, and had at his disposal the whole dictionary, four-fifths of which, according to La Harpe, were forbidden to the use of more regular and pretentious poetry. If he still kept some of the old vocabulary, some of the old imagery, he was yet accustoming people to hear moving subjects treated in a manner more free and simple than heretofore; so that his was a sort of conservative reform, preceding the violent revolution of Victor Hugo and his army of uncompromising romantics. He seems himself to have had glimmerings of some such idea; but he withheld his full approval from the new movement on two grounds:--first, because the romantic school misused somewhat brutally the delicate organism of the French language; and second, as he wrote to Sainte-Beuve in 1832, because they adopted the motto of "Art for art," and set no object of public usefulness before them as they wrote. For himself (and this is the third point of importance) he had a strong sense of political responsibility. Public interest took a far higher place in his estimation than any private passion or favour. He had little toleration for those erotic poets who sing their own loves and not the common sorrows of mankind, "who forget," to quote his own words, "forget beside their mistress those who labour before the Lord."... STEVENSON OF THE LETTERS. Long, hatchet face, black hair, and haunting gaze, That follows, as you move about the room, Ah, this is he who trod the darkening ways, And plucked the flowers upon the edge of doom. The bright, sweet-scented flowers that star the road To death's dim dwelling, others heed them not, With sad eyes fixed upon that drear abode, Weeping, and wailing their unhappy lot. But he went laughing down the shadowed way, The boy's heart leaping still within his breast, Weaving his garlands when his mood was gay, Mocking his sorrows with a solemn jest. The high Gods gave him wine to drink; a cup Of strong desire, of knowledge, and of pain, He set it to his lips and drank it up, Then smiling, turned unto his flowers again. These are the flowers of that immortal strain, Which, when the hand that plucked them drops and dies, Still keep their radiant beauty free from stain, And breathe their fragrance through the centuries. B. PAUL NEWMAN. APROPOS VAILIMA LETTERS. The account of an interview with Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, published in a San Francisco paper, is somewhat distressing reading. It raises over again the old question of the prudence of publishing a dead man's letters, when his widow is still alive, without her sanction. Mrs. Stevenson says that her late husband's friends--if such she still holds them to be--have hastened to make money out of the scraps and scrawls he sent them. The charge reads as an ugly one. But a moment's reflection supplies its modifications. Has Mr. Henley rushed into the market-place with his dead friend's letters? Has Mr. Charles Baxter? That was the old trio renowned in song and famous in fable. Of the newer friends--friends such as those he made in Bournemouth, Lady Shelley and the Misses Ashworth Taylor, the most attached a man ever had--not one has brought out of his or her treasury the delightful letters of "R. L. S." We have the Vailima Letters, it is true, but surely these must be published by the consent of Mrs. Stevenson and at her profit? We had also that letter which Mr. Gosse sent to the _Times_. And, as for that, it was, obviously given and not "sold"? In this particular letter, which was written in acknowledgment of a dedication of Mr. Gosse's poems to him, Stevenson congratulated his correspondent on the prospect of an old age mitigated by the society of his descendants. To heighten the picture, the man who had learned his craft so well, and could hardly elude it in his least-considered letters, introduced his own figure as a sort of foil--he was childless. That word, uttered with regret, has, perhaps, a pang which the heart of a widow might imagine she should be spared. Again, in one of the Vailima Letters, Stevenson refers to his having been happy only once in his life, and that, too, on the chance of its misinterpretation, may be ashes in Mrs. Stevenson's mouth. Yet who does not know "R. L. S." as a man of moods? He is that, and nothing else, in some of his letters. And no chance phrase of his will ever be read to the discredit of Mrs. Stevenson--she may take the English reader's oath on that. In one of his Vailima Letters Stevenson speaks of the "incredible" pains he has given to the first chapter of "Weir of Hermiston." Yet, after that even he remodelled it. It was worth the trouble, and the other seven and a bit are worthy of it. The very title was a serious trouble to him. "Braxfield" he would have liked it to be, but the judge of that name was not treated with enough historical care to warrant the adoption of it. Another name, "The Hanging Judge," he abandoned; also "The Lord Justice Clerk," also "The Two Kirsties of Cauldstaneship," and "The Four Black Brothers." No doubt in choosing "Weir of Hermiston"--with some of the sound-romance of Dobell's "Keiths of Revelston" about it--he chose finally for the best.--_The Sketch._ [Illustration: NOTICE OF A NEW FORM OF INTERMITTENT LIGHT FOR LIGHTHOUSES. BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON _From the Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, Vol. VIII._, 1870-1871 EDINBURGH PRINTED BY NEILL AND COMPANY 1871] A VISIT TO STEVENSON'S PACIFIC ISLE It is a curious fact that Stevenson, whom we all regarded at home as being the personification of Samoa--indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that the average Englishman's idea of Samoa was "some island or other in the Pacific where Stevenson lives,"--has left very little behind him in the way of tradition or story in the island he loved so well. He lived in the midst of a society which, outside his immediate family surroundings, must have been eminently uncongenial to a man of his refined nature, yet he damaged his fame here, at least, by meddling in the petty squabbles which agitate the beach at Apia, and his "Footnote to History" has made him a host of enemies, notably among the German colony, who, by the mouth of one of their many prophets, condemned him to me as a writer of "stupid stinks!" And therefore he may have made a mistake in imagining himself a factor in the insoluble equation of Samoan affairs. It is to the natives that he was more attached than to the vague ideals which form their so-called political future. To them he was a great chief, "Tusitala Talmita" by name, and many a native I have spoken to mentioned him with real affection as a good friend and a man with a golden heart. Perhaps this is the praise he himself would have chosen rather than that of the white colony. It is not my purpose, however, to dilate on his life in Samoa, nor indeed would it be possible to gather, from the mass of conflicting evidence, any rational account of his doings in his island home. It is of a pilgrimage which I made to visit his library that I would give some short account. The room was walled from floor to ceiling with books, and I began to inspect them. To the left of the door were some "yellow backs," but few, nor did I see in his library much trash of any description. Next came books of travel in almost every country in the world, the bulk of them, however, dealing with the Pacific. From Capt. Cook down, it would be hard to name a Pacific travel book that has not found itself on the shelves at Vailima. Next, I am bound to say, came my first disappointment. I had always thought that Stevenson must have been a good classical scholar, and had an idea formed, I know not how or whence, that a great style--and surely his may be justly called so--necessitated a close and intimate acquaintance with those classical authors who-- "Upon the stretched forefinger of all Time Sparkle forever." Yet I found classics, indeed, but, alas! in Mr. Bohn's edition, while on the shelf beneath lay the originals uncut. It came to me as a positive blow to find the pages of the "Odyssey" uncared for and unread, save in some translation. Of Horace he had many and good editions, and they seemed read and used; but of the Greek tragedians I found only "Sophocles" in Prof. Campbell's translation, and no edition of his plays save a small "OEdipus the King." This was a great shock to me, for even supposing that Stevenson was only "a maker of phrases" (as many people will tell you, above all here, "for a prophet is not without honor," etc.), still phrases must have some basis in education, and a man who is evidently careless of his masters of ancient language is not likely to prove a brilliant coiner of words. Turning with regret from this shelf, I came next upon a fine collection of French works, beginning with a complete edition of Balzac, which had evidently been read with care. Much French fiction was here--Daudet's "Tartarin," "Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine," "Les Rois en Exil," Guy de Maupassant, Prosper Merimee and a complete Victor Hugo, besides a swarm of the more ephemeral novels. Here, too, was a fine and complete edition of "Wellington's Dispatches" and several military treatises. Next to these came a good collection (be it always remembered that I speak of Samoa in Samoa, and 14,000 miles from the home of English and French publishing and printing) of historical works; Gibbon, of course, Milman, Von Ranke and many of the old French chroniclers--Philippe de Comines especially--read and marked, no doubt, when Stevenson was writing "The Black Arrow." One passage so marked struck me as curious. Surely Stevenson was a man whom, from his writings, one would imagine to be practically without enemies; yet, in the light of events at Apia, and from what I have heard here, the quotation seems apposite; "Je scay bien que ma lange m'a porte grande hommage, aussi m'a-t-elle fait quelques fois de plaisir beaucoup, toutesfois c'est raison que je repare l'amende." Now these are almost the exact words which conclude the preface to the only deplorable book Stevenson ever wrote--his "Footnote to History," which has made him many enemies, and, I think, no friends--in fact, nothing but the vigorous description of the hurricane saves it from worthlessness. As history it is not trustworthy, and as a footnote it was ridiculous. However, to return to the books. There was a very complete collection of modern poets, hardly any of note being omitted. I even saw a copy of "J. K. S.'s" "Lapsus Calami," which surprised me, for Stevenson was neither a Cambridge nor a public school man. Such, then, in brief, is a rough summary of the library of this remarkable man; many of the editions de luxe were packed away, but I believe what I saw was his working stock. We now opened a little glass door leading from the room into Stevenson's sanctum, where he dictated almost all his work. It was quite a small room, lighted by two windows; and in one corner lay a bed with a mat "Samoan fashion" spread thereon, while beside it was a table with a bunch of withered flowers (the last he ever looked on), and which Mr. Chatfield has very properly never permitted to be removed. Here, in one corner, stood a small bookcase with editions of his own works; the walls were hung with engravings of ancestors--the only sign of his Scotch origin I noted in the house--while above the chimney-piece (the only chimney-pieces and fire-places in Samoa are at Vailima), were a lovely series of drawings of Gordon Browne, to illustrate one of his later books, "The Island Nights' Adventures." These pictures, though only in black and white, breathe the spirit of the islands in a marvellous manner, especially remarkable being the illustration, "The Beach of Falesa." In a small bookcase over the head of the bed were some of his own books, a Shakespeare, and, what was more curious, "A Record of Remarkable Crimes and Criminals." I heard that Stevenson was fond of "supping full of horrors," and that would, of course, account for the inevitable murder or bloodshed which haunts his books; he was an avid reader of murders and crimes of all sorts. His mind was of a curious cast. Mr. Chatfield told me that on some days he was the most charming of companions--brilliant, witty and fascinating; on others, dull and morose beyond description, hardly uttering a word, and giving no sign of the wealth of tenderness and genial kindness that lurked within. As a host, it is agreed on all hands he was incomparable. His entertainment catered for the tastes of all, and in the sunshine of his delightful company all sorts and conditions of men were happy. We left this room with a feeling of depression, and passing through the other to the door, my eye fell on what I had not before noticed, the original of the delightful map which is the frontispiece to Treasure Island--a most beautiful piece of drawing, reminding me, in its quaint accompaniments of spouting dolphins and horn-blowing Tritons, as much as in its pretended accuracy, of those strange maps in the earlier editions of Gulliver, where Brobdingnag, Laputa, etc., are all laid out with geographical detail of latitude and longitude. The curious, sprawling writing of Flint and Billy Bones were in contrast to the fine workmanship of the rest of the map, which, save for some slight coarseness in the shading of the steeper side of "Spyglass Hill," might have been engraved. The last thing I saw in the library was perhaps the most curious of all. It was a navigating chart constructed by the natives of the Wallis Islands for their own use and guidance. I have since learned that such charts are used by the traders also who navigate these latitudes. The form of the charts is a parallelogram constructed on a framework of cane or other light wood. Across this parallelogram run vertically convex pieces of wood bent to show the general run or set of the wind and waves; cross currents are marked with cross pieces of wood showing their direction, and their force and variation are indicated on the slips of wood themselves (which are not half an inch wide) by means of signs and curious marks. Islands are denoted on this wonderful piece of native work by cowrie shells fastened to the framework. I suppose Stevenson must have picked this up on his travels among the islands, and I believe that although these charts are universally used in the Wallis group and are found perfectly correct, very few specimens of the kind have emerged as yet from those islands. I puzzled a long time to guess what it was, Mrs. Chatfield enjoying my mystification, which she herself had experienced when she first saw this remarkable map. One more fact I must mention about the library. In a corner I found a number of quarto volumes, well bound, containing apparently a continuous day-book of some of Stevenson's many voyages. It is to be hoped that these journals may some day be given to the world. Many and curious were the scenes he witnessed; various and entertaining the personages he must have met on his travels. He seems to have visited most of the many groups of islets with which the Pacific is so plentifully sprinkled. I did not care to visit the rest of the house, though my hostess most kindly offered to show me anything she could, but I stood outside and looked at the lofty hill over the house where he sleeps his last sleep in the land and among the people he loved so well. Samoans show much poetic feeling in selecting beautiful sites for the graves of their chiefs. In my journeys round the island, in the most remote districts, I was frequently delighted by coming suddenly upon the usual inclosure of rough stones which mark the resting-place of a chief, always in a beautiful spot and invariably commanding a wide and splendid view. This may also have been Stevenson's object in selecting the summit of the hill for his grave. The labor required to carry him to his last resting-place was immense, as many as sixty Samoans being employed, while only nineteen Europeans braved the difficulties of the ascent to be present at the sad offices. But his last home is beautiful; by day the trees innumerable round his lonely grave are musical with the fanfare of the glorious tradewinds, while at times the sound of "The league-long roller thundering on the reef" is borne across the waving forest. The view by day is superb; mountain, valley, reef and palm, with the gleam of the sunlight on the breaking surf around the distant reef, while overhead the solitary tropic bird wings its silent flight through the dazzling azure of the skies. No more beautiful spot for a grave can be imagined; the majestic voice of those southern seas he loved so well makes melody in the very air around his grave. No spot more typical of the Pacific could have been found; and I turned away with a feeling of relief that one whose nature was so allied to that he wrote of should in his death not have been divided from the scenes he made familiar to so many thousands of admirers. A PEN PORTRAIT Robert Louis Stevenson, the author, really does look like the watermelon portrait of him in one of the magazines. He sat in a Long Branch car on Tuesday on his way from Manasquan to New York. He has a long, narrow face, and wears his long brown hair parted in the middle and combed back. It is just such straight, coarse hair as General Roger A. Pryor's, but much lighter in color. Stevenson sat in a forward corner of the car, with his hat off, and the cape of his coat up behind his head like a monk's cowl. His black velvet coat and vest showed plainly, and over his legs he wore a black and white checked shawl. His Byronic collar was soft and untidy, and his shirt was unlaundered, but his clothes were scrupulously clean. On the long, thin, white fingers of his left hand he wore two rings, and he kept these fingers busy constantly pulling his drooping moustache. His face is slightly freckled and a little hollow at the cheek, but it has a good bit of Scotch color in it. Mr. Stevenson presented such an odd figure that all in the car stared at him, particularly when a rumor of who he was ran among the people. But he seemed unconscious of the interest he aroused. He was reading a book, and every now and then he would fix a sentence in his mind, close the book on one finger, look at the ceiling and muse. When a sentence pleased him, he smiled at it, and then read it again. At the Jersey City depot he threw off his shawl and stood up, and then the figure he cut was extraordinary, for his coat proved to be merely a large cape, with a small one above it, and under both came his extra long legs, or, rather, his long lavender trousers, for they appeared to have no legs within them. Mrs. Stevenson was with him, but sat apart studying the scenery. Her husband looked at her frequently with a whimsical smile, and found great fun in laughing at her behind his book when a dude of tremendous style took the seat beside her.--_The Sun, 1887._ APPRECIATION AND HOMAGE. "The precious memory of a single afternoon at the Saville Club.... We chiefly talked of the craft and the art of story-telling and of its technique.... Stevenson praised heartily Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn,' and it was his belief that it was greater, riper, and richer than its forerunner, 'Tom Sawyer.'" ...."He was a writer of travel sketches and was able to describe Edinburgh with the same freedom from the commonplace that gave freshness to 'Silverado Squatters'.... He was also a biographer and a literary critic ... but as a story-teller he won his widest triumphs." _Brander Matthews._ "No other writer of our time has come as near as Stevenson to the conquest of a perfect English style. He is the one who stands first with the true lovers of the art of words. To quote from himself he is the one who is most unceasingly inspired by '_an unextinguishable zest in technical successes_' and has also most constantly remembered that '_The end of all art is to please_.'" _M. G. Van Rensselaer._ "In the years I knew him, if Stevenson expressed much interest in children, it was mainly for the sake of their fathers and mothers: but that after a while he began to take a very great delight in summoning back to his clear recollection the panic fears and adventurous pleasure of his own early youth, thus becoming, in his portraiture of himself, the consummate painter of one species of child. But his relation to other children was shy and gently defiant; it would have exhausted him to play with them; but he looked forward to a time when they should be old enough to talk to him." _Edmund Gosse._ R. L. S. AND MUSIC. Mr. Andrew Lang recently declared that most poets and literary men hate music. They hate it because it thrusts itself upon them when they don't want it--the poet when his eye is in a fine frenzy rolling, and the prosaic literary man when he is debating about the opening sentence of an important article. You need not look at pictures or statues, Mr. Lang contends; you need not even read poetry, if you "hate poetry and painting," like George II. But you must often listen to music whether you will or not. There is no escape from it any more than from the influenza. Mr. Lang no doubt speaks chiefly for himself. Nature, as he frankly admits, has not made him musical; and though he can stand "Will ye no come back again?" and "Bonnie Dundee," Wagner and Chopin say absolutely nothing to him. In any case, he is somewhat astray in declaring that literary men dislike music. Even Johnson, who is generally quoted as among the music-haters, and who, as we all know, called music "the least disagreeable of noises," even he was at the worst only insensible to the charms of the art. He once bought a flageolet--that he never made out a tune is no matter--and Burney, the musical historian, says that six months before his death he asked to be taught "at least the alphabet of your language." Scott, too, though the incurable defects of his voice and ear drove his music teacher to despair, was very partial to the national music of his country, and, like Congreve's Jeremy, had a "reasonable ear" for a jig. Nay, Lamb himself, whose lack of musical ear has been boldly proclaimed in one of the best of the Elia essays, used to go to Vincent Novello's house for no other purpose than to hear Novello play the organ and listen to his daughter's singing. These may, indeed, be taken as types of the indifferent men, the men who do not care very much whether they ever hear music or not. But look at the number of authors who have explicitly declared their delight in music. De Quincey was one; Browning was another. Did not Goldsmith play the flute, and Milton amuse himself with the organ? Rogers loved a barrel organ to distraction, and Ruskin went into mild raptures over Halle's playing of Thalberg's "Home, sweet home." Burns and Hogg scraped on the fiddle, and Shelley strummed on a guitar, now on the Bodleian at Oxford. Moore sang Irish songs, Tom Campbell once tipped a German organist to play for half an hour to him; and if Shakespeare wasn't musical he ought to have been considering the way in which he has spoken of the man who "hath no music in his soul." In short, in regard to music, our great writers have been just like other people--some have been passionately fond of music, some have liked it in a mild kind of way, and some have been absolutely indifferent to it. To which of the two first-mentioned classes our brave Stevenson belonged it would be somewhat difficult to say. That he was musical at all will probably be regarded as a revelation to most people; and indeed it is only since the recent publication of his correspondence that even the elect have realized the full extent of his musical tastes and accomplishments. That he took at least a mild interest in music might have been inferred from various allusions to the art in his tales and essays. In "The Wrong Box," for example, we have the humorous situation where the young barrister pretends that he is engaged on the composition of an imaginary comic opera. It is in the same story, again, that there occurs a veritable "locus classicus" on the art of playing the penny whistle, and the difference between the amateur and the professional performer. Stevenson, as we shall see, was himself devoted to the penny whistle, and in view of that devotion it is curious to remark the observation in this story that one seldom, if ever, encounters a person learning to play that instrument. "The young of the penny whistler," as he puts it, "like those of the salmon, are occult from observation." He endows David, his forbear at Pilrig, with a musical ear, for the Laird received David Balfour "in the midst of learned works and musical instruments, for he was not only a deep philosopher, but much of a musician." It is, however, needless to dwell upon these vague impersonal references to music when so much that is directly explicit on the subject is to be found both in the Vailima letters and in the latter correspondence. Miss Blantyre Simpson, who knew Stevenson in his early days, says that he had not much of a musical ear, and had only a "rudimentary acquaintance" with "Auld Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green." It is clear that he improved as the years went on, but his family seem always to have regarded his musical accomplishments with something like scorn. In 1874, when he was 24, he was at Chester with his father, and the verger was taking the visitors round the cathedral. "We got into a little side chapel, whence we could hear the choir children at practice, and I stopped a moment listening to them with, I dare-say, a very bright face, for the sound was delightful to me. 'Ah,' says he (the verger), 'You're very fond of music.' I said I was. 'Yes, I could tell that by your head,' he answered. Then my father cut in brutally, said anyway I had no ear, and left the verger so distressed and shaken in the foundation of his creed that, I hear, he got my father aside afterwards and said he was sure there was something in my face, and wanted to know what it was if not music." The elder Stevenson very likely failed to distinguish between the love of music and the possession of an ear for music. The two things are totally different, as Coleridge once pointed out in regard to his own particular case. "I have," he said, "no ear whatever. I could not sing an air to save my life, but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad." Stevenson probably had no such gift of discrimination, but that he had at least the faculty of musical appreciativeness seems perfectly clear. He mentions it as one of his characteristic failings that he never could remember the name of an air, no matter how familiar it was to him; but he was able to say of some engrossing pursuit that it "fascinates me like a tune." Wealth, he remarked once, evidently in all seriousness, is "useful for only two things--a yacht and a string quartette." In his younger days he seems to have been as much devoted to the opera as ever De Quincey was. At Frankfort, in 1872, he reports that he goes to the theatre every night, except when there is no opera. One night he was "terribly excited" over Halévy's "La Juive," so much so indeed that he had to "slope" in the middle of the fifth act. It was raining and cold outside, so he went into a "bierhalle" and brooded for nearly an hour over his glass. "An opera," he mused, "is far more real than real life to me. It seems as if stage illusion, and particularly this hardest to swallow and most conventional illusion of them all--an opera--would never stale upon me. I wish that life was an opera. I should like to live in one; but I don't know in what quarter of the globe I shall find a society so constituted. Besides, it would soon pall--imagine asking for three-kreuzer cigars in recitative, or giving the washerwoman the inventory of your dirty clothes in a sustained and flourishores aria!" Here, as some one has remarked, we see the wide-eyed innocence of the man--the tinsel and the humbug so apparent, and yet the vague longing so real. That Stevenson should make attempts to play the piano was only natural, but in that accomplishment he does not seem to have proceeded very far. When he was at Bournemouth in 1886, he tells Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin that "I write all the morning, come down, and never leave the piano till five; write letters, dine, get down again about eight, and never leave the piano until I go to bed." At this time the whistle was Osborne's instrument. "You should hear Lloyd on the penny whistle and me on the piano!" Stevenson exclaimed to his father, "Dear powers, what a concerto! I now live entirely for the piano; he for the whistle; the neighbors in a radius of a furlong and a half are packing up in quest of better climes." By his own confession, it was a case of picking out the melody with one finger! In the matter of musical arrangements he proclaims himself a purist, and yet, with charming inconsistency, announces that he is arranging certain numbers of the "Magic Flute" for "two melodious forefingers." Clearly, it does not say much for Mr. Henley's powers as a virtuoso that Stevenson should have "counterfeited his playing on the piano." But Stevenson's particular instrument was the flageolet, the same that Johnson once bought. Miss Simpson says that his flageolet-playing was merely one of his impulsive whims, an experiment undertaken to see if he liked making music. However this may have been, there can be no doubt about his assiduity in practice; indeed, the earlier Vailima letters are full of references which show his devotion to the now somewhat despised instrument. "Played on my pipe," "took to tootling on the flageolet," are entries which constantly occur, the context always making it clear that "pipe" is synonymous with flageolet. "If I take to my pipe," he writes on one occasion, "I know myself all is over for the morning." Writing to Mr. Colvin in June, 1891, he says:--"Tell Mrs. S. I have been playing 'Le Chant d'Amour' lately, and have arranged it, after awful trouble, rather prettily for two pipes; and it brought her before me with an effect scarce short of hallucination. I could hear her voice in every note; yet I had forgot the air entirely, and began to pipe it from notes as something new, when I was brought up with a round turn by this reminiscence." Generally speaking, Stevenson "tootled" by himself; but now and again he took part in concerted music with Osborne and Mrs. Strong. One day he makes music "furiously" with these two. A day or two later he writes:--"Woke at the usual time, very little work, for I was tired, and had a job for the evening--to write parts for a new instrument, a violin. Lunch, chat, and up to my place to practise; but there was no practising for me--my flageolet was gone wrong, and I had to take it all to pieces, clean it, and put it up again. As this is a most intricate job--the thing dissolves into seventeen separate members; most of these have to be fitted on their individual springs as fine as needles, and sometimes two at once with the springs shoving different ways--it took me till two." However, he got over his difficulty, and was ready for the performance. "In the evening our violinist arrived, no great virtuoso truly, but plucky, industrious, and a good reader; and we played five pieces with huge amusement, and broke up at nine." It goes without saying that, notwithstanding all this practice, Stevenson was exceedingly modest about his accomplishments. "Even my clumsinesses are my joy," he said--"my woodcuts, my stumbling on the pipe." But we must not forget the penny whistle. That instrument seems to have at one time quite ousted the flageolet. "I am a great performer before the Lord on the penny whistle," he writes to Miss Boodle from Saranac in 1888. "We now perform duets on two D tin whistles; it is no joke to make the bass; I think I must really send you one, which I wish you would correct. I may be said to live for these instrumental labors now; but I have always some childishness on hand." To play a bass of any kind on a tin whistle must indeed have been "no joke." But the instrument appears to have had quite a fascination for Stevenson at this time. He even proposed to associate it with the title of what he ultimately called "A Child's Garden of Verses." When he sent the manuscript for publication he could not decide about the title, but after some banter on the subject he tentatively fixed on "The Penny Whistle: Nursery Verses, &c." Then he thought of a variation--"Penny Whistles for Small Whistlers," and directed that the title-page should be embellished with crossed penny whistles, or "a sheaf of 'em." But Stevenson was more than a player of music: he actually tried his hand at composition! In one letter of the year 1886 he sets down in musical notation from memory a part of a dance air of Lully's. About the harmony, which he has evidently made himself, he talks quite learnedly. "Where I have put an A," he says, "is that a dominant eleventh or what? or just a seventh on the D? and if the latter, is that allowed? It sounds very funny. Never mind all my questions; if I begin about music (which is my leading ignorance and curiosity) I have always to babble questions; all my friends know me now, and take no notice whatever." A few months later and he had composed his Opus 1. He called it a Threnody, and he sent it for criticism to his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, who was better versed in the art. Some plain talk on the part of the cousin apparently followed, for we find the composer urging certain points in self-justification. "There may be hidden fifths in it," he says, "and if there are it shows how damn spontaneous the thing was. I could tinker and tic-tac-toe on a piece of paper, but scorned the act with a Threnody which was poured forth like blood and water on the groaning organ." There was the true composer, putting down his inspiration as it came to him, and allowing it to stand as it was in defiance of all rule! Nothing daunted, he made another attempt. "Herewith another shy," he said, "more melancholy than before, but I think not so abjectly idiotic. The musical terms seem to be as good as in Beethoven, and that, after all, is the great affair. Bar the damn bareness of the base, it looks like a real piece of music from a distance. I am proud to say it was not made one hand at a time. The base was of synchronous birth with the treble; they are of the same age, and may God have mercy on their souls." That is too characteristically charming to be spoiled by comment. J. C. H. Transcriber's Notes: Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. The following misprints have been corrected: "authoratitive" corrected to "authoritative" (page 1) "leggea" corrected to "legged" (page 16) "aud" corrected to "and" (page 24) "delighful" corrected to "delightful" (page 40) 
590	----	Transcribed from the Charles Scribner's Sons 1905 edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON A RECORD, AN ESTIMATE, AND A MEMORIAL BY ALEXANDER H. JAPP, LL.D., F.R.S.E AUTHOR OF "THOREAU: HIS LIFE AND AIMS"; "MEMOIR OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY"; "DE QUINCEY MEMORIALS," ETC., ETC. WITH HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED LETTERS FROM R. L. STEVENSON IN FACSIMILIE . . . SECOND EDITION NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 153-157 FIFTH AVENUE 1905 _Printed in Great Britain_. {Robert Louis Stevenson, from a sketch in oils by Sir William B. Richmond, K.G.B., R.A.: p0.jpg} Dedicated to C. A. LICHTENBERG, ESQ. AND Mrs LICHTENBERG, OF VILLA MARGHERITA, TREVISO, WITH MOST GRATEFUL REGARDS, ALEXANDER H. JAPP. 19_th_ _December_ 1904. PREFACE A few words may here be allowed me to explain one or two points. First, about the facsimile of last page of Preface to _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_. Stevenson was in Davos when the greater portion of that work went through the press. He felt so much the disadvantage of being there in the circumstances (both himself and his wife ill) that he begged me to read the proofs of the Preface for him. This illness has record in the letter from him (pp. 28-29). The printers, of course, had directions to send the copy and proofs of the Preface to me. Hence I am able now to give this facsimile. With regard to the letter at p. 19, of which facsimile is also given, what Stevenson there meant is not the "three last" of that batch, but the three last sent to me before--though that was an error on his part--he only then sent two chapters, making the "eleven chapters now"--sent to me by post. Another point on which I might have dwelt and illustrated by many instances is this, that though Stevenson was fond of hob-nobbing with all sorts and conditions of men, this desire of wide contact and intercourse has little show in his novels--the ordinary fibre of commonplace human beings not receiving much celebration from him there; another case in which his private bent and sympathies received little illustration in his novels. But the fact lies implicit in much I have written. I have to thank many authors for permission to quote extracts I have used. ALEXANDER H. JAPP. CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS II. _TREASURE ISLAND_ AND SOME REMINISCENCES III. THE CHILD FATHER OF THE MAN IV. HEREDITY ILLUSTRATED V. TRAVELS VI. SOME EARLIER LETTERS VII. THE VAILIMA LETTERS VIII. WORK OF LATER YEARS IX. SOME CHARACTERISTICS X. A SAMOAN MEMORIAL OF R. L. STEVENSON XI. MISS STUBBS' RECORD OF A PILGRIMAGE XII. HIS GENIUS AND METHODS XIII. PREACHER AND MYSTIC FABULIST XIV. STEVENSON AS DRAMATIST XV. THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL XVI. STEVENSON'S GLOOM XVII. PROOFS OF GROWTH XVIII. EARLIER DETERMINATIONS AND RESULTS XIX. MR EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN'S ESTIMATE XX. EGOTISTIC ELEMENT AND ITS EFFECTS XXI. UNITY IN STEVENSON'S STORIES XXII. PERSONAL CHEERFULNESS AND INVENTED GLOOM XXIII. EDINBURGH REVIEWERS' DICTA INAPPLICABLE TO LATER WORK XXIV. MR HENLEY'S SPITEFUL PERVERSIONS XXV. MR CHRISTIE MURRAY'S IMPRESSIONS XXVI. HERO-VILLAINS XXVII. MR G. MOORE, MR MARRIOTT WATSON, AND OTHERS XXVIII. UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS XXIX. LOVE OF VAGABONDS XXX. LORD ROSEBERY'S CASE XXXI. MR GOSSE AND MS. OF _TREASURE ISLAND_ XXXII. STEVENSON PORTRAITS XXXIII. LAPSES AND ERRORS IN CRITICISM XXXIV. LETTERS AND POEMS IN TESTIMONY APPENDIX CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTION AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS My little effort to make Thoreau better known in England had one result that I am pleased to think of. It brought me into personal association with R. L. Stevenson, who had written and published in _The Cornhill Magazine_ an essay on Thoreau, in whom he had for some time taken an interest. He found in Thoreau not only a rare character for originality, courage, and indefatigable independence, but also a master of style, to whom, on this account, as much as any, he was inclined to play the part of the "sedulous ape," as he had acknowledged doing to many others--a later exercise, perhaps in some ways as fruitful as any that had gone before. A recent poet, having had some seeds of plants sent to him from Northern Scotland to the South, celebrated his setting of them beside those native to the Surrey slope on which he dwelt, with the lines-- "And when the Northern seeds are growing, Another beauty then bestowing, We shall be fine, and North to South Be giving kisses, mouth to mouth." So the Thoreau influence on Stevenson was as if a tart American wild-apple had been grafted on an English pippin, and produced a wholly new kind with the flavours of both; and here wild America and England kissed each other mouth to mouth. The direct result was the essay in _The Cornhill_, but the indirect results were many and less easily assessed, as Stevenson himself, as we shall see, was ever ready to admit. The essay on Thoreau was written in America, which further, perhaps, bears out my point. One of the authorities, quoted by Mr Hammerton, in _Stevensoniana_ says of the circumstances in which he found our author, when he was busily engaged on that bit of work: "I have visited him in a lonely lodging in California, it was previous to his happy marriage, and found him submerged in billows of bed-clothes; about him floated the scattered volumes of a complete set of Thoreau; he was preparing an essay on that worthy, and he looked at the moment like a half-drowned man, yet he was not cast down. His work, an endless task, was better than a straw to him. It was to become his life-preserver and to prolong his years. I feel convinced that without it he must have surrendered long since. I found Stevenson a man of the frailest physique, though most unaccountably tenacious of life; a man whose pen was indefatigable, whose brain was never at rest, who, as far as I am able to judge, looked upon everybody and everything from a supremely intellectual point of view." {1} We remember the common belief in Yorkshire and other parts that a man could not die so long as he could stand up--a belief on which poor Branwell Bronte was fain to act and to illustrate, but R. L. Stevenson illustrated it, as this writer shows, in a better, calmer, and healthier way, despite his lack of health. On some little points of fact, however, Stevenson was wrong; and I wrote to the Editor of _The Spectator_ a letter, titled, I think, "Thoreau's Pity and Humour," which he inserted. This brought me a private letter from Stevenson, who expressed the wish to see me, and have some talk with me on that and other matters. To this letter I at once replied, directing to 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, saying that, as I was soon to be in that City, it might be possible for me to see him there. In reply to this letter Mr Stevenson wrote: "THE COTTAGE, CASTLETON OF BRAEMAR, _Sunday_, _August_ (? _th_), 1881. "MY DEAR SIR,--I should long ago have written to thank you for your kind and frank letter; but, in my state of health, papers are apt to get mislaid, and your letter has been vainly hunted for until this (Sunday) morning. "I must first say a word as to not quoting your book by name. It was the consciousness that we disagreed which led me, I daresay, wrongly, to suppress _all_ references throughout the paper. But you may be certain a proper reference will now be introduced. "I regret I shall not be able to see you in Edinburgh: one visit to Edinburgh has already cost me too dear in that invaluable particular, health; but if it should be at all possible for you to pass by Braemar, I believe you would find an attentive listener, and I can offer you a bed, a drive, and necessary food. "If, however, you should not be able to come thus far, I can promise two things. First, I shall religiously revise what I have written, and bring out more clearly the point of view from which I regarded Thoreau. Second, I shall in the preface record your objection. "The point of view (and I must ask you not to forget that any such short paper is essentially only a _section through_ a man) was this: I desired to look at the man through his books. Thus, for instance, when I mentioned his return to the pencil-making, I did it only in passing (perhaps I was wrong), because it seemed to me not an illustration of his principles, but a brave departure from them. Thousands of such there were I do not doubt; still they might be hardly to my purpose; though, as you say so, I suppose some of them would be. "Our difference as to 'pity,' I suspect, was a logomachy of my making. No pitiful acts, on his part, would surprise me: I know he would be more pitiful in practice than most of the whiners; but the spirit of that practice would still seem to me to be unjustly described by the word pity. "When I try to be measured, I find myself usually suspected of a sneaking unkindness for my subject, but you may be sure, sir, I would give up most other things to be as good a man as Thoreau. Even my knowledge of him leads me thus far. "Should you find yourself able to push on so far--it may even lie on your way--believe me your visit will be very welcome. The weather is cruel, but the place is, as I daresay you know, the very _wale_ of Scotland--bar Tummelside.--Yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON." {Manuscript letter by R.L.S.: p6.jpg} Some delay took place in my leaving London for Scotland, and hence what seemed a hitch. I wrote mentioning the reason of my delay, and expressing the fear that I might have to forego the prospect of seeing him in Braemar, as his circumstances might have altered in the meantime. In answer came this note, like so many, if not most of his, indeed, without date:-- THE COTTAGE, CASTLETON OF BRAEMAR. (_No date_.) "MY DEAR SIR,--I am here as yet a fixture, and beg you to come our way. Would Tuesday or Wednesday suit you by any chance? We shall then, I believe, be empty: a thing favourable to talks. You get here in time for dinner. I stay till near the end of September, unless, as may very well be, the weather drive me forth.--Yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON." I accordingly went to Braemar, where he and his wife and her son were staying with his father and mother. These were red-letter days in my calendar alike on account of pleasant intercourse with his honoured father and himself. Here is my pen-and-ink portrait of R. L. Stevenson, thrown down at the time: Mr Stevenson's is, indeed, a very picturesque and striking figure. Not so tall probably as he seems at first sight from his extreme thinness, but the pose and air could not be otherwise described than as distinguished. Head of fine type, carried well on the shoulders and in walking with the impression of being a little thrown back; long brown hair, falling from under a broadish-brimmed Spanish form of soft felt hat, Rembrandtesque; loose kind of Inverness cape when walking, and invariable velvet jacket inside the house. You would say at first sight, wherever you saw him, that he was a man of intellect, artistic and individual, wholly out of the common. His face is sensitive, full of expression, though it could not be called strictly beautiful. It is longish, especially seen in profile, and features a little irregular; the brow at once high and broad. A hint of vagary, and just a hint in the expression, is qualified by the eyes, which are set rather far apart from each other as seems, and with a most wistful, and at the same time possibly a merry impish expression arising over that, yet frank and clear, piercing, but at the same time steady, and fall on you with a gentle radiance and animation as he speaks. Romance, if with an indescribable _soupcon_ of whimsicality, is marked upon him; sometimes he has the look as of the Ancient Mariner, and could fix you with his glittering e'e, and he would, as he points his sentences with a movement of his thin white forefinger, when this is not monopolised with the almost incessant cigarette. There is a faint suggestion of a hair-brained sentimental trace on his countenance, but controlled, after all, by good Scotch sense and shrewdness. In conversation he is very animated, and likes to ask questions. A favourite and characteristic attitude with him was to put his foot on a chair or stool and rest his elbow on his knee, with his chin on his hand; or to sit, or rather to half sit, half lean, on the corner of a table or desk, one of his legs swinging freely, and when anything that tickled him was said he would laugh in the heartiest manner, even at the risk of bringing on his cough, which at that time was troublesome. Often when he got animated he rose and walked about as he spoke, as if movement aided thought and expression. Though he loved Edinburgh, which was full of associations for him, he had no good word for its east winds, which to him were as death. Yet he passed one winter as a "Silverado squatter," the story of which he has inimitably told in the volume titled _The Silverado Squatters_; and he afterwards spent several winters at Davos Platz, where, as he said to me, he not only breathed good air, but learned to know with closest intimacy John Addington Symonds, who "though his books were good, was far finer and more interesting than any of his books." He needed a good deal of nursery attentions, but his invalidism was never obtrusively brought before one in any sympathy-seeking way by himself; on the contrary, a very manly, self-sustaining spirit was evident; and the amount of work which he managed to turn out even when at his worst was truly surprising. His wife, an American lady, is highly cultured, and is herself an author. In her speech there is just the slightest suggestion of the American accent, which only made it the more pleasing to my ear. She is heart and soul devoted to her husband, proud of his achievements, and her delight is the consciousness of substantially aiding him in his enterprises. They then had with them a boy of eleven or twelve, Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, to be much referred to later (a son of Mrs Stevenson by a former marriage), whose delight was to draw the oddest, but perhaps half intentional or unintentional caricatures, funny, in some cases, beyond expression. His room was designated the picture-gallery, and on entering I could scarce refrain from bursting into laughter, even at the general effect, and, noticing this, and that I was putting some restraint on myself out of respect for the host's feelings, Stevenson said to me with a sly wink and a gentle dig in the ribs, "It's laugh and be thankful here." On Lloyd's account simple engraving materials, types, and a small printing-press had been procured; and it was Stevenson's delight to make funny poems, stories, and morals for the engravings executed, and all would be duly printed together. Stevenson's thorough enjoyment of the picture-gallery, and his goodness to Lloyd, becoming himself a very boy for the nonce, were delightful to witness and in degree to share. Wherever they were--at Braemar, in Edinburgh, at Davos Platz, or even at Silverado--the engraving and printing went on. The mention of the picture-gallery suggests that it was out of his interest in the colour- drawing and the picture-gallery that his first published story, _Treasure Island_, grew, as we shall see. I have some copies of the rude printing-press productions, inexpressibly quaint, grotesque, a kind of literary horse-play, yet with a certain squint-eyed, sprawling genius in it, and innocent childish Rabelaisian mirth of a sort. At all events I cannot look at the slight memorials of that time, which I still possess, without laughing afresh till my eyes are dewy. Stevenson, as I understood, began _Treasure Island_ more to entertain Lloyd Osbourne than anything else; the chapters being regularly read to the family circle as they were written, and with scarcely a purpose beyond. The lad became Stevenson's trusted companion and collaborator--clearly with a touch of genius. I have before me as I write some of these funny momentoes of that time, carefully kept, often looked at. One of them is, "_The Black Canyon_; _or_, _Wild Adventures in the Far West_: a Tale of Instruction and Amusement for the Young, by Samuel L. Osbourne, printed by the author; Davos Platz," with the most remarkable cuts. It would not do some of the sensationalists anything but good to read it even at this day, since many points in their art are absurdly caricatured. Another is "_Moral Emblems_; _a Collection of Cuts and Verses_, by R. L. Stevenson, author of the _Blue Scalper_, etc., etc. Printers, S. L. Osbourne and Company, Davos Platz." Here are the lines to a rare piece of grotesque, titled _A Peak in Darien_-- "Broad-gazing on untrodden lands, See where adventurous Cortez stands, While in the heavens above his head, The eagle seeks its daily bread. How aptly fact to fact replies, Heroes and eagles, hills and skies. Ye, who contemn the fatted slave, Look on this emblem and be brave." Another, _The Elephant_, has these lines-- "See in the print how, moved by whim, Trumpeting Jumbo, great and grim, Adjusts his trunk, like a cravat, To noose that individual's hat; The Sacred Ibis in the distance, Joys to observe his bold resistance." R. L. Stevenson wrote from Davos Platz, in sending me _The Black Canyon_: "Sam sends as a present a work of his own. I hope you feel flattered, for _this is simply the first time he has ever given one away_. I have to buy my own works, I can tell you." Later he said, in sending a second: "I own I have delayed this letter till I could forward the enclosed. Remembering the night at Braemar, when we visited the picture-gallery, I hope it may amuse you: you see we do some publishing hereaway." Delightfully suggestive and highly enjoyable, too, were the meetings in the little drawing-room after dinner, when the contrasted traits of father and son came into full play--when R. L. Stevenson would sometimes draw out a new view by bold, half-paradoxical assertion, or compel advance on the point from a new quarter by a searching question couched in the simplest language, or reveal his own latest conviction finally, by a few sentences as nicely rounded off as though they had been written, while he rose and gently moved about, as his habit was, in the course of those more extended remarks. Then a chapter or two of _The Sea-Cook_ would be read, with due pronouncement on the main points by one or other of the family audience. The reading of the book is one thing. It was quite another thing to hear Stevenson as he stood reading it aloud, with his hand stretched out holding the manuscript, and his body gently swaying as a kind of rhythmical commentary on the story. His fine voice, clear and keen it some of its tones, had a wonderful power of inflection and variation, and when he came to stand in the place of Silver you could almost have imagined you saw the great one-legged John Silver, joyous-eyed, on the rolling sea. Yes, to read it in print was good, but better yet to hear Stevenson read it. CHAPTER II--_TREASURE ISLAND_ AND SOME REMINISCENCES When I left Braemar, I carried with me a considerable portion of the MS. of _Treasure Island_, with an outline of the rest of the story. It originally bore the odd title of _The Sea-Cook_, and, as I have told before, I showed it to Mr Henderson, the proprietor of the _Young Folks' Paper_, who came to an arrangement with Mr Stevenson, and the story duly appeared in its pages, as well as the two which succeeded it. Stevenson himself in his article in _The Idler_ for August 1894 (reprinted in _My First Book_ volume and in a late volume of the _Edinburgh Edition_) has recalled some of the circumstances connected with this visit of mine to Braemar, as it bore on the destination of _Treasure Island_: "And now, who should come dropping in, _ex machina_, but Dr Japp, like the disguised prince, who is to bring down the curtain upon peace and happiness in the last act; for he carried in his pocket, not a horn or a talisman, but a publisher, in fact, ready to unearth new writers for my old friend Mr Henderson's _Young Folks_. Even the ruthlessness of a united family recoiled before the extreme measure of inflicting on our guest the mutilated members of _The Sea-Cook_; at the same time, we would by no means stop our readings, and accordingly the tale was begun again at the beginning, and solemnly redelivered for the benefit of Dr Japp. From that moment on, I have thought highly of his critical faculty; for when he left us, he carried away the manuscript in his portmanteau. "_Treasure Island_--it was Mr Henderson who deleted the first title, _The Sea-Cook_--appeared duly in _Young Folks_, where it figured in the ignoble midst without woodcuts, and attracted not the least attention. I did not care. I liked the tale myself, for much the same reason as my father liked the beginning: it was my kind of picturesque. I was not a little proud of John Silver also; and to this day rather admire that smooth and formidable adventurer. What was infinitely more exhilarating, I had passed a landmark. I had finished a tale and written The End upon my manuscript, as I had not done since _The Pentland Rising_, when I was a boy of sixteen, not yet at college. In truth, it was so by a lucky set of accidents: had not Dr Japp come on his visit, had not the tale flowed from me with singular ease, it must have been laid aside, like its predecessors, and found a circuitous and unlamented way to the fire. Purists may suggest it would have been better so. I am not of that mind. The tale seems to have given much pleasure, and it brought (or was the means of bringing) fire, food, and wine to a deserving family in which I took an interest. I need scarcely say I mean my own." He himself gives a goodly list of the predecessors which had found a circuitous and unlamented way to the fire "As soon as I was able to write, I became a good friend to the paper- makers. Reams upon reams must have gone to the making of _Rathillet_, _The Pentland Rising_, _The King's Pardon_ (otherwise _Park Whitehead_), _Edward Daven_, _A Country Dance_, and _A Vendetta in the West_. _Rathillet_ was attempted before fifteen, _The Vendetta_ at twenty-nine, and the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till I was thirty-one." Another thing I carried from Braemar with me which I greatly prize--this was a copy of _Christianity confirmed by Jewish and Heathen Testimony_, by Mr Stevenson's father, with his autograph signature and many of his own marginal notes. He had thought deeply on many subjects--theological, scientific, and social--and had recorded, I am afraid, but the smaller half of his thoughts and speculations. Several days in the mornings, before R. L. Stevenson was able to face the somewhat "snell" air of the hills, I had long walks with the old gentleman, when we also had long talks on many subjects--the liberalising of the Scottish Church, educational reform, etc.; and, on one occasion, a statement of his reason, because of the subscription, for never having become an elder. That he had in some small measure enjoyed my society, as I certainly had much enjoyed his, was borne out by a letter which I received from the son in reply to one I had written, saying that surely his father had never meant to present me at the last moment on my leaving by coach with that volume, with his name on it, and with pencilled notes here and there, but had merely given it me to read and return. In the circumstances I may perhaps be excused quoting from a letter dated Castleton of Braemar, September 1881, in illustration of what I have said-- "MY DEAR DR JAPP,--My father has gone, but I think I may take it upon me to ask you to keep the book. Of all things you could do to endear yourself to me you have done the best, for, from your letter, you have taken a fancy to my father. "I do not know how to thank you for your kind trouble in the matter of _The Sea-Cook_, but I am not unmindful. My health is still poorly, and I have added intercostal rheumatism--a new attraction, which sewed me up nearly double for two days, and still gives me 'a list to starboard'--let us be ever nautical. . . . I do not think with the start I have, there will be any difficulty in letting Mr Henderson go ahead whenever he likes. I will write my story up to its legitimate conclusion, and then we shall be in a position to judge whether a sequel would be desirable, and I myself would then know better about its practicability from the story-telling point of view.--Yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON." A little later came the following:-- "THE COTTAGE, CASTLETON OF BRAEMAR. (_No date_.) "MY DEAR DR JAPP,--Herewith go nine chapters. I have been a little seedy; and the two last that I have written seem to me on a false venue; hence the smallness of the batch. I have now, I hope, in the three last sent, turned the corner, with no great amount of dulness. "The map, with all its names, notes, soundings, and things, should make, I believe, an admirable advertisement for the story. Eh? "I hope you got a telegram and letter I forwarded after you to Dinnat.--Believe me, yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON." In the afternoon, if fine and dry, we went walking, and Stevenson would sometimes tell us stories of his short experience at the Scottish Bar, and of his first and only brief. I remember him contrasting that with his experiences as an engineer with Bob Bain, who, as manager, was then superintending the building of a breakwater. Of that time, too, he told the choicest stories, and especially of how, against all orders, he bribed Bob with five shillings to let him go down in the diver's dress. He gave us a splendid description--finer, I think, than even that in his _Memories_--of his sensations on the sea-bottom, which seems to have interested him as deeply, and suggested as many strange fancies, as anything which he ever came across on the surface. But the possibility of enterprises of this sort ended--Stevenson lost his interest in engineering. {Manuscript letter by R.L.S.: p20.jpg} Stevenson's father had, indeed, been much exercised in his day by theological questions and difficulties, and though he remained a staunch adherent of the Established Church of Scotland he knew well and practically what is meant by the term "accommodation," as it is used by theologians in reference to creeds and formulas; for he had over and over again, because of the strict character of the subscription required from elders of the Scottish Church declined, as I have said, to accept the office. In a very express sense you could see that he bore the marks of his past in many ways--a quick, sensitive, in some ways even a fantastic- minded man, yet with a strange solidity and common-sense amid it all, just as though ferns with the veritable fairies' seed were to grow out of a common stone wall. He looked like a man who had not been without sleepless nights--without troubles, sorrows, and perplexities, and even yet, had not wholly risen above some of them, or the results of them. His voice was "low and sweet"--with just a possibility in it of rising to a shrillish key. A sincere and faithful man, who had walked very demurely through life, though with a touch of sudden, bright, quiet humour and fancy, every now and then crossing the grey of his characteristic pensiveness or melancholy, and drawing effect from it. He was most frank and genial with me, and I greatly honour his memory. {2} Thomas Stevenson, with a strange, sad smile, told me how much of a disappointment, in the first stage, at all events, Louis (he always called his son Louis at home), had caused him, by failing to follow up his profession at the Scottish Bar. How much he had looked forward, after the engineering was abandoned, to his devoting himself to the work of the Parliament House (as the Hall of the Chief Court is called in Scotland, from the building having been while yet there was a Scottish Parliament the place where it sat), though truly one cannot help feeling how much Stevenson's very air and figure would have been out of keeping among the bewigged, pushing, sharp-set, hard-featured, and even red-faced and red-nosed (some of them, at any rate) company, who daily walked the Parliament House, and talked and gossiped there, often of other things than law and equity. "Well, yes, perhaps it was all for the best," he said, with a sigh, on my having interjected the remark that R. L. Stevenson was wielding far more influence than he ever could have done as a Scottish counsel, even though he had risen rapidly in his profession, and become Lord-Advocate or even a judge. There was, indeed, a very pathetic kind of harking back on the might-have- beens when I talked with him on this subject. He had reconciled himself in a way to the inevitable, and, like a sensible man, was now inclined to make the most and the best of it. The marriage, which, on the report of it, had been but a new disappointment to him, had, as if by magic, been transformed into a blessing in his mind and his wife's by personal contact with Fanny Van der Griff Stevenson, which no one who ever met her could wonder at; but, nevertheless, his dream of seeing his only son walking in the pathways of the Stevensons, and adorning a profession in Edinburgh, and so winning new and welcome laurels for the family and the name, was still present with him constantly, and by contrast, he was depressed with contemplation of the real state of the case, when, as I have said, I pointed out to him, as more than once I did, what an influence his son was wielding now, not only over those near to him, but throughout the world, compared with what could have come to him as a lighthouse engineer, however successful, or it may be as a briefless advocate or barrister, walking, hardly in glory and in joy, the Hall of the Edinburgh Parliament House. And when I pictured the yet greater influence that was sure to come to him, he only shook his head with that smile which tells of hopes long-cherished and lost at last, and of resignation gained, as though at stern duty's call and an honest desire for the good of those near and dear to him. It moved me more than I can say, and always in the midst of it he adroitly, and somewhat abruptly, changed the subject. Such penalties do parents often pay for the honour of giving geniuses to the world. Here, again, it may be true, "the individual withers but the world is more and more." The impression of a kind of tragic fatality was but added to when Stevenson would speak of his father in such terms of love and admiration as quite moved one, of his desire to please him, of his highest respect and gratitude to him, and pride in having such a father. It was most characteristic that when, in his travels in America, he met a gentleman who expressed plainly his keen disappointment on learning that he had but been introduced to the son and not to the father--to the as yet but budding author--and not to the builder of the great lighthouse beacons that constantly saved mariners from shipwreck round many stormy coasts, he should record the incident, as his readers will remember, with such a strange mixture of a pride and filial gratitude, and half humorous humiliation. Such is the penalty a son of genius often pays in heart- throbs for the inability to do aught else but follow his destiny--follow his star, even though as Dante says:-- "Se tu segui tua stella Non puoi fallire a glorioso porto." {3} What added a keen thrill as of quivering flesh exposed, was that Thomas Stevenson on one side was exactly the man to appreciate such attainments and work in another, and I often wondered how far the sense of Edinburgh propriety and worldly estimates did weigh with him here. Mr Stevenson mentioned to me a peculiar fact which has since been noted by his son, that, notwithstanding the kind of work he had so successfully engaged in, he was no mathematician, and had to submit his calculations to another to be worked out in definite mathematical formulae. Thomas Stevenson gave one the impression of a remarkably sweet, great personality, grave, anxious, almost morbidly forecasting, yet full of childlike hope and ready affection, but, perhaps, so earnestly taken up with some points as to exaggerate their importance and be too self-conscious and easily offended in respect to them. But there was no affectation in him. He was simple-minded, sincere to the core; most kindly, homely, hospitable, much intent on brotherly offices. He had the Scottish _perfervidum_ too--he could tolerate nothing mean or creeping; and his eye would lighten and glance in a striking manner when such was spoken of. I have since heard that his charities were very extensive, and dispensed in the most hidden and secret ways. He acted here on the Scripture direction, "Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth." He was much exercised when I saw him about some defects, as he held, in the methods of Scotch education (for he was a true lover of youth, and cared more for character being formed than for heads being merely crammed). Sagacious, with fine forecast, with a high ideal, and yet up to a certain point a most tolerant temper, he was a fine specimen of the Scottish gentleman. His son tells that, as he was engaged in work calculated to benefit the world and to save life, he would not for long take out a patent for his inventions, and thus lost immense sums. I can well believe that: it seems quite in keeping with my impressions of the man. There was nothing stolid or selfishly absorbed in him. He bore the marks of deep, true, honest feeling, true benevolence, and open-handed generosity, and despite the son's great pen-craft, and inventive power, would have forgiven my saying that sometimes I have had a doubt whether the father was not, after all, the greater man of the two, though certainly not, like the hero of _In Memoriam_, moulded "in colossal calm." In theological matters, in which Thomas Stevenson had been much and deeply exercised, he held very strong views, leading decisively to ultra- Calvinism; but, as I myself could well sympathise with such views, if I did not hold them, knowing well the strange ways in which they had gone to form grand, if sometimes sternly forbidding characters, there were no cross-purposes as there might have been with some on that subject. And always I felt I had an original character and a most interesting one to study. This is another very characteristic letter to me from Davos Platz: "CHALET BUOL, DAVOS, GRISONS, SWITZERLAND. (_No date_.) "MY DEAR DR JAPP,--You must think me a forgetful rogue, as indeed I am; for I have but now told my publisher to send you a copy of the _Familiar Studies_. However, I own I have delayed this letter till I could send you the enclosed. Remembering the night at Braemar, when we visited the picture-gallery, I hoped they might amuse you. "You see we do some publishing hereaway. "With kind regards, believe me, always yours faithfully, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON." "I shall hope to see you in town in May." The enclosed was the second series of _Moral Emblems_, by R. L. Stevenson, printed by Samuel Osbourne. My answer to this letter brought the following: "CHALET-BUOL, DAVOS, _April_ 1_st_, 1882. "MY DEAR DR JAPP,--A good day to date this letter, which is, in fact, a confession of incapacity. During my wife's wretched illness--or I should say the worst of it, for she is not yet rightly well--I somewhat lost my head, and entirely lost a great quire of corrected proofs. This is one of the results: I hope there are none more serious. I was never so sick of any volume as I was of that; I was continually receiving fresh proofs with fresh infinitesimal difficulties. I was ill; I did really fear, for my wife was worse than ill. Well, 'tis out now; and though I have already observed several carelessnesses myself, and now here is another of your finding--of which indeed, I ought to be ashamed--it will only justify the sweeping humility of the preface. "Symonds was actually dining with us when your letter came, and I communicated your remarks, which pleased him. He is a far better and more interesting thing than his books. "The elephant was my wife's, so she is proportionately elate you should have picked it out for praise from a collection, let us add, so replete with the highest qualities of art. "My wicked carcass, as John Knox calls it, holds together wonderfully. In addition to many other things, and a volume of travel, I find I have written since December ninety Cornhill pp. of Magazine work--essays and stories--40,000 words; and I am none the worse--I am better. I begin to hope I may, if not outlive this wolverine upon my shoulders, at least carry him bravely like Symonds or Alexander Pope. I begin to take a pride in that hope. "I shall be much interested to see your criticisms: you might perhaps send them on to me. I believe you know that I am not dangerous--one folly I have not--I am not touchy under criticism. "Sam and my wife both beg to be remembered, and Sam also sends as a present a work of his own.--Yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON." As indicating the estimate of many of the good Edinburgh people of Stevenson and the Stevensons that still held sway up to so late a date as 1893, I will here extract two characteristic passages from the letters of the friend and correspondent of these days just referred to, and to whom I had sent a copy of the _Atalanta_ Magazine, with an article of mine on Stevenson. "If you can excuse the garrulity of age, I can tell you one or two things about Louis Stevenson, his father and even his grandfather, which you may work up some other day, as you have so deftly embedded in the _Atalanta_ article that small remark on his acting. Your paper is pleasant and modest: most of R. L. Stevenson's admirers are inclined to lay it on far too thick. That he is a genius we all admit; but his genius, if fine, is limited. For example, he cannot paint (or at least he never has painted) a woman. No more could Fettes Douglas, skilful artist though he was in his own special line, and I shall tell you a remark of Russel's thereon some day. {4} There are women in his books, but there is none of the beauty and subtlety of womanhood in them. "R. L. Stevenson I knew well as a lad and often met him and talked with him. He acted in private theatricals got up by the late Professor Fleeming Jenkin. But he had then, as always, a pretty guid conceit o' himsel'--which his clique have done nothing to check. His father and his grandfather (I have danced with his mother before her marriage) I knew better; but 'the family theologian,' as some of R. L. Stevenson's friends dabbed his father, was a very touchy theologian, and denounced any one who in the least differed from his extreme Calvinistic views. I came under his lash most unwittingly in this way myself. But for this twist, he was a good fellow--kind and hospitable--and a really able man in his profession. His father-in- law, R. L. Stevenson's maternal grandfather, was the Rev. Dr Balfour, minister of Colinton--one of the finest-looking old men I ever saw--tall, upright, and ruddy at eighty. But he was marvellously feeble as a preacher, and often said things that were deliciously, unconsciously, unintentionally laughable, if not witty. We were near Colinton for some years; and Mr Russell (of the _Scotsman_), who once attended the Parish Church with us, was greatly tickled by Balfour discoursing on the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, remarking that Mrs P-'s conduct was 'highly improper'!" The estimate of R. L. Stevenson was not and could not be final in this case, for _Weir of Hermiston_ and _Catriona_ were yet unwritten, not to speak of others, but the passages reflect a certain side of Edinburgh opinion, illustrating the old Scripture doctrine that a prophet has honour everywhere but in his own country. And the passages themselves bear evidence that I violate no confidence then, for they were given to me to be worked into any after-effort I might make on Stevenson. My friend was a good and an acute critic who had done some acceptable literary work in his day. CHAPTER III--THE CHILD FATHER OF THE MAN R. L. Stevenson was born on 13th November 1850, the very year of the death of his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, whom he has so finely celebrated. As a mere child he gave token of his character. As soon as he could read, he was keen for books, and, before very long, had read all the story-books he could lay hands on; and, when the stock ran out, he would go and look in at all the shop windows within reach, and try to piece out the stories from the bits exposed in open pages and the woodcuts. He had a nurse of very remarkable character--evidently a paragon--who deeply influenced him and did much to form his young mind--Alison Cunningham, who, in his juvenile lingo, became "Cumy," and who not only was never forgotten, but to the end was treated as his "second mother." In his dedication of his _Child's Garden of Verses_ to her, he says: "My second mother, my first wife, The angel of my infant life." Her copy of _Kidnapped_ was inscribed to her by the hand of Stevenson, thus: "TO CUMY, FROM HER BOY, THE AUTHOR. SKERRYVORE, 18_th_ _July_ 1888." Skerryvore was the name of Stevenson's Bournemouth home, so named after one of the Stevenson lighthouses. His first volume, _An Inland Voyage_ has this pretty dedication, inscribed in a neat, small hand: "MY DEAR CUMY,--If you had not taken so much trouble with me all the years of my childhood, this little book would never have been written. Many a long night you sat up with me when I was ill. I wish I could hope, by way of return, to amuse a single evening for you with my little book. But whatever you think of it, I know you will think kindly of THE AUTHOR." "Cumy" was perhaps the most influential teacher Stevenson had. What she and his mother taught took effect and abode with him, which was hardly the case with any other of his teachers. "In contrast to Goethe," says Mr Baildon, "Stevenson was but little affected by his relations to women, and, when this point is fully gone into, it will probably be found that his mother and nurse in childhood, and his wife and step-daughter in later life, are about the only women who seriously influenced either his character or his art." (p. 32). When Mr Kelman is celebrating Stevenson for the consistency and continuity of his undogmatic religion, he is almost throughout celebrating "Cumy" and her influence, though unconsciously. Here, again, we have an apt and yet more striking illustration, after that of the good Lord Shaftesbury and many others, of the deep and lasting effect a good and earnest woman, of whom the world may never hear, may have had upon a youngster of whom all the world shall hear. When Mr Kelman says that "the religious element in Stevenson was not a thing of late growth, but an integral part and vital interest of his life," he but points us back to the earlier religious influences to which he had been effectually subject. "His faith was not for himself alone, and the phases of Christianity which it has asserted are peculiarly suited to the spiritual needs of many in the present time." We should not lay so much weight as Mr Kelman does on the mere number of times "the Divine name" is found in Stevenson's writings, but there is something in such confessions as the following to his father, when he was, amid hardship and illness, in Paris in 1878: "Still I believe in myself and my fellow-men and the God who made us all. . . . I am lonely and sick and out of heart. Well, I still hope; I still believe; I still see the good in the inch, and cling to it. It is not much, perhaps, but it is always something." Yes, "Cumy" was a very effective teacher, whose influence and teaching long remained. His other teachers, however famous and highly gifted, did not attain to such success with him. And because of this non-success they blamed him, as is usual. He was fond of playing truant--declared, indeed, that he was about as methodic a truant as ever could have existed. He much loved to go on long wanderings by himself on the Pentland Hills and read about the Covenanters, and while yet a youth of sixteen he wrote _The Pentland Rising_--a pamphlet in size and a piece of fine work--which was duly published, is now scarce, and fetches a high price. He had made himself thoroughly familiar with all the odd old corners of Edinburgh--John Knox's haunts and so on, all which he has turned to account in essays, descriptions and in stories--especially in _Catriona_. When a mere youth at school, as he tells us himself, he had little or no desire to carry off prizes and do just as other boys did; he was always wishing to observe, and to see, and try things for himself--was, in fact, in the eyes of schoolmasters and tutors something of an _idler_, with splendid gifts which he would not rightly apply. He was applying them rightly, though not in their way. It is not only in his _Apology for Idlers_ that this confession is made, but elsewhere, as in his essay on _A College Magazine_, where he says, "I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read and one to write in!" When he went to College it was still the same--he tells us in the funniest way how he managed to wheedle a certificate for Greek out of Professor Blackie, though the Professor owned "his face was not familiar to him"! He fared very differently when, afterwards his father, eager that he should follow his profession, got him to enter the civil engineering class under Professor Fleeming Jenkin. He still stuck to his old courses--wandering about, and, in sheltered corners, writing in the open air, and was not present in class more than a dozen times. When the session was ended he went up to try for a certificate from Fleeming Jenkin. "No, no, Mr Stevenson," said the Professor; "I might give it in a doubtful case, but yours is not doubtful: you have not kept my classes." And the most characteristic thing--honourable to both men--is to come; for this was the beginning of a friendship which grew and strengthened and is finally celebrated in the younger man's sketch of the elder. He learned from Professor Fleeming Jenkin, perhaps unconsciously, more of the _humaniores_, than consciously he did of engineering. A friend of mine, who knew well both the Stevenson family and the Balfours, to which R. L. Stevenson's mother belonged, recalls, as we have seen, his acting in the private theatricals that were got up by the Professor, and adds, "He was then a very handsome fellow, and looked splendidly as Sir Charles Pomander, and essayed, not wholly without success, Sir Peter Teazle," which one can well believe, no less than that he acted such parts splendidly as well as looked them. _Longman's Magazine_, immediately after his death, published the following poem, which took a very pathetic touch from the circumstances of its appearance--the more that, while it imaginatively and finely commemorated these days of truant wanderings, it showed the ruling passion for home and the old haunts, strongly and vividly, even not unnigh to death: "The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allermuir, Or steep Caerketton, dreaming gaze again. Far set in fields and woods, the town I see Spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke, Cragg'd, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort Beflagg'd. About, on seaward drooping hills, New folds of city glitter. Last, the Forth Wheels ample waters set with sacred isles, And populous Fife smokes with a score of towns, There, on the sunny frontage of a hill, Hard by the house of kings, repose the dead, My dead, the ready and the strong of word. Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive; The sea bombards their founded towers; the night Thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers, One after one, here in this grated cell, Where the rain erases and the rust consumes, Fell upon lasting silence. Continents And continental oceans intervene; A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle, Environs and confines their wandering child In vain. The voice of generations dead Summons me, sitting distant, to arise, My numerous footsteps nimbly to retrace, And all mutation over, stretch me down In that denoted city of the dead." CHAPTER IV--HEREDITY ILLUSTRATED At first sight it would seem hard to trace any illustration of the doctrine of heredity in the case of this master of romance. George Eliot's dictum that we are, each one of us, but an omnibus carrying down the traits of our ancestors, does not appear at all to hold here. This fanciful realist, this naive-wistful humorist, this dreamy mystical casuist, crossed by the innocent bohemian, this serious and genial essayist, in whom the deep thought was hidden by the gracious play of wit and phantasy, came, on the father's side, of a stock of what the world regarded as a quiet, ingenious, demure, practical, home-keeping people. In his rich colour, originality, and graceful air, it is almost as though the bloom of japonica came on a rich old orchard apple-tree, all out of season too. Those who go hard on heredity would say, perhaps, that he was the result of some strange back-stroke. But, on closer examination, we need not go so far. His grandfather, Robert Stevenson, the great lighthouse-builder, the man who reared the iron-bound pillar on the destructive Bell Rock, and set life-saving lights there, was very intent on his professional work, yet he had his ideal, and romantic, and adventurous side. In the delightful sketch which his famous grandson gave of him, does he not tell of the joy Robert Stevenson had on the annual voyage in the _Lighthouse Yacht_--how it was looked forward to, yearned for, and how, when he had Walter Scott on board, his fund of story and reminiscence all through the tour never failed--how Scott drew upon it in _The Pirate_ and the notes to _The Pirate_, and with what pride Robert Stevenson preserved the lines Scott wrote in the lighthouse album at the Bell Rock on that occasion: "PHAROS LOQUITUR "Far in the bosom of the deep O'er these wild shelves my watch I keep, A ruddy gem of changeful light Bound on the dusky brow of night. The seaman bids my lustre hail, And scorns to strike his timorous sail." And how in 1850 the old man, drawing nigh unto death, was with the utmost difficulty dissuaded from going the voyage once more, and was found furtively in his room packing his portmanteau in spite of the protests of all his family, and would have gone but for the utter weakness of death. His father was also a splendid engineer; was full of invention and devoted to his profession, but he, too, was not without his romances, and even vagaries. He loved a story, was a fine teller of stories, used to sit at night and spin the most wondrous yarns, a man of much reserve, yet also of much power in discourse, with an aptness and felicity in the use of phrases--so much so, as his son tells, that on his deathbed, when his power of speech was passing from him, and he couldn't articulate the right word, he was silent rather than use the wrong one. I shall never forget how in these early morning walks at Braemar, finding me sympathetic, he unbent with the air of a man who had unexpectedly found something he had sought, and was fairly confidential. On the mother's side our author came of ministers. His maternal grandfather, the Rev. Dr Balfour of Colinton, was a man of handsome presence, tall, venerable-looking, and not without a mingled authority and humour of his own--no very great preacher, I have heard, but would sometimes bring a smile to the faces of his hearers by very naive and original ways of putting things. R. L. Stevenson quaintly tells a story of how his grandfather when he had physic to take, and was indulged in a sweet afterwards, yet would not allow the child to have a sweet because he had not had the physic. A veritable Calvinist in daily action--from him, no doubt, our subject drew much of his interest in certain directions--John Knox, Scottish history, the '15 and the '45, and no doubt much that justifies the line "something of shorter-catechist," as applied by Henley to Stevenson among very contrasted traits indeed. But strange truly are the interblendings of race, and the way in which traits of ancestors reappear, modifying and transforming each other. The gardener knows what can be done by grafts and buddings; but more wonderful far than anything there, are the mysterious blendings and outbursts of what is old and forgotten, along with what is wholly new and strange, and all going to produce often what we call sometimes eccentricity, and sometimes originality and genius. Mr J. F. George, in _Scottish Notes and Queries_, wrote as follows on Stevenson's inheritances and indebtedness to certain of his ancestors: "About 1650, James Balfour, one of the Principal Clerks of the Court of Session, married Bridget, daughter of Chalmers of Balbaithan, Keithhall, and that estate was for some time in the name of Balfour. His son, James Balfour of Balbaithan, Merchant and Magistrate of Edinburgh, paid poll-tax in 1696, but by 1699 the land had been sold. This was probably due to the fact that Balfour was one of the Governors of the Darien Company. His grandson, James Balfour of Pilrig (1705-1795), sometime Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh University, whose portrait is sketched in _Catriona_, also made a Garioch [Aberdeenshire district] marriage, his wife being Cecilia, fifth daughter of Sir John Elphinstone, second baronet of Logie (Elphinstone) and Sheriff of Aberdeen, by Mary, daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, first baronet of Minto. "Referring to the Minto descent, Stevenson claims to have 'shaken a spear in the Debatable Land and shouted the slogan of the Elliots.' He evidently knew little or nothing of his relations on the Elphinstone side. The Logie Elphinstones were a cadet branch of Glack, an estate acquired by Nicholas Elphinstone in 1499. William Elphinstone, a younger son of James of Glack, and Elizabeth Wood of Bonnyton, married Margaret Forbes, and was father of Sir James Elphinstone, Bart., of Logie, so created in 1701. . . . "Stevenson would have been delighted to acknowledge his relationship, remote though it was, to 'the Wolf of Badenoch,' who burned Elgin Cathedral without the Earl of Kildare's excuse that he thought the Bishop was in it; and to the Wolf's son, the Victor of Harlaw [and] to his nephew 'John O'Coull,' Constable of France. . . . Also among Tusitala's kin may be noted, in addition to the later Gordons of Gight, the Tiger Earl of Crawford, familiarly known as 'Earl Beardie,' the 'Wicked Master' of the same line, who was fatally stabbed by a Dundee cobbler 'for taking a stoup of drink from him'; Lady Jean Lindsay, who ran away with 'a common jockey with the horn,' and latterly became a beggar; David Lindsay, the last Laird of Edzell [a lichtsome Lindsay fallen on evil days], who ended his days as hostler at a Kirkwall inn, and 'Mussel Mou'ed Charlie,' the Jacobite ballad- singer. "Stevenson always believed that he had a strong spiritual affinity to Robert Fergusson. It is more than probable that there was a distant maternal affinity as well. Margaret Forbes, the mother of Sir James Elphinstone, the purchaser of Logie, has not been identified, but it is probable she was of the branch of the Tolquhon Forbeses who previously owned Logie. Fergusson's mother, Elizabeth Forbes, was the daughter of a Kildrummy tacksman, who by constant tradition is stated to have been of the house of Tolquhon. It would certainly be interesting if this suggested connection could be proved." {5} "From his Highland ancestors," says the _Quarterly Review_, "Louis drew the strain of Celtic melancholy with all its perils and possibilities, and its kinship, to the mood of day-dreaming, which has flung over so many of his pages now the vivid light wherein figures imagined grew as real as flesh and blood, and yet, again, the ghostly, strange, lonesome, and stinging mist under whose spell we see the world bewitched, and every object quickens with a throb of infectious terror." Here, as in many other cases, we see how the traits of ancestry reappear and transform other strains, strangely the more remote often being the strongest and most persistent and wonderful. "It is through his father, strange as it may seem," says Mr Baildon, "that Stevenson gets the Celtic elements so marked in his person, character, and genius; for his father's pedigree runs back to the Highland clan Macgregor, the kin of Rob Roy. Stevenson thus drew in Celtic strains from both sides--from the Balfours and the Stevensons alike--and in his strange, dreamy, beautiful, and often far-removed fancies we have the finest and most effective witness of it." Mr William Archer, in his own characteristic way, has brought the inheritances from the two sides of the house into more direct contact and contrast in an article he wrote in _The Daily Chronicle_ on the appearance of the _Letters to Family and Friends_. "These letters show," he says, "that Stevenson's was not one of those sunflower temperaments which turn by instinct, not effort, towards the light, and are, as Mr Francis Thompson puts it, 'heartless and happy, lackeying their god.' The strains of his heredity were very curiously, but very clearly, mingled. It may surprise some readers to find him speaking of 'the family evil, despondency,' but he spoke with knowledge. He inherited from his father not only a stern Scottish intentness on the moral aspect of life ('I would rise from the dead to preach'), but a marked disposition to melancholy and hypochondria. From his mother, on the other hand, he derived, along with his physical frailty, a resolute and cheery stoicism. These two elements in his nature fought many a hard fight, and the besieging forces from without--ill-health, poverty, and at one time family dissensions--were by no means without allies in the inner citadel of his soul. His spirit was courageous in the truest sense of the word: by effort and conviction, not by temperamental insensibility to fear. It is clear that there was a period in his life (and that before the worst of his bodily ills came upon him) when he was often within measurable distance of Carlylean gloom. He was twenty-four when he wrote thus, from Swanston, to Mrs Sitwell: "'It is warmer a bit; but my body is most decrepit, and I can just manage to be cheery and tread down hypochondria under foot by work. I lead such a funny life, utterly without interest or pleasure outside of my work: nothing, indeed, but work all day long, except a short walk alone on the cold hills, and meals, and a couple of pipes with my father in the evening. It is surprising how it suits me, and how happy I keep.' "This is the serenity which arises, not from the absence of fuliginous elements in the character, but from a potent smoke-consuming faculty, and an inflexible will to use it. Nine years later he thus admonishes his backsliding parent: "'MY DEAR MOTHER,--I give my father up. I give him a parable: that the Waverley novels are better reading for every day than the tragic _Life_. And he takes it back-side foremost, and shakes his head, and is gloomier than ever. Tell him that I give him up. I don't want no such a parent. This is not the man for my money. I do not call that by the name of religion which fills a man with bile. I write him a whole letter, bidding him beware of extremes, and telling him that his gloom is gallows-worthy; and I get back an answer--. Perish the thought of it. "'Here am I on the threshold of another year, when, according to all human foresight, I should long ago have been resolved into my elements: here am I, who you were persuaded was born to disgrace you--and, I will do you the justice to add, on no such insufficient grounds--no very burning discredit when all is done; here am I married, and the marriage recognised to be a blessing of the first order. A1 at Lloyd's. There is he, at his not first youth, able to take more exercise than I at thirty-three, and gaining a stone's weight, a thing of which I am incapable. There are you; has the man no gratitude? . . . "'Even the Shorter Catechism, not the merriest epitome of religion, and a work exactly as pious although not quite so true as the multiplication table--even that dry-as-dust epitome begins with a heroic note. What is man's chief end? Let him study that; and ask himself if to refuse to enjoy God's kindest gifts is in the spirit indicated.' "As may be judged from this half-playful, half-serious remonstrance, Stevenson's relation to his parents was eminently human and beautiful. The family dissensions above alluded to belonged only to a short but painful period, when the father could not reconcile himself to the discovery that the son had ceased to accept the formulas of Scottish Calvinism. In the eyes of the older man such heterodoxy was for the moment indistinguishable from atheism; but he soon arrived at a better understanding of his son's position. Nothing appears more unmistakably in these letters than the ingrained theism of Stevenson's way of thought. The poet, the romancer within him, revolted from the conception of formless force. A personal deity was a necessary character in the drama, as he conceived it. And his morality, though (or inasmuch as) it dwelt more on positive kindness than on negative lawlessness, was, as he often insisted, very much akin to the morality of the New Testament." Anyway it is clear that much in the interminglings of blood we _can_ trace, may go to account for not a little in Stevenson. His peculiar interest in the enormities of old-time feuds, the excesses, the jealousies, the queer psychological puzzles, the desire to work on the outlying and morbid, and even the unallowed and unhallowed, for purposes of romance--the delight in dealing with revelations of primitive feeling and the out-bursts of the mere natural man always strangely checked and diverted by the uprise of other tendencies to the dreamy, impalpable, vague, weird and horrible. There was the undoubted Celtic element in him underlying what seemed foreign to it, the disregard of conventionality in one phase, and the falling under it in another--the reaction and the retreat from what had attracted and interested him, and then the return upon it, as with added zest because of the retreat. The confessed Hedonist, enjoying life and boasting of it just a little, and yet the Puritan in him, as it were, all the time eyeing himself as from some loophole of retreat, and then commenting on his own behaviour as a Hedonist and Bohemian. This clearly was not what most struck Beerbohm Tree, during the time he was in close contact with Stevenson, while arranging the production of _Beau Austin_ at the Haymarket Theatre, for he sees, or confesses to seeing, only one side, and that the most assertive, and in a sense, unreal one: "Stevenson," says Mr Tree, "always seemed to me an epicure in life. He was always intent on extracting the last drop of honey from every flower that came in his way. He was absorbed in the business of the moment, however trivial. As a companion, he was delightfully witty; as a personality, as much a creature of romance as his own creations." This is simple, and it looks sincere; but it does not touch 'tother side, or hint at, not to say, solve the problem of Stevenson's personality. Had he been the mere Hedonist he could never have done the work he did. Mr Beerbohm Tree certainly did not there see far or all round. Miss Simpson says: "Mr Henley recalls him to Edinburgh folk as he was and as the true Stevenson would have wished to be known--a queer, inexplicable creature, his Celtic blood showing like a vein of unknown metal in the stolid, steady rock of his sure-founded Stevensonian pedigree. His cousin and model, 'Bob' Stevenson, the art critic, showed that this foreign element came from the men who lit our guiding lights for seamen, not from the gentle-blooded Balfours. "Mr Henley is right in saying that the gifted boy had not much humour. When the joke was against himself he was very thin-skinned and had a want of balance. This made him feel his honest father's sensible remarks like the sting of a whip." Miss Simpson then proceeds to say: "The R. L. Stevenson of old Edinburgh days was a conceited, egotistical youth, but a true and honest one: a youth full of fire and sentiment, protesting he was misunderstood, though he was not. Posing as 'Velvet Coat' among the slums, he did no good to himself. He had not the Dickens aptitude for depicting the ways of life of his adopted friends. When with refined judgment he wanted a figure for a novel, he went back to the Bar he scorned in his callow days and then drew in _Weir of Hermiston_." CHAPTER V--TRAVELS His interest in engineering soon went--his mind full of stories and fancies and human nature. As he had told his mother: he did not care about finding what was "the strain on a bridge," he wanted to know something of human beings. No doubt, much to the disappointment and grief of his father, who wished him as an only son to carry on the traditions of the family, though he had written two engineering essays of utmost promise, the engineering was given up, and he consented to study law. He had already contributed to College Magazines, and had had even a short spell of editing one; of one of these he has given a racy account. Very soon after his call to the Bar articles and essays from his pen began to appear in _Macmillan's_, and later, more regularly in the _Cornhill_. Careful readers soon began to note here the presence of a new force. He had gone on the _Inland Voyage_ and an account of it was in hand; and had done that tour in the Cevennes which he has described under the title _Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes_, with Modestine, sometimes doubting which was the donkey, but on that tour a chill caught either developed a germ of lung disease already present, or produced it; and the results unfortunately remained. He never practised at the Bar, though he tells facetiously of his one brief. He had chosen his own vocation, which was literature, and the years which followed were, despite the delicacy which showed itself, very busy years. He produced volume on volume. He had written many stories which had never seen the light, but, as he says, passed through the ordeal of the fire by more or less circuitous ways. By this time some trouble and cause for anxiety had arisen about the lungs, and trials of various places had been made. _Ordered South_ suggests the Mediterranean, sunny Italy, the Riviera. Then a sea-trip to America was recommended and undertaken. Unfortunately, he got worse there, his original cause of trouble was complicated with others, and the medical treatment given was stupid, and exaggerated some of the symptoms instead of removing them, All along--up, at all events, to the time of his settlement in Samoa--Stevenson was more or less of an invalid. Indeed, were I ever to write an essay on the art of wisely "laying-to," as the sailors say, I would point it by a reference to R. L. Stevenson. For there is a wise way of "laying-to" that does not imply inaction, but discreet, well-directed effort, against contrary winds and rough seas, that is, amid obstacles and drawbacks, and even ill-health, where passive and active may balance and give effect to each other. Stevenson was by native instinct and temperament a rover--a lover of adventure, of strange by-ways, errant tracts (as seen in his _Inland Voyage_ and _Travels with a Donkey through the Cevennes_--seen yet more, perhaps, in a certain account of a voyage to America as a steerage passenger), lofty mountain- tops, with stronger air, and strange and novel surroundings. He would fain, like Ulysses, be at home in foreign lands, making acquaintance with outlying races, with "Cities of men, And manners, climates, councils, governments: Myself not least, but honoured of them all, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy." If he could not move about as he would, he would invent, make fancy serve him instead of experience. We thus owe something to the staying and restraining forces in him, and a wise "laying-to"--for his works, which are, in large part, finely-healthy, objective, and in almost everything unlike the work of an invalid, yet, in some degree, were but the devices to beguile the burdens of an invalid's days. Instead of remaining in our climate, it might be, to lie listless and helpless half the day, with no companion but his own thoughts and fancies (not always so pleasant either, if, like Frankenstein's monster, or, better still like the imp in the bottle in the _Arabian Nights_, you cannot, once for all liberate them, and set them adrift on their own charges to visit other people), he made a home in the sweeter air and more steady climate of the South Pacific, where, under the Southern Cross, he could safely and beneficially be as active as he would be involuntarily idle at home, or work only under pressure of hampering conditions. That was surely an illustration of the true "laying-to" with an unaffectedly brave, bright resolution in it. CHAPTER VI--SOME EARLIER LETTERS Carlyle was wont to say that, next to a faithful portrait, familiar letters were the best medium to reveal a man. The letters must have been written with no idea of being used for this end, however--free, artless, the unstudied self-revealings of mind and heart. Now, these letters of R. L. Stevenson, written to his friends in England, have a vast value in this way--they reveal the man--reveal him in his strength and his weakness--his ready gift in pleasing and adapting himself to those with whom he corresponded, and his great power at once of adapting himself to his circumstances and of humorously rising superior to them. When he was ill and almost penniless in San Francisco, he could give Mr Colvin this account of his daily routine: "Any time between eight and half-past nine in the morning a slender gentleman in an ulster, with a volume buttoned into the breast of it, maybe observed leaving No. 608 Bush and descending Powell with an active step. The gentleman is R. L. Stevenson; the volume relates to Benjamin Franklin, on whom he meditates one of his charming essays. He descends Powell, crosses Market, and descends in Sixth on a branch of the original Pine Street Coffee-House, no less. . . . He seats himself at a table covered with waxcloth, and a pampered menial of High-Dutch extraction, and, indeed, as yet only partially extracted, lays before him a cup of coffee, a roll, and a pat of butter, all, to quote the deity, very good. A while ago, and R. L. Stevenson used to find the supply of butter insufficient; but he has now learned the art to exactitude, and butter and roll expire at the same moment. For this rejection he pays ten cents, or fivepence sterling (0 pounds 0s. 5d.). "Half an hour later, the inhabitants of Bush Street observed the same slender gentleman armed, like George Washington, with his little hatchet, splitting kindling, and breaking coal for his fire. He does this quasi-publicly upon the window-sill; but this is not to be attributed to any love of notoriety, though he is indeed vain of his prowess with the hatchet (which he persists in calling an axe), and daily surprised at the perpetuation of his fingers. The reason is this: That the sill is a strong supporting beam, and that blows of the same emphasis in other parts of his room might knock the entire shanty into hell. Thenceforth, for from three hours, he is engaged darkly with an ink-bottle. Yet he is not blacking his boots, for the only pair that he possesses are innocent of lustre, and wear the natural hue of the material turned up with caked and venerable slush. The youngest child of his landlady remarks several times a day, as this strange occupant enters or quits the house, 'Dere's de author.' Can it be that this bright-haired innocent has found the true clue to the mystery? The being in question is, at least, poor enough to belong to that honourable craft." Here are a few letters belonging to the winter of 1887-88, nearly all written from Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks, celebrated by Emerson, and now a most popular holiday resort in the United States, and were originally published in _Scribner's Magazine_. . . "It should be said that, after his long spell of weakness at Bournemouth, Stevenson had gone West in search of health among the bleak hill summits--'on the Canadian border of New York State, very unsettled and primitive and cold.' He had made the voyage in an ocean tramp, the _Ludgate Hill_, the sort of craft which any person not a born child of the sea would shun in horror. Stevenson, however, had 'the finest time conceivable on board the "strange floating menagerie."'" Thus he describes it in a letter to Mr Henry James: "Stallions and monkeys and matches made our cargo; and the vast continent of these incongruities rolled the while like a haystack; and the stallions stood hypnotised by the motion, looking through the port at our dinner-table, and winked when the crockery was broken; and the little monkeys stared at each other in their cages, and were thrown overboard like little bluish babies; and the big monkey, Jacko, scoured about the ship and rested willingly in my arms, to the ruin of my clothing; and the man of the stallions made a bower of the black tarpaulin, and sat therein at the feet of a raddled divinity, like a picture on a box of chocolates; and the other passengers, when they were not sick, looked on and laughed. Take all this picture, and make it roll till the bell shall sound unexpected notes and the fittings shall break loose in our stateroom, and you have the voyage of the _Ludgate Hill_. She arrived in the port of New York without beer, porter, soda-water, curacoa, fresh meat, or fresh water; and yet we lived, and we regret her." He discovered this that there is no joy in the Universe comparable to life on a villainous ocean tramp, rolling through a horrible sea in company with a cargo of cattle. "I have got one good thing of my sea voyage; it is proved the sea agrees heartily with me, and my mother likes it; so if I get any better, or no worse, my mother will likely hire a yacht for a month or so in the summer. Good Lord! what fun! Wealth is only useful for two things: a yacht and a string quartette. For these two I will sell my soul. Except for these I hold that 700 pounds a year is as much as anybody can possibly want; and I have had more, so I know, for the extra coins were of no use, excepting for illness, which damns everything. I was so happy on board that ship, I could not have believed it possible; we had the beastliest weather, and many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp ship gave us many comforts. We could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at sea. And truly there is nothing else. I had literally forgotten what happiness was, and the full mind--full of external and physical things, not full of cares and labours, and rot about a fellow's behaviour. My heart literally sang; I truly care for nothing so much as for that. "To go ashore for your letters and hang about the pier among the holiday yachtsmen--that's fame, that's glory--and nobody can take it away." At Saranac Lake the Stevensons lived in a "wind-beleaguered hill-top hat- box of a house," which suited the invalid, but, on the other hand, invalided his wife. Soon after getting there he plunged into _The Master of Ballantrae_. "No thought have I now apart from it, and I have got along up to page ninety-two of the draught with great interest. It is to me a most seizing tale: there are some fantastic elements, the most is a dead genuine human problem--human tragedy, I should say rather. It will be about as long, I imagine, as _Kidnapped_. . . . I have done most of the big work, the quarrel, duel between the brothers, and the announcement of the death to Clementina and my Lord--Clementina, Henry, and Mackellar (nicknamed Squaretoes) are really very fine fellows; the Master is all I know of the devil; I have known hints of him, in the world, but always cowards: he is as bold as a lion, but with the same deadly, causeless duplicity I have watched with so much surprise in my two cowards. 'Tis true, I saw a hint of the same nature in another man who was not a coward; but he had other things to attend to; the Master has nothing else but his devilry." His wife grows seriously ill, and Stevenson has to turn to household work. "Lloyd and I get breakfast; I have now, 10.15, just got the dishes washed and the kitchen all clean, and sit down to give you as much news as I have spirit for, after such an engagement. Glass is a thing that really breaks my spirit; and I do not like to fail, and with glass I cannot reach the work of my high calling--the artist's." In the midst of such domestic tasks and entanglements he writes _The Master_, and very characteristically gets dissatisfied with the last parts, "which shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning." Of Mr Kipling this is his judgment--in the year 1890: "Kipling is by far the most promising young man who has appeared since--ahem--I appeared. He amazes me by his precocity and various endowments. But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste. He should shield his fire with both hands, 'and draw up all his strength and sweetness in one ball.' ('Draw all his strength and all his sweetness up into one ball'? I cannot remember Marvell's words.) So the critics have been saying to me; but I was never capable of--and surely never guilty of--such a debauch of production. At this rate his works will soon fill the habitable globe, and surely he was armed for better conflicts than these succinct sketches and flying leaves of verse? I look on, I admire, I rejoice for myself; but in a kind of ambition we all have for our tongue and literature I am wounded. If I had this man's fertility and courage, it seems to me I could heave a pyramid. "Well, we begin to be the old fogies now, and it was high time _something_ rose to take our places. Certainly Kipling has the gifts; the fairy godmothers were all tipsy at his christening. What will he do with them?" Of the rest of Stevenson's career we cannot speak at length, nor is it needful. How in steady succession came his triumphs: came, too, his trials from ill-health--how he spent winters at Davos Platz, Bournemouth, and tried other places in America; and how, at last, good fortune led him to the South Pacific. After many voyagings and wanderings among the islands, he settled near Apia, in Samoa, early in 1890, cleared some four hundred acres, and built a house; where, while he wrote what delighted the English-speaking race, he took on himself the defence of the natives against foreign interlopers, writing under the title _A Footnote to History_, the most powerful _expose_ of the mischief they had done and were doing there. He was the beloved of the natives, as he made himself the friend of all with whom he came in contact. There, as at home, he worked--worked with the same determination and in the enjoyment of better health. The obtaining idea with him, up to the end, as it had been from early life, was a brave, resolute, cheerful endeavour to make the best of it. "I chose Samoa instead of Honolulu," he told Mr W. H. Trigg, who reports the talk in _Cassells' Magazine_, "for the simple and eminently satisfactory reason that it is less civilised. Can you not conceive that it is awful fun?" His house was called "Vailima," which means Five Waters in the Samoan, and indicates the number of streams that flow by the spot. CHAPTER VII--THE VAILIMA LETTERS The Vailima Letters, written to Mr Sidney Colvin and other friends, are in their way delightful if not inimitable: and this, in spite of the idea having occurred to him, that some use might hereafter be made of these letters for publication purposes. There is, indeed, as little trace of any change in the style through this as well could be--the utterly familiar, easy, almost child-like flow remains, unmarred by self-consciousness or tendency "to put it on." In June, 1892, Stevenson says: "It came over me the other day suddenly that this diary of mine to you would make good pickings after I am dead, and a man could make some kind of a book out of it, without much trouble. So for God's sake don't lose them, and they will prove a piece of provision for 'my floor old family,' as Simele calls it." But their great charm remains: they are as free and gracious and serious and playful and informal as before. Stevenson's traits of character are all here: his largeness of heart, his delicacy, his sympathy, his fun, his pathos, his boylike frolicsomeness, his fine courage, his love of the sea (for he was by nature a sailor), his passion for action and adventure despite his ill-health, his great patience with others and fine adaptability to their temper (he says that he never gets out of temper with those he has to do with), his unbounded, big-hearted hopefulness, and fine perseverance in face of difficulties. What could be better than the way in which he tells that in January, 1892, when he had a bout of influenza and was dictating _St Ives_ to his stepdaughter, Mrs Strong, he was "reduced to dictating to her in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet"?--and goes on: "The amanuensis has her head quite turned, and believes herself to be the author of this novel [_and is to some extent_.--A.M.] and as the creature (!) has not been wholly useless in the matter [_I told you so_!--A.M.] I propose to foster her vanity by a little commemoration gift! . . . I shall tell you on some other occasion, and when the A.M. is out of hearing, how _very_ much I propose to invest in this testimonial; but I may as well inform you at once that I intend it to be cheap, sir--damned cheap! My idea of running amanuenses is by praise, not pudding, flattery, and not coins." Truly, a rare and rich nature which could thus draw sunshine out of its trials!--which, by aid of the true philosopher's stone of cheerfulness and courage, could transmute the heavy dust and clay to gold. His interests are so wide that he is sometimes pulled in different and conflicting directions, as in the contest between his desire to aid Mataafa and the other chiefs, and his literary work--between letters to the _Times_ about Samoan politics, and, say, _David Balfour_. Here is a characteristic bit in that strain: "I have a good dose of the devil in my pipestem atomy; I have had my little holiday outing in my kick at _The Young Chevalier_, and I guess I can settle to _David Balfour_, to-morrow or Friday like a little man. I wonder if any one had ever more energy upon so little strength? I know there is a frost; . . . but I mean to break that frost inside two years, and pull off a big success, and Vanity whispers in my ear that I have the strength. If I haven't, whistle owre the lave o't! I can do without glory, and perhaps the time is not far off when I can do without corn. It is a time coming soon enough, anyway; and I have endured some two and forty years without public shame, and had a good time as I did it. If only I could secure a violent death, what a fine success! I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse--ay, to be hanged, rather than pass again through that slow dissolution." He would not consent to act the invalid unless the spring ran down altogether; was keen for exercise and for mixing among men--his native servants if no others were near by. Here is a bit of confession and casuistry quite _a la_ Stevenson: "To come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after some hours in the bush, change, rub down, and take a chair in the verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience. And the strange thing that I mark is this: If I go out and make sixpence, bossing my labourers and plying the cutlass or the spade, idiot conscience applauds me; if I sit in the house and make twenty pounds, idiot conscience wails over my neglect and the day wasted." His relish for companionship is indeed strong. At one place he says: "God knows I don't care who I chum with perhaps I like sailors best, but to go round and sue and sneak to keep a crowd together--never!" If Stevenson's natural bent was to be an explorer, a mountain-climber, or a sailor--to sail wide seas, or to range on mountain-tops to gain free and extensive views--yet he inclines well to farmer work, and indeed, has to confess it has a rare attraction for him. "I went crazy over outdoor work," he says at one place, "and had at last to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board. _Nothing_ is so interesting as weeding, clearing, and path- making: the oversight of labourers becomes a disease. It is quite an effort not to drop into the farmer; and it does make you feel so well." The odd ways of these Samoans, their pride of position, their vices, their virtues, their vanities, their small thefts, their tricks, their delightful _insouciance_ sometimes, all amused him. He found in them a fine field of study and observation--a source of fun and fund of humanity--as this bit about the theft of some piglings will sufficiently prove: "Last night three piglings were stolen from one of our pig-pens. The great Lafaele appeared to my wife uneasy, so she engaged him in conversation on the subject, and played upon him the following engaging trick: You advance your two forefingers towards the sitter's eyes; he closes them, whereupon you substitute (on his eyelids) the fore and middle fingers of the left hand, and with your right (which he supposes engaged) you tap him on the head and back. When you let him open his eyes, he sees you withdrawing the two forefingers. 'What that?' asked Lafaele. 'My devil,' says Fanny. 'I wake um, my devil. All right now. He go catch the man that catch my pig.' About an hour afterwards Lafaele came for further particulars. 'Oh, all right,' my wife says. 'By-and-by that man be sleep, devil go sleep same place. By-and-by that man plenty sick. I no care. What for he take my pig?' Lafaele cares plenty; I don't think he is the man, though he may be; but he knows him, and most likely will eat some of that pig to-night. He will not eat with relish.'" Yet in spite of this R. L. Stevenson declares that: "They are a perfectly honest people: nothing of value has ever been taken from our house, where doors and windows are always wide open; and upon one occasion when white ants attacked the silver chest, the whole of my family treasure lay spread upon the floor of the hall for two days unguarded." Here is a bit on a work of peace, a reflection on a day's weeding at Vailima--in its way almost as touching as any: "I wonder if any one had ever the same attitude to Nature as I hold, and have held for so long? This business fascinates me like a tune or a passion; yet all the while I thrill with a strong distaste. The horror of the thing, objective and subjective, is always present to my mind; the horror of creeping things, a superstitious horror of the void and the powers about me, the horror of my own devastation and continual murders. The life of the plants comes through my finger- tips, their struggles go to my heart like supplications. I feel myself blood-boltered; then I look back on my cleared grass, and count myself an ally in a fair quarrel, and make stout my heart." Here, again, is the way in which he celebrates an act of friendly kindness on the part of Mr Gosse: "MY DEAR GOSSE,--Your letter was to me such a bright spot that I answer it right away to the prejudice of other correspondents or--dants (don't know how to spell it) who have prior claims. . . . It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters, multiplying, spreading, making one happy through another and bringing forth benefits, some thirty, some fifty, some a thousandfold, I should be tempted to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit. So your four pages have confirmed my philosophy as well as consoled my heart in these ill hours." CHAPTER VIII--WORK OF LATER YEARS Mr Hammerton, in his _Stevensoniana_ (pp. 323-4), has given the humorous inscriptions on the volumes of his works which Stevenson presented to Dr Trudeau, who attended him when he was in Saranac in 1887-88--very characteristic in every way, and showing fully Stevenson's fine appreciation of any attention or service. On the _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_ volume he wrote: "Trudeau was all the winter at my side: I never saw the nose of Mr Hyde." And on _Kidnapped_ is this: "Here is the one sound page of all my writing, The one I'm proud of and that I delight in." Stevenson was exquisite in this class of efforts, and were they all collected they would form indeed, a fine supplement and illustration of the leading lesson of his essays--the true art of pleasing others, and of truly pleasing one's self at the same time. To my thinking the finest of all in this line is the legal (?) deed by which he conveyed his birthday to little Miss Annie Ide, the daughter of Mr H. C. Ide, a well-known American, who was for several years a resident of Upolo, in Samoa, first as Land Commissioner, and later as Chief Justice under the joint appointment of England, Germany, and the United States. While living at Apia, Mr Ide and his family were very intimate with the family of R. L. Stevenson. Little Annie was a special pet and protege of Stevenson and his wife. After the return of the Ides to their American home, Stevenson "deeded" to Annie his birthday in the following unique document: I, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, advocate of the Scots Bar, author of _The Master of Ballantrae_ and _Moral Emblems_, civil engineer, sole owner and patentee of the palace and plantation known as Vailima, in the island of Upolo, Samoa, a British subject, being in sound mind, and pretty well, I thank you, in mind and body; In consideration that Miss Annie H. Ide, daughter of H. C. Ide, in the town of Saint Johnsbury, in the County of Caledonia, in the State of Vermont, United States of America, was born, out of all reason, upon Christmas Day, and is, therefore, out of all justice, denied the consolation and profit of a proper birthday; And considering that I, the said Robert Louis Stevenson, have attained the age when we never mention it, and that I have now no further use for a birthday of any description; And in consideration that I have met H. C. Ide, the father of the said Annie H. Ide, and found him as white a land commissioner as I require, I have transferred, and do hereby transfer, to the said Annie H. Ide, all and whole of my rights and privileges in the 13th day of November, formerly my birthday, now, hereby and henceforth, the birthday of the said Annie H. Ide, to have, hold, exercise, and enjoy the same in the customary manner, by the sporting of fine raiment, eating of rich meats, and receipt of gifts, compliments, and copies of verse, according to the manner of our ancestors; And I direct the said Annie H. Ide to add to the said name of Annie H. Ide the name of Louisa--at least in private--and I charge her to use my said birthday with moderation and humanity, _et tamquam bona filia familias_, the said birthday not being so young as it once was and having carried me in a very satisfactory manner since I can remember; And in case the said Annie H. Ide shall neglect or contravene either of the above conditions, I hereby revoke the donation and transfer my rights in the said birthday to the President of the United States of America for the time being. In witness whereof I have hereto set my hand and seal this 19th day of June, in the year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-one. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. [Seal.] _Witness_, LLOYD OSBOURNE. _Witness_, HAROLD WATTS. He died in Samoa in December 1894--not from phthisis or anything directly connected with it, but from the bursting of a blood-vessel and suffusion of blood on the brain. He had up to the moment almost of his sudden and unexpected death been busy on _Weir of Hermiston_ and _St Ives_, which he left unfinished--the latter having been brought to a conclusion by Mr Quiller-Couch. CHAPTER IX--SOME CHARACTERISTICS In Stevenson we lost one of the most powerful writers of our day, as well as the most varied in theme and style. When I use the word "powerful," I do not mean merely the producing of the most striking or sensational results, nor the facility of weaving a fascinating or blood-curdling plot; I mean the writer who seemed always to have most in reserve--a secret fund of power and fascination which always pointed beyond the printed page, and set before the attentive and careful reader a strange but fascinating _personality_. Other authors have done that in measure. There was Hawthorne, behind whose writings there is always the wistful, cold, far-withdrawn spectator of human nature--eerie, inquisitive, and, I had almost said, inquisitorial--a little bloodless, eerie, weird, and cobwebby. There was Dr Wendell Holmes, with his problems of heredity, of race-mixture and weird inoculation, as in _Elsie Venner_ and _The Guardian Angel_, and there were Poe and Charles Whitehead. Stevenson, in a few of his writings--in one of the _Merry Men_ chapters and in _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, and, to some extent, in _The Master of Ballantrae_--showed that he could enter on the obscure and, in a sense, weird and metaphysical elements in human life; though always there was, too, a touch at least of gloomy suggestion, from which, as it seemed, he could not there wholly escape. But always, too, there was a touch that suggests the universal. Even in the stories that would be classed as those of incident and adventure merely, _Treasure Island_, _Kidnapped_, and the rest, there is a sense as of some unaffected but fine symbolism that somehow touches something of possibility in yourself as you read. The simplest narrative from his hand proclaimed itself a deep study in human nature--its motives tendencies, and possibilities. In these stories there is promise at once of the most realistic imagination, the most fantastic romance, keen insights into some sides of human nature, and weird fancies, as well as the most delicate and dainty pictures of character. And this is precisely what we have--always with a vein of the finest autobiography--a kind of select and indirect self-revelation--often with a touch of quaintness, a subdued humour, and sweet-blooded vagary, if we may be allowed the word, which make you feel towards the writer as towards a friend. He was too much an artist to overdo this, and his strength lies there, that generally he suggests and turns away at the right point, with a smile, as you ask for _more_. Look how he sets, half slyly, these words into the mouth of David Balfour on his first meeting with Catriona in one of the steep wynds or closes off the High Street of Edinburgh: "There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman fits in a man's mind, and stays there, and he never could tell you why: it just seems it was the thing he wanted." Take this alongside of his remark made to his mother while still a youth--"that he did not care to understand the strain on a bridge" (when he tried to study engineering); what he wanted was something with human nature in it. His style, in his essays, etc., where he writes in his own person, is most polished, full of phrases finely drawn; when he speaks through others, as in _Kidnapped_ and _David Balfour_, it is still fine and effective, and generally it is fairly true to the character, with cunning glimpses, nevertheless, of his own temper and feeling too. He makes us feel his confidants and friends, as has been said. One could almost construct a biography from his essays and his novels--the one would give us the facts of his life suffused with fancy and ideal colour, humour and fine observation not wanting; the other would give us the history of his mental and moral being and development, and of the traits and determinations which he drew from along a lengthened line of progenitors. How characteristic it is of him--a man who for so many years suffered as an invalid--that he should lay it down that the two great virtues, including all others, were cheerfulness and delight in labour. One writer has very well said on this feature in Stevenson: "Other authors have struggled bravely against physical weakness, but their work has not usually been of a creative order, dependent for its success on high animal spirits. They have written histories, essays, contemplative or didactic poems, works which may more or less be regarded as 'dull narcotics numbing pain.' But who, in so fragile a frame as Robert Louis Stevenson's, has retained such indomitable elasticity, such fertility of invention, such unflagging energy, not merely to collect and arrange, but to project and body forth? Has any true 'maker' been such an incessant sufferer? From his childhood, as he himself said apropos of the _Child's Garden_, he could 'speak with less authority of gardens than of that other "land of counterpane."' There were, indeed, a few years of adolescence during which his health was tolerable, but they were years of apprenticeship to life and art ('pioching,' as he called it), not of serious production. Though he was a precocious child, his genius ripened slowly, and it was just reaching maturity when the 'wolverine,' as he called his disease, fixed its fangs in his flesh. From that time forward not only did he live with death at his elbow in an almost literal sense (he used to carry his left arm in a sling lest a too sudden movement should bring on a haemorrhage), but he had ever-recurring intervals of weeks and months during which he was totally unfit for work; while even at the best of times he had to husband his strength most jealously. Add to all this that he was a slow and laborious writer, who would take more pains with a phrase than Scott with a chapter--then look at the stately shelf of his works, brimful of impulse, initiative, and the joy of life, and say whether it be an exaggeration to call his tenacity and fortitude unique!" Samoa, with its fine climate, prolonged his life--we had fain hoped that in that air he found so favourable he might have lived for many years, to add to the precious stock of innocent delight he has given to the world--to do yet more and greater. It was not to be. They buried him, with full native honours as to a chief, on the top of Vaea mountain, 1300 feet high--a road for the coffin to pass being cut through the woods on the slopes of the hill. There he has a resting-place not all unfit--for he sought the pure and clearer air on the heights from whence there are widest prospects; yet not in the spot he would have chosen--for his heart was at home, and not very long before his death he sang, surely with pathetic reference now: "Spring shall come, come again, calling up the moorfowl, Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers, Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley, Soft flow the stream thro' the even-flowing hours; Fair the day shine, as it shone upon my childhood-- Fair shine the day on the house with open door; Birds come and cry there, and twitter in the chimney-- But I go for ever and come again no more." CHAPTER X--A SAMOAN MEMORIAL OF R. L. STEVENSON A few weeks after his death, the mail from Samoa, brought to Stevenson's friends, myself among the number, a precious, if pathetic, memorial of the master. It is in the form of "A Letter to Mr Stevenson's Friends," by his stepson, Mr Lloyd Osbourne, and bears the motto from Walt Whitman, "I have been waiting for you these many years. Give me your hand and welcome." Mr Osbourne gives a full account of the last hours. "He wrote hard all that morning of the last day; his half-finished book, _Hermiston_, he judged the best he had ever written, and the sense of successful effort made him buoyant and happy as nothing else could. In the afternoon the mail fell to be answered--not business correspondence, for this was left till later--but replies to the long, kindly letters of distant friends received but two days since, and still bright in memory. At sunset he came downstairs; rallied his wife about the forebodings she could not shake off; talked of a lecturing tour to America that he was eager to make, 'as he was now so well'; and played a game of cards with her to drive away her melancholy. He said he was hungry; begged her assistance to help him make a salad for the evening meal; and, to enhance the little feast he brought up a bottle of old Burgundy from the cellar. He was helping his wife on the verandah, and gaily talking, when suddenly he put both hands to his head and cried out, 'What's that?' Then he asked quickly, 'Do I look strange?' Even as he did so he fell on his knees beside her. He was helped into the great hall, between his wife and his body-servant, Sosimo, losing consciousness instantly as he lay back in the armchair that had once been his grandfather's. Little time was lost in bringing the doctors--Anderson of the man-of-war, and his friend, Dr Funk. They looked at him and shook their heads; they laboured strenuously, and left nothing undone. But he had passed the bounds of human skill. He had grown so well and strong, that his wasted lungs were unable to bear the stress of returning health." Then 'tis told how the Rev. Mr Clarke came and prayed by him; and how, soon after, the chiefs were summoned, and came, bringing their fine mats, which, laid on the body, almost hid the Union jack in which it had been wrapped. One of the old Mataafa chiefs, who had been in prison, and who had been one of those who worked on the making of the "Road of the Loving Heart" (the road of gratitude which the chiefs had made up to Mr Stevenson's house as a mark of their appreciation of his efforts on their behalf), came and crouched beside the body and said: "I am only a poor Samoan, and ignorant. Others are rich, and can give Tusitala {6} the parting presents of rich, fine mats; I am poor, and can give nothing this last day he receives his friends. Yet I am not afraid to come and look the last time in my friend's face, never to see him more till we meet with God. Behold! Tusitala is dead; Mataafa is also dead. These two great friends have been taken by God. When Mataafa was taken, who was our support but Tusitala? We were in prison, and he cared for us. We were sick, and he made us well. We were hungry, and he fed us. The day was no longer than his kindness. You are great people, and full of love. Yet who among you is so great as Tusitala? What is your love to his love? Our clan was Mataafa's clan, for whom I speak this day; therein was Tusitala also. We mourn them both." A select company of Samoans would not be deterred, and watched by the body all night, chanting songs, with bits of Catholic prayers; and in the morning the work began of clearing a path through the wood on the hill to the spot on the crown where Mr Stevenson had expressed a wish to be buried. The following prayer, which Mr Stevenson had written and read aloud to his family only the night before, was read by Mr Clarke in the service: "We beseech thee, Lord, to behold us with favour, folk of many families and nations, gathered together in the peace of this roof; weak men and women, subsisting under the covert of Thy patience. Be patient still; suffer us yet a while longer--with our broken purposes of good, with our idle endeavours against evil--suffer us a while longer to endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, have us play the man under affliction. Be with our friends; be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest: if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns to us, our Sun and Comforter, call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts--eager to labour--eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion; and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it. "We thank Thee and praise Thee, and in the words of Him to whom this day is sacred, close our oblations." Mr Bazzet M. Haggard, H.B.M., Land-Commissioner, tells, by way of reminiscence, the story of "The Road of Good Heart," how it came to be built, and of the great feast Mr Stevenson gave at the close of the work, at which, in the course of his speech, he said: "You are all aware in some degree of what has happened. You know those chiefs to have been prisoners; you perhaps know that during the term of their confinement I had it in my power to do them certain favours. One thing some of you cannot know, that they were immediately repaid by answering attentions. They were liberated by the new Administration. . . . As soon as they were free men--owing no man anything--instead of going home to their own places and families, they came to me. They offered to do this work (to make this road) for me as a free gift, without hire, without supplies, and I was tempted at first to refuse their offer. I knew the country to be poor; I knew famine threatening; I knew their families long disorganised for want of supervision. Yet I accepted, because I thought the lesson of that road might be more useful to Samoa than a thousand bread-fruit trees, and because to myself it was an exquisite pleasure to receive that which was so handsomely offered. It is now done; you have trod it to- day in coming hither. It has been made for me by chiefs; some of them old, some sick, all newly delivered from a harassing confinement, and in spite of weather unusually hot and insalubrious. I have seen these chiefs labour valiantly with their own hands upon the work, and I have set up over it, now that it is finished the name of 'The Road of Gratitude' (the road of loving hearts), and the names of those that built it. 'In perpetuam memoriam,' we say, and speak idly. At least, as long as my own life shall be spared it shall be here perpetuated; partly for my pleasure and in my gratitude; partly for others continually to publish the lesson of this road." And turning to the chiefs, Mr Stevenson said: "I will tell you, chiefs, that when I saw you working on that road, my heart grew warm; not with gratitude only, but with hope. It seemed to me that I read the promise of something good for Samoa; it seemed to me as I looked at you that you were a company of warriors in a battle, fighting for the defence of our common country against all aggression. For there is a time to fight and a time to dig. You Samoans may fight, you may conquer twenty times, and thirty times, and all will be in vain. There is but one way to defend Samoa. Hear it, before it is too late. It is to make roads and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their produce wisely; and, in one word, to occupy and use your country. If you do not, others will. . . . "I love Samoa and her people. I love the land. I have chosen it to be my home while I live, and my grave after I am dead, and I love the people, and have chosen them to be my people, to live and die with. And I see that the day is come now of the great battle; of the great and the last opportunity by which it shall be decided whether you are to pass away like those other races of which I have been speaking, or to stand fast and have your children living on and honouring your memory in the land you received of your fathers." Mr James H. Mulligan, U.S. Consul, told of the feast of Thanksgiving Day on the 29th November prior to Mr Stevenson's death, and how at great pains he had procured for it the necessary turkey, and how Mrs Stevenson had found a fair substitute for the pudding. In the course of his speech in reply to an unexpected proposal of "The Host," Mr Stevenson said: "There on my right sits she who has but lately from our own loved native land come back to me--she to whom, with no lessening of affection to those others to whom I cling, I love better than all the world besides--my mother. From the opposite end of the table, my wife, who has been all in all to me, when the days were very dark, looks to-night into my eyes--while we have both grown a bit older--with undiminished and undiminishing affection. "Childless, yet on either side of me sits that good woman, my daughter, and the stalwart man, my son, and both have been and are more than son and daughter to me, and have brought into my life mirth and beauty. Nor is this all. There sits the bright boy dear to my heart, full of the flow and the spirits of boyhood, so that I can even know that for a time at least we have still the voice of a child in the house." Mr A. W. Mackay gives an account of the funeral and a description of the burial-place, ending: "Tofa Tusitala! Sleep peacefully! on thy mountain-top, alone in Nature's sanctity, where the wooddove's note, the moaning of the waves as they break unceasingly on the distant reef, and the sighing of the winds in the distant tavai trees chant their requiem." The Rev. Mr Clarke tells of the constant and active interest Mr Stevenson took in the missionaries and their work, often aiding them by his advice and fine insight into the character of the natives; and a translation follows of a dirge by one of the chiefs, so fine that we must give it: I. "Listen, O this world, as I tell of the disaster That befell in the late afternoon; That broke like a wave of the sea Suddenly and swiftly, blinding our eyes. Alas for Loia who speaks tears in his voice! _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, in its sorrow. Alas for Tusitala, who rests in the forest! Aimlessly we wait, and sorrowing. Will he again return? Lament, O Vailima, waiting and ever waiting! Let us search and inquire of the captain of ships, 'Be not angry, but has not Tusitala come?' II. "Teuila, sorrowing one, come thou hither! Prepare me a letter, and I will carry it. Let her Majesty Victoria be told That Tusitala, the loving one, has been taken hence. _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc. III. "Alas! my heart weeps with anxious grief As I think of the days before us: Of the white men gathering for the Christmas assembly! Alas for Aolele! left in her loneliness, And the men of Vailima, who weep together Their leader--their leader being taken. _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc. IV. "Alas! O my heart! it weeps unceasingly When I think of his illness Coming upon him with fatal swiftness. Would that it waited a glance or a word from him, Or some token, some token from us of our love. _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc. V. "Grieve, O my heart! I cannot bear to look on All the chiefs who are there now assembling: Alas, Tusitala! Thou art not here! I look hither and thither in vain for thee. _Refrain_--Groan and weep, O my heart, etc., etc." And the little booklet closes with Mr Stevenson's own lines: "REQUIEM. Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie; Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: 'Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea; And the hunter home from the hill.'" Every touch tells here was a man, with heart and head, with soul and mind intent on the loftiest things; simple, great, "Like one of the simple great ones gone For ever and ever by. His character towered after all far above his books; great and beautiful though they were. Ready for friendship; from all meanness free. So, too, the Samoans felt. This, surely, was what Goethe meant when he wrote: "The clear head and stout heart, However far they roam, Yet in every truth have part, Are everywhere at home." His manliness, his width of sympathy, his practicality, his range of interests were in nothing more seen than in his contributions to the history of Samoa, as specially exhibited in _A Footnote to History_ and his letters to the _Times_. He was, on this side, in no sense a dreamer, but a man of acute observation and quick eye for passing events and the characters that were in them with sympathy equal to his discernments. His portraits of certain Germans and others in these writings, and his power of tracing effects to remote and underlying causes, show sufficiently what he might have done in the field of history, had not higher voices called him. His adaptation to the life in Samoa, and his assumption of the semi-patriarchal character in his own sphere there, were only tokens of the presence of the same traits as have just been dwelt on. CHAPTER XI--MISS STUBBS' RECORD OF A PILGRIMAGE Mrs Strong, in her chapter of _Table Talk in Memories of Vailima_, tells a story of the natives' love for Stevenson. "The other day the cook was away," she writes, "and Louis, who was busy writing, took his meals in his room. Knowing there was no one to cook his lunch, he told Sosimo to bring him some bread and cheese. To his surprise he was served with an excellent meal--an omelette, a good salad, and perfect coffee. 'Who cooked this?' asked Louis in Samoan. 'I did,' said Sosimo. 'Well,' said Louis, 'great is your wisdom.' Sosimo bowed and corrected him--'Great is my love!'" Miss Stubbs, in her _Stevenson's Shrine_; _the Record of a Pilgrimage_, illustrates the same devotion. On the top of Mount Vaea, she writes, is the massive sarcophagus, "not an ideal structure by any means, not even beautiful, and yet in its massive ruggedness it somehow suited the man and the place." "The wind sighed softly in the branches of the 'Tavau' trees, from out the green recesses of the 'Toi' came the plaintive coo of the wood-pigeon. In and out of the branches of the magnificent 'Fau' tree, which overhangs the grave, a king-fisher, sea-blue, iridescent, flitted to and fro, whilst a scarlet hibiscus, in full flower, showed up royally against the gray lichened cement. All around was light and life and colour, and I said to myself, 'He is made one with nature'; he is now, body and soul and spirit, commingled with the loveliness around. He who longed in life to scale the height, he who attained his wish only in death, has become in himself a parable of fulfilment. No need now for that heart-sick cry:-- "'Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I?' No need now for the despairing finality of: "'I have trod the upward and the downward slope, I have endured and done in the days of yore, I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope, And I have lived, and loved, and closed the door.' "Death has set his seal of peace on the unequal conflict of mind and matter; the All-Mother has gathered him to herself. "In years to come, when his grave is perchance forgotten, a rugged ruin, home of the lizard and the bat, Tusitala--the story-teller--'the man with a heart of gold' (as I so often heard him designated in the Islands), will live, when it may be his tales have ceased to interest, in the tender remembrance of those whose lives he beautified, and whose hearts he warmed into gratitude." The chiefs have prohibited the use of firearms or other weapons on Mount Vaea, "in order that the birds may live there undisturbed and unafraid, and build their nests in the trees around Tusitala's grave." Miss Stubbs has many records of the impression produced on those he came in contact with in Samoa--white men and women as well as natives. She met a certain Austrian Count, who adored Stevenson's memory. Over his camp bed was a framed photograph of R. L. Stevenson. "So," he said, "I keep him there, for he was my saviour, and I wish 'good-night' and 'good-morning,' every day, both to himself and to his old home." The Count then told us that when he was stopping at Vailima he used to have his bath daily on the verandah below his room. One lovely morning he got up very early, got into the bath, and splashed and sang, feeling very well and very happy, and at last beginning to sing very loudly, he forgot Mr Stevenson altogether. All at once there was Stevenson himself, his hair all ruffled up, his eyes full of anger. "Man," he said, "you and your infernal row have cost me more than two hundred pounds in ideas," and with that he was gone, but he did not address the Count again the whole of that day. Next morning he had forgotten the Count's offence and was just as friendly as ever, but--the noise was never repeated! Another of the Count's stories greatly amused the visitors: "An English lord came all the way to Samoa in his yacht to see Mr Stevenson, and found him in his cool Kimino sitting with the ladies, and drinking tea on his verandah; the whole party had their feet bare. The English lord thought that he must have called at the wrong time, and offered to go away, but Mr Stevenson called out to him, and brought him back, and made him stay to dinner. They all went away to dress, and the guest was left sitting alone in the verandah. Soon they came back, Mr Osbourne and Mr Stevenson wearing the form of dress most usual in that hot climate a white mess jacket, and white trousers, but their feet were still bare. The guest put up his eyeglass and stared for a bit, then he looked down upon his own beautifully shod feet, and sighed. They all talked and laughed until the ladies came in, the ladies in silk dresses, befrilled with lace, but still with bare feet, and the guest took a covert look through his eyeglass and gasped, but when he noticed that there were gold bangles on Mrs Strong's ankles and rings upon her toes, he could bear no more and dropped his eyeglass on the ground of the verandah breaking it all to bits." Miss Stubbs met on the other side of the island a photographer who told her this: "I had but recently come to Samoa," he said, "and was standing one day in my shop when Mr Stevenson came in and spoke. 'Man,' he said, 'I tak ye to be a Scotsman like mysel'.' "I would I could have claimed a kinship," deplored the photographer, "but, alas! I am English to the backbone, with never a drop of Scotch blood in my veins, and I told him this, regretting the absence of the blood tie." "'I could have sworn your back was the back of a Scotsman,' was his comment, 'but,' and he held out his hand, 'you look sick, and there is a fellowship in sickness not to be denied.' I said I was not strong, and had come to the Island on account of my health. 'Well, then,' replied Mr Stevenson, 'it shall be my business to help you to get well; come to Vailima whenever you like, and if I am out, ask for refreshment, and wait until I come in, you will always find a welcome there.'" At this point my informant turned away, and there was a break in his voice as he exclaimed, "Ah, the years go on, and I don't miss him less, but more; next to my mother he was the best friend I ever had: a man with a heart of gold; his house was a second home to me." Stevenson's experience shows how easy it is with a certain type of man, to restore the old feudal conditions of service and relationship. Stevenson did this in essentials in Samoa. He tells us how he managed to get good service out of the Samoans (who are accredited with great unwillingness to work); and this he _did_ by firm, but generous, kindly, almost brotherly treatment, reviving, as it were, a kind of clan life--giving a livery of certain colours--symbol of all this. A little fellow of eight, he tells, had been taken into the household, made a pet of by Mrs Strong, his stepdaughter, and had had a dress given to him, like that of the men; and, when one day he had strolled down by himself as far as the hotel, and the master of it, seeing him, called out in Samoan, "Hi, youngster, who are you?" The eight-year-old replied, "Why, don't you see for yourself? I am one of the Vailima men!" The story of the _Road of the Loving Heart_ was but another fine attestation of it. CHAPTER XII--HIS GENIUS AND METHODS To have created a school of idolaters, who will out and out swear by everything, and as though by necessity, at the same time, a school of studious detractors, who will suspiciously question everything, or throw out suggestions of disparagement, is at all events, a proof of greatness, the countersign of undoubted genius, and an assurance of lasting fame. R. L. Stevenson has certainly secured this. Time will tell what of virtue there is with either party. For me, who knew Stevenson, and loved him, as finding in the sweet-tempered, brave, and in some things, most generous man, what gave at once tone and elevation to the artist, I would fain indicate here my impressions of him and his genius--impressions that remain almost wholly uninfluenced by the vast mass of matter about him that the press now turns out. Books, not to speak of articles, pour forth about him--about his style, his art, his humour and his characters--aye, and even about his religion. Miss Simpson follows Mr Bellyse Baildon with the _Edinburgh Days_, Miss Moyes Black comes on with her picture in the _Famous Scots_, and Professor Raleigh succeeds her; Mr Graham Balfour follows with his_ Life_; Mr Kelman's volume about his Religion comes next, and that is reinforced by more familiar letters and _Table Talk_, by Lloyd Osbourne and Mrs Strong, his step-children; Mr J. Hammerton then comes on handily with _Stevensoniana_--fruit lovingly gathered from many and far fields, and garnered with not a little tact and taste, and catholicity; Miss Laura Stubbs then presents us with her touching _Stevenson's Shrine_: _the Record of a Pilgrimage_; and Mr Sidney Colvin is now busily at work on his _Life of Stevenson_, which must do not a little to enlighten and to settle many questions. Curiosity and interest grow as time passes; and the places connected with Stevenson, hitherto obscure many of them, are now touched with light if not with romance, and are known, by name at all events, to every reader of books. Yes; every place he lived in, or touched at, is worthy of full description if only on account of its associations with him. If there is not a land of Stevenson, as there is a land of Scott, or of Burns, it is due to the fact that he was far-travelled, and in his works painted many scenes: but there are at home--Edinburgh, and Halkerside and Allermuir, Caerketton, Swanston, and Colinton, and Maw Moss and Rullion Green and Tummel, "the _wale_ of Scotland," as he named it to me, and the Castletown of Braemar--Braemar in his view coming a good second to Tummel, for starting-points to any curious worshipper who would go the round in Scotland and miss nothing. Mr Geddie's work on _The Home Country of Stevenson_ may be found very helpful here. 1. It is impossible to separate Stevenson from his work, because of the imperious personal element in it; and so I shall not now strive to gain the appearance of cleverness by affecting any distinction here. The first thing I would say is, that he was when I knew him--what pretty much to the end he remained--a youth. His outlook on life was boyishly genial and free, despite all his sufferings from ill-health--it was the pride of action, the joy of endurance, the revelry of high spirits, and the sense of victory that most fascinated him; and his theory of life was to take pleasure and give pleasure, without calculation or stint--a kind of boyish grace and bounty never to be overcome or disturbed by outer accident or change. If he was sometimes haunted with the thought of changes through changed conditions or circumstances, as my very old friend, Mr Charles Lowe, has told even of the College days that he was always supposing things to undergo some sea-change into something else, if not "into something rich and strange," this was but to add to his sense of enjoyment, and the power of conferring delight, and the luxuries of variety, as boys do when they let fancy loose. And this always had, with him, an individual reference or return. He was thus constantly, and latterly, half-consciously, trying to interpret himself somehow through all the things which engaged him, and which he so transmogrified--things that especially attracted him and took his fancy. Thus, if it must be confessed, that even in his highest moments, there lingers a touch--if no more than a touch--of self-consciousness which will not allow him to forget manner in matter, it is also true that he is cunningly conveying traits in himself; and the sense of this is often at the root of his sweet, gentle, naive humour. There is, therefore, some truth in the criticisms which assert that even "long John Silver," that fine pirate, with his one leg, was, after all, a shadow of Stevenson himself--the genial buccaneer who did his tremendous murdering with a smile on his face was but Stevenson thrown into new circumstances, or, as one has said, Stevenson-cum-Henley, so thrown as was also Archer in _Weir of Hermiston_, and more than this, that his most successful women-folk--like Miss Grant and Catriona--are studies of himself, and that in all his heroes, and even heroines, was an unmistakable touch of R. L. Stevenson. Even Mr Baildon rather maladroitly admits that in Miss Grant, the Lord Advocate's daughter, _there is a good deal of the author himself disguised in petticoats_. I have thought of Stevenson in many suits, beside that which included the velvet jacket, but--petticoats! Youth is autocratic, and can show a grand indifferency: it goes for what it likes, and ignores all else--it fondly magnifies its favourites, and, after all, to a great extent, it is but analysing, dealing with and presenting itself to us, if we only watch well. This is the secret of all prevailing romance: it is the secret of all stories of adventure and chivalry of the simpler and more primitive order; and in one aspect it is true that R. L. Stevenson loved and clung to the primitive and elemental, if it may not be said, as one distinguished writer has said, that he even loved savagery in itself. But hardly could it be seriously held, as Mr I. Zangwill held: "That women did not cut any figure in his books springs from this same interest in the elemental. Women are not born, but made. They are a social product of infinite complexity and delicacy. For a like reason Stevenson was no interpreter of the modern. . . . A child to the end, always playing at 'make-believe,' dying young, as those whom the gods love, and, as he would have died had he achieved his centenary, he was the natural exponent in literature of the child." But there were subtly qualifying elements beyond what Mr Zangwill here recognises and reinforces. That is just about as correct and true as this other deliverance: "His Scotch romances have been as over-praised by the zealous Scotsmen who cry 'genius' at the sight of a kilt, and who lose their heads at a waft from the heather, as his other books have been under-praised. The best of all, _The Master of Ballantrae_, ends in a bog; and where the author aspires to exceptional subtlety of character-drawing he befogs us or himself altogether. We are so long weighing the brothers Ballantrae in the balance, watching it incline now this way, now that, scrupulously removing a particle of our sympathy from the one brother to the other, to restore it again in the next chapter, that we end with a conception of them as confusing as Mr Gilbert's conception of Hamlet, who was idiotically sane with lucid intervals of lunacy." If Stevenson was, as Mr Zangwill holds, "the child to the end," and the child only, then if we may not say what Carlyle said of De Quincey: "_Eccovi_, that child has been in hell," we may say, "_Eccovi_, that child has been in unchildlike haunts, and can't forget the memory of them." In a sense every romancer is a child--such was Ludwig Tieck, such was Scott, such was James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. But each is something more--he has been touched with the wand of a fairy, and knows, at least, some of Elfin Land as well as of childhood's home. The sense of Stevenson's youthfulness seems to have struck every one who had intimacy with him. Mr Baildon writes (p. 21 of his book): I would now give much to possess but one of Stevenson's gifts--namely, that extraordinary vividness of recollection by which he could so astonishingly recall, not only the doings, but the very thoughts and emotions of his youth. For, often as we must have communed together, with all the shameless candour of boys, hardly any remark has stuck to me except the opinion already alluded to, which struck me--his elder by some fifteen months--as very amusing, that at sixteen 'we should be men.' _He of all mortals_, _who was_, _in a sense_, _always still a boy_!" Mr Gosse tells us: "He had retained a great deal of the temperament of a child, and it was his philosophy to encourage it. In his dreary passages of bed, when his illness was more than commonly heavy on him, he used to contrive little amusements for himself. He played on the flute, or he modelled little groups and figures in clay." 2. One of the qualifying elements unnoted by Mr Zangwill is simply this, that R. L. Stevenson never lost the strange tint imparted to his youth by the religious influences to which he was subject, and which left their impress and colour on him and all that he did. Henley, in his striking sonnet, hit it when he wrote: "A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, _And something of the Shorter Catechist_." _Something_! he was a great deal of Shorter Catechist! Scotch Calvinism, its metaphysic, and all the strange whims, perversities, and questionings of "Fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," which it inevitably awakens, was much with him--the sense of reprobation and the gloom born of it, as well as the abounding joy in the sense of the elect--the Covenanters and their wild resolutions, the moss-troopers and their dare- devilries--Pentland Risings and fights of Rullion Green; he not only never forgot them, but they mixed themselves as in his very breath of life, and made him a great questioner. How would I have borne myself in this or in that? Supposing I had been there, how would it have been--the same, or different from what it was with those that were there? His work is throughout at bottom a series of problems that almost all trace to this root, directly or indirectly. "There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford," said the famous Puritan on seeing a felon led to execution; so with Stevenson. Hence his fondness for tramps, for scamps (he even bestowed special attention and pains on Villon, the poet-scamp); he was rather impatient with poor Thoreau, because he was a purist solitary, and had too little of vice, and, as Stevenson held, narrow in sympathy, and too self-satisfied, and bent only on self-improvement. He held a brief for the honest villain, and leaned to him brotherly. Even the anecdotes he most prizes have a fine look this way--a hunger for completion in achievement, even in the violation of fine humane feeling or morality, and all the time a sense of submission to God's will. "Doctor," said the dying gravedigger in _Old Mortality_, "I hae laid three hunner an' fower score in that kirkyaird, an' had it been His wull," indicating Heaven, "I wad hae likeit weel to hae made oot the fower hunner." That took Stevenson. Listen to what Mr Edmond Gosse tells of his talk, when he found him in a private hotel in Finsbury Circus, London, ready to be put on board a steamer for America, on 21st August, 1887: "It was church time, and there was some talk of my witnessing his will, which I could not do because there could be found no other reputable witness, the whole crew of the hotel being at church. 'This,' he said, 'is the way in which our valuable city hotels--packed no doubt with gems and jewellery--are deserted on a Sunday morning. Some bold piratical fellow, defying the spirit of Sabbatarianism, might make a handsome revenue by sacking the derelict hotels between the hours of ten and twelve. One hotel a week would enable such a man to retire in course of a year. A mask might perhaps be worn for the mere fancy of the thing, and to terrify kitchen-maids, but no real disguise would be needful.'" I would rather agree with Mr Chesterton than with Mr Zangwill here: "Stevenson's enormous capacity for joy flowed directly out of his profoundly religious temperament. He conceived himself as an unimportant guest at one eternal and uproarious banquet, and instead of grumbling at the soup, he accepted it with careless gratitude. . . . His gaiety was neither the gaiety of the pagan, nor the gaiety of the _bon vivant_. It was the greater gaiety of the mystic. He could enjoy trifles because there was to him no such thing as a trifle. He was a child who respected his dolls because they were the images of the image of God, portraits at only two removes." Here, then, we have the child crossed by the dreamer and the mystic, bred of Calvinism and speculation on human fate and chance, and on the mystery of temperament and inheritance, and all that flows from these--reprobation, with its dire shadows, assured Election with its joys, etc., etc. 3. If such a combination is in favour of the story-teller up to a certain point, it is not favourable to the highest flights, and it is alien to dramatic presentation pure and simple. This implies detachment from moods and characters, high as well as low, that complete justice in presentation may be done to all alike, and the one balance that obtains in life grasped and repeated with emphasis. But towards his leading characters Stevenson is unconsciously biassed, because they are more or less shadowy projections of himself, or images through which he would reveal one or other side or aspect of his own personality. Attwater is a confessed failure, because it, more than any other, testifies this: he is but a mouth-piece for one side or tendency in Stevenson. If the same thing is not more decisively felt in some other cases, it is because Stevenson there showed the better art o' hidin', and not because he was any more truly detached or dramatic. "Of Hamlet most of all," wrote Henley in his sonnet. The Hamlet in Stevenson--the self-questioning, egotistic, moralising Hamlet--was, and to the end remained, a something alien to bold, dramatic, creative freedom. He is great as an artist, as a man bent on giving to all that he did the best and most distinguished form possible, but not great as a free creator of dramatic power. "Mother," he said as a mere child, "I've drawed a man. Now, will I draw his soul?" He was to the end all too fond to essay a picture of the soul, separate and peculiar. All the Jekyll and Hyde and even Ballantrae conceptions came out of that--and what is more, he always mixed his own soul with the other soul, and could not help doing so. 4. When; therefore, I find Mr Pinero, in lecturing at Edinburgh, deciding in favour of Stevenson as possessed of rare dramatic power, and wondering why he did not more effectively employ it, I can't agree with him; and this because of the presence of a certain atmosphere in the novels, alien to free play of the individualities presented. Like Hawthorne's, like the works of our great symbolists, they are restricted by a sense of some obtaining conception, some weird metaphysical _weird_ or preconception. This is the ground "Ian MacLaren" has for saying that "his kinship is not with Boccaccio and Rabelais, but with Dante and Spenser"--the ground for many remarks by critics to the effect that they still crave from him "less symbol and more individuality"--the ground for the Rev. W. J. Dawson's remark that "he has a powerful and persistent sense of the spiritual forces which move behind the painted shows of life; that he writes not only as a realist but as a prophet, his meanest stage being set with eternity as a background." Such expressions are fullest justification for what we have here said: it adds, and can only add, to our admiration of Stevenson, as a thinker, seer, or mystic, but the asserting sense of such power can only end in lessening the height to which he could attain as a dramatic artist; and there is much indeed against Mr Pinero's own view that, in the dramas, he finds that "fine speeches" are ruinous to them as acting plays. In the strict sense overfine speeches are yet almost everywhere. David Balfour could never have writ some speeches attributed to him--they are just R. L. Stevenson with a very superficial difference that, when once detected, renders them curious and quaint and interesting, but not dramatic. CHAPTER XIII--PREACHER AND MYSTIC FABULIST In reality, Stevenson is always directly or indirectly preaching a sermon--enforcing a moral--as though he could not help it. "He would rise from the dead to preach a sermon." He wrote some first-rate fables, and might indeed have figured to effect as a moralist-fabulist, as truly he was from beginning to end. There was a bit of Bunyan in him as well as of AEsop and Rousseau and Thoreau--the mixture that found coherency in his most peculiarly patient and forbearing temper is what gives at once the quaintness, the freedom, and yet the odd didactic something that is never wanting. I remember a fable about the Devil that might well be brought in to illustrate this here--careful readers who neglect nothing that Stevenson wrote will remember it also and perhaps bear me out here. But for the sake of the young folks who may yet have some leeway to make up, I shall indulge myself a little by quoting it: and, since I am on that tack, follow it by another which presents Stevenson in his favourite guise of quizzing his own characters, if not for his own advantage certainly for ours, if we would in the least understand the fine moralist- casuistical qualities of his mind and fancy: THE DEVIL AND THE INNKEEPER Once upon a time the devil stayed at an inn, where no one knew him, for they were people whose education had been neglected. He was bent on mischief, and for a time kept everybody by the ears. But at last the innkeeper set a watch upon the devil and took him in the act. The innkeeper got a rope's end. "Now I am going to thrash you," said the inn-keeper. "You have no right to be angry with me," said the devil. "I am only the devil, and it is my nature to do wrong." "Is that so?" asked the innkeeper. "Fact, I assure you," said the devil. "You really cannot help doing ill?" asked the innkeeper. "Not in the smallest," said the devil, "it would be useless cruelty to thrash a thing like me." "It would indeed," said the innkeeper. And he made a noose and hanged the devil. "There!" said the innkeeper. The deeper Stevenson goes, the more happily is he inspired. We could scarcely cite anything more Stevensonian, alike in its humour and its philosophy, than the dialogue between Captain Smollett and Long John Silver, entitled _The Persons of the Tale_. After chapter xxxii. of _Treasure Island_, these two puppets "strolled out to have a pipe before business should begin again, and met in an open space not far from the story." After a few preliminaries: "You're a damned rogue, my man," said the Captain. "Come, come, Cap'n, be just," returned the other. "There's no call to be angry with me in earnest. I'm on'y a character in a sea story. I don't really exist." "Well, I don't really exist either," says the Captain, "which seems to meet that." "I wouldn't set no limits to what a virtuous character might consider argument," responded Silver. "But I'm the villain of the tale, I am; and speaking as one seafaring man to another, what I want to know is, what's the odds?" "Were you never taught your catechism?" said the Captain. "Don't you know there's such a thing as an Author?" "Such a thing as a Author?" returned John, derisively. "And who better'n me? And the p'int is, if the Author made you, he made Long John, and he made Hands, and Pew, and George Merry--not that George is up to much, for he's little more'n a name; and he made Flint, what there is of him; and he made this here mutiny, you keep such a work about; and he had Tom Redruth shot; and--well, if that's a Author, give me Pew!" "Don't you believe in a future state?" said Smollett. "Do you think there's nothing but the present sorty-paper?" " I don't rightly know for that," said Silver, "and I don't see what it's got to do with it, anyway. What I know is this: if there is sich a thing as a Author, I'm his favourite chara'ter. He does me fathoms better'n he does you--fathoms, he does. And he likes doing me. He keeps me on deck mostly all the time, crutch and all; and he leaves you measling in the hold, where nobody can't see you, nor wants to, and you may lay to that! If there is a Author, by thunder, but he's on my side, and you may lay to it!" "I see he's giving you a long rope," said the Captain. . . . Stevenson's stories--one and all--are too closely the illustrations by characters of which his essays furnish the texts. You shall not read the one wholly apart from the other without losing something--without losing much of the quaint, often childish, and always insinuating personality of the writer. It is this if fully perceived which would justify one writer, Mr Zangwill, if I don't forget, in saying, as he did say, that Stevenson would hold his place by his essays and not by his novels. Hence there is a unity in all, but a unity found in a root which is ultimately inimical to what is strictly free dramatic creation--creation, broad, natural and unmoral in the highest sense just as nature is, as it is to us, for example, when we speak of Shakespeare, or even Scott, or of Cervantes or Fielding. If Mr Henley in his irruptive if not spiteful _Pall Mall Magazine_ article had made this clear from the high critical ground, then some of his derogatory remarks would not have been quite so personal and offensive as they are. Stevenson's bohemianism was always restrained and coloured by this. He is a casuistic moralist, if not a Shorter Catechist, as Mr Henley put it in his clever sonnet. He is constantly asking himself about moral laws and how they work themselves out in character, especially as these suggest and involve the casuistries of human nature. He is often a little like Nathaniel Hawthorne, but he hardly follows them far enough and rests on his own preconceptions and predilections, only he does not, like him, get into or remain long in the cobwebby corners--his love of the open air and exercise derived from generations of active lighthouse engineers, out at all times on sea or land, or from Scottish ministers who were fond of composing their sermons and reflecting on the backwardness of human nature as they walked in their gardens or along the hillsides even among mists and storms, did something to save him here, reinforcing natural cheerfulness and the warm desire to give pleasure. His excessive elaboration of style, which grew upon him more and more, giving throughout often a sense of extreme artificiality and of the self- consciousness usually bred of it, is but another incidental proof of this. And let no reader think that I wish here to decry R. L. Stevenson. I only desire faithfully to try to understand him, and to indicate the class or group to which his genius and temperament really belong. He is from first to last the idealistic dreamy or mystical romancer, and not the true idealist or dealer direct with life or character for its own sake. The very beauty and sweetness of his spirit in one way militated against his dramatic success--he really did not believe in villains, and always made them better than they should have been, and that, too, on the very side where wickedness--their natural wickedness--is most available--on the stage. The dreamer of dreams and the Shorter Catechist, strangely united together, were here directly at odds with the creative power, and crossed and misdirected it, and the casuist came in and manoeuvred the limelight--all too like the old devil of the mediaeval drama, who was made only to be laughed at and taken lightly, a buffoon and a laughing-stock indeed. And while he could unveil villainy, as is the case pre-eminently in Huish in the _Ebb-Tide_, he shrank from inflicting the punishments for which untutored human nature looks, and thus he lost one great aid to crude dramatic effect. As to his poems, they are intimately personal in his happiest moments: he deals with separate moods and sentiments, and scarcely ever touches those of a type alien to his own. The defect of his child poems is distinctly that he is everywhere strictly recalling and reproducing his own quaint and wholly exceptional childhood; and children, ordinary, normal, healthy children, will not take to these poems (though grown-ups largely do so), as they would to, say, the _Lilliput Levee_ of my old friend, W. B. Rands. Rands showed a great deal of true dramatic play there within his own very narrow limits, as, at all events, adults must conceive them. Even in his greatest works, in _The Master of Ballantrae_ and _Weir of Hermiston_, the special power in Stevenson really lies in subduing his characters at the most critical point for action, to make them prove or sustain his thesis; and in this way the rare effect that he might have secured _dramatically_ is largely lost and make-believe substituted, as in the Treasure Search in the end of _The Master of Ballantrae_. The powerful dramatic effect he might have had in his _denouement_ is thus completely sacrificed. The essence of the drama for the stage is that the work is for this and this alone--dialogue and everything being only worked rightly when it bears on, aids, and finally secures this in happy completeness. In a word, you always, in view of true dramatic effect, see Stevenson himself too clearly behind his characters. The "fine speeches" Mr Pinero referred to trace to the intrusion behind the glass of a part-quicksilvered portion, which cunningly shows, when the glass is moved about, Stevenson himself behind the character, as we have said already. For long he shied dealing with women, as though by a true instinct. Unfortunately for him his image was as clear behind _Catriona_, with the discerning, as anywhere else; and this, alas! too far undid her as an independent, individual character, though traits like those in her author were attractive. The constant effort to relieve the sense of this affords him the most admirable openings for the display of his exquisite style, of which he seldom or never fails to make the very most in this regard; but the necessity laid upon him to aim at securing a sense of relief by this is precisely the same as led him to write the overfine speeches in the plays, as Mr Pinero found and pointed out at Edinburgh: both defeat the true end, but in the written book mere art of style and a naivete and a certain sweetness of temper conceal the lack of nature and creative spontaneity; while on the stage the descriptions, saving reflections and fine asides, are ruthlessly cut away under sheer stage necessities, or, if left, but hinder the action; and art of this kind does not there suffice to conceal the lack of nature. More clearly to bring out my meaning here and draw aid from comparative illustration, let me take my old friend of many years, Charles Gibbon. Gibbon was poor, very poor, in intellectual subtlety compared with Stevenson; he had none of his sweet, quaint, original fancy; he was no casuist; he was utterly void of power in the subdued humorous twinkle or genial by-play in which Stevenson excelled. But he has more of dramatic power, pure and simple, than Stevenson had--his novels--the best of them--would far more easily yield themselves to the ordinary purposes of the ordinary playwright. Along with conscientiousness, perception, penetration, with the dramatist must go a certain indescribable common- sense commonplaceness--if I may name it so--protection against vagary and that over-refined egotism and self-confession which is inimical to the drama and in which the Stevensonian type all too largely abounds for successful dramatic production. Mr Henley perhaps put it too strongly when he said that what was supremely of interest to R. L. Stevenson was Stevenson himself; but he indicates the tendency, and that tendency is inimical to strong, broad, effective and varied dramatic presentation. Water cannot rise above its own level; nor can minds of this type go freely out of themselves in a grandly healthy, unconscious, and unaffected way, and this is the secret of the dramatic spirit, if it be not, as Shelley said, the secret of morals, which Stevenson, when he passed away, was but on the way to attain. As we shall see, he had risen so far above it, subdued it, triumphed over it, that we really cannot guess what he might have attained had but more years been given him. For the last attainment of the loftiest and truest genius is precisely this--to gain such insight of the real that all else becomes subsidiary. True simplicity and the abiding relief and enduring power of true art with all classes lies here and not elsewhere. Cleverness, refinement, fancy, and invention, even sublety of intellect, are practically nowhere in this sphere without this. CHAPTER XIV--STEVENSON AS DRAMATIST In opposition to Mr Pinero, therefore, I assert that Stevenson's defect in spontaneous dramatic presentation is seen clearly in his novels as well as in his plays proper. In writing to my good friend, Mr Thomas M'Kie, Advocate, Edinburgh, telling him of my work on R. L. Stevenson and the results, I thus gathered up in little the broad reflections on this point, and I may perhaps be excused quoting the following passages, as they reinforce by a new reference or illustration or two what has just been said: "Considering his great keenness and force on some sides, I find R. L. Stevenson markedly deficient in grip on other sides--common sides, after all, of human nature. This was so far largely due to a dreamy, mystical, so far perverted and, so to say, often even inverted casuistical, fatalistic morality, which would not allow him scope in what Carlyle would have called a healthy hatred of fools and scoundrels; with both of which classes--vagabonds in strictness--he had rather too much of a sneaking sympathy. Mr Pinero was wrong--totally and incomprehensibly wrong--when he told the good folks of Edinburgh at the Philosophical Institution, and afterwards at the London Birkbeck Institution, that it was lack of concentration and care that made R. L. Stevenson a failure as a dramatist. No: it was here and not elsewhere that the failure lay. R. L. Stevenson was himself an unconscious paradox--and sometimes he realised it--his great weakness from this point of view being that he wished to show strong and original by making the villain the hero of the piece as well. Now, _that_, if it may, by clever manipulation and dexterity, be made to do in a novel, most certainly it will not do on the stage--more especially if it is done consciously and, as it were, of _malice prepense_; because, for one thing, there is in the theatre a very varied yet united audience which has to give a simultaneous and immediate verdict--an audience not inclined to some kinds of overwrought subtleties and casuistries, however clever the technique. If _The Master of Ballantrae_ (which has some highly dramatic scenes and situations, if it is not in itself substantially a drama) were to be put on the stage, the playwright, if wisely determined for success, would really have--not in details, but in essential conception--to kick R. L. Stevenson in his most personal aim out of it, and take and present a more definite moral view of the two villain-heroes (brothers, too); improve and elevate the one a bit if he lowered the other, and not wobble in sympathy and try to make the audience wobble in sympathy also, as R. L. Stevenson certainly does. As for _Beau Austin_, it most emphatically, in view of this, should be re-writ--re- writ especially towards the ending--and the scandalous Beau tarred and feathered, metaphorically speaking, instead of walking off at the end in a sneaking, mincing sort of way, with no more than a little momentary twinge of discomfort at the wreck and ruin he has wrought, for having acted as a selfish, snivelling poltroon and coward, though in fine clothes and with fine ways and fine manners, which only, from our point of view, make matters worse. It is, with variations I admit, much the same all through: R. L. Stevenson felt it and confessed it about the _Ebb-Tide_, and Huish, the cockney hero and villain; but the sense of healthy disgust, even at the vile Huish, is not emphasised in the book as it would have demanded to be for the stage--the audience would not have stood it, and the more mixed and varied, the less would it have stood it--not at all; and his relief of style and fine or finished speeches would not _there_ in the least have told. This is demanded of the drama--that at once it satisfies a certain crude something subsisting under all outward glosses and veneers that might be in some a lively sense of right and wrong--the uprisal of a conscience, in fact, or in others a vague instinct of proper reward or punishment, which will even cover and sanction certain kinds of revenge or retaliation. The one feeling will emerge most among the cultured, and the other among the ruder and more ignorant; but both meet immediately on beholding action and the limits of action on the demand for some clear leading to what may be called Providential equity--each man undoubtedly rewarded or punished, roughly, according to his deserts, if not outwardly then certainly in the inner torments that so often lead to confessions. There it is--a radical fact of human nature--as radical as any reading of trait or determination of character presented--seen in the Greek drama as well as in Shakespeare and the great Elizabethan dramatists, and in the drama-transpontine and others of to-day. R. L. Stevenson was all too casuistical (though not in the exclusively bad sense) for this; and so he was not dramatic, though _Weir of Hermiston_ promised something like an advance to it, and _St Ives_ did, in my idea, yet more." The one essential of a _dramatic_ piece is that, by the interaction of character and incident (one or other may be preponderating, according to the type and intention of the writer) all naturally leads up to a crisis in which the moral motives, appealed to or awakened by the presentation of the play, are justified. Where this is wanting the true leading and the definite justification are wanting. Goethe failed in this in his _Faust_, resourceful and far-seeing though he was--he failed because a certain sympathy is awakened for Mephistopheles in being, so to say, chivied out of his bargain, when he had complied with the terms of the contract by Faust; and Gounod in his opera does exactly for "immediate dramatic effect," what we hold it would be necessary to do for R. L. Stevenson. Goethe, with his casuistries which led him to allegory and all manner of overdone symbolisms and perversions in the Second Part, is set aside and a true crisis and close is found by Gounod through simply sending Marguerite above and Faust below, as, indeed, Faust had agreed by solemn compact with Mephistopheles that it should be. And to come to another illustration from our own times, Mr Bernard Shaw's very clever and all too ingenious and over-subtle _Man and Superman_ would, in my idea, and for much the same reason, be an utterly ineffective and weak piece on the stage, however carefully handled and however clever the setting--the reason lying in the egotistic upsetting of the "personal equation" and the theory of life that lies behind all--tinting it with strange and even _outre_ colours. Much the same has to be said of most of what are problem-plays--several of Ibsen's among the rest. Those who remember the Fairy opera of _Hansel and Gretel_ on the stage in London, will not have forgotten in the witching memory of all the charms of scenery and setting, how the scene where the witch of the wood, who was planning out the baking of the little hero and heroine in her oven, having "fatted" them up well, to make sweet her eating of them, was by the coolness and cleverness of the heroine locked in her own oven and baked there, literally brought down the house. She received exactly what she had planned to give those children, whom their own cruel parents had unwittingly, by losing the children in the wood, put into her hands. Quaint, naive, half-grotesque it was in conception, yet the truth of all drama was there actively exhibited, and all casuistic pleading of excuses of some sort, even of justification for the witch (that it was her nature; heredity in her aworking, etc., etc.) would have not only been out of place, but hotly resented by that audience. Now, Stevenson, if he could have made up his mind to have the witch locked in her own oven, would most assuredly have tried some device to get her out by some fairy witch-device or magic slide at the far end of it, and have proceeded to paint for us the changed character that she was after she had been so outwitted by a child, and her witchdom proved after all of little effect. He would have put probably some of the most effective moralities into her mouth if indeed he would not after all have made the witch a triumph on his early principle of bad-heartedness being strength. If this is the sort of falsification which the play demands, and is of all tastes the most ungrateful, then, it is clear, that for full effect of the drama it is essential to it; but what is primary in it is the direct answering to certain immediate and instinctive demands in common human nature, the doing of which is far more effective than no end of deep philosophy to show how much better human nature would be if it were not just quite thus constituted. "Concentration," says Mr Pinero, "is first, second, and last in it," and he goes on thus, as reported in the _Scotsman_, to show Stevenson's defect and mistake and, as is not, of course, unnatural, to magnify the greatness and grandeur of the style of work in which he has himself been so successful. "If Stevenson had ever mastered that art--and I do not question that if he had properly conceived it he had it in him to master it--he might have found the stage a gold mine, but he would have found, too, that it is a gold mine which cannot be worked in a smiling, sportive, half-contemptuous spirit, but only in the sweat of the brain, and with every mental nerve and sinew strained to its uttermost. He would have known that no ingots are to be got out of this mine, save after sleepless nights, days of gloom and discouragement, and other days, again, of feverish toil, the result of which proves in the end to be misapplied and has to be thrown to the winds. . . . When you take up a play-book (if ever you do take one up) it strikes you as being a very trifling thing--a mere insubstantial pamphlet beside the imposing bulk of the latest six-shilling novel. Little do you guess that every page of the play has cost more care, severer mental tension, if not more actual manual labour, than any chapter of a novel, though it be fifty pages long. It is the height of the author's art, according to the old maxim, that the ordinary spectator should never be clearly conscious of the skill and travail that have gone to the making of the finished product. But the artist who would achieve a like feat must realise its difficulties, or what are his chances of success?" But what I should, in little, be inclined to say, in answer to the "concentration" idea is that, unless you have first some firm hold on the broad bed-rock facts of human nature specially appealed to or called forth by the drama, you may concentrate as much as you please, but you will not write a successful acting drama, not to speak of a great one. Mr Pinero's magnifications of the immense effort demanded from him must in the end come to mean that he himself does not instinctively and with natural ease and spontaneity secure this, but secures it only after great conscious effort; and hence, perhaps, it is that he as well as so many other modern playwrights fall so far behind alike in the amount turned out, and also in its quality as compared with the products of many playwrights in the past. The problem drama, in every phase and turn of it, endeavours to dispense with these fundamental demands implied in the common and instinctive sense or consciousness of the mass of men and women, and to substitute for that interest something which will artificially supersede it, or, at any rate, take its place. The interest is transferred from the crises necessarily worked up to in the one case, with all of situation and dialogue directed to it, and without which it would not be strictly explicable, to something abnormal, odd, artificial or inverted, or exceptional in the characters themselves. Having thus, instead of natural process and sequence, if we may put it so, the problem dramatist has a double task--he must gain what unity he can, and reach such crises as he may by artificial aids and inventions which the more he uses the more makes natural simplicity unattainable; and next he must reduce and hide as far as he can the abnormality he has, after all, in the long run, created and presented. He cannot maintain it to the full, else his work would become a mere medical or psychological treatise under the poorest of disguises; and the very necessity for the action and reaction of characters upon each other is a further element against him. In a word no one character can stand alone, and cannot escape influencing others, and also the action. Thus it is that he cannot isolate as a doctor does his patient for scientific examination. The healthy and normal must come in to modify on all sides what is presented of unhealthy and abnormal, and by its very presence expose the other, while at the same time it, by its very presence, ministers improvement, exactly as the sunlight disperses mist and all unhealthy vapours, germs, and microbes. The problem dramatist, in place of broad effect and truth to nature, must find it in stress of invention and resource of that kind. Thus care and concentration must be all in all with him--he must never let himself go, or get so interested and taken with his characters that _they_, in a sense, control or direct him. He is all too conscious a "maker" and must pay for his originality by what in the end is really painful and overweighted work. This, I take it, is the reason why so many of the modern dramatists find their work so hard, and are, comparatively, so slow in the production of it, while they would fain, by many devices, secure the general impression or appeal made to all classes alike by the natural or what we may call spontaneous drama, they are yet, by the necessity of subject matter and methods of dealing with it, limited to the real interest of a special class--to whom is finally given up what was meant for mankind--and the troublesome and trying task laid on them, to try as best they may to reconcile two really conflicting tendencies which cannot even by art be reconciled but really point different ways and tend to different ends. As the impressionist and the pre-Raphaelite, in the sister-art of painting cannot be combined and reconciled in one painter--so it is here; by conception and methods they go different ways, and if they _seek_ the same end, it is by opposing processes--the original conception alike of nature and of art dictating the process. As for Stevenson, it was no lack of care or concentration in anything that he touched; these two were never lacking, but because his subtlety, mystical bias and dreaminess, and theorising on human nature made this to him impossible. He might have concentrated as much as he pleased, concentrated as much as even Mr Pinero desires, but he would not have made a successful drama, because he was Robert Louis Stevenson, and not Mr Pinero, and too long, as he himself confessed, had a tendency to think bad-heartedness was strength; while the only true and enduring joy attainable in this world--whether by deduction from life itself, or from _impressions_ of art or of the drama, is simply the steady, unassailable, and triumphant consciousness that it is not so, but the reverse, that goodness and self-sacrifice and self-surrender are the only strength in the universe. Just as Byron had it with patriotism:-- "Freedom's battle once begun, Bequeathed from bleeding sire to son, Tho' baffled oft is ever won." To go consciously either in fiction or in the drama for bad-heartedness as strength, is to court failure--the broad, healthy, human heart, thank Heaven, is so made as to resent the doctrine; and if a fiction or a play based on this idea for the moment succeeds, it can only be because of strength in other elements, or because of partial blindness and partially paralysed moral sense in the case of those who accept it and joy in it. If Mr Pinero directly disputes this, then he and I have no common standing-ground, and I need not follow the matter any further. Of course, the dramatist may, under mistaken sympathy and in the midst of complex and bewildering concatenations, give wrong readings to his audience, but he must not be always doing even that, or doing it on principle or system, else his work, however careful and concentrated, will before long share the fate of the Stevenson-Henley dramas confessedly wrought when the authors all too definitely held bad-heartedness was strength. CHAPTER XV--THEORY OF GOOD AND EVIL We have not hitherto concerned ourselves, in any express sense, with the ethical elements involved in the tendency now dwelt on, though they are, of necessity, of a very vital character. We have shown only as yet the effect of this mood of mind on dramatic intention and effort. The position is simply that there is, broadly speaking, the endeavour to eliminate an element which is essential to successful dramatic presentation. That element is the eternal distinction, speaking broadly, between good and evil--between right and wrong--between the secret consciousness of having done right, and the consciousness of mere strength and force in certain other ways. Nothing else will make up for vagueness and cloudiness here--no technical skill, no apt dialogue nor concentration, any more than "fine speeches," as Mr Pinero calls them. Now the dramatic demand and the ethical demand here meet and take each other's hands, and will not be separated. This is why Mr Stevenson and Mr Henley--young men of great talent, failed--utterly failed--they thought they could make a hero out of a shady and dare-devil yet really cowardly villain generally--and failed. The spirit of this is of the clever youth type--all too ready to forego the moral for the sake of the fun any day of the week, and the unthinking selfishness and self-enjoyment of youth--whose tender mercies are often cruel, are transcendent in it. As Stevenson himself said, they were young men then and fancied bad-heartedness was strength. Perhaps it was a sense of this that made R. L. Stevenson speak as he did of the _Ebb- Tide_ with Huish the cockney in it, after he was powerless to recall it; which made him say, as we have seen, that the closing chapters of _The Master of Ballantrae_ "_shame_, _and perhaps degrade_, _the beginning_." He himself came to see then the great error; but, alas! it was too late to remedy it--he could but go forward to essay new tales, not backward to put right errors in what was done. Did Mr William Archer have anything of this in his mind and the far-reaching effects on this side, when he wrote the following: "Let me add that the omission with which, in 1885, I mildly reproached him--the omission to tell what he knew to be an essential part of the truth about life--was abundantly made good in his later writings. It is true that even in his final philosophy he still seems to me to underrate, or rather to shirk, the significance of that most compendious parable which he thus relates in a letter to Mr Henry James:--'Do you know the story of the man who found a button in his hash, and called the waiter? "What do you call that?" says he. "Well," said the waiter, "what d'you expect? Expect to find a gold watch and chain?" Heavenly apologue, is it not?' Heavenly, by all means; but I think Stevenson relished the humour of it so much that he 'smiling passed the moral by.' In his enjoyment of the waiter's effrontery, he forgot to sympathise with the man (even though it was himself) who had broken his teeth upon the harmful, unnecessary button. He forgot that all the apologetics in the world are based upon just this audacious paralogism." Many writers have done the same--and not a few critics have hinted at this: I do not think any writer has got at the radical truth of it more directly, decisively, and clearly than "J. F. M.," in a monthly magazine, about the time of Stevenson's death; and the whole is so good and clear that I must quote it--the writer was not thinking of the drama specially; only of prose fiction, and this but makes the passage the more effective and apt to my point. "In the outburst of regret which followed the death of Robert Louis Stevenson, one leading journal dwelt on his too early removal in middle life 'with only half his message delivered.' Such a phrase may have been used in the mere cant of modern journalism. Still it set one questioning what was Stevenson's message, or at least that part of it which we had time given us to hear. "Wonderful as was the popularity of the dead author, we are inclined to doubt whether the right appreciation of him was half as wide. To a certain section of the public he seemed a successful writer of boys' books, which yet held captive older people. Now, undoubtedly there was an element (not the highest) in his work which fascinated boys. It gratified their yearning for adventure. To too large a number of his readers, we suspect, this remains Stevenson's chief charm; though even of those there were many able to recognise and be thankful for the literary power and grace which could serve up their sanguinary diet so daintily. "Most of Stevenson's titles, too, like _Treasure Island_, _Kidnapped_, and_ The Master of Ballantrae_, tended to foster delusion in this direction. The books were largely bought for gifts by maiden aunts, and bestowed as school prizes, when it might not have been so had their titles given more indication of their real scope and tendency. "All this, it seems to us, has somewhat obscured Stevenson's true power, which is surely that of an arch-delineator of 'human nature' and of the devious ways of men. As we read him we feel that we have our finger on the pulse of the cruel politics of the world. He has the Shakespearean gift which makes us recognise that his pirates and his statesmen, with their violence and their murders and their perversions of justice, are swayed by the same interests and are pulling the same strings and playing on the same passions which are at work in quieter methods around ourselves. The vast crimes and the reckless bloodshed are nothing more nor less than stage effects used to accentuate for the common eye what the seer can detect without them. "And reading him from this standpoint, Stevenson's 'message' (so far as it was delivered) appears to be that of utter gloom--the creed that good is always overcome by evil. We do not mean in the sense that good always suffers through evil and is frequently crucified by evil. That is only the sowing of the martyr's blood, which is, we know, the seed of the Church. We should not have marvelled in the least that a genius like Stevenson should rebel against mere external 'happy endings,' which, being in flat contradiction to the ordinary ways of Providence, are little short of thoughtless blasphemy against Providence. But the terrible thing about the Stevenson philosophy of life is that it seems to make evil overcome good in the sense of absorbing it, or perverting it, or at best lowering it. When good and evil come in conflict in one person, Dr Jekyll vanishes into Mr Hyde. The awful Master of Ballantrae drags down his brother, though he seems to fight for his soul at every step. The sequel to _Kidnapped_ shows David Balfour ready at last to be hail-fellow-well-met with the supple Prestongrange and the other intriguers, even though they had forcibly made him a partner to their shedding of innocent blood. "Is it possible that this was what Stevenson's experience of real life had brought him? Fortunate himself in so many respects, he was yet one of those who turn aside from the smooth and sunny paths of life, to enter into brotherly sympathy and fellowship with the disinherited. Is this, then, what he found on those darker levels? Did he discover that triumphant hypocrisy treads down souls as well as lives? "We cannot doubt that it often does so; and it is well that we should see this sometimes, to make us strong to contend with evil before it works out this, its worst mischief, and to rouse us from the easy optimist laziness which sits idle while others are being wronged, and bids them believe 'that all will come right in the end,' when it is our direct duty to do our utmost to make it 'come right' to-day. "But to show us nothing but the gloomy side, nothing but the weakness of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not inspire us to contend for the right, does not inform us of the powers and weapons with which we might so contend. To gaze at unqualified and inevitable moral defeat will but leave us to the still worse laziness of pessimism, uttering its discouraging and blasphemous cry, 'It does not matter; nothing will ever come right!' "Shakespeare has shown us--and never so nobly as in his last great creation of _The Tempest_--that a man has one stronghold which none but himself can deliver over to the enemy--that citadel of his own conduct and character, from which he can smile supreme upon the foe, who may have conquered all down the line, but must finally make pause there. "We must remember that _The Tempest_ was Shakespeare's last work. The genuine consciousness of the possible triumph of the moral nature against every assault is probably reserved for the later years of life, when, somewhat withdrawn from the passions of its struggle, we become those lookers-on who see most of the game. Strange fate is it that so much of our genius vanishes into the great silence before those later years are reached!" Stevenson was too late in awakening fully to the tragic error to which short-sighted youth is apt to wander that "bad-heartedness is strength." And so, from this point of view, to our sorrow, he too much verified Goethe's saw that "simplicity (not artifice) and repose are the acme of art, and therefore no youth can be a master." In fact, he might very well from another side, have taken one of Goethe's fine sayings as a motto for himself: "Greatest saints were ever most kindly-hearted to sinners; Here I'm a saint with the best; sinners I never could hate." {7} Stevenson's own verdict on _Deacon Brodie_ given to a _New York Herald_ reporter on the author's arrival in New York in September 1887, on the _Ludgate Hill_, is thus very near the precise truth: "The piece has been all overhauled, and though I have no idea whether it will please an audience, I don't think either Mr Henley or I are ashamed of it. _But we were both young men when we did that_, _and I think we had an idea that bad-heartedness was strength_." If Mr Henley in any way confirmed R. L. Stevenson in this perversion, as I much fear he did, no true admirer of Stevenson has much to thank him for, whatever claims he may have fancied he had to Stevenson's eternal gratitude. He did Stevenson about the very worst turn he could have done, and aided and abetted in robbing us and the world of yet greater works than we have had from his hands. He was but condemning himself when he wrote some of the detractory things he did in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ about the _Edinburgh Edition_, etc. Men are mirrors in which they see each other: Henley, after all, painted himself much more effectively in that now notorious _Pall Mall Magazine_ article than he did R. L. Stevenson. Such is the penalty men too often pay for wreaking paltry revenges--writing under morbid memories and narrow and petty grievances--they not only fail in truth and impartiality, but inscribe a kind of grotesque parody of themselves in their effort to make their subject ridiculous, as he did, for example, about the name Lewis=Louis, and various other things. R. L. Stevenson's fate was to be a casuistic and mystic moralist at bottom, and could not help it; while, owing to some kink or twist, due, perhaps, mainly to his earlier sufferings, and the teachings he then received, he could not help giving it always a turn to what he himself called "tail-foremost" or inverted morality; and it was not till near the close that he fully awakened to the fact that here he was false to the truest canons at once of morality and life and art, and that if he pursued this course his doom was, and would be, to make his endings "disgrace, or perhaps, degrade his beginnings," and that no true and effective dramatic unity and effect and climax was to be gained. Pity that he did so much on this perverted view of life and world and art: and well it is that he came to perceive it, even though almost too late:--certainly too late for that full presentment of that awful yet gladdening presence of a God's power and equity in this seeming tangled web of a world, the idea which inspired Robert Browning as well as Wordsworth, when he wrote, and gathered it up into a few lines in _Pippa Passes_: "The year's at the spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hillsides dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn: God's in His heaven, All's right with the world. . . . . . . . . . . . . "All service ranks the same with God, If now, as formerly he trod Paradise, His presence fills Our earth, each only as God wills Can work--God's puppets best and worst, Are we; there is no last or first." It shows what he might have accomplished, had longer life been but allowed him. CHAPTER XVI--STEVENSON'S GLOOM The problem of Stevenson's gloom cannot be solved by any commonplace cut- and-dried process. It will remain a problem only unless (1) his original dreamy tendency crossed, if not warped, by the fatalistic Calvinism which was drummed into him by father, mother, and nurse in his tender years, is taken fully into account; then (2) the peculiar action on such a nature of the unsatisfying and, on the whole, distracting effect of the bohemian and hail-fellow-well-met sort of ideal to which he yielded, and which has to be charged with much; and (3) the conflict in him of a keenly social animus with a very strong egotistical effusiveness, fed by fancy, and nourished by the enforced solitariness inevitable in the case of one who, from early years up, suffered from painful, and even crushing, disease. His text and his sermon--which may be shortly summed in the following sentence--be kind, for in kindness to others lies the only true pleasure to be gained in life; be cheerful, even to the point of egotistic self- satisfaction, for through cheerfulness only is the flow of this incessant kindliness of thought and service possible. He was not in harmony with the actual effect of much of his creative work, though he illustrated this in his life, as few men have done. He regarded it as the highest duty of life to give pleasure to others; his art in his own idea thus became in an unostentatious way consecrated, and while he would not have claimed to be a seer, any more than he would have claimed to be a saint, as he would have held in contempt a mere sybarite, most certainly a vein of unblamable hedonism pervaded his whole philosophy of life. Suffering constantly, he still was always kindly. He encouraged, as Mr Gosse has said, this philosophy by every resource open to him. In practical life, all who knew him declared that he was brightness, naive fancy, and sunshine personified, and yet he could not help always, somehow, infusing into his fiction a pronounced, and sometimes almost fatal, element of gloom. Even in his own case they were not pleasure-giving and failed thus in essence. Some wise critic has said that no man can ever write well creatively of that in which in his early youth he had no knowledge. Always behind Stevenson's latest exercises lies the shadow of this as an unshifting background, which by art may be relieved, but never refined away wholly. He cannot escape from it if he would. Here, too, as George MacDonald has neatly and nicely said: We are the victims of our own past, and often a hand is put forth upon us from behind and draws us into life backward. Here was Stevenson, with his half-hedonistic theories of life, the duty of giving pleasure, of making eyes brighter, and casting sunshine around one wherever one went, yet the creator of gloom for us, when all the world was before him where to choose. This fateful shadow pursued him to the end, often giving us, as it were, the very justificative ground for his own father's despondency and gloom, which the son rather too decisively reproved, while he might have sympathised with it in a stranger, and in that most characteristic letter to his mother, which we have quoted, said that it made his father often seem, to him, to be ungrateful--"_Has the man no gratitude_?" Two selves thus persistently and constantly struggled in Stevenson. He was from this point of view, indeed, his own Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the buoyant, self- enjoying, because pleasure-conferring, man, and at the same time the helpless yet fascinating "dark interpreter" of the gloomy and gloom-inspiring side of life, viewed from the point of view of dominating character and inherited influence. When he reached out his hand with desire of pleasure-conferring, lo and behold, as he wrote, a hand from his forefathers was stretched out, and he was pulled backward; so that, as he has confessed, his endings were apt to shame, perhaps to degrade, the beginnings. Here is something pointing to the hidden and secret springs that feed the deeper will and bend it to their service. Individuality itself is but a mirror, which by its inequalities transforms things to odd shapes. Hawthorne confessed to something of this sort. He, like Stevenson, suffered much in youth, if not from disease then through accident, which kept him long from youthful company. At a time when he should have been running free with other boys, he had to be lonely, reading what books he could lay his hands on, mostly mournful and puritanic, by the borders of lone Sebago Lake. He that hath once in youth been touched by this Marah-rod of bitterness will not easily escape from it, when he essays in later years to paint life and the world as he sees them; nay, the hand, when he deems himself freest, will be laid upon him from behind, if not to pull him, as MacDonald has said, into life backward, then to make him a mournful witness of having once been touched by the Marah-rod, whose bitterness again declares itself and wells out its bitterness when set even in the rising and the stirring of the waters. Such is our view of the "gloom" of Stevenson--a gloom which well might have justified something of his father's despondency. He struggles in vain to escape from it--it narrows, it fatefully hampers and limits the free field of his art, lays upon it a strange atmosphere, fascinating, but not favourable to true dramatic breadth and force, and spontaneous natural simplicity, invariably lending a certain touch of weakness, inconsistency, and inconclusiveness to his endings; so that he himself could too often speak of them afterwards as apt to "shame, perhaps to degrade, the beginnings." This is what true dramatic art should never do. In the ending all that may raise legitimate question in the process--all that is confusing, perplexing in the separate parts--is met, solved, reconciled, at least in a way satisfactory to the general, or ordinary mind; and thus such unity is by it so gained and sealed, that in no case can the true artist, whatever faults may lie in portions of the process-work, say of his endings that "they shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning." Wherever this is the case there will be "gloom," and there will also be a sad, tormenting sense of something wanting. "The evening brings a 'hame';" so should it be here--should it especially be in a dramatic work. If not, "We start; for soul is wanting there;" or, if not soul, then the last halo of the soul's serene triumph. From this side, too, there is another cause for the undramatic character, in the stricter sense of Stevenson's work generally: it is, after all, distressful, unsatisfying, egotistic, for fancy is led at the beck of some pre-established disharmony which throws back an abiding and irremovable gloom on all that went before; and the free spontaneous grace of natural creation which ensures natural simplicity is, as said already, not quite attained. It was well pointed out in _Hammerton_, by an unanonymous author there quoted (pp. 22, 23), that while in the story, Hyde, the worse one, wins, in Stevenson himself--in his real life--Jekyll won, and not Mr Hyde. This writer, too, might have added that the Master of Ballantrae also wins as well as Beau Austin and Deacon Brodie. R. L. Stevenson's dramatic art and a good deal of his fiction, then, was untrue to his life, and on one side was a lie--it was not in consonance with his own practice or his belief as expressed in life. In some other matters the test laid down here is not difficult of application. Stevenson, at the time he wrote _The Foreigner at Home_, had seen a good deal; he had been abroad; he had already had experiences; he had had differences with his father about Calvinism and some other things; and yet just see how he applies the standard of his earlier knowledge and observation to England--and by doing so, cannot help exaggerating the outstanding differences, always with an almost provincial accent of unwavering conviction due to his early associations and knowledge. He cannot help paying an excessive tribute to the Calvinism he had formally rejected, in so far as, according to him, it goes to form character--even national character, at all events, in its production of types; and he never in any really effective way glances at what Mr Matthew Arnold called "Scottish manners, Scottish drink" as elements in any way radically qualifying. It is not, of course, that I, as a Scotsman, well acquainted with rural life in some parts of England, as with rural life in many parts of Scotland in my youth, do not heartily agree with him--the point is that, when he comes to this sort of comparison and contrast, he writes exactly as his father would or might have done, with a full consciousness, after all, of the tribute he was paying to the practical outcome on character of the Calvinism in which he so thoroughly believed. It is, in its way, a very peculiar thing--and had I space, and did I believe it would prove interesting to readers in general, I might write an essay on it, with instances--in which case the Address to the Scottish Clergy would come in for more notice, citation and application than it has yet received. But meanwhile just take this little snippet--very characteristic and very suggestive in its own way--and tell me whether it does not justify and bear out fully what I have now said as illustrating a certain side and a strange uncertain limitation in Stevenson: "But it is not alone in scenery and architecture that we count England foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire, surprise and even pain us. The dull neglected peasant, sunk in matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast to our own long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-loving ploughman. A week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotsman gasping. It seems impossible that within the boundaries of his own island a class should have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent who hold our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all things with less interest and conviction. The first shock of English society is like a cold plunge." {8} As there was a great deal of the "John Bull element" {9} in the little dreamer De Quincey, so there was a great deal, after all, of the rather conceited Calvinistic Scot in R. L. Stevenson, and it is to be traced as clearly in certain of his fictions as anywhere, though he himself would not perhaps have seen it and acknowledged it, as I am here forced now to see it, and to acknowledge it for him. CHAPTER XVII--PROOFS OF GROWTH Once again I quote Goethe: "Natural simplicity and repose are the acme of art, and hence it follows no youth can be a master." It has to be confessed that seldom, if ever, does Stevenson naturally and by sheer enthusiasm for subject and characters attain this natural simplicity, if he often attained the counterfeit presentment--artistic and graceful euphony, and new, subtle, and often unexpected concatenations of phrase. Style is much; but it is not everything. We often love Scott the more that he shows loosenesses and lapses here, for, in spite of them, he gains natural simplicity, while not seldom Stevenson, with all his art and fine sense of verbal music, rather misses it. _The Sedulous Ape_ sometimes disenchants as well as charms; for occasionally a word, a touch, a turn, sends us off too directly in search of the model; and this operates against the interest as introducing a new and alien series of associations, where, for full effect, it should not be so. And this distraction will be the more insistent, the more knowledge the reader has and the more he remembers; and since Stevenson's first appeal, both by his spirit and his methods, is to the cultured and well read, rather than to the great mass, his "sedulous apehood" only the more directly wars against him as regards deep, continuous, and lasting impression; where he should be most simple, natural and spontaneous; he also is most artificial and involved. If the story-writer is not so much in earnest, not so possessed by his matter that this is allowed to him, how is it to be hoped that we shall be possessed in the reading of it? More than once in _Catriona_ we must own we had this experience, directly warring against full possession by the story, and certain passages about Simon Lovat were especially marked by this; if even the first introduction to Catriona herself was not so. As for Miss Barbara Grant, of whom so much has been made by many admirers, she is decidedly clever, indeed too clever by half, and yet her doom is to be a mere _deus ex machina_, and never do more than just pay a little tribute to Stevenson's own power of _persiflage_, or, if you like, to pay a penalty, poor lass, for the too perfect doing of hat, and really, really, I could not help saying this much, though, I do believe that she deserved just a wee bit better fate than that. But we have proofs of great growth, and nowhere are they greater than at the very close. Stevenson died young: in some phases he was but a youth to the last. To a true critic then, the problem is, having already attained so much--a grand style, grasp of a limited group of characters, with fancy, sincerity, and imagination,--what would Stevenson have attained in another ten years had such been but allotted him? It has over and over again been said that, for long he _shied_ presenting women altogether. This is not quite true: _Thrawn Janet_ was an earlier effort; and if there the problem is persistent, the woman is real. Here also he was on the right road--the advance road. The sex-question was coming forward as inevitably a part of life, and could not be left out in any broad and true picture. This element was effectively revived in _Weir of Hermiston_, and "Weir" has been well said to be sadder, if it does not go deeper than _Denis Duval_ or _Edwin Drood_. We know what Dickens and Thackeray could do there; we can but guess now what Stevenson would have done. "Weir" is but a fragment; but, to a wisely critical and unprejudiced mind, it suffices to show not only what the complete work would have been, but what would have inevitably followed it. It shows the turning-point, and the way that was to be followed at the cross-roads--the way into a bigger, realer, grander world, where realism, freed from the dream, and fancy, and prejudice of youth, would glory in achieving the more enduring romance of manhood, maturity and humanity. Yes; there was growth--undoubted growth. The questioning and severely moral element mainly due to the Shorter Catechism--the tendency to casuistry, and to problems, and wistful introspection--which had so coloured Stevenson's art up to the date of _The Master of Ballantrae_, and made him a great essayist, was passing in the satisfaction of assured insight into life itself. The art would gradually have been transformed also. The problem, pure and simple, would have been subdued in face of the great facts of life; if not lost, swallowed up in the grandeur, pathos, and awe of the tragedy clearly realised and presented. CHAPTER XVIII--EARLIER DETERMINATIONS AND RESULTS Stevenson's earlier determination was so distinctly to the symbolic, the parabolic, allegoric, dreamy and mystical--to treatment of the world as an array of weird or half-fanciful existences, witnessing only to certain dim spiritual facts or abstract moralities, occasionally inverted moralities--"tail foremost moralities" as later he himself named them--that a strong Celtic strain in him had been detected and dwelt on by acute critics long before any attention had been given to his genealogy on both sides of the house. The strong Celtic strain is now amply attested by many researches. Such phantasies as _The House of Eld_, _The Touchstone_, _The Poor Thing_, and _The Song of the Morrow_, published along with some fables at the end of an edition of _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, by Longman's, I think, in 1896, tell to the initiated as forcibly as anything could tell of the presence of this element, as though moonshine, disguising and transfiguring, was laid over all real things and the secret of the world and life was in its glamour: the shimmering and soft shading rendering all outlines indeterminate, though a great idea is felt to be present in the mind of the author, for which he works. The man who would say there is no feeling for symbol--no phantasy or Celtic glamour in these weird, puzzling, and yet on all sides suggestive tales would thereby be declared inept, inefficient--blind to certain qualities that lie near to grandeur in fanciful literature, or the literature of phantasy, more properly. This power in weird and playful phantasy is accompanied with the gift of impersonating or embodying mere abstract qualities or tendencies in characters. The little early sketch written in June 1875, titled _Good Content_, well illustrates this: "Pleasure goes by piping: Hope unfurls his purple flag; and meek Content follows them on a snow-white ass. Here, the broad sunlight falls on open ways and goodly countries; here, stage by stage, pleasant old towns and hamlets border the road, now with high sign- poles, now with high minster spires; the lanes go burrowing under blossomed banks, green meadows, and deep woods encompass them about; from wood to wood flock the glad birds; the vane turns in the variable wind; and as I journey with Hope and Pleasure, and quite a company of jolly personifications, who but the lady I love is by my side, and walks with her slim hand upon my arm? "Suddenly, at a corner, something beckons; a phantom finger-post, a will o' the wisp, a foolish challenge writ in big letters on a brand. And twisting his red moustaches, braggadocio Virtue takes the perilous way where dim rain falls ever, and sad winds sigh. And after him, on his white ass, follows simpering Content. "Ever since I walk behind these two in the rain. Virtue is all a-cold; limp are his curling feather and fierce moustache. Sore besmirched, on his jackass, follows Content." The record, entitled _Sunday Thoughts_, which is dated some five days earlier is naive and most characteristic, touched with the phantastic moralities and suggestions already indicated in every sentence; and rises to the fine climax in this respect at the close. "A plague o' these Sundays! How the church bells ring up the sleeping past! I cannot go in to sermon: memories ache too hard; and so I hide out under the blue heavens, beside the small kirk whelmed in leaves. Tittering country girls see me as I go past from where they sit in the pews, and through the open door comes the loud psalm and the fervent solitary voice of the preacher. To and fro I wander among the graves, and now look over one side of the platform and see the sunlit meadow where the grown lambs go bleating and the ewes lie in the shadow under their heaped fleeces; and now over the other, where the rhododendrons flower fair among the chestnut boles, and far overhead the chestnut lifts its thick leaves and spiry blossom into the dark-blue air. Oh, the height and depth and thickness of the chestnut foliage! Oh, to have wings like a dove, and dwell in the tree's green heart! . . . . . . . . "A plague o' these Sundays! How the Church bells ring up the sleeping past! Here has a maddening memory broken into my brain. To the door, to the door, with the naked lunatic thought! Once it is forth we may talk of what we dare not entertain; once the intriguing thought has been put to the door I can watch it out of the loophole where, with its fellows, it raves and threatens in dumb show. Years ago when that thought was young, it was dearer to me than all others, and I would speak with it always when I had an hour alone. These rags that so dismally trick forth its madness were once the splendid livery my favour wrought for it on my bed at night. Can you see the device on the badge? I dare not read it there myself, yet have a guess--'_bad ware nicht_'--is not that the humour of it? . . . . . . . . . "A plague o' these Sundays! How the Church bells ring up the sleeping past! If I were a dove and dwelt in the monstrous chestnuts, where the bees murmur all day about the flowers; if I were a sheep and lay on the field there under my comely fleece; if I were one of the quiet dead in the kirkyard--some homespun farmer dead for a long age, some dull hind who followed the plough and handled the sickle for threescore years and ten in the distant past; if I were anything but what I am out here, under the sultry noon, between the deep chestnuts, among the graves, where the fervent voice of the preacher comes to me, thin and solitary, through the open windows; _if I were what I was yesterday_, _and what_, _before God_, _I shall be again to-morrow_, _how should I outface these brazen memories_, _how live down this unclean resurrection of dead hopes_!" Close associated with this always is the moralising faculty, which is assertive. Take here the cunning sentences on _Selfishness and Egotism_, very Hawthornian yet quite original: "An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks less, and is more easily loved, than one who is laboriously and egotistically unselfish. There is at least no fuss about the first; but the other parades his sacrifices, and so sells his favours too dear. Selfishness is calm, a force of nature; you might say the trees were selfish. But egotism is a piece of vanity; it must always take you into its confidence; it is uneasy, troublesome, seeking; it can do good, but not handsomely; it is uglier, because less dignified, than selfishness itself." If Mr Henley had but had this clear in his mind he might well have quoted it in one connection against Stevenson himself in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ article. He could hardly have quoted anything more apparently apt to the purpose. In the sphere of minor morals there is no more important topic. Unselfishness is too often only the most exasperating form of selfishness. Here is another very characteristic bit: "You will always do wrong: you must try to get used to that, my son. It is a small matter to make a work about, when all the world is in the same case. I meant when I was a young man to write a great poem; and now I am cobbling little prose articles and in excellent good spirits. I thank you. . . . Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits." Again: "It is the mark of good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about." The moral to _The House of Eld_ is incisive writ out of true experience--phantasy there becomes solemn, if not, for the nonce, tragic:-- "Old is the tree and the fruit good, Very old and thick the wood. Woodman, is your courage stout? Beware! the root is wrapped about Your mother's heart, your father's bones; And, like the mandrake, comes with groans." The phantastic moralist is supreme, jauntily serious, facetiously earnest, most gravely funny in the whole series of _Moral Emblems_. "Reader, your soul upraise to see, In yon fair cut designed by me, The pauper by the highwayside Vainly soliciting from pride. Mark how the Beau with easy air Contemns the anxious rustic's prayer And casting a disdainful eye Goes gaily gallivanting by. He from the poor averts his head . . . He will regret it when he's dead." Now, the man who would trace out step by step and point by point, clearly and faithfully, the process by which Stevenson worked himself so far free of this his besetting tendency to moralised symbolism or allegory into the freer air of life and real character, would do more to throw light on Stevenson's genius, and the obstacles he had had to contend with in becoming a novelist eager to interpret definite times and character, than has yet been done or even faithfully attempted. This would show at once Stevenson's wonderful growth and the saving grace and elasticity of his temperament and genius. Few men who have by force of native genius gone into allegory or moralised phantasy ever depart out of that fateful and enchanted region. They are as it were at once lost and imprisoned in it and kept there as by a spell--the more they struggle for freedom the more surely is the bewitching charm laid upon them--they are but like the fly in amber. It was so with Ludwig Tieck; it was so with Nathaniel Hawthorne; it was so with our own George MacDonald, whose professedly real pictures of life are all informed of this phantasy, which spoils them for what they profess to be, and yet to the discerning cannot disguise what they really are--the attempts of a mystic poet and phantasy writer and allegoristic moralist to walk in the ways of Anthony Trollope or of Mrs Oliphant, and, like a stranger in a new land always looking back (at least by a side-glance, an averted or half-averted face which keeps him from seeing steadily and seeing whole the real world with which now he is fain to deal), to the country from which he came. Stevenson did largely free himself, that is his great achievement--had he lived, we verily believe, so marked was his progress, he would have been a great and true realist, a profound interpreter of human life and its tragic laws and wondrous compensations--he would have shown how to make the full retreat from fairyland without penalty of too early an escape from it, as was the case with Thomas the Rymer of Ercildoune, and with one other told of by him, and proved that to have been a dreamer need not absolutely close the door to insight into the real world and to art. This side of the subject, never even glanced at by Mr Henley or Mr Zangwill or their _confreres_, yet demands, and will well reward the closest and most careful attention and thought that can be given to it. The parabolic element, with the whimsical humour and turn for paradoxical inversion, comes out fully in such a work as _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_. There his humour gives body to his fancy, and reality to the half-whimsical forms in which he embodies the results of deep and earnest speculations on human nature and motive. But even when he is professedly concerned with incident and adventure merely, he manages to communicate to his pages some touch of universality, as of unconscious parable or allegory, so that the reader feels now and then as though some thought, or motive, or aspiration, or weakness of his own were being there cunningly unveiled or presented; and not seldom you feel he has also unveiled and presented some of yours, secret and unacknowledged too. Hence the interest which young and old alike have felt in _Treasure Island_, _Kidnapped_, and _The Wrecker_--a something which suffices decisively to mark off these books from the mass with which superficially they might be classed. CHAPTER XIX--EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN'S ESTIMATE It should be clearly remembered that Stevenson died at a little over forty--the age at which severity and simplicity and breadth in art but begin to be attained. If Scott had died at the age when Stevenson was taken from us, the world would have lacked the _Waverley Novels_; if a like fate had overtaken Dickens, we should not have had _A Tale of Two Cities_; and under a similar stroke, Goldsmith could not have written _Retaliation_, or tasted the bitter-sweet first night of _She Stoops to Conquer_. At the age of forty-four Mr Thomas Hardy had probably not dreamt of _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_. But what a man has already done at forty years is likely, I am afraid, to be a gauge as well as a promise of what he will do in the future; and from Stevenson we were entitled to expect perfect form and continued variety of subject, rather than a measurable dynamic gain. This is the point of view which my friend and correspondent of years ago, Mr Edmund Clarence Stedman, of New York, set out by emphasising in his address, as President of the meeting under the auspices of the Uncut Leaves Society in New York, in the beginning of 1895, on the death of Stevenson, and to honour the memory of the great romancer, as reported in the _New York Tribune_: "We are brought together by tidings, almost from the Antipodes, of the death of a beloved writer in his early prime. The work of a romancer and poet, of a man of insight and feeling, which may be said to have begun but fifteen years ago, has ended, through fortune's sternest cynicism, just as it seemed entering upon even more splendid achievement. A star surely rising, as we thought, has suddenly gone out. A radiant invention shines no more; the voice is hushed of a creative mind, expressing its fine imagining in this, our peerless English tongue. His expression was so original and fresh from Nature's treasure-house, so prodigal and various, its too brief flow so consummate through an inborn gift made perfect by unsparing toil, that mastery of the art by which Robert Louis Stevenson conveyed those imaginings to us so picturesque, yet wisely ordered, his own romantic life--and now, at last, so pathetic a loss which renews "'The Virgilian cry, The sense of tears in mortal things,' that this assemblage has gathered at the first summons, in tribute to a beautiful genius, and to avow that with the putting out of that bright intelligence the reading world experiences a more than wonted grief. "Judged by the sum of his interrupted work, Stevenson had his limitations. But the work was adjusted to the scale of a possibly long career. As it was, the good fairies brought all gifts, save that of health, to his cradle, and the gift-spoiler wrapped them in a shroud. Thinking of what his art seemed leading to--for things that would be the crowning efforts of other men seemed prentice-work in his case--it was not safe to bound his limitations. And now it is as if Sir Walter, for example, had died at forty-four, with the _Waverley Novels_ just begun! In originality, in the conception of action and situation, which, however phantastic, are seemingly within reason, once we breathe the air of his Fancyland; in the union of bracing and heroic character and adventure; in all that belongs to tale-writing pure and simple, his gift was exhaustless. No other such charmer, in this wise, has appeared in his generation. We thought the stories, the fairy tales, had all been told, but 'Once upon a time' meant for him our own time, and the grave and gay magic of Prince Florizel in dingy London or sunny France. All this is but one of his provinces, however distinctive. Besides, how he buttressed his romance with apparent truth! Since Defoe, none had a better right to say: 'There was one thing I determined to do when I began this long story, and that was to tell out everything as it befell.' "I remember delighting in two fascinating stories of Paris in the time of Francois Villon, anonymously reprinted by a New York paper from a London magazine. They had all the quality, all the distinction, of which I speak. Shortly afterward I met Mr Stevenson, then in his twenty-ninth year, at a London club, where we chanced to be the only loungers in an upper room. To my surprise he opened a conversation--you know there could be nothing more unexpected than that in London--and thereby I guessed that he was as much, if not as far, away from home as I was. He asked many questions concerning 'the States'; in fact, this was but a few months before he took his steerage passage for our shores. I was drawn to the young Scotsman at once. He seemed more like a New-Englander of Holmes's Brahmin caste, who might have come from Harvard or Yale. But as he grew animated I thought, as others have thought, and as one would suspect from his name, that he must have Scandinavian blood in his veins--that he was of the heroic, restless, strong and tender Viking strain, and certainly from that day his works and wanderings have not belied the surmise. He told me that he was the author of that charming book of gipsying in the Cevennes which just then had gained for him some attentions from the literary set. But if I had known that he had written those two stories of sixteenth-century Paris--as I learned afterwards when they reappeared in the _New Arabian Nights_--I would not have bidden him good-bye as to an 'unfledged comrade,' but would have wished indeed to 'grapple him to my soul with hooks of steel.' "Another point is made clear as crystal by his life itself. He had the instinct, and he had the courage, to make it the servant, and not the master, of the faculty within him. I say he had the courage, but so potent was his birth-spell that doubtless he could not otherwise. Nothing commonplace sufficed him. A regulation stay-at-home life would have been fatal to his art. The ancient mandate, 'Follow thy Genius,' was well obeyed. Unshackled freedom of person and habit was a prerequisite; as an imaginary artist he felt--nature keeps her poets and story-tellers children to the last--he felt, if he ever reasoned it out, that he must gang his own gait, whether it seemed promising, or the reverse, to kith, kin, or alien. So his wanderings were not only in the most natural but in the wisest consonance with his creative dreams. Wherever he went, he found something essential for his use, breathed upon it, and returned it fourfold in beauty and worth. The longing of the Norseman for the tropic, of the pine for the palm, took him to the South Seas. There, too, strange secrets were at once revealed to him, and every island became an 'Isle of Voices.' Yes, an additional proof of Stevenson's artistic mission lay in his careless, careful, liberty of life; in that he was an artist no less than in his work. He trusted to the impulse which possessed him--that which so many of us have conscientiously disobeyed and too late have found ourselves in reputable bondage to circumstances. "But those whom you are waiting to hear will speak more fully of all this--some of them with the interest of their personal remembrance--with the strength of their affection for the man beloved by young and old. In the strange and sudden intimacy with an author's record which death makes sure, we realise how notable the list of Stevenson's works produced since 1878; more than a score of books--not fiction alone, but also essays, criticism, biography, drama, even history, and, as I need not remind you, that spontaneous poetry which comes only from a true poet. None can have failed to observe that, having recreated the story of adventure, he seemed in his later fiction to interfuse a subtler purpose--the search for character, the analysis of mind and soul. Just here his summons came. Between the sunrise of one day and the sunset of the next he exchanged the forest study for the mountain grave. There, as he had sung his own wish, he lies 'under the wide and starry sky.' If there was something of his own romance, so exquisitely capricious, in the life of Robert Louis Stevenson, so, also, the poetic conditions are satisfied in his death, and in the choice of his burial-place upon the top of Pala. As for the splendour of that maturity upon which we counted, now never to be fulfilled on sea or land, I say--as once before, when the great New- England romancer passed in the stillness of the night: "'What though his work unfinished lies? Half bent The rainbow's arch fades out in upper air, The shining cataract half-way down the height Breaks into mist; the haunting strain, that fell On listeners unaware, Ends incomplete, but through the starry night The ear still waits for what it did not tell.'" Dr Edward Eggleston finely sounded the personal note, and told of having met Stevenson at a hotel in New York. Stevenson was ill when the landlord came to Dr Eggleston and asked him if he should like to meet him. Continuing, he said: "He was flat on his back when I entered, but I think I never saw anybody grow well in so short a time. It was a soul rather than a body that lay there, ablaze with spiritual fire, good will shining through everywhere. He did not pay me any compliment about my work, and I didn't pay him any about his. We did not burn any of the incense before each other which authors so often think it necessary to do, but we were friends instantly. I am not given to speedy intimacies, but I could not help my heart going out to him. It was a wonderfully invested soul, no hedges or fences across his fields, no concealment. He was a romanticist; I was--well, I don't know exactly what. But he let me into the springs of his romanticism then and there. "'You go in your boat every day?' he asked. 'You sail? Oh! to write a novel a man must take his life in his hands. He must not live in the town.' And so he spoke, in his broad way, of course, according to the enthusiasm of the moment. "I can't sound any note of pathos here to-night. Some lives are so brave and sweet and joyous and well-rounded, with such a completeness about them that death does not leave imperfection. He never had the air of sitting up with his own reputation. He let his books toss in the waves of criticism and make their ports if they deserve to. He had no claptrap, no great cause, none of the disease of pruriency which came into fashion with Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant. He simply told his story, with no condescension, taking the readers into his heart and his confidence." CHAPTER XX--EGOTISTIC ELEMENT AND ITS EFFECTS From these sources now traced out by us--his youthfulness of spirit, his mystical bias, and tendency to dream--symbolisms leading to disregard of common feelings--flows too often the indeterminateness of Stevenson's work, at the very points where for direct interest there should be decision. In _The Master of Ballantrae_ this leads him to try to bring the balances even as regards our interest in the two brothers, in so far justifying from one point of view what Mr Zangwill said in the quotation we have given, or, as Sir Leslie Stephen had it in his second series of the _Studies of a Biographer_: "The younger brother in _The Master of Ballantrae_, who is black-mailed by the utterly reprobate master, ought surely to be interesting instead of being simply sullen and dogged. In the later adventures, we are invited to forgive him on the ground that his brain has been affected: but the impression upon me is that he is sacrificed throughout to the interests of the story [or more strictly for the working out of the problem as originally conceived by the author]. The curious exclusion of women is natural in the purely boyish stories, since to a boy woman is simply an incumbrance upon reasonable modes of life. When in _Catriona_ Stevenson introduces a love story, it is still unsatisfactory, because David Balfour is so much the undeveloped animal that his passion is clumsy, and his charm for the girl unintelligible. I cannot feel, to say the truth, that in any of these stories I am really among living human beings with whom, apart from their adventures, I can feel any very lively affection or antipathy." In the _Ebb-Tide_ it is, in this respect, yet worse: the three heroes choke each other off all too literally. In his excess of impartiality he tones down the points and lines that would give the attraction of true individuality to his characters, and instead, would fain have us contented with his liberal, and even over- sympathetic views of them and allowances for them. But instead of thus furthering his object, he sacrifices the whole--and his story becomes, instead of a broad and faithful human record, really a curiosity of autobiographic perversion, and of overweening, if not extravagant egotism of the more refined, but yet over-obtrusive kind. Mr Baildon thus hits the subjective tendency, out of which mainly this defect--a serious defect in view of interest--arises. "That we can none of us be sure to what crime we might not descend, if only our temptation were sufficiently acute, lies at the root of his fondness and toleration for wrong-doers (p. 74). Thus he practically declines to do for us what we are unwilling or unable to do for ourselves. Interest in two characters in fiction can never, in this artificial way, and if they are real characters truly conceived, be made equal, nor can one element of claim be balanced against another, even at the beck of the greatest artist. The common sentiment, as we have seen, resents it even as it resents lack of guidance elsewhere. After all, the novelist is bound to give guidance: he is an authority in his own world, where he is an autocrat indeed; and can work out issues as he pleases, even as the Pope is an authority in the Roman Catholic world: he abdicates his functions when he declines to lead: we depend on him from the human point of view to guide us right, according to the heart, if not according to any conventional notion or opinion. Stevenson's pause in individual presentation in the desire now to raise our sympathy for the one, and then for the other in _The Master of Ballantrae_, admits us too far into Stevenson's secret or trick of affected self-withdrawal in order to work his problem and to signify his theories, to the loss and utter confusion of his aims from the point of common dramatic and human interest. It is the same in _Catriona_ in much of the treatment of James Mohr or More; it is still more so in not a little of the treatment of _Weir of Hermiston_ and his son, though there, happily for him and for us, there were the direct restrictions of known fact and history, and clearly an attempt at a truer and broader human conception unburdened by theory or egotistic conception. Everywhere the problem due to the desire to be overjust, so to say, emerges; and exactly in the measure it does so the source of true dramatic directness and variety is lost. It is just as though Shakespeare were to invent a chorus to cry out at intervals about Iago--"a villain, bad lot, you see, still there's a great deal to be said for him--victim of inheritance, this, that and the other; and considering everything how could you really expect anything else now." Thackeray was often weak from this same tendency--he meant Becky Sharp to be largely excused by the reader on these grounds, as he tries to excuse several others of his characters; but his endeavours in this way to gloss over "wickedness" in a way, do not succeed--the reader does not carry clear in mind as he goes along, the suggestions Thackeray has ineffectually set out and the "healthy hatred of scoundrels" Carlyle talked about has its full play in spite of Thackeray's suggested excuses and palliations, and all in his own favour, too, as a story-wright. Stevenson's constant habit of putting himself in the place of another, and asking himself how would I have borne myself here or there, thus limited his field of dramatic interest, where the subject should have been made pre-eminently in aid of this effect. Even in Long John Silver we see it, as in various others of his characters, though there, owing to the demand for adventure, and action contributory to it, the defect is not so emphasised. The sense as of a projection of certain features of the writer into all and sundry of his important characters, thus imparts, if not an air of egotism, then most certainly a somewhat constrained, if not somewhat artificial, autobiographical air--in the very midst of action, questions of ethical or casuistical character arise, all contributing to submerging individual character and its dramatic interests under a wave of but half-disguised autobiography. Let Stevenson do his very best--let him adopt all the artificial disguises he may, as writing narrative in the first person, etc., as in _Kidnapped_ and _Catriona_, nevertheless, the attentive reader's mind is constantly called off to the man who is actually writing the story. It is as though, after all, all the artistic or artificial disguises were a mere mask, as more than once Thackeray represented himself, the mask partially moved aside, just enough to show a chubby, childish kind of transformed Thackeray face below. This belongs, after all, to the order of self-revelation though under many disguises: it is creation only in its manner of work, not in its essential being--the spirit does not so to us go clean forth of itself, it stops at home, and, as if from a remote and shadowy cave or recess, projects its own colour on all on which it looks. This is essentially the character of the _mystic_; and hence the justification for this word as applied expressly to Stevenson by Mr Chesterton and others. "The inner life like rings of light Goes forth of us, transfiguring all we see." The effect of these early days, with the peculiar tint due to the questionings raised by religious stress and strain, persists with Stevenson; he grows, but he never escapes from that peculiar something which tells of childish influences--of boyish perversions and troubled self-examinations due to Shorter Catechism--any one who would view Stevenson without thought of this, would view him only from the outside--see him merely in dress and outer oddities. Here I see definite and clear heredity. Much as he differed from his worthy father in many things, he was like him in this--the old man like the son, bore on him the marks of early excesses of wistful self-questionings and painful wrestlings with religious problems, that perpetuated themselves in a quaint kind of self-revelation often masked by an assumed self-withdrawal or indifference which to the keen eye only the more revealed the real case. Stevenson never, any more than his father, ceased to be interested in the religious questions for which Scotland has always had a _penchant_--and so much is this the case that I could wish Professor Sidney Colvin would even yet attempt to show the bearing of certain things in that _Address to the Scottish Clergy_ written when Stevenson was yet but a young man, on all that he afterwards said and did. It starts in the _Edinburgh Edition_ without any note, comment, or explanation whatever, but in that respect the _Edinburgh Edition_ is not quite so complete as it might have been made. In view of the point now before us, it is far more important than many of the other trifles there given, and wants explanation and its relation to much in the novels brought out and illustrated. Were this adequately done, only new ground would be got for holding that Stevenson, instead of, as has been said, "seeing only the visible world," was, in truth, a mystical moralist, once and always, whose thoughts ran all too easily into parable and fable, and who, indeed, never escaped wholly from that atmosphere, even when writing of things and characters that seemed of themselves to be wholly outside that sphere. This was the tendency, indeed, that militated against the complete detachment in his case from moral problems and mystical thought, so as to enable him to paint, as it were, with a free hand exactly as he saw; and most certainly not that he saw only the visible world. The mystical element is not directly favourable to creative art. You see in Tolstoy how it arrests and perplexes--how it lays a disturbing check on real presentation--hindering the action, and is not favourable to the loving and faithful representation, which, as Goethe said, all true and high art should be. To some extent you see exactly the same thing in Nathaniel Hawthorne as in Tolstoy. Hawthorne's preoccupations in this way militated against his character-power; his healthy characters who would never have been influenced as he describes by morbid ones yet are not only influenced according to him, but suffer sadly. Phoebe Pyncheon in _The House of the Seven Gables_, gives sunshine to poor Hepzibah Clifford, but is herself never merry again, though joyousness was her natural element. So, doubtless, it would have been with Pansie in _Doctor Dolliver_, as indeed it was with Zenobia and with the hero in the _Marble Faun_. "We all go wrong," said Hawthorne, "by a too strenuous resolution to go right." Lady Byron was to him an intolerably irreproachable person, just as Stevenson felt a little of the same towards Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was the "sunnily-ascetic," the asceticism and its corollary, as he puts it: the passion for individual self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson. This is the position of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man who sees only the visible world. Mr Baildon says: "Stevenson has many of the things that are wanting or defective in Scott. He has his philosophy of life; he is beyond remedy a moralist, even when his morality is of the kind which he happily calls 'tail foremost,' or as we may say, inverted morality. Stevenson is, in fact, much more of a thinker than Scott, and he is also much more of the conscious artist, questionable advantage as that sometimes is. He has also a much cleverer, acuter mind than Scott, also a questionable advantage, as genius has no greater enemy than cleverness, and there is really no greater descent than to fall from the style of genius to that of cleverness. But Stevenson was too critical and alive to misuse his cleverness, and it is generally employed with great effect as in the diabolical ingenuities of a John Silver, or a Master of Ballantrae. In one sense Stevenson does not even belong to the school of Scott, but rather to that of Poe, Hawthorne, and the Brontes, in that he aims more at concentration and intensity, than at the easy, quiet breadth of Scott." If, indeed, it should not here have been added that Stevenson's theory of life and conduct was not seldom too insistent for free creativeness, for dramatic freedom, breadth and reality. Now here I humbly think Mr Baldion errs about the cleverness when he criticises Stevenson for the _faux pas_ artistically of resorting to the piratic filibustering and the treasure-seeking at the close of _The Master of Ballantrae_, he only tells and tells plainly how cleverness took the place of genius there; as indeed it did in not a few cases--certainly in some points in the Dutch escapade in _Catriona_ and in not a few in _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_. The fault of that last story is simply that we seem to hear Stevenson chuckling to himself, "Ah, now, won't they all say at last how clever I am." That too mars the _Merry Men_, whoever wrote them or part wrote them, and _Prince Otto_ would have been irretrievably spoiled by this self-conscious sense of cleverness had it not been for style and artifice. In this incessant "see how clever I am," we have another proof of the abounding youthfulness of R. L. Stevenson. If, as Mr Baildon says (p. 30), he had true child's horror of being put in fine clothes in which one must sit still and be good, _Prince Otto_ remains attractive in spite of some things and because of his fine clothes. Neither Poe nor Hawthorne could have fallen to the piracy, and treasure-hunting of _The Master of Ballantrae_. "Far behind Scott in the power of instinctive, irreflective, spontaneous creation of character, Stevenson tells his story with more art and with a firmer grip on his reader." And that is exactly what I, wishing to do all I dutifully can for Stevenson, cannot see. His genius is in nearly all cases pulled up or spoiled by his all too conscious cleverness, and at last we say, "Oh Heavens! if he could and would but let himself go or forget himself what he might achieve." But he doesn't--never does, and therefore remains but a second-rate creator though more and more the stylist and the artist. This is more especially the case at the very points where writers like Scott would have risen and roused all the readers' interest. When Stevenson reaches such points, he is always as though saying "See now how cleverly I'll clear that old and stereotyped style of thing and do something _new_." But there are things in life and human nature, which though they are old are yet ever new, and the true greatness of a writer can never come from evading or looking askance at them or trying to make them out something else than what they really are. No artistic aim or ambition can suffice to stand instead of them or to refine them away. That way lies only cold artifice and frigid lacework, and sometimes Stevenson did go a little too much on this line. CHAPTER XXI--UNITY IN STEVENSON'S STORIES The unity in Stevenson's stories is generally a unity of subjective impression and reminiscence due, in the first place, to his quick, almost abnormal boyish reverence for mere animal courage, audacity, and doggedness, and, in the second place, to his theory of life, his philosophy, his moral view. He produces an artificial atmosphere. Everything then has to be worked up to this--kept really in accordance with it, and he shows great art in the doing of this. Hence, though, a quaint sense of sameness, of artificial atmosphere--at once really a lack of spontaneity and of freedom. He is freest when he pretends to nothing but adventure--when he aims professedly at nothing save to let his characters develop themselves by action. In this respect the most successful of his stories is yet _Treasure Island_, and the least successful perhaps _Catriona_, when just as the ambitious aim compels him to pause in incident, the first-person form creates a cold stiffness and artificiality alien to the full impression he would produce upon the reader. The two stories he left unfinished promised far greater things in this respect than he ever accomplished. For it is an indisputable fact, and indeed very remarkable, that the ordinary types of men and women have little or no attraction for Stevenson, nor their commonplace passions either. Yet precisely what his art wanted was due infusion of this very interest. Nothing else will supply the place. The ordinary passion of love to the end he _shies_, and must invent no end of expedients to supply the want. The devotion of the ordinary type, as Thomas Hardy has over and over exhibited it, is precisely what Stevenson wants, to impart to his novels the full sense of reality. The secret of morals, says Shelley, is a going out of self. Stevenson was only on the way to secure this grand and all-sufficing motive. His characters, in a way, are all already like himself, romantic, but the highest is when the ordinary and commonplace is so apprehended that it becomes romantic, and may even, through the artist's deeper perception and unconscious grasp and vision, take the hand of tragedy, and lose nothing. The very atmosphere Stevenson so loved to create was in itself alien to this; and, so far as he went, his most successful revelations were but records of his own limitations. It is something that he was to the end so much the youth, with fine impulses, if sometimes with sympathies misdirected, and that, too, in such a way as to render his work cold and artificial, else he might have turned out more of the Swift than of the Sterne or Fielding. Prince Otto and Seraphina are from this cause mainly complete failures, alike from the point of view of nature and of art, and the Countess von Rosen is not a complete failure, and would perhaps have been a bit of a success, if only she had made Prince Otto come nearer to losing his virtue. The most perfect in style, perhaps, of all Stevenson's efforts it is yet most out of nature and truth,--a farce, felt to be disguised only when read in a certain mood; and this all the more for its perfections, just as Stevenson would have said it of a human being too icily perfect whom he had met. On this subject, Mr Baildon has some words so decisive, true, and final, that I cannot refrain from here quoting them: "From sheer incapacity to retain it, Prince Otto loses the regard, affection, and esteem of his wife. He goes eavesdropping among the peasantry, and has to sit silent while his wife's honour is coarsely impugned. After that I hold it is impossible for Stevenson to rehabilitate his hero, and, with all his brilliant effects, he fails. . . . I cannot help feeling a regret that such fine work is thrown away on what I must honestly hold to be an unworthy subject. The music of the spheres is rather too sublime an accompaniment for this genteel comedy Princess. A touch of Offenbach would seem more appropriate. Then even in comedy the hero must not be the butt." And it must reluctantly be confessed that in Prince Otto you see in excess that to which there is a tendency in almost all the rest--it is to make up for lack of hold on human nature itself, by resources of style and mere external technical art. CHAPTER XXII--PERSONAL CHEERFULNESS AND INVENTED GLOOM Now, it is in its own way surely a very remarkable thing that Stevenson, who, like a youth, was all for _Heiterkeit_, cheerfulness, taking and giving of pleasure, for relief, change, variety, new impressions, new sensations, should, at the time he did, have conceived and written a story like _The Master of Ballantrae_--all in a grave, grey, sombre tone, not aiming even generally at what at least indirectly all art is conceived to aim at--the giving of pleasure: he himself decisively said that it "lacked all pleasurableness, and hence was imperfect in essence." A very strange utterance in face of the oft-repeated doctrine of the essays that the one aim of art, as of true life, is to communicate pleasure, to cheer and to elevate and improve, and in face of two of his doctrines that life itself is a monitor to cheerfulness and mirth. This is true: and it is only explainable on the ground that it is youth alone which can exult in its power of accumulating shadows and dwelling on the dark side--it is youth that revels in the possible as a set-off to its brightness and irresponsibility: it is youth that can delight in its own excess of shade, and can even dispense with sunshine--hugging to its heart the memory of its own often self-created distresses and conjuring up and, with self-satisfaction, brooding over the pain and imagined horrors of a lifetime. Maturity and age kindly bring their own relief--rendering this kind of ministry to itself no longer desirable, even were it possible. _The Master of Ballantrae_ indeed marks the crisis. It shows, and effectively shows, the other side of the adventure passion--the desire of escape from its own sombre introspections, which yet, in all its "go" and glow and glitter, tells by its very excess of their tendency to pass into this other and apparently opposite. But here, too, there is nothing single or separate. The device of piracy, etc., at close of _Ballantrae_, is one of the poorest expedients for relief in all fiction. Will in _Will o' the Mill_ presents another. When at the last moment he decides that it is not worth while to get married, the author's then rather incontinent philosophy--which, by-the-bye, he did not himself act on--spoils his story as it did so much else. Such an ending to such a romance is worse even than any blundering such as the commonplace inventor could be guilty of, for he would be in a low sense natural if he were but commonplace. We need not therefore be surprised to find Mr Gwynn thus writing: "The love scenes in _Weir of Hermiston_ are almost unsurpassable; but the central interest of the story lies elsewhere--in the relations between father and son. Whatever the cause, the fact is clear that in the last years of his life Stevenson recognised in himself an ability to treat subjects which he had hitherto avoided, and was thus no longer under the necessity of detaching fragments from life. Before this, he had largely confined himself to the adventures of roving men where women had made no entrance; or, if he treated of a settled family group, the result was what we see in _The Master of Ballantrae_." In a word, between this work and _Weir of Hermiston_ we have the passage from mere youth to manhood, with its wider, calmer views, and its patience, inclusiveness, and mild, genial acceptance of types that before did not come, and could not by any effort of will be brought, within range or made to adhere consistently with what was already accepted and workable. He was less the egotist now and more the realist. He was not so prone to the high lights in which all seems overwrought, exaggerated; concerned really with effects of a more subdued order, if still the theme was a wee out of ordinary nature. Enough is left to prove that Stevenson's life-long devotion to his art anyway was on the point of being rewarded by such a success as he had always dreamt of: that in the man's nature there was power to conceive scenes of a tragic beauty and intensity unsurpassed in our prose literature, and to create characters not unworthy of his greatest predecessors. The blind stroke of fate had nothing to say to the lesson of his life, and though we deplore that he never completed his masterpieces, we may at least be thankful that time enough was given him to prove to his fellow-craftsmen, that such labour for the sake of art is not without art's peculiar reward--the triumph of successful execution. CHAPTER XXIII--EDINBURGH REVIEWERS' DICTA INAPPLICABLE TO LATER WORK From many different points of view discerning critics have celebrated the autobiographic vein--the self-revealing turn, the self-portraiture, the quaint, genial, yet really child-like egotistic and even dreamy element that lies like an amalgam, behind all Stevenson's work. Some have even said, that because of this, he will finally live by his essays and not by his stories. That is extreme, and is not critically based or justified, because, however true it may be up to a certain point, it is not true of Stevenson's quite latest fictions where we see a decided breaking through of the old limits, and an advance upon a new and a fresher and broader sphere of interest and character altogether. But these ideas set down truly enough at a certain date, or prior to a certain date, are wrong and falsely directed in view of Stevenson's latest work and what it promised. For instance, what a discerning and able writer in the _Edinburgh Review_ of July 1895 said truly then was in great part utterly inapplicable to the whole of the work of the last years, for in it there was grasp, wide and deep, of new possibilities--promise of clear insight, discrimination, and contrast of character, as well as firm hold of new and great human interest under which the egotistic or autobiographic vein was submerged or weakened. The _Edinburgh Reviewer_ wrote: "There was irresistible fascination in what it would be unfair to characterise as egotism, for it came natural to him to talk frankly and easily of himself. . . . He could never have dreamed, like Pepys, of locking up his confidence in a diary. From first to last, in inconsecutive essays, in the records of sentimental touring, in fiction and in verse, he has embodied the outer and the inner autobiography. He discourses--he prattles--he almost babbles about himself. He seems to have taken minute and habitual introspection for the chief study in his analysis of human nature, as a subject which was immediately in his reach, and would most surely serve his purpose. We suspect much of the success of his novels was due to the fact that as he seized for a substructure on the scenery and situations which had impressed him forcibly, so in the characters of the most different types, there was always more or less of self-portraiture. The subtle touch, eminently and unmistakably realistic, gave life to what might otherwise have seemed a lay-figure. . . . He hesitated again and again as to his destination; and under mistakes, advice of friends, doubted his chances, as a story-writer, even after _Treasure Island_ had enjoyed its special success. . . . We venture to think that, with his love of intellectual self-indulgence, had he found novel-writing really enjoyable, he would never have doubted at all. But there comes in the difference between him and Scott, whom he condemns for the slovenliness of hasty workmanship. Scott, in his best days, sat down to his desk and let the swift pen take its course in inspiration that seemed to come without an effort. Even when racked with pains, and groaning in agony, the intellectual machinery was still driven at a high pressure by something that resembled an irrepressible instinct. Stevenson can have had little or nothing of that inspiriting afflatus. He did his painstaking work conscientiously, thoughtfully; he erased, he revised, and he was hard to satisfy. In short, it was his weird--and he could not resist it--to set style and form before fire and spirit." CHAPTER XXIV--MR HENLEY'S SPITEFUL PERVERSIONS More unfortunate still, as disturbing and prejudicing a sane and true and disinterested view of Stevenson's claims, was that article of his erewhile "friend," Mr W. E. Henley, published on the appearance of the _Memoir_ by Mr Graham Balfour, in the _Pall Mall Magazine_. It was well that Mr Henley there acknowledged frankly that he wrote under a keen sense of "grievance"--a most dangerous mood for the most soberly critical and self-restrained of men to write in, and that most certainly Mr W. E. Henley was not--and that he owned to having lost contact with, and recognition of the R. L. Stevenson who went to America in 1887, as he says, and never came back again. To do bare justice to Stevenson it is clear that knowledge of that later Stevenson was essential--essential whether it was calculated to deepen sympathy or the reverse. It goes without saying that the Louis he knew and hobnobbed with, and nursed near by the Old Bristo Port in Edinburgh could not be the same exactly as the Louis of Samoa and later years--to suppose so, or to expect so, would simply be to deny all room for growth and expansion. It is clear that the W. E. Henley of those days was not the same as the W. E. Henley who indited that article, and if growth and further insight are to be allowed to Mr Henley and be pleaded as his justification _cum_ spite born of sense of grievance for such an onslaught, then clearly some allowance in the same direction must be made for Stevenson. One can hardly think that in his case old affection and friendship had been so completely submerged, under feelings of grievance and paltry pique, almost always bred of grievances dwelt on and nursed, which it is especially bad for men of genius to acknowledge, and to make a basis, as it were, for clearer knowledge, insight, and judgment. In other cases the pleading would simply amount to an immediate and complete arrest of judgment. Mr Henley throughout writes as though whilst he had changed, and changed in points most essential, his erewhile friend remained exactly where he was as to literary position and product--the Louis who went away in 1887 and never returned, had, as Mr W. E. Henley, most unfortunately for himself, would imply, retained the mastery, and the Louis who never came back had made no progress, had not added an inch, not to say a cubit, to his statue, while Mr Henley remained _in statu quo_, and was so only to be judged. It is an instance of the imperfect sympathy which Charles Lamb finely celebrated--only here it is acknowledged, and the "imperfect sympathy" pled as a ground for claiming the full insight which only sympathy can secure. If Mr Henley was fair to the Louis he knew and loved, it is clear that he was and could only be unjust to the Louis who went away in 1887 and never came back. "At bottom Stevenson was an excellent fellow. But he was of his essence what the French call _personnel_. He was, that is, incessantly and passionately interested in Stevenson. He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidences every time he passed it; to him there was nothing obvious in time and eternity, and the smallest of his discoveries, his most trivial apprehensions, were all by way of being revelations, and as revelations must be thrust upon the world; he was never so much in earnest, never so well pleased (this were he happy or wretched), never so irresistible as when he wrote about himself. _Withal_, _if he wanted a thing_, _he went after it with an entire contempt of consequences_. _For these_, _indeed_, _the Shorter Catechism was ever prepared to answer_; _so that whether he did well or ill_, _he was safe to come out unabashed and cheerful_." Notice here, how undiscerning the mentor becomes. The words put in "italics," unqualified as they are, would fit and admirably cover the character of the greatest criminal. They would do as they stand, for Wainwright, for Dr Dodd, for Deeming, for Neil Cream, for Canham Read, or for Dougal of Moat Farm fame. And then the touch that, in the Shorter Catechism, Stevenson would have found a cover or justification for it somehow! This comes of writing under a keen sense of grievance; and how could this be truly said of one who was "at bottom an excellent fellow." W. Henley's ethics are about as clear-obscure as is his reading of character. Listen to him once again--more directly on the literary point. "To tell the truth, his books are none of mine; I mean that if I wanted reading, I do not go for it to the _Edinburgh Edition_. I am not interested in remarks about morals; in and out of letters. _I have lived a full and varied life_, and my opinions are my own. _So_, _if I crave the enchantment of romance_, _I ask it of bigger men than he_, _and of bigger books than his_: of _Esmond_ (say) and _Great Expectations_, of _Redgauntlet_ and _Old Mortality_, _of La Reine Margot_ and _Bragelonne_, of _David Copperfield_ and _A Tale of Two Cities_; while if good writing and some other things be in my appetite, are there not always Hazlitt and Lamb--to say nothing of that globe of miraculous continents; which is known to us as Shakespeare? There is his style, you will say, and it is a fact that it is rare, and _in the last_ times better, because much simpler than in the first. But, after all, his style is so perfectly achieved that the achievement gets obvious: and when achievement gets obvious, is it not by way of becoming uninteresting? And is there not something to be said for the person who wrote that Stevenson always reminded him of a young man dressed the best he ever saw for the Burlington Arcade? {10} Stevenson's work in letters does not now take me much, and I decline to enter on the question of his immortality; since that, despite what any can say, will get itself settled soon or late, for all time. No--when I care to think of Stevenson it is not of R. L. Stevenson--R. L. Stevenson, the renowned, the accomplished--executing his difficult solo, but of the Lewis that I knew and loved, and wrought for, and worked with for so long. The successful man of letters does not greatly interest me. I read his careful prayers and pass on, with the certainty that, well as they read, they were not written for print. I learn of his nameless prodigalities, and recall some instances of conduct in another vein. I remember, rather, the unmarried and irresponsible Lewis; the friend, the comrade, the _charmeur_. Truly, that last word, French as it is, is the only one that is worthy of him. I shall ever remember him as that. The impression of his writings disappears; the impression of himself and his talk is ever a possession. . . . Forasmuch as he was primarily a talker, his printed works, like these of others after his kind, are but a sop for posterity. A last dying speech and confession (as it were) to show that not for nothing were they held rare fellows in their day." Just a month or two before Mr Henley's self-revealing article appeared in the _Pall Mall Magazine_, Mr Chesterton, in the _Daily News_, with almost prophetic forecast, had said: "Mr Henley might write an excellent study of Stevenson, but it would only be of the Henleyish part of Stevenson, and it would show a distinct divergence from the finished portrait of Stevenson, which would be given by Professor Colvin." And it were indeed hard to reconcile some things here with what Mr Henley set down of individual works many times in the _Scots and National Observer_, and elsewhere, and in literary judgments as in some other things there should, at least, be general consistency, else the search for an honest man in the late years would be yet harder than it was when Diogenes looked out from his tub! Mr James Douglas, in the _Star_, in his half-playful and suggestive way, chose to put it as though he regarded the article in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ as a hoax, perpetrated by some clever, unscrupulous writer, intent on provoking both Mr Henley and his friends, and Stevenson's friends and admirers. This called forth a letter from one signing himself "A Lover of R. L. Stevenson," which is so good that we must give it here. A LITERARY HOAX. TO THE EDITOR OF THE _STAR_. SIR--I fear that, despite the charitable scepticism of Mr Douglas, there is no doubt that Mr Henley is the perpetrator of the saddening Depreciation of Stevenson which has been published over his name. What openings there are for reprisals let Mr Henley's conscience tell him; but permit me to remind him of two or three things which R. L. Stevenson has written concerning W. E. Henley. First this scene in the infirmary at Edinburgh: "(Leslie) Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow (Henley) sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king's palace, or the great King's palace of the blue air. He has taught himself two languages since he has been lying there. _I shall try to be of use to him_." Secondly, this passage from Stevenson's dedication of _Virginibus Puerisque_ to "My dear William Ernest Henley": "These papers are like milestones on the wayside of my life; and as I look back in memory, there is hardly a stage of that distance but I see you present with advice, reproof, or praise. Meanwhile, many things have changed, you and I among the rest; but I hope that our sympathy, founded on the love of our art, and nourished by mutual assistance, shall survive these little revolutions, undiminished, and, with God's help, unite us to the end." Thirdly, two scraps from letters from Stevenson to Henley, to show that the latter was not always a depreciator of R. L. Stevenson's work: "1. I'm glad to think I owe you the review that pleased me best of all the reviews I ever had. . . . To live reading such reviews and die eating ortolans--sich is my aspiration. "2. Dear lad,--If there was any more praise in what you wrote, I think--(the editor who had pruned down Mr Henley's review of Stevenson's _Prince Otto_) has done us both a service; some of it stops my throat. . . . Whether (considering our intimate relations) you would not do better to refrain from reviewing me, I will leave to yourself." And, lastly, this extract from the very last of Stevenson's letters to Henley, published in the two volumes of _Letters_: "It is impossible to let your new volume pass in silence. I have not received the same thrill of poetry since G. M.'s _Joy of Earth_ volume, and _Love in a Valley_; and I do not know that even that was so intimate and deep. . . . I thank you for the joy you have given me, and remain your old friend and present huge admirer, R. L. S." It is difficult to decide on which side in this literary friendship lies the true modesty and magnanimity? I had rather be the author of the last message of R. L. Stevenson to W. E. Henley, than of the last words of W. E. Henley concerning R. L. Stevenson. CHAPTER XXV--MR CHRISTIE MURRAY'S IMPRESSIONS MR CHRISTIE MURRAY, writing as "Merlin" in our handbook in the _Referee_ at the time, thus disposed of some of the points just dealt with by us: "Here is libel on a large scale, and I have purposely refrained from approaching it until I could show my readers something of the spirit in which the whole attack is conceived. 'If he wanted a thing he went after it with an entire contempt for consequences. For these, indeed, the Shorter Catechist was ever prepared to answer; so that whether he did well or ill, he was safe to come out unabashed and cheerful.' Now if Mr Henley does not mean that for the very express picture of a rascal without a conscience he has been most strangely infelicitous in his choice of terms, and he is one of those who make so strong a profession of duty towards mere vocables that we are obliged to take him _au pied de la lettre_. A man who goes after whatever he wants with an entire contempt of consequences is a scoundrel, and the man who emerges from such an enterprise unabashed and cheerful, whatever his conduct may have been, and justifies himself on the principles of the Shorter Catechism, is a hypocrite to boot. This is not the report we have of Robert Louis Stevenson from most of those who knew him. It is a most grave and dreadful accusation, and it is not minimised by Mr Henley's acknowledgment that Stevenson was a good fellow. We all know the air of false candour which lends a disputant so much advantage in debate. In Victor Hugo's tremendous indictment of Napoleon le Petit we remember the telling allowance for fine horsemanship. It spreads an air of impartiality over the most mordant of Hugo's pages. It is meant to do that. An insignificant praise is meant to show how a whole Niagara of blame is poured on the victim of invective in all sincerity, and even with a touch of reluctance. "Mr Henley, despite his absurdities of ''Tis' and 'it were,' is a fairly competent literary craftsman, and he is quite gifted enough to make a plain man's plain meaning an evident thing if he chose to do it. But if for the friend for whom 'first and last he did share' he can only show us the figure of one 'who was at bottom an excellent fellow,' and who had 'an entire contempt' for the consequences of his own acts, he presents a picture which can only purposely be obscured. . . . "All I know of Robert Louis Stevenson I have learned from his books, and from one unexpected impromptu letter which he wrote to me years ago in friendly recognition of my own work. I add the testimonies of friends who may have been of less actual service to him than Mr Henley, but who surely loved him better and more lastingly. These do not represent him as the victim of an overweening personal vanity, nor as a person reckless of the consequences of his own acts, nor as a Pecksniff who consoled himself for moral failure out of the Shorter Catechism. The books and the friends amongst them show me an erratic yet lovable personality, a man of devotion and courage, a loyal, charming, and rather irresponsible person whose very slight faults were counter-balanced many times over by very solid virtues. . . . "To put the thing flatly, it is not a heroism to cling to mere existence. The basest of us can do that. But it is a heroism to maintain an equable and unbroken cheerfulness in the face of death. For my own part, I never bowed at the literary shrine Mr Henley and his friends were at so great pains to rear. I am not disposed to think more loftily than I ever thought of their idol. But the Man--the Man was made of enduring valour and childlike charm, and these will keep him alive when his detractors are dead and buried." As to the Christian name, it is notorious that he was christened Robert Lewis--the Lewis being after his maternal grandfather--Dr Lewis Balfour. Some attempt has been made to show that the Louis was adopted because so many cousins and relatives had also been so christened; but the most likely explanation I have ever heard was that his father changed the name to Louis, that there might be no chance through it of any notion of association with a very prominent noisy person of the name of Lewis, in Edinburgh, towards whom Thomas Stevenson felt dislike, if not positive animosity. Anyhow, it is clear from the entries in the register of pupils at the Edinburgh Academy, in the two years when Stevenson was there, that in early youth he was called Robert only; for in the school list for 1862 the name appears as Robert Stevenson, without the Lewis, while in the 1883 list it is given as Lewis Robert Stevenson. Clearly if in earlier years Stevenson was, in his family and elsewhere, called _Robert_, there could have then arisen no risk of confusion with any of his relatives who bore the name of Lewis; and all this goes to support the view which I have given above. Anyhow he ceased to be called Robert at home, and ceased in 1863 to be Robert on the Edinburgh Academy list, and became Lewis Robert. Whether my view is right or not, he was thenceforward called Louis in his family, and the name uniformly spelt Louis. What blame on Stevenson's part could be attached to this family determination it is hard to see--people are absolutely free to spell their names as they please, and the matter would not be worth a moment's attention, or the waste of one drop of ink, had not Mr Henley chosen to be very nasty about the name, and in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ article persisted in printing it Lewis as though that were worthy of him and of it. That was not quite the unkindest cut of all, but it was as unkind as it was trumpery. Mr Christie Murray neatly set off the trumpery spite of this in the following passage: "Stevenson, it appears, according to his friend's judgment, was 'incessantly and passionately interested in Stevenson,' but most of us are incessantly and passionately interested in ourselves. 'He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidences every time he passed it.' I remember that George Sala, who was certainly under no illusion as to his own personal aspect, made public confession of an identical foible. Mr Henley may not have an equal affection for the looking-glass, but he is a very poor and unimaginative reader who does not see him gloating over the god-like proportions of the shadow he sends sprawling over his own page. I make free to say that a more self-conscious person than Mr Henley does not live. 'The best and most interesting part of Stevenson's life will never get written--even by me,' says Mr Henley. "There is one curious little mark of animus, or one equally curious affectation--I do not profess to know which, and it is most probably a compound of the two--in Mr Henley's guardedly spiteful essay which asks for notice. The dead novelist signed his second name on his title-pages and his private correspondence 'Louis.' Mr Henley spells it 'Lewis.' Is this intended to say that Stevenson took an ornamenting liberty with his own baptismal appellation? If so, why not say the thing and have done with it? Or is it one of Mr Henley's wilful ridiculosities? It seems to stand for some sort of meaning, and to me, at least, it offers a jarring hint of small spitefulness which might go for nothing if it were not so well borne out by the general tone of Mr Henley's article. It is a small matter enough, God knows, but it is precisely because it is so very small that it irritates." CHAPTER XXVI--HERO-VILLAINS In truth, it must indeed be here repeated that Stevenson for the reason he himself gave about _Deacon Brodie_ utterly fails in that healthy hatred of "fools and scoundrels" on which Carlyle somewhat incontinently dilated. Nor does he, as we have seen, draw the line between hero and villain of the piece, as he ought to have done; and, even for his own artistic purposes, has it too much all on one side, to express it simply. Art demands relief from any one phase of human nature, more especially of that phase, and even from what is morbid or exceptional. Admitting that such natures, say as Huish, the cockney, in the _Ebb-Tide_ on the one side, and Prince Otto on the other are possible, it is yet absolutely demanded that they should not stand _alone_, but have their due complement and balance present in the piece also to deter and finally to tell on them in the action. If "a knave or villain," as George Eliot aptly said, is but a fool with a circumbendibus, this not only wants to be shown, but to have that definite human counterpart and corrective; and this not in any indirect and perfunctory way, but in a direct and effective sense. It is here that Stevenson fails--fails absolutely in most of his work, save the very latest--fails, as has been shown, in _The Master of Ballantrae_, as it were almost of perverse and set purpose, in lack of what one might call ethical decision which causes him to waver or seem to waver and wobble in his judgment of his characters or in his sympathy with them or for them. Thus he fails to give his readers the proper cue which was his duty both as man and artist to have given. The highest art and the lowest are indeed here at one in demanding moral poise, if we may call it so, that however crudely in the low, and however artistically and refinedly in the high, vice should not only not be set forth as absolutely triumphing, nor virtue as being absolutely, outwardly, and inwardly defeated. It is here the same in the melodrama of the transpontine theatre as in the tragedies of the Greek dramatists and Shakespeare. "The evening brings a' 'hame'" and the end ought to show something to satisfy the innate craving (for it is innate, thank Heaven! and low and high alike in moments of _elevated impression_, acknowledge it and bow to it) else there can scarce be true _denouement_ and the sense of any moral rectitude or law remain as felt or acknowledged in human nature or in the Universe itself. Stevenson's toleration and constant sermonising in the essays--his desire to make us yield allowances all round is so far, it may be, there in place; but it will not work out in story or play, and declares the need for correction and limitation the moment that he essays artistic presentation--from the point of view of art he lacks at once artistic clearness and decision, and from the point of view of morality seems utterly loose and confusing. His artistic quality here rests wholly in his style--mere style, and he is, alas! a castaway as regards discernment and reading of human nature in its deepest demands and laws. Herein lies the false strain that has spoiled much of his earlier work, which renders really superficial and confusing and undramatic his professedly dramatic work--which never will and never can commend the hearty suffrages of a mixed and various theatrical audience in violating the very first rule of the theatre, and of dramatic creation. From another point of view this is my answer to Mr Pinero in regard to the failure of Stevenson to command theatrical success. He confuses and so far misdirects the sympathies in issues which strictly are at once moral and dramatic. I am absolutely at one with Mr Baildon, though I reach my results from somewhat different grounds from what he does, when he says this about _Beau Austin_, and the reason of its failure--complete failure--on the stage: "I confess I should have liked immensely to have seen [? to see] this piece on the boards; for only then could one be quite sure whether it could be made convincing to an audience and carry their sympathies in the way the author intended. Yet the fact that _Beau Austin_, in spite of being 'put on' by so eminent an actor-manager as Mr Beerbohm Tree, was no great success on the stage, is a fair proof that the piece lacked some of the essentials, good or bad, of dramatic success. Now a drama, like a picture or a musical composition, must have a certain unity of key and tone. You can, indeed, mingle comedy with tragedy as an interlude or relief from the strain and stress of the serious interest of the piece. But you cannot reverse the process and mingle tragedy with comedy. Once touch the fine spun-silk of the pretty fire-balloon of comedy with the tragic dagger, and it falls to earth a shrivelled nothing. And the reason that no melodrama can be great art is just that it is a compromise between tragedy and comedy, a mixture of tragedy with comedy and not comedy with tragedy. So in drama, the middle course, proverbially the safest, is in reality the most dangerous. Now I maintain that in _Beau Austin_ we have an element of tragedy. The betrayal of a beautiful, pure and noble-minded woman is surely at once the basest act a man can be capable of, and a more tragic event than death itself to the woman. Richardson, in _Clarissa Harlowe_, is well aware of this, and is perfectly right in making his _denouement_ tragic. Stevenson, on the other hand, patches up the matter into a rather tame comedy. It is even much tamer than it would have been in the case of Lovelace and Clarissa Harlowe; for Lovelace is a strong character, a man who could have been put through some crucial atonement, and come out purged and ennobled. But Beau Austin we feel is but a frip. He endures a few minutes of sharp humiliation, it is true, but to the spectator this cannot but seem a very insufficient expiation, not only of the wrong he had done one woman, but of the indefinite number of wrongs he had done others. He is at once the villain and the hero of the piece, and in the narrow limits of a brief comedy this transformation cannot be convincingly effected. Wrongly or rightly, a theatrical audience, like the spectators of a trial, demand a definite verdict and sentence, and no play can satisfy which does not reasonably meet this demand. And this arises not from any merely Christian prudery or Puritanism, for it is as true for Greek tragedy and other high forms of dramatic art." The transformation of villain into hero, if possible at all, could only be convincingly effected in a piece of wide scope, where there was room for working out the effect of some great shock, upheaval of the nature, change due to deep and unprecedented experiences--religious conversion, witnessing of sudden death, providential rescue from great peril of death, or circumstance of that kind; but to be effective and convincing it needs to be marked and _fully justified_ in some such way; and no cleverness in the writer will absolve him from deference to this great law in serious work for presentation on the stage; if mere farces or little comedies may seem sometimes to contravene it, yet this--even this--is only in appearance. True, it is not the dramatists part _of himself_ to condemn, or to approve, or praise: he has to present, and to present various characters faithfully in their relation to each other, and their effect upon each other. But the moral element cannot be expunged or set lightly aside because it is closely involved in the very working out and presentation of these relations, and the effect upon each other. Character is vital. And character, if it tells in life, in influence and affection, must be made to tell directly also in the drama. There is no escape from this--none; the dramatist is lopsided if he tries to ignore it; he is a monster if he is wholly blind to it--like the poet in _In Memoriam_, "Without a conscience or an aim." Mr Henley, in his notorious, all too confessional, and yet rather affected article on Stevenson in the _Pall Mall Magazine_, has a remark which I confess astonished me--a remark I could never forget as coming from him. He said that he "had lived a very full and varied life, and had no interest in remarks about morals." "Remarks about morals" are, nevertheless, in essence, the pith of all the books to which he referred, as those to which he turned in preference to the _Edinburgh Edition_ of R. L. Stevenson's works. The moral element is implicit in the drama, and it is implicit there because it is implicit in life itself, or so the great common-sense conceives it and demands it. What we might call the asides proper of the drama, are "remarks about morals," nothing else--the chorus in the Greek tragedy gathered up "remarks about morals" as near as might be to the "remarks about morals" in the streets of that day, only shaped to a certain artistic consistency. Shakespeare is rich in "remarks about morals," often coming near, indeed, to personal utterance, and this not only when Polonius addresses his son before his going forth on his travels. Mr Henley here only too plainly confessed, indeed, to lack of that conviction and insight which, had he but possessed them, might have done a little to relieve _Beau Austin_ and the other plays in which he collaborated with R. L. Stevenson, from their besetting and fatal weakness. The two youths, alas! thought they could be grandly original by despising, or worse, contemning "remarks about morals" in the loftier as in the lower sense. To "live a full and varied life," if the experience derived from it is to have expression in the drama, is only to have the richer resource in "remarks about morals." If this is perverted under any self- conscious notion of doing something spick-and-span new in the way of character and plot, alien to all the old conceptions, then we know our writers set themselves boldly at loggerheads with certain old-fashioned and yet older new-fashioned laws, which forbid the violation of certain common demands of the ordinary nature and common-sense; and for the lack of this, as said already, no cleverness, no resource, no style or graft, will any way make up. So long as this is tried, with whatever concentration of mind and purpose, failure is yet inevitable, and the more inevitable the more concentration and less of humorous by-play, because genius itself, if it despises the general moral sentiment and instinct for moral proportion--an ethnic reward and punishment, so to say--is all astray, working outside the line; and this, if Mr Pinero will kindly excuse me, is the secret of the failure of these plays, and not want of concentration, etc., in the sense he meant, or as he has put it. Stevenson rather affected what he called "tail-foremost morality," a kind of inversion in the field of morals, as De Quincey mixed it up with tail- foremost humour in _Murder as a Fine Art_, etc., etc., but for all such perversions as these the stage is a grand test and corrector, and such perversions, and not "remarks about morals," are most strictly prohibited there. Perverted subtleties of the sort Stevenson in earlier times especially much affected are not only amiss but ruinous on the stage; and what genius itself would maybe sanction, common-sense must reject and rigidly cut away. Final success and triumph come largely by _this_ kind of condensation and concentration, and the stern and severe lopping off of the indulgence of the _egotistical_ genius, which is human discipline, and the best exponent of the doctrine of unity also. This is the straight and the narrow way along which genius, if it walk but faithfully, sows as it goes in the dramatic pathway all the flowers of human passion, hope, love, terror, and triumph. I find it advisable, if not needful, here to reinforce my own impressions, at some points, by another quotation from Mr Baildon, if he will allow me, in which Stevenson's dependence in certain respects on the dream-faculty is emphasised, and to it is traced a certain tendency to a moral callousness or indifference which is one of the things in which the waking Stevenson transparently suffered now and then invasions from the dream-Stevenson--the result, a kind of spot, as we may call it, on the eye of the moral sense; it is a small spot; but we know how a very small object held close before the eye will wholly shut out the most lovely natural prospects, interposing distressful phantasmagoria, due to the strained and, for the time, morbid condition of the organ itself. So, it must be confessed, it is to a great extent here. But listen to Mr Baildon: "In _A Chapter on Dreams_, Stevenson confesses his indebtedness to this still mysterious agency. From a child he had been a great and vivid dreamer, his dreams often taking such frightful shape that he used to awake 'clinging in terror to the bedpost.' Later in life his dreams continued to be frequent and vivid, but less terrifying in character and more continuous and systematic. 'The Brownies,' as he picturesquely names that 'sub-conscious imagination,' as the scientist would call it, that works with such surprising freedom and ingenuity in our dreams, became, as it were, _collaborateurs_ in his work of authorship. He declares that they invented plots and even elaborated whole novels, and that, not in a single night or single dream, but continuously, and from one night to another, like a story in serial parts. Long before this essay was written or published, I had been struck by this phantasmal dream-like quality in some of Stevenson's works, which I was puzzled to account for, until I read this extraordinary explanation, for explanation it undoubtedly affords. Anything imagined in a dream would have a tendency, when retold, to retain something of its dream-like character, and I have on doubt one could trace in many instances and distinguish the dreaming and the waking Stevenson, though in others they may be blended beyond recognition. The trouble with the Brownies or the dream-Stevenson _was his or their want of moral sense_, so that they sometimes presented the waking author with plots which he could not make use of. Of this Stevenson gives an instance in which a complete story of marked ingenuity is vetoed through the moral impossibility of its presentment by a writer so scrupulous (and in some directions he is extremely scrupulous) as Stevenson was. But Stevenson admits that his most famous story, _The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_, was not only suggested by a dream, but that some of the most important and most criticised points, such as the matter of the powder, were taken direct from the dream. It had been extremely instructive and interesting had he gone more into detail and mentioned some of the other stories into which the dream-element entered largely and pointed out its influence, and would have given us a better clue than we have or now ever can have. "Even in _The Suicide Club_ and the _Rajah's Diamond_, I seem to feel strongly the presence of the dream-Stevenson. . . . _At certain points one feels conscious of a certain moral callousness_, _such as marks the dream state_, _as in the murder of Colonel Geraldine's brother_, _the horror of which never seems to come fully home to us_. But let no one suppose these stories are lacking in vividness and in strangely realistic detail; for this is of the very nature of dreaming at its height. . . . While the _dramatis personae_ play their parts with the utmost spirit while the story proceeds, they do not, as the past creations do, seem to survive this first contact and live in our minds. This is particularly true of the women. They are well drawn, and play the assigned parts well enough, but they do not, as a rule, make a place for themselves either in our hearts or memories. If there is an exception it is Elvira, in _Providence and the Guitar_; but we remember her chiefly by the one picture of her falling asleep, after the misadventures of the night, at the supper-table, with her head on her husband's shoulder, and her hand locked in his with instinctive, almost unconscious tenderness." CHAPTER XXVII--MR G. MOORE, MR MARRIOTT WATSON AND OTHERS From our point of view it will therefore be seen that we could not have read Mr George Moore's wonderfully uncritical and misdirected diatribe against Stevenson in _The Daily Chronicle_ of 24th April 1897, without amusement, if not without laughter--indeed, we confess we may here quote Shakespeare's words, we "laughed so consumedly" that, unless for Mr Moore's high position and his assured self-confidence, we should not trust ourselves to refer to it, not to speak of writing about it. It was a review of _The Secret Rose_ by W. B. Yeats, but it passed after one single touch to belittling abuse of Stevenson--an abuse that was justified the more, in Mr Moore's idea, because Stevenson was dead. Had he been alive he might have had something to say to it, in the way, at least, of fable and moral. And when towards the close Mr Moore again quotes from Mr Yeats, it is still "harping on my daughter" to undo Stevenson, as though a rat was behind the arras, as in _Hamlet_. "Stevenson," says he, "is the leader of these countless writers who perceive nothing but the visible world," and these are antagonistic to the great literature, of which Mr Yeats's _Secret Rose_ is a survival or a renaissance, a literature whose watchword should be Mr Yeats's significant phrase, "When one looks into the darkness there is always something there." No doubt Mr Yeats's product all along the line ranks with the great literature--unlike Homer, according to Mr Moore, he never nods, though in the light of great literature, poor Stevenson is always at his noddings, and more than that, in the words of Leland's Hans Breitmann, he has "nodings on." He is poor, naked, miserable--a mere pretender--and has no share in the makings of great literature. Mr Moore has stripped him to the skin, and leaves him to the mercy of rain and storm, like Lear, though Lear had a solid ground to go on in self-aid, which Stevenson had not; he had daughters, and one of them was Cordelia, after all. This comes of painting all boldly in black and white: Mr Yeats is white, R. L. Stevenson is black, and I am sure neither one nor other, because simply of their self-devotion to their art, could have subscribed heartily to Mr Moore's black art and white art theory. Mr Yeats is hardly the truest modern Celtic artist I take him for, if he can fully subscribe to all this. Mr Marriott Watson has a little unadvisedly, in my view, too like ambition, fallen on 'tother side, and celebrated Stevenson as the master of the horrifying. {11} He even finds the _Ebb-Tide_, and Huish, the cockney, in it richly illustrative and grand. "There never was a more magnificent cad in literature, and never a more foul-hearted little ruffian. His picture glitters (!) with life, and when he curls up on the island beach with the bullet in his body, amid the flames of the vitriol he had intended for another, the reader's shudder conveys something also, even (!) of regret." And well it may! Individual taste and opinion are but individual taste and opinion, but the _Ebb-Tide_ and the cockney I should be inclined to cite as a specimen of Stevenson's all too facile make-believe, in which there is too definite a machinery set agoing for horrors for the horrors to be quite genuine. The process is often too forced with Stevenson, and the incidents too much of the manufactured order, for the triumph of that simplicity which is of inspiration and unassailable. Here Stevenson, alas! all too often, _pace_ Mr Marriott Watson, treads on the skirts of E. A. Poe, and that in his least composed and elevated artistic moments. And though, it is true, that "genius will not follow rules laid down by desultory critics," yet when it is averred that "this piece of work fulfils Aristotle's definition of true tragedy, in accomplishing upon the reader a certain purification of the emotions by means of terror and pity," expectations will be raised in many of the new generation, doomed in the cases of the more sensitive and discerning, at all events, not to be gratified. There is a distinction, very bold and very essential, between melodrama, however carefully worked and staged, and that tragedy to which Aristotle was there referring. Stevenson's "horrifying," to my mind, too often touches the trying borders of melodrama, and nowhere more so than in the very forced and unequal _Ebb-Tide_, which, with its rather doubtful moral and forced incident when it is good, seems merely to borrow from what had gone before, if not a very little even from some of what came after. No service is done to an author like Stevenson by fatefully praising him for precisely the wrong thing. "Romance attracted Stevenson, at least during the earlier part of his life, as a lodestone attracts the magnet. To romance he brought the highest gifts, and he has left us not only essays of delicate humour" (should this not be "essays _full of_" _or_ "characterised by"?) "and sensitive imagination, but stories also which thrill with the realities of life, which are faithful pictures of the times and tempers he dealt with, and which, I firmly believe, will live so" (should it not be "as"?) "long as our noble English language." Mr Marriott Watson sees very clearly in some things; but occasionally he misses the point. The problem is here raised how two honest, far-seeing critics could see so very differently on so simple a subject. Mr Baildon says about the _Ebb-Tide_: "I can compare his next book, the _Ebb-Tide_ (in collaboration with Osbourne) to little better than a mud-bath, for we find ourselves, as it were, unrelieved by dredging among the scum and dregs of humanity, the 'white trash' of the Pacific. Here we have Stevenson's masterly but utterly revolting incarnation of the lowest, vilest, vulgarest villainy in the cockney, Huish. Stevenson's other villains shock us by their cruel and wicked conduct; but there is a kind of fallen satanic glory about them, some shining threads of possible virtue. They might have been good, even great in goodness, but for the malady of not wanting. But Huish is a creature hatched in slime, his soul has no true humanity: it is squat and toad-like, and can only spit venom. . . . He himself felt a sort of revulsive after-sickness for the story, and calls it in one passage of his _Vailima Letters_ 'the ever-to-be-execrated _Ebb-Tide_' (pp. 178 and 184). . . . He repented of it like a debauch, and, as with some men after a debauch, felt cleared and strengthened instead of wrecked. So, after what in one sense was his lowest plunge, Stevenson rose to the greatest height. That is the tribute to his virtue and strength indeed, but it does not change the character of the _Ebb-Tide_ as 'the ever-to-be-execrated.'" Mr Baildon truly says (p. 49): "The curious point is that Stevenson's own great fault, that tendency to what has been called the 'Twopence-coloured' style, is always at its worst in books over which he collaborated." "Verax," in one of his "Occasional Papers" in the _Daily News_ on "The Average Reader" has this passage: "We should not object to a writer who could repeat Barrie in _A Window in Thrums_, nor to one who would paint a scene as Louis Stevenson paints Attwater alone on his South Sea island, the approach of the pirates to the harbour, and their subsequent reception and fate. All these are surely specimens of brilliant writing, and they are brilliant because, in the first place, they give truth. The events described must, in the supposed circumstances, and with the given characters, have happened in the way stated. Only in none of the specimens have we a mere photograph of the outside of what took place. We have great pictures by genius of the--to the prosaic eye--invisible realities, as well as of the outward form of the actions. We behold and are made to feel the solemnity, the wildness, the pathos, the earnestness, the agony, the pity, the moral squalor, the grotesque fun, the delicate and minute beauty, the natural loveliness and loneliness, the quiet desperate bravery, or whatever else any of these wonderful pictures disclose to our view. Had we been lookers-on, we, the average readers, could not have seen these qualities for ourselves. But they are there, and genius enables us to see them. Genius makes truth shine. "Is it not, therefore, probable that the brilliancy which we average readers do not want, and only laugh at when we get it, is something altogether different? I think I know what it is. It is an attempt to describe with words without thoughts, an effort to make readers see something the writer has never seen himself in his mind's eye. He has no revelation, no vision, nothing to disclose, and to produce an impression uses words, words, words, makes daub, daub, daub, without any definite purpose, and certainly without any real, or artistic, or definite effect. To describe, one must first of all see, and if we see anything the description of it will, as far as it is in us, come as effortless and natural as the leaves on trees, or as 'the tender greening of April meadows.' I, therefore, more than suspect that the brilliancy which the average reader laughs at is not brilliancy. A pot of flaming red paint thrown at a canvas does not make a picture." Now there is vision for outward picture or separate incident, which may exist quite apart from what may be called moral, spiritual, or even loftily imaginative conception, at once commanding unity and commanding it. There can be no doubt of Stevenson's power in the former line--the earliest as the latest of his works are witnesses to it. _The Master of Ballantrae_ abounds in picture and incident and dramatic situations and touches; but it lacks true unity, and the reason simply is given by Stevenson himself--that the "ending shames, perhaps degrades, the beginning," as it is in the _Ebb-Tide_, with the cockney Huish, "execrable." "We have great pictures by genius of the--to the prosaic eye--invisible realities, as well as the outward form of the action." True, but the "invisible realities" form that from which true unity is derived, else their partial presence but makes the whole the more incomplete and lop-sided, if not indeed, top-heavy, from light weight beneath; and it is in the unity derived from this higher pervading, yet not too assertive "invisible reality," that Stevenson most often fails, and is, in his own words, "execrable"; the ending shaming, if not degrading, the beginning--"and without the true sense of pleasurableness; and therefore really imperfect _in essence_." Ah, it is to be feared that Stevenson, viewing it in retrospect, was a far truer critic of his own work, than many or most of his all too effusive and admiring critics--from Lord Rosebery to Mr Marriott Watson. Amid the too extreme deliverances of detractors and especially of erewhile friends, become detractors or panegyrists, who disturb judgment by overzeal, which is often but half-blindness, it is pleasant to come on one who bears the balances in his hand, and will report faithfully as he has seen and felt, neither more nor less than what he holds is true. Mr Andrew Lang wrote an article in the _Morning Post_ of 16th December 1901, under the title "Literary Quarrels," in which, as I think, he fulfilled his part in midst of the talk about Mr Henley's regrettable attack on Stevenson. "Without defending the character of a friend whom even now I almost daily miss, as that character was displayed in circumstances unknown to me, I think that I ought to speak of him as I found him. Perhaps our sympathy was mainly intellectual. Constantly do those who knew him desire to turn to him, to communicate with him, to share with him the pleasure of some idea, some little discovery about men or things in which he would have taken pleasure, increasing our own by the gaiety of his enjoyment, the brilliance of his appreciation. We may say, as Scott said at the grave of John Ballantyne, that he has taken with him half the sunlight out of our lives. That he was sympathetic and interested in the work of others (which I understand has been denied) I have reason to know. His work and mine lay far apart: mine, I think, we never discussed, I did not expect it to interest him. But in a fragmentary manuscript of his after his death I found the unlooked for and touching evidence of his kindness. Again, he once wrote to me from Samoa about the work of a friend of mine whom he had never met. His remarks were ideally judicious, a model of serviceable criticism. I found him chivalrous as an honest boy; brave, with an indomitable gaiety of courage; on the point of honour, a Sydney or a Bayard (so he seemed to me); that he was open-handed I have reason to believe; he took life 'with a frolic welcome.' That he was self-conscious, and saw himself as it were, from without; that he was fond of attitude (like his own brave admirals) he himself knew well, and I doubt not that he would laugh at himself and his habit of 'playing at' things after the fashion of childhood. Genius is the survival into maturity of the inspiration of childhood, and Stevenson is not the only genius who has retained from childhood something more than its inspiration. Other examples readily occur to the memory--in one way Byron, in another Tennyson. None of us is perfect: I do not want to erect an immaculate clay-cold image of a man, in marble or in sugar-candy. But I will say that I do not remember ever to have heard Mr Stevenson utter a word against any mortal, friend or foe. Even in a case where he had, or believed himself to have, received some wrong, his comment was merely humorous. Especially when very young, his dislike of respectability and of the _bourgeois_ (a literary tradition) led him to show a kind of contempt for virtues which, though certainly respectable, are no less certainly virtuous. He was then more or less seduced by the Bohemian legend, but he was intolerant of the fudge about the rights and privileges of genius. A man's first business, he thought, was 'keep his end up' by his work. If, what he reckoned his inspired work would not serve, then by something else. Of many virtues he was an ensample and an inspiring force. One foible I admit: the tendency to inopportune benevolence. Mr Graham Balfour says that if he fell into ill terms with a man he would try to do him good by stealth. Though he had seen much of the world and of men, this practice showed an invincible ignorance of mankind. It is improbable, on the doctrine of chances, that he was always in the wrong; and it is probable, as he was human, that he always thought himself in the right. But as the other party to the misunderstanding, being also human, would necessarily think himself in the right, such secret benefits would be, as Sophocles says, 'the gifts of foeman and unprofitable.' The secret would leak out, the benefits would be rejected, the misunderstanding would be embittered. This reminds me of an anecdote which is not given in Mr Graham Balfour's biography. As a little delicate, lonely boy in Edinburgh, Mr Stevenson read a book called _Ministering Children_. I have a faint recollection of this work concerning a small Lord and Lady Bountiful. Children, we know, like to 'play at' the events and characters they have read about, and the boy wanted to play at being a ministering child. He 'scanned his whole horizon' for somebody to play with, and thought he had found his playmate. From the window he observed street boys (in Scots 'keelies') enjoying themselves. But one child was out of the sports, a little lame fellow, the son of a baker. Here was a chance! After some misgivings Louis hardened his heart, put on his cap, walked out--a refined little figure--approached the object of his sympathy, and said, 'Will you let me play with you?' 'Go to hell!' said the democratic offspring of the baker. This lesson against doing good by stealth to persons of unknown or hostile disposition was, it seems, thrown away. Such endeavours are apt to be misconstrued." CHAPTER XXVIII--UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS The complete artist should not be mystical-moralist any more than the man who "perceives only the visible world"--he should not engage himself with problems in the direct sense any more than he should blind himself to their effect upon others, whom he should study, and under certain conditions represent, though he should not commit himself to any form of zealot faith, yet should he not be, as Lord Tennyson puts it in the Palace of Art: "As God holding no form of creed, But contemplating all," because his power lies in the broadness of his humanity touched to fine issues whenever there is the seal at once of truth, reality, and passion, and the tragedy bred of their contact and conflict. All these things are to him real and clamant in the measure that they aid appeal to heart and emotion--in the measure that they may, in his hands, be made to tell for sympathy and general effect. He creates an atmosphere in which each and all may be seen the more effectively, but never seen alone or separate, but only in strict relation to each other that they may heighten the sense of some supreme controlling power in the destinies of men, which with the ancients was figured as Fate, and for which the moderns have hardly yet found an enduring and exhaustive name. Character revealed in reference to that, is the ideal and the aim of all high creative art. Stevenson's narrowness, allied to a quaint and occasionally just a wee pedantic finickiness, as we may call it--an over- elaborate, almost tricky play with mere words and phrases, was in so far alien to the very highest--he was too often like a man magnetised and moving at the dictates of some outside influence rather than according to his own freewill and as he would. Action in creative literary art is a _sine qua non_; keeping all the characters and parts in unison, that a true _denouement_, determined by their own tendencies and temperaments, may appear; dialogue and all asides, if we may call them so, being supererogatory and weak really unless they aid this and are constantly contributory to it. Egotistical predeterminations, however artfully intruded, are, alien to the full result, the unity which is finally craved: Stevenson fails, when he does fail, distinctly from excess of egotistic regards; he is, as Henley has said, in the French sense, too _personnel_, and cannot escape from it. And though these personal regards are exceedingly interesting and indeed fascinating from the point of view of autobiographical study, they are, and cannot but be, a drawback on fiction or the disinterested revelation of life and reality. Instead, therefore, of "the visible world," as the only thing seen, Stevenson's defect is, that between it and him lies a cloud strictly self-projected, like breath on a mirror, which dims the lines of reality and confuses the character marks, in fact melting them into each other; and in his sympathetic regards, causing them all to become too much alike. Scott had more of the power of healthy self-withdrawal, creating more of a free atmosphere, in which his characters could freely move--though in this, it must be confessed, he failed far more with women than with men. The very defects poor Carlyle found in Scott, and for which he dealt so severely with him, as sounding no depth, are really the basis of his strength, precisely as the absence of them were the defects of Goethe, who invariably ran his characters finally into the mere moods of his own mind and the mould of his errant philosophy, so that they became merely erratic symbols without hold in the common sympathy. Whether _Walverwandschaften_, _Wilhelm Meister_, or _Faust_, it is still the same--the company before all is done are translated into misty shapes that he actually needs to label for our identification and for his own. Even Mr G. H. Lewes saw this and could not help declaring his own lack of interest in the latter parts of Goethe's greatest efforts. Stevenson, too, tends to run his characters into symbols--his moralist-fabulist determinations are too much for him--he would translate them into a kind of chessmen, moved or moving on a board. The essence of romance strictly is, that as the characters will not submit themselves to the check of reality, the romancer may consciously, if it suits him, touch them at any point with the magic wand of symbol, and if he finds a consistency in mere fanciful invention it is enough. Tieck's _Phantasus_ and George MacDonald's _Phantastes_ are ready instances illustrative of this. But it is very different with the story of real life, where there is a definite check in the common-sense and knowledge of the reader, and where the highest victory always lies in drawing from the reader the admission--"that is life--life exactly as I have seen and known it. Though I could never have put it so, still it only realises my own conception and observation. That is something lovingly remembered and re-presented, and this master makes me lovingly remember too, though 'twas his to represent and reproduce with such vigor, vividness and truth that he carried me with him, exactly as though I had been looking on real men and women playing their part or their game in the great world." Mr Zangwill, in his own style, wrote: "He seeks to combine the novel of character with the novel of adventure; to develop character through romantic action, and to bring out your hero at the end of the episode, not the fixed character he was at the beginning, as is the way of adventure books, but a modified creature. . . . It is his essays and his personality, rather than his novels, that will count with posterity. On the whole, a great provincial writer. Whether he has that inherent grip which makes a man's provinciality the very source of his strength . . . only the centuries can show. The romanticist to the end pursued Stevenson--he could not, wholly or at once, shake off the bonds in which he had bound himself to his first love, and it was the romanticist crossed by the casuist, and the mystic--Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Markheim and Will of the Mill, insisted on his acknowledging them in his work up to the end. _The modified creature_ at the end of Mr Zangwill was modified too directly by the egotistic element as well as through the romantic action, and this point missed the great defect was missed, and Mr Zangwill spoke only in generals. M. Schwob, after having related how unreal a real sheep's heart looked when introduced on the end of Giovanni's dagger in a French performance of John Ford's _Annabella and Giovanni_, and how at the next performance the audience was duly thrilled when Annabella's bleeding heart, made of a bit of red flannel, was borne upon the stage, goes on to say significantly: "Il me semble que les personnages de Stevenson ont justement cette espece de realisme irreal. La large figure luisante de Long John, la couleur bleme du crane de Thevenin Pensete s'attachent a la memoire de nos yeux en vertue de leur irrealite meme. Ce sont des fantomes de la verite, hallucinants comme de vrais fantomes. Notez en passant que les traits de John Silver hallucinent Jim Hawkins, et que Francois Villon est hante par l'aspect de Thevenin Pensete." Perhaps the most notable fact arising here, and one that well deserves celebration, is this, that Stevenson's development towards a broader and more natural creation was coincident with a definite return on the religious views which had so powerfully prevailed with his father--a circumstance which it is to be feared did not, any more than some other changes in him, at all commend itself to Mr Henley, though he had deliberately dubbed him even in the times of nursing nigh to the Old Bristo Port in Edinburgh--something of "Shorter Catechist." Anyway Miss Simpson deliberately wrote: "Mr Henley takes exception to Stevenson's later phase in life--what he calls his 'Shorter Catechism phase.' It should be remembered that Mr Henley is not a Scotsman, and in some things has little sympathy with Scotch characteristics. Stevenson, in his Samoan days, harked back to the teaching of his youth; the tenets of the Shorter Catechism, which his mother and nurse had dinned into his head, were not forgotten. Mr Henley knew him best, as Stevenson says in the preface to _Virginibus Puerisque_ dedicated to Henley, 'when he lived his life at twenty-five.' In these days he had [in some degree] forgotten about the Shorter Catechism, but the 'solemn pause' between Saturday and Monday came back in full force to R. L. Stevenson in Samoa." Now to me that is a most suggestive and significant fact. It will be the business of future critics to show in how far such falling back would of necessity modify what Mr Baildon has set down as his corner-stone of morality, and how far it was bound to modify the atmosphere--the purely egotistic, hedonistic, and artistic atmosphere, in which, in his earlier life as a novelist, at all events, he had been, on the whole, for long whiles content to work. CHAPTER XXIX--LOVE OF VAGABONDS What is very remarkable in Stevenson is that a man who was so much the dreamer of dreams--the mystic moralist, the constant questioner and speculator on human destiny and human perversity, and the riddles that arise on the search for the threads of motive and incentives to human action--moreover, a man, who constantly suffered from one of the most trying and weakening forms of ill-health--should have been so full-blooded, as it were, so keen for contact with all forms of human life and character, what is called the rougher and coarser being by no means excluded. Not only this: he was himself a rover--seeking daily adventure and contact with men and women of alien habit and taste and liking. His patience is supported by his humour. He was a bit of a vagabond in the good sense of the word, and always going round in search of "honest men," like Diogenes, and with no tub to retire into or the desire for it. He thus on this side touches the Chaucers and their kindred, as well as the Spensers and Dantes and their often illusive _confreres_. His voyage as a steerage passenger across the Atlantic is only one out of a whole chapter of such episodes, and is more significant and characteristic even than the _Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes_ or the _Inland Voyage_. These might be ranked with the "Sentimental Journeys" that have sometimes been the fashion--that was truly of a prosaic and risky order. The appeal thus made to an element deep in the English nature will do much to keep his memory green in the hearts that could not rise to appreciation of his style and literary gifts at all. He loves the roadways and the by-ways, and those to be met with there--like him in this, though unlike him in most else. The love of the roadsides and the greenwood--and the queer miscellany of life there unfolded and ever changing--a kind of gipsy-like longing for the tent and familiar contact with nature and rude human-nature in the open dates from beyond Chaucer, and remains and will have gratification--the longing for novelty and all the accidents, as it were, of pilgrimage and rude social travel. You see it bubble up, like a true and new nature-spring, through all the surface coatings of culture and artificiality, in Stevenson. He anew, without pretence, enlivens it--makes it first a part of himself, and then a part of literature once more. Listen to him, as he sincerely sings this passion for the pilgrimage--or the modern phase of it--innocent vagabond roving: "Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me; Give the jolly heaven above, And the by-way nigh me: Bed in the bush, with stars to see; Bread I dip in the river-- Here's the life for a man like me, Here's the life for ever. . . . "Let the blow fall soon or late; Let what will be o'er me; Give the face of earth around And the road before me. Health I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me: All I ask the heaven above, And the road below me." True; this is put in the mouth of another, but Stevenson could not have so voiced it, had he not been the born rover that he was, with longing for the roadside, the high hills, and forests and newcomers and varied miscellaneous company. Here he does more directly speak in his own person and quite to the same effect: "I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird song at morning, and star shine at night, I will make a palace fit for you and me, Of green days in forests and blue days at sea. "I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room, Where white flows the river, and bright blows the broom, And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white, In rainfall at morning and dew-fall at night. "And this shall be for music when no one else is near, The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear! That only I remember, that only you admire, Of the broad road that stretches, and the roadside fire." Here Stevenson, though original in his vein and way, but follows a great and gracious company in which Fielding and Sterne and so many others stand as pleasant proctors. Scott and Dickens have each in their way essayed it, and made much of it beyond what mere sentiment would have reached. _Pickwick_ itself--and we must always regard Dickens as having himself gone already over every bit of road, described every nook and corner, and tried every resource--is a vagrant fellow, in a group of erratic and most quaint wanderers or pilgrims. This is but a return phase of it; Vincent Crummles and Mrs Crummles and the "Infant Phenomenon," yet another. The whole interest lies in the roadways, and the little inns, and the odd and unexpected _rencontres_ with oddly-assorted fellows there experienced: glimpses of grim or grimy, or forbidding, or happy, smiling smirking vagrants, and out-at-elbows fellow- passengers and guests, with jests and quips and cranks, and hanky-panky even. On high roads and in inns, and alehouses, with travelling players, rogues and tramps, Dickens was quite at home; and what is yet more, he made us all quite at home with them: and he did it as Chaucer did it by thorough good spirits and "hail-fellow-well-met." And, with all his faults, he has this merit as well as some others, that he went willingly on pilgrimage always, and took others, promoting always love of comrades, fun, and humorous by-play. The latest great romancer, too, took his side: like Dickens, he was here full brother of Dan Chaucer, and followed him. How characteristic it is when he tells Mr Trigg that he preferred Samoa to Honolulu because it was more savage, and therefore yielded more _fun_. CHAPTER XXX--LORD ROSEBERY'S CASE Immediately on reading Lord Rosebery's address as Chairman of the meeting in Edinburgh to promote the erection of a monument to R. L. Stevenson, I wrote to him politely asking him whether, since he quoted a passage from a somewhat early essay by Stevenson naming the authors who had chiefly influenced him in point of style, his Lordship should not, merely in justice and for the sake of balance, have referred to Thoreau. I also remarked that Stevenson's later style sometimes showed too much self-conscious conflict of his various models in his mind while he was in the act of writing, and that this now and then imparted too much an air of artifice to his later compositions, and that those who knew most would be most troubled by it. Of that letter, I much regret now that I did not keep any copy; but I think I did incidentally refer to the friendship with which Stevenson had for so many years honoured me. This is a copy of the letter received in reply: "38 BERKELEY SQUARE, W., 17_th_ _December_ 1896. "DEAR SIR,--I am much obliged for your letter, and can only state that the name of Thoreau was not mentioned by Stevenson himself, and therefore I could not cite it in my quotation. "With regard to the style of Stevenson's later works, I am inclined to agree with you.-Believe me, yours very faithfully, ROSEBERY. "Dr ALEXANDER H. JAPP." This I at once replied to as follows: "NATIONAL LIBERAL CLUB, WHITEHALL PLACE, S.W., 19_th_ _December_ 1896. "MY LORD,--It is true R. L. Stevenson did not refer to Thoreau in the passage to which you allude, for the good reason that he could not, since he did not know Thoreau till after it was written; but if you will oblige me and be so good as to turn to p. xix. of Preface, _By Way of Criticism_, to _Familiar Studies of Men and Books_ you will read: "'Upon me this pure, narrow, sunnily-ascetic Thoreau had exercised a wondrous charm. _I have scarce written ten sentences since I was introduced to him_, _but his influence might be somewhere detected by a close observer_.' "It is very detectable in many passages of nature-description and of reflection. I write, my Lord, merely that, in case opportunity should arise, you might notice this fact. I am sure R. L. Stevenson would have liked it recognised.--I remain, my Lord, always yours faithfully, etc., ALEXANDER H. JAPP." {Manuscript letter by R.L.S.: p262.jpg} In reply to this Lord Rosebery sent me only the most formal acknowledgment, not in the least encouraging me in any way to further aid him in the matter with regard to suggestions of any kind; so that I was helpless to press on his lordship the need for some corrections on other points which I would most willingly have tendered to him had he shown himself inclined or ready to receive them. I might also have referred Lord Rosebery to the article in _The British Weekly_ (_1887_), "Books that have Influenced Me," where, after having spoken of Shakespeare, the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_, Bunyan, Montaigne, Goethe, Martial, Marcus Aurelius's _Meditations_, and Wordsworth, he proceeds: "I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten much that is influential, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau." I need but to add to what has been said already that, had Lord Rosebery written and told me the result of his references and encouraged me to such an exercise, I should by-and-by have been very pleased to point out to him that he blundered, proving himself no master in Burns' literature, precisely as Mr Henley blundered about Burns' ancestry, when he gives confirmation to the idea that Burns came of a race of peasants on both sides, and was himself nothing but a peasant. When the opportunity came to correct such blunders, corrections which I had even implored him to make, Lord Rosebery (who by several London papers had been spoken of as "knowing more than all the experts about all his themes"), that is, when his volume was being prepared for press, did not act on my good advice given him "_free_, _gratis_, _for nothing_"; no; he contented himself with simply slicing out columns from the _Times_, or allowing another man to do so for him, and reprinting them _literatim et verbatim_, all imperfect and misleading, as they stood. _Scripta manet_ alas! only too truly exemplified to his disadvantage. But with that note of mine in his hand, protesting against an ominous and fatal omission as regards the confessed influences that had operated on Stevenson, he goes on, or allows Mr Geake to go on, quite as though he had verified matters and found that I was wrong as regards the facts on which I based my appeal to him for recognition of Thoreau as having influenced Stevenson in style. Had he attended to correcting his serious errors about Stevenson, and some at least of those about Burns, thus adding, say, a dozen or twenty pages to his book wholly fresh and new and accurate, then the _Times_ could not have got, even if it had sought, an injunction against his publishers and him; and there would have been no necessity that he should pad out other and later speeches by just a little whining over what was entirely due to his own disregard of good advice, his own neglect--his own fault--a neglect and a fault showing determination not to revise where revision in justice to his subject's own free and frank acknowledgments made it most essential and necessary. Mr Justice North gave his decision against Lord Rosebery and his publishers, while the Lords of Appeal went in his favour; but the House of Lords reaffirmed the decision of Mr Justice North and granted a perpetual injunction against this book. The copyright in his speech is Lord Rosebery's, but the copyright in the _Times_' report is the _Times_'. You see one of the ideas underlying the law is that no manner of speech is quite perfect as the man speaks it, or is beyond revision, improvement, or extension, and, if there is but one _verbatim_ report, as was the case of some of these speeches and addresses, then it is incumbent on the author, if he wishes to preserve his copyright, to revise and correct his speeches and addresses, so as to make them at least in details so far differ from the reported form. This thing ought Lord Rosebery to have done, on ethical and literary _grounds_, not to speak of legal and self-interested grounds; and I, for one, who from the first held exactly the view the House of Lords has affirmed, do confess that I have no sympathy for Lord Rosebery, since he had before him the suggestion and the materials for as substantial alterations and additions from my own hands, with as much more for other portions of his book, had he informed me of his appreciation, as would have saved him and his book from such a sadly ironical fate as has overtaken him and it. From the whole business--since "free, gratis, for nothing," I offered him as good advice as any lawyer in the three kingdoms could have done for large payment, and since he never deemed it worth while, even to tell me the results of his reference to _Familiar Studies_, I here and now say deliberately that his conduct to me was scarcely so courteous and grateful and graceful as it might have been. How different--very different--the way in which the late R. L. Stevenson rewarded me for a literary service no whit greater or more essentially valuable to him than this service rendered to Lord Rosebery might have been to him. This chapter would most probably not have been printed, had not Mr Coates re-issued the inadequate and most misleading paragraph about Mr Stevenson and style in his Lord Rosebery's _Life and Speeches_ exactly as it was before, thus perpetuating at once the error and the wrong, in spite of all my trouble, warnings, and protests. It is a tragicomedy, if not a farce altogether, considering who are the principal actors in it. And let those who have copies of the queer prohibited book cherish them and thank me; for that I do by this give a new interest and value to it as a curiosity, law-inhibited, if not as high and conscientious literature--which it is not. I remember very well about the time Lord Rosebery spoke on Burns, and Stevenson, and London, that certain London papers spoke of his deliverances as indicating more knowledge--fuller and exacter knowledge--of all these subjects than the greatest professed experts possessed. That is their extravagant and most reckless way, especially if the person spoken about is a "great politician" or a man of rank. They think they are safe with such superlatives applied to a brilliant and clever peer (with large estates and many interests), and an ex-Prime Minister! But literature is a republic, and it must here be said, though all unwillingly, that Lord Rosebery is but an amateur--a superficial though a clever amateur after all, and their extravagances do not change the fact. I declare him an amateur in Burns' literature and study because of what I have said elsewhere, and there are many points to add to that if need were. I have proved above from his own words that he was crassly and unpardonably ignorant of some of the most important points in R. L. Stevenson's development when he delivered that address in Edinburgh on Stevenson--a thing very, very pardonable--seeing that he is run after to do "speakings" of this sort; but to go on, in face of such warning and protest, printing his most misleading errors is not pardonable, and the legal recorded result is my justification and his condemnation, the more surely that even that would not awaken him so far as to cause him to restrain Mr Coates from reproducing in his _Life and Speeches_, just as it was originally, that peccant passage. I am fully ready to prove also that, though Chairman of the London County Council for a period, and though he made a very clever address at one of Sir W. Besant's lectures, there is much yet--very much--he might learn from Sir W. Besant's writings on London. It isn't so easy to outshine all the experts--even for a clever peer who has been Prime Minister, though it is very, very easy to flatter Lord Rosebery, with a purpose or purposes, as did at least once also with rarest tact, at Glasgow, indicating so many other things and possibilities, a certain very courtly ex-Moderator of the Church of Scotland. CHAPTER XXXI--MR GOSSE AND MS. OF _TREASURE ISLAND_ Mr Edmund Gosse has been so good as to set down, with rather an air of too much authority, that both R. L. Stevenson and I deceived ourselves completely in the matter of my little share in the _Treasure Island_ business, and that too much credit was sought by me or given to me, for the little service I rendered to R. L. Stevenson, and to the world, say, in helping to secure for it an element of pleasure through many generations. I have not _sought_ any recognition from the world in this matter, and even the mention of it became so intolerable to me that I eschewed all writing about it, in the face of the most stupid and misleading statements, till Mr Sidney Colvin wrote and asked me to set down my account of the matter in my own words. This I did, as it would have been really rude to refuse a request so graciously made, and the reader has it in the _Academy_ of 10th March 1900. Nevertheless, Mr Gosse's statements were revived and quoted, and the thing seemed ever to revolve again in a round of controversy. Now, with regard to the reliability in this matter of Mr Edmund Gosse, let me copy here a little note made at request some time ago, dealing with two points. The first is this: 1. _Most assuredly_ I carried away from Braemar in my portmanteau, as R. L. Stevenson says in _Idler's_ article and in chapter of _My First Book_ reprinted in _Edinburgh Edition_, several chapters of _Treasure Island_. On that point R. L. Stevenson, myself, and Mr James Henderson, to whom I took these, could not all be wrong and co-operating to mislead the public. These chapters, at least vii. or viii., as Mr Henderson remembers, would include the _first three_, that is, _finally revised versions for press_. Mr Gosse could not then _have heard R. L. Stevenson read from these final versions but from first draughts_ ONLY, and I am positively certain that with some of the later chapters R. L. Stevenson wrote them off-hand, and with great ease, and did not revise them to the extent of at all needing to re-write them, as I remember he was proud to tell me, being then fully in the vein, as he put it, and pleased to credit me with a share in this good result, and saying "my enthusiasm over it had set him up steep." There was then, in my idea, a necessity that Stevenson should fill up a gap by verbal summary to Mr Gosse (which Mr Gosse has forgotten), bringing the incident up to a further point than Mr Gosse now thinks. I am certain of my facts under this head; and as Mr Gosse clearly fancies he heard R. L. Stevenson read all from final versions and is mistaken--_completely_ mistaken there--he may be just as wrong and the victim of error or bad memory elsewhere after the lapse of more than twenty years. 2. I gave the pencilled outline of incident and plot to Mr Henderson--a fact he distinctly remembers. This fact completely meets and disposes of Mr Robert Leighton's quite imaginative _Billy Bo'sun_ notion, and is absolute as to R. L. Stevenson before he left Braemar on the 21st September 1881, or even before I left it on 26th August 1881, having clear in his mind the whole scheme of the work, though we know very well that the absolute re-writing out finally for press of the concluding part of the book was done at Davos. Mr Henderson has always made it the strictest rule in his editorship that the complete outline of the plot and incident of the latter part of a story must be supplied to him, if the whole story is not submitted to him in MS.; and the agreement, if I am not much mistaken, was entered into days before R. L. Stevenson left Braemar, and when he came up to London some short time after to go to Weybridge, the only arrangement then needed to be made was about the forwarding of proofs to him. The publication of _Treasure Island_ in _Young Folks_ began on the 1st October 1881, No. 565 and ran on in the following order: _October_ 1, 1881. THE PROLOGUE No. 565. I. The Old Sea Dog at the Admiral Benbow. II. Black Dog Appears and Disappears. No. 566. Dated _October_ 8, 1881. III. The Black Spot. No. 567. Dated _October_ 15, 1881. IV. The Sea Chart. V. The Last of the Blind Man. VI. The Captain's Papers. No. 568. Dated _October_ 22, 1881. THE STORY I. I go to Bristol. II. The Sea-Cook. Ill. Powder and Arms. Now, as the numbers of _Young Folks_ were printed about a fortnight in advance of the date they bear under the title, it is clear that not only must the contract have been executed days before the middle of September, but that a large proportion of the _copy_ must have been in Mr Henderson's hands at that date too, as he must have been entirely satisfied that the story would go on and be finished in a definite time. On no other terms would he have begun the publication of it. He was not in the least likely to have accepted a story from a man who, though known as an essayist, had not yet published anything in the way of a long story, on the ground merely of three chapters of prologue. Mr Gosse left Braemar on 5th September, when he says nine chapters were written, and Mr Henderson had offered terms for the story before the last of these could have reached him. That is on seeing, say six chapters of prologue. But when Mr Gosse speaks about three chapters only written, does he mean three of the prologue or three of the story, in addition to prologue, or what does he mean? The facts are clear. I took away in my portmanteau a large portion of the MS., together with a very full outline of the rest of the story, so that Mr Stevenson was, despite Mr Gosse's cavillings, _substantially_ right when he wrote in _My First Book_ in the _Idler_, etc., that "when he (Dr Japp) left us he carried away the manuscript in his portmanteau." There was nothing of the nature of an abandonment of the story at any point, nor any difficulty whatever arose in this respect in regard to it. CHAPTER XXXII--STEVENSON PORTRAITS Of the portraits of Stevenson a word or two may be said. There is a very good early photograph of him, taken not very long before the date of my visit to him at Braemar in 1881, and is an admirable likeness--characteristic not only in expression, but in pose and attitude, for it fixes him in a favourite position of his; and is, at the same time, very easy and natural. The velvet jacket, as I have remarked, was then his habitual wear, and the thin fingers holding the constant cigarette an inseparable associate and accompaniment. He acknowledged himself that he was a difficult subject to paint--not at all a good sitter--impatient and apt to rebel at posing and time spent in arrangement of details--a fact he has himself, as we shall see, set on record in his funny verses to Count Nerli, who painted as successful a portrait as any. The little miniature, full-length, by Mr J. S. Sarjent, A.R.A., which was painted at Bournemouth in 1885, is confessedly a mere sketch and much of a caricature: it is in America. Sir W. B. Richmond has an unfinished portrait, painted in 1885 or 1886--it has never passed out of the hands of the artist,--a photogravure from it is our frontispiece. There is a medallion done by St Gauden's, representing Stevenson in bed propped up by pillows. It is thought to be a pretty good likeness, and it is now in Mr Sidney Colvin's possession. Others, drawings, etc., are not of much account. And now we come to the Nerli portrait, of which so much has been written. Stevenson himself regarded it as the best portrait of him ever painted, and certainly it also is characteristic and effective, and though not what may be called a pleasant likeness, is probably a good representation of him in the later years of his life. Count Nerli actually undertook a voyage to Samoa in 1892, mainly with the idea of painting this portrait. He and Stevenson became great friends, as Stevenson naively tells in the verses we have already referred to, but even this did not quite overcome Stevenson's restlessness. He avenged himself by composing these verses as he sat: Did ever mortal man hear tell o' sic a ticklin' ferlie As the comin' on to Apia here o' the painter Mr Nerli? He cam'; and, O, for o' human freen's o' a' he was the pearlie-- The pearl o' a' the painter folk was surely Mr Nerli. He took a thraw to paint mysel'; he painted late and early; O wow! the many a yawn I've yawned i' the beard o' Mr Nerli. Whiles I wad sleep and whiles wad wake, an' whiles was mair than surly; I wondered sair as I sat there fornent the eyes o' Nerli. O will he paint me the way I want, as bonnie as a girlie? O will he paint me an ugly tyke?--and be d-d to Mr Nerli. But still an' on whichever it be, he is a canty kerlie, The Lord protect the back an' neck o' honest Mr Nerli. Mr Hammerton gives this account of the Nerli portrait: "The history of the Nerli portrait is peculiar. After being exhibited for some time in New Zealand it was bought, in the course of this year, by a lady who was travelling there, for a hundred guineas. She then offered it for that sum to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; but the Trustees of the Board of Manufactures--that oddly named body to which is entrusted the fostering care of Art in Scotland, and, in consequence, the superintendence of the National Portrait Gallery--did not see their way to accept the offer. Some surprise has been expressed at the action of the Trustees in thus declining to avail themselves of the opportunity of obtaining the portrait of one of the most distinguished Scotsmen of recent times. It can hardly have been for want of money, for though the funds at their disposal for the purchase of ordinary works of art are but limited, no longer ago than last year they were the recipients of a very handsome legacy from the late Mr J. M. Gray, the accomplished and much lamented Curator of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery--a legacy left them for the express purpose of acquiring portraits of distinguished Scotsmen, and the income of which was amply sufficient to have enabled them to purchase this portrait. One is therefore almost shut up to the conclusion that the Trustees were influenced in their decision by one of the two following reasons: "1. That they did not consider Stevenson worthy of a place in the gallery. This is a position so incomprehensible and so utterly opposed to public sentiment that one can hardly credit it having been the cause of this refusal. Whatever may be the place which Stevenson may ultimately take as an author, and however opinions may differ as to the merits of his work, no one can deny that he was one of the most popular writers of his day, and that as a mere master of style, if for nothing else, his works will be read so long as there are students of English Literature. Surely the portrait of one for whom such a claim may legitimately be made cannot be considered altogether unworthy of a place in the National Collection, as one of Scotland's most distinguished sons. "2. The only other reason which can be suggested as having weighed with the Trustees in their decision is one which in some cases might be held to be worthy of consideration. It is conceivable that in the case of some men the Trustees might be of opinion that there was plenty of time to consider the matter, and that in the meantime there was always the chance of some generous donor presenting them with a portrait. But, as has been shown above, the portraits of Stevenson are practically confined to two: one of these is in America, and there is not the least chance of its ever coming here; and the other they have refused. And, as it is understood that the Trustees have a rule that they do not accept any portrait which has not been painted from the life, they preclude themselves from acquiring a copy of any existing picture or even a portrait done from memory. "It is rumoured that the Nerli portrait may ultimately find a resting- place in the National Collection of Portraits in London. If this should prove to be the case, what a commentary on the old saying: 'A prophet is not without honour save in his own country.'" CHAPTER XXXIII--LAPSES AND ERRORS IN CRITICISM Nothing could perhaps be more wearisome than to travel o'er the wide sandy area of Stevenson criticism and commentary, and expose the many and sad and grotesque errors that meet one there. Mr Baildon's slip is innocent, compared with many when he says (p. 106) _Treasure Island_ appeared in _Young Folks_ as _The Sea-Cook_. It did nothing of the kind; it is on plain record in print, even in the pages of the _Edinburgh Edition_, that Mr James Henderson would not have the title _The Sea-Cook_, as he did not like it, and insisted on its being _Treasure Island_. To him, therefore, the vastly better title is due. Mr Henley was in doubt if Mr Henderson was still alive when he wrote the brilliant and elevated article on "Some Novels" in the _North American_, and as a certain dark bird killed Cock Robin, so he killed off Dr Japp, and not to be outdone, got in an ideal "Colonel" _Jack_; so Mr Baildon there follows Henley, unaware that Mr Henderson did not like _The Sea-Cook_, and was still alive, and that a certain Jack in the fatal _North American_ has Japp's credit. Mr Baildon's words are: "This was the famous book of adventure, _Treasure Island_, appearing first as _The Sea-Cook_ in a boy's paper, where it made no great stir. But, on its publication in volume form, with the vastly better title, the book at once 'boomed,' as the phrase goes, to an extent then, in 1882, almost unprecedented. The secret of its immense success may almost be expressed in a phrase by saying that it is a book like _Gulliver's Travels_, _The Pilgrim's Progress_, and _Robinson Crusoe_ itself for all ages--boys, men, and women." Which just shows how far lapse as to a fact may lead to critical misreadings also. Mr Hammerton sometimes lets good folks say in his pages, without correction, what is certainly not correct. Thus at one place we are told that Stevenson was only known as Louis in print, whereas that was the only name by which he was known in his own family. Then Mr Gosse, at p. 34, is allowed to write: "Professor Blackie was among them on the steamer from the Hebrides, a famous figure that calls for no description, and a voluble shaggy man, clad in homespun, with spectacles forward upon his nose, who it was whispered to us, was Mr Sam Bough, the Scottish Academician, _a water- colour painter of some repute_, who was to die in 1878." Mr Sam Bough _was_ "a water-colour painter of some repute," but a painter in oils of yet greater repute--a man of rare strength, resource, and facility--never, perhaps, wholly escaping from some traces of his early experiences in scene-painting, but a true genius in his art. Ah, well I remember him, though an older man, yet youthful in the band of young Scotch artists among whom as a youngster I was privileged to move in Edinburgh--Pettie, Chalmers, M'Whirter, Peter Graham, MacTaggart, MacDonald, John Burr, and Bough. Bough could be voluble on art; and many a talk I had with him as with the others named, especially with John Burr. Bough and he both could talk as well as paint, and talk right well. Bough had a slight cast in the eye; when he got a _wee_ excited on his subject he would come close to you with head shaking, and spectacles displaced, and forelock wagging, and the cast would seem to die away. Was this a fact, or was it an illusion on my part? I have often asked myself that question, and now I ask it of others. Can any of my good friends in Edinburgh say; can Mr Caw help me here, either to confirm or to correct me? I venture to insert here an anecdote, with which my friend of old days, Mr Wm. MacTaggart, R.S.A., in a letter kindly favours me: "Sam Bough was a very sociable man; and, when on a sketching tour, liked to have a young artist or two with him. Jack Nisbett played the violin, and Sam the 'cello, etc. Jack was fond of telling that Sam used to let them all choose the best views, and then he would take what was left; and Jack, with mild astonishment, would say, that 'it generally turned out to be the best--on the canvas!'" In Mr Hammerton's copy of the verses in reply to Mr Crockett's dedication of _The Stickit Minister_ to Stevenson, in which occurred the fine phrase "The grey Galloway lands, where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, his heart remembers how": "Blows the wind to-day and the sun and the rain are flying: Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now, Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, My heart remembers how. "Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places, Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor, Hills of sheep, and the _homes_ of the silent vanished races, And winds austere and pure. "Be it granted me to behold you again in dying, Hills of home! and to hear again the call-- Hear about the graves of the martyrs the pee-weet crying, And hear no more at all." Mr Hammerton prints _howes_ instead of _homes_, which I have italicised above. And I may note, though it does not affect the poetry, if it does a little affect the natural history, that the _pee-weets_ and the whaups are not the same--the one is the curlew, and the other is the lapwing--the one most frequenting wild, heathery or peaty moorland, and the other pasture or even ploughed land--so that it is a great pity for unity and simplicity alike that Stevenson did not repeat the "whaup," but wrote rather as though pee-weet or pee-weets were the same as whaups--the common call of the one is _Ker-lee_, _ker-lee_, and of the other _pee- weet_, _pee-weet_, hence its common name. It is a pity, too, that Mr Hammerton has no records of some portions of the life at Davos Platz. Not only was Stevenson ill there in April 1892, but his wife collapsed, and the tender concern for her made havoc with some details of his literary work. It is good to know this. Such errata or omissions throw a finer light on his character than controlling perfection would do. Ah, I remember how my old friend W. B. Rands ("Matthew Browne" and "Henry Holbeach") was wont to declare that were men perfect they would be isolated, if not idiotic, that we are united to each other by our defects--that even physical beauty would be dead like later Greek statues, were these not departures from the perfect lines. The letter given by me at p. 28 transfigures in its light, some of his work at that time. And then what an opportunity, we deeply regret to say, Mr Hammerton wholly missed, when he passed over without due explanation or commentary that most significant pamphlet--the _Address to the Scottish Clergy_. If Mr Hammerton had but duly and closely studied that and its bearings and suggestions in many directions, then he would have written such a chapter for true enlightenment and for interest as exactly his book--attractive though it is in much--yet specially lacks. It is to be hoped that Mr Sidney Colvin will not once more miss the chance which is thus still left open to him to perfect his _Life of Stevenson_, and make it more interpretive than anything yet published. If he does this, then, a dreadful _lacuna_ in the _Edinburgh Edition_ will also be supplied. Carefully reading over again Mr Arthur Symons' _Studies in Two Literatures_--published some years ago--I have come across instances of apparent contradiction which, so far as I can see, he does not critically altogether reconcile, despite his ingenuity and great charm of style. One relates to Thoreau, who, while still "sturdy" as Emerson says, "and like an elm tree," as his sister Sophia says, showed exactly the same love of nature and power of interpreting her as he did after in his later comparatively short period of "invalidity," while Mr Symons says his view of Nature absolutely was that of the invalid, classing him unqualifiedly with Jefferies and Stevenson, as invalid. Thoreau's mark even in the short later period of "invalidity" was complete and robust independence and triumph over it--a thing which I have no doubt wholly captivated Stevenson, as scarce anything else would have done, as a victory in the exact _role_ he himself was most ambitious to fill. For did not he too wrestle well with the "wolverine" he carried on his back--in this like Addington Symonds and Alexander Pope? Surely I cannot be wrong here to reinforce my statement by a passage from a letter written by Sophia Thoreau to her good friend Daniel Ricketson, after her brother's death, the more that R. L. Stevenson would have greatly exulted too in its cheery and invincible stoicism: "Profound joy mingles with my grief. I feel as if something very beautiful had happened--not death; although Henry is with us no longer, yet the memory of his sweet and virtuous soul must ever cheer and comfort me. My heart is filled with praise to God for the gift of such a brother, and may I never distrust the love and wisdom of Him who made him and who has now called him to labour in more glorious fields than earth affords. You ask for some particulars relating to Henry's illness. I feel like saying that Henry was never affected, never reached by it. I never before saw such a manifestation of the power of spirit over matter. Very often I heard him tell his visitors that he enjoyed existence as well as ever. The thought of death, he said, did not trouble him. His thoughts had entertained him all his life and did still. . . . He considered occupation as necessary for the sick as for those in health, and accomplished a vast amount of labour in those last few months." A rare "invalidity" this--a little confusing easy classifications. I think Stevenson would have felt and said that brother and sister were well worthy of each other; and that the sister was almost as grand and cheery a stoic, with no literary profession of it, as was the brother. The other thing relates to Stevenson's _human soul_. I find Mr Symons says, at p. 243, that Stevenson "had something a trifle elfish and uncanny about him, as of a bewitched being who was not actually human--had not actually a human soul"--in which there may be a glimmer of truth viewed from his revelation of artistic curiosities in some aspects, but is hardly true of him otherwise; and this Mr Symons himself seems to have felt, when, at p. 246, he writes: "He is one of those writers who speak _to us on easy terms_, with whom we _may exchange affections_." How "affections" could be exchanged on easy terms between the normal human being and an elfish creature actually _without a human soul_ (seeing that affections are, as Mr Matthew Arnold might have said, at least, three- fourths of soul) is more, I confess, than I can quite see at present; but in this rather _maladroit_ contradiction Mr Symons does point at one phase of the problem of Stevenson--this, namely that to all the ordinary happy or pleasure-endings he opposes, as it were of set purpose, gloom, as though to certain things he was quite indifferent, and though, as we have seen, his actual life and practice were quite opposed to this. I am sorry I _cannot_ find the link in Mr Symons' essay, which would quite make these two statements consistently coincide critically. As an enthusiastic, though I hope still a discriminating, Stevensonian, I do wish Mr Symons would help us to it somehow hereafter. It would be well worth his doing, in my opinion. CHAPTER XXXIV--LETTERS AND POEMS IN TESTIMONY Among many letters received by me in acknowledgment of, or in commentary on, my little tributes to R. L. Stevenson, in various journals and magazines, I find the following, which I give here for reasons purely personal, and because my readers may with me, join in admiration of the fancy, grace and beauty of the poems. I must preface the first poem by a letter, which explains the genesis of the poem, and relates a striking and very touching incident: "37 ST DONATT'S ROAD, LEWISHAM HIGH ROAD, S.E., 1_st_ _March_ 1895. "DEAR SIR,--As you have written so much about your friend, the late Robert Louis Stevenson, and quoted many tributes to his genius from contemporary writers, I take the liberty of sending you herewith some verses of mine which appeared in _The Weekly Sun_ of November last. I sent a copy of these verses to Samoa, but unfortunately the great novelist died before they reached it. I have, however, this week, received a little note from Mrs Strong, which runs as follows: "'Your poem of "Greeting" came too late. I can only thank you by sending a little moss that I plucked from a tree overhanging his grave on Vaea Mountain.' "I trust you will appreciate my motive in sending you the poem. I do not wish to obtrude my claims as a verse-writer upon your notice, but I thought the incident I have recited would be interesting to one who is so devoted a collector of Stevensoniana.--Respectfully yours, F. J. COX." GREETING (TO ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, IN SAMOA) We, pent in cities, prisoned in the mart, Can know you only as a man apart, But ever-present through your matchless art. You have exchanged the old, familiar ways For isles, where, through the range of splendid days, Her treasure Nature lavishly displays. There, by the gracious sweep of ampler seas, That swell responsive to the odorous breeze. You have the wine of Life, and we the lees! You mark, perchance, within your island bowers, The slow departure of the languorous hours, And breathe the sweetness of the strange wild-flowers. And everything your soul and sense delights-- But in the solemn wonder of your nights, When Peace her message on the landscape writes; When Ocean scarcely flecks her marge with foam-- Your thoughts must sometimes from your island roam, To centre on the sober face of Home. Though many a league of water rolls between The simple beauty of an English scene, From all these wilder charms your love may wean. Some kindly sprite may bring you as a boon Sweets from the rose that crowns imperial June, Or reminiscence of the throstle's tune; Yea, gladly grant you, with a generous hand, Far glimpses of the winding, wind-swept strand, The glens and mountains of your native land, Until you hear the pipes upon the breeze-- But wake unto the wild realities The tangled forests and the boundless seas! For lo! the moonless night has passed away, A sudden dawn dispels the shadows grey, The glad sea moves and hails the quickening day. New life within the arbours of your fief Awakes the blossom, quivers in the leaf, And splendour flames upon the coral reef. If such a prospect stimulate your art, More than our meadows where the shadows dart, More than the life which throbs in London's heart, Then stay, encircled by your Southern bowers, And weave, amid the incense of the flowers, The skein of fair romance--the gain is ours! F. J. COX. _Weekly Sun_, 11_th_ November 1904. R. L. S., IN MEMORIAM. An elfin wight as e'er from faeryland Came to us straight with favour in his eyes, Of wondrous seed that led him to the prize Of fancy, with the magic rod in hand. Ah, there in faeryland we saw him stand, As for a while he walked with smiles and sighs, Amongst us, finding still the gem that buys Delight and joy at genius's command. And now thy place is empty: fare thee well; Thou livest still in hearts that owe thee more Than gold can reckon; for thy richer store Is of the good that with us aye most dwell. Farewell; sleep sound on Vaea's windy shrine, While round the songsters join their song to thine. A. C. R. APPENDIX The following appeared some time ago in one of the London evening papers, and I make bold, because of its truth and vigour, to insert it here: THE LAND OF STEVENSON, _ON AN AFTERNOON'S WALK_ Will there be a "Land of Stevenson," as there is already a "Land of Burns," or a "Land of Scott," known to the tourist, bescribbled by the guide-book maker? This the future must tell. Yet will it be easy to mark out the bounds of "Robert Louis Stevenson's Country"; and, taking his native and well-loved city for a starting-point, a stout walker may visit all its principal sites in an afternoon. The house where he was born is within a bowshot of the Water of Leith; some five miles to the south are Caerketton and Allermuir, and other crests of the Pentlands, and below them Swanston Farm, where year after year, in his father's time, he spent the summer days basking on the hill slopes; two or three miles to the westward of Swanston is Colinton, where his mother's father, Dr Balfour, was minister; and here again you are back to the Water of Leith, which you can follow down to the New Town. In this triangular space Stevenson's memories and affections were firmly rooted; the fibres could not be withdrawn from the soil, and "the voice of the blood" and the longing for this little piece of earth make themselves plaintively heard in his last notes. By Lothian Road, after which Stevenson quaintly thought of naming the new edition of his works, and past Boroughmuirhead and the "Bore Stane," where James FitzJames set up his standard before Flodden, wends your southward way to the hills. The builder of suburban villas has pushed his handiwork far into the fields since Stevenson was wont to tramp between the city and the Pentlands; and you may look in vain for the flat stone whereon, as the marvelling child was told, there once rose a "crow-haunted gibbet." Three-quarters of an hour of easy walking, after you have cleared the last of the houses will bring you to Swanston; and half an hour more will take the stiff climber, a little breathless, to THE TOP OF CAERKETTON CRAGS. You may follow the high road--indeed there is a choice of two, drawn at different levels--athwart the western skirts of the Braid Hills, now tenanted, crown and sides of them, by golf; then to the crossroads of Fairmilehead, whence the road dips down, to rise again and circumvent the most easterly wing of the Pentlands. You would like to pursue this route, were it only to look down on Bow Bridge and recall how the last- century gauger used to put together his flute and play "Over the hills and far away" as a signal to his friend in the distillery below, now converted into a dairy farm, to stow away his barrels. Better it is, however, to climb the stile just past the poor-house gate, and follow the footpath along the smoothly scooped banks of the Braid Burn to "Cockmylane" and to Comiston. The wind has been busy all the morning spreading the snow over a glittering world. The drifts are piled shoulder-high in the lane as it approaches Comiston, and each old tree grouped around the historic mansion is outlined in snow so virgin pure that were the Ghost--"a lady in white, with the most beautiful clear shoes on her feet"--to step out through the back gate, she would be invisible, unless, indeed, she were between you and the ivy-draped dovecot wall. Near by, at the corner of the Dreghorn Woods, is the Hunters' Tryst, on the roof of which, when it was still a wayside inn, the Devil was wont to dance on windy nights. In the field through which you trudge knee-deep in drift rises the "Kay Stane," looking to-day like a tall monolith of whitest marble. Stevenson was mistaken when he said that it was from its top a neighbouring laird, on pain of losing his lands, had to "wind a blast of bugle horn" each time the King VISITED HIS FOREST OF PENTLAND. That honour belongs to another on the adjacent farm of Buckstane. The ancient monument carries you further back, and there are Celtic authorities that translate its name the "Stone of Victory." The "Pechtland Hills"--their elder name--were once a refuge for the Picts; and Caerketton--probably Caer-etin, the giant's strong-hold--is one of them. Darkly its cliffs frown down upon you, while all else is flashing white in the winter sunlight. For once, in this last buttress thrown out into the plain of Lothian towards the royal city, the outer folds of the Pentlands loses its boldly-rounded curves, and drops an almost sheer descent of black rock to the little glen below. In a wrinkle of the foothills Swanston farm and hamlet are snugly tucked away. The spirit that breathes about it in summer time is gently pastoral. It is sheltered from the rougher blasts; it is set about with trees and green hills. It was with this aspect of the place that Stevenson, coming hither on holiday, was best acquainted. The village green, whereon the windows of the neat white cottages turn a kindly gaze under low brows of thatch, is then a perfect place in which to rest, and, watching the smoke rising and listening to "the leaves ruffling in the breeze," to muse on men and things; especially on Sabbath mornings, when the ploughman or shepherd, "perplext wi' leisure," it is time to set forth on the three- mile walk along the hill-skirts to Colinton kirk. But Swanston in winter time must also HAVE BEEN FAMILIAR TO STEVENSON. Snow-wreathed Pentlands, the ribbed and furrowed front of Caerketton, the low sun striking athwart the sloping fields of white, the shadows creeping out from the hills, and the frosty yellow fog drawing in from the Firth--must often have flashed back on the thoughts of the exile of Samoa. Against this wintry background the white farmhouse, old and crow- stepped, looks dingy enough; the garden is heaped with the fantastic treasures of the snow; and when you toil heavily up the waterside to the clump of pines and beeches you find yourself in a fairy forest. One need not search to-day for the pool where the lynx-eyed John Todd, "the oldest herd on the Pentlands," watched from behind the low scrag of wood the stranger collie come furtively to wash away the tell-tale stains of lamb's blood. The effacing hand of the snow has smothered it over. Higher you mount, mid leg-deep in drift, up the steep and slippery hill- face, to the summit. Edinburgh has been creeping nearer since Stevenson's musing fancy began to draw on the memories of the climbs up "steep Caerketton." But this light gives it a mystic distance; and it is all glitter and shadow. Arthur Seat is like some great sea monster stranded near a city of dreams; from the fog-swathed Firth gleams the white walls of Inchkeith lighthouse, a mark never missed by Stevenson's father's son; above Fife rise the twin breasts of the Lomonds. Or turn round and look across the Esk valley to the Moorfoots; or more westerly, where the back range of the Pentlands--Caernethy, the Scald, and the knife-edged Kips--draw a sharp silhouette of Arctic peaks against the sky. In the cloven hollow between is Glencarse Loch, an ancient chapel and burying ground hidden under its waters; on the slope above it, not a couple miles away, is Rullion Green, where, as Stevenson told in _The Pentland Rising_ (his first printed work) THE WESTLAND WHIGS WERE SCATTERED as chaff on the hills. Were "topmost Allermuir," that rises close beside you, removed from his place, we might see the gap in the range through which Tom Dalyell and his troopers spurred from Currie to the fray. The air on these heights is invigorating as wine; but it is also keen as a razor. Without delaying long yon plunge down to the "Windy Door Nick"; follow the "nameless trickle that springs from the green bosom of Allermuir," past the rock and pool, where, on summer evenings, the poet "loved to sit and make bad verses"; and cross Halkerside and the Shearers' Knowe, those "adjacent cantons on a single shoulder of a hill," sometimes floundering to the neck in the loose snow of a drain, sometimes scaring the sheep huddling in the wreaths, or putting up a covey of moorfowl that circle back without a cry to cover in the ling. In an hour you are at Colinton, whose dell has on one side the manse garden, where a bright-eyed boy, who was to become famous, spent so much of his time when he came thither on visits to his stern Presbyterian grandfather; on the other the old churchyard. The snow has drawn its cloak of ermine over the sleepers, it has run its fingers over the worn lettering; and records almost effaced start out from the stone. In vain these "voices of generations dead" summon their wandering child, though you might deem that his spirit would rest more quietly where the cold breeze from Pentland shakes the ghostly trees in Colinton Dell than "under the flailing fans and shadows of the palm." Footnotes: {1} Professor Charles Warren Stoddard, Professor of English Literature at the Catholic University of Washington, in _Kate Field's Washington_. {2} In his portrait-sketch of his father, Stevenson speaks of him as a "man of somewhat antique strain, and with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish, and at first sight somewhat bewildering," as melancholy, and with a keen sense of his unworthiness, yet humorous in company; shrewd and childish; a capital adviser. {3} _Inferno_, Canto XV. {4} Alas, I never was told that remark--when I saw my friend afterwards there was always too much to talk of else, and I forgot to ask. {5} Quoted by Hammerton, pp. 2 and 3. {6} Tusitala, as the reader must know, is the Samoan for Teller of Tales. {7} _Wisdom of Goethe_, p. 38. {8} _The Foreigner at Home_, in _Memories and Portraits_. {9} A great deal has been made of the "John Bull element" in De Quincey since his _Memoir_ was written by me (see _Masson's Condensation_, p. 95); so now perhaps a little more may be made of the rather conceited Calvinistic Scot element in R. L. Stevenson! {10} It was Mr George Moore who said this. {11} _Fortnightly Review_, October, 1903. 
29624	----	SIR WALTER SCOTT FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES _The following Volumes are now ready_-- THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson. ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton. HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Leask. JOHN KNOX. By A. Taylor Innes. ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun. THE BALLADISTS. By John Geddie. RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless. SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson. THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden Blaikie. JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Leask. TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By Oliphant Smeaton. FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. Omond. THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir George Douglas. NORMAN MACLEOD. By John Wellwood. SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor Saintsbury. [Illustration: SIR WALTER SCOTT BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES PUBLISHED BY OLIPHANT ANDERSON & FERRIER. EDINBURGH AND LONDON ] * * * * * The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and the printing from the press of Morrison & Gibb Limited, Edinburgh. _June 1897._ * * * * * PREFACE To the very probable remark that 'Another little book about Scott is not wanted,' I can at least reply that apparently it is, inasmuch as the publishers proposed this volume to me, not I to them. And I believe that, as a matter of fact, no 'little book about Scott' has appeared since the _Journal_ was completed, since the new and important instalment of _Letters_ appeared (in both cases with invaluable editorial apparatus by Mr. David Douglas), and especially since Mr. Lang's _Lockhart_ was published. It is true that no one of these, nor any other book that is likely to appear, has altered, or is likely to alter, much in a sane estimate of Sir Walter. His own matchless character and the genius of his first biographer combined to set before the world early an idea, of which it is safe to say that nothing that should lower it need be feared, and hardly anything to heighten it can be reasonably hoped. But as fresh items of illustrative detail are made public, there can be no harm in endeavouring to incorporate something of what they give us in fresh abstracts and _aperçus_ from time to time. And for the continued and, as far as space permits, detailed criticism of the work, it may be pleaded that criticism of Scott has for many years been chiefly general, while in criticism, even more than in other things, generalities are deceptive. CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I LIFE TILL MARRIAGE 9 CHAPTER II EARLY LITERARY WORK 20 CHAPTER III THE VERSE ROMANCES 38 CHAPTER IV THE NOVELS, FROM _WAVERLEY_ TO _REDGAUNTLET_ 69 CHAPTER V THE DOWNFALL OF BALLANTYNE & COMPANY 104 CHAPTER VI LAST WORKS AND DAYS 118 CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION 139 SIR WALTER SCOTT CHAPTER I LIFE TILL MARRIAGE Scott's own 'autobiographic fragment,' printed in Lockhart's first volume, has made other accounts of his youth mostly superfluous, even to a day which persists in knowing better about everything and everybody than it or they knew about themselves. No one ever recorded his genealogy more minutely, with greater pride, or with a more saving sense of humour than Sir Walter. He was connected, though remotely, with gentle families on both sides. That is to say, his great-grandfather was son of the Laird of Raeburn, who was grandson of Walter Scott of Harden and the 'Flower of Yarrow.' The great-grandson, 'Beardie,' acquired that cognomen by letting his beard grow like General Dalziel, though for the exile of James II., instead of the death of Charles I.--'whilk was the waur reason,' as Sir Walter himself might have said. Beardie's second son, being more thoroughly sickened of the sea in his first voyage than Robinson Crusoe, took to farming and Whiggery, and married the daughter of Haliburton of Newmains--there was also Macdougal and Campbell blood on the spindle side of the older generations of the family. Their eldest son Walter, father of Sir Walter, was born in 1729, and, being bred to the law, became the original, according to undisputed tradition, of the 'Saunders Fairford' of _Redgauntlet_, the most autobiographical as well as not the least charming of the novels. He married Anne Rutherford, who, through her mother, brought the blood of the Swintons of Swinton to enrich the joint strain; and from her father, a member of a family distinguished in the annals of the University of Edinburgh, may have transmitted some of the love for books which was not the most prominent feature of the other ingredients. Walter himself was the third 'permanent child' (to adopt an agreeable phrase of Mr. Traill's about another person) of a family of twelve, only five of whom survived infancy. His three brothers, John, Thomas, and Daniel, and his sister Anne, all figure in the records; but little is heard of John and not much of Anne. Thomas, the second, either had, or was thought by his indulgent brother to have, literary talents, and was at one time put up to father the novels; while Daniel (whose misconduct in money matters, and still more in showing the white feather, brought on him the only display of anything that can be called rancour recorded in Sir Walter's history) concerns us even less. The date of the novelist's birth was 15th August 1771, the place, 'the top of the College Wynd,' a locality now whelmed in the actual Chambers Street face of the present Old University buildings, and near that of Kirk of Field. Escaping the real or supposed dangers of a consumptive wet-nurse, he was at first healthy enough; but teething or something else developed the famous lameness, which at first seemed to threaten loss of all use of the right leg. The child was sent to the house of his grandfather, the Whig farmer of Sandyknowe, where he abode for some years under the shadow of Smailholm Tower, reading a little, listening to Border legends a great deal, and making one long journey to London and Bath. This first blessed period of 'making himself'[1] lasted till his eighth year, and ended with a course of sea-bathing at Prestonpans, where he met the original in name and perhaps in nature of Captain Dalgetty, and the original in character of the Antiquary. Then he returned (_circ._ 1779) to his father's house, now in George Square, to his numerous, if impermanent, family of brothers and sisters, and to the High School. The most memorable incident of this part of his career is the famous episode of 'Greenbreeks.'[2] His health, as he grew up, becoming again weak, the boy was sent once more Borderwards--this time to Kelso, where he lived with an aunt, went to the town school, and made the acquaintance there, whether for good or ill, who shall say? of the Ballantynes. And he had to return to Kelso for the same cause, at least once during his experiences at College, where he did not take the full usual number of courses, and acquired no name as a scholar. But he always read. As it had not been decided whether he was to adopt the superior or the inferior branch of the law, he was apprenticed to his father at the age of fifteen, as a useful preparation for either career. He naturally enough did not love 'engrossing,' but he did not cross his father's soul by refusing it, and though returns of illness occurred now and then, his constitution appeared to be gradually strengthening itself, partly, as he thought, owing to the habit of very long walks, in which he took great delight. He tried various accomplishments; but he could neither draw, nor make music, nor (at this time) write. Still he always read--irregularly, uncritically, but enormously, so that to this day Sir Walter's real learning is under-estimated. And he formed a very noteworthy circle of friends--William Clerk, 'Darsie Latimer,' the chief of them all. It must have been just after he entered his father's office that he met Burns, during that poet's famous visit to Edinburgh in 1786-87. Considerably less is known of his late youth and early manhood than either of his childhood or of his later life. His letters--those invaluable and unparalleled sources of biographical information--do not begin till 1792, the year of his majority, when (on July 11) he was called to the Bar. But it is a universal tradition that, in these years of apprenticeship, in more senses than one, he, partly in gratifying his own love of wandering, and partly in serving his father's business by errands to clients, etc., did more than lay the foundation of that unrivalled knowledge of Scotland, and of all classes in it, which plays so important a part in his literary work. I say 'of all classes in it,' and this point is of the greatest weight. Scott has been accused (for the most part foolishly) of paying an exaggerated respect to rank. If this had been true, it would at least not have been due to late or imperfect acquaintance with persons of rank. Democratic as the Scotland of this century has sometimes been called, it is not uncommon to find a considerable respect for aristocracy in the greatest Scotch Radicals; and Scott was notoriously not a Radical. But his familiarity with all ranks from an early age is undoubted, and only very shallow or prejudiced observers will doubt the beneficial effect which this had on his study of humanity.[6] The uneasy caricature which mars Dickens's picture of the upper, and even the upper middle, classes is as much absent from his work as the complete want of familiarity with the lower which appears, for instance, in Bulwer. It is certain that before he had written anything, he was on familiar terms with many persons, both men and women, of the highest rank--the most noteworthy among his feminine correspondents being Lady Louisa Stuart (sister of the Marquis of Bute and grand-daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) and Lady Abercorn. With the former the correspondence is always on the footing of mere though close friendship, literary and other; in part at least of that with Lady Abercorn, I cannot help suspecting the presence, especially on the lady's side, of that feeling, 'Too warm for friendship and too pure for love,' which undoubtedly sometimes does exist between men and women who cannot, and perhaps who would not if they could, turn love into marriage. However this may be, it is, let it be repeated, certain that Scott, in the six years from his fifteenth, when he is said to have first visited the Highlands and seen Rob Roy's country, to his majority, and yet again in the five or six between his call to the Bar and his marriage, visited many, if not all, parts of Scotland; knew high and low, rich and poor, with the amiable interest of his temperament and the keen observation of his genius; took part in business and amusement and conviviality (he accuses himself later of having been not quite free from the prevalent peccadillo of rather deep drinking); and still and always _read_. He joined the 'Speculative Society' in January 1791, and, besides taking part in the debates on general subjects, read papers on Feudalism, Ossian, and Northern Mythology, in what were to be his more special lines. His young lawyer friends called him 'Colonel Grogg,' a _sobriquet_ not difficult to interpret on one of the hints just given, and 'Duns Scotus,' which concerns the other; while yet a third characteristic, which can surprise nobody, is indicated in the famous introduction of him to a boisterous party of midshipmen of the Marryat type by James Clerk, the brother of Darsie Latimer, who kept a yacht, and was fond of the sea: 'You may take Mr. Scott for a poor _lamiter_, gentlemen, but he is the first to begin a row and the last to end it.' It appears that it was from a time somewhat before the call that the beginning of Scott's famous, his unfortunate, and (it has been the fashion, rightly or wrongly, to add) his only love affair dates. Some persons have taken the trouble to piece together and eke out the references to 'Green Mantle,' otherwise Miss Stuart of Belches, later Lady Forbes. It is better to respect Scott's own reticence on a subject of which very little is really known, and of which he, like most gentlemen, preferred to say little or nothing. The affection appears to have been mutual; but the lady was probably not very eager to incur family displeasure by making a match decidedly below her in rank, and, at that time, distinctly imprudent in point of fortune. But the courtship, such as it was, appears to have been long, and the effects of the loss indelible. Scott speaks of his heart as 'handsomely pieced'--'pieced,' it may be observed, not 'healed.' A healed wound sometimes does not show; a pieced garment or article of furniture reminds us of the piecing till the day when it goes to fire or dustbin. But it has been supposed, with some reason, that those heroines of Scott's who show most touch of personal sympathy--Catherine Seyton, Die Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet--bear features, physical or mental or both, of this Astarte, this 'Lost woman of his youth, yet unpossessed.' And no one can read the _Diary_ without perceiving the strange bitter-sweet, at the moment of his greatest calamity, of the fact that Sir William Forbes, who rendered him invaluable service at his greatest need, was his successful rival thirty years before, and the widower of 'Green Mantle.' This affair came to an end in October 1796; and it may astonish some wise people, accustomed to regard Scott as a rather humdrum and prosaic person, who escaped the scandals so often associated with the memory of men of letters from sheer want of temptation, to hear that one of his most intimate friends of his own age at the time 'shuddered at the violence of his most irritable and ungovernable mind.' There is no reason to doubt the fidelity of this description. And those who know something of human nature will be disposed to assign the disappearance of the irritableness and ungovernableness precisely to this incident, and to the working of a strong mind, confronted by fate with the question whether it was to be the victim or the master of its own passions, fighting out the battle once for all, and thenceforward keeping its house armed against them, it may be with some loss, but certainly with much gain. It has been said that he states (with a touch of irony, no doubt) that his heart was 'handsomely pieced'; and it is not against the theory hinted in the foregoing paragraph, but, on the contrary, in favour of it, that the piecing did not take long. In exactly a year Scott became engaged to Miss Charlotte Margaret Carpenter or Charpentier,[4] and they were married on Christmas Eve, 1797, at St. Mary's, Carlisle. They had met at Gilsland Spa in the previous July, and the courtship had not taken very long. The lady was of French extraction, had an only brother in the service of the East India Company, and, being an orphan, was the ward of the Marquis of Downshire,--circumstances on which gossips like Hogg made impertinent remarks. It is fair, however, to 'the Shepherd' to say that he speaks enthusiastically both of Mrs. Scott's appearance ('one of the most beautiful and handsome creatures I ever saw in my life'; 'a perfect beauty') and of her character ('she is cradled in my remembrance, and ever shall be, as a sweet, kind, and affectionate creature').[5] She was very dark, small, with hair which the Shepherd calls black, Lockhart dark brown; her features not regular, but her complexion, figure, and so forth 'unusually attractive.' Not very much is said about her in any of the authentic accounts, and traditional tittle-tattle may be neglected. She does not seem to have been extremely wise, and was entirely unliterary; but neither of these defects is a _causa redhibitionis_ in marriage; and she was certainly a faithful and affectionate wife. At any rate, Scott made no complaints, if he had any to make, and nearly the most touching passage in the _Diary_ is that written after her death. The minor incidents, not literary, of his life, between his call to the Bar and his marriage, require a little notice, for they had a very great influence on the character of his future work. His success at the Bar was moderate, but his fees increased steadily if slowly. He defended (unsuccessfully) a Galloway minister who was accused among other counts of 'toying with a sweetie-wife,' and it is interesting to find in his defence some casuistry about _ebrius_ and _ebriosus_, which reminds one of the Baron of Bradwardine. He took part victoriously in a series of battles with sticks, between Loyalist advocates and writers and Irish Jacobin medical students, in the pit of the Edinburgh theatre during April 1794. In June 1795 he became a curator of the Advocates' Library, and a year later engaged (of course on the loyal side) in another great political 'row,' this time in the streets. Above all, in the spring and summer between the loss of his love and his marriage, he engaged eagerly in volunteering, becoming quartermaster, paymaster, secretary, and captain in the Edinburgh Light Horse--an occupation which has left at least as much impression on his work as Gibbon's equally famous connection with the Hampshire Militia on his. His friendships continued and multiplied; and he began with the sisters of some of his friends, especially Miss Cranstoun (his chief confidante in the 'Green Mantle' business) and Miss Erskine, the first, or the first known to us, of those interesting correspondences with ladies which show him perhaps at his very best. For in them he plays neither jack-pudding, nor coxcomb, nor sentimentalist, nor any of the involuntary counterparts which men in such cases are too apt to play; and they form not the least of his titles to the great name of gentleman. But by far the most important contribution of these six or seven years to his 'making' was the further acquaintance with the scenery, and customs, and traditions, and dialects, and local history of his own country, which his greater independence, enlarged circle of friends, and somewhat increased means enabled him to acquire. It is quite true that to a man with his gifts any microcosm will do for a macrocosm in miniature. I have heard in conversation (I forget whether it is in any of the books) that he picked up the word 'whomled' (= 'bucketed over'--'turned like a tub'), which adds so much to the description of the nautical misfortune of Claud Halcro and Triptolemus in _The Pirate_, by overhearing it from a scold in the Grassmarket. But still the enlarged experience could not but be of the utmost value. It was during these years that he saw Glamis Castle in its unspoiled state, during these that, in connection with the case of the unfortunate but rather happily named devotee of Bacchus and Venus, M'Naught, he explored Galloway, and obtained the decorations and scenery, if not the story, of _Guy Mannering_. He also repeated his visits to the English side of the Border, not merely on the occasion during which he met Miss Carpenter, but earlier, in a second excursion to Northumberland. But, above all, these were the years of his famous 'raids' into Liddesdale, then one of the most inaccessible districts of Scotland, under the guidance of Mr. Shortreed of Jedburgh--raids which completed the information for _Guy Mannering_, which gave him much of the material for the _Minstrelsy_, and the history of which has, I think, delighted every one of his readers and biographers, except one or two who have been scandalised at the exquisite story of the Arrival of the Keg.[3] Of these let us not speak, but, regarding them with a tender pity not unmixed with wonder, pass to the beginnings of his actual literary life and to the history of his early married years. The literature a little preceded the life; but the life certainly determined the growth of the literature. FOOTNOTES: [1] His friend Shortreed's well-known expression for the results of the later Liddesdale 'raids.' [2] See General Preface to the Novels, or Lockhart, i. 136. [3] He attributes to Lady Balcarres the credit of being his earliest patroness, and of giving him, when a mere shy boy, the run of her drawing-room and of her box at the theatre. [4] He himself, in his entries of his children's births, always gives the order of the names as Margaret Charlotte. [5] The Boar of the Forest seems, not unnaturally, to have had a rather less warm 'cradle' in Lady Scott's feelings. She thought he took liberties; and though he meant no harm, he certainly did. [6] Lockhart, i. 270. I quote, as is usual, the second or ten-volume edition. But, for reading, some may prefer the first, in which the number of the volumes coincides with their real division, which has the memories of the death of Sophia Scott and others connected with its course, and to which the second made fewer positive additions than may be thought.--[It has been pointed out to me in reference to the word 'whomle' on the opposite page that Fergusson has 'whumble' in 'The Rising of the Session.' But if Scott had quoted, would he have altered the spelling? The Grassmarket story, moreover, exactly corresponds to his words, 'as a gudewife would whomle a bowie.'] CHAPTER II EARLY LITERARY WORK It is pretty universally known, and must have been perceived even from the foregoing summary, that Scott was by no means a very precocious writer. He takes rank, indeed, neither with those who, according to a famous phrase, 'break out threescore thousand strong' in youth; nor with those who begin original composition betimes, and by degrees arrive at excellence; nor yet with those who do not display any aptitude for letters till late in life. His class--a fourth, which, at least as regards the greater names of literature, is perhaps the smallest of all--comprises those who may almost be said to drift into literary work and literary fame, whose first production is not merely tentative and unoriginal, but, so to speak, accidental, who do not discover their real faculty for literary work till after a pretty long course of casual literary play. Part of this was no doubt due to the fact--vouched for sufficiently, and sufficiently probable, though not, so far as I know, resting on any distinct and firsthand documentary evidence--that Walter Scott the elder had, even more than his _eidolon_ the elder Fairford, that horror of literary employment on the part of his son which was for generations a tradition among persons of business, and which is perhaps not quite extinct yet. For this opposition, as is well known, rather stimulates than checks, even in dutiful offspring, the noble rage. It was due partly, perhaps, to a metaphysical cause--the fact that until Scott was well past his twentieth year, the wind of the spirit was not yet blowing, that the new poetical and literary day had not yet dawned; and partly to a more commonplace reason or set of reasons. About 1790 literary work was extremely badly paid;[11] and, even if it had been paid better, Scott had no particular need of money. Till his marriage he lived at home, spent his holidays with friends, or on tours where the expenses were little or nothing, and obtained sufficient pocket-money, first by copying while he was still apprenticed to his father, then by his fees when he was called. He could, as he showed later, spend money royally when he had it or thought he had it; but he was a man of no extravagant tastes of the ordinary kind, and Edinburgh was not in his days at all an extravagant place of living. Even when he married, he was by no means badly off. His wife, though not exactly an heiress, had means which had been estimated at five hundred a year, and which seem never to have fallen below two hundred; Scott's fees averaged about another two hundred; he evidently had an allowance from his father (who had been very well off, and was still not poor), and before very long the Sheriffship of Selkirkshire added three hundred more, though he seems to have made this an excuse for giving up practice, which he had never much liked. His father's death in 1799 put him in possession of some property; legacies from relations added more. Before the publication of the _Lay_ (when he was barely three-and-thirty), Lockhart estimates his income, leaving fees and literary work out of the question, at nearly if not quite a thousand a year; and a thousand a year at the beginning of the century went as far as fifteen hundred, if not two thousand, at its close. Thus, with no necessity to live by his pen, with no immediate or extraordinary temptation to use it for gain, and as yet, it would seem, with no overmastering inducement from his genius to do so, while he at no time of his life felt any stimulus from vanity, it is not surprising that it was long before Scott began to write in earnest. A few childish verse translations and exercises of his neither encourage nor forbid any particular expectations of literature from him; they are neither better nor worse than those of hundreds, probably thousands, of boys every year. His first published performance, now of extreme rarity, and not, of course, produced with any literary object, was his Latin call-thesis on the rather curious subject (which has been, not improbably, supposed to be connected with his German studies and the terror-literature of the last decade of the century) of the disposal of the dead bodies of legally executed persons. His first English work was directly the result of the said German studies, to which, like many of his contemporaries, he had been attracted by fashion. It consisted of nothing more than the well-known translations of Bürger's _Lenore_ and _Wild Huntsman_, which were issued in a little quarto volume by Manners & Miller of Edinburgh, in October 1796--a date which has the special interest of suggesting that Scott sought some refuge in literature from the agony of his rejection by Miss Stuart. These well-known translations, or rather imitations, the first published under the title of _William and Helen_, which it retains, the other as _The Chase_, which was subsequently altered to the better and more literal rendering, show unmistakably the result of the study of ballads, both in the printed forms and as orally delivered. Some crudities of rhyme and expression are said to have been corrected at the instance of one of Scott's (at this time rather numerous) Egerias, the beautiful wife of his kinsman, Scott of Harden, a young lady partly of German extraction, but of the best English breeding. Slight books of the kind, even translations, made a great deal more mark sometimes in those days than they would in these; but there were a great many translations of _Lenore_ about, and except by Scott's friends, little notice was taken of the volume. There were some excuses for the neglect, the best perhaps being that English criticism at the time was at nearly as low an ebb as English poetry. A really acute critic could hardly have mistaken the difference between Scott's verse and the fustian or tinsel of the Della Cruscans, the frigid rhetoric of Darwin, or the drivel of Hayley. Only Southey had as yet written ballad verses with equal vigour and facility; and, I think, he had not yet published any of them. It is Scott who tells us that he borrowed 'Tramp, tramp, along the land they rode, Splash, splash, along the sea,' from Taylor of Norwich; but Taylor himself had the good taste to see how much it was improved by the completion-- 'The scourge is red, the spur drops blood, _The fashing pebbles flee_'-- which last line, indeed, Coleridge himself hardly bettered in the not yet written _Ancient Mariner_, the _ne plus ultra_ of the style. It must be mainly a question of individual taste whether the sixes and eights of the _Lenore_ version or the continued eights of the _Huntsman_ please most. But any one who knows what the present state of British poetry was in October 1796 will be more than indifferently well satisfied with either. It was never Scott's way to be cast down at the failure or the neglect of any of his work; nor does he seem to have been ever actuated by the more masculine but perhaps equally childish determination to 'do it again' and 'shame the fools.' It seems quite on the cards that he might have calmly acquiesced in want of notoriety, and have continued a mere literary lawyer, with a pretty turn or verse and a great amount of reading, if his most intimate friend, William Erskine, had not met 'Monk' Lewis in London, and found him anxious for contributions to his _Tales of Wonder_. Lewis was a coxcomb, a fribble, and the least bit in the world of a snob: his _Monk_ is not very clean fustian, and most of his other work rubbish. But he was, though not according to knowledge, a sincere Romantic; he had no petty jealousy in matters literary; and, above all, he had, as Scott recognised, but as has not been always recognised since, a really remarkable and then novel command of flowing but fairly strict lyrical measures, the very things needed to thaw the frost of the eighteenth-century couplet. Erskine offered, and Lewis gladly accepted, contributions from Scott, and though _Tales of Wonder_ were much delayed, and did not appear till 1801, the project directly caused the production of Scott's first original work in ballad, _Glenfinlas_ and _The Eve of St. John_, as well as the less important pieces of the _Fire King_, _Frederick and Alice_, etc. In _Glenfinlas_ and _The Eve_ the real Scott first shows, and the better of the two is the second. It is not merely that, though Scott had a great liking for and much proficiency in 'eights,' that metre is never so effective for ballad purposes as eights and sixes; nor that, as Lockhart admits, _Glenfinlas_ exhibits a Germanisation which is at the same time an adulteration; nor even that, well as Scott knew the Perthshire Highlands, they could not appeal to him with the same subtle intimacy of touch as that possessed by the ruined tower where, as a half-paralysed infant, he had been herded with the lambs. But all these causes together, and others, join to produce a freer effect in _The Eve_. The eighteenth century is farther off; the genuine mediæval inspiration is nearer. And it is especially noticeable that, as in most of the early performances of the great poetical periods, an alteration of metrical etiquette (as we may call it) plays a great part. Scott had not yet heard that recitation of _Christabel_ which had so great an effect on his work, and through it on the work of others. But he had mastered for himself, and by study of the originals, the secret of the _Christabel_ metre, that is to say, the wide licence of equivalence in trisyllabic and dissyllabic feet,[10] of metre catalectic or not, as need was, of anacrusis and the rest. As is natural to a novice, he rather exaggerates his liberties, especially in the cases where the internal rhyme seduces him. It is necessary not merely to slur, but to gabble, in order to get some of these into proper rhythm, while in other places the mistake is made of using so many anapæsts that the metre becomes, not as it should be, iambic, with anapæsts for variation, but anapæstic without even a single iamb. But these are 'sma' sums, sma' sums,' as saith his own Bailie Jarvie, and on the whole the required effect of vigour and variety, of narrative giving place to terror and terror to narrative is capitally achieved. Above all, in neither piece, in the less no more than in the more successful, do we find anything of what the poet has so well characterised in one of his early reviews as the 'spurious style of tawdry and affected simplicity which trickles through the legendary ditties' of the eighteenth century. 'The hunt is up' in earnest; and we are chasing the tall deer in the open hills, not coursing rabbits with toy terriers on a bowling-green. The writing of these pieces had, however, been preceded by the publication of Scott's second volume, the translation of _Goetz von Berlichingen_, for which Lewis had arranged with a London bookseller, so that this time the author was not defrauded of his hire. He received twenty-five guineas, and was to have as much more for a second edition, which the short date of copyright forestalled. The book appeared in February 1799, and received more attention than the ballads, though, as Lockhart saw, it was in fact belated, the brief English interest in German _Sturm und Drang_ having ceased directly, though indirectly it gave Byron much of his hold on the public a dozen years later. At about the same time Scott executed, but did not publish, an original, or partly original, dramatic work of the same kind, _The House of Aspen_, which he contributed thirty years later to _The Keepsake_. Few good words have ever been said for this, and perhaps not many persons have ever cared much for the _Goetz_, either in the original or in the translation. Goethe did not, in drama at least, understand adventurous matter, and Scott had no grasp of dramatic form.[9] It has been said that there was considerable delay in the publication of the _Tales of Wonder_; and some have discussed what direct influence this delay had on Scott's further and further advance into the waters of literature. It is certain that he at one time thought of publishing his contributions independently, and that he did actually print a few copies of them privately; and it is extremely probable that his little experiments in publication, mere _hors-d'oeuvre_ as they were, had whetted his appetite. Even the accident of his friend Ballantyne's having taken to publishing a newspaper, and having room at his press for what I believe printers profanely call 'job-work,' may not have been without influence. What is certain is that the project of editing a few Border ballads--a selection of his collection which might make 'a neat little volume of four or five shillings'--was formed roughly in the late autumn of 1799, and had taken very definite shape by April 1800. Heber, the great bibliophile and brother of the Bishop, introduced Scott to that curious person Leyden, whose gifts, both original and erudite, are undoubted, although perhaps his exile and early death have not hurt their fame. And it so happened that Leyden was both an amateur of old ballads and (for the two things went together then, though they are sternly kept apart now) a skilful fabricator of new. The impetuous Borderer pooh-poohed a 'thin thing' such as a four or five shilling book, and Scott, nothing loath, extended his project. Most of his spare time during 1800 and 1801 was spent on it; and besides corresponding with the man who 'fished this murex up,' Bishop Percy, he entered into literary relations with Joseph Ritson. Even Ritson's waspish character seems to have been softened by Scott's courtesy, and perhaps even more by the joint facts that he had as yet attained no literary reputation, and neither at this nor at any other time gave himself literary airs. He also made the acquaintance of George Ellis, who became a warm and intimate friend. These were the three men of the day who, since Warton's death, knew most of early English poetry, and though Percy was too old to help, the others were not. The scheme grew and grew, especially by the inclusion in it of the publication not merely of ballads, but of the romance of _Sir Tristrem_ (of the authorship of which by someone else than Thomas the Rhymer, Scott never would be convinced), till the neat four or five shilling volume was quite out of the question. When at last the two volumes of the first (Kelso) edition appeared in 1802, not merely was _Sir Tristrem_ omitted, but much else which, still without 'the knight who fought for England,' subsequently appeared in a third. The earliest form of the _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_ is a very pretty book; it deservedly established the fame of Ballantyne as a printer, and as it was not printed in the huge numbers which have reduced the money value of Sir Walter's later books, it is rather surprising that it is not more sought after than it is at present. My copy--I do not know whether by exception or not--wears the rather unusual livery of pink boards instead of the common blue, grey, or drab. The paper and type are excellent; the printing (with a few slips in the Latin quotations such as _concedunt_ for _comedunt_) is very accurate, and the frontispiece, a view of Hermitage Castle in the rain, has the interest of presenting what is said to have been a very faithful view of the actual state of Lord Soulis' stronghold and the place of the martyrdom of Ramsay, attained by the curious stages of (1) a drawing by Scott, who could not draw at all; (2) a rifacimento by Clerk, who had never seen the place; and (3) an engraving by an artist who was equally innocent of local knowledge. The book, however, which brought in the modest profit of rather less than eighty pounds, would have been of equal moment under whatever guise it had pleased to assume. The shock of Percy's _Reliques_ was renewed, and in a far more favourable atmosphere, before a far better prepared audience. The public indeed had not yet been 'ground-baited' up to the consummation of thousands of copies of poetry as they were later by Scott himself and Byron; but an edition of eight hundred copies went off in the course of the year, and a second, with the additional volume, was at once called for. It contained, indeed, not much original verse, though 'Glenfinlas' and 'The Eve,' with Leyden's 'Cout of Keeldar,' 'Lord Soulis,' etc., appeared in it after a fashion which Percy had set and Evans had continued. But the ballads, familiar as they have become since, not merely in the _Minstrelsy_ itself, but in a hundred fresh collections, selections, and what not, could never be mistaken by anyone fitted to appreciate them. 'The Outlaw Murray,' with its rub-a-dub of _e_ rhymes throughout, opens the book very cunningly, with something not of the best, but good enough to excite expectation,--an expectation surely not to be disappointed by the immortal agony (dashed with one stroke of magnificent wrath) of 'Helen of Kirkconnell,' the bustle, frolic, and battle-joy of the Border pieces proper, the solemn notes of 'The Lyke-Wake Dirge,' the eeriness of 'Clerk Saunders' and 'The Wife of Usher's Well.' Even Percy had not been lucky enough to hit upon anything so characteristic of the _average_ ballad style at its best as the opening stanza of 'Fause Foodrage'-- 'King Easter courted her for her lands, King Wester for her fee, King Honour for her comely face And for her fair bodie'; and Percy would no doubt have been tempted to 'polish' such more than average touches as Margaret's 'turning,' without waking, in the arms of her lover as he receives his deathblow, or as the incomparable stanza in 'The Wife of Usher's Well' which tells how-- 'By the gates of Paradise That birk grew fair enough.' Those who study literature in what they are pleased to call a scientific manner have, as was to be expected, found fault (mildly or not, according to their degree of sense and taste) with Scott, for the manner in which he edited these ballads. It may be admitted that the practice of mixing imitations with originals is a questionable one; and that in some other cases, Scott, though he was far from the illegitimate and tasteless fashion of alteration, of which in their different ways Allan Ramsay and Percy himself had set the example, was not always up to the highest lights on this subject of editorial faithfulness. It must, for instance, seem odd to the least pedantic nowadays that he should have thought proper to print Dryden's _Virgil_ with Dr. Somebody's pedantic improvements instead of Dryden's own text. But the case of the ballads is very different. Here, it must be remembered, there is no authentic original at all. Even in the rare cases, where very early printed or MS. copies exist, we not only do not know that these are the originals, we have every reasonable reason for being pretty certain that they are not. In the case of ballads taken down from repetition, we know as a matter of certainty that, according to the ordinary laws of human nature, the reciter has altered the text which he or she heard, that that text was in its day and way altered by someone else, and so on almost _ad infinitum_. 'Mrs. Brown's version,' therefore, or Mr. Smith's, or Mr. Anybody's, has absolutely no claims to sacrosanctity. It is well, no doubt, that all such versions should be collected by someone (as in this case by Professor Child) who has the means, the time, and the patience. But for the purposes of reading, for the purposes of poetic enjoyment, such a collection is nearly valueless. We must have it for reference, of course; nobody grudges the guineas he has spent for the best part of the last twenty years on Professor Child's stately, if rather cumbrous, volumes. But who can _read_ a dozen versions, say, of 'The Queen's Marie' with any pleasure? What is exquisite in one is watered, messed, spoiled by the others. Therefore I shall maintain that though the most excellent way of all might have been to record his alterations, and the original, in an appendix-dustbin of _apparatus criticus_, Scott was right, and trebly right, in such dealing as that with the first stanza of 'Fause Foodrage,' which I have quoted and praised. That stanza, as it stands above, does not occur in any of the extant quasi-originals. 'Mrs. Brown's MS.,' from which, as Professor Child says, with almost silent reproach, Scott took his text, 'with some forty small changes,' reads-- 'King Easter has courted her for her gowd, King Wester for her fee, King Honour for her lands sae braid, And for her fair bodie.' Now this is clearly wrong. Either 'gowd' or 'lands' is a mere repetition of 'fee,' and if not,[8] the reading does not point any ethical antithesis between Kings Easter and Wester and their more chivalrous rival. As it happens, there are two other versions, shorter and less dramatic, but one of them distinctly giving, the other implying, the sense of Scott's alteration. Therefore I say that Scott was fully justified in adjusting the one text that he did print, especially as he did it in his own right way, and not in the wrong one of Percy and Mickle. There is here no Bentleian impertinence, no gratuitous meddling with the at least possibly genuine text of a known and definite author. The editor simply picks out of the mud, and wipes clean, something precious, which has been defaced by bad usage, and has become masterless. The third volume of the _Minstrelsy_ was pretty speedily got ready, with more matter; and _Sir Tristrem_ (which is in a way a fourth) was not very long in following. This last part contained a _tour de force_ in the shape of a completion of the missing part by Scott himself, a completion which, of course, shocks philologists, but which was certainly never written for them, and possesses its own value for others. Not the least part of the interest of the _Minstrelsy_ itself was the editor's appearance as a prose-writer. Percy had started, and others down to Ritson had continued, the practice of interspersing verse collections with dissertations in prose; and while the first volume of the _Minstrelsy_ contained a long general introduction of more than a hundred pages, and most of the ballads had separate prefaces of more or less length, the preface to 'Young Tamlane' turned itself into a disquisition on fairy lore, which, being printed in small type, is probably not much shorter than the general introduction. In these pieces (the Fairy essay is said to be based on information partly furnished by Leyden) all the well-known characteristics of Scott's prose style appear--its occasional incorrectness, from the strictly scholastic point of view, as well as its far more than counterbalancing merits of vivid presentation, of arrangement, not orderly in appearance but curiously effective in result, of multifarious facts and reading, of the bold pictorial vigour of its narrative, of its pleasant humour, and its incessant variety. Nor was this the only opportunity for exercising himself in the medium which, even more than verse, was to be his, that the earliest years of the century afforded to Scott. The _Edinburgh Review_, as everybody knows, was started in 1802. Although its politics were not Scott's, they were for some years much less violently put forward and exclusively enforced than was the case later; indeed, the Whig Review started with much the same ostensible policy as the Whig Deliverer a century before, the policy, at least in declared intention, of using both parties as far as might be for the public good. The attempt, if made _bona fide_, was not more successful in one case than in the other; but it at least permitted Tories to enlist under the blue-and-yellow banner. The standard-bearer, Jeffrey, moreover, was a very old, an intimate, and a never-quite-to-be-divorced friend of Scott's. At a later period, Scott's contributions to periodicals attained an excellence which has been obscured by the fame of the poems and novels together, even more unjustly than the poems have been obscured by the novels alone. His reviews at this time on Southey's _Amadis_, on Godwin's _Chaucer_, on Ellis's _Specimens_, etc., are a little crude and amateurish, especially in the direction (well known, to those who have ever had to do with editing, as a besetting sin of novices) of substituting a mere account of the book, with a few expressions of like and dislike, for a grasped and reasoned criticism of it. But this is far less peculiar to them than those who have not read the early numbers of the great reviews may suppose. The fact is that Jeffrey himself, Sydney Smith, Scott, and others were only feeling for the principles and practice of reviewing, as they themselves later, and the brilliant second generation of Carlyle and Macaulay, De Quincey and Lockhart, were to carry it out. Perhaps the very best specimens of Scott's powers in this direction are the prefaces which he contributed much later and gratuitously to John Ballantyne's _Novelists' Library_--things which hardly yield to Johnson's _Lives_ as examples of the combined arts of criticism and biography. At the time of which we speak he was 'making himself' in this direction as in others. I hope that Jeffrey and not he was responsible for a fling at Mary Woollstonecraft in the Godwin article, which would have been ungenerous in any case, and which in this was unpardonable. But there is nothing else to object to, and the _Amadis_ review in particular is a very interesting one. We must now look back a little, so as to give a brief sketch of Scott's domestic life, from his marriage until the publication of _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, which, with that of _Waverley_ and the crash of 1825-26, supplies the three turning-points of his career. After a very brief sojourn in lodgings (where the landlady was shocked at Mrs. Scott's habit of sitting constantly in her drawing-room), the young couple took up their abode in South Castle Street. Hence, not very long afterwards, they moved to the house--the famous No. 39--in the northern division of the same street, which continued to be her home for the rest of her Edinburgh life, and Scott's so long as he could afford a house in Edinburgh. Their first child was born on the 14th of October 1798, but did not live many hours. As was (and for the matter of that is) much more customary with Edinburgh residents, even of moderate means, than it has been for at least a century with Londoners, Scott, while his own income was still very modest, took a cottage at Lasswade in the neighbourhood. Here he lived during the summer for years; and in March 1799 he and his wife went to London, for the first time in his case since he had been almost a baby. His father died during this visit, after a painful breakdown, which is said to have suggested the touching particulars of the deathbed of Chrystal Croftangry's benefactor (not 'the elder Croftangry,' as is said in a letter quoted by Lockhart), and was repeated to some extent in Scott's own case. His appointment to the Sheriff[depute]ship of Selkirkshire was made in December 1799, and gave, for light work, three hundred a year. It need not have interfered with even an active practice at the Bar had such fallen to him, and at first did not impose on him even a partial residence. The Lord-Lieutenant, however, Lord Napier of Ettrick, insisted on this, and though Scott rather resented a strictness which seems not to have been universal, he had to comply. He did not, however, do so at once, and during the last year of the century and its two successors, Lasswade and Castle Street were Scott's habitats, with various radiations; while in the spring of 1803 he and Mrs. Scott repeated their visit to London and extended it to Oxford. It is not surprising to read his confession in sad days, a quarter of a century later, of the 'ecstatic feeling' with which he first saw this, the place in all the island which was his spiritual home. The same year saw the alarm of invasion which followed the resumption of hostilities after the armistice of Amiens; and Scott's attention to his quartermastership, which he still held, seems to have given Lord Napier the idea that he was devoting himself, not only _tam Marti quam Mercurio_, but to Mars rather at Mercury's expense.[7] Scott, however, was never fond of being dictated to, and he and his wife were still at Lasswade when the Wordsworths visited them in the autumn, though Scott accompanied them to his sheriffdom on their way back to Westmoreland. He had not yet wholly given up practice, and though its rewards were not munificent, they reached about this time, it would seem, their maximum sum of £218, which, in the days of his fairy-money, he must often have earned by a single morning's work. Lord Napier, by no means improperly (for it was a legal requirement, though often evaded, that four months' residence per annum should be observed), persisted; and Scott, after a pleasing but impracticable dream of taking up his summer residence in the Tower of Harden itself, which was offered to him, took a lease of Ashestiel, a pleasant country house,--'a decent farmhouse,' he calls it, in his usual way,--the owner of which was his relation, and absent in India. The place was not far from Selkirk, on the banks of the Tweed and in the centre of the Buccleuch country. He seems to have settled there by the end of July 1804. The family, after leaving it for the late autumn session in Edinburgh, returned at Christmas, by which time _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, though not actually published, was printed and ready. It was issued in the first week of the new year 1805, being, except Wordsworth's and Coleridge's, the first book published, which was distinctly and originally characteristic of the new poetry of the nineteenth century. FOOTNOTES: [7] Not many years before, Johnson had denied that it was possible for a working man of letters to earn even _six_ guineas a sheet (the _Edinburgh_ began at ten and proceeded to a minimum of sixteen), '_communibus sheetibus_,' as he put it jocularly to Boswell. Southey, in the year of Scott's marriage, seems to have thought about ten shillings (certainly not more) 'not amiss' for a morning's work in reviewing. [8] For an interesting passage showing how slow contemporary ears were to admit this, see Southey's excellent defence of his own practice to Wynn (_Letters_, i. 69). [9] His attempts at the kind may best be despatched in a note here. Their want of merit contrasts strangely with the admirable quality of the 'Old Play' fragments scattered about the novels. _Halidon Hill_ (1822), in the subject of which Scott had an ancestral interest from his Swinton blood, reminds one much more of Joanna Baillie than of its author. _Macduff's Cross_ (1823), a very brief thing, is still more like Joanna, was dedicated to her, and appeared in a miscellany which she edited for a charitable purpose. _The Doom of Devorgoil_, written for Terry in the first 'cramp' attack of 1817, but not published till 1830, has a fine supernatural subject, but hardly any other merit. _Auchindrane_, the last, is by far the best. [10] It is quite possible that Mrs. Brown's illiterate authority, or one of his predecessors in title, took 'fee' in the _third_ sense of 'cattle.' [11] He wrote for his corps the 'War Song of the Edinburgh Light Dragoons,' which appeared in the _Scots Magazine_ for 1802, but was written earlier. It is good, but not so good as it would have been a few years later. CHAPTER III THE VERSE ROMANCES Although Scott was hard upon his thirty-fifth year when the _Lay_ appeared, and although he had already a considerable literary reputation in Edinburgh, and some in London, the amount of his original publications was then but small. Indeed, on the austere principles of those who deny 'originality' to such things as reviews, or as the essays in the _Minstrelsy_, it must be limited to a mere handful, though of very pleasant delights, the half-dozen of ballads made up by 'Glenfinlas,' 'The Eve of St. John,' the rather inferior 'Fire King,' the beautiful 'Cadzow Castle' (not yet mentioned, but containing some of its author's most charming _topic_ lines), the fragment of 'The Grey Brother,' and a few minor pieces. With the _Lay_ he took an entirely different position. The mere bulk of the poem was considerable; and, putting for the instant entirely out of question its peculiarities of subject, metre, and general treatment, it was a daring innovation in point of class. The eighteenth century had, even under its own laws and conditions, distinctly eschewed long narrative poems, the unreadable epics of Glover, for instance, belonging to that class of exception which really does prove the rule. Pope's _Rape_ had been burlesque, and his _Dunciad_, satire; hardly the ghost of a narrative had appeared in Thomson and Young; Shenstone, Collins, Gray, had nothing _de longue haleine_; the entire poetical works of Goldsmith probably do not exceed in length a canto of the Lay; Cowper had never attempted narrative; Crabbe was resting on the early laurels of his brief _Village_, etc., and had not begun his tales. _Thalaba_, indeed, had been published, and no doubt was not without effect on Scott himself; but it was not popular, and the author was still under the sway of the craze against rhyme. To all intents and purposes the poet was addressing the public, in a work combining the attractions of fiction with the attractions of verse at considerable length, for the first time since Dryden had done so in his _Fables_, a hundred and five years before. And though the mastery of the method might be less, the stories were original, they were continuous, and they displayed an entirely new gust and seasoning both of subject and of style. There can be no doubt at all, for those who put metre in its proper place, that a very large, perhaps the much larger, part of the appeal of the _Lay_ was metrical. The public was sick of the couplet--had indeed been sickened twice over, if the abortive revolt of Gray and Collins be counted. It did not take, and was quite right in not taking, to the rhymeless, shortened Pindaric of Sayers and Southey, as to anything but an eccentric 'sport' of poetry. What Scott had to offer was practically new, or at least novel. It is universally known--and Scott, who was only too careless of his own claims, and the very last of men to steal or conceal those of others, made no secret of it--that the suggestion of the _Lay_ in metre came from a private recitation or reading of Coleridge's _Christabel_, written in the year of Scott's marriage, but not published till twenty years later, and more than ten after the appearance of the _Lay_. Coleridge seems to have regarded Scott's priority with an irritability less suitable to his philosophic than to his poetical character.[16] But he had, in the first place, only himself, if anybody, to blame; in the second, Scott more than made the loan his own property by the variations executed on its motive; and in the third, Coleridge's original right was far less than he seems to have honestly thought, and than most people have guilelessly assumed since. For the iambic dimeter, freely altered by the licences of equivalence, anacrusis, and catalexis, though not recently practised in English when _Christabel_ and the _Lay_ set the example, is an inevitable result of the clash between accented, alliterative, asyllabic rhythm and quantitative, exactly syllabic metre, which accompanied the transformation of Anglo-Saxon into English. We have distinct approaches to it in the thirteenth century _Genesis_; it attains considerable development in Spenser's _The Oak and the Brere_; anybody can see that the latter part of Milton's _Comus_ was written under the breath of its spirit. But it had not hitherto been applied on any great scale, and the delusions under which the eighteenth century laboured as to the syllabic restrictions of English poetry had made it almost impossible that it should be. At the same time, that century, by its lighter practice on the one hand in the octosyllable, on the other in the four-footed anapæstic, was making the way easier for those who dared a little: and Coleridge first, then Scott, did the rest. We have seen that in some of his early ballad work Scott had a little overdone the licence of equivalence, but this had probably been one of the formal points on which, as we know, the advice of Lewis, no poet but a remarkably good metrist, had been of use to him. And he acquitted himself now in a manner which, if it never quite attains the weird charm of _Christabel_ itself at its best, is more varied, better sustained, and, above all, better suited to the story-telling which was, of course, Scott's supremest gift. It is very curious to compare Coleridge's remarks on Scott's verse with those of Wordsworth, in reference to the _White Doe of Rylstone_. Neither in _Christabel_, nor in the _White Doe_, is there a real _story_ really told. Coleridge, but for his fatal weaknesses, undoubtedly could have told such a story; it is pretty certain that Wordsworth could not. But Scott could tell a story as few other men who have ever drawn breath on the earth could tell it. He had been distinguished in the conversational branch of the art from his youth up, and though it was to be long before he could write a story in prose, he showed now, at the first attempt, how he could write one in verse. Construction, of course, was not his forte; it never was. The plot of the _Lay_, if not exactly non-existent, is of the simplest and loosest description; the whole being in effect a series of episodes strung together by the loves of Margaret and Cranstoun and the misdeeds of the Goblin Page. Even the Book supplies no real or necessary _nexus_. But the romance proper has never required elaborate construction, and has very rarely, if ever, received it. A succession of engaging or exciting episodes, each plausibly joined to each, contents its easy wants; and such a succession is liberally provided here. So, too, it does not require strict character-drawing--a gift with which Scott was indeed amply provided, but which he did not exhibit, and had no call to exhibit, here. If the personages will play their parts, that is enough. And they all play them very well here, though the hero and heroine do certainly exhibit something of that curious nullity which has been objected to the heroes nearly always, the heroines too frequently, of the later prose novels. But even those critics who, as too many critics are wont to do, forgot and forget that 'the prettiest girl in the world' not only cannot give, but ought not to be asked to give, more than she has, must have been, and must be, very unreasonable if they find fault with the subject and stuff of the _Lay_. Jeffrey's remark about 'the present age not enduring' the Border and mosstrooping details was contradicted by the fact, and was, as a matter of taste, one of those strange blunders which diversified his often admirably acute critical utterances. When he feared their effects on '_English_ readers,' he showed himself, as was not common with him, actually ignorant of one of the simplest general principles of the poetic appeal, that is to say, the element of _strangeness_. But we must not criticise criticism here, and must only add that another great appeal, that of variety, is amply given, as well as that of unfamiliarity. The graceful and touching, if a little conventional, overture of the Minstrel introduces with the truest art the vigorous sketch of Branksome Tower. The spirits of flood and fell are allowed to impress and not allowed to bore us; for the quickest of changes is made to Deloraine's ride--a kind of thing in which Scott never failed, even in his latest and saddest days. The splendid Melrose opening of the Second Canto supports itself through the discovery of the Book, and finds due contrast in the description (or no-description) of the lovers' meeting; the fight and the Goblin Page's misbehaviour and punishment (to all, at least, but those, surely few now, who are troubled by the Jeffreyan sense of 'dignity'), the decoying and capture of young Buccleuch, and the warning of the clans are certainly no ungenerous provision for the Third; nor the clan anecdotes (especially the capital episode of the Beattisons), the parley, the quarrel of Howard and Dacre, and the challenge, for the Fourth. There is perhaps less in the Fifth, for Scott seems to have been afraid of another fight in detail; but the description of the night before, and the famous couplet-- 'I'd give the lands of Deloraine Dark Musgrave were alive again'-- would save it if there were nothing else, as there is much. And if the actual conclusion has no great interest (Scott was never good at conclusions, as we shall find Lady Louisa Stuart telling him frankly later), the Sixth Canto is full, and more than full, of brilliant things--the feast, the Goblin's tricks, his carrying-off, the pilgrimage, and, above all, the songs, especially 'Rosabelle' and the version of the 'Dies Iræ.' The mention of these last may fairly introduce a few words on the formal and metrical characteristics of the poem, remarks which perhaps some readers resent, but which must nevertheless be made, inasmuch as they are to my mind by far the most important part of poetical criticism. Scott evidently arranged his scheme of metre with extreme care here, though it is possible that after this severe exercise he let it take care of itself to some extent later. His introduction is in the strict octosyllable, with only such licences of slur or elision-- 'The pi | _tying Duch_ | ess praised its chime,' '_He had played_ | it to King Charles the Good'-- as the greatest precisians might have allowed themselves. But the First Canto breaks at once into the full licence, not merely of equivalence,--that is to say, of substituting an anapæst or a trochee for an iamb,--but of shifting the base and rhythm of any particular verse, or of set batches of verses, between the three ground-feet, and, further, of occasionally introducing sixes, as in the ballad metre, and even fours-- 'Bards long | shall tell How Lord Wal | ter fell,' instead of the usual eights. In similar fashion he varies the rhymes, passing as the subject or the accompaniment of the word-music may require, from the couplet to the quatrain, and from the quatrain to the irregularly rhymed 'Pindaric'; always, however, taking care that, except in the set lyric, the quatrain shall not fall too much into definite stanza, but be interlaced in sense or sound sufficiently to carry on the narrative. The result, to some tastes, is a medium quite unsurpassed for the particular purpose. The only objection to it at all capable of being maintained, that I can think of, is that the total effect is rather lyrical than epic. And so much of this must be perhaps allowed as comes to granting that Scott's verse-romance is rather a long and cunningly sustained and varied ballad than an epic proper. The _Lay_, though not received with quite that eager appetite for poetry which Scott was 'born to introduce,' and of which he lived long enough to see the glutting, had a large and immediate sale. The author, not yet aware what a gold mine his copyrights were, parted with this after the first edition, and received in all rather less than £770, a sum trifling in comparison with his after gains; but probably the largest that had as yet been received by any English poet for a single volume not published by subscription. It is curious that, at the estimated rate of three for one in comparing the value of money at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the sum almost exactly equals that paid by Tonson for Dryden's _Fables_, the last book, before the _Lay_ itself, which had united popularity, merit, and bulk in English verse. But Dryden was the acknowledged head of English literature at the time, and Scott was a mere beginner. He was probably even better pleased with the quality of the praise than with the quantity of the pudding. For though professional criticism, then in no very vigorous state, said some silly things, it was generally favourable; and a saying of Pitt (most indifferent, as a rule, of all Prime Ministers to English literature) is memorable not merely as summing up the general impression, but as defining what that impression was in a fashion quite invaluable to the student of literary history. The Pilot that Weathered the Storm, it seems, said of the description of the Minstrel's hesitation before playing, 'This is a sort of thing I might have expected in painting, but could never have fancied capable of being given by poetry.' To the present generation and the last, the reverse expression would probably seem more natural. We say, of Mr. Watts or of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, that they have put, in 'Love and Death' or in 'Love among the Ruins,' what we might have expected from poetry, but could hardly have thought possible in painting. But a hundred years of studious convention and generality, of deliberate avoidance of the poignant, and the vivid, and the detailed, and the coloured in poetry had made Pitt's confession as natural as another hundred years of contrary practice from Coleridge to Rossetti have made ours. The publication of the _Lay_ immediately preceded, and perhaps its success had no small share in deciding, the most momentous and unfortunate step of Scott's life, his entry into partnership with James Ballantyne. The discussion of the whole of this business will best be postponed till the date of its catastrophe is reached, but a few words may be said on the probable reasons for it. Much, no doubt, was the result of that combination of incalculable things which foolish persons of one kind call mere chance, of which foolish persons of another kind deny the existence, and which wise men term, from different but not irreconcilable points of view, Providence, or Luck, or Fate. But a little can be cleared up. Scott had evidently made up his mind that he should not succeed at the Bar, and had also persuaded himself that the very success of the _Lay_ had made failure certain. The ill success of his brother Thomas, with the writer's business inherited from their father, perhaps inconvenienced and no doubt frightened him. In fact, though his harsher judges are wrong in attributing to him any undue haste to be rich, he certainly does seem to have been under a dread of being poor; a dread no doubt not wholly intelligible and partly morbid in a young man still under thirty-five, with brilliant literary and some legal prospects, who had, independently of fees, literary or legal, a secured income of about a thousand a year. He probably thought, and was right in thinking, that the book trade was going to 'look up' to a degree previously unknown; he seems throughout to have been under one of those inexplicable attractions towards the Ballantynes which now and then exist, as Hobbes says, 'in the greater towards the meaner, but not contrary'; and perhaps there was another cause which has not been usually allowed for enough. Good Christian and good-natured man as he was, Scott was exceedingly proud; and though joining himself with persons of dubious social position in mercantile operations seems an odd way of pride, it had its temptations. I do not doubt but that from the first Scott intended, more or less vaguely and dimly, to extend the printing business into a publishing one, and so to free himself from any necessity of going cap-in-hand to publishers. However, for good or for ill,--I think it was mainly for ill,--for this reason or for that, the partnership was formed, at first indirectly by way of loan, then directly by further advance on security of a share in the business, and finally so that Scott became, though he did not appear, the leading partner. And the very first letter that we have of his about business shows the fatal flaw which he, the soul of honour, seems never to have detected till too late, if even then. The scheme for an edition of Dryden was already afloat, and the first editor proposed was a certain Mr. Foster, who 'howled about the expense of printing.' 'I still,' says Scott to Ballantyne, 'stick to my answer that _I know nothing of the matter_, but that, settle it how he and you will, _it must be printed by you or be no concern of mine. This gives you an advantage in driving the bargain._' Perhaps; but how about the advantage to Mr. Foster of being advised by Ballantyne's partner to employ Ballantyne, while he was innocent of the knowledge of the identity of partner and adviser, and was even told that Scott 'knew nothing of the matter'? Even before the quarrel which soon occurred with Constable established the Ballantynes--nominally the other brother John--as publishers, Scott had begun, and was constantly pressing upon the different publishing houses with which he was connected, a variety of literary schemes of the most ambitious and costly character. All these books were to be printed by Ballantyne, and many of them edited by himself; while, when the direct publishing business was added, there was no longer any check on this dangerous proceeding. It is most curious how Scott, the shrewdest and sanest of men in the vast majority of affairs, seems to have lost his head wherever books or lands were concerned. Himself both an antiquary and an antiquarian,[15] as well as a lover of literature, he seems to have taken it for granted that the same combination of tastes existed in the public to an extent which would pay all expenses, however lavishly incurred. To us, nowadays, who know how cold a face publishers turn on what we call really interesting schemes, and how often these schemes, even when fostered, miscarry or barely pay expenses,--who are aware that even the editors of literary societies, where expenses are assured beforehand, have to work for love or for merely nominal fees, simply because the public will not buy the books,--it is not so wonderful that some of Scott's schemes never got into being at all, and that others were dead losses, as that any 'got home.' His _Dryden_, an altogether admirable book, on which he lavished labour, and great part of which appealed to a still dominant prestige, may just have carried the editor's certainly not excessive fee of forty guineas a volume, or about £750 for the whole. But when one reads of twice that sum paid for the _Swift_, of £1300 for the thirteen quartos of the _Somers Papers_, and so forth, the feeling is not that the sums paid were at all too much for the work done, but that the publishers must have been very lucky men if they ever saw their money again. The two first of these schemes certainly, the third perhaps, deserved success; and still more so did a great scheme for the publication of the entire _British Poets_, to be edited by Scott and Campbell, which indeed fell through in itself, but resulted indirectly in Campbell's excellent _Specimens_ and Chalmers's invaluable if not very comely _Poets_. Even another project, a _Corpus Historicorum_, would have been magnificent, though it could hardly have been bookselling war. But the _Somers Tracts_ themselves, the _Memoirs_ and papers of Sadler, Slingsby, Carleton, Cary, etc., were of the class of book which requires subvention of some kind to prevent it from being a dead loss; and when the preventive check of the unwillingness of publishers was removed by the fatal establishment of '_John_ Ballantyne & Co.,' things became worse still. There are few better instances of the eternal irony of fate than that the author of the admirable description of the bookseller's horror at Mr. Pembroke's Sermons[14] should have permitted, should have positively caused, the publishing at what was in effect his own risk, or rather his own certainty of loss, not merely of Weber's ambitious _Beaumont and Fletcher_, but of collections of _Tixall Poetry_, _Histories of the Culdees_, Wilson's _History of James the First_, and the rest. As the beginning of 1805 saw the first birth of his real books, so the end of it saw that of the last of his children according to the flesh. His firstborn, as has been said, did not live. But Walter (born November 1799), Sophia (born October 1801), Anne (born February 1803), and Charles (born December 1805) survived infancy; and it is quite probable that these regular increases to his family, by suggesting that he might have a large one, stimulated Scott's desire to enlarge his income. As a matter of fact, however, the quartette of two boys and two girls was not exceeded. The domestic life at Castle Street and Ashestiel, from the publication of the _Lay_ to that of _Marmion_ in 1808,--indeed to that of _The Lady of the Lake_ in May 1810,--ran smoothly enough; and there can be little doubt that these five years were the happiest, and in reality the most prosperous, of Scott's life. He had at once attained great fame, and was increasing it by each successive poem; his immense intellectual activity found vent besides in almost innumerable projects, some of which were in a way successful, and some of which, if they did himself no very great good pecuniarily, did good to more or less deserving friends and _protégés_. His health had, as yet, shown no signs whatever of breaking down; he was physically in perfect condition for, and at Ashestiel he had every opportunity of indulging in, the field sports in which his soul delighted at least as much as in reading and writing; he had pleasant intervals of wandering; and, to crown it all, he was, during this period, established in reversionary prospect, if not yet in actual possession, of an income which should have put even his anxieties at rest, and which certainly might have made him dissociate himself from the dangerous and doubtful commercial enterprises in which he had engaged. This reversion was that of a Clerkship of Session, one of an honourable, well-paid, and by no means laborious group of offices which seems to have been accepted as a comely and comfortable set of shelves for advocates of ability, position, and influence, who, for this reason or that, were not making absolutely first-rate mark at the Bar. The post to which Scott was appointed was in the possession of a certain Mr. Hope, and as no retiring pension was attached to these places, it was customary to hold them on the rather uncomfortable terms of doing the work till the former holder died, without getting any money. But before many years a pension scheme was put in operation; Mr. Hope took his share of it, and Scott entered upon thirteen hundred a year in addition to his Sheriffship and to his private property, without taking any account at all of literary gains. The appointment had not actually been completed, though the patent had been signed, when the Fox and Grenville Government came in, and it so happened that the document had been so made out as to have enabled Scott, if he chose, to draw the whole salary and leave his predecessor in the cold. But this was soon set right. In the visit to London which he paid (apparently for the purpose of getting the error corrected), he made the acquaintance of the unlucky Princess of Wales, who was at this time rather a favourite with the Tories. And when he came back to Scotland, the trial of Lord Melville gave him an opportunity of distinguishing himself by a natural and very pardonable partisanship, which made his Whig friends rather sore. Politics in Edinburgh ran very high during this short break in the long Tory domination, and from it dates a story, to some minds, perhaps, one of the most interesting of all those about Scott, and connected indelibly with the scene of its occurrence. It tells how, as he was coming down the Mound with Jeffrey and another Whig, after a discussion in the Faculty of Advocates on some proposals of innovation, Jeffrey tried to laugh the difference off, and how Scott, usually stoical enough, save in point of humour, broke out with actual tears in his eyes, 'No, no! it is no laughing matter. Little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain!' He would probably have found no great reason at the other end of the century to account himself a false prophet; and he might have thought his prophecies in fair way of fulfilment not in Scotland only. During 1806 and 1807 the main occupations of Scott's leisure (if he can ever be said to have had such a thing) were the _Dryden_ and _Marmion_. The latter of these appeared in February and the former in April 1808, a perhaps unique example of an original work, and one of criticism and compilation, both of unusual bulk and excellence, appearing, with so short an interval, from the same pen. As for _Marmion_, it is surely by far the greatest, taking all constituents of poetical greatness together, of Scott's poems. It was not helped at the time, and probably never has been helped, by the author's plan of prefixing to each canto introductions of very considerable length, each addressed to one or other of his chief literary friends, and having little or nothing at all to do with the subject of the tale. Contemporaries complained that the main poem was thereby intolerably interrupted; posterity, I believe, has taken the line of ignoring the introductions altogether. This is a very great pity, for not only do they contain some of Scott's best and oftenest quoted lines, but each is a really charming piece of occasional verse, and something more, in itself. The beautiful description of Tweedside in late autumn, the dirge on Nelson, Pitt, and Fox (which last, of course, infuriated Jeffrey), and, above all, the splendid passage on the _Morte d'Arthur_ (which Scott had at this time thought of editing, but gave up to Southey) adorn the epistle to Rose; the picture of Ettrick Forest in that to Marriott is one of the best sustained things the poet ever did; the personal interest of the Erskine piece is of the highest, though it has fewer 'purple' passages, and it is well-matched with that to Skene; while the fifth to Ellis and the sixth and last to Heber nobly complete the batch. Only, though the things in this case _are_ both rich and rare, 'We wonder what the devil they do there'; and Lockhart unearthed, what Scott seems to have forgotten, the fact that they were originally intended to appear by themselves. It is a pity they did not; for, excellent as they are, they are quite out of place as interludes to a story, the serried range of which not only does not require but positively rejects them. For here, while Scott had lost little, if anything, of the formal graces of the _Lay_, he had improved immensely in grip and force. Clare may be a bread-and-butter heroine, and Wilton a milk-and-water lover, but the designs of Marmion against both give a real story-interest, which is quite absent from the _Lay_. The figure of Constance is really tragic, not melodramatic merely, and makes one regret that Scott, in his prose novels, did not repeat and vary her. All the accessories, both in incident and figure, are good, and it is almost superfluous to praise the last canto. It extorted admiration from the partisan rancour and the literary prudishness of Jeffrey; it made the disturbed dowagers of the _Critical Review_, who thought, with Rymer, that 'a hero ought to be virtuous,' mingle applause with their fie-fies; it has been the delight of every reader, not a milksop, or a faddist, or a poetical man-of-one-idea, ever since. The last canto of _Marmion_ and the last few 'Aventiuren' of the _Nibelungen Lied_ are perhaps the only things in all poetry where a set continuous battle (not a series of duels as in Homer) is related with unerring success; and the steady _crescendo_ of the whole, considering its length and intensity, is really miraculous. Nay, even without this astonishing finale, the poem that contained the opening sketch of Norham, the voyage from Whitby to Holy Island, the final speech of Constance, and the famous passage of her knell, the Host's Tale, the pictures of Crichton and the Blackford Hill view, the 'air and fire' of the 'Lochinvar' song, the phantom summons from the Cross of Edinburgh, and the parting of Douglas and Marmion, could spare half of these and still remain one of the best of its kind, while every passage so spared would be enough to distinguish any poem in which it occurred. The considerable change in the metre of _Marmion_ as compared with the _Lay_ is worth noticing. Here, as there, the 'introductions' are, for the most part, if not throughout, in continuous octosyllabic couplets. But, in the text, the couplet plays also a much larger part than it does in the _Lay_, and where it is dropped the substitute is not usually the light and extremely varied medley of the earlier poem, so much as a sort of irregular (and sometimes almost regular) stanza arrangement, sets of (usually three) octosyllables being interspersed with sixes, rhyming independently. The batches of monorhymed octosyllables sometimes extend to even four in number, with remarkably good effect, as, for instance, in the infernal proclamation from the Cross. Altogether the metrical scheme is of a graver cast than that of the _Lay_, and suits the more serious and tragical colour of the story. It has been mentioned above in passing that Jeffrey reviewed _Marmion_ on the whole unfavourably. The story of this review is well known: how the editor-reviewer (with the best intentions doubtless) sent the proof with a kind of apology to Scott on the morning of a dinner-party in Castle Street; how Scott showed at least outward indifference, and Mrs. Scott a not unamiable petulance; and how, though the affair caused no open breach of private friendship, it doubtless gave help to the increasing Whiggery of the _Review_ and its pusillanimous policy in regard to the Spanish War in severing Scott's connection with it, and determining him to promote, heart and soul, the opposition venture of the _Quarterly_. Of this latter it was naturally enough proposed by Canning that Scott should be editor; but, as naturally, he does not seem to have even considered the proposal. He would have hated living in London; no salary that could have been offered him could have done more than equal, if so much, the stipends of his Sheriffship and the coming Clerkship, which he would have had to give up; and the work would have interfered much more seriously than his actual vocations with his literary avocations. Besides, it is quite certain that he would not have made a good editor. In the first place, he was fitted neither by education nor by temperament for the troublesome and 'meticulous' business of knocking contributions into shape. And, in the second, he would most assuredly have fallen into the most fatal of all editorial errors--that of inserting articles, not because they were actually good or likely to be popular, but because the subjects were interesting, or the writers agreeable, to himself. But he backed the venture manfully with advice, by recruiting for it, and afterwards by contributing to it. It so happened, too, that about the same time he had dissensions with the publisher as well as with the editor of the _Edinburgh_. Constable, though he had not entered into the intimate relations with Scott and the Ballantynes that were afterwards so fatal, had made the spirited bid of a thousand pounds for _Marmion_, and the much more spirited and (it is to be feared) much less profitable one of fifteen hundred for the _Swift_. He had, however, recently taken into partnership a certain Mr. Hunter of Blackness. This Hunter must have had some merits--he had at any rate sufficient wit to throw the blame of the fact that sojourn in Scotland did not always agree with Englishmen on their disgusting habit of 'eating too much _and not drinking enough_.' But he was a laird of some family, and he seems to have thought that he might bring into business the slightly hectoring ways which were then tolerated in Scotland from persons of quality to persons of none or less. He was a very bitter Whig, and, therefore, ill disposed towards Scott. And, lastly, he had, or thought he had, a grievance against his distinguished 'hand' in respect of the _Swift_, to wit, that the editor of that well-paid compilation did not devote himself to it by any means exclusively enough. Now Scott, though the most good-natured of men and only too easy to lead, was absolutely impossible to drive; and his blood was as ready as the 'bluid of M'Foy' itself to be set on fire at the notion of a cock-laird from Fife not merely treating a Scott with discourtesy, but imputing doubtful conduct to him. He offered to throw up the _Swift_, and though this was not accepted, broke for a time all other connection with Constable--an unfortunate breach, as it helped to bring about the establishment of the Ballantyne publishing business, and so unquestionably began Scott's own ruin. It is remarkable that a similar impatience of interference afterwards broke Scott's just-begun connection with Blackwood, which, could it have lasted, would probably have saved him. For that sagacious person would certainly never have plunged, or, if he could have helped it, let anyone else plunge, into Charybdis. Between the publication of _Marmion_ and that of _The Lady of the Lake_ Scott was very busy in bookmaking and bookselling projects. It was characteristic of the mixture of bad luck and bad management which hung on the Ballantynes from the first that even their _Edinburgh Annual Register_, published as it was in the most stirring times, and written by Scott, by Southey, and others of the very best hands, was a failure. He made some visits to London, and (for the scenery of the new poem) to the Trossachs and Loch Lomond; and had other matters of concern, the chief of which were the death of his famous bull-terrier Camp, and two troublesome affairs connected with his brothers. One of these, the youngest, Daniel, after misconduct of various kinds, had, as mentioned above, shown the white feather during a negro insurrection in Jamaica, and so disgusted his brother that when he came home to die, Scott would neither see him, nor, when he died, go to his funeral. The other concerned his brother Thomas, who, after his failure as a writer, had gone from prudential motives to the Isle of Man, where he for a time was an officer in the local Fencibles. But before leaving Edinburgh, and while he was still a practising lawyer, his brother had appointed him to a small post in his own gift as Clerk. Not only was there nothing discreditable in this according to the idea of any time,--for Thomas Scott's education and profession qualified him fully for the office,--but there were circumstances which, at that time, showed rather heroic and uncommon virtue. For the actual vacancy had occurred in a higher and more valuable post, also in Scott's gift, and he, instead of appointing his brother to this, promoted a deserving subordinate veteran, and gave the lower and less valuable place to Thomas. The latter's circumstances, however, obliged him to perform his duties by deputy, and a Commission then sitting ultimately abolished the office altogether, with a retiring allowance of about half the salary. Certain Whig peers took this up as a job, and Lord Lauderdale, supported by Lord Holland, made in the House of Lords very offensive charges against Scott personally for having appointed his brother to a place which he knew would be abolished,[13] and against Thomas for claiming compensation in respect of duties which he had never performed. The Bill was, however, carried; but Scott was indignant at the loss threatened to his brother and the imputation made on himself, and 'cut' Lord Holland at a semi-public dinner not long afterwards. For this he was and has since been severely blamed, and his behaviour was perhaps a little 'perfervid.' But everybody knows, or should know, that there are few things more trying to humanity than to be accused of improper conduct when a man is hugging himself on having behaved with unusual and saint-like propriety. _The Lady of the Lake_ appeared in May 1810, being published by Ballantyne and Miller, and at once attained enormous popularity. Twenty thousand copies were sold within the year, two thousand of which were costly quartos; and while there can be no doubt that this was the highest point of Scott's poetical vogue, there is, I believe, not much doubt that the poem has always continued to be a greater favourite with the general than any other of his. It actually, more than any other, created the _furore_ for Scottish scenery and touring, which has never ceased since; it supplied in the descriptions of that scenery, in the fight between Roderick and Fitz-James, and in other things, his most popular passages; and it has remained probably the type of his poetry to the main body of readers. Yet there are some who like it less than any other of the major divisions of that poetry, and this is by no means necessarily due either to a desire to be eccentric or to the subtler but almost equally illegitimate operation of the want of novelty--of the fact that its best effects are but repetitions of those of _Marmion_ and the _Lay_. For, fine as it is, it seems to me to display the drawbacks of Scott's scheme and method more than any of the longer poems. Douglas, Ellen, Malcolm, are null; Roderick and the king have a touch of theatricality which I look for in vain elsewhere in Scott; there is nothing fantastic in the piece like the Goblin Page, and nothing tragical like Constance. There is something teasing in what has been profanely called the 'guide-book' character--the cicerone-like fidelity which contrasts so strongly with the skilfully subordinated description in the two earlier and even in the later poems. Moreover, though Ellis ought not to have called the octosyllable 'the Hudibrastic measure' (which is only a very special variety of it), he was certainly right in objecting to its great predominance in unmixed form here. The critics, however, sang the praises of the poem lustily. Even Jeffrey--perhaps because it was purely Scottish (he had thought _Marmion_ not Scottish enough), perhaps because its greater conventionality appealed to him, perhaps because he wished to make atonement--was extremely complimentary. And certainly no one need be at a loss for things to commend positively, whatever may be his comparative estimate. The fine Spenserian openings (which Byron copied almost slavishly in the form of the stanza he took for _Harold_), the famous beginning of the stag, the description of the pass (till Fitz-James begins to soliloquise), some of the songs (especially the masterly 'Coronach'), the passage of the Fiery Cross, the apparition of the clan (not perhaps so great as some have thought it, but still great), the struggle, the guard-room (which shocked Jeffrey dreadfully)--these are only some of the best things. But I own that I turn from the best of them to the last stand of the spearmen at Flodden, and the unburying of the Book in the _Lay_. It may, perhaps, not be undesirable to anticipate somewhat, in order to complete the sketch of the verse romances in this chapter; for not very long after the publication of the _Lady of the Lake_, Scott resumed the writing of _Waverley_, which effected an entire change in the direction of his literature; and it was not a twelvemonth later that he planned the establishment at Abbotsford, which was thenceforward the headquarters of his life. The first poem to follow was one which lay out of the series in subject, scheme, and dress, and which perhaps should rather be counted with his minor and miscellaneous pieces--_The Vision of Don Roderick_. It was written with rapidity, even for him, and with a special purpose; the profits being promised beforehand to the Committee of the Portuguese Relief Fund, formed to assist the sufferers from Massena's devastations. It consists of rather less than a hundred Spenserian stanzas, the story of Roderick merely ushering in a magical revelation, to that too-amorous monarch, of the fortunes of the Peninsular War and its heroes up to the date of writing. The _Edinburgh Review_, which hated the war, was very angry because Scott did not celebrate Sir John Moore (whether as a good Whig or a bad general it did not explain); but even Jeffrey was not entirely unfavourable, and the piece was otherwise well received. The description of the subterranean hall beneath the Cathedral of Toledo is as good as we should expect, and the verses on Saragossa and on the forces of the three kingdoms are very fine. But the whole was something of a _torso_, and it is improbable that Scott could ever have used the Spenserian stanza to good effect for continuous narrative. Even in its individual shape, that great form requires the artistic patience as well as the natural gift of men like its inventor, or like Thomson, Shelley, and Tennyson, in other times and of other schools, to get the full effect out of it; while to connect it satisfactorily with its kind and adjust it to narrative is harder still. The true succession, however, after this parenthesis, was taken up by _Rokeby_, which was dated on the very last day of 1812. Its reception was not exceedingly enthusiastic; for Byron, borrowing most of his technique and general scheme from Scott, and joining with these greater apparent passion and a more novel and unfamiliar local colour, had appeared on the scene as a 'second lion.' The public, a 'great-sized monster of ingratitudes,' had got accustomed to Scott, if not weary of him. The title[12] was not very happy; and perhaps some harm was really done by one of the best of Moore's many good jokes in the _Twopenny Postbag_, where he represented Scott as coming from Edinburgh to London 'To do all the gentlemen's seats by the way' in romances of half a dozen cantos. The poem, however, is a very delightful one, and to some tastes at least very far above the _Lady of the Lake_. Scott, indeed, clung to the uninterrupted octosyllable more than ever; but that verse, if a poet knows how to manage it, is by no means so unsuited for story-telling as Ellis thought; and Scott had here more story to tell than in any of his preceding pieces, except _Marmion_. The only character, indeed, in which one takes much interest is Bertram Risingham; but he is a really excellent person, the cream of Scott's ruffians, whether in prose or verse; appearing well, conducting himself better, and ending best of all. Nor is Oswald, the contrasted villain, by any means to be despised; while the passages--on which the romance, in contradistinction to the classical epic, stands or falls--are equal to all but the very best in _Marmion_ or the _Lay_. Bertram's account of the first and happier events at Marston Moor, as well as of his feelings as to his comradeship with Mortham; the singularly beautiful opening of the second canto-- 'Far in the chambers of the west'; with the description of Upper Teesdale; Bertram's clamber on the cliff, with its reminiscences of the 'Kittle Nine Steps,'--these lead on to many other things as good, ending with that altogether admirable bit of workmanship, Bertram's revenge on Oswald and his own death. Matilda is one of the best of Scott's verse-heroines, except Constance--that is to say, the best of his good girls--and she has the interest of being avowedly modelled on 'Green Mantle.' Nor in any of the poems do the lyrics give more satisfactory setting-off to the main text. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any contains such a garland as--to mention only the best--is formed by 'O, Brignall banks are wild and fair'; the exquisite 'A weary lot is thine, fair maid,' adapted from older matter with a skill worthy of Burns himself; the capital bravura of Allen-a-Dale; and that noble Cavalier lyric-- 'When the dawn on the mountain was misty and grey.' _The Bridal of Triermain_ was published in 1813, not long after _Rokeby_, and, like that poem, drew its scenery from the North of England; but in circumstances, scale, and other ways it forms a pair with _Harold the Dauntless_, and they had best be noticed together. _The Lord of the Isles_, the last of the great quintet, appeared in December 1814. Scott had obtained part of the scenery for it in an earlier visit to the Hebrides, and the rest in his yachting voyage (see below) with the Commissioners of Northern Lights, which also gave the _décor_ for _The Pirate_. The poem was not more popular than _Rokeby_ in England, and it was even less so in Scotland, chiefly for the reason, only to be mentioned with all but silent amazement, that it was 'not bitter enough against England.' Its faults are, of course, obvious enough. Central story there is simply none; the inconvenience that arises to the hero from his being addressed by two young ladies cannot awake any very sympathetic tear, nor does either Edith of Lorn or Isabel Bruce awaken any violent desire to offer to relieve him of one of them. The versification, however, is less uniform than that of _Rokeby_ or _The Lady of the Lake_, and there are excellent passages--the best being, no doubt, the Abbot's extorted blessing on the Bruce; the great picture of Loch Coruisk, which, let people say what they will, is marvellously faithful; part of the voyage (though one certainly could spare some of the 'merrilys'); the landing in Carrick; the rescue of the supposed page; and, finally, Bannockburn, which even Jeffrey admired, though its want of 'animosity' shocked him. The two last of the great poems--there was indeed a third, _The Field of Waterloo_, written hastily for a subscription, and not worthy either of Scott or of the subject--have not by any means the least interest, either intrinsic or that of curiosity. Indeed, as a matter of liking, not quite disjoined from criticism, I should put them very high indeed. Both were issued anonymously, and with indications intended to mislead readers into the idea that they were by Erskine; the intention being, it would seem, partly to ascertain how far the author's mere name counted in his popularity, partly also to 'fly kites' as to the veering of the public taste in reference to the verse romance in general. By the time of the publication of _Harold the Dauntless_ in 1817, Scott could hardly have had any intention of deserting the new way--his own exclusive right--in which he was already walking firmly. But the _Bridal of Triermain_ appeared very shortly after _Rokeby_, and was, no doubt, seriously intended as a test. In both pieces the author fell back upon his earlier scheme of metre, the _Christabel_ blend of iambic with anapæstic passages, instead of the nearly pure iambs of his middle poems. The _Bridal_, partly to encourage the Erskine notion, it would seem, is hampered by an intermixed outline-story, told in the introductions, of the wooing and winning of a certain Lucy by a certain Arthur, both of whom may be very heartily wished away. But the actual poem is more thoroughly a Romance of Adventure than even the _Lay_, has much more central interest than that poem, and is adorned by passages of hardly less beauty than the best of the earlier piece. It is astonishing how anyone of the slightest penetration could have entertained the slightest doubt about the authorship of 'Come hither, come hither, Henry my page, Whom I saved from the sack of Hermitage'; still more of that of the well-known opening of the Third Canto, one of the triumphs of that 'science of names' in which Scott was such a proficient-- 'Bewcastle now must keep the Hold, Speir-Adam's steeds must bide in stall, Of Hartley-burn the bowmen bold Must only shoot from battled wall; And Liddesdale may buckle spur, And Teviot now may belt the brand, Tarras and Ewes keep nightly stir, And Eskdale foray Cumberland!' But these are only the most unmistakable, not the best. The opening specification of the Bride; the admirable 'Lyulph's Tale,' with the first appearance of the castle, and the stanza (suggested no doubt by a famous picture) of the damsels dragging Arthur's war-gear; the courtship, and Guendolen's wiles to retain Arthur, and the parting; the picture of the King's court; the tournament; all these are good enough. But I am not sure that the description of Sir Roland's tantalised vigil in the Vale of St. John, with the moonlit valley (itself a worthy pendant even to the Melrose), and the sudden and successful revelation of the magic hold when the knight flings his battle-axe, does not even surpass the Tale. Nor do I think that the actual adventures of this Childe Roland in the dark towers are inferior. The trials and temptations are of stock material, but all the best matter is stock, and this is handled with a rush and dash which more than saves it. I hope the tiger was only a magic tiger, and went home comfortably with the damsels of Zaharak. It seems unfair that he should be actually killed. But this is the only thing that disquiets me; and it is impossible to praise too much De Vaux's ingenious compromise between tasteless asceticism and dangerous indulgence in the matter of 'Asia's willing maids.' _Harold the Dauntless_ is much slighter, as indeed might be expected, considering that it was finished in a hurry, long after the author had given up poetry as a main occupation. But the half burlesque Spenserians of the overture are very good; the contrasted songs, 'Dweller of the Cairn' and 'A Danish Maid for Me,' are happy. Harold's interview with the Chapter is a famous bit of bravura; and all concerning the Castle of the Seven Shields, from the ballad introducing it, through the description of its actual appearance (in which, by the way, Scott shows almost a better grasp of the serious Spenserian stanza than anywhere else) to the final battle of Odin and Harold, is of the very best Romantic quality. Perhaps, indeed, it is because (as the _Critical Review_, the Abdiel of 'classical' orthodoxy among the reviews of the time, scornfully said), 'both poems are romantic enough to satisfy all the parlour-boarders of all the ladies' schools in England,' that they are so pleasant. It is something, in one's grey and critical age, to feel genuine sympathy with the parlour-boarder. The chapter has already stretched to nearly the utmost proportions compatible with the scale of this little book, and we must not indulge in very many critical remarks on the general character of the compositions discussed in it. But I have never carried out the plan (which I think indispensable) of reading over again whatever work, however well known, one has to write about, with more satisfaction. The main defects lie on the surface. Despite great felicities of a certain kind, these poems have no claim to formal perfection, and occasionally sin by very great carelessness, if not by something worse. The poet frankly shows himself as one whose appeal is not that of 'jewels five words long,' set and arranged in phrases of that magical and unending beauty which the very greatest poets of the world command. His effect, even in description, is rather of mass than of detail. He does not attempt analysis in character, and only skirts passion. Although prodigal enough of incident, he is very careless of connected plot. But his great and abiding glory is that he revived the art, lost for centuries in England, of telling an interesting story in verse, of riveting the attention through thousands of lines of poetry neither didactic nor argumentative. And of his separate passages, his patches of description and incident, when the worst has been said of them, it will remain true that, in their own way and for their own purpose, they cannot be surpassed. The already noticed comparison of any of Scott's best verse-tales with _Christabel_, which they formally imitated to some extent, and with the _White Doe of Rylstone_, which followed them, will no doubt show that Coleridge and Wordsworth had access to mansions in the house of poetry where Scott is never seen. But in some respects even their best passages are not superior to his; and as tales, as romances, his are altogether superior to theirs. FOOTNOTES: [12] It is fair to him to say that he made no public complaints, and that when some gutter-scribbler in 1810 made charges of plagiarism from him against Scott, he furnished Southey with the means of clearing him from all share in the matter (_Lockhart_, iii. 293; Southey's _Life and Correspondence_, iii. 291). But there is a suspicion of fretfulness even in the Preface to _Christabel_; and the references to Scott's poetry (not to himself) in the _Table Talk_, etc., are almost uniformly disparaging. It is true that these last are not strictly evidence. [13] The objection taken to this word by precisians seems to ignore a useful distinction. The _antiquary_ is a collector; the _antiquarian_ a student or writer. The same person may be both; but he may not. [14] _Waverley_, chap. vi. It owes a little to Smollett's Introduction to _Humphry Clinker_, but as usual improves the loan greatly. [15] Inasmuch as he himself was secretary to the Commission which did away with it. [16] Taken from the name of his friend Morritt's place on the Greta. CHAPTER IV THE NOVELS, FROM _WAVERLEY_ TO _REDGAUNTLET_ In the opening introduction to the collected edition of the novels, Scott has given a very full account of the genesis of _Waverley_. These introductions, written before the final inroad had been made on his powers by the united strength of physical and moral misfortune, animated at once by the last glow of those powers, and by the indefinable charm of a fond retrospection, displaying every faculty in autumn luxuriance, are so delightful that they sometimes seem to be the very cream and essence of his literary work in prose. Indeed, I have always wondered why they have not been published separately as a History of the Waverley Novels by their author. Yet the public, I believe, with what I fear must be called its usual lack of judgment in some such matters, seems never to have read them very widely. An exception, however, may possibly have been made in the case of this first one, opening as it has long done every new issue of the whole set of novels. At anyrate, in one way or another, it is probably known, at least to those who take an interest in Scott, that he had begun _Waverley_ and thrown it aside some ten years before its actual appearance, at a time when he was yet a novice in literature. He had also attempted one or two other things,--a completion of Strutt's _Queenhoo Hall_, the beginning of a tale about Thomas the Rhymer, etc., which are now appended to the introduction itself,--and he had once, in 1810, resumed _Waverley_, and again thrown it aside. At last, when his supremacy as a popular poet was threatened by Byron, and when, perhaps, he himself was a little wearying of the verse tale, he discovered the fragment while searching for fishing-tackle in the old desk where he had put it, and after a time resolved to make a new and anonymous attempt on public favour. By the time--1814--when the book actually appeared, considerable changes, both for good and for bad, had occurred in Scott's circumstances; and the total of his literary work, independently of the poems mentioned in the last chapter, had been a good deal increased. Ashestiel had been exchanged for Abbotsford; the new house was being planned and carried out so as to become, if not exactly a palace, something much more than the cottage which had been first talked of; and the owner's passion for buying, at extravagant prices, every neighbouring patch of mostly thankless soil that he could get hold of was growing by indulgence. He himself, in 1811 and the following years, was extremely happy and extremely busy, planting trees, planning rooms, working away at _Rokeby_ and _Triermain_ in the general sitting-room of the makeshift house, with hammering all about him (now, the hammer and the pen are perhaps of all manual implements the most deadly and irreconcilable foes!), corresponding with all sorts and conditions of men; furnishing introductions and contributions (in some cases never yet collected) to all sorts and conditions of books, and struggling, as best he saw his way, though the way was unfortunately not the right one, with the ever-increasing difficulties of Ballantyne & Company. I forget whether there is any evidence that Dickens consciously took his humorous incarnation of the duties of a 'Co.' from Scott's own experience. But Scott as certainly had to provide the money, the sense, the good-humour, and the rest of the working capital as Mark Tapley himself. The merely pecuniary part of these matters may be left to the next chapter; it is sufficient to say that, aggravated by misjudgment in the selection and carrying out of the literary part, it brought the firm in 1814 exceedingly near the complete smash which actually happened ten years later. One is tempted to wish that the crash had come, for it was only averted by the alliance with Constable which was the cause of the final downfall. Also, it would have come at a time when Scott was physically better able to bear it; it could hardly in any degree have interfered with the appearance of _Waverley_ and its followers; and it would have had at least a chance of awakening their author to a sense of the double mistake of engaging his credit in directly commercial concerns, and of sinking his money in land and building. However, things were to be as they were, and not otherwise. How anxious Constable must have been to recover Scott (Hunter, the stone of stumbling, was now removed by death) is evident from the mere list of the titles of the books which he took over in whole or part from the Ballantynes. Even his Napoleonic audacity quailed before the _Edinburgh Annual Register_, with its handsome annual loss of a thousand a year, at Brewster's _Persian Astronomy_, in 4to and 8vo, and at _General Views of the County of Dumfries_. But he saddled himself with a good deal of the 'stock' (which in this case most certainly had not its old sense of 'assets'), and in May 1813, Scott seems to have thought that if John Ballantyne would curb his taste for long-dated bills, things might go well. Unluckily, John did not choose to do so, and Scott, despite the warning, was equally unable to curb his own for peat-bogs, marl-pits, the Cauldshiels Loch, and splendid lots of ancient armour. By July there was again trouble, and in August things were so bad that they were only cleared by Scott's obtaining from the Duke of Buccleuch a guarantee for £4000. It was in consenting to this that the Duke expressed his approval of Scott's determination to refuse the Laureateship, which had been offered to him, and which, in consequence of his refusal and at his suggestion, was conferred upon Southey. Even the guarantee, though it did save the firm, saved it with great difficulty. In the following winter Scott had an adventure with his eccentric German amanuensis, Henry Weber, who had for some time been going mad, and who proposed a duel with pistols (which he produced) to his employer in the study at Castle Street. _Swift_ appeared at last in the summer, and it was in June 1814 that the first of a series of wonderful _tours de force_ was achieved by the completion, in about three weeks, of the last half of _Waverley_. One of the most striking things in Lockhart is the story of the idle apprentice who became industrious by seeing Scott's hand traversing the paper hour after hour at his study window. The novel actually appeared on July 7, and, being anonymous, made no immediate 'move,' as booksellers say, before Scott set off a fortnight later for his long-planned tour with the Commissioners of Northern Lights--the Scottish Trinity House--in their yacht, round the northern half of the island and to Orkney and Shetland. To abstract his own admirable account of the tour[27] would be a task grateful neither to writer nor to reader, the latter of whom, if he does not know it already, had better lose no time in making its acquaintance. On the return in September, Scott was met by two pieces of bad and good tidings respectively--the death of the Duchess of Buccleuch, and the distinct, though not as yet 'furious,' success of his novel. There is no doubt that the early fragments in tale-telling which have been noticed above do not display any particular skill in the art; nor is there much need to quarrel with those who declare that the opening of _Waverley_[26] itself ranks little, if at all, above them. I always read it myself; but I believe most people plunge almost at once into the Tullyveolan visit. By doing so, however, they miss not merely the critical pleasure of comparing a man's work (as can rarely be done) during his period of groping for the way, with his actual stumble into it for the first time, but also such justification as there is for the hero's figure. Nobody ever judged the unlucky captain of Gardiner's better than his creator, who at the time frankly called him 'a sneaking piece of imbecility,' and avowed, with as much probability as right, that 'if he had married Flora, she would have set him up on the chimney-piece, as Count Borowlaski's[25] wife used to do.' But his weaknesses have at least an excuse from his education and antecedents, which does not appear if these antecedents are neglected. Still, the story-interest only begins when Waverley rides into the bear-warded avenue; it certainly never ceases till the golden image of the same totem is replaced in the Baron of Bradwardine's hand. And it is very particularly to be observed that this interest is of a kind absolutely novel in combination and idiosyncrasy. The elements of literary interest are nowhere new, except in what is, for aught we know, accidentally the earliest literature _to us_. They are all to be found in Homer, in the Book of Job, in the _Agamemnon_, in the _Lancelot_, in the _Poem of the Cid_. But from time to time, in the hands of the men of greater genius, they are shaken up afresh, they receive new adjustments, and a touch of something personal which transforms them. This new adjustment and touch produced in Scott's case what we call the Historical Novel.[24] It is quite a mistake to think that he was limited to this. _Guy Mannering_ and _The Antiquary_ among the earlier novels, _St. Ronan's Well_ and the exquisite introductory sketch to the _Chronicles of the Canongate_ among the later, would disprove that. But the historical novel was the new kind that he was 'born to introduce,' after many failures in many generations. It is difficult to say whether it was accident or property which made his success in it co-existent with his success in depicting national character, scenery, and manners. Attempts at this, not always unsuccessful attempts, had indeed been made before. It had been tried frequently, though usually in the sense of caricature, on the stage; it had been done quite recently in the novel by Miss Edgeworth (whom Scott at least professed to regard as his governess here), and much earlier in this very department of Scotch matters by Smollett. But it had never been done with really commanding ability on the great scale. In _Waverley_ Scott supplied these two aspects, the historical-romantic and the national-characteristic, with a felicity perhaps all the more unerring in that it seems to have been only partly conscious. The subject of 'the Forty-five' was now fully out of taboo, and yet retained an interest more than antiquarian. The author had the amplest stores of knowledge, and that sympathy which is so invaluable to the artist when he keeps it within the limits of art. He seems to have possessed by instinct (for there was nobody to teach him) the paramount secret of the historical novelist, the secret of making his central and prominent characters fictitious, and the real ones mostly subsidiary. On the other hand, the knowledge of his native country, which he had been accumulating for almost the whole of his nearly four-and-forty years of life, was joined in him with that universal knowledge of humanity which only men of the greatest genius have. I am, indeed, aware that both these positions have been attacked. I was much pleased, some time after I had begun to write this little book, to find in a review of the present year of grace these words: 'Scott only knew a small portion of human nature, and he was unable to portray the physiognomy of the past.' I feared at first that this might be only one of the numerous flings of our young barbarians, a pleasant, or pleasantly intended, flirt of the heels of the New Humour. But the context showed that the writer was in deadly earnest. I shall not attempt here to explain to him, in a popular or any other style, that he is, perhaps, not quite right. Life itself is not long enough--'little books' are decidedly too short--for a demonstration that the Pacific Ocean is not really a small portion of the terrestrial water-space, or that Alexander was able to overrun foreign countries. We may find a little room in the Conclusion to say something more about Scott's range and his faculty. Here it will be enough to wear our friend's rue with a slight difference, and to say that _Waverley_ and its successors showed in their author knowledge, complete in all but certain small parts, of human nature, and an almost unlimited faculty of portraying the physiognomy of the past. It was scarcely to be expected that a book which was anonymous, and of which only a very few persons knew the real authorship, while even those who guessed it at all early were not so very many, should attain immediate popularity. Lockhart says that the slowness of the success was exaggerated, but his own figures prove that it was somewhat leisurely. Five editions, one (the second) of two thousand, the others of one thousand each, supplied the demand of the first six months, and a thousand copies more that of the next eighteen months--a difference from the almost instantaneous myriads of the poems, quite sufficient to show very eloquently how low the prose novel then stood in popular favour. It is the greatest triumph of Scott, from this low point of view, that his repeated blows heated the public as they did, till at the fourth publication, within but a year or two, Constable actually dared to start with ten thousand copies at once, and they were all absorbed in no time. Scott had always been a rapid worker, but it was only now, under the combined stimulus of the new-found gift, the desire for more land and a statelier Abbotsford, and the pressure of the affairs of Ballantyne & Co., that he began to work at the portentous rate which, though I do not believe that it at all injured the quality of his production, pretty certainly endangered his health. During 1814 he had written nearly all his _Life of Swift_, nearly all _Waverley_, the _Lord of the Isles_, and an abundance of 'small wares,' essays, introductions, and what not. The major part of _Guy Mannering_--perhaps the very best of the novels, for merit of construction and interest of detail--seems to have been written in less than a month, at the extreme end of this year and the beginning of 1815. The whole appears to have been done in six weeks, to 'shake himself free of _Waverley_'--probably the most gigantic exhibition of the 'hair of the dog' recorded in literature. The _donnée_ of this novel was furnished by a Dumfries surveyor of taxes, Mr. Train, the scenery by that early visit to Galloway, in the interest of the reverend toyer with sweetie-wives, which has been recorded. Other indebtedness, such as that of Hatteraick to the historical or legendary free-trader, Yawkins, and the like, has been traced. But the charm of the whole lies in none of these things, nor in all together, but in Scott's own fashion of working them up. Nothing at first could seem to be a greater contrast with _Waverley_ than this tale. No big wars, no political hazards; but a double and tenfold portion of human nature and local colour. This last element had in the earlier book been almost entirely supplied by Tullyveolan and its master; for Fergus and the Highland scenes, good as they are, are not much more than a furbishing up of the poem-matter of this kind, especially in the _Lady of the Lake_. But here the supply of character was liberal and the variety of scenery extraordinary. We cannot judge the innovation fully now, but let anyone turn to the theatrical properties of Godwin and Holcroft, of Mrs. Radcliffe and 'Monk' Lewis, and he will begin to have a better idea of what _Guy Mannering_ must have been to its first readers. As usual, the personages who head the _dramatis personæ_ are not the best. Bertram, though less of a nincompoop than Waverley, is not very much; Lucy is a less lively _ange de candeur_ than Rose, and nothing else; and Julia's genteel-comedy missishness does not do much more than pair off with Flora's tragedy-queen air. 'Mannering, Guy, a Colonel returned from the Indies,' is, perhaps, also too fair a description of the player of the title-part.[23] But we trouble ourselves very little about these persons. As for characters, the author opens fire on us almost at the very first with Dominie Sampson and Meg Merrilees, and the hardly less excellent figure of Bertram's well-meaning booby of a father; gives us barely time to make their acquaintance before we meet Dandie Dinmont; brings up almost superfluous reinforcements with Mr. Pleydell, and throughout throws in Hatteraick and Glossin, Jock Jabos and his mistress, and Sir Robert Haslewood, the company at Kippletringan, and at the funeral, and elsewhere, in the most reckless spirit of literary lavishness. Nor is he less prodigal of incident and scene. The opening passage of Mannering's night-ride could not have been bettered if the painter had taken infinitely more pains. Bertram's walk and the skirmish with the prowlers are simply first-rate; the Edinburgh scenes have always excited admiration as the very best of their kind; and the various passages which lead to the working out of justice on Glossin and Hatteraick are not merely told with a gusto, but arranged with a craftsmanship, of which the latter is unfortunately less often present than the former in the author's later work. There is hardly any book of Scott's on which it is more tempting to dwell than this. Although the demand had not yet reached anything like its height, two thousand copies were sold in forty-eight hours, and five thousand in three months. In March 1815 Scott went to London, and met two persons of distinction, the Regent and Lord Byron. There seems to be a little doubt whether George did or did not adapt the joke of the hanging judge, about 'checkmating this time,' to the authorship of the _Waverley_ novels; but there is no doubt that he was very civil. With Byron Scott was at once on very good terms, for Scott was not the man to bear any grudge for the early fling in _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_; and Byron, whatever his faults, 'had more of lion' in him than to be jealous of such a rival. The difference of their characters was such as to prevent them from being in the strict sense friends; and Scott's comparison of Byron, after the separation, to a peacock parted from the hen and lifting up his voice to tell the world about it, has a rather terribly far-reaching justice, both of moral and literary criticism, on that noble bard's whole life and conversation. But there were no little jealousies between them, and apparently some real liking. This visit to London was extended to Brussels and Paris, with the result in verse of the already mentioned and not particularly happy _Field of Waterloo_, in prose of the interesting _Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk_, an account of the tour. Both were published (the poem almost immediately, _Paul_ not till the new year) after Scott's return to Abbotsford at the end of September; and he set to work during the later autumn on his third novel, _The Antiquary_. The book appeared in May 1816, at about the time of the death of Major John Scott, the last but one of the poet's surviving brothers. It was not at first so popular as _Guy Mannering_, which, however, it very rapidly caught up even in that respect: nor is this bad start surprising. To good judges nowadays the book appeals as strongly at least as any other of its author's--in fact, Monkbarns and the Mucklebackits, the rescue of Sir Arthur and Isabel, the scenes in the ruins of St. Ruth's, and especially Edie Ochiltree, were never surpassed by him. But the story was a daring innovation, or return, among the novels of its own day. It boldly rejected most of the ordinary sources of romance interest. It had very little plot; its humorous characters, though touched with the rarest art, were not caricatured; and (for which it certainly cannot be praised) that greatest fault of Scott's,--perhaps his only great fault as a novelist,--the 'huddling up' of the end, appears in it for the first, though unluckily by no means for the last, time. But it would have been a very sad thing for the public taste if it had definitely refused _The Antiquary_. A book which contains within the compass of the opening chapters such masterpieces as the journey to the Hawes, the description of the Antiquary's study, and the storm and rescue, must have had a generation of idiots for an audience if it had not been successful. Moreover, it had, as Scott's unwearied biographer has already noted, a new and special source of interest in the admirable fragmentary mottoes, invented to save the greater labour of discovery, which adorn its chapter-headings.[22] Lockhart himself thought that Scott never quite equalled these first three novels. I cannot agree with him there; but what is certain is that he in them discovered, with extraordinary felicity, skill in three different kinds of novel--the historical, the romantic-adventurous, and that of ordinary or almost wholly ordinary life; and that even he never exactly added a fourth kind to his inventions, though he varied them wonderfully within themselves. The romance partly historical, the romance mainly or wholly fictitious, and the novel of manners; these were his three classes, and hardly any others. It is not entirely explained what were the reasons which determined Scott to make his next venture, the _Tales of my Landlord_, under a fresh pseudonym, and also to publish it not with Constable, but with Murray and Blackwood. Lockhart's blame of John Ballantyne may not be unfair; but it is rather less supported by documentary evidence than most of his strictures on the Ballantynes. And the thing is perhaps to be sufficiently accounted for by Scott's double dislike, both as an independent person and a man of business, of giving a monopoly of his work to one publisher, and by his constant fancy for trying experiments on the public--a fancy itself not wholly, though partially, comprehensible. As a matter of fact, _Old Mortality_ and the _Black Dwarf_ were offered to and pretty eagerly accepted by Murray and Blackwood, on the terms of half profits and the inevitable batch of 'old stock.' The story of the unlucky quarrel with Blackwood in consequence of some critical remarks of his on the end of the _Black Dwarf_,--remarks certainly not inexcusable,--and of Scott's famous letter in reply, will doubtless receive further elucidation in the forthcoming chronicle of the House of 'Ebony'; but it is told with fair detail, in the second edition of Lockhart, from the actual archives. Scott doubled his work during the summer and autumn by undertaking the historical department, relinquished by Southey, of the _Edinburgh Annual Register_, yet the two _Tales_ were ready in November, and appeared on the 1st of December 1816. Murray wrote effusively to Scott (who, it must be remembered, was not even to his publishers the known author), and received a very amusing reply, from which one sentence may be quoted as an example of those which have brought upon Sir Walter the reproach of falsehood, or at least disingenuousness, from Goodman Dull. 'I assure you,' he writes, 'I have never read a volume of them till they were printed,' a delightful selection of words, for it looks decisive, and means absolutely nothing. Nobody but a magician, and no ordinary magician, could read a _volume_ (which in the usual parlance means a printed volume) before it was printed. To back his disclaimer, Scott offered to review himself in the _Quarterly_, which he did. I certainly do not approve of authors being their own reviewers; though when (as sometimes happens) they have any brains, they probably know the faults and merits of their books better than anyone else, and can at anyrate state, with a precision which is too rare in the ordinary critic, what the book is meant to be and tries to do. But this case was clearly one out of the common way, and rather part of an elaborate practical joke than anything else. Dulness, however, had in many ways found stumbling-blocks in the first foster-children of the excellent Jedediah. The very pious and learned, if not exactly humorous or shrewd, Dr. M'Crie, fell foul of the picture of the Covenanters given in _Old Mortality_. No one who knows the documents is likely to agree with him now, and from hardly any point of view but his could the greatness of the book be denied. Although Scott's humour is by no means absent from it, that quality does not perhaps find quite such an opportunity, even in Mause and Cuddie, as in the Baron, and the Dominie, and the inhabitants of Monkbarns. But as a historical novel, it is a far greater one than _Waverley_. Drumclog, the siege of Tillietudlem, above all, the matchless scene where Morton is just saved from murder by his own party, surpass anything in the earlier book. But greater than any of these single things is one of the first and the greatest of Scott's splendid gallery of romantic-historic portraits, the stately figure of Claverhouse. All the features which he himself was to sum up in that undying sentence of Wandering Willie's Tale later are here put in detail and justified. As for the companion to this masterly book, I have always thought the earlier part of the _Black Dwarf_ as happy as all but the best of Scott's work. But the character of the _Dwarf_ himself was not one that he could manage. The nullity of Earnscliff and Isabel is complete. Isabel's father is a stagy villain, or rather rascal (for Victor Hugo's antithesis between _scélérat_ and _maroufle_ comes in here), and even Scott has never hustled off a conclusion with such complete _insouciance_ as to anything like completeness. Willie of Westburnflat here, like Christie of the Clinthill later, is one of our old friends of the poems back again, and welcome back again. But he and Hobbie can hardly save a book which Scott seems to have thrown in with its admirable companion, not as a makeweight, but rather as a foil. Between the first and the second sets of _Tales_, the 'Author of _Waverley_,' true to his odd design of throwing the public off the scent, reappeared, and the result was _Rob Roy_. Perhaps because it was written under the first attacks of that 'cramp of the stomach' which, though obscurely connected with his later and more fatal ailments, no doubt ushered them in something more than an accidental manner, Scott did not at first much like _Rob_. But he was reconciled later; and hardly anybody else (except those exceedingly unhappy persons who cannot taste him at all) can ever have had any doubt about it. That the end is even more than usually huddled, that the beginning may perhaps have dawdled a little over commercial details (I do not think so myself, but Lady Louisa Stuart did), and that the distribution of time, which lingers over weeks and months before and after it devotes almost the major part of the book to the events of forty-eight hours, is irregular, even in the eyes of those who are not serfs to the unities, cannot be denied. But almost from the introduction of Frank to Diana, certainly from his setting off in the grey of the morning with Andrew Fairservice, to the point at least where the heroine stoops from her pony in a manner equally obliging and graceful, there is no dropped stitch, no false note. Nor in any book are there so many of Scott's own characters, and others not quite so much his own. Helen Macgregor, perhaps, does not 'thrill our blood and overpower our reason,' as she did Lady Louisa's, simply because we were born some hundred years later than that acute and accomplished granddaughter of Lady Mary; and Rashleigh pretty frequently, Rob himself now and then, may also savour to us a little of the boards and the sawdust. But, as a rule, Rob does not; and for nobody else, not even for the fortunate Frank,--who has nothing to do but to walk through his part creditably, and does it,--need any allowance be made. The Bailie is, with Shallow, his brother justice (upon whom he justly looks down, but to whom he is, I think, kind) in Arthur's bosom; Andrew Fairservice and the Dougal creature, Justice Inglewood and Sir Hildebrand, are there too. As for Die Vernon, she is the one of Scott's heroines with whom one _has to_ fall in love, just as, according to a beautiful story, a thoughtless and reluctant world _had to_ believe the Athanasian Creed. It is painful to say that persons on whom it is impossible to retort the charge, have sometimes insinuated a touch of vulgarity in Di. For these one can but pray; and, after all, they are usually of her sex, which in such judgments of itself counts not. All men, who are men and gentlemen, must delight in her. And here, as always, to all but the very last, even in the twilight of _Anne of Geierstein_, the succession of scenes hurries the reader along without breath or time to stop and criticise, with nothing to do, if he is a reasonable person, but to read and enjoy and admire. Lockhart has taken the opportunity of this point of time (1817-1818), which may be said to mark the zenith of Scott's prosperity, if not of his fame, to halt and to give a sort of survey of his father-in-law's private life at Castle Street and at Abbotsford. It forms one of the pleasantest portions of his book, containing nothing more tragic than the advent of the famous American tragedy of _The Cherokee Lovers_, which its careful author sent, that Scott might approve and publish it, in duplicate, so that the unfortunate recipient had to pay five pounds twice over for the postage of the rubbish. Of course things were not entirely as they seemed. The cramps with which, as mentioned, Scott had been already seized, during the progress of _Rob Roy_, were, though probably not caused, yet all too much helped and hastened, by the ferocious manner in which he worked his brains. For it must be doubted whether social intercourse, or even bodily exercise in company with others, is really the best refreshment after very severe mental labour. Both distract and amuse; but they do not refresh, relax, relieve, like a bath of pure solitude. Divers events of importance happened to Scott, in the later course of the year 1818[21] (besides a much worse recurrence of his disorder), after the _Heart of Midlothian_ (the second series of the _Tales_) had been published in June, and the _Bride of Lammermoor_ (the third series) had been begun. The Duke of Buccleuch, his chief, his (as he would himself have cheerfully allowed) patron, his helper in time of need, and his most intimate friend, died. So did his brother-in-law, Charles Carpenter, this latter death adding considerably, though to an extent exaggerated at first and only reversionary, to the prospects of Scott's children. He gave up an idea, which he had for some time held, of obtaining a judgeship of the Scotch Exchequer; but he received his baronetcy in April 1820. Abbotsford went on gradually and expensively completing itself; the correspondence which tells us so much and is such delightful reading continued, as if the writer had nothing else to write and nothing else to do. But for us the chief matters of interest are the two novels mentioned, and that admirable supplement to the second of them, the _Legend of Montrose_. There can be little doubt, I think, that in at least passages, and those very large ones, of the _Heart of Midlothian_, Scott went as high as he ever had done, or ever did thereafter. I have never agreed with Lady Louisa Stuart that 'Mr. Saddletree is not amusing,' nor that there is too much Scots law for English readers. It must be remembered that until Scott opened people's eyes, there were some very singular conventions and prejudices, even in celestial minds, about novels. Technical details were voted tedious and out of place--as, Heaven knows! M. Zola and others have shown us since, that they may very easily be made. Professional matters, the lower middle classes, etc., were thought 'low,' as Goldsmith's audience had had it, 'vulgar,' as Madame de Staël said of Miss Austen. That the farrago of the novelist's book is absolutely universal and indiscriminate, provided only that he knows what to do with it, had not dawned on the general mind. On the other hand, Lady Louisa was right in objecting to the finale,--it has been admitted that Scott was never good at a conclusion,--and personally I have always thought George Staunton uninteresting throughout. But how much does this leave! The description of the lynching of Porteous and the matchless interview with Queen Caroline are only the very best of such a series of good things that, except just at the end, it may be said to be uninterrupted. Jeanie it is unnecessary to praise; the same Lady Louisa's admiration of the wonderful art which could attract so much interest to a plain, good, not clever, almost middle-aged woman sums up all. But almost everyone plays up to Jeanie in perfection--her father and, to no small extent, her sister, her husband and Dumbiedykes, Madge Wildfire (a most difficult and most successful character) and her old fiend of a mother, the Duke and the tobacco-shop keeper. Abundant as are the good things afterwards, I do not know that Scott ever showed his actual original genius, his faculty of creation and combination, to such an extent and in such proportion again. He certainly did not, so far as my taste goes, in _The Bride of Lammermoor_, a book which, putting the mere fragment of the _Black Dwarf_ aside, seems to me his first approach to failure in prose. Lockhart, whose general critical opinions deserve the profoundest respect, thought differently--thought it, indeed, 'the most pure and perfect of all the tragedies that Scott ever penned.' Perhaps there is something in this of the same ingenuity which Scott himself showed in his disclaimer to Murray quoted above, for tragedy _per se_ was certainly not Scott's forte to the same extent as were comedy and history. But I know that there are many who agree with Lockhart. On the other hand, I should say that while we do not know enough of the House of Ravenswood to feel much sympathy with its fortunes as a house, the 'conditions,' in the old sense, of its last representative are not such as to attract us much to him personally. He is already far too much of that hero of opera which he was destined to become, a sulky, stagy creature, in theatrical poses and a black-plumed hat, who cannot even play the easy and perennially attractive part of _desdichado_ so as to keep our compassion. Lucy is a simpleton so utter and complete that it is difficult even to be sorry for her, especially as Ravenswood would have made a detestable husband. The mother is meant to be and is a repulsive virago, and the father a time-serving and almost vulgar intriguer. Moreover--and all this is not in the least surprising, since he was in agonies during most of the composition, and nearly died before its close[20]--the author has, contrary to his wont, provided very few subsidiary characters to support or carry off the principals. Caleb Balderstone has been perhaps unduly objected to by the very persons who praise the whole book; but he is certainly somewhat of what the French call a _charge_. Bucklaw, though agreeable, is very slight; Craigengelt a mere 'super'; the Marquis shadowy. Even such fine things as the hags at the laying-out, and the visit of Lucy and her father to Wolf's Crag, and such amusing ones as Balderstone's _fabliau_-like expedients to raise the wind in the matter of food, hardly save the situation; and though the tragedy of the end is complete, it leaves me, I own, rather cold.[19] One is sorry for Lucy, but it was really her own fault--a Scottish maiden is not usually unaware of the possibilities and advantages of 'kilting her coats of green satin' and flying from the lad she does not love to the lad she does. The total disappearance of Edgar is the best thing that could happen to him, and the only really satisfactory point is Bucklaw's very gentlemanlike sentence of arrest on all impertinent questioners. But if the companion of the first set of _Tales_ was a dead-weight rather than a make-weight, the make-weight of the third would have atoned for anything. Sometimes I think, allowing for scale and conditions, that Scott never did anything much better than _A Legend of Montrose_. First, it is pervaded by the magnificent figure of Dugald Dalgetty. Secondly, the story, though with something of the usual huddle at the end, is interesting throughout, with the minor figures capitally sketched in. Menteith, though merely outlined, is a good fellow, a gentleman, and not a stick; Allan escapes the merely melodramatic; 'Gillespie Grumach' is masterly in his brief appearances; and Montrose himself seems to me to be brought in with a skill which has too often escaped notice. For it would mar the story to deal with the tragedy of his end, and his earlier history is a little awkward to manage. Moreover, that faculty of hurrying on the successive _tableaux_ which is so conspicuous in most of Scott's work, and so conspicuously absent in the _Bride_ (where there are long passages with no action at all) is eminently present here. The meeting with Dalgetty; the night at Darnlinvarach, from the bravado of the candlesticks to Menteith's tale; the gathering and council of the clans; the journey of Dalgetty, with its central point in the Inverary dungeon; the escape; and the battle of Inverlochy,--these form an exemplary specimen of the kind of interest which Scott's best novels possess as nothing of the kind had before possessed it, and as few things out of Dumas have possessed it since. Nor can the most fervent admirer of Chicot and of Porthos--I know none more fervent than myself--say in cool blood that their creator could have created Dalgetty, who is at once an admirable human being, a wonderful national type of the more eccentric kind, and the embodiment of an astonishing amount of judiciously adjusted erudition. Many incidents of interest and some of importance occurred in Scott's private life between the date of 1818 and that of 1820, besides those mentioned already. One of these was the acquisition by Constable of the whole of his back-copyrights for the very large sum of twelve thousand pounds, a contract supplemented twice later in 1821 and 1823 by fresh purchases of rights as they accrued for nominal sums of eleven thousand pounds in addition. Unfortunately, this transaction, like almost all his later ones, was more fictitious than real. And though it was lucky that the publisher never discharged the full debt, so that when his bankruptcy occurred something was saved out of the wreck which would otherwise have been pure loss, the proceeding is characteristic of the mischievously unreal system of money transactions which brought Scott to ruin. Except for small things like review articles, etc., and for his official salaries, he hardly ever touched real money for the fifteen most prosperous years of his life, between 1810 and 1825. Promises to receive were interchanged with promises to pay in such a bewildering fashion that unless he had kept a chartered accountant of rather unusual skill and industry perpetually at work, it must have been utterly impossible for him to know at any given time what he had, what he owed, what was due to him, and what his actual income and expenditure were. The commonly accepted estimate is that during the most flourishing time, 1820-1825, he made about fifteen thousand a year, and on paper he probably did. Nor can he ever have spent, in the proper sense of the term, anything like that sum, for the Castle Street house cannot have cost, even with lavish hospitality, much to keep up, and the Abbotsford establishment, though liberal, was never ostentatious. But when large lump sums are constantly expended in purchases of land, building, furnishing, and the like; when every penny of income except official salaries goes through a complicated process of abatement in the way of discounts for six and twelve months' bills, fines for renewal, payments to banks for advances and the like--the 'clean' sums available at any given moment bear quite fantastic and untrustworthy relations to their nominal representatives. It may be strongly suspected, from the admitted decrease of a very valuable practice under Walter Scott _père_, and from its practical disappearance under Thomas, that the genius of the Scott family did not precisely lie in the management of money. The marriage of Sophia Scott to Lockhart, and the purchase of a commission for her eldest brother Walter in the 18th Hussars, made gaps in Scott's family circle, and also, beyond all doubt, in his finances. The first was altogether happy for him. It did not, for at anyrate some years, absolutely sever him from the dearest of his children, a lady who, to judge from her portraits, must have been of singular charm, and who seems to have been the only one of the four with much of his mental characteristics; it provided him with an agreeable companion, a loyal friend, and an incomparable biographer. Of Sir Walter Scott the second and last, not much personal idea is obtainable. The few anecdotes handed down, and his father's letters to him (we have no replies), suggest a good sort of person, slightly 'chuckle-headed' and perfervid in the wrong places, with next to no intellectual gifts, and perhaps more his mother's son than his father's. He had some difficulties in his first regiment, which seems to have been a wild one, and not in the best form; he married an heiress of the unpoetical name of Jobson, to whom and of whom his father writes with a pretty old-fashioned affection and courtesy, which perhaps gave Thackeray some traits for Colonel Newcome. Of the younger brother Charles, an Oxford man, who went into the Foreign Office, even less is recorded than of Walter. Anne Scott, the third of the family, and the faithful attendant of her father in his last evil days, died in her sister's house shortly after Sir Walter, and Mrs. Lockhart herself followed before the _Life_ was finished. Scott can hardly be said to have bequeathed good luck to any of these his descendants. It was at the end of 1819, after Walter the younger left home, and before Sophia's marriage, that the next in order of the _Waverley Novels_ (now again such by title, and not _Tales of my Landlord_) appeared. This was _Ivanhoe_, which was published in a rather costlier shape than its forerunners, and yet sold to the extent of twelve thousand copies in its three-volume form. Lockhart, perhaps with one of the few but graceful escapes of national predilection (it ought not to be called prejudice) to be noticed in him, pronounces this a greater work of art, but a less in genius than its purely Scottish predecessors. As there is nothing specially English in _Ivanhoe_, but only an attempt to delineate Normans and Saxons before the final blend was formed, an Englishman may, perhaps, claim at least impartiality if he accepts the positive part of Lockhart's judgment and demurs to the negative. Although the worst of Scott's cramps were past, he was still in anything but good health when he composed the novel, most of which was dictated, not written; and his avocations and bodily troubles together may have had something to do with those certainly pretty flagrant anachronisms which have brought on _Ivanhoe_ the wrath of Dryasdust. But Dryasdust is _adeo negligibile ut negligibilius nihil esse possit_, and the book is a great one from beginning to end. The mere historians who quarrel with it have probably never read the romances which justify it, even from the point of view of literary 'document.' The picturesque opening; the Shakespearean character of Wamba; the splendid Passage of Arms; the more splendid siege of Torquilstone; the gathering up of a dozen popular stories of the 'King-and-the-Tanner' kind into the episodes of the Black Knight and the Friar; the admirable, if a little conventional, sketch of Bois-Guilbert, the pendant in prose to Marmion; the more admirable contrast of Rebecca and Rowena; and the final Judgment of God, which for once vindicates Scott from the charge of never being able to wind up a novel,--with such subsidiary sketches as Gurth, Prior Aymer, Isaac, Front-de-Boeuf (Urfried, I fear, will not quite do, except in the final interview with her tempter-victim), Athelstane, and others--give such a plethora of creative and descriptive wealth as nobody but Scott has ever put together in prose. Even the nominal hero, it is to be observed, escapes the curse of most of Scott's young men (the young men to several of whom Thackeray would have liked to be mother-in-law), and if he is not worthy of Rebecca, he does not get her. As for Richard, no doubt, he is not the Richard of history, but what does that matter? He is a most admirable re-creation, softened and refined, of the Richard of a romance which, be it remembered, is itself in all probability as old as the thirteenth century. After speaking frankly of the _Bride of Lammermoor_ and of some others of Scott's works, it may perhaps be permissible to rate the successor to _Ivanhoe_ rather higher than it was rated at the time, or than it has generally been rated since. _The Monastery_ was at its appearance (March 1820) regarded as a failure; and quite recently a sincere admirer of Scott confided to a fellow in that worship the opinion that 'a good deal of it really is rot, you know.' I venture to differ. Undoubtedly it does not rank with the very best, or even next to them. In returning to Scottish ground, Scott may have strengthened himself on one side, but from the distance of the times and the obscure and comparatively uninteresting period which he selected (just after the strange and rapid panorama of the five Jameses and before the advent of Queen Mary), he lost as much as he gained. An intention, afterwards abandoned, to make yet a fresh start, and try a new double on the public by appearing neither as 'Author of _Waverley_' nor as Jedediah Cleishbotham, may have hampered him a little, though it gave a pleasant introduction. The supernatural part, though much better, as it seems to me, than is generally admitted, is no doubt not entirely satisfactory, being uncertainly handled, and subject to the warning of _Nec deus intersit_. There is some return of that superabundance of interval and inaction which has been noted in the _Bride_. And, above all, there appears here a fault which had not been noticeable before, but which was to increase upon Scott,--the fault of introducing a character as if he were to be of great pith and moment, and then letting his interest, as the vernacular says, 'tail off.' The trouble taken about Halbert by personages natural and supernatural promises the case of some extraordinary figure, and he is but very ordinary. Still, at the works of how many novelists except Scott should we grumble, if we had the admirable descriptions of Glendearg, the scenes in the Abbey, the night-ride of poor Father Philip, the escape from the Castle of Avenel, the passage of the interview of Halbert with Murray and Morton? Even the episode of Sir Piercie Shafton, though it is most indisputably true that Scott has not by any means truly represented Euphuism, is good and amusing in itself; while there are those who boldly like the White Lady personally. She is more futile than a sprite beseems; but she is distinctly 'nice.' At any rate, nobody could (or indeed did) deny that the author, six months later, made up for any shortcoming in _The Abbot_, where, except the end (eminently of the huddled order), everything is as it should be. The heroine is, except Die Vernon, Scott's masterpiece in that kind, while all the Queen Mary scenes are unsurpassed in him, and rarely equalled out of him. Nor was there any falling off in _Kenilworth_ (Jan. 1821), where he again shifted his scene to England. He has not indeed interested us very much personally in Amy Robsart, but as a hapless heroine she is altogether the superior of Lucy Ashton. The book is, among his, the 'novel without a hero,' and, considering his defects in that direction, this was hardly a drawback. It cannot be indeed said to have any one minor character which is a success of the first class. But the whole is interesting throughout. The journeys of Tressilian to Devonshire and of Amy and Wayland to Kenilworth have the curious attraction which Scott, a great traveller, and a lover of it, knew how to give to journeys, and the pageantry and Court scenes, at Greenwich and elsewhere, command admiration. Indeed, _Kenilworth_ equals any of the novels in sustained variety of interest, and, unlike too many of them, it comes to a real end. It was in 1821 that a book now necessarily much forgotten and even rare (it is comparatively seldom that one sees it in catalogues), Adolphus's _Letters on the Author of Waverley_, at once showed the interest taken in the identity of the 'Great Unknown,' and fixed it as being that of the author of the _Lay_, with a great deal of ingenuity and with a most industrious abundance of arguments, bad and good. After such a proof of public interest, neither Scott nor Constable could be much blamed for working what has been opprobriously called the 'novel manufactory' at the highest pressure; and _The Pirate_, _The Fortunes of Nigel_, _Peveril of the Peak_, _Quentin Durward_, _St. Ronan's Well_, and _Redgauntlet_ were written and published in the closest succession. These books, almost all of wonderful individual excellence (_Peveril_, I think, is the only exception), and of still more wonderful variety, were succeeded, before the crash of 1825-26, by the _Tales of the Crusaders_, admirable in part, if not wholly. When we think that all these were, with some other work, accomplished in less than five years, it scarcely seems presumption in the author to have executed, or rashness in the bookseller to have suggested, a contract for four of them in a batch--a batch unnamed, unplanned, not even yet in embryo, but simply existing _in potentia_ in the brain of Walter Scott himself. In surveying together this batch, written when the first novelty of the novels was long over, and before there was any decadence, one obtains, as well perhaps as from any other division of his works, an idea of their author's miraculous power. Many novelists since have written as much or more in the same time. But their books for the most part, even when well above the average, popular, and deservedly popular too, leave next to no trace on the mind. You do not want to read them again; you remember, even with a strong memory, nothing special about their plots; above all, their characters take little or no hold on the mind in the sense of becoming part of its intellectual circle and range. How different is it with these six or eight novels, 'written with as much care as the others, that is to say, with none at all,' as the author wickedly remarked! _The Pirate_ (December 1821) leads off, its scenery rendered with the faithfulness of recent memory, and yet adjusted and toned by the seven years' interval since Scott yachted round Orkney and Shetland. Here are the admirable characters of Brenda (slight yet thoroughly pleasing), and her father, the not too melodramatic ones of Minna, Cleveland, and Norna, the triumph of Claud Halcro (to whom few do justice), and again, the excellent keeping of story and scenery to character and incident. _The Fortunes of Nigel_ (May 1822) originated in a proposed series of 'Letters of the Seventeenth Century,' in which others were to take part, and perhaps marks a certain decline, though only in senses to be distinctly defined and limited. Nothing that Scott ever did is better than the portrait of King James, which, in the absence of one from the hand of His Majesty's actual subject for some dozen years, Mr. William Shakespeare of New Place, Stratford, is probably the most perfect thing of the kind that ever could have been or can be done. And the picture of Whitefriars, though it is borrowed to a great extent, and rather anticipated in point of time, from Shadwell's _Squire of Alsatia_, sixty or seventy years after date, is of the finest, whilst Sir Mungo Malagrowther[18] all but deserves the same description. But this most cantankerous knight is not touched off with the completeness of Dalgetty, or even of Claud Halcro. Lord Glenvarloch adds, to the insipidity which is the bane of Scott's good heroes, some rather disagreeable traits which none of them had hitherto shown. Dalgarno in the same way falls short of his best bad heroes. Dame Suddlechop suggests, for the first time _un_favourably, a Shakespearean ancestress, Mistress Quickly, and the story halts and fails to carry the reader rapidly over the stony path. Even Richie Moniplies, even Gentle Geordie, good as both are, fall short of their predecessors. Ten years earlier _The Fortunes of Nigel_ would have been a miracle, and one might have said, 'If a man begins like this, what will he do later?' Now, thankless and often uncritical as is the chatter about 'writing out,' we can hardly compare _Nigel_ with _Guy Mannering_, or _Rob Roy_, or even _The Abbot_, and not be conscious of something that (to use a favourite quotation of Scott's own), 'doth appropinque an end,' though an end as yet afar off. The 'bottom of the sack,' as the French say, is a long way from us; but it is within measurable distance. Even a friendly critic must admit that this distance seemed to be alarmingly shortened by _Peveril of the Peak_ (January 1823), which among the full-sized novels seems to me quite his least good book, worse even than 'dotages,' as they are sometimes thought, like _Anne of Geierstein_ and _Count Robert_. No one has defended the story, which, languid as it is, is made worse by the long gaps between the passages that ought to be interesting, and by a (for Scott) quite abnormal and portentous absence of really characteristic characters. Lockhart pleads for some of these, but I fear the plea can hardly be admitted. I imagine that those who read Scott pretty regularly are always sorely tempted to skip _Peveril_ altogether, and that when they do read it, they find the chariot wheels drive with a heaviness of which elsewhere they are entirely unconscious. But in the same year (1823), _Quentin Durward_ not only made up for _Peveril_, but showed Scott's powers to be at least as great as when he wrote _The Abbot_, if not as great as ever. He has taken some liberties with history, but no more than he was perfectly entitled to take; he has paid the historic muse with ample interest for anything she lent him, by the magnificent sketch of Louis and the fine one of Charles; he has given a more than passable hero in Quentin, and a very agreeable if not ravishing heroine in Isabelle. Above all, he has victoriously shown his old faculty of conducting the story with such a series of enthralling, even if sometimes episodic passages, that nobody but a pedant of 'construction' would care to inquire too narrowly whether they actually make a whole. Quentin's meeting with the King and his rescue from Tristan by the archers; the interviews between Louis and Crevecoeur, and Louis and the Astrologer; the journey (another of Scott's admirable journeys); the sack of Schonwaldt, and the feast of the Boar of Ardennes; Louis in the lion's den at Peronne,--these are things that are simply of the first order. Nor need the conclusion, which has shocked some, shock any who do not hold, with critics of the Rymer school, that 'the hero ought always to be successful.' For as Quentin wins Isabelle at last, what more success need we want? and why should not Le Balafré, that loyal Leslie, be the instrument of his nephew's good fortune? The recovery was perfectly well maintained in _St. Ronan's Well_ (still 1823) and _Redgauntlet_ (1824), the last novels of full length before the downfall. They were also, be it noticed, the first planned (while _Quentin_ itself was completed) after some early symptoms of apoplectic seizure, which might, even if they had not been helped by one of the severest turns of fortune that any man ever experienced, have punished Scott's daring contempt of ordinary laws in the working of his brains.[17] The harm done to _St. Ronan's Well_ by the author's submission to James Ballantyne's Philistine prudery in protesting against the original story (in which Clara did not discover the cheat put on her till a later period than the ceremony) is generally acknowledged. As it is, not merely is the whole thing made a much ado about nothing,--for no law and no Church in Christendom would have hesitated to declare the nullity of a marriage which had never been consummated, and which was celebrated while one of the parties took the other for some one else,--but Clara's shattered reason, Tyrrel's despair, and Etherington's certainty that he has the cards in his hand, are all incredible and unaccountable--mere mid-winter madness. Nevertheless, this, Scott's only attempt at actual contemporary fiction, has extraordinary interest and great merit as such, while Meg Dods would save half a dozen novels, and the society at the Well is hardly inferior. And then came _Redgauntlet_. A great lover of Scott once nearly invoked the assistance of Captain M'Turk to settle matters with a friend of his who would not pronounce _Redgauntlet_ the best of all the novels, and would only go so far as to admit that it contains some, and many, of the best things. The best as a novel it cannot be called, because the action is desultory in the extreme. There are wide gaps even in the chain of story interest that does exist, and the conclusion, admirable in itself, has even for Scott a too audacious disconnection with any but the very faintest concern of the nominally first personages. But even putting 'Wandering Willie's Tale' aside, and taking for granted the merits of that incomparable piece (of which, it may yet be gently hinted, it was not so very long ago still a singularity and mark of daring to perceive the absolute supremacy), the good things in this fascinating book defy exaggeration. The unique autobiographic interest--so fresh and keen and personal, and yet so free from the odious intrusion of actual personality--of the earlier epistolary presentment of Saunders and Alan Fairford, of Darsie and Green Mantle; Peter Peebles, peer of Scott's best; Alan's journey and Darsie's own wanderings; the scenes at the Provost's dinner-table and in Tam Turnpenny's den; that unique figure, the skipper of the _Jumping Jenny_; the extraordinarily effective presentment of Prince Charles, already in his decadence, if not yet in his dotage; the profusion of smaller sketches and vignettes everywhere grouped round the mighty central triumph of the adventures of Piper Steenie,--who but Scott has done such things? He never put so much again in a single book. There is something in it which it is hardly fanciful to take as a 'note of finishing,' as the last piece of the work, that, gigantic as it was, was not exactly collar work, not sheer hewing of wood and drawing of water for the taskmasters. And it was fitting that the book, so varied, so fresh, so gracious and kindly, so magnificent in part, with a magnificence dominating Scott's usual range, should begin with the beginnings of his own career, and should end with the practical finish, not merely of the good days, but of the days that dawned with any faint promise of goodness, in the career of the last hope of the Jacobite cause. FOOTNOTES: [17] _Lockhart_, iv. chaps. xxviii.-xxxiii. [18] The name, which, as many people now know since Aldershot Camp was established, is a real one, had been already used with the double meaning by Charlotte Smith, a now much-forgotten novelist, whom Scott admired. [19] The once celebrated 'Polish dwarf.' [20] I may be permitted to refer--as to a _pièce justificatif_ which there is no room here to give or even abstract in full--to a set of three essays on this subject in my _Essays in English Literature_. Second Series. London, 1895. [21] This part, however, has a curious adventitious interest, owing to the idea--fairly vouched for--that Scott intended to delineate in the Colonel some points of his own character. His pride, his generosity, and his patronage of the Dominie, are not unrecognisable, certainly. And a man's idea of himself is often, even while strange to others, perfectly true to his real nature. [22] All who do not skip such things must have enjoyed these scraps, sometimes labelled particularly, sometimes merely dubbed 'Old Play'; and they are well worth reading together, as they appear in the editions of the _Poems_. At the same time, they have been, in some cases, too hastily attributed to Sir Walter himself. For instance, that in _The Legend of Montrose_, ch. xiv., assigned to _The Tragedy of Brennoralt_ (not '_v_alt,' as misprinted), is really from Sir John Suckling's sententious play (act iv. sc. 1), though loosely quoted. [23] In the earlier months had taken place that famous rediscovery of the Regalia of Scotland in Edinburgh Castle, which was one of the central moments of Scott's life, and in which, as afterwards in the restoring of Mons Meg, he took a great, if not the chief, part. His influence with George IV. as Prince and King had much to do with both, and in the earlier he took the very deepest interest. The effect on himself (and on his daughter Sophia) of the actual finding of the Crown jewels is a companion incident to that previously noticed (p. 52) as occurring on the Mound. Those who cannot sympathise with either can hardly hope to understand either Scott or his work. [24] From March to May 1819 he had a series of attacks of the cramp, so violent that he once took solemn leave of his children in expectation of decease, that the eccentric Earl of Buchan forced a way into his bedchamber to 'relieve his mind as to the arrangements of his funeral,' and that he entirely forgot the whole of the _Bride_ itself. This, too, was the time of his charge to Lockhart (_Familiar Letters_, ii. 38), as to his successor in Tory letters and politics-- 'Take thou the vanguard of the three, And bury me by the bracken-bush That grows upon yon lily lee.' [25] It has always struck me that the other form of the legend itself--that in which the 'open window' suggests that the bridegroom's wounds were due to his rival--has far greater capabilities. [26] Said to embody certain mental peculiarities of that ingenious draughtsman, but rather unamiable person, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. [27] He had said in a letter to Terry, as early as November 20, 1822, that he feared _Peveril_ 'would smell of the apoplexy.' But he made no definite complaint to any one of a particular seizure, and the date, number, and duration of the attacks are unknown. CHAPTER V THE DOWNFALL OF BALLANTYNE & COMPANY _Redgauntlet_, it has been said, was the last novel on the full scale before the downfall of Scott's prosperity. But before this he had begun _The Life of Napoleon_ and _Woodstock_, and, in June 1825, had published the _Tales of the Crusaders_, which contain some work almost, if not quite, equal to his best, and which obtained at first a greater popularity than their immediate predecessors. It was, and generally is, held that _The Betrothed_, the earlier of the two, was saved by _The Talisman_; and there can be no doubt that this latter is the better. Contrary to the wont of novelists, Scott was at least as happy with Richard here as he had been in _Ivanhoe_, and though he owed a good deal in both to the presentation of his hero in the very interesting romance published by his old secretary Weber,--one of the best of all the English verse romances and the first English poem to show a really English patriotism,--he owed nothing but suggestion. The duel at the Diamond in the Desert is admittedly one of the happiest things of the kind by a master in that kind, and if the adventures in the chapel of Engedi are both a little farcical and a little 'apropos of nothing in particular,' the story nowhere else halts or fails till it reaches its real 'curtain' with the second _Accipe hoc!_ If it had been longer, it might not have been so strong, but as it is, it is nearly perfect. But there is also more good in _The Betrothed_ than it is usual to allow. The beginning, the siege of the Garde Doloureuse, and the ghostly adventure of Eveline at the Saxon manor are excellent; while, even later, Scott has entangled the evidence against Damian and the heroine with not a little of the skill which he had shown in compromising Waverley. Had not James Ballantyne dashed the author's spirits with some of his cavillings, the whole might have been as much of a piece as _The Talisman_ is. Indeed, it must be confessed that, though Lockhart is generous enough on this point to the man to whom he has been accused of being unjust, we have very little evidence of any improvement in Scott's work due to James, while we know that he did harm not once only. But, as it stands, the book no doubt exhibits the usual faults, that languishing of the middle action, for instance, which injures _The Bride of Lammermoor_ and _The Monastery_, together with the much more common huddling and improbability of the conclusion. But we know that this last was put on hurriedly, against the grain, and after the author, disgusted by the grumblings of others, had relinquished his work; so that we cannot greatly wonder. It is impossible here to depict in detail Scott's domestic life during the years which passed since we last noticed it, and which represent the most flourishing time of his worldly circumstances. The estate of Abbotsford gradually grew, always at fancy prices, till the catastrophe itself finally prevented an expenditure of £40,000 in a lump on more land. The house grew likewise to its hundred and fifty feet of front, its slightly confused but not disagreeable external muddle of styles, and reproductions, and incorporated fragments, and its internal blend of museum and seignorial hall. It was practically completed and splendidly 'house-warmed' to celebrate the marriage (3rd February 1825) of the heir, on whom both house and estate were settled, with no very fortunate result. Between it and Castle Street the family oscillated as usual, when summer and winter, term and vacation, called them. At Abbotsford open house was always kept to a Noah's ark-full of visitors, invited and uninvited, high and low, and Castle Street saw more modest but equally cordial and constant hospitalities, in which the Lockharts were pretty frequent participators; while their country home at Chiefswood was a sort of escaping place for Sir Walter when visitors made Abbotsford unbearable. The 'Abbotsford Hunt' yearly rejoiced the neighbours; and though, as his health grew weaker, Scott's athletic and sporting exercises were necessarily and with insidious encroachment curtailed, he still did all he could in this way. In 1822 there was the great visit of George IV. to Scotland, wherein Sir Walter took a part which was only short, if short at all, of principal; and of this Lockhart has left one of his liveliest and most pleasantly subacid accounts. Visits to England were not unfrequent; and at last, in the summer of 1825, Scott made a journey, which was a kind of triumphal progress, to Ireland, with his daughter Anne and Lockhart as companions. The party returned by way of the Lakes, and the triumph was, as it were, formally wound up at Windermere in a regatta, with Wilson for admiral of the lake and Canning for joint-occupant of the triumphal boat. 'It was roses, roses all the way,' till in the autumn of the year the rue began, according to its custom, to take their place. The immediate cause of the disaster was Scott's secret partnership in the house of Ballantyne & Co., which, dragged down by the greater concerns of Constable & Co. in Edinburgh and Hurst, Robinson, & Co. in London, failed for the nominal amount of £117,000 at the end of January 1826.[34] Their assets were, in the first place, claims on the two other firms, which realised a mere trifle; and, in the second place, the property, the genius, the life, and the honour of Sir Walter Scott. When one has to deal briefly with very complicated and much-debated matters, there is nothing more important than to confine the dealing to as few points as possible. We may, I think, limit the number here to two,--the nature and amount of the indebtedness itself, and the manner in which it was met. The former, except so far as the total figures on the debtor side are concerned, is the question most in dispute. That the printing business of Ballantyne & Co. (the publishing business had lost heavily, but it had long ceased to be a drain), in the ordinary literal sense owed £117,000--that is to say, that it had lost that sum in business, or that the partners had overdrawn to that amount--nobody contends. Lockhart's account, based on presumably accurate information, not merely from his father-in-law's papers, but from Cadell, Constable's partner, is that the losses were due partly to the absolutely unbusinesslike conduct of the concern, and the neglect for many years to come to a clear understanding what its profits were and what they were not; partly to the ruinous system of eternally interchanged and renewed bills, so that, for instance, sums which Constable nominally paid years before were not actually liquidated at the time of the smash; but most of all to a proceeding which seems to pass the bounds of recklessness on one side, and to enter pretty deeply into those of fraud on the other. This is the celebrated affair of the counter-bills, things, according to Lockhart, representing no consideration or value received of any kind, but executed as a sort of collateral security to Constable when he discounted any of John Ballantyne's innumerable acceptances, and intended for use only if the real and original bills were not met. Still, according to Lockhart, this system was continued long after there was any special need for it, and a mass of counter-bills, for which the Ballantynes had never had the slightest value, and the amount of which they had either discharged or stood accountable for already on other documents, was in whole or part flung upon the market by Constable in the months of struggle which preceded his fall, and ranked against Ballantyne & Co., that is to say, Scott, when that fall came. This account, when published in the first edition of Lockhart's _Life_, provoked strong protests from the representatives of the Ballantynes, and a rather acrimonious pamphlet war followed, in which Lockhart is accused by some not merely of acrimony, but of a supercilious and contemptuous fashion of dealing with his opponents. He made, however, no important retractations later, and it is fair to say that not one of his allegations has ever been disproved by documentary evidence, as certainly ought to have been possible while all the documents were at hand. Nor did the _Memoirs_ of Constable, published many years later, supply what was and is missing; nor does Mr. Lang, with all his pains, seem to have found anything decisive. The assertions opposed to Lockhart's are that the 'counter-bill' story is not true, and that the distresses of Ballantyne & Co., and the dangerous extent to which they were involved in complicated bill transactions with Constable, were at least partly due to reckless drawings by the senior partner for his land purchases and other private expenses. Between the two it is impossible to decide with absolute certainty.[32] All that can be said is this. First, considering that the whole original capital of the firm was Scott's, that he had repeatedly saved it from ruin by his own exertions and credit, and that a very large part of the legitimate grist that came to its mill was supplied by his introduction of work to be printed, he was certainly entitled to the lion's share of any profit that was actually earned. Secondly, the neglect to balance accounts, and the reckless fashion of interweaving acceptance with drawing and drawing with acceptance, had, as we know, been repeatedly protested against by him. Thirdly, his private expenditure, very moderate at Castle Street, and not recklessly lavish even at Abbotsford, must have been amply covered by his official and private income _plus_ no great proportion of the always large and latterly immense supplies which for nearly twenty years he derived from his pen. It is impossible to see that, except by his carelessness in neglecting to ascertain from time to time the exact liabilities of the firm, he had added to the original fault of joining it, or had in any other way deserved the blow that fell upon him. No one can believe, certainly no one has ever proved, that his earnings, and his salaries, and the value of his property, if capitalised, would not have covered, and far more than covered, the cost of Abbotsford, land and house, the settlements on his children, and the household expenses of the whole fifteen years and more since he became a housekeeper there. While, as for the printing business itself, it admittedly ought to have made a handsome profit from first to last, and certainly did make a handsome profit as soon as it fell under reasonably business-like management afterwards. There remains the said 'original fault' of engaging in the business at all, and that, I think, can never be denied. The very introduction of joint-stock companies, to which, in part, Scott owed his ruin, has made a confusion between professional and commercial occupations which did not then exist; but even now I think it would hardly be considered decent for a public servant, discharging judicial functions, to carry on actual business in a private trading concern. Moreover, the secrecy which Scott observed--to such an extent that his family and his most intimate friends did not know the facts--could come from nothing but a sense of something amiss, and certainly led to the commission of not a little that was so. Scott had to conceal the actual and very material truth when he applied to the Duke of Buccleuch for the guarantee that saved him a dozen years earlier. He had to conceal it from the various persons who employed Ballantyne & Co., and were induced to do so by him. He had to conceal it when he executed those settlements on his son's marriage, which certainly would have been affected had it been known that the whole of his fortune was subject to an unlimited liability. The mystery of his unconsciousness of all this may be left pretty much where Lockhart, with full acknowledgment, left it. I have said that his action seems to have originated partly in a blind and causeless fear of poverty, which, as blind and causeless fear so often does, made him run into the very danger he tried to avoid, partly in an incomprehensible partiality for the Ballantynes.[30] We have no evidence, in any degree trustworthy, that during the entire term of his connection with the firm he derived any positive profit from it at all commensurate with his actual sinkings of money and his sacrifices and exertions of various kinds. The whole thing is, once more, a mystery, and the best comment is perhaps the simple one that the means which a man takes to ruin or seriously damage himself generally do seem a mystery to others, and probably are so to himself. Nor is there anything more unusual in the colossal irony of the situation, when we find Scott, just before his own ruin, and in the act of giving his friend Terry the actor a guarantee (which, as it happened, he had to pay), writing[36] words of the most excellent sense on the rashness of engaging in commercial undertakings without sufficient capital, the madness of dealing in bills, and his own resolve to have nothing to do with any business carried on 'by discounts and renewals.' The irony, let it be repeated, is colossal; yet we meet it, we commit it, every day. It is painful to read that during the months of uncertainty which preceded the actual crash, Scott threw the helve after the hatchet by charging himself personally, first, with an advance, or, at least, bond for £5000, and then for another of double that amount,[29] to help two firms, Constable and Hurst & Robinson, whose combined indebtedness was over half a million. But the fact of his doing so was sufficient indication of the spirit in which he would meet the crash of Ballantyne & Co. itself. The whole of the _Diary_ (_v. infra_) of the period is one long illustration (without the slightest pretentiousness or self-consciousness) of the famous line of perhaps his own greatest poetical passage-- 'No thought was there of dastard flight.' He had made up his mind, before it was certainly imminent, that bankruptcy was not to be accepted; evasion of any more thorough kind, if it occurred, he dismissed at once as not even to be thought of. Yet it is perhaps to be regretted that the mode in which the disaster was actually met, heroic as it was, was substituted for that of which he had at first thought--the simple throwing up of every scrap of his property, including all but a bare subsistence out of his official incomes, which could not have been touched without difficulty. Had he done, or been able to do this, had he shaken off the vampire in stone and lime and hungry soil which had so long sucked his blood, had he sold the library, and the 'Gabions of Jonathan Oldbuck,'[35] and the Japanese papers, and the Byron vase, and the armour, had he mortgaged his incomes by help of insurance, sold his copyrights outright, and, in short, realised everything, it does not seem absolutely certain that he might not have paid off his creditors in full, or, at least, left but a small balance to be discharged by less superhuman and fatal exertions than those actually made. The time was not a good time for selling, no doubt; but, on the other hand, the interest in Abbotsford and its master was still at its height, and the enthusiasm, which actually inspired one anonymous offer of thirty thousand pounds on loan in a lump, would probably have made good bargains for him on sales. He would then have been a free, or nearly a free man, with his own exertions untrammelled, or nearly so; and, serious as were the warnings that his health had given or received, the actual history of the next six or seven years seems to show that, had the machine been driven with less unsparing ferocity, and at a more moderate rate, it might have lasted for years, and even restored its master to competence, if not to wealth. Unfortunately, if nothing else--family affection and perhaps also family pride did still, it may be feared, supply something else--the unlucky settlement of Abbotsford stood in the way. Legally, it is true or at least probable, this settlement might have been upset; but the trustees of Mrs. Walter Scott would probably also have felt bound to resist this, and leave to unsettle could only have been obtained on the humiliating and even slightly disgraceful plea that the granter, being practically insolvent at the time, was acting beyond his rights. It seems to have been proposed by the Bank of Scotland, during the negotiations for the arrangement which followed, that this should be done; and the reasons which dictated Scott's refusal would have equally, no doubt, prevented him from doing it in the other case. Accordingly, it was resolved, as he declined to go into bankruptcy, that his whole property should, under a procedure half legal, half amicable, be vested in trustees for the benefit of his creditors; nothing except the Castle Street house and some minor chattels being actually sold. He, on the other hand, undertook to devote to the liquidation of the balance of his debts all the proceeds of his future work, except a bare maintenance for himself and (on a reduced scale) for Abbotsford. How 'this fatal venture of mistaken chivalry' (to borrow a most applicable phrase of Kingsley's about another matter) was carried out we shall see, but how grossly unfair it was to Scott himself must appear at once. In return for his sacrifices he had no real legal protection; any creditor could, as a Jew named Abud actually did, threaten at any time to force bankruptcy unless he were paid at once and in full. Instead of retaining (as he would have done had the whole of his property been actually surrendered, and had he allowed the debts which came with the law to go with it) complete control of his future earnings and exertions, and making, as he might have made, restitution by instalments as a free gift, he was in such a plight that any creditor was entitled to regard him as a kind of thrall, paying debt by service as a matter of course, and deserving neither rest, nor gratitude, nor commendation. One really sometimes feels inclined to regret that Abud or somebody else was not more relentless--to pray for a Sir Giles Overreach or a Shylock among the creditors. For such a one, by his apparently malevolent but really beneficent grasping, would have in effect liberated the bondsman, who, as it was, was compelled to toil at a hopeless task to his dying day, and to hasten that dying day by the attempt. Mention has been made above of a certain _Diary_ which is our main authority, and, indeed, makes other authorities merely illustrative for a great part of the few and evil last years of Sir Walter's life. It was begun before the calamities, and just after the return from Ireland, being pleasantly christened 'Gurnal,' after a slight early phonetic indulgence of his daughter Sophia's. It was suggested--and Lockhart seems to think that it was effective--as a relief from the labour of _Napoleon_, which went slightly against the grain, even before it became bond-work. It may have been a doubtful prescription, for 'the cud[28] of sweet and bitter fancy' is dangerous food. But it has certainly done _us_ good. When Mr. Douglas obtained leave to publish it as a whole, there were, I believe, wiseacres who dreaded the effect of the publication, thinking that the passages which Lockhart himself had left out might in some way diminish and belittle our respect for Scott. They had no need to trouble themselves. It was already, as published in part in the Life, one of the most pathetically interesting things in biographical literature. This quality was increased by the complete publication, while it also became a new proof that 'good blood cannot lie,' that the hero is a hero even in utterances kept secret from the very valet. If, as has happened before and might conceivably happen again, some cataclysm destroyed all Scott's other work, we should still have in this not merely an admirable monument of literature, but the picture of a character not inhumanly flawless, yet almost superhumanly noble; of the good man struggling against adversity, not, indeed, with a sham pretence of stoicism, but with that real fortitude of which stoicism is too often merely a caricature and a simulation. It is impossible not to recur to the _Marmion_ passage already quoted as one reads the account of the successive misfortunes, the successive expedients resorted to, the absolute determination never to cry craven.[33] It is from the _Diary_ that we learn his own complete knowledge of the fact urged above, that it would have been better for him if his creditors had been in appearance less kind. 'If they drag me into court,' he says,[31] 'instead of going into this scheme of arrangement, they would do themselves a great injury, and _perhaps eventually do the good, though it would give me great pain_.' The _Diary_, illustrated as it is by the excellent selections from Skene's _Reminiscences_ and other scattered or unpublished matter which Mr. Douglas has appended, exhibits the whole history of this period with a precision that could not otherwise have been hoped for, especially as pecuniary misfortunes were soon, according to the fashion of this world, to be complicated by others. For some two years before the catastrophe Lady Scott had been in weak health; and though the misfortune itself does not seem to have affected her much after the first shock, she grew rapidly worse in the spring of 1826, and, her asthma changing into dropsy, died at Abbotsford during Scott's absence in Edinburgh, when his work began in May. His successive references to her illness, and the final and justly-famous passage on her death, are excellent examples of the spirit which pervades this part of the _Diary_. This spirit is never unmanly, but displays throughout, and occasionally, as we see, to his own consciousness, that strange yet not uncommon phenomenon which is well expressed in a French phrase, _il y a quelque chose de cassé_, and which frequently comes upon men after or during the greater misfortunes of life. Neither in his references to this, nor in those to another threatened, though as yet deferred blow, expected from the ever-declining health of the Lockharts' eldest child, the 'Hugh Littlejohn' of the _Tales of a Grandfather_, is there any tone of whining on the one hand, or any mark of insensibility on the other. But there is throughout something like a confession, stoutly avoided in words, but hinted in tone and current of quotation and sentiment, that the strength, though not the courage, is hardly equal to the day. The _Diary_, both here and elsewhere, is full of good things, pleasant wit still, shrewd criticism of life, quaint citation of wise old Scots saws and good modern instances, happy judgment of men and books,--above all, that ever-present touch of literature, without mere bookishness, which is as delightful to those who can taste it as any of Scott's gifts. And perhaps, too, we may trace, even behind this, a secret sense that, as his own Habakkuk Mucklewrath has it in the dying curse on Claverhouse, the wish of his heart had indeed been granted to his loss, and that the hope of his own pride had gone too near to destroy him. FOOTNOTES: [28] Some say £130,000, but this seems to include the £10,000 mortgage on Abbotsford. This, however, was a private affair of Scott's own, not a transaction of the firm. [29] I have consulted high authority on the legal side of this counter-bill story, and have been informed (with the expected caution that, the facts being so doubtful, the law is hard to give) that under Scots law these counter-bills, if they existed, would probably be allowed to rank, supposing that twenty shillings in the pound had not been paid on the first set, and to an extent sufficient to make up that sum. But Lockhart's allegation clearly is that they were so used as to charge Scott's estate to the extent of _forty_ shillings in the pound. [30] John Ballantyne had died in 1821, before the mischief was punished, but after it was done. [31] _Lockhart_, vii. 370, 371. [32] I am not certain whether the second advance, which was secured by mortgage on Abbotsford, included the first or not. Probably it did. [33] A pet name for his 'curios.' [34] Our now-accepted texts, of course, read 'food'; but no one who remembers the pleasant use which Sir Walter himself has made of the other reading in the Introduction to _Quentin Durward_ will readily give it up. [35] As Scott, like Swift and Shakespeare, like Thackeray and Fielding, never hesitated at a touch of grim humour even though it might border on grotesque, he himself would probably not have missed the coincidence of-- 'Though _bill_men ply the ghastly blow,' which suggests itself only too tragi-comically. [36] _Journal_, Feb. 3, 1826, p. 103, ed. Douglas; _Lockhart_, viii. 216, 217. CHAPTER VI LAST WORKS AND DAYS It has been mentioned that when Scott returned from Ireland, and before his misfortunes came upon him, he had already engaged in two works of magnitude, a new novel, _Woodstock_, and a _Life of Napoleon_, planned upon a very large scale, for which Constable made great preparations, and from which he expected enormous profits. After the catastrophe it became a question whether Constable's estate could claim the fulfilment of these contracts, or whether the profits of them could be devoted wholly to the liquidation of Scott's, or rather Ballantyne & Co.'s, own debts. The completion of _Woodstock_ was naturally delayed until this point was settled. But from the very moment when Sir Walter had resolved to devote himself to the heroic but apparently hopeless task of paying off his nominal liabilities in full, he arranged a system of work upon these two books, and especially upon the _Napoleon_, which exceeded in dogged determination anything that even he had hitherto done. The novel was, of course, to him comparative child's play: he had written novels before in six weeks or thereabouts all told, though his impaired vigour, the depression of his spirits, and the sense of labouring for the mere purpose of pouring the results into a sieve, made things harder now. But the _Napoleon_, though he had made some preparation for this kind of writing by his elaborate and multifarious editorial work, especially by that on Dryden and Swift, was to a great extent new; and it required, what was always irksome to him, elaborate reading up of books and documents for the special purpose. No man has ever utilised the results of previous reading for his own pleasure better than Scott, and few men, not mere professed book-grubbers, have ever had vaster stores of it. But he frequently confesses--a confession which in many ways makes his plight in these years still more to be pitied--an ingrained dislike to task-work of any kind; and there is no more laborious task-work than getting up and piecing together the materials for history. The book, one, at a rough guess, of at least a million words, was completed from end to end in less than eighteen months, during which he also wrote _Woodstock_, _Malachi Malagrowther_ (_vide infra_), with several reviews and minor things, besides serving his usual number of days at the Clerk's table, devoting necessarily much time to the not more painful than troublesome business of his pecuniary affairs, his removal from Castle Street, etc., and taking one journey of some length in the summer of 1826 to London and Paris for materials. The feat was accomplished by a rigid system of 'so much per day'--by dint of which, no doubt, an amount of work, surprising to the inexperienced, can be turned out with no necessarily disastrous consequences. But Scott, disgusted with society, and avoiding it from motives of economy as well as of want of heart, disturbed hardly at all by strangers at Abbotsford, and not at all in the lodgings and furnished houses which he took while in Edinburgh, let 'his own thought drive him like a goad' to work in the interest of his task-masters, and perhaps, also, for the sake of drowning care, pushed the system to the most extravagant lengths. We know that he sometimes worked from six in the morning to six at even, with breakfast and luncheon brought into his study and consumed there; and though his court duties made this fortunately impossible for a part of the year, at least during a part of the week, they were not a complete preservative. In the eighteen months he cleared for his bloodsuckers nearly twenty thousand pounds, eight thousand for _Woodstock_ and eleven or twelve for _Napoleon_. The trifling profits of _Malachi_ and the reviews seem to have been permitted to go into his own pocket. He was naturally proud of the exploit, but it may be feared that it made the end certain. Of the merits of the _Napoleon_ (the second edition of which, by the way, carried its profits to eighteen thousand pounds) it is perhaps not necessary to say very much. I should imagine that few living persons have read it word for word through, and I confess very frankly that I have not done so myself, though I think I have read enough to qualify me for judging it. It is only unworthy of its author in the sense that one feels it to have been not in the least the work that he was born to do. It is nearly as good, save for the technical inferiority of Scott's prose style, as the historical work of Southey, and very much better than the historical work of Campbell and Moore. The information is sufficient, the narrative clear, and the author can at need rise to very fair eloquence, or at least rhetoric. But it is too long to be read, as one reads Southey's _Nelson_, for its merits as biography, and not technically authoritative enough to be an exhaustive work of reference from the military, diplomatic, and political side. Above all, one cannot read a page without remembering that there were living then in England at least a dozen men who could have done it better,--Grote, Thirlwall, Mitford, Arnold, Hallam, Milman, Lingard, Palgrave, Turner, Roscoe, Carlyle, Macaulay, to mention only the most prominent, and mention them at random, were all alive and of man's estate,--and probably scores who could have done it nearly or quite as well; while there was not one single man living, in England or in the world, who was capable of doing the work which Scott, if not as capable as ever, was still capable of doing like no one before and scarcely any one after him. Take, for instance, _Woodstock_ itself. In a very quaint, characteristic, agreeable, and, as criticism, worthless passage of _Wild Wales_, Borrow has stigmatised it as 'trash.' I only wish we had more such trash outside the forty-eight volumes of the _Waverley Novels_, or were likely to have more. The book, of course, has certain obvious critical faults--which are not in the least what made Borrow object to it. Although Scott, and apparently Ballantyne, liked the catastrophe, it has always seemed to me one of his worst examples of 'huddling up.' For it is historically and dramatically impossible that Cromwell should change his mind, or that Pearson and Robbins should wish to thwart severity which, considering the death of Humgudgeon, had a good deal more excuse than Oliver often thought necessary. Nor may the usual, and perhaps a little more than the usual, shortcomings in construction be denied. But as of old, and even more than on some occasions of old, the excellences of character, description, dialogue, and incident are so great as to atone over and over again for defects of the expected kind. If Everard has something of that unlucky quality which the author recognised in Malcolm Graeme when he said, 'I ducked him in the lake to give him something to do; but wet or dry I could make nothing of him,' Alice is quite of the better class of his heroines; and from her we ascend to personages in whose case there is very little need of apology and proviso. Sir Henry Lee, Wildrake, Cromwell himself, Charles, may not satisfy others, but I am quite content with them; and the famous scene where Wildrake is a witness to Oliver's half-confession seems to me one of its author's greatest serious efforts. Trusty Tomkins, perhaps, might have been a little better; he comes somewhat under the ban of some unfavourable remarks which Reginald Heber makes in his diary on this class of Scott's figures, though the good bishop seems to me to have been rather too severe. But the pictures of Woodstock Palace and Park have that indescribable and vivid charm which Scott, without using any of the 'realist' minuteness or 'impressionist' contortions of later days, has the faculty of communicating to such things. For myself, I can say--and I am sure I may speak for hundreds--that Tullyveolan, Ellangowan, the Bewcastle moor where Bertram rescued Dandie, Clerihugh's, Monkbarns (I do not see Knockwinnock so clearly), the home of the Osbaldistones, and the district from Aberfoyle to Loch Ard, the moors round Drumclog, Torquilstone, and, not to make the list tedious, a hundred other places, including Woodstock itself, are as real as if I had walked over every inch of the ground and sat in every room of the houses. In some cases I have never seen the supposed originals, in others, I have recognised them as respectable, though usually inferior, representatives of Scott's conceptions. But in any case _these_ are all real, all possessions, all part of the geographical and architectural furniture of the mind. They are like the wood in the 'Dream of Fair Women': one knows the flowers, one knows the leaves, one knows the battlements and the windows, the platters and the wine-cups, the cabinets and the arras. They are, like all the great places of literature, like Arden and Elsinore, like the court before Agamemnon's palace, and that where the damsel said to Sir Launcelot, 'Fair knight, thou art unhappy,' our own--our own to 'pass freely through until the end of time.' It must not be forgotten in this record of his work that Scott wrote 'Bonnie Dundee' in the very middle of his disaster, and that he had not emerged from the first shock of that disaster, when the astonishingly clever _Letters of Malachi Malagrowther_ appeared. Of the reasonableness of their main purpose--a strenuous opposition to the purpose of doing away, in Scotland as in England, with notes of a less denomination than five pounds--I cannot pretend to judge. It is possible that suppressed rage at his own misfortunes found vent, and, for him, very healthy vent, while it did harm to no one, in a somewhat too aggressive patriotism, of a kind more particularist than was usual with him. But the fire and force of the writing are so great, the alternations from seriousness to humour, from denunciation to ridicule, so excellently managed, that there are few better specimens of this particular kind of pamphlet. As for 'Bonnie Dundee,' there are hardly two opinions about that. As a whole, it may not be quite equal to 'Lochinvar,' to which it forms such an excellent pendant, and which it so nearly resembles in rhythm. But the best of it is equal as poetry, and perhaps superior as meaning. And it admirably completes in verse the tribute long before paid by _Old Mortality_ in prose, to the 'last and best of Scots,' as Dryden called him in the noble epitaph,[46] which not improbably inspired Scott himself to do what he could to remove the vulgar aspersions on the fame of the hero of Killiecrankie. Moreover, according to his wont, Scott had barely finished, indeed he had not finished, the _Napoleon_ before he had arranged for new work of two different kinds; and he was soon, without a break, actually engaged upon both tasks, one of them among the happiest things he ever undertook, and the other containing, at least, one piece of his most interesting work. These were the _Tales of a Grandfather_ and the _Chronicles of the Canongate_. Both supplied him with his tasks, his daily allowance of 'leaves,'[38] for great part of 1827, and both were finished and the _Chronicles_ actually published, before the end of it.[39] For the actual stories comprising these _Chronicles_ I have never cared much. The chief in point of size, the _Surgeon's Daughter_, deals with Indian scenes, of which Scott had no direct knowledge, and in connection with which there was no interesting literature to inspire him. It appears to me almost totally uninteresting, more so than _Castle Dangerous_ itself. _The Two Drovers_ and _The Highland Widow_ have more merit; but they are little more than anecdotes.[40] On the other hand, the 'Introduction' to these _Chronicles_, with the history of their supposed compiler, Mr. Chrystal Croftangry, is a thing which I should be disposed to put on a level with his very greatest work. Much is admittedly personal reminiscence of himself and his friends, handled not with the clumsy and tactless directness of reporting, which has ruined so many novels, but in the great transforming way of Fielding and Thackeray. Chrystal's early thoughtless life, the sketch of his ancestry (said to represent the Scotts of Raeburn), the agony of Mr. Somerville, suggested partly by the last illness of Scott's father, the sketches of Janet M'Evoy and Mrs. Bethune Baliol (Mrs. Murray Keith of Ravelston), the visit to the lost home,--all these things are treated not merely with consummate literary effect, but with a sort of _sourdine_ accompaniment of heart-throbs which only the dullest ear can miss. Nor, as we see from the _Diary_, were the author's recent misfortunes, and his sojourn in a moral counterpart of the Deserted Garden of his friend Campbell, the only disposing causes of this. He had in several ways revived the memory of his early love, Lady Forbes, long since dead. Her husband had been among the most active of his business friends in arranging the compromise with creditors, and was shortly (though Scott did not know it) to discharge privately the claim of the recalcitrant Jew bill-broker Abud, who threatened Sir Walter's personal liberty. Her mother, Lady Jane Stuart, had renewed acquaintance with him, and very soon after the actual publication sent him some MS. memorials of the days that were long enough ago--memorials causing one of those paroxysms of memory which are the best of all things for a fairly hale and happy man, but dangerous for one whom time and ill-luck have shaken.[41] He had, while the _Chronicles_ were actually a-writing, revisited St. Andrews, and, while his companions were climbing St. Rule's Tower, had sat on a tombstone and thought how he carved her name in Runic letters thirty-four years before. In short, all the elements, sentimental and circumstantial, of the moment of literary projection were present, and the Introduction was no vulgar piece of 'chemic gold.' The delightful and universally known _Tales of a Grandfather_ present no such contrasts of literary merit, and were connected with no such powerful but exhausting emotions of the mind. They originated in actual stories told to 'Hugh Littlejohn,' they were encouraged by the fact that there was no popular and readable compendium of Scottish history, they came as easily from his pen as the _Napoleon_ had run with difficulty, and are as far removed from hack-work as that vast and, to his creditors, profitable compilation must be pronounced to be on the whole near to it. The book, of course, is not in the modern sense strictly critical, though it must be remembered that the authorities for at least the earlier history of Scotland are so exceedingly few and meagre, that criticism of the saner kind has very little to fasten upon. But in this book eminently, in the somewhat later compilation for _Lardner's Cyclopædia_ to a rather less degree, this absence of technical criticism is more than made up by Scott's knowledge of humanity, by the divining power, so to say, which his combined affection for the subject and general literary skill gave him, and by that singularly shrewd and pervading common sense which in him was so miraculously united with the poetical and romantic gift. I was pleased, but not at all surprised, when, some year or so ago, I asked a professed historian, and one of the best living authorities on the particular subject, what he thought of the general historic effect of Scott's work, to find him answer without the slightest hesitation that it was about the soundest thing, putting mere details aside, that exists on the matter. It may be observed, in passing, that the later compilation referred to was a marked example of the way in which Scott could at this time 'coin money.' He was offered a thousand pounds for one of the Lardner volumes; and as his sketch swelled beyond the limit, he received fifteen hundred. The entire work, much of which was simple paraphrase of the _Tales_, occupied him, it would seem, about six working weeks, or not quite so much. Can it be wondered that both before and after the crash this power of coining money should have put him slightly out of focus with pecuniary matters generally? Mediæval and other theorisers on usury have been laughed at for their arguments as to the 'unnatural' nature of usurious gain, and its consequent evil. One need not be superstitious more than reason, to scent a certain unnaturalness in the gift of turning paper into gold in this other way also. Every _peau de chagrin_ has a faculty of revenging itself on the possessor. For the time, however, matters went with Scott as swimmingly as they could with a man who, by his own act, was, as he said, 'eating with spoons and reading books that were not his own,' and yet earning by means absolutely within his control, and at his pleasure to exercise or not, some twenty thousand a year. _The Fair Maid of Perth_, a title which has prevailed over what was its first, _St. Valentine's Eve_, and has entirely obscured the fact that it was issued as a second series of the _Chronicles of the Canongate_, provided money for a new scheme. This scheme, outlined by Constable himself, and now carried out by Cadell and accepted by Scott's trustees, was for buying in the outstanding copyrights belonging to the bankrupt firm, and issuing the entire series of novels, with new introductions and notes by Scott himself, with attractive illustrations and in a cheap and handy form. Scott himself usually designates the plan as the _Magnum Opus_, or more shortly (and perhaps not without remembrance of more convivial days) 'the _Magnum_'. _The Fair Maid_ itself was very well received, and seems to have kept its popularity as well as any of the later books. Indeed, the figures of the Smith, of Oliver Proudfute (the last of Scott's humorous-pathetic characters), of the luckless Rothsay, and of Ramornie (who very powerfully affected a generation steeped in Byronism), are all quite up to the author's 'best seconds.' The opening and the close are quite excellent, especially the fight on the North Inch and 'Another for Hector!' and the middle part is full of attractive bits of the old kind. But Conachar-Eachin is rather a thing of shreds and patches, and the entire episode of Father Clement and the heresy business is dragged in with singularly little initial excuse, valid connection, or final result. We have unluckily no diary for the last half of 1828, after Scott returned from a long stay with the Lockharts in London, and we thus hear little of the beginnings of the next novel, _Anne of Geierstein_. When the _Journal_ begins again, complaints are heard from Ballantyne. Alterations (which Scott always loathed, and which certainly are detestable things) became or were thought necessary, and when the poor _Maid of the Mist_ at length appeared in May 1829, she was dismissed by her begetter very unkindly, as 'not a good girl like the other Annes'--his daughter and her cousin, _fille de Thomas_, who were living with him. The book was not at all ill received, but Lockhart is apologetic about it, and it has been the habit of criticism since to share the opinions of 'Aldiborontiphoscophormio.'[45] I cannot agree with this, and should put _Anne of Geierstein_--as a mere romance and not counting the personal touches which exalt _Redgauntlet_ and the Introduction to the _Chronicles_--on a level with anything, and above most things, later than _The Pirate_. Its chief real fault is not so much bad construction--it is actually more, not less, well knit than _The Fair Maid of Perth_,--as the too great predominance of merely episodic and unnecessary things and persons, like the _Vehmgericht_ and King's René's court. Its merits are manifold. The opening storm and Arthur's rescue by Anne, as well as the quarrel with Rudolf, are excellent; the journey (though too much delayed by the said Rudolf's tattlings), with the sojourn at Grafslust and the adventures at La Ferette, ranks with Scott's many admirable journeys, and high among them; Queen Margaret is nobly presented (I wish Shakespeare, Lancastrian that he was, had had the chance of versifying the scene where she flings the feather and the rose to the winds, as a pendant to 'I called thee then vain shadow of my fortune'); and not only Philipson's rattling peal of thunder to wake Charles the Bold from his stupor, but the Duke's final scenes, come well up to the occasion. Earlier, Scott would not have made René quite such a mere old fool, and could have taken the slight touch of pasteboard and sawdust out of the Black Priest of St. Paul's. But these are small matters, and the whole merits of the book are not small. Even Arthur and Anne are above, not below, the usual hero and heroine. The gap in the _Journal_ for the last half of 1828 is matched by another and more serious one for nearly a twelvemonth, from July 1829 to May 1830, a period during which Sir Walter's health went from bad to worse, and in which he lost his Abbotsford factotum, Tom Purdie. But the first six months of 1829, and perhaps a little more, are among its pleasantest parts. The shock of the failure and of his wife's death were, as far as might be, over; he had resumed the habit of seeing a fair amount of society; his work, though still busily pursued, was less killing than during the composition of the _Napoleon_; and his affairs were looking almost rosily. A first distribution, of thirty-two thousand pounds at once, had been made among the creditors. Cadell's scheme of the _Magnum_--wisely acquiesced in by the trustees, and facilitated by a bold purchase at auction of Constable's copyrights for some eight thousand pounds, and later, of those of the poems from Longmans for about the same or a little less--was turning out a great success. They had counted on a sale of eight thousand copies; they had to begin with twelve thousand, and increase it to twenty, while the number ultimately averaged thirty-five thousand. The work of annotation and introduction was not hard, and was decidedly interesting. Unluckily, irreparable mischief had already been done, and when the _Diary_ begins again, we soon see signs of it. The actual beginning of the end had occurred before the resumption, on February 15, 1830, when Sir Walter had, in the presence of his daughter and of Miss Violet Lockhart, experienced an attack of an apoplectic-paralytic character, from which he only recovered by much blood-letting and starvation. There can be little doubt that this helped to determine him to do what he had for some time meditated, and resign his place at the Clerk's table: nor perhaps could he have well done otherwise. But the results were partly unfortunate. The work had been very trifling, and had saved him from continual drudgery indoors at home, while it incidentally provided him with society and change of scene. He was now to live at Abbotsford,--for neither his means nor his health invited an Edinburgh residence when it was not necessary,--with surroundings only too likely to encourage 'thick-coming fancies,' out of reach of immediate skilled medical attendance, and with very dangerous temptations to carry on the use of his brain, which was now becoming almost deadly. Yet he would never give in. The pleasant and not exhausting task of arranging the _Magnum_ (which was now bringing in from eight to ten thousand a year for the discharge of his debts) was supplemented by other things, especially _Count Robert of Paris_, and a book on Demonology for Murray's _Family Library_. This last occupied him about the time of his seizure, and after the _Diary_ was resumed, it was published in the summer of 1830. Scott was himself by this time conscious of a sort of aphasia of the pen (the direct result of the now declared affection of his brain), which prevented him from saying exactly what he wished in a connected manner; and the results of this are in part evident in the book. But it must always remain a blot, quite unforgivable and nearly inexplicable, on the memory of Wilson, that 'Christopher North' permitted himself to comment on some lapses in logic and style in a way which would have been rather that side of good manners and reasonable criticism in the case of a mere beginner in letters. It is true that he and Scott were at no time very intimate friends, and that there were even some vague antipathies between them. But Wilson had been deeply obliged to Scott in the matter of his professorship;[44] he at least ought to have been nearly as well aware as we are of the condition of his benefactor's health; and even if he had known nothing of this, the rest of Sir Walter's circumstances were known to all the world, and should surely have secured silence. But it seems that Wilson was for the moment in a pet with Lockhart, to whom the _Letters on Demonology_ were addressed, and so he showed, as he seldom, but sometimes did, the 'black drop,' which in his case, though not in Lockhart's, marred at times a generally healthy and noble nature. As a matter of fact, it needs either distinct malevolence or silly hypercriticism to find any serious fault with the _Demonology_. If not a masterpiece of scientific treatment in reference to a subject which hardly admits of any such thing, it is an exceedingly pleasant and amusing and a by no means uninstructive medley of learning, traditional anecdote, reminiscence, and what not, on a matter which, as we know, had interested the writer from very early days, and which he regarded from his usual and invaluable combined standpoint of shrewd sense and poetical appreciation. The decay, now not to be arrested, though its progress was comparatively slow, was more evident in the last two works of fiction which Scott completed, _Count Robert of Paris_ and _Castle Dangerous_. Against the first ending of the former (we do not possess it, so we cannot criticise their criticism) Ballantyne and Cadell formally protested, and Scott rewrote a great deal of it by dictation to Laidlaw. The loss of command both of character and of story-interest is indeed very noticeable. But the opening incident at the Golden Gate, the interview of the Varangian with the Imperial family, the intrusion of Count Robert, and, above all, his battle with the tiger and liberation from the dungeon of the Blachernal, with some other things, show that astonishing power of handling single incidents which was Scott's inseparable gift, and which seems to have accompanied him throughout to the very eve of his death. The much briefer _Castle Dangerous_ (which is connected with an affecting visit of Scott and Lockhart to the tombs of the Douglases) is too slight to give room for very much shortcoming. Its chief artistic fault is the happy ending--for though a romancer is in no respect bound to follow his text exactly, and happy endings are quite good things, yet it is rather too much to turn upside down the historic catastrophe of the Good Lord James's fashion of warfare. Otherwise the book is more noticeable for a deficiency of spirit, life, and light--for the evidence of shadow and stagnation falling over the once restless and brilliant scene--than for anything positively bad. These two books were mainly dictated, the paralytic affection having injured the author's power of handwriting,[43] to William Laidlaw between the summer of 1830 and the early autumn of 1831, increasing weakness, and the demands of the _Magnum_, preventing more speed. The last pages of _Castle Dangerous_ contain Scott's farewell, and the announcement to the public of that voyage to Italy which had actually begun when the novels appeared in the month of November. The period between the fatal seizure and the voyage to the Mediterranean has not much diary concerning it, but has been related with inimitable judgment and sympathy by Lockhart. It was, even putting failing health and obscured mental powers aside, not free from 'browner shades'; for the Reform agitation naturally grieved Sir Walter deeply, while on two occasions he was the object of popular insult and on one of popular violence. Both were at Jedburgh; but the blame is put upon intrusive weavers from Hawick. The first, a meeting of Roxburghshire freeholders, saw nothing worse than unmannerly interruption of a speech made partially unintelligible by the speaker's failing articulation. He felt it bitterly, and when hissing was repeated as he bowed farewell, is said to have replied, low, but now quite distinctly, '_Moriturus vos saluto!_' On the second, the election after the throwing out of the first Bill, he was stoned, spat upon, and greeted with cries of 'Burke Sir Walter.'[42] Natural indignation has often been expressed at this behaviour towards the best neighbour and the greatest man in Scotland--behaviour which, as we know, haunted him on his deathbed; but it is to be presumed that the persons who thus proclaimed their cause knew the line of conduct most worthy of it. It does not appear with absolute certainty who first suggested the Italian journey. It could not have been expected to produce any radical cure; but it seems to have been hoped that change of scene would prevent the patient from indulging in that attempt to write from which at Abbotsford it was impossible to keep him, though it was simply slow, and not so very slow, suicide. The wishes of his family were most kindly and generously met by the Government of the day, among whose members he had many personal friends, though political opponents; and the frigate _Barham_, a cut-down seventy-four, which had the credit of being one of the smartest vessels in the navy, was assigned to take him to Malta. He had, before he left Abbotsford itself, an affecting interview with Wordsworth, which occasioned _Yarrow Revisited_ and the beautiful sonnet, 'A trouble, not of clouds or weeping rain,' and had no doubt part in the initiation of the last really great thing that Wordsworth ever wrote--the _Effusion_ on the deaths of Hogg, Coleridge, Crabbe, Lamb, and Scott himself, in 1835. Some stay was made with the Lockharts in London, and a little at Portsmouth, waiting for a wind; but the final departure took place on October 29, 1831. Scott was abroad for the best part of a year, the time being chiefly made out in visits of some length to Malta, Naples, and Rome. We have a good deal of diary for this period, and it, even more than the subsidiary documents and Lockhart's summary of no doubt much that is unpublished, betrays the state of the case. Every now and then--indeed, for long passages--there is nothing very different from the matter to which, since the first warning in 1818, we have been accustomed. Scott is, if not the infinitely various but never mutable Scott of the earlier years, still constant in fun and kindness, in quaint erudition and hearty friendship, though he is all this in a slightly deadened and sicklied degree. But there are strange breaks-down and unfamiliar touches, now of almost querulous self-concern (the thing most foreign to his earlier nature), as where he complains that his companions, his son and daughter, 'are neither desirous to follow his amusements nor anxious that he should adopt theirs'; now of still more foreign callousness, as where he dismisses the news of the death of Hugh Littlejohn, whose illnesses earlier had been almost his chief anxiety, and records in the same entry that he 'went to the opera.' The passage in the Introduction to the _Chronicles_, written not so very long before, traces with an almost horrible exactness the changes which were now taking place in himself. Moreover, he would resume the pen; and, first in Malta, then at Naples, began and went far to complete two new novels, _The Siege of Malta_ and _Il Bizarro_, which, I suppose, are still at Abbotsford, with Lockhart's solemn curse on the person who shall publish them. He had now (it does not seem clear on what grounds, or by what stages) confirmed himself in the belief that he had paid off all his debts, instead of nearly half of them.[37] And he founded divers schemes on the profits of these works, added to the (as he thought) liberated returns of the _Magnum_; and even revived his notions of buying Faldonside with its thousand acres, and 'holding all Tweed-bank, from Ettrick-foot to Calla weel.' Fêted, too, as he was, and in this condition of mind, it seems to have been difficult for his companions to make him observe the absolute temperance in food and drink which was as necessary to the staving off of the end as abstinence from brain-work; and it must be regarded as a signal proof of the extraordinary strength of his constitution that it resisted as long as it did. At last, and of course suddenly, came the final warning of all: the occurrence, without notice, of an almost agonising home-sickness. The party travelled by land, as speedily as they could, to the Channel, a last attack of apoplectic paralysis taking place at Nimeguen; and after crossing it and reaching London, Sir Walter was taken by sea to the Forth, and thence home. The actual end was delayed but very little longer, and it has been told by Lockhart in one of those capital passages of English literature on which it is folly to attempt to improve or even to comment, and which, a hundred times quoted, can never be stale. Sir Walter Scott died at Abbotsford on September 21, 1832, and was buried four days later at Dryburgh, a post-mortem examination having disclosed considerable softening of the brain. There remained unpaid at his death about fifty-five thousand pounds of the Ballantyne debts, besides private encumbrances on Abbotsford, etc., including the ten thousand which Constable had extracted, he knowing, from Scott unknowing, the extent of the ruin, in the hours just before it. The falling in of assurances cleared off two-fifths of this balance, and Cadell discharged the rest on the security of the _Magnum_, which was equal, though not much more than equal, to the burden in the longrun. Thus, if Scott's exertions during the last seven years of his life had benefited his own pocket, his ambition--whether wise or foolish, persons more confident in their judgment of human wishes than the present writer must decide--would have been amply fulfilled, and his son, supposing the money to have been invested with ordinary care and luck, would have been left a baronet and squire, with at least six or seven thousand a year. As it was, he did not succeed to much more than the title, a costly house, and a not very profitable estate, burdened, though not heavily, with mortgages. This burden was reduced by the good sense of the managers of the English memorial subscription to Scott, who devoted the six or seven thousand pounds, remaining after some embezzlement, to clearing off the encumbrances as far as possible. The chief result of many Scottish tributes of the same kind was the well-known Scott Monument on the edge of Princes Street Gardens, which has the great good luck to be one of the very few not unsatisfactory things of the kind in the British Islands. By mishap rather than neglect, no monument in Westminster Abbey was erected for the greater part of the century; but one has been at last set up in May of the present year. FOOTNOTES: [37] This is a translation, of course; but if anyone will compare Pitcairn's Latin and Dryden's English, he will see where the poetry comes in. [38] He wrote on sheets of a large quarto size, in a very small and close hand, so that his usual 'task' of six 'leaves' meant about thirty pages of print, though not very small or close print. [39] It was early in this year, on February 23, at a Theatrical Fund dinner, that he made public avowal of the authorship of _Waverley_. [40] Cadell did not like any of them much, and objected still more to others intended to follow them. Sir Walter, therefore, kept these back, and gave them later to Heath's _Keepsake_. They now appear with their intended companions: the slightest, _The Tapestried Chamber_, is perhaps the best. [41] Compare _Diary_, 1827, Nov. 7 ('I fairly softened myself like an old fool with recalling old stories, till I was fit for nothing but shedding tears and repeating verses the whole night'), with the famous couplet in 'Rose Aylmer'-- 'A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee.' [42] Scott's name for _James_ Ballantyne, as 'Rigdumfunnidos' was for John. [43] See his own unqualified and almost too gushing acknowledgment of this ten years before, in the _Familiar Letters_, ii. 84-85, _note_. [44] It had also caused great and very painful trouble in his lame leg, which from this time onwards had to be mechanically treated. [45] The Burke and Hare murders were recent. [46] The success of the _Magnum_ had allowed a second large dividend to be paid, and the creditors had been generous enough to restore Scott's forks, spoons, and books to him. CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION It is natural--indeed the feeling is not merely easy of excuse, but entitled to respect--that 'the pity of it,' the sombre close of so brilliant a career as Scott's, should attract somewhat disproportionate attention. Thus readers of his life are drawn more especially either to sorrow for his calamities, or to admiration of this stoutest of all hearts set to nearly the stiffest of all hills, or to casuistical debate on the 'dram of eale' that brought about his own share in causing his misfortunes. Undoubtedly, none of these things ought to escape our attention. But, in the strict court of literary and critical audit, they must not have more than their share. As a matter of fact, Scott's work was almost finished--nothing distinctly novel in kind and first-rate in quality, except the _Tales of a Grandfather_ and the Introduction to the _Chronicles_, remained to be added to it--when that fatal bill of Constable's was suffered by Hurst & Robinson to be returned. And the trials which followed, though they showed the strength, the nobleness, the rare balance and solidity of his character, did not create these virtues, which had been formed and established by habit long before. _Respice finem_ is not here a wise, at least a sufficient, maxim: we must look along the whole line to discern satisfactorily and thoroughly what manner of man this was in life and in letters. What manner of man he was physically is pretty well-known from his originally numerous and almost innumerably reproduced and varied portraits; not extremely tall, but of a goodly height, somewhat shortened by his lameness and massive make, the head being distinguished by a peculiar domed, or coned, cranium. This made 'Lord Peter' Robertson give him the nickname of 'Peveril of the Peak,' which he himself after a little adopted, and which, shortened to 'Peveril,' was commonly used by his family. His expression, according to the intelligence of those who saw him and the mood in which he found himself, has been variously described as 'heavy,' 'homely,' and in more complimentary terms. But the more appreciative describers recognise the curiously combined humour, shrewdness, and kindliness which animated features naturally irregular and quite devoid of what his own generation would have called 'chiselled elegance.' He himself asserts--and it seems to be the fact--that from the time of the disappearance of his childish maladies to the attack of cramp, or gallstones, or whatever the evil was which came on in 1818, and from which he never really recovered, his health was singularly robust; and he appears as quite a young man to have put it to considerable, though not excessive, tests. His conversation, like his countenance, has been variously characterised, and it is probable that the complexion of both depended, even more than it does with most men, on his company. He is acknowledged never to have 'talked for victory,' an evil and barbarous practice, which the Edinburgh wits seem to have caught from their great enemy and guest, Dr. Johnson; to have (like all good men) simply abominated talking about his own works, or indeed bookishly at all, full as his conversation was of literature; and, though a great tale-teller, to have been no monopoliser of the conversation in any way. He admits having been in youth and early middle age not disinclined to solitude,--and he does not appear to have at any time liked miscellaneous society much, though he prided himself, and very justly, on having, from all but his earliest youth, frequented many kinds of it, including the best. The perfect ease of his correspondence with all sorts and conditions of men and women may have owed something to this; but, no doubt, it owed as much to the happy peculiarities and composition of his nature and temperament. The only fault or faults of which he has been accused with any plausibility are those which attend or proceed from a somewhat too high estimate of rank and of riches;--that is to say, a too great eagerness to obtain these things, and at the same time a too great deference for those who possessed them. From avarice, in any of the ordinary senses of the word, he was, indeed, entirely free. His generosity, if not absolutely and foolishly indiscriminate, was extraordinary, and as unostentatious as it was lavish. He certainly had no delight in hoarding money, and his personal tastes, except in so far as books, 'curios,' and so forth were concerned, were of the simplest possible. Yet, as we have seen, he was never quite content with an income which, after very early years, was always competent, and when he launched into commercial ventures, already, in prospect at least, considerable; while in the one article of spending money on house and lands he was admittedly excessive. So, too, he seems to have been really indifferent about his title, except as an adjunct to these possessions, and as something transmissible to, and serving to distinguish, the family he longed to found. Yet no instance of the slightest servility on his part to rank--much less to riches--has been produced. His address, no doubt, both in writing and conversation, was more ceremonious than would now be customary. But it must be remembered that this was then a point of good manners, and that 'your Lordship' and 'my noble friend,' even between persons intimate with each other and on the common footing of gentlemen, were then phrases as proper and usual in private as they still are in public life.[51] Attempts have been made to excuse his attitude, on the plea that it was inherited from his father (_vide_ the scene between Saunders Fairford and Herries), that it was national, that it was this, that, and the other. For my own part, I have never read or heard of any instance of it which seemed to me to exceed the due application to etiquette of the rule of distributive justice, to give every man his own. Scott, I think, would have accepted the principle, though not the application, of the sentence of Timoléon de Cossé, Duke of Brissac--'God has made thee a gentleman, and the king has made thee a duke.' And he honoured God and the king by behaving accordingly. Of his infinite merits as a host and a guest, as a friend and as a relation, there is a superabundance of evidence. It does not appear that he ever lost an old friend; and though, like most men who have more talent for friendship than for acquaintance, he did not latterly make many new ones, the relations existing between himself and Lockhart are sufficient proof of his faculty of playing the most difficult of all parts, that of elder friend to younger. I have said above that, though in no sense touchy, he was a very dangerous person to take a liberty with; he adopted to the full the morality of his time about duelling, though he disapproved of it;[49] he was in all respects a man of the world, yet without guile. It is, moreover, quite certain that Scott, though never talking much about religion (as, indeed, he never talked much about any of the deeper feelings of the heart), was a man very sincerely religious. He was not a metaphysician in any way, and therefore had no special inclination towards that face or summit of metaphysics which is called theology. And it is pretty clear that he had towards disputed points of doctrine, ceremony, and discipline, a not sharply or decidedly formulated attitude. But there is no doubt whatever that he was a thoroughly and sincerely orthodox Christian, and there are some slight escapes of confession unawares in his private writings, which show in what thorough conformity with his death his life had been. Few men have ever so well observed the one-half of the apostle's doctrine as to pure religion; and if he did not keep himself (in the matter of the secret partnership and others) altogether unspotted from the world, the sufferings of his last seven years may surely be taken as a more than sufficient purification. More blameless morally, I think, few men have been; fewer still better equipped with the positive virtues. And, above all, we must recognise in Scott (if we have any power of such recognition) what has been already called a certain nobleness, a certain natural inclination towards all things high, and great, and pure, and of good report, which is rarer still than negative blamelessness or even than positive virtue. To speak of Scott's politics is a little difficult and perhaps a little dangerous; yet they played so large a part in his life and work that the subject can hardly be omitted, especially as it comes just between those aspects of him which we have already discussed, and those to which we are coming. It has sometimes been disputed whether his Toryism was much more than mere sentiment; and of course there were not wanting in his own day fellows of the baser sort who endeavoured to represent it as mere self-interest. But no impartial person nowadays, I suppose, doubts, however meanly he may think of Scott's political creed, that that creed was part, not of his interests, not even of his mere crotchets and crazes, literary and other, but of his inmost heart and soul. That reverence for the past, that distaste for the vulgar, that sense of continuity, of mystery, of something beyond interest and calculation, which the worst foes of Toryism would, I suppose, allow to be its nobler parts, were the blood of Scott's veins, the breath of his nostrils, the marrow of his bones. My friend Mr. Lang thinks that Scott's Toryism is dead, that no successor has arisen on its ruins, that it was, in fact, almost a private structure, of which he was the architect, a tree fated to fall with its planter. Perhaps; but perhaps also 'The Little Tower with no such ease Is won'; and there are enough still to keep watch and ward of it. But we have of course here to look even more to his mental character than to his moral, to do with him rather as a man of genius than as a 'man of good,' though it is impossible to overlook, and difficult to overestimate, his singular eminence as both combined. Of his actual literary accomplishment, something like a detailed view has been given in this little book, and of some of its separate departments estimates have been attempted.[48] But we may, or rather must, gather all these up here. Nor can we proceed better than by the old way of inquiry--first, What were the peculiar characteristics of his thought? and, secondly, What distinguished his expression of this thought? As to the first point, it has been pretty generally admitted--though the admissions have in some cases been carried almost too far--that we are not to look for certain things in Scott. We are not to look for any elaborately or at least scholastically minute faculty or practice of analysis or of argument. But to proceed from this to a general denial of 'philosophy' to him--that is to say, to allow him a merely superficial knowledge of human nature--is an utter mistake. I have quoted elsewhere, but the book from which the quotation is made is so rare that I may well quote here again, some remarkable words on this subject from M. Milsand, Mr. Browning's friend, and the recipient of the Dedication of the reprint of _Sordello_.[50] It is certain that this praise might be supported with a large anthology of passages in the novels and even the poems--passages indicating an anthropological science as intimate as it is unpretentiously expressed. To some good folk in our days, who think that nothing can be profound which is naturally and simply spoken, and who demand that a human philosopher shall speak gibberish and wear his boots on his brows, the fact may be strange, but it is a fact. And it may be added that even if chapter and verse could not thus be produced, a sufficient proof, the most sufficient possible, could be otherwise provided. Scott, by the confession of all competent judges, save a very few, has created almost more men and women, undoubtedly real and lifelike, than any other prose novelist. Now you cannot create a man or a woman without knowing whereof a man and a woman are made, though the converse proposition is unfortunately by no means so universally predicable. He was content, as a rule, to put this great science of his into practice rather than to expound it in theory, to demonstrate it rather than to lecture on it, but that is all. In the second place, we are not to look to him for any great intensity of delineation of passion, especially in the sense to which that word is more commonly confined. He has nowhere left us (as some other men of letters have) any hint that he abstained from doing this because the passion would have been so tremendous that it was on the whole best for mankind that they should not be exposed to it. The qualities of humour and of taste which were always present with Scott would have prevented this. But I should doubt whether he felt any temptation to unbosom himself, or any need to do so. The slight hints given at the time of the combined action of his misfortunes and the agitation arising from his renewed communications with Lady Jane Stuart, are almost all the indications that we have on the subject, and they are too slight to found any theory upon. It is evident that this was not his vein, or that, if the vein was there, he did not choose to work it. To pass from negations to positives, the region in which Scott's power of conception and expression did lie, and which he ruled with wondrous range and rarely equalled power, was a strangely united kingdom of common-sense fact and fanciful or traditional romance. No writer who has had such a sense of the past, of tradition, of romantic literature, has had such a grasp of the actual working motives and conduct of mankind; none who has had the latter has even come near to his command of the former. We may take Spenser and Fielding as the princes of these separate principalities in English literature, and though each had gifts that Scott had not,--though Scott had gifts possessed by neither,--yet if we could conceive Spenser and Fielding blended, the blend would, I think, come nearer to Scott's idiosyncrasy than anything else that can be imagined. He had advanced (or rather returned) from that one-sided eighteenth-century conception of nature which was content to know _human_ nature pretty thoroughly up to a certain point, and to dismiss 'prospects,' in Johnson's scornful language to Thrale, as one just like the other. But he had retained the eighteenth-century grasp of man himself, while recovering the path to the Idle Lake and the Cave of Despair, to the many-treed wood through which Una and her knight journeyed, and the Rich Strand where all the treasures of antiquity lay. We may think--apparently some of us do think--that we have improved on him in the recovery, and even in the retaining grasp. The fact of the improvement on him will take a great deal of proving, I am inclined to think; of the fact of his achievement there is no doubt. If I must select Scott's special literary characteristic, next to that really magical faculty of placing scenes and peopling them with characters in the memory of his readers which I have noticed before, I should certainly fix on his humour. It is a good old scholastic doctrine, that the greatest merit of anything is to be excellent in the special excellence of its kind. And in that quality which so gloriously differentiates English literature from all others, Scott is never wanting, and is almost always pre-eminent. If his patriotism, intense as it is, is never grotesque or offensive, as patriotism too often is to readers who do not share it; if his pathos never touches the maudlin; if his romantic sentiment is always saved by the sense of solid fact,--and we may assert these things without hesitation or qualification,--it is due to his humour. For this humour, never merely local, never bases its appeal on small private sympathies and understandings and pass-words which leave the world at large cold, or mystified, or even disgusted. Nor is it perhaps uncritical to set down that pre-eminently happy use, without abuse, of dialect, which has attracted the admiration of almost all good judges, to this same humour, warning him alike against the undisciplined profusion and the injudicious selection which have not been and are not unknown in some followers of his. And, further, his universal quality is free from some accompanying drawbacks which must be acknowledged in the humour of some of the other very great humorists. It is not coarse--a defect which has made prigs at all times, and especially at this time, affect horror at Aristophanes; it is not grim, like that of Swift; it is free from any very strong evidences of its owner having lived at a particular date, such as may be detected by the Devil's Advocate even in Fielding, even in Thackeray. No tricks or grimaces, no mere elaboration, no lingering to bespeak applause; but a moment of life and nature subjected to the humour-stamp and left recorded and transformed for ever--there is Scott. That the necessary counterpart and companion of this breadth of humour should be depth of feeling can be no surprise to those who accept the only sound distinction between humour and wit. Scott himself never wore his heart on his sleeve; but to those who looked a little farther than the sleeve its beatings were sufficiently evident. The Scott who made that memorable exclamation on the Mound, and ejaculated 'No, by----!' at the discovery of the Regalia,[47] who wrote Jeanie's speech to Queen Caroline and Habakkuk Mucklewrath's to Claverhouse, had no need ever to affect emotion, because it was always present, though repressed when it had no business to exhibit itself. And his romantic imagination was as sincere as his pathos or his indignation. He never lost the clue to 'the shores of old romance'; and, at least, great part of the secret which made him such a magician to his readers was that the spell was on himself--that the regions of fancy were as open, as familiar as Princes Street or the Parliament Square to this solid practical Clerk of Session, who avowed that no food could to his taste equal Scotch broth, and in everything but the one fatal delusion was as sound a man of business as ever partook of that nourishing concoction. In his execution both in prose and verse, but especially, or at least more obviously, in the latter there are certain peculiarities, in the nature (at least partly) of defect, which strike every critical eye at once. At no time, and in no case, was Scott of the order of the careful, anxious miniaturists of work, who repaint every stroke a hundred times, adjust every detail of composition over and over again, and can never have done with rehandling and perfecting. Nor did he belong to that very rare class whose work seems to be, at any rate after a slight apprenticeship, faultless from the first, to whom inelegancies of style, incorrect rhymes, licences of metre--not deliberate and intended to produce the effect they achieve, but the effect of carelessness or of momentary inability to do what is wanted--are by nature or education impossible. His nature did not give him this endowment, and his education was of the very last sort to procure it for him. He himself, not out of pique or conceit, things utterly alien from his nature, still less out of laziness, but, I believe, as a genuine, and, what is more, a correct self-criticism, has left in his private writings repeated expressions of his belief that revision and correction in his case not only did not improve the work, but were in most cases likely to do it positive harm, that the spoon was made or the horn spoiled (to adapt his country proverb) at the first draft, and once for all. I think that this was a correct judgment, and I do not see that it implies any inferiority on his part. It is not as if he ever aimed at the methods of the precisians and failed, as if it was his desire to be a 'correct' writer, a careful observer of proportion and construction, a producer of artful felicities in metre, rhythm, rhyme, phrase. We may yield to no one in the delight of tracing the exact correspondence of strophe and antistrophe in a Greek chorus, the subtle vowel-music of a Latin hymn or a passage of Rossetti's. But I cannot see why, because we rejoice in these things, we should demand them of all poetry, or why, because we rejoice in the faultless construction of Fielding or the exquisite finish of Jane Austen as novelists, we should despise the looser handling and more sweeping touch of Scott in prose fiction. It is extremely probable that, as Mr. Balfour suggested the other day in unveiling the Westminster Abbey monument, this breadth of touch obtained him his popularity abroad, nor need it impair his fame at home. Unquestionably, though he had many minor gifts and graces, including that of incomparable lyric snatch, from the drums and fifes of 'Lochinvar' and 'Bonnie Dundee' to the elfin music of 'Proud Maisie,' his faculty of weaving a story in prose or in verse, with varied decorations of dialogue and description and character, rather than on a cunning canvas of plot, was Scott's main forte. If it is in verse--and admirable as it is here, I think we must allow it to be--less pre-eminent than in prose, it is, first, because minor formal defects are more felt in verse than in prose; secondly, because the scope of the medium is less; and thirdly, because the medium itself was in reality not what he wanted. The verse romance of Scott is a great achievement and a delightful possession: it has had extraordinary influence on English literature, from the work of Byron, which it directly produced, and which pretty certainly would never have been produced without it, to that of Mr. William Morris, which may not impossibly have been its last echo--transformed and refreshed, but still an echo--for some time to come. But there was a little of the falsetto in it, and the interludes, of which the introductions to _Marmion_ and to the _Bridal_ are the most considerable, show that it gave no outlets, or outlets only awkward, for much of what he wanted to say. He defines his own general literary object admirably in a letter to Morritt. 'I have tried to induce the public to relax some of the rules of criticism, and to be amused with that medley of tragic and comic with which life presents us, not only in the same course of action, but in the same character.' The detailed remarks which have been given in earlier chapters make it unnecessary to bring out the application of this to all his work, both verse and prose. And it need but be pointed out in passing how much more satisfactorily the form of prose fiction lent itself, than the form of verse romance, to the expression of a creed which, as it had been that of Shakespeare, so it was the creed of Scott. But a few words must be added in reference to the complaint which is often openly made, and which, I understand, is still more often secretly entertained, or taken for proved, by the younger generation--to wit, the complaint that Scott is 'commonplace' and 'conventional,' not merely in thought, but in expression. As to the thought, that is best met by the reply churlish, if not even by the reproof valiant. Scott's thought is never commonplace, and never merely conventional: it can only seem so to those who have given their own judgments in bondage to a conventional and temporary cant of unconventionality. In respect of expression, the complaint will admit of some argument which may best take the form of example. It is perfectly true that Scott's expression is not 'quintessenced'--that it has to a hasty eye an air of lacking what is called distinction; and, especially, that it has no very definite savour of any particular time. At present, as at other periods during the recorded story of literature, there is a marked preference for all these things which it is not; and so Scott is, with certain persons, in disfavour accordingly. But it so happens that the study of this now long record of literature is itself sufficient to convince anyone how treacherous the tests thus suggested are. There never, for instance, was an English writer fuller of all the marks which these, our younger critics, desiderate in Scott, and admire in some authors of our own day, than John Lyly, the author of _Euphues_, of a large handful of very charming and interesting court dramas, and of some delightful lyrics. Those who have to teach literature impress the importance, and try to impress the interest, of Lyly on students and readers, and they do right. For he was a man not merely of talent, but (with respect to my friend Mr. Courthope, who thinks differently), I think, of genius. He had a poetical fancy, a keen and biting wit, a fairly exact proficiency in the scholarship of his time. He eschewed the obvious, the commonplace in thought, and still more in style, as passionately as any man ever has eschewed it, and, having not merely will and delicacy, but power, he not only achieved an immense temporary popularity, but even influenced the English language permanently. Yet--and those who thus praise him know it--he, the apostle of ornate prose, the model of a whole generation of the greatest wits that England has seen, the master of Shakespeare in more things than one, including romantic comedy, the originator of the English analytic novel, the 'raiser' (as I think they call it) 'of his native language to a higher power,' is dead. We shall never get anybody outside the necessarily small number of those who have cultivated the historic as well as the æsthetic sense in literature, to read him except as a curiosity or a task, because he not merely cultivated art, but neglected nature for it; because he fooled the time to the top of its bent, and let the time fool him in return; because, instead of making the common as though it were not common, he aimed and strained at the uncommon _in_ and _per se_. Scott did just the contrary. He never tried to be unlike somebody else; if he hit, as he did hit, upon great new styles of literature,--absolutely new in the case of the historical novel, revived after long trance in the case of the verse tale,--it was from no desire to innovate, but because his genius called him. Though in ordinary ways he was very much a man of his time, he did not contort himself in any fashion by way of expressing a (then) modern spirit, a Georgian idiosyncrasy, or anything of that sort; he was content with the language of the best writers and the thoughts of the best men. He was no amateur of the topsy-turvy, and had not the very slightest desire to show how a literary head could grow beneath the shoulders. He was satisfied that his genius should flow naturally. And the consequence is that it was never checked, that it flows still for us with all its spontaneous charm, and that it will flow _in omne volubilis ævum_. Among many instances of the strength which accompanied this absence of strain one already alluded to may be mentioned again. Scott is one of the most literary of all writers. He was saturated with reading; nothing could happen but it brought some felicitous quotation, some quaint parallel to his mind from the great wits, or the small, of old. Yet no writer is less _bookish_ than he; none insults his readers less with any parade, with any apparent consciousness of erudition; and he wears his learning so lightly that pedants have even accused him of lacking it because he lacks pedantry. His stream, to resume the simile, carries in solution more reading as well as more wit, more knowledge of life and nature, more gifts of almost all kinds than would suffice for twenty men of letters, yet the very power of its solvent force, as well as the vigour of its current, makes these things comparatively invisible. In dealing with an author so voluminous and so various in his kinds and subjects of composition, it is a hard matter to say what has to be said within prescribed limits such as these, just as it is still harder to select from so copious a store of biographical information details which may be sufficient, and not more than sufficient, to give a firm and distinct picture of his life. Yet it may perhaps be questioned whether very elaborate handling is necessary for Scott. No man probably, certainly no man of letters, is more of a piece than he. As he has been subjected to an almost unparalleled trial in the revelation of his private thoughts, so his literary powers and performances extend over a range which is unusual, if not absolutely singular, in men of letters of the first rank. Yet he is the same throughout, in romance as in review, in novel as in note-writing. Except his dramatic work, a department for which he seems to have been almost totally unfitted (despite the felicity of his 'Old Play' fragments), nothing of his can be neglected by those who wish to enjoy him to the full. Yet though there is no monotony, there is a uniformity which is all the more delightfully brought out by the minor variations of subject and kind. The last as the first word about Scott should perhaps be, 'Read him. And, as far as may be, read all of him.' When, in comparatively early days of his acquaintance with Lockhart, Scott, thinking himself near death in the paroxysms of his cramps, bequeathed to his future son-in-law, in the words of the ballad, 'the vanguard of the three,' the duty of burying him and continuing his work, if possible, he had himself limited the heritage to the defence of ancient faith and loyalty--a great one enough. But his is, in fact, a greater. From generation to generation, whosoever determines, in so far as fate and the gods allow, to hold these things fast, and, moreover, to love all good literature, to temper erudition with common sense, to let humour wait always upon fancy, and duty upon romance; whosoever at least tries to be true to the past, to show a bold front to the present, and to let the future be as it may; whosoever 'spurns the vulgar' while endeavouring to be just to individuals, and faces 'the Secret' with neither bravado nor cringing,--he may take, if not the vanguard, yet a place according to his worth and merit, in the legion which this great captain led. Of the frequent parallels or contrasts drawn between him and Shakespeare it is not the least noteworthy that he is, of all men of letters, that one of whom we have the most intimate and the fullest revelation, while of Shakespeare we have the least. There need be very little doubt that if we knew everything about Shakespeare, he would come, as a man of mould might, scathless from the test. But we do know everything, or almost everything, about Scott, and he comes out nearly as well as anyone but a faultless monster could. For all the works of the Lord in literature, as in other things, let us give thanks--for Blake and for Beddoes as well as for Shelley and for Swift. But let everyone who by himself, or by his fathers, claims origin between Tol-Pedn-Penwith and Dunnet Head give thanks, with more energy and more confidence than in any other case save one, for the fact that his is the race and his the language of Sir Walter Scott. FOOTNOTES: [47] So, in a still earlier generation, Johnson, after calling his step-daughter 'my dearest love,' and writing in the simplest way, will end, and quite properly, with, 'Madam, your obedient, humble servant.' [48] He made, as is well known, preparations to 'meet' General Gourgaud, who was wroth about the _Napoleon_, but who never actually challenged him. [49] Most injustice has perforce been done to his miscellaneous verse lying outside the great poems, and not all of it included in the novels. It would be impossible to dwell on all the good things, from _Helvellyn_ and _The Norman Horseshoe_ onward; and useless to select a few. Some of his best things are among them: few are without force, and fire, and unstudied melody. The song-scraps, like the mottoes, in his novels are often really marvellous snatches of improvisation. [50] Il y a plus de philosophie dans ses écrits ... que dans bon nombre de _romans philosophiques_. [51] When some tactless person tried to play tricks with the Crown. INDEX SCOTT, SIR WALTER: Ancestry and parentage, 9, 10; birth, 10; infancy, 11; school and college days, _ibid._; apprenticeship, _ibid._; friends and early occupations, 12, 13; call to the Bar, 12, 14; first love, 14-16; engagement and marriage, 16; briefs, fights, and volunteering, 17; journeys to Galloway and elsewhere, 18, 19; slowness of literary production and its causes, 20, 21; call-thesis and translations of Bürger, 22; reception of these last and their merit, 23; contributes to _Tales of Wonder_, 24; remarks on _Glenfinlas_ and _The Eve of St. John_, 25, 26; _Goetz von Berlichingen_ and _The House of Aspen_, 26; dramatic work generally, 27, _note_; friendship with Leyden, Ritson, and Ellis, 28; _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, 28-33; contributes to the _Edinburgh Review_, 33-35; his domestic life for the first seven years after his marriage, 35-37; _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, 38-46; partnership with Ballantyne, 46-50; children and pecuniary affairs, 50, 51; Clerkship of Session, 51; politics during Fox and Grenville administration, 52; anecdote of, on Mound, _ibid._; _Marmion_, 52-55; coolness with _Edinburgh_ and starting of _Quarterly Review_, 55, 56; quarrel with Constable, 56, 57; affair of Thomas Scott's appointment, 58, 59; _The Lady of the Lake_, 59, 60; _The Vision of Don Roderick_, 61; _Rokeby_, 61-63; _The Lord of the Isles_, 63, 64; _The Bridal of Triermain_, 64-66; _Harold the Dauntless_, 66, 67; remarks on the verse romances generally, 67, 68; _Waverley_, its origin, character, and reception, 69-76; settlement at Abbotsford, 70, 71; danger of Ballantyne & Co., and closer alliance with Constable, 71, 72; yachting tour, 72; _Guy Mannering_, 77-79; introduced in London to the Regent and to Byron, 79; journey to Brussels, _Field of Waterloo_, and _Paul's Letters_, 79; _The Antiquary_, 80; original mottoes, 81 and _note_; _Old Mortality_ and _Black Dwarf_, 81-84; quarrel with Blackwood, 82; _Rob Roy_, 84, 85; domestic affairs, 85-87; _Heart of Midlothian_, 87, 88; _Bride of Lammermoor_ and _Legend of Montrose_, 88-91; attacked by cramp, 84, 86, 89, _note_; domestic affairs, 91-93; _Ivanhoe_, 93, 96; _The Monastery_, 95, 96; _The Abbot_ and _Kenilworth_, 96, 97; _The Pirate_, 97, 98; _The Fortunes of Nigel_, 99; _Peveril of the Peak_, 100; _Quentin Durward_, 100, 101; _St. Ronan's Well_, 101, 102; _Redgauntlet_, 102, 103; _Tales of the Crusaders_, 104, 105; domestic affairs, to tour in Ireland, 105, 106; commercial crisis and fall of Constable and Ballantyne, 106, 107; discussion of the facts, 107-114; the _Journal_, 114-117; death of Lady Scott, 116; _Life of Napoleon_, 118-121; _Woodstock_, 121-123; _Letters of Malachi Malagrowther_, 123; 'Bonnie Dundee,' _ibid._; _Chronicles of the Canongate_, 124-126; _Tales of a Grandfather_, 126, 127; _The Fair Maid of Perth_ and the '_Magnum Opus_,' 128; _Anne of Geierstein_, 129; declining health, 130; success of the '_Magnum_,' _ibid._; stroke of paralysis and resignation of Clerkship, 131; _Letters on Demonology_ and Christopher North's criticism, 131, 132; _Count Robert of Paris_ and _Castle Dangerous_, 133; political annoyances and insults at Jedburgh, 134; last visit of Wordsworth and departure for Italy, 135; sojourn on the Mediterranean, 136; return and death, 137; settlement of debts, _ibid._; monuments to Scott, 138; general view of Scott desirable, 139; his physique and conversation, 140; his alleged subserviency to rank, 141, 142; his moral and religious character, 142, 143; his politics, 144; characteristics of his thought, 145-147; his combination of the practical and the romantic, 147; his humour, 148; his feeling, 149; his style, 150; his power of story, 151; not 'commonplace,' 151, 154; comparison with Lyly, 153; final remarks, 155, 156. OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON THE "FAMOUS SCOTS" SERIES. Of THOMAS CARLYLE, by H. C. MACPHERSON, the _British Weekly_ says:-- "We congratulate the publishers on the in every way attractive appearance of the first volume of their new series. The typography is everything that could be wished, and the binding is most tasteful.... We heartily congratulate author and publishers on the happy commencement of this admirable enterprise." The _Literary World_ says:-- "One of the very best little books on Carlyle yet written, far outweighing in value some more pretentious works with which we are familiar." The _Scotsman_ says:-- "As an estimate of the Carlylean philosophy, and of Carlyle's place in literature and his influence in the domains of morals, politics, and social ethics, the volume reveals not only care and fairness, but insight and a large capacity for original thought and judgment." The _Glasgow Daily Record_ says:-- "Is distinctly creditable to the publishers, and worthy of a national series such as they have projected." The _Educational News_ says:-- "The book is written in an able, masterly, and painstaking manner." Of ALLAN RAMSAY, by OLIPHANT SMEATON, the _Scotsman_ says:-- "It is not a patchwork picture, but one in which the writer, taking genuine interest in his subject, and bestowing conscientious pains on his task, has his materials well in hand, and has used them to produce a portrait that is both lifelike and well balanced." The _People's Friend_ says:-- "Presents a very interesting sketch of the life of the poet, as well as a well-balanced estimate and review of his works." The _Edinburgh Dispatch_ says:-- "The author has shown scholarship and much enthusiasm in his task." The _Daily Record_ says:-- "The kindly, vain, and pompous little wig-maker lives for us in Mr. Smeaton's pages." The _Glasgow Herald_ says:-- "A careful and intelligent study." Of HUGH MILLER, by W. KEITH LEASK, the _Expository Times_ says:-- "It is a right good book and a right true biography.... There is a very fine sense of Hugh Miller's greatness as a man and a Scotsman; there is also a fine choice of language in making it ours." The _Bookseller_ says:-- "Mr. Leask gives the reader a clear impression of the simplicity, and yet the greatness, of his hero, and the broad result of his life's work is very plainly and carefully set forth. A short appreciation of his scientific labours, from the competent pen of Sir Archibald Geikie, and a useful bibliography of his works, complete a volume which is well worth reading for its own sake, and which forms a worthy installment in an admirable series." The _Daily News_ says:-- "Leaves on us a very vivid impression." Of JOHN KNOX, by A. TAYLOR INNES, Mr. Hay Fleming, in the _Bookman_ says:-- "A masterly delineation of those stirring times in Scotland, and of that famous Scot who helped so much to shape them." The _Freeman_ says:-- "It is a concise, well written, and admirable narrative of the great Reformer's life, and in its estimate of his character and work it is calm, dispassionate, and well balanced.... It is a welcome addition to our Knox literature." The _Speaker_ says:-- "There is vision in this book, as well as knowledge." The _Sunday School Chronicle_ says:-- "Everybody who is acquainted with Mr. Taylor Innes's exquisite lecture on Samuel Rutherford will feel instinctively that he is just the man to do justice to the great Reformer, who is more to Scotland 'than any million of unblameable Scotsmen who need no forgiveness.' His literary skill, his thorough acquaintance with Scottish ecclesiastical life, his religious insight, his chastened enthusiasm, have enabled the author to produce an excellent piece of work.... It is a noble and inspiring theme, and Mr. Taylor Innes has handled it to perfection." Of ROBERT BURNS, by GABRIEL SETOUN, the _New Age_ says:-- "It is the best thing on Burns we have yet had, almost as good as Carlyle's Essay and the pamphlet published by Dr. Nichol of Glasgow." The _Methodist Times_ says:-- "We are inclined to regard it as the very best that has yet been produced. There is a proper perspective, and Mr. Setoun does neither praise nor blame too copiously.... A difficult bit of work has been well done, and with fine literary and ethical discrimination." _Youth_ says:-- "It is written with knowledge, judgment, and skill.... The author's estimate of the moral character of Burns is temperate and discriminating; he sees and states his evil qualities, and beside these he places his good ones in their fulness, depth, and splendour. The exposition of the special features marking the genius of the poet is able and penetrating." Of THE BALLADISTS, by JOHN GEDDIE, the _Birmingham Daily Gazette_ says:-- "As a popular sketch of an intensely popular theme, Mr. Geddie's contribution to the 'Famous Scots Series' is most excellent." The _Publishers' Circular_ says:-- "It may be predicted that lovers of romantic literature will re-peruse the old ballads with a quickened zest after reading Mr. Geddie's book. We have not had a more welcome little volume for many a day." The _New Age_ says:-- "One of the most delightful and eloquent appreciations of the ballad literature of Scotland that has ever seen the light." The _Spectator_ says:-- "The author has certainly made a contribution of remarkable value to the literary history of Scotland. We do not know of a book in which the subject has been treated with deeper sympathy or out of a fuller knowledge." 
18124	----	SIR WALTER SCOTT BY RICHARD H. HUTTON. London: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1878 PREFATORY NOTE. It will be observed that the greater part of this little book has been taken in one form or other from Lockhart's _Life of Sir Walter Scott_, in ten volumes. No introduction to Scott would be worth much in which that course was not followed. Indeed, excepting Sir Walter's own writings, there is hardly any other great source of information about him; and that is so full, that hardly anything needful to illustrate the subject of Scott's life remains untouched. As regards the only matters of controversy,--Scott's relations to the Ballantynes, I have taken care to check Mr. Lockhart's statements by reading those of the representatives of the Ballantyne brothers; but with this exception, Sir Walter's own works and Lockhart's life of him are the great authorities concerning his character and his story. Just ten years ago Mr. Gladstone, in expressing to the late Mr. Hope Scott the great delight which the perusal of Lockhart's life of Sir Walter had given him, wrote, "I may be wrong, but I am vaguely under the impression that it has never had a really wide circulation. If so, it is the saddest pity, and I should greatly like (without any censure on its present length) to see published an abbreviation of it." Mr. Gladstone did not then know that as long ago as 1848 Mr. Lockhart did himself prepare such an abbreviation, in which the original eighty-four chapters were compressed into eighteen,--though the abbreviation contained additions as well as compressions. But even this abridgment is itself a bulky volume of 800 pages, containing, I should think, considerably more than a third of the reading in the original ten volumes, and is not, therefore, very likely to be preferred to the completer work. In some respects I hope that this introduction may supply, better than that bulky abbreviation, what Mr. Gladstone probably meant to suggest,--some slight miniature taken from the great picture with care enough to tempt on those who look on it to the study of the fuller life, as well as of that image of Sir Walter which is impressed by his own hand upon his works. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD CHAPTER II. YOUTH--CHOICE OF A PROFESSION CHAPTER III. LOVE AND MARRIAGE CHAPTER IV. EARLIEST POETRY AND BORDER MINSTRELSY CHAPTER V. SCOTT'S MATURER POEMS CHAPTER VI. COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS CHAPTER VII. FIRST COUNTRY HOMES CHAPTER VIII. REMOVAL TO ABBOTSFORD, AND LIFE THERE CHAPTER IX. SCOTT'S PARTNERSHIPS WITH THE BALLANTYNES CHAPTER X. THE WAVERLEY NOVELS CHAPTER XI. SCOTT'S MORALITY AND RELIGION CHAPTER XII. DISTRACTIONS AND AMUSEMENTS AT ABBOTSFORD CHAPTER XIII. SCOTT AND GEORGE IV CHAPTER XIV. SCOTT AS A POLITICIAN CHAPTER XV. SCOTT IN ADVERSITY CHAPTER XVI. THE LAST YEAR CHAPTER XVII. THE END OF THE STRUGGLE SIR WALTER SCOTT. CHAPTER I. ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD. Sir Walter Scott was the first literary man of a great riding, sporting, and fighting clan. Indeed, his father--a Writer to the Signet, or Edinburgh solicitor--was the first of his race to adopt a town life and a sedentary profession. Sir Walter was the lineal descendant--six generations removed--of that Walter Scott commemorated in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, who is known in Border history and legend as Auld Wat of Harden. Auld Wat's son William, captured by Sir Gideon Murray, of Elibank, during a raid of the Scotts on Sir Gideon's lands, was, as tradition says, given his choice between being hanged on Sir Gideon's private gallows, and marrying the ugliest of Sir Gideon's three ugly daughters, Meikle-mouthed Meg, reputed as carrying off the prize of ugliness among the women of four counties. Sir William was a handsome man. He took three days to consider the alternative proposed to him, but chose life with the large-mouthed lady in the end; and found her, according to the tradition which the poet, her descendant, has transmitted, an excellent wife, with a fine talent for pickling the beef which her husband stole from the herds of his foes. Meikle-mouthed Meg transmitted a distinct trace of her large mouth to all her descendants, and not least to him who was to use his "meikle" mouth to best advantage as the spokesman of his race. Rather more than half-way between Auld Wat of Harden's times--i. e., the middle of the sixteenth century--and those of Sir Walter Scott, poet and novelist, lived Sir Walter's great-grandfather, Walter Scott generally known in Teviotdale by the surname of Beardie, because he would never cut his beard after the banishment of the Stuarts, and who took arms in their cause and lost by his intrigues on their behalf almost all that he had, besides running the greatest risk of being hanged as a traitor. This was the ancestor of whom Sir Walter speaks in the introduction to the last canto of _Marmion_:-- "And thus my Christmas still I hold, Where my great grandsire came of old, With amber beard and flaxen hair, And reverend apostolic air,-- The feast and holy tide to share, And mix sobriety with wine, And honest mirth with thoughts divine; Small thought was his in after time E'er to be hitch'd into a rhyme, The simple sire could only boast That he was loyal to his cost; The banish'd race of kings revered, And lost his land--but kept his beard." Sir Walter inherited from Beardie that sentimental Stuart bias which his better judgment condemned, but which seemed to be rather part of his blood than of his mind. And most useful to him this sentiment undoubtedly was in helping him to restore the mould and fashion of the past. Beardie's second son was Sir Walter's grandfather, and to him he owed not only his first childish experience of the delights of country life, but also,--in his own estimation at least,--that risky, speculative, and sanguine spirit which had so much influence over his fortunes. The good man of Sandy-Knowe, wishing to breed sheep, and being destitute of capital, borrowed 30_l._ from a shepherd who was willing to invest that sum for him in sheep; and the two set off to purchase a flock near Wooler, in Northumberland; but when the shepherd had found what he thought would suit their purpose, he returned to find his master galloping about a fine hunter, on which he had spent the whole capital in hand. _This_ speculation, however, prospered. A few days later Robert Scott displayed the qualities of the hunter to such admirable effect with John Scott of Harden's hounds, that he sold the horse for double the money he had given, and, unlike his grandson, abandoned speculative purchases there and then. In the latter days of his clouded fortunes, after Ballantyne's and Constable's failure, Sir Walter was accustomed to point to the picture of his grandfather and say, "Blood will out: my building and planting was but his buying the hunter before he stocked his sheep-walk, over again." But Sir Walter added, says Mr. Lockhart, as he glanced at the likeness of his own staid and prudent father, "Yet it was a wonder, too, for I have a thread of the attorney in me," which was doubtless the case; nor was that thread the least of his inheritances, for from his father certainly Sir Walter derived that disposition towards conscientious, plodding industry, legalism of mind, methodical habits of work, and a generous, equitable interpretation of the scope of all his obligations to others, which, prized and cultivated by him as they were, turned a great genius, which, especially considering the hare-brained element in him, might easily have been frittered away or devoted to worthless ends, to such fruitful account, and stamped it with so grand an impress of personal magnanimity and fortitude. Sir Walter's father reminds one in not a few of the formal and rather martinetish traits which are related of him, of the father of Goethe, "a formal man, with strong ideas of strait-laced education, passionately orderly (he thought a good book nothing without a good binding), and never so much excited as by a necessary deviation from the 'pre-established harmony' of household rules." That description would apply almost wholly to the sketch of old Mr. Scott which the novelist has given us under the thin disguise of Alexander Fairford, Writer to the Signet, in _Redgauntlet_, a figure confessedly meant, in its chief features, to represent his father. To this Sir Walter adds, in one of his later journals, the trait that his father was a man of fine presence, who conducted all conventional arrangements with a certain grandeur and dignity of air, and "absolutely loved a funeral." "He seemed to preserve the list of a whole bead-roll of cousins merely for the pleasure of being at their funerals, which he was often asked to superintend, and I suspect had sometimes to pay for. He carried me with him as often as he could to these mortuary ceremonies; but feeling I was not, like him, either useful or ornamental, I escaped as often as I could." This strong dash of the conventional in Scott's father, this satisfaction in seeing people fairly to the door of life, and taking his final leave of them there, with something of a ceremonious flourish of observance, was, however, combined with a much nobler and deeper kind of orderliness. Sir Walter used to say that his father had lost no small part of a very flourishing business, by insisting that his clients should do their duty to their own people better than they were themselves at all inclined to do it. And of this generous strictness in sacrificing his own interests to his sympathy for others, the son had as much as the father. Sir Walter's mother, who was a Miss Rutherford, the daughter of a physician, had been better educated than most Scotchwomen of her day, in spite of having been sent "to be finished off" by "the honourable Mrs. Ogilvie," whose training was so effective, in one direction at least, that even in her eightieth year Mrs. Scott could not enjoy a comfortable rest in her chair, but "took as much care to avoid touching her chair with her back, as if she had still been under the stern eyes of Mrs. Ogilvie." None the less Mrs. Scott was a motherly, comfortable woman, with much tenderness of heart, and a well-stored, vivid memory. Sir Walter, writing of her, after his mother's death, to Lady Louisa Stewart, says, "She had a mind peculiarly well stored with much acquired information and natural talent, and as she was very old, and had an excellent memory, she could draw, without the least exaggeration or affectation, the most striking pictures of the past age. If I have been able to do anything in the way of painting the past times, it is very much from the studies with which she presented me. She connected a long period of time with the present generation, for she remembered, and had often spoken with, a person who perfectly recollected the battle of Dunbar and Oliver Cromwell's subsequent entry into Edinburgh." On the day before the stroke of paralysis which carried her off, she had told Mr. and Mrs. Scott of Harden, "with great accuracy, the real story of the Bride of Lammermuir, and pointed out wherein it differed from the novel. She had all the names of the parties, and pointed out (for she was a great genealogist) their connexion with existing families."[1] Sir Walter records many evidences of the tenderness of his mother's nature, and he returned warmly her affection for himself. His executors, in lifting up his desk, the evening after his burial, found "arranged in careful order a series of little objects, which had obviously been so placed there that his eye might rest on them every morning before he began his tasks. These were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished his mother's toilette, when he, a sickly child, slept in her dressing-room,--the silver taper-stand, which the young advocate had bought for her with his first five-guinea fee,--a row of small packets inscribed with her hand, and containing the hair of those of her offspring that had died before her,--his father's snuff-box, and etui-case,--and more things of the like sort."[2] A story, characteristic of both Sir Walter's parents, is told by Mr. Lockhart which will serve better than anything I can remember to bring the father and mother of Scott vividly before the imagination. His father, like Mr. Alexander Fairford, in _Redgauntlet_, though himself a strong Hanoverian, inherited enough feeling for the Stuarts from his grandfather Beardie, and sympathized enough with those who were, as he neutrally expressed it, "out in '45," to ignore as much as possible any phrases offensive to the Jacobites. For instance, he always called Charles Edward not _the Pretender_ but _the Chevalier_,--and he did business for many Jacobites:-- "Mrs. Scott's curiosity was strongly excited one autumn by the regular appearance at a certain hour every evening of a sedan chair, to deposit a person carefully muffled up in a mantle, who was immediately ushered into her husband's private room, and commonly remained with him there until long after the usual bed-time of this orderly family. Mr. Scott answered her repeated inquiries with a vagueness that irritated the lady's feelings more and more; until at last she could bear the thing no longer; but one evening, just as she heard the bell ring as for the stranger's chair to carry him off, she made her appearance within the forbidden parlour with a salver in her hand, observing that she thought the gentlemen had sat so long they would be better of a dish of tea, and had ventured accordingly to bring some for their acceptance. The stranger, a person of distinguished appearance, and richly dressed, bowed to the lady and accepted a cup; but her husband knit his brows, and refused very coldly to partake the refreshment. A moment afterwards the visitor withdrew, and Mr. Scott, lifting up the window-sash, took the cup, which he had left empty on the table, and tossed it out upon the pavement. The lady exclaimed for her china, but was put to silence by her husband's saying, 'I can forgive your little curiosity, madam, but you must pay the penalty. I may admit into my house, on a piece of business, persons wholly unworthy to be treated as guests by my wife. Neither lip of me nor of mine comes after Mr. Murray of Broughton's.' "This was the unhappy man who, after attending Prince Charles Stuart as his secretary throughout the greater part of his expedition, condescended to redeem his own life and fortune by bearing evidence against the noblest of his late master's adherents, when-- "Pitied by gentle hearts, Kilmarnock died, The brave, Balmerino were on thy side."[3] "Broughton's saucer"--i. e. the saucer belonging to the cup thus sacrificed by Mr. Scott to his indignation against one who had redeemed his own life and fortune by turning king's evidence against one of Prince Charles Stuart's adherents,--was carefully preserved by his son, and hung up in his first study, or "den," under a little print of Prince Charlie. This anecdote brings before the mind very vividly the character of Sir Walter's parents. The eager curiosity of the active-minded woman, whom "the honourable Mrs. Ogilvie" had been able to keep upright in her chair for life, but not to cure of the desire to unravel the little mysteries of which she had a passing glimpse; the grave formality of the husband, fretting under his wife's personal attention to a dishonoured man, and making her pay the penalty by dashing to pieces the cup which the king's evidence had used,--again, the visitor himself, perfectly conscious no doubt that the Hanoverian lawyer held him in utter scorn for his faithlessness and cowardice, and reluctant, nevertheless, to reject the courtesy of the wife, though he could not get anything but cold legal advice from the husband:--all these are figures which must have acted on the youthful imagination of the poet with singular vivacity, and shaped themselves in a hundred changing turns of the historical kaleidoscope which was always before his mind's eye, as he mused upon that past which he was to restore for us with almost more than its original freshness of life. With such scenes touching even his own home, Scott must have been constantly taught to balance in his own mind, the more romantic, against the more sober and rational considerations, which had so recently divided house against house, even in the same family and clan. That the stern Calvinistic lawyer should have retained so much of his grandfather Beardie's respect for the adherents of the exiled house of Stuart, must in itself have struck the boy as even more remarkable than the passionate loyalty of the Stuarts' professed partisans, and have lent a new sanction to the romantic drift of his mother's old traditions, and one to which they must have been indebted for a great part of their fascination. Walter Scott, the ninth of twelve children, of whom the first six died in early childhood, was born in Edinburgh, on the 15th of August, 1771. Of the six later-born children, all but one were boys, and the one sister was a somewhat querulous invalid, whom he seems to have pitied almost more than he loved. At the age of eighteen months the boy had a teething-fever, ending in a life-long lameness; and this was the reason why the child was sent to reside with his grandfather--the speculative grandfather, who had doubled his capital by buying a racehorse instead of sheep--at Sandy-Knowe, near the ruined tower of Smailholm, celebrated afterwards in his ballad of _The Eve of St. John_, in the neighbourhood of some fine crags. To these crags the housemaid sent from Edinburgh to look after him, used to carry him up, with a design (which she confessed to the housekeeper)--due, of course, to incipient insanity--of murdering the child there, and burying him in the moss. Of course the maid was dismissed. After this the child used to be sent out, when the weather was fine, in the safer charge of the shepherd, who would often lay him beside the sheep. Long afterwards Scott told Mr. Skene, during an excursion with Turner, the great painter, who was drawing his illustration of Smailholm tower for one of Scott's works, that "the habit of lying on the turf there among the sheep and the lambs had given his mind a peculiar tenderness for these animals, which it had ever since retained." Being forgotten one day upon the knolls when a thunderstorm came on, his aunt ran out to bring him in, and found him shouting, "Bonny! bonny!" at every flash of lightning. One of the old servants at Sandy-Knowe spoke of the child long afterwards as "a sweet-tempered bairn, a darling with all about the house," and certainly the miniature taken of him in his seventh year confirms the impression thus given. It is sweet-tempered above everything, and only the long upper lip and large mouth, derived from his ancestress, Meg Murray, convey the promise of the power which was in him. Of course the high, almost conical forehead, which gained him in his later days from his comrades at the bar the name of "Old Peveril," in allusion to "the peak" which they saw towering high above the heads of other men as he approached, is not so much marked beneath the childish locks of this miniature as it was in later life; and the massive, and, in repose, certainly heavy face of his maturity, which conveyed the impression of the great bulk of his character, is still quite invisible under the sunny ripple of childish earnestness and gaiety. Scott's hair in childhood was light chestnut, which turned to nut brown in youth. His eyebrows were bushy, for we find mention made of them as a "pent-house." His eyes were always light blue. They had in them a capacity, on the one hand, for enthusiasm, sunny brightness, and even hare-brained humour, and on the other for expressing determined resolve and kindly irony, which gave great range of expression to the face. There are plenty of materials for judging what sort of a boy Scott was. In spite of his lameness, he early taught himself to clamber about with an agility that few children could have surpassed, and to sit his first pony--a little Shetland, not bigger than a large Newfoundland dog, which used to come into the house to be fed by him--even in gallops on very rough ground. He became very early a declaimer. Having learned the ballad of Hardy Knute, he shouted it forth with such pertinacious enthusiasm that the clergyman of his grandfather's parish complained that he "might as well speak in a cannon's mouth as where that child was." At six years of age Mrs. Cockburn described him as the most astounding genius of a boy, she ever saw. "He was reading a poem to his mother when I went in. I made him read on: it was the description of a shipwreck. His passion rose with the storm. 'There's the mast gone,' says he; 'crash it goes; they will all perish.' After his agitation he turns to me, 'That is too melancholy,' says he; 'I had better read you something more amusing.'" And after the call, he told his aunt he liked Mrs. Cockburn, for "she was a _virtuoso_ like himself." "Dear Walter," says Aunt Jenny, "what is a _virtuoso_?" "Don't ye know? Why, it's one who wishes and will know everything." This last scene took place in his father's house in Edinburgh; but Scott's life at Sandy-Knowe, including even the old minister, Dr. Duncan, who so bitterly complained of the boy's ballad-spouting, is painted for us, as everybody knows, in the picture of his infancy given in the introduction to the third canto of _Marmion_:-- "It was a barren scene and wild, Where naked cliffs were rudely piled: But ever and anon between Lay velvet tufts of loveliest green; And well the lonely infant knew Recesses where the wall-flower grew, And honeysuckle loved to crawl Up the low crag and ruin'd wall. I deem'd such nooks the sweetest shade The sun in all its round survey'd; And still I thought that shatter'd tower The mightiest work of human power; And marvell'd as the aged hind With some strange tale bewitch'd my mind, Of forayers, who, with headlong force, Down from that strength had spurr'd their horse, Their southern rapine to renew, Far in the distant Cheviots blue, And, home returning, fill'd the hall With revel, wassail-rout, and brawl. Methought that still with trump and clang The gateway's broken arches rang; Methought grim features, seam'd with scars, Glared through the window's rusty bars; And ever, by the winter hearth, Old tales I heard of woe or mirth, Of lovers' slights, of ladies' charms, Of witches' spells, of warriors' arms, Of patriot battles, won of old By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold; Of later fields of feud and fight, When, pouring from their Highland height, The Scottish clans, in headlong sway, Had swept the scarlet ranks away. While, stretch'd at length upon the floor, Again I fought each combat o'er, Pebbles and shells in order laid, The mimic ranks of war display'd; And onward still the Scottish lion bore, And still the scattered Southron fled before. Still, with vain fondness, could I trace Anew each kind familiar face That brighten'd at our evening fire! From the thatch'd mansion's grey-hair'd sire, Wise without learning, plain and good, And sprung of Scotland's gentler blood; Whose eye in age, quick, clear, and keen, Show'd what in youth its glance had been; Whose doom discording neighbours sought, Content with equity unbought; To him the venerable priest, Our frequent and familiar guest, Whose life and manners well could paint Alike the student and the saint; Alas! whose speech too oft I broke With gambol rude and timeless joke; For I was wayward, bold, and wild, A self-will'd imp, a grandame's child; But, half a plague and half a jest, Was still endured, beloved, caress'd." A picture this of a child of great spirit, though with that spirit was combined an active and subduing sweetness which could often conquer, as by a sudden spell, those whom the boy loved. Towards those, however, whom he did not love he could be vindictive. His relative, the laird of Raeburn, on one occasion wrung the neck of a pet starling, which the child had partly tamed. "I flew at his throat like a wild-cat," he said, in recalling the circumstance, fifty years later, in his journal on occasion of the old laird's death; "and was torn from him with no little difficulty." And, judging from this journal, I doubt whether he had ever really forgiven the laird of Raeburn. Towards those whom he loved but had offended, his manner was very different. "I seldom," said one of his tutors, Mr. Mitchell, "had occasion all the time I was in the family to find fault with him, even for trifles, and only once to threaten serious castigation, of which he was no sooner aware, than he suddenly sprang up, threw his arms about my neck and kissed me." And the quaint old gentleman adds this commentary:--"By such generous and noble conduct my displeasure was in a moment converted into esteem and admiration; my soul melted into tenderness, and I was ready to mingle my tears with his." This spontaneous and fascinating sweetness of his childhood was naturally overshadowed to some extent in later life by Scott's masculine and proud character, but it was always in him. And there was much of true character in the child behind this sweetness. He had wonderful self-command, and a peremptory kind of good sense, even in his infancy. While yet a child under six years of age, hearing one of the servants beginning to tell a ghost-story to another, and well knowing that if he listened, it would scare away his night's rest, he acted for himself with all the promptness of an elder person acting for him, and, in spite of the fascination of the subject, resolutely muffled his head in the bed-clothes and refused to hear the tale. His sagacity in judging of the character of others was shown, too, even as a school-boy; and once it led him to take an advantage which caused him many compunctions in after-life, whenever he recalled his skilful puerile tactics. On one occasion--I tell the story as he himself rehearsed it to Samuel Rogers, almost at the end of his life, after his attack of apoplexy, and just before leaving England for Italy in the hopeless quest of health--he had long desired to get above a schoolfellow in his class, who defied all his efforts, till Scott noticed that whenever a question was asked of his rival, the lad's fingers grasped a particular button on his waistcoat, while his mind went in search of the answer. Scott accordingly anticipated that if he could remove this button, the boy would be thrown out, and so it proved. The button was cut off, and the next time the lad was questioned, his fingers being unable to find the button, and his eyes going in perplexed search after his fingers, he stood confounded, and Scott mastered by strategy the place which he could not gain by mere industry. "Often in after-life," said Scott, in narrating the manoeuvre to Rogers, "has the sight of him smote me as I passed by him; and often have I resolved to make him some reparation, but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed my acquaintance with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior office in one of the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe he is dead; he took early to drinking."[4] Scott's school reputation was one of irregular ability; he "glanced like a meteor from one end of the class to the other," and received more praise for his interpretation of the spirit of his authors than for his knowledge of their language. Out of school his fame stood higher. He extemporized innumerable stories to which his school-fellows delighted to listen; and, in spite of his lameness, he was always in the thick of the "bickers," or street fights with the boys of the town, and renowned for his boldness in climbing the "kittle nine stanes" which are "projected high in air from the precipitous black granite of the Castle-rock." At home he was much bullied by his elder brother Robert, a lively lad, not without some powers of verse-making, who went into the navy, then in an unlucky moment passed into the merchant service of the East India Company, and so lost the chance of distinguishing himself in the great naval campaigns of Nelson. Perhaps Scott would have been all the better for a sister a little closer to him than Anne--sickly and fanciful--appears ever to have been. The masculine side of life appears to predominate a little too much in his school and college days, and he had such vast energy, vitality, and pride, that his life at this time would have borne a little taming under the influence of a sister thoroughly congenial to him. In relation to his studies he was wilful, though not perhaps perverse. He steadily declined, for instance, to learn Greek, though he mastered Latin pretty fairly. After a time spent at the High School, Edinburgh, Scott was sent to a school at Kelso, where his master made a friend and companion of him, and so poured into him a certain amount of Latin scholarship which he would never otherwise have obtained. I need hardly add that as a boy Scott was, so far as a boy could be, a Tory--a worshipper of the past, and a great Conservative of any remnant of the past which reformers wished to get rid of. In the autobiographical fragment of 1808, he says, in relation to these school-days, "I, with my head on fire for chivalry, was a Cavalier; my friend was a Roundhead; I was a Tory, and he was a Whig; I hated Presbyterians, and admired Montrose with his victorious Highlanders; he liked the Presbyterian Ulysses, the deep and politic Argyle; so that we never wanted subjects of dispute, but our disputes were always amicable." And he adds candidly enough: "In all these tenets there was no real conviction on my part, arising out of acquaintance with the views or principles of either party.... I took up politics at that period, as King Charles II. did his religion, from an idea that the Cavalier creed was the more gentlemanlike persuasion of the two." And the uniformly amicable character of these controversies between the young people, itself shows how much more they were controversies of the imagination than of faith. I doubt whether Scott's _convictions_ on the issues of the Past were ever very much more decided than they were during his boyhood; though undoubtedly he learned to understand much more profoundly what was really held by the ablest men on both sides of these disputed issues. The result, however, was, I think, that while he entered better and better into both sides as life went on, he never adopted either with any earnestness of conviction, being content to admit, even to himself, that while his feelings leaned in one direction, his reason pointed decidedly in the other; and holding that it was hardly needful to identify himself positively with either. As regarded the present, however, feeling always carried the day. Scott was a Tory all his life. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vi. 172-3. The edition referred to is throughout the edition of 1839 in ten volumes.] [Footnote 2: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, x. 241.] [Footnote 3: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 243-4.] [Footnote 4: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 128.] CHAPTER II. YOUTH--CHOICE OF A PROFESSION. As Scott grew up, entered the classes of the college, and began his legal studies, first as apprentice to his father, and then in the law classes of the University, he became noticeable to all his friends for his gigantic memory,--the rich stores of romantic material with which it was loaded,--his giant feats of industry for any cherished purpose,--his delight in adventure and in all athletic enterprises,--his great enjoyment of youthful "rows," so long as they did not divide the knot of friends to which he belonged, and his skill in peacemaking amongst his own set. During his apprenticeship his only means of increasing his slender allowance with funds which he could devote to his favourite studies, was to earn money by copying, and he tells us himself that he remembered writing "120 folio pages with no interval either for food or rest," fourteen or fifteen hours' very hard work at the very least,--expressly for this purpose. In the second year of Scott's apprenticeship, at about the age of sixteen, he had an attack of hæmorrhage, no recurrence of which took place for some forty years, but which was then the beginning of the end. During this illness silence was absolutely imposed upon him,--two old ladies putting their fingers on their lips, whenever he offered to speak. It was at this time that the lad began his study of the scenic side of history, and especially of campaigns, which he illustrated for himself by the arrangement of shells, seeds, and pebbles, so as to represent encountering armies, in the manner referred to (and referred to apparently in anticipation of a later stage of his life than that he was then speaking of) in the passage from the introduction to the third canto of _Marmion_ which I have already given. He also managed so to arrange the looking-glasses in his room as to see the troops march out to exercise in the meadows, as he lay in bed. His reading was almost all in the direction of military exploit, or romance and mediæval legend and the later border songs of his own country. He learned Italian and read Ariosto. Later he learned Spanish and devoured Cervantes, whose "_novelas_," he said, "first inspired him with the ambition to excel in fiction;" and all that he read and admired he remembered. Scott used to illustrate the capricious affinity of his own memory for what suited it, and its complete rejection of what did not, by old Beattie of Meikledale's answer to a Scotch divine, who complimented him on the strength of his memory. "No, sir," said the old Borderer, "I have no command of my memory. It only retains what hits my fancy; and probably, sir, if you were to preach to me for two hours, I would not be able, when you finished, to remember a word you had been saying." Such a memory, when it belongs to a man of genius, is really a sieve of the most valuable kind. It sifts away what is foreign and alien to his genius, and assimilates what is suited to it. In his very last days, when he was visiting Italy for the first time, Scott delighted in Malta, for it recalled to him Vertot's _Knights of Malta_, and much, other mediæval story which he had pored over in his youth. But when his friends descanted to him at Pozzuoli on the Thermæ--commonly called the Temple of Serapis--among the ruins of which he stood, he only remarked that he would believe whatever he was told, "for many of his friends, and particularly Mr. Morritt, had frequently tried to drive classical antiquities, as they are called, into his head, but they had always found his skull too thick." Was it not perhaps some deep literary instinct, like that here indicated, which made him, as a lad, refuse so steadily to learn Greek, and try to prove to his indignant professor that Ariosto was superior to Homer? Scott afterwards deeply regretted this neglect of Greek; but I cannot help thinking that his regret was misplaced. Greek literature would have brought before his mind standards of poetry and art which could not but have both deeply impressed and greatly daunted an intellect of so much power; I say both impressed and daunted, because I believe that Scott himself would never have succeeded in studies of a classical kind, while he might--like Goethe perhaps--have been either misled, by admiration for that school, into attempting what was not adapted to his genius, or else disheartened in the work for which his character and ancestry really fitted him. It has been said that there is a real affinity between Scott and Homer. But the long and refluent music of Homer, once naturalized in his mind, would have discontented him with that quick, sharp, metrical tramp of his own moss-troopers, to which alone his genius as a poet was perfectly suited. It might be supposed that with these romantic tastes, Scott could scarcely have made much of a lawyer, though the inference would, I believe, be quite mistaken. His father, however, reproached him with being better fitted for a pedlar than a lawyer,--so persistently did he trudge over all the neighbouring counties in search of the beauties of nature and the historic associations of battle, siege, or legend. On one occasion when, with their last penny spent, Scott and one of his companions had returned to Edinburgh, living during their last day on drinks of milk offered by generous peasant-women, and the hips and haws on the hedges, he remarked to his father how much he had wished for George Primrose's power of playing on the flute in order to earn a meal by the way, old Mr. Scott, catching grumpily at the idea, replied, "I greatly doubt, sir, you were born for nae better then a gangrel scrape-gut,"--a speech which very probably suggested his son's conception of Darsie Latimer's adventures with the blind fiddler, "Wandering Willie," in _Redgauntlet_. And, it is true that these were the days of mental and moral fermentation, what was called in Germany the Sturm-und-Drang, the "fret-and-fury" period of Scott's life, so far as one so mellow and genial in temper ever passed through a period of fret and fury at all. In other words these were the days of rapid motion, of walks of thirty miles a day which the lame lad yet found no fatigue to him; of mad enterprises, scrapes and drinking-bouts, in one of which Scott was half persuaded by his friends that he actually sang a song for the only time in his life. But even in these days of youthful sociability, with companions of his own age, Scott was always himself, and his imperious will often asserted itself. Writing of this time, some thirty-five years or so later, he said, "When I was a boy, and on foot expeditions, as we had many, no creature could be so indifferent which way our course was directed, and I acquiesced in what any one proposed; but if I was once driven to make a choice, and felt piqued in honour to maintain my proposition, I have broken off from the whole party, rather than yield to any one." No doubt, too, in that day of what he himself described as "the silly smart fancies that ran in my brain like the bubbles in a glass of champagne, as brilliant to my thinking, as intoxicating, as evanescent," solitude was no real deprivation to him; and one can easily imagine him marching off on his solitary way after a dispute with his companions, reciting to himself old songs or ballads, with that "noticeable but altogether indescribable play of the upper lip," which Mr. Lockhart thinks suggested to one of Scott's most intimate friends, on his first acquaintance with him, the grotesque notion that he had been "a hautboy-player." This was the first impression formed of Scott by William Clerk, one of his earliest and life-long friends. It greatly amused Scott, who not only had never played on any instrument in his life, but could hardly make shift to join in the chorus of a popular song without marring its effect; but perhaps the impression suggested was not so very far astray after all. Looking to the poetic side of his character, the trumpet certainly would have been the instrument that would have best symbolized the spirit both of Scott's thought and of his verses. Mr. Lockhart himself, in summing up his impressions of Sir Walter, quotes as the most expressive of his lines:-- "Sound, sound the clarion! fill the fife! To all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth a world without a name." And undoubtedly this gives us the key-note of Scott's personal life as well as of his poetic power. Above everything he was high-spirited, a man of noble, and, at the same time, of martial feelings. Sir Francis Doyle speaks very justly of Sir Walter as "among English singers the undoubted inheritor of that trumpet-note, which, under the breath of Homer, has made the wrath of Achilles immortal;" and I do not doubt that there was something in Scott's face, and especially in the expression of his mouth, to suggest this even to his early college companions. Unfortunately, however, even "one crowded hour of glorious life" may sometimes have a "sensual" inspiration, and in these days of youthful adventure, too many such hours seem to have owed their inspiration to the Scottish peasant's chief bane, the Highland whisky. In his eager search after the old ballads of the Border, Scott had many a blithe adventure, which ended only too often in a carouse. It was soon after this time that he first began those raids into Liddesdale, of which all the world has enjoyed the records in the sketches--embodied subsequently in _Guy Mannering_--of Dandie Dinmont, his pony Dumple, and the various Peppers and Mustards from whose breed there were afterwards introduced into Scott's own family, generations of terriers, always named, as Sir Walter expressed it, after "the cruet." I must quote the now classic record of those youthful escapades:-- "Eh me," said Mr. Shortreed, his companion in all these Liddesdale raids, "sic an endless fund of humour and drollery as he had then wi' him. Never ten yards but we were either laughing or roaring and singing. Wherever we stopped, how brawlie he suited himsel' to everybody! He aye did as the lave did; never made himsel' the great man or took ony airs in the company. I've seen him in a' moods in these jaunts, grave and gay, daft and serious, sober and drunk--(this, however, even in our wildest rambles, was but rare)--but drunk or sober he was aye the gentleman. He looked excessively heavy and stupid when he was _fou_, but he was never out o' gude humour." One of the stories of that time will illustrate better the wilder days of Scott's youth than any comment:-- "On reaching one evening," says Mr. Lockhart, "some Charlieshope or other (I forget the name) among those wildernesses, they found a kindly reception as usual: but to their agreeable surprise, after some days of hard living, a measured and orderly hospitality as respected liquor. Soon after supper, at which a bottle of elderberry wine alone had been produced, a young student of divinity who happened to be in the house was called upon to take the 'big ha' Bible,' in the good old fashion of Burns' Saturday Night: and some progress had been already made in the service, when the good man of the farm, whose 'tendency,' as Mr. Mitchell says, 'was soporific,' scandalized his wife and the dominie by starting suddenly from his knees, and rubbing his eyes, with a stentorian exclamation of 'By ----! here's the keg at last!' and in tumbled, as he spake the word, a couple of sturdy herdsmen, whom, on hearing, a day before, of the advocate's approaching visit, he had despatched to a certain smuggler's haunt at some considerable distance in quest of a supply of _run_ brandy from the Solway frith. The pious 'exercise' of the household was hopelessly interrupted. With a thousand apologies for his hitherto shabby entertainment, this jolly Elliot or Armstrong had the welcome _keg_ mounted on the table without a moment's delay, and gentle and simple, not forgetting the dominie, continued carousing about it until daylight streamed in upon the party. Sir Walter Scott seldom failed, when I saw him in company with his Liddesdale companions, to mimic with infinite humour the sudden outburst of his old host on hearing the clatter of horses' feet, which he knew to indicate the arrival of the keg, the consternation of the dame, and the rueful despair with which the young clergyman closed the book."[5] No wonder old Mr. Scott felt some doubt of his son's success at the bar, and thought him more fitted in many respects for a "gangrel scrape-gut."[6] In spite of all this love of excitement, Scott became a sound lawyer, and might have been a great lawyer, had not his pride of character, the impatience of his genius, and the stir of his imagination rendered him indisposed to wait and slave in the precise manner which the prepossessions of solicitors appoint. For Scott's passion for romantic literature was not at all the sort of thing which we ordinarily mean by boys' or girls' love of romance. No amount of drudgery or labour deterred Scott from any undertaking on the prosecution of which he was bent. He was quite the reverse, indeed, of what is usually meant by sentimental, either in his manners or his literary interests. As regards the history of his own country he was no mean antiquarian. Indeed he cared for the mustiest antiquarian researches--of the mediæval kind--so much, that in the depth of his troubles he speaks of a talk with a Scotch antiquary and herald as one of the things which soothed him most. "I do not know anything which relieves the mind so much from the sullens as trifling discussions about antiquarian _old womanries_. It is like knitting a stocking, diverting the mind without occupying it."[7] Thus his love of romantic literature was as far as possible from that of a mind which only feeds on romantic excitements; rather was it that of one who was so moulded by the transmitted and acquired love of feudal institutions with all their incidents, that he could not take any deep interest in any other fashion of human society. Now the Scotch law was full of vestiges and records of that period,--was indeed a great standing monument of it; and in numbers of his writings Scott shows with how deep an interest he had studied the Scotch law from this point of view. He remarks somewhere that it was natural for a Scotchman to feel a strong attachment to the principle of rank, if only on the ground that almost any Scotchman might, under the Scotch law, turn out to be heir-in-tail to some great Scotch title or estate by the death of intervening relations. And the law which sometimes caused such sudden transformations, had subsequently a true interest for him of course as a novel writer, to say nothing of his interest in it as an antiquarian and historian who loved to repeople the earth, not merely with the picturesque groups of the soldiers and courts of the past, but with the actors in all the various quaint and homely transactions and puzzlements which the feudal ages had brought forth. Hence though, as a matter of fact, Scott never made much figure as an advocate, he became a very respectable, and might unquestionably have become a very great, lawyer. When he started at the bar, however, he had not acquired the tact to impress an ordinary assembly. In one case which he conducted before the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, when defending a parish minister threatened with deposition for drunkenness and unseemly behaviour, he certainly missed the proper tone,--first receiving a censure for the freedom of his manner in treating the allegations against his client, and then so far collapsing under the rebuke of the Moderator, as to lose the force and urgency necessary to produce an effect on his audience. But these were merely a boy's mishaps. He was certainly by no means a Heaven-born orator, and therefore could not expect to spring into exceptionally _early_ distinction, and the only true reason for his relative failure was that he was so full of literary power, and so proudly impatient of the fetters which prudence seemed to impose on his extra-professional proceedings, that he never gained the credit he deserved for the general common sense, the unwearied industry, and the keen appreciation of the ins and outs of legal method, which might have raised him to the highest reputation even as a judge. All readers of his novels know how Scott delights in the humours of the law. By way of illustration take the following passage, which is both short and amusing, in which Saunders Fairford--the old solicitor painted from Scott's father in _Redgauntlet_--descants on the law of the stirrup-cup. "It was decided in a case before the town bailies of Cupar Angus, when Luckie Simpson's cow had drunk up Luckie Jamieson's browst of ale, while it stood in the door to cool, that there was no damage to pay, because the crummie drank without sitting down; such being the circumstance constituting a Doch an Dorroch, which is a standing drink for which no reckoning is paid." I do not believe that any one of Scott's contemporaries had greater legal abilities than he, though, as it happened, they were never fairly tried. But he had both the pride and impatience of genius. It fretted him to feel that he was dependent on the good opinions of solicitors, and that they who were incapable of understanding his genius, thought the less instead of the better of him as an advocate, for every indication which he gave of that genius. Even on the day of his call to the bar he gave expression to a sort of humorous foretaste of this impatience, saying to William Clerk, who had been called with him, as he mimicked the air and tone of a Highland lass waiting at the Cross of Edinburgh to be hired for the harvest, "We've stood here an hour by the Tron, hinny, and deil a ane has speered our price." Scott continued to practise at the bar--nominally at least--for fourteen years, but the most which he ever seems to have made in any one year was short of 230_l._, and latterly his practice was much diminishing instead of increasing. His own impatience of solicitors' patronage was against him; his well-known dabblings in poetry were still more against him; and his general repute for wild and unprofessional adventurousness--which was much greater than he deserved--was probably most of all against him. Before he had been six years at the bar he joined the organization of the Edinburgh Volunteer Cavalry, took a very active part in the drill, and was made their Quartermaster. Then he visited London, and became largely known for his ballads, and his love of ballads. In his eighth year at the bar he accepted a small permanent appointment, with 300_l._ a year, as sheriff of Selkirkshire; and this occurring soon after his marriage to a lady of some means, no doubt diminished still further his professional zeal. For one third of the time during which Scott practised as an advocate he made no pretence of taking interest in that part of his work, though he was always deeply interested in the law itself. In 1806 he undertook gratuitously the duties of a Clerk of Session--a permanent officer of the Court at Edinburgh--and discharged them without remuneration for five years, from 1806 to 1811, in order to secure his ultimate succession to the office in the place of an invalid, who for that period received all the emoluments and did none of the work. Nevertheless Scott's legal abilities were so well known, that it was certainly at one time intended to offer him a Barony of the Exchequer, and it was his own doing, apparently, that it was not offered. The life of literature and the life of the Bar hardly ever suit, and in Scott's case they suited the less, that he felt himself likely to be a dictator in the one field, and only a postulant in the other. Literature was a far greater gainer by his choice, than Law could have been a loser. For his capacity for the law he shared with thousands of able men, his capacity for literature with few or none. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 5: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 269-71.] [Footnote 6: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 206.] [Footnote 7: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 221.] CHAPTER III. LOVE AND MARRIAGE. One Sunday, about two years before his call to the bar, Scott offered his umbrella to a young lady of much beauty who was coming out of the Greyfriars Church during a shower; the umbrella was graciously accepted; and it was not an unprecedented consequence that Scott fell in love with the borrower, who turned out to be Margaret, daughter of Sir John and Lady Jane Stuart Belches, of Invernay. For near six years after this, Scott indulged the hope of marrying this lady, and it does not seem doubtful that the lady herself was in part responsible for this impression. Scott's father, who thought his son's prospects very inferior to those of Miss Stuart Belches, felt it his duty to warn the baronet of his son's views, a warning which the old gentleman appears to have received with that grand unconcern characteristic of elderly persons in high position, as a hint intrinsically incredible, or at least unworthy of notice. But he took no alarm, and Scott's attentions to Margaret Stuart Belches continued till close on the eve of her marriage, in 1796, to William Forbes (afterwards Sir William Forbes), of Pitsligo, a banker, who proved to be one of Sir Walter's most generous and most delicate-minded friends, when his time of troubles came towards the end of both their lives. Whether Scott was in part mistaken as to the impression he had made on the young lady, or she was mistaken as to the impression he had made on herself, or whether other circumstances intervened to cause misunderstanding, or the grand indifference of Sir John gave way to active intervention when the question became a practical one, the world will now never know, but it does not seem very likely that a man of so much force as Scott, who certainly had at one time assured himself at least of the young lady's strong regard, should have been easily displaced even by a rival of ability and of most generous and amiable character. An entry in the diary which Scott kept in 1827, after Constable's and Ballantyne's failure, and his wife's death, seems to me to suggest that there may have been some misunderstanding between the young people, though I am not sure that the inference is justified. The passage completes the story of this passion--Scott's first and only deep passion--so far as it can ever be known to us; and as it is a very pathetic and characteristic entry, and the attachment to which it refers had a great influence on Scott's life, both in keeping him free from some of the most dangerous temptations of the young, during his youth, and in creating within him an interior world of dreams and recollections throughout his whole life, on which his imaginative nature was continually fed--I may as well give it. "He had taken," says Mr. Lockhart, "for that winter [1827], the house No. 6, Shandwick Place, which he occupied by the month during the remainder of his servitude as a clerk of session. Very near this house, he was told a few days after he took possession, dwelt the aged mother of his first love; and he expressed to his friend Mrs. Skene, a wish that she should carry him to renew an acquaintance which seems to have been interrupted from the period of his youthful romance. Mrs. Skene complied with his desire, and she tells me that a very painful scene ensued." His diary says,--"November 7th. Began to settle myself this morning after the hurry of mind and even of body which I have lately undergone. I went to make a visit and fairly softened myself, like an old fool, with recalling old stories till I was fit for nothing but shedding tears and repeating verses for the whole night. This is sad work. The very grave gives up its dead, and time rolls back thirty years to add to my perplexities. I don't care. I begin to grow case-hardened, and like a stag turning at bay, my naturally good temper grows fierce and dangerous. Yet what a romance to tell--and told I fear it will one day be. And then my three years of dreaming and my two years of wakening will be chronicled, doubtless. But the dead will feel no pain.--November 10th. At twelve o'clock I went again to poor Lady Jane to talk over old stories. I am not clear that it is a right or healthful indulgence to be ripping up old sores, but it seems to give her deep-rooted sorrow words, and that is a mental blood-letting. To me these things are now matter of calm and solemn recollection, never to be forgotten, yet scarce to be remembered with pain."[8] It was in 1797, after the break-up of his hopes in relation to this attachment, that Scott wrote the lines _To a Violet_, which Mr. F. T. Palgrave, in his thoughtful and striking introduction to Scott's poems, rightly characterizes as one of the most beautiful of those poems. It is, however, far from one characteristic of Scott, indeed, so different in style from the best of his other poems, that Mr. Browning might well have said of Scott, as he once affirmed of himself, that for the purpose of one particular poem, he "who blows through bronze," had "breathed through silver,"--had "curbed the liberal hand subservient proudly,"--and tamed his spirit to a key elsewhere unknown. "The violet in her greenwood bower, Where birchen boughs with hazels mingle, May boast itself the fairest flower In glen, or copse, or forest dingle. "Though fair her gems of azure hue, Beneath the dewdrop's weight reclining, I've seen an eye of lovelier blue, More sweet through watery lustre shining. "The summer sun that dew shall dry, Ere yet the day be past its morrow; Nor longer in my false love's eye Remain'd the tear of parting sorrow." These lines obviously betray a feeling of resentment, which may or may not have been justified; but they are perhaps the most delicate produced by his pen. The pride which was always so notable a feature in Scott, probably sustained him through the keen, inward pain which it is very certain from a great many of his own words that he must have suffered in this uprooting of his most passionate hopes. And it was in part probably the same pride which led him to form, within the year, a new tie--his engagement to Mademoiselle Charpentier, or Miss Carpenter as she was usually called,--the daughter of a French royalist of Lyons who had died early in the revolution. She had come after her father's death to England, chiefly, it seems, because in the Marquis of Downshire, who was an old friend of the family, her mother knew that she should find a protector for her children. Miss Carpenter was a lively beauty, probably of no great depth of character. The few letters given of hers in Mr. Lockhart's life of Scott, give the impression of an amiable, petted girl, of somewhat thin and _espiègle_ character, who was rather charmed at the depth and intensity of Scott's nature, and at the expectations which he seemed to form of what love should mean, than capable of realizing them. Evidently she had no inconsiderable pleasure in display; but she made on the whole a very good wife, only one to be protected by him from every care, and not one to share Scott's deeper anxieties, or to participate in his dreams. Yet Mrs. Scott was not devoid of spirit and self-control. For instance, when Mr. Jeffrey, having reviewed _Marmion_ in the _Edinburgh_ in that depreciating and omniscient tone which was then considered the evidence of critical acumen, dined with Scott on the very day on which the review had appeared, Mrs. Scott behaved to him through the whole evening with the greatest politeness, but fired this parting shot in her broken English, as he took his leave,--"Well, good night, Mr. Jeffrey,--dey tell me you have abused Scott in de _Review_, and I hope Mr. Constable has paid you very well for writing it." It is hinted that Mrs. Scott was, at the time of Scott's greatest fame, far more exhilarated by it than her husband with his strong sense and sure self-measurement ever was. Mr. Lockhart records that Mrs. Grant of Laggan once said of them, "Mr. Scott always seems to me like a glass, through which the rays of admiration pass without sensibly affecting it; but the bit of paper that lies beside it will presently be in a blaze, and no wonder." The bit of paper, however, never was in a blaze that I know of; and possibly Mrs. Grant's remark may have had a little feminine spite in it. At all events, it was not till the rays of misfortune, instead of admiration, fell upon Scott's life, that the delicate tissue paper shrivelled up; nor does it seem that, even then, it was the trouble, so much as a serious malady that had fixed on Lady Scott before Sir Walter's troubles began, which really scorched up her life. That she did not feel with the depth and intensity of her husband, or in the same key of feeling, is clear. After the failure, and during the preparations for abandoning the house in Edinburgh, Scott records in his diary:--"It is with a sense of pain that I leave behind a parcel of trumpery prints and little ornaments, once the pride of Lady Scott's heart, but which she saw consigned with indifference to the chance of an auction. Things that have had their day of importance with me, I cannot forget, though the merest trifles; but I am glad that she, with bad health, and enough to vex her, has not the same useless mode of associating recollections with this unpleasant business."[9] Poor Lady Scott! It was rather like a bird of paradise mating with an eagle. Yet the result was happy on the whole; for she had a thoroughly kindly nature, and a true heart. Within ten days before her death, Scott enters in his diary:--"Still welcoming me with a smile, and asserting she is better." She was not the ideal wife for Scott; but she loved him, sunned herself in his prosperity, and tried to bear his adversity cheerfully. In her last illness she would always reproach her husband and children for their melancholy faces, even when that melancholy was, as she well knew, due to the approaching shadow of her own death. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 8: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 183-4.] [Footnote 9: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, viii. 273.] CHAPTER IV. EARLIEST POETRY AND BORDER MINSTRELSY. Scott's first serious attempt in poetry was a version of Bürger's _Lenore_, a spectre-ballad of the violent kind, much in favour in Germany at a somewhat earlier period, but certainly not a specimen of the higher order of imaginative genius. However, it stirred Scott's youthful blood, and made him "wish to heaven he could get a skull and two cross-bones!" a modest desire, to be expressed with so much fervour, and one almost immediately gratified. Probably no one ever gave a more spirited version of Bürger's ballad than Scott has given; but the use to which Miss Cranstoun, a friend and confidante of his love for Miss Stuart Belches, strove to turn it, by getting it printed, blazoned, and richly bound, and presenting it to the young lady as a proof of her admirer's abilities, was perhaps hardly very sagacious. It is quite possible, at least, that Miss Stuart Belches may have regarded this vehement admirer of spectral wedding journeys and skeleton bridals, as unlikely to prepare for her that comfortable, trim, and decorous future which young ladies usually desire. At any rate, the bold stroke failed. The young lady admired the verses, but, as we have seen, declined the translator. Perhaps she regarded banking as safer, if less brilliant work than the most effective description of skeleton riders. Indeed, Scott at this time--to those who did not know what was in him, which no one, not even excepting himself, did--had no very sure prospects of comfort, to say nothing of wealth. It is curious, too, that his first adventure in literature was thus connected with his interest in the preternatural, for no man ever lived whose genius was sounder and healthier, and less disposed to dwell on the half-and-half lights of a dim and eerie world; yet ghostly subjects always interested him deeply, and he often touched them in his stories, more, I think, from the strong artistic contrast they afforded to his favourite conceptions of life, than from any other motive. There never was, I fancy, an organization less susceptible of this order of fears and superstitions than his own. When a friend jokingly urged him, within a few months of his death, not to leave Rome on a Friday, as it was a day of bad omen for a journey, he replied, laughing, "Superstition is very picturesque, and I make it, at times, stand me in great stead, but I never allow it to interfere with interest or convenience." Basil Hall reports Scott's having told him on the last evening of the year 1824, when they were talking over this subject, that "having once arrived at a country inn, he was told there was no bed for him. 'No place to lie down at all?' said he. 'No,' said the people of the house; 'none, except a room in which there is a corpse lying.' 'Well,' said he, 'did the person die of any contagious disorder?' 'Oh, no; not at all,' said they. 'Well, then,' continued he, 'let me have the other bed. So,' said Sir Walter, 'I laid me down, and never had a better night's sleep in my life.'" He was, indeed, a man of iron nerve, whose truest artistic enjoyment was in noting the forms of character seen in full daylight by the light of the most ordinary experience. Perhaps for that reason he can on occasion relate a preternatural incident, such as the appearance of old Alice at the fountain, at the very moment of her death, to the Master of Ravenswood, in _The Bride of Lammermoor_, with great effect. It was probably the vivacity with which he realized the violence which such incidents do to the terrestrial common sense of our ordinary nature, and at the same time the sedulous accuracy of detail with which he narrated them, rather than any, even the smallest, special susceptibility of his own brain to thrills of the preternatural kind, which gave him rather a unique pleasure in dealing with such preternatural elements. Sometimes, however, his ghosts are a little too muscular to produce their due effect as ghosts. In translating Bürger's ballad his great success lay in the vividness of the spectre's horsemanship. For instance,-- "Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode, Splash! splash! along the sea; The scourge is red, the spur drops blood, The flashing pebbles flee," is far better than any ghostly touch in it; so, too, every one will remember how spirited a rider is the white Lady of Avenel, in _The Monastery_, and how vigorously she takes fords,--as vigorously as the sheriff himself, who was very fond of fords. On the whole, Scott was too sunny and healthy-minded for a ghost-seer; and the skull and cross-bones with which he ornamented his "den" in his father's house, did not succeed in tempting him into the world of twilight and cobwebs wherein he made his first literary excursion. His _William and Helen_, the name he gave to his translation of Bürger's _Lenore_, made in 1795, was effective, after all, more for its rapid movement, than for the weirdness of its effects. If, however, it was the raw preternaturalism of such ballads as Bürger's which first led Scott to test his own powers, his genius soon turned to more appropriate and natural subjects. Ever since his earliest college days he had been collecting, in those excursions of his into Liddesdale and elsewhere, materials for a book on _The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_; and the publication of this work, in January, 1802 (in two volumes at first), was his first great literary success. The whole edition of eight hundred copies was sold within the year, while the skill and care which Scott had devoted to the historical illustration of the ballads, and the force and spirit of his own new ballads, written in imitation of the old, gained him at once a very high literary name. And the name was well deserved. The _Border Minstrelsy_ was more commensurate _in range_ with the genius of Scott, than even the romantic poems by which it was soon followed, and which were received with such universal and almost unparalleled delight. For Scott's _Border Minstrelsy_ gives more than a glimpse of all his many great powers--his historical industry and knowledge, his masculine humour, his delight in restoring the vision of the "old, simple, violent world" of rugged activity and excitement, as well as that power to kindle men's hearts, as by a trumpet-call, which was the chief secret of the charm of his own greatest poems. It is much easier to discern the great novelist of subsequent years in the _Border Minstrelsy_ than even in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, _Marmion_, and _The Lady of the Lake_ taken together. From those romantic poems you would never guess that Scott entered more eagerly and heartily into the common incidents and common cares of every-day human life than into the most romantic fortunes; from them you would never know how completely he had mastered the leading features of quite different periods of our history; from them you would never infer that you had before you one of the best plodders, as well as one of the most enthusiastic dreamers, in British literature. But all this might have been gathered from the various introductions and notes to the _Border Minstrelsy_, which are full of skilful illustrations, of comments teeming with humour, and of historic weight. The general introduction gives us a general survey of the graphic pictures of Border quarrels, their simple violence and simple cunning. It enters, for instance, with grave humour into the strong distinction taken in the debatable land between a "freebooter" and a "thief," and the difficulty which the inland counties had in grasping it, and paints for us, with great vivacity, the various Border superstitions. Another commentary on a very amusing ballad, commemorating the manner in which a blind harper stole a horse and got paid for a mare he had not lost, gives an account of the curious tenure of land, called that of the "king's rentallers," or "kindly tenants;" and a third describes, in language as vivid as the historical romance of _Kenilworth_, written years after, the manner in which Queen Elizabeth received the news of a check to her policy, and vented her spleen on the King of Scotland. So much as to the breadth of the literary area which this first book of Scott's covered. As regards the poetic power which his own new ballads, in imitation of the old ones, evinced, I cannot say that those of the first issue of the _Border Minstrelsy_ indicated anything like the force which might have been expected from one who was so soon to be the author of _Marmion_, though many of Scott's warmest admirers, including Sir Francis Doyle, seem to place _Glenfinlas_ among his finest productions. But in the third volume of the _Border Minstrelsy_, which did not appear till 1803, is contained a ballad on the assassination of the Regent Murray, the story being told by his assassin, which seems to me a specimen of his very highest poetical powers. In _Cadyow Castle_ you have not only that rousing trumpet-note which you hear in _Marmion,_ but the pomp and glitter of a grand martial scene is painted with all Scott's peculiar terseness and vigour. The opening is singularly happy in preparing the reader for the description of a violent deed. The Earl of Arran, chief of the clan of Hamiltons, is chasing among the old oaks of Cadyow Castle,--oaks which belonged to the ancient Caledonian forest,--the fierce, wild bulls, milk-white, with black muzzles, which were not extirpated till shortly before Scott's own birth:-- "Through the huge oaks of Evandale, Whose limbs a thousand years have worn, What sullen roar comes down the gale, And drowns the hunter's pealing horn? "Mightiest of all the beasts of chase That roam in woody Caledon, Crashing the forest in his race, The mountain bull comes thundering on. "Fierce on the hunter's quiver'd band He rolls his eyes of swarthy glow, Spurns, with black hoof and horn, the sand, And tosses high his mane of snow. "Aim'd well, the chieftain's lance has flown; Struggling in blood the savage lies; His roar is sunk in hollow groan,-- Sound, merry huntsman! sound the pryse!" It is while the hunters are resting after this feat, that Bothwellhaugh dashes among them headlong, spurring his jaded steed with poniard instead of spur:-- "From gory selle and reeling steed, Sprang the fierce horseman with a bound, And reeking from the recent deed, He dash'd his carbine on the ground." And then Bothwellhaugh tells his tale of blood, describing the procession from which he had singled out his prey:-- "'Dark Morton, girt with many a spear, Murder's foul minion, led the van; And clash'd their broadswords in the rear The wild Macfarlanes' plaided clan. "'Glencairn and stout Parkhead were nigh, Obsequious at their Regent's rein, And haggard Lindsay's iron eye, That saw fair Mary weep in vain. "''Mid pennon'd spears, a steely grove, Proud Murray's plumage floated high; Scarce could his trampling charger move, So close the minions crowded nigh. "'From the raised vizor's shade, his eye, Dark rolling, glanced the ranks along, And his steel truncheon waved on high, Seem'd marshalling the iron throng. "'But yet his sadden'd brow confess'd A passing shade of doubt and awe; Some fiend was whispering in his breast, "Beware of injured Bothwellhaugh!" "'The death-shot parts,--the charger springs,-- Wild rises tumult's startling roar! And Murray's plumy helmet rings-- Rings on the ground to rise no more.'" This was the ballad which made so strong an impression on Thomas Campbell, the poet. Referring to some of the lines I have quoted, Campbell said,--"I have repeated them so often on the North Bridge that the whole fraternity of coachmen know me by tongue as I pass. To be sure, to a mind in sober, serious, street-walking humour, it must bear an appearance of lunacy when one stamps with the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head which strong, pithy poetry excites."[10] I suppose anecdotes of this kind have been oftener told of Scott than of any other English poet. Indeed, Sir Walter, who understood himself well, gives the explanation in one of his diaries:--"I am sensible," he says, "that if there be anything good about my poetry or prose either, it is a hurried frankness of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active dispositions."[11] He might have included old people too. I have heard of two old men--complete strangers--passing each other on a dark London night, when one of them happened to be repeating to himself, just as Campbell did to the hackney coachmen of the North Bridge of Edinburgh, the last lines of the account of Flodden Field in _Marmion_, "Charge, Chester, charge," when suddenly a reply came out of the darkness, "On, Stanley, on," whereupon they finished the death of Marmion between them, took off their hats to each other, and parted, laughing. Scott's is almost the only poetry in the English language that not only runs thus in the head of average men, but heats the head in which it runs by the mere force of its hurried frankness of style, to use Scott's own terms, or by that of its strong and pithy eloquence, as Campbell phrased it. And in _Cadyow Castle_ this style is at its culminating point. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 10: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 79.] [Footnote 11: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, viii. 370.] CHAPTER V. SCOTT'S MATURER POEMS. Scott's genius flowered late. _Cadyow Castle_, the first of his poems, I think, that has indisputable genius plainly stamped on its terse and fiery lines, was composed in 1802, when he was already thirty-one years of age. It was in the same year that he wrote the first canto of his first great romance in verse, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, a poem which did not appear till 1805, when he was thirty-four. The first canto (not including the framework, of which the aged harper is the principal figure) was written in the lodgings to which he was confined for a fortnight in 1802, by a kick received from a horse on Portobello sands, during a charge of the Volunteer Cavalry in which Scott was cornet. The poem was originally intended to be included in the _Border Minstrelsy_, as one of the studies in the antique style, but soon outgrew the limits of such a study both in length and in the freedom of its manner. Both the poorest and the best parts of _The Lay_ were in a special manner due to Lady Dalkeith (afterwards Duchess of Buccleugh), who suggested it, and in whose honour the poem was written. It was she who requested Scott to write a poem on the legend of the goblin page, Gilpin Horner, and this Scott attempted,--and, so far as the goblin himself was concerned, conspicuously failed. He himself clearly saw that the story of this unmanageable imp was both confused and uninteresting, and that in fact he had to extricate himself from the original groundwork of the tale, as from a regular literary scrape, in the best way he could. In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott says,--"At length the story appeared so uncouth that I was fain to put it into the mouth of my old minstrel, lest the nature of it should be misunderstood, and I should be suspected of setting up a new school of poetry, instead of a feeble attempt to imitate the old. In the process of the romance, the page, intended to be a principal person in the work, contrived (from the baseness of his natural propensities, I suppose) to slink down stairs into the kitchen, and now he must e'en abide there."[12] And I venture to say that no reader of the poem ever has distinctly understood what the goblin page did or did not do, what it was that was "lost" throughout the poem and "found" at the conclusion, what was the object of his personating the young heir of the house of Scott, and whether or not that object was answered;--what use, if any, the magic book of Michael Scott was to the Lady of Branksome, or whether it was only harm to her; and I doubt moreover whether any one ever cared an iota what answer, or whether any answer, might be given to any of these questions. All this, as Scott himself clearly perceived, was left confused, and not simply vague. The goblin imp had been more certainly an imp of mischief to him than even to his boyish ancestor. But if Lady Dalkeith suggested the poorest part of the poem, she certainly inspired its best part. Scott says, as we have seen, that he brought in the aged harper to save himself from the imputation of "setting-up a new school of poetry" instead of humbly imitating an old school. But I think that the chivalrous wish to do honour to Lady Dalkeith, both as a personal friend and as the wife of his "chief,"--as he always called the head of the house of Scott,--had more to do with the introduction of the aged harper, than the wish to guard himself against the imputation of attempting a new poetic style. He clearly intended the Duchess of _The Lay_ to represent the Countess for whom he wrote it, and the aged harper, with his reverence and gratitude and self-distrust, was only the disguise in which he felt that he could best pour out his loyalty, and the romantic devotion with which both Lord and Lady Dalkeith, but especially the latter, had inspired him. It was certainly this beautiful framework which assured the immediate success and permanent charm of the poem; and the immediate success was for that day something marvellous. The magnificent quarto edition of 750 copies was soon exhausted, and an octavo edition of 1500 copies was sold out within the year. In the following year two editions, containing together 4250 copies, were disposed of, and before twenty-five years had elapsed, that is, before 1830, 44,000 copies of the poem had been bought by the public in this country, taking account of the legitimate trade alone. Scott gained in all by _The Lay_ 769_l._, an unprecedented sum in those times for an author to obtain from any poem. Little more than half a century before, Johnson received but fifteen guineas for his stately poem on _The Vanity of Human Wishes_, and but ten guineas for his _London_. I do not say that Scott's poem had not much more in it of true poetic fire, though Scott himself, I believe, preferred these poems of Johnson's to anything that he himself ever wrote. But the disproportion in the reward was certainly enormous, and yet what Scott gained by his _Lay_ was of course much less than he gained by any of his subsequent poems of equal, or anything like equal, length. Thus for _Marmion_ he received 1000 guineas long before the poem was published, and for _one half_ of the copyright of _The Lord of the Isles_ Constable paid Scott 1500 guineas. If we ask ourselves to what this vast popularity of Scott's poems, and especially of the earlier of them (for, as often happens, he was better remunerated for his later and much inferior poems than for his earlier and more brilliant productions) is due, I think the answer must be for the most part, the high romantic glow and extraordinary romantic simplicity of the poetical elements they contained. Take the old harper of _The Lay_, a figure which arrested the attention of Pitt during even that last most anxious year of his anxious life, the year of Ulm and Austerlitz. The lines in which Scott describes the old man's embarrassment when first urged to play, produced on Pitt, according to his own account, "an effect which I might have expected in painting, but could never have fancied capable of being given in poetry."[13] Every one knows the lines to which Pitt refers:-- "The humble boon was soon obtain'd; The aged minstrel audience gain'd. But, when he reach'd the room of state, Where she with all her ladies sate, Perchance he wish'd his boon denied; For, when to tune the harp he tried, His trembling hand had lost the ease Which marks security to please; And scenes long past, of joy and pain, Came wildering o'er his aged brain,-- He tried to tune his harp in vain! The pitying Duchess praised its chime, And gave him heart, and gave him time, Till every string's according glee Was blended into harmony. And then, he said, he would full fain He could recall an ancient strain He never thought to sing again. It was not framed for village churls, But for high dames and mighty earls; He'd play'd it to King Charles the Good, When he kept Court at Holyrood; And much he wish'd, yet fear'd, to try The long-forgotten melody. Amid the strings his fingers stray'd, And an uncertain warbling made, And oft he shook his hoary head. But when he caught the measure wild The old man raised his face, and smiled; And lighten'd up his faded eye, With all a poet's ecstasy! In varying cadence, soft or strong, He swept the sounding chords along; The present scene, the future lot, His toils, his wants, were all forgot; Cold diffidence and age's frost In the full tide of song were lost; Each blank in faithless memory void The poet's glowing thought supplied; And, while his harp responsive rung, 'Twas thus the latest minstrel sung. * * * * * Here paused the harp; and with its swell The master's fire and courage fell; Dejectedly and low he bow'd, And, gazing timid on the crowd, He seem'd to seek in every eye If they approved his minstrelsy; And, diffident of present praise, Somewhat he spoke of former days, And how old age, and wandering long, Had done his hand and harp some wrong." These lines hardly illustrate, I think, the particular form of Mr. Pitt's criticism, for a quick succession of fine shades of feeling of this kind could never have been delineated in a painting, or indeed in a series of paintings, at all, while they _are_ so given in the poem. But the praise itself, if not its exact form, is amply deserved. The singular depth of the romantic glow in this passage, and its equally singular simplicity,--a simplicity which makes it intelligible to every one,--are conspicuous to every reader. It is not what is called classical poetry, for there is no severe outline,--no sculptured completeness and repose,--no satisfying wholeness of effect to the eye of the mind,--no embodiment of a great action. The poet gives us a breath, a ripple of alternating fear and hope in the heart of an old man, and that is all. He catches an emotion that had its roots deep in the past, and that is striving onward towards something in the future;--he traces the wistfulness and self-distrust with which age seeks to recover the feelings of youth,--the delight with which it greets them when they come,--the hesitation and diffidence with which it recalls them as they pass away, and questions the triumph it has just won,--and he paints all this without subtlety, without complexity, but with a swiftness such as few poets ever surpassed. Generally, however, Scott prefers action itself for his subject, to any feeling, however active in its bent. The cases in which he makes a study of any mood of feeling, as he does of this harper's feeling, are comparatively rare. Deloraine's night-ride to Melrose is a good deal more in Scott's ordinary way, than this study of the old harper's wistful mood. But whatever his subject, his treatment of it is the same. His lines are always strongly drawn; his handling is always simple; and his subject always romantic. But though romantic, it is simple almost to bareness,--one of the great causes both of his popularity, and of that deficiency in his poetry of which so many of his admirers become conscious when they compare him with other and richer poets. Scott used to say that in poetry Byron "bet" him; and no doubt that in which chiefly as a poet he "bet" him, was in the variety, the richness, the lustre of his effects. A certain ruggedness and bareness was of the essence of Scott's idealism and romance. It was so in relation to scenery. He told Washington Irving that he loved the very nakedness of the Border country. "It has something," he said, "bold and stern and solitary about it. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented garden-land, I begin to wish myself back again among my honest grey hills, and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, _I think I should die_."[14] Now, the bareness which Scott so loved in his native scenery, there is in all his romantic elements of feeling. It is while he is bold and stern, that he is at his highest ideal point. Directly he begins to attempt rich or pretty subjects, as in parts of _The Lady of the Lake_, and a good deal of _The Lord of the Isles_, and still more in _The Bridal of Triermain_, his charm disappears. It is in painting those moods and exploits, in relation to which Scott shares most completely the feelings of ordinary men, but experiences them with far greater strength and purity than ordinary men, that he triumphs as a poet. Mr. Lockhart tells us that some of Scott's senses were decidedly "blunt," and one seems to recognize this in the simplicity of his romantic effects. "It is a fact," he says, "which some philosophers may think worth setting down, that Scott's organization, as to more than one of the senses, was the reverse of exquisite. He had very little of what musicians call an ear; his smell was hardly more delicate. I have seen him stare about, quite unconscious of the cause, when his whole company betrayed their uneasiness at the approach of an overkept haunch of venison; and neither by the nose nor the palate could he distinguish corked wine from sound. He could never tell Madeira from sherry,--nay, an Oriental friend having sent him a butt of _sheeraz_, when he remembered the circumstance some time afterwards and called for a bottle to have Sir John Malcolm's opinion of its quality, it turned out that his butler, mistaking the label, had already served up half the bin as _sherry_. Port he considered as physic ... in truth he liked no wines except sparkling champagne and claret; but even as to the last he was no connoisseur, and sincerely preferred a tumbler of whisky-toddy to the most precious 'liquid-ruby' that ever flowed in the cup of a prince."[15] However, Scott's eye was very keen:--"_It was commonly him_," as his little son once said, "_that saw the hare sitting_." And his perception of colour was very delicate as well as his mere sight. As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, his landscape painting is almost all done by the lucid use of colour. Nevertheless this bluntness of organization in relation to the less important senses, no doubt contributed something to the singleness and simplicity of the deeper and more vital of Scott's romantic impressions; at least there is good reason to suppose that delicate and complicated susceptibilities do at least diminish the chance of living a strong and concentrated life--do risk the frittering away of feeling on the mere backwaters of sensations, even if they do not directly tend towards artificial and indirect forms of character. Scott's romance is like his native scenery,--bold, bare and rugged, with a swift deep stream of strong pure feeling running through it. There is plenty of colour in his pictures, as there is on the Scotch hills when the heather is out. And so too there is plenty of intensity in his romantic situations; but it is the intensity of simple, natural, unsophisticated, hardy, and manly characters. But as for subtleties and fine shades of feeling in his poems, or anything like the manifold harmonies of the richer arts, they are not to be found, or, if such complicated shading is to be found--and it is perhaps attempted in some faint measure in _The Bridal of Triermain,_ the poem in which Scott tried to pass himself off for Erskine,--it is only at the expense of the higher qualities of his romantic poetry, that even in this small measure it is supplied. Again, there is no rich music in his verse. It is its rapid onset, its hurrying strength, which so fixes it in the mind. It was not till 1808, three years after the publication of _The Lay_, that _Marmion_, Scott's greatest poem, was published. But I may as well say what seems necessary of that and his other poems, while I am on the subject of his poetry. _Marmion_ has all the advantage over _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ that a coherent story told with force and fulness, and concerned with the same class of subjects as _The Lay_, must have over a confused and ill-managed legend, the only original purpose of which was to serve as the opportunity for a picture of Border life and strife. Scott's poems have sometimes been depreciated as mere _novelettes_ in verse, and I think that some of them may be more or less liable to this criticism. For instance, _The Lady of the Lake_, with the exception of two or three brilliant passages, has always seemed to me more of a versified _novelette_,--without the higher and broader characteristics of Scott's prose novels--than of a poem. I suppose what one expects from a poem as distinguished from a romance--even though the poem incorporates a story--is that it should not rest for its chief interest on the mere development of the story; but rather that the narrative should be quite subordinate to that insight into the deeper side of life and manners, in expressing which poetry has so great an advantage over prose. Of _The Lay_ and _Marmion_ this is true; less true of _The Lady of the Lake_, and still less of _Rokeby_, or _The Lord of the Isles_, and this is why _The Lay_ and _Marmion_ seem so much superior as poems to the others. They lean less on the interest of mere incident, more on that of romantic feeling and the great social and historic features of the day. _Marmion_ was composed in great part in the saddle, and the stir of a charge of cavalry seems to be at the very core of it. "For myself," said Scott, writing to a lady correspondent at a time when he was in active service as a volunteer, "I must own that to one who has, like myself, _la tête un peu exaltée_, the pomp and circumstance of war gives, for a time, a very poignant and pleasing sensation."[16] And you feel this all through _Marmion_ even more than in _The Lay_. Mr. Darwin would probably say that Auld Wat of Harden had about as much responsibility for _Marmion_ as Sir Walter himself. "You will expect," he wrote to the same lady, who was personally unknown to him at that time, "to see a person who had dedicated himself to literary pursuits, and you will find me a rattle-skulled, half-lawyer, half-sportsman, through whose head a regiment of horse has been exercising since he was five years old."[17] And what Scott himself felt in relation to the martial elements of his poetry, soldiers in the field felt with equal force. "In the course of the day when _The Lady of the Lake_ first reached Sir Adam Fergusson, he was posted with his company on a point of ground exposed to the enemy's artillery, somewhere no doubt on the lines of Torres Vedras. The men were ordered to lie prostrate on the ground; while they kept that attitude, the captain, kneeling at the head, read aloud the description of the battle in Canto VI., and the listening soldiers only interrupted him by a joyous huzza when the French shot struck the bank close above them."[18] It is not often that martial poetry has been put to such a test; but we can well understand with what rapture a Scotch force lying on the ground to shelter from the French fire, would enter into such passages as the following:-- "Their light-arm'd archers far and near Survey'd the tangled ground, Their centre ranks, with pike and spear, A twilight forest frown'd, Their barbèd horsemen, in the rear, The stern battalia crown'd. No cymbal clash'd, no clarion rang, Still were the pipe and drum; Save heavy tread, and armour's clang, The sullen march was dumb. There breathed no wind their crests to shake, Or wave their flags abroad; Scarce the frail aspen seem'd to quake, That shadow'd o'er their road. Their vanward scouts no tidings bring, Can rouse no lurking foe, Nor spy a trace of living thing Save when they stirr'd the roe; The host moves like a deep-sea wave, Where rise no rocks its power to brave, High-swelling, dark, and slow. The lake is pass'd, and now they gain A narrow and a broken plain, Before the Trosach's rugged jaws, And here the horse and spearmen pause, While, to explore the dangerous glen, Dive through the pass the archer-men. "At once there rose so wild a yell Within that dark and narrow dell, As all the fiends from heaven that fell Had peal'd the banner-cry of Hell! Forth from the pass, in tumult driven, Like chaff before the wind of heaven, The archery appear; For life! for life! their plight they ply, And shriek, and shout, and battle-cry, And plaids and bonnets waving high, And broadswords flashing to the sky, Are maddening in the rear. Onward they drive, in dreadful race, Pursuers and pursued; Before that tide of flight and chase, How shall it keep its rooted place, The spearmen's twilight wood? Down, down, cried Mar, 'your lances down Bear back both friend and foe!' Like reeds before the tempest's frown, That serried grove of lances brown At once lay levell'd low; And, closely shouldering side to side, The bristling ranks the onset bide,-- 'We'll quell the savage mountaineer, As their Tinchel cows the game! They came as fleet as forest deer, We'll drive them back as tame.'" But admirable in its stern and deep excitement as that is, the battle of Flodden in _Marmion_ passes it in vigour, and constitutes perhaps the most perfect description of war by one who was--almost--both poet and warrior, which the English language contains. And _Marmion_ registers the high-water mark of Scott's poetical power, not only in relation to the painting of war, but in relation to the painting of nature. Critics from the beginning onwards have complained of the six introductory epistles, as breaking the unity of the story. But I cannot see that the remark has weight. No poem is written for those who read it as they do a novel--merely to follow the interest of the story; or if any poem be written for such readers, it deserves to die. On such a principle--which treats a poem as a mere novel and nothing else,--you might object to Homer that he interrupts the battle so often to dwell on the origin of the heroes who are waging it; or to Byron that he deserts Childe Harold to meditate on the rapture of solitude. To my mind the ease and frankness of these confessions of the author's recollections give a picture of his life and character while writing _Marmion_, which adds greatly to its attraction as a poem. You have a picture at once not only of the scenery, but of the mind in which that scenery is mirrored, and are brought back frankly, at fit intervals, from the one to the other, in the mode best adapted to help you to appreciate the relation of the poet to the poem. At least if Milton's various interruptions of a much more ambitious theme, to muse upon his own qualifications or disqualifications for the task he had attempted, be not artistic mistakes--and I never heard of any one who thought them so--I cannot see any reason why Scott's periodic recurrence to his own personal history should be artistic mistakes either. If Scott's reverie was less lofty than Milton's, so also was his story. It seems to me as fitting to describe the relation between the poet and his theme in the one case as in the other. What can be more truly a part of _Marmion_, as a poem, though not as a story, than that introduction to the first canto in which Scott expresses his passionate sympathy with the high national feeling of the moment, in his tribute to Pitt and Fox, and then reproaches himself for attempting so great a subject and returns to what he calls his "rude legend," the very essence of which was, however, a passionate appeal to the spirit of national independence? What can be more germane to the poem than the delineation of the strength the poet had derived from musing in the bare and rugged solitudes of St. Mary's Lake, in the introduction to the second canto? Or than the striking autobiographical study of his own infancy which I have before extracted from the introduction to the third? It seems to me that _Marmion_ without these introductions would be like the hills which border Yarrow, without the stream and lake in which they are reflected. Never at all events in any later poem was Scott's touch as a mere painter so terse and strong. What a picture of a Scotch winter is given in these few lines:-- "The sheep before the pinching heaven To shelter'd dale and down are driven, Where yet some faded herbage pines, And yet a watery sunbeam shines: In meek despondency they eye The wither'd sward and wintry sky, And from beneath their summer hill Stray sadly by Glenkinnon's rill." Again, if Scott is ever Homeric (which I cannot think he often is), in spite of Sir Francis Doyle's able criticism,--(he is too short, too sharp, and too eagerly bent on his rugged way, for a poet who is always delighting to find loopholes, even in battle, from which to look out upon the great story of human nature), he is certainly nearest to it in such a passage as this:-- "The Isles-men carried at their backs The ancient Danish battle-axe. They raised a wild and wondering cry As with his guide rode Marmion by. Loud were their clamouring tongues, as when The clanging sea-fowl leave the fen, And, with their cries discordant mix'd, Grumbled and yell'd the pipes betwixt." In hardly any of Scott's poetry do we find much of what is called the _curiosa felicitas_ of expression,--the magic use of _words_, as distinguished from the mere general effect of vigour, purity, and concentration of purpose. But in _Marmion_ occasionally we do find such a use. Take this description, for instance, of the Scotch tents near Edinburgh:-- "A thousand did I say? I ween Thousands on thousands there were seen, That chequer'd all the heath between The streamlet and the town; In crossing ranks extending far, Forming a camp irregular; Oft giving way where still there stood Some relics of the old oak wood, That darkly huge did intervene, _And tamed the glaring white with green_; In these extended lines there lay A martial kingdom's vast array." The line I have italicized seems to me to have more of the poet's special magic of expression than is at all usual with Scott. The conception of the peaceful green oak wood _taming_ the glaring white of the tented field, is as fine in idea as it is in relation to the effect of the mere colour on the eye. Judge Scott's poetry by whatever test you will--whether it be a test of that which is peculiar to it, its glow of national feeling, its martial ardour, its swift and rugged simplicity, or whether it be a test of that which is common to it with most other poetry, its attraction for all romantic excitements, its special feeling for the pomp and circumstance of war, its love of light and colour--and tested either way, _Marmion_ will remain his finest poem. The battle of Flodden Field touches his highest point in its expression of stern patriotic feeling, in its passionate love of daring, and in the force and swiftness of its movement, no less than in the brilliancy of its romantic interests, the charm of its picturesque detail, and the glow of its scenic colouring. No poet ever equalled Scott in the description of wild and simple scenes and the expression of wild and simple feelings. But I have said enough now of his poetry, in which, good as it is, Scott's genius did not reach its highest point. The hurried tramp of his somewhat monotonous metre, is apt to weary the ears of men who do not find their sufficient happiness, as he did, in dreaming of the wild and daring enterprises of his loved Border-land. The very quality in his verse which makes it seize so powerfully on the imaginations of plain, bold, adventurous men, often makes it hammer fatiguingly against the brain of those who need the relief of a wider horizon and a richer world. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 12: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 217.] [Footnote 13: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 226.] [Footnote 14: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, v. 248.] [Footnote 15: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, v. 338.] [Footnote 16: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 137.] [Footnote 17: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 259.] [Footnote 18: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iii. 327.] CHAPTER VI. COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS. I have anticipated in some degree, in speaking of Scott's later poetical works, what, in point of time at least, should follow some slight sketch of his chosen companions, and of his occupations in the first period of his married life. Scott's most intimate friend for some time after he went to college, probably the one who most stimulated his imagination in his youth, and certainly one of his most intimate friends to the very last, was William Clerk, who was called to the bar on the same day as Scott. He was the son of John Clerk of Eldin, the author of a book of some celebrity in its time on _Naval Tactics_. Even in the earliest days of this intimacy, the lads who had been Scott's fellow-apprentices in his father's office, saw with some jealousy his growing friendship with William Clerk, and remonstrated with Scott on the decline of his regard for them, but only succeeded in eliciting from him one of those outbursts of peremptory frankness which anything that he regarded as an attempt to encroach on his own interior liberty of choice always provoked. "I will never cut any man," he said, "unless I detect him in scoundrelism, but I know not what right any of you have to interfere with my choice of my company. As it is, I fairly own that though I like many of you very much, and have long done so, I think William Clerk well worth you all put together."[19] Scott never lost the friendship which began with this eager enthusiasm, but his chief intimacy with Clerk was during his younger days. In 1808 Scott describes Clerk as "a man of the most acute intellects and powerful apprehension, who, if he should ever shake loose the fetters of indolence by which he has been hitherto trammelled, cannot fail to be distinguished in the highest degree." Whether for the reason suggested, or for some other, Clerk never actually gained any other distinction so great as his friendship with Scott conferred upon him. Probably Scott had discerned the true secret of his friend's comparative obscurity. Even while preparing for the bar, when they had agreed to go on alternate mornings to each other's lodgings to read together, Scott found it necessary to modify the arrangement by always visiting his friend, whom he usually found in bed. It was William Clerk who sat for the picture of Darsie Latimer, the hero of _Redgauntlet_,--whence we should suppose him to have been a lively, generous, susceptible, contentious, and rather helter-skelter young man, much alive to the ludicrous in all situations, very eager to see life in all its phases, and somewhat vain of his power of adapting himself equally to all these phases. Scott tells a story of Clerk's being once baffled--almost for the first time--by a stranger in a stage coach, who would not, or could not, talk to him on any subject, until at last Clerk addressed to him this stately remonstrance, "I have talked to you, my friend, on all the ordinary subjects--literature, farming, merchandise, gaming, game-laws, horse-races, suits-at-law, politics, swindling, blasphemy, and philosophy,--is there any one subject that you will favour me by opening upon?" "Sir," replied the inscrutable stranger, "can you say anything clever about '_bend-leather_'?"[20] No doubt this superficial familiarity with a vast number of subjects was a great fascination to Scott, and a great stimulus to his own imagination. To the last he held the same opinion of his friend's latent powers. "To my thinking," he wrote in his diary in 1825, "I never met a man of greater powers, of more complete information on all desirable subjects." But in youth at least Clerk seems to have had what Sir Walter calls a characteristic Edinburgh complaint, the "itch for disputation," and though he softened this down in later life, he had always that slight contentiousness of bias which enthusiastic men do not often heartily like, and which may have prevented Scott from continuing to the full the close intimacy of those earlier years. Yet almost his last record of a really delightful evening, refers to a bachelor's dinner given by Mr. Clerk, who remained unmarried, as late as 1827, after all Sir Walter's worst troubles had come upon him. "In short," says the diary, "we really laughed, and real laughter is as rare as real tears. I must say, too, there was a _heart_, a kindly feeling prevailed over the party. Can London give such a dinner?"[21] It is clear, then, that Clerk's charm for his friend survived to the last, and that it was not the mere inexperience of boyhood, which made Scott esteem him so highly in his early days. If Clerk pricked, stimulated, and sometimes badgered Scott, another of his friends who became more and more intimate with him, as life went on, and who died before him, always soothed him, partly by his gentleness, partly by his almost feminine dependence. This was William Erskine, also a barrister, and son of an Episcopalian clergyman in Perthshire,--to whose influence it is probably due that Scott himself always read the English Church service in his own country house, and does not appear to have retained the Presbyterianism into which he was born. Erskine, who was afterwards raised to the Bench as Lord Kinnedder--a distinction which he did not survive for many months--was a good classic, a man of fine, or, as some of his companions thought, of almost superfine taste. The style apparently for which he had credit must have been a somewhat mimini-pimini style, if we may judge by Scott's attempt in _The Bridal of Triermain_, to write in a manner which he intended to be attributed to his friend. Erskine was left a widower in middle life, and Scott used to accuse him of philandering with pretty women,--- a mode of love-making which Scott certainly contrived to render into verse, in painting Arthur's love-making to Lucy in that poem. It seems that some absolutely false accusation brought against Lord Kinnedder, of an intrigue with a lady with whom he had been thus philandering, broke poor Erskine's heart, during his first year as a Judge. "The Counsellor (as Scott always called him) was," says Mr. Lockhart, "a little man of feeble make, who seemed unhappy when his pony got beyond a footpace, and had never, I should suppose, addicted himself to any out of door's sports whatever. He would, I fancy, as soon have thought of slaying his own mutton as of handling a fowling-piece; he used to shudder when he saw a party equipped for coursing, as if murder was in the wind; but the cool, meditative angler was in his eyes the abomination of abominations. His small elegant features, hectic cheek and soft hazel eyes, were the index of the quick, sensitive, gentle spirit within." "He would dismount to lead his horse down what his friend hardly perceived to be a descent at all; grew pale at a precipice; and, unlike the white lady of Avenel, would go a long way round for a bridge." He shrank from general society, and lived in closer intimacies, and his intimacy with Scott was of the closest. He was Scott's confidant in all literary matters, and his advice was oftener followed on questions of style and form, and of literary enterprise, than that of any other of Scott's friends. It is into Erskine's mouth that Scott puts the supposed exhortation to himself to choose more classical subjects for his poems:-- "'Approach those masters o'er whose tomb Immortal laurels ever bloom; Instructive of the feebler bard, Still from the grave their voice is heard; From them, and from the paths they show'd, Choose honour'd guide and practised road; Nor ramble on through brake and maze, With harpers rude of barbarous days." And it is to Erskine that Scott replies,-- "For me, thus nurtured, dost thou ask The classic poet's well-conn'd task? Nay, Erskine, nay,--on the wild hill Let the wild heath-bell flourish still; Cherish the tulip, prune the vine, But freely let the woodbine twine, And leave untrimm'd the eglantine: Nay, my friend, nay,--since oft thy praise Hath given fresh vigour to my lays; Since oft thy judgment could refine My flatten'd thought or cumbrous line, Still kind, as is thy wont, attend, And in the minstrel spare the friend!" It was Erskine, too, as Scott expressly states in his introduction to the _Chronicles of the Canongate_, who reviewed with far too much partiality the _Tales of my Landlord_, in the _Quarterly Review_, for January, 1817,--a review unjustifiably included among Scott's own critical essays, on the very insufficient ground that the MS. reached Murray in Scott's own handwriting. There can, however, be no doubt at all that Scott copied out his friend's MS., in order to increase the mystification which he so much enjoyed as to the authorship of his variously named series of tales. Possibly enough, too, he may have drawn Erskine's attention to the evidence which justified his sketch of the Puritans in _Old Mortality_, evidence which he certainly intended at one time to embody in a reply of his own to the adverse criticism on that book. But though Erskine was Scott's _alter ego_ for literary purposes, it is certain that Erskine, with his fastidious, not to say finical, sense of honour, would never have lent his name to cover a puff written by Scott of his own works. A man who, in Scott's own words, died "a victim to a hellishly false story, or rather, I should say, to the sensibility of his own nature, which could not endure even the shadow of reproach,--like the ermine, which is said to pine if its fur is soiled," was not the man to father a puff, even by his dearest friend, on that friend's own creations. Erskine was indeed almost feminine in his love of Scott; but he was feminine with all the irritable and scrupulous delicacy of a man who could not derogate from his own ideal of right, even to serve a friend. Another friend of Scott's earlier days was John Leyden, Scott's most efficient coadjutor in the collection of the _Border Minstrelsy_,--that eccentric genius, marvellous linguist, and good-natured bear, who, bred a shepherd in one of the wildest valleys of Roxburghshire, had accumulated before the age of nineteen an amount of learning which confounded the Edinburgh Professors, and who, without any previous knowledge of medicine, prepared himself to pass an examination for the medical profession, at six months' notice of the offer of an assistant-surgeoncy in the East India Company. It was Leyden who once walked between forty and fifty miles and back, for the sole purpose of visiting an old person who possessed a copy of a border ballad that was wanting for the _Minstrelsy_. Scott was sitting at dinner one day with company, when he heard a sound at a distance, "like that of the whistling of a tempest through the torn rigging of a vessel which scuds before it. The sounds increased as they approached more near; and Leyden (to the great astonishment of such of the guests as did not know him) burst into the room chanting the desiderated ballad with the most enthusiastic gesture, and all the energy of what he used to call the _saw-tones_ of his voice."[22] Leyden's great antipathy was Ritson, an ill-conditioned antiquarian, of vegetarian principles, whom Scott alone of all the antiquarians of that day could manage to tame and tolerate. In Scott's absence one day, during his early married life at Lasswade, Mrs. Scott inadvertently offered Ritson a slice of beef, when that strange man burst out in such outrageous tones at what he chose to suppose an insult, that Leyden threatened to "thraw his neck" if he were not silent, a threat which frightened Ritson out of the cottage. On another occasion, simply in order to tease Ritson, Leyden complained that the meat was overdone, and sent to the kitchen for a plate of literally raw beef, and ate it up solely for the purpose of shocking his crazy rival in antiquarian research. Poor Leyden did not long survive his experience of the Indian climate. And with him died a passion for knowledge of a very high order, combined with no inconsiderable poetical gifts. It was in the study of such eccentric beings as Leyden that Scott doubtless acquired his taste for painting the humours of Scotch character. Another wild shepherd, and wilder genius among Scott's associates, not only in those earlier days, but to the end, was that famous Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg, who was always quarrelling with his brother poet, as far as Scott permitted it, and making it up again when his better feelings returned. In a shepherd's dress, and with hands fresh from sheep-shearing, he came to dine for the first time with Scott in Castle Street, and finding Mrs. Scott lying on the sofa, immediately stretched himself at full length on another sofa; for, as he explained afterwards, "I thought I could not do better than to imitate the lady of the house." At dinner, as the wine passed, he advanced from "Mr. Scott," to "Shirra" (Sheriff), "Scott," "Walter," and finally "Wattie," till at supper he convulsed every one by addressing Mrs. Scott familiarly as "Charlotte."[23] Hogg wrote certain short poems, the beauty of which in their kind Sir Walter himself never approached; but he was a man almost without self-restraint or self-knowledge, though he had a great deal of self-importance, and hardly knew how much he owed to Scott's magnanimous and ever-forbearing kindness, or if he did, felt the weight of gratitude a burden on his heart. Very different was William Laidlaw, a farmer on the banks of the Yarrow, always Scott's friend, and afterwards his manager at Abbotsford, through whose hand he dictated many of his novels. Mr. Laidlaw was one of Scott's humbler friends,--a class of friends with whom he seems always to have felt more completely at his ease than any others--who gave at least as much as he received, one of those wise, loyal, and thoughtful men in a comparatively modest position of life, whom Scott delighted to trust, and never trusted without finding his trust justified. In addition to these Scotch friends, Scott had made, even before the publication of his _Border Minstrelsy_, not a few in London or its neighbourhood,--of whom the most important at this time was the grey-eyed, hatchet-faced, courteous George Ellis, as Leyden described him, the author of various works on ancient English poetry and romance, who combined with a shrewd, satirical vein, and a great knowledge of the world, political as well as literary, an exquisite taste in poetry, and a warm heart. Certainly Ellis's criticism on his poems was the truest and best that Scott ever received; and had he lived to read his novels,--only one of which was published before Ellis's death,--he might have given Scott more useful help than either Ballantyne or even Erskine. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 19: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 214.] [Footnote 20: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iii. 344.] [Footnote 21: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 75.] [Footnote 22: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 56.] [Footnote 23: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 168-9.] CHAPTER VII. FIRST COUNTRY HOMES. So completely was Scott by nature an out-of-doors man that he cannot be adequately known either through his poems or through his friends, without also knowing his external surroundings and occupations. His first country home was the cottage at Lasswade, on the Esk, about six miles from Edinburgh, which he took in 1798, a few months after his marriage, and retained till 1804. It was a pretty little cottage, in the beautification of which Scott felt great pride, and where he exercised himself in the small beginnings of those tastes for altering and planting which grew so rapidly upon him, and at last enticed him into castle-building and tree-culture on a dangerous, not to say, ruinous scale. One of Scott's intimate friends, the master of Rokeby, by whose house and neighbourhood the poem of that name was suggested, Mr. Morritt, walked along the Esk in 1808 with Scott four years after he had left it, and was taken out of his way to see it. "I have been bringing you," he said, "where there is little enough to be seen, only that Scotch cottage, but though not worth looking at, I could not pass it. It was our first country house when newly married, and many a contrivance it had to make it comfortable. I made a dining-table for it with my own hands. Look at these two miserable willow-trees on either side the gate into the enclosure; they are tied together at the top to be an arch, and a cross made of two sticks over them is not yet decayed. To be sure it is not much of a lion to show a stranger; but I wanted to see it again myself, for I assure you that after I had constructed it, _mamma_ (Mrs. Scott) and I both of us thought it so fine, we turned out to see it by moonlight, and walked backwards from it to the cottage-door, in admiration of our own magnificence and its picturesque effect." It was here at Lasswade that he bought the phaeton, which was the first wheeled carriage that ever penetrated to Liddesdale, a feat which it accomplished in the first August of this century. When Scott left the cottage at Lasswade in 1804, it was to take up his country residence in Selkirkshire, of which he had now been made sheriff, in a beautiful little house belonging to his cousin, Major-General Sir James Russell, and known to all the readers of Scott's poetry as the Ashestiel of the _Marmion_ introductions. The Glenkinnon brook dashes in a deep ravine through the grounds to join the Tweed; behind the house rise the hills which divide the Tweed from the Yarrow; and an easy ride took Scott into the scenery of the Yarrow. The description of Ashestiel, and the brook which runs through it, in the introduction to the first canto of _Marmion_ is indeed one of the finest specimens of Scott's descriptive poetry:-- "November's sky is chill and drear, November's leaf is red and sear; Late, gazing down the steepy linn, That hems our little garden in, Low in its dark and narrow glen, You scarce the rivulet might ken, So thick the tangled greenwood grew, So feeble trill'd the streamlet through; Now, murmuring hoarse, and frequent seen, Through bush and briar no longer green, An angry brook, it sweeps the glade, Brawls over rock and wild cascade, And, foaming brown with doubled speed, Hurries its waters to the Tweed." Selkirk was his nearest town, and that was seven miles from Ashestiel; and even his nearest neighbour was at Yair, a few miles off lower down the Tweed,--Yair of which he wrote in another of the introductions to _Marmion_:-- "From Yair, which hills so closely bind Scarce can the Tweed his passage find, Though much he fret, and chafe, and toil, Till all his eddying currents boil." At Ashestiel it was one of his greatest delights to look after his relative's woods, and to dream of planting and thinning woods of his own, a dream only too amply realized. It was here that a new kitchen-range was sunk for some time in the ford, which was so swollen by a storm in 1805 that the horse and cart that brought it were themselves with difficulty rescued from the waters. And it was here that Scott first entered on that active life of literary labour in close conjunction with an equally active life of rural sport, which gained him a well-justified reputation as the hardest worker and the heartiest player in the kingdom. At Lasswade Scott's work had been done at night; but serious headaches made him change his habit at Ashestiel, and rise steadily at five, lighting his own fire in winter. "Arrayed in his shooting-jacket, or whatever dress he meant to use till dinner-time, he was seated at his desk by six o'clock, all his papers arranged before him in the most accurate order, and his books of reference marshalled around him on the floor, while at least one favourite dog lay watching his eye, just beyond the line of circumvallation. Thus, by the time the family assembled for breakfast, between nine and ten, he had done enough, in his own language, 'to break the neck of the day's work.' After breakfast a couple of hours more were given to his solitary tasks, and by noon he was, as he used to say, his 'own man.' When the weather was bad, he would labour incessantly all the morning; but the general rule was to be out and on horseback by one o'clock at the latest; while, if any more distant excursion had been proposed overnight, he was ready to start on it by ten; his occasional rainy days of unintermitted study, forming, as he said, a fund in his favour, out of which he was entitled to draw for accommodation whenever the sun shone with special brightness." In his earlier days none of his horses liked to be fed except by their master. When Brown Adam was saddled, and the stable-door opened, the horse would trot round to the leaping-on stone of his own accord, to be mounted, and was quite intractable under any one but Scott. Scott's life might well be fairly divided--just as history is divided into reigns--by the succession of his horses and dogs. The reigns of Captain, Lieutenant, Brown Adam, Daisy, divide at least the period up to Waterloo; while the reigns of Sybil Grey, and the Covenanter, or Douce Davie, divide the period of Scott's declining years. During the brilliant period of the earlier novels we hear less of Scott's horses; but of his deerhounds there is an unbroken succession. Camp, Maida (the "Bevis" of _Woodstock_), and Nimrod, reigned successively between Sir Walter's marriage and his death. It was Camp on whose death he relinquished a dinner invitation previously accepted, on the ground that the death of "an old friend" rendered him unwilling to dine out; Maida to whom he erected a marble monument, and Nimrod of whom he spoke so affectingly as too good a dog for his diminished fortunes during his absence in Italy on the last hopeless journey. Scott's amusements at Ashestiel, besides riding, in which he was fearless to rashness, and coursing, which was the chief form of sporting in the neighbourhood, comprehended "burning the water," as salmon-spearing by torchlight was called, in the course of which he got many a ducking. Mr. Skene gives an amusing picture of their excursions together from Ashestiel among the hills, he himself followed by a lanky Savoyard, and Scott by a portly Scotch butler--both servants alike highly sensitive as to their personal dignity--on horses which neither of the attendants could sit well. "Scott's heavy lumbering buffetier had provided himself against the mountain storms with a huge cloak, which, when the cavalcade was at gallop, streamed at full stretch from his shoulders, and kept flapping in the other's face, who, having more than enough to do in preserving his own equilibrium, could not think of attempting at any time to control the pace of his steed, and had no relief but fuming and _pesting_ at the _sacré manteau_, in language happily unintelligible to its wearer. Now and then some ditch or turf-fence rendered it indispensable to adventure on a leap, and no farce could have been more amusing than the display of politeness which then occurred between these worthy equestrians, each courteously declining in favour of his friend the honour of the first experiment, the horses fretting impatient beneath them, and the dogs clamouring encouragement."[24] Such was Scott's order of life at Ashestiel, where he remained from 1804 to 1812. As to his literary work here, it was enormous. Besides finishing _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, writing _Marmion_, _The Lady of the Lake_, part of _The Bridal of Triermain_, and part of _Rokeby_, and writing reviews, he wrote a _Life of Dryden_, and edited his works anew with some care, in eighteen volumes, edited _Somers's Collection of Tracts_, in thirteen volumes, quarto, _Sir Ralph Sadler's Life, Letters, and State Papers_, in three volumes, quarto, _Miss Seward's Life and Poetical Works_, _The Secret History of the Court of James I_., in two volumes, _Strutt's Queenhoo Hall_, in four volumes, 12mo., and various other single volumes, and began his heavy work on the edition of Swift. This was the literary work of eight years, during which he had the duties of his Sheriffship, and, after he gave up his practice as a barrister, the duties of his Deputy Clerkship of Session to discharge regularly. The editing of Dryden alone would have seemed to most men of leisure a pretty full occupation for these eight years, and though I do not know that Scott edited with the anxious care with which that sort of work is often now prepared, that he went into all the arguments for a doubtful reading with the pains that Mr. Dyce spent on the various readings of Shakespeare, or that Mr. Spedding spent on a various reading of Bacon, yet Scott did his work in a steady, workmanlike manner, which satisfied the most fastidious critics of that day, and he was never, I believe, charged with hurrying or scamping it. His biographies of Swift and Dryden are plain solid pieces of work--not exactly the works of art which biographies have been made in our day--not comparable to Carlyle's studies of Cromwell or Frederick, or, in point of art, even to the life of John Sterling, but still sensible and interesting, sound in judgment, and animated in style. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 24: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 268-9.] CHAPTER VIII. REMOVAL TO ABBOTSFORD, AND LIFE THERE. In May, 1812, Scott having now at last obtained the salary of the Clerkship of Session, the work of which he had for more than five years discharged without pay, indulged himself in realizing his favourite dream of buying a "mountain farm" at Abbotsford,--five miles lower down the Tweed than his cottage at Ashestiel, which was now again claimed by the family of Russell,--and migrated thither with his household goods. The children long remembered the leave-taking as one of pure grief, for the villagers were much attached both to Scott and to his wife, who had made herself greatly beloved by her untiring goodness to the sick among her poor neighbours. But Scott himself describes the migration as a scene in which their neighbours found no small share of amusement. "Our flitting and removal from Ashestiel baffled all description; we had twenty-five cartloads of the veriest trash in nature, besides dogs, pigs, ponies, poultry, cows, calves, bare-headed wenches, and bare-breeched boys."[25] To another friend Scott wrote that the neighbours had "been much delighted with the procession of my furniture, in which old swords, bows, targets, and lances, made a very conspicuous show. A family of turkeys was accommodated within the helmet of some _preux chevalier_ of ancient border fame; and the very cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and muskets. I assure your ladyship that this caravan attended by a dozen of ragged rosy peasant children, carrying fishing-rods and spears, and leading ponies, greyhounds, and spaniels, would, as it crossed the Tweed, have furnished no bad subject for the pencil, and really reminded me of one of the gipsy groups of Callot upon their march."[26] The place thus bought for 4000_l._,--half of which, according to Scott's bad and sanguine habit, was borrowed from his brother, and half raised on the security of a poem at the moment of sale wholly unwritten, and not completed even when he removed to Abbotsford--"Rokeby"--became only too much of an idol for the rest of Scott's life. Mr. Lockhart admits that before the crash came he had invested 29,000_l._ in the purchase of land alone. But at this time only the kernel of the subsequent estate was bought, in the shape of a hundred acres or rather more, part of which ran along the shores of the Tweed--"a beautiful river flowing broad and bright over a bed of milk-white pebbles, unless here and there where it darkened into a deep pool, overhung as yet only by birches and alders." There was also a poor farm-house, a staring barn, and a pond so dirty that it had hitherto given the name of "Clarty Hole" to the place itself. Scott renamed the place from the adjoining ford which was just above the confluence of the Gala with the Tweed. He chose the name of Abbotsford because the land had formerly all belonged to the Abbots of Melrose,--the ruin of whose beautiful abbey was visible from many parts of the little property. On the other side of the river the old British barrier called "the Catrail" was full in view. As yet the place was not planted,--the only effort made in this direction by its former owner, Dr. Douglas, having been a long narrow stripe of firs, which Scott used to compare to a black hair-comb, and which gave the name of "The Doctor's Redding-Kame" to the stretch of woods of which it is still the central line. Such was the place which he made it the too great delight of the remainder of his life to increase and beautify, by spending on it a good deal more than he had earned, and that too in times when he should have earned a good deal more than he ought to have thought even for a moment of spending. The cottage grew to a mansion, and the mansion to a castle. The farm by the Tweed made him long for a farm by the Cauldshiel's loch, and the farm by the Cauldshiel's loch for Thomas the Rhymer's Glen; and as, at every step in the ladder, his means of buying were really increasing--though they were so cruelly discounted and forestalled by this growing land-hunger,--Scott never realized into what troubles he was carefully running himself. Of his life at Abbotsford at a later period when his building was greatly enlarged, and his children grown up, we have a brilliant picture from the pen of Mr. Lockhart. And though it does not belong to his first years at Abbotsford, I cannot do better than include it here as conveying probably better than anything I could elsewhere find, the charm of that ideal life which lured Scott on from one project to another in that scheme of castle-building, in relation to which he confused so dangerously the world of dreams with the harder world of wages, capital, interest, and rent. "I remember saying to William Allan one morning, as the whole party mustered before the porch after breakfast, 'A faithful sketch of what you at this moment see would be more interesting a hundred years hence than the grandest so-called historical picture that you will ever exhibit in Somerset House;' and my friend agreed with me so cordially that I often wondered afterwards he had not attempted to realize the suggestion. The subject ought, however, to have been treated conjointly by him (or Wilkie) and Edwin Landseer. "It was a clear, bright September morning, with a sharpness in the air that doubled the animating influence of the sunshine, and all was in readiness for a grand coursing match on Newark Hill. The only guest who had chalked out other sport for himself was the staunchest of anglers, Mr. Rose; but he too was there on his _shelty_, armed with his salmon-rod and landing-net, and attended by his humorous squire, Hinves, and Charlie Purdie, a brother of Tom, in those days the most celebrated fisherman of the district. This little group of Waltonians, bound for Lord Somerville's preserve, remained lounging about to witness the start of the main cavalcade. Sir Walter, mounted on Sybil, was marshalling the order of procession with a huge hunting-whip; and among a dozen frolicsome youths and maidens, who seemed disposed to laugh at all discipline, appeared, each on horseback, each as eager as the youngest sportsman in the troop, Sir Humphry Davy, Dr. Wollaston, and the patriarch of Scottish _belles lettres_, Henry Mackenzie. The Man of Feeling, however, was persuaded with some difficulty to resign his steed for the present to his faithful negro follower, and to join Lady Scott in the sociable, until we should reach the ground of our _battue_. Laidlaw, on a long-tailed, wiry Highlander, yclept Hoddin Grey, which carried him nimbly and stoutly, although his feet almost touched the ground as he sat, was the adjutant. But the most picturesque figure was the illustrious inventor of the safety-lamp. He had come for his favourite sport of angling, and had been practising it successfully with Rose, his travelling-companion, for two or three days preceding this, but he had not prepared for coursing fields, and had left Charlie Purdie's troop for Sir Walter's on a sudden thought; and his fisherman's costume--a brown hat with flexible brim, surrounded with line upon line, and innumerable fly-hooks, jack-boots worthy of a Dutch smuggler, and a fustian surtout dabbled with the blood of salmon,--made a fine contrast with the smart jackets, white cord breeches, and well-polished jockey-boots of the less distinguished cavaliers about him. Dr. Wollaston was in black, and, with his noble, serene dignity of countenance, might have passed for a sporting archbishop. Mr. Mackenzie, at this time in the seventy-sixth year of his age, with a white hat turned up with green, green spectacles, green jacket, and long brown leather gaiters buttoned upon his nether anatomy, wore a dog-whistle round his neck, and had all over the air of as resolute a devotee as the gay captain of Huntly Burn. Tom Purdie and his subalterns had preceded us by a few hours with all the greyhounds that could be collected at Abbotsford, Darnick, and Melrose; but the giant Maida had remained as his master's orderly, and now gambolled about Sibyl Grey, barking for mere joy, like a spaniel puppy. "The order of march had been all settled, and the sociable was just getting under weigh, when _the Lady Anne_ broke from the line, screaming with laughter, and exclaimed, 'Papa! papa! I know you could never think of going without your pet.' Scott looked round, and I rather think there was a blush as well as a smile upon his face, when he perceived a little black pig frisking about his pony, and evidently a self-elected addition to the party of the day. He tried to look stern, and cracked his whip at the creature, but was in a moment obliged to join in the general cheers. Poor piggy soon found a strap round his neck, and was dragged into the background. Scott, watching the retreat, repeated with mock pathos the first verse of an old pastoral song:-- "What will I do gin my hoggie die? My joy, my pride, my hoggie! My only beast, I had nae mae, And wow! but I was vogie!" The cheers were redoubled, and the squadron moved on. This pig had taken, nobody could tell how, a most sentimental attachment to Scott, and was constantly urging its pretension to be admitted a regular member of his _tail_, along with the greyhounds and terriers; but indeed I remember him suffering another summer under the same sort of pertinacity on the part of an affectionate hen. I leave the explanation for philosophers; but such were the facts. I have too much respect for the vulgarly calumniated donkey to name him in the same category of pets with the pig and the hen; but a year or two after this time, my wife used to drive a couple of these animals in a little garden chair, and whenever her father appeared at the door of our cottage, we were sure to see Hannah More and Lady Morgan (as Anne Scott had wickedly christened them) trotting from their pasture to lay their noses over the paling, and, as Washington Irving says of the old white-haired hedger with the Parisian snuff-box, 'to have a pleasant crack wi' the laird.'"[27] Carlyle, in his criticism on Scott--a criticism which will hardly, I think, stand the test of criticism in its turn, so greatly does he overdo the reaction against the first excessive appreciation of his genius--adds a contribution of his own to this charming idyll, in reference to the natural fascination which Scott seemed to exert over almost all dumb creatures. A little Blenheim cocker, "one of the smallest, beautifullest, and tiniest of lapdogs," with which Carlyle was well acquainted, and which was also one of the shyest of dogs, that would crouch towards his mistress and draw back "with angry timidity" if any one did but look at him admiringly, once met in the street "a tall, singular, busy-looking man," who halted by. The dog ran towards him and began "fawning, frisking, licking at his feet;" and every time he saw Sir Walter afterwards, in Edinburgh, he repeated his demonstration of delight. Thus discriminating was this fastidious Blenheim cocker even in the busy streets of Edinburgh. And Scott's attraction for dumb animals was only a lesser form of his attraction for all who were in any way dependent on him, especially his own servants and labourers. The story of his demeanour towards them is one of the most touching ever written. "Sir Walter speaks to every man as if they were blood-relations" was the common _formula_ in which this demeanour was described. Take this illustration. There was a little hunchbacked tailor, named William Goodfellow, living on his property (but who at Abbotsford was termed Robin Goodfellow). This tailor was employed to make the curtains for the new library, and had been very proud of his work, but fell ill soon afterwards, and Sir Walter was unremitting in his attention to him. "I can never forget," says Mr. Lockhart, "the evening on which the poor tailor died. When Scott entered the hovel, he found everything silent, and inferred from the looks of the good women in attendance that the patient had fallen asleep, and that they feared his sleep was the final one. He murmured some syllables of kind regret: at the sound of his voice the dying tailor unclosed his eyes, and eagerly and wistfully sat up, clasping his hands with an expression of rapturous gratefulness and devotion that, in the midst of deformity, disease, pain, and wretchedness, was at once beautiful and sublime. He cried with a loud voice, 'The Lord bless and reward you!' and expired with the effort."[28] Still more striking is the account of his relation with Tom Purdie, the wide-mouthed, under-sized, broad-shouldered, square-made, thin-flanked woodsman, so well known afterwards by all Scott's friends as he waited for his master in his green shooting-jacket, white hat, and drab trousers. Scott first made Tom Purdie's acquaintance in his capacity as judge, the man being brought before him for poaching, at the time that Scott was living at Ashestiel. Tom gave so touching an account of his circumstances--work scarce--wife and children in want--grouse abundant--and his account of himself was so fresh and even humorous, that Scott let him off the penalty, and made him his shepherd. He discharged these duties so faithfully that he came to be his master's forester and factotum, and indeed one of his best friends, though a little disposed to tyrannize over Scott in his own fashion. A visitor describes him as unpacking a box of new importations for his master "as if he had been sorting some toys for a restless child." But after Sir Walter had lost the bodily strength requisite for riding, and was too melancholy for ordinary conversation, Tom Purdie's shoulder was his great stay in wandering through his woods, for with him he felt that he might either speak or be silent at his pleasure. "What a blessing there is," Scott wrote in his diary at that time, "in a fellow like Tom, whom no familiarity can spoil, whom you may scold and praise and joke with, knowing the quality of the man is unalterable in his love and reverence to his master." After Scott's failure, Mr. Lockhart writes: "Before I leave this period, I must note how greatly I admired the manner in which all his dependents appeared to have met the reverse of his fortunes--a reverse which inferred very considerable alteration in the circumstances of every one of them. The butler, instead of being the easy chief of a large establishment, was now doing half the work of the house at probably half his former wages. Old Peter, who had been for five and twenty years a dignified coachman, was now ploughman in ordinary, only putting his horses to the carriage upon high and rare occasions; and so on with all the rest that remained of the ancient train. And all, to my view, seemed happier than they had ever done before."[29] The illustration of this true confidence between Scott and his servants and labourers might be extended to almost any length. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 25: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iv. 6.] [Footnote 26: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iv. 3.] [Footnote 27: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vi. 238--242.] [Footnote 28: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vii. 218.] [Footnote 29: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 170.] CHAPTER IX. SCOTT'S PARTNERSHIPS WITH THE BALLANTYNES. Before I make mention of Scott's greatest works, his novels, I must say a few words of his relation to the Ballantyne Brothers, who involved him, and were involved by him, in so many troubles, and with whose name the story of his broken fortunes is inextricably bound up. James Ballantyne, the elder brother, was a schoolfellow of Scott's at Kelso, and was the editor and manager of the _Kelso Mail_, an anti-democratic journal, which had a fair circulation. Ballantyne was something of an artist as regarded "type," and Scott got him therefore to print his _Minstrelsy of the Border_, the excellent workmanship of which attracted much attention in London. In 1802, on Scott's suggestion, Ballantyne moved to Edinburgh; and to help him to move, Scott, who was already meditating some investment of his little capital in business other than literary, lent him 500l. Between this and 1805, when Scott first became a partner of Ballantyne's in the printing business, he used every exertion to get legal and literary printing offered to James Ballantyne, and, according to Mr. Lockhart, the concern "grew and prospered." At Whitsuntide, 1805, when _The Lay_ had been published, but before Scott had the least idea of the prospects of gain which mere literature would open to him, he formally, though secretly, joined Ballantyne as a partner in the printing business. He explains his motives for this step, so far at least as he then recalled them, in a letter written after his misfortunes, in 1826. "It is easy," he said, "no doubt for any friend to blame me for entering into connexion with commercial matters at all. But I wish to know what I could have done better--excluded from the bar, and then from all profits for six years, by my colleague's prolonged life. Literature was not in those days what poor Constable has made it; and with my little capital I was too glad to make commercially the means of supporting my family. I got but 600_l._ for _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, and--it was a price that made men's hair stand on end--1000_l._ for _Marmion_. I have been far from suffering by James Ballantyne. I owe it to him to say, that his difficulties, as well as his advantages, are owing to me." This, though a true, was probably a very imperfect account of Scott's motives. He ceased practising at the bar, I do not doubt, in great degree from a kind of hurt pride at his ill-success, at a time when he felt during every month more and more confidence in his own powers. He believed, with some justice, that he understood some of the secrets of popularity in literature, but he had always, till towards the end of his life, the greatest horror of resting on literature alone as his main resource; and he was not a man, nor was Lady Scott a woman, to pinch and live narrowly. Were it only for his lavish generosity, that kind of life would have been intolerable to him. Hence, he reflected, that if he could but use his literary instinct to feed some commercial undertaking, managed by a man he could trust, he might gain a considerable percentage on his little capital, without so embarking in commerce as to oblige him either to give up his status as a sheriff, or his official duties as a clerk of session, or his literary undertakings. In his old schoolfellow, James Ballantyne, he believed he had found just such an agent as he wanted, the requisite link between literary genius like his own, and the world which reads and buys books; and he thought that, by feeling his way a little, he might secure, through this partnership, besides the then very bare rewards of authorship, at least a share in those more liberal rewards which commercial men managed to squeeze for themselves out of successful authors. And, further, he felt--and this was probably the greatest unconscious attraction for him in this scheme--that with James Ballantyne for his partner he should be the real leader and chief, and rather in the position of a patron and benefactor of his colleague, than of one in any degree dependent on the generosity or approval of others. "If I have a very strong passion in the world," he once wrote of himself--and the whole story of his life seems to confirm it--"it is pride."[30] In James Ballantyne he had a faithful, but almost humble friend, with whom he could deal much as he chose, and fear no wound to his pride. He had himself helped Ballantyne to a higher line of business than any hitherto aspired to by him. It was his own book which first got the Ballantyne press its public credit. And if he could but create a great commercial success upon this foundation, he felt that he should be fairly entitled to share in the gains, which not merely his loan of capital, but his foresight and courage had opened to Ballantyne. And it is quite possible that Scott might have succeeded--or at all events not seriously failed--if he had been content to stick to the printing firm of James Ballantyne and Co., and had not launched also into the bookselling and publishing firm of John Ballantyne and Co., or had never begun the wild and dangerous practice of forestalling his gains, and spending wealth which he had not earned. But when by way of feeding the printing press of James Ballantyne and Co., he started in 1809 the bookselling and publishing firm of John Ballantyne and Co., using as his agent a man as inferior in sterling worth to James, as James was inferior in general ability to himself, he carefully dug a mine under his own feet, of which we can only say, that nothing except his genius could have prevented it from exploding long before it did. The truth was evidently that James Ballantyne's respectful homage, and John's humorous appreciation, all but blinded Scott's eyes to the utter inadequacy of either of these men, especially the latter, to supply the deficiencies of his own character for conducting business of this kind with proper discretion. James Ballantyne, who was pompous and indolent, though thoroughly honest, and not without some intellectual insight, Scott used to call Aldiborontiphoscophornio. John, who was clever but frivolous, dissipated, and tricksy, he termed Rigdumfunnidos, or his "little Picaroon." It is clear from Mr. Lockhart's account of the latter that Scott not only did not respect, but despised him, though he cordially liked him, and that he passed over, in judging him, vices which in a brother or son of his own he would severely have rebuked. I believe myself that his liking for co-operation with both, was greatly founded on his feeling that they were simply creatures of his, to whom he could pretty well dictate what he wanted,--colleagues whose inferiority to himself unconsciously flattered his pride. He was evidently inclined to resent bitterly the patronage of publishers. He sent word to Blackwood once with great hauteur, after some suggestion from that house had been made to him which appeared to him to interfere with his independence as an author, that he was one of "the Black Hussars" of literature, who would not endure that sort of treatment. Constable, who was really very liberal, hurt his sensitive pride through the _Edinburgh Review_, of which Jeffrey was editor. Thus the Ballantynes' great deficiency--that neither of them had any independent capacity for the publishing business, which would in any way hamper his discretion--though this is just what commercial partners ought to have had, or they were not worth their salt,--was, I believe, precisely what induced this Black Hussar of literature, in spite of his otherwise considerable sagacity and knowledge of human nature, to select them for partners. And yet it is strange that he not only chose them, but chose the inferior and lighter-headed of the two for far the most important and difficult of the two businesses. In the printing concern there was at least this to be said, that of part of the business--the selection of type and the superintendence of the executive part,--James Ballantyne was a good judge. He was never apparently a good man of business, for he kept no strong hand over the expenditure and accounts, which is the core of success in every concern. But he understood types; and his customers were publishers, a wealthy and judicious class, who were not likely all to fail together. But to select a "Rigdumfunnidos,"--a dissipated comic-song singer and horse-fancier,--for the head of a publishing concern, was indeed a kind of insanity. It is told of John Ballantyne, that after the successful negotiation with Constable for _Rob Roy_, and while "hopping up and down in his glee," he exclaimed, "'Is Rob's gun here, Mr. Scott? Would you object to my trying the old barrel with a _few de joy_?' 'Nay, Mr. Puff,' said Scott, 'it would burst and blow you to the devil before your time.' 'Johnny, my man,' said Constable, 'what the mischief puts drawing at sight into _your_ head?' Scott laughed heartily at this innuendo; and then observing that the little man felt somewhat sore, called attention to the notes of a bird in the adjoining shrubbery. 'And by-the-bye,' said he, as they continued listening, ''tis a long time, Johnny, since we have had "The Cobbler of Kelso."' Mr. Puff forthwith jumped up on a mass of stone, and seating himself in the proper attitude of one working with an awl, began a favourite interlude, mimicking a certain son of Crispin, at whose stall Scott and he had often lingered when they were schoolboys, and a blackbird, the only companion of his cell, that used to sing to him while he talked and whistled to it all day long. With this performance Scott was always delighted. Nothing could be richer than the contrast of the bird's wild, sweet notes, some of which he imitated with wonderful skill, and the accompaniment of the cobbler's hoarse, cracked voice, uttering all manner of endearing epithets, which Johnny multiplied and varied in a style worthy of the old women in Rabelais at the birth of Pantagruel."[31] That passage gives precisely the kind of estimation in which John Ballantyne was held both by Scott and Constable. And yet it was to him that Scott entrusted the dangerous and difficult duty of setting up a new publishing house as a rival to the best publishers of the day. No doubt Scott really relied on his own judgment for working the publishing house. But except where his own books were concerned, no judgment could have been worse. In the first place he was always wanting to do literary jobs for a friend, and so advised the publishing of all sorts of unsaleable books, because his friends desired to write them. In the next place, he was a genuine historian, and one of the antiquarian kind himself; he was himself really interested in all sorts of historical and antiquarian issues,--and very mistakenly gave the public credit for wishing to know what he himself wished to know. I should add that Scott's good nature and kindness of heart not only led him to help on many books which he knew in himself could never answer, and some which, as he well knew, would be altogether worthless, but that it greatly biassed his own intellectual judgment. Nothing can be plainer than that he really held his intimate friend, Joanna Baillie, a very great dramatic poet, a much greater poet than himself, for instance; one fit to be even mentioned as following--at a distance--in the track of Shakespeare. He supposes Erskine to exhort him thus:-- "Or, if to touch such chord be thine, Restore the ancient tragic line, And emulate the notes that rung From the wild harp which silent hung By silver Avon's holy shore, Till twice a hundred years roll'd o'er,-- When she, the bold enchantress, came With fearless hand and heart on flame, From the pale willow snatch'd the treasure, And swept it with a kindred measure, Till Avon's swans, while rung the grove With Montfort's hate and Basil's love, Awakening at the inspired strain, Deem'd their own Shakespeare lived again." Avon's swans must have been Avon's geese, I think, if they had deemed anything of the kind. Joanna Baillie's dramas are "nice," and rather dull; now and then she can write a song with the ease and sweetness that suggest Shakespearian echoes. But Scott's judgment was obviously blinded by his just and warm regard for Joanna Baillie herself. Of course with such interfering causes to bring unsaleable books to the house--of course I do not mean that John Ballantyne and Co. published for Joanna Baillie, or that they would have lost by it if they had--the new firm published all sorts of books which did not sell at all; while John Ballantyne himself indulged in a great many expenses and dissipations, for which John Ballantyne and Co. had to pay. Nor was it very easy for a partner who himself drew bills on the future--even though he were the well-spring of all the paying business the company had--to be very severe on a fellow-partner who supplied his pecuniary needs in the same way. At all events, there is no question that all through 1813 and 1814 Scott was kept in constant suspense and fear of bankruptcy, by the ill-success of John Ballantyne and Co., and the utter want of straightforwardness in John Ballantyne himself as to the bills out, and which had to be provided against. It was the publication of _Waverley_, and the consequent opening up of the richest vein not only in Scott's own genius, but in his popularity with the public, which alone ended these alarms; and the many unsaleable works of John Ballantyne and Co. were then gradually disposed of to Constable and others, to their own great loss, as part of the conditions on which they received a share in the copyright of the wonderful novels which sold like wildfire. But though in this way the publishing business of John Ballantyne and Co. was saved, and its affairs pretty decently wound up, the printing firm remained saddled with some of their obligations; while Constable's business, on which Scott depended for the means with which he was buying his estate, building his castle, and settling money on his daughter-in-law, was seriously injured by the purchase of all this unsaleable stock. I do not think that any one who looks into the complicated controversy between the representatives of the Ballantynes and Mr. Lockhart, concerning these matters, can be content with Mr. Lockhart's--no doubt perfectly sincere--judgment on the case. It is obvious that amidst these intricate accounts, he fell into one or two serious blunders--blunders very unjust to James Ballantyne. And without pretending to have myself formed any minute judgment on the details, I think the following points clear:--(1.) That James Ballantyne was very severely judged by Mr. Lockhart, on grounds which were never alleged by Scott against him at all,--indeed on grounds on which he was expressly exempted from all blame by Sir Walter. (2.) That Sir Walter Scott was very severely judged by the representatives of the Ballantynes, on grounds on which James Ballantyne himself never brought any charge against him; on the contrary, he declared that he had no charge to bring. (3.) That both Scott and his partners invited ruin by freely spending gains which they only expected to earn, and that in this Scott certainly set an example which he could hardly expect feebler men not to follow. On the whole, I think the troubles with the Ballantyne brothers brought to light not only that eager gambling spirit in him, which his grandfather indulged with better success and more moderation when he bought the hunter with money destined for a flock of sheep, and then gave up gambling for ever, but a tendency still more dangerous, and in some respects involving an even greater moral defect,--I mean a tendency, chiefly due, I think, to a very deep-seated pride,--to prefer inferior men as working colleagues in business. And yet it is clear that if Scott were to dabble in publishing at all, he really needed the check of men of larger experience, and less literary turn of mind. The great majority of consumers of popular literature are not, and indeed will hardly ever be, literary men; and that is precisely why a publisher who is not, in the main, literary,--who looks on authors' MSS. for the most part with distrust and suspicion, much as a rich man looks at a begging-letter, or a sober and judicious fish at an angler's fly,--is so much less likely to run aground than such a man as Scott. The untried author should be regarded by a wise publisher as a natural enemy,--an enemy indeed of a class, rare specimens whereof will always be his best friends, and who, therefore, should not be needlessly affronted--but also as one of a class of whom nineteen out of every twenty will dangle before the publisher's eyes wiles and hopes and expectations of the most dangerous and illusory character,--which constitute indeed the very perils that it is his true function in life skilfully to evade. The Ballantynes were quite unfit for this function; first, they had not the experience requisite for it; next, they were altogether too much under Scott's influence. No wonder that the partnership came to no good, and left behind it the germs of calamity even more serious still. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 30: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, viii. 221.] [Footnote 31: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, v. 218.] CHAPTER X. THE WAVERLEY NOVELS. In the summer of 1814, Scott took up again and completed--almost at a single heat,--a fragment of a Jacobite story, begun in 1805 and then laid aside. It was published anonymously, and its astonishing success turned back again the scales of Scott's fortunes, already inclining ominously towards a catastrophe. This story was _Waverley_. Mr. Carlyle has praised _Waverley_ above its fellows. "On the whole, contrasting _Waverley_, which was carefully written, with most of its followers which were written extempore, one may regret the extempore method." This is, however, a very unfortunate judgment. Not one of the whole series of novels appears to have been written more completely extempore than the great bulk of _Waverley_, including almost everything that made it either popular with the million or fascinating to the fastidious; and it is even likely that this is one of the causes of its excellence. "The last two volumes," says Scott, in a letter to Mr. Morritt, "were written in three weeks." And here is Mr. Lockhart's description of the effect which Scott's incessant toil during the composition, produced on a friend whose window happened to command the novelist's study:-- "Happening to pass through Edinburgh in June, 1814, I dined one day with the gentleman in question (now the Honourable William Menzies, one of the Supreme Judges at the Cape of Good Hope), whose residence was then in George Street, situated very near to, and at right angles with, North Castle Street. It was a party of very young persons, most of them, like Menzies and myself, destined for the Bar of Scotland, all gay and thoughtless, enjoying the first flush of manhood, with little remembrance of the yesterday, or care of the morrow. When my companion's worthy father and uncle, after seeing two or three bottles go round, left the juveniles to themselves, the weather being hot, we adjourned to a library which had one large window looking northwards. After carousing here for an hour or more, I observed that a shade had come over the aspect of my friend, who happened to be placed immediately opposite to myself, and said something that intimated a fear of his being unwell. 'No,' said he, 'I shall be well enough presently, if you will only let me sit where you are, and take my chair; for there is a confounded hand in sight of me here, which has often bothered me before, and now it won't let me fill my glass with a good will.' I rose to change places with him accordingly, and he pointed out to me this hand, which, like the writing on Belshazzar's wall, disturbed his hour of hilarity. 'Since we sat down,' he said, 'I have been watching it--it fascinates my eye--it never stops--page after page is finished, and thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied; and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is the same every night--I can't stand a sight of it when I am not at my books.' 'Some stupid, dogged engrossing clerk, probably,' exclaimed myself, 'or some other giddy youth in our society.' 'No, boys,' said our host; 'I well know what hand it is--'tis Walter Scott's.'"[32] If that is not extempore writing, it is difficult to say what extempore writing is. But in truth, there is no evidence that any one of the novels was laboured, or even so much as carefully composed. Scott's method of composition was always the same; and, when writing an imaginative work, the rate of progress seems to have been pretty even, depending much more on the absence of disturbing engagements, than on any mental irregularity. The morning was always his brightest time; but morning or evening, in country or in town, well or ill, writing with his own pen or dictating to an amanuensis in the intervals of screaming-fits due to the torture of cramp in the stomach, Scott spun away at his imaginative web almost as evenly as a silkworm spins at its golden cocoon. Nor can I detect the slightest trace of any difference in quality between the stories, such as can be reasonably ascribed to comparative care or haste. There are differences, and even great differences, of course, ascribable to the less or greater suitability of the subject chosen to Scott's genius, but I can find no trace of the sort of cause to which Mr. Carlyle refers. Thus, few, I suppose, would hesitate to say that while _Old Mortality_ is very near, if not quite, the finest of Scott's works, _The Black Dwarf_ is not far from the other end of the scale. Yet the two were written in immediate succession (_The Black Dwarf_ being the first of the two), and were published together, as the first series of _Tales of my Landlord_, in 1816. Nor do I think that any competent critic would find any clear deterioration of quality in the novels of the later years,--excepting of course the two written after the stroke of paralysis. It is true, of course, that some of the subjects which most powerfully stirred his imagination were among his earlier themes, and that he could not effectually use the same subject twice, though he now and then tried it. But making allowance for this consideration, the imaginative power of the novels is as astonishingly _even_ as the rate of composition itself. For my own part, I greatly prefer _The Fortunes of Nigel_ (which was written in 1822) to _Waverley_ which was begun in 1805, and finished in 1814, and though very many better critics would probably decidedly disagree, I do not think that any of them would consider this preference grotesque or purely capricious. Indeed, though _Anne of Geierstein_,--the last composed before Scott's stroke,--would hardly seem to any careful judge the equal of _Waverley_, I do not much doubt that if it had appeared in place of _Waverley_, it would have excited very nearly as much interest and admiration; nor that had _Waverley_ appeared in 1829, in place of _Anne of Geierstein_, it would have failed to excite very much more. In these fourteen most effective years of Scott's literary life, during which he wrote twenty-three novels besides shorter tales, the best stories appear to have been on the whole the most rapidly written, probably because they took the strongest hold of the author's imagination. Till near the close of his career as an author, Scott never avowed his responsibility for any of these series of novels, and even took some pains to mystify the public as to the identity between the author of _Waverley_ and the author of _Tales of my Landlord_. The care with which the secret was kept is imputed by Mr. Lockhart in some degree to the habit of mystery which had grown upon Scott during his secret partnership with the Ballantynes; but in this he seems to be confounding two very different phases of Scott's character. No doubt he was, as a professional man, a little ashamed of his commercial speculation, and unwilling to betray it. But he was far from ashamed of his literary enterprise, though it seems that he was at first very anxious lest a comparative failure, or even a mere moderate success, in a less ambitious sphere than that of poetry, should endanger the great reputation he had gained as a poet. That was apparently the first reason for secrecy. But, over and above this, it is clear that the mystery stimulated Scott's imagination and saved him trouble as well. He was obviously more free under the veil--free from the liability of having to answer for the views of life or history suggested in his stories; but besides this, what was of more importance to him, the slight disguise stimulated his sense of humour, and gratified the whimsical, boyish pleasure which he always had in acting an imaginary character. He used to talk of himself as a sort of Abou Hassan--a private man one day, and acting the part of a monarch the next--with the kind of glee which indicated a real delight in the change of parts, and I have little doubt that he threw himself with the more gusto into characters very different from his own, in consequence of the pleasure it gave him to conceive his friends hopelessly misled by this display of traits, with which he supposed that they could not have credited him even in imagination. Thus besides relieving him of a host of compliments which he did not enjoy, and enabling him the better to evade an ill-bred curiosity, the disguise no doubt was the same sort of fillip to the fancy which a mask and domino or a fancy dress are to that of their wearers. Even in a disguise a man cannot cease to be himself; but he can get rid of his improperly "imputed" righteousness--often the greatest burden he has to bear--and of all the expectations formed on the strength, as Mr. Clough says,-- "Of having been what one has been, What one thinks one is, or thinks that others suppose one." To some men the freedom of this disguise is a real danger and temptation. It never could have been so to Scott, who was in the main one of the simplest as well as the boldest and proudest of men. And as most men perhaps would admit that a good deal of even the best part of their nature is rather suppressed than expressed by the name by which they are known in the world, Scott must have felt this in a far higher degree, and probably regarded the manifold characters under which he was known to society, as representing him in some respects more justly than any individual name could have done. His mind ranged hither and thither over a wide field--far beyond that of his actual experience,--and probably ranged over it all the more easily for not being absolutely tethered to a single class of associations by any public confession of his authorship. After all, when it became universally known that Scott was the only author of all these tales, it may be doubted whether the public thought as adequately of the imaginative efforts which had created them, as they did while they remained in some doubt whether there was a multiplicity of agencies at work, or only one. The uncertainty helped them to realize the many lives which were really led by the author of all these tales, more completely than any confession of the individual authorship could have done. The shrinking of activity in public curiosity and wonder which follows the final determination of such ambiguities, is very apt to result rather in a dwindling of the imaginative effort to enter into the genius which gave rise to them, than in an increase of respect for so manifold a creative power. When Scott wrote, such fertility as his in the production of novels was regarded with amazement approaching to absolute incredulity. Yet he was in this respect only the advanced-guard of a not inconsiderable class of men and women who have a special gift for pouring out story after story, containing a great variety of figures, while retaining a certain even level of merit. There is more than one novelist of the present day who has far surpassed Scott in the number of his tales, and one at least of very high repute, who has, I believe, produced more even within the same time. But though to our larger experience, Scott's achievement, in respect of mere fertility, is by no means the miracle which it once seemed, I do not think one of his successors can compare with him for a moment in the ease and truth with which he painted, not merely the life of his own time and country--seldom indeed that of precisely his own time--but that of days long past, and often too of scenes far distant. The most powerful of all his stories, _Old Mortality_, was the story of a period more than a century and a quarter before he wrote; and others,--which though inferior to this in force, are nevertheless, when compared with the so-called historical romances of any other English writer, what sunlight is to moonlight, if you can say as much for the latter as to admit even that comparison,--go back to the period of the Tudors, that is, two centuries and a half. _Quentin Durward_, which is all but amongst the best, runs back farther still, far into the previous century, while _Ivanhoe_ and _The Talisman_, though not among the greatest of Scott's works, carry us back more than five hundred years. The new class of extempore novel writers, though more considerable than, sixty years ago, any one could have expected ever to see it, is still limited, and on any high level of merit will probably always be limited, to the delineation of the times of which the narrator has personal experience. Scott seemed to have had something very like personal experience of a few centuries at least, judging by the ease and freshness with which he poured out his stories of these centuries, and though no one can pretend that even he could describe the period of the Tudors as Miss Austen described the country parsons and squires of George the Third's reign, or as Mr. Trollope describes the politicians and hunting-men of Queen Victoria's, it is nevertheless the evidence of a greater imagination to make us live so familiarly as Scott does amidst the political and religious controversies of two or three centuries' duration, to be the actual witnesses, as it were, of Margaret of Anjou's throes of vain ambition, and Mary Stuart's fascinating remorse, and Elizabeth's domineering and jealous balancings of noble against noble, of James the First's shrewd pedantries, and the Regent Murray's large forethought, of the politic craft of Argyle, the courtly ruthlessness of Claverhouse, and the high-bred clemency of Monmouth, than to reflect in countless modifications the freaks, figures, and fashions of our own time. The most striking feature of Scott's romances is that, for the most part, they are pivoted on public rather than mere private interests and passions. With but few exceptions--(_The Antiquary_, _St. Ronan's Well_, and _Guy Mannering_ are the most important)--Scott's novels give us an imaginative view, not of mere individuals, but of individuals as they are affected by the public strifes and social divisions of the age. And this it is which gives his books so large an interest for old and young, soldiers and statesmen, the world of society and the recluse, alike. You can hardly read any novel of Scott's and not become better aware what public life and political issues mean. And yet there is no artificiality, no elaborate attitudinizing before the antique mirrors of the past, like Bulwer's, no dressing out of clothes-horses like G. P. R. James. The boldness and freshness of the present are carried back into the past, and you see Papists and Puritans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Jews, Jacobites, and freebooters, preachers, schoolmasters, mercenary soldiers, gipsies, and beggars, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in their circumstances and under the same conditions of time and place and parentage, he might have lived too. Indeed, no man can read Scott without being more of a public man, whereas the ordinary novel tends to make its readers rather less of one than before. Next, though most of these stories are rightly called romances, no one can avoid observing that they give that side of life which is unromantic, quite as vigorously as the romantic side. This was not true of Scott's poems, which only expressed one-half of his nature, and were almost pure romances. But in the novels the business of life is even better portrayed than its sentiments. Mr. Bagehot, one of the ablest of Scott's critics, has pointed out this admirably in his essay on _The Waverley Novels_. "Many historical novelists," he says, "especially those who with care and pains have read up the detail, are often evidently in a strait how to pass from their history to their sentiment. The fancy of Sir Walter could not help connecting the two. If he had given us the English side of the race to Derby, _he would have described the Bank of England paying in sixpences, and also the loves of the cashier_." No one who knows the novels well can question this. Fergus MacIvor's ways and means, his careful arrangements for receiving subsidies in black mail, are as carefully recorded as his lavish highland hospitalities; and when he sends his silver cup to the Gaelic bard who chaunts his greatness, the faithful historian does not forget to let us know that the cup is his last, and that he is hard-pressed for the generosities of the future. So too the habitual thievishness of the highlanders is pressed upon us quite as vividly as their gallantry and superstitions. And so careful is Sir Walter to paint the petty pedantries of the Scotch traditional conservatism, that he will not spare even Charles Edward--of whom he draws so graceful a picture--the humiliation of submitting to old Bradwardine's "solemn act of homage," but makes him go through the absurd ceremony of placing his foot on a cushion to have its brogue unlatched by the dry old enthusiast of heraldic lore. Indeed it was because Scott so much enjoyed the contrast between the high sentiment of life and its dry and often absurd detail, that his imagination found so much freer a vent in the historical romance, than it ever found in the romantic poem. Yet he clearly needed the romantic excitement of picturesque scenes and historical interests, too. I do not think he would ever have gained any brilliant success in the narrower region of the domestic novel. He said himself, in expressing his admiration of Miss Austen, "The big bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me." Indeed he tried it to some extent in _St. Ronan's Well_, and so far as he tried it, I think he failed. Scott needed a certain largeness of type, a strongly-marked class-life, and, where it was possible, a free, out-of-doors life, for his delineations. _No_ one could paint beggars and gipsies, and wandering fiddlers, and mercenary soldiers, and peasants and farmers and lawyers, and magistrates, and preachers, and courtiers, and statesmen, and best of all perhaps queens and kings, with anything like his ability. But when it came to describing the small differences of manner, differences not due to external habits, so much as to internal sentiment or education, or mere domestic circumstance, he was beyond his proper field. In the sketch of the St. Ronan's Spa and the company at the _table-d'hôte_, he is of course somewhere near the mark,--he was too able a man to fall far short of success in anything he really gave to the world; but it is not interesting. Miss Austen would have made Lady Penelope Penfeather a hundred times as amusing. We turn to Meg Dods and Touchwood, and Cargill, and Captain Jekyl, and Sir Bingo Binks, and to Clara Mowbray,--i. e. to the lives really moulded by large and specific causes, for enjoyment, and leave the small gossip of the company at the Wells as, relatively at least, a failure. And it is well for all the world that it was so. The domestic novel, when really of the highest kind, is no doubt a perfect work of art, and an unfailing source of amusement; but it has nothing of the tonic influence, the large instructiveness, the stimulating intellectual air, of Scott's historic tales. Even when Scott is farthest from reality--as in _Ivanhoe_ or _The Monastery_--he makes you open your eyes to all sorts of historical conditions to which you would otherwise be blind. The domestic novel, even when its art is perfect, gives little but pleasure at the best; at the worst it is simply scandal idealized. Scott often confessed his contempt for his own heroes. He said of Edward Waverley, for instance, that he was "a sneaking piece of imbecility," and that "if he had married Flora, she would have set him up upon the chimney-piece as Count Borowlaski's wife used to do with him. I am a bad hand at depicting a hero, properly so called, and have an unfortunate propensity for the dubious characters of borderers, buccaneers, highland robbers, and all others of a Robin-Hood description."[33] In another letter he says, "My rogue always, in despite of me, turns out my hero."[34] And it seems very likely that in most of the situations Scott describes so well, his own course would have been that of his wilder impulses, and not that of his reason. Assuredly he would never have stopped hesitating on the line between opposite courses as his Waverleys, his Mortons, his Osbaldistones do. Whenever he was really involved in a party strife, he flung prudence and impartiality to the winds, and went in like the hearty partisan which his strong impulses made of him. But granting this, I do not agree with his condemnation of all his own colourless heroes. However much they differed in nature from Scott himself, the even balance of their reason against their sympathies is certainly well conceived, is in itself natural, and is an admirable expedient for effecting that which was probably its real use to Scott,--the affording an opportunity for the delineation of all the pros and cons of the case, so that the characters on both sides of the struggle should be properly understood. Scott's imagination was clearly far wider--was far more permeated with the fixed air of sound judgment--than his practical impulses. He needed a machinery for displaying his insight into both sides of a public quarrel, and his colourless heroes gave him the instrument he needed. Both in Morton's case (in _Old Mortality_), and in Waverley's, the hesitation is certainly well described. Indeed in relation to the controversy between Covenanters and Royalists, while his political and martial prepossessions went with Claverhouse, his reason and educated moral feeling certainly were clearly identified with Morton. It is, however, obviously true that Scott's heroes are mostly created for the sake of the facility they give in delineating the other characters, and not the other characters for the sake of the heroes. They are the imaginative neutral ground, as it were, on which opposing influences are brought to play; and what Scott best loved to paint was those who, whether by nature, by inheritance, or by choice, had become unique and characteristic types of one-sided feeling, not those who were merely in process of growth, and had not ranged themselves at all. Mr. Carlyle, who, as I have said before, places Scott's romances far below their real level, maintains that these great types of his are drawn from the outside, and not made actually to live. "His Bailie Jarvies, Dinmonts, Dalgettys (for their name is legion), do look and talk like what they give themselves out for; they are, if not _created_ and made poetically alive, yet deceptively _enacted_ as a good player might do them. What more is wanted, then? For the reader lying on a sofa, nothing more; yet for another sort of reader much. It were a long chapter to unfold the difference in drawing a character between a Scott and a Shakespeare or Goethe. Yet it is a difference literally immense; they are of a different species; the value of the one is not to be counted in the coin of the other. We might say in a short word, which covers a long matter, that your Shakespeare fashions his characters from the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them. The one set become living men and women; the other amount to little more than mechanical cases, deceptively painted automatons."[35] And then he goes on to contrast Fenella in _Peveril of the Peak_ with Goethe's Mignon. Mr. Carlyle could hardly have chosen a less fair comparison. If Goethe is to be judged by his women, let Scott be judged by his men. So judged, I think Scott will, as a painter of character--of course, I am not now speaking of him as a poet,--come out far above Goethe. Excepting the hero of his first drama (Götz of the iron hand), which by the way was so much in Scott's line that his first essay in poetry was to translate it--not very well--I doubt if Goethe was ever successful with his pictures of men. _Wilhelm Meister_ is, as Niebuhr truly said, "a ménagerie of tame animals." Doubtless Goethe's women--certainly his women of culture--are more truly and inwardly conceived and created than Scott's. Except Jeanie Deans and Madge Wildfire, and perhaps Lucy Ashton, Scott's women are apt to be uninteresting, either pink and white toys, or hardish women of the world. But then no one can compare the men of the two writers, and not see Scott's vast pre-eminence on that side. I think the deficiency of his pictures of women, odd as it seems to say so, should be greatly attributed to his natural chivalry. His conception of women of his own or a higher class was always too romantic. He hardly ventured, as it were, in his tenderness for them, to look deeply into their little weaknesses and intricacies of character. With women of an inferior class, he had not this feeling. Nothing can be more perfect than the manner in which he blends the dairy-woman and woman of business in Jeanie Deans, with the lover and the sister. But once make a woman beautiful, or in any way an object of homage to him, and Scott bowed so low before the image of her, that he could not go deep into her heart. He could no more have analysed such a woman, as Thackeray analyzed Lady Castlewood, or Amelia, or Becky, or as George Eliot analysed Rosamond Vincy, than he could have vivisected Camp or Maida. To some extent, therefore, Scott's pictures of women remain something in the style of the miniatures of the last age--bright and beautiful beings without any special character in them. He was dazzled by a fair heroine. He could not take them up into his imagination as real beings as he did men. But then how living are his men, whether coarse or noble! What a picture, for instance, is that in _A Legend of Montrose_ of the conceited, pragmatic, but prompt and dauntless soldier of fortune, rejecting Argyle's attempts to tamper with him, in the dungeon at Inverary, suddenly throwing himself on the disguised Duke so soon as he detects him by his voice, and wresting from him the means of his own liberation! Who could read that scene and say for a moment that Dalgetty is painted "from the skin inwards"? It was just Scott himself breathing his own life through the habits of a good specimen of the mercenary soldier--realizing where the spirit of hire would end, and the sense of honour would begin--and preferring, even in a dungeon, the audacious policy of a sudden attack to that of crafty negotiation. What a picture (and a very different one) again is that in _Redgauntlet_ of Peter Peebles, the mad litigant, with face emaciated by poverty and anxiety, and rendered wild by "an insane lightness about the eyes," dashing into the English magistrate's court for a warrant against his fugitive counsel. Or, to take a third instance, as different as possible from either, how powerfully conceived is the situation in _Old Mortality_, where Balfour of Burley, in his fanatic fury at the defeat of his plan for a new rebellion, pushes the oak-tree, which connects his wild retreat with the outer world, into the stream, and tries to slay Morton for opposing him. In such scenes and a hundred others--for these are mere random examples--Scott undoubtedly painted his masculine figures from as deep and inward a conception of the character of the situation as Goethe ever attained, even in drawing Mignon, or Klärchen, or Gretchen. The distinction has no real existence. Goethe's pictures of women were no doubt the intuitions of genius; and so are Scott's of men--and here and there of his women too. Professional women he can always paint with power. Meg Dods, the innkeeper, Meg Merrilies, the gipsy, Mause Headrigg, the Covenanter, Elspeth, the old fishwife in _The Antiquary_, and the old crones employed to nurse and watch, and lay out the corpse, in _The Bride of Lammermoor_, are all in their way impressive figures. And even in relation to women of a rank more fascinating to Scott, and whose inner character was perhaps on that account, less familiar to his imagination, grant him but a few hints from history, and he draws a picture which, for vividness and brilliancy, may almost compare with Shakespeare's own studies in English history. Had Shakespeare painted the scene in _The Abbot_, in which Mary Stuart commands one of her Mary's in waiting to tell her at what bridal she last danced, and Mary Fleming blurts out the reference to the marriage of Sebastian at Holyrood, would any one hesitate to regard it as a stroke of genius worthy of the great dramatist? This picture of the Queen's mind suddenly thrown off its balance, and betraying, in the agony of the moment, the fear and remorse which every association with Darnley conjured up, is painted "from the heart outwards," not "from the skin inwards," if ever there were such a painting in the world. Scott hardly ever failed in painting kings or peasants, queens or peasant-women. There was something in the well-marked type of both to catch his imagination, which can always hit off the grander features of royalty, and the homelier features of laborious humility. Is there any sketch traced in lines of more sweeping grandeur and more impressive force than the following of Mary Stuart's lucid interval of remorse--lucid compared with her ordinary mood, though it was of a remorse that was almost delirious--which breaks in upon her hour of fascinating condescension?-- "'Are they not a lovely couple, my Fleming? and is it not heart-rending to think that I must be their ruin?' "'Not so,' said Roland Græme, 'it is we, gracious sovereign, who will be your deliverers.' '_Ex oribus parvulorum!_' said the queen, looking upward; 'if it is by the mouth of these children that heaven calls me to resume the stately thoughts which become my birth and my rights, thou wilt grant them thy protection, and to me the power of rewarding their zeal.' Then turning to Fleming, she instantly added, 'Thou knowest, my friend, whether to make those who have served me happy, was not ever Mary's favourite pastime. When I have been rebuked by the stern preachers of the Calvinistic heresy--when I have seen the fierce countenances of my nobles averted from me, has it not been because I mixed in the harmless pleasures of the young and gay, and rather for the sake of their happiness than my own, have mingled in the masque, the song or the dance, with the youth of my household? Well, I repent not of it--though Knox termed it sin, and Morton degradation--I was happy because I saw happiness around me: and woe betide the wretched jealousy that can extract guilt out of the overflowings of an unguarded gaiety!--Fleming, if we are restored to our throne, shall we not have one blithesome day at a blithesome bridal, of which we must now name neither the bride nor the bridegroom? But that bridegroom shall have the barony of Blairgowrie, a fair gift even for a queen to give, and that bride's chaplet shall be twined with the fairest pearls that ever were found in the depths of Lochlomond; and thou thyself, Mary Fleming, the best dresser of tires that ever busked the tresses of a queen, and who would scorn to touch those of any woman of lower rank--thou thyself shalt for my love twine them into the bride's tresses.--Look, my Fleming, suppose then such clustered locks as these of our Catherine, they would not put shame upon thy skill.' So saying she passed her hand fondly over the head of her youthful favourite, while her more aged attendant replied despondently, 'Alas, madam, your thoughts stray far from home.' 'They do, my Fleming,' said the queen, 'but is it well or kind in you to call them back?--God knows they have kept the perch this night but too closely.--Come, I will recall the gay vision, were it but to punish them. Yes, at that blithesome bridal, Mary herself shall forget the weight of sorrows, and the toil of state, and herself once more lead a measure.--At whose wedding was it that we last danced, my Fleming? I think care has troubled my memory--yet something of it I should remember, canst thou not aid me? I know thou canst.' 'Alas, madam,' replied the lady. 'What,' said Mary, 'wilt thou not help us so far? this is a peevish adherence to thine own graver opinion which holds our talk as folly. But thou art court-bred and wilt well understand me when I say the queen _commands_ Lady Fleming to tell her when she led the last _branle_.' With a face deadly pale and a mien as if she were about to sink into the earth, the court-bred dame, no longer daring to refuse obedience, faltered out, 'Gracious lady--if my memory err not--it was at a masque in Holyrood--at the marriage of Sebastian.' The unhappy queen, who had hitherto listened with a melancholy smile, provoked by the reluctance with which the Lady Fleming brought out her story, at this ill-fated word interrupted her with a shriek so wild and loud that the vaulted apartment rang, and both Roland and Catherine sprung to their feet in the utmost terror and alarm. Meantime, Mary seemed, by the train of horrible ideas thus suddenly excited, surprised not only beyond self-command, but for the moment beyond the verge of reason. 'Traitress,' she said to the Lady Fleming, 'thou wouldst slay thy sovereign. Call my French guards--_à moi! à moi! mes Français_!--I am beset with traitors in mine own palace--they have murdered my husband--Rescue! Rescue! for the Queen of Scotland!' She started up from her chair--her features late so exquisitely lovely in their paleness, now inflamed with the fury of frenzy, and resembling those of a Bellona. 'We will take the field ourself,' she said; 'warn the city--warn Lothian and Fife--saddle our Spanish barb, and bid French Paris see our petronel be charged. Better to die at the head of our brave Scotsmen, like our grandfather at Flodden, than of a broken heart like our ill-starred father.' 'Be patient--be composed, dearest sovereign,' said Catherine; and then addressing Lady Fleming angrily, she added, 'How could you say aught that reminded her of her husband?' The word reached the ear of the unhappy princess who caught it up, speaking with great rapidity, 'Husband!--what husband? Not his most Christian Majesty--he is ill at ease--he cannot mount on horseback--not him of the Lennox--but it was the Duke of Orkney thou wouldst say?' 'For God's love, madam, be patient!' said the Lady Fleming. But the queen's excited imagination could by no entreaty be diverted from its course. 'Bid him come hither to our aid,' she said, 'and bring with him his lambs, as he calls them--Bowton, Hay of Talla, Black Ormiston and his kinsman Hob--Fie, how swart they are, and how they smell of sulphur! What! closeted with Morton? Nay, if the Douglas and the Hepburn hatch the complot together, the bird when it breaks the shell will scare Scotland, will it not, my Fleming?' 'She grows wilder and wilder,' said Fleming. 'We have too many hearers for these strange words.' 'Roland,' said Catherine, 'in the name of God begone!--you cannot aid us here--leave us to deal with her alone--away--away!" And equally fine is the scene in _Kenilworth_ in which Elizabeth undertakes the reconciliation of the haughty rivals, Sussex and Leicester, unaware that in the course of the audience she herself will have to bear a great strain on her self-command, both in her feelings as a queen and her feelings as a lover. Her grand rebukes to both, her ill-concealed preference for Leicester, her whispered ridicule of Sussex, the impulses of tenderness which she stifles, the flashes of resentment to which she gives way, the triumph of policy over private feeling, her imperious impatience when she is baffled, her jealousy as she grows suspicious of a personal rival, her gratified pride and vanity when the suspicion is exchanged for the clear evidence, as she supposes, of Leicester's love, and her peremptory conclusion of the audience, bring before the mind a series of pictures far more vivid and impressive than the greatest of historical painters could fix on canvas, even at the cost of the labour of years. Even more brilliant, though not so sustained and difficult an effort of genius, is the later scene in the same story, in which Elizabeth drags the unhappy Countess of Leicester from her concealment in one of the grottoes of Kenilworth Castle, and strides off with her, in a fit of vindictive humiliation and Amazonian fury, to confront her with her husband. But this last scene no doubt is more in Scott's way. He can always paint women in their more masculine moods. Where he frequently fails is in the attempt to indicate the finer shades of women's nature. In Amy Robsart herself, for example, he is by no means generally successful, though in an early scene her childish delight in the various orders and decorations of her husband is painted with much freshness and delicacy. But wherever, as in the case of queens, Scott can get a telling hint from actual history, he can always so use it as to make history itself seem dim to the equivalent for it which he gives us. And yet, as every one knows, Scott was excessively free in his manipulations of history for the purposes of romance. In _Kenilworth_ he represents Shakespeare's plays as already in the mouths of courtiers and statesmen, though he lays the scene in the eighteenth year of Elizabeth, when Shakespeare was hardly old enough to rob an orchard. In _Woodstock_, on the contrary, he insists, if you compare Sir Henry Lee's dates with the facts, that Shakespeare died twenty years at least before he actually died. The historical basis, again, of _Woodstock_ and of _Redgauntlet_ is thoroughly untrustworthy, and about all the minuter details of history,--unless so far as they were characteristic of the age,--I do not suppose that Scott in his romances ever troubled himself at all. And yet few historians--not even Scott himself when he exchanged romance for history--ever drew the great figures of history with so powerful a hand. In writing history and biography Scott has little or no advantage over very inferior men. His pictures of Swift, of Dryden, of Napoleon, are in no way very vivid. It is only where he is working from the pure imagination,--though imagination stirred by historic study,--that he paints a picture which follows us about, as if with living eyes, instead of creating for us a mere series of lines and colours. Indeed, whether Scott draws truly or falsely, he draws with such genius that his pictures of Richard and Saladin, of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold, of Margaret of Anjou and René of Provence, of Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor, of Sussex and of Leicester, of James and Charles and Buckingham, of the two Dukes of Argyle--the Argyle of the time of the revolution, and the Argyle of George II., of Queen Caroline, of Claverhouse, and Monmouth, and of Rob Roy, will live in English literature beside Shakespeare's pictures--probably less faithful if more imaginative--of John and Richard and the later Henries, and all the great figures by whom they were surrounded. No historical portrait that we possess will take precedence--as a mere portrait--of Scott's brilliant study of James I. in _The Fortunes of Nigel_. Take this illustration for instance, where George Heriot the goldsmith (Jingling Geordie, as the king familiarly calls him) has just been speaking of Lord Huntinglen, as "a man of the old rough world that will drink and swear:"-- "'O Geordie!' exclaimed the king, 'these are auld-warld frailties, of whilk we dare not pronounce even ourselves absolutely free. But the warld grows worse from day to day, Geordie. The juveniles of this age may weel say with the poet,-- "�tas parentum pejor avis tulit Nos nequiores--" This Dalgarno does not drink so much; aye or swear so much, as his father, but he wenches, Geordie, and he breaks his word and oath baith. As to what ye say of the leddy and the ministers, we are all fallible creatures, Geordie, priests and kings as weel as others; and wha kens but what that may account for the difference between this Dalgarno and his father? The earl is the vera soul of honour, and cares nae mair for warld's gear than a noble hound for the quest of a foulmart; but as for his son, he was like to brazen us all out--ourselves, Steenie, Baby Charles, and our Council, till he heard of the tocher, and then by my kingly crown he lap like a cock at a grossart! These are discrepancies betwixt parent and son not to be accounted for naturally, according to Baptista Porta, Michael Scott _de secretis_, and others. Ah, Jingling Geordie, if your clouting the caldron, and jingling on pots, pans, and veshels of all manner of metal, hadna jingled a' your grammar out of your head, I could have touched on that matter to you at mair length.' ... Heriot inquired whether Lord Dalgarno had consented to do the Lady Hermione justice. 'Troth, man, I have small doubt that he will,' quoth the king, 'I gave him the schedule of her worldly substance, which you delivered to us in the council, and we allowed him half an hour to chew the cud upon that. It is rare reading for bringing him to reason. I left Baby Charles and Steenie laying his duty before him, and if he can resist doing what _they_ desire him, why I wish he would teach _me_ the gate of it. O Geordie, Jingling Geordie, it was grand to hear Baby Charles laying down the guilt of dissimulation, and Steenie lecturing _on_ the turpitude of incontinence.' 'I am afraid,' said George Heriot, more hastily than prudently, 'I might have thought of the old proverb of Satan reproving sin.' 'Deil hae our saul, neighbour,' said the king, reddening, 'but ye are not blate! I gie ye licence to speak freely, and by our saul, ye do not let the privilege become lost, _non utendo_--it will suffer no negative prescription in your hands. Is it fit, think ye, that Baby Charles should let his thoughts be publicly seen? No, no, princes' thoughts are _arcana imperii: qui nescit dissimulare, nescit regnare_. Every liege subject is bound to speak the whole truth to the king, but there is nae reciprocity of obligation--and for Steenie having been whiles a dike-louper at a time, is it for you, who are his goldsmith, and to whom, I doubt, he awes an uncomatable sum, to cast that up to him?" Assuredly there is no undue favouring of Stuarts in such a picture as that. Scott's humour is, I think, of very different qualities in relation to different subjects. Certainly he was at times capable of considerable heaviness of hand,--of the Scotch "wut" which has been so irreverently treated by English critics. His rather elaborate jocular introductions, under the name of Jedediah Cleishbotham, are clearly laborious at times. And even his own letters to his daughter-in-law, which Mr. Lockhart seems to regard as models of tender playfulness and pleasantry, seem to me decidedly elephantine. Not unfrequently, too, his stereotyped jokes weary. Dalgetty bores you almost as much as he would do in real life,--which is a great fault in art. Bradwardine becomes a nuisance, and as for Sir Piercie Shafton, he is beyond endurance. Like some other Scotchmen of genius, Scott twanged away at any effective chord till it more than lost its expressiveness. But in dry humour, and in that higher humour which skilfully blends the ludicrous and the pathetic, so that it is hardly possible to separate between smiles and tears, Scott is a master. His canny innkeeper, who, having sent away all the peasemeal to the camp of the Covenanters, and all the oatmeal (with deep professions of duty) to the castle and its cavaliers, in compliance with the requisitions sent to him on each side, admits with a sigh to his daughter that "they maun gar wheat flour serve themsels for a blink,"--his firm of solicitors, Greenhorn and Grinderson, whose senior partner writes respectfully to clients in prosperity, and whose junior partner writes familiarly to those in adversity,--his arbitrary nabob who asks how the devil any one should be able to mix spices so well "as one who has been where they grow;"--his little ragamuffin who indignantly denies that he has broken his promise not to gamble away his sixpences at pitch-and-toss because he has gambled them away at "neevie-neevie-nick-nack,"--and similar figures abound in his tales,--are all creations which make one laugh inwardly as we read. But he has a much higher humour still, that inimitable power of shading off ignorance into knowledge and simplicity into wisdom, which makes his picture of Jeanie Deans, for instance, so humorous as well as so affecting. When Jeanie reunites her father to her husband by reminding the former how it would sometimes happen that "twa precious saints might pu' sundrywise like twa cows riving at the same hayband," she gives us an admirable instance of Scott's higher humour. Or take Jeanie Deans's letter to her father communicating to him the pardon of his daughter and her own interview with the Queen:-- "DEAREST AND TRULY HONOURED FATHER.--This comes with my duty to inform you, that it has pleased God to redeem that captivitie of my poor sister, in respect the Queen's blessed Majesty, for whom we are ever bound to pray, hath redeemed her soul from the slayer, granting the ransom of her, whilk is ane pardon or reprieve. And I spoke with the Queen face to face, and yet live; for she is not muckle differing from other grand leddies, saving that she has a stately presence, and een like a blue huntin' hawk's, whilk gaed throu' and throu' me like a Highland durk--And all this good was, alway under the Great Giver, to whom all are but instruments, wrought for us by the Duk of Argile, wha is ane native true-hearted Scotsman, and not pridefu', like other folk we ken of--and likewise skeely enow in bestial, whereof he has promised to gie me twa Devonshire kye, of which he is enamoured, although I do still haud by the real hawkit Airshire breed--and I have promised him a cheese; and I wad wuss ye, if Gowans, the brockit cow, has a quey, that she suld suck her fill of milk, as I am given to understand he has none of that breed, and is not scornfu' but will take a thing frae a puir body, that it may lighten their heart of the loading of debt that they awe him. Also his honour the Duke will accept ane of our Dunlop cheeses, and it sall be my faut if a better was ever yearned in Lowden."--[Here follow some observations respecting the breed of cattle, and the produce of the dairy, which it is our intention to forward to the Board of Agriculture.]--"Nevertheless, these are but matters of the after-harvest, in respect of the great good which Providence hath gifted us with--and, in especial, poor Effie's life. And oh, my dear father, since it hath pleased God to be merciful to her, let her not want your free pardon, whilk will make her meet to be ane vessel of grace, and also a comfort to your ain graie hairs. Dear Father, will ye let the Laird ken that we have had friends strangely raised up to us, and that the talent whilk he lent me will be thankfully repaid. I hae some of it to the fore; and the rest of it is not knotted up in ane purse or napkin, but in ane wee bit paper, as is the fashion heir, whilk I am assured is gude for the siller. And, dear father, through Mr. Butler's means I hae gude friendship with the Duke, for there had been kindness between their forbears in the auld troublesome time byepast. And Mrs. Glass has been kind like my very mother. She has a braw house here, and lives bien and warm, wi' twa servant lasses, and a man and a callant in the shop. And she is to send you doun a pound of her hie-dried, and some other tobaka, and we maun think of some propine for her, since her kindness hath been great. And the Duk is to send the pardon doun by an express messenger, in respect that I canna travel sae fast; and I am to come doun wi' twa of his Honour's servants--that is, John Archibald, a decent elderly gentleman, that says he has seen you lang syne, when ye were buying beasts in the west frae the Laird of Aughtermuggitie--but maybe ye winna mind him--ony way, he's a civil man--and Mrs. Dolly Dutton, that is to be dairy-maid at Inverara: and they bring me on as far as Glasgo', whilk will make it nae pinch to win hame, whilk I desire of all things. May the Giver of all good things keep ye in your outgauns and incomings, whereof devoutly prayeth your loving dauter, "JEAN DEANS." This contains an example of Scott's rather heavy jocularity as well as giving us a fine illustration of his highest and deepest and sunniest humour. Coming where it does, the joke inserted about the Board of Agriculture is rather like the gambol of a rhinoceros trying to imitate the curvettings of a thoroughbred horse. Some of the finest touches of his humour are no doubt much heightened by his perfect command of the genius as well as the dialect of a peasantry, in whom a true culture of mind and sometimes also of heart is found in the closest possible contact with the humblest pursuits and the quaintest enthusiasm for them. But Scott, with all his turn for irony--and Mr. Lockhart says that even on his death-bed he used towards his children the same sort of good-humoured irony to which he had always accustomed them in his life--certainly never gives us any example of that highest irony which is found so frequently in Shakespeare, which touches the paradoxes of the spiritual life of the children of earth, and which reached its highest point in Isaiah. Now and then in his latest diaries--the diaries written in his deep affliction--he comes near the edge of it. Once, for instance, he says, "What a strange scene if the surge of conversation could suddenly ebb like the tide, and show us the state of people's real minds! 'No eyes the rocks discover Which lurk beneath the deep.' Life could not be endured were it seen in reality." But this is not irony, only the sort of meditation which, in a mind inclined to thrust deep into the secrets of life's paradoxes, is apt to lead to irony. Scott, however, does not thrust deep in this direction. He met the cold steel which inflicts the deepest interior wounds, like a soldier, and never seems to have meditated on the higher paradoxes of life till reason reeled. The irony of Hamlet is far from Scott. His imagination was essentially one of distinct embodiment. He never even seemed so much as to contemplate that sundering of substance and form, that rending away of outward garments, that unclothing of the soul, in order that it might be more effectually clothed upon, which is at the heart of anything that may be called spiritual irony. The constant abiding of his mind within the well-defined forms of some one or other of the conditions of outward life and manners, among the scores of different spheres of human habit, was, no doubt, one of the secrets of his genius; but it was also its greatest limitation. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 32: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iv. 171-3.] [Footnote 33: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iv. 175-6.] [Footnote 34: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iv. 46.] [Footnote 35: Carlyle's _Miscellaneous Essays_, iv. 174-5.] CHAPTER XI. MORALITY AND RELIGION. The very same causes which limited Scott's humour and irony to the commoner fields of experience, and prevented him from ever introducing into his stories characters of the highest type of moral thoughtfulness, gave to his own morality and religion, which were, I think, true to the core so far as they went, a shade of distinct conventionality. It is no doubt quite true, as he himself tells us, that he took more interest in his mercenaries and moss-troopers, outlaws, gipsies, and beggars, than he did in the fine ladies and gentlemen under a cloud whom he adopted as heroines and heroes. But that was the very sign of his conventionalism. Though he interested himself more in these irregular persons, he hardly ever ventured to paint their inner life so as to show how little there was to choose between the sins of those who are at war with society and the sins of those who bend to the yoke of society. He widened rather than narrowed the chasm between the outlaw and the respectable citizen, even while he did not disguise his own romantic interest in the former. He extenuated, no doubt, the sins of all brave and violent defiers of the law, as distinguished from the sins of crafty and cunning abusers of the law. But the leaning he had to the former was, as he was willing to admit, what he regarded as a "naughty" leaning. He did not attempt for a moment to balance accounts between them and society. He paid his tribute as a matter of course to the established morality, and only put in a word or two by way of attempt to diminish the severity of the sentence on the bold transgressor. And then, where what is called the "law of honour" comes in to traverse the law of religion, he had no scruple in setting aside the latter in favour of the customs of gentlemen, without any attempt to justify that course. Yet it is evident from various passages in his writings that he held Christian duty inconsistent with duelling, and that he held himself a sincere Christian. In spite of this, when he was fifty-six, and under no conceivable hurry or perturbation of feeling, but only concerned to defend his own conduct--which was indeed plainly right--as to a political disclosure which he had made in his life of Napoleon, he asked his old friend William Clerk to be his second, if the expected challenge from General Gourgaud should come, and declared his firm intention of accepting it. On the strength of official evidence he had exposed some conduct of General Gourgaud's at St. Helena, which appeared to be far from honourable, and he thought it his duty on that account to submit to be shot at by General Gourgaud, if General Gourgaud had wished it. In writing to William Clerk to ask him to be his second, he says, "Like a man who finds himself in a scrape, General Gourgaud may wish to fight himself out of it, and if the quarrel should be thrust on me, why, _I will not baulk him, Jackie_. He shall not dishonour the country through my sides, I can assure him." In other words, Scott acted just as he had made Waverley and others of his heroes act, on a code of honour which he knew to be false, and he must have felt in this case to be something worse. He thought himself at that time under the most stringent obligations both to his creditors and his children, to do all in his power to redeem himself and his estate from debt. Nay, more, he held that his life was a trust from his Creator, which he had no right to throw away merely because a man whom he had not really injured, was indulging a strong wish to injure him; but he could so little brook the imputation of physical cowardice, that he was moral coward enough to resolve to meet General Gourgaud, if General Gourgaud lusted after a shot at him. Nor is there any trace preserved of so much as a moral scruple in his own mind on the subject, and this though there are clear traces in his other writings as to what he thought Christian morality required. But the Border chivalry was so strong in Scott that, on subjects of this kind at least, his morality was the conventional morality of a day rapidly passing away. He showed the same conventional feeling in his severity towards one of his own brothers who had been guilty of cowardice. Daniel Scott was the black sheep of the family. He got into difficulties in business, formed a bad connexion with an artful woman, and was sent to try his fortunes in the West Indies. There he was employed in some service against a body of refractory negroes--we do not know its exact nature--and apparently showed the white feather. Mr. Lockhart says that "he returned to Scotland a dishonoured man; and though he found shelter and compassion from his mother, his brother would never see him again. Nay, when, soon after, his health, shattered by dissolute indulgence, ... gave way altogether, and he died, as yet a young man, the poet refused either to attend his funeral or to wear mourning for him, like the rest of his family."[36] Indeed he always spoke of him as his "relative," not as his brother. Here again Scott's severity was due to his brother's failure as a "man of honour," i. e. in courage. He was forbearing enough with vices of a different kind; made John Ballantyne's dissipation the object rather of his jokes than of his indignation; and not only mourned for him, but really grieved for him when he died. It is only fair to say, however, that for this conventional scorn of a weakness rather than a sin, Scott sorrowed sincerely later in life, and that in sketching the physical cowardice of Connochar in _The Fair Maid of Perth_, he deliberately made an attempt to atone for this hardness towards his brother by showing how frequently the foundation of cowardice may be laid in perfectly involuntary physical temperament, and pointing out with what noble elements of disposition it may be combined. But till reflection on many forms of human character had enlarged Scott's charity, and perhaps also the range of his speculative ethics, he remained a conventional moralist, and one, moreover, the type of whose conventional code was borrowed more from that of honour than from that of religious principle. There is one curious passage in his diary, written very near the end of his life, in which Scott even seems to declare that conventional standards of conduct are better, or at least safer, than religious standards of conduct. He says in his diary for the 15th April, 1828,--"Dined with Sir Robert Inglis, and met Sir Thomas Acland, my old and kind friend. I was happy to see him. He may be considered now as the head of the religious party in the House of Commons--a powerful body which Wilberforce long commanded. It is a difficult situation, for the adaptation of religious motives to earthly policy is apt--among the infinite delusions of the human heart--to be a snare."[37] His letters to his eldest son, the young cavalry officer, on his first start in life, are much admired by Mr. Lockhart, but to me they read a little hard, a little worldly, and extremely conventional. Conventionality was certainly to his mind almost a virtue. Of enthusiasm in religion Scott always spoke very severely; both in his novels and in his letters and private diary. In writing to Lord Montague, he speaks of such enthusiasm as was then prevalent at Oxford, and which makes, he says, "religion a motive and a pretext for particular lines of thinking in politics and in temporal affairs" [as if it could help doing that!] as "teaching a new way of going to the devil for God's sake," and this expressly, because when the young are infected with it, it disunites families, and sets "children in opposition to their parents."[38] He gives us, however, one reason for his dread of anything like enthusiasm, which is not conventional;--that it interferes with the submissive and tranquil mood which is the only true religious mood. Speaking in his diary of a weakness and fluttering at the heart, from which he had suffered, he says, "It is an awful sensation, and would have made an enthusiast of me, had I indulged my imagination on religious subjects. I have been always careful to place my mind in the most tranquil posture which it can assume, during my private exercises of devotion."[39] And in this avoidance of indulging the imagination on religious, or even spiritual subjects, Scott goes far beyond Shakespeare. I do not think there is a single study in all his romances of what may be fairly called a pre-eminently spiritual character as such, though Jeanie Deans approaches nearest to it. The same may be said of Shakespeare. But Shakespeare, though he has never drawn a pre-eminently spiritual character, often enough indulged his imagination while meditating on spiritual themes. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 36: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iii. 198-9.] [Footnote 37: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 231.] [Footnote 38: Ibid., vii. 255-6.] [Footnote 39: Ibid., viii. 292.] CHAPTER XII. DISTRACTIONS AND AMUSEMENTS AT ABBOTSFORD. Between 1814 and the end of 1825, Scott's literary labour was interrupted only by one serious illness, and hardly interrupted by that,--by a few journeys,--one to Paris after the battle of Waterloo, and several to London,--and by the worry of a constant stream of intrusive visitors. Of his journeys he has left some records; but I cannot say that I think Scott would ever have reached, as a mere observer and recorder, at all the high point which he reached directly his imagination went to work to create a story. That imagination was, indeed, far less subservient to his mere perceptions than to his constructive powers. _Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk_--the records of his Paris journey after Waterloo--for instance, are not at all above the mark of a good special correspondent. His imagination was less the imagination of insight, than the imagination of one whose mind was a great kaleidoscope of human life and fortunes. But far more interrupting than either illness or travel, was the lion-hunting of which Scott became the object, directly after the publication of the earlier novels. In great measure, no doubt, on account of the mystery as to his authorship, his fame became something oppressive. At one time as many as _sixteen_ parties of visitors applied to see Abbotsford in a single day. Strangers,--especially the American travellers of that day, who were much less reticent and more irrepressible than the American travellers of this,--would come to him without introductions, facetiously cry out "Prodigious!" in imitation of Dominie Sampson, whatever they were shown, inquire whether the new house was called Tullyveolan or Tillytudlem, cross-examine, with open note-books, as to Scott's age, and the age of his wife, and appear to be taken quite by surprise when they were bowed out without being asked to dine.[40] In those days of high postage Scott's bill for letters "seldom came under 150_l._ a year," and "as to coach parcels, they were a perfect ruination." On one occasion a mighty package came by post from the United States, for which Scott had to pay five pounds sterling. It contained a MS. play called _The Cherokee Lovers_, by a young lady of New York, who begged Scott to read and correct it, write a prologue and epilogue, get it put on the stage at Drury Lane, and negotiate with Constable or Murray for the copyright. In about a fortnight another packet not less formidable arrived, charged with a similar postage, which Scott, not grown cautious through experience, recklessly opened; out jumped a duplicate copy of _The Cherokee Lovers_, with a second letter from the authoress, stating that as the weather had been stormy, and she feared that something might have happened to her former MS., she had thought it prudent to send him a duplicate.[41] Of course, when fame reached such a point as this, it became both a worry and a serious waste of money, and what was far more valuable than money, of time, privacy, and tranquillity of mind. And though no man ever bore such worries with the equanimity of Scott, no man ever received less pleasure from the adulation of unknown and often vulgar and ignorant admirers. His real amusements were his trees and his friends. "Planting and pruning trees," he said, "I could work at from morning to night. There is a sort of self-congratulation, a little tickling self-flattery, in the idea that while you are pleasing and amusing yourself, you are seriously contributing to the future welfare of the country, and that your very acorn may send its future ribs of oak to future victories like Trafalgar,"[42]--for the day of iron ships was not yet. And again, at a later stage of his planting:--"You can have no idea of the exquisite delight of a planter,--he is like a painter laying on his colours,--at every moment he sees his effects coming out. There is no art or occupation comparable to this; it is full of past, present, and future enjoyment. I look back to the time when there was not a tree here, only bare heath; I look round and see thousands of trees growing up, all of which, I may say almost each of which, have received my personal attention. I remember, five years ago, looking forward with the most delighted expectation to this very hour, and as each year has passed, the expectation has gone on increasing. I do the same now. I anticipate what this plantation and that one will presently be, if only taken care of, and there is not a spot of which I do not watch the progress. Unlike building, or even painting, or indeed any other kind of pursuit, this has no end, and is never interrupted; but goes on from day to day, and from year to year, with a perpetually augmenting interest. Farming I hate. What have I to do with fattening and killing beasts, or raising corn, only to cut it down, and to wrangle with farmers about prices, and to be constantly at the mercy of the seasons? There can be no such disappointments or annoyances in planting trees."[43] Scott indeed regarded planting as a mode of so moulding the form and colour of the outward world, that nature herself became indebted to him for finer outlines, richer masses of colour, and deeper shadows, as well as for more fertile and sheltered soils. And he was as skilful in producing the last result, as he was in the artistic effects of his planting. In the essay on the planting of waste lands, he mentions a story,--drawn from his own experience,--of a planter, who having scooped out the lowest part of his land for enclosures, and "planted the wood round them in masses enlarged or contracted as the natural lying of the ground seemed to dictate," met, six years after these changes, his former tenant on the ground, and said to him, "I suppose, Mr. R----, you will say I have ruined your farm by laying half of it into woodland?" "I should have expected it, sir," answered Mr. R----, "if you had told me beforehand what you were going to do; but I am now of a very different opinion; and as I am looking for land at present, if you are inclined to take for the remaining sixty acres the same rent which I formerly gave for a hundred and twenty, I will give you an offer to that amount. I consider the benefit of the enclosing, and the complete shelter afforded to the fields, as an advantage which fairly counterbalances the loss of one-half of the land."[44] And Scott was not only thoughtful in his own planting, but induced his neighbours to become so too. So great was their regard for him, that many of them planted their estates as much with reference to the effect which their plantations would have on the view from Abbotsford, as with reference to the effect they would have on the view from their own grounds. Many was the consultation which he and his neighbours, Scott of Gala, for instance, and Mr. Henderson of Eildon Hall, had together on the effect which would be produced on the view from their respective houses, of the planting going on upon the lands of each. The reciprocity of feeling was such that the various proprietors acted more like brothers in this matter, than like the jealous and exclusive creatures which landowners, as such, so often are. Next to his interest in the management and growth of his own little estate was Scott's interest in the management and growth of the Duke of Buccleuch's. To the Duke he looked up as the head of his clan, with something almost more than a feudal attachment, greatly enhanced of course by the personal friendship which he had formed for him in early life as the Earl of Dalkeith. This mixture of feudal and personal feeling towards the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch continued during their lives. Scott was away on a yachting tour to the Shetlands and Orkneys in July and August, 1814, and it was during this absence that the Duchess of Buccleuch died. Scott, who was in no anxiety about her, employed himself in writing an amusing descriptive epistle to the Duke in rough verse, chronicling his voyage, and containing expressions of the profoundest reverence for the goodness and charity of the Duchess, a letter which did not reach its destination till after the Duchess's death. Scott himself heard of her death by chance when they landed for a few hours on the coast of Ireland; he was quite overpowered by the news, and went to bed only to drop into short nightmare sleeps, and to wake with the dim memory of some heavy weight at his heart. The Duke himself died five years later, leaving a son only thirteen years of age (the present Duke), over whose interests, both as regarded his education and his estates, Scott watched as jealously as if they had been those of his own son. Many were the anxious letters he wrote to Lord Montague as to his "young chief's" affairs, as he called them, and great his pride in watching the promise of his youth. Nothing can be clearer than that to Scott the feudal principle was something far beyond a name; that he had at least as much pride in his devotion to his chief, as he had in founding a house which he believed would increase the influence--both territorial and personal--of the clan of Scotts. The unaffected reverence which he felt for the Duke, though mingled with warm personal affection, showed that Scott's feudal feeling had something real and substantial in it, which did not vanish even when it came into close contact with strong personal feelings. This reverence is curiously marked in his letters. He speaks of "the distinction of rank" being ignored by both sides, as of something quite exceptional, but it was never really ignored by him, for though he continued to write to the Duke as an intimate friend, it was with a mingling of awe, very different indeed from that which he ever adopted to Ellis or Erskine. It is necessary to remember this, not only in estimating the strength of the feeling which made him so anxious to become himself the founder of a house within a house,--of a new branch of the clan of Scotts,--but in estimating the loyalty which Scott always displayed to one of the least respectable of English sovereigns, George IV.,--a matter of which I must now say a few words, not only because it led to Scott's receiving the baronetcy, but because it forms to my mind the most grotesque of all the threads in the lot of this strong and proud man. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 40: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, v. 387.] [Footnote 41: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, v. 382.] [Footnote 42: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iii. 288.] [Footnote 43: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vii. 287-8.] [Footnote 44: Scott's _Miscellaneous Prose Works_, xxi. 22-3.] CHAPTER XIII. SCOTT AND GEORGE IV. The first relations of Scott with the Court were, oddly enough, formed with the Princess, not with the Prince of Wales. In 1806 Scott dined with the Princess of Wales at Blackheath, and spoke of his invitation as a great honour. He wrote a tribute to her father, the Duke of Brunswick, in the introduction to one of the cantos of _Marmion_, and received from the Princess a silver vase in acknowledgment of this passage in the poem. Scott's relations with the Prince Regent seem to have begun in an offer to Scott of the Laureateship in the summer of 1813, an offer which Scott would have found it very difficult to accept, so strongly did his pride revolt at the idea of having to commemorate in verse, as an official duty, all conspicuous incidents affecting the throne. But he was at the time of the offer in the thick of his first difficulties on account of Messrs. John Ballantyne and Co., and it was only the Duke of Buccleuch's guarantee of 4000_l._--a guarantee subsequently cancelled by Scott's paying the sum for which it was a security--that enabled him at this time to decline what, after Southey had accepted it, he compared in a letter to Southey to the herring for which the poor Scotch clergyman gave thanks in a grace wherein he described it as "even this, the very least of Providence's mercies." In March, 1815, Scott being then in London, the Prince Regent asked him to dinner, addressed him uniformly as Walter, and struck up a friendship with him which seems to have lasted their lives, and which certainly did much more honour to George than to Sir Walter Scott. It is impossible not to think rather better of George IV. for thus valuing, and doing his best in every way to show his value for, Scott. It is equally impossible not to think rather worse of Scott for thus valuing, and in every way doing his best to express his value for, this very worthless, though by no means incapable king. The consequences were soon seen in the indignation with which Scott began to speak of the Princess of Wales's sins. In 1806, in the squib he wrote on Lord Melville's acquittal, when impeached for corruption by the Liberal Government, he had written thus of the Princess Caroline:-- "Our King, too--our Princess,--I dare not say more, sir,-- May Providence watch them with mercy and might! While there's one Scottish hand that can wag a claymore, sir, They shall ne'er want a friend to stand up for their right. Be damn'd he that dare not-- For my part I'll spare not To beauty afflicted a tribute to give; Fill it up steadily, Drink it off readily, Here's to the Princess, and long may she live." But whoever "stood up" for the Princess's right, certainly Scott did not do so after his intimacy with the Prince Regent began. He mentioned her only with severity, and in one letter at least, written to his brother, with something much coarser than severity;[45] but the king's similar vices did not at all alienate him from what at least had all the appearance of a deep personal devotion to his sovereign. The first baronet whom George IV. made on succeeding to the throne, after his long Regency, was Scott, who not only accepted the honour gratefully, but dwelt with extreme pride on the fact that it was offered to him by the king himself, and was in no way due to the prompting of any minister's advice. He wrote to Joanna Baillie on hearing of the Regent's intention--for the offer was made by the Regent at the end of 1818, though it was not actually conferred till after George's accession, namely, on the 30th March, 1820,--"The Duke of Buccleuch and Scott of Harden, who, as the heads of my clan and the sources of my gentry, are good judges of what I ought to do, have both given me their earnest opinion to accept of an honour directly derived from the source of honour, and neither begged nor bought, as is the usual fashion. Several of my ancestors bore the title in the seventeenth century, and, were it of consequence, I have no reason to be ashamed of the decent and respectable persons who connect me with that period when they carried into the field, like Madoc, "The Crescent at whose gleam the Cambrian oft, Cursing his perilous tenure, wound his horn," so that, as a gentleman, I may stand on as good a footing as other new creations."[46] Why the honour was any greater for coming from such a king as George, than it would have been if it had been suggested by Lord Sidmouth, or even Lord Liverpool,--or half as great as if Mr. Canning had proposed it, it is not easy to conceive. George was a fair judge of literary merit, but not one to be compared for a moment with that great orator and wit; and as to his being the fountain of honour, there was so much dishonour of which the king was certainly the fountain too, that I do not think it was very easy for two fountains both springing from such a person to have flowed quite unmingled. George justly prided himself on Sir Walter Scott's having been the first creation of his reign, and I think the event showed that the poet was the fountain of much more honour for the king, than the king was for the poet. When George came to Edinburgh in 1822, it was Sir Walter who acted virtually as the master of the ceremonies, and to whom it was chiefly due that the visit was so successful. It was then that George clad his substantial person for the first time in the Highland costume--to wit, in the Steuart Tartans--and was so much annoyed to find himself outvied by a wealthy alderman, Sir William Curtis, who had gone and done likewise, and, in his equally grand Steuart Tartans, seemed a kind of parody of the king. The day on which the king arrived, Tuesday, 14th of August, 1822, was also the day on which Scott's most intimate friend, William Erskine, then Lord Kinnedder, died. Yet Scott went on board the royal yacht, was most graciously received by George, had his health drunk by the king in a bottle of Highland whiskey, and with a proper show of devoted loyalty entreated to be allowed to retain the glass out of which his Majesty had just drunk his health. The request was graciously acceded to, but let it be pleaded on Scott's behalf, that on reaching home and finding there his friend Crabbe the poet, he sat down on the royal gift, and crushed it to atoms. One would hope that he was really thinking more even of Crabbe, and much more of Erskine, than of the royal favour for which he had appeared, and doubtless had really believed himself, so grateful. Sir Walter retained his regard for the king, such as it was, to the last, and even persuaded himself that George's death would be a great political calamity for the nation. And really I cannot help thinking that Scott believed more in the king, than he did in his friend George Canning. Assuredly, greatly as he admired Canning, he condemned him more and more as Canning grew more liberal, and sometimes speaks of his veerings in that direction with positive asperity. George, on the other hand, who believed more in number one than in any other number, however large, became much more conservative after he became Regent than he was before, and as he grew more conservative Scott grew more conservative likewise, till he came to think this particular king almost a pillar of the Constitution. I suppose we ought to explain this little bit of fetish-worship in Scott much as we should the quaint practical adhesion to duelling which he gave as an old man, who had had all his life much more to do with the pen than the sword--that is, as an evidence of the tendency of an improved type to recur to that of the old wild stock on which it had been grafted. But certainly no feudal devotion of his ancestors to their chief was ever less justified by moral qualities than Scott's loyal devotion to the fountain of honour as embodied in "our fat friend." The whole relation to George was a grotesque thread in Scott's life; and I cannot quite forgive him for the utterly conventional severity with which he threw over his first patron, the Queen, for sins which were certainly not grosser, if they were not much less gross, than those of his second patron, the husband who had set her the example which she faithfully, though at a distance, followed. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 45: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vi. 229-30.] [Footnote 46: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, vi. 13, 14.] CHAPTER XIV. SCOTT AS A POLITICIAN. Scott usually professed great ignorance of politics, and did what he could to hold aloof from a world in which his feelings were very easily heated, while his knowledge was apt to be very imperfect. But now and again, and notably towards the close of his life, he got himself mixed up in politics, and I need hardly say that it was always on the Tory, and generally on the red-hot Tory, side. His first hasty intervention in politics was the song I have just referred to on Lord Melville's acquittal, during the short Whig administration of 1806. In fact Scott's comparative abstinence from politics was due, I believe, chiefly to the fact that during almost the whole of his literary life, Tories and not Whigs were in power. No sooner was any reform proposed, any abuse threatened, than Scott's eager Conservative spirit flashed up. Proposals were made in 1806 for changes--and, as it was thought, reforms--in the Scotch Courts of Law, and Scott immediately saw something like national calamity in the prospect. The mild proposals in question were discussed at a meeting of the Faculty of Advocates, when Scott made a speech longer than he had ever before delivered, and animated by a "flow and energy of eloquence" for which those who were accustomed to hear his debating speeches were quite unprepared. He walked home between two of the reformers, Mr. Jeffrey and another, when his companions began to compliment him on his eloquence, and to speak playfully of its subject. But Scott was in no mood for playfulness. "No, no," he exclaimed, "'tis no laughing matter; little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain!" "And so saying," adds Mr. Lockhart, "he turned round to conceal his agitation, but not until Mr. Jeffrey saw tears gushing down his cheek,--resting his head, until he recovered himself, on the wall of the Mound."[47] It was the same strong feeling for old Scotch institutions which broke out so quaintly in the midst of his own worst troubles in 1826, on behalf of the Scotch banking-system, when he so eloquently defended, in the letters of _Malachi Malagrowther_, what would now be called Home-Rule for Scotland, and indeed really defeated the attempt of his friends the Tories, who were the innovators this time, to encroach on those sacred institutions--the Scotch one-pound note, and the private-note circulation of the Scotch banks. But when I speak of Scott as a Home-Ruler, I should add that had not Scotland been for generations governed to a great extent, and, as he thought successfully, by Home-Rule, he was far too good a Conservative to have apologized for it at all. The basis of his Conservatism was always the danger of undermining a system which had answered so well. In the concluding passages of the letters to which I have just referred, he contrasts "Theory, a scroll in her hand, full of deep and mysterious combinations of figures, the least failure in any one of which may alter the result entirely," with "a practical system successful for upwards of a century." His vehement and unquailing opposition to Reform in almost the very last year of his life, when he had already suffered more than one stroke of paralysis, was grounded on precisely the same argument. At Jedburgh, on the 21st March, 1831, he appeared in the midst of an angry population (who hooted and jeered at him till he turned round fiercely upon them with the defiance, "I regard your gabble no more than the geese on the green,") to urge the very same protest. "We in this district," he said, "are proud, and with reason, that the first chain-bridge was the work of a Scotchman. It still hangs where he erected it a pretty long time ago. The French heard of our invention, and determined to introduce it, but with great improvements and embellishments. A friend of my own saw the thing tried. It was on the Seine at Marly. The French chain-bridge looked lighter and airier than the prototype. Every Englishman present was disposed to confess that we had been beaten at our own trade. But by-and-by the gates were opened, and the multitude were to pass over. It began to swing rather formidably beneath the pressure of the good company; and by the time the architect, who led the procession in great pomp and glory, reached the middle, the whole gave way, and he--worthy, patriotic artist--was the first that got a ducking. They had forgot the middle bolt,--or rather this ingenious person had conceived that to be a clumsy-looking feature, which might safely be dispensed with, while he put some invisible gimcrack of his own to supply its place."[48] It is strange that Sir Walter did not see that this kind of criticism, so far as it applied at all to such an experiment as the Reform Bill, was even more in point as a rebuke to the rashness of the Scotch reformer who hung the first successful chain-bridge, than to the rashness of the French reformer of reform who devised an unsuccessful variation on it. The audacity of the first experiment was much the greater, though the competence of the person who made it was the greater also. And as a matter of fact, the political structure against the supposed insecurity of which Sir Walter was protesting, with all the courage of that dauntless though dying nature, was made by one who understood his work at least as well as the Scotch architect. The tramp of the many multitudes who have passed over it has never yet made it to "swing dangerously," and Lord Russell in the fulness of his age was but yesterday rejoicing in what he had achieved, and even in what those have achieved who have altered his work in the same spirit in which he designed it. But though Sir Walter persuaded himself that his Conservatism was all founded in legitimate distrust of reckless change, there is evidence, I think, that at times at least it was due to elements less noble. The least creditable incident in the story of his political life--which Mr. Lockhart, with his usual candour, did not conceal--was the bitterness with which he resented a most natural and reasonable Parliamentary opposition to an appointment which he had secured for his favourite brother, Tom. In 1810 Scott appointed his brother Tom, who had failed as a Writer to the Signet, to a place vacant under himself as Clerk of Session. He had not given him the best place vacant, because he thought it his duty to appoint an official who had grown grey in the service, but he gave Tom Scott this man's place, which was worth about 250_l._ a year. In the meantime Tom Scott's affairs did not render it convenient for him to be come-at-able, and he absented himself, while they were being settled, in the Isle of Man. Further, the Commission on the Scotch system of judicature almost immediately reported that his office was one of supererogation, and ought to be abolished; but, to soften the blow, they proposed to allow him a pension of 130_l._ per annum. This proposal was discussed with some natural jealousy in the House of Lords. Lord Lauderdale thought that when Tom Scott was appointed, it must have been pretty evident that the Commission would propose to abolish his office, and that the appointment therefore should not have been made. "Mr. Thomas Scott," he said, "would have 130_l._ for life as an indemnity for an office the duties of which he never had performed, while those clerks who had laboured for twenty years had no adequate remuneration." Lord Holland supported this very reasonable and moderate view of the case; but of course the Ministry carried their way, and Tom Scott got his unearned pension. Nevertheless, Scott was furious with Lord Holland. Writing soon after to the happy recipient of this little pension, he says, "Lord Holland has been in Edinburgh, and we met accidentally at a public party. He made up to me, but I remembered his part in your affair, and _cut_ him with as little remorse as an old pen." Mr. Lockhart says, on Lord Jeffrey's authority, that the scene was a very painful one. Lord Jeffrey himself declared that it was the only rudeness of which he ever saw Scott guilty in the course of a life-long familiarity. And it is pleasant to know that he renewed his cordiality with Lord Holland in later years, though there is no evidence that he ever admitted that he had been in the wrong. But the incident shows how very doubtful Sir Walter ought to have felt as to the purity of his Conservatism. It is quite certain that the proposal to abolish Tom Scott's office without compensation was not a reckless experiment of a fundamental kind. It was a mere attempt at diminishing the heavy burdens laid on the people for the advantage of a small portion of the middle class, and yet Scott resented it with as much display of selfish passion--considering his genuine nobility of breeding--as that with which the rude working men of Jedburgh afterwards resented his gallant protest against the Reform Bill, and, later again, saluted the dauntless old man with the dastardly cry of "Burk Sir Walter!" Judged truly, I think Sir Walter's conduct in cutting Lord Holland "with as little remorse as an old pen," for simply doing his duty in the House of Lords, was quite as ignoble in him as the bullying and insolence of the democratic party in 1831, when the dying lion made his last dash at what he regarded as the foes of the Constitution. Doubtless he held that the mob, or, as we more decorously say, the residuum, were in some sense the enemies of true freedom. "I cannot read in history," he writes once to Mr. Laidlaw, "of any free State which has been brought to slavery till the rascal and uninstructed populace had had their short hour of anarchical government, which naturally leads to the stern repose of military despotism." But he does not seem ever to have perceived that educated men identify themselves with "the rascal and uninstructed populace," whenever they indulge on behalf of the selfish interests of their own class, passions such as he had indulged in fighting for his brother's pension. It is not the want of instruction, it is the rascaldom, i. e. the violent _esprit de corps_ of a selfish class, which "naturally leads" to violent remedies. Such rascaldom exists in all classes, and not least in the class of the cultivated and refined. Generous and magnanimous as Scott was, he was evidently by no means free from the germs of it. One more illustration of Scott's political Conservatism, and I may leave his political life, which was not indeed his strong side, though, as with all sides of Scott's nature, it had an energy and spirit all his own. On the subject of Catholic Emancipation he took a peculiar view. As he justly said, he hated bigotry, and would have left the Catholics quite alone, but for the great claims of their creed to interfere with political life. And even so, when the penal laws were once abolished, he would have abolished also the representative disabilities, as quite useless, as well as very irritating when the iron system of effective repression had ceased. But he disapproved of the abolition of the political parts of the penal laws. He thought they would have stamped out Roman Catholicism; and whether that were just or unjust, he thought it would have been a great national service. "As for Catholic Emancipation," he wrote to Southey in 1807, "I am not, God knows, a bigot in religious matters, nor a friend to persecution; but if a particular set of religionists are _ipso facto_ connected with foreign politics, and placed under the spiritual direction of a class of priests, whose unrivalled dexterity and activity are increased by the rules which detach them from the rest of the world--I humbly think that we may be excused from entrusting to them those places in the State where the influence of such a clergy, who act under the direction of a passive tool of our worst foe, is likely to be attended with the most fatal consequences. If a gentleman chooses to walk about with a couple of pounds of gunpowder in his pocket, if I give him the shelter of my roof, I may at least be permitted to exclude him from the seat next to the fire."[49] And in relation to the year 1825, when Scott visited Ireland, Mr. Lockhart writes, "He on all occasions expressed manfully his belief that the best thing for Ireland would have been never to relax the strictly _political_ enactments of the penal laws, however harsh these might appear. Had they been kept in vigour for another half-century, it was his conviction that Popery would have been all but extinguished in Ireland. But he thought that after admitting Romanists to the elective franchise, it was a vain notion that they could be permanently or advantageously deterred from using that franchise in favour of those of their own persuasion." In his diary in 1829 he puts the same view still more strongly:--"I cannot get myself to feel at all anxious about the Catholic question. I cannot see the use of fighting about the platter, when you have let them snatch the meat off it. I hold Popery to be such a mean and degrading superstition, that I am not sure I could have found myself liberal enough for voting the repeal of the penal laws as they existed before 1780. They must and would, in course of time, have smothered Popery; and I confess that I should have seen the old lady of Babylon's mouth stopped with pleasure. But now that you have taken the plaster off her mouth, and given her free respiration, I cannot see the sense of keeping up the irritation about the claim to sit in Parliament. Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink into dust, with all its absurd ritual and solemnities. Still it is an awful risk. The world is in fact as silly as ever, and a good competence of nonsense will always find believers."[50] That is the view of a strong and rather unscrupulous politician--a moss-trooper in politics--which Scott certainly was. He was thinking evidently very little of justice, almost entirely of the most effective means of keeping the Kingdom, the Kingdom which he loved. Had he understood--what none of the politicians of that day understood--the strength of the Church of Rome as the only consistent exponent of the principle of Authority in religion, I believe his opposition to Catholic emancipation would have been as bitter as his opposition to Parliamentary reform. But he took for granted that while only "silly" persons believed in Rome, and only "infidels" rejected an authoritative creed altogether, it was quite easy by the exercise of common sense, to find the true compromise between reason and religious humility. Had Scott lived through the religious controversies of our own days, it seems not unlikely that with his vivid imagination, his warm Conservatism, and his rather inadequate critical powers, he might himself have become a Roman Catholic. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 47: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 328.] [Footnote 48: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, x. 47.] [Footnote 49: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iii. 34.] [Footnote 50: Ibid., ix. 305.] CHAPTER XV. SCOTT IN ADVERSITY. With the year 1825 came a financial crisis, and Constable began to tremble for his solvency. From the date of his baronetcy Sir Walter had launched out into a considerable increase of expenditure. He got plans on a rather large scale in 1821 for the increase of Abbotsford, which were all carried out. To meet his expenses in this and other ways he received Constable's bills for "four unnamed works of fiction," of which he had not written a line, but which came to exist in time, and were called _Peveril of the Peak_, _Quentin Durward_, _St. Ronan's Well_, and _Redgauntlet_. Again, in the very year before the crash, 1825, he married his eldest son, the heir to the title, to a young lady who was herself an heiress, Miss Jobson of Lochore, when Abbotsford and its estates were settled, with the reserve of 10,000_l._, which Sir Walter took power to charge on the property for purposes of business. Immediately afterwards he purchased a captaincy in the King's Hussars for his son, which cost him 3500_l._ Nor were the obligations he incurred on his own account, or that of his family, the only ones by which he was burdened. He was always incurring expenses, often heavy expenses, for other people. Thus, when Mr. Terry, the actor, became joint lessee and manager of the Adelphi Theatre, London, Scott became his surety for 1250_l._, while James Ballantyne became his surety for 500_l._ more, and both these sums had to be paid by Sir Walter after Terry's failure in 1828. Such obligations as these, however, would have been nothing when compared with Sir Walter's means, had all his bills on Constable been duly honoured, and had not the printing firm of Ballantyne and Co. been so deeply involved with Constable's house that it necessarily became insolvent when he stopped. Taken altogether, I believe that Sir Walter earned during his own lifetime at least 140,000_l._ by his literary work alone, probably more; while even on his land and building combined he did not apparently spend more than half that sum. Then he had a certain income, about 1000_l._ a year, from his own and Lady Scott's private property, as well as 1300_l._ a year as Clerk of Session, and 300_l._ more as Sheriff of Selkirk. Thus even his loss of the price of several novels by Constable's failure would not seriously have compromised Scott's position, but for his share in the printing-house which fell with Constable, and the obligations of which amounted to 117,000_l._ As Scott had always forestalled his income,--spending the purchase-money of his poems and novels before they were written,--such a failure as this, at the age of fifty-five, when all the freshness of his youth was gone out of him, when he saw his son's prospects blighted as well as his own, and knew perfectly that James Ballantyne, unassisted by him, could never hope to pay any fraction of the debt worth mentioning, would have been paralysing, had he not been a man of iron nerve, and of a pride and courage hardly ever equalled. Domestic calamity, too, was not far off. For two years he had been watching the failure of his wife's health with increasing anxiety, and as calamities seldom come single, her illness took a most serious form at the very time when the blow fell, and she died within four months of the failure. Nay, Scott was himself unwell at the critical moment, and was taking sedatives which discomposed his brain. Twelve days before the final failure,--which was announced to him on the 17th January, 1826,--he enters in his diary, "Much alarmed. I had walked till twelve with Skene and Russell, and then sat down to my work. To my horror and surprise I could neither write nor spell, but put down one word for another, and wrote nonsense. I was much overpowered at the same time and could not conceive the reason. I fell asleep, however, in my chair, and slept for two hours. On my waking my head was clearer, and I began to recollect that last night I had taken the anodyne left for the purpose by Clarkson, and being disturbed in the course of the night, I had not slept it off." In fact the hyoscyamus had, combined with his anxieties, given him a slight attack of what is now called _aphasia_, that brain disease the most striking symptom of which is that one word is mistaken for another. And this was Scott's preparation for his failure, and the bold resolve which followed it, to work for his creditors as he had worked for himself, and to pay off, if possible, the whole 117,000_l._ by his own literary exertions. There is nothing in its way in the whole of English biography more impressive than the stoical extracts from Scott's diary which note the descent of this blow. Here is the anticipation of the previous day: "Edinburgh, January 16th.--Came through cold roads to as cold news. Hurst and Robinson have suffered a bill to come back upon Constable, which, I suppose, infers the ruin of both houses. We shall soon see. Dined with the Skenes." And here is the record itself: "January 17th.--James Ballantyne this morning, good honest fellow, with a visage as black as the crook. He hopes no salvation; has, indeed, taken measures to stop. It is hard, after having fought such a battle. I have apologized for not attending the Royal Society Club, who have a _gaudeamus_ on this day, and seemed to count much on my being the præses. My old acquaintance Miss Elizabeth Clerk, sister of Willie, died suddenly. I cannot choose but wish it had been Sir W. S., and yet the feeling is unmanly. I have Anne, my wife, and Charles to look after. I felt rather sneaking as I came home from the Parliament-house--felt as if I were liable _monstrari digito_ in no very pleasant way. But this must be borne _cum coeteris_; and, thank God, however uncomfortable, I do not feel despondent."[51] On the following day, the 18th January, the day after the blow, he records a bad night, a wish that the next two days were over, but that "the worst _is_ over," and on the same day he set about making notes for the _magnum opus_, as he called it--the complete edition of all the novels, with a new introduction and notes. On the 19th January, two days after the failure, he calmly resumed the composition of _Woodstock_--the novel on which he was then engaged--and completed, he says, "about twenty printed pages of it;" to which he adds that he had "a painful scene after dinner and another after supper, endeavouring to convince these poor creatures" [his wife and daughter] "that they must not look for miracles, but consider the misfortune as certain, and only to be lessened by patience and labour." On the 21st January, after a number of business details, he quotes from Job, "Naked we entered the world and naked we leave it; blessed be the name of the Lord." On the 22nd he says, "I feel neither dishonoured nor broken down by the bad, now truly bad, news I have received. I have walked my last in the domains I have planted--sat the last time in the halls I have built. But death would have taken them from me, if misfortune had spared them. My poor people whom I loved so well! There is just another die to turn up against me in this run of ill-luck, i. e. if I should break my magic wand in the fall from this elephant, and lose my popularity with my fortune. Then _Woodstock_ and _Boney_" [his life of Napoleon] "may both go to the paper-maker, and I may take to smoking cigars and drinking grog, or turn devotee and intoxicate the brain another way."[52] He adds that when he sets to work doggedly, he is exactly the same man he ever was, "neither low-spirited nor _distrait_," nay, that adversity is to him "a tonic and bracer." The heaviest blow was, I think, the blow to his pride. Very early he begins to note painfully the different way in which different friends greet him, to remark that some smile as if to say, "think nothing about it, my lad, it is quite out of our thoughts;" that others adopt an affected gravity, "such as one sees and despises at a funeral," and the best-bred "just shook hands and went on." He writes to Mr. Morritt with a proud indifference, clearly to some extent simulated:--"My womenkind will be the greater sufferers, yet even they look cheerily forward; and, for myself, the blowing off of my hat on a stormy day has given me more uneasiness."[53] To Lady Davy he writes truly enough:--"I beg my humblest compliments to Sir Humphrey, and tell him, Ill Luck, that direful chemist, never put into his crucible a more indissoluble piece of stuff than your affectionate cousin and sincere well-wisher, Walter Scott."[54] When his _Letters of Malachi Malagrowther_ came out he writes:--"I am glad of this bruilzie, as far as I am concerned; people will not dare talk of me as an object of pity--no more 'poor-manning.' Who asks how many punds Scots the old champion had in his pocket when 'He set a bugle to his mouth, And blew so loud and shrill, The trees in greenwood shook thereat, Sae loud rang every hill.' This sounds conceited enough, yet is not far from truth."[55] His dread of pity is just the same when his wife dies:--"Will it be better," he writes, "when left to my own feelings, I see the whole world pipe and dance around me? I think it will. Their sympathy intrudes on my present affliction." Again, on returning for the first time from Edinburgh to Abbotsford after Lady Scott's funeral:--"I again took possession of the family bedroom and my widowed couch. This was a sore trial, but it was necessary not to blink such a resolution. Indeed I do not like to have it thought that there is any way in which I can be beaten." And again:--"I have a secret pride--I fancy it will be so most truly termed--which impels me to mix with my distresses strange snatches of mirth, 'which have no mirth in them.'"[56] But though pride was part of Scott's strength, pride alone never enabled any man to struggle so vigorously and so unremittingly as he did to meet the obligations he had incurred. When he was in Ireland in the previous year, a poor woman who had offered to sell him gooseberries, but whose offer had not been accepted, remarked, on seeing his daughter give some pence to a beggar, that they might as well give her an alms too, as she was "an old struggler." Sir Walter was struck with the expression, and said that it deserved to become classical, as a name for those who take arms against a sea of troubles, instead of yielding to the waves. It was certainly a name the full meaning of which he himself deserved. His house in Edinburgh was sold, and he had to go into a certain Mrs. Brown's lodgings, when he was discharging his duties as Clerk of Session. His wife was dead. His estate was conveyed to trustees for the benefit of his creditors till such time as he should pay off Ballantyne and Co's. debt, which of course in his lifetime he never did. Yet between January, 1826, and January, 1828, he earned for his creditors very nearly 40,000_l._ _Woodstock_ sold for 8228_l._, "a matchless sale," as Sir Walter remarked, "for less than three months' work." The first two editions of _The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte_, on which Mr. Lockhart says that Scott had spent the unremitting labour of about two years--labour involving a far greater strain on eyes and brain than his imaginative work ever caused him--sold for 18,000_l._ Had Sir Walter's health lasted, he would have redeemed his obligations on behalf of Ballantyne and Co. within eight or nine years at most from the time of his failure. But what is more remarkable still, is that after his health failed he struggled on with little more than half a brain, but a whole will, to work while it was yet day, though the evening was dropping fast. _Count Robert of Paris_ and _Castle Dangerous_ were really the compositions of a paralytic patient. It was in September, 1830, that the first of these tales was begun. As early as the 15th February of that year he had had his first true paralytic seizure. He had been discharging his duties as clerk of session as usual, and received in the afternoon a visit from a lady friend of his, Miss Young, who was submitting to him some manuscript memoirs of her father, when the stroke came. It was but slight. He struggled against it with his usual iron power of will, and actually managed to stagger out of the room where the lady was sitting with him, into the drawing-room where his daughter was, but there he fell his full length on the floor. He was cupped, and fully recovered his speech during the course of the day, but Mr. Lockhart thinks that never, after this attack, did his style recover its full lucidity and terseness. A cloudiness in words and a cloudiness of arrangement began to be visible. In the course of the year he retired from his duties of clerk of session, and his publishers hoped that, by engaging him on the new and complete edition of his works, they might detach him from the attempt at imaginative creation for which he was now so much less fit. But Sir Walter's will survived his judgment. When, in the previous year, Ballantyne had been disabled from attending to business by his wife's illness (which ended in her death), Scott had written in his diary, "It is his (Ballantyne's) nature to indulge apprehensions of the worst which incapacitate him for labour. I cannot help regarding this amiable weakness of the mind with something too nearly allied to contempt," and assuredly he was guilty of no such weakness himself. Not only did he row much harder against the stream of fortune than he had ever rowed with it, but, what required still more resolution, he fought on against the growing conviction that his imagination would not kindle, as it used to do, to its old heat. When he dictated to Laidlaw,--for at this time he could hardly write himself for rheumatism in the hand,--he would frequently pause and look round him, like a man "mocked with shadows." Then he bestirred himself with a great effort, rallied his force, and the style again flowed clear and bright, but not for long. The clouds would gather again, and the mental blank recur. This soon became visible to his publishers, who wrote discouragingly of the new novel--to Scott's own great distress and irritation. The oddest feature in the matter was that his letters to them were full of the old terseness, and force, and caustic turns. On business he was as clear and keen as in his best days. It was only at his highest task, the task of creative work, that his cunning began to fail him. Here, for instance, are a few sentences written to Cadell, his publisher, touching this very point--the discouragement which James Ballantyne had been pouring on the new novel. Ballantyne, he says, finds fault with the subject, when what he really should have found fault with was the failing power of the author:--"James is, with many other kindly critics, perhaps in the predicament of an honest drunkard, when crop-sick the next morning, who does not ascribe the malady to the wine he has drunk, but to having tasted some particular dish at dinner which disagreed with his stomach.... I have lost, it is plain, the power of interesting the country, and ought, injustice to all parties, to retire while I have some credit. But this is an important step, and I will not be obstinate about it if it be necessary.... Frankly, I cannot think of flinging aside the half-finished volume, as if it were a corked bottle of wine.... I may, perhaps, take a trip to the Continent for a year or two, if I find Othello's occupation gone, or rather Othello's _reputation_."[57] And again, in a very able letter written on the 12th of December, 1830, to Cadell, he takes a view of the situation with as much calmness and imperturbability as if he were an outside spectator. "There were many circumstances in the matter which you and J. B. (James Ballantyne) could not be aware of, and which, if you were aware of, might have influenced your judgment, which had, and yet have, a most powerful effect upon mine. The deaths of both my father and mother have been preceded by a paralytic shock. My father survived it for nearly two years--a melancholy respite, and not to be desired. I was alarmed with Miss Young's morning visit, when, as you know, I lost my speech. The medical people said it was from the stomach, which might be, but while there is a doubt upon a point so alarming, you will not wonder that the subject, or to use Hare's _lingo_, the _shot_, should be a little anxious." He relates how he had followed all the strict medical _régime_ prescribed to him with scrupulous regularity, and then begun his work again with as much attention as he could. "And having taken pains with my story, I find it is not relished, nor indeed tolerated, by those who have no interest in condemning it, but a strong interest in putting even a face" (? force) "upon their consciences. Was not this, in the circumstances, a damper to an invalid already afraid that the sharp edge might be taken off his intellect, though he was not himself sensible of that?" In fact, no more masterly discussion of the question whether his mind were failing or not, and what he ought to do in the interval of doubt, can be conceived, than these letters give us. At this time the debt of Ballantyne and Co. had been reduced by repeated dividends--all the fruits of Scott's literary work--more than one half. On the 17th of December, 1830, the liabilities stood at 54,000_l._, having been reduced 63,000_l._ within five years. And Sir Walter, encouraged by this great result of his labour, resumed the suspended novel. But with the beginning of 1831 came new alarms. On January 5th Sir Walter enters in his diary,--"Very indifferent, with more awkward feelings than I can well bear up against. My voice sunk and my head strangely confused." Still he struggled on. On the 31st January he went alone to Edinburgh to sign his will, and stayed at his bookseller's (Cadell's) house in Athol Crescent. A great snow-storm set in which kept him in Edinburgh and in Mr. Cadell's house till the 9th February. One day while the snow was still falling heavily, Ballantyne reminded him that a motto was wanting for one of the chapters of _Count Robert of Paris_. He went to the window, looked out for a moment, and then wrote,-- "The storm increases; 'tis no sunny shower, Foster'd in the moist breast of March or April, Or such as parchèd summer cools his lips with. Heaven's windows are flung wide; the inmost deeps Call, in hoarse greeting, one upon another; On comes the flood, in all its foaming horrors, And where's the dike shall stop it? _The Deluge: a Poem._" Clearly this failing imagination of Sir Walter's was still a great deal more vivid than that of most men, with brains as sound as it ever pleased Providence to make them. But his troubles were not yet even numbered. The "storm increased," and it was, as he said, "no sunny shower." His lame leg became so painful that he had to get a mechanical apparatus to relieve him of some of the burden of supporting it. Then, on the 21st March, he was hissed at Jedburgh, as I have before said, for his vehement opposition to Reform. In April he had another stroke of paralysis which he now himself recognized as one. Still he struggled on at his novel. Under the date of May 6, 7, 8, he makes this entry in his diary:--"Here is a precious job. I have a formal remonstrance from those critical people, Ballantyne and Cadell, against the last volume of _Count Robert_, which is within a sheet of being finished. I suspect their opinion will be found to coincide with that of the public; at least it is not very different from my own. The blow is a stunning one, I suppose, for I scarcely feel it. It is singular, but it comes with as little surprise as if I had a remedy ready; yet God knows I am at sea in the dark, and the vessel leaky, I think, into the bargain. I cannot conceive that I have tied a knot with my tongue which my teeth cannot untie. We shall see. I have suffered terribly, that is the truth, rather in body than mind, and I often wish I could lie down and sleep without waking. But I will fight it out if I can."[58] The medical men with one accord tried to make him give up his novel-writing. But he smiled and put them by. He took up _Count Robert of Paris_ again, and tried to recast it. On the 18th May he insisted on attending the election for Roxburghshire, to be held at Jedburgh, and in spite of the unmannerly reception he had met with in March, no dissuasion would keep him at home. He was saluted in the town with groans and blasphemies, and Sir Walter had to escape from Jedburgh by a back way to avoid personal violence. The cries of "Burk Sir Walter," with which he was saluted on this occasion, haunted him throughout his illness and on his dying bed. At the Selkirk election it was Sir Walter's duty as Sheriff to preside, and his family therefore made no attempt to dissuade him from his attendance. There he was so well known and loved, that in spite of his Tory views, he was not insulted, and the only man who made any attempt to hustle the Tory electors, was seized by Sir Walter with his own hand, as he got out of his carriage, and committed to prison without resistance till the election day was over. A seton which had been ordered for his head, gave him some relief, and of course the first result was that he turned immediately to his novel-writing again, and began _Castle Dangerous_ in July, 1831,--the last July but one which he was to see at all. He even made a little journey in company with Mr. Lockhart, in order to see the scene of the story he wished to tell, and on his return set to work with all his old vigour to finish his tale, and put the concluding touches to _Count Robert of Paris_. But his temper was no longer what it had been. He quarrelled with Ballantyne, partly for his depreciatory criticism of _Count Robert of Paris_, partly for his growing tendency to a mystic and strait-laced sort of dissent and his increasing Liberalism. Even Mr. Laidlaw and Scott's children had much to bear. But he struggled on even to the end, and did not consent to try the experiment of a voyage and visit to Italy till his immediate work was done. Well might Lord Chief Baron Shepherd apply to Scott Cicero's description of some contemporary of his own, who "had borne adversity wisely, who had not been broken by fortune, and who, amidst the buffets of fate, had maintained his dignity." There was in Sir Walter, I think, at least as much of the Stoic as the Christian. But Stoic or Christian, he was a hero of the old, indomitable type. Even the last fragments of his imaginative power were all turned to account by that unconquerable will, amidst the discouragement of friends, and the still more disheartening doubts of his own mind. Like the headland stemming a rough sea, he was gradually worn away, but never crushed. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 51: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, viii. 197.] [Footnote 52: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, viii. 203-4.] [Footnote 53: Ibid., viii. 235.] [Footnote 54: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, viii. 238.] [Footnote 55: viii. 277.] [Footnote 56: viii. 347, 371, 381.] [Footnote 57: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, x. 11, 12.] [Footnote 58: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, x. 65-6.] CHAPTER XVI. THE LAST YEAR. In the month of September, 1831, the disease of the brain which had long been in existence must have made a considerable step in advance. For the first time the illusion seemed to possess Sir Walter that he had paid off all the debt for which he was liable, and that he was once more free to give as his generosity prompted. Scott sent Mr. Lockhart 50_l._ to save his grandchildren some slight inconvenience, and told another of his correspondents that he had "put his decayed fortune into as good a condition as he could desire." It was well, therefore, that he had at last consented to try the effect of travel on his health,--not that he could hope to arrest by it such a disease as his, but that it diverted him from the most painful of all efforts, that of trying anew the spell which had at last failed him, and perceiving in the disappointed eyes of his old admirers that the magic of his imagination was a thing of the past. The last day of real enjoyment at Abbotsford--for when Sir Walter returned to it to die, it was but to catch once more the outlines of its walls, the rustle of its woods, and the gleam of its waters, through senses already darkened to all less familiar and less fascinating visions--was the 22nd September, 1831. On the 21st, Wordsworth had come to bid his old friend adieu, and on the 22nd--the last day at home--they spent the morning together in a visit to Newark. It was a day to deepen alike in Scott and in Wordsworth whatever of sympathy either of them had with the very different genius of the other, and that it had this result in Wordsworth's case, we know from the very beautiful poem,--"Yarrow Revisited,"--and the sonnet which the occasion also produced. And even Scott, who was so little of a Wordsworthian, who enjoyed Johnson's stately but formal verse, and Crabbe's vivid Dutch painting, more than he enjoyed the poetry of the transcendental school, must have recurred that day with more than usual emotion to his favourite Wordsworthian poem. Soon after his wife's death, he had remarked in his diary how finely "the effect of grief upon persons who like myself are highly susceptible of humour" had been "touched by Wordsworth in the character of the merry village teacher, Matthew, whom Jeffrey profanely calls a half-crazy, sentimental person."[59] And long before this time, during the brightest period of his life, Scott had made the old Antiquary of his novel quote the same poem of Wordsworth's, in a passage where the period of life at which he had now arrived is anticipated with singular pathos and force. "It is at such moments as these," says Mr. Oldbuck, "that we feel the changes of time. The same objects are before us--those inanimate things which we have gazed on in wayward infancy and impetuous youth, in anxious and scheming manhood--they are permanent and the same; but when we look upon them in cold, unfeeling old age, can we, changed in our temper, our pursuits, our feelings,--changed in our form, our limbs, and our strength,--can we be ourselves called the same? or do we not rather look back with a sort of wonder upon our former selves as beings separate and distinct from what we now are? The philosopher who appealed from Philip inflamed with wine to Philip in his hours of sobriety, did not claim a judge so different as if he had appealed from Philip in his youth to Philip in his old age. I cannot but be touched with the feeling so beautifully expressed in a poem which I have heard repeated:-- 'My eyes are dim with childish tears, My heart is idly stirr'd, For the same sound is in my ears Which in those days I heard. Thus fares it still in our decay, And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what age takes away Than what it leaves behind.'"[60] Sir Walter's memory, which, in spite of the slight failure of brain and the mild illusions to which, on the subject of his own prospects, he was now liable, had as yet been little impaired--indeed, he could still quote whole pages from all his favourite authors--must have recurred to those favourite Wordsworthian lines of his with singular force, as, with Wordsworth for his companion, he gazed on the refuge of the last Minstrel of his imagination for the last time, and felt in himself how much of joy in the sight, age had taken away, and how much, too, of the habit of expecting it, it had unfortunately left behind. Whether Sir Walter recalled this poem of Wordsworth's on this occasion or not--and if he recalled it, his delight in giving pleasure would assuredly have led him to let Wordsworth know that he recalled it--the mood it paints was unquestionably that in which his last day at Abbotsford was passed. In the evening, referring to the journey which was to begin the next day, he remarked that Fielding and Smollett had been driven abroad by declining health, and that they had never returned; while Wordsworth--willing perhaps to bring out a brighter feature in the present picture--regretted that the last days of those two great novelists had not been surrounded by due marks of respect. With Sir Walter, as he well knew, it was different. The Liberal Government that he had so bitterly opposed were pressing on him signs of the honour in which he was held, and a ship of his Majesty's navy had been placed at his disposal to take him to the Mediterranean. And Wordsworth himself added his own more durable token of reverence. As long as English poetry lives, Englishmen will know something of that last day of the last Minstrel at Newark:-- "Grave thoughts ruled wide on that sweet day, Their dignity installing In gentle bosoms, while sere leaves Were on the bough or falling; But breezes play'd, and sunshine gleam'd The forest to embolden, Redden'd the fiery hues, and shot Transparence through the golden. "For busy thoughts the stream flow'd on In foamy agitation; And slept in many a crystal pool For quiet contemplation: No public and no private care The free-born mind enthralling, We made a day of happy hours, Our happy days recalling. * * * * * "And if, as Yarrow through the woods And down the meadow ranging, Did meet us with unalter'd face, Though we were changed and changing; If _then_ some natural shadow spread Our inward prospect over, The soul's deep valley was not slow Its brightness to recover. "Eternal blessings on the Muse And her divine employment, The blameless Muse who trains her sons For hope and calm enjoyment; Albeit sickness lingering yet Has o'er their pillow brooded, And care waylays their steps--a sprite Not easily eluded. * * * * * "Nor deem that localized Romance Plays false with our affections; Unsanctifies our tears--made sport For fanciful dejections: Ah, no! the visions of the past Sustain the heart in feeling Life as she is--our changeful Life With friends and kindred dealing. "Bear witness ye, whose thoughts that day In Yarrow's groves were centred, Who through the silent portal arch Of mouldering Newark enter'd; And clomb the winding stair that once Too timidly was mounted By the last Minstrel--not the last!-- Ere he his tale recounted." Thus did the meditative poetry, the day of which was not yet, do honour to itself in doing homage to the Minstrel of romantic energy and martial enterprise, who, with the school of poetry he loved, was passing away. On the 23rd September Scott left Abbotsford, spending five days on his journey to London; nor would he allow any of the old objects of interest to be passed without getting out of the carriage to see them. He did not leave London for Portsmouth till the 23rd October, but spent the intervening time in London, where he took medical advice, and with his old shrewdness wheeled his chair into a dark corner during the physicians' absence from the room to consult, that he might read their faces clearly on their return without their being able to read his. They recognized traces of brain disease, but Sir Walter was relieved by their comparatively favourable opinion, for he admitted that he had feared insanity, and therefore had "feared _them_." On the 29th October he sailed for Malta, and on the 20th November Sir Walter insisted on being landed on a small volcanic island which had appeared four months previously, and which disappeared again in a few days, and on clambering about its crumbling lava, in spite of sinking at nearly every step almost up to his knees, in order that he might send a description of it to his old friend Mr. Skene. On the 22nd November he reached Malta, where he looked eagerly at the antiquities of the place, for he still hoped to write a novel--and, indeed, actually wrote one at Naples, which was never published, called _The Siege of Malta_--on the subject of the Knights of Malta, who had interested him so much in his youth. From Malta Scott went to Naples, which he reached on the 17th December, and where he found much pleasure in the society of Sir William Gell, an invalid like himself, but not one who, like himself, struggled against the admission of his infirmities, and refused to be carried when his own legs would not safely carry him. Sir William Gell's dog delighted the old man; he would pat it and call it "Poor boy!" and confide to Sir William how he had at home "two very fine favourite dogs, so large that I am always afraid they look too large and too feudal for my diminished income." In all his letters home he gave some injunction to Mr. Laidlaw about the poor people and the dogs. On the 22nd of March, 1832, Goethe died, an event which made a great impression on Scott, who had intended to visit Weimar on his way back, on purpose to see Goethe, and this much increased his eager desire to return home. Accordingly on the 16th of April, the last day on which he made any entry in his diary, he quitted Naples for Rome, where he stayed long enough only to let his daughter see something of the place, and hurried off homewards on the 21st of May. In Venice he was still strong enough to insist on scrambling down into the dungeons adjoining the Bridge of Sighs; and at Frankfort he entered a bookseller's shop, when the man brought out a lithograph of Abbotsford, and Scott remarking, "I know that already, sir," left the shop unrecognized, more than ever craving for home. At Nimeguen, on the 9th of June, while in a steamboat on the Rhine, he had his most serious attack of apoplexy, but would not discontinue his journey, was lifted into an English steamboat at Rotterdam on the 11th of June, and arrived in London on the 13th. There he recognized his children, and appeared to expect immediate death, as he gave them repeatedly his most solemn blessing, but for the most part he lay at the St. James's Hotel, in Jermyn Street, without any power to converse. There it was that Allan Cunningham, on walking home one night, found a group of working men at the corner of the street, who stopped him and asked, "as if there was but one death-bed in London, 'Do you know, sir, if this is the street where he is lying?'" According to the usual irony of destiny, it was while the working men were doing him this hearty and unconscious homage, that Sir Walter, whenever disturbed by the noises of the street, imagined himself at the polling-booth of Jedburgh, where the people had cried out, "Burk Sir Walter." And it was while lying here,--only now and then uttering a few words,--that Mr. Lockhart says of him, "He expressed his will as determinedly as ever, and expressed it with the same apt and good-natured irony that he was wont to use." Sir Walter's great and urgent desire was to return to Abbotsford, and at last his physicians yielded. On the 7th July he was lifted into his carriage, followed by his trembling and weeping daughters, and so taken to a steamboat, where the captain gave up his private cabin--a cabin on deck--for his use. He remained unconscious of any change till after his arrival in Edinburgh, when, on the 11th July, he was placed again in his carriage, and remained in it quite unconscious during the first two stages of the journey to Tweedside. But as the carriage entered the valley of the Gala, he began to look about him. Presently he murmured a name or two, "Gala water, surely,--Buckholm,--Torwoodlee." When the outline of the Eildon hills came in view, Scott's excitement was great, and when his eye caught the towers of Abbotsford, he sprang up with a cry of delight, and while the towers remained in sight it took his physician, his son-in-law, and his servant, to keep him in the carriage. Mr. Laidlaw was waiting for him, and he met him with a cry, "Ha! Willie Laidlaw! O, man, how often I have thought of you!" His dogs came round his chair and began to fawn on him and lick his hands, while Sir Walter smiled or sobbed over them. The next morning he was wheeled about his garden, and on the following morning was out in this way for a couple of hours; within a day or two he fancied that he could write again, but on taking the pen into his hand, his fingers could not clasp it, and he sank back with tears rolling down his cheek. Later, when Laidlaw said in his hearing that Sir Walter had had a little repose, he replied, "No, Willie; no repose for Sir Walter but in the grave." As the tears rushed from his eyes, his old pride revived. "Friends," he said, "don't let me expose myself--get me to bed,--that is the only place." After this Sir Walter never left his room. Occasionally he dropped off into delirium, and the old painful memory,--that cry of "Burk Sir Walter,"--might be again heard on his lips. He lingered, however, till the 21st September,--more than two months from the day of his reaching home, and a year from the day of Wordsworth's arrival at Abbotsford before his departure for the Mediterranean, with only one clear interval of consciousness, on Monday, the 17th September. On that day Mr. Lockhart was called to Sir Walter's bedside with the news that he had awakened in a state of composure and consciousness, and wished to see him. "'Lockhart,' he said, 'I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man,--be virtuous,--be religious,--be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here.' He paused, and I said, 'Shall I send for Sophia and Anne?' 'No,' said he, 'don't disturb them. Poor souls! I know they were up all night. God bless you all!'" With this he sank into a very tranquil sleep, and, indeed, he scarcely afterwards gave any sign of consciousness except for an instant on the arrival of his sons. And so four days afterwards, on the day of the autumnal equinox in 1832, at half-past one in the afternoon, on a glorious autumn day, with every window wide open, and the ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles distinctly audible in his room, he passed away, and "his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes." He died a month after completing his sixty-first year. Nearly seven years earlier, on the 7th December, 1825, he had in his diary taken a survey of his own health in relation to the age reached by his father and other members of his family, and had stated as the result of his considerations, "Square the odds and good night, Sir Walter, about sixty. I care not if I leave my name unstained and my family property settled. _Sat est vixisse._" Thus he lived just a year--but a year of gradual death--beyond his own calculation. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 59: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 63.] [Footnote 60: _The Antiquary_, chap. x.] CHAPTER XVII. THE END OF THE STRUGGLE. Sir Walter certainly left his "name unstained," unless the serious mistakes natural to a sanguine temperament such as his, are to be counted as stains upon his name; and if they are, where among the sons of men would you find many unstained names as noble as his with such a stain upon it? He was not only sensitively honourable in motive, but, when he found what evil his sanguine temper had worked, he used his gigantic powers to repair it, as Samson used his great strength to repair the mischief he had inadvertently done to Israel. But with all his exertions he had not, when death came upon him, cleared off much more than half his obligations. There was still 54,000_l._ to pay. But of this, 22,000_l._ was secured in an insurance on his life, and there were besides a thousand pounds or two in the hands of the trustees, which had not been applied to the extinction of the debt. Mr. Cadell, his publisher, accordingly advanced the remaining 30,000_l._ on the security of Sir Walter's copyrights, and on the 21st February, 1833, the general creditors were paid in full, and Mr. Cadell remained the only creditor of the estate. In February, 1847, Sir Walter's son, the second baronet, died childless; and in May, 1847, Mr. Cadell gave a discharge in full of all claims, including the bond for 10,000_l._ executed by Sir Walter during the struggles of Constable and Co. to prevent a failure, on the transfer to him of all the copyrights of Sir Walter, including "the results of some literary exertions of the sole surviving executor," which I conjecture to mean the copyright of the admirable biography of Sir Walter Scott in ten volumes, to which I have made such a host of references--probably the most perfect specimen of a biography rich in great materials, which our language contains. And thus, nearly fifteen years after Sir Walter's death, the debt which, within six years, he had more than half discharged, was at last, through the value of the copyrights he had left behind him, finally extinguished, and the small estate of Abbotsford left cleared. Sir Walter's effort to found a new house was even less successful than the effort to endow it. His eldest son died childless. In 1839 he went to Madras, as Lieutenant-Colonel of the 15th Hussars, and subsequently commanded that regiment. He was as much beloved by the officers of his regiment as his father had been by his own friends, and was in every sense an accomplished soldier, and one whose greatest anxiety it was to promote the welfare of the privates as well as of the officers of his regiment. He took great pains in founding a library for the soldiers of his corps, and his only legacy out of his own family was one of 100_l._ to this library. The cause of his death was his having exposed himself rashly to the sun in a tiger-hunt, in August, 1846; he never recovered from the fever which was the immediate consequence. Ordered home for his health, he died near the Cape of Good Hope, on the 8th of February, 1847. His brother Charles died before him. He was rising rapidly in the diplomatic service, and was taken to Persia by Sir John MacNeill, on a diplomatic mission, as attaché and private secretary. But the climate struck him down, and he died at Teheran, almost immediately on his arrival, on the 28th October, 1841. Both the sisters had died previously. Anne Scott, the younger of the two, whose health had suffered greatly during the prolonged anxiety of her father's illness, died on the Midsummer-day of the year following her father's death; and Sophia, Mrs. Lockhart, died on the 17th May, 1837. Sir Walter's eldest grandchild, John Hugh Lockhart, for whom the _Tales of a Grandfather_ were written, died before his grandfather; indeed Sir Walter heard of the child's death at Naples. The second son, Walter Scott Lockhart Scott, a lieutenant in the army, died at Versailles, on the 10th January, 1853. Charlotte Harriet Jane Lockhart, who was married in 1847 to James Robert Hope-Scott, and succeeded to the Abbotsford estate, died at Edinburgh, on the 26th October, 1858, leaving three children, of whom only one survives. Walter Michael and Margaret Anne Hope-Scott both died in infancy. The only direct descendant, therefore, of Sir Walter Scott, is now Mary Monica Hope-Scott who was born on the 2nd October, 1852, the grandchild of Mrs. Lockhart, and the great-grandchild of the founder of Abbotsford. There is something of irony in such a result of the Herculean labours of Scott to found and endow a new branch of the clan of Scott. When fifteen years after his death the estate was at length freed from debt, all his own children and the eldest of his grandchildren were dead; and now forty-six years have elapsed, and there only remains one girl of his descendants to borrow his name and live in the halls of which he was so proud. And yet this, and this only, was wanting to give something of the grandeur of tragedy to the end of Scott's great enterprise. He valued his works little compared with the house and lands which they were to be the means of gaining for his descendants; yet every end for which he struggled so gallantly is all but lost, while his works have gained more of added lustre from the losing battle which he fought so long, than they could ever have gained from his success. What there was in him of true grandeur could never have been seen, had the fifth act of his life been less tragic than it was. Generous, large-hearted, and magnanimous as Scott was, there was something in the days of his prosperity that fell short of what men need for their highest ideal of a strong man. Unbroken success, unrivalled popularity, imaginative effort flowing almost as steadily as the current of a stream,--these are characteristics, which, even when enhanced as they were in his case, by the power to defy physical pain, and to live in his imaginative world when his body was writhing in torture, fail to touch the heroic point. And there was nothing in Scott, while he remained prosperous, to relieve adequately the glare of triumphant prosperity. His religious and moral feeling, though strong and sound, was purely regulative, and not always even regulative, where his inward principle was not reflected in the opinions of the society in which he lived. The finer spiritual element in Scott was relatively deficient, and so the strength of the natural man was almost too equal, complete, and glaring. Something that should "tame the glaring white" of that broad sunshine, was needed; and in the years of reverse, when one gift after another was taken away, till at length what he called even his "magic wand" was broken, and the old man struggled on to the last, without bitterness, without defiance, without murmuring, but not without such sudden flashes of subduing sweetness as melted away the anger of the teacher of his childhood,--that something seemed to be supplied. Till calamity came, Scott appeared to be a nearly complete natural man, and no more. Then first was perceived in him something above nature, something which could endure though every end in life for which he had fought so boldly should be defeated,--something which could endure and more than endure, which could shoot a soft transparence of its own through his years of darkness and decay. That there was nothing very elevated in Scott's personal or moral, or political or literary ends,--that he never for a moment thought of himself as one who was bound to leave the earth better than he found it,--that he never seems to have so much as contemplated a social or political reform for which he ought to contend,--that he lived to some extent like a child blowing soap-bubbles, the brightest and most gorgeous of which--the Abbotsford bubble--vanished before his eyes, is not a take-off from the charm of his career, but adds to it the very speciality of its fascination. For it was his entire unconsciousness of moral or spiritual efforts, the simple straightforward way in which he laboured for ends of the most ordinary kind, which made it clear how much greater the man was than his ends, how great was the mind and character which prosperity failed to display, but which became visible at once so soon as the storm came down and the night fell. Few men who battle avowedly for the right, battle for it with the calm fortitude, the cheerful equanimity, with which Scott battled to fulfil his engagements and to save his family from ruin. He stood high amongst those-- "Who ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads," among those who have been able to display-- "One equal temper of heroic hearts Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." And it was because the man was so much greater than the ends for which he strove, that there is a sort of grandeur in the tragic fate which denied them to him, and yet exhibited to all the world the infinite superiority of the striver himself to the toy he was thus passionately craving. THE END. 
31809	----	THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON SWANSTON EDITION VOLUME XXIV _Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies have been printed, of which only Two Thousand Copies are for sale._ _This is No._ ....... [Illustration: TEMBINOKA, KING OF APEMAMA, WITH THE HEIR-APPARENT] THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON VOLUME TWENTY-FOUR LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN AND COMPANY MDCCCCXII _For permission to use the_ LETTERS _in the_ SWANSTON EDITION OF STEVENSON'S WORKS _the Publishers are indebted to the kindness of_ MESSRS. METHUEN & CO., LTD. _ALL RIGHTS RESERVED_ THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON EDITED BY SIDNEY COLVIN PARTS VII-X CONTENTS VII. THE RIVIERA AGAIN--MARSEILLES AND HYÈRES PAGE INTRODUCTORY 3 LETTERS-- To the Editor of the New York Tribune 7 To R. A. M. Stevenson 8 To Thomas Stevenson 9 To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 9 To Trevor Haddon 10 [Mrs. R. L. Stevenson to John Addington Symonds] 11 To Charles Baxter 14 To Sidney Colvin 15 To Alison Cunningham 16 To W. E. Henley 17 To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 21 To Thomas Stevenson 22 To W. E. Henley 23 To Mrs. Sitwell 24 To Edmund Gosse 26 To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 27 To the Same 28 To Edmund Gosse 29 To the Same 30 To W. E. Henley 31 To the Same 32 To Sidney Colvin 33 To W. E. Henley 34 To the Same 36 To Jules Simoneau 36 To W. E. Henley 37 To Trevor Haddon 39 To Jules Simoneau 41 To Alison Cunningham 44 To Edmund Gosse 45 To Miss Ferrier 46 To W. E. Henley 47 To Edmund Gosse 50 To Miss Ferrier 52 To W. E. Henley 54 To Sidney Colvin 55 To W. E. Henley 57 To W. H. Low 57 To R. A. M. Stevenson 59 To Thomas Stevenson 62 To W. H. Low 63 To W. E. Henley 65 To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 66 To Sidney Colvin 67 To Sidney Colvin 69 To Mrs. Milne 70 To Miss Ferrier 71 To W. E. Henley 72 To W. H. Low 73 To Thomas Stevenson 74 To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 75 To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 76 To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 78 To W. E. Henley 79 To Sidney Colvin 81 To Mr. Dick 83 To Cosmo Monkhouse 85 To Edmund Gosse 87 To Miss Ferrier 88 To W. H. Low 89 To Thomas Stevenson 90 To W. E. Henley 91 To Trevor Haddon 93 To Cosmo Monkhouse 95 To W. E. Henley 96 To Edmund Gosse 97 To Sidney Colvin 98 To the Same 99 To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 100 To Sidney Colvin 101 To W. E. Henley 102 VIII. LIFE AT BOURNEMOUTH INTRODUCTORY 104 LETTERS-- To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 110 To Andrew Chatto 110 To W. E. Henley 111 To the Rev. Professor Lewis Campbell 113 To W. E. Henley 114 To W. H. Low 115 To Sir Walter Simpson 117 To Thomas Stevenson 118 To the Same 119 To W. E. Henley 120 To Charles Baxter 121 To Miss Ferrier 121 To Charles Baxter 122 To W. E. Henley 123 To Edmund Gosse 125 To Austin Dobson 126 To W. E. Henley 127 To Henry James 127 To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 130 To W. E. Henley 131 To Miss Ferrier 132 To W. E. Henley 133 To H. A. Jones 133 To Sidney Colvin 134 To Thomas Stevenson 135 To Sidney Golvin 136 To the Same 137 To J. A. Symonds 138 To Edmund Gosse 140 To W. H. Low 142 To P. G. Hamerton 143 To W. E. Henley 146 To the Same 147 To William Archer 147 To Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Pennell 149 To Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin 150 To the Same 151 To C. Howard Carrington 152 To Katharine de Mattos 152 To W. H. Low 153 To W. E. Henley 155 To William Archer 156 To Thomas Stevenson 159 To Henry James 160 To William Archer 161 To the Same 163 To W. H. Low 166 To Mrs. de Mattos 167 To Alison Cunningham 167 To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 168 To W. H. Low 169 To Edmund Gosse 173 To James Payn 176 To W. H. Low 177 To Charles J. Guthrie 178 To Thomas Stevenson 179 To C. W. Stoddard 180 To Edmund Gosse 181 To J. A. Symonds 183 To F. W. H. Myers 184 To W. H. Low 185 To Sidney Colvin 186 To Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin 187 To Sidney Colvin 189 To Thomas Stevenson 190 To Miss Monroe 191 To Sidney Colvin 192 To Miss Monroe 193 To Alison Cunningham 196 To R. A. M. Stevenson 196 To the Same 198 To Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 199 To Charles Baxter 200 To Alison Cunningham 200 To Thomas Stevenson 201 To Alison Cunningham 202 To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 202 To T. Watts-Dunton 203 To Alison Cunningham 204 To Frederick Locker-Lampson 205 To the Same 206 To the Same 207 To the Same 208 To Auguste Rodin 209 To Sidney Colvin 210 To Lady Taylor 211 To the Same 213 To Henry James 214 To Frederick Locker-Lampson 215 To Henry James 215 To Auguste Rodin 216 To W. H. Low 217 To Sidney Colvin 219 To Alison Cunningham 220 To Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin 221 To the Same 225 To Miss Rawlinson 227 To Sidney Colvin 228 To Sir Walter Simpson 229 To W. E. Henley 229 To W. H. Low 230 To Miss Adelaide Boodle 231 To Messrs. Chatto and Windus 231 IX. THE UNITED STATES AGAIN WINTER IN THE ADIRONDACKS INTRODUCTORY 233 LETTERS-- To Sidney Colvin 235 To the Same 236 To Henry James 237 To Sidney Colvin 238 To W. E. Henley 239 To R. A. M. Stevenson 240 To Sir Walter Simpson 242 To Edmund Gosse 244 To W. H. Low 245 To Charles Fairchild 246 To William Archer 247 To W. E. Henley 248 To Henry James 249 To Charles Baxter 251 To Charles Scribner 252 To E. L. Burlingame 253 To the Same 254 To John Addington Symonds 254 To W. E. Henley 257 To Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin 258 To Miss Adelaide Boodle 259 To Charles Baxter 260 To Miss Munroe 261 To Henry James 262 To Sidney Colvin 264 To the Same 265 To Miss Adelaide Boodle 267 To Charles Baxter 268 To E. L. Burlingame 268 To William Archer 270 To the Same 272 To the Same 273 To E. L. Burlingame 273 To the Same 274 To Sidney Colvin 275 To the Rev. Dr. Charteris 276 To Edmund Gosse 277 To Henry James 278 To the Rev. Dr. Charteris 279 To S. R. Crockett 280 To Miss Ferrier 282 To Sidney Colvin 283 To Miss Adelaide Boodle 284 To Sidney Colvin 285 To Charles Baxter 286 To Lady Taylor 286 To Homer St. Gaudens 287 To Henry James 288 X. PACIFIC VOYAGES YACHT CASCO--SCHOONER EQUATOR-- S.S. JANET NICOLL INTRODUCTORY 290 LETTERS-- To Sidney Colvin 293 To Charles Baxter 294 To Sidney Colvin 295 To Charles Baxter 296 To Miss Adelaide Boodle 297 To Sidney Colvin 298 To William and Thomas Archer 300 To Charles Baxter 301 To the Same 303 To John Addington Symonds 304 To Thomas Archer 305 [Mrs. R. L. Stevenson to Sidney Colvin] 308 To Sidney Colvin 316 To E. L. Burlingame 319 To Charles Baxter 322 To R. A. M. Stevenson 323 To Marcel Schwob 327 To Charles Baxter 327 To Sidney Colvin 329 [Mrs. R. L. Stevenson to Mrs. Sitwell] 331 To Henry James 334 To Sidney Colvin 336 To E. L. Burlingame 338 To Miss Adelaide Boodle 339 To Charles Baxter 343 To the Same 344 To W. H. Low 345 [Mrs. R. L. Stevenson to Sidney Colvin] 347 To Mrs. R. L. Stevenson 349 To Sidney Colvin 353 To James Payn 355 To Lady Taylor 357 To Sidney Colvin 357 To the Same 362 To E. L. Burlingame 367 To Charles Baxter 369 To Lady Taylor 372 To Dr. Scott 374 To Charles Baxter 375 To E. L. Burlingame 377 To James Payn 381 To Henry James 382 To Mrs. Thomas Stevenson 383 To Charles Baxter 384 To Sidney Colvin 385 To E. L. Burlingame 387 To Charles Baxter 392 To E. L. Burlingame 394 To Henry James 396 To Marcel Schwob 397 To Andrew Lang 399 To Miss Adelaide Boodle 401 To Mrs. Charles Fairchild 403 THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1882-1890 THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON VII THE RIVIERA AGAIN--MARSEILLES AND HYÈRES OCTOBER 1882--AUGUST 1884 In the two years and odd months since his return from California, Stevenson had made no solid gain of health. His winters, and especially his second winter, at Davos had seemed to do him much temporary good; but during the summers in Scotland he had lost as much as he had gained, or more. Loving the Mediterranean shores of France from of old, he now made up his mind to try them once again. As the ways and restrictions of a settled invalid were repugnant to Stevenson's character and instincts, so were the life and society of a regular invalid station depressing and uncongenial to him. He determined, accordingly, to avoid settling in one of these, and hoped to find a suitable climate and habitation that should be near, though not in, some centre of the active and ordinary life of man, with accessible markets, libraries, and other resources. In September 1882 he started with his cousin Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson in search of a new home, and thought first of trying the Languedoc coast, a region new to him. At Montpellier, he was laid up again with a bad bout of his lung troubles; and, the doctor not recommending him to stay, returned to Marseilles. Here he was rejoined by his wife, and after a few days' exploration in the neighbourhood they lighted on what seemed exactly the domicile they wanted. This was a roomy and attractive enough house and garden called the Campagne Defli, near the manufacturing suburb of St. Marcel, in a sheltered position in full view of the shapely coastward hills. By the third week in October they were installed, and in eager hopes of pleasant days to come and a return to working health. These hopes were not realised. Week after week went on, and the hemorrhages and fits of fever and exhaustion did not diminish. Work, except occasional verses, and a part of the story called _The Treasure of Franchard_, would not flow, and the time had to be whiled away with games of patience and other resources of the sick man. Nearly two months were thus passed; during the whole of one of them Stevenson had not been able to go beyond the garden; and by Christmas he had to face the fact that the air of the place was tainted. An epidemic of fever, due to some defect of drainage, broke out, and it became clear that this could be no home for Stevenson. Accordingly, at his wife's instance, though having scarce the strength to travel, he left suddenly for Nice, she staying behind to pack their chattels and wind up their affairs and responsibilities as well as might be. Various misadventures, miscarriages of telegrams, journeys taken at cross purposes and the like, making existence uncomfortably dramatic at the moment, caused the couple to believe for a while that they had fairly lost each other. Mrs. Stevenson allows me to print a letter from herself to Mr. J. A. Symonds vividly relating these predicaments (see p. 11 foll.). At last, in the course of January, they came safely together at Marseilles, and next made a few weeks' stay at Nice, where Stevenson's health quickly mended. Thence they returned as far as Hyères. Staying here through the greater part of February, at the Hôtel des Îles d'Or, and finding the place to their liking, they cast about once more for a resting-place, and were this time successful. The house chosen by the Stevensons at Hyères was not near the sea, but inland, on the road above the old town and beneath the ruins of the castle. The Chalet La Solitude it was called; a cramped but habitable cottage built in the Swiss manner, with a pleasant strip of garden, and a view and situation hardly to be bettered. Here he and his family lived for the next sixteen months (March 1883 to July 1884). To the first part of this period he often afterwards referred as the happiest time of his life. His malady remained quiescent enough to afford, at least to his own buoyant spirit, a strong hope of ultimate recovery. He delighted in his surroundings, and realised for the first time the joys of a true home of his own. The last shadow of a cloud between himself and his parents had long passed away; and towards his father, now in declining health, and often suffering from moods of constitutional depression, the son begins on his part to assume, how touchingly and tenderly will be seen from the following letters, a quasi-paternal attitude of encouragement and monition. At the same time his work on the completion of the _Silverado Squatters_, on _Prince Otto_, the _Child's Garden of Verses_ (for which his own name was _Penny Whistles_), on the _Black Arrow_ (designated hereinafter, on account of its Old English dialect, as "tushery"), and other undertakings prospered well. In the autumn the publication of _Treasure Island_ in book form brought with it the first breath of popular applause. The reader will see how modest a price Stevenson was content, nay, delighted, to receive for this classic. It was two or three years yet before he could earn enough to support himself and his family by literature: a thing he had always been earnestly bent on doing, regarding it as the only justification for his chosen way of life. In the meantime, it must be understood, whatever help he needed from his father was from the hour of his marriage always amply and ungrudgingly given. In September of the same year, 1883, Stevenson had felt deeply the death of his old friend James Walter Ferrier (see the essay _Old Mortality_ and the references in the following letters). But still his health held out fairly, until, in January 1884, on a visit to Nice, he was unexpectedly prostrated anew by an acute congestion of the internal organs, which for the time being brought him to death's door. Returning to his home, his recovery had been only partial when, after four months (May 1884), a recurrence of violent hemorrhages from the lung once more prostrated him completely; soon after which he quitted Hyères, and the epidemic of cholera which broke out there the same summer prevented all thoughts of his return. The Hyères time, both during the happy and hard-working months of March-December 1883, and the semi-convalescence of February-May 1884, was a prolific one in the way of correspondence; and there is perhaps no period of his life when his letters reflect so fully the variety of his moods and the eagerness of his occupations. TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE At Marseilles, while waiting to occupy the house which he had leased in the suburbs of that city, Stevenson learned that his old friend and kind adviser, Mr. James Payn, with whom he had been intimate as sub-editor of the Cornhill Magazine under Mr. Leslie Stephen in the '70's, had been inadvertently represented in the columns of the New York Tribune as a plagiarist of R. L. S. In order to put matters right, he at once sent the following letter both to the Tribune and to the London Athenæum:-- _Terminus Hotel, Marseilles, October 16, 1882._ SIR,--It has come to my ears that you have lent the authority of your columns to an error. More than half in pleasantry--and I now think the pleasantry ill-judged--I complained in a note to my _New Arabian Nights_ that some one, who shall remain nameless for me, had borrowed the idea of a story from one of mine. As if I had not borrowed the ideas of the half of my own! As if any one who had written a story ill had a right to complain of any other who should have written it better! I am indeed thoroughly ashamed of the note, and of the principle which it implies. But it is no mere abstract penitence which leads me to beg a corner of your paper--it is the desire to defend the honour of a man of letters equally known in America and England, of a man who could afford to lend to me and yet be none the poorer; and who, if he would so far condescend, has my free permission to borrow from me all that he can find worth borrowing. Indeed, sir, I am doubly surprised at your correspondent's error. That James Payn should have borrowed from me is already a strange conception. The author of _Lost Sir Massingberd_ and _By Proxy_ may be trusted to invent his own stories. The author of _A Grape from a Thorn_ knows enough, in his own right, of the humorous and pathetic sides of human nature. But what is far more monstrous--what argues total ignorance of the man in question--is the idea that James Payn could ever have transgressed the limits of professional propriety. I may tell his thousands of readers on your side of the Atlantic that there breathes no man of letters more inspired by kindness and generosity to his brethren of the profession, and, to put an end to any possibility of error, I may be allowed to add that I often have recourse, and that I had recourse once more but a few weeks ago, to the valuable practical help which he makes it his pleasure to extend to younger men. I send a duplicate of this letter to a London weekly; for the mistake, first set forth in your columns, has already reached England, and my wanderings have made me perhaps last of the persons interested to hear a word of it.--I am, etc., ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO R. A. M. STEVENSON _Terminus Hotel, Marseille_, _Saturday_ [_October 1882_]. MY DEAR BOB,--We have found a house!--at Saint Marcel, Banlieue de Marseille. In a lovely valley between hills part wooded, part white cliffs; a house of a dining-room, of a fine salon--one side lined with a long divan--three good bedrooms (two of them with dressing-rooms), three small rooms (chambers of _bonne_ and sich), a large kitchen, a lumber room, many cupboards, a back court, a large olive yard, cultivated by a resident _paysan_, a well, a berceau, a good deal of rockery, a little pine shrubbery, a railway station in front, two lines of omnibus to Marseille. £48 per annum. It is called Campagne Defli! query Campagne Debug? The Campagne Demosquito goes on here nightly, and is very deadly. Ere we can get installed, we shall be beggared to the door, I see. I vote for separations; F.'s arrival here, after our separation, was better fun to me than being married was by far. A separation completed is a most valuable property; worth piles.--Ever your affectionate cousin, R. L. S. TO THOMAS STEVENSON _Terminus Hotel, Marseille, le 17th October 1882._ MY DEAR FATHER,--We grow, every time we see it, more delighted with our house. It is five miles out of Marseilles, in a lovely spot, among lovely wooded and cliffy hills--most mountainous in line--far lovelier, to my eyes, than any Alps. To-day we have been out inventorying; and though a mistral blew, it was delightful in an open cab, and our house with the windows open was heavenly, soft, dry, sunny, southern. I fear there are fleas--it is called Campagne Defli--and I look forward to tons of insecticide being employed. I have had to write a letter to the New York Tribune and the Athenæum. Payn was accused of stealing my stories! I think I have put things handsomely for him. Just got a servant!!!--Ever affectionate son, R. L. STEVENSON. Our servant is a Muckle Hash of a Weedy! TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON The next two months' letters had perforce to consist of little save bulletins of back-going health, and consequent disappointment and incapacity for work. _Campagne Defli, St. Marcel, Banlieue de Marseille, November 13, 1882._ MY DEAR MOTHER,--Your delightful letters duly arrived this morning. They were the only good feature of the day, which was not a success. Fanny was in bed--she begged I would not split upon her, she felt so guilty; but as I believe she is better this evening, and has a good chance to be right again in a day or two, I will disregard her orders. I do not go back, but do not go forward--or not much. It is, in one way, miserable--for I can do no work; a very little wood-cutting, the newspapers, and a note about every two days to write, completely exhausts my surplus energy; even Patience I have to cultivate with parsimony. I see, if I could only get to work, that we could live here with comfort, almost with luxury. Even as it is, we should be able to get through a considerable time of idleness. I like the place immensely, though I have seen so little of it--I have only been once outside the gate since I was here! It puts me in mind of a summer at Prestonpans and a sickly child you once told me of. Thirty-two years now finished! My twenty-ninth was in San Francisco, I remember--rather a bleak birthday. The twenty-eighth was not much better; but the rest have been usually pleasant days in pleasant circumstances. Love to you and to my father and to Cummy. From me and Fanny and Wogg. R. L. S. TO TREVOR HADDON _Campagne Defli, St. Marcel, Dec. 29th, 1882._ DEAR SIR,--I am glad you sent me your note, I had indeed lost your address, and was half thinking to try the Ringstown one; but far from being busy, I have been steadily ill. I was but three or four days in London, waiting till one of my friends was able to accompany me, and had neither time nor health to see anybody but some publisher people. Since then I have been worse and better, better and worse, but never able to do any work and for a large part of the time forbidden to write and even to play Patience, that last of civilised amusements. In brief, I have been "the sheer hulk" to a degree almost outside of my experience, and I desire all my friends to forgive me my sins of omission this while back. I only wish you were the only one to whom I owe a letter, or many letters. But you see, at least, you had done nothing to offend me; and I dare say you will let me have a note from time to time, until we shall have another chance to meet.--Yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. An excellent new year to you, and many of them. If you chance to see a paragraph in the papers describing my illness, and the "delicacies suitable to my invalid condition" cooked in copper, and the other ridiculous and revolting yarns, pray regard it as a spectral illusion, and pass by. [MRS. R. L. STEVENSON TO JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS I intercalate here Mrs. Stevenson's extremely vivid and characteristic account of the weird misadventures that befell the pair during their retreat from St. Marcel in search of a healthier home. [_Campagne Defli, St. Marcel, January 1883._] MY DEAR MR. SYMONDS,--What must you think of us? I hardly dare write to you. What do you do when people to whom you have been the dearest of friends requite you by acting like fiends? I do hope you heap coals of fire on their heads in the good old Christian sense. Louis has been very ill again. I hasten to say that he is now better. But I thought at one time he would never be better again. He had continual hemorrhages and became so weak that he was twice insensible in one day, and was for a long time like one dead. At the worst fever broke out in this village, typhus, I think, and all day the death-bells rang, and we could hear the chanting whilst the wretched villagers carried about their dead lying bare to the sun on their coffin-lids, so spreading the contagion through the streets. The evening of the day when Louis was so long insensible the weather changed, becoming very clear and fine and greatly refreshing and reviving him. Then I said if it held good he should start in the morning for Nice and try what a change might do. Just at that time there was not money enough for the two of us, so he had to start alone, though I expected soon to be able to follow him. During the night a peasant-man died in a house in our garden, and in the morning the corpse, hideously swollen in the stomach, was lying on its coffin-lid at our gates. Fortunately it was taken away just before Louis went, and he didn't see it nor hear anything about it until afterwards. I had been back and forth all the morning from the door to the gates, and from the gates to the door, in an agony lest Louis should have to pass it on his way out. I was to have a despatch from Toulon where Louis was to pass the night, two hours from St. Marcel, and another from Nice, some few hours further, the next day. I waited one, two, three, four days, and no word came. Neither telegram nor letter. The evening of the fourth day I went to Marseilles and telegraphed to the Toulon and Nice stations and to the bureau of police. I had been pouring out letters to every place I could think of. The people at Marseilles were very kind and advised me to take no further steps to find my husband. He was certainly dead, they said. It was plain that he stopped at some little station on the road, speechless and dying, and it was now too late to do anything; I had much better return at once to my friends. "Eet ofen 'appens so," said the Secretary, and "Oh yes, all right, very well," added a Swiss in a sympathetic voice. I waited all night at Marseilles and got no answer, all the next day and got no answer; then I went back to St. Marcel and there was nothing there. At eight I started on the train with Lloyd who had come for his holidays, but it only took us to Toulon where again I telegraphed. At last I got an answer the next day at noon. I waited at Toulon for the train I had reason to believe Louis travelled by, intending to stop at every station and inquire for him until I got to Nice. Imagine what those days were to me. I never received any of the letters Louis had written to me, and he was reading the first he had received from me when I knocked at his door. A week afterwards I had an answer from the police. Louis was much better: the change and the doctor, who seems very clever, have done wonderful things for him. It was during this first day of waiting that I received your letter. There was a vague comfort in it like a hand offered in the darkness, but I did not read it until long after. We have had many other wild misadventures, Louis has twice (started) actually from Nice under a misapprehension. At this moment I believe him to be at Marseilles, stopping at the Hotel du Petit Louvre; I am supposed to be packing here at St. Marcel, afterwards we are to go somewhere, perhaps to the Lake of Geneva. My nerves were so shattered by the terrible suspense I endured that memorable week that I have not been fit to do much. When I was returning from Nice a dreadful old man with a fat wife and a weak granddaughter sat opposite me and plied me with the most extraordinary questions. He began by asking if Lloyd was any connection of mine, and ended I believe by asking my mother's maiden name. Another of the questions he put to me was where Louis wished to be buried, and whether I could afford to have him embalmed when he died. When the train stopped the only other passenger, a quiet man in a corner who looked several times as if he wished to interfere and stop the old man but was too shy, came to me and said that he knew Sidney Colvin and he knew you, and that you were both friends of Louis; and that his name was Basil Hammond,[1] and he wished to stay on a day in Marseilles and help me work off my affairs. I accepted his offer with heartfelt thanks. I was extremely ill next day, but we two went about and arranged about giving up this house and what compensation, and did some things that I could not have managed alone. My French is useful only in domestic economy, and even that, I fear, is very curious and much of it patois. Wasn't that a good fellow, and a kind fellow?--I cannot tell you how grateful I am, words are such feeble things--at least for that purpose. For anger, justifiable wrath, they are all too forcible. It was very bad of me not to write to you, we talked of you so often and thought of you so much, and I always said--"now I will write"--and then somehow I could not.... FANNY V. DE G. STEVENSON.] TO CHARLES BAXTER After his Christmas flight to Marseilles and thence to Nice, Stevenson began to mend quickly. In this letter to Mr. Baxter he acknowledges the receipt of a specimen proof, set up for their private amusement, of _Brashiana_, the series of burlesque sonnets he had written at Davos in memory of the Edinburgh publican already mentioned. It should be explained that in their correspondence Stevenson and Mr. Baxter were accustomed to keep up an old play of their student days by merging their identities in those of two fictitious personages, Thomson and Johnson, imaginary types of Edinburgh character, and ex-elders of the Scottish Kirk. _Grand Hotel, Nice, 12th January '83._ DEAR CHARLES,--Thanks for your good letter. It is true, man, God's trüth, what ye say about the body Stevison. The deil himsel, it's my belief, couldnae get the soul harled oot o' the creature's wame, or he had seen the hinder end o' they proofs. Ye crack o' Mæcenas, he's naebody by you! He gied the lad Horace a rax forrit by all accounts; but he never gied him proofs like yon. Horace may hae been a better hand at the clink than Stevison--mind, I'm no sayin' 't--but onyway he was never sae weel prentit. Damned, but it's bonny! Hoo mony pages will there be, think ye? Stevison maun hae sent ye the feck o' twenty sangs--fifteen I'se warrant. Weel, that'll can make thretty pages, gin ye were to prent on ae side only, whilk wad be perhaps what a man o' your _great_ idees would be ettlin' at, man Johnson. Then there wad be the Pre-face, an' prose ye ken prents oot langer than po'try at the hinder end, for ye hae to say things in't. An' then there'll be a title-page and a dedication and an index wi' the first lines like, and the deil an' a'. Man, it'll be grand. Nae copies to be given to the Liberys. I am alane myself, in Nice, they ca't, but damned, I think they micht as well ca't Nesty. The Pile-on,[2] 's they ca't, 's aboot as big as the river Tay at Perth; and it's rainin' maist like Greenock. Dod, I've seen 's had mair o' what they ca' the I-talian at Muttonhole. I-talian! I haenae seen the sun for eicht and forty hours. Thomson's better, I believe. But the body's fair attenyated. He's doon to seeven stane eleeven, an' he sooks awa' at cod liver ile, till it's a fair disgrace. Ye see he tak's it on a drap brandy; and it's my belief, it's just an excuse for a dram. He an' Stevison gang aboot their lane, maistly; they're company to either, like, an' whiles they'll speak o' Johnson. But _he's_ far awa', losh me! Stevison's last book 's in a third edeetion; an' it's bein' translated (like the psaulms of David, nae less) into French; and an eediot they ca' Asher--a kind o' rival of Tauchnitz--is bringin' him oot in a paper book for the Frenchies and the German folk in twa volumes. Sae he's in luck, ye see.--Yours, THOMSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Stevenson here narrates in his own fashion by what generalship he at last got rid of the Campagne Defli without having to pay compensation as his wife expected. _Hotel du Petit Louvre, Marseille, 15 Feb. 1883._ DEAR SIR,--This is to intimate to you that Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson were yesterday safely delivered of a Campagne. The parents are both doing much better than could be expected; particularly the dear papa. There, Colvin, I did it this time. Huge success. The propriétaires were scattered like chaff. If it had not been the agent, may Israel now say, if it had not been the agent who was on our side! But I made the agent march! I threatened law; I was Immense--what do I say?--Immeasurable. The agent, however, behaved well and is a fairly honest little one-eared, white-eyed tom-cat of an opera-going gold-hunter. The propriétaire _non est inventa_; we countermarched her, got in valuators; and in place of a hundred francs in her pocket, she got nothing, and I paid _one_ silver biscuit! It _might_ go further but I am convinced will not, and anyway, I fear not the consequences. The weather is incredible; my heart sings; my health satisfies even my wife. I did jolly well right to come after all and she now admits it. For she broke down as I knew she would, and I from here, without passing a night at the Defli, though with a cruel effusion of coach-hires, took up the wondrous tale and steered the ship through. I now sit crowned with laurel and literally exulting in kudos. The affair has been better managed than our two last winterings,--I am yours, BRABAZON DRUM. TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM The verses referred to in the following are those of the _Child's Garden_. [_Nice, February 1883._] MY DEAR CUMMY,--You must think, and quite justly, that I am one of the meanest rogues in creation. But though I do not write (which is a thing I hate), it by no means follows that people are out of my mind. It is natural that I should always think more or less about you, and still more natural that I should think of you when I went back to Nice. But the real reason why you have been more in my mind than usual is because of some little verses that I have been writing, and that I mean to make a book of; and the real reason of this letter (although I ought to have written to you anyway) is that I have just seen that the book in question must be dedicated to ALISON CUNNINGHAM, the only person who will really understand it, I don't know when it may be ready, for it has to be illustrated, but I hope in the meantime you may like the idea of what is to be; and when the time comes, I shall try to make the dedication as pretty as I can make it. Of course, this is only a flourish, like taking off one's hat; but still, a person who has taken the trouble to write things does not dedicate them to any one without meaning it; and you must just try to take this dedication in place of a great many things that I might have said, and that I ought to have done, to prove that I am not altogether unconscious of the great debt of gratitude I owe you. This little book, which is all about my childhood, should indeed go to no other person but you, who did so much to make that childhood happy. Do you know, we came very near sending for you this winter. If we had not had news that you were ill too, I almost believe we should have done so, we were so much in trouble. I am now very well; but my wife has had a very, very bad spell, through overwork and anxiety, when I was _lost_! I suppose you heard of that. She sends you her love, and hopes you will write to her, though she no more than I deserves it. She would add a word herself, but she is too played out.--I am, ever your old boy, R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY Stevenson was by this time beginning to send home some of the MS. of the _Child's Garden_, the title of which had not yet been settled. The pieces as first numbered are in a different order from that afterwards adopted, but the reader will easily identify the references. [_Nice, March 1883._] MY DEAR LAD,--This is to announce to you the MS. of Nursery Verses, now numbering XLVIII. pieces or 599 verses, which, of course, one might augment _ad infinitum_. But here is my notion to make all clear. I do not want a big ugly quarto; my soul sickens at the look of a quarto. I want a refined octavo, not large--not _larger_ than the Donkey book, at any price. I think the full page might hold four verses of four lines, that is to say, counting their blanks at two, of twenty-two lines in height. The first page of each number would only hold two verses or ten lines, the title being low down. At this rate, we should have seventy-eight or eighty pages of letterpress. The designs should not be in the text, but facing the poem; so that if the artist liked, he might give two pages of design to every poem that turned the leaf, _i.e._ longer than eight lines, _i.e._ to twenty-eight out of the forty-six. I should say he would not use this privilege (?) above five times, and some he might scorn to illustrate at all, so we may say fifty drawings. I shall come to the drawings next. But now you see my book of the thickness, since the drawings count two pages, of 180 pages; and since the paper will perhaps be thicker, of near two hundred by bulk. It is bound in a quiet green with the words in thin gilt. Its shape is a slender, tall octavo. And it sells for the publisher's fancy, and it will be a darling to look at; in short, it would be like one of the original Heine books in type and spacing. Now for the pictures. I take another sheet and begin to jot notes for them when my imagination serves: I will run through the book, writing when I have an idea. There, I have jotted enough to give the artist a notion. Of course, I don't do more than contribute ideas, but I will be happy to help in any and every way. I may as well add another idea; when the artist finds nothing much to illustrate, a good drawing of any _object_ mentioned in the text, were it only a loaf of bread or a candlestick, is a most delightful thing to a young child. I remember this keenly. Of course, if the artist insists on a larger form, I must, I suppose, bow my head. But my idea I am convinced is the best, and would make the book truly, not fashionably pretty. I forgot to mention that I shall have a dedication; I am going to dedicate 'em to Cummy; it will please her, and lighten a little my burthen of ingratitude. A low affair is the Muse business. I will add no more to this lest you should want to communicate with the artist; try another sheet. I wonder how many I'll keep wandering to. O I forgot. As for the title, I think "Nursery Verses" the best. Poetry is not the strong point of the text, and I shrink from any title that might seem to claim that quality; otherwise we might have "Nursery Muses" or "New Songs of Innocence" (but that were a blasphemy), or "Rimes of Innocence": the last not bad, or--an idea--"The Jews' Harp," or--now I have it--"The Penny Whistle." THE PENNY WHISTLE NURSERY VERSES BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ILLUSTRATED BY ---- ---- ---- And here we have an excellent frontispiece, of a party playing on a P. W. to a little ring of dancing children. THE PENNY WHISTLE is the name for me. Fool! this is all wrong, here is the true name:-- PENNY WHISTLES FOR SMALL WHISTLERS. The second title is queried, it is perhaps better, as simply PENNY WHISTLES. Nor you, O Penny Whistler, grudge That I your instrument debase: By worse performers still we judge, And give that fife a second place! Crossed penny whistles on the cover, or else a sheaf of 'em. SUGGESTIONS IV. The procession--the child running behind it. The procession tailing off through the gates of a cloudy city. IX. _Foreign Lands._--This will, I think, want two plates--the child climbing, his first glimpse over the garden wall, with what he sees--the tree shooting higher and higher like the beanstalk, and the view widening. The river slipping in. The road arriving in Fairyland. X. _Windy Nights._--The child in bed listening--the horseman galloping. XII. The child helplessly watching his ship--then he gets smaller, and the doll joyfully comes alive--the pair landing on the island--the ship's deck with the doll steering and the child firing the penny cannon. Query two plates? The doll should never come properly alive. XV. Building of the ship--storing her--Navigation--Tom's accident, the other child paying no attention. XXXI. _The Wind._--I sent you my notion of already. XXXVII. _Foreign Children._--The foreign types dancing in a jing-a-ring, with the English child pushing in the middle. The foreign children looking at and showing each other marvels. The English child at the leeside of a roast of beef. The English child sitting thinking with his picture-books all round him, and the jing-a-ring of the foreign children in miniature dancing over the picture-books. XXXIX. Dear artist, can you do me that? XLII. The child being started off--the bed sailing, curtains and all, upon the sea--the child waking and finding himself at home; the corner of toilette might be worked in to look like the pier. XLVII. The lighted part of the room, to be carefully distinguished from my child's dark hunting grounds. A shaded lamp. R. L. S. TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON _Hôtel des Îles d'Or, Hyères, Var, March 2 [1883]._ MY DEAR MOTHER,--It must be at least a fortnight since we have had a scratch of a pen from you; and if it had not been for Cummy's letter, I should have feared you were worse again: as it is, I hope we shall hear from you to-day or to-morrow at latest. _Health._--Our news is good: Fanny never got so bad as we feared, and we hope now that this attack may pass off in threatenings. I am greatly better, have gained flesh, strength, spirits; eat well, walk a good deal, and do some work without fatigue. I am off the sick list. _Lodging._--We have found a house up the hill, close to the town, an excellent place though very, very little. If I can get the landlord to agree to let us take it by the month just now, and let our month's rent count for the year in case we take it on, you may expect to hear we are again installed, and to receive a letter dated thus:-- La Solitude, Hyères-les-Palmiers, Var. If the man won't agree to that, of course I must just give it up, as the house would be dear enough anyway at 2000 f. However, I hope we may get it, as it is healthy, cheerful, and close to shops, and society, and civilisation. The garden, which is above, is lovely, and will be cool in summer. There are two rooms below with a kitchen, and four rooms above, all told.--Ever your affectionate son, R. L. STEVENSON. TO THOMAS STEVENSON "Cassandra" was a nickname of the elder Mr. Stevenson for his daughter-in-law. The scheme of a play to be founded on _Great Expectations_ was one of a hundred formed in these days and afterwards given up. _Hôtel des Îles d'Or, but my address will be Chalet la Solitude, Hyères-les-Palmiers, Var, France, March 17, 1883._ DEAR SIR,--Your undated favour from Eastbourne came to hand in course of post, and I now hasten to acknowledge its receipt. We must ask you in future, for the convenience of our business arrangements, to struggle with and tread below your feet this most unsatisfactory and uncommercial habit. Our Mr. Cassandra is better; our Mr. Wogg expresses himself dissatisfied with our new place of business; when left alone in the front shop, he bawled like a parrot; it is supposed the offices are haunted. To turn to the matter of your letter, your remarks on _Great Expectations_ are very good. We have both re-read it this winter, and I, in a manner, twice. The object being a play; the play, in its rough outline, I now see: and it is extraordinary how much of Dickens had to be discarded as unhuman, impossible, and ineffective: all that really remains is the loan of a file (but from a grown-up young man who knows what he was doing, and to a convict who, although he does not know it is his father--the father knows it is his son), and the fact of the convict-father's return and disclosure of himself to the son whom he has made rich. Everything else has been thrown aside; and the position has had to be explained by a prologue which is pretty strong. I have great hopes of this piece, which is very amiable and, in places, very strong indeed: but it was curious how Dickens had to be rolled away; he had made his story turn on such improbabilities, such fantastic trifles, not on a good human basis, such as I recognised. You are right about the casts, they were a capital idea; a good description of them at first, and then afterwards, say second, for the lawyer to have illustrated points out of the history of the originals, dusting the particular bust--that was all the development the thing would bear. Dickens killed them. The only really well _executed_ scenes are the riverside ones; the escape in particular is excellent; and I may add, the capture of the two convicts at the beginning. Miss Havisham is, probably, the worst thing in human fiction. But Wemmick I like; and I like Trabb's boy; and Mr. Wopsle as Hamlet is splendid. The weather here is greatly improved, and I hope in three days to be in the chalet. That is, if I get some money to float me there. I hope you are all right again, and will keep better. The month of March is past its mid career; it must soon begin to turn toward the lamb; here it has already begun to do so; and I hope milder weather will pick you up. Wogg has eaten a forpet of rice and milk, his beard is streaming, his eyes wild. I am besieged by demands of work from America. The £50 has just arrived; many thanks; I am now at ease.--Ever your affectionate son, _pro_ Cassandra, Wogg and Co., R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY [_Chalet la Solitude, Hyères, April 1883._] My head is singing with _Otto_; for the first two weeks I wrote and revised and only finished IV chapters: last week, I have just drafted straight ahead, and I have just finished Chapter XI. It will want a heap of oversight and much will not stand, but the pace is good; about 28 Cornhill pp. drafted in seven days, and almost all of it dialogue--indeed I may say all, for I have dismissed the rest very summarily in the draft: one can always tickle at that. At the same rate, the draft should be finished in ten days more; and then I shall have the pleasure of beginning again at the beginning. Ah damned job! I have no idea whether or not Otto will be good. It is all pitched pretty high and stilted; almost like the Arabs, at that; but of course there is love-making in Otto, and indeed a good deal of it. I sometimes feel very weary; but the thing travels--and I like it when I am at it. Remember me kindly to all.--Your ex-contributor, R. L. S. TO MRS. SITWELL His correspondent had at his request been writing and despatching to him fair copies of the various sets of verses for the _Child's Garden_ (as the collection was ultimately called), which he had been from time to time sending home. _Chalet la Solitude, Hyères [April 1883]._ MY DEAR FRIEND,--I am one of the lowest of the--but that's understood. I received the copy, excellently written, with I think only one slip from first to last. I have struck out two, and added five or six; so they now number forty-five; when they are fifty, they shall out on the world. I have not written a letter for a cruel time; I have been, and am, so busy, drafting a long story (for me, I mean), about a hundred Cornhill pages, or say about as long as the Donkey book: _Prince Otto_ it is called, and is, at the present hour, a sore burthen but a hopeful. If I had him all drafted, I should whistle and sing. But no: then I'll have to rewrite him; and then there will be the publishers, alas! But some time or other, I shall whistle and sing, I make no doubt. I am going to make a fortune, it has not yet begun, for I am not yet clear of debt; but as soon as I can, I begin upon the fortune. I shall begin it with a halfpenny, and it shall end with horses and yachts and all the fun of the fair. This is the first real grey hair in my character: rapacity has begun to show, the greed of the protuberant guttler. Well, doubtless, when the hour strikes, we must all guttle and protube. But it comes hard on one who was always so willow-slender and as careless as the daisies. Truly I am in excellent spirits. I have crushed through a financial crisis; Fanny is much better; I am in excellent health, and work from four to five hours a day--from one to two above my average, that is; and we all dwell together and make fortunes in the loveliest house you ever saw, with a garden like a fairy story, and a view like a classical landscape. Little? Well, it is not large. And when you come to see us, you will probably have to bed at the hotel, which is hard by. But it is Eden, madam, Eden and Beulah and the Delectable Mountains and Eldorado and the Hesperidean Isles and Bimini.[3] We both look forward, my dear friend, with the greatest eagerness to have you here. It seems it is not to be this season: but I appoint you with an appointment for next season. You cannot see us else: remember that. Till my health has grown solid like an oak-tree, till my fortune begins really to spread its boughs like the same monarch of the woods (and the acorn, ay de mi! is not yet planted), I expect to be a prisoner among the palms. Yes, it is like old times to be writing you from the Riviera, and after all that has come and gone, who can predict anything? How fortune tumbles men about! Yet I have not found that they change their friends, thank God. Both of our loves to your sister and yourself. As for me, if I am here and happy, I know to whom I owe it; I know who made my way for me in life, if that were all, and I remain, with love, your faithful friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO EDMUND GOSSE "Gilder" in the following is of course the late R. W. Gilder, for many years the admirable editor of the Century Magazine. _Chalet la Solitude, Hyères [April 1883]._ MY DEAR GOSSE,--I am very guilty; I should have written to you long ago; and now, though it must be done, I am so stupid that I can only boldly recapitulate. A phrase of three members is the outside of my syntax. First, I like the _Rover_ better than any of your other verse. I believe you are right, and can make stories in verse. The last two stanzas and one or two in the beginning--but the two last above all--I thought excellent. I suggest a pursuit of the vein. If you want a good story to treat, get the _Memoirs of the Chevalier Johnstone_, and do his passage of the Tay; it would be excellent: the dinner in the field, the woman he has to follow, the dragoons, the timid boatmen, the brave lasses. It would go like a charm; look at it, and you will say you owe me one. Second, Gilder asking me for fiction, I suddenly took a great resolve, and have packed off to him my new work, _The Silverado Squatters_. I do not for a moment suppose he will take it; but pray say all the good words you can for it. I should be awfully glad to get it taken. But if it does not mean dibbs at once, I shall be ruined for life. Pray write soon and beg Gilder your prettiest for a poor gentleman in pecuniary sloughs. Fourth, next time I am supposed to be at death's door write to me like a Christian, and let not your correspondence attend on business.--Yours ever, R. L. S. _P.S._--I see I have led you to conceive the _Squatters_ are fiction. They are not, alas! TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON _Chalet la Solitude, May 5 [1883]._ MY DEAREST PEOPLE,--I have had a great piece of news. There has been offered for _Treasure Island_--how much do you suppose? I believe it would be an excellent jest to keep the answer till my next letter. For two cents I would do so. Shall I? Anyway, I'll turn the page first. No--well--A hundred pounds, all alive, O! A hundred jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid. Is not this wonderful? Add that I have now finished, in draft, the fifteenth chapter of my novel, and have only five before me, and you will see what cause of gratitude I have. The weather, to look at the per contra sheet, continues vomitable; and Fanny is quite out of sorts. But, really, with such cause of gladness, I have not the heart to be dispirited by anything. My child's verse book is finished, dedication and all, and out of my hands--you may tell Cummy; _Silverado_ is done, too, and cast upon the waters; and this novel so near completion, it does look as if I should support myself without trouble in the future. If I have only health, I can, I thank God. It is dreadful to be a great, big man, and not be able to buy bread. O that this may last! I have to-day paid my rent for the half year, till the middle of September, and got my lease: why they have been so long, I know not. I wish you all sorts of good things. When is our marriage day?--Your loving and ecstatic son, TREESURE EILAAN. It has been for me a Treasure Island verily. TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON _La Solitude, Hyères, May 8, 1883._ MY DEAR PEOPLE,--I was disgusted to hear my father was not so well. I have a most troubled existence of work and business. But the work goes well, which is the great affair. I meant to have written a most delightful letter; too tired, however, and must stop. Perhaps I'll find time to add to it ere post. I have returned refreshed from eating, but have little time, as Lloyd will go soon with the letters on his way to his tutor, Louis Robert (!!!!), with whom he learns Latin in French, and French, I suppose, in Latin, which seems to me a capital education. He, Lloyd, is a great bicycler already, and has been long distances; he is most new-fangled over his instrument, and does not willingly converse on other subjects. Our lovely garden is a prey to snails; I have gathered about a bushel, which, not having the heart to slay, I steal forth withal and deposit near my neighbour's garden wall. As a case of casuistry, this presents many points of interest. I loathe the snails, but from loathing to actual butchery, trucidation of multitudes, there is still a step that I hesitate to take. What, then, to do with them? My neighbour's vineyard, pardy! It is a rich, villa, pleasure-garden of course; if it were a peasant's patch, the snails, I suppose, would have to perish. The weather these last three days has been much better, though it is still windy and unkind. I keep splendidly well, and am cruelly busy, with mighty little time even for a walk. And to write at all, under such pressure, must be held to lean to virtue's side. My financial prospects are shining. O if the health will hold, I should easily support myself.--Your ever affectionate son, R. L. S. TO EDMUND GOSSE _La Solitude, Hyères-les-Palmiers, Var [May 20, 1883]._ MY DEAR GOSSE,--I enclose the receipt and the corrections. As for your letter and Gilder's, I must take an hour or so to think; the matter much importing--to me. The £40 was a heavenly thing. I send the MS. by Henley, because he acts for me in all matters, and had the thing, like all my other books, in his detention. He is my unpaid agent--an admirable arrangement for me, and one that has rather more than doubled my income on the spot. If I have been long silent, think how long you were so and blush, sir, blush. I was rendered unwell by the arrival of your cheque, and, like Pepys, "my hand still shakes to write of it." To this grateful emotion, and not to D.T., please attribute the raggedness of my hand. This year I should be able to live and keep my family on my own earnings, and that in spite of eight months and more of perfect idleness at the end of last and beginning of this. It is a sweet thought. This spot, our garden and our view, are sub-celestial. I sing daily with my Bunyan, that great bard, "I dwell already the next door to Heaven!" If you could see my roses, and my aloes, and my fig-marigolds, and my olives, and my view over a plain, and my view of certain mountains as graceful as Apollo, as severe as Zeus, you would not think the phrase exaggerated. It is blowing to-day a _hot_ mistral, which is the devil or a near connection of his. This to catch the post.--Yours affectionately, R. L. STEVENSON. TO EDMUND GOSSE _La Solitude, Hyères-les-Palmiers, Var, France, May 21, 1883._ MY DEAR GOSSE,--The night giveth advice, generally bad advice; but I have taken it. And I have written direct to Gilder to tell him to keep the book[4] back and go on with it in November at his leisure. I do not know if this will come in time; if it doesn't, of course things will go on in the way proposed. The £40, or, as I prefer to put it, the 1000 francs, has been such a piercing sun-ray as my whole grey life is gilt withal. On the back of it I can endure. If these good days of Longman and the Century only last, it will be a very green world, this that we dwell in and that philosophers miscall. I have no taste for that philosophy; give me large sums paid on the receipt of the MS. and copyright reserved, and what do I care about the non-bëent? Only I know it can't last. The devil always has an imp or two in every house, and my imps are getting lively. The good lady, the dear, kind lady, the sweet, excellent lady, Nemesis, whom alone I adore, has fixed her wooden eye upon me. I fall prone; spare me, Mother Nemesis! But catch her! I must now go to bed; for I have had a whoreson influenza cold, and have to lie down all day, and get up only to meals and the delights, June delights, of business correspondence. You said nothing about my subject for a poem. Don't you like it? My own fishy eye has been fixed on it for prose, but I believe it could be thrown out finely in verse, and hence I resign and pass the hand. Twig the compliment?--Yours affectionately, R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY "Tushery" had been a name in use between Stevenson and Mr. Henley for romances of the _Ivanhoe_ type. He now applies it to his own tale of the Wars of the Roses, _The Black Arrow_, written for Mr. Henderson's Young Folks, of which the office was in Red Lion Court. [Hyères, May 1883.] ... The influenza has busted me a good deal; I have no spring, and am headachy. So, as my good Red Lion Courier begged me for another Butcher's Boy--I turned me to--what thinkest 'ou?--to Tushery, by the mass! Ay, friend, a whole tale of tushery. And every tusher tushes me so free, that may I be tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush. _The Black Arrow: A Tale of Tunstall Forest_ is his name: tush! a poor thing! Will _Treasure Island_ proofs be coming soon, think you? I will now make a confession. It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot John Silver in _Treasure Island_. Of course, he is not in any other quality or feature the least like you; but the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you. Otto is, as you say, not a thing to extend my public on. It is queer and a little, little bit free; and some of the parties are immoral; and the whole thing is not a romance, nor yet a comedy; nor yet a romantic comedy; but a kind of preparation of some of the elements of all three in a glass jar. I think it is not without merit, but I am not always on the level of my argument, and some parts are false, and much of the rest is thin; it is more a triumph for myself than anything else; for I see, beyond it, better stuff. I have nine chapters ready, or almost ready, for press. My feeling would be to get it placed anywhere for as much as could be got for it, and rather in the shadow, till one saw the look of it in print.--Ever yours, PRETTY SICK. TO W. E. HENLEY _La Solitude, Hyères-les-Palmiers, May 1883._ MY DEAR LAD,--The books came some time since, but I have not had the pluck to answer: a shower of small troubles having fallen in, or troubles that may be very large. I have had to incur a huge vague debt for cleaning sewers; our house was (of course) riddled with hidden cesspools, but that was infallible. I have the fever, and feel the duty to work very heavy on me at times; yet go it must. I have had to leave _Fontainebleau_, when three hours would finish it, and go full-tilt at tushery for a while. But it will come soon. I think I can give you a good article on Hokusai; but that is for afterwards; _Fontainebleau_ is first in hand. By the way, my view is to give the _Penny Whistles_ to Crane or Greenaway. But Crane, I think, is likeliest; he is a fellow who, at least, always does his best. Shall I ever have money enough to write a play? O dire necessity! A word in your ear: I don't like trying to support myself. I hate the strain and the anxiety; and when unexpected expenses are foisted on me, I feel the world is playing with false dice.--Now I must Tush, adieu. AN ACHING, FEVERED, PENNY-JOURNALIST. A lytle Jape of TUSHERIE. By A. Tusher. The pleasant river gushes Among the meadows green; At home the author tushes; For him it flows unseen. The Birds among the Bushes May wanton on the spray; But vain for him who tushes The brightness of the day! The frog among the rushes Sits singing in the blue. By'r la'kin! but these tushes Are wearisome to do! The task entirely crushes The spirit of the bard: God pity him who tushes-- His task is very hard. The filthy gutter slushes, The clouds are full of rain, But doomed is he who tushes To tush and tush again. At morn with his hair-br_u_shes, Still "tush" he says, and weeps; At night again he tushes, And tushes till he sleeps. And when at length he pushes Beyond the river dark-- 'Las, to the man who tushes, "Tush," shall be God's remark! TO SIDNEY COLVIN [_Chalet la Solitude, Hyères, May 1883._] COLVIN,--The attempt to correspond with you is vain. Well, well, then so be it. I will from time to time write you an insulting letter, brief but monstrous harsh. I regard you in the light of a genteel impostor. Your name figures in the papers but never to a piece of letter-paper: well, well. News. I am well: Fanny been ill but better: _Otto_ about three-quarters done; _Silverado_ proofs a terrible job--it is a most unequal work--new wine in old bottles--large rats, small bottles:[5] as usual, penniless--O but penniless: still, with four articles in hand (say £35) and the £100 for _Silverado_ imminent, not hopeless. Why am I so penniless, ever, ever penniless, ever, ever penny-penny-penniless and dry? The birds upon the thorn, The poppies in the corn, They surely are more fortunate or prudenter than I! In Arabia, everybody is called the Father of something or other for convenience or insult's sake. Thus you are "the Father of Prints," or of "Bummkopferies," or "Father of Unanswered Correspondence." They would instantly dub Henley "the Father of Wooden Legs"; me they would denominate the "Father of Bones," and Matthew Arnold "the Father of Eyeglasses." I have accepted most of the excisions. Proposed titles:-- The Innocent Muse. A Child's Garden of Rhymes. Songs of the Playroom. Nursery Songs. I like the first? R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY _La Solitude, Hyères, May or June 1883._ DEAR LAD,--Snatches in return for yours; for this little once, I'm well to windward of you. Seventeen chapters of _Otto_ are now drafted, and finding I was working through my voice and getting screechy, I have turned back again to rewrite the earlier part. It has, I do believe, some merit: of what order, of course, I am the last to know; and, triumph of triumphs, my wife--my wife who hates and loathes and slates my women--admits a great part of my Countess to be on the spot. Yes, I could borrow, but it is the joy of being before the public, for once. Really, £100 is a sight more than _Treasure Island_ is worth. The reason of my _dèche_? Well, if you begin one house, have to desert it, begin another, and are eight months without doing any work, you will be in a _dèche_ too. I am not in a _dèche_, however; _distingue_--I would fain distinguish; I am rather a swell, but _not solvent_. At a touch the edifice, _ædificium_, might collapse. If my creditors began to babble around me, I would sink with a slow strain of music into the crimson west. The difficulty in my elegant villa is to find oil, _oleum_, for the dam axles. But I've paid my rent until September; and beyond the chemist, the grocer, the baker, the doctor, the gardener, Lloyd's teacher, and the great chief creditor Death, I can snap my fingers at all men. Why will people spring bills on you? I try to make 'em charge me at the moment; they won't, the money goes, the debt remains.--The Required Play is in the _Merry Men_. Q. E. F. I thus render honour to your _flair_; it came on me of a clap; I do not see it yet beyond a kind of sunset glory. But it's there: passion, romance, the picturesque, involved: startling, simple, horrid: a sea-pink in sea-froth! _S'agit de la désenterrer._ "Help!" cries a buried masterpiece. Once I see my way to the year's end, clear, I turn to plays; till then I grind at letters; finish _Otto_; write, say, a couple of my _Traveller's Tales_; and then, if all my ships come home, I will attack the drama in earnest. I cannot mix the skeins. Thus, though I'm morally sure there is a play in _Otto_, I dare not look for it: I shoot straight at the story. As a story, a comedy, I think _Otto_ very well constructed; the echoes are very good, all the sentiments change round, and the points of view are continually, and, I think (if you please), happily contrasted. None of it is exactly funny, but some of it is smiling. R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY The verses alluded to are some of those afterwards collected in _Underwoods_. [_Chalet la Solitude, Hyères, May or June 1883._] DEAR HENLEY,--You may be surprised to hear that I am now a great writer of verses; that is, however, so. I have the mania now like my betters, and faith, if I live till I am forty, I shall have a book of rhymes like Pollock, Gosse, or whom you please. Really, I have begun to learn some of the rudiments of that trade, and have written three or four pretty enough pieces of octosyllabic nonsense, semi-serious, semi-smiling. A kind of prose Herrick, divested of the gift of verse, and you behold the Bard. But I like it. R. L. S. TO JULES SIMONEAU This friend was the keeper of the inn and restaurant where Stevenson had boarded at Monterey in the autumn of 1879. In writing French, as will be seen, Stevenson had always more grip of idiom than of grammar. [_La Solitude, Hyères, May or June 1883_.] MON CHER ET BON SIMONEAU,--J'ai commencé plusieurs fois de vous écrire; et voilà-t-il pas qu'un empêchement quelconque est arrivé toujours. La lettre ne part pas; et je vous laisse toujours dans le droit de soupçonner mon coeur. Mon bon ami, ne pensez pas que je vous ai oublié ou que je vous oublierai jamais. Il n'en est de rien. Votre bon souvenir me tient de bien près, et je le garderai jusqu'à la mort. J'ai failli mourir de bien près; mais me voici bien rétabli, bien que toujours un peu chétif et malingre. J'habite, comme vous voyez, la France. Je travaille beaucoup, et je commence à ne pas être le dernier; déjà on me dispute ce que j'écris, et je n'ai pas à me plaindre de ce que l'on appelle les honoraires. Me voici alors très affairé, très heureux dans mon ménage, gâté par ma femme, habitant la plus petite maisonette dans le plus beau jardin du monde, et voyant de mes fen êtres la mer, les isles d'Hyères, et les belles collines, montagnes et forts de Toulon. Et vous, mon très cher ami? Comment celà va-t-il? Comment vous portez-vous? Comment va le commerce? Comment aimez vous le pays? et l'enfant? et la femme? Et enfin toutes les questions possibles. Écrivez-moi donc bien vite, cher Simoneau. Et quant à moi, je vous promets que vous entendrez bien vîte parler de moi; je vous _récrirai_ sous peu, et je vous enverrai un de mes livres. Ceci n'est qu'un serrement de main, _from the bottom of my heart, dear and kind old man_.--Your friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY The "new dictionary" means, of course, the first instalments of the great Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, edited by Dr. J. A. H. Murray. _La Solitude, Hyères [June 1883]._ DEAR LAD,--I was delighted to hear the good news about ----. Bravo, he goes uphill fast. Let him beware of vanity, and he will go higher; let him be still discontented, and let him (if it might be) see the merits and not the faults of his rivals, and he may swarm at last to the top-gallant. There is no other way. Admiration is the only road to excellence; and the critical spirit kills, but envy and injustice are putrefaction on its feet. Thus far the moralist. The eager author now begs to know whether you may have got the other Whistles, and whether a fresh proof is to be taken; also whether in that case the dedication should not be printed therewith; _B_ulk _D_elights _P_ublishers (original aphorism; to be said sixteen times in succession as a test of sobriety). Your wild and ravening commands were received; but cannot be obeyed. And anyway, I do assure you I am getting better every day; and if the weather would but turn, I should soon be observed to walk in hornpipes. Truly I am on the mend. I am still very careful. I have the new dictionary; a joy, a thing of beauty, and--bulk. I shall be raked i' the mools before it's finished; that is the only pity; but meanwhile I sing. I beg to inform you that I, Robert Louis Stevenson, author of _Brashiana_ and other works, am merely beginning to commence to prepare to make a first start at trying to understand my profession. O the height and depth of novelty and worth in any art! and O that I am privileged to swim and shoulder through such oceans! Could one get out of sight of land--all in the blue? Alas not, being anchored here in flesh, and the bonds of logic being still about us. But what a great space and a great air there is in these small shallows where alone we venture! and how new each sight, squall, calm, or sunrise! An art is a fine fortune, a palace in a park, a band of music, health, and physical beauty; all but love--to any worthy practiser. I sleep upon my art for a pillow; I waken in my art; I am unready for death, because I hate to leave it. I love my wife, I do not know how much, nor can, nor shall, unless I lost her; but while I can conceive my being widowed, I refuse the offering of life without my art. I _am_ not but in my art; it is me; I am the body of it merely. And yet I produce nothing, am the author of _Brashiana_ and other works: tiddy-iddity--as if the works one wrote were anything but 'prentice's experiments. Dear reader, I deceive you with husks, the real works and all the pleasure are still mine and incommunicable. After this break in my work, beginning to return to it, as from light sleep, I wax exclamatory, as you see. Sursum Corda: Heave ahead: Here's luck. Art and Blue Heaven, April and God's Larks. Green reeds and the sky-scattering river. A stately music. Enter God! R. L. S. Ay, but you know, until a man can write that "Enter God," he has made no art! None! Come, let us take counsel together and make some! TO TREVOR HADDON During the height of the Provençal summer, for July and part of August, Stevenson went with his wife to the Baths of Royat in Auvergne (travelling necessarily by way of Clermont-Ferrand). His parents joined them at Royat for part of their visit. This and possibly the next following letters were written during the trip. The news here referred to was that his correspondent had won a scholarship at the Slade School. _La Solitude, Hyères. But just now writing from Clermont-Ferrand, July 5, 1883._ DEAR MR. HADDON,--Your note with its piece of excellent news duly reached me. I am delighted to hear of your success: selfishly so; for it is pleasant to see that one whom I suppose I may call an admirer is no fool. I wish you more and more prosperity, and to be devoted to your art. An art is the very gist of life; it grows with you; you will never weary of an art at which you fervently and superstitiously labour. Superstitiously: I mean, think more of it than it deserves; be blind to its faults, as with a wife or father; forget the world in a technical trifle. The world is very serious; art is the cure of that, and must be taken very lightly; but to take art lightly, you must first be stupidly owlishly in earnest over it. When I made Casimir say "Tiens" at the end, I made a blunder. I thought it was what Casimir would have said and I put it down. As your question shows, it should have been left out. It was a "patch" of realism, and an anti-climax. Beware of realism; it is the devil; 'tis one of the means of art, and now they make it the end! And such is the farce of the age in which a man lives, that we all, even those of us who most detest it, sin by realism. Notes for the student of any art. 1. Keep an intelligent eye upon _all_ the others. It is only by doing so that you come to see what Art is: Art is the end common to them all, it is none of the points by which they differ. 2. In this age beware of realism. 3. In your own art, bow your head over technique. Think of technique when you rise and when you go to bed. Forget purposes in the meanwhile; get to love technical processes; to glory in technical successes; get to see the world entirely through technical spectacles, to see it entirely in terms of what you can do. Then when you have anything to say, the language will be apt and copious. My health is better. I have no photograph just now; but when I get one you shall have a copy. It will not be like me; sometimes I turn out a capital, fresh bank clerk; once I came out the image of Runjeet Singh; again the treacherous sun has fixed me in the character of a travelling evangelist. It's quite a lottery; but whatever the next venture proves to be, soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, you shall have a proof. Reciprocate. The truth is I have no appearance; a certain air of disreputability is the one constant character that my face presents: the rest change like water. But still I am lean, and still disreputable. Cling to your youth. It is an artistic stock in trade. Don't give in that you are ageing, and you won't age. I have exactly the same faults and qualities still; only a little duller, greedier and better tempered; a little less tolerant of pain and more tolerant of tedium. The last is a great thing for life but--query?--a bad endowment for art? Another note for the art student. 4. See the good in other people's work; it will never be yours. See the bad in your own, and don't cry about it; it will be there always. Try to use your faults; at any rate use your knowledge of them, and don't run your head against stone walls. Art is not like theology; nothing is forced. You have not to represent the world. You have to represent only what you can represent with pleasure and effect, and the only way to find out what that is is by technical exercise.--Yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO JULES SIMONEAU [_Hyères or Royat, Summer 1883._] MY DEAR FRIEND SIMONEAU,--It would be difficult to tell how glad I was to get your letter with your good news and kind remembrances, it did my heart good to the bottom. I shall never forget the good time we had together, the many long talks, the games of chess, the flute on an occasion, and the excellent food. Now I am in clover, only my health a mere ruined temple; the ivy grows along its shattered front, otherwise, I have no wish that is not fulfilled: a beautiful large garden, a fine view of plain, sea and mountain; a wife that suits me down to the ground, and a barrel of good Beaujolais. To this I must add that my books grow steadily more popular, and if I could only avoid illness I should be well to do for money, as it is, I keep pretty near the wind. Have I other means? I doubt it. I saw François here; and it was in some respects sad to see him, pining in the ungenial life and not, I think, very well pleased with his relatives. The young men, it is true, adored him, but his niece tried to pump me about what money I had, with an effrontery I was glad to disappoint. How he spoke of you I need not tell you. He is your true friend, dear Simoneau, and your ears should have tingled when we met, for we talked of little but yourself. The papers you speak about are past dates but I will send you a paper from time to time, as soon as I am able to go out again. We were both well pleased to hear of your marriage, and both Mrs. Stevenson and myself beg to be remembered with the kindest wishes to Mrs. Simoneau. I am glad you have done this. All races are better away from their own country; but I think you French improve the most of all. At home, I like you well enough, but give me the Frenchman abroad! Had you stayed at home, you would probably have acted otherwise. Consult your consciousness, and you will think as I do. How about a law condemning the people of every country to be educated in another, to change sons in short? Should we not gain all around? Would not the Englishman unlearn hypocrisy? Would not the Frenchman learn to put some heart into his friendships? I name what strikes me as the two most obvious defects of the two nations. The French might also learn to be a little less rapacious to women and the English to be a little more honest. Indeed their merits and defects make a balance. The English. The French. hypocrites free from hypocrisy good, stout reliable friends incapable of friendship dishonest to the root fairly honest fairly decent to women. rather indecent to women. There is my table, not at all the usual one, but yes, I think you will agree with it. And by travel, each race can cure much of its defects and acquire much of the others' virtues. Let us say that you and I are complete! You are anyway: I would not change a hair of you. The Americans hold the English faults: dishonest and hypocrites, perhaps not so strongly but still to the exclusion of others. It is strange that such mean defects should be so hard to eradicate, after a century of separation, and so great an admixture of other blood. Your stay in Mexico must have been interesting indeed: and it is natural you should be so keen against the Church on this side, we have a painful exhibition of the other side: the _libre-penseur_ a mere priest without the sacraments, the narrowest tyranny of intolerance popular, and in fact a repetition in the XIXth century of theological ill-feeling minus the sermons. We have speeches instead. I met the other day one of the new lay schoolmasters of France; a pleasant cultivated man, and for some time listened to his ravings. "In short," I said, "you are like Louis Quatorze, you wish to drive out of France all who do not agree with you." I thought he would protest; not he!--"Oui, Monsieur," was his answer. And that is the cause of liberty and free thought! But the race of man was born tyrannical; doubtless Adam beat Eve, and when all the rest are dead the last man will be found beating the last dog. In the land of Padre d. R. you see the old tyranny still active on its crutches; in this land, I begin to see the new, a fat fellow, out of leading-strings and already killing flies. This letter drones along unprofitably enough. Let me put a period to my divagations. Write again soon, and let me hear good news of you, and I will try to be more quick of answer. And with the best wishes to yourself and all your family, believe me, your sincere friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM The persons mentioned below in the third paragraph are cousins of the writer and playmates of his childhood; two of them, christened Lewis like himself after their Balfour grandfather, had been nicknamed after their birthplaces "Delhi" and "Cramond" to avoid confusion. Mount Chessie is a beautiful place near Lasswade: "Cummy" has described his delight when she cut whistles for him there out of a plane-tree. [_Hyères or Royat, Summer_ 1883.] MY DEAR CUMMY,--Yes, I own I am a real bad correspondent, and am as bad as can be in most directions. I have been adding some more poems to your book. I wish they would look sharp about it; but, you see, they are trying to find a good artist to make the illustrations, without which no child would give a kick for it. It will be quite a fine work, I hope. The dedication is a poem too, and has been quite a long while written, but I do not mean you to see it till you get the book; keep the jelly for the last, you know, as you would often recommend in former days, so now you can take your own medicine. I am very sorry to hear you have been so poorly; I have been very well; it used to be quite the other way, used it not? Do you remember making the whistle at Mount Chessie? I do not think it _was_ my knife; I believe it was yours; but rhyme is a very great monarch, and goes before honesty, in these affairs at least. Do you remember, at Warriston, one autumn Sunday, when the beech nuts were on the ground, seeing heaven open? I would like to make a rhyme of that, but cannot. Is it not strange to think of all the changes: Bob, Cramond, Delhi, Minnie, and Henrietta, all married, and fathers and mothers, and your humble servant just the one point better off? And such a little while ago all children together! The time goes swift and wonderfully even; and if we are no worse than we are, we should be grateful to the power that guides us. For more than a generation I have now been to the fore in this rough world, and been most tenderly helped, and done cruelly wrong, and yet escaped; and here I am still, the worse for wear, but with some fight in me still, and not unthankful--no, surely not unthankful, or I were then the worst of human things! My little dog is a very much better child in every way, both more loving and more amiable; but he is not fond of strangers, and is, like most of his kind, a great, specious humbug. Fanny has been ill, but is much better again; she now goes donkey rides with an old woman, who compliments her on her French. That old woman--seventy odd--is in a parlous spiritual state. Pretty soon, in the new sixpenny illustrated magazine, Wogg's picture is to appear: this is a great honour! And the poor soul, whose vanity would just explode if he could understand it, will never be a bit the wiser!--With much love, in which Fanny joins, believe me, your affectionate boy, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO EDMUND GOSSE The reference is to Mr. Gosse's volume called _Seventeenth Century Studies_. [_Hyères or Royat, Summer 1883._] MY DEAR GOSSE,--I have now leisurely read your volume; pretty soon, by the way, you will receive one of mine. It is a pleasant, instructive, and scholarly volume. The three best being, quite out of sight--Crashaw, Otway, and Etherege. They are excellent; I hesitate between them; but perhaps Crashaw is the most brilliant. Your Webster is not my Webster; nor your Herrick my Herrick. On these matters we must fire a gun to leeward, show our colours, and go by. Argument is impossible. They are two of my favourite authors: Herrick above all: I suppose they are two of yours. Well, Janus-like, they do behold us two with diverse countenances, few features are common to these different avatars; and we can but agree to differ, but still with gratitude to our entertainers, like two guests at the same dinner, one of whom takes clear and one white soup. By my way of thinking, neither of us need be wrong. The other papers are all interesting, adequate, clear, and with a pleasant spice of the romantic. It is a book you may be well pleased to have so finished, and will do you much good. The Crashaw is capital: capital; I like the taste of it. Preface clean and dignified. The handling throughout workmanlike, with some four or five touches of preciosity, which I regret. With my thanks for information, entertainment, and a pleasurable envy here and there.--Yours affectionately, R. L. S. TO MISS FERRIER Soon after he was settled again at Hyères, Stevenson had a great shock in the death of one of the oldest and most intimate of his friends of Edinburgh days, Mr. James Walter Ferrier (see the essay _Old Mortality_ in _Memories and Portraits_). It is in accordance with the expressed wish of this gentleman's surviving sister that publicity is given to the following letters:-- _La Solitude, Hyères_ [_Sept. 1883_]. MY DEAR MISS FERRIER,--They say Walter is gone. You, who know how I have neglected him, will conceive my remorse. I had another letter written; when I heard he was worse, I promised myself to wake up for the last time. Alas, too late! My dear Walter, set apart that terrible disease, was, in his right mind, the best and gentlest gentleman. God knows he would never intentionally hurt a soul. Well, he is done with his troubles and out of his long sickness, and I dare say is glad to be at peace and out of the body, which in him seemed the enemy of the fine and kind spirit. He is the first friend I have ever lost, and I find it difficult to say anything and fear to intrude upon your grief. But I had to try to tell you how much I shared it. Could you get any one to tell me particulars? Do not write yourself of course--I do not mean that; but some one else. R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY _La Solitude, Hyères, September 19, 1883._ DEAR BOY,--Our letters vigorously cross: you will ere this have received a note to Coggie: God knows what was in it. It is strange, a little before the first word you sent me--so late--kindly late, I know and feel--I was thinking in my bed, when I knew you I had six friends--Bob I had by nature; then came the good James Walter--with all his failings--the _gentleman_ of the lot, alas to sink so low, alas to do so little, but now, thank God, in his quiet rest; next I found Baxter--well do I remember telling Walter I had unearthed "a W.S. that I thought would do"--it was in the Academy Lane, and he questioned me as to the Signet's qualifications; fourth came Simpson; somewhere about the same time, I began to get intimate with Jenkin; last came Colvin. Then, one black winter afternoon, long Leslie Stephen, in his velvet jacket, met me in the Spec. by appointment, took me over to the infirmary, and in the crackling, blighting gas-light showed me that old head whose excellent representation I see before me in the photograph. Now when a man has six friends, to introduce a seventh is usually hopeless. Yet when you were presented, you took to them and they to you upon the nail. You must have been a fine fellow; but what a singular fortune I must have had in my six friends that you should take to all. I don't know if it is good Latin, most probably not: but this is enscrolled before my eyes for Walter: _Tandem e nubibus in apricum properat_. Rest, I suppose, I know, was all that remained; but O to look back, to remember all the mirth, all the kindness, all the humorous limitations and loved defects of that character; to think that he was young with me, sharing that weather-beaten, Fergussonian youth, looking forward through the clouds to the sunburst; and now clean gone from my path, silent--well, well. This has been a strange awakening. Last night, when I was alone in the house, with the window open on the lovely still night, I could have sworn he was in the room with me; I could show you the spot; and, what was very curious, I heard his rich laughter, a thing I had not called to mind for I know not how long. I see his coral waistcoat studs that he wore the first time he dined in my house; I see his attitude, leaning back a little, already with something of a portly air, and laughing internally. How I admired him! And now in the West Kirk. I am trying to write out this haunting bodily sense of absence; besides, what else should I write of? Yes, looking back, I think of him as one who was good, though sometimes clouded. He was the only gentle one of all my friends, save perhaps the other Walter. And he was certainly the only modest man among the lot. He never gave himself away; he kept back his secret; there was always a gentle problem behind all. Dear, dear, what a wreck; and yet how pleasant is the retrospect! God doeth all things well, though by what strange, solemn, and murderous contrivances! It is strange: he was the only man I ever loved who did not habitually interrupt. The fact draws my own portrait. And it is one of the many reasons why I count myself honoured by his friendship. A man like you _had_ to like me; you could not help yourself; but Ferrier was above me, we were not equals; his true self humoured and smiled paternally upon my failings, even as I humoured and sorrowed over his. Well, first his mother, then himself, they are gone: "in their resting graves." When I come to think of it, I do not know what I said to his sister, and I fear to try again. Could you send her this? There is too much both about yourself and me in it; but that, if you do not mind, is but a mark of sincerity. It would let her know how entirely, in the mind of (I suppose) his oldest friend, the good, true Ferrier obliterates the memory of the other, who was only his "lunatic brother." Judge of this for me, and do as you please; anyway, I will try to write to her again; my last was some kind of scrawl that I could not see for crying. This came upon me, remember, with terrible suddenness; I was surprised by this death; and it is fifteen or sixteen years since first I saw the handsome face in the Spec. I made sure, besides, to have died first. Love to you, your wife, and her sisters.--Ever yours, dear boy, R. L. S. I never knew any man so superior to himself as poor James Walter. The best of him only came as a vision, like Corsica from the Corniche. He never gave his measure either morally or intellectually. The curse was on him. Even his friends did not know him but by fits. I have passed hours with him when he was so wise, good, and sweet, that I never knew the like of it in any other. And for a beautiful good humour he had no match. I remember breaking in upon him once with a whole red-hot story (in my worst manner), pouring words upon him by the hour about some truck not worth an egg that had befallen me; and suddenly, some half hour after, finding that the sweet fellow had some concern of his own of infinitely greater import, that he was patiently and smilingly waiting to consult me on. It sounds nothing; but the courtesy and the unselfishness were perfect. It makes me rage to think how few knew him, and how many had the chance to sneer at their better. Well, he was not wasted, that we know; though if anything looked liker irony than this fitting of a man out with these rich qualities and faculties to be wrecked and aborted from the very stocks, I do not know the name of it. Yet we see that he has left an influence; the memory of his patient courtesy has often checked me in rudeness; has it not you? You can form no idea of how handsome Walter was. At twenty he was splendid to see; then, too, he had the sense of power in him, and great hopes; he looked forward, ever jesting of course, but he looked to see himself where he had the right to expect. He believed in himself profoundly; but _he never disbelieved in others_. To the roughest Highland student he always had his fine, kind, open dignity of manner; and a good word behind his back. The last time that I saw him before leaving for America--it was a sad blow to both of us. When he heard I was leaving, and that might be the last time we might meet--it almost was so--he was terribly upset, and came round at once. We sat late, in Baxter's empty house, where I was sleeping. My dear friend Walter Ferrier: O if I had only written to him more! if only one of us in these last days had been well! But I ever cherished the honour of his friendship, and now when he is gone, I know what I have lost still better. We live on, meaning to meet; but when the hope is gone, the pang comes. R. L. S. TO EDMUND GOSSE _La Solitude, Hyères, 26th September 1883._ MY DEAR GOSSE,--It appears a bolt from Transatlantica is necessary to produce four lines from you. It is not flattering; but as I was always a bad correspondent, 'tis a vice to which I am lenient. I give you to know, however, that I have already twice (this makes three times) sent you what I please to call a letter, and received from you in return a subterfuge--or nothing.... My present purpose, however, which must not be postponed, is to ask you to telegraph to the Americans. After a summer of good health of a very radiant order, toothache and the death of a very old friend, which came upon me like a thunderclap, have rather shelved my powers. I stare upon the paper, not write. I wish I could write like your Sculptors; yet I am well aware that I should not try in that direction. A certain warmth (tepid enough) and a certain dash of the picturesque are my poor essential qualities; and if I went fooling after the too classical, I might lose even these. But I envied you that page. I am, of course, deep in schemes; I was so ever. Execution alone somewhat halts. How much do you make per annum, I wonder? This year, for the first time, I shall pass £300; I may even get halfway to the next milestone. This seems but a faint remuneration; and the devil of it is, that I manage, with sickness, and moves, and education, and the like, to keep steadily in front of my income. However, I console myself with this, that if I were anything else under God's Heaven, and had the same crank health, I should make an even zero. If I had, with my present knowledge, twelve months of my old health, I would, could, and should do something neat. As it is, I have to tinker at my things in little sittings; and the rent, or the butcher, or something, is always calling me off to rattle up a pot-boiler. And then comes a back-set of my health, and I have to twiddle my fingers and play patience. Well, I do not complain, but I do envy strong health where it is squandered. Treasure your strength, and may you never learn by experience the profound _ennui_ and irritation of the shelved artist. For then, what is life? All that one has done to make one's life effective then doubles the itch of inefficiency. I trust also you may be long without finding out the devil that there is in a bereavement. After love it is the one great surprise that life preserves for us. Now I don't think I can be astonished any more.--Yours affectionately, R. L. S. TO MISS FERRIER _La Solitude, Hyères, 30th Sept. 1883._ MY DEAR MISS FERRIER,--I am very much obliged to you for your letter and was interested by all you told me. Yes, I know it is better for him to be gone, and what you say helps me to realise that it is so--I did not know how much he had suffered; it is so that we are cured of life. I am a little afraid to write or think much of Walter just yet; as I have not quite recovered the news and I have my work and my wife to think of. Some day soon when the sharpness passes off (if it does) I must try to write some more of what he was: he was so little understood. I don't suppose any one knew him better than I did. But just now it is difficult to think of him. For you I do mourn indeed, and admire your courage: the loss is terrible. I have no portrait of him. Is there one? If so please let me have it: if it has to be copied please let it be. Henley seems to have been as good to dear Walter as he is to all. That introduction was a good turn I did to both. It seems so strange for a friendship to begin all these years ago with so much mirth and now to end with this sorrow. Our little lives are moments in the wake of the eternal silence: but how crowded while they last. His has gone down in peace. I was not certainly the best companion for Walter, but I do believe I was the best he had. In these early days he was not fortunate in friends--looking back I see most clearly how much we both wanted a man of riper wisdom. We had no religion between the pair of us--that was the flaw. How very different was our last intimacy in Gladstone Terrace. But youth must learn--looking back over these wasted opportunities, I must try rather to remember what I did right, than to bewail the much that I left undone and knew not how to do. I see that even you have allowed yourself to have regrets. Dear Miss Ferrier, sure you were his angel. We all had something to be glad of, in so far as we had understood and loved and perhaps a little helped the gentle spirit; but you may certainly be proud. He always loved you; and I remember in his worst days spoke of you with great affection; a thing unusual with him; for he was walking very wild and blind and had no true idea whether of himself or life. The lifting afterwards was beautiful and touching. Dear Miss Ferrier I have given your kind messages to my wife who feels for you and reciprocates the hope to meet. When it may come off I know not. I feel almost ashamed to say that I keep better, I feel as if like Mrs. Leslie "you must hate me for it"--still I can very easily throw back whether by fatigue or want of care, and I do not like to build plans for my return to my own land. Is there no chance of your coming hereabouts? Though we cannot in our small and disorderly house offer a lady a room, one can be got close by and we can offer possible board and a most lovely little garden for a lounge. Please remember me kindly to your brother John and Sir A. and Lady Grant and believe me with hearty sympathy--Yours most sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. I was rejoiced to hear he never doubted of my love, but I must cure my hate of correspondence. This has been a sharp lesson. TO W. E. HENLEY It will be remembered that "Whistles" or "Penny Whistles" was his own name for the verses of the _Child's Garden_. The proposal referred to at the end of this letter was one which had reached him from Messrs. Lippincott, the American publishers, for a sailing trip to be taken among the Greek islands and made the subject of a book. _La Solitude, Hyères [October 1883]._ My dear excellent, admired, volcanic angel of a lad, trusty as a dog, eruptive as Vesuvius, in all things great, in all the soul of loyalty: greeting. That you are better spirits me up good. I have had no colour of a Mag. of Art. From here, here in Highairs the Palm-trees, I have heard your conversation. It came here in the form of a Mistral, and I said to myself, Damme, there is some Henley at the foot of this! I shall try to do the Whistle as suggested; but I can usually do whistles only by giving my whole mind to it: to produce even such limping verse demanding the whole forces of my untuneful soul. I have other two anyway: better or worse. I am now deep, deep, ocean deep in _Otto_: a letter is a curst distraction. About 100 pp. are near fit for publication; I am either making a spoon or spoiling the horn of a Caledonian bull, with that airy potentate. God help me, I bury a lot of labour in that principality; and if I am not greatly a gainer, I am a great loser and a great fool. However, _sursum corda_; faint heart never writ romance. Your Dumas I think exquisite; it might even have been stronglier said: the brave old godly pagan, I adore his big footprints on the earth. Have you read Meredith's _Love in the Valley_? It got me, I wept; I remembered that poetry existed. "When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror." I propose if they (Lippincotts) will let me wait till next Autumn, and go when it is safest, to accept £450 with £100 down; but it is now too late to go this year. November and December are the months when it is safest; and the back of the season is broken. I shall gain much knowledge by the trip; this I look upon as one of the main inducements. R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The following is in answer to a letter containing remarks on the proofs of the _Child's Garden_, then going round among some of his friends, and on the instalments of _Silverado Squatters_ and the _Black Arrow_, which were appearing in the Century Magazine and Young Folks respectively. The remarks on Professor Seeley's literary manner are _àpropos_ of the _Expansion of England_, which I had lately sent him. _La Solitude, Hyères [October 1883]._ COLVIN, COLVIN, COLVIN,--Yours received; also interesting copy of _P. Whistles_. "In the multitude of councillors the Bible declares there is wisdom," said my great-uncle, "but I have always found in them distraction." It is extraordinary how tastes vary: these proofs have been handed about, it appears, and I have had several letters; and--distraction. Æsop: the Miller and the Ass. Notes on details:-- 1. I love the occasional trochaic line; and so did many excellent writers before me. 2. If you don't like _A Good Boy_, I do. 3. In _Escape at Bedtime_, I found two suggestions. "Shove" for "above" is a correction of the press; it was so written. "Twinkled" is just the error; to the child the stars appear to be there; any word that suggests illusion is a horror. 4. I don't care; I take a different view of the vocative. 5. Bewildering and childering are good enough for me. These are rhymes, jingles; I don't go for eternity and the three unities. I will delete some of those condemned, but not all. I don't care for the name Penny Whistles; I sent a sheaf to Henley when I sent 'em. But I've forgot the others. I would just as soon call 'em "Rimes for Children" as anything else. I am not proud nor particular. Your remarks on the _Black Arrow_ are to the point. I am pleased you liked Crookback; he is a fellow whose hellish energy has always fixed my attention. I wish Shakespeare had written the play after he had learned some of the rudiments of literature and art rather than before. Some day, I will re-tickle the Sable Missile, and shoot it, _moyennant finances_, once more into the air; I can lighten it of much, and devote some more attention to Dick o' Gloucester. It's great sport to write tushery. By this I reckon you will have heard of my proposed excursiolorum to the Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece, and kindred sites. If the excursiolorum goes on, that is if _moyennant finances_ comes off, I shall write to beg you to collect introductiolorums for me. Distinguo: 1. _Silverado_ was not written in America, but in Switzerland's icy mountains. 2. What you read is the bleeding and disembowelled remains of what I wrote. 3. The good stuff is all to come--so I think. "The Sea Fogs," "The Hunter's Family," "Toils and Pleasures"--_belles pages_.--Yours ever, RAMNUGGER. O!--Seeley is too clever to live, and the book a gem. But why has he read too much Arnold? Why will he avoid--obviously avoid--fine writing up to which he has led? This is a winking, curled-and-oiled, ultra-cultured, Oxford-don sort of an affectation that infuriates my honest soul. "You see"--they say--"how unbombastic _we_ are; we come right up to eloquence, and, when it's hanging on the pen, dammy, we scorn it!" It is literary Deronda-ism. If you don't want the woman, the image, or the phrase, mortify your vanity and avoid the appearance of wanting them. TO W.E. HENLEY The first paragraph of the following refers to contributions of R. L. S. to the Magazine of Art under Mr. Henley's editorship:-- _La Solitude, Hyères [Autumn 1883]._ DEAR LAD,--Glad you like _Fontainebleau_. I am going to be the means, under heaven, of aërating or literating your pages. The idea that because a thing is a picture-book all the writing should be on the wrong tack is _triste_ but widespread. Thus _Hokusai_ will be really a gossip on convention, or in great part. And the Skelt will be as like a Charles Lamb as I can get it. The writer should write, and not illustrate pictures: else it's bosh.... Your remarks about the ugly are my eye. Ugliness is only the prose of horror. It is when you are not able to write _Macbeth_ that you write _Thérèse Raquin_. Fashions are external: the essence of art only varies in so far as fashion widens the field of its application; art is a mill whose thirlage, in different ages, widens and contracts; but, in any case and under any fashion, the great man produces beauty, terror, and mirth, and the little man produces cleverness (personalities, psychology) instead of beauty, ugliness instead of terror, and jokes instead of mirth. As it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be ever, world without end. Amen! And even as you read, you say, "Of course, _quelle rengaine_!" R. L. S. TO W. H. LOW Manhattan mentioned below is the name of a short-lived New York magazine, the editor of which had asked through Mr. Low for a contribution from R. L. S. _La Solitude, Hyères, October [1883]._ MY DEAR LOW,-- ... Some day or other, in Cassell's Magazine of Art, you will see a paper which will interest you, and where your name appears. It is called _Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Artists_, and the signature of R. L. Stevenson will be found annexed. Please tell the editor of Manhattan the following secrets for me: 1_st_, That I am a beast; 2_nd_, that I owe him a letter; 3_rd_, that I have lost his, and cannot recall either his name or address; 4_th_, that I am very deep in engagements, which my absurd health makes it hard for me to overtake; but 5_th_, that I will bear him in mind; 6_th_ and last, that I am a brute. My address is still the same, and I live in a most sweet corner of the universe, sea and fine hills before me, and a rich variegated plain; and at my back a craggy hill, loaded with vast feudal ruins. I am very quiet; a person passing by my door half startles me; but I enjoy the most aromatic airs, and at night the most wonderful view into a moonlit garden. By day this garden fades into nothing, overpowered by its surroundings and the luminous distance; but at night and when the moon is out, that garden, the arbour, the flight of stairs that mount the artificial hillock, the plumed blue gum-trees that hang trembling, become the very skirts of Paradise. Angels I know frequent it; and it thrills all night with the flutes of silence. Damn that garden;--and by day it is gone. Continue to testify boldly against realism. Down with Dagon, the fish god! All art swings down towards imitation, in these days, fatally. But the man who loves art with wisdom sees the joke; it is the lustful that tremble and respect her ladyship; but the honest and romantic lovers of the Muse can see a joke and sit down to laugh with Apollo. The prospect of your return to Europe is very agreeable; and I was pleased by what you said about your parents. One of my oldest friends died recently, and this has given me new thoughts of death. Up to now I had rather thought of him as a mere personal enemy of my own; but now that I see him hunting after my friends, he looks altogether darker. My own father is not well; and Henley, of whom you must have heard me speak, is in a questionable state of health. These things are very solemn, and take some of the colour out of life. It is a great thing, after all, to be a man of reasonable honour and kindness. Do you remember once consulting me in Paris whether you had not better sacrifice honesty to art; and how, after much confabulation, we agreed that your art would suffer if you did? We decided better than we knew. In this strange welter where we live, all hangs together by a million filaments; and to do reasonably well by others, is the first pre-requisite of art. Art is a virtue; and if I were the man I should be, my art would rise in the proportion of my life. If you were privileged to give some happiness to your parents, I know your art will gain by it. _By God it will!_--_Sic subscribitur_, R. L. S. TO R. A. M. STEVENSON _La Solitude, Hyères [October 1883]._ MY DEAR BOB,--Yes, I got both your letters at Lyons, but have been since then decading in several steps. Toothache; fever; Ferrier's death; lung. Now it is decided I am to leave to-morrow, penniless, for Nice to see Dr. Williams. I was much struck by your last. I have written a breathless note on Realism for Henley; a fifth part of the subject hurriedly touched, which will show you how my thoughts are driving. You are now at last beginning to think upon the problems of executive, plastic art, for you are now for the first time attacking them. Hitherto you have spoken and thought of two things--technique and the _ars artium_, or common background of all arts. Studio work is the real touch. That is the genial error of the present French teaching. Realism I regard as a mere question of method. The "brown foreground," "old mastery," and the like, ranking with villanelles, as technical sports and pastimes. Real art, whether ideal or realistic, addresses precisely the same feeling, and seeks the same qualities--significance or charm. And the same--very same--inspiration is only methodically differentiated according as the artist is an arrant realist or an arrant idealist. Each, by his own method, seeks to save and perpetuate the same significance or charm; the one by suppressing, the other by forcing, detail. All other idealism is the brown foreground over again, and hence only art in the sense of a game, like cup and ball. All other realism is not art at all--but not at all. It is, then, an insincere and showy handicraft. Were you to re-read some Balzac, as I have been doing, it would greatly help to clear your eyes. He was a man who never found his method. An inarticulate Shakespeare, smothered under forcible-feeble detail. It is astounding to the riper mind how bad he is, how feeble, how untrue, how tedious; and, of course, when he surrendered to his temperament, how good and powerful. And yet never plain nor clear. He could not consent to be dull, and thus became so. He would leave nothing undeveloped, and thus drowned out of sight of land amid the multitude of crying and incongruous details. There is but one art--to omit! O if I knew how to omit, I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knew how to omit would make an _Iliad_ of a daily paper. Your definition of seeing is quite right. It is the first part of omission to be partly blind. Artistic sight is judicious blindness. Sam Bough must have been a jolly blind old boy. He would turn a corner, look for one-half or quarter minute, and then say, "This'll do, lad." Down he sat, there and then, with whole artistic plan, scheme of colour, and the like, and begin by laying a foundation of powerful and seemingly incongruous colour on the block. He saw, not the scene, but the water-colour sketch. Every artist by sixty should so behold nature. Where does he learn that? In the studio, I swear. He goes to nature for facts, relations, values--material; as a man, before writing a historical novel, reads up memoirs. But it is not by reading memoirs that he has learned the selective criterion. He has learned that in the practice of his art; and he will never learn it well, but when disengaged from the ardent struggle of immediate representation, of realistic and _ex facto_ art. He learns it in the crystallisation of day-dreams; in changing, not in copying, fact; in the pursuit of the ideal, not in the study of nature. These temples of art are, as you say, inaccessible to the realistic climber. It is not by looking at the sea that you get "The multitudinous seas incarnadine," nor by looking at Mont Blanc that you find "And visited all night by troops of stars." A kind of ardour of the blood is the mother of all this; and according as this ardour is swayed by knowledge and seconded by craft, the art expression flows clear, and significance and charm, like a moon rising, are born above the barren juggle of mere symbols. The painter must study more from nature than the man of words. By why? Because literature deals with men's business and passions which, in the game of life, we are irresistibly obliged to study; but painting with relations of light, and colour, and significances, and form, which, from the immemorial habit of the race, we pass over with an unregardful eye. Hence this crouching upon camp-stools, and these crusts.[6] But neither one nor other is a part of art, only preliminary studies. I want you to help me to get people to understand that realism is a method, and only methodic in its consequences; when the realist is an artist, that is, and supposing the idealist with whom you compare him to be anything but a _farceur_ and a _dilettante_. The two schools of working do, and should, lead to the choice of different subjects. But that is a consequence, not a cause. See my chaotic note, which will appear, I fancy, in November in Henley's sheet. Poor Ferrier, it bust me horrid. He was, after you, the oldest of my friends. I am now very tired, and will go to bed having prelected freely. Fanny will finish. R. L. S. TO THOMAS STEVENSON Some pages of MS. exist in which the writer at this time attempted to re-cast and expand a portion of the _Lay Morals_ of 1879. A letter written some days earlier to his father, and partly quoted in Mr. Graham Balfour's _Life_ (ed. 1906, p. 209), explains his purpose. _La Solitude, Hyères, 12th October 1883._ MY DEAR FATHER,--I have just lunched; the day is exquisite, the air comes through the open window rich with odour, and I am by no means spiritually minded. Your letter, however, was very much valued, and has been read oftener than once. What you say about yourself I was glad to hear; a little decent resignation is not only becoming a Christian, but is likely to be excellent for the health of a Stevenson. To fret and fume is undignified, suicidally foolish, and theologically unpardonable; we are here not to make, but to tread predestined, pathways; we are the foam of a wave, and to preserve a proper equanimity is not merely the first part of submission to God, but the chief of possible kindnesses to those about us. I am lecturing myself, but you also. To do our best is one part, but to wash our hands smilingly of the consequence is the next part, of any sensible virtue. I have come, for the moment, to a pause in my moral works; for I have many irons in the fire, and I wish to finish something to bring coin before I can afford to go on with what I think doubtfully to be a duty. It is a most difficult work; a touch of the parson will drive off those I hope to influence; a touch of overstrained laxity, besides disgusting, like a grimace, may do harm. Nothing that I have ever seen yet speaks directly and efficaciously to young men; and I do hope I may find the art and wisdom to fill up a gap. The great point, as I see it, is to ask as little as possible, and meet, if it may be, every view or absence of view; and it should be, must be, easy. Honesty is the one desideratum; but think how hard a one to meet. I think all the time of Ferrier and myself; these are the pair that I address. Poor Ferrier, so much a better man than I, and such a temporal wreck. But the thing of which we must divest our minds is to look partially upon others; all is to be viewed; and the creature judged, as he must be by his Creator, not dissected through a prism of morals, but in the unrefracted ray. So seen, and in relation to the almost omnipotent surroundings, who is to distinguish between F. and such a man as Dr. Candlish, or between such a man as David Hume and such an one as Robert Burns? To compare my poor and good Walter with myself is to make me startle; he, upon all grounds above the merely expedient, was the nobler being. Yet wrecked utterly ere the full age of manhood; and the last skirmishes so well fought, so humanly useless, so pathetically brave, only the leaps of an expiring lamp. All this is a very pointed instance. It shuts the mouth. I have learned more, in some ways, from him than from any other soul I ever met; and he, strange to think, was the best gentleman, in all kinder senses, that I ever knew.--Ever your affectionate son, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. H. LOW The paper referred to at the beginning of the second paragraph is one on R. L. S. in the Century Magazine, the first seriously critical notice, says Mr. Low, which appeared of him in the States. [_La Solitude, Hyères, Oct. 23, 1883._] MY DEAR LOW,--_C'est d'un bon camarade_; and I am much obliged to you for your two letters and the inclosure. Times are a lityle changed with all of us since the ever memorable days of Lavenue: hallowed be his name! hallowed his old Fleury!--of which you did not see--I think--as I did--the glorious apotheosis: advanced on a Tuesday to three francs, on the Thursday to six, and on Friday swept off, holus bolus, for the proprietor's private consumption. Well, we had the start of that proprietor. Many a good bottle came our way, and was, I think, worthily made welcome. I am pleased that Mr. Gilder should like my literature; and I ask you particularly to thank Mr. Bunner (have I the name right?) for his notice, which was of that friendly, headlong sort that really pleases an author like what the French call a "shake-hands." It pleased me the more coming from the States, where I have met not much recognition, save from the buccaneers, and above all from pirates who misspell my name. I saw my book advertised in a number of the Critic as the work of one R. L. Stephenson; and, I own, I boiled. It is so easy to know the name of the man whose book you have stolen; for there it is, at full length, on the title-page of your booty. But no, damn him, not he! He calls me Stephenson. These woes I only refer to by the way, as they set a higher value on the Century notice. I am now a person with an established ill-health--a wife--a dog possessed with an evil, a Gadarene spirit--a chalet on a hill, looking out over the Mediterranean--a certain reputation--and very obscure finances. Otherwise, very much the same, I guess; and were a bottle of Fleury a thing to be obtained, capable of developing theories along with a fit spirit even as of yore. Yet I now draw near to the Middle Ages; nearly three years ago, that fatal Thirty struck; and yet the great work is not yet done--not yet even conceived. But so, as one goes on, the wood seems to thicken, the footpath to narrow, and the House Beautiful on the hill's summit to draw further and further away. We learn, indeed, to use our means; but only to learn, along with it, the paralysing knowledge that these means are only applicable to two or three poor commonplace motives. Eight years ago, if I could have slung ink as I can now, I should have thought myself well on the road after Shakespeare; and now--I find I have only got a pair of walking-shoes and not yet begun to travel. And art is still away there on the mountain summit. But I need not continue; for, of course, this is your story just as much as it is mine; and, strange to think, it was Shakespeare's too, and Beethoven's, and Phidias's. It is a blessed thing that, in this forest of art, we can pursue our woodlice and sparrows, _and not catch them_, with almost the same fervour of exhilaration as that with which Sophocles hunted and brought down the Mastodon. Tell me something of your work, and your wife.--My dear fellow, I am yours ever, R. L. STEVENSON. My wife begs to be remembered to both of you; I cannot say as much for my dog, who has never seen you, but he would like, on general principles, to bite you. TO W. E. HENLEY By this time _Treasure Island_ was out in book form, and the following is in reply to some reflections on its seamanship which had been conveyed to him through Mr. Henley:-- [_La Solitude, Hyères, November 1883._] MY DEAR LAD,-- ... Of course, my seamanship is jimmy: did I not beseech you I know not how often to find me an ancient mariner--and you, whose own wife's own brother is one of the ancientest, did nothing for me? As for my seamen, did Runciman ever know eighteenth century Buccaneers? No? Well, no more did I. But I have known and sailed with seamen too, and lived and eaten with them; and I made my put-up shot in no great ignorance, but as a put-up thing has to be made, _i.e._ to be coherent and picturesque, and damn the expense. Are they fairly lively on the wires? Then, favour me with your tongues. Are they wooden, and dim, and no sport? Then it is I that am silent, otherwise not. The work, strange as it may sound in the ear, is not a work of realism. The next thing I shall hear is that the etiquette is wrong in Otto's Court! With a warrant, and I mean it to be so, and the whole matter never cost me half a thought. I make these paper people to please myself, and Skelt, and God Almighty, and with no ulterior purpose. Yet am I mortal myself; for, as I remind you, I begged for a supervising mariner. However, my heart is in the right place. I have been to sea, but I never crossed the threshold of a court; and the courts shall be the way I want 'em. I'm glad to think I owe you the review that pleased me best of all the reviews I ever had; the one I liked best before that was ----'s on the _Arabians_. These two are the flowers of the collection, according to me. To live reading such reviews and die eating ortolans--sich is my aspiration. Whenever you come you will be equally welcome. I am trying to finish _Otto_ ere you shall arrive, so as to take and be able to enjoy a well-earned--O yes, a well-earned--holiday. Longman fetched by _Otto_: is it a spoon or a spoilt horn? Momentous, if the latter; if the former, a spoon to dip much praise and pudding, and to give, I do think, much pleasure. The last part, now in hand, much smiles upon me.--Ever yours, R. L. S. TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON _La Solitude, Hyères [November 1883]._ MY DEAR MOTHER,--You must not blame me too much for my silence; I am over head and ears in work, and do not know what to do first. I have been hard at _Otto_, hard at _Silverado_ proofs, which I have worked over again to a tremendous extent; cutting, adding, rewriting, until some of the worst chapters of the original are now, to my mind, as good as any. I was the more bound to make it good, as I had such liberal terms; it's not for want of trying if I have failed. I got your letter on my birthday; indeed, that was how I found it out about three in the afternoon, when postie comes. Thank you for all you said. As for my wife, that was the best investment ever made by man; but "in our branch of the family" we seem to marry well. I, considering my piles of work, am wonderfully well; I have not been so busy for I know not how long. I hope you will send me the money I asked however, as I am not only penniless, but shall remain so in all human probability for some considerable time. I have got in the mass of my expectations; and the £100 which is to float us on the new year cannot come due till _Silverado_ is all ready; I am delaying it myself for the moment; then will follow the binders and the travellers and an infinity of other nuisances; and only at the last, the jingling-tingling. Do you know that _Treasure Island_ has appeared? In the November number of Henley's Magazine, a capital number anyway, there is a funny publisher's puff of it for your book; also a bad article by me. Lang dotes on _Treasure Island_: "Except _Tom Sawyer_ and the _Odyssey_," he writes, "I never liked any romance so much." I will inclose the letter though. The Bogue is angelic, although very dirty. It has rained--at last! It was jolly cold when the rain came. I was overjoyed to hear such good news of my father. Let him go on at that!--Ever your affectionate, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Of the "small ships" here mentioned, _Fontainebleau_ and _The Character of Dogs_ are well known: _A Misadventure in France_ is probably a draft of the _Epilogue to an Inland Voyage_, not published till five years later. The _Travelling Companion_ (of which I remember little except that its scene was partly laid in North Italy and that a publisher to whom it was shown declared it a work of genius but indecent) was abandoned some two years later, as set forth on p. 193 of this volume. _La Solitude, Hyères [November 1883]._ £10,000 Pounds Reward! WHEREAS Sidney Colvin, more generally known as the Guardian Angel, has vanished from the gaze of Mr. R. L. Stevenson, the above reward is offered as a means to discover the whereabouts of the misguided gentleman. He was known as a man of irregular habits, and his rowdy exterior would readily attract attention in a crowd. He was never known to resist a drink; whisky was his favourite dish. If any one will bring him to Mr. Stevenson's back area door, dead or alive, the greatest rejoicing will be felt by a bereaved and uneasy family. Also, wherefore not a word, dear Colvin? My news is: splendid health; great success of the _Black Arrow_; another tale demanded, readers this time (the Lord lighten them!) pleased; a great variety of small ships launched or still upon the stocks--(also, why not send the annotated proof of _Fontainebleau_? ce n'est pas d'un bon camarade); a paper on dogs for Carr;[7] a paper called _Old Mortality_, a paper called _A Misadventure in France_, a tale entituled _The Travelling Companion_; _Otto_ arrested one foot in air; and last and not least, a great demand for news of Sidney Colvin and others. Herewith I pause, for why should I cast pearls before swine? A word, Guardian Angel. You are much loved in this house, not by me only, but by the wife. The Wogg himself is anxious.--Ever yours affectionately, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _La Solitude, Hyères [November 1883]._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--I have been bad, but as you were worse, I feel no shame. I raise a blooming countenance, not the evidence of a self-righteous spirit. I continue my uphill fight with the twin spirits of bankruptcy and indigestion. Duns rage about my portal, at least to fancy's ear. I suppose you heard of Ferrier's death: my oldest friend, except Bob. It has much upset me. I did not fancy how much. I am strangely concerned about it. My house is the loveliest spot in the universe; the moonlight nights we have are incredible; love, poetry and music, and the Arabian Nights, inhabit just my corner of the world--nest there like mavises. Here lies The carcase of Robert Louis Stevenson, An active, austere, and not inelegant writer, who, at the termination of a long career, wealthy, wise, benevolent, and honoured by the attention of two hemispheres, yet owned it to have been his crowning favour TO INHABIT LA SOLITUDE. (with the consent of the intelligent edility of Hyères, he has been interred, below this frugal stone, in the garden which he honoured for so long with his poetic presence.) I must write more solemn letters. Adieu. Write. R. L. S. TO MRS. MILNE This is to a cousin who had been one of his favourite playmates in childhood, and had recognised some allusions in the proof slips of the _Child's Garden_ (the piece called _A Pirate Story_). _La Solitude, Hyères [November 1883]._ MY DEAR HENRIETTA,--Certainly; who else would they be? More by token, on that particular occasion, you were sailing under the title of Princess Royal; I, after a furious contest, under that of Prince Alfred; and Willie, still a little sulky, as the Prince of Wales. We were all in a buck basket about half-way between the swing and the gate; and I can still see the Pirate Squadron heave in sight upon the weather bow. I wrote a piece besides on Giant Bunker; but I was not happily inspired, and it is condemned. Perhaps I'll try again; he was a horrid fellow, Giant Bunker! and some of my happiest hours were passed in pursuit of him. You were a capital fellow to play: how few there were who could! None better than yourself. I shall never forget some of the days at Bridge of Allan; they were one golden dream. See "A Good Boy" in the _Penny Whistles_, much of the sentiment of which is taken direct from one evening at B. of A. when we had had a great play with the little Glasgow girl. Hallowed be that fat book of fairy tales! Do you remember acting the Fair One with Golden Locks? What a romantic drama! Generally speaking, whenever I think of play, it is pretty certain that you will come into my head. I wrote a paper called _Child's Play_ once, where, I believe, you or Willie would recognise things.... Surely Willie is just the man to marry; and if his wife wasn't a happy woman, I think I could tell her who was to blame. Is there no word of it? Well, these things are beyond arrangement; and the wind bloweth where it listeth--which, I observe, is generally towards the west in Scotland. Here it prefers a south-easterly course, and is called the Mistral--usually with an adjective in front. But if you will remember my yesterday's toothache and this morning's crick, you will be in a position to choose an adjective for yourself. Not that the wind is unhealthy; only when it comes strong, it is both very high and very cold, which makes it the d-v-l. But as I am writing to a lady, I had better avoid this topic; winds requiring a great scope of language. Please remember me to all at home; give Ramsay a pennyworth of acidulated drops for his good taste.--And believe me, your affectionate cousin, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MISS FERRIER _La Solitude, Hyères [November 22, 1883]._ DEAR MISS FERRIER,--Many thanks for the photograph. It is---well, it is like most photographs. The sun is an artist of too much renown; and, at any rate, we who knew Walter "in the brave days of old" will be difficult to please. I was inexpressibly touched to get a letter from some lawyers as to some money. I have never had any account with my friends; some have gained and some lost; and I should feel there was something dishonest in a partial liquidation even if I could recollect the facts, _which I cannot_. But the fact of his having put aside this memorandum touched me greatly. The mystery of his life is great. Our chemist in this place, who had been at Malvern, recognised the picture. You may remember Walter had a romantic affection for all pharmacies? and the bottles in the window were for him a poem? He said once that he knew no pleasure like driving through a lamplit city, waiting for the chemists to go by. All these things return now. He had a pretty full translation of Schiller's _Æsthetic Letters_, which we read together, as well as the second part of _Faust_, in Gladstone Terrace, he helping me with the German. There is no keepsake I should more value than the MS. of that translation. They were the best days I ever had with him, little dreaming all would so soon be over. It needs a blow like this to convict a man of mortality and its burthen. I always thought I should go by myself; not to survive. But now I feel as if the earth were undermined, and all my friends have lost one thickness of reality since that one passed. Those are happy who can take it otherwise; with that I found things all beginning to dislimn. Here we have no abiding city, and one felt as though he had--and O too much acted. But if you tell me, he did not feel my silence. However, he must have done so; and my guilt is irreparable now. I thank God at least heartily that he did not resent it. Please remember me to Sir Alexander and Lady Grant, to whose care I will address this. When next I am in Edinburgh I will take flowers, alas! to the West Kirk. Many a long hour we passed in graveyards, the man who has gone and I--or rather not that man--but the beautiful, genial, witty youth who so betrayed him.--Dear Miss Ferrier, I am yours most sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY This refers to some dispute which had arisen with an editor (I forget whom) concerning the refusal of an article on Salvini. The nickname "Fastidious Brisk," from Ben Jonson's _Every Man out of his Humour_, was applied by Mr. Henley to Stevenson--very inappropriately as I always thought. _La Solitude, Hyères, Autumn_ 1883. MY DEAR LAD,--You know your own business best; but I wish your honesty were not so warfaring. These conflicts pain Lucretian sitters on the shore; and one wonders--one wonders--wonders and whimpers. I do not say my attitude is noble; but is yours conciliatory? I revere Salvini, but I shall never see him--nor anybody--play again. That is all a matter of history, heroic history, to me. Were I in London, I should be the liker Tantalus--no more. But as for these quarrels: in not many years shall we not all be clay-cold and safe below ground, you with your loud-mouthed integrity, I with my fastidious briskness--and--with all their faults and merits, swallowed in silence. It seems to me, in ignorance of cause, that when the dustman has gone by, these quarrellings will prick the conscience. Am I wrong? I am a great sinner; so, my brave friend, are you; the others also. Let us a little imitate the divine patience and the divine sense of humour, and smilingly tolerate those faults and virtues that have so brief a period and so intertwined a being. I fear I was born a parson; but I live very near upon the margin (though, by your leave, I may outlive you all!), and too much rigour in these daily things sounds to me like clatter on the kitchen dishes. If it might be--could it not be smoothed? This very day my father writes me he has gone to see, upon his deathbed, an old friend to whom for years he has not spoken or written. On his deathbed; no picking up of the lost stitches; merely to say: my little fury, my spotted uprightness, after having split our lives, have not a word of quarrel to say more. And the same post brings me the news of another--War! Things in this troubled medium are not so clear, dear Henley; there are faults upon all hands; and the end comes, and Ferrier's grave gapes for us all. THE PROSY PREACHER (But written in deep dejection, my dear man). Suppose they _are_ wrong? Well, am I not tolerated, are you not tolerated?--we and _our_ faults? TO W. H. LOW _La Solitude, Hyères, Var, 13th December 1883._ MY DEAR LOW,-- ... I was much pleased with what you said about my work. Ill-health is a great handicapper in the race. I have never at command that press of spirits that are necessary to strike out a thing red-hot. _Silverado_ is an example of stuff worried and pawed about, God knows how often, in poor health, and you can see for yourself the result: good pages, an imperfect fusion, a certain languor of the whole. Not, in short, art. I have told Roberts to send you a copy of the book when it appears, where there are some fair passages that will be new to you. My brief romance, _Prince Otto_--far my most difficult adventure up to now--is near an end. I have still one chapter to write _de fond en comble_, and three or four to strengthen or recast. The rest is done. I do not know if I have made a spoon, or only spoiled a horn; but I am tempted to hope the first. If the present bargain hold, it will not see the light of day for some thirteen months. Then I shall be glad to know how it strikes you. There is a good deal of stuff in it, both dramatic and, I think, poetic; and the story is not like these purposeless fables of to-day, but is, at least, intended to stand firm upon a base of philosophy--or morals--as you please. It has been long gestated, and is wrought with care. _Enfin, nous verrons._ My labours have this year for the first time been rewarded with upwards of £350; that of itself, so base we are! encourages me; and the better tenor of my health yet more.--Remember me to Mrs. Low, and believe me, yours most sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO THOMAS STEVENSON _La Solitude, December 20, 1883._ MY DEAR FATHER,--I do not know which of us is to blame; I suspect it is you this time. The last accounts of you were pretty good, I was pleased to see; I am, on the whole, very well--suffering a little still from my fever and liver complications, but better. I have just finished re-reading a book, which I counsel you above all things _not_ to read, as it has made me very ill, and would make you worse--Lockhart's _Scott_. It is worth reading, as all things are from time to time that keep us nose to nose with fact; though I think such reading may be abused, and that a great deal of life is better spent in reading of a light and yet chivalrous strain. Thus, no Waverley novel approaches in power, blackness, bitterness, and moral elevation to the diary and Lockhart's narrative of the end; and yet the Waverley novels are better reading for every day than the Life. You may take a tonic daily, but not phlebotomy. The great double danger of taking life too easily, and taking it too hard, how difficult it is to balance that! But we are all too little inclined to faith; we are all, in our serious moments, too much inclined to forget that all are sinners, and fall justly by their faults, and therefore that we have no more to do with that than with the thundercloud; only to trust, and do our best, and wear as smiling a face as may be for others and ourselves. But there is no royal road among this complicated business. Hegel the German got the best word of all philosophy with his antinomies: the contrary of everything is its postulate. That is, of course, grossly expressed, but gives a hint of the idea, which contains a great deal of the mysteries of religion, and a vast amount of the practical wisdom of life. For your part, there is no doubt as to your duty--to take things easy and be as happy as you can, for your sake, and my mother's, and that of many besides. Excuse this sermon.--Ever your loving son, R. L. S. TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON _La Solitude, December 25, 1883._ MY DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER,--This it is supposed will reach you about Christmas, and I believe I should include Lloyd in the greeting. But I want to lecture my father; he is not grateful enough; he is like Fanny; his resignation is not the "true blue." A man who has gained a stone; whose son is better, and, after so many fears to the contrary, I dare to say, a credit to him; whose business is arranged; whose marriage is a picture--what I should call resignation in such a case as his would be to "take down his fiddle and play as lood as ever he could." That and nought else. And now, you dear old pious ingrate, on this Christmas morning, think what your mercies have been; and do not walk too far before your breakfast--as far as to the top of India Street, then to the top of Dundas Street, and then to your ain stair heid; and do not forget that even as _laborare_, so _joculari_, _est orare_; and to be happy the first step to being pious. I have as good as finished my novel, and a hard job it has been--but now practically over, _laus deo_! My financial prospects better than ever before; my excellent wife a touch dolorous, like Mr. Tommy; my Bogue quite converted, and myself in good spirits. O, send Curry Powder per Baxter. R. L. S. TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON _[La Solitude, Hyères] last Sunday of '83._ MY DEAR MOTHER,--I give my father up. I give him a parable: that the Waverley novels are better reading for every day than the tragic Life. And he takes it backside foremost, and shakes his head, and is gloomier than ever. Tell him that I give him up. I don't want no such a parent. This is not the man for my money. I do not call that by the name of religion which fills a man with bile. I write him a whole letter, bidding him beware of extremes, and telling him that his gloom is gallows-worthy; and I get back an answer--Perish the thought of it. Here am I on the threshold of another year, when, according to all human foresight, I should long ago have been resolved into my elements; here am I, who you were persuaded was born to disgrace you--and, I will do you the justice to add, on no such insufficient grounds--no very burning discredit when all is done; here am I married, and the marriage recognised to be a blessing of the first order, A1 at Lloyd's. There is he, at his not first youth, able to take more exercise than I at thirty-three, and gaining a stone's weight, a thing of which I am incapable. There are you; has the man no gratitude? There is Smeoroch[8]: is he blind? Tell him from me that all this is NOT THE TRUE BLUE! I will think more of his prayers when I see in him a spirit of _praise_. Piety is a more childlike and happy attitude than he admits. Martha, Martha, do you hear the knocking at the door? But Mary was happy. Even the Shorter Catechism, not the merriest epitome of religion, and a work exactly as pious although not quite so true as the multiplication table--even that dry-as-dust epitome begins with a heroic note. What is man's chief end? Let him study that; and ask himself if to refuse to enjoy God's kindest gifts is in the spirit indicated. Up, Dullard! It is better service to enjoy a novel than to mump. I have been most unjust to the Shorter Catechism, I perceive. I wish to say that I keenly admire its merits as a performance; and that all that was in my mind was its peculiarly unreligious and unmoral texture; from which defect it can never, of course, exercise the least influence on the minds of children. But they learn fine style and some austere thinking unconsciously.--Ever your loving son, R. L. S. TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON _La Solitude, Hyères-les-Palmiers, Var, January 1 (1884)._ MY DEAR PEOPLE,--A Good New Year to you. The year closes, leaving me with £50 in the bank, owing no man nothing, £100 more due to me in a week or so, and £150 more in the course of the month; and I can look back on a total receipt of £465, 0s. 6d. for the last twelve months! And yet I am not happy! Yet I beg! Here is my beggary:-- 1. Sellar's Trial. 2. George Borrow's Book about Wales. 3. My Grandfather's Trip to Holland. 4. And (but this is, I fear, impossible) the Bell Rock Book. When I think of how last year began, after four months of sickness and idleness, all my plans gone to water, myself starting alone, a kind of spectre, for Nice--should I not be grateful? Come, let us sing unto the Lord! Nor should I forget the expected visit, but I will not believe in that till it befall; I am no cultivator of disappointments, 'tis a herb that does not grow in my garden; but I get some good crops both of remorse and gratitude. The last I can recommend to all gardeners; it grows best in shiny weather, but once well grown, is very hardy; it does not require much labour; only that the husbandman should smoke his pipe about the flower-plots and admire God's pleasant wonders. Winter green (otherwise known as Resignation, or the "false gratitude plant") springs in much the same soil; is little hardier, if at all; and requires to be so dug about and dunged, that there is little margin left for profit. The variety known as the Black Winter green (H. V. Stevensoniana) is rather for ornament than profit. "John, do you see that bed of resignation?"--"It's doin' bravely, sir."--"John, I will not have it in my garden; it flatters not the eye and comforts not the stomach; root it out."--"Sir, I ha'e seen o' them that rase as high as nettles; gran' plants!"--"What then? Were they as tall as alps, if still unsavoury and bleak, what matters it? Out with it, then; and in its place put Laughter and a Good Conceit (that capital home evergreen), and a bush of Flowering Piety--but see it be the flowering sort--the other species is no ornament to any gentleman's Back Garden." JNO. BUNYAN. TO W. E. HENLEY Early in January, Stevenson, after a week's visit at Hyères from his friends Charles Baxter and W. E. Henley, accompanied them as far as Nice, and there suddenly went down with an attack of acute congestion, first of the lungs and then of the kidneys. At one moment there seemed no hope, but he recovered slowly and returned to Hyères. His friends had not written during his illness, fearing him to be too far gone to care for letters. As he got better he began to chafe at their silence. _[Hyères, February or March 1884]._ TANDEM DESINO* I cannot read, work, sleep, lie still, walk, or even play patience. These plagues will overtake all damned silencists; among whom, from this day out, number Eructavit cor Timonis.** the fiery indignator Roland Little Stevenson. I counted miseries by the heap, But now have had my fill, I cannot see, I do not sleep, _But shortly I shall kill_. Of many letters, here is a Full End. The last will and testament of a demitting correspondent. My indefatigable pen I here lay down forever. Men Have used, and left me, and forgot; Men are entirely off the spot; Men are a _blague_ and an abuse; And I commit them to the deuce! RODERICK LAMOND STEVENSON. I had companions, I had friends, I had of whisky various blends. The whisky was all drunk; and lo! The friends were gone for evermo! * * * * * The loquacious man at peace.* And when I marked the ingratitude, I to my maker turned, and spewed. RANDOLPH LOVEL STEVENSON. A pen broken, a subverted ink-pot. Here endeth the Familiar Correspondence of R. L. S.** Explicuerunt Epistolae Stevensonianae Omnes.** All men are rot; but there are two-- Sidney, the oblivious Slade, and you-- Who from that rabble stand confest Ten million times the rottenest. R. L. S. When I was sick and safe in gaol I thought my friends would never fail. One wrote me nothing; t'other bard Sent me an insolent post-card. R. L. S. Terminus: Silentia.** FINIS Finaliter finium** IF NOBODY WRITES TO ME I SHALL DIE I now write no more. RICHARD LEFANU STEVENSON, Duke of Indignation Mark Tacebo, Isaac Blood } Secretary John Blind } Vain-hope Go-to-bed } witnesses Israel Sciatica } ----- The finger on the mouth. ----- * Originally reversed print. ** Originally sideways print. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The allusions in the second paragraph are to the commanders in the Nile campaigns of those years. _La Solitude, Hyères, 9th March 1884._ MY DEAR S. C.,--You will already have received a not very sane note from me; so your patience was rewarded--may I say, your patient silence? However, now comes a letter, which on receipt, I thus acknowledge. I have already expressed myself as to the political aspect. About Grahame, I feel happier; it does seem to have been really a good, neat, honest piece of work. We do not seem to be so badly off for commanders: Wolseley and Roberts, and this pile of Woods, Stewarts, Alisons, Grahames, and the like. Had we but ONE statesman on any side of the house! Two chapters of _Otto_ do remain: one to rewrite, one to create; and I am not yet able to tackle them. For me it is my chief o' works; hence probably not so for others, since it only means that I have here attacked the greatest difficulties. But some chapters towards the end: three in particular--I do think come off. I find them stirring, dramatic, and not unpoetical. We shall see, however; as like as not, the effort will be more obvious than the success. For, of course, I strung myself hard to carry it out. The next will come easier, and possibly be more popular. I believe in the covering of much paper, each time with a definite and not too difficult artistic purpose; and then, from time to time, drawing oneself up and trying, in a superior effort, to combine the facilities thus acquired or improved. Thus one progresses. But, mind, it is very likely that the big effort, instead of being the masterpiece, may be the blotted copy, the gymnastic exercise. This no man can tell; only the brutal and licentious public, snouting in Mudie's wash-trough, can return a dubious answer. I am to-day, thanks to a pure heaven and a beneficent, loud-talking, antiseptic mistral, on the high places as to health and spirits. Money holds out wonderfully. Fanny has gone for a drive to certain meadows which are now one sheet of jonquils: sea-bound meadows, the thought of which may freshen you in Bloomsbury. "Ye have been fresh and fair, Ye have been filled with flowers"--I fear I misquote. Why do people babble? Surely Herrick, in his true vein, is superior to Martial himself, though Martial is a very pretty poet. Did you ever read St. Augustine? The first chapters of the _Confessions_ are marked by a commanding genius: Shakespearian in depth. I was struck dumb, but, alas! when you begin to wander into controversy, the poet drops out. His description of infancy is most seizing. And how is this: "Sed majorum nugae negotia vocantur; puerorum autem talia cum sint puniuntur a majoribus." Which is quite after the heart of R. L. S. See also his splendid passage about the "luminosus limes amicitiae" and the "nebulae de limosa concupiscentia carnis"; going on "_Utrumque_ in confuso aestuabat et rapiebat imbecillam aetatem per abrupta cupiditatum." That "Utrumque" is a real contribution to life's science. Lust _alone_ is but a pigmy; but it never, or rarely, attacks us single-handed. Do you ever read (to go miles off, indeed) the incredible Barbey d'Aurévilly? A psychological Poe--to be for a moment Henley. I own with pleasure I prefer him with all his folly, rot, sentiment, and mixed metaphors, to the whole modern school in France. It makes me laugh when it's nonsense; and when he gets an effect (though it's still nonsense and mere Poëry, not poesy) it wakens me. _Ce qui ne meurt pas_ nearly killed me with laughing, and left me--well, it left me very nearly admiring the old ass. At least, it's the kind of thing one feels one couldn't do. The dreadful moonlight, when they all three sit silent in the room--by George, sir, it's imagined--and the brief scene between the husband and wife is all there. _Quant au fond_, the whole thing, of course, is a fever dream, and worthy of eternal laughter. Had the young man broken stones, and the two women been hard-working honest prostitutes, there had been an end of the whole immoral and baseless business: you could at least have respected them in that case. I also read _Petronius Arbiter_, which is a rum work, not so immoral as most modern works, but singularly silly. I tackled some Tacitus too. I got them with a dreadful French crib on the same page with the text, which helps me along and drives me mad. The French do not even try to translate. They try to be much more classical than the classics, with astounding results of barrenness and tedium. Tacitus, I fear, was too solid for me. I liked the war part; but the dreary intriguing at Rome was too much. R. L. S. TO MR. DICK This correspondent was for many years head clerk and confidential assistant in the family firm at Edinburgh. _La Solitude, Hyères, 12th March 1884._ MY DEAR MR. DICK,--I have been a great while owing you a letter; but I am not without excuses, as you have heard. I overworked to get a piece of work finished before I had my holiday, thinking to enjoy it more; and instead of that, the machinery near hand came sundry in my hands! like Murdie's uniform. However, I am now, I think, in a fair way of recovery; I think I was made, what there is of me, of whipcord and thorn-switches; surely I am tough! But I fancy I shall not overdrive again, or not so long. It is my theory that work is highly beneficial, but that it should, if possible, and certainly for such partially broken-down instruments as the thing I call my body, be taken in batches, with a clear break and breathing space between. I always do vary my work, laying one thing aside to take up another, not merely because I believe it rests the brain, but because I have found it most beneficial to the result. Reading, Bacon says, makes a full man, but what makes me full on any subject is to banish it for a time from all my thoughts. However, what I now propose is, out of every quarter to work two months, and rest the third. I believe I shall get more done, as I generally manage, on my present scheme, to have four months' impotent illness and two of imperfect health--one before, one after, I break down. This, at least, is not an economical division of the year. I re-read the other day that heartbreaking book, the _Life of Scott_. One should read such works now and then, but O, not often. As I live, I feel more and more that literature should be cheerful and brave-spirited, even if it cannot be made beautiful and pious and heroic. We wish it to be a green place; the Waverley Novels are better to re-read than the over-true _Life_, fine as dear Sir Walter was. The Bible, in most parts, is a cheerful book; it is our little piping theologies, tracts, and sermons that are dull and dowie; and even the Shorter Catechism, which is scarcely a work of consolation, opens with the best and shortest and completest sermon ever written--upon Man's chief end.--Believe me, my dear Mr. Dick, very sincerely yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--You see I have changed my hand. I was threatened apparently with scrivener's cramp, and at any rate had got to write so small, that the revisal of my MS. tried my eyes, hence my signature alone remains upon the old model; for it appears that if I changed that, I should be cut off from my "vivers." R. L. S. TO COSMO MONKHOUSE This amiable and excellent public servant, art-critic, and versifier was a friend of old Savile Club days; the drift of his letter can easily be guessed from this reply. The reference to Lamb is to the essay on the Restoration dramatists. _La Solitude, Hyères, March 16, 1884._ MY DEAR MONKHOUSE,--You see with what promptitude I plunge into correspondence; but the truth is, I am condemned to a complete inaction, stagnate dismally, and love a letter. Yours, which would have been welcome at any time, was thus doubly precious. Dover sounds somewhat shiveringly in my ears. You should see the weather _I_ have--cloudless, clear as crystal, with just a punkah-draft of the most aromatic air, all pine and gum tree. You would be ashamed of Dover; you would scruple to refer, sir, to a spot so paltry. To be idle at Dover is a strange pretension; pray, how do you warm yourself? If I were there I should grind knives or write blank verse, or---- But at least you do not bathe? It is idle to deny it: I have--I may say I nourish--a growing jealousy of the robust, large-legged, healthy Britain-dwellers, patient of grog, scorners of the timid umbrella, innocuously breathing fog: all which I once was, and I am ashamed to say liked it. How ignorant is youth! grossly rolling among unselected pleasures; and how nobler, purer, sweeter, and lighter, to sip the choice tonic, to recline in the luxurious invalid chair, and to tread, well-shawled, the little round of the constitutional. Seriously, do you like to repose? Ye gods, I hate it. I never rest with any acceptation; I do not know what people mean who say they like sleep and that damned bedtime which, since long ere I was breeched, has rung a knell to all my day's doings and beings. And when a man, seemingly sane, tells me he has "fallen in love with stagnation," I can only say to him, "You will never be a Pirate!" This may not cause any regret to Mrs. Monkhouse; but in your own soul it will clang hollow--think of it! Never! After all boyhood's aspirations and youth's immoral day-dreams, you are condemned to sit down, grossly draw in your chair to the fat board, and be a beastly Burgess till you die. Can it be? Is there not some escape, some furlough from the Moral Law, some holiday jaunt contrivable into a Better Land? Shall we never shed blood? This prospect is too grey. Here lies a man who never did Anything but what he was bid; Who lived his life in paltry ease, And died of commonplace disease. To confess plainly, I had intended to spend my life (or any leisure I might have from Piracy upon the high seas) as the leader of a great horde of irregular cavalry, devastating whole valleys. I can still, looking back, see myself in many favourite attitudes; signalling for a boat from my pirate ship with a pocket-handkerchief, I at the jetty end, and one or two of my bold blades keeping the crowd at bay; or else turning in the saddle to look back at my whole command (some five thousand strong) following me at the hand-gallop up the road out of the burning valley: this last by moonlight. _Et point du tout._ I am a poor scribe, and have scarce broken a commandment to mention, and have recently dined upon cold veal! As for you (who probably had some ambitions), I hear of you living at Dover, in lodgings, like the beasts of the field. But in heaven, when we get there, we shall have a good time, and see some real carnage. For heaven is--must be--that great Kingdom of Antinomia, which Lamb saw dimly adumbrated in the _Country Wife_, where the worm which never dies (the conscience) peacefully expires, and the sinner lies down beside the Ten Commandments. Till then, here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling, with neither health nor vice for anything more spirited than procrastination, which I may well call the Consolation Stakes of Wickedness; and by whose diligent practice, without the least amusement to ourselves, we can rob the orphan and bring down grey hairs with sorrow to the dust. This astonishing gush of nonsense I now hasten to close, envelope, and expedite to Shakespeare's Cliff. Remember me to Shakespeare, and believe me, yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO EDMUND GOSSE Mr. Gosse had written describing the office which he then occupied, a picturesque old-fashioned chamber in the upper stories of the Board of Trade. _La Solitude, Hyères, March 17, 1884._ MY DEAR GOSSE,--Your office--office is profanely said--your bower upon the leads is divine. Have you, like Pepys, "the right to fiddle" there? I see you mount the companion, barbiton in hand, and, fluttered about by city sparrows, pour forth your spirit in a voluntary. Now when the spring begins, you must lay in your flowers: how do you say about a potted hawthorn? Would it bloom? Wallflower is a choice pot-herb; lily-of-the-valley, too, and carnation, and Indian cress trailed about the window, is not only beautiful by colour, but the leaves are good to eat. I recommend thyme and rosemary for the aroma, which should not be left upon one side; they are good quiet growths. On one of your tables keep a great map spread out; a chart is still better--it takes one further--the havens with their little anchors, the rocks, banks, and soundings, are adorably marine; and such furniture will suit your ship-shape habitation. I wish I could see those cabins; they smile upon me with the most intimate charm. From your leads, do you behold St. Paul's? I always like to see the Foolscap; it is London _per se_ and no spot from which it is visible is without romance. Then it is good company for the man of letters, whose veritable nursing Pater-Noster is so near at hand. I am all at a standstill; as idle as a painted ship, but not so pretty. My romance, which has so nearly butchered me in the writing, not even finished; though so near, thank God, that a few days of tolerable strength will see the roof upon that structure. I have worked very hard at it, and so do not expect any great public favour. _In moments of effort, one learns to do the easy things that people like._ There is the golden maxim; thus one should strain and then play, strain again and play again. The strain is for us, it educates; the play is for the reader, and pleases. Do you not feel so? We are ever threatened by two contrary faults: both deadly. To sink into what my forefathers would have called "rank conformity," and to pour forth cheap replicas, upon the one hand; upon the other, and still more insidiously present, to forget that art is a diversion and a decoration, that no triumph or effort is of value, nor anything worth reaching except charm.--Yours affectionately, R. L. S. TO MISS FERRIER Soon after the date of the following letter Miss Ferrier went out to her friends and stayed with them through the trying weeks which followed. _La Solitude, Hyères_ [_March_ 22, 1884]. MY DEAR MISS FERRIER,--Are you really going to fail us? This seems a dreadful thing. My poor wife, who is not well off for friends on this bare coast, has been promising herself, and I have been promising her, a rare acquisition. And now Miss Burn has failed, and you utter a very doubtful note. You do not know how delightful this place is, nor how anxious we are for a visit. Look at the names: "The Solitude"--is that romantic? The palm-trees?--how is that for the gorgeous East? "Var"? the name of a river--"the quiet waters by"! 'Tis true, they are in another department, and consist of stones and a biennial spate; but what a music, what a plash of brooks, for the imagination! We have hills; we have skies; the roses are putting forth, as yet sparsely; the meadows by the sea are one sheet of jonquils; the birds sing as in an English May--for, considering we are in France and serve up our song-birds, I am ashamed to say, on a little field of toast and with a sprig of thyme (my own receipt) in their most innocent and now unvocal bellies--considering all this, we have a wonderfully fair wood-music round this Solitude of ours. What can I say more?--All this awaits you. _Kennst du das Land_, in short.--Your sincere friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. H. LOW The verses enclosed were the set entitled "The Canoe Speaks," afterwards printed in _Underwoods_. Stevenson was suffering at this time from a temporary weakness of the eyesight. _La Solitude, Hyères [April 1884]._ MY DEAR LOW,--The blind man in these sprawled lines sends greeting. I have been ill, as perhaps the papers told you. The news--"great news--glorious news--sec-ond ed-ition!"--went the round in England. Anyway, I now thank you for your pictures, which, particularly the Arcadian one, we all (Bob included, he was here sick-nursing me) much liked. Herewith are a set of verses which I thought pretty enough to send to press. Then I thought of the Manhattan, towards whom I have guilty and compunctious feelings. Last, I had the best thought of all--to send them to you in case you might think them suitable for illustration. It seemed to me quite in your vein. If so, good; if not, hand them on to Manhattan, Century, or Lippincott, at your pleasure, as all three desire my work or pretend to. But I trust the lines will not go unattended. Some riverside will haunt you; and O! be tender to my bathing girls. The lines are copied in my wife's hand, as I cannot see to write otherwise than with the pen of Cormoran, Gargantua, or Nimrod. Love to your wife.--Yours ever, R. L. S. Copied it myself. TO THOMAS STEVENSON _La Solitude, Hyères, April 19, 1884._ MY DEAR FATHER,--Yesterday I very powerfully stated the _Hæresis Stevensoniana_, or the complete body of divinity of the family theologian, to Miss Ferrier. She was much impressed; so was I. You are a great heresiarch; and I know no better. Whaur the devil did ye get thon about the soap? Is it altogether your own? I never heard it elsewhere; and yet I suspect it must have been held at some time or other, and if you were to look up you would probably find yourself condemned by some Council. I am glad to hear you are so well. The hear is excellent. The Cornhills came; I made Miss Ferrier read us _Thrawn Janet_, and was quite bowled over by my own works. _The Merry Men_ I mean to make much longer, with a whole new dénouement, not yet quite clear to me. _The Story of a Lie_ I must rewrite entirely also, as it is too weak and ragged, yet is worth saving for the Admiral. Did I ever tell you that the Admiral was recognised in America? When they are all on their legs this will make an excellent collection. Has Davie never read _Guy Mannering_, _Rob Roy_, or _The Antiquary_? All of which are worth three _Waverleys_. I think _Kenilworth_ better than _Waverley_; _Nigel_, too; and _Quentin Durward_ about as good. But it shows a true piece of insight to prefer _Waverley_, for it _is_ different; and though not quite coherent, better worked in parts than almost any other: surely more carefully. It is undeniable that the love of the slap-dash and the shoddy grew upon Scott with success. Perhaps it does on many of us, which may be the granite on which D.'s opinion stands. However, I hold it, in Patrick Walker's phrase, for an "old, condemned, damnable error." Dr. Simson was condemned by P. W. as being "a bagful of" such. One of Patrick's amenities! Another ground there may be to D.'s opinion; those who avoid (or seek to avoid) Scott's facility are apt to be continually straining and torturing their style to get in more of life. And to many the extra significance does not redeem the strain. DOCTOR STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY _La Solitude, Hyères, April 20th, 1884._ I have been really ill for two days, hemorrhage, weakness, extreme nervousness that will not let me lie a moment, and damned sciatica o' nights; but to-day I am on the recovery. Time; for I was miserable. It is not often that I suffer, with all my turns and tumbles, from the sense of serious illness; and I hate it, as I believe everybody does. And then the combination of not being able to read, not being allowed to speak, being too weak to write, and not wishing to eat, leaves a man with some empty seconds. But I bless God, it's over now; to-day I am much mended. Insatiable gulf, greedier than hell, and more silent than the woods of Styx, have you or have you not lost the dedication to the _Child's Garden_? Answer that plain question as otherwise I must try to tackle to it once again. Sciatica is a word employed much by Shakespeare in a certain connection. 'Tis true, he was no physician, but as I read, he had smarted in his day. I, too, do smart. And yet this keen soprano agony, these veins of fire and bombshell explosions in the knee, are as nothing to a certain dull, drowsy pain I had when my kidneys were congested at Nice; there was death in that; the creak of Charon's rowlocks, and the miasmas of the Styx. I may say plainly, much as I have lost the power of bearing pain, I had still rather suffer much than die. Not only the love of life grows on me, but the fear of certain odd end-seconds grows as well. 'Tis a suffocating business, take it how you will; and Tyrrel and Forest only bunglers. Well, this is an essay on death, or worse, on dying: to return to daylight and the winds, I perceive I have grown to live too much in my work and too little in life. 'Tis the dollars do it: the world is too much. Whenever I think I would like to live a little, I hear the butcher's cart resounding through the neighbourhood; and so to plunge again. The fault is a good fault for me; to be able to do so, is to succeed in life; and my life has been a huge success. I can live with joy and without disgust in the art by which I try to support myself; I have the best wife in the world; I have rather more praise and nearly as much coin as I deserve; my friends are many and true-hearted. Sir, it is a big thing in successes. And if mine anchorage lies something open to the wind, Sciatica, if the crew are blind, and the captain spits blood, one cannot have all, and I may be patched up again, who knows? "His timbers yet are (indifferently) sound, and he may float again." Thanks for the word on _Silverado_.--Yours ever, THE SCIATICATED BARD. TO TREVOR HADDON The allusions to Skelt, the last of the designers and etchers of cheap sheets illustrating the popular dramas and melodramas of the day, will need no explanation to readers familiar with the essay _A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured_. _La Solitude, Hyères, April 23rd, 1884._ DEAR MR. HADDON,--I am pleased to see your hand again, and, waiting my wife's return, to guess at some of the contents. For various things have befallen me of late. First, as you see, I had to change my hand; lastly I have fallen into a kind of blindness, and cannot read. This more inclines me for something to do, to answer your letter before I have read it, a safe plan familiar to diplomatists. I gather from half shut eyes that you were a Skeltist; now seriously that is a good beginning; there is a deal of romance (cheap) in Skelt. Look at it well, and you will see much of Dickens. And even Skelt is better than conscientious, grey back-gardens, and conscientious, dull still lives. The great lack of art just now is a spice of life and interest; and I prefer galvanism to acquiescence in the grave. All do not; 'tis an affair of tastes; and mine are young. Those who like death have their innings to-day with art that is like mahogany and horse-hair furniture, solid, true, serious and as dead as Cæsar. I wish I could read _Treasure Island_; I believe I should like it. But work done, for the artist, is the Golden Goose killed; you sell its feathers and lament the eggs. To-morrow the fresh woods! I have been seriously ill, and do not pick up with that finality that I should like to see. I linger over and digest my convalescence like a favourite wine; and what with blindness, green spectacles, and seclusion, cut but a poor figure in the world. I made out at the end that you were asking some advice--but what, my failing eyes refuse to inform me. I must keep a sheet for the answer; and Mrs. Stevenson still delays, and still I have no resource against tedium but the waggling of this pen. You seem to me to be a pretty lucky young man; keep your eyes open to your mercies. That part of piety is eternal; and the man who forgets to be grateful has fallen asleep in life. Please to recognise that you are unworthy of all that befalls you--unworthy, too, I hear you wail, of this terrible sermon; but indeed we are not worthy of our fortunes; love takes us in a counterfeit, success comes to us at play, health stays with us while we abuse her; and even when we gird at our fellow-men, we should remember that it is of their good will alone, that we still live and still have claims to honour. The sins of the most innocent, if they were exactly visited, would ruin them to the doer. And if you know any man who believes himself to be worthy of a wife's love, a friend's affection, a mistress's caress, even if venal, you may rest assured he is worthy of nothing but a kicking. I fear men who have no open faults; what do they conceal? We are not meant to be good in this world, but to try to be, and fail, and keep on trying; and when we get a cake to say, "Thank God!" and when we get a buffet, to say, "Just so: well hit!" I have been getting some of the buffets of late; but have amply earned them--you need not pity me. Pity sick children and the individual poor man; not the mass. Don't pity anybody else, and never pity fools. The optimistic Stevenson; but there is a sense in these wanderings. Now I have heard your letter, and my sermon was not mal-à-propos. For you seem to be complaining. Everybody's home is depressing, I believe; it is their difficult business to make it less so. There is an unpleasant saying, which would have pricked me sharply at your age.--Yours truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO COSMO MONKHOUSE _La Solitude, Hyères [April 24, 1884]._ DEAR MONKHOUSE,--If you are in love with repose, here is your occasion: change with me. I am too blind to read, hence no reading; I am too weak to walk, hence no walking; I am not allowed to speak, hence no talking; but the great simplification has yet to be named; for, if this goes on, I shall soon have nothing to eat--and hence, O Hallelujah! hence no eating. The offer is a fair one: I have not sold myself to the devil, for I could never find him. I am married, but so are you. I sometimes write verses, but so do you. Come! _Hic quies!_ As for the commandments, I have broken them so small that they are the dust of my chambers; you walk upon them, triturate and toothless; and with the Golosh of Philosophy, they shall not bite your heel. True, the tenement is falling. Ay, friend, but yours also. Take a larger view; what is a year or two? dust in the balance! 'Tis done, behold you Cosmo Stevenson, and me R. L. Monkhouse; you at Hyères, I in London; you rejoicing in the clammiest repose, me proceeding to tear your tabernacle into rags, as I have already so admirably torn my own. My place to which I now introduce you--it is yours--is like a London house, high and very narrow; upon the lungs I will not linger; the heart is large enough for a ballroom; the belly greedy and inefficient; the brain stocked with the most damnable explosives, like a dynamiter's den. The whole place is well furnished, though not in a very pure taste; Corinthian much of it; showy and not strong. About your place I shall try to find my way above, an interesting exploration. Imagine me, as I go to bed, falling over a blood-stained remorse; opening that cupboard in the cerebellum and being welcomed by the spirit of your murdered uncle. I should probably not like your remorses; I wonder if you will like mine; I have a spirited assortment; they whistle in my ear o' nights like a north-easter. I trust yours don't dine with the family; mine are better mannered; you will hear nought of them till 2 A.M., except one, to be sure, that I have made a pet of, but he is small; I keep him in buttons, so as to avoid commentaries; you will like him much--if you like what is genuine. Must we likewise change religions? Mine is a good article, with a trick of stopping; cathedral bell note; ornamental dial; supported by Venus and the Graces; quite a summer-parlour piety. Of yours, since your last, I fear there is little to be said. There is one article I wish to take away with me: my spirits. They suit me. I don't want yours; I like my own; I have had them a long while in bottle. It is my only reservation.--Yours (as you decide), R. L. MONKHOUSE. TO W. E. HENLEY _La Solitude, Hyères [May 1884]._ DEAR BOY,--_Old Mortality_[9] is out, and I am glad to say Coggie likes it. We like her immensely. I keep better, but no great shakes yet; cannot work--cannot: that is flat, not even verses: as for prose, that more active place is shut on me long since. My view of life is essentially the comic; and the romantically comic. _As You Like It_ is to me the most bird-haunted spot in letters; _Tempest_ and _Twelfth Night_ follow. These are what I mean by poetry and nature. I make an effort of my mind to be quite one with Molière, except upon the stage, where his inimitable _jeux de scène_ beggar belief; but you will observe they are stage-plays--things _ad hoc_; not great Olympian debauches of the heart and fancy; hence more perfect, and not so great. Then I come, after great wanderings, to Carmosine and to Fantasio; to one part of La Dernière Aldini (which, by the by, we might dramatise in a week), to the notes that Meredith has found, Evan and the postillion, Evan and Rose, Harry in Germany. And to me these things are the good; beauty, touched with sex and laughter; beauty with God's earth for the background. Tragedy does not seem to me to come off; and when it does, it does so by the heroic illusion; the anti-masque has been omitted; laughter, which attends on all our steps in life, and sits by the deathbed, and certainly redacts the epitaph, laughter has been lost from these great-hearted lies. But the comedy which keeps the beauty and touches the terrors of our life (laughter and tragedy-in-a-good-humour having kissed), that is the last word of moved representation; embracing the greatest number of elements of fate and character; and telling its story, not with the one eye of pity, but with the two of pity and mirth. R. L. S. TO EDMUND GOSSE Early in May Stevenson again fell very dangerously ill with hemorrhage of the lungs, and lay for several weeks between life and death, until towards the end of June he was brought sufficiently round to venture by slow stages on the journey to England, staying for two or three weeks at Royat on the way. His correspondent had lately been appointed Clark Reader in English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. _[La Solitude, Hyères] From my bed, May 29, 1884._ DEAR GOSSE,--The news of the Professorate found me in the article of--well, of heads or tails; I am still in bed, and a very poor person. You must thus excuse my damned delay; but, I assure you, I was delighted. You will believe me the more, if I confess to you that my first sentiment was envy; yes, sir, on my blood-boltered couch I envied the professor. However, it was not of long duration; the double thought that you deserved and that you would thoroughly enjoy your success fell like balsam on my wounds. How came it that you never communicated my rejection of Gilder's offer for the Rhone? But it matters not. Such earthly vanities are over for the present. This has been a fine well-conducted illness. A month in bed; a month of silence; a fortnight of not stirring my right hand; a month of not moving without being lifted. Come! _Ça y est_: devilish like being dead.--Yours, dear Professor, academically, R. L. S. I am soon to be moved to Royat; an invalid valet goes with me! I got him cheap--second-hand. In turning over my late friend Ferrier's commonplace book, I find three poems from _Viol and Flute_ copied out in his hand: "When Flower-time," "Love in Winter," and "Mistrust." They are capital too. But I thought the fact would interest you. He was no poetist either; so it means the more. "Love in W.!" I like the best. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Enclosing some supplementary verses for the _Child's Garden_. _Marseilles, June 1884._ DEAR S. C.,--Are these four in time? No odds about order. I am at Marseille and stood the journey wonderfully. Better address Hotel Chabassière, Royat, Puy de Dôme. You see how this d--d poeshie flows from me in sickness: Are they good or bad? Wha kens? But I like the _Little Land_, I think, as well as any. As time goes on I get more fancy in. We have no money, but a valet and a maid. The valet is no end; how long can you live on a valet? Vive le valet! I am tempted to call myself a valetudinarian. I love my love with a V because he is a Valetudinarian; I took him to Valetta or Valais, gave him his Vails and tenderly addressed him with one word, Vale. _P.S._--It does not matter of course about order. As soon as I have all the slips I shall organise the book for the publisher. A set of 8 will be put together under the title _An Only Child_; another cycle of 10 will be called _In the Garden_, and other six called _Bedtime_ to end all up. It will now make quite a little volume of a good way upwards of 100 pp. Will you instruct Bain to send me a Bible; of a type that I can read without blindness; the better if with notes; there is a Clarendon Press Bible, pray see it yourself. I also want Ewald's History in a translation. R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The play of _Deacon Brodie_, the joint work of R. L. S. and W. E. H., was to be performed in London early in July. [_Hotel Chabassière, Royat, July 1884._] DEAR S. C.,--Books received with great thanks. Very nice books, though I see you underrate my cecity: I could no more read their beautiful Bible than I could sail in heaven. However I have sent for another and can read the rest for patience. I quite understand your feelings about the _Deacon_, which is a far way behind; but I get miserable when I think of Henley cutting this splash and standing, I fear, to lose a great deal of money. It is about Henley, not Brodie, that I care. I fear my affections are not strong to my past works; they are blotted out by others; and anyhow the _Deacon_ is damn bad. I am half asleep and can no more discourse. Say to your friends, "Look here, some friends of mine are bringing out a play; it has some stuff; suppose you go and see it." But I know I am a cold, unbelieving fellow, incapable of those hot claps that honour you and Henley and therefore--I am asleep. _Child's Garden_ (first instalment) come. Fanny ill; self asleep. R. L. S. TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON _Hotel Chabassière, Royat [July 1884]._ MY DEAR PEOPLE,--The weather has been demoniac; I have had a skiff of cold, and was finally obliged to take to bed entirely; to-day, however, it has cleared, the sun shines, and I begin to * * * * * _Several days after._--I have been out once, but now am back in bed. I am better, and keep better, but the weather is a mere injustice. The imitation of Edinburgh is, at times, deceptive; there is a note among the chimney pots that suggests Howe Street; though I think the shrillest spot in Christendom was not upon the Howe Street side, but in front, just under the Miss Graemes' big chimney stack. It had a fine alto character--a sort of bleat that used to divide the marrow in my joints--say in the wee, slack hours. That music is now lost to us by rebuilding; another air that I remember, not regret, was the solo of the gas-burner in the little front room; a knickering, flighty, fleering, and yet spectral cackle. I mind it above all on winter afternoons, late, when the window was blue and spotted with rare rain-drops, and, looking out, the cold evening was seen blue all over, with the lamps of Queen's and Frederick's Street dotting it with yellow, and flaring eastward in the squalls. Heavens, how unhappy I have been in such circumstances--I, who have now positively forgotten the colour of unhappiness; who am full like a fed ox, and dull like a fresh turf, and have no more spiritual life, for good or evil, than a French bagman. We are at Chabassière's, for of course it was nonsense to go up the hill when we could not walk. The child's poems in a far extended form are likely soon to be heard of--which Cummy I dare say will be glad to know. They will make a book of about one hundred pages.--Ever your affectionate, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN I had reported to Stevenson a remark made by one of his greatest admirers, Sir E. Burne-Jones, on some particular analogy, I forget what, between a passage of Defoe and one in _Treasure Island_. [_Hotel Chabassière, Royat, July 1884._] ... Here is a quaint thing, I have read _Robinson_, _Colonel Jack_, _Moll Flanders_, _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, _History of the Plague_, _History of the Great Storm_, _Scotch Church and Union_. And there my knowledge of Defoe ends--except a book, the name of which I forget, about Peterborough in Spain, which Defoe obviously did not write, and could not have written if he wanted. To which of these does B. J. refer? I guess it must be the history of the Scottish Church. I jest; for, of course, I _know_ it must be a book I have never read, and which this makes me keen to read--I mean _Captain Singleton_. Can it be got and sent to me? If _Treasure Island_ is at all like it, it will be delightful. I was just the other day wondering at my folly in not remembering it, when I was writing _T. I._, as a mine for pirate tips. _T. I._ came out of Kingsley's _At Last_, where I got the Dead Man's Chest--and that was the seed--and out of the great Captain Johnson's _History of Notorious Pirates_. The scenery is Californian in part, and in part _chic_. I was downstairs to-day! So now I am a made man--till the next time. R. L. STEVENSON. If it was _Captain Singleton_, send it to me, won't you? _Later._--My life dwindles into a kind of valley of the shadow picnic. I cannot read; so much of the time (as to-day) I must not speak above my breath, that to play patience, or to see my wife play it, is become the be-all and the end-all of my dim career. To add to my gaiety, I may write letters, but there are few to answer. Patience and Poesy are thus my rod and staff; with these I not unpleasantly support my days. I am very dim, dumb, dowie, and damnable. I hate to be silenced; and if to talk by signs is my forte (as I contend), to understand them cannot be my wife's. Do not think me unhappy; I have not been so for years; but I am blurred, inhabit the debatable frontier of sleep, and have but dim designs upon activity. All is at a standstill; books closed, paper put aside, the voice, the eternal voice of R. L. S., well silenced. Hence this plaint reaches you with no very great meaning, no very great purpose, and written part in slumber by a heavy, dull, somnolent, superannuated son of a bedpost. TO W. E. HENLEY I suppose, but cannot remember, that I had in the meantime sent him _Captain Singleton_. [_Hotel Chabassière, Royat, July 1884._] DEAR BOY,--I am glad that ---- ---- has disappointed you. Depend upon it, nobody is so bad as to be worth scalping, except your dearest friends and parents; and scalping them may sometimes be avoided by scalping yourself. I grow daily more lymphatic and benign; bring me a dynamiter, that I may embrace and bless him!--So, if I continue to evade the friendly hemorrhage, I shall be spared in anger to pour forth senile and insignificant volumes, and the clever lads in the journals, not doubting of the eye of Nemesis, shall mock and gird at me. All this seems excellent news of the _Deacon_. But O! that the last tableau, on from Leslie's entrance, were re-written! We had a great opening there and missed it. I read for the first time _Captain Singleton_; it has points; and then I re-read _Colonel Jack_ with ecstasy; the first part is as much superior to _Robinson Crusoe_ as _Robinson_ is to--_The Inland Voyage_. It is pretty, good, philosophical, dramatic, and as picturesque as a promontory goat in a gale of wind. Get it and fill your belly with honey. Fanny hopes to be in time for the _Deacon_. I was out yesterday, and none the worse. We leave Monday. R. L. S. FOOTNOTES: [1] For many years fellow of and historical lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. [2] _Paillon._ [3] The name of the Delectable Land in one of Heine's _Lieder_. [4] _Silverado Squatters_. [5] The allusion is to a specimen I had been used to hear quoted of the Duke of Wellington's table-talk in his latter years. He had said that musk-rats were sometimes kept alive in bottles in India. Curate, or other meek dependent: "I presume, your Grace, they are small rats and large bottles." His Grace: "No, large rats, small bottles; large rats, small bottles; large rats, small bottles." [6] _Croûtes_: crude studies from nature. [7] Mr. J. Comyns Carr, at this time editing the English Illustrated Magazine. [8] A favourite Skye terrier. Mr. Stevenson was a great lover of dogs. [9] The essay so called, suggested by the death of J. W. Ferrier. See _Memories and Portraits_. VIII LIFE AT BOURNEMOUTH SEPTEMBER 1884--AUGUST 1887 Arriving in England at the end of July 1884, Stevenson took up his quarters first for a few weeks at Richmond. He was compelled to abandon the hope of making his permanent home at Hyères, partly by the renewed failure there of his own health, partly by a bad outbreak of cholera which occurred in the old Provençal town about the time he left it. After consultation with several doctors, all of whom held out hopes of ultimate recovery despite the gravity of his present symptoms, he moved to Bournemouth. Here he found in the heaths and pinewoods some distant semblance of the landscape of his native Scotland, and in the sandy curves of the Channel coast a passable substitute for the bays and promontories of his beloved Mediterranean. At all events, he liked the place well enough to be willing to try it for a home; and such it became for all but three years, from September 1884 to August 1887. These, although in the matter of health the worst and most trying years of his life, were in the matter of work some of the most active and successful. For the first two or three months the Stevensons occupied a lodging on the West Cliff called Wensleydale; for the next five, from mid-November 1884 to mid-April 1885, they were tenants of a house named Bonallie Towers, pleasantly situated amid the pinewoods of Branksome Park, and by its name recalling familiar Midlothian associations. Lastly, about Easter 1885, they entered into occupation of a house of their own, given by the elder Mr. Stevenson as a special gift to his daughter-in-law, and renamed by its new occupants Skerryvore, in reminiscence of one of the great lighthouse works carried out by the family firm off the Scottish coast. During all the time of Stevenson's residence at Bournemouth he was compelled to lead the life, irksome to him above all men, but borne with invincible spirit and patience, of a chronic invalid and almost constant prisoner to the house. A great part of his time had perforce to be spent in bed, and there almost all his literary work was produced. Often for days, and sometimes for whole weeks together, he was forbidden to speak aloud, and compelled to carry on conversation with his family and friends in whispers or with the help of pencil and paper. The few excursions to a distance which he attempted--most commonly to my house at the British Museum, once to Cambridge, once to Matlock, once to Exeter, and once in 1886 as far as Paris--these excursions generally ended in a breakdown and a hurried retreat to home and bed. Nevertheless, he was able in intervals of comparative ease to receive and enjoy the visits of friends from a distance both old and new--among the most welcome of the latter being Mr. Henry James, Mr. William Archer, and Mr. John S. Sargent; while among Bournemouth residents who attached themselves to him on terms of special intimacy and affection were Sir Percy and Lady Shelley and Sir Henry and Lady Taylor and their daughters. At the same time, seizing and making the most of every week, nay, every day and hour of respite, he contrived to produce work surprising, under the circumstances, alike by quantity and quality. During the first two months of his life at Bournemouth the two plays _Admiral Guinea_ and _Beau Austin_ were written in collaboration with Mr. Henley, and many other dramatic schemes were broached which health and leisure failed him to carry out. In the course of the next few months he finished _Prince Otto_, _The Child's Garden of Verses_, and _More New Arabian Nights_, all three of which had been begun, and the two first almost completed, before he left Hyères. He at the same time attacked two new tasks--a highway novel called _The Great North Road_, and a _Life of Wellington_ for a series edited by Mr. Andrew Lang, both of which he had in the sequel to abandon; and a third, the boys' story of _Kidnapped_, which in its turn had to be suspended, but on its publication next year turned out one of the most brilliant of his successes. About midsummer of this year, 1885, he was distressed by the sudden death of his old and kind friend Professor Fleeming Jenkin, and after a while undertook the task of writing a memoir of him to be prefixed to his collected papers. Towards the close of the same year he was busy with what proved to be the most popular of all his writings, _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, and with the Christmas story of _Olalla_. _Jekyll and Hyde_ was published in January 1886, and after threatening for the first week or two to fall flat, in no long time caught the attention of all classes of readers, was quoted from a hundred pulpits, and made the writer's name familiar to multitudes both in England and America whom it had never reached before. A success scarcely inferior, though of another kind, was made a few months afterwards by _Kidnapped_, which Stevenson had taken up again in the early spring, and which was published about midsummer. After completing this task in March, he was able to do little work during the remainder of the year, except in preparing materials for the _Life of Fleeming Jenkin_, and in writing occasional verses which helped to make up the collection published in the following year under the title _Underwoods_. In the early autumn of the same year, 1886, he took a longer and more successful excursion from home than usual, staying without breakdown for two or three weeks at the Monument, as he always called my house at the British Museum, and seeing something of kindred spirits among his elders, such as Robert Browning, James Russell Lowell, the painters Burne-Jones and W. B. Richmond, and others who had hitherto delighted in his work and now learned to delight no less in his society. Thence he went with Mr. Henley for a short trip to Paris, chiefly in order to see the sculptor Rodin and his old friends Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Low. From this trip he returned none the worse, but during all the later autumn and winter at Bournemouth was again hampered in his work by renewed and prolonged attacks of illness. A further cause of trouble was the distressing failure of his father's health and spirits, attended by symptoms which plainly indicated the beginning of the end. For some weeks of April, 1887, he was much taken up with a scheme which had nothing to do with literature, and which the few friends to whom he confided it regarded as wildly Quixotic and unwise. In these years he had, as we have seen, taken deeply to heart both what he thought the guilty remissness of Government action in the matter of the Soudan garrisons and of Gordon, and the tameness of acquiescence with which the national conscience appeared to take the result. He had been not less disturbed at the failure, hitherto, of successive administrations to assert the reign of law in Ireland. He was no blind partisan of the English cause in that country, and had even written of the hereditary hatred of Irish for English as a sentiment justified by the facts of history. But he held strongly that private warfare, the use of dynamite and the knife, with the whole system of agrarian vengeances and the persecution of the weak, were means which no end could justify; and that redress of grievances, whatever form it might ultimately take, must be preceded by the re-establishment of law. In _More New Arabian Nights_, published the year before, he had endeavoured "to make dynamite ridiculous if he could not make it horrible," and to the old elements of fantastic invention, and humorously solemn realism in the unreal, had added the new element of a witty and scornful criminal psychology. A case that now appealed to him with especial force was that of the cruel persecution kept up against the widow and daughters of the murdered man Curtin. He determined that if no one else would take up the duty of resisting such persecution without regard to consequences, he would take it up himself, in the hope of more effectually rousing the public conscience to the evils of the time. His plan was to go with his family, occupy and live upon the derelict farm, and let happen what would. This, as the letters referring to the matter plainly show, was no irresponsible dream or whim, but a purpose conceived in absolute and sober earnest. His wife and household were prepared to follow, though under protest, had he persisted; as it seemed for some weeks that he certainly would, until at last the arguments of his friends, and still more the unmistakable evidence that his father's end was near, persuaded him to give up his purpose. But to the last, I think he was never well satisfied that in giving way he had not been a coward, preferring fireside ease and comfort to the call of a public duty. After spending a part of the winter at Bournemouth and a part at Torquay, both Stevenson's parents returned to Edinburgh in April 1887; and within a few weeks after their arrival he was summoned north to his father's death-bed. He stayed at Edinburgh the short time necessary for the dispatch of business, and returned to his own sick-room life at Skerryvore. During the two years and nine months of Stevenson's residence at Bournemouth, preceding the date of his father's death, he had made no apparent progress towards recovery. Every period of respite had been quickly followed by a relapse, and all his work, brilliant and varied as it was, had been done under conditions which would have reduced almost any other man to inactivity. The close and frequently recurring struggles against the danger of death from hemorrhage and exhaustion, which he had been used, when they first occurred, to find exciting, grew in the long run merely irksome; and even his persistent high courage and gaiety, sustained as they were by the devoted affection of his wife and many friends, began occasionally, for the first time, to fail him. Accordingly, when in May 1887 the death of his father severed the strongest of the ties which bound him to the old country, he was very ready to listen to the advice of his physicians, who were unanimous in thinking his case not hopeless, but urged him to try some complete change of climate, surroundings, and mode of life. His wife's connections pointing to the West, he thought of the mountain health-resorts of Colorado, and of their growing reputation for the cure of lung patients. Having let his house at Bournemouth, he accordingly took passage on board the S.S. _Ludgate Hill_, sailing for New York from London on August 21st, 1887, with his whole party, consisting of his wife, his widowed mother, whom they had persuaded to join them, his young stepson, and a trusted servant, Valentine Roch. The concluding letters of the present section tell of the preparations for this departure. TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON _Wensleydale, Bournemouth, Sunday, 28th September 1884._ MY DEAR PEOPLE,--I keep better, and am to-day downstairs for the first time. I find the lockers entirely empty; not a cent to the front. Will you pray send us some? It blows an equinoctial gale, and has blown for nearly a week. Nimbus Britannicus; piping wind, lashing rain; the sea is a fine colour, and wind-bound ships lie at anchor under the Old Harry rocks, to make one glad to be ashore. The Henleys are gone, and two plays practically done. I hope they may produce some of the ready.--I am, ever affectionate son, R. L. S. TO ANDREW CHATTO During the earlier Bournemouth days were firmly established Stevenson's cordial relations with the several English publishers Cassell & Co., Chatto & Windus, and Longmans, and a little later with C. Scribner's Sons in America. _Wensleydale, Bournemouth, October 3, 1884._ DEAR MR. CHATTO,--I have an offer of £25 for _Otto_ from America. I do not know if you mean to have the American rights; from the nature of the contract, I think not; but if you understood that you were to sell the sheets, I will either hand over the bargain to you, or finish it myself and hand you over the money if you are pleased with the amount. You see, I leave this quite in your hands. To parody an old Scotch story of servant and master: if you don't know that you have a good author, I know that I have a good publisher. Your fair, open, and handsome dealings are a good point in my life, and do more for my crazy health than has yet been done by any doctor.--Very truly yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY There is no certain clue to the date of the following; neither has it been possible to make sure what was the enclosure mentioned. The special illness referred to seems to be that of the preceding May at Hyères. [_Wensleydale, Bournemouth, October 1884?_] DEAR BOY,--I trust this finds you well; it leaves me so-so. The weather is so cold that I must stick to bed, which is rotten and tedious, but can't be helped. I find in the blotting book the enclosed, which I wrote to you the eve of my blood. Is it not strange? That night, when I naturally thought I was coopered, the thought of it was much in my mind; I thought it had gone; and I thought what a strange prophecy I had made in jest, and how it was indeed like to be the end of many letters. But I have written a good few since, and the spell is broken. I am just as pleased, for I earnestly desire to live. This pleasant middle age into whose port we are steering is quite to my fancy. I would cast anchor here, and go ashore for twenty years and see the manners of the place. Youth was a great time, but somewhat fussy. Now in middle age (bar lucre) all seems mighty placid. It likes me; I spy a little bright café in one corner of the port, in front of which I now propose we should sit down. There is just enough of the bustle of the harbour and no more; and the ships are close in, regarding us with stern-windows--the ships that bring deals from Norway and parrots from the Indies. Let us sit down here for twenty years, with a packet of tobacco and a drink, and talk of art and women. By-and-by, the whole city will sink, and the ships too, and the table, and we also; but we shall have sat for twenty years and had a fine talk; and by that time, who knows? exhausted the subject. I send you a book which (or I am mistook) will please you; it pleased me. But I do desire a book of adventure--a romance--and no man will get or write me one. Dumas I have read and re-read too often; Scott, too and I am short. I want to hear swords clash. I want a book to begin in a good way; a book, I guess, like _Treasure Island_, alas! which I have never read, and cannot though I live to ninety. I would God that some one else had written it! By all that I can learn, it is the very book for my complaint. I like the way I hear it opens; and they tell me John Silver is good fun. And to me it is, and must ever be, a dream unrealised, a book unwritten. O my sighings after romance, or even Skeltery, and O! the weary age which will produce me neither! CHAPTER I The night was damp and cloudy, the ways foul. The single horseman, cloaked and booted, who pursued his way across Willesden Common, had not met a traveller, when the sound of wheels---- CHAPTER I "Yes, sir," said the old pilot, "she must have dropped into the bay a little afore dawn. A queer craft she looks." "She shows no colours," returned the young gentleman musingly. "They're a-lowering of a quarter-boat, Mr. Mark," resumed the old salt. "We shall soon know more of her." "Ay," replied the young gentleman called Mark, "and here, Mr. Seadrift, comes your sweet daughter Nancy tripping down the cliff." "God bless her kind heart, sir," ejaculated old Seadrift. CHAPTER I The notary, Jean Rossignol, had been summoned to the top of a great house in the Isle St. Louis to make a will; and now, his duties finished, wrapped in a warm roquelaure and with a lantern swinging from one hand, he issued from the mansion on his homeward way. Little did he think what strange adventures were to befall him!---- That is how stories should begin. And I am offered HUSKS instead. What should be: What is: The Filibuster's Cache. Aunt Anne's Tea Cosy. Jerry Abershaw. Mrs. Brierly's Niece. Blood Money: A Tale. Society: A Novel. R. L. S. TO THE REV. PROFESSOR LEWIS CAMPBELL In reply to a gift of books, including the correspondent's well-known translation of Sophocles. [_Wensleydale, Bournemouth, November 1884._] MY DEAR CAMPBELL,--The books came duly to hand. My wife has occupied the translation ever since, nor have I yet been able to dislodge her. As for the primer, I have read it with a very strange result: that I find no fault. If you knew how, dogmatic and pugnacious, I stand warden on the literary art, you would the more appreciate your success and my--well, I will own it--disappointment. For I love to put people right (or wrong) about the arts. But what you say of Tragedy and of Sophocles very amply satisfies me; it is well felt and well said; a little less technically than it is my weakness to desire to see it put, but clear and adequate. You are very right to express your admiration for the resource displayed in Oedipus King; it is a miracle. Would it not have been well to mention Voltaire's interesting onslaught, a thing which gives the best lesson of the difference of neighbour arts?--since all his criticisms, which had been fatal to a narrative, do not amount among them to exhibit one flaw in this masterpiece of drama. For the drama, it is perfect; though such a fable in a romance might make the reader crack his sides, so imperfect, so ethereally slight is the verisimilitude required of these conventional, rigid, and egg-dancing arts. I was sorry to see no more of you; but shall conclude by hoping for better luck next time. My wife begs to be remembered to both of you.--Yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY The "Arabs" mentioned below are the stories comprised in the volume _More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter_, written by Stevenson and his wife in collaboration. _Wensleydale, Bournemouth, November 1884._ DEAR HENLEY,--We are all to pieces in health, and heavily handicapped with Arabs. I have a dreadful cough, whose attacks leave me _ætat_. 90. I never let up on the Arabs, all the same, and rarely get less than eight pages out of hand, though hardly able to come downstairs for twittering knees. I shall put in ----'s letter. He says so little of his circumstances that I am in an impossibility to give him advice more specific than a copybook. Give him my love, however, and tell him it is the mark of the parochial gentleman who has never travelled to find all wrong in a foreign land. Let him hold on, and he will find one country as good as another; and in the meanwhile let him resist the fatal British tendency to communicate his dissatisfaction with a country to its inhabitants. 'Tis a good idea, but it somehow fails to please. In a fortnight, if I can keep my spirit in the box at all, I should be nearly through this Arabian desert; so can tackle something fresh.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO W. H. LOW It was some twenty months since the plan of publishing the _Child's Garden_ in the first instance as a picture-book had been mooted (see above, pp. 18, foll.). But it had never taken effect, and in the following March the volume appeared without illustrations in England, and also, I believe, in America. _Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park, Bournemouth, Hants, England, First week in November, I guess, 1884._ MY DEAR LOW,--Now, look here, the above is my address for three months, I hope; continue, on your part, if you please, to write to Edinburgh, which is safe; but if Mrs. Low thinks of coming to England, she might take a run down from London (four hours from Waterloo, main line) and stay a day or two with us among the pines. If not, I hope it will be only a pleasure deferred till you can join her. My Children's Verses will be published here in a volume called _A Child's Garden_. The sheets are in hand; I will see if I cannot send you the lot, so that you might have a bit of a start. In that case I would do nothing to publish in the States, and you might try an illustrated edition there; which, if the book went fairly over here, might, when ready, be imported. But of this more fully ere long. You will see some verses of mine in the last Magazine of Art, with pictures by a young lady; rather pretty, I think. If we find a market for _Phasellulus loquitur_, we can try another. I hope it isn't necessary to put the verse into that rustic printing. I am Philistine enough to prefer clean printer's type; indeed, I can form no idea of the verses thus transcribed by the incult and tottering hand of the draughtsman, nor gather any impression beyond one of weariness to the eyes. Yet the other day, in the Century, I saw it imputed as a crime to Vedder that he had not thus travestied Omar Khayyàm. We live in a rum age of music without airs, stories without incident, pictures without beauty, American wood engravings that should have been etchings, and dry-point etchings that ought to have been mezzotints. I think of giving 'em literature without words; and I believe if you were to try invisible illustration, it would enjoy a considerable vogue. So long as an artist is on his head, is painting with a flute, or writes with an etcher's needle, or conducts the orchestra with a meat-axe, all is well; and plaudits shower along with roses. But any plain man who tries to follow the obtrusive canons of his art, is but a commonplace figure. To hell with him is the motto, or at least not that; for he will have his reward, but he will never be thought a person of parts. _January 3, 1885._--And here has this been lying near two months. I have failed to get together a preliminary copy of the Child's Verses for you, in spite of doughty efforts; but yesterday I sent you the first sheet of the definitive edition, and shall continue to send the others as they come. If you can, and care to, work them--why so, well. If not, I send you fodder. But the time presses; for though I will delay a little over the proofs, and though it is even possible they may delay the English issue until Easter, it will certainly not be later. Therefore perpend, and do not get caught out. Of course, if you can do pictures, it will be a great pleasure to me to see our names joined; and more than that, a great advantage, as I dare say you may be able to make a bargain for some share a little less spectral than the common for the poor author. But this is all as you shall choose; I give you _carte blanche_ to do or not to do.--Yours most sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. O, Sargent has been and painted my portrait; a very nice fellow he is, and is supposed to have done well; it is a poetical but very chicken-boned figure-head, as thus represented. R. L. S. Go on. _P.P.S._--Your picture came; and let me thank you for it very much. I am so hunted I had near forgotten. I find it very graceful; and I mean to have it framed. TO SIR WALTER SIMPSON _Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park, Bournemouth [first week of November 1884]._ MY DEAR SIMPSON,--At last, after divers adventures here we are: not Pommery and Greno as you see, "but jist plain auld Bonellie, no very faur frae Jenniper Green," as I might say if I were writing to Charles. I hope now to receive a good bundle from you ere long; and I will try to be both prompt and practical in response. I hope to hear your boy is better: ah, that's where it bites, I know, that is where the childless man rejoices; although, to confess fully, my whole philosophy of life renounces these renunciations; I am persuaded we gain nothing in the least comparable to what we lose, by holding back the hand from any province of life; the intrigue, the imbroglio, such as it is, was made for the plunger and not for the teetotaller. And anyway I hope your news is good. I have nearly finished Lawson's most lively pamphlet. It is very clear and interesting. For myself, I am in our house--a home of our own, in a most lovely situation, among forest trees, where I hope you will come and see us and find me in a repaired and more comfortable condition--greatly pleased with it--rather hard-up, verging on the dead-broke--and full tilt at hammering up some New Arabians for the pot. I wonder what you do without regular habits of work. I am capable of only two theories of existence: the industrious worker's, the spreester's; all between seems blank to me. We grow too old, and I, at least, am too much deteriorated, for the last; and the first becomes a bedrock necessary. My father is in a gloomy state and has the yellow flag at the peak, or the fore, or wherever it should be; and he has just emptied some melancholy vials on me; I am also, by way of change, spitting blood. This somewhat clouds the termination of my note.--Yours ever affectionately, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO THOMAS STEVENSON About this time Mr. Stevenson was in some hesitation as to letting himself be proposed for the office of President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, November 1884._ MY DEAR FATHER,--I have no hesitation in recommending you to let your name go up; please yourself about an address; though I think, if we could meet, we could arrange something suitable. What you propose would be well enough in a way, but so modest as to suggest a whine. From that point of view it would be better to change a little; but this, whether we meet or not, we must discuss. Tait, Chrystal, the Royal Society, and I, all think you amply deserve this honour and far more; it is not the True Blue to call this serious compliment a "trial"; you should be glad of this recognition. As for resigning, that is easy enough if found necessary; but to refuse would be husky and unsatisfactory. _Sic subs._ R. L. S. My cold is still very heavy; but I carry it well. Fanny is very very much out of sorts, principally through perpetual misery with me. I fear I have been a little in the dumps, which, _as you know, sir_, is a very great sin. I must try to be more cheerful; but my cough is so severe that I have sometimes most exhausting nights and very peevish wakenings. However, this shall be remedied, and last night I was distinctly better than the night before. There is, my dear Mr. Stevenson (so I moralise blandly as we sit together on the devil's garden-wall), no more abominable sin than this gloom, this plaguy peevishness; why (say I) what matters it if we be a little uncomfortable--that is no reason for mangling our unhappy wives. And then I turn and _girn_ on the unfortunate Cassandra.--Your fellow culprit, R. L. S. TO THOMAS STEVENSON Mr. Stevenson, the elder, had read the play of _Admiral Guinea_, written in September by his son and Mr. Henley in collaboration, and had protested, with his usual vehemence of feeling and expression, against the stage confrontation of profane blackguardry in the person of Pew with evangelical piety in that of the reformed slaving captain who gives his name to the piece. _Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park, Bournemouth (The three B's) [November 5, 1884]._ MY DEAR FATHER,--Allow me to say, in a strictly Pickwickian sense, that you are a silly fellow. I am pained indeed, but how should I be offended? I think you exaggerate; I cannot forget that you had the same impression of the _Deacon_; and yet, when you saw it played, were less revolted than you looked for; and I will still hope that the _Admiral_ also is not so bad as you suppose. There is one point, however, where I differ from you very frankly. Religion is in the world; I do not think you are the man to deny the importance of its rôle; and I have long decided not to leave it on one side in art. The opposition of the Admiral and Mr. Pew is not, to my eyes, either horrible or irreverent; but it may be, and it probably is, very ill done: what then? This is a failure; better luck next time; more power to the elbow, more discretion, more wisdom in the design, and the old defeat becomes the scene of the new victory. Concern yourself about no failure; they do not cost lives as in engineering; they are the _pierres perdues_ of successes. Fame is (truly) a vapour; do not think of it; if the writer means well and tries hard, no failure will injure him, whether with God or man. I wish I could hear a brighter account of yourself; but I am inclined to acquit the _Admiral_ of having a share in the responsibility. My very heavy cold is, I hope, drawing off; and the change to this charming house in the forest will, I hope, complete my re-establishment.--With love to all, believe me, your ever affectionate ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, November 11, 1884._ DEAR BOY,--I have been nearly smashed altogether; fever and chills, with really very considerable suffering; and to my deep gloom and some fear about the future, work has had to stop. There was no way out of it; yesterday and to-day nothing would come, it was a mere waste of tissue, productive of spoiled paper. I hope it will not last long; for the bum-baily is panting at my rump, and when I turn a scared eye across my shoulder, I behold his talons quivering above my frock-coat tails. Gosse has writ to offer me £40 for a Christmas number ghost story for the Pall Mall: eight thousand words. I have, with some conditions, accepted; I pray Heaven I may be able to do it. But I am not sure that my incapacity to work is wholly due to illness; I believe the morphine I have been taking for my bray may have a hand in it. It moderates the bray, but, I think, sews up the donkey. I think my wife is a little better. If only I could get in trim, and get this work done, I should be quite chipper. R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER The two next letters, on the same subject, are written in the styles and characters of the two Edinburgh ex-elders, Johnstone (or Johnson) and Thomson alternately. _Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park, Bournemouth, November 11 [1884]._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--I am in my new house, thus proudly styled, as you perceive; but the deevil a tower ava' can be perceived (except out of window); this is not as it should be; one might have hoped, at least, a turret. We are all vilely unwell. I put in the dark watches imitating a donkey with some success, but little pleasure; and in the afternoon I indulge in a smart fever, accompanied by aches and shivers. There is thus little monotony to be deplored. I at least am a _regular_ invalid; I would scorn to bray in the afternoon; I would indignantly refuse the proposal to fever in the night. What is bred in the bone will come out, sir, in the flesh; and the same spirit that prompted me to date my letter regulates the hour and character of my attacks.--I am, sir, yours, THOMSON. TO MISS FERRIER The controversy here mentioned had been one in which Mr. Samuel Smiles and others had taken part, concerning the rival claims of Robert Stevenson, the grandfather of R. L. S., and John Rennie to have been the chief engineers of the Bell Rock Lighthouse (see _A Family of Engineers_, chap. iii.). _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, Nov. 12, 1884._ MY DEAR COGGIE,--Many thanks for the two photos which now decorate my room. I was particularly glad to have the Bell Rock. I wonder if you saw me plunge, lance in rest, into a controversy thereanent? It was a very one-sided affair. The man I attacked cried "Boo-hoo!" and referred me to his big brother. And the big brother refused to move. So I slept upon the field of battle, paraded, sang Te Deum, and came home after a review rather than a campaign. Please tell Campbell I got his letter. The Wild Woman of the West has been much amiss and complaining sorely. I hope nothing more serious is wrong with her than just my ill-health, and consequent anxiety and labour; but the deuce of it is, that the cause continues. I am about knocked out of time now: a miserable, snuffling, shivering, fever-stricken, nightmare-ridden, knee-jottering, hoast-hoast-hoasting shadow and remains of man. But we'll no gie ower jist yet a bittie. We've seen waur; and dod, mem, it's my belief that we'll see better. I dinna ken 'at I've muckle mair to say to ye, or, indeed, onything; but jist here's guid-fallowship, guid health, and the wale o' guid fortune to your bonny sel'; and my respecs to the Perfessor and his wife, and the Prinshiple, an' the Bell Rock, an' ony ither public chara'ters that I'm acquaunt wi'. R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER [_Bournemouth, November 13, 1884._] MY DEAR THOMSON,--It's a maist remarkable fac', but nae shüner had I written yon braggin', blawin' letter aboot ma business habits, when bang! that very day, ma hoast[10] begude in the aifternune. It is really remaurkable; it's providenshle, I believe. The ink wasnae fair dry, the words werenae weel ooten ma mouth, when bang, I got the lee. The mair ye think o't, Thomson, the less ye'll like the looks o't. Proavidence (I'm no' sayin') is all verra weel _in its place_; but if Proavidence has nae mainners, wha's to learn't? Proavidence is a fine thing, but hoo would you like Proavidence to keep your till for ye? The richt place for Proavidence is in the kirk; it has naething to do wi' private correspondence between twa gentlemen, nor freendly cracks, nor a wee bit word of sculduddery[11] ahint the door, nor, in shoart, wi' ony _hole-and-corner wark_, what I would call. I'm pairfec'ly willin' to meet in wi' Proavidence, I'll be prood to meet in wi' him, when my time's come and I cannae dae nae better; but if he's to come skulking aboot my stair-fit, damned, I micht as weel be deid for a' the comfort I'll can get in life. Cannae he no be made to understand that it's beneath him? Gosh, if I was in his business, I wouldnae steir my heid for a plain, auld ex-elder that, tak him the way he taks himsel', 's just aboot as honest as he can weel afford, an' but for a wheen auld scandals, near forgotten noo, is a pairfec'ly respectable and thoroughly decent man. Or if I fashed wi' him ava', it wad be kind o' handsome like; a pun'-note under his stair door, or a bottle o' auld, blended malt to his bit marnin', as a teshtymonial like yon ye ken sae weel aboot, but mair successfu'. Dear Thomson, have I ony money? If I have, _send it_, for the loard's sake. JOHNSTONE. TO W. E. HENLEY _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, Nov. 13, 1884._ MY DEAR BOY,--A thousand thanks for the _Molière_. I have already read, in this noble presentment, _La Comtesse d'Escarbaguas_, _Le Malade Imaginaire_, and a part of _Les Femmes Savantes_; I say, Poquelin took damned good care of himself: Argan and Arysule, what parts! Many thanks also for John Silver's pistol; I recognise it; that was the one he gave Jim Hawkins at the mouth of the pit; I shall get a plate put upon it to that effect. My birthday was a great success; I was better in health; I got delightful presents; I received the definite commission from the P.M.G., and began to write the tale; and in the evening Bob arrived, a simple seraph. We have known each other ten years; and here we are, too, like the pair that met in the infirmary: why can we not mellow into kindness and sweetness like Bob? What is the reason? Does nature, even in my octogenarian carcase, run too strong that I must be still a bawler and a brawler and a treader upon corns? You, at least, have achieved the miracle of embellishing your personal appearance to that point that, unless your mother is a woman of even more perspicacity than I suppose, it is morally impossible that she can recognise you. When I saw you ten years ago, you looked rough and--kind of stigmatised, a look of an embittered political shoemaker; where is it now? You now come waltzing around like some light-hearted monarch; essentially jovial, essentially royal; radiant of smiles. And in the meanwhile, by a complementary process, I turn into a kind of hunchback with white hair! The devil. Well, let us be thankful for our mercies; in these ten years what a change from the cell in the hospital, and the two sick boys in the next bed, to the influence, the recognition, the liberty, and the happiness of to-day! Well, well; fortune is not so blind as people say; you dreed a good long weird; but you have got into a fine green paddock now to kick your heels in. And I, too, what a difference; what a difference in my work, in my situation, and unfortunately, also in my health! But one need not complain of a pebble in the shoe, when by mere justice one should rot in a dungeon. Many thanks to both of you; long life to our friendship, and that means, I do most firmly believe, to these clay continents on which we fly our colours; good luck to one and all, and may God continue to be merciful.--Your old and warm friend, R. L. S. TO EDMUND GOSSE Stevenson had been unable to finish for the Pall Mall Christmas number the tale he had first intended; had tried the publishers with _Markheim_ (afterwards printed in the collection called _Merry Men_), which proved too short; had then furbished up as well as he could a tale drafted in the Pitlochry days, _The Body Snatcher_, which was advertised in the streets of London by sandwich-men carrying posters so horrific that they were suppressed, if I remember right, by the police. Stevenson rightly thought the tale not up to his best mark, and would not take the full payment which had been bargained for. His correspondent was just about to start on a tour to the United States. _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, Nov. 15, 1884._ MY DEAR GOSSE,--This Mr. Morley[12] of yours is a most desperate fellow. He has sent me (for my opinion) the most truculent advertisement I ever saw, in which the white hairs of Gladstone are dragged round Troy behind my chariot wheels. What can I say? I say nothing to him; and to you, I content myself with remarking that he seems a desperate fellow. All luck to you on your American adventure; may you find health, wealth, and entertainment! If you see, as you likely will, Frank R. Stockton, pray greet him from me in words to this effect:-- My Stockton if I failed to like, It were a sheer depravity, For I went down with the _Thomas Hyke_ And up with the _Negative Gravity_! I adore these tales. I hear flourishing accounts of your success at Cambridge, so you leave with a good omen. Remember me to _green corn_ if it is in season; if not, you had better hang yourself on a sour apple tree, for your voyage has been lost.--Yours affectionately, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO AUSTIN DOBSON Written in acknowledgment of the gift of a desk. _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth [December 1884 ?]._ DEAR DOBSON,--Set down my delay to your own fault; I wished to acknowledge such a gift from you in some of my inapt and slovenly rhymes; but you should have sent me your pen and not your desk. The verses stand up to the axles in a miry cross-road, whence the coursers of the sun shall never draw them; hence I am constrained to this uncourtliness, that I must appear before one of the kings of that country of rhyme without my singing robes. For less than this, if we may trust the book of Esther, favourites have tasted death; but I conceive the kingdom of the Muses mildlier mannered; and in particular that county which you administer and which I seem to see as a half-suburban land; a land of hollyhocks and country houses; a land where at night, in thorny and sequestered bypaths, you will meet masqueraders going to a ball in their sedans, and the rector steering homeward by the light of his lantern; a land of the windmill, and the west wind, and the flowering hawthorn with a little scented letter in the hollow of its trunk, and the kites flying over all in the season of kites, and the far away blue spires of a cathedral city. Will you forgive me, then, for my delay and accept my thanks not only for your present, but for the letter which followed it, and which perhaps I more particularly value, and believe me to be, with much admiration, yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY Stevenson and his wife were still busy on _More New Arabian Nights_ (the romance of the _Great North Road_ having been begun and postponed). The question here touched is, to what publishers should they be offered. _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, December 1884._ DEAR LAD,--For Cassell, I thought the G.N.R. (not railway this time) was the motto. What are Cassells to do with this eccentric mass of blague and seriousness? Their poor auld pows will a' turn white as snaw, man. They would skriegh with horror. You see, the lot of tales is now coming to a kind of bearing. They are being quite rehandled; all the three intercalary narratives have been condemned and are being replaced--two by picturesque and highly romantic adventures; one by a comic tale of character; and the thing as it goes together so far, is, I do think, singularly varied and vivid, coming near to laughter and touching tears. Will Cassell stand it? No. _Et de deux._ I vote for the syndicate, and to give Cassell the _North Road_ when done. _Et sic subscr._ R. L. S. My health is better. I never sleep, to be sure; Cawdor hath butchered sleep; and I am twinged a bit by aches and rheumatism; but I get my five to seven hours of work; and if that is not health, it is the nearest I am like to have. TO HENRY JAMES The following to Mr. Henry James refers to the essay of R. L. S. called _A Humble Remonstrance_, which had just appeared in Longman's Magazine. Mr. James had written holding out the prospect of a continuance of the friendly controversy which had thus been opened up between them on the aims and qualities of fiction. _Bonallie Towers, Branksome Park, Bournemouth, December 8, 1884._ MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--This is a very brave hearing from more points than one. The first point is that there is a hope of a sequel. For this I laboured. Seriously, from the dearth of information and thoughtful interest in the art of literature, those who try to practise it with any deliberate purpose run the risk of finding no fit audience. People suppose it is "the stuff" that interests them; they think, for instance, that the prodigious fine thoughts and sentiments in Shakespeare impress by their own weight, not understanding that the unpolished diamond is but a stone. They think that striking situations, or good dialogue, are got by studying life; they will not rise to understand that they are prepared by deliberate artifice and set off by painful suppressions. Now, I want the whole thing well ventilated, for my own education and the public's; and I beg you to look as quick as you can, to follow me up with every circumstance of defeat where we differ, and (to prevent the flouting of the laity) to emphasise the points where we agree. I trust your paper will show me the way to a rejoinder; and that rejoinder I shall hope to make with so much art as to woo or drive you from your threatened silence. I would not ask better than to pass my life in beating out this quarter of corn with such a seconder as yourself. Point the second--I am rejoiced indeed to hear you speak so kindly of my work; rejoiced and surprised. I seem to myself a very rude, left-handed countryman; not fit to be read, far less complimented, by a man so accomplished, so adroit, so craftsmanlike as you. You will happily never have cause to understand the despair with which a writer like myself considers (say) the park scene in _Lady Barberina_. Every touch surprises me by its intangible precision; and the effect when done, as light as syllabub, as distinct as a picture, fills me with envy. Each man among us prefers his own aim, and I prefer mine; but when we come to speak of performance, I recognise myself, compared with you, to be a lout and slouch of the first water. Where we differ, both as to the design of stories and the delineation of character, I begin to lament. Of course, I am not so dull as to ask you to desert your walk; but could you not, in one novel, to oblige a sincere admirer, and to enrich his shelves with a beloved volume, could you not, and might you not, cast your characters in a mould a little more abstract and academic (dear Mrs. Pennyman had already, among your other work, a taste of what I mean), and pitch the incidents, I do not say in any stronger, but in a slightly more emphatic key--as it were an episode from one of the old (so-called) novels of adventure? I fear you will not; and I suppose I must sighingly admit you to be right. And yet, when I see, as it were, a book of Tom Jones handled with your exquisite precision and shot through with those side-lights of reflection in which you excel, I relinquish the dear vision with regret. Think upon it. As you know, I belong to that besotted class of man, the invalid: this puts me to a stand in the way of visits. But it is possible that some day you may feel that a day near the sea and among pinewoods would be a pleasant change from town. If so, please let us know; and my wife and I will be delighted to put you up, and give you what we can to eat and drink (I have a fair bottle of claret).--On the back of which, believe me, yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--I reopen this to say that I have re-read my paper, and cannot think I have at all succeeded in being either veracious or polite. I knew, of course, that I took your paper merely as a pin to hang my own remarks upon; but, alas! what a thing is any paper! What fine remarks can you not hang on mine! How I have sinned against proportion, and with every effort to the contrary, against the merest rudiments of courtesy to you! You are indeed a very acute reader to have divined the real attitude of my mind; and I can only conclude, not without closed eyes and shrinking shoulders, in the well-worn words, Lay on, Macduff! TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, December 9, 1884._ MY DEAR PEOPLE,--The dreadful tragedy of the Pall Mall has come to a happy but ludicrous ending: I am to keep the money, the tale writ for them is to be buried certain fathoms deep, and they are to flash out before the world with our old friend of Kinnaird, _The Body Snatcher_. When you come, please to bring-- (1) My Montaigne, or, at least, the two last volumes. (2) My Milton in the three vols. in green. (3) The Shakespeare that Babington sent me for a wedding-gift. (4) Hazlitt's _Table Talk and Plain Speaker_. If you care to get a box of books from Douglas and Foulis, let them be _solid_. _Croker Papers_, _Correspondence of Napoleon_, _History of Henry IV._, Lang's _Folk Lore_, would be my desires. I had a charming letter from Henry James about my Longman paper. I did not understand queries about the verses; the pictures to the Seagull I thought charming; those to the second have left me with a pain in my poor belly and a swimming in the head. About money, I am afloat and no more, and I warn you, unless I have great luck, I shall have to fall upon you at the New Year like a hundredweight of bricks. Doctor, rent, chemist, are all threatening; sickness has bitterly delayed my work; and unless, as I say, I have the mischief's luck, I shall completely break down. _Verbum sapientibus._ I do not live cheaply, and I question if I ever shall; but if only I had a halfpenny worth of health, I could now easily suffice. The last breakdown of my head is what makes this bankruptcy probable. Fanny is still out of sorts; Bogue better; self fair, but a stranger to the blessings of sleep.--Ever affectionate son, R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth [December 1884]._ DEAR LAD,--I have made up my mind about the P. M. G., and send you a copy, which please keep or return. As for not giving a reduction, what are we? Are we artists or city men? Why do we sneer at stockbrokers? O nary; I will not take the £40. I took that as a fair price for my best work; I was not able to produce my best; and I will be damned if I steal with my eyes open. _Sufficit._ This is my lookout. As for the paper being rich, certainly it is; but I am honourable. It is no more above me in money than the poor slaveys and cads from whom I look for honesty are below me. Am I Pepys, that because I can find the countenance of "some of our ablest merchants," that because--and--pour forth languid twaddle and get paid for it, I, too, should "cheerfully continue to steal"? I am not Pepys. I do not live much to God and honour; but I will not wilfully turn my back on both. I am, like all the rest of us, falling ever lower from the bright ideas I began with, falling into greed, into idleness, into middle-aged and slippered fireside cowardice; but is it you, my bold blade, that I hear crying this sordid and rank twaddle in my ear? Preaching the dankest Grundyism and upholding the rank customs of our trade--you who are so cruel hard upon the customs of the publishers? O man, look at the Beam in our own Eyes; and whatever else you do, do not plead Satan's cause, or plead it for all; either embrace the bad, or respect the good when you see a poor devil trying for it. If this is the honesty of authors--to take what you can get and console yourself because publishers are rich--take my name from the rolls of that association. 'Tis a caucus of weaker thieves, jealous of the stronger.--Ever yours, THE ROARING R. L. S. You will see from the enclosed that I have stuck to what I think my dues pretty tightly in spite of this flourish: these are my words for a poor ten-pound note! TO MISS FERRIER This refers to the death of Sir Alexander Grant, the distinguished Aristotelian scholar and Principal of Edinburgh University. [_Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, Dec. 1884._] MY DEAR COGGIE,--We are very much distressed to hear of this which has befallen your family. As for Sir Alexander, I can but speak from my own feelings: he survived to finish his book and to conduct, with such a great success, the tercentenary. Ah, how many die just upon the threshold! Had he died a year ago, how great a disappointment! But all this is nothing to the survivors. Do please, as soon as you are able, let us know how it goes and _how it is likely to go_ with the family; and believe that both my wife and I are most anxious to have good news, or the best possible. My poor Coggie, I know very well how you must feel; you are passing a bad time. Our news must seem very impertinent. We have both been ill; I, pretty bad, my wife, pretty well down; but I, at least, am better. The Bogue, who is let out every night for half an hour's yapping, is anchored in the moonlight just before the door, and, under the belief that he is watchdog at a lone farm beleaguered by moss-troopers, is simply raising Cain. I can add nothing more, but just that we wish to hear as soon as you have nothing else to do--not to hurry, of course,--if it takes three months, no matter--but bear us in mind. R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth [Winter 1884]._ MY DEAR LAD,--Here was I in bed; not writing, not hearing, and finding myself gently and agreeably ill used; and behold I learn you are bad yourself. Get your wife to send us a word how you are. I am better decidedly. Bogue got his Christmas card, and behaved well for three days after. It may interest the cynical to learn that I started my last hemorrhage by too sedulous attentions to my dear Bogue. The stick was broken; and that night Bogue, who was attracted by the extraordinary aching of his bones, and is always inclined to a serious view of his own ailments, announced with his customary pomp that he was dying. In this case, however, it was not the dog that died. (He had tried to bite his mother's ankles.) I have written a long and peculiarly solemn paper on the technical elements of style. It is path-breaking and epoch-making; but I do not think the public will be readily convoked to its perusal. Did I tell you that S. C. had risen to the paper on James? At last! O but I was pleased; he's (like Johnnie) been lang, lang o' comin', but here he is. He will not object to my future manoeuvres in the same field, as he has to my former. All the family are here; my father better than I have seen him these two years; my mother the same as ever. I do trust you are better, and I am yours ever, R. L. S. TO H. A. JONES _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, Dec. 30, 1884._ DEAR SIR,--I am so accustomed to hear nonsense spoken about all the arts, and the drama in particular, that I cannot refrain from saying "Thank you" for your paper. In my answer to Mr. James, in the December Longman, you may see that I have merely touched, I think in a parenthesis, on the drama; but I believe enough was said to indicate our agreement in essentials. Wishing you power and health to further enunciate and to act upon these principles, believe me, dear sir, yours truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Stevenson had begun with great eagerness to prepare material for a volume on the Duke of Wellington for the series of _English Worthies_ published by Messrs. Longman and edited by Mr. Andrew Lang, but beyond preparation the scheme never went. _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, Jan. 4, 1885._ DEAR S. C.,--I am on my feet again, and getting on my boots to do the Iron Duke. Conceive my glee: I have refused the £100, and am to get some sort of royalty, not yet decided, instead. 'Tis for Longman's _English Worthies_, edited by A. Lang. Aw haw, haw! Now, look here, could you get me a loan of the Despatches, or is that a dream? I should have to mark passages I fear, and certainly note pages on the fly. If you think it a dream, will Bain get me a second-hand copy, or who would? The sooner, and cheaper, I can get it the better. If there is anything in your weird library that bears on either the man or the period, put it in a mortar and fire it here instanter; I shall catch. I shall want, of course, an infinity of books: among which, any lives there may be; a life of the Marquis Marmont (the Maréchal), _Marmont's Memoirs_, _Greville's Memoirs_, _Peel's Memoirs_, _Napier_, that blind man's history of England you once lent me, Hamley's _Waterloo_; can you get me any of these? Thiers, idle Thiers also. Can you help a man getting into his boots for such a huge campaign? How are you? A Good New Year to you. I mean to have a good one, but on whose funds I cannot fancy: not mine leastways, as I am a mere derelict and drift beam-on to bankruptcy. For God's sake, remember the man who set out for to conquer Arthur Wellesley, with a broken bellows and an empty pocket.--Yours ever, R. L. STEVENSON. TO THOMAS STEVENSON Stevenson had been asked by his father to look over the proofs of a paper which the latter was about to read, as President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, "On the Principal Causes of Silting in Estuaries," in connection with the Manchester Ship Canal Scheme. _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, 14th January 1885._ MY DEAR FATHER,--I am glad you like the changes. I own I was pleased with my hand's darg; you may observe, I have corrected several errors which (you may tell Mr. Dick) he had allowed to pass his eagle eye; I wish there may be none in mine; at least, the order is better. The second title, "Some New Engineering Questions involved in the M. S. C. Scheme of last Session of P.," likes me the best. I think it a very good paper; and I am vain enough to think I have materially helped to polish the diamond. I ended by feeling quite proud of the paper, as if it had been mine; the next time you have as good a one, I will overhaul it for the wages of feeling as clever as I did when I had managed to understand and helped to set it clear. I wonder if I anywhere misapprehended you? I rather think not at the last; at the first shot I know I missed a point or two. Some of what may appear to you to be wanton changes, a little study will show to be necessary. Yes, Carlyle was ashamed of himself as few men have been; and let all carpers look at what he did. He prepared all these papers for publication with his own hand; all his wife's complaints, all the evidence of his own misconduct: who else would have done so much? Is repentance, which God accepts, to have no avail with men? nor even with the dead? I have heard too much against the thrawn, discomfortable dog: dead he is, and we may be glad of it; but he was a better man than most of us, no less patently than he was a worse. To fill the world with whining is against all my views: I do not like impiety. But--but--there are two sides to all things, and the old scalded baby had his noble side.--Ever affectionate son, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, January 1885._ DEAR S. C.,--I have addressed a letter to the G. O. M. _à propos_ of Wellington; and I became aware, you will be interested to hear, of an overwhelming respect for the old gentleman. I can _blaguer_ his failures; but when you actually address him, and bring the two statures and records to confrontation, dismay is the result. By mere continuance of years, he must impose; the man who helped to rule England before I was conceived, strikes me with a new sense of greatness and antiquity, when I must actually beard him with the cold forms of correspondence. I shied at the necessity of calling him plain "Sir"! Had he been "My lord," I had been happier; no, I am no equalitarian. Honour to whom honour is due; and if to none, why, then, honour to the old! These, O Slade Professor, are my unvarnished sentiments: I was a little surprised to find them so extreme, and therefore I communicate the fact. Belabour thy brains, as to whom it would be well to question. I have a small space; I wish to make a popular book, nowhere obscure, nowhere, if it can be helped, unhuman. It seems to me the most hopeful plan to tell the tale, so far as may be, by anecdote. He did not die till so recently, there must be hundreds who remember him, and thousands who have still ungarnered stories. Dear man, to the breach! Up, soldier of the iron dook, up, Slades, and at 'em! (which, conclusively, he did not say: the at 'em-ic theory is to be dismissed). You know piles of fellows who must reek with matter; help! help! I am going to try Happy-and-Glorious-long-to-reign-over-us. H.M. must remember things: and it is my belief, if my letter could be discreetly introduced, she would like to tell them. So I jest, when I don't address my mind to it: when I do, shall I be smit louting to my knee, as before the G. O. M.? Problème!--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN In the two following letters are expressed some of the distress and bitterness with which, in common with most Englishmen, Stevenson felt the circumstances of Gordon's abandonment in the Soudan and the failure of the belated attempt to rescue him. The advice to go on with "my book" refers, if I remember right, to some scheme for the republication in book form of stray magazine papers of mine of a more or less personal or biographical nature. _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, February 1885._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--You are indeed a backward correspondent, and much may be said against you. But in this weather, and O dear! in this political scene of degradation, much must be forgiven. I fear England is dead of Burgessry, and only walks about galvanised. I do not love to think of my countrymen these days; nor to remember myself. Why was I silent? I feel I have no right to blame any one; but I won't write to the G. O. M. I do really not see my way to any form of signature, unless "your fellow criminal in the eyes of God," which might disquiet the proprieties. About your book, I have always said: go on. The drawing of character is a different thing from publishing the details of a private career. No one objects to the first, or should object, if his name be not put upon it; at the other, I draw the line. In a preface, if you chose, you might distinguish; it is, besides, a thing for which you are eminently well equipped, and which you would do with taste and incision. I long to see the book. People like themselves (to explain a little more); no one likes his life, which is a misbegotten issue, and a tale of failure. To see these failures either touched upon, or _coasted_, to get the idea of a spying eye and blabbing tongue about the house, is to lose all privacy in life. To see that thing, which we do love, our character, set forth, is ever gratifying. See how my _Talk and Talkers_ went; every one liked his own portrait, and shrieked about other people's; so it will be with yours. If you are the least true to the essential, the sitter will be pleased; very likely not his friends, and that from _various motives_. R. L. S. When will your holiday be? I sent your letter to my wife, and forget. Keep us in mind, and I hope we shall be able to receive you. TO J. A. SYMONDS _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, February 1885._ MY DEAR SYMONDS,--Yes we have both been very neglectful. I had horrid luck, catching two thundering influenzas in August and November. I recovered from the last with difficulty, but have come through this blustering winter with some general success; in the house, up and down. My wife, however, has been painfully upset by my health. Last year, of course, was cruelly trying to her nerves; Nice and Hyères are bad experiences; and though she is not ill, the doctor tells me that prolonged anxiety may do her a real mischief. I feel a little old and fagged, and chary of speech, and not very sure of spirit in my work; but considering what a year I have passed, and how I have twice sat on Charon's pierhead, I am surprising. My father has presented us with a very pretty home in this place, into which we hope to move by May. My _Child's Verses_ come out next week. _Otto_ begins to appear in April; _More New Arabian Nights_ as soon as possible. Moreover, I am neck deep in Wellington; also a story on the stocks, _The Great North Road_. O, I am busy! Lloyd is at college in Edinburgh. That is, I think, all that can be said by way of news. Have you read _Huckleberry Finn_? It contains many excellent things; above all, the whole story of a healthy boy's dealings with his conscience, incredibly well done. My own conscience is badly seared; a want of piety; yet I pray for it, tacitly, every day; believing it, after courage, the only gift worth having; and its want, in a man of any claims to honour, quite unpardonable. The tone of your letter seemed to me very sound. In these dark days of public dishonour, I do not know that one can do better than carry our private trials piously. What a picture is this of a nation! No man that I can see, on any side or party, seems to have the least sense of our ineffable shame: the desertion of the garrisons. I tell my little parable that Germany took England, and then there was an Indian Mutiny, and Bismarck said: "Quite right: let Delhi and Calcutta and Bombay fall; and let the women and children be treated Sepoy fashion," and people say, "O, but that is very different!" And then I wish I were dead. Millais (I hear) was painting Gladstone when the news came of Gordon's death; Millais was much affected, and Gladstone said, "Why? _It is the man's own temerity!_" Voilà le Bourgeois! le voilà nu! But why should I blame Gladstone, when I too am a Bourgeois? when I have held my peace? Why did I hold my peace? Because I am a sceptic: _i.e._ a Bourgeois. We believe in nothing, Symonds; you don't, and I don't; and these are two reasons, out of a handful of millions, why England stands before the world dripping with blood and daubed with dishonour. I will first try to take the beam out of my own eye, trusting that even private effort somehow betters and braces the general atmosphere. See, for example, if England has shown (I put it hypothetically) one spark of manly sensibility, they have been shamed into it by the spectacle of Gordon. Police-Officer Cole is the only man that I see to admire. I dedicate my _New Arabs_ to him and Cox, in default of other great public characters.--Yours ever most affectionately, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO EDMUND GOSSE The following refers to an edition of Gray, with notes and a short prefatory Life by Mr. Gosse; and to the publication of the _Child's Garden of Verses_. _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, March 12, 1885._ MY DEAR GOSSE,--I was indeed much exercised how I could be worked into Gray; and lo! when I saw it, the passage seemed to have been written with a single eye to elucidate the--worst?--well, not a very good poem of Gray's. Your little life is excellent, clean, neat, efficient. I have read many of your notes, too, with pleasure. Your connection with Gray was a happy circumstance; it was a suitable conjunction. I did not answer your letter from the States, for what was I to say? I liked getting it and reading it; I was rather flattered that you wrote it to me; and then I'll tell you what I did--I put it in the fire. Why? Well, just because it was very natural and expansive; and thinks I to myself, if I die one of these fine nights, this is just the letter that Gosse would not wish to go into the hands of third parties. Was I well inspired? And I did not answer it because you were in your high places, sailing with supreme dominion, and seeing life in a particular glory; and I was peddling in a corner, confined to the house, overwhelmed with necessary work, which I was not always doing well, and, in the very mild form in which the disease approaches me, touched with a sort of bustling cynicism. Why throw cold water? How ape your agreeable frame of mind? In short, I held my tongue. I have now published on 101 small pages _The Complete Proof of Mr. R. L. Stevenson's Incapacity to Write Verse_, in a series of graduated examples with table of contents. I think I shall issue a companion volume of exercises: "Analyse this poem. Collect and comminate the ugly words. Distinguish and condemn the _chevilles_. State Mr. Stevenson's faults of taste in regard to the measure. What reasons can you gather from this example for your belief that Mr. S. is unable to write any other measure?" They look ghastly in the cold light of print; but there is something nice in the little ragged regiment for all; the blackguards seem to me to smile, to have a kind of childish treble note that sounds in my ears freshly; not song, if you will, but a child's voice. I was glad you enjoyed your visit to the States. Most Englishmen go there with a confirmed design of patronage, as they go to France for that matter; and patronage will not pay. Besides, in this year of--grace, said I?--of disgrace, who should creep so low as an Englishman? "It is not to be thought of that the flood"--ah, Wordsworth, you would change your note were you alive to-day! I am now a beastly householder, but have not yet entered on my domain. When I do, the social revolution will probably cast me back upon my dung heap. There is a person called Hyndman whose eye is on me; his step is beHynd me as I go. I shall call my house Skerryvore when I get it: SKERRYVORE: _c'est bon pour la poéshie_. I will conclude with my favourite sentiment: "The world is too much with me." ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, _The Hermit of Skerryvore_, Author of "John Vane Tempest: a Romance," "Herbert and Henrietta: or the Nemesis of Sentiment," "The Life and Adventures of Colonel Bludyer Fortescue," "Happy Homes and Hairy Faces," "A Pound of Feathers and a Pound of Lead," part author of "Minn's Complete Capricious Correspondent: a Manual of Natty, Natural, and Knowing Letters," and editor of the "Poetical Remains of Samuel Burt Crabbe, known as the melodious Bottle-Holder." Uniform with the above: "The Life and Remains of the Reverend Jacob Degray Squah," author of "Heave-yo for the New Jerusalem," "A Box of Candles; or the Patent Spiritual Safety Match," and "A Day with the Heavenly Harriers." TO W. H. LOW The "dedication" referred to was that of a forthcoming illustrated edition of Keats's _Lamia_. _Bonallie Towers, Bournemouth, March 13, 1885._ MY DEAR LOW,--Your success has been immense. I wish your letter had come two days ago: _Otto_, alas! has been disposed of a good while ago; but it was only day before yesterday that I settled the new volume of Arabs. However, for the future, you and the sons of the deified Scribner are the men for me. Really they have behaved most handsomely. I cannot lay my hand on the papers, or I would tell you exactly how it compares with my English bargain; but it compares well. Ah, if we had that copyright, I do believe it would go far to make me solvent, ill-health and all. I wrote you a letter to the Rembrandt, in which I stated my views about the dedication in a very brief form. It will give me sincere pleasure, and will make the second dedication I have received, the other being from John Addington Symonds. It is a compliment I value much; I don't know any that I should prefer. I am glad to hear you have windows to do; that is a fine business, I think; but, alas! the glass is so bad nowadays; realism invading even that, as well as the huge inferiority of our technical resource corrupting every tint. Still, anything that keeps a man to decoration is, in this age, good for the artist's spirit. By the way, have you seen James and me on the novel? James, I think in the August or September--R. L. S. in the December Longman. I own I think the _école bête_, of which I am the champion, has the whip hand of the argument; but as James is to make a rejoinder, I must not boast. Anyway the controversy is amusing to see. I was terribly tied down to space, which has made the end congested and dull. I shall see if I can afford to send you the April Contemporary--but I dare say you see it anyway--as it will contain a paper of mine on style, a sort of continuation of old arguments on art in which you have wagged a most effective tongue. It is a sort of start upon my Treatise on the Art of Literature: a small, arid book that shall some day appear. With every good wish from me and mine (should I not say "she and hers"?) to you and yours, believe me yours ever, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO P.G. HAMERTON The work of his correspondent's which R. L. S. notices in the following is the sumptuous volume _Landscape_: Seeley & Co., 1885. The passages specially referred to will be found pp. 46-62 of that work. _Bournemouth, March 16, 1885._ MY DEAR HAMERTON,--Various things have been reminding me of my misconduct: First, Swan's application for your address; second, a sight of the sheets of your _Landscape_ book; and last, your note to Swan, which he was so kind as to forward. I trust you will never suppose me to be guilty of anything more serious than an idleness, partially excusable. My ill-health makes my rate of life heavier than I can well meet, and yet stops me from earning more. My conscience, sometimes perhaps too easily stifled, but still (for my time of life and the public manners of the age) fairly well alive, forces me to perpetual and almost endless transcriptions. On the back of all this, my correspondence hangs like a thundercloud; and just when I think I am getting through my troubles, crack, down goes my health, I have a long, costly sickness, and begin the world again. It is fortunate for me I have a father, or I should long ago have died; but the opportunity of the aid makes the necessity none the more welcome. My father has presented me with a beautiful house here--or so I believe, for I have not yet seen it, being a cage bird but for nocturnal sorties in the garden. I hope we shall soon move into it, and I tell myself that some day perhaps we may have the pleasure of seeing you as our guest. I trust at least that you will take me as I am, a thoroughly bad correspondent, and a man, a hater, indeed, of rudeness in others, but too often rude in all unconsciousness himself; and that you will never cease to believe the sincere sympathy and admiration that I feel for you and for your work. About the _Landscape_, which I had a glimpse of while a friend of mine was preparing a review, I was greatly interested, and could write and wrangle for a year on every page; one passage particularly delighted me, the part about Ulysses--jolly. Then, you know, that is just what I fear I have come to think landscape ought to be in literature; so there we should be at odds. Or perhaps not so much as I suppose, as Montaigne says it is a pot with two handles, and I own I am wedded to the technical handle, which (I likewise own and freely) you do well to keep for a mistress. I should much like to talk with you about some other points; it is only in talk that one gets to understand. Your delightful Wordsworth trap I have tried on two hardened Wordsworthians, not that I am not one myself. By covering up the context, and asking them to guess what the passage was, both (and both are very clever people, one a writer, one a painter) pronounced it a guide-book. "Do you think it an unusually good guide-book?" I asked, and both said, "No, not at all!" Their grimace was a picture when I showed the original. I trust your health and that of Mrs. Hamerton keep better; your last account was a poor one. I was unable to make out the visit I had hoped, as (I do not know if you heard of it) I had a very violent and dangerous hemorrhage last spring. I am almost glad to have seen death so close with all my wits about me, and not in the customary lassitude and disenchantment of disease. Even thus clearly beheld I find him not so terrible as we suppose. But, indeed, with the passing of years, the decay of strength, the loss of all my old active and pleasant habits, there grows more and more upon me that belief in the kindness of this scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an excellent and pacifying compensation. I trust, if your health continues to trouble you, you may find some of the same belief. But perhaps my fine discovery is a piece of art, and belongs to a character cowardly, intolerant of certain feelings, and apt to self-deception. I don't think so, however; and when I feel what a weak and fallible vessel I was thrust into this hurly-burly, and with what marvellous kindness the wind has been tempered to my frailties, I think I should be a strange kind of ass to feel anything but gratitude. I do not know why I should inflict this talk upon you; but when I summon the rebellious pen, he must go his own way; I am no Michael Scott, to rule the fiend of correspondence. Most days he will none of me; and when he comes, it is to rape me where he will.--Yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY Stevenson was by this time beginning to realise that work at play-writing in collaboration with Mr. Henley was doing much more to exhaust his strength than to replenish either of their purses, and Mr. Henley, who had built hopes of fame and fortune on their collaboration, was very unwilling to face the fact. [_Bournemouth, March 1885._] MY DEAR LAD,--That is all right, and a good job. About coming down, you cannot get into us for a while, as you may imagine; we are in desperate vortex, and everybody 'most dead. I have been two days in bed with liver and slight bleeding. Do you think you are right to send _Macaire_ and the _Admiral_ about? Not a copy have I sent, nor (speaking for myself personally) do I want sent. The reperusal of the _Admiral_, by the way, was a sore blow; eh, God, man, it is a low, black, dirty, blackguard, ragged piece: vomitable in many parts--simply vomitable. Pew is in places a reproach to both art and man. But of all that afterwards. What I mean is that I believe in playing dark with second and third-rate work. Macaire is a piece of job-work, hurriedly bockled; might have been worse, might have been better; happy-go-lucky; act it or-let-it-rot piece of business. Not a thing, I think, to send in presentations. Do not let us _gober_ ourselves--and, above all, not _gober_ dam pot-boilers--and p.b.'s with an obvious flaw and hole in them, such as is our unrealised Bertrand in this one. But of this also, on a meeting. I am not yet done with my proofs, I am sorry to say; so soon as I am, I must tackle _Kidnapped_ seriously, or be content to have no bread, which you would scarcely recommend. It is all I shall be able to do to wait for the Young Folk money, on which I'll have to live as best I can till the book comes in. Plays at that rate I do not think I can possibly look at before July; so let that be a guide to you in your views. July, or August, or September, or thereabouts: these must be our times, whichever we attack. I think you had better suspend a visit till we can take you in and till I can speak. It seems a considerable waste of money; above all, as just now I could not even offer you meals with my woman in such a state of overwork. My father and mother have had to go to lodgings.--Post. R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY [_Bournemouth, March 1885._] DEAR LAD,--Much better, but rather unequal to do what I ought, a common complaint. The change of weather much helped me, not too soon. I have thought as well as I could of what you said; and I come unhesitatingly to the opinion that the stage is only a lottery, must not be regarded as a trade, and must never be preferred to drudgery. If money comes from any play, let us regard it as a legacy, but never count upon it in our income for the year. In other words, I must go on and drudge at _Kidnapped_, which I hate, and am unfit to do; and you will have to get some journalism somehow. These are my cold and blighting sentiments. It is bad enough to have to live by an art--but to think to live by an art combined with commercial speculation--that way madness lies. Time is our only friend. The _Admiral_, pulled simply in pieces and about half deleted, will act some day: such is my opinion. I can no more.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO WILLIAM ARCHER An anonymous review of the _Child's Garden_, appearing in March, gave R. L. S. so much pleasure that he wrote (in the four words, "Now who are you?") to inquire the name of its writer, and learned that it was Mr. Archer; with whom he had hitherto had no acquaintance. He thereupon entered into friendly correspondence with his critic. _Bournemouth, March 29, 1885._ DEAR MR. ARCHER,--Yes, I have heard of you and read some of your work; but I am bound in particular to thank you for the notice of my verses. "There," I said, throwing it over to the friend who was staying with me, "it's worth writing a book to draw an article like that." Had you been as hard upon me as you were amiable, I try to tell myself I should have been no blinder to the merits of your notice. For I saw there, to admire and to be very grateful for, a most sober, agile pen; an enviable touch; the marks of a reader, such as one imagines for one's self in dreams, thoughtful, critical, and kind; and to put the top on this memorial column, a greater readiness to describe the author criticised than to display the talents of his censor. I am a man _blasé_ to injudicious praise (though I hope some of it may be judicious too), but I have to thank you for THE BEST CRITICISM I EVER HAD; and am therefore, dear Mr. Archer, the most grateful critickee now extant. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--I congratulate you on living in the corner of all London that I like best. _À propos_, you are very right about my voluntary aversion from the painful sides of life. My childhood was in reality a very mixed experience, full of fever, nightmare, insomnia, painful days and interminable nights; and I can speak with less authority of gardens than of that other "land of counterpane." But to what end should we renew these sorrows? The sufferings of life may be handled by the very greatest in their hours of insight; it is of its pleasures that our common poems should be formed; these are the experiences that we should seek to recall or to provoke; and I say with Thoreau, "What right have I to complain, who have not ceased to wonder?" and, to add a rider of my own, who have no remedy to offer. R. L. S. TO MR. AND MRS. JOSEPH PENNELL Acknowledging the dedication of an illustrated _Canterbury Pilgrimage_. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Summer 1885._] DEAR SIR AND MADAM,--This horrible delay must be forgiven me. It was not caused by any want of gratitude; but by the desire to acknowledge the dedication more suitably (and to display my wit) in a copy of verses. Well, now I give that up, and tell you in plain prose, that you have given me much pleasure by the dedication of your graceful book. As I was writing the above, I received a visit from Lady Shelley, who mentioned to me that she was reading Mrs. Pennell's _Mary Wollstonecraft_ with pleasure. It is odd how streams cross. Mr. Pennell's work I have, of course, long known and admired: and I believe there was once some talk, on the part of Mr. Gilder, that we should work together; but the scheme fell through from my rapacity; and since then has been finally rendered impossible (or so I fear) by my health. I should say that when I received the _Pilgrimage_, I was in a state (not at all common with me) of depression; and the pleasant testimony that my work had not all been in vain did much to set me up again. You will therefore understand, late as is the hour, with what sincerity I am able to sign myself--Gratefully yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. MR. AND MRS. PENNELL,--I see I should explain that this is all in my own hand, I have not fobbed you off with an amanuensis; but as I have two handwritings (both equally bad in these days) I might lead you to think so. R. L. S. TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN On the death of Professor Fleeming Jenkin, who in Stevenson's early student days at Edinburgh had been both the warmest and the wisest of his elder friends (died June 12, 1885). [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, June 1885._] MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,--You know how much and for how long I have loved, respected, and admired him; I am only able to feel a little with you. But I know how he would have wished us to feel. I never knew a better man, nor one to me more lovable; we shall all feel the loss more greatly as time goes on. It scarce seems life to me; what must it be to you? Yet one of the last things that he said to me was, that from all these sad bereavements of yours he had learned only more than ever to feel the goodness and what we, in our feebleness, call the support of God; he had been ripening so much--to other eyes than ours, we must suppose he was ripe, and try to feel it. I feel it is better not to say much more. It will be to me a great pride to write a notice of him: the last I can now do. What more in any way I can do for you, please to think and let me know. For his sake and for your own, I would not be a useless friend: I know, you know me a most warm one; please command me or my wife, in any way. Do not trouble to write to me; Austin, I have no doubt, will do so, if you are, as I fear you will be, unfit. My heart is sore for you. At least you know what you have been to him; how he cherished and admired you; how he was never so pleased as when he spoke of you; with what a boy's love, up to the last, he loved you. This surely is a consolation. Yours is the cruel part--to survive; you must try and not grudge to him his better fortune, to go first. It is the sad part of such relations that one must remain and suffer; I cannot see my poor Jenkin without you. Nor you indeed without him; but you may try to rejoice that he is spared that extremity. Perhaps I (as I was so much his confidant) know even better than you can do what your loss would have been to him; he never spoke of you but his face changed; it was--you were--his religion. I write by this post to Austin and to the Academy.--Yours most sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, June 1885_.] MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,--I should have written sooner, but we are in a bustle, and I have been very tired, though still well. Your very kind note was most welcome to me. I shall be very much pleased to have you call me Louis, as he has now done for so many years. Sixteen, you say? is it so long? It seems too short now; but of that we cannot judge, and must not complain. I wish that either I or my wife could do anything for you; when we can, you will, I am sure, command us. I trust that my notice gave you as little pain as was possible. I found I had so much to say, that I preferred to keep it for another place and make but a note in the Academy. To try to draw my friend at greater length, and say what he was to me and his intimates, what a good influence in life and what an example, is a desire that grows upon me. It was strange, as I wrote the note, how his old tests and criticisms haunted me; and it reminded me afresh with every few words how much I owe to him. I had a note from Henley, very brief and very sad. We none of us yet feel the loss; but we know what he would have said and wished. Do you know that Dew Smith has two photographs of him, neither very bad? and one giving a lively, though not flattering air of him in conversation? If you have not got them, would you like me to write to Dew and ask him to give you proofs? I was so pleased that he and my wife made friends; that is a great pleasure. We found and have preserved one fragment (the head) of the drawing he made and tore up when he was last here. He had promised to come and stay with us this summer. May we not hope, at least, some time soon to have one from you?--Believe me, my dear Mrs. Jenkin, with the most real sympathy, your sincere friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Dear me, what happiness I owe to both of you! TO C. HOWARD CARRINGTON In answer to an inquiry from a correspondent not personally known to him, who had by some means heard of the _Great North Road_ project. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, June 9th [1885]._ DEAR SIR,--_The Great North Road_ is still unfinished; it is scarce I should say beyond Highgate: but it will be finished some day, bar the big accident. It will not however gratify your taste; the highwayman is not grasped: what you would have liked (and I, believe me) would have been _Jerry Abershaw_: but Jerry was not written at the fit moment; I have outgrown the taste--and his romantic horse-shoes clatter faintlier down the incline towards Lethe.--Truly yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO KATHARINE DE MATTOS _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Summer 1885._ MY DEAR CATHERINE,--'Tis the most complete blague and folly to write to you; you never answer and, even when you do, your letters crackle under the teeth like ashes; containing nothing as they do but unseasonable japes and a great cloudy vagueness as of the realm of chaos. In this I know well they are like mine; and it becomes me well to write such--but not you--for reasons too obvious to mention. We have both been sick; but to-day I am up, though with an aching back. But I hope all will be better. Of your views, state, finances, etc. etc., I know nothing. We were mighty near the end of all things financially, when a strange shape of a hand giving appeared in Heaven or from Hell, and set us up again for the moment; yet still we totter on a whoreson brink. I beg pardon. I forgot I was writing to a lady; but the word shall stay: it is the only word; I would say it to the Q----n of E----d. How do you like letters of this kind? It is your kind. They mean nothing; they are blankly insignificant; and impudently put one in the wrong. One has learnt nothing; and forsooth one must reply.--Yours, the Inexpressive Correspondent, R. L. S. Hey-ey-ey! Sold again. Hey-ey-ey! Postscript: sold again. TO W. H. LOW In August of this year Stevenson made with his wife an excursion to the west country (stopping at Dorchester on the way, for the pleasure of seeing Mr. Thomas Hardy at home), and was detained for several weeks at The New London inn, Exeter, by a bad fit of hemorrhage. His correspondence is not resumed until the autumn. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, October 22, 1885._ MY DEAR LOW,--I trust you are not annoyed with me beyond forgiveness; for indeed my silence has been devilish prolonged. I can only tell you that I have been nearly six months (more than six) in a strange condition of collapse, when it was impossible to do any work, and difficult (more difficult than you would suppose) to write the merest note. I am now better, but not yet my own man in the way of brains, and in health only so-so. I suppose I shall learn (I begin to think I am learning) to fight this vast, vague feather-bed of an obsession that now overlies and smothers me; but in the beginnings of these conflicts, the inexperienced wrestler is always worsted, and I own I have been quite extinct. I wish you to know, though it can be no excuse, that you are not the only one of my friends by many whom I have thus neglected; and even now, having come so very late into the possession of myself, with a substantial capital of debts, and my work still moving with a desperate slowness--as a child might fill a sandbag with its little handfuls--and my future deeply pledged, there is almost a touch of virtue in my borrowing these hours to write to you. Why I said "hours" I know not; it would look blue for both of us if I made good the word. I was writing your address the other day, ordering a copy of my next, _Prince Otto_, to go your way. I hope you have not seen it in parts; it was not meant to be so read; and only my poverty (dishonourably) consented to the serial evolution. I will send you with this a copy of the English edition of the _Child's Garden_. I have heard there is some vile rule of the post-office in the States against inscriptions; so I send herewith a piece of doggerel which Mr. Bunner may, if he thinks fit, copy off the fly-leaf. Sargent was down again and painted a portrait of me walking about in my own dining-room, in my own velveteen jacket, and twisting as I go my own moustache; at one corner a glimpse of my wife, in an Indian dress, and seated in a chair that was once my grandfather's, but since some months goes by the name of Henry James's--for it was there the novelist loved to sit--adds a touch of poesy and comicality. It is, I think, excellent, but is too eccentric to be exhibited. I am at one extreme corner; my wife, in this wild dress, and looking like a ghost, is at the extreme other end; between us an open door exhibits my palatial entrance hall and a part of my respected staircase. All this is touched in lovely, with that witty touch of Sargent's; but, of course, it looks dam queer as a whole. Pray let me hear from you, and give me good news of yourself and your wife, to whom please remember me.--Yours most sincerely, my dear Low, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY _Prince Otto_ was published in October of this year; and the following refers to two reviews of it--one of them by Mr. Henley, which to the writer's displeasure had been pruned by the editor before printing; the other by a writer in the Saturday Review who declared that Otto was "a fool and a wittol," and could see nothing but false style in the story of Seraphina's flight through the forest. _[Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Autumn 1885.]_ DEAR LAD,--If there was any more praise in what you wrote, I think [the editor] has done us both a service; some of it stops my throat. What, it would not have been the same if Dumas or Musset had done it, would it not? Well, no, I do not think it would, do you know, now; I am really of opinion it would not; and a dam good job too. Why, think what Musset would have made of Otto! Think how gallantly Dumas would have carried his crowd through! And whatever you do, don't quarrel with ----. It gives me much pleasure to see your work there; I think you do yourself great justice in that field; and I would let no annoyance, petty or justifiable, debar me from such a market. I think you do good there. Whether (considering our intimate relations) you would not do better to refrain from reviewing me, I will leave to yourself: were it all on my side, you could foresee my answer; but there is your side also, where you must be the judge. As for the Saturday. Otto is no "fool," the reader is left in no doubt as to whether or not Seraphina was a Messalina (though much it would matter, if you come to that); and therefore on both these points the reviewer has been unjust. Secondly, the romance lies precisely in the freeing of two spirits from these court intrigues; and here I think the reviewer showed himself dull. Lastly, if Otto's speech is offensive to him, he is one of the large class of unmanly and ungenerous dogs who arrogate and defile the name of manly. As for the passages quoted, I do confess that some of them reek Gongorically; they are excessive, but they are not inelegant after all. However, had he attacked me only there, he would have scored. Your criticism on Gondremark is, I fancy, right. I thought all your criticisms were indeed; only your praise--chokes me.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO WILLIAM ARCHER The paper referred to in this and the following letters is one which Mr. Archer wrote over his own signature in the November number of Time, a magazine now extinct. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, October 28, 1885._ DEAR MR. ARCHER,--I have read your paper with my customary admiration; it is very witty, very adroit; it contains a great deal that is excellently true (particularly the parts about my stories and the description of me as an artist in life); but you will not be surprised if I do not think it altogether just. It seems to me, in particular, that you have wilfully read all my works in terms of my earliest; my aim, even in style, has quite changed in the last six or seven years; and this I should have thought you would have noticed. Again, your first remark upon the affectation of the italic names; a practice only followed in my two affected little books of travel, where a typographical _minauderie_ of the sort appeared to me in character; and what you say of it, then, is quite just. But why should you forget yourself and use these same italics as an index to my theology some pages further on? This is lightness of touch indeed; may I say, it is almost sharpness of practice? Excuse these remarks. I have been on the whole much interested, and sometimes amused. Are you aware that the praiser of this "brave gymnasium" has not seen a canoe nor taken a long walk since '79? that he is rarely out of the house nowadays, and carries his arm in a sling? Can you imagine that he is a back-slidden communist, and is sure he will go to hell (if there be such an excellent institution) for the luxury in which he lives? And can you believe that, though it is gaily expressed, the thought is hag and skeleton in every moment of vacuity or depression? Can you conceive how profoundly I am irritated by the opposite affectation to my own, when I see strong men and rich men bleating about their sorrows and the burthen of life, in a world full of "cancerous paupers," and poor sick children, and the fatally bereaved, ay, and down even to such happy creatures as myself, who has yet been obliged to strip himself, one after another, of all the pleasures that he had chosen except smoking (and the days of that I know in my heart ought to be over), I forgot eating, which I still enjoy, and who sees the circle of impotence closing very slowly but quite steadily around him? In my view, one dank, dispirited word is harmful, a crime of _lèse-humanité_, a piece of acquired evil; every gay, every bright word or picture, like every pleasant air of music, is a piece of pleasure set afloat; the reader catches it, and, if he be healthy, goes on his way rejoicing; and it is the business of art so to send him, as often as possible. For what you say, so kindly, so prettily, so precisely, of my style, I must in particular thank you; though even here, I am vexed you should not have remarked on my attempted change of manner: seemingly this attempt is still quite unsuccessful! Well, we shall fight it out on this line if it takes all summer. And now for my last word: Mrs. Stevenson is very anxious that you should see me, and that she should see you, in the flesh. If you at all share in these views, I am a fixture. Write or telegraph (giving us time, however, to telegraph in reply, lest the day be impossible), and come down here to a bed and a dinner. What do you say, my dear critic? I shall be truly pleased to see you; and to explain at greater length what I meant by saying narrative was the most characteristic mood of literature, on which point I have great hopes I shall persuade you.--Yours truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--My opinion about Thoreau, and the passage in The Week, is perhaps a fad, but it is sincere and stable. I am still of the same mind five years later; did you observe that I had said "modern" authors? and will you observe again that this passage touches the very joint of our division? It is one that appeals to me, deals with that part of life that I think the most important, and you, if I gather rightly, so much less so? You believe in the extreme moment of the facts that humanity has acquired and is acquiring; I think them of moment, but still of much less than those inherent or inherited brute principles and laws that sit upon us (in the character of conscience) as heavy as a shirt of mail, and that (in the character of the affections and the airy spirit of pleasure) make all the light of our lives. The house is, indeed, a great thing, and should be rearranged on sanitary principles; but my heart and all my interest are with the dweller, that ancient of days and day-old infant man. R. L. S. An excellent touch is p. 584. "By instinct or design he eschews what demands constructive patience." I believe it is both; my theory is that literature must always be most at home in treating movement and change; hence I look for them. TO THOMAS STEVENSON _[Skerryvore, Bournemouth] October 28, 1885._ MY DEAREST FATHER,--Get the November number of Time, and you will see a review of me by a very clever fellow, who is quite furious at bottom because I am too orthodox, just as Purcell was savage because I am not orthodox enough. I fall between two stools. It is odd, too, to see how this man thinks me a full-blooded fox-hunter, and tells me my philosophy would fail if I lost my health or had to give up exercise! An illustrated _Treasure Island_ will be out next month. I have had an early copy, and the French pictures are admirable. The artist has got his types up in Hogarth; he is full of fire and spirit, can draw and can compose, and has understood the book as I meant it, all but one or two little accidents, such as making the _Hispaniola_ a brig. I would send you my copy, _but I cannot_; it is my new toy, and I cannot divorce myself from this enjoyment. I am keeping really better, and have been out about every second day, though the weather is cold and very wild. I was delighted to hear you were keeping better; you and Archer would agree, more shame to you! (Archer is my pessimist critic.) Good-bye to all of you, with my best love. We had a dreadful overhauling of my conduct as a son the other night; and my wife stripped me of my illusions and made me admit I had been a detestable bad one. Of one thing in particular she convicted me in my own eyes: I mean, a most unkind reticence, which hung on me then, and I confess still hangs on me now, when I try to assure you that I do love you.--Ever your bad son, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO HENRY JAMES _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, October 28, 1885._ MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--At last, my wife being at a concert, and a story being done, I am at some liberty to write and give you of my views. And first, many thanks for the works that came to my sickbed. And second, and more important, as to the _Princess_.[13] Well, I think you are going to do it this time; I cannot, of course, foresee, but these two first numbers seem to me picturesque and sound and full of lineament, and very much a new departure. As for your young lady, she is all there; yes, sir, you can do low life, I believe. The prison was excellent; it was of that nature of touch that I sometimes achingly miss from your former work; with some of the grime, that is, and some of the emphasis of skeleton there is in nature. I pray you to take grime in a good sense; it need not be ignoble: dirt may have dignity; in nature it usually has; and your prison was imposing. And now to the main point: why do we not see you? Do not fail us. Make an alarming sacrifice, and let us see "Henry James's chair" properly occupied. I never sit in it myself (though it was my grandfather's); it has been consecrated to guests by your approval, and now stands at my elbow gaping. We have a new room, too, to introduce to you--our last baby, the drawing-room; it never cries, and has cut its teeth. Likewise, there is a cat now. It promises to be a monster of laziness and self-sufficiency. Pray see, in the November Time (a dread name for a magazine of light reading), a very clever fellow, W. Archer, stating his views of me; the rosy-gilled "athletico-æsthete"; and warning me, in a fatherly manner, that a rheumatic fever would try my philosophy (as indeed it would), and that my gospel would not do for "those who are shut out from the exercise of any manly virtue save renunciation." To those who know that rickety and cloistered spectre, the real R. L. S., the paper, besides being clever in itself, presents rare elements of sport. The critical parts are in particular very bright and neat, and often excellently true. Get it by all manner of means. I hear on all sides I am to be attacked as an immoral writer; this is painful. Have I at last got, like you, to the pitch of being attacked? 'Tis the consecration I lack--and could do without. Not that Archer's paper is an attack, or what either he or I, I believe, would call one; 'tis the attacks on my morality (which I had thought a gem of the first water) I referred to. Now, my dear James, come--come--come. The spirit (that is me) says, Come; and the bride (and that is my wife) says, Come; and the best thing you can do for us and yourself and your work is to get up and do so right away.--Yours affectionately, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO WILLIAM ARCHER _[Skerryvore, Bournemouth] October 30, 1885._ DEAR MR. ARCHER,--It is possible my father may be soon down with me; he is an old man and in bad health and spirits; and I could neither leave him alone, nor could we talk freely before him. If he should be here when you offer your visit, you will understand if I have to say no, and put you off. I quite understand your not caring to refer to things of private knowledge. What still puzzles me is how you ("in the witness box"--ha! I like the phrase) should have made your argument actually hinge on a contention which the facts answered. I am pleased to hear of the correctness of my guess. It is then as I supposed; you are of the school of the generous and not the sullen pessimists; and I can feel with you. I used myself to rage when I saw sick folk going by in their Bath-chairs; since I have been sick myself (and always when I was sick myself), I found life, even in its rough places, to have a property of easiness. That which we suffer ourselves has no longer the same air of monstrous injustice and wanton cruelty that suffering wears when we see it in the case of others. So we begin gradually to see that things are not black, but have their strange compensations; and when they draw towards their worst, the idea of death is like a bed to lie on. I should bear false witness if I did not declare life happy. And your wonderful statement that happiness tends to die out and misery to continue, which was what put me on the track of your frame of mind, is diagnostic of the happy man raging over the misery of others; it could never be written by the man who had tried what unhappiness was like. And at any rate, it was a slip of the pen: the ugliest word that science has to declare is a reserved indifference to happiness and misery in the individual; it declares no leaning toward the black, no iniquity on the large scale in fate's doings, rather a marble equality, dread not cruel, giving and taking away and reconciling. Why have I not written my _Timon_? Well, here is my worst quarrel with you. You take my young books as my last word. The tendency to try to say more has passed unperceived (my fault, that). And you make no allowance for the slowness with which a man finds and tries to learn his tools. I began with a neat brisk little style, and a sharp little knack of partial observation; I have tried to expand my means, but still I can only utter a part of what I wish to say, and am bound to feel; and much of it will die unspoken. But if I had the pen of Shakespeare, I have no _Timon_ to give forth. I feel kindly to the powers that be; I marvel they should use me so well; and when I think of the case of others, I wonder too, but in another vein, whether they may not, whether they must not, be like me, still with some compensation, some delight. To have suffered, nay, to suffer, sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth, and has to be learned in the fire.--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. We expect you, remember that. TO WILLIAM ARCHER _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, November 1, 1885._ DEAR MR. ARCHER,--You will see that I had already had a sight of your article and what were my thoughts. One thing in your letter puzzles me. Are you, too, not in the witness-box? And if you are, why take a wilfully false hypothesis? If you knew I was a chronic invalid, why say that my philosophy was unsuitable to such a case? My call for facts is not so general as yours, but an essential fact should not be put the other way about. The fact is, consciously or not, you doubt my honesty; you think I am making faces, and at heart disbelieve my utterances. And this I am disposed to think must spring from your not having had enough of pain, sorrow, and trouble in your existence. It is easy to have too much; easy also or possible to have too little; enough is required that a man may appreciate what elements of consolation and joy there are in everything but absolutely overpowering physical pain or disgrace, and how in almost all circumstances the human soul can play a fair part. You fear life, I fancy, on the principle of the hand of little employment. But perhaps my hypothesis is as unlike the truth as the one you chose. Well, if it be so, if you have had trials, sickness, the approach of death, the alienation of friends, poverty at the heels, and have not felt your soul turn round upon these things and spurn them under--you must be very differently made from me, and I earnestly believe from the majority of men. But at least you are in the right to wonder and complain. To "say all"? Stay here. All at once? That would require a word from the pen of Gargantua. We say each particular thing as it comes up, and "with that sort of emphasis that for the time there seems to be no other." Words will not otherwise serve us; no, nor even Shakespeare, who could not have put _As You Like It_ and _Timon_ into one without ruinous loss both of emphasis and substance. Is it quite fair then to keep your face so steadily On my most light-hearted works, and then say I recognise no evil? Yet in the paper on Burns, for instance, I show myself alive to some sorts of evil. But then, perhaps, they are not your sorts. And again: "to say all"? All: yes. Everything: no. The task were endless, the effect nil. But my all, in such a vast field as this of life, is what interests me, what stands out, what takes on itself a presence for my imagination or makes a figure in that little tricky abbreviation which is the best that my reason can conceive. That I must treat, or I shall be fooling with my readers. That, and not the all of some one else. And here we come to the division: not only do I believe that literature should give joy, but I see a universe, I suppose, eternally different from yours; a solemn, a terrible, but a very joyous and noble universe, where suffering is not at least wantonly inflicted, though it falls with dispassionate partiality, but where it may be and generally is nobly borne; where, above all (this I believe; probably you don't: I think he may, with cancer), _any brave man may make_ out a life which shall be happy for himself, and, by so being, beneficent to those about him. And if he fails, why should I hear him weeping? I mean if I fail, why should I weep? Why should _you_ hear _me_? Then to me morals, the conscience, the affections, and the passions are, I will own frankly and sweepingly, so infinitely more important than the other parts of life, that I conceive men rather triflers who become immersed in the latter; and I will always think the man who keeps his lip stiff, and makes "a happy fireside clime," and carries a pleasant face about to friends and neighbours, infinitely greater (in the abstract) than an atrabilious Shakespeare or a backbiting Kant or Darwin. No offence to any of these gentlemen, two of whom probably (one for certain) came up to my standard. And now enough said; it were hard if a poor man could not criticise another without having so much ink shed against him. But I shall still regret you should have written on an hypothesis you knew to be untenable, and that you should thus have made your paper, for those who do not know me, essentially unfair. The rich, fox-hunting squire speaks with one voice; the sick man of letters with another.--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (_Prometheus-Heine in minimis_). _P.S._--Here I go again. To me, the medicine bottles on my chimney and the blood on my handkerchief are accidents; they do not colour my view of life, as you would know, I think, if you had experience of sickness; they do not exist in my prospect; I would as soon drag them under the eyes of my readers as I would mention a pimple I might chance to have (saving your presence) on my posteriors. What does it prove? what does it change? it has not hurt, it has not changed me in any essential part; and I should think myself a trifler and in bad taste if I introduced the world to these unimportant privacies. But, again, there is this mountain-range between us--_that you do not believe me_. It is not flattering, but the fault is probably in my literary art. TO W. H. LOW The "other thing coming out" mentioned below in the last paragraph but one was _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, December 26, 1885._ MY DEAR LOW,--_Lamia_ has not yet turned up, but your letter came to me this evening with a scent of the Boulevard Montparnasse that was irresistible. The sand of Lavenue's crumbled under my heel; and the bouquet of the old Fleury came back to me, and I remembered the day when I found a twenty franc piece under my fetish. Have you that fetish still? and has it brought you luck? I remembered, too, my first sight of you in a frock-coat and a smoking-cap, when we passed the evening at the Café de Medicis; and my last when we sat and talked in the Parc Monceau; and all these things made me feel a little young again, which, to one who has been mostly in bed for a month, was a vivifying change. Yes, you are lucky to have a bag that holds you comfortably. Mine is a strange contrivance; I don't die, damme, and I can't get along on both feet to save my soul; I am a chronic sickist; and my work cripples along between bed and the parlour, between the medicine bottle and the cupping glass. Well, I like my life all the same; and should like it none the worse if I could have another talk with you, though even my talks now are measured out to me by the minute hand like poisons in a minim glass. A photograph will be taken of my ugly mug and sent to you for ulterior purposes: I have another thing coming out, which I did not put in the way of the Scribners, I can scarce tell how; but I was sick and penniless and rather back on the world, and mismanaged it. I trust they will forgive me. I am sorry to hear of Mrs. Low's illness, and glad to hear of her recovery. I will announce the coming _Lamia_ to Bob: he steams away at literature like smoke. I have a beautiful Bob on my walls, and a good Sargent, and a delightful Lemon; and your etching now hangs framed in the dining-room. So the arts surround me.--Yours, R. L. S. TO MRS. DE MATTOS With this cousin the writer had always been on terms of close affection, and he now dedicated to her _The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. In the dedication as published only the second verse stands. _[Skerryvore, Bournemouth] January 1st, 1886._ DEAREST KATHARINE,--Here, on a very little book and accompanied with lame verses, I have put your name. Our kindness is now getting well on in years; it must be nearly of age; and it gets more valuable to me with every time I see you. It is not possible to express any sentiment, and it is not necessary to try, at least between us. You know very well that I love you dearly, and that I always will. I only wish the verses were better, but at least you like the story; and it is sent to you by the one that loves you--Jekyll, and not Hyde. _R. L. S._ _Ave!_ Bells upon the city are ringing in the night; High above the gardens are the houses full of light; On the heathy Pentlands is the curlew flying free; And the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie. We cannae break the bonds that God decreed to bind, Still we'll be the children of the heather and the wind; Far away from home, O, it's still for you and me That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie. R. L. S. TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM _[Skerryvore, Bournemouth] Jan. 1st, 1886._ MY DEAR KINNICUM,[14]--I am a very bad dog, but not for the first time. Your book, which is very interesting, came duly; and I immediately got a very bad cold indeed, and have been fit for nothing whatever. I am a bit better now, and aye on the mend; so I write to tell you, I thought of you on New Year's Day; though, I own, it would have been more decent if I had thought in time for you to get my letter then. Well, what can't be cured must be endured, Mr. Lawrie; and you must be content with what I give. If I wrote all the letters I ought to write, and at the proper time, I should be very good and very happy; but I doubt if I should do anything else. I suppose you will be in town for the New Year; and I hope your health is pretty good. What you want is diet; but it is as much use to tell you that as it is to tell my father. And I quite admit a diet is a beastly thing. I doubt, however, if it be as bad as not being allowed to speak, which I have tried fully, and do not like. When, at the same time, I was not allowed to read, it passed a joke. But these are troubles of the past, and on this day, at least, it is proper to suppose they won't return. But we are not put here to enjoy ourselves: it was not God's purpose; and I am prepared to argue, it is not our sincere wish. As for our deserts, the less said of them the better, for somebody might hear, and nobody cares to be laughed at. A good man is a very noble thing to see, but not to himself; what he seems to God is, fortunately, not our business; that is the domain of faith; and whether on the first of January or the thirty-first of December, faith is a good word to end on. My dear Cummy, many happy returns to you and my best love.--The worst correspondent in the world, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth_] _January 1st, 1886_. MY DEAR PEOPLE,--Many happy returns of the day to you all; I am fairly well and in good spirits; and much and hopefully occupied with dear Jenkin's life. The inquiry in every detail, every letter that I read, makes me think of him more nobly. I cannot imagine how I got his friendship; I did not deserve it. I believe the notice will be interesting and useful. My father's last letter, owing to the use of a quill pen and the neglect of blotting-paper, was hopelessly illegible. Every one tried, and every one failed to decipher an important word on which the interest of one whole clause (and the letter consisted of two) depended. I find I can make little more of this; but I'll spare the blots.--Dear people, ever your loving son, R. L. S. I will try again, being a giant refreshed by the house being empty. The presence of people is the great obstacle to letter-writing. I deny that letters should contain news (I mean mine; those of other people should). But mine should contain appropriate sentiments and humorous nonsense, or nonsense without the humour. When the house is empty, the mind is seized with a desire--no, that is too strong--a willingness to pour forth unmitigated rot, which constitutes (in me) the true spirit of correspondence. When I have no remarks to offer (and nobody to offer them to), my pen flies, and you see the remarkable consequence of a page literally covered with words and genuinely devoid of sense. I can always do that, if quite alone, and I like doing it; but I have yet to learn that it is beloved by correspondents. The deuce of it is, that there is no end possible but the end of the paper; and as there is very little left of that--if I cannot stop writing--suppose you give up reading. It would all come to the same thing; and I think we should all be happier.... TO W. H. LOW In the following letter R. L. S. accepts the dedication of Mr. Low's illustrated edition of Keats's _Lamia_, and sends him in return the newly published _Jekyll and Hyde_, and a set of verses afterwards printed in the Century Magazine and _Underwoods_, and inscribed by Mr. St. Gaudens on his medallion portrait of the author. The terms of the _Lamia_ dedication are as follows: "In testimony of loyal friendship and of a common faith in doubtful tales from Faery-Land, I dedicate to Robert Louis Stevenson my work in this book." The Latin legend inscribed above the design runs: "Neque est ullum certius amicitiae vinculum quam consensus et societas consiliorum et voluntatum." [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth_] _Jan. 2nd, 1886._ MY DEAR LOW,--_Lamia_ has come, and I do not know how to thank you, not only for the beautiful art of the designs, but for the handsome and apt words of the dedication. My favourite is "Bathes unseen," which is a masterpiece; and the next, "Into the green recessed woods," is perhaps more remarkable, though it does not take my fancy so imperiously. The night scene at Corinth pleases me also. The second part offers fewer opportunities. I own I should like to see both _Isabella_ and the _Eve_ thus illustrated; and then there's _Hyperion_--O, yes, and _Endymion_! I should like to see the lot: beautiful pictures dance before me by hundreds: I believe _Endymion_ would suit you best. It also is in faery-land; and I see a hundred opportunities, cloudy and flowery glories, things as delicate as the cobweb in the bush; actions, not in themselves of any mighty purport, but made for the pencil: the feast of Pan, Peona's isle, the "slabbed margin of a well," the chase of the butterfly, the nymph, Glaucus, Cybele, Sleep on his couch, a farrago of unconnected beauties. But I divagate; and all this sits in the bosom of the publisher. What is more important, I accept the terms of the dedication with a frank heart, and the terms of your Latin legend fairly. The sight of your pictures has once more awakened me to my right mind; something may come of it; yet one more bold push to get free of this prison-yard of the abominably ugly, where I take my daily exercise with my contemporaries. I do not know, I have a feeling in my bones, a sentiment which may take on the forms of imagination, or may not. If it does, I shall owe it to you; and the thing will thus descend from Keats even if on the wrong side of the blanket. If it can be done in prose--that is the puzzle--I divagate again. Thank you again: you can draw and yet you do not love the ugly: what are you doing in this age? Flee, while it is yet time; they will have your four limbs pinned upon a stable door to scare witches. The ugly, my unhappy friend, is _de rigueur_: it is the only wear! What a chance you threw away with the serpent! Why had Apollonius no pimples? Heavens, my dear Low, you do not know your business.... I send you herewith a Gothic gnome for your Greek nymph; but the gnome is interesting, I think, and he came out of a deep mine, where he guards the fountain of tears. It is not always the time to rejoice.--Yours ever, R. L. S. The gnome's name is _Jekyll & Hyde_; I believe you will find he is likewise quite willing to answer to the name of Low or Stevenson. _Same day._--I have copied out on the other sheet some bad verses, which somehow your picture suggested; as a kind of image of things that I pursue and cannot reach, and that you seem--no, not to have reached--but to have come a thought nearer to than I. This is the life we have chosen: well, the choice was mad, but I should make it again. What occurs to me is this: perhaps they might be printed in (say) the Century for the sake of my name; and if that were possible, they might advertise your book. It might be headed as sent in acknowledgment of your _Lamia_. Or perhaps it might be introduced by the phrases I have marked above. I dare say they would stick it in: I want no payment, being well paid by _Lamia_. If they are not, keep them to yourself. TO WILL H. LOW _Damned bad lines in return for a beautiful book_ YOUTH now flees on feathered foot. Faint and fainter sounds the flute; Rarer songs of Gods. And still, Somewhere on the sunny hill, Or along the winding stream. Through the willows, flits a dream; Flits, but shows a smiling face, Flees, but with so quaint a grace, None can choose to stay at home, All must follow--all must roam. This is unborn beauty: she Now in air floats high and free, Takes the sun, and breaks the blue;-- Late, with stooping pinion flew Raking hedgerow trees, and wet Her wing in silver streams, and set Shining foot on temple roof. Now again she flies aloof, Coasting mountain clouds, and kissed By the evening's amethyst. In wet wood and miry lane Still we pound and pant in vain; Still with earthy foot we chase Waning pinion, fainting face; Still, with grey hair, we stumble on Till--behold!--the vision gone! Where has fleeting beauty led? To the doorway of the dead! [Life is gone, but life was gay: We have come the primrose way!][15] R. L. S. TO EDMUND GOSSE _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jan. 2nd, 1886._ MY DEAR GOSSE,--Thank you for your letter, so interesting to my vanity. There is a review in the St. James's, which, as it seems to hold somewhat of your opinions, and is besides written with a pen and not a poker, we think may possibly be yours. The _Prince_[16] has done fairly well in spite of the reviews, which have been bad: he was, as you doubtless saw, well slated in the Saturday; one paper received it as a child's story; another (picture my agony) described it as a "Gilbert comedy." It was amusing to see the race between me and Justin M'Carthy: the Milesian has won by a length. That is the hard part of literature. You aim high, and you take longer over your work, and it will not be so successful as if you had aimed low and rushed it. What the public likes is work (of any kind) a little loosely executed; so long as it is a little wordy, a little slack, a little dim and knotless, the dear public likes it; it should (if possible) be a little dull into the bargain. I know that good work sometimes hits; but, with my hand on my heart, I think it is by an accident. And I know also that good work must succeed at last; but that is not the doing of the public; they are only shamed into silence or affectation. I do not write for the public; I do write for money, a nobler deity; and most of all for myself, not perhaps any more noble, but both more intelligent and nearer home. Let us tell each other sad stories of the bestiality of the beast whom we feed. What he likes is the newspaper; and to me the press is the mouth of a sewer, where lying is professed as from an university chair, and everything prurient, and ignoble, and essentially dull, finds its abode and pulpit. I do not like mankind; but men, and not all of these--and fewer women. As for respecting the race, and, above all, that fatuous rabble of burgesses called "the public," God save me from such irreligion!--that way lies disgrace and dishonour. There must be something wrong in me, or I would not be popular. This is perhaps a trifle stronger than my sedate and permanent opinion. Not much, I think. As for the art that we practise, I have never been able to see why its professors should be respected. They chose the primrose path; when they found it was not all primroses, but some of it brambly, and much of it uphill, they began to think and to speak of themselves as holy martyrs. But a man is never martyred in any honest sense in the pursuit of his pleasure; and _delirium tremens_ has more of the honour of the cross. We were full of the pride of life, and chose, like prostitutes, to live by a pleasure. We should be paid if we give the pleasure we pretend to give; but why should we be honoured? I hope some day you and Mrs. Gosse will come for a Sunday; but we must wait till I am able to see people. I am very full of Jenkin's life; it is painful, yet very pleasant, to dig into the past of a dead friend, and find him, at every spadeful, shine brighter. I own, as I read, I wonder more and more why he should have taken me to be a friend. He had many and obvious faults upon the face of him; the heart was pure gold. I feel it little pain to have lost him, for it is a loss in which I cannot believe; I take it, against reason, for an absence; if not to-day, then to-morrow, I still fancy I shall see him in the door; and then, now when I know him better, how glad a meeting! Yes, if I could believe in the immortality business, the world would indeed be too good to be true; but we were put here to do what service we can, for honour and not for hire: the sods cover us, and the worm that never dies, the conscience, sleeps well at last; these are the wages, besides what we receive so lavishly day by day; and they are enough for a man who knows his own frailty and sees all things in the proportion of reality. The soul of piety was killed long ago by that idea of reward. Nor is happiness, whether eternal or temporal, the reward that mankind seeks. Happinesses are but his wayside campings; his soul is in the journey; he was born for the struggle, and only tastes his life in effort and on the condition that he is opposed. How, then, is such a creature, so fiery, so pugnacious, so made up of discontent and aspiration, and such noble and uneasy passions--how can he be rewarded but by rest? I would not say it aloud; for man's cherished belief is that he loves that happiness which he continually spurns and passes by; and this belief in some ulterior happiness exactly fits him. He does not require to stop and taste it; he can be about the rugged and bitter business where his heart lies; and yet he can tell himself this fairy tale of an eternal tea-party, and enjoy the notion that he is both himself and something else; and that his friends will yet meet him, all ironed out and emasculate, and still be lovable,--as if love did not live in the faults of the beloved only, and draw its breath in an unbroken round of forgiveness! But the truth is, we must fight until we die; and when we die there can be no quiet for mankind but complete resumption into--what?--God, let us say--when all these desperate tricks will lie spellbound at last. Here came my dinner and cut this sermon short--_excusez_. R. L. S. TO JAMES PAYN The late Mrs. Buckle, a daughter of Mr. James Payn married to the editor of the Times, had laughingly remonstrated, through her father, on recognising some features of her own house in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, in the description of that tenanted by the fair Cuban in the section of Stevenson's _Dynamiter_ which tells the story of the Brown Box. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jan. 2nd, 1886._ DEAR JAMES PAYN,--Your very kind letter came very welcome; and still more welcome the news that you see ----'s tale. I will now tell you (and it was very good and very wise of me not to tell it before) that he is one of the most unlucky men I know, having put all his money into a pharmacy at Hyères, when the cholera (certainly not his fault) swept away his customers in a body. Thus you can imagine the pleasure I have to announce to him a spark of hope, for he sits to-day in his pharmacy, doing nothing and taking nothing, and watching his debts inexorably mount up. To pass to other matters: your hand, you are perhaps aware, is not one of those that can be read running; and the name of your daughter remains for me undecipherable. I call her, then, your daughter--and a very good name too--and I beg to explain how it came about that I took her house. The hospital was a point in my tale; but there is a house on each side. Now the true house is the one before the hospital: is that No. 11? If not, what do you complain of? If it is, how can I help what is true? Everything in the _Dynamiter_ is not true; but the story of the Brown Box is, in almost every particular; I lay my hand on my heart and swear to it. It took place in that house in 1884; and if your daughter was in that house at the time, all I can say is she must have kept very bad society. But I see you coming. Perhaps your daughter's house has not a balcony at the back? I cannot answer for that; I only know that side of Queen Square from the pavement and the back windows of Brunswick Row. Thence I saw plenty of balconies (terraces rather); and if there is none to the particular house in question, it must have been so arranged to spite me. I now come to the conclusion of this matter. I address three questions to your daughter:-- 1st. Has her house the proper terrace? 2nd. Is it on the proper side of the hospital? 3rd. Was she there in the summer of 1884? You see, I begin to fear that Mrs. Desborough may have deceived me on some trifling points, for she is not a lady of peddling exactitude. If this should prove to be so, I will give your daughter a proper certificate, and her house property will return to its original value. Can man say more?--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. I saw the other day that the Eternal had plagiarised from _Lost Sir Massingberd_: good again, sir! I wish he would plagiarise the death of Zero. TO W. H. LOW The late Sir Percy and Lady Shelley had in these days attached themselves warmly to R. L. S., and saw in his ways and character a living image of those of the poet, Sir Percy's father, as they imagined him. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jan. Somethingorother-th, 1886._ MY DEAR LOW,--I send you two photographs: they are both done by Sir Percy Shelley, the poet's son, which may interest. The sitting down one is, I think, the best; but if they choose that, see that the little reflected light on the nose does not give me a turn-up; that would be tragic. Don't forget "Baronet" to Sir Percy's name. We all think a heap of your book; and I am well pleased with my dedication.--Yours ever, R. L. STEVENSON. _P.S._--Apropos of the odd controversy about Shelley's nose: I have before me four photographs of myself, done by Shelley's son: my nose is hooked, not like the eagle, indeed, but like the accipitrine family in man: well, out of these four, only one marks the bend, one makes it straight, and one suggests a turn-up. This throws a flood of light on calumnious man--and the scandal-mongering sun. For personally I cling to my curve. To continue the Shelley controversy: I have a look of him, all his sisters had noses like mine: Sir Percy has a marked hook; all the family had high cheek-bones like mine; what doubt, then, but that this turn-up (of which Jeaffreson accuses the poet, along with much other _fatras_) is the result of some accident similar to what has happened in my photographs by his son? R. L. S. TO CHARLES J. GUTHRIE "The lad" is Lloyd Osbourne, at this time a student at Edinburgh University. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Jan. 18th, 1886._ MY DEAR GUTHRIE,--I hear the lad has got into the Spec. and I write to thank you very warmly for the part you have played. I only wish we were both going there together to-morrow night, and you would be in the secretary's place (that so well became you, sir) and I were to open a debate or harry you on "Private Business," and Omond perhaps to read us a few glowing pages on--the siege of Saragossa, was it? or the Battle of Saratoga? my memory fails me, but I have not forgotten a certain white charger that careered over the fields of incoherent fight with a prodigious consequence of laughter: have you? I wonder, has Omond? Well, well, _perierunt_, but, I hope, _non imputantur_. We have had good fun. Again thanking you sincerely, I remain, my dear Guthrie, your old comrade, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO THOMAS STEVENSON _Kidnapped_ had at this time just been taken up again, and Stevenson explains the course of the story to his father, who had taken the deepest interest in it since they visited together the scene of the Appin murder. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, January 25, 1886._] MY DEAR FATHER,--Many thanks for a letter quite like yourself. I quite agree with you, and had already planned a scene of religion in _Balfour_; the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge furnishes me with a catechist whom I shall try to make the man. I have another catechist, the blind, pistol-carrying highway robber, whom I have transferred from the Long Island to Mull. I find it a most picturesque period, and wonder Scott let it escape. The _Covenant_ is lost on one of the Tarrans, and David is cast on Earraid, where (being from inland) he is nearly starved before he finds out the island is tidal; then he crosses Mull to Toronsay, meeting the blind catechist by the way; then crosses Morven from Kinlochaline to Kingairloch, where he stays the night with the good catechist; that is where I am; next day he is to be put ashore in Appin, and be present at Colin Campbell's death. To-day I rest, being a little run down. Strange how liable we are to brain fag in this scooty family! But as far as I have got, all but the last chapter, I think David is on his feet, and (to my mind) a far better story and far sounder at heart than _Treasure Island_. I have no earthly news, living entirely in my story, and only coming out of it to play patience. The Shelleys are gone; the Taylors kinder than can be imagined. The other day, Lady Taylor drove over and called on me; she is a delightful old lady, and great fun. I mentioned a story about the Duchess of Wellington--which I had heard Sir Henry tell; and though he was very tired, he looked it up and copied it out for me in his own hand.--Your most affectionate son, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO C. W. STODDARD _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Feb. 13th, 1886._ MY DEAR STODDARD,--I am a dreadful character; but, you see, I have at last taken pen in hand; how long I may hold it, God knows. This is already my sixth letter to-day, and I have many more waiting; and my wrist gives me a jog on the subject of scrivener's cramp, which is not encouraging. I gather you were a little down in the jaw when you wrote your last. I am as usual pretty cheerful, but not very strong. I stay in the house all winter, which is base; but, as you continue to see, the pen goes from time to time, though neither fast enough nor constantly enough to please me. My wife is at Bath with my father and mother, and the interval of widowery explains my writing. Another person writing for you when you have done work is a great enemy to correspondence. To-day I feel out of health, and shan't work; and hence this so much over-due reply. I was re-reading some of your _South Sea Idyls_ the other day: some of the chapters are very good indeed; some pages as good as they can be. How does your class get along? If you like to touch on _Otto_, any day in a by-hour, you may tell them--as the author's last dying confession--that it is a strange example of the difficulty of being ideal in an age of realism; that the unpleasant giddy-mindedness, which spoils the book and often gives it a wanton air of unreality and juggling with air-bells, comes from unsteadiness of key; from the too great realism of some chapters and passages--some of which I have now spotted, others I dare say I shall never spot--which disprepares the imagination for the cast of the remainder. Any story can be made _true_ in its own key; any story can be made _false_ by the choice of a wrong key of detail or style: _Otto_ is made to reel like a drunken--I was going to say man, but let us substitute cipher--by the variations of the key. Have you observed that the famous problem of realism and idealism is one purely of detail? Have you seen my _Note on Realism_ in Cassell's Magazine of Art; and _Elements of Style_ in the Contemporary; and _Romance_ and _Humble Apology_ in Longman's? They are all in your line of business; let me know what you have not seen and I'll send 'em. I am glad I brought the old house up to you. It was a pleasant old spot, and I remember you there, though still more dearly in your own strange den upon a hill in San Francisco; and one of the most San Francisco-y parts of San Francisco. Good-bye, my dear fellow, and believe me your friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO EDMUND GOSSE Concerning the payment which Mr. Gosse had procured him from an American magazine for the set of verses addressed to Mr. Low (see above, p. 172). [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Feb. 17, 1886._] DEAR GOSSE,--Non, c'est honteux! for a set of shambling lines that don't know whether they're trochees or what they are, that you or any of the crafty ones would blush all over if you had so much as thought upon, all by yourselves, in the water-closet. But God knows, I am glad enough of five pounds; and this is almost as honest a way to get it as plain theft, so what should I care?--Ever yours, R. L. S. TO J. A. SYMONDS _Skerryvore, Bournemouth [Spring 1886]._ MY DEAR SYMONDS,--If we have lost touch, it is (I think) only in a material sense; a question of letters, not hearts. You will find a warm welcome at Skerryvore from both the lightkeepers; and, indeed, we never tell ourselves one of our financial fairy tales, but a run to Davos is a prime feature. I am not changeable in friendship; and I think I can promise you you have a pair of trusty well-wishers and friends in Bournemouth: whether they write or not is but a small thing; the flag may not be waved, but it is there. _Jekyll_ is a dreadful thing, I own; but the only thing I feel dreadful about is that damned old business of the war in the members. This time it came out; I hope it will stay in, in future. Raskolnikoff[17] is easily the greatest book I have read in ten years; I am glad you took to it. Many find it dull: Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness. James did not care for it because the character of Raskolnikoff was not objective; and at that I divined a great gulf between us, and, on further reflection, the existence of a certain impotence in many minds of to-day, which prevents them from living in a book or a character, and keeps them standing afar off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are tortured and purified. The Juge d'Instruction I thought a wonderful, weird, touching, ingenious creation: the drunken father, and Sonia, and the student friend, and the uncircumscribed, protoplasmic humanity of Raskolnikoff, all upon a level that filled me with wonder: the execution also, superb in places. Another has been translated--_Humiliés et Offensés_. It is even more incoherent than _Le Crime et le Châtiment_, but breathes much of the same lovely goodness, and has passages of power. Dostoieffsky is a devil of a swell, to be sure. Have you heard that he became a stout, imperialist conservative? It is interesting to know. To something of that side, the balance leans with me also in view of the incoherency and incapacity of all. The old boyish idea of the march on Paradise being now out of season, and all plans and ideas that I hear debated being built on a superb indifference to the first principles of human character, a helpless desire to acquiesce in anything of which I know the worst assails me. Fundamental errors in human nature of two sorts stand on the skyline of all this modern world of aspirations. First, that it is happiness that men want; and second, that happiness consists of anything but an internal harmony. Men do not want, and I do not think they would accept, happiness; what they live for is rivalry, effort, success--the elements our friends wish to eliminate. And, on the other hand, happiness is a question of morality--or of immorality, there is no difference--and conviction. Gordon was happy in Khartoum, in his worst hours of danger and fatigue; Marat was happy, I suppose, in his ugliest frenzy; Marcus Aurelius was happy in the detested camp; Pepys was pretty happy, and I am pretty happy on the whole, because we both somewhat crowingly accepted a _via media_, both liked to attend to our affairs, and both had some success in managing the same. It is quite an open question whether Pepys and I ought to be happy; on the other hand, there is no doubt that Marat had better be unhappy. He was right (if he said it) that he was _la misère humaine_, cureless misery--unless perhaps by the gallows. Death is a great and gentle solvent; it has never had justice done it, no, not by Whitman. As for those crockery chimney-piece ornaments, the bourgeois (_quorum pars_), and their cowardly dislike of dying and killing, it is merely one symptom of a thousand how utterly they have got out of touch of life. Their dislike of capital punishment and their treatment of their domestic servants are for me the two flaunting emblems of their hollowness. God knows where I am driving to. But here comes my lunch. Which interruption, happily for you, seems to have stayed the issue. I have now nothing to say, that had formerly such a pressure of twaddle. Pray don't fail to come this summer. It will be a great disappointment, now it has been spoken of, if you do,--Yours ever, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO F. W. H. MYERS In reply to a paper of criticisms on _Jekyll and Hyde_. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, March 1st, 1886._ MY DEAR SIR,--I know not how to thank you: this is as handsome as it is clever. With almost every word I agree--much of it I even knew before--much of it, I must confess, would never have been, if I had been able to do what I like, and lay the thing by for the matter of a year. But the wheels of Byles the Butcher drive exceeding swiftly, and _Jekyll_ was conceived, written, re-written, re-rewritten, and printed inside ten weeks. Nothing but this white-hot haste would explain the gross error of Hyde's speech at Lanyon's. Your point about the specialised fiend is more subtle, but not less just: I had not seen it.--About the picture, I rather meant that Hyde had brought it himself; and Utterson's hypothesis of the gift (p. 42) an error.--The tidiness of the room, I thought, but I dare say my psychology is here too ingenious to be sound, was due to the dread weariness and horror of the imprisonment. Something has to be done: he would tidy the room. But I dare say it is false. I shall keep your paper; and if ever my works come to be collected, I will put my back into these suggestions. In the meanwhile, I do truly lack words in which to express my sense of gratitude for the trouble you have taken. The receipt of such a paper is more than a reward for my labours. I have read it with pleasure, and as I say, I hope to use it with profit.--Believe me, your most obliged, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. H. LOW The following letter relates to a suggestion which Mr. Gilder, as editor of the Century Magazine, had already made in the Hyères time nearly three years previously, and had now lately revived, that Stevenson and his friend Mr. W. H. Low should make a joint excursion down the Saône and Rhone, the result to be a book written by R. L. S. and illustrated by Mr. Low. Considerations of health caused the plan to be promptly abandoned for the second time. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, March 1886._] MY DEAR LOW,--This is the most enchanting picture. Now understand my state: I am really an invalid, but of a mysterious order. I might be a _malade imaginaire_, but for one too tangible symptom, my tendency to bleed from the lungs. If we could go (_1st_) We must have money enough to travel with _leisure and comfort_--especially the first. (_2nd_) You must be prepared for a comrade who would go to bed some part of every day and often stay silent. (_3rd_) You would have to play the part of a thoughtful courier, sparing me fatigue, looking out that my bed was warmed, etc. (_4th_) If you are very nervous, you must recollect a bad hemorrhage is always on the cards, with its concomitants of anxiety and horror for those who are beside me. Do you blench? If so, let us say no more about it. If you are still unafraid, and the money were forthcoming, I believe the trip might do me good, and I feel sure that, working together, we might produce a fine book. The Rhone is the river of Angels. I adore it: have adored it since I was twelve, and first saw it from the train. Lastly, it would depend on how I keep from now on. I have stood the winter hitherto with some credit, but the dreadful weather still continues, and I cannot holloa till I am through the wood. Subject to these numerous and gloomy provisos, I embrace the prospect with glorious feelings. I write this from bed, snow pouring without, and no circumstance of pleasure except your letter. That, however, counts for much. I am glad you liked the doggerel: I have already had a liberal cheque, over which I licked my fingers with a sound conscience. I had not meant to make money by these stumbling feet, but if it comes, it is only too welcome in my handsome but impecunious house. Let me know soon what is to be expected--as far as it does not hang by that inconstant quantity, my want of health. Remember me to Madam with the best thanks and wishes; and believe me your friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Written just before a visit to London; not, this time, as my guest at the British Museum, but to stay with his father at an hotel in Fitzroy Square. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, March 1886._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--I have been reading the Vth and VIth Aeneid--the latter for the first time--and am overpowered. That is one of the most astonishing pieces of literature, or rather it contains the best, I ever met with. We are all damned small fry, and Virgil is one of the tops of human achievement; I never appreciated this; you should have a certain age to feel this; it is no book for boys, who grind under the lack of enterprise and dash, and pass ignorantly over miracles of performance that leave an old hoary-headed practitioner like me stricken down with admiration. Even as a boy, the Sibyl would have bust me; but I never read the VIth till I began it two days ago; it is all fresh and wonderful; do you envy me? If only I knew any Latin! if you had a decent edition with notes--many notes--I should like well to have it; mine is a damned Didot with not the ghost of a note, type that puts my eyes out, and (I suspect) no very splendid text--but there, the carnal feelings of the man who can't construe are probably parents to the suspicion. My dear fellow, I would tenfold rather come to the Monument; but my father is an old man, and if I go to town, it shall be (this time) for his pleasure. He has many marks of age, some of childhood; I wish this knighthood business could come off, though even the talk of it has been already something, but the change (to my eyes) is thoroughly begun; and a very beautiful, simple, honourable, high-spirited and child-like (and childish) man is now in process of deserting us piecemeal. _Si quis piorum_--God knows, not that he was pious, but he did his hand's darg or tried to do it; and if not,--well, it is a melancholy business.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN The first letter showing Stevenson's new interest in the technicalities of music. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, March 1886._] MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,--I try to tell myself it is good nature, but I know it is vanity that makes me write. I have drafted the first part of Chapter VI., Fleeming and his friends, his influence on me, his views on religion and literature, his part at the Savile; it should boil down to about ten pages, and I really do think it admirably good. It has so much evoked Fleeming for myself that I found my conscience stirred just as it used to be after a serious talk with him: surely that means it is good? I had to write and tell you, being alone. I have excellent news of Fanny, who is much better for the change. My father is still very yellow, and very old, and very weak, but yesterday he seemed happier, and smiled, and followed what was said; even laughed, I think. When he came away, he said to me, "Take care of yourself, my dearie," which had a strange sound of childish days, and will not leave my mind. You must get Litolf's _Gavottes Célèbres_: I have made another trover there: a musette of Lully's. The second part of it I have not yet got the hang of; but the first--only a few bars! The gavotte is beautiful and pretty hard, I think, and very much of the period; and at the end of it, this musette enters with the most really thrilling effect of simple beauty. O--it's first-rate. I am quite mad over it. If you find other books containing Lully, Rameau, Martini, please let me know; also you might tell me, you who know Bach, where the easiest is to be found. I write all morning, come down, and never leave the piano till about five; write letters, dine, get down again about eight, and never leave the piano till I go to bed. This is a fine life.--Yours most sincerely, R. L. S. If you get the musette (Lully's), please tell me if I am right, and it was probably written for strings. Anyway, it is as neat as--as neat as Bach--on the piano; or seems so to my ignorance. I play much of the Rigadoon; but it's strange, it don't come off _quite_ so well with me! [Illustration] There is the first part of the musette copied (from memory, so I hope there's nothing wrong). Is it not angelic? But it ought, of course, to have the gavotte before. The gavotte is in G, and ends on the keynote thus (if I remember):-- [Illustration] staccato, I think. Then you sail into the musette. _N.B._--Where I have put an "A" is that a dominant eleventh, or what? or just a seventh on the D? and if the latter, is that allowed? It sounds very funny. Never mind all my questions; if I begin about music (which is my leading ignorance and curiosity), I have always to babble questions: all my friends know me now, and take no notice whatever. The whole piece is marked allegro; but surely could easily be played too fast? The dignity must not be lost; the periwig feeling. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Written after his return from an excursion to Matlock with his father, following on their visit to London. "The verses" means _Underwoods_. The suppressed poem is that headed "To ----," afterwards printed in _Songs of Travel_. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1886._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--This is to announce to you, what I believe should have been done sooner, that we are at Skerryvore. We were both tired, and I was fighting my second cold, so we came straight through by the west. We have a butler! He doesn't buttle, but the point of the thing is the style. When Fanny gardens, he stands over her and looks genteel. He opens the door, and I am told waits at table. Well, what's the odds; I shall have it on my tomb--"He ran a butler." He may have been this and that, A drunkard or a guttler; He may have been bald and fat-- At least he kept a butler. He may have sprung from ill or well, From Emperor or sutler; He may be burning now in Hell-- On earth he kept a butler. I want to tell you also that I have suppressed your poem. I shall send it you for yourself, and I hope you will agree with me that it was not good enough in point of view of merit, and a little too intimate as between you and me. I would not say less of you, my friend, but I scarce care to say so much in public while we live. A man may stand on his own head; it is not fair to set his friend on a pedestal. The verses are now at press; I have written a damn fine ballad.--And I am, dear S. C., ever yours, TOMNODDY. TO THOMAS STEVENSON Want of health preventing the author at this time from carrying the adventures of David Balfour, as narrated in _Kidnapped_, through to their issue as originally designed, it was resolved to wind them up for the present with the discomfiture of the wicked uncle, leaving open the possibility of a sequel, which was supplied six years later in _Catriona_. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1886._] MY DEAR FATHER,--The David problem has to-day been decided. I am to leave the door open for a sequel if the public take to it, and this will save me from butchering a lot of good material to no purpose. Your letter from Carlisle was pretty like yourself, sir, as I was pleased to see; the hand of Jekyll, not the hand of Hyde. I am for action quite unfit, and even a letter is beyond me; so pray take these scraps at a vast deal more than their intrinsic worth. I am in great spirits about David, Colvin agreeing with Henley, Fanny, and myself in thinking it far the most human of my labours hitherto. As to whether the long-eared British public may take to it, all think it more than doubtful; I wish they would, for I could do a second volume with ease and pleasure, and Colvin thinks it sin and folly to throw away David and Alan Breck upon so small a field as this one.--Ever your affectionate son, R. L. S. TO MISS MONROE The next is in answer to criticisms on _Prince Otto_ received from a lady correspondent in Chicago. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, May 25th, 1886._ DEAR MISS MONROE,--(I hope I have this rightly) I must lose no time in thanking you for a letter singularly pleasant to receive. It may interest you to know that I read to the signature without suspecting my correspondent was a woman; though in one point (a reference to the Countess) I might have found a hint of the truth. You are not pleased with Otto; since I judge you do not like weakness; and no more do I. And yet I have more than tolerance for Otto, whose faults are the faults of weakness, but never of ignoble weakness, and who seeks before all to be both kind and just. Seeks, not succeeds. But what is man? So much of cynicism to recognise that nobody does right is the best equipment for those who do not wish to be cynics in good earnest. Think better of Otto, if my plea can influence you; and this I mean for your own sake--not his, poor fellow, as he will never learn your opinion; but for yours, because, as men go in this world (and women too), you will not go far wrong if you light upon so fine a fellow; and to light upon one and not perceive his merits is a calamity. In the flesh, of course, I mean; in the book the fault, of course, is with my stumbling pen. Seraphina made a mistake about her Otto; it begins to swim before me dimly that you may have some traits of Seraphina? With true ingratitude you see me pitch upon your exception; but it is easier to defend oneself gracefully than to acknowledge praise. I am truly glad that you should like my books; for I think I see from what you write that you are a reader worth convincing. Your name, if I have properly deciphered it, suggests that you may be also something of my countrywoman; for it is hard to see where Monroe came from, if not from Scotland. I seem to have here a double claim on your good nature: being myself pure Scotch and having appreciated your letter, make up two undeniable merits which, perhaps, if it should be quite without trouble, you might reward with your photograph.--Yours truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Evidently written about the 10th of June, very soon after the decision of Mr. Gladstone to dissolve Parliament on the defeat of the Home Rule Bill (June 8). As to the _Travelling Companion_, see above, p. 68. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, June 1886._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--I am in bed again--bloodie jackery and be damned to it. Lloyd is better, I think; and money matters better; only my rascal carcase, and the muddy and oily lees of what was once my immortal soul are in a poor and pitiful condition. LITANY Damn the political situation " you " me and " Gladstone. I am a kind of dam home ruler, worse luck to it. I would support almost anything but that bill. How am I to vote? Great Cæsar's Ghost!--Ever yours, R. L. S. O! the _Travelling Companion_ won't do; I am back on it entirely: it is a foul, gross, bitter, ugly daub, with lots of stuff in it, and no urbanity and no glee and no true tragedy--to the crows with it, a carrion tale! I will do no more carrion, I have done too much in this carrion epoch; I will now be clean; and by clean, I don't mean any folly about purity, but such things as a healthy man with his bowels open shall find fit to see and speak about without a pang of nausea.--I am, yours, A REPENTANT DANKIST. The lakeists, the drainists, the brookists, and the riverites; let me be a brookist, _faute de mieux_. I did enjoy myself in town, and was a thousandfold the better of it. TO MISS MONROE [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, June 1886._] MY DEAR MISS MONROE,--I am ill in bed and stupid, incoherently stupid; yet I have to answer your letter, and if the answer is incomprehensible you must forgive me. You say my letter caused you pleasure; I am sure, as it fell out, not near so much as yours has brought to me. The interest taken in an author is fragile: his next book, or your next year of culture, might see the interest frosted or outgrown; and himself, in spite of all, you might probably find the most distasteful person upon earth. My case is different. I have bad health, am often condemned to silence for days together--was so once for six weeks, so that my voice was awful to hear when I first used it, like the whisper of a shadow--have outlived all my chief pleasures, which were active and adventurous, and ran in the open air: and being a person who prefers life to art, and who knows it is a far finer thing to be in love, or to risk a danger, than to paint the finest picture or write the noblest book, I begin to regard what remains to me of my life as very shadowy. From a variety of reasons, I am ashamed to confess I was much in this humour when your letter came. I had a good many troubles; was regretting a high average of sins; had been recently reminded that I had outlived some friends, and wondering if I had not outlived some friendships; and had just, while boasting of better health, been struck down again by my haunting enemy, an enemy who was exciting at first, but has now, by the iteration of his strokes, become merely annoying and inexpressibly irksome. Can you fancy that to a person drawing towards the elderly this sort of conjunction of circumstances brings a rather aching sense of the past and the future? Well, it was just then that your letter and your photograph were brought to me in bed; and there came to me at once the most agreeable sense of triumph. My books were still young; my words had their good health and could go about the world and make themselves welcome; and even (in a shadowy and distant sense) make something in the nature of friends for the sheer hulk that stays at home and bites his pen over the manuscripts. It amused me very much to remember that I had been in Chicago, not so many years ago, in my proper person; where I had failed to awaken much remark, except from the ticket collector; and to think how much more gallant and persuasive were the fellows that I now send instead of me, and how these are welcome in that quarter to the sitter of Herr Platz, while their author was not very welcome even in the villainous restaurant where he tried to eat a meal and rather failed. And this leads me directly to a confession. The photograph which shall accompany this is not chosen as the most like, but the best-looking. Put yourself in my place, and you will call this pardonable. Even as it is, even putting forth a flattered presentment, I am a little pained; and very glad it is a photograph and not myself that has to go; for in this case, if it please you, you can tell yourself it is my image--and if it displease you, you can lay the blame on the photographer; but in that, there were no help, and the poor author might belie his labours. _Kidnapped_ should soon appear; I am afraid you may not like it, as it is very unlike _Prince Otto_ in every way; but I am myself a great admirer of the two chief characters, Alan and David. _Virginibus Puerisque_ has never been issued in the States. I do not think it is a book that has much charm for publishers in any land; but I am to bring out a new edition in England shortly, a copy of which I must try to remember to send you. I say try to remember, because I have some superficial acquaintance with myself: and I have determined, after a galling discipline, to promise nothing more until the day of my death: at least, in this way, I shall no more break my word, and I must now try being churlish instead of being false. I do not believe you to be the least like Seraphina. Your photograph has no trace of her, which somewhat relieves me, as I am a good deal afraid of Seraphinas--they do not always go into the woods and see the sunrise, and some are so well-mailed that even that experience would leave them unaffected and unsoftened. The "hair and eyes of several complexions" was a trait taken from myself; and I do not bind myself to the opinions of Sir John. In this case, perhaps--but no, if the peculiarity is shared by two such pleasant persons as you and I (as you and me--the grammatical nut is hard), it must be a very good thing indeed, and Sir John must be an ass. The Book Reader notice was a strange jumble of fact and fancy. I wish you could have seen my father's old assistant and present partner when he heard my father described as an "inspector of lighthouses," for we are all very proud of the family achievements, and the name of my house here in Bournemouth is stolen from one of the sea-towers of the Hebrides which are our pyramids and monuments. I was never at Cambridge, again; but neglected a considerable succession of classes at Edinburgh. But to correct that friendly blunderer were to write an autobiography.--And so now, with many thanks, believe me yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM Accompanying a presentation copy of _Kidnapped_. Alison Cunningham's maiden name had been Hastie. [_Bournemouth, July 1886._] MY DEAR CUMMY,--Herewith goes my new book, in which you will find some places that you know: I hope you will like it: I do. The name of the girl at Limekilns (as will appear if the sequel is ever written) was Hastie, and I conceive she was an ancestor of yours: as David was no doubt some kind of relative of mine. I have no time for more, but send my love, and remembrances to your brother.--Ever your affectionate R. L. S. TO R. A. M. STEVENSON During these months, as already indicated, Stevenson was very much taken up, in by-hours, with trying to learn something of the theory and practice of music, and spent much of his time "pickling," as he called it, in an elementary manner on the piano. He even tried his hand in an experimental way at composition, and had sent one of his attempts for criticism to his cousin, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, who was better versed in the art. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July 1886._ SIR,--Your foolish letter was unduly received. There may be hidden fifths, and if there are, it shows how dam spontaneous the thing was. I could tinker and tic-tac-toe on a piece of paper, but scorned the act with a Threnody, which was poured forth like blood and water on the groaning organ. If your heart (which was what I addressed) remained unmoved, let us refer to the affair no more: crystallised emotion, the statement and the reconciliation of the sorrows of the race and the individual, is obviously no more to you than supping sawdust. Well, well. If ever I write another Threnody! My next op. will probably be a Passepied and fugue in G (or D). The mind is in my case shrunk to the size and sp. gr. of an aged Spanish filbert. O, I am so jolly silly. I now pickle with some freedom (1) the refrain of _Martini's Moutons_; (2) _Sul margine d'un rio_, arranged for the infant school by the Aged Statesman; (3) the first phrase of Bach's musette (Sweet Englishwoman,[18] No. 3), the rest of the musette being one prolonged cropper, which I take daily for the benefit of my health. All my other works (of which there are many) are either arranged (by R. L. Stevenson) for the manly and melodious forefinger, or else prolonged and melancholy croppers.... I find one can get a notion of music very nicely. I have been pickling deeply in the Magic Flute; and have arranged _La dove prende_, almost to the end, for two melodious forefingers. I am next going to score the really nobler _Colomba o tortorella_ for the same instruments. This day is published The works of Ludwig van Beethoven arranged and wiederdurchgearbeiteted for two melodious forefingers by, Sir,--Your obedient servant, PIMPERLY STIPPLE. That's a good idea? There's a person called Lenz who actually does it--beware his den; I lost eighteenpennies on him, and found the bleeding corpses of pieces of music divorced from their keys, despoiled of their graces, and even changed in time; I do not wish to regard music (nor to be regarded) through that bony Lenz. You say you are "a spoon-fed idiot"; but how about Lenz? And how about me, sir, me? I yesterday sent Lloyd by parcel post, at great expense, an empty matchbox and empty cigarette-paper book, a bell from a cat's collar, an iron kitchen spoon, and a piece of coal more than half the superficies of this sheet of paper. They are now (appropriately enough) speeding towards the Silly Isles; I hope he will find them useful. By that, and my telegram with prepaid answer to yourself, you may judge of my spiritual state. The finances have much brightened; and if _Kidnapped_ keeps on as it has begun, I may be solvent.--Yours, THRENODIÆ AVCTOR (The author of ane Threnodie). Op. 2: Scherzo (in G Major) expressive of the Sense of favours to come. TO R. A. M. STEVENSON _Skerryvore [Bournemouth, July 1886]._ DEAR BOB,--Herewith another shy; more melancholy than before, but I think not so abjectly idiotic. The musical terms seem to be as good as in Beethoven, and that, after all, is the great affair. Bar the dam bareness of the bass, it looks like a piece of real music from a distance. I am proud to say it was not made one hand at a time; the bass was of synchronous birth with the treble; they are of the same age, sir, and may God have mercy on their souls!--Yours, THE MAESTRO. TO MR. AND MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON Mr. and Mrs. T. Stevenson had been thinking of trying a winter at Bournemouth for the sake of being near their son, a plan which was eventually carried out. The health of the former was now fast and painfully breaking. Mr. J. W. Alexander, the well-known American artist, had been down at Skerryvore with an introduction from Mr. Gosse, and had made a drawing of Stevenson's head. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July 7th, 1886._ MY DEAR PEOPLE,--It is probably my fault, and not yours, that I did not understand. I think it would be well worth trying the winter in Bournemouth; but I would only take the house by the month--this after mature discussion. My leakage still pursues its course; if I were only well, I have a notion to go north and get in (if I could) at the inn at Kirkmichael, which has always smiled upon me much. If I did well there, we might then meet and do what should most smile at the time. Meanwhile, of course, I must not move, and am in a rancid box here, feeling the heat a great deal, and pretty tired of things. Alexander did a good thing of me at last; it looks like a mixture of an aztec idol, a lion, an Indian Rajah, and a woman; and certainly represents a mighty comic figure. F. and Lloyd both think it is the best thing that has been done of me up to now. You should hear Lloyd on the penny whistle, and me on the piano! Dear powers, what a concerto! I now live entirely for the piano, he for the whistle; the neighbours, in a radius of a furlong and a half, are packing up in quest of brighter climes.--Ever yours, R. L. S. _P.S._--Please say if you can afford to let us have money for this trip, and if so, how much. I can see the year through without help, I believe, and supposing my health to keep up; but can scarce make this change on my own metal. R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July 1886._] DEAR CHARLES,--Doubtless, if all goes well, towards the 1st of August we shall be begging at your door. Thanks for a sight of the papers, which I return (you see) at once, fearing further responsibility. Glad you like Dauvit; but eh, man, yon's terrible strange conduc' o' thon man Rankeillor. Ca' him a legal adviser! It would make a bonny law-shuit, the Shaws case; and yon paper they signed, I'm thinking, wouldnae be muckle thought o' by Puggy Deas.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM Hecky was a dog belonging to his correspondent's brother. Stevenson was always interested by his own retentiveness of memory for childish things, and here asks Cummy some questions to test the quality of hers. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July 1886._] MY DEAR CUMMY,--I was sorry to get so poor account of you and Hecky. Fanny thinks perhaps it might be Hecky's teeth. Sir Walter Simpson has a very clever vet. I have forgotten his name; but if you like, I send a card and you or James might ask the address. Now to what is more important. Do you remember any of the following names: Lady Boothroyd, Barny Gee, Andrew Silex, the Steward, Carus Rearn, Peter Mangles, Richard Markham, Fiddler Dick? Please let me know and I will tell you how I come to ask. I warn you, you will have to cast back your eyes a good long way, close upon thirty years, before you strike the trail on which I wish to lead you. When I have had an answer I will write you a decent letter. To-day, though nothing much is wrong with me, I am out of sorts and most disinclined for writing.--Yours most affectionately, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO THOMAS STEVENSON "Coolin," mentioned below, had been a favourite Skye terrier of Heriot Row days. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth_] _July 28, 1886._ MY DEAR FATHER,--We have decided not to come to Scotland, but just to do as Dobell wished, and take an outing. I believe this is wiser in all ways; but I own it is a disappointment. I am weary of England; like Alan, "I weary for the heather," if not for the deer. Lloyd has gone to Scilly with Katharine and C., where and with whom he should have a good time. _David_ seems really to be going to succeed, which is a pleasant prospect on all sides. I am, I believe, floated financially; a book that sells will be a pleasant novelty. I enclose another review; mighty complimentary, and calculated to sell the book too. Coolin's tombstone has been got out, honest man! and it is to be polished, for it has got scratched, and have a touch of gilding in the letters, and be sunk in the front of the house. Worthy man, he, too, will maybe weary for the heather, and the bents of Gullane, where (as I dare say you remember) he gaed clean gyte, and jumped on to his crown from a gig, in hot and hopeless chase of many thousand rabbits. I can still hear the little cries of the honest fellow as he disappeared; and my mother will correct me, but I believe it was two days before he turned up again at North Berwick: to judge by his belly, he had caught not one out of these thousands, but he had had some exercise. I keep well.--Ever your affectionate son, R. L. S. TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM Anticipating the gift of a cupboard and answering the questions set in his last. The date of the readings had been his seventh year. Mr. Galpin was a partner in Cassell, Petter, Galpin, & Co. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, July or August 1886._] MY DEAR CUMMY,--The cupboard has not yet turned up, and I was hanging on to be able to say it had. However, that is only a trick to escape another letter, and I should despise myself if I kept it up. It was truly kind of you, dear Cummy, to send it to us: and I will let you know where we set it and how it looks. Carus Rearn and Andrew Silex and the others were from a story you read me in Cassell's Family Paper, and which I have been reading again and found by no means a bad story. Mr. Galpin lent me all the old volumes, and I mean to re-read Custaloga also, but have not yet. It was strangely like old times to read the other; don't you remember the poisoning with mushrooms? That was Andrew Silex.--Yours most affectionately, R. L. S. TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON Having given up going to Scotland for a summer change, Stevenson had started on the "outing" which he mentions in the last letter. It took the shape of a ten days' visit to my house at the British Museum, followed by another made in the company of Mr. Henley to Paris, chiefly for the sake of seeing the W. H. Lows and the sculptor Rodin. _British Museum [August 10th, 1886]._ MY DEAR MOTHER,--We are having a capital holiday, and I am much better, and enjoying myself to the nines. Richmond is painting my portrait. To-day I lunch with him, and meet Burne-Jones; to-night Browning dines with us. That sounds rather lofty work, does it not? His path was paved with celebrities. To-morrow we leave for Paris, and next week, I suppose, or the week after, come home. Address here, as we may not reach Paris. I am really very well.--Ever your affectionate son, R. L. S. TO T. WATTS-DUNTON Written after his return from London and Paris. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth [September 1886]._ DEAR MR. WATTS,--The sight of the last Athenæum reminds me of you, and of my debt, now too long due. I wish to thank you for your notice of _Kidnapped_; and that not because it was kind, though for that also I valued it, but in the same sense as I have thanked you before now for a hundred articles on a hundred different writers. A critic like you is one who fights the good fight, contending with stupidity, and I would fain hope not all in vain; in my own case, for instance, surely not in vain. What you say of the two parts in _Kidnapped_ was felt by no one more painfully than by myself. I began it partly as a lark, partly as a pot-boiler; and suddenly it moved, David and Alan stepped out from the canvas, and I found I was in another world. But there was the cursed beginning, and a cursed end must be appended; and our old friend Byles the butcher was plainly audible tapping at the back door. So it had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to me) alive, one part merely galvanised: no work, only an essay. For a man of tentative method, and weak health, and a scarcity of private means, and not too much of that frugality which is the artist's proper virtue, the days of sinecures and patrons look very golden: the days of professional literature very hard. Yet I do not so far deceive myself as to think I should change my character by changing my epoch; the sum of virtue in our books is in a relation of equality to the sum of virtues in ourselves; and my _Kidnapped_ was doomed, while still in the womb and while I was yet in the cradle, to be the thing it is. And now to the more genial business of defence. You attack my fight on board the _Covenant_: I think it literal. David and Alan had every advantage on their side--position, arms, training, a good conscience; a handful of merchant sailors, not well led in the first attack, not led at all in the second, could only by an accident have taken the round-house by attack; and since the defenders had firearms and food, it is even doubtful if they could have been starved out. The only doubtful point with me is whether the seamen would have ever ventured on the second onslaught; I half believe they would not; still the illusion of numbers and the authority of Hoseason would perhaps stretch far enough to justify the extremity.--I am, dear Mr. Watts, your very sincere admirer, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, September 1886._ MY DEAR CUMMY,--I am home from a long holiday, vastly better in health. My wife not home yet, as she is being cured in some rather boisterous fashion by some Swedish doctors. I hope it may do her good, as the process seems not to be agreeable in itself. Your cupboard has come, and it is most beautiful: it is certainly worth a lot of money, and is just what we have been looking for in all the shops for quite a while: so your present falls very pat. It is to go in our bedroom I think; but perhaps my wife will think it too much of a good thing to be put so much out of the way, so I shall not put it in its place till her return. I am so well that I am afraid to speak of it, being a coward as to boasting. I take walks in the wood daily, and have got back to my work after a long break. The story I wrote you about was one you read to me in Cassell's Family Paper long ago when it came out. It was astonishing how clearly I remembered it all, pictures, characters, and incidents, though the last were a little mixed and I had not the least the hang of the story. It was very pleasant to read it again, and remember old days, and the weekly excursion to Mrs. Hoggs after that precious journal. Dear me, lang syne now! God bless you, dear Cummy.--Your afft. boy, R. L. STEVENSON. TO FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON Mr. Locker-Lampson, better known as Frederick Locker, the friend of Tennyson and most accomplished writer of _vers de société_ in his time, had through their common friend Mr. Andrew Lang asked Stevenson for a set of verses, and he had sent the following--which were first printed, I believe, at the head of a very scarce volume:--"_Rowfant Rhymes_, by Frederick Locker, with an introduction by Austin Dobson. Cleveland, The Rowfant Club, 1895. 127 copies only printed." _Skerryvore, September 4, 1886._ Not roses to the rose, I trow, The thistle sends, nor to the bee Do wasps bring honey. Wherefore now Should Locker ask a verse from me? Martial, perchance,--but he is dead, And Herrick now must rhyme no more; Still burning with the muse, they tread (And arm in arm) the shadowy shore. They, if they lived, with dainty hand, To music as of mountain brooks, Might bring you worthy words to stand Unshamed, dear Locker, in your books. But tho' these fathers of your race Be gone before, yourself a sire, To-day you see before your face Your stalwart youngsters touch the lyre. On these--on Lang or Dobson--call, Long leaders of the songful feast. They lend a verse your laughing fall-- A verse they owe you at the least. TO FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON To Mr. Locker's acknowledgment of these verses Stevenson replied as follows, asking his correspondent's interest on behalf of a friend who had been kind to him at Hyères, in procuring a nomination for her son to the Blue-Coat School. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, September 1886._ DEAR LOCKER,--You take my verses too kindly, but you will admit, for such a bluebottle of a versifier to enter the house of Gertrude, where her necklace hangs, was not a little brave. Your kind invitation, I fear, must remain unaccepted; and yet--if I am very well--perhaps next spring--(for I mean to be very well)--my wife might.... But all that is in the clouds with my better health. And now look here: you are a rich man and know many people, therefore perhaps some of the Governors of Christ's Hospital. If you do, I know a most deserving case, in which I would (if I could) do anything. To approach you, in this way, is not decent; and you may therefore judge by my doing it, how near this matter lies to my heart. I enclose you a list of the Governors, which I beg you to return, whether or not you shall be able to do anything to help me. The boy's name is ----; he and his mother are very poor. It may interest you in her cause if I tell you this: that when I was dangerously ill at Hyères, this brave lady, who had then a sick husband of her own (since dead) and a house to keep and a family of four to cook for, all with her own hands, for they could afford no servant, yet took watch-about with my wife, and contributed not only to my comfort, but to my recovery in a degree that I am not able to limit. You can conceive how much I suffer from my impotence to help her, and indeed I have already shown myself a thankless friend. Let not my cry go up before you in vain!--Yours in hope, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON Mr. Locker, apparently misunderstanding the application, had replied with a cheque. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, September 1886._ MY DEAR LOCKER,--That I should call myself a man of letters, and land myself in such unfathomable ambiguities! No, my dear Locker, I did not want a cheque; and in my ignorance of business, which is greater even than my ignorance of literature, I have taken the liberty of drawing a pen through the document and returning it; should this be against the laws of God or man, forgive me. All that I meant by my excessively disgusting reference to your material well-being was the vague notion that a man who is well off was sure to know a Governor of Christ's Hospital; though how I quite arrived at this conclusion I do not see. A man with a cold in the head does not necessarily know a ratcatcher; and the connection is equally close--as it now appears to my awakened and somewhat humbled spirit. For all that, let me thank you in the warmest manner for your friendly readiness to contribute. You say you have hopes of becoming a miser: I wish I had; but indeed I believe you deceive yourself, and are as far from it as ever. I wish I had any excuse to keep your cheque, for it is much more elegant to receive than to return; but I have my way of making it up to you, and I do sincerely beg you to write to the two Governors. This extraordinary out-pouring of correspondence would (if you knew my habits) convince you of my great eagerness in this matter. I would promise gratitude; but I have made a promise to myself to make no more promises to anybody else, having broken such a host already, and come near breaking my heart in consequence; and as for gratitude, I am by nature a thankless dog, and was spoiled from a child up. But if you can help this lady in the matter of the Hospital, you will have helped the worthy. Let me continue to hope that I shall make out my visit in the spring, and believe me, yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. It may amuse you to know that a very long while ago, I broke my heart to try to imitate your verses, and failed hopelessly. I saw some of the evidences the other day among my papers, and blushed to the heels. R. L. S. I give up finding out your name in the meantime, and keep to that by which you will be known--Frederick Locker. TO FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON _[Skerryvore, Bournemouth] 24th September 1886._ MY DEAR LOCKER,--You are simply an angel of light, and your two letters have gone to the post; I trust they will reach the hearts of the recipients--at least, that could not be more handsomely expressed. About the cheque: well now, I am going to keep it; but I assure you Mrs. ---- has never asked me for money, and I would not dare to offer any till she did. For all that I shall stick to the cheque now, and act to that amount as your almoner. In this way I reward myself for the ambiguity of my epistolary style. I suppose, if you please, you may say your verses are thin (would you so describe an arrow, by the way, and one that struck the gold? It scarce strikes me as exhaustively descriptive), and, thin or not, they are (and I have found them) inimitably elegant. I thank you again very sincerely for the generous trouble you have taken in this matter which was so near my heart, and you may be very certain it will be the fault of my health and not my inclination, if I do not see you before very long; for all that has past has made me in more than the official sense sincerely yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO AUGUSTE RODIN Written after another visit to me in London, in November, which had been cut short by fogs. "Le Printemps" is Rodin's group so called. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, December 1886._] MON CHER AMI,--Il y a bien longtemps déjà que je vous dois des lettres par dizaines; mais bien que je vais mieux, je ne vais toujours que doucement. Il a fallu faire le voyage à Bournemouth comme une fuite en Egypte, par crainte des brouillards qui me tuaient; et j'en ressentais beaucoup de fatigue. Mais maintenant celà commence à aller, et je puis vous donner de mes nouvelles. Le Printemps est arrivé, mais il avait le bras cassé, et nous l'avons laissé, lors de notre fuite, aux soins d'un médecin-de-statues. Je l'attends de jour en jour; et ma maisonette en resplendira bientôt. Je regrette beaucoup le dédicace; peutêtre, quand vous viendrez nous voir, ne serait-il pas trop tard de l'ajouter? Je n'en sais rien, je l'espère. L'oeuvre, c'est pour tout le monde; le dédicace est pour moi. L'oeuvre est un cadeau, trop beau même; c'est le mot d'amitié qui me le donne pour de bon. Je suis si bête que je m'embrouille, et me perds; mais vous me comprendrez, je pense. Je ne puis même pas m'exprimer en Anglais; comment voudriez vous que je le pourrais en Français? Plus heureux que vous, le Némésis des arts ne me visite pas sous le masque du désenchantement; elle me suce l'intelligence et me laisse bayer aux corneilles, sans capacité mais sans regret; sans espérance, c'est vrai, mais aussi, Dieu merci, sans désespoir. Un doux étonnement me tient; je ne m'habitue pas à me trouver si bûche, mais je m'y résigne; même si celà durait, ce ne serait pas désagréable--mais comme je mourrais certainement de faim, ce serait tout au moins regrettable pour moi et ma famille. Je voudrais pouvoir vous écrire; mais ce n'est pas moi qui tiens la plume--c'est l'autre, le bête, celui qui ne connaît pas le Français, celui qui n'aime pas mes amis comme je les aime, qui ne goûte pas aux choses de l'art comme j'y goûte; celui que je renie, mais auquel je commande toujours assez pour le faire prendre la plume en main et écrire des tristes bavardages. Celui-là, mon cher Rodin, vous ne l'aimez pas; vous ne devez jamais le connaître. Votre ami, qui dort à present, comme un ours, au plus profond de mon être, se réveillera sous peu. Alors, il vous écrira de sa propre main. Attendez lui. L'autre ne compte pas; ce n'est qu'un secrétaire infidèle et triste, à l'âme gelée, à la tête de bois. Celui qui dort est toujours, mon cher ami, bien à vous; celui qui écrit est chargé de vous en faire part et de signer de la raison sociale, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ET TRIPLE-BRUTE. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The following refers first, if I remember right, to some steps that were being taken to obtain recognition in the form of a knighthood for the elder Stevenson's public services; next, to the writer's own work at the time in hand; and lastly, to my volume on Keats then in preparation for the _English Men of Letters_ series. _Skerryvore, Dec. 14, 1886._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--This is first-rate of you, the Lord love you for it! I am truly much obliged. He--my father--is very changeable; at times, he seems only a slow quiet edition of himself; again, he will be very heavy and blank; but never so violent as last spring; and therefore, to my mind, better on the whole. Fanny is pretty peepy; I am splendid. I have been writing much verse--quite the bard, in fact; and also a dam tale to order, which will be what it will be: I don't love it, but some of it is passable in its mouldy way, _The Misadventures of John Nicholson_. All my bardly exercises are in Scotch; I have struck my somewhat ponderous guitar in that tongue to no small extent: with what success, I know not, but I think it's better than my English verse; more marrow and fatness, and more ruggedness. How goes _Keats_? Pray remark, if he (Keats) hung back from Shelley, it was not to be wondered at, _when so many of his friends were Shelley's pensioners_. I forget if you have made this point; it has been borne in upon me reading Dowden and the _Shelley Papers_; and it will do no harm if you have made it. I finished a poem to-day, and writ 3000 words of a story, _tant bien que mal_; and have a right to be sleepy, and (what is far nobler and rarer) am so.--My dear Colvin, ever yours, THE REAL MACKAY. TO LADY TAYLOR Stevenson's volume of tales _The Merry Men_, so called from the story which heads the collection, was about to appear with a dedication to Lady Taylor. Professor Dowden's _Shelley_ had lately come out, and had naturally been read with eager interest in a circle where Sir Percy (the poet's son) and Lady Shelley were intimate friends and neighbours. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth_ [_New Year, 1887_]. MY DEAR LADY TAYLOR,--This is to wish you all the salutations of the year, with some regret that I cannot offer them in person; yet less than I had supposed. For hitherto your flight to London seems to have worked well; and time flies and will soon bring you back again. Though time is ironical, too; and it would be like his irony if the same tide that brought you back carried me away. That would not be, at least, without some meeting. I feel very sorry to think the book to which I have put your name will be no better, and I can make it no better. The tales are of all dates and places; they are like the box, the goose, and the cottage of the ferryman; and must go floating down time together as best they can. But I am after all a (superior) penny-a-liner; I must do, in the Scotch phrase, as it will do with me; and I cannot always choose what my books are to be, only seize the chance they offer to link my name to a friend's. I hope the lot of them (the tales) will look fairly disciplined when they are clapped in binding; but I fear they will be but an awkward squad. I have a mild wish that you at least would read them no further than the dedication. I suppose we have all been reading Dowden. It seems to me a really first-rate book, full of justice, and humour without which there can be no justice; and of fine intelligence besides. Here and there, perhaps a trifle precious, but this is to spy flaws in a fine work. I was weary at my resemblances to Shelley; I seem but a Shelley with less oil, and no genius; though I have had the fortune to live longer and (partly) to grow up. He was growing up. There is a manlier note in the last days; in spite of such really sickening aberrations as the Emillia Viviani business. I try to take a humorously-genial view of life; but Emillia Viviani, if I have her detested name aright,[19] is too much for my philosophy. I cannot smile when I see all these grown folk waltzing and piping the eye about an insubordinate and perfectly abominable schoolgirl, as silly and patently as false as Blanche Amory.[20] I really think it is one of those episodes that make the angels weep. With all kind regards and affectionate good wishes to and for you and yours, believe me, your affectionate friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO LADY TAYLOR The reference in the last paragraph to a "vision" cannot be explained, his correspondent's daughters retaining no memory on the subject. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, January 1887._] MY DEAR LADY TAYLOR,--I don't know but what I agree fairly well with all you say, only I like _The Merry Men_, as a fantasia or vision of the sea, better than you do. The trouble with _Olalla_ is that it somehow sounds false; and I think it must be this that gives you the feeling of irreverence. Of _Thrawn Janet_, which I like very much myself, you say nothing, thus uttering volumes; but it is plain that people cannot always agree. I do not think it is a wholesome part of me that broods on the evil in the world and man; but I do not think that I get harm from it; possibly my readers may, which is more serious; but at any account, I do not purpose to write more in this vein. But the odd problem is: what makes a story true? _Markheim_ is true; _Olalla_ false; and I don't know why, nor did I feel it while I worked at them; indeed I had more inspiration with _Olalla_, as the style shows. I am glad you thought that young Spanish woman well dressed; I admire the style of it myself, more than is perhaps good for me; it is so solidly written. And that again brings back (almost with the voice of despair) my unanswerable: why is it false? Here is a great deal about my works. I am in bed again; and my wife but so-so; and we have no news recently from Lloyd; and the cat is well; and we see, or I see, no one; so that other matters are all closed against me. Your vision is strange indeed; but I see not how to use it; I fear I am earthy enough myself to regard it as a case of disease, but certainly it is a thrilling case to hear of.--Ever affectionately yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO HENRY JAMES This letter is written on the front page of a set of proofs of _Memories and Portraits_. The "silly Xmas story" is _The Misadventures of John Nicholson_; the "volume of verse" appeared later in the year as _Underwoods_. The signature refers to the two Scots poets of whom, "in his native speech," he considered himself the follower. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, January 1887._ All the salutations! MY DEAR JAMES,--I send you the first sheets of the new volume, all that has yet reached me, the rest shall follow in course. I am really a very fair sort of a fellow all things considered, have done some work; a silly Xmas story (with some larks in it) which won't be out till I don't know when. I am also considering a volume of verse, much of which will be cast in my native speech, that very dark oracular medium: I suppose this is a folly, but what then? As the nurse says in Marryat, "It was only a little one." My wife is peepy and dowie: two Scotch expressions with which I will leave you to wrestle unaided, as a preparation for my poetical works. She is a woman (as you know) not without art: the art of extracting the gloom of the eclipse from sunshine; and she has recently laboured in this field not without success or (as we used to say) not without a blessing. It is strange: "we fell out my wife and I" the other night; she tackled me savagely for being a canary-bird; I replied (bleatingly) protesting that there was no use in turning life into King Lear; presently it was discovered that there were two dead combatants upon the field, each slain by an arrow of the truth, and we tenderly carried off each other's corpses. Here is a little comedy for Henry James to write! The beauty was each thought the other quite unscathed at first. But we had dealt shrewd stabs. You say nothing of yourself, which I shall take to be good news. Archer's note has gone. He is, in truth, a very clever fellow that Archer, and I believe a good one. It is a pleasant thing to see a man who can use a pen; he can: really says what he means, and says it with a manner; comes into print like one at his ease, not shame-faced and wrong-foot-foremost like the bulk of us. Well, here is luck, and here are the kindest recollections from the canary-bird and from King Lear, from the Tragic Woman and the Flimsy Man. ROBERT RAMSAY FERGUSSON STEVENSON. TO FREDERICK LOCKER-LAMPSON Stevenson suffered more even than usual after the turn of the year and during the spring of 1887, and for several months his correspondence almost entirely fails. This is in reply to an invitation to Rowfant for Easter. _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, February 5th, 1887._ MY DEAR LOCKER,--Here I am in my bed as usual, and it is indeed a long while since I went out to dinner. You do not know what a crazy fellow this is. My winter has not so far been luckily passed, and all hope of paying visits at Easter has vanished for twelve calendar months. But because I am a beastly and indurated invalid, I am not dead to human feelings; and I neither have forgotten you nor will forget you. Some day the wind may round to the right quarter and we may meet; till then I am still truly yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO HENRY JAMES The volume of tales here mentioned is _The Merry Men_; that of essays, _Memories and Portraits_; that of verse, _Underwoods_. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, February 1887._] MY DEAR JAMES,--My health has played me it in once more in the absurdest fashion, and the creature who now addresses you is but a stringy and white-faced _bouilli_ out of the pot of fever, with the devil to pay in every corner of his economy. I suppose (to judge by your letter) I need not send you these sheets, which came during my collapse by the rush. I am on the start with three volumes, that one of tales, a second one of essays, and one of--ahem--verse. This is a great order, is it not? After that I shall have empty lockers. All new work stands still; I was getting on well with Jenkin when this blessed malady unhorsed me, and sent me back to the dung-collecting trade of the republisher. I shall re-issue _Virg. Puer._ as vol. I. of _Essays_, and the new vol. as vol. II. of ditto; to be sold, however, separately. This is but a dry maundering; however, I am quite unfit--"I am for action quite unfit Either of exercise or wit." My father is in a variable state; many sorrows and perplexities environ the house of Stevenson; my mother shoots north at this hour on business of a distinctly rancid character; my father (under my wife's tutorage) proceeds to-morrow to Salisbury; I remain here in my bed and whistle; in no quarter of heaven is anything encouraging apparent, except that the good Colvin comes to the hotel here on a visit. This dreary view of life is somewhat blackened by the fact that my head aches, which I always regard as a liberty on the part of the powers that be. This is also my first letter since my recovery. God speed your laudatory pen! My wife joins in all warm messages.--Yours, R. L. S. TO AUGUSTE RODIN _Skerryvore, Bournemouth, February 1887._ MON CHER AMI,--Je vous néglige, et cependant ce n'est véritablement pas de ma faute. J'ai fait encore une maladie; et je puis dire que je l'ai royalement bien faite. Que celà vous aide à me pardonner. Certes je ne vous oublie pas; et je puis dire que je ne vous oublierai jamais. Si je n'écris pas, dites que je suis malade--c'est trop souvent vrai, dites que je suis las d'écrivailler--ce sera toujours vrai; mais ne dites pas, et ne pensez pas, que je deviens indifférent. J'ai devant moi votre portrait tiré d'un journal anglais (et encadré à mes frais), et je le regarde avec amitié, je le regarde même avec une certaine complaisance--dirai-je, de faux aloi? comme un certificat de jeunesse. Je me croyais trop vieux--au moins trop quarante-ans--pour faire de nouveaux amis; et quand je regarde votre portrait, et quand je pense au plaisir de vous revoir, je sens que je m'étais trompé. Écrivez-moi donc un petit mot, pour me dire que vous ne gardez pas rancune de mon silence, et que vous comptez bientôt venir en Angleterre. Si vous tardez beaucoup, ce sera moi qui irai vous relancer.--Bien à vous, mon cher ami, R. L. STEVENSON. TO W. H. LOW Mr. Low and his wife, who were at this time leaving Paris for good, had been meditating a visit to the Stevensons at Bournemouth on their way home to the United States. [_April 1887._] MY DEAR LOW,--The fares to London may be found in any continental Bradshaw or sich; from London to Bournemouth impoverished parties who can stoop to the third class get their ticket for the matter of 10s., or, as my wife loves to phrase it, "a half a pound." You will also be involved in a 3s. fare to get to Skerryvore; but this, I dare say, friends could help you in on your arrival; so that you may reserve your energies for the two tickets--costing the matter of a pound--and the usual gratuities to porters. This does not seem to me much: considering the intellectual pleasures that await you here, I call it dirt cheap. I _believe_ the third class from Paris to London (_via_ Dover) is _about_ forty francs, but I cannot swear. Suppose it to be fifty. frcs. 50 x 2 = 100 100 The expense of spirit or spontaneous lapse of coin on the journey, at 5 frcs. a head, 5 x 2 = 10 10 Victuals on ditto, at 5 frcs. a head, 5 x 2 = 10 10 Gratuity to stewardess, in case of severe prostration, at 3 francs 3 One night in London, on a modest footing, say 20 20 Two tickets to Bournemouth at 12·50, 12·50 x 2 = 25 25 Porters and general devilment, say 5 5 Cabs in London, say 2 shillings, and in Bournemouth, 3 shillings = 5 shillings, 6 frcs. 25 6·25 ------ frcs. 179·25 Or, the same in pounds, £7, 3s. 6-1/2d. Or, the same in dollars, $35·45, if there be any arithmetical virtue in me. I have left out dinner in London in case you want to blow out, which would come extry, and with the aid of _vangs fangs_ might easily double the whole amount--above all if you have a few friends to meet you. In making this valuable project, or budget, I discovered for the first time a reason (frequently overlooked) for the singular costliness of travelling with your wife. Anybody would count the tickets double; but how few would have remembered--or indeed has any one ever remembered?--to count the spontaneous lapse of coin double also? Yet there are two of you, each must do his daily leakage, and it must be done out of your travelling fund. You will tell me, perhaps, that you carry the coin yourself: my dear sir, do you think you can fool your Maker? Your wife has to lose her quota; and by God she will--if you kept the coin in a belt. One thing I have omitted: you will lose a certain amount on the exchange, but this even I cannot foresee, as it is one of the few things that vary with the way a man has.--I am, dear sir, yours financially, SAMUEL BUDGETT. TO SIDNEY COLVIN I had lately sent him two books, the fifth volume of Huxley's _Collected Essays_ and Cotter Morison's _Service of Man_: the latter a work of Positivist tendency, which its genial and accomplished author had long meditated, but which unfortunately he only began to write after a rapid decline of health and power had set in. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Spring 1887._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--I read Huxley, and a lot of it with great interest. Eh, what a gulf between a man with a mind like Huxley and a man like Cotter Morison. Truly 'tis the book of a boy; before I was twenty I was done with all these considerations. Nor is there one happy phrase, except "the devastating flood of children." Why should he din our ears with languid repetitions of the very first ideas and facts that a bright lad gets hold of; and how can a man be so destitute of historical perspective, so full of cheap outworn generalisations--feudal ages, time of suffering--_pas tant qu'aujourdhui_, M. Cotter! Christianity--which? what? how? You must not attack all forms, from Calvin to St. Thomas, from St. Thomas to (One who should surely be considered) Jesus Christ, with the same missiles: they do not all tell against all. But there it is, as we said; a man joins a sect, and becomes one-eyed. He affects a horror of vices which are just the thing to stop his "devastating flood of babies," and just the thing above all to keep the vicious from procreating. Where, then, is the ground of this horror in any intelligent Servant of Humanity? O, beware of creeds and anti-creeds, sects and anti-sects. There is but one truth, outside science, the truth that comes of an earnest, smiling survey of mankind "from China to Peru," or further, and from to-day to the days of Probably Arboreal; and the truth (however true it is) that robs you of sympathy with any form of thought or trait of man, is false for you, and heretical, and heretico-plastic. Hear Morison struggling with his chains; hear me, hear all of us, when we suffer our creeds or anti-creeds to degenerate towards the whine, and begin to hate our neighbours, or our ancestors, like ourselves. And yet in Morison, too, as in St. Thomas, as in Rutherford, ay, or in Peden, truth struggles, or it would not so deform them. The man has not a devil; it is an angel that tears and blinds him. But Morison's is an old, almost a venerable seraph, with whom I dealt before I was twenty, and had done before I was twenty-five. Behold how the voices of dead preachers speak hollowly (and lengthily) within me!--Yours ever--and rather better---not much, R. L. S. TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM _Skerryvore, April 16th, 1887._ MY DEAREST CUMMY,--As usual, I have been a dreary bad fellow and not written for ages; but you must just try to forgive me, to believe (what is the truth) that the number of my letters is no measure of the number of times I think of you, and to remember how much writing I have to do. The weather is bright, but still cold; and my father, I'm afraid, feels it sharply. He has had--still has, rather--a most obstinate jaundice, which has reduced him cruelly in strength, and really upset him altogether. I hope, or think, he is perhaps a little better; but he suffers much, cannot sleep at night, and gives John and my mother a severe life of it to wait upon him. My wife is, I think, a little better, but no great shakes. I keep mightily respectable myself. Coolin's Tombstone is now built into the front wall of Skerryvore, and poor Bogie's (with a Latin inscription also) is set just above it. Poor, unhappy wee man, he died, as you must have heard, in fight, which was what he would have chosen; for military glory was more in his line than the domestic virtues. I believe this is about all my news, except that, as I write, there is a blackbird singing in our garden trees, as it were at Swanston. I would like fine to go up the burnside a bit, and sit by the pool and be young again--or no, be what I am still, only there instead of here, for just a little. Did you see that I had written about John Todd? In this month's Longman it was; if you have not seen it, I will try and send it you. Some day climb as high as Halkerside for me (I am never likely to do it for myself), and sprinkle some of the well water on the turf. I am afraid it is a pagan rite, but quite harmless, and _ye can sain it wi' a bit prayer_. Tell the Peewies that I mind their forbears well. My heart is sometimes heavy and sometimes glad to mind it all. But for what we have received, the Lord make us truly thankful. Don't forget to sprinkle the water, and do it in my name; I feel a childish eagerness in this. Remember me most kindly to James, and with all sorts of love to yourself, believe me, your laddie, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--I suppose Mrs. Todd ought to see the paper about her man; judge of that, and if you think she would not dislike it, buy her one from me, and let me know. The article is called _Pastoral_, in Longman's Magazine for April. I will send you the money; I would to-day, but it's the Sabbie day, and I cannae. R. L. S. Remembrances from all here. TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN The following sets forth the _pros_ and _cons_ which were balancing each other in his mind in regard to his scheme of going to make a stand in his own person against agrarian outrage in Ireland. _[Skerryvore, Bournemouth] April 15 or 16 (the hour not being known), 1887._ MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,--It is I know not what hour of the night; but I cannot sleep, have lit the gas, and here goes. First, all your packet arrived: I have dipped into the Schumann already with great pleasure. Surely, in what concerns us there is a sweet little chirrup; the _Good Words_ arrived in the morning just when I needed it, and the famous notes that I had lost were recovered also in the nick of time. And now I am going to bother you with my affairs: premising, first, that this is _private_; second, that whatever I do the _Life_ shall be done first, and I am getting on with it well; and third, that I do not quite know why I consult you, but something tells me you will hear with fairness. Here is my problem. The Curtin women are still miserable prisoners; no one dare buy their farm of them, all the manhood of England and the world stands aghast before a threat of murder. (1) Now, my work can be done anywhere; hence I can take up without loss a back-going Irish farm, and live on, though not (as I had originally written) in it: First Reason. (2) If I should be killed, there are a good many who would feel it: writers are so much in the public eye, that a writer being murdered would attract attention, throw a bull's-eye light upon this cowardly business: Second Reason. (3) I am not unknown in the States, from which the funds come that pay for these brutalities: to some faint extent, my death (if I should be killed) would tell there: Third Reason. (4) _Nobody else is taking up this obvious and crying duty:_ Fourth Reason. (5) I have a crazy health and may die at any moment, my life is of no purchase in an insurance office, it is the less account to husband it, and the business of husbanding a life is dreary and demoralising: Fifth Reason. I state these in no order, but as they occur to me. And I shall do the like with the objections. First Objection: It will do no good; you have seen Gordon die, and nobody minded; nobody will mind if you die. This is plainly of the devil. Second Objection: You will not even be murdered, the climate will miserably kill you, you will strangle out in a rotten damp heat, in congestion, etc. Well, what then? It changes nothing: the purpose is to brave crime; let me brave it, for such time and to such an extent as God allows. Third Objection: The Curtin women are probably highly uninteresting females. I haven't a doubt of it. But the Government cannot, men will not, protect them. If I am the only one to see this public duty, it is to the public and the Right I should perform it--not to Mesdames Curtin. Fourth Objection: I am married. "I have married a wife!" I seem to have heard it before. It smells ancient! what was the context? Fifth Objection: My wife has had a mean life (1), loves me (2), could not bear to lose me (3). (1) I admit: I am sorry. (2) But what does she love me for? and (3) she must lose me soon or late. And after all, because we run this risk, it does not follow we should fail. Sixth Objection: My wife wouldn't like it. No, she wouldn't. Who would? But the Curtins don't like it. And all those who are to suffer if this goes on, won't like it. And if there is a great wrong, somebody must suffer. Seventh Objection: I won't like it. No, I will not; I have thought it through, and I will not. But what of that? And both she and I may like it more than we suppose. We shall lose friends, all comforts, all society: so has everybody who has ever done anything; but we shall have some excitement, and that's a fine thing; and we shall be trying to do the right, and that's not to be despised. Eighth Objection: I am an author with my work before me. See Second Reason. Ninth Objection: But am I not taken with the hope of excitement? I was at first. I am not much now. I see what a dreary, friendless, miserable, God-forgotten business it will be. And anyway, is not excitement the proper reward of doing anything both right and a little dangerous? Tenth Objection: But am I not taken with a notion of glory? I dare say I am. Yet I see quite clearly how all points to nothing coming, to a quite inglorious death by disease and from the lack of attendance; or even if I should be knocked on the head, as these poor Irish promise, how little any one will care. It will be a smile at a thousand breakfast-tables. I am nearly forty now; I have not many illusions. And if I had? I do not love this health-tending, housekeeping life of mine. I have a taste for danger, which is human, like the fear of it. Here is a fair cause; a just cause; no knight ever set lance in rest for a juster. Yet it needs not the strength I have not, only the passive courage that I hope I could muster, and the watchfulness that I am sure I could learn. Here is a long midnight dissertation; with myself; with you. Please let me hear. But I charge you this: if you see in this idea of mine the finger of duty, do not dissuade me. I am nearing forty, I begin to love my ease and my home and my habits, I never knew how much till this arose; do not falsely counsel me to put my head under the bed-clothes. And I will say this to you: my wife, who hates the idea, does not refuse. "It is nonsense," says she, "but if you go, I will go." Poor girl, and her home and her garden that she was so proud of! I feel her garden most of all, because it is a pleasure (I suppose) that I do not feel myself to share. 1. Here is a great wrong. 2. " a growing wrong. 3. " a wrong founded on crime. 4. " crime that the Government cannot prevent. 5. " crime that it occurs to no man to defy. 6. But it has occurred to me. 7. Being a known person, some will notice my defiance. 8. Being a writer, I can _make_ people notice it. 9. And, I think, _make_ people imitate me. 10. Which would destroy in time this whole scaffolding of oppression. 11. And if I fail, however ignominiously, that is not my concern. It is, with an odd mixture of reverence and humorous remembrances of Dickens, be it said--it is A-nother's. And here, at I cannot think what hour of the morning, I shall dry up, and remain--Yours, really in want of a little help, R. L. S. Sleepless at midnight's dewy hour. " " witching " " " maudlin " etc. _Next morning._--Eleventh Objection: I have a father and mother. And who has not? Macduff's was a rare case; if we must wait for a Macduff. Besides, my father will not perhaps be long here. Twelfth Objection: The cause of England in Ireland is not worth supporting. _À qui le dites-vous?_ And I am not supporting that. Home Rule, if you like. Cause of decency, the idea that populations should not be taught to gain public ends by private crime, the idea that for all men to bow before a threat of crime is to loosen and degrade beyond redemption the whole fabric of man's decency. TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN The first paragraph of the following refers to the _Life of Fleeming Jenkin_; the second, to a remark of his correspondent that a task such as he had proposed to himself in Ireland should be undertaken by a society rather than an individual. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1887._] MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,--The Book. It is all drafted: I hope soon to send you for comments Chapters III., IV., and V. Chapter VII. is roughly but satisfactorily drafted: a very little work should put that to rights. But Chapter VI. is no joke; it is a _mare magnum_: I swim and drown and come up again; and it is all broken ends and mystification: moreover, I perceive I am in want of more matter. I must have, first of all, a little letter from Mr. Ewing about the phonograph work: _If_ you think he would understand it is quite a matter of chance whether I use a word or a fact out of it. If you think he would not: I will go without. Also, could I have a look at Ewing's _précis_? And lastly, I perceive I must interview you again about a few points; they are very few, and might come to little; and I propose to go on getting things as well together as I can in the meanwhile, and rather have a final time when all is ready and only to be criticised. I do still think it will be good. I wonder if Trélat would let me cut? But no, I think I wouldn't after all; 'tis so quaint and pretty and clever and simple and French, and gives such a good sight of Fleeming: the plum of the book, I think. You misunderstood me in one point: I always hoped to found such a society; that was the outside of my dream, and would mean entire success. _But_--I cannot play Peter the Hermit. In these days of the Fleet Street journalist, I cannot send out better men than myself, with wives or mothers just as good as mine, and sisters (I may at least say) better, to a danger and a long-drawn dreariness that I do not share. My wife says it's cowardice; what brave men are the leader-writers! Call it cowardice; it is mine. Mind you, I may end by trying to do it by the pen only: I shall not love myself if I do; and is it ever a good thing to do a thing for which you despise yourself?--even in the doing? And if the thing you do is to call upon others to do the thing you neglect? I have never dared to say what I feel about men's lives, because my own was in the wrong: shall I dare to send them to death? The physician must heal himself; he must honestly _try_ the path he recommends: if he does not even try, should he not be silent? I thank you very heartily for your letter, and for the seriousness you brought to it. You know, I think when a serious thing is your own, you keep a saner man by laughing at it and yourself as you go. So I do not write possibly with all the really somewhat sickened gravity I feel. And indeed, what with the book, and this business to which I referred, and Ireland, I am scarcely in an enviable state. Well, I ought to be glad, after ten years of the worst training on earth--valetudinarianism--that I can still be troubled by a duty. You shall hear more in time; so far, I am at least decided: I will go and see Balfour when I get to London. We have all had a great pleasure: a Mrs. Rawlinson came and brought with her a nineteen-year-old daughter, simple, human, as beautiful as--herself; I never admired a girl before, you know it was my weakness: we are all three dead in love with her. How nice to be able to do so much good to harassed people by--yourself!--Ever yours, R. L. S. TO MISS RAWLINSON Here follows a compliment in verse to the young lady last mentioned, whose Christian name was May. [_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, April 1887._] Of the many flowers you brought me, Only some were meant to stay, And the flower I thought the sweetest Was the flower that went away. Of the many flowers you brought me, All were fair and fresh and gay, But the flower I thought the sweetest Was the blossom of the May. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Within a fortnight after the date of the above Stevenson went himself, and for the last time, to Scotland, and was present, too late for recognition, at the death of his father (May 8, 1887). Business detained him for some weeks, and the following was written just before his return to Bournemouth. [_Edinburgh, June 1887._] MY DEAR S. C.,--At last I can write a word to you. Your little note in the P.M.G. was charming. I have written four pages in the Contemporary, which Bunting found room for: they are not very good, but I shall do more for his memory in time. About the death, I have long hesitated, I was long before I could tell my mind; and now I know it, and can but say that I am glad. If we could have had my father, that would have been a different thing. But to keep that changeling--suffering changeling--any longer, could better none and nothing. Now he rests; it is more significant, it is more like himself. He will begin to return to us in the course of time, as he was and as we loved him. My favourite words in literature, my favourite scene--"O let him pass," Kent and Lear--was played for me here in the first moment of my return. I believe Shakespeare saw it with his own father. I had no words; but it was shocking to see. He died on his feet, you know; was on his feet the last day, knowing nobody--still he would be up. This was his constant wish; also that he might smoke a pipe on his last day. The funeral would have pleased him; it was the largest private funeral in man's memory here. We have no plans, and it is possible we may go home without going through town. I do not know; I have no views yet whatever; nor can have any at this stage of my cold and my business.--Ever yours, R. L. S. TO SIR WALTER SIMPSON Written during a short visit to me between his return from Scotland and his departure for New York. _British Museum [July 1887]._ MY DEAR SIMPSON,--This is a long time I have not acknowledged the Art of Golf, though I read it through within thirty-six hours of its arrival. I have been ill and out of heart, and ill again and again ill, till I am weary of it, and glad indeed to try the pitch-farthing hazard of a trip to Colorado or New Mexico. There we go, if I prove fit for the start, on August 20th. Meanwhile, the Art of Golf. A lot of it is very funny, and I liked the fun very well; but what interested me most was the more serious part, because it turns all the while on a branch of psychology that no one has treated and that interests me much: the psychology of athletics. I had every reason to be interested in it, because I am abnormal: I have no memory in athletics. I have forgotten how to ride and how to skate; and I should not be the least surprised if I had forgotten how to swim. I find I can write no more: it is the first I have tried since I was ill; and I am too weak.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY During the two months following his father's death Stevenson had suffered much both from his old complaints and from depression of mind. His only work had been in preparing for press the verse collection _Underwoods_, the _Life of Fleeming Jenkin_, and the volume of essays called _Memories and Portraits_. The opinions quoted are those of physicians. _[Skerryvore, Bournemouth] August 1887._ DEAR LAD,--I write to inform you that Mr. Stevenson's well-known work, _Virginibus Puerisque_, is about to be reprinted. At the same time a second volume called _Memories and Portraits_ will issue from the roaring loom. Its interest will be largely autobiographical, Mr. S. having sketched there the lineaments of many departed friends, and dwelt fondly, and with a m'istened eye, upon by-gone pleasures. The two will be issued under the common title of _Familiar Essays_; but the volumes will be vended separately to those who are mean enough not to hawk at both. The blood is at last stopped: only yesterday. I began to think I should not get away. However, I hope--I hope--remark the word--no boasting--I hope I may luff up a bit now. Dobell, whom I saw, gave as usual a good account of my lungs, and expressed himself, like his neighbours, hopefully about the trip. He says, my uncle says, Scott says, Brown says--they all say--You ought not to be in such a state of health; you should recover. Well, then, I mean to. My spirits are rising again after three months of black depression: I almost begin to feel as if I should care to live: I would, by God! And so I believe I shall.--Yours, BULLETIN M'GURDER. How has the _Deacon_ gone? TO W. H. LOW _[Skerryvore, Bournemouth] August 6th, 1887._ MY DEAR LOW,--We--my mother, my wife, my stepson, my maidservant, and myself, five souls--leave, if all is well, Aug. 20th, per Wilson line s.s. Ludgate Hill. Shall probably evade N. Y. at first, cutting straight to a watering-place: Newport, I believe, its name. Afterwards we shall steal incognito into _la bonne ville_, and see no one but you and the Scribners, if it may be so managed. You must understand I have been very seedy indeed, quite a dead body; and unless the voyage does miracles, I shall have to draw it dam fine. Alas, "The Canoe Speaks" is now out of date; it will figure in my volume of verses now imminent. However, I may find some inspiration some day.--Till very soon, yours ever, R. L. S. TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE The lady to whom the following (and much correspondence yet to come) is addressed had been an attached friend of the Skerryvore household and a pupil of Stevenson's in the art of writing. She had given R. L. S. a paper-cutter by way of farewell token at his starting. _Bournemouth, August 19th, 1887._ MY DEAR MISS BOODLE,--I promise you the paper-knife shall go to sea with me; and if it were in my disposal, I should promise it should return with me too. All that you say, I thank you for very much; I thank you for all the pleasantness that you have brought about our house; and I hope the day may come when I shall see you again in poor old Skerryvore, now left to the natives of Canada, or to worse barbarians, if such exist. I am afraid my attempt to jest is rather _à contre-coeur_.--Good-bye--_au revoir_--and do not forget your friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MESSRS. CHATTO AND WINDUS The titles and proofs mentioned in the text are presumably those of _Underwoods_ and _Memories and Portraits_. _Bournemouth_ [_August 1887_]. DEAR SIRS,--I here enclose the two titles. Had you not better send me the bargains to sign? I shall be here till Saturday; and shall have an address in London (which I shall send you) till Monday, when I shall sail. Even if the proofs do not reach you till Monday morning, you could send a clerk from Fenchurch Street Station at 10.23 A.M. for Galleons Station, and he would find me embarking on board the _Ludgate Hill_, Island Berth, Royal Albert Dock. Pray keep this in case it should be necessary to catch this last chance. I am most anxious to have the proofs with me on the voyage.--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. FOOTNOTES: [10] Cough. [11] Loose talk. [12] Mr. Charles Morley, at this time manager or assistant-manager of the Pall Mall Gazette. [13] _Princess Casamassima._ [14] Lothian vernacular pronunciation of Cunningham. [15] In _Underwoods_ the lines thus bracketed as doubtful stand with the change: "Life is over; life was gay." [16] _Prince Otto._ [17] The name of the hero in Dostoieffsky's _Le Crime et le Châtiment_. [18] _Suite anglaise._ [19] As in fact he had, all except the double l. [20] In _Pendennis_. IX THE UNITED STATES AGAIN WINTER IN THE ADIRONDACKS AUGUST 1887--JUNE 1888 The letters printed in the following section are selected from those which tell of Stevenson's voyage to New York and reception there at the beginning of September 1887; of his winter's life and work at Saranac Lake, and of his decision taken in May 1888 to venture on a yachting cruise in the South Seas. The moment of his arrival at New York was that when his reputation had first reached its height in the United States, owing to the popularity both of _Treasure Island_ and _Kidnapped_, but more especially to the immense impression made by the _Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_. He experienced consequently for the first time the pleasures, such as they were, of celebrity, and also its inconveniences; found the most hospitable of refuges in the house of his kind friends, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Fairchild, at Newport; and quickly made many other friends, including the late Augustus St. Gaudens, the famous sculptor, with Mr. C. Scribner and Mr. E. L. Burlingame, the owner and the editor of Scribner's Magazine, from whom he immediately received and accepted very advantageous offers of work. Having been dissuaded from braving for the present the fatigue of the long journey to Colorado and the extreme rigour of its winter climate, he determined to try instead a season at Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains, New York State, which had lately been coming into reputation as a place of cure. There, under the care of the well-known resident physician, Dr. Trudeau, he spent nearly seven months, from the end of September 1887 to the end of April 1888, with results on the whole favourable to his own health, though not to that of his wife, which could never support these winter mountain cures. On the 16th of April, he and his party left Saranac. After spending a fortnight in New York, where, as always in cities, his health quickly flagged again, he went for the month of May into seaside quarters at Union House, Manasquan, on the New Jersey coast, for the sake of fresh air and boating. Here he enjoyed the occasional society of some of his New York friends, including Mr. St. Gaudens and Mr. W. H. Low, and was initiated in the congenial craft of cat-boat sailing. In the meantime, Mrs. Stevenson had gone to San Francisco to see her relatives; and holding that the climate of the Pacific was likely to be better for the projected cruise than that of the Atlantic, had inquired there whether a yacht was to be hired for such a purpose. The schooner _Casco_, Captain Otis, was found. Stevenson signified by telegraph his assent to the arrangement; determined to risk in the adventure the sum of £2000, of which his father's death had put him in possession, hoping to recoup himself by a series of Letters recounting his experiences, for which he had received a commission from Mr. S. S. M'Clure; and on the 2nd of June started with his mother and stepson for San Francisco, the first stage on that island cruise from which he was destined never to return. His work during the season September 1887-May 1888 had consisted of the twelve papers published in the course of 1888 in Scribner's Magazine, including perhaps the most striking of all his essays, _A Chapter on Dreams_, _Pulvis et Umbra_, _Beggars_, _The Lantern Bearers_, _Random Memories_, etc.; as well as the greater part of the _Master of Ballantrae_ and _The Wrong Box_--the last originally conceived and drafted by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne. TO SIDNEY COLVIN A succession of Stevenson's friends had visited and spent part of the day or the evening with him at Armfield's hotel on Sunday, August 20th, each bringing some farewell gift or another (as related by Mr. Gosse in his volume _Critical Kitcats_, p. 297). Among these, Mr. Henry James's gift had been a case of champagne for consumption during the journey. On the morning of the 21st I accompanied him to the docks, saw him and his party embarked on board the steamer _Ludgate Hill_, a vessel sailing from the port of London and carrying animals and freight as well as passengers. They had chosen to go by this route for the sake alike of economy and amusement, rather than by one of the sumptuous liners sailing from Liverpool or Southampton. Leaving the ship's side as she weighed anchor, and waving farewell to the party from the boat which landed me, I little knew what was the truth, that I was looking on the face of my friend for the last time. The letters next following were written during or Immediately after his passage across the Atlantic. "The Commodore" is of course R. L. S. _H.M.S. Vulgarium, off Havre de Grace, this 22nd day of August [1887]._ SIR,--The weather has been hitherto inimitable. Inimitable is the only word that I can apply to our fellow-voyagers, whom a categorist, possibly premature, has been already led to divide into two classes--the better sort consisting of the baser kind of Bagman, and the worser of undisguised Beasts of the Field. The berths are excellent, the pasture swallowable, the champagne of H. James (to recur to my favourite adjective) inimitable. As for the Commodore, he slept awhile in the evening, tossed off a cup of Henry James with his plain meal, walked the deck till eight, among sands and floating lights and buoys and wrecked brigantines, came down (to his regret) a minute too soon to see Margate lit up, turned in about nine, slept, with some interruptions, but on the whole sweetly, until six, and has already walked a mile or so of deck, among a fleet of other steamers waiting for the tide, within view of Havre, and pleasantly entertained by passing fishing-boats, hovering sea-gulls, and Vulgarians pairing on deck with endearments of primitive simplicity. There, sir, can be viewed the sham quarrel, the sham desire for information, and every device of these two poor ancient sexes (who might, you might think, have learned in the course of the ages something new) down to the exchange of head-gear.--I am, sir, yours, BOLD BOB BOLTSPRIT. B. B. B. (_alias_ the Commodore) will now turn to his proofs. Havre de Grace is a city of some show. It is for-ti-fied; and, so far as I can see, is a place of some trade. It is situ-ated in France, a country of Europe. You always complain there are no facts in my letters. R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Newport, R.I., U.S.A. [September 1887]_ MY DEAR COLVIN,--So long it went excellent well, and I had a time I am glad to have had; really enjoying my life. There is nothing like being at sea, after all. And O, why have I allowed myself to rot so long on land? But on the Banks I caught a cold, and I have not yet got over it. My reception here was idiotic to the last degree.... It is very silly, and not pleasant, except where humour enters; and I confess the poor interviewer lads pleased me. They are too good for their trade; avoided anything I asked them to avoid, and were no more vulgar in their reports than they could help. I liked the lads. O, it was lovely on our stable-ship, chock full of stallions. She rolled heartily, rolled some of the fittings out of our state-room, and I think a more dangerous cruise (except that it was summer) it would be hard to imagine. But we enjoyed it to the masthead, all but Fanny; and even she perhaps a little. When we got in, we had run out of beer, stout, cocoa, soda-water, water, fresh meat, and (almost) of biscuit. But it was a thousandfold pleasanter than a great big Birmingham liner like a new hotel; and we liked the officers, and made friends with the quarter-masters, and I (at least) made a friend of a baboon (for we carried a cargo of apes), whose embraces have pretty near cost me a coat. The passengers improved, and were a very good specimen lot, with no drunkard, no gambling that I saw, and less grumbling and backbiting than one would have asked of poor human nature. Apes, stallions, cows, matches, hay, and poor men-folk, all, or almost all, came successfully to land.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO HENRY JAMES [_Newport, U.S.A., September 1887._] MY DEAR JAMES,--Here we are at Newport in the house of the good Fairchilds; and a sad burthen we have laid upon their shoulders. I have been in bed practically ever since I came. I caught a cold on the Banks after having had the finest time conceivable, and enjoyed myself more than I could have hoped on board our strange floating menagerie: stallions and monkeys and matches made our cargo; and the vast continent of these incongruities rolled the while like a haystack; and the stallions stood hypnotised by the motion, looking through the ports at our dinner-table, and winked when the crockery was broken; and the little monkeys stared at each other in their cages, and were thrown overboard like little bluish babies; and the big monkey, Jacko, scoured about the ship and rested willingly in my arms, to the ruin of my clothing; and the man of the stallions made a bower of the black tarpaulin, and sat therein at the feet of a raddled divinity, like a picture on a box of chocolates; and the other passengers, when they were not sick, looked on and laughed. Take all this picture, and make it roll till the bell shall sound unexpected notes and the fittings shall break loose in our state-room, and you have the voyage of the _Ludgate Hill_. She arrived in the port of New York, without beer, porter, soda-water, curaçoa, fresh meat, or fresh water; and yet we lived, and we regret her. My wife is a good deal run down, and I am no great shakes. America is, as I remarked, a fine place to eat in, and a great place for kindness; but, Lord, what a silly thing is popularity! I envy the cool obscurity of Skerryvore. If it even paid, said Meanness! and was abashed at himself.--Yours most sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN [_New York, end of September 1887._] MY DEAR S. C.,--Your delightful letter has just come, and finds me in a New York hotel, waiting the arrival of a sculptor (St. Gaudens) who is making a medallion of yours truly and who is (to boot) one of the handsomest and nicest fellows I have seen. I caught a cold on the Banks; fog is not for me; nearly died of interviewers and visitors, during twenty-four hours in New York; cut for Newport with Lloyd and Valentine, a journey like fairyland for the most engaging beauties, one little rocky and pine-shaded cove after another, each with a house and a boat at anchor, so that I left my heart in each and marvelled why American authors had been so unjust to their country; caught another cold on the train; arrived at Newport to go to bed and to grow worse, and to stay in bed until I left again; the Fairchilds proving during this time kindness itself; Mr. Fairchild simply one of the most engaging men in the world, and one of the children, Blair, _aet._ ten, a great joy and amusement in his solemn adoring attitude to the author of _Treasure Island_. Here I was interrupted by the arrival of my sculptor.--I withdraw calling him handsome; he is not quite that, his eyes are too near together; he is only remarkable looking, and like an Italian cinque-cento medallion; I have begged him to make a medallion of himself and give me a copy. I will not take up the sentence in which I was wandering so long, but begin fresh. I was ten or twelve days at Newport; then came back convalescent to New York. Fanny and Lloyd are off to the Adirondacks to see if that will suit; and the rest of us leave Monday (this is Saturday) to follow them up. I hope we may manage to stay there all winter. I have a splendid appetite and have on the whole recovered well after a mighty sharp attack. I am now on a salary of £500 a year for twelve articles in Scribner's Magazine on what I like; it is more than £500, but I cannot calculate more precisely. You have no idea how much is made of me here; I was offered £2000 for a weekly article--eh heh! how is that? but I refused that lucrative job. The success of _Underwoods_ is gratifying. You see, the verses are sane; that is their strong point, and it seems it is strong enough to carry them. A thousand thanks for your grand letter.--Ever yours, R. L. S. TO W. E. HENLEY The verses herein alluded to were addressed to Rossetti's friend, Dr. Gordon Hake, physician and poet (1809-1895), in return for some received from him. They are those beginning "In the beloved hour that ushers day" and printed as No. xix. in _Songs of Travel_. _New York [September 1887]._ MY DEAR LAD,--Herewith verses for Dr. Hake, which please communicate. I did my best with the interviewers; I don't know if Lloyd sent you the result; my heart was too sick: you can do nothing with them; and yet ----literally sweated with anxiety to please, and took me down in long hand! I have been quite ill, but go better. I am being not busted, but medallioned, by St. Gaudens, who is a first-rate, plain, high-minded artist and honest fellow; you would like him down to the ground. I believe sculptors are fine fellows when they are not demons. O, I am now a salaried person, £600, a year,[21] to write twelve articles in Scribner's Magazine; it remains to be seen if it really pays, huge as the sum is, but the slavery may overweigh me. I hope you will like my answer to Hake, and specially that he will. Love to all.--Yours affectionately, R. L. S. (_le salarié_). TO R. A. M. STEVENSON _Saranac Lake, Adirondacks, New York, U.S.A. [October 1887]._ MY DEAR BOB,--The cold [of Colorado] was too rigorous for me; I could not risk the long railway voyage, and the season was too late to risk the Eastern, Cape Hatteras side of the steamer one; so here we stuck and stick. We have a wooden house on a hill-top, overlooking a river, and a village about a quarter of a mile away, and very wooded hills; the whole scene is very Highland, bar want of heather and the wooden houses. I have got one good thing of my sea voyage: it is proved the sea agrees heartily with me, and my mother likes it; so if I get any better, or no worse, my mother will likely hire a yacht for a month or so in summer. Good Lord! What fun! Wealth is only useful for two things: a yacht and a string quartette. For these two I will sell my soul. Except for these I hold that £700 a year is as much as any body can possibly want; and I have had more, so I know, for the extry coins were for no use, excepting for illness, which damns everything. I was so happy on board that ship, I could not have believed it possible. We had the beastliest weather, and many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp-ship gave us many comforts; we could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at sea. And truly there is nothing else. I had literally forgotten what happiness was, and the full mind--full of external and physical things, not full of cares and labours and rot about a fellow's behaviour. My heart literally sang; I truly care for nothing so much as for that. We took so north a course, that we saw Newfoundland; no one in the ship had ever seen it before. It was beyond belief to me how she rolled; in seemingly smooth water, the bell striking, the fittings bounding out of our state-room. It is worth having lived these last years, partly because I have written some better books, which is always pleasant, but chiefly to have had the joy of this voyage. I have been made a lot of here, and it is sometimes pleasant, sometimes the reverse; but I could give it all up, and agree that ---- was the author of my works, for a good seventy ton schooner and the coins to keep her on. And to think there are parties with yachts who would make the exchange! I know a little about fame now; it is no good compared to a yacht; and anyway there is more fame in a yacht, more genuine fame; to cross the Atlantic and come to anchor in Newport (say) with the Union Jack, and go ashore for your letters and hang about the pier, among the holiday yachtsmen--that's fame, that's glory, and nobody can take it away; they can't say your book is bad; you _have_ crossed the Atlantic. I should do it south by the West Indies, to avoid the damned Banks; and probably come home by steamer, and leave the skipper to bring the yacht home. Well, if all goes well, we shall maybe sail out of Southampton water some of these days and take a run to Havre, and try the Baltic, or somewhere. Love to you all--Ever your afft. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIR WALTER SIMPSON It was supposed that Stevenson's letters to this friend, like those to Professor Fleeming Jenkin, had been destroyed or disappeared altogether. But besides the two printed above (pp. 117 and 229) here is a third, preserved by a friend to whom Sir Walter made a present of it. [_Saranac Lake, October 1887._] MY DEAR SIMPSON, the address is c/o Charles Scribner's Sons, 243 Broadway, N.Y., where I wish you would write and tell us you are better. But the place of our abode is Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks; it is a mighty good place too, and I mean it shall do me good. Indeed the dreadful depression and collapse of last summer has quite passed away; it was a thorough change I wanted; I wonder perhaps if it wouldn't pick you up--if you are not picked up already; you have been a long time in Great Britain; and that is a slow poison, very slow for the strong, but certain for all. Old Dr. Chepmell told Lloyd: any one can stay a year in England and be the better for it, but no one can stay there steadily and not be the worse. I have had a very curious experience here; being very much made of, and called upon, and all that; quite the famous party in fact: it is not so nice as people try to make out, when you are young, and don't want to bother working. Fame is nothing to a yacht; _experto crede_. There are nice bits of course; for you meet very pleasant and interesting people; but the thing at large is a bore and a fraud; and I am much happier up here, where I see no one and live my own life. One thing is they do not stick for money to the Famed One; I was offered £2000 a year for a weekly article; and I accepted (and now enjoy) £720 a year for a monthly one: 720/12 (whatever that may be) for each article, as long or as short as I please, and on any mortal subject. I am sure it will do me harm to do it; but the sum was irresistible. See calculations on verso of last page, and observe, sir, the accuracy of my methods. Hulloh, I must get up, as I can't lose any time. Good-bye, remember me to her ladyship and salute the Kids.--Ever your friend, R. L. S. 12 : 10 :: 72 : _x_, and this results in the same problem. Well--tackle it. 12)720(60 72 Is it possible? £60!!?? Let us cheque it by trying it in dollars, $3500 per an. 12)3500(291. 80 24 --- 110 108 --- 20 Well : $291.80 then divide by 5 for a rough test 5)291(58.4.4 25 add 80 cents = 40d. = 3. 4d. -- 3.4 ------- £58. 7.8 Well, call it £58.10. ====== and be done with it! TO EDMUND GOSSE The following refers to a review by Mr. Gosse of Stevenson's volume of verse called _Underwoods_. The book had been published a few weeks previously, and is dedicated, as readers will remember, to a number of physicians who had attended him at sundry times and places. _Saranac Lake, Oct. 8th, 1887._ MY DEAR GOSSE,--I have just read your article twice, with cheers of approving laughter. I do not believe you ever wrote anything so funny: Tyndall's "shell," the passage on the Davos press and its invaluable issues, and that on V. Hugo and Swinburne, are exquisite; so, I say it more ruefully, is the touch about the doctors. For the rest, I am very glad you like my verses so well; and the qualities you ascribe to them seem to me well found and well named. I own to that kind of candour you attribute to me: when I am frankly interested, I suppose I fancy the public will be so too; and when I am moved, I am sure of it. It has been my luck hitherto to meet with no staggering disillusion. "Before" and "After" may be two; and yet I believe the habit is now too thoroughly ingrained to be altered. About the doctors, you were right, that dedication has been the subject of some pleasantries that made me grind, and of your happily touched reproof which made me blush. And to miscarry in a dedication is an abominable form of book-wreck; I am a good captain, I would rather lose the tent and save my dedication. I am at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, I suppose for the winter: it seems a first-rate place; we have a house in the eye of many winds, with a view of a piece of running water--Highland, all but the dear hue of peat--and of many hills--Highland also, but for the lack of heather. Soon the snow will close on us; we are here some twenty miles--twenty-seven, they say, but this I profoundly disbelieve--in the woods: communication by letter is slow and (let me be consistent) aleatory; by telegram is as near as may be possible. I had some experience of American appreciation; I liked a little of it, but there is too much; a little of that would go a long way to spoil a man; and I like myself better in the woods. I am so damned candid and ingenuous (for a cynic), and so much of a "cweatu' of impulse--aw" (if you remember that admirable Leech) that I begin to shirk any more taffy; I think I begin to like it too well. But let us trust the Gods; they have a rod in pickle; reverently I doff my trousers, and with screwed eyes await the _amari aliquid_ of the great God Busby. I thank you for the article in all ways, and remain yours affectionately, R. L. S. TO W. H. LOW [_Saranac Lake, October 1887._] SIR,--I have to trouble you with the following _paroles bien senties_. We are here at a first-rate place. "Baker's" is the name of our house, but we don't address there; we prefer the tender care of the Post-Office, as more aristocratic (it is no use to telegraph even to the care of the Post-Office, who does not give a single damn[22]). Baker's has a prophet's chamber, which the hypercritical might describe as a garret with a hole in the floor: in that garret, sir, I have to trouble you and your wife to come and slumber. Not now, however: with manly hospitality, I choke off any sudden impulse. Because first, my wife and my mother are gone (a note for the latter, strongly suspected to be in the hand of your talented wife, now sits silent on the mantel shelf), one to Niagara and t'other to Indianapolis. Because, second, we are not yet installed. And because, third, I won't have you till I have a buffalo robe and leggings, lest you should want to paint me as a plain man, which I am not, but a rank Saranacker and wild man of the woods.--Yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES FAIRCHILD _Post Office, Saranac Lake, Adirondacks, N.Y. [October 1887]._ MY DEAR FAIRCHILD,--I do not live in the Post Office; that is only my address; I live at "Baker's," a house upon a hill, and very jolly in every way. I believe this is going to do: we have a kind of a garret of a spare room, where hardy visitors can sleep, and our table (if homely) is not bad. And here, appropriately enough, comes in the begging part. We cannot get any fruit here: can you manage to send me some grapes? I told you I would trouble you, and I will say that I do so with pleasure, which means a great deal from yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--Remember us to all yours: my mother and my wife are away skylarking; my mother to Niagara, my wife to Indianapolis; and I live here to-day alone with Lloyd, Valentine, some cold meat, and four salmon trout, one of which is being grilled at this moment of writing; so that, after the immortal pattern of the Indian boys, my household will soon only reckon three. As usual with me, the news comes in a P.S., and is mostly folly. R. L. S. _P.P.S._--My cold is so much better that I took another yesterday. But the new one is a puny child; I fear him not; and yet I fear to boast. If the postscript business goes on, this establishment will run out of P's; but I hope it wasn't you that made this paper--just for a last word--I could not compliment you upon that. And Lord! if you could see the ink--not what I am using--but the local vintage! They don't write much here; I bet what you please. R. L. S. TO WILLIAM ARCHER The Wondrous Tale referred to in the following is Stevenson's _Black Arrow_, which had been through Mr. Archer's hands in proof. _Saranac Lake, October 1887._ DEAR ARCHER,--Many thanks for the Wondrous Tale. It is scarcely a work of genius, as I believe you felt. Thanks also for your pencillings; though I defend "shrew," or at least many of the shrews. We are here (I suppose) for the winter in the Adirondacks, a hill and forest country on the Canadian border of New York State, very unsettled and primitive and cold, and healthful, or we are the more bitterly deceived. I believe it will do well for me; but must not boast. My wife is away to Indiana to see her family; my mother, Lloyd, and I remain here in the cold, which has been exceeding sharp, and the hill air, which is inimitably fine. We all eat bravely, and sleep well, and make great fires, and get along like one o'clock. I am now a salaried party; I am a _bourgeois_ now; I am to write a weekly paper for Scribner's, at a scale of payment which makes my teeth ache for shame and diffidence. The editor is, I believe, to apply to you; for we were talking over likely men, and when I instanced you, he said he had had his eye upon you from the first. It is worth while, perhaps, to get in tow with the Scribners; they are such thorough gentlefolk in all ways that it is always a pleasure to deal with them. I am like to be a millionaire if this goes on, and be publicly hanged at the social revolution: well, I would prefer that to dying in my bed; and it would be a godsend to my biographer, if ever I have one. What are you about? I hope you are all well and in good case and spirits, as I am now, after a most nefast experience of despondency before I left; but indeed I was quite run down. Remember me to Mrs. Archer, and give my respects to Tom.--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY "Gleeson White" in this letter means the collection of _Ballades, Rondeaus, &c._, edited by that gentleman and dedicated to R. L. S. (Walter Scott, 1887). [_Saranac Lake, October 1887._] MY DEAR LAD,--I hear some vague reports of a success[23] at Montreal. My news is not much, my mother is away to Niagara and Fanny to Indiana; the Port Admiral and I and Valentine keep house together in our verandahed cottage near a wood. I am writing, and have got into the vein. When I got to N. Y. a paper offered me £2000 a year to do critical weekly articles for them; the sum was so enormous that I tottered; however, Scribner at once offered me the same scale to give him a monthly paper in his magazine; indeed it is rather higher, £720 for the twelve papers. This I could not decently refuse; and I am now a yoked man, and after a fit of my usual impotence under bondage, seem to have got into the swing. I suppose I shall scarce manage to do much else; but there is the fixed sum, which shines like a sun in the firmament. A prophet has certainly a devil of a lot of honour (and much coins) in another country, whatever he has in his own. I got Gleeson White; your best work and either the best or second best in the book is the Ballade in Hot Weather; that is really a masterpiece of melody and fancy. Damn your Villanelles--and everybody's. G. Macdonald comes out strong in his two pious rondels; _Fons Bandusiæ_ seems as exquisite as ever. To my surprise, I liked two of the Pantoums, the blue-bottle, and the still better after-death one from _Love in Idleness_. Lang cuts a poor figure, except in the Cricket one; your patter ballade is a great _tour de force_, but spoiled by similar cæsuras. On the whole 'tis a ridiculous volume, and I had more pleasure out of it than I expected. I forgot to praise Grant Allen's excellent ballade, which is the one that runs with yours,--and here, to the point, a note from you at Margate--among East Winds and Plain Women, damn them! Well, what can we do or say? We are only at Saranac for the winter; and if this _Deacon_ comes off, why you may join us there in glory; I would I had some news of it. Saranac is not _quite_ so dear, in some ways, as the rest of this land, where it costs you a pound to sneeze, and fifty to blow your nose; but even here it costs $2·50 to get a box from the station! Think of it! Lift it up tenderly! They had need to pay well! but how poor devils live; and how it can pay to take a theatre company over to such a land, is more than I can fancy. The devil of the States for you is the conveyances, they are so dear--but O, what is not! I have thrown off my cold in excellent style, though still very groggy about the knees, so that when I climb a paling, of which we have many, I feel as precarious and nutatory as a man of ninety. Under this I grind; but I believe the place will suit me. Must stop.--Ever affectionately, R. L. S. TO HENRY JAMES The "dear Alexander" mentioned below is Mr. J. W. Alexander, the well-known American artist, who had been a welcome visitor to Stevenson at Bournemouth, and had drawn his portrait there. The humorous romance proceeding from Mr. Osbourne's typewriter was the first draft of _The Wrong Box_; or, as it was originally called, _The Finsbury Tontine_, or _The Game of Bluff_. The article by Mr. Henry James referred to in the last paragraph is one on R. L. S. which had appeared in the Century Magazine for October, and was reprinted in _Partial Portraits_. [_Saranac Lake, October 1887_.] I know not the day; but the month it is the drear October by the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--This is to say _First_, the voyage was a huge success. We all enjoyed it (bar my wife) to the ground: sixteen days at sea with a cargo of hay, matches, stallions, and monkeys, and in a ship with no style on, and plenty of sailors to talk to, and the endless pleasures of the sea--the romance of it, the sport of the scratch dinner and the smashing crockery, the pleasure--an endless pleasure--of balancing to the swell: well, it's over. _Second_, I had a fine time, rather a troubled one, at Newport and New York; saw much of and liked hugely the Fairchilds, St. Gaudens the sculptor, Gilder of the Century--just saw the dear Alexander--saw a lot of my old and admirable friend Will Low, whom I wish you knew and appreciated--was medallioned by St. Gaudens, and at last escaped to _Third_, Saranac Lake, where we now are, and which I believe we mean to like and pass the winter at. Our house--emphatically "Baker's"--is on a hill, and has a sight of a stream turning a corner in the valley--bless the face of running water!--and sees some hills too, and the paganly prosaic roofs of Saranac itself; the Lake it does not see, nor do I regret that; I like water (fresh water I mean) either running swiftly among stones, or else largely qualified with whisky. As I write, the sun (which has been long a stranger) shines in at my shoulder; from the next room, the bell of Lloyd's typewriter makes an agreeable music as it patters off (at a rate which astonishes this experienced novelist) the early chapters of a humorous romance; from still further off--the walls of Baker's are neither ancient nor massive--rumours of Valentine about the kitchen stove come to my ears; of my mother and Fanny I hear nothing, for the excellent reason that they have gone sparking off, one to Niagara, one to Indianapolis. People complain that I never give news in my letters. I have wiped out that reproach. But now, _Fourth_, I have seen the article; and it may be from natural partiality, I think it the best you have written. O--I remember the Gautier, which was an excellent performance; and the Balzac, which was good; and the Daudet, over which I licked my chops; but the R. L. S. is better yet. It is so humorous, and it hits my little frailties with so neat (and so friendly) a touch; and Alan is the occasion for so much happy talk, and the quarrel is so generously praised. I read it twice, though it was only some hours in my possession; and Low, who got it for me from the Century, sat up to finish it ere he returned it; and, sir, we were all delighted. Here is the paper out, nor will anything, not even friendship, not even gratitude for the article, induce me to begin a second sheet; so here, with the kindest remembrances and the warmest good wishes, I remain, yours affectionately, R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER _[Saranac Lake], 18th November 1887._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--No likely I'm going to waste a sheet of paper.... I am offered £1600 ($8000) for the American serial rights on my next story! As you say, times are changed since the Lothian Road. Well, the Lothian Road was grand fun too; I could take an afternoon of it with great delight. But I'm awfu' grand noo, and long may it last! Remember me to any of the faithful--if there are any left. I wish I could have a crack with you.--Yours ever affectionately, R. L. S. I find I have forgotten more than I remembered of business.... Please let us know (if you know) for how much Skerryvore is let; you will here detect the female mind; I let it for what I could get; nor shall the possession of this knowledge (which I am happy to have forgot) increase the amount by so much as the shadow of a sixpenny piece; but my females are agog.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO CHARLES SCRIBNER Shortly after the date of the present correspondence Stevenson, to his great advantage, put all his publishing arrangements (as he had already put his private business) into the hands of his friend Mr. Baxter. Meantime he was managing them himself; and an occasional lapse of memory or attention betrayed him once or twice into misunderstandings, and once at least conflicting agreements with two different publishers, both his friends. He was the first to denounce the error when he became aware of it, and suffered sharply from the sense of his own unintentional fault. The next two letters, and some allusions in those which follow, relate to this affair. [_Saranac Lake, November 20 or 21, 1887._] MY DEAR MR. SCRIBNER,--Heaven help me, I am under a curse just now. I have played fast and loose with what I said to you; and that, I beg you to believe, in the purest innocence of mind. I told you you should have the power over all my work in this country; and about a fortnight ago, when M'Clure was here, I calmly signed a bargain for the serial publication of a story. You will scarce believe that I did this in mere oblivion; but I did; and all that I can say is that I will do so no more, and ask you to forgive me. Please write to me soon as to this. Will you oblige me by paying in for three articles, as already sent, to my account with John Paton & Co., 52 William Street? This will be most convenient for us. The fourth article is nearly done; and I am the more deceived, or it is _A Buster_. Now as to the first thing in this letter, I do wish to hear from you soon; and I am prepared to hear any reproach, or (what is harder to hear) any forgiveness; for I have deserved the worst.--Yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO E. L. BURLINGAME This is the first of many letters, increasing in friendliness as the correspondence goes on, to the editor of Scribner's Magazine. [_Saranac Lake, November 1887._] DEAR MR. BURLINGAME,--I enclose corrected proof of _Beggars_, which seems good. I mean to make a second sermon, which, if it is about the same length as _Pulvis et Umbra_, might go in along with it as two sermons, in which case I should call the first "The Whole Creation," and the second "Any Good." We shall see; but you might say how you like the notion. One word: if you have heard from Mr. Scribner of my unhappy oversight in the matter of a story, you will make me ashamed to write to you, and yet I wish to beg you to help me into quieter waters. The oversight committed--and I do think it was not so bad as Mr. Scribner seems to think it--and discovered, I was in a miserable position. I need not tell you that my first impulse was to offer to share or to surrender the price agreed upon when it should fall due; and it is almost to my credit that I arranged to refrain. It is one of these positions from which there is no escape; I cannot undo what I have done. And I wish to beg you--should Mr. Scribner speak to you in the matter--to try to get him to see this neglect of mine for no worse than it is: unpardonable enough, because a breach of an agreement; but still pardonable, because a piece of sheer carelessness and want of memory, done, God knows, without design and since most sincerely regretted. I have no memory. You have seen how I omitted to reserve the American rights in _Jekyll_: last winter I wrote and demanded, as an increase, a less sum than had already been agreed upon for a story that I gave to Cassell's. For once that my forgetfulness has, by a cursed fortune, seemed to gain, instead of lose, me money, it is painful indeed that I should produce so poor an impression on the mind of Mr. Scribner. But I beg you to believe, and if possible to make him believe, that I am in no degree or sense a _faiseur_, and that in matters of business my design, at least, is honest. Nor (bating bad memory and self-deception) am I untruthful in such affairs. If Mr. Scribner shall have said nothing to you in the matter, please regard the above as unwritten, and believe me, yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO E. L. BURLINGAME [_Saranac Lake, November 1887._] DEAR MR. BURLINGAME,--The revise seemed all right, so I did not trouble you with it; indeed, my demand for one was theatrical, to impress that obdurate dog, your reader. Herewith a third paper: it has been a cruel long time upon the road, but here it is, and not bad at last, I fondly hope. I was glad you liked the _Lantern Bearers_; I did, too. I thought it was a good paper, really contained some excellent sense, and was ingeniously put together. I have not often had more trouble than I have with these papers; thirty or forty pages of foul copy, twenty is the very least I have had. Well, you pay high; it is fit that I should have to work hard, it somewhat quiets my conscience.--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS _Saranac Lake, Adirondack Mountains, New York, U.S.A., November 21, 1887._ MY DEAR SYMONDS,--I think we have both meant and wanted to write to you any time these months; but we have been much tossed about, among new faces and old, and new scenes and old, and scenes (like this of Saranac) which are neither one nor other. To give you some clue to our affairs, I had best begin pretty well back. We sailed from the Thames in a vast bucket of iron that took seventeen days from shore to shore. I cannot describe how I enjoyed the voyage, nor what good it did me; but on the Banks I caught friend catarrh. In New York and then in Newport I was pretty ill; but on my return to New York, lying in bed most of the time, with St. Gaudens the sculptor sculping me, and my old friend Low around, I began to pick up once more. Now here we are in a kind of wilderness of hills and firwoods and boulders and snow and wooden houses. So far as we have gone the climate is grey and harsh, but hungry and somnolent; and although not charming like that of Davos, essentially bracing and briskening. The country is a kind of insane mixture of Scotland and a touch of Switzerland and a dash of America, and a thought of the British Channel in the skies. We have a decent house-- _December 6th._--A decent house, as I was saying, sir, on a hill-top, with a look down a Scottish river in front, and on one hand a Perthshire hill; on the other, the beginnings and skirts of the village play hide and seek among other hills. We have been below zero, I know not how far (-10 at 8 A.M. once), and when it is cold it is delightful; but hitherto the cold has not held, and we have chopped in and out from frost to thaw, from snow to rain, from quiet air to the most disastrous north-westerly curdlers of the blood. After a week of practical thaw, the ice still bears in favoured places. So there is hope. I wonder if you saw my book of verses? It went into a second edition, because of my name, I suppose, and its _prose_ merits. I do not set up to be a poet. Only an all-round literary man: a man who talks, not one who sings. But I believe the very fact that it was only speech served the book with the public. Horace is much a speaker, and see how popular! Most of Martial is only speech, and I cannot conceive a person who does not love his Martial; most of Burns, also, such as "The Louse," "The Toothache," "The Haggis," and lots more of his best. Excuse this little apology for my house; but I don't like to come before people who have a note of song, and let it be supposed I do not know the difference. To return to the more important--news. My wife again suffers in high and cold places; I again profit. She is off to-day to New York for a change, as heretofore to Berne, but I am glad to say in better case than then. Still it is undeniable she suffers, and you must excuse her (at least) if we both prove bad correspondents. I am decidedly better, but I have been terribly cut up with business complications: one disagreeable, as threatening loss; one, of the most intolerable complexion, as involving me in dishonour. The burthen of consistent carelessness: I have lost much by it in the past; and for once (to my damnation) I have gained. I am sure you will sympathise. It is hard work to sleep; it is hard to be told you are a liar, and have to hold your peace, and think, "Yes, by God, and a thief too!" You remember my lectures on Ajax, or the Unintentional Sin? Well, I know all about that now. Nothing seems so unjust to the sufferer: or is more just in essence. _Laissez passer la justice de Dieu._ Lloyd has learned to use the typewriter, and has most gallantly completed upon that the draft of a tale, which seems to me not without merit and promise, it is so silly, so gay, so absurd, in spots (to my partial eyes) so genuinely humorous. It is true, he would not have written it but for the _New Arabian Nights_; but it is strange to find a young writer funny. Heavens, but I was depressing when I took the pen in hand! And now I doubt if I am sadder than my neighbours. Will this beginner move in the inverse direction? Let me have your news, and believe me, my dear Symonds, with genuine affection, yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY The following refers to a volume on the elder Dumas, which Mr. Henley was at this time preparing to write, and which he proposed to dedicate to his friend. _Saranac [December 1887]._ MY DEAR LAD,--I was indeed overjoyed to hear of the Dumas. In the matter of the dedication, are not cross dedications a little awkward? Lang and Rider Haggard did it, to be sure. Perpend. And if you should conclude against a dedication, there is a passage in _Memories and Portraits_ written _at_ you, when I was most desperate (to stir you up a bit), which might be quoted: something about Dumas still waiting his biographer. I have a decent time when the weather is fine; when it is grey, or windy or wet (as it too often is), I am merely degraded to the dirt. I get some work done every day with a devil of a heave; not extra good ever; and I regret my engagement. Whiles I have had the most deplorable business annoyances too; have been threatened with having to refund money; got over that; and found myself in the worst scrape of being a kind of unintentional swindler. These have worried me a great deal; also old age with his stealing steps seems to have clawed me in his clutch to some tune. Do you play All Fours? We are trying it; it is still all haze to me. Can the elder hand _beg_ more than once? The Port Admiral is at Boston mingling with millionaires. I am but a weed on Lethe wharf. The wife is only so-so. The Lord lead us all: if I can only get off the stage with clean hands, I shall sing Hosanna. "Put" is described quite differently from your version in a book I have; what are your rules? The Port Admiral is using a game of Put in a tale of his, the first copy of which was gloriously finished about a fortnight ago, and the revise gallantly begun: _The Finsbury Tontine_ it is named, and might fill two volumes, and is quite incredibly silly, and in parts (it seems to me) pretty humorous.--Love to all from AN OLD, OLD MAN. I say, _Taine's Origines de la France Contemporaine_ is no end; it would turn the dead body of Charles Fox into a living Tory. TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN [_Saranac Lake, December 1887._] MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,--The Opal is very well; it is fed with glycerine when it seems hungry. I am very well, and get about much more than I could have hoped. My wife is not very well; there is no doubt the high level does not agree with her, and she is on the move for a holiday to New York. Lloyd is at Boston on a visit, and I hope has a good time. My mother is really first-rate; she and I, despairing of other games for two, now play All Fours out of a gamebook, and have not yet discovered its niceties, if any. You will have heard, I dare say, that they made a great row over me here. They also offered me much money, a great deal more than my works are worth: I took some of it, and was greedy and hasty, and am now very sorry. I have done with big prices from now out. Wealth and self-respect seem, in my case, to be strangers. We were talking the other day of how well Fleeming managed to grow rich. Ah, that is a rare art; something more intellectual than a virtue. The book has not yet made its appearance here; the Life alone, with a little preface, is to appear in the States; and the Scribners are to send you half the royalties. I should like it to do well, for Fleeming's sake. Will you please send me the Greek water-carrier's song? I have a particular use for it. Have I any more news, I wonder?--and echo wonders along with me. I am strangely disquieted on all political matters; and I do not know if it is "the signs of the times" or the sign of my own time of life. But to me the sky seems black both in France and England, and only partly clear in America. I have not seen it so dark in my time; of that I am sure. Please let us have some news; and excuse me, for the sake of my well-known idleness; and pardon Fanny, who is really not very well, for this long silence.--Very sincerely your friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE The lady at Bournemouth (the giver of the paper-knife) to whom the following letter is addressed had been trusted to keep an eye on Stevenson's interests in connection with his house (which had been let) and other matters, and to report thereon from time to time. In their correspondence Stevenson is generally referred to as the Squire and the lady as the Gamekeeper. [_Saranac Lake, December 1887._] MY DEAR MISS BOODLE,--I am so much afraid our gamekeeper may weary of unacknowledged reports! Hence, in the midst of a perfect horror of detestable weathers of a quite incongruous strain, and with less desire for correspondence than--well, than--well, with no desire for correspondence, behold me dash into the breach. Do keep up your letters. They are most delightful to this exiled backwoods family; and in your next, we shall hope somehow or other to hear better news of you and yours--that in the first place--and to hear more news of our beasts and birds and kindly fruits of earth and those human tenants who are (truly) too much with us. I am very well; better than for years: that is for good. But then my wife is no great shakes; the place does not suit her--it is my private opinion that no place does--and she is now away down to New York for a change, which (as Lloyd is in Boston) leaves my mother and me and Valentine alone in our wind-beleaguered hill-top hat-box of a house. You should hear the cows butt against the walls in the early morning while they feed; you should also see our back log when the thermometer goes (as it does go) away--away below zero, till it can be seen no more by the eye of man--not the thermometer, which is still perfectly visible, but the mercury, which curls up into the bulb like a hibernating bear; you should also see the lad who "does chores" for us, with his red stockings and his thirteen-year-old face, and his highly manly tramp into the room; and his two alternative answers to all questions about the weather: either "Cold," or with a really lyrical movement of the voice, "_Lovely_--raining!" Will you take this miserable scrap for what it is worth? Will you also understand that I am the man to blame, and my wife is really almost too much out of health to write, or at least doesn't write?--And believe me, with kind remembrances to Mrs. Boodle and your sisters, very sincerely yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES BAXTER The supposed Lord Warmingpan of the following was really Lord Pollexfen. _Saranac, 12th December '87._ Give us news of all your folk. A Merry Christmas from all of us. MY DEAR CHARLES,--Will you please send £20 to ---- for a Christmas gift from ----? Moreover, I cannot remember what I told you to send to ----; but as God has dealt so providentially with me this year, I now propose to make it £20. I beg of you also to consider my strange position. I jined a club which it was said was to defend the Union; and I had a letter from the secretary, which his name I believe was Lord Warmingpan (or words to that effect), to say I am elected, and had better pay up a certain sum of money, I forget what. Now I cannae verra weel draw a blank cheque and send to-- LORD WARMINGPAN (or words to that effect), London, England. And, man, if it was possible, I would be dooms glad to be out o' this bit scrapie. Mebbe the club was ca'd "The Union," but I wouldnae like to sweir; and mebbe it wasnae, or mebbe only words to that effec'--but I wouldnae care just exac'ly about sweirin'. Do ye no think Henley, or Pollick, or some o' they London fellies, micht mebbe perhaps find out for me? and just what the soom was? And that you would aiblins pay for me? For I thocht I was sae dam patriotic jinin', and it would be a kind o' a come-doun to be turned out again. Mebbe Lang would ken; or mebbe Rider Haggyard: they're kind o' Union folks. But it's my belief his name was Warmingpan whatever.--Yours, THOMSON, _alias_ ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Could it be Warminster? TO MISS MONROE The play of DEACON BRODIE was at this time being performed at Chicago, with Mr. E. J. Henley in the title-part. _Saranac Lake, New York [December 19, 1887]._ DEAR MISS MONROE,--Many thanks for your letter and your good wishes. It was much my desire to get to Chicago: had I done--or if I yet do--so, I shall hope to see the original of my photograph, which is one of my show possessions; but the fates are rather contrary. My wife is far from well; I myself dread, worse than almost any other imaginable peril, that miraculous and really insane invention the American Railroad Car. Heaven help the man--may I add the woman--that sets foot in one! Ah, if it were only an ocean to cross, it would be a matter of small thought to me--and great pleasure. But the railroad car--every man has his weak point; and I fear the railroad car as abjectly as I do an earwig, and, on the whole, on better grounds. You do not know how bitter it is to have to make such a confession; for you have not the pretension nor the weakness of a man. If I do get to Chicago, you will hear of me: so much can be said. And do you never come east? I was pleased to recognise a word of my poor old _Deacon_ in your letter. It would interest me very much to hear how it went and what you thought of piece and actors; and my collaborator, who knows and respects the photograph, would be pleased too.--Still in the hope of seeing you, I am, yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO HENRY JAMES _Saranac Lake, Winter 1887-88._ MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--It may please you to know how our family has been employed. In the silence of the snow the afternoon lamp has lighted an eager fireside group: my mother reading, Fanny, Lloyd, and I devoted listeners; and the work was really one of the best works I ever heard; and its author is to be praised and honoured; and what do you suppose is the name of it? and have you ever read it yourself? and (I am bound I will get to the bottom of the page before I blow the gaff, if I have to fight it out on this line all summer; for if you have not to turn a leaf, there can be no suspense, the conspectory eye being swift to pick out proper names; and without suspense, there can be little pleasure in this world, to my mind at least)--and, in short, the name of it is _Roderick Hudson_, if you please. My dear James, it is very spirited, and very sound, and very noble too. Hudson, Mrs. Hudson, Rowland, O, all first-rate: Rowland a very fine fellow; Hudson as good as he can stick (did you know Hudson? I suspect you did), Mrs. H. his real born mother, a thing rarely managed in fiction. We are all keeping pretty fit and pretty hearty; but this letter is not from me to you, it is from a reader of _R. H._ to the author of the same, and it says nothing, and has nothing to say, but thank you. We are going to re-read _Casamassima_ as a proper pendant. Sir, I think these two are your best, and care not who knows it. May I beg you, the next time _Roderick_ is printed off, to go over the sheets of the last few chapters, and strike out "immense" and "tremendous"? You have simply dropped them there like your pocket-handkerchief; all you have to do is to pick them up and pouch them, and your room--what do I say?--your cathedral!--will be swept and garnished.--I am, dear sir, your delighted reader, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--Perhaps it is a pang of causeless honesty, perhaps I hope it will set a value on my praise of _Roderick_, perhaps it's a burst of the diabolic, but I must break out with the news that I can't bear the _Portrait of a Lady_. I read it all, and I wept too; but I can't stand your having written it; and I beg you will write no more of the like. _Infra_, sir; Below you: I can't help it--it may be your favourite work, but in my eyes it's BELOW YOU to write and me to read. I thought _Roderick_ was going to be another such at the beginning; and I cannot describe my pleasure as I found it taking bones and blood, and looking out at me with a moved and human countenance, whose lineaments are written in my memory until my last of days. R. L. S. My wife begs your forgiveness; I believe for her silence. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Saranac Lake [December 1887]._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--This goes to say that we are all fit, and the place is very bleak and wintry, and up to now has shown no such charms of climate as Davos, but is a place where men eat and where the cattarh, catarrh (cattarrh, or cattarrhh) appears to be unknown. I walk in my verandy in the snaw, sir, looking down over one of those dabbled wintry landscapes that are (to be frank) so chilly to the human bosom, and up at a grey, English--nay, _mehercle_, Scottish--heaven; and I think it pretty bleak; and the wind swoops at me round the corner, like a lion, and fluffs the snow in my face; and I could aspire to be elsewhere; but yet I do not catch cold, and yet, when I come in, I eat. So that hitherto Saranac, if not deliriously delectable, has not been a failure; nay, from the mere point of view of the wicked body, it has proved a success. But I wish I could still get to the woods; alas, _nous n'irons plus au bois_ is my poor song; the paths are buried, the dingles drifted full, a little walk is grown a long one; till spring comes, I fear the burthen will hold good. I get along with my papers for Scribner not fast, nor so far specially well; only this last, the fourth one (which makes a third part of my whole task), I do believe is pulled off after a fashion. It is a mere sermon: "Smith opens out";[24] but it is true, and I find it touching and beneficial, to me at least; and I think there is some fine writing in it, some very apt and pregnant phrases. _Pulvis et Umbra_, I call it; I might have called it a Darwinian Sermon, if I had wanted. Its sentiments, although parsonic, will not offend even you, I believe. The other three papers, I fear, bear many traces of effort, and the ungenuine inspiration of an income at so much per essay, and the honest desire of the incomer to give good measure for his money. Well, I did my damndest anyway. We have been reading H. James's _Roderick Hudson_, which I eagerly press you to get at once: it is a book of a high order--the last volume in particular. I wish Meredith would read it. It took my breath away. I am at the seventh book of the _Æneid_, and quite amazed at its merits (also very often floored by its difficulties). The Circe passage at the beginning, and the sublime business of Amata with the simile of the boy's top--O Lord, what a happy thought!--have specially delighted me.--I am, dear sir, your respected friend, JOHN GREGG GILLSON, J.P., M.R.I.A., etc. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The following narrates the beginning of the author's labours on _The Master of Ballantrae_. An unfinished paper written some years later in Samoa, and intended for Scribner's Magazine, tells how the story first took shape in his mind. See Edinburgh edition, _Miscellanies_, vol. iv. p. 297: reprinted in _Essays on the Art of Writing_. [_Saranac Lake, December 24, 1887._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--Thank you for your explanations. I have done no more Virgil since I finished the seventh book, for I have first been eaten up with Taine, and next have fallen head over heels into a new tale, _The Master of Ballantrae_. No thought have I now apart from it, and I have got along up to page ninety-two of the draft with great interest. It is to me a most seizing tale: there are some fantastic elements; the most is a dead genuine human problem--human tragedy, I should say rather. It will be about as long, I imagine, as _Kidnapped_. DRAMATIS PERSONAE: (1) My old Lord Durrisdeer. (2) The Master of Ballantrae, _and_ (3) Henry Durie, _his sons_. (4) Clementina,[25] _engaged to the first, married to the second_. (5) Ephraim Mackellar, _land steward at Durrisdeer and narrator of the most of the book_. (6) Francis Burke, Chevalier de St. Louis, _one of Prince Charlie's Irishmen and narrator of the rest_. Besides these, many instant figures, most of them dumb or nearly so: Jessie Brown the whore, Captain Crail, Captain MacCombie, our old friend Alan Breck, our old friend Riach (both only for an instant), Teach the pirate (vulgarly Blackbeard), John Paul and Macconochie, servants at Durrisdeer. The date is from 1745 to '65 (about). The scene, near Kirkcudbright, in the States, and for a little moment in the French East Indies. I have done most of the big work, the quarrel, duel between the brothers, and announcement of the death to Clementina and my Lord--Clementina, Henry, and Mackellar (nicknamed Squaretoes) are really very fine fellows; the Master is all I know of the devil. I have known hints of him, in the world, but always cowards; he is as bold as a lion, but with the same deadly, causeless duplicity I have watched with so much surprise in my two cowards. 'Tis true, I saw a hint of the same nature in another man who was not a coward; but he had other things to attend to; the Master has nothing else but his devilry. Here come my visitors--and have now gone, or the first relay of them; and I hope no more may come. For mark you, sir, this is our "day"--Saturday, as ever was; and here we sit, my mother and I, before a large wood fire and await the enemy with the most steadfast courage; and without snow and greyness: and the woman Fanny in New York for her health, which is far from good; and the lad Lloyd at the inn in the village because he has a cold; and the handmaid Valentine abroad in a sleigh upon her messages; and to-morrow Christmas and no mistake. Such is human life: _la carrière humaine_. I will enclose, if I remember, the required autograph. I will do better, put it on the back of this page. Love to all, and mostly, my very dear Colvin, to yourself. For whatever I say or do, or don't say or do, you may be very sure I am--Yours always affectionately, R. L. S. TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE _Saranac Lake, Christmas 1887._ MY DEAR MISS BOODLE,---And a very good Christmas to you all; and better fortune; and if worse, the more courage to support it--which I think is the kinder wish in all human affairs. Somewhile--I fear a good while--after this, you should receive our Christmas gift; we have no tact and no taste, only a welcome and (often) tonic brutality; and I dare say the present, even after my friend Baxter has acted on and reviewed my hints, may prove a White Elephant. That is why I dread presents. And therefore pray understand if any element of that hamper prove unwelcome, _it is to be exchanged_. I will not sit down under the name of a giver of White Elephants. I never had any elephant but one, and his initials were R. L. S.; and he trod on my foot at a very early age. But this is a fable, and not in the least to the point: which is that if, for once in my life, I have wished to make things nicer for anybody but the Elephant (see fable), do not suffer me to have made them ineffably more embarrassing, and exchange--ruthlessly exchange! For my part, I am the most cockered up of any mortal being; and one of the healthiest, or thereabout, at some modest distance from the bull's eye. I am condemned to write twelve articles in Scribner's Magazine for the love of gain; I think I had better send you them; what is far more to the purpose, I am on the jump with a new story which has bewitched me--I doubt it may bewitch no one else. It is called _The Master of Ballantrae_--pronounce B[=a]ll[)a]n-tray. If it is not good, well, mine will be the fault; for I believe it is a good tale. The greetings of the season to you, and your mother, and your sisters. My wife heartily joins.--And I am, yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--You will think me an illiterate dog: I am, for the first time, reading Robertson's sermons. I do not know how to express how much I think of them. If by any chance you should be as illiterate as I, and not know them, it is worth while curing the defect. R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER The following letter invites Mr. Baxter to allow himself (under an _alias_) and his office in Edinburgh to figure in a preface to the new story. Such a preface was drafted accordingly, but on second thoughts suppressed; to be, on renewed consideration, reinstated in the final editions. _Saranac Lake, January '88._ DEAR CHARLES,--You are the flower of Doers.... Will my doer collaborate thus much in my new novel? In the year 1794 or 5, Mr. Ephraim Mackellar, A.M., late steward on the Durrisdeer estates, completed a set of memoranda (as long as a novel) with regard to the death of the (then) late Lord Durrisdeer, and as to that of his attainted elder brother, called by the family courtesy title the Master of Ballantrae. These he placed in the hand of John Macbrair, W.S., the family agent, on the understanding they were to be sealed until 1862, when a century would have elapsed since the affair in the wilderness (my lord's death). You succeeded Mr. Macbrair's firm; the Durrisdeers are extinct; and last year, in an old green box, you found these papers with Macbrair's indorsation. It is that indorsation of which I want a copy; you may remember, when you gave me the papers, I neglected to take that, and I am sure you are a man too careful of antiquities to have let it fall aside. I shall have a little introduction descriptive of my visit to Edinburgh, arrival there, denner with yoursel', and first reading of the papers in your smoking-room: all of which, of course, you well remember.--Ever yours affectionately, R. L. S. Your name is my friend Mr. Johnstone Thomson, W.S.!!! TO E. L. BURLINGAME _Saranac Lake, Winter 1887-88._ DEAR MR. BURLINGAME,--I am keeping the sermon to see if I can't add another. Meanwhile, I will send you very soon a different paper which may take its place. Possibly some of these days soon I may get together a talk on things current, which should go in (if possible) earlier than either. I am now less nervous about these papers; I believe I can do the trick without great strain, though the terror that breathed on my back in the beginning is not yet forgotten. The _Master of Ballantrae_ I have had to leave aside, as I was quite worked out. But in about a week I hope to try back and send you the first four numbers: these are all drafted, it is only the revision that has broken me down, as it is often the hardest work. These four I propose you should set up for me at once, and we'll copyright 'em in a pamphlet. I will tell you the names of the _bona fide_ purchasers in England. The numbers will run from twenty to thirty pages of my manuscript. You can give me that much, can you not? It is a howling good tale--at least these first four numbers are; the end is a trifle more fantastic, but 'tis all picturesque. Don't trouble about any more French books; I am on another scent, you see, just now. Only the _French in Hindustan_ I await with impatience, as that is for _Ballantrae_. The scene of that romance is Scotland---the States--Scotland--India---Scotland--and the States again; so it jumps like a flea. I have enough about the States now, and very much obliged I am; yet if Drake's _Tragedies of the Wilderness_ is (as I gather) a collection of originals, I should like to purchase it. If it is a picturesque vulgarisation, I do not wish to look it in the face. Purchase, I say; for I think it would be well to have some such collection by me with a view to fresh works.--Yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--If you think of having the _Master_ illustrated, I suggest that Hole would be very well up to the Scottish, which is the larger, part. If you have it done here, tell your artist to look at the hall of Craigievar in Billing's _Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities_, and he will get a broad hint for the hall at Durrisdeer: it is, I think, the chimney of Craigievar and the roof of Pinkie, and perhaps a little more of Pinkie altogether; but I should have to see the book myself to be sure. Hole would be invaluable for this. I dare say if you had it illustrated, you could let me have one or two for the English edition. R. L. S. TO WILLIAM ARCHER The following refers to Mr. Bernard Shaw's novel, _Cashel Byron's Profession_, which had been sent Stevenson to read by their common friend Mr. Archer. [_Saranac Lake, Winter 1887-88._] MY DEAR ARCHER,--What am I to say? I have read your friend's book with singular relish. If he has written any other, I beg you will let me see it; and if he has not, I beg him to lose no time in supplying the deficiency. It is full of promise; but I should like to know his age. There are things in it that are very clever, to which I attach small importance; it is the shape of the age. And there are passages, particularly the rally in presence of the Zulu king, that show genuine and remarkable narrative talent--a talent that few will have the wit to understand, a talent of strength, spirit, capacity, sufficient vision, and sufficient self-sacrifice, which last is the chief point in a narrator. As a whole, it is (of course) a fever dream of the most feverish. Over Bashville the footman I howled with derision and delight; I dote on Bashville--I could read of him for ever; _de Bashville je suis le fervent_--there is only one Bashville, and I am his devoted slave; _Bashville est magnifique, mais il n'est guère possible_. He is the note of the book. It is all mad, mad and deliriously delightful; the author has a taste in chivalry like Walter Scott's or Dumas', and then he daubs in little bits of socialism; he soars away on the wings of the romantic griffon--even the griffon, as he cleaves air, shouting with laughter at the nature of the quest--and I believe in his heart he thinks he is labouring in a quarry of solid granite realism. It is this that makes me--the most hardened adviser now extant--stand back and hold my peace. If Mr. Shaw is below five-and-twenty, let him go his path; if he is thirty, he had best be told that he is a romantic, and pursue romance with his eyes open;--or perhaps he knows it;--God knows!--my brain is softened. It is HORRID FUN. All I ask is more of it. Thank you for the pleasure you gave us, and tell me more of the inimitable author. (I say, Archer, my God, what women!)--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 1 part Charles Reade; 1 part Henry James or some kindred author badly assimilated; 1/2 part Disraeli (perhaps unconscious); 1-1/2 parts struggling, over-laid original talent; 1 part blooming, gaseous folly. That is the equation as it stands. What it may be, I don't know, nor any other man. _Vixere fortes_--O, let him remember that--let him beware of his damned century; his gifts of insane chivalry and animated narration are just those that might be slain and thrown out like an untimely birth by the Daemon of the epoch. And if he only knew how I have adored the chivalry! Bashville!--_O Bashville! j'en chortle_ (which is fairly polyglot). R. L. S. TO WILLIAM ARCHER [_Saranac Lake, February 1888._] MY DEAR ARCHER,--Pretty sick in bed; but necessary to protest and continue your education. Why was Jenkin an amateur in my eyes? You think because not amusing (I think he often was amusing). The reason is this: I never, or almost never, saw two pages of his work that I could not have put in one without the smallest loss of material. That is the only test I know of writing. If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and as engagingly and as forcibly said in one, then it's amateur work. Then you will bring me up with old Dumas. Nay, the object of a story is to be long, to fill up hours; the story-teller's art of writing is to water out by continual invention, historical and technical, and yet not seem to water; seem on the other hand to practise that same wit of conspicuous and declaratory condensation which is the proper art of writing. That is one thing in which my stories fail: I am always cutting the flesh off their bones. I would rise from the dead to preach! Hope all well. I think my wife better, but she's not allowed to write; and this (only wrung from me by desire to Boss and Parsonise and Dominate, strong in sickness) is my first letter for days, and will likely be my last for many more. Not blame my wife for her silence: doctor's orders. All much interested by your last, and fragment from brother, and anecdotes of Tomarcher.--The sick but still Moral R. L. S. Tell Shaw to hurry up: I want another. TO WILLIAM ARCHER In early days in Paris, Stevenson's chivalrous feelings had once been shocked by the scene in the _Demi-Monde_ of Dumas fils, where Suzanne d'Ange is trapped by Olivier de Jalin. His correspondent had asked what exactly took place. [_Saranac Lake, February 1888 ?_] MY DEAR ARCHER,--It happened thus. I came forth from that performance in a breathing heat of indignation. (Mind, at this distance of time and with my increased knowledge, I admit there is a problem in the piece; but I saw none then, except a problem in brutality; and I still consider the problem in that case not established.) On my way down the _Français_ stairs, I trod on an old gentleman's toes, whereupon with that suavity that so well becomes me, I turned about to apologise, and on the instant, repenting me of that intention, stopped the apology midway, and added something in French to this effect: No, you are one of the _lâches_ who have been applauding that piece. I retract my apology. Said the old Frenchman, laying his hand on my arm, and with a smile that was truly heavenly in temperance, irony, good-nature, and knowledge of the world, "Ah, monsieur, vous êtes bien jeune!"--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO E. L. BURLINGAME [_Saranac Lake, February 1888._] DEAR MR. BURLINGAME,--Will you send me (from the library) some of the works of my dear old G. P. R. James? With the following especially I desire to make or to renew acquaintance: _The Songster_, _The Gipsy_, _The Convict_, _The Stepmother_, _The Gentleman of the Old School_, _The Robber_. _Excusez du peu._ This sudden return to an ancient favourite hangs upon an accident. The "Franklin County Library" contains two works of his, _The Cavalier_ and _Morley Ernstein_. I read the first with indescribable amusement--it was worse than I had feared, and yet somehow engaging; the second (to my surprise) was better than I had dared to hope: a good, honest, dull, interesting tale, with a genuine old-fashioned talent in the invention when not strained; and a genuine old-fashioned feeling for the English language. This experience awoke appetite, and you see I have taken steps to stay it. R. L. S. TO E. L. BURLINGAME [_Saranac Lake, February 1888._] DEAR MR. BURLINGAME,--1. Of course then don't use it. Dear Man, I write these to please you, not myself, and you know a main sight better than I do what is good. In that case, however, I enclose another paper, and return the corrected proof of _Pulvis et Umbra_, so that we may be afloat. 2. I want to say a word as to the _Master_. (The _Master of Ballantrae_ shall be the name by all means.) If you like and want it, I leave it to you to make an offer. You may remember I thought the offer you made when I was still in England too small; by which I did not at all mean, I thought it less than it was worth, but too little to tempt me to undergo the disagreeables of serial publication. This tale (if you want it) you are to have; for it is the least I can do for you; and you are to observe that the sum you pay me for my articles going far to meet my wants, I am quite open to be satisfied with less than formerly. I tell you I do dislike this battle of the dollars. I feel sure you all pay too much here in America; and I beg you not to spoil me any more. For I am getting spoiled: I do not want wealth, and I feel these big sums demoralise me. My wife came here pretty ill; she had a dreadful bad night; to-day she is better. But now Valentine is ill; and Lloyd and I have got breakfast, and my hand somewhat shakes after washing dishes.--Yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--Please order me the Evening Post for two months. My subscription is run out. The _Mutiny_ and _Edwardes_ to hand. TO SIDNEY COLVIN [_Saranac Lake, March 1888._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--Fanny has been very unwell. She is not long home, has been ill again since her return, but is now better again to a degree. You must not blame her for not writing, as she is not allowed to write at all, not even a letter. To add to our misfortunes, Valentine is quite ill and in bed. Lloyd and I get breakfast; I have now, 10.15, just got the dishes washed and the kitchen all clear, and sit down to give you as much news as I have spirit for, after such an engagement. Glass is a thing that really breaks my spirit: I do not like to fail, and with glass I cannot reach the work of my high calling--the artist's. I am, as you may gather from this, wonderfully better: this harsh, grey, glum, doleful climate has done me good. You cannot fancy how sad a climate it is. When the thermometer stays all day below 10°, it is really cold; and when the wind blows, O commend me to the result. Pleasure in life is all delete; there is no red spot left, fires do not radiate, you burn your hands all the time on what seem to be cold stones. It is odd, zero is like summer heat to us now; and we like, when the thermometer outside is really low, a room at about 48°: 60° we find oppressive. Yet the natives keep their holes at 90° or even 100°. This was interrupted days ago by household labours. Since then I have had and (I tremble to write it, but it does seem as if I had) beaten off an influenza. The cold is exquisite. Valentine still in bed. The proofs of the first part of _The Master of Ballantrae_ begin to come in; soon you shall have it in the pamphlet form; and I hope you will like it. The second part will not be near so good; but there--we can but do as it'll do with us. I have every reason to believe this winter has done me real good, so far as it has gone; and if I carry out my scheme for next winter, and succeeding years, I should end by being a tower of strength. I want you to save a good holiday for next winter; I hope we shall be able to help you to some larks. Is there any Greek Isle you would like to explore? or any creek in Asia Minor?--Yours ever affectionately, R. L. S. TO THE REV. DR. CHARTERIS The Rev. Dr. Charteris, of Edinburgh, had been one of the most intimate and trusted friends of Stevenson's father, and R. L. S. turns to him accordingly for memories and impressions. [_Saranac Lake, Winter 1887-88._] MY DEAR DR. CHARTERIS,--I have asked Douglas and Foulis to send you my last volume, so that you may possess my little paper on my father in a permanent shape; not for what that is worth, but as a tribute of respect to one whom my father regarded with such love, esteem, and affection. Besides, as you will see, I have brought you under contribution, and I have still to thank you for your letter to my mother; so more than kind; in much, so just. It is my hope, when time and health permit, to do something more definite for my father's memory. You are one of the very few who can (if you will) help me. Pray believe that I lay on you no obligation; I know too well, you may believe me, how difficult it is to put even two sincere lines upon paper, where all, too, is to order. But if the spirit should ever move you, and you should recall something memorable of your friend, his son will heartily thank you for a note of it.--With much respect, believe me, yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO EDMUND GOSSE [_Saranac Lake, March 31, 1888._] MY DEAR GOSSE,--Why so plaintive? Either the post-office has played us false, or you were in my debt. In case it should be my letter that has failed to come to post, I must tell again the fate of Mrs. Gosse's thermometer. It hangs in our sitting-room, where it has often marked freezing point and below; "See what Gosse says," is a common word of command. But the point is this: in the verandah hangs another thermometer, condemned to register minus 40° and that class of temperatures; and to him, we have given the name of the Quarterly Reviewer. I hope the jape likes you. Please tell the Fortnightly man that I am sorry but I can do nothing of that sort this year, as I am under a pledge to Scribner's; and indeed my monthly articles take the best of my time. It was a project I went into with horrid diffidence; and lucre was my only motive. I get on better than I expected, but it is difficult to find an article of the sort required for each date, and to vary the matter and keep up (if possible) the merit. I do not know if you think I have at all succeeded; it seemed to me this really worked paper was more money's worth (as well as probably better within my means) than the Lang business at the Sign of the Ship. Indeed I feel convinced I could never have managed that; it takes a gift to do it. Here is lunch.--Yours afftly., R. L. S. TO HENRY JAMES [_Saranac Lake, March 1888._] MY DEAR DELIGHTFUL JAMES,--To quote your heading to my wife, I think no man writes so elegant a letter, I am sure none so kind, unless it be Colvin, and there is more of the stern parent about him. I was vexed at your account of my admired Meredith: I wish I could go and see him; as it is I will try to write; and yet (do you understand me?) there is something in that potent, _genialisch_ affectation that puts one on the strain even to address him in a letter. He is not an easy man to be yourself with: there is so much of him, and veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.[26] I read with indescribable admiration your _Emerson_. I begin to long for the day when these portraits of yours shall be collected: do put me in. But Emerson is a higher flight. Have you a _Tourgueneff_? You have told me many interesting things of him, and I seem to see them written, and forming a graceful and _bildend_ sketch. (I wonder whence comes this flood of German--I haven't opened a German book since I teethed.) My novel is a tragedy; four parts out of six or seven are written, and gone to Burlingame. Five parts of it are sound, human tragedy; the last one or two, I regret to say, not so soundly designed; I almost hesitate to write them; they are very picturesque, but they are fantastic; they shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning. I wish I knew; that was how the tale came to me however. I got the situation; it was an old taste of mine: The older brother goes out in the '45, the younger stays; the younger, of course, gets title and estate and marries the bride designate of the elder--a family match, but he (the younger) had always loved her, and she had really loved the elder. Do you see the situation? Then the devil and Saranac suggested this _dénouement_, and I joined the two ends in a day or two of constant feverish thought, and began to write. And now--I wonder if I have not gone too far with the fantastic? The elder brother is an INCUBUS: supposed to be killed at Culloden, he turns up again and bleeds the family of money; on that stopping he comes and lives with them, whence flows the real tragedy, the nocturnal duel of the brothers (very naturally, and indeed, I think, inevitably arising), and second supposed death of the elder. Husband and wife now really make up, and then the cloven hoof appears. For the third supposed death and the manner of the third reappearance is steep; steep, sir. It is even very steep, and I fear it shames the honest stuff so far; but then it is highly pictorial, and it leads up to the death of the elder brother at the hands of the younger in a perfectly cold-blooded murder, of which I wish (and mean) the reader to approve. You see how daring is the design. There are really but six characters, and one of these episodic, and yet it covers eighteen years, and will be, I imagine, the longest of my works.--Yours ever, R. L. S. _Read Gosse's Raleigh._ First-rate.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO THE REV. DR. CHARTERIS _Saranac Lake, Adirondacks, New York, U.S.A. [Spring 1888]._ MY DEAR DR. CHARTERIS,--The funeral letter, your notes, and many other things, are reserved for a book, _Memorials of a Scottish Family_, if ever I can find time and opportunity. I wish I could throw off all else and sit down to it to-day. Yes, my father was a "distinctly religious man," but not a pious. The distinction painfully and pleasurably recalls old conflicts; it used to be my great gun--and you, who suffered for the whole Church, know how needful it was to have some reserve artillery! His sentiments were tragic; he was a tragic thinker. Now, granted that life is tragic to the marrow, it seems the proper function of religion to make us accept and serve in that tragedy, as officers in that other and comparable one of war. Service is the word, active service, in the military sense; and the religious man--I beg pardon, the pious man--is he who has a military joy in duty--not he who weeps over the wounded. We can do no more than try to do our best. Really, I am the grandson of the manse--I preach you a kind of sermon. Box the brat's ears! My mother--to pass to matters more within my competence--finely enjoys herself. The new country, some new friends we have made, the interesting experiment of this climate--which (at least) is tragic--all have done her good. I have myself passed a better winter than for years, and now that it is nearly over have some diffident hopes of doing well in the summer and "eating a little more air" than usual. I thank you for the trouble you are taking, and my mother joins with me in kindest regards to yourself and Mrs. Charteris.--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO S. R. CROCKETT [_Saranac Lake, Spring 1888_]. DEAR MINISTER OF THE FREE KIRK AT PENICUIK,--For O, man, I cannae read your name!--That I have been so long in answering your delightful letter sits on my conscience badly. The fact is I let my correspondence accumulate until I am going to leave a place; and then I pitch in, overhaul the pile, and my cries of penitence might be heard a mile about. Yesterday I despatched thirty-five belated letters: conceive the state of my conscience, above all as the Sins of Omission (see boyhood's guide, the Shorter Catechism) are in my view the only serious ones; I call it my view, but it cannot have escaped you that it was also Christ's. However, all that is not to the purpose, which is to thank you for the sincere pleasure afforded by your charming letter. I get a good few such; how few that please me at all, you would be surprised to learn--or have a singularly just idea of the dulness of our race; how few that please me as yours did, I can tell you in one word--_None_. I am no great kirkgoer, for many reasons--and the sermon's one of them, and the first prayer another, but the chief and effectual reason is the stuffiness. I am no great kirkgoer, says I, but when I read yon letter of yours, I thought I would like to sit under ye. And then I saw ye were to send me a bit buik, and says I, I'll wait for the bit buik, and then I'll mebbe can read the man's name, and anyway I'll can kill twa birds wi' ae stane. And, man! the buik was ne'er heard tell o'! That fact is an adminicle of excuse for my delay. And now, dear minister of the illegible name, thanks to you, and greeting to your wife, and may you have good guidance in your difficult labours, and a blessing on your life. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. (No just sae young's he was, though-- I'm awfae near forty, man.) Address c/o Charles Scribner's Sons, 743 Broadway, New York. Don't put "N.B." in your paper: put SCOTLAND, and be done with it. Alas, that I should be thus stabbed in the home of my friends! The name of my native land is not NORTH BRITAIN, whatever may be the name of yours. R. L. S. TO MISS FERRIER [_Saranac Lake, April 1888._] MY DEAREST COGGIE,--I wish I could find the letter I began to you some time ago when I was ill; but I can't and I don't believe there was much in it anyway. We have all behaved like pigs and beasts and barn-door poultry to you; but I have been sunk in work, and the lad is lazy and blind and has been working too; and as for Fanny, she has been (and still is) really unwell. I had a mean hope you might perhaps write again before I got up steam: I could not have been more ashamed of myself than I am, and I should have had another laugh. They always say I cannot give news in my letters: I shall shake off that reproach. On Monday, if she is well enough, Fanny leaves for California to see her friends; it is rather an anxiety to let her go alone; but the doctor simply forbids it in my case, and she is better anywhere than here--a bleak, blackguard, beggarly climate, of which I can say no good except that it suits me and some others of the same or similar persuasions whom (by all rights) it ought to kill. It is a form of Arctic St. Andrews, I should imagine; and the miseries of forty degrees below zero, with a high wind, have to be felt to be appreciated. The greyness of the heavens here is a circumstance eminently revolting to the soul; I have near forgot the aspect of the sun--I doubt if this be news; it is certainly no news to us. My mother suffers a little from the inclemency of the place, but less on the whole than would be imagined. Among other wild schemes, we have been projecting yacht voyages; and I beg to inform you that Cogia Hassan was cast for the part of passenger. They may come off!--Again this is not news. The lad? Well, the lad wrote a tale this winter, which appeared to me so funny that I have taken it in hand, and some of these days you will receive a copy of a work entitled "_A Game of Bluff_, by Lloyd Osbourne and Robert Louis Stevenson." Otherwise he (the lad) is much as usual. There remains, I believe, to be considered only R. L. S., the house-bond, prop, pillar, bread-winner, and bully of the establishment. Well, I do not think him much better; he is making piles of money; the hope of being able to hire a yacht ere long dances before his eyes; otherwise he is not in very high spirits at this particular moment, though compared with last year at Bournemouth an angel of joy. And now is this news, Cogia, or is it not? It all depends upon the point of view, and I call it news. The devil of it is that I can think of nothing else, except to send you all our loves, and to wish exceedingly you were here to cheer us all up. But we'll see about that on board the yacht.--Your affectionate friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The Mutiny novel here foreshadowed never got written. _[Saranac Lake] April 9th!! 1888._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--I have been long without writing to you, but am not to blame. I had some little annoyances quite for a private eye, but they ran me so hard that I could not write without lugging them in, which (for several reasons) I did not choose to do. Fanny is off to San Francisco, and next week I myself flit to New York: address Scribner's. Where we shall go I know not, nor (I was going to say) care; so bald and bad is my frame of mind. Do you know our--ahem!--fellow clubman, Colonel Majendie? I had such an interesting letter from him. Did you see my sermon? It has evoked the worst feeling: I fear people don't care for the truth, or else I don't tell it. Suffer me to wander without purpose. I have sent off twenty letters to-day, and begun and stuck at a twenty-first, and taken a copy of one which was on business, and corrected several galleys of proof, and sorted about a bushel of old letters; so if any one has a right to be romantically stupid it is I--and I am. Really deeply stupid, and at that stage when in old days I used to pour out words without any meaning whatever and with my mind taking no part in the performance. I suspect that is now the case. I am reading with extraordinary pleasure the life of Lord Lawrence: Lloyd and I have a mutiny novel-- (_Next morning, after twelve other letters_)--mutiny novel on hand--a tremendous work--so we are all at Indian books. The idea of the novel is Lloyd's: I call it a novel. 'Tis a tragic romance, of the most tragic sort: I believe the end will be almost too much for human endurance--when the hero is thrown to the ground with one of his own (Sepoy) soldier's knees upon his chest, and the cries begin in the Beebeeghar. O truly, you know it is a howler! The whole last part is--well the difficulty is that, short of resuscitating Shakespeare, I don't know who is to write it. I still keep wonderful. I am a great performer before the Lord on the penny whistle.--Dear sir, sincerely yours, ANDREW JACKSON. TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE _[Saranac Lake, April 1888.] Address, c/o Messrs. Scribner's Sons, 743 Broadway, N.Y._ MY DEAR GAMEKEEPER,--Your p.c. (proving you a good student of Micawber) has just arrived, and it paves the way to something I am anxious to say. I wrote a paper the other day--_Pulvis et Umbra_;--I wrote it with great feeling and conviction: to me it seemed bracing and healthful, it is in such a world (so seen by me), that I am very glad to fight out my battle, and see some fine sunsets, and hear some excellent jests between whiles round the camp fire. But I find that to some people this vision of mine is a nightmare, and extinguishes all ground of faith in God or pleasure in man. Truth I think not so much of; for I do not know it. And I could wish in my heart that I had not published this paper, if it troubles folk too much: all have not the same digestion, nor the same sight of things. And it came over me with special pain that perhaps this article (which I was at the pains to send to her) might give dismalness to my _Gamekeeper at Home_. Well, I cannot take back what I have said; but yet I may add this. If my view be everything but the nonsense that it may be--to me it seems self-evident and blinding truth--surely of all things it makes this world holier. There is nothing in it but the moral side--but the great battle and the breathing times with their refreshments. I see no more and no less. And if you look again, it is not ugly, and it is filled with promise. Pray excuse a desponding author for this apology. My wife is away off to the uttermost parts of the States, all by herself. I shall be off, I hope, in a week; but where? Ah! that I know not. I keep wonderful, and my wife a little better, and the lad flourishing. We now perform duets on two D tin whistles; it is no joke to make the bass; I think I must really send you one, which I wish you would correct.... I may be said to live for these instrumental labours now, but I have always some childishness on hand.--I am, dear Gamekeeper, your indulgent but intemperate Squire, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Having spent the last fortnight of April at New York, Stevenson and his stepson moved at the beginning of May to the small New Jersey watering-place from whence the following few letters are dated: his wife having meanwhile gone to San Francisco, where she presently made arrangements for the Pacific yachting trip. _Union House, Manasquan, New Jersey [May 1888]._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--We are here at a delightful country inn, like a country French place, the only people in the house, a cat-boat at our disposal, the sea always audible on the outer beach, the lagoon as smooth as glass, all the little, queer, many coloured villas standing shuttered and empty; in front of ours, across the lagoon, two long wooden bridges; one for the rail, one for the road, sounding with intermittent traffic. It is highly pleasant, and a delightful change from Saranac. My health is much better for the change; I am sure I walked about four miles yesterday, one time with another--well, say three and a half; and the day before, I was out for four hours in the cat-boat, and was as stiff as a board in consequence. More letters call.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER _Union House, Manasquan, N. J., but address to Scribner's, 11th May 1888._ _MY DEAR CHARLES_,--I have found a yacht, and we are going the full pitch for seven months. If I cannot get my health back (more or less), 'tis madness; but, of course, there is the hope, and I will play big.... If this business fails to set me up, well, £2000 is gone, and I know I can't get better. We sail from San Francisco, June 15th, for the South Seas in the yacht _Casco_.--With a million thanks for all your dear friendliness, ever yours affectionately, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO LADY TAYLOR [_Manasquan, May 1888._] MY DEAR LADY TAYLOR,--I have to announce our great news. On June 15th we sail from San Francisco in the schooner yacht _Casco_, for a seven months' cruise in the South Seas. You can conceive what a state of excitement we are in; Lloyd perhaps first; but this is an old dream of mine which actually seems to be coming true, and I am sun-struck. It seems indeed too good to be true; and that we have not deserved so much good fortune. From Skerryvore to the Galapagos is a far cry! And from poking in a sick-room all winter to the deck of one's own ship, is indeed a heavenly change. All these seven months I doubt if we can expect more than three mails at the best of it: and I do hope we may hear something of your news by each. I have no very clear views as to where the three addresses ought to be, but if you hear no later news, Charles Scribner's Sons will always have the run of our intended movements. And an early letter there would probably catch us at the Sandwich Islands. Tahiti will probably be the second point: and (as I roughly guess) Quito the third. But the whole future is invested with heavenly clouds. I trust you are all well and content, and have good news of the Shelleys, to whom I wish you would pass on ours. They should be able to sympathise with our delight. Now I have all my miserable Scribner articles to rake together in the inside of a fortnight: so you must not expect me to be more copious. I have you all in the kindest memory, and am, your affectionate friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Remember me to Aubrey de Vere. TO HOMER ST. GAUDENS The following is addressed from Manasquan to a boy, the son of the writer's friend, the sculptor St. Gaudens; for the rest, it explains itself. _Manasquan, New Jersey, 27th May 1888._ DEAR HOMER ST. GAUDENS,--Your father has brought you this day to see me, and he tells me it is his hope you may remember the occasion. I am going to do what I can to carry out his wish; and it may amuse you, years after, to see this little scrap of paper and to read what I write. I must begin by testifying that you yourself took no interest whatever in the introduction, and in the most proper spirit displayed a single-minded ambition to get back to play, and this I thought an excellent and admirable point in your character. You were also (I use the past tense, with a view to the time when you shall read, rather than to that when I am writing) a very pretty boy, and (to my European views) startlingly self-possessed. My time of observation was so limited that you must pardon me if I can say no more: what else I marked, what restlessness of foot and hand, what graceful clumsiness, what experimental designs upon the furniture, was but the common inheritance of human youth. But you may perhaps like to know that the lean flushed man in bed, who interested you so little, was in a state of mind extremely mingled and unpleasant: harassed with work which he thought he was not doing well, troubled with difficulties to which you will in time succeed, and yet looking forward to no less a matter than a voyage to the South Seas and the visitation of savage and desert islands.--Your father's friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO HENRY JAMES _Manasquan (ahem!), New Jersey, May 28th, 1888._ MY DEAR JAMES,--With what a torrent it has come at last! Up to now, what I like best is the first number of a _London Life_. You have never done anything better, and I don't know if perhaps you have ever done anything so good as the girl's outburst: tip-top. I have been preaching your later works in your native land. I had to present the Beltraffio volume to Low, and it has brought him to his knees; he was _amazed_ at the first part of Georgina's Reasons, although (like me) not so well satisfied with Part II. It is annoying to find the American public as stupid as the English, but they will waken up in time: I wonder what they will think of _Two Nations_?... This, dear James, is a valedictory. On June 15th the schooner yacht _Casco_ will (weather and a jealous providence permitting) steam through the Golden Gates for Honolulu, Tahiti, the Galapagos, Guayaquil, and--I hope _not_ the bottom of the Pacific. It will contain your obedient 'umble servant and party. It seems too good to be true, and is a very good way of getting through the green-sickness of maturity which, with all its accompanying ills, is now declaring itself in my mind and life. They tell me it is not so severe as that of youth; if I (and the _Casco_) are spared, I shall tell you more exactly, as I am one of the few people in the world who do not forget their own lives. Good-bye, then, my dear fellow, and please write us a word; we expect to have three mails in the next two months: Honolulu, Tahiti, and Guayaquil. But letters will be forwarded from Scribner's, if you hear nothing more definite directly. In 3 (three) days I leave for San Francisco.--Ever yours most cordially, R. L. S. FOOTNOTES: [21] For the actual sum, see below, p. 243. [22] "But she was more than usual calm, She did not give a single dam." _Marjorie Fleming._ [23] Of the play _Deacon Brodie_. [24] "Smith opens out his cauld harangues On practice and on morals." The Rev. George Smith of Galston, the minister thus referred to by Burns (in the _Holy Fair_), was a great-grandfather of Stevenson on the mother's side; and against Stevenson himself, in his didactic moods, the passage was often quoted by his friends when they wished to tease him. [25] Afterwards changed to Alison. [26] Alluding to a kind of lofty, posturing manner of G. M.'s in mind and speech, quite different from any real insincerity. X PACIFIC VOYAGES YACHT _CASCO_--SCHOONER _EQUATOR_--S.S. _JANET NICOLL_ JUNE 1888-OCTOBER 1890 In the following section are printed nearly all the letters which reached Stevenson's correspondents in England and the United States, at intervals necessarily somewhat rare, during the eighteen months of his Pacific voyages. It was on the 28th of June 1888 that he started from the harbour of San Francisco on what was only intended to be a health and pleasure excursion of a few months' duration, but turned into a voluntary exile prolonged until the hour of his death. His company consisted, besides himself, of his wife, his mother, his stepson Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, and the servant Valentine Roch. They sailed on board the schooner yacht _Casco_, Captain Otis, and made straight for the Marquesas, dropping anchor on the 28th of July in Anaho Bay, the harbour of the island of Nukahiva. The magic effect of this first island landfall on his mind he has described in the opening chapter of his book _In the South Seas_. After spending six weeks in this group they sailed south-eastwards, visiting (a sufficiently perilous piece of navigation) several of the coral atolls of the Paumotus or Low Archipelago. Thence they arrived in the first week of October at the Tahitian group or "Society" islands. In these their longest stay was not at the chief town, Papeete, where Stevenson fell sharply ill, but in a more secluded and very beautiful station, Tautira, whither he went to recruit, and where they were detained by the necessity of remasting the schooner. Here Stevenson and one of the local chiefs, Ori a Ori, made special friends and parted with heartfelt mutual regret. Mrs. Stevenson is good enough to allow me to supplement the somewhat fragmentary account of these adventures given in his letters with one or two of her own, in which they are told with full vividness and detail. Sailing from Tahiti due northwards through forty degrees of latitude, the party arrived about Christmas at Honolulu, the more than semi-civilised capital of the Hawaiian group (Sandwich Islands), where they paid off the yacht _Casco_ and made a stay of nearly six months. Here Stevenson finished _The Master of Ballantrae_ and _The Wrong Box_; and hence his mother returned for a while to Scotland, to rejoin her son's household when it was fairly installed two years later at Vailima. From Honolulu Stevenson made several excursions, including one, which profoundly impressed him, to the leper settlement at Molokai, the scene of Father Damien's ministrations and death. This first year of cruising and residence among the Pacific Islands had resulted in so encouraging a renewal of health, with so keen a zest added to life by the restored capacity for outdoor activity and adventure, that Stevenson determined to prolong his experiences in yet more remote archipelagoes of the same ocean. He started accordingly from Honolulu in June 1889 on a trading schooner, the _Equator_, bound to the Gilberts, one of the least visited and most primitively mannered of all the island groups of the Western Pacific; emerged towards Christmas of the same year into semi-civilisation again at Apia, on the island of Upolu in Samoa, where he wrote his first Polynesian story, _The Bottle Imp_. Enchanted with the scenery and the people, he stayed for six weeks, first in the house of Mr. H. J. Moors, a leading American trader, then with his family in a separate cottage not far off; bought an estate on the densely wooded mountain side above Apia, with the notion of making there, if not a home, at least a place of rest and call on later projected excursions among the islands; and began to make collections for his studies in recent Samoan history. In February he went on to Sydney to find his correspondence and consider future plans. It was during this stay at Sydney that he was moved to give expression to his righteous indignation at the terms of a letter concerning Father Damien by the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu. Here also he fell once more seriously ill, with a renewal of all his old symptoms; and the conclusion was forced upon him that he must take up his residence for the rest of his life in the tropics--though with occasional excursions, as he then hoped, at least half-way homeward to places where it might be possible for friends from England to meet him. In order to shake off the effects of this attack, he started with his party on a fresh sea voyage from Sydney, this time on a trading steamer, the _Janet Nicoll_, which took him by a very devious course to the Gilberts again, the Marshalls, and among many other remote islands during the months of April-August 1890. During the voyage he began to put into shape the notes for a volume on the South Seas which he had been compiling ever since he left San Francisco. Unfortunately, he persisted in the endeavour to make his work impersonal and full of information, or what he called "serious interest," exactly in the manner which his wife had foreseen before they left Honolulu, and from which she had wisely tried to dissuade him (see her letter printed on pp. 347 foll.). On the return voyage Stevenson left the _Janet Nicoll_ to land in New Caledonia, staying for some days at Noumea before he went on to Sydney, where he spent four or five weeks of later August and September. Thence he returned in October to take up his abode for good on his Samoan property, where the work of clearing, planting, and building a habitable cottage had been going on busily during his absence. TO SIDNEY COLVIN It should be remembered that the Marquesas, the Paumotus, and the Tahitian group are all dependencies of France. _Yacht Casco, Anaho Bay, Nukahiva, Marquesas Islands [July 1888]._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--From this somewhat (ahem) out of the way place, I write to say how d'ye do. It is all a swindle: I chose these isles as having the most beastly population, and they are far better, and far more civilised than we. I know one old chief Ko-o-amua, a great cannibal in his day, who ate his enemies even as he walked home from killing 'em, and he is a perfect gentleman and exceedingly amiable and simple-minded: no fool, though. The climate is delightful; and the harbour where we lie one of the loveliest spots imaginable. Yesterday evening we had near a score natives on board; lovely parties. We have a native god; very rare now. Very rare and equally absurd to view. This sort of work is not favourable to correspondence: it takes me all the little strength I have to go about and see, and then come home and note, the strangeness around us. I shouldn't wonder if there came trouble here some day, all the same. I could name a nation that is not beloved in certain islands--and it does not know it! Strange: like ourselves, perhaps, in India! Love to all and much to yourself. R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER _Yacht Casco, at sea, near the Paumotus, 7 A.M., September 6th, 1888, with a dreadful pen._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--Last night as I lay under my blanket in the cockpit, courting sleep, I had a comic seizure. There was nothing visible but the southern stars, and the steersman there out by the binnacle lamp; we were all looking forward to a most deplorable landfall on the morrow, praying God we should fetch a tuft of palms which are to indicate the Dangerous Archipelago; the night was as warm as milk, and all of a sudden I had a vision of--Drummond Street. It came on me like a flash of lightning: I simply returned thither, and into the past. And when I remember all I hoped and feared as I pickled about Rutherford's in the rain and the east wind; how I feared I should make a mere shipwreck, and yet timidly hoped not; how I feared I should never have a friend, far less a wife, and yet passionately hoped I might; how I hoped (if I did not take to drink) I should possibly write one little book, etc. etc. And then now--what a change! I feel somehow as if I should like the incident set upon a brass plate at the corner of that dreary thoroughfare for all students to read, poor devils, when their hearts are down. And I felt I must write one word to you. Excuse me if I write little: when I am at sea, it gives me a headache; when I am in port, I have my diary crying "Give, give." I shall have a fine book of travels, I feel sure; and will tell you more of the South Seas after very few months than any other writer has done--except Herman Melville perhaps, who is a howling cheese. Good luck to you, God bless you.--Your affectionate friend, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The signature used at foot of this letter and occasionally elsewhere, "The Old Man Virulent," alludes to the fits of uncontrollable anger to which he was often in youth, but by this time very rarely, subject: fits occasioned sometimes by instances of official stolidity or impertinence or what he took for such, more often by acts savouring of cruelty, meanness, or injustice. _Fakarava, Low Archipelago, September 21st, 1888._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--Only a word. Get out your big atlas, and imagine a straight line from San Francisco to Anaho, the N.E. corner of Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas Islands; imagine three weeks there: imagine a day's sail on August 12th round the eastern end of the island to Tai-o-hae, the capital; imagine us there till August 22nd: imagine us skirt the east side of Ua-pu--perhaps Rona-Poa on your atlas--and through the Bordelais straits to Taa-hauku in Hiva-Oa, where we arrive on the 23rd; imagine us there until September 4th, when we sailed for Fakarava, which we reached on the 9th, after a very difficult and dangerous passage among these isles. Tuesday, we shall leave for Taiti, where I shall knock off and do some necessary work ashore. It looks pretty bald in the atlas; not in fact; nor I trust in the 130 odd pages of diary which I have just been looking up for these dates: the interest, indeed, has been _incredible_: I did not dream there were such places or such races. My health has stood me splendidly; I am in for hours wading over the knees for shells; I have been five hours on horseback: I have been up pretty near all night waiting to see where the _Casco_ would go ashore, and with my diary all ready--simply the most entertaining night of my life. Withal I still have colds; I have one now, and feel pretty sick too; but not as at home: instead of being in bed, for instance, I am at this moment sitting snuffling and writing in an undershirt and trousers; and as for colour, hands, arms, feet, legs, and face, I am browner than the berry: only my trunk and the aristocratic spot on which I sit retain the vile whiteness of the north. Please give my news and kind love to Henley, Henry James, and any whom you see of well-wishers. Accept from me the very best of my affection: and believe me ever yours, THE OLD MAN VIRULENT. _Papeete, Taiti, October 7th, 1888._ Never having found a chance to send this off, I may add more of my news. My cold took a very bad turn, and I am pretty much out of sorts at this particular, living in a little bare one-twentieth-furnished house, surrounded by mangoes, etc. All the rest are well, and I mean to be soon. But these Taiti colds are very severe and, to children, often fatal; so they were not the thing for me. Yesterday the brigantine came in from San Francisco, so we can get our letters off soon. There are in Papeete at this moment, in a little wooden house with grated verandahs, two people who love you very much, and one of them is ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES BAXTER _Taiti, as ever was, 6th October 1888._ MY DEAR CHARLES,-- ... You will receive a lot of mostly very bad proofs of photographs: the paper was so bad. Please keep them very private, as they are for the book. We send them, having learned so dread a fear of the sea, that we wish to put our eggs in different baskets. We have been thrice within an ace of being ashore: we were lost (!) for about twelve hours in the Low Archipelago, but by God's blessing had quiet weather all the time; and once in a squall, we cam so near gaun heels ower hurdies, that I really dinnae ken why we didnae a'thegither. Hence, as I say, a great desire to put our eggs in different baskets, particularly on the Pacific (aw-haw-haw) Pacific Ocean. You can have no idea what a mean time we have had, owing to incidental beastlinesses, nor what a glorious, owing to the intrinsic interest of these isles. I hope the book will be a good one; nor do I really very much doubt that--the stuff is so curious; what I wonder is, if the public will rise to it. A copy of my journal, or as much of it as is made, shall go to you also; it is, of course, quite imperfect, much being to be added and corrected; but O, for the eggs in the different baskets. All the rest are well enough, and all have enjoyed the cruise so far, in spite of its drawbacks. We have had an awfae time in some ways, Mr. Baxter; and if I wasnae sic a verra patient man (when I ken that I _have_ to be) there wad hae been a braw row; and ance if I hadnae happened to be on deck about three in the marnin', I _think_ there would have been _murder_ done. The American Mairchant Marine is a kent service; ye'll have heard its praise, I'm thinkin'; an' if ye never did, ye can get _Twa Years Before the Mast_, by Dana, whaur forbye a great deal o' pleisure, ye'll get a' the needcessary information. Love to your father and all the family.--Ever your affectionate friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE This lady, as we have seen, had made Stevenson a present of a paper-cutter when he left Bournemouth; and it is in the character of the paper-cutter that he now writes. _Taiti, October 10th, 1888._ DEAR GIVER,--I am at a loss to conceive your object in giving me to a person so locomotory as my proprietor. The number of thousand miles that I have travelled, the strange bed-fellows with which I have been made acquainted, I lack the requisite literary talent to make clear to your imagination. I speak of bed-fellows; pocket-fellows would be a more exact expression, for the place of my abode is in my master's right-hand trouser-pocket; and there, as he waded on the resounding beaches of Nukahiva, or in the shallow tepid water on the reef of Fakarava, I have been overwhelmed by and buried among all manner of abominable South Sea shells, beautiful enough in their way, I make no doubt, but singular company for any self-respecting paper-cutter. He, my master--or as I more justly call him, my bearer; for although I occasionally serve him, does not he serve me daily and all day long, carrying me like an African potentate on my subject's legs?--_he_ is delighted with these isles, and this climate, and these savages, and a variety of other things. He now blows a flageolet with singular effects: sometimes the poor thing appears stifled with shame, sometimes it screams with agony; he pursues his career with truculent insensibility. Health appears to reign in the party. I was very nearly sunk in a squall. I am sorry I ever left England, for here there are no books to be had, and without books there is no stable situation for, dear Giver, your affectionate WOODEN PAPER-CUTTER. A neighbouring pair of scissors snips a kiss in your direction. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The ballad referred to in the letter which follows is the _Feast of Famine_, published with others in the collection of 1890 _Ballads_ (Chatto & Windus). I never very much admired his South Sea ballads for any quality except their narrative vigour, thinking them unequal and uncertain both in metre and style. _Taiti, October 16th, 1888._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--The cruiser for San Francisco departs to-morrow morning bearing you some kind of a scratch. This much more important packet will travel by way of Auckland. It contains a ballant; and I think a better ballant than I expected ever to do. I can imagine how you will wag your pow over it; and how ragged you will find it, etc., but has it not spirit all the same? and though the verse is not all your fancy painted it, has it not some life? And surely, as narrative, the thing has considerable merit! Read it, get a typewritten copy taken, and send me that and your opinion to the Sandwiches. I know I am only courting the most excruciating mortification; but the real cause of my sending the thing is that I could bear to go down myself, but not to have much MS. go down with me. To say truth, we are through the most dangerous; but it has left in all minds a strong sense of insecurity, and we are all for putting eggs in various baskets. We leave here soon, bound for Uahiva, Raiatea, Bora-Bora, and the Sandwiches. O, how my spirit languishes To step ashore on the Sanguishes; For there my letters wait, There shall I know my fate. O, how my spirit languidges To step ashore on the Sanguidges. _18th._--I think we shall leave here if all is well on Monday. I am quite recovered, astonishingly recovered. It must be owned these climates and this voyage have given me more strength than I could have thought possible. And yet the sea is a terrible place, stupefying to the mind and poisonous to the temper, the sea, the motion, the lack of space, the cruel publicity, the villainous tinned foods, the sailors, the captain, the passengers--but you are amply repaid when you sight an island, and drop anchor in a new world. Much trouble has attended this trip, but I must confess more pleasure. Nor should I ever complain, as in the last few weeks, with the curing of my illness indeed, as if that were the bursting of an abscess, the cloud has risen from my spirits and to some degree from my temper. Do you know what they called the _Casco_ at Fakarava? The _Silver Ship_. Is that not pretty? Pray tell Mrs. Jenkin, _die silberne Frau_, as I only learned it since I wrote her. I think of calling the book by that name: _The Cruise of the Silver Ship_--so there will be one poetic page at least--the title. At the Sandwiches we shall say farewell to the _S. S._ with mingled feelings. She is a lovely creature: the most beautiful thing at this moment in Taiti. Well, I will take another sheet, though I know I have nothing to say. You would think I was bursting: but the voyage is all stored up for the book, which is to pay for it, we fondly hope; and the troubles of the time are not worth telling; and our news is little. Here I conclude (Oct. 24th, I think), for we are now stored, and the Blue Peter metaphorically flies. R. L. S. TO WILLIAM AND THOMAS ARCHER Stevenson addresses a part of this letter, as well as the whole of another later on, to a young son of Mr. Archer's, but rather to amuse himself than his nominal correspondent, who was then aged three _Taiti, October 17th, 1888._ DEAR ARCHER,--Though quite unable to write letters I nobly send you a line signifying nothing. The voyage has agreed well with all; it has had its pains, and its extraordinary pleasures; nothing in the world can equal the excitement of the first time you cast anchor in some bay of a tropical island, and the boats begin to surround you, and the tattooed people swarm aboard. Tell Tomarcher, with my respex, that hide-and-seek is not equal to it; no, nor hidee-in-the-dark; which, for the matter of that, is a game for the unskilful: the artist prefers daylight, a good-sized garden, some shrubbery, an open paddock, and--come on, Macduff. TOMARCHER, I am now a distinguished litterytour, but that was not the real bent of my genius. I was the best player of hide-and-seek going; not a good runner, I was up to every shift and dodge, I could jink very well, I could crawl without any noise through leaves, I could hide under a carrot plant, it used to be my favourite boast that I always _walked_ into the den. You may care to hear, Tomarcher, about the children in these parts; their parents obey them, they do not obey their parents; and I am sorry to tell you (for I dare say you are already thinking the idea a good one) that it does not pay one halfpenny. There are three sorts of civilisation, Tomarcher: the real old-fashioned one, in which children either had to find out how to please their dear papas, or their dear papas cut their heads off. This style did very well, but is now out of fashion. Then the modern European style: in which children have to behave reasonably well, and go to school and say their prayers, or their dear papas _will know the reason why_. This does fairly well. Then there is the South Sea Island plan, which does not do one bit. The children beat their parents here; it does not make their parents any better; so do not try it. Dear Tomarcher, I have forgotten the address of your new house, but will send this to one of your papa's publishers. Remember us all to all of you, and believe me, yours respectably, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES BAXTER _Tautira (The Garden of the World), otherwise called Hans-Christian-Andersen-ville [November 1888]._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--Whether I have a penny left in the wide world, I know not, nor shall know, till I get to Honolulu, where I anticipate a devil of an awakening. It will be from a mighty pleasant dream at least: Tautira being mere Heaven. But suppose, for the sake of argument, any money to be left in the hands of my painful doer, what is to be done with it? Save us from exile would be the wise man's choice, I suppose; for the exile threatens to be eternal. But yet I am of opinion--in case there should be _some_ dibbs in the hand of the P.D., _i.e._ painful doer; because if there be none, I shall take to my flageolet on the high-road, and work home the best way I can, having previously made away with my family--I am of opinion that if ---- and his are in the customary state, and you are thinking of an offering, and there should be still some funds over, you would be a real good P.D. to put some in with yours and tak' the credit o't, like a wee man! I know it's a beastly thing to ask, but it, after all, does no earthly harm, only that much good. And besides, like enough there's nothing in the till, and there is an end. Yet I live here in the full lustre of millions; it is thought I am the richest son of man that has yet been to Tautira: I!--and I am secretly eaten with the fear of lying in pawn, perhaps for the remainder of my days, in San Francisco. As usual, my colds have much hashed my finances. Do tell Henley I write this just after having dismissed Ori the sub-chief, in whose house I live, Mrs. Ori, and Pairai, their adopted child, from the evening hour of music: during which I Publickly (with a k) Blow on the Flageolet. These are words of truth. Yesterday I told Ori about W. E. H., counterfeited his playing on the piano and the pipe, and succeeded in sending the six feet four there is of that sub-chief somewhat sadly to his bed; feeling that his was not the genuine article after all. Ori is exactly like a colonel in the Guards.--I am, dear Charles, ever yours affectionately, R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER The stanzas which end this letter are well known, having been printed, with one additional, in _Songs of Travel_; but they gain effect, I think, from being given here in their place. _Tautira, 10th November '88._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--Our mainmast is dry-rotten, and we are all to the devil; I shall lie in a debtor's jail. Never mind, Tautira is first chop. I am so besotted that I shall put on the back of this my attempt at words to Wandering Willie; if you can conceive at all the difficulty, you will also conceive the vanity with which I regard any kind of result; and whatever mine is like, it has some sense, and Burns's has none. Home no more home to me, whither must I wander? Hunger my driver, I go where I must. Cold blows the winter wind over hill and heather; Thick drives the rain, and my roof is in the dust. Loved of wise men was the shade of my roof-tree; The true word of welcome was spoken in the door-- Dear days of old, with the faces in the firelight, Kind folks of old, you come again no more. Home was home then, my dear, full of kindly faces, Home was home then, my dear, happy for the child. Fire and the windows bright glittered on the moorland; Song, tuneful song, built a palace in the wild. Now, when day dawns on the brow of the moorland, Lone stands the house, and the chimney-stone is cold. Lone let it stand, now the friends are all departed, The kind hearts, the true hearts, that loved the place of old. R. L. S. TO JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS The following is the draft of a proposed dedication to the South Sea travel-book which was to be the fruit of the present voyages, as is explained in a note at the end. _November 11th, 1888._ _One November night, in the village of Tautira, we sat at the high table in the hall of assembly, hearing the natives sing. It was dark in the hall, and very warm; though at times the land wind blew a little shrewdly through the chinks, and at times, through the larger openings, we could see the moonlight on the lawn. As the songs arose in the rattling Tahitian chorus, the chief translated here and there a verse. Farther on in the volume you shall read the songs themselves; and I am in hopes that not you only, but all who can find a savour in the ancient poetry of places, will read them with some pleasure. You are to conceive us, therefore, in strange circumstances and very pleasing; in a strange land and climate, the most beautiful on earth; surrounded by a foreign race that all travellers have agreed to be the most engaging; and taking a double interest in two foreign arts._ _We came forth again at last, in a cloudy moonlight, on the forest lawn which is the street of Tautira. The Pacific roared outside upon the reef. Here and there one of the scattered palm-built lodges shone out under the shadow of the wood, the lamplight bursting through the crannies of the wall. We went homeward slowly, Ori a Ori carrying behind us the lantern and the chairs, properties with which we had just been enacting our part of the distinguished visitor. It was one of those moments in which minds not altogether churlish recall the names and deplore the absence of congenial friends; and it was your name that first rose upon our lips. "How Symonds would have enjoyed this evening!" said one, and then another. The word caught in my mind; I went to bed, and it was still there. The glittering, frosty solitudes in which your days are cast arose before me: I seemed to see you walking there in the late night, under the pine-trees and the stars; and I received the image with something like remorse._ _There is a modern attitude towards Fortune; in this place I will not use a graver name. Staunchly to withstand her buffets and to enjoy with equanimity her favours was the code of the virtuous of old. Our fathers, it should seem, wondered and doubted how they had merited their misfortunes: we, rather how we have deserved our happiness. And we stand often abashed, and sometimes revolted, at those partialities of fate by which we profit most. It was so with me on that November night: I felt that our positions should be changed. It was you, dear Symonds, who should have gone upon that voyage and written this account. With your rich stores of knowledge, you could have remarked and understood a thousand things of interest and beauty that escaped my ignorance; and the brilliant colours of your style would have carried into a thousand sickrooms the sea air and the strong sun of tropic islands. It was otherwise decreed. But suffer me at least to connect you, if only in name and only in the fondness of imagination, with the voyage of the_ Silver Ship. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. DEAR SYMONDS,--I send you this (November 11th), the morning of its completion. If I ever write an account of this voyage, may I place this letter at the beginning? It represents--I need not tell you, for you too are an artist--a most genuine feeling, which kept me long awake last night; and though perhaps a little elaborate, I think it a good piece of writing. We are _in heaven here_. Do not forget. R. L. S. Please keep this: I have no perfect copy. _Tautira, on the peninsula of Taiti._ TO THOMAS ARCHER _Tautira, Island of Taiti [November 1888]._ DEAR TOMARCHER,--This is a pretty state of things! seven o'clock and no word of breakfast! And I was awake a good deal last night, for it was full moon, and they had made a great fire of cocoa-nut husks down by the sea, and as we have no blinds or shutters, this kept my room very bright. And then the rats had a wedding or a school-feast under my bed. And then I woke early, and I have nothing to read except Virgil's _Æneid_, which is not good fun on an empty stomach, and a Latin dictionary, which is good for naught, and by some humorous accident, your dear papa's article on Skerryvore. And I read the whole of that, and very impudent it is, but you must not tell your dear papa I said so, or it might come to a battle in which you might lose either a dear papa or a valued correspondent, or both, which would be prodigal. And still no breakfast; so I said "Let's write to Tomarcher." This is a much better place for children than any I have hitherto seen in these seas. The girls (and sometimes the boys) play a very elaborate kind of hopscotch. The boys play horses exactly as we do in Europe; and have very good fun on stilts, trying to knock each other down, in which they do not often succeed. The children of all ages go to church and are allowed to do what they please, running about the aisles, rolling balls, stealing mamma's bonnet and publicly sitting on it, and at last going to sleep in the middle of the floor. I forgot to say that the whips to play horses, and the balls to roll about the church--at least I never saw them used elsewhere--grow ready made on trees; which is rough on toy-shops. The whips are so good that I wanted to play horses myself; but no such luck! my hair is grey, and I am a great, big, ugly man. The balls are rather hard, but very light and quite round. When you grow up and become offensively rich, you can charter a ship in the port of London, and have it come back to you entirely loaded with these balls; when you could satisfy your mind as to their character, and give them away when done with to your uncles and aunts. But what I really wanted to tell you was this: besides the tree-top toys (Hush-a-by, toy-shop, on the tree-top!), I have seen some real _made_ toys, the first hitherto observed in the South Seas. This was how. You are to imagine a four-wheeled gig; one horse; in the front seat two Tahiti natives, in their Sunday clothes, blue coat, white shirt, kilt (a little longer than the Scotch) of a blue stuff with big white or yellow flowers, legs and feet bare; in the back seat me and my wife, who is a friend of yours; under our feet, plenty of lunch and things: among us a great deal of fun in broken Tahitian, one of the natives, the sub-chief of the village, being a great ally of mine. Indeed we have exchanged names; so that he is now called Rui, the nearest they can come to Louis, for they have no _l_ and no _s_ in their language. Rui is six feet three in his stockings, and a magnificent man. We all have straw hats, for the sun is strong. We drive between the sea, which makes a great noise, and the mountains; the road is cut through a forest mostly of fruit trees, the very creepers, which take the place of our ivy, heavy with a great and delicious fruit, bigger than your head and far nicer, called Barbedine. Presently we came to a house in a pretty garden, quite by itself, very nicely kept, the doors and windows open, no one about, and no noise but that of the sea. It looked like a house in a fairy-tale, and just beyond we must ford a river, and there we saw the inhabitants. Just in the mouth of the river, where it met the sea waves, they were ducking and bathing and screaming together like a covey of birds: seven or eight little naked brown boys and girls as happy as the day was long; and on the banks of the stream beside them, real toys--toy ships, full rigged, and with their sails set, though they were lying in the dust on their beam ends. And then I knew for sure they were all children in a fairy-story, living alone together in that lonely house with the only toys in all the island; and that I had myself driven, in my four-wheeled gig, into a corner of the fairy-story, and the question was, should I get out again? But it was all right; I guess only one of the wheels of the gig had got into the fairy-story; and the next jolt the whole thing vanished, and we drove on in our sea-side forest as before, and I have the honour to be Tomarcher's valued correspondent, TERIITERA, which he was previously known as ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. [MRS. R. L. STEVENSON TO SIDNEY COLVIN This letter from Mrs. Stevenson serves to fill out and explain allusions in the three or four preceding. The beautiful brown princess is Princess Moë, ex-queen of Raiatea, well known to readers of Pierre Loti and Miss Gordon Cumming. The move away from Papeete, where Stevenson had fallen seriously ill, had been made in hopes of finding on the island a climate that would suit him better. _Tautira, Tahiti, Dec. 4th [1888]._ DEAR, long neglected, though never forgotten Custodian, I write you from fairyland, where we are living in a fairy story, the guests of a beautiful brown princess. We came to stay a week, five weeks have passed, and we are still indefinite as to our time of leaving. It was chance brought us here, for no one in Papeete could tell us a word about this part of the island except that it was very fine to look at, and inhabited by wild people--"almost as wild as the people of Anaho!" That touch about the people of Anaho inclined our hearts this way, so we finally concluded to take a look at the other side of Tahiti. The place of our landing was windy, uninhabited except by mosquitoes, and Louis was ill. The first day Lloyd and the Captain made an exploration, but came back disgusted. They had found a Chinaman, a long way off, who seemed to have some horses, but no desire to hire them to strangers, and they had found nothing else whatever. The next morning I took Valentine and went on a prospecting tour of my own. I found the Chinaman, persuaded him to let me have two horses and a wagon, and went back for the rest of my family. When asked where I wished to go, I could only say to the largest native village and the most wild. Ill as Louis was, I brought him the next day, and shall never cease to be thankful for my courage, for he has gained health and strength every day. He takes sea baths and swims, and lives almost entirely in the open air as nearly without clothes as possible, a simple pyjama suit of striped light flannel his only dress. As to shoes and stockings we all have scorned them for months except Mrs. Stevenson, who often goes barefoot and never, I believe, wears stockings. Lloyd's costume, in which he looks remarkably well, consists of a striped flannel shirt and a pareu. The pareu is no more or less than a large figured blue and white cotton window curtain twisted about the waist, and hanging a little below the bare knees. Both Louis and Lloyd wear wreaths of artificial flowers, made of the dried pandanus leaf, on their hats. Moë has gone to Papeete by the command of the king, whose letter was addressed "To the great Princess at Tautira. P.V." P.V. stands for Pomaré 5th. Every evening, before she went, we played Van John lying in a circle on pillows in the middle of the floor with our heads together: and hardly an evening passed but it struck us afresh how very much you would like Moë, and we told her of you again. The house (really here a palace) in which we live, belongs to the sub-chief, Ori, a subject and relation of the Princess. He, and his whole family, consisting of his wife, his two little adopted sons, his daughter and her two young babies, turned out to live in a little bird-cage hut of one room. Ori is the very finest specimen of a native we have seen yet; he is several inches over six feet, of perfect though almost gigantic proportions, and looks more like a Roman Emperor in bronze than words can express. One day, when Moë gave a feast, it being the correct thing to do, we all wore wreaths of golden yellow leaves on our heads; when Ori walked in and sat down at the table, as with one voice we all cried out in admiration. His manners and I might say his habit of thought are English. In some ways, he is so like a Colonel of the Guards that we often call him Colonel. It was either the day before, or the morning of our public feast, that Louis asked the Princess if she thought Ori would accept his name. She was sure of it, and much pleased at the idea. I wish you could have seen Louis, blushing like a schoolgirl, when Ori came in, and the brotherhood was offered. So now if you please, Louis is no more Louis, having given that name away in the Tahitian form of _Rui_, but is known as _Terii-Tera_ (pronounced Ter_ee_terah) that being Ori's Christian name. "Ori a Ori" is his clan name. Let me tell you of our village feast. The chief, who was our guide in the matter, found four large fat hogs, which Louis bought, and four cases of ship's biscuit were sent over from the _Casco_, which is lying at Papeete for repairs. Our feast cost in all about eighty dollars. Every Sunday all things of public interest are announced in the Farehau (an enormous public bird cage) and the news of the week read aloud from the Papeete journal, if it happens to turn up. Our feast was given on a Wednesday, and was announced by the chief the Sunday before, who referred to Louis as "the rich one." Our hogs were killed in the morning, washed in the sea, and roasted whole in a pit with hot stones. When done they were laid on their stomachs in neat open coffins of green basket work, each hog with his case of biscuits beside him. Early in the morning the entire population began bathing, a bath being the preliminary to everything. At about three o'clock--four was the hour set--there was a general movement towards our premises, so that I had to hurry Louis into his clothes, all white, even to his shoes. Lloyd was also in white, but barefoot. I was not prepared, so had to appear in a red and white muslin gown, also barefoot. As Mrs. Stevenson had had a feast of her own, conducted on religious principles, she kept a little in the background, so that her dress did not matter so much. The chief, who speaks French very well, stood beside Louis to interpret for him. By the time we had taken our respective places on the veranda in front of our door, an immense crowd had assembled. They came in five, instead of four detachments which was what the chief expected, and he was a little confused at first, as he and Louis had been arranging a speech to four sets of people, which ran in this order. The clergyman at the head of the Protestants: the chief, council, and irreligious:--one of the council at their head. The schoolmaster with the schoolchildren: the catechist and the Catholics: but there was another very small sect, by some strange mischance called Mormons, which it was supposed would be broken up and swallowed by the others. But no, the Mormons came in a body alone, marshalled by the best and wittiest speaker--_bar Rui_--in Tautira. Each set of people came bending under the weight of bamboo poles laden with fruits, pigs, fowls, etc. All were dressed in their gayest pareus, and many had wreaths of leaves or flowers on their heads. The prettiest sight of all was the children, who came marching two and two abreast, the bamboo poles lying lengthwise across their shoulders. When all the offerings had been piled in five great heaps upon the ground, Louis made his oration to the accompaniment of the squealing of pigs, the cackling of hens, and the roar of the surf which beats man-high upon the roof. A speech was made in return on behalf of the village, and then each section sent forth its orator, the speeches following in the order I have given above. Each speaker finished by coming forward with one of the smaller things in his hand, which he offered personally to Louis, and then shook hands with us all and retired. Among these smaller presents were many fish-hooks for large fishing, laboriously carved from mother-of-pearl shell. One man came with one egg in each hand saying, "carry these to Scotland with you, let them hatch into cocks, and their song shall remind you of Tautira." The schoolmaster, with a leaf-basket of rose apples, made his speech in French. Somehow the whole effect of the scene was like a story out of the Bible, and I am not ashamed that Louis and I both shed tears when we saw the enchanting procession of schoolchildren. The Catholic priest, Father Bruno, a great friend of ours, said that for the next fifty years the time of the feast of the rich one will be talked of: which reminds me of our friend Donat, of Fakarava, who was temporary resident at the time we were there. "I am so glad," he said, "that the _Casco_ came in just now, otherwise I should be forgotten: but now the people will always say this or that happened so long before--or so long after--the coming of the _Silver Ship_, when Donat represented the government." In front of our house is a broad stretch of grass, dotted with cocoanuts, breadfruits, mangoes, and the strange pandanus tree. I wish you could have seen them, their lower branches glowing with the rich colours of the fruits hung upon them by Ori and his men, and great heaps lying piled against their roots, on the evening of our feast. From the bamboo poles that they were carried upon, a pen was made for the ten pigs, and a fowl house for the twenty-three fowls that were among the presents. But there was a day of reckoning at hand. Time after time we ran down to the beach to look for the _Casco_, until we were in despair. For over a month we had lived in Ori's house, causing him infinite trouble and annoyance, and not even his, at that. Areia (the chief--Areia means the Prince) went to Papeete and came back with a letter to say that more work had to be done upon the _Casco_, and it might be any time before she could get to Tautira. We had used up all our stores, and had only a few dollars of money left in Tautira, and not very much in Papeete. Could we stand the journey to Papeete, we could not live upon the yacht in the midst of the workmen, and we had not money enough left to live at an hotel. We were playing cards on the floor, as usual, when this message came, and you can imagine its effect. I knew perfectly well that Rui would force us to stay on with him, but what depressed me the most of all, was the fact of Louis having made brothers with him just before this took place. Had there been a shadow of doubt on our dear Rui's face, I should have fled from before him. Sitting there on the floor waiting for him was too much for my nerves and I burst into tears, upon which the princess wept bitterly. In the meantime the priest had dropped in, so that we had him and Moë, and Areia, as witnesses to our humiliating position. First came Madame Rui, who heard the story, and sat down on the floor in silence, which was very damping for a beginning, and then Ori of Ori, the magnificent, who listened to the tale of the shipwrecked mariners with serious dignity, asking one or two questions, and then spoke to this effect. "You are my brother: all that I have is yours. I know that your food is done, but I can give you plenty of fish and taro. We like you, and wish to have you here. Stay where you are till the _Casco_ comes. Be happy--_et ne pleurez pas_." Louis dropped his head into his hands and wept, and then we all went up to Rui and shook hands with him and accepted his offer. Madame Rui, who had been silent only as a dutiful wife, that her husband might speak first, poured forth manifold reasons for our staying on as long as we could possibly manage. During all this scene, an attendant of the princess had been sitting on the floor behind us, a baby in his arms, where he had ensconced himself for the purpose of watching the game. He understood nothing of what was going on; we wondered afterwards what he thought of it. Reduced as we were, we still had a few bottles of champagne left. Champagne being an especial weakness of our gigantic friend, it occurred to some one that this was a proper occasion to open a couple of bottles. Louis, the Princess, and I were quite, as the Scotch so well say, "begrutten," Areia's immense eyes were fairly melting out of his head with emotion, the priest was wiping his eyes and blowing his nose: and then for no apparent cause we suddenly fell to drinking and clinking glasses quite merrily: the bewildered attendant clinked and drank too, and then sat down and waited in case there should be any repetition of the drinking part of the performance. And sure enough there was, for in the midst of an animated discussion as to ways and means, Mrs. Stevenson announced that it was St. Andrew's day, so again the attendant clinked and drank with Ori's mad foreigners. It is quite true that we live almost entirely upon native food; our luncheon to-day consisted of raw fish with sauce made of cocoanut milk mixed with sea water and lime juice, taro poi-poi, and bananas roasted in hot stones in a little pit in the ground, with cocoanut cream to eat with them. Still we like coffee in the evening, a little wine at dinner, and a few other products of civilisation. It would be possible, the chief said, to send a boat, but that would cost sixty dollars. A final arrangement, which we were forced to accept, was that Rui should go in his own boat, and the chief would appoint a substitute for some public work that he was then engaged upon. Early the next morning, amidst a raging sea and a storming wind, Rui departed with three men to help him. It is forty miles to Papeete, and Rui, starting in the early morning, arrived there at nine o'clock; but alas, the wind was against him, and it was altogether six days before he got back. Louis has done a great deal of work on his new story, _The Master of Ballantrae_, almost finished it in fact, while Mrs. Stevenson and I are deep in the mysteries of hatmaking, which is a ladies' accomplishment taking the place of water-colour drawing in England. It is a small compliment to present a hat to an acquaintance. Altogether we have about thirteen. Next door to us is Areia's out-of-door house, where he and the ladies of his family sleep and eat: it has a thatched roof of palm branches, and a floor of boards, the sides and ends being open to the world. On the floor are spread mats plaited of pandanus leaves, and pillows stuffed with silk cotton from the cotton tree. We make little calls upon the ladies, lie upon the mats, and smoke cigarettes made of tobacco leaves rolled in a bit of dried pandanus, and admire their work, or get a lesson; or they call upon us, and lie upon our mats. One day there was an election in the Farehau. It takes place all over the island once a year, and among others, the sub-chief and head-councillor is chosen. For the latter, our Rui was a candidate. In the beginning, the French deposed the born chiefs and told the people to elect men for themselves. The choice of Tautira fell upon Rui, who declined the honour, saying that Areia was his natural chief, and he could not take a position that should belong to his superior; upon which the people elected Areia chief, and Rui sub-chief and head-councillor. We all went over to the Farehau, where Areia sat in the middle of his councillors on a dais behind a long table. The Farehau is an immense bird-cage of bamboos tied together with pandanus fibre, and thatched with palms. In front of the dais the ground is deeply covered with dried leaves. The costume of the dignitaries was rather odd. Areia wore a white shirt and blue flannel coat, which was well enough; but on his plump legs were a pair of the most incredible trousers: light blue calico with a small red pattern, such as servant girls wear for gowns in England: on his feet were neat little shoes and stockings. Rui was a fine sight, and we were very proud of him; he sat, exactly like an English gentleman, holding himself well in hand, alert as a fox and keen as a greyhound: several men spoke from the farther end of the hall, making objections of some sort, we could see. Rui listened with a half satirical, half kindly smile in his eyes, and then dropped a quiet answer without rising from his seat, which had the effect of raising a shout of laughter, and quite demolishing his opponent. Voters came up to the table and dropped their bits of paper into a slit in a box: some led children by the hand, and some carried babies in their arms; across the centre of the great room children and dogs ran chasing each other and playing. I noticed two little maids who walked up and down for a long time with their arms intertwined about each other's waists. Near where we sat (we were on the dais, above the common herd), a pretty young lady having tied up her dog's mouth with a tuft of grass, industriously caught and cracked fleas from its back. Both Lloyd and I grew very sleepy, and as we did not like to leave till the election was decided, we just threw ourselves down and took a nap at the feet of the councillors: nor did we wake till the chief called out to us in English "it is finished." I never thought I should be able to calmly sleep at a public meeting on a platform in the face of several hundred people: but it is wonderful how quickly one takes up the ways of a people when you live with them as intimately as we do. I hear dinner coming on the table, so with much love from us all to you and other dear ones, including our dear friend Henry James, believe me, affectionately yours, FANNY V. de G. STEVENSON.] TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Yacht Casco, at Sea, 14th January 1889._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--Twenty days out from Papeete. Yes, sir, all that, and only (for a guess) in 4° north or at the best 4°30', though already the wind seems to smell a little of the North Pole. My handwriting you must take as you get, for we are speeding along through a nasty swell, and I can only keep my place at the table by means of a foot against the divan, the unoccupied hand meanwhile gripping the ink-bottle. As we begin (so very slowly) to draw near to seven months of correspondence, we are all in some fear; and I want to have letters written before I shall be plunged into that boiling pot of disagreeables which I constantly expect at Honolulu. What is needful can be added there. We were kept two months at Tautira in the house of my dear old friend, Ori a Ori, till both the masts of this invaluable yacht had been repaired. It was all for the best: Tautira being the most beautiful spot, and its people the most amiable, I have ever found. Besides which, the climate suited me to the ground; I actually went sea-bathing almost every day, and in our feasts (we are all huge eaters in Taiarapu) have been known to apply four times for pig. And then again I got wonderful materials for my book, collected songs and legends on the spot; songs still sung in chorus by perhaps a hundred persons, not two of whom can agree on their translation; legends, on which I have seen half a dozen seniors sitting in conclave and debating what came next. Once I went a day's journey to the other side of the island to Tati, the high chief of the Tevas--_my_ chief that is, for I am now a Teva and Teriitera, at your service--to collect more and correct what I had already. In the meanwhile I got on with my work, almost finished _The Master of Ballantrae_, which contains more human work than anything of mine but _Kidnapped_, and wrote the half of another ballad, the _Song of Rahero_, on a Taiarapu legend of my own clan, sir--not so much fire as the _Feast of Famine_, but promising to be more even and correct. But the best fortune of our stay at Tautira was my knowledge of Ori himself, one of the finest creatures extant. The day of our parting was a sad one. We deduced from it a rule for travellers: not to stay two months in one place--which is to cultivate regrets. At last our contemptible ship was ready; to sea we went, bound for Honolulu and the letter-bag, on Christmas Day; and from then to now have experienced every sort of minor misfortune, squalls, calms, contrary winds and seas, pertinacious rains, declining stores, till we came almost to regard ourselves as in the case of Vanderdecken. Three days ago our luck seemed to improve, we struck a leading breeze, got creditably through the doldrums, and just as we looked to have the N.E. trades and a straight run, the rains and squalls and calms began again about midnight, and this morning, though there is breeze enough to send us along, we are beaten back by an obnoxious swell out of the north. Here is a page of complaint, when a verse of thanksgiving had perhaps been more in place. For all this time we must have been skirting past dangerous weather, in the tail and circumference of hurricanes, and getting only annoyance where we should have had peril, and ill-humour instead of fear. I wonder if I have managed to give you any news this time, or whether the usual damn hangs over my letter? "The midwife whispered, Be thou dull!" or at least inexplicit. Anyway I have tried my best, am exhausted with the effort, and fall back into the land of generalities. I cannot tell you how often we have planned our arrival at the Monument: two nights ago, the 12th January, we had it all planned out, arrived in the lights and whirl of Waterloo, hailed a hansom, span up Waterloo Road, over the bridge, etc. etc., and hailed the Monument gate in triumph and with indescribable delight. My dear Custodian, I always think we are too sparing of assurances: Cordelia is only to be excused by Regan and Goneril in the same nursery; I wish to tell you that the longer I live, the more dear do you become to me; nor does my heart own any stronger sentiment. If the bloody schooner didn't send me flying in every sort of direction at the same time, I would say better what I feel so much; but really, if you were here, you would not be writing letters, I believe; and even I, though of a more marine constitution, am much perturbed by this bobbery and wish--O ye Gods, how I wish!--that it was done, and we had arrived, and I had Pandora's Box (my mail-bag) in hand, and was in the lively hope of something eatable for dinner instead of salt horse, tinned mutton, duff without any plums, and pie fruit, which now make up our whole repertory. O Pandora's Box! I wonder what you will contain. As like as not you will contain but little money: if that be so, we shall have to retire to 'Frisco in the _Casco_, and thence by sea _via_ Panama to Southampton, where we should arrive in April. I would like fine to see you on the tug: ten years older both of us than the last time you came to welcome Fanny and me to England. If we have money, however, we shall do a little differently: send the _Casco_ away from Honolulu empty of its high-born lessees, for that voyage to 'Frisco is one long dead beat in foul and at last in cold weather; stay awhile behind, follow by steamer, cross the States by train, stay awhile in New York on business, and arrive probably by the German Line in Southampton. But all this is a question of money. We shall have to lie very dark awhile to recruit our finances: what comes from the book of the cruise, I do not want to touch until the capital is repaid. R. L. S. TO E. L. BURLINGAME _Honolulu, January 1889._ MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--Here at last I have arrived. We could not get away from Tahiti till Christmas Day, and then had thirty days of calms and squalls, a deplorable passage. This has thrown me all out of gear in every way. I plunge into business. 1. _The Master._ Herewith go three more parts. You see he grows in bulk; this making ten already, and I am not yet sure if I can finish it in an eleventh; which shall go to you _quam primum_--I hope by next mail. 2. _Illustrations to M._ I totally forgot to try to write to Hole. It was just as well, for I find it impossible to forecast with sufficient precision. You had better throw off all this and let him have it at once. _Please do: all, and at once: see further_; and I should hope he would still be in time for the later numbers. The three pictures I have received are so truly good that I should bitterly regret having the volume imperfectly equipped. They are the best illustrations I have seen since I don't know when. 3. _Money._ To-morrow the mail comes in, and I hope it will bring me money either from you or home, but I will add a word on that point. 4. My address will be Honolulu--no longer Yacht _Casco_, which I am packing off--till probably April. 5. As soon as I am through with _The Master_, I shall finish _The Game of Bluff_--now rechristened _The Wrong Box_. This I wish to sell, cash down. It is of course copyright in the States; and I offer it to you for five thousand dollars. Please reply on this by return. Also please tell the typewriter who was so good as to be amused by our follies that I am filled with admiration for his piece of work. 6. _Master_ again. Please see that I haven't the name of the Governor of New York wrong (1764 is the date) in part ten. I have no book of reference to put me right. Observe you now have up to August inclusive in hand, so you should begin to feel happy. Is this all? I wonder, and fear not. Henry the Trader has not yet turned up: I hope he may to-morrow, when we expect a mail. Not one word of business have I received either from the States or England, nor anything in the shape of coin; which leaves me in a fine uncertainty and quite penniless on these islands. H.M.[27] (who is a gentleman of a courtly order and much tinctured with letters) is very polite; I may possibly ask for the position of palace doorkeeper. My voyage has been a singular mixture of good and ill fortune. As far as regards interest and material, the fortune has been admirable; as far as regards time, money, and impediments of all kinds, from squalls and calms to rotten masts and sprung spars, simply detestable. I hope you will be interested to hear of two volumes on the wing. The cruise itself, you are to know, will make a big volume with appendices; some of it will first appear as (what they call) letters in some of M'Clure's papers. I believe the book when ready will have a fair measure of serious interest: I have had great fortune in finding old songs and ballads and stories, for instance, and have many singular instances of life in the last few years among these islands. The second volume is of ballads. You know _Ticonderoga_. I have written another: _The Feast of Famine_, a Marquesan story. A third is half done: _The Song of Rahero_, a genuine Tahitian legend. A fourth dances before, me. A Hawaiian fellow this, _The Priest's Drought_, or some such name. If, as I half suspect, I get enough subjects out of the islands, _Ticonderoga_ shall be suppressed, and we'll call the volume _South Sea Ballads_. In health, spirits, renewed interest in life, and, I do believe, refreshed capacity for work, the cruise has proved a wise folly. Still we're not home, and (although the friend of a crowned head) are penniless upon these (as one of my correspondents used to call them) "lovely but _fatil_ islands." By the way, who wrote the _Lion of the Nile_? My dear sir, that is Something Like. Overdone in bits, it has a true thought and a true ring of language. Beg the anonymous from me, to delete (when he shall republish) the two last verses, and end on "the lion of the Nile." One Lampman has a good sonnet on a "Winter Evening" in, I think, the same number: he seems ill named, but I am tempted to hope a man is not always answerable for his name.[28] For instance, you would think you knew mine. No such matter. It is--at your service and Mr. Scribner's and that of all of the faithful--Teriitera (pray pronounce Tayree-Tayra) or (_gallicé_) Téri-téra. R. L. S. More when the mail shall come. I am an idiot. I want to be clear on one point. Some of Hole's drawings must of course be too late; and yet they seem to me so excellent I would fain have the lot complete. It is one thing for you to pay for drawings which are to appear in that soul-swallowing machine, your magazine: quite another if they are only to illustrate a volume. I wish you to take a brisk (even a fiery) decision on the point; and let Hole know. To resume my desultory song, I desire you would carry the same fire (hereinbefore suggested) into your decision on _The Wrong Box_; for in my present state of benighted ignorance as to my affairs for the last seven months--I know not even whether my house or my mother's house have been let--I desire to see something definite in front of me--outside the lot of palace doorkeeper. I believe the said _Wrong Box_ is a real lark; in which, of course, I may be grievously deceived; but the typewriter is with me. I may also be deceived as to the numbers of _The Master_ now going and already gone; but to me they seem First Chop, sir, First Chop. I hope I shall pull off that damned ending; but it still depresses me: this is your doing, Mr. Burlingame: you would have it there and then, and I fear it--I fear that ending. R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER _Honolulu, February 8th, 1889._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--Here we are at Honolulu, and have dismissed the yacht, and lie here till April anyway, in a fine state of haze, which I am yet in hopes some letter of yours (still on the way) may dissipate. No money, and not one word as to money! However, I have got the yacht paid off in triumph, I think; and though we stay here impignorate, it should not be for long, even if you bring us no extra help from home. The cruise has been a great success, both as to matter, fun, and health; and yet, Lord, man! we're pleased to be ashore! Yon was a very fine voyage from Tahiti up here, but--the dry land's a fine place too, and we don't mind squalls any longer, and eh, man, that's a great thing. Blow, blow, thou wintry wind, thou hast done me no appreciable harm beyond a few grey hairs! Altogether, this foolhardy venture is achieved; and if I have but nine months of life and any kind of health, I shall have both eaten my cake and got it back again with usury. But, man, there have been days when I felt guilty, and thought I was in no position for the head of a house. Your letter and accounts are doubtless at S. F., and will reach me in course. My wife is no great shakes; she is the one who has suffered most. My mother has had a Huge Old Time; Lloyd is first chop; I so well that I do not know myself--sea-bathing, if you please, and what is far more dangerous, entertaining and being entertained by His Majesty here, who is a very fine intelligent fellow, but O, Charles! what a crop for the drink! He carries it, too, like a mountain with a sparrow on its shoulders. We calculated five bottles of champagne in three hours and a half (afternoon), and the sovereign quite presentable, although perceptibly more dignified at the end.... The extraordinary health I enjoy and variety of interests I find among these islands would tempt me to remain here; only for Lloyd, who is not well placed in such countries for a permanency; and a little for Colvin, to whom I feel I owe a sort of filial duty. And these two considerations will no doubt bring me back--to go to bed again--in England.--Yours ever affectionately, R. L. S. TO R. A. M. STEVENSON _Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands, February 1889._ MY DEAR BOB,--My extremely foolhardy venture is practically over. How foolhardy it was I don't think I realised. We had a very small schooner, and, like most yachts, over-rigged and over-sparred, and like many American yachts on a very dangerous sail plan. The waters we sailed in are, of course, entirely unlighted, and very badly charted; in the Dangerous Archipelago, through which we were fools enough to go, we were perfectly in ignorance of where we were for a whole night and half the next day, and this in the midst of invisible islands and rapid and variable currents; and we were lucky when we found our whereabouts at last. We have twice had all we wanted in the way of squalls: once, as I came on deck, I found the green sea over the cockpit coamings and running down the companion like a brook to meet me; at that same moment the foresail sheet jammed and the captain had no knife; this was the only occasion on the cruise that ever I set a hand to a rope, but I worked like a Trojan, judging the possibility of hemorrhage better than the certainty of drowning. Another time I saw a rather singular thing: our whole ship's company as pale as paper from the captain to the cook; we had a black squall astern on the port side and a white squall ahead to starboard; the complication passed off innocuous, the black squall only fetching us with its tail, and the white one slewing off somewhere else. Twice we were a long while (days) in the close vicinity of hurricane weather, but again luck prevailed, and we saw none of it. These are dangers incident to these seas and small craft. What was an amazement, and at the same time a powerful stroke of luck, both our masts were rotten, and we found it out--I was going to say in time, but it was stranger and luckier than that. The head of the mainmast hung over so that hands were afraid to go to the helm; and less than three weeks before--I am not sure it was more than a fortnight--we had been nearly twelve hours beating off the lee shore of Eimeo (or Moorea, next island to Tahiti) in half a gale of wind with a violent head sea: she would neither tack nor wear once, and had to be boxed off with the mainsail--you can imagine what an ungodly show of kites we carried--and yet the mast stood. The very day after that, in the southern bight of Tahiti, we had a near squeak, the wind suddenly coming calm; the reefs were close in with, my eye! what a surf! The pilot thought we were gone, and the captain had a boat cleared, when a lucky squall came to our rescue. My wife, hearing the order given about the boats, remarked to my mother, "Isn't that nice? We shall soon be ashore!" Thus does the female mind unconsciously skirt along the verge of eternity. Our voyage up here was most disastrous--calms, squalls, head sea, waterspouts of rain, hurricane weather all about, and we in the midst of the hurricane season, when even the hopeful builder and owner of the yacht had pronounced these seas unfit for her. We ran out of food, and were quite given up for lost in Honolulu: people had ceased to speak to Belle[29] about the _Casco_, as a deadly subject. But the perils of the deep were part of the programme; and though I am very glad to be done with them for a while and comfortably ashore, where a squall does not matter a snuff to any one, I feel pretty sure I shall want to get to sea again ere long. The dreadful risk I took was financial, and double-headed. First, I had to sink a lot of money in the cruise, and if I didn't get health, how was I to get it back? I have got health to a wonderful extent; and as I have the most interesting matter for my book, bar accidents, I ought to get all I have laid out and a profit. But, second (what I own I never considered till too late), there was the danger of collisions, of damages and heavy repairs, of disablement, towing, and salvage; indeed, the cruise might have turned round and cost me double. Nor will this danger be quite over till I hear the yacht is in San Francisco; for though I have shaken the dust of her deck from my feet, I fear (as a point of law) she is still mine till she gets there. From my point of view, up to now the cruise has been a wonderful success. I never knew the world was so amusing. On the last voyage we had grown so used to sea-life that no one wearied, though it lasted a full month, except Fanny, who is always ill. All the time our visits to the islands have been more like dreams than realities: the people, the life, the beachcombers, the old stories and songs I have picked up, so interesting; the climate, the scenery, and (in some places) the women, so beautiful. The women are handsomest in Tahiti, the men in the Marquesas; both as fine types as can be imagined. Lloyd reminds me, I have not told you one characteristic incident of the cruise from a semi-naval point of view. One night we were going ashore in Anaho Bay; the most awful noise on deck; the breakers distinctly audible in the cabin; and there I had to sit below, entertaining in my best style a negroid native chieftain, much the worse for rum! You can imagine the evening's pleasure. This naval report on cruising in the South Seas would be incomplete without one other trait. On our voyage up here I came one day into the dining-room, the hatch in the floor was open, the ship's boy was below with a baler, and two of the hands were carrying buckets as for a fire; this meant that the pumps had ceased working. One stirring day was that in which we sighted Hawaii. It blew fair, but very strong; we carried jib, foresail, and mainsail, all single-reefed, and she carried her lee rail under water and flew. The swell, the heaviest I have ever been out in--I tried in vain to estimate the height, _at least_ fifteen feet--came tearing after us about a point and a half off the wind. We had the best hand--old Louis--at the wheel; and, really, he did nobly, and had noble luck, for it never caught us once. At times it seemed we must have it; old Louis would look over his shoulder with the queerest look and dive down his neck into his shoulders; and then it missed us somehow, and only sprays came over our quarter, turning the little outside lane of deck into a mill race as deep as to the cockpit coamings. I never remember anything more delightful and exciting. Pretty soon after we were lying absolutely becalmed under the lee of Hawaii, of which we had been warned; and the captain never confessed he had done it on purpose, but when accused, he smiled. Really, I suppose he did quite right, for we stood committed to a dangerous race, and to bring her to the wind would have been rather a heart-sickening manoeuvre. R. L. S. TO MARCEL SCHWOB At Honolulu, Stevenson found awaiting him, among the accumulations of the mail-bag, two letters of friendly homage--the first, I think, he had received from any foreign _confrère_--addressed to him by the distinguished young French scholar and man of letters, M. Marcel Schwob, since deceased. _Honolulu, Sandwich Islands, February 8th, 1889._ DEAR SIR,--I thank you--from the midst of such a flurry as you can imagine, with seven months' accumulated correspondence on my table--for your two friendly and clever letters. Pray write me again. I shall be home in May or June, and not improbably shall come to Paris in the summer. Then we can talk; or in the interval I may be able to write, which is to-day out of the question. Pray take a word from a man of crushing occupations, and count it as a volume. Your little _conte_ is delightful. Ah yes, you are right, I love the eighteenth century; and so do you, and have not listened to its voice in vain.--The Hunted One, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES BAXTER _Honolulu, 8th March 1889._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--At last I have the accounts: the Doer has done excellently, and in the words of ----, "I reciprocate every step of your behaviour."... I send a letter for Bob in your care, as I don't know his Liverpool address,[30] by which (for he is to show you part of it) you will see we have got out of this adventure--or hope to have--with wonderful fortune. I have the retrospective horrors on me when I think of the liabilities I incurred; but, thank God, I think I'm in port again, and I have found one climate in which I can enjoy life. Even Honolulu is too cold for me; but the south isles were a heaven upon earth to a puir, catarrhal party like Johns'one. We think, as Tahiti is too complete a banishment, to try Madeira. It's only a week from England, good communications, and I suspect in climate and scenery not unlike our dear islands; in people, alas! there can be no comparison. But friends could go, and I could come in summer, so I should not be quite cut off. Lloyd and I have finished a story, _The Wrong Box_. If it is not funny, I am sure I do not know what is. I have split over writing it. Since I have been here, I have been toiling like a galley slave: three numbers of _The Master_ to rewrite, five chapters of _The Wrong Box_ to write and rewrite, and about five hundred lines of a narrative poem to write, rewrite, and re-rewrite. Now I have _The Master_ waiting me for its continuation, two numbers more; when that's done, I shall breathe. This spasm of activity has been chequered with champagne parties: Happy and Glorious, Hawaii Ponoi paua: kou moi--(Native Hawaiians, dote upon your monarch!) Hawaiian God save the King. (In addition to my other labours, I am learning the language with a native moonshee.) Kalakaua is a terrible companion; a bottle of fizz is like a glass of sherry to him; he thinks nothing of five or six in an afternoon as a whet for dinner. You should see a photograph of our party after an afternoon with H. H. M.: my! what a crew!--Yours ever affectionately, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Ill-health and pressing preoccupations, together with uncertainty as to when and where letters would reach him, had kept me from writing during the previous autumn and winter. _Honolulu, March 1889._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--Still not a word from you! I am utterly cast down; but I will try to return good for evil and for once give you news. We are here in the suburb of Honolulu in a rambling house or set of houses in a great garden. [Illustration: _a a a_, stairs up to balcony.] 1. Lloyd's room. 2. My mother's room. 3. A room kept dark for photographs. 4. The kitchen. 5. Balcony. 6. The Lanai, an open room or summer parlour, partly surrounded with Venetian shutters, in part quite open, which is the living-room. 7. A crazy dirty cottage used for the arts. 8. Another crazy dirty cottage, where Fanny and I live. The town is some three miles away, but the house is connected by telephone with the chief shops, and the tramway runs to within a quarter of a mile of us. I find Honolulu a beastly climate after Tahiti and have been in bed a little; but my colds _took on no catarrhal symptom_, which is staggeringly delightful. I am studying Hawaiian with a native, a Mr. Joseph Poepoe, a clever fellow too: the tongue is a little bewildering; I am reading a pretty story in native--no, really it is pretty, although wandering and wordy; highly pretty with its continual traffic from one isle to another of the soothsayer, pursuing rainbows. Fanny is, I think, a good deal better on the whole, having profited like me by the tropics; my mother and Lloyd are first-rate. I do not think I have heard from you since last May; certainly not since June; and this really frightens me. Do write, even now. Scribner's Sons it should be; we shall probably be out of this some time in April, home some time in June. But the world whirls to me perceptibly, a mass of times and seasons and places and engagements, and seas to cross, and continents to traverse, so that I scarce know where I am. Well, I have had a brave time. _Et ego in Arcadia_--though I don't believe Arcadia was a spot upon Tahiti. I have written another long narrative poem: the _Song of Rahero_. Privately, I think it good: but your ominous silence over the _Feast of Famine_ leads me to fear we shall not be agreed. Is it possible I have wounded you in some way? I scarce like to dream that it is possible; and yet I know too well it may be so. If so, don't write, and you can pitch into me when we meet. I am, admittedly, as mild as London Stout now; and the Old Man Virulent much a creature of the past. My dear Colvin, I owe you and Fleeming Jenkin, the two older men who took the trouble and knew how to make a friend of me, everything that I have or am: if I have behaved ill, just hold on and give me a chance, you shall have the slanging of me and I bet I shall prefer it to this silence.--Ever, my dear Colvin, your most affectionate R. L. S. [MRS. R. L. STEVENSON to MRS. SITWELL This letter brought to friends in England the first news of the intended prolongation of the cruise among the remoter islands of the Pacific. _Honolulu, towards the end of March 1889._ MY DEAR FRIEND,--Louis has improved so wonderfully in the delicious islands of the South Seas, that we think of trying yet one more voyage. We are a little uncertain as to how we shall go, whether in a missionary ship, or by hiring schooners from point to point, but the "unregenerate" islands we must see. I suppose we shall be off some time in June, which will fetch us back to England in another year's time. You could hardly believe it if you could see Louis now. He looks as well as he ever did in his life, and has had no sign of cough or hemorrhage (begging pardon of Nemesis) for many months. It seems a pity to return to England until his health is firmly reestablished, and also a pity not to see all that we can see quite easily starting from this place: and which will be our only opportunity in life. Of course there is the usual risk from hostile natives, and the horrible sea, but a positive risk is so much more wholesome than a negative one, and it is all such joy to Louis and Lloyd. As for me, I hate the sea, and am afraid of it (though no one will believe that because in time of danger I do not make an outcry--nevertheless I _am_ afraid of it, and it is not kind to me), but I love the tropic weather, and the wild people, and to see my two boys so happy. Mrs. Stevenson is going back to Scotland in May, as she does not like to be longer away from her old sister, who has been very ill. And besides, we do not feel justified in taking her to the sort of places we intend to visit. As for me, I can get comfort out of very rough surroundings for my people, I can work hard and enjoy it; I can even shoot pretty well, and though I "don't want to fight, by jingo if I must," why I can. I don't suppose there will be any occasion for that sort of thing--only in case. I am not quite sure of the names, but I _think_ our new cruise includes the Gilberts, the Fijis, and the Solomons. A letter might go from the Fijis; Louis will write the particulars, of which I am not sure. As for myself, I have had more cares than I was really fit for. To keep house on a yacht is no easy thing. When Louis and I broke loose from the ship and lived alone amongst the natives I got on very well. It was when I was deathly sea-sick, and the question was put to me by the cook, "What shall we have for the cabin dinner, what for to-morrow's breakfast, what for lunch? and what about the sailors' food? Please come and look at the biscuits, for the weevils have got into them, and show me how to make yeast that will rise of itself, and smell the pork which seems pretty high, and give me directions about making a pudding with molasses--and what is to be done about the bugs?"--etc. etc. In the midst of heavy dangerous weather, when I was lying on the floor clutching a basin, down comes the mate with a cracked head, and I must needs cut off the hair matted with blood, wash and dress the wound, and administer restoratives. I do not like being "the lady of the yacht," but ashore! O, then I felt I was repaid for all. I wonder did any of my letters from beautiful Tautira ever come to hand, with the descriptions of our life with Louis's adopted brother Ori a Ori? Ori wrote to us, if no one else did, and I mean to give you a translation of his letter. It begins with our native names. _Tautira, 26 Dec. 1888._ To Teriitera (Louis) and Tapina Tutu (myself) and Aromaiterai (Lloyd) and Teiriha (Mrs. Stevenson) Salutation in the true Jesus. I make you to know my great affection. At the hour when you left us, I was filled with tears; my wife, Rui Tehini, also, and all of my household. When you embarked I felt a great sorrow. It is for this that I went upon the road, and you looked from that ship, and I looked at you on the ship with great grief until you had raised the anchor and hoisted the sails. When the ship started, I ran along the beach to see you still; and when you were on the open sea I cried out to you, "farewell Louis": and when I was coming back to my house I seemed to hear your voice crying "Rui farewell." Afterwards I watched the ship as long as I could until the night fell; and when it was dark I said to myself, "if I had wings I should fly to the ship to meet you, and to sleep amongst you, so that I might be able to come back to shore and to tell Rui Tehini, 'I have slept upon the ship of Teriitera.'" After that we passed that night in the impatience of grief. Towards eight o'clock I seemed to hear your voice, "Teriitera--Rui--here is the hour for putter and tiro" (cheese and syrup). I did not sleep that night, thinking continually of you, my very dear friend, until the morning: being then awake I went to see Tapina Tutu on her bed, and alas, she was not there. Afterwards I looked into your rooms; they did not please me as they used to do. I did not hear your voice crying, "hail Rui." I thought then that you had gone, and that you had left me. Rising up I went to the beach to see your ship, and I could not see it. I wept, then, till the night, telling myself continually, "Teriitera returns into his own country and leaves his dear Rui in grief, so that I suffer for him, and weep for him." I will not forget you in my memory. Here is the thought: I desire to meet you again. It is my dear Teriitera makes the only riches I desire in this world. It is your eyes that I desire to see again. It must be that your body and my body shall eat together at our table: there is what would make my heart content. But now we are separated. May God be with you all. May His word and His mercy go with you, so that you may be well and we also, according to the words of Paul. ORI A ORI; that is to say, RUI. After reading this to me Louis has left in tears saying that he is not worthy that such a letter should be written to him. We hope to so manage that we shall stop at Tahiti and see Rui once more. I tell myself that pleasant story when I wake in the night. I find my head swimming so that I cannot write any more. I wish some rich Catholic would send a parlour organ to Père Bruno of Tautira. I am going to try and save money to do it myself, but he may die before I have enough. I feel ashamed to be sitting here when I think of that old man who cannot draw because of scrivener's paralysis, who has no one year in and year out to speak to but natives (our Rui is a Protestant not bigoted like the rest of them--but still a Protestant) and the only pastime he has is playing on an old broken parlour organ whose keys are mostly dumb. I know no more pathetic figure. Have you no rich Catholic friends who would send him an organ that he could play upon? Of course I am talking nonsense, and yet I know somewhere that person exists if only I knew the place. Our dearest love to you all. FANNY.] TO HENRY JAMES _Honolulu [March 1889]._ MY DEAR JAMES,--Yes--I own up--I am untrue to friendship and (what is less, but still considerable) to civilisation. I am not coming home for another year. There it is, cold and bald, and now you won't believe in me at all, and serve me right (says you) and the devil take me. But look here, and judge me tenderly. I have had more fun and pleasure of my life these past months than ever before, and more health than any time in ten long years. And even here in Honolulu I have withered in the cold; and this precious deep is filled with islands, which we may still visit; and though the sea is a deathful place, I like to be there, and like squalls (when they are over); and to draw near to a new island, I cannot say how much I like. In short, I take another year of this sort of life, and mean to try to work down among the poisoned arrows, and mean (if it may be) to come back again when the thing is through, and converse with Henry James as heretofore; and in the meanwhile issue directions to H. J. to write to me once more. Let him address here at Honolulu, for my views are vague; and if it is sent here it will follow and find me, if I am to be found; and if I am not to be found, the man James will have done his duty, and we shall be at the bottom of the sea, where no post-office clerk can be expected to discover us, or languishing on a coral island, the philosophic drudges of some barbarian potentate: perchance, of an American Missionary. My wife has just sent to Mrs. Sitwell a translation (_tant bien que mal_) of a letter I have had from my chief friend in this part of the world: go and see her, and get a hearing of it; it will do you good; it is a better method of correspondence than even Henry James's. I jest, but seriously it is a strange thing for a tough, sick, middle-aged scrivener like R. L. S. to receive a letter so conceived from a man fifty years old, a leading politician, a crack orator, and the great wit of his village: boldly say, "the highly popular M.P. of Tautira." My nineteenth century strikes here, and lies alongside of something beautiful and ancient. I think the receipt of such a letter might humble, shall I say even ----? and for me, I would rather have received it than written _Redgauntlet_ or the sixth _Æneid_. All told, if my books have enabled or helped me to make this voyage, to know Rui, and to have received such a letter, they have (in the old prefatorial expression) not been writ in vain. It would seem from this that I have been not so much humbled as puffed up; but, I assure you, I have in fact been both. A little of what that letter says is my own earning; not all, but yet a little; and the little makes me proud, and all the rest ashamed; and in the contrast, how much more beautiful altogether is the ancient man than him of to-day! Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he _is_ of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly. And to curry favour with him, I wish I could be more explicit; but, indeed, I am still of necessity extremely vague, and cannot tell what I am to do, nor where I am to go for some while yet. As soon as I am sure, you shall hear. All are fairly well--the wife, your countrywoman, least of all; troubles are not entirely wanting; but on the whole we prosper, and we are all affectionately yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Honolulu, April 2nd, 1889._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--I am beginning to be ashamed of writing on to you without the least acknowledgment, like a tramp; but I do not care--I am hardened; and whatever be the cause of your silence, I mean to write till all is blue. I am outright ashamed of my news, which is that we are not coming home for another year. I cannot but hope it may continue the vast improvement of my health: I think it good for Fanny and Lloyd; and we have all a taste for this wandering and dangerous life. My mother I send home, to my relief, as this part of our cruise will be (if we can carry it out) rather difficult in places. Here is the idea: about the middle of June (unless the Boston Board objects) we sail from Honolulu in the missionary ship (barquentine auxiliary steamer) _Morning Star_: she takes us through the Gilberts and Marshalls, and drops us (this is my great idea) on Ponape, one of the volcanic islands of the Carolines. Here we stay marooned among a doubtful population, with a Spanish vice-governor and five native kings, and a sprinkling of missionaries all at loggerheads, on the chance of fetching a passage to Sydney in a trader, a labour ship or (maybe, but this appears too bright) a ship of war. If we can't get the _Morning Star_ (and the Board has many reasons that I can see for refusing its permission) I mean to try to fetch Fiji, hire a schooner there, do the Fijis and Friendlies, hit the course of the _Richmond_ at Tonga Tabu, make back by Tahiti, and so to S. F., and home: perhaps in June 1890. For the latter part of the cruise will likely be the same in either case. You can see for yourself how much variety and adventure this promises, and that it is not devoid of danger at the best; but if we can pull it off in safety, gives me a fine book of travel, and Lloyd a fine lecture and diorama, which should vastly better our finances. I feel as if I were untrue to friendship; believe me, Colvin, when I look forward to this absence of another year, my conscience sinks at thought of the Monument; but I think you will pardon me if you consider how much this tropical weather mends my health. Remember me as I was at home, and think of me sea-bathing and walking about, as jolly as a sandboy: you will own the temptation is strong; and as the scheme, bar fatal accidents, is bound to pay into the bargain, sooner or later, it seems it would be madness to come home now, with an imperfect book, no illustrations to speak of, no diorama, and perhaps fall sick again by autumn. I do not think I delude myself when I say the tendency to catarrh has visibly diminished. It is a singular thing that as I was packing up old papers ere I left Skerryvore, I came on the prophecies of a drunken Highland sibyl, when I was seventeen. She said I was to be very happy, to visit America, and _to be much upon the sea_. It seems as if it were coming true with a vengeance. Also, do you remember my strong, old, rooted belief that I shall die by drowning? I don't want that to come true, though it is an easy death; but it occurs to me oddly, with these long chances in front. I cannot say why I like the sea; no man is more cynically and constantly alive to its perils; I regard it as the highest form of gambling; and yet I love the sea as much as I hate gambling. Fine, clean emotions; a world all and always beautiful; air better than wine; interest unflagging; there is upon the whole no better life.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO E. L. BURLINGAME [_Honolulu, April 1889._] MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--This is to announce the most prodigious change of programme. I have seen so much of the South Seas that I desire to see more, and I get so much health here that I dread a return to our vile climates. I have applied accordingly to the missionary folk to let me go round in the _Morning Star_; and if the Boston Board should refuse, I shall get somehow to Fiji, hire a trading schooner, and see the Fijis and Friendlies and Samoa. He would be a South Seayer, Mr. Burlingame. Of course, if I go in the _Morning Star_, I see all the eastern (or western?) islands. Before I sail, I shall make out to let you have the last of _The Master_: though I tell you it sticks!--and I hope to have had some proofs forbye, of the verses anyway. And now to business. I want (if you can find them) in the British sixpenny edition, if not, in some equally compact and portable shape--Seaside Library, for instance--the Waverley Novels entire, or as entire as you can get 'em, and the following of Marryat: _Phantom Ship_, _Peter Simple_, _Percival Keene_, _Privateersman_, _Children of the New Forest_, _Frank Mildmay_, _Newton Forster_, _Dog Fiend (Snarleyyow)_. Also _Midshipman Easy_, _Kingsburn_, Carlyle's _French Revolution_, Motley's _Dutch Republic_, Lang's _Letters on Literature_, a complete set of my works, _Jenkin_, in duplicate; also _Familiar Studies_, ditto. I have to thank you for the accounts, which are satisfactory indeed, and for the cheque for $1000. Another account will have come and gone before I see you. I hope it will be equally roseate in colour. I am quite worked out, and this cursed end of _The Master_ hangs over me like the arm of the gallows; but it is always darkest before dawn, and no doubt the clouds will soon rise; but it is a difficult thing to write, above all in Mackellarese; and I cannot yet see my way clear. If I pull this off, _The Master_ will be a pretty good novel or I am the more deceived; and even if I don't pull if off, it'll still have some stuff in it. We shall remain here until the middle of June anyway; but my mother leaves for Europe early in May. Hence our mail should continue to come here; but not hers. I will let you know my next address, which will probably be Sydney. If we get on the _Morning Star_, I propose at present to get marooned on Ponape, and take my chance of getting a passage to Australia. It will leave times and seasons mighty vague, and the cruise is risky; but I shall know something of the South Seas when it is done, or else the South Seas will contain all there is of me. It should give me a fine book of travels, anyway. Low will probably come and ask some dollars of you. Pray let him have them, they are for outfit. O, another complete set of my books should go to Captain A. H. Otis, care of Dr. Merritt, Yacht _Casco_, Oakland, Cal.--In haste, R. L. S. TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE _Honolulu, April 6th, 1889._ MY DEAR MISS BOODLE,--Nobody writes a better letter than my Gamekeeper: so gay, so pleasant, so engagingly particular, answering (by some delicate instinct) all the questions she suggests. It is a shame you should get such a poor return as I can make, from a mind essentially and originally incapable of the art epistolary. I would let the paper-cutter take my place; but I am sorry to say the little wooden seaman did after the manner of seamen, and deserted in the Societies. The place he seems to have stayed at--seems, for his absence was not observed till we were near the Equator--was Tautira, and, I assure you, he displayed good taste, Tautira being as "nigh hand heaven" as a paper-cutter or anybody has a right to expect. I think all our friends will be very angry with us, and I give the grounds of their probable displeasure bluntly--we are not coming home for another year. My mother returns next month. Fanny, Lloyd, and I push on again among the islands on a trading schooner, the _Equator_--first for the Gilbert group, which we shall have an opportunity to explore thoroughly; then, if occasion serve, to the Marshalls and Carolines; and if occasion (or money) fail, to Samoa, and back to Tahiti. I own we are deserters, but we have excuses. You cannot conceive how these climates agree with the wretched house-plant of Skerryvore: he wonders to find himself sea-bathing, and cutting about the world loose, like a grown-up person. They agree with Fanny too, who does not suffer from her rheumatism, and with Lloyd also. And the interest of the islands is endless; and the sea, though I own it is a fearsome place, is very delightful. We had applied for places in the American missionary ship, the _Morning Star_, but this trading schooner is a far preferable idea, giving us more time and a thousandfold more liberty; so we determined to cut off the missionaries with a shilling. The Sandwich Islands do not interest us very much; we live here, oppressed with civilisation, and look for good things in the future. But it would surprise you if you came out to-night from Honolulu (all shining with electric lights, and all in a bustle from the arrival of the mail, which is to carry you these lines) and crossed the long wooden causeway along the beach, and came out on the road through Kapiolani park, and seeing a gate in the palings, with a tub of gold-fish by the wayside, entered casually in. The buildings stand in three groups by the edge of the beach, where an angry little spitfire sea continually spirts and thrashes with impotent irascibility, the big seas breaking further out upon the reef. The first is a small house, with a very large summer parlour, or _lanai_, as they call it here, roofed, but practically open. There you will find the lamps burning and the family sitting about the table, dinner just done: my mother, my wife, Lloyd, Belle, my wife's daughter, Austin her child, and to-night (by way of rarity) a guest. All about the walls our South Sea curiosities, war clubs, idols, pearl shells, stone axes, etc.; and the walls are only a small part of a lanai, the rest being glazed or latticed windows, or mere open space. You will see there no sign of the Squire, however; and being a person of a humane disposition, you will only glance in over the balcony railing at the merrymakers in the summer parlour, and proceed further afield after the Exile. You look round, there is beautiful green turf, many trees of an outlandish sort that drop thorns--look out if your feet are bare; but I beg your pardon, you have not been long enough in the South Seas--and many oleanders in full flower. The next group of buildings is ramshackle, and quite dark; you make out a coach-house door, and look in--only some cocoanuts; you try round to the left and come to the sea front, where Venus and the moon are making luminous tracks on the water, and a great swell rolls and shines on the outer reef; and here is another door--all these places open from the outside--and you go in, and find photography, tubs of water, negatives steeping, a tap, and a chair and an ink-bottle, where my wife is supposed to write; round a little further, a third door, entering which you find a picture upon the easel and a table sticky with paints; a fourth door admits you to a sort of court, where there is a hen sitting--I believe on a fallacious egg. No sign of the Squire in all this. But right opposite the studio door you have observed a third little house, from whose open door lamp-light streams and makes hay of the strong moonlight shadows. You had supposed it made no part of the grounds, for a fence runs round it lined with oleander; but as the Squire is nowhere else, is it not just possible he may be here? It is a grim little wooden shanty; cobwebs bedeck it; friendly mice inhabit its recesses; the mailed cockroach walks upon the wall; so also, I regret to say, the scorpion. Herein are two pallet beds, two mosquito curtains, strung to the pitch-boards of the roof, two tables laden with books and manuscripts, three chairs, and, in one of the beds, the Squire busy writing to yourself, as it chances, and just at this moment somewhat bitten by mosquitoes. He has just set fire to the insect powder, and will be all right in no time; but just now he contemplates large white blisters, and would like to scratch them, but knows better. The house is not bare; it has been inhabited by Kanakas, and--you know what children are!--the bare wood walls are pasted over with pages from the _Graphic_, _Harper's Weekly_, etc. The floor is matted, and I am bound to say the matting is filthy. There are two windows and two doors, one of which is condemned; on the panels of that last a sheet of paper is pinned up, and covered with writing. I cull a few plums:-- "A duck-hammock for each person. A patent organ like the commandant's at Taiohae. Cheap and bad cigars for presents. Revolvers. Permanganate of potass. Liniment for the head and sulphur. Fine tooth-comb." What do you think this is? Simply life in the South Seas foreshortened. These are a few of our desiderata for the next trip, which we jot down as they occur. There, I have really done my best and tried to send something like a letter--one letter in return for all your dozens. Pray remember us all to yourself, Mrs. Boodle, and the rest of your house. I do hope your mother will be better when this comes. I shall write and give you a new address when I have made up my mind as to the most probable, and I do beg you will continue to write from time to time and give us airs from home. To-morrow--think of it--I must be off by a quarter to eight to drive in to the palace and breakfast with his Hawaiian Majesty at 8.30: I shall be dead indeed. Please give my news to Scott, I trust he is better; give him my warm regards. To you we all send all kinds of things, and I am the absentee Squire, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES BAXTER _Honolulu, April 1889._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--As usual, your letter is as good as a cordial, and I thank you for it, and all your care, kindness, and generous and thoughtful friendship, from my heart. I was truly glad to hear a word of Colvin, whose long silence has terrified me; and glad to hear that you condoned the notion of my staying longer in the South Seas, for I have decided in that sense. The first idea was to go in the _Morning Star_, missionary ship; but now I have found a trading schooner, the _Equator_, which is to call for me here early in June and carry us through the Gilberts. What will happen then, the Lord knows. My mother does not accompany us: she leaves here for home early in May, and you will hear of us from her; but not, I imagine, anything more definite. We shall get dumped on Butaritari, and whether we manage to go on to the Marshalls and Carolines, or whether we fall back on Samoa, Heaven must decide; but I mean to fetch back into the course of the _Richmond_--(to think you don't know what the _Richmond_ is!--_the_ steamer of the Eastern South Seas, joining New Zealand, Tongatabu, the Samoas, Taheite, and Rarotonga, and carrying by last advices sheep in the saloon!)--into the course of the _Richmond_ and make Tahiti again on the home track. Would I like to see the Scots Observer? Wouldn't I not? But whaur? I'm direckit at space. They have nae post offishes at the Gilberts, and as for the Car'lines! Ye see, Mr. Baxter, we're no just in the punkshewal _centre_ o' civ'lisation. But pile them up for me, and when I've decided on an address, I'll let you ken, and ye'll can send them stavin' after me.--Ever your affectionate R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER The reference in the first paragraph is to the publication in the press, which Mr. Baxter had permitted, of one of Stevenson's letters written during the earlier part of his voyage. R. L. S. had remonstrated, always greatly disliking the publication of private letters during the writer's lifetime; and now writes to soften the effect of his remonstrance. _Honolulu, 10th May 1889._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--I am appalled to gather from your last just to hand that you have felt so much concern about the letter. Pray dismiss it from your mind. But I think you scarce appreciate how disagreeable it is to have your private affairs and private unguarded expressions getting into print. It would soon sicken any one of writing letters. I have no doubt that letter was very wisely selected, but it just shows how things crop up. There was a raging jealousy between the two yachts; our captain was nearly in a fight over it. However, no more; and whatever you think, my dear fellow, do not suppose me angry with you or ----; although I was _annoyed at the circumstance_--a very different thing. But it is difficult to conduct life by letter, and I continually feel I may be drifting into some matter of offence, in which my heart takes no part. I must now turn to a point of business. This new cruise of ours is somewhat venturesome; and I think it needful to warn you not to be in a hurry to suppose us dead. In these ill-charted seas, it is quite on the cards we might be cast on some unvisited, or very rarely visited, island; that there we might lie for a long time, even years, unheard of; and yet turn up smiling at the hinder end. So do not let me be "rowpit" till you get some certainty we have gone to Davie Jones in a squall, or graced the feast of some barbarian in the character of Long Pig. I have just been a week away alone on the lee coast of Hawaii, the only white creature in many miles, riding five and a half hours one day, living with a native, seeing four lepers shipped off to Molokai, hearing native causes, and giving my opinion as _amicus curiæ_ as to the interpretation of a statute in English; a lovely week among God's best--at least God's sweetest works--Polynesians. It has bettered me greatly. If I could only stay there the time that remains, I could get my work done and be happy; but the care of my family keeps me in vile Honolulu, where I am always out of sorts, amidst heat and cold and cesspools and beastly _haoles_.[31] What is a haole? You are one; and so, I am sorry to say, am I. After so long a dose of whites, it was a blessing to get among Polynesians again even for a week. Well, Charles, there are waur haoles than yoursel', I'll say that for ye; and trust before I sail I shall get another letter with more about yourself.--Ever your affectionate friend, R. L. S. TO W. H. LOW The allusions in the latter half of this letter are to the departure for Europe of the young Hawaiian princess Kaiulani (see the poem beginning "When from her land to mine she goes," in _Songs of Travel_), and to the circumstances of the great hurricane at Apia on March 15th, 1889. _Honolulu, (about) 20th May '89._ MY DEAR LOW,-- ... The goods have come; many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all.--I have at length finished _The Master_; it has been a sore cross to me; but now he is buried, his body's under hatches,--his soul, if there is any hell to go to, gone to hell; and I forgive him: it is harder to forgive Burlingame for having induced me to begin the publication, or myself for suffering the induction.--Yes, I think Hole has done finely; it will be one of the most adequately illustrated books of our generation; he gets the note, he tells the story--_my_ story: I know only one failure--the Master standing on the beach.--You must have a letter for me at Sydney--till further notice. Remember me to Mrs. Will. H., the godlike sculptor, and any of the faithful. If you want to cease to be a republican, see my little Kaiulani, as she goes through--but she is gone already. You will die a red: I wear the colours of that little royal maiden, _Nous allons chanter à la ronde, si vous voulez!_ only she is not blonde by several chalks, though she is but a half-blood, and the wrong half Edinburgh Scots like mysel'. But, O Low, I love the Polynesian: this civilisation of ours is a dingy, ungentlemanly business; it drops out too much of man, and too much of that the very beauty of the poor beast: who has his beauties in spite of Zola and Co. As usual, here is a whole letter with no news: I am a bloodless, inhuman dog; and no doubt Zola is a better correspondent.--Long live your fine old English admiral--yours, I mean--the U.S.A. one at Samoa; I wept tears and loved myself and mankind when I read of him: he is not too much civilised. And there was Gordon, too; and there are others, beyond question. But if you could live, the only white folk, in a Polynesian village; and drink that warm, light _vin du pays_ of human affection and enjoy that simple dignity of all about you--I will not gush, for I am now in my fortieth year, which seems highly unjust, but there it is, Mr. Low, and the Lord enlighten your affectionate R. L. S. [MRS. R. L. STEVENSON TO SIDNEY COLVIN This letter shows the writer in her character of wise and anxious critic of her husband's work. The result, in the judgment of most of his friends, went far to justify her misgivings. _Honolulu, May 21st, 1889._ BEST OF FRIENDS,--It was a joy inexpressible to get a word from you at last. Fortunately for our peace of mind, we were almost positive that your letters had been sent to the places we had already left. Still it was a bitter disappointment to get nothing from you when we arrived here. I wish you could have seen us both throwing over the immense package of letters searching for your handwriting. Now that we know you have been ill, please do let some one send us a line to our next address telling us how you are. What that next address may be we do not yet know, as our final movements are a little uncertain. To begin with, a trading schooner, the _Equator_, will come along some time in the first part of June, lie outside the harbour here and signal to us. Within forty-eight hours we shall pack up our possessions, our barrel of sauer kraut, our barrel of salt onions, our bag of cocoanuts, our native garments, our tobacco, fish hooks, red combs, and Turkey red calicoes (all the latter for trading purposes), our hand organ, photograph and painting materials, and finally our magic lantern--all these upon a large whaleboat, and go out to the _Equator_. Lloyd, also, takes a fiddle, a guitar, a native instrument something like a banjo, called a taropatch fiddle, and a lot of song books. We shall be carried first to one of the Gilberts, landing at Butaritari. The _Equator_ is going about amongst the Gilbert group, and we have the right to keep her over when we like within reasonable limits. Finally she will leave us, and we shall have to take the chances of what happens next. We hope to see the Marshalls, the Carolines, the Fijis, Tonga and Samoa (also other islands that I do not remember), perhaps staying a little while in Sydney, and stopping on our way home to see our friends in Tahiti and the Marquesas. I am very much exercised by one thing. Louis has the most enchanting material that any one ever had in the whole world for his book, and I am afraid he is going to spoil it all. He has taken into his Scotch Stevenson head that a stern duty lies before him, and that his book must be a sort of scientific and historical impersonal thing, comparing the different languages (of which he knows nothing, really) and the different peoples, the object being to settle the question as to whether they are of common Malay origin or not. Also to compare the Protestant and Catholic missions, etc., and the whole thing to be impersonal, leaving out all he knows of the people themselves. And I believe there is no one living who has got so near to them, or who understands them as he does. Think of a small treatise on the Polynesian races being offered to people who are dying to hear about Ori a Ori, the making of brothers with cannibals, the strange stories they told, and the extraordinary adventures that befell us:--suppose Herman Melville had given us his theories as to the Polynesian language and the probable good or evil results of the missionary influence instead of _Omoo_ and _Typee_, or Kinglake[32] instead of _Eothen_. Louis says it is a stern sense of duty that is at the bottom of it, which is more alarming than anything else. I am so sure that you will agree with me that I am going to ask you to throw the weight of your influence as heavily as possible in the scales with me. Please refer to the matter in the letters we shall receive at our first stopping place, otherwise Louis will spend a great deal of time in Sydney actually reading up other people's books on the Islands. What a thing it is to have a "man of genius" to deal with. It is like managing an overbred horse. Why with my own feeble hand I could write a book that the whole world would jump at. Please keep any letters of mine that contain any incidents of our wanderings. They are very exact as to facts, and Louis may, in this conscientious state of mind (indeed I am afraid he has), put nothing in his diary but statistics. Even if I thought it a desirable thing to write what he proposes, I should still think it impossible unless after we had lived and studied here some twenty years or more. Now I am done with my complaining, and shall turn to the pleasanter paths. Louis went to one of the other islands a couple of weeks ago, quite alone, got drenched with rain and surf, rode over mountain paths--five and a half hours one day--and came back none the worse for it. To-day he goes to Molokai, the leper island. He never has a sign of hemorrhage, the air cushion is a thing of the past, and altogether he is a new man. How he will do in the English climate again I do not know, but in these latitudes he is very nearly a well man, nothing seems to do him harm but overwork. That, of course, is sometimes difficult to prevent. Now, however, the _Master_ is done, we have enough money to go upon and there is no need to work at all. I must stop. My dear love to you all. FANNY V. DE G. STEVENSON.] TO MRS. R. L. STEVENSON The following two letters were written during and immediately after Stevenson's trip to the noted leper settlement, the scene of Father Damien's labours, at Molokai. _Kalawao, Molokai [May 1889]._ DEAR FANNY,--I had a lovely sail up. Captain Cameron and Mr. Gilfillan, both born in the States, yet the first still with a strong Highland, and the second still with a strong Lowland accent, were good company; the night was warm, the victuals plain but good. Mr. Gilfillan gave me his berth, and I slept well, though I heard the sisters sick in the next stateroom, poor souls. Heavy rolling woke me in the morning; I turned in all standing, so went right on the upper deck. The day was on the peep out of a low morning bank, and we were wallowing along under stupendous cliffs. As the lights brightened, we could see certain abutments and buttresses on their front where wood clustered and grass grew brightly. But the whole brow seemed quite impassable, and my heart sank at the sight. Two thousand feet of rock making 19° (the Captain guesses) seemed quite beyond my powers. However, I had come so far; and, to tell you the truth, I was so cowed with fear and disgust that I dared not go back on the adventure in the interests of my own self-respect. Presently we came up with the leper promontory: lowland, quite bare and bleak and harsh, a little town of wooden houses, two churches, a landing-stair, all unsightly, sour, northerly, lying athwart the sunrise, with the great wall of the pali cutting the world out on the south. Our lepers were sent on the first boat, about a dozen, one poor child very horrid, one white man, leaving a large grown family behind him in Honolulu, and then into the second stepped the sisters and myself. I do not know how it would have been with me had the sisters not been there. My horror of the horrible is about my weakest point; but the moral loveliness at my elbow blotted all else out; and when I found that one of them was crying, poor soul, quietly under her veil, I cried a little myself; then I felt as right as a trivet, only a little crushed to be there so uselessly. I thought it was a sin and a shame she should feel unhappy; I turned round to her, and said something like this: "Ladies, God Himself is here to give you welcome. I'm sure it is good for me to be beside you; I hope it will be blessed to me; I thank you for myself and the good you do me." It seemed to cheer her up; but indeed I had scarce said it when we were at the landing-stairs, and there was a great crowd, hundreds of (God save us!) pantomime masks in poor human flesh, waiting to receive the sisters and the new patients. Every hand was offered: I had gloves, but I had made up my mind on the boat's voyage _not_ to give my hand; that seemed less offensive than the gloves. So the sisters and I went up among that crew, and presently I got aside (for I felt I had no business there) and set off on foot across the promontory, carrying my wrap and the camera. All horror was quite gone from me: to see these dread creatures smile and look happy was beautiful. On my way through Kalaupapa I was exchanging cheerful _alohas_ with the patients coming galloping over on their horses; I was stopping to gossip at house-doors; I was happy, only ashamed of myself that I was here for no good. One woman was pretty, and spoke good English, and was infinitely engaging and (in the old phrase) towardly; she thought I was the new white patient; and when she found I was only a visitor, a curious change came in her face and voice--the only sad thing, morally sad, I mean--that I met that morning. But for all that, they tell me none want to leave. Beyond Kalaupapa the houses became rare; dry stone dykes, grassy, stony land, one sick pandanus; a dreary country; from overhead in the little clinging wood shogs of the pali chirruping of birds fell; the low sun was right in my face; the trade blew pure and cool and delicious; I felt as right as ninepence, and stopped and chatted with the patients whom I still met on their horses, with not the least disgust. About half-way over, I met the superintendent (a leper) with a horse for me, and O, wasn't I glad! But the horse was one of those curious, dogged, cranky brutes that always dully want to go somewhere else, and my traffic with him completed my crushing fatigue. I got to the guest-house, an empty house with several rooms, kitchen, bath, etc. There was no one there, and I let the horse go loose in the garden, lay down on the bed, and fell asleep. Dr. Swift woke me and gave me breakfast, then I came back and slept again while he was at the dispensary, and he woke me for dinner; and I came back and slept again, and he woke me about six for supper; and then in about an hour I felt tired again, and came up to my solitary guest-house, played the flageolet, and am now writing to you. As yet, you see, I have seen nothing of the settlement, and my crushing fatigue (though I believe that was moral and a measure of my cowardice) and the doctor's opinion make me think the pali hopeless. "You don't look a strong man," said the doctor; "but are you sound?" I told him the truth; then he said it was out of the question, and if I were to get up at all, I must be carried up. But, as it seems, men as well as horses continually fall on this ascent: the doctor goes up with a change of clothes--it is plain that to be carried would in itself be very fatiguing to both mind and body; and I should then be at the beginning of thirteen miles of mountain road to be ridden against time. How should I come through? I hope you will think me right in my decision: I mean to stay, and shall not be back in Honolulu till Saturday, June first. You must all do the best you can to make ready. Dr. Swift has a wife and an infant son, beginning to toddle and run, and they live here as composed as brick and mortar--at least the wife does, a Kentucky German, a fine enough creature, I believe, who was quite amazed at the sisters shedding tears! How strange is mankind! Gilfillan too, a good fellow I think, and far from a stupid, kept up his hard Lowland Scottish talk in the boat while the sister was covering her face; but I believe he knew, and did it (partly) in embarrassment, and part perhaps in mistaken kindness. And that was one reason, too, why I made my speech to them. Partly, too, I did it, because I was ashamed to do so, and remembered one of my golden rules, "When you are ashamed to speak, speak up at once." But, mind you, that rule is only golden with strangers; with your own folks, there are other considerations. This is a strange place to be in. A bell has been sounded at intervals while I wrote, now all is still but a musical humming of the sea, not unlike the sound of telegraph wires; the night is quite cool and pitch dark, with a small fine rain; one light over in the leper settlement, one cricket whistling in the garden, my lamp here by my bedside, and my pen cheeping between my inky fingers. Next day, lovely morning, slept all night, 80° in the shade, strong, sweet Anaho trade-wind. LOUIS. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Honolulu, June 1889._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--I am just home after twelve days' journey to Molokai, seven of them at the leper settlement, where I can only say that the sight of so much courage, cheerfulness, and devotion strung me too high to mind the infinite pity and horror of the sights. I used to ride over from Kalawao to Kalaupapa (about three miles across the promontory, the cliff-wall, ivied with forest and yet inaccessible from steepness, on my left), go to the Sisters' home, which is a miracle of neatness, play a game of croquet with seven leper girls (90° in the shade), got a little old-maid meal served me by the Sisters, and ride home again, tired enough, but not too tired. The girls have all dolls, and love dressing them. You who know so many ladies delicately clad, and they who know so many dressmakers, please make it known it would be an acceptable gift to send scraps for doll dressmaking to the Reverend Sister Maryanne, Bishop Home, Kalaupapa, Molokai, Hawaiian Islands. I have seen sights that cannot be told, and heard stories that cannot be repeated: yet I never admired my poor race so much, nor (strange as it may seem) loved life more than in the settlement. A horror of moral beauty broods over the place: that's like bad Victor Hugo, but it is the only way I can express the sense that lived with me all these days. And this even though it was in great part Catholic, and my sympathies flow never with so much difficulty as towards Catholic virtues. The passbook kept with heaven stirs me to anger and laughter. One of the sisters calls the place "the ticket office to heaven." Well, what is the odds? They do their darg, and do it with kindness and efficiency incredible; and we must take folks' virtues as we find them, and love the better part. Of old Damien, whose weaknesses and worse perhaps I heard fully, I think only the more. It was a European peasant: dirty, bigoted, untruthful, unwise, tricky, but superb with generosity, residual candour and fundamental good-humour: convince him he had done wrong (it might take hours of insult) and he would undo what he had done and like his corrector better. A man, with all the grime and paltriness of mankind, but a saint and hero all the more for that. The place as regards scenery is grand, gloomy, and bleak. Mighty mountain walls descending sheer along the whole face of the island into a sea unusually deep; the front of the mountain ivied and furred with clinging forest, one viridescent cliff: about half-way from east to west, the low, bare, stony promontory edged in between the cliff and the ocean; the two little towns (Kalawao and Kalaupapa) seated on either side of it, as bare almost as bathing machines upon a beach; and the population--gorgons and chimaeras dire. All this tear of the nerves I bore admirably; and the day after I got away, rode twenty miles along the opposite coast and up into the mountains: they call it twenty, I am doubtful of the figures: I should guess it nearer twelve; but let me take credit for what residents allege; and I was riding again the day after, so I need say no more about health. Honolulu does not agree with me at all: I am always out of sorts there, with slight headache, blood to the head, etc. I had a good deal of work to do and did it with miserable difficulty; and yet all the time I have been gaining strength, as you see, which is highly encouraging. By the time I am done with this cruise I shall have the material for a very singular book of travels: names of strange stories and characters, cannibals, pirates, ancient legends, old Polynesian poetry,--never was so generous a farrago. I am going down now to get the story of a shipwrecked family, who were fifteen months on an island with a murderer: there is a specimen. The Pacific is a strange place; the nineteenth century only exists there in spots: all round, it is a no man's land of the ages, a stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilisations, virtues and crimes. It is good of you to let me stay longer, but if I had known how ill you were, I should be now on my way home. I had chartered my schooner and made all arrangements before (at last) we got definite news. I feel highly guilty; I should be back to insult and worry you a little. Our address till further notice is to be c/o R. Towns & Co., Sydney. That is final: I only got the arrangement made yesterday; but you may now publish it abroad.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO JAMES PAYN The following was written to his old friend of Cornhill Magazine days, Mr. James Payn, on receiving in Hawaii news of that gentleman's ill health and gathering deafness. _Honolulu, H.I., June 13th, 1889._ MY DEAR JAMES PAYN,--I get sad news of you here at my offsetting for further voyages: I wish I could say what I feel. Sure there was never any man less deserved this calamity; for I have heard you speak time and again, and I remember nothing that was unkind, nothing that was untrue, nothing that was not helpful, from your lips. It is the ill-talkers that should hear no more. God knows, I know no word of consolation; but I do feel your trouble. You are the more open to letters now; let me talk to you for two pages. I have nothing but happiness to tell; and you may bless God you are a man so sound-hearted that (even in the freshness of your calamity) I can come to you with my own good fortune unashamed and secure of sympathy. It is a good thing to be a good man, whether deaf or whether dumb; and of all our fellow-craftsmen (whom yet they count a jealous race), I never knew one but gave you the name of honesty and kindness: come to think of it gravely, this is better than the finest hearing. We are all on the march to deafness, blindness, and all conceivable and fatal disabilities; we shall not all get there with a report so good. My good news is a health astonishingly reinstated. This climate; these voyagings; these landfalls at dawn; new islands peaking from the morning bank; new forested harbours; new passing alarms of squalls and surf; new interests of gentle natives,--the whole tale of my life is better to me than any poem. I am fresh just now from the leper settlement of Molokai, playing croquet with seven leper girls, sitting and yarning with old, blind, leper beachcombers in the hospital, sickened with the spectacle of abhorrent suffering and deformation amongst the patients, touched to the heart by the sight of lovely and effective virtues in their helpers: no stranger time have I ever had, nor any so moving. I do not think it a little thing to be deaf, God knows, and God defend me from the same!--but to be a leper, or one of the self-condemned, how much more awful! and yet there's a way there also. "There are Molokais everywhere," said Mr. Dutton, Father Damien's dresser; you are but new landed in yours; and my dear and kind adviser, I wish you, with all my soul, that patience and courage which you will require. Think of me meanwhile on a trading schooner bound for the Gilbert Islands, thereafter for the Marshalls, with a diet of fish and cocoanut before me; bound on a cruise of--well, of investigation to what islands we can reach, and to get (some day or other) to Sydney, where a letter addressed to the care of R. Towns & Co. will find me sooner or later; and if it contain any good news, whether of your welfare or the courage with which you bear the contrary, will do me good.--Yours affectionately (although so near a stranger), ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO LADY TAYLOR _Honolulu, June 19th, 1889._ MY DEAR LADY TAYLOR,--Our new home, the _Equator_, trading schooner, rides at the buoy to-night, and we are for sea shortly. All your folk of the Roost held us for phantoms and things of the night from our first appearance; but I do wish you would try to believe in our continued existence, as flesh and blood obscurely tossed in the Pacific, or walking coral shores, and in our affection, which is more constant than becomes the breasts of such absconders. My good health does not cease to be wonderful to myself: Fanny is better in these warm places; it is the very thing for Lloyd; and in the matter of interest, the spice of life, etc., words cannot depict what fun we have. Try to have a little more patience with the fugitives, and think of us now and again among the Gilberts, where we ought to be about the time when you receive this scrap. They make no great figure on the atlas, I confess; but you will see the name there, if you look--which I wish you would, and try to conceive us as still extant. We all send the kindest remembrances to all of you; please make one of the girls write us the news to the care of R. Towns & Co., Sydney, New South Wales, where we hope to bring up about the end of the year--or later. Do not forget yours affectionately, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Stevenson and his party sailed accordingly on the trading schooner _Equator_, "on a certain bright June day in 1889," for the Gilbert Islands, a scattered group of atolls in the Western Pacific. Their expectation was to come back into civilisation again by way of the Carolines, Manila, and the China ports; but instead of this, circumstances which occurred to change the trader's course took them southwards to Samoa, where they arrived in December of the same year. Their second voyage was thus of six months' duration; in the course of it they spent two periods of about six weeks each on land, first at one and then at another of the two island capitals, Butaritari and Apemama. The following letter is the first which reached Stevenson's friends from this part of his voyage, and was written in two instalments, the first from on board the _Equator_ in the lagoon of the island of Apaiang; the second, six weeks later, from the settlement on shore at Apemama, which the king, his friend Temhinoka, allowed him and his party to occupy during their stay. The account of this stay at Apemama and of the character of the king is far the most interesting and attractive part of the volume called _In the South Seas_, which was the literary result of these voyages. _Schooner Equator, Apaiang Lagoon, August 22nd, 1889._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--The missionary ship is outside the reef trying (vainly) to get in; so I may have a chance to get a line off. I am glad to say I shall be home by June next for the summer, or we shall know the reason why. For God's sake be well and jolly for the meeting. I shall be, I believe, a different character from what you have seen this long while. This cruise is up to now a huge success, being interesting, pleasant, and profitable. The beachcomber is perhaps the most interesting character here; the natives are very different, on the whole, from Polynesians: they are moral, stand-offish (for good reasons), and protected by a dark tongue. It is delightful to meet the few Hawaiians (mostly missionaries) that are dotted about, with their Italian _brio_ and their ready friendliness. The whites are a strange lot, many of them good, kind, pleasant fellows; others quite the lowest I have ever seen even in the slums of cities. I wish I had time to narrate to you the doings and character of three white murderers (more or less proven) I have met. One, the only undoubted assassin of the lot, quite gained my affection in his big home out of a wreck, with his New Hebrides wife in her savage turban of hair and yet a perfect lady, and his three adorable little girls in Rob Roy Macgregor dresses, dancing to the hand organ, performing circus on the floor with startling effects of nudity, and curling up together on a mat to sleep, three sizes, three attitudes, three Rob Roy dresses, and six little clenched fists: the murderer meanwhile brooding and gloating over his chicks, till your whole heart went out to him; and yet his crime on the face of it was dark: disembowelling, in his own house, an old man of seventy, and him drunk. It is lunch-time, I see, and I must close up with my warmest love to you. I wish you were here to sit upon me when required. Ah! if you were but a good sailor! I will never leave the sea, I think; it is only there that a Briton lives: my poor grandfather, it is from him I inherit the taste, I fancy, and he was round many islands in his day; but I, please God, shall beat him at that before the recall is sounded. Would you be surprised to learn that I contemplate becoming a shipowner? I do, but it is a secret. Life is far better fun than people dream who fall asleep among the chimney stacks and telegraph wires. Love to Henry James and others near.--Ever yours, my dear fellow, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _Equator Town, Apemama, October 1889._ No _Morning Star_ came, however; and so now I try to send this to you by the schooner _J. L. Tiernan_. We have been about a month ashore, camping out in a kind of town the king set up for us: on the idea that I was really a "big chief" in England. He dines with us sometimes, and sends up a cook for a share of our meals when he does not come himself. This sounds like high living! alas, undeceive yourself. Salt junk is the mainstay; a low island, except for cocoanuts, is just the same as a ship at sea: brackish water, no supplies, and very little shelter. The king is a great character--a thorough tyrant, very much of a gentleman, a poet, a musician, a historian, or perhaps rather more a genealogist--it is strange to see him lying in his house among a lot of wives (nominal wives) writing the History of Apemama in an account-book; his description of one of his own songs, which he sang to me himself, as "about sweethearts, and trees, and the sea--and no true, all-the-same lie," seems about as compendious a definition of lyric poetry as a man could ask. Tembinoka is here the great attraction: all the rest is heat and tedium and villainous dazzle, and yet more villainous mosquitoes. We are like to be here, however, many a long week before we get away, and then whither? A strange trade this voyaging: so vague, so bound-down, so helpless. Fanny has been planting some vegetables, and we have actually onions and radishes coming up: ah, onion-despiser, were you but a while in a low island, how your heart would leap at sight of a coster's barrow! I think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips. No doubt we shall all be glad to say farewell to low islands--I had near said for ever. They are very tame; and I begin to read up the directory, and pine for an island with a profile, a running brook, or were it only a well among the rocks. The thought of a mango came to me early this morning and set my greed on edge; but you do not know what a mango is, so----. I have been thinking a great deal of you and the Monument of late, and even tried to get my thoughts into a poem, hitherto without success. God knows how you are: I begin to weary dreadfully to see you--well, in nine months, I hope; but that seems a long time. I wonder what has befallen me too, that flimsy part of me that lives (or dwindles) in the public mind; and what has befallen _The Master_, and what kind of a Box the Merry Box has been found. It is odd to know nothing of all this. We had an old woman to do devil-work for you about a month ago, in a Chinaman's house on Apaiang (August 23rd or 24th), You should have seen the crone with a noble masculine face, like that of an old crone [_sic_], a body like a man's (naked all but the feathery female girdle), knotting cocoanut leaves and muttering spells: Fanny and I, and the good captain of the _Equator_, and the Chinaman and his native wife and sister-in-law, all squatting on the floor about the sibyl; and a crowd of dark faces watching from behind her shoulder (she sat right in the doorway) and tittering aloud with strange, appalled, embarrassed laughter at each fresh adjuration. She informed us you were in England, not travelling and now no longer sick; she promised us a fair wind the next day, and we had it, so I cherish the hope she was as right about Sidney Colvin. The shipownering has rather petered out since I last wrote, and a good many other plans beside. Health? Fanny very so-so; I pretty right upon the whole, and getting through plenty work: I know not quite how, but it seems to me not bad and in places funny. South Sea Yarns: 1. _The Wrecker_ } R. L. S. 2. _The Pearl Fisher_ } by and 3. _The Beachcombers_ } Lloyd O. _The Pearl Fisher_, part done, lies in Sydney. It is _The Wrecker_ we are now engaged upon: strange ways of life, I think, they set forth: things that I can scarce touch upon, or even not at all, in my travel book; and the yarns are good, I do believe. _The Pearl Fisher_ is for the New York Ledger: the yarn is a kind of Monte Cristo one. _The Wrecker_ is the least good as a story, I think; but the characters seem to me good. _The Beachcombers_ is more sentimental. These three scarce touch the out-skirts of the life we have been viewing; a hot-bed of strange characters and incidents: Lord, how different from Europe or the Pallid States! Farewell. Heaven knows when this will get to you. I burn to be in Sydney and have news. R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The following, written in the last days of the sail southwards from the Gilberts to Samoa, contains the full plan of the South Sea book as it had now been conceived. In the issue, Part I. (so far as I know) was never written; Parts II. and III. appeared serially in the New York Sun, and were reprinted with corrections in the volume called _In the South Seas_; Part IV. was never written; Part V. was written but has not been printed, at least in this country; Part VI. (and far the most successful) closes the volume _In the South Seas_; Part VII. developed itself into _A Footnote to History_. The verses at the end of this letter have already been printed (_Songs of Travel_, vol. xiv., p. 244); but I give them here with the context, as in similar instances above. The allusion is to the two colossal images from Easter Island which used to stand under the portico to the right hand of the visitor entering the Museum, were for some years removed, and are now restored to their old place. _Schooner Equator, at sea. 190 miles off Samoa. Monday, December 2nd, 1889._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--We are just nearing the end of our long cruise. Rain, calms, squalls, bang--there's the foretopmast gone; rain, calm, squalls, away with the stay-sail; more rain, more calm, more squalls; a prodigious heavy sea all the time, and the _Equator_ staggering and hovering like a swallow in a storm; and the cabin, a great square, crowded with wet human beings, and the rain avalanching on the deck, and the leaks dripping everywhere: Fanny, in the midst of fifteen males, bearing up wonderfully. But such voyages are at the best a trial. We had one particularity: coming down on Winslow Reef, p. d. (position doubtful): two positions in the directory, a third (if you cared to count that) on the chart; heavy sea running, and the night due. The boats were cleared, bread put on board, and we made up our packets for a boat voyage of four or five hundred miles, and turned in, expectant of a crash. Needless to say it did not come, and no doubt we were far to leeward. If we only had twopenceworth of wind, we might be at dinner in Apia to-morrow evening; but no such luck: here we roll, dead before a light air--and that is no point of sailing at all for a fore and aft schooner--the sun blazing overhead, thermometer 88°, four degrees above what I have learned to call South Sea temperature; but for all that, land so near, and so much grief being happily astern, we are all pretty gay on board, and have been photographing and draught-playing and sky-larking like anything. I am minded to stay not very long in Samoa and confine my studies there (as far as any one can forecast) to the history of the late war. My book is now practically modelled: if I can execute what is designed, there are few better books now extant on this globe, bar the epics, and the big tragedies, and histories, and the choice lyric poetics, and a novel or so--none. But it is not executed yet; and let not him that putteth on his armour, vaunt himself. At least, nobody has had such stuff; such wild stories, such beautiful scenes, such singular intimacies, such manners and traditions, so incredible a mixture of the beautiful and horrible, the savage and civilised. I will give you here some idea of the table of contents, which ought to make your mouth water. I propose to call the book _The South Seas_: it is rather a large title, but not many people have seen more of them than I, perhaps no one--certainly no one capable of using the material. _Part I. General. "Of schooners, islands, and maroons"_ CHAPTER I. Marine. " II. Contraband (smuggling, barratry, labour traffic). " III. The Beachcomber. " IV. Beachcomber stories, i. The Murder of the Chinaman, ii. Death of a Beachcomber. iii. A Character, iv. The Apia Blacksmith. _Part II. The Marquesas_ " V. Anaho. i. Arrival, ii. Death, iii. The Tapu. iv. Morals, v. Hoka. " VI. Tai-o-hae. i. Arrival. ii. The French. iii. The Royal Family. iv. Chiefless Folk. v. The Catholics. vi. Hawaiian Missionaries " VII. Observations of a Long Pig. i. Cannibalism, ii. Hatiheu. iii. Frère Michel, iv. Taa-hauku and Atuona. v. The Vale of Atuona. vi. Moipu. vii. Captain Hati. _Part III. The Dangerous Archipelago_ " VIII. The Group. " IX. A House to let in a Low Island. " X. A Paumotuan Funeral, i. The Funeral, ii. Tales of the Dead. _Part IV. Tahiti_ " XI. Tautira. " XII. Village Government in Tahiti. " XIII. A Journey in Quest of Legends. " XIV. Legends and Songs. " XV. Life in Eden. " XVI. Note on the French Regimen. _Part V. The Eight Islands_ " XVII. A Note on Missions. " XVIII. The Kona Coast of Hawaii. i. Hookena. ii. A Ride in the Forest. iii. A Law Case. iv. The City of Refuge. v. The Lepers. " XIX. Molokai. i. A Week in the Precinct. ii. History of the Leper Settlement, iii. The Mokolii. iv. The Free Island. _Part VI. The Gilberts_ " XX. The Group, ii. Position of Woman, iii. The Missions. iv. Devilwork. v. Republics. " XXI. Rule and Misrule on Makin. i. Butaritari, its King and Court. ii. History of Three Kings. iii. The Drink Question. " XXII. A Butaritarian Festival. " XXIII. The King of Apemama. i. First Impressions. ii. Equator Town and the Palace. iii. The Three Corselets. _Part VII. Samoa_ which I have not yet reached. Even as so sketched it makes sixty chapters, not less than 300 Cornhill pages; and I suspect not much under 500. Samoa has yet to be accounted for: I think it will be all history, and I shall work in observations on Samoan manners, under the similar heads in other Polynesian islands. It is still possible, though unlikely, that I may add a passing visit to Fiji or Tonga, or even both; but I am growing impatient to see yourself, and I do not want to be later than June of coming to England. Anyway, you see it will be a large work, and as it will be copiously illustrated, the Lord knows what it will cost. We shall return, God willing, by Sydney, Ceylon, Suez and, I guess, Marseilles the many-masted (copyright epithet). I shall likely pause a day or two in Paris, but all that is too far ahead--although now it begins to look near--so near, and I can hear the rattle of the hansom up Endell Street, and see the gates swing back, and feel myself jump out upon the Monument steps--Hosanna!--home again. My dear fellow, now that my father is done with his troubles, and 17 Heriot Row no more than a mere shell, you and that gaunt old Monument in Bloomsbury are all that I have in view when I use the word home; some passing thoughts there may be of the rooms at Skerryvore, and the blackbirds in the chine on a May morning; but the essence is S.C. and the Museum. Suppose, by some damned accident, you were no more; well, I should return just the same, because of my mother and Lloyd, whom I now think to send to Cambridge; but all the spring would have gone out of me, and ninety per cent. of the attraction lost. I will copy for you here a copy of verses made in Apemama. I heard the pulse of the besieging sea Throb far away all night. I heard the wind Fly crying, and convulse tumultuous palms. I rose and strolled. The isle was all bright sand, And flailing fans and shadows of the palm: The heaven all moon, and wind, and the blind vault-- The keenest planet slain, for Venus slept. The King, my neighbour, with his host of wives, Slept in the precinct of the palisade: Where single, in the wind, under the moon, Among the slumbering cabins, blazed a fire, Sole street-lamp and the only sentinel. To other lands and nights my fancy turned. To London first, and chiefly to your house, The many-pillared and the well-beloved. There yearning fancy lighted; there again In the upper room I lay and heard far off The unsleeping city murmur like a shell; The muffled tramp of the Museum guard Once more went by me; I beheld again Lamps vainly brighten the dispeopled street; Again I longed for the returning morn, The awaking traffic, the bestirring birds, The consentancous trill of tiny song That weaves round monumental cornices A passing charm of beauty: most of all, For your light foot I wearied, and your knock That was the glad réveillé of my day. Lo, now, when to your task in the great house At morning through the portico you pass, One moment glance where, by the pillared wall, Far-voyaging island gods, begrimed with smoke, Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument Of faiths forgot and races undivined; Sit now disconsolate, remembering well The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd, The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice Incessant, of the breakers on the shore. As far as these from their ancestral shrine, So far, so foreign, your divided friends Wander, estranged in body, not in mind. R. L. S. TO E. L. BURLINGAME _Schooner Equator, at sea, Wednesday, 4th December 1889._ MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--We are now about to rise, like whales, from this long dive, and I make ready a communication which is to go to you by the first mail from Samoa. How long we shall stay in that group I cannot forecast; but it will be best still to address at Sydney, where I trust, when I shall arrive, perhaps in one month from now, more probably in two or three, to find all news. _Business._--Will you be likely to have a space in the Magazine for a serial story, which should be ready, I believe, by April, at latest by autumn? It is called _The Wrecker_; and in book form will appear as number 1 of _South Sea Yarns_ by R. L. S. and Lloyd Osbourne. Here is the table as far as fully conceived, and indeed executed.[33]... The story is founded on fact, the mystery I really believe to be insoluble; the purchase of a wreck has never been handled before, no more has San Francisco. These seem all elements of success. There is, besides, a character, Jim Pinkerton, of the advertising American, on whom we build a good deal; and some sketches of the American merchant marine, opium smuggling in Honolulu, etc. It should run to (about) three hundred pages of my MS. I would like to know if this tale smiles upon you, if you will have a vacancy, and what you will be willing to pay. It will of course be copyright in both the States and England. I am a little anxious to have it tried serially, as it tests the interest of the mystery. _Pleasure._--We have had a fine time in the Gilbert group, though four months on low islands, which involves low diet, is a largeish order; and my wife is rather down. I am myself, up to now, a pillar of health, though our long and vile voyage of calms, squalls, cataracts of rain, sails carried away, foretopmast lost, boats cleared and packets made on the approach of a p. d. reef, etc., has cured me of salt brine, and filled me with a longing for beef steak and mangoes not to be depicted. The interest has been immense. Old King Tembinoka of Apemama, the Napoleon of the group, poet, tyrant, altogether a man of mark, gave me the woven corselets of his grandfather, his father and his uncle, and, what pleased me more, told me their singular story, then all manner of strange tales, facts, and experiences for my South Sea book, which should be a Tearer, Mr. Burlingame: no one at least has had such stuff. We are now engaged in the hell of a dead calm, the heat is cruel--it is the only time when I suffer from heat: I have nothing on but a pair of serge trousers, and a singlet without sleeves of Oxford gauze--O, yes, and a red sash about my waist; and yet as I sit here in the cabin, sweat streams from me. The rest are on deck under a bit of awning; we are not much above a hundred miles from port, and we might as well be in Kamschatka. However, I should be honest: this is the first calm I have endured without the added bane of a heavy swell, and the intoxicated blue-bottle wallowings and knockings of the helpless ship. I wonder how you liked the end of _The Master_; that was the hardest job I ever had to do; did I do it? My wife begs to be remembered to yourself and Mrs. Burlingame. Remember all of us to all friends, particularly Low, in case I don't get a word through for him.--I am, yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES BAXTER The following was written soon after the termination of the voyage of the _Equator_ and Stevenson's first landing in Samoa, where he was engaged in collecting materials for the account (then intended to be the concluding part of his great projected South Sea book) of the war and hurricane of the previous year. _Samoa [December 1889]._ MY DEAR BAXTER,-- ... I cannot return until I have seen either Tonga or Fiji or both: and I must not leave here till I have finished my collections on the war--a very interesting bit of history, the truth often very hard to come at, and the search (for me) much complicated by the German tongue, from the use of which I have desisted (I suppose) these fifteen years. The last two days I have been mugging with a dictionary from five to six hours a day; besides this, I have to call upon, keep sweet, and judiciously interview all sorts of persons--English, American, German, and Samoan. It makes a hard life; above all, as after every interview I have to come and get my notes straight on the nail. I believe I should have got my facts before the end of January, when I shall make for Tonga or Fiji. I am down right in the hurricane season; but they had so bad a one last year, I don't imagine there will be much of an edition this. Say that I get to Sydney some time in April, and I shall have done well, and be in a position to write a very singular and interesting book, or rather two; for I shall begin, I think, with a separate opuscule on the Samoan Trouble, about as long as _Kidnapped_, not very interesting, but valuable--and a thing proper to be done. And then, hey! for the big South Sea Book: a devil of a big one, and full of the finest sport. This morning as I was going along to my breakfast a little before seven, reading a number of Blackwood's Magazine, I was startled by a soft _talofa, alii_ (note for my mother: they are quite courteous here in the European style, quite unlike Tahiti), right in my ear: it was Mataafa coming from early mass in his white coat and white linen kilt, with three fellows behind him. Mataafa is the nearest thing to a hero in my history, and really a fine fellow; plenty sense, and the most dignified, quiet, gentle manners. Talking of Blackwood--a file of which I was lucky enough to find here in the lawyer's--Mrs. Oliphant seems in a staggering state: from the _Wrong Box_ to _The Master_ I scarce recognise either my critic or myself. I gather that _The Master_ should do well, and at least that notice is agreeable reading. I expect to be home in June: you will have gathered that I am pretty well. In addition to my labours, I suppose I walk five or six miles a day, and almost every day I ride up and see Fanny and Lloyd, who are in a house in the bush with Ah Fu. I live in Apia for history's sake with Moors, an American trader. Day before yesterday I was arrested and fined for riding fast in the street, which made my blood bitter, as the wife of the manager of the German Firm has twice almost ridden me down, and there seems none to say her nay. The Germans have behaved pretty badly here, but not in all ways so ill as you may have gathered: they were doubtless much provoked; and if the insane Knappe had not appeared upon the scene, might have got out of the muddle with dignity. I write along without rhyme or reason, as things occur to me. I hope from my outcries about printing you do not think I want you to keep my news or letters in a Blue Beard closet. I like all friends to hear of me; they all should if I had ninety hours in the day, and strength for all of them; but you must have gathered how hard worked I am, and you will understand I go to bed a pretty tired man. _29th December [1889]._ To-morrow (Monday, I won't swear to my day of the month; this is the Sunday between Christmas and New Year) I go up the coast with Mr. Clarke, one of the London Society missionaries, in a boat to examine schools, see Tamasese, etc. Lloyd comes to photograph. Pray Heaven we have good weather; this is the rainy season; we shall be gone four or five days; and if the rain keep off, I shall be glad of the change; if it rain, it will be beastly. This explains still further how hard pressed I am, as the mail will be gone ere I return, and I have thus lost the days I meant to write in. I have a boy, Henry, who interprets and copies for me, and is a great nuisance. He said he wished to come to me in order to learn "long explessions." Henry goes up along with us; and as I am not fond of him, he may before the trip is over hear some "stlong explessions." I am writing this on the back balcony at Moors', palms and a hill like the hill of Kinnoull looking in at me; myself lying on the floor, and (like the parties in Handel's song) "clad in robes of virgin white"; the ink is dreadful, the heat delicious, a fine going breeze in the palms, and from the other side of the house the sudden angry splash and roar of the Pacific on the reef, where the warships are still piled from last year's hurricane, some under water, one high and dry upon her side, the strangest figure of a ship was ever witnessed; the narrow bay there is full of ships; the men-of-war covered with sail after the rains, and (especially the German ship, which is fearfully and awfully top heavy) rolling almost yards in, in what appears to be calm water. Samoa, Apia at least, is far less beautiful than the Marquesas or Tahiti: a more gentle scene, gentler acclivities, a tamer face of nature; and this much aided, for the wanderer, by the great German plantations with their countless regular avenues of palms. The island has beautiful rivers, of about the bigness of our waters in the Lothians, with pleasant pools and waterfalls and overhanging verdure, and often a great volume of sound, so that once I thought I was passing near a mill, and it was only the voice of the river. I am not specially attracted by the people; but they are courteous; the women very attractive, and dress lovely; the men purposelike, well set up, tall, lean, and dignified. As I write, the breeze is brisking up, doors are beginning to slam, and shutters; a strong draught sweeps round the balcony; it looks doubtful for to-morrow. Here I shut up.--Ever your affectionate R. L. STEVENSON. TO LADY TAYLOR This letter contains the first announcement of the purchase of the Vailima estate (not yet so named). Sir Percy Shelley had died in the previous December. _Apia, Samoa, Jan. 20th, 1890._ MY DEAR LADY TAYLOR,--I shall hope to see you in some months from now, when I come home--to break up my establishment--I know no diminutive of the word. Your daughters cast a spell upon me; they were always declaring I was a winged creature and would vanish into the uttermost isle; and they were right, and I have made my preparations. I am now the owner of an estate upon Upolu, some two or three miles behind and above Apia; three streams, two waterfalls, a great cliff, an ancient native fort, a view of the sea and lowlands, or (to be more precise) several views of them in various directions, are now mine. It would be affectation to omit a good many head of cattle; above all as it required much diplomacy to have them thrown in, for the gentleman who sold to me was staunch. Besides all this, there is a great deal more forest than I have any need for; or to be plain the whole estate is one impassable jungle, which must be cut down and through at considerable expense. Then the house has to be built; and then (as a climax) we may have to stand a siege in it in the next native war. I do feel as if I was a coward and a traitor to desert my friends; only, my dear lady, you know what a miserable corrhyzal (is that how it is spelt?) creature I was at home: and here I have some real health, I can walk, I can ride, I can stand some exposure, I am up with the sun, I have a real enjoyment of the world and of myself; it would be hard to go back again to England and to bed; and I think it would be very silly. I am sure it would; and yet I feel shame, and I know I am not writing like myself. I wish you knew how much I admired you, and when I think of those I must leave, how early a place your name occupies. I have not had the pleasure to know you very long; and yet I feel as if my leaving England were a special treachery to you, and my leaving you a treachery to myself. I will only ask you to try to forgive me: for I am sure I will never quite forgive myself. Somebody might write to me in the care of R. Towns & Co., Sydney, New South Wales, to tell me if you can forgive. But you will do quite right if you cannot. Only let me come and see you when we do return, or it will be a lame home-coming. My wife suffered a good deal in our last, somewhat arduous voyage; all our party indeed suffered except myself. Fanny is now better but she is still no very famous success in the way of health. All the while I have been writing, I have had another matter in my eye; of which I scarce like to speak: You know of course that I am thinking of Sir Percy and his widow. The news has reached me in the shape of a newspaper cutting, I have no particulars. He had a sweet, original nature; I think I liked him better than ever I should have liked his father; I am sorry he was always a little afraid of me; if I had had more chance, he would have liked me too, we had so much in common, and I valued so much his fine soul, as honest as a dog's, and the romance of him, which was like a dog's too, and like a poet's at the same time. If he had not been Shelley's son, people would have thought more of him; and yet he was the better of the two, bar verses. Please tell my dear Ida and Una that we think much of them, as well as of your dear self, and believe me, in words which you once allowed me to use (and I was very much affected when you did so), your affectionate friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO DR. SCOTT This gentleman is the physician to whose assiduous care and kindness, as recorded in the dedication to _Underwoods_, Stevenson owed so much during his invalid years at Bournemouth. _Apia, Samoa, January 20th, 1890._ MY DEAR SCOTT,--Shameful indeed that you should not have heard of me before! I have now been some twenty months in the South Seas, and am (up to date) a person whom you would scarce know. I think nothing of long walks and rides: I was four hours and a half gone the other day, partly riding, partly climbing up a steep ravine. I have stood a six months' voyage on a copra schooner with about three months ashore on coral atolls, which means (except for cocoanuts to drink) no change whatever from ship's food. My wife suffered badly--it was too rough a business altogether--Lloyd suffered--and, in short, I was the only one of the party who "kept my end up." I am so pleased with this climate that I have decided to settle; have even purchased a piece of land from three to four hundred acres, I know not which till the survey is completed, and shall only return next summer to wind up my affairs in England; thenceforth I mean to be a subject of the High Commissioner. Now you would have gone longer yet without news of your truant patient, but that I have a medical discovery to communicate. I find I can (almost immediately) fight off a cold with liquid extract of coca; two or (if obstinate) three teaspoonfuls in the day for a variable period of from one to five days sees the cold generally to the door. I find it at once produces a glow, stops rigour, and though it makes one very uncomfortable, prevents the advance of the disease. Hearing of this influenza, it occurred to me that this might prove remedial; and perhaps a stronger exhibition--injections of cocaine, for instance--still better. If on my return I find myself let in for this epidemic, which seems highly calculated to nip me in the bud, I shall feel very much inclined to make the experiment. See what a gulf you may save me from if you shall have previously made it on _anima vili_, on some less important sufferer, and shall have found it worse than useless. How is Miss Boodle and her family? Greeting to your brother and all friends in Bournemouth.--Yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES BAXTER After a stay of four or five weeks at Apia, during which he had fallen more and more in love with Samoa and the Samoans, Stevenson took steamer again, this time for Sydney, where he had ordered his letters to await him. This and the two following letters were written during the passage. I again print in their original place a set of verses separately published in _Songs of Travel_. _Februar den 3en 1890 Dampfer Lübeck, zwischen Apia und Sydney._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--I have got one delightful letter from you, and heard from my mother of your kindness in going to see her. Thank you for that: you can in no way more touch and serve me.... Ay, ay, it is sad to sell 17; sad and fine were the old days: when I was away in Apemama, I wrote two copies of verse about Edinburgh and the past, so ink black, so golden bright. I will send them, if I can find them, for they will say something to you, and indeed one is more than half addressed to you. This is it-- TO MY OLD COMRADES Do you remember--can we e'er forget?-- How, in the coiled perplexities of youth, In our wild climate, in our scowling town, We gloomed and shivered, sorrowed, sobbed, and feared? The belching winter wind, the missile rain, The rare and welcome silence of the snows, The laggard morn, the haggard day, the night, The grimy spell of the nocturnal town, Do you remember?--Ah, could one forget! As when the fevered sick that all night long Listed the wind intone, and hear at last The ever-welcome voice of the chanticleer Sing in the bitter hour before the dawn,-- With sudden ardour, these desire the day: (Here a squall sends all flying.) So sang in the gloom of youth the bird of hope; So we, exulting, hearkened and desired. For lo! as in the palace porch of life We huddled with chimeras, from within-- How sweet to hear!--the music swelled and fell, And through the breach of the revolving doors What dreams of splendour blinded us and fled! I have since then contended and rejoiced; Amid the glories of the house of life Profoundly entered, and the shrine beheld: Yet when the lamp from my expiring eyes Shall dwindle and recede, the voice of love Fall insignificant on my closing ears, What sound shall come but the old cry of the wind In our inclement city? what return But the image of the emptiness of youth, Filled with the sound of footsteps and that voice Of discontent and rapture and despair? So, as in darkness, from the magic lamp, The momentary pictures gleam and fade And perish, and the night resurges--these Shall I remember, and then all forget. They're pretty second-rate, but felt. I can't be bothered to copy the other. I have bought 314-1/2 acres of beautiful land in the bush behind Apia; when we get the house built, the garden laid, and cattle in the place, it will be something to fall back on for shelter and food; and if the island could stumble into political quiet, it is conceivable it might even bring a little income.... We range from 600 to 1500 feet, have five streams, waterfalls, precipices, profound ravines, rich tablelands, fifty head of cattle on the ground (if any one could catch them), a great view of forest, sea, mountains, the warships in the haven: really a noble place. Some day you are to take a long holiday and come and see us: it has been all planned. With all these irons in the fire, and cloudy prospects, you may be sure I was pleased to hear a good account of business. I believed _The Master_ was a sure card: I wonder why Henley thinks it grimy; grim it is, God knows, but sure not grimy, else I am the more deceived. I am sorry he did not care for it; I place it on the line with _Kidnapped_ myself. We'll see as time goes on whether it goes above or falls below. R. L. S. TO E. L. BURLINGAME The Editor of Scribner's Magazine had written asking him for fresh contributions, and he sends the set of verses addressed to Tembinoka, the king at Butaritari, and afterwards reprinted in _Songs of Travel_, beginning "Let us who part like brothers part like bards." _S.S. _Lübeck_ [between Apia and Sydney, February] 1890_ MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--I desire nothing better than to continue my relation with the Magazine, to which it pleases me to hear I have been useful. The only thing I have ready is the enclosed barbaric piece. As soon as I have arrived in Sydney I shall send you some photographs, a portrait of Tembinoka, perhaps a view of the palace or of the "matted men" at their singing; also T.'s flag, which my wife designed for him: in a word, what I can do best for you. It will be thus a foretaste of my book of travels. I shall ask you to let me have, if I wish it, the use of the plates made, and to make up a little tract of the verses and illustrations, of which you might send six copies to H.M. Tembinoka, King of Apemama, via Butaritari, Gilbert Islands. It might be best to send it by Crawford & Co., S.F. There is no postal service; and schooners must take it, how they may and when. Perhaps some such note as this might be prefixed: _At my departure from the island of Apemama, for which you will look in vain in most atlases, the king and I agreed, since we both set up to be in the poetical way, that we should celebrate our separation in verse. Whether or not his majesty has been true to his bargain, the laggard posts of the Pacific may perhaps inform me in six months, perhaps not before a year. The following lines represent my part of the contract, and it is hoped, by their pictures of strange manners, they may entertain a civilised audience. Nothing throughout has been invented or exaggerated; the lady herein referred to as the author's Muse, has confined herself to stringing into rhyme facts and legends that I saw or heard during two months' residence upon the island._ R. L. S. You will have received from me a letter about _The Wrecker_. No doubt it is a new experiment for me, being disguised so much as a study of manners, and the interest turning on a mystery of the detective sort. I think there need be no hesitation about beginning it in the fall of the year. Lloyd has nearly finished his part, and I shall hope to send you very soon the MS. of about the first four-sevenths. At the same time, I have been employing myself in Samoa, collecting facts about the recent war; and I propose to write almost at once and to publish shortly a small volume, called I know not what--the War in Samoa, the Samoa Trouble, an Island War, the War of the Three Consuls, I know not--perhaps you can suggest. It was meant to be a part of my travel book; but material has accumulated on my hands until I see myself forced into volume form, and I hope it may be of use, if it come soon. I have a few photographs of the war, which will do for illustrations. It is conceivable you might wish to handle this in the Magazine, although I am inclined to think you won't, and to agree with you. But if you think otherwise, there it is. The travel letters (fifty of them) are already contracted for in papers; these I was quite bound to let M'Clure handle, as the idea was of his suggestion, and I always felt a little sore as to one trick I played him in the matter of the end-papers. The war-volume will contain some very interesting and picturesque details: more I can't promise for it. Of course the fifty newspaper letters will be simply patches chosen from the travel volume (or volumes) as it gets written, But you see I have in hand:-- Say half done. 1. _The Wrecker_. Lloyd's copy half done, mine 2. _The Pearl Fisher_ (a novel promised not touched. to the Ledger, and which will form, when it comes in book form, No. 2 of our _South Sea Yarns_). Not begun, but all material 3. The War volume. ready. Ditto. 4. The Big Travel Book, which includes the letters. You know how they stand. 5. The _Ballads_. _Excusez du peu!_ And you see what madness it would be to make any fresh engagements. At the same time, you have _The Wrecker_ and the War volume, if you like either--or both--to keep my name in the Magazine. It begins to look as if I should not be able to get any more ballads done this somewhile. I know the book would sell better if it were all ballads; and yet I am growing half tempted to fill up with some other verses. A good few are connected with my voyage, such as the "Home of Tembinoka" sent herewith, and would have a sort of slight affinity to the _South Sea Ballads_. You might tell me how that strikes a stranger. In all this, my real interest is with the travel volume, which ought to be of a really extraordinary interest. I am sending you "Tembinoka" as he stands; but there are parts of him that I hope to better, particularly in stanzas III. and II. I scarce feel intelligent enough to try just now; and I thought at any rate you had better see it, set it up if you think well, and let me have a proof; so, at least, we shall get the bulk of it straight. I have spared you Teñkoruti, Tembaitake, Tembinatake, and other barbarous names, because I thought the dentists in the States had work enough without my assistance; but my chief's name is TEMBINOKA, pronounced, according to the present quite modern habit in the Gilberts, Tembinok'. Compare in the margin Tengkorootch; a singular new trick, setting at defiance all South Sea analogy, for nowhere else do they show even the ability, far less the will, to end a word upon a consonant. Loia is Lloyd's name, ship becomes shipé, teapot tipoté, etc. Our admirable friend Herman Melville, of whom, since I could judge, I have thought more than ever, had no ear for languages whatever: his Hapar tribe should be Hapaa, etc. But this is of no interest to you: suffice it, you see how I am as usual up to the neck in projects, and really all likely bairns this time. When will this activity cease? Too soon for me, I dare to say. R. L. S. TO JAMES PAYN _February 4th, 1890_, S.S. Lübeck. MY DEAR JAMES PAYN,--In virtue of confessions in your last, you would at the present moment, if you were along of me, be sick; and I will ask you to receive that as an excuse for my hand of write. Excuse a plain seaman if he regards with scorn the likes of you pore land-lubbers ashore now. (Reference to nautical ditty.) Which I may however be allowed to add that when eight months' mail was laid by my side one evening in Apia, and my wife and I sat up the most of the night to peruse the same--(precious indisposed we were next day in consequence)--no letter, out of so many, more appealed to our hearts than one from the pore, stick-in-the-mud, land-lubbering, common (or garden) Londoner, James Payn. Thank you for it; my wife says, "Can't I see him when we get back to London?" I have told her the thing appeared to me within the spear of practical politix. (Why can't I spell and write like an honest, sober, god-fearing litry gent? I think it's the motion of the ship.) Here I was interrupted to play chess with the chief engineer; as I grow old, I prefer the "athletic sport of cribbage," of which (I am sure I misquote) I have just been reading in your delightful _Literary Recollections_. How you skim along, you and Andrew Lang (different as you are), and yet the only two who can keep a fellow smiling every page, and ever and again laughing out loud. I joke wi' deeficulty, I believe; I am not funny; and when I am, Mrs. Oliphant says I'm vulgar, and somebody else says (in Latin) that I'm a whore, which seems harsh and even uncalled for: I shall stick to weepers; a 5s. weeper, 2s. 6d. laugher, 1s. shocker. My dear sir, I grow more and more idiotic; I cannot even feign sanity. Some time in the month of June a stalwart weather-beaten man, evidently of seafaring antecedents, shall be observed wending his way between the Athenæum Club and Waterloo Place. Arrived off No. 17, he shall be observed to bring his head sharply to the wind, and tack into the outer haven. "Captain Payn in the harbour?"--"Ay, ay, sir. What ship?"--"Barquentin R. L. S., nine hundred and odd days out from the port of Bournemouth, homeward bound, with yarns and curiosities." Who was it said, "For God's sake, don't speak of it!" about Scott and his tears? He knew what he was saying. The fear of that hour is the skeleton in all our cupboards; that hour when the pastime and the livelihood go together; and--I am getting hard of hearing myself; a pore young child of forty, but new come frae my Mammy, O! Excuse these follies, and accept the expression of all my regards.--Yours affectionately, R. L. STEVENSON. TO HENRY JAMES The _Solution_ is a short story of Mr. Henry James, first published in a periodical and reprinted in the collection called _The Lesson of the Master_ (Macmillans). _Union Club, Sydney, February 19, 1890._ HERE--in this excellent civilised, antipodal club smoking-room, I have just read the first part of your _Solution_. Dear Henry James, it is an exquisite art; do not be troubled by the shadows of your French competitors: not one, not de Maupassant, could have done a thing more clean and fine; dry in touch, but the atmosphere (as in a fine summer sunset) rich with colour and with perfume. I shall say no more; this note is De Solutione; except that I--that we--are all your sincere friends and hope to shake you by the hand in June. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. signed, sealed and delivered as his act and deed and very thought of very thought, this nineteenth of February in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred ninety and nothing. TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON Written while he was still in a white heat of indignation on behalf of Father Damien. He was not aware that Dr. Hyde's letter had been a private one not meant for publicity, and later came to think he might have struck as effectively on behalf of Damien without striking so fiercely against Dr. Hyde (see below, p. 404). "Damon" is the Rev. F. Damon, a missionary in Hawaii. _Union Club, Sydney, March 5, 1890._ MY DEAR MOTHER,--I understand the family keeps you somewhat informed. For myself I am in such a whirl of work and society, I can ill spare a moment. My health is excellent and has been here tried by abominable wet weather, and (what's waur) dinners and lunches. As this is like to be our metropolis, I have tried to lay myself out to be sociable with an eye to yoursel'. Several niceish people have turned up: Fanny has an evening, but she is about at the end of the virtuous effort, and shrinks from the approach of any fellow creature. Have you seen Hyde's (Dr. not Mr.) letter about Damien? That has been one of my concerns; I have an answer in the press; and have just written a difficult letter to Damon trying to prepare him for what (I fear) must be to him extremely painful. The answer is to come out as a pamphlet; of which I make of course a present to the publisher. I am not a cannibal, I would not eat the flesh of Dr. Hyde,--and it is conceivable it will make a noise in Honolulu. I have struck as hard as I knew how; nor do I think my answer can fail to do away (in the minds of all who see it) with the effect of Hyde's incredible and really villainous production. What a mercy I wasn't this man's _guest_ in the _Morning Star_! I think it would have broke my heart. Time for me to go!--I remain, with love, R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER Stevenson had not been long at Sydney--just long enough to write and print the famous _Letter to Dr. Hyde_ in defence of Father Damien--when, to his heavy disappointment, he fell ill again with one of his old bad attacks of fever and hemorrhage from the lungs. It was this experience which finally determined him to settle for good on his new island property in Samoa, which at first he had thought of rather as an occasional refuge and resting-place in the intervals between future projected yachting voyages. _Union Club, Sydney, March 7th, 1890._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--I did not send off the enclosed before from laziness; having gone quite sick, and being a blooming prisoner here in the club, and indeed in my bedroom. I was in receipt of your letters and your ornamental photo, and was delighted to see how well you looked, and how reasonably well I stood.... I am sure I shall never come back home except to die; I may do it, but shall always think of the move as suicidal, unless a great change comes over me, of which as yet I see no symptom. This visit to Sydney has smashed me handsomely; and yet I made myself a prisoner here in the club upon my first arrival. This is not encouraging for further ventures; Sydney winter--or, I might almost say, Sydney spring, for I came when the worst was over--is so small an affair, comparable to our June depression at home in Scotland.... The pipe is right again; it was the springs that had rusted, and ought to have been oiled. Its voice is now that of an angel; but, Lord! here in the club I dare not wake it! Conceive my impatience to be in my own backwoods and raise the sound of minstrelsy. What pleasures are to be compared with those of the Unvirtuous Virtuoso.--Yours ever affectionately, the Unvirtuous Virtuoso, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN To try and recover from the effects of his illness at Sydney, Stevenson determined to take another voyage; and started accordingly in April with his party on a trading steamer, the _Janet Nicoll_, which took him by a long and devious course among many groups of islands that he had not yet visited, returning to Sydney in August by way of New Caledonia. On the first night out of Auckland harbour the voyage nearly came to a premature end through the blowing up of some trade fireworks, or materials for fireworks, which had been packed in the stateroom. _S.S. Janet Nicoll, off Upolu [Spring 1890]._ MY DEAREST COLVIN,--I was sharply ill at Sydney, cut off, right out of bed, in this steamer on a fresh island cruise, and have already reaped the benefit. We are excellently found this time, on a spacious vessel, with an excellent table; the captain, supercargo, our one fellow-passenger, etc., very nice; and the charterer, Mr. Henderson, the very man I could have chosen. The truth is, I fear, this life is the only one that suits me; so long as I cruise in the South Seas, I shall be well and happy--alas, no, I do not mean that, and _absit omen_!--I mean that, so soon as I cease from cruising, the nerves are strained, the decline commences, and I steer slowly but surely back to bedward. We left Sydney, had a cruel rough passage to Auckland, for the _Janet_ is the worst roller I was ever aboard of. I was confined to my cabin, ports closed, self shied out of the berth, stomach (pampered till the day I left on a diet of perpetual egg-nogg) revolted at ship's food and ship eating, in a frowsy bunk, clinging with one hand to the plate, with the other to the glass, and using the knife and fork (except at intervals) with the eyelid. No matter: I picked up hand over hand. After a day in Auckland, we set sail again; were blown up in the main cabin with calcium fires, as we left the bay. Let no man say I am unscientific: when I ran, on the alert, out of my stateroom, and found the main cabin incarnadined with the glow of the last scene of a pantomime, I stopped dead: "What is this?" said I. "This ship is on fire, I see that; but why a pantomime?" And I stood and reasoned the point, until my head was so muddled with the fumes that I could not find the companion. A few seconds later, the captain had to enter crawling on his belly, and took days to recover (if he has recovered) from the fumes. By singular good fortune, we got the hose down in time and saved the ship, but Lloyd lost most of his clothes and a great part of our photographs was destroyed. Fanny saw the native sailors tossing overboard a blazing trunk; she stopped them in time, and behold, it contained my manuscripts. Thereafter we had three (or two) days fine weather: then got into a gale of wind, with rain and a vexatious sea. As we drew into our anchorage in a bight of Savage Island, a man ashore told me afterwards the sight of the _Janet Nicoll_ made him sick; and indeed it was rough play, though nothing to the night before. All through this gale I worked four to six hours per diem spearing the ink-bottle like a flying fish, and holding my papers together as I might. For, of all things, what I was at was history--the Samoan business--and I had to turn from one to another of these piles of manuscript notes, and from one page to another in each, until I should have found employment for the hands of Briareus. All the same, this history is a godsend for a voyage; I can put in time, getting events co-ordinated and the narrative distributed, when my much-heaving numskull would be incapable of finish or fine style. At Savage we met the missionary barque _John Williams_. I tell you it was a great day for Savage Island: the path up the cliffs was crowded with gay islandresses (I like that feminine plural) who wrapped me in their embraces, and picked my pockets of all my tobacco, with a manner which a touch would have made revolting, but as it was, was simply charming, like the Golden Age. One pretty, little, stalwart minx, with a red flower behind her ear, had searched me with extraordinary zeal; and when, soon after, I missed my matches, I accused her (she still following us) of being the thief. After some delay, and with a subtle smile, she produced the box, gave me _one match_, and put the rest away again. Too tired to add more.--Your most affectionate R. L. S. TO E. L. BURLINGAME The idea here discussed of a further series of essays to be contributed to Scribner's Magazine was never carried out. _S.S. Janet Nicoll, off Peru Island, Kingsmills Group, July 13th, '90._ MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--I am moved to write to you in the matter of the end papers. I am somewhat tempted to begin them again. Follow the reasons _pro_ and _con_:-- 1st. I must say I feel as if something in the nature of the end paper were a desirable finish to the number, and that the substitutes of occasional essays by occasional contributors somehow fail to fill the bill. Should you differ with me on this point, no more is to be said. And what follows must be regarded as lost words. 2nd. I am rather taken with the idea of continuing the work. For instance, should you have no distaste for papers of the class called _Random Memories_, I should enjoy continuing them (of course at intervals), and when they were done I have an idea they might make a readable book. On the other hand, I believe a greater freedom of choice might be taken, the subjects more varied and more briefly treated, in somewhat approaching the manner of Andrew Lang in the _Sign of the Ship_; it being well understood that the broken sticks[34] method is one not very suitable (as Colonel Burke would say) to my genius, and not very likely to be pushed far in my practice. Upon this point I wish you to condense your massive brain. In the last lot I was promised, and I fondly expected to receive, a vast amount of assistance from intelligent and genial correspondents. I assure you, I never had a scratch of a pen from any one above the level of a village idiot, except once, when a lady sowed my head full of grey hairs by announcing that she was going to direct her life in future by my counsels. Will the correspondents be more copious and less irrelevant in the future? Suppose that to be the case, will they be of any use to me in my place of exile? Is it possible for a man in Samoa to be in touch with the great heart of the People? And is it not perhaps a mere folly to attempt, from so hopeless a distance, anything so delicate as a series of papers? Upon these points, perpend, and give me the results of your perpensions. 3rd. The emolument would be agreeable to your humble servant. I have now stated all the _pros_, and the most of the _cons_ are come in by the way. There follows, however, one immense Con (with a capital "C"), which I beg you to consider particularly. I fear that, to be of any use for your magazine, these papers should begin with the beginning of a volume. Even supposing my hands were free, this would be now impossible for next year. You have to consider whether, supposing you have no other objection, it would be worth while to begin the series in the middle of a volume, or desirable to delay the whole matter until the beginning of another year. Now supposing that the _cons_ have it, and you refuse my offer, let me make another proposal, which you will be very inclined to refuse at the first off-go, but which I really believe might in time come to something. You know how the penny papers have their answers to correspondents. Why not do something of the same kind for the "culchawed"? Why not get men like Stimson, Brownell, Professor James, Goldwin Smith, and others who will occur to you more readily than to me, to put and to answer a series of questions of intellectual and general interest, until at last you should have established a certain standard of matter to be discussed in this part of the Magazine? I want you to get me bound volumes of the Magazine from its start. The Lord knows I have had enough copies; where they are I know not. A wandering author gathers no magazines. _The Wrecker_ is in no forrader state than in last reports. I have indeed got to a period when I cannot well go on until I can refresh myself on the proofs of the beginning. My respected collaborator, who handles the machine which is now addressing you, has indeed carried his labours farther, but not, I am led to understand, with what we used to call a blessing; at least, I have been refused a sight of his latest labours. However, there is plenty of time ahead, and I feel no anxiety about the tale, except that it may meet with your approval. All this voyage I have been busy over my _Travels_, which, given a very high temperature and the saloon of a steamer usually going before the wind, and with the cabins in front of the engines, has come very near to prostrating me altogether. You will therefore understand that there are no more poems. I wonder whether there are already enough, and whether you think that such a volume would be worth the publishing? I shall hope to find in Sydney some expression of your opinion on this point. Living as I do among--not the most cultured of mankind ("splendidly educated and perfect gentlemen when sober")--I attach a growing importance to friendly criticisms from yourself. I believe that this is the most of our business. As for my health, I got over my cold in a fine style, but have not been very well of late. To my unaffected annoyance, the blood-spitting has started again. I find the heat of a steamer decidedly wearing and trying in these latitudes, and I am inclined to think the superior expedition rather dearly paid for. Still, the fact that one does not even remark the coming of a squall, nor feel relief on its departure, is a mercy not to be acknowledged without gratitude. The rest of the family seem to be doing fairly well; both seem less run down than they were on the _Equator_, and Mrs. Stevenson very much less so. We have now been three months away, have visited about thirty-five islands, many of which were novel to us, and some extremely entertaining; some also were old acquaintances, and pleasant to revisit. In the meantime, we have really a capital time aboard ship, in the most pleasant and interesting society, and with (considering the length and nature of the voyage) an excellent table. Please remember us all to Mr. Scribner, the young chieftain of the house, and the lady, whose health I trust is better. To Mrs. Burlingame we all desire to be remembered, and I hope you will give our news to Low, St. Gaudens, Faxon, and others of the faithful in the city. I shall probably return to Samoa direct, having given up all idea of returning to civilisation in the meanwhile. There, on my ancestral acres, which I purchased six months ago from a blind Scots blacksmith, you will please address me until further notice. The name of the ancestral acres is going to be Vailima; but as at the present moment nobody else knows the name, except myself and the co-patentees, it will be safer, if less ambitious, to address R. L. S., Apia, Samoa. The ancestral acres run to upwards of three hundred; they enjoy the ministrations of five streams, whence the name. They are all at the present moment under a trackless covering of magnificent forest, which would be worth a great deal if it grew beside a railway terminus. To me, as it stands, it represents a handsome deficit. Obliging natives from the Cannibal Islands are now cutting it down at my expense. You would be able to run your magazine to much greater advantage if the terms of authors were on the same scale with those of my cannibals. We have also a house about the size of a manufacturer's lodge. 'Tis but the egg of the future palace, over the details of which on paper Mrs. Stevenson and I have already shed real tears; what it will be when it comes to paying for it, I leave you to imagine. But if it can only be built as now intended, it will be with genuine satisfaction and a growunded pride that I shall welcome you at the steps of my Old Colonial Home, when you land from the steamer on a long-merited holiday. I speak much at my ease; yet I do not know, I may be now an outlaw, a bankrupt, the abhorred of all good men. I do not know, you probably do. Has Hyde[35] turned upon me? Have I fallen, like Danvers Carew? It is suggested to me that you might like to know what will be my future society. Three consuls, all at loggerheads with one another, or at the best in a clique of two against one; three different sects of missionaries, not upon the best of terms; and the Catholics and Protestants in a condition of unhealable ill-feeling as to whether a wooden drum ought or ought not to be beaten to announce the time of school. The native population, very genteel, very songful, very agreeable, very good-looking, chronically spoiling for a fight (a circumstance not to be entirely neglected in the design of the palace). As for the white population of (technically, "The Beach"), I don't suppose it is possible for any person not thoroughly conversant with the South Seas to form the smallest conception of such a society, with its grog-shops, its apparently unemployed hangers-on, its merchants of all degrees of respectability and the reverse. The paper, of which I must really send you a copy--if yours were really a live magazine, you would have an exchange with the editor: I assure you, it has of late contained a great deal of matter about one of your contributors--rejoices in the name of Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser. The advertisements in the Advertiser are permanent, being simply subsidies for its existence. A dashing warfare of newspaper correspondence goes on between the various residents, who are rather fond of recurring to one another's antecedents. But when all is said, there are a lot of very nice, pleasant people, and I don't know that Apia is very much worse than half a hundred towns that I could name. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES BAXTER As above indicated, on the way between Samoa and Sydney Stevenson left the _Janet Nicoll_ for a week's stay in New Caledonia, during which he was hospitably received by the French officials. _Hotel Sebastopol, Noumea, August 1890._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--I have stayed here a week while Lloyd and my wife continue to voyage in the _Janet Nicoll_; this I did, partly to see the convict system, partly to shorten my stay in the extreme cold--hear me with my extreme! _moi qui suis originaire d'Edimbourg_--of Sydney at this season. I am feeling very seedy, utterly fatigued and overborne with sleep. I have a fine old gentleman of a doctor, who attends and cheers and entertains, if he does not cure me; but even with his ministrations I am almost incapable of the exertion sufficient for this letter; and I am really, as I write, falling down with sleep. What is necessary to say, I must try to say shortly. Lloyd goes to clear out our establishments: pray keep him in funds, if I have any; if I have not, pray try to raise them. Here is the idea: to install ourselves, at the risk of bankruptcy, in Samoa. It is not the least likely it will pay (although it may); but it is almost certain it will support life, with very few external expenses. If I die, it will be an endowment for the survivors, at least for my wife and Lloyd; and my mother, who might prefer to go home, has her own. Hence I believe I shall do well to hurry my installation. The letters are already in part done; in part done is a novel for Scribner; in the course of the next twelve months I should receive a considerable amount of money. I am aware I had intended to pay back to my capital some of this. I am now of opinion I should act foolishly. Better to build the house and have a roof and farm of my own; and thereafter, with a livelihood assured, save and repay.... There is my livelihood, all but books and wine, ready in a nutshell; and it ought to be more easy to save and to repay afterwards. Excellent, say you, but will you save and will you repay? I do not know, said the Bell of Old Bow.... It seems clear to me.... The deuce of the affair is that I do not know when I shall see you and Colvin. I guess you will have to come and see me: many a time already we have arranged the details of your visit in the yet unbuilt house on the mountain. I shall be able to get decent wine from Noumea. We shall be able to give you a decent welcome, and talk of old days. _Apropos_ of old days, do you remember still the phrase we heard in Waterloo Place? I believe you made a piece for the piano on that phrase. Pray, if you remember it, send it me in your next. If you find it impossible to write correctly, send it me _à la récitative_, and indicate the accents. Do you feel (you must) how strangely heavy and stupid I am? I must at last give up and go sleep; I am simply a rag. _The morrow._--I feel better, but still dim and groggy. To-night I go to the governor's; such a lark--no dress clothes--twenty-four hours' notice--able-bodied Polish tailor--suit made for a man with the figure of a puncheon--same hastily altered for self with the figure of a bodkin--sight inconceivable. Never mind; dress clothes, "which nobody can deny"; and the officials have been all so civil that I liked neither to refuse nor to appear in mufti. Bad dress clothes only prove you are a grisly ass; no dress clothes, even when explained, indicate a want of respect. I wish you were here with me to help me dress in this wild raiment, and to accompany me to M. Noel-Pardon's. I cannot say what I would give if there came a knock now at the door and you came in. I guess Noel-Pardon would go begging, and we might burn the fr. 200 dress clothes in the back garden for a bonfire; or what would be yet more expensive and more humorous, get them once more expanded to fit you, and when that was done, a second time cut down for my gossamer dimensions. I hope you never forget to remember me to your father, who has always a place in my heart, as I hope I have a little in his. His kindness helped me infinitely when you and I were young; I recall it with gratitude and affection in this town of convicts at the world's end. There are very few things, my dear Charles, worth mention: on a retrospect of life, the day's flash and colour, one day with another, flames, dazzles, and puts to sleep; and when the days are gone, like a fast-flying thaumatrope, they make but a single pattern. Only a few things stand out; and among these--most plainly to me--Rutland Square.--Ever, my dear Charles, your affectionate friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--Just returned from trying on the dress clo'. Lord, you should see the coat! It stands out at the waist like a bustle, the flaps cross in front, the sleeves are like bags. TO E. L. BURLINGAME Proceeding from New Caledonia to Sydney, Stevenson again made a stay there of about a month, before going to settle in his new island home and superintend the operations of planting and building. The next letter is in acknowledgment of proofs received from Messrs. Scribner of a proposed volume of verse to contain, besides _Ticonderoga_ and the two ballads on Marquesan and Tahitian legends, a number of the other miscellaneous verses which he had written in the course of his travels. In the end, the ballads only stood for publication at this time; the other verses were reserved, and have been posthumously published under the title _Songs of Travel_. _Union Club, Sydney [August 1890]._ MY DEAR BURLINGAME,-- _Ballads._ The deuce is in this volume. It has cost me more botheration and dubiety than any other I ever took in hand. On one thing my mind is made up: the verses at the end have no business there, and throw them down. Many of them are bad, many of the rest want nine years' keeping, and the remainder are not relevant--throw them down; some I never want to hear of more, others will grow in time towards decent items in a second _Underwoods_--and in the meanwhile, down with them! At the same time, I have a sneaking idea the ballads are not altogether without merit--I don't know if they're poetry, but they're good narrative, or I'm deceived. (You've never said one word about them, from which I astutely gather you are dead set against: "he was a diplomatic man"--extract from epitaph of E. L. B.--"and remained on good terms with Minor Poets.") You will have to judge: one of the Gladstonian trinity of paths must be chosen. (1st) Either publish the five ballads, such as they are, in a volume called _Ballads_; in which case pray send sheets at once to Chatto and Windus. Or (2nd) write and tell me you think the book too small, and I'll try and get into the mood to do some more. Or (3rd) write and tell me the whole thing is a blooming illusion; in which case draw off some twenty copies for my private entertainment, and charge me with the expense of the whole dream. In the matter of rhyme no man can judge himself; I am at the world's end, have no one to consult, and my publisher holds his tongue. I call it unfair and almost unmanly. I do indeed begin to be filled with animosity; Lord, wait till you see the continuation of _The Wrecker_, when I introduce some New York publishers.... It's a good scene; the quantities you drink and the really hideous language you are represented as employing may perhaps cause you one tithe of the pain you have inflicted by your silence on, sir, The Poetaster, R. L. S. Lloyd is off home; my wife and I dwell sundered: she in lodgings, preparing for the move; I here in the club, and at my old trade--bedridden. Naturally, the visit home is given up; we only wait our opportunity to get to Samoa, where, please, address me. Have I yet asked you to despatch the books and papers left in your care to me at Apia, Samoa? I wish you would, _quam primum_. R. L. S. TO HENRY JAMES _Union Club, Sydney, August 1890._ MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--Kipling is too clever to live. The _Bête Humaine_[36] I had already perused in Noumea, listening the while to the strains of the convict band. He is a Beast; but not human, and, to be frank, not very interesting. "Nervous maladies: the homicidal ward," would be the better name: O, this game gets very tedious. Your two long and kind letters have helped to entertain the old familiar sickbed. So has a book called _The Bondman_, by Hall Caine; I wish you would look at it. I am not half-way through yet. Read the book, and communicate your views. Hall Caine, by the way, appears to take Hugo's view of History and Chronology (_Later_; the book doesn't keep up; it gets very wild.) I must tell you plainly--I can't tell Colvin--I do not think I shall come to England more than once, and then it'll be to die. Health I enjoy in the tropics; even here, which they call sub- or semi-tropical, I come only to catch cold. I have not been out since my arrival; live here in a nice bedroom by the fireside, and read books and letters from Henry James, and send out to get his _Tragic Muse_, only to be told they can't be had as yet in Sydney, and have altogether a placid time. But I can't go out! The thermometer was nearly down to 50° the other day--no temperature for me, Mr. James: how should I do in England? I fear not at all. Am I very sorry? I am sorry about seven or eight people in England, and one or two in the States. And outside of that, I simply prefer Samoa. These are the words of honesty and soberness. (I am fasting from all but sin, coughing, _The Bondman_, a couple of eggs and a cup of tea.) I was never fond of towns, houses, society, or (it seems) civilisation. Nor yet it seems was I ever very fond of (what is technically called) God's green earth. The sea, islands, the islanders, the island life and climate, make and keep me truly happier. These last two years I have been much at sea, and I have _never wearied_; sometimes I have indeed grown impatient for some destination; more often I was sorry that the voyage drew so early to an end; and never once did I lose my fidelity to blue water and a ship. It is plain, then, that for me my exile to the place of schooners and islands can be in no sense regarded as a calamity. Good-bye just now: I must take a turn at my proofs. _N.B._--Even my wife has weakened about the sea. She wearied, the last time we were ashore, to get afloat again.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO MARCEL SCHWOB _Union Club, Sydney, August 19th, 1890._ MY DEAR MR. SCHWOB,--_Mais, alors, vous avez tous les bonheurs, vous!_ More about Villon; it seems incredible: when it is put in order, pray send it me. You wish to translate the _Black Arrow_: dear sir, you are hereby authorised; but I warn you, I do not like the work. Ah, if you, who know so well both tongues, and have taste and instruction--if you would but take a fancy to translate a book of mine that I myself admired--for we sometimes admire our own--or I do--with what satisfaction would the authority be granted! But these things are too much to expect. _Vous ne détestez pas alors mes bonnes femmes? moi, je les déteste._ I have never pleased myself with any women of mine save two character parts, one of only a few lines--the Countess of Rosen, and Madame Desprez in the _Treasure of Franchard_. I had indeed one moment of pride about my poor _Black Arrow_: Dickon Crookback I did, and I do, think is a spirited and possible figure. Shakespeare's--O, if we can call that cocoon Shakespeare!--Shakespeare's is spirited--one likes to see the untaught athlete butting against the adamantine ramparts of human nature, head down, breech up; it reminds us how trivial we are to-day, and what safety resides in our triviality. For spirited it may be, but O, sure not possible! I love Dumas and I love Shakespeare: you will not mistake me when I say that the Richard of the one reminds me of the Porthos of the other; and if by any sacrifice of my own literary baggage I could clear the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_ of Porthos, _Jekyll_ might go, and the _Master_, and the _Black Arrow_, you may be sure, and I should think my life not lost for mankind if half a dozen more of my volumes must be thrown in. The tone of your pleasant letters makes me egotistical; you make me take myself too gravely. Comprehend how I have lived much of my time in France, and loved your country, and many of its people, and all the time was learning that which your country has to teach--breathing in rather that atmosphere of art which can only there be breathed; and all the time knew--and raged to know--that I might write with the pen of angels or of heroes, and no Frenchman be the least the wiser! And now steps in M. Marcel Schwob, writes me the most kind encouragement, and reads and understands, and is kind enough to like my work. I am just now overloaded with work. I have two huge novels on hand--_The Wrecker_ and the _Pearl Fisher_,[37] in collaboration with my stepson: the latter, the _Pearl Fisher_, I think highly of, for a black, ugly, trampling, violent story, full of strange scenes and striking characters. And then I am about waist-deep in my big book on the South Seas: _the_ big book on the South Seas it ought to be, and shall. And besides, I have some verses in the press, which, however, I hesitate to publish. For I am no judge of my own verse; self-deception is there so facile. All this and the cares of an impending settlement in Samoa keep me very busy, and a cold (as usual) keeps me in bed. Alas, I shall not have the pleasure to see you yet awhile, if ever. You must be content to take me as a wandering voice, and in the form of occasional letters from recondite islands; and address me, if you will be good enough to write, to Apia, Samoa. My stepson, Mr. Osbourne, goes home meanwhile to arrange some affairs; it is not unlikely he may go to Paris to arrange about the illustrations to my South Seas; in which case I shall ask him to call upon you, and give you some word of our outlandish destinies. You will find him intelligent, I think; and I am sure, if (_par hasard_) you should take any interest in the islands, he will have much to tell you.--Herewith I conclude, and am your obliged and interested correspondent, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--The story you refer to has got lost in the post. TO ANDREW LANG _Union Club, Sydney [August 1890]._ MY DEAR LANG,--I observed with a great deal of surprise and interest that a controversy in which you have been taking sides at home, in yellow London, hinges in part at least on the Gilbert Islanders and their customs in burial. Nearly six months of my life has been passed in the group: I have revisited it but the other day; and I make haste to tell you what I know. The upright stones--I enclose you a photograph of one on Apemama--are certainly connected with religion; I do not think they are adored. They stand usually on the windward shore of the islands, that is to say, apart from habitation (on _enclosed islands_, where the people live on the sea side, I do not know how it is, never having lived on one). I gathered from Tembinoka, Rex Apemamae, that the pillars were supposed to fortify the island from invasion: spiritual martellos. I think he indicated they were connected with the cult of Tenti--pronounce almost as chintz in English, the _t_ being explosive; but you must take this with a grain of salt, for I knew no word of Gilbert Island; and the King's English, although creditable, is rather vigorous than exact. Now, here follows the point of interest to you: such pillars, or standing stones, have no connection with graves. The most elaborate grave that I have ever seen in the group--to be certain--is in the form of a _raised border_ of gravel, usually strewn with broken glass. One, of which I cannot be sure that it was a grave, for I was told by one that it was, and by another that it was not--consisted of a mound about breast high in an excavated taro swamp, on the top of which was a child's house, or rather _maniapa_--that is to say, shed, or open house, such as is used in the group for social or political gatherings--so small that only a child could creep under its eaves. I have heard of another great tomb on Apemama, which I did not see; but here again, by all accounts, no sign of a standing stone. My report would be--no connection between standing stones and sepulture. I shall, however, send on the terms of the problem to a highly intelligent resident trader, who knows more than perhaps any one living, white or native, of the Gilbert group; and you shall have the result. In Samoa, whither I return for good, I shall myself make inquiries; up to now, I have neither seen nor heard of any standing stones in that group.--Yours, R. L. STEVENSON. TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE Exactly what tale of doings in the garret at Skerryvore had been related to Stevenson (in the character of Robin Lewison) by his correspondent (in the character of Miss Green) cannot well be gathered from this reply. But the letter is interesting as containing the only mention of certain schemes of romance afterwards abandoned. _Union Club, Sydney, 1st September 1890._ MY DEAR MISS BOODLE,--I find you have been behaving very ill: _been_ very ill, in fact. I find this hard to forgive; probably should not forgive it at all if Robin Lewison had not been sick himself and a wretched sick-room prisoner in this club for near a month. Well, the best and bravest sometimes fail. But who is Miss Green? Don't know her! I knew a lady of an exceedingly generous and perfervid nature--worthy to be suspected of Scotch blood for the pertervidness--equipped with a couple--perhaps a brace sounds better English--of perfervid eyes--with a certain graceful gaucherie of manner, almost like a child's, and that is at once the highest point of gaucherie and grace--a friend everybody I ever saw was delighted to see come and sorry to see go. Yes, I knew that lady, and can see her now. But who was Miss Green? There is something amiss here. Either the Robin Lewisons have been very shabbily treated, or--and this is the serious part of the affair--somebody unknown to me has been entrusted with the key of the Skerryvore garret. This may go as far as the Old Bailey, ma'am. But why should I gird at you or anybody, when the truth is we are the most miserable sinners in the world? For we are not coming home, I dare not. Even coming to Sydney has made me quite ill, and back I go to Samoa, whither please address--Apia, Samoa--(and remember it is Sámó-a, a spondee to begin with, or Sahmoa, if you prefer that writing)--back I and my wife go to Samoa to live on our landed estate with four black labour boys in a kind of a sort of house, which Lloyd will describe to you. For he has gone to England: receive him like a favour and a piece of cake; he is our greeting to friends. I paused here to put in the date on the first page. I am precious nearly through my fortieth year, thinks I to myself. Must be nearly as old as Miss Green, thinks I. O, come! I exclaimed, not as bad as that! Some lees of youth about the old remnant yet. My amiable Miss Green, I beg you to give me news of your health, and if it may be good news. And when you shall have seen Lloyd, to tell me how his reports of the South Seas and our new circumstances strike such an awfully old person as yourself, and to tell me if you ever received a letter I sent you from Hawaii. I remember thinking--or remember remembering rather--it was (for me) quite a long respectable communication. Also, you might tell me if you got my war-whoop and scalping-knife assault on _le nommé_ Hyde. I ought not to forget to say your tale fetched me (Miss Green) by its really vile probability. If we had met that man in Honolulu he would have done it, and Miss Green would have done it. Only, alas! there is no completed novel lying in the garret: would there were! It should be out to-morrow with the name to it, and relieve a kind of tightness in the money market much deplored in our immediate circle. To be sure (now I come to think of it) there are some seven chapters of _The Great North Road_; three, I think, of _Robin Run the Hedge_, given up when some nefarious person pre-empted the name; and either there--or somewhere else--likely New York--one chapter of _David Balfour_, and five or six of the _Memoirs of Henry Shovel_. That's all. But Lloyd and I have one-half of The Wrecker in type, and a good part of _The Pearl Fisher_ (O, a great and grisly tale that!) in MS. And I have a projected, entirely planned love-story--everybody will think it dreadfully improper, I'm afraid--called _Cannonmills_. And I've a vague, rosy haze before me--a love-story too, but not improper--called _The Rising Sun_. (It's the name of the wayside inn where the story, or much of the story, runs; but it's a kind of a pun: it means the stirring up of a boy by falling in love, and how he rises in the estimation of a girl who despised him, though she liked him, and had befriended him; I really scarce see beyond their childhood yet, but I want to go beyond, and make each out-top the other by successions: it should be pretty and true if I could do it.) Also I have my big book, _The South Seas_, always with me, and a sair handfu'--if I may be allowed to speak Scotch to Miss Green--a sair handfu' it is likely to be. All this literary gossip I bestow upon you _entre confrères_, Miss Green, which is little more than fair, Miss Green. Allow me to remark that it is now half-past twelve o'clock of the living night; I should certainly be ashamed of myself, and you also; for this is no time of the night for Miss Green to be colloguing with a comparatively young gentleman of forty. So with all the kindest wishes to yourself, and all at Lostock, and all friends in Hants, or over the borders in Dorset, I bring my folly to an end. Please believe, even when I am silent, in my real affection; I need not say the same for Fanny, more obdurately silent, not less affectionate than I.--Your friend, ROBERT--ROBIN LEWISON. (Nearly had it wrong--force of habit.) TO MRS. CHARLES FAIRCHILD _Union Club, Sydney [September 1890]._ MY DEAR MRS. FAIRCHILD,--I began a letter to you on board the _Janet Nicoll_ on my last cruise, wrote, I believe, two sheets, and ruthlessly destroyed the flippant trash. Your last has given me great pleasure and some pain, for it increased the consciousness of my neglect. Now, this must go to you, whatever it is like. ... It is always harshness that one regrets.... I regret also my letter to Dr. Hyde. Yes, I do; I think it was barbarously harsh; if I did it now, I would defend Damien no less well, and give less pain to those who are alive. These promptings of good-humour are not all sound; the three times three, cheer boys cheer, and general amiability business rests on a sneaking love of popularity, the most insidious enemy of virtue. On the whole, it was virtuous to defend Damien; but it was harsh to strike so hard at Dr. Hyde. When I wrote the letter, I believed he would bring an action, in which case I knew I could be beggared. And as yet there has come no action; the injured Doctor has contented himself up to now with the (truly innocuous) vengeance of calling me a "Bohemian Crank," and I have deeply wounded one of his colleagues whom I esteemed and liked. Well, such is life. You are quite right; our civilisation is a hollow fraud, all the fun of life is lost by it; all it gains is that a larger number of persons can continue to be contemporaneously unhappy on the surface of the globe. O, unhappy!--there is a big word and a false--continue to be not nearly--by about twenty per cent.--so happy as they might be: that would be nearer the mark. When--observe that word, which I will write again and larger--WHEN you come to see us in Samoa, you will see for yourself a healthy and happy people. You see, you are one of the very few of our friends rich enough to come and see us; and when my house is built, and the road is made, and we have enough fruit planted and poultry and pigs raised, it is undeniable that you must come--must is the word; that is the way in which I speak to ladies. You and Fairchild, anyway--perhaps my friend Blair--we'll arrange details in good time. It will be the salvation of your souls, and make you willing to die. Let me tell you this: In '74 or 5 there came to stay with my father and mother a certain Mr. Seed, a prime minister or something of New Zealand. He spotted what my complaint was; told me that I had no business to stay in Europe; that I should find all I cared for, and all that was good for me, in the Navigator Islands; sat up till four in the morning persuading me, demolishing my scruples. And I resisted: I refused to go so far from my father and mother. O, it was virtuous, and O, wasn't it silly! But my father, who was always my dearest, got to his grave without that pang; and now in 1890, I (or what is left of me) go at last to the Navigator Islands. God go with us! It is but a Pisgah sight when all is said; I go there only to grow old and die; but when you come, you will see it is a fair place for the purpose. Flaubert[38] has not turned up; I hope he will soon; I knew of him only through Maxime Descamps.--With kindest messages to yourself and all of yours, I remain ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. FOOTNOTES: [27] King Kalakaua. [28] This is the Canadian poet Archibald Lampman (d. 1899). [29] Stevenson's stepdaughter, Mrs. Strong, who was at this time living at Honolulu, and joined his party and family for good after they arrived at Sydney in the following autumn. [30] R. A. M. Stevenson was at this time professor of Fine Art in the University of Liverpool. [31] The Hawaiian name for white men. [32] The writer has omitted something here. [33] Table of chapter headings follows. [34] French _bâtons rompus_: disconnected thoughts or studies. [35] The Rev. Dr. Hyde, of Honolulu: in reference to Stevenson's letter on Father Damien. [36] By Émile Zola. [37] Afterwards re-named _The Ebb-Tide_. [38] His _Letters_. END OF VOL. XXIV PRINTED BY CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON, E.C. 
52246	----	available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration. See 52246-h.htm or 52246-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/52246/52246-h/52246-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/52246/52246-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/boswellbiographe00mallrich Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold face (=bold=). Text enclosed by plus signs is in Copperplate hand-written text. [oe] represents the oe-ligature. A carat character is used to denote superscription. In the text multiple superscripted characters are enclosed by curly brackets (example: 27^{th}). In the Index numerals following a carat character are superscripted and refer to the footnote from the page reference where the reference is only found in the footnote (example: 178^16). BOSWELL THE BIOGRAPHER [Illustration: +_April 27^{th}. 1753_+ +_Emery Walker Ph. So._+ +_James Boswell_+ +_from a drawing by George Dance R.A._+] BOSWELL THE BIOGRAPHER by GEORGE MALLORY With a Portrait by George Dance, R.A. London Smith, Elder & Co., 15 Waterloo Place 1912 [All rights reserved] PREFACE The responsibility for upwards of 300 pages in print is a burden which my unaccustomed conscience cannot easily bear, and by accepting it I lose for ever the unassailable dignity of private criticism. In these circumstances I approach my readers in an apologetic frame of mind. I shall not apologise for writing a dull book by explaining in what manner it is interesting. I had thought of doing something of the sort, but at the present moment that course presents insuperable difficulties. An explanation, if not apology, is however necessary; for this volume is in one sense a compromise. It is less than a biography and more than an essay. It aims at being not a complete Life of Boswell, but an explanation of his character. This purpose may not seem to require so long a treatment as mine. Certainly it would have been easier to say, and easier to read, all that I have said about Boswell's psychology in far fewer words. But my design was to prove my case. Boswell has been so much a subject of controversy that, were I merely to state my views, I should convince, if anyone is to be convinced by me, only those who had observed the same facts as myself--the facts upon which those views are based. By bringing forward the evidence without stint I have hoped to establish my opinions on a firmer base. A list of the books to which I have referred is printed at the beginning of this volume. I am naturally indebted to the researches of Dr. G. Birkbeck Hill, to the three biographers of Boswell--Dr. Rogers (in 'Boswelliana'), Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, and Mr. W. K. Leask--and to the brilliant study by Carlyle. I must also mention three essays which have been particularly illuminating--that by W. E. Henley in 'Views and Reviews,' by Lionel Johnson in 'Post Liminium,' and by Mr. Birrell in his edition of Boswell's 'Life of Johnson.' I am grateful especially to Mr. A. C. Benson, whose encouragement promoted this enterprise, to Mr. G. L. Strachey for many valuable suggestions, and to Mr. E. H. Marsh for correcting my proofs, which was no mean labour. GEORGE MALLORY. CHARTERHOUSE: _July 25, 1912_. BIBLIOGRAPHY [This is a list of books bearing directly upon Boswell which have been used for this volume.] Birrell, A., Introduction to his edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson London, 1906 Boswell, James: Elegy on the Death of an Amiable Young Lady 1761 Ode to Tragedy 1761 Collection of Original Poems, contributions to 1762 The Cub at Newmarket 1762 Critical Strictures on Mallet's Elvira, by A. Erskine and J. Boswell 1763 Correspondence with the Hon. Andrew Erskine 1763 Dorando, a Spanish Tale 1767 Essence of the Douglas Cause 1767 Account of Corsica, &c., 2nd edition 1768 (1st edition was published 1768) British Essays in favour of the Brave Corsicans 1769 The Hypochondriack in the London Magazine, Oct. 1777 to Dec. 1779 Letter to the People of Scotland on the Present State of the Nation 1783 Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Ed. G. Birkbeck Hill 1887 (1st edition 1785) Letter to the People of Scotland against the attempt to diminish the number of the Lords of Session 1785 No Abolition of Slavery, or the Universal Empire of Love 1791 Life of Johnson. Ed. Right Hon. John Wilson Croker 1866 Life of Samuel Johnson. Ed. G. Birkbeck Hill. 6 vols. Oxford, 1887[1] (1st edition 1791) Letters to Temple, reprint London, 1908[1] ---- Life of, see Rogers, Fitzgerald, and Leask. Boswelliana, the Commonplace Book of James Boswell, London, Grampian Club, 1876 Burke, Edmund, Correspondence London, 1824 Burney, Miss, _see_ D'Arblay. Campbell, Rev. Dr. Thomas, Diary London, 1854 Carlyle, Miscellanies London, 1872 Chatham, Earl of, Correspondence. 4 vols. London, 1838 Collection of Original Poems Edinburgh, 1763 Croker, Right Hon. John Wilson, Correspondence and Diaries. 3 vols. London, 1884 D'Arblay, Diary of Madame. Ed. Austin Dobson. 6 vols. London, 1904 ---- Memoirs of Dr. Burney. 3 vols. London, 1832 Edinburgh, Traditions of 1869 Eldon, Lord Chancellor, Life of, by Horace Twiss. 3 vols. London, 1844 Fitzgerald, Percy, Life of Boswell London, 1891 Forbes, Sir William, Life of James Beattie London, 1806 Gentleman's Magazine Goldsmith, Life by James Prior. 2 vols. London, 1837 Gray, Life by Mason. 2 vols. London, 1807 Hawkins, Sir John, Life of Johnson London, 1787 ---- Lætitia Matilda, Memoirs. 2 vols. London, 1824 Henley, W. E., Views and Reviews London, 1902 Hill, Dr. George Birkbeck, Life of Johnson. 6 vols. Oxford, 1887 ---- Dr. Johnson, his Friends and Critics London, 1878 _See also_ Johnson Club Papers. Holcroft, Thomas, Memoirs. 3 vols. London, 1816 Hume, David, Correspondence London, 1846 Ireland, S. W. H., The Confessions of W. H. Ireland London, 1805 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, Dictionary London, 1755 ---- Lives of the Poets London, 1781 ---- Journey to the Western Islands London, 1775 Johnson, Lionel, Post Liminium, Critical Essays London, 1911 Johnson Club Papers, by various hands London, 1899 Leask, W. K., James Boswell, Famous Scots Series. Edinburgh, 1896 London Magazine Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays. 3 vols. London, 1843 Malone, Life of, Prior London, 1860 More, Hannah, Memoirs of. 4 vols. London, 1834 Nichols, John, Literary Anecdotes of the XVIIIth Century. 9 vols. London, 1812-15 ---- Literary History of the XVIIIth Century. 8 vols. London, 1817-58 Piozzi, Mrs., Autobiography. 2 vols. London, 1861 ---- Johnson's Letters to. 2 vols. London, 1788 ---- Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, 2nd edition London, 1789 Raleigh, Sir Walter, Six Essays on Johnson Oxford, 1910 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, Life by Leslie and Taylor. 2 vols. London, 1865 Rogers, Rev. Charles, Memoir of Boswell, in Boswelliana Taylor, John, Records of My Life London, 1832 Trevelyan, Sir G. O., Life of Fox London, 1912 Walpole, Horace, Letters. 9 vols. London, 1861 [Footnote 1: All references are to this edition.] BOSWELL THE BIOGRAPHER CHAPTER I Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' is, as we all know, a unique biography; it has no rival. Its unchallenged supremacy has a special significance from the position which Johnson himself retains in literature. For as it must be admitted that his work has been but little read since his own day, and that by far his greatest performance, the compiling of a dictionary, has in its nature nothing of an artistic appeal, it may well be supposed that the literary men of this age find more to stir the imagination in the lives of the great figures of the nineteenth century, in the romance of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and at a later date of the Pre-Raphaelite group, in the peculiar simplicity of Wordsworth, the splendour of Tennyson, and the fervid passion of Browning. And yet we have for Johnson a more intimate place which is all his own. It is because we know him better. Subsequent biographers, Lockhart, Froude, Trevelyan--to mention a few of the more successful--have like Boswell written good biographies: we know much that is interesting about Scott, Carlyle, and Macaulay. But what we know of Johnson is more vivid, real, and true; it is the man himself. Boswell is therefore the first of biographers. He is first beyond the jealousy of a rival and above the common earth of imitators--as Homer is first in epic poetry, as Molière and Racine, Shakespeare and Milton are all first where they most excel. And he is first only for this reason, that we know most intimately the man who was portrayed by him. But if the mere extent of our knowledge of Johnson determines the greatness of Boswell, there is yet some particular appeal besides, some special charm that wins us in Boswell's 'Johnson.' When we come to think of the nature of Boswell's value for so many people, we shall find that it depends not altogether upon the completeness of his method or his capacity for giving expression to it, but also upon an interest which exists apart from any structural or artistic quality. The 'Life of Johnson' is one of those rare books which have by nature a certain universality. It exists not for one but for every generation. It is not for the cultured alone nor for the uncultured, nor yet, if he exists, for the normal person. It is everybody's book. And this is a fact which requires explanation. It would be easy if we were merely seeking to distinguish that which has a special value or quality from what is merely commonplace, if we simply wished to determine the peculiar flavour and virtue of the work, to find a number of reasons why the book we are speaking of should have a special value among biographies. The careful art of the writer, the vividness of the scenes he depicts, his unrivalled humour, the mere form of what he presents, including as it does all that he meant by biography, the interest we feel in the distinguished men who play, as it were, the minor parts of the drama--all these are responsible in their several degrees for the pleasure we derive from Boswell's 'Johnson.' But to account for its universality we must look elsewhere--to the simple human interest felt by everyone in two such characters as Johnson and Boswell. A biography may be written about an interesting man by a dull one or about a dull man by an interesting one; and interest in either may be satisfied by reading it: even when both the men are dull some pleasure may be obtained from a biography by one who is interested in the psychological phenomenon of dullness. The 'Life of Johnson' may be read with pleasure, and even with something more than pleasure, because both Johnson and his biographer are supremely interesting men. There may be some of Boswell's readers who have pleasure from his _magnum opus_, for the treatment, as it is technically called; but it is the subject, or rather one might say the two subjects, since there is in it so much also of autobiography, that attract the greater number of them. And there must be many to whom--of these two historic people, Johnson and Boswell--the more interesting because he was more interested in himself, the more attractive because we can see in him more of ourselves, is Boswell the biographer. * * * * * In presenting the literary portrait of a man there can be no greater error than to indulge in controversy. It is an error which one may make very readily, for we have all at heart the love of battle; moreover, it is easy to contradict another, and difficult to give a whole picture of one's own. And in the case of Boswell there is matter for controversy particularly obvious and particularly inviting. Distinguished men have formed entirely different conceptions of his character and used the pen with more energy than wisdom to support their views. It seems clear now that Boswell has been widely misunderstood. We are confronted at the outset by a sort of popular paradox. Not only Lord Macaulay, but most of Boswell's contemporaries and most of his editors, have thought of him as nothing more than a fool--they have supposed with the poet Gray, 'Any fool may write a most valuable book by chance.' No one has ever denied that the 'Life' is a good book. No one after his own generation, till Carlyle, ever denied that Boswell was a bad man, just the mean, snivelling creature imagined by Macaulay. Modern criticism has done much to raise the besmirched name of the biographer, but has managed at the same time to envelop his character in a sort of generous obscurity. 'Boswell,' Professor Raleigh has boldly exclaimed, 'was a genius.' The Boswellian student will probably agree: but in agreeing we must be cautious not to confuse our ideas about Boswell's character; to say that a man is a genius is not to say that he is unaccountable for his actions, or even of necessity to imply that he is mad. The genius is often more complex than other men, but not more incomprehensible. It is possible, if we like, to look behind the veil that is drawn between humanity and a particular human being. We can see in a genius not less than in others the meaning of all the names which we use to describe life, of love and sympathy, greed and egoism, hate, fear, joy, and the rest; of all the qualities that form for better or for worse what we call character, what it is to be kind or cruel, vain or modest, false or true. Nor, when we say that Boswell is a genius, do we preclude the possibility of his being a fool. Boswell was indeed a fool, as is easy enough to show; but he was not, as was long supposed, a stupid fool. We do, however, mean something by the term genius; and it is something of the inward life. The soul of man is composed of combustible matter, and the violence and quality of its conflagration depend upon the proportions in which the ingredients are mixed. In certain cases an abnormal quantity of one substance or another produces an extraordinary result; and when this result can be classified neither as criminal nor lunatic it is called by the more approved name of genius. Two questions therefore are to be asked especially with regard to a genius: First, in what way was the conflagration peculiar? Secondly, what were the substances present in abnormal quantity which caused the peculiarity? It is intended that these two questions shall be answered with regard to Boswell in the course of this general inquiry concerning his psychology. It is held that Boswell was a genius; it must be explained in what his genius consisted, and how, in the end, this abnormal essence dominated the whole man and inspired the great work of his life. * * * * * James Boswell was born in Edinburgh on October 29th, 1740. He came of an old Scottish stock, and his ancestors, if not eminent, were at least distinguished men and proud of being the Lairds of Auchinleck. Of his mother we know but little; she was, however, a woman of 'almost unexampled piety and goodness.' Lord Auchinleck, his father, figures occasionally in the various authorities for Boswell's 'Life,' and we can get a very good picture of him. Scott gives the following account: Old Lord Auchinleck was an able lawyer, a good scholar, after the manner of Scotland, and highly valued his own advantages as a man of good estate and ancient family; and, moreover, he was a strict Presbyterian and Whig of the old Scottish cast. This did not prevent his being a terribly proud aristocrat, and great was the contempt he entertained and expressed for his son James, for the nature of his friendships and the character of the personages of whom he was _engoué_ one after another. 'There's nae hope for Jamie, mon,' he said to a friend. 'Jamie is gaen clean gyte.... Whose tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, mon?' Here the old judge summoned up a sneer of most sovereign contempt. 'A _dominie_, mon--an auld dominie; he keeped a schule and cau'd it an acaadamy.' The Laird, as is evident from the account in the 'Tour to the Hebrides' of Johnson's visit to Boswell's home, held his opinions with that conviction which admits of no discussion. A story of him is related by Scott that when challenged by Johnson to explain the utility of Cromwell's career, he very curtly remarked: 'God, Doctor, he gart kings ken they had a lith[1] in their neck.' Boswell seems to have summed up the situation at home when he wrote in the _London Magazine_ for 1781: I knew a father who was a violent Whig and used to attack his son for being a Tory, upbraiding him with being deficient in noble sentiments of liberty, while at the same time he made this son live under his roof in such bondage as he was not only afraid to stir from home without leave like a child, but durst scarcely open his mouth in his father's presence. This was sad living. The problem of youth is one of selection. Not many of us accept for ourselves the whole of our inheritance. Of the influences of our early years there are some which we reject; and the judgments which we make about the problems that affected us when young, differ as a rule from those about other questions which come upon us only in maturer years. In youth we must either love or hate--there is no indifference; and so in youth very often are formed the prejudices of a lifetime. Thus it was with Boswell. It was inevitable that the inflexible, hard-headed old judge, and the gay, clever son, should agree very ill. The latter contrived to be in many ways the exact antithesis of his father, and he had the courage of his opinions. It is remarkable, when we think of the violence of the old Whig's political views, that in 1745 Boswell 'wore a white cockade and prayed for King James.' The advances of an uncle it is true were able to purchase his political sympathies, and for the sum of one shilling Boswell became a Whig. But it is more decorous, at the age of five, to side with one's father without the persuasion of a silver bribe, especially upon a question of so great importance as the choice of a sovereign. For his tutor, Mr. Dunn, James seems to have retained no startling degree of affection or even of respect; for it was he who 'discovered a narrowness of information concerning the dignitaries of the Church of England. He talked before Dr. Johnson of fat bishops and drowsy deans, and in short seemed to believe the illiberal and profane scoffings of professed satirists or vulgar railers'; and so brought upon himself the admirable rebuke: 'Sir, you know no more of our Church than a Hottentot.' In the uncongenial atmosphere of home Boswell learnt, no doubt, to dislike instruction and to mistrust what he was told about the way to live, about manners in the old use of the word. There is, however, the trace of a pious mother's influence in the respect which Boswell always showed for religion and for principles. To know what he thought right or wrong was always of importance to him, however slight the relation to his practice of these moral decisions. It is possible indeed that he could never have been better than a tyro in the art of living: but the close-fettered days of this unfortunate childhood must be partly responsible for the fact. When the term of his education at home was accomplished, Boswell very properly went to school at Edinburgh. We have reason to complain, if we may complain at all, that we can know nothing of Boswell's school life. It is idle to conjecture what it was like. We may only suppose that school was to him a place of comparative freedom, and that to his schoolfellows his presence there was a valuable source of merriment, and perhaps also an occasion of maliciousness. From school Boswell went by a natural sequence to Edinburgh University: he was barely seventeen years old when the change took place. It was at Edinburgh University, at Hunter's Greek class, that Boswell met his lifelong friend William Temple. Temple is distinguished as the grandfather of an archbishop. Beyond this his life has no considerable distinction; and beyond the fact that he was Boswell's friend it has no peculiar interest. His eminence in the immediate affairs of this world may be rightly judged from the unembellished statement that, after his ordination in 1766, he remained a country parson, first at Mamhead, near Exeter, and later at St. Gluvias, in Cornwall, for his entire life. It is a curiously undecorated career for one who obtained so large a measure not merely of Boswell's friendship, but of his admiration. A sad mischance has denied us at least the gratification of curiosity by hiding from our view, and perhaps destroying, the letters of Temple to Boswell; those qualities which attracted the youthful biographer, and completely won his confidence, are no doubt exposed therein; but we may not see. Boswell's own letters however reveal something of his correspondent's character. Temple in the first place--and this perhaps is the most important fact--was literary. He was evidently a far better scholar than Boswell, and knew more about books. He was a writer too in a small way. He published several unpretentious volumes. They have no particular interest that demands our attention, but one of them, 'An Essay on the Clergy, &c.,' 'by some divine mischance,' as Mr. Seccombe puts it, 'materially aided his prospects.' Temple's ability seems rather to have been that of a critic. In the letters that he wrote to Boswell he pronounced his views about books and authors: Boswell esteemed his opinions highly, and there was a proposal, apparently fruitless, that these passages should be collected into a book. It would be wrong to assume from Boswell's optimistic remarks that Temple was really capable of writing anything valuable. But his opinion was in one instance at least supported by eminent men of letters. Boswell quoted in a periodical an appreciation of Gray which Temple wrote at the time of that poet's death; Mason thought this so good that he inserted it in his 'Life of Gray'; and Dr. Johnson afterwards included the same passage in the 'Lives of the Poets.' Temple, as we see, is not entitled to the fame of Letters; but it is important to realise, since he was the greatest friend both of the young and the old Boswell, that though he had not the qualities that deserve success, and had not the good fortune that may bring it by chance, he had, however, a certain distinction. There are other reasons for Boswell's preference. If neither Temple nor Boswell was a successful man, yet they both desired success in a quite extraordinary degree, and in the early days of their friendship at Edinburgh this was a strong link. They perceived, no doubt, that they were unlike the majority of students, and concluded they were better than the rest. They looked forward to brilliant careers and elegant fame, to the respect of princes and the friendship of the ingenious. Boswell lived for the greater part of his life in a palace of boyish dreams where Wishes became Destiny, and it is fair to suppose that Temple at the Scottish University shared this luxury of anticipation. He, too, could look back to the Edinburgh days and consider if he were becoming 'the great man, as we used to say.' And in later life the link held firm; for neither of them was 'the great man' in the sense that he intended. If they were companions in hopeful optimism when young, they were equally companions at a maturer age in the discontent and despair of unrealised ambition. It might be supposed that any friend of Boswell would play the part of the strong man. He might not have the capacity of Dr. Johnson for sweeping away cobwebs and for discouraging complaint, but one would expect to find him upon the same platform. Temple, however, did not take this attitude. On the contrary it was Boswell who encouraged Temple. Not once but many times we find in the letters that Temple has told the tale of his evil fortune in tones of despondency, and Boswell tries to present the circumstances in a more favourable light. Boswell perhaps did not do this very well. Neither the cheerfulness of optimism nor the consolation of philosophy is sufficient for the occasion; and it may be doubted whether the philosophy advocated by Boswell was anything more than an affectation of indifference. But it does him credit that he should have made the attempt to console, and at the same time displays the weakness of Temple's character. Certainly this was not the kind of man to exert a strong influence. Boswell seems to have regarded him in the light of a father confessor with whom a certain ceremony is to be performed, and is reproved and forgiven by a natural sequence, which adds nothing but pleasure to the agreeable duty of confession. Temple expostulates in the _rôle_ of parson when the conduct of his friend is particularly damnable; it is possible there shall be a 'blaze hereafter,' and one must at least be on the safe side. So Boswell no doubt understood it. The mild reproofs of his clerical friend never for a moment deterred him either from doing or from telling of his deed. He came to expect and even to like them. 'Admonish me, but forgive me,' he says after a particularly detailed account of his amours; and at a later date, in an expression which seems to epitomise the relations of the pastor and his erring sheep, 'Your soft admonitions,' he writes, 'would at any time calm the tempests of my soul.' It is clear that Boswell had no moral respect for Temple; it was not in search of guidance that he told stories of his profligacy, but simply because he liked to tell them. Boswell, as his friend remarked, mounted the hobby-horse of his own temperament; this was his perennial and unfailing interest, and the irrepressible delight which he had in his own feelings and performances found an outlet in the 'Letters to Temple' and in many amusing passages in the 'Life of Johnson.' Boswell no doubt was capable of self-revelation without encouragement, and it is difficult for this reason to tell how much sympathy he had from his friend. Temple wanted to hear from Boswell; he asked him to write, and praised his letters. But his mild disapproval was probably genuine. When he accuses Boswell of neglecting a friend or of unkindness to his father, he must have thought himself a more considerate man. He was not like Boswell, a tippler, and seems to have been really distressed by the other's intemperate habits. In a manuscript diary, reports Mr. Seccombe, he describes Boswell, no doubt in a moment of irritation, as 'irregular in conduct and manners, selfish, indelicate, no sensibility or feeling for others.' And yet Temple himself was not above a gross fault; he talks of a 'dear infidel,' and Boswell exclaims that he is exceeded by his friend. Boswell no doubt made the most of any lapse on Temple's part from the path of rectitude; he would like to feel that he had the support of a respectable companion. His conscience was by no means complacent, and it would become more tranquil if one whom he respected were in the same boat with himself. It is conceivable that Temple encouraged Boswell's confidence with the object of controlling him as much as he could; his advice certainly was always that he should get well married instead of carrying on a number of flirtations. But it is difficult to believe, if we read the letters carefully, that Temple ever appeared to be shocked by Boswell's confessions; and to the latter no doubt that was an encouragement. In brief, we may describe Temple as a refined and well-intentioned creature, but hardly wise and not courageous. His marriage was so much a failure that he sought at one time a colonial chaplaincy with the object of living apart from his wife. He was discontented with his lot and inclined rather to complain acrimoniously than to make the best of it. He had apparently no staunch qualities to influence a friend; and this friend needed a firm monitor. * * * * * The date of the first of Boswell's letters to Temple is July 1758. In 1763 he met Johnson. In the five years between these dates we see Boswell in a number of characteristic lights. The period from eighteen to twenty-three is commonly held to mark a special change and development in a man's character. In Boswell's, however, we do not see this very strongly. As he grew up he did fewer, no doubt, of the wild things of youth. But he seems hardly to have become older in the ordinary way, until towards the close of his life. He was always to the world the gay, good-humoured, sociable being, with a strong vein of fatuous buffoonery, that we see in these early years. A great difficulty in rightly understanding Boswell's life lies in this fact. It seems impossible at times to realise that this was a serious man; he appears to find the world and himself such a preposterous joke. And yet if he saw to the full the humour of living, he felt too very keenly that it was an important matter, that there were real standards. No one has valued more the opinion of others about himself, and no one has experienced more miserably the bitterness of disappointed ambition. It must be our duty, then, to mark, with all the follies and frivolities which express the youth he retained so long, a more serious nature within, which showed itself also from time to time to the outer world. The course of Boswell's life during this period of five years may be briefly followed in chronological order. In 1758 he was at Edinburgh University, and it is from there that his first letter to Temple is dated. The summer vacation was spent on the Northern Circuit with his father and Sir David Dalrymple, afterwards also a Scottish judge with the title of Lord Hailes. In November 1759, he entered Adam Smith's class for Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University. In 1760 he paid his first visit to London, and in the spring of 1761 returned to Edinburgh, where he resided until the close of 1762; he then went for the second time to London. It was upon this second visit that he met Dr. Johnson. It is characteristic of these years that he did not quite know what he was or what he wanted. He was posing now in one guise and now in another, wondering the while what his serious purpose might be. At Edinburgh University he seems to have wished to appear an intellectual cynic. He writes to Temple: Don't be surprised if your grave, sedate, philosophic friend, who used to carry it so high, and talk with such composed indifference of the beauteous sex, and whom you used to admonish not to turn an old man too soon--don't be thunderstruck if this same fellow should all at once _subito furore obreptus_ commence Don Quixote for his adorable Dulcinea. The inference is clear; the _subito furore obreptus_ type of conduct is a great change from a sedate indifference. He often adopted the _rôle_ of the wise counsellor. His letters to Temple are full of excellent advice. It is always hard to be quite certain that Boswell is serious, but it is probable that he was sincere enough in this. He was ready always with sympathy and kind actions for his friend, and we may conjecture that besides wishing to appear wise beyond his years he thought that Temple could best be served by the commonplace advice of the old to the young. But it is pre-eminently as the promising young _littérateur_ that we see Boswell in these years. He became acquainted with many interesting people, who were attracted, no doubt, by a clever young man, fond of literature and appearing less ignorant than most young men. Lord Hailes, Lord Kames, and Dr. Robertson were numbered among his friends. Even Hume took notice of him: 'We talk a great deal of genius, fine learning, improving in our style, &c., but I am afraid solid learning is much wore out. Mr. Hume, I think, is a very proper person for a young man to cultivate an acquaintance with.' Boswell was not eighteen when he wrote these words. They suggest an amusing picture of a clever and conceited young genius. He was admitted in 1761 to the Select Society, a distinguished group of men who represented the best learning of Edinburgh--a high compliment this, both to his brains and to his social qualities. Among Boswell's friends of the aristocracy of letters were several younger men. Charles Dilly, the publisher, who was afterwards host at the famous dinner when Dr. Johnson met Jack Wilkes, was a native of Edinburgh; and George Dempster, who became M.P. for the burghs of Fife and Forfar in 1762, was, like Boswell, a member of the Select Society; it was he who afterwards appeared as the disciple of Hume and Rousseau, and of whom Johnson said, 'I have not met with any man for a long time who has given me such general displeasure.' A greater friend than either of these, and one who had far more influence in forming the literary tastes of Boswell, was the Honourable Andrew Erskine. This lively young gentleman was both soldier and writer. His interest in literature was not of a very creative order: he edited, however, in 1760 and 1761, two volumes of a 'Collection of Original Poems by the Rev. Mr. Blacklock and other Scotch Gentlemen,' to which both he and Boswell contributed; in 1764, he published a farce in two acts, and in 1773 he issued a poem of twenty-two quarto pages intended 'to expose the false taste for florid description which prevails in modern poetry.' He appears to have had considerable discrimination; he was an early admirer of the poet Burns, and Burns, in a letter to a friend, praises some of Erskine's songs; an eminent publisher describes him as having 'an excellent taste in the fine arts.' Such a man may well have had influence with Boswell, and the two became associated in several small literary ventures. The early tastes and tendencies of Boswell in literary matters are connected with several influences of a different nature. There was always a strong instinct of rebellion in Boswell, and with him it found expression in sympathy for those whom the world rejected. Some of his friends among those who sought favour of the Muses were therefore less successful and less respectable than the distinguished members of the Select Society, the learned and the grave. Several of these friends were connected in various ways with the stage. Acting was not supported as an art in Edinburgh, nor countenanced as a profession, at the time when Boswell was an undergraduate at the University. But he came in contact with a Mr. Love who, it would seem, was the first to encourage his sympathy with the drama. Mr. Love had been connected at one time with Drury Lane Theatre; fortune cannot have favoured him greatly, since he left London for Edinburgh; and there after fruitless attempts to practise private theatricals he became a teacher of elocution. It was in this last capacity that Boswell met him. The lessons of Mr. Love were apparently of some use to Boswell; for Dr. Johnson said in commendation of his English accent, 'Sir, your pronunciation is not offensive'; and Miss Burney too speaks approvingly. Mr. Love became the great friend of Boswell after Temple had proceeded to the University of Cambridge. He is mentioned in the first of the 'Letters to Temple' as the only other confidant of Boswell in a matter of the heart; and in the next letter he is called his 'second-best friend.' Boswell says of him: 'He has not only good taste, genius and learning, but a good heart.' He must in any case have been a man of singular virtue, for it was he who persuaded Boswell to keep a diary. 'I went along with my father to the Northern Circuit and was so happy as to be in the same chaise as Sir David Dalrymple the whole way. I kept an exact journal, at the particular desire of my friend Mr. Love, and sent it to him in sheets every post.' So was the habit of 'memorandising' begun. Boswell was destined no doubt to form that habit; it was the most vital factor in his method of biography; and it was besides a complete expression in itself of that inner secret which, by a magic touch, was to marshal the soul of a glorious man before the eyes of us all. The wheel of Fate might have turned ever so little differently for Boswell and altered the whole course of his mortal existence; but if it were still to be Boswell, there must still have been the tablets; and his title to immortality would have been secured by these alone. And yet, though the tablets are Boswell's by indubitable birthright, we may allow ourselves a pious exclamation at the name of Mr. Love. When Boswell went to Glasgow he made friends with another actor in depressed circumstances. 'The merchants of Glasgow,' Dr. Rogers tells us, 'tolerated theatrical representations, obtaining on their boards such talent as their provincial situation could afford.' Boswell evidently took an interest in the Glasgow theatre. One of those who sought a livelihood there was a certain Francis Gentleman, a native of Ireland, and originally an officer in the army. 'This amiable gentleman sold his commission in the hope of obtaining fame and opulence as a dramatic author.' He obtained neither, and became an actor; and so he qualified to be the friend of Boswell, who entertained him, and 'encouraged him to publish an edition of Southern's "Tragedy of Oroonoco."' To Boswell it must have been a double pleasure to play the patron and to read the dedication of the volume addressed to himself. Mr. Gentleman thought well of the man who had befriended him, and the dedication ends thus: But where, with honest pleasure, she can find Sense, taste, religion, and good nature joined, There gladly will she raise her feeble voice Nor fear to tell that Boswell is her choice. On his return to Edinburgh Boswell became more than ever concerned with the ill-favoured art of the drama. 'The popular prejudice against theatricals,' says Dr. Rogers, 'was a sufficient cause for our author falling into the opposite extreme; he threw his whole energies into a movement which led, six years afterwards, to a theatre being licensed in the capital.' He became associated in this movement with a Mr. David Ross, the most important save Garrick of his actor friends. Ross, too, was acquainted with misfortune, yet not without earning some kind of celebrity. When he made his first appearance at Drury Lane, 'he was approved by a polite and distinguishing audience, who seemed to congratulate themselves on seeing an actor whom they imagined capable of restoring to the stage the long-lost character of the real fine gentleman'; and his first success was followed by a considerable measure of popularity at Covent Garden. He must have been a good actor, for Garrick is said to have been jealous of his reputation. It was the 'fine gentleman' we may suppose that Boswell particularly admired. 'Poor Ross!' he exclaims at the time of his death; 'he was an unfortunate man in some respects; but he was a true _bon-vivant_, a most social man, and never was without good eating and drinking and hearty companions.' These qualities were no doubt to Boswell the highest recommendation. And he seems besides to have found the society of actors in general especially congenial. In his own character there was much of the actor: he was so often conscious of a part to be played! And he had a way of occupying the stage when conversing in company. He may have found, too, that actors appreciated best his lively social qualities. Ross, though irregular habits, as we are told, may have interfered with his advancement, was evidently a man of some talents and some enthusiasm, and eventually he succeeded in starting a theatre in Edinburgh. He had some respect, it would appear, for Boswell's talents; for on the occasion of his first performance in the capital of Scotland, he requested Boswell to write a prologue which the actor himself was to recite. Boswell can hardly have seen much of Ross in later years, but the friendship between them was preserved, and Boswell was chief mourner at the actor's funeral in 1790. One other friend of Boswell's in these early years must be mentioned here. Actors may have had particular qualities which made them attractive to him, but Boswell in any case had always a sympathy with misfortune which was mere good-nature; he had at the same time an interest in the shady walks of life, in human nature exhibited under stress of adverse circumstances, and in an added poignancy to the performance of intellect when spurred by poverty. These feelings may account for his friendship with Mr. Derrick the poet. Derrick, like Love and Gentleman and Ross, was somewhat of a failure. He had been apprenticed to a linendraper, and deserted the concerns of trade to seek his fortune as an actor; when Boswell met him as a man of thirty-six he aspired to be a poet. His verses must have been remarkably poor; Boswell refers to some of them as 'infamously bad.' Dr. Johnson, who knew him slightly, 'reproved his muse and condemned his levity.' But he was a writer, and that meant a great deal to Boswell; the mark of his profession was a sign of grace. The Doctor was probably right when he said: 'It is to his being a writer that he owes anything he has. Sir, had not Derrick been a writer, he would have been sweeping the crosses in the streets, and asking halfpence from everybody that passed.' Derrick no doubt was a gay companion, and Boswell evidently liked him, though not excessively. He was of some importance, too, in the youth of Boswell, for he was his first tutor in the ways of London, and these were not entirely good ways. * * * * * It was as a poet that Boswell was to make his _début_ in literary performance. Besides his contributions to the collections edited by Erskine, he published in 1761 two longer poems, 'An Elegy on the Death of an Amiable Young Lady' and 'An Ode to Tragedy.' The latter was apparently a serious attempt at poetry; but it serves only to demonstrate that poetry was quite beyond Boswell's grasp. His productions were typical of the eighteenth century. He had no imagination teeming with beautiful images, such as came to a later generation; the graces and conceits of the Elizabethans, and the appeal of Nature, were alike unknown to him; and he never acquired the technical skill which was the merit of the best poets of the age. The 'Ode' is neither better nor worse than might be expected from a wholly misdirected literary talent; it could have been written by almost anyone who had read a certain quantity of English verse. The 'Elegy' also was intended to express a serious vein. It would be an error to suppose that Boswell meant to be satirical; but he evidently saw that he might be laughed at as extravagant, and published it without alteration, introducing some prefatory letters to ridicule its sentimentality. In 1762 he published, apparently at his own expense, 'The Cub at Newmarket, a tale.' This, as he states in the preface, is the story told in doggerel verse of his visit to the Jockey Club at Newmarket. He had been taken there when in London by Lord Eglinton, and was discovered in the coffee-room while in the act of composing. The Cub at Newmarket is, of course, himself. Lord Eglinton afterwards introduced him to the Duke of York, to whom Boswell, not unwillingly we may suppose, read out his poem. It must have been a triumphant moment for the young author, and he felt obliged to preserve the memory of it by asking and obtaining leave to dedicate the poem to his Royal Highness--he desired, as he explains in the preface, 'to let the world know that this same Cub has been laughed at by the Duke of York, has been read to his Royal Highness by the genius himself, and warmed by the immediate beams of his kind indulgence.' The humorous poem is not remarkably funny; one stanza which describes himself is perhaps worthy to be quoted: He was not of the iron Race, Which sometimes Caledonia grace, Though he to combat could advance-- Plumpness shone in his countenance; And Belly prominent declar'd That he for Beef and Pudding car'd; He had a large and pond'rous head, That seemed to be composed of lead; From which hung down such stiff, lank hair, As might the crows in Autumn scare. But besides being a somewhat light-headed poet, Boswell was anxious to appear as the 'young Buck.' 'The Epistle of a London Buck to his Friend' is the title of one of his publications in the 'Collection of Original Poems.' There is also a confused story of a club he formed in Edinburgh called the 'Soaping Club,' which existed apparently for Bacchanalian purposes; Boswell was the king of the Soapers and wrote some verses about himself: Boswell is pleasant and gay, For frolic by nature designed; He heedlessly rattles away When the company is to his mind. 'This maxim,' he says, 'you may see, We never can have corn without chaff'; So not a bent sixpence cares he, Whether _with_ him, or _at_ him you laugh. Boswell does women adore, And never once means to deceive, He's in love with at least half a score; If they're serious he smiles in his sleeve. He has all the bright fancy of youth, With the judgment of forty and five; In short, to declare the plain truth, There is no better fellow alive. Stories about 'frolic' (to use Boswell's word) are not as a rule very laughable, and we are perhaps too apt to consider them as merely childish and contemptible when they fail to amuse us. The exact atmosphere of the moment which accounts for its merriment is forgotten too often and seldom reproduced, and we are left cold after a recital of such behaviour as we may suppose the Club of Soapers to have indulged in. In Boswell's character there was a large vein of buffoonery which is apt when recounted by anyone but himself to appear stupid enough. But in reality it seems to have contained a true sense of the incongruous, and had at least the success of making people laugh. What an incomparable moment that must have been when Boswell, as one of the audience at Drury Lane theatre, took upon himself to imitate the lowing of a cow! 'I was so successful in this boyish frolic,' he relates, 'that the universal cry of the galleries was: "Encore the cow! Encore the cow!"' There is nothing very brilliant about Boswell's comic verses, but it is curious that those we have quoted should represent the facts so closely: So not a bent sixpence cares he Whether _with_ him or _at_ him you laugh; these lines express exactly the social principle which Boswell adopted. He had no objection to men laughing at his oddities so long as they laughed good-humouredly. He wished to find gaiety in every company, and it is just to say that he brought more than his share of mirth regardless of dignity. There are many other instances of these self-portraits, anonymous sometimes, but easily to be recognised. We can hardly do better than illustrate Boswell's life by his own words about himself, because upon this subject he found it necessary, when he had anything to say, to say it truthfully. In another early literary venture, the correspondence between Erskine and Boswell, which these two young gentlemen published, there is a letter of Boswell's containing an account of the author of the 'Ode to Tragedy,' which he had published anonymously; he thus describes himself: The author of the 'Ode to Tragedy,' is a most excellent man: he is of an ancient family in the West of Scotland, upon which he values himself not a little. At his nativity there appeared omens of his future greatness; his parts are bright, and his education has been good; he has travelled in postchaises miles without number; he is fond of seeing much of the world; he eats of every good dish, especially apple-pie; he drinks old hock; he has a very fine temper; he is somewhat of a humourist, and a little tinctured with pride; he has a good, manly countenance, and he owns himself to be amorous; he has infinite vivacity, yet is observed at times to have a melancholy cast; he is rather fat than lean, rather short than tall, rather young than old; his shoes are neatly made, and he never wears spectacles. The 'Letters between the Honourable Andrew Erskine and James Boswell, Esq.' are the most remarkable in some ways of these early literary ventures. The letters were evidently written from the first with a view to publication. They are completely frivolous, but attempt to be satirical and amusing. Boswell and Erskine wish to appear as two young men of society who are budding poets and have brilliant wit. They hoped, perhaps, to take the world by storm like the Admirable Crichton and his friend Aldus. The result, if far from brilliant, is certainly clever and amusing. The _rôle_ which Boswell played in this theatrical performance may be illustrated by some passages of his own letters. He was before everything else the knight of chivalry--a chivalry which was occupied exclusively with an excess of romantic attachment and an adoring worship of female charm. Boswell in real life was extravagant enough, we may suppose, in his homage to women; but his performance can have hardly reached the standard set up in the letters to Erskine: Lady B---- entreats me to come and pass the Christmas holidays with her. Guess, O guess! what transport I felt at reading that; I did not know how to contain my elevation of spirits. I thought myself one of the greatest geniuses in Europe; I thought I could write all sorts of books and work at all handicraft trades; I imagined that I had fourscore millions of money out at interest, and, that I should actually be chosen Pope at the next election. It is conceivable of course that Boswell imagined that he had the fourscore millions; there is evidence which might suggest a misconception of this kind. And it is even possible that he entertained at some time the dream of becoming Pope. But that at all events is not meant to appear. It is meant as the froth of youthful gallantry. There is no deception. We are not expected to suppose that Boswell was like this: we are expected merely to be amused at the pose. He represents himself also as the _bon-vivant_. There are allusions to splendid feasts and there is an 'Ode to Gluttony.' The poet is always very much to the fore, and his behaviour is supposed to be marked occasionally by a vein of seriousness, which is to suggest the anxious cogitation of the philosopher: We had a splendid ball.... I exhibited my existence in a minuet, and as I was dressed in a full chocolate suit and wore my most solemn countenance, I looked, as you used to tell me, like the fifth act of a deep tragedy. Perhaps the most significant passages in these letters are where Boswell plays the cynic: A light heart may bid defiance to fortune. And yet, Erskine, I must tell you that I have been a little pensive of late, amorously pensive, and disposed to read Shenstone's 'Pastoral on Absence,' the tendency of which I greatly admire. A man who is in love is like a man who has got the toothache: he feels in most acute pain, while nobody pities him. In that situation I am at present, but well do I know that I will not be long so. So much for inconstancy! Boswell represented himself in the letters to Erskine very much as he affected to be in real life--the gay young wit with a serious background, the jolly good fellow and at the same time the budding genius, and finally, the cynical philosopher, such as he alludes to in the first letter to Temple. The whole picture is exaggerated and laughed at: yet we feel very often that the laughter has a hollow ring. It is the laughter in reality of one who wishes to protect himself from ridicule by jesting at his own expense. The real Boswell peeps through in many places. The remark about Shenstone's 'Pastoral on Absence' might equally well have been made in all seriousness to Temple. In another letter he says: Allow me a few more words. I live here in a remote corner of an old ruinous house, where my ancestors have been very jovial. What a solemn idea rushes on my mind! They are all gone: I must follow. Well, and what then? I must shift about to another subject. The best I can think of is a sound sleep: so good-night! The sentiment about his dead ancestors is a flash of the true Boswell as bright and real as anything in Pepys' Diary. The pleasure which the thought gave him and the pleasure he had in imparting it to another cannot be concealed by the forced levity of the ending. The friendship of Boswell with Erskine was responsible for yet another publication; these two with George Dempster collaborated to criticise some dramatic performances in 'Critical Strictures on Mallet's "Elvira."' This brochure[2] would seem to have been written in the same flippant manner as the 'Letters.' Mr. Mallet's 'Elvira' came in for plenty of abuse, but there was no serious attempt at literary criticism. And yet this publication must rank with the letters as the most important exhibition of Boswell's talents up to the age of twenty-three. * * * * * In London no doubt Boswell enjoyed himself very well, and Edinburgh seemed a dull town by comparison. In May, 1761, Boswell writes: A young fellow whose happiness was always centred in London, who had at last got there, and had begun to taste its delights, who had got his mind filled with the most gay ideas,--getting into the Guards, being about the court, enjoying the happiness of the _beau monde_, and the company of men of genius, in short everything that he could wish,--consider this poor fellow hauled away to the town of Edinburgh, obliged to conform to every Scotch custom or be laughed at--'Will you hae some jeel? oh fie! oh fie!'--his flighty imagination quite cramped, and he obliged to study Corpus Juris Civilis, and live in his father's strict family; is there any wonder, Sir, that the unlucky dog should be somewhat fretful? This passage from a letter to Temple explains very well the attitude of Boswell towards the world at the age of twenty-one. He is the gay, frank, talkative, amusing, sociable young man, frivolous if you like and a little unrestrained in his affections, extravagant one would rather say in that matter as in others, but quite without malice. The profession to which for a time he aspired was that of a soldier. In the Guards, no doubt, he would be able to enjoy just that kind of life which attracted him, the 'happiness of the _beau monde_,' with no thought of what is supposed to be the serious business of soldiering, and probably a decided preference for the gay, smart costume. But for the army he was clearly unsuited. 'I like your son,' said the Duke of Argyll to his father; 'that boy must not be shot at for three-and-sixpence a day.' It was resolved accordingly that he should study law. We hear so much in the letters to Temple of Boswell's amusements that it is easy to lose sight altogether of a less frivolous side to his life. It is safe at least to conjecture that he read a good many books at this time; in the _rôle_ of a young _littérateur_ he would naturally keep up with the books that were coming out; we know that he read Johnson and Hume and Harris, and, from the knowledge of literature that he always showed, we may infer that he read much else besides. The law studies he took seriously at this time. I can assure you [he writes to Temple] the study of law here is a most laborious task. In return for yours, I shall give you an account of my studies. From nine to ten I attend the law class; from ten to eleven study at home, and from one to two attend a College upon Roman Antiquities. The afternoons and evenings I likewise spend in study; I never walk except on Saturdays. This is hard work for one at a University! And especially for one of Boswell's temperament. There is no great amount of diligence associated as a rule with the youth of either the literary or the very sociable character. The truth is that Boswell was very far from being idle; he had great energy, and often applied himself to something which interested him with fervent industry; he was irregular no doubt, as are very many people who work in this way. An indication of the channel into which his industry was to be turned is provided by that journal (and what pains it must have cost!), which he began to keep while travelling with Lord Hailes and his father; and at the same time he was made aware of the existence of Dr. Johnson as a great writer in London, began to read his works, and also no doubt to feel, as he afterwards said, that 'highest reverence for their author, which had grown up with my fancy into a kind of mysterious veneration, by figuring to myself a state of solemn elevated abstraction, in which I supposed him to live in the immense metropolis of London.' Boswell also seems to have been deeply interested in religion even during these early years. While at Glasgow University his views underwent a violent revolution, most distressing to his parents, and he became for a short time a Roman Catholic. There is no reason to suppose that Boswell was in any way frivolous when he took this decisive step. He clearly hated the Presbyterianism of his youth and was probably in search of some creed to take its place. He cannot, however, have gained much credit from this episode, since it was mixed up in some way with an elopement with a Roman Catholic lady. It is probable that Boswell was in earnest both about the young lady and about his religion. But since, in order to be entirely respectable, it is often necessary to give a hypocritical consistency to our fickle inclinations, we are not thought to be serious if we do not affect to be constant. We can assume, in the case of most people, from a sort of faith they hold in the durability of sentiment, and a desire which they have to prove by a time test the depth of their emotion, that the feelings which do not appear to endure are trivial and shallow. In Boswell's case we cannot make this assumption; though he affected much, he yet had real and vivid feelings; but since they could never be wholly dissociated from the pleasure which they gave him, they were both various and contradictory; he could be grave and sedate at one moment and gay and boyish the next, yet really feeling something both of the gravity and the gaiety of living; he could be almost in the same breath either the romantic lover or the indifferent cynic, and yet feel something both of the romance of love and of the aloofness which has tasted often enough the joys and sorrows of life; he forgot more quickly than most men, but did not care very often--while it was part of his inconsistency that he did sometimes care--to conceal the fundamental elasticity of his nature. This volatility of Boswell, exhibited especially in his sexual inconstancy, was in itself but a phase of an innate and irrepressible candour which, in spite of a lifelong desire and struggle for respectability, showed itself very often to his friend Temple in the 'Letters,' and not infrequently also to the general public. In all that he wrote we find passages of amazing frankness about matters which most men would prefer to conceal. He was absurdly vain, he was childishly sanguine, he was often both foolish and ridiculous, and he tells us all about it as a matter that should interest us as well as him. 'Why,' he says, '"out of the abundance of the heart" should I not speak?' The light of truth led him into strange paths. He was a formalist and yet he was sometimes known to fail in formalism through an aversion to insincerity; when his enemy Baretti came, by chance, into the room where he was being entertained by a friend, Boswell refused to greet him; he could even be flagrantly rude in company. To be entirely respectable and conventional, to be the man of the world, the gentleman of society, that is what Boswell wanted most in life; and that he never could become, because there was in his nature a further consciousness, which was not to be subdued, and which determined, by reason of the curious inconsistency so produced, his whole capacity for interesting mankind, for fame, for greatness. And so beside the sentimentality, the self-deception, the respectability, which he so often exhibited, we see the germ of self-knowledge, of honesty, of truth, which developed and was ultimately expressed, almost by chance as it seems, in a supreme biography: for it is the candour of Boswell far more than any other single factor, the natural instinct to record what he observed both of himself and of others, the honesty in observing and the truthfulness which he had as an artist in recording, that distinguishes his literary work. Herein lay the essence of his genius. The story of Boswell's life is the story of a struggle between influences and ambitions which led him towards the commonplace, and the rare qualities grafted deeply within him, which bore him steadily in an opposite direction. The triumph of the latter involved no doubt the unhappiness of Boswell, but it also involved the production of a great work of art; and this achievement has won for its author a unique place among distinguished men; he is famous beyond any fame that he dreamed of attaining and failed to attain. [Footnote 1: Joint.] [Footnote 2: I have not seen a copy; _v._ Fitzgerald, _Life of Boswell_ i. 37-38, and _Life of Garrick_.] CHAPTER II 'The accident,' says Professor Raleigh,[1] 'which gave Boswell to Johnson and Johnson to Boswell is one of the most extraordinary pieces of good fortune in literary history.' The event of their meeting took place on May 16th, 1763, and if in one sense it was clearly, as the word is commonly used, an accident, it was equally the result of a strong wish and intention, if not of deliberate design, on Boswell's part. He had long known of Johnson, and as early as 1760 had hoped for an introduction from 'Mr. Derrick, the poet,' 'an honour,' he says, 'of which I was very ambitious.' This honour bestowed eventually upon a vain and extravagant youth (a circumstance which must be highly esteemed among the good gifts of the Lady Fortune to humanity) was to be attained through a humble agent. Among those of Boswell's friends who were not of the higher strata in society was one Tom Davies. He was at this time a bookseller, but as he had been formerly an actor and then dramatic critic, there was something uncommon and adventurous about his career. He had in fact in some degree the equivalent of what has been known at a later date as Bohemianism. It seems particularly appropriate that Boswell should have forgotten the pride of birth to meet so, in humble circumstances, the object of his devotion. The scene which took place in Tom Davies' back-parlour has the essence of true comedy. Two of the actors are light-heartedly unconscious that the moment has the least importance; the third is painfully and anxiously aware that it is important to him, and naturally unaware that it can have a value to anyone else. And it has, too, that dramatic quality of great events taking place by accident, as it seems, among incongruous circumstances. It is a scene which must kindle always, for one who feels a serious value in humour, an emotion beyond mere pleasure. The comedy opens by Tom Davies announcing the eventful news in farcical manner. At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back-parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him, through the glass-door in the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us,--he announced his aweful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, 'Look, my Lord, it comes....' Boswell, who at once became nervous, had only time to give a warning to Davies, and the latter maliciously said the one thing he had been asked not to say. 'Mr. Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to him. I was much agitated; and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, "Don't tell where I come from."--"From Scotland," cried Davies roguishly.' This was apparently a disastrous beginning, and something must be done to retrieve the position. '"Mr. Johnson," said I, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it."' It was rash indeed to originate the conversation and not less typical of Boswell for that. But a more pleasing remark could hardly be imagined, at once courteous and frank and full of humour.[2] Johnson no doubt appreciated it very well, and the more because he was able to find an excellent repartee. For the moment, however, Boswell seemed to be involved in fresh calamity. 'This speech was somewhat unlucky; for with that quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he seized the expression, "come from Scotland," which I used in the sense of being of that country; and, as if I had said that I had come away from it, or left it, retorted, "That, Sir, I find, is what a great many of your countrymen cannot help."' Boswell for the moment was completely crushed: 'This stroke stunned me a good deal,' and he now found himself left out of the conversation, in which situation he felt that he was unlikely to make a very favourable impression. 'He then addressed himself to Davies: "What do you think of Garrick? He has refused me an order for the play for Miss Williams, because he knows that the house will be full, and that an order would be worth three shillings."' No opportunity must be missed, and youth is prompted by enthusiasm. 'Eager to take any opening to get into conversation with him, I ventured to say, "O, Sir, I cannot think Mr. Garrick would grudge such a trifle to you!"' If this was bold it was at least both genuine and polite, and the reproof was severe though Boswell admits its justice. '"Sir," (said he, with a stern look) "I have known David Garrick longer than you have done: and I know no right you have to talk to me on the subject."' 'Perhaps' Boswell continues, 'I deserved this check; for it was rather presumptuous in me, an entire stranger, to express any doubt of the justice of his animadversion upon his old acquaintance and pupil. I now felt myself much mortified, and began to think that the hope which I had long indulged of obtaining his acquaintance was blasted. And, in truth, had not my ardour been uncommonly strong, and my resolution uncommonly persevering, so rough a reception might have deterred me for ever from making any further attempts. Fortunately, however, I remained upon the field not wholly discomfited; and was soon rewarded by hearing some of his conversation.' Eventually, when he went away, Davies made some encouraging remarks: 'Tom Davies followed me to the door; and when I complained to him a little of the hard blows which the great man had given me, he kindly took upon him to console me by saying, "Don't be uneasy. I can see he likes you very well!"' The evidence that Johnson liked him very well was not very convincing, we may suppose, to Boswell. But he called upon Johnson a week later. In the account of Boswell's first visit to Dr. Johnson's house there is one instructive passage: He told me that he generally went abroad at four in the afternoon, and seldom came home till ten in the morning. I took the liberty to ask if he did not think it wrong to live thus, and not make more use of his great talents. He owned it was a bad habit. On reviewing, at the distance of many years, my journal of this period, I wonder how, at my first visit, I ventured to talk to him so freely, and that he bore it with so much indulgence. Clearly Boswell was good at saying what he thought--the remark about Garrick and the question as to the morality of Johnson's habits, so early in their acquaintance, show this; he is himself amazed, at a later date, 'how I ventured to talk so freely.' It is this candour, in fact, which particularly attracted Johnson. His fame for brilliant argument and crushing repartee, and his unbending dogmatic manner in conversation, prevented very often the course of free and fearless expression in his presence. The young, too, from their supposed ignorance, have still something of the privilege of childhood in saying what they think without offending. It is refreshing to older men to hear the frank opinions of youth; and it was very characteristic of Johnson that he liked people to speak quite openly upon serious subjects, so long as they were sincere. It is easy enough indeed to see why the two became friends. Boswell was attractive to Johnson in more ways than one. His outspokenness was happily blended with more gentle softening qualities, which made it modest and appealing rather than over-confident and repelling. He expressed, by his 'light pleasantry to soothe and conciliate him'--and also, we may suppose, by something respectful in his manner--a frank admiration for Johnson. And though some may say that this attitude--flattery one might almost call it (for it is something very near to that)--is repulsive to them, there are very few people in practice who, when it is managed with sufficient dexterity, do not find in it something peculiarly pleasant. Johnson certainly liked to have admirers, and it was Boswell's nature to admire--but not in a mean or servile fashion. He managed, one may suppose, to make Johnson feel pleased with himself, but without lying and without compromising his own opinions. We may see the attitude which he adopted from his own words upon the subject of flattery: [3]But there may be honest as well as dishonest flattery. There may be flattery from a sincere admiration, and a desire to please. It is benevolent to indulge this: and a man of good disposition may find frequent opportunities for it, by directly or obliquely bringing under the view of those with whom he associates, such circumstances in their situations and characters as are agreeable. There is nothing unpleasant about this attitude: on the contrary it is a very desirable civility. It must be remembered, too, that Boswell with all his good-humoured gaiety and pleasant social qualities could be, and often wanted to be serious. And the conversation of Johnson was very often, at least during the latter end of his life, of a serious nature. Morality, human beings, literature, these were his great subjects; religion and politics were discussed, but less often. Boswell was interested in the same things; if with him more than with most men his own case was the mainspring of all interests, this made him not less, but rather more, attentive to all questions dealing with right and wrong and the motives of men; and in literature, as we shall have occasion to show later, he had a strong natural interest. But there is another reason which made him an extremely suitable companion for Johnson. What Johnson loved best in conversation was to 'buffet' his adversary; this mode of proceeding has, however, the obvious disadvantage that it prevents people talking, and also may possibly offend them, a result which Johnson himself held to be inexpedient. Boswell, fortunately, was little affected in either way. Nothing, it is evident, could prevent him talking, and it took a great deal to offend or even to hurt him. He was so divinely good-humoured! For the moment, sometimes, he might be annoyed; but it very soon blew over, and there was no malice in his nature to irritate a wound. The consequence of this was that Johnson was often rude, which pleased him, and sometimes went too far, which made him really sorry, so that his kind-hearted nature liked the object of his brutality the better for having injured it. Of the attraction of Dr. Johnson for Boswell we need hardly speak. The little that has been said already about Boswell's strange personality and desires is almost sufficient explanation. We must not think that he attached himself to Johnson with any particular object. 'To suppose,' said Malone '(as some of his detractors have suggested), that he attached himself to Dr. Johnson for the purpose of writing his life, is to know nothing of the author and nothing of human nature.' Malone, who knew Boswell very well at the end of his life, was probably a good judge; and it is not difficult to account for Johnson's attraction for Boswell without making a supposition of this kind. Apart from the unique position which he had among literary men, Johnson was a very striking figure and a very lovable man, and one who would readily appeal to the imagination of the young; the honour of receiving the attentions of Johnson would be pleasant in every way; and Boswell's character was eminently capable of devotion. The friendship which grew up between these two men, who were so different, was not wholly without the shadow of romance. The relations between them were of the kind that parents would wish to exist between father and son. A great deal of affection on both sides there certainly was. The journey together which they took to Harwich on the occasion of Boswell's departure for the Continent[4] is significant enough of Johnson's feelings, and Boswell's account of their parting may speak for his: My revered friend walked down with me to the beach, where we embraced and parted with tenderness and engaged to correspond by letters. I said, 'I hope, Sir, you will not forget me in my absence.' Johnson, 'Nay, Sir, it is more likely you should forget me, than that I should forget you.' As the vessel put out to sea I kept my eyes upon him for a considerable time, while he remained rolling his majestic frame in his usual manner: and at last I perceived him walk back into the town, and he disappeared. There is a note of regret in the paragraph, which, as anyone can see, is perfectly genuine. But Boswell's attitude was much more complicated than one of mere affection. The friendship was of that complementary order where each person contributes something which the other lacks, so that they have a natural need each of the other. Johnson liked Boswell for his youth and freshness; Boswell worshipped Johnson for his strength.[5] Worship! it was no less than that; he admitted it, he was proud of it. His own mind was of the indecisive kind which sees many things and finds it difficult to choose among them; he turned very readily to the strong, definite view of life, the expression of an intelligence not smaller, as convinced people are often fundamentally smaller, but clearly larger than his own; Johnson's overwhelming personality was able to support their common prejudices, usually by argument, but, if not so, by sheer force of conviction. It was not so much that Boswell approved of everything in Johnson's mind as that he could depend upon finding there a certain attitude expressive, as he thought, of his own better self, or of what he would like to have become had he been able to forgo a part of his own nature. * * * * * Dr. Johnson, if he was by far the most important, was by no means the only great man who was to become Boswell's friend. The paternal graciousness admitted of two years to be spent on the Continent, years that were to be devoted to diligent study in the University of Utrecht. Boswell turned them to the best advantage. The parting was propitious; his friend of the past few months accompanied him to the quay-side and Boswell was launched for the Continent by the great literary dictator. That the excellent advice of the moralist and the command of a father were neglected made little difference to the success of the lively young man. Utrecht was frankly a dull place, and there were several gay spots to be visited. Boswell fulfilled his destiny by amusing the best society, and made acquaintances among distinguished men. The capital of Prussia was visited, and the English ambassador Sir Andrew Mitchell was assailed and surrendered. The courts of Saxe-Gotha and Baden were the sphere of the young Scotsman's wit. Philosophers were among his honoured objects of attachment. The youthful Bozzy called upon Voltaire at Ferney, and became almost the friend of Rousseau. Lord Mount Stuart desired him for a travelling companion. The greatest achievement, perhaps, and the most characteristic was the capture of the notorious Wilkes; and intimacy with him was not unfitting, for the two were much alike in their irresponsible levity. But all this was no more than the tinkling of a cymbal before the booming of an heroic drum. Boswell determined to visit the Island of Corsica. Corsica was at this time the scene of a romantic struggle. Tired of the heavy yoke of the Genoese republic, the islanders were in a state of rebellion and were fighting under the flag of Liberty. Their leader was an admirable figurehead, one General Paoli, a zealous and disinterested patriot, a capable soldier and a wise politician. The Byronic furore of a later date for an oppressed people would have found a suitable object in the Corsicans and their national idol. For the mind of Boswell in search of the heroic they had a special appeal. A letter of introduction to Paoli was solicited from Rousseau, and with this the light-hearted young man stepped bravely forth with the bravery of ignorance, to be the first Englishman of his generation to visit those distant and uncivilised shores. The event was properly considered to be worthy of notice in the English Press, and the requisite information as to Mr. Boswell's movements was supplied from time to time by the pen of Mr. Boswell himself. The visit of Boswell to Corsica was a complete success. He travelled in the _rôle_ of explorer, but was treated as an unknown political force. Men of many wiles sought behind an ingenuous and good-natured simplicity a deeper significance when there was none such to be found; Paoli, who hoped for English assistance, was glad to treat with especial favour the one English subject whom he had the opportunity of knowing. And Boswell, if he disclaimed an embassy, was not unwilling to be seen with an escort of Corsicans as he rode upon the general's horse, and to be entertained with diplomatic courtesy. His own social qualities were perhaps of even greater service to him. He exercised to the full his invaluable talent for bringing good cheer to his companions. In the journal which he afterwards published, the 'Tour to Corsica,' there is an admirable account of an evening spent with the Corsican peasants which shows what an acceptable guest the good-humoured and lively Boswell must have been. The Corsican peasants and soldiers were quite free and easy with me. Numbers of them used to come and see me of a morning, and just go out and in as they pleased. I did everything in my power to make them fond of the British, and bid them hope for an alliance with us. They asked me a thousand questions about my country, all which I cheerfully answered as well as I could. One day they would needs hear me play upon my German flute. To have told my honest natural visitants, 'Really, gentlemen, I play very ill,' and put on such airs as we do in our genteel companies, would have been highly ridiculous. I therefore immediately complied with their request. I gave them one or two Italian airs, and then some of our beautiful old Scotch tunes, 'Gilderoy,' 'The Lass of Patie's Mill,' 'Corn Riggs are Bonny.' The pathetick simplicity and pastoral gaiety of the Scots musick will always please those who have the genuine feelings of nature. The Corsicans were charmed with the specimens I gave them, though I may now say that they were very indifferently performed. My good friends insisted also to have an English song from me. I endeavoured to please them in this too, and was very lucky in that which occurred to me. I sung them, 'Hearts of oak are our ships, Hearts of oak are our men.' I translated it into Italian for them, and never did I see men so delighted with a song as the Corsicans were with 'Hearts of Oak.' 'Cuori di querco,' cried they, 'bravo Inglese.' It was quite a joyous riot. I fancied myself to be a recruiting sea-officer. I fancied all my chorus of Corsicans aboard the British fleet.[6] There is a natural good fellowship or social instinct, a splendid enjoyment in the company of others, revealed in this story: it is a quality that pleases everybody. To Paoli he was agreeable besides for other reasons. He had a real enthusiasm and taste for literature, which the intellectual world understood and appreciated readily enough. Hume writes of Boswell's return from Paris, in the company of Thérèse Le Vasseur. He calls him, 'a young gentleman, very good-humoured, very agreeable, and very mad'; and afterwards refers to his literary tastes: 'He has such a rage for literature that I dread some event fatal to our friend's honour. You remember the story of Terentia, who was first married to Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last, in her old age, married a young nobleman, who imagined that she must possess some secret which would convey to him eloquence and genius.'[7] There is a certain extravagance suggested by this which is very characteristic of Boswell. He produced almost the expectation that he would do something odd. This in itself is not to every one an attractive quality; but it is one which combined with others may bring an added charm. Boswell had great generosity of a certain kind which was more than sufficient to excuse anything that might be tiresome about him; he had an unabashed admiration and real respect for great men. He was also able and was not unwilling to capture the hearts of men by repeating things that would please them; as he relates that he did upon his visit to Voltaire, by repeating the dictum of Johnson about Frederick the Great: 'He writes just as you might suppose Voltaire's footboy to do, who has been his amanuensis. He has such parts as the valet might have, and about as much of the colouring of his style as might be got by transcribing his works.' 'When I was at Ferney,' Boswell records, 'I repeated this to Voltaire, in order to reconcile him somewhat to Johnson, whom he, in affecting the English mode of expression, had previously characterised as 'a superstitious dog'; but after hearing such a criticism on Frederick the Great, with whom he was then on bad terms, he exclaimed, 'An honest fellow!' With such pleasant qualities Boswell won the esteem of the General of the Corsicans. Paoli not only treated him with the courtesy due to a distinguished and possibly a useful stranger but entertained him with the spontaneous enjoyment of friendship. The intimate relations which sprang up between Boswell and Paoli were, as we may judge from Boswell's own account, very similar to those already in existence between himself and Johnson. The taste for the heroic may be satisfied easily. Even about the scamp Wilkes in exile there was a glamour which appealed to the imaginative young Bozzy. But for the real Boswellian admiration something more was required--the portentous possession of the 'solid virtues.' The probity of Paoli could never be in question. He appears to have been a simple character with a noble disinterestedness and the honesty of the Mediterranean sun. His interest was Corsica, and, if we may believe Boswell, there was hardly a thought of self in the matter. In this he was perhaps not different from the greater part of his countrymen; but he had besides enthusiasm a wise moderation and self-control, a knowledge of men and a military ability which gave him an authority of the most absolute kind over the Corsicans. His power rested solely upon the weight of his personal influence. It was an impressive figure no doubt--a man to be admired; and Boswell was good at admiring: but a man also to be loved, direct, kind-hearted and sympathetic. He had too what we should scarcely expect in the patriot general--a wide knowledge of literature and considerable culture. General Paoli was in fact entirely suitable to be Boswellised, more suitable it might almost seem than Doctor Sam himself; but the latter was a man of far greater intelligence. The opinions of Boswell in any case are clear enough, and we may read a few specimens from the 'Tour in Corsica.' The contemplation of such a character really existing was of more service to me than all I had been able to draw from books, from conversation or from the exertions of my own mind. I had often enough formed the idea of a man continually such as I could conceive in my best moments. But this idea appeared like the ideas we are taught in the schools to form of things which may exist, but do not; of seas of milk, and ships of amber. But I saw my highest idea realised in Paoli. It was impossible for me, speculate as I pleased, to have a little opinion of human nature in him. One morning, I remember, I came in upon him without ceremony, while he was dressing. I was glad to have an opportunity of seeing him in those teasing moments, when, according to the Duke of Rochefoucault, no man is a hero to his valet de chambre. The lively nobleman who has a malicious pleasure in endeavouring to divest human nature of its dignity, by exhibiting partial views, and exaggerating faults, would have owned that Paoli was every moment of his life a hero. Here is a candid unpretending hero-worship. If it eludes the virtue of moderation it escapes the vice of mediocrity. In this is its capacity for greatness. For the moment there is nothing very great about it, but it has a most desirable effect for good in Boswell: Never was I so thoroughly sensible of my own defects as while I was in Corsica. I felt how small were my abilities, and how little I knew. The example made for a genuine modesty in the admirer (though it is doubtful if Boswell was ever suspected of being modest); the Boswell who was 'ambitious to be the companion of Paoli' was willing to deserve the honour of that companionship: From having known intimately so exalted a character my sentiments of human nature were raised, while, by a sort of contagion, I felt an honest ardour to distinguish myself, and be useful, as far as my situation and abilities would allow; and I was, for the rest of my life, set free from a slavish timidity in the presence of great men, for where shall I find a man greater than Paoli? The expedition to Corsica was, as we have said, a complete success. To visit the island, to observe the manners of the heroic peasants, and to become the friend of Paoli were admirable undertakings at that time, and under those circumstances. But it was in England that Boswell was to triumph. He was launched upon society with the _éclat_ of an interesting personage; he returned from his adventures over seas to exact without reluctance the homage due to a brave traveller. The early fame of Boswell came not from Johnson, but from Paoli and Corsica. It is a fact worth remarking, because Boswell's connection with Johnson is so much the more important for us, that we are apt to forget that he can have had another title to renown. He was 'Corsica' Boswell and 'Paoli' Boswell, as Dr. Birkbeck Hill remarks, long before he became famous as 'Johnson' Boswell. Boswell himself fully appreciated the situation. He felt that he had accomplished something of which he could be justly proud. He knew himself to be in the public eye. 'No apology shall be made,' he writes in the preface to his book, 'for presenting the world with "An Account of Corsica." It has been for some time expected from me; and I own that the ardour of publick opinion has both encouraged and intimidated me.' Johnson wrote him a letter which he quoted without permission in the 'Tour to Corsica'--'Come home and expect such a welcome as is due to him whom a wise and noble curiosity has led where perhaps no native of this country ever was before.' He said no doubt what he really felt. When Boswell returned to England in 1766 he became therefore, quite naturally, the champion of Corsican liberty. But this was only one phase of the fame to which he aspired; there was still, and there was always, the desire to shine in the great and elevated sphere of literature, and the opportunity had now arrived to write a book of universal interest. It was in 1768 that the first literary work of any magnitude which Boswell produced, 'An Account of Corsica, the journal of a tour to that island; and memoirs of Pascal Paoli,' was published. The title explains exactly the scope of the book. The account of Corsica is historical; the journal is in its method much like other books of travel, except for the biographical part which deals with Paoli. Of the historical part of the book there is nothing particular to be said: it is, as Johnson remarked, 'like other histories.' 'Your History,' he told him, 'was copied from books; your Journal rose out of your own experience and observation.' The chief interest of the book is that it is the earliest example of Boswell's biographical method. The memoirs that we have here of Paoli aim at giving a picture of a man in much the same way as does the 'Life of Johnson.' The question as to what exactly was Boswell's method will be discussed later; but we are reminded here that the man who preserved the conversations of Paoli and 'came in upon him without ceremony while he was dressing,' in order to see how he conducted himself before his _valet de chambre_, was becoming an adept in his own peculiar art. A great charm of the Journal, also prophetic of the future, lies in the perfect frankness with which Boswell discusses his own feelings. 'We retired to another room to drink coffee. My timidity wore off. I no longer anxiously thought of myself; my whole attention was employed in listening to the illustrious commander of a nation.' Or again, 'I enjoyed a luxury of noble sentiment. Paoli became more affable with me. I made myself known to him. I forgot the great distance between us and had every day some hours of private conversation with him.' Boswell realised that a Journal is delightful only if it is quite informal. We have a pleasing sense of inconsequent freedom when we read in the Journal several pages quoted from the 'First Book of the Maccabees.' But it is not irrelevant to Boswell's purpose. It occurred to his thoughts; and that is a sufficient justification, whether it seem ludicrous or incongruous or ponderous, for its inclusion. There is no scene in the 'Tour in Corsica' which comes up to the best in the 'Life of Johnson,' but there are several descriptions, such as that quoted above, when Boswell played the pipe and sang 'Hearts of Oak,' which are really artistic and pleasing. The book, at all events, had the effect of amusing people and it gave them an interest in Corsica too. Boswell had good accounts of it on all sides. 'My book,' he writes to Temple, 'has amazing celebrity:[8] Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Walpole, Mrs. Macaulay, Mr. Garrick, have all written me noble letters about it.' The sale must have been very rapid. The dedication to the first edition is dated October 29, 1767, and the preface to the third edition on the same day of October, his birthday, in the following year. In this preface he explains that he has acquired that literary fame which he desired: May I be permitted to say that the success of this book has exceeded my warmest hopes. When I first ventured to send it into the world, I fairly owned an ardent desire for literary fame. I have obtained my desire; and whatever clouds may overcast my days, I can now walk here among the rocks and woods of my ancestors, with an agreeable consciousness that I have done something worthy. There is nothing deserving particular remark in an author's desire for literary fame. But it is remarkable that a man should proclaim it to the world as Boswell did. The common ideal of an artist supposes that his work should be, in the first place, the expression of his own personality; an expression because to him it is necessary to reproduce in some form what he sees and feels: it is for himself and himself alone, and the world without is allowed to share, partly that the artist may earn a living, partly perhaps that he may have some justification for his self-absorption; and in greater part no doubt, in some cases more than in others, but in every case a little, that he may win the applause that we all like at bottom. None of these reasons, and, least of all, the desire for fame, is held to be a motive for producing art. There may be various impulses with varying circumstances; but there can be but one motive. The ambition which Boswell had, and which he expressed so freely, is peculiar in some ways for the end desired, but it is not essentially different from that of other artists. He who publishes a book, affecting not to be an 'authour',[9] and professing an indifference for literary fame, may possibly impose upon many people such an idea of his consequence as he wishes may be received. For my part, I should be proud to be known as an authour and I have an ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish a book which has been approved by the world, has established himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having that character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. To preserve an uniform dignity among those who see us every day is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The authour of an approved book may allow his natural disposition an easy play, and yet indulge the pride of superiour genius when he considers that, by those who know him only as an authour, he never ceases to be respected. Such an authour, when in his hours of discontent, may have the consolation to think that his writings are at that very time giving pleasure to numbers; and such an authour may cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great object to the noblest minds in all ages. The nature of the desire for fame which he had is revealed to us by Boswell in this curious passage. It does not compromise his character as an artist.[10] He wished to obtain the public esteem, to have the reputation of an ingenious and worthy man; and literature was considered as a means to this end. But we cannot argue that he must therefore have pandered to the public taste: he wrote, as he proclaimed at a later date in a contribution to a periodical, 'from the primary motive of pleasing himself.' This ambition is not in its nature an attitude towards art but towards the world. In all his writings, even in the frivolous publications of his youth, Boswell has expressed his own person in a peculiar degree. We must not suppose, when we see an eagerness for literary fame, which, from the frankness of his expression, may appear extravagant, that he lacked a literary conscience, for he had an excellent one; nor indeed that it mattered at all to him whether opinion in general should care about his book, except in so far as it approved of him, of the real Boswell, which it could not but find there. Boswell's ideal of the literary man's position is well expressed in one of the letters to Temple: Temple, I wish to be at last an uniform, pretty man. I am astonishingly so already, but I wish to be a man who deserves Miss B.... I am always for fixing some period for my perfection as far as possible. Let it be when my account of Corsica is published; I shall then have a character which I must support. I will swear, like an ancient disciple of Pythagoras, to observe silence; I will be grave and reserved, though cheerful and communicative of what is _verum atque decens_. One great fault of mine is talking at random; I will guard against it. It is amusing to think of Boswell in this _rôle_. Already we may see the great contest in his life between natural candour and commonplace ambition--the charm of the 'Tour to Corsica' was the charm of candour, and it was dangerous to dreams of future greatness in the sphere of public affairs. Boswell understood that to gain respect he must be more serious. But this he never was able to be; it was his nature to be extravagant. He had a mind which in some respects was wholly unconventional, and though he tried sometimes, he could never entirely repress his feelings: the consequence was that though there were many things about which he cared very much, it was never possible to take him quite seriously; if a man plays the buffoon sometimes we are in danger of being fooled if we give him credit for being in earnest; and so, if we are to preserve our _amour propre_, which is what everybody wants to do, we must laugh at a buffoon whatever he does. A most notable piece of Boswell's buffoonery was in connection with the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford-on-Avon in 1769. He attended this festival dressed as an armed Corsican chief. This perhaps was not particularly odd; the form of rejoicing which the company indulged in was a 'Mask.' It is dangerous even so, and hardly decent, to blow the personal trumpet so loudly. Boswell, however, was not content merely with the public advertisement of his connexion with Corsica; he wrote to the _London Magazine_[11] an elaborate unsigned account of himself and his costume: it was entitled 'Account of the Armed Corsican Chief at the Masquerade at Shakespeare's Jubilee, with a fine whole-length portrait of James Boswell, Esq., in the dress of an armed Corsican chief, as he appeared at the Jubilee Mask.' There is no need to give here the text of this document: it has been quoted at length a number of times, and it suffices to say that there can be no possible doubt that Boswell wrote it and that he wrote it to exhibit himself in a favourable light. The incident is characteristic of Boswell. It is not the mad whim that may occur once in a lifetime, the event which stands as it were by itself apart from the man; it is not an experiment miscarried, that has taken him away from his usual self and so must remain unexplained or be put to the long account of genius: rather it is the sort of oddity that we come to expect of Boswell. Frolics of this kind naturally deprived Boswell of the respect which he desired for himself as a man of letters. The 'Tour to Corsica' was an admirable beginning to a literary career; he had then the chance of founding the reputation he wanted as a person of weight, a man whose judgment must be accounted of some importance by the world at large. His writings about Corsica had been widely read and his views had found general sympathy. Moreover the popular poetess, Mrs. Barbauld, had paid homage in verse to his fame as an explorer. But by such behaviour as this at Stratford these hopes were frustrated. And to him, though perhaps not to us, this was the tragedy of his life. [Footnote 1: _Samuel Johnson_, by Walter Raleigh, 1907.] [Footnote 2: This remark we may suppose was deliberately misinterpreted by some of Boswell's contemporaries and he finds it necessary to introduce a defence of it: 'I am willing to believe that I meant this as light pleasantry to soothe and conciliate him, and not as humiliating abasement at the expense of my country.' It was of course an apology for coming from Scotland, but an absurd apology of which he saw the absurdity, as though a man were to apologise for being six feet high.] [Footnote 3: _London Magazine_, vol. li., p. 359.] [Footnote 4: In August 1763.] [Footnote 5: _Life of Johnson_, iii., 331.] [Footnote 6: _Tour to Corsica_, pp. 320-1.] [Footnote 7: _Private Correspondence of David Hume_, 1820.] [Footnote 8: It is an interesting fact that it was translated into German, Dutch, Italian, and French (_Gentleman's Magazine_, June 1795--Letter from J. B. R.) The _Life_, I believe, has never been translated. The same correspondent says, 'It was received with extraordinary approbation.'] [Footnote 9: For Boswell's views on spelling see this same preface.] [Footnote 10: Mr. Malone, speaking of the _Life_, said, 'That in this work he had not both fame and profit in view, would be idle to assert; but to suppose that these were his principal objects is to know nothing of the author, and nothing of human nature.' _Gentleman's Magazine_, June 1795.] [Footnote 11: September 1769.] CHAPTER III The portion of Boswell's career which we have been relating up to this point gives rise by natural sequence to the discussion of one or two interesting questions about his personality. We must know the part played in the main theme by his peculiar qualities. We must notice how they seem to assist or to impede his particular faculty for biography. Allusion has already been made to the reasons for which Boswell was attracted by two great men, Dr. Johnson and General Paoli. We must see now in general the reason of that intimacy which he took care to cultivate with a large number of distinguished men. Boswell, there can be no doubt, liked men in some way because they were distinguished. We must remember that the judgments of the world were always very real standards to him. If a man were great, he must be somehow good; and to be the friend of such a man, that was good too. It is not that Boswell judged of characters wholly by success. We may see that as he grew older he judged them more and more by the Johnsonian morality. He grew less tolerant of heresy under the influence of his moral guide. Hence the dislike of Gibbon:--'He is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our Literary Club to me.' Johnson probably shared this feeling and undoubtedly shared the reasons for it, which Boswell expresses in Johnsonian phrases: 'I think it is right that as fast as infidel wasps or venomous insects, whether creeping or flying, are hatched, they should be crushed.' This was said in reference to Gibbon's book; the sentiments were extended to Adam Smith. 'Murphy says that he has read thirty pages of Smith's "Wealth," but says that he shall read no more: Smith too is now of our Club. It has lost its select merit.' Personal antipathy in the one case and ignorance of economics in the other need not surprise us. But it comes as a shock, nevertheless, to discover Boswell's views upon the two men who were, intellectually, the most distinguished of his contemporaries. The Doctor's prejudices may have much to do with it. Boswell records a similar judgment in the 'Tour to the Hebrides': 'Infidelity in a Highland gentleman appeared to me peculiarly offensive. I was sorry for him as he had otherwise a good character.' And yet he was probably always as he was in the early years far more tolerant than Johnson. There is an instructive passage also in the 'Tour to the Hebrides' about Hume. Johnson was talking about Hume's infidelity: 'He added something much too rough, both as to Mr. Hume's head and heart, which I suppress. Violence is, in my opinion, not suitable to the Christian cause. Besides I always lived on good terms with Mr. Hume, though I have frankly told him I was not clear that it was right in me to keep company with him.' That he did not condemn the infidel Hume, shows that Boswell's prejudices were weaker, at least, than friendship. Boswell, besides, throughout his life gave a very high value to mere intellectual power. He complained of 'dull provinciality' in Scotland, because the people of Edinburgh were less intelligent than the Londoners. His love of London was founded upon the need he felt of conversing with clever people; and this need became in him with maturity, not weaker, as in most cases, but stronger. In these early years Boswell was glad to make a friend of any particularly intelligent person, and his acquaintances included characters widely differing--Hume and Rousseau, Johnson and Lord Hailes, Wilkes and Paoli. Boswell clearly had pleasure in the society of them all; he did not, like Johnson, condemn them to a place beyond the range of his acquaintance; these men were specimens of human nature worthy to be studied; he saw some good in all of them. There is a characteristic passage in the 'Life' about the meeting of Johnson and Wilkes which illustrates the attitude: My desire of being acquainted with celebrated men of every description had made me, much about the same time, obtain an introduction to Dr. Samuel Johnson and to John Wilkes, Esq. Two men more different could perhaps not be selected out of all mankind. They have even attacked one another with some asperity in their writings; yet I lived in habits of friendship with both. I could fully relish the excellence of each; for I have ever delighted in that intellectual chymistry which can separate good qualities from evil in the same person. He looked upon men much as we look upon works of art, distinguishing that which, as art, has merit, and crediting with a certain value every design or idea which has been executed well, but attaching ourselves more particularly to a few rare objects which have some special significance or appeal for our own nature. Johnson and Paoli had this appeal for Boswell. Wilkes and Hume attracted him more because they were interesting individuals for whom, though he really disapproved of them, he might retain some slight affection because they were representative men. He might dislike the things they represented, but like them in spite of this: like them, one might almost say, for representing something. With Hume, for instance, he had a considerable friendship at one time. He was of course, an individual to be studied; to Temple, Boswell related his conversations much as he recorded those of Johnson and Paoli. But he did not see him merely because he was interested; he liked him too: 'David is really amiable; I always regret to him his unlucky principles and he smiles at my faith.' It is probable that as he grew older Boswell grew less tolerant. He was always somewhat of an experimentalist, interested in various sides of life and fitting one or another to his own case; but though he became with maturity more definitely attached to the conventional Christianity, to 'belief,' as he termed it, as opposed to 'infidelity,' and less tolerant of the people who held different views, he never hated a man for being a Whig or an atheist as Johnson did. Interest and affection: these, then, are real motives with Boswell for seeking as he did the company of distinguished men. The question, however, of a further motive--of the snobbishness in Boswell's nature--still remains. Boswell himself was well aware of a certain 'propensity in his disposition,' of a particular pleasure from the society of the great and a desire which he had to form friendships among them; he knew too that his behaviour was condemned by many of his contemporaries. In the 'Tour to the Hebrides'[1] he has given his own account and explanation of his conduct: My fellow-traveller and I talked of going to Sweden; and, while we were settling our plan, I expressed a pleasure in the prospect of seeing the king. Johnson: 'I doubt, Sir, if he would speak to us.' Colonel McLeod said, 'I am sure Mr. Boswell would speak to _him_.' But, seeing me a little disconcerted by his remark, he politely added, 'and with great propriety.' Here let me offer a short defence of that propensity in my disposition, to which this gentleman alluded. It has procured me much happiness. I hope it does not deserve so hard a name as either forwardness or impudence. If I know myself, it is nothing more than an eagerness to enjoy the society of men distinguished either by their rank or their talents, and a diligence to attain what I desire. If a man is praised for seeking knowledge, though mountains and seas are in his way, may he not be pardoned, whose ardour, in pursuit of the same object, leads him to encounter difficulties as great, though of a different kind? This defence is characteristic of the manner in which Boswell consistently treated the world. 'Curiosity,' said Mrs. Thrale, 'carried Boswell farther than it ever carried any mortal breathing. He cared not what he provoked so as he said what _such a one_ would say or do.'[2] But the basis of social conventions is a desire to consider the feelings of others. A person's 'forwardness' and 'impudence' are judged not so much by his own sentiments as by the effect he produces upon other people. Boswell pressed an acquaintanceship entirely because he thought it might be good for himself; he never considered the views of the acquaintance: 'It has procured me much happiness.' He did not understand the consequences of this attitude. He was an intellectual parasite upon society, determined at any cost to feed upon the good qualities of others, taking where he would, without caring if he gave. It may possibly be well for the individual that he should consider himself alone; but society, just because it is society, must object to the egoist. This Boswell never was able to understand. His own point of view was concerned with what he could get from others; and though he was by nature in many ways excellent as the member of a community, he had no conception of himself in this capacity. He cared a great deal about his importance, but very little about his value. He took systematically, he gave at random. Interest in human beings simply for his own sake because it pleased him[3]: that is one prime motive which impelled him to seek the acquaintance of distinguished men. Boswell, besides this, was essentially a snob. To have pleasure in the company of distinguished men, not only from a sense of the good qualities they have, but from a feeling that their greatness adds to one's position in the esteem of mankind, that is to be a snob. Boswell had this feeling; he freely admitted it. 'Now, Temple,' he writes, 'can I help indulging my vanity? Sir David Dalrymple says to me in his last letter, "It gives me much pleasure to think that you have obtained the friendship of Mr. Samuel Johnson...."' And again: I am really the great man now. I have had David Hume, in the forenoon, and Mr. Johnson, in the afternoon, of the same day, visiting me. Sir John Pringle, Dr. Franklin, and some more company dined with me to-day; and Mr. Johnson and General Oglethorpe one day, Mr. Garrick alone another, and David Hume and some more literati another, dine with me next week. I give admirable dinners and good claret; and the moment I go abroad again, which will be in a day or two, I set up my chariot. This is enjoying the fruit of my labours, and appearing like the friend of Paoli. By the bye, the Earl of Pembroke and Captain Meadows are just setting out for Corsica, and I have the honour of introducing them by a letter to the General. David Hume came on purpose, the other day, to tell me that the Duke of Bedford was very fond of my book, and had recommended it to the Duchess. 'The great man' because he kept the company of great men--that is what he says, and it is snobbish. His enjoyment of 'the society of men distinguished by their rank or their talents' depended partly upon that. He considered this to be a legitimate way of acquiring fame. The absurdity of Boswell's behaviour in this respect seems all the more ridiculous from the fact that it was unnecessary. When he returned from Corsica he had obtained, as we remarked above, a position of considerable distinction for a young man. He had only to wait discreetly and carefully and he was certain to obtain the patronage of the great. But he courted them, on the contrary, with unheard-of fervour. The climax was reached in a letter to Chatham, with whom he had an opportunity of corresponding about Corsica. He writes from the pinnacle of pomposity to descend to the pit of adulation: 'I only wish that circumstances were such that your Lordship could have an opportunity of showing the interest you take in the fate of a people who well deserve the favour of so illustrious a patron of liberty as your Lordship.' He proceeds by quoting, as the mediator between the General and Lord Chatham, a letter from Paoli. There is then an immortal passage in which the underlying egoism, too little concealed, is yoked with a flattery which could scarcely be tolerated in Olympia: Your Lordship applauds my 'generous warmth for so striking a character as the able chief.' Indeed, my Lord, I have the happiness of being capable to contemplate with supreme delight those distinguished spirits by whom God is sometimes pleased to honour humanity; and as I have no personal favour to ask of your Lordship, I will tell you with the confidence of one who does not fear to be thought a flatterer, that your character, my Lord, has filled many of my best hours with that noble admiration which a disinterested soul can enjoy in the bower of philosophy. Then follows an account of Boswell's plan for his book about Corsica; and finally his personal vanity leaps over every barrier. As for myself, to please a worthy and respected father, one of our Scotch judges, I studied law, and am now fairly entered to the bar. I begin to like it. I can labour hard; I feel myself coming forward, and I hope to be useful to my country. Could your Lordship find time to honour me now and then with a letter? I have been told how favourably your Lordship has spoken of me. To correspond with a Paoli and a Chatham is enough to keep a young man ever ardent in the pursuit of virtuous fame. This letter illustrates much of Boswell's attitude towards the great, and it will be necessary to refer to it again in that connection; it shows, at least, how earnestly Boswell desired the friendship of the great man, and what a thrill of pleasure those letters from Chatham must have given him. However much we may dislike this propensity of Boswell's disposition, while admitting that it is unpleasant in itself, although we would not and could not have Boswell without it, there is no reason to see in much of it a blacker vice than merely the ignorance of how to behave. And it was connected as we have shown with feelings not entirely selfish. But of the flagrant self-advertisement to which we have referred above no such agreeable things may be said. It is condemnable without compensation as an obtrusive egoism and foolish vanity. It must be written down frankly on the debit side of Boswell's peculiar genius, and it was as much opposed to the proper exercise of his biographical talents as to his more practical career. * * * * * We are forced to wonder, and it is important that we should decide, whether in spite of his immoderate self-centredness Boswell was capable of acting without considering his own advantage in the interest of others. Had he, in the first place, any real care for the cause of Corsican liberty? It is often far from easy to discover what Boswell's feelings were, because the balance between sentiment and expression was with him very ill-adjusted. By prolonged study of the Boswellian extravagances we may come to perceive, as we think, how much Boswell really felt; but even so it is hardly possible to explain any valid reason for judgments of this nature. Boswell was often guilty of extravagance; but it would be as false to believe that he felt none of the zeal he talks about so easily, as to believe that he felt as much as he says. He undoubtedly exaggerated, but he probably never made an absolute misstatement. There is a passage of great enthusiasm for the Corsicans in a letter to Johnson:[4] 'Shall they not rise in the great cause of liberty, and break the galling yoke? And shall not every liberal soul be warm for them?' Boswell's heart must have been warm when he wrote that: but we are unfortunately still left in doubt by an anti-climax: 'No! while I live, Corsica and the cause of the brave islanders shall ever employ much of my attention, shall ever interest me in the sincerest manner.' The letter in which these quotations occur is dated April 26, 1768; it is possible that Boswell's ardour had begun to cool by that time and that the cause of liberty, though it might 'employ much of his attention' was less vital to him than he imagined. The 'Tour to Corsica,' however, gives an impression of genuine interest and sympathy with the Corsicans. Boswell seems to have liked very well these simple folk, who appreciated more readily than his countrymen the natural gaiety and good humour of his spirits.[5] How different is his attitude in the 'Tour to the Hebrides' towards the Scots! We must remember too that Boswell, whatever may have been his motives, did much in England and Scotland to help the Corsicans. Besides publishing his book, which was of value to their cause, he raised a subscription and sent out £700 worth of ordnance.[6] He also collected and published a volume of 'British Essays in favour of the Brave Corsicans,' some of which he himself wrote. Boswell had in fact a real generosity of character; he hated anything mean, and expressed himself as anxious to cure his own 'narrowness.' He could be kind to his friends and was willing to lend money. He was interested as a lawyer in the decisions of the courts and readily bestowed his sympathy. On behalf of a certain Dr. Dodd, a divine who was under sentence of death for forgery, he wrote to Dr. Johnson: 'If for ten righteous men the Almighty would have spared Sodom, shall not a thousand acts of goodness done by Dr. Dodd counterbalance one crime?' And Dr. Johnson afterwards used his pen in Dr. Dodd's service. On another occasion he appealed for his friend's assistance in the case of a Scotch schoolmaster--a client of Boswell's, who had been 'deprived of his office for being somewhat severe in the chastisement of his scholars': Boswell in his letter to Johnson seems to have at heart both the interests of the schoolmaster and the principle of corporal punishment. For his friend Temple he more than once went out of his way to obtain some favour. He treated his tenants with the greatest consideration, and even made special provisions in his will for their future welfare.[7] But Boswell was not one of those who continually exercise these amiable qualities. It is probable indeed that, had he tried, he would have met with more rebuffs than encouragement. To be flagrantly kind with any success requires a good deal of cunning, and of that useful quality Boswell had extremely little: he was likely to appear in any good work more meddlesome than great-hearted. But if with him care for the happiness of others was not the first consideration, he was at bottom a sympathetic, kind-hearted man, and capable of generous actions. It is very important that we should bear this in mind about Boswell. Those who are gifted with powers of expression are often in one sense primarily egoists--more so than other men because they are apt to become more completely absorbed--and Boswell, as we have shown, was not without his portion of egoism; but there may be a place in the lives of such men for unselfish feelings, and if we may think that Boswell had his due share of them we may judge less harshly in him the egoism which we cannot admire. * * * * * Boswell, as we have seen, had already at the age of twenty-seven made a bid for renown. He was anxious to shine in more lights than one. It was not mere social success or literary fame that he wanted: he had an ardent desire to be successful in his profession. The sphere of employment which had been chosen for him by his father with his own sanction was the Scotch Bar, to which he was formally 'called' in 1766.[8] His work seems to have engrossed at once a great deal of his time. He writes on March 4th, 1767, to Temple: I am surprised at myself, I already speak with so much ease and boldness, and have already the language of the bar so much at command. I have now cleared eighty guineas. My clerk comes to me every morning at six, and I have dictated to him forty folio pages in one day. It is impossible to give you an idea of my present life. I send you one of my law papers, and a copy of my thesis. I am doing nobly; but I have not leisure for learning. I can hardly ever answer the letters of my friends. This is the letter of a man who finds himself engrossed as well as busy. The truth is that Boswell was extremely anxious to make a mark in his profession. Here, as always, he must win approval; he must become a person to be considered. To this end he succeeded in mixing himself up with the Douglas Cause, a case concerned with a Scotch title which was commanding much attention in the summer of 1767. He seems to have acted as a voluntary counsel to Mr. Douglas the plaintiff, and was most diligent, even perhaps to excess, in his interest. In connection with this trial, two small publications appeared from Boswell's hand. The first of them, 'The Essence of the Douglas Cause,' is a _précis_ of the whole affair, well arranged and clearly expressed; it was written with a view to aiding Boswell's own side in the case,[9] in reply to a pleading from the other side, 'Considerations on the Douglas Cause.' The labour of compiling this summary must have been very great. Boswell tells us in the introduction that he was present during the whole deliberation of the Cause before the Court of Session and took very full notes. It shows, as Mr. Fitzgerald has remarked, how industrious Boswell could be when his enthusiasm was aroused. The other publication, 'Dorando: A Spanish Tale'[10] affects to be a story about a trial in Spain, but reproduces the characters in the Douglas case. Under this thin veil approbation and criticism are distributed to the two parties, and the cause decided. The publication of 'Dorando,'[11] extracts of which appeared in several of the Scotch newspapers and were held by some of the Scotch judges to be contempt of court, was wholly characteristic of Boswell. Whether or no it would be possible to find in his conduct anything which amounted to a breach of etiquette, it is clear that a publication of this sort might well injure his position at the Bar. It is true that the author's name did not appear, but it was not to be supposed that it would always remain a secret, and the precaution was probably taken with a view to being on the right side rather of the law than of the lawyers. Boswell, with all his wish to win the esteem of men, never understood how easily the opposite is earned and how harshly a tiny cosmos will punish an offence against itself. And when the humorous side of things struck him forcibly he was unable to repress his feelings. Boswell's behaviour during the Douglas Cause is said to have been decidedly extravagant. His father was heard to say that 'James had taken a tout on a new horn,'[12] and a story got about which, though it may have been false, must have had some relation to the common conception of Boswell, that when he heard that the House of Lords had reversed the decision of the Court of Session, he placed himself at the head of an uproarious mob who broke his father's windows. There are other indications than the Douglas Cause to show that Boswell was anxious to be successful in his legal career. It is not to be thought that he always displayed the energy which he showed at this time. But he clearly took the trouble, on several occasions recorded in the 'Life,' to prepare the best arguments he could to support his case; and if we must suppose that he was as anxious as he represents himself to be that justice should be done, it is still quite evident that he hoped to gain some advantage to himself from the assistance which he solicited and obtained from Johnson, and was glad that the right should triumph, in part no doubt because it was supported by James Boswell. In fact it is probable that Johnson's assistance was of little value. As Boswell says on one occasion, having presented the written arguments of Johnson without success, 'their Lordships in general, though they were pleased to call this, "a well-drawn paper," preferred the former very inferior petition which I had written; thus confirming the truth of an observation made to me by one of their number in a merry mood: "My dear Sir, give yourself no trouble in the composition of the paper you present to us; for, indeed, it is casting pearls before swine."' We shall have to consider when we come to the last years of Boswell's life the various reasons for his failure at the Bar. But one reason may be mentioned here because it is so essential a part of his character that we should do wrong not to have it in mind as we go over the spectacle of his whole life. Boswell, it must be remembered, was called to the Scotch Bar; but the society of the Scotch, and particularly of the Scotch lawyers, was never congenial to him. As early as March 1767 he writes to Temple: 'It must be confessed that our Court of Session is not so favourable to eloquence as the English Courts.' By 1775 he was apparently quite tired of his work; 'On my arrival here [Edinburgh] I had the pleasure to find my wife and two little daughters as well as I could wish; but indeed, my worthy priest, it required some philosophy to bear the change from England to Scotland. The unpleasing tone, the rude familiarity, the barren conversation of those whom I found here, in comparison with what I had left, really hurt my feelings.' It is probable that Boswell's opinions about the Scotch lawyers were not entirely concealed from them. And they knew, no doubt, that he had friends among the Edinburgh players, and may have resented the fact. 'The Scottish Themis,' says Scott, speaking of his own early experience, 'is peculiarly jealous of any flirtation with the Muses on the part of those who have ranged themselves under her banners.' We may suppose that Boswell's flirtations, with the Muses at all events, injured his position in legal circles. The General Assembly [Boswell continues] is sitting, and I practise at its Bar. There is _de facto_ something low and coarse in such employment, though on paper it is a Court of _Supreme Judicature_; but guineas must be had.... To speak well, when I despise both the cause and the judges, is difficult; but I believe I shall do wonderfully. I look forward with aversion to the little, dull, labours of the Court of Session. Boswell himself was quite unlike most Scotchmen, and he relates in the 'Life' the remarks upon this subject made by Johnson at various times: _Johnson_: 'I never say, I do not value Boswell more for being born to an estate, because I do not care.' _Boswell_: 'Nor for being a Scotchman.' _Johnson_: 'Nay, Sir, I do value you more for being a Scotchman. You are a Scotchman without the faults of a Scotchman. You would not have been so valuable as you are, had you not been a Scotchman.' And again, when talking of the Scotch nation, _Johnson_: '_You_ are an exception, though. Come, gentlemen, let us candidly admit that there is one Scotchman who is cheerful.' _Beauclerk_: 'But he is a very unnatural Scotchman.' Professor Raleigh has emphasised this point in his delightful manner: If I had to find a paradox in Boswell, I should find it in this, that he was a Scot. His character was destitute of all the vices, and all the virtues, which are popularly, and in the main rightly, attributed to the Scottish people. The young Scot is commonly shy, reserved, and self-conscious; independent in temper, sensible to affront, slow to make friends, and wary in society. Boswell was the opposite of all these things. He made himself at home in all societies, and charmed others into a like ease and confidence. Under the spell of his effervescent good-humour the melancholy Highlanders were willing to tell stories of the supernatural. 'Mr. Boswell's frankness and gayety,' says Johnson, 'made everybody communicative.' And Boswell himself took no trouble to conceal, but rather published this truth. He saw very clearly certain qualities in the Scotch character which he disliked. It must be remembered, however, that Boswell professed to be in one sense, perhaps the only right sense, patriotic. He may have hated the Scotch, but he loved Scotland and loved in particular the home of his ancestors. If he preferred to live in England, it was a preference only for the society he found there. During those memorable months when the great Doctor made his tour in Scotland, Boswell had a real anxiety that Johnson should get rid of his prejudices and appreciate the country. He takes the trouble to defend at length Johnson's 'Journey to the Western Islands' from the anger of Scotchmen, but he does so by asserting that Johnson saw both the good and the bad. 'And let me add' [he says in an extravagant vein] 'that, citizen of the world as I hold myself to be, I have that just sense of the merit of an ancient nation, which has been ever renowned for its valour, which in former times maintained its independence against a powerful neighbour, and in modern times has been equally distinguished for its ingenuity and industry in civilised life, that I should have felt a genuine indignation at any injustice done to it. Johnson treated Scotland no worse than he did even his best friends, whose characters he used to give as they appeared to him, both in light and shade.' However Boswell may have had 'that just sense of the merit of an ancient nation,' it is clear, as we have said, that he disliked very much his legal work in Scotland. But it must not be thought that he rapidly became grave and soured by constant irritation. That process was a slow one in his case. His disposition was too sanguine to feel very much, as a young man, his disappointments. He did without doubt, as he grew older, become less frivolous, and more sedate; with this we must suppose that his marriage in 1769 was in some way connected. * * * * * Before we come to discuss the domesticity of Boswell we must consider for a time those affairs of the heart in which he had such a plentiful experience. About these he was as frank as he was about all the subjects which he discusses in his letters to Temple. We have detailed accounts (detailed enough, apparently, to offend, unfortunately for our purpose, the delicate ear of the first editor of the letters) which describe in several cases the precise nature of Boswell's love or passion or whatever be the appropriate expression. These accounts were intentionally complete. The eye of Boswell is fixed upon the thermometer of his affections to observe and indicate its rise and fall. Nothing could illustrate the man so well as the attitude which he here so nakedly revealed, typical entirely of Boswell because it is so completely self-centred. He lived for his own pleasure and says as much: 'That pleasure is not the aim but the end of our being, seems to be philosophically demonstrable. Therefore all the labour and all the serious business of life should first be considered as means to that end.'[13] In love he was not less governed by this system than he was in every other phase of life. It was at the early age of eighteen when Boswell was still at the University that the son of Venus came to him upon the first of many visits. The lady, a Miss W----t, is described as a most desirable companion; and Cupid in one sense was kind to Boswell--for though his hope of an ideal future in the company of the beloved, the heiress to a fortune of thirty thousand pounds, was not destined to be realised, he was able, if the lady were disinclined to adorn his life, to 'bear it _æquo animo_, and retire into the calm regions of philosophy.' The subject of matrimony seems often to have occupied the thoughts of Boswell. At times the appeal of unmarried life was strong. 'The bachelor has a carelessness of disposition which pleases everybody, and everybody thinks him a sort of common good--a feather which flies about and lights now here, now there.' But the ideal of a winged good which was to float about thus amiably gave way at times to a more sedate view of living. 'If you think of the comforts of a home, where you are a sort of sovereign, the kind endearments of an amiable woman, who has no wish but to make you happy, the amusement of seeing your children grow up from infancy to manhood, and the pleasing pride of being the father of brave and learned men, all which may be the case--then marriage is truly the condition in which true felicity is to be found.' In the absence, however, of a felicity which could add so much comfort and pleasure and so small a burden of responsibility to his life, Boswell was happy enough, he proceeds to relate, to have a '_dear infidel_.' That there was no infidelity on the part of this 'charmer' Boswell is able to affirm, while he does not deny that she has a husband; but though, as he says, 'imagination represented it just as being fond of a pretty, lively, black little lady, who, to oblige me, stayed in Edinburgh, and I very genteelly paid her expenses,' he was glad no doubt that circumstances permitted him to arrange his pleasures without hypocrisy. The course of his amour was not destined to run very smoothly. The ardour of Boswell for the deserted or deserting lady was intermittent and expensive; it was difficult to be rid of her because the tendernesses of a farewell upset the unstable balance of Boswell's susceptibility; 'I was sometimes resolved to let her go, and sometimes my heart was like to burst within me. I took her dear hand; her eyes were full of passion, I took her in my arms.' The dramatic moment is too much for the best-laid plans, and Boswell was grateful, as he well might be, to find himself free after two months. 'I am totally emancipated from my charmer, as much as from the gardener's daughter who now puts on my fire and performs menial offices like any other wench.' The affair with the gardener's daughter is unfortunately not related. She is mentioned only this once where Boswell tells us that a year before this date (March 30, 1767), he had been 'so madly in love as to think of marrying her.' Two other ladies are mentioned in the same letter, Miss Bosville and Miss Blair. He thought of the former, who was his cousin, as a convenient match, but the suit does not appear to have been prosecuted with much vigour. She was kept, as it were, in the second line of battle to fill up a gap when an object of devotion was required. There is another name of the same kind, Zelide, a Dutch lady whom he met at Utrecht and who appears upon the scene periodically. Boswell several times threatened to marry her. How many affairs there were of this class it is difficult to estimate. Exact information on the subject would be valuable as enabling us to adjust the proportion of these matters. From isolated remarks referring to women not elsewhere mentioned, such as 'My Italian angel is constant,' we might suppose that Boswell conducted his amours on the magnificent scale of Solomon. But this can hardly have been the case. Miss Blair was a Scotch heiress whose estate was not far from Auchinleck. Boswell's father was in favour of the match, which would have been in every way desirable, particularly so if it be considered appropriate that the young lady was in love with Boswell. The initial stages were highly propitious. Miss Blair with her mother was persuaded, without great difficulties we may suppose, to stay at Auchinleck, where Boswell in the 'romantic groves' of his ancestors 'adored her like a divinity.' The heir whose 'grand object is the ancient family of Auchinleck--a venerable and noble principle' intends to carry off the 'neighbouring princess' by assault rather than siege, and in the pursuit of romance allows no time for love to languish. An emissary[14] is despatched, no other than the faithful Temple, who is at once to blow the trumpet as a herald, and as a spy to observe the enemy's fortifications. 'Praise me for my good qualities--you know them.' These are the instructions. Romance is to be fed by mystery and the chase encouraged by the elusiveness of the quarry. 'But talk also how odd, how inconstant, how impetuous, how much accustomed to women of intrigue. Ask gravely, Pray don't you imagine there is something of madness in that family?' A tinge of insanity may be a pleasing dash of colour in the hero; or the suggestion may draw the attention of the fair one to extravagances which are to be noted as the fantasies of genius. The ultimate halo, the crown of glory, is reserved for the explorer of distant lands and the friend of men distinguished in a continent. 'Talk of my various travels, German princes--Voltaire and Rousseau.' The effect upon the audience of this elaborate comedy is to be duly registered in order that the manager may arrange the sequence appropriately and the principal actor appear in splendour at the dramatic moment. 'Observe her well. See how amiable! Judge if she would be happy with your friend. Think of me as the great man at Adamtown--quite classical too; study the mother. Remember well what passes.... Consider what a romantic expedition you are on; take notes.' By the final injunction, the biographer's own peculiar weapon is to be directed at the prize and the lady captured by a sheet of memoranda. An accident, however, occurs and trivial circumstance is swollen to importance by the fever of impatience. The fervour of a suitor's letter demands immediate reply; but the letter remains for some days in the post. Letter follows letter, and the perturbation increases when jealousy summons the image of a yellow nabob. The actor doubts if he has chosen the proper _rôle_, and fears the effect of his 'Spanish stateliness.' But the ardent lover is able to exclaim, 'I am entertained with this dilemma like another chapter in my adventures,' and consolation comes in a letter from the Signora 'written with all the warmth of Italian affection.' Finally the matter is explained and there is the pleasure of restoring harmony. Lucky that these matters run never smoothly, for there will be further opportunity of experiencing the tortured joy of a quarrel and the supreme delight of reconciliation. An uninteresting interval is amused by a renewal of intimacy with the 'dear infidel' before another coolness is arranged. The self-possession of the lady now provokes 'a strange sultanish letter, very cold and very formal,' and after an absence of three weeks the suitor pays an eminently agreeable visit to the prospective bride, though still apparently in a rather sultanish mood: 'I am dressed in green and gold. I have my chaise in which I sit alone with Mr. Gray, and Thomas rides by me in a claret-coloured suit with a silver-laced hat.' The final joy was however withheld. 'The princess and I have not yet made up our quarrel, she talks lightly of it.' The adorer is prepared conditionally to soar to the last heights of adoration. 'If she feels as I wish her to do, I shall adore her while my blood is warm': but the philosopher is determined to escape the inconvenience of a wounded heart: 'I shall just bring myself, I hope, to a good, easy tranquillity.' The 'princess' by this time has ceased to be a dupe; she may have seen that the courtship was arranged to give the colouring of romance to conventional matrimony, and alter the pompous comedy of surrender to a serious farce for one party and for the other probably to a serious tragedy. Her manner in any case became more reserved: 'She refused sending me a lock ... and she says very cool things upon that head.' The burning lover begins to congratulate himself upon escape from so unsatisfying a mate, and the beautiful princess is discovered to be a jilt. 'Wish me joy, my good friend, of having discovered the snake before it was too late.... After this I shall be upon my guard against ever indulging the least fondness for a Scot lass; I am a soul of a more Southern frame. I may perhaps be fortunate enough to find an Englishwoman who will be sensible of my merits and will study to please my singular humour.' Zelide and Miss Bosville are mentioned in the same letter, the former to illustrate the truth that 'an old flame is easily rekindled' and the latter as a possibility to be kept in mind. But a volatility amazing even in Boswell produces on the following day a letter which is full of the charms of Miss Blair. The more violent the quarrel the more pleasing the peace-making. A meeting is arranged at Edinburgh; a declaration is made and the now enthusiastic suitor reports, 'I ventured to seize her hand. She is really the finest woman I ever saw.' The 'princess' however is still reserved, and determined efforts have to be made at the theatre. Next evening I was at the play with them; it was 'Othello.' I sat close behind the princess, and at the most affecting scenes I pressed my hand upon her waist; she was in tears and rather leaned to me. The jealous Moor described my very soul. I often spake to her of the torment she saw before her. But even after this touching scene there is cause for disquiet. 'Still,' he says, 'I thought her distant, and still I felt uneasy.' The encouragement however was sufficient to give confidence to the attack, and there follows a _tête-à-tête_ in which 'pleasure from the intimacy of often squeezing and kissing her fine hand, while she looked at me with those beautiful black eyes,' was somewhat darkened by a disconcerting surprise. 'I then asked her to tell me if she had any particular liking for me. What think you, Temple, was her answer? "No; I really have no particular liking for you; I like many people as well as you--I like Jeany Maxwell better than you."' Consolation must now be sought where love is denied. _Boswell_: 'If you should happen to love another, will you tell me immediately and help me to make myself easy?' _Princess_: 'Yes, I will.' But the lady's sympathy shows a want of imagination which is highly unsatisfying. _Boswell_: 'I must, if possible, endeavour to forget you. What would you have me do?' _Princess_: 'I really don't know what you should do.' It would appear that honour had no escape from such a defeat but in renewing the encounter. The history of the last period of this wooing, of the nadir of the wooer's fortunes and his cheerfulness in spite of repulses, is told to Temple six weeks later. A new rival appears upon the scene, and there is rumour of an engagement. The rejected suitor writes to ascertain the truth of this alarming story. But his appeal is neglected. Dignity now demands that disappointment shall be concealed, and an alliance is formed with the presumably successful rival, Sir Alexander Gilmour. 'I endeavoured to laugh off my passion, and I got Sir Alexander Gilmour to frank a letter to her, which I wrote in a pleasant strain, and amused myself with the whim.' The lady now appears in London and at the same moment the Nabob. He too is to be an ally, and a final scene is arranged. 'We gave our words as men of honour that we would be honest to each other so that neither should suffer needlessly; and to satisfy ourselves of our real situation, we gave our words of honour that we should both ask her this morning, and I should go first.' The result can hardly have been doubtful. Boswell tells his adorable princess, 'I have great animal spirits, and bear it wonderfully well,' and proceeds to write 'A Crambo Song on Losing my Mistress.' Although I be an honest laird, In person rather strong and brawny, For me the heiress never cared, For she would have the knight, Sir Sawney. And when, with ardent vows, I swore, Loud as Sir Jonathan Trelawney, The heiress showed me to the door, And said, she'd have the knight, Sir Sawney. She told me with a scornful look, I was as ugly as a tawney; For she a better fish could hook, The rich and gallant knight, Sir Sawney. We might suppose that Boswell in spite of his cheerfulness would have been at heart rather dejected by these events; but he writes to Temple, 'My mind is now twice as enlarged as it has been for some months. You cannot say how fine a woman I may marry; perhaps a Howard or some other of the noblest in the kingdom.' The realities were hardly so elevated as these dreams, for in the following spring (1768), it is Zelide again, and not she alone. 'Zelide may have had her faults but is she always to have them? May not time have altered her for the better as it has altered me? But you will tell me that I am not so greatly altered, as I have still many unruly passions. To confess to you at once Temple, I have, since my last coming to town been as wild as ever.' But flowers were to be fresh at last in the month of August. 'I am exceedingly lucky in having escaped the insensible Miss Bosville and the furious Zelide, for I have now seen the finest creature that ever was formed, _la belle Irlandaise_. Figure to yourself, Temple, a young lady just sixteen, formed like a Grecian nymph, with the sweetest countenance full of sensibility....' Everything was favourable. 'Here every flower is united.' The diplomat who had been fatigued before by the restraint of a wise cautiousness is resolved that this time there shall be no reserve. 'Ah, my friend, I am now as I ought to be; no reserved prudent conduct as with Miss Bosville. No! all youthful, warm, natural, in short, all genuine love.' And the ardent hunter seems to have been more successful than the wily angler. 'I repeated my fervent passion to her again and again; she was pleased and I could swear that her little heart beat. I carved the first letter of her name on a tree; I cut off a lock of her hair, _male pertinax_. She promised not to forget me, nor to marry a lord before March.' Moreover, the unspoilt joy of advance without contest was more pleasant than the doubts and hopes of expectation, while a puritanical idealism and the solemnity of an oath were a welcome change for less spiritual delights. This is the most agreeable passion I ever felt; sixteen, innocence, and gaiety make me quite a Sicilian swain. Before I left London I made a vow in St. Paul's Church that I would not allow myself in licentious connections of any kind for six months, I am hitherto firm to my vow, and already feel myself a superior being ... in short, Maria has me without any rival; I do hope the period of my perfect felicity, as far as this state can afford, is now in view. Whether this 'perfect felicity' was attained and how long it lasted we do not know. Maria no doubt had her day like the others; the sequel to the vow in St. Paul's we may conjecture. Boswell, if his name endured for no other talents, would remain with us for ever as an incomparable genius for reviving affection. In December we learn: 'Miss Blair is Miss Blair still,'--still a fit subject for this curious pastime. 'I was two or three times at Adamtown, and, upon my word, the old flame was kindled.' Miss Blair apparently had been piqued because her suitor had made such a joke of his love for the heiress in every company. 'Temple, to a man again in love, this was engaging. I walked whole hours with the princess; I kneeled; I became truly amorous.' These brief sentences adequately describe the last recorded love-scene. If Boswell corresponded with Temple between December 1768 and May 1770 the letters have been lost; and so the outrageous story ends abruptly--and it is fortunate perhaps for the readers of this book, for it is a story so fascinating and so absurd and so richly human that no part of it can be omitted. Boswell in fact was destined to be married to his cousin, Miss Montgomerie. The Montgomeries were an aristocratic family related to Lord Eglinton, and Boswell was proud of the connection: he speaks in a published pamphlet of 'having the honour and happiness to be married to his Lordship's relation, a true Montgomerie.' We know very little about Mrs. Boswell. Johnson's curt judgment in a letter to Mrs. Thrale is probably right in placing her with the great bulk of mediocre humanity: 'Mrs. B---- has the mien and manners of a gentlewoman; and such a person and mind as would not be in any place either admired or contemned. She is in a proper degree inferior to her husband: she cannot rival him, nor can he ever be ashamed of her.' But if undistinguished, as in Johnson's view a good wife should be, the lady had some excellent qualities; and Johnson himself would have been the first to praise them. If he urged Boswell on more than one occasion to be considerate of his home, it was because he knew that the home was both pleasant and valuable to his friend: 'I need not tell you what regard you owe to Mrs. Boswell's entreaties; or how much you ought to study the happiness of her who studies yours with so much diligence, and of whose kindness you enjoy such good effects.' Boswell, too, loudly sings the praise of his wife: 'I am fully sensible,' he writes to Temple, 'of my happiness in being married to so excellent a woman, so sensible a mistress of a family, so agreeable a companion, so affectionate and peculiarly proper helpmate for me.' After her death he writes: 'I had no occasion almost to think concerning my family, and every particular was thought of by her better than I could'; and he refers to her in the 'Life of Johnson' as 'my very valuable wife, and the very affectionate mother of my children, who, if they inherit her good qualities, will have no reason to complain of their lot.' That Mrs. Boswell had in abundance the matronly virtues is sufficiently clear. She had besides considerable intellectual gifts. Boswell calls her, 'A lady of admirable good sense and quickness of understanding'; he kept a common-place book, 'Uxoriana,' to preserve her witty sayings, and after her death regretted her 'admirable conversation.' From her own expressed opinion of her husband's friendship with Dr. Johnson we are obliged to think well of her intelligence: it was a female opinion, as Boswell remarks, with something of resentment for the intrusion of this uncomfortable guest: 'His irregular hours and uncouth habits, such as turning the candles with their heads downwards, when they did not burn bright enough, and letting the wax drop upon the carpet, could not but be disagreeable to a lady.' And no doubt she failed to appreciate the devotion of Boswell to this ungainly and unpleasing animal. But her observation, in the manner of the times, is admirably pointed: 'I have seen many a bear led by a man, but I never before saw a man led by a bear.' The marriage took place in the autumn of 1769; Boswell was then twenty-nine years of age. The situation is summed up in his own remarks in the _London Magazine_ for April 1781: After having for many years cherished a system of marrying for money, I at last totally departed from it, and married for love. But the truth was that I had not been careful enough to weed my mind; for while I cultivated the plant of interest, love all the time grew up along with it and fairly got the better. Naturally somewhat singular, independent of any additions which affectation and vanity may perhaps have made, I resolved to have a more pleasing species of marriage than common, and bargained with my bride that I should not be bound to live with her longer than I really inclined; and that whenever I tired of her domestic society, I should be at liberty to give it up. That Boswell was always fond of his wife is clear enough. 'Eleven years have elapsed and I have never yet wanted to take advantage of my stipulated privilege.' He never speaks of her without affection, and was deeply distressed by her death in 1789. But for how long he continued to love her fervently it is difficult to tell; not, one would suppose, for a great length of time, or he could hardly have written in the _London Magazine_: 'Whatever respect I may have for the institution of marriage, and however much I am convinced that it upon the whole produces rational happiness, I cannot but be of the opinion that the passion of love has been improperly feigned as continuing long after the conjugal knot has been tied.' Nor, if Boswell had continued to love his wife passionately, would he have found it disagreeable to return to Edinburgh, after visits to London. But Boswell no doubt wanted to be a faithful husband: 'I can unite little fondnesses with perfect conjugal love.'[15] His idea of fidelity would seem to involve no kind of restriction upon his natural inclinations except in so far as that he should appear to be a good husband in the eyes of the world and particularly of his wife. However sensible this view may have been, it was not such as commonly finds favour among the female sex. But he was undoubtedly in his own view a faithful husband and he had really at heart the welfare of his wife. 'Upon the whole I do believe,' he says, 'I make her very happy.'[16] [Footnote 1: _Tour to the Hebrides_, September 17.] [Footnote 2: _Autobiography, Letters, &c., of Mrs. Piozzi_, ii, 124.] [Footnote 3: Perhaps the best evidence of all for this quality is Boswell's habit of attending executions (mentioned several times in the _Life_ and also in the _Life of Reynolds_, by Leslie and Taylor), and his acquaintance with Mrs. Rudd, a notorious criminal.] [Footnote 4: _Life of Johnson_, ii, 59. This letter is an admirable instance of Boswell's affected manner of expressing real feelings.] [Footnote 5: _Life of Johnson_, ii, 3, note 1.] [Footnote 6: _Letters to Temple_, p. 126.] [Footnote 7: _Boswelliana_, p. 186.] [Footnote 8: _Life of Johnson_, ii, 20.] [Footnote 9: Fitzgerald's _Life of Boswell_, i, 111.] [Footnote 10: Boswell's authorship proved by _Letters to Temple_, p. 89.] [Footnote 11: Fitzgerald's _Life of Boswell_, i, 113.] [Footnote 12: Fitzgerald's _Life of Boswell_, i, 116.] [Footnote 13: _London Magazine_, 1, 40.] [Footnote 14: Temple, it appears, was promised payment for his services: 'You shall have consultation guineas, as an ambassador has his appointments.' This seems to imply more than the mere travelling expenses which Dr. Rogers suggests as an explanation.] [Footnote 15: _Letters to Temple_, p. 159.] [Footnote 16: _Ib._ p. 137.] CHAPTER IV A biography of Boswell, though it might profess to be complete, could say little about his domestic life. If he has told us very little about it, there is, however, no reason that we should seek to know more. It was a very essential part of Boswell that he should have a wife and family: a wife, because she adds a certain flavour of respectability and is a definite asset to the social position of a man, still more perhaps because she increases responsibility and so intensifies the sensation of importance; a family, because to the man of estate there must be born an heir. But the mere fact of his being married was, in a sense, of far less consequence to him than to most men. There were two aspects of his life which were dissociated in a peculiar degree from each other--the life in Scotland, where he laboured at the Law and was eventually to be Laird of Auchinleck, and where his home was the basis of operations; and the life in London, which he visited as often as he was able, to live the gay life he loved, and to talk to his literary friends, especially to Dr. Johnson. The pleasure he had in the society of his English friends was far more to him than another man's recreation or hobby. It occupied more time, and it was time spent away from his domestic circle and, for the most part, away from his work. He is never tired of telling of his love of London. I had long complained to him [Johnson] that I felt myself discontented in Scotland, as too narrow a sphere, and that I wished to make my chief residence in London, the great scene of ambition, instruction, amusement: a scene which was to me, comparatively speaking, a heaven upon earth! _Johnson_: 'Why, Sir, I never knew anyone who had such a gust for London as you have.' It must be our business then to follow for a little the life of Boswell among his London friends, to see the relations in which he stood to them and the progress of his intimacy with Dr. Johnson. In the 'Life' there are recorded the consecutive visits of Boswell to England with relation always to Dr. Johnson in particular, but referring also to other celebrities whom he met, and to his own pleasures and amusements. The group of men who were in the first place the friends and admirers of Dr. Johnson, and with whom Boswell naturally associated so far as he was able, were for the most part distinguished men in the best literary society, and members of that club which was started by Johnson and Reynolds in 1762 or 1763. Burke, Beauclerk, Langton, Goldsmith, Hawkins, were original members; Garrick was elected in 1773, as was Boswell himself. Malone, whose wise help was invaluable to Boswell in preparing for the press his _magnum opus_, and who was its first editor, became a member later. The pleasure which it gave Boswell to belong to this club of distinguished men is revealed in his own account of his election. 'The gentlemen went away to their club, and I was left at Beauclerk's till the fate of my election should be announced to me. I sat in a state of anxiety which even the charming conversation of Lady Di Beauclerk could not entirely dissipate. In a short time I received the agreeable intelligence that I was chosen. I hastened to the place of meeting, and was introduced to such a society as can seldom be found.' From a conversation reported in the 'Tour to the Hebrides' it would appear that Boswell was not elected without some difficulty. 'He [Johnson] told me, "Sir, you got into our club by doing what a man can do."' (Boswell's note on this is: 'This I find is considered as obscure. I suppose Dr. Johnson meant that I assiduously and earnestly recommended myself to some of the members, as in a canvass for an election into Parliament.') 'Several of the members wished to keep you out. Burke told me he doubted if you were fit for it....' _Boswell_: 'They were afraid of you, Sir, as it was you who proposed me.' _Johnson_: 'Sir, they knew that if they refused you, they'd probably have never got in another. I'd have kept them all out.' Boswell, of course, did not get on equally well with all of Johnson's friends. Goldsmith especially he seems to have disliked, and at a later date Mrs. Thrale, Miss Burney and Baretti; we may suppose that the feeling was mutual, especially after the appearance of the 'Life of Johnson,' in which Boswell made little attempt to conceal his feelings. With Hawkins, who was chosen to write the official biography of Johnson, he was eventually to quarrel. But he had strong supporters in the club. 'Now you are in,' Johnson told him, 'none of them are sorry. Burke says you have so much good humour naturally, it is scarce a virtue.' Beauclerk too appreciated him. 'Beauclerk was very earnest for you.' His greatest friend of this _coterie_ besides Dr. Johnson was Sir Joshua Reynolds. Sir Joshua seems always to have understood and insisted upon the value of Boswell. He was prepared to take up the cudgels. 'He thaws reserve wherever he comes and sets the ball of conversation rolling.'[1] The club, whatever else it might think about Boswell, was obliged to admit that he was excellent company. There were some, no doubt, who had a high opinion of Boswell's abilities; it was admitted by everyone that he had written a good book, and not all, like Gray and Walpole,[2] can have thought that he wrote it by chance. And Boswell too, if not a good literary critic, was interested in books and able to talk about them. The opinions to which he gave expression in the 'Life of Johnson' about various books which came under discussion are often more appreciative and better supported by reason than the dicta of Johnson, and he sometimes shows considerable sagacity. His views about Johnson's own books, and especially his criticism of Johnson's style and the high estimate he formed of the 'Lives of the Poets,' are excellent. But it was far more for his social than for his literary qualities that Boswell was valued. In the circle of Johnson's admirers he was in a sense the most important figure; he had a greater admiration than any other and was rewarded by Johnson with a greater degree of affection. He came to understand Johnson. Hannah More relates that she was on one occasion made umpire in a trial of skill between Garrick and Boswell, which could most nearly imitate Dr. Johnson's manner.[3] 'I remember I gave it for Boswell in familiar conversation, and for Garrick in reciting poetry.' To have beaten Garrick was a great performance and shows how Boswell must have studied Johnson. He was, as it were, his chief exploiter. It was he above all the rest who could make Johnson talk.[4] He knew what would provoke a discussion, and was so reckless of appearing foolish that he would introduce any subject. He made opportunities for Johnson to exhibit his powers. The description of how he arranged the meeting with Wilkes, though more famous almost than any other passage of the 'Life,' is too important as illustrating the whole attitude of Boswell to be omitted here. It is not inappropriate to say that the very name of Wilkes was to Johnson like a red rag to a bull. He hated what he considered to be a pretentious notoriety, and what he no doubt talked about as 'this cant of liberty' was the signal for an outburst of violence in his best manner. Boswell conceived the idea of bringing these two together, and probably hoped to witness an incomparable contest. But how was this to be done? 'I was persuaded that if I had come upon him with a direct proposal, "Sir, will you dine in company with Jack Wilkes?" he would have flown into a passion and would probably have answered, "Dine with Jack Wilkes, Sir! I'd as soon dine with Jack Ketch."' But it was easy to see the weak point in the Doctor's armour. 'Notwithstanding the high veneration which I entertained for Dr. Johnson, I was sensible that he was a little actuated sometimes by contradiction, and by means of that I hoped I should gain my point.' Boswell, who knows exactly what will provoke his friend, has thought out beforehand precisely what he shall say, and opens with a proposal which Johnson is sure to accept. 'Mr. Dilly, Sir, sends me his respectful compliments, and would be happy if you would do him the honour to dine with him on Wednesday next along with me, as I must soon go to Scotland.' _Johnson_: 'Sir, I am obliged to Mr. Dilly. I will wait upon him.' The dictator is in a gracious mood, and the moment favourable to excite a rebuke in defence of that formal courtesy which he loved to practise. 'Provided, Sir, I suppose,' adds Boswell, 'that the company which he is to have is agreeable to you.' The apparent artlessness of the remark in the true Boswellian fashion, with the exaggerated respect that so often irritated Johnson, took effect at once. _Johnson_: 'What do you mean, Sir? What do you take me for? Do you think I am so ignorant of the world as to imagine that I am to prescribe to a gentleman what company he is to have at his table?' An excuse must now be made which is certain to meet with sledge-hammer reasoning or piercing sarcasm, and it will then be safe to lead up to the disagreeable intelligence. 'I beg your pardon, Sir, for wishing to prevent you from meeting people whom you might not like. Perhaps he may have some of what he calls his patriotic friends with him.' _Johnson_: 'Well, Sir, what then? What care _I_ for his _patriotic friends_? Poh!' _Boswell_: 'I should not be surprised to find Jack Wilkes there.' The possibility may have been disconcerting, but retreat was now out of the question. _Johnson_: 'And if Jack Wilkes should be there, what is that to me, Sir? My dear friend, let me have no more of this. I am sorry to be angry with you, but really it is treating me strangely to talk to me as if I could not meet any company whatever, occasionally.' So the matter was settled. Boswell asks forgiveness and clinches the matter: 'Pray forgive me, Sir; I meant well. But you shall meet whoever comes.' 'Thus,' he tells the reader, with evident satisfaction, 'I secured him.' The man who could do this was clearly of importance to those who were interested, even though in a less degree than himself, in Dr. Johnson. We may suppose that the circle of Johnson's literary friends welcomed Boswell as much for his peculiar homage to the Doctor as for his own social talents. * * * * * We must now more nearly examine that friendship, which is as much the concern of our own age as it was of Boswell's. We have considered already what it was that caused these two men to be friends; but the meanest picture of Boswell must include some account of his behaviour towards Johnson; we must review the progress of their friendship and remark the more characteristic attitudes of the biographer. In the pages of the 'Life of Johnson' is recorded in detail, and almost without reserve, the story of the relations between these two friends. It is a story full of humour, telling of all the little peculiarities of a great man, of all the whims and foibles which we are accustomed to observe in old age and which we both like and laugh at; but it is the story also of a deep and anxious affection. If the course of friendship ran smoothly on the whole for Johnson and Boswell, as might be expected when one of the two was so well balanced and so practically wise as the older man, yet, as must always be the case with people who are not either quite perfect or quite colourless, there were rough places here and there; and these, if responsible for no great misery, were, however, the cause of some unhappiness to both. Boswell, at all events, realised very keenly the great gulf between them; between his own sensitive, uncertain nature and Johnson's rude strength. He, probably more than most men, wanted sympathy, wanted to be understood. With what relief he speaks from his heart to Temple: 'I have not had such a relief as this for I don't know how long. I have broke the trammels of business, and am roving unconfined with my Temple.' It is unfortunate for Boswell that he expressed himself so extravagantly. We sympathise with those who are self-contained about sentiment and particularly about their own sorrows, but we have few kind feelings for those who exaggerate. And Boswell, because he was difficult to understand, was more than usually isolated: to Johnson, at all events, there must have been many matters about which he could not talk, and he was nettled sometimes by the other's blunt advice. It was unpleasant to be told by one whom he so much respected, at the moment of his first serious publication, 'The Corsican Journal,' to 'empty his head of Corsica which had filled it too long.' It must have been more than annoying when he had written to Johnson in a despondent mood (there is no reason to doubt that he was genuine in despondency) to receive his answer: 'I had hoped you had got rid of all this hypocrisy of misery. What have you to do with Liberty and Necessity? Or what more than to hold your tongue about it? Do not doubt that I shall be most heartily glad to see you here again, for I love every part about you but your affectation of distress.' Much as we must admire the honest wrath of Johnson, and the desire which he had to cure the affectation of Boswell, we cannot but regret sometimes that he was not more discriminating. It was much, no doubt, to be assured of affection, but affection alone could not take the place of an understanding sympathy; and if this had come from one whom he so much respected, it would have been invaluable to Boswell. As it was, he realised that Johnson must partially disapprove of him, and it was because he knew, and felt this disapproval, as much as from any inherent quality of his temperament, that he so often wanted a proof of affection. Whatever may have been their cause--it may have been no more than the mere need for friendship coupled with the peculiar unreserve of Boswell's character--the result of these demands was sometimes to irritate Johnson. I said to him: 'My dear Sir, we must meet every year, if you don't quarrel with me.' _Johnson_: 'Nay, Sir, you are more likely to quarrel with me than I with you. My regard for you is greater almost than I have words to express; but I do not choose to be always repeating it; write it down in the first leaf of your pocket-book, and never doubt of it again.' On one occasion Johnson was really angry. Boswell conceived the idea of making an experiment to test his affection. It was apparently his custom to write to Johnson upon his return to his family. He wanted to see what the Doctor would do if he neglected the usual civility. Johnson, of course, was eventually the first to write; and Boswell, thus gratified, answered him by a letter which frankly explained his motives: I was willing ... to try whether your affection for me would, after an unusual silence on my part, make you write first. This afternoon I have had very high satisfaction by receiving your kind letter of inquiry, for which I most gratefully thank you. I am doubtful if it was right to make the experiment, though I have gained by it. We may forgive Johnson for being annoyed by this letter. Those who make very large demands upon their friends for a display of affection are, as a rule, rather tiresome companions; it may possibly be good to be sensitive, but it is bad to be easily offended, which is often the case with such people. But if Boswell, like many who take a decided lead in friendship, required many proofs to make him believe that it was more than a one-sided affair, he of all men was the most difficult to offend. We cannot do better than read his own accounts of his quarrels with Johnson. There is that famous one, in the first place, of the dinner at Sir Joshua's. On Saturday, May 2, I dined with him at Sir Joshua Reynolds', where there was a very large company, and a great deal of conversation; but owing to some circumstance which I cannot now recollect, I have no record of any part of it, except that there were several people there by no means of the Johnsonian school; so that less attention was paid to him than usual, which put him out of humour; and upon some imaginary offence from me he attacked me with such rudeness, that I was vexed and angry, because it gave those persons an opportunity of enlarging upon his supposed ferocity and ill-treatment of his friends. We may doubt whether Boswell gives the true reason for his vexation. He was able to stand a great deal of 'buffeting' at Dr. Johnson's hands; but it was probably necessary for him to feel that the company were good-natured in their merriment. We do not resent that men should laugh _at_ us if they laugh _with_ us at the same time. It was no doubt the contemptuous and half-concealed mirth of strangers which Boswell felt to be unbearable. And if he felt like this we may sympathise with a short period of sulking. 'I was so much hurt, and had my pride so much roused, that I kept away from him for a week; and, perhaps, might have kept away much longer, nay, gone to Scotland without seeing him again, had not we fortunately met and been reconciled. To such unhappy chances are human friendships liable.' The oddest thing of all about Boswell, when we reflect upon the scenes of his humiliation, is his pride. It is not the least unlikely that, as he suggests, if circumstances had not ordained otherwise he would have waited, and waited for a long time, for Johnson to make advances. It was not merely the pride of the worm in the proverb which may be roused at the last. The worm would not consciously go out of his way to incur insulting anger as Boswell did when he arranged the dinner with Wilkes and on many other occasions. Boswell's was a pride which was constantly giving him pain and was capable, when goaded to obstinacy, of going to considerable lengths. At Sir Joshua Reynolds' dinner he must have suffered acutely. Croker tells the story of Boswell's discomfiture as it was told to him at fourth-hand by the Marquess of Wellesley. 'The wits of Queen Anne's reign were talked of, when Boswell exclaimed, "How delightful it must have been to have lived in the society of Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, Gay, and Bolingbroke! We have no such society in our days." Sir Joshua answered, "I think, Mr. Boswell, you might be satisfied with your great friend's conversation." "Nay, Sir, Mr. Boswell is right," said Johnson, "every man wishes for preferment, and if Boswell had lived in those days, he would have obtained promotion." "How so, Sir?" asked Sir Joshua. "Why, Sir," said Johnson, "he would have had a high place in the Dunciad."' It was a hard blow. How deep was the wound we cannot tell, because we do not know how it was said or how received. It is curious at first sight that Boswell should have been more sulky about this than about many a rough retort recorded in the 'Life.' It is even more remarkable that he should have concealed this story of his humiliation while he told others with perfect frankness. To do so was entirely contrary to his principle and practice. The idea that 'the several people there by no means of the Johnsonian school' should read the story, recall the circumstances and laugh, not good-naturedly but with contempt and malice, must have overcome for once the biographer's 'sacred love of truth.' From these facts, in any case, we may fairly argue that Boswell suffered from his pride as a proud man must have suffered from the Doctor's rude snubs. It is to Boswell's credit that he was willing to run the gauntlet and even to bare his breast for the wound, not only because if he was to have the honour he must endure the pain, but at least as much because he knew that it was his vocation to goad the giant into action, to strike and fan the spark that would ignite the powder. It is to Boswell's credit that he had a part in the fray: he bled from honourable wounds. But since men had been so ill-natured as to despise them it was difficult to display the gashes and the scars; and because from a noble motive he did what was most difficult and most valuable we must praise Boswell exceedingly. It is further to Boswell's credit that, if he winced for a moment under the sledge-hammer and pouted at the executioner, his natural good-humour and generosity made reconciliation easy. On Friday, May 8, I dined with him at Mr. Langton's. I was reserved and silent, which I suppose he perceived and might recollect the cause. After dinner, while Mr. Langton was called out of the room, and we were by ourselves, he drew his chair near to mine, and said, in a tone of conciliating courtesy, 'Well, how have you done?' _Boswell_: 'Sir, you have made me very uneasy by your behaviour to me when we were last at Sir Joshua Reynolds'. You know, my dear Sir, no man has a greater respect and affection for you, or would sooner go to the end of the world to serve you. Now to treat me so----.' He insisted that I had interrupted him, which I assured him was not the case and proceeded--'But why treat me so before people who neither love you nor me?' _Johnson_: 'Well, I am sorry for it. I'll make it up to you i' twenty different ways as you please.' Johnson certainly seems to have made himself most agreeable on this occasion, and it would have been churlish of Boswell to have resisted these advances; but nothing could be more truly generous than the way in which he reminded Johnson of his affection and respect. Boswell now proceeds to appease his pride by using the occasion to make a _bon mot_. 'I said to-day to Sir Joshua, when he observed that you _tossed_ me sometimes--"I don't care how often or how high he tosses me, when only friends are present, for then I fall upon soft ground: but I do not like falling on stones, which is the case when enemies are present." I think this is a pretty good image, Sir.' Johnson assents, with unusual courtesy, 'Sir it is one of the happiest I have ever heard.' And Boswell is now completely satisfied. The account proceeds by giving Johnson a testimonial for good-nature and assuring its readers that the best of relations were at once re-established. 'The truth is, there was no venom in the wounds he inflicted at any time, unless they were irritated by some malignant infusion from other hands. We were instantly as cordial again as ever, and joined in hearty laugh at some ludicrous but innocent peculiarities of one of our friends.' The story of this quarrel, if there were no other evidence, would show that Boswell endured not a few rebuffs. The fact indeed has never been challenged. Johnson's method of talking for victory often took the form of mere rudeness, and Boswell was frequently the subject of his rough wit. For Boswell it was a question whether the fun and the interest of making Johnson angry were worth the sacrifice of dignity involved. In retrospect it always was so, and, at the moment too, very often. He tells us how, on one occasion, he had quoted Shakespeare in the course of discussion, and Johnson, who was angry, had made the characteristic reply, 'Nay, if you are to bring in gabble I'll talk no more'; it is evident that this was regarded by him as a successful issue to the argument. Johnson had become angrier and angrier, and Boswell, far from trying to appease him, was glad to bring him to a state of entire unreasonableness. He was conscious of this when he commented with evident pleasure, 'My readers will decide upon this dispute.' There is something of the same spirit in the tale which Boswell tells of the quarrel on the moor during the Tour in the Hebrides. Boswell towards the end of a day had the not unnatural intention of going on ahead to make preparations at the inn. It grew dusky; and we had a very tedious ride for what was called five miles; but I am sure would measure ten. We had no conversation. I was riding forward to the inn at Glenelg, on the opposite shore to Skye, that I might take proper measures, before Dr. Johnson, who was now advancing in dreary silence, Hay leading his horse, should arrive. Vass also walked by the side of his horse, and Joseph followed behind: as therefore he was thus attended, and seemed to be in deep meditation, I thought there could be no harm in leaving him for a little while. Boswell indeed seems to have been particularly thoughtful and even shows some delicacy in not interrupting Johnson's meditations to tell him his plan. The sequel must have surprised him very much. 'He called me back with a tremendous shout, and was really in a passion with me for leaving him. I told him my intentions, but he was not satisfied, and said, "Do you know I should as soon have thought of picking a pocket as doing so?"' This did not annoy Boswell in the least, though it took place in the presence of their servants; he was accustomed by this time to the Doctor's moods, and could only be amused. He replied with a composure which he must have known would irritate Johnson exceedingly; 'I am diverted with you, Sir.' The force of the desired explosion may have been underestimated. '_Johnson_: "Sir, I could never be diverted with incivility...." His extraordinary warmth confounded me so much, that I justified myself but lamely to him. Matters in fact were rather more serious than Boswell had supposed, and he must now make an effort to pacify his companion--but without effect. 'I resumed the subject of my leaving him on the road, and endeavoured to defend it better. He still was violent on that head, and said, "Sir, had you gone on, I was thinking that I should have returned with you to Edinburgh, and then have parted from you, and never spoken to you more."' The storm was indeed a bad one that did not clear up entirely by bedtime. Boswell felt distinctly uneasy in the volcanic atmosphere; but he easily effected a complete reconciliation. Thursday, September 2. I had slept ill. Dr. Johnson's anger had affected me much. I considered that, without any bad intention, I might suddenly forfeit his friendship; and was impatient to see him this morning. I told him how uneasy he had made me by what he had said, and reminded him of his own remark at Aberdeen upon old friendships being hastily broken off. He owned he had spoken in a passion ...; and he added, 'Let's think no more on't.' _Boswell_: 'Well then, Sir, I shall be easy. Remember I am to have fair warning in case of any quarrel. You are never to spring a mine upon me. It was absurd in me to believe you.' _Johnson_: 'You deserved about as much as to believe me from night to morning.' The mixture of amusement and anxiety in Boswell's conduct and the affectionate and good-humoured reconciliation are all extremely typical of the relations between these two friends. Johnson indeed had far too much sense of Boswell's good qualities and value ever to fall out with him seriously, and it would have been hard to do so. There was never one real misunderstanding between them up to the end. Their intercourse, consisting of the visits of Boswell to London and a number of letters on both sides, had but one break, from November 1769 to April 1771. Boswell had just been married, and omitted in 1770 to pay his usual visit to London; he tells us that there was no coldness on either side, no reason for not writing beyond the common one of procrastination. The correspondence of Boswell and Johnson is on the whole of an irregular nature; there is more than one interval, longer than we might expect, between two men who were such active friends as they, in an age when letter-writing was cultivated for its own sake. Arguing from this fact and considering that he was not present at Johnson's death-bed, Boswell has been accused of neglecting his friend at the end of his life. But from the state of mind which he described much earlier in the _London Magazine_, we can otherwise account for these lapses: To pay a visit or write a letter to a friend does not surely require much activity. Yet such small exertions have appeared so laborious to a Hypochondriack, that he has delayed from hour to hour, so that friendship has grown cold for want of having its heat continued, for which repeated renewals, however slight, are necessary; or, perhaps, till death has carried his friend beyond the reach of any token of his kindness, and the regrets which pained him in the course of his neglect are accumulated and press upon his mind with a weight of sorrow.[5] We may suppose that whenever Boswell for a short time failed in his careful attention it was through no lack of affection, but rather through a kind of indolence and want of purpose in the manner of it, which is far from being uncommon. The greatest event in this long friendship, and the time which has left us the fullest record, is the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' in 1773. In Boswell's journal we see more nearly than elsewhere the relations between the two friends and the nature of their companionship. In the foreground is the extreme amiability of Boswell--it was by this that he was fitted to perform that most difficult office of friendship, to travel with Dr. Johnson. We may read his own account of himself at this time: Think then, of a gentleman of ancient blood, the pride of which was his predominant passion. He was then in his thirty-third year, and had been about four years happily married. His inclination was to be a soldier; but his father, a respectable judge, had pressed him into the profession of the law. He had travelled a good deal, and seen many varieties of human life. He had thought more than anybody supposed, and had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge. He had all Dr. Johnson's principles, with some degree of relaxation. He had rather too little, than too much prudence; and, his imagination being lively, he often said things of which the effect was very different from the intention. He resembled sometimes 'The best good man, with the worst natur'd muse.' He cannot deny himself the vanity of finishing with the encomium of Dr. Johnson, whose friendly partiality to the companion of his 'Tour' represents him as one 'whose acuteness would help my enquiry, and whose gaiety of conversation, and civility of manners, are sufficient to counteract the inconveniences of travel, in countries less hospitable than we have passed.' Dr. Johnson in a letter to Mrs. Thrale wrote of him in terms of the highest esteem: 'Boswell will praise my resolution and perseverance, and I shall in return celebrate his good humour and perpetual cheerfulness.... It is very convenient to travel with him, for there is no house where he is not received with kindness and respect.'[6] No one certainly could have been more attentive than Boswell was: he had a sense of responsibility in being in charge of the great writer, which made him anxious not only that Johnson should be welcomed in a fitting manner, but that he himself should appear as a worthy companion. His deep sense of respect, his desire for approval and dread of reproof are constantly obvious. This attitude is well illustrated by the account of his carouse in Corrichatachin: We were cordial and merry to a high degree, but of what passed I have no recollection, with any accuracy.... Sunday, September 26. I awaked at noon with a severe headache. I was much vexed that I should have been guilty of such a riot, and afraid of a reproof from Dr. Johnson. I thought it very inconsistent with that conduct which I ought to maintain as the companion of the Rambler. The interview, however, was a very pleasant one. Boswell found 'the Rambler' in his most agreeable mood and was glad to escape the reproof he had anticipated. 'About one he came into my room and accosted me, "What, drunk yet?"' His tone of voice was not that of severe upbraiding; so I was relieved a little. 'Sir,' said I, 'they kept me up.' He answered, 'No, you kept them up, you drunken dog:' This he said with a good-humoured _English_ pleasantry. Boswell, it need hardly be said, was very proud of introducing Johnson to the men of Scotland: it raised him, as he no doubt understood, in their esteem, and he took trouble that Johnson should appear to them in the most favourable light. He had also a further gratification. He was more than a mere showman. He came to have proprietary rights in Dr. Johnson. Boswell's joy was the joy of possession: and he even became jealous. There is a story told by Miss Burney, of a later date, when Boswell, it must be admitted, behaved rather badly. A party gathered at Streatham where Johnson was staying. Boswell arrived to spend the morning. The Doctor's intimacy with Miss Burney was new to Boswell and the latter now found that his rights were being infringed. 'A collation was ordered.' Mr. Boswell [it is related] was preparing to take a seat that he seemed, by prescription, to consider as his own, next to Dr. Johnson; but Mr. Seward, who was present, waved his hand for Mr. Boswell to move farther on, saying, with a smile, 'Mr. Boswell, that seat is Miss Burney's.' He stared, amazed: the asserted claimant was new and unknown to him, and he appeared by no means pleased to resign his prior rights. But, after looking round for a minute or two with an important air of demanding the meaning of this innovation, and receiving no satisfaction, he reluctantly, also resentfully, got another chair, and placed it at the back of the shoulder of Dr. Johnson, while this new and unheard-of rival quietly seated herself as if not hearing what was passing, for she shrunk from the explanation that she feared might ensue, as she saw a smile stealing over every countenance, that of Dr. Johnson himself not excepted, at the discomfiture and surprise of Mr. Boswell. We must not forget that Boswell, before everything else, was the biographer, looking ever with inquisitive eye upon the great man's movements, marking with zealous care any detail that might be significant, and appreciating very keenly the humour of every scene. The furthest point one may suppose that his curiosity reached, or indeed was able to reach, is recorded in an account of breakfast at Lochbuy. The comedy arose from an unusual proposal on the part of Lady Lochbuy as to the provision to be made for Johnson's entertainment; Boswell encouraged it to see what the Doctor would do, deriving at the same time much pleasure from the dispute between the lady and her brother. She proposed that he should have some cold sheep's head for breakfast. Sir Allan seemed displeased at his sister's vulgarity, and wondered how such a thought should come into her head. From a mischievous love of sport, I took the lady's part; and very gravely said, 'I think it is but fair to give him an offer of it. If he does not choose it, he may let it alone.' 'I think so,' said the lady, looking at her brother with an air of victory. Sir Allan, finding the matter desperate, strutted about the room and took snuff. When Dr. Johnson came in she called to him, 'Do you choose any cold sheep's head, Sir?' 'No, Madam,' said he, with a tone of surprise and anger. 'It is here, Sir,' said she, supposing he had refused it to save the trouble of bringing it in. They thus went on at cross purposes till he confirmed his refusal in a manner not to be misunderstood. The malicious experiment of Boswell had the desired conclusion. 'I,' he says, 'sat quietly by, and enjoyed my success.' Dr. Johnson was irritated sometimes by Boswell's curiosity. Dr. Campbell even records that Johnson on one occasion was driven away by Boswell's continual questions.[7] But it would seem that far more often Johnson found means of protecting himself. Miss Burney gives an enlightening summary of the prospect in case Johnson should notice Boswell imitating him. Dr. Burney thought that Dr. Johnson, who generally treated Mr. Boswell like a schoolboy, whom, without the smallest ceremony, he pardoned or rebuked alternately, would so indignantly have been provoked as to have instantaneously inflicted upon him some mark of his displeasure. And equally he was persuaded that Mr. Boswell, however shocked and even inflamed in receiving it, would soon, from his deep veneration, have thought it justly incurred, and after a day or two of pouting and sullenness would have compromised the matter by one of his customary simple apologies of 'Pray, Sir, forgive me.' Dr. Johnson though often irritated by the officious importunity of Mr. Boswell, was really touched by his attachment. It was presumably in some degree because he realised that Johnson was fond of him that Boswell was able to endure his rudeness. It must be remembered, however, that it was deliberately in most cases brought upon himself, and there was then no real cause to take offence. You cannot complain if by your own fault you have made a man angry, whatever he may say--especially if he is thirty years older than yourself. It is one of Boswell's chief merits that he was able to see this. He may have been often annoyed, but he came afterwards to see that it was but the natural result of his method of treating Johnson--the method which enabled him to write in the end the immortal 'Life.' Boswell in the _rôle_ of biographer will claim a more detailed attention later in this book. It will suffice to say here that the attitude which he presented in the scene at Lochbuy, and on all those occasions when he led Johnson to talk or arranged some situation for the sake of observing his behaviour, is that which is most typical of Boswell, that by which he was famous, or, as some might have said, notorious among his contemporaries. The relations between these two friends which we see so pleasantly revealed in Boswell's journal of the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' in 1773, containing as they did all that is best between the old and the young, remained unimpaired to the death of Johnson in 1784: Boswell never neglected to pay at least one visit in the year to England, and preserved to the end his affection, his careful and kind attention, his pride and respect, and above all his humour and curiosity. It would be idle to suggest, though it may be difficult to understand or explain the fact, that his absence from Johnson's death-bed is significant in any way of a declining interest and affection. Boswell himself was feeling ill and melancholy during a considerable part of the year, and was much upset by Johnson's charges of affectation: it is easily conceivable that he shrank from the pain of being present at the death-bed of his friend, and believed too that his own distress could only irritate the other.[8] But, whatever may have been the cause of his absence, it is impossible, if we consider his own words about the final parting, to doubt the sincerity of his affection.[9] He asked me whether I would not go with him to his house; I declined it, from an apprehension that my spirits would sink. We bade adieu to each other affectionately in the carriage. When he had got down upon the foot-pavement, he called out, 'Fare you well,' and without looking back, sprung away with a kind of pathetic briskness, if I may use the expression, which seemed to indicate a struggle to conceal uneasiness, and impressed me with a foreboding of our long, long separation.[10] Johnson in one of his last letters said: 'I consider your fidelity and tenderness as a great part of the comforts which are yet left me'; and Boswell, speaking of his death, says enough when he says no more than this: 'I trust I shall not be accused of affectation when I declare that I find myself unable to express all that I felt upon the loss of such a Guide, Philosopher, and Friend.' The loss was indeed a severe one for Boswell. He made a friend of Johnson at the age of twenty-two and was forty-four at the date of Johnson's death. For more than twenty years he had been accustomed implicitly to trust the judgment of the older man. Its mere duration in time is some testimony to the value of the friendship, the more so when we remember that Boswell when he died himself was but fifty-five years old. The friend who was the hero of Boswell's youth, and his constant adviser, saw within the space of a few years the beginning of his professional life at the Scotch Bar, the publication of his first serious book, his marriage to an admirable lady, and his election to the Literary Club; he died but two years after Boswell had become the Laird of Auchinleck, at a time when he was showing an increased activity, and before the political and legal hopes that he indulged had brought about by their failure the disappointment of his later life. From the few facts which have been related here something may be gleaned, if not a complete conception of the part which Johnson played in Boswell's life. Boswell has revealed himself as a friend and in particular as the friend of Johnson. So great a devotion is a real asset in life. Whatever its definite value may be as regards events, and it is often small, it serves to fix more clearly and fuse together the intricate moving forms of a land of dreams into a simple mundane shape. It may be an end in itself. And devotion in Boswell's case belonged to the essence of his genius. It was an important part of that abnormal ingredient in him which was to blaze forth in an imperishable flame. What Johnson accomplished for Boswell was primarily in the realm of ideals. The aspirations of Boswell were concentrated by his admiration. But what was the final result? When Johnson died, the ship that carried that heavy load of Boswell's hopes was sailing steadily towards a definite harbour, though not the harbour he intended to reach: what had Johnson to do with this? Was his the hand at the helm?--the breath in the sails? [Footnote 1: _Life of Reynolds_, ii, p. 12.] [Footnote 2: _Letters of Horace Walpole_, v, p. 85.] [Footnote 3: _Memoirs of Hannah More_, i, p. 213.] [Footnote 4: The evidence for what is stated in this sentence and the next is discussed later under Boswell's biographical qualities.] [Footnote 5: _London Magazine_, xlvii, 106.] [Footnote 6: _Piozzi Letters_, i, 198.] [Footnote 7: _Campbell's Diary_, p. 70.] [Footnote 8: _Life of Johnson_, iv, pp. 378-80.] [Footnote 9: It must be remembered that Boswell spent nearly two months with Johnson in this last year. In March he wrote to Dr. Percy about going to London, 'chiefly to attend upon Dr. Johnson with respectful attention.' (Nichols, _Literary History_, vii, p. 302.]) [Footnote 10: _Life of Johnson_, iv, p. 339.] CHAPTER V Biography is by its nature historical and suited to an historical method. The history of an institution is written in respect of its functions. The Christian Church, for instance, played a certain part in the life of society at the end of the fourth century, and another part when Clement proclaimed a Crusade to all Western Europe. The historian of the Church may well be expected to hold in view the later development during the whole course of his inquiry before that climax; he must analyse the primitive organism, having regard to its future growth, and explain how it was that those organs grew. The biographer has similar duties. We commonly consider the lives of men with reference to a few conspicuous events or remarkable achievements; and we want to know what were the essential qualities of the man and how they grew to those results. In Boswell's case the central theme is single, for he accomplished one thing of overwhelmingly greater importance than anything else in his life. But the growth which came to this glorious end was by no means a simple and serene development. It is concerned with an amazing war between the conventional and the real, the false and the true. We have now to investigate more closely the details of that struggle, and incidentally the effect on Johnson. Boswell, in the first place, had a number of what may be called conventional prejudices; he had the common prejudices of the landed gentleman in the eighteenth century. He was brought up to believe that he would one day become the Laird of Auchinleck. He was proud of his family name and ancient lineage; he believed altogether the conventional idea, that a man was not only in a higher position and a greater person, but, in some indefinable way, better from the possession of land. Soil and mansion were not merely the insignia of the governing class or the boast of blood, but, further, the supreme expression of an ideal--the commonest practical ideal of the British people, 'to be as our fathers.' 'Holding an estate,' says Boswell, in the first of the political letters which he addressed to his compatriots,[1] 'transmitted to me through my ancestors, by charters from a series of kings, the importance of a charter, the prerogative of a king, impresses my mind with seriousness and duty; and while animated, I hope, as much as any man, with genuine feelings of liberty, I shall ever adhere to our excellent Monarchy, that venerable institution under which liberty is best enjoyed.' The truth expressed by these extravagant words is that Boswell accepted, as a consequence of having inherited an estate, a certain outfit of principles and practical objects which was to be worn in the same way that a parson wears a black coat or a coachman a livery. In politics, therefore, he was a Monarchist and Tory. Property and the Constitution, these were his interests. In the second political letter he shows that he strongly disapproved of innovation and of change in general; disapproved because he disliked and mistrusted them as by convention a man of property ought to do. Reform, however necessary, is never respectable. Boswell liked an order and formality which should go on for ever exactly as he knew it. It was for this reason and not from any æsthetic pleasure that he delighted in the ceremonial of the dinners in the Inner Temple and in the services which he was wont to attend in St. Paul's Cathedral each year, if he were able, upon Easter Day. The same views found expression in a series of essays which Boswell wrote for the _London Magazine_. It is in fact in these essays rather than in his biographical writings that we should look for Boswell's opinions on general subjects. Comprehensive though the 'Life of Johnson' is, it necessarily refrains from giving the author's view on many occasions, and when Boswell speaks for himself he does so incidentally, and not directly. In the _London Magazine_ he is free, and consequently the range is wider and the matter more diffuse. 'The Hypochondriack'--for such is the title under which Boswell wrote--appeared in twenty-seven numbers of the _London Magazine_ from October, 1777, to December, 1779. The articles are not very long--three pages of close double-columns is the average length; but altogether they must contain enough printed matter to fill one volume of a moderate size in our day. The title explains the attitude of the writer in the whole series; Boswell wrote as a hypochondriac to others who suffered as he did from periodical depression, to divert them, as he said, by good-humour. 'I may, without ever offending them by excess of gaiety, insensibly communicate to them that good-humour which, if it does not make life rise to felicity, at least preserves it from wretchedness.' It is remarkable that Boswell formed the plan of writing these papers at an earlier stage of his existence, during the years which he spent abroad from 1763-5. The tenth of the series was actually written then and was intended, so he tells us, to be published, in the _London Magazine_ as Number X of 'The Hypochondriack.' The fact that it fulfilled its destiny, and that, though written in a rather more frivolous style, it is in no way out of place, is a testimony, if any further were needed besides the _magnum opus_, to the capacity that Boswell had for carrying a literary project to its due accomplishment. The qualities required of a biographer, which Boswell had in so supreme a measure, are not those which necessarily make a good essayist. But Boswell was by no means contemptible as a writer of essays. A great thinker he never professed to be, and never could have become; he had, however, what for his purpose was even more valuable than profound thought or comprehensive originality--the art of self-expression. We are obliged to read anything that Boswell wrote because, by some enchanter's magic, he is there talking to us. This is not the place to probe the mystery of Orpheus with his lute; perhaps, in any case, it is better that the mystery should remain for ever dark; for the charm of Orpheus might be perceptibly less if we knew its mechanism. And it may be no more than an accomplishment which, when exercised with particular grace, gives, in the common way, the capricious illusion of facility. Whatever it be in the art of letters, Boswell had it. He inevitably produced his effect; and it is himself. We are made to feel good-humoured and agreeable; and we wish to leave it at that and trouble our heads no further. A less easy style will draw our attention to the technique of words. With Boswell, it is clear midday on the dial, and we have no desire to bother with the wheels inside. 'The Hypochondriack,' however, is scarcely so gay as one might expect. Truly this is not the serious business of life; he is out for a spree. 'The pleasure of writing a short essay,' says the lively physician of melancholy, 'is like taking a pleasant airing that enlivens and invigorates by the exercise which it yields, while the design is gratified in its completion.' Boswell the essayist has not the solemn responsibility of showing a great example to the world; and he has no need to be the grave judge. Yet there is a very serious background to the thoughts of this jolly author. When he chooses a theme he searches in the depths. Religion, Death and Conscience, Fear, Truth, Pleasure and Pride, Matrimony and Offspring, Youth and Age, Pity and Prudence, Excess, Drinking, Flattery, and Hypochondria itself--such are the subjects with which he sets forth to divert his fellow-sufferers. And having chosen thus, Boswell naturally, on many occasions, says earnestly what he sincerely thinks. He faithfully describes in one place the discomfort of his own depression: To be overpowered with languor must make a man very unhappy. He is tantalized with a thousand ineffectual wishes which he cannot realise. For as Tantalus is fabled to have been tormented by the objects of his desire being ever in his near view, yet ever receding from his touch as he endeavoured to approach them, the languid Hypochondriack has the sad mystification of being disappointed of realising every wish, by the wretched defect of his own activity. While in that situation time passes over him only to be loaded with regrets. The important duties of life, the benevolent offices of friendship are neglected, though he is sensible that he shall upbraid himself for that neglect till he is glad to take shelter under cover of disease. In this account there is no ill-placed levity and no extravagance such as we might fear to find. It is a simple and effective account of an unpleasant experience. The advice which he gives to hypochondriacs from time to time is similarly grave and sympathetic, and concerned with defeating the dangers of their state of mind; his view is that the disease is nearly always curable; he unwillingly admits that there are cases beyond hope, and condemns pessimistic fatalism: We should guard against imagining that there is a volcano within us, a melancholy so dreadful that we can do nothing in opposition to it. It would be a mistake to suppose when we read such grave advice that Boswell had a serious view of himself as the spiritual adviser of hypochondriacs. His object, as he tells us, was to divert them; and in that frame of mind no doubt he began to write. He became grave and even earnest because he had a very strong vein of seriousness. In the ordinary way of life he was light-hearted enough, and easily dispensed with his thoughts when they began to be uncomfortable: but when he had set himself to write from a text he persevered with his serious reflections and they found expression. He was able to reach considerable heights; a famous epitaph, when he is writing upon a motto from Cicero about the duties of Conscience, stirs him to a noble feeling: The epitaph upon Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul's Church, of which he was the architect, has been justly admired as sublime: 'Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice'; 'Reader, if you would see his monument, cast your eyes around you,' so that the whole Church is made his Mausoleum. In my opinion there is a similar sublimity about this sentiment, by which a man, upon the ancient principle of [Greek: tima seauton], 'reverence thyself,' is taught to expand his mind into a grand theatre of self-observation. Occasionally Boswell, on account of this same seriousness, has an outburst of Johnsonian anger. He tells of a French writer that he published a book, 'Réflexions sur ceux qui sont morts en plaisantant,' that he succeeded in collecting a good number of instances both ancient and modern: 'But I,' says Boswell 'hold all such extraordinary appearances to be unnatural, affected, and thoughtless.' However, when all is said about the gravity of the Hypochondriack, he is essentially the easy, good-humoured companion he set out to be. He is often dignified, never indecorous; rarely is he even light-hearted, for while he supports the cares of this world with smiling equanimity he leaves the impression that they matter; still more rarely is he flippant. The effect is never depressing. He is for the most part a soothing optimist; and if that seem scant praise, be it remembered that one may resist the optimist's persuasion and yet fall a victim to the cheerful manners that accompany it. Such is the attitude of Boswell as an essayist; and, when we consider what he chose to write about, it is a remarkable performance. The lightness of touch which was necessary for Boswell's purpose was obtained partly by anecdote and image. A wide acquaintance with books evidently supplied Boswell with a store of anecdotes; and he both selected them well and used them relevantly. One instance, where Boswell, in an essay about Excess, is speaking of the dangers of wealth, will suffice to illustrate his method: The Dutch, who have much sagacity of contrivance in many respects, have in what they call a 'verbeetering huys' (that is to say, a correcting and amending house, a house for making people better) an admirable method of curing laziness. A fellow who will not work is put into a large reservoir, which takes him up to the chin; a cock is then turned so as to let more water run in upon him, and he is then shown a pump. If he exerts himself with active force he prevents the water from rising, and breathes freely; but if he does not ply the pump, the water soon gets up upon him and he is suffocated. An inundation of wealth will be equally fatal to a man's happiness, if he does not throw it off by vigorous exertion. _Aurum potabile_ will choak him; and, when drowning in Pactolus's streams, it will be no consolation to him to know that they have golden sands. Boswell's images, sometimes employed in imitation of Dr. Johnson's manner, if they are apt to be slightly extravagant, are generally pointed and help the sense. 'A Dogmatist,' he says, 'is a man that has got a pair of shoes that fit him exactly well, and therefore he thinks them so very good that he flies in a passion against those who cannot wear them.' An image is often used far more gracefully to bring the argument to a head as in the following admirable passage: But old men forget in a wonderful degree their own feelings in the early part of life, are angry because the young are not as sedate in the season of effervescence as they are, would have the fruit where in the course of nature there should be only the blossom, and complain because another generation has not been able to ascend the steep of prudence in a fourth part of the time which they themselves have taken. These few quotations may suffice to show that Boswell's essays are worthy of some attention. They can be read with pleasure because Boswell was both a capable writer and an agreeable man. And, moreover, Boswell was a good man. It is a somewhat ridiculous exclamation, because the fact is so striking and so indisputable. One might dispute the proposition that to write an unrivalled biography a man must be good: it would probably be a foolish discussion, for the common sense of mortals refuses to believe that one who has done a supremely good thing is not himself essentially good. But to dispute it in the case of Boswell--when we consider how many hearts he has won, and with how excellent a wooing, surely that would be preposterous! He was not wholly good more than other men, nor less than the majority; but he possessed a quantity of good that might be envied of the best. And this is true, not of the man only, but of the writer. The test is a very simple one: the plain fact is that it is impossible to read Boswell without feeling better. Boswell does not edify in the spiritual fashion of Michael Angelo or Milton; but he edifies just as truly. With Boswell we never want to leave the world for something better, but we want to live in it and enjoy life to the full; and we want especially to love other men. It is not a small matter that we should feel this: and as we may feel it in the 'Life of Johnson,' we may feel it also, though in a less degree, in the essays. But 'The Hypochondriack' is not to be read for the sake of the author's opinions, nor even for the arguments by which he supports them. For Boswell writes from a conventional point of view. His conclusions are not his very own. He has never been tossed in the great void and fought long doubtful battles for a sure place to stand on. His children have not been begotten with pangs, but adopted for pleasure. And here we return to the main battle. Boswell was conventional. But this is by no means a sufficient explanation. Clearly, in some respects, it is not even true. What then is the range of Boswell's conventionality and what are its limits? Beliefs are the result, as a rule, either of tradition, or of emotional experience, or of mere desire. In a few rare spirits they may be determined in more intellectual fashion; but Reason is seldom mistress, and very often she is servant and nurse. By reason, we seek to justify our prejudices and convictions. With varying degrees of intellectual dishonesty we make use of reason to reject what we dislike and nourish what we prefer. Boswell's case was somewhat uncommon. He was clearly not very critical. Having once adopted an attitude he marched through life without looking back. We have seen something of the outlook he adopted conventionally. He deceived himself, however, far less than most men of those opinions. And in the effort to believe what he wished to believe, Boswell used reason in a curiously deliberate fashion. He accepted the conventional beliefs and standards in an unconventional manner--not chaotically and aimlessly, but perceiving what the conventional aim essentially was, and approving it as a mode of living. Boswell's philosophy of life, as far as he had a philosophy, was to have in all (including, that is, the future life of happiness which he flattered himself that he would be able to enjoy) the maximum amount of pleasure. Pleasure and happiness, these are ends in themselves; and except in so far as pleasure must be restrained for the sake of happiness either in this state of being or in another--and Boswell can hardly be said to have practised restraint in any remarkable degree--they are not distinguished. Pleasure he speaks of as 'not only the aim but the end of our being.' 'To be happy,' he says, 'as far as mortality and human imperfection allow, is the wisest study of men.' In the 'Hypochondriack' essays we see how entirely Boswell's philosophy of life is a philosophy of comfort. With regard, for instance, to Love--a subject which, since three papers of 'The Hypochondriack' are devoted to it, must have been considered important--though too logical to be entirely conventional, his doctrine is frankly based upon his view of happiness: As no disorder of the imagination has produced more evils than the passion of love, it behoves us to guard ourselves with caution against its first appearance. However coldness or indifference is unpleasant, yet excess of love or fondness is bad, not only as it is not lasting, but also because it is disagreeable at the time. It is in his religious views that we see best this attitude of Boswell. While his opinions were on the one hand completely conventional, they yet depended quite consciously upon this doctrine of happiness. The religious fear which I mean to inculcate, is that reverential awe for the Most High Ruler of the Universe, mixed with affectionate gratitude and hope, by which our minds are kept steady, calm, and placid, at once exalted by the contemplation of greatness, and warmed by the contemplation of goodness, while both are contemplated with a reference to ourselves.[2] However 'romantic' Boswell may have been in other matters, there is no shadow of romance in his conception of a Deity. His admiration for what seems to be merely a superior human being admitted of no spiritual disquiet. Rather the 'steady, calm, and placid' temper so produced was to serve as an antidote to hypochondria. In order to have these comforts which not only relieve but 'delight the soul,' the Hypochondriack must take care to have the principles of our holy religion firmly established in his mind, when it is sound and clear, and by the habit and exercise of piety to strengthen it, so that the flame may live even in the damp and foul vapour of melancholy.[3] Further instructions as to how these comforts are to be enjoyed are given in the 'Life' where his final view is expressed: This I have learned from a pretty hard course of experience, and would, from sincere benevolence, impress upon all who honour this book with a perusal, that until a steady conviction is obtained that the present life is an imperfect state, and only a passage to a better, if we comply with the divine scheme of progressive improvement; and also that it is part of the mysterious plan of Providence that intellectual beings must be 'made perfect through suffering'; there will be a continual recurrence of disappointment and uneasiness. But if we walk with hope in 'the mid-day sun of revelation' our temper and disposition will be such that the comforts and enjoyments in our way will be relished, while we patiently support the inconveniences and pains. The argument is clear: we must choose the path where 'uneasiness' is avoided and 'comforts and enjoyments' are in store for us. The part to be played by the intellect is not doubtful. The power of reasoning may be valuable up to a certain point; beyond that point it is unsafe for it to pass: After much speculation and various reasonings, I acknowledge myself convinced of the truth of Voltaire's conclusion, '_Après tout, c'est un monde passable._' But we must not think too deeply; Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise is, in many respects, more than poetically just. Let us cultivate, under the command of good principles, '_la théorie des sensations agréables_'; and, as Mr. Burke once counselled a grave and anxious gentleman, 'live pleasant.' 'We must not think too deeply'--because it is not pleasant. 'I most willingly admit,' he says elsewhere, 'that of all kinds of misery, the misery of thought is the severest.' He wished to escape from thought, and found his religion a very pleasant substitute. It enabled him to believe all that he found most pleasant in beliefs, and to reject what he found disquieting. The fear of death, he discovered, could best be alleviated by believing in the divine revelation; accordingly he proceeded to adopt this belief. But the pleasure which Boswell obtained in this way was not merely the pleasure of a mind lulled to tranquillity, it was the pleasure also of possessing a point of view. He wanted to be entirely respectable. And respectability was to be achieved by adopting wholesale the respectable beliefs. Boswell perhaps could never have been otherwise than conventional in his ethical and religious thought; but he did at one time think, and he deliberately ceased to think; with the consequence that all those views which he might or might not have arrived at by thought and experience, instead of being deeply founded within him, were only an ill-balanced superstructure. * * * * * The effect of Johnson upon this development was a very remarkable one. Johnson himself was pre-eminently a conformist, and it was partly, no doubt, from his example that Boswell derived his desire to be respectable--to be, as he expressed it, 'an uniform pretty man.' Boswell's own words show us that he was influenced in this way. A meeting had been arranged between Johnson and one of Boswell's friends, George Dempster, who held the sceptical views of Hume and Rousseau; a discussion took place in which Johnson, whether by force of argument or power of lungs, was victorious. 'I had infinite satisfaction,' says Boswell, 'in hearing solid truth confuting vain subtilty. I thank God that I have got acquainted with Mr. Johnson. He has done me infinite service. He has assisted me to obtain peace of mind, he has assisted me to become a rational Christian.' How much are we to assume from this? How much of Boswell's respectability came directly from Johnson? There could be nothing more unreasonable than to dogmatise about the extent of a personal influence. How subtle and intricate it is in the thousand chances of a mind's development, of acquiescence and rebellion, of mere time and place! how difficult to see the beginning and the end, to know even approximately the value of any one force in a number of causes! The distinction alone between a conscious or unconscious acceptance, what a difference it makes! That which determines individuality in men more than any other factor is the freedom of choice. But there is more than one way of choosing. There are some who choose to march upon the high road where tall fences on either side prevent the possibility of wandering astray; and there are others who select the by-paths deliberately. All who choose are in search of treasure. Those who have rejected the high roads hardly know what they so urgently desire; but when they come upon a rare flower in the wilderness which pleases them particularly they cull it; they are then refreshed and go forward with more certain step, and there hangs about them something of the fragrance they inhaled, so that other men when they meet them are reminded of that flower which they too have seen and smelt. The rest press forward more directly; when they have chosen the way there is no deviation; they will pause for nothing unless it be of precious metal. And when their quest is rewarded they surround themselves with a cloud of gold-dust, as it seems to them, and cannot be seen except through this strange mist. Boswell, it would seem, was among these last. He chose freely, but did not wander far afield. He was one of those in pursuit of ideal treasure; and when he found in Dr. Johnson all that he desired, and the ideal was satisfied, he impregnated himself with the priceless essence. But, inasmuch as it was the essence he had chosen to seek, even this exterior atmosphere was entirely of himself. We expect, indeed, to see in Boswell beyond his own real nature the marks of a stronger personality. But we may admit the Johnsonian flavour without impugning the originality of Boswell or degrading him to the level of a mere imitator. All the conventional prejudices, the strong conformity which was so pronounced in Johnson, existed in Boswell independently. The 'old Tory sentiments' inasmuch as they exceeded the sentiments of Johnson (which they occasionally did, _e.g._ on the subject of slavery), were definitely a part of the true Boswell. It is remarkable that in the 'Letters to Temple' the opinions of Johnson are very rarely mentioned; Boswell on one occasion was 'confirmed in his Toryism'; and Johnson is quoted two or three times: but his name appears far less often than we should expect. It is clear, indeed, when we read the 'Life of Johnson,' that Boswell, however he might be a worshipper, was far from being a slave: his passion for truth would not allow him to pass lightly by an opinion he disapproved, and his conviction that Johnson was wrong, or at least that his own opinions remained unaltered, is frankly if respectfully stated more than once. He knew that Johnson's opinions might be formed only to refute an adversary: 'But it is not improbable that if one had taken the other side he might have reasoned differently.' Not infrequently Boswell ventures to criticise his philosopher's argument. On one occasion, when predestination had been discussed, he even goes so far as to excuse Johnson's prejudices: He avoided the question which has excruciated philosophers and divines beyond any other. I did not press it further, when I perceived that he was displeased, and shrunk from any abridgment of an attribute usually ascribed to the divinity, however irreconcilable in its full extent with the grand system of moral government. His supposed orthodoxy here cramped the vigorous powers of his understanding. He was confined by a chain, which early imagination and long habit made him think massy and strong, but which, had he ventured to try, he could at once have snapped asunder. Boswell's attitude in this passage is very far from being intellectually dependent on Johnson or on anyone else. And it is not an unusual attitude. We sometimes see another side--Boswell, apparently in fetters, a prisoner in the citadel of respectability. But it cannot be asserted too often that Boswell was essentially an independent individual, one who was capable of pursuing his own true vision, inflexible and careless of the consequences. There is no need to infer from this that the influence of Johnson was negligible, or even small. We cannot suppose that the guide, philosopher and friend of Boswell, for whom he had a 'mysterious veneration,' whose 'just frown' he so greatly dreaded, whom upon so many occasions he eagerly consulted, can have been of small account. Boswell himself was far from thinking so; he knew the value of Johnson to him when, reflecting that death must soon rob him of his friend, he wrote to Temple, in Johnsonian words: 'it will be like a limb amputated.' If influence is to be defined it may be said perhaps that it is a quality which makes us see what we should not have seen without it. We cannot doubt that Boswell learnt many things by his intercourse with Dr. Johnson. The influence of Johnson was in the first place, as we remarked above, an influence for truth, for honesty. It helped Boswell in his early life to see the self which he came in the end to understand so well. He must long have remembered the letter which he received from Johnson at Utrecht. Boswell, in his desire to make an impression as the young genius, then regarded himself as a peculiar mortal who had no need to regulate his conduct by the ordinary standards. Johnson begins by describing this state of mind: There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself.... You know a gentleman who, when first he set his foot in the gay world, as he prepared himself to whirl in the vortex of pleasure, imagined a total indifference and universal negligence to be the most agreeable concomitants of youth, and the strongest indication of an airy temper and a quick apprehension. The result which he particularly deplored was Boswell's idleness: Vacant to every object, and sensible of every impulse, he thought that all appearance of diligence would deduct something from the reputation of genius; and hoped that he should appear to attain, amidst all the ease of carelessness, and all the tumults of diversion, that knowledge and those accomplishments which mortals of the common fabrick obtain only by mute abstraction and solitary drudgery. He then alludes to the wrong conclusions which might be drawn by one in Boswell's mental condition from the difficulties which attend a return to a normal course of life: He tried this scheme of life awhile; was made weary of it by his sense and his virtue; he then wished to return to his studies; and finding long habits of idleness and pleasure harder to be cured than he expected, still willing to retain his claim to some extraordinary prerogatives, resolved the common consequences of irregularity into an unalterable decree of destiny, and concluded that Nature had originally formed him incapable of rational employment. And finally he gives some very solemn advice: Let all such fancies, illusive and destructive, be banished henceforward from your thoughts for ever. Resolution will sometimes relax, and diligence will sometimes be interrupted; but let no accidental surprise or deviation, whether short or long, dispose you to despondency. Consider these failings as incident to all mankind. Boswell was too honest not to realise the truth of what Johnson said, and we cannot but think of this letter when we read a number of years later, in the _London Magazine_ of 1778, an attack written by Boswell upon the association by Aristotle of melancholy with genius; for this essay seems to aim at undermining the same kind of affectation as that which Johnson had seen in him. Similarly the effect of Johnson in making Boswell more respectable was produced less by example than by dislike of affectation. Johnson was pre-eminently a conformist; and Boswell desired the same happy state for himself. But Johnson was honest in his conformity, and he cared less for the conformity than for the honesty. And so he was able, when he saw Boswell affecting sentiments which he did not wholly feel, to reprove him. It was not that the sentiments in themselves were not good sentiments, for they often were, but that in Boswell they were unreal. _Boswell_: 'Perhaps, Sir, I should be the less happy for being in Parliament. I never would sell my vote, and I should be vexed if things went wrong.' _Johnson_: 'That's cant, Sir. It would not vex you more in the House than in the Gallery: publick affairs vex no man.' Boswell was probably annoyed at this retort; it is very annoying to be told the truth about oneself. He now tries to make Johnson admit that he has been vexed himself 'by all the turbulence of this reign.' _Johnson_: 'Sir, I have never slept an hour less, nor ate an ounce less meat. I would have knocked the factious dogs on the head, to be sure; but I was not _vexed_.' The argument is too strong: _Boswell_: 'I declare, Sir, upon my honour, I did imagine I was vexed, and took a pride in it; but it _was_, perhaps, cant; for I own I neither ate less, nor slept less.' _Johnson_: 'My dear friend, clear your _mind_ of cant. You may _talk_ as other people do; you may say to a man, "Sir, I am your most humble servant." ... You may _talk_ in this manner; it is a mode of talking in society: but don't _think_ foolishly.' The result of Johnson's honesty acting upon Boswell's conventional affectations was not to make him less but rather more conventional. It gave him a surer foundation. An affectation does not as a rule become less affected but rather the reverse. But Boswell's affectations tended rather to become the substantial and real expression of a mind as he came to understand that they were affectations. He saw that the manners and opinions which he affected because they pleased him had a value in life and a value for him. The lessons which he learnt from Johnson in this way were, for the most part, moral; they were concerned with the piety and goodness which were so much a part of Johnson himself. Boswell was able to reinforce a set of religious beliefs with a little real piety, and a set of moral axioms with a little real goodness. If it were necessary to point to one definite quality in the Johnsonian atmosphere which we might suppose to be of special value to Boswell, it would be the genuine kind-heartedness and benevolent interest, the 'tenderness' which we find so carefully recorded in the 'Life.' It was to some purpose that the naturally egotistical Boswell was reminded of a duty towards other men, was told more than once without compromise that he must be kind to his father and kind to his wife. But it is not so much in any minute particular that Johnson was reflected by his biographer, but rather in a more general way, in a whole attitude towards life, in the one significant fact that Boswell himself as we see him, not only in the biographical writings but in his own letters too, is essentially a moralist. The one difficulty which his conscience found in writing the 'Life' was that he might, by showing the failings of so great a man, give support to those who were inclined to the same faults so that they should conceive themselves to be justified by that example. And so he points out with zealous care that, where the 'practice' of Johnson does not agree with his 'principle,' it is not because the principle is not good but that even so great a man was not quite perfect; _humanum est errare_. Undoubtedly the influence of Johnson was a moral influence; this in itself may be considered as one aspect of its complete respectability. Johnson wanted Boswell to be a sober, honest, contented citizen, a hard-working, successful lawyer, a good son, a good husband, a good friend and a religious man. 'I have always loved and valued you,' he wrote in 1769, 'and shall love you and value you still more, as you become more regular and useful.' And again, in 1771: I never was so much pleased as now with your account of yourself; and sincerely hope, that between publick business, improving studies, and domestick pleasures, neither melancholy nor caprice will find any place for entrance. Whatever philosophy may determine of material nature, it is certainly true of intellectual nature that it 'abhors a vacuum'; our minds cannot be empty; and evil will break in upon them, if they are not preoccupied by good. My dear Sir, mind your studies, mind your business, make your lady happy, and be a good Christian. There was no place for any intellectual unquiet--and herein it was essentially respectable--in Johnson's scheme of life as he presented it to others. If a subject were unpleasant to think of, it were better not to heed it. He wished himself to walk through life in a calm, majestic, and dignified way, with firm knowledge of good and a resolute purpose to follow it. He never, if we may judge from Boswell, was in any serious doubt as to the right course, and he seems to have thought the matter as easy for Boswell as it was for him. It is because he himself desired to be like this that Boswell found Johnson such a valuable friend. But it was unfortunate, as it turned out, that he attached so much importance to mere success in the world, in his profession, in politics; in these, with the encouragement of Johnson, he so completely believed, that when he discovered that he had failed, or had at least fallen far short of his ambitions, he was bitterly disappointed. [Footnote 1: For Boswell's political career see pp. 174-182. He published this letter in 1783, and a second two years later.] [Footnote 2: _London Magazine_, vol. xlvi, pp. 492-3.] [Footnote 3: _Ibid._, vol. xlix, p. 542.] CHAPTER VI Lord Auchinleck died in 1782. His relations with Boswell are of some interest in this place, because they exhibit Boswell in the _rôle_ of son and incidentally raise an important question. The two never agreed very well. Was this the fault of the son? Was he deliberately unkind, or negligent, or disagreeable? There is no reason to suppose that Boswell was culpable in any such way: indiscretion on the one hand and intolerance on the other are sufficient to account for all the friction. Lord Auchinleck had evidently a very rigid view of the career fitting for his eldest son. His ideal of progeniture seems to have assumed with a not uncommon complacency that the ego was worthy of a second edition. James Boswell must be after the pattern of his father--a Scotch lawyer, a hard-headed, practical man of affairs, a wise man of business successful in his profession. James, however, was not made like that: and if he had practical ability he hated the Scotch law and lawyers far too much ever to use it with success. He had a taste for extravagant behaviour and liked to exhibit his high spirits. Johnson might condone this, though he disapproved of it, and love Boswell the more, because 'he was a boy longer than others.' Lord Auchinleck regarded it with alarm while Boswell was young, and with contempt when he was of a mature age. Conduct that would have been regrettable to a milder father, was to him intolerable. It is not surprising, then, that Boswell found the company of his father extremely irksome: We divaricate so much (he writes to Temple) that I am often hurt when I dare say he means no harm; and he has a method of treating me which makes me feel like a timid boy, which to me (comprehending all that my character does in my own imagination, and in that of a wonderful number of mankind) is intolerable. I have appeared good-humoured; but it has cost me drinking a considerable quantity of strong beer to dull my faculties. The stern father had undoubtedly some good reasons for disapproving of the irresponsible James. Besides the habitual lack of restraint in Boswell's behaviour, money was a continual source of irritation. The heir to Auchinleck, it is clear, considered that he had a sort of natural right to his father's money. He found an allowance of £300 a year insufficient. He wrote to Temple in a complaining tone about his financial difficulties and his father: He allows me £300 a year. But I find that what I gain by practice and that sum together will not support my family. I have now two sons and three daughters. I am in hopes that my father will augment my allowance to £400. He admits, however, that 'his paying £1000 of my debt some years ago was a large bounty.' Lord Auchinleck, no doubt with justice, considered Boswell to be extravagant; and he did not approve of his marriage. 'I understand,' writes Boswell, 'he fancies that if I had married another woman, I might not only have had a better portion with her, but might have been kept from what he thinks idle and extravagant conduct.' The indiscretion of Boswell in his correspondence and conversation with his father must have continually aggravated the pronounced prejudices and preferences of the ill-tempered old lawyer. It was a wanton imprudence to express his extreme aversion to his father's second marriage; we can hardly doubt that he was equally imprudent with regard to the Scotch law and Scotch legal circles. Boswell intended that his father should appreciate him for what he was rather than tolerate him for what he was not. In 1767 he writes to Temple: How unaccountable it is that my father and I should be so ill together! He is a man of sense and a man of worth; but from some unhappy turn in his disposition, he is much dissatisfied with a son whom you know. I write to him with warmth, with an honest pride, wishing that he should think of me as I am; but my letters shock him, and every expression in them is interpreted unfavourably. Boswell did not understand that the temperaments of his father and himself were in some degree incompatible, and he succeeded in emphasising their points of disagreement rather than cultivating what they had in common. He was very slow to realise how much his father disapproved of his literary friends in London, and of Dr. Johnson in particular: to Temple he exclaims, with horrified surprise, 'he harps on my going over Scotland with a brute (think how shockingly erroneous) and wandering (or some such phrase) to London.' Johnson was actually taken to visit Auchinleck--a most hazardous experiment! Boswell must certainly be blamed, if blame can be distributed in this sort, for indiscretion, but not for unkindness. From no passage in the 'Letters to Temple' can it be inferred that he disliked his father, or wished to displease him; on several occasions he speaks of him with affection. Moreover the obligation to be deliberately kind to one who cannot occupy the position of a friend is based upon a supposed affection on his part. Boswell clearly was not cruel in any positive or malevolent sense; he can only be condemned as unkind if it be proved that he was inconsiderate to a man who displayed a substantial affection towards him. But Lord Auchinleck cannot be said to have done this--if we may accept as true the dictum of Dr. Johnson to Boswell on the occasion of his father's death: 'His disposition towards you was undoubtedly that of a kind, though not of a fond father.' And so we may say that Boswell was a disappointing, though not a bad son. * * * * * In 1782 Boswell, on his father's death, became Laird of Auchinleck. The new position was a matter of importance to him. Not only were the duties it involved such duties as he liked to perform, but it was a considerable advance in the right direction. He was the man of property. A part of his dream was come true; and he could now invest himself with a fresh halo of respect and respectability derived from his new station. Local and public affairs were more intimately connected in the eighteenth century than in our own day; and, when the men of estate had a monopoly of governing, it was not unnatural for one who inherited land to cast his eyes beyond the fences of his patrimony. At the age of forty-two Boswell was by no means too old to look forward. The event of inheriting quickened his aspirations, and the prospect of becoming 'the great man' seemed nearer. The ambitions of Boswell were not destined to be realised in any high degree. His hopes were of a double nature; they were both legal and political. Of his early life at the Bar we have already spoken, and we must now briefly trace out the course of his legal career to its dismal conclusion. It was hardly to be expected that a man who disliked and despised so much the whole Scotch atmosphere of his work should persevere with it. Boswell was so discontented with his lot that he began to hope for a change which should bring him into a more congenial situation. In 1775 he entered at the Inner Temple with the intention of being called eventually to the English Bar. There was much to recommend this plan; for it would enable him to spend far more time in his beloved London. Boswell no doubt considered this a very important reason. In London he was happier and better than elsewhere. 'I own, Sir, the spirits which I have in London make me do everything with more readiness and vigour. I can talk twice as much in London as anywhere else'; and he considered, no doubt with equal justice, that it had some effects of a different nature: 'In reality it is highly improving to me, considering the company which I enjoy'; and he goes on to say, 'I think it is also for my interest, as in time I may get something.'[1] Ambition was one motive which prompted Boswell to seek a different sphere; he seems to have thought the abilities which were cramped in Scotland and were not appreciated by the Scotch would grow in London to their full stature and be handsomely recognised. In 1777 he talked to Johnson upon the subject of the English Bar: I had long complained to him that I felt myself discontented in Scotland as too narrow a sphere, and that I wished to make my chief residence in London, the great scene of ambition, instruction and amusement: a scene which was to me, comparatively speaking, a heaven upon earth. There were, however, a number of reasons which prevented Boswell from making his home in London till long after this conversation. The possibility of his father's death, which would probably make him the Laird of Auchinleck, was always present to him, and it would be inconvenient as well as expensive to have a separate establishment in London. It was by no means certain, moreover, as Boswell seems to have realised, that there would be much financial gain by the change, and he could not afford to fail at the English Bar; his father as well as Johnson opposed the step, a consideration which would probably in itself have prevented it, from interested motives on Boswell's part if from no others. Boswell, in fact, remained at the Scotch Bar until 1786, when he determined finally, in spite of his position as a Scotch laird, which he had occupied for four years, to try his fortune at Westminster Hall. He had been disappointed of promotion[2] for so long in Scotland that it was time to exercise his talents in a different sphere. The English lawyers, however, seem to have been no more congenial than the Scotchmen, for he speaks of the 'rough scene of the roaring and bantering society of lawyers,' which he is compelled to be with on the Northern Circuit.[3] There is an amusing story recounted by Lord Eldon in his 'Anecdotes' about Boswell at the Lancaster Assizes, which belongs to a period between the years '86 and '88: We found Jemmy Boswell lying upon the pavement--inebriated. We subscribed at supper a guinea for him and half-a-crown for his clerk, and sent him next morning a brief with instructions to move for the writ _Quare adhæsit pavimento_, with observations calculated to induce him to think that it required great learning to explain the necessity of granting it. He sent all round the town to attornies for books, but in vain. He moved, however, for the writ, making the best use he could of the observations in the brief. The judge was astonished and the audience amazed. The judge said, 'I never heard of such a writ--what can it be that adheres pavimento? Are any of you gentlemen at the Bar able to explain this?' The Bar laughed. At last one of them said, 'My Lord, Mr. Boswell last night _adhæsit pavimento_. There was no moving him for some time. At last he was carried to bed, and he has been dreaming about himself and the pavement.' Boswell himself pours out to Temple in plaintive accents the tangled story of a wig lost at Carlisle in 1789, from which we may suspect, as he did himself, another practical joke. 'I suspected a wanton trick, which some people think witty, but I thought it very ill-timed to one in my situation.' We might judge from the manner in which he was treated by his fellow-lawyers that Boswell was not wholly successful at the English Bar. No one can have realised this more keenly than himself. 'I am sadly discouraged,' he writes, 'by having no practice, nor probable prospect of it.... Yet the delusion of Westminster Hall, of brilliant reputation and splendid fortune as a barrister, still weighs upon my imagination. I must be seen in the courts, and must hope for some happy openings in causes of importance. The Chancellor, as you observe, has not done as I expected; but why did I expect it?' Later in the same year, 1789, he exclaims: 'O Temple! Temple! is this realising any of the towering hopes which have so often been the subject of our conversations and letters?' It is pathetic to see him clinging still to the old hopes and ideals, when his real title to fame lay near at hand in his Johnsonian stores, so much thought of, and yet so little valued beside the great world of practical affairs. There were no doubt some special reasons, connected with his attitude towards the law itself, which may account in a large degree for Boswell's failure at the Bar. We have mentioned already the aversion which Boswell had for the society of lawyers. This in itself was likely to be a hindrance in his legal career; but it is only the result of the general unfittedness of Boswell for the Bar. He was not unwilling, when his plan of being a soldier had been abandoned, to enter upon a legal career; it would offer the kind of opportunities for distinction which he wanted. Possibly he was attracted too by the formalism of the Courts; one may suppose that the mere wearing of a wig and gown would give him pleasure. But the mind of Boswell was entirely unlegal. He had no capacity for estimating the value of evidence, and was readily convinced by a plausible story. He applied to his work rather the common sense of the layman (being actually advised very often by Johnson, who knew nothing of Scotch law) than the exact reasoning required by his profession. And though Boswell could apply himself at times with continued effort to any work which he particularly wanted to do, the dislike which he had for his legal studies made him tire of them so soon that he never knew very much about any body of laws. 'Mr. Boswell,' says Malone, 'professed the Scotch and the English Law; but had never taken very great pains on the subject. His father, Lord Auchinleck, told him one day that it would cost him more trouble to hide his ignorance in these professions than to show his knowledge. This Boswell owned he had found to be true.'[4] Boswell himself wrote to Temple on the subject of his chances of success at the English Bar: 'To confess fairly to you, my friend, I am afraid that, were I to be tried, I should be found so deficient in the forms, the _quirks_ and _quiddities_ which early habit acquires, that I should expose myself.' Boswell, moreover, had never the reputation which is suitable for a legal man. The sober citizen does not choose either the adventurer or the _littérateur_ to plead his cause before a jury. His connections with actors, who were disapproved as a class by the respectable community, told against Boswell in legal circles. And worst of all was the tour in the Hebrides with the avowed enemy of Scotland. Boswell, besides, acquired a reputation for eccentricity which must have been fatal to the chances of a barrister. One habit, that of attending executions, deserves a closer examination; by this behaviour Boswell made himself conspicuous in a wholly unprofessional attitude, which must have been extremely damaging to his position as a lawyer. 'I must confess,' he writes, 'that I myself am never absent from a public execution.... When I first attended them I was shocked to the greatest degree. I was in a manner convulsed with pity and terror, and for several days, but especially nights after, I was in a very dismal situation.' The object in the first place seems then to have been the mere indulgence of morbid sentiment; but later he continued the habit more out of curiosity and as an inherent part of his whole study of Man. I can now see one with great composure. I can account for this curiosity in a philosophical manner, when I consider that death is the most awful object before every man who ever directs his thoughts seriously towards futurity. Therefore it is that I feel an irresistible impulse to be present at every execution, as I there behold the various effects of the near approach of death. In accordance with this practice Boswell accompanied a celebrated criminal, Hackman, in the prison coach to the gibbet; and he made the acquaintance of the murderess Mrs. Rudd. The latter apparently was an interesting woman. Johnson entirely approved Boswell's conduct, and said he would have done the same himself if he had not been afraid that his presence would be reported in the newspapers. It is interesting to note that Boswell had scruples, and wrote to Temple: 'Perhaps the adventure with Mrs. Rudd is very foolish notwithstanding the approbation of Dr. Johnson.' On one occasion Boswell persuaded Sir Joshua Reynolds to go with him, and evidently won him over to his view about the question of propriety: 'I am obliged to you,' wrote Sir Joshua, 'for carrying me yesterday to see the execution at Newgate of the five malefactors. I am convinced it is a vulgar error in the opinion that it is so terrible a spectacle, or that it in any way implies a hardness of heart or cruelty of disposition.' Sir Walter Scott gives a kinder motive on Boswell's part than mere curiosity: He used to visit the prisoners on the day before execution, with the singular wish to make the condemned wretches laugh by dint of buffoonery, in which he not infrequently succeeded. The satisfaction which Boswell had from these strange interviews was no doubt in part the commendable satisfaction of being kind and good; and his piety as well as his jesting may have been a comfort to many of these criminals in their last hours. It was also a pleasure to Boswell to read his name in the newspaper on the day following an execution. But probably this conduct did not earn the praises of the Scotch lawyers nor inspire the confidence of the litigating public. * * * * * The failure which attended Boswell's legal career included also his political schemes. It is clear that Boswell had an idea of some kind of Parliamentary career. His ambition was to be a Minister: He [Hume] says there will in all probability be a change of the Ministry soon, which he regrets. Oh Temple, while they change so often, how does one feel an ambition to have a share in that great department; but I fear my wish to be a man of consequence in the State is much like some of your ambitious sallies. Boswell, if he was ambitious in 1775 of some high office in the State, can certainly have had little chance, as he evidently realised, of being immediately satisfied. His financial difficulties alone would have prevented this. But when in 1782 he became the Laird of Auchinleck the increase of his importance seemed to warrant some more definite plan. 'I wish much to be in Parliament, Sir,' he said to Johnson; and though the latter discouraged him he applied himself with energy to his political schemes. Boswell had two plans by which he hoped to become a member of Parliament. He hoped in the first place that the influence of Lord Lonsdale[5] would procure him a seat. This patron seems to have shown a disposition to be friendly. In the summer of 1786, Boswell received from Bishop Percy, who had formerly been at Carlisle and knew Lord Lonsdale, a most encouraging letter: You are now connected with a nobleman [Lord Lonsdale] who serves his friends with a zeal and spirit which I hope will be attended with the happiest consequences to your establishment in England. I also anticipate his bringing you into the House of Commons, as an event no less certain and splendid to your fortunes. Early in 1788[6] Lord Lonsdale appointed Boswell Recorder of Carlisle. This was not an important post, but it was doubtless a sign of favour. Bishop Percy wrote warm congratulations; and Boswell was no doubt encouraged to hope for more. Lord Lonsdale, however, would appear to have lost interest in Boswell: he procured no seat in Parliament for his friend, and some years later behaved so insolently that Boswell broke the connection.[7] Boswell's second plan was to represent his county. Even in Ayrshire he was not altogether independent of Lord Lonsdale, but he relied chiefly upon his own position as head of an old county family. With this project in view, he engaged himself in various activities. The most remarkable of these were his 'Letters to the People of Scotland,' the first dated 1783 and the second 1785. In these two pamphlets Boswell displayed abundantly to his countrymen his ardent patriotism and zealous Tory principles. In 1784 he took part in a Tory demonstration at York; and in his county he issued 'An Address to the Real Freeholders of the County of Ayr,' stating his willingness to be their representative, and his qualifications for that position.[8] He also carried an address to his Majesty--'it was most graciously received, and Mr. Boswell had afterwards the honour to kiss his Majesty's hand.'[9] In 1789 he was again very busy electioneering, though he seems to have realised that his chance of success was very small.[10] He carried an address to the Prince of Wales. I am carrying it up, to be presented by the Earl of Eglintoun, accompanied by such Justices of us as may be in London. This will add something to my 'conspicuousness.' Will that word do?[11] The word seems to do very well. Boswell writes later: The Prince of Wales has received our Address most graciously, and I am to be presented to his Royal Highness, who desired it might be signified that he regretted Mr. Boswell was gone from town.[12] But this would seem to be the final achievement of Boswell's political career, for he was not successful in the General Election, and we hear no more in the 'Letters' of political schemes. Beyond any special reasons which there may be for the failure of Boswell in his legal career, there is a more general cause for all his disappointment. We must remember that Boswell throughout his life was, like many men in the eighteenth century less gifted than himself, a thorough-going place-hunter. He hoped even in his early life for some advantages through his great patrons, Lord Somerville,[13] Sir David Dalrymple,[14] Lord Eglintoun,[13] Lord Mount Stuart,[15] Sir Andrew Mitchell[16]; he had obtained by their means a number of introductions. The ardour with which he pursued the acquaintance of the great must have been prompted in some degree by an interested expectation, and we may suppose that from the friendship of Chatham, which he was so eager to cultivate, he had flattered himself with a hope of political advancement, a hope of fulfilling the dreams that he had dreamt, with Temple, in University days, of their future greatness. They were but vague hopes in those early years, since he could hardly have expected an immediate recognition of his particular services. But Boswell when he grew older attached himself more definitely to particular patrons. There are a number of names--Lord Pembroke, Lord Lisburne, Lord Lonsdale, Burke, Dundas.[17] To these in turn he seems to have pinned his faith and almost to have expected some promotion to have fallen upon him. And from all his great acquaintances he was to get but one poor post, the Recordership of Carlisle. We can hardly be surprised from what we have seen already of Boswell's methods of approaching his patrons that he had no great success in these schemes of advancement. We have quoted already a letter to Chatham, which was designed to impress that Minister with the fact that he was a rising young man, and to solicit his favour. There is another letter of a later date[18] intended to further his acquaintance with Burke. The great orator might have one day at his disposal some Government posts; his memory must not be allowed to lapse: Dear Sir,--Upon my honour I began a letter to you some time ago, and did not finish it, because I imagined you were then near your apotheosis--as poor Goldsmith said upon a former occasion, when he thought your party was coming into administration; and being one of your old barons of Scotland, my pride could not brook the appearance of paying my court to a Minister, amongst the crowd of interested expectants on his accession. Certainly if one wishes to obtain a post it is better to avoid the 'crowd of interested expectants.' The 'old baron' too is an excellent card to play to one who is not of the aristocratic circles; few men are free from the taint of snobbishness, and patronage may be courted by cultivating disinterested friendship. It is well at the same time to remember _Qui s'excuse s'accuse_. 'At present,' Boswell continues, 'I take it for granted that I need be under no such apprehension, and, therefore, I resume the indulgence of my inclination.' Only one who was really interested and wished to conceal the fact could be so careful. Boswell realises that there is something rather odd about the explanation. It may not after all be entirely wise. It is possible that men rather like it to be thought that they have much patronage, and find some pleasure in being asked for favours. 'This may be, perhaps, a singular method of beginning a correspondence; and, in one sense may not be very complimentative. But I can sincerely assure you, my dear Sir, that it is a genuine compliment to Mr. Burke himself.' The explanation of how it is a compliment is now to follow, but the desire for self-excuse obtrudes itself again: 'It is generally thought no meanness to solicit the notice and favour of a man in power, and, surely, it is much less a meanness to endeavour, by honest means, to have the honour and pleasure of being on an agreeable footing with a superior man of knowledge, abilities and genius.' A further excuse is furnished by the favours shown to Boswell in the past by Mr. Burke himself: I have to thank you for the obligation which you have already conferred upon me, by the welcome which I have, upon repeated occasions, experienced under your roof. When I was last in London, you gave me a general invitation, which I value more than a treasury warrant: an invitation to the 'feast of reason'; and what I like still more, the 'flow of the soul,' which you dispense with liberal and elegant abundance, is, in my estimation, a privilege of enjoying certain felicity. The comparison between the places that come of courting a patron and this sublime 'felicity' that comes of friendship must still be maintained--'and we know that riches and honour are desirable only as a means of felicity, and that they often fail of the end.' It is necessary now to give an account of his political opinions, so that Mr. Burke may be assured that Mr. Boswell is his supporter: Most heartily do I rejoice that our present Ministers have, at last, yielded to conciliation. For amidst all the sanguinary zeal of my countrymen I have professed myself a friend to our fellow-subjects in America, so far as they claim an exemption from being taxed by the representatives of the King's British subjects. I do not perfectly agree with you; for I deny the Declaratory Act; and I am a warm Tory, in its true constitutional sense. It will be noticed that the assertion of independence adds to this declaration a considerable degree of importance. After so careful a preparation the real point of the letter may be disclosed: I wish I were a Commissioner, or one of the Secretaries of the Commission, for the grand treaty. I am to be in London this spring, and if His Majesty should ask me what I would choose, my answer will be, to assist at the compact between Britain and America. The letter to Burke is only less absurd than the letter to Chatham, which was quoted above. What most surprises us is not the vanity of the young man who confided to Chatham his hopes and prospects, nor his impudence in asking a Minister to favour him with a letter and in bothering Burke with his political opinions, but the entire ignorance displayed by a man of intelligence about the kind of impression that letters such as these would produce upon their recipients. Boswell indeed as we have said--and it is a sufficient reason to account for his failure--was a fool. It is this ignorance of the minds of others about oneself, a certain simplicity of character, an unquestioning, childlike self-confidence, that makes fools of men. No fool would wish to be thought foolish, and if a fool were to understand what was thought about him he would soon alter his behaviour. His foolishness depends upon the fact that in this respect he has no imagination. The ignorance of Boswell about the effect of his behaviour is the more remarkable because he was in many ways intelligent, sagacious, and extremely observant. It was not a quality which vanished with maturity, though it was slightly modified in later years: he was nearly fifty when he wrote to Temple an account of his attempts to enlist the patronage of Pitt (the younger), which shows how completely he misunderstood the whole situation: It is utter folly in Pitt not to reward and attach to his administration a man of my popular and pleasant talents, whose merit he has acknowledged in a letter under his own hand. He did not answer several letters, which I wrote at intervals, requesting to wait upon him; I lately wrote to him that such behaviour to me was certainly not generous. 'I think it is not just, and (forgive the freedom) I doubt if it be wise. If I do not hear from you in ten days, I shall conclude that you are resolved to have no farther communication with me; for I assure you, Sir, I am extremely unwilling to give you, or indeed myself, unnecessary trouble.' About two months have elapsed, and he has made no sign. And it was an ignorance which included even his own father: I have answered him in my own style: I will be myself.... Would you not be pleased to see your son happy in independence, cultivating his little farm and ornamenting his nuptial villa, and filling himself one day, as well as possible, the place of a much greater man? Temple, would you not like such a son? Would you not feel a glow of parental joy? I know you would; and yet my worthy father writes to me in the manner you see, with that Scots strength of sarcasm which is peculiar to a North Briton. But he is offended with that fire which you and I cherish as the essence of our soul; and how can I make him happy?[19] But if all fools are alike in so far as they have this common foundation upon which the flimsy fabric of folly is erected, yet they differ widely in the manner of their foolishness. To say that a man is a fool is to say but little of all that is meant by the expression in his individual case. Boswell was a fool in a number of ways which we shall now have to consider. The extract of Boswell's letter to his father which we have quoted above in his letter to Temple is typical of one phase of all his foolishness. The impulse which made him write in this place about 'cultivating his little farm and ornamenting his nuptial villa' is one which he frequently had. It is difficult to find a name which exactly fits it. It is the melodramatic instinct applied to real life. The words which he uses in this case contain a sentiment beyond the mere facts they represent; and it is a false sentiment--false not because he did not feel it, but because there was no occasion for it; sentiment is wasted. In Boswell there was a sentimental side to the affectation that we have already spoken of as having been partially cured by Johnson. It is not meant, by this expression, that Boswell consciously assumed sentiment which he did not feel: we cannot always tell whether he was conscious or not; and it does not matter. Affectation implies only the presence of what is unreal; it is concerned as much with the feeling of what is false as with falsely pretending to feel. Perhaps the most remarkable of Boswell's extravagant utterances are those to Temple on the subject of their friendship. He idealises this to suit his conception of the most perfect of human relationships, and frequently alludes to it. 'May indulgent Heaven grant a continuance of our friendship! As our minds improve in knowledge, may the sacred flame still increase, until at last we reach the glorious world above, when we shall never be separated, but enjoy an everlasting society of bliss!' He was able to enjoy the 'luxury of philosophy and friendship,' and 'invaluable hours of elegant friendship and classical sociality,' and 'calmly smile' in consequence 'at the attacks of envy or of malevolence.' Temple, 'whose kind and amiable counsel never failed to soothe my dejected mind,' was told to 'reflect, my friend, that you have sure comfort, you have true friends--you have Nichols and Boswell, whom you may look upon as parts of yourself. Consider this as an exalted comfort which few enjoy, although they have many of the shining gifts of fortune.' He seems at one moment to have suspected that he might grow cold in his affection: I am a quick fire, but I know not if I last sufficiently, though, surely, my dear Temple, there is always a warm place for you. With many people I have compared myself to a taper, which can light up a great and lasting fire though itself is soon extinguished. The friendship, indeed, was of the greatest value to Boswell; as we see, behind his absurd manner of expressing it, it must have been a comfort to him in many disappointments: When harassed and fretted with Court of Sessions business, when vexed to think myself a coarse labourer in an obscure corner, I get into good humour again by recollecting that I am Temple's most intimate friend.[20] His friendship with Mrs. Stuart is treated in the same manner: We talked with unreserved freedom, as we had nothing to fear; we were philosophical, upon honour,--not deep, but feeling; we were pious, we drank tea and bid each other adieu as finely as romance paints. She is my wife's dearest friend, so you see how beautiful our intimacy is.[21] The romantic sphere into which Boswell elevated these friendships contrasts very strangely with his acute analysis to Johnson of his true sentiments: 'The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef.' One would suspect that the feeling of friendship with him was, as he might have expressed it himself, like a balloon, which rises higher and higher as it is more blown out with gas. In the same fashion he believed that his life was, 'one of the most romantic' he knew of;[22] that Temple's 'soft admonitions would at any time calm the tempests of his soul,'[23] and that he could 'retire into the calm regions of philosophy' and contemplate the 'heroism' which he was able to see in his conduct towards his father.[24] Philosophy, indeed, had a great attraction for him. It was in the bower of philosophy that many of his best hours were filled with that noble admiration which his disinterested soul was able to enjoy for the character of Lord Chatham. In early years he was Temple's philosophic friend, and Paoli is told that 'with a mind naturally inclined to melancholy and a deep desire of inquiry, I have intensely applied myself to metaphysical researches.' The affectation or extravagance of Boswell appears also from time to time in his pious and moral remarks. Being in a frame of mind which I hope, for the felicity of human nature, many experience--in fine weather--at the country house of a friend--consoled and elevated by pious exercises--I expressed myself with an unrestrained fervour to my 'Guide, Philosopher and Friend': 'My dear Sir, I could fain be a good man; and I am very good now. I fear God and honour the king, I wish to do no ill, and to be benevolent to all mankind.'[25] Boswell was very impressionable, by his own account, to good influences. He rose from reading a dialogue of Hume's 'happier and more disposed to follow virtue.'[26] Relating how Mr. Edward Dilly repeated on his death-bed a passage from Young's 'Night Thoughts'--'Death, a subterraneous road to bliss,' or some such words--Boswell remarks: 'I am edified here.'[27] The greatest triumph, one would suppose, of this nature was when, as he says, speaking of his 'moral fences,' 'Reason, that steady builder and overseer, has set them firm.'[28] Boswell was excellent too at giving moral advice: 'It is certainly true philosophy to submit to the will of Heaven, and to fulfil the amiable duties of morality.'[29] 'Read Epictetus,'[30] he writes to Temple; on another occasion, 'Read Johnson. Let a manly and firm philosophy brace your mind.' Boswell, however, though he was continually posing, posed not for others but for himself. He had an insatiable greed of sensation. He derived prodigious pleasure from the view of himself in a situation. 'I cannot resist,' he says, 'the serious pleasure of writing to Mr. Johnson from the tomb of Melancthon. My paper rests upon the tomb of that great and good man.' While he wrote the letter he admired the scene he had arranged. He admired himself playing every kind of _rôle_; he could be the grave author, or the romantic lover, the scholar of 'solid learning' or the elegant man of the world, the sage counsellor or the jolly good fellow, the enthusiast for liberty who talked heroics with Paoli and politics with Chatham, explorer and diplomat, the feudal lord or the humble paterfamilias of a rustic domesticity; he could be literary, theological, pious, philosophical, legal, or political, as occasion suited, with profound enjoyment of the part he was acting. He delighted in the solemnity of a vow, and even had a taste for the solitude of a hermit: 'Sometimes,' he exclaims, 'I have been in the humour of wishing to retire to a desert.' His gust for London was the same gust for sensation; and his pursuit of distinguished men was partly for the sake of an added zest and excitement from their company. 'You can almost see him,' says Lionel Johnson, 'reckoning up, as it were, on his plump fingers, his eminent acquaintances, the cities and courts he has visited, his writings and flirtations and experiences in general: they are his treasures and his triumphs. The acquisition of Johnson was but the greatest of them all, his crowning achievement; all his life was devoted to social _coups d'état_. To hear service in an Anglican cathedral, to attend an exceptionally choice murderer to the gallows; to contrive a meeting between Johnson and Wilkes;... to pray among the ruins of Iona, and to run away for fear of ghosts; to turn Roman Catholic, and immediately to run away with an actress: each and all of these performances were to him sensational, enlivening, vivid.' Boswell was not unaware of this extravagance in his temperament. He alludes to his 'warm imagination.' In 'Boswelliana,' pleased at having found 'a good image,' he records: There have been many people who built castles in the air; but, I believe, I am the first who ever attempted to live in them. By castles in the air, he means not only glorious plans for the future, but the sensational and emotional in common incidents. A moment during the 'Tour to the Hebrides' reveals the whole of what he meant: I can never forget the impression made upon my fancy by some of the ladies' maids tripping about in neat morning dresses. After seeing for a long time little but rusticity, their lively appearance pleased me so much that I thought for a moment I could have been a knight-errant for them. A knight-errant for a couple of Scotch maids! A preposterous fancy! But none the less it is Boswell. It would be too large a task to deal here with all the recorded affectation or extravagance of Boswell. But we must not omit to mention one particular phase of it. Consciously or unconsciously, Boswell in some degree imitated Dr. Johnson--precisely in what degree it is difficult to determine. The influence which Johnson had upon his faithful follower has been discussed already. This must be carefully distinguished from the imitation in question now; for an influence is something acquired from the manner and mind of another, assimilated and reproduced, not as original but as genuine; an imitation is, as it were, a garment put on, an adornment of the outward person, reflecting no true sentiment within. Though Johnson had a real moral influence upon Boswell, some of his remarks, and especially some of the pious exclamations, such as those we have quoted, were of the latter kind. We find passages in the 'Life' when Boswell makes truly Johnsonian remarks; as on the occasion when, in a discussion about the freedom of the will, Dr. Mayo alluded to the distinction between moral and physical necessity, and Boswell replied: 'Alas! Sir, they come both to the same thing. You may be bound as hard by chains when covered by leather, as when the iron appears'; or when he said in answer to Dr. Johnson's remark that he had _downed_ Dr. Robertson with the King of Prussia, 'Yes, Sir, you threw a _bottle_ at his head.' When actually in his presence, it is clear from Fanny Burney's account that Boswell imitated Dr. Johnson: He had an odd mock-solemnity of tone and manner that he had acquired imperceptibly from constantly thinking of and imitating Dr. Johnson, whose own solemnity, nevertheless, far from mock, was the result of pensive rumination. There was, also, something slouching in the gait and dress of Mr. Boswell that wore an air, ridiculously enough, of purporting to personify the same model. His clothes were always too large for him; his hair, or wig, was constantly in a state of negligence; and he never for a moment sat still or upright upon a chair. Every look and movement displayed either intentional or voluntary imitation. Yet certainly it was not meant for caricature, for his heart, almost even to idolatry, was in his reverence for Dr. Johnson.[31] It is a curious and striking picture, and we may gather that there was always something odd and laughable, and yet rather lamentable, about Boswell's appearance. The effect of imitation he seems sometimes half-conscious of producing, from the care with which he accentuates in the 'Life' and the 'Tour' any point of difference between Dr. Johnson and himself. But it must be remembered that Miss Burney's account is an account of particular circumstances--the company was a large one, and not an inner circle of more intimate friends of Boswell and Johnson. We have no reason to suppose that Boswell's behaviour, particularly his behaviour apart from Dr. Johnson, was greatly affected by this strange homage to his friend. It is clear in any case that affectation, however much it may have taken a Johnsonian form, was fundamental in Boswell's character; for we can see it plainly before the date of that eventful meeting. Johnson indeed had a marked aversion from the kind of sentimentality which Boswell frequently indulged in, and there is in it something which could not possibly have been the effect of imitating Dr. Johnson. How very far removed from anything which Johnson could have done is the absurd conduct of Boswell (the best instance, perhaps, of this kind of affectation in him) when he visited Mr. Ireland and saw the fraudulent Shakespeare papers: On the arrival of Mr. Boswell, the papers were as usual placed before him, when he commenced his examination of them; and being satisfied as to their antiquity, as far as the external appearance would attest, he proceeded to examine the style of the language from the fair transcripts made from the disguised handwriting. In this research Mr. Boswell continued for a considerable length of time, constantly speaking in favour of the internal as well as external proofs of the validity of the manuscripts. At length, finding himself rather thirsty, he requested a tumbler of warm brandy and water; which having nearly finished, he then redoubled his praises of the manuscripts; and at length, arising from his chair, he made use of the following expression: 'Well, I shall now die contented, since I have lived to witness the present day.' Mr. Boswell then, kneeling down before the volume containing a portion of the papers, continued, 'I now kiss the invaluable relics of our bard: and thanks to God that I have lived to see them!' Having kissed the volume with every token of reverence, Mr. Boswell shortly after quitted Mr. Ireland's house.[32] However absurd the behaviour of Boswell in the _rôle_ of a man of letters may seem to us when we understand the feelings which prompted it, it is doubtful whether it would have been sufficient alone to give him the reputation of a fool. Extravagance of this kind is not very commonly condemned if it is not seen to be insincere, and though it is easy enough for us who are in possession of all the records of his life to see the imposture, it must have been more difficult for those who knew Boswell to have a real interest in literature, and to be already a man of letters, to understand that he was posing as the literary man. His acquaintance would more readily have called him a fool on account of his vanity. We have all at bottom in some degree the love of self, and vanity is the expression we apply to it when it causes us in some way to lose our sense of proportion, to see things, as it were, in a false perspective. Self-love becomes vanity when we love ourselves undeservedly, or when it makes necessary to us the approbation of others. Usually when it has one effect it has also the other. But Boswell was vain, not, like many people, of qualities which he did not possess, or which, if he did possess them, were no cause for self-congratulation, but because he had an uncontrollable desire that everyone else should know about his success and share his wonder and admiration. It was not so much that he exaggerated his importance, though he did that sometimes, as that he exaggerated the importance to other people of his importance. He not only desired their applause as well as his own, but assumed, with his curious ignorance of the mind of others in matters which concerned himself, that what interested him would naturally interest them. It was vanity of this kind which, more than anything else, made a fool of Boswell. The insatiable desire to be conspicuous which made him as a young man publish what he must have known to be worthless, appear at the Shakespeare Jubilee as Corsican Boswell, and insert notices of his movements in the papers,[33] did not diminish as one might expect with maturity, but rather grew with his years. There is nothing which he wrote so egotistical and vain as some passages in those most serious documents which he addressed to the 'People of Scotland upon the State of the Nation' and to which were pinned his hopes of political honour. In the letter of 1783 he says of himself: 'For my own part, I should claim no credit, did I not flatter myself that I practise what I now presume to recommend. I have mentioned former circumstances, perhaps of too much egotism, to show that I am no time server; and at this moment, friends to whom I am attached by affection, gratitude, and interest, are zealous for the measure which I deem so alarming. Let me add that a dismission of the Portland administration will probably disappoint an object which I have most ardently at heart. The second letter alludes to the former one as though it had almost created a revolution, and manages in the same sentence to remind his readers that he had the approval of Pitt and was himself descended from an old Scotch family: I had the happiness to find my letter received not only with indulgence, but with a generous warmth of heart I can never forget, but to the latest moment of my life shall most gratefully remember. The fire of loyalty was kindled. It flew through our counties and our boroughs. The King was addressed: the Constitution was saved. I was proud to have been able thus _ciere viros_; prouder still than of receiving the applause of the _Minister of the Crown_, which he was pleased to convey to me in a very handsome letter; upon which, however, I set a high value, considering not only the Minister, but the man; and accordingly it shall be preserved in the archives of my family. In the same pamphlet Boswell refers to his wife's aristocratic connections, and intrudes an assertion of his domestic felicity which could have no bearing on the political theme. He wishes to appear as 'the friend of Lord Eglintoun': Amongst those friends I myself am one of the warmest, both as an enthusiast for ancient feudal attachments, and as having the honour and happiness to be married to his Lordship's relation, a true Montgomerie, whom I esteem, after fifteen years, as on the day when she gave me her hand. This declaration satisfied in some strange manner a personal vanity, and was also no doubt intended to enlist the support of his Lordship. But by far the most remarkable story of Boswell's absurdities is one told by John Taylor, editor of the _Sun_, about his behaviour at a public dinner: I remember dining with him at Guildhall in 1785, when Alderman Boydell gave his grand civic festival on being raised to the mayoralty. Mr. Pitt honoured the table on that occasion with his presence, and, when the company removed to a room, in a short time Mr. Boswell contrived to be asked to favour the company with a song. He declared his readiness to comply, but first delivered a short preface, in which he observed that it had been his good fortune to be introduced to several of the potentates and most of the great characters of Europe, but with all his endeavours he had never been successful in obtaining an introduction to a gentleman who was an honour to his country, and whose talents he held in the highest esteem and admiration. It was evident to all the company that Mr. Boswell alluded to Mr. Pitt, who sat with all the dignified silence of a marble statue, though, indeed, in such a situation he could not but take the reference to himself. Mr. Boswell then sang a song of his own composition, which was a parody on Dibdin's 'Sweet Little Cherub,' under the title of 'A Grocer of London,' which rendered the reference to Mr. Pitt too evident to be mistaken, as the great minister was then a member of the Grocers' Company. This song Mr. Boswell, partly volunteering and partly pressed by the company, sang at least six times, insomuch that Mr. Pitt was obliged to relax from his gravity and join in the general laugh at the oddity of Mr. Boswell's character.[34] The value of this tale as evidence of Boswell's behaviour and character depends in some degree upon the extent of his potations. Though he may have had the audacity to do such things when in a normal condition, it must have been easier to do them when tipsy. It may be judged, from the continuation of Dr. Taylor's story, that a part of Boswell's confidence in the presence of Mr. Pitt was due to the festivity of the occasion: Boswell and I came away together, both in so convivial a mood that we roared out all the way 'The Grocer of London,' till we reached Hatton Garden, where I then resided, to the annoyance of many watchmen whom we roused from their peaceful slumbers, without, however, being taken into custody for disturbing their repose.... I met him the next day about twelve o'clock near St. Dunstan's Church, as fresh as a rose. Fitzgerald, after quoting this account of the mayoralty dinner, continues: This ludicrous exhibition was much talked of and laughed at. To heighten the absurdity, his Liberal friends affected to be shocked at his want of principle, in singing praises of the 'Grocer,' whom he had been heard to abuse. They were enchanted to find him rise to the bait, and thus vindicate himself: 'Pray let them know that I am vain of a hasty composition which has procured me large draughts of the popular applause in which I delight. Let me add that there was certainly no servility on my part, for I publicly declared in Guildhall, between the encores, "that this same Grocer had treated me arrogantly and ungratefully, but that, from his great merit as a minister, I was compelled to support him." The time will come when I shall have a riper opportunity to show, that in one instance, at least, the man has wanted wisdom.' He goes on to explain that Boswell gained a good deal of notoriety from the escapade, which was alluded to in a popular satirical poem of the time. It is easy indeed to understand the motives of Boswell. His childish and unrestrained love of merriment, his insatiable desire to be the wag and the buffoon, enabled him to give vent in the most mirthful fashion to his passion for self-advertisement, to explain how he had been honoured by the attention of kings and how he intended to have an introduction to the great Minister; and with all this he retained a certain fundamental honesty about himself, so that he was compelled to exclaim between the encores 'that this same Minister had treated me arrogantly and ungratefully.' He understood so little what was the opinion of the company about him that he seems to have believed that he was recommending himself to a patron, and he was so vain that he was undoubtedly proud of what must have been an absurd composition. Boswell indeed was very fond of writing humorous verse.[35] The instinct in him was the natural result of his animal spirits; the need to be laughing, which he felt so strongly at most times when he was not depressed and melancholy, fixed upon the smallest objects as suitable for his wit, and he was satisfied only by some form of expression. The reason that he collected in his commonplace-book a number of 'good things,' as he would call them, is not so much that he was proud of his own sayings (for those of others are also treasured) or that he wished to preserve them for posterity, though both these feelings were present, as that his huge enjoyment of anything witty must be recorded to be satisfied. It is remarkable, when we recollect what a large sense of humour he had, that many of his verses and of his jokes should be so dull and colourless. But the faculty for appreciating what is amusing is very different from the capacity for originating it. It is the difference between humour and wit. The latter involves the power of expression; and a man may as easily be full of humour, without making a joke, as he may be by nature a poet without ever writing a line of good poetry. Boswell had some wit, but not very much--far less than anyone would imagine merely from reading the 'Life' or the 'Tour.' His position perhaps is not unlike that of several poets who have written some stanzas and stray lines of a rare beauty, and are none the less poets because they have written also much that seems quite unpoetical. A specimen of Boswell's humorous verse is printed in the 'Life.' He had dined one evening at Lord Montrose's and afterwards went to Miss Monckton's, where 'a great number of persons of the first rank' were assembled, in a state of improper elevation. 'Next day,' says Boswell, 'I endeavoured to give what had happened the most ingenious turn I could, by the following verses: Not that with th' excellent Montrose I had the happiness to dine; Not that I late from table rose, From Graham's wit, from generous wine. It was not these alone which led On sacred manners to encroach; And made me feel what most I dread, Johnson's just frown, and self-reproach. But when I entered, not abash'd, From your bright eyes were shot such rays, At once intoxication flash'd, And all my frame was in a blaze: But not a brilliant blaze I own, Of the dull smoke I'm yet asham'd; I was a dreary ruin grown, And not enlighten'd though enflam'd. Victim at once to wine and love, I hope, Maria, you'll forgive; While I invoke the powers above, That henceforth I may wiser live. Certainly this is amusing in some degree, and amusing too in an original way; but much of it is mere rhyming without any sort of wit. Boswell could be as banal as anyone. An ode ('Horatian Ode,' he calls it) to Charles Dilly, which is chiefly concerned with one Dr. Lettsom, frequently the host of both Boswell and Dilly, exhibits the author of humorous verse at his worst; it will be enough to quote one stanza: And guests has he in ev'ry degree Of decent estimation. His liberal mind holds all mankind, As an extended nation. Boswell's _mots_ are of a common eighteenth-century type. The turn of phrase admired by both Johnson and Boswell and most of their contemporaries was the image. In 'Boswelliana' is a story of Boswell's introduction to Scotch lawyers: 'Boswell had a great aversion to the law, but forced himself to enter upon that laborious profession in compliance with the anxious desire of his father, for whom he had the greatest regard. After putting on the gown he said with great good humour to his brother advocates, 'Gentlemen, I am prest into the service here; but I have observed that a prest man, either by sea or land, after a little time does just as well as a volunteer.' That is Boswell at his best. Here is another specimen of Boswell's wit: 'A modern man of taste found fault with the avenues at Auchinleck, and said he wished to see straggling trees. 'I wish,' said Boswell, 'I could see straggling fools in this world.' That is Boswell at his worst. Why a man who had so much natural humour as Boswell had should have failed so completely to discriminate when his own wit was in question must remain as much a problem to us as is the failure of many a poet to criticise his own writings--the explanation may be perhaps that it requires some special effort of the mind which can but rarely be made and which is impossible after the moment of composition. Boswell certainly seems to have had a high opinion of his efforts to be witty; his verses to Miss Monckton are inserted in the 'Life' with evident pride, and without any excuse of some connection with Johnson such as he usually makes when alluding to his own performances, and he seems frequently to have sung the songs which he composed, obtaining, no doubt, in this way the 'conspicuousness' which he desired.[36] The enjoyment which Boswell had in public at Stratford and at the mayoralty dinner and in private, no doubt, on many occasions of which unfortunately we have no account, is perhaps best illustrated and best understood from a single sentence of his own in one of the 'Letters to Temple': I was the great man (as we used to say) at the late Drawing-Room, in a suit of imperial blue lined with rose-coloured silk, and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons. For the eagerness which Boswell had to reveal to others anything about himself which he was proud of, and a sort of inevitable obtrusiveness in him, Johnson with his usual shrewdness found an excellent parallel which is faithfully recounted in the 'Life': Once when checking my boasting too frequently of myself in company, he said to me, 'Boswell, you often vaunt so much as to provoke ridicule. You put me in mind of a man who was standing in the kitchen of an inn with his back to the fire, and thus accosted the person next him, "Do you know, sir, who I am?" "No, sir," said the other, "I have not that advantage." "Sir," said he, "I am the _great Twalmley_, who invented the New Floodgate Iron."' Endowed with these qualities of unsuspecting simplicity and open-mouthed vanity, Boswell naturally became, as we have seen, an object of mirth to his fellow-lawyers. When they took away his wig he did indeed half suspect a trick; but how confident and innocent and entirely unsuspicious he is when he boldly pleads for the writ, '_Quare adhaesit pavimento_.' His own story of the storm during the sail to Mull, told in the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' illustrates perhaps better than any other the childish confidence of his conduct. Boswell, though filled with undisguised terror, still ardently wished to play the man and be the hero, and he thought, no doubt, as he stood holding the rope in expectation of the captain's command, that the post assigned to him was one of vital importance. As I saw them all busy doing something, I asked Col, with much earnestness, what I could do. He, with a happy readiness, put into my hand a rope, which was fixed to the top of one of the masts, and told me to hold it till he bade me pull. If I had considered the matter, I might have seen that this could not be of the least service; but his object was to keep me out of the way of those who were busy working the vessel, and at the same time to divert my fear by employing me and making me think that I was of use. Thus did I stand firm to my post, while the wind and rain beat upon me, always expecting a call to pull my rope.' The vanity and simplicity of Boswell no doubt obtruded themselves very frequently in his behaviour; and they caused a certain expansiveness and recklessness of conversation which would be interpreted at once as thoughtless and foolish. We have an admirable glimpse into the kind of atmosphere produced by his talk in a story which he tells of a snub he received from Colman: I was then so impressed with the truth of many of the stories of which I had been told, that I avowed my conviction, saying, 'He is only _willing_ to believe; I _do_ believe. The evidence is enough for me, though not for his great mind. What will not fill a quart bottle will fill a pint bottle. I am filled with belief.' 'Are you?' said Colman, 'then cork it up.'[37] 'His social propensities,' says Sir J. Prior, 'were well known ... he opens his mind so freely that we discover much of what is passing there, even when the disclosure is not meant.'[38] Boswell, indeed, talked very readily even upon the most serious subjects. About morals and religion he was continually questioning Dr. Johnson, and most of all about what to the other was a peculiarly sacred and awful thing, the fear of death. The topics were introduced apparently without any particular reason or fitness, but just as it occurred to Boswell that he might elicit some response from Johnson upon questions about which it was essential to his purpose that he should hear the doctor's views: and they were introduced too not merely in private converse but when a number of people were present. It seems clear that Boswell was sometimes very tactless in leading Johnson to talk; he did not understand that not every company nor every occasion is suitable for the discussion of the most serious matters. He had, too, an unfortunate habit of saying things which were extremely injudicious. He did not even understand altogether what was likely to annoy Dr. Johnson--as on the occasion when he referred to him in company by the name 'Gargantua,' which Johnson had spoken of as having been applied to himself, or when he made what must have been an obvious reference to Johnson's curious clothes: 'Would not _you_, sir, be the better for velvet embroidery?' These remarks were made, it is evident, without any malevolent intention. It would seem that even when he meant to be rude he did not realise all the harm he was doing: Hume was with some justice annoyed when Boswell quoted the phrase of Temple, 'their infidel pensioner, Hume';[39] and it was introduced just as a child might say in some personal argument, 'I know what someone said of _you_'; and Foote can never have felt much friendship for Johnson after he heard that the latter had compared his infidelity to that of a dog.[40] The company in both cases may have been glad to see Boswell defend his friend, but they must have thought him a considerable fool and hardly a harmless one. Nor was it merely from his disregard of what was appropriate that his conversation might be thought foolish, but rather because a man who is very ready to talk of his most intimate thoughts and feelings is usually supposed to be a fool. Boswell certainly had far more candour than most men, and he had also a far greater curiosity and interest in mankind, which made him ready to talk like a child of things about which many men prefer to be silent. But it would seem, too, that though far from incapable of feeling deep emotion he was unaffected where most of us would be touched. 'He was a boy longer than others,' and this perhaps is the explanation. [Footnote 1: _Letters to Temple_, pp. 146-7.] [Footnote 2: _Letters to Temple_, p. 157.] [Footnote 3: _Letters to Temple_, p. 250.] [Footnote 4: _European Magazine_, 1798, p. 376.] [Footnote 5: For an account of Lord Lonsdale _v._ Sir George Trevelyan's _Life of Fox_.] [Footnote 6: Or possibly at the end of 1787--_v._ Nichols' _Illustrations_, vii. 310. The _Dictionary of National Biography_ gives 1790, and Dr. Rogers 1789. But Bishop Percy's letter of congratulation (printed in Nichols) was dated 1788. The year is undoubtedly correct, for it refers to a letter of Boswell's dated Feb. 9, 1788, and in this letter Boswell speaks of the forthcoming publication of Johnson's letters to Mrs. Piozzi, which were published actually in 1788.] [Footnote 7: _Letters to Temple_, pp. 268-9.] [Footnote 8: _Life of Johnson_, iv. 265.] [Footnote 9: Fitzgerald's _Life of Boswell_, II, 16.] [Footnote 10: _Letters to Temple_, p. 244.] [Footnote 11: _Ib._, p. 244.] [Footnote 12: _Ib._, p. 249.] [Footnote 13: _Gentleman's Magazine_, June 1795, and _Nichols' Literary Anecdotes_, ii, pp. 400-2.] [Footnote 14: _Letters to Temple_, p. 29.] [Footnote 15: _Ib._, p. 43.] [Footnote 16: _Ib._, p. 190, and _Tour to Corsica_.] [Footnote 17: _Letters to Temple._] [Footnote 18: March 3, 1778.] [Footnote 19: _Letters to Temple_, p. 88.] [Footnote 20: _Letters to Temple_, p. 162.] [Footnote 21: _Ib._, p. 158.] [Footnote 22: _Ib._, p. 63.] [Footnote 23: _Letters to Temple_, p. 148.] [Footnote 24: _Ib._, p. 4.] [Footnote 25: _Life of Johnson_, iv, 122.] [Footnote 26: _Letters to Temple_, p. 20.] [Footnote 27: _Ib._, p. 195.] [Footnote 28: _Ib._, p. 148.] [Footnote 29: _Ib._, p. 24.] [Footnote 30: _Ib._, p. 127.] [Footnote 31: _Diary of Madame D'Arblay_, i, p. 509.] [Footnote 32: _Ireland's Confessions_, pp. 95-6.] [Footnote 33: Prior's _Life of Goldsmith_, i, 449-50.] [Footnote 34: _Taylor's Records_, vol. i, 89, 90.] [Footnote 35: Fitzgerald's _Life of Boswell_, ii, 73-8.] [Footnote 36: Fitzgerald's _Life of Boswell_, ii, 76.] [Footnote 37: _Life of Johnson_, ii, 318.] [Footnote 38: Prior's _Life of Goldsmith_, i, 452-3.] [Footnote 39: _Letters to Temple_, p. 165.] [Footnote 40: _Life of Johnson_, ii, 95.] CHAPTER VII Nothing in Boswell's life became him so well as his second important publication, 'The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.' The event took place in 1785, not many months after Johnson's death, and less than twelve years after the eventful journey when Johnson was displayed to his biographer's countrymen. The 'Tour' has already been mentioned here as an episode in Boswell's remarkable friendship. It was an episode, besides, in Boswell's life; it decided his destiny. In the year 1785 Boswell was in the midst of his political schemes and ambitions. It was exactly in this period of his life that it was most important for him to win respect. Yet the 'Journal' revealed the whole severity of Johnson's criticisms upon Scotland and the Scotch; Boswell's position among his countrymen was certain to suffer, and did suffer very much by its publication. His candour triumphed by the event. His real self was expressed without compromise, at the expense of the respectable self which he cherished and cultivated. It matters very little how much Boswell foresaw the consequence. Probably he was not altogether unsuspicious, for Malone was at his side, and Malone was a man of the world.[1] In any case he did publish this amazing book, and he published it at a critical time. Just when he seemed to be deserting his genius and drifting into a world that was never intended for him, the vital truth of Boswell proved that it was irrepressible and saved him for Johnson, for himself, and for posterity. * * * * * Johnson and Boswell were typical travellers of the eighteenth century. They went in no romantic spirit to see the beauties of Nature in remote corners of the earth. 'He always said,' reports Boswell of the Doctor, 'that he was not come to Scotland to see fine places, of which there were enough in England, but wild objects, mountains, waterfalls, peculiar manners--in short, things which he had not seen before. I have a notion that he at no time has had much taste for rural beauties. I have myself very little.' This is a clear statement. They looked at 'wild objects' because they were unusual, and eschewed almost entirely scenery of a tamer spirit. They were interested in 'manners.' The Journal bears out this statement. Observations about the people of the country are part of the traveller's stock-in-trade, and they seem even to be one of the _raisons d'être_ of Boswell's book. In the same way the Journal is filled with archæological and historical speculations. Johnson's journey to the Western Islands is far more so, and seems to have been written almost entirely from this point of view. These were the absorbing interests of educated men, and travel was expected to furnish the occasion for 'an ordered series of learned observations.' To be convinced of the paramount importance of these interests in the eighteenth century one has only to glance at the periodicals of the time. But both Johnson and Boswell, especially the latter, had, though they may have been scarcely conscious of the fact, a far more important interest in human nature. The Tour was admirably arranged for its gratification. It consisted for the most part in visits to the gentlemen of the country: the travellers occasionally put up at an inn; but for the most part they took advantage of Highland hospitality. Their conversation therefore would naturally be concerned very much with the qualities of their various hosts. Now Boswell kept an elaborate and strictly diurnal diary of which the most important item was professedly the record of Dr. Johnson's talk. The briefest reflection on the Doctor's manner and the nature of his remarks must therefore reveal at once the character of Boswell's Journal. Assuredly it is an amazing fact that this Journal was published within twelve years of the Tour itself! As we should expect, it is full of observations, many of them condemnatory, about men and women who were still living. 'Nowadays,' says Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, 'we have been regularly trained to personality by what are called the "Society papers," in which the names of private persons as well as their doings are recorded; still it would cause a commotion if the conversation of some leading personage were reported, in which persons still living were described in such fashion as this: "A---- is a poor creature; _he has no bottom_." "B---- is a thorough donkey, talks a good deal of what he _thinks_ to be sense," &c.' One instance will serve to illustrate the tone of Boswell's Journal; it shows perhaps the ultimate point of indiscretion which he reached, but is a fair indication of his manner. One of the gentlemen who entertained the two travellers was Sir Alexander Macdonald: he had not, it appears, a reputation for generosity. The penurious gentleman of our acquaintance, formerly alluded to, afforded us a topick of conversation to-night. Dr. Johnson said I ought to write down a recollection of the instances of his narrowness as they almost exceeded belief. Boswell proceeds to relate a story to the effect that the Highlander gave to an Irish harper a valuable harp-key, because 'he could not find it in his heart to give him any money.' Later, he discovered its value and wished to have it back. _Johnson_: 'I like to see how avarice defeats itself; how when avoiding to part with money the miser gives something more valuable.' Col said the gentleman's relations were angry at his giving away the harp-key, for it had been long in the family. _Johnson_: 'Sir, he values a new guinea more than an old friend.' One can hardly imagine anything more offensive--unless it were the story which follows it: Col also told us that the same person having come up with a serjeant and twenty men, working on the high road, he entered into discourse with the serjeant and then gave him sixpence for the men to drink. The serjeant asked, 'Who is this fellow?' Upon being informed, he said, 'If I had known who it was I should have thrown it in his face.' _Johnson_: '... he has not learnt to be a miser; I believe we must take him apprentice.' _Boswell_: 'He would grudge giving half a guinea to be taught.' _Johnson_: 'Nay, sir, you must teach him _gratis_.' If the 'Tour to the Hebrides' is uniquely indiscreet, it is only the more typical of Boswell. He loved to be in the public eye and he was now notorious beyond measure. The wags laughed, the injured Scotsmen were angry, and the more respectable parts of the community were profoundly shocked. A sheaf of cartoons did justice to the humour of the situation. Lord Macdonald was represented with uplifted stick, and the threatened author on his knees before him.[2] 'Johnson's Ghost' was depicted as appearing to the terror-stricken Boswell and mournfully reproaching him. In a series of twenty large caricatures the biographer was represented in twenty absurd situations, and each sketch had a quotation from his book. Boswell at all events was the first in the field of all who intended to write about Johnson, and no doubt he was glad that all the world was aware of the fact. But Boswell did not mean to be notorious in this fashion. He may have expected some ridicule, but not ill-feeling; he was too good-humoured himself. Possibly he satisfied his malice on more than one occasion; but as a rule he had no intention of giving pain. The admirable Dr. Beattie calls him 'a very good-natured man,' and says he was convinced that Bozzy meant no harm. Sir William Forbes said that he seemed sorry for 'some parts,' and Boswell published his own apology and defence in one of the notes of a later edition: Having found, on a revision of the first edition of this work, that, notwithstanding my best care, a few observations had escaped me, which arose from the instant impression, the publication of which might perhaps be considered as passing the bounds of strict decorum, I immediately ordered that they should be omitted in subsequent editions. I was pleased to find that they did not amount in the whole to a page. If any of the same kind are yet left, it is owing to inadvertence alone, no man being more unwilling to give pain to others than I am. When Boswell says that he is unwilling to give pain we may believe him unreservedly; there may have been particular cases when he lowered himself to the satisfaction of a grudge, but as a general statement it is true. That Boswell was good-natured is incontestable: it is admitted on all hands. 'Good-nature,' wrote Mr. Courtenay, 'was highly predominant in his character. He appeared to entertain sentiments of benevolence to all mankind, and it does not appear to me that he ever did, or could, injure any human being _intentionally_.' Mr. Malone wrote a letter for the _Gentleman's Magazine_ vindicating Boswell's character after his death. 'He had not only an inexhaustible fund of good-humour and good-nature, but was extremely warm in his attachments, and as ready to exert himself for his friends as any man.' His untiring kindness to Johnson might perhaps be refused as evidence that he was 'ready to exert himself for his friends.' Towards Temple and his wife also, from whom he had nothing to gain, 'he always played,' as Mr. Seccombe remarks, 'a very friendly part'; 'he made Johnson known to them, for instance; he took Paoli down to Mamhead, he had Temple up to town and took him and his daughter to Westminster Hall to see the trial of Warren Hastings. He took them more than once to Sir Joshua's studio in Leicester Square, he acted as godfather to one of the sons, and tipped another who was at Eton.' But the most remarkable testimony that Boswell had, as the French say, _le c[oe]ur bon_ is his will. We shall have to pay some attention to this document in a later chapter: it shows that Boswell could be remarkably considerate. Boswell wrote and published the 'Tour' with a greedy enjoyment and uncontained expansiveness entirely typical of him, and in amazing ignorance of some of the strongest human feelings--of the proprietorship that men feel with respect to their own lives which surrounds them with a sacred halo of privacy, and of their inordinate desire to appear more virtuous and more successful than they are. He babbled of himself as he babbled of others, not unconscious of the folly that he committed and revealed, but not suspecting that he would be called a fool for admitting his folly. Truth, as these pages have already remarked, was of supreme importance to Boswell, and was not to be suppressed. He could hardly understand that plain fact could hurt anyone. A pamphleteer who wished to make Boswell ridiculous has suggested his attitude in a picturesque manner: Lord Macdonald is supposed to be threatening personal violence; Walcot writes: Treat with contempt the menace of this Lord. 'Tis Hist'ry's province, Bozzy, to record. There was fundamentally in Boswell's nature a desire to record observations--a desire which overrode his conventional aims and ambitions and, while decreasing the possibility of his being a successful man, made it certain that he would be a great one. All that Boswell meant by truth will be examined later in connection with his biographical method. 'The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides' must be criticised as a book along with the 'Life of Johnson' and not apart from it. It is, in a sense, but a portion of the larger work. The same genius, the same art, has made two incomparable books. The later is more discreet. 'I have been more reserved,' says Boswell. But it is not less vividly life-like: 'I have managed so as to occasion no diminution of the pleasure my book should afford.' The 'Tour,' however--and this is the one important difference--is concerned with Johnson in an extraordinary phase of his life, and one which is not treated in the larger work. Johnson is on a holiday. The journey is called a 'jaunt.' And the atmosphere of the 'jaunt' is reflected on every page of the Journal. The freedom, the expectancy and the high spirits of a travelling holiday to those who very rarely enjoy one, the increased opportunities to Boswell for observation and his unflagging interest and pleasure in his great experiment--all these account, and are sufficient to account, for the different effect we feel in reading the 'Tour to the Hebrides': and most of those who perceive this difference will agree that it is an additional charm. * * * * * During the eight years of Boswell's life between the ages of forty-two and fifty, several important events happened beside the publication of the 'Tour to the Hebrides.' It is unfortunate that for the greater part of this period we have no letters from Boswell to Temple. If there was any correspondence between them, none has been preserved between the dates November 3rd, 1780, and January 5th, 1787. And so we hear no private utterances about the death of Boswell's father, by which he became Laird of Auchinleck, or about the death of Johnson. It is not difficult to imagine the feelings of Boswell about the first event. There can have been no great sorrow as there had been no great affection; and there must have been no little pleasure in becoming the head of an ancient family and a man of property. It is a sad thing if the records of this period have indeed been lost, for they ought to have been peculiarly rich in extravagant and pompous sayings. Of Johnson's value to Boswell we have already spoken. It would be impossible to suppose that Boswell did not realise his loss. He must have felt when he visited London, as he continued to do in spite of his Scotch inheritance, that the central figure was gone, and with it much of the zest of life in his London circle. There was no doubt a yearning sometimes for that rude strength, which had so much of tenderness besides, and a lasting grief. Of Boswell's sorrows in later life, of his failure to realise those 'towering hopes,' and consequent disappointment, something has been said already in these pages. It was not apparently until the autumn of 1789 that Boswell began to see that he was not destined to succeed in the manner he wished--in politics and in the law. The letters at this time were more frequent than usual, and we are able to see how, earlier in the year, he was quite hopeful about the future, but later became despondent. A further reason depressed Boswell's spirits at this time: in the summer of 1789 he lost his wife.[3] It is greatly to the credit of Boswell that he was very deeply affected by her death--to his credit, not because as a husband he was able to retain affection for his wife (for affections are not completely under our control), but because he was able to appreciate a woman who from his own accounts must have been a sensible, kind woman, and one who treated him with a patient consideration. Boswell was not a good husband, because he never became in the ordinary sense domesticated; his home was never to him the predominant interest. During her last illness he seems to have realised that he might have behaved better towards his wife, and to have felt a true remorse: No man ever had a higher esteem or a warmer love for a wife than I have for her. You will recollect, my Temple, how our marriage was the result of an attachment truly romantic; yet how painful is it to me to recollect a thousand instances of inconsistent conduct. I can justify my removing to the great sphere of England, upon a principle of laudable ambition; but the frequent scenes of what I must call dissolute conduct are inexcusable; and often and often when she was very ill, in London have I been indulging in festivity with Sir Joshua Reynolds, Courtenay, Malone, &c., and have come home late, and disturbed her repose. Nay, when I was last at Auchinleck, on purpose to soothe and console her, I repeatedly went from home; and both on those occasions, and when neighbours visited me, drank a great deal too much wine.[4] He was remorseful too after the death of his wife that he had not been present to comfort her at the end. And there was good reason. She, as he remarked, would not have treated him so. But Boswell must not be blamed too severely for this serious omission. His wife was suffering with a disease from which, though it was certain she would not recover, there was no immediate prospect of release. Boswell seems to have expected from the medical opinion that her life would linger on longer than actually it did: and, if it was not for pressing duties that he left his wife, it was not for pleasure, but for the kind of activity incident to the career he had chosen. Boswell was not unlike many people inasmuch as he found out rather late in life the true value of his wife, and was more sorry than could have been expected when he no longer had her help and companionship; he found perhaps that he had rated too highly by comparison the greater intellectual stimulus of his literary circle. His sorrow in any case, at her death, whatever the proportion of remorse to the sense of loss, is pleasant to see. There was so much affectation in his character, that whenever he shows that he had simple, genuine feelings--and he had them more often than might be supposed--we must have some regard for them, however commonplace they may be. Boswell was evidently quite miserable at his loss; he was unrestrained in grief as he was in enjoyment, and the tale of his woe was poured out to Temple in the same fervid manner as the love affairs of earlier years: I am amazed when I look back. Though I often and often dreaded this loss, I had no conception how distressing it would be. May God have mercy on me! I am quite restless and feeble and desponding.... I have an avidity for death; I eagerly wish to be laid by my dear wife; years of life seem insupportable. I cannot express to you, Temple [he writes in a later letter], 'what I suffer from the loss of my valuable wife and the mother of my children. While she lived, I had no occasion to think concerning my family; every particular was thought of by her, better than I could. I am the most helpless of human beings; I am in a state very much that of one in despair.' It must not be thought that Boswell faced the world in the sad and sometimes complaining vein in which he wrote to Temple. There was no whining self-pity, and no pride of the grievance, as might perhaps have been expected, in his public attitude. 'It is astonishing what force I have put upon myself since her death, how I have entertained company, &c., &c.'[5] He no doubt tried to be cheerful in company, and probably he succeeded. The weakness of Boswell was shown in a different way, by an increase of those vices which he had been encouraged to resist by Johnson, and also, we may suppose, by his wife. Johnson had said, long before the bereavement: 'In losing her you would lose your sheet-anchor, and be tost, without stability, by the waves of life.' This prediction was fulfilled. Boswell had always been a self-indulgent man. Before his marriage he was, as may be seen from the letters, sexually self-indulgent. Whether he was so in later years, or in what degree, it is difficult to determine; he may have been alluding to this when he talks of 'little fondnesses,' and of being 'dissipated';[6] and the fact that he says on one occasion that he had no 'confessions' to make rather suggests the possibility that this may not always have been the case, though he never actually confesses. But the particular form of his self-indulgence was drunkenness. Besides frequent references to his habit of drinking, there are, altogether, some half-dozen recorded instances of Boswell being drunk or intoxicated, and as they are referred to only because they had some curious results they suggest that this was far from being unusual. In the letters, Boswell records on several occasions that he has been drinking too much lately, or that he was becoming a drunkard. His mode of resisting what he quite well saw to be an evil habit was to take a series of vows. It is a method which seems to have had a curious appeal for Boswell's nature. There was something to his mind rather romantic about a vow: something heroic in taking that great resolve, made so quickly to endure for so long, something of the saintly penance; and there was something of the martyr about one who had bound himself in this way. In Boswell's drunkenness, however, there was nothing romantic; it was rather sordid; and he was neither saint, nor hero, nor martyr, for the vows, even if they could have made him all these, were too frequently broken. There was no doubt some serious effort on Boswell's part; but the impulse of the moment was always too strong for him, and the efforts which lasted too short a time were apparently followed by grave relapses. Boswell's drinking habits had ill effects. Johnson, when reminded of the headache which his companion was wont to feel after sitting up with him, exclaimed: 'Nay, Sir, it was not the _wine_ that made your head ache, but the sense that I put into it.' But though the nature of Johnson's sense and of Boswell's head may fortify the explanation, it was not the common case; excess of alcohol was injurious to Boswell's health. It has been pointed out with justice that Boswell's melancholy was to some extent the result of this excess. How much of it was affectation we cannot easily tell. When Boswell first made his appearance to the world as the young _littérateur_, he may have hoped to increase the appearance of genius by assuming hereditary hypochondria. But it must be remarked that he seems, as far as we can judge, to have given very little impression of ever being morose; it is on the contrary his gaiety and good spirits that are always emphasised. And we may at least suppose when, as has been mentioned above, he entirely denies, in a number of the 'Hypochondriack,' that genius and melancholy have any particular connection, that he had by that time outgrown any affectation there may originally have been. That one of Boswell's great vivacity should sometimes be dejected, is really very natural, and when we add to this his self-indulgent habits, it is not hard to account for occasional attacks of low spirits. Sir Walter Scott remarks: There was a variation of spirits about James Boswell which indicated some slight touch of insanity. His melancholy which he so often complained of to Johnson was not affected but constitutional, though doubtless he thought it a mark of high distinction to be afflicted with hypochondria like his moral patron. Malone too denies altogether 'that he caught from Johnson a portion of his constitutional melancholy.' 'This was not the fact,' writes Malone. 'He had a considerable share of melancholy in his own temperament; and though the general tenour of his life was gay and active, he frequently experienced an unaccountable depression of spirits.'[7] It was natural that Boswell's malady of depression should have become worse towards the end of his life; not only because habits of excess take their revenge upon the constitution, but because these too are likely to grow with the disease. The result of Boswell's sorrows when his wife had died and his ambitions were being thwarted was that he was driven still more to drink. I have drunk too much wine for some time past. I fly to every mode of agitation.[8] With grief continually at my heart, I have been endeavouring to seek relief in dissipation and in wine, so that my life for some time past has been unworthy of myself, of you, and of all that is valuable in my character and connections.[9] It is a pitiable picture this, of a man's decay; grief and self-indulgence reacted upon each other, each of them adding something to the causes of disappointment. [Footnote 1: Malone saw a sheet of the _Tour to the Hebrides_ at the printer's and was so much impressed that he obtained an introduction to Boswell; he helped him in the final stage, both of this book and the _Life_, and was eventually Boswell's first editor.] [Footnote 2: Sir Alexander became Lord Macdonald in 1776 (_Boswelliana_, p. 140).] [Footnote 3: _Letters to Temple_, p. 246 _et seq._] [Footnote 4: _Letters to Temple_, p. 242.] [Footnote 5: _Letters to Temple_, p. 253.] [Footnote 6: _Letters to Temple_, p. 231.] [Footnote 7: 'In a subsequent number of the _Gentleman's Magazine_,' says Dr. Rogers in his _Memoir of J. B._, 'Mr. Temple, under the signature of "Biographicus," denied a statement by Mr. Malone that Boswell was of a melancholy temperament; he maintained that he was quite otherwise prior to his attachment to Dr. Johnson.' It may be remarked, however, that Boswell might have a constitutional melancholy without showing many signs of it before the age of twenty-three; and that Temple after 1763 saw Boswell very seldom. Malone's view, therefore, based upon an intimate connection with Boswell for some years at the end of his life, apart from the fact that it was likely to be a wiser view, should carry more weight than that of Temple.] [Footnote 8: _Letters to Temple_, p. 255.] [Footnote 9: _Ib._, p. 257.] CHAPTER VIII There is one redeeming feature, the most important feature of all, in the last years of Boswell's life. The biographer had gradually during the life of Johnson relaxed his efforts in collecting material for the _magnum opus_; we can see in the 'Life' how he grew less industrious in recording conversations; for though even in the later part many are preserved at great length, he neglected to write up his journal more often than in the early years of the friendship. This was due no doubt in part to his drinking habits. Conviviality of that kind has a curious effect upon the memory. But Boswell had still very firmly the purpose of writing the 'Life,' after Johnson had died, though he was not the person chosen to do so by the literary executors.[1] The 'Life of Johnson' was published about six years later than the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' in the spring of 1791. The latter, it is clear from its nature, required far less labour from the author than his _magnum opus_: the whole scope of the book is infinitely smaller, and there was none of the endless trouble of collecting and verifying the materials of others as in the great biography; for the 'Tour' deals only with Johnson as observed by Boswell himself during their journey in the Hebrides. Boswell, moreover, had wanted to publish his journal during Johnson's lifetime, and we cannot doubt that he had written up a good deal. It would be quite unjust therefore to say that the biographer became more idle, as he was more dissipated, after 1785. The reverse is nearer the truth. It is remarkable and it is praiseworthy that Boswell, in spite of his political schemes, the depression which followed the death of his wife, and the illness which was the consequence of his unhealthy habits of life and in particular the habit of drink, should still have worked hard at the 'Life.' He may have become less regular, but he retained the energy of earlier years. There was, in fact, in him the need to satisfy somehow those better qualities. His intense belief in the merit of his work and the almost endless trouble he took to verify the accuracy of the smallest fact and to discover the minutest information about Johnson--to satisfy, in a word, his 'sacred love of truth'--are the expression of this need within him. Sometimes, indeed, he is despondent about his book: 'Many a time have I thought of giving it up.' 'I am in such bad spirits that I have every fear concerning it.' Sometimes he feels the immensity of the labour without the enthusiasm which has urged him on: 'Though I am now in woeful indifference, I trust that before it is finished a taste or relish shall return.' The vastness of the task seems almost to weigh him down. In November 1789 he writes to Temple explaining that he cannot pay him a visit because he must stay in London to receive Malone's help, Malone who is 'Johnsonianissimus,' in revising the 'Life': You cannot imagine what labour, what perplexity, what vexation I have endured in arranging a prodigious multiplicity of materials, in supplying omissions, in searching for papers, buried in different masses, and all this besides the exertion of composing and polishing: many a time have I thought of giving it up. And yet he has the firmest conviction that the book will be a masterpiece; it will be an unparalleled history of a man; and for that reason of supreme importance to the world: However, though I shall be uneasily sensible of its many deficiencies, it will certainly be to the world a very valuable and peculiar volume of biography, full of literary and characteristical anecdotes _told with authenticity and in a lively manner_. Would that it were in the booksellers' shops! Methinks if I had this _magnum opus_ launched, the public has no further claim upon me; for I have promised no more, and I may die in peace, or retire into dull obscurity, _reddarque tenebris_. It is a curious mixture, this, of weariness and optimism; it shows that there was something in Boswell which drove him on, in spite of a good many difficulties, though he himself (as we see in the last sentence) understood little of its nature. 'The "Life of Johnson,"' he says in another place, 'still keeps me up; I must bring that forth.'[2] At times his enthusiasm breaks out and he expresses his real conviction of the supreme merit of his work: The next [day] I am in Malone's study revising my 'Life of Johnson,' of which I have the highest expectations both as to fame and profit. I surely have the art of writing agreeably. The Lord Chancellor told me he had read every word of my Hebridean Journal; he could not help it; adding, 'Could you give a rule how to write a book that a man _must read_? I believe Longinus could not.'[3] Boswell understood the scale and interest of his book: In truth it is a view of much of the literature, and many of the literary men, of Great Britain for more than half a century.[4] 'I think,' he says, in the same letter to Temple, 'it will be without exception the most entertaining book you ever read.' To Mr. Dempster he said: 'I really think it will be the most entertaining collection that has appeared in this age.'[5] Boswell's belief in his own work was based not so much upon his literary powers as upon his conception of biography: Mason's 'Life of Gray' is excellent, because it is interspersed with letters which show us the _man_. His 'Life of Whitehead' is not a life at all, because there is neither a letter nor a saying from first to last. I am absolutely certain that my mode of biography, which gives not only a _history_ of Johnson's _visible_ progress through the world, and of his publications, but a _view_ of his mind in his letters and conversations, is the most perfect that can be conceived, and will be more of a Life than any work that has ever yet appeared.[6] To Bishop Percy he writes in February 1788: I do it chronologically, giving year by year his publications, if there were any; his letters, his conversations, and everything else that I can collect. It appears to me that mine is the best plan of biography that can be conceived; for my readers will, as near as may be, accompany Johnson in his progress, and as it were see each scene as it happened.[7] The conviction that Boswell had that his was the best possible conception of biography seems never to have been in doubt, though he might be sometimes depressed or indifferent, and exactly the same conception as that which we have seen in his letters to Temple and Bishop Percy was expressed more fully later in the 'Life' itself. Instead of melting down my materials into one mass, and constantly speaking in my own person, by which I might have appeared to have more merit in the execution of the work, I have resolved to adopt and enlarge upon the excellent plan of Mr. Mason, in his Memoirs of Gray. Wherever narrative is necessary to explain, connect, and supply, I furnish it to the best of my abilities; but in the chronological series of Johnson's life, which I trace as distinctly as I can, year by year, I produce, wherever it is in my power, his own minutes, letters, or conversation, being convinced that this mode is more lively, and will make my readers better acquainted with him, than even most of those were, who actually knew him, but could know him only partially; whereas there is here an accumulation of intelligence from various points, by which his character is more fully understood and illustrated. Indeed I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man's life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought, by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to 'live o'er each scene' with him, as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life. Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved. As it is, I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived. And he will be seen as he really was; for I profess to write not his panegyrick, which must be all praise, but his Life; which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect. To be as he was, is indeed subject of panegyrick enough to any man in this state of being; but in every picture there should be shade as well as light, and when I delineate him without reserve, I do what he himself recommended, both by his precept and his example.[8] The 'Life' then is, as Boswell intended, a complete picture of Johnson; complete, inasmuch as it gives a picture of Johnson in every phase of his living, as the writer, the talker, the correspondent, and most of all simply as a man in his dealings with other men, and in all these gives a living picture: complete especially in this, that it gives not merely what there is to praise in Johnson, but every little detail as it occurred, the shade as well as the light. But Boswell had something further in his mind as he wrote the 'Life.' He was, as we have said before, essentially the moralist. He seems to have had a purpose as he wrote, not only of not doing moral harm, but of doing moral good. When he talks of the faults of Dr. Johnson he does so with a kind of apology and explanation, with quotations from the great moralist himself, to show that to mention the vices of a famous man may as well do good as harm: When I objected [evidently for the sake of argument] to the danger of telling that Parnell drank to excess, he said, that 'it would produce an instructive caution to avoid drinking, when it was seen that even the learning and genius of Parnell could be debased by it.' And in the Hebrides he maintained, as appears from my journal, that a man's intimate friend should mention his faults, if he writes his life. After saying that 'it must not be concealed, that like many other good and pious men, among whom we may place the Apostle Paul upon his own authority, Johnson was not free from propensities which were ever "warring against the law of his mind," and that in his combat with them, he was sometimes overcome,' he gives a moral lecture to his readers: But let no man encourage or soothe himself in 'presumptuous sin,' from knowing that Johnson was sometimes hurried into indulgences which he thought criminal. I have exhibited this circumstance as a shade in so great a character, both from my sacred love of truth, and to shew that he was not so weakly scrupulous as he has been represented by those who imagine that the sins, of which a deep sense was on his mind, were merely such little venial trifles as pouring milk into his tea on Good Friday. In the 'Advertisement to the Second Edition,' Boswell seems to go further: His strong, clear, and animated enforcement of religion, morality, loyalty, and subordination, while it delights and improves the wise and the good, will, I trust, prove an effectual antidote to that detestable sophistry which has been lately imported from France, under the false name of _Philosophy_, and with a malignant industry has been employed against the peace, good order, and happiness of society, in our free and prosperous country; but thanks be to God, without producing the pernicious effects which were hoped for by its propagators. This history of the deeds and words and thoughts of his hero is compared by Boswell to the Odyssey. He seems almost to think that the merit of Homer's epic lies in the good behaviour of Ulysses, just as he conceives that the value of his own work is in the excellence of Johnson:-- ----Quid virtus et quid sapientia possit, Utile proposuit nobis exemplar Ulyssen. It is not perhaps remarkable in itself that Boswell should have had this attitude towards his work; it is the attitude in some degree of most biographers, the attitude especially of the age in which he lived, and the attitude of Johnson himself. Boswell's principles as a biographer are indeed the same as Johnson's. We cannot suppose, when he has revealed so clearly his supreme faculty for biography, that there was anything of this which was not entirely his own. But he took the trouble to find out on several occasions the opinions of his great friend, to ask him about particular doubts which troubled him from time to time, and obtain his approval. He had a profound respect for Johnson's manner of estimating character. Mr. Pennant, 'a traveller in Scotland,' is censured in the 'Life' for a book of travel which is compared to Johnson's 'Journey to the Western Islands' and then quoted on the subject of Johnson; the quotation speaks of 'the numerous weaknesses and prejudices which his friends have kindly taken care to draw from their dread abode.' Boswell's note is: This is the common cant against faithful biography. Does the worthy gentleman mean that I, who was taught discrimination of character by Johnson, should have omitted his frailties, and in short, have _bedaubed_ him, as the worthy gentleman has bedaubed Scotland? It was also due in some degree to the influence of Johnson that Boswell himself was so much a moralist: it was something of the same influence, it was in part the honest ruggedness which exalted that morality, by denuding it of excessive and affected sentiment, that enabled Boswell to be a moralist without being (in the Johnsonian phraseology) a canting moralist. Boswell, indeed, became a moralist because he wanted to be respectable; but he was not entirely respectable because he succeeded in being a moralist. A man who is a moralist to the extent that Boswell and Johnson were moralists may be too respectable to be an honest biographer. It does not become the stainless respectability of the moralist to bring to light the blemishes of a man in a book; in conversation that may be done; there is no harm in a few people knowing; but it would be dangerous and improper to reveal them in print to the public gaze; and so it was not respectable in Boswell to say anything about the sexual temptations of Johnson, and Miss Burney and Hannah More would no doubt be shocked. But the love of truth which Johnson nourished was fundamental in Boswell, and it was irrepressible; we know Johnson, chiefly for this reason, better than any other man whose life has been recorded. It is remarkable for other reasons besides this--that he was a moralist--that Boswell produced an impartial biography. He was by no means free from personal animosities. Sir John Hawkins had written the official life at the request of Johnson's literary executors, and Boswell, naturally, was jealous of him on this account. A matter for greater irritation was that Boswell himself had been almost entirely ignored,[9] the one slighting mention of his name being worse than no mention of his connection with Johnson. And Mrs. Thrale also, who had published her 'Anecdotes,' had alluded to Boswell only in one contemptuous passage. Boswell therefore had the deliberate intention of showing up the faults of these two rivals; a long paragraph is introduced as early as possible, explaining fully why the 'Life' by Sir John Hawkins is a bad book, and ending thus: There is throughout the whole of it a dark uncharitable cast, by which the most unfavourable construction is put upon almost every circumstance in the character and conduct of my illustrious friend; who, I trust, will, by a true and fair delineation, be vindicated both from the injurious misrepresentations of this author, and from the slighter aspersions of a lady who once lived in great intimacy with him.[10] The same lady was alluded to afterwards in a note of peculiar malice: I am obliged in so many instances to notice Mrs. Piozzi's incorrectness of relation, that I gladly seize this opportunity of acknowledging that, however often, she is not always inaccurate. It was not only for his personal grievances that Boswell was anxious to contradict Sir John Hawkins and Mrs. Piozzi, but also because he had a different conception of Johnson, a far more loving appreciation and veneration, which was a reason in itself that he should write the life of his friend; to vindicate his character and express his admiration would be some tribute to their long friendship. Boswell, indeed, always retained something of the 'mysterious veneration' of his early years. Johnson to him was always the hero; he was the 'literary Colossus,' the 'Rambler,' the 'awful and majestick Philosopher.' The thought that he might lose his reverence was a source of anxiety to Boswell: In my interview with Dr. Johnson this evening, I was quite easy, quite as his companion; upon which I find in my journal the following reflection: 'So ready is my mind to suggest matter for dissatisfaction that I felt a sort of regret that I was so easy. I missed that awful reverence with which I used to contemplate Mr. Samuel Johnson, in the complex magnitude of his literary, moral, and religious character. I have a wonderful superstitious love of mystery.' Boswell, as a matter of fact, as we may see from the 'Life,' preserved his 'reverence,' and his view of Johnson as the solemn and wise writer and moralist has tinged the biography. He records a jovial mood of Johnson's as a most extraordinary moment in a man of his dignified character: I have known him at times exceedingly diverted at what seemed to others a very small sport. He now laughed immoderately, without any reason that we could perceive, at our friend's making his will; called him the _testator_, and added, 'I daresay, he thinks he has done a mighty thing.' ... In this playful manner did he run on, exulting in his own pleasantry, which certainly was not such as might be expected from the authour of The Rambler, but which is here preserved, that my readers may be acquainted even with the slightest occasional characteristicks of so eminent a man. He goes on to tell how Dr. Johnson 'could not stop his merriment, but continued it all the way till he got without the Temple Gate. He then burst into such a fit of laughter that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion; and, in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud, that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple Bar to Fleetditch.' Boswell talks of the episode as 'this most ludicrous exhibition of the awful, melancholy, and venerable Johnson.' [Footnote 1: Sir John Hawkins wrote the official life.] [Footnote 2: _Letters to Temple_, p. 252.] [Footnote 3: _Ib._, p. 267.] [Footnote 4: _Ib._, p. 265.] [Footnote 5: _Letters to Temple_, p. 338.] [Footnote 6: _Ib._, p. 218.] [Footnote 7: Nichols' _Illustrations_, vii, 309.] [Footnote 8: _Life of Johnson_, i, 29-30.] [Footnote 9: _Memoirs of Sir J. Hawkins_, i, 235.] [Footnote 10: _Life of Johnson_, i, 28.] CHAPTER IX It is remarkable, as we have observed, in view of his personal animosities, and of his determination to prove Dr. Johnson to be both a greater and a better man than would appear from previous accounts, and to be an extremely dignified man as fitted his own conception of him, that Boswell should have presented a complete picture of Johnson--that he should have mentioned all the incidents from which he might appear both a less important and a less pleasant man--all the circumstances that might detract from his dignity. The explanation which seems so simple and involves, when we come to understand all that it means, not only the exact shades of what the author said, but many things that he refrained from saying, is that Boswell in this particular sphere, the sphere of the biographer, was entirely truthful. And truth meant far more than that he did not distort the facts and did not suppress them; it involved in him the capacity for creating, the essential quality of his genius. Boswell had in fact the scientific spirit and applied it to the greatest of all subjects, to human nature. He was, in the first place, extremely accurate both in observing and recording; he watched attentively and often; and he described patiently what he had seen and heard. The biographer's own pen has given us a short account of his qualifications, as they appeared to him, for the task of writing the life of Johnson: 'As I had the honour and happiness of enjoying his friendship for upwards of twenty years; as I had the scheme of writing his life constantly in view; as he was well apprised of this circumstance, and from time to time obligingly satisfied my inquiries, by communicating to me the incidents of his early years; as I acquired a facility in recollecting and was very assiduous in recording his conversation, of which the extraordinary vigour and vivacity constituted one of the first features of his character; and as I have spared no pains in obtaining materials concerning him, from every quarter where I could discover that they were to be found, and have been favoured with the most liberal communications by his friends; I flatter myself that few biographers have entered upon such a work as this, with more advantages; independent of literary abilities, in which I am not vain enough to compare myself with some great names who have gone before me in this kind of writing.'[1] With this statement we may heartily agree; but all that it really says is that Boswell had opportunities, and acquired a faculty, for _recording_. He had, besides, a quite remarkable faculty of acute observation. All that he says of Johnson's appearance, his clothes, his walk, that truly horrible paragraph about his nails and knuckles, is admirable, because he tells us in a few words exactly what is most characteristic. The event of his first visit to Dr. Johnson was naturally an occasion for Boswell to describe his hero: His brown suit of clothes looked very rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his shirt-neck and knees of his breeches were loose; his black worsted stockings ill drawn up; and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. That is all! And what more or what less could anyone want? In the 'Tour to the Hebrides' it is recorded that He wore ... a very wide brown cloth great-coat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio 'Dictionary'; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. What a difference it makes to our knowledge of Johnson that we know these details! Boswell compels us to see Johnson. Plenty of men would have noticed what he noticed, but few would have presented it so vividly. Boswell's superiority depends upon his powers as an observer; he saw things clear and strong, and so they are clear and strong for his readers. And Boswell excelled not only in painting the mere exterior; he often alludes to the spirit that it expresses with the same dexterity. 'Generally,' he says, speaking of Johnson in the course of a dispute, 'when he had finished a period, by which time he was a good deal exhausted by violence and vociferation, he used to blow out his breath like a whale. This I suppose was a relief to his lungs; and seemed in him to be a contemptuous mode of expression, as if he had made the arguments of his opponents fly like chaff before the wind.' We are told the physical details, but so much more! The whole attitude of Johnson is described. Similarly all the little touches, as when Johnson 'sprung away with a kind of pathetick briskness,' reveal his feelings with startling fidelity. Perhaps most remarkable of all is the account of Johnson's behaviour to his cat: I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature.... I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson's breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend, smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, 'Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this'; and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, 'but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.' We are pleased to find that Boswell has preserved for us the motive of Johnson, 'lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature.'[2] This is characteristic and interesting. But how deeply satisfying it is to discover that poor Hodge, as it appeared to Johnson, was 'out of countenance.' It is not, however, only because he observed so accurately what was obviously relevant, as the appearance of Johnson, or that he saw exactly what his motives were, that Boswell was a good observer; the range of his observation is equally remarkable. He observed everything; no detail was too insignificant for his attention. It was of vital importance for him to record (in the 'Tour to the Hebrides') 'I slept in the same room with Dr. Johnson. Each had a neat bed, with Tartan curtains, in an upper chamber,' and it is well that he did so; it is highly agreeable to imagine Johnson and Boswell in this situation. It is also interesting to know that Boswell, on the following morning, found upon the table in their room a slip of paper, on which Dr. Johnson had written these words: '_Quantum cedat virtutibus aurum_'; and that when Johnson turned his cup at Aberbrothick, where they drank tea, he muttered '_Claudite jam rivos pueri_.' And what an invaluable devotion it was that has preserved for us so small a fact as this--that the book which Johnson presented to a Highland lass was 'Cocker's Arithmetic'! These details are ours not by the fortune of a naturally endowed memory, but by the labour and patience and attention that trained a mind to a point of excellence. Miss Burney has left us an admirable account of Boswell's deportment when in the act of 'memorandising' Dr. Johnson's conversation, and from this we may see something of what it cost him to observe and record and remember: In truth, when he met with Dr. Johnson, he commonly forbore even answering anything that was said, or attending to anything that went forward, lest he should miss the smallest sound from that voice to which he paid such exclusive, though merited, homage. But the moment that voice burst forth, the attention which it excited in Mr. Boswell amounted almost to pain. His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his ear almost on the shoulder of the Doctor; and his mouth dropped open to catch every syllable that might be uttered; nay, he seemed not only to dread losing a word, but to be anxious not to miss a breathing, as if hoping from it, latently or mystically, some information. Miss Burney had no admiration for Boswell, and the effect of this description is merely grotesque. It is probable that Boswell was not so wholly unconscious of self in this performance as Miss Burney seems to have thought. His behaviour appears to have been absurd, in a degree unnecessary alike to his curious character and his extraordinary task. It is possible that Boswell, aware that his minute attention to Dr. Johnson was a rather laughable affair, tried by a sort of buffoonery to avoid the natural consequence. Boswell, when he imitates Dr. Johnson in his presence, and when his eyes goggle with eagerness, was perhaps attempting to divert the company by caricaturing what was already ridiculous. But however that may be, Miss Burney's account is no doubt faithful enough as regards the original motive of the biographer's behaviour; his eyes goggled with a genuine eagerness. That exclusive attention was the attention of one who had a difficult task to perform and was extremely anxious to perform it. Boswell's infinite capacity for concentration in observing and recording, and for patience in collecting and preserving the smallest facts, is indeed an essential part of his genius; for genius, whenever it achieves anything, implies devotion, implies the relentless pursuit of its object, however small the actual result of the moment may seem when compared to the trouble which has been expended upon it. And this capacity for concentration enabled Boswell not merely to observe and record what he saw and heard, but to seek continually for any information, however it was to be obtained, which might be of value to him. It is easy to see from many passages in the early portion of the 'Life'--the portion, that is, which deals with Johnson before Boswell made his acquaintance, and which naturally required the greatest labour, in collecting and investigating material, on the part of the biographer--how much trouble Boswell took. In order to obtain a copy of the famous letter to Lord Chesterfield he tells us: I for many years solicited Johnson to favour me with a copy of it, that so excellent a composition might not be lost to posterity. He delayed from time to time to give it me; till at last, in 1781, when we were on a visit at Mr. Dilly's, at Southill in Bedfordshire, he was pleased to dictate it to me from memory. He afterwards found among his papers a copy of it, which he had dictated to Mr. Baretti, with its title and corrections in his own handwriting. This he gave to Mr. Langton; adding that if it were to come into print, he wished it to be from that copy. By Mr. Langton's kindness, I am enabled to enrich my work with a perfect transcript of what the world has so eagerly desired to see. It appears that, though he had at last succeeded in obtaining a copy from Johnson, he was willing to take the further trouble of getting Mr. Langton's copy, which was more likely to be absolutely accurate. Still more remarkable is the manner in which he discovered the facts about Johnson's pension: _Lord Bute told me_[3] that Mr. Wedderburne, now Lord Loughborough, was the person who first mentioned this subject to him. _Lord Loughborough told me_ that the pension was granted solely as a reward of his literary merit.... _Mr. Thomas Sheridan and Mr. Murphy_, who then lived a good deal both with him and Mr. Wedderburne, _told me_, that they previously talked with Johnson on this matter.... _Sir Joshua Reynolds told me_ that Johnson called on him. The mere number of names consulted is sufficiently imposing. Boswell in fact was collecting evidence for a case. He must examine all the witnesses: also he must examine them in such a way that the truth might be discovered. Mr. Murphy and the late Mr. Sheridan severally contended for the distinction of having been the first who mentioned to Mr. Wedderburne that Johnson ought to have a pension. _When I spoke of this to Lord Loughborough_, wishing to know if he recollected the prime mover in the business, _he said_: 'All his friends assisted,' and when I told him that Mr. Sheridan strenuously asserted his claim to it, his Lordship said: 'He rang the bell.' And it is but just to add, that _Mr. Sheridan told me_ that when he communicated to Dr. Johnson that a pension was to be granted him he replied in a fervour of gratitude.... _When I repeated this to Dr. Johnson he did not contradict it._ The profusion of information about this particular point may seem to us unnecessary--it is of course controversial, and the controversy has lost much of its interest. But it shows in any case not only the great number of questions Boswell was willing to ask in order to find out exactly what had taken place and the scale upon which his investigations were conducted, but also the minute and detailed care with which he preserved the truth. Boswell has himself said something of the labour it cost him to compile the 'Life': The labour and anxious attention with which I have collected and arranged the materials of which these volumes are composed, will hardly be conceived by those who read them with careless facility. The stretch of mind and prompt assiduity by which so many conversations were preserved, I myself, at some distance of time, contemplate with wonder; and I must be allowed to suggest, that the nature of the work in other respects, as it consists of innumerable detached particulars, all of which, even the most minute, I have spared no pains to ascertain with a scrupulous authenticity, has occasioned a degree of trouble far beyond that of any other species of composition. Were I to detail the books which I have consulted, and the inquiries which I have found it necessary to make by various channels, I should probably be thought ridiculously ostentatious. Let me only observe, as a specimen of my trouble, that I have sometimes been obliged to run half over London in order to fix a date correctly.[4] Something of all that Boswell meant by this can be seen more nearly in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's essay upon Boswell's Proof-sheets: A delay was sometimes caused by his desire to 'ascertain particulars with scrupulous authenticity.' 'Sheet 777,' he wrote, 'is with Mr. Wilkes to look at a note.' ... A short delay is caused in ascertaining the number of years the Rev. Mr. Vilette had been Ordinary of Newgate. A blank had been left in the text. On the margin Boswell wrote: 'Send my note to Mr. Vilette in the morning and open the answer. Or inquire of Mr. Akerman (the keeper of Newgate) for the number of years. Get it somehow.' ... On page 505 of the second volume Boswell writes: 'I could wish that the forme in which page 512 is were not thrown off till I have an answer from Mr. Stone, the gentleman mentioned in the note, to tell me his Christian name, that I may call him Esq.' ... In the margin of the passage in which he quotes the inscription on a gold snuff-box given to Reynolds by Catherine II., he writes, 'Pray be very careful in printing the words of the Empress of _all the Russias_.' ... Opposite the long note where he quotes the anonymous editor of 'Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian,' he writes in the margin: '_This page_ must not be laid on till I hear from Dr. Parr whether his name may be mentioned.' Accordingly he wrote to him requesting 'to have by return of post if I may say or guess that Dr. Parr is the editor.' The success of these inquiries was far from certain. Dr. Parr's name does not appear. Boswell was more fortunate in obtaining a name for another entry, which had originally stood: 'He was in this like ... who, Mr. Daines Barrington told me, used to say: 'I hate a _cui bono_ man!' In the margin he filled up the blank with 'a respectable person'; but before the sheet was 'laid on,' he learnt this respectable person's name. In the published text he figures as 'Dr. Shaw, the great traveller.'[5] The proof-sheets which Dr. Birkbeck Hill was so fortunate as to see were not the first sheets, but only 'revises': in the earlier stages there must have been many more minute facts for Boswell to find out. But they are undoubtedly documents of great interest, and the point which stands out most clearly from the essay we have quoted is the extraordinary minuteness of Boswell's care and attention. * * * * * The devotion of Boswell to his biographical work is illustrated not so much by the prodigious toil it cost him--for many men have this power of sustained labour when they have found the right object for it--as by the reckless disregard of conventions and people to which it led him. The admirable account in the 'Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft'[6] of how Boswell obtained from Mr. Lowe a copy of one of Johnson's letters shows how attentive he could be even to a man whom, it would seem, he rather despised, when there was a chance of acquiring any document or information which might be of use to him. Lowe had requested Johnson to write him a letter, which Johnson did, and Boswell came in while it was writing; his attention was immediately fixed. Lowe took the letter, retired, and was followed by Boswell. 'Nothing,' said Lowe, 'could surprise me more. Till that moment he had so entirely overlooked me that I did not imagine he knew there was such a creature in existence, and he now accosted me with the most overstrained and insinuating compliments possible. "How do you do, Mr. Lowe? I hope you are well, Mr. Lowe? Pardon my freedom, Mr. Lowe, but I think I saw my dear friend Dr. Johnson writing a letter for you." "Yes, sir." "I hope you will not think me rude, but if it would not be too great a favour, you would infinitely oblige me if you would just let me have a sight of it; everything from that hand, you know, is so inestimable." "Sir, it is on my own private affairs, but----." "I would not pry into a person's affairs, my dear Mr. Lowe, by any means. I am sure you would not accuse me of such a thing, only, if it were no particular secret----" "Sir, you are welcome to read the letter." "I thank you, my dear Mr. Lowe, you are very obliging. I take it exceedingly kind." ... (Having read): "It is nothing I believe, Mr. Lowe, that you would be ashamed of----" "Certainly not." "Why, then, my dear sir, if you would do me another favour you would make the obligation eternal. If you would but step to Peele's coffee-house with me and just suffer me to take a copy of it I would do anything in my power to oblige you." 'I was so overcome,' said Lowe, 'by this sudden familiarity and condescension, accompanied with bows and grimaces, I had no power to refuse. We went to the coffee-house. My letter was presently transcribed, and as soon as he had put his document in his pocket Mr. Boswell walked away as erect and as proud as half an hour before. I ever after was unnoticed. Nay, I am not certain,' added he sarcastically, 'whether the Scotchman did not leave me, poor as he knew I was, to pay for my own dish of coffee.'[7] Miss Burney also gives an amusing account of how she was pressed to give her recollections of Johnson. Boswell met her at the gate of St. George's chapel, and since the lady relates 'Mr. Turbulent brought him to me,' it would seem that the anxious biographer sought the mediation of a friend so as to have a better reception. Miss Burney, however, found the occasion unsuitable; she was on the way to the 'Queen's Lodge'; a Queen's lady has to reflect the aloofness of royalty, and a conversation with Mr. Boswell would not add to her dignity. Her assistance is sought in most eloquent terms: Yes, madam; you must give me some of your choice little notes of the Doctor's; we have seen him long enough upon stilts; I want to show him in a new light. Grave Sam, and great Sam, and solemn Sam, and learned Sam--all these he has appeared over and over. Now I want to entwine a wreath of the graces across his brow; I want to show him as gay Sam, agreeable Sam, pleasant Sam; so you must help me with some of his beautiful billets to yourself. Miss Burney apparently had no wish that her 'choice little notes' should appear in the 'Life.' Boswell did his best in vain. 'I evaded this by declaring I had not any stores at hand. He proposed a thousand curious expedients to get at them, but I was invincible....' But Boswell was not easily to be dismissed; he must glean what he may from Miss Burney; she must, at least, give judgment on the style of the work. He then told me his 'Life of Dr. Johnson' was nearly printed, and took a proof-sheet out of his pocket to show me, with crowds passing and repassing, knowing me well, and staring well at him: for we were now at the iron rails of the Queen's Lodge. I stopped; I could not ask him in: I saw he expected it, and was reduced to apologise, and tell him I must attend the Queen immediately.... But finding he had no chance for entering, he stopped me again at the gate, and said he would read me a part of his work. There was no refusing this: and he began, with a letter of Dr. Johnson's to himself. He read it in strong imitation of the Doctor's manner, very well, and not caricature. But Mrs. Schwellenberg was at her window, a crowd was gathering to stand round the rails, and the King and Queen and Royal Family now approached from the Terrace. It is a delightful scene--the enthusiastic Boswell oblivious of Royalty as he declaims the sonorous words of the Doctor, and Miss Burney anxious only to effect an escape. The whole account shows how importunate Boswell could become in the cause of his art and for his 'sacred love of truth.' [Footnote 1: _Life of Johnson_, i, 25-6.] [Footnote 2: So also Mrs. Piozzi.] [Footnote 3: The italics throughout are of course mine.] [Footnote 4: _Life of Johnson_, Advertisement to First Edition.] [Footnote 5: _Johnson Club Papers_, pp. 58-60. The proof-sheets were in 1893 possessed by Mr. R. B. Adam, Barnstaple, Cape Cod.] [Footnote 6: Quoted in the introduction to Mr. Birrell's edition of the _Life_.] [Footnote 7: _Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft_, iii, 29-31.] CHAPTER X There is an even more remarkable feature of Boswell's work--the scientific manner in which he deliberately made experiments. Here again we shall see his uncompromising attitude. Dr. Johnson has been considered, and very properly considered, a great talker. Not the least of our reasons for reading the 'Life' is that we are interested to know what Johnson had to say; and we find there the expressed thoughts of Johnson upon a great number of subjects. That Boswell should have preserved so much--that, though the same topics may more than once be discussed, yet every conversation gives a distinct and separate impression, and each one is valuable--tells us not only that Boswell himself must have had a high order of intelligence to apprehend and preserve the point of Johnson's discourse upon so many occasions, but, what is important for our purpose at the moment, tells us (when we remember how little time altogether he spent with Johnson and that the time most fruitful in records, during the famous tour in the Hebrides, is not included in the 'Life') that he himself must have had some part in finding out the Doctor's opinion. For Johnson was not exactly what is called an expansive person; it was an effort to him to talk seriously, and it was usually necessary to engage him gradually in conversation before he talked his best. Boswell has told us, 'he very often sat quite silent for a long time.' He said of himself: 'Tom Tyers described me the best. He once said to me, "Sir, you are like a ghost. You never speak until you are spoken to."' It is remarkable that Boswell should have had so much to record. The explanation is that he made Johnson talk; he did it not by accident but quite deliberately; this is a substantial part of his whole biographical method. 'I also,' he says in the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' 'may be allowed to claim some merit in leading the conversation. I do not mean leading as in an orchestra, by playing the first fiddle; but leading as one does in examining a witness--starting topics and making him pursue them.' And he did not find this part of his task particularly easy: He appears to me like a great mill, into which a subject is thrown to be ground. It requires, indeed, fertile minds to furnish subjects for this mill--I regret when I see it unemployed; but sometimes I feel myself quite barren, and have nothing to throw in. On most occasions, however, Boswell's mind was sufficiently fertile, and it enabled him to say some very odd things; his ingenuity was exercised in asking Johnson the most absurd questions, and he did this very often in the hope of some good retort. 'If, Sir,' he once demanded irrelevantly, 'you were shut up in a castle and a new-born child with you, what would you do?' Johnson is said to have related that one question was, 'Pray, Sir, can you tell why an apple is round and a pear pointed?'[1] On one occasion Boswell, apparently without reference to anything which had previously been said, asked 'if he had ever been accustomed to wear a night-cap.' And such questions were apt to produce an amusing discussion. But Boswell's spirit of investigation did not lead him merely to ask questions like these; it was frequently both serious and subtle--indeed there are so many instances in the 'Life' of his leading Johnson to talk that it is difficult to choose one for illustration. Perhaps the most characteristic kind of method employed is where Boswell, evidently having thought of his subject beforehand, brings in at a convenient moment a quotation, which furnishes an excuse for starting a discussion; as when he relates: Talking of divorces, I asked if Othello's doctrine were not plausible-- He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, Let him not know't, and he's not robbed at all.[2] Then follows a discussion about divorce, in which Boswell takes a prominent part. A few pages later we find Boswell re-starting a topic upon which Johnson, on a former occasion, has no doubt exhibited some warmth of feeling, and, having thought out his own line of argument, is able to lead him on to one of those moments of thunder which he loves to see. After Mrs. Thrale was gone to bed, Johnson and I sat up late. We resumed Sir Joshua Reynolds' argument on the preceding Sunday, that a man would be virtuous though he had no other motive than to preserve his character.[3] In the course of the argument Johnson exclaims ('very angry'): Nay, sir, what stuff is this! You had no more this opinion after Robertson said it than before. I know nothing more offensive than repeating what one knows to be foolish things, by way of continuing a dispute, to see what a man will answer--to make him your butt! (angrier still). The scenes which illustrate perhaps better than any others Boswell's minute interest in his friend and experimenting attitude have already been quoted. In the account of the breakfast at Lochbuy (when Johnson was offered the cold sheep's head) we see how great was his passion for experiment and what a depth of enjoyment he had from it: 'I sat quietly by and enjoyed my success'--that is the point of view. The manner in which he arranged the meeting with Wilkes shows the trouble he could take to form his plans for creating a situation and his ingenuity in carrying them out. This is not the only occasion when he made arrangements for his observation of Johnson; the whole of the tour in the Hebrides was in a sense a great series of experiments, and we feel as we read it that the circumstances of Johnson's riding bespurred upon a Highland pony, of his sitting majestically in the stern of the little boat, of his dinner with the Duke of Argyle, of his visit to Auchinleck, are consciously arranged, in some way, for effect by Boswell. No less a person than Walter Scott, who knew much at first hand from the contemporaries of Johnson and Boswell, and could remember distinctly the tour in Scotland and the discussion it provoked, held this view of the biographer: [4]After all, Bozzy, though submitting to Johnson in everything, had his means of indemnification. Like the jackanapes mounted on the bear's back he contrived now and then to play the more powerful animal a trick by getting him into situations like the meeting with Wilkes merely to see how he would look. The voyage to the Hebrides exhibited some tricks of that kind, the weather being so stormy at that late season that everyone thought they must have been drowned. Undoubtedly Bozzy wanted to see how the Doctor would look in a storm. Boswell himself explains the visit to Lord Monboddo: 'I knew Lord Monboddo and Dr. Johnson did not love each other; yet ... I was curious to see them together.' It could hardly be supposed that Boswell adopted this attitude without encountering some opposition from Dr. Johnson. The latter evidently wished that a good life of him should be written, and was pleased with Boswell's journal and glad to tell him from time to time about his early life; but there were limits to his endurance. 'I will not be put to the _question_. Don't you consider, Sir, that these are not the manners of a gentleman? I will not be baited with _what_ and _why_; what is this? what is that? why is a cow's tail long? why is a fox's tail bushy?' 'Sir,' he said on one occasion, 'you have but two topicks, yourself and me. I am sick of both.' Boswell indeed was continually taking risks; he compares himself to 'the man who has put his head into the lion's mouth a great many times:' his ordinary method of conversing with Johnson was to push his inquiries to the furthest possible point. His courage in this respect must have been notorious. 'I won a small bet,' he relates on one occasion, 'from Lady Diana Beauclerk, by asking him as to one of his particularities, which her Ladyship said I durst not do. It seems he had been frequently observed at the Club to put into his pocket the Seville oranges, after he had squeezed the juice of them into the drink which he had made for himself. Beauclerk and Garrick talked of it to me, and seemed to think he had a strange unwillingness to be discovered. We could not divine what he did with them; and this was the bold question to be put.' Boswell on this occasion was not successful in his inquiries; but it is to be observed that Boswell was deputed to inquire, and that he asked the question, and won his bet. Occasionally Boswell remarks that Johnson was not in a good humour for talking. He must have wondered at such times how long it would take before his irritation would break forth, and he would make some typical utterance. 'But I wonder, Sir,' &c., was a sort of Boswellian formula to be met sooner or later with: 'Sir, you _may_ wonder,' or some similar retort. But what irritated Johnson perhaps more than the endless questions was to be made a 'butt' as he termed it. 'On Monday, September 22, when at breakfast, I unguardedly said to Dr. Johnson, "I wish I saw you and Mrs. Macaulay together!" He grew very angry, and, after a pause, while a cloud gathered on his brow, he burst out: "No, Sir, you would not see us quarrel to make you sport."' Boswell eventually owns that he had wished to see a contest between Mrs. Macaulay and Johnson. It is not to be supposed that Boswell's provocations were always intentional, though there are many occasions upon which they clearly were so. Sometimes he was 'out of countenance,' and when Johnson 'carried the company with him,' his discomfiture perhaps was greater than he would have wished. Not infrequently he made mistakes. On one occasion when Johnson began: 'If I kept a seraglio,' Boswell was so much amused that he failed to keep his countenance and was overwhelmed with 'a variety of degrading images'! Yet he was well aware of the general tendency of his behaviour to provoke the ridicule of Johnson, and though there may have been moments when he did not intend it to do so, we may say that he consciously led to his own humiliation, or consciously at least ran the risk of it. How much humiliation Boswell was able to support may be seen from Miss Burney's account of a party at Streatham. Boswell, finding that there was no place at the side of Dr. Johnson, had taken up a seat immediately behind and between Dr. Johnson and Miss Burney. It was not very polite, and the discovery of his position by Dr. Johnson was disastrous: The Doctor turned angrily round upon him, and, clapping his hand rather loudly upon his knee, said, in a tone of displeasure, 'What do you do there, Sir? Go to the table, Sir!' Mr. Boswell instantly, and with an air of affright, obeyed; and there was something so unusual in such humble submission to so imperious a command that another smile gleamed its way across every mouth except that of the Doctor and of Mr. Boswell, who now, very unwillingly, took a distant seat. Anything more ignominious could hardly be imagined, and that Boswell was sensitive to a rebuke from the Doctor we cannot doubt. And yet, within a few minutes, he was to run the risk of a second. For some reason or other he wished to leave the room while the ceremony still demanded his presence at the table. The Doctor, calling after him authoritatively, said: 'What are you thinking of, Sir? Why do you get up before the cloth is removed? Come back to your place, Sir!' 'Again,' Miss Burney continues, 'and with equal obsequiousness, Mr. Boswell did as he was bid.' Boswell's behaviour, indeed, on this particular occasion was not heroic. His position near Dr. Johnson cannot have been essential to his purpose of taking notes; he was unwilling to abandon it out of a childish feeling of dignity; he considered it his natural right to sit near the doctor, and was obstinate about it. And it was no experiment of his to leave the room unceremoniously with the purpose of hearing what Dr. Johnson might have to say. But it was heroic of Boswell to put himself continually, and often intentionally, in the way of such rebuffs; for this he undoubtedly did. It was heroic because he had a noble purpose. Boswell was a man of science, and his science was concerned with nothing less than the mind and soul of Man. He was none the less scientific because he did not deal in generalities; he was concerned with detail rather than with deduction and with one man rather than with all men. Science may not have been the only motive for enduring. Boswell may have supported the harsh sayings of Dr. Johnson and suffered for the sake of his friendship, for its honour as well as for its value; but when we consider the humiliation of those rebukes we know at least that he suffered not a little; and inasmuch as he courted them, and courted them deliberately, friendship offers no explanation. Here we are compelled to accept the scientific motive. Boswell must be allowed the credit of having suffered as a man of science for the sake of Biography. Miss Burney, though she neither understood nor appreciated Boswell, and even disliked him, has no doubt given a truthful picture. It is clear that Boswell suffered from the rebuffs which he received from Johnson. If he endured them on the whole willingly, yet he endured them not without feeling some pain. He could not carry it off; Boswell had no natural dignity; he had a 'jovial bluntness' and a comical air about him, but these could not help him on such occasions, and he was obliged as it were to lose prestige, to appear in fact mean-spirited and servile. Miss Burney tells us also that Johnson generally treated him as a schoolboy. The difference in their ages was more than thirty years; but even so the expression is remarkable, and shows as does the whole account how complete was the submission of Boswell. His behaviour, however, was not merely undignified and grotesque, it was rude. His whole attitude towards Johnson was a rude one. Curiosity indulged as he indulged it cannot be polite. Johnson told him more than once that he had no manners. Langton said: 'Boswell's conversation consists entirely in asking questions, and is extremely offensive.' Boswell, in fact, as the biographer, was rude not only to Johnson but to the whole company; concerned entirely with his own purpose, he ignored the social obligation. It seems to have been his common habit to sit down, note-book in hand, to record the conversation. Mr. Barclay said that he had seen Boswell lay down his knife and fork, and take out his tablets, in order to register a good anecdote. Mrs. Thrale refers to his 'reporting' as a usual and obnoxious practice. A trick which I have seen played on common occasions, of sitting steadily down at the other end of the room to write at the moment what should be said in company, either _by_ Dr. Johnson or _to_ him, I never practised myself, nor approved of in another. There is something so ill-bred, and so inclining to treachery in this conduct, that were it commonly adopted, all confidence would soon be exiled from society, and a conversation assembly-room would become tremendous as a court of justice. [Footnote 1: _Autobiography, Letters, &c., of Mrs. Piozzi_, ii, 125.] [Footnote 2: _Life of Johnson_, iii, 347.] [Footnote 3: _Life of Johnson_, iii, 349.] [Footnote 4: _Croker Papers_, iii, 33.] CHAPTER XI The habit which annoyed Mrs. Thrale was necessary to Boswell's conception of his task; it involved what he spoke of as his 'authenticity.' To understand what he meant by this, an attitude perhaps not only towards himself, but to the public also, since he wished very much that those who read his book should feel that it was true in every detail, we must examine more nearly Boswell's method of carrying out his biographical plan. It is remarkable that Boswell should have begun his system of recording when quite a young man. A man of forty is more easily forgiven some eccentricity than one of two-and-twenty. Yet we find Boswell, during his travels on the Continent, tablets in hand on his first visit to Paoli, who gives an amusing account of him: He came to my country and he fetched me some letter of recommending him: but I was of the belief he might be an impostor, and I supposed in my minte, he was an espy; for I look away from him and in a moment I look to him again, and I behold his tablets. Oh! he was to the work of writing down all I say! Indeed I was angry. But soon I discover he was no impostor and no espy; and I only find I was myself the monster he had come to discover. Oh--he is a very good man, I love him indeed; so cheerful! so gay! so pleasant! but at the first, oh! indeed I was angry.[1] Boswell's method of recording conversations was not completed in these memoranda taken down at the moment. He had, besides these, his journal. It has been remarked already that he began to keep this regularly as early as 1758 during his tour on the Northern Circuit in the company of his father and Lord Hailes, and he tells us something of it at the time of his journey to Greenwich with Johnson in 1763: I was the more sensible of it (the cold) from having sat up all the night before _recollecting and writing_ in my journal what I thought worthy of preservation; an exertion which, during the first part of my acquaintance with Johnson, I frequently made. I remember having sat up four nights in one week, without being much incommoded in the daytime. In the 'Tour to Corsica,' also, he tells us: From my first setting out on this tour, I wrote down every night what I had observed during the day, throwing together a great deal, that I might afterwards select at leisure.[2] We have then two processes mentioned by which Boswell recorded conversation: the notes taken down at the moment, and the journal written up at night. The relation of these two--the function which each of them performed--is not difficult to conjecture. Boswell's object was to get his records written up as soon as possible after the events or conversations which he was describing: I found, from experience, that to collect my friend's conversation so as to exhibit it with any degree of its original flavour, it was necessary to write it down without delay. To record his sayings, after some distance of time, was like preserving or pickling long-kept or faded fruits, or other vegetables, which, when in that state, have little or nothing of their taste when fresh.[3] It was upon the fact that he trusted, not to his memory, but to 'exact transcript of conversations,' that Boswell based his claim to authenticity.[4] He was so absolutely truthful himself, that it never occurred to him to think that the truth of what was actually written down at the time could be doubted, and it was to him an entire refutation of any adversary to confront him with his method. If this book should again be reprinted, I shall with the utmost readiness correct any errours I may have committed, in stating conversations, provided it can be clearly shown to me that I have been inaccurate. But I am slow to believe (as I have elsewhere observed) that any man's memory, at the distance of several years, can preserve facts or sayings with such fidelity as may be done by writing them down when they are recent: and I beg it may be remembered, that it is not upon _memory_, but upon what was _written at the time_, that the authenticity of my 'Journal' rests.[5] But it is clear enough that the notes which Boswell made at the time must have been very unlike the final form in which he wrote the dialogue. In the course of conversations in which he himself took part, it would have been impossible without shorthand to make so full a record. The kind of notes which Boswell took may be gathered from the following passage: I this evening boasted, that though I did not write what is called stenography, or short-hand, in appropriated characters devised for the purpose, I had a method of my own of writing half words, and leaving out some altogether, so as yet to keep the substance and language of any discourses which I had heard so much in view, that I could give it very completely soon after I had taken it down.[6] It would seem then that what was written down during a conversation was far from including every word which was spoken; it was rather an aid, though a very substantial aid, to memory. We may conjecture that the most important expressions were recorded, and the course of the argument indicated, so as to be intelligible to Boswell, but not even to him, perhaps, after a long interval. He was able to 'keep in view' the 'substance and language.' To give a full and permanent form to these rough drafts must therefore have been a work of considerable labour; and it is this no doubt that the journal accomplished. We may see in the 'Life' the traces of two kinds of record. For we have sometimes the actual words of the speakers, but at others only the purport of their remarks. What we should naturally suppose--if this theory of the respective functions of the notes and the journal is correct--that the former came from the journal and the latter from the notes taken down at the moment, or sometimes perhaps shortly afterwards--is confirmed by the fact that, when we have only the less complete account, Boswell very often regrets the neglect of his journal, and talks of presenting such scraps as he has; and on one occasion says: I kept very imperfect notes of his conversation, which had I according to my usual custom _written out at large soon after the time_, much might have been preserved.[7] He was obliged in consequence of his neglect to write the text directly from notes; with their aid he filled in what he could remember; but he dispensed with the intermediate assistance of the journal, and the account is therefore far less full. The rough notes of the moment and the elaborate journal made by writing them out at large 'soon after the time'--these, then, form the basis of Boswell's method for preserving Johnson's talk. It is not to be supposed that Boswell strictly adhered to this method on every occasion. He was too much an experimentalist for that; and sometimes it must have been very difficult to take notes. We cannot imagine that when Boswell was alone with Johnson he pulled out 'tablets' in the course of an argument. More probably he seized an opportunity, as soon afterwards as possible, when Johnson was not talking, to put down the more striking phrases and record the point of the discussion. But there must have been some occasions when opportunities did not occur. Johnson, no doubt, became accustomed to his companion's habits and was often willing to help him by telling him details about his early life or dictating the text of a letter for Boswell to write down there and then. But sometimes he was in the mood to resent memoranda; and sometimes the talk was too continuous for Boswell's task to be an easy one. At such times Boswell may have written the journal as well as he could without the notes, and as soon afterwards as possible. At Ashbourne, for instance, in 1777, he may have done this: he was alone with Johnson more than usual, and several discussions made Johnson very angry; he may well have waited to record anything until he wrote the journal, for he had no lack of time to devote to this purpose while staying in the quiet country town, and in point of fact he actually kept the journal more fully at this time than at any other. He mentions that he has 'acquired a facility in recollecting his conversation.'[8] This may refer to the effort of memory required in recalling altogether what had been said, as well as to the effort of reconstructing the talk from what he had written down at the moment. In the early part of the 'Life' Boswell says: In progress of time, when my mind was, as it were, _strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian æther_, I could, with much more facility and exactness, _carry in my memory and commit to paper_ the exuberant variety of his wisdom and wit.[9] Here again he may well have had in mind a process of writing the journal with no notes to help him. All the original documents from which Boswell compiled the 'Life' are concealed from this generation. There are, however--or at least there were--in existence two of Boswell's note-books. Mr. Fitzgerald relates that in Mr. Pocock's 'Johnsonian Catalogue' there was a note-book in which Boswell jotted down from day to day the actual sayings and doings of the eminent lexicographer. This volume contains literary opinions and aphorisms peculiar to this great man, and of which many have never been published. He gives a specific account of the manner in which he compiled the 'Dictionary,' and relates other matters of interest, bearing on his long literary career and contemporaries. This manuscript, if it were to be seen, might reveal more definitely what Boswell's method was. The description of it can do nothing but emphasise the use of the 'tablets'; but its value as evidence depends upon its accuracy with regard to the sequence of the notes: if they were really 'jotted down from day to day,' then they are the 'tablets' without a doubt. The other note-book is 'Boswelliana'; and it is of a different kind. Boswell kept in a portfolio a quantity of loose quarto sheets, inscribed on each page _Boswelliana_. In certain of these sheets the pages are denoted by numerals in the ordinary fashion; another portion is numbered by the folios; while a further portion consists of loose leaves and letter-backs. The greater part of the entries are made so carefully as to justify the belief that the author intended to embody the whole in a volume of literary anecdotes.[10] Emphatically this collection was not 'tablets.' It was probably intended for a particular purpose. Boswell may have had several collections of a similar kind. But it is clear that the purpose of 'Boswelliana' has no connection with the 'Life of Johnson.'[11] Stories of Johnson it does indeed contain; but they are few, and are unconnected by any chronological arrangement. They form only a small part of the whole. The journal itself was kept in quarto and octavo volumes,[12] and Boswell on one occasion showed it to Sir William Forbes.[13] It seems that his object in doing this was to get an opinion which might encourage him to publish; he quotes with great pleasure in the 'Life' the praise which this gentleman had bestowed upon it. One would suppose that the journal displayed in this way gave the Johnsonian conversations and anecdotes in words almost identical with the text of the 'Life.' In the preface to the 'Corsican Journal' Boswell says of the Paoli memoirs: As I have related his remarkable sayings, I declare upon my honour, that I have neither added nor diminished; nay, so scrupulous have I been, that I would not make the smallest variation even when my friends thought it would be an improvement. I know with how much pleasure we read what is perfectly authentick.[14] One might easily expect that the same words would equally well apply to the 'Life.' But this is not the case. It is reasonable to suppose that the Johnsonian stories in 'Boswelliana' are not less polished than those in the journal; they are themselves in a definite form; and since the journal itself is only the second stage of Boswell's method, these stories must be in a state at the least no less advanced. And yet the verbal differences between these stories and those in the 'Life' are often considerable and sometimes large. The truth is that Boswell's method must have developed very much in one direction from the account he gave of it in the 'Tour to Corsica.' As Dr. Birkbeck Hill has clearly proved, he made changes in the way of 'touching up' the conversations and stories. One or two instances of these variations will illustrate Boswell's treatment of his materials; the stories are given below in double columns for purpose of comparison. _Boswelliana_ _Life_ 1. Boswell asked Mr. We talked of the education Samuel Johnson what was of children; and I best to teach a gentleman's asked him what he thought children first. was best to teach them 'Why, Sir,' said he, first. _Johnson_: 'Sir, it 'there is no matter what is no matter what you you teach them first. It shall teach them first, any matters no more than more than what leg you which leg you put first shall put in your breeches into your bretches [_sic_]. first. Sir, you may stand Sir, you may stand disputing which leg you disputing which leg you shall put in first, but in shall put in first, but in the meantime your breech the meantime your legs is bare. Sir, while you are bare. No matter are considering which of which you put in first two things you shall teach so that you put 'em both your child first, another in, and then you have boy has learnt them both. your bretches on. Sir, while you think which of two things to teach a child first, another boy, in the common course has learnt both.' I was present. _Boswelliana_ _Life_ 2. Boswell told Mr. The same gentleman Samuel Johnson that a maintained that there was gentleman of their no distinction between acquaintance maintained virtue and vice. _Johnson_: in public company that he 'Why, Sir, if the fellow could see no distinction does not think as he between virtue and vice. speaks, he is lying; and 'Sir,' said Mr. Johnson, I see not what honour he 'does he intend that we can propose to himself should believe that he is from having the character lying, or that he is in of a liar. But if he does earnest? If we think really think that there is him a lyar, that is not no distinction between honouring him very much. virtue and vice, why, Sir, But if we think him in when he leaves our houses earnest, when he leaves let us count our spoons.' our houses let us count our spoons.' A comparison of the two versions of No. 1 reveals at once the brevity of the final form. It is evident, as Mr. Fitzgerald remarks, that the text itself could not have represented the talk as it came from Johnson's lips. 'The whole is too deliberate, too close, too well winnowed, as it were.' Conversation is more discursive. Boswell's method as we see it here is in the first place to compress--to give not the whole of Johnson's words, but only the essence of them. In the result the story in its last state preserves the most important expressions and is more pointed for being shorter. The second story in the table has not been cut down in the same fashion. It illustrates very well another process. It is the process, one may say, of Johnsonising. Not only has the argument, as in the former case, been made clearer and more concise, but the words themselves have been considerably altered. The result indicates the reason of these changes. The version in the 'Life' is stronger and more convincing; it has more of the energy of human tongues. The assertion 'he is lying' has more force than the corresponding question: the 'why, Sir,' introduced before the climax gives the proper snort of war before the culminating triumph of the dilemma. Boswell made these changes that he might retain the spirit of Johnson's talk and the atmosphere of the moment as the listeners felt it. He succeeded whenever he added force and directness; one may easily be convinced of this by recalling the uncouth figure with its suggestion of abnormal strength which uttered slowly in a very loud voice, occasionally shaking the head, 'as if to promote the fermentation of his wit.' A most remarkable instance of the two processes--of compressing and Johnsonising--is furnished by two stories in 'Boswelliana' which become one story in the 'Life.' _Boswelliana_ _Life_ Mr. Sheridan, though a He now added, 'Sheridan man of knowledge and cannot bear me. I parts, was a little fanciful bring his declamation to a in his projects for point. I ask him a plain establishing oratory and question, What do you altering the mode of British mean to teach? Besides, education. 'Mr. Samuel Sir, what influence can Mr. Johnson,' said Sherry, Sheridan have upon the 'cannot abide me, for I language of this great always ask him, Pray, Sir, country by his narrow what do you propose to exertions? Sir, it is do?' burning a farthing candle at Dover to show light at From Mr. Johnson: Calais!' Boswell was talking to Mr. Samuel Johnson of Mr. Sheridan's enthusiasm for the advancement of eloquence. 'Sir,' said Mr. Johnson, 'it won't do. He cannot carry through his scheme. He is like a man attempting to stride the English Channel. Sir, the cause bears no proportion to the effect. It is setting up a candle at Whitechapel to give light at Westminster.' The compression and alteration are of the same character as in the two previous stories. The argument is closer and the point clearer; and the effect of the whole is stronger. One verbal change is very striking. One might expect that the image with which Johnson summarises his views would be wholly inviolate. Yet here we see Dover and Calais substituted for Whitechapel and Westminster: probably the reason is that Boswell regrets the phrase he has omitted, 'He is like a man attempting to stride across the English Channel,' and tries to combine the two images. It must not be forgotten that the stories in 'Boswelliana' were probably not used by Boswell in writing the 'Life.' If they were to be written down in full once only, then why not in the proper Johnsonian stores? Or why should this peculiar collection of 'Boswelliana' take precedence? Some of the stories, indeed, must have been in the journal; the record in 'Boswelliana,' for instance, of Johnson's retort about Scotland--the first remark he made to Boswell--cannot be the only record of the famous meeting in Tom Davies' back parlour; clearly Boswell must have kept a more elaborate account. But though the 'Boswelliana' manuscripts were not used, as seems most likely, it may fairly be argued that the difference between the versions given there and the final forms in the 'Life' are a proper indication of Boswell's method of adapting his material. There is no reason to suppose that Boswell was less accurate in the 'Boswelliana' than in his journal and other Johnsonian stores; or indeed, that there was a great difference between 'Boswelliana' versions and any others in an unfinished state. And it is clear that two versions of a story, both in an unfinished state, must differ from the final form more or less, perhaps, but with the same species of difference. It is contended, therefore, that Boswell altered his written Johnsoniana in a way which could account for the differences we have observed between the versions of stories in 'Boswelliana' and those in the 'Life.' This proposition, however, casts no reflection upon his reputation for accuracy. He preserved the 'substance and language'; and if he changed some words he preserved the colouring and made the whole a better representation of Johnson. Boswell himself gives some suggestion of his method when he presents a series of Johnsoniana for which he was indebted to Mr. Langton: Very few articles in this collection were committed to writing by himself, he not having that habit.... The authenticity of every article is unquestionable. For the expressions, I, who wrote them down, am partly answerable. By 'unquestionable authenticity' it was meant, no doubt, that the purport of what Johnson said had been correctly reported. In 'Boswelliana' a story told by Mr. Langton is written out with suggestions for its improvement. It may be quoted as a final example of the manner in which Boswell was partly answerable for the expressions: Johnson had a sovereign contempt for Wilkes and his party, whom he looked upon as a mere rabble. 'Sir,' said he, 'had Wilkes's mob prevailed against Government, this nation would have died of _phthiriasis_! Mr. Langton told me this. The expression _morbus pediculosus_, as being better known, would strike more. _Lousy disease_ may be put in a parenthesis.' [Footnote 1: _Miss Burney's Diary_, ii, 100.] [Footnote 2: _Tour to Corsica_, p. 297.] [Footnote 3: _Life of Johnson_, iii, 183.] [Footnote 4: _Tour to the Hebrides_, p. 434 (Dr. Hill's edition).] [Footnote 5: _Tour to the Hebrides_, Appendix 1.] [Footnote 6: _Life of Johnson_, iii, 270.] [Footnote 7: _Life of Johnson_, ii, 372.] [Footnote 8: _Life of Johnson_, i, 26.] [Footnote 9: _Ib._, i, 421.] [Footnote 10: _Boswelliana_, Grampian Club, 1874. Preface.] [Footnote 11: Boswell on one occasion told a lady that her joke should be included in _Boswelliana_.] [Footnote 12: _Life of Johnson_, iv, 83.] [Footnote 13: _Ib._, iii, 308.] [Footnote 14: p. xiii.] CHAPTER XII The method we have been examining has revealed, in a sense, a second aspect of Boswell as the biographer, the natural complement of that scientific spirit which inspired the acute observation, the delicate experiments, the methodical accuracy; for he brought to the work of recording not merely the faculty for stating truthfully what he had seen, but the power of expressing his feelings; and it was particularly this feeling--an interest at the same time full-blooded, comprehensive and minute--that insisted upon expression. The emotion which compels a man to bind himself to an ideal, and, having determined that something must be done under certain conditions, compels the doing of it without capitulation, is one which enters into many kinds of work and is to be found no doubt very often among scientists; but it is in a peculiar degree the possession of the artist. To him indeed it seems to be essential; for his value depends certainly not more on the quality of what he has to express than on the completeness with which he expresses it. And so perhaps we ought to connect the consistency, the truth, the faith of Boswell, and his disregard for obstacles, with his artistic rather than with his scientific qualities; so we ought to interpret Boswell's love of his labour and his conviction that it was good, and so to understand all the trouble that it cost to his mind and to the more sensitive part of him. The refusal to depart from his ideal which he made to Hannah More ('I would not cut off his claws, nor make my tiger a cat, to please anybody'),[1] and again to Bishop Percy when he declined, for the sake of 'authenticity,' to suppress the bishop's name,[2] is an indication of the need he had to express himself as an artist.[3] But how was it that he came so to express himself? And what is it that he succeeded in expressing? Of the impulse to expression and what it meant in Boswell's case something has been said already in these pages. We cannot understand the engine if we forget the power that drives it, and we must emphasise once again the force that Boswell obeyed. His passion for truth was not comprehensive: and it was for the truth of the realist, not the truth of the idealist. It did not include the whole of life; it did not attempt to view the entire scene in correct perspective; and Boswell was decidedly not a philosopher. He did not greatly need explanations of the universe; he tended to accept such as seemed convenient. He had no logic about abstract theories, and only a very limited power of criticising evidence. One who cares for truth with respect to every fact and deduction is inclined to reject his first impressions, because experience has taught him that 'all men are liars.' The face of things is so often false! But Boswell was content to look no further; he sometimes deliberately disregarded the facts of existence; he lived one half his life in a glitter of his own creation. Nevertheless, the passion for truth was vivid and vital. It lived apart to work out its own consummation; and it was all the more vehement for being confined. It is perhaps for this reason--that the truth inherent in Boswell was confined within such strict limits--that it required expression. In these circumstances Boswell's buoyant nature had need of a safety-valve. Truth for him was concerned entirely with an external view of people. He was rarely analytical; he did not care for subtle states of mind and the feelings that composed them; he looked directly at actions and their primary motives. The vision was so clear and strong that Boswell by its very insistence was obliged to create an imperishable image. The reasons that made it certain from the beginning that Johnson would become the vehicle for this expression extend beyond those qualities which made Boswell prefer and admire him above all other men; they depend upon Boswell's attitude towards mankind. We have seen that he apologises and justifies himself for relating the weaknesses and absurdities of Johnson. And yet he sometimes seems to have a peculiar delight in them. These shades in Johnson's character are dealt with not as an unpleasant but necessary task, to be despatched with a light touch as though it ill became him to speak of them, but with a full flavour of rich and lasting enjoyment. They were in fact to Boswell the most striking and salient qualities of his great hero, and it was necessary therefore that they should be well and completely related. But in the story as we read it, we do not merely observe that the rude victories and uneven justice of Johnson were supremely significant in the eyes of the author. To Boswell the whole personality of Johnson was a source of the keenest pleasure. He took an insatiable delight in it. He loved to imitate the curious gestures and manner of the Doctor. He became, to use his own word, 'Johnsonised'; and no doubt he reached that state which he desired his readers to attain, and both 'talked and thought' Johnson. He was 'strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian æther'; and when he had drunk his fill and it had all soaked in, it was reproduced with a relish of the joyous moments it had given him. The picture of Johnson, as he saw it, was a source of deep and satisfying enjoyment to Boswell: he overflowed with mere pleasure in the contemplation of a man, and expressed himself, as an artist, out of the abundance of this sympathy, in terms of 'Johnson.' And the enjoyment, one may say, depending as it did very largely upon a certain dramatic quality of that curious figure, was concerned necessarily very much with the oddities and weaknesses of the man, and particularly with that greatest weakness of all, the abuse of strength. When it is said that Boswell is an artist, it is not meant that the whole of the 'Life of Johnson' was treated artistically. It exhibits, no doubt, a certain elegance of proportion; it is a good composition, well arranged, well spaced; and in as far as it has those qualities we may consider that it belongs to art. But it is not chiefly because, having recorded what happened in a perfectly straightforward manner, he then fitted together the fragments to make as it were a complete model of a man--it is not for the design--that we call Boswell an artist. It is because he did not very often, as we have seen, relate the facts quite simply, but related them in such a manner that the whole atmosphere of the scene, all that is most human and most humorous, strikes upon us. It is in what have been called his comedy scenes that we see the supreme art of Boswell. A characteristic passage relates an attempt to make fun of Johnson by inquiring if he took dancing lessons: I ventured to mention a ludicrous passage in the newspapers, that Dr. Johnson was learning to dance of Vestris. Lord Charlemont, wishing to excite him to talk, proposed in a whisper, that he should be asked whether it was true. 'Shall I ask him?' said his Lordship. We were by a great majority clear for the experiment. In these few words Boswell has recalled the spirit of the scene. We have a vision of Johnson sitting terrible in the midst, and his hearers feeling and behaving like schoolboys in the presence of some bearish pedagogue. Some one proposes an audacious jest, and all await with eagerness the crucial moment. You may sit upon the edge of a volcano, or you may fire the train which shall explode a planet, but no expectancy is so keen as this. His Lordship very gravely and with a courteous air said, 'Pray, sir, is it true that you are taking lessons of Vestris?' ... This was risking a good deal, and required the boldness of a General of Irish Volunteers to make the attempt. The explosion unerringly follows, but the rumble dies away in rippling laughter: Johnson was at first startled and in some heat answered, 'How can your Lordship ask so simple a question?' But immediately recovering himself, whether from unwillingness to be deceived or to appear deceived, or whether from real good-humour, he kept up the joke.... Johnson in these scenes of comedy is always the dictator; the elements of the ridiculous are constantly present when someone who behaves with a pompous manner is rarely willing to be laughed at, and Boswell's sense of what was incongruous was near the surface and ready to make merry. The company on one occasion were greatly tickled by a word applied in Johnson's most majestic manner to a rather laughable female character, and the incident furnishes Boswell with material for one of his best descriptions of this kind. Johnson had remarked 'The woman had a bottom of good sense.' The word _bottom_ [says Boswell] thus introduced, was so ludicrous when contrasted with his gravity, that most of us could not forbear tittering and laughing; though I recollect that the Bishop of Killaloe kept his countenance with perfect steadiness, while Miss Hannah More slyly hid her face behind a lady's back who sat on the same settee with her. His pride could not bear that any expression of his should excite ridicule, when he did not intend it; he therefore resolved to assume and exercise despotick power, glanced sternly around, and called out in a strong tone, 'Where's the merriment?' Then collecting himself, and looking aweful, to make us feel how he could impose restraint, and as it were searching his mind for a still more ludicrous word, he slowly pronounced, 'I say the _woman_ was _fundamentally_ sensible'; as if he had said, 'Hear this now, and laugh if you dare.' We all sat composed as at a funeral. This, like the other scene, is extremely dramatic. Neither would have been so had not the writer himself realised the full humour of the situation. Perhaps the most remarkable quality of the descriptions is the amount left out.[4] The few details which Boswell gives us are sufficient to reveal the secret of everybody's feelings, and then Johnson strikes in with the characteristic remark. It is difficult to appreciate to the full the merit of these scenes without comparing them with those supplied by less talented pens; when we read the accounts of Mrs. Piozzi and Sir John Hawkins, and even of Miss Burney, we realise the immeasurable superiority of Boswell's. They have the elusive quality of all impressionist[5] art; they might be ranked with the nocturnes of Whistler: if they were produced, as it almost seems they were, with as little apparent care, they were produced, however, only by the experience of a lifetime. By continually thinking 'Johnson,' Boswell was able to give the few necessary touches which expressed the inward vision. In the two passages we have quoted, Boswell has revealed the humour of a situation; those supreme moments of Johnson's dictatorship were to him a never-failing treasure-house of priceless mirth; and he has given us a key which enables us to hear with him the magic thunder, to see each bright flash of the lightning, and with him to laugh the rich mellow laughter because it is so absurd, and yet so inevitable, and so good, that men should have been fashioned so. Boswell delights in showing us the mind of Johnson, how he was prompted like the rest of us by all the little motives of men. He enjoys Johnson's humanity. Sometimes he is more solemn. One great subject is Johnson's tenderness--as in an account of an argument with Sir Joshua about drinking: _Johnson_ (who from drinking only water supposed everybody who drank wine to be elevated): 'I won't argue any more with you, Sir. You are too far gone.' _Sir Joshua_: 'I should have thought so indeed, Sir, had I made such a speech as you have now done.' _Johnson_ (drawing himself in, and I really thought blushing): 'Nay, don't be angry. I did not mean to offend you.' The best instance perhaps of Johnson's compunction after rudeness is on the occasion of Dr. Percy's defence of Dr. Mounsey: Mr. Davies, who sat next to Dr. Percy, having after this had some conversation aside with him, made a discovery which, in his zeal to pay court to Dr. Johnson, he eagerly proclaimed aloud from the foot of the table: 'O, Sir, I have found out a very good reason why Dr. Percy never heard Mounsey swear or talk bawdy; for he tells me, he never saw him but at the Duke of Northumberland's table.' 'And so, Sir (said Johnson loudly, to Dr. Percy), you would shield this man from the charge of swearing and talking bawdy, because he did not do so at the Duke of Northumberland's table....' Dr. Percy seemed to be displeased, and soon afterwards left the company. Later, in the course of conversation, Johnson denied any merit to Swift for writing 'The Conduct of the Allies'; then _recollecting that Mr. Davies, by acting as an informer, had been the occasion of his talking somewhat too harshly to his friend Dr. Percy, for which, probably, when the first ebullition was over, he felt some compunction_,[6] he took an opportunity to give him a hit; so added, with a preparatory laugh, 'Why, Sir, Tom Davies might have written "The Conduct of the Allies."' Poor Tom being thus suddenly dragged into ludicrous notice in presence of the Scottish doctors, to whom he was ambitious of appearing to advantage, was grievously mortified. The compunction, however, on this occasion seems to have had a short duration, for Boswell goes on to say: When I called upon Dr. Johnson next morning, I found him highly satisfied with his colloquial prowess the preceding evening: 'Well (said he), we had good talk.' _Boswell_: 'Yes, Sir, you tossed and gored several persons.' Boswell seems to have had the power of picking out all that was characteristic and important, of ruthlessly discarding unnecessary details and presenting only the salient points, of seeing a scene as a whole, with its more vivid colours flashing out as it were from a dull background, so that the whole impression is complete and clear. The smallest conversations, as we saw, were dealt with in this way. And as he 'Johnsonised' the talk which he had himself taken down, and 'Johnsonised' the stories given to him by Mr. Langton, he 'Johnsonised' in the same way these larger scenes. While retaining most of the words used by Johnson himself, Boswell seems to have added here and there a characteristic expression to make the whole more pointed, and to have compressed it all till it preserved nothing but the true Johnsonian flavour. * * * * * In all this, the artistic part of his work, Boswell was expressing his own conception of Johnson. But it has been doubted by some whether this is a true view of him, or whether the whole is not overdrawn. Dr. Birkbeck Hill says that Johnson was drawn by Boswell as 'too awful.'[7] It is indeed, as has been said before, the awfulness of Johnson which Boswell had in mind when he wrote his 'comedy scenes,' and even in relating less pungent moments. The humour of it all depended so much upon that! It must be remarked, at the outset, that several individuals may have quite different impressions of one man. Not only do the observers emphasise different qualities, so that the same person might be described by one as kind and affectionate, and by another as sentimental and stupid, without either account being untrue, except in so far as it is incomplete, but a man's behaviour often varies with the company. The truth of Boswell, since he expressed quite truthfully his own impressions, would be in nowise confounded if it were discovered that the majority did not share his view of Johnson; still less if he had seen what they saw, while they had not seen what he revealed. But the fact is that Boswell's conception of Johnson as being 'awful' was the common one. The idea that he was not so is probably derived from Miss Burney's 'Diary.' It will be remembered, however, that Johnson's behaviour to Miss Burney was quite unlike his behaviour to the great majority of people: she was chosen to be the special object of his gallantry. It was extremely pleasant for her; she was naturally pleased to be continually the recipient of the most charming compliments; and her 'Diary' tells us all about it. Boswell was well aware that to her more than to anybody else Johnson showed the gayer side of his character, and he was anxious, as we have seen, to make use of her 'stores': I want to show him as gay Sam, agreeable Sam, pleasant Sam; so you must help me with some of his beautiful billets to yourself. Miss Burney indeed can hardly be excused for not giving her assistance to Boswell, since she afterwards talks of vindicating Johnson to his King and Queen,[8] which she would hardly have found necessary had she contributed largely herself to Boswell's 'Life.' And even Miss Burney alludes to the fear in which Johnson was held by his contemporaries, and reports a terrible, if deserved, rebuke to Hannah More, when Johnson, after politely bearing the lady's adulation for some little time, exclaimed, 'Madam, before you flatter a man so grossly to his face, you should consider whether or not your flattery is worth his having.'[9] Mrs. Piozzi, too, in whose house it was that she met Dr. Johnson, has, in her own account of him, emphasised very much the other side of the picture. It must also be remembered that Boswell, though he loves to relate the roughness of Johnson and his imperiousness, is always at pains to show that he was a really kind and considerate man, and even seems to make allowance for the possibility that he has made the harshness too prominent, and takes care to explain that it was not so common as might be supposed: How very false is the notion which has gone round the world of the rough, and passionate, and harsh manners of this great and good man. That he had occasional sallies of heat of temper, and that he was sometimes, perhaps, too 'easily provoked' by absurdity and folly, and sometimes too desirous of triumph in colloquial contest, must be allowed. The quickness both of his perception and sensibility disposed him to sudden explosions of satire; to which his extraordinary readiness of wit was a strong and almost irresistible incitement. I admit that the beadle within him was often so eager to apply the lash, that the judge had not time to consider the case with sufficient deliberation.[10] Boswell is prepared to admit, as he is obliged to do, the dogmatist and the fighter in Johnson, but not that he was in the ordinary way disagreeable. That he was occasionally remarkable for violence of temper may be granted: but let us ascertain the degree, and not let it be supposed that he was in a perpetual rage, and never without a club in his hand, to knock down everyone who approached him. On the contrary, the truth is, that by much the greatest part of his time he was civil, obliging, nay, polite in the true sense of the word; so much so, that many gentlemen, who were long acquainted with him, never received, or even heard a strong expression from him. It will be seen from his lengthy defence of Johnson against what he considered a common accusation and an unjust one, and it may be seen also from other passages, that Boswell regards his own life of Johnson as likely to weaken the prevalent opinions about Johnson's rough behaviour. Mrs. Piozzi is violently attacked by him for having exaggerated and maliciously enlarged upon this part of his character.[11] It is not to be supposed that the conception of Johnson's 'awfulness' depended entirely upon his capacity for giving rude blows to his antagonists in conversation. There is a certain gravity of demeanour, amounting almost to pompousness, which Boswell loves to depict. It may seem that the Doctor is not sufficiently good-humoured. No doubt it was Boswell's particular delight to represent the majesty of the great man of letters, and the many occasions on which Johnson is jovial and pleasant are, for him perhaps, the exceptions to a rule. But how many there are! The 'Tour to the Hebrides' especially (and in considering Boswell's presentation of Johnson we must consider always the 'Tour' with the 'Life') is full of instances of this kind of behaviour. It was indeed a serious departure from Boswell's ideal that the Rambler should take upon his knee a Highland lady, but it would be difficult to count the number of times that Johnson is reported quite naturally to have laughed and to have been good-humoured. He is even reported to have perverted a line of Shakespeare, with the spontaneous merrymaking of a schoolboy, to suit his companion. Surely it could be said by no one that his impression of Johnson after reading Boswell's 'Life' and the 'Tour to the Hebrides' was that of a cross and grave old man. Boswell perhaps does not give the picture of affability and even gaiety which Miss Burney gives; but her account too is qualified. 'Dr. Johnson,' she says, 'has more fun and comical humour, and love of nonsense about him, than almost anybody I ever saw: I mean when with those he likes; for otherwise he can be as severe and as bitter as report relates him.'[12] On another occasion she speaks of 'a formality that accompanies whatever he says,' which conveys exactly the impression of 'awfulness' that we get so often from Boswell.[13] The criticism which could perhaps be made with most justice of the Johnson whom we know from Boswell is that he is not playful enough. Miss Burney's Johnson may seem a jollier man. She alludes to his 'love of nonsense' and 'a turn for burlesque humour.'[14] But it must be remembered that behaviour of this kind is mentioned very seldom--only four or five times at the most, even in Miss Burney's 'Diary.' And it would be not unnatural (from the circumstances mentioned before) that Miss Burney would see more of this side of his character than other people. Boswell, in the preface to the second edition of the 'Life,' tells us that the book had been received with favour, that he had obtained a great deal of spontaneous praise, and that Sir Joshua Reynolds lived to give the strongest testimony to its fidelity. These are expressions which he could not use, had they been untrue, in that place; for they would invite a damaging attack from the reviewers. But a book which upset the popular conception of a figure like Johnson, or even one which merely overdrew the 'shades' in his character, would hardly have been received like that. And Boswell in fact was never attacked in print for these faults, which, considering what a number of enemies he had, and the disputes in which he was engaged after the publication of the 'Life,' is almost conclusive evidence that his accounts of Johnson's 'awfulness' corresponded with the observations of other people. Courtenay was a good judge when he wrote the following lines about the 'Tour to the Hebrides': "With Reynolds' pencil, vivid, bold, and true, So fervent Boswell gives him to our view: In every trait we see his mind expand; The master rises by the pupil's hand. We love the writer, praise his happy vein, Grac'd with the _naïveté_ of the sage Montaigne. Hence not alone are brighter parts display'd, But e'en the specks of character pourtray'd: We see the Rambler with fastidious smile...."[15] [Footnote 1: _Autobiography, Letters, &c., of Mrs. Piozzi_, ii, 403.] [Footnote 2: Nichols' _Illustrations_, vii, 313.] [Footnote 3: Henley, in _Views and Reviews_, speaks of Boswell as an artist.] [Footnote 4: Fitzgerald and Birkbeck Hill both say something of this.] [Footnote 5: I use this term not in a particular technical sense (as applied to a school of French painters) but in a general sense, of all art that neglects details for the sake of general effect.] [Footnote 6: The italics are mine.] [Footnote 7: _Life of Johnson_, ii. 262, n. 2.] [Footnote 8: _Miss Burney's Diary_, iv, 478.] [Footnote 9: _Ib._, i, 100.] [Footnote 10: _Life of Johnson_, iii, 80-1.] [Footnote 11: _Life of Johnson_, iv, 340 _et seq._] [Footnote 12: _Miss Burney's Diary_, i, 211.] [Footnote 13: _Ib._, i, 231.] [Footnote 14: _Ib._, i, 102.] [Footnote 15: _Life of Johnson_, ii, 268.] CHAPTER XIII Four years of life remained to Boswell after the publication of the great biography. His death came at the due moment; he was not cut off in the midst of a great undertaking or in the course of an important development. It is inconceivable that, had he lived, he would have produced another biography which should be comparable to the 'Life of Johnson.' An autobiography he might indeed have written, but there is no sign that he was engaged upon such a work in the closing years, or that the idea had taken definite shape in his mind; his nature was rather that of the casual autobiographer, such as we find him in the 'Life' from time to time, and particularly in the 'Letters to Temple'; and it is doubtful whether his autobiography, if ever it had been written, would have added much to letters and diaries which were no doubt in existence, though not preserved for our eyes.[1] The great labour of his life had been accomplished: and he was allowed a little time longer to see that it was approved by his own generation. Several questions naturally present themselves when we consider the end of a man's life. Has he been successful? What is his position in the world? Do men respect him? Do they love him? Boswell, we had occasion to remark before, had not been, in the ordinary sense, successful. He had always been ambitious; he had wanted to be 'the great man'; he had coveted the world's honours; he would have liked to be busy with the affairs of a nation, or, at the least, to have been reputed a leading barrister. But the glory which fell to the lot of those who governed this country was withheld from Boswell; in the legal and political spheres he failed. The one post which he obtained, as Recorder of Carlisle--and it was one of no importance--he resigned in 1790, because he could no longer brook the overbearing behaviour of an insolent patron. Certainly Boswell was far from attaining such fame as he desired; but at the same time he had a very remarkable success. What then was Boswell's reputation among his contemporaries? The literary world had welcomed the 'Tour to the Hebrides'; men of discrimination had seen that it was a very remarkable book. And yet Boswell's talents won little respect from this performance. It was amazingly indiscreet; and censure was more readily bestowed upon the author's indiscretion than praise upon his art. It was easy to account for the interest of the book, as Gray and Walpole had accounted for the charm of the 'Tour in Corsica,' by the peculiarities of the writer; and though to many so shallow an explanation must have been unsatisfactory, it detracted from Boswell's reputation as a man of letters. Moreover, the caricaturists were always busy with Boswell's oddities: the 'Tour to the Hebrides' provided ample store for the exercise of their wit, and the persistency of their ridicule no doubt hindered the recognition of Boswell's talents. When the 'Life of Johnson' was published, the subject of Boswell and Johnson had been somewhat played out. A number of 'Lives' of Johnson had already appeared; besides Hawkins, Mrs. Thrale, and Murphy, several less known pens had made use of so promising a subject. The public interest in Johnson had begun to wane. The sale of Boswell's 'Life' was actually rather less rapid than was expected. This was, on the whole, an advantage. The work obtained a less hasty and more serious consideration. Some who would have bought the book five years before, when the subject was fresh, and the expectation to be amused by Boswell was still keen, probably now refrained. Those who bought Boswell's 'Life' bought it, one may surmise, as the best book about Johnson; and, to anyone who read it, Boswell's work must have profited by comparison with those who had published before him. No doubt another reason for the graver attitude of the public towards the 'Life' was that it was less indiscreet than the 'Tour'; it provided less capital for those whose trade it was to amuse, and--by comparison--provoked very little ridicule. Boswell's reputation as a serious writer certainly gained enormously from the 'Life of Johnson.' It gained, in fact, disproportionately. The plan and scope of the 'Life' are larger than that of the 'Tour'; but the earlier book exhibits in their maturity, and equally well, all the qualities for which we most value Boswell. It was the later work, however, that brought honour to Boswell. The publication of the _magnum opus_ in April 1791 led to a distinction which he can hardly have expected. 'In July 1791,' we read in Taylor's 'Life of Reynolds,' 'Boswell to his great delight was appointed Secretary for Foreign Correspondence to the Academy in lieu of Baretti. The newspapers abounded in squibs at his appointment, for Bozzy's weaknesses were favourite game with the small wits.' The announcement, with its double import of respect and ridicule, gives a fair indication of Boswell's reputation among his contemporaries. It was easy not to respect Boswell; it was difficult not to love him. He was a 'truly social' man. 'His conversation talents were always pleasing and often fascinating.'[2] Boswell, in his best form, must have been irresistible. His spirits were tremendous and they were constantly bubbling over. Such spirits are infectious and intoxicating. They are like 'tone' in a violin; the full resonance, the very robustness of the sound, carries one away. Boswell, it may be said, had 'tone.' His gaiety and good humour were not self-contained, but expanded to others. The mainspring, or whatever it be that works the human being, was particularly powerful and active in his case; and his companions must have felt it. The testimony as to his radiating good humour is unanimous. Dr. Rogers in describing his personal appearance says 'his well-set features beamed with perpetual good humour,' and certainly the portraits bear him out. 'It was impossible,' remarked a contemporary, 'to look upon his face without being moved by the comicality which always reigned upon it.'[3] 'It is no wonder,' says his friend John Taylor, 'that Mr. Boswell was universally well received. He was full of anecdote, well acquainted with the most distinguished characters, good-humoured, and ready at repartee. There was a kind of jovial bluntness in his manner, which threw off all restraint even with strangers, and immediately kindled a social familiarity.'[4] Malone, replying to a detractor of Boswell, wrote: The most important misrepresentation is, that Mr. Boswell was convivial without being _social or friendly_; a falsehood, which all who knew him intimately, can peremptorily contradict. He had not only an inexhaustible fund of good-humour and good-nature, but was extremely warm in his attachments, and as ready to exert himself for his friends as any man. It would be tedious to discuss Boswell's character with reference to his popularity, explaining the various qualities which were or were not attractive in him. A good-natured and affectionate disposition, supported by high spirits, gives the key to many hearts; and Boswell's lack of dignity, and even his weaknesses, may have endeared him still more, when it was considered that there was nothing low or mean about him. Popular he certainly was; he had many acquaintances and also a number of very good friends. Boswell, though he was volatile enough in some of his relations with the opposite sex, was very constant in his real affections. Temple was still his greatest friend at the end of his life. His fidelity to Johnson was remarkable, and surprised his contemporaries; and he was no less faithful to his other hero, Paoli. The General, indeed, was always very kind to Boswell, especially when he came to live in London after the death of his wife, and Boswell more than once stayed in his house.[5] Reynolds, the most distinguished among Boswell's friends of the Johnsonian circle, is mentioned by Malone as having had 'a very warm regard' for Boswell.[6] He left him £200 to buy a picture, to be kept for his sake.[7] Charles Dilly was Boswell's friend only for a less time than was Temple; and Boswell, it appears, was a second host in Dilly's house: If ever the strict rule of decorum was by chance infringed on, it was on those occasional days when, inevitable business preventing the master of the house from sitting so long with his guests as he could wish, the pleasure of entertaining them was deputed to his kind-hearted and pleasant friend, James Boswell.[8] Courtenay, Dempster and Sir William Forbes were all old friends, and friends to the last. Forbes was Boswell's literary executor in company with Malone and Temple. Malone's acquaintance with Boswell was more recent; but his friendship does Boswell more credit almost than any other. Its ten years began by Malone correcting the proof-sheets of the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' and ended by his preparing the third edition of the 'Life.' His affection for Boswell not only survived these labours, but grew up with them.[9] Shortly after Boswell's death he wrote a handsome defence of Boswell, who had been attacked by a journalist in the _Gentleman's Magazine_. Some parts of it have already been quoted here. Malone knew Boswell at the end of his life better perhaps than anyone, and the letter is authoritative as coming from his pen; it not only bears testimony to his friendship, but also gives a valuable estimate of Boswell. He was 'extremely warm in his attachments,' Malone tells us. He also pays a striking tribute to his devotion to Dr. Johnson and his intellectual abilities: His fervent attachment to Dr. Johnson at the early age of three-and-twenty, when the dissipation and amusements of London hold out to men of such lively parts as he possessed irresistible attraction, reflects great credit on his memory. His veneration and esteem for his friend induced him, at a subsequent period, to go through the laborious task of arranging and digesting the immense mass of materials with which his own diligence and the kindness of his friends had furnished him; and of forming his history of the life of that excellent and extraordinary man; one of the most instructive and entertaining books in the English language.... Mr. Boswell undoubtedly possessed considerable intellectual powers, for which he has not had sufficient credit; many supposing him to be a mere relator of the sayings of others: but it is manifest to every reader of any discernment that he never could have collected such a mass of information and just observation on human life as his very valuable work contains, without great strength of mind and much various knowledge; as he never could have displayed his collections in so lively a manner as he has done, had he not possessed a very picturesque imagination, or, in other words, had he not had a very happy turn for poetry as well as for humour and for wit. Mr. Malone ends his letter by paying a final tribute to the affection of Boswell's friends: He will long be regretted by a wide circle of friends, to whom his good qualities and social talents always made his company a valuable accession; and by none more sincerely than the present vindicator of his fame. * * * * * Life is commonly somewhat of a battle. Blows are given and received. Flags are lost and won. Positions are captured and surrendered. Limbs are crushed and amputated. There are many ugly wounds; some bleed and fester; some are healed. It is natural to look back on life, as the general surveys the battlefield and the hospitals, to count the score. At the end of all the struggle and the horror, the strange joys and the fantastic dreams, what has happened? What view does the fighter take himself? Was the cause worth struggling for, after all is done? Would he fight on the same side if he could start again? Would he refrain from fighting? Or would he fight with a different object? Is the essential man the same? Or have his ambitions and desires and the vital force of the man been modified? And if so how much? Can they be recognised as the same equipment with which he set forth, or has the consuming fire burnt out, and the bright flame grown pale and dim? Boswell was not an old man when he died; and apart from the prostration caused by ill-health--for he was frequently ill towards the close of his life--his robust vigour seems hardly to have diminished. In July 1790, a year after Mrs. Boswell's death, he seems already to entertain some matrimonial scheme.[10] This apparently was the first of a fresh suite. In the spring of 1791 he is looking forward to the pleasure of meeting a certain Miss Bagnal, 'who may probably have six or seven hundred a year.' 'Here then I am, my Temple,' exclaims Boswell, 'my flattering self! A scheme, an adventure, seizes upon my fancy.' Assuredly this is the old Boswell. In his whole outlook upon life Boswell, in fact, changed very little. He had failed in the main battle; the ambitious dreams which pleased him most had not come to pass. Neither as politician nor as barrister had he won the smallest degree of fame. He was, and is, famous in a rarer sort: yet he had esteemed literary fame at a much lower rate. And at the end of his life he still measured distinction by the same old standards. He felt that the struggle had gone against him: but he never doubted of the cause for which he was fighting. As late as August 1791, some months after the 'Life of Johnson' appeared, he wrote to Temple as though he were on the eve of a legal career: I have gone the full round of the Home Circuit, to which I have returned, finding it much more pleasant, and, though I did not get a single brief, do not repent of the expense, as I am showing myself desirous of business and imbibing legal knowledge. He still was building castles in the air of the old type; still, sometimes, he took an opportunity to be 'conspicuous' and made conscious efforts to 'be the great man.' Almost simultaneously with the 'Life,' he published a political poem, 'No Abolition of Slavery, or The Universal Empire of Love.' It was of a semi-frivolous nature, the argument being drawn from a premise that slavery is the most agreeable of 'goods,' when it is enforced by the chains of loving devotion. The name of Miss Bagnal is introduced, and it is difficult to tell whether the whole may not be an elaborate attempt to bring off a marriage with that lady. But it is evident from a remark to Temple, that the main purpose is political: I am thinking to curtail my poem on the Slave Trade, and throw it into the world just before the great question comes on next Wednesday. A rumour of war with Russia also rouses the public spirit of Boswell to seek distinction, and he hesitates whether I should not write one of my characteristical pamphlets on this crisis--An Appeal to the People upon the threatened project of involving this country in a war with Russia, in order to assist the Turks. At the end of his life Boswell had not deserted his ambition, and, as far as we can tell, he had not forgotten his disappointment. There are few 'Letters to Temple' during these last few years, and it is difficult to form an exact idea of Boswell's state of mind. For the year 1792 we have only one note of a few lines: it begins, 'Still I cannot write a long letter.' These words suggest, though they do not prove, that Boswell had been in low spirits; for such a condition was frequently a reason for neglecting to write. For the following year there are three letters. In the first, Boswell refers to the pain it gives him to visit Auchinleck; in the second, he discusses with remorse his habit of indulgence in wine; in the third, he says 'My spirits are somewhat better, but by no means right yet.' It is probable that Boswell wrote more regularly in 1794, but only one letter to Temple exists. This, the last letter written in his own hand, is much more cheerful in tone, and concerned more with Temple than with himself. But this alone is no evidence to prove that Boswell at the end of his life was contented with his lot and satisfied with the measure of success he had attained. The reverse is far more likely to be the case. As late as 1791 he had time, in the very throes of publishing the _magnum opus_, to brood over 'the disappointment of my hopes in life.' He clearly suffered from low spirits during the next two years, and it can hardly be supposed that his disappointment, though only one of several causes, had nothing to do with it. The old standards had not changed. The same weights and measures, which were adopted early in life, still at the end of it were used to determine the deeds of men and fix their value. And yet a change had come. In the 'Letters to Temple' a certain difference of tone may be distinguished after Boswell lost his wife. It was partly that he began fully to realise the failure of his ambitious plans; and it was still more a different attitude which that realisation involved. When a man discovers that he cannot get what he wants, he is apt to pay more attention to what he already has. Though literature did not supply for Boswell the wine of life, it had always attracted him very strongly. He had a taste for books and a very keen desire for learning; above all, he had literary ambition. He made a number of literary plans besides that of writing Johnson's 'Life.'[11] He was not merely, in his own conception, the biographer of Johnson, but the man of letters in a most extended fashion, and something of a scholar. And it was towards the end of his life, though then concerned almost exclusively with Johnson, that Boswell was most industrious in the literary field. Not only did he publish the _magnum opus_ four years before his death, but he continued diligently to collect fresh material. The second edition appeared two years later, in July 1793. The third edition was being prepared, with Malone's valuable help, when Boswell died. The biographer evidently did not consider his labours ended when the 'Life of Johnson' was at last published. Its favourable reception 'has excited,' he says in the Advertisement to the Second Edition, 'my best exertions to render my Book more perfect; and in this endeavour I have had the assistance not only of some of my particular friends, but of many other learned and ingenious men, by which I have been able to rectify some mistakes, and to enrich the Work with many valuable additions.' The scale of Boswell's literary efforts towards the end of his life is the measure of his satisfaction in the performance, and this satisfaction, though it did not take the place of the magnificent pleasure he had imagined in being 'the great man,' and did not cure his disappointment, must have frequently consoled, and, in some moods, keenly delighted Boswell. In the 'Life' he expresses, with a note of triumph, his satisfaction in the fate of the 'Tour to the Hebrides': To please the true, candid, warm admirers of Johnson, and in any degree increase the splendour of his reputation, I bid defiance to the shafts of ridicule, or even of malignity. Showers of them have been discharged at my 'Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides'; yet it still sails unhurt along the stream of time, and, as attendant upon Johnson, Pursues the triumph, and partakes the gale. Boswell is equally triumphant about the 'Life': That I was anxious for the success of a Work which had employed much of my time and labour, I do not wish to conceal: but whatever doubts I at any time entertained, have been entirely removed by the very favourable reception with which it has been honoured. It was not merely literary fame that so much delighted Boswell: it was literary fame of the best sort. The most respected of Johnson's friends and the best critics had praised his book. Boswell could now feel secure in his own conviction that his 'Life' was beyond comparison as a portrait of a man and as a portrait of Johnson: In reflecting that the illustrious subject of this Work, by being more extensively and more intimately known, however elevated before, has risen in the veneration and love of mankind, I feel a satisfaction beyond what fame can afford.... It seems to me, in my moments of self-complacency, that this extensive biographical work, however inferior in its nature, may in one respect be assimilated to the Odyssey. Boswell goes on to explain that the 'Hero,' like Ulysses, 'in the whole course of the History, is exhibited by the authour for the best advantage of his readers.' So certain is he of the merits of his book that he tells his readers, in so many words, that, if they do not like it, their own bad temper is to blame. Should there be any cold-blooded morose mortals who really dislike this Book, I will give them a story to apply. When the great Duke of Marlborough, accompanied by Lord Cadogan, was one day reconnoitering the army in Flanders, a heavy rain came on and they both called for their cloaks. Lord Cadogan's servant, a good-humoured, alert lad, brought his Lordship's in a minute. The Duke's servant, a lazy sulky dog, was so sluggish, that his Grace being wet to the skin, reproved him, and had for answer, with a grunt, 'I came as fast as I could,' upon which the Duke calmly said, 'Cadogan, I would not for a thousand pounds have that fellow's temper.' Boswell's satisfaction with his literary labours was certainly well-founded. It is fair to remind those who may condemn this attitude that he allowed an unduly large share of the book's merits to Dr. Johnson. Interesting and lovable as Johnson was, he had little to do with Boswell's execution. The biographer was fortunate--peculiarly fortunate--in his subject: so much must be allowed and no more. Boswell's pride did not exceed his deserts. But his 'moments of self-complacency' must have provided a considerable compensation for despondent moods when he regretted failure in other spheres. His 'satisfaction' reached a very high pitch when he could calmly say to an unappreciative reader--for that is what it amounts to--that he would be sorry to have a temper like that. It is not remarkable for an author to feel as self-satisfied as Boswell. Many authors tell their readers, though not so frankly, that they ought to be interested in a book, and few give so good reasons as Boswell gave. The point has been laboured here in order to illustrate the final stage in his paradoxical development; to show in what degree Boswell, while realising failure in all his magnificent dreams, was satisfied with the fame he had of another sort. Assuredly he was pleased with what he had; the degree may be judged from this final extract from the Advertisement to the Second Edition: There are some men, I believe, who have, or think they have, a very small share of vanity. Such may speak of their literary fame in a decorous style of diffidence. But I confess, that I am so formed by nature, and by habit, that to restrain the effusion of delight, on having obtained such fame, to me would be truly painful. Why then should I suppress it? Why 'out of the abundance of the heart' should I not speak? Let me then mention with a warm, but no insolent exultation, that I have been regaled with spontaneous praise of my work by many and various persons eminent for their rank, learning, talents and accomplishments; much of which praise I have under their hands to be reposited in my archives at Auchinleck. An honourable and reverend friend, speaking of the favourable reception of my volumes, even in the circles of fashion and elegance, said to me, 'You have made them all talk Johnson.'--Yes, I may add, I have _Johnsonised_ the land; and I trust they will not only _talk_ but _think_ Johnson. Boswell, after all, had changed very little since the publication of the 'Tour in Corsica' in his desire for literary fame, but he must have had a very different view of what it meant. In early life this literary ambition was but one aspect of the prevailing idea, to be 'the great man'; and he intended to win respect through literature as a wise and honoured 'citizen of the world.' He cannot have retained this delusion after publishing the 'Tour to the Hebrides.' It was in the very month when the 'Life' appeared that he spoke of 'the disappointment of my hopes of success in life.' There was no thought that the 'Life' would redeem these hopes. It was to win praise and bring esteem: but not in the same sphere with these 'hopes of success.' Boswell's literary fame compensated his disappointment in some degree, but by no means banished it. His triumphant satisfaction was founded, as is the case with many literary men, upon the merits of literary work and the applause of competent judges. * * * * * Such changes as may be observed in Boswell towards the end of his life arose, it must be repeated, from the failure of his political and legal ambitions. When he ceased to pursue the adventures suggested by his wild imagination, he paid more attention to the natural interests of his position. He was a landlord and a father; and his children had now no mother. Boswell not only accepted his responsibilities, but performed something more than his duty. When Boswell had left Auchinleck and came to live in London, his opportunities for interesting himself in the welfare of his tenants and dependants were naturally curtailed. With the strict view of a landlord's obligations which is commonly held in this age, we may be inclined to condemn Boswell simply on the ground that he did not live upon his estate. But, though Ayrshire is a far cry from London, the Laird of Auchinleck did not forget his position. He was willing to travel to Scotland 'to transact business with my tenants.' On one occasion, in 1793, he undertook the journey in order to see that the parish was provided with a suitable parson: 'The choice of a minister to a worthy parish is a matter of importance, and I cannot be sure of the real wishes of the people without being present.' He went to Auchinleck not because he enjoyed going, but because he thought he ought to go: 'though the journey will no doubt be uncomfortable (probably because Boswell was in bad health), and my being alone in that house where once I was so happy, be dreary in a woeful degree, the consciousness of duty, and being busy, will I hope support me.' In Boswell's will special provisions were made for his tenants and servants: As there are upon the estate of Auchinleck several tenants whose families have possessed their farms for many generations, I do by these presents grant leases for nineteen years and their respective lifetimes of their present farms to John Templeton etc.... And I do beseech all the succeeding heirs of entail to be kind to the Tenants and not turn out old possessors to get a little more rent. 'Seldom,' exclaims Dr. Rogers, 'has Scottish landlord evinced greater consideration for his tenantry and domestics.' As a father, Boswell was no less kind. He had had six children altogether, three sons and three daughters;[12] one of the sons had died early in 1777. His interest in his children no doubt increased very much after their mother's death. Frequently in the 'Letters to Temple' after that event (June, 1789) one or other of them is mentioned, and Boswell shows anxiety both for their present happiness and for their future welfare. Malone, in answering a detractor of Boswell's, says: This writer acknowledges that he was an affectionate father; he was more; he was extremely liberal and indulgent to his children, having, for some years past, expended out of his moderate income, £300 a year to educate his two sons, one at Eton and the other at Westminster, and one of his daughters at a boarding-school: to effect which he confined his own personal expenses within the narrowest bounds. That Boswell could stint himself in this way for his children shows a larger degree of self-sacrifice than might be expected from one of his extravagant tastes. It shows also a development in his character. The old passion for being conspicuous could now be put aside for the sake of his children. Boswell, in fact, became less extravagant and affected towards the end of life. He was less often carried away by his 'warm imagination.' He lived less in his 'castles in the air,' and nearer the solid earth. * * * * * The next cause of this development is not far to seek. It lies in the result of the main struggle in Boswell's life. Truth had won the day. The irrepressible quality of Boswell's genius had triumphed in spite of his commonplace aims and the conventionality of his beliefs and standards; and it had found its expression in biography. The nature of that triumph reacted inevitably upon Boswell. The highest of his qualifications for writing the 'Life of Johnson' was simply honesty. He was honest about human nature. He had related without omission and without perversion the story of a man as he had witnessed it. All his powers of observing and of judging character had been brought to bear upon the great work of his life. His own character had developed in the process. It is impossible for a man to concentrate all his mind upon the effort to understand the human being, without involving himself in his investigations; and Boswell was no exception. He had always been interested in his own character, though in a rather uncritical fashion; and no doubt, as often happens, his knowledge of others began with himself. He was himself both the primer of psychology and the standard for comparison, upon which his whole view of individuals was based; and it is often clear, when he is discussing some moral question, that he has his own case in mind. The 'Life of Johnson' was necessarily concerned with Boswell in some degree; and so it was that the author, when he came to record his observations of Johnson and his friends and acquaintances, found that the process which he applied to others was being applied to himself. Nothing in Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' is more remarkable, as nothing is more charming, than the author's candour when his own person is concerned. He does not obtrude himself upon the reader's notice; he relates the events quite naturally as they occurred. And though Boswell was not a little vain, he was able to relate what was not to his credit. Most of the stories of Boswell's folly we know from himself. He has recorded the sledge-hammer blows of Johnson provoked by his own absurdity; he has told us of occasions when he lacked in manners, even when, more than once, he was drunk in a lady's drawing-room; he has described at length, in the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' the story of a carouse at Corrichatachin, and has not failed to mention how very ill he felt next morning, and how much he dreaded Johnson's rebuke; it is in his own account that we read of the ridiculous figure he cut in a storm at sea; it is from his own correspondence with Johnson that we learn of all the weaknesses that earned the Doctor's reproof. Boswell was perfectly conscious of his folly when he allowed us to see the absurdity of his behaviour. He was sometimes conscious, at the moment, of provoking ridicule. Occasionally, as he takes care to explain, he deliberately planned his own discomfiture: Desirous of calling Johnson forth to talk and exercise his wit, though I should myself be the object of it, I resolutely ventured.... This was a common attitude. It has been discussed before in these pages with reference to Boswell's biographical method. Boswell even mentions once that he spoke 'with an assumed air of ignorance, to incite him to talk, for which it was often necessary to employ some address.' He realised well enough that he made the best possible foil to Johnson. And if he was able to understand his position in these undignified moments, still more must he have been conscious of it when he allowed his records to be printed many years afterwards in the 'Life.' He tells us as much himself in the Dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds: In one respect, this Work will, in some passages, be different from the former. In my 'Tour,' I was almost unboundedly open in my communications, and from my eagerness to display the wonderful fertility and readiness of Johnson's wit, freely shewed to the world its dexterity, even when I was myself the object of it. I trusted that I should be liberally understood, as knowing very well what I was about, and by no means as simply unconscious of the pointed effects of the satire. I own, indeed, that I was arrogant enough to suppose that the tenour of the rest of the book would sufficiently guard me against such a strange imputation. But it seems I judged too well of the world; for, though I could scarcely believe it, I have been undoubtedly informed, that many persons, especially in distant quarters, not penetrating enough into Johnson's character, so as to understand his mode of treating his friends, have arraigned my judgement, instead of seeing that I was sensible of all that they could observe. It is related of the great Dr. Clarke, that when in one of his leisure hours he was unbending himself with a few friends in the most playful and frolicksome manner, he observed Beau Nash approaching; upon which he suddenly stopped. 'My boys (said he) let us be grave: here comes a fool.' The world, my friend, I have found to be a great fool, as to that particular, on which it has become necessary to speak very plainly. I have, therefore, in this Work been more reserved; and though I tell nothing but the truth, I have still kept in my mind that the whole truth is not always to be exposed. This, however, I have managed so as to occasion no diminution of the pleasure which my Book should afford; though malignity may sometimes be disappointed of its gratifications. Boswell's statement speaks for itself. He realised as well as anyone his own vanity and affectation. It had been necessary when writing Johnson's 'Life' to apply the searching light of truth indiscriminately. Boswell had not flinched from applying it to himself: on the contrary it amused him to do so. He enjoyed his own absurdities as he enjoyed those of Johnson himself and of every other figure portrayed with good-humoured ridicule in the course of his great book. Boswell, we may be sure, laughed wherever his readers may laugh: indeed his readers laugh at all only because he himself laughed so whole-heartedly. Assuredly the laughter which comes when the searching light is turned inwards is not without a lasting effect. The desire for dignity in some measure is with most men almost an instinct. It is rare for a man to perceive that he has been ridiculous without a blush, even though he smile; and the result of such perception is almost invariably preventive; the absurdity must not be repeated. Boswell was able to laugh at himself more whole-heartedly than the majority. But the mere fact of looking inwards with the seeing glance was certain to arrest him in moments of absurdity; and the necessity, as it appeared to him, of writing out an account of himself in the most undignified situations made his realisation more vivid and the inevitable tendency more sure. And so, in the end, the truth of Boswell, his innate and unquenchable candour, not only won a victory, but spoiled the enemy. We may observe, if we care to, that the natural development has taken place. Much of the old affectation has disappeared. Boswell, to the last, is still tempted to give rein to that 'warm imagination'; but now as a rule the impulse is checked with a smile by a moment of self-consciousness. The development is clearly to be seen in the 'Letters to Temple,' and one instance will suffice to illustrate his attitude. Boswell, when telling of his intention of visiting Auchinleck, for the purpose related before in these pages of choosing a minister for the parish, cannot refrain from exclaiming in the old manner, 'Only think, Temple, how serious a duty I am about to discharge!' But then comes the inward glance and Boswell laughs: I, James Boswell, Esq.--you know what vanity that name includes!--I have promised to come down on purpose, and his Honour's goodness is gratefully acknowledged. Boswell was not systematic in his self-examination; but he came to know himself with a truer judgment than most men have where self is concerned. His principles had been ill carried out; his ideals had not been comprehensive. He had neglected the personal discipline which we look to see in men of power and in men who have accomplished important matters; he had neglected to train his mind to deal with all the problems of life. His grasp upon the whole scheme of things was feeble, as his control of himself was limited. And yet this knowledge of self with the good-humoured laugh--and it was not unaccompanied by fervent regret for his weakness, and anxious piety--this knowledge, which is the key to all right knowing, was a fitting achievement for one whose predominant interest was Human Nature, and whose prevailing passion was Truth. [Footnote 1: Boswell's literary executors were Temple, Malone, and Sir William Forbes. 'The three persons,' says Dr. Rogers, 'nominated as literary executors did not meet, and the entire business of the trust was administered by Sir William Forbes, Bart., who appointed as his law-agent Robert Boswell, Writer to the Signet, cousin-german of the deceased. By that gentleman's advice Boswell's manuscripts were left to the disposal of his family, and it is believed that the whole were immediately destroyed. The Commonplace-book escaped, having been accidentally sold among the printed books.' I believe there is still at Auchinleck the manuscript of a diary and some letters, but I have not been permitted to see them. Undoubtedly Boswell must have left far more than these.] [Footnote 2: The quotation is from a letter, quoted before in these pages, which appeared in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for June 1795; it is clearly written by one of Boswell's friends, and the signature 'C.' suggests Courtenay. Dr. Rogers accepts it as by him.] [Footnote 3: Quoted in Dr. Rogers's _Memoir_ with reference to _Traditions of Edinburgh_, 1869, p. 74. I have not verified.] [Footnote 4: _Records of my Life_, by John Taylor, Esq., 1832, i, 214.] [Footnote 5: Nichols' _Literary History_, vii, 303-13.] [Footnote 6: _Gentleman's Magazine_, June, 1795.] [Footnote 7: _Life of Reynolds_, ii, 636.] [Footnote 8: Nichols' _Literary Anecdotes_, iii, 192.] [Footnote 9: See Nichols' _Literary History_, v, 456-7.] [Footnote 10: _Letters to Temple_, p. 272.] [Footnote 11: _James Boswell_, by W. K. Leask, p. 155.] [Footnote 12: For an account of Boswell's family, see Dr. Rogers in _Boswelliana_, pp. 192-7.] INDEX A Aberbrothick, 245 Academy, 303 Account of Corsica, 56-64, 114, 178^16, 268, 275, 276, 302, 317 Adam, Mr. R. B., 251^5 Adamtown, 93, 100 Address to the Real Freeholders of the County of Ayr, 177 Akerman, 251 Aldus, 30 America, 181 Arbuthnot, 118 Argyll, Duke of, 35 Aristotle, 157 Ashbourne, 272 Auchinleck, 6, 91, 92, 105, 133, 136, 165, 166, 168, 301^1, 311, 318-9, 325 Auchlinleck, Lord, 7, 8, 9, 76, 83, 162-6, 171, 175, 218 Ayrshire, 176, 177, 318 B Baden, 50 Bagnal, Miss, 309, 310 Bar, the English, 84, 137, 167-172, 310 ----, the Scottish, 80, 82, 84, 85, 105, 133, 162, 164, 166, 168, 171, 174, 186, 203 Barbauld, Mrs., 66 Barclay, Mr., 266 Baretti, 38, 108, 248, 303 Barrington, Mr. Daines, 251 Beattie, Dr., 214 Beauclerk, 86, 106, 107, 108, 262 ----, Lady Di, 107, 261 Bedford, Duke of, 74 ----, Duchess of, 74 Birrell, Rt. Hon. A., 252^6 Blacklock, Rev. Mr., 19 Blair, Miss, 64, 91-7, 100 Bolingbroke, 118 Bosville, Miss, 91, 95, 98-9 Boswell: Accent in speaking English, 21; accuracy, 228, 267-82; actor, 24; advertisement, 65, 76, 199; affectation, 103, 132, 157-8, 184-94, 221, 224, 320-1, 326; ambition, 12-13, 39, 59, 61-4, 74-6, 80, 160; 166-208 _passim_, especially 166-8, 170, 174-6; 209, 217, 226, 301, 310, 311; amours, 14, 88-100; animosities, 237-8, 241; artistic qualities, 2, 61-4, 283-4, 287-93; authenticity, 229, 267, 269-70, 282; autobiography, 300; Bachelors, views on, 89; biography, 1-4, 21, 59-60, 67, 77, 93, 118, 128, 135, 144, 159; 227-99 _passim_, especially 231, 235-6, 247, 265-6, 267, 284^1; 313-8; boasting, 204-5; boyishness--boy longer than others, 16, 163, 208; buffoonery, 28, 65-6, 199, 246; Candour, 38-9, 60, 64, 86, 118, 208, 209, 212-13, 302, 303, 322, 325; castles in the air, 12, 190, 310; ceremonial, love of, 137, 171; childhood, 6-9; cleverness, 18-19, 30; collection of original poems, B. contributes, 25, 27; commonplace book, _see_ Boswelliana; consciousness of absurdity, 321-6; conspicuousness, 171, 204, 320; controversy about, 4-5; conventionality, 136-7, 146-50, 320, _see also_ respectability; conventions, disregard of, _see_ rudeness; cow, B. imitates, 29; criticism of literature, 109; curiosity, 72, 129, 131, 173-4, 208, 266; Death, 300; dedication, addressed to, 22; dignity, 62, 97, 121, 265, 305, 324-5; diligence, _see_ industry; disappointment, 17, 66, 133, 161, 168, 170, 219, 226, 311-2, 317; drinking habits, 15, 127, 220, 223-6, 227-8, 311; Eccentricity, 172; egoism, 73, 75, 77, 80, 195-6; essays, 139-44; executions, present at, 172-4; experiments, 129; extravagance: of disposition, 31, 54, 64, 77, 83, 141, 184-94, 320-1, _see also_ affectation; in financial matters, 31, 163-4; Fame, _see_ reputation; family, 6, 30, 164, 218, 318-20; family life, 6-9, 105-6; father, _see_ Lord Auchinleck; fidelity, conjugal, 104; flattery, 45-6, 75; foolishness, 4-5, 38; 182-208 _passim_, especially 182, 184, 194, 206, 208; 216, 322; frankness, _see_ candour; friends: as a young man, 10-16, 19-25: the Johnsonian circle, 106-12: at the close of life, 305-8; frolic, 28, 66; Gaiety, 16, 30-1, 52-4, 78, 138, 224, 304; generosity, 54, 79-80, 119, 320; genius, 5-6, 156-7, 210, 217, 224, 241, 247, 320; good-humour, 16, 47, 78, 86, 108, 119, 126, 138, 142, 304; good-nature, 22, 24, 79-80, 174, 214-6, 305; goodness, 144-5; 'great man,' Boswell the, 74, 166, 204, 314; great men, admiration for and relations with, 50, 54, 55, 57, 67-77; Happiness, 147; hermit, taste for being a, 189; honesty, 157, 200, 321; human nature, Boswell's interest in, 24, 46, 69-73, 208, 211, 241, 321, 326; humour, 3, 16, 30, 42, 131, 200-1, 203, 287-91, 308; hypochondria, _see_ melancholy; Ignorance of what others thought of him, 182-4, 216; images, 120, 144, 203; imagination, 26; inconstancy, 38, 92; indiscretion, _see_ candour; indulgence, 222-6; industry, 36, 82, 227-9, 247-52; insanity, 92, 225; interest in, 3-4; intolerance, 68, 71; Johnson, Dr. Samuel: admiration for, _see_ veneration; affection for, 48-9, 119, 131, 132, 153, 218-9, 306-8; conception of, as awful, 293-9; enjoyment of, 285-7, 291, 324; experiments with, 110-2, 257-66, 321-3; friendship with, 40-9, 112-34, 306-8; humiliated by, _see_ roughness; imitation of, 109, 144, 191-3; influenced by, 68, 150-61, 191; jealousy with regard to, 128; letters to, 48, 77-8, 79, 114, 115, 124, 188; letters from, 48, 58, 114, 124, 132, 155-7, 160, 166; loss by his death, 132-4, 218-9; quarrels with, 116-23; questions, 130, 258, 261; roughness to Boswell, 47, 116, 117, 118, 210-4, 259-66; talks freely to, 43, 44, 45, 47; tour in Hebrides with, 125-131, 260; veneration for, 36, 49, 109, 130, 238-9, 307; visit to Boswell's home, 7, 260; jokes, _see_ wit; journal, 21, 36, 227-8, 261, 268-76; Landlord, 318-9; law, 34-6, 76, 79, 80-5, 87, 105, 125, 133, 162, 164, 166-72, 203, 219, 310; lawyers, relations with, 162, 164, 169-72, 203, 205; letters: to Burke, 179-87; to Chatham, 75-6, 179-82; to Erskine, 30-3; to Johnson, _see_ Johnson under Boswell; Temple, quoted, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 34, 35, 70, 78^6, 82^10, 100-1, 104^15-16, 113, 153, 155, 163, 164, 165, 167^1, 168, 169^2-3, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177^10-12, 178^14-17, 183-4, 185-6, 204, 207, 218, 219^3, 220, 221, 222, 223^6, 226, 230, 231^5-6, 300, 310-12, 320, 325; literary executors, 300^1; literature, interest in, 11, 18, 20, 25, 35, 46, 53, 193-4, 230, 312-5; London: B. visits, 17, 25, 124, 218; love of, 34, 69, 105, 167, 168, 218; Marriage, 88, 89-90, 100-4, 133, 164, 309-10; meeting with Johnson, 16, 17, 40-4; melancholy, 30, 124, 132, 138, 140-1, 157, 187, 224-6; memorandising, 21-2, 246, 266-74; modesty, 57; morality, interest in, 9, 46, 159, 188, 206, 233-7; mother, 6; Notebook, _see_ memorandising; Observation, powers of, 183, 217, 242-7, 257-62; ode to Tragedy, 25, 29, 30; opinions about himself, 28, 29, 30; optimism, 142-3, 229-30; Patron of the drama, 22-3; patrons, 175-6, 178-84, 200; philosophy: affectation of, 13, 17, 32, 75, 94, 173; views of life, 88, 147-50, 187-8, 285; pleasure an object of life, 88, 147; poetry, Boswell's, 25-7, 200-2; politics, 133, 137, 174-82, 209, 219, 310-11; popularity, 304-5; prejudices, 136-7, 153; pride, 30, 116, 164, 179, 204, 253; profession chosen, 34-5; profligacy, 14-15; prologue, Boswell writes one for Ross, 24; proof-sheets, 250-1; property, 136-7, 166, 218; publications, 25-7, 29-32, 59-66, 81, 82, 133, 176, 209, 310; Recording: conversations, 227, 242, 266; observations, 217; religion, 9, 22, 36-7, 147-50, 188-9, 206; reputation, 1, 39, 58, 61, 66, 172, 199, 209, 213-4, 300-4, 314, 317; respectability, 37-9, 62, 105, 150-61, 166, 209, 236-7; rivals, 237-8; romantic, 31, 186; rudeness, 38, 252-5, 266; satisfaction with literary work, 229-33, 313-8; scholar, 189; school, 10; scientific spirit, 241, 256-66; selfish, 15; self-revelation, 14, 139; sentimentality, 39, 184-6, _see also_ affectation; seriousness, 140-2; shorthand, 270; simplicity, 182, 204, 206; sings: to Corsican peasants, 52-3: at mayoralty dinner, 197-9; songs of his own composition, 204; snobbishness, 71-7, _see also_ under Boswell, 'great men'; social qualities, 16, 24, 30-1, 46, 52-4, 86, 108, 126, 206, 304-5, 308; solemnity, 192; Tablets, _see_ memorandising; talks very freely, 43, 44, 64, 204-8; taste, 22; tenants, 79, 318-9; Tory, a, 8, 137, 153, 176, 181; travels on the Continent, 50-8, 93, 125; truth, Boswell's attitude towards, 38-9, 118, 210, 216, 228, 233, 236-7, 241, 249, 255, 284-5, 294, 324-6; Vanity, 38, 73, 77, 103, 194-7, 205, 206, 316, 322, 326; verse, _see_ poetry; vows, 99, 223; Wife, _see_ Mrs. Boswell; will, 216, 318-9; wit, 200-3, 308 Boswell, Mrs., 84, 100-4, 219-22, 309 Boswell, Robert, 300^1 'Boswelliana,' 79^7, 190, 200, 203, 214^2, 274-82, 301^1 Boydell, Alderman, 197 British Essays to the Brave Corsicans, 78 Browning, 1 Burke, Edmund, 106, 107, 108, 150, 179-182 Burney, Miss, 21, 108, 128, 130, 191-2, 237, 246-7, 253-4, 255, 263-5, 268^1, 290, 294-5, 298 ----, Dr., 130 Burns, 20 Bute, Lord, 248 Byron, 1 C Cadogan, Lord, 315 Cambridge University, 21 Campbell, Dr. Thomas, 130 ---- diary of, 130^7 Carlisle, 170, 175 ---- Recorder, 176, 179, 301 Carlyle, 2, 5 Catherine II. of Russia, 251 Charlemont, Lord, 288 Chatham, Earl of, 75-6, 178, 179, 182, 187, 189 Chesterfield, Lord, 248 Church of England, 9 Cicero, 53, 142 Clarke, Dr., 323 'Cocker's Arithmetic,' 245 'Collection of Original Poems,' 19, 27 College upon Roman Antiquities, 35 Commonplace book, Boswell's, _see_ 'Boswelliana' Corrichatachin, 127, 322 Corsica, 51-60, 65-6, 74-8, 114, 195 Corsican Journal, _see_ account of Corsica Courtenay, 215, 220, 299, 304^2, 306 Covent Garden, 23 Crichton, the Admirable, 30 Croker, 118 Cromwell, 7 'Cub at Newmarket,' 26, 27 D Dalrymple, Sir David, 17, 21, 73, 178 D'Arblay, Madame, diary of, _see under_ Miss Burney Davies, Tom, 40-2, 44, 291-2 Dempster, George, 19, 33, 151, 230, 306 Derrick, 25, 40 Dictionary, Johnson's, 1, 243, 274 'Dictionary of National Biography,' 176^6 Dilly, Charles, 19, 111, 202, 248, 306 Dilly, Edward, 188 Dodd, Dr., 79 Douglas, Mr., 81 Douglas Cause, 81-4 'Dorando: a Spanish Tale,' 82 Drury Lane Theatre, 20, 23, 29 Dunciad, 118 Dundas, 179 Dunn, Mr., 9 E Edinburgh, 6, 12, 17, 19, 20, 23, 24, 27, 34, 84, 90, 95, 103, 123 Edinburgh, traditions of, 304^3 Edinburgh University, 10, 12, 17, 20, 35, 89 Eglinton, Earl of, 26, 100, 177, 178, 197 Eldon, Lord Chancellor, 169 'Elegy on the Death of an Amiable Young Lady,' 25, 26 England, 85, 87, 106, 210, 220 Epictetus, 188 'Epistle of a London Buck to his Friend,' 27 Erskine, Honourable Andrew, 19, 20, 25, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 Eton, 216, 320 F Ferney, 50, 54 Fitzgerald's 'Life of Boswell,' 81^9, 82^11, 83^12, 177^9, 199, 200^35, 204^36, 212, 273, 278, 290^4 Flanders, 315 Fleet ditch, 240 Foote, 207 Forbes, Sir William, 214, 275, 300^1, 306 France, 235 Franklin, Dr., 74 Frederick the Great, 54 Froude, 1 G Garrick, 23, 43, 44, 61, 74, 107, 109, 262 Gay, 118 Gentleman, Francis, 22, 25 'Gentleman's Magazine,' 61^8, 63^10, 178^13, 215, 225^7, 304^2, 306^6, 307 Gibbon, 68 Gilmour, Sir Alexander, 97 Glasgow, 22 ---- University, 17, 36 Glenelg, 122 Goldsmith, 106, 108, 179 Goldsmith, Prior's Life of, 195^33, 206^38 Graham, 201 Gray, 4, 11, 12, 94, 109, 302 ----, Mason's Life of, 231-2 Greenwich, 268 Guards, 34 H Hackman, 173 Hailes, Lord, 17, 36, 69, 268 Hamlet, 41 Harris, 35 Harwich, 48 Hawkins, Sir John, 107, 108, 227^1, 237, 290, 302 Hebrides, 172, 211 Henley, W. E., 'Views and Reviews,' 284^3 Hill, Dr. George Birkbeck, 58, 250-1, 276, 290, 293 Hodge, 244 Holcroft, Thomas, Memoirs of, 252 Home Circuit, 310 Homer, 2 Howard, 98 Hume, David, 18, 35, 53, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74, 151, 175, 207 Hypochondriack, the [in 'London Magazine'], 124, 137-44, 145-6, 147, 148, 224 I Inner Temple, 137, 167 Ireland, 22 Ireland, Mr., 193-4 J James, King, 8 Jockey Club, 26 Johnson, Lionel, 189 Johnson, Samuel: better known to us than other literary men, 1-2; interest in, 3-4; argument with Lord Auchinleck, 7; retort to Mr. Dunn, 9; Temple contrasted with, 13; condemnation of Dempster, 19; commends Boswell's accent, 21; opinion of Derrick, 25; great writer, 36; becomes friends with Boswell, 40-50; conversation, 45-7; liked admiration, 45; strength of personality, 49; Frederick the Great and Voltaire, 54; compared with Paoli, 56-8; approves Boswell's adventures in Corsica, 58; opinion of Boswell's account of Corsica, &c., 59; opinion of Gibbon and condemnation of 'infidelity,' 68 _seq._; talks of going to Sweden, 71; dines with Boswell, 74; writes on behalf of Mr. Dodd, 79; legal help to Boswell, 83-4; on Scotchmen, 85-7, on Mrs. Boswell, 100-1; Mrs. Boswell's opinion of, 102; the Johnsonian circle, 106 _seq._; meeting with Wilkes arranged, 110-12; friendship with Boswell, 112-34; lack of sympathy and blunt advice, 114; irritated by Boswell, 115; quarrels, 116-24; no venom in his wounds, 120; very angry, 121; in the Hebrides, 125 _seq._; at Streatham, 128; at Lochbuy, 129; use of images, 144; influence on Boswell, 150-61; conventional prejudices, 153 _seq._; talks for victory, 121, 153-4; truth, honesty, 155, 201; dislikes affectation, 157-8; a moralist, 159-60; Lord Auchinleck's opinion of, 165; on Lord Auchinleck as Boswell's father, 166; knows nothing of Scotch law, 171; view of Boswell's attendance at executions, 173; discourages Boswell's political ambitions, 175; Boswell's imitation of, 191-2; 'just frown,' 155, 201; _mot_ about Boswell's boasting, 204; fear of death, 206; Gargantua, 207; records of the tour in the Hebrides, 209-14; little taste for rural beauties, 210; interest in human nature, 211; remarks on his host's avarice, 212-13; introduced to Temple, 215; moral support, 222; melancholy, 225; faults of the great moralist, 233-4; love of truth applied to biography, 235-7; Hawkins' Life, and Mrs. Thrale's Memoirs, 237-8; Boswell's conception of, 238-40; description of, 242; physical characteristics, 244; his cat, 244-5; Latin quotations, 245; presents a Highland lass with 'Cocker's Arithmetic,' 245; letter to Lord Chesterfield, 248; his pension, 248-9; gay Sam, 254, 295; a great talker, 256; not expansive, 257; baited by Boswell, 259; the subject of Boswell's experiments, 260 _seq._; questioned by Boswell, 261 _seq._; helps Boswell in his biographical work, 272; the Johnsonian æther, 286-7; the dictator, 288-93; dancing lessons, 288; the element of humour, 289; his humanity and tenderness, 291; Tom Davies put down, 292; his 'awfulness,' 293-8; Miss Burney's account, 294 _seq._; his gallantry, 294-5; his rebuke to Hannah More, 295; his kindness, 295; the dogmatist, 296; pompousness and playfulness, 297; his 'formality,' 298; public interest in, 302; his share in Boswell's great work, 315-6; talked about, 317; fertility and readiness of his wit, 323; _See also under_ Boswell. Johnson, Boswell's Life of: universality, 2-3; self-expression in, 14; 'Tour in Corsica' compared with, 59-60; tells a story of friendship, 113; attitude towards Johnson involved, 131; not a complete expression of Boswell's views, 137; proves Boswell's ability, 138; an edifying book, 145; humour, 201; Malone the first editor, 210^1; connection of the 'Tour to the Hebrides' with, 217, 227-8; not the official life, 227^1; industry of the author, 227-9; Malone revises, 229-30; Boswell's conviction that it will be a masterpiece, 229-33; his conception of, 231-3; nature of moral purpose in, 233-7; Boswell's conception of Johnson's character, 238-41; his qualifications, 242 _seq._; his care, 247-5; the proof-sheets, 250-1; interest in Johnson's talk, 256; the author's questions and experiments, 258-66; his note-taking, 266 _seq._, _see_ Boswell; compiled from documents not extant, 273; the process of Johnsonising, 278-82; artistic nature of the representation, 283-93; the 'shades' in Johnson's character emphasised, 286; the comedy scenes, 288-92; is Boswell's Johnson in any degree his own invention? 293-9; Boswell's account accepted as the truth, 299; contains occasional autobiography, 300; solidifies Boswell's reputation, 303; Malone prepares the third edition, 307; Malone's opinion of, 308; additions and corrections, 313; its popularity and Boswell's triumph, 314-15; Dr. Johnson's share, 315-16; Boswell necessarily appears in, 321-2; the dedication, 324; _see also under_ Boswell, biography, &c. 'Journey to the Western Islands,' 87, 236 K Kames, Lord, 18 Keats, 1 Killaloe, Bishop of, 289 King George III., 177, 182, 196, 255, 295 King of Prussia, 191 L Langton, 106, 119, 248, 266, 281-2, 293 Leask, W. K., James Boswell, 313^11 Letters between the Honourable Andrew Erskine and James Boswell, Esq., 30, 31, 32, 33 Letters, Boswell's political, 136-7, 176-7, 195 Letters to Temple, _see under_ Boswell Lettsom, Dr., 202 Lisburne, 178 Literary Club, 68, 106-7, 133 Literature, _see under_ Boswell 'Lives of the Poets,' 109 Lochbuy, 129, 131, 260 ----, Lady, 129 Lockhart, 1 London, 17, 20, 25, 34, 36, 97, 103, 105, 106, 124, 165, 167, 168, 177, 182, 189, 218-19, 229, 306, 307, 318 'London Magazine,' 8, 46^3, 65, 102, 103, 124, 137, 138, 148^2-3, 157 Lonsdale, Lord, 175-6, 179 Loughborough, Lord, 248-9 Love, Mr., 20, 21, 22 Lowe, Mr., 252-3, M Macaulay, Lord, 2, 4, 5 ----, Mrs., 61, 262 Macdonald, Sir Alexander (afterwards Lord), 212-14, 216 Mallet's 'Elvira,' 33 ----, critical strictures on, 33 Malone, Edmund, 47, 48, 107, 171, 210, 215, 220, 225, 229-30, 300^1, 305-8, 313, 320 Mamhead, 10, 215 Marlborough, Duke of, 315 Mason, 11, 231-2 Maxwell, Jeany, 96 Mayo, Dr., 191 McLeod, Colonel, 72 Meadows, Captain, 74 Melancthon, 188 Michael Angelo, 145 Milton, 2, 145 Mitchell, Sir Andrew, 50, 178 Molière, 2 Monboddo, Lord, 261 Monckton, Miss, 201-2, 204 Montaigne, 299 Montgomerie, Miss, 100, 197 Montrose, Lord, 201 More, Hannah, 109, 237, 284, 289, 295 ----, Memoirs of, 109,^3 Mounsey, Dr., 291-2 Mountstuart, Lord, 178 Mull, 205 Murphy, 68, 248-9, 302 N Nash, Beau, 324 Newgate, 174 Newmarket, 26, 27 Nichols, John, 185 ----, 'Literary Anecdotes of the XVIIIth Century,' 178^13, 306^8 ----, 'Literary History,' 132^9, 306^5, 307^9 ----, 'Literary Illustrations of the XVIIIth Century,' 176^6, 231^7, 284^2 Northern Circuit, 17, 21, 169, 268 Northumberland, Duke of, 292 O 'Ode to Gluttony,' 31 'Ode to Tragedy,' 25, 29, 30 Odyssey, 235, 315 Oglethorpe, General, 74 Othello, 95, 258 P Paoli, General, 51, 53, 55-60, 67, 69, 70, 74, 75, 76, 197, 189, 215, 267-8, 275, 306 Paris, 53 Parnell, 234 Parr, Dr., 251 Paul, the Apostle, 234 Pembroke, Earl of, 74, 178 Pennant, Mr., 235 Pepys' Diary, 33 Percy, Bishop, 132^9, 175, 176^6, 231-2, 284, 291-2 Piozzi, Mrs., _see_ Mrs. Thrale Pitt, William (the younger), 183, 196, 197-200 Pocock's Johnsonian Catalogue, 273 Pope, 118 Presbyterian, Boswell's father a, 7 Prince of Wales, 177 Pringle, Sir John, 74 Prussia, 50 Pythagoras, 64 R Racine, 2 Raleigh, Professor, 5, 40, 86 Rambler, 127, 238, 297, 299 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 106, 108, 116, 118, 119, 173, 216, 220, 249, 259, 291, 299, 306, 323 ----, Life of, 73^3, 108^1, 303 Robertson, Dr., 18, 191, 259 Rochefoucauld, 56 Rogers, Rev. Charles, LL.D., Memoir of James Boswell, 22, 23, 92^14, 176^6, 225^7, 300, 304^2, 319 Roman Catholic, Boswell a, 37 Ross, Mr. David, 23, 24, 25 Rousseau, 19, 50, 51, 69, 93, 151 Rudd, Mrs., 73^3, 173 Russia, 311 S Sallust, 53 Saxe-Gotha, 50 Schwellenberg, Mrs., 255 Scotland, 24, 30, 42, 78, 85, 87, 105, 106, 111, 127, 165, 167, 168, 169, 209, 210, 235-6 Scott, Sir Walter, 2, 7, 85, 174, 225 Seccombe, Mr., 11, 15, 215 Select Society, 19, 20 Seward, 128 Shakespeare, 2, 65, 193, 195, 297 Shaw, Dr., 251 Shelley, 1 Shenstone's 'Pastoral on Absence,' 32, 33 Sheridan, Mr. Thomas, 248-9, 279 Skye, 122 'Slavery, No Abolition of,' 310 Smith, Adam, 17, 68 Soaping Club, 27, 28 Somerville, Lord, 178 Southern's 'Tragedy of Oroonoco,' 22 Southill, 248 St. Gluvias, 10 Stone, Mr., 251 St. Paul's, 100, 137, 142 Stratford, Shakespeare Jubilee at, 65-6, 204 Streatham, 128, 263 Stuart, Lord Mount, 50 Sweden, 71 Swift, 118, 292 T Taylor, John, 197-8, 304 ----, records of, 198^34, 305^4 ----, Tom, 'Life of Reynolds,' 73^3, 108, 303 Temple, William, 10-16, 61, 64, 70, 73, 79, 81, 84, 88, 92, 96, 98, 100, 178, 183, 185-6, 187, 215, 225^7, 300^1, 306, 309-12 ----, 'Essay on the Clergy,' 11 Temple, William, Boswell's letters to, _see_ Boswell Temple Bar, 240 Temple Gate, 240 Templeton, John, 319 Tennyson, 1 Terentia, 53 Thérèse le Vasseur, 53 Thrale, Mrs., 72, 100, 108, 126, 237-8, 259, 266-7, 302 ----, Anecdote of Dr. Johnson, 237 ----, Autobiography, Letters, &c., 72^2, 258^1, 284^1 ----, Johnson's letters to, 126, 176^6 Tory, Boswell a, 8, 137, 153, 176, 177, 181 Tour to the Hebrides, 7, 68, 71^1, 78, 107, 121-3, 125-7, 131, 190, 201, 205, 209-18, 227-8, 230, 234, 245, 257, 269^4, 270^5, 297-9, 302, 303, 307, 314, 322 Tour in Corsica, _see_ account of Corsica Trelawney, Sir Jonathan, 97 Trevelyan, Sir George, 1 ----, 'Life of Fox,' 175^5 Turbulent, Mr., 254 Turks, 311 Twalmley, 205 Tyers, Tom, 257 U Ulysses, 315 Utrecht, 50, 91, 155 Uxoriana, 102 V Vestris, 288 Vilette, Rev. Mr., 251 Voltaire, 50, 54, 93, 149 W Walcot, 216 Walpole, Horace, 61, 109, 302 ----, Letters of, 109^2 Warburton, 251 Wedderburne, 248-9 Wellesley, Marquess of, 118 Westminster Hall, 168, 170, 215 Westminster School, 320 Whig, Boswell's father a, 7, 8 ----, Boswell becomes a, 9 Whitehead, Mason's Life of, 231 Wilkes, Jack, 19, 50, 55, 69, 70, 110, 112, 117, 250, 282 Williams, Miss, 43 Wordsworth, 1 Wren, Sir Christopher, 142 Y York, 177 York, Duke of, 26, 27 Young's Night Thoughts, 188 Z Zelide, 91, 95, 98 * * * * * PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO. LTD., COLCHESTER LONDON AND ETON * * * * * _Biography_ * * * * * Second Edition. Large Post 8vo. 5s. net. A Nurse's Life in War and Peace. By E. C. LAURENCE, R.R.C. With a Preface by Sir Frederick Treves, Bart., G.C.V.O., C.B., &c. _British Medical Journal._--'A really life-like and unbiassed account of hospital life. Miss E. C. 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He writes admirably and gives a bright and touching portrait of his subject.' * * * * * NEW SUPPLEMENT (1901-1911) of The Dictionary of National Biography Edited by Sir SIDNEY LEE, Litt.D., &c. SECOND SUPPLEMENT, IN THREE VOLUMES. 1,650 Memoirs by 290 Contributors. Roy. 8vo. 15s. net each volume, in brown or blue cloth; or in half-morocco, 20s. net. VOL. I. ABBEY--EYRE. VOL. II. FAED--MUYBRIDGE. VOL. III. NAPIER--YOUNG. This second Supplement of the Dictionary supplies biographies of all noteworthy persons who died between the day of Queen Victoria's death, 22nd January, 1901 (the limit of the First Supplement) and 31st December, 1911. _SOME PRESS OPINIONS._ _Times._--'The remarkable biography of King Edward VII. shows qualities of careful preparation and of judgment.' _Daily Telegraph._--'The biography of the late King written by the Editor reviews the life from every standpoint, and makes a closer personal study of the man and the King than has hitherto been attempted.' _Morning Post._--'The Editor is to be heartily congratulated on the conscientious execution of a delicate but most interesting task.' _Standard._--'A most valuable contribution to the political and constitutional history of the period that lies immediately behind us.' _Manchester Guardian._--'The appearance of the first volume of the Second Supplement is an event of more than usual importance.' _Daily Chronicle._--'The first real, intimate, authoritative account of King Edward.' * * * * * London: Smith, Elder & Co., 15 Waterloo Place, S.W. * * * * * Transcriber's note: The book contains some foreign words and a few old spellings, e.g., 'authour', 'tenour', etc., and also instances of hyphenated and non-hyphenated variants of some words. These have all been retained. Instances of both 'adhaesit' and 'adhæsit' appear in the text. Both have been retained. Punctuation is not always consistent. Some punctuation has been amended for conformity; sundry missing or damaged punctuation has been repaired. Page 28: Extraneous closing quote removed after "alive.'" "There is no better fellow alive." Page 56: 'Rochefoucault' is the spelling used by Boswell; Rochefoucauld appears in the Index. Both have been retained. Page 65: 'possble' corrected to 'possible' "... there can be no possible doubt that Boswell wrote it...." Page 108: 'Boswell:' changed to '_Boswell_:' for consistency. "... _Boswell_: 'They were afraid of you, Sir, as...." Page 200: 'compositon' corrected to 'composition'. "... and he was so vain that he was undoubtedly proud of what must have been an absurd composition." Page 336: 'Tory, Boswella corrected to 'Tory, Boswell a' "Tory, Boswell a, 8, 137, 153, 176, 177, 181" A few corrections have been made to page numbers in the index, some numbers (without a reference on the page) removed, and some added: The corrected number is after the name; The printed number is in (brackets). Akerman, ... 251 (250) Boswell: law ... (187)(204) lawyers ... 205 () letters: Temple, quoted ... 70 (69) ... 167^1 () ... (179) ... 185-186 (186) Eglinton, Earl of ... 197 (196) Graham, ... 201 (202) Hypochondriack, ... 145-6 (146) Samuel Johnson: talks for victory, ... 121 () 'just frown', ... 155 () gay Sam, ... 254, 295 (246) Lisburne, ... 178 (179) Lochbuy, ... 260 (258) London Magazine, ... (69) (104) Lowe, ... (255) Macaulay, ... 2 (1) ... (61) Macaulay, Mrs., ... 61 () Montgomerie, ... 100, 197 (98-9, 100) More, Hannah, ... 284 (283) Nichols, John, ----, 'Literary History,' ... 307^9 (308) Paoli, General, ... 67 (66) 187 () Percy, Bishop, ... 284 (283) Reynolds, Sir Joshua, ... 249 (248) ... 259 (258) Robertson, Dr., ... 259 (258) Rogers, Rev. Charles, LL.D., Memoir of James Boswell, ... (216) Temple Gate ... 240 (229) Thrale, Mrs., ... (290), (295), (297) Turbulent, Mr., ... 254 (253) Tyers, Tom, ... 257 (256) Vilette, Rev. Mr., ... 251 (250) 
20263	----	Transcriber's note: Inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies of spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, capitalization, and use of diacriticals are preserved as they appear in the original text. BOSWELL'S CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE HONOURABLE ANDREW ERSKINE AND HIS JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO CORSICA (Reprinted from the Original Editions) Edited With a Preface, Introduction, and Notes by GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL, D.C.L. Author of "Dr. Johnson: His Friends and His Critics." London: Thos. De La Rue & Co. 1879 Printed by Thomas De La Rue and Co., Bunhill Row, London. CONTENTS. PREFACE i LETTERS BETWEEN THE HONOURABLE ANDREW ERSKINE AND JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ. 3 INTRODUCTION TO THE JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO CORSICA 101 PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 125 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION 135 THE JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO CORSICA 137 APPENDIX 239 BOSWELL AND ERSKINE'S LETTERS. PREFACE. Boswell did not bring out his "Life of Johnson" till he was past his fiftieth year. His "Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides" had appeared more than five years earlier. While it is on these two books that his fame rests, yet to the men of his generation he was chiefly known for his work on Corsica and for his friendship with Paoli. His admiration for Johnson he had certainly proclaimed far and wide. He had long been off, in the words of his father, "wi' the land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican, and had pinned himself to a dominie--an auld dominie who keeped a schule and cau'd it an acaadamy." Nevertheless it was to Corsica and its heroic chief that he owed the position that he undoubtedly held among men of letters. He was Corsica Boswell and Paoli Boswell long before he became famous as Johnson Boswell. It has been shown elsewhere[1] what a spirited thing it was in this young Scotchman to make his way into an island, the interior of which no traveller from this country had ever before visited. The Mediterranean still swarmed with Turkish corsairs, while Corsica itself was in a very unsettled condition. It had been computed that, till Paoli took the rule and held it with a firm hand, the state had lost no less than 800 subjects every year by assassination. Boswell, as he tells us in his Journal, had been warned by an officer of rank in the British Navy, who had visited several of the ports, of the risk he ran to his life in going among these "barbarians." Moreover a state of hostility existed between the Corsicans and the Republic of Genoa--which, the year before Boswell's visit, had obtained the assistance of France. The interior of the island was still held by Paoli, but many of the seaport towns were garrisoned by the French and the Genoese. At the time of Boswell's visit war was not being actively carried on, for the French commander had been instructed merely to secure these points, and not to undertake offensive operations against the natives. From the Journal that Boswell gives, we see that when once he had landed he ran no risks; but it is not every young man who, when out on his travels, leaves the safe and beaten round to go into a country that is almost unknown, and to prove to others that there also safety is to be found. With good reason did Johnson write to him--"Come home and expect such welcome as is due to him whom a wise and noble curiosity has led where perhaps no native of this country ever was before." With scarcely less reason did Paoli say, "A man come from Corsica will be like a man come from the Antipodes." [Footnote 1: "Dr. Johnson: His Friends and His Critics." By George Birkbeck Hill, D.C.L. Smith, Elder & Co.] How strongly his journey and his narrative touched the hearts of people at home may still be read in Mrs. Barbauld's fine lines on Corsica:-- "Such were the working thoughts which swelled the breast Of generous Boswell; when with nobler aim And views beyond the narrow beaten track By trivial fancy trod, he turned his course From polished Gallia's soft delicious vales, From the grey reliques of imperial Rome, From her long galleries of laureled stone, Her chiseled heroes and her marble gods, Whose dumb majestic pomp yet awes the world, To animated forms of patriot zeal; Warm in the living majesty of virtue; Elate with fearless spirit; firm; resolved; By fortune nor subdued; nor awed by power."[2] [Footnote 2: "Mrs. Barbauld's Poems," vol. i., p. 2. It is certainly strange that Boswell, so far as I know, nowhere quotes these lines. He was not wont to let the world remain in ignorance of any compliment that had been paid him. I fear that he was rather ashamed at finding himself praised by a writer who was not only a woman, but also was the wife of "a little presbyterian parson who kept an infant boarding school."] Gray was moved greatly by the account given of Paoli. "He is a man," he wrote, "born two thousand years after his time." Horace Walpole had written to beg him to read the book. "What relates to Paoli," he said, "will amuse you much." What merely amused Walpole "moved" Gray "strangely." It moved others besides him. Subscriptions were raised for the Corsicans, and money and arms were sent to them from this country. Boswell writes to tell his friend Temple--"I have hopes that our Government will interfere. In the meantime, by a private subscription in Scotland, I am sending this week £700 worth of ordnance." Other subscriptions were forwarded which Paoli, as is told in a letter from him published in the "Gentleman's Magazine,"[3] "applied to the support of the families of those patriots who, abhorring a foreign yoke, have abandoned their houses and estates in that part of the country held by the enemy, and have retired to join our army." [Footnote 3: "Gentleman's Magazine," vol. xxxix., p. 214.] Boswell's work met with a rapid sale. The copyright he sold to Dilly for one hundred guineas. The publisher must have made no small gain by the bargain, for a third edition was called for within a year. "My book," writes Boswell, "has amazing celebrity: Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Walpole, Mrs. Macaulay, Mr. Garrick have all written me noble letters about it." With his Lordship's letter he was so much delighted that in the third edition he obtained leave to use it to "enrich" his book. Johnson pronounced his Journal in a very high degree curious and delightful. It is surprising that a work which thus delighted Johnson, moved Gray strangely, and amused Horace Walpole, can now be met with only in old libraries and on the shelves of a dealer in second-hand books. I doubt whether a new edition has been published in the last hundred years. It is still more surprising when we remember that it is the work of an author who has written a book "that is likely to be read as long as the English exists, either as a living or as a dead language." The explanation of this, I take it, is to be found in the distinction that Johnson draws between Boswell's Account of Corsica, which forms more than two-thirds of the whole book, and the Journal of his Tour. His history, he said, was like other histories. It was copied from books. His Journal rose out of his own experience and observation. His history was read, and perhaps read with eagerness, because at the time when it appeared there was a strong interest felt in the Corsicans. In despair of maintaining their independence, they had been willing to place themselves and their island entirely under the protection of Great Britain. The offer had been refused, but they still hoped for our assistance. Not a few Englishmen felt with Lord Lyttelton when he wrote--"I wish with you that our Government had shown more respect for Corsican liberty, and I think it disgraces our nation that we do not live in good friendship with a brave people engaged in the noblest of all contests, a contest against tyranny." But in such a contest as this Corsica was before long to play a different part. Scarcely four years after Boswell from some distant hill "had a fine view of Ajaccio and its environs," that town was rendered famous by the birth of Napoleon Buonaparte. With whatever skill Boswell's history had been compiled it could not have lived. There were not, indeed, the materials out of which a history that should last could have been formed. The whole island boasted of but one printing press and one bookseller's shop. The feuds and wars of the wild islanders might have lived in the songs of the poet, but were little fit for the purposes of the historian. He who attempts to write the history of such a people is almost forced to accept tradition for fact, and to believe in their Arthurs and their Tells. The Corsicans are, indeed, from time to time found in one or other of the great tracks of European history. As Boswell says, their island had belonged to the Phoenicians, the Etruscans, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Goths, and the Saracens. It had been conquered by France, and had been made a gift from that kingdom to the Pope. It had been given by the Pope to the Pisans, and from them had passed to the Republic of Genoa. It had undergone strange and rapid revolutions, but they were those common revolutions that befall a wild race that lives in the midst of powerful neighbours. Boswell, unsurpassed though he is as a biographer, admirable as he is as a writer of a Journal, yet had little of the stuff out of which an historian is made. His compilation is a creditable performance for a young man who had but lately returned home from his travels. It certainly adds nothing to the reputation of the author of the "Life of Johnson." But while it lies overwhelmed with deserved neglect, it ought not to drag down with it the Journal of his Tour. That portion of the work is lively, is interesting, and is brief. It can be read with pleasure now, as it was read with pleasure when it first appeared. But, besides this, it is interesting to us as the early work of a writer whose mind has been a puzzle to men of letters. Even should we accept Macaulay's judgment on Boswell, and despise him as he despises him, yet it must surely be worth while to examine closely the early writings of an author, who has, "in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson."[4] This Journal is like the youthful sketch of some great artist. It exhibits the merits which, later on, distinguished, in so high a degree the mature writer. [Footnote 4: "Macaulay's Essays," vol. i., p. 377.] Together with the "Journal of a Tour to Corsica," I am reprinting a volume of letters that passed between Boswell and his friend The Honourable Andrew Erskine. Lively and amusing though they often are, yet I should not have proposed to republish them did not they throw almost as much light on Boswell's character as the Journal throws light on his powers as a writer. In his account of Corsica, there is a passage in which, while describing the historian Petrus Cyrnaeus, he at the same time describes himself. "The fourth book of Petrus Cyrnaeus," he says, "is entirely taken up with an account of his own wretched vagabond life, full of strange, whimsical anecdotes. He begins it very gravely: 'Quoniam ad hunc locum perventum est, non alienum videtur de Petri qui haec scripsit vita et moribus proponere.' 'Since we are come thus far it will not be amiss to say something of the life and manners of Petrus, who writeth this history.' He gives a very excellent character of himself, and, I dare say, a very faithful one. But so minute is his narration, that he takes care to inform posterity that he was very irregular in his method of walking, and that he preferred sweet wine to hard. In short, he was a man of considerable parts, with a great simplicity and oddity of character." To the simplicity and oddity of character that Boswell shared with this learned historian, there was certainly added not a little impudence. It was an impudence that was lively and amusing; but none the less was it downright impudence. We are amazed at the audacity with which two young men ventured to publish to the world the correspondence which had passed between them when they were scarcely of age. In fact, the earlier letters were written when Boswell was but twenty. Their justification only increases their offence. "Curiosity," they say, "is the most prevalent of all our passions; and the curiosity for reading letters, is the most prevalent of all kinds of curiosity. Had any man in the three kingdoms found the following letters, directed, sealed, and adorned with postmarks,--provided he could have done it honestly--he would have read every one of them." There is this, however, that makes us always look with a certain indulgence on Boswell. He never plays the hypocrite. He likes praise, he likes to be talked about, he likes to know great people, and he no more cares to conceal his likings than Sancho Panza cared to conceal his appetite. Three pullets and a couple of geese were but so much scum, which Don Quixote's squire whipped off to stay his stomach till dinner-time. By the time Boswell was six-and-twenty he could boast that he had made the acquaintance of Adam Smith, Robertson, Hume, Johnson, Goldsmith, Wilkes, Garrick, Horace Walpole, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Paoli. He had twice at least received a letter from the Earl of Chatham. But his appetite for knowing great men could never be satisfied. These might stay his stomach for a while, but more would be presently wanted. At the time when he published this volume of Letters he seems to have had some foresight into his future life. "I am thinking," he says, "of the intimacies which I shall form with the learned and ingenious in every science, and of the many amusing literary anecdotes which I shall pick up." When fame did come upon him by his book on Corsica, no one could have relished it more. "I am really the _great man_ now," he writes to his friend Temple. "I have had David Hume in the forenoon, and Mr. Johnson in the afternoon of the same day visiting me. Sir John Pringle, Dr. Franklin, and some more company dined with me to-day; and Mr. Johnson and General Oglethorpe one day, Mr. Garrick alone another, and David Hume and some more _literati_ another, dine with me next week. I give admirable dinners and good claret; and the moment I go abroad again, which will be in a day or two, I set up my chariot. This is enjoying the fruit of my labours, and appearing like the friend of Paoli.... David Hume came on purpose the other day to tell me that the Duke of Bedford was very fond of my book, and had recommended it to the Duchess." In the preface to the third edition, he says,--"When I first ventured to send my book into the world, I fairly owned an ardent desire for literary fame. I have obtained my desire: and whatever clouds may overcast my days, I can now walk here among the rocks and woods of my ancestors, with an agreeable consciousness that I have done something worthy." It was about this time that, writing to the great Earl of Chatham, he said--"I can labour hard; I feel myself coming forward, and I hope to be useful to my country. Could your Lordship find time to honour me now and then with a letter? I have been told how favourably your Lordship has spoken of me. To correspond with a Paoli and a Chatham, is enough to keep a young man ever ardent in the pursuit of virtuous fame."[5] [Footnote 5: "Chatham Correspondence," vol. iii., p. 246.] A few months before his account of Corsica was published, he had fixed upon the date of its publication as the period when he should steadily begin that pursuit of virtuous fame, which now was to be secured by correspondence with a Paoli and a Chatham. "I am always for fixing some period," he wrote, "for my perfection, as far as possible. Let it be when my account of Corsica is published; I shall then have a character which I must support." Unhappily the time for his perfection was again and again put off. Johnson, in speaking of Derrick, said--"Derrick may do very well, as long as he can outrun his character; but the moment his character gets up with him, it is all over." With Boswell, just the opposite was the case. He soon acquired a character--a character which he was bound to support. But he could never get up with it. The friend of Paoli, the friend of Johnson, was, unhappily, given to drink. The gay spirits and lively health of youth supported him for a while; but, even in these early days, he was too often troubled with that depression of spirit which follows on a debauch. But, as time passed on, and the habit grew stronger upon him, his health began to give way, and his cheerfulness of mind to desert him. He lived but four years after the publication of his great work. In the preface to the second edition of the "Life of Johnson" he shows his delight in his fame. "There are some men, I believe, who have, or think they have, a very small share of vanity. Such may speak of their literary fame in a decorous state of diffidence. But I confess that I am so formed by nature and by habit, that to restrain the effusion of delight on having obtained such fame, to me would be truly painful. Why, then, should I suppress it? Why, 'out of the abundance of the heart,' should I not speak?" This preface bears the date of July 1, 1793. Only ten days earlier he had written to tell Temple how he had been drinking, and had been robbed. "The robbery is only of a few shillings; but the cut on my head and bruises on my arms were sad things, and confined me to bed in pain, and fever, and helplessness, as a child, many days.... This shall be a crisis in my life: I trust I shall henceforth be a sober, regular man. Indeed, my indulgence in wine has, of late years especially, been excessive.... Your suggestion as to my being carried off in a state of intoxication, is awful. I thank you for it, my dear friend. It impressed me much, I assure you." It was too late in life to form resolutions. A year later he was again "resolved anew to be upon his guard." In the May of 1795, he died, after an illness of great suffering. To him might be applied some of the lines which the great poet who lived so near him wrote as his own epitaph:-- "He keenly felt the friendly glow, And softer flame; But thoughtless follies laid him low, And stain'd his name." Boswell had, indeed, but little of that "prudent, cautious, self-control," which, as Burns tells us, "is wisdom's root." It is a sad thought that at the very same time the two most famous writers that Ayrshire can boast, men whose homes were but a few miles apart, were at the same time drinking themselves to death. Burns outlived Boswell little more than a year. Boswell was fifty-four years old when he died. Greatly as he relished wine, he relished fame still more. He had worked hard for fame, and he had fairly earned it; but in its full flush his intemperance swept him away. There can be little question that his first triumph in the field of letters, his book on Corsica brought him far greater pleasure than his "Life of Johnson," by which his name will live. Perhaps the happiest day in his life was when, at the Shakespeare Jubilee, he entered the amphitheatre in the dress of a Corsican chief. "On the front of his cap was embroidered, in gold letters, "_Viva la Libertà_," and on the side of it was a handsome blue feather and cockade, so that it had an elegant as well as a warlike appearance." "So soon as he came into the room," says the account in the "London Magazine," written, no doubt, by himself, "he drew universal attention." The applause that his "Life of Johnson" brought him was, no doubt, far greater, but then, as I have said, his health was breaking, and his fine spirits were impaired. He who would know Boswell at his happiest--when he was, as Hume described him, very good humoured, very agreeable, and very mad, must read his volume of Letters, and the Journals of his Tours to Corsica and the Hebrides. LETTERS BETWEEN THE HONOURABLE ANDREW ERSKINE, AND JAMES BOSWELL, Esq; LONDON: Printed by SAMUEL CHANDLER; For W. FLEXNEY, near Gray's-Inn-Gate, Holborn. MDCCLXIII. ADVERTISEMENT. Curiosity is the most prevalent of all our passions; and the curiosity for reading letters, is the most prevalent of all kinds of curiosity. Had any man in the three Kingdoms found the following letters, directed, sealed, and adorned with postmarks,--provided he could have done it honestly--he would have read every one of them; or, had they been ushered into the world, from Mr. Flexney's shop, in that manner, they would have been bought up with the greatest avidity. As they really once had all the advantages of concealment, we hope their present more conspicuous form will not tend to diminish their merit. They have made ourselves laugh; we hope they will have the same effect upon other people. LETTERS. [In a Memoir of James Boswell,[6] by the Rev. Charles Rogers, a short account is given of the Hon. Andrew Erskine, Boswell's correspondent. He was the youngest son of Alexander, fifth Earl of Kellie. He served in the army for some years. After his retirement he settled at Edinburgh. "His habits were regular, but he indulged occasionally at cards, and was partial to the game of whist. Having sustained a serious loss at his favourite pastime, he became frantic, and threw himself into the Forth and perished." Burns, writing to his friend Thomson, October, 1793, says--"Your last letter, my dear Thomson, was indeed laden with heavy news. Alas, poor Erskine! The recollection that he was a coadjutor in your publication has, till now, scared me from writing to you, or turning my thoughts on composing for you." "He was," adds Dr. Rogers, "of a tall, portly form, and to the last wore gaiters and a flapped vest." By this last description Dr. Rogers's readers may be pleasantly reminded of an anecdote that is given for the first time, I believe, in his book. "Dr. Johnson used to laugh at a passage in Carte's 'Life of the Duke of Ormond,' where he gravely observed that 'he was always in full dress when he went to Court; too many being in the practice of going thither with double lapells.'" As poor Erskine "wore to the last his gaiters and a flapped vest," no doubt he had them on when he drowned himself.--ED.] [Footnote 6: "Boswelliana: The Commonplace Book of James Boswell." With a Memoir and Annotations, by the Rev. Charles Rogers, LL.D. London: Printed for the Grampian Club, 1874.] * * * * * LETTER I. Auchinleck, Aug. 25, 1761. Dear ERSKINE,--No ceremony, I beseech you. Give me your hand. How is my honest Captain Andrew? How goes it with the elegant gentle Lady A----? the lovely sighing Lady J----? and how, O how does that glorious luminary Lady B---- do? You see I retain my usual volatility. The Boswells, you know, came over from Normandy, with William the Conqueror, and some of us possess the spirit of our ancestors the French. I do for one. A pleasant spirit it is. _Vive la Bagatelle_, is the maxim. A light heart may bid defiance to fortune. And yet, Erskine, I must tell you, that I have been a little pensive of late, amorously pensive, and disposed to read Shenstone's Pastoral on Absence, the tenderness and simplicity of which I greatly admire. A man who is in love is like a man who has got the tooth-ache, he feels most acute pain while nobody pities him. In that situation am I at present: but well do I know that I will not be long so. So much for inconstancy. As this is my first epistle to you, it cannot in decency be a long one. Pray write to me soon. Your letters, I prophecy, will entertain me not a little; and will besides be extremely serviceable in many important respects. They will supply me with oil to my lamps, grease to my wheels, and blacking to my shoes. They will furnish me with strings to my fiddle, lashes to my whip, lining to my breeches, and buttons to my coat. They will make charming spurs, excellent knee buckles, and inimitable watch-keys. In short, while they last I shall neither want breakfast, dinner, nor supper. I shall keep a couple of horses, and I shall sleep upon a bed of down. I shall be in France this year, and in Spain the next; with many other particulars too tedious to mention. You may take me in a metaphorical sense; but I would rather choose to be understood literally. I am Your most affectionate friend, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER II. Kelly, Sept. 11, 1761. HAIL! mighty Boswell! at thy awful name The fainting muse relumes her sinking flame. Behold how high the tow'ring blaze aspires, While fancy's waving pinions fan my fires! Swells the full song? it swells alone from thee; Some spark of thy bright genius kindles me! "But softly, Sir," I hear you cry, "This wild bombast is rather dry: I hate your d----n'd insipid song, That sullen stalks in lines so long; Come, give us short ones like to Butler, Or, like our friend Auchinleck[7] the cutler." A Poet, Sir, whose fame is to support, Must ne'er write verses tripping pert and short: Who ever saw a judge himself disgrace, By trotting to the bench with hasty pace? I swear, dear Sir, you're really in the wrong; To make a line that's good, I say, James, make it long. [Footnote 7: Pronounced "Affleck."--ED.] You see, Sir, I have quite the best of the argument; and indeed I was determined not to give it up, till you acknowledged yourself vanquished; so to verse I go again, tooth and nail. How well you talk of glory and the guards, Of fighting heroes, and their great rewards! Our eyes behold you glow with martial flame, Our ears attend the never-ceasing theme. Fast from your tongue the rousing accents flow, And horror darkens on your sable brow! We hear the thunder of the rolling war, And see red vict'ry shouting from her car! You kindly took me up, an awkward cub, And introduced me to the Soaping-Club;[8] Where ev'ry Tuesday eve our ears are blest With genuine humour, and with genuine jest: The voice of mirth ascends the list'ning sky, While, "soap his own beard, every man," you cry. Say, who could e'er indulge a yawn or nap, When Barclay roars forth snip, and Bainbridge snap?[9] Tell me how I your favours may return; With thankfulness and gratitude I burn. I've one advice, oh! take it I implore! Search out America's untrodden shore; There seek some vast Savannah rude and wild, Where Europe's sons of slaughter never smil'd, With fiend-like arts, insidious to betray The sooty natives as a lawful prey. At you th' astonish'd savages shall stare, And hail you as a God, and call you fair: Your blooming beauty shall unrivall'd shine, And Captain Andrew's whiteness yield to thine.[10] [Footnote 8: The Soaping-Club--a Club in Edinburgh, the motto of which was, "Every Man soap his own Beard;" or, "Every Man indulge his own Humour." Their game was that facetious one, Snip, Snap, Snorum.] [Footnote 9: Barclay and Bainbridge, two members of this Club.] [Footnote 10: "And Captain Andrew's whiteness, &c." The writers of these Letters, instead of being rivals in wit, were rivals in complexion.] In reality, I'm under vast obligations to you. It was you who first made me thoroughly sensible (indeed I very readily believed it) of the excellencies of my own Poetry; and about that time, I made two wonderful discoveries, to wit, that you was a sensible man, and that I was a good poet; discoveries which I dare say are yet doubted by some incredulous people. Boswell, I shall not praise your letter, because I know you have an aversion at being thought a genius, or a wit. The reluctance with which you always repeat your Cub,[11] and the gravity of countenance which you always assume upon that occasion, are convincing proofs of this assertion. You hate flattery, too, but in spite of your teeth I must tell you, that you are the best Poet, and the most humorous letter-writer I know; and that you have a finer complexion, and dance better than any man of my acquaintance. For my part, I actually think you would make an excellent champion at the approaching coronation.[12] What though malevolent critics may say you are too little, yet you are a Briareus in comparison of Tydeus the hero of Statius's Thebais; and if he was not a warrior, then am I, Andrew Erskine, Lieutenant in the 71st regiment, blind of one eye, hump-backed, and lame in both legs. We all tired so much of the Highlands, that we had not been there three weeks before we all came away again. Lady B---- is gone a-visiting, and the rest of us are come to Kelly. It was most unaccountable in me to leave New-Tarbat; for nowhere will you meet with such fine ingredients for poetical description. However, we are all going back again when Mr. M---- comes from London; so some time in October you may expect a most cordial invitation. This is all at present (according to the simple but eloquent expression of the vulgar) from your sincere friend, ANDREW ERSKINE. [Footnote 11: In March, 1762, Boswell published "The Cub at Newmarket: a Tale." (Dodsley).--ED.] [Footnote 12: George III. was crowned on September 22nd, of this year.--ED.] * * * * * LETTER III. Auchinleck, Sept. 14, 1761. Dear Captain Andrew! Poet of renown! Whether the chairmen of Edina's town You curious draw, and make 'em justly speak, To use a vulgar phrase, _as clean's a leek_; Or smart Epistles, Fables, Songs you write, All put together handsome trim and tight; Or when your sweetly plaintive muse does sigh, And elegiac strains you happy try; Or when in ode sublime your genius soars, Which guineas brings to Donaldson by scores; Accept the thanks of ME, as quick as sage, Accept sincerest thanks for ev'ry page, For ev'ry page?--for ev'ry single line Of your rich letter aided by the Nine.[13] [Footnote 13: The rest of Boswell's verses--more than a hundred in number--the reader will thank me for omitting.--ED.] * * * * * You are now so heartily tired, that it would be absolutely barbarous to stun your ears any longer; only give me leave to tell you in one good round sentence, that your prose is admirable, and that I am just now (at three o'clock in the morning) sitting over the poor pale remnant of a once glorious blazing fire, and feasting upon it, till I am all in a _Lather_. I cannot stop yet. Allow me a few more words. I live here in a remote corner of an old ruinous house, where my ancestors have been very jovial. What a solemn idea rushes on my mind! They are all gone; I must follow. Well, and what then? Let me shift about to another subject. The best I can think of is a sound sleep. So good night, and believe me, Yours, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER IV. Auchinleck, Oct. 10, 1761. Dear ERSKINE,--Had Philip of Macedon been saddle-sick with riding up and down the country after his unruly son Alexander, and been waiting in extreme pain, till the surgeon of the next village brought him emollient relief, he could not have been more impatient than I am for a return to my last letter. I thought, indeed, that my firing so great a gun, would have produced a speedy and a suitable echo, and I had no doubt of at least being paid the interest of a sum so very large. I now give you fair warning, that if something is not speedily done in this affair, I shall be obliged to take very disagreeable methods. From this way of talking, I begin to fancy myself a Schoolmaster; a character next to that of a giant, most terrible to tender minds. Don't think to escape the rod. Don't think your dignity as a poet will save you from it. I make no question, but what that acrimonious pedagogue George Buchanan has often applied it to his pupil, and he you know was a poet and a king into the bargain. I have been reading the Rosciad. You see my very studies have tended towards flagellation. Upon my word Churchill[14] does scourge with a vengeance; I should not like to come under his discipline. He is certainly a very able writer. He has great power of numbers. [Footnote 14: Churchill's "Rosciad" had been published in March of this year.--ED.] "In manly tides of verse he rolls along."[15] [Footnote 15: "In manly tides of sense they roll'd along." --"The Rosciad."--ED.] I desire, Erskine, once again, that you may write without delay, otherwise, I shall no longer be Your affectionate friend, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER V. Kelly, Nov. 1, 1761. Dear BOSWELL,--If you could conceive the many twitches of conscience I have felt upon your account, the agitations, the compunctions, the remorses, you would certainly forgive me. However, I was beginning to turn callous against all suggestions of writing to you, when your last letter arrived, which like the day of judgment, made my transgressions stare me full in the face. Indolence and unwearied stupidity have been my constant companions this many a day; and that amiable couple, above all things in the world detest letter-writing. Besides, I heard you was just going to be married, and as a poet, I durst not approach you without an Epithalamium, and an Epithalamium was a thing, which at that time I could not compass. It was all in vain, that Cupid and Hymen, Juno and Luna, offered their assistance; I had no sort of employment for them. When you and I walked twice round the meadow upon the subject of matrimony, I little thought that my difference in opinion from you, would have brought on your marriage so soon; for I can attribute it to no other cause: From this I learn that contradiction is of use in society; and I shall take care to encourage that humour, or rather spirit, in myself. As this is the first marriage I ever made, I expect great congratulations, especially from you. I have been busy furbishing up some old pieces for Donaldson's[16] second volume: I exceed in quantity, twenty Eustace Budgels, according to your epistle. Pray what is become of the Cub? Is Dodsley to sell you for a shilling, or not? I have written one or two new things, an Ode to Pity, and an Epistle to the great Donaldson, which is to be printed: The subject was promising, but I made nothing of it. I must give over poetry, and copy epistles out of that elegant treatise the Complete Letter-Writer. D---- is gone to London, his parting advice to his sister was, to keep the key of the coals herself; so I suppose he intends to keep up his fire, this winter, in parliament, and not to go over the coals with the ministry. [Footnote 16: Donaldson, an Edinburgh bookseller, was bringing out a collection of Original Poems, by the Rev. Mr. Blacklock, and other Scotch gentlemen. Erskine was the editor.--ED.] Lady A---- and I set out for New-Tarbat to-morrow. Could you come? Let nothing but wedlock detain you. Oh, Boswell! the soporific effluvia of a hearty dinner cloud all my faculties. I'm as dull as the tolling in of the eighth-hour bell, or a neighbour in the country, that pays you an annual visit. At this present moment, I'm astonished how anybody can be clever; and your letter in heroic verse seems more amazing to me than if the King of Britain was to send an express for me, to dance a hornpipe before him, or the King of Prussia was to declare in a manifesto, that I was the occasion of the present war. I detest the invention of writing; and nothing could reconcile me to it, but that I can assure you at this distance, that I am yours sincerely, ANDREW ERSKINE. There's a genteel conclusion for you. When you come to Edinburgh, I'll settle an unintermitting correspondence with you. * * * * * LETTER VI. Edinburgh, Nov. 17, 1761. Dear ERSKINE,--Much much concern does it give me, to find that you have been in such bad spirits as your last most grievously indicates. I believe we great geniuses are all a little subject to the sorcery of that whimsical demon the spleen, which indeed we cannot complain of, considering what power of enchantment we ourselves possess, by the sweet magic of our flowing numbers. I would recommend to you to read Mr. Green's[17] excellent poem upon that subject. He will dispel the clouds and enliven you immediately. Or if that should not do, you may have recourse to Xenophon's method, which was boiling potatoes, and pelting the cats with them, an infallible receipt to promote risibility. [Footnote 17: Matthew Green (1696-1737). Author of "The Spleen."--ED.] So you too have listened to the report of my marriage, and must forsooth display a pretty vein of jocularity upon the mournful occasion. Did you really believe it? If you did, you will never be able to astonish me with any thing else that is wonderful in your creed, for I shall reckon your judgment at least three stanzas worse than formerly. In the name of every thing that is upside down, what could the people mean by marrying me? If they had boiled me into portable soup, or hammered me into horse-shoes, I should not have been greatly surprised. A man who has so deeply pondered on the wonders daily presented to our view, and who has experienced so many vicissitudes of fortune, as I have done, can easily make allowance for stranger things than these. But I own their matrimonial system exceeds my comprehension. Happy is it for the world that this affair did not take place. An event so prodigious must have been attended with very alarming consequences. For my own part, I tremble when I think of it. Damocles, Nero, and Richard the Third, would have appeared amiable princes in comparison of me. Wherever I went I should have carried horror and devastation, sparing neither sex nor age. All, all should have been sacrificed to my relentless cruelty. Donaldson is busy printing his second volume. I have mustered up a few verses for him, some old, some new. I will not boast of _them_. But I'll tell you one thing; the volume will be pretty free from typographical errors: I have the honour to correct the proof-sheets. My Cub is now with Dodsley. I fancy he will soon make his appearance in public. I long to see him in his Pall-Mall[18] habit: Though I'm afraid he will look a little awkward. Write to me often. You shall have the best answers I can give you. I remain, yours, JAMES BOSWELL. [Footnote 18: Dodsley's shop was in Pall Mall.--ED.] * * * * * LETTER VII. New-Tarbat, Nov. 23, 1761. Dear BOSWELL,--As we never hear that Demosthenes could broil beef-steaks, or Cicero poach eggs, we may safely conclude, that these gentlemen understood nothing of cookery. In like manner it may be concluded, that you, James Boswell, and I Andrew Erskine, cannot write serious epistles. This, as Mr. Tristram[19] says, I deny; for this letter of mine shall contain the quintessence of solidity; it shall be a piece of boiled beef and cabbage, a roasted goose, and a boiled leg of pork and greens: in one word, it shall contain advice; sage and mature advice. Oh! James Boswell! take care and don't break your neck; pray don't fracture your skull, and be very cautious in your manner of tumbling down precipices: beware of falling into coal-pits, and don't drown yourself in every pool you meet with. Having thus warned you of the most material dangers which your youth and inexperience will be ready to lead you into, I now proceed to others less momentary indeed, but very necessary to be strictly observed. Go not near the Soaping-Club, never mention Drury-lane Playhouse; be attentive to those Pinchbeck buckles which fortune has so graciously given you, of which I am afraid you're hardly fond enough; never wash your face, but above all forswear Poetry: from experience I can assure you, and this letter may serve as a proof, that a man may be as dull in prose as in verse; and as dullness is what we aim at, prose is the easiest of the two. Oh! my friend! profit by these my instructions; think that you see me studying for your advantage, my reverend locks over-shadowing my paper, my hands trembling, and my tongue hanging out, a figure of esteem, affection and veneration. By Heavens! Boswell! I love you more--But this, I think, may be more conveniently expressed in rhyme More than a herd of swine a kennel muddy, More than a brilliant belle polemic study, More than fat Falstaff lov'd a cup of sack, More than a guilty criminal the rack, More than attorneys love by cheats to thrive, And more than witches to be burnt alive. [Footnote 19: The first two volumes of Tristram Shandy were published towards the end of 1759.--ED.] I begin to be afraid that we shall not see you here this winter; which will be a great loss to you. If ever you travel into foreign parts, as Machiavel used to say, everybody abroad will require a description of New-Tarbat[20] from you. That you may not appear totally ridiculous and absurd, I shall send you some little account of it. Imagine then to yourself what Thomson would call an interminable plain,[21] interspersed in a lovely manner with beautiful green hills. The Seasons here are only shifted by Summer and Spring. Winter with his fur cap and his cat-skin gloves, was never seen in this charming retreat. The Castle is of Gothic structure, awful and lofty: there are fifty bed-chambers in it, with halls, saloons, and galleries without number. Mr. M----'s father, who was a man of infinite humour, caused a magnificent lake to be made, just before the entry of the house. His diversion was to peep out of his window, and see the people who came to visit him, skipping through it;--for there was no other passage--then he used to put on such huge fires to dry their clothes, that there was no bearing them. He used to declare, that he never thought a man good company till he was half drown'd and half burnt; but if in any part of his life he had narrowly escaped hanging (a thing not uncommon in the Highlands) he would perfectly doat upon him, and whenever the story was told him, he was ready to choke himself. But to return. Everything here is in the grand and sublime style. But, alas! some envious magician, with his d----d enchantments, has destroyed all these beauties. By his potent art, the house with so many bed-chambers in it, cannot conveniently lodge above a dozen people. The room which I am writing in, just now, is in reality a handsome parlour of twenty feet by sixteen; though in my eyes, and to all outward appearance, it seems a garret of six feet by four. The magnificent lake is a dirty puddle; the lovely plain, a rude wild country cover'd with the most astonishing high black mountains: the inhabitants, the most amiable race under the sun, appear now to be the ugliest, and look as if they were over-run with the itch. Their delicate limbs, adorned with the finest silk stockings, are now bare, and very dirty; but to describe all the transformations would take up more paper than Lady B---- from whom I had this, would choose to give me. My own metamorphosis is indeed so extraordinary, that I must make you acquainted with it. You know I am really very thick and short, prodigiously talkative and wonderfully impudent. Now I am thin and tall, strangely silent, and very bashful. If these things continue, who is safe? Even you, Boswell, may feel a change. Your fair and transparent complexion may turn black and oily; your person little and squat; and who knows but you may eternally rave about the King of Great Britain's guards;[22] a species of madness, from which good Lord deliver us! [Footnote 20: New-Tarbat, a wild seat in the western Highlands of Scotland, surrounded with mountains.] [Footnote 21: "Far smoking o'er the interminable plain." --Thomson's "Seasons."--Spring.--ED.] [Footnote 22: Boswell in a letter to his friend Temple, dated May 1st 1761, had thus described himself. "A young fellow whose happiness was always centred in London, ... who had got his mind filled with the most gay ideas--getting into the Guards, being about Court, enjoying the happiness of the _beau monde_, and the company of men of genius, &c."--ED.] I have often wondered, Boswell, that a man of your taste in music, cannot play upon the Jew's harp; there are some of us here that touch it very melodiously, I can tell you. Corelli's solo of _Maggie Lauder_, and Pergolesi's sonata of _The Carle he came o'er the Craft_, are excellently adapted to that instrument; let me advise you to learn it. The first cost is but three halfpence, and they last a long time. I have composed the following ode upon it, which exceeds Pindar as much as the Jew's harp does the organ. ODE UPON A JEW'S HARP. I. SWEET instrument! which fix'd in yellow teeth, So clear so sprightly and so gay is found, Whether you breathe along the shore of Leith, Or Lowmond's lofty cliffs thy strains resound; Struck by a taper finger's gentle tip, Ah softly in our ears thy pleasing murmurs slip! II. Where'er thy lively music's found, All are jumping, dancing round: Ev'n trusty William lifts a leg, And capers like sixteen with Peg; Both old and young confess thy pow'rful sway, They skip like madmen and they frisk away. III. Rous'd by the magic of the charming air, The yawning dogs forego their heavy slumbers; The ladies listen on the narrow stair, And Captain Andrew straight forgets his numbers. Cats and mice give o'er their battling, Pewter plates on shelves are rattling; But falling down the noise my lady hears, Whose scolding drowns the trump more tuneful than the spheres! Having thus, Boswell, written you a most entertaining letter, with which you are highly pleased; to your great grief I give over in these or the like words, your affectionate friend, ANDREW ERSKINE. * * * * * LETTER VIII. Edinburgh, Dec. 2, 1761. Dear ERSKINE,--Notwithstanding of your affecting elegy on the death of two pigs, I am just now returned from eating a most excellent one with the most magnificent Donaldson. I wish you would explain to me the reason of my being so very hard-hearted as to discover no manner of reluctance at that innocent animal's being brought to table well roasted. I will confess to you, my friend, that I fed upon it with no small alacrity--neither do I feel any pangs of remorse for having so done. The reason perhaps lies so deep as to elude our keenest penetration;--at the same time give me leave to offer my conjecture, which you may have by a little transmutation of a vulgar adage, in such manner as to obtain at one and the same time (so to speak) not only a strong reason for my alleged inhumanity, but also an apparent pun, and a seeming paradox; all which you have for the small and easy charge of saying, The belly has no bowels. I do assure you the imperial sovereign of Pope's head, Caledonian Dodsley, Scottish Baskerville, and captain general of collective bards, entertained us most sumptuously; I question much if captain Erskine himself ever fared better; although I was the only author in the company, which I own surprised me not a little. Donaldson is undoubtedly a gentleman perfectly skilled in the art of insinuation. His dinners are the most eloquent addresses imaginable. For my own part, I am never a sharer in one of his copious repasts, but I feel my heart warm to the landlord, and spontaneously conceive this expressive soliloquy,--Upon my word I must give him another hundred lines. Now, my dear Captain, tell me how is it with you, after reading this? With what feeling are you most strongly possessed? But as this depends a good deal upon the time of the day at which you receive my epistle, I shall make no farther inquiry. Thus, Sir, have I unbosomed the big exultation which possessed me upon occasion of what some of the fathers would call _splendidum prandium_; Englished thus, a splendid dinner. Are not you all this time very much astonished, nay, somewhat piqued, that I have as yet made no mention of your last, notwithstanding of the wonderful enchantments which you relate, the sagacious advices which you give, and the ode to a Jew's harp, which you add. Forgive me, good Captain. Blame Donaldson. Write to me whenever you have any thing that you wish to say, and believe me, Yours, JAMES BOSWELL. P.S. Are not you very proud of your Ode to Midnight? Lord K---- calls it the best Poem in the English language. But it will not be long so. For in imitation of it I have written an Ode to Gluttony, of which take two stanzas. I. HAIL Gluttony! O let me eat Immensely at thy awful board, On which to serve the stomach meet, What art and nature can afford. I'll furious cram, devoid of fear, Let but the roast and boil'd appear; Let me but see a smoking dish, I care not whether fowl or fish; Then rush ye floods of ale adown my throat, And in my belly make the victuals float! II. And yet why trust a greasy cook? Or give to meat the time of play? While ev'ry trout gulps down a hook, And poor dumb beasts harsh butchers slay? Why seek the dull, sauce-smelling gloom, Of the beef-haunted dining room; Where D----r gives to every guest With lib'ral hand whate'er is best; While you in vain th' insurance must invoke To give security you shall not choke? * * * * * LETTER IX. New-Tarbat, Dec. 3, 1761. Dear BOSWELL, EV'N now intent upon thy Ode, I plunge my knife into the beef, Which, when a cow--as is the mode-- Was _lifted_ by a Highland thief. Ah! spare him, spare him, circuit Lords! Ah hang him not in hempen cords; Ah save him in his morn of youth From the damp-breathing, dark[23] tolbooth, Lest when condemn'd and hung in clanking chains, His body moulder down white-bleached with winter rains! [Footnote 23: Tolbooth Prison.] But let not me intermeddle with your province; to parody the ode to midnight, could only be thought of and executed by the mirth-moving, humour-hunting, raillery-raising James Boswell. You must send me the rest of your Gluttony by the return of the post, even though it should prove the night of the Beard-soaping Club. Did you ever suspect me of believing your marriage? No, I always said from the beginning, there was nothing in it; I can bring twenty witnesses to prove it, who shall be nameless; indeed if you had been married, I don't know but the same gentlemen might have been prevailed upon to vouch for me that I frequently declared my firm persuasion of it; these kind of witnesses have multiplied greatly of late years, to the eternal credit of many a person's surprising sagacity; but if you want to see this subject pursued and treated with accuracy, peruse Doctor Woodward's Treatise of Fossils, particularly his remarks upon the touchstone. I am glad to hear you are returned to town, and once more near that seat of learning and genius Mr. Alexander Donaldson's shop. You tell me you are promoted to be his corrector of the press; I wish you also had the office of correcting his children, which they very much want; the eldest son, when I was there, never failed to play at taw all the time, and my queue used frequently to be pulled about; you know, upon account of its length it is very liable to these sort of attacks; I am thinking to cut it off, for I never yet met with a child that could keep his hands from it: and here I can't forbear telling you, that if ever you marry and have children, our acquaintance ceases from that moment, unless you breed them up after the manner of the great Scriblerus, and unless they be suckled with soft verse, and weaned with criticism. Write me when the volume will be published, and what sort of figure you think it will make, particularly how James Boswell and Andrew Erskine will appear; I know you will mix your opinion with a good deal of partial praise, as you are one of those extraordinary authors that have a love for their own works, and also one of those still more extraordinary ones that can flatter another. I find fault with one or two things in your letters; I could wish you wrote in a smaller hand, and that when you end a sentence in the beginning of a line, you would begin the next sentence in the same line. Dear Boswell, go to Donaldson and tell him he is a most inhuman miscreant, and deserves, as he is a Printer, to be pressed to death; then thunder in his ear that he has not sent Captain Erskine his Critical Review. Lady B---- entreats that you would come here and spend the Christmas holidays; she has sent for two Highland bards to entertain you, and I have a wash-ball and a stick of pomatum much at your service: we are all, thank God, in general pretty clear of the Itch just now, and most of us not near so lousy as we used to be, so I think you may venture. I received your letter ten days after the date, though it only came from Edinburgh; I had wrote you one some little time before, directed to the Parliament-Close, have you got it? That you may never want Odes of mine to parody, I enclose you one to Fear,[24] nothing like it you will observe since the time of Pindar. [Footnote 24: This Ode is not worth reprinting.--ED.] And now, my dear dear Boswell, I conclude, having, as I hope for mercy, not one word more to say, which I believe is often the case of many an enormous genius. Farewell. Yours, &c., ANDREW ERSKINE. * * * * * LETTER X. Edinburgh, Dec. 8, 1761. Dear ERSKINE,--It is a very strange thing, that I James Boswell, Esq., "who am happily possessed of a facility of manners,"--(to use the very words of Mr. Professor Smith,[25] which upon honour were addressed to me. I can produce the Letter in which they are to be found) I say it is a very strange thing that I should ever be at a loss how to express myself; and yet at this moment of my existence, that is really the case. May Lady B---- say unto me, "Boswell, I detest thee," if I am not in downright earnest. [Footnote 25: Adam Smith. Boswell had attended his classes on Moral Philosophy, when a student in the University of Glasgow.--ED.] Mankind are such a perverse race of beings, that they never fail to lay hold of every circumstance tending to their own praise, while they let slip every circumstance tending to their censure. To illustrate this by a recent example, you see I accurately remember Mr. Smith's beautiful, I shall even grant you just compliment, but have quite forgot his severe criticism on a sentence so clumsily formed, as to require an _I say_ to keep it together; which I myself candidly think much resembles a pair of ill-mended breeches. Having a mind, Erskine, to open a sluice of happiness upon you, I must inform you that I have lately got you an immensity of applause from men of the greatest taste. You know I read rather better than any man in Britain; so that your works had a very uncommon advantage. I was pleased at the praise which you received. I was vain of having such a correspondent. I thought I did not envy you a bit, and yet, I don't know, I felt somehow, as if I could like to thresh you pretty heartily: however, I have one comfort, in thinking that all this praise would not have availed you a single curl of Sir Cloudesley Shovel's periwig,[26] had not I generously reported it to you: so that in reality you are obliged to me for it. [Footnote 26: "Sir Cloudesley Shovel's monument has very often given me great offence: instead of the brave, rough English Admiral, which was the distinguishing character of that plain, gallant man, he is represented on his tomb by the figure of a beau, dressed in a long periwig, and reposing himself upon velvet cushions under a canopy of state."--The "Spectator," No. 26.--ED.] The second volume of the Poems will not be published till January. Captain Erskine will make a very good figure. Boswell a decent one. Lady B---- intreats me to come and pass the Christmas holidays with her: guess, O guess! what transport I felt at reading that. I did not know how to contain my elevation of spirits. I thought myself one of the greatest geniuses in Europe. I thought I could write all sorts of books, and work at all handicraft trades. I imagined that I had fourscore millions of money out at interest, and that I should actually be chosen Pope at the next election. I obtest you, my friend, in the warmest spirit of love to return to her Ladyship my most sincere thanks, and tell her that when the planets permit us to meet, she herself shall judge how richly I can express my gratitude. Although I am a good deal of a Don Quixote, yet I feel myself averse to so long a journey. Believe me, I am as sweetly indolent as any genius in all his Majesty's dominions, so that for my own incitement I must propose the following scheme. You Captain Andrew shall, upon Monday the 28th day of this present month, set out from New-Tarbat in Mr. M----'s chaise, and meet me at Glasgow, that evening. Next day shall we both in friendly guise get into the said chaise, and drive with velocity to your present habitation, where I shall remain till the Monday sennight; on which day I shall be in like manner accompanied back to Glasgow, from thence to make my way as well as I can, to the Scottish metropolis. I have told the story of my scheme rather awkwardly; but it will have its advantages; I shall have a couple of days more of your classical company, and somewhat less to pay, which to a Poet is no slender consideration. I shall chaise it the whole way. Thanks to the man who first invented that comfortable method of journeying. Had it not been for that, I dare say both you and I would have circumscribed our travels within a very few miles. For my own part, I think to dress myself in a great-coat and boots, and get astride a horse's back, and be jolted through the mire, perhaps in wind and rain, is a punishment too severe for all the offences which I can charge myself with. Indeed I have a mortal antipathy at riding, and that was the true reason for my refusing a regiment of dragoons which the King of Prussia offered me at the beginning of this war. I know indeed the Marischal Duke de Belleisle in his Political Testament,[27] has endeavoured to persuade the world that it was owing to my having a private amour with a Lady of distinction in the Austrian court, but that minister was too deeply immersed in state-intrigues, to know much about those of a more tender nature. The tumultuous hurry of business and ambition, left no room in his mind for the delicious delicacy of sentiment and passion, so very essential to a man of gallantry. [Footnote 27: "Avez-vous lu le _Testament politique du Maréchal de Belle-Isle_? C'est un ex-capucin de Rouen, nommé jadis Maubert, fripon, espion, escroc, menteur et ivrogne, ayant tous les talens de moinerie, qui a composé cet impertinent ouvrage."--Voltaire, Nov. 27, 1761.--ED.] I think, Erskine, in this scheme of mine, I am playing a very sure game, for you must either indulge me in every article which I have mentioned, or entertain me with a plentiful dish of well drest apologies. I beg it of you, however, don't put yourself to any inconvenience; indeed I might have saved myself the trouble of making this request, for you are that kind of man that I believe you would not put yourself to an inconvenience to be made a Lieutenant-General. Pray shall we not see you here this winter at all? You ought to come and eat the fruit of your labours. I remain your most affectionate friend, JAMES BOSWELL. I shall rouse Donaldson as you desire. I shall rouse him like a peal of thunder. I wonder what you will all think of this proposal of mine for delivering myself in Folio. Ten days make a period, as I use to say. They bear some proportion to the whole of life. Write instantly. * * * * * LETTER XI.[28] [Footnote 28: This Letter was occasioned by seeing an Ode to Tragedy, written by a Gentleman of Scotland, and dedicated to James Boswell, Esq., advertised in the Edinburgh Newspapers. It afterwards appeared that the Ode was written by Mr. Boswell himself.] New-Tarbat, Dec. 13, 1761. Dear BOSWELL,--An Ode to Tragedy by a gentleman of Scotland, and dedicated to you! had there been only one spark of curiosity in my whole composition, this would have raised it to a flame equal to the general conflagration. May G----d d----n me, as Lord Peter says,[29] if the edge of my appetite to know what it can be about, is not as keen as the best razor ever used by a member of the Soaping-Club. Go to Donaldson, demand from him two of my franks, and send it me even before the first post: write me, O write me! what sort of man this author is, where he was born, how he was brought up, and with what sort of diet he has been principally fed; tell me his genealogy, like Mr. M----; how many miles he has travelled in post-chaises, like Colonel R----; tell me what he eats, like a cook; what he drinks, like a wine-merchant; what shoes he wears, like a shoe-maker; in what manner his mother was delivered of him, like a man-midwife; and how his room is furnished, like an upholsterer; but if you happen to find it difficult to utter all this in terms befitting Mr. M----, Colonel R----, a cook, a wine-merchant, a shoemaker, a man-midwife, and an upholsterer, Oh! tell it me all in your own manner, and in your own incomparable style. [Footnote 29: In the "Tale of a Tub."--ED.] Your scheme, Boswell, has met with--but the thoughts of this Ode-writing gentleman of Scotland again come across me,--I must now ask, like the Spectator,[30] is he fat or lean, tall or short, does he use spectacles? what is the length of his walking-stick? has he a landed estate? has he a good coal-work?--Lord! Lord! what a melancholy thing it is to live twenty miles from a post-town! why am I not in Edinburgh? why am I not chained to Donaldson's shop? [Footnote 30: "I have observed that a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure, till he knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particulars of the like nature that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author."--"The Spectator," No. 1.--ED.] I received both your letters yesterday, for we send to the Post-house but once a week: I need not tell you how I liked them; were I to acquaint you with that, you would consecrate the pen with which they were written, and deify the inkhorn: I think the outside of one of them was adorned with the greatest quantity of good sealing-wax I ever saw, and my brother A---- and Lady A----, both of whom have a notable comprehension of these sort of things, agree with me in this my opinion. Your Ode to Gluttony[31] is altogether excellent; the descriptions are so lively, that mistaking the paper on which they were written, for a piece of bread and butter spread with marmalade, I fairly swallowed the whole composition, and I find my stomach increased three-fold since that time; I declare it to be the most admirable whet in the world, superior to a solan goose, or white wine and bitters; it ought to be hung up in every cook's shop in the three kingdoms, engraved on pillars in all market places, and pasted in all rooms in all taverns. [Footnote 31: He refers to the continuation of this Ode, which I have omitted in the present Edition.--ED.] You seem to doubt in your first letter, if ever Captain Erskine was better entertained by the great Donaldson, than you was lately; banish that opinion, tell it not in Gath; nor publish it in Askalon; repeat it not in John's Coffee-house, neither whisper it in the Abbey of Holyrood-House; no, I shall never forget the fowls and oyster sauce which bedecked the board: fat were the fowls, and the oysters of the true pandour or croat kind; then the apple pie with raisins, and the mutton with cauliflower, can never be erased from my remembrance; I may forget my native country, my dear brothers and sisters, my poetry, my art of making love, and even you, O Boswell! but these things I can never forget; the impression is too deep, too well imprinted ever to be effaced; I may turn Turk or Hottentot, I may be hanged for stealing a bag to adorn my hair, I may ravish all sorts of virgins, young and old, I may court the fattest Wapping landlady, but these things I can never forget; I may be sick and in prison, I may be deaf, dumb, and may lose my memory, but these things I can never forget. And now, Boswell, I am to acquaint you, that your proposal is received with the utmost joy and festivity, and the scheme, if I live till to-morrow fortnight, will be put in execution. The New-Tarbat chaise will arrive at Glasgow on Monday evening the 28th of December, drove by William. Captain Andrew's slim personage will slip out, he will enquire for James Boswell, Esq.; he will be shewn into the room where he is sitting before a large fire, the evening being cold, raptures and poetry will ensue, and every man will soap his own beard; every other article of the proposals will be executed as faithfully as this; but to speak very seriously, you must be true to your appointment, and come with the utmost regularity upon the Monday; think of my emotions at Græme's, if you should not come; view my melancholy posture; hark! I rave like Lady Wishfort,[32] no Boswell yet, Boswell's a lost thing. I must receive a letter from you before I set out, telling me whether you keep true to your resolution, and pray send me the Ode to Tragedy: I beg you'll bring me out in your pocket my Critical Review, which you may desire Donaldson to give you; but above all, employ Donaldson to get me a copy of Fingal,[33] which tell him I'll pay him for; I long to see it. [Footnote 32: In "The Way of the World," by Congreve.--ED.] [Footnote 33: The first volume of Macpherson's "Fingal" was published this winter.--ED.] There are some things lately published in London, which I would be glad to have, particularly a Spousal Hymn on the marriage of the King and Queen, and an Elegy on viewing a ruined Pile of Buildings; see what you can do for me; I know you will not take it ill to be busied a little for that greatest of all Poets Captain Andrew. The sluice of happiness you have let in upon me, has quite overflowed the shallows of my understanding; at this moment I am determined to write more and print more than any man in the kingdom, except the great Dr. Hill, who writes a Folio every month, a Quarto every fortnight, an Octavo every week, and a Duodecimo every day.[34] Hogarth has humourously represented a brawny porter almost sinking to the ground under a huge load of his works. I am too lazy just now to copy out an Ode to Indolence, which I have lately written; besides, it's fitting I reserve something for you to peruse when we meet, for upon these occasions an exchange of Poems ought to be as regular as an exchange of prisoners between two nations at war. Believe me, dear Boswell, to be yours sincerely, ANDREW ERSKINE. [Footnote 34: "Would you believe, what I know is fact, that Dr. Hill earned fifteen guineas a week by working for wholesale dealers? He was at once employed on six voluminous works of Botany, Husbandry, &c., published weekly."--Horace Walpole, date of Jan. 3, 1761.--ED.] P.S.--Pray write me before I set out for Glasgow.--The Ode to Tragedy, by a gentleman of Scotland, good now! wonderful! * * * * * LETTER XII. Edinburgh, Saturday, Dec. 14, 1761. Dear ERSKINE,--If my scheme takes, you must alter it. Thursday the 24th must be the day of our meeting, as I am obliged to return hither on Saturday the 2nd of January. This is really a curious way of employing you; however, you will gain something by it; you will acquire a particular exactness in knowing the days of the month, a science too much neglected in these degenerate days, but a science which was cultivated with a glorious ardour in Greece and Rome, and was no doubt the cause of their flourishing so much in every respect. I am yours sincerely, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER XIII. Edinburgh, Dec. 17, 1761. Dear ERSKINE,--Had you but hinted a method of conveyance sooner than by the first post, sooner should the Ode to Tragedy have saluted your longing eyes. At length it comes! it comes! Hark! with what lofty music do the spheres proclaim its triumphal entry into the majestic edifice at Tarbat! Behold the family gathered around it in a sort of quadrangular figure! Heavens! what a picture of curiosity! what a group of eager expectants! They show their teeth, they rub their hands, they kick the floor! But who is this the fire of whose look flames infinitely beyond the rest? It is Captain Andrew! It is! it is! ye Gods! he seizes! he opens! he reads! Let us leave him. I can no more. It would stretch the strings too far to proceed. You must know I purposely neglected to send the Ode myself, and likewise prevented Donaldson from sending it immediately when it was published, in order to give full play to your impatience. I considered what amazing effects it must produce upon Captain Erskine, to find in one advertisement, An Ode to Tragedy--A Gentleman of Scotland--Alexander Donaldson--and James Boswell, Esq. How far my conjecture was just, your last letter does most amply testify. The author of the Ode to Tragedy, is a most excellent man: he is of an ancient family in the west of Scotland, upon which he values himself not a little. At his nativity there appeared omens of his future greatness. His parts are bright, and his education has been good. He has travelled in post-chaises, miles without number. He is fond of seeing much of the world. He eats of every good dish, especially apple-pie. He drinks old hock. He has a very fine temper. He is somewhat of an humorist, and a little tinctured with pride. He has a good manly countenance, and he owns himself to be amorous. He has infinite vivacity, yet is observed at times to have a melancholy cast. He is rather fat than lean, rather short than tall, rather young than old. His shoes are neatly made, and he never wears spectacles. The length of his walking-stick is not as yet ascertained; but we hope soon to favour the republic of letters with a solution of this difficulty, as several able mathematicians are employed in its investigation, and for that purpose have posted themselves at different given points in the Cannongate, so that when the gentleman saunters down to the Abbey of Holyrood-house, in order to think on ancient days, on King James the Fifth, and on Queen Mary, they may compute its altitude above the street, according to the rules of geometry. I hope you have received a line from me fixing Thursday the 24th, as the day of our meeting. I exult in the prospect of felicity that is before us. Fingal and your Critical Review shall accompany me. I will not anticipate your pleasure in reading the Highland bard; only take my word for it, he will make you feel that you have a soul. I shall remember your other commissions. Continue to trust me till you find me negligent. I beg it of you, for once, be a Frenchman, and in the character of Boswell, kneel, supplicate, worship Lady B----. I remain, your affectionate Friend, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER XIV. New-Tarbat, Dec. 16, 1761. Dear BOSWELL,--Swift as pen can scratch, or ink can flow, as floods can rush, or winds can blow, which you'll observe is a very pretty rhyme, I sit down on a chair which has really a very bad bottom, being made of wood, and answer your epistle which I received this moment; it is dated on Saturday the 14th, which was really the 12th, according to the computation of the best chronologists: this is a blunder which Sir Isaac Newton would never have excused; but I a man no less great, forgive it from my soul; and I here declare, that I will never upbraid you with it in any company or conversation, even though that conversation should turn upon the quickest and most pleasant method of swallowing oysters, when you know I might very naturally introduce it. I confess it is singularly silly in me to turn the page in this manner, and that I should have followed your example, or rather ensample, as some great judges of style usually write it. I see by the newspapers, that Fingal is to be published at Edinburgh in a few days, pray bring it with you. I will undoubtedly meet you at Glasgow on the 24th day of the month, being exactly that day which precedes Christmas, as was ingeniously observed by Mr. Sheridan in his fourth Lecture;[35] and I hear he is going to publish a whole volume of discoveries all as notable as this, which I imagine will exceed his lectures greatly. [Footnote 35: "Course of Lectures on Elocution," by Thomas Sheridan, M.A. London, 1762.--ED.] Pray now be faithful to this appointment, and so I commit this letter to the guidance of Providence, hoping that it will not miscarry, or fail of being duly delivered. Believe me yours sincerely, ANDREW ERSKINE. * * * * * LETTER XV. New-Tarbat, Jan. 10, 1762. Dear BOSWELL,--The storms of night descended, the winds rolled along the clouds with all their ghosts, around the rock the dark waves burst, and shewed their flaming bosoms, loud rushed the blast through the leafless oaks, and the voice of the spirit of the mountains was heard in our halls; it was Saturday, when lo! at once the postman came, mighty was his striding in the kitchen, and strong was his voice for ale. In short, I have as yet received no letter from you, and great is my wonder and astonishment, even Donaldson has not sent me my Critical Review; would to God he had one rap from Fingal's sword of Luno. I feel myself at this present moment capable of writing a letter which would delight you, but I am determined not to do it, and this is the severe punishment of your neglect, I withhold the treasures of my wit and humour from you, a perfect Golconda mine of Diamonds. I have been enjoying since you left me, the most exquisite entertainment, in the perusal of the noble works of Ossian, the greatest poet, in my opinion, that ever composed, and who exceeds Homer, Virgil, and Milton. He transports us by the grandeur of his sublime, or by some sudden start of tenderness he melts us into distress: Who can read, without the warmest emotions, the pathetic complaints of the venerable old bard, when he laments his blindness, and the death of his friends? But how are we animated when the memory of former years comes rushing on his mind, and the light of the song rises in his soul. It is quite impossible to express my admiration of his Poems; at particular passages I felt my whole frame trembling with ecstasy; but if I was to describe all my thoughts, you would think me absolutely mad. The beautiful wildness of his fancy is inexpressibly agreeable to the imagination; for instance, the mournful sound from the untouched harp when a hero is going to fall, or the awful appearances of his ghosts and spirits. Notwithstanding all these beauties, we shall still continue pedants, and Homer and Virgil will be read and quoted, when Ossian shall be totally forgot; this, without the gift of prophecy, I can foresee; much could I enlarge upon this subject, but this must not be a long letter. Believe me Yours sincerely, ANDREW ERSKINE. * * * * * LETTER XVI. Edinburgh, Jan. 11, 1762. Dear ERSKINE,--Instead of endeavouring to excuse myself for neglecting so long to write, I shall present you with some original conjectures of my own, upon the way and manner in which you have been affected upon this present occasion. And here I must premise, that in so doing I shall not follow the formal and orderly method of Bishop Latimer, in his sermons before King Edward the Sixth; but, on the contrary, shall adopt the easy, desultory style of one whom at present I shall not venture to name, but leave that to some future ingenious commentator on the epistolary correspondence of the Hon. Andrew Erskine and James Boswell, Esq. Either you have been sunk into a frigid state of listless indifference, and gone whistling up and down the room upon a fife, and murmuring at intervals, while you took breath; let him do as he likes, let him please himself; yes, yes, let him soap his own beard. Or you have felt the most delicate pangs of afflicted sensibility, and uttered tender tales of woe in softly plaintive numbers. The savage bard returns no humorous line, No Tragic Ode now sooths my soul to rest; In vain I fly to Lady B----'s wine, Nor can a hearty supper make me blest. Or you have burned, raged, and fried like the thrice-amorous swain in the renowned English translation of Voi Amante, and perhaps thundered forth all the Anathemas which Tristram Shandy has borrowed from the church of Rome, and transferred to poor Obadiah. By this time, the storm is blown over. This merry letter has made you grin, and show every expression of laughter. You are now in very good humour, and are in all human probability saying to yourself, My good friend Boswell, is a most excellent correspondent. It is true he is indolent, and _dissipated_, as the celebrated Parson Brown,[36] of Carlisle says, and he frequently is a little negligent: but when he does write, ye Gods! how he does write! in short, to sing him his own inimitable song, "There is no better fellow alive." I remain Yours sincerely, JAMES BOSWELL. [Footnote 36: Dr. John Brown, the author of "An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times."--ED.] * * * * * LETTER XVII. New-Tarbat, Jan. 20, 1762. Dear BOSWELL,--It is a kind of maxim, or rule in life, never to begin a thing without having an eye towards the conclusion; certainly this rule was never better observed than in your last letter, in which indeed I am apt to think you kept the conclusion rather too much in view, or perhaps you forgot the beginning altogether, which is not unfrequently the case with you; but you do these things with so little compunction, that I shall very soon cease to forgive you, and answer you in the same manner. It is to be feared, that the dissolution of our correspondence will immediately follow, or dwindle into half a page of your text hand, which I always looked upon as a detestable invention: if all this that I dread happens, we shall then cease to be reckoned men of LETTERS. I find it recorded in the history of the eastern Roman Empire, that it was the custom whenever the inhabitants of Constantinople mutinied for want of bread, to whip all the bakers through the city, which always appeased the populace; in like manner, Boswell, I having dreamt a few nights ago, that I had whipt you severely, find my wrath and resentment very much mollified; not so much indeed I confess, as if I had really had the pleasure of actually correcting you, but however I am pretty well satisfied. You was quite mistaken as to the manner I bore your silence; I only thought it was a little droll. Donaldson tells me, that he wants thirty or forty pages to complete his volume; pray don't let him insert any nonsense to fill it up, but try John Home[37] and John R----, who I hear is a very good poet; you may also hint the thing to Mr. N----, and to my brother, Lord K----, who has some excellent poems by him. [Footnote 37: The author of "Douglas."--ED.] Since I saw you, I received a letter from Mr. D----; it is filled with encomiums upon you: he says there is a great deal of humility in your vanity, a great deal of tallness in your shortness, and a great deal of whiteness in your black complexion. He says there is a great deal of poetry in your prose, and a great deal of prose in your poetry. He says, that as to your late publication, there is a great deal of Ode in your dedication, and a great deal of dedication in your Ode; it would amaze you to see how D---- keeps up this see-saw, which you'll remark has prodigious wit in it. He says there is a great deal of coat in your waistcoat, and a great deal of waistcoat in your coat; that there is a great deal of liveliness in your stupidity, and a great deal of stupidity in your liveliness; but to write you all he says, would require rather more fire in my grate, than there is at present; and my fingers would undoubtedly be numbed, for there is a great deal of snow in this frost, and a great deal of frost in this snow: in short, upon this occasion he writes like a Christian and a Poet, and a Physician and an Orator, and a Jew. Pray, Boswell, tell me particularly in your first letter, how Fingal has been received; that book will serve me as a criterion, to discover the taste of the present age. Boswell, imitate me in your writing; observe how closely the lines are joined, how near the words are written to one another, and how small the letters are formed; I am praiseworthy in this particular. Adieu. Yours sincerely, ANDREW ERSKINE. * * * * * LETTER XVIII. Edinburgh, Jan. 22, 1762. Dear ERSKINE,--I would not for all the books in Donaldson's shop that our correspondence should cease. Rather, much rather would I trot a horse in the hottest day in summer, between Fort George and Aberdeen; rather, much rather would I hold the office of him who every returning noon plays upon the music-bells of the good town of Edinburgh;[38] and rather, much rather would I be condemned to pass the next seven years of my life, as a spiritless student at the college of Glasgow. [Footnote 38: "All the people of business at Edinburgh, and even the genteel company may be seen standing in crowds every day, from one to two in the afternoon, in the open street.... The company are entertained with a variety of tunes, played upon a set of bells, fixed in a steeple hard by. As these bells are well toned, and the musician, who has a salary from the city for playing upon them with keys, is no bad performer, the entertainment is really agreeable, and very striking to the ears of a stranger."--"Humphry Clinker," vol. ii., p. 223.--ED.] Let our wit, my friend, continue to shine in a succession of brilliant sparkles. Let there be no more distance between each flash of vivacity, but what is necessary for giving time to observe its splendid radiance. I hope I shall never again approach so near the clod of clay. I hope the fire of my genius shall never again be so long in kindling, or so much covered up with the dross of stupidity. I have desired Donaldson to cause his correspondent at London, to send a copy of the first volume of his collection to each of the Reviews, that is to say, to Hamilton[39] and Griffiths, with whose names the slate-blue covers of these awful oracles of criticism are inscribed. [Footnote 39: Hamilton was the proprietor of "The Critical Review." Its first editor was Smollett. Griffiths was the proprietor of "The Monthly Review." Goldsmith worked for him for some time. Griffiths was fool enough to venture, with the aid of his wife, to correct Goldsmith's compositions.--See Forster's "Life of Goldsmith."--ED.] Donaldson has yet about thirty-six pages of the second Volume to print. I have given him two hundred lines more. He is a loadstone of prodigious power, and attracts all my poetic needles. The Volume will be out next week; the different pieces of which it is composed are, to be sure, not all of equal merit. But is not that the case in every miscellaneous collection, even in that excellent one published by Mr. Dodsley? The truth is, that a volume printed in a small type exhausts an infinite quantity of _copy_ (to talk technically) so that we must not be over-nice in our choice, nor think every man in our ranks below size, who does not come up to the elevated standard of Captain Andrew. D----'s encomiums have rendered my humility still prouder; they are indeed superb, and worthy of an opposer of the German war. I suppose they have not lost a bit of beef by their long journey, and I should imagine that the Highland air has agreed well with them, and that they have agreed well with the Highland air. They occasioned much laughter in my heart, and much heart in my laughter. They have at last given over marrying me; so that I am going about like a horse wanting a halter, ready to be bridled and saddled by the first person who is so very fortunate as to lay hold of me. A simile not to be found in any author ancient or modern. We had a splendid ball at the Abbey of Holyrood-house, on the Queen's birthday, given by Colonel Graeme. I exhibited my existence in a minuet, and as I was dressed in a full chocolate suit, and wore my most solemn countenance, I looked as you used to tell me, like the fifth act of a deep Tragedy. Lord K---- danced with Miss C----, by the fire of whose eyes, his melodious lordship's heart is at present in a state of combustion. Such is the declaration which he makes in loud whispers many a time and oft. Our friend H---- S---- is in town this winter. He is a most surprising old fellow. I am told he is some years past sixty; and yet he has all the vivacity and frolic, and whim of the sprightliest youth. He continues to rank all mankind under the general denomination of Gilbert. He patrols the streets at midnight as much as ever, and beats with as much vigour the town-guard drum; nor is his affection for the company of blind fiddlers, in the least abated. Fingal has been very warmly received at London. A second edition of it is just now come out. The public taste you will allow is good at present: long may it last. Long may the voice of the venerable bard be heard with unaffected pleasure. I see your regiment is ordered for England. I hope you will be allowed to recruit, or have leave of absence, as it would be very severe upon you to be moved from your present situation. If you will number the lines in our pages, you will find I have twenty-three, whereas you have only eighteen. I enclose you the sorrowful lamentation of a stabler called Hutchison, who, on Wednesday last was whipt through this town, for forcing away a young man as a recruit, and beating him unmercifully. The said lamentation you will find is in verse; and although sold for a single penny, is a work of remarkable merit. The exordium is a passionate address to Captains all; amongst whom, who can more properly be reckoned than Captain Andrew? I remain your sincere friend, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER XIX. Morpeth, Feb. 7th, 1762. Dear BOSWELL,--And lo I am at Morpeth, after meeting with every accident that could possibly happen to a man in a post-chaise, overturns, breaking of springs, dropping of wheels, and sticking in roads, though with four horses. We imagine we are to remain in this town some time. Upon looking over my poems, in the second volume, I find several errors; I'm afraid you have not corrected the press so violently as you boasted. Perhaps, Boswell, this will be the worst and the shortest letter I ever wrote to you; I'm writing in an inn, and half-a-dozen people in the room; but when I'm settled in lodgings of my own, expect epistles in the usual style. I think you two or three times have treated me as I treat you now, so I remain your most humble servant, And affectionate friend, ANDREW ERSKINE. P.S.--Never was there such a tame subjected performance as this. * * * * * LETTER XX. Morpeth, Feb. 8, 1762. Dear BOSWELL,--I beg you will get a copy of the second volume of the Poems, and send me it by the man who brings you this; let it be a neat one, well-bound: pray tell me what people say of the book. Your currant-jelly is good, has a delicious flavour, and tastes much of the fruit, as my aunts say. I did not make out all the names in your Race-Ballad cleverly. I am still in the way I was, when I wrote you last, in a public-house, and pestered with noise: I have not above six ideas at present, and none of them fit for a letter. Dear Boswell, farewell! pray for my recovery from this lethargy of spirits and sense which has seized me. Yours, &c. ANDREW ERSKINE. * * * * * LETTER XXI. Edinburgh, Feb. 16, 1762. Dear ERSKINE,--To see your brother ---- at Morpeth, will, I dare say, surprise you as much as it did me, to find him here. In short, nothing will serve him but a sight of the British capital, although he is already much better acquainted with it than either you or I. What has at present instigated him I own I am puzzled to discover: but I solemnly and merrily declare, that I never yet saw anybody so excessively enamoured of London. The effects of this violent passion are deeply impressed upon every feature in his countenance, his nose not excepted, which is absolutely most surprising. His body is tossed and shaken like one afflicted with the hot fit of an ague, or the severest paroxysms of convulsion. Then as to his mind, it is altogether distempered. He is perpetually declaiming on the magnificence, the liberty, and the pleasure, which reigns in the imperial British metropolis. He swears, that in that glorious place alone we can enjoy life. He says, there is no breathing beyond St. James's; and he affirms, that the air of that delicious spot is celestial. He says, there is no wit except at the Bedford; no military genius but at George's; no wine but at the Star and Garter; no turbot except at the Tilt-Yard. He asserts, that there are no clothes made beyond the liberties of Westminster; and he firmly holds Cheapside to be the sole mart of stockings. It would fill up two-thirds of a quarto volume to enumerate the various extravagant exclamations into which he breaks out. He declares that for his own part, he will never go to church except to St. Paul's, nor to a lady's private lodgings, except in the neighbourhood of Soho-square. I beg it of you, my friend, be very attentive to him; observe his appearance and behaviour with the greatest accuracy, so that between us we may be able to have a pretty just notion of this wonderful affair, and may faithfully draw up his case to be read before the Royal Society, and transmitted to posterity in these curious annals the Philosophical Transactions. I have sent you the second volume, which Donaldson begs leave to present you with, in consideration of your being one of those who bear the brunt of the day. He has also done me the same honour. No plain shop copy; no, no, elegantly bound and gilt. Adieu, yours sincerely, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER XXII. Morpeth, March 2, 1762. Oh, BOSWELL! if you found yourself in the middle of the Firth of Forth, and the sea fast up-springing through every leak, after the skipper had remonstrated, in the most warm manner, against proceeding to cross the water; or if, like me, you found yourself in the midst of a sentence, without knowing how to end it, you could not feel more pain than I do at this instant: in short, I have had a very excellent letter of yours in my left waistcoat-pocket this fortnight; is that letter answered? you say: Oh! let the reply to this question be buried in the bottom of the Red Sea, where I hope no future army will ever disturb it; or let it be inserted in the third volume of Donaldson's Collection, where it will never be found, as the book will never be opened. What would I not do to gain your pardon? I would even swear that black was white; that's to say, I would praise the fairness of your complexion. By that smile which irradiates your countenance, like a gleam of the moon through the black clouds of the south; by the melting of that pomatum which gives your hair a gloss, like the first beaming of a new suit of regimentals on an assembly night, when twenty fiddlers sweat; by the grandeur of your pinchbeck buckles; by the solemnity of your small nose; by the blue expended in washing your shirts; by the rotundity of your Bath great-coat; by the well-polished key of your portmanteau; by the tag of your shoe; by the tongue of your buckle; by your tailor's bill; by the last kiss of Miss C----; by the first guinea you ever had in your possession; and chiefly by all the nonsense you have just read, let the kneeling Captain find favour in your eyes, and then, my Ode to Goodnature shall be inscribed to you, while your Ode to Ingratitude (which, I suppose, is finished) shall be burnt. I was, as you imagine, very much surprised to see A---- here; I noted him, according to your direction, with a critical eye; like a gentleman in a line which you may remember I made on the Castle-hill, he seemed to have taken the Tower of London for his bride; every feature and every limb was changed wonderfully; his nose resembled Westminster-Bridge; his cheeks were like Bloomsbury-Square; his high forehead like Constitution-Hill; his chin like China-Row; his tongue and his teeth looked like Almack's in Pall-Mall; his lips like the Shakespeare's Head; his fists like Hockley-in-the-Hole; his ears like the Opera-House; his eyes like a harlequin entertainment; his stomach was like Craven-Street; his chest like the trunk-maker's in the corner of St. Paul's-Church-yard; the calf of his leg like Leadenhall-market; his pulse like the Green-market in Covent-Garden; his neck like Tyburn; and his gait like Newgate; his navel like Fleet-street; and his lungs and his bladder were like Blowbladder-street: everything about him seemed metamorphosed; he had moulded his hat into the form of the Mansion-House; some guineas which he had, looked like the 'Change; but it would be tedious to relate every particular; however, I must not let his conversation be forgot, though it was much of a piece with that you so humorously relate: he swore to me he never saw a rag fit for a gentleman to wear, but in Rag-fair; he said there was no scolding but at Billingsgate; and he avowed there were no bad poets but in Grub-street; I could not stand that, I bid him call to remembrance an acquaintance of his who lived in the Parliament-Close, and also a relation of his who formerly resided in Campbell's Land; he smiled, and confessed these were really very bad poets, but that he was not convinced for all that; upon this, to put the matter out of all dispute, I offered to lend him the first and second volumes of Donaldson's Collection. At that very moment the hostler informed him the chaise was ready, and he still remains ignorant where the worst poets in the world are. Tell me how our second volume is received; I was much pleased with N----'s lines; how did he get them inserted? I intend writing a criticism upon the volume, and upon your writings in particular, so tremble. Dear Boswell, farewell, Yours most affectionately, ANDREW ERSKINE. P.S.--I hope you'll write to me soon. * * * * * LETTER XXIII. Edinburgh, March 9, 1762. Dear ERSKINE,--Can a man walk up the Cowgate after a heavy rain without dirtying his shoes? I might have said the soles of his shoes:--and, indeed, to put the matter beyond dispute, I would yet have you to understand me so; for although nothing is so common as to use a part for the whole; yet if you should be out of humour with a bad dinner, a bad lodging, an ill-dressed shirt, or an ill-printed book, you might be disposed to cavil, and object, that in critical precision of language, (supposing a man to walk slow) he could not be said to have dirtied his shoes, no more than a boarding-school girl, who has cut her finger in paring an apple, could be said to have mangled her carcase. But to proceed; can a man make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land from the Island of Great Britain, without the aid of navigation? Can a man walk in the Mall at noon, carrying his breeches upon an enormous long pole, without being laughed at? Can a man of acknowledged ignorance and stupidity, write a tragedy superior to Hamlet? or a genteel comedy superior to the Careless Husband?[40] I need not wait for an answer. No word but no, will do: it is self-evident. No more, my friend, can he who is lost in dissipation, write a letter. I am at present so circumstanced; accept this short line in answer to your last, and write very soon to Your affectionate Friend, JAMES BOSWELL. [Footnote 40: By Colley Cibber. "Who upon earth has written such perfect comedies (as Molière)? for the 'Careless Husband' is but one."--Horace Walpole, Aug. 29, 1785.--ED.] * * * * * LETTER XXIV. New-Tarbat, April 15, 1762. Dear BOSWELL,--The sun which rose on Wednesday last, with his first beams beheld you set out for Auchinleck, but he did not see me arrive in Edinburgh; however, he was good-natured enough to lend a little light to the moon, by the help of which, about twelve at night I landed at Peter Ramsay's: the thoughts of seeing you next day kept up my spirits, during a stage of seventeen miles. William he snored; I called upon you, after being refreshed with soft slumbers, in which my guardian genius did not inform me of your absence: but oh! when the maid told me you was gone, what were my emotions! she beholding me affected in a most supreme degree, tried to administer comfort to me, and plainly told me, that you would be very sorry you had missed me, this delivered in an elegant manner, soothed me prodigiously. I began writing this at Graham's in Glasgow, but was interrupted by a jowl of Salmon; every thing there reminded me of you. I was in the same room you and I were in, you seemed placed before me, your face beamed a black ray upon me. I am now at New-Tarbat, once more returned to the scenes of calm retirement, and placid meditation, as Mr. Samuel Johnson says in the Idler.[41] We all wish to have you here, and we all agree in thinking that there is nothing to hinder you to come. [Footnote 41: "I am now, as I could wish every man of wisdom and virtue to be, in the regions of calm content and placid meditation."--"The Idler," No. 71.--ED.] I must beg your pardon seriously for not writing to you, but I was really in such bad spirits, and such ill temper, at that cursed place Morpeth, that it was impossible; but I assure you I will make up terribly. I am recruiting again; I believe our regiment won't go abroad this summer. I was glad to see by the London newspapers, that Mr. Robert Dodsley had at last published your Cub: Mr. H---- showed me a very severe Epigram that somebody in London had written upon it. You know it is natural to take a lick at a Cub. Pray come to us. I cannot all at once come into the way of letter-writing again, so I must conclude, Dear Boswell, Your affectionate friend, ANDREW ERSKINE. * * * * * LETTER XXV. Auchinleck, April 22, 1762. Dear ERSKINE,--This is a strange world that we live in. Things turn out in a very odd manner. Every day produces something more wonderful than another. Earthquakes, murders, conflagrations, inundations, jubilees, operas, marriages, and pestilence, unite to make mortal men gape and stare. But your last letter and mine being wrote on the same day, astonishes me still more than all these things put together. This is the most unaccountable rhodomontade that I ever uttered. I am really dull at present, and my affectation to be clever, is exceedingly awkward. My manner resembles that of a footman who has got an ensign's commission, or a kept mistress who is made a wife. I have not at any time been more insipid, more muddy, and more standing-water like than I am just now. The country is my aversion. It renders me quite torpid. Were you here just now, you would behold your vivacious friend a most stupid exhibition. It is very surprising that the country should affect me so; whether it be that the scenes to be met with there, fall infinitely short of my ideas of pastoral simplicity; or that I have acquired so strong a relish for the variety and hurry of a town life, as to languish in the stillness of retirement; or that the atmosphere is too moist and heavy, I shall not determine. I have now pretty good hopes of getting soon into the guards, that gay scene of life of which I have been so long and so violently enamoured. Surely this will cause you to rejoice. I have lately had the pleasure and the pride of receiving a most brilliant epistle from Lady B----. It excels Captain Andrew's letters by many degrees. I have picked as many diamonds out of it, as to make me a complete set of buckles; I have turned so much of it into brocade waistcoats, and so much into a very rich suit of embroidered horse-furniture. I know how unequal I am to the task of answering it; nevertheless present her Ladyship with the inclosed. It may amuse her a little. It is better to have two shillings in the pound, than nothing at all. I was really shocked at the lethargy of our correspondence. Let it now be renovated with increase of spirit, so that I may not only subscribe myself your sincere friend, but your witty companion, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER XXVI. New-Tarbat, May 1, 1762. Well then, my friend, you leave the bar, Resolv'd on drums, on dress, and war, While fancy paints in liveliest hues, Swords, sashes, shoulder-knots, reviews, You quit the study of the laws, And show a blade in Britain's cause, Of length to throw into a trance, The frighten'd kings of Spain and France! A hat of fiercest cock is sought, And your cockade's already bought, While on your coat there beams a lace, That might a captain-general grace! For me, who never show admir'd, Or very long ago was tir'd, I can with face unmov'd behold, A scarlet suit with glittering gold; And tho' a son of war and strife, Detest the listless languid life; Then coolly, Sir, I say repent, And in derision hold a tent; Leave not the sweet poetic band, To scold recruits, and pore on Bland,[42] Our military books won't charm ye, Not even th' enchanting list o' th' army. Trust me, 'twill be a foolish sight, To see you facing to the right; And then, of all your sense bereft, Returning back unto the left; Alas! what transport can you feel, In turning round on either heel? Much sooner would I choose indeed, To see you standing on your head; Or with your breeches off to rub Foul clothes, and dance within a tub. [Footnote 42: Humphrey Bland, author of "Military Discipline," (1727). He served under the Duke of Marlborough. Was present also at the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy. Became colonel of the Second Dragoon Guards.--ED.] Besides, my dear Boswell, we find in all history ancient and modern, lawyers are very apt to run away. Demosthenes the Greek, writer to the signet, who managed the great suit against Philip of Macedon, fairly scoured off, I think, at the battle of Cheronea; and Cicero, the Roman advocate is universally accused of cowardice. I am not indeed ignorant that some of your ancestors behaved well at Flodden;[43] but as they lost the day, I think the omen but bad, and as they were killed, I think that makes the omen still worse; however, perhaps you don't think so, and I allow that argument to be very convincing, and rather more conclusive, than if you had said, "I don't know that." [Footnote 43: "Thomas Boswell obtained from James IV., as a signal mark of royal favour, the estate of Auchinleck. He was slain at Flodden."--"Memoir of James Boswell," by Rev. C. Rogers, p. 3.--ED.] You complain much of the country, and you assign various reasons for disliking it; among others, you imagine the atmosphere too moist and heavy; I agree with you in that opinion, all the black clouds in the sky are continually pressing upon you, for as the proverb says, Like draws to like. Believe me, I have sometimes taken you at a distance, for the pillar of smoke which used to accompany the Israelites out of Egypt; it would be impossible to tell how many things I have taken you for at different times; sometimes I have taken you for the witches' cauldron in Macbeth; this resemblance was in some degree warranted by your figure and shape; sometimes for an enormous ink-bottle; sometimes for a funeral procession; now and then for a chimney sweeper, and not unfrequently for a black-pudding. For my part, Boswell, I must confess I am fond of the country to a degree; things there are not so artificially disguised as in towns, real sentiments are discovered, and the passions play naturally and without restraint. As for example, it was only in the country I could have found out Lady J----'s particular attachment to the tune of _Appie Mac-Nab_; in the town, no doubt, she would have pretended a great liking for Voi Amante; in the town, I never would have seen Lady B---- go out armed for fear of the Turkey-cock, which is her daily practice here, and leaves room for numberless reflections: she cannot eat Turkeys when roasted or boiled; and she dreads them when alive so much, that she displays every forenoon a cudgel to them, fitted by its size to strike terror into a bull, or a butting cow. What can her keeping of Turkeys be owing to? Assuredly to vanity, which is of such an insinuating nature, that we are apt very often to meet it where we least expect it; I have seen it in an old shoe, in a dirty shirt, in a long nose, a crooked leg, and a red face. So much it seemed good for me to say upon the subject of vanity, supporting by the most irrefragable arguments, the doctrine of Solomon. We had a visit from Mr. C---- of S---- here this morning; he came in a chaise drawn by four bay horses; I am certain of the number, you may draw what inference you please from this intelligence, I give you only a simple narration of the fact. I am surprised you say nothing of my proposal of your coming here, and still more that you say nothing of your Cub. Why don't you send me a copy? We were all so much entertained with your letter to Lady B----, that I was really seized with a qualm of envy; we regard it as one of those efforts of genius, which are only produced by a fine flow of spirits, a beautiful day, and a good pen. I pray you, Boswell, note well this sheet of paper, its size is magnificent: If Lady B---- was possessed of such an extent of plain ground, she would undoubtedly throw it into a lawn, and plant it with clumps of trees, she would vary it with fish-ponds, and render it rural with flocks; here, where I am writing, might a cow feed; here might be an arbour; here, perhaps, might you recline at full length; by the edge of this stream might the Captain walk, and in this corner, might Lady B---- give orders to her shepherds. I am drawn in the most irresistible manner to conclude, by the external impulse of the cloth's being laid, and by the internal impulse of being hungry. Believe me, Boswell, to be in the most unconscionable manner, your affectionate friend, ANDREW ERSKINE. P.S.--I send you franks, which return filled with the utmost wit and humour. * * * * * LETTER XXVII. Auchinleck, May 4, 1762. For military operation[44] I have a wondrous inclination; Ev'n when a boy, with cheerful glee, The red-coats march I used to see; With joy beheld the corporals drill, The men upon the Castle-hill; And at the sound of drum and fife, Felt an unusual flow of life. Besides, my honest friend, you know I am a little of a beau. I'm sure, my friend need not be told, That Boswell's hat was edg'd with gold; And that a shining bit of lace, My brownish-colour'd suit did grace; And that mankind my hair might see, Powder'd at least two days in three. My pinchbeck buckles are admir'd By all who are with taste inspir'd. Trophies of Gallic pride appear, The crown to every Frenchman dear, And the enchanting fleur de lis, The flower of flowers you must agree; While for variety's sweet sake, And witty Charles's tale to wake, The curious artist interweaves A twisted bunch of oaken leaves. Tell me, dear Erskine, should not I My favourite path of fortune try? Our life, my friend, is very short, A little while is all we've for't; And he is blest who can beguile, With what he likes, that little while. [Footnote 44: I have omitted the first eighty lines of this poem.--ED.] My fondness for the guards must appear very strange to you, who have a rooted antipathy at the glare of scarlet. But I must inform you, that there is a city called London, for which I have as violent an affection as the most romantic lover ever had for his mistress. There a man may indeed soap his own beard, and enjoy whatever is to be had in this transitory state of things. Every agreeable whim may be freely indulged without censure. I hope, however, you will not impute my living in England, to the same cause for which Hamlet was advised to go there; because the people were all as mad as himself. I long much for another of our long conversations on a fine forenoon, after breakfast, while the sun sheds light and gladness around us. Believe me, Yours sincerely, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER XXVIII. Auchinleck, May 8, 1762. Dear ERSKINE,--I should have wondered very much, had I been told of Lady J----'s particular attachment to the tune of _Appie Mac-nab_, two months ago: but I must inform you, that a few days before I left Edinburgh, having occasion to look into the advocates' library, I there chanced to turn up an old Roman song-book, and, to my great surprise, met with the individual air of _Appie Mac-nab_, which I discovered to be part of an original Patrician cantata on the daughter of the famous Appius, set for the _Tibiæ sinistræ_. In a manuscript marginal note, it is said to have been composed by Tigellius the famous musician, whose death and character Horace takes occasion to entertain and instruct us with, in the second satire of his first Book. You see, therefore, that Lady J----'s taste for Italian music, cannot be called in question; and indeed, I think her liking _Appie Mac-nab_, is a very strong proof of it, as she certainly could not know its original. The Roman song-book, a very great curiosity, was brought from Rome some hundred years ago, by father Macdonald, an old popish priest, who left it as a legacy to the Duke of Gordon. It is probable, that some musician in the North of Scotland, has transcribed the Appian cantata from it, and giving its principal air a Scottish turn, and adapting proper words to it, has produced the vulgar ballad of _Appie Mac-nab_. Lady B----'s terror for the Turkey-cock, diverts me extremely. Did they but come to an engagement, how noble must it be! The idea makes a strong impression on my fancy. I shall certainly write something astonishing upon it. This charming weather has reconciled me to the country. It enlivens me exceedingly. I am cheerful and happy. I have been wandering by myself, all this forenoon, through the sweetest place in the world. The sunshine is mild, the breeze is gentle, my mind is peaceful. I am indulging the most agreeable reveries imaginable. I am thinking of the brilliant scenes of happiness, which I shall enjoy as an officer of the guards. How I shall be acquainted with all the grandeur of a court, and all the elegance of dress and diversions; become a favourite of ministers of state, and the adoration of ladies of quality, beauty, and fortune! How many parties of pleasure shall I have in town! How many fine jaunts to the noble seats of dukes, lords, and members of parliament in the country! I am thinking of the perfect knowledge which I shall acquire of men and manners, of the intimacies which I shall have the honour to form with the learned and ingenious in every science, and of the many amusing literary anecdotes which I shall pick up. I am thinking of making the tour of Europe, and feasting on the delicious prospects of Italy and France; of feeling all the transports of a bard at Rome, and writing noble poems on the banks of the Tiber. I am thinking of the distinguished honours which I shall receive at every foreign court, and of what infinite service I shall be to all my countrymen upon their travels. I am thinking of returning to England, of getting into the house of commons, of speaking still better than Mr. Pitt, and of being made principal secretary of state. I am thinking of having a regiment of guards, and of making a glorious stand against an invasion by the Spaniards. I am thinking how I shall marry a lady of the highest distinction, with a fortune of a hundred thousand pounds. I am thinking of my flourishing family of children; how my sons shall be men of sense and spirit, and my daughters women of beauty, and every amiable perfection. I am thinking of the prodigious respect which I shall receive, of the splendid books which will be dedicated to me, and the statues which will be erected to my immortal honour. I am thinking that my mind is too delicate, and my feelings too fine for the rough bustle of life; I am therefore thinking that I shall steal silently and unperceived through the world; that I shall pass the winter in London, much in the same way that the Spectator describes himself to have done; and in summer, shall live sometimes here at home; sometimes in such a pleasing retirement as Mrs. Row beautifully paints in her letters moral and entertaining.[45] I like that book much. I read it when I was very young, and I am persuaded, that it contributed to improve my tender imagination. I am thinking that I shall feel my frame too delicate for the British Climate. I am thinking that I shall go and live in one of the most pleasant provincial towns in the South of France, where I shall be blest with constant felicity. This is a scheme to which I could give vast praise, were I near the beginning of my letter; but as that is very far from being the case, I must reserve it for a future epistle. [Footnote 45: "Letters, Moral and Entertaining, in Prose and Verse," by Elizabeth Rowe.--ED.] I am glad to find you are so anxious to hear about the Cub at Newmarket, Love me, love my Cub. However, I can tell you nothing about him. Dodsley has not yet sent me a copy. Derrick,[46] a London author, whom you have heard me mention, has sent me his versifications of the battle of Lora, and some of the Erse fragments. If you want to see them, let me have some franks. [Footnote 46: "Pray, Sir," said Mr. Morgann to Johnson, "whether do you reckon Derrick or Smart the best poet?" Johnson at once felt himself roused; and answered, "Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea." Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Date of March 30th, 1783.--ED.] I shall be at Dumfries soon, where I hope to see my friend Johnston. We will talk much of old Scotch history, and the memory of former years will warm our hearts. We will also talk of Captain Andrew, with whom we have passed many a pleasant hour. Johnston is a very worthy fellow: I may safely say so; for I have lived in intimacy with him more years than the Egyptian famine lasted. And now, O most renowned of Captains! having fairly written myself out of pen, ink, and paper, I conclude with my usual epithet, of Your affectionate friend, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER XXIX. New-Tarbat, May 13, 1762. Dear BOSWELL,--Your first epistle being of a length which modern letters seldom attain to, surprised me very much; but at the sight of your second, consisting of such an exuberant number of sheets, I was no less amazed than if I had wakened at three o'clock in the morning, and found myself fast clasped in the arms of the empress Queen; or if I had found myself at the mouth of the river Nile, half-eaten by a crocodile; or if I had found myself ascending the fatal ladder in the Grass-market at Edinburgh, and Mr. Alexander Donaldson the hangman. To confess a truth, I imagine your funds for letter-writing are quite inexhaustible; and that the fire of your fancy, like the coal at Newcastle, will never be burnt out; indeed, I look upon you in the light of an old stocking, in which we have no sooner mended one hole, than out starts another; or I think you are like a fertile woman, who is hardly delivered of one child, before slap she is five months gone with a second. I need not tell you your letters are entertaining; I might as well acquaint King George the Third, that he is sovereign of Great Britain, or gravely disclose to my servant, that his name is William. It is superfluous to inform people of what it is impossible they should not know. You think you have a knack of story-telling, but there you must yield to me, if you hearken attentively to what I am about to disclose, you will be convinced; it is a tale, my dear Boswell, which whether we consider the turnings and windings of fortune, or the sadness of the catastrophe, is delightful and improving.--You demand of me, Sir, a faithful recital of the events which have distinguished my life. Though the remembrance of every misfortune which can depress human nature, must be painful; yet the commands of such a revered friend as James Boswell must be obeyed; and Oh, Sir! if you find any of my actions blamable, impute them to destiny, and if you find any of them commendable, impute them to my good sense. I am about fifty years of age, grief makes me look as if I was fourscore; thirty years ago I was a great deal younger; and about twenty years before that, I was just born; as I find nothing remarkable in my life, before that event, I shall date my history from that period; some omens happened at my birth: Mr. Oman at Leith was married at that time; this was thought very portentous; the very day my mother was brought to bed of me, the cat was delivered of three kittens; but the world was soon bereaved of them by death, and I had not the pleasure of passing my infancy with such amiable companions; this was my first misfortune, and no subsequent one ever touched me more nearly; delightful innocents! methinks, I still see them playing with their tails, and galloping after corks; with what a becoming gravity did they wash their faces! how melodious was their purring! From them I derived any little taste I have for music; I composed an Ode upon their death; as it was my first attempt in poetry, I write it for your perusal; you will perceive the marks of genius in the first production of MY TENDER IMAGINATION; and you will shed a tear of applause and sorrow, on the remains of those animals, so dear to the premature years of your mourning and lamenting friend. ODE ON THE DEATH OF THREE KITTENS. STROPHE. Attend, ye watchful cats, Attend the ever lamentable strain; For cruel death, most kind to rats, Has kill'd the sweetest of the kitten-train. ANTISTROPHE. How pleas'd did I survey, Your beauteous whiskers as they daily grew, I mark'd your eyes that beam'd so grey, But little thought that nine lives were too few. EPODE. It was delight to see My lovely kittens three, When after corks through all the room they flew, When oft in gamesome guise they did their tails pursue. When thro' the house, You hardly, hardly, heard a mouse; And every rat lay snug and still, And quiet as a thief in mill; But cursed death has with a blow, Laid all my hopes low, low, low, low: Had that foul fiend the least compassion known; I should not now lament my beauteous kittens gone. You have often wondered what made me such a miserable spectacle; grief for the death of my kittens, has wrought the most wonderful effects upon me; grief has drawn my teeth, pulled out my hair, hollowed my eyes, bent my back, crooked my legs, and marked my face with the small-pox; but I give over this subject, seeing it will have too great a hold of your tender imagination: I find myself too much agitated with melancholy to proceed any longer in my life to-day; the weather also is extremely bad, and a thousand mournful ideas rush into my mind; I am totally overpowered with them; I will now disburden myself to you, and set down each sad thought as it occurs. I am thinking how I will never get a clean shirt to my back; how my coat will always be out at the elbows; and how I never will get my breeches to stay up. I am thinking how I will be married to a shrew of a wife, who will beat me every evening and morning, and sometimes in the middle of the day. I am thinking what a d----d w---- she will be, and how my children will be most of them hanged, and whipped through towns, and burnt in the hand. I am thinking of what execrable poems I will write; and how I will be thrown into prison for debt; and how I will never get out again; and how nobody will pity me. I am thinking how hungry I will be; and how little I will get to eat; and how I'll long for a piece of roast-beef; and how they'll bring me a rotten turnip. And I am thinking how I will take a consumption, and waste away inch by inch; and how I'll grow very fat and unwieldy, and won't be able to stir out of my chair. And I am thinking how I'll be roasted by the Portuguese inquisition; and how I'll be impaled by the Turks; and how I'll be eaten by Cannibals; and how I'll be drowned on a voyage to the East Indies; and how I'll be robbed and murdered by a highwayman; and how I'll lose my senses; and how very mad I'll be; and how my body will be thrown out to dogs to devour; and how I'll be hanged, drawn, and quartered; and how my friend Boswell will neglect me; and how I'll be despised by the whole world; and how I will meet with ten thousand misfortunes worse than the loss of my kittens. Thus have I, in a brief manner, related a few of the calamities which, in the present disposition of my mind, appear so dreadful; I could have enlarged the catalogue, but your heart is too susceptible of pity, and I will not shock you altogether. You will doubtless remark the great inequality of our fortunes. In your last letter, you was the happiest man I was ever acquainted with; I wish it may last, and that your children may have as much merit as you imagine; I only hope you won't plan a marriage with any of mine, their dispositions will be so unlike, that it must prove unhappy. Pray send me Derrick's versifications, which though they are undoubtedly very bad, I shall be glad to see, as sometimes people take a pleasure in beholding a man hanged. And now, Boswell, I am going to end my letter, which being very short, I know will please you, as you will think you have gained a complete victory over the captain, seeing that you are several sheets a-head of me; but times may alter, and when I resume my adventures, you will find yourself sorely defeated; believe me, Yours sincerely, ANDREW ERSKINE. * * * * * LETTER XXX. New-Tarbat, May 25, 1762. Dear BOSWELL,--It has been said, that few people succeed both in poetry and prose. Homer's prose essay on the gun-powder-plot, is reckoned by all critics inferior to the Iliad; and Warburton's rhyming satire on the methodists is allowed by all to be superior to his prosaical notes on Pope's works. Let it be mine to unite the excellencies both of prose and verse in my inimitable epistles. From this day, my prose shall have a smack of verse, and my verse have a smack of prose. I'll give you a specimen of both--My servant addresses me in these words, very often-- The roll is butter'd, and the kettle boil'd, Your honour's newest coat with grease is soil'd; In your best breeches glares a mighty hole, Your wash-ball and pomatum, Sir, are stole. Your tailor, Sir, must payment have, that's plain, He call'd to-day, and said he'd call again. There's prosaic poetry; now for poetic prose--Universal genius is a wide and diffused stream that waters the country and makes it agreeable; 'tis true, it cannot receive ships of any burden, therefore it is of no solid advantage, yet is it very amusing. Gondolas and painted barges float upon its surface, the country gentleman forms it into ponds, and it is spouted out of the mouths of various statues; it strays through the finest fields, and its banks nourish the most blooming flowers. Let me sport with this stream of science, wind along the vale, and glide through the trees, foam down the mountain, and sparkle in the sunny ray; but let me avoid the deep, nor lose myself in the vast profound, and grant that I may never be pent in the bottom of a dreary cave, or be so unfortunate as to stagnate in some unwholesome marsh. Limited genius is a pump-well, very useful in all the common occurrences of life, the water drawn from it is of service to the maids in washing their aprons; it boils beef, and it scours the stairs; it is poured into the tea-kettles of the ladies, and into the punch-bowls of the gentlemen. Having thus given you, in the most clear and distinct manner, my sentiments of genius, I proceed to give you my opinion of the ancient and modern writers; a subject, you must confess, very aptly and naturally introduced. I am going to be very serious, you will trace a resemblance between me and Sir William Temple,[47] or perhaps David Hume, Esq. [Footnote 47: Temple wrote "An Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning."--ED.] A modern writer must content himself with gleaning a few thoughts here and there, and binding them together without order or regularity, that the variety may please; the ancients have reaped the full of the harvest, and killed the noblest of the game: in vain do we beat about the once plenteous fields, the dews are exhaled, no scent remains. How glorious was the fate of the early writers![48] born in the infancy of letters; their task was to reject thoughts more than to seek after them, and to select out of a number, the most shining, the most striking, and the most susceptible of ornament. The poet saw in his walks every pleasing object of nature undescribed; his heart danced with the gale, and his spirits shone with the invigorating sun, his works breathed nothing but rapture and enthusiasm. Love then spoke with its genuine voice, the breast was melted down with woe, the whole soul was dissolved into pity with its tender complaints; free from the conceits and quibbles which, since that time, have rendered the very name of it ridiculous; real passion heaved the sigh; real passion uttered the most prevailing language. Music too reigned in its full force; that soft deluding art, whose pathetic strains so gently steal into our very souls, and involve us in the sweetest confusion; or whose animating strains fire us even to madness: how has the shore of Greece echoed with the wildest sounds; the delicious warblings of the Lyre charmed and astonished every ear. The blaze of rhetoric then burst forth; the ancients sought not by false thoughts, and glittering diction, to captivate the ear, but by manly and energetic modes of expression, to rule the heart and sway the passions. [Footnote 48: "The most ancient poets are considered as the best ... whether the first writers took possession of the most striking objects for description, and the most probable occurrences for fiction, and left nothing to those that followed them but transcription of the same events, and new combinations of the same images."--"Rasselas," chapter x.--ED.] There, Boswell, there are periods for you. Did you not imagine that you was reading "The Rambler" of Mr. Samuel Johnson; or that Mr. Thomas Sheridan[49] himself was resounding the praises of the ancients, and his own art? I shall now finish this letter without the least blaze of rhetoric, and with no very manly or energetic mode of expression, assure you, that I am, Yours sincerely, ANDREW ERSKINE. [Footnote 49: Thomas Sheridan, the father of R.B. Sheridan, was about this time lecturing on Oratory. "He knows that I laugh at his oratory," Johnson once said to Boswell.--ED.] * * * * * LETTER XXXI. Auchinleck, June 1, 1762. At length, O Erskine! Lady B---- and the Turkey-cock are sung in strains sublime. I have finished an ode. Receive it with reverence.[50] It is one of the greatest productions of the human mind. Just that sort of composition which we form an awful and ravishing conception of, in those divine moments, when the soul (to use a bold metaphor) is in full blow, and soaring fancy reaches its utmost heights. Could it but be really personified--it would be like Saul of old, taller than any of the people, and were it to be guilty of a capital crime, it could not enjoy one of the greatest privileges of a British subject, to be tried by its Peers. [Footnote 50: The Ode is not worth reprinting.--ED.] I am sure that my ode is great. Mr. James Bruce the gardener, my faithful counsellor and very excellent companion, declares it is quite to his mind. He stood by me while I took my portrait of the cock, from a large one which struts upon the green. I shall be in Edinburgh in a few days; for which reason, I remain your affectionate friend, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER XXXII. New-Tarbat, June 5, 1762. Dear BOSWELL,--The first idea of our correspondence was not yours; for, many months before you addressed me, I wrote you the following letter at Fort George, where you may remember our acquaintance commenced. You'll observe that some of the stanzas[51] are parodies on Gray's Elegy in a Church-yard, I use the liberty to mark them. I stood too much in awe of you, to send it when it was written, and I am too much at my ease now, to be withheld any longer from presenting you with it. I am, Sir, With the greatest respect and esteem, Your most obedient, And most humble servant, ANDREW ERSKINE. [Footnote 51: These stanzas are nearly as bad as Boswell's Ode, and, like it, are not worth reprinting.--ED.] * * * * * LETTER XXXIII. Auchinleck, June 9, 1762. Dear ERSKINE,--At this delightful season of the year, when everything is cheerful and gay, when the groves are all rich with leaves, the gardens with flowers, and the orchards with blossoms, one would think it almost impossible to be unhappy; yet such is my hard fate at present, that instead of relishing the beautiful appearance of nature, instead of participating the universal joy, I rather look upon it with aversion, as it exhibits a strong contrast to the cloudy darkness of my mind, and so gives me a more dismal view of my own situation. Fancy, capricious fancy will allow me to see nothing but shade. How strange is it to think, that I who lately abounded in bliss, should now be the slave of black melancholy! How unaccountable does it appear to the reasoning mind that this change should be produced without any visible cause. However, since I have been seized with _the pale cast of thought_, I know not how, I comfort myself, that I shall get free of it as whimsically. You must excuse this piece of serious sententiousness; for it has relieved me; and you may look upon it as much the same with coughing before one begins to sing, or deliver anything in public, in order that the voice may be as clear as possible. The death of your kittens, my dear Erskine! affected me very much. I could wish that you would form it into a tragedy, as the story is extremely pathetic, and could not fail greatly to interest the tender passions. If you have any doubts as to the propriety of their being three in number, I beg it of you to reflect that the immortal Shakespeare has introduced three daughters into his tragedy of King Lear, which has often drawn tears from the eyes of multitudes. The same author has likewise begun his tragedy of Macbeth with three witches; and Mr. Alexander Donaldson has resolved, that his collection of original poems by Scotch gentlemen, shall consist of three volumes, and no more. I don't know, indeed, but your affecting tale might better suit the intention of an opera, especially when we consider the musical genius of the feline race: were a sufficient number of these animals put under the tuition of proper masters, nobody can tell what an astonishing chorus might be produced. If this proposal shall be embraced, I make no doubt of its being the wonder of all Europe, and I remain, Yours, as usual, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER XXXIV. New-Tarbat, June 14, 1762. AND are YOU gloomy! oh James Boswell! has your flow of spirits evaporated, and left nothing but the black dregs of melancholy behind? has the smile of cheerfulness left your countenance? and is the laugh of gaiety no more? oh woeful condition! oh wretched friend! but in this situation you are dear to me; for lately my disposition was exactly similar to yours. No conversation pleased me; no books could fix my attention; I could write no letters, and I despised my own poems. Tell me how you was affected; could you speak any? could you fix your thoughts upon anything but the dreary way you was in? and would not the sight of me have made you very miserable? I have lately had the epidemical distemper; I don't mean poverty, but that cold which they call the influenza, and which made its first appearance in London;[52] whether it came to Scotland in the wagon, or travelled with a companion in a post-chaise, is quite uncertain. [Footnote 52: "The time is wonderfully sickly; nothing but sore-throats, colds, and fevers." Horace Walpole, in a letter to George Montagu, April 29, 1762.--ED.] Derrick's versifications are infamously bad; what think you of the Reviewers commending such an execrable performance? I have a fancy to write an ironical criticism upon it, and praise all the worst lines, which you shall send to Derrick, as the real sentiments of a gentleman of your acquaintance on reading his work. For want of something else to entertain you, I begin my criticism immediately.--To versify poetical prose has been found a very difficult task. Dr. Young and Mr. Langhorne, in their paraphrases upon the Bible (which Lord Bolingbroke tells us, is an excellent book) have succeeded but indifferently: I therefore took up Mr. Samuel Derrick's versifications from Fingal, with little expectation of being entertained; but let no man judge of a book till at least he reads the title page; for lo! Mr. Samuel Derrick has adorned his with a very apt and uncommon quotation, from a good old poet called Virgil. I am much pleased with the candour so conspicuous in the short advertisement to the public, in which Mr. Derrick seems very willing to run snacks in reputation with Mr. MacPherson, which will greatly rejoice that gentleman, who cannot justly boast of so extensive a fame as Mr. Samuel Derrick. The dedication is very elegant, though, I am apt to think, the author has neither praised Lord Pomfret nor himself enough; two worthy people, who, in my opinion, deserve it. But at last, we come to the poems themselves: and here I might indulge myself in warm and indiscriminate applause; but let it be my ambition to trace Mr. Derrick step by step through his wonderful work; let me pry both into the kitchen and dining-room of his genius, to use the comparison of the great Mr. Boyle. The first lines, or the exordium of the battle of Lora, are calmly sublime, and refined with simplicity. In the eighth line, our author gives the epithet of posting to the wind, which is very beautiful: however, to make it natural, it ought to be applied, in poetical justice, to that wind which wafts a packet-boat. I had almost forgot, the sixth line says, "the voice of songs, a tuneful voice I hear." Now, I should be glad to know, whether these same songs be a man or a woman. Lines 23 and 24. "In secret round they glanc'd their kindled eyes, Their indignation spoke in bursting sighs." It seems to me improbable, that a pair of kindled eyes could glance in secret; and I cannot think that sighs are the language of indignation. Lines 57, 58, 59. "So on the settled sea blue mists arise, In vapory volumes darkening to the skies, They glitter in the sun." These mists that glitter and are dark at the same time, are very extraordinary, and the contrast is lovely and new. Line 67th begins--"His post is terror."--This is a post, that, I believe, none of our members of Parliament would accept. Lines 175, 176, "An hundred steeds he gives that own the rein, Never a swifter race devour'd the plain." Devoured the plain! if this is not sublime, then am I no critic; however, its lucky for the landed interest, that the breed of those horses is lost; they might do very well, I confess, in the Highlands of Scotland; but a dozen of them turned loose near Salisbury would be inconceivably hurtful. I'm tired of this stuff; if you think it worth the while you may end it and send it to Derrick; but let your part be better than mine, or it won't do. "Grief for thy loss drank all my vitals dry"--I laughed heartily at that line. In this letter I have bestowed my dulness[53] freely upon you; you have had my wit, and you must take my stupidity into the bargain; as when we go to the market, we purchase bones as well as beef; and when we marry an heiress, we are obliged to take the woman as well as the money; and when we buy Donaldson's collection, we pay as dear for the poems of Mr. Lauchlan MacPherson, as we do for those written by the incomparable Captain Andrew. [Footnote 53: "If I were as tedious as a king, I could find it in my heart to bestow it all of your worship."--"Much Ado about Nothing." Act iii., scene 5.--ED.] You are in Edinburgh, I imagine, by this time, if the information of Mr. Alexander Donaldson may be depended upon. I shall be in town one night soon on my way to Kelly, for the H----s of D---- threaten an invasion upon this peaceful abode. Farewell. Yours sincerely, ANDREW ERSKINE. * * * * * LETTER XXXV. Edinburgh, June 19, 1762. Dear ERSKINE,--You have upon many occasions made rather too free with my person, upon which I have often told you that I principally value myself. I feel a strong inclination to retaliate. I have great opportunity, and I will not resist it. Your figure, Erskine, is amazingly uncouth. The length of your body bears no manner of proportion to its breadth, and far less does its breadth bear to its length. If we consider you one way, you are the tallest, and if we consider you another way, you are the thickest man alive. The crookedness of your back is terrible; but it is nothing in comparison of the frightful distortions of your countenance. What monsters have you been the cause of bringing into the world! not only the wives of sergeants and corporals of the 71st regiment, but the unhappy women in every town where you was quartered, by looking at you have conceived in horror. Natural defects should be spared; but I must not omit the large holes in your ears, and the deep marks of the iron on your hands. I hope you will allow these to be artificial. Nature nails no man's ears to the pillory. Nature burns no man in the hand. As I have a very sincere friendship for you, I cannot help giving you my best advice with regard to your future schemes of life. I would beseech you to lay aside all your chimerical projects, which have made you so absurd. You know very well, when you went upon the stage at Kingston in Jamaica, how shamefully you exposed yourself, and what disgrace and vexation you brought upon all your friends. You must remember what sort of treatment you met with, when you went and offered yourself to be one of the fathers of the inquisition at Macerata, in the room of Mr. Archibald Bower;[54] a project which could enter into the head of no man who was not utterly destitute of common sense. [Footnote 54: The author of the "History of the Popes." He had been a professor in the University of Macerata, and a Counsellor of the Inquisition. He became a Protestant, and died in England.--ED.] You tell me, that your intention at present is, to take orders in the Church of England; and you hope I will approve of your plan: but I must tell you honestly, that this is a most ridiculous hair-brained conceit. Before you can be qualified for the smallest living, you must study nine years at Oxford; you must eat at a moderate computation, threescore of fat beeves, and upwards of two hundred sheep; you must consume a thousand stone of bread, and swallow ninety hogsheads of porter. You flatter yourself with being highly promoted, because you are an Earl's brother, and a man of genius. But, my dear friend, I beg it of you to consider, how little these advantages have already availed you. The army was as good a scene for you to rise in as the church can be; and yet you are only a lieutenant in a very young regiment. I seriously think, that your most rational scheme should be, to turn inn-keeper upon some of the great roads: you might have an elegant sign painted of Apollo and the Muses, and entertainment for men and horses, by THE HONOURABLE ANDREW ERSKINE, would be something very unusual, and could not fail to bring numbers of people to your house. You would by this means have a life of most pleasing indolence, and would never want a variety of company, as you would constantly dine and sup with your guests. Men of fashion would be glad to receive you as their equal; and men of no fashion would be proud to sit at table with one who had any pretension to nobility. I hope the honest concern which I shew for your real welfare, will convince you how much I am, My dear Sir, Your most affectionate friend, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER XXXVI. Kelly, July 5, 1762. Dear BOSWELL,--Vanity has, in all former ages, been reckoned the characteristic of poets; in our time, I think they are more particularly distinguished by modesty; I have carefully perused their works, and I have never once found them throwing out either thought, sentiment, or reflection of their own; convincing proof of their humility; they seem all to allow that the ancients, and some few of the earlier moderns, were much better writers than themselves; therefore they beg, borrow, and steal from them, without the smallest mercy or hesitation. In some things, however, they are quite original; their margins and prices are larger than any ever known before; and they advertise their pieces much oftener in the newspapers than any of their predecessors. You compliment me highly on my elegies, and tell me that I have even dared to be original now and then; and you ask me very seriously, how I come to be so well acquainted with the tender passion of love.--Ah, Sir, how deceitful are appearances! under a forbidding aspect and uncouth form, I conceal the soul of an Oroondates, a soul that thrills with the most sensible emotions at the sight of beauty. Love easily finds access where the mind is naturally inclined to melancholy; we foster the pleasing delusion, it grows up with our frame, and becomes a part of our being; long have I laboured under the influence of that passion; long vented my grief in unavailing sighs. Besides, your thin meagre man is always the most violent lover; a thousand delusions enter his paper-skull, which the man of guts never dreams of. In vain does Cupid shoot his arrows at the plump existence, who is entrenched in a solid wall of fat: they are buried like shrimps in melted butter; as eggs are preserved by mutton-tallow, from rottenness and putrefaction, so he, by his grease, is preserved from love. Pleased with his pipe, he sits and smokes in his elbow-chair; totally unknown to him is the ardent passion that actuates the sentimental soul: alas! unhappy man! he never indulged in the pleasing reverie which inspires the spindle-shanked lover, as he strays through nodding forest by gliding stream; if he marries, he chooses a companion fat as himself; they lie together, and most musical is their snore, they melt like two pounds of butter in one plate in a sunshiny-day. Pray, Boswell, remember me kindly to honest Johnston. Let me know if his trees are growing well, at his paternal estate of Grange; if he is as fond of Melvil's Memoirs[55] as he used to be; and if he continues to stretch himself in the sun upon the mountains near Edinburgh. I ever am, Yours most affectionately, ANDREW ERSKINE. [Footnote 55: Sir James Melville. Born 1535, died 1607. His "Memoirs" were published in 1683.--ED.] * * * * * LETTER XXXVII. Kelly, July 6, 1762. Dear BOSWELL,--Nothing happened during my journey; I arrived in Aberdeen on Thursday last; the town is really neater, cleaner, and better than you would imagine; but the country around is dismal; long gloomy moors, and the extended ocean, are the only prospects that present themselves; the whole region seems as if made in direct opposition to descriptive poetry. You meet here with none of the lengthened meads, sunny vales and dashing streams, that brighten in the raptured poet's eye; however, as I believe you have been here, I shall trouble you with no farther descriptions. Never was parting more tender than that of mine with George Robertson the postilion, and the Kelly chaise at Dundee water-side; we formed as dolorous a trio as then existed upon the face of this valley of tears. Oh George! Oh! Erskine! were the cries that echoed across the waves, and along the mountains. Tears trickled down the rugged boatman's face, An unpaid freight he thought no harder case; The seals no longer sported in the sea, While ev'ry bell rung mournful in Dundee, Huge ploughmen wept, and stranger still, 'tis said, So strong is sympathy, that asses bray'd. Farewell, lovely George, I roared out, and oh! if you should happen to be dry, for such is the nature of sorrow, take this shilling, and spend it in the sugared ale, or the wind-expelling dram: with sweet reluctance he put forth his milk-white hand, cold with clammy sweat, and with a faltering voice, feebly thanked me. Oh! I shall never forget my emotions when he drove from me, and the chaise lessened in my view; now it whirled sublime along the mountain's edge; now, I scarcely saw the head of George nodding in the vale. Thus, on the summit of a craggy cliff, which high overlooks the resounding waves, Jean, Susan, or Nell, sees in a boat her lovely sailor, who has been torn from her arms by a cruel press-gang; now it climbs the highest seas; now it is buried between two billows, and vanishes from her sight. Weep not, sweet maid, he shall return loaded with honours; a gold watch shall grace each fob, a pair of silver buckles shall shine resplendent upon his shoes, and a silk handkerchief shall be tied around his neck, which soon shall cover thy snowy bosom. When the chaise was totally lost, and my breast was distracted with a thousand different passions; all of a sudden I broke out into the following soliloquy.--Surely, surely mortal man is a chaise: now trailing through the heavy sand of indolence, anon jolted to death upon the rough road of discontent; and shortly after sunk in the deep rut of low spirits; now galloping on the post-road of expectation, and immediately after, trotting on the stony one of disappointment; but the days of our driving soon cease, our shafts break, our leather rots, and we tumble into a hole. Adieu, yours, ANDREW ERSKINE. * * * * * LETTER XXXVIII. Kelly, July 7, 1762. Dear BOSWELL,--I imagined, that by ceasing to write to you for some time, I should be able to lay up a stock of materials, enough to astonish you, and that, like a river damm'd up, when let loose, I should flow on with unusual rapidity; or like a man, who has not beat his wife for a fortnight, I should cudgel you with my wit for hours together; but I find the contrary of all this is the case; I resemble a person long absent from his native country, of which he has formed a thousand endearing ideas, and to which he at last returns; but alas! he beholds with sorrowful eyes, everything changed for the worse; the town where he was born, which used to have two snows[56] and three sloops trading to all parts of the known world, is not now master of two fishing-boats; the steeple of the church, where he used to sleep in his youth, is rent with lightning; and the girl on whom he had placed his early affections, has had three bastard children, and is just going to be delivered of a fourth; or I resemble a man who has had a fine waistcoat lying long in the very bottom of a chest, which he is determined shall be put on at the hunter's ball; but woe's me, the lace is tarnished, and the moths have devoured it in a melancholy manner; these few similies may serve to shew, that this letter has little chance of being a good one; yet they don't make the affair certain. Prince Ferdinand beat the French at Minden; Sheridan, in his lectures, sometimes spoke sense; and John Home wrote one good play.[57] I have read Lord Kames's Elements,[58] and agree very heartily with the opinion of the Critical Reviewers; however, I could often have wished, that his Lordship had been less obscure, or that I had had more penetration; he praises the Mourning Bride excessively, which, nevertheless, I can not help thinking a very indifferent play; the plot wild and improbable, and the language infinitely too high and swelling.[59] It is curious to see the opinions of the Reviewers concerning you and me; they take you for a poor distressed gentleman, writing for bread, and me for a very impudent Irishman; whereas you are heir to a thousand a year, and I am one of the most bashful Scotchmen that ever appeared! I confess, indeed, my bashfulness does not appear in my works, for them I print in the most impudent manner; being exceeded in that respect by nobody but James Boswell, Esq. Yours, &c., ANDREW ERSKINE. [Footnote 56: A snow (Low-German, snau; High-German, schnau) is a small vessel with beaked or snout-like bows, according to Wedgewood. But more probably it takes its name from the triangular shape of its sails.--Schnauzegel, a trysail.--ED.] [Footnote 57: "As we sat over our tea, Mr. Home's tragedy of Douglas was mentioned. I put Dr. Johnson in mind that once, in a coffee-house at Oxford, he called to old Mr. Sheridan, 'how came you, Sir, to give Home a gold medal for writing that foolish play?'" Boswell's "Tour to the Hebrides." Date of October 26, 1773.--ED.] [Footnote 58: "The Elements of Criticism," by Henry Home, Lord Kames. "Sir," said Johnson, "this book is a pretty essay and deserves to be held in some estimation though much of it is chimerical!" Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Date of May 16, 1763.--ED.] [Footnote 59: "In this play there is more bustle than sentiment; the plot is busy and intricate, and the events take hold on the attention; but, except a very few passages, we are rather amused with noise, and perplexed with stratagem, than entertained with any true delineation of natural characters."--Johnson's "Lives of the Poets."--ED.] * * * * * LETTER XXXIX. Kames, October 19, 1762. Dear ERSKINE,--In my own name, and in the name of Lord Kames, I desire to see you here immediately. I have been reading the "Elements of Criticism." You and the Reviewers have pronounced enough of serious panegyric on that book. In my opinion, it has the good properties of all the four elements. It has the solidity of earth, the pureness of air, the glow of fire, and the clearness of water. The language is excellent, and sometimes rises to so noble a pitch, that I exclaim, in imitation of Zanga in the Revenge,[60] "I like this roaring of the Elements." [Footnote 60: "The Revenge," a tragedy, by Edward Young, author of "Night Thoughts."--ED.] If this does not bring you, nothing will; and so, Sir, I continue, Yours as usual, JAMES BOSWELL. * * * * * LETTER XL. Kelly, October 28, 1762. Dear BOSWELL,--How shall I begin? what species of apology shall I make? the truth is, I really could not write, my spirits have been depressed so unaccountably. I have had whole mountains of lead pressing me down: you would have thought that five Dutchmen had been riding on my back, ever since I saw you; or that I had been covered with ten thousand folios of controversial divinity; you would have imagined that I was crammed in the most dense part of a plumb-pudding, or steeped in a hogshead of thick English Port. Heavens! is it possible, that a man of some fame for joking, possessed of no unlaughable talent in punning, and endued with no contemptible degree of liveliness in letter-writing, should all of a sudden have become more impenetrably stupid than a Hottentot legislator, or a moderator of the general assembly of the Kirk of Scotland. By that smile which enlivens your black countenance, like a farthing candle in a dark cellar, I perceive I am pardoned; indeed I expected no less; for, I believe, if a sword was to run you through the body, or a rope was to hang you, you would forget and forgive: you are at Kames just now, very happy, I suppose; your letter seems to come from a man in excellent spirits; I am very unequal at present to the task of writing an answer to it, but I was resolved to delay no longer, lest you should think I neglected you wilfully; a thought, I'm sure, you never shall have occasion to entertain of me, though the mist of dulness should for ever obscure and envelope my fancy and imagination. I cannot think of coming to Kames, yet I am sufficiently thankful for the invitation; my lowness would have a very bad effect in a cheerful society; it would be like a dead march in the midst of a hornpipe, or a mournful elegy in a collection of epigrams. Farewell. Yours, &c., ANDREW ERSKINE. * * * * * LETTER XLI. Parliament-Close, Nov. 10, 1762. Dear ERSKINE,--All I have now to say, is to inform you, that I shall set out for London on Monday next, and to beg that you may not leave Edinburgh before that time. My letters have often been carried to you over rising mountains and rolling seas. This pursues a simpler track, and under the tuition of a cadie,[61] is transmitted from the Parliament-Close to the Canongate. Thus it is with human affairs; all is fluctuating, all is changing. Believe me, Yours, &c. JAMES BOSWELL. [Footnote 61: "There is at Edinburgh a society or corporation of errand-boys, called 'cawdies,' who ply in the streets at night with paper lanthorns, and are very serviceable in carrying messages."--"Humphry Clinker," vol. ii., p. 240.--ED.] * * * * * LETTER XLII. London, Nov. 20, 1762. Dear ERSKINE,--What sort of a letter shall I now write to you? Shall I cram it from top to bottom with tables of compound interest? with anecdotes of Queen Anne's wars? with excerpts from Robertson's history? or with long stories translated from Olaus Wormius?[62] [Footnote 62: A distinguished Danish historian and antiquary, "Known in the history of anatomy by the bones of the skull named after him _ossa Wormiana_."--ED.] To pass four-and-twenty hours agreeably was still my favourite plan. I think at present that the mere contemplation of this amazing bustle of existence, is enough to make my four-and-twenty go merrily round. I went last night to Covent-Garden; and saw Woodward play Captain Bobadil;[63] he is a very lively performer; but a little extravagant: I was too late for getting into Drury-Lane, where Garrick played King Lear. That inimitable actor is in as full glory as ever; like genuine wine, he improves by age, and possesses the steady and continued admiration even of the inconstant English.[64] [Footnote 63: In Ben Jonson's "Every Man in his Humour." This was thought to be Woodward's masterpiece.--ED.] [Footnote 64: This is scarcely correct. Garrick's popularity was, at this time, falling off, and his theatre did not fill. "The profits of the following season," says Davies, "fell very short to those of the preceding years." At the close of the season he went abroad, and was away for nearly two years. In Rogers's "Table Talk," it is recorded--"Before his going abroad, Garrick's attraction had much decreased; Sir W.W. Pepys said that the pit was often almost empty. But, on his return to England, people were mad about seeing him." His popularity did not wane a second time.--ED.] I don't know what to say to you about myself: if I can get into the Guards, it will please me much; if not, I can't help it. Perhaps you may hear of my turning Templar, and perhaps ranger of some of his Majesty's parks. It is not impossible but I may catch a little true poetic inspiration, and have my works splendidly printed at Strawberry-hill, under the benign influence of the Honourable Horace Walpole.[65] You and I, Erskine, are, to be sure, somewhat vain. We have some reason too. The Reviewers gave great applause to your Odes to Indolence and Impudence; and they called my poems "agreeable light pieces," which was the very character I wished for. Had they said less, I should not have been satisfied; and had they said more, I should have thought it a burlesque. [Footnote 65: Walpole always expressed the greatest contempt for Boswell. In one of his letters he says that "he is the ape of most of Johnson's faults, without a grain of his sense." In another letter he writes about "a jackanapes who has lately made a noise here, one Boswell, by anecdotes of Dr. Johnson." Improbable though it was that Boswell should catch a little true poetic inspiration, it was still more improbable that he should ever have a single one of his works printed at The Strawberry Press.--ED.] What a fine animated prospect of life now spreads before me! Be assured, that my genius will be highly improved, and please yourself with the hopes of receiving letters still more entertaining. I ever am, Your affectionate friend, JAMES BOSWELL. THE JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO CORSICA. INTRODUCTION. The following sketch of the Corsican War of Independence may, perhaps, enable the reader better to follow Boswell in his narrative, and in his description of Paoli's character. I have founded it chiefly on Boswell's own account, though I have, at the same time consulted other authorities. As an historical writer, in theory at least, he would scarcely satisfy the exact school of historians that has sprung up since his day. "I confess I am not," he says in his second chapter, "for humouring an inordinate avidity for positive evidence." He is speaking, however, about the origin of nations, and not about the wars of Corsica, which he describes at some length. From about the beginning of the fourteenth century Corsica had belonged to the Republic of Genoa. The islanders had proved restive under the yoke of their hard masters, and more than once had risen in revolt. The Government of the Republic was, indeed, the worst of despotisms. A succession of infamous Governors--men who came to Corsica poor, and, after their two years of office, returned to Genoa rich--had cruelly oppressed the people. By their ill-gotten wealth, and by their interest in the Senate, they were able on their return to secure themselves against any inquiry into their conduct. The foreign trade of the islanders was almost ruined by a law which appointed Genoa as the sole port to which their products could be exported. The Corsicans, like many other mountaineers, had always been too much given up to private feuds. But it was charged against their Genoese masters, that, in their dread of union among their subjects, they themselves fomented dissentions. It was asserted in a petition presented to the King of France in 1738, that, under the last sixteen Governors, no less than 26,000 Corsicans had died by the hands of the assassin. In the legal proceedings that followed on these deeds of bloodshed, the Genoese judges found their profit. Condemnation was often followed by confiscation of the criminal's estates; acquittal had often been preceded by a heavy bribe to the judge. Multitudes were condemned to the galleys on frivolous charges in the hope that they would purchase their freedom at a high price. The law was even worse than the judges. A man could be condemned to the galleys or to death on secret information, without being once confronted with his accusers, without undergoing any examination, without the observance of any formality of any kind in the sentence that was passed on him. The judge could either acquit the greatest criminal, or condemn a man of stainless character "_ex informata conscientia_, on the information of his own conscience, of which he was not obliged to give any account." He could at any time stop the course of justice, "by saying '_Non procedatur_, let there be no process;' which could easily be cloaked under the pretence of some defect in point of form." When this atrocious law was at last abolished, Montesquieu wrote, "On a vu souvent des peuples demander des priviléges; ici le souverain accorde le droit de toutes les nations." No wonder that Horace Walpole exclaimed more than twenty years before Boswell's book was published, "I hate the Genoese; they make a commonwealth the most devilish of all tyrannies!" In 1729 the people rose once more against their rulers. It was the case of Wat Tyler over again. A tax-gatherer demanded a small sum--it was but about fivepence--of a poor old woman. Small as it was, she had not wherewithal to pay. He abused her, and seized some of her furniture. She raised an outcry. Her neighbours came flocking in and took her part. The tax-gatherer used threats, and was answered with a volley of stones. Troops were sent to support him in the execution of his office, and the people, in their turn, flew to their weapons. The revolt spread, and soon the whole island was in arms. The Genoese, as vassals of the Empire, sought the aid of their sovereign lord, the Emperor Charles the Sixth, who sent a strong body of troops to the island. The Corsicans were unable to resist, and "laid down their arms, upon condition that a treaty should be made between them and the Genoese, having for guarantee the Emperor." Hostages were sent by the islanders, to whom the Republic was inclined to show but scant respect. In fact, the Emperor's consent to their execution had been almost obtained, when the Prince of Wirtemberg, the commander of the imperial forces in Corsica, sent an express to Vienna, "with a very strong letter, representing how much the honour of Cæsar would suffer, should he consent to the death of those who had surrendered themselves upon the faith of his sacred protection." The great Prince Eugene also spoke out, and for this time, Cæsar's honour--at all events, all that was left of it--was saved. The suspension of hostilities was but short; for neither was the cruelty of the Genoese, nor the hatred of the Corsicans easily confined within the limits of a treaty. "There is not," writes Boswell, "a Corsican child who can procure a little gun-powder, but he immediately sets fire to it, huzzas at the explosion, and, as if he had blown up the enemy, calls out, 'Ecco i Genovesi; there go the Genoese!'" In 1734, the whole island once more was in the flames of an insurrection. Giafferi and Giacinto Paoli, the father of the famous Pascal Paoli, were chosen as leaders. The Genoese hired Swiss mercenaries. They thought that against soldiers, brought up amidst the Alps, as these had been, the mountains of Corsica would provide no shelter for freedom. But the Swiss "soon saw that they had made a bad bargain, and that they gave the Genoese too much blood for their money." When at Lucerne we gaze at the noble monument set up by Switzerland in memory of her sons who were massacred in Paris, it is well at times to remember how the Swiss lion was at the hire of the very jackals of the world. Genoa next published an indemnity to all her assassins and outlaws, on condition that they should fight for the Republic, in Corsica. "The robbers and assassins of Genoa," writes Boswell, "are no inconsiderable proportion of her people. These wretches flocked together from all quarters, and were formed into twelve companies." The Corsican chiefs called a general assembly, in which "On donna la Corse à la Vierge Marie, qui ne parut pas accepter cette couronne."[66] They were not, however, to be left long without a king, for the following year one of the strangest adventurers whom the world has ever seen made a bid for the crown. He promised the islanders the support of the great powers, and, with their aid, he undertook, if he were made king, to clear Corsica of her enemies. Men whose fortunes are well-nigh desperate, are of easy faith, and the conditions of this poor German Baron were accepted. [Footnote 66: Voltaire, "Précis du Siècle de Louis XV.," chapter xl.] His name was Theodore. He was Baron Neuhof, in the county of La Marc, in Westphalia. Horace Walpole, who had seen him, describes him as "a comely, middle-sized man, very reserved, and affecting much dignity." Boswell says that "he was a man of abilities and address." He had served in the French army, and, later on, had travelled through Spain, Italy, England, and Holland, ever in search of some new adventure. He had passed over to Tunis, and, under pretence of conquering Corsica for that power, had obtained a supply of money and arms. In a ship of ten guns furnished by the Bey, but carrying the English flag, which Theodore had the impudence to raise, he sailed to Leghorn. There he sold the ship, and despatched his offers to the Corsican leaders. He quickly passed over to the island. This was in the spring of 1736. "He was a man of a very stately appearance, and the Turkish dress which he wore, added to the dignity of his mien.... He had his guards, and his officers of state. He conferred titles of honour, and he struck money, both of silver and copper. There was such a curiosity over all Europe to have King Theodore's coins, that his silver coins were sold at four zechins each; and when the genuine ones were exhausted, imitations of them were made at Naples, and, like the imitations of antiques, were bought up at a high price, and carefully preserved in the cabinets of the virtuosi." He boasted of the immense treasures he had brought with him, and, as a proof, he scattered among the people fifty sequins in small coins of a debased or worn out currency. "Il donna des souliers de bon cuir, magnificence ignorée en Corse." He blockaded the seaport towns that were in the occupation of the Genoese. "He used to be sometimes at one siege, sometimes at another, standing with a telescope in his hand, as if he spied the assistance which he said he expected" from his allies, the other monarchs of Europe. Couriers, who had been despatched by himself, were constantly arriving from Leghorn, bringing him despatches, as he pretended, from the great powers. The Genoese set a price on his head. He replied in a manifesto, with all the calmness and dignity of an injured monarch. At the end of eight months, he "perceived that the people began to cool in their affections towards him, and he therefore wisely determined to leave them for a little, and try his fortune again upon the continent." He went to Amsterdam, where he was thrown into prison for debt. But even in prison he made fresh dupes. He induced some merchants, particularly Jews, to pay his debts, and to furnish him with a ship, arms, and provisions. He undertook in return, that they, and they alone, should carry on the whole foreign trade of Corsica. When he reached the island he did not venture to land; but contented himself with disembarking his stores, and with putting to death the supercargo, "that he might not have any trouble from demands being made upon him." In the end he retired to London. "I believe I told you that King Theodore is here," wrote Horace Walpole in 1749, to Sir Horace Mann, our Envoy at Florence. "I am to drink coffee with him to-morrow at Lady Schaub's." The rest of the story of this adventurer is so strange that, though it scarcely bears on Corsica, I shall venture to continue it. In the summer of the next year Walpole writes to his friend, "I believe I told you that one of your sovereigns, and an intimate friend of yours, King Theodore, is in the King's Bench prison." The unfortunate monarch languished there for some years. Walpole, with a kindliness which was natural to him, raised a subscription for his majesty. He advocated his cause in a paper in "The World," with the motto _Date obolum Belisario_. But he wrote to his former correspondent, "His majesty's character is so bad, that it only raised fifty pounds; and though that was so much above his desert, it was so much below his expectation, that he sent a solicitor to threaten the printer with a prosecution for having taken so much liberty with his name--take notice, too, that he had accepted the money! Dodsley, you may believe, laughed at the lawyer; but that does not lessen the dirty knavery.... I have done with countenancing kings." After he had remained in prison more than six years, "he took the benefit of the Act of Insolvency, and went to the Old Bailey for that purpose: in order to it, the person applying gives up all his effects to his creditors: his Majesty was asked what effects he had? He replied 'Nothing but the kingdom of Corsica;' and it was actually registered for the benefit of his creditors. As soon as Theodore was at liberty, he took a chair and went to the Portuguese Minister, but did not find him at home; not having sixpence to pay, he prevailed on the chairmen to carry him to a tailor he knew in Soho, whom he prevailed upon to harbour him; but he fell sick the next day, and died in three more." Walpole set up a stone in St. Ann's Churchyard, Soho, in memory of his majesty, with the following inscription:-- Near this place is interred Theodore, King of Corsica; Who died in this parish, Dec. 11, 1756, Immediately after leaving the King's Bench Prison, By the benefit of the Act of Insolvency: In consequence of which, he registered His Kingdom of Corsica For the use of his Creditors. The Grave, great teacher, to a level brings, Heroes and beggars, galley-slaves and kings. But Theodore this moral learn'd, ere dead; Fate pour'd its lessons on his living head, Bestow'd a kingdom and denied him bread. Disappointed though they were in their king, the Corsicans nevertheless carried on the war with spirit. They would, no doubt, have soon freed the whole island, had not the French come to the help of their oppressors. It was in vain that the islanders sent a memorial to the King of France. "If," said their spokesman to Louis XV., "your sovereign commands force us to yield to Genoa, well then, let us drink this bitter cup to the health of the most Christian king, and die." The king and the emperor acting together drew up articles of peace which seemed fair enough; but, as a preliminary, the Corsicans were to be disarmed. To this they refused to yield. Their leaders "published a spirited manifesto to their countrymen, concluding it with the noble sentiment of Judas Maccabeus: 'Melius est mori in bello quam videre mala gentis nostrae. It is better for us to die in battle than to behold the calamities of our people.'" The French dispatched an expedition to the assistance of the Genoese which utterly failed. The following year (1739) a more formidable expedition was sent under an able commander, the Marquis de Maillebois. He divided his forces into two bodies. Marching through the heart of the country each army carried devastation in its path. "He cut down the standing corn," writes Boswell, "the vines, the olives, set fire to the villages, and spread terror and desolation in every quarter. He hanged numbers of monks and others who were keenest in the revolt, and at the same time published, wherever he went, his terms of capitulation." In a few weeks, all but the wildest parts of the island were reduced. By the end of the next year there was not a single patriot left in arms. In 1741 broke out the war of the Austrian Succession, and the French troops, which were needed elsewhere, were recalled. Once more the island rose; even young boys took the field. The Genoese were driven into the fortified towns. The Corsican leader Gaffori was besieging the Castle of Corte, when the defenders, making a sudden sally, seized his infant son, whom his nurse had thoughtlessly carried too near the walls. "The General," says Boswell, in language which strikes us as most odd, though, to the men of his time, it sounded perhaps natural enough, "showed a decent concern at this unhappy accident, which struck a damp into the whole army. The Genoese," he goes on to say, "thought they could have Gaffori upon their own terms, since they were possessed of so dear a pledge. When he advanced to make some cannon play, they held up his son, directly over that part of the wall against which his artillery was levelled. The Corsicans stopped, and began to draw back; but Gaffori, with the resolution of a Roman, stood at their head, and ordered them to continue the fire." The child escaped and lived to tell Boswell this curious story. In 1745, England "not, as if from herself, but as complying with the request of her ally, the king of Sardinia," sent a squadron of ships to the assistance of the Corsicans. They came before Bastia on November 18th--three days, as it is worth while noticing, after the town of Carlisle had surrendered to the forces of the Young Pretender. "There was but little wind blowing, and the men of war had to be towed up by the long boats. The fortress of Bastia let fly first, and made a terrible fire, particularly against the commodore's ship, whose flag was beat down three times, and her main and mizen masts broke. The Commodore being exasperated immediately ordered the Castle to be cannonaded and bombarded, which was continued near two hours with extraordinary fury, when part of the wall was seen to tumble down."[67] The place surrendered in a few days to the Corsicans. In the following year the patriots sent envoys to the English ambassador at Turin with proposals that Corsica should put herself entirely under the protection of Great Britain. No definite answer was given. In 1748 some English troops were landed in the island, but on the conclusion of the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle they were withdrawn, and the Corsicans and Genoese were again left to fight out their own battles. [Footnote 67: "The Gentleman's Magazine," vol. xv., p. 628.] Five years later (1753) Gaffori, who had long held the office of sole general of the island, was carried off by assassination. "The murderers," says Boswell, "were set on by the Republic. At least, it is a fact that some of these wretches have still a miserable pension to support them, in the territory of Genoa." His place was filled by Pascal Paoli, the son of the old Corsican leader, who ever since the French invasion had lived with his boy in retirement at Naples. When the young man was sent for by his countrymen, his old father, "hoary and gray with years, fell on his neck and kissed him, gave him his blessing, and with a broken feeble voice, encouraged him in the undertaking on which he was entering: 'My son,' said he, 'I may, possibly, never see you more; but in my mind I shall ever be present with you. Your design is a great and a noble one; and I doubt not, but God will bless you in it.'" Paoli's task was full of difficulties. In "the affairs of Corsica, he found the utmost disorder and confusion. There was no subordination, no discipline, no money, hardly any arms and ammunition; and, what was worse than all, little union among the people. He immediately began to remedy these defects. His persuasion and example had wonderful force. In a short time he drove the Genoese to the remotest corners of the island.... He, in a manner, new-modelled the government upon the soundest principles of democratical rule, which was always his favourite idea." He carried a law by which assassination was made capital on whatever pretence it had been committed. He set about establishing schools in every village, and he founded a University at Corte. Boswell writing to Temple in 1767 says, "I have received an elegant letter from the University of Corte, and also an extract of an oration pronounced this year at the opening of the University, in which oration I am celebrated in a manner which does me the greatest honour." But the jealousy of France was again excited, and again she sent troops to the island. This was in 1764, nine years after Paoli had received the supreme command. Rousseau, full of indignation at this monstrous proceeding, thus expressed himself in a letter to a friend, "Il faut avouer que vos François, sont un peuple bien servile, bien vendu à la tyrannie, bien cruel, et bien acharné sur les malheureux. S'ils savoient un homme libre à l'autre bout du monde, je crois qu'ils iroient pour le seul plaisir de l'exterminer. It must be owned that your countrymen, the French, are a very servile nation, wholly sold to tyranny, exceedingly cruel and relentless in persecuting the unhappy. If they knew of a free man at the other end of the world I believe they would go thither for the mere pleasure of extirpating him." The French did not act on the offensive. They merely garrisoned certain towns, and professed to limit their occupation to the space of four years. It was in the second year of their occupation (1765) that Boswell visited the island. At the end of the four years the Republic of Genoa ceded Corsica to the crown of France. In the cession there was a pretence of a reservation with which it is needless to trouble the reader. "Genoa," writes Voltaire, "made a good bargain, and France made a better." "Il restait à savoir," he added, "si les hommes ont le droit de vendre d'autres hommes, mais c'est une question qu'on n'examina jamais dans aucun traité." Negociations were opened with Paoli, but there was no common ground between the free chief of a free people and the despot who wished to enslave them. Paoli might have looked for high honours and rewards had he consented to enter the French service. He had the far greater and purer glory of resisting a King of France for nearly a whole year. No foreign power came to his aid. "A few Englishmen alone," wrote Voltaire, "full of love for that liberty which he upheld, sent him some money and arms." His troops were badly armed. Their muskets were not even furnished with bayonets. Their courage went some way to make up for their want of proper weapons. In one battle they piled up in front of them a rampart of their dead, and behind this bloody pile they loaded their pieces before they began their retreat. But against the disciplined forces that France could bring, all resistance was in vain. "Poor brave Paoli!" wrote Horace Walpole, "but he is not disgraced. We, that have sat still and seen him overwhelmed, must answer it to history. Nay, the Mediterranean will taunt us in the very next war." Walpole wrote this letter but two months before the birth of Buonaparte. Had England, who has joined in many a worthless quarrel, struck in for the Corsicans, what a change might have been made in the history of the world! If Buonaparte had never been a citizen of France the name of Napoleon might be unknown. Paoli escaped in an English ship, and settled in England. Walpole met him one day at Court. "I could not believe it," he wrote, "when I was told who he was.... Nobody sure ever had an air so little foreign!... The simplicity of his whole appearance had not given me the slightest suspicion of anything remarkable in him." Paoli remained in England, an honoured guest, for thirty years. In 1789 Mirabeau moved, in the National Assembly, the recall of all the Corsican patriots. Paoli went to Paris, where "he was received with enthusiastic veneration. The Assembly and the Royal Family contended which should show him most distinction." The king made him lieutenant-general and military commandant in Corsica. "He used the powers entrusted to him with great wisdom and moderation." The rapid changes that swept over France did not leave him untouched. He was denounced in the Convention and "was summoned to attend for the purpose of standing on his defence. He declined the journey on account of his age." A large part of his countrymen stood by him, and in an assembly appointed him general-in-chief, and president of the council of government. The Convention sent an expedition to arrest him. Buonaparte happened at the time to be in Corsica, on leave of absence from his regiment. He and Paoli had been on friendly terms, indeed they were distantly related, but Buonaparte did not hesitate for a moment which side to take. He commanded the French troops in an attack on his native town. Paoli's party proved the stronger, and Napoleon Buonaparte and his brother Lucien were banished. The Corsicans sought the aid of the English who, in the year 1794, landed, five regiments strong, in the island. A deputation went to London to offer the Crown of Corsica to the King of Great Britain. The offer was accepted, but contrary to the hopes and the expectations of the islanders, not Paoli, but Sir Gilbert Eliot was made Viceroy. The great patriot then found that he could best serve his country by leaving it. For about two years Corsica remained part of the British Empire; but in 1796 the English were forced to abandon it. Paoli returned to England, where he passed the rest of his years. He died in 1807 at the age of eighty-two. His monument is in Westminster Abbey. AN ACCOUNT OF CORSICA, THE JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO THAT ISLAND; AND MEMOIRS OF PASCAL PAOLI. BY JAMES BOSWELL, Esq; ILLUSTRATED with a New and Accurate MAP OF CORSICA. Non enim propter gloriam, divitias aut honores pugnamus, sed propter libertatem solummodo, quam nemo bonus nisi simul cum vita amittit. Lit. Comit. et Baron. Scotiae ad Pap. A.D. 1320. GLASGOW, PRINTED BY ROBERT AND ANDREW FOULIS FOR EDWARD AND CHARLES DILLY IN THE POULTRY, LONDON; MDCCLXVIII. DEDICATION TO PASCAL PAOLI, GENERAL OF THE CORSICANS. SIR,--Dedications are for most part the offerings of interested servility, or the effusions of partial zeal; enumerating the virtues of men in whom no virtues can be found, or predicting greatness to those who afterwards pass their days in unambitious indolence, and die leaving no memorial of their existence, but a dedication, in which all their merit is confessedly future, and which time has turned into a silent reproach. He who has any experience of mankind, will be cautious to whom he dedicates. Publickly to bestow praise on merit of which the publick is not sensible, or to raise flattering expectations which are never fulfilled, must sink the character of an authour, and make him appear a cringing parasite, or a fond enthusiast. I am under no apprehensions of that nature, when I inscribe this book to Pascal Paoli. Your virtues, Sir, are universally acknowledged; they dignify the pages which I venture to present to you; and it is my singular felicity that my book is the voucher of its dedication. In thus addressing you, my intention is not to attempt your panegyrick. That may in some measure be collected from my imperfect labours. But I wish to express to the world, the admiration and gratitude with which you have inspired me. This, Sir, is all the return that I can make for the many favours which you have deigned to confer upon me. I intreat you to receive it as a testimony of my disposition. I regret that I have neither power nor interest to enable me to render any essential service to you and to the brave Corsicans. I can only assure you of the most fervent wishes of a private gentleman. I have the honour to be, with all respect and affection, Sir, Your ever devoted obliged humble servant JAMES BOSWELL. Auchinleck, Ayrshire, 29 October,[68] 1767. [Footnote 68: Boswell's birthday. The preface to the third edition also bears the date of his birthday.--ED.] PREFACE. No apology shall be made for presenting the world with An Account of Corsica. It has been for some time expected from me; and I own that the ardour of publick curiosity has both encouraged and intimidated me. On my return from visiting Corsica, I found people wherever I went, desirous to hear what I could tell them concerning that island and its inhabitants. Unwilling to repeat my tale to every company, I thought it best to promise a book which should speak for me. But I would not take upon me to do this till I consulted with the General of the nation. I therefore informed him of my design. His answer is perhaps too flattering for me to publish: but I must beg leave to give it as the licence and sanction of this work. Paoli was pleased to write to me thus; "Nothing can be more generous than your design to publish the observations which you have made upon Corsica. You have seen its natural situation, you have been able to study the manners of its inhabitants, and to see intimately the maxims of their government, of which you know the constitution. This people with an enthusiasm of gratitude, will unite their applause with that of undeceived Europe." * * * * * It is amazing that an island so considerable, and in which such noble things have been doing, should be so imperfectly known. Even the succession of chiefs has been unperceived; and because we have read of Paoli being at the head of the Corsicans many years back, and Paoli still appears at their head, the command has been supposed all this time in the person of the same man. Hence all our newspapers have confounded the gallant Pascal Paoli in the vigour of manhood, with the venerable chief his deceased father, Giacinto Paoli. Nay the same errour has found its way into the page of the historian; for Dr. Smollet when mentioning Paoli at the siege of Furiani a few years ago, says he was then past fourscore. I would in the first place return my most humble thanks to Pascal Paoli, for the various communications with which he has been pleased to favour me; and as I have related his remarkable sayings, I declare upon honour, that I have neither added nor diminished; nay so scrupulous have I been, that I would not make the smallest variation even when my friends thought it would be an improvement. I know with how much pleasure we read what is perfectly authentick. Count Rivarola[69] was so good as to return me full and distinct answers to a variety of queries which I sent him with regard to many particulars concerning Corsica. I am much indebted to him for this, and particularly so, from the obliging manner in which he did it. [Footnote 69: The Sardinian Consul in Corsica. See page 142.--ED.] The reverend Mr. Burnaby, chaplain to the British factory at Leghorn, made a tour to Corsica in 1766, at the same time with the honourable and reverend Mr. Hervey, now bishop of Cloyne.[70] Mr. Burnaby was absent from Leghorn when I was there, so I had not the pleasure of being personally known to him. But he with great politeness of his own accord, sent me a copy of the Journal which he made of what he observed in Corsica. I had the satisfaction to find that we agreed in every thing which both of us had considered. But I found in his Journal, observations on several things which I had omitted; and several things which I had remarked, I found set in a clearer light. As Mr. Burnaby was so obliging as to allow me to make what use I pleased of his Journal, I have freely interwoven it into my work. [Footnote 70: The son of Pope's Lord Hervey. He succeeded in 1779 to the Earldom of Bristol.--ED.] I acknowledge my obligations to my esteemed friend John Dick Esquire, his Britannick Majesty's Consul at Leghorn, to Signor Gian Quilico Casa Bianca, to the learned Greek physician Signor Stefanopoli, to Colonel Buttafoco,[71] and to the Abbé Rostini. These gentlemen have all contributed their aid in erecting my little monument to liberty. [Footnote 71: Colonel Buttafoco was one of Rousseau's correspondents. At the time of the French Revolution he was elected Deputy from Corsica to the National Assembly. He was most violently attacked by Napoleon Buonaparte in a letter dated "From my closet at Milleli, 23rd January, Year 2." The letter thus begins:--"From Bonifacio to Cape Corso, from Ajaccio to Bastia, there is one chorus of imprecations against you." The writer goes on to say, "Your countrymen, to whom you are an object of horror, will enlighten France as to your character. The wealth, the pensions, the fruits of your treasons, will be taken from you.... O Lameth! O Robespierre! O Petion! O Volney! O Mirabeau! O Barnave! O Bailly! O La Fayette! this is the man who dares to seat himself by your side!"--Scott's "Life of Napoleon Buonaparte," vol. ix., Appendix I.--ED.] I am also to thank an ingenious gentleman who has favoured me with the translations of Seneca's Epigrams. I made application for this favour, in the "London Chronicle;" and to the honour of literature, I found her votaries very liberal. Several translations were sent, of which I took the liberty to prefer those which had the signature of Patricius, and which were improved by another ingenious correspondent under the signature of Plebeius. By a subsequent application I begged that Patricius would let me know to whom I was obliged for what I considered as a great ornament to my book. He has complied with my request; and I beg leave in this publick manner, to acknowledge that I am indebted for those translations to Thomas Day Esquire,[72] of Berkshire, a gentleman whose situation in life is genteel, and his fortune affluent. I must add that although his verses have not only the fire of youth, but the maturity and correctness of age, Mr. Day is no more than nineteen. [Footnote 72: This is, I believe the author of "Sandford and Merton," who was born in 1748, and was nineteen years old at the date of the dedication of Boswell's work. His father had died when Day was a year old, and had left him a fortune of £1,200 a year.--ED.] Nor can I omit to express my sense of the candour and politeness with which Sir James Steuart received the remark which I have ventured to make in opposition to a passage concerning the Corsicans, in his "Inquiry into the principles of Political Oeconomy." I have submitted my book to the revisal of several gentlemen who honour me with their regard, and I am sensible how much it is improved by their corrections. It is therefore my duty to return thanks to the reverend Mr. Wyvill rectour of Black Notely in Essex, and to my old and most intimate friend the reverend Mr. Temple[73] rectour of Mamhead in Devonshire. I am also obliged to My Lord Monboddo for many judicious remarks, which his thorough acquaintance with ancient learning enabled him to make. But I am principally indebted to the indulgence and friendly attention of My Lord Hailes, who under the name of Sir David Dalrymple,[74] has been long known to the world as an able Antiquarian, and an elegant and humourous Essayist; to whom the world has no fault but that he does not give them more of his own writings, when they value them so highly.[75] [Footnote 73: See "Letters of James Boswell addressed to the Rev. W.J. Temple."--Bentley, London, 1857.--ED.] [Footnote 74: It is the custom in Scotland to give the Judges of the Court of Session the title of Lords by the names of their estates. Thus Mr. Burnett is Lord Monboddo, and Sir David Dalrymple is Lord Hailes.] [Footnote 75: "Johnson this evening drank a bumper to Sir David Dalrymple, 'as a man of worth, a scholar, and a wit. I have,' said he, 'never heard of him, except from you; but let him know my opinion of him: for as he does not show himself much in the world, he should have the praise of the few who hear of him.'"--Boswell's "Johnson." Date of July 20, 1763.--ED.] I would however have it understood, that although I received the corrections of my friends with deference, I have not always agreed with them. An authour should be glad to hear every candid remark. But I look upon a man as unworthy to write, who has not force of mind to determine for himself. I mention this, that the judgement of the friends I have named may not be considered as connected with every passage in this book. Writing a book I have found to be like building a house. A man forms a plan and collects materials. He thinks he has enough to raise a large and stately edifice; but after he has arranged, compacted and polished, his work turns out to be a very small performance. The authour, however, like the builder, knows how much labour his work has cost him; and therefore estimates it at a much higher rate than other people think it deserves. I have endeavoured to avoid an ostentatious display of learning. By the idle and the frivolous indeed, any appearance of learning is called pedantry. But as I do not write for such readers, I pay no regard to their censures. Those by whom I wish to be judged, will I hope, approve of my adding dignity to Corsica, by shewing its consideration among the ancients, and will not be displeased to find my page sometimes embellished with a seasonable quotation from the Classicks. The translations are ascribed to their proper authours. What are not so ascribed are my own. It may be necessary to say something in defence of my orthography. Of late it has become the fashion to render our language more neat and trim by leaving out k after c, and u in the last syllable of words which used to end in our. The illustrious Mr. Samuel Johnson, who has alone[76] executed in England what was the task of whole academies in other countries, has been careful in his Dictionary to preserve the k as a mark of Saxon original. He has for most part, too, been careful to preserve the u, but he has also omitted it in several words. I have retained the k, and have taken upon me to follow a general rule with regard to words ending in our. Wherever a word originally Latin has been transmitted to us through the medium of the French, I have written it with the characteristical u. An attention to this may appear trivial. But I own I am one of those who are curious in the formation of language in its various modes; and therefore wish that the affinity of English with other tongues may not be forgotten. If this work should at any future period be reprinted, I hope that care will be taken of my orthography.[77] [Footnote 76: "ADAMS.--But, Sir, how can you do this in three years? JOHNSON.--Sir, I have no doubt that I can do it in three years. ADAMS.--But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary. JOHNSON.--Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman."--Boswell's "Johnson." Date of 1748.--ED.] [Footnote 77: I have not dared to disregard Boswell's request. His orthography is retained.--ED.] He who publishes a book, affecting not to be an authour, and professing an indifference for literary fame, may possibly impose upon many people such an idea of his consequence as he wishes may be received. For my part, I should be proud to be known as an authour; and I have an ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish a book which has been approved by the world, has established himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having that character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. To preserve an uniform dignity among those who see us every day, is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The authour of an approved book may allow his natural disposition an easy play, and yet indulge the pride of superiour genius when he considers that by those who know him only as an authour, he never ceases to be respected. Such an authour when in his hours of gloom and discontent, may have the consolation to think that his writings are at that very time giving pleasure to numbers; and such an authour may cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great object to the noblest minds in all ages.[78] [Footnote 78: "The rational pride of an author may be offended, rather than flattered, by vague, indiscriminate praise; but he cannot, he should not, be indifferent to the fair testimonies of private and public esteem. Even his moral sympathy may be gratified by the idea, that now, in the present hour, he is imparting some degree of amusement or knowledge to his friends in a distant land; that one day his mind will be familiar to the grand-children of those who are yet unborn."--"Memoirs of my Life and Writings," by Edward Gibbon, vol. i., p. 273. "Do thou teach me not only to foresee but to enjoy, nay even to feed on future praise. Comfort me by the solemn assurance, that when the little parlour in which I sit at this moment shall be reduced to a worse-furnished box, I shall be read with honour by those who never knew nor saw me, and whom I shall neither know nor see."--"Tom Jones," book xiii., chap. I. Quoted by Gibbon, or his Editor.--ED.] Whether I may merit any portion of literary fame, the publick will judge. Whatever my ambition may be, I trust that my confidence is not too great, nor my hopes too sanguine. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. I now beg leave to present the world with a more correct edition of my Account of Corsica. I return my sincere thanks to those who have taken the trouble to point out several faults, with a spirit of candid criticism. I hope they will not be offended that in one or two places I have preserved my own reading, contrary to their opinion; as I never would own that I am wrong, till I am convinced that it is so. My orthography I have sufficiently explained; and although some pleasantry has been shewn, I have not met with one argument against it. * * * * * While I have a proper sense of my obligations to those who have treated me with candour, I do not forget that there have been others who have chosen to treat me in an illiberal manner. The resentment of some has evidently arisen from the grateful admiration which I have expressed of Mr. Samuel Johnson. Over such, it is a triumph to me to assure them, that I never cease to think of Mr. Johnson with the same warmth of affection, and the same dignity of veneration. The resentment of others it is more difficult to explain. For what should make men attack one who never offended them, who has done his best to entertain them, and who is engaged in the most generous cause? But I am told by those who have gone before me in literature, that the attacks of such should rather flatter me, than give me displeasure. To those who have imagined themselves very witty in sneering at me for being a Christian, I would recommend the serious study of Theology, and I hope they will attain to the same comfort that I have, in the belief of a Revelation by which a SAVIOUR is proclamed to the world, and "life and immortality are clearly brought to light." I am now to return thanks to My Lord Lyttelton, for being so good as to allow me to enrich my book with one of his Lordship's letters to me.[79] I was indeed most anxious that it should be published; as it contains an eulogium on Pascal Paoli, equal to anything that I have found in the writings of antiquity. Nor can I deny that I was very desirous to shew the world that this worthy and respectable Nobleman, to whom genius, learning and virtue owe so much, can amidst all his literary honours be pleased with what I have been able to write. [Footnote 79: I have not thought it needful to reprint this letter.--ED.] May I be permitted to say that the success of this book has exceeded my warmest hopes. When I first ventured to send it into the world, I fairly owned an ardent desire for literary fame. I have obtained my desire: and whatever clouds may overcast my days, I can now walk here among the rocks and woods of my ancestors, with an agreeable consciousness that I have done something worthy. AUCHINLECK, AYRSHIRE, 29 October, 1768. THE JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO CORSICA; AND MEMOIRS OF PASCAL PAOLI. Olim meminisse juvabit. VIRG. THE JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO CORSICA. Having resolved to pass some years[80] abroad, for my instruction and entertainment, I conceived a design of visiting the island of Corsica. I wished for something more than just the common course of what is called the tour of Europe; and Corsica occurred to me as a place which no body else had seen, and where I should find what was to be seen no where else, a people actually fighting for liberty, and forming themselves from a poor inconsiderable oppressed nation, into a flourishing and independent state. [Footnote 80: Boswell had left England, on August 6th, 1763, for the University of Utrecht, whither his father had sent him to study civil law. On his return to Scotland, he was to put on the gown as a member of the Faculty of Advocates. "Honest man!" he writes of his father to his friend Temple, "he is now very happy; it is amazing to think how much he has had at heart my pursuing the road of civil life." Boswell had once hoped to enter the Guards. A few days later on he wrote: "My father has allowed me £60 a quarter; that is not a great allowance, but with economy I may live very well upon it, for Holland is a cheap country. However I am determined not to be straightened, nor to encourage the least narrowness of disposition as to saving money, but will draw upon my father for any sums I find necessary." He did not give many months to his legal studies at Utrecht. In the following year he set out on his travels. He went through Germany and Switzerland to Italy. It was in the autumn of 1765 that he visited Corsica. He returned to England through France, and arrived in London in February, 1766.] When I got into Switzerland, I went to see M. Rousseau. He was then living in romantick retirement, from whence, perhaps, it had been better for him never to have descended. While he was at a distance, his singular eloquence filled our minds with high ideas of the wild philosopher. When he came into the walks of men, we know alas! how much these ideas suffered.[81] [Footnote 81: Rousseau came to England in January, 1766. He had not been here long before he quarrelled with Hume, who had been to him so true a friend.--ED.] He entertained me very courteously; for I was recommended to him by my honoured friend the Earl Marischal,[82] with whom I had the happiness of travelling through a part of Germany. I had heard that M. Rousseau had some correspondence with the Corsicans, and had been desired to assist them in forming their laws.[83] I told him my scheme of going to visit them, after I had compleated my tour of Italy; and I insisted that he should give me a letter of introduction. He immediately agreed to do so, whenever I should acquaint him of my time of going thither; for he saw that my enthusiasm for the brave islanders was as warm as his own. [Footnote 82: George, tenth Earl Marischal. He had taken part in the Jacobite rising of 1715. Later on he held high office in the Prussian service. In 1759 his attainder was reversed, but he continued to live abroad. In one of his letters to Madame de Boufflers he says, in speaking of Rousseau, "Je lui avais fait un projet; mais en le disant un château en Espagne, d'aller habiter une maison toute meublée que j'ai en Ecosse; d'engager le bon David Hume de vivre avec nous."--"Hume's Private Correspondence," page 43.--ED.] [Footnote 83: See page 222.] I accordingly wrote to him from Rome, in April 1765, that I had fixed the month of September for my Corsican expedition, and therefore begged of him to send me the letter of introduction, which if he refused, I should certainly go without it, and probably be hanged as a spy. So let him answer for the consequences. The wild philosopher was a man of his word; and on my arrival at Florence in August I received the following letter. "A MONSIEUR, MONSIEUR BOSWELL, &c. "A MOTIERS le 30 May, 1765. "La crise orageuse ou je me trouve, Monsieur, depuis votre depart d'ici, m'a oté le tems de repondre à votre premiére lettre, et me laisse à peine celui de repondre en peu de mots à la seconde. Pour m'en tenir à ce qui presse pour le moment, savoir la recommendation que vous desirez en Corse; puisque vous avez le desir de visiter ces braves insulaires, vous pourrez vous informer à Bastia, de M. Buttafoco capitaine au Regiment Royal Italien; il a sa maison à Vescovado, ou il se tient assez souvent. C'est un très galant homme, qui a des connoissances et de l'esprit; il suffira de lui montrer cette lettre, et je suis sur qu'il vous recevra bien, et contribuera à vous faire voir l'isle et ses habitans avec satisfaction. Si vous ne trouvez pas M. Buttafoco, et que vous vouliez aller tout droit à M. Pascal de Paoli general de la nation, vous pouvez egalement lui montrer cette lettre, et je suis sur, connoissant la noblesse de son caractére, que vous serez très-content de son accueil: vous pourrez lui dire même que vous étes aimé de Mylord Mareschal d'Ecosse, et que Mylord Mareschal est un des plus zelés partizans de la nation Corse. Au reste vouz n'avez besoin d'autre recommendation près de ces Messieurs que votre propre mérite, la nation Corse etant naturellement si accueillante et si hospitaliére, que tous les etrangers y sont bien venus et caressés. * * * * * "Bons et heureux voyages, santé, gaieté et promt retour. Je vous embrasse, Monsieur, de tout mon coeur." "J.J. ROUSSEAU." "TO MR. BOSWELL, &c. "MOTIERS, the 30 May 1765. "The stormy crisis in which I have found myself since your departure from this, has not allowed me any leisure to answer your first letter, and hardly allows me leisure to reply in a few words to your second. To confine myself to what is immediately pressing, the recommendation which you ask for Corsica; since you have a desire to visit those brave islanders, you may enquire at Bastia for M. Buttafoco, captain of the Royal Italian Regiment; his house is at Vescovado, where he resides pretty often. He is a very worthy man, and has both knowledge and genius; it will be sufficient to shew him this letter, and I am sure he will receive you well, and will contribute to let you see the island and its inhabitants with satisfaction. If you do not find M. Buttafoco, and will go directly to M. Pascal Paoli General of the nation, you may in the same manner shew him this letter, and as I know the nobleness of his character, I am sure you will be very well pleased at your reception. You may even tell him that you are liked by My Lord Marischal of Scotland, and that My Lord Marischal is one of the most zealous partisans of the Corsican nation. You need no other recommendation to these gentlemen but your own merit, the Corsicans being naturally so courteous and hospitable, that all strangers who come among them, are made welcome and caressed. * * * * * "I wish you agreeable and fortunate travels, health, gaiety, and a speedy return. I embrace you Sir with all my heart "JOHN JAMES ROUSSEAU." Furnished with these credentials, I was impatient to be with the illustrious Chief. The charms of sweet Siena detained me longer than they should have done. I required the hardy air of Corsica to brace me, after the delights of Tuscany. I recollect with astonishment how little the real state of Corsica was known, even by those who had good access to know it. An officer of rank in the British navy, who had been in several ports of the island, told me that I run the risque of my life in going among these barbarians; for, that his surgeon's mate went ashore to take the diversion of shooting, and every moment was alarmed by some of the natives, who started from the bushes with loaded guns, and if he had not been protected by Corsican guides, would have certainly blown out his brains. Nay at Leghorn, which is within a day's sailing of Corsica, and has a constant intercourse with it, I found people who dissuaded me from going thither, because it might be dangerous. I was however under no apprehension in going to Corsica. Count Rivarola the Sardinian consul, who is himself a Corsican, assuring me that the island was then in a very civilized state; and besides, that in the rudest times no Corsican would ever attack a stranger. The Count was so good as to give me most obliging letters to many people in the island. I had now been in several foreign countries. I had found that I was able to accommodate myself to my fellow-creatures of different languages and sentiments. I did not fear that it would be a difficult task for me to make myself easy with the plain and generous Corsicans. The only danger I saw was, that I might be taken by some of the Barbary Corsairs, and have a tryal of slavery among the Turks at Algiers.[84] I spoke of it to Commodore Harrison, who commanded the British squadron in the Mediterranean, and was then lying with his ship the Centurion in the bay of Leghorn. He assured me, that if the Turks did take me, they should not keep me long; but in order to prevent it, he was so good as to grant me a very ample and particular passport; and as it could be of no use if I did not meet the Corsairs, he said very pleasantly when he gave it me, "I hope, Sir, it shall be of no use to you." [Footnote 84: In the "Gentleman's Magazine" for 1750 (vol. xx., p. 42), we read, "The Phoenix, Captain Carberry, of Bristol, was taken on Christmas eve by an Algerine corsair off the rock of Lisbon, on pretence that his pass was not good, and ordered for Algiers with an officer and six other Turks; but in the passage Captain Carberry with three English sailors and a boy recovered the vessel, after flinging the Turkish officer and two other Turks overboard, and brought it with the Turkish sailors prisoners to Bristol." In the same year the English consul at Algiers wrote to say that some Algerine Corsairs had taken five English vessels because their passes were not good. The consul had complained to the Dey, "who said that he would give such orders that nothing of this sort should happen again, and then swore by his prophet that if any one controverted those orders he would take his head." The Dey had also seized a packet-boat of the British Crown. Commodore Keppel was sent to demand restitution. The Dey replied, "We are disposed to give full satisfaction to the King and the British nation for anything that may happen amiss hereafter; but as to what is past, if they have had any cause to complain, they must think no more of it, and bury it in oblivion." The packet-boat, he maintained, had not a proper Algerine pass, and therefore had been lawfully seized. By a treaty made with the Dey in the following year, the Commodore "settled all differences by waiving the restitution of the money and effects taken from on board the packet-boat on condition that his Majesty's packet-boats shall never be obliged to carry Algerine passports," &c. Whatever protection the English vessels may have had the Turkish corsairs continued to plunder the ships of most other nations. In the "Gentleman's Magazine" for 1785, (vol. lv., p. 830) we read, "The Algerines still continue their piracies in the Mediterranean. They even extend their captures to the Atlantic Ocean, and have struck the American traders with terror."--ED.] Before I left Leghorn, I could observe, that my tour was looked upon by the Italian politicians in a very serious light, as if truly I had a commission from my Court, to negociate a treaty with the Corsicans. The more I disclaimed any such thing, the more they persevered in affirming it; and I was considered as a very close young man. I therefore just allowed them to make a minister of me, till time should undeceive them.[85] [Footnote 85: Compare Scribe's Comedy of "_Le Diplomate_."--ED.] I sailed from Leghorn in a Tuscan vessel, which was going over to Capo Corso for wine. I preferred this to a vessel going to Bastia, because, as I did not know how the French general was affected towards the Corsicans, I was afraid that he might not permit me to go forward to Paoli. I therefore resolved to land on the territories of the nation, and after I had been with the illustrious Chief, to pay my respects to the French if I should find it safe. Though from Leghorn to Corsica is usually but one day's sailing, there was so dead a calm that it took us two days. The first day was the most tedious. However there were two or three Corsicans aboard, and one of them played on the Citra, which amused me a good deal. At sun-set all the people in the ship sung the Ave Maria, with great devotion and some melody. It was pleasing to enter into the spirit of their religion, and hear them offering up their evening orisons. The second day we became better acquainted, and more lively and chearful. The worthy Corsicans thought it was proper to give a moral lesson to a young traveller just come from Italy. They told me that in their country I should be treated with the greatest hospitality; but if I attempted to debauch any of their women, I might lay my account with instant death. I employed myself several hours in rowing, which gave me great spirits. I relished fully my approach to the island, which had acquired an unusual grandeur in my imagination. As long as I can remember any thing, I have heard of "The malecontents of Corsica, with Paoli at their head." It was a curious thought that I was just going to see them. About seven o'clock at night, we landed safely in the harbour of Centuri. I learnt that Signor Giaccomini of this place, to whom I was recommended by Count Rivarola, was just dead. He had made a handsome fortune in the East Indies; and having had a remarkable warmth in the cause of liberty during his whole life, he shewed it in the strongest manner in his last will. He bequeathed a considerable sum of money, and some pieces of ordinance, to the nation. He also left it in charge to his heir, to live in Corsica, and be firm in the patriotick interest; and if ever the island should again be reduced under the power of the Genoese, he ordered him to retire with all his effects to Leghorn. Upon these conditions only could his heir enjoy his estate. I was directed to the house of Signor Giaccomini's cousin, Signor Antonio Antonetti at Morsiglia, about a mile up the country. The prospect of the mountains covered with vines and olives, was extremely agreeable; and the odour of the myrtle and other aromatick shrubs and flowers that grew all around me, was very refreshing. As I walked along, I often saw Corsican peasants come suddenly out from the covert; and as they were all armed, I saw how the frightened imagination of the surgeon's mate had raised up so many assassins. Even the man who carried my baggage was armed, and had I been timorous might have alarmed me. But he and I were very good company to each other. As it grew dusky, I repeated to myself these lines from a fine passage in Ariosto. "E pur per selve oscure e calli obliqui Insieme van senza, sospetto aversi." ARIOST. Canto I. "Together through dark woods and winding ways They walk, nor on their hearts suspicion preys." I delivered Signor Antonetti the letter for his deceased cousin. He read it, and received me with unaffected cordiality, making an apology for my frugal entertainment, but assuring me of a hearty welcome. His true kindly hospitality was also shewn in taking care of my servant, an honest Swiss, who loved to eat and drink well.[86] [Footnote 86: Like master, like man.--ED.] I had formed a strange notion that I should see every thing in Corsica totally different from what I had seen in any other country.[87] I was therefore much surprised to find Signor Antonetti's house quite an Italian one, with very good furniture, prints, and copies of some of the famous pictures. In particular, I was struck to find here a small copy from Raphael, of St. Michael and the Dragon. There was no necessity for its being well done. To see the thing at all was what surprised me. [Footnote 87: See Appendix B for a curious custom described by Boswell.--ED.] Signor Antonetti gave me an excellent light repast, and a very good bed. He spoke with great strength of the patriotick cause, and with great veneration of the General. I was quite easy, and liked much the opening of my Corsican tour. The next day, being Sunday, it rained very hard; and I must observe that the Corsicans with all their resolution, are afraid of bad weather, to a degree of effeminacy. I got indeed a drole but a just enough account of this, from one of them. "Sir," said he, "if you were as poor as a Corsican, and had but one coat, so as that after being wet, you could not put on dry cloaths, you would be afraid too."[88] Signor Antonetti would not allow me to set out while it rained, for, said he, "Quando si trova fuori, patienza; ma di andare fuori è cattivo. If a man finds himself abroad, there is no help for it. But to go deliberately out, is too much." [Footnote 88: A friend of mine, driving last September from Tunis to Utica, was overtaken by a storm of rain. The driver at once got down from the box and seated himself on the ground under the carriage. By way of excuse he said that he had but one coat.--ED.] When the day grew a little better, I accompanied Signor Antonetti and his family, to hear mass in the parish church, a very pretty little building, about half a quarter of a mile off. Signor Antonetti's parish priest was to preach to us, at which I was much pleased, being very curious to hear a Corsican sermon. Our priest did very well. His text was in the Psalms. "Descendunt ad infernum viventes. They go down alive into the pit." After endeavouring to move our passions with a description of the horrours of hell, he told us "Saint Catherine of Siena wished to be laid on the mouth of this dreadful pit, that she might stop it up, so as no more unhappy souls should fall into it. I confess, my brethren, I have not the zeal of holy Saint Catherine. But I do what I can; I warn you how to avoid it." He then gave us some good practical advices and concluded. The weather being now cleared up, I took leave of the worthy gentleman to whom I had been a guest. He gave me a letter to Signor Damiano Tomasi Padre del Commune at Pino, the next village. I got a man with an ass to carry my baggage. But such a road I never saw. It was absolutely scrambling along the face of a rock overhanging the sea, upon a path sometimes not above a foot broad. I thought the ass rather retarded me; so I prevailed with the man to take my portmanteau and other things on his back. Had I formed my opinion of Corsica from what I saw this morning, I might have been in as bad humour with it, as Seneca was, whose reflections in prose are not inferiour to his epigrams. "Quid tam nudum inveniri potest, quid tam abruptum undique quam hoc saxum? quid ad copias respicienti jejunius? quid ad homines immansuetius? quid ad ipsum loci situm horridius? Plures tamen hîc peregrini quam cives consistunt? usque eò ergo commutatio ipsa locorum gravis non est, ut hic quoque locus a patria quosdam abduxerit.[89] What can be found so bare, what so rugged all around as this rock? what more barren of provisions? what more rude as to its inhabitants? what in the very situation of the place more horrible? what in climate more intemperate? yet there are more foreigners than natives here. So far then is a change of place from being disagreeable, that even this place hath brought some people away from their country." [Footnote 89: Seneca de Consolatione.] At Pino I was surprised to find myself met by some brisk young fellows drest like English sailors, and speaking English tolerably well. They had been often with cargoes of wine at Leghorn, where they had picked up what they knew of our language, and taken clothes in part of payment for some of their merchandise. I was cordially entertained at Signor Tomasi's. Throughout all Corsica, except in garrison towns, there is hardly an inn. I met with a single one, about eight miles from Corte. Before I was accustomed to the Corsican hospitality, I sometimes forgot myself, and imagining I was in a publick house, called for what I wanted, with the tone which one uses in calling to the waiters at a tavern. I did so at Pino, asking for a variety of things at once; when Signora Tomasi, perceiving my mistake, looked in my face and smiled, saying with much calmness and good-nature, "Una cosa dopo un altra, Signore. One thing after another, Sir." In writing this Journal, I shall not tire my readers with relating the occurrences of each particular day. It will be much more agreeable to them, to have a free and continued account of what I saw or heard, most worthy of observation. For some time, I had very curious travelling, mostly on foot, and attended by a couple of stout women, who carried my baggage upon their heads. Every time that I prepared to set out from a village, I could not help laughing, to see the good people eager to have my equipage in order, and roaring out, "Le Donne, Le Donne. The Women, The Women." I had full leisure and the best opportunities to observe every thing, in my progress through the island. I was lodged sometimes in private houses, sometimes in convents, being always well recommended from place to place. The first convent in which I lay, was at Canari. It appeared a little odd at first. But I soon learnt to repair to my dormitory as naturally as if I had been a friar for seven years. The convents were small decent buildings, suited to the sober ideas of their pious inhabitants. The religious who devoutly endeavour to "walk with GOD," are often treated with raillery by those whom pleasure or business prevents from thinking of future and more exalted objects. A little experience of the serenity and peace of mind to be found in convents, would be of use to temper the fire of men of the world. At Patrimonio I found the seat of a provincial magistracy. The chief judge was there, and entertained me very well. Upon my arrival, the captain of the guard came out, and demanded who I was? I replied "Inglese English." He looked at me seriously, and then said in a tone between regret and upbraiding, "Inglese, c'erano i nostri amici; ma non le sono più. The English. They were once our friends; but they are so no more." I felt for my country, and was abashed before this honest soldier. At Oletta I visited Count Nicholas Rivarola, brother to my friend at Leghorn. He received me with great kindness, and did every thing in his power to make me easy. I found here a Corsican who thought better of the British than the captain of the guard at Patrimonio. He talked of our bombarding San Fiorenzo,[90] in favour of the patriots, and willingly gave me his horse for the afternoon, which he said he would not have done to a man of any other nation. [Footnote 90: In 1745. See Introduction. Page 110.--ED.] When I came to Morato, I had the pleasure of being made acquainted with Signor Barbaggi, who is married to the niece of Paoli. I found him to be a sensible, intelligent, well-bred man. The mint of Corsica was in his house. I got specimens of their different kinds of money in silver and copper, and was told that they hoped in a year or two, to strike some gold coins. Signor Barbaggi's house was repairing, so I was lodged in the convent. But in the morning returned to breakfast, and had chocolate; and at dinner we had no less than twelve well-drest dishes, served on Dresden china, with a desert, different sorts of wine and a liqueur, all the produce of Corsica. Signor Barbaggi was frequently repeating to me, that the Corsicans inhabited a rude uncultivated country, and that they lived like Spartans. I begged leave to ask him in what country he could show me greater luxury than I had seen in his house; and I said I should certainly tell wherever I went, what tables the Corsicans kept, notwithstanding their pretensions to poverty and temperance. A good deal of pleasantry passed upon this. His lady was a genteel woman, and appeared to be agreeable, though very reserved. From Morato to Corte, I travelled through a wild mountainous rocky country, diversified with some large valleys. I got little beasts for me and my servant, sometimes horses, but oftener mules or asses. We had no bridles, but cords fixed round their necks, with which we managed them as well as we could. At Corte I waited upon the supreme council, to one of whom, Signor Boccociampe, I had a letter from Signor Barbaggi. I was very politely received, and was conducted to the Franciscan convent, where I got the apartment of Paoli, who was then some days' journey beyond the mountains, holding a court of syndicato[91] at a village called Sollacarò. [Footnote 91: "The Syndicatori make a tour through the different provinces, as our judges in Britain go the circuits. They hear complaints against the different magistrates."--Boswell's "Account of Corsica," p. 153.--ED.] As the General resided for some time in this convent, the fathers made a better appearance than any I saw in the island. I was principally attended by the Priour, a resolute divine, who had formerly been in the army, and by Padre Giulio, a man of much address, who still favours me with his correspondence. These fathers have a good vineyard and an excellent garden. They have between 30 and 40 bee-hives in long wooden cases or trunks of trees, with a covering of the bark of the cork tree. When they want honey, they burn a little juniper wood, the smoak of which makes the bees retire. They then take an iron instrument with a sharp-edged crook at one end of it, and bring out the greatest part of the honey-comb, leaving only a little for the bees, who work the case full again. By taking the honey in this way, they never kill a bee. They seemed much at their ease, living in peace and plenty. I often joked them with the text which is applied to their order, "Nihil habentes et omnia possidentes. Having nothing, and yet possessing all things." I went to the choir with them. The service was conducted with propriety, and Padre Giulio played on the organ. On the great altar of their church is a tabernacle carved in wood by a Religious. It is a piece of exquisite workmanship. A Genoese gentleman offered to give them one in silver for it; but they would not make the exchange. These fathers have no library worth mentioning; but their convent is large and well built. I looked about with great attention, to see if I could find any inscriptions; but the only one I found was upon a certain useful edifice. "Sine necessitate huc non intrate, Quia necessaria sumus." A studied, rhiming, Latin conceit marked upon such a place was truly ludicrous. I chose to stop a while at Corte, to repose myself after my fatigues, and to see every thing about the capital of Corsica. The morning after my arrival here, three French deserters desired to speak with me. The foolish fellows had taken it into their heads, that I was come to raise recruits for Scotland, and so they begged to have the honour of going along with me; I suppose with intention to have the honour of running off from me, as they had done from their own regiments. I received many civilities at Corte from Signor Boccociampe, and from Signor Massesi the Great Chancellor, whose son Signor Luigi a young gentleman of much vivacity, and natural politeness, was so good as to attend me constantly as my conductour. I used to call him my governour. I liked him much, for as he had never been out of the island, his ideas were entirely Corsican. Such of the members of the supreme council as were in residence during my stay at Corte, I found to be solid and sagacious, men of penetration and ability, well calculated to assist the General in forming his political plans, and in turning to the best advantage, the violence and enterprise of the people. The university was not then sitting, so I could only see the rooms, which were shewn me by the Abbé Valentini, procuratour of the university. The professours were all absent except one Capuchin father whom I visited at his convent. It is a tolerable building, with a pretty large collection of books. There is in the church here a tabernacle carved in wood, in the manner of that at the Franciscans', but much inferiour to it. I went up to the castle of Corte. The commandant very civilly shewed me every part of it. As I wished to see all things in Corsica, I desired to see even the unhappy criminals.[92] There were then three in the castle, a man for the murder of his wife, a married lady who had hired one of her servants to strangle a woman of whom she was jealous, and the servant who had actually perpetrated this barbarous action. They were brought out from their cells, that I might talk with them. The murderer of his wife had a stupid hardened appearance, and told me he did it at the instigation of the devil. The servant was a poor despicable wretch. He had at first accused his mistress, but was afterwards prevailed with to deny his accusation, upon which he was put to the torture,[93] by having lighted matches held between his fingers. This made him return to what he had formerly said, so as to be a strong evidence against his mistress. His hands were so miserably scorched, that he was a piteous object. I asked him why he had committed such a crime, he said, "Perche era senza spirito. Because I was without understanding." The lady seemed of a bold and resolute spirit. She spoke to me with great firmness, and denied her guilt, saying with a contemptuous smile, as she pointed to her servant, "They can force that creature to say what they please." [Footnote 92: Boswell was too fond of seeing criminals and hangmen. He was frequently present at executions. In his "Life of Johnson" he records, under date of June 23rd, 1784, "I visited Johnson in the morning, after having been present at the shocking sight of fifteen men executed before Newgate." He once persuaded Sir Joshua Reynolds to accompany him, and they recognised among the sufferers a former servant of Mrs. Thrale's. He describes Mr. Akerman, the Keeper of Newgate, as his esteemed friend. According to Mr. Croker, he defended his taste in a paper he wrote for the "London Magazine," "as a natural and irresistible impulse."--ED.] [Footnote 93: So far as I have been able to ascertain, this passage, this great blot on Paoli and the Corsican patriots, excited no attention in England. But the Inquisition was still at its hateful work in many countries, and men's minds were used to cruelties. Torture was still employed in capital cases to force confession even in Holland and France.--ED.] The hangman of Corsica was a great curiosity. Being held in the utmost detestation, he durst not live like another inhabitant of the island. He was obliged to take refuge in the castle, and there he was kept in a little corner turret, where he had just room for a miserable bed, and a little bit of fire to dress such victuals for himself as were sufficient to keep him alive, for nobody would have any intercourse with him, but all turned their backs upon him. I went up and looked at him. And a more dirty rueful spectacle I never beheld. He seemed sensible of his situation, and held down his head like an abhorred outcast. It was a long time before they could get a hangman in Corsica, so that the punishment of the gallows was hardly known, all their criminals being shot.[94] At last this creature whom I saw, who is a Sicilian, came with a message to Paoli. The General who has a wonderful talent for physiognomy, on seeing the man, said immediately to some of the people about him, "Ecco il boia. Behold our hangman." He gave orders to ask the man if he would accept of the office, and his answer was, "My grandfather was a hangman, my father was a hangman. I have been a hangman myself, and am willing to continue so." He was therefore immediately put into office, and the ignominious death dispensed by his hands, had more effect than twenty executions by fire arms. [Footnote 94: "Their dignities, and a' that," are, it seems, to be found even among executioners. The man who shoots scorns the man who hangs. It would be an interesting inquiry how the headsman ranks.--ED.] It is remarkable that no Corsican would upon any account consent to be hangman. Not the greatest criminals, who might have had their lives upon that condition. Even the wretch, who for a paultry hire, had strangled a woman, would rather submit to death, than do the same action, as the executioner of the law.[95] [Footnote 95: See, however, page 201.--ED.] When I had seen every thing about Corte, I prepared for my journey over the mountains, that I might be with Paoli. The night before I set out, I recollected that I had forgotten to get a passport, which, in the present situation of Corsica, is still a necessary precaution. After supper therefore the Priour walked with me to Corte, to the house of the Great Chancellor, who ordered the passport to be made out immediately, and while his secretary was writing it, entertained me by reading to me some of the minutes of the general consulta. When the passport was finished, and ready to have the seal put to it, I was much pleased with a beautiful, simple incident. The Chancellor desired a little boy who was playing in the room by us, to run to his mother, and bring the great seal of the kingdom. I thought myself sitting in the house of a Cincinnatus. Next morning I set out in very good order, having excellent mules, and active clever Corsican guides. The worthy fathers of the convent who treated me in the kindest manner while I was their guest, would also give me some provisions for my journey; so they put up a gourd of their best wine, and some delicious pomegranates. My Corsican guides appeared so hearty, that I often got down and walked along with them, doing just what I saw them do. When we grew hungry, we threw stones among the thick branches of the chestnut trees which over-shadowed us, and in that manner we brought down a shower of chestnuts with which we filled our pockets, and went on eating them with great relish; and when this made us thirsty, we lay down by the side of the first brook, put our mouths to the stream, and drank sufficiently. It was just being for a little while, one of the "prisca gens mortalium, the primitive race of men," who ran about in the woods eating acorns and drinking water. While I stopped to refresh my mules at a little village, the inhabitants came crouding about me as an ambassadour going to their General. When they were informed of my country, a strong black fellow among them said, "Inglese! sono barbari; non credono in Dio grande. English! they are barbarians; they don't believe in the great GOD." I told him, "Excuse me Sir. We do believe in GOD, and in Jesus Christ too." "Um," said he, "e nel Papa? and in the Pope?" "No." "E perche? And why?" This was a puzzling question in these circumstances; for there was a great audience to the controversy. I thought I would try a method of my own, and very gravely replied, "Perche siamo troppo lontani. Because we are too far off."[96] A very new argument against the universal infallibility of the Pope. It took however; for my opponent mused a while, and then said, "Troppo lontano! La Sicilia è tanto lontana che l'Inghilterra; e in Sicilia si credono nel Papa. Too far off! Why Sicily is as far off as England. Yet in Sicily they believe in the Pope." "O," said I "noi siamo dieci volte più lontani che la Sicilia! We are ten times farther off than Sicily." "Aha!" said he; and seemed quite satisfied. In this manner I got off very well. I question much whether any of the learned reasonings of our protestant divines would have had so good an effect. [Footnote 96: According to Macaulay ("Essays," vol. i., p. 378), "wit was utterly wanting to Boswell."--ED.] My journey over the mountains was very entertaining. I past some immense ridges and vast woods. I was in great health and spirits, and fully able to enter into the ideas of the brave rude men whom I found in all quarters. At Bastelica where there is a stately spirited race of people, I had a large company to attend me in the convent. I liked to see their natural frankness and ease;[97] for why should men be afraid of their own species? They just came in making an easy bow, placed themselves round the room where I was sitting, rested themselves on their muskets, and immediately entered into conversation with me. They talked very feelingly of the miseries that their country had endured, and complained that they were still but in a state of poverty. I happened at that time to have an unusual flow of spirits; and as one who finds himself amongst utter strangers in a distant country has no timidity, I harangued the men of Bastelica with great fluency. I expatiated on the bravery of the Corsicans, by which they had purchased liberty, the most valuable of all possessions, and rendered themselves glorious over all Europe. Their poverty, I told them, might be remedied by a proper cultivation of their island, and by engaging a little in commerce. But I bid them remember, that they were much happier in their present state than in a state of refinement and vice, and that therefore they should beware of luxury.[98] [Footnote 97: "For my part I like very well to hear honest Goldsmith talk away carelessly." Boswell, as reported by himself. "Life of Johnson." Date of April 11, 1772.--ED.] [Footnote 98: "I give admirable dinners, and good claret; and the moment I go abroad again, I set up my chariot."--Boswell, in a letter to Temple, May 14, 1768.--ED.] What I said had the good fortune to touch them, and several of them repeated the same sentiments much better than I could do. They all expressed their strong attachment to Paoli, and called out in one voice that they were all at his command. I could with pleasure have passed a long time here. At Ornano I saw the ruins of the seat where the great Sampiero[99] had his residence. They were a droll enough society of monks in the convent at Ornano. When I told them that I was an Englishman, "Aye, aye," said one of them, "as was well observed by a reverend bishop, when talking of your pretended reformation, 'Angli olim angeli nunc diaboli. The English, formerly angels now devils.'" I looked upon this as an honest effusion of spiritual zeal. The Fathers took good care of me in temporals. [Footnote 99: Sampiero had been the leader of a revolt which broke out in 1564. He was assassinated three years later.--ED.] When I at last came within sight of Sollacarò, where Paoli was, I could not help being under considerable anxiety. My ideas of him had been greatly heightened by the conversations I had held with all sorts of people in the island, they having represented him to me as something above humanity. I had the strongest desire to see so exalted a character; but I feared that I should be unable to give a proper account why I had presumed to trouble him with a visit, and that I should sink to nothing before him. I almost wished yet to go back without seeing him.[100] These workings of sensibility employed my mind till I rode through the village and came up to the house where he was lodged. [Footnote 100: Compare Boswell's introduction to Johnson.--ED.] Leaving my servant with my guides, I past through the guards, and was met by some of the General's people, who conducted me into an antichamber, where were several gentlemen in waiting. Signor Boccociampe had notified my arrival, and I was shewn into Paoli's room. I found him alone, and was struck with his appearance. He is tall, strong, and well made; of a fair complexion, a sensible, free, and open countenance, and a manly and noble carriage. He was then in his fortieth year. He was drest in green and gold. He used to wear the common Corsican habit, but on the arrival of the French he thought a little external elegance might be of use to make the government appear in a more respectable light. He asked me what were my commands for him. I presented him a letter from Count Rivarola, and when he had read it, I shewed him my letter from Rousseau. He was polite, but very reserved. I had stood in the presence of many a prince, but I never had such a trial as in the presence of Paoli. I have already said that he is a great physiognomist. In consequence of his being in continual danger from treachery and assassination, he has formed a habit of studiously observing every new face. For ten minutes we walked backwards and forwards through the room, hardly saying a word, while he looked at me, with a steadfast, keen and penetrating eye, as if he searched my very soul. This interview was for a while very severe upon me. I was much relieved when his reserve wore off, and he began to speak more. I then ventured to address him with this compliment to the Corsicans. "Sir, I am upon my travels, and have lately visited Rome. I am come from seeing the ruins of one brave and free people; I now see the rise of another." He received my compliment very graciously; but observed that the Corsicans had no chance of being like the Romans, a great conquering nation, who should extend its empire over half the globe. Their situation, and the modern political systems, rendered this impossible. "But," said he, "Corsica may be a very happy country." He expressed a high admiration of M. Rousseau, whom Signor Buttafoco had invited to Corsica, to aid the nation in forming its laws. It seems M. de Voltaire had reported, in his rallying manner, that the invitation was merely a trick which he had put upon Rousseau. Paoli told me that when he understood this, he himself wrote to Rousseau, enforcing the invitation. Of this affair I shall give a full account in an after part of my Journal.[101] [Footnote 101: See page 222.--ED.] Some of the nobles who attended him came into the room, and in a little we were told that dinner was served up. The General did me the honour to place me next him. He had a table of fifteen or sixteen covers, having always a good many of the principal men of the island with him. He had an Italian cook who had been long in France; but he chose to have a few plain substantial dishes, avoiding every kind of luxury, and drinking no foreign wine. I felt myself under some constraint in such a circle of heroes. The General talked a great deal on history and on literature. I soon perceived that he was a fine classical scholar, that his mind was enriched with a variety of knowledge, and that his conversation at meals was instructive and entertaining. Before dinner he had spoken French. He now spoke Italian, in which he is very eloquent. We retired to another room to drink coffee. My timidity wore off. I no longer anxiously thought of myself; my whole attention was employed in listening to the illustrious commander of a nation. He recommended me to the care of the Abbé Rostini, who had lived many years in France. Signor Colonna, the lord of the manor here being from home, his house was assigned for me to live in. I was left by myself till near supper time, when I returned to the General, whose conversation improved upon me, as did the society of those about him, with whom I gradually formed an acquaintance. Every day I felt myself happier. Particular marks of attention were shewn me as a subject of Great Britain, the report of which went over to Italy, and confirmed the conjectures that I was really an envoy. In the morning I had my chocolate served up upon a silver salver adorned with the arms of Corsica. I dined and supped constantly with the General. I was visited by all the nobility, and whenever I chose to make a little tour, I was attended by a party of guards. I begged of the General not to treat me with so much ceremony; but he insisted upon it. One day when I rode out I was mounted on Paoli's own horse, with rich furniture of crimson velvet, with broad gold lace, and had my guards marching along with me.[102] I allowed myself to indulge a momentary pride in this parade, as I was curious to experience what could really be the pleasure of state and distinction with which mankind are so strangely intoxicated. [Footnote 102: "Then took Haman the apparel and the horse, and arrayed Mordecai, and brought him on horseback through the street of the city, and proclaimed before him, 'Thus shall it be done unto the man whom the king delighteth to honour.'"--Book of Esther, c. vi., v. 11.--ED.] When I returned to the continent after all this greatness, I used to joke with my acquaintance, and tell them that I could not bear to live with them, for they did not treat me with a proper respect. My time passed here in the most agreeable manner. I enjoyed a sort of luxury of noble sentiment. Paoli became more affable with me. I made myself known to him.[103] I forgot the great distance between us, and had every day some hours of private conversation with him. [Footnote 103: "Finding him (Johnson) in a placid humour, and wishing to avail myself of the opportunity which I fortunately had of consulting a sage, to hear whose wisdom, I conceived, in the ardour of youthful imagination, that men filled with a noble enthusiasm for intellectual improvement would gladly have resorted from distant lands, I opened my mind to him ingenuously, and gave him a little sketch of my life, to which he was pleased to listen with great attention."--Boswell's "Johnson." Date of June 13, 1763.--ED.] From my first setting out on this tour, I wrote down every night what I had observed during the day, throwing together a great deal, that I might afterwards make a selection at leisure. Of these particulars, the most valuable to my readers, as well as to myself, must surely be the memoirs and remarkable sayings of Paoli, which I am proud to record. Talking of the Corsican war, "Sir," said he, "if the event prove happy, we shall be called great defenders of liberty. If the event shall prove unhappy, we shall be called unfortunate rebels." The French objected to him that the Corsican nation had no regular troops. "We would not have them," said Paoli. "We should then have the bravery of this and the other regiment. At present every single man is as a regiment himself. Should the Corsicans be formed into regular troops, we should lose that personal bravery which has produced such actions among us, as in another country would have rendered famous even a Marischal."[104] [Footnote 104: See page 140.--ED.] I asked him how he could possibly have a soul so superiour to interest. "It is not superiour," said he; "my interest is to gain a name. I know well that he who does good to his country will gain that: and I expect it. Yet could I render this people happy, I would be content to be forgotten. I have an unspeakable pride. 'Una superbia indicibile.' The approbation of my own heart is enough." He said he would have great pleasure in seeing the world, and enjoying the society of the learned, and the accomplished in every country. I asked him how with these dispositions he could bear to be confined to an island yet in a rude uncivilised state; and instead of participating Attick evenings, "noctes coenaeque Deûm," be in a continual course of care and of danger. He replied in one line of Virgil, "Vincet amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido." This uttered with the fine open Italian pronunciation, and the graceful dignity of his manner, was very noble. I wished to have a statue of him taken at that moment. I asked him if he understood English. He immediately began and spoke it, which he did tolerably well. When at Naples he had known several Irish gentlemen who were officers in that service. Having a great facility in acquiring languages, he learnt English from them. But as he had been now ten years without ever speaking it, he spoke very slow. One could see that he was possessed of the words, but for want of what I may call mechanical practice, he had a difficulty in expressing himself. I was diverted with his English library. It consisted of-- Some broken volumes of the "Spectatour" and "Tatler." Pope's "Essay on Man." "Gulliver's Travels." A "History of France," in old English. And "Barclay's Apology for the Quakers." I promised to send him some English books.[105] [Footnote 105: I have sent him the works of Harrington, of Sidney, of Addison, of Trenchard, of Gordon, and of other writers in favour of liberty. I have also sent him some of our best books of morality and entertainment, in particular the works of Mr. Samuel Johnson, with a compleat set of the "Spectatour," "Tatler," and "Guardian;" and to the University of Corte, I have sent a few of the Greek and Roman Classicks, of the beautiful editions of the Messieurs Foulis at Glasgow.[A]] [Footnote A: The fate of one of these books was curious. Dr. Moore (the author of "Edward," and the father of Sir John Moore) visited Berne somewhere about the year 1772 (he gives no dates). He went to examine the public library of that town. "I happened," he says, "to open the Glasgow edition of Homer, which I saw here; on a blank page of which was an address in Latin to the Corsican General, Paoli, signed James Boswell. This very elegant book had been sent, I suppose, as a present from Mr. Boswell to his friend, the General; and, when that unfortunate chief was obliged to abandon his country, fell, with other of his effects, into the hands of the Swiss officer in the French service, who made a present of the Homer to this library."--"A View of Society and Manners in France," &c., by John Moore, M.D., vol. i., p. 307.--ED.] He convinced me how well he understood our language; for I took the liberty to shew him a Memorial which I had drawn up on the advantages to Great Britain from an alliance with Corsica, and he translated this memorial into Italian with the greatest facility. He has since given me more proofs of his knowledge of our tongue by his answers to the letters which I have had the honour to write to him in English, and in particular by a very judicious and ingenious criticism on some of Swift's works. He was well acquainted with the history of Britain. He had read many of the parliamentary debates, and had even seen a number of the "North Briton."[106] He shewed a considerable knowledge of this country, and often introduced anecdotes and drew comparisons and allusions from Britain. [Footnote 106: John Wilkes began the publication of the "North Briton" in June, 1762.--ED.] He said his great object was to form the Corsicans in such a manner that they might have a firm constitution, and might be able to subsist without him. "Our state," said he, "is young, and still requires the leading strings. I am desirous that the Corsicans should be taught to walk of themselves. Therefore when they come to me to ask whom they should chuse for their Padre del Commune, or other Magistrate, I tell them, 'You know better than I do the able and honest men among your neighbours. Consider the consequence of your choice, not only to yourselves in particular, but to the island in general.' In this manner I accustom them to feel their own importance as members of the state." After representing the severe and melancholy state of oppression under which Corsica had so long groaned, he said, "We are now to our country like the prophet Elishah stretched over the dead child of the Shunamite, eye to eye, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. It begins to recover warmth, and to revive. I hope it shall yet regain full health and vigour." I said that things would make a rapid progress, and that we should soon see all the arts and sciences flourish in Corsica. "Patience, Sir," said he. "If you saw a man who had fought a hard battle, who was much wounded, who was beaten to the ground, and who with difficulty could lift himself up, it would not be reasonable to ask him to get his hair well drest, and to put on embroidered clothes. Corsica has fought a hard battle, has been much wounded, has been beaten to the ground, and with difficulty can lift herself up. The arts and sciences are like dress and ornament. You cannot expect them from us for some time. But come back twenty or thirty years hence, and we'll shew you arts and sciences, and concerts and assemblies, and fine ladies, and we'll make you fall in love among us, Sir." He smiled a good deal, when I told him that I was much surprised to find him so amiable, accomplished, and polite; for although I knew I was to see a great man, I expected to find a rude character, an Attila king of the Goths, or a Luitprand[107], king of the Lombards. [Footnote 107: Liutprand. See Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," chap. xlix.--ED.] I observed that although he had often a placid smile upon his countenance, he hardly ever laughed. Whether loud laughter in general society be a sign of weakness or rusticity, I cannot say; but I have remarked that real great men, and men of finished behaviour, seldom fall into it. The variety, and I may say versatility, of the mind of this great man is amazing. One day when I came in to pay my respects to him before dinner, I found him in much agitation, with a circle of his nobles around him, and a Corsican standing before him like a criminal before his judge. Paoli immediately turned to me, "I am glad you are come, Sir. You protestants talk much against our doctrine of transubstantiation. Behold here the miracle of transubstantiation, a Corsican transubstantiated into a Genoese. That unworthy man who now stands before me is a Corsican, who has been long a lieutenant under the Genoese, in Capo Corso. Andrew Doria and all their greatest heroes could not be more violent for the republick than he has been, and all against his country." Then turning to the man, "Sir," said he, "Corsica makes it a rule to pardon the most unworthy of her children, when they surrender themselves, even when they are forced to do so, as is your case. You have now escaped. But take care. I shall have a strict eye upon you; and if ever you make the least attempt to return to your traiterous practices, you know I can be avenged of you." He spoke this with the fierceness of a lion, and from the awful darkness of his brow, one could see that his thoughts of vengeance were terrible. Yet when it was over, he all at once resumed his usual appearance, called out "andiamo, come along;" went to dinner, and was as chearful and gay as if nothing had happened. His notions of morality are high and refined, such as become the Father of a nation. Were he a libertine, his influence would soon vanish; for men will never trust the important concerns of society to one they know will do what is hurtful to society for his own pleasures. He told me that his father had brought him up with great strictness, and that he had very seldom deviated from the paths of virtue. That this was not from a defect of feeling and passion, but that his mind being filled with important objects, his passions were employed in more noble pursuits than those of licentious pleasure. I saw from Paoli's example the great art of preserving young men of spirit from the contagion of vice, in which there is often a species of sentiment, ingenuity and enterprise nearly allied to virtuous qualities. Shew a young man that there is more real spirit in virtue than in vice, and you have a surer hold of him, during his years of impetuosity and passion, than by convincing his judgement of all the rectitude of ethicks. One day at dinner, he gave us the principal arguments for the being and attributes of GOD. To hear these arguments repeated with graceful energy by the illustrious Paoli in the midst of his heroick nobles, was admirable. I never felt my mind more elevated. I took occasion to mention the king of Prussia's infidel writings, and in particular his epistle to Marischal Keith.[108] Paoli, who often talks with admiration of the greatness of that monarch, instead of uttering any direct censure of what he saw to be wrong in so distinguished a hero, paused a little, and then said with a grave and most expressive look, "C'est une belle consolation pour un vieux general mourant, 'En peu de tems vous ne serez plus.' It is fine consolation for an old general when dying, 'In a little while you shall be no more.'" [Footnote 108: The younger brother of the Earl Marischal (see p. 140). He took part in the rebellion of 1715, although he was but seventeen years old. He next served for ten years in the Irish Brigade in the Spanish army. He then entered the Russian service, and fought against the Turks. He was sent to England as Russian ambassador. When he came to Court he was required to speak by an interpreter when he had an audience of the king, and to appear in Russian dress. He next entered the Prussian service as Field-Marshal. He was killed in the battle of Hochkirchen, in 1758.--ED.] He observed that the Epicurean philosophy had produced but one exalted character, whereas Stoicism had been the seminary of great men. What he now said put me in mind of these noble lines of Lucan. Hi mores, haec duri immota Catonis Secta fuit, servare modum finemque tenere, Naturamque sequi, patriaeque impendere vitam, Nec sibi sed toti genitum se credere mundo. LUCAN. Pharsal. lib. ii. l. 380. These were the stricter manners of the man, And this the stubborn course in which they ran; The golden mean unchanging to pursue, Constant to keep the purpos'd end in view; Religiously to follow nature's laws, And die with pleasure in his country's cause. To think he was not for himself design'd, But born to be of use to all mankind. --ROWE. When he was asked if he would quit the island of which he had undertaken the protection, supposing a foreign power should create him a Marischal, and make him governour of a province; he replied, "I hope they will believe I am more honest, or more ambitious; for," said he, "to accept of the highest offices under a foreign power would be to serve." "To have been a colonel, a general or a marischal," said he, "would have been sufficient for my table, for my taste in dress, for the beauty whom my rank would have entitled me to attend. But it would not have been sufficient for this spirit, for this imagination." Putting his hand upon his bosom. He reasoned one day in the midst of his nobles whether the commander of a nation should be married or not. "If he is married," said he, "there is a risk that he may be distracted by private affairs, and swayed too much by a concern for his family. If he is unmarried, there is a risk that not having the tender attachments of a wife and children, he may sacrifice all to his own ambition." When I said he ought to marry and have a son to succeed him, "Sir," said he, "what security can I have that my son will think and act as I do? What sort of a son had Cicero, and what had Marcus Aurelius?" He said to me one day when we were alone, "I never will marry. I have not the conjugal virtues. Nothing would tempt me to marry, but a woman who should bring me an immense dowry, with which I might assist my country." But he spoke much in praise of marriage, as an institution which the experience of ages had found to be the best calculated for the happiness of individuals, and for the good of society. Had he been a private gentleman, he probably would have married, and I am sure would have made as good a husband and father as he does a supreme magistrate and a general. But his arduous and critical situation would not allow him to enjoy domestick felicity. He is wedded to his country, and the Corsicans are his children. He often talked to me of marriage, told me licentious pleasures were delusive and transient, that I should never be truly happy till I was married, and that he hoped to have a letter from me soon after my return home, acquainting him that I had followed his advice, and was convinced from experience that he was in the right. With such an engaging condescension did this great man behave to me. If I could but paint his manner, all my readers would be charmed with him. He has a mind fitted for philosophical speculations as well as for affairs of state. One evening at supper, he entertained us for some time with some curious reveries and conjectures as to the nature of the intelligence of beasts, with regard to which, he observed human knowledge was as yet very imperfect. He in particular seemed fond of inquiring into the language of the brute creation. He observed that beasts fully communicate their ideas to each other, and that some of them, such as dogs, can form several articulate sounds. In different ages there have been people who pretended to understand the language of birds and beasts. Perhaps, said Paoli, in a thousand years we may know this as well as we know things which appeared much more difficult to be known. I have often since this conversation indulged myself in such reveries. If it were not liable to ridicule, I would say that an acquaintance with the language of beasts would be a most agreeable acquisition to man, as it would enlarge the circle of his social intercourse. On my return to Britain I was disappointed to find nothing upon this subject in Doctour Gregory's[109] Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World, which was then just published. My disappointment however was in a good measure made up by a picture of society, drawn by that ingenious and worthy authour, which may be well applied to the Corsicans. "There is a certain period in the progress of society in which mankind appear to the greatest advantage. In this period, they have the bodily powers, and all the animal functions remaining in full vigour. They are bold, active, steady, ardent in the love of liberty and their native country. Their manners are simple, their social affections warm, and though they are greatly influenced by the ties of blood, yet they are generous and hospitable to strangers. Religion is universally regarded among them, though disguised by a variety of superstitions."[110] [Footnote 109: John Gregory, M.D., born 1724, Professor of the Practice of Physic in Edinburgh. "It is stated that no less than sixteen members of this family have held British Professorships, chiefly in the Scotch Universities."--Chalmers' "Biog. Dict.," p. 289.--ED.] [Footnote 110: Preface to "Comparative View," p. 8.] Paoli was very desirous that I should study the character of the Corsicans. "Go among them," said he, "the more you talk with them, you will do me the greater pleasure. Forget the meanness of their apparel. Hear their sentiments. You will find honour, and sense, and abilities among these poor men." His heart grew big when he spoke of his countrymen. His own great qualities appeared to unusual advantage, while he described the virtues of those for whose happiness his whole life was employed. "If," said he, "I should lead into the field an army of Corsicans against an army double their number, let me speak a few words to the Corsicans, to remind them of the honour of their country and of their brave forefathers, I do not say that they would conquer, but I am sure that not a man of them would give way. The Corsicans," said he, "have a steady resolution that would amaze you. I wish you could see one of them die. It is a proverb among the Genoese, 'I Corsi meritano la furca e la sanno soffrire. The Corsicans deserve the gallows, and they fear not to meet it.' There is a real compliment to us in this saying." He told me, that in Corsica, "criminals are put to death four and twenty hours after sentence is pronounced against them. This," said he, "may not be over catholick, but it is humane." He went on, and gave me several instances of the Corsican spirit. "A sergeant," said he, "who fell in one of our desperate actions, when just a dying, wrote to me thus. 'I salute you. Take care of my aged father. In two hours I shall be with the rest who have bravely died for their country.'" A Corsican gentleman who had been taken prisoner by the Genoese, was thrown into a dark dungeon, where he was chained to the ground. While he was in this dismal situation, the Genoese sent a message to him, that if he would accept of a commission in their service, he might have it. "No," said he. "Were I to accept of your offer, it would be with a determined purpose to take the first opportunity of returning to the service of my country. But I will not accept of it. For I would not have my countrymen even suspect that I could be one moment unfaithful." And he remained in his dungeon. Paoli went on: "I defy Rome, Sparta or Thebes to shew me thirty years of such patriotism as Corsica can boast. Though the affection between relations is exceedingly strong in the Corsicans, they will give up their nearest relations for the good of their country, and sacrifice such as have deserted to the Genoese." He gave me a noble instance of a Corsican's feeling and greatness of mind. "A criminal," said he, "was condemned to die. His nephew came to me with a lady of distinction, that she might solicit his pardon. The nephew's anxiety made him think that the lady did not speak with sufficient force and earnestness. He therefore advanced, and addressed himself to me, 'Sir, is it proper for me to speak?' as if he felt that it was unlawful to make such an application. I bid him go on. 'Sir,' said he, with the deepest concern, 'may I beg the life of my uncle? If it is granted, his relations will make a gift to the state of a thousand zechins. We will furnish fifty soldiers in pay during the siege of Furiani. We will agree that my uncle shall be banished, and will engage that he shall never return to the island.' I knew the nephew to be a man of worth, and I answered him: 'You are acquainted with the circumstances of this case. Such is my confidence in you, that if you will say that giving your uncle a pardon would be just, useful or honourable for Corsica, I promise you it shall be granted.' He turned about, burst into tears, and left me, saying, 'Non vorrei vendere l'onore della patria per mille zechini. I would not have the honour of our country sold for a thousand zechins.' And his uncle suffered." Although the General was one of the constituent members of the court of syndicato,[111] he seldom took his chair. He remained in his own apartment; and if any of those whose suits were determined by the syndicato were not pleased with the sentence, they had an audience of Paoli, who never failed to convince them that justice had been done them. This appeared to me a necessary indulgence in the infancy of government. The Corsicans having been so long in a state of anarchy, could not all at once submit their minds to the regular authority of justice. They would submit implicitly to Paoli, because they love and venerate him. But such a submission is in reality being governed by their passions. They submit to one for whom they have a personal regard. They cannot be said to be perfectly civilized till they submit to the determinations of their magistrates as officers of the state, entrusted with the administration of justice. By convincing them that the magistrates judge with abilities and uprightness, Paoli accustoms the Corsicans to have that salutary confidence in their rulers, which is necessary for securing respect and stability to the government. [Footnote 111: See page 154.--ED.] After having said much in praise of the Corsicans, "Come," said he, "you shall have a proof of what I tell you. There is a crowd in the next room, waiting for admittance to me. I will call in the first I see, and you shall hear him." He who chanced to present himself, was a venerable old man. The General shook him by the hand, and bid him good day, with an easy kindness that gave the aged peasant full encouragement to talk to his Excellency with freedom. Paoli bid him not mind me, but say on. The old man then told him that there had been an unlucky tumult in the village where he lived, and that two of his sons were killed. That looking upon this as a heavy misfortune, but without malice on the part of those who deprived him of his sons, he was willing to have allowed it to pass without enquiry. But his wife anxious for revenge, had made an application to have them apprehended and punished. That he gave his Excellency this trouble to intreat that the greatest care might be taken, lest in the heat of enmity among his neighbours, any body should be punished as guilty of the blood of his sons, who was really innocent of it. There was something so generous in this sentiment, while at the same time the old man seemed full of grief for the loss of his children, that it touched my heart in the most sensible manner. Paoli looked at me with complacency and a kind of amiable triumph on the behaviour of the old man, who had a flow of words and a vivacity of gesture which fully justified what Petrus Cyrnaeus[112] hath said of the Corsican eloquence; "Diceres omnes esse bonos causidicos. You would say they are all good pleaders." [Footnote 112: See Preface, page viii.--ED.] I found Paoli had reason to wish that I should talk much with his countrymen, as it gave me a higher opinion both of him and of them. Thuanus[113] has justly said, "Sunt mobilia Corsorum ingenia. The dispositions of the Corsicans are changeable." Yet after ten years, their attachment to Paoli is as strong as at the first. Nay, they have an enthusiastick admiration of him. "Questo grand' uomo mandato per Dio a liberare la patria. This great man whom God hath sent to free our country," was the manner in which they expressed themselves to me concerning him. [Footnote 113: Jacques-Auguste de Thou (or, as he called himself in Latin, Jacobus Augustus Thuanus), born in Paris 1553. Author of "Historia sui Temporis," in 138 books.--ED.] Those who attended on Paoli were all men of sense and abilities in their different departments. Some of them had been in foreign service. One of them, Signor Suzzoni, had been long in Germany. He spoke German to me, and recalled to my mind, the happy days which I have past among that plain, honest, brave people, who of all nations in the world, receive strangers with the greatest cordiality.[114] Signor Gian Quilico Casa Bianca, of the most ancient Corsican nobility, was much my friend. He instructed me fully with regard to the Corsican government. He had even the patience to sit by me while I wrote down an account of it, which from conversations with Paoli, I afterwards enlarged and improved. I received many civilities from the Abbé Rostini, a man of literature, and distinguished no less for the excellency of his heart. His saying of Paoli deserves to be remembered. "Nous ne craignons pas que notre General nous trompe ni qu'il se laisse tromper. We are not afraid that our General will deceive us, nor that he will let himself be deceived." [Footnote 114: They must have wonderfully improved since the days of Erasmus. "Advenientem nemo salutat, ne videantur ambire hospitem.... Ubi diu inclamaveris, tandem aliquis per fenestellam æstuarii (nam in his degunt fere usque ad solstitium æstivum) profert caput, non aliter quam e testa prospicit testudo. Is rogandus est an liceat illic diversari. Si non renuit, intelligis dari locum," &c.--"Erasmi Colloquia. Diversoria."--ED.] I also received civilities from Father Guelfucci of the order of Servites,[115] a man whose talents and virtues, united with a singular decency and sweetness of manners, have raised him to the honourable station of secretary to the General. Indeed all the gentlemen here behaved to me in the most obliging manner. We walked, rode, and went a-shooting together. [Footnote 115: Servites, or Servants of the Blessed Virgin, a religious order, first instituted in Tuscany in 1233.--ED.] The peasants and soldiers were all frank, open, lively and bold, with a certain roughness of manner which agrees well with their character, and is far from being displeasing. The General gave me an admirable instance of their plain and natural solid good sense. A young French Marquis, very rich and very vain, came over to Corsica. He had a sovereign contempt for the barbarous inhabitants, and strutted[116] about (andava a passo misurato) with prodigious airs of consequence. The Corsicans beheld him with a smile of ridicule, and said, "Let him alone, he is young." [Footnote 116: "You see yon birkie, ca'd a lord, Wha struts, and stares, and a' that." --Burns.--ED.] The Corsican peasants and soldiers are very fond of baiting cattle with the large mountain dogs. This keeps up a ferocity among them which totally extinguishes fear. I have seen a Corsican in the very heat of a baiting, run in, drive off the dogs, seize the half-frantick animal by the horns, and lead it away. The common people did not seem much given to diversions. I observed some of them in the great hall of the house of Colonna where I was lodged, amusing themselves with playing at a sort of draughts in a very curious manner. They drew upon the floor with chalk, a sufficient number of squares, chalking one all over, and leaving one open, alternately; and instead of black men and white, they had bits of stone and bits of wood. It was an admirable burlesque on gaming. The chief satisfaction of these islanders when not engaged in war or in hunting, seemed to be that of lying at their ease in the open air, recounting tales of the bravery of their countrymen, and singing songs in honour of the Corsicans, and against the Genoese. Even in the night they will continue this pastime in the open air, unless rain forces them to retire into their houses. The ambasciadore Inglese, The English ambassadour, as the good peasants and soldiers used to call me, became a great favourite among them. I got a Corsican dress made, in which I walked about with an air of true satisfaction. The General did me the honour to present me with his own pistols, made in the island, all of Corsican wood and iron, and of excellent workmanship. I had every other accoutrement. I even got one of the shells which had often sounded the alarm to liberty. I preserve them all with great care. The Corsican peasants and soldiers were quite free and easy with me. Numbers of them used to come and see me of a morning, and just go out and in as they pleased.[117] I did every thing in my power to make them fond of the British, and bid them hope for an alliance with us. They asked me a thousand questions about my country, all which I chearfully answered as well as I could. [Footnote 117: One is reminded of Gulliver in Lilliput. "I took all possible methods to cultivate this favourable disposition. The natives came, by degrees, to be less apprehensive of any danger from me. I would sometimes lie down, and let five or six of them dance on my hand."--ED.] One day they would needs hear me play upon my German flute. To have told my honest natural visitants, Really gentlemen I play very ill, and put on such airs as we do in our genteel companies, would have been highly ridiculous. I therefore immediately complied with their request. I gave them one or two Italian airs, and then some of our beautiful old Scots tunes, Gilderoy, the Lass of Patie's Mill, Corn riggs are Bonny. The pathetick simplicity and pastoral gaiety of the Scots musick, will always please those who have the genuine feelings of nature. The Corsicans were charmed with the specimens I gave them, though I may now say that they were very indifferently performed. My good friends insisted also to have an English song from me. I endeavoured to please them in this too, and was very lucky in that which occurred to me. I sung them "Hearts of oak are our ships, Hearts of oak are our men."[118] I translated it into Italian for them, and never did I see men so delighted with a song as the Corsicans were with Hearts of oak. "Cuore di querco," cried they, "bravo Inglese." It was quite a joyous riot. I fancied myself to be a recruiting sea-officer. I fancied all my chorus of Corsicans aboard the British fleet. [Footnote 118: A song written by Garrick.--ED.] Paoli talked very highly on preserving the independency of Corsica. "We may," said he, "have foreign powers for our friends; but they must be 'Amici fuori di casa. Friends at arm's length.' We may make an alliance, but we will not submit ourselves to the dominion of the greatest nation in Europe. This people who have done so much for liberty, would be hewn in pieces man by man, rather than allow Corsica to be sunk into the territories of another country. Some years ago, when a false rumour was spread that I had a design to yield up Corsica to the Emperour, a Corsican came to me, and addressed me in great agitation. 'What! shall the blood of so many heroes, who have sacrificed their lives for the freedom of Corsica, serve only to tinge the purple of a foreign prince!'" I mentioned to him the scheme of an alliance between Great Britain and Corsica. Paoli with politeness and dignity waved the subject, by saying, "The less assistance we have from allies, the greater our glory." He seemed hurt by our treatment of his country. He mentioned the severe proclamation at the last peace, in which the brave islanders were called the Rebels of Corsica. He said with a conscious pride and proper feeling, "Rebels! I did not expect that from Great Britain." He however showed his great respect for the British nation, and I could see he wished much to be in friendship with us. When I asked him what I could possibly do in return for all his goodness to me. He replied, "Solamente disingannate il suo corte. Only undeceive your court. Tell them what you have seen here. They will be curious to ask you. A man come from Corsica will be like a man come from the Antipodes." I expressed such hopes as a man of sensibility would in my situation naturally form. He saw at least one Briton devoted to his cause. I threw out many flattering ideas of future political events, imaged the British and the Corsicans strictly united both in commerce and in war, and described the blunt kindness and admiration with which the hearty, generous common people of England would treat the brave Corsicans. I insensibly got the better of his reserve upon this head. My flow of gay ideas relaxed his severity, and brightened up his humour. "Do you remember," said he, "the little people in Asia who were in danger of being oppressed by the great king of Assyria,[119] till they addressed themselves to the Romans. And the Romans, with the noble spirit of a great and free nation, stood forth, and would not suffer the great king to destroy the little people, but made an alliance with them?" [Footnote 119: When Paoli makes the Romans have dealings with the great king of Assyria, we may well say, as Mrs. Shandy said of Socrates, "He had been dead a hundred years ago."--ED.] He made no observations upon this beautiful piece of history. It was easy to see his allusion to his own nation and ours. When the General related this piece of history to me, I was negligent enough not to ask him what little people he meant. As the story made a strong impression upon me, upon my return to Britain I searched a variety of books to try if I could find it, but in vain. I therefore took the liberty in one of my letters to Paoli, to beg he would let me know it. He told me the little people was the Jews, that the story was related by several ancient authours, but that I would find it told with most precision and energy in the eighth chapter of the first book of the Maccabees. The first book of the Maccabees, though not received into the Protestant canon, is allowed by all the learned to be an authentick history. I have read Paoli's favourite story with much satisfaction, and, as in several circumstances, it very well applies to Great Britain and Corsica, is told with great eloquence, and furnishes a fine model for an alliance, I shall make no apology for transcribing the most interesting verses. "Now Judas had heard of the fame of the Romans, that they were mighty and valiant men, and such as would lovingly accept all that joined themselves unto them, and make a league of amity with all that came unto them. "And that they were men of great valour. It was told him also of their wars and noble acts which they had done amongst the Galatians, and how they had conquered them, and brought them under tribute. "And what they had done in the country of Spain, for the winning of the mines of the silver and gold which are there. "And that by their policy and patience they had conquered all the place, though it were very far from them. "It was told him besides, how they destroyed and brought under their dominion, all other kingdoms and isles that at any time resisted them. "But with their friends, and such as relied upon them, they kept amity: and that they had conquered kingdoms both far and near, insomuch as all that heard of their name were afraid of them: "Also, that whom they would help to a kingdom, those reign; and whom again they would, they displace: finally, that they were greatly exalted: "Moreover, how they had made for themselves a senate-house, wherein three hundred and twenty men sat in council dayly, consulting alway for the people, to the end that they might be well ordered. "In consideration of these things Judas chose Eupolemus the son of John the son of Accos, and Jason the son of Eleazar, and sent them to Rome, to make a league of amity and confederacy with them, "And to entreat them that they would take the yoke from them, for they saw that the kingdom of the Grecians did oppress Israel with servitude. "They went therefore to Rome, which was a very great journey, and came into the senate, where they spake, and said, "Judas Maccabeus, with his brethren, and the people of the Jews, have sent us unto you, to make a confederacy and peace with you, and that we might be registered your confederates and friends. "So that matter pleased the Romans well. "And this is the copy of the epistle which the senate wrote back again, in tables of brass, and sent to Jerusalem, that there they might have by them a memorial of peace and confederacy. "Good success be to the Romans, and to the people of the Jews, by sea and by land for ever. The sword also, and enemy be far from them. "If there come first any war upon the Romans, or any of their confederates, throughout all their dominions. "The people of the Jews shall help them, as the time shall be appointed, with all their heart. "Neither shall they give any thing unto them that make war upon them, or aid them with victuals, weapons, money or ships, as it hath seemed good unto the Romans, but they shall keep their covenant, without taking anything therefore. "In the same manner also, if war come first upon the nation of the Jews, the Romans shall help them with all their heart, according as the time shall be appointed them. "Neither shall victuals be given to them that take part against them, or weapons, or money, or ships, as it hath seemed good to the Romans; but they shall keep their covenants, and that without deceit. "According to these articles did the Romans make a covenant with the people of the Jews. "Howbeit, if hereafter the one party or the other, shall think meet to add or diminish any thing they may do it at their pleasures, and whatsoever they shall add or take away, shall be ratified. "And, as touching the evils that Demetrius doth to the Jews, we have written unto him, saying, Wherefore hast thou made thy yoke heavy upon our friends and confederates the Jews? "If therefore they complain any more against thee, we will do them justice, and fight with thee by sea and by land." I will venture to ask whether the Romans appear, in any one instance of their history, more truly great than they do here. Paoli said, "If a man would preserve the generous glow of patriotism, he must not reason too much. Mareschal Saxe reasoned; and carried the arms of France into the heart of Germany, his own country.[120] I act from sentiment, not from reasonings." [Footnote 120: "Ce fier Saxon, qu'on croit né parmi nous." --Voltaire, "Poëme de Fontenoi."--ED.] "Virtuous sentiments and habits," said he, "are beyond philosophical reasonings, which are not so strong, and are continually varying. If all the professours in Europe were formed into one society, it would no doubt be a society very respectable, and we should there be entertained with the best moral lessons. Yet I believe I should find more real virtue in a society of good peasants in some little village in the heart of your island. It might be said of these two societies, as was said of Demosthenes and Themistocles, 'Illius dicta, hujus facta magis valebant. The one was powerful in words, but the other in deeds.'" This kind of conversation led me to tell him how much I had suffered from anxious speculations. With a mind naturally inclined to melancholy, and a keen desire of inquiry, I had intensely applied myself to metaphysical researches, and reasoned beyond my depth, on such subjects as it is not given to man to know. I told him I had rendered my mind a camera obscura, that in the very heat of youth I felt the "non est tanti," the "omnia vanitas" of one who has exhausted all the sweets of his being, and is weary with dull repetition. I told him that I had almost become for ever incapable of taking a part in active life. "All this," said Paoli, "is melancholy. I have also studied metaphysicks. I know the arguments for fate and free-will, for the materiality and immateriality of the soul, and even the subtile arguments for and against the existence of matter. 'Ma lasciamo queste dispute ai oziosi. But let us leave these disputes to the idle. Io tengo sempre fermo un gran pensiero. I hold always firm one great object. I never feel a moment of despondency.'"[121] [Footnote 121: "Do not hope wholly to reason away your troubles; do not feed them with attention, and they will die imperceptibly away. Fix your thoughts upon your business, fill your intervals with company, and sunshine will again break in upon your mind."--Johnson to Boswell, March 5, 1776.--ED.] The contemplation of such a character really existing, was of more service to me than all I had been able to draw from books, from conversation, or from the exertions of my own mind. I had often enough formed the idea of a man continually such as I could conceive in my best moments. But this idea appeared like the ideas we are taught in the schools to form of things which may exist, but do not; of seas of milk, and ships of amber. But I saw my highest idea realised in Paoli. It was impossible for me, speculate as I pleased, to have a little opinion of human nature in him. One morning I remember, I came in upon him without ceremony, while he was dressing. I was glad to have an opportunity of seeing him in those teasing moments, when according to the Duke de Rochefoucault, no man is a hero to his valet de chambre. The lively nobleman who has a malicious pleasure in endeavouring to divest human nature of its dignity, by exhibiting partial views, and exaggerating faults, would have owned that Paoli was every moment of his life a hero. Paoli told me that from his earliest years, he had in view the important station which he now holds; so that his sentiments must ever have been great. I asked him how one of such elevated thoughts could submit with any degree of patience, to the unmeaning ceremonies and poor discourse of genteel society, which he certainly was obliged to do while an officer at Naples. "O," said he, "I managed it very easily. Ero connosciuto per una testa singolare, I was known to be a singular man. I talked and joked, and was merry; but I never sat down to play; I went and came as I pleased. The mirth I like is what is easy and unaffected. Je ne puis souffrir long temps les diseurs de bons mots. I cannot endure long the sayers of good things." How much superiour is this great man's idea of agreeable conversation to that of professed wits, who are continually straining for smart remarks, and lively repartees. They put themselves to much pain in order to please, and yet please less than if they would just appear as they naturally feel themselves. A company of professed wits has always appeared to me, like a company of artificers employed in some very nice and difficult work, which they are under a necessity of performing. Though calm and fully master of himself, Paoli is animated with an extraordinary degree of vivacity. Except when indisposed or greatly fatigued, he never sits down but at meals. He is perpetually in motion, walking briskly backwards and forwards. Mr. Samuel Johnson, whose comprehensive and vigorous understanding, has by long observation, attained to a perfect knowledge of human nature, when treating of biography has this reflection. "There are many invisible circumstances which, whether we read as enquiries after natural or moral knowledge; whether we intend to enlarge our science, or increase our virtue, are more important than publick occurrences. Thus Sallust the great master of nature, has not forgotten in his account of Catiline, to remark, that 'his walk was now quick, and again slow,' as an indication of a mind revolving something with violent commotion."[122] Ever mindful of the wisdom of the "Rambler," I have accustomed myself to mark the small peculiarities of character. Paoli's being perpetually in motion, nay his being so agitated that, as the same Sallust also says of Catiline, "Neque vigiliis, neque quietibus sedari poterat. He could not be quieted either by watching or by repose," are indications of his being as active and indefatigable as Catiline, but from a very different cause. The conspiratour from schemes of ruin and destruction to Rome; the patriot from schemes of liberty and felicity to Corsica. [Footnote 122: "Rambler," number 60.] Paoli told me that the vivacity of his mind was such, that he could not study above ten minutes at a time. "La testa mi rompa. My head is like to break," said he. "I can never write my lively ideas with my own hand. In writing, they escape from my mind. I call the Abbé Guelfucci, Allons presto, pigliate li pensieri. Come quickly, take my thoughts; and he writes them." Paoli has a memory like that of Themistocles; for I was assured that he knows the names of almost all the people in the island, their characters, and their connections. His memory as a man of learning, is no less uncommon. He has the best part of the classicks by heart, and he has a happy talent in applying them with propriety, which is rarely to be found. This talent is not always to be reckoned pedantry. The instances in which Paoli is shewn to display it, are a proof to the contrary. I have heard Paoli recount the revolutions of one of the ancient states, with an energy and a rapidity which shewed him to be master of the subject, to be perfectly acquainted with every spring and movement of the various events. I have heard him give what the French call, "Une catalogue raisonnée" of the most distinguished men in antiquity. His characters of them were concise, nervous and just. I regret that the fire with which he spoke upon such occasions, so dazzled me that I could not recollect his sayings so as to write them down when I retired from his presence.[123] [Footnote 123: "I recollect with admiration an animating blaze of eloquence, which roused every intellectual power in me to the highest pitch, but must have dazzled me so much, that my memory could not preserve the substance of his discourse."--Boswell's "Johnson." Date of July 30, 1763.--ED.] He just lives in the times of antiquity. He said to me, "A young man who would form his mind to glory, must not read modern memoirs; mà Plutarcho, mà Tito Livio; but Plutarch and Titus Livius." I have seen him fall into a sort of reverie, and break out into sallies of the grandest and noblest enthusiasm. I recollect two instances of this. "What a thought? that thousands owe their happiness to you!" And throwing himself into an attitude, as if he saw the lofty mountain of fame before him. "THERE is my object (pointing to the summit); if I fall, I fall at least THERE (pointing a good way up) magnis tamen excidit ausis." I ventured to reason like a libertine, that I might be confirmed in virtuous principles by so illustrious a preceptour.[124] I made light of moral feelings. I argued that conscience was vague and uncertain; that there was hardly any vice but what men might be found who have been guilty of it without remorse. "But," said he, "there is no man who has not a horrour at some vice. Different vices and different virtues have the strongest impression on different men! Mà il virtù in astratto è il nutrimento dei nostri cuori. But virtue in the abstract, is the food of our hearts." [Footnote 124: Compare Boswell's discussion with Johnson on May 7th, 1773.--ED.] Talking of Providence, he said to me with that earnestness with which a man speaks who is anxious to be believed: "I tell you on the word of an honest man, it is impossible for me not to be persuaded that GOD interposes to give freedom to Corsica. A people oppressed like the Corsicans, are certainly worthy of divine assistance. When we were in the most desperate circumstances, I never lost courage, trusting as I did in Providence." I ventured to object: "But why has not Providence interposed sooner?" He replied with a noble, serious and devout air, "Because his ways are unsearchable. I adore him for what he hath done. I revere him in what he hath not done." I gave Paoli the character of my revered friend Mr. Samuel Johnson. I have often regreted that illustrious men such as humanity produces a few times in the revolution of many ages, should not see each other; and when such arise in the same age, though at the distance of half the globe, I have been astonished how they could forbear to meet. "As steel sharpneth steel, so doth a man the countenance of his friend," says the wise monarch. What an idea may we not form of an interview between such a scholar and philosopher as Mr. Johnson, and such a legislatour and general as Paoli![125] [Footnote 125: "On the evening of October 10, 1769, I presented Dr. Johnson to General Paoli. I had greatly wished that two men, for whom I had the highest esteem, should meet. They met with a manly ease, mutually conscious of their own abilities, and of the abilities of each other."--Boswell's "Johnson."--ED.] I repeated to Paoli several of Mr. Johnson's sayings, so remarkable for strong sense and original humour. I now recollect these two. When I told Mr. Johnson that a certain authour affected in conversation to maintain, that there was no distinction between virtue and vice, he said, "Why Sir, if the fellow does not think as he speaks, he is lying; and I see not what honour he can propose to himself from having the character of a lyar. But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons."[126] [Footnote 126: See Boswell's "Johnson." Date of July 14th, 1763.--ED.] Of modern infidels and innovatours, he said, "Sir, these are all vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour. Truth Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull."[127] [Footnote 127: See Boswell's "Johnson." Date of July 20th, 1763.--ED.] I felt an elation of mind to see Paoli delighted with the sayings of Mr. Johnson, and to hear him translate them with Italian energy to the Corsican heroes. I repeated Mr. Johnson's sayings as nearly as I could, in his own peculiar forcible language,[128] for which, prejudiced or little criticks have taken upon them to find fault with him. He is above making any answer to them, but I have found a sufficient answer in a general remark in one of his excellent papers. "Difference of thoughts will produce difference of language. He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of larger meaning."[129] [Footnote 128: "Lord Pembroke said once to me at Wilton, with a happy pleasantry and some truth, that Dr. Johnson's sayings would not appear so extraordinary were it not for his _bow-wow-way_."--Boswell's "Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides," page 7.--ED.] [Footnote 129: "Idler," number 70.] I hope to be pardoned for this digression, wherein I pay a just tribute of veneration and gratitude to one from whose writings and conversation I have received instructions of which I experience the value in every scene of my life. During Paoli's administration there have been few laws made in Corsica. He mentioned one which he has found very efficacious in curbing that vindictive spirit of the Corsicans, of which I have said a good deal in a former part of this work. There was among the Corsicans a most dreadful species of revenge, called "Vendetta trasversa, Collateral revenge," which Petrus Cyrnaeus candidly acknowledges. It was this. If a man had received an injury, and could not find a proper opportunity to be revenged on his enemy personally, he revenged himself on one of his enemy's relations. So barbarous a practice, was the source of innumerable assassinations. Paoli knowing that the point of honour was every thing to the Corsicans, opposed it to the progress of the blackest of crimes, fortified by long habits. He made a law, by which it was provided, that this collateral revenge should not only be punished with death, as ordinary murther, but the memory of the offender should be disgraced for ever by a pillar of infamy. He also had it enacted that the same statute should extend to the violatours of an oath of reconciliation, once made. By thus combating a vice so destructive, he has, by a kind of shock of opposite passions, reduced the fiery Corsicans to a state of mildness, and he assured me that they were now all fully sensible of the equity of that law. While I was at Sollacarò information was received that the poor wretch who strangled the woman at the instigation of his mistress had consented to accept of his life, upon condition of becoming hangman. This made a great noise among the Corsicans, who were enraged at the creature, and said their nation was now disgraced. Paoli did not think so. He said to me, "I am glad of this. It will be of service. It will contribute to form us to a just subordination.[130] We have as yet too great an equality among us. As we must have Corsican taylours and Corsican shoemakers, we must also have a Corsican hangman." [Footnote 130: "'Sir,' said Johnson, 'I am a friend to subordination, as most conducive to the happiness of society.'"--Boswell's "Johnson." Date of June 13, 1763.--ED.] I could not help being of a different opinion. The occupations of a taylour and a shoemaker, though mean, are not odious. When I afterwards met M. Rousseau in England, and made him a report of my Corsican expedition, he agreed with me in thinking that it would be something noble for the brave islanders to be able to say that there was not a Corsican but who would rather suffer death than become a hangman; and he also agreed with me, that it might have a good effect to have always a Genoese for the hangman of Corsica. I must, however, do the Genoese the justice to observe that Paoli told me, that even one of them had suffered death in Corsica, rather than consent to become hangman. When I, with a keenness natural enough in a Briton born with an abhorrence at tyranny, talked with violence against the Genoese, Paoli said with a moderation and candour which ought to do him honour even with the republick, "It is true the Genoese are our enemies; but let us not forget that they are the descendants of those worthies who carried their arms beyond the Hellespont." There is one circumstance in Paoli's character which I present to my readers with caution, knowing how much it may be ridiculed in an age when mankind are so fond of incredulity, that they seem to pique themselves in contracting their circle of belief as much as possible. But I consider this infidel rage as but a temporary mode of the human understanding, and am well persuaded that e'er long we shall return to a more calm philosophy. I own I cannot help thinking that though we may boast some improvements in science, and in short, superior degrees of knowledge in things where our faculties can fully reach, yet we should not assume to ourselves sounder judgements than those of our fathers; I will therefore venture to relate that Paoli has at times extraordinary impressions of distant and future events. The way in which I discovered it was this: Being very desirous of studying so exalted a character, I so far presumed upon his goodness to me, as to take the liberty of asking him a thousand questions with regard to the most minute and private circumstances of his life. Having asked him one day when some of his nobles were present, whether a mind so active as his was employed even in sleep, and if he used to dream much, Signor Casa Bianca said, with an air and tone which implied something of importance, "Sì, si sogna. Yes, he dreams." And upon my asking him to explain his meaning, he told me that the General had often seen in his dreams, what afterwards came to pass. Paoli confirmed this by several instances. Said he, "I can give you no clear explanation of it. I only tell you facts. Sometimes I have been mistaken, but in general these visions have proved true. I cannot say what may be the agency of invisible spirits. They certainly must know more than we do; and there is nothing absurd in supposing that GOD should permit them to communicate their knowledge to us." He went into a most curious and pleasing disquisition on a subject, which the late ingenious Mr. Baxter has treated in a very philosophical manner, in his "Inquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul;"[131] a book which may be read with as much delight, and surely with more advantage than the works of those who endeavour to destroy our belief. Belief is favourable to the human mind, were it for nothing else but to furnish it entertainment. An infidel I should think must frequently suffer from ennui. [Footnote 131: Published in October, 1733. "The author is said to be one Baxter."--"Gentleman's Magazine" for 1750, vol. xx.--ED.] It was perhaps affectation in Socrates to say, that all he had learned to know was that he knew nothing. But surely it is a mark of wisdom, to be sensible of the limited extent of human knowledge, to examine with reverence the ways of GOD, nor presumptuously reject any opinion which has been held by the judicious and the learned, because it has been made a cloak for artifice, or had a variety of fictions raised upon it by credulity. Old Feltham says, "Every dream is not to be counted of; nor yet are all to be cast away with contempt. I would neither be a Stoick, superstitious in all; nor yet an Epicure, considerate of none."[132] And after observing how much the ancients attended to the interpretation of dreams, he adds, "Were it not for the power of the gospel in crying down the vains[133] of men, it would appear a wonder how a science so pleasing to humanity, should fall so quite to ruin."[134] [Footnote 132: "Feltham's Resolves," Cent. I., Resol. 52.] [Footnote 133: He means vanity.] [Footnote 134: "Feltham's Resolves," Cent. I., Resol. 52.] The mysterious circumstance in Paoli's character which I have ventured to relate, is universally believed in Corsica. The inhabitants of that island, like the Italians, express themselves much by signs. When I asked one of them if there had been many instances of the General's foreseeing future events, he grasped a large bunch of his hair, and replied, "Tante, Signore, So many, Sir." It may be said that the General has industriously propagated this opinion, in order that he might have more authority in civilizing a rude and ferocious people, as Lycurgus pretended to have the sanction of the oracle at Delphos, as Numa gave it out that he had frequent interviews with the nymph Egeria, or as Marius persuaded the Romans that he received divine communications from a hind. But I cannot allow myself to suppose that Paoli ever required the aid of pious frauds. Paoli, though never familiar, has the most perfect ease of behaviour. This is a mark of a real great character. The distance and reserve which some of our modern nobility affect is, because nobility is now little else than a name in comparison of what it was in ancient times. In ancient times, noblemen lived at their country seats, like princes, in hospitable grandeur. They were men of power, and every one of them could bring hundreds of followers into the field. They were then open and affable. Some of our modern nobility are so anxious to preserve an appearance of dignity which they are sensible cannot bear an examination, that they are afraid to let you come near them. Paoli is not so. Those about him come into his apartment at all hours, wake him, help him on with his clothes, are perfectly free from restraint; yet they know their distance, and, awed by his real greatness, never lose their respect for him. Though thus easy of access, particular care is taken against such attempts upon the life of the illustrious Chief, as he has good reason to apprehend from the Genoese, who have so often employed assassination merely in a political view, and who would gain so much by assassinating Paoli. A certain number of soldiers are continually on guard upon him; and as still closer guards, he has some faithful Corsican dogs. Of these five or six sleep, some in his chamber, and some at the outside of the chamber-door. He treats them with great kindness, and they are strongly attached to him. They are extremely sagacious, and know all his friends and attendants. Were any person to approach the General during the darkness of the night, they would instantly tear him in pieces. Having dogs for his attendants, is another circumstance about Paoli similar to the heroes of antiquity. Homer represents Telemachus so attended. [Greek: duô kunes argoi heponto], --HOMER, "Odyss.," lib. ii., l. 11. "Two dogs a faithful guard attend behind." --POPE. But the description given of the family of Patroclus applies better to Paoli. [Greek: Ennea tô ge anakti trapezêes kunes êsan], --HOMER, "Iliad," lib. xxiii., l. 73. "Nine large dogs domestick at his board." --POPE. Mr. Pope, in his notes on the second book of the "Odyssey," is much pleased with dogs being introduced, as it furnishes an agreeable instance of ancient simplicity. He observes that Virgil thought this circumstance worthy of his imitation, in describing old Evander.[135] So we read of Syphax, general of the Numidians, "Syphax inter duos canes stans, Scipionem appellavit.[136] Syphax standing between two dogs called to Scipio." [Footnote 135: "Æneid," lib. viii., l. 461.] [Footnote 136: I mention this on the authority of an excellent scholar, and one of our best writers, Mr. Joseph Warton, in his notes on the Aeneid; for I have not been able to find the passage in Livy which he quotes.] Talking of courage, he made a very just distinction between constitutional courage and courage from reflection. "Sir Thomas More," said he, "would not probably have mounted a breach so well as a sergeant who had never thought of death. But a sergeant would not on a scaffold have shewn the calm resolution of Sir Thomas More." On this subject he told me a very remarkable anecdote, which happened during the last war in Italy. At the siege of Tortona, the commander of the army which lay before the town, ordered Carew an Irish officer in the service of Naples, to advance with a detachment to a particular post. Having given his orders, he whispered to Carew, "Sir, I know you to be a gallant man. I have therefore put you upon this duty. I tell you in confidence, it is certain death for you all. I place you there to make the enemy spring a mine below you." Carew made a bow to the general, and led on his men in silence to the dreadful post. He there stood with an undaunted countenance, and having called to one of the soldiers for a draught of wine, "Here," said he, "I drink to all those who bravely fall in battle." Fortunately at that instant Tortona capitulated, and Carew escaped. But he had thus a full opportunity of displaying a rare instance of determined intrepidity. It is with pleasure that I record an anecdote so much to the honour of a gentleman of that nation, on which illiberal reflections are too often thrown, by those of whom it little deserves them. Whatever may be the rough jokes of wealthy insolence, or the envious sarcasms of needy jealousy, the Irish have ever been, and will continue to be, highly regarded upon the continent. Paoli's personal authority among the Corsicans struck me much. I have seen a crowd of them, with eagerness and impetuosity, endeavouring to approach him, as if they would have burst into his apartment by force. In vain did the guards attempt to restrain them; but when he called to them in a tone of firmness, "Non c'è ora ricorso, No audience now," they were hushed at once. He one afternoon gave us an entertaining dissertation on the ancient art of war. He observed that the ancients allowed of little baggage, which they very properly called "impedimenta;" whereas the moderns burthen themselves with it to such a degree, that 50,000 of our present soldiers are allowed as much baggage as was formerly thought sufficient for all the armies of the Roman empire. He said it was good for soldiers to be heavy armed, as it renders them proportionably robust; and he remarked that when the Romans lightened their arms the troops became enfeebled.[137] He made a very curious observation with regard to the towers full of armed men, which we are told were borne on the backs of their elephants. He said it must be a mistake; for if the towers were broad, there would not be room for them on the backs of elephants; for he and a friend who was an able calculatour, had measured a very large elephant at Naples, and made a computation of the space necessary to hold the number of men said to be contained in those towers, and they found that the back of the broadest elephant would not be sufficient, after making the fullest allowance for what might be hung by ballance on either side of the animal. If again the towers were high, they would fall; for he did not think it at all probable that the Romans had the art of tying on such monstrous machines at a time when they had not learnt the use even of girths to their saddles. He said he did not give too much credit to the figures on Trajan's pillar, many of which were undoubtedly false. He said it was his opinion, that those towers were only drawn by the elephants; an opinion founded in probability, and free from the difficulties of that which has been commonly received. [Footnote 137: "The enervated soldiers abandoned their own, and the public defence; and their pusillanimous indolence may be considered as the immediate cause of the downfall of the empire." Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," chapter 27.--ED.] Talking of various schemes of life, fit for a man of spirit and education; I mentioned to him that of being a foreign minister. He said he thought it a very agreeable employment for a man of parts and address, during some years of his life. "In that situation," said he, "a man will insensibly attain to a greater knowledge of men and manners, and a more perfect acquaintance with the politicks of Europe. He will be promoted according to the returns which he makes to his court. They must be accurate, distinct, without fire or ornament. He may subjoin his own opinion, but he must do it with great modesty. The ministry at home are proud." He said the greatest happiness was not in glory, but in goodness; and that Penn in his American colony, where he had established a people in quiet and contentment, was happier than Alexander the Great after destroying multitudes at the conquest of Thebes. He observed that the history of Alexander is obscure and dubious; for his captains who divided his kingdom, were too busy to record his life and actions, and would at any rate wish to render him odious to posterity. Never was I so thoroughly sensible of my own defects as while I was in Corsica. I felt how small were my abilities, and how little I knew. Ambitious to be the companion of Paoli, and to understand a country and a people which roused me so much, I wished to be a Sir James MacDonald.[138] [Footnote 138: Sir James MacDonald, baronet of the Isle of Sky, who at the age of one and twenty, had the learning and abilities of a Professour and a statesman, with the accomplishments of a man of the world. Eton and Oxford will ever remember him as one of their greatest ornaments.[B] He was well known to the most distinguished in Europe, but was carried off from all their expectations. He died at Frescati, near Rome, in 1765. Had he lived a little longer, I believe I should have prevailed with him to visit Corsica.] [Footnote B: Horace Walpole thus describes him in a letter dated September 30th, 1765:--"He is a very extraordinary young man for variety of learning. He is rather too wise for his age, and too fond of showing it; but when he has seen more of the world, he will choose to know less." See also Boswell's "Johnson." Date of July 20th, 1763.--ED.] The last day which I spent with Paoli appeared of inestimable value. I thought him more than usually great and amiable, when I was upon the eve of parting from him. The night before my departure, a little incident happened which shewed him in a most agreeable light. When the servants were bringing in the desert after supper, one of them chanced to let fall a plate of walnuts. Instead of flying into a passion at what the man could not help, Paoli said with a smile, "No matter;" and turning to me, "It is a good sign for you, Sir, Tempus est spargere nuces, It is time to scatter walnuts. It is a matrimonial omen: You must go home to your own country, and marry some fine woman whom you really like. I shall rejoice to hear of it." This was a pretty allusion to the Roman ceremony at weddings, of scattering walnuts. So Virgil's "Damon" says-- "Mopse novas incide faces: tibi ducitur uxor. Sparge marite nuces: tibi deserit Hesperus Oetam." --VIRG. "Eclog." viii, l. 30. "Thy bride comes forth! begin the festal rites! The walnuts strew! prepare the nuptial lights! O envied husband, now thy bliss is nigh! Behold for thee bright Hesper mounts the sky!" --WARTON. When I again asked Paoli if it was possible for me in any way to shew him my great respect and attachment, he replied, "Ricordatevi che Io vi sia amico, e scrivetemi. Remember that I am your friend, and write to me." I said I hoped that when he honoured me with a letter, he would write not only as a commander, but as a philosopher and a man of letters. He took me by the hand, and said, "As a friend." I dare not transcribe from my private notes the feelings which I had at this interview. I should perhaps appear too enthusiastick. I took leave of Paoli with regret and agitation, not without some hopes of seeing him again. From having known intimately so exalted a character, my sentiments of human nature were raised, while, by a sort of contagion, I felt an honest ardour to distinguish myself, and be useful, as far as my situation and abilities would allow; and I was, for the rest of my life, set free from a slavish timidity in the presence of great men, for where shall I find a man greater than Paoli? When I set out from Sollacarò I felt myself a good deal indisposed. The old house of Colonna, like the family of its master, was much decayed; so that both wind and rain found their way into my bed-chamber. From this I contracted a severe cold, which ended in a tertian ague. There was no help for it. I might well submit to some inconveniences, where I had enjoyed so much happiness. I was accompanied a part of the road by a great swarthy priest, who had never been out of Corsica. He was a very Hercules for strength and resolution. He and two other Corsicans took a castle, garrisoned by no less than fifteen Genoese. Indeed the Corsicans have such a contempt for their enemies, that I have heard them say, "Basterebbero le donne contra i Genovesi, Our women would be enough against the Genoese." This priest was a bluff, hearty, roaring fellow, troubled neither with knowledge nor care. He was ever and anon shewing me how stoutly his nag could caper. He always rode some paces before me, and sat in an attitude half turned round, with his hand clapped upon the crupper. Then he would burst out with comical songs about the devil and the Genoese,[139] and I don't know what all. In short, notwithstanding my feverishness, he kept me laughing whether I would or no. [Footnote 139: "When he came to the part-- 'We'll still make 'em run, and we'll still make 'em sweat, In spite of the devil and Brussels Gazette!' his eyes would sparkle as with the freshness of an impending event."--Letter of Charles Lambe to H.C. Robinson, January 20th, 1826.--ED.] I was returning to Corte, but I varied my road a little from the way I had come, going more upon the low country, and nearer the western shore. At Cauro I had a fine view of Ajaccio and its environs. My ague was sometime of forming, so I had frequent intervals of ease, which I employed in observing whatever occurred. I was lodged at Cauro in the house of Signor Peraldi of Ajaccio, who received me with great politeness. I found here another provincial magistracy. Before supper, Signor Peraldi and a young Abbé of Ajaccio entertained me with some airs on a violin. After they had shewn me their taste in fine improved musick, they gave me some original Corsican airs, and at my desire, they brought up four of the guards of the magistracy, and made them shew me a Corsican dance. It was truly savage. They thumped with their heels, sprung upon their toes, brandished their arms, wheeled and leaped with the most violent gesticulations. It gave me the idea of an admirable war dance. During this journey I had very bad weather. I cannot forget the worthy rectour of Cuttoli, whose house afforded me a hospitable retreat, when wet to the skin, and quite overcome by the severity of the storm, which my sickness made me little able to resist. He was directly such a venerable hermit as we read of in the old romances. His figure and manner interested me at first sight. I found he was a man well respected in the island, and that the General did him the honour to correspond with him. He gave me a simple collation of eggs, chestnuts and wine, and was very liberal of his ham and other more substantial victuals to my servant. The honest Swiss was by this time very well pleased to have his face turned towards the continent. He was heartily tired of seeing foreign parts, and meeting with scanty meals and hard beds, in an island which he could not comprehend the pleasure of visiting. He said to me, "Si J' etois encore une fois retourné à mon pais parmi ces montagnes de Suisse dont monsieur fait tant des plaisanteries, Je verrai qui m'engagera à les quitter. If I were once more at home in my own country, among those mountains of Switzerland, on which you have had so many jokes, I will see who shall prevail with me to quit them." The General, out of his great politeness, would not allow me to travel without a couple of chosen guards to attend me in case of any accidents. I made them my companions, to relieve the tediousness of my journey. One of them called Ambrosio, was a strange iron-coloured fearless creature. He had been much in war; careless of wounds, he was cooly intent on destroying the enemy. He told me, as a good anecdote, that having been so lucky as to get a view of two Genoese exactly in a line, he took his aim, and shot them both through the head at once. He talked of this just as one would talk of shooting a couple of crows. I was sure I needed be under no apprehension; but I don't know how, I desired Ambrosio to march before me that I might see him. I was upon my guard how I treated him. But as sickness frets one's temper, I sometimes forgot myself, and called him "bestia, blockhead;" and once when he was at a loss which way to go, at a wild woody part of the country, I fell into a passion, and called to him "Mi maraviglio che un uomo si bravo può esser si stupido. I am amazed that so brave a man can be so stupid." However by afterwards calling him friend, and speaking softly to him, I soon made him forget my ill humour, and we proceeded as before. Paoli had also been so good as to make me a present of one of his dogs, a strong and fierce animal. But he was too old to take an attachment to me, and I lost him between Lyons and Paris. The General has promised me a young one, to be a guard at Auchinleck. At Bogognano I came upon the same road I had formerly travelled from Corte, where I arrived safe after all my fatigues. My good fathers of the Franciscan convent, received me like an old acquaintance, and shewed a kind concern at my illness. I sent my respects to the Great Chancellor, who returned me a note, of which I insert a translation as a specimen of the hearty civility to be found among the highest in Corsica. "Many congratulations to Mr. Boswell on his return from beyond the mountains, from his servant Massesi, who is at the same time very sorry for his indisposition, which he is persuaded has been occasioned by his severe journey. He however flatters himself, that when Mr. Boswell has reposed himself a little, he will recover his usual health. In the mean time he has taken the liberty to send him a couple of fowls, which he hopes, he will honour with his acceptance, as he will need some refreshment this evening. He wishes him a good night, as does his little servant Luiggi, who will attend him to-morrow, to discharge his duty." My ague distressed me so much, that I was confined to the convent for several days: I did not however weary. I was visited by the Great Chancellor, and several others of the civil magistrates, and by Padre Mariani rectour of the university, a man of learning and abilities, as a proof of which he had been three years at Madrid in the character of secretary to the General of the Franciscans. I remember a very eloquent expression of his on the state of his country. "Corsica," said he, "has for many years past, been bleeding at all her veins. They are now closed. But after being so severely exhausted, it will take some time before she can recover perfect strength." I was also visited by Padre Leonardo, of whose animating discourse I have made mention in a former part of this book. Indeed I should not have been at a loss though my very reverend fathers had been all my society. I was not in the least looked upon as a heretick. Difference of faith was forgotten in hospitality. I went about the convent as if I had been in my own house; and the fathers without any impropriety of mirth, were yet as chearful as I could desire. I had two surgeons to attend me at Corte, a Corsican and a Piedmontese; and I got a little Jesuit's bark from the spiceria, or apothecary's shop, of the Capuchin convent. I did not however expect to be effectually cured till I should get to Bastia. I found it was perfectly safe for me to go thither. There was a kind of truce between the Corsicans and the French. Paoli had held two different amicable conferences with M. de Marboeuf their commander in chief, and was so well with him, that he gave me a letter of recommendation to him. On one of the days that my ague disturbed me least, I walked from the convent to Corte, purposely to write a letter to Mr. Samuel Johnson. I told my revered friend, that from a kind of superstition agreeable in a certain degree to him, as well as to myself, I had during my travels, written to him from Loca Solennia, places in some measure sacred. That as I had written to him from the Tomb of Melancthon, sacred to learning and piety, I now wrote to him from the palace of Pascal Paoli, sacred to wisdom and liberty; knowing that however his political principles may have been represented, he had always a generous zeal for the common rights of humanity. I gave him a sketch of the great things I had seen in Corsica, and promised him a more ample relation.[140] [Footnote 140: "He kept the greater part of my letters very carefully; and a short time before his death was attentive enough to seal them up in bundles, and ordered them to be delivered to me, which was accordingly done. Amongst them I found one, of which I had not made a copy, and which I own I read with pleasure at the distance of almost twenty years. It is dated November, 1765, at the palace of Pascal Paoli, in Corte, and is full of generous enthusiasm. After giving a sketch of what I had seen and heard in that island, it proceeded thus:--'I dare to call this a spirited tour. I dare to challenge your approbation.'"--Boswell's "Johnson." Date of 1765.] Mr. Johnson was pleased with what I wrote here; for I received at Paris an answer from him which I keep as a valuable charter. "When you return, you will return to an unaltered, and I hope, unalterable friend. All that you have to fear from me, is the vexation of disappointing me. No man loves to frustrate expectations which have been formed in his favour, and the pleasure which I promise myself from your journals and remarks, is so great, that perhaps no degree of attention or discernment will be sufficient to afford it. Come home however and take your chance. I long to see you, and to hear you; and hope that we shall not be so long separated again. Come home, and expect such a welcome as is due to him whom a wise and noble curiosity has led where perhaps, no native of this country ever was before."[141] [Footnote 141: "Having had no letter from him, ... and having been told by somebody that he was offended at my having put into my book an extract of his letter to me at Paris, I was impatient to be with him.... I found that Dr. Johnson had sent a letter to me to Scotland, and that I had nothing to complain of but his being more indifferent to my anxiety than I wished him to be." In the letter, which is dated March 23, 1768, Johnson had said, "I have omitted a long time to write to you, without knowing very well why. I could now tell why I should not write; for who would write to men who publish the letters of their friends without their leave? Yet I write to you, in spite of my caution, to tell you that I shall be glad to see you, and that I wish you would empty your head of Corsica, which I think has filled it rather too long."--ED.] I at length set out for Bastia. I went the first night to Rostino, hoping to have found there Signor Clemente de' Paoli. But unluckily he had gone upon a visit to his daughter; so that I had not an opportunity of seeing this extraordinary personage, of whom I have given so full an account,[142] for a great part of which I am indebted to Mr. Burnaby. [Footnote 142: See Appendix C.--ED.] Next day I reached Vescovato, where I was received by Signor Buttafoco, who proved superiour to the character I had conceived of him from the letter of M. Rousseau.[143] I found in him the incorrupted virtues of the brave islander, with the improvements of the continent. I found him, in short, to be a man of principle, abilities and knowledge; and at the same time a man of the world. He is now deservedly raised to the rank of colonel of the Royal Corsicans, in the service of France. [Footnote 143: In this letter a high character is given of Buttafoco. See page 141.--ED.] I past some days with Signor Buttafoco, from whose conversation I received so much pleasure, that I in a great measure forgot my ague. As various discourses have been held in Europe, concerning an invitation given to M. Rousseau to come to Corsica; and as that affair was conducted by Signor Buttafoco, who shewed me the whole correspondence between him and M. Rousseau, I am enabled to give a distinct account of it. M. Rousseau in his Political Treatise, entitled "Du Contract Social," has the following observation: "Il est encore en Europe un pays capable de législation; c'est l'isle de Corse. La valeur et la constance avec laquelle ce brave peuple a su recouvrer et défendre sa liberté mériteroit bien que quelque homme sage lui apprit à la conserver. J'ai quelque pressentiment qu'un jour cette petite isle étonnera l'Europe.[144] There is yet one country in Europe, capable of legislation; and that is the island of Corsica. The valour and the constancy with which that brave people have recovered and defended its liberty, would well deserve that some wise man should teach them how to preserve it. I have some presentiment that one day that little island will astonish Europe." [Footnote 144: "Du Contract Social," liv. ii., chap. 10.] Signor Buttafoco, upon this, wrote to M. Rousseau, returning him thanks for the honour he had done to the Corsican nation, and strongly inviting him to come over, and be that wise man who should illuminate their minds. I was allowed to take a copy of the wild philosopher's answer to this invitation; it is written with his usual eloquence. "Il est superflu, Monsieur, de chercher à exciter mon zele pour l'entreprise que vous me proposez. Sa[145] seule idée m'éleve l'ame et me transporte. Je croirois la[146] reste de mes jours bien noblement, bien vertueusement et bien heureusement employés.[147] Je croirois meme avoir bien racheté l'inutilité des autres, si je pouvois rendre ce triste reste bon en quelque chose à vos braves compatriotes; si je pouvois concourir par quelque conseil utile aux vues de votre[148] digne Chef et aux vôtres; de ce côté-là donc soyez sur de moi. Ma vie et mon coeur sont à vous." [Footnote 145: La.--ED.] [Footnote 146: Le.--ED.] [Footnote 147: Employé.--ED.] [Footnote 148: Leur. I have made the corrections by the copy given in "Rousseau's Collected Works."--ED.] "It is superfluous, Sir, to endeavour to excite my zeal for the undertaking which you propose to me. The very idea of it elevates my soul and transports me. I should esteem the rest of my days very nobly, very virtuously, and very happily employed. I should even think that I well redeemed the inutility of many of my days that are past, if I could render these sad remains of any advantage to your brave countrymen. If by any useful advice, I could concur in the views of your worthy Chief, and in yours. So far then you may be sure of me. My life and my heart are devoted to you." Such were the first effusions of Rousseau. Yet before he concluded even this first letter, he made a great many complaints of his adversities and persecutions, and started a variety of difficulties as to the proposed enterprise. The correspondence was kept up for some time, but the enthusiasm of the paradoxical philosopher gradually subsiding, the scheme came to nothing.[149] [Footnote 149: In one of his letters, dated March 24, 1765, Rousseau said:--"Sur le peu que j'ai parcouru de vos mémoires, je vois que mes idées different prodigieusement de celles de votre nation. Il ne serait pas possible que le plan que je proposerais ne fît beaucoup de mécontents, et peut-être vous-même tout le premier. Or, Monsieur, je suis rassasié de disputes et de querelles."--ED.] As I have formerly observed, M. de Voltaire thought proper to exercise his pleasantry upon occasion of this proposal,[150] in order to vex the grave Rousseau, whom he never could bear. I remember he used to talk of him with a satyrical smile, and call him, "Ce Garçon, That Lad;" I find this among my notes of M. de Voltaire's conversations, when I was with him at his Chateau de Ferney, where he entertains with the elegance rather of a real prince than of a poetical one. [Footnote 150: "Je reçus bien ... la lettre de M. Paoli; mais ... il faut vous dire, Monsieur, que le bruit de la proposition que vous m'aviez faite s'étant répandu sans que je sache comment, M. de Voltaire fit entendre à tout le monde que cette proposition était une invention de sa façon; il prétendait m'avoir écrit au nom des Corses une lettre contrefaite dont j'avais été la dupe."--Rousseau to Butta-Foco, May 26, 1765.--ED.] To have Voltaire's assertion contradicted by a letter under Paoli's own hand, was no doubt a sufficient satisfaction to Rousseau. From the account which I have attempted to give of the present constitution of Corsica, and of its illustrious Legislatour and General, it may well be conceived that the scheme of bringing M. Rousseau into that island, was magnified to an extravagant degree by the reports of the continent. It was said, that Rousseau was to be made no less than a Solon by the Corsicans, who were implicitely to receive from him a code of laws. This was by no means the scheme. Paoli was too able a man to submit the legislation of his country to one who was an entire stranger to the people, the manners, and in short to every thing in the island. Nay, I know well that Paoli pays more regard to what has been tried by the experience of ages than to the most beautiful ideal systems. Besides, the Corsicans were not all at once to be moulded at will. They were to be gradually prepared, and by one law laying the foundation for another, a compleat fabrick of jurisprudence was to be formed. Paoli's intention was to grant a generous asylum to Rousseau, to avail himself of the shining talents which appeared in his writings, by consulting with him, and catching the lights of his rich imagination, from many of which he might derive improvements to those plans which his own wisdom had laid down. But what he had principally in view, was to employ the pen of Rousseau in recording the heroick actions of the brave islanders. It is to be regretted that this project did not take place. The father of the present colonel Buttafoco made large collections for many years back. These are carefully preserved, and when joined to those made by the Abbé Rostini, would furnish ample materials for a History of Corsica. This, adorned with the genius of Rousseau, would have been one of the noblest monuments of modern times. Signor Buttafoco accompanied me to Bastia. It was comfortable to enter a good warm town after my fatigues. We went to the house of Signor Morelli, a counsellor at law here, with whom we supped. I was lodged for that night by a friend of Signor Buttafoco, in another part of the town. Next morning I waited on M. de Marboeuf. Signor Buttafoco introduced me to him, and I presented him the letter of recommendation from Paoli. He gave me a most polite reception. The brilliancy of his levee pleased me; it was a scene so different from those which I had been for some time accustomed to see. It was like passing at once from a rude and early age to a polished modern age; from the mountains of Corsica to the banks of the Seine. My ague was now become so violent that it got the better of me altogether. I was obliged to ask the French general's permission to have a chair set for me in the circle. When M. de Marboeuf was informed of my being ill, he had the goodness to ask me to stay in his house till I should recover; "I insist upon it," said he, "I have a warm room for you. My servants will get you bouillons, and every thing proper for a sick man; and we have an excellent physician." I mention all these circumstances to shew the goodness of M. de Marboeuf, to whom I shall ever consider myself as under great obligations, His invitation was given in so kind and cordial a manner, that I willingly accepted of it. I found M. de Marboeuf a worthy open-hearted Frenchman. It is a common and a very just remark, that one of the most agreeable characters in the world is a Frenchman who has served long in the army, and has arrived at that age when the fire of youth is properly tempered. Such a character is gay without levity, and judicious without severity. Such a character was the Count de Marboeuf, of an ancient family in Britanny, where there is more plainness of character than among the other French. He had been Gentilhomme de la Chambre to the worthy King Stanislaus. He took a charge of me as if he had been my near relation. He furnished me with books and every thing he could think of to amuse me. While the physician ordered me to be kept very quiet, M. de Marboeuf would allow nobody to go near me, but payed me a friendly visit alone. As I grew better he gradually encreased my society, bringing with him more and more of his officers; so that I had at last the honour of very large companies in my apartment. The officers were polite agreeable men: some of them had been prisoners in England, during the last war. One of them was a Chevalier de St. Louis, of the name of Douglas, a descendant of the illustrious house of Douglas in Scotland, by a branch settled near to Lyons. This gentleman often came and sat with me. The idea of our being in some sort countrymen, was pleasing to us both. I found here an English woman of Penrith in Cumberland. When the Highlanders marched through that country in the year 1745, she had married a soldier of the French picquets in the very midst of all the confusion and danger, and when she could hardly understand one word he said. Such freaks will love sometimes take. "Sic visum Veneri; cui placet impares Formas atque animos sub juga ahenea Saevo mittere cum joco." --HORAT. lib. i., Od. 33. "So Venus wills, whose power controuls The fond affections of our souls; With sportive cruelty she binds Unequal forms, unequal minds." --FRANCIS. M. de la Chapelle was the physician who attended me. He had been several years physician to the army at Minorca, and had now the same office in Corsica. I called him the physician of the isles. He was indeed an excellent one. That gayeté de coeur which the French enjoy, runs through all their professions. I remember the phrase of an English common soldier who told me, "that at the battle of Fontenoy, his captain received a shot in the breast, and fell," said the soldier, "with his spontoon in his hand, as prettily killed as ever I see'd a gentleman." The soldier's phrase might be used in talking of almost every thing which the French do. I may say I was prettily cured by M. de la Chapelle. But I think myself bound to relate a circumstance which shews him and his nation in the genteelest light. Though he attended me with the greatest assiduity, yet, when I was going away, he would not accept of a single Louis d'or. "No Sir," said he, "I am nobly paid by my king. I am physician to his army here. If I can at the same time, be of service to the people of the country, or to any gentleman who may come among us, I am happy. But I must be excused from taking money." M. Brion the surgeon major behaved in the same manner. As soon as I had gathered a little strength, I walked about as well as I could; and saw what was to be seen at Bastia. Signor Morelli was remarkably obliging. He made me presents of books and antiques, and of every other curiosity relating to Corsica. I never saw a more generous man. Signor Carassa, a Corsican officer in the service of France, with the order of St. Louis, was also very obliging. Having made a longer stay in Corsica than I intended, my finances were exhausted, and he let me have as much money as I pleased. M. Barlé, secretary to M. de Marboeuf, was also very obliging. In short, I know not how to express my thankfulness to all the good people whom I saw at Bastia. The French seemed to agree very well with the Corsicans. Of old, those islanders were much indebted to the interposition of France in their favour. But since the days of Sampiero, there have been many variances between them. A singular one happened in the reign of Lewis XIV. The Pope's Corsican guards in some fit of passion insulted the French ambassadour at Rome.[151] The superb monarch resolved to revenge this outrage. But Pope Alexander VII. foreseeing the consequences, agreed to the conditions required by France; which were, that the Corsican guards should be obliged to depart the ecclesiastical state, that the nation should be declared incapable ever to serve the holy see, and, that opposite to their ancient guard-house, should be erected a pyramid inscribed with their disgrace.[152] [Footnote 151: According to Voltaire it was the French who were the most to blame. Their ambassador had disgusted the Romans by his arrogance. His servants exaggerated their master's faults, and imitated "la jeunesse indisciplinable de Paris, qui se fesait alors un honneur d'attaquer toutes les nuits le guet qui vieille à la garde de la ville!" Some of them ventured one day to fall sword in hand on the Corsican guards. The Corsicans in their turn besieged the ambassador's house. Shots were fired, and a page was killed. The ambassador at once left Rome. "Le pape différa tant qu'il put la réparation, persuadé qu' avec les Français il n'y a qu' à temporiser, et que tout s'oublie." He hanged, however, a Corsican, and he took other measures to appease Lewis XIV. He learnt with alarm that the French troops were entering Italy, and that Rome was threatened with a siege. "Dans d'autres temps les excommunications de Rome auraient suivi ces outrages; mais c'étaient des armes usées et devenues ridicules." He was forced to give full satisfaction. The pyramid mentioned by Boswell was set up, but in a few years the French King allowed it to be destroyed.--See Voltaire's "Siècle de Louis XIV.," chap. vii.--ED.] [Footnote 152: Corps Diplomatique, anno 1664.] Le Brun, whose royal genius could magnify and enrich every circumstance in honour of his sovereign, has given this story as a medallion on one of the compartments of the great gallery at Versailles. France appears with a stately air, shewing to Rome the design of the pyramid; and Rome, though bearing a shield marked S.P.Q.R. receives the design with most submissive humility. I wish that France had never done the Corsicans greater harm than depriving them of the honour of being the Pope's guards. Boisseux and Maillebois[153] cannot easily be forgotten; nor can the brave islanders be blamed for complaining that a powerful nation should interpose to retard their obtaining entire possession of their country and of undisturbed freedom. [Footnote 153: The commanders of the French troops that invaded Corsica in 1738 and 1739.--ED.] M. de Marboeuf appeared to conduct himself with the greatest prudence and moderation. He told me that he wished to preserve peace in Corsica. He had entered into a convention with Paoli, mutually to give up such criminals as should fly into each others territories. Formerly not one criminal in a hundred was punished. There was no communication between the Corsicans and the Genoese; and if a criminal could but escape from the one jurisdiction to the other, he was safe. This was very easily done, so that crimes from impunity were very frequent. By this equitable convention, justice has been fully administered. Perhaps indeed the residence of the French in Corsica, has, upon the whole, been an advantage to the patriots. There have been markets twice a week at the frontiers of each garrison-town, where the Corsican peasants have sold all sorts of provisions, and brought in a good many French crowns; which have been melted down into Corsican money. A cessation of arms for a few years has been a breathing time to the nation, to prepare itself for one great effort, which will probably end in a total expulsion of the Genoese. A little leisure has been given for attending to civil improvements, towards which the example of the French has in no small degree contributed. Many of the soldiers were excellent handi-craftsmen, and could instruct the natives in various arts. M. de Marboeuf entertained himself by laying out several elegant pieces of pleasure ground; and such were the humane and amicable dispositions of this respectable officer, that he was at pains to observe what things were most wanted in Corsica, and then imported them from France, in order to shew an example to the inhabitants. He introduced, in particular, the culture of potatoes, of which there were none in the island upon his arrival.[154] This root will be of considerable service to the Corsicans, it will make a wholesome variety in their food; and as there will thereby, of consequence, be less home consumption of chestnuts, they will be able to export a greater quantity of them. [Footnote 154: About the year 1750 potatoes were not commonly known in Kidderminster, as I know from an anecdote recorded by my grandfather.--ED.] M. de Marboeuf made merry upon the reports which had been circulated, that I was no less than a minister from the British court. The "Avignon Gazette" brought us one day information that the English were going to establish Un Bureau de Commerce in Corsica. "O Sir," said he, "the secret is out. I see now the motive of your destination to these parts. It is you who are to establish this Bureau de Commerce." Idle as these rumours were, it is a fact that, when I was at Genoa, Signor Gherardi, one of their secretaries of state, very seriously told me, "Monsieur, vous m'avez fait trembler quoique je ne vous ai jamais vu. Sir, you have made me tremble although I never saw you before." And when I smiled and assured him that I was just a simple traveller, he shook his head; but said, he had very authentick information concerning me. He then told me with great gravity, "That while I travelled in Corsica, I was drest in scarlet and gold; but when I payed my respects to the Supreme Council at Corte, I appeared in a full suit of black." These important truths I fairly owned to him, and he seemed to exult over me. I was more and more obliged to M. de Marboeuf. When I was allowed by my physician, to go to his Excellency's table where we had always a large company, and every thing in great magnificence, he was so careful of me, that he would not suffer me to eat any thing, or taste a glass of wine, more than was prescribed for me. He used to say, "I am here both physician and commander in chief; so you must submit." He very politely prest me to make some stay with him, saying, "We have taken care of you when sick, I think we have a claim to you for a while, when in health." His kindness followed me after I left him. It procured me an agreeable reception from M. Michel, the French chargé d'affaires at Genoa; and was the occasion of my being honoured with great civilities at Paris, by M. L'Abbé de Marboeuf conseiller d'etat, brother of the Count, and possessing similar virtues in private life. I quitted Corsica with reluctance, when I thought of the illustrious Paoli. I wrote to him from Bastia, informing him of my illness, which I said, was owing to his having made me a man of so much consequence, that instead of putting me into a snug little room, he had lodged me in the magnificent old palace, where the wind and rain entered. His answer to my first letter is written with so much spirit, that I begged his permission to publish it, which he granted in the genteelest manner, saying, "I do not remember the contents of the letter; but I have such a confidence in Mr. Boswell, that I am sure he would not publish it if there was any thing in it improper for publick view; so he has my permission." I am thus enabled to present my readers with an original letter from Paoli. "TO JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ., "OF AUCHINLECK, SCOTLAND. "STIMATISSIMO SIGNOR BOSWELL. "RICEVEI la lettera che mi favori da Bastia, e mi consolo assai colla notizia di essersi rimessa in perfetta salute. Buon per lei che cadde in mano di un valente medico! Quando altra volta il disgusto de' paesi colti, ed ameni lo prendesse, e lo portasse in questa infelice contrada, procurerò che sia alloggiata in camere più calde, e custodita di quelle della casa Colonna in Sollacarò; mà ella ancora dovrà contentarsi di non viaggiare quando la giornata, e la stagione vogliono che si resti in casa per attendere il tempo buono. Io resto ora impaziente per la lettera che ha promesso scrivermi da Genova, dove dubito assai che la delicatezza di quelle dame non le abbia fatto fare qualche giorno di quarantena, per ispurgarsi di ogni anche più leggiero influsso, che possa avere portato seco dell' aria di questo paese; e molto più, se le fosse venuto il capriccio di far vedere quell' abito di veluto Corso, e quel berrettone, di cui i Corsi vogliono l'origine dagli elmi antichi, ed i Genovesi lo dicono inventato da quelli, che, rubando alla strada, non vogliano essere conosciuti: come se in tempo del loro governo avessero mai avuta apprensione di castigo i ladri pubblici? Son sicuro però, che ella presso avrà il buon partito con quelle amabili, e delicate persone, insinuando alle medesime, che il cuore delle belle è fatto per la compassione, non per il disprezzo, e per la tirannia; e cosi sarà rientrato facilmente nella lor grazia. Io ritornato in Corte ebbi subito la notizia del secreto sbarco dell' Abbatucci nelle spiaggie di Solenzara. Tutte le apparenze fanno credere che il medesimo sia venuto con disegni opposti alla pubblica quiete; pure si è constituito in castello, e protesta ravvedimento. Nel venire per Bocognano si seppe, che un capitano riformato Genovese cercava compagni per assassinarmi. Non potè rinvenirne e vedendosi scoperto si pose alla macchia, dove è stato ucciso dalle squadriglie che gli tenevano dietro i magistrati delle provincie oltramontane. Queste insidie non sembrano buoni preliminari del nostro accomodamento colla republica di Genova. Io sto passando il sindicato a questa provincia di Nebbio. Verso il 10 dell' entrante anderò per l'istesso oggetto in quella del Capocorso, ed il mese di Febrajo facilmente mi trattenerò in Balagna. Ritornerò poi in Corte alla primavera, per prepararmi all' apertura della consulta generale. In ogni luogo avrò presente la sua amicizia, e sarò desideroso de' continui suoi riscontri. Frattanto ella mi creda. "Suo affettuosissimo amico "PASQUALE DE' PAOLI." "PATRIMONIO, 23 Decembre, 1765." "MUCH ESTEEMED MR. BOSWELL, "I RECEIVED the letter which you wrote to me from Bastia, and am much comforted by hearing that you are restored to perfect health. It is lucky for you that you fell into the hands of an able physician. When you shall again be seized with a disgust at improved and agreeable countries, and shall return to this ill-fated land, I will take care to have you lodged in warmer and better finished apartments than those of the house of Colonna, at Sollacarò. But you again should be satisfied not to travel when the weather and the season require one to keep within doors, and wait for a fair day. I expect with impatience the letter which you promised to write to me from Genoa, where I much suspect that the delicacy of the ladies will have obliged you to perform some days of quarantine, for purifying you from every the least infection, which you may have carried with you from the air of this country; and still more so, if you have taken the whim to show that suit of Corsican velvet[155] and that bonnet of which the Corsicans will have the origin to be from the ancient helmets, whereas the Genoese say that it was invented by those who rob on the high way, in order to disguise themselves; as if during the Genoese government publick robbers needed to fear punishment. I am sure however, that you will have taken the proper method with these amiable and delicate persons, insinuating to them, that the hearts of beauties are formed for compassion, and not for disdain and tyranny: and so you will have been easily restored to their good graces. Immediately on my return to Corte, I received information of the secret landing of Abbatucci,[156] on the coast of Solenzara. All appearances make us believe, that he is come with designs contrary to the publick quiet. He has however surrendered himself a prisoner at the castle, and protests his repentance. As I passed by Bogognano, I learnt that a disbanded Genoese officer was seeking associates to assassinate me. He could not succeed, and finding that he was discovered, he betook himself to the woods; where he has been slain by the party detached by the magistrates of the provinces on the other side of the mountains, in order to intercept him. These ambuscades do not seem to be good preliminaries towards our accommodation with the republick of Genoa. I am now holding the syndicato in this province of Nebbio. About the 10th of next month, I shall go, for the same object, into the province of Capo Corso, and during the month of February, I shall probably fix my residence in Balagna. I shall return to Corte in the spring, to prepare myself for the opening of the General Consulta.[157] Wherever I am, your friendship will be present to my mind, and I shall be desirous to continue a correspondence with you. Meanwhile believe me to be "Your most affectionate friend "PASCAL PAOLI." "PATRIMONIO, 28 December, 1765." [Footnote 155: By Corsican velvet he means the coarse stuff made in the island, which is all that the Corsicans have in stead of the fine velvet of Genoa.] [Footnote 156: Abbatucci, a Corsican of a very suspicious character.] [Footnote 157: The Parliament of the nation.--ED.] Can any thing be more condescending, and at the same time shew more the firmness of an heroick mind, than this letter? With what a gallant pleasantry does the Corsican Chief talk of his enemies! One would think that the Queens of Genoa should become Rival Queens for Paoli. If they saw him I am sure they would. I take the liberty to repeat an observation made to me by that illustrious minister,[158] whom Paoli calls the Pericles of Great Britain. It may be said of Paoli, as the Cardinal de Retz said of the great Montrose, "C'est un de ces hommes qu'on ne trouve plus que dans les Vies de Plutarque. He is one of those men who are no longer to be found but in the lives of Plutarch." [Footnote 158: The Earl of Chatham. It appears from a letter published in the correspondence of the Earl of Chatham (vol. ii., p. 388) that Boswell had an interview granted him by Pitt. Boswell writes:--"I have had the honour to receive your most obliging letter, and can with difficulty restrain myself from paying you compliments on the very genteel manner in which you are pleased to treat me.... I hope that I may with propriety talk to Mr. Pitt of the views of the illustrious Paoli."--ED.] THE END. APPENDIX A. Under the head of learning I must observe that there is a printing-house at Corte, and a bookseller's shop, both kept by a Luccese, a man of some capacity in his business. He has very good types; but he prints nothing more than the publick manifestoes, calendars of feast days, and little practical devotional pieces, as also the "Corsican Gazette," which is published by authority, from time to time, just as news are collected; for it contains nothing but the news of the island. It admits no foreign intelligence, nor private anecdotes; so that there will sometimes be an interval of three months during which no news-papers are published. It will be long before the Corsicans arrive at the refinement in conducting a news-paper, of which London affords an unparalleled perfection; for I do believe an English news-paper is the most various and extraordinary composition that mankind ever produced. An English news-paper, while it informs the judicious of what is really doing in Europe, can keep pace with the wildest fancy in feigned adventures, and amuse the most desultory taste with essays on all subjects, and in every stile.--Boswell's "Account of Corsica," page 197. APPENDIX B. There are some extraordinary customs which still subsist in Corsica. In particular they have several strange ceremonies at the death of their relations. When a man dies, especially if he has been assassinated, his widow with all the married women in the village accompany the corpse to the grave, where, after various howlings, and other expressions of sorrow, the women fall upon the widow, and beat and tear her in a most miserable manner. Having thus satisfied their grief and passion, they lead her back again, covered with blood and bruises, to her own habitation. This I had no opportunity of seeing while I was in the island; but I have it from undoubted authority.--Boswell's "Account of Corsica," page 221. APPENDIX C. Having said so much of the genius and character of the Corsicans, I must beg leave to present my readers with a very distinguished Corsican character, that of Signor Clemente de' Paoli, brother of the General. This gentleman is the eldest son of the old General Giacinto Paoli. He is about fifty years of age, of a middle size and dark complexion, his eyes are quick and piercing, and he has something in the form of his mouth which renders his appearance very particular. His understanding is of the first rate; and he has by no means suffered it to lie neglected. He was married, and has an only daughter, the wife of Signor Barbaggi one of the first men in the island. For these many years past, Signor Clementi, being in a state of widowhood, has resided at Rostino, from whence the family of Paoli comes. He lives there in a very retired manner. He is of a Saturnine disposition, and his notions of religion are rather gloomy and severe. He spends his whole time in study, except what he passes at his devotions. These generally take up six or eight hours every day; during all which time he is in church, and before the altar, in a fixed posture, with his hands and eyes lifted up to heaven, with solemn fervour. He prescribes to himself, an abstemious, rigid course of life; as if he had taken the vows of some of the religious orders. He is much with the Franciscans, who have a convent at Rostino. He wears the common coarse dress of the country, and it is difficult to distinguish him from one of the lowest of the people. When he is in company he seldom speaks, and except upon important occasions, never goes into publick, or even to visit his brother at Corte. When danger calls, however, he is the first to appear in the defence of his country. He is then foremost in the ranks, and exposes himself to the hottest action; for religious fear is perfectly consistent with the greatest bravery; according to the famous line of the pious Racine, "Je crains DIEU, cher Abner; et n'ai point d'autre crainte." "I fear my GOD; and Him alone I fear." --A FRIEND. In the beginning of an engagement he is generally calm; and will frequently offer up a prayer to heaven, for the person at whom he is going to fire; saying he is sorry to be under the necessity of depriving him of life; but that he is an enemy to Corsica, and Providence has sent him in his way, in order that he may be prevented from doing any farther mischief; that he hopes GOD will pardon his crimes, and take him to himself. After he has seen two or three of his countrymen fall at his side, the case alters. His eyes flame with grief and indignation, and he becomes like one furious, dealing vengeance every where around him. His authority in the council is not less than his valour in the field. His strength of judgement and extent of knowledge, joined to the singular sanctity of his character, give him great weight in all the publick consultations; and his influence is of considerable service to his brother the General.--Boswell's "Account of Corsica," page 222. REVIEWS. DR. JOHNSON: HIS FRIENDS AND HIS CRITICS. BY GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL, D.C.L.[159] [Footnote 159: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1878] OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. "Seldom has a pleasanter commentary been written on a literary masterpiece.... What its author has aimed at has been the reproduction of the atmosphere in which Johnson lived; and he has succeeded so well that we shall look with interest for other chapters of Johnsonian literature which he promises.... Throughout the author of this pleasant volume has spared no pains to enable the present generation to realise more completely the sphere, so near and so far from this latter half of the nineteenth century, in which Johnson talked and taught."--SATURDAY REVIEW, _July 13th, 1878_. "Dr. Hill has written out of his ripe scholarship several interesting disquisitions, all tending to a better understanding of the man and his times, and all written with the ease and the absence of pretence which come of long familiarity with a subject and complete mastery of its facts."--THE EXAMINER, _July 27th, 1878_. "Dr. Hill has published a very interesting little book.... All the chapters are interesting in a high degree."--WESTMINSTER REVIEW, _October, 1878_. "We think Dr. Hill has succeeded in bringing before his readers, vividly and exactly, both the College of Johnson's youth and the University of his later years.... We think he clearly establishes that Boswell, Murphy, and Hawkins were all alike wrong in supposing that the celebrated passage in Chesterfield's letters describing the 'respectable Hottentot' refers to Johnson.... He devotes a chapter each to Langton and Beauclerk, in which he gathers together the various scattered references to them by Boswell and other biographers of Johnson and combines them into admirable sketches of each of these friends of Johnson."--WESTMINSTER REVIEW, _January, 1879_. "With great industry Dr. Hill has illustrated the condition of Oxford as a University in the last century.... His first chapter ... embodies, in a lively and entertaining form, a highly instructive picture of the University, the materials for which only laborious industry could have collected."--THE SPECTATOR, _August 17th, 1878_. "The glimpses which these essays give us of the great men of the days of Burke, Reynolds, and Goldsmith, of Oxford, of London, and of the country, are as full of interest as the most powerful romance. The opening paper on the Oxford of Johnson's time is one of the longest, best, and most original of the whole set."--THE STANDARD, _August 12th, 1878_. "Dr. Hill is at his best in examining the views of Johnson's critics. Macaulay's rough and ready assertions are subjected to a searching criticism, and Mr. Carlyle's estimate of Johnson's position in London society in 1763, if not altogether destroyed, is severely damaged."--THE ACADEMY, _July 27th, 1878_. "Dr. Hill's book is, in fact, a supplement to Boswell, is brimful of original and independent research, and displays so complete a mastery of the whole subject, that it must be regarded as only less essential to a true understanding of Johnson's life and character than Boswell himself."--THE WORLD, _July 17th, 1878_. "Dr. Hill's 'Johnson: his Friends and his Critics' is a volume which no reader, however familiar with Boswell, will think superfluous. Its method is, in the main, critical; and even so far it possesses striking novelty from the tendency of the writer's judgment to obviously juster estimates than those of previous critics, both friendly and unfriendly."--THE DAILY NEWS, _August 24th, 1878_. "The charming papers ... now published by Dr. Hill, under the title of 'Dr. Johnson: his Friends and his Critics,' will be, to admirers of the great eighteenth century lexicographer, like the discovery of some new treasure.... It is not too much to say that it is a volume which will henceforth be indispensable to all who would form a full conception of Johnson's many-sided personality."--THE GRAPHIC, _August 3rd, 1878_. "Dr. Hill's work is certainly not the outcome of any sudden itch to give forth a fresh estimate of the great lexicographer, but the result of long and careful studies and researches; very natural indeed in a member of Johnson's College at Oxford, Pembroke, but not such as any man, that was not gifted with the kind of genius which is patience, would be inclined to undertake. The first chapter, 'Oxford in Dr. Johnson's Time,' is one of the most admirable summaries of the kind we have ever read--doubly admirable here, as forming so fitting and illustrative an introduction to his work, which is very complete and thorough."--THE BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, _October, 1878_. "Dr. Hill has produced an entertaining and instructive book, based on careful and minute research, which has been prompted by keen interest in his subject. The introductory sketch of Oxford in Johnson's time is admirably executed."--THE SCOTSMAN, _August 8th, 1878_. "Every reader who would be fully informed about the period of English literature, and the men and women who then figured in society, must read Dr. Hill's volume, or miss much that is essential to a full comprehension of it."--THE NONCONFORMIST, _August 28th, 1878_. "This work is the result of long study, has been accomplished with care and diligence, and is not only in itself a piece of very pleasant reading, but tends to place before us, in a truer light than anything that has before been written, the character of a man who did so much for the English language, and who deserves better than to be forgotten by his countrymen."--THE MORNING POST, _October 15th, 1878_. 
37631	----	[Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected, all other inconsistencies are as in the original. The author's spelling has been maintained. Superscript are marked with { }.] Large-Paper Edition LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT COPIOUSLY ANNOTATED AND ABUNDANTLY ILLUSTRATED IN TEN VOLUMES VOL. VI [Illustration: WALTER SCOTT IN 1820 _From the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence_] MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT BART. by JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART In Ten Volumes VOLUME VI [Illustration: Editor's logo.] Boston and New York Houghton, Mifflin and Company The Riverside Press, Cambridge MCMI Copyright, 1901 by Houghton, Mifflin and Company All Rights Reserved Six Hundred Copies Printed Number, TABLE OF CONTENTS Chap. Page XLIII. Declining Health of Charles, Duke of Buccleuch. -- Letter on the Death of Queen Charlotte. -- Provincial Antiquities, etc. -- Extensive Sale of Copyrights to Constable & Co. -- Death of Mr. Charles Carpenter. -- Scott accepts the Offer of a Baronetcy. -- He declines to renew his Application for a Seat on the Exchequer Bench. -- Letters to Morritt, Richardson, Miss Baillie, the Duke of Buccleuch, Lord Montagu, and Captain Ferguson. -- Rob Roy played at Edinburgh. -- Letter from Jedediah Cleishbotham to Mr. Charles Mackay. 1818-1819 1 XLIV. Recurrence of Scott's Illness. -- Death of the Duke of Buccleuch. -- Letters to Captain Ferguson, Lord Montagu, Mr. Southey, and Mr. Shortreed. -- Scott's Sufferings while dictating The Bride of Lammermoor. -- Anecdotes by James Ballantyne, etc. -- Appearance of the Third Series of Tales of my Landlord. -- Anecdote of the Earl of Buchan. 1819 24 XLV. Gradual Reëstablishment of Scott's Health. -- Ivanhoe in Progress. -- His Son Walter joins the Eighteenth Regiment of Hussars. -- Scott's Correspondence with his Son. -- Miscellaneous Letters to Mrs. Maclean Clephane, M. W. Hartstonge, J. G. Lockhart, John Ballantyne, John Richardson, Miss Edgeworth, Lord Montagu, etc. -- Abbotsford visited by Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. -- Death of Mrs. William Erskine. 1819 69 XLVI. Political Alarms. -- The Radicals. -- Levies of Volunteers. -- Project of the Buccleuch Legion. -- Death of Scott's Mother, her Brother Dr. Rutherford, and her Sister Christian. -- Letters to Lord Montagu, Mr. Thomas Scott, Cornet Scott, Mr. Laidlaw, and Lady Louisa Stuart. -- Publication of Ivanhoe. 1819 106 XLVII. The Visionary. -- The Peel of Darnick. -- Scott's Saturday Excursions to Abbotsford. -- A Sunday there in February. -- Constable. -- John Ballantyne. -- Thomas Purdie, etc. -- Prince Gustavus Vasa. -- Proclamation of King George IV. -- Publication of The Monastery. 1820 132 XLVIII. Scott revisits London. -- His Portrait by Lawrence, and Bust by Chantrey. -- Anecdotes by Allan Cunningham. -- Letters to Mrs. Scott, Laidlaw, etc. -- His Baronetcy gazetted. -- Marriage of his Daughter Sophia. -- Letter to "the Baron of Galashiels." -- Visit of Prince Gustavus Vasa at Abbotsford. -- Tenders of Honorary Degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. -- Letter to Mr. Thomas Scott. 1820 147 XLIX. Autumn at Abbotsford. -- Scott's Hospitality. -- Visit of Sir Humphry Davy, Henry Mackenzie, Dr. Wollaston, and William Stewart Rose. -- Coursing on Newark Hill. -- Salmon-fishing. -- The Festival at Boldside. -- The Abbotsford Hunt. -- The Kirn, etc. 1820 172 L. Publication of The Abbot. -- The Blair-Adam Club. -- Kelso, Walton Hall, etc. -- Ballantyne's Novelists' Library. -- Acquittal of Queen Caroline. -- Service of the Duke of Buccleuch. -- Scott elected President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. -- The Celtic Society. -- Letters to Lord Montagu, Cornet Scott, Charles Scott, Allan Cunningham, etc. -- Kenilworth published. 1820-1821 189 LI. Visit to London. -- Project of the Royal Society of Literature. -- Affairs of the 18th Hussars. -- Marriage of Captain Adam Ferguson. -- Letters to Lord Sidmouth, Lord Montagu, Allan Cunningham, Mrs. Lockhart, and Cornet Scott. 1821 219 LII. Illness and Death of John Ballantyne. -- Extract from his Pocketbook. -- Letters from Blair-Adam. -- Castle-Campbell. -- Sir Samuel Shepherd. -- "Bailie Mackay," etc. -- Coronation of George IV. -- Correspondence with James Hogg and Lord Sidmouth. -- Letter on the Coronation. -- Anecdotes. -- Allan Cunningham's Memoranda. -- Completion of Chantrey's Bust. 1821 241 LIII. Publication of Mr. Adolphus's Letters on the Authorship of Waverley. 1821 267 LIV. New Buildings at Abbotsford. -- Chiefswood. -- William Erskine. -- Letter to Countess Purgstall. -- Progress of The Pirate. -- Franck's Northern Memoir, and Notes of Lord Fountainhall, published. -- Private Letters in the Reign of James I. -- Commencement of The Fortunes of Nigel. -- Second Sale of Copyrights. -- Contract for "Four Works of Fiction." -- Enormous Profits of the Novelist, and Extravagant Projects of Constable. -- The Pirate published. -- Lord Byron's Cain, dedicated to Scott. -- Affair of the Beacon Newspaper. 1821 288 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Page WALTER SCOTT IN 1820 _Frontispiece_ From the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P. R. A., in the Royal Gallery, Windsor Castle. CHARLES MACKAY AS BAILIE NICOL JARVIE 22 From the painting by Sir D. Macnee, P. R. S. A., in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. ANNE RUTHERFORD, MOTHER OF SIR WALTER SCOTT 106 After the painting at Abbotsford. SOPHIA SCOTT (Mrs. J. G. LOCKHART) 136 After the painting at Abbotsford by William Nicholson, R. S. A. WALTER SCOTT IN 1820 150 From the pencil sketch by Sir Francis Chantrey, R. A. CHIEFSWOOD 288 After the drawing by J. M. W. Turner, R. A. SIR WALTER SCOTT CHAPTER XLIII Declining Health of Charles, Duke of Buccleuch. -- Letter on the Death of Queen Charlotte. -- Provincial Antiquities, Etc. -- Extensive Sale of Copyrights to Constable and Co. -- Death of Mr. Charles Carpenter. -- Scott Accepts the Offer of a Baronetcy. -- He Declines to Renew his Application for a Seat on the Exchequer Bench. -- Letters to Morritt, Richardson, Miss Baillie, The Duke of Buccleuch, Lord Montagu, and Captain Ferguson. -- Rob Roy Played at Edinburgh. -- Letter from Jedediah Cleishbotham to Mr. Charles Mackay. 1818-1819 I have now to introduce a melancholy subject--one of the greatest afflictions that ever Scott encountered. The health of Charles, Duke of Buccleuch was by this time beginning to give way, and Scott thought it his duty to intimate his very serious apprehensions to his noble friend's brother. TO THE RIGHT HON. LORD MONTAGU, DITTON PARK, WINDSOR. EDINBURGH, 12th November, 1818. MY DEAR LORD,--I am about to write to you with feelings of the deepest anxiety. I have hesitated for two or three days whether I should communicate to your Lordship the sincere alarm which I entertain on account of the Duke's present state of health, but I have come to persuade myself, that it will be discharging a part of the duty which I owe to him, to mention my own most distressing apprehensions. I was at the cattle-show on the 6th, and executed the delegated task of toast-master, and so forth. I was told by **** that the Duke is under the influence of the muriatic bath, which occasions a good deal of uneasiness when the medicine is in possession of the system. The Duke observed the strictest diet, and remained only a short time at table, leaving me to do the honors, which I did with a sorrowful heart, endeavoring, however, to persuade myself that ****'s account, and the natural depression of spirits incidental to his finding himself unable for the time to discharge the duty to his guests, which no man could do with so much grace and kindness, were sufficient to account for the alteration of his manner and appearance. I spent Monday with him quietly and alone, and I must say that all I saw and heard was calculated to give me the greatest pain. His strength is much less, his spirits lower, and his general appearance far more unfavorable than when I left him at Drumlanrig a few weeks before. What ****, and indeed what the Duke himself, says of the medicine, may be true--but **** is very sanguine, and, like all the personal physicians attached to a person of such consequence, he is too much addicted to the _placebo_--at least I think so--too apt to fear to give offence by contradiction, or by telling that sort of truth which may controvert the wishes or habits of his patient. I feel I am communicating much pain to your Lordship, but I am sure that, excepting yourself, there is not a man in the world whose sorrow and apprehension could exceed mine in having such a task to discharge; for, as your Lordship well knows, the ties which bind me to your excellent brother are of a much stronger kind than usually connect persons so different in rank. But the alteration in voice and person, in features, and in spirits, all argue the decay of natural strength, and the increase of some internal disorder, which is gradually triumphing over the system. Much has been done in these cases by change of climate. I hinted this to the Duke at Drumlanrig, but I found his mind totally averse to it. But he made some inquiries of Harden (just returned from Italy), which seemed to imply that at least the idea of a winter in Italy or the south of France was not altogether out of his consideration. Your Lordship will consider whether he can or ought to be pressed upon this point. He is partial to Scotland, and feels the many high duties which bind him to it. But the air of this country, with its alternations of moisture and dry frost, although excellent for a healthy person, is very trying to a valetudinarian. I should not have thought of volunteering to communicate such unpleasant news, but that the family do not seem alarmed. I am not surprised at this, because, where the decay of health is very gradual, it is more easily traced by a friend who sees the patient from interval to interval, than by the affectionate eyes which are daily beholding him. Adieu, my dear Lord. God knows you will scarce read this letter with more pain than I feel in writing it. But it seems indispensable to me to communicate my sentiments of the Duke's present situation to his nearest relation and dearest friend. His life is invaluable to his country and to his family, and how dear it is to his friends can only be estimated by those who know the soundness of his understanding, the uprightness and truth of his judgment, and the generosity and warmth of his feelings. I am always, my dear Lord, most truly yours, WALTER SCOTT. Scott's letters of this and the two following months are very much occupied with the painful subject of the Duke of Buccleuch's health; but those addressed to his Grace himself are, in general, in a more jocose strain than usual. His friend's spirits were sinking, and he exerted himself in this way, in the hope of amusing the hours of languor at Bowhill. These letters are headed "Edinburgh Gazette Extraordinary," No. 1, No. 2, and so on; but they deal so much in laughable gossip about persons still living, that I find it difficult to make any extracts from them. The following paragraphs, however, from the Gazette of November the 20th, give a little information as to his own minor literary labors:-- "The article on Gourgaud's Narrative[1] _is_ by a certain _Vieux Routier_ of your Grace's acquaintance, who would willingly have some military hints from you for the continuation of the article, if at any time you should feel disposed to amuse yourself with looking at the General's most marvellous performance. His lies are certainly like the father who begot them. Do not think that at any time the little trumpery intelligence this place affords can interrupt my labors, while it amuses your Grace. I can scribble as fast in the Court of Session as anywhere else, without the least loss of time or hindrance of business. At the same time, I cannot help laughing at the miscellaneous trash I have been putting out of my hand, and the various motives which made me undertake the jobs. An article for the Edinburgh Review[2]--this for the love of Jeffrey, the editor--the first for ten years. Do., being the article _Drama_ for the Encyclopædia--this for the sake of Mr. Constable, the publisher. Do. for the Blackwoodian Magazine--this for love of the cause I espoused. Do. for the Quarterly Review[3]--this for the love of myself, I believe, or, which is the same thing, for the love of £100, which I wanted for some odd purpose. As all these folks fight like dog and cat among themselves, my situation is much like the _Suave mare magno_, and so forth.... [Footnote 1: Article on _General Gourgaud's Memoirs_ in _Blackwood's Magazine_ for November, 1818.] [Footnote 2: Article on Maturin's _Women, or Pour et Contre_. (_Miscellaneous Prose Works_, vol. xviii.)] [Footnote 3: Article on _Childe Harold_, Canto IV. (_Miscellaneous Prose Works_, vol. xvii.)] "I hope your Grace will never think of answering the Gazettes at all, or even replying to letters of business, until you find it quite convenient and easy. The Gazette will continue to appear as materials occur. Indeed I expect, in the end of next week, to look in upon Bowhill, per the Selkirk mail, about eight at night, with the hope of spending a day there, which will be more comfortable than at Abbotsford, where I should feel like a mouse below a firlot. If I find the Court can spare so important a person for one day, I shall order my pony up to meet me at Bowhill, and, supposing me to come on Friday night, I can easily return by the Blucher on Monday, dining and sleeping at Huntly Burn on the Sunday. So I shall receive all necessary reply in person." Good Queen Charlotte died on the 17th of this month; and in writing to Mr. Morritt on the 21st, Scott thus expresses what was, I believe, the universal feeling at the moment:-- "So we have lost the old Queen. She has only had the sad prerogative of being kept alive by nursing for some painful weeks, whereas perhaps a subject might have closed the scene earlier. I fear the effect of this event on public manners--were there but a weight at the back of the drawing-room door, which would slam it in the face of w----s, its fall ought to be lamented; and I believe that poor Charlotte really adopted her rules of etiquette upon a feeling of duty. If we should suppose the Princess of Wales to have been at the head of the matronage of the land for these last ten years, what would have been the difference on public opinion! No man of experience will ever expect the breath of a court to be favorable to correct morals--_sed si non caste caute tamen_. One half of the mischief is done by the publicity of the evil, which corrupts those which are near its influence, and fills with disgust and apprehension those to whom it does not directly extend. Honest old Evelyn's account of Charles the Second's court presses on one's recollection, and prepares the mind for anxious apprehensions." Towards the end of this month Scott received from his kind friend Lord Sidmouth, then Secretary of State for the Home Department, the formal announcement of the Prince Regent's desire (which had been privately communicated some months earlier through the Lord Chief Commissioner Adam) to confer on him the rank of Baronet. When Scott first heard of the Regent's gracious intention, he had signified considerable hesitation about the prudence of his accepting any such accession of rank; for it had not escaped his observation, that such airy sounds, however modestly people may be disposed to estimate them, are apt to entail in the upshot additional cost upon their way of living, and to affect accordingly the plastic fancies, feelings, and habits of their children. But Lord Sidmouth's letter happened to reach him a few days after he had heard of the sudden death of his wife's brother, Charles Carpenter, who had bequeathed the reversion of his fortune to his sister's family; and this circumstance disposed Scott to waive his scruples, chiefly with a view to the professional advantage of his eldest son, who had by this time fixed on the life of a soldier. As is usually the case, the estimate of Mr. Carpenter's property transmitted at the time to England proved to have been an exaggerated one; as nearly as my present information goes, the amount was doubled. But as to the only question of any interest, to wit, how Scott himself felt on all these matters at the moment, the following letter to one whom he had long leaned to as a brother, will be more satisfactory than anything else it is in my power to quote:-- TO J. B. S. MORRITT, ESQ., M. P., ROKEBY. EDINBURGH, 7th December, 1818. MY DEAR MORRITT,--I know you are indifferent to nothing that concerns us, and therefore I take an early opportunity to acquaint you with the mixture of evil and good which has very lately befallen us. On Saturday last we had the advice of the death of my wife's brother, Charles Carpenter, commercial resident at Salem, in the Madras Establishment. This event has given her great distress. She has not, that we know of, a single blood-relation left in the world, for her uncle, the Chevalier de la Volere,[4] colonel of a Russian regiment, is believed to have been killed in the campaign of 1813. My wife has been very unwell for two days, and is only now sitting up and mixing with us. She has that sympathy which we are all bound to pay, but feels she wants that personal interest in her sorrow which could only be grounded on a personal acquaintance with the deceased. Mr. Carpenter has, with great propriety, left his property in life-rent to his wife--the capital to my children. It seems to amount to about £40,000. Upwards of £30,000 is in the British funds; the rest, to an uncertain value, in India. I hope this prospect of independence will not make my children different from that which they have usually been--docile, dutiful, and affectionate. I trust it will not. At least, the first expression of their feelings was honorable, for it was a unanimous wish to give up all to their mother. This I explained to them was out of the question; but that, if they should be in possession at any time of this property, they ought, among them, to settle an income of £400 or £500 on their mother for her life, to supply her with a fund at her own uncontrolled disposal, for any indulgence or useful purpose that might be required. Mrs. Scott will stand in no need of this; but it is a pity to let kind affections run to waste; and if they never have it in their power to pay such a debt, their willingness to have done so will be a pleasant reflection. I am Scotchman enough to hate the breaking up of family ties, and the too close adherence to personal property. For myself, this event makes me neither richer nor poorer _directly_; but indirectly it will permit me to do something for my poor brother Tom's family, besides pleasing myself in "_plantings_, and _policies_, and _biggings_,"[5] with a safe conscience. There is another thing I have to whisper to your faithful ear. Our fat friend, being desirous to honor Literature in my unworthy person, has intimated to me, by his organ the Doctor,[6] that, with consent ample and unanimous of all the potential voices of all his ministers, each more happy than another of course on so joyful an occasion, he proposes to dub me Baronet. It would be easy saying a parcel of fine things about my contempt of rank, and so forth; but although I would not have gone a step out of my way to have asked, or bought, or begged or borrowed a distinction, which to me personally will rather be inconvenient than otherwise, yet, coming as it does directly from the source of feudal honors, and as an honor, I am really gratified with it;--especially as it is intimated that it is his Royal Highness's pleasure to heat the oven for me expressly, without waiting till he has some new _batch_ of Baronets ready in dough. In plain English, I am to be gazetted _per se_. My poor friend Carpenter's bequest to my family has taken away a certain degree of _impecuniosity_, a necessity of saving cheese-parings and candle-ends, which always looks inconsistent with any little pretension to rank. But as things now stand, Advance banners in the name of God and Saint Andrew. Remember, I anticipate the jest, "I like not such grinning honor as Sir Walter hath."[7] After all, if one must speak for himself, I have my quarters and emblazonments, free of all stain but Border theft and High Treason, which I hope are gentlemanlike crimes; and I hope Sir Walter Scott will not sound worse than Sir Humphry Davy, though my merits are as much under his, in point of utility, as can well be imagined. But a name is something, and mine is the better of the two. Set down this flourish to the account of national and provincial pride, for you must know we have more Messieurs de Sotenville[8] in our Border counties than anywhere else in the Lowlands--I cannot say for the Highlands. The Duke of Buccleuch, greatly to my joy, resolves to go to France for a season. Adam Ferguson goes with him, to glad him by the way. Charlotte and the young folks join in kind compliments. Most truly yours, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 4: I know nothing of the history or fate of this gentleman, except that he was an ardent Royalist, and emigrated from France early in the Revolution.] [Footnote 5: I believe this is a quotation from some old Scotch chronicler on the character of King James V.] [Footnote 6: _The Doctor_ was Mr. Canning's nickname for Lord Sidmouth, the son of an accomplished physician, the intimate friend of the great Lord Chatham. Mr. Sheridan, when the Scotch Members deserted the Addington administration upon a trying vote, had the grace to say to the Premier, across the table of the House of Commons,--"Doctor! the Thanes fly from thee!"] [Footnote 7: Sir Walter Blunt--_1st King Henry IV._, Act V. Scene 3.] [Footnote 8: See Molière's _George Dandin_.] A few additional circumstances are given in a letter of the same week to Joanna Baillie. To her, after mentioning the testamentary provisions of Mr. Carpenter, Scott says:-- MY DEAR FRIEND,--I am going to tell you a little secret. I have changed my mind, or rather existing circumstances have led to my altering my opinions in a case of sublunary honor. I have now before me Lord Sidmouth's letter, containing the Prince's gracious and unsolicited intention to give me a Baronetcy. It will neither make me better nor worse than I feel myself--in fact it will be an incumbrance rather than otherwise; but it may be of consequence to Walter, for the title is worth something in the army, although not in a learned profession. The Duke of Buccleuch and Scott of Harden, who, as the heads of my clan and the sources of my gentry, are good judges of what I ought to do, have both given me their earnest opinion to accept of an honor directly derived from the source of honor, and neither begged nor bought, as is the usual fashion. Several of my ancestors bore the title in the seventeenth century; and were it of consequence, I have no reason to be ashamed of the decent and respectable persons who connect me with that period when they carried into the field, like Madoc-- "The crescent, at whose gleam the _Cambrian_ oft, Cursing his perilous tenure, wound his horn"-- so that, as a gentleman, I may stand on as good a footing as other new creations. Respecting the reasons peculiar to myself which have made the Prince show his respect for general literature in my person, I cannot be a good judge, and your friendly zeal will make you a partial one: the purpose is fair, honorable, and creditable to the Sovereign, even though it should number him among the monarchs who made blunders in literary patronage. You know Pope says:-- "The Hero William, and the Martyr Charles, One knighted Blackmore, and one pensioned Quarles."[9] So let the intention sanctify the error, if there should be one on this great occasion. The time of this grand affair is uncertain: it is coupled with an invitation to London, which it would be inconvenient to me to accept, unless it should happen that I am called to come up by the affairs of poor Carpenter's estate. Indeed, the prospects of my children form the principal reason for a change of sentiments upon this flattering offer, joined to my belief that, though I may still be a scribbler from inveterate habit, I shall hardly engage again in any work of consequence. We had a delightful visit from the Richardsons, only rather too short. He will give you a picture of Abbotsford, but not as it exists in my mind's eye, waving with all its future honors. The pinasters are thriving very well, and in a year or two more Joanna's Bower will be worthy of the name. At present it is like Sir Roger de Coverley's portrait, which hovered between its resemblance to the good knight and to a Saracen. Now the said bower has still such a resemblance to its original character of a gravel pit, that it is not fit to be shown to "bairns and fools," who, according to our old canny proverb, should never see half-done work; but Nature, if she works slowly, works surely, and your laurels at Abbotsford will soon flourish as fair as those you have won on Parnassus. I rather fear that a quantity of game, which was shipped awhile ago at Inverness for the Doctor, never reached him: it is rather a transitory commodity in London; there were ptarmigan, grouse, and black game. I shall be grieved if they have miscarried.--My health, thank God, continues as strong as at any period in my life; only I think of rule and diet more than I used to do, and observe as much as in me lies the advice of my friendly physician, who took such kind care of me: my best respects attend him, Mrs. Baillie, and Mrs. Agnes. Ever, my dear friend, most faithfully yours, W. S. [Footnote 9: _Imitations of Horace._ B. ii. Ep. 1. v. 386.] In the next of these letters Scott alludes, among other things, to a scene of innocent pleasure which I often witnessed afterwards. The whole of the ancient ceremonial of the _daft days_, as they are called in Scotland, obtained respect at Abbotsford. He said it was _uncanny_, and would certainly have felt it very uncomfortable, not to welcome the new year in the midst of his family and a few old friends, with the immemorial libation of a _het pint_; but of all the consecrated ceremonies of the time, none gave him such delight as the visit which he received as _Laird_ from all the children on his estate, on the last morning of every December--when, in the words of an obscure poet often quoted by him, "The cottage bairns sing blithe and gay, At the ha' door for _hogmanay_." TO MISS JOANNA BAILLIE, HAMPSTEAD. ABBOTSFORD, 1st January, 1819. MY DEAR FRIEND,--Many thanks for your kind letter. Ten brace of ptarmigan sailed from Inverness about the 24th, directed for Dr. Baillie;--if they should have reached, I hope you would seize some for yourself and friends, as I learn the Doctor is on duty at Windsor. I do not know the name of the vessel, but they were addressed to Dr. Baillie, London, which I trust was enough, for there are not _two_. The Doctor has been exercising his skill upon my dear friend and chief, the Duke of Buccleuch, to whom I am more attached than to any person beyond the reach of my own family, and has advised him to do what, by my earnest advice, he ought to have done three years ago--namely, to go to Lisbon: he left this vicinity with much reluctance to go to Toulouse, but if he will be advised, should not stop save in Portugal or the south of Spain. The Duke is one of those retired and high-spirited men who will never be known until the world asks what became of the huge oak that grew on the brow of the hill, and sheltered such an extent of ground. During the late distress, though his own immense rents remained in arrears, and though I know he was pinched for money, as all men were, but more especially the possessors of entailed estates, he absented himself from London in order to pay with ease to himself the laborers employed on his various estates. These amounted (for I have often seen the roll and helped to check it) to nine hundred and fifty men, working at day wages, each of whom on a moderate average might maintain three persons, since the single men have mothers, sisters, and aged or very young relations to protect and assist. Indeed it is wonderful how much even a small sum, comparatively, will do in supporting the Scottish laborer, who is in his natural state perhaps one of the best, most intelligent, and kind-hearted of human beings; and in truth I have limited my other habits of expense very much since I fell into the habit of employing mine honest people. I wish you could have seen about a hundred children, being almost entirely supported by their fathers' or brothers' labor, come down yesterday to dance to the pipes, and get a piece of cake and bannock, and pence apiece (no very deadly largess) in honor of _hogmanay_. I declare to you, my dear friend, that when I thought the poor fellows who kept these children so neat, and well taught, and well behaved, were slaving the whole day for eighteen-pence or twenty-pence at the most, I was ashamed of their gratitude, and of their becks and bows. But, after all, one does what one can, and it is better twenty families should be comfortable according to their wishes and habits, than half that number should be raised above their situation. Besides, like Fortunio in the fairy tale, I have my gifted men--the best wrestler and cudgel-player--the best runner and leaper--the best shot in the little district; and as I am partial to all manly and athletic exercises, these are great favorites, being otherwise decent persons, and bearing their faculties meekly. All this smells of sad egotism, but what can I write to you about, save what is uppermost in my own thoughts: and here am I, thinning old plantations and planting new ones; now undoing what has been done, and now doing what I suppose no one would do but myself, and accomplishing all my magical transformations by the arms and legs of the aforesaid genii, conjured up to my aid at eighteen-pence a day. There is no one with me but my wife, to whom the change of scene and air, with the facility of easy and uninterrupted exercise, is of service. The young people remain in Edinburgh to look after their lessons, and Walter, though passionately fond of shooting, only stayed three days with us, his mind running entirely on mathematics and fortification, French and German. One of the excellencies of Abbotsford is very bad pens and ink; and besides, this being New Year's Day, and my writing-room above the servants' hall, the progress of my correspondence is a little interrupted by the Piper singing Gaelic songs to the servants, and their applause in consequence. Adieu, my good and indulgent friend: the best influences of the New Year attend you and yours, who so well deserve all that they can bring. Most affectionately yours, WALTER SCOTT. Before quitting the year 1818, I ought to have mentioned that among Scott's miscellaneous occupations in its autumn, he found time to contribute some curious materials toward a new edition of Burt's Letters from the North of Scotland, which had been undertaken by his old acquaintance, Mr. Robert Jameson. During the winter session he appears to have made little progress with his novel; his painful seizures of cramp were again recurring frequently, and he probably thought it better to allow the story of Lammermoor to lie over until his health should be reëstablished. In the mean time he drew up a set of topographical and historical essays, which originally appeared in the successive numbers of the splendidly illustrated work, entitled Provincial Antiquities of Scotland.[10] But he did this merely to gratify his own love of the subject, and because, well or ill, he must be doing something. He declined all pecuniary recompense; but afterwards, when the success of the publication was secure, accepted from the proprietors some of the beautiful drawings by Turner, Thomson, and other artists, which had been prepared to accompany his text. These drawings are now in the little breakfast-room at Abbotsford--the same which had been constructed for his own den, and which I found him occupying as such in the spring of 1819. [Footnote 10: These charming essays are now reprinted in his _Miscellaneous Prose Works_ (Edition 1834) vol. vii.] In the course of December, 1818, he also opened an important negotiation with Messrs. Constable, which was completed early in the ensuing year. The cost of his building had, as is usual, exceeded his calculation; and he had both a large addition to it, and some new purchases of land, in view. Moreover, his eldest son had now fixed on the cavalry, in which service every step infers very considerable expense. The details of this negotiation are remarkable;--Scott considered himself as a very fortunate man when Constable, who at first offered £10,000 for all his then existing copyrights, agreed to give for them £12,000. Meeting a friend in the street, just after the deed had been executed, he said he wagered no man could guess at how large a price Constable had estimated his "eild kye" (cows barren from age). The copyrights thus transferred were, as specified in the instrument:-- "The said Walter Scott, Esq.'s present share, being the entire copyright, of Waverley. Do. do Guy Mannering. Do. do Antiquary. Do. do Rob Roy. Do. do Tales of My Landlord, 1st Series. Do. do do. 2d Series. Do. do do. 3d Series. Do. do Bridal of Triermain. Do. do Harold the Dauntless. Do. do Sir Tristrem. Do. do Roderick Collection, Do. do Paul's Letters. Do. being one eighth of The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Do. being one half of The Lady of the Lake. Do. being one half of Rokeby. Do. being one half of The Lord of the Isles." The instrument contained a clause binding Messrs. Constable never to divulge the name of the Author of Waverley during his life, under a penalty of £2000. I may observe, that had these booksellers fulfilled their part of this agreement, by paying off, prior to their insolvency in 1826, the whole bonds for £12,000, which they signed on the 2d of February, 1819, no interest in the copyrights above specified could have been expected to revert to the Author of Waverley: but more of this in due season. He alludes to the progress of the treaty in the following letter to Captain Adam Ferguson, who had, as has already appeared, left Scotland with the Duke of Buccleuch. His Grace hearing, when in London, that one of the Barons of Exchequer at Edinburgh meant speedily to resign, the Captain had, by his desire, written to urge on Scott the propriety of renewing his application for a seat on that bench; which, however, Scott at once refused to do. There were several reasons for this abstinence; among others, he thought such a promotion at this time would interfere with a project which he had formed of joining "the Chief and the Aide-de-Camp" in the course of the spring, and accomplishing in their society the tour of Portugal and Spain--perhaps of Italy also. Some such excursion had been strongly recommended to him by his own physicians, as the likeliest means of interrupting those habits of sedulous exertion at the desk, which they all regarded as the true source of his recent ailments, and the only serious obstacle to his cure; and his standing as a Clerk of Session, considering how largely he had labored in that capacity for infirm brethren, would have easily secured him a twelve-month's leave of absence from the Judges of his Court. But the principal motive was, as we shall see, his reluctance to interfere with the claims of the then Sheriff of Mid-Lothian, his own and Ferguson's old friend and schoolfellow, Sir William Rae--who, however, accepted the more ambitious post of Lord Advocate, in the course of the ensuing summer. TO CAPTAIN ADAM FERGUSON, DITTON PARK, WINDSOR. 15th January, 1819. DEAR ADAM,--Many thanks for your kind letter, this moment received. I would not for the world stand in Jackie (I beg his pardon, Sir John) Peartree's way.[11] He has merited the cushion _en haut_, and besides he needs it. To me it would make little difference in point of income. The _otium cum dignitate_, if it ever come, will come as well years after this as now. Besides, I am afraid the opening will be soon made, through the death of our dear friend the Chief Baron, of whose health the accounts are unfavorable.[12] Immediate promotion would be inconvenient to me, rather than otherwise, because I have the desire, like an old fool as I am, _courir un peu le monde_. I am beginning to draw out from my literary commerce. Constable has offered me £10,000 for the copyrights of published works which have already produced more than twice the sum. I stand out for £12,000. Tell this to the Duke; he knows how I managed to keep the hen till the rainy day was past. I will write two lines to Lord Melville, just to make my bow for the present, resigning any claims I have through the patronage of my kindest and best friend, for I have no other, till the next opportunity. I should have been truly vexed if the Duke had thought of writing about this. I don't wish to hear from him till I can have his account of the lines of Torres Vedras. I care so little how or where I travel, that I am not sure at all whether I shall not come to Lisbon and surprise you, instead of going to Italy by Switzerland; that is, providing the state of Spain will allow me, without any unreasonable danger of my throat, to get from Lisbon to Madrid, and thence to Gibraltar. I am determined to roll a little about, for I have lost much of my usual views of summer pleasure here. But I trust we shall have one day the Maid of Lorn (recovered of her lameness), and Charlie Stuart (reconciled to bogs), and Sibyl Grey (no longer retrograde), and the Duke set up by a southern climate, and his military and civil aides-de-camp, with all the rout of younkers and dogs, and a brown hillside, introductory to a good dinner at Bowhill or Drumlanrig, and a merry evening. Amen, and God send it. As to my mouth being stopped with the froth of the title, that is, as the learned Partridge says, a _non sequitur_. You know the schoolboy's expedient of first asking mustard for his beef, and then beef for his mustard. Now, as they put the mustard on my plate, without my asking it, I shall consider myself, time and place serving, as entitled to ask a slice of beef; that is to say, I would do so if I cared much about it; but as it is, I trust it to time and chance, which, as you, dear Adam, know, have (added to the exertions of kind friends) been wonderful allies of mine. People usually wish their letters to come to hand, but I hope you will not receive this in Britain. I am impatient to hear you have sailed. All here are well and hearty. The Baronet[13] and I propose to go up to the Castle to-morrow to fix on the most convenient floor of the Crown House for your mansion, in hopes you will stand treat for gin-grog and Cheshire cheese on your return, to reward our labor. The whole expense will fall within the Treasury order, and it is important to see things made convenient. I will write a long letter to the Duke to Lisbon. Yours ever, WALTER SCOTT. P. S.--No news here, but that the goodly hulk of conceit and tallow, which was called Macculloch, of the Royal Hotel, Prince's Street, was put to bed dead-drunk on Wednesday night, and taken out the next morning dead-by-itself-dead. Mair skaith at Sheriffmuir. [Footnote 11: _Jackie Peartree_ had, it seems, been Sir William Rae's nickname at the High School. He probably owed it to some exploit in an orchard.] [Footnote 12: The Right Honorable Robert Dundas of Arniston, Chief Baron of the Scotch Exchequer, died 17th June, 1819. See _post_, p. 123.] [Footnote 13: Mr. William Clerk.] TO J. RICHARDSON, ESQ., FLUDYER STREET, WESTMINSTER. EDINBURGH, 18th January, 1819. MY DEAR RICHARDSON,--Many thanks for your kind letter. I own I did mystify Mrs. **** a little about the report you mention; and I am glad to hear the finesse succeeded.[14] She came up to me with a great overflow of gratitude for the delight and pleasure, and so forth, which she owed to me on account of these books. Now, as she knew very well that I had never owned myself the author, this was not _polite_ politeness, and she had no right to force me up into a corner and compel me to tell her a word more than I chose, upon a subject which concerned no one but myself--and I have no notion of being pumped by any old dowager Lady of Session, male or female. So I gave in dilatory defences, under protestation to add and eik; for I trust, in learning a new slang, you have not forgot the old. In plain words, I denied the charge, and as she insisted to know who else _could_ write these novels, I suggested Adam Ferguson as a person having all the information and capacity necessary for that purpose. But the inference that he _was_ the author was of her own deducing; and thus ended her attempt, notwithstanding her having primed the pump with a good dose of flattery. It is remarkable, that among all my real friends to whom I did not choose to communicate this matter, not one ever thought it proper or delicate to tease me about it. Respecting the knighthood, I can only say, that coming as it does, and I finding myself and my family in circumstances which will not render the _petit titre_ ridiculous, I think there would be more vanity in declining than in accepting what is offered to me by the express wish of the Sovereign as a mark of favor and distinction. Will you be so kind as to inquire and let me know what the fees, etc., of a baronetcy amount to--for I must provide myself accordingly, not knowing exactly when this same title may descend upon me. I am afraid the sauce is rather smart. I should like also to know what is to be done respecting registration of arms and so forth. Will you make these inquiries for me _sotto voce_? I should not suppose, from the persons who sometimes receive this honor, that there is any inquiry about descent or genealogy; mine were decent enough folks, and enjoyed the honor in the seventeenth century, so I shall not be first of the title; and it will sound like that of a Christian knight, as Sir Sidney Smith said. I had a letter from our immortal Joanna some fortnight since, when I was enjoying myself at Abbotsford. Never was there such a season, flowers springing, birds singing, grubs eating the wheat--as if it was the end of May. After all, nature had a grotesque and inconsistent appearance, and I could not help thinking she resembled a withered beauty who persists in looking youthy, and dressing conform thereto. I thought the loch should have had its blue frozen surface, and russet all about it, instead of an unnatural gayety of green. So much are we the children of habit, that we cannot always enjoy thoroughly the alterations which are most for our advantage.--They have filled up the historical chair here. I own I wish it had been with our friend Campbell, whose genius is such an honor to his country. But he has cast anchor I suppose in the south. Your friend, Mrs. Scott, was much cast down with her brother's death. His bequest to my family leaves my own property much at my own disposal, which is pleasant enough. I was foolish enough sometimes to be vexed at the prospect of my library being sold _sub hasta_, which is now less likely to happen. I always am, most truly yours, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 14: The wife of one of the Edinburgh Judges is alluded to.] On the 15th of February, 1819, Scott witnessed the first representation, on the Edinburgh boards, of the most meritorious and successful of all the _Terryfications_, though Terry himself was not the manufacturer. The drama of Rob Roy will never again be got up so well, in all its parts, as it then was by William Murray's company; the manager's own _Captain Thornton_ was excellent--and so was the _Dugald Creature_ of a Mr. Duff--there was also a good _Mattie_--(about whose equipment, by the bye, Scott felt such interest that he left his box between the acts to remind Mr. Murray that she "must have a mantle with her lanthorn;")--but the great and unrivalled attraction was the personification of _Bailie Jarvie_, by Charles Mackay, who, being himself a native of Glasgow, entered into the minutest peculiarities of the character with high _gusto_, and gave the west-country dialect in its most racy perfection. It was extremely diverting to watch the play of Scott's features during this admirable realization of his conception; and I must add, that the behavior of the Edinburgh audience on all such occasions, while the secret of the novels was preserved, reflected great honor on their good taste and delicacy of feeling. He seldom, in those days, entered his box without receiving some mark of general respect and admiration; but I never heard of any pretext being laid hold of to connect these demonstrations with the piece he had come to witness, or, in short, to do or say anything likely to interrupt his quiet enjoyment of the evening in the midst of his family and friends. The Rob Roy had a continued run of forty-one nights, during February and March; and it was played once a week, at least, for many years afterwards.[15] Mackay, of course, always selected it for his benefit;--and I now print from Scott's MS. a letter, which, no doubt, reached the mimic Bailie in the handwriting of one of the Ballantynes, on the first of these occurrences:-- [Footnote 15: "Between February 15, 1819, and March 14, 1837, _Rob Roy_ was played in the Theatre-Royal, Edinburgh, 285 times."--_Letter from Mr. W. Murray._ [Nicol Jarvie remained Mr. Mackay's masterpiece, but his Dominie Sampson and Meg Dods in the dramas founded on _Guy Mannering_ and _St. Ronan's Well_ were very successful. He died in Glasgow in 1857.]] TO MR. CHARLES MACKAY, THEATRE-ROYAL, EDIN{R}. (_Private._) FRIEND MACKAY,--My lawful occasions having brought me from my residence at Gandercleuch to this great city, it was my lot to fall into company with certain friends, who impetrated from me a consent to behold the stage-play, which hath been framed forth of an history entitled Rob (_seu potius_ Robert) Roy; which history, although it existeth not in mine erudite work, entitled Tales of my Landlord, hath nathless a near relation in style and structure to those pleasant narrations. Wherefore, having surmounted those arguments whilk were founded upon the unseemliness of a personage in my place and profession appearing in an open stage-play house, and having buttoned the terminations of my cravat into my bosom, in order to preserve mine incognito, and indued an outer coat over mine usual garments, so that the hue thereof might not betray my calling, I did place myself (much elbowed by those who little knew whom they did incommode) in that place of the Theatre called the two-shilling gallery, and beheld the show with great delectation, even from the rising of the curtain to the fall thereof. [Illustration: CHARLES MACKAY _From the painting by Sir D. Macnee_] Chiefly, my facetious friend, was I enamored of the very lively representation of Bailie Nicol Jarvie, in so much that I became desirous to communicate to thee my great admiration thereof, nothing doubting that it will give thee satisfaction to be apprised of the same. Yet further, in case thou shouldst be of that numerous class of persons who set less store by good words than good deeds, and understanding that there is assigned unto each stage-player a special night, called a benefit (it will do thee no harm to know that the phrase cometh from two Latin words, _bene_ and _facio_), on which their friends and patrons show forth their benevolence, I now send thee mine in the form of a five-ell web (_hoc jocose_, to express a note for £5), as a meet present for the Bailie, himself a weaver, and the son of a worthy deacon of that craft. The which propine I send thee in token that it is my purpose, business and health permitting, to occupy the central place of the pit on the night of thy said beneficiary or benefit. Friend Mackay! from one, whose profession it is to teach others, thou must excuse the freedom of a caution. I trust thou wilt remember that, as excellence in thine art cannot be attained without much labor, so neither can it be extended, or even maintained, without constant and unremitted exertion; and further, that the decorum of a performer's private character (and it gladdeth me to hear that thine is respectable) addeth not a little to the value of his public exertions. Finally, in respect there is nothing perfect in this world,--at least I have never received a wholly faultless version from the very best of my pupils--I pray thee not to let Rob Roy twirl thee around in the ecstasy of thy joy, in regard it oversteps the limits of nature, which otherwise thou so sedulously preservest in thine admirable national portraiture of Bailie Nicol Jarvie.--I remain thy sincere friend and well-wisher, JEDEDIAH CLEISHBOTHAM. CHAPTER XLIV Recurrence of Scott's Illness. -- Death of the Duke of Buccleuch. -- Letters to Captain Ferguson, Lord Montagu, Mr. Southey, and Mr. Shortreed. -- Scott's Sufferings while Dictating the Bride of Lammermoor. -- Anecdotes by James Ballantyne, Etc. -- Appearance of the Third Series of Tales of My Landlord. -- Anecdote of the Earl of Buchan. 1819 It had been Scott's purpose to spend the Easter vacation in London, and receive his baronetcy; but this was prevented by the serious recurrence of the malady which so much alarmed his friends in the early part of the year 1817, and which had continued ever since to torment him at intervals. The subsequent correspondence will show that afflictions of various sorts were accumulated on his head at the same period:-- TO THE LORD MONTAGU, DITTON PARK, WINDSOR. EDINBURGH, 4th March, 1819. MY DEAR LORD,--The Lord President tells me he has a letter from his son, Captain Charles Hope, R. N., who had just taken leave of our High Chief, upon the deck of the Liffey. He had not seen the Duke for a fortnight, and was pleasingly surprised to find his health and general appearance so very much improved. For my part, having watched him with such unremitting attention, I feel very confident in the effect of a change of air and of climate. It is with great pleasure that I find the Duke has received an answer from me respecting a matter about which he was anxious, and on which I could make his mind quite easy. His Grace wished Adam Ferguson to assist him as his confidential secretary; and with all the scrupulous delicacy that belongs to his character, he did not like to propose this, except through my medium as a common friend. Now, I can answer for Adam, as I can for myself, that he will have the highest pleasure in giving assistance in every possible way the Duke can desire; and if forty years' intimacy can entitle one man to speak for another, I believe the Duke can find nowhere a person so highly qualified for such a confidential situation. He was educated for business, understands it well, and was long a military secretary;--his temper and manners your Lordship can judge as well as I can, and his worth and honor are of the very first water. I confess I should not be surprised if the Duke should wish to continue the connection even afterwards, for I have often thought that two hours' letter-writing, which is his Grace's daily allowance, is rather worse than the duty of a Clerk of Session, because there is no vacation. Much of this might surely be saved by an intelligent friend, on whose style of expression, prudence, and secrecy, his Grace could put perfect reliance. Two words marked on any letter by his own hand would enable such a person to refuse more or less positively--to grant directly or conditionally--or, in short, to maintain the exterior forms of the very troublesome and extensive correspondence which his Grace's high situation entails upon him. I think it is Monsieur le Duc de Saint-Simon who tells us of one of Louis XIV.'s ministers _qu'il avoit la plume_--which he explains by saying that it was his duty to imitate the King's handwriting so closely, as to be almost undistinguishable, and make him on all occasions _parler très noblement_. I wonder how the Duke gets on without such a friend. In the mean time, however, I am glad I can assure him of Ferguson's willing and ready assistance while abroad; and I am happy to find still further that he had got that assurance before they sailed, for tedious hours occur on board of ship, when it will serve as a relief to talk over any of the private affairs which the Duke wishes to entrust to him. I have been very unwell from a visitation of my old enemy, the cramp in my stomach, which much resembles, as I conceive, the process by which _the deil_ would make one's _king's-hood_ into a _spleuchan_,[16] according to the anathema of Burns. Unfortunately, the opiates which the medical people think indispensable to relieve spasms, bring on a habit of body which has to be counteracted by medicines of a different tendency, so as to produce a most disagreeable see-saw--a kind of pull-devil, pull-baker contention, the field of battle being my unfortunate _præcordia_. I am better to-day, and I trust shall be able to dispense with these alternations. I still hope to be in London in April. I will write to the Duke regularly, for distance of place acts in a contrary ratio on the mind and on the eye: trifles, instead of being diminished, as in prospect, become important and interesting, and therefore he shall have a budget of them. Hogg is here busy with his Jacobite songs. I wish he may get handsomely through, for he is profoundly ignorant of history, and it is an awkward thing to read in order that you may write.[17] I give him all the help I can, but he sometimes poses me. For instance, he came yesterday, open mouth, inquiring what great dignified clergyman had distinguished himself at Killiecrankie--not exactly the scene where one would have expected a churchman to shine--and I found, with some difficulty, that he had mistaken Major-General Canon, called, in Kennedy's Latin Song, _Canonicus Gallovidiensis_, for the canon of a cathedral. _Ex ungue leonem._ Ever, my dear Lord, your truly obliged and faithful WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 16: _King's-Hood_--"The second of the four stomachs of ruminating animals." JAMIESON.--_Spleuchan_--The Gaelic name of the Highlander's tobacco-pouch.] [Footnote 17: "I am sure I produced two volumes of Jacobite Relics, such as no man in Scotland or England could have produced but myself." So says Hogg, _ipse_--see his _Autobiography_, 1832, p. 88. I never saw the Shepherd so elated as he was on the appearance of a very severe article on this book in the _Edinburgh Review_; for, to his exquisite delight, the hostile critic selected for _exceptive_ encomium one "old Jacobite strain," namely, _Donald M'Gillavry_, which Hogg had fabricated the year before. Scott, too, enjoyed this joke almost as much as the Shepherd.] Before this letter reached Lord Montagu, his brother had sailed for Lisbon. The Duke of Wellington had placed his house in that capital (the Palace _das Necessidades_) at the Duke of Buccleuch's disposal; and in the affectionate care and cheerful society of Captain Ferguson, the invalid had every additional source of comfort that his friends could have wished for him. But the malady had gone too far to be arrested by a change of climate; and the letter which he had addressed to Scott, when about to embark at Portsmouth, is endorsed with these words: "_The last I ever received from my dear friend the Duke of Buccleuch.--Alas! alas!_" The principal object of this letter was to remind Scott of his promise to sit to Raeburn for a portrait, to be hung up in that favorite residence where the Duke had enjoyed most of his society. "My prodigious undertaking," writes his Grace, "of a west wing at Bowhill, is begun. A library of forty-one feet by twenty-one is to be added to the present drawing-room. A space for one picture is reserved over the fireplace, and in this warm situation I intend to place the Guardian of Literature. I should be happy to have my friend Maida appear. It is now almost proverbial, 'Walter Scott and his Dog.' Raeburn should be warned that I am as well acquainted with my friend's hands and arms as with his nose--and Vandyke was of my opinion. Many of R.'s works are shamefully finished--the face studied, but everything else neglected. This is a fair opportunity of producing something really worthy of his skill." I shall insert by and by Scott's answer--which never reached the Duke's hand--with another letter of the same date to Captain Ferguson; but I must first introduce one, addressed a fortnight earlier to Mr. Southey, who had been distressed by the accounts he received of Scott's health from an American traveller, Mr. George Ticknor of Boston--a friend, and worthy to be such, of Mr. Washington Irving.[18] The Poet Laureate, by the way, had adverted also to an impudent trick of a London bookseller, who shortly before this time announced certain volumes of Grub Street manufacture, as "A New Series of the Tales of my Landlord," and who, when John Ballantyne, as the "agent for the Author of Waverley," published a declaration that the volumes thus advertised were not from that writer's pen, met John's declaration by an audacious rejoinder--impeaching his authority, and asserting that nothing but the personal appearance in the field of the gentleman for whom Ballantyne pretended to act, could shake his belief that he was himself in the confidence of the true Simon Pure.[19] This affair gave considerable uneasiness at the time, and for a moment the dropping of Scott's mask seems to have been pronounced advisable by both Ballantyne and Constable. But he was not to be worked upon by such means as these. He calmly replied, "The author who lends himself to such a trick must be a blockhead--let them publish, and that will serve our purpose better than anything we ourselves could do." I have forgotten the names of the "tales," which, being published accordingly, fell still-born from the press. Mr. Southey had likewise dropped some allusions to another newspaper story of Scott's being seriously engaged in a dramatic work--a rumor which probably originated in the assistance he had lent to Terry in some of the recent highly popular adaptations of his novels to the purposes of the stage; though it is not impossible that some hint of the _Devorgoil_ matter may have transpired. "It is reported," said the Laureate, "that you are about to bring forth a play, and I am greatly in hopes it may be true; for I am verily persuaded that in this course you might run as brilliant a career as you have already done in narrative--both in prose and rhyme;--for as for believing that you have a double in the field--not I! Those same powers would be equally certain of success in the drama, and were you to give them a dramatic direction, and reign for a third seven years upon the stage, you would stand alone in literary history. Indeed already I believe that no man ever afforded so much delight to so great a number of his contemporaries in this or in any other country. God bless you, my dear Scott, and believe me ever yours affectionately, R. S." Mr. Southey's letter had further announced his wife's safe delivery of a son; the approach of the conclusion of his History of Brazil; and his undertaking of the Life of Wesley. [Footnote 18: [In _The Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor_ will be found some interesting notes regarding his visits to Castle Street, and two days spent at Abbotsford in March, 1819.]] [Footnote 19: June, 1839.--A friend has sent me the following advertisement from an Edinburgh newspaper of 1819:-- TALES OF MY LANDLORD. "The Public are respectfully informed, that the Work announced for publication under the title of 'TALES OF MY LANDLORD, Fourth Series, containing _Pontefract Castle_,' is not written by the Author of the First, Second, and Third Series of TALES OF MY LANDLORD, of which we are the Proprietors and Publishers. ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO."] TO ROBERT SOUTHEY, ESQ., KESWICK. ABBOTSFORD, 4th April, 1819. MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--Tidings from you must be always acceptable, even were the bowl in the act of breaking at the fountain--and my health is at present very _totterish_. I have gone through a cruel succession of spasms and sickness, which have terminated in a special fit of the jaundice, so that I might sit for the image of Plutus, the god of specie, so far as complexion goes. I shall like our American acquaintance the better that he has sharpened your remembrance of me, but he is also a wondrous fellow for romantic lore and antiquarian research, considering his country. I have now seen four or five well-lettered Americans, ardent in pursuit of knowledge, and free from the ignorance and forward presumption which distinguish many of their countrymen. I hope they will inoculate their country with a love of letters, so nearly allied to a desire of peace and a sense of public justice--virtues to which the great Transatlantic community is more strange than could be wished. Accept my best and most sincere wishes for the health and strength of your latest pledge of affection. When I think what you have already suffered, I can imagine with what mixture of feelings this event must necessarily affect you; but you need not to be told that we are in better guidance than our own. I trust in God this late blessing will be permanent, and inherit your talents and virtues. When I look around me, and see how many men seem to make it their pride to misuse high qualifications, can I be less interested than I truly am in the fate of one who has uniformly dedicated his splendid powers to maintaining the best interests of humanity? I am very angry at the time you are to be in London, as I must be there in about a fortnight, or so soon as I can shake off this depressing complaint, and it would add not a little that I should meet you there. My chief purpose is to put my eldest son into the army. I could have wished he had chosen another profession, but have no title to combat a choice which would have been my own had my lameness permitted. Walter has apparently the dispositions and habits fitted for the military profession, a very quiet and steady temper, an attachment to mathematics and their application, good sense, and uncommon personal strength and activity, with address in most exercises, particularly horsemanship. --I had written thus far last week when I was interrupted, first by the arrival of our friend Ticknor with Mr. Cogswell, another well-accomplished Yankee--(by the bye, we have them of all sorts, _e. g._, one Mr. ****, rather a fine man, whom the girls have christened, with some humor, the Yankee Doodle _Dandie_). They have had Tom Drum's entertainment, for I have been seized with one or two successive _crises_ of my cruel malady, lasting in the utmost anguish from eight to ten hours. If I had not the strength of a team of horses, I could never have fought through it, and through the heavy fire of medical artillery, scarce less exhausting--for bleeding, blistering, calomel, and ipecacuanha have gone on without intermission--while, during the agony of the spasms, laudanum became necessary in the most liberal doses, though inconsistent with the general treatment. I did not lose my senses, because I resolved to keep them, but I thought once or twice they would have gone overboard, top and top-gallant. I should be a great fool, and a most ungrateful wretch, to complain of such inflictions as these. My life has been, in all its private and public relations, as fortunate perhaps as was ever lived, up to this period; and whether pain or misfortune may lie behind the dark curtain of futurity, I am already a sufficient debtor to the bounty of Providence to be resigned to it. Fear is an evil that has never mixed with my nature, nor has even unwonted good fortune rendered my love of life tenacious; and so I can look forward to the possible conclusion of these scenes of agony with reasonable equanimity, and suffer chiefly through the sympathetic distress of my family. --Other ten days have passed away, for I would not send this Jeremiad to tease you, while its termination seemed doubtful. For the present, "The game is done--I've won, I've won, Quoth she, and whistles thrice."[20] I am this day, for the first time, free from the relics of my disorder, and, except in point of weakness, perfectly well. But no broken-down hunter had ever so many sprung sinews, whelks, and bruises. I am like Sancho after the doughty affair of the Yanguesian Carriers, and all through the unnatural twisting of the muscles under the influence of that _Goule_, the cramp. I must be swathed in Goulard and Rosemary spirits--_probatum est_. I shall not fine and renew a lease of popularity upon the theatre. To write for low, ill-informed, and conceited actors, whom you must please, for your success is necessarily at their mercy, I cannot away with. How would you, or how do you think I should relish being the object of such a letter as Kean[21] wrote t'other day to a poor author, who, though a pedantic blockhead, had at least the right to be treated as a gentleman by a copper-laced, twopenny tearmouth, rendered mad by conceit and success? Besides, if this objection were out of the way, I do not think the character of the audience in London is such that one could have the least pleasure in pleasing them. One half come to prosecute their debaucheries, so openly that it would degrade a bagnio. Another set to snooze off their beef-steaks and port wine; a third are critics of the fourth column of the newspaper; fashion, wit, or literature, there is not; and, on the whole, I would far rather write verses for mine honest friend Punch and his audience. The only thing that could tempt me to be so silly, would be to assist a friend in such a degrading task who was to have the whole profit and shame of it. Have you seen decidedly the most full and methodized collection of Spanish romances (ballads) published by the industry of Depping (Altenburgh and Leipsic), 1817? It is quite delightful. Ticknor had set me agog to see it, without affording me any hope it could be had in London, when by one of these fortunate chances which have often marked my life, a friend, who had been lately on the Continent, came unexpectedly to inquire for me, and plucked it forth _par manière de cadeau_. God prosper you, my dear Southey, in your labors; but do not work too hard--_experto crede_. This conclusion, as well as the confusion of my letter, like the Bishop of Grenada's sermon, savors of the apoplexy. My most respectful compliments attend Mrs. S. Yours truly, WALTER SCOTT. P. S.--I shall long to see the conclusion of the Brazil history, which, as the interest comes nearer, must rise even above the last noble volume. Wesley you alone can touch; but will you not have the hive about you? When I was about twelve years old, I heard him preach more than once, standing on a chair, in Kelso churchyard. He was a most venerable figure, but his sermons were vastly too colloquial for the taste of Saunders. He told many excellent stories. One I remember, which he said had happened to him at Edinburgh. "A drunken dragoon," said Wesley, "was commencing an assertion in military fashion, G--d eternally d--n me, just as I was passing. I touched the poor man on the shoulder, and when he turned round fiercely, said calmly, you mean _God bless you_." In the mode of telling the story he failed not to make us sensible how much his patriarchal appearance, and mild yet bold rebuke, overawed the soldier, who touched his hat, thanked him, and, I think, came to chapel that evening. [Footnote 20: These lines are from Coleridge's _Ancient Mariner_.] [Footnote 21: The reader will find something about this actor's quarrel with Mr. Bucke, author of _The Italians_, in Barry Cornwall's _Life of Kean_, vol. ii. p. 178.] TO ROBERT SHORTREED, ESQ., SHERIFF-SUBSTITUTE, ETC., JEDBURGH. ABBOTSFORD, 13th April, 1819. DEAR BOB,--I am very desirous to procure, and as soon as possible, Mrs. Shortreed's excellent receipt for making yeast. The Duke of Buccleuch complains extremely of the sour yeast at Lisbon as disagreeing with his stomach, and I never tasted half such good bread as Mrs. Shortreed has baked at home. I am sure you will be as anxious as I am that the receipt should be forwarded to his Grace as soon as possible. I remember Mrs. Shortreed giving a most distinct account of the whole affair. It should be copied over in a very distinct hand, lest Monsieur Florence makes blunders. I am recovering from my late indisposition, but as weak as water. To write these lines is a fatigue. I scarce think I can be at the circuit at all--certainly only for an hour or two. So on this occasion I will give Mrs. Shortreed's kind hospitality a little breathing time. I am tired even with writing these few lines. Yours ever, WALTER SCOTT.[22] [Footnote 22: "Sir Walter got not only the recipe for making bread from us--but likewise learnt the best mode of cutting it 'in a family way.' The breadboard and large knife used at Abbotsford at breakfast-time were adopted by Sir Walter, after seeing them 'work well' in our family."--_Note by Mr. Andrew Shortreed._] TO HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH, ETC., LISBON. ABBOTSFORD, 15th April, 1819. MY DEAR LORD DUKE,--How very strange it seems that this should be the first letter I address to your Grace, and you so long absent from Scotland, and looking for all the news and nonsense of which I am in general such a faithful reporter. Alas, I have been ill--very--very ill--only Dr. Baillie says there is nothing of consequence about my malady _except the pain_--a pretty exception--said pain being intense enough to keep me roaring as loud as your Grace's _ci-devant_ John of Lorn, and of, generally speaking, from six to eight hours' incessant duration, only varied by intervals of deadly sickness. Poor Sophia was alone with me for some time, and managed a half-distracted pack of servants with spirit, and sense, and presence of mind, far beyond her years, never suffering her terror at seeing me in a state so new to her, and so alarming, to divert her mind an instant from what was fit and proper to be done. Pardon this side compliment to your Grace's little Jacobite, to whom you have always been so kind. If sympathy could have cured me, I should not have been long ill. Gentle and simple were all equally kind, and even old Tom Watson crept down from Falshope to see how I was coming on, and to ejaculate "if anything ailed the Shirra, it would be sair on the Duke." The only unwelcome resurrection was that of old ****, whose feud with me (or rather dryness) I had well hoped was immortal; but he came jinking over the moor with daughters and ponies, and God knows what, to look after my precious health. I cannot tolerate that man; it seems to me as if I hated him for things not only past and present, but for some future offence, which is as yet in the womb of fate. I have had as many remedies sent me for cramp and jaundice as would set up a quack doctor: three from Mrs. Plummer, each better than the other--one at least from every gardener in the neighborhood--besides all sorts of recommendations to go to Cheltenham, to Harrowgate, to Jericho for aught I know. Now if there is one thing I detest more than another, it is a watering-place, unless a very pleasant party be previously formed, when, as Tony Lumpkin says, "a gentleman may be in a concatenation." The most extraordinary recipe was that of my Highland piper, John Bruce, who spent a whole Sunday in selecting twelve stones from twelve _south-running_ streams, with the purpose that I should sleep upon them, and be whole. I caused him to be told that the recipe was infallible, but that it was absolutely necessary to success that the stones should be wrapt up in the petticoat of a widow who had never wished to marry again; upon which the piper renounced all hope of completing the charm. I had need of a softer couch than Bruce had destined me, for so general was the tension of the nerves all over the body, although the pain of the spasms in the stomach did not suffer the others to be felt, that my whole left leg was covered with swelling and inflammation, arising from the unnatural action of the muscles, and I had to be carried about like a child. My right leg escaped better, the muscles there having less irritability, owing to its lame state. Your Grace may imagine the energy of pain in the nobler parts, when cramps in the extremities, sufficient to produce such effects, were unnoticed by me during their existence. But enough of so disagreeable a subject. Respecting the portrait, I shall be equally proud and happy to sit for it, and hope it may be so executed as to be in some degree worthy of the preferment to which it is destined.[23] But neither my late golden hue (for I was covered with jaundice), nor my present silver complexion (looking much more like a spectre than a man), will present any idea of my quondam beef-eating physiognomy. I must wait till the _age of brass_, the true juridical bronze of my profession, shall again appear on my frontal. I hesitate a little about Raeburn, unless your Grace is quite determined. He has very much to do; works just now chiefly for cash, poor fellow, as he can have but a few years to make money; and has twice already made a very chowder-headed person of me. I should like much (always with your approbation) to try Allan, who is a man of real genius, and has made one or two glorious portraits, though his predilection is to the historical branch of the art. We did rather a handsome thing for him, considering that in Edinburgh we are neither very wealthy nor great amateurs. A hundred persons subscribed ten guineas apiece to raffle[24] for his fine picture of the Circassian Chief selling Slaves to the Turkish Pacha--a beautiful and highly poetical picture. There was another small picture added by way of second prize, and, what is curious enough, the only two peers on the list, Lord Wemyss and Lord Fife, both got prizes. Allan has made a sketch which I shall take to town with me when I can go, in hopes Lord Stafford, or some other picture-buyer, may fancy it, and order a picture. The subject is the murder of Archbishop Sharp on Magus Moor, prodigiously well treated. The savage ferocity of the assassins, crowding one on another to strike at the old prelate on his knees--contrasted with the old man's figure--and that of his daughter endeavoring to interpose for his protection, and withheld by a ruffian of milder mood than his fellows:--the dogged fanatical severity of Rathillet's countenance, who remained on horseback, witnessing, with stern fanaticism, the murder he did not choose to be active in, lest it should be said that he struck out of private revenge--are all amazingly well combined in the sketch. I question if the artist can bring them out with equal spirit in the painting which he meditates.[25] Sketches give a sort of fire to the imagination of the spectator, who is apt to fancy a great deal more for himself, than the pencil, in the finished picture, can possibly present to his eye afterwards.--Constable has offered Allan three hundred pounds to make sketches for an edition of the Tales of my Landlord, and other novels of that cycle, and says he will give him the same sum next year, so, from being pinched enough, this very deserving artist suddenly finds himself at his ease. He was long at Odessa with the Duke of Richelieu, and is a very entertaining person. [Footnote 23: The position in the Library at Bowhill, originally destined by the late Duke of Buccleuch for a portrait that never was executed, is now filled by that which Raeburn painted in 1808 for Constable.] [Footnote 24: Three pictures were ultimately raffled for; and the following note, dated April the 1st, 1819, shows how keenly and practically Scott, almost in the crisis of his malady, could attend to the details of such a business:-- TO J. G. LOCKHART, ESQ., ADVOCATE, EDINBURGH. ... I have been dreadfully ill since I wrote to you, but I think I have now got the turn fairly. It was quite time, for though the doctors say the disease is not dangerous, yet I could not have endured six days more agony. I have a summons from the ingenious Mr. David Bridges to attend to my interests at his shop next Saturday, or send some qualified person to act on my behalf. I suppose that this mysterious missive alludes to the plan about Allan's pictures, and at any rate I hope you will act for me. I should think a raffle with dice would give more general satisfaction than a lottery. Yon would be astonished what unhandsome suspicions well-educated and sensible persons will take into their heads, when a selfish competition awakens the mean and evil passions of our nature. Let each subscriber throw the dice in person or by proxy, leaving out all who throw under a certain number, and let this be repeated till the number is so far reduced that the three who throw highest may hold the prizes. I have much to say to you, and should you spare me a day about the end of next week, I trust you will find me pretty _bobbish_. Always yours affectionately, W. S. The Mr. David Bridges here mentioned has occurred already.--See _ante_, vol. v. p. 262. The jokers in _Blackwood_ made him happy by dubbing him, "The Director-General of the Fine Arts for Scotland."--He says the subscribers for the Allan-Raffle were not so numerous as Scott had supposed. (Mr. Bridges died in November, 1840, in his 64th year.)] [Footnote 25: The fine picture which Allan executed is in the possession of Mr. Lockhart of Milton-Lockhart, and has been well engraved.] I saw with great pleasure Wilkie's sketch of your Grace, and I think when I get to town I shall coax him out of a copy, to me invaluable. I hope, however, when you return, you will sit to Lawrence. We should have at least one picture of your Grace from the real good hand. Sooth to speak, I cannot say much for the juvenile representations at Bowhill and in the library at Dalkeith. Return, however, with the original features in good health, and we shall not worry you about portraits. The library at Bowhill will be a delightful room, and will be some consolation to me who must, I fear, lose for some time the comforts of the eating-room, and substitute panada and toast and water for the bonny haunch and buxom bottle of claret. Truth is, I must make great restrictions on my creature-comforts, at least till my stomach recovers its tone and ostrich-like capacity of digestion. Our spring here is slow, but not unfavorable: the country looking very well, and my plantings for the season quite completed. I have planted quite up two little glens, leading from the Aide-de-Camp's habitation up to the little loch, and expect the blessings of posterity for the shade and shelter I shall leave, where, God knows, I found none. It is doomed this letter is not to close without a request. I conclude your Grace has already heard from fifty applicants that the kirk of Middlebie is vacant, and I come forward as the fifty-first (always barring prior engagements and better claims) in behalf of George Thomson, a son of the minister of Melrose, being the grinder of my boys, and therefore deeply entitled to my gratitude and my good offices, as far as they can go. He is nearer Parson Abraham Adams than any living creature I ever saw--very learned, very religious, very simple, and extremely absent. His father, till very lately, had but a sort of half stipend, during the incumbency of a certain notorious Mr. MacLagan, to whom he acted only as assistant. The poor devil was brought to the grindstone (having had the want of precaution to beget a large family), and became the very figure of a fellow who used to come upon the stage to sing "Let us all be unhappy together." This poor lad George was his saving angel, not only educating himself, but taking on him the education of two of his brothers, and maintaining them out of his own scanty pittance. He is a sensible lad, and by no means a bad preacher, a stanch Anti-Gallican, and orthodox in his principles. Should your Grace find yourself at liberty to give countenance to this very innocent and deserving creature, I need not say it will add to the many favors you have conferred on me; but I hope the parishioners will have also occasion to say, "Weel bobbit, George of Middlebie." Your Grace's Aide-de-Camp, who knows young Thomson well, will give you a better idea of him than I can do. He lost a leg by an accident in his boyhood, which spoiled as bold and fine-looking a grenadier as ever charged bayonet against a Frenchman's throat. I think your Grace will not like him the worse for having a spice of military and loyal spirit about him. If you knew the poor fellow, your Grace would take uncommon interest in him, were it but for the odd mixture of sense and simplicity, and spirit and good morals. Somewhat too much of him. I conclude you will go to Mafra, Cintra, or some of these places, which Baretti describes so delightfully, to avoid the great heats, when the Palace de las Necessidades must become rather oppressive. By the bye, though it were only for the credit of the name, I am happy to learn it has that useful English comfort, a water-closet. I suppose the armorer of the Liffey has already put it in complete repair. Your Grace sees the most secret passages respecting great men cannot be hidden from their friends. There is but little news here but death in the clan. Harden's sister is dead--a cruel blow to Lady Die,[26] who is upwards of eighty-five, and accustomed to no other society. Again, Mrs. Frank Scott, his uncle's widow, is dead, unable to survive the loss of two fine young men in India, her sons, whose death closely followed each other. All this is sad work; but it is a wicked and melancholy world we live in. God bless you, my dear, dear Lord. Take great care of your health for the sake of all of us. You are the breath of our nostrils, useful to thousands, and to many of these thousands indispensable. I will write again very soon, when I can keep my breast longer to the desk without pain, for I am not yet without frequent relapses, when they souse me into scalding water without a moment's delay, where I lie, as my old _grieve_ Tom Purdie said last night, being called to assist at the operation, "like a _haulded saumon_." I write a few lines to the Aide-de-Camp, but I am afraid of putting this letter beyond the bounds of Lord Montagu's frank. When I can do anything for your Grace here, you know I am most pleased and happy.--Ever respectfully and affectionately your Grace's WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 26: See _ante_, vol. i. p. 230.] TO CAPTAIN ADAM FERGUSON, ETC., ETC., ETC. ABBOTSFORD, April 16, 1819. MY DEAR ADAM,--Having only been able last night to finish a long letter to the Chief, I now add a few lines for the Aide-de-Camp. I have had the pleasure to hear of you regularly from Jack,[27] who is very regular in steering this way when packets arrive; and I observe with great satisfaction that you think our good Duke's health is on the mending hand. Climate must operate as an alterative, and much cannot perhaps be expected from it at first. Besides, the great heat must be a serious drawback. But I hope you will try by and by to get away to Cintra, or some of those sequestered retreats where there are shades and cascades to cool the air. I have an idea the country there is eminently beautiful. I am afraid the Duke has not yet been able to visit Torres Vedras, but _you_ must be meeting with things everywhere to put you in mind of former scenes. As for the Senhoras, I have little doubt that the difference betwixt your military hard fare and Florence's high sauces and jellies will make them think that time has rather improved an old friend than otherwise. Apropos of these ticklish subjects. I am a suitor to the Duke, with little expectation of success (for I know his engagements), for the kirk of Middlebie to George Thomson, the very Abraham Adams of Presbytery. If the Duke mentions him to you (not otherwise) pray lend him a lift. With a kirk and a manse the poor fellow might get a good farmer's daughter, and beget grenadiers for his Majesty's service. But as I said before, I dare say all St. Hubert's black pack are in full cry upon the living, and that he has little or no chance. It is something, however, to have tabled him, as better may come of it another day. All at Huntly Burn well and hearty, and most kind in their attentions during our late turmoils. Bauby[28] came over to offer her services as sick-nurse, and I have drunk scarce anything but delicious ginger-beer of Miss Bell's brewing, since my troubles commenced. They have been, to say the least, damnable; and I think you would hardly know me. When I crawl out on Sibyl Grey, I am the very image of Death on the pale horse--lanthorn-jawed, decayed in flesh, stooping as if I meant to eat the pony's ears, and unable to go above a footpace. But although I have had, and must expect, frequent relapses, yet the attacks are more slight, and I trust I shall mend with the good weather. Spring sets in very pleasantly, and in a settled fashion. I have planted a number of shrubs, etc., at Huntly Burn, and am snodding up the drive of the old farmhouse, enclosing the Toftfield, and making a good road from the parish road to your gate. This I tell you to animate you to pick up a few seeds both of forest trees, shrubs, and vegetables; we will rear them in the hot-house, and divide honorably. _Avis au lecteur._ I have been a good deal entrusted to the care of Sophia, who is an admirable sick-nurse. Mamma has been called to town by two important avocations: to get a cook--no joking matter,--and to see Charles, who was but indifferent, but has recovered. You must have heard of the death of Joseph Hume, David's only son. Christ! what a calamity!--just entering life with the fairest prospects--full of talent, and the heir of an old and considerable family--a fine career before him: all this he was one day, or rather one hour--or rather in the course of five minutes--so sudden was the death--and then--a heap of earth. His disease is unknown; something about the heart, I believe; but it had no alarming appearance, nothing worse than a cold and sore throat, when convulsions came, and death ensued. It is a complete smash to poor David, who had just begun to hold his head up after his wife's death. But he bears it stoutly, and goes about his business as usual. A woeful case. London is now out of the question with me; I have no prospect of being now able to stand the journey by sea or land; but the best is, I have no pressing business there. The Commie[29] takes charge of Walter's matters--cannot, you know, be in better hands; and Lord Melville talks of gazetting _quam primum_. I will write a long letter very soon, but my back, fingers, and eyes ache with these three pages. All here send love and fraternity. Yours ever most truly, WALTER SCOTT. P. S.--By the bye, old Kennedy, the tinker, swam for his life at Jedburgh, and was only, by the sophisticated and timid evidence of a seceding doctor, who differed from all his brethren, saved from a well-deserved gibbet. He goes to botanize for fourteen years. Pray tell this to the Duke, for he was "An old soldier of the Duke's, And the Duke's old soldier." Six of his brethren, I am told, were in court, and kith and kin without end. I am sorry so many of the clan are left. The cause of quarrel with the murdered man was an old feud between two gypsy clans, the Kennedies and Irvings, which, about forty years since, gave rise to a desperate quarrel and battle on Hawick Green, in which the grandfathers of both Kennedy, and Irving whom he murdered, were engaged. [Footnote 27: Captain John Ferguson, R. N.] [Footnote 28: Bauby--_i. e._, Barbara, was a kind old housekeeper of the Miss Fergusons.] [Footnote 29: The Lord Chief-Commissioner Adam.] In the next of these letters there is allusion to a drama, on the story of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, of which Mr. Terry had transmitted the MS. to Abbotsford--and which ultimately proved very successful. Terry had, shortly before this time, become the acting manager of the Haymarket Theatre. TO D. TERRY, ESQ., HAYMARKET, LONDON. ABBOTSFORD, 18th April, 1819. DEAR TERRY,--I am able (though very weak) to answer your kind inquiries. I have thought of you often, and been on the point of writing or dictating a letter, but till very lately I could have had little to tell you of but distress and agony, with constant relapses into my unhappy malady, so that for weeks I seemed to lose rather than gain ground, all food nauseating on my stomach, and my clothes hanging about me like a potato-bogle,[30] with from five or six to ten hours of mortal pain every third day; latterly the fits have been much milder, and have at last given way to the hot bath without any use of opiates; an immense point gained, as they hurt my general health extremely. Conceive my having taken, in the course of six or seven hours, six grains of opium, three of hyoscyamus, near 200 drops of laudanum--and all without any sensible relief of the agony under which I labored. My stomach is now getting confirmed, and I have great hopes the bout is over; it has been a dreadful set-to. I am sorry to hear Mrs. Terry is complaining; you ought not to let her labor, neither at Abbotsford sketches nor at anything else, but to study to keep her mind amused as much as possible. As for Walter, he is a shoot of an _Aik_,[31] and I have no fear of him: I hope he remembers Abbotsford and his soldier namesake. I send the MS.--I wish you had written for it earlier. My touching, or even thinking of it, was out of the question; my corrections would have smelled as cruelly of the cramp as the Bishop of Grenada's homily did of the apoplexy. Indeed I hold myself inadequate to estimate those criticisms which rest on stage effect, having been of late very little of a play-going person. Would to Heaven these sheets could do for you what Rob Roy has done for Murray; he has absolutely netted upwards of £3000: to be sure, the man who played the Bailie made a piece of acting equal to whatever has been seen in the profession. For my own part, I was actually electrified by the truth, spirit, and humor which he threw into the part. It was the living Nicol Jarvie: conceited, pragmatical, cautious, generous, proud of his connection with Rob Roy, frightened for him at the same time, and yet extremely desirous to interfere with him as an adviser: the tone in which he seemed to give him up for a lost man after having provoked him into some burst of Highland violence, "Ah Rab! Rab!" was quite inimitable. I do assure you I never saw a thing better played. It is like it may be his only part, for no doubt the Patavinity and knowledge of the provincial character may have aided him much; but still he must be a wonderful fellow; and the houses he drew were tremendous. I am truly glad you are settled in London--"a rolling stone"--"the proverb is something musty:"[32] it is always difficult to begin a new profession; I could have wished you quartered nearer us, but we shall always hear of you. The becoming stage-manager at the Haymarket I look upon as a great step: well executed, it cannot but lead to something of the same kind elsewhere. You must be aware of stumbling over a propensity which easily besets you from the habit of not having your time fully employed--I mean what the women very expressively call _dawdling_. Your motto must be _Hoc age_. Do instantly whatever is to be done, and take the hours of reflection or recreation after business, and never before it. When a regiment is under march, the rear is often thrown into confusion because the front do not move steadily and without interruption. It is the same thing with business. If that which is first in hand is not instantly, steadily, and regularly despatched, other things accumulate behind till affairs begin to press all at once, and no human brain can stand the confusion: pray mind this, it is one of your few weak points--ask Mrs. Terry else. A habit of the mind it is which is very apt to beset men of intellect and talent, especially when their time is not regularly filled up, but left at their own arrangement. But it is like the ivy round the oak, and ends by limiting, if it does not destroy, the power of manly and necessary exertion. I must love a man so well to whom I offer such a word of advice, that I will not apologize for it, but expect to hear you are become as regular as a Dutch clock--hours, quarters, minutes, all marked and appropriated. This is a great cast in life, and must be played with all skill and caution. We wish much to have a plan of the great bed, that we may hang up the tester. Mr. Atkinson offered to have it altered or exchanged; but with the expense of land-carriage and risk of damage, it is not to be thought of. I enclose a letter to thank him for all his kindness. I should like to have the invoice when the things are shipped. I hope they will send them to Leith, and not to Berwick. The plasterer has broke a pane in the armory. I enclose a sheet with the size, the black lines being traced within the lead; and I add a rough drawing of the arms, which are those of my mother. I should like it replaced as soon as possible, for I will set the expense against the careless rascal's account. I have got a beautiful scarlet paper, inlaid with gold (rather crimson than scarlet) in a present from India, which will hang the parlor to a T; but we shall want some articles from town to enable us to take possession of the parlor--namely, a _carpet_--you mentioned a _wainscot pattern_, which would be delightful--item, _grates_ for said parlor and armory--a plain and unexpensive pattern, resembling that in my room (which vents most admirably), and suited by half-dogs for burning wood. The sideboard and chairs you have mentioned. I see Mr. Bullock (George's brother) advertises his museum for sale. I wonder if a good set of _real tilting_ armor could be got cheap there. James Ballantyne got me one very handsome bright steel cuirassier of Queen Elizabeth's time, and two less perfect, for £20--dog cheap; they make a great figure in the armory. Hangings, curtains, etc., I believe we shall get as well in Edinburgh as in London; it is in your joiner and cabinet work that your infinite superiority lies. Write to me if I can do aught about the play--though I fear not: much will depend on Dumbiedikes, in whom Listen will be strong. Sophia has been chiefly my nurse, as an indisposition of little Charles called Charlotte to town. She returned yesterday with him. All beg kind compliments to you and Mrs. Terry and little Walter. I remain your very feeble but convalescent to command, WALTER SCOTT. P. S.--We must not forget the case for the leaves of the table while out of use; without something of the kind, I am afraid they will be liable to injury, which is a pity, as they are so very beautiful.[33] [Footnote 30: _Anglice_--Scarecrow.] [Footnote 31: _Anglice_--an Oak.] [Footnote 32: _Hamlet_, Act III. Scene 2.] [Footnote 33: The Duke of Buccleuch gave Scott some old oak-roots from Drumlanrig, out of which a very beautiful set of dinner-tables were manufactured by Messrs. Bullock.] The accounts of Scott's condition circulated in Edinburgh in the course of this April were so alarming, that I should not have thought of accepting his invitation to revisit Abbotsford, unless John Ballantyne had given me better tidings about the end of the month.[34] He informed me that his "illustrious friend" (for so both the Ballantynes usually spoke of him) was so much recovered as to have resumed his usual literary tasks, though with this difference, that he now, for the first time in his life, found it necessary to employ the hand of another. I have now before me a letter of the 8th April, in which Scott says to Constable: "Yesterday I began to dictate, and did it easily and with comfort. This is a great point, but I must proceed by little and little; last night I had a slight return of the enemy, but baffled him;"--and he again writes to the bookseller on the 11th, "John Ballantyne is here, and returns with copy, which my increasing strength permits me to hope I may now furnish regularly." [Footnote 34: [An extract from a letter of March 23 will show how warm a regard Scott already felt for Lockhart: "I am but just on my feet after a fourth very severe spasmodic affection, which held me from half-past six last night to half-past three this morning in a state little short of the extreme agony, during which time, to the infinite consternation of my terrified family, I waltzed with Madam Cramp to my own sad music. I sighed and howl'd, And groaned and growl'd, A wild and wondrous sound; incapable of lying in one posture, yet unable to find any possible means of changing it. I thought of you amid all this agony, and of the great game which with your parts and principles lies before you in Scotland, and having been for very many years the only man of letters who at least stood by, if he could not support, the banner of ancient faith and loyalty, I was mentally bequeathing to you my baton, like old Douglas:-- 'Take _thou_ the vanguard of the three And bury me by the bracken bush, That grows upon yon lily lea.' "I believe the women thought I was growing light-headed as they heard me repeat a rhyme apparently so little connected with my situation. I have much to say to you on these subjects, for which I hope we shall have a fit time; for, like old Sir Anthony Absolute, I hope still to live long and be very troublesome to you. Indeed, the surgeon could not help expressing his astonishment at the great strength of my temperament, and I think had an eye to my ribs as glorious hoops for a skeleton."--_Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 38.]] The _copy_ (as MS. for the press is technically called) which Scott was thus dictating, was that of The Bride of Lammermoor, and his amanuenses were William Laidlaw and John Ballantyne;--of whom he preferred the latter, when he could be at Abbotsford, on account of the superior rapidity of his pen; and also because John kept his pen to the paper without interruption, and, though with many an arch twinkle in his eyes, and now and then an audible smack of his lips, had resolution to work on like a well-trained clerk; whereas good Laidlaw entered with such keen zest into the interest of the story as it flowed from the author's lips, that he could not suppress exclamations of surprise and delight--"Gude keep us a'!--the like o' that!--eh sirs! eh sirs!"--and so forth--which did not promote despatch. I have often, however, in the sequel, heard both these secretaries describe the astonishment with which they were equally affected when Scott began this experiment. The affectionate Laidlaw beseeching him to stop dictating, when his audible suffering filled every pause, "Nay, Willie," he answered, "only see that the doors are fast. I would fain keep all the cry as well as all the wool to ourselves; but as to giving over work, that can only be when I am in woollen." John Ballantyne told me, that after the first day he always took care to have a dozen of pens made before he seated himself opposite to the sofa on which Scott lay, and that though he often turned himself on his pillow with a groan of torment, he usually continued the sentence in the same breath. But when dialogue of peculiar animation was in progress, spirit seemed to triumph altogether over matter--he arose from his couch and walked up and down the room, raising and lowering his voice, and as it were acting the parts. It was in this fashion that Scott produced the far greater portion of The Bride of Lammermoor--the whole of the Legend of Montrose--and almost the whole of Ivanhoe. Yet, when his health was fairly reëstablished, he disdained to avail himself of the power of dictation, which he had thus put to the sharpest test, but resumed, and for many years resolutely adhered to, the old plan of writing everything with his own hand. When I once, some time afterwards, expressed my surprise that he did not consult his ease, and spare his eyesight at all events, by occasionally dictating, he answered, "I should as soon think of getting into a sedan chair while I can use my legs." On one of the envelopes in which a chapter of The Bride of Lammermoor reached the printer in the Canongate about this time (May 2, 1819), there is this note in the author's own handwriting:-- DEAR JAMES,--These matters will need more than your usual carefulness. Look sharp--double sharp--my trust is constant in thee:-- "Tarry woo, tarry woo, Tarry woo is ill to spin; Card it weel, card it weel, Card it weel ere ye begin. When 'tis carded, row'd, and spun, Then the work is hafflins done; But when woven, drest, and clean, It may be cleading for a queen." So be it,--W. S. But to return: I rode out to Abbotsford with John Ballantyne towards the end of the spring vacation, and though he had warned me of a sad change in Scott's appearance, it was far beyond what I had been led to anticipate. He had lost a great deal of flesh--his clothes hung loose about him--his countenance was meagre, haggard, and of the deadliest yellow of the jaundice--and his hair, which a few weeks before had been but slightly sprinkled with gray, was now almost literally snow-white. His eye, however, retained its fire unquenched; indeed it seemed to have gained in brilliancy from the new languor of the other features; and he received us with all the usual cordiality, and even with little perceptible diminishment in the sprightliness of his manner. He sat at the table while we dined, but partook only of some rice pudding; and after the cloth was drawn, while sipping his toast and water, pushed round the bottles in his old style, and talked with easy cheerfulness of the stout battle he had fought, and which he now seemed to consider as won. "One day there was," he said, "when I certainly began to have great doubts whether the mischief was not getting at my mind--and I'll tell you how I tried to reassure myself on that score. I was quite unfit for anything like original composition; but I thought if I could turn an old German ballad I had been reading into decent rhymes, I might dismiss my worst apprehensions--and you shall see what came of the experiment." He then desired his daughter Sophia to fetch the MS. of The Noble Moringer, as it had been taken down from his dictation, partly by her and partly by Mr. Laidlaw, during one long and painful day while he lay in bed. He read it to us as it stood, and seeing that both Ballantyne and I were much pleased with the verses, he said he should copy them over,--make them a little "tighter about the joints,"--and give me them to be printed in the Edinburgh Annual Register for 1816,--to consult him about which volume had partly been the object of my visit; and this promise he redeemed before I left him. The reading of this long ballad, however (it consists of forty-three stanzas),[35] seemed to have exhausted him: he retired to his bedroom; and an hour or two after, when we were about to follow his example, his family were distressed by the well-known symptoms of another sharp recurrence of his affliction. A large dose of opium and the hot bath were immediately put in requisition. His good neighbor, Dr. Scott of Darnlee, was sent for, and soon attended; and in the course of three or four hours we learned that he was once more at ease. But I can never forget the groans which, during that space, his agony extorted from him. Well knowing the iron strength of his resolution, to find him confessing its extremity, by cries audible not only all over the house, but even to a considerable distance from it (for Ballantyne and I, after he was put into his bath, walked forth to be out of the way, and heard him distinctly at the bowling-green), it may be supposed that this was sufficiently alarming, even to my companion; how much more to me, who had never before listened to that voice, except in the gentle accents of kindness and merriment. [Footnote 35: See Scott's _Poetical Works_ (Ed. 1834), vol. vi. p. 343 [Cambridge Ed. p. 444].] I told Ballantyne that I saw this was no time for my visit, and that I should start for Edinburgh again at an early hour--and begged he would make my apologies--in the propriety of which he acquiesced. But as I was dressing, about seven next morning, Scott himself tapped at my door, and entered, looking better I thought than at my arrival the day before. "Don't think of going," said he; "I feel hearty this morning, and if my devil does come back again, it won't be for three days at any rate. For the present, I want nothing to set me up except a good trot in the open air, to drive away the accursed vapors of the laudanum I was obliged to swallow last night. You have never seen Yarrow, and when I have finished a little job I have with Jocund Johnny, we shall all take horse and make a day of it." When I said something about a ride of twenty miles being rather a bold experiment after such a night, he answered that he had ridden more than forty, a week before, under similar circumstances, and felt nothing the worse. He added, that there was an election on foot, in consequence of the death of Sir John Riddell, of Riddell, Member of Parliament for the Selkirk district of Burghs, and that the bad health and absence of the Duke of Buccleuch rendered it quite necessary that he should make exertions on this occasion. "In short," said he, laughing, "I have an errand which I shall perform--and as I must pass Newark, you had better not miss the opportunity of seeing it under so excellent a cicerone as the old minstrel, 'Whose withered cheek and tresses grey Shall yet see many a better day.'" About eleven o'clock, accordingly, he was mounted, by the help of Tom Purdie, upon a stanch, active cob, yclept Sibyl Grey,--exactly such a creature as is described in Mr. Dinmont's _Dumple_--while Ballantyne sprang into the saddle of noble _Old Mortality_, and we proceeded to the town of Selkirk, where Scott halted to do business at the Sheriff-Clerk's, and begged us to move onward at a gentle pace until he should overtake us. He came up by and by at a canter, and seemed in high glee with the tidings he had heard about the canvass. And so we rode by Philiphaugh, Carterhaugh, Bowhill, and Newark, he pouring out all the way his picturesque anecdotes of former times--more especially of the fatal field where Montrose was finally overthrown by Leslie. He described the battle as vividly as if he had witnessed it; the passing of the Ettrick at daybreak by the Covenanting General's heavy cuirassiers, many of them old soldiers of Gustavus Adolphus, and the wild confusion of the Highland host when exposed to their charge on an extensive _haugh_ as flat as a bowling-green. He drew us aside at _Slain-men's-lee_, to observe the green mound that marks the resting-place of the slaughtered royalists; and pointing to the apparently precipitous mountain, Minchmoor, over which Montrose and his few cavaliers escaped, mentioned that, rough as it seemed, his mother remembered passing it in her early days in a coach and six, on her way to a ball at Peebles--several footmen marching on either side of the carriage to prop it up, or drag it through bogs, as the case might require. He also gave us, with all the dramatic effect of one of his best chapters, the history of a worthy family who, inhabiting at the time of the battle a cottage on his own estate, had treated with particular kindness a young officer of Leslie's army quartered on them for a night or two before. When parting from them to join the troops, he took out a purse of gold, and told the good woman that he had a presentiment he should not see another sun set, and in that case would wish his money to remain in her kind hands; but, if he should survive, he had no doubt she would restore it honestly. The young man returned mortally wounded, but lingered awhile under her roof, and finally bequeathed to her and hers his purse and his blessing. "Such," he said, "was the origin of the respectable lairds of----, now my good neighbors." The prime object of this expedition was to talk over the politics of Selkirk with one of the Duke of Buccleuch's great store-farmers, who, as the Sheriff had learned, possessed private influence with a doubtful bailie or deacon among the Souters. I forget the result, if ever I heard it. But next morning, having, as he assured us, enjoyed a good night in consequence of this ride, he invited us to accompany him on a similar errand across Bowden Moor, and up the Valley of the Ayle; and when we reached a particularly bleak and dreary point of that journey, he informed us that he perceived in the waste below a wreath of smoke, which was the appointed signal that a _wavering_ Souter of some consequence had agreed to give him a personal interview where no Whiggish eyes were likely to observe them;--and so, leaving us on the road, he proceeded to thread his way westward, across moor and bog, until we lost view of him. I think a couple of hours might have passed before he joined us again, which was, as had been arranged, not far from the village of Lilliesleaf. In that place, too, he had some negotiation of the same sort to look after; and when he had finished it, he rode with us all round the ancient woods of Riddell, but would not go near the house; I suppose lest any of the afflicted family might still be there. Many were his lamentations over the catastrophe which had just befallen them. "They are," he said, "one of the most venerable races in the south of Scotland--they were here long before these glens had ever heard the name of Soulis or of Douglas--to say nothing of Buccleuch: they can show a Pope's bull of the tenth century, authorizing the then Riddell to marry a relation within the forbidden degrees. Here they have been for a thousand years at least; and now all the inheritance is to pass away, merely because one good worthy gentleman would not be contented to enjoy his horses, his hounds, and his bottle of claret, like thirty or forty predecessors, but must needs turn scientific agriculturist, take almost all his fair estate into his own hand, superintend for himself perhaps a hundred ploughs, and try every new nostrum that has been tabled by the quackish _improvers_ of the time. And what makes the thing ten times more wonderful is, that he kept day-book and ledger, and all the rest of it, as accurately as if he had been a cheesemonger in the Grassmarket." Some of the most remarkable circumstances in Scott's own subsequent life have made me often recall this conversation--with more wonder than he expressed about the ruin of the Riddells. I remember he told us a world of stories, some tragical, some comical, about the old lairds of this time-honored lineage; and among others, that of the seven Bibles and the seven bottles of ale, which he afterwards inserted in a note to The Bride of Lammermoor.[36] He was also full of anecdotes about a friend of his father's, a minister of Lilliesleaf, who reigned for two generations the most popular preacher in Teviotdale; but I forget the orator's name. When the original of Saunders Fairford congratulated him in his latter days on the undiminished authority he still maintained--every kirk in the neighborhood being left empty when it was known he was to mount the _tent_ at any country sacrament--the shrewd divine answered: "Indeed, Mr. Walter, I sometimes think it's vera surprising. There's aye a talk of this or that wonderfully gifted young man frae the college; but whenever I'm to be at the same _occasion_ with ony o' them, I e'en mount the white horse in the Revelations, and he dings them a'." [Footnote 36: "It was once the universal custom to place ale, wine, or some strong liquor, in the chamber of an honored guest, to assuage his thirst should he feel any on awakening in the night, which, considering that the hospitality of that period often reached excess, was by no means unlikely. The author has met some instances of it in former days, and in old-fashioned families. It was, perhaps, no poetic fiction that records how 'My cummer and I lay down to sleep With two pint stoups at our bed feet; And aye when we waken'd we drank them dry; What think you o' my cummer and I?' "It is a current story in Teviotdale, that in the house of an ancient family of distinction, much addicted to the Presbyterian cause, a Bible was always put into the sleeping apartment of the guests, along with a bottle of strong ale. On some occasion there was a meeting of clergymen in the vicinity of the castle, all of whom were invited to dinner by the worthy Baronet, and several abode all night. According to the fashion of the times, seven of the reverend guests were allotted to one large barrack-room, which was used on such occasions of extended hospitality. The butler took care that the divines were presented, according to custom, each with a Bible and a bottle of ale. But after a little consultation among themselves, they are said to have recalled the domestic as he was leaving the apartment. 'My friend,' said one of the venerable guests, 'you must know, when we meet together as brethren, the youngest minister reads aloud a portion of Scripture to the rest;--only one Bible, therefore, is necessary; take away the other six, and in their place bring six more bottles of ale.' "This synod would have suited the 'hermit sage' of Johnson, who answered a pupil who inquired for the real road to happiness with the celebrated line, 'Come, my lad, and drink some beer!'" --See _The Bride of Lammermoor_, note to chap. xiv.] Thus Scott amused himself and us as we jogged homewards: and it was the same the following day, when (no election matters pressing) he rode with us to the western peak of the Eildon hills, that he might show me the whole panorama of his Teviotdale, and expound the direction of the various passes by which the ancient forayers made their way into England, and tell the names and the histories of many a monastic chapel and baronial peel, now mouldering in glens and dingles that escape the eye of the traveller on the highways. Among other objects on which he descanted with particular interest, were the ruins of the earliest residence of the Kerrs of Cessford, so often opposed in arms to his own 'chieftains of Branksome, and a desolate little kirk on the adjoining moor, where the Dukes of Roxburghe are still buried in the same vault with the hero who fell at Turn-again. Turning to the northward, he showed us the crags and tower of Smailholm, and behind it the shattered fragment of Ercildoune--and repeated some pretty stanzas ascribed to the last of the real wandering minstrels of this district, by name _Burn_:-- "Sing Erceldoune, and Cowdenknowes, Where Homes had ance commanding, And Drygrange, wi' the milk-white ewes, 'Twixt Tweed and Leader standing. The bird that flees through Redpath trees And Gledswood banks each morrow, May chaunt and sing--_sweet Leader's haughs_ And _Bonny howms of Yarrow_. "But Minstrel Burn cannot assuage His grief while life endureth, To see the changes of this age Which fleeting time procureth; For mony a place stands in hard case, Where blythe folks kent nae sorrow, With Homes that dwelt on Leader side, And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow."[37] [Footnote 37: [See _ante_, vol. ii. p. 114, note.]] That night he had again an attack of his cramp, but not so serious as the former. Next morning he was again at work with Ballantyne at an early hour; and when I parted from him after breakfast, he spoke cheerfully of being soon in Edinburgh for the usual business of his Court. I left him, however, with dark prognostications; and the circumstances of this little visit to Abbotsford have no doubt dwelt on my mind the more distinctly, from my having observed and listened to him throughout under the painful feeling that it might very probably be my last. On the 5th of May he received the intelligence of the death of the Duke of Buccleuch, which had occurred at Lisbon on the 20th April; and next morning he wrote as follows to his Grace's brother:-- TO THE LORD MONTAGU, DITTON PARK. ABBOTSFORD, 6th May, 1819. MY DEAR LORD,--I heard from Lord Melville, by yesterday's post, the calamitous news which your Lordship's very kind letter this moment confirmed, had it required confirmation. For this fortnight past, my hopes have been very faint indeed, and on Wednesday, when I had occasion to go to Yarrow, and my horse turned from habit to go up the avenue at Bowhill, I felt deeply impressed that it was a road I should seldom travel for a long time at least. To your Lordship--let me add, to myself--this is an irreparable loss; for such a fund of excellent sense, high principle, and perfect honor have been rarely combined in the same individual. To the country the inestimable loss will be soon felt, even by those who were insensible to his merits, or wished to detract from them, when he was amongst us. In my opinion he never recovered from his domestic calamity. He wrote to me, a few days after that cruel event, a most affectionate and remarkable letter, explaining his own feelings, and while he begged that I would come to him, assuring me that I should find him the same he would be for the future years of his life. He kept his word; but I could see a grief of that calm and concentrated kind which claims the hours of solitude and of night for its empire, and gradually wastes the springs of life. Among the thousand painful feelings which this melancholy event had excited, I have sometimes thought of his distance from home. Yet this was done with the best intention, and upon the best advice, and was perhaps the sole chance which remained for reëstablishment. It has pleased God that it has failed; but the best means were used under the best direction, and mere mortality can do no more. I am very anxious about the dear young ladies, whose lives were so much devoted to their father, and shall be extremely desirous of knowing how they are. The Duchess has so much firmness of mind, and Lady M. so much affectionate prudence, that they will want no support that example and kindness can afford. To me the world seems a sort of waste without him. We had many joint objects, constant intercourse, and unreserved communication, so that through him and by him I took interest in many things altogether out of my own sphere, and it seems to me as if the horizon were narrowed and lowered around me. But God's will be done; it is all that brother or friend can or dare say.--I have reluctance to mention the trash which is going on here. Indeed, I think little is altered since I wrote to your Lordship fully, excepting that last night late, Chisholm[38] arrived at Abbotsford from Lithgow, recalled by the news which had somehow reached Edinburgh,--as I suspect by some officiousness of ****. He left Lithgow in such a state that there is no doubt he will carry that burgh, unless Pringle[39] gets Selkirk. He is gone off this morning to try the possible and impossible to get the single vote which he wants, or to prevail on one person to stand neuter. It is possible he may succeed, though this event, when it becomes generally known, will be greatly against his efforts. I should care little more about the matter, were it not for young Walter,[40] and for the despite I feel at the success of speculations which were formed on the probability of the event which has happened. Two sons of ******* came here yesterday, and with their father's philosophical spirit of self-accommodation, established themselves for the night. Betwixt them and Chisholm's noise, my head and my stomach suffered so much (under the necessity of drowning feelings which I could not express), that I had a return of the spasms, and I felt as if a phantasmagoria was going on around me. Quiet, and some indulgence of natural and solitary sorrow, have made me well. To-day I will ride up to Selkirk and see the magistrates, or the chief of them. It is necessary they should not think the cause deserted. If it is thought proper to suspend the works at Bowhill, perhaps the measure may be delayed till the decision of this matter. I am sure, my dear Lord, you will command me in all I can do. I have only to regret it is so little. But to show that my gratitude has survived my benefactor, would be the pride and delight of my life. I never thought it possible that a man could have loved another so much, where the distance of rank was so very great. But why recur to things so painful? I pity poor Adam Ferguson, whose affections were so much engaged by the Duke's kindness, and who has with his gay temper a generous and feeling heart. The election we may lose, but not our own credit, and that of the family--that you may rest assured of. My best respects and warmest sympathy attend the dear young ladies, and Lady Montagu. I shall be anxious to know how the Duchess-Dowager does under this great calamity. The poor boy--what a slippery world is before him, and how early a dangerous, because a splendid, lot is presented to him! But he has your personal protection. Believe me, with a deep participation in your present distress, your Lordship's most faithfully, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 38: Mr. Chisholm was the Tory candidate for the Selkirk burghs.] [Footnote 39: Mr. Pringle of Clifton, the Whig candidate.] [Footnote 40: Walter Francis, the present Duke of Buccleuch.] Scott drew up for Ballantyne's newspaper of that week the brief character of Charles, Duke of Buccleuch, which has since been included in his Prose Miscellanies (vol. iv.); and the following letter accompanied a copy of it to Ditton Park:-- TO THE LORD MONTAGU, ETC., ETC., ETC. MY DEAR LORD,--I send you the newspaper article under a different cover. I have studied so much to suppress my own feelings, and so to give a just, calm, and temperate view of the excellent subject of our present sorrow, such as I conceive might be drawn by one less partially devoted to him, that it has to my own eye a cold and lifeless resemblance of an original so dear to me. But I was writing to the public, and to a public less acquainted with him than a few years' experience would have made them. Even his own tenantry were but just arrived at the true estimation of his character. I wrote, therefore, to insure credit and belief, in a tone greatly under my own feelings. I have ordered twenty-five copies to be put in a different shape, of which I will send your Lordship twenty. It has been a painful task, but I feel it was due from me. I am just favored with your letter. I beg your Lordship will not write more frequently than you find quite convenient, for you must have now more than enough upon you. The arrangement respecting Boughton[41] is what I expected--the lifeless remains will be laid where the living thoughts had long been. I grieve that I shall not see the last honors, yet I hardly know how I could have gone through the scene. Nothing in the circumstances could have given me the satisfaction which I receive from your Lordship's purpose of visiting Scotland, and bringing down the dear young ladies, who unite so many and such affecting ties upon the regard and affection of every friend of the family. It will be a measure of the highest necessity for the political interest of the family, and your Lordship will have an opportunity of hearing much information of importance, which really could not be made the subject of writing. The extinction of fire on the hearths of this great house would be putting out a public light and a public beacon in the time of darkness and storms. Ever your most faithful W. S. [Footnote 41: Boughton, in Northamptonshire. This seat came into the possession of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, by his marriage with the daughter and heiress of John, the last Duke of Montagu, who survived for many years her son, Duke Charles. At Boughton, as the reader will see, Scott's early friend, the Duchess Harriet of Buccleuch, had been buried in 1814.] On the 11th of May, Scott returned to Edinburgh, and was present next day at the opening of the Court of Session; when all who saw him were as much struck as I had been at Abbotsford with the lamentable change his illness had produced in his appearance. He was unable to persist in attendance at the Clerks' Table--for several weeks afterwards I think he seldom if ever attempted it;--and I well remember that, when the Third Series of the Tales of my Landlord at length came out (which was on the 10th of June), he was known to be confined to bed, and the book was received amidst the deep general impression that we should see no more of that parentage. On the 13th he wrote thus to Captain Ferguson, who had arrived in London with the remains of the Duke of Buccleuch:-- TO CAPTAIN ADAM FERGUSON, ETC., ETC., MONTAGU HOUSE, WHITEHALL. MY DEAR ADAM,--I am sorry to say I have had another eight days' visit of my disorder, which has confined me chiefly to my bed. It is not attended with so much acute pain as in spring, but with much sickness and weakness. It will perhaps shade off into a mild chronic complaint--if it returns frequently with the same violence, I shall break up by degrees, and follow my dear Chief. I do not mean that there is the least cause for immediate apprehension, but only that the constitution must be injured at last, as well by the modes of cure, or rather of relief, as by the pain. My digestion as well as my appetite are for the present quite gone--a change from former days of Leith and Newhaven parties. I thank God I can look at this possibility without much anxiety, and without a shadow of fear. Will you, if your time serves, undertake two little commissions for me? One respects a kind promise of Lord Montagu to put George Thomson's name on a list for kirk preferment. I don't like to trouble him with letters--he must be overwhelmed with business, and has his dear brother's punctuality in replying even to those which require none. I would fain have that Scottish Abraham Adams provided for if possible. My other request is, that you will, if you can, see Terry, and ask him what is doing about my dining-room chairs, and especially about the carpet, for I shall not without them have the use of what Slender calls "mine own great parlor" this season. I should write to him, but am really unable. I hope you will soon come down--a sight of you would do me good at the worst turn I have yet had. The Baronet[42] is very kind, and comes and sits by me. Everybody likes the Regalia, and I have heard of no one grudging their _hog_[43]--but you must get something better. I have been writing to the Commie[44] about this. He has been inexpressibly kind in Walter's matter, and the Duke of York has promised an early commission. When you see our friend, you can talk over this, and may perhaps save him the trouble of writing particular directions what further is to be done. Iago's rule, I suppose--"put money in thy purse." I wish in passing you would ask how the ladies are in Piccadilly. Yours ever, W. SCOTT. [Footnote 42: Mr. William Clerk.] [Footnote 43: A shilling.] [Footnote 44: The Lord Chief-Commissioner Adam.] The Bride of Lammermoor, and A Legend of Montrose, would have been read with indulgence had they needed it; for the painful circumstances under which they must have been produced were known wherever an English newspaper made its way; but I believe that, except in numerous typical errors, which sprung of necessity from the author's inability to correct any proof sheets, no one ever affected to perceive in either tale the slightest symptom of his malady. Dugald Dalgetty was placed by acclamation in the same rank with Bailie Jarvie--a conception equally new, just, and humorous, and worked out in all the details, as if it had formed the luxurious entertainment of a chair as easy as was ever shaken by Rabelais; and though the character of Montrose himself seemed hardly to have been treated so fully as the subject merited, the accustomed rapidity of the novelist's execution would have been enough to account for any such defect. Of Caleb Balderstone--(the hero of one of the many ludicrous delineations which he owed to the late Lord Haddington, a man of rare pleasantry, and one of the best tellers of old Scotch stories that I ever heard)--I cannot say that the general opinion was then, nor do I believe it ever since has been, very favorable. It was pronounced at the time, by more than one critic, a mere caricature; and though Scott himself would never in after-days admit this censure to be just, he allowed that "he might have sprinkled rather too much parsley over his chicken." But even that blemish, for I grant that I think it a serious one, could not disturb the profound interest and pathos of The Bride of Lammermoor--to my fancy the most pure and powerful of all the tragedies that Scott ever penned. The reader will be well pleased, however, to have, in place of any critical observations on this work, the following particulars of its composition from the notes which its printer dictated when stretched on the bed from which he well knew he was never to rise. "The book" (says James Ballantyne) "was not only written, but published, before Mr. Scott was able to rise from his bed; and he assured me, that when it was first put into his hands in a complete shape, he did not recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it contained! He did not desire me to understand, nor did I understand, that his illness had erased from his memory the original incidents of the story, with which he had been acquainted from his boyhood. These remained rooted where they had ever been; or, to speak more explicitly, he remembered the general facts of the existence of the father and mother, of the son and daughter, of the rival lovers, of the compulsory marriage, and the attack made by the bride upon the hapless bridegroom,[45] with the general catastrophe of the whole. All these things he recollected just as he did before he took to his bed: but he literally recollected nothing else--not a single character woven by the romancer, not one of the many scenes and points of humor, nor anything with which he was connected as the writer of the work. 'For a long time,' he said, 'I felt myself very uneasy in the course of my reading, lest I should be startled by meeting something altogether glaring and fantastic. However, I recollected that you had been the printer, and I felt sure that you would not have permitted anything of this sort to pass.' 'Well,' I said, 'upon the whole, how did you like it?' 'Why,' he said, 'as a whole, I felt it monstrous gross and grotesque; but still the worst of it made me laugh, and I trusted the good-natured public would not be less indulgent.' I do not think I ever ventured to lead to the discussion of this singular phenomenon again; but you may depend upon it, that what I have now said is as distinctly reported as if it had been taken down in short-hand at the moment; I should not otherwise have ventured to allude to the matter at all. I believe you will agree with me in thinking that the history of the human mind contains nothing more wonderful." [Footnote 45: There appeared in the _Edinburgh Evening Post_ of October 10, 1840, a letter dated September 5, 1823, addressed by Sir J. Horne Dalrymple Elphinstone, Bart., to the late Sir James Stewart Denham of Coltness, Bart., both descendants of the Lord President Stair, whose daughter was the original of the Bride of Lammermoor, from which it appears that, according to the traditional creed of the Dalrymple family, the lady's unhappy lover, Lord Rutherford, had found means to be secreted in the nuptial chamber, and that the wound of the bridegroom, Sir David Dunbar of Baldoon, was inflicted by his Lordship's hand. The letter in question will be appended to future editions of the novel.--(1841.)] Soon after Scott reappeared in the Parliament House, he came down one Saturday to the vaulted chambers below, where the Advocates' Library was then kept, to attend a meeting of the Faculty, and as the assembly was breaking up, he asked me to walk home with him, taking Ballantyne's printing-office in our way. He moved languidly, and said, if he were to stay in town many days, he must send for Sibyl Grey; but his conversation was heart-whole; and, in particular, he laughed till, despite his weakness, the stick was flourishing in his hand, over the following almost incredible specimen of that most absurd personage the late Earl of Buchan. Hearing one morning shortly before this time, that Scott was actually _in extremis_, the Earl proceeded to Castle Street, and found the knocker tied up. He then descended to the door in the area, and was there received by honest Peter Mathieson, whose face seemed to confirm the woeful tidings, for in truth his master was ill enough. Peter told his Lordship that he had the strictest orders to admit no visitor; but the Earl would take no denial, pushed the bashful coachman aside, and elbowed his way upstairs to the door of Scott's bedchamber. He had his fingers upon the handle before Peter could give warning to Miss Scott; and when she appeared to remonstrate against such an intrusion, he patted her on the head like a child, and persisted in his purpose of entering the sickroom so strenuously, that the young lady found it necessary to bid Peter see the Earl downstairs again, at whatever damage to his dignity. Peter accordingly, after trying all his eloquence in vain, gave the tottering, bustling, old, meddlesome coxcomb a single shove,--as respectful, doubt not, as a shove can ever be,--and he accepted that hint, and made a rapid exit. Scott, meanwhile, had heard the confusion, and at length it was explained to him; when, fearing that Peter's gripe might have injured Lord Buchan's feeble person, he desired James Ballantyne, who had been sitting by his bed, to follow the old man home--make him comprehend, if he could, that the family were in such bewilderment of alarm, that the ordinary rules of civility were out of the question--and, in fine, inquire what had been the object of his Lordship's intended visit. James proceeded forthwith to the Earl's house in George Street and found him strutting about his library in a towering indignation. Ballantyne's elaborate demonstrations of respect, however, by degrees softened him, and he condescended to explain himself. "I wished," said he, "to embrace Walter Scott before he died, and inform him that I had long considered it as a satisfactory circumstance that he and I were destined to rest together in the same place of sepulture. The principal thing, however, was to relieve his mind as to the arrangements of his funeral--to show him a plan which I had prepared for the procession--and, in a word, to assure him that I took upon myself the whole conduct of the ceremonial at Dryburgh." He then exhibited to Ballantyne a formal programme, in which, as may be supposed, the predominant feature was not Walter Scott, but David, Earl of Buchan. It had been settled, _inter alia_, that the said Earl was to pronounce an eulogium over the grave, after the fashion of French Academicians in the _Père la Chaise_. And this silliest and vainest of busybodies was the elder brother of Thomas and Henry Erskine! But the story is well known of his boasting one day to the late Duchess of Gordon of the extraordinary talents of his family--when her unscrupulous Grace asked him, very coolly, whether the wit had not come by the mother, and been all settled on the younger branches? Scott, as his letters to be quoted presently will show, had several more attacks of his disorder, and some very severe ones, during the autumn of 1819; nor, indeed, had it quite disappeared until about Christmas. But from the time of his return to Abbotsford in July, when he adopted the system of treatment recommended by a skilful physician (Dr. Dick), who had had large experience in maladies of this kind during his Indian life, the seizures gradually became less violent, and his confidence that he was ultimately to baffle the enemy remained unshaken.[46] [Footnote 46: ["For nearly two years he had to struggle for his life with that severe illness, which the natural strength of his constitution at length proved sufficient to throw off. With its disappearance, although restored to health, disappeared also much of his former vigor of body, activity, and power of undergoing fatigue, while in personal appearance he had advanced twenty years in the downward course of life; his hair had become bleached to pure white and scanty locks; the fire of his eye quenched; and his step, more uncertain, had lost the vigorous swinging gait with which he was used to proceed; in fact, old age had by many years anticipated its usual progress and marked how severely he had suffered."--James Skene's _Reminiscences_,--See _Journal_, vol. ii. p. 97, note.]] As I had no opportunity of seeing him again until he was almost entirely reëstablished, I shall leave the progress of his restoration to be collected from his correspondence. But I must not forget to set down what his daughter Sophia afterwards told me of his conduct upon one night in June, when he really did despair of himself. He then called his children about his bed, and took leave of them with solemn tenderness. After giving them, one by one, such advice as suited their years and characters, he added: "For myself, my dears, I am unconscious of ever having done any man an injury, or omitted any fair opportunity of doing any man a benefit. I well know that no human life can appear otherwise than weak and filthy in the eyes of God: but I rely on the merits and intercession of our Redeemer." He then laid his hand on their heads, and said, "God bless you! Live so that you may all hope to meet each other in a better place hereafter. And now leave me, that I may turn my face to the wall." They obeyed him; but he presently fell into a deep sleep; and when he awoke from it after many hours, the crisis of extreme danger was felt by himself, and pronounced by his physician, to have been overcome. CHAPTER XLV Gradual Reëstablishment of Scott's Health. -- Ivanhoe in Progress. -- His Son Walter Joins the Eighteenth Regiment of Hussars. -- Scott's Correspondence with Hhis Son. -- Miscellaneous Letters to Mrs. Maclean Clephane, M. W. Hartstonge, J. G. Lockhart, John Ballantyne, John Richardson, Miss Edgeworth, Lord Montagu, Etc. -- Abbotsford Visited by Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. -- Death of Mrs. William Erskine. 1819 Before Scott left Edinburgh, on the 12th of July, he had not only concluded his bargain with Constable for another novel, but, as will appear from some of his letters, made considerable progress in the dictation of Ivanhoe. That he already felt great confidence on the score of his health may be inferred from his allowing his son, Walter, about the middle of the month, to join the 18th regiment of Hussars in which he had, shortly before, received his commission as Cornet. Scott's letters to his son, the first of his family that left the house, will merit henceforth a good deal of the reader's attention. Walter was, when he thus quitted Abbotsford to try his chances in the active world, only in the eighteenth year of his age; and the fashion of education in Scotland is such, that he had scarcely ever slept a night under a different roof from his parents, until this separation occurred. He had been treated from his cradle with all the indulgence that a man of sense can ever permit himself to show to any of his children; and for several years he had now been his father's daily companion in all his out-of-doors occupations and amusements. The parting was a painful one; but Scott's ambition centred in the heir of his name, and instead of fruitless pinings and lamentings, he henceforth made it his constant business to keep up such a frank correspondence with the young man as might enable himself to exert over him, when at a distance, the gentle influence of kindness, experience, and wisdom. The series of his letters to his son is, in my opinion, by far the most interesting and valuable, as respects the personal character and temper of the writer. It will easily be supposed that, as the young officer entered fully into his father's generous views of what their correspondence ought to be, and detailed every little incident of his new career with the same easy confidence as if he had been writing to a friend or elder brother not very widely differing from himself in standing, the answers abound with opinions on subjects with which I have no right to occupy or entertain my readers: but I shall introduce in the prosecution of this work, as many specimens of Scott's paternal advice as I can hope to render generally intelligible without indelicate explanations--and more especially such as may prove serviceable to other young persons when first embarking under their own pilotage upon the sea of life. Scott's manly kindness to his boy, whether he is expressing approbation or censure of his conduct, can require no pointing out; and his practical wisdom was of that liberal order, based on such comprehensive views of man and the world, that I am persuaded it will often be found available to the circumstances of their own various cases, by young men of whatever station or profession. I shall, nevertheless, adhere as usual to the chronological order; and one or two miscellaneous letters must accordingly precede the first article of his correspondence with the Cornet. He alludes, however, to the youth's departure in the following:-- TO MRS. MACLEAN CLEPHANE OF TORLOISK. ABBOTSFORD, July 15, 1819. DEAR MRS. CLEPHANE,--Nothing could give me more pleasure than to hear you are well, and thinking of looking this way. You will find all my things in very different order from when you were here last, and plenty of room for matron and miss, man and maid. We have no engagements, except to Newton Don about the 20th August--if we be alive--no unreasonable proviso in so long an engagement. My health, however, seems in a fair way of being perfectly restored. It is a joke to talk of any other remedy than that forceful but most unpleasant one--_calomel_. I cannot say I ever felt advantage from anything else; and I am perfectly satisfied that, used as an alterative, and taken in very small quantities for a long time, it must correct all the inaccuracies of the biliary organs. At least it has done so in my case more radically than I could have believed possible. I have intermitted the régime for some days, but begin a new course next week for precaution. Dr. Dick, of the East India Company's service, has put me on this course of cure,[47] and says he never knew it fail unless when the liver was irreparably injured. I believe I shall go to Carlsbad next year. If I must go to a watering-place, I should like one where I might hope to see and learn something new myself, instead of being hunted down by some of the confounded lion-catchers who haunt English spas. I have not the art of being savage to those people, though few are more annoyed by them. I always think of Snug the Joiner-- "----If I should as lion _come in strife_ Into such place, 't were pity on my life." I have been delayed in answering your kind letter by Walter's departure from us to join his regiment, the 18th Dragoons. He has chosen a profession for which he is well suited, being of a calm but remarkably firm temper--fond of mathematics, engineering, and all sorts of calculation--clear-headed, and good-natured. When you add to this a good person and good manners, with great dexterity in horsemanship and all athletic exercises, and a strong constitution, one hopes you have the grounds of a good soldier. My own selfish wish would have been that he should have followed the law; but he really had no vocation that way, wanting the acuteness and liveliness of intellect indispensable to making a figure in that profession. So I am satisfied all is for the best, only I shall miss my gamekeeper and companion in my rides and walks. But so it was, is, and must be--the young must part from the nest, and learn to wing their own way against the storm. I beg my best and kindest compliments to Lady Compton. Stooping to write hurts me, or I would have sent her a few lines. As I shall be stationary here for all this season, I shall not see her, perhaps, for long enough. Mrs. Scott and the girls join in best love, and I am ever, dear Mrs. Clephane, your faithful and most obedient servant, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 47: [An interesting letter from Dr. Dick to Scott will be found in _Familiar Letters_ (vol. ii. p. 53), in which he speaks of their common friend, Leyden, and expresses sorrow at the tone regarding him taken by some of the Edinburgh periodicals, which ridiculed the idea of comparing him with Sir William Jones as a linguist. The writer, who knew both, shows Leyden to have been in this respect much the greater of the two. The Doctor makes light of his efficient services in Scott's case, and says: "I have only to offer my grateful thanks for your intended present, which, however, I must beg leave to decline, because I am rewarded already a thousandfold, by being allowed the honor of prescribing for you, and by being assured, under your own hand, that you are so well.... But if you will send me one volume of any kind, and write on it that it is from yourself, I shall consider it a great favor. I have the vanity to wish that my son and his descendants may have it to show as a proof that I was honored with the friendship of the author."]] I have had some hesitation about introducing the next letter--which refers to the then recent publication of a sort of mock-tour in Scotland, entitled Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk. Nobody but a very young and a very thoughtless person could have dreamt of putting forth such a book; yet the Epistles of the imaginary Dr. Morris have been so often denounced as a mere string of libels, that I think it fair to show how much more leniently Scott judged of them at the time. Moreover, his letter is a good specimen of the liberal courtesy with which, on all occasions, he treated the humblest aspirants in literature. Since I have alluded to Peter's Letters at all, I may as well take the opportunity of adding that they were not wholly the work of one hand.[48] [Footnote 48: [The other hand is supposed to have been Wilson's. It is difficult for any reader of to-day to understand why these clever and interesting sketches of the men and manners of the Edinburgh of 1819 should have been so emphatically denounced in certain quarters. This is not the first occasion on which Scott sent words of praise concerning the _Letters_, which first appeared in part in _Blackwood's Magazine_. He says of the Pleaders' portraits [John Clerk, Cranstoun, and Jeffrey], they "are about the best I ever read, and will preserve these three very remarkable and original men, for all of whom, however differing in points whereon I wish we had agreed, I entertain not only deep respect, but sincere friendship and regard."--_Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 39.]] TO J. G. LOCKHART, ESQ., CARNBROE HOUSE, HOLLYTOWN. ABBOTSFORD, July 19, 1819. MY DEAR SIR,--_Distinguendum est._ When I receive a book _ex dono_ of the author, in the general case I offer my thanks with all haste before I cut a leaf, lest peradventure I should feel more awkward in doing so afterwards, when they must not only be tendered for the well-printed volumes themselves, and the attention which sent them my way, but moreover for the supposed pleasure I have received from the contents. But with respect to the learned Dr. Morris, the case is totally different, and I formed the immediate resolution not to say a word about that gentleman's labors without having read them at least twice over--a pleasant task, which has been interrupted partly by my being obliged to go down the country, partly by an invasion of the Southron, in the persons of Sir John Shelley, famous on the turf, and his lady. I wish Dr. Morris had been of the party, chiefly for the benefit of a little Newmarket man, called Cousins, whose whole ideas, similes, illustrations, etc., were derived from the course and training stable. He was perfectly good-humored, and I have not laughed more this many a day. I think the Doctor has got over his ground admirably;--only the general turn of the book is perhaps too favorable, both to the state of our public society, and of individual character:-- "His fools have their follies so lost in a crowd Of virtues and feelings, that folly grows proud."[49] But it was, in every point of view, right to take this more favorable tone, and to throw a Claude Lorraine tint over our northern landscape. We cannot bear the actual bare truth, either in conversation, or that which approaches nearest to conversation, in a work like the Doctor's, published within the circle to which it refers. For the rest, the Doctor has fully maintained his high character for force of expression, both serious and comic, and for acuteness of observation--_rem acu tetigit_--and his scalpel has not been idle, though his lenient hand has cut sharp and clean, and poured balm into the wound. What an acquisition it would have been to our general information to have had such a work written, I do not say fifty, but even five-and-twenty years ago; and how much of grave and gay might then have been preserved, as it were, in amber, which have now mouldered away. When I think that at an age not much younger than yours I knew Black, Ferguson, Robertson, Erskine, Adam Smith, John Home, etc., etc., and at least saw Burns, I can appreciate better than any one the value of a work which, like this, would have handed them down to posterity in their living colors. Dr. Morris ought, like Nourjahad, to revive every half century, to record the fleeting manners of the age, and the interesting features of those who will be only known to posterity by their works. If I am very partial to the Doctor, which I am not inclined to deny, remember I have been bribed by his kind and delicate account of his visit to Abbotsford. Like old Cumberland, or like my own gray cat, I will e'en purr and put up my back, and enjoy his kind flattery, even when I know it goes beyond my merits. I wish you would come and spend a few days here, while this delightful weather lasts. I am now so well as quite to enjoy the society of my friends, instead of the woeful pickle in which I was in spring, when you last favored me. It was, however, _dignus vindice nodus_, for no less a deity descended to my aid than the potent Mercury himself, in the shape of calomel, which I have been obliged to take daily, though in small quantities, for these two months past. Notwithstanding the inconveniences of this remedy, I thrive upon it most marvellously, having recovered both sleep and appetite; so when you incline to come this way, you will find me looking pretty _bobbishly_. Yours very truly, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 49: Goldsmith's _Retaliation_.] On the same day, Scott wrote as follows to John Ballantyne, who had started for London, on his route to Paris in quest of articles for next winter's auction-room--and whose good offices he was anxious to engage on behalf of the Cornet, in case they should happen to be in the metropolis at the same time:-- TO MR. JOHN BALLANTYNE, CARE OF MESSRS. LONGMAN & CO., LONDON. ABBOTSFORD, July 19, 1819. DEAR JOHN,--I have only to say, respecting matters here, that they are all going on quietly. The first volume is very nearly finished, and the whole will be out in the first or second week of September. It will be well if you can report yourself in Britain by that time at farthest, as something must be done on the back of this same Ivanhoe. Walter left us on Wednesday night, and will be in town by the time this reaches you, looking, I fancy, very like a cow in a fremd loaning.[50] He will be heard of at Miss Dumergue's. Pray look after him, and help him about his purchases. I hope you will be so successful in your foreign journey as to diddle the Edinburgh folk out of some cash this winter. But don't forget September, if you wish to partake the advantages thereof. I wish you would see what good reprints of old books are come out this year at Triphook's, and send me a note of them.--Yours very truly, W. SCOTT. [Footnote 50: _Anglice_--a strange pasture.] John Ballantyne found the Cornet in London, and did for him what his father had requested. TO MR. JOHN BALLANTYNE. ABBOTSFORD, July 26, 1819. DEAR JOHN,--I have yours with the news of Walter's rattle-traps, which are abominably extravagant. But there is no help for it but submission. The things seem all such as cannot well be wanted. How the devil they mount them to such a price, the tailors best know. They say it takes _nine_ tailors to make a man--apparently, one is sufficient to ruin him. We shall rub through here well enough, though James is rather glumpy and dumpy--chiefly, I believe, because his child is unwell. If you can make any more money for me in London, good and well. I have no spare cash till Ivanhoe comes forth. Yours truly, W. SCOTT. P. S.--Enclosed are sundry letters of introduction for the _ci-devant_ Laird of Gilnockie. TO MISS EDGEWORTH OF EDGEWORTHSTOWN. ABBOTSFORD, July 21, 1819. MY DEAR MISS EDGEWORTH,--When this shall happen to reach your hands, it will be accompanied by a second edition of Walter Scott, a _tall_ copy, as collectors say, and bound in Turkey leather, garnished with all sorts of fur and frippery--not quite so well _lettered_, however, as the old and vamped original edition. In other and more intelligible phrase, the tall Cornet of Hussars, whom this will introduce to you, is my eldest son, who is now just leaving me to join his regiment in Ireland. I have charged him, and he is himself sufficiently anxious, to avoid no opportunity of making your acquaintance, as to be known to the good and the wise is by far the best privilege he can derive from my connection with literature. I have always felt the value of having access to persons of talent and genius to be the best part of a literary man's prerogative, and you will not wonder, I am sure, that I should be desirous this youngster should have a share of the same benefit. I have had dreadful bad health for many months past, and have endured more pain than I thought was consistent with life. But the thread, though frail in some respects, is tough in others; and here am I with renewed health, and a fair prospect of regaining my strength, much exhausted by such a train of suffering. I do not know when this will reach you, my son's motions being uncertain. But, find you where or when it will, it comes, dear Miss Edgeworth, from the sincere admirer of your genius, and of the patriotic and excellent manner in which it has always been exerted. In which character I subscribe myself ever yours truly, WALTER SCOTT. I believe, at the time when the foregoing letter was written, Scott and Miss Edgeworth had never met. The next was addressed to a gentleman whose acquaintance the poet had formed when collecting materials for his edition of Swift. On that occasion Mr. Hartstonge was of great service to Scott--and he appears to have paid him soon afterwards a visit at Abbotsford. Mr. Hartstonge was an amiable and kind-hearted man, and enthusiastically devoted to literature; but his own poetical talents were undoubtedly of the sort that finds little favor either with gods or columns. He seems to have written shortly before this time to inquire about his old acquaintance's health. TO MATTHEW WELD HARTSTONGE, ESQ., MOLESWORTH STREET, DUBLIN. ABBOTSFORD, July 21, 1819. MY DEAR SIR,--... Fortunately at present my system is pretty strong. In the mean while my family are beginning to get forwards. Walter (you remember my wading into Cauldshiels Loch to save his little frigate from wreck) is now a Cornet of six feet two inches in your Irish 18th Hussars; the regiment is now at Cork, and will probably be next removed to Dublin, so you will see your old friend with a new face; be-furred, be-feathered, and be-whiskered in the highest military _ton_. I have desired him to call upon you, should he get to Dublin on leave, or come there upon duty. I miss him here very much, for he was my companion, gamekeeper, etc., etc., and when one loses one's own health and strength, there are few things so pleasant as to see a son enjoying both in the vigor of hope and promise. Think of this, my good friend, and as you have kind affections to make some good girl happy, settle yourself in life while you are young, and lay up, by so doing, a stock of domestic happiness, against age or bodily decay. There are many good things in life, whatever satirists and misanthropes may say to the contrary; but probably the best of all, next to a conscience void of offence (without which, by the bye, they can hardly exist), are the quiet exercise and enjoyment of the social feelings, in which we are at once happy ourselves, and the cause of happiness to them who are dearest to us. I have no news to send you from hence. The addition to my house is completed with battlement and bartisan, but the old cottage remains hidden among creepers, until I shall have leisure--_i. e._, time and money--to build the rest of my mansion--which I will not do hastily, as the present is amply sufficient for accommodation. Adieu, my dear sir; never reckon the degree of my regard by the regularity of my correspondence, for besides the vile diseases of laziness and procrastination, which have always beset me, I have had of late both pain and languor sufficient to justify my silence. Believe me, however, always most truly yours, WALTER SCOTT. The first letter the young Cornet received from his father after mounting his "rattle-traps" was the following:-- TO CORNET WALTER SCOTT, 18TH HUSSARS, CORK. ABBOTSFORD, August 1, 1819. DEAR WALTER,--I was glad to find you got safe to the hospitable quarters of Piccadilly, and were put on the way of achieving your business well and expeditiously. You would receive a packet of introductory letters by John Ballantyne, to whom I addressed them. I had a very kind letter two days ago from your Colonel.[51] Had I got it sooner it would have saved some expense in London, but there is no help for it now. As you are very fully provided with all these appointments, you must be particular in taking care of them, otherwise the expense of replacing them will be a great burden. Colonel Murray seems disposed to show you much attention. He is, I am told, rather a reserved man, which indeed is the manner of his family. You will, therefore, be the more attentive to what he says, as well as to answer all advances he may make to you with cordiality and frankness; for if you be shy on the one hand, and he reserved on the other, you cannot have the benefit of his advice, which I hope and wish you may gain. I shall be guided by his opinion respecting your allowance: he stipulates that you shall have only two horses (not to be changed without his consent), and on no account keep a gig. You know of old how I detest that mania of driving wheel-barrows up and down, when a man has a handsome horse, and can ride him. They are both foolish and expensive things, and, in my opinion, are only fit for English bagmen--therefore gig it not, I pray you. In buying your horses you will be very cautious. I see Colonel Murray has delicacy about assisting you directly in the matter--for he says very truly that some gentlemen make a sort of traffic in horse-flesh--from which his duty and inclination equally lead him to steer clear. But he will take care that you don't buy any that are unfit for service, as in the common course they must be approved by the commandant as _chargers_. Besides which, he will probably give you some private hints, of which avail yourself, as there is every chance of your needing much advice in this business. Two things I preach on my own experience: _1st_, Never to buy an aged horse, however showy. He must have done work, and, at any rate, will be unserviceable in a few years. _2dly_, To buy rather when the horse is something low in condition, that you may the better see all his points. Six years is the oldest at which I would purchase. You will run risk of being jockeyed by knowing gentlemen of your own corps parting with their _experienced_ chargers to _oblige_ you. Take care of this. Any good-tempered horse learns the dragoon duty in wonderfully short time, and you are rider enough not to want one quite broke in. Look well about you, and out into the country. Excellent horses are bred all through Munster, and better have a clever young one than an old regimental brute foundered by repeated charges and bolts. If you see a brother-officer's horse that pleases you much, and seems reasonable, look particularly how he stands on his forelegs, and for that purpose see him in the stable. If he shifts and shakes a little, have nothing to say to him. This is the best I can advise, not doubting you will be handsomely excised after all. The officer who leaves his corps may be disposing of good horses, and perhaps selling reasonable. One who continues will not, at least should not, part with a good horse without some great advantage. You will remain at Cork till you have learned your regimental duty, and then probably be despatched to some outquarter. I need not say how anxious I am that you should keep up your languages, mathematics, and other studies. To have lost that which you already in some degree possess--and that which we don't practise we soon forget--would be a subject of unceasing regret to you hereafter. You have good introductions, and don't neglect to avail yourself of them. Something in this respect your name may do for you--a fair advantage, if used with discretion and propriety. By the way, I suspect you did not call on John Richardson. The girls were very dull after you left us; indeed the night you went away, Anne had hysterics, which lasted some time. Charles also was down in the mouth, and papa and mamma a little grave and dejected. I would not have you think yourself of too great importance neither, for the greatest personages are not always long missed, and to make a bit of a parody,-- "Down falls the rain, up gets the sun, Just as if Walter were not gone." We comfort ourselves with the hopes that you are to be happy in the occupation you have chosen, and in your new society. Let me know if there are any well-informed men among them, though I don't expect you to find out that for some time. Be civil to all, till you can by degrees find out who are really best deserving. I enclose a letter from Sophia, which doubtless contains all the news. St. Boswell's Fair rained miserably, and disappointed the misses. The weather has since been delightful, and harvest advances fast. All here goes its old round--the habits of age do not greatly change, though those of youth do. Mamma has been quite well, and so have I--but I still take calomel. I was obliged to drink some claret with Sir A. Don, Sir John Shelley, and a funny little Newmarket quizzy, called Cousins, whom they brought here with them the other day, but I was not the worse. I wish you had Sir J. S. at your elbow when you are buying your horses--he is a very knowing man on the turf. I like his lady very much. She is perfectly feminine in her manners, has good sense, and plays divinely on the harp; besides all which, she shoots wild boars, and is the boldest horsewoman I ever saw. I saw her at Paris ride like a lapwing, in the midst of all the aide-de-camps and suite of the Duke of Wellington. Write what your horses come to, etc. Your outfit will be an expensive matter; but once settled, it will be fairly launching you into life in the way you wished, and I trust you will see the necessity of prudence and a gentlemanlike economy, which consists chiefly in refusing one's self trifling indulgences until we can easily pay for them. Once more, I beg you to be attentive to Colonel Murray and to his lady. I hear of a disease among the moorfowl. I suppose they are dying for grief at your departure. Ever, my dear boy, your affectionate father, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 51: The then commandant of the 18th Hussars was Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon. Henry Murray, brother to the Earl of Mansfield.] TO THE SAME. 7th August, 1819. DEAR WALTER,--... I shall be curious to know how you like your brother-officers, and how you dispose of your time. The drills and riding-school will, of course, occupy much of your mornings for some time. I trust, however, you will keep in view drawing, languages, etc. It is astonishing how far even half an hour a day regularly bestowed on one object, will carry a man in making himself master of it. The habit of dawdling away time is easily acquired, and so is that of putting every moment either to use or to amusement. You will not be hasty in forming intimacies with any of your brother-officers, until you observe which of them are most generally respected, and likely to prove most creditable friends. It is seldom that the people who put themselves hastily forward to please are those most worthy of being known. At the same time you will take care to return all civility which is offered, with readiness and frankness. The Italians have a proverb, which I hope you have not forgot poor Pierrotti's lessons so far as not to comprehend, "_Volto sciolto e pensieri stretti_." There is no occasion to let any one see what you exactly think of him; and it is the less prudent, as you will find reason, in all probability, to change your opinion more than once. I shall be glad to hear of your being fitted with a good servant. Most of the Irish of that class are scapegraces--drink, steal, and lie like the devil. If you could pick up a canny Scot, it would be well. Let me know about your mess. To drink hard is none of your habits; but even drinking what is called a certain quantity every day, hurts the stomach, and by hereditary descent yours is delicate. I believe the poor Duke of Buccleuch laid the foundation of that disease which occasioned his premature death in the excesses of Villars's regiment; and I am sorry and ashamed to say, for your warning, that the habit of drinking wine, so much practised when I was a young man, occasioned, I am convinced, many of my cruel stomach complaints. You had better drink a bottle of wine on any particular occasion, than sit and soak and sipple at an English pint every day. All our bipeds are well. Hamlet had an inflammatory attack, and I began to think he was going mad, after the example of his great namesake, but Willie Laidlaw bled him, and he has recovered. Pussy is very well. Mamma, the girls, and Charlie, join in love. Yours affectionately, W. S. P. S.--Always mention what letters of mine you have received, and write to me whatever comes into your head. It is the privilege of great boys when distant that they cannot tire papas by any length of detail upon any subject. TO THE SAME. ABBOTSFORD, 13th August, 1819. MY DEAREST WALTER,--I am very much obliged to Colonel Murray for the trouble he has taken on your behalf. I hope he has received the letter which I wrote to him a fortnight since under Mr. Freeling's cover. It enclosed a parcel of letters to you. I took the liberty of asking his advice what allowance you should have to assist you. You know pretty well my circumstances and your own, and that I wish you to be comfortable, but not in any respect extravagant; and this for your own sake, and not for that of money, which I never valued very much, perhaps not so much as I ought to have done. I think by speaking to Colonel Murray you may get at his opinion, and I have so much trust in your honor and affection as to confide in your naming your own allowance. Meantime, lest the horse should starve while the grass grows, I enclose a cheque upon Messrs. Coutts for £50, to accompt of your first year's allowance. Your paymaster will give you the money for it I dare say. You have to endorse the bill, _i. e._, write your name on the back of it. All concerned are pleased with your kind tokens of remembrance from London. Mamma and I like the caricatures very much. I think, however, scarce any of them shows the fancy and talent of old Gilray: he became insane, I suppose by racking his brain in search of extravagant ideas, and was supported in his helpless condition by the woman who keeps the great print-shop in St. James's Street, who had the generosity to remember that she had made thousands by his labor. Everything here goes on in the old fashion, and we are all as well as possible, saving that Charles rode to Lawrence fair yesterday in a private excursion, and made himself sick with eating gingerbread, whereby he came to disgrace. Sophia has your letter of the 4th, which she received yesterday. The enclosed will help you to set up shop and to get and pay whatever is necessary. I wish we had a touch of your hand to make the parties rise in the morning, at which they show as little alertness as usual. I beg you will keep an account of money received and paid. Buy a little book ruled for the purpose, for pounds, shillings, and pence, and keep an account of cash received and expended. The balance ought to be cash in purse, if the book is regularly kept. But any very small expenses you can enter as "Sundries, £0: 3: 6," which saves trouble. You will find this most satisfactory and useful. But, indeed, arithmetic is indispensable to a soldier who means to rise in his profession. All military movements depend upon calculation of time, numbers, and distance. Dogs all well--cat sick--supposed with eating birds in their feathers. Sisters, brother, and mamma join in love to the "poor wounded hussa-a-r;"--I dare say you have heard the song; if not, we shall send it for the benefit of the mess. Yours affectionately, WALTER SCOTT. P. S.--Yesterday, _the 12th_, would, I suppose, produce some longings after the Peel heights. In the following letter to Mr. Richardson, we see Scott busied about certain little matters of heraldic importance which had to be settled before his patent of baronetcy could be properly made out. He also alludes to two little volumes, which he edited during this autumn--the Memorials of the Haliburtons, a thin quarto (never published)--and the poems of Patrick Carey, of which he had given specimens some years before in the Annual Register. TO JOHN RICHARDSON, ESQ., FLUDYER STREET, WESTMINSTER. ABBOTSFORD, 22d August, 1819. MY DEAR RICHARDSON,--I am sorry Walter did not get to your kind domicile. But he stayed but about five or six days in London, and great was his haste, as you may well suppose. He had a world of trinkums to get, for you know there goes as much to the man-millinery of a young officer of hussars as to that of an heiress on her bridal day. His complete equipage, horses not included, cost about £360, and if you add a couple of blood horses, it will be £200 more, besides the price of his commission, for the privilege of getting the hardness of his skull tried by a brick-bat at the next meeting of Radical Reformers. I am not much afraid of these folks, however, because I remember 1793 and 1794, when the same ideas possessed a much more formidable class of the people, being received by a large proportion of farmers, shopkeepers, and others, possessed of substance. A mere mob will always be a fire of loose straw; but it is melancholy to think of the individual mischief that may be done. I did not find it quite advisable to take so long a journey as London this summer. I am quite recovered; but my last attack was of so dreadful a nature, that I wish to be quite insured against another--_i. e._, as much as one can be insured against such a circumstance--before leaving home for any length of time. To return to the vanities of this world, from what threatened to hurry me to the next: I enclose a drawing of my arms, with the supporters which the heralds here assign me. Our friend Harden seems to wish I would adopt one of his Mer-maidens, otherwise they should be both Moors, as on the left side. I have also added an impression of my seal. You can furnish Sir George Naylor with as much of my genealogy as will serve the present purpose. I shall lose no time in connecting myself by a general service with my grand-uncle, the last Haliburton of Dryburgh Abbey, or Newmains, as they call it. I spoke to the Lyon-office people in Edinburgh. I find my entry there will be an easy matter, the proofs being very pregnant and accessible. I would not stop for a trifling expense to register my pedigree in England, as far as you think may be necessary, to show that it is a decent one. My ancestors were brave and honest men, and I have no reason to be ashamed of them, though they were neither wealthy nor great. As something of an antiquary and genealogist, I should not like there were any mistakes in this matter, so I send you a small note of my descent by my father and my paternal grandmother, with a memorandum of the proofs by which they may be supported, to which I might add a whole cloud of oral witnesses. I hate the being suspected of fishing for a pedigree, or bolstering one up with false statements. How people can bring themselves to this, I cannot conceive. I send you a copy of the Haliburton MS., of which I have printed twenty for the satisfaction of a few friends. You can have any part of them copied in London which ought to be registered. I should like if Sir George Naylor would take the trouble of looking at the proofs, which are chiefly extracts from the public records. I take this opportunity to send you also a copy of a little amateur-book--Carey's Poems--a thoroughbred Cavalier, and, I think, no bad versifier. Kind compliments to Mrs. Richardson. Yours, my dear Richardson, most truly, WALTER SCOTT. TO CORNET W. SCOTT, 18TH HUSSARS, CORK. ABBOTSFORD, 4th September, 1819. DEAR WALTER,--Your very acceptable letter of the 26th reached me to-day. I had begun to be apprehensive that the draft had fallen into the hands of the Philistines, but the very long calm must have made the packets slow in their progress, which I suppose was the occasion of the delay. Respecting the allowance, Colonel Murray informs me that from £200 to £250, in addition to the pay of a Cornet, ought to make a young man very comfortable. He adds, which I am much pleased to hear, that your officers are, many of them, men of moderate fortune, and disposed to be economical. I had thought of £200 as what would suit us both, but when I see the account which you very properly keep, I shall be better able to determine. It must be considered that any uncommon expense, as the loss of a horse or the like, may occasion an extra draft over and above the allowance. I like very much your methodical arrangement as to expenses; it is rather a tiresome thing at first to keep an accompt of pounds, shillings, and pence, but it is highly necessary, and enables one to see how the money actually goes. It is, besides, a good practical way of keeping up acquaintance with arithmetic, and you will soon find that the principles on which all military movements turn are arithmetical, and that though one may no doubt learn to do them by rote, yet to _understand_ them, you must have recourse to numbers. Your adjutant will explain this to you. By the way, as he is a foreigner, you will have an opportunity to keep up a little of your French and German. Both are highly necessary to you; the knowledge of the last, with few other qualifications, made several officers' fortunes last war. I observe with pleasure you are making acquaintances among the gentry, which I hope you will not drop for want of calling, etc. I trust you have delivered all your recommendations, for it is an affront to omit doing so, both to the person who writes them, and those for whom they are designed. On the other hand, one always holds their head a little better up in the world when they keep good society. Lord and Lady Melville are to give you recommendations when you go to Dublin. I was at Melville Castle for two days, and found them both well. I was also one day at Langholm Lodge to meet Lord Montagu. Possibly, among your Irish friends, you may get some shooting. I shall be glad you avail yourself of any such opportunities, and also that, when you get your own horses, you hunt in the winter, if you be within the reach of hounds. Nothing confirms a man in horsemanship so well as hunting, though I do not recommend it to beginners, who are apt to learn to ride like grooms. Besides the exercise, field-sports make a young soldier acquainted with the country, and habituate him to have a good eye for distance and for taking up the _carte de pays_ in general, which is essential to all, but especially to officers of light troops, who are expected to display both alertness and intelligence in reporting the nature of the country, being in fact the _eyes_ of the army. In every point of view, field-sports are preferable to the indoors amusement of a billiard-table, which is too often the lounging-place for idle young officers, where there is nothing to be got but a habit of throwing away time, and an acquaintance with the very worst society--I mean at public billiard-rooms--for unquestionably the game itself is a pretty one, when practised among gentlemen, and not made a constant habit of. But public billiard-tables are almost always the resort of blacklegs and sharpers, and all that numerous class whom the French call _chevaliers d'industrie_, and we, _knights of the whipping-post_. I am glad you go to the anatomical lectures. An acquaintance with our own very extraordinary frame is a useful branch of general knowledge, and as you have some turn for drawing, it will also enable you to judge of the proper mode of disposing the limbs and muscles of your figures, should you prosecute the art so far. In fact, there is no branch of study can come much amiss to a young man, providing he does study, and very often the precise occupation of the time must be trusted to taste and opportunity. The White Boys made a great noise when I was a boy. But Ireland (the more is the pity) has never been without White Boys, or Right Boys, or Defenders, or Peep-of-day Boys, or some wild association or another for disturbing the peace of the country. We shall not be many degrees better if the Radical Reformers be not checked. The Manchester Yeomen behaved very well, upsetting the most immense crowd ever was seen, and notwithstanding the lies in the papers, without any unnecessary violence. Mr. Hunt pretends to have had several blows on his head with sabres, but has no wound to show for it. I am disposed to wish he had got such a one as once on a day I could have treated him to. I am apt to think his politic pate would have broached no more sedition. Miss Rutherford and Eliza Russell are now with us. We were also favored with a visit of the Miss ----s, who are rather empty canisters, though I dare say very good girls. Anne tired of them most inhospitably. Mrs. Maclean Clephane and her two unmarried daughters are now here; being, as we say, pears of another tree. Your sisters seem very fond of the young ladies, and I am glad of it, for they will see that a great deal of accomplishment and information may be completely reconciled with liveliness, fun, good-humor, and good-breeding. All here send love. Dogs and cat are well. I dare say you have heard from some other correspondent that poor Lady Wallace died of an inflammation, after two days' illness. Trout[52] has returned here several times, poor fellow, and seems to look for you; but Henry Scott is very kind to him, and he is a great favorite. As you Hussars smoke, I will give you one of my pipes, but you must let me know how I can send it safely. It is a very handsome one, though not my best. I will keep my _Meerschaum_ until I make my Continental tour, and then you shall have that also. I hope you will get leave for a few months, and go with me. Yours very affectionately, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 52: _Lady Wallace_ was a pony; _Trout_ a favorite pointer which the Cornet had given, at leaving home, to the young Laird of Harden, now the Master of Polwarth.] About this time, as the succeeding letters will show, Abbotsford had the honor of a short visit from Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, now King of the Belgians. Immediately afterwards Scott heard of the death of Mrs. William Erskine, and repaired to Edinburgh to condole with his afflicted friend.[53] His allusions, meanwhile, to views of buying more land on Tweedside, are numerous. These speculations are explained in a most characteristic style to the Cornet; and we see that one of them was cut short by the tragical death of a _bonnet-laird_ already introduced to the reader's notice--namely, _Lauchie Longlegs_, the admired of Geoffrey Crayon. [Footnote 53: For Scott's Epitaph for Mrs. Erskine, see his _Poetical Works_ (Ed. 1834), vol. xi. p. 347 [Cambridge Ed. p. 447].] TO CORNET WALTER SCOTT, 18TH HUSSARS, CORK. ABBOTSFORD, 27th September, 1819. MY DEAR WALTER,--Your letter of the 10th gave me the pleasant assurance that you are well and happy, and attending to your profession. We have been jogging on here in the old fashion, somewhat varied by an unexpected visit, on Friday last, from no less a person than Prince Leopold. I conclude you will have all the particulars of this important event from the other members of the family, so I shall only say that when I mentioned the number of your regiment, the Prince said he had several friends in the 18th, and should now think he had one more, which was very polite. By the way, I hear an excellent character of your officers for regularity and gentlemanlike manners. This report gives me great pleasure, for to live in bad society will deprave the best manners, and to live in good will improve the worst. I am trying a sort of bargain with neighbor Nicol Milne at present. He is very desirous of parting with his estate of Faldonside, and if he will be contented with a reasonable price, I am equally desirous to be the purchaser. I conceive it will come to about £30,000 at least. I will not agree to give a penny more; and I think that sum is probably £2000 and more above its actual marketable value. But then it lies extremely convenient for us, and would, joined to Abbotsford, make a very gentlemanlike property, worth at least £1800 or £2000 a year. I can command about £10,000 of my own, and if I be spared life and health, I should not fear rubbing off the rest of the price, as Nicol is in no hurry for payment. As you will succeed me in my landed property, I think it right to communicate my views to you. I am much moved by the prospect of getting at about £2000 or £3000 worth of marle, which lies on Milne's side of the loch, but which can only be drained on my side, so that he can make no use of it. This would make the lands of Abbotsford worth 40_s._ an acre over-head, excepting the sheep farm. I am sensible I might dispose of my money to more advantage, but probably to none which, in the long run, would be better for you--certainly to none which would be productive of so much pleasure to myself. The woods are thriving, and it would be easy, at a trifling expense, to restore Faldonside loch, and stock it with fish. In fact, it would require but a small dam-head. By means of a little judicious planting, added to what is already there, the estate might be rendered one of the most beautiful in this part of Scotland. Such are my present plans, my dear boy, having as much your future welfare and profit in view as the immediate gratification of my own wishes. I am very sorry to tell you that poor Mrs. William Erskine is no more. She was sent by the medical people on a tour to the lakes of Cumberland, and was taken ill at Lowood, on Windermere. Nature, much exhausted by her previous indisposition, sunk under four days' illness. Her husband was with her, and two of her daughters--he is much to be pitied. Mr. Rees, the bookseller, told me he had met you in the streets of Cork, and reported well of the growth of your _Schnurr-bart_. I hope you know what that means. Pray write often, as the post comes so slow. I keep all your letters, and am much pleased with the frankness of the style. No word of your horses yet? but it is better not to be impatient, and to wait for good ones. I have been three times on Newark, and killed six hares each time. The two young dogs are capital good. I must not omit to tell you our old, and, I may add, our kind neighbor Lauchie, has departed, or, as Tom expresses it, has been fairly _flytten out o' the warld_. You know the old quarrel betwixt his brother and him about the wife: in an ill-fated hour Jock the brother came down to Lochbreist with a sister from Edinburgh, who was determined to have her share of the scolding-match; they attacked poor old Lauchie like mad folks, and reviled his wife in all sort of evil language. At length his passion was wrought up to a great pitch, and he answered with much emotion, that if she were the greatest ---- in Edinburgh, it was not their business, and as he uttered this speech, he fell down on his back, and lay a dead man before them. There is little doubt the violence of the agitation had broke a blood-vessel in the heart or brain. A very few days since he was running up and down calling for a coffin, and wishing to God he was in one; to which Swanston,[54] who was present, answered, he could not apply to a better hand, and he would make him one if he had a mind. He has left a will of his own making, but from some informality I think it will be set aside. His land cannot come into the market until his girl comes of age, which, by the way, makes me more able for the other bargain.... The blackcocks are very plenty. I put up fourteen cocks and hens in walking up the Clappercleuch to look at the wood. Do you not wish you had been on the outside with your gun? Tom has kept us well supplied with game; he boasts that he shot fifteen times without a miss. I shall be glad to hear that you do the same on Mr. Newenham's grounds. Mamma, the girls, and Charles, all join in love and affection. Believe me ever, dear Walter, your affectionate father, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 54: John Swanston had then the care of the sawmill at Toftfield; he was one of Scott's most valued dependents, and in the sequel succeeded Tom Purdie as his henchman.] TO THE LORD MONTAGU, ETC., ETC., ETC. ABBOTSFORD, 3d October, 1819. MY DEAR LORD,--I am honored with your Buxton letter.... _Anent_ Prince Leopold, I only heard of his approach at eight o'clock in the morning, and he was to be at Selkirk by eleven. The magistrates sent to ask me to help them to receive him. It occurred to me he might be coming to Melrose to see the Abbey, in which case I could not avoid asking him to Abbotsford, as he must pass my very door. I mentioned this to Mrs. Scott, who was lying quietly in bed, and I wish you had heard the scream she gave on the occasion. "What have we to offer him?"--"Wine and cake," said I, thinking to make all things easy; but she ejaculated, in a tone of utter despair, "Cake!! where am I to get cake?" However, being partly consoled with the recollection that his visit was a very improbable incident, and curiosity, as usual, proving too strong for alarm, she set out with me in order not to miss a peep of the great man. James Skene and his lady were with us, and we gave our carriages such additional dignity as a pair of leaders could add, and went to meet him in full puff. The Prince very civilly told me, that, though he could not see Melrose on this occasion, he wished to come to Abbotsford for an hour. New despair on the part of Mrs. Scott, who began to institute a domiciliary search for cold meat through the whole city of Selkirk, which produced _one shoulder of cold lamb_. In the mean while, his Royal Highness received the civic honors of the BIRSE[55] very graciously. I had hinted to Bailie Lang,[56] that it ought only to be licked _symbolically_ on the present occasion; so he flourished it three times before his mouth, but without touching it with his lips, and the Prince followed his example as directed. Lang made an excellent speech--sensible, and feeling, and well delivered. The Prince seemed much surprised at this great propriety of expression and behavior in a magistrate, whose people seemed such a rabble, and whose whole band of music consisted in a drum and fife. He noticed to Bailie Anderson that Selkirk seemed very populous in proportion to its extent. "On an occasion like this it seems so," answered the Bailie,--neatly enough, I thought. I question if any magistrates in the kingdom, lord mayors and aldermen not excepted, could have behaved with more decent and quiet good-breeding. Prince Leopold repeatedly alluded to this during the time he was at Abbotsford. I do not know how Mrs. Scott ultimately managed; but with broiled salmon, and blackcock, and partridges, she gave him a very decent lunch; and I chanced to have some very fine old hock, which was mighty germane to the matter. The Prince seems melancholy, whether naturally or from habit, I do not pretend to say; but I do not remember thinking him so at Paris, where I saw him frequently, then a much poorer man than myself; yet he showed some humor, for, alluding to the crowds that followed him everywhere, he mentioned some place where he had gone out to shoot, but was afraid to proceed for fear of "bagging a boy." He said he really thought of getting some shooting-place in Scotland, and promised me a longer visit on his return. If I had had a day's notice to have _warned the waters_, we could have met him with a very respectable number of the gentry; but there was no time for this, and probably he liked it better as it was. There was only young Clifton who could have come, and he was shy and cubbish, and would not, though requested by the Selkirk people. He was perhaps ashamed to march through Coventry with them. It hung often and sadly on my mind that _he_ was wanting who could and would have received him like a Prince indeed; and yet the meeting betwixt them, had they been fated to meet, would have been a very sad one. I think I have now given your Lordship a very full, true, and particular account of our royal visit, unmatched even by that of King Charles at the Castle of Tillietudlem. That we did not speak of it for more than a week after it happened, and that that emphatic monosyllable, _The Prince_, is not heard amongst us more than ten times a day, is, on the whole, to the credit of my family's understanding. The piper is the only one whose brain he seems to have endangered; for, as the Prince said he preferred him to any he had heard in the Highlands--(which, by the way, shows his Royal Highness knows nothing of the matter)--the fellow seems to have become incapable of his ordinary occupation as a forester, and has cut stick and stem without remorse to the tune of _Phail Phranse_, _i. e._, the Prince's Welcome. I am just going to the head-court with Donaldson, and go a day sooner to exhume certain old monuments of the Rutherfords at Jedburgh. Edgerstone[57] is to meet me at Jedburgh for this research, and then we shall go up with him to dinner. My best respects attend Lady Montagu. I wish this letter may reach you on a more lively day than it is written in, for it requires little to add to its dulness. Tweed is coming down very fast, the first time this summer. Believe me, my dear Lord, most truly yours, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 55: See _ante_, vol. v. p. 88.] [Footnote 56: Scott's good friend, Mr. Andrew Lang, Sheriff-Clerk for Selkirkshire, was then chief magistrate of the county town. [He was the grandfather of the accomplished man of letters who bears his name.]] [Footnote 57: The late John Rutherford of Edgerstone, long M. P. for Roxburghshire, was a person of high worth, and universally esteemed. Scott used to say Edgerstone was his _beau ideal_ of the character of a country gentleman. He was, I believe, the head of the once great and powerful clan of Rutherford.] TO W. SCOTT, ESQ., 18TH HUSSARS, CORK. ABBOTSFORD, 14th October, 1819. DEAR WALTER,--I had your last letter, and am very glad you find pleasant society. Mrs. Dundas of Arniston is so good as to send you some introductions, which you will deliver as soon as possible. You will be now in some degree accustomed to meet with strangers, and to form your estimate of their character and manners. I hope, in the mean time, the French and German are attended to; please to mention in your next letter what you are reading, and in what languages. The hours of youth, my dear Walter, are too precious to be spent all in gayety. We must lay up in that period when our spirit is active, and our memory strong, the stores of information which are not only to facilitate our progress through life, but to amuse and interest us in our later stage of existence. I very often think what an unhappy person I should have been, if I had not done something more or less towards improving my understanding when I was at your age; and I never reflect, without severe self-condemnation, on the opportunities of acquiring knowledge which I either trifled with, or altogether neglected. I hope you will be wiser than I have been, and experience less of that self-reproach. My last acquainted you with Mrs. Erskine's death, and I grieve to say we have just received intelligence that our kind neighbor and good friend Lord Somerville is at the very last gasp. His disease is a dysentery, and the symptoms, as his brother writes to Mr. Samuel Somerville, are mortal. He is at Vevay, upon his road, I suppose, to Italy, where he had purposed spending the winter. His death, for I understand nothing else can be expected, will be another severe loss to me; for he was a kind, good friend, and at my time of day men do not readily take to new associates. I must own this has been one of the most melancholy years I ever passed. The poor Duke, who loved me so well--Mrs. Erskine--Lord Somerville--not to mention others with whom I was less intimate, make it one year of mourning. I should not forget the Chief Baron, who, though from ill health we met of late seldom, was always my dear friend, and indeed very early benefactor. I must look forwards to seeing in your success and respectability, and in the affection and active improvement of all of you, those pleasures which are narrowed by the death of my contemporaries. Men cannot form new intimacies at my period of life, but must be happy or otherwise according to the good fortune and good conduct of those near relatives who rise around them. I wish much to know if you are lucky in a servant. Trust him with as little cash as possible, and keep short accounts. Many a good servant is spoiled by neglecting this simple precaution. The man is tempted to some expense of his own, gives way to it, and then has to make it up by a system of overcharge and peculation; and thus mischief begins, and the carelessness of the master makes a rogue out of an honest lad, and cheats himself into the bargain. I have a letter from your uncle Tom, telling me his eldest daughter is to be forthwith married to a Captain Huxley of his own regiment. As he has had a full opportunity of being acquainted with the young gentleman, and approves of the match, I have to hope that it will be a happy one. I fear there is no great fortune in the case on either side, which is to be regretted. Of domestic affairs I have little to tell you. The harvest has been excellent, the weather delightful; but this I must often have repeated. To-day I was thinning out fir-trees in the thicket, and the men were quite exhausted with the heat, and I myself, though only marking the trees, felt the exercise sufficiently warm. The wood is thriving delightfully. On the 28th we are to have a dance in honor of your birthday. I wish you could look in upon us for the day at least--only I am afraid we could not part with you when it was over, and so you would be in the guise of Cinderella, when she outstayed her time at the ball, and all her finery returned into its original base materials. Talking of balls, the girls would tell you the Melrose hop, where mamma presided, went off well. I expect poor Erskine and his daughter next week, or the week after. I went into town to see him--and found him bearing his great loss with his natural gentleness and patience. But he was sufficiently distressed, as he has great reason to be. I also expect Lord and Lady Melville here very soon. Sir William Rae (now Lord Advocate) and his lady came to us on Saturday. On Sunday Maida walked with us, and in jumping the paling at the Greentongue park contrived to hang himself up by the hind leg. He howled at first, but seeing us making towards him he stopped crying, and waved his tail, by way of signal, it was supposed, for assistance. He sustained no material injury, though his leg was strangely twisted into the bars, and he was nearly hanging by it. He showed great gratitude, in his way, to his deliverers. This is a long letter, and little in it; but that is nothing extraordinary. All send best love--and I am ever, dear Walter, your affectionate father, WALTER SCOTT. TO THOMAS SCOTT, ESQ., PAYMASTER, 70th REGIMENT, CANADA. ABBOTSFORD, 16th October, 1819. DEAR TOM,--I received yesterday your very acceptable letter, containing the news of Jessie's approaching marriage, in which, as a match agreeable to her mother and you, and relieving your minds from some of the anxious prospects which haunt those of parents, I take the most sincere interest. Before this reaches you the event will probably have taken place. Meantime, I enclose a letter to the bride or wife, as the case may happen to be. I have sent a small token of good-will to ballast my good wishes, which you will please to value for the young lady, that she may employ it as most convenient or agreeable to her. A little more fortune would perhaps have done the young folks no harm; but Captain Huxley, being such as you describe him, will have every chance of getting forward in his profession; and the happiest marriages are often those in which there is, at first, occasion for prudence and economy. I do certainly feel a little of the surprise which you hint at, for time flies over our heads one scarce marks how, and children become marriageable ere we consider them as out of the nursery. My eldest son, Walter, has also wedded himself--but it is to a regiment of hussars. He is at present a cornet in the 18th, and quartered in Cork barracks. He is capital at most exercises, but particularly as a horseman. I do not intend he shall remain in the cavalry, however, but shall get him into the line when he is capable of promotion. Since he has chosen this profession, I shall be desirous that he follows it out in good earnest, and that can only be done by getting into the infantry. My late severe illness has prevented my going up to London to receive the honor which the Prince Regent has announced his intention to inflict upon me. My present intention is, if I continue as well as I have been, to go up about Christmas to get this affair over. My health was restored (I trust permanently) by the use of calomel, a very severe and painful remedy, especially in my exhausted state of body, but it has proved a radical one. By the way, _Radical_ is a word in very bad odor here, being used to denote a set of blackguards a hundred times more mischievous and absurd than our old friends in 1794 and 1795. You will learn enough of the doings of the _Radical Reformers_ from the papers. In Scotland we are quiet enough, excepting in the manufacturing districts, and we are in very good hands, as Sir William Rae, our old commander, is Lord Advocate. Rae has been here two or three days, and left me yesterday; he is the old man, sensible, cool-headed, and firm, always thinking of his duty, never of himself. He inquired kindly after you, and I think will be disposed to serve you, should an opportunity offer. Poor William Erskine has lost his excellent wife, after a long and wasting illness. She died at Lowood on Windermere, he having been recommended to take her upon a tour about three weeks before her death. I own I should scarce forgive a physician who should contrive to give me this addition to family distress. I went to town last week to see him, and found him, upon the whole, much better than I expected. I saw my mother on the same occasion, admirably well indeed. She is greatly better than this time two years, when she rather quacked herself a little too much. I have sent your letter to our mother, and will not fail to transmit to our other friends the agreeable news of your daughter's settlement. Our cousin, Sir Harry Macdougal, is marrying his eldest daughter to Sir Thomas Brisbane, a very good match on both sides. I have been paying a visit on the occasion, which suspends my closing this letter. I hope to hear very soon from you. Respecting our silence, I, like a ghost, only waited to be spoken to, and you may depend on me as a regular correspondent, when you find time to be one yourself. Charlotte and the girls join in kind love to Mrs. Scott and all the family. I should like to know what you mean to do with young Walter, and whether I can assist you in that matter. Believe me, dear Tom, ever your affectionate brother, W. SCOTT. TO DANIEL TERRY, ESQ., LONDON. ABBOTSFORD, November 10, 1819. MY DEAR TERRY,--I should be very sorry if you thought the interest I take in you and yours so slight as not to render your last letter extremely interesting. We have all our various combats to fight in this best of all possible worlds, and, like brave fellow-soldiers, ought to assist one another as much as possible. I have little doubt, that if God spares me till my little namesake be fit to take up his share of the burden, I may have interest enough to be of great advantage to him in the entrance of life. In the present state of your own profession, you would not willingly, I suppose, choose him to follow it; and, as it is very seductive to young people of a lively temper and good taste for the art, you should, I think, consider early how you mean to dispose of little Walter, with a view, that is, to the future line of life which you would wish him to adopt. Mrs. Terry has not the good health which all who know her amiable disposition and fine accomplishments would anxiously wish her; yet, with impaired health and the caution which it renders necessary, we have very frequently instances of the utmost verge of existence being attained, while robust strength is cut off in the middle career. So you must be of good heart, and hope the best in this as in other cases of a like affecting nature. I go to town on Monday, and will forward under Mr. Freeling's cover as much of Ivanhoe as is finished in print. It is completed, but in the hands of a very slow transcriber; when I can collect it, I will send you the MS., which you will please to keep secret from every eye. I think this will give a start, if it be worth taking, of about a month, for the work will be out on the 20th of December. It is certainly possible to adapt it to the stage, but the expense of scenery and decorations would be great, this being a tale of chivalry, not of character. There is a tale in existence, by dramatizing which, I am certain, a most powerful effect might be produced: it is called Undine, and I believe has been translated into French by Mademoiselle Montolieu, and into English from her version: do read it, and tell me your opinion: in German the character of Undine is exquisite. The only objection is, that the catastrophe is unhappy, but this might be altered. I hope to be in London for ten days the end of next month; and so good-by for the present, being in great haste, most truly yours, W. SCOTT. I conclude this chapter with a letter written two or three days before Scott quitted Abbotsford for the winter session. It is addressed to his friend Hartstonge, who had taken the opportunity of the renewal of Scott's correspondence to solicit his opinion and assistance touching a MS. drama; and the reader will be diverted with the style in which the amiable tragedian is treated to his _quietus_:-- TO MATTHEW WELD HARTSTONGE, ESQ., DUBLIN. ABBOTSFORD, 11th November, 1819. MY DEAR SIR,--I was duly favored with your packet, containing the play, as well as your very kind letter. I will endeavor (though extremely unwilling to offer criticism on most occasions) to meet your confidence with perfect frankness. I do not consider the Tragedy as likely to make that favorable impression on the public which I would wish that the performance of a friend should effect--and I by no means recommend to you to hazard it upon the boards. In other compositions, the neglect of the world takes nothing from the merit of the author; but there is something ludicrous in being _affiché_ as the author of an unsuccessful play. Besides, you entail on yourself the great and eternal plague of altering and retrenching to please the humors of performers, who are, speaking generally, extremely ignorant, and capricious in proportion. These are not vexations to be voluntarily undertaken; and the truth is, that in the present day there is only one reason which seems to me adequate for the encountering the plague of trying to please a set of conceited performers and a very motley audience,--I mean the want of money, from which, fortunately, you are exempted. It is very true that some day or other a great dramatic genius may arise to strike out a new path; but I fear till this happens no great effect will be produced by treading in the old one. The reign of Tragedy seems to be over, and the very considerable poetical abilities which have been lately applied to it, have failed to revive it. Should the public ever be indulged with small theatres adapted to the hours of the better ranks in life, the dramatic art may recover; at present it is in abeyance--and I do therefore advise you in all sincerity to keep the Tragedy (which I return under cover) safe under your own charge. Pray think of this as one of the most unpleasant offices of friendship--and be not angry with me for having been very frank, upon an occasion when frankness may be more useful than altogether palatable. I am much obliged to you for your kind intentions towards my young Hussar. We have not heard from him for three weeks. I believe he is making out a meditated visit to Killarney. I am just leaving the country for Edinburgh, to attend my duty in the courts; but the badness of the weather in some measure reconciles me to the unpleasant change. I have the pleasure to continue the most satisfactory accounts of my health; it is, to external appearance, as strong as in my strongest days--indeed, after I took once more to Sancho's favorite occupations of eating and sleeping, I recovered my losses wonderfully. Very truly yours, WALTER SCOTT. CHAPTER XLVI Political Alarms. -- The Radicals. -- Levies of Volunteers. -- Project of the Buccleuch Legion. -- Death of Scott's Mother, her Brother Dr. Rutherford, and her Sister Christian. -- Letters to Lord Montagu, Mr. Thomas Scott, Cornet Scott, Mr. Laidlaw, and Lady Louisa Stuart. -- Publication of Ivanhoe. 1819 [Illustration: ANNE RUTHERFORD (MOTHER OF SIR WALTER SCOTT) _After the painting at Abbotsford_] Towards the winter of 1819 there prevailed a spirit of alarming insubordination among the mining population of Northumberland and the weavers of the West of Scotland; and Scott was particularly gratified with finding that his own neighbors at Galashiels had escaped the contagion. There can be little doubt that this exemption was principally owing to the personal influence and authority of the Laird of Abbotsford and Sheriff of the Forest; but the people of Galashiels were also fortunate in the qualities of their own beneficent landlords, Mr. Scott of Gala, and Mr. Pringle of Torwoodlee. The progress of the western _Reformers_ by degrees led even the most important Whigs in that district to exert themselves in the organization of volunteer regiments, both mounted and dismounted; and, when it became generally suspected that Glasgow and Paisley maintained a dangerous correspondence with the refractory colliers of Northumberland--Scott, and his friends the Lairds of Torwoodlee and Gala, determined to avail themselves of the loyalty and spirit of the men of Ettrick and Teviotdale, and proposed first raising a company of sharpshooters among their own immediate neighbors, and afterwards--this plan receiving every encouragement--a legion or brigade upon a large scale, to be called the Buccleuch Legion. During November and December, 1819, these matters formed the chief daily care and occupation of the author of Ivanhoe; and though he was still obliged to dictate most of the chapters of his novel, we shall see that, in case it should be necessary for the projected levy of Foresters to march upon Tynedale, he was prepared to place himself at their head. He had again intended, as soon as he should have finished Ivanhoe, to proceed to London, and receive his baronetcy; but as that affair had been crossed at Easter by his own illness, so at Christmas it was again obliged to be put off in consequence of a heavy series of domestic afflictions. Within one week Scott lost his excellent mother, his uncle Dr. Daniel Rutherford, Professor of Botany in the University of Edinburgh--and their sister, Christian Rutherford, already often mentioned as one of the dearest and most esteemed of all his friends and connections. The following letters require no further introduction or comment:-- TO THE LORD MONTAGU, BUXTON. ABBOTSFORD, 12th November, 1819. MY DEAR LORD,--... I wish I had any news to send your Lordship; but the best is, we are all quiet here. The Galashiels weavers, both men and masters, have made their political creed known to me, and have sworn themselves anti-radical. They came in solemn procession, with their banners, and my own piper at their head, whom they had borrowed for the nonce. But the Tweed being in flood, we could only communicate like Wallace and Bruce across the Carron. However, two deputies came through in the boat, and made me acquainted with their loyal purposes. The evening was crowned with two most distinguished actions--the weavers refusing, in the most peremptory manner, to accept of a couple of guineas to buy whiskey, and the renowned John of Skye, piper in ordinary to the Laird of Abbotsford, no less steadily refusing a very handsome collection, which they offered him for his minstrelsy. All this sounds very nonsensical, but the people must be humored and countenanced when they take the right turn, otherwise they will be sure to take the wrong. The accounts from the West sometimes make me wish our little Duke five or six years older, and able to get on horseback. It seems approaching to the old song-- "Come fill up our cup, come fill up our can, Come saddle the horses, and call up our men, Come open the gates, and let us go free, And we'll show them the bonnets of bonny Dundee."[58] I am rather too old for that work now, and I cannot look forward to it with the sort of feeling that resembled pleasure--as I did in my younger and more healthy days. However, I have got a good following here, and will endeavor to keep them together till times mend. My respectful compliments attend Lady Montagu, and I am always, with the greatest regard, your Lordship's very faithful WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 58: See Scott's _Poetical Works_, vol. xii. p. 195 [Cambridge Ed. p. 485].] TO CORNET WALTER SCOTT, 18TH HUSSARS. EDINBURGH, 13th November, 1819. DEAR WALTER,--I am much surprised and rather hurt at not hearing from you for so long a while. You ought to remember that, however pleasantly the time may be passing with you, we at home have some right to expect that a part of it (a very small part will serve the turn) should be dedicated, were it but for the sake of propriety, to let us know what you are about. I cannot say I shall be flattered by finding myself under the necessity of again complaining of neglect. To write once a week, to one or other of us, is no great sacrifice, and it is what I earnestly pray you to do. We are to have great doings in Edinburgh this winter. No less than Prince Gustavus of Sweden is to pass the season here, and do what Princes call studying. He is but half a Prince either, for this Northern Star is somewhat shorn of his beams. His father was, you know, dethroned by Buonaparte, at least by the influence of his arms, and one of his generals, Bernadotte, made heir of the Swedish throne in his stead. But this youngster, I suppose, has his own dreams of royalty, for he is nephew to the Emperor of Russia (by the mother's side), and that is a likely connection to be of use to him, should the Swedish nobles get rid of Bernadotte, as it is said they wish to do. Lord Melville has recommended the said Prince particularly to my attention, though I do not see how I can do much for him. I have just achieved my grand remove from Abbotsford to Edinburgh--a motion which you know I do not make with great satisfaction. We had the Abbotsford hunt last week. The company was small, as the newspapers say, but select, and we had excellent sport, killing eight hares. We coursed on Gala's ground, and he was with us. The dinner went off with its usual alacrity, but we wanted you and Sally to ride and mark for us. I enclose another letter from Mrs. Dundas of Arniston. I am afraid you have been careless in not delivering those I formerly forwarded, because in one of them, which Mrs. Dundas got from a friend, there was enclosed a draft for some money. I beg you will be particular in delivering any letters entrusted to you, because though the good-nature of the writers may induce them to write to be of service to you, yet it is possible that they may, as in this instance, add things which are otherwise of importance to their correspondents. It is probable that you may have picked up among your military friends the idea that the mess of a regiment is all in all sufficient to itself; but when you see a little of the world you will be satisfied that none but pedants--for there is pedantry in all professions--herd exclusively together, and that those who do so are laughed at in real good company. This you may take on the authority of one who has seen more of life and society, in all its various gradations, from the highest to the lowest, than a whole hussar regimental mess, and who would be much pleased by knowing that you reap the benefit of an experience which has raised him from being a person of small consideration to the honor of being father of an officer of hussars. I therefore enclose another letter from the same kind friend, of which I pray you to avail yourself. In fact, those officers who associate entirely among themselves see and know no more of the world than their messman, and get conceited and disagreeable by neglecting the opportunities offered for enlarging their understanding. Every distinguished soldier whom I have known, and I have known many, was a man of the world, and accustomed to general society. To sweeten my lecture, I have to inform you that, this being quarter-day, I have a remittance of £50 to send you whenever you are pleased to let me know it will be acceptable--for, like a ghost, I will not speak again till I am spoken to. I wish you not to avail yourself of your leave of absence this winter, because, if my health continues good, I shall endeavor to go on the Continent next summer, and should be very desirous to have you with me; therefore, I beg you to look after your French and German. We had a visit from a very fine fellow indeed at Abbotsford,--Sir Thomas Brisbane, who long commanded a brigade in the Peninsula. He is very scientific, but bores no one with it, being at the same time a well-informed man on all subjects, and particularly alert in his own profession, and willing to talk about what he has seen. Sir Harry Hay Macdougal, whose eldest daughter he is to marry, brought him to Abbotsford on a sort of wedding visit, as we are cousins according to the old fashion of country kin; Beardie, of whom Sir Harry has a beautiful picture, being a son of an Isabel Macdougal, who was, I fancy, grand-aunt to Sir Harry. Once more, my dear Walter, write more frequently, and do not allow yourself to think that the first neglect in correspondence I have ever had to complain of has been on your part. I hope you have received the Meerschaum pipe.--I remain your affectionate father, WALTER SCOTT. TO THE SAME. EDINBURGH, 3d December, 1819. MY DEAR WALTER,--I hope your servant proves careful and trusty. Pray let me know this. At any rate, do not trust him a bit further than you can help it, for in buying anything you will get it much cheaper yourself than he will. We are now settled for the winter; that is, all of them excepting myself, who must soon look southwards. On Saturday we had a grand visitor, _i. e._, the Crown Prince of Sweden, under the name of Count Itterburg. His travelling companion or tutor is Baron de Polier, a Swiss of eminence in literature and rank. They took a long look at King Charles XII., who, you cannot have forgotten, keeps his post over the dining-room chimney; and we were all struck with the resemblance betwixt old Ironhead, as the janissaries called him, and his descendant. The said descendant is a very fine lad, with very soft and mild manners, and we passed the day very pleasantly. They were much diverted with Captain Adam,[59] who outdid his usual outdoings, and, like the Barber of Bagdad, danced the dance and sung the song of every person he spoke of. I am concerned I cannot give a very pleasant account of things here. Glasgow is in a terrible state. The Radicals had a plan to seize on 1000 stand of arms, as well as a depôt of ammunition, which had been sent from Edinburgh Castle for the use of the volunteers. The Commander-in-Chief, Sir Thomas Bradford, went to Glasgow in person, and the whole city was occupied with patrols of horse and foot, to deter them from the meditated attack on the barracks. The arms were then delivered to the volunteers, who are said to be 4000 on paper; how many effective and trustworthy, I know not. But it was a new sight in Scotland on a Sunday to see all the inhabitants in arms, soldiers patrolling the streets, and the utmost precaution of military service exacted and observed in an apparently peaceful city. The Old Blue Regiment of volunteers was again summoned together yesterday. They did not muster very numerous, and looked most of them a little _ancient_. However, they are getting recruits fast, and then the veterans may fall out of the ranks. The Commander-in-Chief has told the President that he may soon be obliged to leave the charge of the Castle to these armed citizens. This looks serious. The President[60] made one of the most eloquent addresses that ever was heard, to the Old Blues. The Highland Chiefs have offered to raise their clans, and march them to any point in Scotland where their services shall be required. To be sure, the Glasgow folks would be a little surprised at the arrival of Dugald Dhu, "brogues an' brochan an' a'." I shall, I think, bid Ballantyne send you a copy of his weekly paper, which often contains things you would like to see, and will keep you in mind of Old Scotland. They are embodying a troop of cavalry in Edinburgh--nice young men and good horses. They have paid me the compliment to make me an honorary member of the corps, as my days of active service have been long over. Pray take care, however, of my sabre, in case the time comes which must turn out all. I have almost settled that, if things look moderately tranquil in Britain in spring and summer, I will go abroad, and take Charles, with the purpose of leaving him, for two or three years, at the famous institution of Fellenborg, near Berne, of which I hear very highly. Two of Fraser Tytler's sons are there, and he makes a very favorable report of the whole establishment. I think that such a residence abroad will not only make him well acquainted with French and German, as indeed he will hear nothing else, but also prevent his becoming an Edinburgh _petit-maître_ of fourteen or fifteen, which he could otherwise scarce avoid. I mentioned to you that I should be particularly glad to get you leave of absence, providing it does not interfere with your duty, in order that you may go with us. If I have cash enough, I will also take your sister and mamma, and you might return home with them by Paris, in case I went on to Italy. All this is doubtful, but I think it is almost certain that Charles and I go, and hope to have you with us. This will be probably about July next, and I wish you particularly to keep it in view. If these dark prospects become darker, which God forbid! neither you nor I will have it in our power to leave the post to which duty calls us. Mamma and the girls are quite well, and so is Master Charles, who is of course more magnificent, as being the only specimen of youthhead at home. He has got an old broadsword hanging up at his bed-head, which, to be the more ready for service, hath no sheath. To this I understand we are to trust for our defence against the Radicals. Anne (notwithstanding the assurance) is so much afraid of the disaffected, that last night, returning with Sophia from Portobello, where they had been dancing with the Scotts of Harden, she saw a Radical in every man that the carriage passed. Sophia is of course wise and philosophical, and mamma has not yet been able to conceive why we do not catch and hang the whole of them, untried and unconvicted. Amidst all their various emotions, they join in best love to you; and I always am very truly yours, W. SCOTT. P. S.--I shall set off for London on the 25th. [Footnote 59: Sir Adam Ferguson.] [Footnote 60: The Right Honorable Charles Hope, Lord President of the Court of Session, was Colonel-commandant of the Old Blues, or First Regiment of Edinburgh Volunteers.] TO THE SAME. EDINBURGH, 17th December, 1819. MY DEAR WALTER,--I have a train of most melancholy news to acquaint you with. On Saturday I saw your grandmother perfectly well, and on Sunday the girls drank tea with her, when the good old lady was more than usually in spirits; and, as if she had wished to impress many things on their memory, told over a number of her old stories with her usual alertness and vivacity. On Monday she had an indisposition, which proved to be a paralytic affection, and on Tuesday she was speechless, and had lost the power of one side, without any hope of recovery, although she may linger some days. But what is very remarkable, and no less shocking, Dr. Rutherford, who attended his sister in perfect health upon Tuesday, died himself upon the Wednesday morning. He had breakfasted without intimating the least illness, and was dressed to go out, and particularly to visit my mother, when he sunk backwards, and died in his daughter Anne's arms, almost without a groan. To add to this melancholy list, our poor friend, Miss Christie, is despaired of. She was much affected by my mother's fatal indisposition, but does not know as yet of her brother's death. Dr. Rutherford was a very ingenious as well as an excellent man, more of a gentleman than his profession too often are, for he could not take the back-stairs mode of rising in it, otherwise he might have been much more wealthy. He ought to have had the Chemistry class, as he was one of the best chemists in Europe;[61] but superior interest assigned it to another, who, though a neat experimentalist, is not to be compared to poor Daniel for originality of genius. Since you knew him, his health was broken and his spirits dejected, which may be traced to the loss of his eldest son on board an East Indiaman, and also, I think, to a slight paralytic touch which he had some years ago. To all this domestic distress I have to add the fearful and unsettled state of the country. All the regular troops are gone to Glasgow. The Mid-Lothian Yeomanry and other corps of volunteers went there on Monday, and about 5000 men occupied the town. In the mean while, we were under considerable apprehension here, the Castle being left in the charge of the city volunteers and a few veterans. All our corner, high and low, is loyal. Torwoodlee, Gala, and I, have offered to raise a corps, to be called the Loyal Foresters, to act anywhere south of the Forth. If matters get worse, I will ask leave of absence for you from the Commander-in-Chief, because your presence will be materially useful to levy men, and you can only be idle where you are, unless Ireland should be disturbed. Your old corps of the Selkirkshire Yeomanry have been under orders, and expect to be sent either to Dumfries or Carlisle. Berwick is dismantled, and they are removing the stores, cannon, etc., from one of the strongest places here, for I defy the devil to pass the bridge at Berwick, if reasonably well kept by 100 men. But there is a spirit of consternation implied in many of the orders, which, _entre nous_, I like worse than what I see or know of the circumstances which infer real danger. For myself I am too old to fight, but nobody is too old to die, like a man of virtue and honor, in defence of the principles he has always maintained. I would have you to keep yourself ready to return here suddenly, in case the Duke of York should permit your temporary services in your own country, which, if things grow worse, I will certainly ask. The fearful thing is the secret and steady silence observed by the Radicals in all they do. Yet, without anything like effective arms or useful discipline, without money and without a commissariat, what can they do, but, according to their favorite toast, have blood and plunder? Mamma and the girls, as well as Charles, send kind love. Your affectionate father, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 61: "The subject of his _Thesis_ is singular, and entitles Rutherford to rank very high among the chemical philosophers of modern times. Its title is _De Aere Mephitico_, etc.--It is universally admitted that Dr. Rutherford first discovered this gas--the reputation of his discovery being speedily spread through Europe, his character as a chemist of the first eminence was firmly established, and much was augured from a young man in his twenty-second year having distinguished himself so remarkably."--Bower's _History of the University of Edinburgh_, vol. iii. (1830), pp. 260, 261.] TO MR. WILLIAM LAIDLAW, KAESIDE. EDINBURGH, December 20, 1819. MY DEAR WILLIE,--Distress has been very busy with me since I wrote to you. I have lost, in the course of one week, my valued relations, Dr. and Miss Rutherford--happy in this, that neither knew of the other's dissolution. My dear mother has offered me deeper subject of affliction, having been struck with the palsy, and being now in such a state that I scarce hope to see her again. But the strange times compel me, under this pressure of domestic distress, to attend to public business. I find Mr. Scott of Gala agrees with me in thinking we should appeal at this crisis to the good sense and loyalty of the lower orders, and we have resolved to break the ice, and be the first in the Lowlands, so far as I have yet heard of, to invite our laborers and those over whom circumstances and fortune give us influence, to rise with us in arms, and share our fate. You know, as well as any one, that I have always spent twice the income of my property in giving work to my neighbors, and I hope they will not be behind the Galashiels people, who are very zealous. Gala and I go hand in hand, and propose to raise at least a company each of men, to be drilled as sharpshooters or infantry, which will be a lively and interesting amusement for the young fellows. The dress we propose to be as simple, and at the same time as serviceable, as possible;--a jacket and trousers of Galashiels gray cloth, and a smart bonnet with a small feather, or, to save even that expense, a sprig of holly. And we will have shooting at the mark, and prizes, and fun, and a little whiskey, and daily pay when on duty or drill. I beg of you, dear Willie, to communicate my wish to all who have received a good turn at my hand, or may expect one, or may be desirous of doing me one--(for I should be sorry Darnick and Brigend were beat)--and to all other free and honest fellows who will take share with me on this occasion. I do not wish to take any command farther than such as shall entitle me to go with the corps, for I wish it to be distinctly understood that, in whatever capacity, _I go with them_, and take a share in good or bad as it casts up. I cannot doubt that I will have your support, and I hope you will use all your enthusiasm in our behalf. Morrison volunteers as our engineer. Those who I think should be spoke to are the following, among the higher class:-- John Usher.[62] He should be lieutenant, or his son ensign. Sam Somerville.[63] I will speak to him--he may be lieutenant, if Usher declines; but I think, in that case, Usher should give us his son. Young Nicol Milne[64] is rather young, but I will offer to his father to take him in. Harper[65] is a _sine qua non_. Tell him I depend on him for the honor of Darnick. I should propose to him to take a gallant halbert. Adam Ferguson thinks you should be our adjutant. John Ferguson I propose for captain. He is steady, right bold, and has seen much fire. The auld captain will help us in one shape or other. For myself, I know not what they propose to make of me, but it cannot be anything very active. However, I should like to have a steady quiet horse, drilled to stand fire well, and if he has these properties, no matter how stupid, so he does not stumble. In this case the price of such a horse will be no object. These, my dear friend, are your beating orders. I would propose to raise about sixty men, and not to take old men. John the Turk[66] will be a capital corporal; and I hope in general that all my young fellows will go with me, leaving the older men to go through necessary labor. Sound Tom what he would like. I think, perhaps, he would prefer managing matters at home in your absence and mine at drill. John of Skye is cock-a-hoop upon the occasion, and I suppose has made fifty blunders about it by this time. You must warn Tom Jamieson, Gordon Winness, John Swanston (who will carry off all the prizes at shooting), Davidson, and so forth. If you think it necessary, a little handbill might be circulated. But it may be better to see if Government will accept our services; and I think, in the situation of the country, when work is scarce, and we offer pay for their playing themselves, we should have choice of men. But I would urge no one to do what he did not like. The very precarious state of my poor mother detains me here, and makes me devolve this troublesome duty upon you. All you have to do, however, is to sound the men, and mark down those who seem zealous. They will perhaps have to fight with the pitmen and colliers of Northumberland for defence of their firesides, for these literal _blackguards_ are got beyond the management of their own people. And if such is the case, better keep them from coming into Scotland, than encounter the mischief they might do there. Yours always most truly, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 62: Mr. Usher has already been mentioned as Scott's predecessor in the property of Toftfield. He now resided near those lands, and was Scott's tenant on the greater part of them.] [Footnote 63: Samuel Somerville, W. S. (a son of the historian of Queen Anne), had a pretty villa at Lowood, on the Tweed, immediately opposite the seat of his relation, Lord Somerville, of whose estate he had the management.] [Footnote 64: Nicol Milne, Esq. (now advocate), eldest son of the Laird of Faldonside.] [Footnote 65: Harper, keeper of a little inn at Darnick, was a gallant and spirited yeoman--uniformly the gainer of the prizes at every contest of strength and agility in that district.] [Footnote 66: One of Scott's foresters--thus designated as being, in all senses of the word, a _gallant_ fellow.] TO THOMAS SCOTT, ESQ., 70th REGIMENT, KINGSTON, CANADA. EDINBURGH, 22d December, 1819. MY DEAR TOM,--I wrote you about ten days since, stating that we were all well here. In that very short space a change so sudden and so universal has taken place among your friends here, that I have to communicate to you a most miserable catalogue of losses. Our dear mother was on Sunday the 12th December in all her usual strength and alertness of mind. I had seen and conversed with her on the Saturday preceding, and never saw her better in my life of late years. My two daughters drank tea with her on Sunday, when she was uncommonly lively, telling them a number of stories, and being in rather unusual spirits, probably from the degree of excitation which sometimes is remarked to precede a paralytic affection. In the course of Monday she received that fatal summons, which at first seemed slight; but in the night betwixt Monday and Tuesday our mother lost the use both of speech and of one side. Since that time she has lain in bed constantly, yet so sensible as to see me and express her earnest blessing on all of us. The power of speech is totally lost; nor is there any hope, at her advanced age, that the scene can last long. Probably a few hours will terminate it. At any rate, life is not to be wished, even for our nearest and dearest, in those circumstances. But this heavy calamity was only the commencement of our family losses. Dr. Rutherford, who had seemed perfectly well, and had visited my mother upon Tuesday the 14th, was suddenly affected with gout in his stomach, or some disease equally rapid, on Wednesday the 15th, and, without a moment's warning or complaint, fell down a dead man, almost without a single groan. You are aware of his fondness for animals: he was just stroking his cat after eating his breakfast, as usual, when, without more warning than a half-uttered exclamation, he sunk on the ground, and died in the arms of his daughter Anne. Though the Doctor had no formed complaint, yet I have thought him looking poorly for some months; and though there was no failure whatever in intellect, or anything which approached it, yet his memory was not so good; and I thought he paused during the last time he attended me, and had difficulty in recollecting the precise terms of his recipe. Certainly there was a great decay of outward strength. We were very anxious about the effect this fatal news was likely to produce on the mind and decayed health of our aunt, Miss C. Rutherford, and resolved, as her health had been gradually falling off ever since she returned from Abbotsford, that she should never learn anything of it until it was impossible to conceal it longer. But God had so ordered it that she was never to know the loss she had sustained, and which she would have felt so deeply. On Friday the 17th December, the second day after her brother's death, she expired, without a groan and without suffering, about six in the morning. And so we lost an excellent and warm-hearted relation, one of the few women I ever knew whose strength of mental faculties enabled her, at a mature period of life, to supply the defects of an imperfect education. It is a most uncommon and afflicting circumstance, that a brother and two sisters should be taken ill the same day--that two of them should die, without any rational possibility of the survivance of the third--and that no one of the three could be affected by learning the loss of the other. The Doctor was buried on Monday the 20th, and Miss Rutherford this day (Wednesday the 22d), in the burial-place adjoining to and surrounding one of the new Episcopal chapels,[67] where Robert Rutherford[68] had purchased a burial-ground of some extent, and parted with one half to the Russells. It is surrounded with a very high wall, and all the separate burial-grounds (five, I think, in number) are separated by party-walls going down to the depth of twelve feet, so as to prevent the possibility either of encroachment, or of disturbing the relics of the dead. I have purchased one half of Miss Russell's interest in this sad spot, moved by its extreme seclusion, privacy, and security. When poor Jack was buried in the Greyfriars' Churchyard, where my father and Anne lie,[69] I thought their graves more encroached upon than I liked to witness; and in this new place I intend to lay our poor mother when the scene shall close; so that the brother and the two sisters, whose fate has been so very closely entwined in death, may not be divided in the grave,--and this I hope you will approve of. _Thursday, December 23d._--My mother still lingers this morning, and as her constitution is so excellent, she may perhaps continue to exist some time, or till another stroke. It is a great consolation that she is perfectly easy. All her affairs of every sort have been very long arranged for this great change, and with the assistance of Donaldson and Macculloch, you may depend, when the event takes place, that your interest will be attended to most pointedly.--I hope our civil tumults here are like to be ended by the measures of Parliament. I mentioned in my last that Kinloch of Kinloch was to be tried for sedition. He has forfeited his bail, and was yesterday laid under outlawry for non-appearance. Our neighbors in Northumberland are in a deplorable state; upwards of 50,000 blackguards are ready to rise between Tyne and Wear.[70] On the other hand, the Scottish frontiers are steady and loyal, and arming fast. Scott of Gala and I have offered 200 men, all fine strapping young fellows, and good marksmen, willing to go anywhere with us. We could easily double the number. So the necessity of the times has made me get on horseback once more. Our mother has at different times been perfectly conscious of her situation, and knew every one, though totally unable to speak. She seemed to take a very affectionate farewell of me the last time I saw her, which was the day before yesterday; and as she was much agitated, Dr. Keith advised I should not see her again, unless she seemed to desire it, which hitherto she has not done. She sleeps constantly, and will probably be so removed. Our family sends love to yours. Yours most affectionately:-- WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 67: St. John's Chapel.] [Footnote 68: Robert Rutherford, Esq., W. S., son to the Professor of Botany.] [Footnote 69: "Our family heretofore buried in the Greyfriars' Churchyard, close by the entrance to Heriot's Hospital, and on the southern or left-hand side as you pass from the churchyard."--_MS. Memorandum._] [Footnote 70: This was a ridiculously exaggerated report of that period of alarm.] Scott's excellent mother died on the 24th December--the day after he closed the foregoing letter to his brother. On the 18th, in the midst of these accumulated afflictions, the romance of Ivanhoe made its appearance. The date has been torn from the following letter, but it was evidently written while all these events were fresh and recent:-- TO THE LADY LOUISA STUART, DITTON PARK, WINDSOR. DEAR LADY LOUISA,--I am favored with your letter from Ditton, and am glad you found anything to entertain you in Ivanhoe.[71] Novelty is what this giddy-paced time demands imperiously, and I certainly studied as much as I could to get out of the old beaten track, leaving those who like to keep the road, which I have rutted pretty well. I have had a terrible time of it this year, with the loss of dear friends and near relations; it is almost fearful to count up my losses, as they make me bankrupt in society. My brother-in-law; our never-to-be-enough regretted Duke; Lord Chief Baron, my early, kind, and constant friend, who took me up when I was a young fellow of little mark or likelihood; the wife of my intimate friend William Erskine; the only son of my friend David Hume, a youth of great promise, and just entering into life, who had grown up under my eye from childhood; my excellent mother; and, within a few days, her surviving brother and sister. My mother was the only one of these whose death was the natural consequence of very advanced life. And our sorrows are not at an end. A sister of my mother's, Mrs. Russell of Ashestiel, long deceased, had left (besides several sons, of whom only one now survives and is in India) three daughters, who lived with her youngest sister, Miss Rutherford, and were in the closest habits of intimacy with us. The eldest of these girls, and a most excellent creature she is, was in summer so much shocked by the sudden news of the death of one of the brothers I have mentioned, that she was deprived of the use of her limbs by an affection either nervous or paralytic. She was slowly recovering from this afflicting and helpless situation, when the sudden fate of her aunts and uncle, particularly of her who had acted as a mother to the family, brought on a new shock; and though perfectly possessed of her mind, she has never since been able to utter a word. Her youngest sister, a girl of one or two and twenty, was so much shocked by this scene of accumulated distress, that she was taken very ill, and having suppressed and concealed her disorder, relief came too late, and she has been taken from us also. She died in the arms of the elder sister, helpless as I have described her; and to separate the half dead from the actual corpse was the most melancholy thing possible. You can hardly conceive, dear Lady Louisa, the melancholy feeling of seeing the place of last repose belonging to the devoted family open four times within so short a space, and to meet the same group of sorrowing friends and relations on the same sorrowful occasion. Looking back on those whom I have lost, all well known to me excepting my brother-in-law, whom I could only judge of by the general report in his favor, I can scarce conceive a group possessing more real worth and amiable qualities, not to mention talents and accomplishments. I have never felt so truly what Johnson says so well,-- "Condemn'd to Hope's delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day, By sudden blasts, or slow decline, Our social comforts drop away."[72] I am not sure whether it was your Ladyship, or the poor Duchess of Buccleuch, who met my mother once, and flattered me by being so much pleased with the good old lady. She had a mind peculiarly well stored with much acquired information and natural talent, and as she was very old, and had an excellent memory, she could draw without the least exaggeration or affectation the most striking pictures of the past age. If I have been able to do anything in the way of painting the past times, it is very much from the studies with which she presented me. She connected a long period of time with the present generation, for she remembered, and had often spoken with, a person who perfectly recollected the battle of Dunbar, and Oliver Cromwell's subsequent entry into Edinburgh. She preserved her faculties to the very day before her final illness; for our friends Mr. and Mrs. Scott of Harden visited her on the Sunday; and, coming to our house after, were expressing their surprise at the alertness of her mind, and the pleasure which she had in talking over both ancient and modern events. She had told them with great accuracy the real story of the Bride of Lammermuir, and pointed out wherein it differed from the novel. She had all the names of the parties, and detailed (for she was a great genealogist) their connection with existing families. On the subsequent Monday she was struck with a paralytic affection, suffered little, and that with the utmost patience; and what was God's reward, and a great one to her innocent and benevolent life, she never knew that her brother and sister, the last thirty years younger than herself, had trodden the dark path before her. She was a strict economist, which she said enabled her to be liberal; out of her little income of about £300 a year, she bestowed at least a third in well-chosen charities, and with the rest lived like a gentlewoman, and even with hospitality more general than seemed to suit her age; yet I could never prevail on her to accept of any assistance. You cannot conceive how affecting it was to me to see the little preparations of presents which she had assorted for the New Year--for she was a great observer of the old fashions of her period--and to think that the kind heart was cold which delighted in all these acts of kindly affection. I should apologize, I believe, for troubling your ladyship with these melancholy details; but you would not thank me for a letter written with constraint, and my mind is at present very full of this sad subject, though I scarce know any one to whom I would venture to say so much. I hear no good news of Lady Anne, though Lord Montagu writes cautiously. The weather is now turning milder, and may, I hope, be favorable to her complaint. After my own family, my thought most frequently turns to these orphans, whose parents I loved and respected so much.--I am always, dear Lady Louisa, your very respectful and obliged WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 71: [Lady Louisa's letter was written January 16, 1820, and can be found in _Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 71. In it she says:-- "Everybody in this house has been reading an odd new kind of a book called _Ivanhoe_, and nobody, as far as I have observed, has willingly laid it down again till finished. By this, I conclude that its success will be fully equal to that of its predecessors, notwithstanding it has quite abandoned their ground and ploughed up a field hitherto untouched. The interest of it, indeed, is most powerful; few things in prose or verse seize upon one's mind so strongly, or are read with such breathless eagerness, as the storming of the castle, related by Rebecca, and her trial at Templestowe. Few characters ever were so forcibly painted as hers: the Jew, too, the Templar, the courtly knight De Bracy, the wavering, inconstant wickedness of John, are all worthy of Shakespeare. I must not omit paying my tribute to Cedric, that worthy forefather of the genuine English country gentleman.... And according to what has been alleged against the author in some other instances, the hero and the heroine are the people one cares least about. But provided one does but care enough about somebody, it is all one to me; and I think the cavil is like that against Milton for making the Devil his hero."]] [Footnote 72: _Lines on the Death of Mr. Robert Levett._] There is in the library at Abbotsford a fine copy of Baskerville's folio Bible, two volumes, printed at Cambridge in 1763; and there appears on the blank leaf, in the trembling handwriting of Scott's mother, this inscription: "_To my dear son, Walter Scott, from his affectionate mother, Anne Rutherford,--January 1st, 1819._" Under these words her son has written as follows: "This Bible was the gift of my grandfather Dr. John Rutherford, to my mother, and presented by her to me; being, alas, the last gift which I was to receive from that excellent parent, and, as I verily believe, the thing which she most loved in the world,--not only in humble veneration of the sacred contents, but as the dearest pledge of her father's affection to her. As such she gave it to me; and as such I bequeath it to those who may represent me--charging them carefully to preserve the same, in memory of those to whom it has belonged. 1820." * * * * * If literary success could have either filled Scott's head or hardened his heart, we should have no such letters as those of December, 1819. Ivanhoe was received throughout England with a more clamorous delight than any of the Scotch novels had been. The volumes (three in number) were now, for the first time, of the post 8vo form, with a finer paper than hitherto, the press-work much more elegant, and the price accordingly raised from eight shillings the volume to ten; yet the copies sold in this original shape were twelve thousand. I ought to have mentioned sooner, that the original intention was to bring out Ivanhoe as the production of a new hand, and that, to assist this impression, the work was printed in a size and manner unlike the preceding ones; but Constable, when the day of publication approached, remonstrated against this experiment, and it was accordingly abandoned. The reader has already been told that Scott dictated the greater part of this romance. The portion of the MS. which is his own, appears, however, not only as well and firmly executed as that of any of the Tales of my Landlord, but distinguished by having still fewer erasures and interlineations, and also by being in a smaller hand. The fragment is beautiful to look at--many pages together without one alteration.[73] It is, I suppose, superfluous to add, that in no instance did Scott rewrite his prose before sending it to the press. Whatever may have been the case with his poetry, the world uniformly received the _prima cura_ of the novelist. [Footnote 73: Three of these MS. pages were a fair day's work in the author's estimation--equal to fifteen or sixteen of the original impression.] As a work of art, Ivanhoe is perhaps the first of all Scott's efforts, whether in prose or in verse; nor have the strength and splendor of his imagination been displayed to higher advantage than in some of the scenes of this romance. But I believe that no reader who is capable of thoroughly comprehending the author's Scotch character and Scotch dialogue will ever place even Ivanhoe, as a work of genius, on the same level with Waverley, Guy Mannering, or The Heart of Mid-Lothian. There is, to me, something so remarkably characteristic of Scott's mind and manner in a particular passage of the Introduction, which he penned ten years afterwards for this work, that I must be pardoned for extracting it here. He says: "The character of the fair Jewess found so much favor in the eyes of some fair readers, that the writer was censured, because, when arranging the fates of the characters of the drama, he had not assigned the hand of Wilfred to Rebecca, rather than the less interesting Rowena. But, not to mention that the prejudices of the age rendered such a union almost impossible, the author may, in passing, observe that he thinks a character of a highly virtuous and lofty stamp is degraded rather than exalted by an attempt to reward virtue with temporal prosperity. Such is not the recompense which Providence has deemed worthy of suffering merit; and it is a dangerous and fatal doctrine to teach young persons, the most common readers of romance, that rectitude of conduct and of principle are either naturally allied with, or adequately rewarded by, the gratification of our passions, or attainment of our wishes. In a word, if a virtuous and self-denied character is dismissed with temporal wealth, greatness, rank, or the indulgence of such a rashly formed or ill-assorted passion as that of Rebecca for Ivanhoe, the reader will be apt to say, verily Virtue has had its reward. But a glance on the great picture of life will show that the duties of self-denial, and the sacrifice of passion to principle, are seldom thus remunerated; and that the internal consciousness of their high-minded discharge of duty produces on their own reflections a more adequate recompense, in the form of that peace which the world cannot give or take away." The introduction of the charming Jewess and her father originated, I find, in a conversation that Scott held with his friend Skene during the severest season of his bodily sufferings in the early part of this year. "Mr. Skene," says that gentleman's wife, "sitting by his bedside, and trying to amuse him as well as he could in the intervals of pain, happened to get on the subject of the Jews, as he had observed them when he spent some time in Germany in his youth. Their situation had naturally made a strong impression; for in those days they retained their own dress and manners entire, and were treated with considerable austerity by their Christian neighbors, being still locked up at night in their own quarter by great gates; and Mr. Skene, partly in seriousness, but partly from the mere wish to turn his mind at the moment upon something that might occupy and divert it, suggested that a group of Jews would be an interesting feature if he could contrive to bring them into his next novel." Upon the appearance of Ivanhoe, he reminded Mr. Skene of this conversation, and said, "You will find this book owes not a little to your German reminiscences." Mrs. Skene adds: "Dining with us one day, not long before Ivanhoe was begun, something that was mentioned led him to describe the sudden death of an advocate of his acquaintance, a Mr. Elphinstone, which occurred in the _Outer-house_ soon after he was called to the Bar. It was, he said, no wonder that it had left a vivid impression on his mind, for it was the first sudden death he ever witnessed; and he now related it so as to make us all feel as if we had the scene passing before our eyes. In the death of the Templar in Ivanhoe, I recognized the very picture--I believe I may safely say the very words."[74] [Footnote 74: See _Ivanhoe_, end of chap. xliv.] By the way, before Ivanhoe made its appearance, I had myself been formally admitted to the author's secret; but had he favored me with no such confidence, it would have been impossible for me to doubt that I had been present some months before at the conversation which suggested, and indeed supplied all the materials of, one of its most amusing chapters. I allude to that in which our Saxon terms for animals in the field, and our Norman equivalents for them as they appear on the table, and so on, are explained and commented on. All this Scott owed to the after-dinner talk one day in Castle Street of his old friend Mr. William Clerk,--who, among other elegant pursuits, has cultivated the science of philology very deeply.[75] [Footnote 75: [It is said that the character of Rebecca was suggested to Scott by Washington Irving's description of Rebecca Gratz of Philadelphia, a lady belonging to a Jewish family of high position in that city, with whom Irving was intimate. Miss Gratz had been a friend of his betrothed, Matilda Hoffman, and in her youth had loved devotedly a man in every way worthy of her, but the difference of religion made their union impossible. During a conversation with Scott, Irving spoke with much feeling of Rebecca Gratz, of her extraordinary beauty, of her adherence to her faith under most trying circumstances, of her nobility, distinction, and loveliness of character, and her untiring zeal in works of charity, greatly interesting his host, as the guest recalled when _Ivanhoe_ appeared. Rebecca Gratz died in 1869 in her eighty-ninth year. A sketch of her, with a portrait after a miniature by Malbone, was published in the _Century Magazine_ for September, 1882.]] I cannot conclude this chapter without observing that the publication of Ivanhoe marks the most brilliant epoch in Scott's history as the literary favorite of his contemporaries. With the novel which he next put forth, the immediate sale of these works began gradually to decline; and though, even when that had reached its lowest declension, it was still far above the most ambitious dreams of any other novelist, yet the publishers were afraid the announcement of anything like a falling-off might cast a damp over the spirits of the author. He was allowed to remain, for several years, under the impression that whatever novel he threw off commanded at once the old triumphant sale of ten or twelve thousand, and was afterwards, when included in the collective edition, to be circulated in that shape also as widely as Waverley or Ivanhoe. In my opinion, it would have been very unwise in the booksellers to give Scott any unfavorable tidings upon such subjects after the commencement of the malady which proved fatal to him,--for that from the first shook his mind; but I think they took a false measure of the man when they hesitated to tell him exactly how the matter stood, throughout 1820 and the three or four following years, when his intellect was as vigorous as it ever had been, and his heart as courageous; and I regret their scruples (among other reasons), because the years now mentioned were the most costly ones in his life; and for every twelvemonth in which any man allows himself, or is encouraged by others, to proceed in a course of unwise expenditure, it becomes proportionably more difficult for him to pull up when the mistake is at length detected or recognized. CHAPTER XLVII The Visionary. -- The Peel of Darnick. -- Scott's Saturday Excursions to Abbotsford. -- A Sunday there in February. -- Constable. -- John Ballantyne. -- Thomas Purdie, Etc. -- Prince Gustavus Vasa. -- Proclamation of King George IV. -- Publication of the Monastery. 1820 In the course of December, 1819 and January, 1820, Scott drew up three essays, under the title of The Visionary, upon certain popular doctrines or delusions, the spread of which at this time filled with alarm, not only Tories like him, but many persons who had been distinguished through life for their adherence to political liberalism. These papers appeared successively in James Ballantyne's Edinburgh Weekly Journal, and their parentage being obvious, they excited much attention in Scotland. Scott collected them into a pamphlet, which had also a large circulation; and I remember his showing very particular satisfaction when he observed a mason reading it to his comrades, as they sat at their dinner, by a new house on Leith Walk. During January, however, his thoughts continued to be chiefly occupied with the details of the proposed corps of Foresters; of which, I believe it was at last settled, as far as depended on the other gentlemen concerned in it, that he should be the Major. He wrote and spoke on this subject with undiminished zeal, until the whole fell to the ground in consequence of the Government's ultimately declining to take on itself any part of the expense; a refusal which must have been fatal to any such project when the Duke of Buccleuch was a minor. He felt the disappointment keenly; but, in the mean time, the hearty alacrity with which his neighbors of all classes gave in their adhesion had afforded him much pleasure, and, as regarded his own immediate dependents, served to rivet the bonds of affection and confidence, which were to the end maintained between him and them. Darnick had been especially ardent in the cause, and he thenceforth considered its volunteers as persons whose individual fortunes closely concerned him. I could fill many a page with the letters which he wrote at subsequent periods, with the view of promoting the success of these spirited young fellows in their various departments of industry: they were proud of their patron, as may be supposed, and he was highly gratified, as well as amused, when he learned that--while the rest of the world were talking of "The Great Unknown"--his usual _sobriquet_ among these villagers was "The Duke of Darnick." Already his possessions almost encircled this picturesque and thriving hamlet; and there were few things on which he had more strongly fixed his fancy than acquiring a sort of symbol of seigniory there, by becoming the purchaser of a certain then ruinous tower that predominated, with a few coeval trees, over the farmhouses and cottages of his _ducal_ vassals. A letter, previously quoted, contains an allusion to this Peelhouse of Darnick; which is moreover exactly described in the novel which he had now in hand--The Monastery. The interest Scott seemed to take in the Peel awakened, however, the pride of its hereditary proprietor: and when that worthy person, who had made some money by trade in Edinburgh, resolved on fitting it up for the evening retreat of his own life, _his Grace of Darnick_ was too happy to waive his pretensions. This was a winter of uncommon severity in Scotland; and the snow lay so deep and so long as to interrupt very seriously all Scott's country operations. I find, in his letters to Laidlaw, various paragraphs expressing the concern he took in the hardships which his poor neighbors must be suffering. Thus, on the 19th of January, he says:-- DEAR WILLIE,--I write by the post that you may receive the enclosed, or rather subjoined, cheque for £60, in perfect safety. This dreadful morning will probably stop Mercer.[76] It makes me shiver in the midst of superfluous comforts to think of the distress of others. £10 of the £60 I wish you to distribute among our poorer neighbors, so as may best aid them. I mean not only the actually indigent, but those who are, in our phrase, _ill aff._ I am sure Dr. Scott[77] will assist you with his advice in this labor of love. I think part of the wood-money,[78] too, should be given among the Abbotstown folks if the storm keeps them off work, as is like. Yours truly, WALTER SCOTT. Deep, deep snow lying here. How do the goodwife and bairns? The little bodies will be half-buried in snow-drift. [Footnote 76: The weekly Darnick carrier.] [Footnote 77: Dr. Scott of Darnlee.--See _ante_, vol. v. p. 277. This very amiable, modest, and intelligent friend of Sir Walter Scott's died in 1837.] [Footnote 78: Some money expected from the sale of larches.] And again, on the 25th, he writes thus:-- DEAR WILLIE,--I have yours with the news of the inundation, which, it seems, has done no damage. I hope _Mai_ will be taken care of. He should have a bed in the kitchen, and always be called indoors after it is dark, for all the kind are savage at night. Please cause Swanston to knock him up a box, and fill it with straw from time to time. I enclose a cheque for £50 to pay accounts, etc. Do not let the poor bodies want for a £5, or even a £10, more or less;-- "We'll get a blessing wi' the lave, And never miss 't."[79] Yours, W. S. [Footnote 79: Burns--_Lines to a Mouse._] In the course of this month, through the kindness of Mr. Croker, Scott received from the late Earl Bathurst, then Colonial Secretary of State, the offer of an appointment in the civil service of the East India Company for his second son: and this seemed at the time too good a thing not to be gratefully accepted; though the apparently increasing prosperity of his fortunes induced him, a few years afterwards, to indulge his parental feelings by throwing it up. He thus alludes to this matter in a letter to his good old friend at Jedburgh:-- TO ROBERT SHORTREED, ESQ., SHERIFF-SUBSTITUTE OF ROXBURGHSHIRE, JEDBURGH. EDINBURGH, 19th January, 1820. MY DEAR SIR,--I heartily congratulate you on getting the appointment for your son William in a manner so very pleasant to your feelings, and which is, like all Whytbank does, considerate, friendly, and generous.[80] I am not aware that I have any friends at Calcutta, but if you think letters to Sir John Malcolm and Lieut.-Colonel Russell would serve my young friend, he shall have my best commendations to them. It is very odd that almost the same thing has happened to me; for about a week ago I was surprised by a letter, saying that an unknown friend (who since proves to be Lord Bathurst, whom I never saw or spoke with) would give my second son a Writer's situation for India. Charles is two years too young for this appointment; but I do not think I am at liberty to decline an offer so advantageous, if it can be so arranged that, by exchange or otherwise, it can be kept open for him. Ever yours faithfully, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 80: "An India appointment, with the name blank, which the late Mr. Pringle of Whytbank sent unsolicited, believing it might be found useful to a family where there were seven sons to provide for."--_Note by Mr. A. Shortreed._] [Illustration: SOPHIA SCOTT (MRS. J. G. LOCKHART) _After the painting by William Nicholson_] About the middle of February--it having been ere that time arranged that I should marry his eldest daughter[81] in the course of the spring--I accompanied him and part of his family on one of those flying visits to Abbotsford, with which he often indulged himself on a Saturday during term. Upon such occasions Scott appeared at the usual hour in Court, but wearing, instead of the official suit of black, his country morning dress--green jacket and so forth--under the clerk's gown; a license of which many gentlemen of the long robe had been accustomed to avail themselves in the days of his youth--it being then considered as the authentic badge that they were lairds as well as lawyers--but which, to use the dialect of the place, had fallen into _desuetude_ before I knew the Parliament House. He was, I think, one of the two or three, or at most the half dozen, who still adhered to this privilege of their order; and it has now, in all likelihood, become quite obsolete, like the ancient custom, a part of the same system, for all Scotch barristers to appear without gowns or wigs, and in colored clothes, when upon circuit. At noon, when the Court broke up, Peter Mathieson was sure to be in attendance in the Parliament Close, and five minutes after, the gown had been tossed off, and Scott, rubbing his hands for glee, was under weigh for Tweedside. On this occasion, he was, of course, in mourning; but I have thought it worth while to preserve the circumstance of his usual Saturday's costume. As we proceeded, he talked without reserve of the novel of The Monastery, of which he had the first volume with him; and mentioned, what he had probably forgotten when he wrote the Introduction of 1830, that a good deal of that volume had been composed before he concluded Ivanhoe. "It was a relief," he said, "to interlay the scenery most familiar to me with the strange world for which I had to draw so much on imagination." [Footnote 81: [Of Miss Scott, not long before her marriage, Mr. George Ticknor writes:-- "Sophia Scott is a remarkable girl, with great simplicity and naturalness of manners, full of enthusiasm, with tact in everything, a lover of old ballads, a Jacobite, and, in short, in all respects, such a daughter as Scott ought to have and ought to be proud of. And he is proud of her, as I saw again and again when he could not conceal it. "One evening, after dinner, he told her to take her harp and play five or six ballads he mentioned to her, as a specimen of the different ages of Scottish music. I hardly ever heard anything of the kind that moved me so much. And yet, I imagine, many sing better; but I never saw such an air and manner, such spirit and feeling, such decision and power.... I was so much excited that I turned round to Mr. Scott and said to him, probably with great emphasis, 'I never heard anything so fine;' and he, seeing how involuntarily I had said it, caught me by the hand, and replied, very earnestly, 'Everybody says so, sir,' but added in an instant, blushing a little, 'but I must not be too vain of her.' "I was struck, too, with another little trait in her character and his, that exhibited itself the same evening. Lady Hume asked her to play _Rob Roy_, an old ballad. A good many persons were present, and she felt a little embarrassed by the recollection of how much her father's name had been mentioned in connection with this strange Highlander's; but, as upon all occasions, she took the most direct means to settle her difficulties; ... she ran across the room to her father, and, blushing pretty deeply, whispered to him. 'Yes, my dear,' he said, loud enough to be heard, 'play it, to be sure, if you are asked, and _Waverley_ and the _Antiquary_, too, if there be any such ballads.' ... She is as perfectly right-minded as I ever saw one so young, and, indeed, perhaps right-mindedness is the prevailing feature in her character."--_Life of George Ticknor_, vol. i. pp. 281, 283.]] Next morning there appeared at breakfast John Ballantyne, who had at this time a shooting or hunting box a few miles off, in the vale of the Leader, and with him Mr. Constable, his guest; and it being a fine clear day, as soon as Scott had read the Church service and one of Jeremy Taylor's sermons, we all sallied out, before noon, on a perambulation of his upland territories; Maida and the rest of the favorites accompanying our march. At starting we were joined by the constant henchman, Tom Purdie--and I may save myself the trouble of any attempt to describe his appearance, for his master has given us an inimitably true one in introducing a certain personage of his Redgauntlet: "He was, perhaps, sixty years old; yet his brow was not much furrowed, and his jet black hair was only grizzled, not whitened, by the advance of age. All his motions spoke strength unabated; and, though rather undersized, he had very broad shoulders, was square-made, thin-flanked, and apparently combined in his frame muscular strength and activity; the last somewhat impaired, perhaps, by years, but the first remaining in full vigor. A hard and harsh countenance; eyes far sunk under projecting eyebrows, which were grizzled like his hair: a wide mouth, furnished from ear to ear with a range of unimpaired teeth of uncommon whiteness, and a size and breadth which might have become the jaws of an ogre, completed this delightful portrait." Equip this figure in Scott's cast-off green jacket, white hat and drab trousers; and imagine that years of kind treatment, comfort, and the honest consequence of a confidential _grieve_, had softened away much of the hardness and harshness originally impressed on the visage by anxious penury and the sinister habits of a _black-fisher_,--and the Tom Purdie of 1820 stands before us. We were all delighted to see how completely Scott had recovered his bodily vigor, and none more so than Constable, who, as he puffed and panted after him up one ravine and down another, often stopped to wipe his forehead, and remarked that "it was not every author who should lead him such a dance." But Purdie's face shone with rapture as he observed how severely the swag-bellied bookseller's activity was tasked. Scott exclaiming exultingly, though perhaps for the tenth time, "This will be a glorious spring for our trees, Tom!"--"You may say that, Shirra," quoth Tom,--and then lingering a moment for Constable--"My certy," he added, scratching his head, "and I think it will be a grand season for _our buiks_ too." But indeed Tom always talked of _our buiks_ as if they had been as regular products of the soil as _our aits_ and _our birks_.[82] Having threaded, first the Haxelcleugh, and then the Rhymer's Glen, we arrived at Huntly Burn, where the hospitality of the kind _Weird-Sisters_, as Scott called the Miss Fergusons, reanimated our exhausted Bibliopoles, and gave them courage to extend their walk a little further down the same famous brook. Here there was a small cottage in a very sequestered situation, by making some little additions to which Scott thought it might be converted into a suitable summer residence for his daughter and future son-in-law. The details of that plan were soon settled--it was agreed on all hands that a sweeter scene of seclusion could not be fancied. He repeated some verses of Rogers's Wish, which paint the spot:-- "Mine be a cot beside the hill-- A bee-hive's hum shall soothe my ear; A willowy brook that turns a mill, With many a fall shall linger near:" etc. [Footnote 82: [Mr. Skene, in his _Reminiscences_, says of Tom Purdie:-- "He used to talk of Sir Walter's publications as our books, and said that the reading of them was the greatest comfort to him, for whenever he was off his sleep, which sometimes happened, he had only to take one of the novels, and before he read two pages it was sure to set him asleep. Tom, with the usual shrewdness common to his countrymen in that class of life, joined a quaintness and drollery in his notions and mode of expressing himself that was very amusing; he was familiar, but at the same time perfectly respectful, although he was sometimes tempted to deal sharp cuts, particularly at Sir Adam Ferguson, whom he seemed to take a pleasure in assailing. When Sir Walter obtained the honor of knighthood for Sir Adam, upon the plea of his being Custodier of the Regalia of Scotland, Tom was very indignant, because, he said, 'It would take some of the shine out of us,' meaning Sir Walter.... He was remarkably fastidious in his care of the Library, and it was exceedingly amusing to see a clodhopper (for he was always in the garb of a ploughman) moving about in the splendid apartment, scrutinizing the state of the books, putting derangement to rights, remonstrating when he observed anything that indicated carelessness."--See _Journal_, vol. ii. p. 318, note.]] But when he came to the stanza,-- "And Lucy at her wheel shall sing, In russet-gown and apron blue," he departed from the text, adding,-- "But if Bluestockings here you bring, The Great Unknown won't dine with you." Johnny Ballantyne, a projector to the core, was particularly zealous about this embryo establishment. Foreseeing that he should have had walking enough ere he reached Huntly Burn, his dapper little Newmarket groom had been ordered to fetch Old Mortality thither, and now, mounted on his fine hunter, he capered about us, looking pallid and emaciated as a ghost, but as gay and cheerful as ever, and would fain have been permitted to ride over hedge and ditch to mark out the proper line of the future avenue. Scott admonished him that the country-people, if they saw him at such work, would take the whole party for heathens; and clapping spurs to his horse, he left us. "The deil's in the body," quoth Tom Purdie; "he'll be ower every _yett_ atween this and Turn-again, though it be the Lord's day. I wadna wonder if he were to be _ceeted_ before the Session." "Be sure, Tam," cries Constable, "that ye egg on the Dominie to blaw up his father--I wouldna grudge a hundred miles o' gait to see the ne'er-do-weel on the stool, and neither, I'll be sworn, would the Sheriff."--"Na, na," quoth the Sheriff; "we'll let sleeping dogs be, Tam." As we walked homeward, Scott, being a little fatigued, laid his left hand on Tom's shoulder, and leaned heavily for support, chatting to his "Sunday pony," as he called the affectionate fellow, just as freely as with the rest of the party, and Tom put in his word shrewdly and manfully, and grinned and grunted whenever the joke chanced to be within his apprehension. It was easy to see that his heart swelled within him from the moment that the Sheriff got his collar in his gripe. There arose a little dispute between them about what tree or trees ought to be cut down in a hedge-row that we passed, and Scott seemed somewhat ruffled with finding that some previous hints of his on that head had not been attended to. When we got into motion again, his hand was on Constable's shoulder--and Tom dropped a pace or two to the rear, until we approached a gate, when he jumped forward and opened it. "Give us a pinch of your snuff, Tom," quoth the Sheriff. Tom's mull was produced, and the hand resumed its position. I was much diverted with Tom's behavior when we at length reached Abbotsford. There were some garden chairs on the green in front of the cottage porch. Scott sat down on one of them to enjoy the view of his new tower as it gleamed in the sunset, and Constable and I did the like. Mr. Purdie remained lounging near us for a few minutes, and then asked the Sheriff "to speak a word." They withdrew together into the garden--and Scott presently rejoined us with a particularly comical expression of face. As soon as Tom was out of sight, he said--"Will ye guess what he has been saying, now?--Well, this is a great satisfaction! Tom assures me that he has thought the matter over, and _will take my advice_ about the thinning of that clump behind Captain Ferguson's."[83] [Footnote 83: I am obliged to my friend Mr. Scott of Gala for reminding me of the following trait of Tom Purdie. The first time Mr. John Richardson of Fludyer Street came to Abbotsford, Tom (who took him for a Southron) was sent to attend upon him while he tried for a _fish_ (_i. e._, a salmon) in the neighborhood of Melrose Bridge. As they walked thither, Tom boasted grandly of the size of the fish he had himself caught there, evidently giving the stranger no credit for much skill in the Waltonian craft. By and by, however, Richardson, who is an admirable angler, hooked a vigorous fellow, and after a beautiful exhibition of the art, landed him in safety. "A fine _fish_, Tom."--"Oo, aye, Sir," quoth Tom, "it's a bonny grilse." "A _grilse_, Tom!" says Mr. R., "it's as heavy a _salmon_ as the heaviest you were telling me about." Tom showed his teeth in a smile of bitter incredulity; but while they were still debating, Lord Somerville's fisherman came up with scales in his basket, and Richardson insisted on having his victim weighed. The result was triumphant for the captor. "Weel," says Tom, letting the salmon drop on the turf, "weel, ye _are_ a meikle fish, mon--and a meikle _fule_, too" (he added in a lower key), "to let yoursell be kilt by an Englander."--(1839.) [Mr. Richardson's own account of this incident can be found in the memorial sketch of him in the _North British Review_ for November, 1864. The scene was not Abbotsford, but Ashestiel, in September, 1810.]] I must not forget that, whoever might be at Abbotsford, Tom always appeared at his master's elbow on Sunday, when dinner was over, and drank long life to the Laird and the Lady and all the good company, in a quaigh of whiskey, or a tumbler of wine, according to his fancy. I believe Scott has somewhere expressed in print his satisfaction that, among all the changes of our manners, the ancient freedom of personal intercourse may still be indulged between a master and an _out-of-doors_ servant; but in truth he kept by the old fashion even with domestic servants, to an extent which I have hardly seen practised by any other gentleman. He conversed with his coachman if he sat by him, as he often did on the box--with his footman, if he happened to be in the rumble; and when there was any very young lad in the household, he held it a point of duty to see that his employments were so arranged as to leave time for advancing his education, made him bring his copy-book once a week to the library, and examined him as to all that he was doing. Indeed he did not confine this humanity to his own people. Any steady servant of a friend of his was soon considered as a sort of friend too, and was sure to have a kind little colloquy to himself at coming and going. With all this, Scott was a very rigid enforcer of discipline--contrived to make it thoroughly understood by all about him, that they must do their part by him as he did his by them; and the result was happy. I never knew any man so well served as he was--so carefully, so respectfully, and so silently; and I cannot help doubting if, in any department of human operations, real kindness ever compromised real dignity. In a letter, already quoted, there occurs some mention of the Prince Gustavus Vasa, who was spending this winter in Edinburgh, and his Royal Highness's accomplished attendant, the Baron Polier. I met them frequently in Castle Street, and remember as especially interesting the first evening that they dined there. The only portrait in Scott's Edinburgh dining-room was one of Charles XII. of Sweden, and he was struck, as indeed every one must have been, with the remarkable resemblance which the exiled Prince's air and features presented to the hero of his race. Young Gustavus, on his part, hung with keen and melancholy enthusiasm on Scott's anecdotes of the expedition of Charles Edward Stewart.--The Prince, accompanied by Scott and myself, witnessed the ceremonial of the proclamation of King George IV. on the 2d of February at the Cross of Edinburgh, from a window over Mr. Constable's shop in the High Street; and on that occasion, also, the air of sadness that mixed in his features with eager curiosity was very affecting. Scott explained all the details to him, not without many lamentations over the barbarity of the Auld Reekie bailies, who had removed the beautiful Gothic Cross itself, for the sake of widening the thoroughfare. The weather was fine, the sun shone bright; and the antique tabards of the heralds, the trumpet notes of _God save the King_, and the hearty cheerings of the immense uncovered multitude that filled the noble old street, produced altogether a scene of great splendor and solemnity. The Royal Exile surveyed it with a flushed cheek and a watery eye, and Scott, observing his emotion, withdrew with me to another window, whispering: "Poor lad! poor lad! God help him." Later in the season, the Prince spent a few days at Abbotsford; but I have said enough to explain some allusions in the next letter to Lord Montagu, in which Scott also adverts to several public events of January and February, 1820,--the assassination of the Duke of Berri, the death of King George III., the general election which followed the royal demise, and its more unhappy consequence, the reagitation of the old disagreement between George IV. and his wife, who, as soon as she learned his accession to the throne, announced her resolution of returning from the Continent (where she had been leading for some years a wandering life), and asserting her rights as Queen. The Tory gentleman, in whose canvass of the Selkirk boroughs Scott was now earnestly concerned, was his worthy friend, Mr. Henry Monteith of Carstairs, who ultimately carried the election. TO THE LORD MONTAGU, ETC., DITTON PARK. EDINBURGH, 22d February, 1820. MY DEAR LORD,--I have nothing to say, except that Selkirk has declared decidedly for Monteith, and that his calling and election seem to be sure. Roxburghshire is right and tight. Harden will not stir for Berwickshire. In short, within my sphere of observation, there is nothing which need make you regret your personal absence; and I hope my dear young namesake and chief will not find his influence abated while he is unable to head it himself. It is but little I can do, but it shall always be done with a good will--and merits no thanks, for I owe much more to his father's memory than ever I can pay a tittle of. I often think what he would have said or wished, and, within my limited sphere, _that_ will always be a rule to me while I have the means of advancing in any respect the interest of his son;--certainly, if anything could increase this desire, it would be the banner being at present in your Lordship's hand. I can do little but look out ahead, but that is always something. When I look back on the house of Buccleuch, as I once knew it, it is a sad retrospect. But we must look forward, and hope for the young blossom of so goodly a tree. I think your Lordship judged quite right in carrying Walter in his place to the funeral.[84] He will long remember it, and may survive many occasions of the same kind, to all human appearance.--Here is a horrid business of the Duke de Berri. It was first told me yesterday by Count Itterburg (_i. e._, Prince Gustavus of Sweden, son of the ex-King), who comes to see me very often. No fairy tale could match the extravagance of such a tale being told to a private Scotch gentleman by such a narrator, his own grandfather having perished in the same manner. But our age has been one of complete revolution, baffling all argument and expectation. As to the King and Queen, or, to use the abbreviation of an old Jacobite of my acquaintance, who, not loving to hear them so called at full length, and yet desirous to have the newspapers read to him, commanded these words always to be pronounced as the letters K. and Q.--I say then, as to the K. and the Q., I venture to think, that whichever strikes the first blow will lose the battle. The sound, well-judging, and well-principled body of the people will be much shocked at the stirring such a hateful and disgraceful question. If the K. urges it unprovoked, the public feeling will put him in the wrong; if he lets her alone, her own imprudence, and that of her hot-headed adviser Harry Brougham, will push on the discussion; and, take a fool's word for it, as Sancho says, the country will never bear her coming back, foul with the various kinds of infamy she has been stained with, to force herself into the throne. On the whole, it is a discussion most devoutly to be deprecated by those who wish well to the Royal family. Now for a very different subject. I have a report that there is found on the farm of Melsington, in a bog, the limb of a bronze figure, full size, with a spur on the heel. This has been reported to Mr. Riddell, as Commissioner, and to me as Antiquary in chief, on the estate. I wish your Lordship would permit it to be sent provisionally to Abbotsford, and also allow me, if it shall seem really curious, to make search for the rest of the statue. Clarkson[85] has sent me a curious account of it; and that a Roman statue (for such it seems) of that size should be found in so wild a place, has something very irritating to the curiosity. I do not of course desire to have anything more than the opportunity of examining the relique. It may be the foundation of a set of bronzes, if stout Lord Walter should turn to _virtu_. Always, my dear Lord, most truly yours, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 84: The funeral of George III. at Windsor: the young Duke of Buccleuch was at this time at Eton.] [Footnote 85: Ebenezer Clarkson, Esq., a surgeon of distinguished skill at Selkirk, and through life a trusty friend and crony of the Sheriff's.] The novel of The Monastery was published by Messrs. Longman and Company in the beginning of March. It appeared, not in the post 8vo form of Ivanhoe, but in three volumes 12mo, like the earlier works of the series. In fact, a few sheets of The Monastery had been printed before Scott agreed to let Ivanhoe have "By the Author of Waverley" on its title-page; and the different shapes of the two books belonged to the abortive scheme of passing off "Mr. Laurence Templeton" as a hitherto unheard-of candidate for literary success. CHAPTER XLVIII Scott Revisits London. -- His Portrait by Lawrence, and Bust by Chantrey. -- Anecdotes by Allan Cunningham. -- Letters to Mrs. Scott, Laidlaw, Etc. -- His Baronetcy Gazetted. -- Marriage of his Daughter Sophia. -- Letter to "The Baron of Galashiels." -- Visit of Prince Gustavus Vasa at Abbotsford. -- Tenders of Honorary Degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. -- Letter to Mr. Thomas Scott. 1820 At the rising of his Court on the 12th of March, Scott proceeded to London, for the purpose of receiving his baronetcy, which he had been prevented from doing in the spring of the preceding year by his own illness, and again at Christmas by accumulated family afflictions. On his arrival in town, his son, the Cornet, met him; and they both established themselves at Miss Dumergue's. One of his first visitors was Sir Thomas Lawrence, who informed him that the King had resolved to adorn the great gallery, then in progress at Windsor Castle, with portraits by his hand of his Majesty's most distinguished contemporaries; all the reigning monarchs of Europe, and their chief ministers and generals, had already sat for this purpose: on the same walls the King desired to see exhibited those of his own subjects who had attained the highest honors of literature and science--and it was his pleasure that this series should commence with Walter Scott. The portrait was of course begun immediately, and the head was finished before Scott left town. Sir Thomas has caught and fixed with admirable skill one of the loftiest expressions of Scott's countenance at the proudest period of his life: to the perfect truth of the representation, every one who ever surprised him in the act of composition at his desk, will bear witness. The expression, however, was one with which many who had seen the man often were not familiar; and it was extremely unfortunate that Sir Thomas filled in the figure from a separate sketch after he had quitted London. When I first saw the head, I thought nothing could be better; but there was an evident change for the worse when the picture appeared in its finished state--for the rest of the person had been done on a different scale, and this neglect of proportion takes considerably from the majestic effect which the head itself, and especially the mighty pile of forehead, had in nature. I hope one day to see a good engraving of the head alone, as I first saw it floating on a dark sea of canvas. Lawrence told me, several years afterwards, that, in his opinion, the two greatest men he had painted were the Duke of Wellington and Sir Walter Scott; "and it was odd," said he, "that they both chose usually the same hour for sitting--seven in the morning. They were both as patient sitters as I ever had. Scott, however, was, in my case at least, a very difficult subject. I had selected what struck me as his noblest look; but when he was in the chair before me, he talked away on all sorts of subjects in his usual style, so that it cost me great pains to bring him back to solemnity, when I had to attend to anything beyond the outline of a subordinate feature. I soon found that the surest recipe was to say something that would lead him to recite a bit of poetry. I used to introduce, by hook or by crook, a few lines of Campbell or Byron--he was sure to take up the passage where I left it, or _cap_ it by something better--and then, when he was, as Dryden says of one of his heroes,-- 'Made up of three parts fire--so full of heaven It sparkled at his eyes'-- then was my time--and I made the best use I could of it. The hardest day's work I had with him was once when *****[86] accompanied him to my painting room. ***** was in particularly gay spirits, and nothing would serve him but keeping both artist and sitter in a perpetual state of merriment by anecdote upon anecdote about poor Sheridan. The anecdotes were mostly in themselves black enough--but the style of the _conteur_ was irresistibly quaint and comical. When Scott came next, he said he was ashamed of himself for laughing so much as he listened to them; 'for truly,' quoth he, 'if the tithe was fact, ***** might have said to Sherry--as Lord Braxfield once said to an eloquent culprit at the Bar--"Ye 're a vera clever chiel', man, but ye wad be nane the waur o' a hanging."'" [Footnote 86: A distinguished Whig friend.] It was also during this visit to London that Scott sat to Mr. (now Sir Francis) Chantrey for that bust which alone preserves for posterity the cast of expression most fondly remembered by all who ever mingled in his domestic circle. Chantrey's request that Scott would sit to him was communicated through Mr. Allan Cunningham, then (as now) employed as Clerk of the Works in our great Sculptor's establishment. Mr. Cunningham, in his early days, when gaining his bread as a stonemason in Nithsdale, made a pilgrimage on foot into Edinburgh, for the sole purpose of seeing the author of Marmion as he passed along the street. He was now in possession of a celebrity of his own, and had mentioned to his patron his purpose of calling on Scott to thank him for some kind message he had received, through a common friend, on the subject of those Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, which first made his poetical talents known to the public. Chantrey embraced this opportunity of conveying to Scott his own long-cherished ambition of modelling his head; and Scott at once assented to the flattering proposal. "It was about nine in the morning," says Mr. Cunningham, "that I sent in my card to him at Miss Dumergue's in Piccadilly. It had not been gone a minute, when I heard a quick heavy step coming, and in he came, holding out both hands, as was his custom, and saying, as he pressed mine, 'Allan Cunningham, I am glad to see you.' I said something," continues Mr. C., "about the pleasure I felt in touching the hand that had charmed me so much. He moved his hand, and with one of his comic smiles, said, 'Ay--and a big brown hand it is.' I was a little abashed at first: Scott saw it, and soon put me at my ease; he had the power--I had almost called it the art, but art it was not--of winning one's heart and restoring one's confidence beyond any man I ever met." Then ensued a little conversation, in which Scott complimented Allan on his ballads, and urged him to try some work of more consequence, quoting Burns's words, "for dear auld Scotland's sake;" but being engaged to breakfast in a distant part of the town, he presently dismissed his visitor, promising to appear next day at an early hour, and submit himself to Mr. Chantrey's inspection. [Illustration: WALTER SCOTT IN 1820 _The Chantrey Bust_] Chantrey's purpose had been the same as Lawrence's--to seize a poetical phasis of Scott's countenance; and he proceeded to model the head as looking upwards, gravely and solemnly. The talk that passed, meantime, had equally amused and gratified both, and fortunately, at parting, Chantrey requested that Scott would come and breakfast with him next morning before they recommenced operations in the studio. Scott accepted the invitation, and when he arrived again in Ecclestone Street, found two or three acquaintances assembled to meet him,--among others, his old friend Richard Heber. The breakfast was, as any party in Sir Francis Chantrey's house is sure to be, a gay and joyous one, and not having seen Heber in particular for several years, Scott's spirits were unusually excited by the presence of an intimate associate of his youthful days. I transcribe what follows from Mr. Cunningham's Memorandum:-- "Heber made many inquiries about old friends in Edinburgh, and old books and old houses, and reminded the other of their early socialities. 'Ay,' said Mr. Scott, 'I remember we once dined out together, and sat so late that when we came away the night and day were so neatly balanced, that we resolved to walk about till sunrise. The moon was not down, however, and we took advantage of her Ladyship's lantern, and climbed to the top of Arthur's Seat; when we came down we had a rare appetite for breakfast.'--'I remember it well,' said Heber; 'Edinburgh was a wild place in those days,--it abounded in clubs--convivial clubs.'--'Yes,' replied Mr. Scott, 'and abounds still; but the conversation is calmer, and there are no such sallies now as might be heard in other times. One club, I remember, was infested with two Kemps, father and son; when the old man had done speaking, the young one began,--and before he grew weary, the father was refreshed, and took up the song. John Clerk, during a pause, was called on for a stave; he immediately struck up, in a psalm-singing tone, and electrified the club with a verse which sticks like a burr to my memory,-- "Now, God Almighty judge James Kemp, And likewise his son John, And hang them over Hell in hemp, And burn them in brimstone."'-- "In the midst of the mirth which this specimen of psalmody raised, John (commonly called _Jack_) Fuller, the member for Surrey, and standing jester of the House of Commons, came in. Heber, who was well acquainted with the free and joyous character of that worthy, began to lead him out by relating some festive anecdotes: Fuller growled approbation, and indulged us with some of his odd sallies; things which he assured us 'were damned good, and true too, which was better.' Mr. Scott, who was standing when Fuller came in, eyed him at first with a look grave and considerate; but as the stream of conversation flowed, his keen eye twinkled brighter and brighter; his stature increased, for he drew himself up, and seemed to take the measure of the hoary joker, body and soul. An hour or two of social chat had meanwhile induced Mr. Chantrey to alter his views as to the bust, and when Mr. Scott left us, he said to me privately, 'This will never do--I shall never be able to please myself with a perfectly serene expression. I must try his conversational look, take him when about to break out into some sly funny old story.' As Chantrey said this, he took a string, cut off the head of the bust, put it into its present position, touched the eyes and the mouth slightly, and wrought such a transformation upon it, that when Scott came to his third sitting, he smiled and said,--'Ay, ye're mair like yoursel now!--Why, Mr. Chantrey, no witch of old ever performed such cantrips with clay as this.'"[87] [Footnote 87: [Mr. C. R. Leslie, himself the painter of an admirable portrait of Scott, says of Chantrey's work:-- "Of the many portraits of him, Chantrey's bust is, to my mind, the most perfect; ... the gentle turn of the head, inclined a little forwards and down, and the lurking humor in the eye and about the mouth, are Scott's own. Chantrey watched Sir Walter in company, and invited him to breakfast previous to the sittings, and by these means caught the expression that was most characteristic."--_Leslie's Autobiographical Recollections._]] These sittings were seven in number; but when Scott revisited London a year afterwards, he gave Chantrey several more, the bust being by that time in marble. Allan Cunningham, when he called to bid him farewell, as he was about to leave town on the present occasion, found him in court dress, preparing to kiss hands at the Levee, on being gazetted as Baronet. "He seemed anything but at his ease," says Cunningham, "in that strange attire; he was like one in armor--the stiff cut of the coat--the large shining buttons and buckles--the lace ruffles--the queue--the sword--and the cocked hat, formed a picture at which I could not forbear smiling. He surveyed himself in the glass for a moment, and burst into a hearty laugh. 'O Allan,' he said, 'O Allan, what creatures we must make of ourselves in obedience to Madam Etiquette! Seest thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is? how giddily she turns about all the hot bloods between fourteen and five-and-thirty?'"[88] [Footnote 88: _Much Ado about Nothing_, Act III. Scene 3.] Scott's baronetcy was conferred on him, not in consequence of any Ministerial suggestion, but by the King personally, and of his own unsolicited motion; and when the poet kissed his hand, he said to him, "I shall always reflect with pleasure on Sir Walter Scott's having been the first creation of my reign." The Gazette announcing his new dignity was dated March 30, and published on the 2d of April, 1820; and the Baronet, as soon afterwards as he could get away from Lawrence, set out on his return to the North; for he had such respect for the ancient prejudice (a classical as well as a Scottish one) against marrying in May, that he was anxious to have the ceremony in which his daughter was concerned over before that unlucky month should commence.[89] It is needless to say, that during this stay in London he had again experienced, in its fullest measure, the enthusiasm of all ranks of his acquaintance; and I shall now transcribe a few paragraphs from domestic letters, which will show, among other things, how glad he was when the hour came that restored him to his ordinary course of life. [Footnote 89: [On March 15 Scott had written to Lady Abercorn: "Sophia is going to be married, and to a young man of uncommon talents,--indeed of as promising a character as I know. He is highly accomplished, a beautiful poet and fine draughtsman, and, what is better, of a most honorable and gentlemanlike disposition. He is handsome besides, and I like everything about him, except that he is more grave and retired than I (who have been all my life something of an _étourdi_) like particularly, but it is better than the opposite extreme. In point of situation they have enough to live upon, and 'the world for the winning.' ... Your Ladyship will see some beautiful lines of his writing in the last number of a very clever periodical publication called _Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_. The verses are in an essay on the ballad poetry of the Spaniards, which he illustrates by some beautiful translations which--to speak truth--are much finer than the originals.... The youngster's name is John Gibson Lockhart; he comes of a good Lanarkshire family, and is very well connected. His father is a clergyman." Two months later, in a letter to Morritt, Sir Walter says:-- "To me, as it seems neither of my sons have a strong literary turn, the society of a son-in-law possessed of learning and talent must be a very great acquisition, and relieve me from some anxiety with respect to a valuable part of my fortune, consisting of copyrights, etc., which, though advantageous in my lifetime, might have been less so at my decease, unless under the management of a person acquainted with the nature of such property. All I have to fear on Lockhart's part, is a certain rashness, which I trust has been the effect of youth and high spirits, joined to lack of good advice, as he seems perfectly good-humored and very docile. So I trust your little friend Sophia, who I know has an interest in your bosom, has a very fair chance for such happiness as this motley world can afford."--_Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. pp. 73, 77.]] TO MRS. SCOTT, 39 CASTLE STREET, EDINBURGH. PICCADILLY, 20th March, 1820. MY DEAR CHARLOTTE,--I have got a delightful plan for the addition at Abb----, which I think will make it quite complete, and furnish me with a handsome library, and you with a drawing-room and better bedroom, with good bedrooms for company, etc. It will cost me a little hard work to meet the expense, but I have been a good while idle. I hope to leave this town early next week, and shall hasten back with great delight to my own household gods. I hope this will find you from under Dr. Ross's charge. I expect to see you quite in beauty when I come down, for I assure you I have been coaxed by very pretty ladies here, and look for merry faces at home. My picture comes on, and will be a grand thing, but the sitting is a great bore. Chantrey's bust is one of the finest things he ever did. It is quite the fashion to go to see it--there's for you. Yours, my dearest love, with the most sincere affection, WALTER SCOTT. TO THE SAME. PICCADILLY, March 27. MY DEAR CHARLOTTE,--I have the pleasure to say that Lord Sidmouth has promised to dismiss me in all my honors by the 30th, so that I can easily be with you by the end of April; and you and Sophia may easily select the 28th, 29th, or 30th, for the ceremony. I have been much fêted here, as usual, and had a very quiet dinner at Mr. Arbuthnot's yesterday with the Duke of Wellington, where Walter heard the great Lord in all his glory talk of war and Waterloo. Here is a hellish--yes, literally a hellish bustle. My head turns round with it. The whole mob of the Middlesex blackguards pass through Piccadilly twice a day, and almost drive me mad with their noise and vociferation.[90] Pray do, my dear Charlotte, write soon. You know those at a distance are always anxious to hear from home. I beg you to say what would give you pleasure that I could bring from this place, and whether you want anything from Mrs. Arthur for yourself, Sophia, or Anne; also what would please little Charles. You know you may stretch a point on this occasion. Richardson says your honors will be gazetted on Saturday; certainly very soon, as the King, I believe, has signed the warrant. When, or how I shall see him, is not determined, but I suppose I shall have to go to Brighton. My best love attends the girls, little Charles, and all the quadrupeds. I conclude that the marriage will take place in Castle Street, and want to know where they go, etc. All this you will have to settle without my wise head; but I shall be terribly critical--so see you do all right. I am always, dearest Charlotte, most affectionately yours, WALTER SCOTT. (_For the Lady Scott of Abbotsford--to be._) [Footnote 90: The general election was going on.] TO MR. JAMES BALLANTYNE, PRINTER, ST. JOHN'S STREET, EDINBURGH. 96 PICCADILLY, 28th March. DEAR JAMES,--I am much obliged by your attentive letter. Unquestionably Longman and Co. sell their books at subscription price, because they have the first of the market, and only one third of the books; so that, as they say with us, "let them care that come ahint." This I knew and foresaw, and the ragings of the booksellers, considerably aggravated by the displeasure of Constable and his house, are ridiculous enough; and as to their injuring the work, if it have a principle of locomotion in it, they cannot stop it--if it has not, they cannot make it move. I care not a bent twopence about their quarrels; only I say now, as I always said, that Constable's management is best, both for himself and the author; and, had we not been controlled by the narrowness of discount, I would put nothing past him. I agree with the public in thinking the work not very interesting; but it was written with as much care as the others--that is, with no care at all; and, "If it is na weil bobbit, we'll bobb it again." On these points I am Atlas. I cannot write much in this bustle of engagements, with Sir Francis's mob holloing under the windows. I find that even this light composition demands a certain degree of silence, and I might as well live in a cotton-mill. Lord Sidmouth tells me I will obtain leave to quit London by the 30th, which will be delightful news, for I find I cannot bear late hours and great society so well as formerly; and yet it is a fine thing to hear politics talked of by Ministers of State, and war discussed by the Duke of Wellington.[91] [Footnote 91: [Soon after his return, Scott writes to Morritt:-- "London I thought incredibly tiresome; I wanted my sheet anchors,--you and poor George Ellis,--by whom I could ride at quiet moorings without mixing entirely in the general vortex. The great lion--great in every sense--was the gigantic Belzoni, the handsomest man (for a giant) I ever saw or could suppose to myself. He is said completely to have overawed the Arabs, your old friends, by his great strength, height, and energy. I had one delightful evening in company with the Duke of Wellington, and heard him fight over Waterloo and his other battles with the greatest good-humor. It is odd, he says, that the most distinct writer on military affairs whose labors he has perused is James II., in the warlike details given in his own Memoirs. I have not read over these Memoirs lately, but I think I do not recollect much to justify the eulogium of so great a master."--_Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 77.]] My occasions here will require that John or you send me two notes payable at Coutts's for £300 each, at two and three months' date. I will write to Constable for one at £350, which will settle my affairs here--which, with fees and other matters, come, as you may think, pretty heavy. Let the bills be drawn payable at Coutts's, and sent without delay. I will receive them safe if sent under Mr. Freeling's cover. Mention particularly what you are doing, for now is your time to push miscellaneous work. Pray take great notice of inaccuracies in the Novels. They are very, very many--some mine, I dare say--but all such as you may and ought to correct. If you would call on William Erskine (who is your well-wisher, and a little mortified he never sees you), he would point out some of them. Do you ever see Lockhart? You should consult him on every doubt where you would refer to me if present. Yours very truly, W. S. You say nothing of John, yet I am anxious about him. TO MR. LAIDLAW, KAESIDE, MELROSE. LONDON, April 2, 1820. DEAR WILLIE,--I had the great pleasure of your letter, which carries me back to my own braes, which I love so dearly, out of this place of bustle and politics. When I can see my Master--and thank him for many acts of favor--I think I will bid adieu to London forever; for neither the hours nor the society suit me so well as a few years since. There is too much necessity for exertion, too much brilliancy and excitation from morning till night. I am glad the sheep are away, though at a loss. I should think the weather rather too dry for planting, judging by what we have here. Do not let Tom go on sticking in plants to no purpose--better put in firs in a rainy week in August. Give my service to him. I expect to be at Edinburgh in the end of this month, and to get a week at Abbotsford before the Session sits down. I think you are right to be in no hurry to let Broomielees. There seems no complaint of wanting money here just now, so I hope things will come round. Ever yours truly, WALTER SCOTT. TO MISS SCOTT, CASTLE STREET, EDINBURGH. LONDON, April 3, 1820. DEAR SOPHIA,--I have no letter from any one at home excepting Lockhart, and he only says you are all well; and I trust it is so. I have seen most of my old friends, who are a little the worse for the wear, like myself. A five years' march down the wrong side of the hill tells more than ten on the right side. Our good friends here are kind as kind can be, and no frumps. They lecture the Cornet a little, which he takes with becoming deference and good-humor. There is a certain veil of Flanders lace floating in the wind for a certain occasion, from a certain godmother, but that is more than a dead secret. We had a very merry day yesterday at Lord Melville's, where we found Lord Huntly[92] and other friends, and had a bumper to the new Baronet, whose name was Gazetted that evening. Lady Huntly plays Scotch tunes like a Highland angel. She ran a set of variations on "Kenmure's on and awa'," which I told her were enough to raise a whole country-side. I never in my life heard such fire thrown into that sort of music. I am now laying anchors to windward, as John Ferguson says, to get Walter's leave extended. We saw the Duke of York, who was very civil, but wants altogether the courtesy of the King. I have had a very gracious message from the King. He is expected up very soon, so I don't go to Brighton, which is so far good. I fear his health is not strong. Meanwhile all goes forward for the Coronation. The expense of the robes for the peers may amount to £400 apiece. All the ermine is bought up at the most extravagant prices. I hear so much of it, that I really think, like Beau Tibbs,[93] I shall be tempted to come up and see it, if possible. Indeed, I don't see why I should not stay here, as I seem to be forgotten at home. The people here are like to smother me with kindness, so why should I be in a great hurry to leave them? I write, wishing to know what I could bring Anne and you and mamma down, that would be acceptable; and I shall be much obliged to you to put me up to that matter. To little Charles also I promised something, and I wish to know what he would like. I hope he pays attention to Mr. Thomson, to whom remember my best compliments. I hope to get something for him soon. To-day I go to spend my Sabbath quietly with Joanna Baillie and John Richardson, at Hampstead. The long Cornet goes with me. I have kept him amongst the seniors; nevertheless he seems pretty well amused. He is certainly one of the best-conditioned lads I ever saw, in point of temper. I understand you and Anne have gone through the ceremony of confirmation. Pray write immediately, and let me know how you are all going on, and what you would like to have, all of you. You know how much I would like to please you. Yours, most affectionately, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 92: The late Duke of Gordon.] [Footnote 93: See Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_, No. 105.] While Scott remained in London, the Professorship of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh became vacant by the death of Dr. Thomas Brown; and among others who proposed themselves as candidates to fill it, was the author of the Isle of Palms. He was opposed in the Town Council (who are the patrons of most of the Edinburgh Chairs), on various pretences, but solely, in fact, on party grounds,--certain humorous political pieces having much exacerbated the Whigs of the North against him; and I therefore wrote to Scott, requesting him to animate the Tory Ministers in his behalf. Sir Walter did so, and Mr. Wilson's canvass was successful.[94] The answer to my communication was in these terms:-- [Footnote 94: [This academic struggle was as fiercely contested as though it had been a political contest, which in truth it was. Lockhart celebrated Wilson's victory in the _Testimonium_ (prefacing the seventh volume of _Blackwood_), thus keeping alive the passion of the hour. In July Scott wrote to his son-in-law, and through him to Wilson, a letter which is especially interesting, as showing the writer's attitude in regard to the personalities of _Maga_, which his political opponents were inclined to believe had at least his tacit approval. The letter, from which these extracts are taken, will be found in Lang's _Life of Lockhart_ (vol. i. pp. 239-245), where it was published for the first time:-- ... "I am sure our friend has been taught the danger of giving way to high spirits in mixed society, where there is some one always ready to laugh at the joke and to put it into his pocket to throw in the jester's face on some future occasion. It is plain Wilson must have walked the course had he been cautious in selecting the friends of his lighter hours, and now, clothed with philosophical dignity, his friends will really expect he should be on his guard in this respect, and add to his talents and amiable disposition the proper degree of _retenue_ becoming a moral teacher. Try to express all this to him in your own way, and believe that, as I have said it from the best motives, so I would wish it conveyed in the most delicate terms, as from one who equally honors Wilson's genius and loves his benevolent, ardent, and amiable disposition, but who would willingly see them mingled with the caution which leaves calumny no pin to hang her infamous accusations upon. "For the reasons above mentioned I wish you had not published the _Testimonium_. It is very clever, but descends to too low game. If Jeffrey or Cranstoun, or any of the dignitaries, chose to fight such skirmishes, there would be some credit in it; but I do not like to see you turn out as a sharpshooter with ****. 'What does thou drawn among these heartless hinds?' ... I have hitherto avoided saying anything on this subject, though some little turn towards personal satire is, I think, the only drawback to your great and powerful talents, and I think I may have hinted as much to you. But I wished to see how this matter of Wilson's would turn, before making a clean breast upon this subject. It might have so happened that you could not handsomely or kindly have avoided a share in his defence, if the enemy had prevailed, and where friendship, or country, or any strong call demands the use of satiric talent, I hope I should neither fear risk myself or desire a friend to shun it. But now that he has triumphed, I think it would be bad taste to cry out,-- 'Strike up our drums--pursue the scattered stray.' Besides, the natural consequence of his new situation must be his relinquishing his share in these compositions--at least, he will injure himself in the opinion of many friends, and expose himself to a continuation of galling and vexatious disputes to the embittering of his life, should he do otherwise. In that case I really hope you will pause before you undertake to be the Boaz of the _Maga_; I mean in the personal and satirical department, when the Jachin has seceded. "Besides all other objections of personal enemies, personal quarrels, constant obloquy, and all uncharitableness, such an occupation will fritter away your talents, hurt your reputation both as a lawyer and a literary man, and waste away your time in what at best will be but a monthly wonder. What has been done in this department will be very well as a frolic of young men, but let it suffice, 'the gambol has been shown'--the frequent repetition will lose its effect even as pleasantry, for Peter Pindar, the sharpest of personal satirists, wrote himself down, and wrote himself out, and is forgotten.... "Revere yourself, my dear boy, and think you were born to do your country better service than in this species of warfare. I make no apology (I am sure you will require none) for speaking plainly what my anxious affection dictates. As the old warrior says, 'May the name of Mevni be forgotten among the people, and may they only say, Behold the father of Gaul.' I wish you to have the benefit of my experience without purchasing it; and be assured, that the consciousness of attaining complete superiority over your calumniators and enemies by the force of your general character, is worth a dozen of triumphs over them by the force of wit and raillery. I am sure Sophia, as much as she can or ought to form any judgment respecting the line of conduct you have to pursue in your new character of a man married and settled, will be of my opinion in this matter, and that you will consider her happiness and your own, together with the respectability of both, by giving what I have said your anxious consideration." Lockhart's reply to this letter, expressing gratitude, and promising amendment, can be found in _Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 86.]] TO J. G. LOCKHART, ESQ., GREAT KING STREET, EDINBURGH. LONDON, 30th March, 1820. DEAR LOCKHART,--I have yours of the Sunday morning, which has been terribly long of coming. There needed no apology for mentioning anything in which I could be of service to Wilson; and, so far as good words and good wishes _here_ can do, I think he will be successful; but the battle must be fought in Edinburgh. You are aware that the only point of exception to Wilson may be, that, with the fire of genius, he has possessed some of its eccentricities; but, did he ever approach to those of Henry Brougham, who is the god of Whiggish idolatry? If the high and rare qualities with which he is invested are to be thrown aside as useless, because they may be clouded by a few grains of dust which he can blow aside at pleasure, it is less a punishment on Mr. Wilson than on the country. I have little doubt he would consider success in this weighty matter as a pledge for binding down his acute and powerful mind to more regular labor than circumstances have hitherto required of him, for indeed, without doing so, the appointment could in no point of view answer his purpose. He must stretch to the oar for his own credit, as well as that of his friends; and if he does so, there can be no doubt that his efforts will be doubly blessed, in reference both to himself and to public utility. He must make every friend he can amongst the Council. Palladio Johnstone should not be omitted. If my wife canvasses him, she may do some good.[95] You must, of course, recommend to Wilson great temper in his canvass--for wrath will do no good. After all, he must leave off sack, purge and live cleanly as a gentleman ought to do; otherwise people will compare his present ambition to that of Sir Terry O'Fag, when he wished to become a judge. "Our pleasant follies are made the whips to scourge us," as Lear says; for otherwise, what could possibly stand in the way of his nomination? I trust it will take place, and give him the consistence and steadiness which are all he wants to make him the first man of the age. I am very angry with Castle Street--not a soul has written me, save yourself, since I came to London. Yours very truly, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 95: Mr. Robert Johnstone, a grocer on a large scale on the North Bridge of Edinburgh, and long one of the leading Bailies, was about this time the prominent patron of some architectural novelties in Auld Reekie, which had found no favor with Scott;--hence his prænomen of _Palladio_--which he owed, I believe, to a song in _Blackwood's Magazine_. The good Bailie had been at the High School with Sir Walter, and their friendly intercourse was never interrupted but by death.] Sir Walter, accompanied by the Cornet, reached Edinburgh late in April, and on the 29th of that month he gave me the hand of his daughter Sophia. The wedding, _more Scotico_, took place in the evening; and adhering on all such occasions to ancient modes of observance with the same punctiliousness which he mentions as distinguishing his worthy father, he gave a jolly supper afterwards to all the friends and connections of the young couple.[96] [Footnote 96: ["On Friday evening I gave away Sophia to Mr. Lockhart.... I own my house seems lonely to me since she left us, but that is a natural feeling, which will soon wear off. I have every reason to think I have consulted her happiness in the match, as became the father of a most attached and dutiful daughter, who never in her life gave me five minutes' vexation. In the mean time the words run strangely in my ear:-- 'Ah me! the flower and blossom of my house The wind has blown away to other towers.'" --Scott to Lady Abercorn--_Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 75.]] His excursions to Tweedside during Term-time were, with very rare exceptions, of the sort which I have described in the preceding chapter; but he departed from his rule about this time in honor of the Swedish Prince, who had expressed a wish to see Abbotsford before leaving Scotland, and assembled a number of his friends and neighbors to meet his Royal Highness. Of the invitations which he distributed on this occasion, I insert one specimen--that addressed to Mr. Scott of Gala:-- _To the Baron of Galashiels The Knight of Abbotsford sends greeting._ Trusty and well-beloved,--Whereas Gustavus, Prince Royal of Sweden, proposeth to honor our poor house of Abbotsford with his presence on Thursday next, and to repose himself there for certain days, We do heartily pray you, out of the love and kindness which is and shall abide betwixt us, to be aiding to us at this conjuncture, and to repair to Abbotsford with your lady, either upon Thursday or Friday, as may best suit your convenience and pleasure, looking for no denial at your hands. Which loving countenance we will, with all thankfulness, return to you at your mansion of Gala. The hour of appearance being five o'clock, we request you to be then and there present, as you love the honor of the name; and so advance banners in the name of God and St. Andrew. WALTER SCOTT. Given at EDINBURGH, 20th May, 1820. The visit of Count Itterburg is alluded to in this letter to the Cornet, who had now rejoined his regiment in Ireland. It appears that on reaching headquarters he had found a charger _hors de combat_. TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., 18TH HUSSARS, CORK. CASTLE STREET, May 31, 1820. DEAR WALTER,--I enclose the cheque for the allowance; pray take care to get good notes in exchange. You had better speak to the gentleman whom Lord Shannon introduced you to, for, when banks take a-breaking, it seldom stops with the first who go. I am very sorry for your loss. You must be economical for a while, and bring yourself round again, for at this moment I cannot so well assist as I will do by and by. So do not buy anything but what you _need_. I was at Abbotsford for three days last week, to receive Count Itterburg, who seemed very happy while with us, and was much affected when he took his leave. I am sorry for him--his situation is a very particular one, and his feelings appear to be of the kindest order. When he took leave of me, he presented me with a beautiful seal, with all our new blazonries cut on a fine amethyst; and what I thought the prettiest part, on one side of the setting is cut my name, on the other the Prince's--_Gustaf_. He is to travel through Ireland, and will probably be at Cork. You will, of course, ask the Count and Baron to mess, and offer all civilities in your power, in which, I dare say, Colonel Murray will readily join. They intend to inquire after you. I have bought the land adjoining to the Burnfoot cottage, so that we now march with the Duke of Buccleuch all the way round that course. It cost me £2300--but there is a great deal of valuable fir planting, which you may remember; fine roosting for the black game. Still I think it is £200 too dear, but Mr. Laidlaw thinks it can be made worth the money, and it rounds the property off very handsomely. You cannot but remember the ground; it lies under the Eildon, east of the Chargelaw. Mamma, Anne, and Charles are all well. Sophia has been complaining of a return of her old sprain. I told her Lockhart would return her on our hands as not being sound wind and limb. I beg you to look at your French, and have it much at heart that you should study German. Believe me, always affectionately yours, WALTER SCOTT. In May, 1820, Scott received from both the English Universities the highest compliment which it was in their power to offer him. The Vice-Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge communicated to him, in the same week, their request that he would attend at the approaching Commemorations, and accept the honorary degree of Doctor in Civil Law. It was impossible for him to leave Scotland again that season; and on various subsequent renewals of the same flattering proposition from either body, he was prevented, by similar circumstances, from availing himself of their distinguished kindness. In the course of a few months, Scott's family arrangements had undergone, as we have seen, considerable alteration. Meanwhile he continued anxious to be allowed to adopt, as it were, the only son of his brother Thomas; and the letter, in consequence of which that promising youth was at last committed to his charge, contains so much matter likely to interest parents and guardians, that, though long, I cannot curtail it. TO THOMAS SCOTT, ESQ., PAYMASTER 70th REGIMENT. ABBOTSFORD, 23d July, 1820. MY DEAR TOM,--Your letter of May, this day received, made me truly happy, being the first I have received from you since our dear mother's death, and the consequent breaches which fate has made in our family. My own health continues quite firm, at no greater sacrifice than bidding adieu to our old and faithful friend John Barleycorn, whose life-blood has become a little too heavy for my stomach. I wrote to you from London concerning the very handsome manner in which the King behaved to me in conferring my _petit titre_, and also of Sophia's intended marriage, which took place in the end of April, as we intended. I got Walter's leave prolonged, that he might be present, and I assure you, that when he attended the ceremony in full regimentals, you have scarce seen a handsomer young man. He is about six feet and an inch, and perfectly well made. Lockhart seems to be everything I could wish,--and as they have enough to live easily upon for the present, and good expectations for the future, life opens well with them. They are to spend their vacations in a nice little cottage, in a glen belonging to this property, with a rivulet in front, and a grove of trees on the east side to keep away the cold wind. It is about two miles distant from this house, and a very pleasant walk reaches to it through my plantations, which now occupy several hundred acres. Thus there will be space enough betwixt the old man of letters and the young one. Charles's destination to India is adjourned till he reaches the proper age: it seems he cannot hold a Writership until he is sixteen years old, and then is admitted to study for two years at Hertford College. After my own sons, my most earnest and anxious wish will be, of course, for yours,--and with this view I have pondered well what you say on the subject of your Walter; and whatever line of life you may design him for, it is scarce possible but that I can be of considerable use to him. Before fixing, however, on a point so very important, I would have you consult the nature of the boy himself. I do not mean by this that you should ask his opinion, because at so early an age a well bred up child naturally takes up what is suggested to him by his parents; but I think you should consider, with as much impartiality as a parent can, his temper, disposition, and qualities of mind and body. It is not enough that you think there is an opening for him in one profession rather than another,--for it were better to sacrifice the fairest prospects of that kind than to put a boy into a line of life for which he is not calculated. If my nephew is steady, cautious, fond of a sedentary life and quiet pursuits, and at the same time a proficient in arithmetic, and with a disposition towards the prosecution of its highest branches, he cannot follow a better line than that of an accountant. It is highly respectable--and is one in which, with attention and skill, aided by such opportunities as I may be able to procure for him, he must ultimately succeed. I say ultimately--because the harvest is small and the laborers numerous in this as in other branches of our legal practice; and whoever is to dedicate himself to them, must look for a long and laborious tract of attention ere he reaches the reward of his labors. If I live, however, I will do all I can for him, and see him put under a proper person, taking his 'prentice fee, etc., upon myself. But if, which may possibly be the case, the lad has a decided turn for active life and adventure, is high-spirited, and impatient of long and dry labor, with some of those feelings not unlikely to result from having lived all his life in a camp or a barrack, do not deceive yourself, my dear brother--you will never make him an accountant; you will never be able to convert such a sword into a pruning-hook, merely because you think a pruning-hook the better thing of the two. In this supposed case, your authority and my recommendation might put him into an accountant's office; but it would be just to waste the earlier years of his life in idleness, with all the temptations to dissipation which idleness gives way to; and what sort of a place a writing-chamber is, you cannot but remember. So years might wear away, and at last the youth starts off from his profession, and becomes an adventurer too late in life, and with the disadvantage, perhaps, of offended friends and advanced age standing in the way of his future prospects. This is what I have judged fittest in my own family, for Walter would have gone to the Bar had I liked; but I was sensible (with no small reluctance did I admit the conviction) that I should only spoil an excellent soldier to make a poor and undistinguished gownsman. On the same principle I shall send Charles to India,--not, God knows, with my will, for there is little chance of my living to see him return; but merely that, judging by his disposition, I think the voyage of his life might be otherwise lost in shallows. He has excellent parts, but they are better calculated for intercourse with the world than for hard and patient study. Having thus sent one son abroad from my family, and being about to send off the other in due time, you will not, I am sure, think that I can mean disregard to your parental feelings in stating what I can do for your Walter. Should his temper and character incline for active life, I think I can promise to get him a cadetship in the East India Company's service; so soon as he has had the necessary education, I will be at the expense of his equipment and passage-money; and when he reaches India, there he is completely provided, secure of a competence if he lives, and with great chance of a fortune if he thrives. I am aware this would be a hard pull at Mrs. Scott's feelings and yours; but recollect, your fortune is small, and the demands on it numerous, and pagodas and rupees are no bad things. I can get Walter the first introductions, and if he behaves himself as becomes your son, and my nephew, I have friends enough in India, and of the highest class, to insure his success, even his rapid success--always supposing my recommendations to be seconded by his own conduct. If, therefore, the youth has anything of your own spirit, for God's sake do not condemn him to a drudgery which he will never submit to--and remember, to sacrifice his fortune to your fondness will be sadly mistaken affection. As matters stand, unhappily you must be separated; and considering the advantages of India, the mere circumstance of distance is completely counterbalanced. Health is what will naturally occur to Mrs. Scott; but the climate of India is now well understood, and those who attend to ordinary precautions live as healthy as in Britain. And so I have said my say. Most heartily will I do my best in any way you may ultimately decide for; and as the decision really ought to turn on the boy's temper and disposition, you must be a better judge by far than any one else. But if he should resemble his father and uncle in certain indolent habits, I fear he will make a better subject for an animating life of enterprise than for the technical labor of an accountant's desk. There is no occasion, fortunately, for forming any hasty resolution. When you send him here, I will do all that is in my power to stand in the place of a father to him, and you may fully rely on my care and tenderness. If he should ultimately stay at Edinburgh, as both my own boys leave me, I am sure I shall have great pleasure in having the nearest in blood after them with me. Pray send him as soon as you can, for at his age, and under imperfect opportunities of education, he must have a good deal to make up. I wish I could be of the same use to you which I am sure I can be to your son. Of public news I have little to send. The papers will tell you the issue of the Radical row for the present. The yeomanry behaved most gallantly. There is in Edinburgh a squadron as fine as ours was--all young men, and zealous soldiers. They made the western campaign with the greatest spirit, and had some hard and fatiguing duty, long night-marches, surprises of the enemy, and so forth, but no fight, for the whole Radical plot went to the devil when it came to gun and sword. Scarce any blood was shed, except in a trifling skirmish at Bonnymuir, near Carron. The rebels were behind a wall, and fired on ten hussars and as many yeomen--the latter under command of a son of James Davidson, W. S. The cavalry cleared the wall, and made them prisoners to a man. The Commission of Oyer and Terminer is now busy trying them and others. The Edinburgh young men showed great spirit; all took arms, and my daughters say (I was in London at the time) that not a feasible-looking beau was to be had for love or money. Several were like old Beardie; they would not shave their moustaches till the Radicals were put down, and returned with most awful whiskers. Lockhart is one of the cavalry, and a very good trooper. It is high to hear these young fellows talk of the Raid of Airdrie, the trot of Kilmarnock, and so on, like so many moss-troopers. The Queen is making an awful bustle, and though by all accounts her conduct has been most abandoned and beastly, she has got the whole mob for her partisans, who call her injured innocence, and what not. She has courage enough to dare the worst, and a most decided desire to be revenged of _him_, which, by the way, can scarce be wondered at. If she had as many followers of high as of low degree (in proportion), and funds to equip them, I should not be surprised to see her fat bottom in a pair of buckskins, and at the head of an army--God mend all. The things said of her are beyond all usual profligacy. Nobody of any fashion visits her. I think myself monstrously well clear of London and its intrigues, when I look round my green fields, and recollect I have little to do, but to ----"make my grass mow, And my apple-tree grow." I beg my kind love to Mrs. Huxley. I have a very acceptable letter from her, and I trust to retain the place she promises me in her remembrance. Sophia will be happy to hear from Uncle Tom, when Uncle Tom has so much leisure. My best compliments attend your wife and daughters, not forgetting Major Huxley and Walter. My dear Tom, it will be a happy moment when circumstances shall permit us a meeting on this side Jordan, as Tabitha says, to talk over old stories, and lay new plans. So many things have fallen out which I had set my heart upon strongly, that I trust this may happen amongst others.--Believe me, yours very affectionately, WALTER SCOTT.[97] [Footnote 97: Here ended Vol. IV. of the Original Edition.--(1839.)] CHAPTER XLIX Autumn at Abbotsford. -- Scott's Hospitality. -- Visit of Sir Humphry Davy, Henry Mackenzie, Dr. Wollaston, and William Stewart Rose. -- Coursing on Newark Hill. -- Salmon-fishing. -- The Festival at Boldside. -- The Abbotsford Hunt. -- The Kirn, Etc. 1820 About the middle of August, my wife and I went to Abbotsford; and we remained there for several weeks, during which I became familiarized to Sir Walter Scott's mode of existence in the country. It was necessary to observe it, day after day, for a considerable period, before one could believe that such was, during nearly half the year, the routine of life with the most productive author of his age. The humblest person who stayed merely for a short visit, must have departed with the impression that what he witnessed was an occasional variety; that Scott's courtesy prompted him to break in upon his habits when he had a stranger to amuse; but that it was physically impossible that the man who was writing the Waverley romances at the rate of nearly twelve volumes in the year, could continue, week after week, and month after month, to devote all but a hardly perceptible fraction of his mornings to out-of-doors occupations, and the whole of his evenings to the entertainment of a constantly varying circle of guests. The hospitality of his afternoons must alone have been enough to exhaust the energies of almost any man; for his visitors did not mean, like those of country-houses in general, to enjoy the landlord's good cheer and amuse each other; but the far greater proportion arrived from a distance, for the sole sake of the Poet and Novelist himself, whose person they had never before seen, and whose voice they might never again have any opportunity of hearing. No other villa in Europe was ever resorted to from the same motives, and to anything like the same extent, except Ferney; and Voltaire never dreamt of being visible to his _hunters_, except for a brief space of the day;--few of them even dined with him, and none of them seem to have slept under his roof. Scott's establishment, on the contrary, resembled in every particular that of the affluent idler, who, because he has inherited, or would fain transmit, political influence in some province, keeps open house--receives as many as he has room for, and sees their apartments occupied, as soon as they vacate them, by another troop of the same description. Even on gentlemen guiltless of inkshed, the exercise of hospitality upon this sort of scale is found to impose a heavy tax; few of them, nowadays, think of maintaining it for any large portion of the year: very few indeed below the highest rank of the nobility--in whose case there is usually a staff of led-captains, led-chaplains, servile dandies, and semi-professional talkers and jokers from London, to take the chief part of the burden. Now, Scott had often in his mouth the pithy verses,-- "Conversation is but carving:-- Give no more to every guest, Than he's able to digest; Give him always of the prime, And but little at a time; Carve to all but just enough, Let them neither starve nor stuff, _And that you may have your due, Let your neighbors carve for you:_"-- and he, in his own familiar circle always, and in other circles where it was possible, furnished a happy exemplification of these rules and regulations of the Dean of St. Patrick's. But the same sense and benevolence which dictated adhesion to them among his old friends and acquaintance, rendered it necessary to break them when he was receiving strangers of the class I have described above at Abbotsford: he felt that their coming was the best homage they could pay to his celebrity, and that it would have been as uncourteous in him not to give them their fill of his talk, as it would be in your every-day lord of manors to make his casual guests welcome indeed to his venison, but keep his grouse-shooting for his immediate allies and dependents. Every now and then he received some stranger who was not indisposed to take his part in the _carving_; and how good-humoredly he surrendered the lion's share to any one that seemed to covet it--with what perfect placidity he submitted to be bored even by bores of the first water, must have excited the admiration of many besides the daily observers of his proceedings. I have heard a spruce Senior Wrangler lecture him for half an evening on the niceties of the Greek epigram; I have heard the poorest of all parliamentary blunderers try to detail to him the _pros_ and _cons_ of what he called the _Truck System_; and in either case the same bland eye watched the lips of the tormentor. But, with such ludicrous exceptions, Scott was the one object of the Abbotsford pilgrims; and evening followed evening only to show him exerting, for their amusement, more of animal spirits, to say nothing of intellectual vigor, than would have been considered by any other man in the company as sufficient for the whole expenditure of a week's existence. Yet this was not the chief marvel; he talked of things that interested himself, because he knew that by doing so he should give most pleasure to his guests. But how vast was the range of subjects on which he could talk with unaffected zeal; and with what admirable delicacy of instinctive politeness did he select his topic according to the peculiar history, study, pursuits, or social habits of the stranger!--How beautifully he varied his style of letter-writing, according to the character and situation of his multifarious correspondents, the reader has already been enabled to judge; but to carry the same system into practice _at sight_--to manage utter strangers, of many and widely different classes, in the same fashion, and with the same effect--called for a quickness of observation, and fertility of resource, such as no description can convey the slightest notion of to those who never witnessed the thing for themselves. And all this was done without approach to the unmanly trickery of what is called _catching the tone_ of the person one converses with. Scott took the subject on which he thought such a man or woman would like best to hear him speak--but not to handle it in their way, or in any way but what was completely, and most simply his own;--not to flatter them by embellishing, with the illustration of his genius, the views and opinions which they were supposed to entertain,--but to let his genius play out its own variations, for his own delight and theirs, as freely and easily, and with as endless a multiplicity of delicious novelties, as ever the magic of Beethoven or Mozart could fling over the few primitive notes of a village air. It is the custom in some, perhaps in many country-houses, to keep a register of the guests, and I have often regretted that nothing of the sort was ever attempted at Abbotsford. It would have been a curious record--especially if so contrived (as I have seen done) that the names of each day should, by their arrangement on the page, indicate the exact order in which the company sat at dinner. It would hardly, I believe, be too much to affirm, that Sir Walter Scott entertained, under his roof, in the course of the seven or eight brilliant seasons when his prosperity was at its height, as many persons of distinction in rank, in politics, in art, in literature, and in science, as the most princely nobleman of his age ever did in the like space of time.--I turned over, since I wrote the preceding sentence, Mr. Lodge's compendium of the British Peerage, and on summing up the titles which suggested _to myself_ some reminiscence of this kind, I found them nearly as one out of six.--I fancy it is not beyond the mark to add, that of the eminent foreigners who visited our island within this period, a moiety crossed the Channel mainly in consequence of the interest with which his writings had invested Scotland--and that the hope of beholding the man under his own roof was the crowning motive with half that moiety. As for countrymen of his own, like him ennobled, in the higher sense of that word, by the display of their intellectual energies, if any one such contemporary can be pointed out as having crossed the Tweed, and yet not spent a day at Abbotsford, I shall be surprised. It is needless to add, that Sir Walter was familiarly known, long before the days I am speaking of, to almost all the nobility and higher gentry of Scotland; and consequently, that there seldom wanted a fair proportion of them to assist him in doing the honors of his country. It is still more superfluous to say so respecting the heads of his own profession at Edinburgh: _Sibi et amicis_--Abbotsford was their villa whenever they pleased to resort to it, and few of them were ever absent from it long. He lived meanwhile in a constant interchange of easy visits with the gentlemen's families of Teviotdale and the Forest; so that, mixed up with his superfine admirers of the Mayfair breed, his staring worshippers from foreign parts, and his quick-witted coevals of the Parliament House--there was found generally some hearty homespun laird, with his dame--the young laird, a bashful bumpkin, perhaps, whose ideas did not soar beyond his gun and pointer--or perhaps a little pseudo-dandy, for whom the Kelso race-course and the Jedburgh ball were "Life," and "the World;" and not forgetting a brace of "Miss Rawbolds,"[98] in whom, as their mamma prognosticated, some of Sir Walter's young Waverleys or Osbaldistones might peradventure discover a Flora MacIvor or a Die Vernon. To complete the _olla podrida_, we must remember that no old acquaintance, or family connections, however remote their actual station or style of manners from his own, were forgotten or lost sight of. He had some, even near relations, who, except when they visited him, rarely, if ever, found admittance to what the haughty dialect of the upper world is pleased to designate exclusively as _society_. These were welcome guests, let who might be under that roof; and it was the same with many a worthy citizen of Edinburgh, habitually moving in the obscurest of circles, who had been in the same class with Scott at the High School, or his fellow-apprentice when he was proud of earning threepence a page by the use of his pen. To dwell on nothing else, it was surely a beautiful perfection of real universal humanity and politeness, that could enable this great and good man to blend guests so multifarious in one group, and contrive to make them all equally happy with him, with themselves, and with each other. [Footnote 98: "There were the six Miss Rawbolds--pretty dears! All song and sentiment; whose hearts were set Less on a convent than a coronet." _Don Juan_, canto xiii. st. 85.] I remember saying to William Allan one morning as the whole party mustered before the porch after breakfast, "A faithful sketch of what you at this moment see would be more interesting a hundred years hence, than the grandest so-called historical picture that you will ever exhibit at Somerset House;" and my friend agreed with me so cordially, that I often wondered afterwards he had not attempted to realize the suggestion. The subject ought, however, to have been treated conjointly by him (or Wilkie) and Edwin Landseer. It was a clear, bright September morning, with a sharpness in the air that doubled the animating influence of the sunshine, and all was in readiness for a grand coursing-match on Newark Hill. The only guest who had chalked out other sport for himself was the stanchest of anglers, Mr. Rose;--but he, too, was there on his _shelty_, armed with his salmon-rod and landing-net, and attended by his humorous squire Hinves, and Charlie Purdie, a brother of Tom, in those days the most celebrated fisherman of the district. This little group of Waltonians, bound for Lord Somerville's preserve, remained lounging about to witness the start of the main cavalcade. Sir Walter, mounted on Sibyl, was marshalling the order of procession with a huge hunting-whip; and among a dozen frolicsome youths and maidens, who seemed disposed to laugh at all discipline, appeared, each on horseback, each as eager as the youngest sportsman in the troop, Sir Humphry Davy, Dr. Wollaston, and the patriarch of Scottish belles-lettres, Henry Mackenzie. The Man of Feeling, however, was persuaded with some difficulty to resign his steed for the present to his faithful negro follower, and to join Lady Scott in the sociable, until we should reach the ground of our _battue_. Laidlaw, on a long-tailed wiry Highlander, yclept _Hoddin Grey_, which carried him nimbly and stoutly, although his feet almost touched the ground as he sat, was the adjutant. But the most picturesque figure was the illustrious inventor of the safety-lamp. He had come for his favorite sport of angling, and had been practising it successfully with Rose, his travelling companion, for two or three days preceding this, but he had not prepared for coursing fields, or had left Charlie Purdie's troop for Sir Walter's on a sudden thought; and his fisherman's costume--a brown hat with flexible brims, surrounded with line upon line, and innumerable fly-hooks--jack-boots worthy of a Dutch smuggler, and a fustian surtout dabbled with the blood of salmon, made a fine contrast with the smart jackets, white-cord breeches, and well-polished jockey-boots of the less distinguished cavaliers about him. Dr. Wollaston was in black, and, with his noble serene dignity of countenance, might have passed for a sporting archbishop.[99] Mr. Mackenzie, at this time in the seventy-sixth year of his age, with a white hat turned up with green, green spectacles, green jacket, and long brown leathern gaiters buttoned upon his nether anatomy, wore a dog-whistle round his neck, and had all over the air of as resolute a devotee as the gay Captain of Huntly Burn. Tom Purdie and his subalterns had preceded us by a few hours with all the greyhounds that could be collected at Abbotsford, Darnick, and Melrose; but the giant Maida had remained as his master's orderly, and now gambolled about Sibyl Grey, barking for mere joy like a spaniel puppy. [Footnote 99: [William Hyde Wollaston, the distinguished physiologist, chemist, and physicist.]] The order of march had been all settled, and the sociable was just getting under weigh, when _the Lady Anne_ broke from the line, screaming with laughter, and exclaimed, "Papa, papa, I knew you could never think of going without your pet." Scott looked round, and I rather think there was a blush as well as a smile upon his face, when he perceived a little black pig frisking about his pony, and evidently a self-elected addition to the party of the day. He tried to look stern, and cracked his whip at the creature, but was in a moment obliged to join in the general cheers. Poor piggy soon found a strap round its neck, and was dragged into the background:--Scott, watching the retreat, repeated with mock pathos the first verse of an old pastoral song,-- "What will I do gin my hoggie[100] die? My joy, my pride, my hoggie! My only beast, I had nae mae, And wow! but I was vogie!" --the cheers were redoubled--and the squadron moved on. [Footnote 100: _Hog_ signifies in the Scotch dialect a young sheep that has never been shorn. Hence, no doubt, the name of the Poet of Ettrick--derived from a long line of shepherds. Mr. Charles Lamb, however, in one of his sonnets suggests this pretty origin of _his_ "Family Name:"-- "Perhaps some shepherd on Lincolnian plains, In manners guileless as his own sweet flocks, Received it first amid the merry mocks And arch allusions of his fellow swains."] This pig had taken--nobody could tell how--a most sentimental attachment to Scott, and was constantly urging its pretensions to be admitted a regular member of his _tail_ along with the greyhounds and terriers; but, indeed, I remember him suffering another summer under the same sort of pertinacity on the part of an affectionate hen. I leave the explanation for philosophers--but such were the facts. I have too much respect for the vulgarly calumniated donkey to name him in the same category of pets with the pig and the hen; but a year or two after this time, my wife used to drive a couple of these animals in a little garden chair, and whenever her father appeared at the door of our cottage, we were sure to see Hannah More and Lady Morgan (as Anne Scott had wickedly christened them) trotting from their pasture to lay their noses over the paling, and, as Washington Irving says of the old white-haired hedger with the Parisian snuff-box, "to have a pleasant crack wi' the laird." But to return to our _chasse_. On reaching Newark Castle, we found Lady Scott, her eldest daughter, and the venerable Mackenzie, all busily engaged in unpacking a basket that had been placed in their carriage, and arranging the luncheon it contained upon the mossy rocks overhanging the bed of the Yarrow. When such of the company as chose had partaken of this refection, the Man of Feeling resumed his pony, and all ascended the mountain, duly marshalled at proper distances, so as to beat in a broad line over the heather, Sir Walter directing the movement from the right wing--towards Blackandro. Davy, next to whom I chanced to be riding, laid his whip about the fern like an experienced hand, but cracked many a joke, too, upon his own jack-boots, and surveying the long eager battalion of bushrangers, exclaimed, "Good heavens! is it thus that I visit the scenery of The Lay of the Last Minstrel?" He then kept muttering to himself, as his glowing eye (the finest and brightest that I ever saw) ran over the landscape, some of those beautiful lines from the _Conclusion_ of the Lay:-- ---- "But still, When summer smiled on sweet Bowhill, And July's eve, with balmy breath, Waved the blue-bells on Newark heath, When throstles sung in Hareheadshaw, And corn was green on Carterhaugh, And flourished, broad, Blackandro's oak, The aged harper's soul awoke," etc. Mackenzie, spectacled though he was, saw the first sitting hare, gave the word to slip the dogs, and spurred after them like a boy. All the seniors, indeed, did well as long as the course was upwards, but when puss took down the declivity, they halted and breathed themselves upon the knoll--cheering gayly, however, the young people, who dashed at full speed past and below them. Coursing on such a mountain is not like the same sport over a set of fine English pastures. There were gulfs to be avoided and bogs enough to be threaded--many a stiff nag stuck fast--many a bold rider measured his length among the peat-hags--and another stranger to the ground besides Davy plunged neck-deep into a treacherous well-head, which, till they were floundering in it, had borne all the appearance of a piece of delicate green turf. When Sir Humphry emerged from his involuntary bath, his habiliments garnished with mud, slime, and mangled water-cresses, Sir Walter received him with a triumphant _encore!_ But the philosopher had his revenge, for joining soon afterwards in a brisk gallop, Scott put Sibyl Grey to a leap beyond her prowess, and lay humbled in the ditch, while Davy, who was better mounted, cleared it and him at a bound. Happily there was little damage done--but no one was sorry that the sociable had been detained at the foot of the hill. I have seen Sir Humphry in many places, and in company of many different descriptions; but never to such advantage as at Abbotsford. His host and he delighted in each other, and the modesty of their mutual admiration was a memorable spectacle. Davy was by nature a poet--and Scott, though anything but a philosopher in the modern sense of that term, might, I think it very likely, have pursued the study of physical science with zeal and success, had he happened to fall in with such an instructor as Sir Humphry would have been to him, in his early life. Each strove to make the other talk--and they did so in turn more charmingly than I ever heard either on any other occasion whatsoever. Scott in his romantic narratives touched a deeper chord of feeling than usual, when he had such a listener as Davy; and Davy, when induced to open his views upon any question of scientific interest in Scott's presence, did so with a degree of clear energetic eloquence, and with a flow of imagery and illustration, of which neither his habitual tone of table-talk (least of all in London), nor any of his prose writings (except, indeed, the posthumous Consolations of Travel) could suggest an adequate notion. I say his prose writings--for who that has read his sublime quatrains on the doctrine of Spinoza can doubt that he might have united, if he had pleased, in some great didactic poem, the vigorous ratiocination of Dryden and the moral majesty of Wordsworth? I remember William Laidlaw whispering to me, one night, when their "rapt talk" had kept the circle round the fire until long after the usual bedtime of Abbotsford: "Gude preserve us! this is a very superior occasion! Eh, sirs!" he added, cocking his eye like a bird, "I wonder if Shakespeare and Bacon ever met to screw ilk other up?" Since I have touched on the subject of Sir Walter's autumnal diversions in these his later years, I may as well notice here two annual festivals, when sport was made his pretext for assembling his rural neighbors about him--days eagerly anticipated, and fondly remembered by many. One was a solemn bout of salmon-fishing for the neighboring gentry and their families, instituted originally, I believe, by Lord Somerville, but now, in his absence, conducted and presided over by the Sheriff. Charles Purdie, already mentioned, had charge (partly as lessee) of the salmon-fisheries for three or four miles of the Tweed, including all the water attached to the lands of Abbotsford, Gala, and Allwyn; and this festival had been established with a view, besides other considerations, of recompensing him for the attention he always bestowed on any of the lairds or their visitors that chose to fish, either from the banks or the boat, within his jurisdiction. His selection of the day, and other precautions, generally secured an abundance of sport for the great anniversary; and then the whole party assembled to regale on the newly caught prey, boiled, grilled, and roasted in every variety of preparation, beneath a grand old ash, adjoining Charlie's cottage at Boldside, on the northern margin of the Tweed, about a mile above Abbotsford. This banquet took place earlier in the day or later, according to circumstances; but it often lasted till the harvest moon shone on the lovely scene and its revellers. These formed groups that would have done no discredit to Watteau--and a still better hand has painted the background in the Introduction to The Monastery: "On the opposite bank of the Tweed might be seen the remains of ancient enclosures, surrounded by sycamores and ash-trees of considerable size. These had once formed the crofts or arable ground of a village, now reduced to a single hut, the abode of a fisherman, who also manages a ferry. The cottages, even the church which once existed there, have sunk into vestiges hardly to be traced without visiting the spot, the inhabitants having gradually withdrawn to the more prosperous town of Galashiels, which has risen into consideration within two miles of their neighborhood. Superstitious eld, however, has tenanted the deserted grove with aërial beings, to supply the want of the mortal tenants who have deserted it. The ruined and abandoned churchyard of Boldside has been long believed to be haunted by the Fairies, and the deep broad current of the Tweed, wheeling in moonlight round the foot of the steep bank, with the number of trees originally planted for shelter round the fields of the cottagers, but now presenting the effect of scattered and detached groves, fill up the idea which one would form in imagination for a scene that Oberon and Queen Mab might love to revel in. There are evenings when the spectator might believe, with Father Chaucer, that the ----'Queen of Faëry, With harp, and pipe, and symphony, Were dwelling in the place.'" Sometimes the evening closed with a "burning of the water;" and then the Sheriff, though now not so agile as when he practised that rough sport in the early times of Ashestiel, was sure to be one of the party in the boat,--held a torch, or perhaps took the helm,--and seemed to enjoy the whole thing as heartily as the youngest of his company,-- "'T is blithe along the midnight tide, With stalwart arm the boat to guide-- On high the dazzling blaze to rear, And heedful plunge the barbed spear; Rock, wood, and scaur, emerging bright, Fling on the stream their ruddy light, And from the bank our band appears Like Genii armed with fiery spears."[101] [Footnote 101: See _Poetical Works_, vol. xi. pp 334, 335 [Cambridge Ed. p. 467].] The other "superior occasion" came later in the season; the 28th of October, the birthday of Sir Walter's eldest son, was, I think, that usually selected for _the Abbotsford Hunt_. This was a coursing-field on a large scale, including, with as many of the young gentry as pleased to attend, all Scott's personal favorites among the yeomen and farmers of the surrounding country. The Sheriff always took the field, but latterly devolved the command upon his good friend Mr. John Usher, the ex-laird of Toftfield; and he could not have had a more skilful or a better-humored lieutenant. The hunt took place either on the moors above the Cauldshiels Loch, or over some of the hills on the estate of Gala, and we had commonly, ere we returned, hares enough to supply the wife of every farmer that attended, with soup for a week following. The whole then dined at Abbotsford, the Sheriff in the chair, Adam Ferguson croupier, and Dominie Thomson, of course, chaplain. George, by the way, was himself an eager partaker in the preliminary sport; and now he would favor us with a grace, in Burns's phrase, "as long as my arm," beginning with thanks to the Almighty, who had given man dominion over the fowls of the air, and the beasts of the field, and expatiating on this text with so luculent a commentary, that Scott, who had been fumbling with his spoon long before he reached his Amen, could not help exclaiming as he sat down, "Well done, Mr. George! I think we've had everything but the view holla!" The company, whose onset had been thus deferred, were seldom, I think, under thirty in number, and sometimes they exceeded forty. The feast was such as suited the occasion--a baron of beef, roasted, at the foot of the table, a salted round at the head, while tureens of hare-soup, hotchpotch, and cocky-leeky, extended down the centre, and such light articles as geese, turkeys, entire sucking-pigs, a singed sheep's head, and the unfailing haggis, were set forth by way of side dishes. Blackcock and moorfowl, bushels of snipe, _black puddings_, _white puddings_, and pyramids of pancakes, formed the second course. Ale was the favorite beverage during dinner, but there was plenty of port and sherry for those whose stomachs they suited. The quaighs of Glenlivet were filled brimful, and tossed off as if they held water. The wine decanters made a few rounds of the table, but the hints for hot punch and toddy soon became clamorous. Two or three bowls were introduced, and placed under the supervision of experienced manufacturers,--one of these being usually the Ettrick Shepherd,--and then the business of the evening commenced in good earnest. The faces shone and glowed like those at Camacho's wedding: the chairman told his richest stories of old rural life, Lowland or Highland; Ferguson and humbler heroes fought their peninsular battles o'er again; the stalwart Dandie Dinmonts lugged out their last winter's snowstorm, the parish scandal, perhaps, or the dexterous bargain of the Northumberland _tryste_; and every man was knocked down for the song that he sung best, or took most pleasure in singing. Sheriff-Substitute Shortreed (a cheerful, hearty, little man, with a sparkling eye and a most infectious laugh) gave us Dick o' the Cow, or Now Liddesdale has ridden a Raid; his son Thomas (Sir Walter's assiduous disciple and assistant in Border Heraldry and Genealogy) shone without a rival in The Douglas Tragedy and The Twa Corbies; a weather-beaten, stiff-bearded veteran, _Captain_ Ormistoun, as he was called (though I doubt if his rank was recognized at the Horse-Guards), had the primitive pastoral of Cowdenknowes in sweet perfection; Hogg produced The Women Folk, or The Kye comes Hame; and, in spite of many grinding notes, contrived to make everybody delighted, whether with the fun or the pathos of his ballad; the Melrose doctor sang in spirited style some of Moore's masterpieces; a couple of retired sailors joined in Bould Admiral Duncan upon the High Sea;--and the gallant croupier crowned the last bowl with Ale, good Ale, thou art my Darling! Imagine some smart Parisian _savant_--some dreamy pedant of Halle or Heidelberg--a brace of stray young Lords from Oxford or Cambridge, or perhaps their prim college tutors, planted here and there amidst these rustic wassailers--this being their first vision of the author of Marmion and Ivanhoe, and he appearing as heartily at home in the scene as if he had been a veritable _Dandie_ himself--his face radiant, his laugh gay as childhood, his chorus always ready. And so it proceeded until some worthy, who had fifteen or twenty miles to ride home, began to insinuate that his wife and bairns would be getting sorely anxious about the fords, and the Dumples and Hoddins were at last heard neighing at the gate, and it was voted that the hour had come for _doch an dorrach_--the stirrup-cup--to wit, a bumper all round of the unmitigated _mountain dew_. How they all contrived to get home in safety, Heaven only knows--but I never heard of any serious accident except upon one occasion, when James Hogg made a bet at starting that he would leap over his wall-eyed pony as she stood, and broke his nose in this experiment of "o'ervaulting ambition." One comely goodwife, far off among the hills, amused Sir Walter by telling him, the next time he passed her homestead after one of these jolly doings, what her husband's first words were when he alighted at his own door: "Ailie, my woman, I'm ready for my bed, and oh lass (he gallantly added), I wish I could sleep for a towmont, for there's only ae thing in this warld worth living for, and that's the Abbotsford Hunt!" It may well be supposed that the President of the Boldside Festival and the Abbotsford Hunt did not omit the good old custom of _the Kirn_. Every November, before quitting the country for Edinburgh, he gave a _harvest-home_, on the most approved model of former days, to all the peasantry on his estate, their friends and kindred, and as many poor neighbors besides as his barn could hold. Here old and young danced from sunset to sunrise,--John of Skye's bagpipe being relieved at intervals by the violin of some Wandering Willie;--and the laird and all his family were present during the early part of the evening--he and his wife to distribute the contents of the first tub of whiskey-punch, and his young people to take their due share in the endless reels and hornpipes of the earthen floor. As Mr. Morritt has said of him as he appeared at Laird Nippy's kirn of earlier days, "To witness the cordiality of his reception might have unbent a misanthrope." He had his private joke for every old wife or "gausie carle," his arch compliment for the ear of every bonny lass, and his hand and his blessing for the head of every little _Eppie Daidle_ from Abbotstown or Broomielees. "The notable paradox," he says in one of the most charming of his essays, "that the residence of a proprietor upon his estate is of as little consequence as the bodily presence of a stockholder upon Exchange, has, we believe, been renounced. At least, as in the case of the Duchess of Suffolk's relationship to her own child, the vulgar continue to be of opinion that there is some difference in favor of the next hamlet and village, and even of the vicinage in general, when the squire spends his rents at the manor-house, instead of cutting a figure in France or Italy. A celebrated politician used to say he would willingly bring in one bill to make poaching felony, another to encourage the breed of foxes, and a third to revive the decayed amusements of cock-fighting and bullbaiting--that he would make, in short, any sacrifice to the humors and prejudices of the country gentlemen, in their most extravagant form, provided only he could prevail upon them to 'dwell in their own houses, be the patrons of their own tenantry, and the fathers of their own children.'"[102] [Footnote 102: Essay on Landscape Gardening, _Miscellaneous Prose Works_, vol. xxi. p. 77.] CHAPTER L Publication of the Abbot. -- The Blair-Adam Club. -- Kelso, Walton Hall, Etc. -- Ballantyne's Novelists' Library. -- Acquittal of Queen Caroline. -- Service of the Duke of Buccleuch. -- Scott Elected President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. -- The Celtic Society. -- Letters to Lord Montagu, Cornet Scott, Charles Scott, Allan Cunningham, Etc. -- Kenilworth Published. 1820-1821 In the September of 1820, Longman, in conjunction with Constable, published The Abbot--the continuation, to a certain extent, of The Monastery, of which I barely mentioned the appearance under the preceding March. I had nothing of any consequence to add to the information which the subsequent Introduction affords us respecting the composition and fate of the former of these novels. It was considered as a failure--the first of the series on which any such sentence was pronounced;--nor have I much to allege in favor of the White Lady of Avenel, generally criticised as the primary blot--or of Sir Piercie Shafton, who was loudly, though not quite so generally, condemned. In either case, considered separately, he seems to have erred from dwelling (in the German taste) on materials that might have done very well for a rapid sketch. The phantom, with whom we have leisure to become familiar, is sure to fail--even the witch of Endor is contented with a momentary appearance and five syllables of the shade she evokes. And we may say the same of any grotesque absurdity in human manners. Scott might have considered with advantage how lightly and briefly Shakespeare introduces _his_ Euphuism--though actually the prevalent humor of the hour when he was writing. But perhaps these errors might have attracted little notice had the novelist been successful in finding some reconciling medium capable of giving consistence and harmony to his naturally incongruous materials. "These," said one of his ablest critics, "are joined--but they refuse to blend. Nothing can be more poetical in conception, and sometimes in language, than the fiction of the White Maid of Avenel; but when this ethereal personage, who rides on the cloud which 'for Araby is bound'--who is 'Something between heaven and hell, Something that neither stood nor fell,' whose existence is linked by an awful and mysterious destiny to the fortunes of a decaying family; when such a being as this descends to clownish pranks, and promotes a frivolous jest about a tailor's bodkin, the course of our sympathies is rudely arrested, and we feel as if the author had put upon us the old-fashioned pleasantry of selling a bargain."[103] [Footnote 103: Adolphus's _Letters to Heber_, p. 13.] The beautiful natural scenery, and the sterling Scotch characters and manners introduced in The Monastery are, however, sufficient to redeem even these mistakes; and, indeed, I am inclined to believe that it will ultimately occupy a securer place than some romances enjoying hitherto a far higher reputation, in which he makes no use of Scottish materials. Sir Walter himself thought well of The Abbot when he had finished it. When he sent me a complete copy I found on a slip of paper at the beginning of volume first, these two lines from Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress:-- "Up he rose in a funk, lapped a toothful of brandy, And _to it_ again!--any odds upon Sandy!"-- and whatever ground he had been supposed to lose in The Monastery, part at least of it was regained by this tale, and especially by its most graceful and pathetic portraiture of Mary Stuart. "The Castle of Lochleven," says the Chief-Commissioner Adam, "is seen at every turn from the northern side of Blair-Adam. This castle, renowned and attractive above all the others in my neighborhood, became an object of much increased attention, and a theme of constant conversation, after the author of Waverley had, by his inimitable power of delineating character--by his creative poetic fancy in representing scenes of varied interest--and by the splendor of his romantic descriptions, infused a more diversified and a deeper tone of feeling into the history of Queen Mary's captivity and escape." I have introduced this quotation from a little book privately printed for the amiable Judge's own family and familiar friends, because Sir Walter owned to myself at the time, that the idea of The Abbot had arisen in his mind during a visit to Blair-Adam. In the pages of the tale itself, indeed, the beautiful localities of that estate are distinctly mentioned, with an allusion to the virtues and manners that adorn its mansion, such as must have been intended to satisfy the possessor (if he could have had any doubts on the subject) as to the authorship of those novels. The Right Honorable William Adam (who must pardon my mentioning him here as the only man I ever knew that rivalled Sir Walter Scott in uniform graciousness of _bonhomie_ and gentleness of humor)[104] was appointed, in 1815, to the Presidency of the Court for Jury Trial in Civil Cases, then instituted in Scotland, and he thenceforth spent a great part of his time at his paternal seat in Kinross-shire. Here, about midsummer, 1816, he received a visit from his near relation William Clerk, Adam Ferguson, his hereditary friend and especial favorite, and their lifelong intimate, Scott. They remained with him for two or three days, in the course of which they were all so much delighted with their host, and he with them, that it was resolved to reassemble the party, with a few additions, at the same season of every following year. This was the origin of the Blair-Adam Club, the regular members of which were in number nine; namely, the four already named--the Chief-Commissioner's son, Admiral Sir Charles Adam--his son-in-law, the late Mr. Anstruther Thomson of Charleton, in Fifeshire--Mr. Thomas Thomson, the Deputy-Register of Scotland--his brother, the Rev. John Thomson, minister of Duddingston, who, though a most diligent and affectionate parish priest, has found leisure to make himself one of the first masters of the British School of Landscape Painting--and the Right Hon. Sir Samuel Shepherd, who, after filling with high distinction the office of Attorney-General in England, became Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer in Scotland, shortly after the third anniversary of this brotherhood, into which he was immediately welcomed with unanimous cordiality. They usually contrived to meet on a Friday; spent the Saturday in a ride to some scene of historical interest within an easy distance; enjoyed a quiet Sunday at home--"duly attending divine worship at the Kirk of Cleish (not Cleishbotham)"--gave Monday morning to another antiquarian excursion, and returned to Edinburgh in time for the Courts of Tuesday. From 1816 to 1831 inclusive, Sir Walter was a constant attendant at these meetings. He visited in this way Castle Campbell, Magus Moor, Falkland, Dunfermline, St. Andrews, and many other scenes of ancient celebrity: to one of those trips we must ascribe his dramatic sketch of Macduff's Cross--and to that of the dog-days of 1819, we owe the weightier obligation of The Abbot. [Footnote 104: See _ante_, vol. v. p. 34.] I expect an easy forgiveness for introducing from the _liber rarissimus_ of Blair-Adam the page that belongs to that particular meeting--which, though less numerous than usual, is recorded as having been "most pleasing and delightful." "There were," writes the President, "only five of us; the Chief Baron, Sir Walter, Mr. Clerk, Charles Adam, and myself. The weather was sultry, almost beyond bearing. We did not stir beyond the bounds of the pleasure-ground, indeed not far from the vicinity of the house; wandering from one shady place to another, lolling upon the grass, or sitting upon prostrate trees not yet carried away by the purchaser. Our conversation was constant, though tranquil; and what might be expected from Mr. Clerk, who is a superior converser, and whose mind is stored with knowledge; and from Sir Walter Scott, who has let the public know what his powers are. Our talk was of all sorts (except of _beeves_). Besides a display of their historic knowledge, at once extensive and correct, they touched frequently on the pleasing reminiscences of their early days. Shepherd and I could not go back to those periods; but we could trace our own intimacy and constant friendship for more than forty years back, when in 1783 we began our professional pursuits on the Circuit. So that if Scott could describe, with inconceivable humor, their doings at Mr. Murray's of Simprim, when emerging from boyhood; when he, and Murray, and Clerk, and Adam Ferguson, acted plays in the schoolroom (Simprim making the dominie bear his part)--when Ferguson was prompter, orchestra, and audience--and as Scott said, representing the whole pit, kicked up an 'O. P.' row by anticipation; and many other such recollections--Shepherd and I could tell of our Circuit fooleries, as old Fielding (the son of the great novelist) called them--of the Circuit songs which Will Fielding made and sung,--and of the grave Sir William Grant (then a briefless barrister), ycleped by Fielding the Chevalier Grant, bearing his part in those fooleries, enjoying all our pranks with great zest, and who talked of them with delight to his dying day. When the conversation took a graver tone, and turned upon literary subjects, the Chief-Baron took a great share in it; for notwithstanding his infirmity of deafness, he is a most pleasing and agreeable converser, and readily picks up what is passing; and having a classical mind and classical information, gives a pleasing, gentlemanly, and well-informed tone to general conversation.--Before I bring these recollections of our social and cheerful doings to a close, let me observe, that there was a characteristic feature attending them, which it would be injustice to the individuals who composed our parties not to mention. The whole set of us were addicted to take a full share of conversation, and to discuss every subject that occurred with sufficient keenness. The topics were multifarious, and the opinions of course various; but during the whole time of our intercourse, for so many years, four days at a time, and always together, except when we were asleep, there never was the least tendency, on any occasion, to any unruly debate, nor to anything that deviated from the pure delight of social intercourse." The Chief-Commissioner adds the following particulars in his appendix:-- "Our return from Blair-Adam (after the first meeting of the Club) was very early on a Tuesday morning, that we might reach the Courts by nine o'clock. An occurrence took place near the Hawes' Inn, which left little doubt upon my mind that Sir Walter Scott was the author of Waverley, of Guy Mannering, and of The Antiquary, his only novels then published. The morning was prodigiously fine, and the sea as smooth as glass. Sir Walter and I were standing on the beach, enjoying the prospect; the other gentlemen were not come from the boat. The porpoises were rising in great numbers, when Sir Walter said to me, 'Look at them, how they are showing themselves; what fine fellows they are! I have the greatest respect for them: I would as soon kill a man as a phoca.' I could not conceive that the same idea could occur to two men respecting this animal, and set down that it could only be Sir Walter Scott who made the phoca have the better of the battle with the Antiquary's nephew, Captain M'Intyre.[105] "Soon after, another occurrence quite confirmed me as to the authorship of the novels. On that visit to Blair-Adam, in course of conversation, I mentioned an anecdote about Wilkie, the author of The Epigoniad, who was but a formal poet, but whose conversation was most amusing, and full of fancy. Having heard much of him in my family, where he had been very intimate, I went, when quite a lad, to St. Andrews, where he was a Professor, for the purpose of visiting him. I had scarcely let him know who I was, when he said, 'Mr. William, were you ever in this place before?' I said, no. 'Then, sir, you must go and look at Regulus' Tower,--no doubt you will have something of an eye of an architect about you;--walk up to it at an angle, advance and recede until you get to see it at its proper distance, and come back and tell me whether you ever saw anything so beautiful in building: till I saw that tower and studied it, I thought the beauty of architecture had consisted in curly-wurlies, but now I find it consists in symmetry and proportion.' In the following winter Rob Roy was published, and there I read that the Cathedral of Glasgow was 'a respectable Gothic structure, without any _curly-wurlies_.' "But what confirmed, and was certainly meant to disclose to me the author (and that in a very elegant manner), was the mention of the Kiery Craigs--a picturesque piece of scenery in the grounds of Blair-Adam--as being in the vicinity of Kelty Bridge, the _howf_ of Auchtermuchty, the Kinross carrier.--It was only an intimate friend of the family, in the habit of coming to Blair-Adam, who could know anything of the Kiery Craigs or its name; and both the scenery and the name had attractions for Sir Walter. "At our first meeting after the publication of The Abbot, when the party was assembled on the top of the rock, the Chief-Baron Shepherd, looking Sir Walter full in the face, and stamping his staff on the ground, said, 'Now, Sir Walter, I think we be upon the top of the Kiery _Craggs_.' Sir Walter preserved profound silence; but there was a conscious looking down, and a considerable elongation of his upper lip." [Footnote 105: The good Chief-Commissioner makes a little mistake here--a _Phoca_ being, not a porpoise, but a _Seal_.] Since I have obtained permission to quote from this private volume, I may as well mention that I was partly moved to ask that favor, by the author's own confession that his "Blair-Adam, from 1733 to 1834," originated in a suggestion of Scott's. "It was," says the Judge, "on a fine Sunday, lying on the grassy summit of Bennarty, above its craggy brow, that Sir Walter said, looking first at the flat expanse of Kinross-shire (on the south side of the Ochils), and then at the space which Blair-Adam fills between the hill of Drumglow (the highest of the Cleish hills) and the valley of Lochore, 'What an extraordinary thing it is, that here to the north so little appears to have been done, when there are so many proprietors to work upon it; and to the south, here is a district of country entirely made by the efforts of one family, in three generations, and one of them amongst us in the full enjoyment of what has been done by his two predecessors and himself. Blair-Adam, as I have always heard, had a wild, uncomely, and unhospitable appearance, before its improvements were begun. It would be most curious to record in writing its original state, and trace its gradual progress to its present condition.'" Upon this suggestion, enforced by the approbation of the other members present, the President of the Blair-Adam Club commenced arranging the materials for what constitutes a most instructive as well as entertaining history of the agricultural and arboricultural progress of his domains, in the course of a hundred years, under his grandfather, his father (the celebrated architect), and himself. And Sir Walter had only suggested to his friend of Kinross-shire what he was resolved to put into practice with regard to his own improvements on Tweedside; for he begun at precisely the same period to keep a regular Journal of all his rural transactions, under the title of Sylva Abbotsfordiensis. For reasons, as we have seen, connected with the affairs of the Ballantynes, Messrs. Longman published the first edition of The Monastery; and similar circumstances induced Sir Walter to associate this house with that of Constable in the succeeding novel. Constable disliked its title, and would fain have had The Nunnery instead: but Scott stuck to his Abbot. The bookseller grumbled a little, but was soothed by the author's reception of his request that Queen Elizabeth might be brought into the field in his next romance, as a companion to the Mary Stuart of The Abbot.[106] Scott would not indeed indulge him with the choice of the particular period of Elizabeth's reign, indicated in the proposed title of The Armada; but expressed his willingness to take up his own old favorite, the legend of Meikle's ballad. He wished to call the novel, like the ballad, Cumnor-Hall, but in further deference to Constable's wishes, substituted Kenilworth. John Ballantyne objected to this title, and told Constable the result would be "something worthy of the kennel;" but Constable had all reason to be satisfied with the child of his christening. His partner, Mr. Cadell, says: "His vanity boiled over so much at this time, on having his suggestion gone into, that when in his high moods, he used to stalk up and down his room, and exclaim, 'By G--, I am all but the author of the Waverley Novels!'" Constable's bibliographical knowledge, however, it is but fair to say, was really of most essential service to Scott upon many of these occasions; and his letter (now before me) proposing the subject of The Armada, furnished the Novelist with such a catalogue of materials for the illustration of the period as may, probably enough, have called forth some very energetic expression of thankfulness. [Footnote 106: [Scott writes in December to Lady Louisa Stuart: "I do not design any scandal about Queen Bess, whom I admire much, although, like an old _true blue_, I have malice against her on Queen Mary's account. But I think I shall be very fair. The story is the tragedy of Leicester's first wife, and I have made it, as far as my facilities would permit, 'a pleasant tragedy, stuffed with most pitiful mirth.'"--_Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 102.]] Scott's kindness secured for John Ballantyne the usual interest in the profits of Kenilworth, the last of his great works in which this friend was to have any concern. I have already mentioned the obvious drooping of his health and strength; and a document, to be introduced presently, will show that John himself had occasional glimpses, at least, of his danger, before the close of 1819. Nevertheless, his spirits continued, at the time of which I am now treating, to be in general as high as ever;--nay, it was now, after his maladies had taken a very serious shape, and it was hardly possible to look on him without anticipating a speedy termination of his career, that the gay hopeful spirit of the shattered and trembling invalid led him to plunge into a new stream of costly indulgence. It was an amiable point in his character that he had always retained a tender fondness for his native place. He had now taken up the ambition of rivalling his illustrious friend, in some sort, by providing himself with a summer retirement amidst the scenery of his boyhood; and it need not be doubted, at the same time, that in erecting a villa at Kelso, he anticipated and calculated on substantial advantages from its vicinity to Abbotsford. One fine day of this autumn I accompanied Sir Walter to inspect the progress of this edifice, which was to have the title of Walton Hall. John had purchased two or three old houses of two stories in height, with notched gables and thatched roofs, near the end of the long original street of Kelso, and not far from the gateway of the Duke of Roxburghe's magnificent park, with their small gardens and paddocks running down to the margin of the Tweed. He had already fitted up convenient bachelor's lodgings in one of the primitive tenements, and converted the others into a goodly range of stabling, and was now watching the completion of his new _corps de logis_ behind, which included a handsome entrance-hall, or saloon, destined to have old Piscator's bust, on a stand, in the centre, and to be embellished all round with emblems of his sport. Behind this were spacious rooms overlooking the little _pleasance_, which was to be laid out somewhat in the Italian style, with ornamental steps, a fountain and _jet d'eau_, and a broad terrace hanging over the river, and commanding an extensive view of perhaps the most beautiful landscape in Scotland. In these new dominions John received us with pride and hilarity; and we then walked with him over this pretty town, lounged away an hour among the ruins of the Abbey, and closed our perambulation with _the Garden_, where Scott had spent some of the happiest of his early summers, and where he pointed out with sorrowful eyes the site of the Platanus under which he first read Percy's Reliques. Returning to John's villa, we dined gayly, _al fresco_, by the side of his fountain; and after not a few bumpers to the prosperity of Walton Hall, he mounted Old Mortality, and escorted us for several miles on our ride homewards. It was this day that, overflowing with kindly zeal, Scott revived one of the long-forgotten projects of their early connection in business, and offered his services as editor of a Novelists' Library, to be printed and published for the sole benefit of his host. The offer was eagerly embraced, and when, two or three mornings afterwards John returned Sir Walter's visit, he had put into his hands the MS. of that admirable life of Fielding, which was followed at brief intervals, as the arrangements of the projected work required, by others of Smollett, Richardson, Defoe, Sterne, Johnson, Goldsmith, Le Sage, Horace Walpole, Cumberland, Mrs. Radcliffe, Charles Johnstone, Clara Reeve, Charlotte Smith, and Robert Bage. The publication of the first volume of Ballantyne's Novelists' Library did not take place, however, until February, 1821; and the series was closed soon after the proprietor's death in the ensuing summer. In spite of the charming prefaces, in which Scott combines all the graces of his easy narrative with a perpetual stream of deep and gentle wisdom in commenting on the tempers and fortunes of his best predecessors in novel literature, and also with expositions of his own critical views, which prove how profoundly he had investigated the principles and practice of those masters before he struck out a new path for himself--in spite of these delightful and valuable essays, the publication was not prosperous. Constable, after Ballantyne's death, would willingly have resumed the scheme. But Scott had by that time convinced himself that it was in vain to expect much success for a collection so bulky and miscellaneous, and which must of necessity include a large proportion of matter, condemned by the purity, whether real or affected, of modern taste. He could hardly have failed to perceive, on reflection, that his own novels, already constituting an extensive library of fiction, in which no purist could pretend to discover danger for the morals of youth, had in fact superseded the works of less strait-laced days in the only permanently and solidly profitable market for books of this order. He at all events declined Constable's proposition for renewing and extending this attempt. What he did, was done gratuitously for John Ballantyne's sake; and I have dwelt on it thus long, because, as the reader will perceive by and by, it was so done during (with one exception) the very busiest period of Scott's literary life. Shortly before Scott wrote the following letters, he had placed his second son (at this time in his fifteenth year) under the care of the Reverend John Williams, who had been my intimate friend and companion at Oxford, with a view of preparing him for that University.[107] Mr. Williams was then Vicar of Lampeter, in Cardiganshire, and the high satisfaction with which his care of Charles Scott inspired Sir Walter, induced several other Scotch gentlemen of distinction by and by to send their sons also to his Welsh parsonage; the result of which northern connections was important to the fortunes of one of the most accurate and extensive scholars and most skilful teachers of the present time. [Footnote 107: [Writing to Lady Louisa Stuart, December 14, Scott says: "My youngest son, who is very clever and very idle, I have sent to a learned clergyman ... to get more thoroughly grounded in classical learning. For two years Mr. Williams has undertaken to speak with him in Latin, and, as everybody else talks Welsh, he will have nobody to show off his miscellaneous information to, and thus a main obstacle to his improvement will be removed. It would be a pity any stumbling-block were left for him to break his shins over, for he has a most active mind and a good disposition."--_Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 103.]] TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., 18TH HUSSARS, CORK. EDINBURGH, 14th November, 1820. MY DEAR WALTER,--I send you a cheque on Coutts for your quarter's allowance. I hope you manage your cash like a person of discretion--above all, avoid the card-tables of ancient dowagers. Always remember that my fortune, however much my efforts may increase it, and although I am improving it for your benefit, not for any that can accrue in my own time,--yet never can be more than a decent independence, and therefore will make a poor figure unless managed with good sense, moderation, and prudence--which are habits easily acquired in youth, while habitual extravagance is a fault very difficult to be afterwards corrected. We came to town yesterday, and bade adieu to Abbotsford for the season. Fife,[108] to mamma's great surprise and scandal, chose to stay at Abbotsford with Mai, and plainly denied to follow the carriage--so our canine establishment in Castle Street is reduced to little Ury.[109] We spent two days at Arniston, on the road,--and on coming here, found Sophia as nicely and orderly settled in her house as if she had been a married woman these five years. I believe she is very happy--perhaps unusually so, for her wishes are moderate, and all seem anxious to please her. She is preparing in due time for the arrival of a little stranger, who will make you an uncle, and me (God help me!) a grandpapa. The Round Towers you mention are very curious, and seem to have been built, as the Irish hackney-coachman said of the Martello one at the Black Rock, "to puzzle posterity." There are two of them in Scotland--both excellent pieces of architecture; one at Brechin, built quite close to the old church, so as to appear united with it, but in fact it is quite detached from the church, and sways from it in a high wind, when it vibrates like a lighthouse. The other is at Abernethy in Perthshire--said to have been the capital city of the Picts. I am glad to see you observe objects of interest and curiosity, because otherwise a man may travel over the universe without acquiring any more knowledge than his horse does. We had our hunt, and our jollification after it, on last Wednesday. It went off in great style, although I felt a little sorry at having neither Charles nor you in the field. By the way, Charles seems most admirably settled. I had a most sensible letter on the subject from Mr. Williams, who appears to have taken great pains, and to have formed a very just conception both of his merits and foibles. When I have an opportunity, I will hand you his letter; for it will entertain you, it is so correct a picture of Monsieur Charles. Dominie Thomson has gone to a Mrs. Dennistoun, of Colgrain, to drill her youngsters. I am afraid he will find a change; but I hope to have a nook open to him by and by--as a sort of retreat or harbor on his lee. Adieu, my dear--always believe me your affectionate father, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 108: _Finette_--a spaniel of Lady Scott's.] [Footnote 109: _Urisk_ [Ourisque]--a small terrier of the long silky-haired Kintail breed.] TO MR. CHARLES SCOTT. _Care of the Rev. John Williams, Lampeter._ EDINBURGH, 14th November, 1820. MY DEAR BOY CHARLES,--Your letters made us all very happy, and I trust you are now comfortably settled and plying your task hard. Mr. Williams will probably ground you more perfectly in the grammar of the classical languages than has hitherto been done, and this you will at first find but dry work. But there are many indispensable reasons why you must bestow the utmost attention upon it. A perfect knowledge of the classical languages has been fixed upon, and not without good reason, as the mark of a well-educated young man; and though people may have scrambled into distinction without it, it is always with the greatest difficulty, just like climbing over a wall, instead of giving your ticket at the door. Perhaps you may think another proof of a youth's talents might have been adopted; but what good will arise from your thinking so, if the general practice of society has fixed on this particular branch of knowledge as the criterion? Wheat or barley were as good grain, I suppose, as _sesamum_; but it was only to _sesamum_ that the talisman gave way, and the rock opened; and it is equally certain that, if you are not a well-founded grammatical scholar in Greek and Latin, you will in vain present other qualifications to distinction. Besides, the study of grammar, from its very asperities, is calculated to teach youth that patient labor which is necessary to the useful exertion of the understanding upon every other branch of knowledge; and your great deficiency is want of steadiness and of resolute application to the dry as well as the interesting parts of your learning. But exerting yourself, as I have no doubt you will do, under the direction of so learned a man and so excellent a teacher as Mr. Williams, and being without the temptations to idleness which occurred at home, I have every reason to believe that to your natural quickness you will presently add such a _habit_ of application and steadiness, as will make you a respected member of society, perhaps a distinguished one. It is very probable that the whole success of your future life may depend on the manner in which you employ _the next two years_; and I am therefore most anxious you should fully avail yourself of the opportunities now afforded you. You must not be too much disconcerted with the apparent dryness of your immediate studies. Language is the great mark by which man is distinguished from the beasts, and a strict acquaintance with the manner in which it is composed becomes, as you follow it a little way, one of the most curious and interesting exercises of the intellect. We had our grand hunt on Wednesday last, a fine day, and plenty of sport. We hunted all over Huntly wood, and so on to Halidon and Prieston--saw twelve hares, and killed six, having very hard runs, and tiring three packs of grews completely. In absence of Walter and you, Stenhouse the horse-couper led the field, and rode as if he had been a piece of his horse, sweltering like a wild-drake all through Marriage-Moss, at a motion betwixt swimming and riding. One unlucky accident befell;--Queen Mab, who was bestrode by Captain Adam, lifted up her heels against Mr. Craig of Galashiels,[110] whose leg she greeted with a thump like a pistol-shot, while by the same movement she very nearly sent the noble Captain over her ears. Mr. Craig was helped from horse, but would not permit his boot to be drawn off, protesting he would faint if he saw the bone of his leg sticking through the stocking. Some thought he was reluctant to exhibit his legs in their primitive and unclothed simplicity, in respect they have an unhappy resemblance to a pair of tongs. As for the Captain, he declared that if the accident had happened _in action_, the surgeon and drum-boys would have had off, not his _boot_ only, but his _leg to boot_, before he could have uttered a remonstrance. At length Gala and I prevailed to have the boot drawn, and to my great joy I found the damage was not serious, though the pain must have been severe. On Saturday we left Abbotsford, and dined and spent Sunday at Arniston, where we had many inquiries after you from Robert Dundas, who was so kind to you last year. I must conclude for the present, requesting your earnest pursuit of such branches of study as Mr. Williams recommends. In a short time, as you begin to comprehend the subjects you are learning, you will find the path turn smoother, and that which at present seems wrapped up in an inextricable labyrinth of thorns and briers, will at once become easy and attractive.--Always, dear Charlie, your affectionate father, W. S. [Footnote 110: Mr. George Craig, factor to the laird of Gala, and manager of a little branch bank at Galashiels. This worthy man was one of the regular members of the Abbotsford Hunt.] On the same day Scott wrote as follows to the manly and amiable author of Sir Marmaduke Maxwell, who had shortly before sent the MS. of that romantic drama to Abbotsford for his inspection:-- TO MR. ALLAN CUNNINGHAM. _Care of F. Chantrey, Esq., R. A., London._ EDINBURGH, 14th November, 1820. MY DEAR ALLAN,--I have been meditating a long letter to you for many weeks past; but company, and rural business, and rural sports, are very unfavorable to writing letters. I have now a double reason for writing, for I have to thank you for sending me in safety a beautiful specimen of our English Michael's talents in the cast of my venerable friend Mr. Watt: it is a most striking resemblance, with all that living character which we are apt to think life itself alone can exhibit. I hope Mr. Chantrey does not permit his distinguished skill either to remain unexercised, or to be lavished exclusively on subjects of little interest. I would like to see him engaged on some subject of importance completely adapted to the purpose of his chisel, and demanding its highest powers. Pray remember me to him most kindly. I have perused twice your curious and interesting manuscript. Many parts of the poetry are eminently beautiful, though I fear the great length of the piece, and some obscurity of the plot, would render it unfit for dramatic representation. There is also a fine tone of supernatural impulse spread over the whole action, which I think a common audience would not be likely to adopt or comprehend--though I own that to me it has a very powerful effect. Speaking of dramatic composition in general, I think it is almost essential (though the rule be most difficult in practice) that the plot, or business of the piece, should advance with every line that is spoken. The fact is, the drama is addressed chiefly to the eyes, and as much as can be, by any possibility, represented on the stage, should neither be told nor described. Of the miscellaneous part of a large audience, many do not understand, nay, many cannot hear, either narrative or description, but are solely intent upon the action exhibited. It is, I conceive, for this reason that very bad plays, written by performers themselves, often contrive to get through, and not without applause; while others, immeasurably superior in point of poetical merit, fail, merely because the author is not sufficiently possessed of the trick of the scene, or enough aware of the importance of a maxim pronounced by no less a performer than Punch himself--(at least he was the last authority from whom I heard it),--_Push on, keep moving!_[111] Now, in your very ingenious dramatic effort, the interest not only stands still, but sometimes retrogrades. It contains, notwithstanding, many passages of eminent beauty,--many specimens of most interesting dialogue; and, on the whole, if it is not fitted for the modern stage, I am not sure that its very imperfections do not render it more fit for the closet, for we certainly do not always read with the greatest pleasure those plays which act best. If, however, you should at any time wish to become a candidate for dramatic laurels, I would advise you, in the first place, to consult some professional person of judgment and taste. I should regard friend Terry as an excellent Mentor, and I believe he would concur with me in recommending that at least one third of the drama be retrenched, that the plot should be rendered simpler, and the motives more obvious, and I think the powerful language and many of the situations might then have their full effect upon the audience. I am uncertain if I have made myself sufficiently understood; but I would say, for example, that it is ill explained by what means Comyn and his gang, who land as shipwrecked men, become at once possessed of the old lord's domains, merely by killing and taking possession. I am aware of what you mean--namely, that being attached to the then rulers, he is supported in his ill-acquired power by their authority. But this is imperfectly brought out, and escaped me at the first reading. The superstitious motives, also, which induced the shepherds to delay their vengeance, are not likely to be intelligible to the generality of the hearers. It would seem more probable that the young Baron should have led his faithful vassals to avenge the death of his parents; and it has escaped me what prevents him from taking this direct and natural course. Besides it is, I believe, a rule (and it seems a good one) that one single interest, to which every other is subordinate, should occupy the whole play,--each separate object having just the effect of a mill-dam, sluicing off a certain portion of the sympathy, which should move on with increasing force and rapidity to the catastrophe. Now, in your work, there are several divided points of interest; there is the murder of the old Baron--the escape of his wife--that of his son--the loss of his bride--the villainous artifices of Comyn to possess himself of her person--and, finally, the fall of Comyn, and acceleration of the vengeance due to his crimes. I am sure your own excellent sense, which I admire as much as I do your genius, will give me credit for my frankness in these matters; I only know, that I do not know many persons on whose performances I would venture to offer so much criticism. I will return the manuscript under Mr. Freeling's Post-Office cover, and I hope it will reach you safe.--Adieu, my leal and esteemed friend--yours truly, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 111: _Punch_ had been borrowing from _Young Rapid_, in the _Cure for the Heart-ache_.] Shortly afterwards, Mr. Cunningham, thanking his critic, said he had not yet received back his MS.; but that he hoped the delay had been occasioned by Sir Walter's communication of it to some friend of theatrical experience. He also mentioned his having undertaken a collection of The Songs of Scotland, with notes. The answer was in these terms:-- TO MR. ALLAN CUNNINGHAM. MY DEAR ALLAN,--It was as you supposed--I detained your manuscript to read it over with Terry. The plot appears to Terry, as to me, ill-combined, which is a great defect in a drama, though less perceptible in the closet than on the stage. Still, if the mind can be kept upon one unbroken course of interest, the effect even in perusal is more gratifying. I have always considered this as the great secret in dramatic poetry, and conceive it one of the most difficult exercises of the invention possible, to conduct a story through five acts, developing it gradually in every scene, so as to keep up the attention, yet never till the very conclusion permitting the nature of the catastrophe to become visible,--and all the while to accompany this by the necessary delineation of character and beauty of language. I am glad, however, that you mean to preserve in some permanent form your very curious drama, which, if not altogether fitted for the stage, cannot be read without very much and very deep interest. I am glad you are about Scottish song. No man--not Robert Burns himself--has contributed more beautiful effusions to enrich it. Here and there I would pluck a flower from your Posy to give what remains an effect of greater simplicity; but luxuriance can only be the fault of genius, and many of your songs are, I think, unmatched. I would instance, It's Hame and it's Hame, which my daughter Mrs. Lockhart sings with such uncommon effect. You cannot do anything either in the way of original composition, or collection, or criticism, that will not be highly acceptable to all who are worth pleasing in the Scottish public--and I pray you to proceed with it. Remember me kindly to Chantrey. I am happy my effigy is to go with that of Wordsworth,[112] for (differing from him in very many points of taste) I do not know a man more to be venerated for uprightness of heart and loftiness of genius. Why he will sometimes choose to crawl upon all fours, when God has given him so noble a countenance to lift to heaven, I am as little able to account for, as for his quarrelling (as you tell me) with the wrinkles which time and meditation have stamped his brow withal. I am obliged to conclude hastily, having long letters to write--God wot upon very different subjects. I pray my kind respects to Mrs. Chantrey.--Believe me, dear Allan, very truly yours, etc., WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 112: Mr. Cunningham had told Scott that Chantrey's bust of Wordsworth (another of his noblest works) was also to be produced at the Royal Academy's Exhibition for 1821.] The following letter touches on the dropping of the Bill which had been introduced by Government for the purpose of degrading the consort of George the Fourth; the riotous rejoicings of the Edinburgh mob on that occasion; and Scott's acquiescence in the request of the guardians of the young Duke of Buccleuch, that he should act as chancellor of the jury about to _serve_ his grace _heir_ (as the law phrase goes) to the Scottish estates of his family. TO THE LORD MONTAGU. EDINBURGH, 30th November, 1820. MY DEAR LORD,--I had your letter some time since, and have now to congratulate you on your two months' spell of labor-in-vain duty being at length at an end. The old sign of the Labor-in-vain Tavern was a fellow attempting to scrub a black-a-moor white; but the present difficulty seems to lie in showing that one _is_ black. Truly, I congratulate the country on the issue; for, since the days of Queen Dollalolla[113] and the _Rumti-iddity_ chorus in Tom Thumb, never was there so jolly a representative of royalty. A good ballad might be made, by way of parody, on Gay's Jonathan Wild,-- "Her Majesty's trial has set us at ease, And every wife round me may kiss if she please." We had the Marquis of Bute and Francis Jeffrey, very brilliant in George Street, and I think one grocer besides. I was hard threatened by letter, but I caused my servant to say in the quarter where I thought the threatening came from, that I should suffer my windows to be broken like a Christian, but if anything else was attempted, I should become as great a heathen as the Dey of Algiers. We were passed over, but many houses were terribly _Cossaqué_, as was the phrase in Paris in 1814 and 1815. The next night, being, like true Scotsmen, wise behind the hand, the bailies had a sufficient force sufficiently arranged, and put down every attempt to riot. If the same precautions had been taken before, the town would have been saved some disgrace, and the loss of at least £1000 worth of property.--Hay Donaldson[114] is getting stout again, and up to the throat in business; there is no getting a word out of him that does not smell of parchment and special service. He asked me, as it is to be a mere _law_ service, to act as chancellor on the Duke's inquest, which honorable office I will of course undertake with great willingness, and discharge--I mean the _hospitable_ part of it--to the best of my power. I think you are right to avoid a more extended service, as £1000 certainly would not clear the expense, as you would have to dine at least four counties, and as sweetly sing, with Duke Wharton on Chevy Chase, "Pity it were So much good wine to spill, As these bold freeholders would drink, Before they had their fill." I hope we shall all live to see our young baron take his own chair, and feast the land in his own way. Ever your Lordship's most truly faithful WALTER SCOTT. P. S.--In the illumination row, young Romilly was knocked down and robbed by the mob, just while he was in the act of declaiming on the impropriety of having constables and volunteers to interfere with the harmless mirth of the people. [Footnote 113: _Queen._--"What though I now am half-seas o'er, I scorn to baulk this bout; Of stiff rack-punch fetch bowls a score, 'Fore George, I'll see them out! _Chorus._--"Rumti-iddity, row, row, row, If we'd a good sup, we'd take it now." Fielding's _Tom Thumb_.] [Footnote 114: This gentleman, Scott's friend and confidential solicitor, had obtained (I believe), on his recommendation, the legal management of the Buccleuch affairs in Scotland.] TO MR. CHARLES SCOTT. _Care of the Rev. John Williams, Lampeter._ EDINBURGH, 19th December, 1820. MY DEAR CHARLES,--We begin to be afraid that, in improving your head, you have lost the use of your fingers, or got so deep into the Greek and Latin grammar, that you have forgotten how to express yourself in your own language. To ease our anxious minds in these important doubts, we beg you will write as soon as possible, and give us a full account of your proceedings, as I do not approve of long intervals of silence, or think that you need to stand very rigorously upon the exchange of letters, especially as mine are so much the longest. I rely upon it that you are now working hard in the classical mine, getting out the rubbish as fast as you can, and preparing yourself to collect the ore. I cannot too much impress upon your mind that _labor_ is the condition which God has imposed on us in every station of life--there is nothing worth having, that can be had without it, from the bread which the peasant wins with the sweat of his brow, to the sports by which the rich man must get rid of his ennui. The only difference betwixt them is, that the poor man labors to get a dinner to his appetite, the rich man to get an appetite to his dinner. As for knowledge, it can no more be planted in the human mind without labor, than a field of wheat can be produced without the previous use of the plough. There is indeed this great difference, that chance or circumstances may so cause it that another shall reap what the farmer sows; but no man can be deprived, whether by accident or misfortune, of the fruits of his own studies; and the liberal and extended acquisitions of knowledge which he makes are all for his own use. Labor, my dear boy, therefore, and improve the time. In youth our steps are light, and our minds are ductile, and knowledge is easily laid up; but if we neglect our spring, our summers will be useless and contemptible, our harvest will be chaff, and the winter of our old age unrespected and desolate. It is now Christmas-tide, and it comes sadly round to me as reminding me of your excellent grandmother, who was taken from us last year at this time. Do you, my dear Charles, pay attention to the wishes of your parents while they are with you, that you may have no self-reproach when you think of them at a future period. You hear the Welsh spoken much about you, and if you can pick it up without interfering with more important labors, it will be worth while. I suppose you can easily get a grammar and dictionary. It is, you know, the language spoken by the Britons before the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons, who brought in the principal ingredients of our present language, called from thence English. It was afterwards, however, much mingled with Norman French, the language of William the Conqueror and his followers; so if you can pick up a little of the Cambro-British speech, it will qualify you hereafter to be a good philologist, should your genius turn towards languages. Pray, have you yet learned who Howel Dha was?--Glendower you are well acquainted with by reading Shakespeare. The wild mysterious barbaric grandeur with which he has invested that chieftain has often struck me as very fine. I wish we had some more of him. We are all well here, and I hope to get to Abbotsford for a few days--they cannot be many--in the ensuing vacation, when I trust to see the planting has got well forward. All are well here, and Mr. Cadell[115] is come back, and gives a pleasant account of your journey. Let me hear from you very soon, and tell me if you expect any _skating_, and whether there is any ice in Wales. I presume there will be a merry Christmas, and beg my best wishes on the subject to Mr. Williams, his sister, and family. The Lockharts dine with us, and the Scotts of Harden, James Scott[116] with his pipes, and I hope Captain Adam. We will remember your health in a glass of claret just about _six_ o'clock at night; so that you will know exactly (allowing for variation of time) what we are doing at the same moment. But I think I have written quite enough to a young Welshman, who has forgot all his Scots kith, kin, and allies. Mamma and Anne send many loves. Walter came like a shadow, and so departed--after about ten days' stay. The effect was quite dramatic, for the door was flung open as we were about to go down to dinner, and Turner announced _Captain Scott_. We could not conceive who was meant, when in walked Walter as large as life. He is positively a new edition of the Irish giant.--I beg my kind respects to Mr. Williams. At his leisure I should be happy to have a line from him.--I am, my dear little boy, always your affectionate father, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 115: Mr. Robert Cadell, of the house of Constable, had this year conveyed Charles Scott from Abbotsford to Lampeter.] [Footnote 116: Sir Walter's cousin, a son of his uncle Thomas. See _ante_, vol. i. p. 62.] The next letter contains a brief allusion to an affair, which in the life of any other man of letters would have deserved to be considered as of some consequence. The late Sir James Hall of Dunglass resigned, in November, 1820, the Presidency of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; and the Fellows, though they had on all former occasions selected a man of science to fill that post, paid Sir Walter the compliment of unanimously requesting him to be Sir James's successor in it. He felt and expressed a natural hesitation about accepting this honor--which at first sight seemed like invading the proper department of another order of scholars. But when it was urged upon him that the Society is really a double one,--embracing a section for literature as well as one of science,--and that it was only due to the former to let it occasionally supply the chief of the whole body,--Scott acquiesced in the flattering proposal; and his gentle skill was found effective, so long as he held the Chair, in maintaining and strengthening the tone of good feeling and good manners which can alone render the meetings of such a Society either agreeable or useful. The new President himself soon began to take a lively interest in many of their discussions--those at least which pointed to any discovery of practical use;--and he by and by added some eminent men of science, with whom his acquaintance had hitherto been slight, to the list of his most valued friends: I may mention in particular Doctor, now Sir David, Brewster. Sir Walter also alludes to an institution of a far different description,--that called "The Celtic Society of Edinburgh;" a club established mainly for the patronage of ancient Highland manners and customs, especially the use of "the Garb of Old Gaul"--though part of their funds have always been applied to the really important object of extending education in the wilder districts of the north. At their annual meetings Scott was, as may be supposed, a regular attendant. He appeared, as in duty bound, in the costume of the Fraternity, and was usually followed by "John of Skye," in a still more complete, or rather incomplete, style of equipment. TO THE LORD MONTAGU, DITTON PARK. EDINBURGH, 17th January, 1821. MY DEAR LORD,--We had a tight day of it on Monday last, both dry and wet. The dry part was as dry as may be, consisting in rehearsing the whole lands of the Buccleuch estate for five mortal hours, although Donaldson had kindly selected a clerk whose tongue went over baronies, lordships, and regalities, at as high a rate of top speed as ever Eclipse displayed in clearing the course at Newmarket. The evening went off very well--considering that while looking forward with the natural feelings of hope and expectation on behalf of our young friend, most of us who were present could not help casting looks of sad remembrance on the days we had seen. However, we did very well, and I kept the chair till eleven, when we had coffee, and departed, "no very fou, but gaily yet."[117] Besides the law gentlemen, and immediate agents of the family, I picked up on my own account Tom Ogilvie,[118] Sir Harry Hay Macdougal, Harden and his son, Gala, and Captain John Ferguson, whom I asked as from myself, stating that the party was to be quite private. I suppose there was no harm in this, and it helped us well on. I believe your nephew and my young chief enters life with as favorable auspices as could well attend him, for to few youths can attach so many good wishes, and _none_ can look back to more estimable examples both in his father and grandfather. I think he will succeed to the warm and social affections of his relatives, which, if they sometimes occasion pain to those who possess them, contain also the purest sources of happiness as well as of virtue. Our late Pitt meeting amounted to about 800, a most tremendous multitude. I had charge of a separate room, containing a detachment of about 250, and gained a headache of two days, by roaring to them for five or six hours almost incessantly. The Foxites had also a very numerous meeting,--500 at least, but sad scamps. We had a most formidable band of young men, almost all born gentlemen and zealous proselytes. We shall now begin to look anxiously to London for news. I suppose they will go by the ears in the House of Commons: but I trust Ministers will have a great majority. If not, they should go out, and let the others make the best of it with their acquitted Queen, who will be a ticklish card in their hand, for she is by nature _intrigante_ more ways than one. The loss of Canning is a serious disadvantage; many of our friends have good talents and good taste; but I think he alone has that higher order of parts which we call genius. I wish he had had more prudence to guide it. He has been a most unlucky politician. Adieu. Best love to all at Ditton, and great respect withal. My best compliments attend my young chief, now seated, to use an Oriental phrase, upon the _Musnud_. I am almost knocked up with public meetings, for the triple Hecate was a joke to my plurality of offices this week. On Friday I had my Pittite stewardship;--on Monday my chancellorship;--yesterday my presidentship of the Royal Society; for I had a meeting of that learned body at my house last night, where mulled wine and punch were manufactured and consumed according to the latest philosophical discoveries. Besides all this, I have before my eyes the terrors of a certain Highland Association, who dine bonneted and _kilted_ in the old fashion (all save myself, of course), and armed to the teeth. This is rather severe service; but men who wear broadswords, dirks, and pistols, are not to be neglected in these days; and the Gael are very loyal lads, so it is as well to keep up an influence with them. Once more, my dear Lord, farewell, and believe me always most truly yours, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 117: ["It was often remarked as a proof that they [the novels] were all Sir Walter's, that he was never known to refer to them, though they were the constant topic of conversation in every company at the time. I recollect, however, one striking instance to the contrary. In the month of January, 1821, a dinner was given in the Waterloo Rooms, Edinburgh, to a large party of gentlemen, to celebrate the serving Heir, as it is called in Scotland, of a young gentleman, to the large estates of his ancestors. Sir Walter having been Chancellor of the Inquest, also presided at the dinner, and after the usual toasts on such occasions, he rose, and, with a smiling face, spoke to the following effect: 'Gentlemen, I dare say you have read of a man called Dandie Dinmont, and his dogs. He had old Pepper and old Mustard, and young Pepper and young Mustard, and little Pepper and little Mustard; but he used to say that "beast or body, education should aye be minded; a dog is good for nothing until it has been weel entered; I have always had my dogs weel entered." Now, gentlemen, I am sure [the Duke] has been weel entered, and if you please we shall drink to the health of his guardians.'"--Gibson's _Reminiscences of Sir Walter Scott_.]] [Footnote 118: The late Thomas Elliot Ogilvie, Esq., of Chesters, in Roxburghshire--one of Sir Walter's good friends among his country neighbors.] In the course of the riotous week commemorated in the preceding letter, appeared Kenilworth, in three volumes post 8vo, like Ivanhoe, which form was adhered to with all the subsequent novels of the series. Kenilworth was one of the most successful of them all at the time of publication; and it continues, and, I doubt not, will ever continue to be placed in the very highest rank of prose fiction.[119] The rich variety of character, and scenery, and incident in this novel, has never indeed been surpassed; nor, with the one exception of The Bride of Lammermoor, has Scott bequeathed us a deeper and more affecting tragedy than that of Amy Robsart. [Footnote 119: [Mr. Morritt writes to Scott, January 28, 1821: "I feel that I am leaving Rokeby in your debt, and before I set out for town, amongst other things I have to settle, I may as well discharge my account by paying you a reasonable and no small return of thanks for _Kenilworth_, which was duly delivered, read, re-read, and thumbed with great delight by our fireside. You know, when I first heard that Queen Elizabeth was to be brought forward as a heroine of a novel, how I trembled for her reputation. Well knowing your not over-affectionate regard for that flower of maidenhood, I dreaded lest all her venerable admirers on this side of the Tweed would have been driven to despair by a portrait of her Majesty after the manner of Mr. Sharpe's ingenious sketches. The author, however, has been so very fair, and has allowed her so many of her real historical merits, that I think he really has, like Squire Western, a fair right to demand that we should at least allow her to have been a b----. I am not sure that I do not like and enjoy _Kenilworth_ quite as much as any of its predecessors. I think it peculiarly happy in the variety and facility of its portraits, and the story is so interesting, and so out of the track of the common sources of novel interest, that perhaps I like it better from its having so little of the commonplace heroes and heroines who adorn all other tales of the sort."--_Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 107.]] CHAPTER LI Visit to London. -- Project of the Royal Society of Literature. -- Affairs of the 18th Hussars. -- Marriage of Captain Adam Ferguson. -- Letters to Lord Sidmouth, Lord Montagu, Allan Cunningham, Mrs. Lockhart, and Cornet Scott. 1821 Before the end of January, 1821, Scott went to London at the request of the other Clerks of Session, that he might watch over the progress of an Act of Parliament, designed to relieve them from a considerable part of their drudgery, in attesting recorded deeds by signature;--and his stay was prolonged until near the beginning of the Summer term of his Court. His letters while in London are mostly to his own family, and on strictly domestic topics; but I shall extract a few of them, chiefly (for reasons which I have already sufficiently intimated) those addressed to his son the Cornet. I need not trespass on the reader's attention by any attempt to explain in detail the matters to which these letters refer. It will be seen that Sir Walter had heard some rumors of irregularity in the interior of the 18th Hussars; and that the consequent interference of the then Commander of the Forces in Ireland, the late Sir David Baird, had been received in anything but a spirit of humility. The reports that reached Scott proved to have been most absurdly exaggerated; but nevertheless his observations on them seem well worth quoting. It so happened that the 18th was one of several regiments about to be reduced at this time; and as soon as that event took place, Cornet Scott was sent to travel in Germany, with a view to his improvement in the science of his profession. He afterwards spent a brief period, for the same purpose, in the Royal Military College of Sandhurst; and erelong he obtained a commission as lieutenant in the 15th or King's Hussars, in which distinguished corps his father lived to see him Major. It will also be seen, that during this visit to London Sir Walter was released from considerable anxiety on account of his daughter Sophia, whom he had left in a weak state of health at Edinburgh, by the intelligence of her safe accouchement of a boy,--John Hugh Lockhart, the "Hugh Littlejohn" of the Tales of a Grandfather. The approaching marriage of Captain, now Sir Adam Ferguson, to which some jocular allusions occur, may be classed with these objects of family interest; and that event was the source of unmixed satisfaction to Scott, as it did not interrupt his enjoyment of his old friend's society in the country; for the Captain, though he then pitched a tent for himself, did so at a very short distance from Huntly Burn. I believe the ensuing extracts will need no further commentary. TO MRS. LOCKHART, GREAT KING STREET, EDINBURGH. DITTON PARK, February 18, 1821. MY DEAREST SOPHIA,--I received as much pleasure, and was relieved from as much anxiety, as ever I felt in my life, by Lockhart's kind note, which acquainted me with the happy period that has been put to your suffering, and, as I hope and trust, to the complaints which occasioned it. You are now, my dearest girl, beginning a new course of pleasures, anxieties, and duties, and the best I can wish for you is, that your little boy may prove the same dutiful and affectionate child which you have always been to me, and that God may give him a sound and healthy mind, with a good constitution of body--the greatest blessings which this earth can bestow. Pray be extremely careful of yourself for some time. Young women are apt to injure their health by thinking themselves well too soon. I beg you to be cautious in this respect. The news of the young stranger's arrival was most joyfully received here, and his health and yours toasted in a bumper. Lady Anne is quite well, and Isabella also; and Lady Charlotte, who has rejoined them, is a most beautiful creature indeed. This place is all light and splendor, compared to London, where I was forced to use candles till ten o'clock at least. I have a gay time of it. To-morrow I return to town, and dine with old Sotheby; on Tuesday with the Duke of Wellington; Wednesday with Croker, and so on. Love to L., the Captain, and the Violet, and give your bantling a kiss extraordinary for Grandpapa. I hope Mungo[120] approves of the child, for that is a serious point. There are no dogs in the hotel where I lodge, but a tolerably conversible cat, who eats a mess of cream with me in the morning. The little chief and his brother have come over from Eton to see me, so I must break off.--I am, my dear love, most affectionately yours, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 120: Mungo was a favorite Newfoundland dog.] TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., PORTOBELLO BARRACKS, DUBLIN. WATERLOO HOTEL, Jermyn Street, February 19, 1821. MY DEAR WALTER,--I have just received your letter. I send you a draft for £50, which you must make go as far as you can. There is what I have no doubt is a very idle report here, of your paying rather marked attention to one young lady in particular. I beg you would do nothing that can justify such a rumor, as it would excite my _highest displeasure_ should you either entangle yourself or any other person. I am, and have always been, quite frank with you, and beg you will be equally so with me. One should, in justice to the young women they live with, be very cautious not to give the least countenance to such rumors. They are not easily avoided, but are always highly prejudicial to the parties concerned; and what begins in folly ends in serious misery--_avis au lecteur._ Believe me, dear Cornet, your affectionate father, WALTER SCOTT. P. S.--I wish you could pick me up the Irish lilt of a tune to "Patrick Fleming." The song begins,-- "Patrick Fleming was a gallant soldier, He carried his musket over his shoulder. When I cock my pistol, when I draw my raper, I make them stand in awe of me, for I am a taker. Falala," etc. From another verse in the same song, it seems the hero was in such a predicament as your own:-- "If you be Peter Fleming, as I suppose you be, sir, We are three pedlars walking on so free, sir. We are three pedlars a-walking on to Dublin, With nothing in our pockets to pay for our lodging. Falala," etc. TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., 18TH HUSSARS, CAPPOQUIN. LONDON, 17th March, 1821. MY DEAR COMMANDANT OF CAPPOQUIN,--Wishing you joy of your new government, these are to inform you that I am still in London. The late aspersion on your regiment induced me to protract my stay here, with a view to see the Duke of York on your behalf, which I did yesterday. His Royal Highness expressed himself most obligingly disposed, and promised to consider what could best be done to forward your military education. I told him frankly, that in giving you to the King's service I had done all that was in my power to show our attachment to his Majesty and the country which had been so kind to me, and that it was my utmost ambition that you should render yourself capable of serving them both well. He said he would give the affair his particular consideration, and see whether he could put you on the establishment at Sandhurst, without any violent infringement on the rules; and hinted that he would make an exception to the rule of seniority of standing and priority of application in your favor when an opportunity occurs. From H. R. H.'s very kind expressions, I have little doubt you will have more than justice done you in the patronage necessary to facilitate your course through life; but it must be by your own exertions, my dearest boy, that you must render yourself qualified to avail yourself of the opportunities which you may have offered to you. Work, therefore, as hard as you can, and do not be discontented for want of assistance of masters, etc., because the knowledge which we acquire by our own unaided efforts, is much more tenaciously retained by the memory, while the exertion necessary to gain it strengthens the understanding. At the same time, I would inquire whether there may not be some Catholic priest, or Protestant clergyman, or scholar of any description, who, for love or money, would give you a little assistance occasionally. Such persons are to be found almost everywhere; not professed teachers, but capable of smoothing the road to a willing student. Let me earnestly recommend in your reading to keep fast to particular hours, and suffer no one thing to encroach on the other. Charles's last letter was uncommonly steady, and prepared me for one from Mr. Williams, in which he expresses satisfaction with his attention, and with his progress in learning, in a much stronger degree than formerly. This is truly comfortable, and may relieve me from the necessity of sending the poor boy to India. All in Edinburgh are quite well, and no fears exist, saving those of little Catherine[121] for the baby, lest the fairies take it away before the christening. I will send some books to you from hence, if I can find means to transmit them. I should like you to read with care the campaigns of Buonaparte, which have been written in French with much science.[122] I hope, indeed I am sure, I need not remind you to be very attentive to your duty. You have but a small charge, but it is a charge, and rashness or carelessness may lead to discredit in the commandant of Cappoquin, as well as in a field-marshal. In the exercise of your duty, be tender of the lower classes; and as you are strong, be merciful. In this you will do your master good service, for show me the manners of the man, and I will judge those of the master. In your present situation, it may be interesting to you to know that the bill for Catholic Emancipation will pass the Commons without doubt, and very probably the Peers also, unless the Spiritual Lords make a great rally. Nobody here cares much about it, and if it does not pass this year, it will the next, without doubt. Among other improvements, I wish you would amend your hand. It is a deplorable scratch, and far the worst of the family. Charles writes a firm good hand in comparison. You may address your next to Abbotsford, where I long to be, being heartily tired of fine company and fine living, from dukes and duchesses, down to turbot and plovers' eggs. It is very well for a while, but to be kept at it makes one feel like a poodle dog compelled to stand forever on his hind legs.--Most affectionately yours, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 121: Mrs. Lockhart's maid.] [Footnote 122: This letter was followed by a copy of General Jomini's celebrated work.] During this visit to London, Sir Walter appears to have been consulted by several persons in authority as to the project of a Society of Literature, for which the King's patronage had been solicited, and which was established soon afterwards--though on a scale less extensive than had been proposed at the outset. He expressed his views on this subject in writing at considerable length to his friend the Hon. John Villiers (afterwards Earl of Clarendon);[123] but of that letter, described to me as a most admirable one, I have as yet failed to recover a copy. I have little doubt that both the letter in question, and the following, addressed, soon after his arrival at Abbotsford, to the then Secretary of State for the Home Department, were placed in the hands of the King; but it seems probable, that whatever his Majesty may have thought of Scott's representations, he considered himself as already, in some measure, pledged to countenance the projected academy. [Footnote 123: The third Earl (of the Villierses) died in 1838.] TO THE RIGHT HON. THE LORD VISCOUNT SIDMOUTH, ETC., ETC., ETC., WHITEHALL. ABBOTSFORD, April 20, 1821. MY DEAR LORD,--Owing to my retreat to this place, I was only honored with your Lordship's letter yesterday. Whatever use can be made of my letter to stop the very ill-contrived project to which it relates, will answer the purpose for which it was written. I do not well remember the terms in which my remonstrance to Mr. Villiers was couched, for it was positively written betwixt sleeping and waking; but your Lordship will best judge how far the contents may be proper for his Majesty's eye; and if the sentiments appear a little in dishabille, there is the true apology that they were never intended to go to Court. From more than twenty years' intercourse with the literary world, during which I have been more or less acquainted with every distinguished writer of my day, and, at the same time, an accurate student of the habits and tastes of the reading public, I am enabled to say, with a feeling next to certainty, that the plan can only end in something very unpleasant. At all events, his Majesty should get out of it; it is nonsense to say or suppose that any steps have been taken which, in such a matter, can or ought to be considered as irrevocable. The fact is, that nobody knows as yet how far the matter has gone beyond the _projet_ of some well-meaning but misjudging persons, and the whole thing is asleep and forgotten so far as the public is concerned. The Spanish proverb says, "God help me from my friends, and I will keep myself from my enemies;" and there is much sense in it; for the zeal of misjudging adherents often contrives, as in the present case, to turn to matter of reproach the noblest feelings on the part of a sovereign. Let men of letters fight their own way with the public, and let his Majesty, according as his own excellent taste and liberality dictate, honor with his patronage, expressed in the manner fitted to their studies and habits, those who are able to distinguish themselves, and alleviate by his bounty the distresses of such as, with acknowledged merit, may yet have been unfortunate in procuring independence. The immediate and direct favor of the Sovereign is worth the patronage of ten thousand societies. But your Lordship knows how to set all this in a better light than I can, and I would not wish the cause of letters in better hands. I am now in a scene changed as completely as possible from those in which I had the great pleasure of meeting your Lordship lately, riding through the moors on a pony, instead of traversing the streets in a carriage, and drinking whiskey-toddy with mine honest neighbors, instead of Champagne and Burgundy. I have gained, however, in point of exact political information; for I find we know upon Tweedside with much greater accuracy what is done and intended in the Cabinet, than ever I could learn when living with the Ministers five days in the week. Mine honest Teviotdale friends, whom I left in a high Queen-fever, are now beginning to be somewhat ashamed of themselves, and to make as great advances towards retracting their opinion as they are ever known to do, which amounts to this: "God judge me, Sir W----, the King's no been so dooms far wrong after a' in yon Queen's job like;" which, being interpreted, signifies, "We will fight for the King to the death." I do not know how it was in other places; but I never saw so sudden and violent a delusion possess the minds of men in my life, even those of sensible, steady, well-intentioned fellows, that would fight knee-deep against the Radicals. It is well over, thank God. My best compliments attend the ladies. I ever am, my dear Lord, your truly obliged and faithful humble servant, WALTER SCOTT. I have thought it right to insert the preceding letter, because it indicates with sufficient distinctness what Scott's opinions always were as to a subject on which, from his experience and position, he must have reflected very seriously. In how far the results of the establishment of the Royal Society of Literature have tended to confirm or to weaken the weight of his authority on these matters, I do not presume to have formed any judgment. He received, about the same time, a volume of poetry by Allan Cunningham, which included the drama of Sir Marmaduke Maxwell; and I am happy to quote his letter of acknowledgment to that high-spirited and independent author in the same page with the foregoing monition to the dispensers of patronage. TO MR. ALLAN CUNNINGHAM, ECCLESTONE STREET, PIMLICO. ABBOTSFORD, 27th April. DEAR ALLAN,--Accept my kind thanks for your little modest volume, received two days since. I was acquainted with most of the pieces, and yet I perused them all with renewed pleasure, and especially my old friend Sir Marmaduke with his new face, and by the assistance of an April sun, which is at length, after many a rough blast, beginning to smile on us. The drama has, in my conception, more poetical conception and poetical expression in it, than most of our modern compositions. Perhaps, indeed, it occasionally sins even in the richness of poetical expression; for the language of passion, though bold and figurative, is brief and concise at the same time. But what would, in acting, be a more serious objection, is the complicated nature of the plot, which is very obscure. I hope you will make another dramatic attempt; and, in that case, I would strongly recommend that you should previously make a model or skeleton of your incidents, dividing them regularly into scenes and acts, so as to insure the dependence of one circumstance upon another, and the simplicity and union of your whole story. The common class of readers, and more especially of spectators, are thick-skulled enough, and can hardly comprehend what they see and hear, unless they are hemmed in, and guided to the sense at every turn. The unities of time and place have always appeared to me fopperies, as far as they require close observance of the French rules. Still, the nearer you can come to them, it is always, no doubt, the better, because your action will be more probable. But the unity of action--I mean that continuity which unites every scene with the other, and makes the catastrophe the natural and probable result of all that has gone before--seems to me a critical rule which cannot safely be dispensed with. Without such a regular deduction of incidents, men's attention becomes distracted, and the most beautiful language, if at all listened to, creates no interest, and is out of place. I would give, as an example, the suddenly entertained and as suddenly abandoned jealousy of Sir Marmaduke (p. 85), as a useless excrescence in the action of the drama. I am very much unaccustomed to offer criticism, and when I do so, it is because I believe in my soul that I am endeavoring to pluck away the weeds which hide flowers well worthy of cultivation. In your case, the richness of your language, and fertility of your imagination, are the snares against which I would warn you. If the one had been poor, and the other costive, I would never have made remarks which could never do good, while they only gave pain. Did you ever read Savage's beautiful poem of The Wanderer? If not, do so, and you will see the fault which, I think, attaches to Lord Maxwell--a want of distinct precision and intelligibility about the story, which counteracts, especially with ordinary readers, the effect of beautiful and forcible diction, poetical imagery, and animated description. All this freedom you will excuse, I know, on the part of one who has the truest respect for the manly independence of character which rests for its support on honest industry, instead of indulging the foolish fastidiousness formerly supposed to be essential to the poetical temperament, and which has induced some men of real talents to become coxcombs--some to become sots--some to plunge themselves into want--others into the equal miseries of dependence, merely because, forsooth, they were men of genius, and wise above the ordinary, and, I say, the manly duties of human life. "I'd rather be a kitten, and cry, Mew!"[124] than write the best poetry in the world on condition of laying aside common sense in the ordinary transactions and business of the world; and therefore, dear Allan, I wish much the better to the Muse whom you meet by the fireside in your hours of leisure when you have played your part manfully through a day of labor. I should like to see her making those hours also a little profitable. Perhaps something of the dramatic romance, if you could hit on a good subject, and combine the scenes well, might answer. A beautiful thing with appropriate music, scenes, etc., might be woven out of the Mermaid of Galloway. When there is any chance of Mr. Chantrey coming this way, I hope you will let me know; and if you come with him, so much the better. I like him as much for his manners as for his genius. "He is a man without a clagg; His heart is frank without a flaw." This is a horrible long letter for so vile a correspondent as I am. Once more, my best thanks for the little volume, and believe me yours truly, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 124: _1st King Henry IV._ Act III. Scene 1.] I now return to Sir Walter's correspondence with the Cornet at Cappoquin. TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., 18TH HUSSARS. ABBOTSFORD, April 21, 1821. MY DEAR WALTER,--...A democrat in any situation is but a silly sort of fellow, but a democratical soldier is worse than an ordinary traitor by ten thousand degrees, as he forgets his military honor, and is faithless to the master whose bread he eats. Three distinguished heroes of this class have arisen in my time--Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Colonel Despard, and Captain Thistlewood--and, with the contempt and abhorrence of all men, they died the death of infamy and guilt. If a man of honor is unhappy enough to entertain opinions inconsistent with the service in which he finds himself, it is his duty at once to resign his commission; in acting otherwise, he disgraces himself forever.... The reports are very strange, also, with respect to the private conduct of certain officers.... Gentlemen maintain their characters even in following their most licentious pleasures, otherwise they resemble the very scavengers in the streets.... I had written you a long letter on other subjects, but these circumstances have altered my plans, as well as given me great uneasiness on account of the effects which the society you have been keeping may have had on your principles, both political and moral. Be very frank with me on this subject. I have a title to expect perfect sincerity, having always treated you with openness on my part. Pray write immediately, and at length.--I remain your affectionate father, WALTER SCOTT. TO THE SAME. ABBOTSFORD, April 28, 1821. DEAR WALTER,--... The great point in the mean while is to acquire such preliminary information as may render you qualified to profit by Sandhurst when you get thither. Amongst my acquaintance, the men of greatest information have been those who seemed but indifferently situated for the acquisition of it, but who exerted themselves in proportion to the infrequency of their opportunities. The noble Captain Ferguson was married on Monday last. I was present at the bridal, and I assure you the like hath not been seen since the days of Lesmahago. Like his prototype, the Captain advanced in a jaunty military step, with a kind of leer on his face that seemed to quiz the whole affair. You should write to your brother sportsman and soldier, and wish the veteran joy of his entrance into the band of Benedicts. Odd enough that I should christen a grandchild and attend the wedding of a contemporary within two days of each other. I have sent John of Skye with Tom, and all the rabblement which they can collect, to play the pipes, shout, and fire guns below the Captain's windows this morning; and I am just going over to hover about on my pony, and witness their reception. The happy pair returned to Huntly Burn on Saturday; but yesterday being Sunday, we permitted them to enjoy their pillows in quiet. This morning they must not expect to get off so well. Pray write soon, and give me the history of your still-huntings, etc.--Ever yours affectionately, W. SCOTT. TO CHARLES SCOTT, ESQ. _Care of the Rev. Mr. Williams, Lampeter._ ABBOTSFORD, 9th May, 1821. MY DEAR CHARLES,--I am glad to find, by your letter just received, that you are reading Tacitus with some relish. His style is rather quaint and enigmatical, which makes it difficult to the student; but then his pages are filled with such admirable apothegms and maxims of political wisdom, as infer the deepest knowledge of human nature; and it is particularly necessary that any one who may have views as a public speaker should be master of his works, as there is neither ancient nor modern who affords such a selection of admirable quotations. You should exercise yourself frequently in trying to make translations of the passages which most strike you, trying to invest the sense of Tacitus in as good English as you can. This will answer the double purpose of making yourself familiar with the Latin author, and giving you the command of your own language, which no person will ever have who does not study English composition in early life.... I conclude somewhat abruptly, having trees to cut, and saucy Tom watching me like a Calmuck with the axe in his hand. Yours affectionately, W. SCOTT. TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., 18TH HUSSARS, CAPPOQUIN. ABBOTSFORD, 10th May, 1821. DEAR WALTER,--I wrote yesterday, but I am induced immediately to answer your letter, because I think you expect from it an effect upon my mind different from what it produces. A man may be violent and outrageous in his liquor, but wine seldom makes a gentleman a blackguard, or instigates a loyal man to utter sedition. Wine unveils the passions and throws away restraint, but it does not create habits or opinions which did not previously exist in the mind. Besides, what sort of defence is this of intemperance? I suppose if a private commits riot, or is disobedient in his cups, his officers do not admit whiskey to be an excuse. I have seen enough of that sort of society where habitual indulgence drowned at last every distinction between what is worthy and unworthy,--and I have seen young men with the fairest prospects, turn out degraded miserable outcasts before their life was half spent, merely from soaking and sotting, and the bad habits these naturally lead to. You tell me *** and *** frequent good society, and are well received in it; and I am very glad to hear this is the case. But such stories as these will soon occasion their seclusion from the _best_ company. There may remain, indeed, a large enough circle, where ladies, who are either desirous to fill their rooms or to marry their daughters, will continue to receive any young man in a showy uniform, however irregular in private life; but if these cannot be called _bad_ company, they are certainly anything but _very good_, and the facility of access makes the _entrée_ of little consequence. I mentioned in my last that you were to continue in the 18th until the regiment went to India, and that I trusted you would get the step within the twelve months that the corps yet remains in Europe, which will make your exchange easier. But it is of far more importance that you learn to command yourself, than that you should be raised higher in commanding others. It gives me pain to write to you in terms of censure, but _my duty_ must be done, else I cannot expect you to do _yours_. All here are well, and send love.--I am your affectionate father, WALTER SCOTT. TO THE SAME. EDINBURGH, 15th May, 1821. DEAR WALTER,--I have your letter of May 6th, to which it is unnecessary to reply very particularly. I would only insinuate to you that the _lawyers_ and _gossips_ of Edinburgh, whom your military politeness handsomely classes together in writing to a lawyer, know and care as little about the 18th as they do about the 19th, 20th, or 21st, or any other regimental number which does not happen for the time to be at Piershill, or in the Castle. Do not fall into the error and pedantry of young military men, who, living much together, are apt to think themselves and their actions the subject of much talk and rumor among the public at large.--I will transcribe Fielding's account of such a person, whom he met with on his voyage to Lisbon, which will give two or three hours' excellent amusement when you choose to peruse it:-- "In his conversation it is true there was something military enough, as it consisted chiefly of oaths, and of the great actions and wise sayings of Jack, Will, and Tom of _ours_, a phrase eternally in his mouth, and he seemed to conclude that it conveyed to all the officers such a degree of public notoriety and importance that it entitled him, like the head of a profession, or a first minister, to be the subject of conversation amongst those who had not the least personal acquaintance with him." Avoid this silly narrowness of mind, my dear boy, which only makes men be looked on in the world with ridicule and contempt. Lawyer and gossip as I may be, I suppose you will allow I have seen something of life in most of its varieties; as much at least as if I had been, like you, eighteen months in a cavalry regiment, or, like Beau Jackson in Roderick Random, had cruised for half a year in the chops of the Channel. Now, I have never remarked any one, be he soldier, or divine, or lawyer, that was exclusively attached to the narrow habits of his own profession, but what such person became a great twaddle in good society, besides, what is of much more importance, becoming narrow-minded, and ignorant of all general information. That this letter may not be unacceptable in all its parts, I enclose your allowance without stopping anything for the hackney. Take notice, however, my dear Walter, that this is to last you till midsummer.--We came from Abbotsford yesterday, and left all well, excepting that Mr. Laidlaw lost his youngest child, an infant, very unexpectedly. We found Sophia, Lockhart, and their child in good health, and all send love. I remain your affectionate father, WALTER SCOTT. TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., 18TH HUSSARS. EDINBURGH, 26th May, 1821. MY DEAR WALTER,--I see you are of the mind of the irritable prophet Jonah, who persisted in maintaining "he did well to be angry," even when disputing with Omnipotence. I am aware that Sir David is considered as a severe and ill-tempered man; and I remember a story that, when report came to Europe that Tippoo's prisoners (of whom Baird was one) were chained together two and two, his mother said, "God pity the poor lad that's chained to _our Davie_." But though it may be very true that he may have acted towards you with caprice and severity, yet you are always to remember,--1st, That in becoming a soldier you have subjected yourself to the caprice and severity of superior officers, and have no comfort except in contemplating the prospect of commanding others in your turn. In the mean while, you have in most cases no remedy so useful as patience and submission. But, _2dly_, As you seem disposed to admit that you yourselves have been partly to blame, I submit to you, that in turning the magnifying end of the telescope on Sir D.'s faults, and the diminishing one on your own, you take the least useful mode of considering the matter. By studying _his_ errors, you can acquire no knowledge that will be useful to you till you become Commander-in-Chief in Ireland,--whereas, by reflecting on _your own_, Cornet Scott and his companions may reap some immediate moral advantage. Your fine of a dozen of claret, upon any one who shall introduce females into your mess in future, reminds me of the rule of a country club, that whoever "behaved ungenteel" should be fined in a pot of porter. Seriously, I think there was bad taste in the style of the forfeiture. I am well pleased with your map, which is very businesslike. There was a great battle fought between the English and native Irish near the Blackwater, in which the former were defeated, and Bagenal the Knight-Marshal killed. Is there any remembrance of this upon the spot? There is a clergyman in Lismore, Mr. John Graham--originally, that is by descent, a Borderer. He lately sent me a manuscript which I intend to publish, and I wrote to him enclosing a cheque on Coutts. I wish you could ascertain if he received my letter safe. You can call upon him with my compliments. You need only say I was desirous to know if he had received a letter from me lately. The manuscript was written by a certain Mr. Gwynne, a Welsh loyalist in the great Civil War, and afterwards an officer in the guards of Charles II. This will be an object for a ride to you.[125] I presided last night at the dinner of the Celtic Society, "all plaided and plumed in their tartan array," and such jumping, skipping, and screaming you never saw. Chief-Baron Shepherd dined with us, and was very much pleased with the extreme enthusiasm of the Gael when liberated from the thraldom of breeches. You were voted a member by acclamation, which will cost me a tartan dress for your long limbs when you come here. If the King takes Scotland in coming or going to Ireland (as has been talked of), I expect to get you leave to come over.--I remain your affectionate father, WALTER SCOTT. P. S.--I beg you will not take it into your wise noddle that I will act either hastily or unadvisedly in your matters. I have been more successful in life than most people, and know well how much success depends, first upon desert, and then on knowledge of the _carte de pays_. [Footnote 125: The Rev. John Graham is known as the author of a _History of the Siege of Londonderry, Annals of Ireland_, and various political tracts. Sir Walter Scott published _Gwynne's Memoirs_, with a Preface, etc., in 1822.] The following letter begins with an allusion to a visit which Captain Ferguson, his bride, and his youngest sister, Miss Margaret Ferguson, had been paying at Ditton Park:-- TO THE LORD MONTAGU, ETC., ETC. EDINBURGH, 21st May, 1821. MY DEAR LORD,--I was much diverted with the account of Adam and Eve's visit to Ditton, which, with its surrounding moat, might make no bad emblem of Eden, but for the absence of snakes and fiends. He is a very singular fellow; for, with all his humor and knowledge of the world, he by nature is a remarkably shy and modest man, and more afraid of the possibility of intrusion than would occur to any one who only sees him in the full stream of society. His sister Margaret is extremely like him in the turn of thought and of humor, and he has two others who are as great curiosities in their way. The eldest is a complete old maid, with all the gravity and shyness of the character, but not a grain of its bad humor or spleen; on the contrary, she is one of the kindest and most motherly creatures in the world. The second, Mary, was in her day a very pretty girl; but her person became deformed, and she has the sharpness of features with which that circumstance is sometimes attended. She rises very early in the morning, and roams over all my wild land in the neighborhood, wearing the most complicated pile of handkerchiefs of different colors on her head, and a stick double her own height in her hand, attended by two dogs, whose powers of yelping are truly terrific. With such garb and accompaniments, she has very nearly established the character in the neighborhood of being _something no canny_--and the urchins of Melrose and Darnick are frightened from gathering hazel-nuts and cutting wands in my cleugh, by the fear of meeting _the daft lady_. With all this quizzicality, I do not believe there ever existed a family with so much mutual affection and such an overflow of benevolence to all around them, from men and women down to hedge-sparrows and lame ass-colts, more than one of which they have taken under their direct and special protection. I am sorry there should be occasion for caution in the case of little Duke Walter, but it is most lucky that the necessity is early and closely attended to. How many actual valetudinarians have outlived all their robust contemporaries, and attained the utmost verge of human life, without ever having enjoyed what is usually called high health. This is taking the very worst view of the case, and supposing the constitution habitually delicate. But how often has the strongest and best confirmed health succeeded to a delicate childhood--and such, I trust, will be the Duke's case. I cannot help thinking that this temporary recess from Eton may be made subservient to Walter's improvement in general literature, and particularly in historical knowledge. The habit of reading useful, and at the same time entertaining books of history, is often acquired during the retirement which delicate health in convalescence imposes on us. I remember we touched on this point at Ditton; and I think again, that though classical learning be the _Shibboleth_ by which we judge, generally speaking, of the proficiency of the youthful scholar, yet, when this has been too exclusively and pedantically impressed on his mind as the one thing needful, he very often finds he has entirely a new course of study to commence, just at the time when life is opening all its busy or gay scenes before him, and when study of any kind becomes irksome. For this species of instruction I do not so much approve of tasks and set hours for serious reading, as of the plan of endeavoring to give a taste for history to the youths themselves, and suffering them to gratify it in their own way, and at their own time. For this reason I would not be very scrupulous what books they began with, or whether they began at the middle or end. The knowledge which we acquire of free will and by spontaneous exertion, is like food eaten with appetite--it digests well, and benefits the system ten times more than the double cramming of an alderman. If a boy's attention can be drawn in conversation to any interesting point of history, and the book is pointed out to him where he will find the particulars conveyed in a lively manner, he reads the passage with so much pleasure that he very naturally recurs to the book at the first unoccupied moment, to try if he cannot pick more amusement out of it; and when once a lad gets the spirit of information, he goes on himself with little trouble but that of selecting for him the best and most agreeable books. I think Walter has naturally some turn for history and historical anecdote, and would be disposed to read as much as could be wished in that most useful line of knowledge;--for in the eminent situation he is destined to by his birth, acquaintance with the history and institutions of his country, and her relative position with respect to others, is a _sine qua non_ to his discharging its duties with propriety. All this is extremely like prosing, so I will harp on that string no longer. Kind compliments to all at Ditton; you say nothing of your own rheumatism. I am here for the session, unless the wind should blow me south to see the coronation, and I think 800 miles rather a long journey to see a show. I am always, my dear Lord, Yours very affectionately, WALTER SCOTT. CHAPTER LII Illness and Death of John Ballantyne. -- Extract from his Pocketbook. -- Letters from Blair-Adam. -- Castle-Campbell. -- Sir Samuel Shepherd. -- "Bailie Mackay," Etc. -- Coronation of George IV. -- Correspondence with James Hogg and Lord Sidmouth. -- Letter on the Coronation. -- Anecdotes. -- Allan Cunningham's Memoranda. -- Completion of Chantrey's Bust. 1821 On the 4th of June, Scott, being then on one of his short Sessional visits to Abbotsford, received the painful intelligence that his friend John Ballantyne's maladies had begun to assume an aspect of serious and even immediate danger. The elder brother made the communication in these terms:-- TO SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART., OF ABBOTSFORD, MELROSE. EDINBURGH, Sunday, 3d June, 1821. DEAR SIR,--I have this morning had a most heart-breaking letter from poor John, from which the following is an extract. You will judge how it has affected me, who, with all his peculiarities of temper, love him very much. He says,-- "A spitting of blood has commenced, and you may guess the situation into which I am plunged. We are all accustomed to consider death as certainly inevitable; but his obvious approach is assuredly the most detestable and abhorrent feeling to which human nature can be subject." This is truly doleful. There is something in it more absolutely bitter to my heart than what I have otherwise suffered. I look back to my mother's peaceful rest, and to my infant's blessedness--if life be not the extinguishable worthless spark which I cannot think it--but here, cut off in the very middle of life, with good means and strong powers of enjoying it, and nothing but reluctance and repining at the close--I say the truth when I say that I would joyfully part with my right arm to avert the approaching result. Pardon this, dear sir; my heart and soul are heavy within me. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . With the deepest respect and gratitude, J. B. At the date of this letter, the invalid was in Roxburghshire; but he came to Edinburgh a day or two afterwards, and died there on the 16th of the same month. I accompanied Sir Walter when one of their last interviews took place, and John's deathbed was a thing not to be forgotten. We sat by him for perhaps an hour, and I think half that space was occupied with his predictions of a speedy end, and details of his last will, which he had just been executing, and which lay on his coverlid; the other half being given, five minutes or so at a time, to questions and remarks, which intimated that the hope of life was still flickering before him--nay, that his interest in all its concerns remained eager. The proof sheets of a volume of his Novelists' Library lay also by his pillow; and he passed from them to his will, and then back to them, as by jerks and starts the unwonted veil of gloom closed upon his imagination, or was withdrawn again. He had, as he said, left his great friend and patron £2000 towards the completion of the new library at Abbotsford,--and the spirit of the auctioneer virtuoso flashed up as he began to describe what would, he thought, be the best style and arrangement of the bookshelves. He was interrupted by an agony of asthma, which left him with hardly any signs of life; and ultimately he did expire in a fit of the same kind. Scott was visibly and profoundly shaken by this scene and its sequel. As we stood together a few days afterwards, while they were smoothing the turf over John's remains in the Canongate Churchyard, the heavens, which had been dark and slaty, cleared up suddenly, and the midsummer sun shone forth in his strength. Scott, ever awake to the "skiey influences," cast his eye along the overhanging line of the Calton Hill, with its gleaming walls and towers, and then turning to the grave again, "I feel," he whispered in my ear, "I feel as if there would be less sunshine for me from this day forth." As we walked homewards, Scott told me, among other favorable traits of his friend, one little story which I must not omit. He remarked one day to a poor student of divinity attending his auction, that he looked as if he were in bad health. The young man assented with a sigh. "Come," said Ballantyne, "I think I ken the secret of a sort of draft that would relieve you--particularly," he added, handing him a cheque for £5 or £10--"particularly, my dear, if taken upon an empty stomach." John died in his elder brother's house in St. John Street; a circumstance which it gives me pleasure to record, as it confirms the impression of their affectionate feelings towards each other at this time, which the reader must have derived from James's letter to Scott last quoted. Their confidence and cordiality had undergone considerable interruption in the latter part of John's life; but the close was in all respects fraternal. A year and a half before John's exit,--namely, on the last day of 1819,--he happened to lay his hand on an old pocketbook, which roused his reflections, and he filled two or three of its pages with a brief summary of the most active part of his life, which I think it due to his character, as well as Sir Walter Scott's, to transcribe in this place. "31st Dec., 1819. In moving a bed from the fireplace to-day upstairs, I found an old memorandum-book, which enables me to trace the following recollections of _this day_, the last of the year. "1801. A shopkeeper in Kelso; at this period my difficulties had not begun in business; was well, happy, and 27 years old; new then in a connection which afterwards gave me great pain, but can never be forgotten. "1802. 28 old: In Kelso as before--could scarcely be happier--hunted, shot, kept ****'s company, and neglected business, the fruits whereof I soon found. "1803. 29: Still fortunate, and happy from same cause. James in Edinburgh thriving as a printer. When I was ennuied at home, visited him. Business neglected every way. "1804. 30: Material change; getting into difficulties; all wrong, and changes in every way approaching. "1805. 31: All consummated; health miserable all summer and **** designated in an erased mem., _the scoundrel_. I yet recollect the cause--can I ever forget it? My furniture, goods, etc., sold at Kelso, previous to my going to Edinburgh to become my brother's clerk; whither I _did_ go, for which God be praised eternally, on Friday, 3d January, 1806, on £200 a year. My effects at Kelso, with labor, paid my debts, and left me penniless. "From this period till 1808. 34: I continued in this situation--then the scheme of a bookselling concern in Hanover Street was adopted, which I was to manage; it was £300 a year, and one fourth of the profits besides. "1809. 35: Already the business in Hanover Street getting into difficulty, from our ignorance of its nature, and most extravagant and foolish advances from its funds to the printing concern. I ought to have resisted this, but I was thoughtless, although not young, or rather reckless, and lived on as long as I could make ends meet. "1810. 36: Bills increasing--the destructive system of accommodations adopted. "1811. 37: Bills increased to a most fearful degree. Sir Wm. Forbes and Co. shut their account. No bank would discount with us, and everything leading to irretrievable failure. "1812. 38: The first partner stepped in, at a crisis so tremendous, that it shakes my soul to think of it. By the most consummate wisdom, and resolution, and unheard-of exertions, he put things in a train that finally (so early as 1817) paid even himself (who ultimately became the sole creditor of the house) _in full_, with a balance of a thousand pounds. "1813. 39: In business as a literary auctioneer in Prince's Street; from which period to the present I have got gradually forward, both in that line and as third of a partner of the works of the Author of Waverley, so that I am now, at 45, worth about (I owe £2000) £5000, with, however, alas, many changes--my strong constitution much broken; my father and mother dead, and James estranged--the chief enjoyment and glory of my life being the possession of the friendship and confidence of the greatest of men." In communicating John's death to the Cornet, Sir Walter says: "I have had a very great loss in poor John Ballantyne, who is gone, after a long illness. He persisted to the very last in endeavoring to take exercise, in which he was often imprudent, and was up and dressed the very morning before his death. In his will the grateful creature has left me a legacy of £2000, life-rented, however, by his wife; and the rest of his little fortune goes betwixt his two brothers. I shall miss him very much, both in business, and as an easy and lively companion, who was eternally active and obliging in whatever I had to do." I am sorry to take leave of John Ballantyne with the remark, that his last will was a document of the same class with too many of his _states_ and _calendars_. So far from having £2000 to bequeath to Sir Walter, he died as he had lived, ignorant of the situation of his affairs, and deep in debt.[126] [Footnote 126: No specimen of John's inaccuracy as to business-statements could be pointed out more extraordinary than his assertion in the above sketch of his career, that the bookselling concern, of which he had had the management, was finally wound up with a balance of £1000 in favor of the first partner. At the time he refers to (1817), John's name was on floating bills to the extent of at least £10,000, representing _part_ of the debt which had been accumulated on the bookselling house, and which, on its dissolution, was assumed by the printing company in the Canongate.--(1839.)] The two following letters, written at Blair-Adam, where the Club were, as usual, assembled for the dog-days, have been selected from among several which Scott at this time addressed to his friends in the South, with the view of promoting Mr. Mackay's success in his _début_ on the London boards as Bailie Jarvie. TO MISS JOANNA BAILLIE, HAMPSTEAD. The immediate motive of my writing to you, my dearest friend, is to make Mrs. Agnes and you aware that a Scots performer, called Mackay, is going up to London to play Bailie Nicol Jarvie for a single night at Covent Garden, and to beg you of all dear loves to go and see him; for, taking him in that single character, I am not sure I ever saw anything in my life possessing so much truth and comic effect at the same time: he is completely the personage of the drama, the purse-proud consequential magistrate, humane and irritable in the same moment, and the true Scotsman in every turn of thought and action; his variety of feelings towards Rob Roy, whom he likes, and fears, and despises, and admires, and pities all at once, is exceedingly well expressed. In short, I never saw a part better sustained, certainly; I pray you to collect a party of Scotch friends to see it. I have written to Sotheby to the same purpose, but I doubt whether the exhibition will prove as satisfactory to those who do not know the original from which the resemblance is taken. I observe the English demand (as is natural) broad caricature in the depicting of national peculiarities: they did so as to the Irish till Jack Johnstone taught them better, and at first I should fear Mackay's reality will seem less ludicrous than Liston's humorous extravagances. So let it not be said that a dramatic genius of Scotland wanted the countenance and protection of Joanna Baillie: the Doctor and Mrs. Baillie will be much diverted if they go also, but somebody said to me that they were out of town. The man, I am told, is perfectly respectable in his life and habits, and consequently deserves encouragement every way. There is a great difference betwixt his _bailie_ and all his other performances: one would think the part made for him, and him for the part--and yet I may do the poor fellow injustice, and what we here consider as a falling off may arise from our identifying Mackay so completely with the worthy Glasgow magistrate, that recollections of Nicol Jarvie intrude upon us at every corner, and mar the personification of any other part which he may represent for the time. I am here for a couple of days with our Chief-Commissioner, late Willie Adam, and we had yesterday a delightful stroll to Castle-Campbell, the Rumbling Brig, Cauldron Linns, etc. The scenes are most romantic, and I know not by what fatality it has been, that living within a step of them, I never visited any of them before. We had Sir Samuel Shepherd with us, a most delightful person, but with too much English fidgetiness about him for crags and precipices,--perpetually afraid that rocks would give way under his weight which had over-brow'd the torrent for ages, and that good well-rooted trees, moored so as to resist ten thousand tempests, would fall because he grasped one of their branches; he must certainly be a firm believer in the simile of the lover of your native land, who complains,-- "I leant my back unto an aik, I thought it was a trusty tree, But first it bow'd and then it brake," etc., etc., etc.[127] Certes these Southrons lack much the habits of the wood and wilderness,--for here is a man of taste and genius, a fine scholar and a most interesting companion, haunted with fears that would be entertained by no shopkeeper from the Luckenbooths or the Saut Market. A sort of _Cockneyism_ of one kind or another pervades their men of professional habits, whereas every Scotchman, with very few exceptions, holds country exercises of all kinds to be part of his nature, and is ready to become a traveller, or even a soldier on the slightest possible notice. The habits of the moorfowl shooting, salmon-fishing, and so forth, may keep this much up among the gentry, a name which our pride and pedigree extend so much wider than in England; and it is worth notice that these amusements, being cheap and tolerably easy come at by all the petty dunniewassals, have a more general influence on the national character than fox-hunting, which is confined to those who can mount and keep a horse worth at least 100 guineas. But still this hardly explains the general and wide difference betwixt the countries in this particular. Happen how it will, the advantage is much in favor of Scotland: it is true that it contributes to prevent our producing such very accomplished lawyers, divines, or artisans[128] as when the whole mind is bent with undivided attention upon attaining one branch of knowledge,--but it gives a strong and muscular character to the people in general, and saves men from all sorts of causeless fears and flutterings of the heart, which give quite as much misery as if there were real cause for entertaining apprehension. This is not furiously to the purpose of my letter, which, after recommending Monsieur Mackay, was to tell you that we are all well and happy. Sophia is getting stout and pretty, and is one of the wisest and most important little mammas that can be seen anywhere. Her bower is _bigged in gude green wood_, and we went last Saturday in a body to enjoy it, and to consult about furniture; and we have got the road stopt which led up the hill, so it is now quite solitary and approached through a grove of trees, actual well-grown trees, not Lilliputian forests like those of Abbotsford. The season is dreadfully backward. Our ashes and oaks are not yet in leaf, and will not be, I think, in anything like full foliage this year, such is the rigor of the east winds.--Always, my dear and much respected friend, most affectionately yours, W. SCOTT. BLAIR-ADAM, 11 June, 1821, In full sight of Lochleven. P. S.--Pray read, or have read to you by Mrs. Agnes, The Annals of the Parish. Mr. Galt wrote the worst tragedies ever seen, and has now written a most excellent novel, if it can be called so. [Footnote 127: Ballad of the Marchioness of Douglas, "O waly, waly, up yon bank!" etc.] [Footnote 128: The great engineer, James Watt, of Birmingham--in whose talk Scott took much delight--told him, that though hundreds probably of his northern countrymen had sought employment at his establishment, he never could get one of them to become a first-rate artisan. "Many of them," said he, "were too good for that, and rose to be valuable clerks and book-keepers; but those incapable of this sort of advancement had always the same insuperable aversion to toiling so long at any one point of mechanism as to gain the highest wages among the workmen." I have no doubt Sir Walter was thinking of Mr. Watt's remark when he wrote the sentence in the text.] TO THE LORD MONTAGU, ETC., ETC., LONDON. BLAIR-ADAM, June 11, 1821. MY DEAR LORD,--There is a man going up from Edinburgh to play one night at Covent Garden, whom, as having the very unusual power of presenting on the stage a complete Scotsman, I am very desirous you should see. He plays Bailie Nicol Jarvie in Rob Roy, but with a degree of national truth and understanding, which makes the part equal to anything I have ever seen on the stage, and I have seen all the best comedians for these forty years. I wish much, if you continue in town till he comes up, that you would get into some private box and take a look of him. Sincerely, it is a real treat--the English will not enjoy it, for it is not broad enough, or sufficiently caricatured for their apprehensions, but to a Scotsman it is inimitable, and you have the Glasgow Bailie before you, with all his bustling conceit and importance, his real benevolence, and his irritable habits. He will want in London a fellow who, in the character of the Highland turnkey, held the backhand to him admirably well. I know how difficult it is for folks of condition to get to the theatre, but this is worth an exertion,--and, besides, the poor man (who I understand is very respectable in private life) will be, to use an admirable simile (by which one of your father's farmers persuaded the Duke to go to hear his son, a probationer in divinity, preach his first sermon in the town of Ayr), _like a cow in a fremd loaning_, and glad of Scots countenance. I am glad the Duke's cold is better--his stomach will not be put to those trials which ours underwent in our youth, when deep drinking was the fashion. I hope he will always be aware, however, that his is not a strong one. Campbell's Lives of the Admirals is an admirable book, and I would advise your Lordship e'en to redeem your pledge to the Duke on some rainy day. You do not run the risk from the perusal which my poor mother apprehended. She always alleged it sent her eldest son to the navy, and did not see with indifference any of her younger olive branches engaged with Campbell except myself, who stood in no danger of the cockpit or quarterdeck. I would not swear for Lord John though. Your Lordship's tutor was just such a well-meaning person as mine, who used to take from me old Lindsay of Pitscottie, and set me down to get by heart Rollin's infernal list of the Shepherd Kings, whose hard names could have done no good to any one on earth, unless he had wished to raise the devil, and lacked language to conjure with.--Always, my dear Lord, most truly yours, WALTER SCOTT. The coronation of George IV., preparations for which were (as has been seen) in active progress by March, 1820, had been deferred, in consequence of the unhappy affair of the Queen's Trial. The 19th of July, 1821, was now announced for this solemnity, and Sir Walter resolved to be among the spectators. It occurred to him that if the Ettrick Shepherd were to accompany him, and produce some memorial of the scene likely to catch the popular ear in Scotland, good service might thus be done to the cause of loyalty. But this was not his only consideration. Hogg had married a handsome and most estimable young woman, a good deal above his own original rank in life, the year before; and expecting with her a dowry of £1000, he had forthwith revived the grand ambition of an earlier day, and become a candidate for an extensive farm on the Buccleuch estate, at a short distance from Altrive Lake. Various friends, supposing his worldly circumstances to be much improved, had supported his application, and Lord Montagu had received it in a manner for which the Shepherd's letters to Scott express much gratitude. Misfortune pursued the Shepherd--the unforeseen bankruptcy of his wife's father interrupted the stocking of the sheep-walk; and the arable part of the new possession was sadly mismanaged by himself. Scott hoped that a visit to London, and a coronation poem, or pamphlet, might end in some pension or post that would relieve these difficulties, and he wrote to Hogg, urging him to come to Edinburgh, and embark with him for the great city. Not doubting that this proposal would be eagerly accepted, he, when writing to Lord Sidmouth, to ask a place for himself in the Hall and Abbey of Westminster, mentioned that Hogg was to be his companion, and begged suitable accommodation for him also. Lord Sidmouth, being overwhelmed with business connected with the approaching pageant, answered by the pen of the Under-Secretary of State, Mr. Hobhouse, that Sir Walter's wishes, both as to himself and the Shepherd, should be gratified, _provided_ they would both dine with him the day after the coronation, in Richmond Park, "where," says the letter before me, "his Lordship will invite the Duke of York and a few other Jacobites to meet you." All this being made known to the tenant of Mount-Benger, he wrote to Scott, as he says, "with the tear in his eye," to signify, that if he went to London he must miss attending the great annual Border fair, held on St. Boswell's Green, in Roxburghshire, on the 18th of every July; and that his absence from that meeting so soon after entering upon business as a store-farmer, would be considered by his new compeers as highly imprudent and discreditable. "In short," James concludes, "the thing is impossible. But as there is no man in his Majesty's dominions admires his great talents for government, and the energy and dignity of his administration, so much as I do, I will write something at home, and endeavor to give it you before you start." The Shepherd probably expected that these pretty compliments would reach the royal ear; but however that may have been, his own Muse turned a deaf ear to him--at least I never heard of anything that he wrote on this occasion. Scott embarked without him, on board a new steamship called The City of Edinburgh, which, as he suggested to the master, ought rather to have been christened The New Reekie. This vessel was that described and lauded in the following letter:-- TO THE LORD MONTAGU, ETC., ETC. EDINBURGH, July 1, 1821. MY DEAR LORD,--I write just now to thank you for your letter. I have been on board the steamship, and am so delighted with it, that I think I shall put myself aboard for the coronation. It runs at nine knots an hour (_me ipso teste_) against wind and tide, with a deck as long as a frigate's to walk upon, and to sleep on also, if you like, as I have always preferred a cloak and a mattress to these crowded cabins. This reconciles the speed and certainty of the mail-coach with the ease and convenience of being on shipboard. So I really think I will run up to see the grandee show, and run down again. I scorn to mention economy, though the expense is not one fifth, and that is something in hard times, especially to me, who, to choose, would always rather travel in a public conveyance, than with my domestic's good company in a po-chay. But now comes the news of news. I have been instigating the great Caledonian Boar, James Hogg, to undertake a similar trip--with the view of turning an honest penny, to help out his stocking, by writing some sort of Shepherd's Letters, or the like, to put the honest Scots bodies up to this whole affair. I am trying with Lord Sidmouth to get him a place among the newspaper gentry to see the ceremony. It is seriously worth while to get such a popular view of the whole as he will probably hit off. I have another view for this poor fellow. You have heard of the Royal Literary Society, and how they propose to distribute solid pudding, _alias_ pensions, to men of genius. It is, I think, a very problematical matter, whether it will do the good which is intended; but if they do mean to select worthy objects of encouragement, I really know nobody that has a better or an equal claim to poor Hogg. Our friend Villiers takes a great charge of this matter, and good-naturedly forgave my stating to him a number of objections to the first concoction, which was to have been something resembling the French Academy. It has now been much modified. Perhaps there may be some means fallen upon, with your Lordship's assistance, of placing Hogg under Mr. Villiers's view. I would have done so myself, but only I have battled the point against the whole establishment so keenly, that it would be too bad to bring forward a protégé of my own to take advantage of it. They intended at one time to give pensions of about £100 a year to thirty persons. I know not where they could find half a dozen with such pretensions as the Shepherd's. There will be risk of his being lost in London, or kidnapped by some of those ladies who open literary _menageries_ for the reception of _lions_. I should like to see him at a rout of blue-stockings. I intend to recommend him to the protection of John Murray the bookseller; and I hope he will come equipped with plaid, kent, and colley.[129] I wish to heaven Lord Melville would either keep the Admiralty, or in Hogg's phrase,-- "O I would eagerly press him The keys of the _east_ to require,"-- for truly the Board of Control is the Corn Chest for Scotland, where we poor gentry must send our younger sons, as we send our black cattle to the south.--Ever most truly yours, WALTER SCOTT. [Footnote 129: _Kent_ is the shepherd's staff--_Colley_ his dog. Scott alludes to the old song of the _Lea Rig_,-- "Nae herds wi' kent and colley there," etc.] From London, on the day after the coronation, Sir Walter addressed a letter descriptive of the ceremonial to his friend James Ballantyne, who published it in his newspaper. It has been since reprinted--but not in any collection of Scott's own writings; and I therefore insert it here. It will probably possess considerable interest for the student of English history and manners in future times; for the coronation of George the Fourth's successor was conducted on a vastly inferior scale of splendor and expense--and the precedent of curtailment in any such matters is now seldom neglected. TO THE EDITOR OF THE EDINBURGH WEEKLY JOURNAL. LONDON, July 20, 1821. SIR,--I refer you to the daily papers for the details of the great National Solemnity which we witnessed yesterday, and will hold my promise absolved by sending a few general remarks upon what I saw with surprise amounting to astonishment, and which I shall never forget. It is, indeed, impossible to conceive a ceremony more august and imposing in all its parts, and more calculated to make the deepest impression both on the eye and on the feelings. The most minute attention must have been bestowed to arrange all the subordinate parts in harmony with the rest; so that, amongst so much antiquated ceremonial, imposing singular dresses, duties, and characters, upon persons accustomed to move in the ordinary routine of society, nothing occurred either awkward or ludicrous which could mar the general effect of the solemnity. Considering that it is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, I own I consider it as surprising that the whole ceremonial of the day should have passed away without the slightest circumstance which could derange the general tone of solemn feeling which was suited to the occasion. You must have heard a full account of the only disagreeable event of the day. I mean the attempt of the misguided lady, who has lately furnished so many topics of discussion, to intrude herself upon a ceremonial, where, not being in her proper place, to be present in any other must have been voluntary degradation. That matter is a fire of straw which has now burnt to the very embers, and those who try to blow it into life again will only blacken their hands and noses, like mischievous children dabbling among the ashes of a bonfire. It seems singular, that being determined to be present at all hazards, this unfortunate personage should not have procured a Peer's ticket, which, I presume, would have insured her admittance. I willingly pass to pleasanter matters. The effect of the scene in the Abbey was beyond measure magnificent. Imagine long galleries stretched among the aisles of that venerable and august pile--those which rise above the altar pealing back their echoes to a full and magnificent choir of music--those which occupied the sides filled even to crowding with all that Britain has of beautiful and distinguished, and the cross-gallery most appropriately occupied by the Westminster schoolboys, in their white surplices, many of whom might on that day receive impressions never to be lost during the rest of their lives. Imagine this, I say, and then add the spectacle upon the floor,--the altar surrounded by the Fathers of the Church, the King encircled by the Nobility of the land and the Counsellors of his throne, and by warriors wearing the honored marks of distinction bought by many a glorious danger;--add to this the rich spectacle of the aisles crowded with waving plumage, and coronets, and caps of honor, and the sun, which brightened and saddened as if on purpose, now beaming in full lustre on the rich and varied assemblage, and now darting a solitary ray, which catched, as it passed, the glittering folds of a banner, or the edge of a group of battle-axes or partizans, and then rested full on some fair form, "the cynosure of neighboring eyes," whose circlet of diamonds glistened under its influence. Imagine all this, and then tell me if I have made my journey of four hundred miles to little purpose. I do not love your _cui bono_ men, and therefore I will not be pleased if you ask me in the damping tone of sullen philosophy, what good all this has done the spectators. If we restrict life to its real animal wants and necessities, we shall indeed be satisfied with "food, clothes, and fire;" but Divine Providence, who widened our sources of enjoyment beyond those of the animal creation, never meant that we should bound our wishes within such narrow limits; and I shrewdly suspect that those _non est tanti_ gentlefolks only depreciate the natural and unaffected pleasure which men like me receive from sights of splendor and sounds of harmony, either because they would seem wiser than their simple neighbors at the expense of being less happy, or because the mere pleasure of the sight and sound is connected with associations of a deeper kind, to which they are unwilling to yield themselves. Leaving these gentlemen to enjoy their own wisdom, I still more pity those, if there be any, who (being unable to detect a peg on which to hang a laugh) sneer coldly at this solemn festival, and are rather disposed to dwell on the expense which attends it, than on the generous feelings which it ought to awaken. The expense, so far as it is national, has gone directly and instantly to the encouragement of the British manufacturer and mechanic; and so far as it is personal to the persons of rank attendant upon the Coronation, it operates as a tax upon wealth and consideration for the benefit of poverty and industry; a tax willingly paid by the one class, and not the less acceptable to the other because it adds a happy holiday to the monotony of a life of labor. But there were better things to reward my pilgrimage than the mere pleasures of the eye and ear; for it was impossible, without the deepest veneration, to behold the voluntary and solemn interchange of vows betwixt the King and his assembled People, whilst he, on the one hand, called God Almighty to witness his resolution to maintain their laws and privileges, whilst they called, at the same moment, on the Divine Being, to bear witness that they accepted him for their liege Sovereign, and pledged to him their love and their duty. I cannot describe to you the effect produced by the solemn, yet strange mixture of the words of Scripture, with the shouts and acclamations of the assembled multitude, as they answered to the voice of the Prelate, who demanded of them whether they acknowledged as their Monarch the Prince who claimed the sovereignty in their presence. It was peculiarly delightful to see the King receive from the royal brethren, but in particular from the Duke of York, the fraternal kiss in which they acknowledged their sovereign. There was an honest tenderness, an affectionate and sincere reverence in the embrace interchanged betwixt the Duke of York and his Majesty, that approached almost to a caress, and impressed all present with the electrical conviction, that the nearest to the throne in blood was the nearest also in affection. I never heard plaudits given more from the heart than those that were thundered upon the royal brethren when they were thus pressed to each other's bosoms,--it was an emotion of natural kindness, which, bursting out amidst ceremonial grandeur, found an answer in every British bosom. The King seemed much affected at this and one or two other parts of the ceremonial, even so much so as to excite some alarm among those who saw him as nearly as I did. He completely recovered himself, however, and bore (generally speaking) the fatigue of the day very well. I learn from one near his person, that he roused himself with great energy, even when most oppressed with heat and fatigue, when any of the more interesting parts of the ceremony were to be performed, or when anything occurred which excited his personal and immediate attention. When presiding at the banquet, amid the long line of his Nobles, he looked "every inch a King;" and nothing could exceed the grace with which he accepted and returned the various acts of homage rendered to him in the course of that long day. It was also a very gratifying spectacle to those who think like me, to behold the Duke of Devonshire and most of the distinguished Whig nobility assembled round the throne on this occasion; giving an open testimony that the differences of political opinions are only skin-deep wounds, which assume at times an angry appearance, but have no real effect on the wholesome constitution of the country. If you ask me to distinguish who bore him best, and appeared most to sustain the character we annex to the assistants in such a solemnity, I have no hesitation to name Lord Londonderry, who, in the magnificent robes of the Garter, with the cap and high plume of the order, walked alone, and by his fine face and majestic person formed an adequate representative of the order of Edward III., the costume of which was worn by his Lordship only. The Duke of Wellington, with all his laurels, moved and looked deserving the baton, which was never grasped by so worthy a hand. The Marquis of Anglesea showed the most exquisite grace in managing his horse, notwithstanding the want of his limb, which he left at Waterloo. I never saw so fine a bridle-hand in my life, and I am rather a judge of "noble horsemanship." Lord Howard's horse was worse bitted than those of the two former noblemen, but not so much so as to derange the ceremony of retiring back out of the Hall. The Champion was performed (as of right) by young Dymocke, a fine-looking youth, but bearing, perhaps, a little too much the appearance of a maiden-knight to be the challenger of the world in a King's behalf. He threw down his gauntlet, however, with becoming manhood, and showed as much horsemanship as the crowd of knights and squires around him would permit to be exhibited. His armor was in good taste, but his shield was out of all propriety, being a round _rondache_, or Highland target, a defensive weapon which it would have been impossible to use on horseback, instead of being a three-corner'd, or _heater-shield_, which in time of the tilt was suspended round the neck. Pardon this antiquarian scruple, which, you may believe, occurred to few but myself. On the whole, this striking part of the exhibition somewhat disappointed me, for I would have had the Champion less embarrassed by his assistants, and at liberty to put his horse on the _grand pas_. And yet the young Lord of Scrivelsbaye looked and behaved extremely well. Returning to the subject of costume, I could not but admire what I had previously been disposed much to criticise,--I mean the fancy dress of the Privy-Councillors, which was of white and blue satin, with trunk-hose and mantles, after the fashion of Queen Elizabeth's time. Separately, so gay a garb had an odd effect on the persons of elderly or ill-made men; but when the whole was thrown into one general body, all these discrepancies disappeared, and you no more observed the particular manner or appearance of an individual, than you do that of a soldier in the battalion which marches past you. The whole was so completely harmonized in actual coloring, as well as in association, with the general mass of gay and gorgeous and antique dress which floated before the eye, that it was next to impossible to attend to the effect of individual figures. Yet a Scotsman will detect a Scotsman amongst the most crowded assemblage, and I must say that the Lord Justice-Clerk of Scotland[130] showed to as great advantage in his robes of Privy-Councillor, as any by whom that splendid dress was worn on this great occasion. The common Court-dress used by the Privy-Councillors at the last coronation must have had a poor effect in comparison of the present, which formed a gradation in the scale of gorgeous ornament, from the unwieldy splendor of the heralds, who glowed like huge masses of cloth of gold and silver, to the more chastened robes and ermine of the Peers. I must not forget the effect produced by the Peers placing their coronets on their heads, which was really august. The box assigned to the foreign Ambassadors presented a most brilliant effect, and was perfectly in a blaze with diamonds. When the sunshine lighted on Prince Esterhazy, in particular, he glimmered like a galaxy. I cannot learn positively if he had on that renowned coat which has visited all the courts of Europe save ours, and is said to be worth £100,000, or some such trifle, and which costs the Prince £100 or two every time he puts it on, as he is sure to lose pearls to that amount. This was a hussar dress, but splendid in the last degree; perhaps too fine for good taste--at least it would have appeared so anywhere else. Beside the Prince sat a good-humored lass, who seemed all eyes and ears (his daughter-in-law, I believe), who wore as many diamonds as if they had been Bristol stones. An honest Persian was also a remarkable figure, from the dogged and imperturbable gravity with which he looked on the whole scene, without ever moving a limb or a muscle during the space of four hours. Like Sir Wilful Witwoud, I cannot find that your Persian is orthodox; for if he scorned everything else, there was a Mahometan paradise extended on his right hand along the seats which were occupied by the peeresses and their daughters, which the Prophet himself might have looked on with emotion. I have seldom seen so many elegant and beautiful girls as sat mingled among the noble matronage of the land; and the waving plumage of feathers, which made the universal head-dress, had the most appropriate effect in setting off their charms. I must not omit that the foreigners, who are apt to consider us as a nation _en frac_, and without the usual ceremonials of dress and distinction, were utterly astonished and delighted to see the revival of feudal dresses and feudal grandeur when the occasion demanded it, and that in a degree of splendor which they averred they had never seen paralleled in Europe. The duties of service at the Banquet, and of attendance in general, were performed by pages drest very elegantly in Henri Quatre coats of scarlet, with gold lace, blue sashes, white silk hose, and white rosettes. There were also marshal's-men for keeping order, who wore a similar dress, but of blue, and having white sashes. Both departments were filled up almost entirely by young gentlemen, many of them of the very first condition, who took these menial characters to gain admission to the show. When I saw many of my young acquaintance thus attending upon their fathers and kinsmen, the Peers, Knights, and so forth, I could not help thinking of Crabbe's lines, with a little alteration:-- 'T was schooling pride to see the menial wait, Smile on his father, and receive his plate. It must be owned, however, that they proved but indifferent valets, and were very apt, like the clown in the pantomime, to eat the cheer they should have handed to their masters, and to play other _tours de page_, which reminded me of the caution of our proverb "not to man yourself with your kin." The Peers, for example, had only a cold collation, while the Aldermen of London feasted on venison and turtle; and similar errors necessarily befell others in the confusion of the evening. But these slight mistakes, which indeed were not known till afterwards, had not the slightest effect on the general grandeur of the scene. I did not see the procession between the Abbey and Hall. In the morning a few voices called _Queen! Queen!_ as Lord Londonderry passed, and even when the Sovereign appeared. But these were only signals for the loud and reiterated acclamations in which these tones of discontent were completely drowned. In the return, no one dissonant voice intimated the least dissent from the shouts of gratulation which poured from every quarter; and certainly never Monarch received a more general welcome from his assembled subjects. You will have from others full accounts of the variety of entertainments provided for John Bull in the Parks, the River, in the Theatres, and elsewhere. Nothing was to be seen or heard but sounds of pleasure and festivity; and whoever saw the scene at any one spot, was convinced that the whole population was assembled there, while others found a similar concourse of revellers in every different point. It is computed that about _five hundred thousand people_ shared in the Festival in one way or another; and you may imagine the excellent disposition by which the people were animated, when I tell you, that, excepting a few windows broken by a small bodyguard of ragamuffins, who were in immediate attendance on the Great Lady in the morning, not the slightest political violence occurred to disturb the general harmony--and that the assembled populace seemed to be universally actuated by the spirit of the day--loyalty, namely, and good-humor. Nothing occurred to damp those happy dispositions; the weather was most propitious, and the arrangements so perfect, that no accident of any kind is reported as having taken place.--And so concluded the coronation of GEORGE IV., whom GOD long preserve. Those who witnessed it have seen a scene calculated to raise the country in their opinion, and to throw into the shade all scenes of similar magnificence, from the Field of the Cloth of Gold down to the present day. I remain, your obedient servant, AN EYE-WITNESS. [Footnote 130: Scott's schoolfellow, the Right Hon. D. Boyle.] At the close of this brilliant scene, Scott received a mark of homage to his genius which delighted him not less than Laird Nippy's reverence for the _Sheriff's Knoll_, and the Sheffield cutler's dear acquisition of his signature on a visiting ticket. Missing his carriage, he had to return home on foot from Westminster, after the banquet--that is to say, between two or three o'clock in the morning;--when he and a young gentleman his companion found themselves locked in the crowd, somewhere near Whitehall, and the bustle and tumult were such that his friend was afraid some accident might happen to the lame limb. A space for the dignitaries was kept clear at that point by the Scots Greys. Sir Walter addressed a sergeant of this celebrated regiment, begging to be allowed to pass by him into the open ground in the middle of the street. The man answered shortly, that his orders were strict--that the thing was impossible. While he was endeavoring to persuade the sergeant to relent, some new wave of turbulence approached from behind, and his young companion exclaimed in a loud voice, "Take care, Sir Walter Scott, take care!" The stalwart dragoon, on hearing the name, said, "What! Sir Walter Scott? He shall get through anyhow!" He then addressed the soldiers near him: "Make room, men, for Sir Walter Scott, our illustrious countryman!" The men answered, "Sir Walter Scott!--God bless him!"--and he was in a moment within the guarded line of safety. I shall now take another extract from the _memoranda_ with which I have been favored by my friend Allan Cunningham. After the particulars formerly quoted about Scott's sitting to Chantrey in the spring of 1820, he proceeds as follows:-- "I saw Sir Walter again, when he attended the coronation, in 1821. In the mean time his bust had been wrought in marble, and the sculptor desired to take the advantage of his visit to communicate such touches of expression or lineament as the new material rendered necessary. This was done with a happiness of eye and hand almost magical: for five hours did the poet sit, or stand, or walk, while Chantrey's chisel was passed again and again over the marble, adding something at every touch. "'Well, Allan,' he said, when he saw me at this last sitting, 'were you at the coronation? it was a splendid sight.'--'No, Sir Walter,' I answered, 'places were dear and ill to get: I am told it was a magnificent scene: but having seen the procession of King Crispin at Dumfries, I was satisfied.' I said this with a smile: Scott took it as I meant it, and laughed heartily. 'That's not a bit better than Hogg,' he said. 'He stood balancing the matter whether to go to the coronation or the fair of Saint Boswell--and the fair carried it.' "During this conversation, Mr. Bolton the engineer came in. Something like a cold acknowledgment passed between the poet and him. On his passing into an inner room, Scott said, 'I am afraid Mr. Bolton has not forgot a little passage that once took place between us. We met in a public company, and in reply to the remark of some one, he said, "That's like the old saying,--in every quarter of the world you will find a Scot, a rat, and a Newcastle grindstone." This touched my Scotch spirit, and I said, "Mr. Bolton, you should have added--_and a Brummagem button_." There was a laugh at this, and Mr. Bolton replied, "We make something better in Birmingham than buttons--we make steam-engines, sir." "'I like Bolton,' thus continued Sir Walter; 'he is a brave man,--and who can dislike the brave? He showed this on a remarkable occasion. He had engaged to coin for some foreign prince a large quantity of gold. This was found out by some desperadoes, who resolved to rob the premises, and as a preliminary step tried to bribe the porter. The porter was an honest fellow,--he told Bolton that he was offered a hundred pounds to be blind and deaf next night. "Take the money," was the answer, "and I shall protect the place." Midnight came--the gates opened as if by magic--the interior doors, secured with patent locks, opened as of their own accord--and three men with dark lanterns entered and went straight to the gold. Bolton had prepared some flax steeped in turpentine--he dropt fire upon it, a sudden light filled all the place, and with his assistants, he rushed forward on the robbers,--the leader saw in a moment he was betrayed, turned on the porter, and shooting him dead, burst through all obstruction, and with an ingot of gold in his hand, scaled the wall and escaped.' "'That is quite a romance in robbing,' I said;--and I had nearly said more, for the cavern scene and death of Meg Merrilies rose in my mind;--perhaps the mind of Sir Walter was taking the direction of the Solway too, for he said, 'How long have you been from Nithsdale?'--'A dozen years.' 'Then you will remember it well. I was a visitor there in my youth; my brother was at Closeburn school, and there I found Creehope Linn, a scene ever present to my fancy. It is at once fearful and beautiful. The stream jumps down from the moorlands, saws its way into the freestone rock of a hundred feet deep, and, in escaping to the plain, performs a thousand vagaries. In one part it has actually shaped out a little chapel,--the peasants call it the Sutors' Chair. There are sculptures on the sides of the linn too, not such as Mr. Chantrey casts, but etchings scraped in with a knife perhaps, or a harrow-tooth.'--'Did you ever hear,' said Sir Walter, 'of Patrick Maxwell, who, taken prisoner by the King's troops, escaped from them on his way to Edinburgh, by flinging himself into that dreadful linn on Moffat water, called the Douglasses' Beef-tub?'--'Frequently,' I answered; 'the country abounds with anecdotes of those days: the popular feeling sympathizes with the poor Jacobites, and has recorded its sentiments in many a tale and many a verse.'--'The Ettrick Shepherd has collected not a few of those things,' said Scott, 'and I suppose many snatches of song may yet be found.'--_C._ 'I have gathered many such things myself, Sir Walter, and as I still propose to make a collection of all Scottish songs of poetic merit, I shall work up many of my stray verses and curious anecdotes in the notes.'--_S._ 'I am glad that you are about such a thing; any help which I can give you, you may command; ask me any questions, no matter how many, I shall answer them if I can. Don't be timid in your selection; our ancestors fought boldly, spoke boldly, and sang boldly too. I can help you to an old characteristic ditty not yet in print:-- "There dwalt a man into the wast, And O gin he was cruel, For on his bridal night at e'en He gat up and grat for gruel. "They brought to him a gude sheep's head, A bason, and a towel; Gar take thae whim-whams far frae me, I winna want my gruel."' "_C._--'I never heard that verse before: the hero seems related to the bridegroom of Nithsdale,-- "The bridegroom grat as the sun gade down, The bridegroom grat as the sun gade down; To ony man I'll gie a hunder marks sae free, This night that will bed wi' a bride for me."' "_S._--'A cowardly loon enough. I know of many crumbs and fragments of verse which will be useful to your work; the Border was once peopled with poets, for every one that could fight could make ballads, some of them of great power and pathos. Some such people as the minstrels were living less than a century ago.'--_C._ 'I knew a man, the last of a race of district tale-tellers, who used to boast of the golden days of his youth, and say, that the world, with all its knowledge, was grown sixpence a day worse for him.'--_S._ 'How was that? how did he make his living?--by telling tales, or singing ballads?'--_C._ 'By both: he had a devout tale for the old, and a merry song for the young; he was a sort of beggar.'--_S._ 'Out upon thee, Allan--dost thou call that begging? Why, man, we make our bread by story-telling, and honest bread it is.'" I ought not to close this extract without observing that Sir F. Chantrey presented the original bust, of which Mr. Cunningham speaks, to Sir Walter himself; by whose remotest descendants it will undoubtedly be held in additional honor on that account. The poet had the further gratification of learning that three copies were executed in marble before the original quitted the studio: One for Windsor Castle--a second for Apsley House--and a third for the friendly sculptor's own private collection. The casts of this bust have since been multiplied beyond perhaps any example whatever. Sir Walter returned to Scotland in company with his friend William Stewart Rose; and they took the way by Stratford-upon-Avon, where, on the wall of the room in which Shakespeare is supposed to have been born, the autograph of these pilgrims may still, I believe, be traced. CHAPTER LIII PUBLICATION OF MR. ADOLPHUS'S LETTERS ON THE AUTHORSHIP OF WAVERLEY 1821 During Scott's visit to London in July, 1821, there appeared a work which was read with eager curiosity and delight by the public--with much private diversion besides by his friends--and which he himself must have gone through with a very odd mixture of emotions. I allude to the volume entitled "Letters to Richard Heber, Esq., containing critical remarks on the series of novels beginning with Waverley, and an attempt to ascertain their author;" which was soon known to have been penned by Mr. John Leycester Adolphus, a distinguished alumnus of the University then represented in Parliament by Sir Walter's early friend Heber.[131] Previously to the publication of these letters, the opinion that Scott was the author of Waverley had indeed become well settled in the English, to say nothing of the Scottish mind; a great variety of circumstances, external as well as internal, had by degrees coöperated to its general establishment: yet there were not wanting persons who still dissented, or at least affected to dissent from it. It was reserved for the enthusiastic industry, and admirable ingenuity of this juvenile academic, to set the question at rest by an accumulation of critical evidence which no sophistry could evade, and yet produced in a style of such high-bred delicacy, that it was impossible for the hitherto "veiled prophet" to take the slightest offence with the hand that had forever abolished his disguise. The only sceptical scruple that survived this exposition was extinguished in due time by Scott's avowal of the _sole and unassisted_ authorship of his novels; and now Mr. Adolphus's Letters have shared the fate of other elaborate arguments, the thesis of which has ceased to be controverted. Hereafter, I am persuaded, his volume will be revived for its own sake;--but, in the mean time, regarding it merely as forming, by its original effect, an epoch in Scott's history, I think it my duty to mark my sense of its importance in that point of view, by transcribing the writer's own summary of its CONTENTS. "LETTER I.--Introduction--General reasons for believing the novels to have been written by the author of Marmion. "LETTER II.--Resemblance between the novelist and poet in their tastes, studies, and habits of life, as illustrated by their works--Both Scotchmen--Habitual residents in Edinburgh--Poets--Antiquaries--German and Spanish scholars--Equal in classical attainment--Deeply read in British history--Lawyers--Fond of field sports--Of dogs--Acquainted with most manly exercises--Lovers of military subjects--The novelist apparently not a soldier. "LETTER III.--The novelist is, like the poet, a man of good society--His stories never betray forgetfulness of honorable principles, or ignorance of good manners--Spirited pictures of gentlemanly character--Colonel Mannering--Judicious treatment of elevated historical personages--The novelist quotes and praises most contemporary poets, except the author of Marmion--Instances in which the poet has appeared to slight his own unacknowledged, but afterwards avowed productions. "LETTER IV.--Comparison of the works themselves--All distinguished by good morals and good sense--The latter particularly shown in the management of character--Prose style--Its general features--Plainness and facility--Grave banter--Manner of telling a short story--Negligence--Scotticisms--Great propriety and correctness occasionally, and sometimes unusual sweetness. "LETTER V.--Dialogue in the novels and poems--Neat colloquial turns in the former, such as cannot be expected in romantic poetry--Happy adaptation of dialogue to character, whether merely natural, or artificially modified, as by profession, local habits, etc.--Faults of dialogue, as connected with character of speakers--Quaintness of language and thought--Bookish air in conversation--Historical personages alluding to their own celebrated acts and sayings--Unsuccessful attempts at broad vulgarity--Beauties of composition peculiar to the dialogue--Terseness and spirit--These qualities well displayed in quarrels; but not in scenes of polished raillery--Eloquence. "LETTER VI.--The poetry of the author of Marmion generally characterized--His habits of composition and turn of mind as a poet, compared with those of the novelist--Their descriptions simply conceived and composed, without abstruse and far-fetched circumstances or refined comments--Great advantage derived by both from accidental combinations of images, and the association of objects in the mind with persons, events, etc.--Distinctness and liveliness of effect in narrative and description--Narrative usually picturesque or dramatic, or both--Distinctness, etc., of effect, produced in various ways--Striking pictures of individuals--Their persons, dress, etc.--Descriptions sometimes too obviously picturesque--Subjects for painters--Effects of light frequently noticed and finely described--Both writers excel in grand and complicated scenes--Among detached and occasional ornaments, the similes particularly noticed--Their frequency and beauty--Similes and metaphors sometimes quaint, and pursued too far. "LETTER VII.--Stories of the two writers compared--These are generally connected with true history, and have their scene laid in a real place--Local peculiarities diligently attended to--Instances in which the novelist and poet have celebrated the same places--they frequently describe these as seen by a traveller (the hero or some other principal personage) for the first time--Dramatic mode of relating story--Soliloquies--Some scenes degenerate into melodrame--Lyrical pieces introduced sometimes too theatrically--Comparative unimportance of heroes--Various causes of this fault--Heroes rejected by ladies, and marrying others whom they had before slighted--Personal struggle between a civilized and a barbarous hero--Characters resembling each other--Female portraits in general--Fathers and daughters--Characters in Paul's Letters--Wycliffe and Risingham--Glossin and Hatteraick--Other characters compared--Long periods of time abruptly passed over--Surprises, unexpected discoveries, etc.--These sometimes too forced and artificial--Frequent recourse to the marvellous--Dreams well described--Living persons mistaken for spectres--Deaths of Burley, Risingham, and Rashleigh. "LETTER VIII.--Comparison of particular passages--Descriptions--Miscellaneous thoughts--Instances in which the two writers have resorted to the same sources of information, and borrowed the same incidents, etc.--Same authors quoted by both--The poet, like the novelist, fond of mentioning his contemporaries, whether as private friends or as men publicly distinguished--Author of Marmion never notices the Author of Waverley (see Letter III.)--Both delight in frequently introducing an antiquated or fantastic dialect--Peculiarities of expression common to both writers--Conclusion." [Footnote 131: [John Leycester Adolphus, son of John Adolphus, eminent as a barrister and the author of various historical works, was born in 1795, and was educated at Merchant Taylors', and St. John's College, Oxford, where in 1814 he gained the Newdigate prize for English verse. He held a reputable position in his father's profession, and, beside the work described in the text, published _Letters from Spain in 1856 and 1857_. He also wrote a number of clever metrical _jeux d'esprit_. He was engaged in completing his father's _History of England under George III._ at the time of his death in 1862.]] I wish I had space for extracting copious specimens of the felicity with which Mr. Adolphus works out these various points of his problem. As it is, I must be contented with a narrow selection--and I shall take two or three of the passages which seem to me to connect themselves most naturally with the main purpose of my own compilation. "A thorough knowledge and statesmanlike understanding of the domestic history and politics of Britain at various and distant periods; a familiar acquaintance with the manners and prevailing spirit of former generations, and with the characters and habits of their most distinguished men, are of themselves no cheap or common attainments; and it is rare indeed to find them united with a strong original genius, and great brilliancy of imagination. We know, however, that the towering poet of Flodden Field is also the diligent editor of Swift and Dryden, of Lord Somers's Tracts, and of Sir Ralph Sadler's State Papers; that in these and other parts of his literary career he has necessarily plunged deep into the study of British history, biography, and antiquities, and that the talent and activity which he brought to these researches have been warmly seconded by the zeal and liberality of those who possessed the amplest and rarest sources of information. 'The Muse found him,' as he himself said long ago, 'engaged in the pursuit of historical and traditional antiquities, and the excursions which he has made in her company have been of a nature which increases his attachment to his original study.' Are we then to suppose that another writer has combined the same powers of fancy with the same spirit of investigation, the same perseverance, and the same good fortune? and shall we not rather believe, that the labor employed in the illustration of Dryden has helped to fertilize the invention which produced Montrose and Old Mortality?... "However it may militate against the supposition of his being a poet, I cannot suppress my opinion, that our novelist is a 'man of law.' He deals out the peculiar terms and phrases of that science (as practised in Scotland) with a freedom and confidence beyond the reach of any uninitiated person. If ever, in the progress of his narrative, a legal topic presents itself (which very frequently happens), he neither declines the subject, nor timidly slurs it over, but enters as largely and formally into all its technicalities, as if the case were actually 'before the fifteen.' The manners, humors, and professional _bavardage_ of lawyers, are sketched with all the ease and familiarity which result from habitual observation. In fact, the subject of law, which is a stumbling-block to others, is to the present writer a spot of repose; upon this theme he lounges and gossips, he is _discinctus et soleatus_, and, at times, almost forgets that when an author finds himself at home and perfectly at ease, he is in great danger of falling asleep.--If, then, my inferences are correct, the unknown writer who was just now proved to be an excellent poet, must also be pronounced a follower of the law: the combination is so unusual, at least on this side of the Tweed, that, as Juvenal says on a different occasion-- ... 'bimembri Hoc monstrum puero, vel mirandis sub aratro Piscibus inventis, et foetæ comparo mulsæ.' Nature has indeed presented us with one such prodigy in the author of Marmion; and it is probable, that in the author of Waverley, we only see the same specimen under a different aspect; for, however sportive the goddess may be, she has too much wit and invention to wear out a frolic by many repetitions.... "A striking characteristic of both writers is their ardent love of rural sports, and all manly and robust exercises.--But the importance given to the canine race in these works ought to be noted as a characteristic feature by itself. I have seen some drawings by a Swiss artist, who was called the Raphael of cats; and either of the writers before us might, by a similar phrase, be called the Wilkie of dogs. Is it necessary to justify such a compliment by examples? Call Yarrow, or Lufra, or poor Fangs, Colonel Mannering's Plato, Henry Morton's Elphin, or Hobbie Elliot's Kilbuck, or Wolfe of Avenel Castle:--see Fitz-James's hounds returning from the pursuit of the lost stag-- 'Back limped with slow and crippled pace The sulky leaders of the chase'-- or swimming after the boat which carries their Master-- 'With heads erect and whimpering cry The hounds behind their passage ply.' See Captain Clutterbuck's dog _quizzing_ him when he missed a bird, or the scene of 'mutual explanation and remonstrance' between 'the venerable patriarchs old Pepper and Mustard,' and Henry Bertram's rough terrier Wasp. If these instances are not sufficient, turn to the English bloodhound assailing the young Buccleuch,-- 'And hark! and hark! the deep-mouthed bark Comes nigher still and nigher; Bursts on the path a dark blood-hound, His tawny muzzle tracked the ground, And his red eye shot fire. Soon as the wildered child saw he, He flew at him right furiouslie.... I ween you would have seen with joy The bearing of the gallant boy.... So fierce he struck, the dog, afraid, At cautious distance hoarsely bayed, But still in act to spring.' Or Lord Ronald's deerhounds, in the haunted forest of Glenfinlas,-- 'Within an hour return'd each hound; In rush'd the rousers of the deer; They howl'd in melancholy sound, Then closely couch beside the seer.... Sudden the hounds erect their ears, And sudden cease their moaning howl; Close press'd to Moy, they mark their fears By shivering limbs and stifled growl. Untouch'd the harp began to ring, As softly, slowly, oped the door,' etc. Or look at Cedric the Saxon, in his antique hall, attended by his greyhounds and slowhounds, and the terriers which 'waited with impatience the arrival of the supper; but, with the sagacious knowledge of physiognomy peculiar to their race, forbore to intrude upon the moody silence of their master.' To complete the picture, 'One grisly old wolf-dog alone, with the liberty of an indulged favorite, had planted himself close by the chair of state, and occasionally ventured to solicit notice by putting his large hairy head upon his master's knee, or pushing his nose into his hand. Even he was repelled by the stern command, "Down, Balder, down! I am not in the humor for foolery."' "Another animated sketch occurs in the way of simile:--'The interview between Ratcliffe and Sharpitlaw had an aspect different from all these. They sate for five minutes silent, on opposite sides of a small table, and looked fixedly at each other, with a sharp, knowing, and alert cast of countenance, not unmingled with an inclination to laugh, and resembled, more than anything else, two dogs, who, preparing for a game at romps, are seen to crouch down, and remain in that posture for a little time, watching each other's movements, and waiting which shall begin the game.' "Let me point out a still more amusing study of canine life: 'While the Antiquary was in full declamation, Juno, who held him in awe, according to the remarkable instinct by which dogs instantly discover those who like or dislike them, had peeped several times into the room, and, encountering nothing very forbidding in his aspect, had at length presumed to introduce her full person, and finally, becoming bold by impunity, she actually ate up Mr. Oldbuck's toast, as, looking first at one, then at another of his audience, he repeated with self-complacence,-- "'Weave the warp, and weave the woof.'-- You remember the passage in the Fatal Sisters, which, by the way, is not so fine as in the original--But, hey-day! my toast has vanished! I see which way--Ah, thou type of womankind, no wonder they take offence at thy generic appellation!"--(So saying, he shook his fist at Juno, who scoured out of the parlor.)' "In short, throughout these works, wherever it is possible for a dog to contribute in any way to the effect of a scene, we find there the very dog that was required, in his proper place and attitude. In Branksome Hall, when the feast was over,-- 'The stag-hounds, weary with the chase, Lay stretched upon the rushy floor, And urged, in dreams, the forest race From Teviot-stone to Eskdale-moor.' The gentle Margaret, when she steals secretly from the castle, 'Pats the shaggy blood-hound As he rouses him up from his lair.' When Waverley visits the Baron of Bradwardine, in his concealment at Janet Gellatley's, Ban and Buscar play their parts in every point with perfect discretion; and in the joyous company that assembles at Little Veolan, on the Baron's enlargement, these honest animals are found 'stuffed to the throat with food, in the liberality of Macwheeble's joy,' and 'snoring on the floor.' In the perilous adventure of Henry Bertram, at Portanferry gaol, the action would lose half its interest, without the by-play of little Wasp. At the funeral ceremony of Duncraggan (in The Lady of the Lake), a principal mourner is ----'Stumah, who, the bier beside, His master's corpse with wonder eyed; Poor Stumah! whom his least halloo Could send like lightning o'er the dew.' Ellen Douglas smiled (or did not smile) ----'to see the stately drake, Lead forth his fleet upon the lake, While her vexed spaniel from the beach, Bayed at the prize beyond his reach.' "I will close this growing catalogue of examples with one of the most elegant descriptions that ever sprang from a poet's fancy:-- 'Delightful praise! like summer rose, That brighter in the dew-drop glows, The bashful maiden's cheek appeared, For Douglas spoke, and Malcolm heard. The flush of shame-faced joy to hide, The hounds, the hawk, her cares divide; The loved caresses of the maid The dogs with crouch and whimper paid; And, at her whistle, on her hand, The falcon took his favorite stand, Closed his dark wing, relaxed his eye, Nor, though unhooded, sought to fly.' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "Their passion for martial subjects, and their success in treating them, form a conspicuous point of resemblance between the novelist and poet. No writer has appeared in our age (and few have ever existed) who could vie with the author of Marmion in describing battles and marches, and all the terrible grandeur of war, except the author of Waverley. Nor is there any man of original genius and powerful inventive talent as conversant with the military character, and as well schooled in tactics, as the author of Waverley, except the author of Marmion. Both seem to exult in camps, and to warm at the approach of a soldier. In every warlike scene that awes and agitates, or dazzles and inspires, the poet triumphs; but where any effect is to be produced by dwelling on the minutiæ of military habits and discipline, or exhibiting the blended hues of individual humor and professional peculiarity, as they present themselves in the mess-room or the guard-room, every advantage is on the side of the novelist. I might illustrate this position by tracing all the gradations of character marked out in the novels, from the Baron of Bradwardine to Tom Halliday: but the examples are too well known to require enumeration, and too generally admired to stand in need of panegyric. Both writers, then, must have bestowed a greater attention on military subjects, and have mixed more frequently in the society of soldiers, than is usual with persons not educated to the profession of arms. "It may be asked, why we should take for granted that the writer of these novels is not himself a member of the military profession? The conjecture is a little improbable if we have been right in concluding that the minuteness and multiplicity of our author's legal details are the fruit of his own study and practice, although the same person may certainly, at different periods of life, put on the helmet and the wig, the gorget and the band; attend courts and lie in trenches; head a charge and lead a cause. I cannot help suspecting, however (it is with the greatest diffidence I venture the remark), that in those warlike recitals which so strongly interest the great body of readers, an army critic would discover several particulars that savor more of the amateur than of the practised campaigner. It is not from any technical improprieties (if such exist) that I derive this observation, but, on the contrary, from a too great minuteness and over-curious diligence, at times perceptible in the military details; which, amidst a seeming fluency and familiarity, betray, I think, here and there, the lurking vestiges of labor and contrivance, like the marks of pickaxes in an artificial grotto. The accounts of operations in the field, if not more circumstantial than a professional author would have made them, are occasionally circumstantial on points which such an author would have thought it idle to dwell upon. A writer who derived his knowledge of war from experience would, no doubt, like the Author of Waverley, delight in shaping out imaginary manoeuvres, or in filling up the traditional outline of those martial enterprises and conflicts, which have found a place in history; perhaps, too, he would dwell on these parts of his narrative a little longer than was strictly necessary; but in describing (for example) the advance of a party of soldiers, threatened by an ambuscade, he would scarcely think it worth while to relate at large that the captain 're-formed his line of march, commanded his soldiers to unsling their firelocks and fix their bayonets, and formed an advanced and rear-guard, each consisting of a non-commissioned officer and two privates, who received strict orders to keep an alert look-out:' or that when the enemy appeared, 'he ordered the rear-guard to join the centre, and both to close up to the advance, doubling his files, so as to occupy with his column the whole practicable part of the road,' etc. Again, in representing a defeated corps retiring and pressed by the enemy, he would probably never think of recording (as our novelist does in his incomparable narrative of the engagement at Drumclog) that the commanding officer gave such directions as these: 'Let Allan form the regiment, and do you two retreat up the hill in two bodies, each halting alternately as the other falls back. I'll keep the rogues in check with the rear-guard, making a stand and facing from time to time.' I do not offer these observations for the purpose of depreciating a series of military pictures, which have never been surpassed in richness, animation, and distinctness; I will own, too, that such details as I have pointed out are the fittest that could be selected for the generality of novel-readers; I merely contend, that a writer practically acquainted with war would either have passed over these circumstances as too common to require particular mention, or if he had thought it necessary to enlarge upon these, would have dwelt with proportionate minuteness on incidents of a less ordinary kind, which the recollections of a soldier would have readily supplied, and his imagination would have rested on with complacency. He would, in short, have left as little undone for the military, as the present author has for the legal part of his narratives. But the most ingenious writer who attempts to discourse with technical familiarity on arts or pursuits with which he is not habitually conversant, will too surely fall into a superfluous particularity on common and trivial points, proportioned to his deficiency in those nicer details which imply practical knowledge.... "'The prince of darkness is a gentleman.'[132] "Another point of resemblance between the author of Waverley and him of Flodden Field is, that both are unquestionably men of good society. Of the anonymous writer I infer this from his works; of the poet it is unnecessary to deduce such a character from his writings, because they are not anonymous. I am the more inclined to dwell upon this merit in the novelist, on account of its rarity; for among the whole multitude of authors, well or ill educated, who devote themselves to poetry or to narrative or dramatic fiction, how few there are who give any proof in their works, of the refined taste, the instinctive sense of propriety, the clear spirit of honor, nay, of the familiar acquaintance with conventional forms of good-breeding, which are essential to the character of a gentleman! Even of the small number who, in a certain degree, possess these qualifications, how rarely do we find one who can so conduct his fable, and so order his dialogue throughout, that nothing shall be found either repugnant to honorable feelings, or inconsistent with polished manners! How constantly, even in the best works of fiction, are we disgusted with such offences against all generous principle, as the reading of letters by those for whom they were not intended; taking advantage of accidents to overhear private conversation; revealing what in honor should have remained secret; plotting against men as enemies, and at the same time making use of their services; dishonest practices on the passions or sensibilities of women by their admirers; falsehoods, not always indirect; and an endless variety of low artifices, which appear to be thought quite legitimate if carried on through subordinate agents. And all these knaveries are assigned to characters which the reader is expected to honor with his sympathy, or at least to receive into favor before the story concludes. "The sins against propriety in manners are as frequent and as glaring. I do not speak of the hoyden vivacity, harlot tenderness, and dancing-school affability, with which vulgar novel-writers always deck out their countesses and _principessas_, chevaliers, dukes, and marquises; but it would be easy to produce, from authors of a better class, abundant instances of bookish and laborious pleasantry, of pert and insipid gossip or mere slang, the wrecks, perhaps, of an obsolete fashionable dialect, set down as the brilliant conversation of a witty and elegant society; incredible outrages on the common decorum of life, represented as traits of eccentric humor; familiar raillery pushed to downright rudeness; affectation or ill-breeding over-colored so as to become insupportable insolence; extravagant rants on the most delicate topics indulged in before all the world; expressions freely interchanged between gentlemen, which, by the customs of that class, are neither used nor tolerated; and quarrels carried on most bombastically and abusively, even to mortal defiance, without a thought bestowed upon the numbers, sex, nerves, or discretion of the bystanders. "You will perceive, that in recapitulating the offences of other writers, I have pronounced an indirect eulogium on the Author of Waverley. No man, I think, has a clearer view of what is just and honorable in principle and conduct, or possesses in a higher degree that elegant taste, and that chivalrous generosity of feeling, which, united with exact judgment, give an author the power of comprehending and expressing, not merely the right and fit, but the graceful and exalted in human action. As an illustration of these remarks, a somewhat homely one perhaps, let me call to your recollection the incident, so wild and extravagant in itself, of Sir Piercie Shafton's elopement with the miller's daughter. In the address and feeling with which the author has displayed the high-minded delicacy of Queen Elizabeth's courtier to the unguarded village nymph, in his brief reflections arising out of this part of the narrative, and indeed in his whole conception and management of the adventure, I do not know whether the moralist or the gentleman is most to be admired: it is impossible to praise too warmly either the sound taste, or the virtuous sentiment which have imparted so much grace and interest to such a hazardous episode. "It may, I think, be generally affirmed, on a review of all the six-and-thirty volumes, in which this author has related the adventures of some twenty or more heroes and heroines (without counting second-rate personages), that there is not an unhandsome action or degrading sentiment recorded of any person who is recommended to the full esteem of the reader. To be blameless on this head is one of the strongest proofs a writer can give of honorable principles implanted by education and refreshed by good society. "The correctness in morals is scarcely more remarkable than the refinement and propriety in manners, by which these novels are distinguished. Where the character of a gentleman is introduced, we generally find it supported without affectation or constraint, and often with so much truth, animation, and dignity, that we forget ourselves into a longing to behold and converse with the accomplished creature of imagination. It is true that the volatile and elegant man of wit and pleasure, and the gracefully fantastic _petite-maîtresse_, are a species of character scarcely ever attempted, and even the few sketches we meet with in this style are not worthy of so great a master. But the aristocratic country gentleman, the ancient lady of quality, the gallant cavalier, the punctilious young soldier, and the jocund veteran, whose high mind is mellowed, not subdued by years, are drawn with matchless vigor, grace, and refinement. There is, in all these creations, a spirit of gentility, not merely of that negative kind which avoids giving offence, but of a strong, commanding, and pervading quality, blending unimpaired with the richest humor and wildest eccentricity, and communicating an interest and an air of originality to characters which, without it, would be wearisome and insipid, or would fade into commonplace. In Waverley, for example, if it were not for this powerful charm, the severe but warm-hearted Major Melville and the generous Colonel Talbot would become mere ordinary machines for carrying on the plot, and Sir Everard, the hero of an episode that might be coveted by Mackenzie, would encounter the frowns of every impatient reader, for unprofitably retarding the story at its outset. "But without dwelling on minor instances, I will refer you at once to the character of Colonel Mannering, as one of the most striking representations I am acquainted with, of a gentleman in feelings and in manners, in habits, taste, predilections; nay, if the expression may be ventured, a gentleman even in prejudices, passions, and caprices. Had it been less than all I have described; had any refinement, any nicety of touch, been wanting, the whole portrait must have been coarse, common, and repulsive, hardly distinguishable from the moody father and domineering chieftain of every hackneyed romance-writer. But it was no vulgar hand that drew the lineaments of Colonel Mannering: no ordinary mind could have conceived that exquisite combination of sternness and sensibility, injurious haughtiness and chivalrous courtesy; the promptitude, decision, and imperious spirit of a military disciplinarian; the romantic caprices of an untamable enthusiast; generosity impatient of limit or impediment; pride scourged but not subdued by remorse; and a cherished philosophical severity, maintaining ineffectual conflicts with native tenderness and constitutional irritability. Supposing that it had entered into the thoughts of an inferior writer to describe a temper of mind at once impetuous, kind, arrogant, affectionate, stern, sensitive, deliberate, fanciful; supposing even that he had had the skill to combine these different qualities harmoniously and naturally,--yet how could he have attained the Shakespearean felicity of those delicate and unambitious touches, by which this author shapes and chisels out individual character from general nature, and imparts a distinct personality to the creature of his invention? Such are (for example) the slight tinge of superstition, contracted by the romantic young Astrologer in his adventure at Ellangowan, not wholly effaced in maturer life, and extending itself by contagion to the mind of his daughter," etc., etc. [Footnote 132: _King Lear_, Act III. Scene 4.] It would have gratified Mr. Adolphus could he have known when he penned these pages a circumstance which the reperusal of them brings to my memory. When Guy Mannering was first published, the Ettrick Shepherd said to Professor Wilson, "I have done wi' doubts now. Colonel Mannering is just Walter Scott, painted by himself." This was repeated to James Ballantyne, and he again mentioned it to Scott--who smiled in approbation of the Shepherd's shrewdness, and often afterwards, when the printer expressed an opinion in which he could not concur, would cut him short with, "James--James--you'll find that Colonel Mannering has laid down the law on this point."--I resume my extract:-- "All the productions I am acquainted with, both of the poet and of the prose writer, recommend themselves by a native piety and goodness, not generally predominant in modern works of imagination; and which, where they do appear, are too often disfigured by eccentricity, pretension, or bad taste. In the works before us there is a constant tendency to promote the desire of excellence in ourselves, and the love of it in our neighbors, by making us think honorably of our general nature. Whatever kindly or charitable affection, whatever principle of manly and honest ambition exists within us, is roused and stimulated by the perusal of these writings; our passions are won to the cause of justice, purity, and self-denial; and the old, indissoluble ties that bind us to country, kindred, and birthplace, appear to strengthen as we read, and brace themselves more firmly about the heart and imagination. Both writers, although peculiarly happy in their conception of all chivalrous and romantic excellencies, are still more distinguished by their deep and true feeling and expressive delineation of the graces and virtues proper to domestic life. The gallant, elevated, and punctilious character which a Frenchman contemplates in speaking of '_un honnête homme_,' is singularly combined, in these authors, with the genial, homely good qualities that win from a Caledonian the exclamation of 'honest man!' But the crown of their merits, as virtuous and moral writers, is the manly and exemplary spirit with which, upon all seasonable occasions, they pay honor and homage to religion, ascribing to it its just preëminence among the causes of human happiness, and dwelling on it as the only certain source of pure and elevated thoughts, and upright, benevolent, and magnanimous actions. "This, then, is common to the books of both writers,--that they furnish a direct and distinguished contrast to the atrabilious gloom of some modern works of genius, and the wanton, but not artless levity of others. They yield a memorable, I trust an immortal, accession to the evidences of a truth not always fashionable in literature, that the mind of man may put forth all its bold luxuriance of original thought, strong feeling, and vivid imagination, without being loosed from any sacred and social bond, or pruned of any legitimate affection; and that the Muse is indeed a 'heavenly goddess,' and not a graceless, lawless runagate, '[Greek: aphrêtôr, athemistos, anestios].' "Good sense, the sure foundation of excellence in all the arts, is another leading characteristic of these productions. Assuming the author of Waverley and the author of Marmion to be the same person, it would be difficult in our times to find a second equally free from affectation, prejudice, and every other distortion or depravity of judgment, whether arising from ignorance, weakness, or corruption of morals. It is astonishing that so voluminous and successful a writer should so seldom be betrayed into any of those 'fantastic tricks' which, in such a man, make 'the angels weep,' and (_è converso_) the critics laugh. He adopts no fashionable cant, colloquial, philosophical, or literary; he takes no delight in being unintelligible; he does not amuse himself by throwing out those fine sentimental and metaphysical threads which float upon the air, and tease and tickle the passengers, but present no palpable substance to their grasp; he aims at no beauties that 'scorn the eye of vulgar light;' he is no dealer in paradoxes; no affecter of new doctrines in taste or morals; he has no eccentric sympathies or antipathies; no maudlin philanthropy, or impertinent cynicism; no nondescript hobby-horse; and with all his matchless energy and originality of mind, he is content to admire popular books, and enjoy popular pleasures; to cherish those opinions which experience has sanctioned; to reverence those institutions which antiquity has hallowed; and to enjoy, admire, cherish, and reverence all these with the same plainness, simplicity, and sincerity as our ancestors did of old. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "I cannot help dwelling for a moment on the great similarity of manner apparent in the female portraits of the two writers. The pictures of their heroines are executed with a peculiar fineness, delicacy, and minuteness of touch, and with a care at times almost amounting to timidity, so that they generally appear more highly finished, but less boldly and strikingly thrown out, than the figures with which they are surrounded. Their elegance and purity are always admirable, and are happily combined, in most instances, with unaffected ease and natural spirit. Strong practical sense is their most prevailing characteristic, unaccompanied by any repulsive air of selfishness, pedantry, or unfeminine harshness. Few writers have ever evinced, in so strong a degree as the authors of Marmion and Waverley, that manly regard, and dignified but enthusiastic devotion, which may be expressed by the term loyalty to the fair sex, the honorable attribute of chivalrous and romantic ages. If they touch on the faults of womankind, their satire is playful, not contemptuous; and their acquaintance with female manners, graces, and foibles, is apparently drawn, not from libertine experience, but from the guileless familiarity of domestic life. "Of all human ties and connections there is none so frequently brought in view, or adorned with so many touches of the most affecting eloquence by both these writers, as the pure and tender relation of father and daughter. Douglas and Ellen in The Lady of the Lake will immediately occur to you as a distinguished example. Their mutual affection and solicitude; their pride in each other's excellencies; the parent's regret of the obscurity to which fate has doomed his child; and the daughter's self-devotion to her father's welfare and safety, constitute the highest interest of the poem, and that which is most uniformly sustained; nor does this or any other romance of the same author contain a finer stroke of passion than the overboiling of Douglas's wrath, when, mixed as a stranger with the crowd at Stirling, he sees his daughter's favorite Lufra chastised by the royal huntsman. "In Rokeby, the filial attachment and duteous anxieties of Matilda form the leading feature of her character, and the chief source of her distresses. The intercourse between King Arthur and his daughter Gyneth, in The Bridal of Triermain, is neither long, nor altogether amicable; but the monarch's feelings on first beholding that beautiful 'slip of wilderness,' and his manner of receiving her before the queen and court, are too forcibly and naturally described to be omitted in this enumeration. "Of all the novels, there are at most but two or three in which a fond father and affectionate daughter may not be pointed out among the principal characters, and in which the main interest of many scenes does not arise out of that paternal and filial relation. What a beautiful display of natural feeling, under every turn of circumstances that can render the situations of child and parent agonizing or delightful, runs through the history of David Deans and his two daughters! How affecting is the tale of Leicester's unhappy Countess, after we have seen her forsaken father consuming away with moody sorrow in his joyless manor-house! How exquisite are the grouping and contrast of Isaac, the kind but sordid Jew, and his heroic Rebecca, of the buckram Baron of Bradwardine and the sensitive Rose, the reserved but ardent Mannering, and the flighty coquette Julia! In The Antiquary, and Bride of Lammermoor, anxiety is raised to the most painful height by the spectacle of father and daughter exposed together to imminent and frightful peril. The heroines in Rob Roy and The Black Dwarf are duteous and devoted daughters, the one of an unfortunate, the other of an unworthy parent. In the whole story of Kenilworth there is nothing that more strongly indicates a master-hand than the paternal carefulness and apprehensions of the churl Foster; and among the most striking scenes in A Legend of Montrose is that in which Sir Duncan Campbell is attracted by an obscure yearning of the heart toward his unknown child, the supposed orphan of Darlinvarach." I must not attempt to follow out Mr. Adolphus in his most ingenious tracings of petty coincidences in thought, and, above all, in expression, between the poet of Marmion and the novelist of Waverley. His apology for the minuteness of his detail in that part of his work is, however, too graceful to be omitted: "It cannot, I think, appear frivolous or irrelevant, in the inquiry we are pursuing, to dwell on these minute coincidences. Unimportant indeed they are if looked upon as subjects of direct criticism; but considered with reference to our present purpose, they resemble those light substances which, floating on the trackless sea, discover the true setting of some mighty current: they are the buoyant driftwood which betrays the hidden communication of two great poetic oceans." I conclude with re-quoting a fragment from one of the quaint tracts of Sir Thomas Urquhart. The following is the epigraph of Mr. Adolphus's 5th Letter:-- "O with how great liveliness did he represent the conditions of all manner of men! From the overweening monarch to the peevish swaine, through all intermediate degrees of the superficial courtier or proud warrior, dissembling churchman, doting old man, cozening lawyer, lying traveler, covetous merchant, rude seaman, pedantick scolar, the amorous shepheard, envious artisan, vain-glorious master, and tricky servant;----He had all the jeers, squibs, flouts, buls, quips, taunts, whims, jests, clinches, gybes, mokes, jerks, with all the several kinds of equivocations and other sophistical captions, that could properly be adapted to the person by whose representation he intended to inveagle the company into a fit of mirth!" I have it not in my power to produce the letter in which Scott conveyed to Heber his opinion of this work. I know, however, that it ended with a request that he should present Mr. Adolphus with his thanks for the handsome terms in which his poetical efforts had been spoken of throughout, and request him, in the name of the _author of Marmion_, not to revisit Scotland without reserving a day for Abbotsford; and the _Eidolon_ of the author of _Waverley_ was made, a few months afterwards, to speak as follows in the Introduction to The Fortunes of Nigel: "These letters to the member for the University of Oxford show the wit, genius, and delicacy of the author, which I heartily wish to see engaged on a subject of more importance; and show, besides, that the preservation of my character of _incognito_ has engaged early talent in the discussion of a curious question of evidence. But a cause, however ingeniously pleaded, is not therefore gained. You may remember the neatly wrought chain of circumstantial evidence, so artificially brought forward to prove Sir Philip Francis's title to the Letters of Junius, seemed at first irrefragable; yet the influence of the reasoning has passed away, and Junius, in the general opinion, is as much unknown as ever. But on this subject I will not be soothed or provoked into saying one word more. To say who I am not, would be one step towards saying who I am; and as I desire not, any more than a certain Justice of Peace mentioned by Shenstone, the noise or report such things make in the world, I shall continue to be silent on a subject which, in my opinion, is very undeserving the noise that has been made about it, and still more unworthy of the serious employment of such ingenuity as has been displayed by the young letter-writer." CHAPTER LIV New Buildings at Abbotsford. -- Chiefswood. -- William Erskine. -- Letter to Countess Purgstall. -- Progress of the Pirate. -- Franck's Northern Memoir, and Notes of Lord Fountainhall, Published. -- Private Letters in the Reign of James I. -- Commencement of the Fortunes of Nigel. -- Second Sale of Copyrights. -- Contract for "Four Works of Fiction." -- Enormous Profits of the Novelist, and Extravagant Projects of Constable. -- The Pirate Published. -- Lord Byron's Cain, Dedicated to Scott. -- Affair of the Beacon Newspaper. 1821 [Illustration: CHIEFSWOOD _After the drawing by J. M. W. Turner_] When Sir Walter returned from London, he brought with him the detailed plans of Mr. Atkinson for the completion of his house at Abbotsford; which, however, did not extend to the gateway or the beautiful screen between the court and the garden--for these graceful parts of the general design were conceptions of his own, reduced to shape by the skill of the Messrs. Smith of Darnick. It would not, indeed, be easy for me to apportion rightly the constituent members of the whole edifice;--throughout there were numberless consultations with Mr. Blore, Mr. Terry, and Mr. Skene, as well as with Mr. Atkinson--and the actual builders placed considerable inventive talents, as well as admirable workmanship, at the service of their friendly employer. Every preparation was now made by them, and the foundations might have been set about without farther delay; but he was very reluctant to authorize the demolition of the rustic porch of the old cottage, with its luxuriant overgrowth of roses and jessamines; and, in short, could not make up his mind to sign the death-warrant of this favorite bower until winter had robbed it of its beauties. He then made an excursion from Edinburgh, on purpose to be present at its downfall--saved as many of the creepers as seemed likely to survive removal, and planted them with his own hands about a somewhat similar porch, erected expressly for their reception, at his daughter Sophia's little cottage of Chiefswood. There my wife and I spent this summer and autumn of 1821--the first of several seasons, which will ever dwell on my memory as the happiest of my life. We were near enough Abbotsford to partake as often as we liked of its brilliant society; yet could do so without being exposed to the worry and exhaustion of spirit which the daily reception of newcomers entailed upon all the family except Sir Walter himself. But, in truth, even he was not always proof against the annoyances connected with such a style of open-house-keeping. Even his temper sunk sometimes under the solemn applauses of learned dulness, the vapid raptures of painted and periwigged dowagers, the horse-leech avidity with which underbred foreigners urged their questions, and the pompous simpers of condescending magnates. When sore beset at home in this way, he would every now and then discover that he had some very particular business to attend to on an outlying part of his estate, and craving the indulgence of his guests overnight, appear at the cabin in the glen before its inhabitants were astir in the morning. The clatter of Sibyl Grey's hoofs, the yelping of Mustard and Spice, and his own joyous shout of _reveillée_ under our windows, were the signal that he had burst his toils, and meant for that day to "take his ease in his inn." On descending, he was to be found seated with all his dogs and ours about him, under a spreading ash that overshadowed half the bank between the cottage and the brook, pointing the edge of his woodman's axe for himself, and listening to Tom Purdie's lecture touching the plantation that most needed thinning. After breakfast, he would take possession of a dressing-room upstairs, and write a chapter of The Pirate; and then, having made up and despatched his packet for Mr. Ballantyne, away to join Purdie wherever the foresters were at work--and sometimes to labor among them as strenuously as John Swanston himself--until it was time either to rejoin his own party at Abbotsford, or the quiet circle of the cottage.--When his guests were few and friendly, he often made them come over and meet him at Chiefswood in a body towards evening;[133] and surely he never appeared to more amiable advantage than when helping his young people with their little arrangements upon such occasions. He was ready with all sorts of devices to supply the wants of a narrow establishment; he used to delight particularly in sinking the wine in a well under the _brae_ ere he went out, and hauling up the basket just before dinner was announced--this primitive process being, he said, what he had always practised when a young housekeeper; and in his opinion far superior in its results to any application of ice; and, in the same spirit, whenever the weather was sufficiently genial, he voted for dining out of doors altogether, which at once got rid of the inconvenience of very small rooms, and made it natural and easy for the gentlemen to help the ladies, so that the paucity of servants went for nothing. Mr. Rose used to amuse himself with likening the scene and the party to the closing act of one of those little French dramas, where "Monsieur le Comte" and "Madame la Comtesse" appear feasting at a village bridal under the trees; but in truth, our "M. le Comte" was only trying to live over again for a few simple hours his own old life of Lasswade. [Footnote 133: [Among the friendly visitors at this time was Mr. Charles Young, who brought with him his son. The latter in his diary sketches, not without some vivid touches, the days spent at Abbotsford. One slight incident connected with Scott's greeting of his guests may be noted. On hearing the lad's Christian name, he exclaimed with emphasis, "Why, whom is he called after?" On being told that the name was in memory of the boy's mother, Julia Anne, he replied, "Well, it is a capital name for a novel, I must say;" a remark which Julian Young naturally recalled when _Peveril_ was published. The Youngs also visited Chiefswood, and the youthful diarist was much impressed by Lockhart's strikingly handsome face, while "his deference and attention to his father-in-law were delightful to witness."--See _Memoir of Charles Mayne Young_, pp. 88-96.]] When circumstances permitted, he usually spent one evening at least in the week at our little cottage; and almost as frequently he did the like with the Fergusons, to whose table he could bring chance visitors, when he pleased, with equal freedom as to his daughter's. Indeed it seemed to be much a matter of chance, any fine day when there had been no alarming invasion of the Southron, whether the three families (which, in fact, made but one) should dine at Abbotsford, Huntly Burn, or at Chiefswood; and at none of them was the party considered quite complete, unless it included also Mr. Laidlaw. Death has laid a heavy hand upon that circle--as happy a circle I believe as ever met. Bright eyes now closed in dust, gay voices forever silenced, seem to haunt me as I write. With three exceptions, they are all gone. Even since the last of these volumes[134] was finished, she whom I may now sadly record as, next to Sir Walter himself, the chief ornament and delight at all those simple meetings--she to whose love I owed my own place in them--Scott's eldest daughter, the one of all his children who in countenance, mind, and manners, most resembled himself, and who indeed was as like him in all things as a gentle innocent woman can ever be to a great man deeply tried and skilled in the struggles and perplexities of active life--she, too, is no more. And in the very hour that saw her laid in her grave, the only other female survivor, her dearest friend Margaret Ferguson, breathed her last also.--But enough--and more than I intended--I must resume the story of Abbotsford. [Footnote 134: The 4th vol. of the original edition was published in July--the 5th (of which this was the sixth chapter) in October, 1837.] During several weeks of that delightful summer, Scott had under his roof Mr. William Erskine and two of his daughters; this being, I believe, their first visit to Tweedside since the death of Mrs. Erskine in September, 1819. He had probably made a point of having his friend with him at this particular time, because he was desirous of having the benefit of his advice and corrections from day to day as he advanced in the composition of The Pirate--with the localities of which romance the Sheriff of Orkney and Zetland was of course thoroughly familiar. At all events, the constant and eager delight with which Erskine watched the progress of the tale has left a deep impression on my memory; and indeed I heard so many of its chapters first read from the MS. by him, that I can never open the book now without thinking I hear his voice. Sir Walter used to give him at breakfast the pages he had written that morning; and very commonly, while he was again at work in his study, Erskine would walk over to Chiefswood, that he might have the pleasure of reading them aloud to my wife and me under our favorite tree, before the packet had to be sealed up for the printer, or rather for the transcriber in Edinburgh. I cannot paint the delight and the pride with which he acquitted himself on such occasions. The little artifice of his manner was merely superficial, and was wholly forgotten as tender affection and admiration, fresh as the impulses of childhood, glistened in his eye, and trembled in his voice. This reminds me that I have not yet attempted any sketch of the person and manners of Scott's most intimate friend. Their case was no contradiction to the old saying, that the most attached comrades are often very unlike each other in character and temperament. The mere physical contrast was as strong as could well be, and this is not unworthy of notice here; for Erskine was, I think, the only man in whose society Scott took great pleasure, during the more vigorous part of his life, that had neither constitution nor inclination for any of the rough bodily exercises in which he himself delighted. The Counsellor (as Scott always called him) was a little man of feeble make, who seemed unhappy when his pony got beyond a footpace, and had never, I should suppose, addicted himself to any out-of-doors sport whatever. He would, I fancy, have as soon thought of slaying his own mutton as of handling a fowling-piece: he used to shudder when he saw a party equipped for coursing, as if murder were in the wind; but the cool meditative angler was in his eyes the abomination of abominations. His small elegant features, hectic cheek, and soft hazel eyes, were the index of the quick sensitive gentle spirit within. He had the warm heart of a woman, her generous enthusiasm, and some of her weaknesses. A beautiful landscape, or a fine strain of music, would send the tears rolling down his cheek; and though capable, I have no doubt, of exhibiting, had his duty called him to do so, the highest spirit of a hero or a martyr, he had very little command over his nerves amidst circumstances such as men of ordinary mould (to say nothing of iron fabrics like Scott's) regard with indifference. He would dismount to lead his horse down what his friend hardly perceived to be a descent at all; grew pale at a precipice; and, unlike the White Lady of Avenel, would go a long way round for a bridge. Erskine had as yet been rather unfortunate in his professional career, and thought a sheriffship by no means the kind of advancement due to his merits, and which his connections might naturally have secured for him. These circumstances had at the time when I first observed him tinged his demeanor; he had come to intermingle a certain wayward snappishness now and then with his forensic exhibitions, and in private seemed inclined (though altogether incapable of abandoning the Tory party) to say bitter things of people in high places; but with these exceptions, never was benevolence towards all the human race more lively and overflowing than his evidently was, even when he considered himself as one who had reason to complain of his luck in the world. Now, however, these little asperities had disappeared; one great real grief had cast its shadow over him, and submissive to the chastisement of heaven, he had no longer any thoughts for the petty misusage of mankind. Scott's apprehension was, that his ambition was extinguished with his resentment; and he was now using every endeavor, in connection with their common friend the Lord Advocate Rae, to procure for Erskine that long-coveted seat on the bench, about which the subdued widower himself had ceased to occupy his mind. By and by these views were realized to Scott's high satisfaction, and for a brief season with the happiest effect on Erskine's own spirits;--but I shall not anticipate the sequel. Meanwhile he shrunk from the collisions of general society in Edinburgh, and lived almost exclusively in his own little circle of intimates. His conversation, though somewhat precise and finical on the first impression, was rich in knowledge. His literary ambition, active and aspiring at the outset, had long before this time merged in his profound veneration for Scott; but he still read a great deal, and did so as much I believe with a view to assisting Scott by hints and suggestions, as for his own amusement. He had much of his friend's tact in extracting the picturesque from old, and, generally speaking, dull books; and in bringing out his stores he often showed a great deal of quaint humor and sly wit. Scott, on his side, respected, trusted, and loved him, much as an affectionate husband does the wife who gave him her heart in youth, and thinks his thoughts rather than her own in the evening of life; he soothed, cheered, and sustained Erskine habitually. I do not believe a more entire and perfect confidence ever subsisted than theirs was and always had been in each other; and to one who had duly observed the creeping jealousies of human nature, it might perhaps seem doubtful on which side the balance of real nobility of heart and character, as displayed in their connection at the time of which I am speaking, ought to be cast. Among the common friends of their young days, of whom they both delighted to speak--and always spoke with warm and equal affection--was the sister of their friend Cranstoun, the confidant of Scott's first unfortunate love, whom neither had now seen for a period of more than twenty years. This lady had undergone domestic afflictions more than sufficient to have crushed almost any spirit but her own. Her husband, the Count Purgstall, had died some years before this time, leaving her an only son, a youth of the most amiable disposition, and possessing abilities which, had he lived to develop them, must have secured for him a high station in the annals of genius. This hope of her eyes, the last heir of an illustrious lineage, followed his father to the tomb in the nineteenth year of his age. The desolate Countess was urged by her family in Scotland to return, after this bereavement, to her native country; but she had vowed to her son on his deathbed, that one day her dust should be mingled with his; and no argument could induce her to depart from the resolution of remaining in solitary Styria. By her desire, a valued friend of the house of Purgstall, who had been born and bred up on their estates, the celebrated Orientalist, Joseph von Hammer, compiled a little memoir of The Two Last Counts of Purgstall, which he put forth, in January, 1821, under the title of Denkmahl, or Monument; and of this work the Countess sent a copy to Sir Walter (with whom her correspondence had been during several years suspended), by the hands of her eldest brother, Mr. Henry Cranstoun, who had been visiting her in Styria, and who at this time occupied a villa within a few miles of Abbotsford. Scott's letter of acknowledgment never reached her; and indeed I doubt if it was ever despatched. He appears to have meditated a set of consolatory verses for its conclusion, and the Muse not answering his call at the moment, I suspect he had allowed the sheet, which I now transcribe, to fall aside and be lost sight of among his multifarious masses of MS. TO THE COUNTESS PURGSTALL, ETC., ETC. MY DEAR AND MUCH-VALUED FRIEND,--You cannot imagine how much I was interested and affected by receiving your token of your kind recollection, after the interval of so many years. Your brother Henry breakfasted with me yesterday, and gave me the letter and the book, which served me as a matter of much melancholy reflection for many hours. Hardly anything makes the mind recoil so much upon itself, as the being suddenly and strongly recalled to times long past, and that by the voice of one whom we have so much loved and respected. Do not think I have ever forgotten you, or the many happy days I passed in Frederick Street, in society which fate has separated so far, and for so many years. The little volume was particularly acceptable to me, as it acquainted me with many circumstances, of which distance and imperfect communication had either left me entirely ignorant, or had transmitted only inaccurate information. Alas, my dear friend, what can the utmost efforts of friendship offer you, beyond the sympathy which, however sincere, must sound like an empty compliment in the ear of affliction? God knows with what willingness I would undertake anything which might afford you the melancholy consolation of knowing how much your old and early friend interests himself in the sad event which has so deeply wounded your peace of mind. The verses, therefore, which conclude this letter, must not be weighed according to their intrinsic value, for the more inadequate they are to express the feelings they would fain convey, the more they show the author's anxious wish to do what may be grateful to you. In truth, I have long given up poetry. I have had my day with the public; and being no great believer in poetical immortality, I was very well pleased to rise a winner, without continuing the game till I was beggared of any credit I had acquired. Besides, I felt the prudence of giving way before the more forcible and powerful genius of Byron. If I were either greedy, or jealous of poetical fame--and both are strangers to my nature--I might comfort myself with the thought, that I would hesitate to strip myself to the contest so fearlessly as Byron does; or to command the wonder and terror of the public, by exhibiting, in my own person, the sublime attitude of the dying gladiator. But with the old frankness of twenty years since, I will fairly own, that this same delicacy of mine may arise more from conscious want of vigor and inferiority, than from a delicate dislike to the nature of the conflict. At any rate, there is a time for everything, and without swearing oaths to it, I think my time for poetry has gone by. My health suffered horridly last year, I think from over-labor and excitation; and though it is now apparently restored to its usual tone, yet during the long and painful disorder (spasms in the stomach) and the frightful process of cure, by a prolonged use of calomel, I learned that my frame was made of flesh, and not of iron--a conviction which I will long keep in remembrance, and avoid any occupation so laborious and agitating as poetry must be, to be worth anything. In this humor I often think of passing a few weeks on the Continent--a summer vacation if I can--and of course my attraction to Gratz would be very strong. I fear this is the only chance of our meeting in this world--we, who once saw each other daily! for I understand from George and Henry that there is little chance of your coming here. And when I look around me, and consider how many changes you would see in feature, form, and fashion, amongst all you knew and loved; and how much, no sudden squall, or violent tempest, but the slow and gradual progress of life's long voyage, has severed all the gallant fellowships whom you left spreading their sails to the morning breeze, I really am not sure that you would have much pleasure. The gay and wild romance of life is over with all of us. The real, dull, and stern history of humanity has made a far greater progress over our heads; and age, dark and unlovely, has laid his crutch over the stoutest fellow's shoulders. One thing your old society may boast, that they have all run their course with honor, and almost all with distinction; and the brother suppers of Frederick Street have certainly made a very considerable figure in the world, as was to be expected from her talents under whose auspices they were assembled. One of the most pleasant sights which you would see in Scotland, as it now stands, would be your brother George in possession of the most beautiful and romantic place in Clydesdale--Corehouse. I have promised often to go out with him, and assist him with my deep experience as a planter and landscape gardener. I promise you my oaks will outlast my laurels; and I pique myself more upon my compositions for manure than on any other compositions whatsoever to which I was ever accessary. But so much does business of one sort or other engage us both, that we never have been able to fix a time which suited us both; and with the utmost wish to make out the party, perhaps we never may. This is a melancholy letter, but it is chiefly so from the sad tone of yours--who have had such real disasters to lament--while mine is only the humorous sadness, which a retrospect on human life is sure to produce on the most prosperous. For my own course of life, I have only to be ashamed of its prosperity, and afraid of its termination; for I have little reason, arguing on the doctrine of chances, to hope that the same good fortune will attend me forever. I have had an affectionate and promising family, many friends, few unfriends, and, I think, no enemies--and more of fame and fortune than mere literature ever procured for a man before. I dwell among my own people, and have many whose happiness is dependent on me, and which I study to the best of my power. I trust my temper, which you know is by nature good and easy, has not been spoiled by flattery or prosperity; and therefore I have escaped entirely that irritability of disposition which I think is planted, like the slave in the poet's chariot, to prevent his enjoying his triumph. Should things, therefore, change with me--and in these times, or indeed in any times, such change is to be apprehended--I trust I shall be able to surrender these adventitious advantages, as I would my upper dress, as something extremely comfortable, but which I can make shift to do without.[135]... [Footnote 135: In communicating this letter to my friend Captain Hall, when he was engaged in his Account of a Visit to Madame de Purgstall during the last months of her life, I suggested to him, in consequence of an expression about Scott's health, that it must have been written in 1820. The date of the _Denkmahl_, to which it refers, is, however, sufficient evidence that I ought to have said 1821.] As I may have no occasion hereafter to allude to the early friend with whose sorrows Scott thus sympathized amidst the meridian splendors of his own worldly career, I may take this opportunity of mentioning, that Captain Basil Hall's conjecture, of her having been the original of Diana Vernon, appeared to myself from the first chimerical; and that I have since heard those who knew her best in the days of her intercourse with Sir Walter, express the same opinion in the most decided manner. But to return. While The Pirate was advancing under Mr. Erskine's eye, Scott had even more than the usual allowance of minor literary operations on hand. He edited a reprint of a curious old book, called Franck's Northern Memoir, and the Contemplative Angler; and he also prepared for the press a volume published soon after, under the title of "Chronological Notes on Scottish Affairs, 1680 to 1701, from the Diary of Lord Fountainhall." The professional writings of that celebrated old lawyer had been much in his hands from his early years, on account of the incidental light which they throw on the events of a most memorable period in Scottish history: and he seems to have contemplated some more considerable selection from his remains, but to have dropped these intentions, on being given to understand that they might interfere with those of Lord Fountainhall's accomplished representative, the present Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Baronet. It is, however, to be regretted that Sir Thomas's promise of a Life of his eminent ancestor has not yet been redeemed. In August appeared the volume of the Novelists' Library containing Scott's Life of Smollett; and it being now ascertained that John Ballantyne had died a debtor, the editor offered to proceed with this series of prefaces, on the footing that the whole profits of the work should go to his widow. Mr. Constable, whose health was now beginning to break, had gone southwards in quest of more genial air, and was at Hastings when he heard of this proposition. He immediately wrote to me, entreating me to represent to Sir Walter that the undertaking, having been coldly received at first, was unlikely to grow in favor if continued on the same plan--that in his opinion the bulk of the volumes, and the small type of their text, had been unwisely chosen, for a work of mere entertainment, and could only be suitable for one of reference; that Ballantyne's Novelists' Library, therefore, ought to be stopped at once, and another in a lighter shape, to range with the late collected edition of the first series of the Waverley Romances, announced with his own name as publisher, and Scott's as editor. He proposed at the same time to commence the issue of a Select Library of English Poetry, with prefaces and a few notes by the same hand; and calculating that each of these collections should extend to twenty-five volumes, and that the publication of both might be concluded within two years--"the writing of the prefaces, etc., forming perhaps an occasional relief from more important labors"!--the bookseller offered to pay their editor in all the sum of £6000: a small portion of which sum, as he hinted, would undoubtedly be more than Mrs. John Ballantyne could ever hope to derive from the prosecution of her husband's last publishing adventure. Various causes combined to prevent the realization of these magnificent projects. Scott now, as at the beginning of his career of speculation, had views about what a collection of English Poetry should be, in which even Constable could not, on consideration, be made to concur; and I have already explained the coldness with which he regarded further attempts upon our Elder Novelists. The Ballantyne Library crept on to the tenth volume, and was then dropped abruptly; and the double negotiation with Constable was never renewed. Lady Louisa Stuart had not, I fancy, read Scott's Lives of the Novelists until, some years after this time, they were collected into two little piratical duodecimos by a Parisian bookseller; and on her then expressing her admiration of them, together with her astonishment that the speculation of which they formed a part should have attracted little notice of any sort, he answered as follows: "I am delighted they afford any entertainment, for they are rather flimsily written, being done merely to oblige a friend: they were yoked to a great, ill-conditioned, lubberly, double-columned book, which they were as useful to tug along as a set of fleas would be to draw a mail-coach. It is very difficult to answer your Ladyship's curious question concerning change of taste; but whether in young or old, it takes place insensibly without the parties being aware of it.[136] A grand-aunt of my own, Mrs. Keith of Ravelston,--who was a person of some condition, being a daughter of Sir John Swinton of Swinton,--lived with unabated vigor of intellect to a very advanced age. She was very fond of reading, and enjoyed it to the last of her long life. One day she asked me, when we happened to be alone together, whether I had ever seen Mrs. Behn's novels?--I confessed the charge.--Whether I could get her a sight of them?--I said, with some hesitation, I believed I could; but that I did not think she would like either the manners, or the language, which approached too near that of Charles II.'s time to be quite proper reading. 'Nevertheless,' said the good old lady, 'I remember them being so much admired, and being so much interested in them myself, that I wish to look at them again.' To hear was to obey. So I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with 'private and confidential' on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt. The next time I saw her afterwards, she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with nearly these words: 'Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn; and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not,' she said, 'a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London?' This, of course, was owing to the gradual improvement of the national taste and delicacy. The change that brings into and throws out of fashion particular styles of composition, is something of the same kind. It does not signify what the greater or less merit of the book is;--the reader, as Tony Lumpkin says, must be in a concatenation accordingly--the fashion, or the general taste, must have prepared him to be pleased, or put him on his guard against it. It is much like dress. If Clarissa should appear before a modern party in her lace ruffles and head-dress, or Lovelace in his wig, however genteelly powdered, I am afraid they would make no conquests; the fashion which makes conquests of us in other respects, is very powerful in literary composition, and adds to the effect of some works, while in others it forms their sole merit." [Footnote 136: [Lady Louisa in her letter, written in 1826, after speaking of the delight which the _Lives_ had given to some of her friends, tells of their being induced, by something said of Mackenzie, to read aloud _The Man of Feeling_. The experiment failed sadly, the (supposedly) finest touches only causing laughter. And yet the writer could remember when the book had been read with rapture and many tears. In her girlhood the _Nouvelle Héloïse_ was the prohibited book which all young persons longed to read. Now she finds that if it falls in their way, it interests them not at all. So she propounds the question which Sir Walter tries to answer.--See _Selections from the Manuscripts of Lady Louisa Stuart_, pp. 233-236.]] Among other miscellaneous work of this autumn, Scott amused some leisure hours with writing a series of Private Letters, supposed to have been discovered in the repositories of a Noble English Family, and giving a picture of manners in town and country during the early part of the reign of James I. These letters were printed as fast as he penned them, in a handsome quarto form, and he furnished the margin with a running commentary of notes, drawn up in the character of a disappointed chaplain, a keen Whig, or rather Radical, overflowing on all occasions with spleen against Monarchy and Aristocracy. When the printing had reached the 72d page, however, he was told candidly by Erskine, by James Ballantyne, and also by myself, that, however clever his imitation of the epistolary style of the period in question, he was throwing away in these letters the materials of as good a romance as he had ever penned; and a few days afterwards he said to me--patting Sibyl's neck till she danced under him,--"You were all quite right: if the letters had passed for genuine they would have found favor only with a few musty antiquaries, and if the joke were detected, there was not story enough to carry it off. I shall burn the sheets, and give you Bonny King Jamie and all his tail in the old shape, as soon as I can get Captain Goffe within view of the gallows." Such was the origin of The Fortunes of Nigel. As one set of the uncompleted Letters has been preserved, I shall here insert a specimen of them, in which the reader will easily recognize the germ of more than one scene of the novel.[137] [Footnote 137: [Two of Sir Walter's friends were to assist him in these _Private Letters_. On June 16 he writes to Mr. Morritt: "Pray, my good Lord of Rokeby, be my very gracious good lord, and think of our pirated letters. It will be an admirable amusement for you, and I hold you accountable for two or three academical epistles of the period, full of thumping quotations of Greek and Latin in order to explain what needs no explanation, and fortify sentiments which are indisputable." In another letter, one of his last, written to Lockhart from Naples in the spring of 1832, Scott says: "You may remember a work in which our dear and accomplished friend, Lady Louisa, condescended to take an oar, and which she handled most admirably. It is a supposed set of extracts ... from a collection in James VI.'s time, the costume admirably preserved, and like the fashionable wigs more natural than one's own hair."--_Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 120, and _Journal_, vol. ii. p. 473.]] JENKIN HARMAN TO THE LORD ----. MY LORD,--Towching this new mishappe of Sir Thomas, whereof your Lordshippe makes querie of me, I wolde hartilie that I could, truth and my bounden dutie alweys firste satisfied, make suche answer as were fullie pleasaunte to me to write, or unto your Lordshippe to reade. But what remedy? young men will have stirring bloodes; and the courtier-like gallants of the time will be gamesome and dangerous, as they have beene in dayes past. I think your Lordshippe is so wise as to caste one eye backe to your own more juvenile time, whilest you looke forward with the other upon this mischaunce, which, upon my lyfe, will be founde to be no otherwise harmful to Sir Thomas than as it shews him an hastie Hotspur of the day, suddenlie checking at whatsoever may seem to smirche his honour. As I am a trew man, and your Lordship's poore kinsman and bounden servant, I think ther lives not a gentleman more trew to his friende than Sir Thomas; and although ye be but brothers uterine, yet so dearly doth he holde your favour, that his father, were the gode knight alyve, should not have more swaye with him than shalle your Lordship; and, also, it is no kindly part to sow discord betwene brethrene; for, as the holy Psalmist saythe, "_Ecce quam bonum et quam jucundum habitare fratres_," etc. And moreover, it needes not to tell your Lordshippe that Sir Thomas is suddene in his anger; and it was but on Wednesday last that he said to me, with moche distemperature,--Master Jenkin, I be tolde that ye meddle and make betwene me and my Lorde my brother; wherfore, take this for feyr warninge, that when I shall fynde you so dooyng, I will incontinent put my dager to the hilte in you:--and this was spoken with all earnestness of visage and actioun, grasping of his poinard's handle, as one who wolde presentlie make his words good. Surely, my Lord, it is not fair carriage toward you pore kinsman if anie out of your house make such reports of me, and of that which I have written to you in sympleness of herte, and in obedience to your commandemente, which is my law on this matter. Truely, my Lord, I wolde this was well looked to, otherweys my rewarde for trew service might be to handsell with my herte's blode the steel of a Milan poignado. Natheless, I will procede with my mater, fal back fal edge, trustyng all utterly in the singleness of my integretie, and in your Lordshippe's discretioun. My Lorde, the braule which hath befallen chaunced this waye, and not otherwise. It hap'd that one Raines, the master of the ordinarie where his honour Sir Thomas eteth well nie dailie (when he is not in attendance at courte, wherein he is perchance more slacke than were wise), shoulde assemble some of the beste who haunte his house, havyng diet ther for money. The purpose, as shewn forthe, was to tast a new piece of choice wyne, and ther Sir Thomas must nedes be, or the purpos holdes not, and the Alicant becometh Bastard. Wel, my Lord, dice ther wer and music, lustie helthes and dizzie braines,--some saye fair ladyes also, of which I know nought, save that suche cockatrices hatch wher such cockes of the game do haunt. Alweys ther was revel and wassail enow and to spare. Now it chaunced, that whilst one Dutton, of Graie's-Inn, an Essex man, held the dice, Sir Thomas fillethe a fulle carouse to the helth of the fair Ladie Elizabeth. Trulie, my Lord, I cannot blame his devotioun to so fair a saint, though I may wish the chapel for his adoration had been better chosen, and the companie more suitable; _sed respice finem_. The pledge being given, and alle men on foote, aye, and some on knee, to drink the same, young Philip Darcy, a near kinsman of my Lorde's, or so callyng himself, takes on him to check at the helthe, askyng Sir Thomas if he were willinge to drink the same in a Venetian glasse? the mening of whiche hard sentence your Lordshippe shal esilie construe. Whereupon Sir Thomas, your Lordshippe's brother, somewhat shrewishly demanded whether that were his game or his earnest; to which demaunde the uther answers recklessly as he that wolde not be brow-beaten, that Sir Thomas might take it for game or ernest as him listed. Whereupon your Lordshippe's brother, throwing down withal the woodcocke's bill, with which, as the fashioun goes, he was picking his teeth, answered redily, he cared not that for his game or ernest, for that neither were worth a bean. A small matter this to make such a storie, for presentlie young Darcie up with the wine-pot in which they had assaid the freshe hogshede, and heveth it at Sir Thomas, which vessel missing of the mark it was aym'd at, encountreth the hede of Master Dutton, when the outside of the flaggon did that which peradventure the inside had accomplish'd somewhat later in the evening, and stretcheth him on the flore; and then the crie arose, and you might see twenty swords oute at once, and none rightly knowing wherfor. And the groomes and valets, who waited in the street and in the kitchen, and who, as seldom failes, had been as besy with the beer as their masters with the wine, presentlie fell at odds, and betoke themselves to their weapones; so ther was bouncing of bucklers, and bandying of blades, instede of clattering of quart pottles, and chiming of harpis and fiddles. At length comes the wache, and, as oft happens in the like affraies, alle men join ageynst them, and they are beten bak: An honest man, David Booth, constable of the night, and a chandler by trade, is sorely hurt. The crie rises of Prentices, prentices, Clubs, clubs, for word went that the court-gallants and the Graie's-Inn men had murther'd a citizen; all mene take the street, and the whole ward is uppe, none well knowing why. Menewhile our gallants had the lucke and sense to disperse their company, some getting them into the Temple, the gates wherof were presentlie shut to prevent pursuite I warrant, and some taking boat as they might; water thus saving whom wyne hath endaunger'd. The Alderman of the ward, worthy Master Danvelt, with Master Deputy, and others of repute, bestow'd themselves not a litel to compose the tumult, and so al past over for the evening. My Lord, this is the hole of the mater, so far as my earnest and anxious serch had therein, as well for the sake of my blode-relation to your honourable house, as frome affectioun to my kinsman Sir Thomas, and especiallie in humble obedience to your regarded commandes. As for other offence given by Sir Thomas, whereof idle bruites are current, as that he should have call'd Master Darcie a codshead or an woodcocke, I can lerne of no such termes, nor any nere to them, only that when he said he cared not for his game or ernest, he flung down the woodcock's bill, to which it may be there was sticking a part of the head, though my informant saithe otherwise; and he stode so close by Sir Thomas, that he herde the quart-pot whissel as it flew betwixt there too hedes. Of damage done among the better sort, there is not muche; some cuts and thrusts ther wer, that had their sequents in blood and woundes, but none dedlie. Of the rascal sort, one fellowe is kill'd, and sundrie hurt. Hob Hilton, your brother's grome, for life a maymed man, having a slash over the right hande, for faulte of a gauntlet.--Marry he has been a brave knave and a sturdie: and if it pleses your goode Lordshippe, I fynd he wolde gladlie be preferr'd when tym is fitting, to the office of bedle. He hath a burlie frame, and scare-babe visage; he shall do wel enoughe in such charge, though lackyng the use of four fingers.[138] The hurtyng of the constabel is a worse matter; as also the anger that is between the courtiers and Graie's-Inn men; so that yf close hede be not given, I doubt me we shall here of more _Gesto Graiorum_. Thei will not be persuaded but that the quarrel betwixt Sir Thomas and young Darcie was simulate; and that Master Button's hurte wes wilful; whereas, on my lyfe, it will not be founde so. The counseyl hath taen the matter up, and I here H. M. spoke many things gravely and solidly, and as one who taketh to hert such unhappie chaunces, both against brauling and drinking. Sir Thomas, with others, hath put in plegge to be forthcoming; and so strictly taken up was the unhappie mater of the Scots Lord,[139] that if Booth shulde die, which God forefend, there might be a fereful reckoning: For one cityzen sayeth, I trust falslie, he saw Sir Thomas draw back his hand, having in it a drawn sword, just as the constabel felle. It seems but too constant, that thei were within but short space of ech other when his unhappy chaunce befel. My Lord, it is not for me to saie what course your Lordshippe should steer in this storm, onlie that the Lord Chansellour's gode worde wil, as resen is, do yeoman's service. Schulde it come to fine or imprisonment, as is to be fered, why should not your Lordshippe cast the weyght into the balance for that restraint which goode Sir Thomas must nedes bear himself, rather than for such penalty as must nedes pinche the purses of his frendes. Your Lordship always knoweth best; but surely the yonge knyght hath but litel reson to expect that you shulde further engage yourself in such bondes as might be necessary to bring this fine unto the Chequer. Nether have wise men helde it unfit that heated bloode be coold by sequestration for a space from temptation. There is dout, moreover, whether he may not hold himself bounden, according to the forme of faythe which such gallants and stirring spirits profess, to have further meeting with Master Philip Darcie, or this same Dutton, or with bothe, on this rare dependence of an woodcocke's hede, and a quart-pot; certeynly, methoughte, the last tym we met, and when he bare himself towards me, as I have premonish'd your Lordshippe, that he was fitter for quiet residence under safe keeping, than for a free walk amongst peceful men. And thus, my Lord, ye have the whole mater before you; trew ye shall find it,--my dutie demands it,--unpleasing, I cannot amende it: But I truste neither more evil _in esse_ nor _in posse_, than I have set forth as above. From one who is ever your Lordshippe's most bounden to command, etc.--J. H. [Footnote 138: "The death of the _rascal_ sort is mentioned as he would have commemorated that of a dog; and his readiest plan of providing for a profligate menial, is to place him in superintendence of the unhappy poor, over whom his fierce looks and rough demeanor are to supply the means of authority, which his arm can no longer enforce by actual violence!"] [Footnote 139: "Perhaps the case of Lord Sanquhar. His Lordship had the misfortune to be hanged, for causing a poor fencing-master to be assassinated, which seems the unhappy matter alluded to."] I think it must have been about the middle of October that he dropped the scheme of this fictitious correspondence. I well remember the morning that he began The Fortunes of Nigel. The day being destined for Newark Hill, I went over to Abbotsford before breakfast, and found Mr. Terry (who had been staying there for some time) walking about with his friend's master-mason (John Smith), of whose proceedings he took a fatherly charge, as he might well do, since the plan of the building had been in a considerable measure the work of his own taste. While Terry and I were chatting, Scott came out, bare-headed, with a bunch of MS. in his hand, and said, "Well, lads, I've laid the keel of a new lugger this morning--here it is--be off to the waterside, and let me hear how you like it." Terry took the papers, and walking up and down by the river, read to me the first chapter of Nigel. He expressed great delight with the animated opening, and especially with the contrast between its thorough stir of London life, and a chapter about Norna of the Fitful-head, in the third volume of The Pirate, which had been given to him in a similar manner the morning before. I could see that (according to the Sheriff's phrase) _he smelt roast meat_; here there was every prospect of a fine field for the art of _Terryfication_. The actor, when our host met us returning from the haugh, did not fail to express his opinion that the new novel would be of this quality. Sir Walter, as he took the MS. from his hand, eyed him with a gay smile, in which genuine benevolence mingled with mock exultation, and then throwing himself into an attitude of comical dignity, he rolled out, in the tones of John Kemble, one of the loftiest bursts of Ben Jonson's Mammon:-- "Come on, sir. Now you set your foot on shore In _Novo orbe_-- ----------------Pertinax, my Surly,[140] Again I say to thee aloud, Be rich, This day thou shalt have ingots." [Footnote 140: The fun of this application of "my Surly" will not escape any one who remembers the kind and good-humored Terry's power of assuming a peculiarly saturnine aspect. This queer grimness of look was invaluable to the comedian in several of his best parts; and in private he often called it up when his heart was most cheerful.] This was another period of "refreshing the machine." Early in November, I find Sir Walter writing thus to Constable's partner, Mr. Cadell: "I want two books, Malcolm's London Redivivus, or some such name, and Derham's Artificial Clock-maker." [The reader of Nigel will understand these requests.] "All good luck to you, commercially and otherwise. I am grown a shabby letter-writer, for my eyes are not so young as they were, and I grudge everything that does not go to press." Such a feeling must often have been present with him; yet I can find no period when he grudged writing a letter that might by possibility be of use to any of his family or friends, and I must quote one of the many which about this very time reached his second son. TO MR. CHARLES SCOTT. _Care of the Rev. Mr. Williams, Lampeter._ 21st November, 1821. MY DEAR CHARLES,--I had the pleasure of your letter two days since, being the first symptom of your being alive and well which I have had _directly_ since you left Abbotsford. I beg you will be more frequent in your communications, which must always be desirable when you are at such a distance. I am very glad to hear you are attending closely to make up lost time. Sport is a good thing both for health and pastime; but you must never allow it to interfere with serious study. You have, my dear boy, your own fortune to make, with better assistance of every kind than I had when the world first opened on me; and I assure you that had I not given some attention to learning (I have often regretted that, from want of opportunity, indifferent health, and some indolence, I did not do all I might have done), my own situation, and the advantages which I may be able to procure for you, would have been very much bounded. Consider, therefore, study as the principal object. Many men have read and written their way to independence and fame; but no man ever gained it by exclusive attention to exercises or to pleasures of any sort. You do not say anything of your friend Mr. Surtees,[141] who I hope is well. We all remember him with much affection, and should be sorry to think we were forgotten. Our Abbotsford Hunt went off extremely well. We killed seven hares, I think, and our dogs behaved very well. A large party dined, and we sat down about twenty-five at table. Every gentleman present sung a song, _tant bien que mal_, excepting Walter, Lockhart, and I myself. I believe I should add the melancholy Jaques, Mr. Waugh, who, on this occasion, however, was not melancholy.[142] In short, we had a very merry and sociable party. There is, I think, no news here. The hedger, Captain Davidson,[143] has had a bad accident, and injured his leg much by the fall of a large stone. I am very anxious about him as a faithful and honest servant. Every one else at Abbotsford, horses and dogs included, are in great preservation. You ask me about reading history. You are quite right to read Clarendon--his style is a little long-winded; but, on the other hand, his characters may match those of the ancient historians, and one thinks they would know the very men if you were to meet them in society. Few English writers have the same precision, either in describing the actors in great scenes, or the deeds which they performed. He was, you are aware, himself deeply engaged in the scenes which he depicts, and therefore colors them with the individual feeling, and sometimes, doubtless, with the partiality of a partisan. Yet I think he is, on the whole, a fair writer; for though he always endeavors to excuse King Charles, yet he points out his mistakes and errors, which certainly are neither few nor of slight consequence. Some of his history regards the country in which you are now a resident; and you will find that much of the fate of that Great Civil War turned on the successful resistance made by the city of Gloucester, and the relief of that place by the Earl of Essex, by means of the trained bands of London,--a sort of force resembling our local militia or volunteers. They are the subject of ridicule in all the plays and poems of the time; yet the sort of practice of arms which they had acquired, enabled them to withstand the charge of Prince Rupert and his gallant cavalry, who were then foiled for the first time. Read, my dear Charles, read, and read that which is useful. Man only differs from birds and beasts, because he has the means of availing himself of the knowledge acquired by his predecessors. The swallow builds the same nest which its father and mother built; and the sparrow does not improve by the experience of its parents. The son of the learned pig, if it had one, would be a mere brute, fit only to make bacon of. It is not so with the human race. Our ancestors lodged in caves and wigwams, where we construct palaces for the rich, and comfortable dwellings for the poor; and why is this--but because our eye is enabled to look back upon the past, to improve upon our ancestors' improvements, and to avoid their errors? This can only be done by studying history, and comparing it with passing events. God has given you a strong memory, and the power of understanding that which you give your mind to with attention--but all the advantage to be derived from these qualities must depend on your own determination to avail yourself of them, and improve them to the uttermost. That you should do so, will be the greatest satisfaction I can receive in my advanced life, and when my thoughts must be entirely turned on the success of my children. Write to me more frequently, and mention your studies particularly, and I will on my side be a good correspondent. I beg my compliments to Mr. and Mrs. Williams. I have left no room to sign myself your affectionate father, W. S. [Footnote 141: Mr. Villiers Surtees, a schoolfellow of Charles Scott's at Lampeter, had spent the vacation of this year at Abbotsford. He is now one of the Supreme Judges at the Mauritius.] [Footnote 142: Mr. Waugh was a retired West Indian, of very dolorous aspect, who had settled at Melrose, built a large house there, surrounded it and his garden with a huge wall, and seldom emerged from his own precincts except upon the grand occasion of the Abbotsford Hunt. The villagers called him "the Melancholy Man"--and considered him as already "dreein' his dole for doings amang the poor niggers."] [Footnote 143: This hedger had got the title of Captain, in memory of his gallantry at some _row_.] To return to business and Messrs. Constable.--Sir Walter concluded, before he went to town in November, another negotiation of importance with this house. They agreed to give for the remaining copyright of the four novels published between December, 1819, and January, 1821--to wit, Ivanhoe, The Monastery, The Abbot, and Kenilworth--the sum of five thousand guineas. The stipulation about not revealing the author's name, under a penalty of £2000, was repeated. By these four novels, the fruits of scarcely more than twelve months' labor, he had already cleared at least £10,000 before this bargain was completed. They, like their predecessors, were now issued in a collective shape, under the title of "Historical Romances, by the Author of Waverley." I cannot pretend to guess what the actual state of Scott's pecuniary affairs was at the time when John Ballantyne's death relieved them from one great source of complication and difficulty. But I have said enough to satisfy every reader, that when he began the second, and far the larger division of his building at Abbotsford, he must have contemplated the utmost sum it could cost him as a mere trifle in relation to the resources at his command. He must have reckoned on clearing £30,000 at least in the course of a couple of years by the novels written within such a period. The publisher of his Tales, who best knew how they were produced, and what they brought of gross profit, and who must have had the strongest interest in keeping the author's name untarnished by any risk or reputation of failure, would willingly, as we have seen, have given him £6000 more within a space of two years for works of a less serious sort, likely to be despatched at leisure hours, without at all interfering with the main manufacture. But alas, even this was not all. Messrs. Constable had such faith in the prospective fertility of his imagination, that they were by this time quite ready to sign bargains and grant bills for novels and romances to be produced hereafter, but of which the subjects and the names were alike unknown to them and to the man from whose pen they were to proceed.[144] A forgotten satirist well says,-- "The active principle within Works on some brains the effect of gin;" but in his case, every external influence combined to stir the flame, and swell the intoxication of restless exuberant energy. His allies knew, indeed, what he did not, that the sale of his novels was rather less than it had been in the days of Ivanhoe; and hints had sometimes been dropped to him that it might be well to try the effect of a pause. But he always thought--and James Ballantyne had decidedly the same opinion--that his best things were those which he threw off the most easily and swiftly; and it was no wonder that his booksellers, seeing how immeasurably even his worst excelled in popularity, as in merit, any other person's best, should have shrunk from the experiment of a decisive damper. On the contrary, they might be excused for from time to time flattering themselves that if the books sold at a less rate, this might be counterpoised by still greater rapidity of production. They could not make up their minds to cast the peerless vessel adrift; and, in short, after every little whisper of prudential misgiving, echoed the unfailing burden of Ballantyne's song--to push on, hoisting more and more sail as the wind lulled. [Footnote 144: Mr. Cadell says: "This device for raising the wind was the only real legacy left by John Ballantyne to his generous friend; it was invented to make up for the bad book stock of the Hanover Street concern, which supplied so much good money for the passing hour."--(1848.)] He was as eager to do as they could be to suggest--and this I well knew at the time. I had, however, no notion, until all his correspondence lay before me, of the extent to which he had permitted himself thus early to build on the chances of life, health, and continued popularity. Before The Fortunes of Nigel issued from the press, Scott had exchanged instruments, and received his bookseller's bills, for no less than four "works of fiction"--not one of them otherwise described in the deeds of agreement--to be produced in unbroken succession, each of them to fill at least three volumes, but with proper saving clauses as to increase of copy-money, in case any of them should run to four. And within two years all this anticipation had been wiped off by Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, St. Ronan's Well, and Redgauntlet; and the new castle was by that time complete, and overflowing with all its splendor; but by that time the end also was approaching! The splendid romance of The Pirate was published in the beginning of December, 1821; and the wild freshness of its atmosphere, the beautiful contrast of Minna and Brenda, and the exquisitely drawn character of Captain Cleveland, found the reception which they deserved. The work was analyzed with remarkable care in the Quarterly Review, by a critic second to few, either in the manly heartiness of his sympathy with the felicities of genius, or in the honest acuteness of his censure in cases of negligence and confusion. This was the second of a series of articles in that Journal, conceived and executed in a tone widely different from those given to Waverley, Guy Mannering, and The Antiquary. I fancy Mr. Gifford had become convinced that he had made a grievous mistake in this matter, before he acquiesced in Scott's proposal about "quartering the child" in January, 1816; and if he was fortunate in finding a contributor able and willing to treat the rest of Father Jedediah's progeny with excellent skill, and in a spirit more accordant with the just and general sentiments of the public, we must also recognize a pleasing and honorable trait of character in the frankness with which the recluse and often despotic editor now delegated the pen to Mr. Senior. On the 13th December, Sir Walter received a copy of Cain, as yet unpublished, from Lord Byron's bookseller, who had been instructed to ask whether he had any objection to having the "Mystery" dedicated to him. He replied in these words:-- TO JOHN MURRAY, ESQ., ALBEMARLE STREET, LONDON. EDINBURGH, 17th December, 1821. MY DEAR SIR,--I accept with feelings of great obligation the flattering proposal of Lord Byron to prefix my name to the very grand and tremendous drama of Cain. I may be partial to it, and you will allow I have cause; but I do not know that his Muse has ever taken so lofty a flight amid her former soarings. He has certainly matched Milton on his own ground. Some part of the language is bold, and may shock one class of readers, whose tone will be adopted by others out of affectation or envy. But then they must condemn the Paradise Lost, if they have a mind to be consistent. The fiendlike reasoning and bold blasphemy of the fiend and of his pupil lead exactly to the point which was to be expected--the commission of the first murder, and the ruin and despair of the perpetrator. I do not see how any one can accuse the author himself of Manichæism. The devil takes the language of that sect, doubtless; because, not being able to deny the existence of the Good Principle, he endeavors to exalt himself--the Evil Principle--to a seeming equality with the Good; but such arguments, in the mouth of such a being, can only be used to deceive and to betray. Lord Byron might have made this more evident, by placing in the mouth of Adam, or of some good and protecting spirit, the reasons which render the existence of moral evil consistent with the general benevolence of the Deity. The great key to the mystery is, perhaps, the imperfection of our own faculties, which see and feel strongly the partial evils which press upon us, but know too little of the general system of the universe, to be aware how the existence of these is to be reconciled with the benevolence of the great Creator.--Ever yours truly, WALTER SCOTT. In some preceding narratives of Sir Walter Scott's Life, I find the principal feature for 1821 to be an affair of which I have as yet said nothing; and which, notwithstanding the examples I have before me, I must be excused for treating on a scale commensurate with his real share and interest therein. I allude to an unfortunate newspaper, by name The Beacon, which began to be published in Edinburgh in January, 1821, and was abruptly discontinued in the August of the same year. It originated in the alarm with which the Edinburgh Tories contemplated the progress of Radical doctrines during the agitation of the Queen's business in 1820--and the want of any adequate counteraction on the part of the Ministerial newspapers in the north. James Ballantyne had on that occasion swerved from his banner--and by so doing given not a little offence to Scott. He approved, therefore, of the project of a new Weekly Journal, to be conducted by some steadier hand;[145] and when it was proposed to raise the requisite capital for the speculation by private subscription, expressed his willingness to contribute whatever sum should be named by other gentlemen of his standing. This was accepted of course; but every part of the advice with which the only man in the whole conclave that understood a jot about such things coupled his tender of alliance, was departed from in practice. No experienced and responsible editor of the sort he pointed out as indispensable was secured; the violence of disaffected spleen was encountered by a vein of satire which seemed more fierce than frolicsome; the Law Officers of the Crown, whom he had most strenuously cautioned against any participation in the concern, were rash enough to commit themselves in it; the subscribers, like true Scotchmen, in place of paying down their money, and thinking no more of that part of the matter, chose to put their names to a bond of security on which the sum-total was to be advanced by bankers; and thus, by their own over-caution as to a few pounds, laid the foundation for a long train of humiliating distresses and disgraces; and finally, when the rude drollery of the young hot bloods to whom they had entrusted the editorship of their paper, produced its natural consequences, and the ferment of Whig indignation began to boil over upon the dignified patrons of what was denounced as a systematic scheme of calumny and defamation--these seniors shrunk from the dilemma as rashly as they had plunged into it, and instead of compelling the juvenile allies to adopt a more prudent course, and gradually give the journal a tone worthy of open approbation, they, at the first blush of personal difficulty, left their instruments in the lurch, and, without even consulting Scott, ordered the Beacon to be extinguished at an hour's notice. [Footnote 145: It has been asserted, since this work first appeared, that the editorship of the proposed journal was offered to Ballantyne, and declined by him. If so, he had no doubt found the offer accompanied with a requisition of political pledges, which he could not grant.--(1839.)] A more pitiable mass of blunder and imbecility was never heaped together than the whole of this affair exhibited; and from a very early period Scott was so disgusted with it, that he never even saw the newspaper, of which Whigs and Radicals believed, or affected to believe, that the conduct and management were in some degree at least under his dictation. The results were lamentable: the Beacon was made the subject of Parliamentary discussion, from which the then heads of Scotch Toryism did not escape in any very consolatory plight; but above all, the Beacon bequeathed its rancor and rashness, though not its ability, to a Glasgow paper of similar form and pretensions, entitled The Sentinel. By that organ the personal quarrels of the Beacon were taken up and pursued with relentless industry; and finally, the Glasgow editors disagreeing, some moment of angry confusion betrayed a box of MSS., by which the late Sir Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck was revealed as the writer of certain truculent enough pasquinades. A leading Edinburgh Whig, who had been pilloried in one or more of these, challenged Boswell--and the Baronet fell in as miserable a quarrel as ever cost the blood of a high-spirited gentleman.[146] This tragedy occurred in the early part of 1822; and soon afterwards followed those debates on the whole business in the House of Commons, for which, if any reader feels curiosity about them, I refer him to the Parliamentary Histories of the time. A single extract from one of Scott's letters to a member of the then Government in London will be sufficient for my purpose; and abundantly confirm what I have said as to his personal part in the affairs of the Beacon:-- [Footnote 146: [James Stuart of Dunearn was Boswell's opponent. Lockhart in writing to Scott of Sir Alexander's death [March 27] adds: "I hope I need not say how cordially I enter into the hope you express, that this bloody lesson may be a sufficient and lasting one. I can never be sufficiently grateful for the advice which kept me from having any hand in all these newspaper skirmishes. Wilson also is totally free from any concern in any of them, and for this I am sure he also feels himself chiefly indebted to your counsel."--_Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 137. Stuart's trial took place on June 10, and his acquittal was hailed as a triumph by the Whigs. Lord Cockburn was one of Stuart's counsel, and in his _Memorials_, pp. 392-399, will be found an account of the affair, as viewed by a distinguished member of that party.]] TO J. W. CROKER, ESQ., ADMIRALTY. MY DEAR CROKER,--... I had the fate of Cassandra in the Beacon matter from beginning to end. I endeavored in vain to impress on them the necessity of having an editor who was really up to the business, and could mix spirit with discretion--one of those "gentlemen of the press," who understand the exact lengths to which they can go in their vocation. Then I wished them, in place of that _Bond_, to have each thrown down his hundred pounds, and never inquired more about it--and lastly, I exclaimed against the Crown Counsel being at all concerned. In the two first remonstrances I was not listened to--in the last I thought myself successful, and it was not till long afterwards that I heard they had actually subscribed the Bond. Then the hasty renunciation of the thing, as if we had been doing something very atrocious, put me mad altogether. The younger brethren, too, allege that they are put into the front of the fight, and deserted on the first pinch; and on my word I cannot say the accusation is altogether false, though I have been doing my best to mediate betwixt the parties, and keep the peace if possible. The fact is, it is a blasted business, and will continue long to have bad consequences.--Yours in all love and kindness, WALTER SCOTT. 
9784	----	Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the header without written permission. Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a THOMAS CARLYLE BY JOHN NICHOL, LL. D, M.A., BALLIOL, OXON 1904 PREFATORY NOTE The following record of the leading events of Carlyle's life and attempt to estimate his genius rely on frequently renewed study of his work, on slight personal impressions--"vidi tantum"--and on information supplied by previous narrators. Of these the great author's chosen literary legatee is the most eminent and, in the main, the most reliable. Every critic of Carlyle must admit as constant obligations to Mr. Froude as every critic of Byron to Moore or of Scott to Lockhart. The works of these masters in biography remain the ample storehouses from which every student will continue to draw. Each has, in a sense, made his subject his own, and each has been similarly arraigned. I must here be allowed to express a feeling akin to indignation at the persistent, often virulent, attacks directed against a loyal friend, betrayed, it may be, by excess of faith and the defective reticence that often belongs to genius, to publish too much about his hero. But Mr. Froude's quotation, in defence, from the essay on _Sir Walter Scott_ requires no supplement: it should be remembered that he acted with explicit authority; that the restrictions under which he was at first entrusted with the MSS. of the _Reminiscences_ and the _Letters and Memorials_ (annotated by Carlyle himself, as if for publication) were withdrawn; and that the initial permission to select finally approached a practical injunction to communicate the whole. The worst that can be said is that, in the last years of Carlyle's career, his own judgment as to what should be made public of the details of his domestic life may have been somewhat obscured; but, if so, it was a weakness easily hidden from a devotee. My acknowledgments are due to several of the Press comments which appeared shortly after Carlyle's death, more especially that of the _St. James's Gazette_, giving the most philosophical brief summary of his religious views which I have seen; and to the kindness of Dr. Eugene Oswald, President of the Carlyle Society, in supplying me with valuable hints on matters relating to German History and Literature. I have also to thank the Editor of the _Manchester Guardian_ for permitting me to reproduce the substance of my article in its columns of February 1881. That article was largely based on a contribution on the same subject, in 1859, to Mackenzie's _Imperial Dictionary of Biography_. I may add that in the distribution of material over the comparatively short space at my command, I have endeavoured to give prominence to facts less generally known, and passed over slightly the details of events previously enlarged on, as the terrible accident to Mrs. Carlyle and the incidents of her death. To her inner history I have only referred in so far as it had a direct bearing on her husband's life. As regards the itinerary of Carlyle's foreign journeys, it has seemed to me that it might be of interest to those travelling in Germany to have a short record of the places where the author sought his "studies" for his greatest work. CONTENTS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY CHAPTER II 1795-1826 ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH CHAPTER III 1826-1834 CRAIGENPUTTOCK (from Marriage to London) CHAPTER IV 1834-1842 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Mrs. Welsh) CHAPTER V 1842-1853 CHEYNE ROW--(To death of Carlyle's Mother) CHAPTER VI 1853-1866 THE MINOTAUR--(To death of Mrs. Carlyle) CHAPTER VII 1866-1881 DECADENCE CHAPTER VIII CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN CHAPTER IX CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY CHAPTER X ETHICS--PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE APPENDIX ON CARLYLE'S RELIGION INDEX THOMAS CARLYLE CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY SUMMARY Four Scotchmen, born within the limits of the same hundred years, all in the first rank of writers, if not of thinkers, represent much of the spirit of four successive generations. They are leading links in an intellectual chain. DAVID HUME (1711-1776) remains the most salient type in our island of the scepticism, half conservative, half destructive, but never revolutionary, which marked the third quarter of the eighteenth century. He had some points of intellectual contact with Voltaire, though substituting a staid temper and passionless logic for the incisive brilliancy of a mocking Mercury; he had no relation, save an unhappy personal one, to Rousseau. ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796), last of great lyrists inspired by a local genius, keenest of popular satirists, narrative poet of the people, spokesman of their higher as of their lower natures, stood on the verge between two eras. Half Jacobite, nursling of old minstrelsy, he was also half Jacobin, an early-born child of the upheaval that closed the century; as essentially a foe of Calvinism as Hume himself. Master musician of his race, he was, as Thomas Campbell notes, severed, for good and ill, from his fellow Scots, by an utter want of their protecting or paralysing caution. WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832), broadest and most generous, if not loftiest of the group--"no sounder piece of British manhood," says Carlyle himself in his inadequate review, "was put together in that century"--the great revivalist of the mediaeval past, lighting up its scenes with a magic glamour, the wizard of northern tradition, was also, like Burns, the humorist of contemporary life. Dealing with Feudal themes, but in the manner of the Romantic school, he was the heir of the Troubadours, the sympathetic peer of Byron, and in his translation of Goetz von Berlichingen he laid the first rafters of our bridge to Germany. THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881) is on the whole the strongest, though far from the finest spirit of the age succeeding--an age of criticism threatening to crowd creation out, of jostling interests and of surging streams, some of which he has striven to direct, more to stem. Even now what Mill twenty-five years ago wrote of Coleridge is still true of Carlyle: "The reading public is apt to be divided between those to whom his views are everything and those to whom they are nothing." But it is possible to extricate from a mass of often turbid eloquence the strands of his thought and to measure his influence by indicating its range. Travellers in the Hartz, ascending the Brocken, are in certain atmospheres startled by the apparition of a shadowy figure,--a giant image of themselves, thrown on the horizon by the dawn. Similar is the relation of Carlyle to the common types of his countrymen. Burns, despite his perfervid patriotism, was in many ways "a starry stranger." Carlyle was Scotch to the core and to the close, in every respect a macrocosm of the higher peasant class of the Lowlanders. Saturated to the last with the spirit of a dismissed creed, he fretted in bonds from which he could never get wholly free. Intrepid, independent, steadfast, frugal, prudent, dauntless, he trampled on the pride of kings with the pride of Lucifer. He was clannish to excess, painfully jealous of proximate rivals, self-centred if not self-seeking, fired by zeal and inflamed by almost mean emulations, resenting benefits as debts, ungenerous--with one exception, that of Goethe,--to his intellectual creditors; and, with reference to men and manners around him at variance with himself, violently intolerant. He bore a strange relation to the great poet, in many ways his predecessor in influence, whom with persistent inconsistency he alternately eulogised and disparaged, the half Scot Lord Byron. One had by nature many affinities to the Latin races, the other was purely Teutonic: but the power of both was Titanic rather than Olympian; both were forces of revolution; both protested, in widely different fashion, against the tendency of the age to submerge Individualism; both were to a large extent egoists: the one whining, the other roaring, against the "Philistine" restraints of ordinary society. Both had hot hearts, big brains, and an exhaustless store of winged and fiery words; both were wrapt in a measureless discontent, and made constant appeal against what they deemed the shallows of Optimism; Carlylism is the prose rather than "the male of Byronism." The contrasts are no less obvious: the author of _Sartor Resartus_, however vaguely, defended the System of the Universe; the author of _Cain_, with an audacity that in its essence went beyond that of Shelley, arraigned it. In both we find vehemence and substantial honesty; but, in the one, there is a dominant faith, tempered by pride, in the "caste of Vere de Vere," in Freedom for itself--a faith marred by shifting purposes, the garrulous incontinence of vanity, and a broken life; in the other unwavering belief in Law. The record of their fame is diverse. Byron leapt into the citadel, awoke and found himself the greatest inheritor of an ancient name. Carlyle, a peasant's son, laid slow siege to his eminence, and, only after outliving twice the years of the other, attained it. His career was a struggle, sterner than that of either Johnson or Wordsworth, from obscurity, almost from contempt, to a rarely challenged renown. Fifty years ago few "so poor to do him reverence": at his death, in a sunset storm of praise, the air was full of him, and deafening was the Babel of the reviews; for the progress of every original thinker is accompanied by a stream of commentary that swells as it runs till it ends in a dismal swamp of platitude. Carlyle's first recognition was from America, his last from his own countrymen. His teaching came home to their hearts "late in the gloamin'." In Scotland, where, for good or ill, passions are in extremes, he was long howled down, lampooned, preached at, prayed for: till, after his Edinburgh Inaugural Address, he of a sudden became the object of an equally blind devotion; and was, often by the very men who had tried and condemned him for blasphemy, as senselessly credited with essential orthodoxy. "The stone which the builders rejected became the headstone of the corner," the terror of the pulpit its text. Carlyle's decease was marked by a dirge of rhapsodists whose measureless acclamations stifled the voice of sober criticism. In the realm of contemporary English prose he has left no adequate successor; [Footnote: The nearest being the now foremost prose writers of our time, Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude.] the throne that does not pass by primogeniture is vacant, and the bleak northern skies seem colder and grayer since that venerable head was laid to rest by the village churchyard, far from the smoke and din of the great city on whose streets his figure was long familiar and his name was at last so honoured. Carlyle first saw the world tempest-tossed by the events he celebrates in his earliest History. In its opening pages, we are made to listen to the feet and chariots of "Dubarrydom" hurrying from the "Armida Palace," where Louis XV. and the _ancien régime_ lay dying; later to the ticking of the clocks in Launay's doomed Bastile; again to the tocsin of the steeples that roused the singers of the _Marseillaise_ to march from "their bright Phocaean city" and grapple with the Swiss guard, last bulwark of the Bourbons. "The Swiss would have won," the historian characteristically quotes from Napoleon, "if they had had a commander." Already, over little more than the space of the author's life--for he was a contemporary of Keats, born seven months before the death of Burns, Shelley's junior by three, Scott's by twenty-four, Byron's by seven years--three years after Goethe went to feel the pulse of the "cannon-fever" at Argonne--already these sounds are across a sea. Two whole generations have passed with the memory of half their storms. "Another race hath been, and other palms are won." Old policies, governments, councils, creeds, modes and hopes of life have been sifted in strange fires. Assaye, Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Jena, Leipzig, Inkermann, Sadowa,--Waterloo when he was twenty and Sedan when he was seventy-five,--have been fought and won. Born under the French Directory and the Presidency of Washington, Carlyle survived two French empires, two kingdoms, and two republics; elsewhere partitions, abolitions, revivals and deaths of States innumerable. During his life our sway in the East doubled its area, two peoples (the German with, the Italian without, his sympathy) were consolidated on the Continent, while another across the Atlantic developed to a magnitude that amazes and sometimes alarms the rest. Aggressions were made and repelled, patriots perorated and fought, diplomatists finessed with a zeal worthy of the world's most restless, if not its wisest, age. In the internal affairs of the leading nations the transformation scenes were often as rapid as those of a pantomime. The Art and Literature of those eighty-six years--stirred to new thought and form at their commencement by the so-called Romantic movement, more recently influenced by the Classic reaction, the Pre-Raphaelite protest, the Aesthetic _mode,_--followed various, even contradictory, standards. But, in one line of progress, there was no shadow of turning. Over the road which Bacon laid roughly down and Newton made safe for transit, Physical Science, during the whole period, advanced without let and beyond the cavil of ignorance. If the dreams of the _New Atlantis_ have not even in our days been wholly realised, Science has been brought from heaven to earth, and the elements made ministers of Prospero's wand. This apparent, and partially real, conquest of matter has doubtless done much to "relieve our estate," to make life in some directions run more smoothly, and to multiply resources to meet the demands of rapidly-increasing multitudes: but it is in danger of becoming a conquest of matter over us; for the agencies we have called into almost fearful activity threaten, like Frankenstein's miscreated goblin, to beat us down to the same level. Sanguine spirits who throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring, With, at every mile run taster, O the wondrous, wondrous age, are apt to forget that the electric light can do nothing to dispel the darkness of the mind; that there are strict limits to the power of prosperity to supply man's wants or satisfy his aspirations. This is a great part of Carlyle's teaching. It is impossible, were it desirable, accurately to define his religious, social, or political creed. He swallows formulae with the voracity of Mirabeau, and like Proteus escapes analysis. No printed labels will stick to him: when we seek to corner him by argument he thunders and lightens. Emerson complains that he failed to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon himself have made the "Form" of Carlyle to confess itself. But call him what we will--essential Calvinist or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist, practical Absolutist, or "the strayed reveller" of Radicalism--he is consistent in his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of the problems of the world. One of the foremost physicists of our time was among his truest and most loyal friends; they were bound together by the link of genius and kindred political views; and Carlyle was himself an expert in mathematics, the mental science that most obviously subserves physical research: but of Physics themselves (astronomy being scarcely a physical science) his ignorance was profound, and his abusive criticisms of such men as Darwin are infantile. This intellectual defect, or rather vacuum, left him free to denounce material views of life with unconditioned vehemence. "Will the whole upholsterers," he exclaims in his half comic, sometimes nonsensical, vein, "and confectioners of modern Europe undertake to make one single shoeblack happy!" And more seriously of the railways, without whose noisy aid he had never been able to visit the battle-fields of Friedrich II.-- Our stupendous railway miracles I have stopped short in admiring.... The distances of London to Aberdeen, to Ostend, to Vienna, are still infinitely inadequate to me. Will you teach me the winged flight through immensity, up to the throne dark with excess of bright? You unfortunate, you grin as an ape would at such a question: you do not know that unless you can reach thither in some effectual most veritable sense, you are lost, doomed to Hela's death-realm and the abyss where mere brutes are buried. I do not want cheaper cotton, swifter railways; I want what Novalis calls "God, Freedom, and Immortality." Will swift railways and sacrifices to Hudson help me towards that? The ECONOMIC AND MECHANICAL SPIRIT of the age, faith in mere steel or stone, was one of Carlyle's red rags. The others were INSINCERITY in Politics and in Life, DEMOCRACY without Reverence, and PHILANTHROPY without Sense. In our time these two last powers have made such strides as to threaten the Reign of Law. The Democrat without a ruler, who protests that one man is by nature as good as another, according to Carlyle is "shooting Niagara." In deference to the mandate of the philanthropist the last shred of brutality, with much of decision, has vanished from our code. Sentiment is in office and Mercy not only tempers, but threatens to gag Justice. When Sir Samuel Romilly began his beneficent agitation, and Carlyle was at school, talkers of treason were liable to be disembowelled before execution; now the crime of treason is practically erased, and the free use of dynamite brings so-called reforms "within the range of practical politics." Individualism was still a mark of the early years of the century. The spirit of "L'Etat c'est moi" survived in Mirabeau's "never name to me that _bête_ of a word 'impossible';" in the first Napoleon's threat to the Austrian ambassador, "I will break your empire like this vase"; in Nelson turning his blind eye to the signal of retreat at Copenhagen, and Wellington fencing Torres Vedras against the world: it lingered in Nicholas the Czar, and has found perhaps its latest political representative in Prince Bismarck. This is the spirit to which Carlyle has always given his undivided sympathy. He has held out hands to Knox, Francia, Friedrich, to the men who have made manners, not to the manners which have made men, to the rulers of people, not to their representatives: and the not inconsiderable following he has obtained is the most conspicuous tribute to a power resolute to pull against the stream. How strong its currents may be illustrated by a few lines from our leading literary journal, the _Athenaeum,_ of the Saturday after his death :-- "The future historian of the century will have to record the marvellous fact that while in the reign of Queen Victoria there was initiated, formulated, and methodised an entirely new cosmogony, its most powerful and highly-gifted man of letters was preaching a polity and a philosophy of history that would have better harmonised with the time of Queen Semiramis. . . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at human progress, there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was not the hero that developed the race, but a deep mysterious energy in the race that produced the hero; that the wave produced the bubble, and not the bubble the wave. But the moment a theory of evolution saw the light it was a fact. The old cosmogony, on which were built _Sartor Resartus_ and the Calvinism of Ecclefechan, were gone. Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move; but it moved nevertheless. The great stream of modern thought has advanced; the theory of evolution has been universally accepted; nations, it is acknowledged, produce kings, and kings are denied the faculty of producing nations." _Taliter, qualiter;_ but one or two remarks on the incisive summary of this adroit and able theorist are obvious. First, the implied assertion,--"Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move,"--that Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criticism extant: for what is his _French Revolution_ but a cannonade in three volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done, a hurricane of revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old fortresses, an assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and upheaval? Secondly, every new discovery is apt to be discredited by new shibboleths, and one-sided exaggerations of its range. It were platitude to say that Mr. Darwin was not only an almost unrivalled student of nature, as careful and conscientious in his methods, as fearless in stating his results, but--pace Mr. Carlyle--a man of genius, who has thrown Hoods of light on the inter-relations of the organic world. But there are whole troops of serfs, "addicti jururo in verba magistri," who, accepting, without attempt or capacity to verify the conclusions of the master mind, think to solve all the mysteries of the universe by ejaculating the word "Evolution." If I ask what was the secret of Dante's or of Shakespeare's divining rod, and you answer "Evolution," 'tis as if, when sick in heart and sick in head, I were referred, as medicine for "a mind diseased," to Grimm's Law or to the Magnetic Belt. Let us grant that Cæsar was evolved from the currents in the air about the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius was a blend of Plato and Cleanthes, Charlemagne a graft of Frankish blood on Gallic soil, William I. a rill from Rollo filtered in Neustrian fields, Hildebrand a flame from the altar of the mediæval church, Barbarossa a plant grown to masterdom in German woods, or later--not to heap up figures whose memories still possess the world--that Columbus was a Genoan breeze, Bacon a _réchauffé_ of Elizabethan thought, Orange the Silent a Dutch dyke, Chatham the frontispiece of eighteenth-century England, or Corsican Buonaparte the "armed soldier of Democracy." These men, at all events, were no bubbles on the froth of the waves which they defied and dominated. So much, and more, is to be said for Carlyle's insistence that great men are creators as well as creatures of their age. Doubtless, as we advance in history, direct personal influence, happily or unhappily, declines. In an era of overwrought activity, of superficial, however free, education, when we run the risk of being associated into nothingness and criticised to death, it remains a question whether, in the interests of the highest civilisation (which means opportunity for every capable citizen to lead the highest life), the subordination of the one to the many ought to be accelerated or retarded. It is said that the triumph of Democracy is a mere "matter of time." But time is in this case of the essence of the matter, and the party of resistance will all the more earnestly maintain that the defenders should hold the forts till the invaders have become civilised. "The individual withers and the world is more and more," preludes, though over a long interval, the cynic comment of the second "Locksley Hall" on the "increasing purpose" of the age. At an earlier date "Luria" had protested against the arrogance of mere majorities. A people is but the attempt of many To rise to the completer life of one; And those who live as models to the mass Are singly of more value than they all. Carlyle set these notes to Tennyson and to Browning in his _Hero-Worship_--a creed, though in thought, and more in action, older than Buddha or than Achilles, which he first launched as a dogma on our times, clenching it with the asseveration that on two men, Mirabeau and Napoleon, mainly hung the fates of the most nominally levelling of Revolutions. The stamp his teaching made remains marked on the minds of the men of light who _lead_, and cannot be wholly effaced by the clamour of the men of words who _orate_. If he leans unduly to the exaltation of personal power, Carlyle is on the side of those whose defeat can be beneficent only if it be slow. Further to account for his attitude, we must refer to his life and to its surroundings, _i.e._ to the circumstances amid which he was "evolved." CHAPTER II ECCLEFECHAN AND EDINBURGH [1795-1826] In the introduction to one of his essays, Carlyle has warned us against giving too much weight to genealogy: but all his biographies, from the sketch of the Riquetti kindred to his full-length _Friedrich_, prefaced by two volumes of ancestry, recognise, if they do not overrate, inherited influences; and similarly his fragments of autobiography abound in suggestive reference. His family portraits are to be accepted with the deductions due to the family fever that was the earliest form of his hero-worship. Carlyle, says the _Athenaeum_ critic before quoted, divides contemporary mankind into the fools and the wise: the wise are the Carlyles, the Welshes, the Aitkens, and Edward Irving; the fools all the rest of unfortunate mortals: a Fuseli stroke of the critic rivalling any of the author criticised; yet the comment has a grain of truth. [Footnote: Even the most adverse critics of Carlyle are often his imitators, their hands taking a dye from what they work in.] The Carlyles are said to have come, from the English town somewhat differently spelt, to Annandale, with David II.; and, according to a legend which the great author did not disdain to accept, among them was a certain Lord of Torthorwald, so created for defences of the Border. The churchyard of Ecclefechan is profusely strewn with the graves of the family, all with coats of arms--two griffins with adders' stings. More definitely we find Thomas, the author's grandfather, settled in that dullest of county villages as a carpenter. In 1745 he saw the rebel Highlanders on their southward march: he was notable for his study of _Anson's Voyages_ and of the _Arabian Nights_: "a fiery man, his stroke as ready as his word; of the toughness and springiness of steel; an honest but not an industrious man;" subsequently tenant of a small farm, in which capacity he does not seem to have managed his affairs with much effect; the family were subjected to severe privations, the mother having, on occasion, to heat the meal into cakes by straw taken from the sacks on which the children slept. In such an atmosphere there grew and throve the five sons known as the five fighting masons--"a curious sample of folks," said an old apprentice of one of them, "pithy, bitter speaking bodies, and awfu' fighters." The second of the group, James, born 1757, married--first, a full cousin, Janet Carlyle (the sole issue of which marriage was John, who lived at Cockermouth); second, Margaret Aitken, by whom he had four sons--THOMAS, 1795-1881; Alexander, 1797-1876; John (Dr. Carlyle, translator of Dante), 1801-1879; and James, 1805-1890; also five daughters, one of whom, Jane, became the wife of her cousin James Aitken of Dumfries, and the mother of Mary, the niece who tended her famous uncle so faithfully during the last years of his life. Nowhere is Carlyle's loyalty to his race shown in a fairer light than in the first of the papers published under the name of _Reminiscences_. It differs from the others in being of an early date and free from all offence. From this pathetic sketch, written when on a visit to London in 1832 he had sudden news of his father's death, we may, even in our brief space, extract a few passages which throw light on the characters, _i.e._ the points of contact and contrast of the writer and his theme:-- In several respects I consider my father as one of the most interesting men I have known, ... of perhaps the very largest natural endowment of any it has been my lot to converse with. None of you will ever forget that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, full of metaphors (though he knew not what a metaphor was), with all manner of potent words.... Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to render visible which did not become almost ocularly so. Emphatic I have heard him beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths: his words were like sharp arrows that smote into the very heart. The fault was that he exaggerated (which tendency I also inherit), yet in description, and for the sake chiefly of humorous effect. He was a man of rigid, even scrupulous veracity.... He was never visited with doubt. The old Theorem of the Universe was sufficient for him ... he stood a true man, while his son stands here on the verge of the new.... A virtue he had which I should learn to imitate: he never spoke of what was disagreeable and past. His was a healthy mind. He had the most open contempt for all "clatter."... He was irascible, choleric, and we all dreaded his wrath, but passion never mastered him.... Man's face he did not fear: God he always feared. His reverence was, I think, considerably mixed with fear--rather awe, as of unutterable depths of silence through which flickered a trembling hope.... Let me learn of him. Let me write my books as he built his houses, and walk as blamelessly through this shadow world.... Though genuine and coherent, living and life-giving, he was nevertheless but half developed. We had all to complain that we durst not freely love him. His heart seemed as if walled in: he had not the free means to unbosom himself.... It seemed as if an atmosphere of fear repelled us from him. To me it was especially so. Till late years I was ever more or less awed and chilled by him. James Carlyle has been compared to the father of Burns. The failings of both leant to virtue's side, in different ways. They were at one in their integrity, independence, fighting force at stress, and their command of winged words; but the elder had a softer heart, more love of letters, a broader spirit; the younger more power to stem adverse tides, he was a better man of business, made of tougher clay, and a grimmer Calvinist. "Mr. Lawson," he writes in 1817, "is doing very well, and has given us no more paraphrases." He seems to have grown more rigid as he aged, under the narrowing influences of the Covenanting land; but he remained stable and compact as the Auldgarth Bridge, built with his own hands. James Carlyle hammered on at Ecclefechan, making in his best year £100, till, after the first decade of the century, the family migrated to Mainhill, a bleak farm two miles from Lockerbie, where he so throve by work and thrift that he left on his death in 1832 about £1000. Strong, rough, and eminently _straight,_ intolerant of contradiction and ready with words like blows, his unsympathetic side recalls rather the father of the Brontës on the wild Yorkshire moor than William Burness by the ingle of Mount Oliphant. Margaret Carlyle was in theological theory as strict as her husband, and for a time made more moan over the aberrations of her favourite son. Like most Scotch mothers of her rank, she had set her heart on seeing him in a pulpit, from which any other eminence seemed a fall; but she became, though comparatively illiterate, having only late in life learnt to write a letter, a student of his books. Over these they talked, smoking together in old country fashion by the hearth; and she was to the last proud of the genius which grew in large measure under the unfailing sunshine of her anxious love. Book II. of _Sartor_ is an acknowledged fragment of autobiography, mainly a record of the author's inner life, but with numerous references to his environment. There is not much to identify the foster parents of Teufelsdröckh, and the dramatic drollery of the child's advent takes the place of ancestry: Entepfuhl is obviously Ecclefechan, where the ducks are paddling in the ditch that has to pass muster for a stream, to-day as a century gone: the severe frugality which (as in the case of Wordsworth and Carlyle himself) survived the need for it, is clearly recalled; also the discipline of the Roman-like domestic law, "In an orderly house, where the litter of children's sports is hateful, your training is rather to bear than to do. I was forbid much, wishes in any measure bold I had to renounce; everywhere a strait bond of obedience inflexibly held me down. It was not a joyful life, yet ... a wholesome one." The following oft-quoted passage is characteristic of his early love of nature and the humorous touches by which he was wont to relieve his fits of sentiment:-- On fine evenings I was wont to carry forth my supper (bread crumb boiled in milk) and eat it out of doors. On the coping of the wall, which I could reach by climbing, my porringer was placed: there many a sunset have I, looking at the distant mountains, consumed, not without relish, my evening meal. Those hues of gold and azure, that hush of world's expectation as day died, were still a Hebrew speech for me: nevertheless I was looking at the fair illumined letters, and had an eye for the gilding. In all that relates to the writer's own education, the Dichtung of _Sartor_ and the Wahrheit of the _Reminiscences_ are in accord. By Carlyle's own account, an "insignificant portion" of it "depended on schools." Like Burns, he was for some years trained in his own parish, where home influences counted for more than the teaching of not very competent masters. He soon read eagerly and variously. At the age of seven he was, by an Inspector of the old order, reported to be "complete in English." In his tenth year (1805) he was sent to the Grammar School of Annan, the "Hinterschlag Gymnasium," where his "evil days" began. Every oversensitive child finds the life of a public school one long misery. Ordinary boys--those of the Scotch borderland being of the most savage type--are more brutal than ordinary men; they hate singularity as the world at first hates originality, and have none of the restraints which the later semi-civilisation of life imposes. "They obey the impulse of rude Nature which bids the deer herd fall upon any stricken hart, the duck flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all hands the strong tyrannise over the weak." Young Carlyle was mocked for his moody ways, laughed at for his love of solitude, and called "Tom the Tearful" because of his habit of crying. To add much to his discomfort, he had made a rash promise to his pious mother, who seems, in contrast to her husband's race, to have adopted non-resistance principles--a promise to abstain from fighting, provocative of many cuffs till it was well broken by a hinterschlag, applied to some blustering bully. Nor had he refuge in the sympathy of his teachers, "hide-bound pedants, who knew Syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, which could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the Greek alphabet, began to study history, and had his first glimpse of Edward Irving, the bright prize-taker from Edinburgh, later his Mentor and then life-long friend. On Thomas's return home it was decided to send him to the University, despite the cynical warning of one of the village cronies, "Educate a boy, and he grows up to despise his ignorant parents." "Thou hast not done so," said old James in after years, "God be thanked for it;" and the son pays due tribute to the tolerant patience and substantial generosity of the father: "With a noble faith he launched me forth into a world which he himself had never been permitted to visit." Carlyle walked through Moffat all the way to Edinburgh with a senior student, Tom Smail (who owes to this fact the preservation of his name), with eyes open to every shade on the moors, as is attested in two passages of the _Reminiscences_. The boys, as is the fashion still, clubbed together in cheap lodgings, and Carlyle attended the curriculum from 1809 to 1814. Comparatively little is known of his college life, which seems to have been for the majority of Scotch students much as it is now, a compulsorily frugal life, with too little variety, relaxation, or society outside Class rooms; and, within them, a constant tug at Science, mental or physical, at the gateway to dissecting souls or bodies. We infer, from hints in later conversations and memorials, that Carlyle lived much with his own fancies, and owed little to any system. He is clearly thinking of his own youth in his account of Dr. Francia: "Josè must have been a loose-made tawny creature, much given to taciturn reflection, probably to crying humours, with fits of vehement ill nature--subject to the terriblest fits of hypochondria." His explosion in _Sartor,_ "It is my painful duty to say that out of England and Spain, ours was the worst of all hitherto discovered Universities," is the first of a long series of libels on things and persons he did not like. The Scotch capital was still a literary centre of some original brilliancy, in the light of the circle of Scott, which followed that of Burns, in the early fame of Cockburn and of Clerk (Lord Eldin), of the _Quarterly_ and _Edinburgh Reviews,_ and of the elder Alison. The Chairs of the University were conspicuously well filled by men of the sedate sort of ability required from Professors, some of them--conspicuously Brown (the more original if less "sound" successor of Dugald Stewart), Playfair, and Leslie--rising to a higher rank. But great Educational Institutions must adapt themselves to the training of average minds by requirements and restrictions against which genius always rebels. Biography more than History repeats itself, and the murmurs of Carlyle are, like those of Milton, Gibbon, Locke, and Wordsworth, the protests or growls of irrepressible individuality kicking against the pricks. He was never in any sense a classic; read Greek with difficulty--Aeschylus and Sophocles mainly in translations--and while appreciating Tacitus disparaged Horace. For Scotch Metaphysics, or any logical system, he never cared, and in his days there was written over the Academic entrances "No Mysticism." He distinguished himself in Mathematics, and soon found, by his own vaunt, the _Principia_ of Newton prostrate at his feet: he was a favourite pupil of Leslie, who escaped the frequent penalty of befriending him, but he took no prizes: the noise in the class room hindered his answers, and he said later to Mr. Froude that thoughts only came to him properly when alone. [Footnote: He went so far as to say in 1847 that "the man who had mastered the first forty-seven propositions of Euclid stood nearer to God than he had done before."] The social leader of a select set of young men in his own rank, by choice and necessity _integer vitae_, he divided his time between the seclusion of study and writing letters, in which kind of literature he was perhaps the most prolific writer of his time. In 1814 Carlyle completed his course without taking a degree, did some tutorial work, and, in the same year, accepted the post of Mathematical Usher at Annan as successor to Irving, who had been translated to Haddington. Still in formal pursuit of the ministry, though beginning to fight shy of its fences, he went up twice a year to deliver addresses at the Divinity Hall, one of which, "on the uses of affliction," was afterwards by himself condemned as flowery; another was a Latin thesis on the theme, "num detur religio naturalis." The posthumous publication of some of his writings, e.g. of the fragment of the novel _Wotton Reinfred_, reconciles us to the loss of those which have not been recovered. In the vacations, spent at Mainhill, he began to study German, and corresponded with his College friends. Many of Carlyle's early letters, reproduced in the volumes edited by Mr. Charles E. Norton, are written in that which, according to Voltaire, is the only unpermissible style, "the tiresome"; and the thought, far from being precocious, is distinctly commonplace, e.g. the letter to Robert Mitchell on the fall of Napoleon; or the following to his parents: "There are few things in this world more valuable than knowledge, and youth is the season for acquiring it"; or to James Johnstone the trite quotation, "Truly pale death overturns with impartial foot the hut of the poor man and the palace of the king." Several are marred by the egotism which in most Scotch peasants of aspiring talent takes the form of perpetual comparison of themselves with others; refrains of the ambition against which the writer elsewhere inveighs as the "kettle tied to the dog's tail." In a note to Thomas Murray he writes:-- Ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known has been the foremost. Oh, Fortune! bestow coronets and crowns and principalities and purses, and pudding and power, upon the great and noble and fat ones of the earth. Grant me that, with a heart unyielding to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary fame. That his critical and literary instincts were yet undeveloped there is ample proof. Take his comment, at the age of nineteen, on the verses of Leyden :-- Shout, Britons, for the battle of Assaye, For that was a day When we stood in our array Like the lion's might at bay. "Can anything be grander?" To Johnstone (who with Mitchell consumes almost a volume) he writes: "Read Shakespeare. If you have not, then I desire you read it (_sic_) and tell me what you think of _him_," etc. Elsewhere the dogmatic summary of Hume's "Essays" illustrates the lingering eighteenth-century Latinism that had been previously travestied in the more stilted passages of the letters of Burns. "Many of his opinions are not to be adopted. How odd does it look to refer all the modifications of national character to the influence of moral causes. Might it not be asserted with some plausibility that even those which he denominates moral causes originate from physical circumstances?" The whole first volume of this somewhat overexpanded collection overflows with ebullitions of bile, in comparison with which the misanthropy of Byron's early romances seems philanthropy, e.g.-- How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world. For what are its inhabitants? Its great men and its little, its fat ones and its lean ... pitiful automatons, despicable Yahoos, yea, they are altogether an insufferable thing. "O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade, where the scowl of the purse-proud nabob, the sneer and strut of the coxcomb, the bray of the ninny and the clodpole might never reach me more!" On the other hand, there are frequent evidences of the imperial intrepidity, the matchless industry, and the splendid independence of the writer. In his twenty-first year Carlyle again succeeded his Annan predecessor (who seems to have given dissatisfaction by some vagaries of severity) as mathematical teacher in the main school of Kirkcaldy. The _Reminiscences_ of Irving's generous reception of his protégé present one of the pleasantest pictures in the records of their friendship. The same chapter is illustrated by a series of sketches of the scenery of the east coast rarely rivalled in descriptive literature. It is elsewhere enlivened, if also defaced, by the earliest examples of the cynical criticisms of character that make most readers rejoice in having escaped the author's observation. During the two years of his residence in Fifeshire, Carlyle encountered his first romance, in making acquaintance with a well-born young lady, "by far the brightest and cleverest" of Irving's pupils--Margaret Gordon--"an acquaintance which might easily have been more" had not relatives and circumstances intervened. Doubtless Mr. Froude is right in asserting this lady to have been the original of _Sartor's_ "Blumine"; and in leaving him to marry "Herr Towgood," ultimately governor of Nova Scotia, she bequeathed, though in antithetical style, advice that attests her discrimination of character. "Cultivate the milder dispositions of the heart, subdue the mere extravagant visions of the brain. Genius will render you great. May virtue render you beloved. Remove the awful distance between you and other men by kind and gentle manners. Deal gently with their inferiority, and be convinced that they will respect you as much and like you more." To this advice, which he never even tried to take, she adds, happily perhaps for herself, "I give you not my address, because I dare not promise to see you." In 1818 Carlyle, always intolerant of work imposed, came to the conclusion that "it were better to perish than to continue schoolmastering," and left Kirkcaldy, with £90 saved, for Edinburgh, where he lived over three years, taking private pupils, and trying to enter on his real mission through the gates of literature--gates constantly barred; for, even in those older days of laxer competition, obstinate eccentricity unredeemed by any social advantages led to failure and rebuff. Men with the literary form of genius highly developed have rarely much endurance of defeat. Carlyle, even in his best moods, resented real or fancied injuries, and at this stage of his career complained that he got nothing but vinegar from his fellows, comparing himself to a worm that trodden on would "turn into a torpedo." He had begun to be tormented by the dyspepsia, which "gnawed like a rat" at its life-long tenement, his stomach, and by sleeplessness, due in part to internal causes, but also to the "Bedlam" noises of men, machines, and animals, which pestered him in town and country from first to last. He kept hesitating about his career, tried law, mathematical teaching, contributions to magazines and dictionaries, everything but journalism, to which he had a rooted repugnance, and the Church, which he had definitely abandoned. How far the change in his views may have been due to his reading of Gibbon, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc., how far to self- reflection, is uncertain; but he already found himself unable, in any plain sense, to subscribe to the Westminster Confession or to any "orthodox" Articles, and equally unable by any philosophical reconciliation of contraries to write black with white on a ground of neutral gray. [Footnote: He refers to Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ as "of all books the most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind. His winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing, were often admirably potent and illustrative to me."] Mentally and physically adrift he was midway in the valley of the shadow, which he represents as "The Everlasting No," and beset by "temptations in the wilderness." At this crisis he writes, "The biographies of men of letters are the wretchedest chapters in our history, except perhaps the Newgate Calendar," a remark that recalls the similar cry of Burns, "There is not among the martyrologies so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets." Carlyle, reverting to this crisis, refers with constant bitterness to the absence of a popularity which he yet professes to scorn.--I was entirely unknown in Edinburgh circles; solitary eating my own heart, misgivings as to whether there shall be presently anything else to eat, fast losing health, a prey to numerous struggles and miseries ... three weeks without any kind of sleep, from impossibility to be free of noise, ... wanderings through mazes of doubt, perpetual questions unanswered, etc. What is this but Byron's cry, "I am not happy," which his afterwards stern critic compares to the screaming of a meat-jack? Carlyle carried with him from town to country the same dismal mood. "Mainhill," says his biographer, "was never a less happy home to him than it was this summer (1819). He could not conceal the condition of his mind; and to his family, to whom the truth of their creed was no more a matter of doubt than the presence of the sun in the sky, he must have seemed as if possessed." Returning to Edinburgh in the early winter, he for a time wrote hopefully about his studies. "The law I find to be a most complicated subject, yet I like it pretty well. Its great charm in my eyes is that no mean compliances are requisite for prospering in it." But this strain soon gave way to a fresh fit of perversity, and we have a record of his throwing up the cards in one of his most ill-natured notes. I did read some law books, attend Hume's lectures on Scotch law, and converse with and question various dull people of the practical sort. But it and they and the admired lecturing Hume himself appeared to me mere denizens of the kingdom of dulness, pointing towards nothing but money as wages for all that bogpool of disgust. The same year (that of Peterloo) was that of the Radical rising in Glasgow against the poverty which was the natural aftermath of the great war, oppressions, half real, half imaginary, of the military force, and the yeomanry in particular. Carlyle's contribution to the reminiscences of the time is doubly interesting because written (in the article on Irving, 1836) from memory, when he had long ceased to be a Radical. A few sentences suffice to illustrate this phase or stage of his political progress:-- A time of great rages and absurd terrors and expectations, a very fierce Radical and anti-Radical time. Edinburgh, endlessly agitated by it all around me ... gentry people full of zeal and foolish terror and fury, and looking _disgustingly busy and important_.... One bleared Sunday morning I had gone out for my walk. At the Riding-house in Nicolson Street was a kind of straggly group, with red-coats interspersed. They took their way, not very dangerous-looking men of war; but there rose from the little crowd the strangest shout I have heard human throats utter, not very loud, but it said as plain as words, and with infinitely more emphasis of sincerity, "May the devil go with you, ye peculiarly contemptible, and dead to the distresses of your fellow-creatures!" Another morning ... I met an advocate slightly of my acquaintance hurrying along, musket in hand, towards the Links, there to be drilled as item of the "gentlemen" volunteers now afoot. "You should have the like of this," said he, cheerily patting his musket "Hm, yes; but I haven't yet quite settled on which side"--which probably he hoped was quiz, though it really expressed my feeling ... mutiny and revolt being a light matter to the young. This period is illustrated by numerous letters from Irving, who had migrated to Glasgow as an assistant to Dr. Chalmers, abounding in sound counsels to persevere in some profession and make the best of practical opportunities. Carlyle's answers have in no instance been preserved, but the sole trace of his having been influenced by his friend's advice is his contribution (1820-1823) of sixteen articles to the _Edinburgh Encyclopedia_ under the editorship of Sir David Brewster. The scant remuneration obtained from these was well timed, but they contain no original matter, and did nothing for his fame. Meanwhile it appears from one of Irving's letters that Carlyle's thoughts had been, as later in his early London life, turning towards emigration. He says, writes his friend, "I have the ends of my thoughts to bring together ... my views of life to reform, my health to recover, and then once more I shall venture my bark on the waters of this wide realm, and if she cannot weather it I shall steer west and try the waters of another world." [Footnote: The subjects of these were--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Montfaucon, Dr. Moore, Sir John Moore, Necker, Nelson, Netherlands, Newfoundland, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Mungo Park, Lord Chatham, William Pitt. These articles, on the whole judiciously omitted from the author's collected works, are characterised by marks of great industry, commonplace, and general fairness, with a style singularly formal, like that of the less im pressive pages of Johnson. The following, among numerous passages, are curious as illustrating the comparative orthodoxy of the writer's early judgments: "The brilliant hints which Montesquieu scatters round him with a liberal hand have excited or assisted the speculations of others in almost every department of political economy, and he is deservedly mentioned as a principal founder of that important science." "Mirabeau confronted him (Necker) like his evil genius; and being totally without scruple in the employment of any expedient, was but too successful in overthrowing all reasonable proposals, and conducting the people to that state of anarchy out of which his own ambition was to be rewarded," etc. Similarly the verdicts on Pitt, Chatham, Nelson, Park, Lady Montagu, etc., are those of an ordinary intelligent Englishman of conscientious research, fed on the "Lives of the Poets" and Trafalgar memories. The morality, as in the Essay on Montaigne, is unexceptionable; the following would commend itself to any boarding school: "Melancholy experience has never ceased to show that great warlike talents, like great talents of any kind, may be united with a coarse and ignoble heart."] The resolves, sometimes the efforts, of celebrated Englishmen,--"nos manet oceanus,"--as Cromwell, Burns, Coleridge, and Southey (allured, some critic suggests, by the poetical sound of Susquehanna), Arthur Clough, Richard Hengist Horne, and Browning's "Waring," to elude "the fever and the fret" of an old civilisation, and take refuge in the fancied freedom of wild lands--when more than dreams--have been failures. [Footnote: Cf. the American Bryant himself, in his longing to leave his New York Press and "plant him where the red deer feed, in the green forest," to lead the life of Robin Hood and Shakespeare's banished Duke.] Puritan patriots, it is true, made New England, and the scions of the Cavaliers Virginia; but no poet or imaginative writer has ever been successfully transplanted, with the dubious exception of Heinrich Heine. It is certain that, despite his first warm recognition coming from across the Atlantic, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ would have found the "States" more fruitful in food for cursing than either Edinburgh or London. The spring of 1820 was marked by a memorable visit to Irving, on Carlyle's way to spend as was his wont the summer months at home. His few days in Glasgow are recorded in a graphic sketch of the bald-headed merchants at the Tontine, and an account of his introduction to Dr. Chalmers, to whom he refers always with admiration and a respect but slightly modified. The critic's praise of British contemporaries, other than relatives, is so rare that the following sentences are worth transcribing:-- He (Chalmers) was a man of much natural dignity, ingenuity, honesty, and kind affection, as well as sound intellect and imagination.... He had a burst of genuine fun too.... His laugh was ever a hearty, low guffaw, and his tones in preaching would reach to the piercingly pathetic. No preacher ever went so into one's heart. He was a man essentially of little culture, of narrow sphere all his life. Such an intellect, professing to be educated, and yet ... ignorant in all that lies beyond the horizon in place or time I have almost nowhere met with--a man capable of so much soaking indolence, lazy brooding ... as the first stage of his life well indicated, ... yet capable of impetuous activity and braying audacity, as his later years showed. I suppose there will never again be such a preacher in any Christian church. "The truth of Christianity," he said, "was all written in us already in sympathetic ink. Bible awakens it, and you can read"--a sympathetic image but of no great weight as an argument addressed to doubting Thomas. Chalmers, whose originality lay rather in his quick insight and fire than in his mainly commonplace thought, had the credit of recognising the religious side of Carlyle's genius, when to the mass of his countrymen he was a rock of offence. One of the great preacher's criticisms of the great writer is notably just: "He is a lover of earnestness more than a lover of truth." There follows in some of the early pages of the _Reminiscences_ an account of a long walk with Irving, who had arranged to accompany Carlyle for the first stage, _i.e._ fifteen miles of the road, of his for the most part pedestrian march from Glasgow to Ecclefechan, a record among many of similar excursions over dales and hills, and "by the beached margent," revived for us in sun and shade by a pen almost as magical as Turner's brush. We must refer to the pages of Mr. Froude for the picture of Drumclog moss,--"a good place for Cameronian preaching, and dangerously difficult for Claverse _(sic)_ and horse soldiery if the suffering remnant had a few old muskets among them,"--for the graphic glimpse of Ailsa Craig, and the talk by the dry stone fence, in the twilight. "It was just here, as the sun was sinking, Irving drew from me by degrees, in the softest manner, that I did not think as he of the Christian religion, and that it was vain for me to expect I ever could or should. This, if this was so, he had pre-engaged to take well of me, like an elder brother, if I would be frank with him. And right loyally he did so." They parted here: Carlyle trudged on to the then "utterly quiet little inn" at Muirkirk, left next morning at 4 A.M., and reached Dumfries, a distance of fifty-four miles, at 8 P.M., "the longest walk I ever made." He spent the summer at Mainhill, studying modern languages, "living riotously with Schiller and Goethe." at work on the _Encyclopedia_ articles, and visiting his friend at Annan, when he was offered the post of tutor to the son of a Yorkshire farmer, an offer which Irving urged him to accept, saying, "You live too much in an ideal world," and wisely adding, "try your hand with the respectable illiterate men of middle life. You may be taught to forget ... the splendours and envies ... of men of literature." This exhortation led to a result recorded with much humour, egotism, and arrogance in a letter to his intimate friend Dr. John Fergusson, of Kelso Grammar School, which, despite the mark "private and confidential," was yet published, several years after the death of the recipient and shortly after that of the writer, in a gossiping memoir. We are therefore at liberty to select from the letter the following paragraphs:-- I delayed sending an answer till I might have it in my power to communicate what seemed then likely to produce a considerable change in my stile (_sic_) of life, a proposal to become a "travelling tutor," as they call it, to a young person in the North Riding, for whom that exercise was recommended on account of bodily and mental weakness. They offered me £150 per annum, and withal invited me to come and examine things on the spot before engaging. I went accordingly, and happy was it I went; from description I was ready to accept the place; from inspection all Earndale would not have hired me to accept it. This boy was a dotard, a semi-vegetable, the elder brother, head of the family, a two-legged animal without feathers, intellect, or virtue, and all the connections seemed to have the power of eating pudding but no higher power. So I left the barbarous people....York is but a heap of bricks. Jonathan Dryasdust (see _Ivanhoe_) is justly named. York is the Boetia of Britain.... Upon the whole, however, I derived great amusement from my journey, ... I conversed with all kinds of men, from graziers up to knights of the shire, argued with them all, and broke specimens from their souls (if any), which I retain within the museum of my cranium. I have no prospects that are worth the name. I am like a being thrown from another planet on this dark terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim ... and life is to me like a pathless, a waste, and a howling wilderness. Do not leave your situation if you can possibly avoid it. Experience shows it to be a fearful thing to be swept in by the roaring surge of life, and then to float alone undirected on its restless, monstrous bosom. Keep ashore while yet you may, or if you must to sea, sail under convoy; trust not the waves without a guide. You and I are but pinnaces or cock-boats, yet hold fast by the Manilla ship, _and do not let go the painter_. Towards the close of this year Irving, alarmed by his friend's despondency, sent him a most generous and delicately-worded invitation to spend some months under his roof; but Carlyle declined, and in a letter of March 1821 he writes to his brother John: "Edinburgh, with all its drawbacks, is the only scene for me," on which follows one of his finest descriptions, that of the view from Arthur Seat. According to the most probable chronology, for many of Carlyle's dates are hard to fix, the next important event of his life, his being introduced, on occasion of a visit to Haddington, to Miss Jane Welsh by her old tutor, Edward Irving--an event which marks the beginning of a new era in his career--took place towards the close of May or in the first week of June. To June is assigned the incident, described in _Sartor_ as the transition from the Everlasting No to the Everlasting Yea, a sort of revelation that came upon him as he was in Leith Walk--Rue St. Thomas de l'Enfer in the Romance--on the way to cool his distempers by a plunge in the sea. The passage proclaiming this has been everywhere quoted; and it is only essential to note that it resembled the "illuminations" of St. Paul and of Constantine merely by its being a sudden spiritual impulse. It was in no sense a conversion to any belief in person or creed, it was but the assertion of a strong manhood against an almost suicidal mood of despair; a condition set forth with superabundant paraphernalia of eloquence easily condensed. Doubt in the mind of Teufelsdröckh had darkened into disbelief in divine or human justice, freedom, or himself. If there be a God, He sits on the hills "since the first Sabbath," careless of mankind. Duty seems to be but a "phantasm made up of desire and fear"; virtue "some bubble of the blood," absence of vitality perhaps. What in these days are terrors of conscience to diseases of the liver? Not on morality but on cookery let us build our stronghold.... Thus has the bewildered wanderer to stand, shouting question after question into the Sibyl cave, and receiving for answer an echo. From this scepticism, deeper than that of _Queen Mab,_ fiercer than that of _Candide,_ Carlyle was dramatically rescued by the sense that he was a servant of God, even when doubting His existence. After all the nameless woe that inquiry had wrought me, I nevertheless still loved truth, and would hate no jot of my allegiance....Truth I cried, though the heavens crush me for following her; no falsehood! though a whole celestial lubberland were the price of apostacy. With a grasp on this rock, Carlyle springs from the slough of despond and asserts himself: Denn ich bin ein Mensch gewesen Und das heisst ein Kämpfer seyn. He finds in persistent action, energy, and courage a present strength, and a lamp of at least such partial victory as he lived to achieve. He would not make his judgment blind; He faced the spectres of the mind,-- but he never "laid them," or came near the serenity of his master, Goethe; and his teaching, public and private, remained half a wail. He threw the gage rather in the attitude of a man turning at bay than that of one making a leap. Death? Well, Death ... let it come then, and I will meet it and defy it. And as so I thought there rushed a stream of fire over my soul, and I shook base fear away. Ever from that time the temper of my misery was changed; not ... whining sorrow ... but grim defiance. Yet the misery remained, for two years later we find him writing:-- I could read the curse of Ernulphus, or something twenty times as fierce, upon myself and all things earthly....The year is closing. This time eight and twenty years I was a child of three weeks ago.... Oh! little did my mother think, That day she cradled me, The lands that I should travel in, The death I was to dee. My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man: to be immured in a rotten carcase, every avenue of which is changed into an inlet of pain. How have I deserved this? I know not. Then why don't you kill yourself, sir? Is there not arsenic? Is there not ratsbane of various kinds? And hemp, and steel? Most true, Sathanas...but it will be time enough to use them when I have _lost_ the game I am but _losing_, ... and while my friends, my mother, father, brothers, sisters live, the duty of not breaking their hearts would still remain....I want health, health, health! On this subject I am becoming quite furious: my torments are greater than I am able to bear. Nowhere in Carlyle's writing, save on the surface, is there any excess of Optimism; but after the Leith Walk inspiration he had resolved on "no surrender"; and that, henceforth, he had better heart in his work we have proof in its more regular, if not more rapid progress. His last hack service was the series of articles for Brewster, unless we add a translation, under the same auspices, of Legendre's Geometry, begun, according to some reports, in the Kirkcaldy period, finished in 1822, and published in 1824. For this task, prefixed by an original _Essay on Proportion_, much commended by De Morgan, he obtained the respectable sum of £50. Two subsequent candidatures for Chairs of Astronomy showed that Carlyle had not lost his taste for Mathematics; but this work was his practical farewell to that science. His first sustained efforts as an author were those of an interpreter. His complete mastery of German has been said to have endowed him with "his sword of sharpness and shoes of swiftness"; it may be added, in some instances also, with the "fog-cap." But in his earliest substantial volume, the _Life of Schiller_, there is nothing either obscure in style or mystic in thought. This work began to appear in the _London Magazine_ in 1823, was finished in 1824, and in 1825 published in a separate form. Approved during its progress by an encouraging article in the _Times_, it was, in 1830, translated into German on the instigation of Goethe, who introduced the work by an important commendatory preface, and so first brought the author's name conspicuously before a continental public. Carlyle himself, partly perhaps from the spirit of contradiction, was inclined to speak slightingly of this high-toned and sympathetic biography: "It is," said he, "in the wrong vein, laborious, partly affected, meagre, bombastic." But these are sentences of a morbid time, when, for want of other victims, he turned and rent himself. _Pari passu_, he was toiling at his translation of _Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship_. This was published in Edinburgh in 1824. Heartily commended in _Blackwood_, it was generally recognised as one of the best English renderings of any foreign author; and Jeffrey, in his absurd review of Goethe's great prose drama, speaks in high terms of the skill displayed by the translator. The virulent attack of De Quincey--a writer as unreliable as brilliant--in the _London Magazine_ does not seem to have carried much weight even then, and has none now. The _Wanderjahre_, constituting the third volume of the English edition, first appeared as the last of four on German Romance--a series of admirably selected and executed translations from Musæus, Fouqué, Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Goethe, prefaced by short biographical and critical notices of each--published in Edinburgh in 1827. This date is also that of the first of the more elaborate and extensive criticisms which, appearing in the Edinburgh and Foreign reviews, established Carlyle as the English pioneer of German literature. The result of these works would have been enough to drive the wolf from the door and to render their author independent of the oatmeal from home; while another source of revenue enabled him not only to keep himself, but to settle his brother Alick in a farm, and to support John through his University course as a medical student. This and similar services to the family circle were rendered with gracious disclaimers of obligation. "What any brethren of our father's house possess, I look on as a common stock from which all are entitled to draw." For this good fortune he was again indebted to his friend of friends. Irving had begun to feel his position at Glasgow unsatisfactory, and at the close of 1821 he was induced to accept an appointment to the Caledonian Chapel at Hatton Garden. On migrating to London, to make a greater, if not a safer, name in the central city, and finally, be lost in its vortex, he had invited Carlyle to follow him, saying, "Scotland breeds men, but England rears them." Shortly after, introduced by Mrs. Strachey, one of his worshipping audience, to her sister Mrs. Buller, he found the latter in trouble about the education of her sons. Charles, the elder, was a youth of bright but restive intelligence, and it was desired to find some transitional training for him on his way from Harrow to Cambridge. Irving urged his being placed, in the interim, under Carlyle's charge. The proposal, with an offer of £200 a year, was accepted, and the brothers were soon duly installed in George Square, while their tutor remained in Moray Place, Edinburgh. The early stages of this relationship were eminently satisfactory; Carlyle wrote that the teaching of the Bullers was a pleasure rather than a task; they seemed to him "quite another set of boys than I have been used to, and treat me in another sort of manner than tutors are used. The eldest is one of the cleverest boys I have ever seen." There was never any jar between the teacher and the taught. Carlyle speaks with unfailing regard of the favourite pupil, whose brilliant University and Parliamentary career bore testimony to the good practical guidance he had received. His premature death at the entrance on a sphere of wider influence made a serious blank in his old master's life. [Footnote: Charles Buller became Carlyle's pupil at the age of fifteen. He died as Commissioner of the Poor in 1848 (_aet_. forty-two).] But as regards the relation of the employer and employed, we are wearied by the constantly recurring record of kindness lavishly bestowed, ungraciously received, and soon ungratefully forgotten. The elder Bullers--the mother a former beauty and woman of some brilliancy, the father a solid and courteous gentleman retired from the Anglo-Indian service--came to Edinburgh in the spring of the tutorship, and recognising Carlyle's abilities, welcomed him to the family circle, and treated him, by his own confession, with a "degree of respect" he "did not deserve"; adapting their arrangements, as far as possible, to his hours and habits; consulting his convenience and humouring his whims. Early in 1823 they went to live together at Kinnaird House, near Dunkeld, when he continued to write letters to his kin still praising his patrons; but the first note of discord is soon struck in satirical references to their aristocratic friends and querulous complaints of the servants. During the winter, for greater quiet, a room was assigned to him in another house near Kinnaird; a consideration which met with the award: "My bower is the most polite of bowers, refusing admittance to no wind that blows." And about this same time he wrote, growling at his fare: "It is clear to me that I shall never recover my health under the economy of Mrs. Buller." In 1824 the family returned to London, and Carlyle followed in June by a sailing yacht from Leith. On arrival he sent to Miss Welsh a letter, sneering at his fellow passengers, but ending with a striking picture of his first impressions of the capital:-- We were winding slowly through the forest of masts in the Thames up to our station at Tower Wharf. The giant bustle, the coal heavers, the bargemen, the black buildings, the ten thousand times ten thousand sounds and movements of that monstrous harbour formed the grandest object I had ever witnessed. One man seems a drop in the ocean; you feel annihilated in the immensity of that heart of all the world. On reaching London he first stayed for two or three weeks under Irving's roof and was introduced to his friends. Of Mrs. Strachey and her young cousin Kitty, who seems to have run the risk of admiring him to excess, he always spoke well: but the Basil Montagues, to whose hospitality and friendship he was made welcome, he has maligned in such a manner as to justify the retaliatory pamphlet of the sharp-tongued eldest daughter of the house, then about to become Mrs. Anne Procter. By letter and "reminiscence" he is equally reckless in invective against almost all the eminent men of letters with whom he then came in contact, and also, in most cases, in ridicule of their wives. His accounts of Hazlitt, Campbell, and Coleridge have just enough truth to give edge to libels, in some cases perhaps whetted by the consciousness of their being addressed to a sympathetic listener: but it is his frequent travesty of well-wishers and creditors for kindness that has left the deepest stain on his memory. Settled with his pupil Charles in Kew Green lodgings he writes: "The Bullers are essentially a cold race of people. They live in the midst of fashion and external show. They love no living creature." And a fortnight later, from Irving's house at Pentonville, he sends to his mother an account of his self-dismissal. Mrs. Buller had offered him two alternatives--to go with the family to France or to remain in the country preparing the eldest boy for Cambridge. He declined both, and they parted, shaking hands with dry eyes. "I feel glad," he adds in a sentence that recalls the worst egotism of Coleridge, "that I have done with them ... I was selling the very quintessence of my spirit for £200 a year." [Footnote: _Vide_ Carlyle's _Life of Sterling_ (1st ed. 1851), chap. viii. p. 79.] There followed eight weeks of residence in or about Birmingham, with a friend called 'Badams, who undertook to cure dyspepsia by a new method and failed without being reviled. Together, and in company with others, as the astronomer Airy, they saw the black country and the toiling squads, in whom Carlyle, through all his shifts from radical democracy to Platonic autocracy, continued to take a deep interest; on other days they had pleasant excursions to the green fields and old towers of Warwickshire. On occasion of this visit he came in contact with De Quincey's review of _Meister_, and in recounting the event credits himself with the philosophic thought, "This man is perhaps right on some points; if so let him be admonitory." But the description that follows of "the child that has been in hell," however just, is less magnanimous. Then came a trip, in company with Mr. Strachey and Kitty and maid, by Dover and Calais along Sterne's route to Paris, "The Vanity Fair of the Universe," where Louis XVIII. was then lying dead in state. Carlyle's comments are mainly acid remarks on the Palais Royal, with the refrain, "God bless the narrow seas." But he met Legendre and Laplace, heard Cuvier lecture and saw Talma act, and, what was of more moment, had his first glimpse of the Continent and the city of one phase of whose history he was to be the most brilliant recorder. Back in London for the winter, where his time was divided between Irving's house and his own neighbouring room in Southampton Street, he was cheered by Goethe's own acknowledgment of the translation of _Meister_, characteristically and generously cordial. In March 1825 Carlyle again set his face northward, and travelling by coach through Birmingham, Manchester, Bolton, and Carlisle, established himself, in May, at Hoddam Hill; a farm near the Solway, three miles from Mainhill, which his father had leased for him. His brother Alexander farmed, while Thomas toiled on at German translations and rode about on horseback. For a space, one of the few contented periods of his life, there is a truce to complaining. Here free from the noises which are the pests of literary life, he was building up his character and forming the opinions which, with few material changes, he long continued to hold. Thus he writes from over a distance of forty years :-- With all its manifold petty troubles, this year at Hoddam Hill has a rustic beauty and dignity to me, and lies now like a not ignoble russet-coated idyll in my memory; one of the quietest on the whole, and perhaps the most triumphantly important of my life.... I found that I had conquered all my scepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods of my epoch, and was emerging free in spirit into the eternal blue of ether. I had in effect gained an immense victory.... Once more, thank Heaven for its highest gift, I then felt and still feel endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the steep road before me, the first of the moderns. Bodily health itself seemed improving.... Nowhere can I recollect of myself such pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact and Nature as in these poor Annandale localities. The sound of the Kirk bell once or twice on Sunday mornings from Hoddam Kirk, about a mile off on the plain below me, was strangely touching, like the departing voice of eighteen hundred years. Elsewhere, during one of the rare gleams of sunshine in a life of lurid storms, we have the expression of his passionate independence, his tyrannous love of liberty:-- It is inexpressible what an increase of happiness and of consciousness--of inward dignity--I have gained since I came within the walls of this poor cottage--my own four walls. They simply admit that I am _Herr im Hause_, and act on this conviction. There is no grumbling about my habitudes and whims. If I choose to dine on fire and brimstone, they will cook it for me to their best skill, thinking only that I am an unintelligible mortal, _fâcheux_ to deal with, but not to be dealt with in any other way. My own four walls. The last words form the refrain of a set of verses, the most characteristic, as Mr. Froude justly observes, of the writer, the actual composition of which seems, however, to belong to the next chapter of his career, beginning-- Wild through the wind the huntsman calls, As fast on willing nag I haste Home to my own four walls. The feeling that inspires them is clenched in the defiance-- King George has palaces of pride, And armed grooms must ward those halls; With one stout bolt I safe abide Within my own four walls. Not all his men may sever this; It yields to friends', not monarchs' calls; My whinstone house my castle is-- I have my own four walls. When fools or knaves do make a rout, With gigmen, dinners, balls, cabals, I turn my back and shut them out; These are my own four walls. CHAPTER III CRAIGENPUTTOCK [1826-1834] "Ah, when she was young, she was a fleein', dancin", light-heartit thing, Jeannie Welsh, that naething would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a' at ance. There was Maister Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher; and he cam' aboot her. Then there was Maister ----. Then there was Maister Carlyle himsel', and _he_ cam' to finish her off like."--HADDINGTON NURSE. "My broom, as I sweep up the withered leaves, might be heard at a furlong's distance."--T. CARLYLE, from Craigenputtock, Oct. 1830. During the last days at Hoddam Hill, Carlyle was on the verge of a crisis of his career, _i.e._ his making a marriage, for the chequered fortune of which he was greatly himself to blame. No biography can ignore the strange conditions of a domestic life, already made familiar in so many records that they are past evasion. Various opinions have been held regarding the lady whom he selected to share his lot. Any adequate estimate of this remarkable woman belongs to an account of her own career, such as that given by Mrs. Ireland in her judicious and interesting abridgment of the material amply supplied. Jane Baillie Welsh (_b.1801, d. 1866_)--descended on the paternal side from Elizabeth, the youngest daughter of John Knox; on the maternal owning to an inheritance of gipsy blood--belonged to a family long esteemed in the borders. Her father, a distinguished Edinburgh student, and afterwards eminent surgeon at Haddington, noted alike for his humanity and skill, made a small fortune, and purchased in advance from his father his inheritance of Craigenputtock, a remnant of the once larger family estate. He died in 1819, when his daughter was in her eighteenth year. To her he left the now world-famous farm and the bulk of his property. Jane, of precocious talents, seems to have been, almost from infancy, the tyrant of the house at Haddington, where her people took a place of precedence in the small county town. Her grandfathers, John of Penfillan and Walter of Templand, also a Welsh, though of another--the gipsy--stock, vied for her baby favours, while her mother's quick and shifty tempers seem at that date to have combined in the process of "spoiling" her. The records of the schooldays of the juvenile Jane all point to a somewhat masculine strength of character. Through life, it must be acknowledged, this brilliant creature was essentially "a mockingbird," and made game of every one till she met her mate. The little lady was learned, reading Virgil at nine, ambitious enough to venture a tragedy at fourteen, and cynical; writing to her life-long friend, Miss Eliza Stodart, of Haddington as a "bottomless pit of dulness," where "all my little world lay glittering in tinsel at my feet." She was ruthless to the suitors--as numerous, says Mr. Froude, "as those of Penelope "--who flocked about the young beauty, wit, and heiress. Of the discarded rivals there was only one of note--George Rennie, long afterwards referred to by Carlyle as a "clever, decisive, very ambitious, but quite unmelodious young fellow whom we knew here (in Chelsea) as sculptor and M.P." She dismissed him in 1821 for some cause of displeasure, "due to pride, reserve, and his soured temper about the world"; but when he came to take leave, she confesses, "I scarcely heard a word he said, my own heart beat so loud." Years after, in London, she went by request of his wife to Rennie's death-bed. Meanwhile she had fallen under the spell of her tutor, Edward Irving, and, as she, after much _finesse_ and evasion, admitted, came to love him in earnest. Irving saw her weak points, saying she was apt to turn her powers to "arts of cruelty which satire and scorn are," and "to contemplate the inferiority of others rather from the point of view of ridicule and contempt than of commiseration and relief." Later she retaliated, "There would have been no 'tongues' had Irving married me." But he was fettered by a previous engagement, to which, after some struggle for release, he held, leaving in charge of his pupil, as guide, philosopher, and friend, his old ally and successor, Thomas Carlyle. Between this exceptional pair there began in 1821 a relationship of constant growth in intimacy, marked by frequent visits, conversations, confidences, and a correspondence, long, full, and varied, starting with interchange of literary sympathies, and sliding by degrees into the dangerous friendship called Platonic. At the outset it was plain that Carlyle was not the St. Preux or Wolmar whose ideas of elegance Jane Welsh--a hasty student of Rousseau--had set in unhappy contrast to the honest young swains of Haddington. Uncouth, ungainly in manner and attire, he first excited her ridicule even more than he attracted her esteem, and her written descriptions of him recall that of Johnson by Lord Chesterfield. "He scrapes the fender, ... only his tongue should be left at liberty, his other members are most fantastically awkward"; but the poor mocking-bird had met her fate. The correspondence falls under two sections, the critical and the personal. The critical consists of remarks, good, bad, and indifferent, on books and their writers. Carlyle began his siege by talking German to her, now extolling Schiller and Goethe to the skies, now, with a rare stretch of deference, half conniving at her sneers. Much also passed between them about English authors, among them comments on Byron, notably inconsistent. Of him Carlyle writes (April 15th 1824) as "a pampered lord," who would care nothing for the £500 a year that would make an honest man happy; but later, on hearing of the death at Mesolonghi, more in the vein of his master Goethe, he exclaims:-- Alas, poor Byron! the news of his death came upon me like a mass of lead; and yet the thought of it sends a painful twinge through all my being, as if I had lost a brother. O God! that so many souls of mud and clay should fill up their base existence to the utmost bound; and this, the noblest spirit in Europe, should sink before half his course was run.... Late so full of fire and generous passion and proud purposes, and now for ever dumb and cold.... Had he been spared to the age of threescore and ten what might he not have been! what might he not have been! ... I dreamed of seeing him and knowing him; but ... we shall go to him, he shall not return to us. This in answer to her account of the same intelligence: "I was told it all alone in a room full of people. If they had said the sun or the moon was gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in the creation than the words 'Byron is dead.'" Other letters of the same period, from London, are studded or disfigured by the incisive ill-natured sarcasms above referred to, or they relate to the work and prospects of the writer. Those that bear on the progress of his suit mark it as the strangest and, when we look before and after, one of the saddest courtships in literary history. As early as 1822 Carlyle entertained the idea of making Jane Welsh his wife; she had begun to yield to the fascinations of his speech--a fascination akin to that of Burns--when she wrote, "I will be happier contemplating my beau-ideal than a real, substantial, eating, drinking, sleeping, honest husband." In 1823 they were half-declared lovers, but there were recalcitrant fits on both sides. On occasion of a meeting at Edinburgh there was a quarrel, followed by a note of repentance, in which she confessed, "Nothing short of a devil could have tempted me to torment you and myself as I did on that unblessed day." Somewhat earlier she had written in answer to his first distinct avowal, "My friend, I love you. But were you my brother I should love you the same. No. Your friend I will be ... while I breathe the breath of life; but your wife never, though you were as rich as Croesus, as honoured and renowned as you yet shall be." To which Carlyle answered with characteristic pride, "I have no idea of dying in the Arcadian shepherd's style for the disappointment of hopes which I never seriously entertained, and had no right to entertain seriously." There was indeed nothing of Corydon and Phyllis in this struggle of two strong wills, the weaker giving way to the stronger, the gradual but inexorable closing of an iron ring. Backed by the natural repugnance of her mother to the match, Miss Welsh still rebelled, bracing herself with the reflection, "Men and women may be very charming without having any genius;" and to his renewed appeal (1825), "It lies with you whether I shall be a right man or only a hard and bitter Stoic," retorting, "I am not in love with you ... my affections are in a state of perfect tranquillity." But she admitted he was her "only fellowship and support," and confiding at length the truth about Irving, surrendered in the words, "Decide, and woe to me if your reason be your judge and not your love." In this duel of Puck and Theseus, the latter felt he had won and pressed his advantage, offering to let her free and adding warnings to the blind, "Without great sacrifices on both sides, the possibility of our union is an empty dream." At the eleventh hour, when, in her own words, she was "married past redemption," he wrote, "If you judge fit, I will take you to my heart this very week. If you judge fit, I will this very week forswear you for ever;" and replied to her request that her widowed mother might live under their wedded roof in terms that might have become Petruchio: "It may be stated in a word. The man should bear rule in the house, not the woman. This is an eternal axiom, the law of nature which no mortal departs from unpunished. . . . Will your mother consent to make me her guardian and director, and be a second wife to her daughter's husband!" Was ever woman in this humour woo'd, Was ever woman in this humour won? Miss Welsh at length reluctantly agreed to come to start life at Scotsbrig, where his family had migrated; but Carlyle pushed another counter: "Your mother must not visit mine: the mere idea of such a visit argued too plainly that you _knew nothing_ of the family circle in which for my sake you were willing to take a place." It being agreed that Mrs. Welsh was to leave Haddington, where the alliance was palpably unpopular, Carlyle proposed to begin married life in his mother-in-law's vacant house, saying in effect to his fiancée that as for intrusive visitors he had "nerve enough" to kick her old friends out of doors. At this point, however, her complaisance had reached its limit. The bridegroom-elect had to soothe his sense of partial retreat by a scolding letter. As regards difficulties of finance he pointed out that he had £200 to start with, and that a labourer and his wife had been known to live on £14 a year. On the edge of the great change in her life, Jane Welsh writes, "I am resolved in spirit, in the face of every horrible fate," and says she has decided to put off mourning for her father, having found a second father. Carlyle proposed that after the "dreaded ceremony" he and his bride and his brother John should travel together by the stage-coach from Dumfries to Edinburgh. In "the last dying speech and marrying words" she objects to this arrangement, and after the event (October 17th 1826) they drove in a post-chaise to 21 Comely Bank, where Mrs. Welsh, now herself settled at Templand, had furnished a house for them. Meanwhile the Carlyle family migrated to Scotsbrig. There followed eighteen comparatively tranquil months, an oasis in the wilderness, where the anomalous pair lived in some respects like other people. They had seats in church, and social gatherings--Wednesday "At Homes," to which the celebrity of their brilliant conversational powers attracted the brightest spirits of the northern capital, among them Sir William Hamilton, Sir David Browster, John Wilson, De Quincey, forgiven for his review, and above all Jeffrey, a friend, though of opposite character, nearly as true as Irving himself. Procter had introduced Carlyle to the famous editor, who, as a Scotch cousin of the Welshes, took from the first a keen interest in the still struggling author, and opened to him the door of the _Edinburgh Review_. The appearance, of the article on _Richter_, 1827, and that, in the course of the same year, on _The State of German Literature,_ marks the beginning of a long series of splendid historical and critical essays--closing in 1855 with the _Prinzenraub_--which set Carlyle in the front of the reviewers of the century. The success in the _Edinburgh_ was an "open sesame;" and the conductors of the _Foreign_ and _Foreign Quarterly_ Reviews, later, those of _Fraser_ and the _Westminster_, were ready to receive whatever the new writer might choose to send. To the _Foreign Review_ he contributed from Comely Bank the _Life and Writings of Werner_, a paper on _Helena_, the leading episode of the second part of "Faust," and the first of the two great Essays on _Goethe_, which fixed his place as the interpreter of Germany to England. In midsummer 1827 Carlyle received a letter from Goethe cordially acknowledging the _Life of Schiller_, and enclosing presents of books for himself and his wife. This, followed by a later inquiry as to the author of the article on _German Literature_, was the opening of a correspondence of sage advice on the one side and of lively gratitude on the other, that lasted till the death of the veteran in 1832. Goethe assisted, or tried to assist, his admirer by giving him a testimonial in a candidature for the Chair (vacant by the promotion of Dr. Chalmers) of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews. Jeffrey, a frequent visitor and host of the Carlyles, still regarded as "a jewel of advocates ... the most lovable of little men," urged and aided the canvass, but in vain. The testimonials were too strong to be judicious, and "it was enough that" the candidate "was described as a man of original and extraordinary gifts to make college patrons shrink from contact with him." Another failure, about the same date and with the same backing, was an application for a Professorship in London University, practically under the patronage of Brougham; yet another, of a different kind, was Carlyle's attempt to write a novel, which having been found--better before than after publication--to be a failure, was for the most part burnt. "He could not," says Froude, "write a novel any more than he could write poetry. He had no _invention._" [Footnote: Carlyle's verses also demonstrate that he had no metrical ear. The only really good lines he ever wrote, save in translations where the rhythm was set to him, are those constantly quoted about the dawn of "another blue day." Those sent to his mother on "Proud Hapsburg," and to Jane Welsh before marriage are unworthy of Macaulay's school-boy, "Non di non homines;" but it took much hammering to persuade Carlyle of the fact, and when persuaded he concluded that verse-writing was a mere tinkling of cymbals!] "His genius was for fact; to lay hold on truth, with all his intellect and all his imagination. He could no more invent than he could lie." The remaining incidents of Carlyle's Edinburgh life are few: a visit from his mother; a message from Goethe transmitting a medal for Sir Walter Scott; sums generously sent for his brother John's medical education in Germany; loans to Alexander, and a frustrate scheme for starting a new Annual Register, designed to be a literary _résumé_ of the year, make up the record. The "rift in the lute," Carlyle's incapacity for domestic life, was already showing itself. Within the course of an orthodox honeymoon he had begun to shut himself up in interior solitude, seldom saw his wife from breakfast till 4 P.M., when they dined together and read _Don Quixote_ in Spanish. The husband was half forgotten in the author beginning to prophesy: he wrote alone, walked alone, thought alone, and for the most part talked alone, _i.e._ in monologue that did not wait or care for answer. There was respect, there was affection, but there was little companionship. Meanwhile, despite the _Review_ articles, Carlyle's other works, especially the volumes on German romance, were not succeeding, and the mill had to grind without grist. It seemed doubtful whether he could afford to live in Edinburgh; he craved after greater quiet, and when the farm, which was the main Welsh inheritance, fell vacant, resolved on migrating thither. His wife yielding, though with a natural repugnance to the extreme seclusion in store for her, and the Jeffreys kindly assisting, they went together in May 1828 to the Hill of the Hawks. Craigenputtock is by no means "the dreariest spot in all the British dominions." On a sunny day it is an inland home, with wide billowy straths of grass around, inestimable silence broken only by the placid bleating of sheep, and the long rolling ridges of the Solway hills in front. But in the "winter wind," girt by drifts of snow, no post or apothecary within fifteen miles, it may be dreary enough. Here Carlyle allowed his wife to serve him through six years of household drudgery; an offence for which he was never quite forgiven, and to estimate its magnitude here seems the proper place. He was a model son and brother, and his conjugal fidelity has been much appraised, but he was as unfit, and for some of the same reasons, to make "a happy fireside clime" as was Jonathan Swift; and less even than Byron had he a share of the mutual forbearance which is essential to the closest of all relations. "Napoleon," says Emerson, "to achieve his ends risked everything and spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself." With a slight change of phrase the same may be said of Carlyle's devotion to his work. There is no more prevailing refrain in his writing, public and private, than his denunciation of literature as a profession, nor are there wiser words than those in which the veteran warns the young men, whose questions he answers with touching solicitude, against its adoption. "It should be," he declares, "the wine not the food of life, the ardent spirits of thought and fancy without the bread of action parches up nature and makes strong souls like Byron dangerous, the weak despicable." But it was nevertheless the profession of his deliberate choice, and he soon found himself bound to it as Ixion to his wheel. The most thorough worker on record, he found nothing easy that was great, and he would do nothing little. In his determination to pluck out the heart of the mystery, be it of himself, as in _Sartor_; of Germany, as in his Goethes and Richters; the state of England, as in _Chartism_ and _Past and Present;_ of _Cromwell_ or of _Friedrich,_ he faced all obstacles and overthrew them. Dauntless and ruthless, he allowed nothing to divert or to mar his designs, least of all domestic cares or even duties. "Selfish he was,"--I again quote from his biographer,--"if it be selfish to be ready to sacrifice every person dependent on him as completely as he sacrificed himself." What such a man wanted was a housekeeper and a nurse, not a wife, and when we consider that he had chosen for the latter companionship a woman almost as ambitious as himself, whose conversation was only less brilliant than his own, of delicate health and dainty ways, loyal to death, but, according to Mr. Froude, in some respects "as hard as flint," with "dangerous sparks of fire," whose quick temper found vent in sarcasms that blistered and words like swords, who could declare during the time of the engagement, to which in spite of warnings manifold she clung, "I will not marry to live on less than my natural and artificial wants"; who, ridiculing his accent to his face and before his friends, could write, "apply your talents to gild over the inequality of our births"; and who found herself obliged to live sixteen miles from the nearest neighbour, to milk a cow, scour floors and mend shoes--when we consider all this we are constrained to admit that the 17th October 1826 was a _dies nefastus,_ nor wonder that thirty years later Mrs. Carlyle wrote, "I married for ambition, Carlyle has exceeded all that my wildest hopes ever imagined of him, and I am miserable,"--and to a young friend, "My dear, whatever you do, never marry a man of genius." Carlyle's own references to the life at Craigenputtock are marked by all his aggravating inconsistency. "How happy we shall be in this Craig o' Putta," he writes to his wife from Scotsbrig, April 17th 1827; and later to Goethe:-- Here Rousseau would have been as happy as on his island of Saint Pierre. My town friends indeed ascribe my sojourn here to a similar disposition, and forebode me no good results. But I came here solely with the design to simplify my way of life, and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to be true to myself. This bit of earth is our own; here we can live, write, and think as best pleases ourselves, even though Zoilus himself were to be crowned the monarch of literature. From some of our heights I can descry, about a day's journey to the west, the hill where Agricola and the Romans left a camp behind them. At the foot of it I was born, and there both father and mother still live to love me.... The only piece of any importance that I have written since I came here is an Essay on Burns. This Essay,--modified at first, then let alone, by Jeffrey,--appeared in the _Edinburgh_ in the autumn of 1828. We turn to Carlyle's journal and find the entry, "Finished a paper on Burns at this Devil's Den," elsewhere referred to as a "gaunt and hungry Siberia." Later still he confesses, when preparing for his final move south, "Of solitude I have really had enough." Romae Tibur amem ventosus, Tibure Romam. Carlyle in the moor was always sighing for the town, and in the town for the moor. During the first twenty years of his London life, in what he called "the Devil's oven," he is constantly clamouring to return to the den. His wife, more and more forlorn though ever loyal, consistently disliked it; little wonder, between sluttish maid-servants and owl-like solitude: and she expressed her dislike in the pathetic verses, "To a Swallow Building under our Eaves," sent to Jeffrey in 1832, and ending-- God speed thee, pretty bird; may thy small nest With little ones all in good time be blest; I love thee much For well thou managest that life of thine, While I! Oh, ask not what I do with mine, Would I were such! _The Desert._ The monotony of the moorland life was relieved by visits of relations and others made and repaid, an excursion to Edinburgh, a residence in London, and the production of work, the best of which has a chance of living with the language. One of the most interesting of the correspondences of this period is a series of letters, addressed to an anonymous Edinburgh friend who seems to have had some idea of abandoning his profession of the Law for Literature, a course against which Carlyle strenuously protests. From these letters, which have only appeared in the columns of the _Glasgow Herald_, we may extract a few sentences:-- Don't disparage the work that gains your bread. What is all work but a drudgery? no labour for the present joyous, but grievous. A man who has nothing to admire except himself is in the minimum state. The question is, Does a man really love Truth, or only the market price of it? Even literary men should have something else to do. Katnes was a lawyer, Roscoe a merchant, Hans Sachs a cobbler, Burns a gauger, etc. The following singular passage, the style of which suggests an imitation of Sterne, is the acme of unconscious self-satire:-- You are infinitely unjust to Blockheads, as they are called. Ask yourself seriously within your own heart--what right have you to live wisely in God's world, and they not to live a little less wisely? Is there a man more to be condoled with, nay, I will say to be cherished and tenderly treated, than a man that has no brain? My Purse is empty, it can be filled again; the Jew Rothschild could fill it; or I can even live with it very far from full. But, gracious heavens! What is to be done with my _empty Head_? Three of the visits of this period are memorable. Two from the Jeffreys (in 1828 and 1830) leave us with the same uncomfortable impression of kindness ungrudgingly bestowed and grudgingly received. Jeffrey had a double interest in the household at Craigenputtock--an almost brotherly regard for the wife, and a belief, restrained by the range of a keen though limited appreciation, in the powers of the husband, to whom he wrote: "Take care of the fair creature who has entrusted herself so entirely to you," and with a half truth, "You have no mission upon earth, whatever you may fancy, half so important as to be innocently happy." And again: "Bring your blooming Eve out of your blasted Paradise, and seek shelter in the lower world." But Carlyle held to the "banner with a strange device," and was either deaf or indignant. The visits passed, with satirical references from both host and hostess; for Mrs. Carlyle, who could herself abundantly scoff and scold, would allow the liberty to no one else. Jeffrey meanwhile was never weary of well-doing. Previous to his promotion as Lord Advocate and consequent transference to London, he tried to negotiate for Carlyle's appointment as his successor in the editorship of the _Review,_ but failed to make him accept the necessary conditions. The paper entitled _Signs of the Times_ was the last production that he had to revise for his eccentric friend. Those following on Taylor's _German Literature_ and the _Characteristics_ were brought out in 1831 under the auspices of Macvey Napier. The other visit was from the most illustrious of Carlyle's English-speaking friends, in many respects a fellow-worker, yet "a spirit of another sort," and destined, though a transcendental mystic, to be the most practical of his benefactors. Twenty-four hours of Ralph Waldo Emerson (often referred to in the course of a long and intimate correspondence) are spoken of by Mrs. Carlyle as a visit from the clouds, brightening the prevailing gray. He came to the remote inland home with "the pure intellectual gleam" of which Hawthorne speaks, and "the quiet night of clear fine talk" remained one of the memories which led Carlyle afterwards to say, "Perhaps our happiest days were spent at the Craig." Goethe's letters, especially that in which he acknowledges a lock of Mrs. Carlyle's hair, "eine unvergleichliche schwarze Haar locke," were also among the gleams of 1829. The great German died three years later, after receiving the birthday tribute, in his 82nd year, from English friends; and it is pleasant to remember that in this instance the disciple was to the end loyal to his master. To this period belong many other correspondences. "I am scribble scribbling," he says in a letter of 1832, and mere scribbling may fill many pages with few headaches; but Carlyle wrestled as he wrote, and not a page of those marvellous _Miscellanies_ but is red with his life's blood. Under all his reviewing, he was set on a work whose fortunes were to be the strangest, whose result was, in some respects, the widest of his efforts. The plan of _Sartor Resartus_ is far from original. Swift's _Tale of a Tub_ distinctly anticipates the Clothes Philosophy; there are besides manifest obligations to Reinecke Fuchs, Jean Paul Richter, and other German authors: but in our days originality is only possible in the handling; Carlyle has made an imaginary German professor the mere mouthpiece of his own higher aspirations and those of the Scotland of his day, and it remains the most popular as surely as his _Friedrich_ is the greatest of his works. The author was abundantly conscious of the value of the book, and super-abundantly angry at the unconsciousness of the literary patrons of the time. In 1831 he resolved if possible to go up to London to push the prospects of this first-born male child. The _res angusta_ stood in the way. Jeffrey, after asking his friend "what situation he could get him that he would detest the least," pressed on him "in the coolest, lightest manner the use of his purse." This Carlyle, to the extent of £50 as a loan (carefully returned), was induced ultimately to accept. It has been said that "proud men never wholly forgive those to whom they feel themselves obliged," but their resenting benefits is the worst feature of their pride. Carlyle made his second visit to London to seek types for _Sartor_, in vain. Always preaching reticence with the sound of artillery, he vents in many pages the rage of his chagrin at the "Arimaspian" publishers, who would not print his book, and the public which, "dosed with froth," would not buy it. The following is little softened by the chiaroscuro of five-and-thirty years:-- Done, I think, at Craigenputtock between January and August 1830, _Teufelsdröckh_ was ready, and I decided to make for London; night before going, how I remember it.... The beggarly history of poor _Sartor_ among the blockheadisms is not worth recording or remembering, least of all here! In short, finding that I had got £100 (if memory serve) for _Schiller_ six or seven years before, and for _Sartor_, at least twice as good, I could not only not get £200, but even get no Murray or the like to publish it on half profits. Murray, a most stupendous object to me, tumbling about eyeless, with the evidently strong wish to say "Yes" and "No,"--my first signal experience of that sad human predicament. I said, We will make it "No," then; wrap up our MS., and carry it about for some two years from one terrified owl to another; published at last experimentally in _Fraser_, and even then mostly laughed at, nothing coming of the volume except what was sent by Emerson from America. This summary is unfair to Murray, who was inclined, on Jeffrey's recommendation, to accept the book; but on finding that Carlyle had carried the MS. to Longmans and another publisher, in hopes of a better bargain, and that it had been refused, naturally wished to refer the matter to his "reader," and the negotiation closed. _Sartor_ struggled into half life in parts of the Magazine to which the writer had already contributed several of his German essays, and it was even then published with reluctance, and on half pay. The reception of this work, a nondescript, yet among the finest prose poems in our language, seemed to justify bookseller, editor, and readers alike, for the British public in general were of their worst opinion. "It is a heap of clotted nonsense," pronounced the _Sun_. "Stop that stuff or stop my paper," wrote one of _Fraser's_ constituents. "When is that stupid series of articles by the crazy tailor going to end?" cried another. At this time Carlyle used to say there were only two people who found anything in his book worth reading--Emerson and a priest in Cork, who said to the editor that he would take the magazine when anything in it appeared by the author of _Sartor_. The volume was only published in 1838, by Saunders and Otley, after the _French Revolution_ had further raised the writer's name, and then on a guarantee from friends willing to take the risk of loss. It does not appear whether Carlyle refers to this edition or to some slighter reissue of the magazine articles when he writes in the _Reminiscences: "I sent off six copies to six Edinburgh literary friends, from not one of whom did I get the smallest whisper even of receipt--a thing disappointing more or loss to human nature, and which has silently and insensibly led me never since to send any copy of a book to Edinburgh.... The plebs of literature might be divided in their verdicts about me; though by count of heads I always suspect the guilty clear had it; but the conscript fathers declined to vote at all." [Footnote: _Tempora mutantur_. A few months before Carlyle's death a cheap edition of _Sartor_ was issued, and 30,000 copies were sold within a few weeks.] In America _Sartor_ was pieced together from _Fraser_, published in a volume introduced by Alexander Everett, extolled by Emerson as "A criticism of the spirit of the age in which we live; exhibiting in the most just and novel light the present aspect of religion, politics, literature, and social life." The editors add: "We believe no book has been published for many years ... which discovers an equal mastery over all the riches of the language. The author makes ample amends for the occasional eccentricity of his genius not only by frequent bursts of pure splendour, but by the wit and sense which never fail him." Americans are intolerant of honest criticism on themselves; but they are, more than any other nation, open to appreciate vigorous expressions of original views of life and ethics--all that we understand by philosophy--and equally so to new forms of art. The leading critics of the New England have often been the first and best testers of the fresh products of the Old. A land of experiment in all directions, ranging from Mount Lebanon to Oneida Creek, has been ready to welcome the suggestions, physical or metaphysical, of startling enterprise. Ideas which filter slowly through English soil and abide for generations, flash over the electric atmosphere of the West. Hence Coleridge, Carlyle and Browning were already accepted as prophets in Boston, while their own countrymen were still examining their credentials. To this readiness, as of a photographic plate, to receive, must be added the fact that the message of _Sartor_ crossed the Atlantic when the hour to receive it had struck. To its publication has been attributed the origin of a movement that was almost simultaneously inaugurated by Emerson's _Harvard Discourse_. It was a revolt against the reign of Commerce in practice, Calvinism in theory, and precedent in Art that gave birth to the Transcendentalism of _The Dial_--a Pantheon in which Carlyle had at once assigned to him a place. He meanwhile was busy in London making friends by his conspicuous, almost obtrusive, genius, and sowing the seeds of discord by his equally obtrusive spleen. To his visit of 1831-1832 belongs one of the worst of the elaborate invectives against Lamb which have recoiled on the memory of his critic--to the credit of English sympathies with the most lovable of slightly erring men--with more than the force of a boomorang. A sheaf of sharp sayings of the same date owe their sting to their half truth, _e.g._ to a man who excused himself for profligate journalism on the old plea, "I must live, sir." "No, sir, you need not live, if your body cannot be kept together without selling your soul." Similarly he was abusing the periodicals--"mud," "sand," and "dust magazines"--to which he had contributed, _inter alia_, the great Essay on _Voltaire_ and the consummate sketch of _Novalis_; with the second paper on _Richler_ to the _Foreign Review_, the reviews of _History_ and of _Schiller_ to _Fraser_, and that on _Goethe's Works_ to the _Foreign Quarterly_. During this period he was introduced to Molesworth, Austin, and J.S. Mill. On his summons, October 1st 1832, Mrs. Carlyle came up to Ampton Street, where he then resided, to see him safe through the rest of his London time. They lamented over the lapse of Irving, now lost in the delirium of tongues, and made a league of friendship with Mill, whom he describes as "a partial disciple of mine," a friendship that stood a hard test, but was broken when the author of _Liberty_ naturally found it impossible to remain a disciple of the writer of _Latter-Day Pamphlets_. Mill, like Napier, was at first staggered by the _Characteristics_, though he afterwards said it was one of Carlyle's greatest works, and was enthusiastic over the review of Boswell's _Johnson_, published in _Fraser_ in the course of this year. Meanwhile Margaret, Carlyle's favourite sister, had died, and his brightest, Jean, "the Craw," had married her cousin, James Aitken. In memory of the former he wrote as a master of threnody: to the bridegroom of the latter he addressed a letter reminding him of the duties of a husband, "to do as he would be done by to his wife"! In 1832 John, again by Jeffrey's aid, obtained a situation at £300 a year as travelling physician to Lady Clare, and was enabled, as he promptly did, to pay back his debts. Alexander seems to have been still struggling with an imperfectly successful farm. In the same year, when Carlyle was in London, his father died at Scotsbrig, after a residence there of six years. His son saw him last in August 1831, when, referring to his Craigenputtock solitude, he said: "Man, it's surely a pity that thou shouldst sit yonder with nothing but the eye of Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a gift to speak." The Carlyles returned in March, she to her domestic services, baking bread, preserving eggs, and brightening grates till her eyes grew dim; he to work at his _Diderot_, doing justice to a character more alien to his own than even Voltaire's, reading twenty-five volumes, one per day, to complete the essay; then at _Count Cagliostro_, also for _Fraser_, a link between his last Craigenputtock and his first London toils. The period is marked by shoals of letters, a last present from Weimar, a visit to Edinburgh, and a candidature for a University Chair, which Carlyle thought Jeffrey could have got for him; but the advocate did not, probably could not, in this case satisfy his client. In excusing himself he ventured to lecture the applicant on what he imagined to be the impracticable temper and perverse eccentricity which had retarded and might continue to retard his advancement. [Footnote: The last was in 1836, for the Chair of Astronomy in Glasgow.] Carlyle, never tolerant of rebuke however just, was indignant, and though an open quarrel was avoided by letters, on both sides, of courteous compromise, the breach was in reality never healed, and Jeffrey has a niche in the _Reminiscences_ as a "little man who meant well but did not see far or know much." Carlyle went on, however, like Thor, at the _Diamond Necklace,_ which is a proem to the _French Revolution,_ but inly growling, "My own private impression is that I shall never get any promotion in this world." "A prophet is not readily acknowledged in his own country"; "Mein Leben geht sehr übel: all dim, misty, squally, disheartening at times, almost heartbreaking." This is the prose rather than the male of Byron. Of all men Carlyle could least reek his own rede. He never even tried to consume his own smoke. His _Sartor_ is indeed more contained, and takes at its summit a higher flight than Rousseau's _Confessions,_ or the _Sorrows of Werther,_ or the first two cantos of _Childe Harold:_ but reading Byron's letters is mingling with a world gay and grave; reading Goethe's walking in the Parthenon, though the Graces in the niches are sometimes unclad; reading Carlyle's is travelling through glimpses of sunny fields and then plunging into coal black tunnels. At last he decided, "Puttock is no longer good for _me_," and his brave wife approving, and even inciting, he resolved to burn his ships and seek his fortune sink or swim--in the metropolis. Carlyle, for once taking the initiative of practical trouble, went in advance on a house-hunt to London, and by advice of Leigh Hunt fixed on the now famous house in Chelsea near the Thames. CHAPTER IV CHEYNE ROW [1834-1842] The curtain falls on Craigenputtock, the bleak farm by the bleak hills, and rises on Cheyne Row, a side street off the river Thames, that winds, as slowly as Cowper's Ouse, by the reaches of Barnes and Battersea, dotted with brown-sailed ships and holiday boats in place of the excursion steamers that now stop at Carlyle Pier; hard by the Carlyle Statue on the new (1874) Embankment, in front the "Carlyle mansions," a stone's-throw from "Carlyle Square." Turning up the row, we find over No. 24, formerly No. 5, the Carlyle medallion in marble, marking the house where the Chelsea prophet, rejected, recognised, and adulated of men, lived over a stretch of forty-seven years. Here were his headquarters, but he was a frequent wanderer. About half the time was occupied in trips almost yearly to Scotland, one to Ireland, one to Belgium, one to France, and two to Germany; besides, in the later days, constant visits to admiring friends, more and more drawn from the higher ranks in English society, the members of which learnt to appreciate his genius before he found a hearing among the mass of the people. The whole period falls readily under four sections, marking as many phases of the author's outer and inner life, while the same character is preserved throughout:-- I. 1834-1842--When the death of Mrs. Welsh and the late success of Carlyle's work relieved him from a long, sometimes severe, struggle with narrow means. It is the period of the _French Revolution, The Lectures_, and _Hero-Worship_, and of _Chartism_, the last work with a vestige of adherence to the Radical creed. II. 1842-1853--When the death of his mother loosened his ties to the North. This decade of his literary career is mainly signalised by the writing and publication of the _Life and Letters of Cromwell_, of Carlyle's political works, _Past and Present_ and the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, and of the _Life of Sterling_, works which mark his now consummated disbelief in democracy, and his distinct abjuration of adherence, in any ordinary sense, to the "Creed of Christendom." III. 1853-1866--When the laurels of his triumphant speech as Lord Rector at Edinburgh were suddenly withered by the death of his wife. This period is filled with the _History of Friedrick II._, and marked by a yet more decidedly accentuated trust in autocracy. IV. 1866-1881.--Fifteen years of the setting of the sun. The Carlyles, coming to the metropolis in a spirit of rarely realised audacity on a reserve fund of from £200 to £300 at most, could not propose to establish themselves in any centre of fashion. In their circumstances their choice of abode was on the whole a fortunate one. Chelsea, Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite Beyond it, was, even in those days of less constant communication, within measurable distance of the centres of London life: it had then and still preserves a host of interesting historic and literary traditions. Among the men who in old times lived or met together in that outlying region of London, we have memories of Sir Thomas More and of Erasmus, of the Essayists Addison and Steele, and of Swift. Hard by is the tomb of Bolingbroke and the Square of Sir Hans Sloane; Smollett lived for a time in Laurence Street; nearer our own day, Turner resided in Cheyne Walk, later George Eliot, W.B. Scott, Dante Rossetti, Swinburne for a season, and George Meredith. When Carlyle came to settle there, Leigh Huntin Upper Cheyne Row, an almost next-door neighbour, was among the first of a series of visitors; always welcome, despite his "hugger-mugger" household and his borrowing tendencies, his "unpractical messages" and "rose-coloured reform processes," as a bright "singing bird, musical in flowing talk," abounding in often subtle criticisms and constant good humour. To the Chelsea home, since the Mecca of many pilgrims, there also flocked other old Ampton Street friends, drawn thither by genuine regard, Mrs. Carlyle, by the testimony of Miss Cushman and all competent judges, was a "_raconteur_ unparalleled." To quote the same authority, "that wonderful woman, able to live in the full light of Carlyle's genius without being overwhelmed by it," had a peculiar skill in drawing out the most brilliant conversationalist of the age. Burns and Wilson were his Scotch predecessors in an art of which the close of our century--when every fresh thought is treasured to be printed and paid for--knows little but the shadow. Of Carlyle, as of Johnson, it might have been said, "There is no use arguing with him, for if his pistol misses fire he knocks you down with the butt": both men would have benefited by revolt from their dictation, but the power to contradict either was overborne by a superior power to assert. Swift's occasional insolence, in like manner, prevailed by reason of the colossal strength that made him a Gulliver in Lilliput. Carlyle in earlier, as in later times, would have been the better of meeting his mate, or of being overmatched; but there was no Wellington found for this "grand Napoleon of the realms" of prose. His reverence for men, if not for things, grew weaker with the strengthening of his sway, a sway due to the fact that men of extensive learning are rarely men of incisive force, and Carlyle--in this respect more akin to Johnson than to Swift--had the acquired material to serve as fuel for the inborn fire. Hence the least satisfactory of his criticisms are those passed on his peers. Injustices of conversation should be pardoned to an impulsive nature, even those of correspondence in the case of a man who had a mania for pouring out his moods to all and sundry; but where Carlyle has carefully recarved false estimates in cameo, his memory must abide the consequence. Quite late in life, referring to the Chelsea days, he says, "The best of those who then flocked about us was Leigh Hunt," who never seriously said him nay; "and the worst Lamb," who was not among the worshippers. No one now doubts that Carlyle's best adviser and most candid critic might have been John Stuart Mill, for whom he long felt as much regard as it was possible for him to entertain towards a proximate equal. The following is characteristic: "He had taken a great attachment to me (which lasted about ten years and then suddenly ended, I never knew how), an altogether clear, logical, honest, amicable, affectionate young man, and respected as such here, though sometimes felt to be rather colourless, even aqueous, no religion in any form traceable in him." And similarly of his friend, Mrs. Taylor, "She was a will-o'-the- wispish iridescence of a creature; meaning nothing bad either"; and again of Mill himself, "His talk is sawdustish, like ale when there is no wine to be had." Such criticisms, some ungrateful, others unjust, may be relieved by reference to the close of two friendships to which (though even these were clouded by a touch of personal jealousy) he was faithful in the main; for the references of both husband and wife to Irving's "delirations" are the tears due to the sufferings of errant minds. Their last glimpse of this best friend of earlier days was in October 1834, when he came on horseback to the door of their new home, and left with the benediction to his lost Jane, "You have made a little Paradise around you." He died in Glasgow in December of the same year, and his memory is pathetically embalmed in Carlyle's threnody. The final phases of another old relationship were in some degree similar. During the first years of their settlement, Lord Jeffrey frequently called at Cheyne Row, and sent kind letters to his cousin, received by her husband with the growl, "I am at work stern and grim, not to be interrupted by Jeffrey's theoretic flourish of epistolary trumpeting." Carlyle, however, paid more than one visit to Craigcrook, seeing his host for the last time in the autumn of 1849, "worn in body and thin in mind," "grown lunar now and not solar any more." Three months later he heard of the death of this benefactor of his youth, and wrote the memorial which finds its place in the second volume of the _Reminiscences_. [Footnote: Cf. Byron's account of the same household at Pisa. Carlyle deals very leniently with the malignant volume on Byron which amply justified the epigram of Moore. But he afterwards spoke more slightly of his little satellite, attributing the faint praise, in the _Examiner_, of the second course of lectures to Hunt's jealousy of a friend now "beginning to be somebody."] The work "stern and grim" was the _French Revolution_, the production of which is the dominant theme of the first chapter of Carlyle's London life. Mr. Froude, in the course of an estimate of this work which leaves little room for other criticism, dwells on the fact that it was written for a purpose, _i.e._ to show that rulers, like those of the French in the eighteenth century, who are solely bent on the pleasures and oblivious of the duties of life, must end by being "burnt up." This, doubtless, is one of the morals of the _French Revolution_--the other being that anarchy ends in despotism--and unquestionably a writer who never ceased to be a preacher must have had it in his mind. But Carlyle's peculiarity is that he combined the functions of a prophet and of an artist, and that while now the one, now the other, was foremost, he never wholly forgot the one in the other. In this instance he found a theme well fit for both, and threw his heart into it, though under much discouragement. Despite the Essays, into each of which he had put work enough for a volume, the Reviews were shy of him; while his _Sartor_ had, on this side of the Atlantic, been received mainly with jeers. Carlyle, never unconscious of his prerogative and apostolic primogeniture, felt like an aspirant who had performed his vigils, and finding himself still ignored, became a knight of the rueful countenance. Thoroughly equipped, adept enough in ancient tongues to appreciate Homer, a master of German and a fluent reader of French, a critic whose range stretched from Diderot to John Knox, he regarded his treatment as "tragically hard," exclaiming, "I could learn to do all things I have seen done, and am forbidden to try any of them." The efforts to keep the wolf from his own doors were harder than any but a few were till lately aware of. Landed in London with his £200 reserve, he could easily have made way in the usual ruts; but he would have none of them, and refused to accept the employment which is the most open, as it is the most lucrative, to literary aspirants. To nine out of ten the "profession of literature" means Journalism; while Journalism often means dishonesty, always conformity. Carlyle was, in a sense deeper than that of the sects, essentially a nonconformist; he not only disdained to write a word he did not believe, he would not suppress a word he did believe--a rule of action fatal to swift success. During these years there began an acquaintance, soon ripening into intimacy, the memories of which are enshrined in one of the most beautiful of biographies. Carlyle's relation to John Sterling drew out the sort of affection which best suited him--the love of a master for a pupil, of superior for inferior, of the benefactor for the benefited; and consequently there is no line in the record of it that jars. Sterling once tried to benefit his friend, and perhaps fortunately failed. He introduced Carlyle to his father, then the chief writer in the _Times_, and the Editor invited the struggling author to contribute to its columns, but, according to Mr. Froude, "on the implied conditions ... when a man enlists in the army, his soul as well as his body belong to his commanding officer." Carlyle talked, all his life, about what his greatest disciple calls "The Lamp of Obedience"; but he himself would obey no one, and found it hard to be civil to those who did not see with his eyes. Ho rejected--we trust in polite terms--the offer of "the Thunderer." "In other respects also," says our main authority, "he was impracticable, unmalleable, and as independent and wilful as if he were the heir to a peerage. He had created no 'public' of his own; the public which existed could not understand his writings and would not buy them; and thus it was that in Cheyne Row he was more neglected than he had been in Scotland." Welcome to a limited range of literary society, he astonished and amused by his vehement eloquence, but when crossed he was not only "sarcastic" but rude, and speaking of people, as he wrote of them, with various shades of contempt, naturally gave frequent offence. Those whose toes are trodden on, not by accident, justifiably retaliate. "Are you looking for your t-t-turban?" Charles Lamb is reported to have said in some entertainer's lobby after listening for an evening to Carlyle's invectives, and the phrase may have rankled in his mind. Living in a glass case, while throwing stones about, super-sensitive to criticism though professing to despise critics, he made at least as many enemies as friends, and by his own confession became an Ishmaelite. In view of the reception of _Sartor_, we do not wonder to find him writing in 1833-- It is twenty-three months since I earned a penny by the craft of literature, and yet I know no fault I have committed.... I am tempted to go to America.... I shall quit literature, it does not invite me. Providence warns me to have done with it. I have failed in the Divine Infernal Universe; or meditating, when at the lowest ebb, to go wandering about the world like Teufelsdröckh, looking for a rest for the sole of his foot. And yet all the time, with incomparable naiveté, he was asserting:-- The longer I live among this people the deeper grows my feeling of natural superiority to them.... The literary world here is a thing which I have no other course left me but to defy.... I can reverence no existing man. With health and peace for one year, I could write a better book than there has been in this country for generations. All through his journal and his correspondence there is a perpetual alternation of despair and confidence, always closing with the refrain, "Working, trying is the only remover of doubt," and wise counsels often echoed from Goethe, "Accomplish as well as you can the task on hand, and the next step will become clear;" on the other hand--A man must not only be able to work but to give over working.... If a man wait till he has entirely brushed off his imperfections, he will spin for ever on his axis, advancing no whither.... The _French Revolution_ stands pretty fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to splash down what I know in large masses of colours, that it may look like a smoke-and-flame conflagration in the distance. The progress of this work was retarded by the calamity familiar to every reader, but it must be referred to as throwing one of the finest lights on Carlyle's character. His closest intellectual link with J.S. Mill was their common interest in French politics and literature; the latter, himself meditating a history of the Revolution, not only surrendered in favour of the man whose superior pictorial genius he recognised, but supplied him freely with the books he had accumulated for the enterprise. His interest in the work was unfortunately so great as to induce him to borrow the MS. of the first volume, completed in the early spring of 1835, and his business habits so defective as to permit him to lend it without authority; so that, as appears, it was left lying about by Mrs. Taylor and mistaken by her servant for waste paper: certainly it was destroyed; and Mill came to Cheyne Row to announce the fact in such a desperate state of mind that Carlyle's first anxiety seems to have been to console his friend. According to Mrs. Carlyle, as reported by Froude, "the first words her husband uttered as the door closed were, 'Well, Mill, poor fellow, is terribly cut up; we must endeavour to hide from him how very serious this business is to us.'" This trait of magnanimity under the first blow of a disaster which seemed to cancel the work of years should be set against his nearly contemporaneous criticisms of Coleridge, Lamb, Wordsworth, Sydney Smith, Macaulay, etc. [Footnote: Carlyle had only been writing the volume for five months; but he was preparing for it during much of his life at Craigenputtock.] Mill sent a cheque of £200 as "the slightest external compensation" for the loss, and only, by urgent entreaty, procured the acceptance of half the sum. Carlyle here, as in every real emergency, bracing his resolve by courageous words, as "never tine heart or get provoked heart," set himself to re-write the volume with an energy that recalls that of Scott rebuilding his ruined estate; but the work was at first so "wretched" that it had to be laid aside for a season, during which the author wisely took a restorative bath of comparatively commonplace novels. The re-writing of the first volume was completed in September 1835; the whole book in January 1837. The mood in which it was written throws a light on the excellences as on the defects of the history. The _Reminiscences_ again record the gloom and defiance of "Thomas the Doubter" walking through the London streets "with a feeling similar to Satan's stepping the burning marl," and scowling at the equipages about Hyde Park Corner, sternly thinking, "Yes, and perhaps none of you could do what I am at. I shall finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a rifle and spade, and withdraw to the Transatlantic wilderness." In an adjacent page he reports himself as having said to his wife-- What they will do with this book none knows, my lass; but they have not had for two hundred years any book that came more truly from a man's very heart, and so let them trample it under foot and hoof as they see best.... "They cannot trample that," she would cheerily answer. This passage points at once to the secret of the writer's spell and to the limits of his lasting power. His works were written seldom with perfect fairness, never with the dry light required for a clear presentation of the truth; they have all "an infusion from the will and the affections"; but they were all written with a whole sincerity and utter fervour; they rose from his hot heart, and rushed through the air "like rockets druv' by their own burnin'." Consequently his readers confess that he has never forgot the Horatian maxim-- Si vis me flere, dolendum est Primum ipsi tibi. About this time Carlyle writes, "My friends think I have found the art of living upon nothing," and there must, despite Mill's contribution, have been "bitter thrift" in Cheyne REow during the years 1835-1837. He struggled through the unremunerative interval of waiting for the sale of a great work by help of fees derived from his essay on the _Diamond Necklace_ (which, after being refused by the _Foreign Quarterly,_ appeared in _Fraser,_ 1837), that on _Mirabeau_ in the _Westminster,_ and in the following year, for the same periodical, the article on _Sir Walter Scott._ To the last work, undertaken against the grain, he refers in one of the renewed wails of the year: "O that literature had never been devised. I am scourged back to it by the whip of necessity." The circumstance may account for some of the manifest defects of one of the least satisfactory of Carlyle's longer' reviews. Frequent references in previous letters show that he never appreciated Scott, to whom he refers as a mere Restaurateur. Meanwhile the appearance of the _French Revolution_ had brought the name of its author, then in his forty-third year, for the first time prominently before the public. It attracted the attention of Thackeray, who wrote a generous review in the _Times,_ of Southey, Jeffrey, Macaulay, Hallam, and Brougham, who recognised the advent of an equal, if sometimes an adverse power in the world of letters. But, though the book established his reputation, the sale was slow, and for some years the only substantial profits, amounting to about £400, came from America, through the indefatigable activity and good management of Emerson. It is pleasant to note a passage in the interesting volumes of their _Correspondence_ which shows that in this instance the benefited understood his financial relation to the benefactor: "A reflection I cannot but make is that, at bottom, this money was all yours; not a penny of it belonged to me by any law except that of helpful friend-ship.... I could not examine it (the account) without a kind of crime." Others who, at this period, made efforts to assist "the polar Bear" were less fortunate. In several instances good intentions paved the palace of Momus, and in one led a well-meaning man into a notoriously false position. Mr. Basil Montagu being in want of a private secretary offered the post to his former guest, as a temporary makeshift, at a salary of £200, and so brought upon his memory a torrent of contempt. Undeterred by this and similar warnings, the indefatigable philanthropist, Miss Harriet Martineau, who at first conciliated the Carlyles by her affection for "this side of the street," and was afterwards an object of their joint ridicule, conceived the idea of organising a course of lectures to an audience collected by canvass to hoar the strange being from the moors talk for an hour on end about literature, morals, and history. He was then an object of curiosity to those who knew anything about him at all, and lecturing was at that time a lucrative and an honourable employment. The "good Harriet," so called by Cheyne Row in its condescending mood, aided by other kind friends of the Sterling and Mill circles--the former including Frederick Denison Maurice--made so great a success of the enterprise that it was thrice repeated. The _first_ course of six lectures on "German Literature," May 1837, delivered in Willis's Rooms, realised £135; the _second_ of twelve, on the "History of European Literature," at 17 Edward Street, Portman Square, had a net result of £300; the _third,_ in the same rooms, on "Revolutions," brought £200; the _fourth,_ on "Heroes," the same. In closing this course Carlyle appeared for the last time on a public platform until 1866, when he delivered his Inaugural Address as Lord Rector to the students of Edinburgh. The impression he produced on his unusually select audiences was that of a man of genius, but roughly clad. The more superficial auditors had a new sensation, those who came to stare remained to wonder; the more reflective felt that they had learnt something of value. Carlyle had no inconsiderable share of the oratorical power which he latterly so derided; he was able to speak from a few notes; but there were comments more or less severe on his manner and style. J. Grant, in his _Portraits of Public Characters,_ says: "At times he distorts his features as if suddenly seized by some paroxysm of pain ... he makes mouths; he has a harsh accent and graceless gesticulation." Leigh Hunt, in the _Examiner,_ remarks on the lecturer's power of extemporising; but adds that he often touches only the mountain-tops of the subject, and that the impression left was as if some Puritan had come to life again, liberalised by German philosophy. Bunsen, present at one of the lectures, speaks of the striking and rugged thoughts thrown at people's heads; and Margaret Fuller, afterwards Countess Ossoli, referred to his arrogance redeemed by "the grandeur of a Siegfried melting down masses of iron into sunset red." Carlyle's own comments are for the most part slighting. He refers to his lectures as a mixture of prophecy and play-acting, and says that when about to open his course on "Heroes" he felt like a man going to be hanged. To Emerson, April 17th 1839, he writes :-- My lectures come on this day two weeks. O heaven! I cannot "speak"; I can only gasp and writhe and stutter, a spectacle to gods and fashionables,--being forced to it by want of money. In five weeks I shall be free, and then--! Shall it be Switzerland? shall it be Scotland? nay, shall it be America and Concord? Emerson had written about a Boston publication of the _Miscellanies_ (first there collected), and was continually urging his friend to emigrate and speak to more appreciative audiences in the States; but the London lectures, which had, with the remittances from over sea, practically saved Carlyle from ruin or from exile, had made him decide "to turn his back to the treacherous Syren"--the temptation to sink into oratory. Mr. Froude's explanation and defence of this decision may be clenched by a reference to the warning his master had received. He had announced himself as a preacher and a prophet, and been taken at his word; but similarly had Edward Irving, who for a season of sun or glamour gathered around him the same crowd and glitter: the end came; twilight and clouds of night. Fashion had flocked to the sermons of the elder Annandale youth--as to the recitatives of the younger--to see a wild man of the woods and hear him sing; but the novelty gone, they passed on" to Egyptian crocodiles, Iroquois hunters," and left him stranded with "unquiet fire" and "flaccid face." "O foulest Circaean draft," exclaimed his old admirer in his fine dirge, "thou poison of popular applause, madness is in thee and death, thy end is Bedlam and the grave," and with the fixed resolve, "De me fabula non narrabitur," he shut the book on this phase of his life. The lectures on "Hero-Worship" (a phrase taken from Hume) were published in 1841, and met with considerable success, the name of the writer having then begun to run "like wildfire through London." At the close of the previous year he had published his long pamphlet on _Chartism_, it having proved unsuitable for its original destination as an article in the _Quarterly_. Here first he clearly enunciates, "Might is right"--one of the few strings on which, with all the variations of a political Paganini, he played through life. This tract is on the border line between the old modified Radicalism of _Sartor_ and the less modified Conservatism of his later years. In 1840 Carlyle still speaks of himself as a man foiled; but at the close of that year all fear of penury was over, and in the following he was able to refuse a Chair of History at Edinburgh, as later another at St. Andrews. Meanwhile his practical power and genuine zeal for the diffusion of knowledge appeared in his foundation of the London Library, which brought him into more or less close contact with Tennyson, Milman, Forster, Helps, Spedding, Gladstone, and other leaders of the thought and action of the time. There is little in Carlyle's life at any time that can be called eventful. From first to last it was that of a retired scholar, a thinker demanding sympathy while craving after solitude, and the frequent inconsistency of the two requirements was the source of much of his unhappiness. Our authorities for all that we do not see in his published works are found in his voluminous correspondence, copious autobiographical jottings, and the three volumes of his wife's letters and journal dating from the commencement of the struggle for recognition in London, and extending to the year of her death. Criticism of these remarkable documents, the theme of so much controversy, belongs rather to a life of Mrs. Carlyle; but a few salient facts may here be noted. It appears on the surface that husband and wife had in common several marked peculiarities; on the intellectual side they had not only an extraordinary amount but the same kind of ability, superhumanly keen insight, and wonderful power of expression, both with tongue and pen; the same intensity of feeling, thoroughness, and courage to look the ugliest truths full in the face; in both, these high qualities were marred by a tendency to attribute the worst motives to almost every one. Their joint contempt for all whom they called "fools," _i.e._ the immense majority of mankind, was a serious drawback to the pleasure of their company. It is indeed obvious that, whether or not it be correct to say that "his nature was the soft one, her's the hard," Mrs. Carlyle was the severer cynic of the two. Much of her writing confirms the impression of those who have heard her talk that no one, not even her husband, was safe from the shafts of her ridicule. Her pride in his genius knew no bounds, and it is improbable that she would have tolerated from any outsider a breath of adverse criticism; but she herself claimed many liberties she would not grant. She was clannish as Carlyle himself, yet even her relations are occasionally made to appear ridiculous. There was nothing in her affections, save her memory of her own father, corresponding to his devotion to his whole family. With equal penetration and greater scorn, she had no share of his underlying reverence. Such limited union as was granted to her married life had only soured the mocking-bird spirit of the child that derided her grandfather's accent on occasion of his bringing her back from a drive by another route to "varry the shane." Carlyle's constant wailings take from him any claim to such powers of endurance as might justify his later attacks on Byron. But neither had his wife any real reticence. Whenever there were domestic troubles--flitting, repairing, building, etc., on every occasion of clamour or worry, he, with scarce pardonable oblivion of physical delicacy greater than his own, went off, generally to visit distinguished friends, and left behind him the burden and the heat of the day. She performed her unpleasant work and all associated duties with a practical genius that he complimented as "triumphant." She performed them, ungrudgingly perhaps, but never without complaint; her invariable practice was to endure and tell. "Quelle vie," she writes in 1837 to John Sterling, whom she seems to have really liked, "let no woman who values peace of soul ever marry an author"; and again to the same in 1839, "Carlyle had to sit on a jury two days, to the ruin of his whole being, physical, moral, and intellectual," but "one gets to feel a sort of indifference to his growling." Conspicuous exceptions, as in the case of the Shelleys, the Dobells, and the Brownings, have been seen, within or almost within our memories, but as a rule it is a risk for two supersensitive and nervous people to live together: when they are sensitive in opposite ways the alliance is fatal; fortunately the Carlyles were, in this respect, in the main sympathetic. With most of the household troubles which occupy so exaggerated a space in the letters and journals of both--papering, plastering, painting, deceitful or disorderly domestics--general readers have so little concern that they have reason to resent the number of pages wasted in printing them; but there was one common grievance of wider and more urgent interest, to which we must here again finally refer, premising that it affected not one period but the whole of their lives, _i.e._ their constant, only half-effectual struggle with the modern Hydra-headed Monster, the reckless and needless Noises produced or permitted, sometimes increased rather than suppressed, by modern civilisation. Mrs. Carlyle suffered almost as much as her husband from these murderers of sleep and assassins of repose; on her mainly fell the task of contending with the cochin-chinas, whose senseless shrieks went "through her like a sword," of abating a "Der Freischütz of cats," or a pandemonium of barrel organs, of suppressing macaws for which Carryle "could neither think nor live"; now mitigating the scales on a piano, now conjuring away, by threat or bribe, from their neighbours a shoal of "demon fowls"; lastly of superintending the troops of bricklayers, joiners, iron-hammerers employed with partial success to convert the top story of 5 Cheyne Row into a sound-proof room. Her hard-won victories in this field must have agreeably added to the sense of personality to which she resolutely clung. Her assertion, "Instead of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle round every individuality," is the essence of much of her mate's philosophy; but, in the following to Sterling, she somewhat bitterly protests against her own absorption: "In spite of the honestest efforts to annihilate my I---ity or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting, and, alas, self-seeking me." The ever-restive consciousness of being submerged is one of the dominant notes of her journal, the other is the sense of being even within the circle unrecognised. "C. is a domestic wandering Jew.... When he is at work I hardly ever see his face from breakfast to dinner."... "Poor little wretch that I am, ... I feel as if I were already half-buried ... in some intermediate state between the living and the dead.... Oh, so lonely." These are among the _suspiria de profundis_ of a life which her husband compared to "a great joyless stoicism," writing to the brother, whom he had proposed as a third on their first home-coming:--"Solitude, indeed, is sad as Golgotha, but it is not mad like Bedlam; absence of delirium is possible only for me in solitude"; a sentiment almost literally acted on. In his offering of penitential cypress, referring to his wife's delight in the ultimate success of his work, he says, "She flickered round me like a perpetual radiance." But during their joint lives their numerous visits and journeys were made at separate times or apart. They crossed continually on the roads up and down, but when absent wrote to one another often the most affectionate letters. Their attraction increased, contrary to Newton's law, in the _direct_ ratio of the square of the distance, and when it was stretched beyond the stars the long-latent love of the survivor became a worship. Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood and bone of his bone, did not wait for any death to make itself declared. His veneration for his mother was reciprocated by a confidence and pride in him unruffled from cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic differences; for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to have practically shared his belief, "it matters little what a man holds in comparison with how he holds it." But on his wife's side the family bond was less absolute, and the fact adds a tragic interest to her first great bereavement after the settlement in London. There were many callers--increasing in number and eminence as time went on--at Cheyne Row; but naturally few guests. Among these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid, in 1838, her first and last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant friction. Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the gipsy vein) had been in early years a beauty and a woman of fashion, endowed with so much natural ability that Carlyle, not altogether predisposed in her favour, confessed she had just missed being a genius; but she was accustomed to have her way, and old Walter of Pefillan confessed to having seen her in fifteen different humours in one evening. Welcomed on her arrival, misunderstandings soon arose. Carlyle himself had to interpose with conciliatory advice to his wife to bear with her mother's humours. One household incident, though often quoted, is too characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an evening party, Mrs. Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not display, were perhaps larger than those suited for her still struggling hosts, had lighted a show of candles for the entertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with an air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which her mother resented with tears. The penitent daughter, in a mood like that which prompted Johnson to stand in the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will that the candles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. Carlyle has recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law in a few of his many graphic touches. It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion, perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet waving down the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of February 1842 news came that she had had an apoplectic stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried north, stopping to break the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool; when there she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her mother's death that she was prohibited from going further, and Carlyle came down from London in her stead. On reaching Templand he found that the funeral had already taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as executor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previous will, devolved on his wife. To her during the interval he wrote a series of pathetic letters. Reading these,--which, with others from Haddington in the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse, with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place opposite heaven. But the misery had its origin in the same sensitiveness of nature which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emotion. Men of genius ... are like the wind-harp which answers to the breath that touches it, now low and sweet, now rising into wild swell or angry scream, as the strings are swept by some passing gust." This applies completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world. The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once Mrs. Carlyle had her way. During the eight years over which we have been glancing, Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea life: the restless spirit, which never found peace on this side of the grave, was constantly goading him with an impulse of flight and change, from land to sea, from shore to hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed better than where he was. America and the Teufelsdröckh wanderings abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to his own haunts. A letter to Emerson in 1839 best expresses his prevalent feeling:-- Carlyle's devotion to his own kin, blood of his blood and bone of his bone, did not wait for any death to make itself declared. His veneration for his mother was reciprocated by a confidence and pride in him unruffled from cradle to grave, despite their widening theoretic differences; for with less distinct acknowledgment she seems to have practically shared his belief, "it matters little what a man holds in comparison with how he holds it." But on his wife's side the family bond was less absolute, and the fact adds a tragic interest to her first great bereavement after the settlement in London. There were many callers--increasing in number and eminence as time went on--at Cheyne Row; but naturally few guests. Among these, Mrs. Carlyle's mother paid, in 1838, her first and last visit, unhappily attended by some unpleasant friction. Grace Welsh (through whom her daughter derived the gipsy vein) had been in early years a beauty and a woman of fashion, endowed with so much natural ability that Carlyle, not altogether predisposed in her favour, confessed she had just missed being a genius; but she was accustomed to have her way, and old Walter of Pefillan confessed to having seen her in fifteen different humours in one evening. Welcomed on her arrival, misunderstandings soon arose. Carlyle himself had to interpose with conciliatory advice to his wife to bear with her mother's humours. One household incident, though often quoted, is too characteristic to be omitted. On occasion of an evening party, Mrs. Welsh, whose ideas of hospitality, if not display, were perhaps larger than those suited for her still struggling hosts, had lighted a show of candles for the entertainment, whereupon the mistress of the house, with an air of authority, carried away two of them, an act which her mother resented with tears. The penitent daughter, in a mood like that which prompted Johnson to stand in the Uttoxeter market-place, left in her will that the candles were to be preserved and lit about her coffin, round which, nearly thirty years later, they were found burning. Carlyle has recorded their last sight of his mother-in-law in a few of his many graphic touches. It was at Dumfries in 1841, where she had brought Jane down from Templand to meet and accompany him back to the south. They parted at the door of the little inn, with deep suppressed emotion, perhaps overcharged by some presentiment; Mrs. Welsh looking sad but bright, and their last glimpse of her was the feather in her bonnet waving down the way to Lochmaben gate. Towards the close of February 1842 news came that she had had an apoplectic stroke, and Mrs. Carlyle hurried north, stopping to break the journey at her uncle's house in Liverpool; when there she was so prostrated by the sudden announcement of her mother's death that she was prohibited from going further, and Carlyle came down from London in her stead. On reaching Templand he found that the funeral had already taken place. He remained six weeks, acting as executor in winding up the estate, which now, by the previous will, devolved on his wife. To her during the interval he wrote a series of pathetic letters. Reading these,--which, with others from Haddington in the following years make an anthology of tenderness and ruth, reading them alongside of his angry invectives, with his wife's own accounts of the bilious earthquakes and peevish angers over petty cares; or worse, with ebullitions of jealousy assuming the mask of contempt, we again revert to the biographer who has said almost all that ought to be said of Carlyle, and more: "It seemed as if his soul was divided, like the Dioscuri, as if one part of it was in heaven, and the other in the place opposite heaven. But the misery had its origin in the same sensitiveness of nature which was so tremulously alive to soft and delicate emotion. Men of genius ... are like the wind-harp which answers to the breath that touches it, now low and sweet, now rising into wild swell or angry scream, as the strings are swept by some passing gust." This applies completely to men like Burns, Byron, Heine, and Carlyle, less to the Miltons, Shakespeares, and Goethes of the world. The crisis of bereavement, which promised to bind the husband and wife more closely together, brought to an end a dispute in which for once Mrs. Carlyle had her way. During the eight years over which we have been glancing, Carlyle had been perpetually grumbling at his Chelsea life: the restless spirit, which never found peace on this side of the grave, was constantly goading him with an impulse of flight and change, from land to sea, from shore to hills; anywhere or everywhere, at the time, seemed better than where he was. America and the Teufelsdröckh wanderings abandoned, he reverted to the idea of returning to his own haunts. A letter to Emerson in 1839 best expresses his prevalent feeling:-- This foggy Babylon tumbles along as it was wont: and as for my particular case uses me not worse but better than of old. Nay, there are many in it that have a real friendliness for me.... The worst is the sore tear and wear of this huge roaring Niagara of things on such a poor excitable set of nerves as mine. The velocity of all things, of the very word you hear on the streets, is at railway rate: joy itself is unenjoyable, to be avoided like pain; there is no wish one has so pressingly as for quiet. Ah me! I often swear I will be _buried_ at least in free breezy Scotland, out of this insane hubbub ... if ever the smallest competence of worldly means be mine, I will fly this whirlpool as I would the Lake of Malebolge. The competence had come, the death of Mrs. Welsh leaving to his wife and himself practically from £200 to £300 a year: why not finally return to the home of their early restful secluded life, "in reductâ, valle," with no noise around it but the trickle of rills and the nibbling of sheep? Craigenputtock was now their own, and within its "four walls" they would begin a calmer life. Fortunately Mrs. Carlyle, whose shrewd practical instinct was never at fault, saw through the fallacy, and set herself resolutely against the scheme. Scotland had lost much of its charm for her--a year later she refused an invitation from Mrs. Aitken, saying, "I could do nothing at Scotsbrig or Dumfries but cry from morning to night." She herself had enough of the Hill of the Hawks, and she know that within a year Carlyle would again be calling it the Devil's Den and lamenting Cheyne Row. He gave way with the protest, "I cannot deliberately mean anything that is harmful to you," and certainly it was well for him. There is no record of an original writer or artist coming from the north of our island to make his mark in the south, succeeding, and then retracing his steps. Had Carlyle done so, he would probably have passed from the growing recognition of a society he was beginning to find on the whole congenial, to the solitude of intellectual ostracism. Scotland may be breezy, but it is not conspicuously free. Erratic opinions when duly veiled are generally allowed; but this concession is of little worth. On the tolerance of those who have no strong belief in anything, Carlyle, thinking possibly of rose-water Hunt and the litterateurs of his tribe, expressed himself with incisive and memorable truth: "It is but doubt and indifference. _Touch the thing they do believe and value, their own self-conceit: they are rattlesnakes then_." [Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.] Tolerance for the frank expression of views which clash with the sincere or professed faith of the majority is rare everywhere; in Scotland rarest. English Churchmen, high and broad, were content to condone the grim Calvinism still infiltrating Carlyle's thoughts, and to smile, at worst, at his idolatry of the iconoclast who said, "the idolater shall die the death." But the reproach of "Pantheism" was for long fatal to his reception across the Tweed. Towards the close of this period he acknowledged that London was "among improper places" the best for "writing books," after all the one use of living "for him;" its inhabitants "greatly the best" he "had ever walked with," and its aristocracy--the Marshalls, Stanleys, Hollands, Russells, Ashburtons, Lansdownes, who held by him through life--its "choicest specimens." Other friendships equally valued he made among the leading authors of the age. Tennyson sought his company, and Connop Thirlwall. Arnold of Rugby wrote in commendation of the _French Revolution_ and hailed _Chartism._ Thackeray admired him and reviewed him well. In Macaulay, condemned to limbo under the suspicion of having reviewed him ill, he found, when the suspicion was proved unjust, a promise of better things. As early as 1839 Sterling had written an article in the _Westminster,_ which gave him intense pleasure; for while contemning praise in almost the same words as Byron did, he loved it equally well. In 1840 he had crossed the Rubicon that lies between aspiration and attainment. The populace might be blind or dumb, the "rattlesnakes"--the "irresponsible indolent reviewers," who from behind a hedge pelt every wrestler till they found societies for the victor--might still obscurely hiss; but Carlyle was at length safe by the verdict of the "Conscript Fathers." [Footnote: The italics are Mr. Froude's.] CHAPTER V CHEYNE ROW [1842-1853] The bold venture of coming to London with a lean purse, few friends, and little fame had succeeded: but it had been a terrible risk, and the struggle had left scars behind it. To this period of his life we may apply Carlyle's words,--made use of by himself at a later date,--"The battle was over and we were sore wounded." It is as a maimed knight of modern chivalry, who sounded the _réveil_ for an onslaught on the citadels of sham, rather than as a prophet of the future that his name is likely to endure in the history of English thought. He has also a place with Scott amongst the recreators of bygone ages, but he regarded their annals less as pictures than as lesson-books. His aim was that expressed by Tennyson to "steal fire from fountains of the past," but his design was to admonish rather than "to glorify the present." This is the avowed object of the second of his distinctly political works, which following on the track of the first, _Charlism_, and written in a similar spirit, takes higher artistic rank. _Past and Present_, suggested by a visit to the poorhouse of St. Ives and by reading the chronicle of _Jocelin de Brakelond_, was undertaken as a duty, while he was mainly engaged on a greater work,--the duty he felt laid upon him to say some thing that should bear directly on the welfare of the people, especially of the poor around him. It was an impulse similar to that which inspired _Oliver Twist_, but Carlyle's remedies were widely different from those of Dickens. Not merely more kindness and sympathy, but paternal government, supplying work to the idle inmates of the workhouse, and insisting, by force if need be, on it being done, was his panacea. It had been Abbot Samson's way in his strong government of the Monastery of St. Edmunds, and he resolved, half in parable, half in plain sermon, to recommend it to the Ministers Peel and Russell. In this mood, the book was written off in the first seven weeks of 1843, a _tour de force_ comparable to Johnson's writing of _Rasselas_. Published in April, it at once made a mark by the opposition as well as by the approval it excited. Criticism of the work--of its excellences, which are acknowledged, and its defects as manifold--belongs to a review of the author's political philosophy: it is enough here to note that it was remarkable in three ways. _First_, the object of its main attack, _laissez faire_, being a definite one, it was capable of having and had some practical effect. Mr. Froude exaggerates when he says that Carlyle killed the pseudo-science of orthodox political economy; for the fundamental truths in the works of Turgot, Smith, Ricardo, and Mill cannot be killed: but he pointed out that, like Aristotle's leaden rule, the laws of supply and demand must be made to bend; as Mathematics made mechanical must allow for friction, so must Economics leave us a little room for charity. There is ground to believe that the famous Factory Acts owed some of their suggestions to _Past and Present_. Carlyle always speaks respectfully of the future Lord Shaftesbury. "I heard Milnes saying," notes the Lady Sneerwell of real life, "at the Shuttleworths that Lord Ashley was the greatest man alive: he was the only man that Carlyle praised in his book. I daresay he knew I was overhearing him." But, while supplying arguments and a stimulus to philanthropists, his protests against philanthropy as an adequate solution of the problem of human misery became more pronounced. About the date of the conception of this book we find in the Journal:-- Again and again of late I ask myself in whispers, is it the duty of a citizen to paint mere heroisms? ... Live to make others happy! Yes, surely, at all times, so far as you can. But at bottom that is not the aim of my life ... it is mere hypocrisy to call it such, as is continually done nowadays.... Avoid cant. Do not think that your life means a mere searching in gutters for fallen figures to wipe and set up. _Past and Present_, in the _second_ place, is notable as the only considerable consecutive book--unless we also except the _Life of Sterling_,--which the author wrote without the accompaniment of wrestlings, agonies, and disgusts. _Thirdly_, though marking a stage in his mental progress, the fusion of the refrains of _Chartism_ and _Hero-Worship_, and his first clear breach with Mazzini and with Mill, the book was written as an interlude, when he was in severe travail with his greatest contribution to English history. The last rebuff which Carlyle encountered came, by curious accident, from the _Westminster_, to which Mill had engaged him to contribute an article on "Oliver Cromwell." While this was in preparation, Mill had to leave the country on account of his health, and gave the review in charge to an Aberdonian called Robertson, who wrote to stop the progress of the essay with the message that _he_ had decided to undertake the subject himself. Carlyle was angry; but, instead of sullenly throwing the MS. aside, he set about constructing on its basis a History of the Civil War. Numerous visits and tours during the following three years, though bringing him into contact with new and interesting personalities, were mainly determined by the resolve to make himself acquainted with the localities of the war; and his knowledge of them has contributed to give colour and reality to the finest battle-pieces in modern English prose. In 1842 with Dr. Arnold he drove from Rugby fifteen miles to Naseby, and the same year, after a brief yachting trip to Belgium--in the notes on which the old Flemish towns stand out as clearly as in Longfellow's verse--he made his pilgrimage to St. Ives and Ely Cathedral, where Oliver two centuries before had called out to the recalcitrant Anglican in the pulpit, "Cease your fooling and come down." In July 1843 Carlyle made a trip to South Wales; to visit first a worthy devotee called Redwood, and then Bishop Thirlwall near Carmarthen. "A right solid simple-hearted robust man, very strangely swathed," is the visitor's meagre estimate of one of our most classic historians. On his way back he carefully reconnoitred the field of Worcester. Passing his wife at Liverpool, where she was a guest of her uncle, and leaving her to return to London and brush up Cheyne Row, he walked over Snowdon from Llanheris to Beddgelert with his brother John. He next proceeded to Scotsbrig, then north to Edinburgh, and then to Dunbar, which he contrived to visit on the 3rd of September, an anniversary revived in his pictured page with a glow and force to match which we have to revert to Bacon's account of the sea-fight of the _Revenge_. From Dunbar he returned to Edinburgh, spent some time with his always admired and admiring friend Erskine of Linlathen, a Scotch broad churchman of the type of F.D. Maurice and Macleod Campbell, and then went home to set in earnest to the actual writing of his work. He had decided to abandon the design of a History, and to make his book a Biography of Cromwell, interlacing with it the main features and events of the Commonwealth. The difficulties even of this reduced plan were still immense, and his groans at every stage in its progress were "louder and more loud," _e.g._ "My progress in _Cromwell_ is frightful." "A thousand times I regretted that this task was ever taken up." "The most impossible book of all I ever before tried," and at the close, "_Cromwell_ I must have written in 1844, but for four years previous it had been a continual toil and misery to me; four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculation, futile wrestling, and misery I used to count it had cost me." The book issued in 1845 soon went through three editions, and brought the author to the front as the most original historian of his time. Macaulay was his rival, but in different paths of the same field. About this time Mr. Froude became his pupil, and has left an interesting account (iii. 290-300) of his master's influence over the Oxford of those days, which would be only spoilt by selections. Oxford, like Athens, ever longing after something new, patronised the Chelsea prophet, and then calmed down to her wonted cynicism. But Froude and Ruskin were, as far as compatible with the strong personality of each, always loyal; and the capacity inborn in both, the power to breathe life into dry records and dead stones, had at least an added impulse from their master. The year 1844 is marked by the publication in the _Foreign Quarterly_ of the essay on _Dr. Francia,_ and by the death of John Sterling,--loved with the love of David for Jonathan--outside his own family losses, the greatest wrench in Carlyle's life. Sterling's published writings are as inadequate to his reputation as the fragmentary remains of Arthur Hallam; but in friendships, especially unequal friendships, personal fascination counts for more than half, and all are agreed as to the charm in both instances of the inspiring companionships. Archdeacon Hare having given a somewhat coldly correct account of Sterling as a clergyman, Carlyle three years later, in 1851, published his own impressions of his friend as a thinker, sane philanthropist, and devotee of truth, in a work that, written in a three months' fervour, has some claim to rank, though faltering, as prose after verse, with _Adonais_, _In Memoriam_, and Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_. These years are marked by a series of acts of unobtrusive benevolence, the memory of which has been in some cases accidentally rescued from the oblivion to which the benefactor was willing to have them consigned. Carlyle never boasted of doing a kindness. He was, like Wordsworth, frugal at home beyond necessity, but often as generous in giving as he was ungenerous in judging. His assistance to Thomas Cooper, author of the _Purgatory of Suicides_, his time spent in answering letters of "anxious enquirers,"--letters that nine out of ten busy men would have flung into the waste-paper basket,--his interest in such works as Samuel Bamford's _Life of a Radical_, and admirable advice to the writer; his instructions to a young student on the choice of books, and well-timed warning to another against the profession of literature, are sun-rifts in the storm, that show "a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." The same epoch, however,--that of the start of the great writer's almost uninterrupted triumph--brings us in face of an episode singularly delicate and difficult to deal with, but impossible to evade. [Footnote: These letters to Bamford, showing a keen interest in the working men of whom his correspondent had written, point to the ideal of a sort of Tory Democracy. Carlyle writes: "We want more knowledge about the Lancashire operatives; their miseries and gains, virtues and vices. Winnow what you have to say, and give us wheat free from chaff. Then the rich captains of workers will he willing to listen to you. Brevity and sincerity will succeed. Be brief and select, omit much, give each subject its proper proportionate space; and be exact without caring to round off the edges of what you have to say." Later, he declines Bamford's offer of verses, saying "verse is a bugbear to booksellers at present. These are prosaic, earnest, practical, not singing times."] Carlyle, now generally recognised in London as having one of the most powerful intellects and by far the greatest command of language among his contemporaries, was beginning to suffer some of the penalties of renown in being beset by bores and travestied by imitators; but he was also enjoying its rewards. Eminent men of all shades of opinion made his acquaintance; he was a frequent guest of the genial Maecenas, an admirer of genius though no mere worshipper of success, R. Monckton Milnes; meeting Hallam, Bunsen, Pusey, etc., at his house in London, and afterwards visiting him at Fryston Hall in Yorkshire. The future Lord Houghton was, among distinguished men of letters and society, the one of whom he spoke with the most unvarying regard. Carlyle corresponded with Peel, whom he set almost on a par with Wellington as worthy of perfect trust, and talked familiarly with Bishop Wilberforce, whom he miraculously credits with holding at heart views much like his own. At a somewhat later date, in the circle of his friends, bound to him by various degrees of intimacy, History was represented by Thirlwall, Grote, and Froude; Poetry by Browning, Henry Taylor, Tennyson, and Clough; Social Romance by Kingsley; Biography by James Spedding and John Forster; and Criticism by John Ruskin. His link to the last named was, however, their common distrust of political economy, as shown in _Unto This Last_, rather than any deep artistic sympathy. In Macaulay, a conversationalist more rapid than himself, Carlyle found a rival rather than a companion; but his prejudiced view of physical science was forgotten in his personal affection for Tyndall and in their congenial politics. His society was from the publication of _Cromwell_ till near his death increasingly sought after by the aristocracy, several members of which invited him to their country seats, and bestowed on him all acceptable favours. In this class he came to find other qualities than those referred to in the _Sartor_ inscription, and other aims than that of "preserving their game,"--the ambition to hold the helm of the State in stormy weather, and to play their part among the captains of industry. In the _Reminiscences_ the aristocracy are deliberately voted to be "for continual grace of bearing and of acting, steadfast honour, light address, and cheery stoicism, actually yet the best of English classes." There can be no doubt that his intercourse with this class, as with men of affairs and letters, some of whom were his proximate equals, was a fortunate sequel to the duck-pond of Ecclefechan and the lonely rambles on the Border moors. Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt. The life of a great capital may be the crown of education, but there is a danger in homage that comes late and then without reserve. Give me neither poverty nor riches, applies to praise as well as to wealth; and the sudden transition from comparative neglect to honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, is a moral trial passing the strength of all but a few of the "irritable race" of writers. The deference paid to Carlyle made him yet more intolerant of contradiction, and fostered his selfishness, in one instance with the disastrous result of clouding a whole decade of his domestic life. In February 1839 he speaks of dining--"an eight-o'clock dinner which ruined me for a week"--with "a certain Baring," at whose table in Bath House he again met Bunsen, and was introduced to Lord Mahon. This was the beginning of what, after the death of Sterling, grew into the most intimate friendship of his life. Baring, son of Lord Ashburton of the American treaty so named, and successor to the title on his father's death in 1848, was a man of sterling worth and sound sense, who entered into many of the views of his guest. His wife was by general consent the most brilliant woman of rank in London, whose grace, wit, refinement, and decision of character had made her the acknowledged leader of society. Lady Harriet, by the exercise of some overpowering though purely intellectual spell, made the proudest of men, the modern Diogenes, our later Swift, so much her slave that for twelve years, whenever he could steal a day from his work, he ran at her beck from town to country, from castle to cot; from Addiscombe, her husband's villa in Surrey, to the Grange, her father-in-law's seat in Hampshire; from Loch Luichart and Glen Finnan, where they had Highland shootings, to the Palais Eoyal. Mr. Froude's comment in his introduction to the Journal is substantially as follows: Lady Harriet Baring or Ashburton was the centre of a planetary system in which every distinguished public man of genuine worth then revolved. Carlyle was naturally the chief among them, and he was perhaps at one time ambitious of himself taking some part in public affairs, and saw the advantage of this stepping-stone to enable him to do something more for the world, as Byron said, than write books for it. But the idea of entering Parliament, which seems to have once suggested itself to him in 1849, was too vague and transient to have ever influenced his conduct. It is more correct to say that he was flattered by a sympathy not too thorough to be tame, pleased by adulation never gross, charmed by the same graces that charmed the rest, and finally fascinated by a sort of hypnotism. The irritation which this strange alliance produced in the mind of the mistress of Cheyne Row is no matter of surprise. Pride and affection together had made her bear with all her husband's humours, and share with him all the toils of the struggle from obscurity. He had emerged, and she was still half content to be systematically set aside for his books, the inanimate rivals on which he was building a fame she had some claim to share. But her fiery spirit was not yet tamed into submitting to be sacrificed to an animate rival, or passively permitting the usurpation of companionship grudged to herself by another woman, whom she could not enjoy the luxury of despising. Lady Harriet's superiority in _finesse_ and geniality, as well as advantages of station, only aggravated the injury; and this with a singular want of tact Carlyle further aggravated when he insisted on his wife accepting the invitations of his hostess. These visits, always against the grain, were rendered more irritating from a half-conscious antagonism between the chief female actors in the tragi-comedy; the one sometimes innocently unobservant of the wants of her guest, the other turning every accidental neglect into a slight, and receiving every jest as an affront. Carlyle's "Gloriana" was to the mind of his wife a "heathen goddess," while Mrs. Carlyle, with reference to her favourite dog "Nero," was in her turn nicknamed "Agrippina." In midsummer of 1846, after an enforced sojourn at Addiscombe in worse than her usual health, she returned to Chelsea with "her mind all churned to froth," and opened it to her husband with such plainness that "there was a violent scene": she left the house in a mood like that of the first Mrs. Milton, and took refuge with her friends the Paulets at Seaforth near Liverpool, uncertain whether or not she would return. There were only two persons from whom it seemed natural for her at such a crisis to ask advice; one was Geraldine Jewsbury, a young Manchester lady, authoress of a well-known novel, _The Half-Sisters_, from the beginning of their acquaintance in 1841 till the close in 1866 her most intimate associate and chosen confidant, who, we are told, "knew all" her secrets. [Footnote: Carlyle often speaks, sometimes slightingly, of Miss Jewsbury, as a sensational novelist and admirer of George Sand, but he appreciated her genuine worth.] The other was the inspired Italian, pure patriot and Stoic moralist Joseph Mazzini. To him she wrote twice--once apparently before leaving London, and again from Seaforth. His letters in reply, tenderly sympathetic and yet rigidly insistent on the duty of forbearance and endurance, availed to avert the threatened catastrophe; but there are sentences which show how bitter the complaints must have been. It is only you who can teach yourself that, whatever the _present_ may be, you must front it with dignity.... I could only point out to you the fulfilment of duties which can make life--not happy--what can? but earnest, sacred, and resigned.... I am carrying a burden even heavier than you, and have undergone even bitterer deceptions. Your life proves an empty thing, you say. Empty! Do not blaspheme. Have you never done good? Have you never loved? ... Pain and joy, deception and fulfilled hopes are just the rain and the sunshine that must meet the traveller on his way. Bless the Almighty if He has thought proper to send the latter to you.... Wrap your cloak round you against the first, but do not think a single moment that the one or the other have anything to do with the _end_ of the journey. Carlyle's first letter after the rupture is a mixture of reproach and affection. "We never parted before in such a manner; and all for literally nothing.... Adieu, dearest, for that is, and, if madness prevail not, may for ever be your authentic title." Another, enclosing the birthday present which he had never omitted since her mother's death, softened his wife's resentment, and the storm blew over for a time. But while the cause remained there was in the house at best a surface tranquillity, at worst an under tone of misery which (October 1855 to May 1856) finds voice in the famous Diary, not merely covered with "black spider webs," but steeped in gall, the publication of which has made so much debate. It is like a page from _Othello_ reversed. A few sentences condense the refrain of the lament. "Charles Buller said of the Duchess de Praslin, 'What could a poor fellow do with a wife that kept a journal but murder her?'" "That eternal Bath House. I wonder how many thousand miles Mr. C. has walked between here and there?" "Being an only child, I never wished to sew men's trousers--no, never!" I gin to think I've sold myself For very little cas." "To-day I called on my lady: she was perfectly civil, for a wonder." "Edward Irving! The past is past and gone is gone-- O waly, waly, love is bonnie, A little while when it is new;" quotations which, laid alongside the records of the writer's visit to the people at Haddington, "who seem all to grow so good and kind as they grow old," and to the graves in the churchyard there, are infinitely pathetic. The letters that follow are in the same strain, _e.g._ to Carlyle when visiting his sister at the Gill, "I never forget kindness, nor, alas, unkindness either": to Luichart, "I don't believe thee, wishing yourself at home.... You don't, as weakly amiable people do, sacrifice yourself for the pleasure of others"; to Mrs. Russell at Thornhill, "My London doctor's prescription is that I should be kept always happy and tranquil(!!!)." In the summer of 1856 Lady Ashburton gave a real ground for offence in allowing both the Carlyles, on their way north with her, to take a seat in an ordinary railway carriage, beside her maid, while she herself travelled in a special saloon. Partly, perhaps in consequence, Mrs. Carlyle soon went to visit her cousins in Fifeshire, and afterwards refused to accompany her ladyship on the way back. This resulted in another quarrel with her husband, who had issued the command from Luichart--but it was their last on the subject, for Gloriana died on the 4th of the following May, 1857, at Paris: "The most queen-like woman I had ever known or seen, by nature and by culture _facile princeps_ she, I think, of all great ladies I have ever seen." This brought to a close an episode in which there were faults on both sides, gravely punished: the incidents of its course and the manner in which they were received show, among other things, that railing at the name of "Happiness" does little or nothing to reconcile people to the want of the reality. In 1858 Lord Ashburton married again--a Miss Stuart Mackenzie, who became the attached friend of the Carlyles, and remained on terms of unruffled intimacy with both till the end: she survived her husband, who died in 1864, leaving a legacy of £2000 to the household at Cheyne Row. _Sic transiit._ From this date we must turn back over nearly twenty years to retrace the main steps of the great author's career. Much of the interval was devoted to innumerable visits, in acceptance of endless hospitalities, or in paying his annual devotions to Annandale,--calls on his time which kept him rushing from place to place like a comet. Two facts are notable about those expeditions: they rarely seemed to give him much pleasure, even at Scotsbrig he complained of sleepless nights and farm noises; and he was hardly ever accompanied by his wife. She too was constantly running north to her own kindred in Liverpool or Scotland, but their paths did not run parallel, they almost always intersected, so that when the one was on the way north the other was homeward bound, to look out alone on "a horizon of zero." Only a few of these visits are worth recording as of general interest. Most of them were paid, a few received. In the autumn of 1846, Margaret Fuller, sent from Emerson, called at Cheyne Row, and recorded her impression of the master as "in a very sweet humour, full of wit and pathos, without being overbearing," adding that she was "carried away by the rich flow of his discourse"; and that "the hearty noble earnestness of his personal bearing brought back the charm of his writing before she wearied of it." A later visitor, Miss Martineau, his old helper in days of struggle, was now thus esteemed: "Broken into utter wearisomeness, a mind reduced to these three elements--imbecility, dogmatism, and unlimited hope. I never in my life was more heartily bored with any creature!" In 1847 there followed the last English glimpse of Jeffrey and the last of Dr. Chalmers, who was full of enthusiasm about _Cromwell_; then a visit to the Brights, John and Jacob, at Rochdale: with the former he had "a paltry speaking match" on topics described as "shallow, totally worthless to me," the latter he liked, recognising in him a culture and delicacy rare with so much strength of will and independence of thought. Later came a second visit from Emerson, then on a lecturing tour to England, gathering impressions revived in his _English Traits_. "His doctrines are too airy and thin," wrote Carlyle, "for the solid practical heads of the Lancashire region. We had immense talkings with him here, but found that he did not give us much to chew the cud upon. He is a pure-minded man, but I think his talent is not quite so high as I had anticipated." They had an interesting walk to Stonehenge together, and Carlyle attended one of his friend's lectures, but with modified approval, finding this serene "spiritual son" of his own rather "gone into philanthropy and moonshine." Emerson's notes of this date, on the other hand, mark his emancipation from mere discipleship. "Carlyle had all the kleinstãdtlicher traits of an islander and a Scotsman, and reprimanded with severity the rebellious instincts of the native of a vast continent.... In him, as in Byron, one is more struck with the rhetoric than with the matter.... There is more character than intellect in every sentence, therein strangely resembling Samuel Johnson." The same year Carlyle perpetrated one of his worst criticisms, that on Keats:-- The kind of man he was gets ever more horrible to me. Force of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and want of all other force.... Such a structure of soul, it would once have been very evident, was a chosen "Vessel of Hell"; and in the next an ungenerously contemptuous reference to Macaulay's _History_:-- The most popular ever written. Fourth edition already, within perhaps four months. Book to which four hundred editions could not add any value, there being no depth of sense in it at all, and a very great quantity of rhetorical wind. Landor, on the other hand, whom he visited later at Bath, he appreciated, being "much taken with the gigantesque, explosive but essentially chivalrous and almost heroic old man." He was now at ease about the sale of his books, having, _inter alia_, received £600 for a new edition of the _French Revolution_ and the _Miscellanies_. His journal is full of plans for a new work on Democracy, Organisation of Labour, and Education, and his letters of the period to Thomas Erskine and others are largely devoted to politics. [Footnote: This is one of the few instances in which further knowledge led to a change for the better in Carlyle's judgment. In a letter to Emerson, 1840, he speaks disparagingly of Landor as "a wild man, whom no extent of culture had been able to tame! His intellectual faculty seemed to me to be weak in proportion to his violence of temper: the judgment he gives about anything is more apt to be wrong than right,--as the inward whirlwind shows him this side or the other of the object: and _sides_ of an object are all that he sees." _De te faliula._ Emerson answers defending Landor, and indicating points of likeness between him and Carlyle.] In 1846 he spent the first week of September in Ireland, crossing from Ardrossan to Belfast, and then driving to Drogheda, and by rail to Dublin, where in Conciliation Hall he saw O'Connell for the first time since a casual glimpse at a radical meeting arranged by Charles Buller--a meeting to which he had gone out of curiosity in 1834. O'Connell was always an object of Carlyle's detestation, and on this occasion he does not mince his words. Chief quack of the then world ... first time I had ever heard the lying scoundrel speak.... Demosthenes of blarney ... the big beggar-man who had £15,000 a year, and, _proh pudor!_ the favour of English ministers instead of the pillory. At Dundrum he met by invitation Carleton the novelist, with Mitchell and Gavan Duffy, the Young Ireland leaders whom he seems personally to have liked, but he told Mitchell that he would probably be hanged, and said during a drive about some flourishing and fertile fields of the Pale, "Ah! Duffy, there you see the hoof of the bloody Saxon." [Footnote: Sir C. Gavan Duffy, in the "Conversations and Correspondence," now being published in the _Contemporary Review_, naturally emphasises Carlyle's politer, more genial side, and prints several expressions of sympathy with the "Tenant Agitations"; but his demur to the _Reminiscences of My Irish Journey_ being accepted as an accurate account of the writer's real sentiments is of little avail in face of the letters to Emerson, more strongly accentuating the same views, _e.g._ "Bothered almost to madness with Irish balderdash.... '_Blacklead_ these two million idle beggars,' I sometimes advised, 'and sell them in Brazil as niggers!'--perhaps Parliament on sweet constraint will allow you to advance them to be niggers!"] He returned from Kingston to Liverpool on the 10th, and so closed his short and unsatisfactory trip. Three years later, July to August 6th, 1849, he paid a longer and final visit to the "ragged commonweal" or "common woe," as Raleigh called it, landing at Dublin, and after some days there passing on to Kildare, Kilkenny, Lismore, Waterford, beautiful Killarney and its beggar hordes, and then to Limerick, Clare, Castlebar, where he met W.E. Forster, whose acquaintance he had made two years earlier at Matlock. At Gweedore in Donegal he stayed with Lord George Hill, whom he respected, though persuaded that he was on the wrong road to Reform by Philanthropy in a country where it had never worked; and then on to half Scotch Derry. There, August 6th, he made an emphatic after- breakfast speech to a half-sympathetic audience; the gist of it being that the remedy for Ireland was not "emancipation" or "liberty," but to "cease following the devil, as it had been doing for two centuries." The same afternoon he escaped on board a Glasgow steamer, and landed safe at 2 A.M. on the morning of the 7th. The notes of the tour, set down on his return to Chelsea and republished in 1882, have only the literary merit of the vigorous descriptive touches inseparable from the author's lightest writing; otherwise they are mere rough-and-tumble jottings, with no consecutive meaning, of a rapid hawk's-eye view of the four provinces. But Carlyle never ceased to maintain the thesis they set forth, that Ireland is, for the most part, a country of semi-savages, whose staple trade is begging, whose practice is to lie, unfit not only for self-government but for what is commonly called constitutional government, whose ragged people must be coerced, by the methods of Raleigh, of Spenser, and of Cromwell, into reasonable industry and respect for law. At Westport, where "human swinery has reached its acme," he finds "30,000 paupers in a population of 60,000, and 34,000 kindred hulks on outdoor relief, lifting each an ounce of mould with a shovel, while 5000 lads are pretending to break stones," and exclaims, "Can it be a charity to keep men alive on these terms? In face of all the twaddle of the earth, shoot a man rather than train him (with heavy expense to his neighbours) to be a deceptive human swine." Superficial travellers generally praise the Irish. Carlyle had not been long in their country when he formulated his idea of the Home Rule that seemed to him most for their good. Kildare Railway: big blockhead sitting with his dirty feet on seat opposite, not stirring them for one who wanted to sit there. "One thing we're all agreed on," said he; "we're very ill governed: Whig, Tory, Radical, Repealer, all all admit we're very ill-governed!" I thought to myself, "Yes, indeed; you govern yourself! He that would govern you well would probably surprise you much, my friend--laying a hearty horse-whip over that back of yours." And a little later at Castlebar he declares, "Society here would have to eat itself and end by cannibalism in a week, if it were not held up by the rest of our Empire standing afoot." These passages are written in the spirit which inspired his paper on "The Nigger Question" and the aggressive series of assaults to which it belongs, on what he regarded as the most prominent quackeries, shams, and pretence philanthropies of the day. His own account of the reception of this work is characteristic:-- In 1849, after an interval of deep gloom and bottomless dubitation, came _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, which unpleasantly astonished everybody, set the world upon the strangest suppositions--"Carlyle got deep into whisky," said some,--ruined my reputation according to the friendliest voices, and in effect divided me altogether from the mob of "Progress-of-the-species" and other vulgar; but were a great relief to my own conscience as a faithful citizen, and have been ever since. These pamphlets alienated Mazzini and Mill, and provoked the assault of the newspapers; which, by the author's confession, did something to arrest and restrict the sale. Nor was this indignation wholly unnatural. Once in his life, on occasion of his being called to serve at a jury trial, Carlyle, with remarkable adroitness, coaxed a recalcitrant juryman into acquiescence with the majority; but coaxing as a rule was not his way. When he found himself in front of what he deemed to be a falsehood his wont was to fly in its face and tear it to pieces. His satire was not like that of Horace, who taught his readers _ridendo dicere verum_, it was rather that of the elder Lucilius or the later Juvenal; not that of Chaucer, who wrote-- That patience is a virtue high is plain, Because it conquers, as the clerks explain, Things that rude valour never could attain, but that of _The Lye_, attributed to Raleigh, or Swift's _Gulliver_ or the letters of Junius. The method of direct denunciation has advantages: it cannot be mistaken, nor, if strong enough, ignored; but it must lay its account with consequences, and Carlyle in this instance found them so serious that he was threatened at the height of his fame with dethronement. Men said he had lost his head, gone back to the everlasting "No," and mistaken swearing all round for political philosophy. The ultimate value attached to the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ must depend to a large extent on the view of the critic. It is now, however, generally admitted on the one hand that they served in some degree to counteract the rashness of Philanthropy; on the other, that their effect was marred by more than the writer's usual faults of exaggeration. It is needless to refer the temper they display to the troubles then gathering about his domestic life. A better explanation is to be found in the public events of the time. The two years previous to their appearance were the Revolution years, during which the European world seemed to be turned upside down. The French had thrown out their _bourgeois_ king, Louis Philippe--"the old scoundrel," as Carlyle called him,--and established their second Republic. Italy, Hungary, and half Germany were in revolt against the old authorities; the Irish joined in the chorus, and the Chartist monster petition was being carted to Parliament. Upheaval was the order of the day, kings became exiles and exiles kings, dynasties and creeds were being subverted, and empires seemed rocking as on the surface of an earthquake. They were years of great aspirations, with beliefs in all manner of swift regeneration-- Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo, all varieties of doctrinaire idealisms. Mazzini failed at Rome, Kossuth at Pesth; the riots of Berlin resulted in the restoration of the old dull bureaucratic regime; Smith O'Brien's bluster exploded in a cabbage garden; the Railway Bubble burst in the fall of the bloated king Hudson, and the Chartism of the time evaporated in smoke. The old sham gods, with Buonaparte of the stuffed eagle in front, came back; because, concluded Carlyle, there was no man in the front of the new movement strong enough to guide it; because its figure-heads were futile sentimentalists, insurgents who could not win. The reaction produced by their failure had somewhat the same effect on his mind that the older French Revolution had on that of Burke: he was driven back to a greater degree than Mr. Froude allows on practical conservatism and on the negations of which the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ are the expression. To this series of _pronunciamentos_ of political scepticism he meant to add another, of which he often talks under the name of "Exodus from Houndsditch," boldly stating and setting forth the grounds of his now complete divergence from all forms of what either in England or Europe generally could be called the Orthodox faith in Religion. He was, we are told, withheld from this by the feeling that the teaching even of the priests he saw and derided in Belgium or in Galway was better than the atheistic materialism which he associated with the dominion of mere physical science. He may have felt he had nothing definite enough to be understood by the people to substitute for what he proposed to destroy; and he may have had a thought of the reception of such a work at Scotsbrig. Much of the _Life of Sterling_, however, is somewhat less directly occupied with the same question, and though gentler in tone it excited almost as much clamour as the _Pamphlets_, especially in the north. The book, says Carlyle himself, was "utterly revolting to the religious people in particular (to my surprise rather than otherwise). 'Doesn't believe in us either!' Not he for certain; can't, if you will know." During the same year his almost morbid dislike of materialism found vent in denunciations of the "Crystal Palace" Exhibition of Industry; though for its main promoter, Prince Albert, he subsequently entertained and expressed a sincere respect. In the summer of 1851 the Carlyles went together to Malvern, where they met Tennyson (whose good nature had been proof against some slighting remarks on his verses), Sydney Dobell, then in the fame of his "Roman," and other celebrities. They tried the "Water Cure," under the superintendence of Dr. Gully, who received and treated them as guests; but they derived little good from the process. "I found," says Carlyle, "water taken as medicine to be the most destructive drug I had ever tried." Proceeding northward, he spent three weeks with his mother, then in her eighty-fourth year and at last growing feeble; a quiet time only disturbed by indignation at "one ass whom I heard the bray of in some Glasgow newspaper," comparing "our grand hater of shams" to Father Gavazzi. His stay was shortened by a summons to spend a few days with the Ashburtons at Paris on their return from Switzerland. Though bound by a promise to respond to the call, Carlyle did not much relish it. Travelling abroad was always a burden to him, and it was aggravated in this case by his very limited command of the language for conversational purposes. Fortunately, on reaching London he found that the poet Browning, whose acquaintance he had made ten years before, was, with his wife, about to start for the same destination, and he prevailed upon them, though somewhat reluctant, to take charge of him. [Footnote: Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life of Robert Browning_.] The companionship was therefore not accidental, and it was of great service. "Carlyle," according to Mrs. Browning's biographer, "would have been miserable without Browning," who made all the arrangements for the party, passed luggage through the customs, saw to passports, fought the battles of all the stations, and afterwards acted as guide through the streets of the great city. By a curious irony, two verse-makers and admirers of George Sand made it possible for the would-be man of action to find his way. The poetess, recalling the trip afterwards, wrote that she liked the prophet more than she expected, finding his "bitterness only melancholy, and his scorn sensibility." Browning himself continued through life to regard Carlyle with "affectionate reverence." "He never ceased," says Mrs. Orr, "to defend him against the charge of unkindness to his wife, or to believe that, in the matter of their domestic unhappiness, she was the more responsible of the two.... He always thought her a hard unlovable woman, and I believe little liking was lost between them ... Yet Carlyle never rendered him that service--easy as it appears--which one man of letters most justly values from another, that of proclaiming the admiration which he privately professed for his work." The party started, September 24th, and reached Dieppe by Newhaven, after a rough passage, the effects of which on some fellow-travellers more unfortunate than himself Carlyle describes in a series of recently-discovered jottings [Footnote: Partially reproduced, _Pall Mall Gazette,_ April 9th 1890, with illustrative connecting comments.] made on his return, October 2nd, to Chelsea. On September 25th they reached Paris. Carlyle joined the Ashburtons at Meurice's Hotel; there dined, went in the evening to the Théâtre Français, cursed the play, and commented unpleasantly on General Changarnier sitting in the stalls. During the next few days he met many of the celebrities of the time, and caricatured, after his fashion, their personal appearance, talk, and manner. These criticisms are for the most part of little value. The writer had in some of his essays shown almost as much capacity of understanding the great Frenchmen of the last century as was compatible with his Puritan vein; but as regards French literature since the Revolution he was either ignorant or alien. What light could be thrown on that interesting era by a man who could only say of the authors of _La Comédie Humaine_ and _Consuelo_ that they were ministers in a Phallus worship? Carlyle seems to have seen most of Thiers, whom he treats with good-natured condescension, but little insight: "round fat body, tapering like a ninepin into small fat feet, placidly sharp fat face, puckered eyeward ... a frank, sociable kind of creature, who has absolutely no malignity towards any one, and is not the least troubled with self-seekings." Thiers talked with contempt of Michelet; and Carlyle, unconscious of the numerous affinities between that historian of genius and himself, half assented. Prosper Mérimée, on the other hand, incensed him by some freaks of criticism, whether in badinage or in earnest--probably the former. "Jean Paul," he said, getting on the theme of German literature, "was a hollow fool of the first magnitude," and Goethe was "insignificant, unintelligible, a paltry kind of Scribe manqué." "I could stand no more of it, but lighted a cigar, and adjourned to the street. 'You impertinent blasphemous blockhead!' this was sticking in my throat: better to retire without bringing it out." [Footnote: The two men were mutually antagonistic; Mérimée tried to read the _French Revolution_, but flung the book aside in weariness or in disdain.] Of Guizot he writes, "Tartuffe, gaunt, hollow, resting on the everlasting 'No' with a haggard consciousness that it ought to be the everlasting 'Yea.'" "To me an extremely detestable kind of man." Carlyle missed General Cavaignac, "of all Frenchmen the one" he "cared to see." In the streets of Paris he found no one who could properly be called a gentleman. "The truly ingenious and strong men of France are here (_i.e_. among the industrial classes) making money, while the politician, literary, etc. etc. class is mere play-actorism." His summary before leaving at the close of a week, rather misspent, is: "Articulate-speaking France was altogether without beauty or meaning to me in my then diseased mood; but I saw traces of the inarticulate ... much worthier." Back in London, he sent Mrs. Carlyle to the Grange (distinguishing himself, in an interval of study at home, by washing the back area flags with his own hands), and there joined her till the close of the year. During the early part of the next he was absorbed in reading and planning work. Then came an unusually tranquil visit to Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, during which he had only to complain that the servants were often obliged to run out of the room to hide their laughter at his humorous bursts. At the close of August 1852 he embarked on board a Leith steamer bound for Rotterdam, on his first trip to Germany. Home once more, in October, he found chaos come, and seas of paint overwhelming everything; "went to the Grange, and back in time to witness from Bath House the funeral, November 18th, of the great Duke," remarking, "The one true man of official men in England, or that I know of in Europe, concludes his long course.... Tennyson's verses are naught. Silence alone is respectable on such an occasion." In March, again at the Grange, he met the Italian minister Azeglio, and when this statesman disparaged Mazzini--a thing only permitted by Carlyle to himself--he retorted with the remark, "Monsieur, vous ne le connaissez pas du tout, du tout." At Chelsea, on his return, the fowl tragic-comedy reached a crisis, "the unprotected male" declaring that he would shoot them or poison them. "A man is not a Chatham nor a Wallenstein; but a man has work too, which the Powers would not quite wish to have suppressed by two and sixpence worth of bantams.... They must either withdraw or die." Ultimately his mother-wife came to the rescue of her "babe of genius"; the cocks were bought off, and in the long-talked-of sound-proof room the last considerable work of his life, though painfully, proceeded. Meanwhile "brother John" had married, and Mrs. Carlyle went to visit the couple at Moffat. While there bad tidings came from Scotsbrig, and she dutifully hurried off to nurse her mother-in-law through an attack from which the strong old woman temporarily rallied. But the final stroke could not be long delayed. When Carlyle was paying his winter visit to the Grange in December news came that his mother was worse, and her recovery despaired of; and, by consent of his hostess, he hurried off to Scotsbrig,--"mournful leave given me by the Lady A., mournful encouragement to be speedy, not dilatory,"--and arrived in time to hear her last words. "Here is Tom come to bid you good-night, mother," said John. "As I turned to go, she said, 'I'm muckle obleeged to you.'" She spoke no more, but passed from sleep after sleep of coma to that of death, on Sunday, Christmas Day, 1853. "We can only have one mother," exclaimed Byron on a like event--the solemn close of many storms. But between Margaret Carlyle and the son of whom she was so proud there had never been a shadow. "If," writes Mr. Froude, "she gloried in his fame and greatness, he gloried more in being her son, and while she lived she, and she only, stood between him and the loneliness of which he so often and so passionately complained." Of all Carlyle's letters none are more tenderly beautiful than those which he sent to Scotsbrig. The last, written on his fifty-eighth birthday, December 4th, which she probably never read, is one of the finest. The close of their wayfaring together left him solitary; his "soul all hung with black," and, for months to come, everything around was overshadowed by the thought of his bereavement. In his journal of February 28th 1854, he tells us that he had on the Sunday before seen a vision of Mainhill in old days, with mother, father, and the rest getting dressed for the meeting-house. "They are gone now, vanished all; their poor bits of thrifty clothes, ... their pious struggling efforts; their little life, it is all away. It has all melted into the still sea, it was rounded with a sloop." The entry ends, as fitting, with a prayer: "O pious mother! kind, good, brave, and truthful soul as I have ever found, and more than I have elsewhere found in this world. Your poor Tom, long out of his schooldays now, has fallen very lonely, very lame and broken in this pilgrimage of his; and you cannot help him or cheer him ... any more. From your grave in Ecclefechan kirkyard yonder you bid him trust in God; and that also he will try if he can understand and do." CHAPTER VI THE MINOTAUR [1853-1866] Carlyle was now engaged on a work which required, received, and well nigh exhausted all his strength, resulting in the greatest though the least generally read of all his books. _Cromwell_ achieved, he had thrown himself for a season into contemporary politics, condescending even, contrary to his rule, to make casual contributions to the Press; but his temper was too hot for success in that arena, and his letters of the time are full of the feeling that the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ had set the world against him. Among his generous replies to young men asking advice, none is more suggestive than that in which he writes from Chelsea (March 9th 1850):-- If my books teach you anything, don't mind in the least whether other people believe it or not; but lay it to heart ... as a real message left with you, which you must set about fulfilling, whatever others do.... And be not surprised that "people have no sympathy with you." That is an accompaniment that will attend you all your days if you mean to live an earnest life. But he himself, though "ever a fighter," felt that, even for him, it was not good to be alone. He decided there "was no use railing in vain like Timon"; he would go back again from the present to the past, from the latter days of discord to seek countenance in some great figure of history, under whose ægis he might shelter the advocacy of his views. Looking about for a theme, several crossed his mind. He thought of Ireland, but that was too burning a subject; of William the Conqueror, of Simon de Montfort, the Norsemen, the Cid; but these may have seemed to him too remote. Why, ask patriotic Scotsmen, did he not take up his and their favourite Knox? But Knox's life had been fairly handled by M'Crie, and Carlyle would have found it hard to adjust his treatment of that essentially national "hero" to the "Exodus from Houndsditch." "Luther" might have been an apter theme; but there too it would have been a strain to steer clear of theological controversy, of which he had had enough. Napoleon was at heart too much of a gamin for his taste. Looking over Europe in more recent times, he concluded that the Prussian monarchy had been the main centre of modern stability, and that it had been made so by its virtual creator, Friedrich II., called the Great. Once entertained, the subject seized him as with the eye of Coleridge's mariner, and, in spite of manifold efforts to get free, compelled him, so that he could "not choose but" write on it. Again and again, as the magnitude of the task became manifest, we find him doubting, hesitating, recalcitrating, and yet captive. He began reading Jomini, Preuss, the king's own Memoirs and Despatches, and groaned at the mountains through which he had to dig. "Prussian Friedrich and the Pelion laid on Ossa of Prussian dry-as-dust lay crushing me with the continual question, Dare I try it? Dare I not?" At length, gathering himself together for the effort, he resolved, as before in the case of Cromwell, to visit the scenes of which he was to write. Hence the excursion to Germany of 1852, during which, with the kindly-offered guidance of Mr. Neuberg, an accomplished German admirer of some fortune resident in London, he made his first direct acquaintance with the country of whose literature he had long been himself the English interpreter. The outlines of the trip may be shortly condensed from the letters written during its progress to his wife and mother. He reached Rotterdam on September 1st; then after a night made sleepless by "noisy nocturnal travellers and the most industrious cocks and clamorous bells" he had ever heard, he sailed up the river to Bonn, where he consulted books, saw "Father Arndt," and encountered some types of the German professoriate, "miserable creatures lost in statistics." There he met Neuberg, and they went together to Rolandseck, to the village of Hunef among the Sieben-Gebirge, and then on to Coblenz. After a detour to Ems, which Carlyle, comminating the gaming-tables, compared to Matlock, and making a pilgrimage to Nassau as the birthplace of William the Silent, they rejoined the Rhine and sailed admiringly up the finest reach of the river. From Mainz the philosopher and his guide went on to Frankfort, paid their respects to Goethe's statue and the garret where _Werther_ was written, the Judengasse, "grimmest section of the Middle Ages," and the Römer--election hall of the old Kaisers; then to Homburg, where they saw an old Russian countess playing "gowpanfuls of gold pieces every stake," and left after no long stay, Carlyle, in a letter to Scotsbrig, pronouncing the fashionable Badeort to be the "rallying-place of such a set of empty blackguards as are not to be found elsewhere in the world." We find him next at Marburg, where he visited the castle of Philip of Hesse. Passing through Cassel, he went to Eisenach, and visited the neighbouring Wartburg, where he kissed the old oaken table, on which the Bible was made an open book for the German race, and noted the hole in the plaster where the inkstand had been thrown at the devil and his noises; an incident to which eloquent reference is made in the lectures on "Heroes." Hence they drove to Gotha, and lodged in Napoleon's room after Leipzig. Then by Erfurt, with more Luther memories, they took rail to Weimar, explored the houses of Goethe and of Schiller, and dined by invitation with the Augustenburgs; the Grand Duchess, with sons and daughters, conversing in a Babylonish dialect, a melange of French, English, and German. The next stage seems to have been Leipzig, then in a bustle with the Fair. "However," says Carlyle, "we got a book or two, drank a glass of wine in Auerbach's keller, and at last got off safe to the comparative quiet of Dresden." He ignores the picture galleries; and makes a bare reference to the palaces from which they steamed up the Elbe to the heart of Saxon Switzerland. There he surveyed Lobositz, first battle-field of the Seven Years' War, and rested at the romantic mountain watering-place of Töplitz. "He seems," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, "to be getting very successfully through his travels, thanks to the patience and helpfulness of Neuberg. He makes in every letter frightful _misereres_ over his sleeping accommodations; but he cannot conceal that he is really pretty well." The writer's own _misereres_ are as doleful and nearly as frequent; but she was really in much worse health. From Töplitz the companions proceeded in weary stellwagens to Zittau in Lusatia, and so on to Herrnhut, the primitive city of the Moravian brethren: a place not bigger than Annan, but beautiful, pure, and quiet beyond any town on the earth, I daresay; and, indeed, more like a saintly dream of ideal Calvinism made real than a town of stone and lime. Onward by "dreary moory Frankfurt" on the Oder, whence they reconnoitred "the field of Kunersdorf, a scraggy village where Fritz received his worst defeat," they reached the Prussian capital on the last evening of the month. From the British Hotel, Unter den Linden, we have, October 1st:-- I am dead stupid; my heart nearly choked out of me, and my head churned to pieces.... Berlin is loud almost as London, but in no other way great ... about the size of Liverpool, and more like Glasgow. They spent a week there (sight-seeing being made easier by an introduction from Lady Ashburton to the Ambassador), discovering at length an excellent portrait of Fritz, meeting Tieck, Cornelius, Rauch, Preuss, etc., and then got quickly back to London by way of Hanover, Cologne, and Ostend. Carlyle's travels are always interesting, and would be more so without the tiresome, because ever the same, complaints. Six years later (1858) he made his second expedition to Germany, in the company of two friends, a Mr. Foxton--who is made a butt--and the faithful Neuberg. Of this journey, undertaken with a more exclusively business purpose, and accomplished with greater dispatch, there are fewer notes, the substance of which may be here anticipated. He sailed (August 21st) from Leith to Hamburg, admiring the lower Elbe, and then went out of his way to accept a pressing invitation from the Baron Usedom and his wife to the Isle of Rügen, sometimes called the German Isle of Wight. He went there by Stralsund, liked his hosts and their pleasant place, where for cocks crowing he had doves cooing; but in Putbus, the Richmond of the island, he had to encounter brood sows as well as cochin-chinas. From Rügen he went quickly south by Stettin to Berlin, then to Cüstrin to survey the field of Zorndorf, with what memorable result readers of _Friedrich_ know. His next halt was at Liegnitz, headquarters for exploring the grounds of "Leuthen, the grandest of all the battles," and Molwitz--first of Fritz's fights--of which we hear so much in the _Reminiscences_. His course lay on to Breslau, "a queer old city as ever you heard of, high as Edinburgh or more so," and, by Landshut, through the picturesque villages of the Riesen-Gebirge into Bohemia. There he first put up at Pardubitz in a vile, big inn, for bed a "trough eighteen inches too short, a mattress forced into it which cocked up at both ends"--such as most travellers in remoter Germany at that period have experienced. Carlyle was unfavourably impressed by the Bohemians; and "not one in a hundred of them could understand a word of German. They are liars, thieves, slatterns, a kind of miserable, subter-Irish people,--Irish with the addition of ill-nature." He and his friends visited the fields of Chotusitz and Kolin, where they found the "Golden Sun," from which "the last of the Kings" had surveyed the ground, "sunk to be the dirtiest house probably in Europe." Thence he made for Prague, whose picturesque grandeur he could not help extolling. "Here," he writes, enclosing the flower to his wife, "is an authentic wild pink plucked from the battle-field. Give it to some young lady who practises 'the Battle of Prague' on her piano to your satisfaction." On September 15th he dates from Dresden, whence he spent a laborious day over Torgau. Thereafter they sped on, with the usual tribulations, by Hochkirk, Leipzig, Weissenfels, and Rossbach. Hurrying homeward, they were obliged to decline another invitation from the Duchess at Weimar; and, making for Guntershausen, performed the fatiguing journey from there to Aix-la-Chapelle in one day, _i.e._ travelling often in slow trains from 4 A.M. to 7 P.M., a foolish feat even for the eupeptic. Carlyle visited the cathedral, but has left a very poor account of the impression produced on him by the simple slab sufficiently inscribed, "Carolo Magno." "Next morning stand upon the lid of Charlemagne, abominable monks roaring out their idolatrous grand music within sight." By Ostend and Dover he reached home on the 22nd. A Yankee scamper trip, one might say, but for the result testifying to the enormous energy of the traveller. "He speaks lightly," says Mr. Froude, "of having seen Kolin, Torgau, etc. etc. No one would guess from reading these short notices that he had mastered the details of every field he visited; not a turn of the ground, not a brook, not a wood ... had escaped him.... There are no mistakes. Military students in Germany are set to learn Frederick's battles in Carlyle's account of them." During the interval between those tours there are few events of interest in Carlyle's outer, or phases of his inner life which have not been already noted. The year 1854 found the country ablaze with the excitement of the Crimean War, with which he had as little sympathy as had Cobden or Bright or the members of Sturge's deputation. He had no share in the popular enthusiasm for what he regarded as a mere newspaper folly. All his political leaning was on the side of Russia, which, from a safe distance, having no direct acquaintance with the country, he always admired as a seat of strong government, the representative of wise control over barbarous races. Among the worst of these he reckoned the Turk, "a lazy, ugly, sensual, dark fanatic, whom we have now had for 400 years. I would not buy the continuance of him in Europe at the rate of sixpence a century." Carlyle had no more faith in the "Balance of power" than had Byron, who scoffed at it from another, the Republican, side as "balancing straws on kings' noses instead of wringing them off," _e.g._-- As to Russian increase of strength, he writes, I would wait till Russia meddled with me before I drew sword to stop his increase of strength. It is the idle population of editors, etc., that has done all this in England. One perceives clearly that ministers go forward in it against their will. Even our heroisms at Alma--"a terrible, almost horrible, operation"--Balaclava, and Inkermann, failed to raise a glow in his mind, though he admitted the force of Tennyson's ringing lines. The alliance with the "scandalous copper captain," elected by the French, as the Jews chose Barabbas,--an alliance at which many patriots winced--was to him only an added disgrace. Carlyle's comment on the subsequent visit to Osborne of Victor Hugo's "brigand," and his reception within the pale of legitimate sovereignty was, "Louis Bonaparte has not been shot hitherto. That is the best that can be said." Sedan brought most men round to his mind about Napoleon III.: but his approval of the policy of the Czars remains open to the criticism of M. Lanin. In reference to the next great struggle of the age, Carlyle was in full sympathy with the mass of his countrymen. He was as much enraged by the Sepoy rebellion as were those who blew the ringleaders from the muzzles of guns. "Tongue cannot speak," he exclaims, in the spirit of Noel Paton's picture, before it was amended or spoilt, "the horrors that were done on the English by these mutinous hyaenas. Allow hyaenas to mutiny and strange things will follow." He never seems to have revolved the question as to the share of his admired Muscovy in instigating the revolt. For the barbarism of the north he had ready apologies, for the savagery of the south mere execration; and he writes of the Hindoos as he did, both before and afterwards, of the negroes in Jamaica. Three sympathetic obituary notices of the period expressed his softer side. In April 1854, John Wilson and Lord Cockburn died at Edinburgh. His estimate of the former is notable as that generally entertained, now that the race of those who came under the personal spell of Christopher North has passed:-- We lived apart as in different centuries; though to say the truth I always loved Wilson, he had much nobleness of heart, and many traits of noble genius, but the central tie-beam seemed always wanting; very long ago I perceived in him the most irreconcilable contradictions--Toryism with Sansculottism, Methodism of a sort with total incredulity, etc.... Wilson seemed to me always by far the most gifted of our literary men, either then or still: and yet intrinsically he has written nothing that can endure. Cockburn is referred to in contrast as "perhaps the last genuinely national type of rustic Scotch sense, sincerity, and humour--a wholesome product of Scotch dialect, with plenty of good logic in it." Later, Douglas Jerrold is described as "last of the London wits, I hope the last." Carlyle's letters during this period are of minor interest: many refer to visits paid to distinguished friends and humble relatives, with the usual complaints about health, servants, and noises. At Farlingay, where he spent some time with Edward FitzGerald, translator of _Omar Khayyam_, the lowing of cows took the place of cocks crowing. Here and there occurs a, criticism or a speculation. That on his dreams is, in the days of "insomnia," perhaps worth noting (F. iv. 154, 155); _inter alia_ he says:--"I have an impression that one always dreams, but that only in cases where the nerves are disturbed by bad health, which produces light imperfect sleep, do they start into such relief as to force themselves on our waking consciousness." Among posthumously printed documents of Cheyne Row, to this date belongs the humorous appeal of Mrs. Carlyle for a larger allowance of house money, entitled "Budget of a Femme Incomprise." The arguments and statement of accounts, worthy of a bank auditor, were so irresistible that Carlyle had no resource but to grant the request, _i.e._ practically to raise the amount to £230, instead of £200 per annum. It has been calculated that his reliable income even at this time did not exceed £400, but the rent of the house was kept very low, £30: he and his wife lived frugally, so that despite the expenses of the noise-proof room and his German tour he could afford in 1857 to put a stop to her travelling in second-class railway carriages; in 1860, when the success of the first instalment of his great work made an end of financial fears, to keep two servants; and in 1863 to give Mrs. Carlyle a brougham. Few men have left on the whole so unimpeachable a record in money matters. In November 1854 there occurred an incident hitherto unrecorded in any biography. The Lord Rectorship of the University of Glasgow having fallen vacant, the "Conservative Club" of the year had put forward Mr. Disraeli as successor to the honorary office. A small body of Mr. Carlyle's admirers among the senior students on the other side nominated him, partly as a tribute of respect and gratitude, partly in opposition to a statesman whom they then distrusted. The nomination was, after much debate, adopted by the so-called "Liberal Association" of that day; and, with a curious irony, the author of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ and _Friedrich II._ was pitted, as a Radical, against the future promoter of the Franchise of 1867 as a Tory. It soon appeared that his supporters had underestimated the extent to which Mr. Carlyle had offended Scotch theological prejudice and outraged the current Philanthropy. His name received some sixty adherents, and had ultimately to be withdrawn. The nomination was received by the Press, and other exponents of popular opinion, with denunciations that came loudest and longest from the leaders of orthodox Dissent, then arrogating to themselves the profession of Liberalism and the initiation of Reform. Among the current expressions in reference to his social and religious creeds were the following:-- Carlyle's philanthropy is not that of Howard, his cure for national distress is to bury our paupers in peat bogs, driving wooden boards on the top of them. His entire works may be described as reiterating the doctrine that "whatever is is wrong." He has thrown off every form of religious belief and settled down into the conviction that the Christian profession of Englishmen is a sham.... Elect him and you bid God-speed to Pantheism and spiritualism. [Footnote: Mr. Wylie states that "twice before his election by his own University he (Carlyle) had been invited to allow himself to be nominated for the office of Lord Rector, once by students in the University of Glasgow and once by those of Aberdeen: but both of these invitations he had declined." This as regards Glasgow is incorrect.] Mr. Carlyle neither possesses the talent nor the distinction, nor does he occupy the position which entitle a man to such an honour as the Rectorial Chair. The _Scotch Guardian_ writes: But for the folly exhibited in bringing forward Mr. Disraeli, scarcely any party within the College or out of it would have ventured to nominate a still more obnoxious personage. This is the first instance we have been able to discover in which the suffrages of the youth of the University have been sought for a candidate who denied in his writings that the revealed Word of God is "the way, the truth, the life." It is impossible to separate Mr. Carlyle from that obtrusive feature of his works in which the solemn verities of our holy religion are sneered at as wornout "biblicalities," "unbelievabilities," and religious profession is denounced as "dead putrescent cant." The reader of the _Life of Sterling_ is not left to doubt for a moment the author's malignant hostility to the religion of the Bible. In that work, saving faith is described as "stealing into heaven by the modern method of sticking ostrich-like your head into fallacies on earth," that is to say, by believing in the doctrines of the Gospels. How, after this, could the Principal and Professors of the University, the guardians of the faiths and morals of its inexperienced youth, accompany to the Common Hall, and allow to address the students a man who has degraded his powers to the life-labour of sapping and mining the foundations of the truth, and opened the fire of his fiendish raillery against the citadel of our best aspirations and dearest hopes? In the result, two men of genius--however diverse--were discarded, and a Scotch nobleman of conspicuous talent, always an active, if not intrusive, champion of orthodoxy, was returned by an "overwhelming majority." In answer to intelligence transmitted to Mr. Carlyle of these events, the president of the Association of his supporters--who had nothing on which to congratulate themselves save that only the benches of the rooms in which they held their meetings had been riotously broken,--received the following previously unpublished letter:-- Chelsea, _16th December_ 1854. DEAR SIR--I have received your Pamphlet; and return many thanks for all your kindness to me. I am sorry to learn, as I do for the first time from this narrative, what angry nonsense some of my countrymen see good to write of me. Not being much a reader of Newspapers, I had hardly heard of the Election till after it was finished; and I did not know that anything of this melancholy element of Heterodoxy, "Pantheism," etc. etc., had been introduced into the matter. It is an evil, after its sort, this of being hated and denounced by fools and ignorant persons; but it cannot be mended for the present, and so must be left standing there. That another wiser class think differently, nay, that they alone have any real knowledge of the question, or any real right to vote upon it, is surely an abundant compensation. If that be so, then all is still right; and probably there is no harm done at all!--To you, and the other young gentlemen who have gone with you on this occasion, I can only say that I feel you have loyally meant to do me a great honour and kindness; that I am deeply sensible of your genial recognition, of your noble enthusiasm (which reminds me of my own young years); and that in fine there is no loss or gain of an Election which can in the least alter these valuable facts, or which is not wholly insignificant to me, in comparison with them. "Elections" are not a thing transacted by the gods, in general; and I have known very unbeautiful creatures "elected" to be kings, chief-priests, railway kings, etc., by the "most sweet voices," and the spiritual virtue that inspires these, in our time! Leaving all that, I will beg you all to retain your honourable good feelings towards me; and to think that if anything I have done or written can help any one of you in the noble problem of living like a wise man in these evil and foolish times, it will be more valuable to me than never so many Elections or Non-elections. With many good wishes and regards I heartily thank you all, and remain--Yours very sincerely, T. CARLYLE. [Footnote: For the elucidation of some points of contact between Carlyle and Lord Beaconsfield, _vide_ Mr. Froude's _Life_ of the latter.] Carlyle's letters to strangers are always valuable, for they are terse and reticent. In writing to weavers, like Bamford; to men in trouble, as Cooper; to students, statesmen, or earnest inquirers of whatever degree, a genuine sympathy for them takes the place of the sympathy for himself, often too prominent in the copious effusions to his intimates. The letter above quoted is of special interest, as belonging to a time from which comparatively few survive; when he was fairly under weigh with a task which seemed to grow in magnitude under his gaze. The _Life of Friedrich_ could not be a succession of dramatic scenes, like the _French Revolution_, nor a biography like _Cromwell_, illustrated by the surrounding events of thirty years. Carlyle found, to his dismay, that he had involved himself in writing the History of Germany, and in a measure of Europe, during the eighteenth century, a period perhaps the most tangled and difficult to deal with of any in the world's annals. He was like a man who, with intent to dig up a pine, found himself tugging at the roots of an Igdrasil that twined themselves under a whole Hercynian forest. His constant cries of positive pain in the progress of the work are distressing, as his indomitable determination to wrestle with and prevail over it is inspiring. There is no imaginable image that he does not press into his service in rattling the chains of his voluntary servitude. Above all, he groans over the unwieldy mass of his authorities--"anti-solar systems of chaff." "I read old German books dull as stupidity itself--nay superannuated stupidity--gain with labour the dreariest glimpses of unimportant extinct human beings ... but when I begin operating: _how_ to reduce that widespread black desert of Brandenburg sand to a small human garden! ... I have no capacity of grasping the big chaos that lies around me, and reducing it to order. Order! Reducing! It is like compelling the grave to give up its dead!" Elsewhere he compares his travail with the monster of his own creation to "Balder's ride to the death kingdoms, through frozen rain, sound of subterranean torrents, leaden-coloured air"; and in the retrospect of the _Reminiscences_ touchingly refers to his thirteen years of rarely relieved isolation. "A desperate dead-lift pull all that time; my whole strength devoted to it ... withdrawn from all the world." He received few visitors and had few correspondents, but kept his life vigorous by riding on his horse Fritz (the gift of the Marshalls), "during that book, some 30,000 miles, much of it, all the winter part of it, under cloud of night, sun just setting when I mounted. All the rest of the day I sat, silent, aloft, insisting upon work, and such work, _invitissimâ Minervâ_, for that matter." Mrs. Carlyle had her usual share of the sufferings involved in "the awful _Friedrich_." "That tremendous book," she writes, "made prolonged and entire devastation of any satisfactory semblance of home life or home happiness." But when at last, by help of Neuberg and of Mr. Larkin, who made the maps of the whole book, the first two volumes were in type (they appeared in autumn 1858), his wife hailed them in a letter sent from Edinburgh to Chelsea: "Oh, my dear, what a magnificent book this is going to be, the best of all your books, forcible, clear, and sparkling as the _French Revolution_; compact and finished as _Cromwell_. Yes, you shall see that it will be the best of all your books, and small thanks to it, it has taken a doing." On which the author naively purrs: "It would be worth while to write books, if mankind would read them as you." Later he speaks of his wife's recognition and that of Emerson--who wrote enthusiastically of the art of the work, though much of it was across his grain--as "the only bit of human criticism in which he could discern lineaments of the thing." But the book was a swift success, two editions of 2000 and another of 1000 copies being sold in a comparatively brief space. Carlyle's references to this--after his return from another visit to the north and the second trip to Germany--seen somewhat ungracious:-- Book ... much babbled over in newspapers ... no better to me than the barking of dogs ... officious people put reviews into my hands, and in an idle hour I glanced partly into these; but it would have been better not, so sordidly ignorant and impertinent were they, though generally laudatory. [Footnote: Carlyle himself writes: "I felt well enough how it was crushing down her existence, as it was crushing down my own; and the thought that she had not been at the choosing of it, and yet must suffer so for it, was occasionally bitter to me. But the practical conclusion always was, Get done with it, get done with it! For the saving of us both that is the one outlook. And sure enough, I did stand by that dismal task with all my time and all my means; day and night wrestling with it, as with the ugliest dragon, which blotted out the daylight and the rest of the world to me till I should get it slain."] But these notices recall the fact familiar to every writer, that while the assailants of a book sometimes read it, favourable reviewers hardly ever do; these latter save their time by payment of generally superficial praise, and a few random quotations. Carlyle scarcely enjoyed his brief respite on being discharged of the first instalment of his book: the remainder lay upon him like a menacing nightmare; he never ceased to feel that the work must be completed ere he could be free, and that to accomplish this he must be alone. Never absent from his wife without regrets, lamentations, contrite messages, and childlike entreaties for her to "come and protect him," when she came it was to find that they were better apart; for his temper was never softened by success. "Living beside him," she writes in 1858, is "the life of a weathercock in high wind." During a brief residence together in a hired house near Aberdour in Fifeshire, she compares herself to a keeper in a madhouse; and writes later from Sunny bank to her husband, "If you could fancy me in some part of the house out of sight, my absence would make little difference to you, considering how little I do see of you, and how preoccupied you are when I do see you." Carlyle answers in his touching strain, "We have had a sore life pilgrimage together, much bad road. Oh, forgive me!" and sends her beautiful descriptions; but her disposition, not wholly forgiving, received them somewhat sceptically. "Byron," said Lady Byron, "can write anything, but he does not feel it"; and Mrs. Carlyle on one occasion told her "harsh spouse" that his fine passages were very well written for the sake of future biographers: a charge he almost indignantly repudiates. He was then, August 1860, staying at Thurso Castle, the guest of Sir George Sinclair; a visit that terminated in an unfortunate careless mistake about a sudden change of plans, resulting in his wife, then with the Stanleys at Alderley, being driven back to Chelsea and deprived of her promised pleasure and requisite rest with her friends in the north. The frequency of such incidents,--each apart capable of being palliated by the same fallacy of division that has attempted in vain to justify the domestic career of Henry VIII.,--points to the conclusion of Miss Gully that Carlyle, though often nervous on the subject, acted to his wife as if he were "totally inconsiderate of her health," so much so that she received medical advice not to be much at home when he was in the stress of writing. In January 1858 he writes to his brother John an anxious letter in reference to a pain about a hand-breadth below the heart, of which she had begun to complain, the premonitory symptom of the disease which ultimately proved fatal; but he was not sufficiently impressed to give due heed to the warning; nor was it possible, with his long-engrained habits, to remove the Marah spring that lay under all the wearisome bickerings, repentances, and renewals of offence. The "very little herring" who declined to be made a part of Lady Ashburton's luggage now suffered more than ever from her inanimate rival. The highly-endowed wife of one of the most eminent philanthropists of America, whose life was devoted to the awakening of defective intellects, thirty-five years ago murmured, "If I were only an idiot!" Similarly Mrs. Carlyle might have remonstrated, "Why was I not born a book!" Her letters and journal teem to tiresomeness with the refrain, "I feel myself extremely neglected for unborn generations." Her once considerable ambitions had been submerged, and her own vivid personality overshadowed by a man she was afraid to meet at breakfast, and glad to avoid at dinner. A woman of immense talent and a spark of genius linked to a man of vast genius and imperious will, she had no choice but to adopt his judgments, intensify his dislikes, and give a sharper edge to his sneers. Mr. Froude, who for many years lived too near the sun to see the sun, and inconsistently defends many of the inconsistencies he has himself inherited from his master, yet admits that Carlyle treated the Broad Church party in the English Church with some injustice. His recorded estimates of the leading theologians of the age, and personal relation to them, are hopelessly bewildering. His lifelong friendship for Erskine of Linlathen is intelligible, though he did not extend the same charity to what he regarded as the muddle-headedness of Maurice (Erskine's spiritual son), and keenly ridiculed the reconciliation pamphlet entitled "Subscription no Bondage." The Essayists and Reviewers, "Septem contra Christum," "should," he said, "be shot for deserting their posts"; even Dean Stanley, their _amicus curioe,_ whom he liked, came in for a share of his sarcasm; "there he goes," he said to Froude, "boring holes in the bottom of the Church of England." Of Colenso, who was doing as much as any one for the "Exodus from Houndsditch," he spoke with open contempt, saying, "he mistakes for fame an extended pillory that he is standing on"; and was echoed by his wife, "Colenso isn't worth talking about for five minutes, except for the absurdity of a man making arithmetical onslaughts on the Pentateuch with a bishop's little black silk apron on." This is not the place to discuss the controversy involved; but we are bound to note the fact that Carlyle was, by an inverted Scotch intolerance, led to revile men rowing in the same boat as himself, but with a different stroke. To another broad Churchman, Charles Kingsley, partly from sympathy with this writer's imaginative power, he was more considerate; and one of the still deeply religious freethinkers of the time was among his closest friends. The death of Arthur Clough in 1861 left another blank in Carlyle's life: we have had in this century to lament the comparatively early loss of few men of finer genius. Clough had not, perhaps, the practical force of Sterling, but his work is of a higher order than any of the fragments of the earlier favourite. Among High Churchmen Carlyle commended Dr. Pusey as "solid and judicious," and fraternised with the Bishop of Oxford; but he called Keble "an ape," and said of Cardinal Newman that he had "no more brains than an ordinary-sized rabbit." These years are otherwise marked by his most glaring political blunder. The Civil War, then raging in America, brought, with its close, the abolition of Slavery throughout the States, a consummation for which he cared little, for he had never professed to regard the negroes as fit for freedom; but this result, though inevitable, was incidental. As is known to every one who has the remotest knowledge of Transatlantic history, the war was in great measure a struggle for the preservation of National Unity: but it was essentially more; it was the vindication of Law and Order against the lawless and disorderly violence of those who, when defeated at the polling-booth, flew to the bowie knife; an assertion of Right as Might for which Carlyle cared everything: yet all he had to say of it was his "Ilias Americana in nuce," published in _Macmillan's Magazine_, August 1863. _Peter of the North_ (to Paul of the South): "Paul, you unaccountable scoundrel, I find you hire your servants for life, not by the month or year as I do. You are going straight to Hell, you----" _Paul_: "Good words, Peter. The risk is my own. I am willing to take the risk. Hire you your servants by the month or the day, and get straight to Heaven; leave me to my own method." _Peter_: "No, I won't. I will beat your brains out first!" [And is trying dreadfully ever since, but cannot yet manage it.] This, except the _Prinzenraub_, a dramatic presentation of a dramatic incident in old German history, was his only side publication during the writing of _Friedrich_. After the war ended and Emerson's letters of remonstrance had proved prophetic, Carlyle is said to have confessed to Mr. Moncure Conway as well as to Mr. Froude that he "had not seen to the bottom of the matter." But his republication of this nadir of his nonsense was an offence, emphasising the fact that, however inspiring, he is not always a safe guide, even to those content to abide by his own criterion of success. There remains of this period the record of a triumph and of a tragedy. After seven years more of rarely intermitted toil, broken only by a few visits, trips to the sea-shore, etc., and the distress of the terrible accident to his wife,--her fall on a curbstone and dislocation of a limb,--which has been often sufficiently detailed, he had finished his last great work. The third volume of _Friedrich_ was published in May 1862, the fourth appeared in February 1864, the fifth and sixth in March 1865. Carlyle had at last slain his Minotaur, and stood before the world as a victorious Theseus, everywhere courted and acclaimed, his hard-earned rest only disturbed by a shower of honours. His position as the foremost prose writer of his day was as firmly established in Germany, where his book was at once translated and read by all readers of history, as in England. Scotland, now fully awake to her reflected fame, made haste to make amends. Even the leaders of the sects, bond and "free," who had denounced him, were now eager to proclaim that he had been intrinsically all along, though sometimes in disguise, a champion of their faith. No men knew better how to patronise, or even seem to lead, what they had failed to quell. The Universities made haste with their burnt-offerings. In 1856 a body of Edinburgh students had prematurely repeated the attempt of their forerunners in Glasgow to confer on him their Lord Rectorship, and failed. In 1865 he was elected, in opposition again to Mr. Disraeli, to succeed Mr. Gladstone, the genius of elections being in a jesting mood. He was prevailed on to accept the honour, and, later, consented to deliver in the spring of 1866 the customary Inaugural Address. Mrs. Carlyle's anxiety on this occasion as to his success and his health is a tribute to her constant and intense fidelity. He went north to his Installation, under the kind care of encouraging friends, imprimis of Professor Tyndall, one of his truest; they stopped on the road at Fryston, with Lord Houghton, and there met Professor Huxley, who accompanied them to Edinburgh. Carlyle, having resolved to speak and not merely to read what he had to say, was oppressed with nervousness; and of the event itself he writes: "My speech was delivered in a mood of defiant despair, and under the pressure of nightmare. Some feeling that I was not speaking lies alone sustained me. The applause, etc., I took for empty noise, which it really was not altogether." The address, nominally on the "Reading of Books," really a rapid autobiography of his own intellectual career, with references to history, literature, religion, and the conduct of life, was, as Tyndall telegraphed to Mrs. Carlyle,--save for some difficulty the speaker had in making himself audible--"a perfect triumph." His reception by one of the most enthusiastic audiences ever similarly assembled marked the climax of a steadily-increasing fame. It may be compared to the late welcome given to Wordsworth in the Oxford Theatre. After four days spent with Erskine and his own brother James in Edinburgh, he went for a week's quiet to Scotsbrig, and was kept there, lingering longer than he had intended, by a sprained ankle, "blessed in the country stillness, the purity of sky and earth, and the absence of all babble." On April 20th he wrote his last letter to his wife, a letter which she never read. On the evening of Saturday the 21st, when staying on the way south at his sister's house at Dumfries, he received a telegram informing him that the close companionship of forty years--companionship of struggle and victory, of sad and sweet so strangely blent--was for ever at an end. Mrs. Carlyle had been found dead in her carriage when driving round Hyde Park on the afternoon of that day, her death (from heart-disease) being accelerated by an accident to a favourite little dog. Carlyle felt as "one who hath been stunned," hardly able to realise his loss. "They took me out next day ... to wander in the green sunny Sabbath fields, and ever and anon there rose from my sick heart the ejaculation, 'My poor little woman,' but no full gust of tears came to my relief, nor has yet come." On the following Monday he set off with his brother for London. "Never for a thousand years shall I forget that arrival hero of ours, my first unwelcomed by her. She lay in her coffin, lovely in death. Pale death Hid things not mine or ours had possession of our poor darling." On Wednesday they returned, and on Thursday the 26th she was buried in the nave of the old Abbey Kirk at Haddington, in the grave of her father The now desolate old man, who had walked with her over many a stony road, paid the first of his many regretful tributes in the epitaph inscribed over her tomb: in which follows, after the name and date of birth:-- IN HER BRIGHT EXISTENCE SHE HAD MORE SORROWS THAN ARE COMMON, BUT ALSO A SOFT INVINCIBILITY, A CAPACITY OF DISCERNMENT, AND A NOBLE LOYALTY OF HEART WHICH ARE RARE. FOR 40 YEARS SHE WAS THE TRUE AND LOVING HELP-MATE OF HER HUSBAND, AND BY ACT AND WORD UNWEARIEDLY FORWARDED HIM AS NONE ELSE COULD IN ALL OF WORTHY THAT HE DID OR ATTEMPTED. SHE DIED AT LONDON, 21ST APRIL 1866, SUDDENLY SNATCHED FROM HIM, AND THE LIGHT OF HIS LIFE AS IF GONE OUT. [Footnote: For the most interesting, loyally sympathetic, and characteristic account of Carlyle's journey north on this occasion, and of the incidents which followed, we may refer to _New fragments_, by John Tyndall, just published.] CHAPTER VII DECADENCE [1866-1881] After this shock of bereavement Carlyle's days went by "on broken wing," never brightening, slowly saddening to the close; but lit up at intervals by flashes of the indomitable energy that, starting from no vantage, had conquered a world of thought, and established in it, if not a new dynasty, at least an intellectual throne. Expressions of sympathy came to him from all directions, from the Queen herself downwards, and he received them with the grateful acknowledgment that he had, after all, been loved by his contemporaries. When the question arose as to his future life, it seemed a natural arrangement that he and his brother John, then a childless widower who had retired from his profession with a competence, should take up house together. The experiment was made, but, to the discredit of neither, it proved a failure. They were in some respects too much alike. John would not surrender himself wholly to the will or whims even of one whom he revered, and the attempt was by mutual consent abandoned; but their affectionate correspondence lasted through the period of their joint lives. Carlyle, being left to himself in his "gaunt and lonesome home," after a short visit to Miss Bromley, an intimate friend of his wife, at her residence in Kent, accepted the invitation of the second Lady Ashburton to spend the winter in her house at Mentone. There he arrived on Christmas Eve 1866, under the kind convoy of Professor Tyndall, and remained breathing the balmy air and gazing on the violet sea till March of the following year. During the interval he occupied himself in writing his _Reminiscences,_ drawing pen-and-ink pictures of the country, steeped in beauty fit to soothe any sorrow save such as his, and taking notes of some of the passers-by. Of the greatest celebrity then encountered, Mr. Gladstone, he writes in his journal, in a tone intensified as time went on: "Talk copious, ingenious,... a man of ardent faculty, but all gone irrecoverably into House of Commons shape.... Man once of some wisdom or possibility of it, but now possessed by the Prince, or many Princes, of the Air." Back in Chelsea, he was harassed by heaps of letters, most of which, we are told, he answered, and spent a large portion of his time and means in charities. Amid Carlyle's irreconcilable inconsistencies of theory, and sometimes of conduct, he was through life consistent in practical benevolence. The interest in the welfare of the working classes that in part inspired his _Sartor, Chartism,_ and _Past and Present_ never failed him. He was among the foremost in all national movements to relieve and solace their estate. He was, further, with an amiable disregard of his own maxims, over lenient towards the waifs and strays of humanity, in some instances careless to inquire too closely into the causes of their misfortune or the degree of their demerits. In his latter days this disposition grew upon him: the gray of his own evening skies made him fuller of compassion to all who lived in the shade. Sad himself, he mourned with those who mourned; afflicted, he held out hands to all in affliction. Consequently "the poor were always with him," writing, entreating, and personally soliciting all sorts of alms, from advice and help to ready money. His biographer informs us that he rarely gave an absolute refusal to any of these various classes of beggars. He answered a letter which is a manifest parody of his own surface misanthropy; he gave a guinea to a ticket-of-leave-convict, pretending to be a decayed tradesman; and a shilling to a blind man, whose dog took him over the crossing to a gin shop. Froude remonstrated; "Poor fellow," was the answer, "I daresay he is cold and thirsty." The memory of Wordsworth is less warmly cherished among the dales of Westmoreland than that of Carlyle in the lanes of Chelsea, where "his one expensive luxury was charity." His attitude on political questions, in which for ten years he still took a more or less prominent part, represents him on his sterner side. The first of these was the controversy about Governor Eyre, who, having suppressed the Jamaica rebellion by the violent and, as alleged, cruel use of martial law, and hung a quadroon preacher called Gordon--the man whether honest or not being an undoubted incendiary--without any law at all, was by the force of popular indignation dismissed in disgrace, and then arraigned for mis-government and illegality. In the movement, which resulted in the governor's recall and impeachment, there was doubtless the usual amount of exaggeration--represented by the violent language of one of Carlyle's minor biographers: "There were more innocent people slain than at Jeffreys' Bloody Assize"; "The massacre of Glencoe was nothing to it"; "Members of Christian Churches were flogged," etc. etc.--but among its leaders there were so many men of mark and celebrity, men like John S. Mill, T. Hughes, John Bright, Fawcett, Cairnes, Goldwin Smith, Herbert Spencer, and Frederick Harrison, that it could not be set aside as a mere unreasoning clamour. It was a hard test of Carlyle's theory of strong government; and he stood to his colours. Years before, on John Sterling suggesting that the negroes themselves should be consulted as to making a permanent engagement with their masters, he had said, "I never thought the rights of the negroes worth much discussing in any form. Quashee will get himself made a slave again, and with beneficent whip will be compelled to work." On this occasion he regarded the black rebellion in the same light as the Sepoy revolt. He organised and took the chair of a "Defence Committee," joined or backed by Ruskin, Henry Kingsley, Tyndall, Sir R. Murchison, Sir T. Gladstone, and others. "I never," says Mr. Froude, "knew Carlyle more anxious about anything." He drew up a petition to Government and exerted himself heart and soul for the "brave, gentle, chivalrous, and clear man," who when the ship was on fire "had been called to account for having flung a bucket or two of water into the hold beyond what was necessary." He had damaged some of the cargo perhaps, but he had saved the ship, and deserved to be made "dictator of Jamaica for the next twenty-five years," to govern after the model of Dr. Francia in Paraguay. The committee failed to get Eyre reinstalled or his pension restored; but the impeachment was unsuccessful. The next great event was the passing of the Reform Bill of 1867, by the Tories, educated by Mr. Disraeli to this method of "dishing the Whigs," by outbidding them in the scramble for votes. This instigated the famous tract called _Shooting Niagara_, written in the spirit of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_--Carlyle's final and unqualified denunciation of this concession to Democracy and all its works. But the upper classes in England seemed indifferent to the warning. "Niagara, or what you like," the author quotes as the saying of a certain shining countess, "we will at least have a villa on the Mediterranean when Church and State have gone." A _mot_ emphatically of the decadence. Later he fulminated against the Clerkenwell explosions being a means of bringing the Irish question within the range of practical politics. I sit in speechless admiration of our English treatment of those Fenians first and last. It is as if the rats of a house had decided to expel and extirpate the human inhabitants, which latter seemed to have neither rat-catchers, traps, nor arsenic, and are trying to prevail by the method of love. Governor Eyre, with Spenser's Essay on Ireland for text and Cromwell's storm of Drogheda for example, or Otto von Bismarck, would have been, in his view, in place at Dublin Castle. In the next great event of the century, the close of the greatest European struggle since Waterloo, the cause which pleased Cato pleased also the gods. Carlyle, especially in his later days, had a deepening confidence in the Teutonic, a growing distrust of the Gallic race. He regarded the contest between them as one between Ormuzd and Ahriman, and wrote of Sedan, as he had written of Rossbach, with exultation. When a feeling spread in this country, naming itself sympathy for the fallen,--really half that, the other half, as in the American war, being jealousy of the victor,--and threatened to be dangerous, Carlyle wrote a decisive letter to the _Times_, November 11th 1870, tracing the sources of the war back to the robberies of Louis XIV., and ridiculing the prevailing sentiment about the recaptured provinces of Lothringen and Elsass. With a possible reference to Victor Hugo and his clients, he remarks-- They believe that they are the "Christ of Nations."... I wish they would inquire whether there might not be a Cartouche of nations. Cartouche had many gallant qualities--had many fine ladies begging locks of his hair while the indispensable gibbet was preparing. Better he should obey the heavy-handed Teutsch police officer, who has him by the windpipe in such frightful manner, give up part of his stolen goods, altogether cease to be a Cartouche, and try to become again a Chevalier Bayard. All Europe does _not_ come to the rescue in gratitude for the heavenly illumination it is getting from France: nor could all Europe if it did prevent that awful Chancellor from having his own way. Metz and the boundary fence, I reckon, will be dreadfully hard to get out of that Chancellor's hands again.... Considerable misconception as to Herr von Bismarck is still prevalent in England. He, as I read him, is not a person of Napoleonic ideas, but of ideas quite superior to Napoleonic.... That noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid Germany should be at length welded into a nation, and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive France, seems to me the hopefulest fact that has occurred in my time. Carlyle seldom wrote with more force, or with more justice. Only, to be complete, his paper should have ended with a warning. He has done more than any other writer to perpetuate in England the memories of the great thinkers and actors--Fichte, Richter, Arndt, Körner, Stein, Goethe,--who taught their countrymen how to endure defeat and retrieve adversity. Who will celebrate their yet undefined successors, who will train Germany gracefully to bear the burden of prosperity? Two years later Carlyle wrote or rather dictated, for his hand was beginning to shake, his historical sketch of the _Early Kings of Norway_, showing no diminution of power either of thought or expression, his estimates of the three Hakons and of the three Olafs being especially notable; and a paper on _The Portraits of John Knox_, the prevailing dull gray of which is relieved by a radiant vision of Mary Stuart. He was incited to another public protest, when, in May 1877, towards the close of the Russo-Turkish war, he had got, or imagined himself to have got, reliable information that Lord Beaconsfield, then Prime Minister, having sent our fleet to the Dardanelles, was planning to seize Gallipoli and throw England into the struggle. Carlyle never seems to have contemplated the possibility of a Sclavo-Gallic alliance against the forces of civilised order in Europe, and he chose to think of the Czars as the representatives of an enlightened autocracy. We are here mainly interested in the letter he wrote to the _Times_, as "his last public act in this world,"--the phrase of Mr. Froude, who does not give the letter, and unaccountably says it "was brief, not more than three or four lines." It is as follows:-- Sir--A rumour everywhere prevails that our miraculous Premier, in spite of the Queen's Proclamation of Neutrality, intends, under cover of care for "British interests," to send the English fleet to the Baltic, or do some other feat which shall compel Russia to declare war against England. Latterly the rumour has shifted from the Baltic and become still more sinister, on the eastern side of the scene, where a feat is contemplated that will force, not Russia only, but all Europe, to declare war against us. This latter I have come to know as an indisputable fact; in our present affairs and outlooks surely a grave one. As to "British interests" there is none visible or conceivable to me, except taking strict charge of our route to India by Suez and Egypt, and for the rest, resolutely steering altogether clear of any copartnery with the Turk in regard to this or any other "British interest" whatever. It should be felt by England as a real ignominy to be connected with such a Turk at all. Nay, if we still had, as we ought to have, a wish to save him from perdition and annihilation in God's world, the one future for him that has any hope in it is even now that of being conquered by the Russians, and gradually schooled and drilled into peaceable attempt at learning to be himself governed. The newspaper outcry against Russia is no more respectable to me than the howling of Bedlam, proceeding as it does from the deepest ignorance, egoism, and paltry national jealousy. These things I write, not on hearsay, but on accurate knowledge, and to all friends of their country will recommend immediate attention to them while there is yet time, lest in a few weeks the maddest and most criminal thing that a British government could do, should be done and all Europe kindle into flames of war.--I am, etc. T. CARLYLE. 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, _May 4th._ Meanwhile honours without stint were being rendered to the great author and venerable sage. In 1868 he had by request a personal interview with the Queen, and has left, in a letter, a graphic account of the interview at the Deanery of Westminster. Great artists as Millais, Watts, and Boehm vied with one another, in painting or sculpture, to preserve his lineaments; prominent reviews to record their impression of his work, and disciples to show their gratitude. One of these, Professor Masson of Edinburgh, in memory of Carlyle's own tribute to Goethe, started a subscription for a medal, presented on his eightieth birthday; but he valued more a communication of the same date from Prince Bismarck. Count Bernstoff from Berlin wrote him (1871) a semi-official letter of thanks for the services he had conferred on Germany, and in 1874 he was prevailed on to accept the Prussian "Ordre pour le mérite." In the same year Mr. Disraeli proposed, in courteous oblivion of bygone hostilities, to confer on him a pension and the "Order of the Grand Cross of Bath," an emolument and distinction which Carlyle, with equal courtesy, declined. To the Countess of Derby, whom he believed to be the originator of the scheme, he (December 30th) expressed his sense of the generosity of the Premier's letter: "It reveals to me, after all the hard things I have said of him, a now and unexpected stratum of genial dignity and manliness of character." To his brother John he wrote: "I do, however, truly admire the magnanimity of Dizzy in regard to me. He is the only man I almost never spoke of without contempt ... and yet see here he comes with a pan of hot coals for my guilty head." That he was by no means gagged by personal feeling or seduced in matters of policy is evident from the above-quoted letter to the _Times_; but he liked Disraeli better than he did his great rival; the one may have bewildered his followers, the other, according to his critic's view, deceived himself--the lie, in Platonic phrase, had got into the soul, till, to borrow an epigram, "he made his conscience not his guide but his accomplice." "Carlyle," says Mr. Froude, "did not regard Mr. Gladstone merely as an orator who, knowing nothing as it ought to be known, had flung his force into specious sentiments, but as the representative of the numerous cants of the age ... differing from others in that the cant seemed true to him. He in fact believed him to be one of those fatal figures created by England's evil genius to work irreparable mischief." It must be admitted that Carlyle's censures are so broadcast as to lose half their sting. In uncontroversial writing, it is enough to note that his methods of reforming the world and Mr. Gladstone's were as far as the poles asunder; and the admirers of the latter may console themselves with the reflection that the censor was, at the same time, talking with equal disdain of the scientific discoverers of the age--conspicuously of Mr. Darwin, whom he describes as "evolving man's soul from frog spawn," adding, "I have no patience with these gorilla damnifications of humanity." Other criticisms, as those of George Eliot, whose _Adam Bede_ he pronounced "simply dull," display a curious limitation or obtuseness of mind. One of the pleasantest features of his declining years is the ardour of his attachment to the few staunch friends who helped to cheer and console them. He had a sincere regard for Fitzjames Stephen, "an honest man with heavy strokes"; for Sir Garnet Wolseley, to whom he said in effect, "Your duty one day will be to take away that bauble and close the doors of the House of Discord"; for Tyndall always; for Lecky, despite their differences; for Moncure Conway, athwart the question of "nigger" philanthropies; for Kingsley and Tennyson and Browning, the last of whom was a frequent visitor till near the end. Froude he had bound to his soul by hoops of steel; and a more faithful disciple and apostle, in intention always, in practice in the main (despite the most perplexing errors of judgment), no professed prophet ever had. But Carlyle's highest praise is reserved for Ruskin, whom he regarded as no mere art critic, but as a moral power worthy to receive and carry onward his own "cross of fire." The relationship between the two great writers is unchequered by any shade of patronage on the one hand, of jealousy or adulation on the other. The elder recognised in the younger an intellect as keen, a spirit as fearless as his own, who in the Eyre controversy had "plunged his rapier to the hilt in the entrails of the Blatant Beast," _i.e._ Popular Opinion. He admired all Ruskin's books; the _Stones of Venice,_ the most solid structure of the group, he named "Sermons in Stones"; he resented an attack on _Sesame and Lilies_ as if the book had been his own; and passages of the _Queen of the Air_ went into his heart "like arrows." The _Order of the Rose_ has attempted a practical embodiment of the review contemplated by Carlyle, as a counteractive to the money making practice and expediency-worships of the day. Meanwhile he had been putting his financial affairs in order. In 1867, on return from Mentone, he had recorded his bequest of the revenues of Graigenputtock for the endowment of three John Welsh bursaries in the University of Edinburgh. In 1873 he made his will, leaving John Forster and Froude his literary executors: a legacy of trust which, on the death of the former, fell to the latter, to whose discretion, by various later bequests, less and less limited, there was confided the choice--at last almost made a duty--of editing and publishing the manuscripts and journals of himself and his wife. Early in his seventy-third year (December 1867) Carlyle quotes, "Youth is a garland of roses," adding, "I did not find it such. 'Age is a crown of thorns.' Neither is this altogether true for me. If sadness and sorrow tend to loosen us from life, they make the place of rest more desirable." The talk of Socrates in the _Republic_, and the fine phrases in Cicero's _De Senectute_, hardly touch on the great grief, apart from physical infirmities, of old age--its increasing solitariness. After sixty, a man may make disciples and converts, but few new friends, while the old ones die daily; the "familiar faces" vanish in the night to which there is no morning, and leave nothing in their stead. During these years Carlyle's former intimates were falling round him like the leaves from an autumn tree, and the kind care of the few survivors, the solicitous attention of his niece, nurse, and amanuensis, Mary Aitken, yet left him desolate. Clough had died, and Thomas Erskine, and John Forster, and Wilberforce, with whom he thought he agreed, and Mill, his old champion and ally, with whom he so disagreed that he almost maligned his memory--calling one of the most interesting of autobiographies "the life of a logic-chopping machine." In March 1876 he attended the funeral of Lady Augusta Stanley; in the following month his brother Aleck died in Canada; and in 1878 his brother John at Dumfries. He seemed destined to be left alone; his physical powers were waning. As early as 1868 he and his last horse had their last ride together; later, his right hand failed, and he had to write by dictation. In the gathering gloom he began to look on death as a release from the shreds of life, and to envy the old Roman mode of shuffling off the coil. His thoughts turned more and more to Hamlet's question of the possible dreams hereafter, and his longing for his lost Jeannie made him beat at the iron gates of the "Undiscovered Country" with a yearning cry; but he could get no answer from reason, and would not seek it in any form of superstition, least of all the latest, that of stealing into heaven "by way of mesmeric and spiritualistic trances." His question and answer are always-- Strength quite a stranger to me.... Life is verily a weariness on those terms. Oftenest I feel willing to go, were my time come. Sweet to rejoin, were it only in eternal sleep, those that are away. That ... is now and then the whisper of my worn-out heart, and a kind of solace to me. "But why annihilation or eternal sleep?" I ask too. They and I are alike in the will of the Highest. "When," says Mr. Froude, "he spoke of the future and its uncertainties, he fell back invariably on the last words of his favourite hymn-- Wir heissen euch hoffen." His favourite quotations in those days were Macbeth's "To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow"; Burns's line, "Had we never lo'ed sae kindly,"--thinking of the tomb which he was wont to kiss in the gloamin' in Haddington Church,--the lines from "The Tempest" ending, "our little life is rounded with a sleep," and the dirge in "Cymbeline." He lived on during the last years, save for his quiet walks with his biographer about the banks of the Thames, like a ghost among ghosts, his physical life slowly ebbing till, on February 4th 1881, it ebbed away. His remains were, by his own desire, conveyed to Ecclefechan and laid under the snow-clad soil of the rural churchyard, beside the dust of his kin. He had objected to be buried, should the request be made (as it was by Dean Stanley), in Westminster Abbey:[greek: andron gar epiphanon pasa gae taphos.] Of no man whose life has been so laid bare to us is it more difficult to estimate the character than that of Thomas Carlyle; regarding no one of equal eminence, with the possible exception of Byron, has opinion been so divided. After his death there was a carnival of applause from his countrymen in all parts of the globe, from Canton to San Francisco. Their hot zeal, only equalled by that of their revelries over the memory of Burns, was unrestrained by limit, order, or degree. No nation is warmer than the Scotch in worship of its heroes when dead and buried: one perfervid enthusiast says of the former "Atheist, Deist, and Pantheist": "Carlyle is gone; his voice, pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, will be heard no more": the _Scotsman_ newspaper writes of him as "probably the greatest of modern literary men;... before the volcanic glare of his _French Revolution_ all Epics, ancient and modern, grow pale and shadowy,... his like is not now left in the world." More recently a stalwart Aberdonian, on helping to put a bust into a monument, exclaims in a strain of genuine ardour, "I knew Carlyle, and I aver to you that his heart was as large and generous as his brain was powerful; that he was essentially a most lovable man, and that there were depths of tenderness, kindliness, benevolence, and most delicate courtesy in him, with all his seeming ruggedness and sternness, such as I have found throughout my life rarely in any human being." On the other side, a little later, after the publication of the _Reminiscences_, _Blackwood_ denounced the "old man eloquent" as "a blatant impostor, who speaks as if he were the only person who knew good from bad. ... Every one and every thing dealt with in his _History_ is treated in the tone of a virtuous Mephistopheles." The _World_ remarks that Carlyle has been made to pay the penalty of a posthumous depreciation for a factitious fame; "but the game of venomous recrimination was begun by himself.... There is little that is extraordinary, still less that is heroic in his character. He had no magnanimity about him ... he was full of littleness and weakness, of shallow dogmatism and of blustering conceit." The _Quarterly_, after alluding to Carlyle's style "as the eccentric expression of eccentricity," denounces his choice of "heroes" as reckless of morality. According to the same authority, he "was not a deep thinker, but he was a great word-painter ... he has the inspiration as well as the contortions of the Sibyl, the strength as well as the nodosities of the oak. ... In the _French Revolution_ he rarely condescends to plain narrative ... it resembles a drama at the Porte St. Martin, in so many acts and tableaux. ... The raisers of busts and statues in his honour are winging and pointing new arrows aimed at the reputation of their most distinguished contemporaries, and doing their best to perpetuate a baneful influence." _Fraser_, no longer edited by Mr. Froude, swells the chorus of dissent: "Money, for which he cared little, only came in quantity after the death of his wife, when everything became indifferent to an old and life-weary man. Who would be great at such a price? Who would buy so much misery with so much labour? Most men like their work. In his Carlyle seems to have found the curse imposed upon Adam.... He cultivated contempt of the kindly race of men." Ample texts for these and similar censures are to be found in the pages of Mr. Froude, and he has been accused by Carlyle's devotees of having supplied this material of malice prepense. No accusation was over more ridiculously unjust. To the mind of every impartial reader, Froude appears as one of the loyallest if one of the most infatuated of friends. Living towards the close in almost daily communion with his master, and in inevitable contact with his numerous frailties, he seems to have revered him with a love that passeth understanding, and attributed to him in good faith, as Dryden did in jest to the objects of his mock heroics, every mental as well as every moral power, _e.g.,_ "Had Carlyle turned his mind to it he would have been a great philologer." "A great diplomatist was lost in Carlyle." "He would have done better as a man of action than a man of words." By kicking the other diplomatists into the sea, as he threatened to do with the urchins of Kirkcaldy! Froude's panegyrics are in style and tone worthy of that put into the mouth of Pericles by Thucydides, with which the modern biographer closes his only too faithful record. But his claims for his hero--amounting to the assertions that he was never seriously wrong; that he was as good as he was great; that "in the weightier matters of the law his life had been without speck or flaw"; that "such faults as he had were but as the vapours which hang about a mountain, inseparable from the nature of the man"; that he never, in their intercourse, uttered a "trivial word, nor one which he had better have left unuttered"--these claims will never be honoured, for they are refuted in every third page after that on which they appear:--_e.g._ in the Biography, vol. iv. p. 258, we are told that Carlyle's "knowledge was not in points or lines but complete and solid": facing the remark we read, "He liked _ill_ men like Humboldt, Laplace, or the author of the _Vestiges_. He refused Darwin's transmutation of species as unproved: he fought against it, though I could see he dreaded that it might turn out true." The statement that "he always spoke respectfully of Macaulay" is soon followed by criticisms that make us exclaim, "Save us from such respect." The extraordinary assertion that Carlyle was "always just in speaking of living men" is safeguarded by the quotation of large utterances of injustice and contempt for Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Comte, Balzac, Hugo, Lamb, George Eliot, and disparaging patronage of Scott, of Jeffrey, of Mazzini, and of Mill. The dog-like fidelity of Boswell and Eckermann was fitting to their attitude and capacity; but the spectacle of one great writer surrendering himself to another is a new testimony to the glamour of conversational genius. [Footnote: This patronage of men, some quite, others nearly on his own level, whom he delights in calling "small," "thin," and "poor," as if he were the only big, fat, and rich, is more offensive than spurts of merely dyspeptic abuse. As regards the libels on Lamb, Dr. Ireland has endeavoured to establish that they were written in ignorance of the noble tragedy of "Elia's" life; but this contention cannot be made good as regards the later attacks.] Carlyle was a great man, but a great man spoiled, that is, largely soured. He was never a Timon; but, while at best a Stoic, he was at worst a Cynic, emulous though disdainful, trying all men by his own standard, and intolerant of a rival on the throne. To this result there contributed the bleak though bracing environment of his early years, amid kindred more noted for strength than for amenity, whom he loved, trusted, and revered, but from whose grim creed, formally at least, he had to tear himself with violent wrenches apart; his purgatory among the border-ruffians of Annan school; his teaching drudgeries; his hermit college days; ten years' struggle for a meagre competence; a lifelong groaning under the Nessus shirt of the irritable yet stubborn constitution to which genius is often heir; and above all his unusually late recognition. There is a good deal of natural bitterness in reference to the long refusal by the publishers of his first original work--an idyll like Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_, and our finest prose poem in philosophy. "Popularity," says Emerson, "is for dolls"; but it remains to find the preacher, prophet, or poet wholly impervious to unjust criticism. Neglect which crushes dwarfs only exasperates giants, but to the latter also there is great harm done. Opposition affected Carlyle as it affected Milton, it made him defiant, at times even fierce, to those beyond his own inner circle. When he triumphed, he accepted his success without a boast, but not without reproaches for the past. He was crowned; but his coronation came too late, and the death of his wife paralysed his later years. Let those who from the Clyde to the Isis, from the Dee to the Straits, make it their pastime to sneer at living worth, compare Ben Jonson's lines, Your praise and dispraise are to me alike, One does not stroke me, nor the other strike, with Samuel Johnson's, "It has been delayed till most of those whom I wished to please are sunk into the grave, and success and failure are empty sounds," and then take to heart the following:-- The "recent return of popularity greater than ever," which I hear of, seems due alone to that late Edinburgh affair; especially to the Edinburgh "Address," and affords new proof of the singularly dark and feeble condition of "public judgment" at this time. No idea, or shadow of an idea, is in that Address but what had been set forth by me tens of times before, and the poor gaping sea of prurient blockheadism receives it as a kind of inspired revelation, and runs to buy my books (it is said), now when I have got quite done with their buying or refusing to buy. If they would give me £10,000 a year and bray unanimously their hosannahs heaven-high for the rest of my life, who now would there be to get the smallest joy or profit from it? To me I feel as if it would be a silent sorrow rather, and would bring me painful retrospections, nothing else. We require no open-sesame, no clumsy confidence from attaches flaunting their intimacy, to assure us that there were "depths of tenderness" in Carlyle. His susceptibility to the softer influences of nature, of family life, of his few chosen friends, is apparent in almost every page of his biography, above all in the _Reminiscences_, those supreme records of regret, remorse, and the inspiration of bereavement. There is no surge of sorrow in our literature like that which is perpetually tossed up in the second chapter of the second volume, with the never-to-be-forgotten refrain-- Cherish what is dearest while you have it near you, and wait not till it is far away. Blind and deaf that we are; oh, think, if thou yet love anybody living, wait not till death sweep down the paltry little dust clouds and dissonances of the moment, and all be at last so mournfully clear and beautiful, when it is too late! Were we asked to bring together the three most pathetic sentences in our tongue since Lear asked the question, "And have his daughters brought him to this pass?" we should select Swift's comment on the lock of Stella, "Only a woman's hair"; the cry of Tennyson's Rizpah, "The bones had moved in my side"; and Carlyle's wail, "Oh that I had you yet but for five minutes beside me, to tell you all!" But in answer we hear only the flapping of the folds of Isis, "strepitumque Acherontis avari." All of sunshine that remained in my life went out in that sudden moment. All of strength too often seems to have gone.... Were it permitted, I would pray, but to whom? I can well understand the invocation of saints. One's prayer now has to be voiceless, done with the heart still, but also with the hands still more.... Her birthday. She not here--I cannot keep it for her now, and send a gift to poor old Betty, who next to myself remembers her in life-long love and sacred sorrow. This is all I can do.... Time was to bring relief, said everybody; but Time has not to any extent, nor, in truth, did I much wish him Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua, Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae. Carlyle's pathos, far from being confined to his own calamity, was ready to awake at every touch. "I was walking with him," writes Froude, "one Sunday afternoon in Battersea Park. In the open circle among the trees was a blind man and his daughter, she singing hymns, he accompanying her on some instrument. We stood listening. She sang Faber's 'Pilgrims of the Night.' The words were trivial, but the air, though simple, had something weird and unearthly about it. 'Take me away,' he said, after a few minutes, 'I shall cry if I stay longer.'" The melancholy, "often as of deep misery frozen torpid," that runs through his writing, that makes him forecast death in life and paint the springs of nature in winter hue, the "hoarse sea," the "bleared skies," the sunsets "beautiful and brief and wae," compels our compassion in a manner quite different from the pictures of Sterne, and De Quincey, and other colour dramatists, because we feel it is as genuine as the melancholy of Burns. Both had the relief of humour, but Burns only of the two was capable of gaiety. "Look up there," said Leigh Hunt, pointing to the starry skies, "look at that glorious harmony that sings with infinite voices an eternal song of hope in the soul of man." "Eh, it's a sair sicht," was the reply. We have referred to a few out of a hundred instances of Carlyle's practical benevolence. To all deserving persons in misfortune he was a good Samaritan, and like all benefactors the dupe of some undeserving. Charity may be, like maternal affection, a form of self-indulgence, but it is so only to kind-hearted men. In all that relates to money Carlyle's career is exemplary. He had too much common sense to affect to despise it, and was restive when he was underpaid; he knew that the labourer was worthy of his hire. But, after hacking for Brewster he cannot be said to have ever worked for wages, his concern was rather with the quality of his work, and, regardless of results, he always did his best. A more unworldly man never lived; from his first savings he paid ample tributes to filial piety and fraternal kindness, and to the end of his life retained the simple habits in which he had been trained. He hated waste of all kinds, save in words, and carried his home frugalities even to excess. In writing to James Aitken, engaged to his sister, "the Craw," he says, "remember in marriage you have undertaken to do to others as you would wish they should do to you." But this rede he did not reck. "Carlyle," writes Longfellow, "was one of those men who sacrificed their happiness to their work"; the misfortune is that the sacrifice did not stop with himself. He seemed made to live with no one but himself. Alternately courteous and cross-grained, all his dramatic power went into his creations; he could not put himself into the place of those near him. Essentially perhaps the bravest man of his age, he would not move an inch for threat or flattery; centered in rectitude, conscience never made him a coward. He bore great calamities with the serenity of a Marcus Aurelius: his reception of the loss of his first volume of the _French Revolution_ was worthy of Sidney or of Newton: his letters, when the successive deaths of almost all that were dearest left him desolate, are among the noblest, the most resigned, the most pathetic in biography. Yet, says Mr. Froude, in a judgment which every careful reader must endorse: "Of all men I have ever seen Carlyle was the least patient of the common woes of humanity." "A positive Christian," says Mrs. Carlyle, "in bearing others' pain, he was a roaring Thor when himself pricked by a pin," and his biographer corroborates this: "If matters went well with himself, it never occurred to him that they could be going ill with any one else; and, on the other hand, if he were uncomfortable he required all the world to be uncomfortable along with him." He did his work with more than the tenacity of a Prescott or a Fawcett, but no man ever made more noise over it than this apostle of silence. "Sins of passion he could forgive, but those of insincerity never." Carlyle has no tinge of insincerity; his writing, his conversation, his life, are absolutely, dangerously, transparent. His utter genuineness was in the long run one of the sources of his success. He always, if we allow for a habit of rhetorical exaggeration, felt what he made others feel. Sullen moods, and "words at random sent," those judging him from a distance can easily condone; the errors of a hot head are pardonable to one who, in his calmer hours, was ready to confess them. "Your temptation and mine," he writes to his brother Alexander, "is a tendency to imperiousness and indignant self-help; and, if no wise theoretical, yet, practical forgetfulness and tyrannical contempt of other men." His nicknaming mania was the inheritance of a family failing, always fostered by the mocking-bird at his side. Humour, doubtless, ought to discount many of his criticisms. Dean Stanley, in his funeral sermon, charitably says, that in pronouncing the population of England to be "thirty millions, mostly fools," Carlyle merely meant that "few are chosen and strait is the gate," generously adding--"There was that in him, in spite of his contemptuous descriptions of the people, which endeared him to those who knew him best. The idols of their market-place he trampled under foot, but their joys and sorrows, their cares and hopes, were to him revered things." Another critic pleads for his discontent that it had in it a noble side, like that of Faust, and that his harsh judgments of eminent men were based on the belief that they had allowed meaner to triumph over higher impulses, or influences of society to injure their moral fibre. This plea, however, fails to cover the whole case. Carlyle's ignorance in treating men who moved in spheres apart from his own, as the leaders of science, definite theological enlightenment, or even poetry and arts, was an intellectual rather than a moral flaw; but in the implied assertion, "what I can't do is not worth doing," we have to regret the influence of an enormous egotism stunting enormous powers, which, beginning with his student days, possessed him to the last. The fame of Newton, Leibnitz, Gibbon, whose works he came to regard as the spoon-meat of his "rude untutored youth," is beyond the range of his or of any shafts. When he trod on Mazzini's pure patriot career, as a "rose-water imbecility," or maligned Mill's intrepid thought as that of a mere machine, he was astray on more delicate ground, and alienated some of his truest friends. Among the many curses of our nineteenth-century literature denounced by its leading Censor, the worst, the want of loyalty among literary men, he fails to denounce because he largely shares in it. "No sadder proof," he declares, "can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men," and no one has done more to retrieve from misconception the memories of heroes of the past; but rarely does either he or Mrs. Carlyle say a good word for any considerable English writer then living. It is true that he criticises, more or less disparagingly, all his own works, from _Sartor,_ of which he remarks that "only some ten pages are fused and harmonious," to his self-entitled "rigmarole on the Norse Kings": but he would not let his enemy say so; nor his friend. Mill's just strictures on the "Nigger Pamphlet" he treats as the impertinence of a boy, and only to Emerson would he grant the privilege to hold his own. _Per contra,_ he overestimated those who were content to be his echoes. Material help he refused with a red Indian pride; intellectual he used and slighted. He renders scant justice to those who had preceded him in his lines of historical investigation, as if they had been poachers on his premises, _e.g._ Heath, the royalist writer of the Commonwealth time, is "carrion Heath": Noble, a former biographer of Cromwell, is "my reverend imbecile friend": his predecessors in _Friedrich,_ as Schlosser, Preuss, Ranke, Förster, Vehse, are "dark chaotic dullards whose books are mere blotches of printed stupor, tumbled mountains of marine stores "--criticism valueless even when it raises the laughter due to a pantomime. Carlyle assailed three sets of people:-- 1. Real humbugs, or those who had behaved, or whom he believed to have behaved, badly to him. 2. Persons from whom he differed, or whom he could not understand--as Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Coleridge, and the leaders of Physics and Metaphysics. 3. Persons who had befriended, but would not give him an unrestricted homage or an implicit following, as Mill, Mazzini, Miss Martineau, etc. The last series of assaults are hard to pardon. Had his strictures been always just,--so winged with humorous epigram,--they would have blasted a score of reputations: as it is they have only served to mar his own. He was a typical Scotch student of the better class, stung by the *_oistros_ of their ambitious competition and restless push, wanting in repose, never like a gentleman at wise With moral breadth of tomperament, too apt to note his superiority with the sneer, "they call this man as good as me," Bacon, in one of his finest antitheses, draws a contrast between the love of Excellence and the love of Excelling. Carlyle is possessed by both; he had none of the exaggerated caution which in others of his race is apt to degenerate into moral cowardice: but when he thought himself trod on he became, to use his own figure, "a rattlesnake," and put out fangs like those of the griffins curiously, if not sardonically, carved on the tombs of his family in the churchyard at Ecclefechan. Truth, in the sense of saying what he thought, was one of his ruling passions. To one of his brothers on the birth of a daughter, he writes, "Train her to this, as the cornerstone of all morality, to stand by the truth, to abhor a lie as she does hell-fire." The "gates of hell" is the phrase of Achilles; but Carlyle has no real point of contact with the Greek love of abstract truth. He objects that "Socrates is terribly at ease in Zion": he liked no one to be at ease anywhere. He is angry with Walter Scott because he hunted with his friends over the breezy heath instead of mooning alone over twilight moors. Read Scott's _Memoirs_ in the morning, the _Reminiscences_ at night, and dispute if you like about the greater genius, but never about the healthier, better, and larger man. Hebraism, says Matthew Arnold, is the spirit which obeys the mandate, "walk by your light"; Hellenism the spirit which remembers the other, "have a care your light be not darkness." The former prefers doing to thinking, the latter is bent on finding the truth it loves. Carlyle is a Hebraist unrelieved and unretrieved by the Hellene. A man of inconsistencies, egotisms, Alpine grandeurs and crevasses, let us take from him what the gods or protoplasms have allowed. His way of life, duly admired for its stern temperance, its rigidity of noble aim--eighty years spent in contempt of favour, plaudit, or reward,--left him austere to frailty other than his own, and wrapt him in the repellent isolation which is the wrong side of uncompromising dignity. He was too great to be, in the common sense, conceited. All his consciousness of power left him with the feeling of Newton, "I am a child gathering shells on the shore": but what sense he had of fallibility arose from his glimpse of the infinite sea, never from any suspicion that, in any circumstances, he might be wrong and another mortal right: Shelley's lines on Byron-- The sense that he was greater than his kind Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind By gazing on its own exceeding light. fit him, like Ruskin's verdict, "What can you say of Carlyle but that he was born in the clouds and struck by the lightning?" which withers while it immortalises. [Footnote: In the _Times_ of February 7th 1881, there appeared an interesting account of Carlyle's daily routine. "No book hack could have surpassed the regularity and industry with which he worked early and late in his small attic. A walk before breakfast was part of the day's duties. At ten o'clock in the morning, whether the spirit moved him or not, he took up his pen and laboured hard until three o'clock. Nothing, not even the opening of the morning letters, was allowed to distract him. Then came walking, answering letters, and seeing friends.... In the evening he read and prepared for the work of the morrow."] CHAPTER VIII CARLYLE AS MAN OF LETTERS, CRITIC, AND HISTORIAN Carlyle was so essentially a Preacher that the choice of a profession made for him by his parents was in some measure justified; but he was also a keen Critic, unamenable to ecclesiastic or other rule, a leader of the revolutionary spirit of the age, even while protesting against its extremes: above all, he was a literary Artist. Various opinions will continue to be held as to the value of his sermons; the excellence of his best workmanship is universally acknowledged. He was endowed with few of the qualities which secure a quick success--fluency, finish of style, the art of giving graceful utterance to current thought; he had in full measure the stronger if slower powers--sound knowledge, infinite industry, and the sympathetic insight of penetrative imagination--that ultimately hold the fastnesses of fame. His habit of startling his hearers, which for a time restricted, at a later date widened their circle. There is much, sometimes even tiresome, repetition in Carlyle's work; the range of his ideas is limited, he plays on a few strings, with wonderfully versatile variations; in reading his later we are continually confronted with the "old familiar faces" of his earlier essays. But, after the perfunctory work for Brewster he wrote nothing wholly commonplace; occasionally paradoxical to the verge of absurdity, he is never dull. Setting aside his TRANSLATIONS, always in prose,--often in verse,--masterpieces of their kind, he made his first mark in CRITICISM, which may be regarded as a higher kind of translation: the great value of his work in this direction is due to his so regarding it. Most criticism has for its aim to show off the critic; good criticism interprets the author. Fifty years ago, in allusion to methods of reviewing, not even now wholly obsolete, Carlyle wrote:-- The first and most convenient is for the reviewer to perch himself resolutely, as it were, on the shoulder of his author, and therefrom to show as if he commanded him and looked down upon him by natural superiority of stature. Whatsoever the great man says or does the little man shall treat with an air of knowingness and light condescending mockery, professing with much covert sarcasm that this or that is beyond _his_ comprehension, and cunningly asking his readers if _they_ comprehend it. There is here perhaps some "covert sarcasm" directed against contemporaries who forgot that their mission was to pronounce on the merits of the books reviewed, and not to patronise their authors; it may be set beside the objection to Jeffrey's fashion of saying, "I like this; I do not like that," without giving the reason why. But in this instance the writer did reck his own rede. The temptation of a smart critic is to seek or select legitimate or illegitimate objects of attack; and that Carlyle was well armed with the shafts of ridicule is apparent in his essays as in his histories; superabundantly so in his letters and conversation. His examination of the _German Playwrights_, of _Taylor's German Literature_, and his inimitable sketch of Herr Döring, the hapless biographer of Richter, are as amusing as is Macaulay's _coup de grâce_ to Robert Montgomery. But the graver critic would have us take to heart these sentences of his essay on Voltaire:-- Far be it from us to say that solemnity is an essential of greatness; that no great man can have other than a rigid vinegar aspect of countenance, never to be thawed or warmed by billows of mirth. There are things in this world to be laughed at as well as things to be admired. Nevertheless, contempt is a dangerous element to sport in; a deadly one if we habitually live in it. The faculty of love, of admiration, is to be regarded as a sign and the measure of high souls; unwisely directed, it leads to many evils; but without it, there cannot be any good. Ridicule, on the other hand, is the smallest of all faculties that other men are at pains to repay with any esteem.... Its nourishment and essence is denial, which hovers only on the surface, while knowledge dwells far below,... it cherishes nothing but our vanity, which may in general be left safely enough to shift for itself. [Footnote: As an estimate of Voltaire this brilliant essay is inadequate. Carlyle's maxim, we want to be told "not what is _not_ true but what _is_ true," prevented him from appreciating the great work of Encyclopaedists.] We may compare with this one of the writer's numerous warnings to young men taking to literature, as to drinking, in despair of anything better to do, ending with the exhortation, "Witty above all things, oh, be not witty"; or turn to the passage in the review of Sir Walter Scott:-- Is it with ease or not with ease that a man shall do his best in any shape; above all, in this shape justly named of soul's travail, working in the deep places of thought?... Not so, now nor at any time.... Virgil and Tacitus, were they ready writers? The whole _Prophecies of Isaiah_ are not equal in extent to this cobweb of a Review article. Shakespeare, we may fancy, wrote with rapidity; but not till he had thought with intensity,... no easy writer he. Neither was Milton one of the mob of gentlemen that write with case. Goethe tells us he "had nothing sent to him in his sleep," no page of his but he knew well how it came there. Schiller--"konnte nie fertig werden"--never could get done. Dante sees himself "growing lean" over his _Divine Comedy_; in stern solitary death wrestle with it, to prevail over it and do it, if his uttermost faculty may; hence too it is done and prevailed over, and the fiery life of it endures for evermore among men. No; creation, one would think, cannot be easy; your Jove has severe pains and fire flames in the head, out of which an armed Pallas is struggling! As for manufacture, that is a different matter.... Write by steam if thou canst contrive it and sell it, but hide it like virtue. In these and frequent similar passages lies the secret of Carlyle's slow recognition, long struggle, and ultimate success; also of his occasional critical intolerance. Commander-in-chief of the "red artillery," he sets too little store on the graceful yet sometimes decisive charges of the light brigades of literature. He feels nothing but contempt for the banter of men like Jerrold; despises the genial pathos of Lamb; and salutes the most brilliant wit and exquisite lyrist of our century with the Puritanical comment, "Blackguard Heine." He deified work as he deified strength; and so often stimulated his imitators to attempt to leap beyond their shadows. Hard work will not do everything: a man can only accomplish what he was born fit for. Many, in the first flush of ambition doomed to wreck, are blind to the fact that it is not in every ploughman to be a poet, nor in every prize-student to be a philosopher. Nature does half: after all perhaps the larger half. Genius has been inadequately defined as "an infinite capacity for taking trouble"; no amount of pumping can draw more water than is in the well. Himself in "the chamber of little ease," Carlyle travestied Goethe's "worship of sorrow" till it became a pride in pain. He forgot that rude energy requires restraint. Hercules Furens and Orlando Furioso did more than cut down trees; they tore them up; but to no useful end. His power is often almost Miltonic; it is never Shakespearian; and his insistent earnestness would run the risk of fatiguing us were it not redeemed by his humour. But he errs on the better side; and his example is a salutary counteractive in an age when the dust of so many skirmishers obscures the air, and laughter is too readily accepted as the test of truth, his stern conception of literature accounts for his exaltations of the ideal, and denunciations of the actual, profession of letters in passages which, from his habit of emphasising opposite sides of truth, instead of striking a balance, appear almost side by side in contradiction. The following condenses the ideal:-- If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return, that he may have guidance, freedom, immortality? These two in all degrees I honour; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth. Doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse, indignation, despair itself--all these like hell-hounds lie beleaguering the souls of the poor day worker as of every man; but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stifled--all these shrink murmuring far off in their caves. Against this we have to set innumerable tirades on the crime of worthless writing, _e.g._-- No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something; he knows not what mischief he does, past computation, scattering words without meaning, to afflict the whole world yet before they cease. For thistle-down flies abroad on all winds and airs of wind.... Ship-loads of fashionable novels, sentimental rhymes, tragedies, farces ... tales by flood and field are swallowed monthly into the bottomless pool; still does the press toil,... and still in torrents rushes on the great army of publications to their final home; and still oblivion, like the grave, cries give! give! How is it that of all these countless multitudes no one can ... produce ought that shall endure longer than "snowflake on the river? Because they are foam, because there is no reality in them. . . ." Not by printing ink alone does man live. Literature, as followed at present, is but a species of brewing or cooking, where the cooks use poison and vend it by telling innumerable lies. These passages owe their interest to the attestation of their sincerity by the writer's own practice. "Do not," he counsels one of his unknown correspondents, "take up a subject because it is singular and will get you credit, but because you _love_ it;" and he himself acted on the rule. Nothing more impresses the student of Carlyle's works than his _thoroughness._ He never took a task in hand without the determination to perform it to the utmost of his ability; consequently when he satisfied himself that he was master of his subject he satisfied his readers; but this mastery was only attained, as it is only attainable, by the most rigorous research. He seems to have written down his results with considerable fluency: the molten ore flowed freely forth, but the process of smelting was arduous. The most painful part of literary work is not the actual composition, but the accumulation of details, the wearisome compilation of facts, weighing of previous criticisms, the sifting of the grains of wheat from the bushels of chaff. This part of his task Carlyle performed with an admirable conscientiousness. His numerous letters applying for out-of-the-way books to buy or borrow, for every pamphlet throwing light on his subject, bear testimony to the careful exactitude which rarely permitted him to leave any record unread or any worthy opinion untested about any event of which or any person of whom he undertook to write. From Templand (1833) he applies for seven volumes of Beaumarchais, three of Bassompierre, the Memoirs of Abbé Georgel, and every attainable account of Cagliostro and the Countess de la Motte, to fuse into _The Diamond Necklace._ To write the essay on _Werner_ and the _German Playwrights_ he swam through seas of trash. He digested the whole of _Diderot_ for one review article. He seems to have read through _Jean Paul Richter,_ a feat to accomplish which Germans require a special dictionary. When engaged on the Civil War he routed up a whole shoal of obscure seventeenth-century papers from Yarmouth, the remnant of a yet larger heap, "read hundredweights of dreary books," and endured "a hundred Museum headaches." In grappling with _Friedrich_ he waded through so many gray historians that we can forgive his sweeping condemnation of their dulness. He visited all the scenes and places of which he meant to speak, from St. Ives to Prague, and explored the battlefields. Work done after this fashion seldom brings a swift return; but if it is utilised and made vivid by literary genius it has a claim to permanence. Bating a few instances where his sense of proportion is defective, or his eccentricity is in excess, Carlyle puts his ample material to artistic use; seldom making ostentation of detail, but skilfully concentrating, so that we read easily and readily recall what he has written. Almost everything he has done has made a mark: his best work in criticism is final, it does not require to be done again. He interests us in the fortunes of his leading characters: _first_, because he feels with them; _secondly_, because he knows how to distinguish the essence from the accidents of their lives, what to forget and what to remember, where to begin and where to stop. Hence, not only his set biographies, as of Schiller and of Sterling, but the shorter notices in his Essays, are intrinsically more complete and throw more real light on character than whole volumes of ordinary memoirs. With the limitations above referred to, and in view of his antecedents, the range of Carlyle's critical appreciation is wonderfully wide. Often perversely unfair to the majority of his English contemporaries, the scales seem to fall from his eyes in dealing with the great figures of other nations. The charity expressed in the saying that we should judge men, not by the number of their faults, but by the amount of their deflection from the circle, great or small, that bounds their being, enables him often to do justice to those most widely differing in creed, sentiment, and lines of activity from one another and from himself. When treating congenial themes he errs by overestimate rather than by depreciation: among the qualities of his early work, which afterwards suffered some eclipse in the growth of other powers, is its flexibility. It was natural for Carlyle, his successor in genius in the Scotch lowlands, to give an account of Robert Burns which throws all previous criticism of the poet into the shade. Similarly he has strong affinities to Johnson, Luther, Knox, Cromwell, to all his so-called heroes: but he is fair to the characters, if not always to the work, of Voltaire and Diderot, slurs over or makes humorous the escapades of Mirabeau, is undeterred by the mysticism of Novalis, and in the fervour of his worship fails to see the gulf between himself and Goethe. Carlyle's ESSAYS mark an epoch, _i.e._ the beginning of a new era, in the history of British criticism. The able and vigorous writers who contributed to the early numbers of the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly Reviews_ successfully applied their taste and judgment to such works as fell within their sphere, and could be fairly tested by their canons; but they passed an alien act on everything that lay beyond the range of their insular view. In dealing with the efforts of a nation whose literature, the most recent in Europe save that of Russia, had only begun to command recognition, their rules were at fault and their failures ridiculous. If the old formulas have been theoretically dismissed, and a conscientious critic now endeavours to place himself in the position of his author, the change is largely due to the influence of Carlyle's _Miscellanies._ Previous to their appearance, the literature of Germany, to which half of these papers are devoted, had been (with the exception of Sir Walter Scott's translation of _Goetz von Berlichingen,_ De Quincey's travesties, and Taylor's renderings from Lessing) a sealed book to English readers, save those who were willing to breathe in an atmosphere of Coleridgean mist. Carlyle first made it generally known in England, because he was the first fully to apprehend its meaning. The _Life of Schiller,_ which the author himself depreciated, remains one of the best of comparatively short biographies, it abounds in admirable passages (conspicuously the contrast between the elder and the younger of the Dioscuri at Weimar) and has the advantage to some readers of being written in classical English prose. To the essays relating to Germany, which we may accept as the _disjecta membra_ of the author's unpublished History, there is little to add. In these volumes we have the best English account of the Nibelungen Lied--the most graphic, and in the main most just analyses of the genius of Heyne, Rchter, Novalis, Schiller, and, above all, of Goethe, who is recorded to have said, "Carlyle is almost more at home in our literature than ourselves." With the Germans he is on his chosen ground; but the range of his sympathies is most apparent in the portrait gallery of eighteenth-century Frenchmen that forms, as it were, a proscenium to his first great History. Among other papers in the same collection the most prominent are the _Signs of the Times_ and _Characteristics,_ in which he first distinctly broaches some of his peculiar views on political philosophy and life. The scope and some of the limitations of Carlyle's critical power are exhibited in his second Series of Lectures, delivered in 1838, when (_æt_. 43) he had reached the maturity of his powers. The first three of these lectures, treating of Ancient History and Literature, bring into strong relief the speaker's inadequate view of Greek thought and civilisation:-- Greek transactions had never anything alive, no result for us, they were dead entirely ... all left is a few ruined towers, masses of stone and broken statuary.... The writings of Socrates are made up of a few wire-drawn notions about virtue; there is no conclusion, no word of life in him. [Footnote: Though a mere reproduction of the notes of Mr. Chisholm Anstey, this posthumous publication is justified by its interest and obvious authenticity. The appearance in a prominent periodical (while these sheets are passing through the press) of _Wotton Reinfred_ is more open to question. This fragment of a romance, partly based on the plan of _Wilhelm Meister_, with shadowy love episodes recalling the manner of the "Minerva Press," can add nothing to Carlyle's reputation.] These and similar dogmatic utterances are comments of the Hebrew on the Hellene. To the Romans, "the men of antiquity," he is more just, dwelling on their agriculture and road-making as their "greatest work written on the planet;" but the only Latin author he thoroughly appreciates is Tacitus, "a Colossus on edge of dark night." Then follows an exaltation of the Middle Ages, in which "we see belief getting the victory over unbelief," in the strain of Newman's _Grammar of Assent_. On the surrender of Henry to Hildebrand at Canossa his approving comment is, "the clay that is about man is always sufficiently ready to assert its rights; the danger is always the other way, that the spiritual part of man will become overlaid with the bodily part." In the later struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufens his sympathy is with Gregory and Innocent. In the same vein is his praise of Peter the Hermit, whose motto was not the "action, action" of Demosthenes, but, "belief, belief." In the brief space of those suggestive though unequal discourses the speaker allows awkward proximity to some of the self-contradictions which, even when scattered farther apart, perplex his readers and render it impossible to credit his philosophy with more than a few strains of consistent thought. In one page "the judgments of the heart are of more value than those of the head." In the next "morals in a man are the counterpart of the intellect that is in him." The Middle Ages were "a healthy age," and therefore there was next to no Literature. "The strong warrior disdained to write." "Actions will be preserved when all writers are forgotten." Two days later, apropos of Dante, he says, "The great thing which any nation can do is to produce great men.... When the Vatican shall have crumbled to dust, and St. Peter's and Strassburg Minster be no more; for thousands of years to come Catholicism will survive in this sublime relic of antiquity--the _Divina Commedia."_ [Footnote: It has been suggested that Carlyle may have been in this instance a student of Vauvenargues, who in the early years of the much- maligned eighteenth century wrote "Les graudes pensées viennent du coeur."] Passing to Spain, Carlyle salutes Cervantes and the Cid,--calling Don Quixote the "poetry of comedy," "the age of gold in self-mockery,"--pays a more reserved tribute to Calderon, ventures on the assertion that Cortes was "as great as Alexander," and gives a sketch, so graphic that it might serve as a text for Motley's great work, of the way in which the decayed Iberian chivalry, rotten through with the Inquisition, broke itself on the Dutch dykes. After a brief outline of the rise of the German power, which had three avatars--the overwhelming of Rome, the Swiss resistance to Austria, and the Reformation--we have a rough estimate of some of the Reformers. Luther is exalted even over Knox; Erasmus is depreciated, while Calvin and Melanchthon are passed by. The chapter on the Saxons, in which the writer's love of the sea appears in picturesque reference to the old rover kings, is followed by unusually commonplace remarks on earlier English literature, interspersed with some of Carlyle's refrains. The mind is one, and consists not of bundles of faculties at all ... the same features appear in painting, singing, fighting ... when I hear of the distinction between the poet and the thinker, I really see no difference at all.... Bacon sees, Shakespeare sees through,... Milton is altogether sectarian--a Presbyterian one might say--he got his knowledge out of Knox.... Eve is a cold statue. Coming to the well-belaboured eighteenth century--when much was done of which the nineteenth talks, and massive books were written that we are content to criticise--we have the inevitable denunciations of scepticism, materialism, argumentation, logic; the quotation, (referred to a motto "in the Swiss gardens"), "Speech is silvern, silence is golden," and a loud assertion that all great things are silent. The age is commended for Watt's steam engine, Arkwright's spinning jenny, and Whitfield's preaching, but its policy and theories are alike belittled. The summaries of the leading writers are interesting, some curious, and a few absurd. On the threshold of the age Dryden is noted "as a great poet born in the worst of times": Addison as "an instance of one formal man doing great things": Swift is pronounced "by far the greatest man of that time, not unfeeling," who "carried sarcasm to an epic pitch": Pope, we are told, had "one of the finest heads ever known." Sterne is handled with a tenderness that contrasts with the death sentence pronounced on him by Thackeray, "much is forgiven him because he loved much,... a good simple being after all." Johnson, the "much enduring," is treated as in the _Heroes_ and the Essay. Hume, with "a far duller kind of sense," is commended for "noble perseverance and Stoic endurance of failure; but his eye was not open to faith," etc. On which follows a stupendous criticism of Gibbon, whom Carlyle, returning to his earlier and juster view, ended by admiring. With all his swagger and bombast, no man ever gave a more futile account of human things than he has done of the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. The sketch of the Pre-Revolution period is slight, and marked by a somewhat shallow reference to Rousseau. The last lecture on the recent German writers is a mere _réchauffé_ of the Essays. Carlyle closes with the famous passage from Richter, one of those which indicate the influence in style as in thought of the German over the Scotch humorist. "It is now the twelfth hour of the night, birds of darkness are on the wing, the spectres uprear, the dead walk, the living dream. Thou, Eternal Providence, wilt cause the day to dawn." The whole volume is a testimony to the speaker's power of speech, to his often unsurpassed penetration, and to the hopeless variance of the often rapidly shifting streams of his thought. Detailed criticism of Carlyle's HISTORIES belongs to the sphere of separate disquisitions. Here it is only possible to take note of their general characteristics. His conception of what history should be is shared with Macaulay. Both writers protest against its being made a mere record of "court and camp," of royal intrigue and state rivalry, of pageants of procession, or chivalric encounters. Both find the sources of these outwardly obtrusive events in the underground current of national sentiment, the conditions of the civilisation from which they were evolved, the prosperity or misery of the masses of the people. The essence of history does not lie in laws, senate-houses, or battle-fields, but in the tide of thought and action--the world of existence that in gloom and brightness blossoms and fades apart from these. But Carlyle differs from Macaulay in his passion for the concrete. The latter presents us with pictures to illustrate his political theory; the former leaves his pictures to speak for themselves. "Give him a fact," says Emerson, "he loaded you with thanks; a theory, with ridicule or even abuse." It has been said that with Carlyle History was philosophy teaching by examples. He himself defines it as "the essence of innumerable biographies." He individualises everything he meets; his dislike of abstractions is everywhere extreme. Thus while other writers have expanded biography into history, Carlyle condenses history into biography. Even most biographies are too vague for him. He delights in Boswell: he glides over their generalisations to pick out some previously obscure record from Clarendon or Hume. Even in _The French Revolution,_ where the author has mainly to deal with masses in tumult, he gives most prominence to their leaders. They march past us, labelled with strange names, in the foreground of the scene, on which is being enacted the death wrestle of old Feudalism and young Democracy. This book is unique among modern histories for a combination of force and insight only rivalled by the most incisive passages of the seventh book of Thucydides, of Tacitus, of Gibbon, and of Michelet. [Footnote: _Vide_ a comparison of Carlyle and Michelet in Dr. Oswald's interesting and suggestive little volume of criticism and selection, _Thomas Carlyle, ein Lebensbild und Goldkörner aus seinen Werken._] _The French Revolution_ is open to the charge of being a comment and a prophecy rather than a narrative: the reader's knowledge of the main events of the period is too much assumed for the purpose of a school book. Even Dryasdust will turn when trod on, and this book has been a happy hunting field to aggressive antiquarians, to whom the mistake of a day in date, the omission or insertion of a letter in a name, is of more moment than the difference between vitalising or petrifying an era. The lumber merchants of history are the born foes of historians who, like Carlyle and Mr. Froude, have manifested their dramatic power of making the past present and the distant near. That the excess of this power is not always compatible with perfect impartiality may be admitted; for a poetic capacity is generally attended by heats of enthusiasm, and is liable to errors of detail; but without some share of it-- Die Zeiten der Vergangenheit Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln. Mere research, the unearthing and arrangement of what Sir Philip Sidney calls "old moth-eaten records," supplies material for the work of the historian proper; and, occasionally to good purpose, corrects it, but, as a rule, with too much flourish. Applying this minute criticism to _The French Revolution,_ one reviewer has found that the author has given the wrong number to a regiment: another esteemed scholar has discovered that there are seven errors in the famous account of the flight to Varennes, to wit:--the delay in the departure was due to Bouille, not to the Queen; she did not lose her way and so delay the start; Ste. Menehould is too big to be called a village; on the arrest, it was the Queen who asked for hot water and eggs; the King only left the coach once; it went rather faster than is stated; and, above all, _infandum!_ it was not painted yellow, but green and black. This criticism does not in any degree detract from the value of one of the most vivid and substantially accurate narratives in the range of European literature. Carlyle's object was to convey the soul of the Revolution, not to register its upholstery. The annalist, be he dryasdust or gossip, is, in legal phrase, "the devil" of the prose artist, whose work makes almost as great a demand on the imaginative faculty as that of the poet. Historiography is related to History as the Chronicles of Holinshed and the Voyages of Hakluyt to the Plays of Shakespeare, plays which Marlborough confessed to have been the main source of his knowledge of English history. Some men are born philologists or antiquarians; but, as the former often fail to see the books because of the words, so the latter cannot read the story for the dates. The mass of readers require precisely what has been contemptuously referred to as the "Romance of History," provided it leaves with them an accurate impression, as well as an inspiring interest. Save in his over-hasty acceptance of the French _blague_ version of "The Sinking of the Vengeur," Carlyle has never laid himself open to the reproach of essential inaccuracy. As far as possible for a man of genius, he was a devotee of facts. He is never a careless, though occasionally an impetuous writer; his graver errors are those of emotional misinterpretation. It has been observed that, while contemning Robespierre, he has extenuated the guilt of Danton as one of the main authors of the September massacres, and, more generally, that "his quickness and brilliancy made him impatient of systematic thought." But his histories remain the best illuminations of fact in our language. _The French Revolution_ is a series of flame-pictures; every page is on fire; we read the whole as if listening to successive volleys of artillery: nowhere has such a motley mass been endowed with equal life. This book alone vindicates Lowell's panegyric: "the figures of most historians seem like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole substance runs through any hole that criticism may tear in them; but Carlyle's are so real that if you prick them they bleed." When Carlyle generalises, as in the introductions to his Essays, he is apt to thrust his own views on his subject and on his readers; but, unlike De Quincey, who had a like love of excursus, he comes to the point before the close. The one claimed the privilege, assumed by Coleridge, of starting from no premises and arriving at no conclusion; the other, in his capacity as a critic, arrives at a conclusion, though sometimes from questionable premises. It is characteristic of his habit of concentrating, rather than condensing, that Carlyle abandoned his design of a history of the Civil Wars for _Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches._ The events of the period, whose issues the writer has firmly grasped, are brought into prominence mainly as they elucidate the career of his hero; but the "elucidations" have been accepted, with a few reservations, as final. No other work has gone so far to reverse a traditional estimate. The old current conceptions of the Protector are refuted out of his own mouth; but it was left for his editor to restore life to the half-forgotten records, and sweep away the clouds that obscured their revelations of a great though rugged character. _Cromwell_ has been generally accepted in Scotland as Carlyle's masterpiece--a judgment due to the fact of its being, among the author's mature works, the least apparently opposed to the theological views prevalent in the north of our island. In reality--though containing some of his finest descriptions and battle-pieces, conspicuously that of "Dunbar"--it is the least artistic of his achievements, being overladen with detail and superabounding in extract. A good critic has said that it was a labour of love, like Spedding's _Bacon;_ but that the correspondence, lavishly reproduced in both works, has "some of the defects of lovers' letters for those to whom they are not addressed." [Footnote: In _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11th, 1881.] Carlyle has established that Oliver was not a hypocrite, "not a man of falsehood, but a man of truth": he has thrown doubts on his being a fanatic; but he has left it open to M. Guizot to establish that his later rule was a practical despotism. In _Friedrich II._ he undertook a yet greater task; and his work stretching over a wider arena, is, of necessity, more of a history, less of a biography, than any of his others. In constructing and composing it he was oppressed not only by the magnitude and complexity of his theme, but, for the first time, by hesitancies as to his choice of a hero. He himself confessed, "I never was admitted much to _Friedrich's_ confidence, and I never cared very much about him." Yet he determined, almost of malice prepense, to exalt the narrow though vivid Prussian as "the last of the kings, the one genuine figure in the eighteenth century," and though failing to prove his case, he has, like a loyal lawyer, made the best of his brief. The book embodies and conveys the most brilliant and the most readable account of a great part of the century, and nothing he has written bears more ample testimony to the writer's pictorial genius. It is sometimes garrulous with the fluency of an old man eloquent; parts of the third volume, with its diffuse extracts from the king's survey of his realm, are hard if not weary reading; but the rest is a masterpiece of historic restoration. The introductory portion, leading us through one of the most tangled woods of genealogy and political adjustment, is relieved from tedium by the procession of the half-forgotten host of German worthies,--St. Adalbert and his mission; old Barbarossa; Leopold's mystery; Conrad and St. Elizabeth; Ptolemy Alphonso; Otto with the arrow; Margaret with the mouth; Sigismund _supra grammaticam_; Augustus the physically strong; Albert Achilles and Albert Alcibiades; Anne of Cleves; Mr. John Kepler,--who move on the pages, more brightly "pictured" than those of Livy, like marionettes inspired with life. In the main body of the book the men and women of the Prussian court are brought before us in fuller light and shade. Friedrich himself, at Sans Souci, with his cocked-hat, walking-stick and wonderful gray eyes; Sophia Charlotte's grace, wit, and music; Wilhelmina and her book; the old Hyperborean; the black artists Seckendorf and Grumkow; George I. and his blue-beard chamber; the little drummer; the Old Dessaner; the cabinet Venus; Grävenitz Hecate; Algarotti; Goetz in his tower; the tragedy of Katte; the immeasurable comedy of Maupertuis, the flattener of the earth, and Voltaire; all these and a hundred more are summoned by a wizard's wand from the land of shadows, to march by the central figures of these volumes; to dance, flutter, love, hate, intrigue, and die before our eyes. It is the largest and most varied showbox in all history; a prelude to a series of battle-pieces--Rossbach, Leuthen, Molwitz, Zorndorf--nowhere else, save in the author's own pages, approached in prose, and rarely rivalled out of Homer's verse. Carlyle's style, in the chiar-oscuro of which his Histories and three-fourths of his Essays are set, has naturally provoked much criticism and some objurgation. M. Taine says it is "exaggerated and demoniacal." Hallam could not read _The French Revolution_ because of its "abominable" style, and Wordsworth, whose own prose was perfectly limpid, is reported to have said, "No Scotchman can write English. C---- is a pest to the language." [Footnote: Carlyle with equal unfairness disparaged Hallam's _Middle Ages:--"Eh, the poor miserable skeleton of a book," and regarded the _Literature of Europe_ as a valley of dry bones.] Carlyle's style is not that of Addison, of Berkeley, or of Helps; its peculiarities are due to the eccentricity of an always eccentric being; but it is neither affected nor deliberately imitated. It has been plausibly asserted that his earlier manner of writing, as in _Schiller,_ under the influence of Jeffrey, was not in his natural voice. "They forget," he said, referring to his critics, "that the style is the skin of the writer, not a coat: and the public is an old woman." Erratic, metaphorical, elliptical to excess, and therefore a dangerous model, "the mature oaken Carlylese style," with its freaks, "nodosities and angularities," is as set and engrained in his nature as the _Birthmark_ in Hawthorne's romance. To recast a chapter of the _Revolution_ in the form of a chapter of Macaulay would be like rewriting Tacitus in the form of Cicero, or Browning in the form of Pope. Carlyle is seldom obscure, the energy of his manner is part of his matter; its abruptness corresponds to the abruptness of his thought, which proceeds often as it were by a series of electric shocks, that threaten to break through the formal restraints of an ordinary sentence. He writes like one who must, under the spell of his own winged words; at all hazards, determined to convey his meaning; willing, like Montaigne, to "despise no phrase of those that run in the streets," to speak in strange tongues, and even to coin new words for the expression of a new emotion. It is his fashion to care as little for rounded phrase as for logical argument: and he rather convinces and persuades by calling up a succession of feelings than by a train of reasoning. He repeats himself like a preacher, instead of condensing like an essayist. The American Thoreau writes in the course of an incisive survey:-- Carlyle's ... mastery over the language is unrivalled; it is with him a keen, resistless weapon; his power of words is endless. All nature, human and external, is ransacked to serve and run his errands. The bright cutlery, after all the dross of Birmingham has been thrown aside, is his style.... He has "broken the ice, and the torrent streams forth." He drives six-in-hand over ruts and streams and never upsets.... With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, and crashes his way through shoals of dilettante opinions. It is not in man to determine what his style shall be, if it is to be his own. But though a rugged, Carlyle was the reverse of a careless or ready writer. He weighed every sentence: if in all his works, from _Sartor_ to the _Reminiscences_, you pencil-mark the most suggestive passages you disfigure the whole book. His opinions will continue to be tossed to and fro; but as an artist he continually grows. He was, let us grant, though a powerful, a one-sided historian, a twisted though in some aspects a great moralist; but he was, in every sense, a mighty painter, now dipping his pencil "in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse," now etching his scenes with the tender touch of a Millet. Emerson, in one of his early letters to Carlyle, wrote, "Nothing seems hid from those wonderful eyes of yours; those devouring eyes; those thirsty eyes; those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine." Men of genius, whether expressing themselves in prose or verse, on canvas or in harmony, are, save when smitten, like Beethoven, by some malignity of Nature, endowed with keener physical senses than other men. They actually, not metaphorically, see more and hear more than their fellows. Carlyle's super-sensitive ear was to him, through life, mainly a torment; but the intensity of his vision was that of a born artist, and to' it we owe the finest descriptive passages, if we except those of Mr. Ruskin, in English prose. None of our poets, from Chaucer and Dunbar to Burns and Tennyson, has been more alive to the influences of external nature. His early letters abound in passages like the following, on the view from Arthur's Seat:-- The blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills swelling gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags and rude precipices at our feet (where not a hillock rears its head unsung) with Edinburgh at their base clustering proudly over her rugged foundations and covering with a vapoury mantle the jagged black masses of stonework that stretch far and wide, and show like a city of Faeryland.... I saw it all last evening when the sun was going down, and the moon's fine crescent, like a pretty silver creature as it is, was riding quietly above me. Compare with this the picture, in a letter to Sterling, of Middlebie burn, "leaping into its cauldron, singing a song better than Pasta's"; or that of the Scaur Water, that may be compared with Tennyson's verses in the valley of Cauteretz; or the sketches of the Flemish cities in the tour of 1842, with the photograph of the lace-girl, recalling Sterne at his purest; or the account of the "atmosphere like silk" over the moor, with the phrase, "it was as if Pan slept"; or the few lines written at Thurso, where "the sea is always one's friend"; or the later memories of Mentone, old and new, in the _Reminiscences_ (vol. ii. pp. 335-340). The most striking of those descriptions are, however, those in which the interests of some thrilling event or crisis of human life or history steal upon the scene, and give it a further meaning, as in the dim streak of dawn rising over St. Abb's Head on the morning of Dunbar, or in the following famous apostrophe:-- O evening sun of July, how at this hour thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful, woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on balls at the Orangerie at Versailles, where high-rouged dames of the palace are even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar officers;--and also on this roaring Hell-porch of an Hôtel-de-Ville. Carlyle is, here and there, led astray by the love of contrast; but not even Heinrich Heine has employed antithesis with more effect than in the familiar passage on the sleeping city in _Sartor_, beginning, "Ach mein Lieber ... it is a true sublimity to dwell here," and ending, "But I, mein Werther, sit above it all. I am alone with the stars." His thought, seldom quite original, is often a resuscitation or survival, and owes much of its celebrity to its splendid brocade. _Sartor Resartus_ itself escaped the failure that was at first threatened by its eccentricity partly from its noble passion, partly because of the truth of the "clothes philosophy," applied to literature as to life. His descriptions, too often caricatures, of men are equally vivid. They set the whole great mass of _Friedrich_ in a glow; they lighten the tedium of _Cromwell's_ lumbering despatches; they give a heart of fire to _The French Revolution_. Dickens's _Tale of Two Cities_ attempts and fulfils on a smaller what Carlyle achieved on a greater scale. The historian makes us sympathise with the real actors, even more than the novelist does with the imaginary characters on the same stage. From the account of the dying Louis XV. to the "whiff of grapeshot" which closed the last scene of the great drama, there is not a dull page. Théroigne de Méricourt, Marat, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Mirabeau, Robespierre, Talleyrand, Mdme. Roland, above all Marie Antoinette--for whom Carlyle has a strong affection--and Buonaparte, so kindle and colour the scene that we cannot pause to feel weary of the phrases with which they are labelled. The author's letters show the same power of baptizing, which he used often to unfair excess. We can no more forget Count d'Orsay as the "Phoebus Apollo of Dandyism," Daniel Webster's "brows like cliffs and huge black eyes," or Wordsworth "munching raisins" and recognising no poet but himself, or Maurice "attacked by a paroxysm of mental cramp," than we can dismiss from our memories "The Glass Coachman" or "The Tobacco Parliament." Carlyle quotes a saying of Richter, that Luther's words were half battles; he himself compares those of Burns to cannon-balls; much of his own writing is a fusilade. All three were vehement in abuse of things and persons they did not like; abuse that might seem reckless, if not sometimes coarse, were it not redeemed, as the rogueries of Falstaff are, by strains of humour. The most Protean quality of Carlyle's genius is his humour: now lighting up the crevices of some quaint fancy, now shining over his serious thought like sunshine over the sea, it is at its best as finely quaint as that of Cervantes, more humane than Swift's. There is in it, as in all the highest humour, a sense of apparent contrast, even of contradiction, in life, of matter for laughter in sorrow and tears in joy. He seems to check himself, and as if afraid of wearing his heart in his sleeve, throws in absurd illustrations of serious propositions, partly to show their universal range, partly in obedience to an instinct of reserve, to escape the reproach of sermonising and to cut the story short. Carlyle's grotesque is a mode of his golden silence, a sort of Socratic irony, in the indulgence of which he laughs at his readers and at himself. It appears now in the form of transparent satire, ridicule of his own and other ages, now in droll reference or mock heroic detail, in an odd conception, a character sketch, an event in parody, in an antithesis or simile,--sometimes it lurks in a word, and again in a sentence. In direct pathos--the other side of humour--he is equally effective. His denunciations of sentiment remind us of Plato attacking the poets, for he is at heart the most emotional of writers, the greatest of the prose poets of England; and his dramatic sympathy extends alike to the actors in real events and to his ideal creations. Few more pathetic passages occur in literature than his "stories of the deaths of kings." The following among the less known of his eloquent passages is an apotheosis of their burials:-- In this manner did the men of the Eastern Counties take up the slain body of their Edmund, where it lay cast forth in the village of Hoxne; seek out the severed head and reverently reunite the same. They embalmed him with myrrh and sweet spices, with love, pity, and all high and awful thoughts; consecrating him with a very storm of melodious, adoring admiration, and sun-dried showers of tears; joyfully, yet with awe (as all deep joy has something of the awful in it), commemorating his noble deeds and godlike walk and conversation while on Earth. Till, at length, the very Pope and Cardinals at Rome were forced to hear of it; and they, summing up as correctly as they well could, with _Advocatus Diaboli_ pleadings and other forms of process, the general verdict of mankind, declared that he had in very fact led a hero's life in this world: and, being now gone, was gone, as they conceived, to God above and reaping his reward there. Such, they said, was the best judgment they could form of the case, and truly not a bad judgment. Carlyle's reverence for the past makes him even more apt to be touched by its sorrows than amused by its follies. With a sense of brotherhood he holds out hands to all that were weary; he feels even for the pedlars climbing the Hohenzollern valley, and pities the solitude of soul on the frozen Schreckhorn of power, whether in a dictator of Paraguay or in a Prussian prince. He leads us to the death chamber of Louis XV., of Mirabeau, of Cromwell, of Sterling, his own lost friend; and we feel with him in the presence of a solemnising mystery. Constantly, amid the din of arms or words, and the sarcasms by which he satirises and contemns old follies and idle strifes, a gentler feeling wells up in his pages like the sound of the Angelus. Such pauses of pathos are the records of real or fanciful situations, as of Teufelsdröckh "left alone with the night" when Blumine and Herr Towgood ride down the valley; of Oliver recalling the old days at St. Ives; of the Electress Louisa bidding adieu to her Elector. At the moment of her death, it is said, when speech had fled, he felt from her hand, which lay in his, three slight slight pressures--farewell thrice mutely spoken in that manner, not easily to forget in this world. There is nothing more pathetic in the range of his works, if in that of our literature, than the account of the relations of father and son in the domestic history of the Prussian Court, from the first estrangement between them--the young Friedrich in his prison at Cüstrin, the old Friedrich gliding about seeking shelter from ghosts, mourning for Absalom--to the reconciliation, the end, and the afterthoughts:-- The last breath of Friedrich Wilhelm having fled, Friedrich hurried to a private room; sat there all in tears; looking back through the gulfs of the Past, upon such a Father now rapt away for ever. Sad all and soft in the moonlight of memory--the lost Loved One all in the right as we now see, we all in the wrong!--This, it appears, was the Son's fixed opinion. Sever, years hence here is how Friedrich concludes the _History_ of his Father, written with a loyal admiration throughout: "We have left under silence the domestic chagrins of this great Prince; readers must have some indulgence for the faults of the children, in consideration of the virtues of such a Father." All in tears he sits at present, meditating these sad things. In a little while the Old Dessauer, about to leave for Dessau, ventures in to the Crown Prince, Crown Prince no longer; "embraces his knees," offers weeping his condolence, his congratulation; hopes withal that his sons and he will be continued in their old posts, and that he the Old Dessauer "will have the same authority as in the late reign." Friedrich's eyes, at this last clause, flash out tearless, strangely Olympian. "In your posts I have no thought of making change; in your posts yes; and as to authority I know of none there can be but what resides in the king that is sovereign," which, as it were, struck the breath out of the Old Dessauer; and sent him home with a painful miscellany of feelings, astonishment not wanting among them. At an after hour the same night Friedrich went to Berlin, met by acclamation enough. He slept there not without tumult of dreams, one may fancy; and on awakening next morning the first sound he heard was that of the regiment Glasenap under his windows, swearing fealty to the new King. He sprang out of bed in a tempest of emotion; bustled distractedly to and fro, wildly weeping. Pöllnitz, who came into the anteroom, found him in this state, "half-dressed, with dishevelled hair, in tears, and as if beside himself." "These huzzahings only tell me what I have lost," said the new King. "He was in great suffering," suggested Pöllnitz; "he is now at rest." True, he suffered; but he was here with us; and now----! Carlyle has said of Dante's _Francesco_ "that it is a thing woven as of rainbows on a ground of eternal black." The phrase, well applied to the _Inferno_, is a perhaps half-conscious verdict on his own tenderness as exhibited in his life and in his works. CHAPTER IX CARLYLE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY One of the subtlest of Robert Browning's critics, in the opening sentence of his work, quotes a saying of Hegel's, "A great man condemns the world to the task of explaining him"; adding, "The condemnation is a double one, and it generally falls heaviest on the great man himself who has to submit to explanation." Cousin, the graceful Eclectic, is reported to have said to the great Philosopher, "will you oblige me by stating the results of your teaching in a few sentences?" and to have received the reply, "It is not easy, especially in French." [Footnote: _Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher,_ by Professor Henry Jones, of St. Andrews.] The retort applies, with severity, to those who attempt to systematise Carlyle; for he himself was, as we have seen, intolerant of system. His mathematical attainment and his antipathy to logical methods beyond the lines of square and circle, his love of concise fact and his often sweeping assertions are characteristic of the same contradictions in his nature as his almost tyrannical premises and his practically tender-hearted conclusions. A hard thinker, he was never a close reasoner; in all that relates to human affairs he relies on nobility of feeling rather than on continuity of thought. Claiming the full latitude of the prophet to warn, exhort, even to command, he declines either to preach or to accept the rubric of the partisan or of the priest. In praise of German literature, he remarks, "One of its chief qualities is that it has no particular theory at all on the front of it;" and of its leaders, "I can only speak of the revelations these men have made to me. As to their doctrines, there is nothing definite or precise to be said"; yet he asserts that Goethe, Richter, and the rest, took him "out of the blackness and darkness of death." This is nearly the feeling that his disciples of forty years ago entertained towards himself; but their discipleship has rarely lasted through life. They came to his writings, inspired by the youthful enthusiasm that carries with it a vein of credulity, intoxicated by their fervour as by new wine or mountain air, and found in them the key of the perennial riddle and the solution of the insoluble mystery. But in later years the curtain to many of them became the picture. When Carlyle was first recognised in London as a rising author, curiosity was rife as to his "opinions"; was he a Chartist at heart or an Absolutist, a Calvinist like Knox, a Deist like Hume, a Feudalist with Scott, or a Democrat with Burns--inquisitions mostly vain. He had come from the Scotch moors and his German studies, a strange element, into the midst of an almost foreign society, not so much to promulgate a new set of opinions as to infuse a new life into those already existing. He claimed to have a "mission," but it was less to controvert any form of creed than to denounce the insufficiency of shallow modes of belief. He raised the tone of literature by referring to higher standards than those currently accepted; he tried to elevate men's minds to the contemplation of something better than themselves, and impress upon them the vacuity of lip-services; he insisted that the matter of most consequence was the grip with which they held their convictions and their willingness to sacrifice the interests on which they could lay their hands, in loyalty to some nobler faith. He taught that beliefs by hearsay are not only barren but obstructive; that it is only When half-gods go, the gods arrive. But his manner of reading these important lessons admitted the retort that he himself was content rather to dwell on what is _not_ than to discover what _is_ true. Belief, he reiterates, is the cure for all the worst of human ills; but belief in what or in whom? In "the eternities and immensities," as an answer, requires definition. It means that we are not entitled to regard ourselves as the centres of the universe; that we are but atoms of space and time, with relations infinite beyond our personalities; that the first step to a real recognition of our duties is the sense of our inferiority to those above us, our realisation of the continuity of history and life, our faith and acquiescence in some universal law. This truth, often set forth By saint, by sage, by preacher, and by poet, no one has enforced with more eloquence than Carlyle; but though he founded a dynasty of ideas, they are comparatively few; like a group of strolling players, each with a well-filled wardrobe, and ready for many parts. The difficulty of defining Carlyle results not merely from his frequent golden nebulosity, but from his love of contradicting even himself. Dr. Johnson confessed to Boswell that when arguing in his dreams he was often worsted and took credit for the resignation with which he bore these defeats, forgetting that the victor and the vanquished were one and the same. Similarly his successor took liberties with himself which he would allow to no one else, and in doing so he has taken liberties with his reader. His praise and blame of the profession of letters, as the highest priesthood and the meanest trade; his early exaltation of "the writers of newspapers, pamphlets, books," as "the real effective working church of a modern country"; and his later expressed contempt for journalism as "mean and demoralising"--"we must destroy the faith in newspapers"; his alternate faith and unfaith in Individualism; the teaching of the _Characteristics_ and the _Signs of the Times_ that all healthy genius is unconscious, and the censure of Sir Walter Scott for troubling himself too little with mysteries; his commendation of "the strong warrior" for writing no books, and his taking sides with the mediæval monks against the kings--there is no reconciliation of such contradictories. They are the expression of diverse moods and emphatically of different stages of mental progress, the later, as a rule, more negative than the earlier. This change is most marked in the sphere of politics. At the close of his student days Carlyle was to all intents a Radical, and believed in Democracy; he saw hungry masses around him, and, justly attributing some of their suffering to misgovernment, vented his sympathetic zeal for the oppressed in denunciation of the oppressors. [Footnote: Passage quoted (Chap. II.) about the Glasgow Radical rising in 1819.] He began not only by sympathising with the people, but by believing in their capacity to manage best their own affairs: a belief that steadily waned as he grew older until he denied to them even the right to choose their rulers. As late, however, as 1830, he argued against Irving's conservatism in terms recalled in the _Reminiscences_. "He objected clearly to my Reform Bill notions, found Democracy a thing forbidden, leading even to outer darkness: I a thing inevitable and obliged to lead whithersoever it could." During the same period he clenched his theory by taking a definite side in the controversy of the age. "This," he writes to Macvey Napier, "this is the day when the lords are to reject the Reform Bill. The poor lords can only accelerate (by perhaps a century) their own otherwise inevitable enough abolition." The political part of _Sartor Resartus_, shadowing forth some scheme of well-organised socialism, yet anticipates, especially in the chapter on _Organic Filaments_, the writer's later strain of belief in dukes, earls, and marshals of men: but this work, religious, ethical, and idyllic, contains mere vague suggestions in the sphere of practical life. About this time Carlyle writes of liberty: "What art thou to the valiant and the brave when thou art thus to the weak and timid, dearer than life, stronger than death, higher than purest love?" and agrees with the verdict, "The slow poison of despotism is worse than the convulsive struggles of anarchy." But he soon passed from the mood represented by Emily Brontë to that of the famous apostrophe of Madame Roland. He proclaimed that liberty to do as we like is a fatal license, that the only true liberty is that of doing what is right, which he interprets living under the laws enacted by the wise. Mrs. Austin in 1832 wrote to Mrs. Carlyle, "I am that monster made up of all the Whigs hate--a Radical and an Absolutist." The expression, at the time, accurately defined Carlyle's own political position: but he shifted from it, till the Absolutist, in a spirit made of various elements, devoured the Radical. The leading counsel against the aristocracy changed his brief and became chief advocate on their side, declaring "we must recognise the hereditary principle if there is to be any fixity in things." In 1835, he says to Emerson:-- I believe literature to be as good as dead ... and nothing but hungry Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps three generations.... I suffer also terribly from the solitary existence I have all along had; it is becoming a kind of passion with me to feel myself among my brothers. And then How? Alas I care not a doit for Radicalism, nay, I feel it to be a wretched necessity unfit for me; Conservatism being not unfit only but false for me: yet these two are the grand categories under which all English spiritual activity, that so much as thinks remuneration possible, must range itself. And somewhat later-- People accuse me, not of being an incendiary Sansculotte, but of being a Tory, thank Heaven! Some one has written with a big brush, "He who is not a radical in his youth is a knave, he who is not a conservative in his age is a fool." The rough, if not rude, generalisation has been plausibly supported by the changes in the mental careers of Burke, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. But Carlyle was "a spirit of another sort," of more mixed yarn; and, as there is a vein of Conservatism in his early Radicalism, so there is, as also in the cases of Landor and even of Goethe, still a revolutionary streak in his later Conservatism. Consequently, in his instance, there is a plea in favour of the prepossession (especially strong in Scotland) which leads the political or religious party that a distinguished man has left still to persist in claiming him; while that which he has joined accepts him, if at all, with distrust. Scotch Liberals will not give up Carlyle, one of his biographers keenly asseverating that he was to the last "a democrat at heart"; while the representative organ of northern Conservatism on the same ground continues to assail him--"mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens." On all questions directly bearing on the physical welfare of the masses of the people, his speech and action remained consistent with his declaration that he had "never heard an argument for the corn laws which might not make angels weep." From first to last he was an advocate of Free Trade--though under the constant protest that the greatness of a nation depended in a very minor degree on the abundance of its possessions--and of free, unsectarian, and compulsory Education. while, in theology, though remote from either, he was more tolerant of the dogmatic narrowness of the Low Church of the lower, than of the Ritualism of the upper, classes. His unwavering interest in the poor and his belief that legislation should keep them in constant view, was in accord with the spirit of Bentham's standard: but Carlyle, rightly or wrongly, came to regard the bulk of men as children requiring not only help and guidance but control. On the question of "the Suffrage" he completely revolved. It appears, from the testimony of Mr. Froude, that the result of the Reform Bill of 1832 disappointed him in merely shifting power from the owners of land to the owners of shops, and leaving the handicraftsmen and his own peasant class no better off. Before a further extension became a point of practical politics he had arrived at the conviction that the ascertainment of truth and the election of the fittest did not lie with majorities. These sentences of 1835 represent a transition stage:-- Conservatism I cannot attempt to conserve, believing it to be a portentous embodied sham.... Whether the Tories stay out or in, it will be all for the advance of Radicalism, which means revolt, dissolution, and confusion and a darkness which no man can see through. No one had less faith in the paean chanted by Macaulay and others on the progress of the nation or of the race, a progress which, without faith in great men, was to him inevitably downward; no one protested with more emphasis against the levelling doctrines of the French Revolution. It has been observed that Carlyle's _Chartism_ was "his first practical step in politics"; it is more true to say that it first embodied, with more than his usual precision, the convictions he had for some time held of the dangers of our social system; with an indication of some of the means to ward them off, based on the realisation of the interdependence of all classes in the State. This book is remarkable as containing his last, very partial, concessions to the democratic creed, the last in which he is willing to regard a wide suffrage as a possible, though by no means the best, expedient. Subsequently, in _Past and Present_ and the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, he came to hold "that with every extension of the Franchise those whom the voters would elect would be steadily inferior and more unfit." Every stage in his political progress is marked by a growing distrust in the judgment of the multitude, a distrust set forth, with every variety of metaphor, in such sentences as the following:-- There is a divine message or eternal regulation of the Universe. How find it? All the world answers me, "Count heads, ask Universal Suffrage by the ballot-box and that will tell!" From Adam's time till now the Universe was wont to be of a somewhat abstruse nature, partially disclosing itself to the wise and noble-minded alone, whose number was not the majority. Of what use towards the general result of finding out what it is wise to do, can the fools be? ... If of ten men nine are recognisable as fools, which is a common calculation, how in the name of wonder will you ever get a ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the votes of these ten men? ... Only by reducing to zero nine of these votes can wisdom ever issue from your ten. The mass of men consulted at the hustings upon any high matter whatsoever, is as ugly an exhibition of human stupidity as this world sees.... If the question be asked and the answer given, I will generally consider in any case of importance, that the said answer is likely to be wrong, and that I have to go and do the reverse of the same ... for how should I follow a multitude to do evil? Cease to brag to me of America and its model institutions.... On this side of the Atlantic or on that, Democracy is for ever impossible! The Universe is a monarchy and a hierarchy, the noble in the high places, the ignoble in the low; this is in all times and in all places the Almighty Maker's law. Democracy, take it where you will, is found a regulated method of rebellion, it abrogates the old arrangement of things, and leaves zero and vacuity. It is the consummation of no-government and _laissez faire_. Alongside of this train of thought there runs a constant protest against the spirit of revolt. In _Sartor_ we find: "Whoso cannot obey cannot be free, still less bear rule; he that is the inferior of nothing can be the superior of nothing"; and in _Chartism_-- Men who rebel and urge the lower classes to rebel ought to have other than formulas to go upon, ... those to whom millions of suffering fellow-creatures are "masses," mere explosive masses for blowing down Bastiles with, for voting at hustings for us--such men are of the questionable species.... Obedience ... is the primary duty of man.... Of all "rights of men" this right of the ignorant to be guided by the wiser, gently or forcibly--is the indisputablest.... Cannot one discern, across all democratic turbulence, clattering of ballot-boxes, and infinite sorrowful jangle, that this is at bottom the wish and prayer of all human hearts everywhere, "Give me a leader"? The last sentence indicates the transition from the merely negative aspect of Carlyle's political philosophy to the positive, which is his HERO-WORSHIP, based on the excessive admiration for individual greatness,--an admiration common to almost all imaginative writers, whether in prose or verse; on his notions of order and fealty, and on a reverence for the past, which is also a common property of poets. The Old and Middle Ages, according to his view, had their chiefs, captains, kings, and waxed or waned with the increase or decrease of their Loyality. Democracy, the new force of our times, must in its turn be dominated by leaders. Raised to independence over the arbitrary will of a multitude, these are to be trusted and followed, if need be, to death. Your noblest men at the summit of affairs is the ideal world of poets.... Other aim in this earth we have none. That we all reverence "great men" is to me the living rock amid all rushings down whatsoever. All that democracy ever meant lies there, the attainment of a truer Aristocracy or Government of the Best. Make search for the Able man. How to get him is the question of questions. It is precisely the question to which Carlyle never gives, and hardly attempts, a reply; and his failure to answer it invalidates the larger half of his Politics. Plato has at least detailed a scheme for eliminating his philosopher guardians, though it somewhat pedantically suggests a series of Chinese examinations: his political, though probably unconscious disciple has only a few negative tests. The warrior or sage who is to rule is _not_ to be chosen by the majority, especially in our era, when they would choose the Orators who seduce and "traduce the State"; nor are we ever told that the election is to rest with either Under or Upper House: the practical conclusion is that when we find a man of great force of character, whether representing our own opinions or the reverse, we should take him on trust. This brings us to the central maxim of Carlyle's political philosophy, to which we must, even in our space, give some consideration, as its true meaning has been the theme of so much dispute. It is a misfortune of original thought that it is hardly ever put in practice by the original thinker. When his rank as a teacher is recognised, his words have already lost half their value by repetition. His manner is aped by those who find an easy path to notoriety in imitation; the belief he held near his heart is worn as a creed like a badge; the truth he promulgated is distorted in a room of mirrors, half of it is a truism, the other half a falsism. That which began as a denunciation of tea-table morality, is itself the tea-table morality of the next generation: an outcry against cant may become the quintessence of cant; a revolt from tyranny the basis of a new tyranny; the condemnation of sects the foundation of a new sect; the proclamation of peace a bone of contention. There is an ambiguity in most general maxims, and a seed of error which assumes preponderance over the truth when the interpreters of the maxim are men easily led by formulæ. Nowhere is this degeneracy more strikingly manifested than in the history of some of the maxims which Carlyle either first promulgated or enforced by his adoption. When he said, or quoted, "Silence is better than speech," he meant to inculcate patience and reserve. Always think before you speak: rather lose fluency than waste words: never speak for the sake of speaking. It is the best advice, but they who need it most are the last to take it; those who speak and write not because they have something to say, but because they wish to say or must say something, will continue to write and speak as long as they can spell or articulate. Thoughtful men are apt to misapply the advice, and betray their trust when they sit still and leave the "war of words to those who like it." When Carlyle condemned self-consciousness, a constant introspection and comparison of self with others, he theoretically struck at the root of the morbid moods of himself and other mental analysts; he had no intention to over-exalt mere muscularity or to deify athletic sports. It were easy to multiply instances of truths clearly conceived at first and parodied in their promulgation; but when we have the distinct authority of the discoverer himself for their correct interpretation, we can at once appeal to it. A yet graver, not uncommon, source of error arises when a great writer misapplies the maxims of his own philosophy, or states them in such a manner that they are sure to be misapplied. Carlyle has laid down the doctrine that MIGHT IS RIGHT at various times and in such various forms, with and without modification or caveat, that the real meaning can only be ascertained from his own application of it. He has made clear, what goes without saying, that by "might" he does not intend mere physical strength. Of conquest we may say that it never yet went by brute force; conquest of that kind does not endure. The strong man, what is he? The wise man. His muscles and bones are not stronger than ours; but his soul is stronger, clearer, nobler.... Late in man's history, yet clearly at length, it becomes manifest to the dullest that mind is stronger than matter, that not brute Force, but only Persuasion and Faith, is the king of this world.... Intellect has to govern this world and will do it. There are sentences which indicate that he means something more than even mental force; as in his Diary (Froude, iv. 422), "I shall have to tell Lecky, Right is the eternal symbol of Might"; and again in _Chartism_, "Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them centuries to try it, and they are found to be identical. The strong thing is the just thing. In kings we have either a divine right or a diabolic wrong." On the other hand, we read in _Past and Present_:-- Savage fighting Heptarchies: their lighting is an ascertainment who has the right to rule over them. And again-- Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might: _either_ of these, once ascertained, puts an end to battle. And elsewhere-- Rights men have none save to be governed justly.... Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere correctly articulated mights.... All goes by wager of battle in this world, and it is, well understood, the measure of all worth.... By right divine the strong and capable govern the weak and foolish.... Strength we may say is Justice itself. It is not left for us to balance those somewhat indefinite definitions. Carlyle has himself in his Histories illustrated and enforced his own interpretations of the summary views of his political treatises. There he has demonstrated that his doctrine, "Might is Right," is no mere unguarded expression of the truism that moral might is right. In his hands it implies that virtue is in all cases a property of strength, that strength is everywhere a property of virtue; that power of whatever sort having any considerable endurance, carries with it the seal and signal of its claim to respect, that whatever has established itself has, in the very act, established its right to be established. He is never careful enough to keep before his readers what he must himself have dimly perceived, that victory _by right_ belongs not to the force of will alone, apart from clear and just conceptions of worthy ends. Even in its crude form, the maxim errs not so much in what it openly asserts as in what it implicitly denies. Aristotle (the first among ancients to _question_ the institution of slavery, as Carlyle has been one of the last of moderns to defend it) more guardedly admits that strength is in itself _a_ good,--[Greek: kai estin aei to kratoun en uperochae agathoutinos],--but leaves it to be maintained that there are forms of good which do not show themselves in excess of strength. Several of Carlyle's conclusions and verdicts seem to show that he only acknowledges those types of excellence that have already manifested themselves as powers; and this doctrine (which, if adopted in earlier ages, would practically have left possession with physical strength) colours all his History and much of his Biography. Energy of any sort compels his homage. Himself a Titan, he shakes hands with all Titans, Gothic gods, Knox, Columbus, the fuliginous Mirabeau, burly Danton dying with "no weakness" on his lips. The fulness of his charity is for the errors of Mohammed, Cromwell, Burns, Napoleon I.,--whose mere belief in his own star he calls sincerity,--the atrocious Francia, the Norman kings, the Jacobins, Brandenburg despots; the fulness of his contempt for the conscientious indecision of Necker, the Girondists, the Moderates of our own Commonwealth. He condones all that ordinary judgments regard as the tyranny of conquest, and has for the conquered only a _væ victis._ In this spirit, he writes :-- M. Thierry celebrates with considerable pathos the fate of the Saxons; the fate of the Welsh, too, moves him; of the Celts generally, whom a fiercer race swept before them into the mountains, whither they were not worth following. What can we say, but that the cause which pleased the gods had in the end to please Cato also? When all is said, Carlyle's inconsistent optimism throws no more light than others have done on the apparent relapses of history, as the overthrow of Greek civilisation, the long night of the Dark Ages, the spread of the Russian power during the last century, or of continental Militarism in the present. In applying the tests of success or failure we must bear in mind that success is from its very nature conspicuous. We only know that brave men have failed when they have had a "sacred bard." The good that is lost is, _ipso facto_, forgotten. We can rarely tell of greatness unrecognised, for the very fact of our being able to tell of it would imply a former recognition. The might of evil walks in darkness: we remember the martyrs who, by their deaths, ultimately drove the Inquisition from England; not those whose courage quailed. "It was their fate," as a recent writer remarks, "that was the tragedy." Reading Carlyle's maxim between the lines of his chapter on the Reformation, and noting that the Inquisition triumphed in Spain, while in Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia Protestantism was stifled by stratagem or by force; that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was successful; and that the revocation of the Edict of Nantes killed the France of Henry IV., we see its limitations even in the long perspective of the past. Let us, however, grant that in the ultimate issue the Platonic creed, "Justice is stronger than injustice," holds good. [Footnote: _Vide_ Mill's _Liberty_, chap. ii. pp. 52-54] It is when Carlyle turns to politics and regards them as history accomplished instead of history in progress that his principle leads to the most serious error. No one has a more withering contempt for evil as meanness and imbecility; but he cannot see it in the strong hand. Of two views, equally correct, "evil is weakness," such evil as sloth, and "corruptio optimi pessima," such evil as tyranny--he only recognises the first. Despising the palpable anarchies of passion, he has no word of censure for the more settled form of anarchy which announced, "Order reigns at Warsaw." He refuses his sympathy to all unsuccessful efforts, and holds that if races are trodden under foot, they are [Greek: phusei doulo dunamenoi allou einai] they who have allowed themselves to be subjugated deserve their fate. The cry of "oppressed nationalities" was to him mere cant. His Providence is on the side of the big battalions, and forgives very violent means to an orderly end. To his credit he declined to acknowledge the right of Louis Napoleon to rule France; but he accepted the Czars, and ridiculed Mazzini till forced to admit, almost with chagrin, that he had, "after all," substantially succeeded. Treason never prospers, what's the reason? That when it prospers, none dare call it treason. Apprehending, on the whole more keenly than any of his contemporaries, the foundations of past greatness, his invectives and teaching lay athwart much that is best as well as much that is most hazardous in the new ideas of the age. Because mental strength, endurance, and industry do not appear prominently in the Negro race, he looks forward with satisfaction to the day when a band of white buccaneers shall undo Toussaint l'Ouverture's work of liberation in Hayti, advises the English to revoke the Emancipation Act in Jamaica, and counsels the Americans to lash their slaves--better, he admits, made serfs and not saleable by auction--not more than is necessary to get from them an amount of work satisfactory to the Anglo-Saxon mind. Similarly he derides all movements based on a recognition of the claims of weakness to consideration and aid. Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, Doing or suffering. The application of the maxim, "Might is Right," to a theory of government is obvious; the strongest government must be the best, _i.e._ that in which Power, in the last resort supreme, is concentrated in the hands of a single ruler; the weakest, that in which it is most widely diffused, is the worst. Carlyle in his Address to the Edinburgh students commends Machiavelli for insight in attributing the preservation of Rome to the institution of the Dictatorship. In his _Friedrich_ this view is developed in the lessons he directs the reader to draw from Prussian history. The following conveys his final comparative estimate of an absolute and a limited monarchy:-- This is the first triumph of the constitutional Principle which has since gone to such sublime heights among us--heights which we begin at last to suspect may be depths leading down, all men now ask whitherwards. A much-admired invention in its time, that of letting go the rudder or setting a wooden figure expensively to take care of it, and discovering that the ship would sail of itself so much the more easily. Of all things a nation needs first to be drilled, and a nation that has not been governed by so-called tyrants never came to much in the world. Among the currents of thought contending in our age, two are conspicuously opposed. The one says: Liberty is an end not a mere means in itself; apart from practical results the crown of life. Freedom of thought and its expression, and freedom of action, bounded only by the equal claim of our fellows, are desirable for their own sakes as constituting national vitality: and even when, as is sometimes the case, Liberty sets itself against improvements for a time, it ultimately accomplishes more than any reforms could accomplish without it. The fewer restraints that are imposed from without on human beings the better: the province of law is only to restrain men from violently or fraudulently invading the province of other men. This view is maintained and in great measure sustained by J.S. Mill in his _Liberty_, the _Areopagitica_ of the nineteenth century, and more elaborately if not more philosophically set forth in the comprehensive treatise of Wilhelm von Humboldt on _The Sphere and Duties of Government_. These writers are followed with various reserves by Grote, Buckle, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and by Mr. Lecky. Mill writes:-- The idea of rational Democracy is not that the people themselves govern; but that they have security for good government. This security they can only have by retaining in their own hands the ultimate control. The people ought to be masters employing servants more skilful than themselves. [Footnote: It should be noted that Mill lays as great stress on Individualism as Carlyle does, and a more practical stress. He has the same belief in the essential mediocrity of the masses of men whose "think ing is done for them ... through the newspapers," and the same scorn for "the present low state of society." He writes, "The initiation of all wise and noble things comes and must come from individuals: generally at first from some one individual"; but adds, "I am not countenancing the sort of 'hero-worship' which applauds the strong man of genius for forcibly seizing on the government of the world.... All he can claim is freedom to point out the way."] To this Carlyle, with at least the general assent of Mr. Froude, Mr. Ruskin, and Sir James Stephen, substantially replies:-- In freedom for itself there is nothing to raise a man above a fly; the value of a human life is that of its work done; the prime province of law is to get from its subjects the most of the best work. The first duty of a people is to find--which means to accept--their chief; their second and last to obey him. We see to what men have been brought by "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," by the dreams of idealogues, and the purchase of votes. This, the main drift of Carlyle's political teaching, rests on his absolute belief in strength (which always grows by concentration), on his unqualified admiration of order, and on his utter disbelief in what his adverse friend Mazzini was wont, with over-confidence, to appeal to as "collective wisdom." Theoretically there is much to be said for this view: but, in practice, it involves another idealism as aerial as that of any "idealogue" on the side of Liberty. It points to the establishment of an Absolutism which must continue to exist, whether wisdom survives in the absolute rulers or ceases to survive. [Greek: Kratein d' esti kai mae dikios.] The rule of Caesars, Napoleons, Czars may have been beneficent in times of revolution; but their right to rule is apt to pass before their power, and when the latter descends by inheritance, as from M. Aurelius to Commodus, it commonly degenerates. It is well to learn, from a safe distance, the amount of good that may be associated with despotism: its worst evil is lawlessness, it not only suffocates freedom and induces inertia, but it renders wholly uncertain the life of those under its control. Most men would rather endure the "slings and arrows" of an irresponsible press, the bustle and jargon of many elections, the delay of many reforms, the narrowness of many streets, than have lived from 1814 to 1840, with the noose around all necks, in Paraguay, or even precariously prospered under the paternal shield of the great Fritz's extraordinary father, Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. Carlyle's doctrine of the ultimate identity of "might and right" never leads, with him, to its worst consequence, a fatalistic or indolent repose; the withdrawal from the world's affairs of the soul "holding no form of creed but contemplating all." That he was neither a consistent optimist nor a consistent pessimist is apparent from his faith in man's partial ability to mould his fate. Not "belief, belief," but "action, action," is his working motto. On the title-page of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ he quotes from Rushworth on a colloquy of Sir David Ramsay and Lord Reay in 1638: "Then said his Lordship, 'Well, God mend all!'--'Nay, by God, Donald; we must help Him to mend it,' said the other." "I am not a Tory," he exclaimed, after the clamour on the publication of _Chartism_, "no, but one of the deepest though perhaps the quietest of Radicals." With the Toryism which merely says "stand to your guns" and, for the rest, "let well alone," he had no sympathy. There was nothing selfish in his theories. He felt for and was willing to fight for mankind, though he could not trust them; even his "king" he defines to be a minister or servant of the State. "The love of power," he says, "if thou understand what to the manful heart power signifies, is a very noble and indispensable love"; that is, the power to raise men above the "Pig Philosophy," the worship of clothes, the acquiescence in wrong. "The world is not here for me, but I for it." "Thou shalt is written upon life in characters as terrible as thou shalt not"; are protests against the mere negative virtues which religionists are wont unduly to exalt. Carlyle's so-called Mysticism is a part of his German poetry; in the sphere of common life and politics he made use of plain prose, and often proved himself as shrewd as any of his northern race. An excessively "good hater," his pet antipathies are generally bad things. In the abstract they are always so; but about the abstract there is no dispute. Every one dislikes or professes to dislike shams, hypocrisies, phantoms,--by whatever tiresomely reiterated epithet he may be pleased to address things that are not what they pretend to be. Diogenes's toil with the lantern alone distinguished the cynic Greek, in admiration of an honest man. Similarly the genuine zeal of his successor appears in painstaking search; his discrimination in the detection, his eloquence in his handling of humbugs. Occasional blunders in the choice of objects of contempt and of worship--between which extremes he seldom halts,--demonstrate his fallibility, but outside the sphere of literary and purely personal criticism he seldom attacks any one, or anything, without a show of reason. To all gospels there are two sides; and a great teacher who, by reason of the very fire that makes him great, disdains to halt and hesitate and consider the _juste milieu,_ seldom guards himself against misinterpretation or excess. Mazzini writes, "He weaves and unweaves his web like Penelope, preaches by turns life and nothingness, and wearies out the patience of his readers by continually carrying them from heaven to hell." Carlyle, like Ruskin, keeps himself right not by caveats but by contradictions of himself, and sometimes in a way least to be expected. Much of his writing is a blast of war, or a protest against the philanthropy that sets charity before justice. Yet in a letter to the London Peace Congress of 1851, dated 18th July, we find:-- I altogether approve of your object. Clearly the less war and cutting of throats we have among us, it will be the better for us all. As men no longer wear swords in the streets, so neither by and by will nations.... How many meetings would one expedition to Russia cover the cost of? He denounced the Americans, in apparent ignorance of their "Constitution," for having no Government; and yet admitted that what he called their anarchy had done perhaps more than anything else could have done to subdue the wilderness. He spoke with scorn of the "rights of women," their demand for the suffrage, and the _cohue_ of female authors, expressing himself in terms of ridiculous disparagement of writers so eminent as George Sand and George Eliot; but he strenuously advocated the claim of women to a recognised medical education. He reviled "Model Prisons" as pampering institutes of "a universal sluggard and scoundrel amalgamation society," and yet seldom passed on the streets one of the "Devil's elect" without giving him a penny. He set himself against every law or custom that tended to make harder the hard life of the poor: there was no more consistent advocate of the abolition of the "Game Laws." Emerson says of the mediaeval architects, "they builded better than they knew." Carlyle felt more softly than he said, and could not have been trusted to execute one of his own Rhadamanthine decrees. [Footnote: _Vide_ a remarkable instance of this in the best short _Life of Carlyle_, that by Dr. Richard Garnett, p. 147.] Scratch the skin of the Tartar and you find beneath the despised humanitarian. Everything that he has written on "The Condition of England Question" has a practical bearing, and many of his suggestions have found a place on our code, vindicating the assertion of the _Times_ of the day after his death, that "the novelties and paradoxes of 1846 are to a large extent nothing but the good sense of 1881." Such are:--his insistence on affording every facility for merit to rise from the ranks, embodied in measures against promotion by Purchase; his advocacy of State-aided Emigration, of administrative and civil service Reform,--the abolition of "the circumlocution office" in Downing Street,--of the institution of a Minister of Education; his dwelling on the duties as well as the rights of landowners,--the theme of so many Land Acts; his enlarging on the superintendence of labour,--made practical in Factory and Limited Hours Bills--on care of the really destitute, on the better housing of the poor, on the regulation of weights and measures; his general contention for fixing more exactly the province of the legislative and the executive bodies. Carlyle's view that we should find a way to public life for men of eminence who will not cringe to mobs, has made a step towards realisation in further enfranchisement of Universities. Other of his proposals, as the employment of our army and navy in time of peace, and the forcing of able-bodied paupers into "industrial regiments," have become matter of debate which may pave the way to legislation. One of his desiderata, a practical veto on "puffing," it has not yet been found feasible, by the passing of an almost prohibitive duty on advertisements, to realise. Besides these specific recommendations, three ideas are dominant in Carlyle's political treatises. _First_--a vehement protest against the doctrine of _Laissez faire_; which, he says, "on the part of the governing classes will, we repeat again and again, have to cease; pacific mutual divisions of the spoil and a would-let-well-alone will no longer suffice":--a doctrine to which he is disposed to trace the Trades Union wars, of which he failed to see the issue. He is so strongly in favour of _Free-trade_ between nations that, by an amusing paradox, he is prepared to make it _compulsory_. "All men," he writes in _Past and Present_, "trade with all men when mutually convenient, and are even bound to do it. Our friends of China, who refused to trade, had we not to argue with, them, in cannon-shot at last?" But in Free-trade between class and class, man and man, within the bounds of the same kingdom, he has no trust: he will not leave "supply and demand" to adjust their relations. The result of doing so is, he holds, the scramble between Capital for larger interest and Labour for higher wage, in which the rich if unchecked will grind the poor to starvation, or drive them to revolt. _Second_.--As a corollary to the abolition of _Laissez faire_, he advocates the _Organisation of Labour_, "the problem of the whole future to all who will pretend to govern men." The phrase from its vagueness has naturally provoked much discussion. Carlyle's bigoted dislike of Political Economists withheld him from studying their works; and he seems ignorant of the advances that have been made by the "dismal science," or of what it has proved and disproved. Consequently, while brought in evidence by most of our modern Social idealists, Comtists and Communists alike, all they can say is that he has given to their protest against the existing state of the commercial world a more eloquent expression than their own. He has no compact scheme,--as that of St. Simon or Fourier, or Owen--few such definite proposals as those of Karl Marx, Bellamy, Hertzka or Gronlund, or even William Morris. He seems to share with Mill the view that "the restraints of communism are weak in comparison with those of capitalists," and with Morris to look far forward to some golden age; he has given emphatic support to a copartnership of employers and employed, in which the profits of labour shall be apportioned by some rule of equity, and insisted on the duty of the State to employ those who are out of work in public undertakings. Enlist, stand drill, and become from banditti soldiers of industry. I will lead you to the Irish bogs ... English foxcovers ... New Forest, Salisbury Plains, and Scotch hill-sides which as yet feed only sheep ... thousands of square miles ... destined yet to grow green crops and fresh butter and milk and beef without limit:-- an estimate with the usual exaggeration. But Carlyle's later work generally advances on his earlier, in its higher appreciation of Industrialism. He looks forward to the boon of "one big railway right across America," a prophecy since three times fulfilled; and admits that "the new omnipotence of the steam engine is hewing aside quite other mountains than the physical," _i.e._ bridging the gulf between races and binding men to men. He had found, since writing _Sartor_, that dear cotton and slow trains do not help one nearer to God, freedom, and immortality. Carlyle's _third_ practical point is his advocacy of _Emigration,_ or rather his insistence on it as a sufficient remedy for Over-population. He writes of "Malthusianism" with his constant contempt of convictions other than his own:-- A full formed man is worth more than a horse.... One man in a year, as I have understood it, if you lend him earth will feed himself and nine others(?).... Too crowded indeed!.... What portion of this globe have ye tilled and delved till it will grow no more? How thick stands your population in the Pampas and Savannahs--in the Curragh of Kildare? Let there be an _Emigration Service,_ ... so that every honest willing workman who found England too strait, and the organisation of labour incomplete, might find a bridge to carry him to western lands.... Our little isle has grown too narrow for us, but the world is wide enough yet for another six thousand years.... If this small western rim of Europe is over-peopled, does not everywhere else a whole vacant earth, as it were, call to us "Come and till me, come and reap me"? On this follows an eloquent passage about our friendly Colonies, "overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by many-sounding seas." Carlyle would apparently force emigration, and coerce the Australians, Americans, and Chinese, to receive our ship-loads of living merchandise; but the problem of population exceeds his solution of it. He everywhere inclines to rely on coercion till it is over-mastered by resistance, and to overstretch jurisdiction till it snaps. In Germany, where the latest representative of the Hohenzollerns is ostentatiously laying claim to "right divine," Carlyle's appraisal of Autocracy may have given it countenance. In England, where the opposite tide runs full, it is harmless: but, by a curious irony, our author's leaning to an organised control over social and private as well as public life, his exaltation of duties above rights, may serve as an incentive to the very force he seemed most to dread. Events are every day demonstrating the fallacy of his view of Democracy as an embodiment of _laissez faire._ Kant with deeper penetration indicated its tendency to become despotic. Good government, according to Aristotle, is that of one, of few, or of many, for the sake of all. A Democracy where the poor rule for the poor alone, maybe a deadly engine of oppression; it may trample without appeal on the rights of minorities, and, in the name of the common good, establish and enforce an almost unconditioned tyranny. Carlyle's blindness to this superlative danger--a danger to which Mill, in many respects his unrecognised coadjutor, became alive--emphasises the limits of his political foresight. He has consecrated Fraternity with an eloquence unapproached by his peers, and with equal force put to scorn the superstition of Equality; but he has aimed at Liberty destructive shafts, some of which may find a mark the archer little meant. [Footnote: _Vide passim_ the chapter in _Liberty_ entitled "Limits to the Authority of Society over the Individual," where Mill denounces the idea of "the majority of operatives in many branches of industry ... that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good."] CHAPTER X CARLYLE'S RELIGION AND ETHICS--RELATION TO PREDECESSORS--INFLUENCE The same advance or retrogression that appears in Carlyle's Politics is traceable in his Religion; though it is impossible to record the stages of the change with even an equal approach to precision. Religion, in the widest sense--faith in some supreme Power above us yet acting for us--was the great factor of his inner life. But when we further question his Creed, he is either bewilderingly inconsistent or designedly vague. The answer he gives is that of Schiller: "Welche der Religionen? Keine von allen. Warum? Aus Religion." In 1870 he writes: "I begin to think religion again possible for whoever will piously struggle upwards and sacredly refuse to tell lies: which indeed will mostly mean refusal to speak at all on that topic." This and other implied protests against intrusive inquisition are valid in the case of those who keep their own secrets: it is impertinence to peer and "interview" among the sanctuaries of a poet or politician or historian who does not himself open their doors. But Carlyle has done this in all his books. A reticent writer may veil his convictions on every subject save that on which he writes. An avowed preacher or prophet cannot escape interrogation as to his text. With all the evidence before us--his collected works, his friendly confidences, his journals, his fragmentary papers, as the interesting series of jottings entitled "Spiritual Optics," and the partial accounts to Emerson and others of the design of the "Exodus from Hounds-ditch"--it remains impossible to formulate Carlyle's Theology. We know that he abandoned the ministry, for which he was destined, because, at an early date, he found himself at irreconcilable variance, not on matters of detail but on essentials, with the standards of Scotch Presbyterianism. We know that he never repented or regretted his resolve; that he went, as continuously as possible for a mind so liable to fits and starts, further and further from the faith of his fathers; but that he remained to the last so much affected by it, and by the ineffaceable impress of early associations, that he has been plausibly called "a Calvinist without dogma," "a Calvinist without Christianity," "a Puritan who had lost his creed." We know that he revered the character of Christ, and theoretically accepted the ideal of self-sacrifice: the injunction to return good for evil he never professed to accept; and vicarious sacrifice was contrary to his whole philosophy, which taught that every man must "dree his weird." We know that he not only believed in God as revealed in the larger Bible, the whole history of the human race, but that he threatened, almost with hell-fire, all who dared on this point to give refuge to a doubt. Finally, he believed both in fate and in free-will, in good and evil as powers at internecine war, and in the greater strength and triumph of good at some very far distant date. If we desire to know more of Carlyle's creed we must proceed by "the method of exclusions," and note, in the first place, what he did _not_ believe. This process is simplified by the fact that he assailed all convictions other than his own. Half his teaching is a protest, in variously eloquent phrase, against all forms of _Materialism_ and _Hedonism,_ which he brands as "worships of Moloch and Astarte," forgetting that progress in physical welfare may lead not only to material, but to mental, if not spiritual, gain. Similarly he denounces _Atheism,_ never more vehemently than in his Journals of 1868-1869:-- Had no God made this world it were an insupportable place. Laws without a lawgiver, matter without spirit is a gospel of dirt. All that is good, generous, wise, right ... who or what could by any possibility have given it to me, but One who first had it to give! This is not logic, it is axiom.... Poor "Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic specialities."... Canst _thou_ by searching find out God? I am not surprised thou canst not, vain fool. If they do abolish God from their poor bewildered hearts, there will be seen such a world as few are dreaming of. Carlyle calls evidence from all quarters, appealing to Napoleon's question, "Who made all that?" and to Friedrich's belief that intellect "could not have been put into him by an entity that had none of its own," in support of what he calls the Eternal Fact of Facts, to which he clings as to the Rock of Ages, the sole foundation of hope and of morality to one having at root little confidence in his fellow-men. If people are only driven upon virtuous conduct ... by association of ideas, and there is no "Infinite Nature of Duty," the world, I should say, had better count its spoons to begin with, and look out for hurricanes and earthquakes to end with. Carlyle hazardously confessed that as regards the foundations of his faith and morals, with Napoleon and Friedrich II. on his side, he had against him the advancing tide of modern _Science._ He did not attempt to disprove its facts, or, as Emerson, to sublimate them into a new idealism; he scoffed at and made light of them, _e.g._-- Geology has got rid of Moses, which surely was no very sublime achievement either. I often think ... it is pretty much all that science in this age has done. ... Protoplasm (unpleasant doctrine that we are all, soul and body, made of a kind of blubber, found in nettles among other organisms) appears to be delightful to many.... Yesterday there came a pamphlet published at Lewes, a hallelujah on the advent of Atheism.... The real joy of Julian (the author) was what surprised me, like the shout of a hyaena on finding that the whole universe was actually carrion. In about seven minutes my great Julian was torn in two and lying in the place fit for him.... Descended from Gorillas! Then where is the place for a Creator? Man is only a little higher than the tadpoles, says our new Evangelist.... Nobody need argue with these people. Logic never will decide the matter, or will seem to decide it their way. He who traces nothing of God in his own soul, will never find God in the world of matter--mere circlings of force there, of iron regulation, of universal death and merciless indifference.... Matter itself is either Nothing or else a product due to man's _mind_. ... The fast-increasing flood of Atheism on me takes no hold--does not even wet the soles of my feet. [Footnote: Cf. Othello, "Not a jot, not a jot." Carlyle writes on this question with the agitation of one himself not quite at ease, with none of the calmness of a faith perfectly secure.] "Carlyle," says one of his intimates, "speaks as if Darwin wished to rob or to insult him." _Scepticism_ proper fares as hardly in his hands as definite denial. It is, he declares, "a fatal condition," and, almost in the spirit of the inquisitors, he attributes to it moral vice as well as intellectual weakness, calling it an "atrophy, a disease of the whole soul," "a state of mental paralysis," etc. His fallacious habit of appeal to consequences, which in others he would have scouted as a commonplace of the pulpit, is conspicuous in his remark on Hume's view of life as "a most melancholy theory," according to which, in the words of Jean Paul, "heaven becomes a gas, God a force, and the second world a grave." He fails to see that all such appeals are beside the question; and deserts the ground of his answer to John Sterling's expostulation, "that is downright Pantheism": "What if it were Pot-theism if it is _true_?" It is the same inconsistency which, in practice, led his sympathy for suffering to override his Stoic theories; but it vitiated his reasoning, and made it impossible for him to appreciate the calm, yet legitimately emotional, religiosity of Mill. Carlyle has vetoed all forms of so-called _Orthodoxy_--whether Catholic or Protestant, of Churches High or Low; he abhorred Puseyism, Jesuitry, spoke of the "Free Kirk and other rubbish," and recorded his definite disbelief, in any ordinary sense, in Revelation and in Miracles. "It is as certain as Mathematics that no such thing has ever been on earth." History is a perpetual revelation of God's will and justice, and the stars in their courses are a perpetual miracle, is his refrain. _This is not what Orthodoxy means_, and no one was more intolerant than Carlyle of all shifts and devices to slur the difference between "Yes" and "No." But having decided that his own "Exodus from Houndsditch" might only open the way to the wilderness, he would allow no one else to take in hand his uncompleted task; and disliked Strauss and Renan even more than he disliked Colenso. "He spoke to me once," says Mr. Froude, "with loathing of the _Vie de Jésus_." I asked if a true life could be written. He said, "Yes, certainly, if it were right to do so; but it is not." Still more strangely he writes to Emerson:-- You are the only man of the Unitarian persuasion whom I could unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen were all a kind of half-way-house characters, who I thought should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in unbelief, in faint possible _Theism_; which I like considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel, deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate; to be killed among the bats as a bird, among the birds as a bat. What then is left for Carlyle's Creed? Logically little, emotionally much. If it must be defined, it was that of a Theist with a difference. A spirit of flame from the empyrean, he found no food in the cold _Deism_ of the eighteenth century, and brought down the marble image from its pedestal, as by the music of the "Winter's Tale," to live among men and inspire them. He inherited and _coûte que coûte_ determined to persist in the belief that there was a personal God--"a Maker, voiceless, formless, within our own soul." To Emerson he writes in 1836, "My belief in a special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable"; and later, "Some strange belief in a special Providence was always in me at intervals." Thus, while asserting that "all manner of pulpits are as good as broken and abolished," he clings to the old Ecclefechan days. "To the last," says Mr. Froude, "he believed as strongly as ever Hebrew prophet did in spiritual religion;" but if we ask the nature of the God on whom all relies, he cannot answer even with the Apostles' Creed. Is He One or Three? "Wer darf ihn nennen." Carlyle's God is not a mere "tendency that makes for righteousness"; He is a guardian and a guide, to be addressed in the words of Pope's _Universal Prayer_, which he adopted as his own. A personal God does not mean a great Figure Head of the Universe,--Heine's fancy of a venerable old man, before he became "a knight" of the Holy Ghost,--it means a Supreme Power, Love, or Justice having relations to the individual man: in this sense Carlyle believed in Him, though more as Justice, exacting "the terriblest penalties," than as Love, preaching from the Mount of Olives. He never entered into controversies about the efficacy of prayer; but, far from deriding, he recommended it as "a turning of one's soul to the Highest." In 1869 he writes:-- I occasionally feel able to wish, with my whole softened heart--it is my only form of prayer--"Great Father, oh, if Thou canst, have pity on her and on me and on all such!" In this at least there is no harm. And about the same date to Erskine:-- "Our Father;" in my sleepless tossings, these words, that brief and grand prayer, came strangely into my mind with an altogether new emphasis; as if written and shining for me in mild pure splendour on the black bosom of the night there; when I as it were read them word by word, with a sudden check to my imperfect wanderings, with a sudden softness of composure which was much unexpected. Not for perhaps thirty or forty years had I once formally repeated that prayer: nay, I never felt before how intensely the voice of man's soul it is, the inmost inspiration of all that is high and pious in poor human nature, right worthy to be recommended with an "After this manner pray ye." Carlyle holds that if we do our duty--the best work we can--and faithfully obey His laws, living soberly and justly, God will do the best for us in this life. As regards the next we have seen that he ended with Goethe's hope. At an earlier date he spoke more confidently. On his father's death (_Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 65) he wrote:-- Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told: yet under time does there not lie eternity? ... Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognise one another. ... The possibility, nay (in some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer to me. On the death of Mrs. Welsh he wrote to his wife: "We shall yet go to her. God is great. God is good": and earlier, in 1835-1836, to Emerson on the loss of his brother:-- "What a thin film it is that divides the living and the dead. Your brother is in very deed and truth with God, where both you and I are.... Perhaps we shall all meet YONDER, and the tears be wiped from all eyes. One thing is no perhaps: surely we shall all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of us. If it be not His will, then is it not better so?" After his wife's death, naturally, the question of Immortality came uppermost in his mind; but his conclusions are, like those of Burns, never dogmatic:-- The truth about the matter is absolutely hidden from us. "In my Father's house are many mansions." Yes, if you are God you may have a right to say so; if you are a man what do you know more than I, or any of us? And later-- What if Omnipotence should actually have said, "Yes, poor mortals, such of you as have gone so far shall be permitted to go farther"? To Emerson in 1867 he writes:-- I am as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily serious, silent, and sad old man, gazing into the final chasm of things in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and Eternity" (dialogue mute on both sides), not caring to discourse with poor articulate speaking mortals, on their sorts of topics--disgusted with the world and its roaring nonsense, which I have no further thought of lifting a finger to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my door against. There can be no question of the sincerity of Carlyle's conviction that he had to make war on credulity and to assail the pretences of a _formal Belief_ (which he regards as even worse than Atheism) in order to grapple with real Unbelief. After all explanations of Newton or Laplace, the Universe is, to him, a mystery, and we ourselves the miracle of miracles; sight and knowledge leave us no "less forlorn," and beneath all the soundings of science there is a deeper deep. It is this frame of mind that qualified him to be the exponent of the religious epochs in history. "By this alone," wrote Dr. Chalmers, "he has done so much to vindicate and bring to light the Augustan age of Christianity in England," adding that it is the secret also of the great writer's appreciation of the higher Teutonic literature. His sombre rather than consolatory sense of "God in History," his belief in the mission of righteousness to constrain unrighteousness, and his Stoic view that good and evil are absolute opposites, are his links with the Puritans, whom he habitually exalts in variations of the following strain:-- The age of the Puritans has gone from us, its earnest purpose awakens now no reverence in our frivolous hearts. Not the body of heroic Puritanism alone which was bound to die, but the soul of it also, which was and should have been, and yet shall be immortal, has, for the present, passed away. Yet Goethe, the only man of recent times whom he regarded with a feeling akin to worship, was in all essentials the reverse of a Puritan. To Carlyle's, as to most substantially emotional works, may be applied the phrase made use of in reference to the greatest of all the series of ancient books-- Hic liber est in quo quisquis sua dogmata quaerit, Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua. From passages like those above quoted--his complaints of the falling off of old Scotch faith; his references to the kingdom of a God who has written "in plain letters on the human conscience a Law that all may read"; his insistence that the great soul of the world is just; his belief in religion as a rule of conduct, and his sympathy with the divine depths of sorrow--from all these many of his Scotch disciples persist in maintaining that their master was to the end essentially a Christian. The question between them and other critics who assert that "he had renounced Christianity" is to some extent, not wholly, a matter of nomenclature; it is hard exactly to decide it in the case of a man who so constantly found again in feeling what he had abandoned in thought. Carlyle's Religion was to the last an inconsistent mixture, not an amalgam, of his mother's and of Goethe's. The Puritan in him never dies; he attempts in vain to tear off the husk that cannot be separated from its kernel. He believes in no historical Resurrection, Ascension, or Atonement, yet hungers and thirsts for a supramundane source of Law, and holds fast by a faith in the Nemesis of Greek, Goth, and Jew. He abjures half-way houses; but is withheld by pathetic memories of the church spires and village graveyards of his youth from following his doubts to their conclusion; yet he gives way to his negation in his reference to "old Jew lights now burnt out," and in the half-despair of his expression to Froude about the Deity Himself, "He does nothing." Professor Masson says that "Carlyle had abandoned the Metaphysic of Christianity while retaining much of its Ethic." To reverse this dictum would be an overstrain on the other side: but the _Metaphysic_ of Calvinism is precisely what he retained; the alleged _Facts_ of Revelation he discarded; of the _Ethic_ of the Gospels he accepted perhaps the lesser half, and he distinctly ceased to regard the teaching of Christ as final. [Footnote: A passage in Mrs. Sutherland Orr's _Life and Letters of Robert Browning_, p. 173, is decisive on this point, and perhaps too emphatic for general quotation.] His doctrine of Renunciation (suggested by the Three Reverences in _Wilhelm Meister's Travels_) is Carlyle's transmutation, if not transfiguration, of Puritanism; but it took neither in him nor in Goethe any very consistent form, save that it meant Temperance, keeping the body well under the control of the head, the will strong, and striving, through all the lures of sense, to attain to some ideal life. Both write of Christianity as "a thing of beauty," a perennial power, a spreading tree, a fountain of youth; but Goethe was too much of a Greek--though, as has been said, "a very German Greek"--to be, in any proper sense of the word, a Christian; Carlyle too much of a Goth. His Mythology is Norse; his Ethics, despite his prejudice against the race, are largely Jewish. He proclaimed his code with the thunders of Sinai, not in the reconciling voice of the Beatitudes. He gives or forces on us world-old truths splendidly set, with a leaning to strength and endurance rather than to advancing thought. He did not, says a fine critic of morals, recognise that "morality also has passed through the straits." He did not really believe in Content, which has been called the Catholic, nor in Progress, more questionably styled the Protestant virtue. His often excellent practical rule to "do the duty nearest to hand" may be used to gag the intellect in its search after the goal; so that even his Everlasting Yea, as a predetermined affirmation, may ultimately result in a deeper negation. [Footnote: _Vide_ Professor Jones's _Browning as a Philosophical and Religious, Teacher_, pp. 66-90.] "Duty," to him as to Wordsworth, "stern daughter of the voice of God," has two aspects, on each of which he dwells with a persistent iteration. The _first_ is _Surrender_ to something higher and wider than ourselves. That he has nowhere laid the line between this abnegation and the self-assertion which in his heroes he commends, partly means that correct theories of our complex life are impossible; but Matthew Arnold's criticism, that his Ethics "are made paradoxical by his attack on Happiness, which he should rather have referred to as the result of Labour and of Truth," can only be rebutted by the assertion that the pursuit of pleasure as an end defeats itself. The _second_ aspect of his "Duty" is _Work_. His master Goethe is to him as Apollo to Hercules, as Shakespeare to Luther; the one entire as the chrysolite, the other like the Schreckhorn rent and riven; the words of the former are oracles, of the latter battles; the one contemplates and beautifies truth, the other wrestles and fights for it. Carlyle has a limited love of abstract truth; of action his love is unlimited. His lyre is not that of Orpheus, but that of Amphion which built the walls of Thebes. _Laborare est orare._ He alone is honourable who does his day's work by sword or plough or pen. Strength is the crown of toil. Action converts the ring of necessity that girds us into a ring of duty, frees us from dreams, and makes us men. The midnight phantoms feel the spell, The shadows sweep away. There are few grander passages in literature than some of those litanies of labour. They have the roll of music that makes armies march, and if they have been made so familiar as to cease to seem new, it is largely owing to the power of the writer which has compelled them to become common property. Carlyle's practical Ethics, though too little indulgent to the light and play of life, in which he admitted no [Greek: adiaphora] and only the relaxation of a rare genial laugh, are more satisfactory than his conception of their sanction, which is grim. His "Duty" is a categorical imperative, imposed from without by a taskmaster who has "written in flame across the sky, 'Obey, unprofitable servant.'" He saw the infinite above and around, but not _in_ the finite. He insisted on the community of the race, and struck with a bolt any one who said, "Am I my brother's keeper?" All things, the minutest that man does, influence all men, the very look of his face blesses or curses.... It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe. But he left a great gulf fixed between man and God, and so failed to attain to the Optimism after which he often strove. He held, with Browning, that "God's in His heaven," but not that "All's right with the world." His view was the Zoroastrian _*athanatos machae*_, "in God's world presided over by the prince of the powers of the air," a "divine infernal universe." The Calvinism of his mother, who said "The world is a lie, but God is truth," landed him in an _impasse_; he could not answer the obvious retort,--Did then God make and love a lie, or make it hating it? There must have been some other power _to eteron_, or, as Mill in his Apologia for _Theism_ puts it, a limit to the assumed Omnipotence. Carlyle, accepting neither alternative, inconsequently halts between them; and his prevailing view of mankind adds to his dilemma. [Footnote: Some one remarked to Friedrich II. that the philanthropist Sulzer said, "Men are by nature good." "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer," ejaculated Fritz, as quoted approvingly by Carlyle, "er Remit nicht diese verdarnmte Basse."] He imposes an "infinite duty on a finite being," as Calvin imposes an infinite punishment for a finite fault. He does not see that mankind sets its hardest tasks to itself; or that, as Emerson declares, "the assertion of our weakness and deficiency is the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim." Hence, according to Mazzini, "He stands between the individual and the infinite without hope or guide, and crushes the human being by comparing him with God. From, his lips, so daring, we seem to hear every instant the cry of the Breton mariner, 'My God, protect me; my bark is so small and Thy ocean so vast.'" Similarly, the critic of Browning above referred to concludes of the great prose writer, whom he has called the poet's twin: "He has let loose confusion upon us. He has brought us within sight of the future: he has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there and was denied the view from Pisgah." Carlyle's Theism is defective because it is not sufficiently Pantheistic; but, in his view of the succession of events in the "roaring loom of time," of the diorama of majesty girt by mystery, he has found a cosmic Pantheism and given expression to it in a passage which is the culmination of the English prose eloquence, as surely as Wordsworth's great Ode is the high-tide [A phrase applied by Emerson to the Ode.] mark of the English verse, of this century:-- Are we not sprite shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us as round the veriest spectre is Eternity, and to Eternity minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of beatified Souls? And again do we not squeak and gibber and glide, bodeful and feeble and fearful, and revel in our mad dance of the Dead,--till the scent of the morning air summons us to our still home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon; does the steel host that yelled in fierce battle shouts at Issus and Arbela remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed goblins must? Napoleon, too, with his Moscow retreats and Austerlitz campaigns, was it all other than the veriest spectre hunt; which has now with its howling tumult that made night hideous flitted away? Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the earth openly at noontide; some half hundred have vanished from it, some half hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once. O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future ghost within him, but are in very deed ghosts. [Footnote: _Cf._ "Tempest," "We are such stuff as dreams are made of."] These limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life- blood with its burning passion? They are dust and shadow; a shadow system gathered round our _me_, wherein through some moments or years the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night on Heaven's mission appears. What force and fire there is in each he expends, one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife in war with his fellow, and then the heaven- sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to sense becomes a vanished shadow. Thus, like some wild naming, wild thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious Mankind thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick- succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Thus, like a God- created fire-breathing spirit host, we emerge from the Inane, haste stormfully across the astonished earth, then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled and her seas filled up. On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped; the rear of the host read traces of the earliest van. But whence, O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not. Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God. Volumes might be written on Carlyle's relations, of sentiment, belief, opinion, method of thought, and manner of expression, to other thinkers. His fierce independence, and sense of his own prophetic mission to the exclusion of that of his predecessors and compeers, made him often unconscious of his intellectual debts, and only to the Germans, who impressed his comparatively plastic youth, is he disposed adequately to acknowledge them. Outside the Hebrew Scriptures he seems to have been wholly unaffected by the writings and traditions of the East, which exercised so marked an influence on his New England disciples. He never realised the part played by the philosophers of Greece in moulding the speculations of modern Europe. He knew Plato mainly through the Socratic dialogues. There is, however, a passage in a letter to Emerson (March 13th 1853) which indicates that he had read, comparatively late in life, some portions of _The Republic_. "I was much struck with Plato last year, and his notions about Democracy--mere _Latter-Day Pamphlets, saxa et faces_ ... refined into empyrean radiance and the lightning of the gods." The tribute conveyed in the comparison is just; for there is nothing but community of political view between the bitter acorns dropped from the gnarled border oak and the rich fruit of the finest olive in Athene's garden. But the coincidences of opinion between the ancient and the modern writer are among the most remarkable in literary history. We can only refer, without comments, to a few of the points of contact in this strange conjunction of minds far as the poles asunder. Plato and Carlyle are both possessed with the idea that they are living in a degenerate age, and they attribute its degeneracy to the same causes:--_Laissez faire_; the growth of luxury; the effeminate preference of Lydian to Dorian airs in music, education, and life; the decay of the Spartan and growth of the Corinthian spirit; the habit of lawlessness culminating in the excesses of Democracy, which they describe in language as nearly identical as the difference of the ages and circumstances admit. They propose the same remedies:-- a return to simpler manners, and stricter laws, with the best men in the State to regulate and administer them. Philosophers, says Plato, are to be made guardians, and they are to govern, not for gain or glory, but for the common weal. They need not be happy in the ordinary sense, for there is a higher than selfish happiness, the love of the good. To this love they must be _systematically educated_ till they are fit to be kings and priests in the ideal state; if they refuse they _must_, when their turn comes, be _made to govern_. Compare the following declarations of Carlyle:-- Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing class and a Teaching class--these two sometimes combined in one, a Pontiff King--there did not society exist without those two vital elements, there will none exist. Whenever there are born Kings of men you had better seek them out and _breed them to the work_.... The few wise will have to take command of the innumerable foolish, they _must be got to do it_. The Ancient and the Modern, the Greek and the Teuton, are further curiously at one:--in their dislike of physical or mental Valetudinarianism (cf. _Rep._ Bs. ii. and iii. and _Characteristics_); in their protests against the morality of consequences, of rewards and punishments as motives for the highest life (the just man, says Plato, crucified is better than the unjust man crowned); in their contempt for the excesses of philanthropy and the pampering of criminals (cf. _Rep._ B. viii.); in their strange conjunctions of free-thinking and intolerance. Plato in the Laws enacts that he who speaks against the gods shall be first fined, then imprisoned, and at last, if he persists in his impiety, put to death; yet he had as little belief in the national religion as Carlyle. [Footnote: Rousseau, in the "Contrat Social," also assumes this position; allowing freedom of thought, but banishing the citizen who shows disrespect to the State Religion.] They both accept Destiny,--the Parcae or the Norns spin the threads of life,--and yet both admit a sphere of human choice. In the Republic the souls select their lots: with Carlyle man can modify his fate. The juxtaposition in each of Humour and Pathos (cf. Plato's account of the dogs in a Democracy, and Carlyle's "Nigger gone masterless among the pumpkins," and, for pathos, the image of the soul encrusted by the world as the marine Glaucus, or the Vision of Er and Natural Supernaturalism) is another contact. Both held that philosophers and heroes were few, and yet both leant to a sort of Socialism, under State control; they both assail Poetry and deride the Stage (cf. _Rep._ B. ii. and B. x. with Carlyle on "The Opera"), while each is the greatest prose poet of his race; they are united in hatred of orators, who "would circumvent the gods," and in exalting action and character over "the most sweet voices"--the one enforcing his thesis in the "language of the gods," the other preaching silence in forty volumes of eloquent English speech. Carlyle seems to have known little of Aristotle. His Stoicism was indigenous; but he always alludes with deference to the teaching of the Porch. Marcus Aurelius, the nearest type of the Philosophic King, must have riveted his regard as an instance of the combination of thought and action; and some interesting parallels have been drawn between their views of life as an arena on which there is much to be done and little to be known, a passage from time to a vague eternity. They have the same mystical vein, alongside of similar precepts of self-forgetfulness, abnegation, and the waiving of desire, the same confidence in the power of the spirit to defy or disdain vicissitudes, ideas which brought both in touch with the ethical side of Christianity; but their tempers and manner are as far as possible apart. Carlyle speaks of no one with more admiration than of Dante, recognising in the Italian his own intensity of love and hate and his own tenacity; but beyond this there is little evidence of the "Divina Commedia" having seriously attuned his thought: nor does he seem to have been much affected by any of the elder English poets. He scarcely refers to Chaucer; he alludes to Spenser here and there with some homage, but hardly ever, excepting Shakespeare, to the Elizabethan dramatists. Among writers of the seventeenth century, he may have found in Hobbes some support of his advocacy of a strong government; but his views on this theme came rather from a study of the history of that age. Milton he appreciates inadequately. To Dryden and Swift he is just; the latter, whether consciously to Carlyle or not, was in some respects his English master, and the points of resemblance in their characters suggest detailed examination. Their styles are utterly opposed, that of the one resting almost wholly on its Saxon base, that of the other being a coat of many colours; but both are, in the front rank of masters of prose-satire, inspired by the same audacity of "noble rage." Swift's humour has a subtler touch and yet more scathing scorn; his contempt of mankind was more real; his pathos equally genuine but more withdrawn; and if a worse foe he was a better friend. The comparisons already made between Johnson and Carlyle have exhausted the theme; they remain associated by their similar struggle and final victory, and sometimes by their tyrannous use of power; they are dissociated by the divergence of their intellectual and in some respects even their moral natures; both were forces of character rather than discoverers, both rulers of debate; but the one was of sense, the other of imagination, "all compact." The one blew "the blast of doom" of the old patronage; the other, against heavier odds, contended against the later tyranny of uninformed and insolent popular opinion. Carlyle did not escape wholly from the influence of the most infectious, if the most morbid, of French writers, J.J. Rousseau. They are alike in setting Emotion over Reason: in referring to the Past as a model; in subordinating mere criticism to ethical, religious or irreligious purpose; in being avowed propagandists; in their "deep unrest"; and in the diverse conclusions that have been drawn from their teaching. Carlyle's enthusiasm for the leaders of the new German literature was, in some measure, inspired by the pride in a treasure-trove, the regard of a foster-father or _chaperon_ who first substantially took it by the hand and introduced it to English society: but it was also due to the feeling that he had found in it the fullest expression of his own perplexities, and at least their partial solution. His choice of its representatives is easily explained. In Schiller he found intellectually a younger brother, who had fought a part of his own fight and was animated by his own aspirations; in dealing with his career and works there is a shade of patronage. Goethe, on the other hand, he recognised across many divergencies as his master. The attachment of the belated Scotch Puritan to the greater German has provoked endless comment; but the former has himself solved the riddle. The contrasts between the teacher and pupil remain, but they have been exaggerated by those who only knew Goethe as one who had attained, and ignored the struggle of his hot youth on the way to attainment. Carlyle justly commends him, not for his artistic mastery alone, but for his sense of the reality and earnestness of life, which lifts him to a higher grade among the rulers of human thought than such more perfect artists and more passionate lyrists as Heine. He admires above all his conquest over the world, without concession to it, saying:-- With him Anarchy has now become Peace ... the once perturbed spirit is serene and rich in good fruits.... Neither, which is most important of all, has this Peace been attained by a surrender to Necessity, or any compact with Delusion--a seeming blessing, such as years and dispiritment will of themselves bring to most men, and which is indeed no blessing, since ever-continued battle is better than captivity. Many gird on the harness, few bear it warrior-like, still fewer put it off with triumph. Euphorion still asserts, "To die in strife is the end of life." Goethe ceased to fight only when he had won; his want of sympathy with the so-called Apostles of Freedom, the stump orators of his day, was genuine and shared by Carlyle. In the apologue of the _Three Reverences_ in _Meister_ the master indulges in humanitarian rhapsody and, unlike his pupil, verges on sentimental paradox, declaring through the lips of the Chief in that imaginary pedagogic province--which here and there closely recalls the _New Atlantis_--that we must recognise "humility and poverty, mockery and despite, disgrace and suffering, as divine--nay, even on sin and crime to look not as hindrances, but to honour them, as furtherances of what is holy." In answer to Emerson's Puritanic criticisms Carlyle replies:-- Believe me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than I; nay, I often feel as if I were far too much so, but John Knox himself, could he have seen the peaceable impregnable _fidelity_ of that man's mind, and how to him also Duty was infinite,--Knox would have passed on wondering, not reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like Goethe. His is the only _healthy_ mind, of any extent, that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it was he who first convincingly proclaimed to me ... "Behold even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that man be a man." And then as to that dark ground on which you love to see genius paint itself: consider whether misery is not ill health too, also whether good fortune is not worse to bear than bad, and on the whole whether the glorious serene summer is not greater than the wildest hurricane--as Light, the naturalists say, is stronger than Lightning. Among German so-called mystics the one most nearly in accord with Carlyle was Novalis, who has left a sheaf of sayings--as "There is but one temple in the universe, and that is the body of man," "Who touches a human hand touches God"--that especially commended themselves to his commentator. Among philosophers proper, Fichte, in his assertion of the Will as a greater factor of human life and a nearer indication of personality than pure Thought, was Carlyle's nearest tutor. The _Vocation of the Scholar_ and _The Way to a Blessed Life_ anticipated and probably suggested much of the more speculative part of _Sartor_. But to show their relation would involve a course of Metaphysics. We accept Carlyle's statement that he learnt most of the secret of life and its aims from his master Goethe: but the closest of his kin, the man with whom he shook hands more nearly as an equal, was Richter--_Jean Paul der einzige_, lord of the empire of the air, yet with feet firmly planted on German earth, a colossus of reading and industry, the quaintest of humorists, not excepting either Sir Thomas Browne or Laurence Sterne, a lover and painter of Nature unsurpassed in prose. He first seems to have influenced his translator's style, and set to him the mode of queer titles and contortions, fantastic imaginary incidents, and endless digressions. His Ezekiel visions as the dream in the first _Flower Piece_ from the life of Siebenkäs, and that on _New Year's Eve_, are like pre-visions of _Sartor_, and we find in the fantasies of both authors much of the same machinery. It has been asserted that whole pages of _Schmelzle's Journey to Flätz_ might pass current for Carlyle's own; and it is evident that the latter was saturated with _Quintus Fixlein_. The following can hardly be a mere coincidence. Richter writes of a dead brother, "For he chanced to leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself among several others; but these recoiled, and his shot forth with him, melted away as it floated under his feet, and so sank his heart of fire amid the ice and waves"; while in _Cui Bono_ we have-- What is life? a thawing ice-board On a sea with sunny shore. Similarly, the eloquently pathetic close of _Fixlein_, especially the passage, "Then begun the Æolian harp of Creation," recalls the deepest pathos of _Sartor_. The two writers, it has been observed, had in common "reverence, humour, vehemence, tenderness, gorgeousness, grotesqueness, and pure conduct of life." Much of Carlyle's article in the _Foreign Quarterly_ of 1830 might be taken for a criticism of himself. Enough has been said of the limits of Carlyle's magnanimity in estimating his English contemporaries; but the deliberate judgments of his essays were often more genial than those of his letters and conversation; and perhaps his overestimate of inferiors, whom in later days he drew round him as the sun draws the mist, was more hurtful than his severity; it is good for no man to live with satellites. His practical severance from Mazzini was mainly a personal loss: the widening of the gulf between him and Mill was a public calamity, for seldom have two men been better qualified the one to correct the excesses of the other. Carlyle was the greater genius; but the question which was the greater mind must be decided by the conflict between logic and emotion. They were related proximately as Plato to Aristotle, the one saw what the other missed, and their hold on the future has been divided. Mill had "the dry light," and his meaning is always clear; he is occasionally open to the charge of being a formalist, allowing too little for the "infusion of the affections," save when touched, as Carlyle was, by a personal loss; yet the critical range indicated by his essay on "Coleridge" on the one side, that on "Bentham" on the other, is as wide as that of his friend; and while neither said anything base, Mill alone is clear from the charge of having ever said anything absurd. His influence, though more indirect, may prove, save artistically, more lasting. The two teachers, in their assaults on _laissez faire,_ curiously combine in giving sometimes undesigned support to social movements with which the elder at least had no sympathy. Carlyle's best, because his most independent, friend lived beyond the sea. He has been almost to weariness compared with Emerson, initial pupil later ally, but their contrasts are more instructive than their resemblances. They have both at heart a revolutionary spirit, marked originality, uncompromising aversion to illusions, disdain of traditional methods of thought and stereotyped modes of expression; but in Carlyle this is tempered by greater veneration for the past, in which he holds out models for our imitation; while Emerson sees in it only fingerposts for the future, and exhorts his readers to stay at home lest they should wander from themselves. The one loves detail, hates abstraction, delights to dwell on the minutiæ of biography, and waxes eloquent even on dates. The other, a brilliant though not always a profound generaliser, tells us that we must "leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope not in history ... with the ideal is the rose of joy. But grief cleaves to names and persons, and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday." The one is bent under a burden, and pores over the riddle of the earth, till, when he looks up at the firmament of the unanswering stars, he can but exclaim, "It is a sad sight." The other is blown upon by the fresh breezes of the new world; his vision ranges over her clear horizons, and he leaps up elastic under her light atmosphere, exclaiming, "Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous." Carlyle is a half-Germanised Scotchman, living near the roar of the metropolis, with thoughts of Weimar and reminiscences of the Covenanting hills. Emerson studies Swedenborg and reads the _Phædo_ in his garden, far enough from the din of cities to enable him in calm weather to forget them. "Boston, London, are as fugitive as any whiff of smoke; so is society, so is the world." The one is strong where the other is weak. Carlyle keeps his abode in the murk of clouds illumined by bolts of fire; he has never seen the sun unveiled. Emerson's "Threnody" shows that he has known the shadow; but he has fought with no Apollyons, reached the Celestial City without crossing the dark river, and won the immortal garland "without the dust and heat." Self-sacrifice, inconsistently maintained, is the watchword of the one: self-reliance, more consistently, of the other. The art of the two writers is in strong contrast. The charm of Emerson's style is its precision; his sentences are like medals each hung on its own string; the fields of his thought are combed rather than ploughed: he draws outlines, as Flaxman, clear and colourless. Carlyle's paragraphs are like streams from Pactolus, that roll nuggets from their source on their turbid way. His expressions are often grotesque, but rarely offensive. Both writers are essentially ascetic,--though the one swallows Mirabeau, and the other says that Jane Eyre should have accepted Eochester and "left the world in a minority." But Emerson is never coarse, which Carlyle occasionally is; and Carlyle is never flippant, as Emerson often is. In condemning the hurry and noise of mobs the American keeps his temper, and insists on justice without vindictiveness: wars and revolutions take nothing from his tranquillity, and he sets Hafiz and Shakespeare against Luther and Knox. Careless of formal consistency--"the hobgoblin of little minds"--he balances his aristocratic reserve with a belief in democracy, in progression by antagonism, and in collective wisdom as a limit to collective folly. Leaving his intellectual throne as the spokesman of a practical liberty, Emerson's wisdom was justified by the fact that he was always at first on the unpopular, and ultimately on the winning, side. Casting his rote for the diffusion of popular literature, a wide suffrage, a mild penal code, he yet endorsed the saying of an old American author, "A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom; whilst a republic is a raft that will never sink, but then your feet are always in water." [Footnote: Carlyle, on the other hand, holds "that," as has been said, "we are entitled to deal with criminals as relics of barbarism in the midst of civilisation." His protest, though exuberated, against leniency in dealing with atrocities, emphatically requisite in an age apt to ignore the rigour of justice, has been so far salutary, and may be more so.] Maintaining that the State exists for its members, he holds that the enervating influences of authority are least powerful in popular governments, and that the tyranny of a public opinion not enforced by law need only be endured by voluntary slaves. Emerson confides in great men, "to educate whom the State exists"; but he regards them as inspired mouthpieces rather than controlling forces: their prime mission is to "fortify our hopes," their indirect services are their best. The career of a great man should rouse us to a like assertion of ourselves. We ought not to obey, but to follow, sometimes by not obeying, him. "It is the imbecility not the wisdom of men that is always inviting the impudence of power." It is obvious that many of these views are in essential opposition to the teaching of Carlyle; and it is remarkable that two conspicuous men so differing and expressing their differences with perfect candour should have lived so long on such good terms. Their correspondence, ranging over thirty-eight years (begun in 1834, after Emerson's visit to Craigenputtock, and ending in 1872, before his final trip to England), is on the whole one of the most edifying in literary history. The fundamental accord, unshaken by the ruffle of the visit in 1847, is a testimony to the fact that the common preservation of high sentiments amid the irksome discharge of ordinary duties may survive and override the most distinct antagonisms of opinion. Matthew Arnold has gone so far as to say that he "would not wonder if Carlyle lived in the long run by such an invaluable record as that correspondence between him and Emerson and not by his works." This is paradoxical; but the volumes containing it are in some respects more interesting than the letters of Goethe and Schiller, as being records of "two noble kinsmen" of nearer intellectual claims. The practical part of the relationship on the part of Emerson is very beautiful; he is the more unselfish, and on the whole appears the better man, especially in the almost unlimited tolerance that passes with a smile even such violences as the "Ilias in nuce"; but Carlyle shows himself to be the stronger. Their mutual criticisms were of real benefit. Emerson succeeded in convincing his friend that so-called anarchy might be more effective in subduing the wilderness than any despotism; while the advice to descend from "Himalaya peaks and indigo skies" to concrete life is accepted and adopted in the later works of the American, _Society and Solitude_ and the _Conduct of Life,_ which Carlyle praises without stint. Keeping their poles apart they often meet half-way; and in matters of style as well as judgment tinge and tend to be transfused into each other, so that in some pages we have to look to the signature to be sure of the writer. Towards the close of the correspondence Carlyle in this instance admits his debt. I do not know another man in all the world to whom I can speak with clear hope of getting adequate response from him. Truly Concord seems worthy of the name: no dissonance comes to me from that side. Ah me! I feel as if in the wide world there were still but this one voice that responded intelligently to my own: as if the rest were all hearsays ... echoes: as if this alone were true and alive. My blessings on you, good Ralph Waldo. Emerson answers in 1872, on receipt of the completed edition of his friend's work: "You shall wear the crown at the Pan-Saxon games, with no competitor in sight ... well earned by genius and exhaustive labour, and with nations for your pupils and praisers." The general verdict on Carlyle's literary career assigns to him the first place among the British authors of his time. No writer of our generation, in England, has combined such abundance with such power. Regarding his rank as a writer there is little or no dispute: it is admitted that the irregularities and eccentricities of his style are bound up with its richness. In estimating the value of his thought we must discriminate between instruction and inspiration. If we ask what new truths he has taught, what problems he has definitely solved, our answer must be, "few." This is a perhaps inevitable result of the manner of his writing, or rather of the nature of his mind. Aside from political parties, he helped to check their exaggerations by his own; seeing deeply into the under-current evils of the time, even when vague in his remedies he was of use in his protest against leaving these evils to adjust themselves--what has been called "the policy of drifting"--or of dealing with them only by catchwords. No one set a more incisive brand on the meanness that often marks the unrestrained competition of great cities; no one was more effective in his insistence that the mere accumulation of wealth may mean the ruin of true prosperity; no one has assailed with such force the mammon-worship and the frivolity of his age. Everything he writes comes home to the individual conscience: his claim to be regarded as a moral exemplar has been diminished, his hold on us as an ethical teacher remains unrelaxed. It has been justly observed that he helped to modify "the thought rather than the opinion of two generations." His message, as that of Emerson, was that "life must be pitched on a higher plane." Goethe said to Eckermann in 1827 that Carlyle was a moral force so great that he could not tell what he might produce. His influence has been, though not continuously progressive, more marked than that of any of his compeers, among whom he was, if not the greatest, certainly the most imposing personality. It had two culminations; shortly after the appearance of _The French Revolution,_ and again towards the close of the seventh decade of the author's life. To the enthusiastic reception of his works in the Universities, Mr. Froude has borne eloquent testimony, and the more reserved Matthew Arnold admits that "the voice of Carlyle, overstrained and misused since, sounded then in Oxford fresh and comparatively sound," though, he adds, "The friends of one's youth cannot always support a return to them." In the striking article in the _St. James' Gazette_ of the date of the great author's death we read: "One who had seen much of the world and knew a large proportion of the remarkable men of the last thirty years declared that Mr. Carlyle was by far the most impressive person he had ever known, the man who conveyed most forcibly to those who approached him [best on resistance principles] that general impression of genius and force of character which it is impossible either to mistake or to define." Thackeray, as well as Ruskin and Froude, acknowledged him as, beyond the range of his own _métier_, his master, and the American Lowell, penitent for past disparagement, confesses that "all modern Literature has felt his influence in the right direction"; while the Emersonian hermit Thoreau, a man of more intense though more restricted genius than the poet politician, declares--"Carlyle alone with his wide humanity has, since Coleridge, kept to us the promise of England. His wisdom provokes rather than informs. He blows down narrow walls, and struggles, in a lurid light, like the Jöthuns, to throw the old woman Time; in his work there is too much of the anvil and the forge, not enough hay-making under the sun. He makes us act rather than think: he does not say, know thyself, which is impossible, but know thy work. He has no pillars of Hercules, no clear goal, but an endless Atlantic horizon. He exaggerates. Yes; but he makes the hour great, the picture bright, the reverence and admiration strong; while mere precise fact is a coil of lead." Our leading journal on the morning after Carlyle's death wrote of him in a tone of well-tempered appreciation: "We have had no such individuality since Johnson. Whether men agreed or not, he was a touchstone to which truth and falsehood were brought to be tried. A preacher of Doric thought, always in his pulpit and audible, he denounced wealth without sympathy, equality without respect, mobs without leaders, and life without aim." To this we may add the testimony of another high authority in English letters, politically at the opposite pole: "Carlyle's influence in kindling enthusiasm for virtues worthy of it, and in stirring a sense of the reality on the one hand and the unreality on the other, of all that men can do and suffer, has not been surpassed by any teacher now living. Whatever later teachers may have done in definitely shaping opinion ... here is the friendly fire-bearer who first conveyed the Promethean spark; here the prophet who first smote the rock." Carlyle, writes one of his oldest friends, "may be likened to a fugleman; he stood up in the front of Life's Battle and showed in word and action his notion of the proper attitude and action of men. He was, in truth, a prophet, and he has left his gospels." To those who contest that these gospels are for the most part negative, we may reply that to be taught what not to do is to be far advanced on the way to do. In nothing is the generation after him so prone to be unjust to a fresh thinker as with regard to his originality. A physical discovery, as Newton's, remains to ninety-nine out of a hundred a mental miracle; but a great moral teacher "labours to make himself forgotten." When he begins to speak he is suspected of insanity; when he has won his way he receives a Royal Commission to appoint the judges; as a veteran he is shelved for platitude. So Horace is regarded as a mere jewelry store of the Latin, Bacon in his _Essays_, of the English, wisdom, which they each in fact helped to create. Carlyle's paradoxes have been exaggerated, his partialities intensified, in his followers; his critical readers, not his disciples, have learnt most from him; he has helped across the Slough of Despond only those who have also helped themselves. When all is said of his dogmatism, his petulance, his "evil behaviour," he remains the master spirit of his time, its Censor, as Macaulay is its Panegyrist, and Tennyson its Mirror. He has saturated his nation with a wholesome tonic, and the practice of any one of his precepts for the conduct of life is ennobling. More intense than Wordsworth, more intelligible than Browning, more fervid than Mill, he has indicated the pitfalls in our civilisation. His works have done much to mould the best thinkers in two continents, in both of which he has been the Greatheart to many pilgrims. Not a few could speak in the words of the friend whose memory he has so affectionately preserved, "Towards me it is still more true than towards England that no one has been and done like you." A champion of ancient virtue, he appeared in his own phrase applied to Fichte, as "a Cato Major among degenerate men." Carlyle had more than the shortcomings of a Cato; he had all the inconsistent vehemence of an imperfectly balanced mind; but he had a far wider range and deeper sympathies. The message of the modern preacher transcended all mere applications of the text _delenda est._ He denounced, but at the same time nobly exhorted, his age. A storm-tossed spirit, "tempest-buffeted," he was "citadel-crowned" in his unflinching purpose and the might of an invincible will. APPENDIX CARLYLE'S RELIGION The _St. James' Gazette,_ February 11, 1881, writes:-- "It is obvious that from an early age he entirely ceased to believe, in its only true sense, the creed he had been taught. He never affected to believe it in any other sense, for he was far too manly and simple-hearted to care to frame any of those semi-honest transmutations of the old doctrines into new-fangled mysticism which had so great a charm for many of his weaker contemporaries. On the other hand, it is equally true that he never plainly avowed his unbelief. The line he took up was that Christianity, though not true in fact, had a right to be regarded as the noblest aspiration after a theory of the Universe and of human life ever formed: and that the Calvinistic version of Christianity was on the whole the best it ever assumed; and the one which represented the largest proportion of truth and the least amount of error. He also thought that the truths which Calvinism tried to express, and succeeded in expressing in an imperfect or partially mistaken manner, were the ultimate governing principles of morals and politics, of whose systematic neglect in this age nothing but evil could come. "Unwilling to take up the position of a rebel or revolutionist by stating his views plainly--indeed if he had done so sixty years ago he might have starved--the only resource left to him was that of approaching all the great subjects of life from the point of view of grim humour, irony, and pathos. This was the real origin of his unique style; though no doubt its special peculiarities were due to the wonderful power of his imagination, and to some extent--to a less extent we think than has been usually supposed--to his familiarity with German. "What then was his creed? What were the doctrines which in his view Calvinism shadowed forth and which were so infinitely true, so ennobling to human life? First, he believed in God; secondly, he believed in an absolute opposition between good and evil; thirdly, he believed that all men do, in fact, take sides more or less decisively in this great struggle, and ultimately turn out to be either good or bad; fourthly, he believed that good is stronger than evil, and by infinitely slow degrees gets the better of it, but that this process is so slow as to be continually obscured and thrown back by evil influences of various kinds--one of which he believed to be specially powerful in the present day. "God in his view was not indeed a personal Being, like the Christian God--still less was He in any sense identified with Jesus Christ; who, though always spoken of with rather conventional reverence in his writings, does not appear to have specially influenced him. The God in which Mr. Carlyle believed is, as far as can be ascertained, a Being possessing in some sense or other will and consciousness, and personifying the elementary principles of morals--Justice, Benevolence (towards good people), Fortitude, and Temperance--to such a pitch that they may be regarded, so to speak, as forming collectively the will of God.... That there is some one who--whether by the earthquake, or the fire, or the still small voice--is continually saying to mankind--'_Discite justitiam moniti'_; and that this Being is the ultimate fact at which we can arrive ... is what Mr. Carlyle seems to have meant by believing in God. And if any one will take the trouble to refer to the first few sentences of the Westminster Confession, and to divest them of their references to Christianity and to the Bible, he will find that between the God of Calvin and of Carlyle there is the closest possible similarity.... The great fact about each particular man is the relation, whether of friendship or enmity, in which he stands to God. In the one case he is on the side which must ultimately prevail, ... in the other ... he will, in due time, be crushed and destroyed.... Our relation to the universe can be ascertained only by experiment. We all have to live out our lives.... One man is a Cromwell, another a Frederick, a third a Goethe, a fourth a Louis XV. God hates Louis XV. and loves Cromwell. Why, if so, He made Louis XV., and indeed whether He made him or not, are idle questions which cannot be answered and should not be asked. There are good men and bad men, all pass alike through this mysterious hall of doom called life: most show themselves in their true colours under pressure. The good are blessed here and hereafter; the bad are accursed. Let us bring out as far as may be possible such good as a man has had in him since his origin. Let us strike down the bad to the hell that gapes for him. This, we think, or something like this, was Mr. Carlyle's translation of election and predestination into politics and morals.... There is not much pity and no salvation worth speaking of in either body of doctrine; but there is a strange, and what some might regard as a terrible parallelism between these doctrines and the inferences that may be drawn from physical science. The survival of the fittest has much in common with the doctrine of election, and philosophical necessity, as summed up in what we now call evolution, comes practically to much the same result as predestination." INDEX Aberdour Addiscombe Addison Æschylus Ailsa Craig Airy (the astronomer) Aitken, James Aitken, Mary Aitken, Mrs. Aix-la-Chapelle Albert, Prince Alison Alma America Annan Annandale Annual Register Antoinette, Marie Aristotle Arndt Arnold, Dr. Arnold, Matthew Ashburton, Lord and Lady Assaye Atheism _Athenæum_ Augustenburg Austerlitz Austin Austin, Mrs. Azeglio Bacon Badams Badcort Balaclava Balzac Bamford, Samuel Barbarossa Baring, see Ashburton Bassompierre Beaconsfield, Lord Beaumarchais Beethoven Belgium Bellamy Bentham Berkeley Berlin Bernstoff, Count Biography (by Froude) Birmingham Bismarck _Blackwood,_ Boehm Bohemia Bolingbroke Bonn Boston Boswell Breslau Brewster, Sir David Bright Brocken, spectre of the Bromley, Miss Bronte, Emily Brougham Brown, Prof. Browne, Sir Thomas Browning Bryant _note_ Buckle Buller, Charles Buller, Mrs. Bunsen Burke Burness, William Burns Byron Caesar _Cagliostro, Count_ Cairnes Calderon Calvin Campbell, Macleod Campbell, Thomas Carleton Carlyle (family) Carlyle, Alexander Carlyle, James (brother) Carlyle, James (father) Carlyle, John, Dr. Carlyle, Margaret (mother) Carlyle, Margaret (sister) Carlyle, Mrs. (Jane Welsh)(wife) Carlyle, Thomas (grandfather) Carlyle, Thomas, birth; education; studies German; lives in Edinburgh and takes pupils; studies law; tutor to the Bullers; goes to London; at Hoddam Hill; marriage; Edinburgh life; married life; life at Craigenputtock; second visit to London; publishes _Sartor_; takes house in Chelsea; life and work in London; loss of first volume of _French Revolution_; rewrites first volume of _French Revolution_; lectures; founds London Library; publishes _Chartism_; writes _Past and Present_; writes _Life of Cromwell_; visits Ireland; visits Paris; writes _History of Friedrich II._; excursions to Germany; nominated Lord Rector of Glasgow; success of _Friedrich II._; Lord Rector of Edinburgh; death of his wife; writes his _Reminiscences_; defends Governor Eyre; writes on Franco-German War; writes on Russo-Turkish War; honours; declining years; death; Appreciation of; authorities for his life; complaints; contemporary history; conversation; critic, as; descriptive passages; domestic troubles; dreams; dyspepsia; elements of his character; estimates (his) of contemporaries; ethics; financial affairs; friends; genius; historian, as; ignorance; influence; journal; jury, serves on a; letters; literary artist mission nicknaming mania noises opinions paradoxes polities popularity and praise preacher, as, rank as a writer relations to other thinkers religion routine scepticism sound-proof room, style teaching translations travels, and visits truth verses views, change of walks worker, as Cassel Castlebar Cato Cavaignac, General Cervantes Chalmers, Dr. Changarnier, General _Characteristics,_ Charlemagne _Chartism,_ Chatham Chaucer Chelsea Cheyne Row China Chotusitz Christianity Church, English Cicero Cid, the Civil War Civil War (American) Clare, Lady Clarendon Clerkenwell explosions Clough, Arthur Cobden Coblenz Cockburn Colenso, Bishop Coleridge Colonies Columbus Comte Conservatism Conway, Moncure Cooper, Thomas Cornelius _Correspondence,_ Cortes Cousin Craigcrook Craigenputtock Crimean War Cromwell _Cromwell, Life and Letters of,_ Crystal Palace Exhibition Cushman, Miss Cüstrin Cuvier Czars, the Dante Danton Dardanelles Darwin David II. _Deism,_ Democracy, De Morgan Demosthenes De Quincey Derby, Countess of Desmoulins _Dial, The,_ _Diamond Necklace,_ Dickens Diderot Diogenes Disraeli. _See_ Beaconsfield Dobell _Don Quixote,_ Döring, Herr Dresden Drogheda Drumclog Dryden Duffy, Sir C. Gavan Dumfries Dunbar Dunbar (poet) Duty Ecclefechan Eckermann Edinburgh _Edinburgh Encyclopaedia_ _Edinburgh Review_ Education Eisenach Eldin, Lord Eliot, George Emerson _Emigration_ Ems England _English Traits_ (Emerson's) Erasmus Erfurt Erskine _Essay on Proportion_ _Essays_ (Carlyle's) Everett, Alexander _Examiner,_ "Exodus from Houndsditch," Eyre, Governor Eyre, Jane Faber Factory Acts Faust Fawcett Fergusson, Dr. John Fichte FitzGerald, Edward Flaxman _Foreign Quarterly Preview_ _Foreign Review_ Förster Forster, John Forster, W.E. Fouqué Fourier Foxton, Mr. France Franchise Francia, Dr. Frankenstein Frankfort _Fraser_ Free Trade French Directory French literature _French Revolution_ Friedrich II. _Friedrich II., History of_ Fritz. _See_ Friedrich Fritz (Carlyle's horse) Froude, Mr. Fryston Fuchs, Reinecke Galileo Gallipoli Galway Game Laws Gavazzi, Father Georgel, Abbé German literature German worthies Germany Gibbon Gladstone, Sir T Gladstone, W. E. Glasgow _Glasgow Herald_ Goethe Goldsmith Gordon, Margaret Gordon (quadroon preacher) Gotha Grant, J. Greek thought Grimm's law Gronlund Grote Guizot Gully, Dr. Gully, Miss Guntershausen Haddington Hafiz Hakluyt Hallam Hallam, Arthur Hamburg Hamilton, Sir William Hare, Archdeacon Harrison, Frederick _Harvard Discourse_ (Emerson's) Hawthorne Hayti Heath (royalist writer) Hedonism Hegel Heine, Heinrich _Helena_ Helps Henry VIII. _Hero-Worship_ (and _On Heroes_} Herrnhut Hertzka Heyne Hildebrand Hill, Lord George _Histories_ (Carlyle's) History, definition of _History_ review of Hobbes Hochkirk Hoddam Hill Hoffmann Holinshed Homburg Homer Home Rule Horace Home, E.H. Houghton, Lord Hudson (Railway King) Hughes, T. Hugo, Victor Humboldt Hume Hunef Hunt, Leigh Huxley, Professor "Ilias Americana in nuce" Immortality Inkermann _In Memoriam_ (Tennyson's) Inquisition Ireland Ireland, Mrs. Irish Question Irving, Edward Jamaica Jeffrey Jena Jerrold, Douglas Jewsbury, Geraldine _Jocelin de Brakelond_ Johnson _Johnson_ Review of Boswell's Johnston, James Jomini Jonson, Ben Journalism, definition of Judengasse Junius Juvenal Kant Keats Keble Kingsley, Charles Kingsley, Henry Kinnaird Kirkcakly Knox Kolin Körner Kossuth Kunersdorf Lamb Landor Landshut Lanin, M. Laplace Larkin _Latter-Day Pamphlets_ Law, Carlyle's study of Lawson, Mr., James Carlyle's estimate of _Lectures_ Legendre Leibnitz Leipzig Leith Leslie, Prof. Leuthen Leyden "Liberal Association" Liberalism Liegnitz Literature as a profession Liverpool Livy Lobositz Locke "Locksley Hall" London London Library _London Magazine_ London Peace Congress Longfellow Longmans (the publisher) Louis XIV. Louis XV. Louis XVIII. Louisa, Electress Lowell Lucilius Luichart, Loch "Luria" Luther Macaulay Macbeth Machiavelli Mackenzie, Miss Stuart Mahon, Lord Mainhill Mainz Malthusianism Malvern Marat Marburg Marcus Aurelius Marlborough _Marseillaise_ Marshall Mavtineau, Miss H. Marx, Carl Massou, Prof. _Materialism_ Mathematics Maurice, F. D. Mazzini M'Crie _Meister, Wilhelm_ Melanchthen Mentone Meredith, George Mericourt Merimée, Prosper Metaphysics, Scotch Michelet Middle Ages Mill, J.S. Millais Milman Milton Mirabeau _Miscellanies_ Mitchell, Robert Mitchell (Young Ireland leader) Model Prisons Mohammed Molesworth Molwitz Montague, Basil Montaigne Montgomery, Robert More, Sir Thomas Morris, William Motley Motte, Countess de la Muirkirk Murchison, Sir R. Murray (the publisher) Murray, Thomas Musæus Napier, Macvey Napoleon I. Napoleon III. Naseby Nassau Necker Negroes Nelson "Nero" (Mrs. Carlyle's dog) Neuberg New England Newman, Cardinal Newspapers Newton Nibelungen Lied Nicholas the Czar "Nigger Question" Noble (biographer of Cromwell) North, Christopher Norton, Charles E. _Norway, Early Kings of_ Novalis O'Brien, Smith O'Connell Optimism Orsay, Count d' Orthodoxy vetoed Ossoli, Countess (Margaret Fuller) Owen Oxford Oxford, Bishop of Paraguay Pardubitz Paris _Past and Present_ Paton, Noel Paulets, the Peel Pericles Peter the Hermit Philanthropy Philip of Hesse Plato Playfair Political economy Political philosophy Pope Popes Prague Prayer Prescott Preuss _Prinzenraub_ Procter Procter, Mrs. Anne Puritanism Pusey Putbus _Quarterly Review_ Queen Victoria Radicalism Railways Raleigh Ranke Ranch "Reading of Books" Redwood Reform Bills _Reminiscences_ Renan Rennie, George Revolution years Rhine Ricardo Richter Riesen-Gebirge Riquetti Ritualism Robertson Robespierre Roland, Madame Rolandseck Romans Rome, cause of its preservation Romilly, Sir Samuel Rossbach Rossetti, Dante Rotterdam Rousseau Rugby Rügen Rushworth Ruskin Russell, Lord John Russell, Mrs., at Thornhill Russia Russo-Turkish War Sadowa St. Andrews St. Ives _St. James's Gazette_ St. Simon Samson, Abbot Sand, George _Sartor Resartus_ Saunders and Otley (publishers) Saxons Scepticism Schiller Schlosser Science Scotland Scotsbrig _Scotsman_ newspaper Scott, W.B. Scott, Sir Walter Sedan Sepoy rebellion Seven Years' War Shaftesbury, Lord Shakespeare Shelley _Shooting Niagara_ Sidney, Sir Philip _Signs of the Times_ Simon de Montfort Sinclair, Sir George Slavery Sloane, Sir Hans Smail, Tom Smith, Adam Smith, Goldwin Smith, Sydney Smollett Snowdon Socrates Sophocles Southey Spain Spedding Spencer, Herbert Spenser Stanley, Dean Stanley, Lady Augusta Stanleys (of Alderley) Steele Stein Stephen, Fitzjames Stephen, Sir James Sterling _Sterling, Life of_ Sterne Stewart, Dugald Stodart, Miss Eliza Stonehenge Strachey, Mr. Strachey, Mrs. Stralsund Strauss Stuart, Mary Sturge _Sun,_ newspaper Swift Swinburne Switzerland Tacitus Taine, M. _Tale of a Tub_ (Swift's) Talleyrand Talma Taylor, Henry Taylor's _German Literature_ Taylor, Mrs. Tennyson Teufelsdröckh Thackeray Theism Thierry, M. Thiers Thirlwall, Bishop Thoreau Thucydides Tieck _Times,_ the Toplitz Torgau Trafalgar Turgot Turks Turner Tyndall _Unto this Last_ (Ruskin's) Usedom, Baron Varennes Vauvenargues Vehse Verses (Carlyle's) Verses (Mrs. Carlyle's) Virginia Voltaire _Wanderjahre_ Wartburg Washington Waterloo Watts, G. F. Webster, Daniel Weimar Weissenfels Wellington (Duke of) Welsh, Jane. _See_ Mrs. Carlyle Welsh, Mrs. _Werner_ _Werther_ (Goethe's) Westminster Abbey Westminster Confession _Westminster Review_ Westport Wilberforce (Bishop) William the Conqueror William the Silent Willis's Rooms Wilson Wolseley Worcester Wordsworth _Work_ Working classes _World_ (newspaper) _Wotton Reinfred_ Yarmouth Zittau Zorndorf 
42062	----	Large Paper Edition LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT COPIOUSLY ANNOTATED AND ABUNDANTLY ILLUSTRATED IN TEN VOLUMES VOL. IV [Illustration: WALTER SCOTT IN 1817 _From the water-color portrait by William Nicholson_] MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF SIR WALTER SCOTT BART. by JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART In Ten Volumes VOLUME IV Boston and New York Houghton, Mifflin and Company The Riverside Press, Cambridge MCMI Copyright, 1901 by Houghton, Mifflin and Company All Rights Reserved Six Hundred Copies Printed Number, 200 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page XXV. The "Flitting" to Abbotsford. -- Plantations. -- George Thomson. -- Rokeby and Triermain in Progress. -- Excursion to Flodden. -- Bishop-Auckland, and Rokeby Park. -- Correspondence with Crabbe. -- Life of Patrick Carey, etc. -- Publication of Rokeby, -- and of The Bridal of Triermain. 1812-1813 1 XXVI. Affairs of John Ballantyne and Co. -- Causes of their Derangement. -- Letters of Scott to his Partners. -- Negotiation for Relief with Messrs. Constable. -- New Purchase of Land at Abbotsford. -- Embarrassments continued. -- John Ballantyne's Expresses. -- Drumlanrig, Penrith, etc. -- Scott's Meeting with the Marquis of Abercorn at Longtown. -- His Application to the Duke of Buccleuch. -- Offer of the Poet-Laureateship, -- considered, -- and declined. -- Address of the City of Edinburgh to the Prince Regent. -- Its Reception. -- Civic Honors conferred on Scott. -- Question of Taxation on Literary Income. -- Letters to Mr. Morritt, Mr. Southey, Mr. Richardson, Mr. Crabbe, Miss Baillie, and Lord Byron. 1813 50 XXVII. Insanity of Henry Weber. -- Letters on the Abdication of Napoleon, etc. -- Publication of Scott's Life and Edition of Swift. -- Essays for the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica. -- Completion and Publication of Waverley. 1814 100 XXVIII. Voyage to the Shetland Isles, etc. -- Scott's Diary kept on Board the Lighthouse Yacht. 1814 124 XXIX. Diary on Board the Lighthouse Yacht continued. -- The Orkneys. -- Kirkwall. -- Hoy. -- The Standing Stones of Stennis, etc. 1814 163 XXX. Diary continued. -- Stromness. -- Bessy Millie's Charm. -- Cape Wrath. -- Cave of Smowe. -- The Hebrides. -- Scalpa, etc. 1814 178 XXXI. Diary continued. -- Isle of Harris. -- Monuments of the Chiefs of Macleod. -- Isle of Skye. -- Dunvegan Castle. -- Loch Corriskin. -- Macallister's Cave. 1814 193 XXXII. Diary continued. -- Cave of Egg. -- Iona. -- Staffa. -- Dunstaffnage. -- Dunluce Castle. -- Giant's Causeway. -- Isle of Arran, etc. -- Diary concluded. 1814 206 XXXIII. Letter in Verse from Zetland and Orkney. -- Death of the Duchess of Buccleuch. -- Correspondence with the Duke. -- Altrive Lake. -- Negotiation concerning The Lord of the Isles completed. -- Success of Waverley. -- Contemporaneous criticisms on the Novel. -- Letters to Scott from Mr. Morritt, Mr. Lewis, and Miss Maclean Clephane. -- Letter from James Ballantyne to Miss Edgeworth. 1814 237 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Page WALTER SCOTT IN 1817 _Frontispiece_ From the water-color portrait by William Nicholson, R. S. A., in the possession of W. C. C. Erskine, Esq. Through the courtesy of David Douglas, Esq., Edinburgh. ABBOTSFORD IN 1812 6 ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE 50 From the painting by Sir Henry Raeburn, R. A., at Braeburn, Currie, Mid-Lothian. By permission of William Patrick Bruce, Esq. J. B. S. MORRITT 100 From the painting by Sir M. A. Shee, P. R. A., in the possession of R. A. Morritt, Esq., of Rokeby. WILLIAM ERSKINE, LORD KINNEDDER 124 From the water-color portrait by William Nicholson, R. S. A., in the possession of W. C. C. Erskine, Esq. Through the courtesy of David Douglas, Esq., Edinburgh. JAMES HOGG 250 From the water-color portrait by Stephen Poyntz Denning, in the National Portrait Gallery. SIR WALTER SCOTT CHAPTER XXV THE "FLITTING" TO ABBOTSFORD. -- PLANTATIONS. -- GEORGE THOMSON. --ROKEBY AND TRIERMAIN IN PROGRESS. -- EXCURSION TO FLODDEN. --BISHOP-AUCKLAND, AND ROKEBY PARK. -- CORRESPONDENCE WITH CRABBE. --LIFE OF PATRICK CAREY, ETC. -- PUBLICATION OF ROKEBY, -- AND OF THE BRIDAL OF TRIERMAIN 1812-1813 Towards the end of May, 1812, the Sheriff finally removed from Ashestiel to Abbotsford. The day when this occurred was a sad one for many a poor neighbor--for they lost, both in him and his wife, very generous protectors. In such a place, among the few evils which counterbalance so many good things in the condition of the peasantry, the most afflicting is the want of access to medical advice. As far as their means and skill would go, they had both done their utmost to supply this want; and Mrs. Scott, in particular, had made it so much her business to visit the sick in their scattered cottages, and bestowed on them the contents of her medicine-chest as well as of the larder and cellar, with such unwearied kindness, that her name is never mentioned there to this day without some expression of tenderness. Scott's children remember the parting scene as one of unmixed affliction--but it had had, as we shall see, its lighter features. Among the many amiable English friends whom he owed to his frequent visits at Rokeby Park, there was, I believe, none that had a higher place in his regard than the late Anne, Lady Alvanley, the widow of the celebrated Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. He was fond of female society in general; but her ladyship was a woman after his heart; well born and highly bred, but without the slightest tinge of the frivolities of modern fashion; soundly informed, and a warm lover of literature and the arts, but holding in as great horror as himself the imbecile chatter and affected ecstasies of the bluestocking generation. Her ladyship had written to him early in May, by Miss Sarah Smith (now Mrs. Bartley), whom I have already mentioned as one of his theatrical favorites; and his answer contains, among other matters, a sketch of the "Forest Flitting." TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LADY ALVANLEY. ASHESTIEL, 25th May, 1812. I was honored, my dear Lady Alvanley, by the kind letter which you sent me with our friend Miss Smith, whose talents are, I hope, receiving at Edinburgh the full meed of honorable applause which they so highly merit. It is very much against my will that I am forced to speak of them by report alone, for this being the term of removing, I am under the necessity of being at this farm to superintend the transference of my goods and chattels, a most miscellaneous collection, to a small property, about five miles down the Tweed, which I purchased last year. The neighbors have been much delighted with the procession of my furniture, in which old swords, bows, targets, and lances, made a very conspicuous show. A family of turkeys was accommodated within the helmet of some _preux chevalier_ of ancient Border fame; and the very cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and muskets. I assure your ladyship that this caravan, attended by a dozen of ragged rosy peasant children, carrying fishing-rods and spears, and leading ponies, greyhounds, and spaniels, would, as it crossed the Tweed, have furnished no bad subject for the pencil, and really reminded me of one of the gypsy groups of Callot upon their march. EDINBURGH, 28th May. I have got here at length, and had the pleasure to hear Miss Smith speak the Ode on the Passions charmingly last night. It was her benefit, and the house was tolerable, though not so good as she deserves, being a very good girl, as well as an excellent performer. I have read Lord Byron with great pleasure, though pleasure is not quite the appropriate word. I should say admiration--mixed with regret, that the author should have adopted such an unamiable misanthropical tone.--The reconciliation with Holland House is extremely edifying, and may teach young authors to be in no hurry to exercise their satirical vein. I remember an honest old Presbyterian, who thought it right to speak with respect even of the devil himself, since no one knew in what corner he might one day want a friend. But Lord Byron is young, and certainly has great genius, and has both time and capacity to make amends for his errors. I wonder if he will pardon the Edinburgh Reviewers, who have read their recantation of their former strictures. Mrs. Scott begs to offer her kindest and most respectful compliments to your ladyship and the young ladies. I hope we shall get into Yorkshire this season to see Morritt: he and his lady are really delightful persons. Believe me, with great respect, dear Lady Alvanley, your much honored and obliged WALTER SCOTT. A week later, in answer to a letter, mentioning the approach of the celebrated sale of books in which the Roxburghe Club originated, Scott says to his trusty ally, Daniel Terry:-- EDINBURGH, 9th June, 1812. MY DEAR TERRY,--I wish you joy of your success, which, although all reports state it as most highly flattering, does not exceed what I had hoped for you. I think I shall do you a sensible pleasure in requesting that you will take a walk over the fields to Hampstead one of these fine days, and deliver the enclosed to my friend Miss Baillie, with whom, I flatter myself, you will be much pleased, as she has all the simplicity of real genius. I mentioned to her some time ago that I wished to make you acquainted, so that the sooner you can call upon her, the compliment will be the more gracious. As I suppose you will sometimes look in at the Roxburghe sale, a memorandum respecting any remarkable articles will be a great favor. Abbotsford was looking charming, when I was obliged to mount my wheel in this court, too fortunate that I have at length some share in the roast meat I am daily engaged in turning. Our flitting and removal from Ashestiel baffled all description; we had twenty-four cart-loads of the veriest trash in nature, besides dogs, pigs, ponies, poultry, cows, calves, bare-headed wenches, and bare-breeched boys. In other respects we are going on in the old way, only poor Percy is dead. I intend to have an old stone set up by his grave, with "_Cy gist li preux Percie,_" and I hope future antiquaries will debate which hero of the house of Northumberland has left his bones in Teviotdale.[1] Believe me yours very truly, WALTER SCOTT. This was one of the busiest summers of Scott's busy life. Till the 12th of July he was at his post in the Court of Session five days every week; but every Saturday evening found him at Abbotsford, to observe the progress his laborers had made within doors and without in his absence; and on Monday night he returned to Edinburgh. Even before the Summer Session commenced, he appears to have made some advance in his Rokeby, for he writes to Mr. Morritt, from Abbotsford, on the 4th of May: "As for the house and the poem, there are twelve masons hammering at the one, and one poor noddle at the other--so they are both in progress;"--and his literary labors throughout the long vacation were continued under the same sort of disadvantage. That autumn he had, in fact, no room at all for himself. The only parlor which had been hammered into anything like habitable condition served at once for dining-room, drawing-room, school-room, and study. A window looking to the river was kept sacred to his desk; an old bed-curtain was nailed up across the room close behind his chair, and there, whenever the spade, the dibble, or the chisel (for he took his full share in all the work on hand) was laid aside, he pursued his poetical tasks, apparently undisturbed and unannoyed by the surrounding confusion of masons and carpenters, to say nothing of the lady's small talk, the children's babble among themselves, or their repetition of their lessons. The truth no doubt was, that when at his desk he did little more, as far as regarded _poetry_, than write down the lines which he had fashioned in his mind while pursuing his vocation as a planter, upon that bank which received originally, by way of joke, the title of _the thicket_. "I am now," he says to Ellis (October 17), "adorning a patch of naked land with trees _facturis nepotibus umbram_, for I shall never live to enjoy their shade myself otherwise than in the recumbent posture of Tityrus or Menalcas." But he did live to see _the thicket_ deserve not only that name, but a nobler one; and to fell with his own hand many a well-grown tree that he had planted there. Another plantation of the same date, by his eastern boundary, was less successful. For this he had asked and received from his early friend, the Marchioness of Stafford, a supply of acorns from Trentham, and it was named in consequence _Sutherland bower_; but the field-mice, in the course of the ensuing winter, contrived to root up and devour the whole of her ladyship's goodly benefaction. A third space had been set apart, and duly enclosed, for the reception of some Spanish chestnuts offered to him by an admirer established in merchandise at Seville; but that gentleman had not been a very knowing ally as to such matters, for when the chestnuts arrived, it turned out that they had been boiled. [Illustration: ABBOTSFORD IN 1812] Scott writes thus to Terry, in September, while the Roxburghe sale was still going on:-- I have lacked your assistance, my dear Sir, for twenty whimsicalities this autumn. Abbotsford, as you will readily conceive, has considerably changed its face since the auspices of Mother Retford were exchanged for ours. We have got up a good garden wall, complete stables in the haugh, according to Stark's plan, and the old farmyard being enclosed with a wall, with some little picturesque additions in front, has much relieved the stupendous height of the Doctor's barn. The new plantations have thriven amazingly well, the acorns are coming up fast, and Tom Purdie is the happiest and most consequential person in the world. My present work is building up the well with some debris from the Abbey. Oh, for your assistance, for I am afraid we shall make but a botched job of it, especially as our materials are of a very miscellaneous complexion. The worst of all is, that while my trees grow and my fountain fills, my purse, in an inverse ratio, sinks to zero. This last circumstance will, I fear, make me a very poor guest at the literary entertainment your researches hold out for me. I should, however, like much to have the Treatise on Dreams, by the author of the New Jerusalem, which, as John Cuthbertson the smith said of the minister's sermon, must be neat work. The Loyal Poems, by N. T.,[2] are probably by poor Nahum Tate, who associated with Brady in versifying the Psalms, and more honorably with Dryden in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel. I never saw them, however, but would give a guinea or thirty shillings for the collection. Our friend John Ballantyne has, I learn, made a sudden sally to London, and doubtless you will crush a quart with him or a pottle pot; he will satisfy your bookseller for The Dreamer, or any other little purchase you may recommend for me. You have pleased Miss Baillie very much both in public and in society, and though not fastidious, she is not, I think, particularly lavish of applause either way. A most valuable person is she, and as warm-hearted as she is brilliant.--Mrs. Scott and all our little folks are well. I am relieved of the labor of hearing Walter's lesson by a gallant son of the church, who, with one leg of wood and another of oak, walks to and fro from Melrose every day for that purpose. Pray stick to the dramatic work,[3] and never suppose either that you can be intrusive, or that I can be uninterested in whatever concerns you. Yours, W. S. The tutor alluded to at the close of this letter was Mr. George Thomson, son of the minister of Melrose, who, when the house afforded better accommodation, was and continued for many years to be domesticated at Abbotsford. Scott had always a particular tenderness towards persons afflicted with any bodily misfortune; and Thomson, whose leg had been amputated in consequence of a rough casualty of his boyhood, had a special share in his favor from the high spirit with which he refused at the time to betray the name of the companion that had occasioned his mishap, and continued ever afterwards to struggle against its disadvantages. Tall, vigorous, athletic, a dauntless horseman, and expert at the singlestick, George formed a valuable as well as picturesque addition to the _tail_ of the new laird, who often said, "In the Dominie, like myself, accident has spoiled a capital lifeguardsman." His many oddities and eccentricities in no degree interfered with the respect due to his amiable feelings, upright principles, and sound learning; nor did _Dominie Thomson_ at all quarrel in after-times with the universal credence of the neighborhood that he had furnished many features for the inimitable personage whose designation so nearly resembled his own; and if he has not yet "wagged his head" in a "pulpit o' his ain," he well knows it has not been so for want of earnest and long-continued intercession on the part of the author of Guy Mannering.[4] For many years Scott had accustomed himself to proceed in the composition of poetry along with that of prose essays of various descriptions; but it is a remarkable fact that he chose this period of perpetual noise and bustle, when he had not even a summer-house to himself, for the new experiment of carrying on two poems at the same time--and this, too, without suspending the heavy labor of his edition of Swift, to say nothing of the various lesser matters in which the Ballantynes were, from day to day, calling for the assistance of his judgment and his pen. In the same letter in which William Erskine acknowledges the receipt of the first four pages of Rokeby, he adverts also to The Bridal of Triermain as being already in rapid progress. The fragments of this second poem, inserted in the Register of the preceding year, had attracted considerable notice; the secret of their authorship had been well kept; and by some means, even in the shrewdest circles of Edinburgh, the belief had become prevalent that they proceeded not from Scott, but from Erskine. Scott had no sooner completed his bargain as to the copyright of the unwritten Rokeby, than he resolved to pause from time to time in its composition, and weave those fragments into a shorter and lighter romance, executed in a different metre, and to be published anonymously, in a small pocket volume, as nearly as possible on the same day with the avowed quarto. He expected great amusement from the comparisons which the critics would no doubt indulge themselves in drawing between himself and this humble candidate; and Erskine good-humoredly entered into the scheme, undertaking to do nothing which should effectually suppress the notion of his having set himself up as a modest rival to his friend. Nay, he suggested a further refinement, which in the sequel had no small share in the success of this little plot upon the sagacity of the reviewers. Having said that he much admired the opening of the first canto of Rokeby, Erskine adds, "I shall request your _accoucheur_ to send me your _little Dugald_ too as he gradually makes his progress. What I have seen is delightful. You are aware how difficult it is to form any opinion of a work, the general plan of which is unknown, transmitted merely in legs and wings as they are formed and feathered. Any remarks must be of the most minute and superficial kind, confined chiefly to the language, and other such subordinate matters. I shall be very much amused if the secret is kept and the knowing ones taken in. To prevent any discovery from your prose, what think you of putting down your ideas of what the preface ought to contain, and allowing me to write it over? And perhaps a quizzing review might be concocted." This last hint was welcome; and among other parts of the preface to Triermain which threw out "the knowing ones," certain Greek quotations interspersed in it are now accounted for. Scott, on his part, appears to have studiously interwoven into the piece allusions to personal feelings and experiences more akin to his friend's history and character than to his own; and he did so still more largely, when repeating this experiment, in the introductory parts of Harold the Dauntless. The same post which conveyed William Erskine's letter, above quoted, brought him an equally wise and kind one from Mr. Morritt, in answer to a fresh application for some minute details about the scenery and local traditions of the Valley of the Tees. Scott had promised to spend part of this autumn at Rokeby Park himself; but now, busied as he was with his planting operations at home, and continually urged by Ballantyne to have the poem ready for publication by Christmas, he would willingly have trusted his friend's knowledge in place of his own observation and research. Mr. Morritt gave him in reply various particulars, which I need not here repeat, but added,-- I am really sorry, my dear Scott, at your abandonment of your kind intention of visiting Rokeby, and my sorrow is not quite selfish, for seriously, I wish you could have come, if but for a few days, in order, on the spot, to settle accurately in your mind the localities of the new poem, and all their petty circumstances, of which there are many that would give interest and ornament to your descriptions. I am too much flattered by your proposal of inscribing the poem to me, not to accept it with gratitude and pleasure. I shall always feel your friendship as an honor--we all wish our honors to be permanent--and yours promises mine at least a fair chance of immortality. I hope, however, you will not be obliged to write in a hurry on account of the impatience of your booksellers. They are, I think, ill advised in their proceeding, for surely the book will be the more likely to succeed from not being forced prematurely into this critical world. Do not be persuaded to risk your established fame on this hazardous experiment. If you want a few hundreds independent of these booksellers, your credit is so very good, now that you have got rid of your Old Man of the Sea, that it is no great merit to trust you, and I happen at this moment to have five or six for which I have no sort of demand--so rather than be obliged to spur Pegasus beyond the power of pulling him up when he is going too fast, do consult your own judgment and set the midwives of the trade at defiance. Don't be scrupulous to the disadvantage of your muse, and above all be not offended at me for a proposition which is meant in the true spirit of friendship. I am more than ever anxious for your success--The Lady of the Lake more than succeeded--I think Don Roderick is less popular--I want this work to be another Lady at the least. Surely it would be worth your while for such an object to spend a week of your time, and a portion of your Old Man's salary, in a mail-coach flight hither, were it merely to renew your acquaintance with the country, and to rectify the little misconceptions of a cursory view. Ever affectionately yours, J. B. S. M. This appeal was not to be resisted. Scott, I believe, accepted Mr. Morritt's friendly offer so far as to ask his assistance in having some of Ballantyne's bills discounted; and he proceeded the week after to Rokeby, by the way of Flodden and Hexham, travelling on horseback, his eldest boy and girl on their ponies, while Mrs. Scott followed them in the carriage. Two little incidents that diversified this ride through Northumberland have found their way into print already; but, as he was fond of telling them both down to the end of his days, I must give them a place here also. Halting at Flodden to expound the field of battle to his young folks, he found that Marmion had, as might have been expected, benefited the keeper of the public house there very largely; and the village Boniface, overflowing with gratitude, expressed his anxiety to have a _Scott's Head_ for his sign-post. The poet demurred to this proposal, and assured mine host that nothing could be more appropriate than the portraiture of a foaming tankard, which already surmounted his doorway. "Why, the painter-man has not made an ill job," said the landlord, "but I would fain have something more connected with the book that has brought me so much good custom." He produced a well-thumbed copy, and handing it to the author, begged he would at least suggest a motto from the tale of Flodden Field. Scott opened the book at the death scene of the hero, and his eye was immediately caught by the "inscription" in black-letter,-- "Drink, weary pilgrim, drink, and pray For the kind soul of Sibyl Grey," etc. "Well, my friend," said he, "what more would you have? You need but strike out one letter in the first of these lines, and make your painter-man, the next time he comes this way, print between the jolly tankard and your own name,-- "Drink, weary pilgrim, drink and PAY." Scott was delighted to find, on his return, that this suggestion had been adopted, and, for aught I know, the romantic legend may still be visible. The other story I shall give in the words of Mr. Gillies:-- "It happened at a small country town that Scott suddenly required medical advice for one of his servants, and, on inquiring if there was any doctor at the place, was told that there were two,--one long established, and the other a newcomer. The latter gentleman, being luckily found at home, soon made his appearance;--a grave, sagacious-looking personage, attired in black, with a shovel hat, in whom, to his utter astonishment, Sir Walter recognized a Scotch blacksmith, who had formerly practised, with tolerable success, as a veterinary operator in the neighborhood of Ashestiel.--'How, in all the world,' exclaimed he, 'can it be possible that this is John Lundie?'--'In troth is it, your honor--just _a' that's for him_.'--'Well, but let us hear; you were a _horse_-doctor before; now, it seems, you are a _man_-doctor; how do you get on?'--'Ou, just extraordinar weel; for your honor maun ken my practice is vera sure and orthodox. I depend entirely upon twa _simples_.'--'And what may their names be? Perhaps it is a secret?'--'I'll tell your honor,' in a low tone; 'my twa simples are just _laudamy_ and _calamy_!'--'Simples with a vengeance!' replied Scott. 'But, John, do you never happen to _kill_ any of your patients?'--'Kill? Ou ay, may be sae! Whiles they die, and whiles no;--but it's the will o' Providence. _Ony how, your honor, it wad be lang before it makes up for Flodden!_'"[5] It was also in the course of this expedition that Scott first made acquaintance with the late excellent and venerable Shute Barrington, Bishop of Durham. The travellers having reached Auckland over night were seeing the public rooms of the Castle at an early hour next morning, when the Bishop happened, in passing through one of them, to catch a glimpse of Scott's person, and immediately recognizing him, from the likeness of the engravings by this time multiplied, introduced himself to the party, and insisted upon acting as cicerone. After showing them the picture-gallery and so forth, his Lordship invited them to join the morning service of the chapel, and when that was over, insisted on their remaining to breakfast. But Scott and his Lordship were by this time so much pleased with each other that they could not part so easily. The good Bishop ordered his horse, nor did Scott observe without admiration the proud curvetting of the animal on which his Lordship proposed to accompany him during the next stage of his progress. "Why, yes, Mr. Scott," said the gentle but high-spirited old man, "I still like to feel my horse under me." He was then in his seventy-ninth year, and survived to the age of ninety-two, the model in all things of a real prince of the Church. They parted after a ride of ten miles, with mutual regret; and on all subsequent rides in that direction, Bishop-Auckland was one of the poet's regular halting-places.[6] At Rokeby, on this occasion, Scott remained about a week; and I transcribe the following brief account of his proceedings while there from Mr. Morritt's _Memorandum_:-- "I had, of course," he says, "had many previous opportunities of testing the almost conscientious fidelity of his local descriptions; but I could not help being singularly struck with the lights which this visit threw on that characteristic of his compositions. The morning after he arrived he said, 'You have often given me materials for romance--now I want a good robber's cave, and an old church of the right sort.' We rode out, and he found what he wanted in the ancient slate quarries of Brignall and the ruined Abbey of Egglestone. I observed him noting down even the peculiar little wild flowers and herbs that accidentally grew round and on the side of a bold crag near his intended cave of Guy Denzil; and could not help saying, that as he was not to be upon oath in his work, daisies, violets, and primroses would be as poetical as any of the humble plants he was examining. I laughed, in short, at his scrupulousness; but I understood him when he replied, 'that in nature herself no two scenes were exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit apparently an imagination as boundless as the range of nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas, whoever trusted to imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed, and contracted to a few favorite images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth. Besides which,' he said, 'local names and peculiarities make a fictitious story look so much better in the face.' In fact, from his boyish habits, he was but half satisfied with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect with it some local legend, and when I was forced sometimes to confess with the Knife-grinder, 'Story! God bless you! I have none to tell, sir,'--he would laugh and say, 'Then let us make one--nothing so easy as to make a tradition.'" Mr. Morritt adds, that he had brought with him about half The Bridal of Triermain--told him that he meant to bring it out the same week with Rokeby--and promised himself particular satisfaction in _laying a trap for Jeffrey_; who, however, as we shall see, escaped the snare. Some of the following letters will show with what rapidity, after having refreshed and stored his memory with the localities of Rokeby, he proceeded in the composition of the romance:-- TO J. B. S. MORRITT, ESQ. ABBOTSFORD, 12th October, 1812. MY DEAR MORRITT,--I have this morning returned from Dalkeith House, to which I was whisked amid the fury of an election tempest, and I found your letter on my table. More on such a subject cannot be said among friends who give each other credit for feeling as they ought. We peregrinated over Stanmore, and visited the Castles of Bowes, Brough, Appleby, and Brougham with great interest. Lest our spirit of chivalry thus excited should lack employment, we found ourselves, that is, _I_ did, at Carlisle, engaged in the service of two distressed ladies, being no other than our friends Lady Douglas and Lady Louisa Stuart, who overtook us there, and who would have had great trouble in finding quarters, the election being in full vigor, if we had not anticipated their puzzle, and secured a private house capable of holding us all. Some distress occurred, I believe, among the waiting damsels, whose case I had not so carefully considered, for I heard a sentimental exclamation--"Am I to sleep with the greyhounds?" which I conceived to proceed from Lady Douglas's _suivante_, from the exquisite sensibility of tone with which it was uttered, especially as I beheld the fair one descend from the carriage with three half-bound volumes of a novel in her hand. Not having it in my power to alleviate her woes, by offering her either a part or the whole of my own couch.--"_Transeat_," quoth I, "_cum cæteris erroribus_." I am delighted with your Cumberland admirer,[7] and give him credit for his visit to the vindicator of Homer; but you missed one of another description, who passed Rokeby with great regret, I mean General John Malcolm, the Persian envoy, the Delhi resident, the poet, the warrior, the polite man, and the Borderer. He is really a fine fellow. I met him at Dalkeith, and we returned together;--he has just left me, after drinking his coffee. A fine time we had of it, talking of Troy town, and Babel, and Persepolis, and Delhi, and Langholm, and Burnfoot;[8] with all manner of episodes about Iskendiar, Rustan, and Johnny Armstrong. Do you know, that poem of Ferdusi's must be beautiful. He read me some very splendid extracts which he had himself translated. Should you meet him in London, I have given him charge to be acquainted with you, for I am sure you will like each other. To be sure, I know him little, but I like his frankness and his sound ideas of morality and policy; and I have observed, that when I have had no great liking to persons at the beginning, it has usually pleased Heaven, as Slender says, to decrease it on further acquaintance. Adieu, I must mount my horse. Our last journey was so delightful that we have every temptation to repeat it. Pray give our kind love to the lady, and believe me ever yours, WALTER SCOTT. TO THE SAME. EDINBURGH, 29th November, 1812. MY DEAR MORRITT,--I have been, and still am, working very hard, in hopes to face the public by Christmas, and I think I have hitherto succeeded in throwing some interest into the piece. It is, however, a darker and more gloomy interest than I intended; but involving one's self with bad company, whether in fiction or in reality, is the way not to get out of it easily; so I have been obliged to bestow more pains and trouble upon Bertram, and one or two blackguards whom he picks up in the slate quarries, than what I originally designed. I am very desirous to have your opinion of the three first Cantos, for which purpose, so soon as I can get them collected, I will send the sheets under cover to Mr. Freeling, whose omnipotent frank will transmit them to Rokeby, where, I presume, you have been long since comfortably settled-- "So York may overlook the town of York."[9] I trust you will read it with some partiality, because, if I have not been so successful as I could wish in describing your lovely and romantic glens, it has partly arisen from my great anxiety to do it well, which is often attended with the very contrary effect. There are two or three songs, and particularly one in praise of Brignall Banks, which I trust you will like--because, _entre nous_, I like them myself. One of them is a little dashing banditti song, called and entitled Allen-a-Dale. I think you will be able to judge for yourself in about a week. Pray, how shall I send you the _entire goose_, which will be too heavy to travel the same way with its _giblets_--for the Carlisle coach is terribly inaccurate about parcels? I fear I have made one blunder in mentioning the brooks which flow into the Tees. I have made the Balder distinct from that which comes down Thorsgill--I hope I am not mistaken. You will see the passage; and if they are the same rivulet, the leaf must be cancelled. I trust this will find Mrs. Morritt pretty well; and I am glad to find she has been better for her little tour. We were delighted with ours, except in respect of its short duration, and Sophia and Walter hold their heads very high among their untravelled companions, from the predominance acquired by their visit to England. You are not perhaps aware of the polish which is supposed to be acquired by the most transitory intercourse with your more refined side of the Tweed. There was an honest carter who once applied to me respecting a plan which he had formed of breeding his son, a great booby of twenty, to the Church. As the best way of evading the scrape, I asked him whether he thought his son's language was quite adapted for the use of a public speaker?--to which he answered, with great readiness, that he could knap English with any one, having twice driven his father's cart to Etal coal-hill. I have called my heroine Matilda. I don't much like Agnes, though I can't tell why, unless it is because it begins like Agag. Matilda is a name of unmanageable length; but, after all, is better than none, and my poor damsel was likely to go without one in my indecision. We are all hungering and thirsting for news from Russia. If Boney's devil does not help him, he is in a poor way. The Leith letters talk of the unanimity of the Russians as being most exemplary; and troops pour in from all quarters of their immense empire. Their commissariat is well managed under the Prince Duke of Oldenburgh. This was their weak point in former wars. Adieu! Mrs. Scott and the little people send love to Mrs. Morritt and you. Ever yours, WALTER SCOTT. TO THE SAME. EDINBURGH, Thursday, 10th December, 1812. MY DEAR MORRITT,--I have just time to say that I have received your letters, and am delighted that Rokeby pleases the owner. As I hope the whole will be printed off before Christmas, it will scarce be worth while to send you the other sheets till it reaches you altogether. Your criticisms are the best proof of your kind attention to the poem. I need not say I will pay them every attention in the next edition. But some of the faults are so interwoven with the story, that they must stand. Denzil, for instance, is essential to me, though, as you say, not very interesting; and I assure you that, generally speaking, the _poeta loquitur_ has a bad effect in narrative; and when you have twenty things to tell, it is better to be slatternly than tedious. The fact is, that the tediousness of many really good poems arises from an attempt to support the same tone throughout, which often occasions periphrasis, and always stiffness. I am quite sensible that I have often carried the opposite custom too far; but I am apt to impute it partly to not being able to bring out my own ideas well, and partly to haste--not to error in the system. This would, however, lead to a long discussion, more fit for the fireside than for a letter. I need not say that, the poem being in fact your own, you are at perfect liberty to dispose of the sheets as you please. I am glad my geography is pretty correct. It is too late to inquire if Rokeby is insured, for I have burned it down in Canto V.; but I suspect you will bear me no greater grudge than at the noble Russian who burned Moscow. Glorious news to-day from the North--_pereat iste_! Mrs. Scott, Sophia, and Walter, join in best compliments to Mrs. Morritt; and I am, in great haste, ever faithfully yours, WALTER SCOTT. P. S.--I have heard of Lady Hood by a letter from herself. She is well, and in high spirits, and sends me a pretty topaz seal, with a talisman which secures this letter, and signifies (it seems), which one would scarce have expected from its appearance, my name. We are now close upon the end of this busy twelvemonth; but I must not turn the leaf to 1813, without noticing one of its miscellaneous incidents--his first intercourse by letter with the poet Crabbe. Mr. Hatchard, the publisher of his Tales, forwarded a copy of the book to Scott as soon as it was ready; and, the bookseller having communicated to his author some flattering expressions in Scott's letter of acknowledgment, Mr. Crabbe addressed him as follows:-- TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., EDINBURGH. MUSTON, GRANTHAM, 13th October, 1812. SIR,--Mr. Hatchard, judging rightly of the satisfaction it would afford me, has been so obliging as to communicate your two letters, in one of which you desire my Tales to be sent; in the other, you acknowledge the receipt of them; and in both you mention my verses in such terms, that it would be affected in me were I to deny, and I think unjust if I were to conceal, the pleasure you give me. I am indeed highly gratified. I have long entertained a hearty wish to be made known to a poet whose works are so greatly and so universally admired; and I continued to hope that I might at some time find a common friend, by whose intervention I might obtain that honor; but I am confined by duties near my home, and by sickness in it. It may be long before I be in town, and then no such opportunity might offer. Excuse me, then, sir, if I gladly seize this which now occurs to express my thanks for the politeness of your expressions, as well as my desire of being known to a gentleman who has delighted and affected me, and moved all the passions and feelings in turn, I believe--Envy surely excepted--certainly, if I know myself, but in a moderate degree. I truly rejoice in your success; and while I am entertaining, in my way, a certain set of readers, for the most part, probably, of peculiar turn and habit, I can with pleasure see the effect you produce on all. Mr. Hatchard tells me that he hopes or expects that thousands will read my Tales, and I am convinced that your publisher might, in like manner, so speak of your ten thousands; but this, though it calls to mind the passage, is no true comparison with the related prowess of David and Saul, because I have no evil spirit to arise and trouble me on the occasion; though, if I had, I know no David whose skill is so likely to allay it. Once more, sir, accept my best thanks, with my hearty wishes for your health and happiness, who am, with great esteem, and true respect, Dear Sir, your obedient servant, GEORGE CRABBE. I cannot produce Scott's reply to this communication. Mr. Crabbe appears to have, in the course of the year, sent him a copy of all his works, "ex dono auctoris," and there passed between them several letters, one or two of which I must quote. TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., EDINBURGH. Know you, sir, a gentleman in Edinburgh, A. Brunton (the Rev.), who dates St. John Street, and who asks my assistance in furnishing hymns which have relation to the Old or New Testament--anything which might suit the purpose of those who are cooking up a book of Scotch Psalmody? Who is Mr. Brunton? What is his situation? If I could help one who needed help, I would do it cheerfully--but have no great opinion of this undertaking.... With every good wish, yours sincerely, GEORGE CRABBE. Scott's answer to this letter expresses the opinions he always held in conversation on the important subject to which it refers; and acting upon which, he himself at various times declined taking any part in the business advocated by Dr. Brunton:-- TO THE REV. GEORGE CRABBE, MUSTON, GRANTHAM. MY DEAR SIR,--I was favored with your kind letter some time ago. Of all people in the world, I am least entitled to demand regularity of correspondence; for being, one way and another, doomed to a great deal more writing than suits my indolence, I am sometimes tempted to envy the reverend hermit of Prague, confessor to the niece of Queen Gorboduc, who never saw either pen or ink. Mr. Brunton is a very respectable clergyman of Edinburgh, and I believe the work in which he has solicited your assistance is one adopted by the General Assembly, or Convocation of the Kirk. I have no notion that he has any individual interest in it; he is a well-educated and liberal-minded man, and generally esteemed. I have no particular acquaintance with him myself, though we speak together. He is at this very moment sitting on the outside of the bar of our Supreme Court, within which I am fagging as a clerk; but as he is hearing the opinion of the Judges upon an action for augmentation of stipend to him and to his brethren, it would not, I conceive, be a very favorable time to canvass a literary topic. But you are quite safe with him; and having so much command of scriptural language, which appears to me essential to the devotional poetry of Christians, I am sure you can assist his purpose much more than any man alive. I think those hymns which do not immediately recall the warm and exalted language of the Bible are apt to be, however elegant, rather cold and flat for the purposes of devotion. You will readily believe that I do not approve of the vague and indiscriminate Scripture language which the fanatics of old and the modern Methodists have adopted, but merely that solemnity and peculiarity of diction, which at once puts the reader and hearer upon his guard as to the purpose of the poetry. To my Gothic ear, indeed, the _Stabat Mater_, the _Dies Iræ_, and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church, are more solemn and affecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan; the one has the gloomy dignity of a Gothic church, and reminds us instantly of the worship to which it is dedicated; the other is more like a Pagan temple, recalling to our memory the classical and fabulous deities.[10] This is, probably, all referable to the association of ideas--that is, if the "association of ideas" continues to be the universal pick-lock of all metaphysical difficulties, as it was when I studied moral philosophy--or to any other more fashionable universal solvent which may have succeeded to it in reputation. Adieu, my dear sir,--I hope you and your family will long enjoy all happiness and prosperity. Never be discouraged from the constant use of your charming talent. The opinions of reviewers are really too contradictory to found anything upon them, whether they are favorable or otherwise; for it is usually their principal object to display the abilities of the writers of the critical lucubrations themselves. Your Tales are universally admired here. I go but little out, but the few judges whose opinions I have been accustomed to look up to, are unanimous. Ever yours, most truly, WALTER SCOTT. TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., EDINBURGH. _MY DEAR SIR_,--Law, then, is your profession--I mean a profession you give your mind and time to--but how "fag as a _clerk_"? Clerk is a name for a learned person, I know, in our Church; but how the same hand which held the pen of Marmion holds that with which a clerk fags, unless a clerk means something vastly more than I understand, is not to be comprehended. I wait for elucidation. Know you, dear sir, I have often thought I should love to read _reports_--that is, brief histories of extraordinary cases, with the judgments. If that is what is meant by _reports_, such reading must be pleasant; but, probably, I entertain wrong ideas, and could not understand the books I think so engaging. Yet I conclude there are _histories of cases_, and have often thought of consulting Hatchard whether he knew of such kind of reading, but hitherto I have rested in ignorance.... Yours truly, GEORGE CRABBE. TO THE REV. GEORGE CRABBE. MY DEAR SIR,--I have too long delayed to thank you for the most kind and acceptable present of your three volumes. Now am I doubly armed, since I have a set for my cabin at Abbotsford as well as in town; and, to say truth, the auxiliary copy arrived in good time, for my original one suffers as much by its general popularity among my young people, as a popular candidate from the hugs and embraces of his democratical admirers. The clearness and accuracy of your painting, whether natural or moral, renders, I have often remarked, your works generally delightful to those whose youth might render them insensible to the other beauties with which they abound. There are a sort of pictures--surely the most valuable, were it but for that reason--which strike the uninitiated as much as they do the connoisseur, though the last alone can render reason for his admiration. Indeed our old friend Horace knew what he was saying when he chose to address his ode, "_Virginibus puerisque_," and so did Pope when he told somebody he had the mob on the side of his version of Homer, and did not mind the high-flying critics at Button's. After all, if a faultless poem could be produced, I am satisfied it would tire the critics themselves, and annoy the whole reading world with the spleen. You must be delightfully situated in the Vale of Belvoir--a part of England for which I entertain a special kindness, for the sake of the gallant hero, Robin Hood, who, as probably you will readily guess, is no small favorite of mine; his indistinct ideas concerning the doctrine of _meum_ and _tuum_ being no great objection to an outriding Borderer. I am happy to think that your station is under the protection of the Rutland family, of whom fame speaks highly. Our lord of the "cairn and the scaur," waste wilderness and hungry hills, for many a league around, is the Duke of Buccleuch, the head of my clan; a kind and benevolent landlord, a warm and zealous friend, and the husband of a lady--_comme il y en a peu_. They are both great admirers of Mr. Crabbe's poetry, and would be happy to know him, should he ever come to Scotland, and venture into the Gothic halls of a Border chief. The early and uniform kindness of this family, with the friendship of the late and present Lord Melville, enabled me, some years ago, to exchange my toils as a barrister, for the lucrative and respectable situation of one of the Clerks of our Supreme Court, which only requires a certain routine of official duty, neither laborious nor calling for any exertion of the mind; so that my time is entirely at my own command, except when I am attending the Court, which seldom occupies more than two hours of the morning during sitting. I besides hold _in commendam_ the Sheriffdom of Ettrick Forest, which is now no forest; so that I am a pluralist as to law appointments, and have, as Dogberry says, "two gowns, and everything handsome about me."[11] I have often thought it is the most fortunate thing for bards like you and me to have an established profession, and professional character, to render us independent of those worthy gentlemen, the retailers, or, as some have called them, the midwives of literature, who are so much taken up with the abortions they bring into the world, that they are scarcely able to bestow the proper care upon young and flourishing babes like ours. That, however, is only a mercantile way of looking at the matter; but did any of my sons show poetical talent, of which, to my great satisfaction, there are no appearances, the first thing I should do would be to inculcate upon him the duty of cultivating some honorable profession, and qualifying himself to play a more respectable part in society than the mere poet. And as the best corollary of my doctrine, I would make him get your tale of The Patron by heart from beginning to end. It is curious enough that you should have republished The Village for the purpose of sending your young men to college, and I should have written The Lay of the Last Minstrel for the purpose of buying a new horse for the Volunteer Cavalry. I must now send this scrawl into town to get a frank, for, God knows, it is not worthy of postage. With the warmest wishes for your health, prosperity, and increase of fame--though it needs not--I remain most sincerely and affectionately yours, WALTER SCOTT.[12] The contrast of the two poets' epistolary styles is highly amusing; but I have introduced these specimens less on that account, than as marking the cordial confidence which a very little intercourse was sufficient to establish between men so different from each other in most of the habits of life. It will always be considered as one of the most pleasing peculiarities in Scott's history, that he was the friend of every great contemporary poet: Crabbe, as we shall see more largely in the sequel, was no exception to the rule: yet I could hardly name one of them who, manly principles and the cultivation of literature apart, had many points of resemblance to him; and surely not one who had fewer than Crabbe. Scott continued, this year, his care for the Edinburgh Annual Register--the historical department of which was again supplied by Mr. Southey. The poetical miscellany owed its opening piece, the Ballad of Polydore, to the readiness with which Scott entered into correspondence with its author, who sent it to him anonymously, with a letter which, like the verses, might well have excited much interest in his mind, even had it not concluded with stating the writer's age to be _fifteen_. Scott invited the youth to visit him in the country, was greatly pleased with the modesty of his manners and the originality of his conversation, and wrote to Joanna Baillie, that, "though not one of the crimps for the muses," he thought he could hardly be mistaken in believing that in the boyish author of Polydore he had discovered a true genius. When I mention the name of my friend William Howison of Clydegrove, it will be allowed that he prognosticated wisely. He continued to correspond with this young gentleman and his father, and gave both much advice, for which both were most grateful. There was inserted in the same volume a set of beautiful stanzas, inscribed to Scott by Mr. Wilson, under the title of The Magic Mirror, in which that enthusiastic young poet also bears a lofty and lasting testimony to the gentle kindness with which his earlier efforts had been encouraged by him whom he designates, for the first time, by what afterwards became one of his standing titles, that of The Great Magician. "Onwards a figure came, with stately brow, And, as he glanced upon the ruin'd pile A look of regal pride, 'Say, who art thou' (His countenance bright'ning with a scornful smile, He sternly cried), 'whose footsteps rash profane The wild romantic realm where I have willed to reign?' "But ere to these proud words I could reply, How changed that scornful face to soft and mild! A witching frenzy glitter'd in his eye, Harmless, withal, as that of playful child. And when once more the gracious vision spoke, I felt the voice familiar to mine ear; While many a faded dream of earth awoke, Connected strangely with that unknown seer, Who now stretch'd forth his arm, and on the sand A circle round me traced, as with magician's wand," etc. Scott's own chief contribution to this volume was a brief account of the Life and Poems (hitherto unpublished)[13] of Patrick Carey, whom he pronounces to have been not only as stout a Cavalier, but almost as good a poet as his contemporary Lovelace. That Essay was expanded, and prefixed to an edition of Carey's Trivial Poems and Triolets, which Scott published in 1820; but its circulation in either shape has been limited: and I believe I shall be gratifying the majority of my readers by here transcribing some paragraphs of his beautiful and highly characteristic introduction of this forgotten poet of the seventeenth century. "The present age has been so distinguished for research into poetical antiquities, that the discovery of an unknown bard is, in certain chosen literary circles, held as curious as an augmentation of the number of fixed stars would be esteemed by astronomers. It is true, these 'blessed twinklers of the night' are so far removed from us, that they afford no more light than serves barely to evince their existence to the curious investigator; and in like manner the pleasure derived from the revival of an obscure poet is rather in proportion to the rarity of his volume than to its merit; yet this pleasure is not inconsistent with reason and principle. We know by every day's experience the peculiar interest which the lapse of ages confers upon works of human art. The clumsy strength of the ancient castles, which, when raw from the hand of the builder, inferred only the oppressive power of the barons who reared them, is now broken by partial ruin into proper subjects for the poet or the painter; and as Mason has beautifully described the change, 'Time Has mouldered into beauty many a tower, Which, when it frowned with all its battlements, Was only terrible.' "The monastery, too, which was at first but a fantastic monument of the superstitious devotion of monarchs, or of the purple pride of fattened abbots, has gained by the silent influence of antiquity the power of impressing awe and devotion. Even the stains and weather-taints upon the battlements of such buildings add, like the scars of a veteran, to the affecting impression:-- 'For time has softened what was harsh when new, And now the stains are all of sober hue; The living stains which nature's hand alone, Profuse of life, pours forth upon the stone.'--_Crabbe._ "If such is the effect of Time in adding interest to the labors of the architect, if partial destruction is compensated by the additional interest of that which remains, can we deny his exerting a similar influence upon those subjects which are sought after by the bibliographer and poetical antiquary? The obscure poet, who is detected by their keen research, may indeed have possessed but a slender portion of that spirit which has buoyed up the works of distinguished contemporaries during the course of centuries, yet still his verses shall, in the lapse of time, acquire an interest, which they did not possess in the eyes of his own generation. The wrath of the critic, like that of the son of Ossian, flies from the foe that is low. Envy, base as she is, has one property of the lion, and cannot prey on carcases; she must drink the blood of a sentient victim, and tear the limbs that are yet warm with vital life. Faction, if the ancient has suffered her persecution, serves only to endear him to the recollection of posterity, whose generous compassion overpays him for the injuries he sustained while in life. And thus freed from the operation of all unfavorable prepossessions, his merit, if he can boast any, has more than fair credit with his readers. This, however, is but part of his advantages. The mere attribute of antiquity is of itself sufficient to interest the fancy by the lively and powerful train of associations which it awakens. Had the pyramids of Egypt, equally disagreeable in form and senseless as to utility, been the work of any living tyrant, with what feelings, save those of scorn and derision, could we have regarded such a waste of labor? But the sight, nay, the very mention of these wonderful monuments, is associated with the dark and sublime ideas which vary their tinge according to the favorite hue of our studies. The Christian divine recollects the land of banishment and of refuge; to the eyes of the historian's fancy, they excite the shades of Pharaohs and of Ptolemies, of Cheops and Merops, and Sesostris drawn in triumph by his sceptred slaves; the philosopher beholds the first rays of moral truth as they dawned on the hieroglyphic sculptures of Thebes and Memphis; and the poet sees the fires of magic blazing upon the mystic altars of a land of incantation. Nor is the grandeur of size essential to such feelings, any more than the properties of grace and utility. Even the rudest remnant of a feudal tower, even the obscure and almost indistinguishable vestige of an altogether unknown edifice, has power to awaken such trains of fancy. We have a fellow interest with the 'son of the winged days,' over whose fallen habitation we tread:-- 'The massy stones, though hewn most roughly, show The hand of man had once at least been there.'--_Wordsworth._ "Similar combinations give a great part of the delight we receive from ancient poetry. In the rude song of the Scald, we regard less the strained imagery and extravagance of epithet, than the wild impressions which it conveys of the dauntless resolution, savage superstition, rude festivity, and ceaseless depredation of the ancient Scandinavians. In the metrical romance, we pardon the long, tedious, and bald enumeration of trifling particulars; the reiterated sameness of the eternal combats between knights and giants; the overpowering languor of the love speeches, and the merciless length and similarity of description--when Fancy whispers to us that such strains may have cheered the sleepless pillow of the Black Prince on the memorable eves of Cressy or Poictiers. There is a certain romance of Ferumbras, which Robert the Bruce read to his few followers, to divert their thoughts from the desperate circumstances in which they were placed, after an unsuccessful attempt to rise against the English. Is there a true Scotsman who, being aware of this anecdote, would be disposed to yawn over the romance of Ferumbras? Or, on the contrary, would not the image of the dauntless hero, inflexible in defeat, beguiling the anxiety of his war-worn attendants by the lays of the minstrel, give to these rude lays themselves an interest beyond Greek and Roman fame?" The year 1812 had the usual share of minor literary labors--such as contributions to the journals; and before it closed, the Romance of Rokeby was finished. Though it had been long in hand, the MS. sent to the printer bears abundant evidence of its being the _prima cura_: three cantos at least reached Ballantyne through the Melrose post--written on paper of various sorts and sizes--full of blots and interlineations--the closing couplets of a despatch now and then encircling the page, and mutilated by the breaking of the seal. According to the recollection of Mr. Cadell, though James Ballantyne read the poem, as the sheets were advancing through the press, to his usual circle of literary _dilettanti_, their whispers were far from exciting in Edinburgh such an intensity of expectation as had been witnessed in the case of The Lady of the Lake. He adds, however, that it was looked for with undiminished anxiety in the south. "Send me _Rokeby_," Byron writes to Murray on seeing it advertised,--"Who the devil is he? No matter--he has good connections, and will be well introduced."[14] Such, I suppose, was the general feeling in London. I well remember, being in those days a young student at Oxford, how the booksellers' shops there were beleaguered for the earliest copies, and how he that had been so fortunate as to secure one was followed to his chambers by a tribe of friends, all as eager to hear it read as ever horse-jockeys were to see the conclusion of a match at Newmarket; and indeed not a few of those enthusiastic academics had bets depending on the issue of the struggle, which they considered the elder favorite as making, to keep his own ground against the fiery rivalry of Childe Harold. The poem was published a day or two before Scott returned to Edinburgh from Abbotsford, between which place and Mertoun he had divided his Christmas vacation. On the 9th and 10th of January, 1813, he thus addresses his friends at Sunning Hill and Hampstead:-- TO GEORGE ELLIS, ESQ. MY DEAR ELLIS,--I am sure you will place it to anything rather than want of kindness that I have been so long silent--so very long, indeed, that I am not quite sure whether the fault is on my side or yours--but, be it what it may, it can never, I am sure, be laid to forgetfulness in either. This comes to train you on to the merciful reception of a Tale of the Civil Wars; not political, however, but merely a pseudo-romance of pseudo-chivalry. I have converted a lusty buccaneer into a hero with some effect; but the worst of all my undertakings is, that my rogue always, in despite of me, turns out my hero. I know not how this should be. I am myself, as Hamlet says, "indifferent honest;" and my father, though an attorney (as you will call him), was one of the most honest men, as well as gentlemanlike, that ever breathed. I am sure I can bear witness to that--for if he had at all _smacked_, or _grown to_, like the son of Lancelot Gobbo, he might have left us all as rich as Croesus, besides having the pleasure of taking a fine primrose path himself, instead of squeezing himself through a tight gate and up a steep ascent, and leaving us the decent competence of an honest man's children. As to our more ancient pedigree, I should be loath to vouch for them. My grandfather was a horse-jockey and cattle-dealer, and made a fortune; my great-grandfather a Jacobite and traitor (as the times called him), and lost one; and after him intervened one or two half-starved lairds, who rode a lean horse, and were followed by leaner greyhounds; gathered with difficulty a hundred pounds from a hundred tenants; fought duels; cocked their hats,--and called themselves gentlemen. Then we come to the old Border times, cattle-driving, halters, and so forth, for which, in the matter of honesty, very little I suppose can be said--at least in modern acceptation of the word. Upon the whole, I am inclined to think it is owing to the earlier part of this inauspicious generation that I uniformly find myself in the same scrape in my fables, and that, in spite of the most obstinate determination to the contrary, the greatest rogue in my canvas always stands out as the most conspicuous and prominent figure. All this will be a riddle to you, unless you have received a certain packet, which the Ballantynes were to have sent under Freeling's or Croker's cover, so soon as they could get a copy done up. And now let me gratulate you upon the renovated vigor of your fine old friends the Russians. By the Lord, sir! it is most famous, this campaign of theirs. I was not one of the very sanguine persons who anticipated the actual capture of Buonaparte--a hope which rather proceeded from the ignorance of those who cannot conceive that military movements, upon a large scale, admit of such a force being accumulated upon any particular point as may, by abandonment of other considerations, always insure the escape of an individual. But I had no hope, in my time, of seeing the dry bones of the Continent so warm with life again, as this revivification of the Russians proves them to be. I look anxiously for the effect of these great events on Prussia, and even upon Saxony; for I think Boney will hardly trust himself again in Germany, now that he has been plainly shown, both in Spain and Russia, that protracted, stubborn, unaccommodating resistance will foil those grand exertions in the long run. All laud be to Lord Wellington, who first taught that great lesson. Charlotte is with me just now at this little scrub habitation, where we weary ourselves all day in looking at our projected improvements, and then slumber over the fire, I pretending to read, and she to work trout-nets, or cabbage-nets, or some such article. What is Canning about? Is there any chance of our getting him in? Surely Ministers cannot hope to do without him. Believe me, dear Ellis, ever truly yours, W. SCOTT. ABBOTSFORD, 9th January, 1813. TO MISS JOANNA BAILLIE. ABBOTSFORD, January 10, 1813. Your kind encouragement, my dear friend, has given me spirits to complete the lumbering quarto, which I hope has reached you by this time. I have gone on with my story _forth right_, without troubling myself excessively about the development of the plot and other critical matters-- "But shall we go mourn for that, my dear? The pale moon shines by night; And when we wander here and there, We then do go most right." I hope you will like Bertram to the end; he is a Caravaggio sketch, which, I may acknowledge to you--but tell it not in Gath--I rather pique myself upon; and he is within the keeping of Nature, though critics will say to the contrary. It may be difficult to fancy that any one should take a sort of pleasure in bringing out such a character, but I suppose it is partly owing to bad reading, and ill-directed reading, when I was young. No sooner had I corrected the last sheet of Rokeby, than I escaped to this Patmos as blithe as bird on tree, and have been ever since most decidedly idle--that is to say, with busy idleness. I have been banking, and securing, and diking against the river, and planting willows, and aspens, and weeping-birches, around my new old well, which I think I told you I had constructed last summer. I have now laid the foundations of a famous background of copse, with pendent trees in front; and I have only to beg a few years to see how my colors will come out of the canvas. Alas, who can promise that? But somebody will take my place--and enjoy them, whether I do or no. My old friend and pastor, Principal Robertson (the historian), when he was not expected to survive many weeks, still watched the setting of the blossom upon some fruit-trees in the garden with as much interest as if it was possible he could have seen the fruit come to maturity, and moralized on his own conduct, by observing that we act upon the same inconsistent motive throughout life. It is well we do so for those that are to come after us. I could almost dislike the man who refuses to plant walnut-trees, because they do not bear fruit till the second generation; and so--many thanks to our ancestors, and much joy to our successors, and truce to my fine and very new strain of morality. Yours ever, W. S. The following letter lets us completely behind the scenes at the publication of Rokeby. The "horrid story" it alludes to was that of a young woman found murdered on New Year's Day in the highway between Greta Bridge and Barnard Castle--a crime, the perpetrator of which was never discovered. The account of a parallel atrocity in Galloway, and the mode of its detection, will show the reader from what source Scott drew one of the most striking incidents in his Guy Mannering:-- TO J. B. S. MORRITT, ESQ., ROKEBY PARK. EDINBURGH, 12th January, 1813. DEAR MORRITT,--Yours I have just received in mine office at the Register-House, which will excuse this queer sheet of paper. The publication of Rokeby was delayed till Monday, to give the London publishers a fair start. My copies, that is, my friends', were all to be got off about Friday or Saturday; but yours may have been a little later, as it was to be what they call a picked one. I will call at Ballantyne's as I return from this place, and close the letter with such news as I can get about it there. The book has gone off here very bobbishly, for the impression of 3000 and upwards is within two or three score of being exhausted, and the demand for these continuing faster than they can be boarded. I am heartily glad of this, for now I have nothing to fear but a bankruptcy in the Gazette of Parnassus; but the loss of five or six thousand pounds to my good friends and school-companions would have afflicted me very much. I wish we could whistle you here to-day. Ballantyne always gives a christening dinner, at which the Duke of Buccleuch, and a great many of my friends, are formally feasted. He has always the best singing that can be heard in Edinburgh, and we have usually a very pleasant party, at which your health as patron and proprietor of Rokeby will be faithfully and honorably remembered. Your horrid story reminds me of one in Galloway, where the perpetrator of a similar enormity on a poor idiot girl was discovered by means of the print of his foot which he left upon the clay floor of the cottage in the death struggle. It pleased Heaven (for nothing short of a miracle could have done it) to enlighten the understanding of an old ram-headed sheriff, who was usually nicknamed Leather-head. The steps which he took to discover the murderer were most sagacious. As the poor girl was pregnant (for it was not a case of violation), it was pretty clear that her paramour had done the deed, and equally so that he must be a native of the district. The sheriff caused the minister to advertise from the pulpit that the girl would be buried on a particular day, and that all persons in the neighborhood were invited to attend the funeral, to show their detestation of such an enormous crime, as well as to evince their own innocence. This was sure to bring the murderer to the funeral. When the people were assembled in the kirk, the doors were locked by the sheriff's order, and the shoes of all the men were examined; that of the murderer was detected by the measure of the foot, tread, etc., and a peculiarity in the mode in which the sole of one of them had been patched. The remainder of the curious chain of evidence upon which he was convicted will suit best with twilight, or a blinking candle, being too long for a letter. The fellow bore a most excellent character, and had committed this crime for no other reason that could be alleged, than that, having been led accidentally into an intrigue with this poor wretch, his pride revolted at the ridicule which was likely to attend the discovery. On calling at Ballantyne's, I find, as I had anticipated, that your copy, being of royal size, requires some particular nicety in hot-pressing. It will be sent by the Carlisle mail _quam primum_.--Ever yours, WALTER SCOTT. P. S.--Love to Mrs. Morritt. John Ballantyne says he has just about eighty copies left, out of 3250, this being the second day of publication, and the book a two-guinea one. It will surprise no one to hear that Mr. Morritt assured his friend he considered Rokeby as the best of all his poems. The admirable, perhaps the unique fidelity of the local descriptions, might alone have swayed, for I will not say it perverted, the judgment of the lord of that beautiful and thenceforth classical domain; and, indeed, I must admit that I never understood or appreciated half the charm of this poem until I had become familiar with its scenery. But Scott himself had not designed to rest his strength on these descriptions. He said to James Ballantyne while the work was in progress (September 2), "I hope the thing will do, chiefly because the world will not expect from _me_ a poem of which the interest turns upon _character_;" and in another letter (October 28, 1812), "I think you will see the same sort of difference taken in all my former poems,--of which I would say, if it is fair for me to say anything, that the force in the Lay is thrown on style--in Marmion, on description--and in The Lady of the Lake, on incident."[15] I suspect some of these distinctions may have been matters of afterthought; but as to Rokeby, there can be no mistake. His own original conceptions of some of its principal characters have been explained in letters already cited; and I believe no one who compares the poem with his novels will doubt that, had he undertaken their portraiture in prose, they would have come forth with effect hardly inferior to any of all the groups he ever created. As it is, I question whether even in his prose there is anything more exquisitely wrought out, as well as fancied, than the whole contrast of the two rivals for the love of the heroine in Rokeby; and that heroine herself, too, has a very particular interest attached to her. Writing to Miss Edgeworth five years after this time (10th May, 1818), he says, "I have not read one of my poems since they were printed, excepting last year The Lady of the Lake, which I liked better than I expected, but not well enough to induce me to go through the rest--so I may truly say with Macbeth-- 'I am afraid to think what I have done-- Look on 't again I dare not.' "This much of _Matilda_ I recollect--(for that is not so easily forgotten)--that she was attempted for the existing person of a lady who is now no more, so that I am particularly flattered with your distinguishing it from the others, which are in general mere shadows."[16] I can have no doubt that the lady he here alludes to was the object of his own unfortunate first love; and as little, that in the romantic generosity, both of the youthful poet who fails to win her higher favor, and of his chivalrous competitor, we have before us something more than "a mere shadow." In spite of these graceful characters, the inimitable scenery on which they are presented, and the splendid vivacity and thrilling interest of several chapters in the story--such as the opening interview of Bertram and Wycliffe--the flight up the cliff on the Greta--the first entrance of the cave at Brignall--the firing of Rokeby Castle--and the catastrophe in Eglistone Abbey;--in spite certainly of exquisitely happy lines profusely scattered throughout the whole composition, and of some detached images--that of the setting of the tropical sun,[17] for example--which were never surpassed by any poet; in spite of all these merits, the immediate success of Rokeby was greatly inferior to that of The Lady of the Lake; nor has it ever since been so much a favorite with the public at large as any other of his poetical romances. He ascribes this failure, in his Introduction of 1830, partly to the radically unpoetical character of the Roundheads; but surely their character has its poetical side also, had his prejudices allowed him to enter upon its study with impartial sympathy; and I doubt not, Mr. Morritt suggested the difficulty on this score, when the outline of the story was as yet undetermined, from consideration rather of the poet's peculiar feelings, and powers as hitherto exhibited, than of the subject absolutely. Partly he blames the satiety of the public ear, which had had so much of his rhythm, not only from himself, but from dozens of mocking-birds, male and female, all more or less applauded in their day, and now all equally forgotten.[18] This circumstance, too, had probably no slender effect; the more that, in defiance of all the hints of his friends, he now, in his narrative, repeated (with more negligence) the uniform octosyllabic couplets of The Lady of the Lake, instead of recurring to the more varied cadence of the Lay or Marmion. It is fair to add that, among the London circles at least, some sarcastic flings in Mr. Moore's Twopenny Post Bag must have had an unfavorable influence on this occasion.[19] But the cause of failure which the poet himself places last was unquestionably the main one. The deeper and darker passion of Childe Harold, the audacity of its morbid voluptuousness, and the melancholy majesty of the numbers in which it defied the world, had taken the general imagination by storm; and Rokeby, with many beauties and some sublimities, was pitched, as a whole, on a key which seemed tame in the comparison. I have already adverted to the fact that Scott felt it a relief, not a fatigue, to compose The Bridal of Triermain _pari passu_ with Rokeby. In answer, for example, to one of James Ballantyne's letters, urging accelerated speed with the weightier romance, he says, "I fully share in your anxiety to get forward the grand work; but, I assure you, I feel the more confidence from coquetting with the guerilla." The quarto of Rokeby was followed, within two months, by the small volume which had been designed for a twin birth;--the MS. had been transcribed by one of the Ballantynes themselves, in order to guard against any indiscretion of the press-people; and the mystification, aided and abetted by Erskine, in no small degree heightened the interest of its reception. Except Mr. Morritt, Scott had, so far as I am aware, no English confidant upon this occasion. Whether any of his daily companions in the Parliament House were in the secret, I have never heard; but I can scarcely believe that any of those intimate friends, who had known him and Erskine from their youth upwards, could have for a moment believed the latter capable either of the invention or the execution of this airy and fascinating romance in little. Mr. Jeffrey, for whom chiefly "the trap had been set," was far too sagacious to be caught in it; but, as it happened, he made a voyage that year to America, and thus lost the opportunity of immediately expressing his opinion either of Rokeby or of The Bridal of Triermain. The writer in the Quarterly Review (July, 1813) seems to have been completely deceived. "We have already spoken of it," says the critic, "as an imitation of Mr. Scott's style of composition; and if we are compelled to make the general approbation more precise and specific, we should say, that if it be inferior in vigor to some of his productions, it equals or surpasses them in elegance and beauty; that it is more uniformly tender, and far less infected with the unnatural prodigies and coarseness of the earlier romances. In estimating its merits, however, we should forget that it is offered as an imitation. The diction undoubtedly reminds us of a rhythm and cadence we have heard before; but the sentiments, descriptions, and characters, have qualities that are native and unborrowed." If this writer was, as I suppose, Ellis, he probably considered it as a thing impossible that Scott should have engaged in such a scheme without giving him a hint of it; but to have admitted into the secret any one who was likely to criticise the piece, would have been to sacrifice the very object of the device. Erskine's own suggestion, that "perhaps a quizzical review might be got up," led, I believe, to nothing more important than a paragraph in one of the Edinburgh newspapers. He may be pardoned for having been not a little flattered to find it generally considered as not impossible that he should have written such a poem; and I have heard James Ballantyne say that nothing could be more amusing than the style of his coquetting on the subject while it was yet fresh; but when this first excitement was over, his natural feeling of what was due to himself, as well as to his friend, dictated many a remonstrance; and, though he ultimately acquiesced in permitting another minor romance to be put forth in the same manner, he did so reluctantly, and was far from acting his part so well. Scott says, in the Introduction to The Lord of the Isles, "As Mr. Erskine was more than suspected of a taste for poetry, and as I took care, in several places, to mix something that might resemble (as far as was in my power) my friend's feeling and manner, the train easily caught, and two large editions were sold." Among the passages to which he here alludes are no doubt those in which the character of the minstrel Arthur is shaded with the colorings of an almost effeminate gentleness. Yet, in the midst of them, the "mighty minstrel" himself, from time to time, escapes; as, for instance, where the lover bids Lucy, in that exquisite picture of crossing a mountain stream, trust to his "stalwart arm"-- "Which could yon oak's prone trunk uprear." Nor can I pass the compliment to Scott's own fair patroness, where Lucy's admirer is made to confess, with some momentary lapse of gallantry, that he "Ne'er won--best meed to minstrel true-- One favoring smile from fair Buccleuch;" nor the burst of genuine Borderism,-- "Bewcastle now must keep the hold, Speir-Adam's steeds must bide in stall, Of Hartley-burn the bowmen bold Must only shoot from battled wall; And Liddesdale may buckle spur, And Teviot now may belt the brand, Tarras and Ewes keep nightly stir, And Eskdale foray Cumberland." But, above all, the choice of the scenery, both of the Introductions and of the story itself, reveals the early and treasured predilections of the poet. For who that remembers the circumstances of his first visit to the vale of St. John, but must see throughout the impress of his own real romance? I own I am not without a suspicion that, in one passage, which always seemed to me a blot upon the composition--that in which Arthur derides the military coxcombries of his rival-- "Who comes in foreign trashery Of tinkling chain and spur, A walking haberdashery Of feathers, lace, and fur; In Rowley's antiquated phrase, Horse-milliner of modern days"-- there is a sly reference to the incidents of a certain ball, of August, 1797, at the Gilsland Spa.[20] Among the more prominent Erskinisms, are the eulogistic mention of Glasgow, the scene of Erskine's education; and the lines on Collins--a supplement to whose Ode on the Highland Superstitions is, as far as I know, the only specimen that ever was published of Erskine's verse.[21] As a whole, The Bridal of Triermain appears to me as characteristic of Scott as any of his larger poems. His genius pervades and animates it beneath a thin and playful veil, which perhaps adds as much of grace as it takes away of splendor. As Wordsworth says of the eclipse on the lake of Lugano-- "'T is sunlight sheathed and gently charmed;" and I think there is at once a lightness and a polish of versification beyond what he has elsewhere attained. If it be a miniature, it is such a one as a Cooper might have hung fearlessly beside the masterpieces of Vandyke. The Introductions contain some of the most exquisite passages he ever produced; but their general effect has always struck me as unfortunate. No art can reconcile us to contemptuous satire of the merest frivolities of modern life--some of them already, in twenty years, grown obsolete--interlaid between such bright visions of the old world of romance, when "Strength was gigantic, valor high, And wisdom soared beyond the sky, And beauty had such matchless beam As lights not now a lover's dream." The fall is grievous, from the hoary minstrel of Newark, and his feverish tears on Killiecrankie, to a pathetic swain, who can stoop to denounce as objects of his jealousy-- "The landaulet and four blood bays-- The Hessian boot and pantaloon." Before Triermain came out, Scott had taken wing for Abbotsford; and indeed he seems to have so contrived it in his earlier period, that he should not be in Edinburgh when any unavowed work of his was published; whereas, from the first, in the case of books that bore his name on the title-page, he walked as usual to the Parliament House, and bore all the buzz and tattle of friends and acquaintance with an air of good-humored equanimity, or rather total apparent indifference. The following letter, which contains some curious matter of more kinds than one, was written partly in town and partly in the country:-- TO MISS JOANNA BAILLIE, HAMPSTEAD. EDINBURGH, March 13, 1813. MY DEAREST FRIEND,--The pinasters have arrived safe, and I can hardly regret, while I am so much flattered by, the trouble you have had in collecting them. I have got some wild larch-trees from Loch Katrine, and both are to be planted next week, when, God willing, I shall be at Abbotsford to superintend the operation. I have got a little corner of ground laid out for a nursery, where I shall rear them carefully till they are old enough to be set forth to push their fortune on the banks of Tweed.--What I shall finally make of this villa-work I don't know, but in the mean time it is very entertaining. I shall have to resist very flattering invitations this season; for I have received hints, from more quarters than one, that my bow would be acceptable at Carlton House in case I should be in London, which is very flattering, especially as there were some prejudices to be got over in that quarter. I should be in some danger of giving new offence, too; for, although I utterly disapprove of the present rash and ill-advised course of the princess, yet, as she always was most kind and civil to me, I certainly could not, as a gentleman, decline obeying any commands she might give me to wait upon her, especially in her present adversity. So, though I do not affect to say I should be sorry to take an opportunity of peeping at the splendors of royalty, prudence and economy will keep me quietly at home till another day. My great amusement here this some time past has been going almost nightly to see John Kemble, who certainly is a great artist. It is a pity he shows too much of his machinery. I wish he could be double-capped, as they say of watches;--but the fault of too much study certainly does not belong to many of his tribe. He is, I think, very great in those parts especially where character is tinged by some acquired and systematic habits, like those of the Stoic philosophy in Cato and Brutus, or of misanthropy in Penruddock; but sudden turns and natural bursts of passion are not his forte. I saw him play Sir Giles Overreach (the Richard III. of middling life) last night; but he came not within a hundred miles of Cooke, whose terrible visage, and short, abrupt, and savage utterance, gave a reality almost to that extraordinary scene in which he boasts of his own successful villainy to a nobleman of worth and honor, of whose alliance he is ambitious. Cooke contrived somehow to impress upon the audience the idea of such a monster of enormity as had learned to pique himself even upon his own atrocious character. But Kemble was too handsome, too plausible, and too smooth, to admit its being probable that he should be blind to the unfavorable impression which these extraordinary vaunts are likely to make on the person whom he is so anxious to conciliate. ABBOTSFORD, 21st March. This letter, begun in Edinburgh, is to take wing from Abbotsford. John Winnos (now John Winnos is the sub-oracle of Abbotsford, the principal being Tom Purdie)--John Winnos pronounces that the pinaster seed ought to be raised at first on a hot-bed, and thence transplanted to a nursery; so to a hot-bed they have been carefully consigned, the upper oracle not objecting, in respect his talent lies in catching a salmon, or finding a hare sitting--on which occasions (being a very complete Scrub) he solemnly exchanges his working jacket for an old green one of mine, and takes the air of one of Robin Hood's followers. His more serious employments are ploughing, harrowing, and overseeing all my premises; being a complete Jack-of-all-trades, from the carpenter to the shepherd, nothing comes strange to him; and being extremely honest, and somewhat of a humorist, he is quite my right hand. I cannot help singing his praises at this moment, because I have so many odd and out-of-the-way things to do, that I believe the conscience of many of our jog-trot countrymen would revolt at being made my instrument in sacrificing good corn-land to the visions of Mr. Price's theory. Mr. Pinkerton, the historian, has a play coming out at Edinburgh; it is by no means bad poetry, yet I think it will not be popular; the people come and go, and speak very notable things in good blank verse, but there is no very strong interest excited; the plot also is disagreeable, and liable to the objections (though in a less degree) which have been urged against the Mysterious Mother; it is to be acted on Wednesday; I will let you know its fate. P., with whom I am in good habits, showed the MS., but I referred him, with such praise as I could conscientiously bestow, to the players and the public. I don't know why one should take the task of damning a man's play out of the hands of the proper tribunal. Adieu, my dear friend. I have scarce room for love to Miss, Mrs., and Dr. B. W. SCOTT. To this I add a letter to Lady Louisa Stuart, who had sent him a copy of these lines, found by Lady Douglas on the back of a tattered bank-note:-- "Farewell, my note, and wheresoe'er ye wend, Shun gaudy scenes, and be the poor man's friend. You've left a poor one; go to one as poor, And drive despair and hunger from his door." It appears that these noble friends had adopted, or feigned to adopt, the belief that The Bridal of Triermain was a production of Mr. R. P. Gillies--who had about this time published an imitation of Lord Byron's Romaunt, under the title of Childe Alarique. TO THE LADY LOUISA STUART, BOTHWELL CASTLE. ABBOTSFORD, 28th April, 1813. DEAR LADY LOUISA,--Nothing can give me more pleasure than to hear from you, because it is both a most acceptable favor to me, and also a sign that your own spirits are recovering their tone. Ladies are, I think, very fortunate in having a resource in work at a time when the mind rejects intellectual amusement. Men have no resource but striding up and down the room, like a bird that beats itself to pieces against the bars of its cage; whereas needle-work is a sort of sedative, too mechanical to worry the mind by distracting it from the points on which its musings turn, yet gradually assisting it in regaining steadiness and composure; for so curiously are our bodies and minds linked together, that the regular and constant employment of the former on any process, however dull and uniform, has the effect of tranquillizing, where it cannot disarm, the feelings of the other. I am very much pleased with the lines on the guinea note, and if Lady Douglas does not object, I would willingly mention the circumstance in the Edinburgh Annual Register. I think it will give the author great delight to know that his lines had attracted attention, and _had_ sent the paper on which they were recorded, "heaven-directed, to the poor." Of course I would mention no names. There was, as your Ladyship may remember, some years since, a most audacious and determined murder committed on a porter belonging to the British Linen Company's Bank at Leith, who was stabbed to the heart in broad daylight, and robbed of a large sum in notes.[22] If ever this crime comes to light, it will be through the circumstance of an idle young fellow having written part of a playhouse song on one of the notes, which, however, has as yet never appeared in circulation. I am very glad you like Rokeby, which is nearly out of fashion and memory with me. It has been wonderfully popular, about ten thousand copies having walked off already, in about three months, and the demand continuing faster than it can be supplied. As to my imitator, the Knight of Triermain, I will endeavor to convey to Mr. Gillies (_puisque Gillies il est_) your Ladyship's very just strictures on the Introduction to the second Canto. But if he takes the opinion of a hacked old author like myself, he will content himself with avoiding such bevues in future, without attempting to mend those which are already made. There is an ominous old proverb which says, _Confess and be hanged_; and truly if an author acknowledges his own blunders, I do not know who he can expect to stand by him; whereas, let him confess nothing, and he will always find some injudicious admirers to vindicate even his faults. So that I think after publication the effect of criticism should be prospective, in which point of view I dare say Mr. G. will take your friendly hint, especially as it is confirmed by that of the best judges who have read the poem.--Here is beautiful weather for April! an absolute snow-storm mortifying me to the core by retarding the growth of all my young trees and shrubs.--Charlotte begs to be most respectfully remembered to your Ladyship and Lady D. We are realizing the nursery tale of the man and his wife who lived in a vinegar bottle, for our only sitting-room is just twelve feet square, and my Eve alleges that I am too big for our paradise. To make amends, I have created a tolerable garden, occupying about an English acre, which I begin to be very fond of. When one passes forty, an addition to the quiet occupations of life becomes of real value, for I do not hunt and fish with quite the relish I did ten years ago. Adieu, my dear Lady Louisa, and all good attend you. WALTER SCOTT. Footnotes of the Chapter XXV. [1: The epitaph of this favorite greyhound may be seen on the edge of the bank, a little way below the house of Abbotsford.] [2: The Reverend Alexander Dyce says, "N. T. stands for _Nathaniel Thompson_, the Tory bookseller, who published these _Loyal Poems_."--(1839.)] [3: An edition of the British Dramatists had, I believe, been projected by Mr. Terry.] [4: Mr. Thomson died 8th January, 1838, before the publication of the first edition of these Memoirs had been completed.--(1839.)] [5: _Reminiscences of Sir Walter Scott_, p. 56.] [6: [From a passage in a letter to Lady Abercorn, written September 10, 1818, on the return from a similar journey (see _Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 24), it seems probable that some at least of the incidents of this visit belong to that of the later date.]] [7: This alluded to a ridiculous hunter of lions, who, being met by Mr. Morritt in the grounds at Rokeby, disclaimed all taste for picturesque beauties, but overwhelmed their owner with Homeric Greek; of which he had told Scott.] [8: _Burnfoot_ is the name of a farmhouse on the Buccleuch estate, not far from Langholm, where the late Sir John Malcolm and his distinguished brothers were born. Their grandfather had, I believe, found refuge there after forfeiting a good estate and an ancient baronetcy in the _affair_ of 1715. A monument to the gallant General's memory has recently been erected near the spot of his birth.] [9: _3d King Henry VI._ Act I. Scene 4.] [10: See _Life of Dryden_, Scott's _Miscellaneous Prose Works_, vol. i. p. 293.] [11: _Much Ado about Nothing_, Act IV. Scene 2.] [12: Several of these letters having been enclosed in franked covers, which have perished, I am unable to affix the exact dates to them.] [13: The Rev. Alexander Dyce informs me that _nine_ of Carey's pieces were printed in 1771, for J. Murray of Fleet Street, in a quarto of thirty-five pages, entitled _Poems from a MS. written in the time of Oliver Cromwell_. This rare tract had never fallen into Scott's hands.--(1839.)] [14: Byron's _Life and Works_, vol. ii. p. 169.] [15: Several letters to Ballantyne on the same subject are quoted in the notes to the last edition of _Rokeby_. See Scott's _Poetical Works_, 1834, vol. ix. pp. 1-3; and especially the note on p. 300, from which it appears that the closing stanza was added, in deference to Ballantyne and Erskine, though the author retained his own opinion that "it spoiled one effect without producing another."] [16: [See _Familiar Letters_, vol. ii. p. 16.]] [17: "My noontide, India may declare; Like her fierce sun, I fired the air! Like him, to wood and cave bid fly Her natives, from mine angry eye. And now, my race of terror ran, Mine be the eye of tropic sun! No pale gradations quench his ray, No twilight dews his wrath allay; With disk like battle-target red, He rushes to his burning bed. Dyes the wide wave with bloody light, Then sinks at once--and all is night."--_Canto_ vi. 21.] [18: "Scott found peculiar favor and imitation among the fair sex. There was Miss Holford, and Miss Mitford, and Miss Francis; but, with the greatest respect be it spoken, none of his imitators did much honor to the original except Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, until the appearance of _The Bridal of Triermain_ and _Harold the Dauntless_, which, in the opinion of some, equalled if not surpassed him; and, lo! after three or four years, they turned out to be the master's own compositions."--Byron, vol. xv. p. 96.] [19: See, for instance, the Epistle of Lady Corke--or that of Messrs. Lackington, booksellers, to one of their dandy authors,-- "Should you feel any touch of _poetical_ glow, We've a scheme to suggest--Mr. Scott, you must know (Who, we're sorry to say it, now works for the _Row_), Having quitted the Borders to seek new renown, Is coming by long Quarto stages to town, And beginning with Rokeby (the job's sure to pay), Means to do all the gentlemen's seats on the way. Now the scheme is, though none of our hackneys can beat him, To start a new Poet through Highgate to meet him; Who by means of quick proofs--no revises--long coaches-- May do a few Villas before Scott approaches; Indeed if our Pegasus be not curst shabby, He'll reach, without foundering, at least Woburn-Abbey," etc., etc.] [20: See _ante_, vol. i. p. 246.] [21: It is included in the _Border Minstrelsy_, vol. i. p. 270.] [22: This murder, perpetrated in November, 1806, remains a mystery in 1836. The porter's name was Begbie. [See _Familiar Letters_, vol. i. p. 63.]] CHAPTER XXVI AFFAIRS OF JOHN BALLANTYNE AND CO. -- CAUSES OF THEIR DERANGEMENT. --LETTERS OF SCOTT TO HIS PARTNERS. -- NEGOTIATION FOR RELIEF WITH MESSRS. CONSTABLE. -- NEW PURCHASE OF LAND AT ABBOTSFORD. --EMBARRASSMENTS CONTINUED. -- JOHN BALLANTYNE'S EXPRESSES. --DRUMLANRIG, PENRITH, ETC. -- SCOTT'S MEETING WITH THE MARQUIS OF ABERCORN AT LONGTOWN. -- HIS APPLICATION TO THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH. --OFFER OF THE POET-LAUREATESHIP, -- CONSIDERED, -- AND DECLINED. --ADDRESS OF THE CITY OF EDINBURGH TO THE PRINCE REGENT. -- ITS RECEPTION. -- CIVIC HONORS CONFERRED ON SCOTT. -- QUESTION OF TAXATION ON LITERARY INCOME. -- LETTERS TO MR. MORRITT, MR. SOUTHEY, MR. RICHARDSON, MR. CRABBE, MISS BAILLIE, AND LORD BYRON 1813 About a month after the publication of The Bridal of Triermain, the affairs of the Messrs. Ballantyne, which had never apparently been in good order since the establishment of the bookselling firm, became so embarrassed as to call for Scott's most anxious efforts to disentangle them. Indeed, it is clear that there had existed some very serious perplexity in the course of the preceding autumn; for Scott writes to John Ballantyne, while Rokeby was in progress (August 11, 1812),--"I have a letter from James, very anxious about your health and state of spirits. If you suffer the present inconveniences to depress you too much, you are wrong; and if you conceal any part of them, are very unjust to us all. I am always ready to make any sacrifices to do justice to engagements, and would rather sell anything, or everything, than be less than true men to the world." [Illustration: ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE _From the painting by Raeburn_] I have already, perhaps, said enough to account for the general want of success in this publishing adventure; but Mr. James Ballantyne sums up the case so briefly in his deathbed paper, that I may here quote his words. "My brother," he says, "though an active and pushing, was not a cautious bookseller, and the large sums received never formed an addition to stock. In fact, they were all expended by the partners, who, being then young and sanguine men, not unwillingly adopted my brother's hasty results. By May, 1813, in a word, the absolute throwing away of our own most valuable publications, and the rash adoption of some injudicious speculations of Mr. Scott, had introduced such losses and embarrassments, that after a very careful consideration, Mr. Scott determined to dissolve the concern." He adds: "This became a matter of less difficulty, because time had in a great measure worn away the differences between Mr. Scott and Mr. Constable, and Mr. Hunter was now out of Constable's concern.[23] A peace, therefore, was speedily made up, and the old habits of intercourse were restored." How reluctantly Scott had made up his mind to open such a negotiation with Constable, as involved a complete exposure of the mismanagement of John Ballantyne's business as a publisher, will appear from a letter dated about the Christmas of 1812, in which he says to James, who had proposed asking Constable to take a share both in Rokeby and in the Annual Register, "You must be aware, that in stating the objections which occur to me to taking in Constable, I think they ought to give way either to absolute necessity or to very strong grounds of advantage. But I _am_ persuaded nothing ultimately good can be expected from any connection with that house, unless for those who have a mind to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. We will talk the matter coolly over, and, in the mean while, perhaps you could see W. Erskine, and learn what impression this odd union is like to make among your friends. Erskine is sound-headed, and quite to be trusted with _your whole story_. I must own I can hardly think the purchase of the Register is equal to the loss of credit and character which your surrender will be conceived to infer." At the time when he wrote this, Scott no doubt anticipated that Rokeby would have success not less decisive than The Lady of the Lake; but in this expectation--though 10,000 copies in three months would have seemed to any other author a triumphant sale--he had been disappointed. And meanwhile the difficulties of the firm, accumulating from week to week, had reached, by the middle of May, a point which rendered it absolutely necessary for him to conquer all his scruples. Mr. Cadell, then Constable's partner, says in his _Memoranda_,--"Prior to this time the reputation of John Ballantyne and Co. had been decidedly on the decline. It was notorious in the trade that their general speculations had been unsuccessful; they were known to be grievously in want of money. These rumors were realized to the full by an application which Messrs. B. made to Mr. Constable in May, 1813, for pecuniary aid, accompanied by an offer of some of the books they had published since 1809, as a purchase, along with various shares in Mr. Scott's own poems. Their difficulties were admitted, and the negotiation was pressed urgently; so much so, that a pledge was given, that if the terms asked were acceded to, John Ballantyne and Co. would endeavor to wind up their concerns, and cease as soon as possible to be publishers." Mr. Cadell adds: "I need hardly remind you that this was a period of very great general difficulty in the money market. It was the crisis of the war. The public expenditure had reached an enormous height; and even the most prosperous mercantile houses were often pinched to sustain their credit. It may easily, therefore, be supposed that the Messrs. Ballantyne had during many months besieged every banker's door in Edinburgh, and that their agents had done the like in London." The most important of the requests which the laboring house made to Constable was that he should forthwith take entirely to himself the stock, copyright, and future management of the Edinburgh Annual Register. Upon examining the state of this book, however, Constable found that the loss on it had never been less than £1000 per annum, and he therefore declined that matter for the present. He promised, however, to consider seriously the means he might have of ultimately relieving them from the pressure of the Register, and, in the mean time, offered to take 300 sets of the stock on hand. The other purchases he finally made on the 18th of May were considerable portions of Weber's unhappy Beaumont and Fletcher--of an edition of De Foe's novels in twelve volumes--of a collection entitled Tales of the East in three large volumes, 8vo, double-columned--and of another in one volume, called Popular Tales--about 800 copies of The Vision of Don Roderick--and a fourth of the remaining copyright of Rokeby, price £700. The immediate accommodation thus received amounted to £2000; and Scott, who had personally conducted the latter part of the negotiation, writes thus to his junior partner, who had gone a week or two earlier to London in quest of some similar assistance there:-- TO MR. JOHN BALLANTYNE, CARE OF MESSRS. LONGMAN & CO., LONDON. PRINTING-OFFICE, May 18, 1813. DEAR JOHN,--After many _offs_ and _ons_, and as many _projets_ and _contre-projets_ as the treaty of Amiens, I have at length concluded a treaty with Constable, in which I am sensible he has gained a great advantage;[24] but what could I do amidst the disorder and pressure of so many demands? The arrival of your long-dated bills decided my giving in, for what could James or I do with them? I trust this sacrifice has cleared our way, but many rubs remain; nor am I, after these hard skirmishes, so able to meet them by my proper credit. Constable, however, will be a zealous ally; and for the first time these many weeks I shall lay my head on a quiet pillow, for now I do think that, by our joint exertions, we shall get well through the storm, save Beaumont from depreciation, get a partner in our heavy concerns, reef our topsails, and move on securely under an easy sail. And if, on the one hand, I have sold my gold too cheap, I have, on the other, turned my lead to gold. Brewster[25] and Singers[26] are the only heavy things to which I have not given a blue eye. Had your news of Cadell's sale[27] reached us here, I could not have harpooned my grampus so deeply as I have done, as nothing but Rokeby would have barbed the hook. Adieu, my dear John. I have the most sincere regard for you, and you may depend on my considering your interest with quite as much attention as my own. If I have ever expressed myself with irritation in speaking of this business, you must impute it to the sudden, extensive, and unexpected embarrassments in which I found myself involved all at once. If to your real goodness of heart and integrity, and to the quickness and acuteness of your talents, you added habits of more universal circumspection, and, above all, the courage to tell disagreeable truths to those whom you hold in regard, I pronounce that the world never held such a man of business. These it must be your study to add to your other good qualities. Meantime, as some one says to Swift, I love you with all your failings. Pray make an effort and love me with all mine. Yours truly, W. S. Three days afterwards Scott resumes the subject as follows:-- TO MR. JOHN BALLANTYNE, LONDON. EDINBURGH, 21st May, 1813. DEAR JOHN,--Let it never escape your recollection, that shutting your own eyes, or blinding those of your friends, upon the actual state of business, is the high road to ruin. Meanwhile, we have recovered our legs for a week or two. Constable will, I think, come in to the Register. He is most anxious to maintain the printing-office; he sees most truly that the more we print the less we publish; and for the same reason he will, I think, help us off with our heavy quire-stock. I was aware of the distinction between the _state_ and the _calendar_ as to the latter including the printing-office bills, and I summed and docked them (they are marked with red ink), but there is still a difference of £2000 and upwards on the calendar against the business. I sometimes fear that, between the long dates of your bills, and the tardy settlements of the Edinburgh trade, some difficulties will occur even in June; and July I always regard with deep anxiety. As for loss, if I get out without public exposure, I shall not greatly regard the rest. Radcliffe the physician said, when he lost £2000 on the South Sea scheme, it was only going up 2000 pair of stairs; I say, it is only writing 2000 couplets, and the account is balanced. More of this hereafter. Yours truly, W. SCOTT. P. S.--James has behaved very well during this whole transaction, and has been most steadily attentive to business. I am convinced that the more he works the better his health will be. One or other of you will need to be constantly in the printing-office henceforward,--it is the sheet-anchor. The allusion in this _postscript_ to James Ballantyne's health reminds me that Scott's letters to himself are full of hints on that subject, even from a very early period of their connection; and these hints are all to the same effect. James was a man of lazy habits, and not a little addicted to the more solid, and perhaps more dangerous, part of the indulgences of the table. One letter (dated Ashestiel, 1810) will be a sufficient specimen:-- TO MR. JAMES BALLANTYNE. MY DEAR JAMES,--I am very sorry for the state of your health, and should be still more so, were I not certain that I can prescribe for you as well as any physician in Edinburgh. You have naturally an athletic constitution and a hearty stomach, and these agree very ill with a sedentary life and the habits of indolence which it brings on. Your stomach thus gets weak; and from those complaints of all others arise most certainly flatulence, hypochondria, and all the train of unpleasant feelings connected with indigestion. We all know the horrible sensation of the nightmare arises from the same cause which gives those waking nightmares commonly called the blue devils. You must positively put yourself on a regimen as to eating, not for a month or two, but for a year at least, and take regular exercise--and my life for yours. I know this by myself, for if I were to eat and drink in town as I do here, it would soon finish me, and yet I am sensible I live too genially in Edinburgh as it is. Yours very truly, W. SCOTT. Among Scott's early pets at Abbotsford there was a huge raven, whose powers of speech were remarkable, far beyond any parrot's that he had ever met with; and who died in consequence of an excess of the kind to which James Ballantyne was addicted. Thenceforth, Scott often repeated to his old friend, and occasionally scribbled by way of postscript to his notes on business-- "When you are craving, Remember the Raven." Sometimes the formula is varied to-- "When you've dined half, Think on poor Ralph!" His preachments of regularity in book-keeping to John, and of abstinence from good cheer to James Ballantyne, were equally vain; but on the other hand it must be allowed that they had some reason for displeasure--(the more felt, because they durst not, like him, express their feelings)[28]--when they found that scarcely had these "hard skirmishes" terminated in the bargain of May 18, before Scott was preparing fresh embarrassments for himself, by commencing a negotiation for a considerable addition to his property at Abbotsford. As early as the 20th of June he writes to Constable as being already aware of this matter, and alleges his anxiety "to close at once with a very capricious person," as the only reason that could have induced him to make up his mind to sell the whole copyright of an as yet unwritten poem, to be entitled The Nameless Glen. This copyright he then offered to dispose of to Constable for £5000; adding, "this is considerably less in proportion than I have already made on the share of Rokeby sold to yourself, and surely that is no unfair admeasurement." A long correspondence ensued, in the course of which Scott mentions The Lord of the Isles, as a title which had suggested itself to him in place of The Nameless Glen; but as the negotiation did not succeed, I may pass its details. The new property which Scott was so eager to acquire was that hilly tract stretching from the old Roman road near Turn-again towards the Cauldshiels Loch: a then desolate and naked mountain-mere, which he likens, in a letter of this summer (to Lady Louisa Stuart), to the Lake of the Genie and the Fisherman in the Arabian Tale. To obtain this lake at one extremity of his estate, as a contrast to the Tweed at the other, was a prospect for which hardly any sacrifice would have appeared too much; and he contrived to gratify his wishes in the course of that July, to which he had spoken of himself in May as looking forward "with the deepest anxiety." Nor was he, I must add, more able to control some of his minor tastes. I find him writing to Mr. Terry, on the 20th of June, about "that splendid lot of ancient armor, advertised by Winstanley," a celebrated auctioneer in London, of which he had the strongest fancy to make his spoil, though he was at a loss to know where it should be placed when it reached Abbotsford; and on the 2d of July, this acquisition also having been settled, he says to the same correspondent: "I have written to Mr. Winstanley. My bargain with Constable was otherwise arranged, but Little John is to find the needful article, and I shall take care of Mr. Winstanley's interest, who has behaved too handsomely in this matter to be trusted to the mercy of our little friend the Picaroon, who is, notwithstanding his many excellent qualities, a little on the score of old Gobbo--doth somewhat smack--somewhat grow to.[29] We shall be at Abbotsford on the 12th, and hope soon to see you there. I am fitting up a small room above _Peter-House_, where an unceremonious bachelor may consent to do penance, though the place is a cock-loft, and the access that which leads many a bold fellow to his last nap--a ladder."[30] And a few weeks later, he says, in the same sort, to his sister-in-law, Mrs. Thomas Scott: "In despite of these hard times, which affect my patrons the booksellers very much, I am buying old books and old armor as usual, and adding to what your old friend Burns[31] calls-- 'A fouth of auld nick-nackets, Rusty airn caps and jingling jackets, Wad haud the Lothians three in tackets A towmont gude, And parritch-pats and auld saut-backets, Before the flude.'" Notwithstanding all this, it must have been with a most uneasy mind that he left Edinburgh to establish himself at Abbotsford that July. The assistance of Constable had not been granted, indeed it had not been asked, to an extent at all adequate for the difficulties of the case; and I have now to transcribe, with pain and reluctance, some extracts from Scott's letters, during the ensuing autumn, which speak the language of anxious, and, indeed, humiliating distress; and give a most lively notion of the incurable recklessness of his younger partner. TO MR. JOHN BALLANTYNE. ABBOTSFORD, Saturday, 24th July. DEAR JOHN,--I sent you the order, and have only to hope it arrived safe and in good time. I waked the boy at three o'clock myself, having slept little, less on account of the money than of the time. Surely you should have written, three or four days before, the probable amount of the deficit, and, as on former occasions, I would have furnished you with means of meeting it. These expresses, besides every other inconvenience, excite surprise in my family and in the neighborhood. I know no justifiable occasion for them but the unexpected return of a bill. I do not consider you as answerable for the success of plans, but I do and must hold you responsible for giving me, in distinct and plain terms, your opinion as to any difficulties which may occur, and that in such time that I may make arrangements to obviate them if possible. Of course, if anything has gone wrong you will come out here to-morrow. But if, as I hope and trust, the cash arrived safe, you will write to me, under cover to the Duke of Buccleuch, Drumlanrig Castle, Dumfries-shire. I shall set out for that place on Monday morning early. W. S. TO MR. JAMES BALLANTYNE. ABBOTSFORD, 25th July, 1813. DEAR JAMES,--I address the following jobation for John to you, that you may see whether I do not well to be angry, and enforce upon him the necessity of constantly writing his fears as well as his hopes. You should rub him often on this point, for his recollection becomes rusty the instant I leave town and am not in the way to rack him with constant questions. I hope the presses are doing well, and that you are quite stout again. Yours truly, W. S. (_Enclosure._) TO MR. JOHN BALLANTYNE. MY GOOD FRIEND JOHN,--The post brings me no letter from you, which I am much surprised at, as you must suppose me anxious to learn that your express arrived. I think he must have reached you before post-hours, and James or you _might_ have found a minute to say so in a single line. I once more request that you will be a businesslike correspondent, and state your provisions for every week prospectively. I do not expect you to _warrant them_, which you rather perversely seem to insist is my wish, but I do want to be aware of their nature and extent, that I may provide against the possibility of miscarriage. The calendar, to which you refer me, tells me what sums are due, but cannot tell your shifts to pay them, which are naturally altering with circumstances, and of which alterations I request to have due notice. You say you _could not suppose_ Sir W. Forbes would have refused the long dated bills; but that you _had_ such an apprehension is clear, both because in the calendar these bills were rated two months lower, and because, three days before, you wrote me an enigmatical expression of your apprehensions, instead of saying plainly there was a chance of your wanting £350, when I would have sent you an order to be used conditionally. All I desire is unlimited confidence and frequent correspondence, and that you will give me weekly at least the fullest anticipation of your resources, and the probability of their being effectual. I may be disappointed in my own, of which you shall have equally timeous notice. Omit no exertions to procure the use of money, even for a month or six weeks, for time is most precious. The large balance due in January from the trade, and individuals, which I cannot reckon at less than £4000, will put us finally to rights; and it will be a shame to founder within sight of harbor. The greatest risk we run is from such ill-considered despatches as those of Friday. Suppose that I had gone to Drumlanrig--suppose the pony had set up--suppose a thousand things--and we were ruined for want of your telling your apprehensions in due time. Do not plague yourself to vindicate this sort of management; but if you have escaped the consequences (as to which you have left me uncertain), thank God, and act more cautiously another time. It was quite the same to me on what day I sent that draft; indeed it must have been so if I had the money in my cash account, and if I had not, the more time given me to provide it the better. Now, do not affect to suppose that my displeasure arises from your not having done your utmost to realize funds, and that utmost having failed. It is one mode, to be sure, of exculpation, to suppose one's self accused of something they are not charged with, and then to make a querulous or indignant defence, and complain of the injustice of the accuser. The head and front of your offending is precisely your not writing explicitly, and I request this may not happen again. It is your fault, and I believe arises either from an ill-judged idea of smoothing matters to me--as if I were not behind the curtain--or a general reluctance to allow that any danger is near, until it is almost unparriable. I shall be very sorry if anything I have said gives you pain; but the matter is too serious for all of us, to be passed over without giving you my explicit sentiments. To-morrow I set out for Drumlanrig, and shall not hear from you till Tuesday or Wednesday. Make yourself master of the post-town--Thornhill, probably, or Sanquhar. As Sir W. F. & Co. have cash to meet my order, nothing, I think, can have gone wrong, unless the boy perished by the way. Therefore, in faith and hope, and--that I may lack none of the Christian virtues--in charity with your dilatory worship, I remain very truly yours, W. S. Scott proceeded, accordingly, to join a gay and festive circle, whom the Duke of Buccleuch had assembled about him on first taking possession of the magnificent Castle of Drumlanrig, in Nithsdale, the principal messuage of the dukedom of Queensberry, which had recently lapsed into his family. But, _post equitem sedet atra cura_--another of John Ballantyne's unwelcome missives, rendered necessary by a neglect of precisely the same kind as before, reached him in the midst of this scene of rejoicing. On the 31st, he again writes:-- TO MR. JOHN BALLANTYNE, BOOKSELLER, EDINBURGH. DRUMLANRIG, Friday. DEAR JOHN,--I enclose the order. Unfortunately, the Drumlanrig post only goes thrice a week; but the Marquis of Queensberry, who carries this to Dumfries, has promised that the guard of the mail-coach shall deliver it by five to-morrow. I was less anxious, as your note said you could clear this month. It is a cruel thing that no State you furnish excludes the arising of such unexpected claims as this for the taxes on the printing-office. What unhappy management, to suffer them to run ahead in such a manner!--but it is in vain to complain. Were it not for your strange concealments, I should anticipate no difficulty in winding up these matters. But who can reckon upon a State where claims are kept out of view until they are in the hands of a _writer_? If you have no time to say that _this_ comes safe to hand, I suppose James may favor me so far. Yours truly, W. S. Let the guard be rewarded. Let me know exactly what you _can_ do and _hope_ to do for next month; for it signifies nothing raising money for you, unless I see it is to be of real service. Observe, I make you responsible for nothing but a fair statement.[32] The guard is known to the Marquis, who has good-naturedly promised to give him this letter with his own hand; so it must reach you in time, though probably past five on Saturday. Another similar application reached Scott the day after the guard delivered his packet. He writes thus, in reply: TO MR. JOHN BALLANTYNE. DRUMLANRIG, Sunday. DEAR JOHN,--I trust you got my letter yesterday by five, with the draft enclosed. I return your draft accepted. On Wednesday I think of leaving this place, where, but for these damned affairs, I should have been very happy. W. S. Scott had been for some time under an engagement to meet the Marquis of Abercorn at Carlisle, in the first week of August, for the transaction of some business connected with his brother Thomas's late administration of that nobleman's Scottish affairs; and he had designed to pass from Drumlanrig to Carlisle for this purpose, without going back to Abbotsford. In consequence of these repeated harassments, however, he so far altered his plans as to cut short his stay at Drumlanrig, and turn homewards for two or three days, where James Ballantyne met him with such a statement as in some measure relieved his mind. He then proceeded to fulfil his engagement with Lord Abercorn, whom he encountered travelling in a rather peculiar style between Carlisle and Longtown. The ladies of the family and the household occupied four or five carriages, all drawn by the Marquis's own horses, while the noble Lord himself brought up the rear, mounted on horseback, and decorated with the ribbon of the order of the Garter. On meeting the cavalcade, Scott turned with them, and he was not a little amused when they reached the village of Longtown, which he had ridden through an hour or two before, with the preparations which he found there made for the dinner of the party. The Marquis's major-domo and cook had arrived there at an early hour in the morning, and everything was now arranged for his reception in the paltry little public house, as nearly as possible in the style usual in his own lordly mansions. The ducks and geese that had been dabbling three or four hours ago in the village pond were now ready to make their appearance under numberless disguises as _entrées_; a regular bill-of-fare flanked the noble Marquis's allotted cover; every huckaback towel in the place had been pressed to do service as a napkin; and, that nothing might be wanting to the mimicry of splendor, the landlady's poor remnants of crockery and pewter had been furbished up, and mustered in solemn order on a crazy old beauffet, which was to represent a sideboard worthy of Lucullus. I think it worth while to preserve this anecdote, which Scott delighted in telling, as perhaps the last relic of a style of manners now passed away, and never likely to be revived among us. Having despatched this dinner and his business, Scott again turned southwards, intending to spend a few days with Mr. Morritt at Rokeby; but on reaching Penrith, the landlord there, who was his old acquaintance (Mr. Buchanan), placed a letter in his hands: _ecce iterum_--it was once more a cry of distress from John Ballantyne. He thus answered it:-- TO MR. JOHN BALLANTYNE. PENRITH, August 10, 1813. DEAR JOHN,--I enclose you an order for £350. I shall remain at Rokeby until Saturday or Sunday, and be at Abbotsford on Wednesday at latest. I hope the printing-office is going on well. I fear, from the state of accompts between the companies, restrictions on the management and expense will be unavoidable, which may trench upon James's comforts. I cannot observe hitherto that the printing-office is paying off, but rather adding to its embarrassments; and it cannot be thought that I have either means or inclination to support a losing concern at the rate of £200 a month. If James could find a monied partner, an active man who understood the commercial part of the business, and would superintend the conduct of the cash, it might be the best for all parties; for I really am not adequate to the fatigue of mind which these affairs occasion me, though I must do the best to struggle through them. Believe me yours, etc. W. S. At Brough he encountered a messenger who brought him such a painful account of Mrs. Morritt's health, that he abandoned his intention of proceeding to Rokeby; and, indeed, it was much better that he should be at Abbotsford again as soon as possible, for his correspondence shows a continued succession, during the three or four ensuing weeks, of the same annoyances that had pursued him to Drumlanrig and to Penrith. By his desire, the Ballantynes had, it would seem, before the middle of August, laid a statement of their affairs before Constable. Though the statement was not so clear and full as Scott had wished it to be, Constable, on considering it, at once assured them, that to go on raising money in driblets would never effectually relieve them; that, in short, one or both of the companies must stop, unless Mr. Scott could find means to lay his hand, without farther delay, on at least £4000; and I gather that, by way of inducing Constable himself to come forward with part at least of this supply, John Ballantyne again announced his intention of forthwith abandoning the bookselling business altogether, and making an effort to establish himself--on a plan which Constable had shortly before suggested--as an auctioneer in Edinburgh. The following letters need no comment:-- TO MR. JOHN BALLANTYNE. ABBOTSFORD, August 16, 1813. DEAR JOHN,--I am quite satisfied it is impossible for J. B. and Co. to continue business longer than is absolutely necessary for the sale of stock and extrication of their affairs. The fatal injury which their credit has sustained, as well as your adopting a profession in which I sincerely hope you will be more fortunate, renders the closing of the bookselling business inevitable. With regard to the printing, it is my intention to retire from that also, so soon as I can possibly do so with safety to myself, and with the regard I shall always entertain for James's interest. Whatever loss I may sustain will be preferable to the life I have lately led, when I seem surrounded by a sort of magic circle, which neither permits me to remain at home in peace, nor to stir abroad with pleasure. Your first exertion as an auctioneer may probably be on "that distinguished, select, and inimitable collection of books, made by an amateur of this city retiring from business." I do not feel either health or confidence in my own powers sufficient to authorize me to take a long price for a new poem, until these affairs shall have been in some measure digested. This idea has been long running in my head, but the late fatalities which have attended this business have quite decided my resolution. I will write to James to-morrow, being at present annoyed with a severe headache. Yours truly, W. SCOTT. Were I to transcribe all the letters to which these troubles gave rise, I should fill a volume before I had reached the end of another twelvemonth. The two next I shall quote are dated on the same day (the 24th August), which may, in consequence of the answer the second of them received, be set down as determining the crisis of 1813. TO MR. JAMES BALLANTYNE. ABBOTSFORD, 24th August, 1813. DEAR JAMES,--Mr. Constable's advice is, as I have always found it, sound, sensible, and friendly,--and I shall be guided by it. But I have no wealthy friend who would join in security with me to such an extent; and to apply in quarters where I might be refused would insure disclosure. I conclude John has shown Mr. C. the state of the affairs; if not, I would wish him to do so directly. If the proposed accommodation could be granted to the firm on my personally joining in the security, the whole matter would be quite safe, for I have to receive in the course of the winter some large sums from my father's estate.[33] Besides which, I shall certainly be able to go to press in November with a new poem; or, if Mr. Constable's additional security would please the bankers better, I could insure Mr. C. against the possibility of loss, by assigning the copyrights, together with that of the new poem, or even my library, in his relief. In fact, if he looks into the affairs, he will I think see that there is no prospect of any eventual loss to the creditors, though I may be a loser myself. My property here is unincumbered; so is my house in Castle Street; and I have no debts out of my own family, excepting a part of the price of Abbotsford, which I am to retain for four years. So that, literally, I have no claims upon me unless those arising out of this business; and when it is considered that my income is above £2000 a year, even if the printing-office pays nothing, I should hope no one can possibly be a loser by me. Clerkship, £1300} Sheriffdom, 300 } Mrs. Scott, 200 } Interest, 100 } Somers, (say) 200 } ______ £2100 } I am sure I would strip myself to my shirt rather than it should be the case; and my only reason for wishing to stop the concern was to do open justice to all persons. It must have been a bitter pill to me. I can more confidently expect some aid from Mr. Constable, or from Longman's house, because they can look into the concern and satisfy themselves how little chance there is of their being losers, which others cannot do. Perhaps between them they might manage to assist us with the credit necessary, and go on in winding up the concern by occasional acceptances. An odd thing has happened. I have a letter, by order of the Prince Regent, offering me the laureateship in the most flattering terms. Were I my own man, as you call it, I would refuse this offer (with all gratitude); but, as I am situated, £300 or £400 a year is not to be sneezed at upon a point of poetical honor--and it makes me a better man to that extent. I have not yet written, however. I will say little about Constable's handsome behavior, but shall not forget it. It is needless to say I shall wish him to be consulted in every step that is taken. If I should lose all I advanced to this business, I should be less vexed than I am at this moment. I am very busy with Swift at present, but shall certainly come to town if it is thought necessary; but I should first wish Mr. Constable to look into the affairs to the bottom. Since I have personally superintended them, they have been winding up very fast, and we are now almost within sight of harbor. I will also own it was partly ill-humor at John's blunder last week that made me think of throwing things up. Yours truly, W. S. After writing and despatching this letter, an idea occurred to Scott that there was a quarter, not hitherto alluded to in any of these anxious epistles, from which he might consider himself as entitled to ask assistance, not only with little, if any, chance of a refusal, but (owing to particular circumstances) without incurring any very painful sense of obligation. On the 25th he says to John Ballantyne:-- After some meditation, last night, it occurred to me I had some title to ask the Duke of Buccleuch's guarantee to a cash account for £4000, as Constable proposes. I have written to him accordingly, and have very little doubt that he will be my surety. If this cash account be in view, Mr. Constable will certainly _assist us_ until the necessary writings are made out--I beg your pardon--I dare say I am very stupid; but very often you don't consider that I can't follow details which would be quite obvious to a man of business;--for instance, you tell me daily, "that _if_ the sums I count upon _are_ forthcoming, the results must be as I suppose." But--in a week--the scene is changed, and all I can do, and more, is inadequate to bring about these results. I protest I don't know if at this moment £4000 _will_ clear us out. After all, you are vexed, and so am I; and it is needless to wrangle who has a right to be angry. Commend me to James. Yours truly, W. S. Having explained to the Duke of Buccleuch the position in which he stood--obliged either to procure some guarantee which would enable him to raise £4000, or to sell abruptly all his remaining interest in the copyright of his works; and repeated the statement of his personal property and income, as given in the preceding letter to James Ballantyne--Scott says to his noble friend:-- I am not asking nor desiring any loan from your Grace, but merely the honor of your sanction to my credit as a good man for £4000; and the motive of your Grace's interference would be sufficiently obvious to the London Shylocks, as your constant kindness and protection is no secret to the world. Will your Grace consider whether you can do what I propose, in conscience and safety, and favor me with your answer?--I have a very flattering offer from the Prince Regent, of his own free motion, to make me poet laureate; I am very much embarrassed by it. I am, on the one hand, afraid of giving offence where no one would willingly offend, and perhaps losing an opportunity of smoothing the way to my youngsters through life; on the other hand, the office is a ridiculous one, somehow or other--they and I should be well quizzed,--yet that I should not mind. My real feeling of reluctance lies deeper--it is, that favored as I have been by the public, I should be considered, with some justice, I fear, as engrossing a petty emolument which might do real service to some poorer brother of the Muses. I shall be most anxious to have your Grace's advice on this subject. There seems something churlish, and perhaps conceited, in repelling a favor so handsomely offered on the part of the Sovereign's representative; and on the other hand, I feel much disposed to shake myself free from it. I should make but a bad courtier, and an ode-maker is described by Pope as a poet out of his way or out of his senses. I will find some excuse for protracting my reply till I can have the advantage of your Grace's opinion; and remain, in the mean time, very truly your obliged and grateful WALTER SCOTT. P. S.--I trust your Grace will not suppose me capable of making such a request as the enclosed, upon any idle or unnecessary speculation; but, as I stand situated, it is a matter of deep interest to me to prevent these copyrights from being disposed of either hastily or at under prices. I could have half the booksellers in London for my sureties, on a hint of a new poem; but bankers do not like people in trade, and my brains are not ready to spin another web. So your Grace must take me under your princely care, as in the days of lang syne; and I think I can say, upon the sincerity of an honest man, there is not the most distant chance of your having any trouble or expense through my means. The Duke's answer was in all respects such as might have been looked for from the generous kindness and manly sense of his character. TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., ABBOTSFORD. DRUMLANRIG CASTLE, August 28, 1813. MY DEAR SIR,--I received yesterday your letter of the 24th. I shall with pleasure comply with your request of guaranteeing the £4000. You must, however, furnish me with the form of a letter to this effect, as I am completely ignorant of transactions of this nature. I am never willing to _offer_ advice, but when my opinion is asked by a friend I am ready to give it. As to the offer of his Royal Highness to appoint you laureate, I shall frankly say that I should be mortified to see you hold a situation which, by the general concurrence of the world, is stamped ridiculous. There is no good reason why this should be so; but so it is. _Walter Scott, Poet Laureate_, ceases to be the Walter Scott of the Lay, Marmion, etc. Any future poem of yours would not come forward with the same probability of a successful reception. The poet laureate would stick to you and your productions like a piece of _court plaster_. Your muse has hitherto been independent--don't put her into harness. We know how lightly she trots along when left to her natural paces, but do not try driving. I would write frankly and openly to his Royal Highness, but with respectful gratitude, for he _has_ paid you a compliment. I would not fear to state that you had hitherto written when in poetic mood, but feared to trammel yourself with a fixed periodical exertion; and I cannot but conceive that his Royal Highness, who has much taste, will at once see the many objections which you must have to his proposal, but which you cannot write. Only think of being chaunted and recitatived by a parcel of hoarse and squeaking choristers on a birthday, for the edification of the bishops, pages, maids of honor, and gentlemen-pensioners! Oh horrible! thrice horrible! Yours sincerely, BUCCLEUCH, ETC. The letter which first announced the Prince Regent's proposal was from his Royal Highness's librarian, Dr. James Stanier Clarke; but before Scott answered it he had received a more formal notification from the late Marquis of Hertford, then Lord Chamberlain. I shall transcribe both these documents. TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., EDINBURGH. PAVILION, BRIGHTON, August 18, 1813. MY DEAR SIR,--Though I have never had the honor of being introduced to you, you have frequently been pleased to convey to me very kind and flattering messages,[34] and I trust, therefore, you will allow me, without any further ceremony, to say--That I took an early opportunity this morning of seeing the Prince Regent, who arrived here late yesterday; and I then delivered to his Royal Highness my earnest wish and anxious desire that the vacant situation of poet laureate might be conferred on you. The Prince replied, "that you had already been written to, and that if you wished it, everything would be settled as I could desire." I hope, therefore, I may be allowed to congratulate you on this event. You are the man to whom it ought first to have been offered, and it gave me sincere pleasure to find that those sentiments of high approbation which my Royal Master had so often expressed towards you in private, were now so openly and honorably displayed in public. Have the goodness, dear sir, to receive this intrusive letter with your accustomed courtesy, and believe me, yours very sincerely, J. S. CLARKE, Librarian to H. R. H., the Prince Regent. TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., EDINBURGH. RAGLEY, 31st August, 1813. SIR,--I thought it my duty to his Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, to express to him my humble opinion that I could not make so creditable a choice as in your person for the office, now vacant, of poet laureate. I am now authorized to offer it to you, which I would have taken an earlier opportunity of doing, but that, till this morning, I have had no occasion of seeing his Royal Highness since Mr. Pye's death. I have the honor to be, sir, your most obedient, humble servant, INGRAM HERTFORD. The following letters conclude this matter:-- TO THE MOST NOBLE THE MARQUIS OF HERTFORD, ETC., ETC., RAGLEY, WARWICKSHIRE. ABBOTSFORD, 4th September. MY LORD,--I am this day honored with your Lordship's letter of the 31st August, tendering for my acceptance the situation of poet laureate in the Royal Household. I shall always think it the highest honor of my life to have been the object of the good opinion implied in your Lordship's recommendation, and in the gracious acquiescence of his Royal Highness, the Prince Regent. I humbly trust I shall not forfeit sentiments so highly valued, although I find myself under the necessity of declining, with every acknowledgment of respect and gratitude, a situation above my deserts, and offered to me in a manner so very flattering. The duties attached to the office of poet laureate are not indeed very formidable, if judged of by the manner in which they have sometimes been discharged. But an individual selected from the literary characters of Britain, upon the honorable principle expressed in your Lordship's letter, ought not, in justice to your Lordship, to his own reputation, but above all to his Royal Highness, to accept of the office, unless he were conscious of the power of filling it respectably, and attaining to excellence in the execution of the tasks which it imposes. This confidence I am so far from possessing, that, on the contrary, with all the advantages which do now, and I trust ever will, present themselves to the poet whose task it may be to commemorate the events of his Royal Highness's administration, I am certain I should feel myself inadequate to the fitting discharge of the regularly recurring duty of periodical composition, and should thus at once disappoint the expectation of the public, and, what would give me still more pain, discredit the nomination of his Royal Highness. Will your Lordship permit me to add, that though far from being wealthy, I already hold two official situations in the line of my profession, which afford a respectable income. It becomes me, therefore, to avoid the appearance of engrossing one of the few appointments which seem specially adapted for the provision of those whose lives have been dedicated exclusively to literature, and who too often derive from their labors more credit than emolument. Nothing could give me greater pain than being thought ungrateful to his Royal Highness's goodness, or insensible to the honorable distinction his undeserved condescension has been pleased to bestow upon me. I have to trust to your Lordship's kindness for laying at the feet of his Royal Highness, in the way most proper and respectful, my humble, grateful, and dutiful thanks, with these reasons for declining a situation which, though every way superior to my deserts, I should chiefly have valued as a mark of his Royal Highness's approbation. For your Lordship's unmerited goodness, as well as for the trouble you have had upon this occasion, I can only offer you my respectful thanks, and entreat that you will be pleased to believe me, my Lord Marquis, your Lordship's much obliged and much honored humble servant, WALTER SCOTT. TO HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH, ETC., DRUMLANRIG CASTLE. ABBOTSFORD, September 5, 1813. MY DEAR LORD DUKE,--Good advice is easily followed when it jumps with our own sentiments and inclinations. I no sooner found mine fortified by your Grace's opinion than I wrote to Lord Hertford, declining the laurel in the most civil way I could imagine. I also wrote to the Prince's librarian, who had made himself active on the occasion, dilating, at somewhat more length than I thought respectful to the Lord Chamberlain, my reasons for declining the intended honor. My wife has made a copy of the last letter, which I enclose for your Grace's perusal: there is no occasion either to preserve or return it--but I am desirous you should know what I have put my apology upon, for I may reckon on its being misrepresented. I certainly should never have survived the recitative described by your Grace: it is a part of the etiquette I was quite unprepared for, and should have sunk under it. It is curious enough that Drumlanrig should always have been the refuge of bards who decline court promotion. Gay, I think, refused to be a gentleman-usher, or some such post;[35] and I am determined to abide by my post of Grand Ecuyer Trenchant of the Chateau, varied for that of tale-teller of an evening. I will send your Grace a copy of the letter of guarantee when I receive it from London. By an arrangement with Longman and Co., the great booksellers in Paternoster Row, I am about to be enabled to place their security, as well as my own, between your Grace and the possibility of hazard. But your kind readiness to forward a transaction which is of such great importance both to my fortune and comfort can never be forgotten--although it can scarce make me more than I have always been, my dear Lord, your Grace's much obliged and truly faithful, WALTER SCOTT. (_Copy--Enclosure._) TO THE REV. J. S. CLARKE, ETC., ETC., ETC., PAVILION, BRIGHTON. ABBOTSFORD, 4th September, 1813. SIR,--On my return to this cottage, after a short excursion, I was at once surprised and deeply interested by the receipt of your letter. I shall always consider it as the proudest incident of my life that his Royal Highness, the Prince Regent, whose taste in literature is so highly distinguished, should have thought of naming me to the situation of poet laureate. I feel, therefore, no small embarrassment lest I should incur the suspicion of churlish ingratitude in declining an appointment in every point of view so far above my deserts, but which I should chiefly have valued as conferred by the unsolicited generosity of his Royal Highness, and as entitling me to the distinction of terming myself an immediate servant of his Majesty. But I have to trust to your goodness in representing to his Royal Highness, with my most grateful, humble, and dutiful acknowledgments, the circumstances which compel me to decline the honor which his undeserved favor has proposed for me. The poetical pieces I have hitherto composed have uniformly been the hasty production of impulses, which I must term fortunate, since they have attracted his Royal Highness's notice and approbation. But I strongly fear, or rather am absolutely certain, that I should feel myself unable to justify, in the eye of the public, the choice of his Royal Highness, by a fitting discharge of the duties of an office which requires stated and periodical exertion. And although I am conscious how much this difficulty is lessened under the government of his Royal Highness, marked by paternal wisdom at home and successes abroad which seem to promise the liberation of Europe, I still feel that the necessity of a regular commemoration would trammel my powers of composition at the very time when it would be equally my pride and duty to tax them to the uttermost. There is another circumstance which weighs deeply in my mind while forming my present resolution. I have already the honor to hold two appointments under Government, not usually conjoined, and which afford an income, far indeed from wealth, but amounting to decent independence. I fear, therefore, that in accepting one of the few situations which our establishment holds forth as the peculiar provision of literary men, I might be justly censured as availing myself of his Royal Highness's partiality to engross more than my share of the public revenue, to the prejudice of competitors equally meritorious at least, and otherwise unprovided for; and as this calculation will be made by thousands who know that I have reaped great advantages by the favor of the public, without being aware of the losses which it has been my misfortune to sustain, I may fairly reckon that it will terminate even more to my prejudice than if they had the means of judging accurately of my real circumstances. I have thus far, sir, frankly exposed to you, for his Royal Highness's favorable consideration, the feelings which induce me to decline an appointment offered in a manner so highly calculated to gratify, I will not say my vanity only, but my sincere feelings of devoted attachment to the crown and constitution of my country, and to the person of his Royal Highness, by whom its government has been so worthily administered. No consideration on earth would give me so much pain as the idea of my real feelings being misconstrued on this occasion, or that I should be supposed stupid enough not to estimate the value of his Royal Highness's favor, or so ungrateful as not to feel it as I ought. And you will relieve me from great anxiety if you will have the goodness to let me know if his Royal Highness is pleased to receive favorably my humble and grateful apology. I cannot conclude without expressing my sense of your kindness and of the trouble you have had upon this account, and I request you will believe me, sir, your obliged humble servant, WALTER SCOTT. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY, ESQ., KESWICK. ABBOTSFORD, 4th September, 1813. MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--On my return here I found, to my no small surprise, a letter tendering me the laurel vacant by the death of the poetical Pye. I have declined the appointment, as being incompetent to the task of annual commemoration; but chiefly as being provided for in my professional department, and unwilling to incur the censure of engrossing the emolument attached to one of the few appointments which seems proper to be filled by a man of literature who has no other views in life. Will you forgive me, my dear friend, if I own I had you in my recollection? I have given Croker the hint, and otherwise endeavored to throw the office into your option. I am uncertain if you will like it, for the laurel has certainly been tarnished by some of its wearers, and, as at present managed, its duties are inconvenient and somewhat liable to ridicule. But the latter matter might be amended, as I think the Regent's good sense would lead him to lay aside these regular commemorations; and as to the former point, it has been worn by Dryden of old, and by Warton in modern days. If you quote my own refusal against me, I reply--first, I have been luckier than you in holding two offices not usually conjoined; secondly, I did not refuse it from any foolish prejudice against the situation, otherwise how durst I mention it to you, my elder brother in the muse?--but from a sort of internal hope that they would give it to you, upon whom it would be so much more worthily conferred. For I am not such an ass as not to know that you are my better in poetry, though I have had, probably but for a time, the tide of popularity in my favor. I have not time to add ten thousand other reasons, but I only wished to tell you how the matter was, and to beg you to think before you reject the offer which I flatter myself will be made to you. If I had not been, like Dogberry, a fellow with two gowns already, I should have jumped at it like a cock at a gooseberry. Ever yours most truly, WALTER SCOTT. Immediately after Mr. Croker received Scott's letter here alluded to, Mr. Southey was invited to accept the vacant laurel. But, as the birthday ode had been omitted since the illness of King George III., and the Regent had good sense and good taste enough to hold that ancient custom as "more honored in the breach than the observance," the whole fell completely into disuse.[36] The office was thus relieved from the burden of ridicule which had, in spite of so many illustrious names, adhered to it; and though its emoluments did not in fact amount to more than a quarter of the sum at which Scott rated them when he declined it, they formed no unacceptable addition to Mr. Southey's income. Scott's answer to his brother poet's affectionate and grateful letter on the conclusion of this affair is as follows:-- TO R. SOUTHEY, ESQ., KESWICK. EDINBURGH, November 13, 1813. I do not delay, my dear Southey, to say my _gratulor_. Long may you live, as Paddy says, to rule over us, and to redeem the crown of Spenser and of Dryden to its pristine dignity. I am only discontented with the extent of your royal revenue, which I thought had been £400, or £300 at the very least. Is there no getting rid of that iniquitous modus, and requiring the _butt_ in kind? I would have you think of it; I know no man so well entitled to Xeres sack as yourself, though many bards would make a better figure at drinking it. I should think that in due time a memorial might get some relief in this part of the appointment--it should be at least, £100 wet and £100 dry. When you have carried your point of discarding the ode, and my point of getting the sack, you will be exactly in the situation of Davy in the farce, who stipulates for more wages, less work, and the key of the ale-cellar.[37] I was greatly delighted with the circumstances of your investiture. It reminded me of the porters at Calais with Dr. Smollett's baggage, six of them seizing upon one small portmanteau, and bearing it in triumph to his lodgings. You see what it is to laugh at the superstitions of a gentleman-usher, as I think you do somewhere. "The whirligig of time brings in his revenges."[38] Adieu, my dear Southey; my best wishes attend all that you do, and my best congratulations every good that attends you--yea even this, the very least of Providence's mercies, as a poor clergyman said when pronouncing grace over a herring. I should like to know how the Prince received you; his address is said to be excellent, and his knowledge of literature far from despicable. What a change of fortune even since the short time when we met! The great work of retribution is now rolling onward to consummation, yet am I not fully satisfied--_pereat iste_!--there will be no permanent peace in Europe till Buonaparte sleeps with the tyrants of old. My best compliments attend Mrs. Southey and your family. Ever yours, WALTER SCOTT. To avoid returning to the affair of the laureateship, I have placed together such letters concerning it as appeared important. I regret to say that, had I adhered to the chronological order of Scott's correspondence, ten out of every twelve letters between the date of his application to the Duke of Buccleuch, and his removal to Edinburgh on the 12th of November, would have continued to tell the same story of pecuniary difficulty, urgent and almost daily applications for new advances to the Ballantynes, and endeavors, more or less successful, but in no case effectually so, to relieve the pressure on the bookselling firm by sales of its heavy stock to the great publishing houses of Edinburgh and London. Whatever success these endeavors met with, appears to have been due either directly or indirectly to Mr. Constable; who did a great deal more than prudence would have warranted, in taking on himself the results of its unhappy adventures,--and, by his sagacious advice, enabled the distressed partners to procure similar assistance at the hands of others, who did not partake his own feelings of personal kindness and sympathy. "I regret to learn," Scott writes to him on the 16th October, "that there is great danger of your exertions in our favor, which once promised so fairly, proving finally abortive, or at least being too tardy in their operation to work out our relief. If anything more can be honorably and properly done to avoid a most unpleasant shock, I shall be most willing to do it; if not--God's will be done! There will be enough of property, including my private fortune, to pay every claim; and I have not used prosperity so ill, as greatly to fear adversity. But these things we will talk over at meeting; meanwhile believe me, with a sincere sense of your kindness and friendly views, very truly yours, W. S."--I have no wish to quote more largely from the letters which passed during this crisis between Scott and his partners. The pith and substance of his, to John Ballantyne at least, seems to be summed up in one brief _postscript_: "For God's sake treat me as a man, and not as a milch-cow!" The difficulties of the Ballantynes were by this time well known throughout the commercial circles not only of Edinburgh, but of London; and a report of their actual bankruptcy, with the addition that Scott was engaged as their surety to the extent of £20,000, found its way to Mr. Morritt about the beginning of November. This dear friend wrote to him, in the utmost anxiety, and made liberal offers of assistance in case the catastrophe might still be averted; but the term of Martinmas, always a critical one in Scotland, had passed before this letter reached Edinburgh, and Scott's answer will show symptoms of a clearing horizon. I think also there is one expression in it which could hardly have failed to convey to Mr. Morritt that his friend was involved, more deeply than he had ever acknowledged, in the concerns of the Messrs. Ballantyne. TO J. B. S. MORRITT, ESQ., ROKEBY PARK. EDINBURGH, 20th November, 1813. I did not answer your very kind letter, my dear Morritt, until I could put your friendly heart to rest upon the report you have heard, which I could not do entirely until this term of Martinmas was passed. I have the pleasure to say that there is no truth whatever in the Ballantynes' reported bankruptcy. They have had severe difficulties for the last four months to make their resources balance the demands upon them, and I, having the price of Rokeby, and other monies in their hands, have had considerable reason for apprehension, and no slight degree of plague and trouble. They have, however, been so well supported, that I have got out of hot water upon their account. They are winding up their bookselling concern with great regularity, and are to abide hereafter by the printing-office, which, with its stock, etc., will revert to them fairly. I have been able to redeem the offspring of my brain, and they are like to pay me like grateful children. This matter has set me a-thinking about money more seriously than ever I did in my life, and I have begun by insuring my life for £4000, to secure some ready cash to my family should I slip girths suddenly. I think my other property, library, etc., may be worth about £12,000, and I have not much debt. Upon the whole, I see no prospect of any loss whatever. Although in the course of human events I may be disappointed, there certainly _can_ be none to vex your kind and affectionate heart on my account. I am young, with a large official income, and if I lose anything now, I have gained a great deal in my day. I cannot tell you, and will not attempt to tell you, how much I was affected by your letter--so much, indeed, that for several days I could not make my mind up to express myself on the subject. Thank God! all real danger was yesterday put over--and I will write, in two or three days, a funny letter, without any of these vile cash matters, of which it may be said there is no living with them nor without them. Ever yours, most truly, WALTER SCOTT. All these annoyances produced no change whatever in Scott's habits of literary industry. During these anxious months of September, October, and November, he kept feeding James Ballantyne's press, from day to day, both with the annotated text of the closing volumes of Swift's works, and with the MS. of his Life of the Dean. He had also proceeded to mature in his own mind the plan of The Lord of the Isles, and executed such a portion of the First Canto as gave him confidence to renew his negotiation with Constable for the sale of the whole, or part of its copyright. It was, moreover, at this period, that, looking into an old cabinet in search of some fishing-tackle, his eye chanced to light once more on the Ashestiel fragment of Waverley.--He read over those introductory chapters--thought they had been undervalued--and determined to finish the story. All this while, too, he had been subjected to those interruptions from idle strangers, which from the first to the last imposed so heavy a tax on his celebrity; and he no doubt received such guests with all his usual urbanity of attention. Yet I was not surprised to discover, among his hasty notes to the Ballantynes, several of tenor akin to the following specimens:-- "September 2, 1813. "My temper is really worn to a hair's breadth. The intruder of yesterday hung on me till twelve to-day. When I had just taken my pen, he was relieved, like a sentry leaving guard, by two other lounging visitors; and their post has now been supplied by some people on real business." Again:-- "Monday evening. "Oh James! oh James! Two Irish dames Oppress me very sore; I groaning send one sheet I've penned-- For, hang them! there's no more." A scrap of nearly the same date to his brother Thomas may be introduced, as belonging to the same state of feeling:-- DEAR TOM,--I observe what you say as to Mr. ****; and as you may often be exposed to similar requests, which it would be difficult to parry, you can sign such letters of introduction as relate to persons whom you do not delight to honor short, _T. Scott_; by which abridgment of your name I shall understand to limit my civilities. It is proper to mention that, in the very agony of these perplexities, the unfortunate Maturin received from him a timely succor of £50, rendered doubly acceptable by the kind and judicious letter of advice in which it was enclosed; and I have before me ample evidence that his benevolence had been extended to other struggling brothers of the trade, even when he must often have had actual difficulty to meet the immediate expenditure of his own family. All this, however, will not surprise the reader. Nor did his general correspondence suffer much interruption; and, as some relief after so many painful details, I shall close the narrative of this anxious year by a few specimens of his miscellaneous communications:-- TO MISS JOANNA BAILLIE, HAMPSTEAD. ABBOTSFORD, September 12, 1813. MY DEAR MISS BAILLIE,--I have been a vile lazy correspondent, having been strolling about the country, and indeed a little way into England, for the greater part of July and August; in short, "aye skipping here and there," like the Tanner of Tamworth's horse. Since I returned, I have had a gracious offer of the laurel on the part of the Prince Regent. You will not wonder that I have declined it, though with every expression of gratitude which such an unexpected compliment demanded. Indeed, it would be high imprudence in one having literary reputation to maintain, to accept of an offer which obliged him to produce a poetical exercise on a given theme twice a year; and besides, as my loyalty to the royal family is very sincere, I would not wish to have it thought mercenary. The public has done its part by me very well, and so has Government: and I thought this little literary provision ought to be bestowed on one who has made literature his sole profession. If the Regent means to make it respectable, he will abolish the foolish custom of the annual odes, which is a drudgery no person of talent could ever willingly encounter--or come clear off from, if he was so rash. And so, peace be with the laurel, "Profaned by Cibber and contemned by Gray." I was for a fortnight at Drumlanrig, a grand old chateau, which has descended, by the death of the late Duke of Queensberry, to the Duke of Buccleuch. It is really a most magnificent pile, and when embosomed amid the wide forest scenery, of which I have an infantine recollection, must have been very romantic. But old Q. made wild devastation among the noble trees, although some fine ones are still left, and a quantity of young shoots are, in despite of the want of every kind of attention, rushing up to supply the places of the fathers of the forest from whose stems they are springing. It will now I trust be in better hands, for the reparation of the castle goes hand in hand with the rebuilding of all the cottages, in which an aged race of pensioners of Duke Charles, and his pious wife,--"Kitty, blooming, young and gay,"--have, during the last reign, been pining into rheumatisms and agues, in neglected poverty. All this is beautiful to witness: the indoor work does not please me so well, though I am aware that, to those who are to inhabit an old castle, it becomes often a matter of necessity to make alterations by which its tone and character are changed for the worse. Thus a noble gallery, which ran the whole length of the front, is converted into bedrooms--very comfortable, indeed, but not quite so magnificent; and as grim a dungeon as ever knave or honest man was confined in, is in some danger of being humbled into a wine-cellar. It is almost impossible to draw your breath, when you recollect that this, so many feet under-ground, and totally bereft of air and light, was built for the imprisonment of human beings, whether guilty, suspected, or merely unfortunate. Certainly, if our frames are not so hardy, our hearts are softer than those of our forefathers, although probably a few years of domestic war, or feudal oppression, would bring us back to the same case-hardening both in body and sentiment. I meant to have gone to Rokeby, but was prevented by Mrs. Morritt being unwell, which I very much regret, as I know few people that deserve better health. I am very glad you have known them, and I pray you to keep up the acquaintance in winter. I am glad to see by this day's paper that our friend Terry has made a favorable impression on his first appearance at Covent Garden--he has got a very good engagement there for three years, at twelve guineas a week, which is a handsome income.--This little place comes on as fast as can be reasonably hoped; and the pinasters are all above the ground, but cannot be planted out for twelve months. My kindest compliments--in which Mrs. Scott always joins--attend Miss Agnes, the Doctor, and his family. Ever, my dear friend, yours most faithfully, WALTER SCOTT. TO DANIEL TERRY, ESQ., LONDON. ABBOTSFORD, 20th October, 1813. DEAR TERRY,--You will easily believe that I was greatly pleased to hear from you. I had already learned from The Courier (what I had anticipated too strongly to doubt for one instant) your favorable impression on the London public. I think nothing can be more judicious in the managers than to exercise the various powers you possess, in their various extents. A man of genius is apt to be limited to one single style, and to become perforce a mannerist, merely because the public is not so just to its own amusement as to give him an opportunity of throwing himself into different lines; and doubtless the exercise of our talents in one unvaried course, by degrees renders them incapable of any other, as the over-use of any one limb of our body gradually impoverishes the rest. I shall be anxious to hear that you have played _Malvolio_, which is, I think, one of your _coups-de-maître_, and in which envy itself cannot affect to trace an imitation. That same charge of imitation, by the way, is one of the surest scents upon which dunces are certain to open. Undoubtedly, if the same character is well performed by two individuals, their acting must bear a general resemblance--it could not be well performed by both were it otherwise. But this general resemblance, which arises from both following nature and their author, can as little be termed imitation as the river in Wales can be identified with that of Macedon. Never mind these dunderheads, but go on your own way, and scorn to laugh on the right side of your mouth, to make a difference from some ancient comedian who, in the same part, always laughed on the left. Stick to the public--be uniform in your exertions to study even those characters which have little in them, and to give a grace which you cannot find in the author. Audiences are always grateful for this--or rather--for gratitude is as much out of the question in the theatre, as Bernadotte says to Boney it is amongst sovereigns--or rather, the audience is gratified by receiving pleasure from a part which they had no expectation would afford them any. It is in this view that, had I been of your profession, and possessed talents, I think I should have liked often those parts with which my brethren quarrelled, and studied to give them an effect which their intrinsic merit did not entitle them to. I have some thoughts of being in town in spring (not resolutions by any means); and it will be an additional motive to witness your success, and to find you as comfortably established as your friends in Castle Street earnestly hope and trust you will be. The summer--an uncommon summer in beauty and serenity--has glided away from us at Abbotsford, amidst our usual petty cares and petty pleasures. The children's garden is in apple-pie order, our own completely cropped and stocked, and all the trees flourishing like the green bay of the Psalmist. I have been so busy about our domestic arrangements, that I have not killed six hares this season. Besides, I have got a cargo of old armor, sufficient to excite a suspicion that I intend to mount a squadron of cuirassiers. I only want a place for my armory; and, thank God, I can wait for that, these being no times for building. And this brings me to the loss of poor Stark, with whom more genius has died than is left behind among the collected universality of Scottish architects. O Lord!--but what does it signify?--Earth was born to bear, and man to pay (that is, lords, nabobs, Glasgow traders, and those who have wherewithal)--so wherefore grumble at great castles and cottages, with which the taste of the latter contrives to load the back of Mother Terra?--I have no hobbyhorsical commissions at present, unless if you meet the Voyages of Captain Richard, or Robert Falconer, in one volume--"cow-heel, quoth Sancho"--I mark them for my own. Mrs. Scott, Sophia, Anne, and the boys, unite in kind remembrances. Ever yours truly, W. SCOTT. TO THE RIGHT HON. LORD BYRON, 4 BENNET STREET, ST. JAMES'S, LONDON. ABBOTSFORD, 6th November, 1813. MY DEAR LORD,--I was honored with your Lordship's letter of the 27th September,[39] and have sincerely to regret that there is such a prospect of your leaving Britain, without my achieving your personal acquaintance. I heartily wish your Lordship had come down to Scotland this season, for I have never seen a finer, and you might have renewed all your old associations with Caledonia, and made such new ones as were likely to suit you. I dare promise you would have liked me well enough--for I have many properties of a Turk--never trouble myself about futurity--am as lazy as the day is long--delight in collecting silver-mounted pistols and ataghans, and go out of my own road for no one--all which I take to be attributes of your good Moslem. Moreover, I am somewhat an admirer of royalty, and in order to maintain this part of my creed, I shall take care never to be connected with a court, but stick to the _ignotum pro mirabili_. The author of The Queen's Wake will be delighted with your approbation. He is a wonderful creature for his opportunities, which were far inferior to those of the generality of Scottish peasants. Burns, for instance--(not that their extent of talents is to be compared for an instant)--had an education not much worse than the sons of many gentlemen in Scotland. But poor Hogg literally could neither read nor write till a very late period of his life; and when he first distinguished himself by his poetical talent, could neither spell nor write grammar. When I first knew him, he used to send me his poetry, and was both indignant and horrified when I pointed out to him parallel passages in authors whom he had never read, but whom all the world would have sworn he had copied. An evil fate has hitherto attended him, and baffled every attempt that has been made to place him in a road to independence. But I trust he may be more fortunate in future. I have not yet seen Southey in the Gazette as Laureate. He is a real poet, such as we read of in former times, with every atom of his soul and every moment of his time dedicated to literary pursuits, in which he differs from almost all those who have divided public attention with him. Your Lordship's habits of society, for example, and my own professional and official avocations, must necessarily connect us much more with our respective classes in the usual routine of pleasure or business, than if we had not any other employment than _vacare musis_. But Southey's ideas are all poetical, and his whole soul dedicated to the pursuit of literature. In this respect, as well as in many others, he is a most striking and interesting character. I am very much interested in all that concerns your Giaour, which is universally approved of among our mountains. I have heard no objection except by one or two geniuses, who run over poetry as a cat does over a harpsichord, and they affect to complain of obscurity. On the contrary, I hold every real lover of the art is obliged to you for condensing the narrative, by giving us only those striking scenes which you have shown to be so susceptible of poetic ornament, and leaving to imagination the says I's and says he's, and all the minutiæ of detail which might be proper in giving evidence before a court of justice. The truth is, I think poetry is most striking when the mirror can be held up to the reader, and the same kept constantly before his eyes; it requires most uncommon powers to support a direct and downright narration; nor can I remember many instances of its being successfully maintained even by our greatest bards. As to those who have done me the honor to take my rhapsodies for their model, I can only say they have exemplified the ancient adage, "One fool makes many;" nor do I think I have yet had much reason to suppose I have given rise to anything of distinguished merit. The worst is, it draws on me letters and commendatory verses, to which my sad and sober thanks in humble prose are deemed a most unmeet and ungracious reply. Of this sort of plague your Lordship must ere now have had more than your share, but I think you can hardly have met with so original a request as concluded the letter of a bard I this morning received, who limited his demands to being placed in his due station on Parnassus--_and_ invested with a post in the Edinburgh Custom House. What an awakening of dry bones seems to be taking place on the Continent! I could as soon have believed in the resurrection of the Romans as in that of the Prussians--yet it seems a real and active renovation of national spirit. It will certainly be strange enough if that tremendous pitcher, which has travelled to so many fountains, should be at length broken on the banks of the Saale; but from the highest to the lowest we are the fools of fortune. Your Lordship will probably recollect where the Oriental tale occurs, of a Sultan who consulted Solomon on the proper inscription for a signet-ring, requiring that the maxim which it conveyed should be at once proper for moderating the presumption of prosperity and tempering the pressure of adversity. The apophthegm supplied by the Jewish sage was, I think, admirably adapted for both purposes, being comprehended in the words, "And this also shall pass away." When your Lordship sees Rogers, will you remember me kindly to him? I hope to be in London next spring, and renew my acquaintance with my friends there. It will be an additional motive if I could flatter myself that your Lordship's stay in the country will permit me the pleasure of waiting upon you. I am, with much respect and regard, your Lordship's truly honored and obliged humble servant, WALTER SCOTT. I go to Edinburgh next week, _multum gemens_. TO MISS JOANNA BAILLIE, HAMPSTEAD. EDINBURGH, 10th December, 1813. Many thanks, my dear friend, for your kind token of remembrance, which I yesterday received. I ought to blush, if I had grace enough left, at my long and ungenerous silence: but what shall I say? The habit of procrastination, which had always more or less a dominion over me, does not relax its sway as I grow older and less willing to take up the pen. I have not written to dear Ellis this age,--yet there is not a day that I do not think of you and him, and one or two other friends in your southern land. I am very glad the whiskey came safe: do not stint so laudable an admiration for the liquor of Caledonia, for I have plenty of right good and sound Highland Ferintosh, and I can always find an opportunity of sending you up a bottle. We are here almost mad with the redemption of Holland, which has an instant and gratifying effect on the trade of Leith, and indeed all along the east coast of Scotland. About £100,000 worth of various commodities, which had been dormant in cellars and warehouses, was sold the first day the news arrived, and Orange ribbons and _Orange Boven_ was the order of the day among all ranks. It is a most miraculous revivification which it has been our fate to witness. Though of a tolerably sanguine temper, I had fairly adjourned all hopes and expectations of the kind till another generation: the same power, however, that opened the windows of heaven and the fountains of the great deep has been pleased to close them, and to cause his wind to blow upon the face of the waters, so that we may look out from the ark of our preservation, and behold the reappearance of the mountain crests, and old, beloved, and well-known land-marks, which we had deemed swallowed up forever in the abyss: the dove with the olive branch would complete the simile, but of that I see little hope. Buonaparte is that desperate gambler, who will not rise while he has a stake left; and, indeed, to be King of France would be a poor pettifogging enterprise, after having been almost Emperor of the World. I think he will drive things on, till the fickle and impatient people over whom he rules get tired of him and shake him out of the saddle. Some circumstances seem to intimate his having become jealous of the Senate; and indeed anything like a representative body, however imperfectly constructed, becomes dangerous to a tottering tyranny. The sword displayed on both frontiers may, like that brandished across the road of Balaam, terrify even dumb and irrational subjection into utterance;--but enough of politics, though now a more cheerful subject than they have been for many years past. I have had a strong temptation to go to the Continent this Christmas; and should certainly have done so, had I been sure of getting from Amsterdam to Frankfort, where, as I know Lord Aberdeen and Lord Cathcart, I might expect a welcome. But notwithstanding my earnest desire to see the allied armies cross the Rhine, which I suppose must be one of the grandest military spectacles in the world, I should like to know that the roads were tolerably secure, and the means of getting forward attainable. In spring, however, if no unfortunate change takes place, I trust to visit the camp of the allies, and see all the pomp and power and circumstance of war, which I have so often imagined, and sometimes attempted to embody in verse.--Johnnie Richardson is a good, honorable, kind-hearted little fellow as lives in the world, with a pretty taste for poetry, which he has wisely kept under subjection to the occupation of drawing briefs and revising conveyances. It is a great good fortune to him to be in your neighborhood, as he is an idolater of genius, and where could he offer up his worship so justly? And I am sure you will like him, for he is really "officious, innocent, sincere."[40] Terry, I hope, will get on well; he is industrious, and zealous for the honor of his art. Ventidius must have been an excellent part for him, hovering between tragedy and comedy, which is precisely what will suit him. We have a woeful want of him here, both in public and private, for he was one of the most easy and quiet chimney-corner companions that I have had for these two or three years past. I am very glad if anything I have written to you could give pleasure to Miss Edgeworth, though I am sure it will fall very short of the respect which I have for her brilliant talents. I always write to you _à la volée_, and trust implicitly to your kindness and judgment upon all occasions where you may choose to communicate any part of my letters.[41] As to the taxing men, I must battle them as I can: they are worse than the great Emathian conqueror, who "bade spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground."[42] Your pinasters are coming up gallantly in the nursery-bed at Abbotsford. I trust to pay the whole establishment a Christmas visit, which will be, as Robinson Crusoe says of his glass of rum, "to mine exceeding refreshment." All Edinburgh have been on tiptoe to see Madame de Staël, but she is now not likely to honor us with a visit, at which I cannot prevail on myself to be very sorry; for as I tired of some of her works, I am afraid I should disgrace my taste by tiring of the authoress too. All my little people are very well, learning, with great pain and diligence, much which they will have forgotten altogether, or nearly so, in the course of twelve years hence: but the habit of learning is something in itself, even when the lessons are forgotten. I must not omit to tell you that a friend of mine, with whom that metal is more plenty than with me, has given me some gold mohurs to be converted into a ring for enchasing King Charles's hair; but this is not to be done until I get to London, and get a very handsome pattern. Ever, most truly and sincerely, yours, W. SCOTT. The last sentence of this letter refers to a lock of the hair of Charles I., which, at Dr. Baillie's request, Sir Henry Halford had transmitted to Scott when the royal martyr's remains were discovered at Windsor, in April, 1813.[43] Sir John Malcolm had given him some Indian coins to supply virgin gold for the setting of this relic; and for some years he constantly wore the ring, which is a massive and beautiful one, with the word REMEMBER surrounding it in highly relieved black-letter. The poet's allusion to "taxing men" may require another word of explanation. To add to his troubles during this autumn of 1813, a demand was made on him by the commissioners of the income-tax, to return in one of their schedules an account of the profits of his literary exertions during the last three years. He demurred to this, and took the opinion of high authorities in Scotland, who confirmed him in his impression that the claim was beyond the statute. The grounds of his resistance are thus briefly stated in one of his letters to his legal friend in London:-- TO JOHN RICHARDSON, ESQ., FLUDYER STREET, WESTMINSTER. MY DEAR RICHARDSON,--I have owed you a letter this long time, but perhaps my debt might not yet be discharged, had I not a little matter of business to trouble you with. I wish you to lay before either the King's counsel, or Sir Samuel Romilly and any other you may approve, the point whether a copyright being sold for the term during which Queen Anne's act warranted the property to the author, the price is liable in payment of the property-tax. I contend it is not so liable, for the following reasons: 1st, It is a patent right, expected to produce an annual, or at least an incidental profit, during the currency of many years; and surely it was never contended that if a man sold a theatrical patent, or a patent for machinery, property-tax should be levied in the first place on the full price as paid to the seller, and then on the profits as purchased by the buyer. I am not very expert at figures, but I think it clear that a double taxation takes place. 2d, It should be considered that a book may be the work not of one year, but of a man's whole life; and as it has been found, in a late case of the Duke of Gordon, that a fall of timber was not subject to property-tax because it comprehended the produce of thirty years, it seems at least equally fair that mental exertions should not be subjected to a harder principle of measurement. 3d, The demand is, so far as I can learn, totally new and unheard of. 4th, Supposing that I died and left my manuscripts to be sold publicly along with the rest of my library, is there any ground for taxing what might be received for the written book, any more than any rare printed book, which a speculative bookseller might purchase with a view to republication? You will know whether any of these things ought to be suggested in the brief. David Hume, and every lawyer here whom I have spoken to, consider the demand as illegal. Believe me truly yours, WALTER SCOTT. Mr. Richardson having prepared a case, obtained upon it the opinions of Mr. Alexander (afterwards Sir William Alexander and Chief Baron of the Exchequer) and of the late Sir Samuel Romilly. These eminent lawyers agreed in the view of their Scotch brethren; and after a tedious correspondence, the Lords of the Treasury at last decided that the Income-Tax Commissioners should abandon their claim upon the produce of literary labor. I have thought it worth while to preserve some record of this decision, and of the authorities on which it rested, in case such a demand should ever be renewed hereafter. In the beginning of December, the Town Council of Edinburgh resolved to send a deputation to congratulate the Prince Regent on the prosperous course of public events, and they invited Scott to draw up their address, which, on its being transmitted for previous inspection to Mr. William Dundas, then Member for the City, and through him shown privately to the Regent, was acknowledged to the penman, by his Royal Highness's command, as "the most elegant congratulation a sovereign ever received, or a subject offered."[44] The Lord Provost of Edinburgh presented it accordingly at the levee of the 10th, and it was received most graciously. On returning to the north, the Magistrates expressed their sense of Scott's services on this occasion by presenting him with the freedom of his native city, and also with a piece of plate,--which the reader will find alluded to, among other matters of more consequence, in a letter to be quoted presently. At this time Scott further expressed his patriotic exultation in the rescue of Europe, by two songs for the anniversary of the death of Pitt; one of which has ever since, I believe, been chanted at that celebration:-- "O dread was the time and more dreadful the omen, When the brave on Marengo lay slaughter'd in vain," etc.[45] Footnotes of the Chapter XXVI. [23: Mr. Hunter died in March, 1812.] [24: "These and after purchases of books from the stock of J. Ballantyne and Co. were resold to the trade by Constable's firm, at less than one half and one third of the prices at which they were thus obtained."--_Note from Mr. R. Cadell._] [25: Dr. Brewster's edition of Ferguson's _Astronomy_, 2 vols. 8vo, with plates, 4to, Edin. 1811. 36_s_.] [26: Dr. Singers's _General View of the County of Dumfries_, 8vo, Edin. 1812. 18_s_.] [27: A trade sale of Messrs. Cadell and Davies in the Strand.] [28: Since this work was first published, I have been compelled to examine very minutely the details of Scott's connection with the Ballantynes, and one result is, that both James and John had trespassed so largely, for their private purposes, on the funds of the Companies, that, Scott being, as their letters distinctly state, the only "monied partner," and his over-advances of capital having been very extensive, any inquiry on their part as to his uncommercial expenditure must have been entirely out of the question. To avoid misrepresentation, however, I leave my text as it was.--(1839.)] [29: _Merchant of Venice_, Act II. Scene 2.] [30: The court of offices, built on the haugh at Abbotsford in 1812, included a house for the faithful coachman, Peter Mathieson. One of Scott's Cantabrigian friends, Mr. W. S. Rose, gave the whole pile soon afterwards the name, which it retained to the end, of _Peter-House_. The loft at Peter-House continued to be occupied by occasional bachelor guests until the existing mansion was completed.] [31: Mrs. Thomas Scott had met Burns frequently in early life at Dumfries. Her brother, the late Mr. David MacCulloch, was a great favorite with the poet, and the best singer of his songs that I ever heard.] [32: John Ballantyne had embarked no capital--not a shilling--in the business; and was bound by the contract to limit himself to an allowance of £300 a year, in consideration of his _management_, until there should be an overplus of profits!--(1839.)] [33: He probably alludes to the final settlement of accounts with the Marquis of Abercorn.] [34: The Royal Librarian had forwarded to Scott presentation copies of his successive publications--_The Progress of Maritime Discovery_--Falconer's _Shipwreck, with a Life of the Author_--_Naufragia_--_A Life of Nelson_, in two quarto volumes, etc., etc., etc.] [35: Poor Gay--"In wit a man, simplicity a child"--was insulted, on the accession of George II., by the offer of a gentleman-ushership to one of the royal infants. His prose and verse largely celebrate his obligations to Charles, third Duke of Queensberry, and the charming Lady Catharine Hyde, his Duchess--under whose roof the poet spent the latter years of his life.] [36: See the Preface to the third volume of the late Collective Edition of Mr. Southey's _Poems_, p. xii., where he corrects a trivial error I had fallen into in the first edition of these Memoirs, and adds, "Sir Walter's conduct was, as it always was, characteristically generous, and in the highest degree friendly."--(1839.)] [37: Garrick's _Bon Ton, or High Life Above Stairs_.] [38: _Twelfth Night_, Act V. Scene 1.] [39: The letter in question has not been preserved in Scott's collection of correspondence. This leaves some allusions in the answer obscure.] [40: Scott's old friend, Mr. John Richardson, had shortly before this time taken a house in Miss Baillie's neighborhood, on Hampstead Heath.] [41: Miss Baillie had apologized to him for having sent an extract of one of his letters to her friend at Edgeworthstown.] [42: Milton, _Sonnet No. VIII._ [_When the Assault was intended to the City._]] [43: [On May 3, Scott had written to his daughter, that this hair was light brown, and later, writing to Joanna Baillie, he says, "I did not think Charles's hair had been quite so light; that of his father, and I believe of all the Stuarts till Charles II., was reddish." Of the king, he goes on to say: "Tory, as I am, my heart only goes with King Charles in his struggles and distresses, for the fore part of his reign was a series of misconduct; however, if he sow'd the wind, God knows he reap'd the whirlwind.... Sound therefore be the sleep, and henceforward undisturbed the ashes, of this unhappy prince.... His attachment to a particular form of worship was in him conscience, for he adhered to the Church of England ... when by giving up that favorite point he might have secured his reëstablishment; and in that sense he may be justly considered as a martyr, though his early political errors blemish his character as King of England."--_Familiar Letters_, vol. i. p. 288.]] [44: Letter from the Right Hon. W. Dundas, dated 6th December, 1813.] [45: See Scott's _Poetical Works_, vol. xi. p. 309, Edition 1834 [Cambridge Edition, p. 409].] CHAPTER XXVII INSANITY OF HENRY WEBER. -- LETTERS ON THE ABDICATION OF NAPOLEON, ETC. -- PUBLICATION OF SCOTT'S LIFE AND EDITION OF SWIFT. -- ESSAYS FOR THE SUPPLEMENT TO THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA. -- COMPLETION AND PUBLICATION OF WAVERLEY 1814 I have to open the year 1814 with a melancholy story. Mention has been made, more than once, of Henry Weber, a poor German scholar, who escaping to this country in 1804, from misfortunes in his own, excited Scott's compassion, and was thenceforth furnished, through his means, with literary employment of various sorts. Weber was a man of considerable learning; but Scott, as was his custom, appears to have formed an exaggerated notion of his capacity, and certainly countenanced him, to his own severe cost, in several most unfortunate undertakings. When not engaged on things of a more ambitious character, he had acted for ten years as his protector's amanuensis, and when the family were in Edinburgh, he very often dined with them. There was something very interesting in his appearance and manners: he had a fair, open countenance, in which the honesty and the enthusiasm of his nation were alike visible; his demeanor was gentle and modest; and he had not only a stock of curious antiquarian knowledge, but the reminiscences, which he detailed with amusing simplicity, of an early life chequered with many strange-enough adventures. He was, in short, much a favorite with Scott and all the household; and was invited to dine with them so frequently, chiefly because his friend was aware that he had an unhappy propensity to drinking, and was anxious to keep him away from places where he might have been more likely to indulge it. This vice, however, had been growing on him; and of late Scott had found it necessary to make some rather severe remonstrances about habits which were at once injuring his health, and interrupting his literary industry. [Illustration: J. B. S. MORRITT _From the painting by Sir M. A. Shee_] They had, however, parted kindly when Scott left Edinburgh at Christmas, 1813,--and the day after his return, Weber attended him as usual in his library, being employed in transcribing extracts during several hours, while his friend, seated over against him, continued working at the Life of Swift. The light beginning to fail, Scott threw himself back in his chair, and was about to ring for candles, when he observed the German's eyes fixed upon him with an unusual solemnity of expression. "Weber," said he, "what's the matter with you?" "Mr. Scott," said Weber, rising, "you have long insulted me, and I can bear it no longer. I have brought a pair of pistols with me, and must insist on your taking one of them instantly;" and with that he produced the weapons, which had been deposited under his chair, and laid one of them on Scott's manuscript. "You are mistaken, I think," said Scott, "in your way of setting about this affair--but no matter. It can, however, be no part of your object to annoy Mrs. Scott and the children; therefore, if you please, we will put the pistols into the drawer till after dinner, and then arrange to go out together like gentlemen." Weber answered with equal coolness, "I believe that will be better," and laid the second pistol also on the table. Scott locked them both in his desk, and said, "I am glad you have felt the propriety of what I suggested--let me only request further, that nothing may occur while we are at dinner to give my wife any suspicion of what has been passing." Weber again assented, and Scott withdrew to his dressing-room, from which he immediately despatched a message to one of Weber's intimate companions,--and then dinner was served, and Weber joined the family circle as usual. He conducted himself with perfect composure, and everything seemed to go on in the ordinary way, until whiskey and hot water being produced, Scott, instead of inviting his guest to help himself, mixed two moderate tumblers of toddy, and handed one of them to Weber, who, upon that, started up with a furious countenance, but instantly sat down again, and when Mrs. Scott expressed her fear that he was ill, answered placidly that he was liable to spasms, but that the pain was gone. He then took the glass, eagerly gulped down its contents, and pushed it back to Scott. At this moment the friend who had been sent for made his appearance, and Weber, on seeing him enter the room, rushed past him and out of the house, without stopping to put on his hat. The friend, who pursued instantly, came up with him at the end of the street, and did all he could to soothe his agitation, but in vain. The same evening he was obliged to be put into a strait-waistcoat; and though in a few days he exhibited such symptoms of recovery that he was allowed to go by himself to pay a visit in the north of England, he there soon relapsed, and continued ever afterwards a hopeless lunatic, being supported to the end of his life, in June, 1818, at Scott's expense, in an asylum at York. The reader will now appreciate the gentle delicacy of the following letter:-- TO J. B. S. MORRITT, ESQ., ROKEBY, GRETA BRIDGE. EDINBURGH, 7th January, 1814. Many happy New Years to you and Mrs. Morritt. MY DEAR MORRITT,--I have postponed writing a long while, in hopes to send you the Life of Swift. But I have been delayed by an odd accident. Poor Weber, whom you may have heard me mention as a sort of grinder of mine, who assisted me in various ways, has fallen into a melancholy state. His habits, like those of most German students, were always too convivial--this, of course, I guarded against while he was in my house, which was always once a week at least; but unfortunately he undertook a long walk through the Highlands of upwards of 2000 miles, and, I suppose, took potations pottle deep to support him through the fatigue. His mind became accordingly quite unsettled, and after some strange behavior here, he was fortunately prevailed upon to go to **** who resides in Yorkshire. It is not unlikely, from something that dropped from him, that he may take it into his head to call at Rokeby, in which case you must parry any visit, upon the score of Mrs. Morritt's health. If he were what he used to be, you would be much pleased with him; for besides a very extensive general acquaintance with literature, he was particularly deep in our old dramatic lore, a good modern linguist, a tolerable draughtsman and antiquary, and a most excellent hydrographer. I have not the least doubt that if he submits to the proper regimen of abstinence and moderate exercise, he will be quite well in a few weeks or days--if not, it is miserable to think what may happen. The being suddenly deprived of his services in this melancholy way, has flung me back at least a month with Swift, and left me no time to write to my friends, for all my memoranda, etc., were in his hands, and had to be new-modelled, etc., etc. Our glorious prospects on the Continent called forth the congratulations of the City of Edinburgh among others. The Magistrates asked me to draw their address, which was presented by the Lord Provost in person, who happens to be a gentleman of birth and fortune.[46] The Prince said some very handsome things respecting the address, with which the Magistrates were so much elated, that they have done the genteel thing (as Winifred Jenkins says) by their literary adviser, and presented me with the freedom of the city, and a handsome piece of plate. I got the freedom at the same time with Lord Dalhousie and Sir Thomas Graham, and the Provost gave a very brilliant entertainment. About 150 gentlemen dined at his own house, all as well served as if there had been a dozen. So if one strikes a cuff on the one side from ill-will, there is a pat on the other from kindness, and the shuttlecock is kept flying. To poor Charlotte's great horror, I chose my plate in the form of an old English tankard, an utensil for which I have a particular respect, especially when charged with good ale, cup, or any of these potables. I hope you will soon see mine.[47] Your little friends, Sophia and Walter, were at a magnificent party on Twelfth Night at Dalkeith, where the Duke and Duchess entertained all Edinburgh. I think they have dreamed of nothing since but Aladdin's lamp and the palace of Haroun Al-Raschid. I am uncertain what to do this spring. I would fain go on the Continent for three or four weeks, if it be then safe for non-combatants. If not, we will have a merry meeting in London, and, like Master Silence, "Eat, drink, and make good cheer, And praise heaven for the merry year."[48] I have much to say about Triermain. The fourth edition is at press. The Empress Dowager of Russia has expressed such an interest in it, that it will be inscribed to her, in some doggerel sonnet or other, by the unknown author. This is funny enough.--Love a thousand times to dear Mrs. Morritt, who, I trust, keeps pretty well. Pray write soon--a modest request from WALTER SCOTT. The last of Weber's literary productions were the analyses of the Old German Poems of the _Helden Buch_, and the _Nibelungen Lied_, which appeared in a massive quarto, entitled Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, published in the summer of 1814, by his and Scott's friend, Mr. Robert Jameson. Scott avowedly contributed to this collection an account of the Eyrbiggia Saga, which has since been included in his Prose Miscellanies (Vol. V., edition 1834); but any one who examines the share of the work which goes under Weber's name will see that Scott had a considerable hand in that also. The rhymed versions from the Nibelungen Lied came, I can have no doubt, from his pen; but he never reclaimed these, or any other similar benefactions, of which I have traced not a few; nor, highly curious and even beautiful as many of them are, could they be intelligible, if separated from the prose narrative on which Weber embroidered them, in imitation of the style of Ellis's Specimens of Metrical Romance. The following letters, on the first abdication of Napoleon, are too characteristic to be omitted here. I need not remind the reader how greatly Scott had calmed his opinions, and softened his feelings, respecting the career and fate of the most extraordinary man of our age, before he undertook to write his history. TO J. B. S. MORRITT, ESQ., PORTLAND PLACE, LONDON. ABBOTSFORD, 30th April, 1814 "Joy--joy in London now!"--and in Edinburgh, moreover, my dear Morritt; for never did you or I see, and never again shall we see, according to all human prospects, a consummation so truly glorious, as now bids fair to conclude this long and eventful war. It is startling to think that, but for the preternatural presumption and hardness of heart displayed by the arch-enemy of mankind, we should have had a hollow and ominous truce with him, instead of a glorious and stable peace with the country over which he tyrannized, and its lawful ruler. But Providence had its own wise purposes to answer--and such was the deference of France to the ruling power--so devoutly did they worship the Devil for possession of his burning throne, that, it may be, nothing short of his rejection of every fair and advantageous offer of peace could have driven them to those acts of resistance which remembrance of former convulsions had rendered so fearful to them. Thank God! it is done at last: and--although I rather grudge him even the mouthful of air which he may draw in the Isle of Elba--yet I question whether the moral lesson would have been completed either by his perishing in battle, or being torn to pieces (which I should greatly have preferred), like the De Witts, by an infuriated crowd of conscripts and their parents. Good God! with what strange feelings must that man retire from the most unbounded authority ever vested in the hands of one man, to the seclusion of privacy and restraint! We have never heard of one good action which he did, at least for which there was not some selfish or political reason; and the train of slaughter, pestilence, and famine and fire, which his ambition has occasioned, would have outweighed five hundredfold the private virtues of a Titus. These are comfortable reflections to carry with one to privacy. If he writes his own history, as he proposes, we may gain something; but he must send it here to be printed. Nothing less than a neck-or-nothing London bookseller, like John Dunton of yore, will venture to commit to the press his strange details uncastrated. I doubt if he has _stamina_ to undertake such a labor; and yet, in youth, as I know from the brothers of Lauriston, who were his school-companions, Buonaparte's habits were distinctly and strongly literary. Spain, the Continental System, and the invasion of Russia he may record as his three leading blunders--an awful lesson to sovereigns that morality is not so indifferent to politics as Machiavelians will assert. _Res nolunt diu male administrari._ Why can we not meet to talk over these matters over a glass of claret? and when shall that be! Not this spring, I fear, for time wears fast away, and I have remained here nailed among my future oaks, which I measure daily with a foot-rule. Those which were planted two years ago begin to look very gayly, and a venerable plantation of four years old looks as _bobbish_ as yours at the dairy by Greta side. Besides, I am arranging this cottage a little more conveniently, to put off the plague and expense of building another year; and I assure you, I expect to spare Mrs. Morritt and you a chamber in the wall, with a dressing-room and everything handsome about you. You will not stipulate, of course, for many square feet.--You would be surprised to hear how the Continent is awakening from its iron sleep. The utmost eagerness seems to prevail about English literature. I have had several voluntary epistles from different parts of Germany, from men of letters, who are eager to know what we have been doing, while they were compelled to play at blind man's buff with the _ci-devant Empereur_. The feeling of the French officers, of whom we have many in our vicinity, is very curious, and yet natural.[49] Many of them, companions of Buonaparte's victories, and who hitherto have marched with him from conquest to conquest, disbelieve the change entirely. This is all very stupid to write to you, who are in the centre of these wonders; but what else can I say, unless I should send you the measure of the future fathers of the forest? Mrs. Scott is with me here--the children in Edinburgh. Our kindest love attends Mrs. Morritt. I hope to hear soon that her health continues to gain ground. I have a letter from Southey, in high spirits on the glorious news. What a pity this last battle[50] was fought. But I am glad the rascals were beaten once more. Ever yours, WALTER SCOTT. TO ROBERT SOUTHEY, ESQ., KESWICK. EDINBURGH, 17th June, 1814. MY DEAR SOUTHEY,--I suspended writing to thank you for the Carmen Triumphale--(a happy omen of what you can do to immortalize our public story)--until the feverish mood of expectation and anxiety should be over. And then, as you truly say, there followed a stunning sort of listless astonishment and complication of feeling, which, if it did not lessen enjoyment, confused and confounded one's sense of it. I remember the first time I happened to see a launch, I was neither so much struck with the descent of the vessel, nor with its majestic sweep to its moorings, as with the blank which was suddenly made from the withdrawing so large an object, and the prospect which was at once opened to the opposite side of the dock crowded with spectators. Buonaparte's fall strikes me something in the same way: the huge bulk of his power, against which a thousand arms were hammering, was obviously to sink when its main props were struck away--and yet now--when it has disappeared--the vacancy which it leaves in our minds and attention marks its huge and preponderating importance more strongly than even its presence. Yet I so devoutly expected the termination, that in discussing the matter with Major Philips, who seemed to partake of the doubts which prevailed during the feverish period preceding the capture of Paris, when he was expressing his apprehensions that the capital of France would be defended to the last, I hazarded a prophecy that a battle would be fought on the heights of Montmartre--(no great sagacity, since it was the point where Marlborough proposed to attack, and for which Saxe projected a scheme of defence)--and that if the allies were successful, which I little doubted, the city would surrender, and the Senate proclaim the dethronement of Buonaparte. But I never thought nor imagined that he would have _given in_ as he has done. I always considered him as possessing the genius and talents of an Eastern conqueror; and although I never supposed that he possessed, allowing for some difference of education, the liberality of conduct and political views which were sometimes exhibited by old Hyder Ally, yet I did think he might have shown the same resolved and dogged spirit of resolution which induced Tippoo Saib to die manfully upon the breach of his capital city with his sabre clenched in his hand. But this is a poor devil, and cannot play the tyrant so rarely as Bottom the Weaver proposed to do. I think it is Strap in Roderick Random, who, seeing a highwayman that had lately robbed him, disarmed and bound, fairly offers to box him for a shilling. One has really the same feeling with respect to Buonaparte, though if he go out of life after all in the usual manner, it will be the strongest proof of his own insignificance, and the liberality of the age we live in. Were I a son of Palm or Hoffer, I should be tempted to take a long shot at him in his retreat to Elba. As for coaxing the French by restoring all our conquests, it would be driving generosity into extravagance: most of them have been colonized with British subjects, and improved by British capital; and surely we owe no more to the French nation than any well-meaning individual might owe to a madman, whom--at the expense of a hard struggle, black eyes, and bruises--he has at length overpowered, knocked down, and by the wholesome discipline of a bull's pizzle and strait-jacket, brought to the handsome enjoyment of his senses. I think with you, what we return to them should be well paid for; and they should have no Pondicherry to be a nest of smugglers, nor Mauritius to nurse a hornet-swarm of privateers. In short, draw teeth, and pare claws, and leave them to fatten themselves in peace and quiet, when they are deprived of the means of indulging their restless spirit of enterprise. --The above was written at Abbotsford last month, but left in my portfolio there till my return some days ago; and now, when I look over what I have written, I am confirmed in my opinion that we have given the rascals too good an opportunity to boast that they have got well off. An intimate friend of mine,[51] just returned from a long captivity in France, witnessed the entry of the King, guarded by the Imperial Guards, whose countenances betokened the most sullen and ferocious discontent. The mob, and especially the women, pelted them for refusing to cry, "Vive le Roi." If Louis is well advised, he will get rid of these fellows gradually, but as soon as possible. "Joy, joy in London now!" What a scene has been going on there! I think you may see the Czar appear on the top of one of your stages one morning. He is a fine fellow, and has fought the good fight. Yours affectionately, WALTER SCOTT. On the 1st of July, 1814, Scott's Life and Edition of Swift, in nineteen volumes 8vo, at length issued from the press. This adventure, undertaken by Constable in 1808, had been proceeded in during all the variety of their personal relations, and now came forth when author and publisher felt more warmly towards each other than perhaps they had ever before done. The impression was of 1250 copies; and a reprint of similar extent was called for in 1824. The Life of Swift has subsequently been included in the author's Miscellanies, and has obtained a very wide circulation. By his industrious inquiries, in which, as the preface gratefully acknowledges, he found many zealous assistants, especially among the Irish literati,[52] Scott added to this edition many admirable pieces, both in prose and verse, which had never before been printed, and still more which had escaped notice amidst old bundles of pamphlets and broadsides. To the illustration of these and of all the better known writings of the Dean, he brought the same qualifications which had, by general consent, distinguished his Dryden, "uniting," as the Edinburgh Review expresses it, "to the minute knowledge and patient research of the Malones and Chalmerses, a vigor of judgment and a vivacity of style to which they had no pretensions." His biographical narrative, introductory essays, and notes on Swift, show, indeed, an intimacy of acquaintance with the obscurest details of the political, social, and literary history of the period of Queen Anne, which it is impossible to consider without feeling a lively regret that he never accomplished a long-cherished purpose of preparing a Life and Edition of Pope on a similar scale. It has been specially unfortunate for that "true deacon of the craft," as Scott often called Pope, that first Goldsmith, and then Scott, should have taken up, only to abandon it, the project of writing his life and editing his works. The Edinburgh Reviewer thus characterizes Scott's Memoir of the Dean of St. Patrick's:-- "It is not everywhere extremely well written, in a literary point of view, but it is drawn up in substance with great intelligence, liberality, and good feeling. It is quite fair and moderate in politics; and perhaps rather too indulgent and tender towards individuals of all descriptions--more full, at least, of kindness and veneration for genius and social virtue, than of indignation at baseness and profligacy. Altogether, it is not much like the production of a mere man of letters, or a fastidious speculator in sentiment and morality; but exhibits throughout, and in a very pleasing form, the good sense and large toleration of a man of the world, with much of that generous allowance for the 'Fears of the brave and follies of the wise,' which genius too often requires, and should therefore always be most forward to show. It is impossible, however, to avoid noticing that Mr. Scott is by far too favorable to the personal character of his author, whom we think it would really be injurious to the cause of morality to allow to pass either as a very dignified or a very amiable person. The truth is, we think, that he was extremely ambitious, arrogant, and selfish; of a morose, vindictive, and haughty temper; and though capable of a sort of patronizing generosity towards his dependents, and of some attachment towards those who had long known and flattered him, his general demeanor, both in public and private life, appears to have been far from exemplary; destitute of temper and magnanimity, and we will add, of principle, in the former; and in the latter, of tenderness, fidelity, or compassion."--_Edinburgh Review_, vol. xvii. p. 9. I have no desire to break a lance in this place in defence of the personal character of Swift. It does not appear to me that he stands at all distinguished among politicians (least of all, among the politicians of his time) for laxity of principle; nor can I consent to charge his private demeanor with the absence either of tenderness, or fidelity, or compassion. But who ever dreamed--most assuredly not Scott--of holding up the Dean of St. Patrick's as on the whole an "exemplary character"? The biographer felt, whatever his critic may have thought on the subject, that a vein of morbid humor ran through Swift's whole existence, both mental and physical, from the beginning. "He early adopted," says Scott, "the custom of observing his birthday, as a term not of joy but of sorrow, and of reading, when it annually recurred, the striking passage of Scripture in which Job laments and execrates the day upon which it was said in his father's house _that a man-child was born_;" and I should have expected that any man who had considered the black close of the career thus early clouded, and read the entry of Swift's diary on the funeral of Stella, his epitaph on himself, and the testament by which he disposed of his fortune, would have been willing, like Scott, to dwell on the splendor of his immortal genius, and the many traits of manly generosity "which he unquestionably exhibited," rather than on the faults and foibles of nameless and inscrutable disease, which tormented and embittered the far greater part of his earthly being. What the critic says of the practical and businesslike style of Scott's biography, appears very just--and I think the circumstance eminently characteristic; nor, on the whole, could his edition, as an edition, have been better dealt with than in the Essay which I have quoted. It was, by the way, written by Mr. Jeffrey, at Constable's particular request. "It was, I think, the first time I ever asked such a thing of him," the bookseller said to me; "and I assure you the result was no encouragement to repeat such petitions." Mr. Jeffrey attacked Swift's whole character at great length, and with consummate dexterity; and, in Constable's opinion, his article threw such a cloud on the Dean, as materially checked, for a time, the popularity of his writings. Admirable as the paper is, in point of ability, I think Mr. Constable may have considerably exaggerated its effects; but in those days it must have been difficult for him to form an impartial opinion upon such a question; for, as Johnson said of Cave, that "he could not spit over his window without thinking of The Gentleman's Magazine," I believe Constable allowed nothing to interrupt his paternal pride in the concerns of his Review, until the Waverley Novels supplied him with another periodical publication still more important to his fortunes. And this consummation was not long delayed: a considerable addition having by that time been made to the original fragment, there appeared in The Scots Magazine, for February 1, 1814, an announcement, that "Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, a novel, in 3 vols., 12mo," would be published in March. And before Scott came into Edinburgh, at the close of the Christmas vacation, on the 12th of January, Mr. Erskine had perused the greater part of the first volume, and expressed his decided opinion that Waverley would prove the most popular of all his friend's writings.[53] The MS. was forthwith copied by John Ballantyne, and sent to press. As soon as a volume was printed, Ballantyne conveyed it to Constable, who did not for a moment doubt from what pen it proceeded, but took a few days to consider of the matter, and then offered £700 for the copyright. When we recollect what the state of novel literature in those days was, and that the only exceptions to its mediocrity, the Irish Tales of Miss Edgeworth, however appreciated in refined circles, had a circulation so limited that she had never realized a tithe of £700 by the best of them--it must be allowed that Constable's offer was a liberal one. Scott's answer, however, transmitted through the same channel, was that £700 was too much, in case the novel should not be successful, and too little in case it should. He added, "If our fat friend had said £1000, I should have been staggered." John did not forget to hint this last circumstance to Constable, but the latter did not choose to act upon it; and he ultimately published the work, on the footing of an equal division of profits between himself and the author. There was a considerable pause between the finishing of the first volume and the beginning of the second. Constable had, in 1812, acquired the copyright of the Encyclopædia Britannica, and was now preparing to publish the valuable Supplement to that work, which has since, with modifications, been incorporated into its text. He earnestly requested Scott to undertake a few articles for the Supplement; he agreed--and, anxious to gratify the generous bookseller, at once laid aside his tale until he had finished two essays--those on Chivalry and the Drama. They appear to have been completed in the course of April and May, and he received for each of them--as he did subsequently for that on Romance--£100. The two next letters will give us, in more exact detail than the author's own recollection could supply in 1830, the history of the completion of Waverley. It was published on the 7th of July; and two days afterwards he thus writes:-- TO J. B. S. MORRITT, ESQ., M. P., LONDON. EDINBURGH, 9th July, 1814. MY DEAR MORRITT,--I owe you many apologies for not sooner answering your very entertaining letter upon your Parisian journey. I heartily wish I had been of your party, for you have seen what I trust will not be seen again in a hurry; since, to enjoy the delight of a restoration, there is a necessity for a previous _bouleversement_ of everything that is valuable in morals and policy, which seems to have been the case in France since 1790.[54] The Duke of Buccleuch told me yesterday of a very good reply of Louis to some of his attendants, who proposed shutting the doors of his apartments to keep out the throng of people. "Open the door," he said, "to John Bull; he has suffered a great deal in keeping the door open for me." Now, to go from one important subject to another, I must account for my own laziness, which I do by referring you to a small anonymous sort of a novel, in three volumes, Waverley, which you will receive by the mail of this day. It was a very old attempt of mine to embody some traits of those characters and manners peculiar to Scotland, the last remnants of which vanished during my own youth, so that few or no traces now remain. I had written great part of the first volume, and sketched other passages, when I mislaid the MS., and only found it by the merest accident as I was rummaging the drawers of an old cabinet;[55] and I took the fancy of finishing it, which I did so fast, that the last two volumes were written in three weeks. I had a great deal of fun in the accomplishment of this task, though I do not expect that it will be popular in the south, as much of the humor, if there be any, is local, and some of it even professional. You, however, who are an adopted Scotchman, will find some amusement in it. It has made a very strong impression here, and the good people of Edinburgh are busied in tracing the author, and in finding out originals for the portraits it contains. In the first case, they will probably find it difficult to convict the guilty author, although he is far from escaping suspicion. Jeffrey has offered to make oath that it is mine, and another great critic has tendered his affidavit _ex contrario_; so that these authorities have divided the Gude Town. However, the thing has succeeded very well, and is thought highly of. I don't know if it has got to London yet. I intend to maintain my _incognito_. Let me know your opinion about it. I should be most happy if I could think it would amuse a painful thought at this anxious moment. I was in hopes Mrs. Morritt was getting so much better, that this relapse affects me very much. Ever yours truly, W. SCOTT. P. S.--As your conscience has very few things to answer for, you must still burthen it with the secret of the Bridal. It is spreading very rapidly, and I have one or two little fairy romances, which will make a second volume, and which I would wish published, but not with my name. The truth is, that this sort of muddling work amuses me, and I am something in the condition of Joseph Surface, who was embarrassed by getting himself too good a reputation; for many things may please people well enough anonymously, which, if they have me in the title-page, would just give me that sort of ill name which precedes hanging--and that would be in many respects inconvenient if I thought of again trying a _grande opus_. This statement of the foregoing letter (repeated still more precisely in the following one), as to the time occupied in the composition of the second and third volumes of Waverley, recalls to my memory a trifling anecdote, which, as connected with a dear friend of my youth, whom I have not seen for many years, and may very probably never see again in this world, I shall here set down, in the hope of affording him a momentary, though not an unmixed pleasure, when he may chance to read this compilation on a distant shore--and also in the hope that my humble record may impart to some active mind in the rising generation a shadow of the influence which the reality certainly exerted upon his. Happening to pass through Edinburgh in June, 1814, I dined one day with the gentleman in question (now the Honorable William Menzies, one of the Supreme Judges at the Cape of Good Hope), whose residence was then in George Street, situated very near to, and at right angles with, North Castle Street. It was a party of very young persons, most of them, like Menzies and myself, destined for the Bar of Scotland, all gay and thoughtless, enjoying the first flush of manhood, with little remembrance of the yesterday, or care of the morrow. When my companion's worthy father and uncle, after seeing two or three bottles go round, left the juveniles to themselves, the weather being hot, we adjourned to a library which had one large window looking northwards. After carousing here for an hour or more, I observed that a shade had come over the aspect of my friend, who happened to be placed immediately opposite to myself, and said something that intimated a fear of his being unwell. "No," said he, "I shall be well enough presently, if you will only let me sit where you are, and take my chair; for there is a confounded hand in sight of me here, which has often bothered me before, and now it won't let me fill my glass with a good will." I rose to change places with him accordingly, and he pointed out to me this hand which, like the writing on Belshazzar's wall, disturbed his hour of hilarity. "Since we sat down," he said, "I have been watching it--it fascinates my eye--it never stops--page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied--and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is the same every night--I can't stand a sight of it when I am not at my books."--"Some stupid, dogged, engrossing clerk, probably," exclaimed myself, or some other giddy youth in our society. "No, boys," said our host, "I well know what hand it is--'tis Walter Scott's." This was the hand that, in the evenings of three summer weeks, wrote the last two volumes of Waverley. Would that all who that night watched it had profited by its example of diligence as largely as William Menzies! In the next of these letters Scott enclosed to Mr. Morritt the Prospectus of a new edition of the old poems of the Bruce and the Wallace, undertaken by the learned lexicographer, Dr. John Jamieson; and he announces his departure on a sailing excursion round the north of Scotland. It will be observed that when Scott began his letter, he had only had Mr. Morritt's opinion of the first volume of Waverley, and that before he closed it he had received his friend's honest criticism on the work as a whole, with the expression of an earnest hope that he would drop his _incognito_ on the title-page of a second edition. TO J. B. S. MORRITT, ESQ., M. P., PORTLAND PLACE, LONDON. ABBOTSFORD, July 24, 1814. MY DEAR MORRITT,--I am going to say my _vales_ to you for some weeks, having accepted an invitation from a committee of the Commissioners for the Northern Lights (I don't mean the Edinburgh Reviewers, but the _bona-fide_ Commissioners for the Beacons), to accompany them upon a nautical tour round Scotland, visiting all that is curious on continent and isle. The party are three gentlemen with whom I am very well acquainted, William Erskine being one. We have a stout cutter, well fitted up and manned for the service by Government; and to make assurance double sure, the admiral has sent a sloop of war to cruise in the dangerous points of our tour, and sweep the sea of the Yankee privateers, which sometimes annoy our northern latitudes. I shall visit the Clephanes in their solitude--and let you know all that I see that is rare and entertaining, which, as we are masters of our time and vessel, should add much to my stock of knowledge. As to Waverley, I will play Sir Fretful for once, and assure you that I left the story to flag in the first volume on purpose; the second and third have rather more bustle and interest. I wished (with what success Heaven knows) to avoid the ordinary error of novel writers, whose first volume is usually their best. But since it has served to amuse Mrs. Morritt and you _usque ab initio_, I have no doubt you will tolerate it even unto the end. It may really boast to be a tolerably faithful portrait of Scottish manners, and has been recognized as such in Edinburgh. The first edition of a thousand instantly disappeared, and the bookseller informs me that the second, of double the quantity, will not supply the market long.--As I shall be very anxious to know how Mrs. Morritt is, I hope to have a few lines from you on my return, which will be about the end of August or beginning of September. I should have mentioned that we have the celebrated engineer, Stevenson, along with us. I delight in these professional men of talent; they always give you some new lights by the peculiarity of their habits and studies, so different from the people who are rounded, and smoothed, and ground down for conversation, and who can say all that every other person says, and--nothing more. What a miserable thing it is that our royal family cannot be quiet and decent at least, if not correct and moral in their deportment. Old farmer George's manly simplicity, modesty of expense, and domestic virtue, saved this country at its most perilous crisis; for it is inconceivable the number of persons whom these qualities united in his behalf, who would have felt but feebly the abstract duty of supporting a crown less worthily worn. --I had just proceeded thus far when your kind favor of the 21st reached Abbotsford. I am heartily glad you continued to like Waverley to the end. The hero is a sneaking piece of imbecility; and if he had married Flora, she would have set him up upon the chimney-piece, as Count Borowlaski's wife used to do with him.[56] I am a bad hand at depicting a hero, properly so called, and have an unfortunate propensity for the dubious characters of Borderers, buccaneers, Highland robbers, and all others of a Robin Hood description. I do not know why it should be, as I am myself, like Hamlet, indifferent honest; but I suppose the blood of the old cattle-drivers of Teviotdale continues to stir in my veins. I shall _not_ own Waverley; my chief reason is that it would prevent me of the pleasure of writing again. David Hume, nephew of the historian, says the author must be of a Jacobite family and predilections, a yeoman-cavalry man, and a Scottish lawyer, and desires me to guess in whom these happy attributes are united. I shall not plead guilty, however; and as such seems to be the fashion of the day, I hope charitable people will believe my _affidavit_ in contradiction to all other evidence. The Edinburgh faith now is, that Waverley is written by Jeffrey, having been composed to lighten the tedium of his late transatlantic voyage. So you see the unknown infant is like to come to preferment. In truth, I am not sure it would be considered quite decorous for me, as a Clerk of Session, to write novels. Judges being monks, Clerks are a sort of lay brethren, from whom some solemnity of walk and conduct may be expected. So, whatever I may do of this kind, "I shall whistle it down the wind, and let it prey at fortune."[57] I will take care, in the next edition, to make the corrections you recommend. The second is, I believe, nearly through the press. It will hardly be printed faster than it was written; for though the first volume was begun long ago, and actually lost for a time, yet the other two were begun and finished between the 4th June and the 1st July, during all which I attended my duty in Court, and proceeded without loss of time or hindrance of business. I wish, for poor auld Scotland's sake,[58] and for the manes of Bruce and Wallace, and for the living comfort of a very worthy and ingenious dissenting clergyman, who has collected a library and medals of some value, and brought up, I believe, sixteen or seventeen children (his wife's ambition extended to twenty) upon about £150 a year--I say I wish, for all these reasons, you could get me among your wealthy friends a name or two for the enclosed proposals. The price is, I think, too high; but the booksellers fixed it two guineas above what I proposed. I trust it will be yet lowered to five guineas, which is a more come-at-able sum than six. The poems themselves are great curiosities, both to the philologist and antiquary; and that of Bruce is invaluable even to the historian. They have been hitherto wretchedly edited. I am glad you are not to pay for this scrawl. Ever yours, WALTER SCOTT. P. S.--I do not see how my silence can be considered as imposing on the public. If I give my name to a book without writing it, unquestionably that would be a trick. But, unless in the case of his averring facts which he may be called upon to defend or justify, I think an author may use his own discretion in giving or withholding his name. Harry Mackenzie never put his name in a title-page till the last edition of his works; and Swift only owned one out of his thousand-and-one publications. In point of emolument, everybody knows that I sacrifice much money by withholding my name; and what should I gain by it, that any human being has a right to consider as an unfair advantage? In fact, only the freedom of writing trifles with less personal responsibility, and perhaps more frequently than I otherwise might do. W. S. I am not able to give the exact date of the following reply to one of John Ballantyne's expostulations on the subject of _the secret_:-- "No, John, I will not own the book-- I won't, you Picaroon. When next I try St. Grubby's brook, The A. of Wa--shall bait the hook-- And flat-fish bite as soon, As if before them they had got The worn-out wriggler WALTER SCOTT." Footnotes of the Chapter XXVII. [46: The late Sir John Marjoribanks of Lees, Bart.] [47: The inscription for this tankard was penned by the late celebrated Dr. James Gregory, Professor of the Practice of Physic in the University of Edinburgh; and I therefore transcribe it. GUALTERUM SCOTT DE ABBOTSFORD VIRUM SUMMI INGENII SCRIPTOREM ELEGANTEM POETARUM SUI SECULI FACILE PRINCIPEM PATRIÆ DECUS OB VARIA ERGA IPSAM MERITA IN CIVIUM SUORUM NUMERUM GRATA ADSCRIPSIT CIVITAS EDINBURGENSIS ET HOC CANTHARO DONAVIT A. D. M.DCCC.XIII.] [48: _2d King Henry IV._ Act V. Scene 3.] [49: A good many French officers, prisoners of war, had been living on parole in Melrose, and the adjoining villages; and Mr. and Mrs. Scott had been particularly kind and hospitable to them.] [50: The battle of Toulouse.] [51: Sir Adam Ferguson, who had been taken prisoner in the course of the Duke of Wellington's retreat from Burgos.] [52: The names which he particularly mentions are those of the late Matthew Weld Hartstonge, Esq., of Dublin, Theophilus Swift, Esq., Major Tickell, Thomas Steele, Esq., Leonard Macnally, Esq., and the Rev. M. Berwick.] [53: Entertaining one night a small party of friends, Erskine read the proof sheets of this volume after supper, and was confirmed in his opinion by the enthusiastic interest they excited in his highly intelligent circle. Mr. James Simpson and Mr. Norman Hill, advocates, were of this party, and from the way in which their host spoke, they both inferred that they were listening to the first effort of some unknown aspirant. They all pronounced the work one of the highest classical merit. The sitting was protracted till daybreak.--(1839.)] [54: Mr. Morritt had, in the spring of this year, been present at the first levee held at the Tuileries by Monsieur (afterwards Charles X.), as representative of his brother Louis XVIII. Mr. M. had not been in Paris till that time since 1789.] [55: [The old writing-desk, in which, while searching for some fishing-tackle for a guest, Scott found the long-lost manuscript, was given by him to William Laidlaw, who till his death cherished with religious care all his memorials of Abbotsford. The desk is now a treasured possession of his grandson, Mr. W. L. Carruthers, of Inverness.]] [56: _Count Borowlaski_ was a Polish dwarf, who, after realizing some money as an itinerant object of exhibition, settled, married, and died (September 5, 1837) at Durham. He was a well-bred creature, and much noticed by the clergy and other gentry of that city. Indeed, even when travelling the country as a show, he had always maintained a sort of dignity. I remember him as going from house to house, when I was a child, in a sedan chair, with a servant in livery following him, who took the fee--_M. le Comte_ himself (dressed in a scarlet coat and bag wig) being ushered into the room like any ordinary visitor. The Count died in his 99th year-- "A SPIRIT brave, yet gentle, has dwelt, as it appears, Within three feet of flesh for near one hundred years; Which causes wonder, like his constitution, strong, That one _so short alive_ should be _alive so long_!" _Bentley's Miscellany_ for November, 1837.] [57: _Othello_, Act III. Scene 3.] [58: Burns--lines _On my early days_.] CHAPTER XXVIII VOYAGE TO THE SHETLAND ISLES, ETC. -- SCOTT'S DIARY KEPT ON BOARD THE LIGHTHOUSE YACHT 1814 The gallant composure with which Scott, when he had dismissed a work from his desk, awaited the decision of the public--and the healthy elasticity of spirit with which he could meanwhile turn his whole zeal upon new or different objects--are among the features in his character which will always, I believe, strike the student of literary history as most remarkable. We have now seen him before the fate of Waverley had been determined--before he had heard a word about its reception in England, except from one partial confidant--preparing to start on a voyage to the northern isles, which was likely to occupy the best part of two months, and in the course of which he could hardly expect to receive any intelligence from his friends in Edinburgh. The Diary which he kept during this expedition is--thanks to the leisure of a landsman on board--a very full one; and, written without the least notion probably that it would ever be perused except in his own family circle, it affords such a complete and artless portraiture of the man, as he was in himself, and as he mingled with his friends and companions, at one of the most interesting periods of his life, that I am persuaded every reader will be pleased to see it printed in its original state. A few extracts from it were published by himself, in one of the Edinburgh Annual Registers--he also drew from it some of the notes to his Lord of the Isles, and the substance of several others for his romance of the Pirate. But the recurrence of these detached passages will not be complained of--expounded and illustrated as the reader will find them by the personal details of the context. [Illustration: WILLIAM ERSKINE (LORD KINNEDDER) _From the water-color portrait by William Nicholson_] I have been often told by one of the companions of this voyage, that heartily as Scott entered throughout into their social enjoyments, they all perceived him, when inspecting for the first time scenes of remarkable grandeur, to be in such an abstracted and excited mood, that they felt it would be the kindest and discreetest plan to leave him to himself. "I often," said Lord Kinnedder, "on coming up from the cabin at night, found him pacing the deck rapidly, muttering to himself--and went to the forecastle, lest my presence should disturb him. I remember, that at Loch Corriskin, in particular, he seemed quite overwhelmed with his feelings; and we all saw it, and retiring unnoticed, left him to roam and gaze about by himself, until it was time to muster the party and be gone." Scott used to mention the surprise with which he himself witnessed Erskine's emotion on first entering the Cave of Staffa. "Would you believe it?" he said--"my poor Willie sat down and wept like a woman!" Yet his own sensibilities, though betrayed in a more masculine and sterner guise, were perhaps as keen as well as deeper than his amiable friend's. The poet's Diary, contained in five little paper books, is as follows:-- VACATION, 1814. _Voyage in the Lighthouse Yacht to Nova Zembla, and the Lord knows where._ "_July 29, 1814_.--Sailed from Leith about one o'clock on board the Lighthouse Yacht, conveying six guns, and ten men, commanded by Mr. Wilson. The company: Commissioners of the Northern Lights, Robert Hamilton, Sheriff of Lanarkshire; William Erskine, Sheriff of Orkney and Zetland; Adam Duff, Sheriff of Forfarshire. Non-commissioners, Ipse Ego; Mr. David Marjoribanks, son to John Marjoribanks, Provost of Edinburgh, a young gentleman; Rev. Mr. Turnbull, minister of Tingwall, in the presbytery of Shetland. But the official chief of the expedition is Mr. Stevenson, the Surveyor-Viceroy over the Commissioners--a most gentlemanlike and modest man, and well known by his scientific skill.[59] "Reached the Isle of May in the evening; went ashore, and saw the light--an old tower, and much in the form of a border-keep, with a beacon-grate on the top. It is to be abolished for an oil revolving-light, the grate-fire only being ignited upon the leeward side when the wind is very high. _Quære_--Might not the grate revolve? The isle had once a cell or two upon it. The vestiges of the chapel are still visible. Mr. Stevenson proposed demolishing the old tower, and I recommended _ruining_ it _à la picturesque_--_i. e._, demolishing it partially. The island might be made a delightful residence for sea-bathers. "On board again in the evening: watched the progress of the ship round Fifeness, and the revolving motion of the now distant Bell-Rock light until the wind grew rough, and the landsmen sick. To bed at eleven, and slept sound. "_30th July_.--Waked at six by the steward; summoned to visit the Bell-Rock, where the beacon is well worthy attention. Its dimensions are well known; but no description can give the idea of this slight, solitary, round tower, trembling amid the billows, and fifteen miles from Arbroath, the nearest shore. The fitting up within is not only handsome, but elegant. All work of wood (almost) is wainscot; all hammer-work brass; in short, exquisitely fitted up. You enter by a ladder of rope, with wooden steps, about thirty feet from the bottom, where the mason-work ceases to be solid, and admits of round apartments. The lowest is a storehouse for the people's provisions, water, etc.; above that a storehouse for the lights, of oil, etc.; then the kitchen of the people, three in number; then their sleeping chamber; then the saloon or parlor, a neat little room; above all, the lighthouse; all communicating by oaken ladders, with brass rails, most handsomely and conveniently executed. Breakfasted in the parlor.[60] On board again at nine, and run down, through a rough sea, to Aberbrothock, vulgarly called Arbroath. All sick, even Mr. Stevenson. God grant this occur seldom! Landed and dined at Arbroath, where we were to take up Adam Duff. We visited the appointments of the lighthouse establishment--a handsome tower, with two wings. These contain the lodgings of the keepers of the light--very handsome, indeed, and very clean. They might be thought too handsome, were it not of consequence to give those men, entrusted with a duty so laborious and slavish, a consequence in the eyes of the public and in their own. The central part of the building forms a single tower, corresponding with the lighthouse. As the keepers' families live here, they are apprised each morning by a signal that _all is well_. If this signal be not made, a tender sails for the rock directly. I visited the abbey church for the third time, the first being--_eheu!_[61]--the second with T. Thomson. Dined at Arbroath, and came on board at night, where I made up this foolish journal, and now beg for wine and water. So the vessel is once more in motion. "_31st July_.--Waked at seven; vessel off Fowlsheugh and Dunnottar. Fair wind, and delightful day; glide enchantingly along the coast of Kincardineshire, and open the bay of Nigg about ten. At eleven, off Aberdeen; the gentlemen go ashore to Girdle-Ness, a projecting point of rock to the east of the harbor of Foot-Dee. There the magistrates of Aberdeen wish to have a fort and beacon-light. The Oscar, whaler, was lost here last year, with all her hands, excepting two; about forty perished. Dreadful, to be wrecked so near a large and populous town! The view of Old and New Aberdeen from the sea is quite beautiful. About noon proceed along the coast of Aberdeenshire, which, to the northwards, changes from a bold and rocky to a low and sandy character. Along the bay of Belhelvie, a whole parish was swallowed up by the shifting sands, and is still a desolate waste. It belonged to the Earls of Errol, and was rented at £500 a year at the time. When these sands are passed the land is all arable. Not a tree to be seen; nor a grazing cow, or sheep, or even a labor-horse at grass, though this be Sunday. The next remarkable object was a fragment of the old castle of Slains, on a precipitous bank, overlooking the sea. The fortress was destroyed when James VI. marched north [A. D. 1594], after the battle of Glenlivet, to reduce Huntly and Errol to obedience. The family then removed to their present mean habitation, for such it seems, a collection of low houses forming a quadrangle, one side of which is built on the very verge of the precipice that overhangs the ocean. What seems odd, there are no stairs down to the beach. Imprudence, or ill-fortune as fatal as the sands of Belhelvie, has swallowed up the estate of Errol, excepting this dreary mansion-house, and a farm or two adjoining. We took to the boat, and running along the coast had some delightful sea-views to the northward of the castle. The coast is here very rocky; but the rocks, being rather soft, are wasted and corroded by the constant action of the waves,--and the fragments which remain, where the softer parts have been washed away, assume the appearance of old Gothic ruins. There are open arches, towers, steeples, and so forth. One part of this scaur is called _Dunbuy_, being colored yellow by the dung of the sea-fowls, who build there in the most surprising numbers. We caught three young gulls. But the most curious object was the celebrated Buller of Buchan, a huge rocky cauldron, into which the sea rushes through a natural arch of rock. I walked round the top; in one place the path is only about two feet wide, and a monstrous precipice on either side. We then rowed into the cauldron or buller from beneath, and saw nothing around us but a regular wall of black rock, and nothing above but the blue sky. A fishing hamlet had sent out its inhabitants, who, gazing from the brink, looked like sylphs looking down upon gnomes. In the side of the cauldron opens a deep black cavern. Johnson says it might be a retreat from storms, which is nonsense. In a high gale the waves rush in with incredible violence. An old fisher said he had seen them flying over the natural wall of the buller, which cannot be less than 200 feet high. Same old man says Slains is now inhabited by a Mr. Bowles, who comes so far from the southward that naebody kens whare he comes frae. 'Was he frae the Indies?'--'Na; he did not think he came that road. He was far frae the southland. Naebody ever heard the name of the place; but he had brought more guid out o' Peterhead than a' the Lords he had seen in Slains, and he had seen three.' About half-past five we left this interesting spot, and after a hard pull reached the yacht. Weather falls hazy, and rather calm; but at sea we observe vessels enjoying more wind. Pass Peterhead, dimly distinguishing two steeples and a good many masts. Mormounthill said to resemble a coffin--a likeness of which we could not judge, Mormount being for the present invisible. Pass Rattray-Head: near this cape are dangerous shelves, called the Bridge of Rattray. Here the wreck of the Doris merchant vessel came on shore, lost last year with a number of passengers for Shetland. We lie off all night. "_1st August_.--Off Fraserburgh--a neat little town. Mr. Stevenson and the Commissioners go on shore to look at a light maintained there upon an old castle, on a cape called Kinnaird's Head. The morning being rainy, and no object of curiosity ashore, I remain on board, to make up my journal, and write home. "The old castle, now bearing the light, is a picturesque object from the sea. It was the baronial mansion of the Frasers, now Lords Saltoun--an old square tower with a minor fortification towards the landing-place on the sea-side. About eleven, the Commissioners came off, and we leave this town, the extreme point of the Moray Firth, to stretch for Shetland--salute the castle with three guns, and stretch out with a merry gale. See Mormount, a long flattish-topped hill near to the West Trouphead, and another bold cliff promontory projecting into the firth. Our gale soon failed, and we are now all but becalmed; songs, ballads, recitations, backgammon, and piquet, for the rest of the day. Noble sunset and moon rising; we are now out of sight of land. "_2d August_.--At sea in the mouth of the Moray Firth. This day almost a blank--light baffling airs, which do us very little good; most of the landsmen sick, more or less; piquet, backgammon, and chess, the only resources.--_P.M._ A breeze, and we begin to think we have passed the Fair Isle, lying between Shetland and Orkney, at which it was our intention to have touched. In short, like one of Sinbad's adventures, we have run on till neither captain nor pilot know exactly where we are. The breeze increases--weather may be called rough; worse and worse after we are in our berths, nothing but booming, trampling, and whizzing of waves about our ears, and ever and anon, as we fall asleep, our ribs come in contact with those of the vessel; hail Duff and the Udaller[62] in the after-cabin, but they are too sick to answer. Towards morning, calm (comparative), and a nap. "_3d August_.--At sea as before; no appearance of land; proposed that the Sheriff of Zetland do issue a _meditatione fugæ_ warrant against his territories, which seem to fly from us. Pass two whalers; speak the nearest, who had come out of Lerwick, which is about twenty miles distant; stand on with a fine breeze. About nine at night, with moonlight and strong twilight, we weather the point of Bard-head, and enter a channel about three quarters of a mile broad which forms the southern entrance to the harbor of Lerwick, where we cast anchor about half-past ten, and put Mr. Turnbull on shore. "_4th August_.--Harbor of Lerwick. Admire the excellence of this harbor of the metropolis of Shetland. It is a most beautiful place, screened on all sides from the wind by hills of a gentle elevation. The town, a fishing village built irregularly upon a hill ascending from the shore, has a picturesque appearance. On the left is Fort Charlotte, garrisoned of late by two companies of veterans. The Greenlandmen, of which nine fine vessels are lying in the harbor, add much to the liveliness of the scene. Mr. Duncan, Sheriff-substitute, came off to pay his respects to his principal; he is married to a daughter of my early acquaintance, Walter Scott of Scotshall. We go ashore. Lerwick, a poor-looking place, the streets flagged instead of being causewayed, for there are no wheel-carriages. The streets full of drunken riotous sailors from the whale-vessels. It seems these ships take about 1000 sailors from Zetland every year, and return them as they come back from the fishery. Each sailor may gain from £20 to £30, which is paid by the merchants of Lerwick, who have agencies from the owners of the whalers in England. The whole return may be between £25,000 and £30,000. These Zetlanders, as they get a part of this pay on landing, make a point of treating their English messmates, who get drunk of course, and are very riotous. The Zetlanders themselves do _not_ get drunk, but go straight home to their houses, and reserve their hilarity for the winter season, when they spend their wages in dancing and drinking. Erskine finds employment as Sheriff, for the neighborhood of the fort enables him to make _main forte_, and secure a number of the rioters. We visit F. Charlotte, which is a neat little fort mounting ten heavy guns to the sea, but only one to the land. Major F., the Governor, showed us the fort; it commands both entrances of the harbor: the north entrance is not very good, but the south capital. The water in the harbor is very deep, as frigates of the smaller class lie almost close to the shore. Take a walk with Captain M'Diarmid, a gentlemanlike and intelligent officer of the garrison; we visit a small fresh-water loch called _Cleik-him-in_; it borders on the sea, from which it is only divided by a sort of beach, apparently artificial: though the sea lashes the outside of this beach, the water of the lake is not brackish. In this lake are the remains of a Picts' castle, but ruinous. The people think the castle has not been built on a natural island, but on an artificial one formed by a heap of stones. These Duns or Picts' castles are so small, it is impossible to conceive what effectual purpose they could serve excepting a temporary refuge for the chief.--Leave _Cleik-him-in_, and proceed along the coast. The ground is dreadfully encumbered with stones; the patches which have been sown with oats and barley bear very good crops, but they are mere _patches_, the cattle and ponies feeding amongst them, and secured by tethers. The houses most wretched, worse than the worst herd's house I ever saw. It would be easy to form a good farm by enclosing the ground with Galloway dykes, which would answer the purpose of clearing it at the same time of stones; and as there is plenty of limeshell, marle, and alga-marina, manure could not be wanting. But there are several obstacles to improvement, chiefly the undivided state of the properties, which lie _run-rig_; then the claims of Lord Dundas, the lord of the country, and above all, perhaps, the state of the common people, who, dividing their attention between the fishery and the cultivation, are not much interested in the latter, and are often absent at the proper times of labor. Their ground is chiefly dug with the spade, and their ploughs are beyond description awkward. An odd custom prevails: any person, without exception (if I understand rightly), who wishes to raise a few kail, fixes upon any spot he pleases, encloses it with a dry stone wall, uses it as a kailyard till he works out the soil, then deserts it and makes another. Some dozen of these little enclosures, about twenty or thirty feet square, are in sight at once. They are called _planty-cruives_; and the Zetlanders are so far from reckoning this an invasion, or a favor on the part of the proprietor, that their most exaggerated description of an avaricious person is one who would refuse liberty for a _planty-cruive_; or to infer the greatest contempt of another, they will say, they would not hold a _planty-cruive_ of him. It is needless to notice how much this license must interfere with cultivation. "Leaving the _cultivated_ land, we turn more inland, and pass two or three small lakes. The muirs are mossy and sterile in the highest degree; the hills are clad with stunted heather, intermixed with huge great stones; much of an astringent root with a yellow flower, called _Tormentil_, used by the islanders in dressing leather in lieu of the oak bark. We climbed a hill, about three miles from Lerwick, to a cairn which presents a fine view of the indented coast of the island, and the distant isles of Mousa and others. Unfortunately the day is rather hazy--return by a circuitous route, through the same sterile country. These muirs are used as a commonty by the proprietors of the parishes in which they lie, and each, without any regard to the extent of his peculiar property, puts as much stock upon them as he chooses. The sheep are miserable looking, hairy-legged creatures, of all colors, even to sky-blue. I often wondered where Jacob got speckled lambs; I think now they must have been of the Shetland stock. In our return, pass the upper end of the little lake of _Cleik-him-in_, which is divided by a rude causeway from another small loch, communicating with it, however, by a sluice, for the purpose of driving a mill. But such a mill! The wheel is horizontal, with the cogs turned diagonally to the water; the beam stands upright, and is inserted in a stone-quern of the old-fashioned construction. This simple machine is enclosed in a hovel about the size of a pig-sty--and there is the mill![63] There are about 500 such mills in Shetland, each incapable of grinding more than a sack at a time. "I cannot get a distinct account of the nature of the land rights. The Udal proprietors have ceased to exist, yet proper feudal tenures seem ill understood. Districts of ground are in many instances understood to belong to Townships or Communities, possessing what may be arable by patches, and what is muir as a commonty, _pro indiviso_. But then individuals of such a Township often take it upon them to grant feus of particular parts of the property thus possessed _pro indiviso_. The town of Lerwick is built upon a part of the commonty of Sound, the proprietors of the houses having feu-rights from different heritors of that Township, but why from one rather than another, or how even the whole Township combining (which has not yet been attempted) could grant such a right upon principle, seems altogether uncertain. In the mean time the chief stress is laid upon occupance. I should have supposed, upon principle that Lord Dundas, as superior, possessed the _dominium eminens_, and ought to be resorted to as the source of land rights. But it is not so. It has been found that the heritors of each Township hold directly of the Crown, only paying the _Scat_, or Norwegian land-tax, and other duties to his lordship, used and wont. Besides, he has what are called property lands in every Township, or in most, which he lets to his tenants. Lord Dundas is now trying to introduce the system of leases and a better kind of agriculture.[64] Return home and dine at Sinclair's, a decent inn--Captain M'Diarmid and other gentlemen dine with us.--Sleep at the inn on a straw couch. "_5th August 1814_.--Hazy disagreeable morning;--Erskine trying the rioters--notwithstanding which, a great deal of rioting still in the town. The Greenlanders, however, only quarrelled among themselves, and the Zetland sailors seemed to exert themselves in keeping peace. They are, like all the other Zetlanders I have seen, a strong, clear-complexioned, handsome race, and the women are very pretty. The females are rather slavishly employed, however, and I saw more than one carrying home the heavy sea-chests of their husbands, brothers, or lovers, discharged from on board the Greenlanders. The Zetlanders are, however, so far provident, that when they enter the navy they make liberal allowance of their pay for their wives and families. Not less than £15,000 a year has been lately paid by the Admiralty on this account; yet this influx of money, with that from the Greenland fishery, seems rather to give the means of procuring useless indulgences than of augmenting the stock of productive labor. Mr. Collector Ross tells me that from the King's books it appears that the quantity of spirits, tea, coffee, tobacco, snuff, and sugar, imported annually into Lerwick for the consumption of Zetland, averages at sale price, £20,000 yearly, at the least. Now the inhabitants of Zetland, men, women, and children, do not exceed 22,000 in all, and the proportion of foreign luxuries seems monstrous, unless we allow for the habits contracted by the seamen in their foreign trips. Tea, in particular, is used by all ranks, and porridge quite exploded. "We parade Lerwick. The most remarkable thing is, that the main street being flagged, and all the others very narrow lanes descending the hill by steps, anything like a cart, of the most ordinary and rude construction, seems not only out of question when the town was built, but in its present state quite excluded. A road of five miles in length, on the line between Lerwick and Scalloway, has been already made--upon a very awkward and expensive plan, and ill-lined as may be supposed. But it is proposed to extend this road by degrees: carts will then be introduced, and by crossing the breed of their ponies judiciously, they will have Galloways to draw them. The streets of Lerwick (as one blunder perpetrates another) will then be a bar to improvement, for till the present houses are greatly altered, no cart can approach the quay. In the garden of Captain Nicolson, R. N., which is rather in a flourishing state, he has tried various trees, almost all of which have died except the willow. But the plants seem to me to be injured in their passage; seeds would perhaps do better. We are visited by several of the notables of the island, particularly Mr. Mowat, a considerable proprietor, who claims acquaintance with me as the friend of my father, and remembers me as a boy. The day clearing up, Duff and I walk with this good old gentleman to _Cleik-him-in_, and with some trouble drag a boat off the beach into the fresh-water loch, and go to visit the Picts' castle. It is of considerable size, and consists of three circular walls of huge natural stones admirably combined without cement. The outer circuit seems to have been simply a bounding wall or bulwark; the second or interior defence contains lodgments such as I shall describe. This inner circuit is surrounded by a wall of about sixteen or eighteen feet thick, composed, as I said, of huge massive stones placed in layers with great art, but without mortar or cement. The wall is not perpendicular, but the circle lessens gradually towards the top, as an old-fashioned pigeon-house. Up the interior of this wall there proceeds a circular winding gallery ascending in the form of an inclined plane, so as to gain the top by circling round like a corkscrew within the walls. This is enlightened by little apertures (about two feet by three) into the inside, and also, it is said, by small slits--of which I saw none. It is said there are marks of galleries within the circuit, running parallel to the horizon; these I saw no remains of; and the interior gallery, with its apertures, is so extremely low and narrow, being only about three feet square, that it is difficult to conceive how it could serve the purpose of communication. At any rate, the size fully justifies the tradition prevalent here as well as in the south of Scotland, that the Picts were a diminutive race. More of this when we see the more perfect specimen of a Pict castle in Mousa, which we resolve to examine, if it be possible. Certainly I am deeply curious to see what must be one of the most ancient houses in the world, built by a people who, while they seem to have bestowed much pains on their habitations, knew neither the art of cement, of arches, or of stairs. The situation is wild, dreary, and impressive. On the land side are huge sheets and fragments of rocks, interspersed with a stinted vegetation of grass and heath, which bears no proportion to the rocks and stones. From the top of his tower the Pictish Monarch might look out upon a stormy sea, washing a succession of rocky capes, reaches, and headlands, and immediately around him was the deep fresh-water loch on which his fortress was constructed. It communicates with the land by a sort of causeway, formed, like the artificial islet itself, by heaping together stones till the pile reached the surface of the water. This is usually passable, but at present overflooded.--Return and dine with Mr. Duncan, Sheriff-substitute--are introduced to Dr. Edmonstone, author of a History of Shetland, who proposes to accompany us to-morrow to see the Cradle of Noss. I should have mentioned that Mr. Stevenson sailed this morning with the yacht to survey some isles to the northward; he returns on Saturday, it is hoped. "_6th August._--Hire a six-oared boat, whaler-built, with a taper point at each end, so that the rudder can be hooked on either at pleasure. These vessels look very frail, but are admirably adapted to the stormy seas, where they live when a ship's boat stiffly and compactly built must necessarily perish. They owe this to their elasticity and lightness. Some of the rowers wear a sort of coats of dressed sheep leather, sewed together with thongs. We sailed out at the southern inlet of the harbor, rounding successively the capes of the Hammer, Kirkubus, the Ving, and others, consisting of bold cliffs, hollowed into caverns, or divided into pillars and arches of fantastic appearance, by the constant action of the waves. As we passed the most northerly of these capes, called, I think, the Ord, and turned into the open sea, the scenes became yet more tremendously sublime. Rocks upwards of three or four hundred feet in height presented themselves in gigantic succession, sinking perpendicularly into the main, which is very deep even within a few fathoms of their base. One of these capes is called the Bard-head; a huge projecting arch is named the Giant's Leg. 'Here the lone sea-bird wakes its wildest cry.'[65] Not lone, however, in one sense, for their numbers and the variety of their tribes are immense, though I think they do not quite equal those of Dunbuy, on the coast of Buchan. Standing across a little bay, we reached the Isle of Noss, having hitherto coasted the shore of Bressay. Here we see a detached and precipitous rock, or island, being a portion rent by a narrow sound from the rest of the cliff, and called the Holm. This detached rock is wholly inaccessible, unless by a pass of peril, entitled the Cradle of Noss, which is a sort of wooden chair, travelling from precipice to precipice on rings, which run upon two cables stretched across over the gulf. We viewed this extraordinary contrivance from beneath, at the distance of perhaps one hundred fathoms at least. The boatmen made light of the risk of crossing it, but it must be tremendous to a brain disposed to be giddy. Seen from beneath, a man in the basket would resemble a large crow or raven floating between rock and rock. The purpose of this strange contrivance is to give the tenant the benefit of putting a few sheep upon the Holm, the top of which is level, and affords good pasture. The animals are transported in the cradle by one at a time, a shepherd holding them upon his knees. The channel between the Holm and the isle is passable by boats in calm weather, but not at the time when we saw it. Rowing on through a heavy tide, and nearer the breakers than any but Zetlanders would have ventured, we rounded another immensely high cape, called by the islanders the Noup of Noss, but by sailors Hang-cliff, from its having a projecting appearance. This was the highest rock we had yet seen, though not quite perpendicular. Its height has never been measured: I should judge it exceeds 600 feet; it has been conjectured to measure 800 and upwards. Our steersman had often descended this precipitous rock, having only the occasional assistance of a rope, one end of which he secured from time to time round some projecting cliff. The collecting sea-fowl for their feathers was the object, and he might gain five or six dozen, worth eight or ten shillings, by such an adventure. These huge precipices abound with caverns, many of which run much farther into the rock than any one has ventured to explore. We entered (with much hazard to our boat) one called the Orkney-man's Harbor, because an Orkney vessel run in there some years since to escape a French privateer. The entrance was lofty enough to admit us without striking the mast, but a sudden turn in the direction of the cave would have consigned us to utter darkness if we had gone in farther. The dropping of the sea-fowl and cormorants into the water from the sides of the cavern, when disturbed by our approach, had something in it wild and terrible. "After passing the Noup, the precipices become lower, and sink into a rocky shore with deep indentations, called by the natives, _Gios_. Here we would fain have landed to visit the Cradle from the top of the cliff, but the surf rendered it impossible. We therefore rowed on like Thalaba, in 'Allah's name,' around the Isle of Noss, and landed upon the opposite side of the small sound which divides it from Bressay. Noss exactly resembles in shape Salisbury crags, supposing the sea to flow down the valley called the Hunter's bog, and round the foot of the precipice. The eastern part of the isle is fine smooth pasture, the best I have seen in these isles, sloping upwards to the verge of the tremendous rocks which form its western front. "As we are to dine at Gardie-House (the seat of young Mr. Mowat), on the Isle of Bressay, Duff and I--who went together on this occasion--resolve to walk across the island, about three miles, being by this time thoroughly wet. Bressay is a black and heathy isle, full of little lochs and bogs. Through storm and shade, and dense and dry, we find our way to Gardie, and have then to encounter the sublunary difficulties of wanting the keys of our portmanteaus, etc., the servants having absconded to see the Cradle. These being overcome, we are most hospitably treated at Gardie. Young Mr. Mowat, son of my old friend, is an improver, and a _moderate_ one. He has got a ploughman from Scotland, who acts as _grieve_, but as yet with the prejudices and inconveniences which usually attach themselves to the most salutary experiments. The ploughman complains that the Zetlanders work as if a spade or hoe burned their fingers, and that though they only get a shilling a day, yet the labor of three of them does not exceed what one good hand in Berwickshire would do for 2_s._ 6_d._ The islanders retort that a man can do no more than he can; that they are not used to be taxed to their work so severely; that they will work as their fathers did, and not otherwise; and at first the landlord found difficulty in getting hands to work under his Caledonian task-master. Besides, they find fault with his _ho_, and _gee_, and _wo_, when ploughing. 'He speaks to the horse,' they say, 'and they gang--and there's something no canny about the man.' In short, between the prejudices of laziness and superstition, the ploughman leads a sorry life of it;--yet these prejudices are daily abating, under the steady and indulgent management of the proprietor. Indeed, nowhere is improvement in agriculture more necessary. An old-fashioned Zetland plough is a real curiosity. It had but one handle, or stilt, and a coulter, but no sock; it ripped the furrow, therefore, but did not throw it aside. When this precious machine was in motion, it was dragged by four little bullocks yoked abreast, and as many ponies harnessed, or rather strung, to the plough by ropes and thongs of rawhide. One man went before, walking backward, with his face to the bullocks, and pulling them forward by main strength. Another held down the plough by its single handle, and made a sort of slit in the earth, which two women, who closed the procession, converted into a furrow, by throwing the earth aside with shovels. An antiquary might be of opinion that this was the very model of the original plough invented by Triptolemus; and it is but justice to Zetland to say, that these relics of ancient agricultural art will soon have all the interest attached to rarity. We could only hear of one of these ploughs within three miles of Lerwick. "This and many other barbarous habits to which the Zetlanders were formerly wedded seem only to have subsisted because their amphibious character of fishers and farmers induced them to neglect agricultural arts. A Zetland farmer looks to the sea to pay his rent; if the land finds him a little meal and kail, and (if he be a very clever fellow) a few potatoes, it is very well. The more intelligent part of the landholders are sensible of all this, but argue like men of good sense and humanity on the subject. To have good farming, you must have a considerable farm, upon which capital may be laid out to advantage. But to introduce this change suddenly would turn adrift perhaps twenty families, who now occupy small farms _pro indiviso_, cultivating by patches, or _rundale_ and _runrig_, what part of the property is arable, and stocking the pasture as a common upon which each family turns out such stock as they can rear, without observing any proportion as to the number which it can support. In this way many townships, as they are called, subsist indeed, but in a precarious and indigent manner. Fishing villages seem the natural resource for this excess of population; but, besides the expense of erecting them, the habits of the people are to be considered, who, with 'one foot on land and one on sea,' would be with equal reluctance confined to either element. The remedy seems to be, that the larger proprietors should gradually set the example of better cultivation, and introduce better implements. They will, by degrees, be imitated by the inferior proprietors, and by their tenants; and, as turnips and hay crops become more general, a better and heavier class of stock will naturally be introduced. "The sheep in particular might be improved into a valuable stock, and would no doubt thrive, since the winters are very temperate. But I should be sorry that extensive pasture farms were introduced, as it would tend to diminish a population invaluable for the supply of our navy. The improvement of the arable land, on the contrary, would soon set them beyond the terrors of famine with which the islanders are at present occasionally visited; and, combined with fisheries, carried on not by farmers, but by real fishers, would amply supply the inhabitants, without diminishing the export of dried fish. This separation of trades will in time take place, and then the prosperous days of Zetland will begin. The proprietors are already upon the alert, studying the means of gradual improvement, and no humane person would wish them to drive it on too rapidly, to the distress and perhaps destruction of the numerous tenants who have been bred under a different system. "I have gleaned something of the peculiar superstitions of the Zetlanders, which are numerous and potent. Witches, fairies, etc., are as numerous as ever they were in Teviotdale. The latter are called _Trows_, probably from the Norwegian _Dwärg_ (or _dwarf_) the D being readily converted into T. The dwarfs are the prime agents in the machinery of Norwegian superstition. The _trows_ do not differ from the fairies of the Lowlands, or _Sighean_ of the Highlanders. They steal children, dwell within the interior of green hills, and often carry mortals into their recesses. Some, yet alive, pretend to have been carried off in this way, and obtain credit for the marvels they tell of the subterranean habitations of the trows. Sometimes, when a person becomes melancholy and low-spirited, the trows are supposed to have stolen the real being, and left a moving phantom to represent him. Sometimes they are said to steal only the heart--like Lancashire witches. There are cures in each case. The party's friends resort to a cunning man or woman, who hangs about the neck a triangular stone in the shape of a heart, or conjures back the lost individual, by retiring to the hills and employing the necessary spells. A common receipt, when a child appears consumptive and puny, is that the conjurer places a bowl of water on the patient's head, and pours melted lead into it through the wards of a key. The metal assumes of course a variety of shapes, from which he selects a portion, after due consideration, which is sewn into the shirt of the patient. Sometimes no part of the lead suits the seer's fancy. Then the operation is recommenced, until he obtains a fragment of such a configuration as suits his mystical purpose. Mr. Duncan told us he had been treated in this way when a boy. "A worse and most horrid opinion prevails, or did prevail, among the fishers--namely, that he who saves a drowning man will receive at his hands some deep wrong or injury. Several instances were quoted to-day in company, in which the utmost violence had been found necessary to compel the fishers to violate this inhuman prejudice. It is conjectured to have arisen as an apology for rendering no assistance to the mariners as they escaped from a shipwrecked vessel, for these isles are infamous for plundering wrecks. A story is told of the crew of a stranded vessel who were warping themselves ashore by means of a hawser which they had fixed to the land. The islanders (of Unst, as I believe) watched their motions in silence, till an old man reminded them that if they suffered these sailors to come ashore, they would consume all their winter stock of provisions. A Zetlander cut the hawser, and the poor wretches, twenty in number, were all swept away. This is a tale of former times--the cruelty would not now be _active_; but I fear that even yet the drowning mariner would in some places receive no assistance in his exertions, and certainly he would in most be plundered to the skin upon his landing. The gentlemen do their utmost to prevent this infamous practice. It may seem strange that the natives should be so little affected by a distress to which they are themselves so constantly exposed. But habitual exposure to danger hardens the heart against its consequences, whether to ourselves or others. There is yet living a man--if he can be called so--to whom the following story belongs: He was engaged in catching sea-fowl upon one of the cliffs, with his father and brother. All three were suspended by a cord, according to custom, and overhanging the ocean, at the height of some hundred feet. This man being uppermost on the cord, observed that it was giving way, as unable to support their united weight. He called out to his brother who was next to him--'Cut away a nail below, Willie,' meaning he should cut the rope beneath, and let his father drop. Willie refused, and bid him cut himself, if he pleased. He did so, and his brother and father were precipitated into the sea. He never thought of concealing or denying the adventure in all its parts. We left Gardie-House late; being on the side of the Isle of Bressay, opposite to Lerwick, we were soon rowed across the bay. A laugh with Hamilton,[66] whose gout keeps him stationary at Lerwick, but whose good-humor defies gout and every other provocation, concludes the evening. "_7th August, 1814._--Being Sunday, Duff, Erskine, and I rode to Tingwall upon Zetland ponies, to breakfast with our friend Parson Turnbull, who had come over in our yacht. An ill-conducted and worse-made road served us four miles on our journey. This _Via Flaminia_ of Thule terminates, like its prototype, in a bog. It is, however, the only road in these isles, except about half a mile made by Mr. Turnbull. The land in the interior much resembles the Peel-heights, near Ashestiel; but, as you approach the other side of the island, becomes better. Tingwall is rather a fertile valley, up which winds a loch of about two miles in length. The kirk and manse stand at the head of the loch, and command a view down the valley to another lake beyond the first, and thence over another reach of land, to the ocean, indented by capes and studded with isles; among which, that of St. Ninian's, abruptly divided from the mainland by a deep chasm, is the most conspicuous. Mr. Turnbull is a Jedburgh man by birth, but a Zetlander by settlement and inclination. I have reason to be proud of my countryman; he is doing his best, with great patience and judgment, to set a good example both in temporals and spirituals, and is generally beloved and respected among all classes. His glebe is in far the best order of any ground I have seen in Zetland. It is enclosed chiefly with dry-stone, instead of the useless turf-dykes; and he has sown grass, and has a hay-stack, and a second crop of clover, and may claim well-dressed fields of potatoes, barley, and oats. The people around him are obviously affected by his example. He gave us an excellent discourse and remarkably good prayers, which are seldom the excellence of the Presbyterian worship.[67] The congregation were numerous, decent, clean, and well-dressed. The men have all the air of seamen, and are a good-looking hardy race. Some of the old fellows had got faces much resembling Tritons; if they had had conchs to blow, it would have completed them. After church, ride down the loch to Scalloway--the country wild but pleasant, with sloping hills of good pasturage, and patches of cultivation on the lower ground. Pass a huge standing stone or pillar. Here, it is said, the son of an old Earl of the Orkneys met his fate. He had rebelled against his father, and fortified himself in Zetland. The Earl sent a party to dislodge him, who, not caring to proceed to violence against his person, failed in the attempt. The Earl then sent a stronger force, with orders to take him dead or alive. The young Absalom's castle was stormed--he himself fled across the loch, and was overtaken and slain at this pillar. The Earl afterwards executed the perpetrators of this slaughter, though they had only fulfilled his own mandate. "We reach Scalloway, and visit the ruins of an old castle, composed of a double tower or keep, with turrets at the corners. It is the principal, if not the only ruin of Gothic times in Zetland, and is of very recent date, being built in 1600. It was built by Patrick Stewart, Earl of Orkney, afterwards deservedly executed at Edinburgh for many acts of tyranny and oppression. It was this rapacious lord who imposed many of those heavy duties still levied from the Zetlanders by Lord Dundas. The exactions by which he accomplished this erection were represented as grievous. He was so dreaded that upon his trial one Zetland witness refused to say a word till he was assured that there was no chance of the Earl returning to Scalloway. Over the entrance of the castle are his arms, much defaced, with the unicorns of Scotland for supporters, the assumption of which was one of the articles of indictment. There is a Scriptural inscription also above the door, in Latin, now much defaced:-- 'PATRICIUS ORCHADIÆ ET ZETLANDIÆ COMES. A. D. 1600. CUJUS FUNDAMEN SAXUM EST, DOMUS ILLA MANEBIT STABILIS: E CONTRA, SI SIT ARENA, PERIT.' "This is said to have been furnished to Earl Patrick by a Presbyterian divine, who slyly couched under it an allusion to the evil practices by which the Earl had established his power. He perhaps trusted that the language might disguise the import from the Earl.[68] If so, the Scottish nobility are improved in literature, for the Duke of Gordon pointed out an error in the Latinity. "Scalloway has a beautiful and very safe harbor, but as it is somewhat difficult of access, from a complication of small islands, it is inferior to Lerwick. Hence, though still nominally the capital of Zetland, for all edictal citations are made at Scalloway, it has sunk into a small fishing hamlet. The Norwegians made their original settlement in this parish of Tingwall. At the head of this loch, and just below the manse, is a small round islet accessible by stepping-stones, where they held their courts; hence the islet is called Law-ting--Ting, or Thing, answering to our word business, exactly like the Latin _negotium_. It seems odd that in Dumfries-shire, and even in the Isle of Man, where the race and laws were surely Celtic, we have this Gothic word Ting and Tingwald applied in the same way. We dined with Mr. Scott of Scalloway, who, like several families of this name in Shetland, is derived from the house of Scotstarvet. They are very clannish, marry much among themselves, and are proud of their descent. Two young ladies, daughters of Mr. Scott's, dined with us--they were both Mrs. Scotts, having married brothers--the husband of one was lost in the unfortunate Doris. They were pleasant, intelligent women, and exceedingly obliging. Old Mr. Scott seems a good country gentleman. He is negotiating an exchange with Lord Dundas, which will give him the Castle of Scalloway and two or three neighboring islands: the rest of the archipelago (seven, I think, in number) are already his own. He will thus have command of the whole fishing and harbor, for which he parts with an estate of more immediate value, lying on the other side of the mainland. I found my name made me very popular in this family, and there were many inquiries after the state of the Buccleuch family, in which they seemed to take much interest. I found them possessed of the remarkable circumstances attending the late projected sale of Ancrum, and the death of Sir John Scott, and thought it strange that, settled for three generations in a country so distant, they should still take an interest in those matters. I was loaded with shells and little curiosities for my young people. "There was a report (January was two years) of a kraken or some monstrous fish being seen off Scalloway. The object was visible for a fortnight, but nobody dared approach it, although I should have thought the Zetlanders would not have feared the devil if he came by water. They pretended that the suction, when they came within a certain distance, was so great as to endanger their boats. The object was described as resembling a vessel with her keel turned upmost in the sea, or a small ridge of rock or island. Mr. Scott thinks it might have been a vessel overset, or a large whale: if the latter, it seems odd they should not have known it, as whales are the intimate acquaintances of all Zetland sailors. Whatever it was it disappeared after a heavy gale of wind, which seems to favor the idea that it was the wreck of a vessel. Mr. Scott seems to think Pontopiddan's narrations and descriptions are much more accurate than we inland men suppose; and I find most Zetlanders of the same opinion. Mr. Turnbull, who is not credulous upon these subjects, tells me that this year a parishioner of his, a well-informed and veracious person, saw an animal, which, if his description was correct, must have been of the species of sea-snake, driven ashore on one of the Orkneys two or three years ago. It was very long, and seemed about the thickness of a Norway log, and swam on the top of the waves, occasionally lifting and bending its head. Mr. T. says he has no doubt of the veracity of the narrator, but still thinks it possible it may have been a mere log, or beam of wood, and that the spectator may have been deceived by the motion of the waves, joined to the force of imagination. This for the Duke of Buccleuch. "At Scalloway my curiosity was gratified by an account of the sword-dance, now almost lost, but still practised in the Island of Papa, belonging to Mr. Scott. There are eight performers, seven of whom represent the Seven Champions of Christendom, who enter one by one with their swords drawn, and are presented to the eighth personage, who is not named. Some rude couplets are spoken (in _English_, not _Norse_), containing a sort of panegyric upon each champion as he is presented. They then dance a sort of cotillion, as the ladies described it, going through a number of evolutions with their swords. One of my three Mrs. Scotts readily promised to procure me the lines, the rhymes, and the form of the dance. I regret much that young Mr. Scott was absent during this visit; he is described as a reader and an enthusiast in poetry. Probably I might have interested him in preserving the dance, by causing young persons to learn it. A few years since, a party of Papa-men came to dance the sword-dance at Lerwick as a public exhibition with great applause. The warlike dances of the northern people, of which I conceive this to be the only remnant in the British dominions,[69] are repeatedly alluded to by their poets and historians. The introduction of the Seven Champions savors of a later period, and was probably ingrafted upon the dance when _mysteries_ and _moralities_ (the first scenic representations) came into fashion. In a stall pamphlet, called the history of Buckshaven, it is said those fishers sprung from Danes, and brought with them their _war-dance_ or _sword-dance_, and a rude wooden cut of it is given. We resist the hospitality of our entertainers, and return to Lerwick despite a most downright fall of rain. My pony stumbles coming down hill; saddle sways round, having but one girth and that too long, and lays me on my back. _N. B._ The bogs in Zetland as soft as those in Liddesdale. Get to Lerwick about ten at night. No yacht has appeared. "_8th August._--No yacht, and a rainy morning; bring up my journal. Day clears up, and we go to pay our farewell visits of thanks to the hospitable Lerwegians, and at the Fort. Visit kind old Mr. Mowat, and walk with him and Collector Ross to the point of Quaggers, or Twaggers, which forms one arm of the southern entrance to the sound of Bressay. From the eminence a delightful sea view, with several of those narrow capes and deep reaches or inlets of the sea, which indent the shores of that land. On the right hand a narrow bay, bounded by the isthmus of Sound, with a house upon it resembling an old castle. In the indenture of the bay, and divided from the sea by a slight causeway, the lake of _Cleik-him-in_, with its Pictish castle. Beyond this the bay opens another yet; and, behind all, a succession of capes, headlands, and islands, as far as the cape called Sumburgh-head, which is the furthest point of Zetland in that direction. Inland, craggy, and sable muirs, with cairns, among which we distinguish the Wart or Ward of Wick, to which we walked on the 4th. On the left the island of Bressay, with its peaked hill called the Wart of Bressay. Over Bressay see the top of Hang-cliff. Admire the Bay of Lerwick, with its shipping, widening out to the northwards, and then again contracted into a narrow sound, through which the infamous Bothwell was pursued by Kirkaldy of Grange, until he escaped through the dexterity of his pilot, who sailed close along a sunken rock, upon which Kirkaldy, keeping the weather-gage, struck, and sustained damage. The rock is visible at low water, and is still called the Unicorn, from the name of Kirkaldy's vessel. Admire Mr. Mowat's little farm, of about thirty acres, bought about twenty years since for £75, and redeemed from the miserable state of the surrounding country, so that it now bears excellent corn; here also was a hay crop. With Mr. Turnbull's it makes two. Visit Mr. Ross, collector of the customs, who presents me with the most superb collection of the stone axes (or adzes, or whatever they are), called _celts_. The Zetlanders call them _thunder-bolts_, and keep them in their houses as a receipt against thunder; but the Collector has succeeded in obtaining several. We are now to dress for dinner with the Notables of Lerwick, who give us an entertainment in their Town-hall. Oho! "Just as we were going to dinner, the yacht appeared, and Mr. Stevenson landed. He gives a most favorable account of the isles to the northward, particularly Unst. I believe Lerwick is the worst part of Shetland. Are hospitably received and entertained by the Lerwick gentlemen. They are a quick, intelligent race--chiefly of Scottish birth, as appears from their names, Mowat, Gifford, Scott, and so forth. These are the chief proprietors. The Norwegian or Danish surnames, though of course the more ancient, belong, with some exceptions, to the lower ranks. The Veteran Corps expects to be disbanded, and the officers and Lerwegians seem to part with regret. Some of the officers talk of settling here. The price of everything is moderate, and the style of living unexpensive. Against these conveniences are to be placed a total separation from public life, news, and literature; and a variable and inhospitable climate. Lerwick will suffer most severely if the Fort is not occupied by some force or other; for, between whiskey and frolic, the Greenland sailors will certainly burn the little town. We have seen a good deal, and heard much more, of the pranks of these unruly guests. A gentleman of Lerwick, who had company to dine with him, observed beneath his window a party of sailors eating a leg of roast mutton, which he witnessed with philanthropic satisfaction, till he received the melancholy information, that that individual leg of mutton, being the very sheet-anchor of his own entertainment, had been violently carried off from his kitchen, spit and all, by these honest gentlemen, who were now devouring it. Two others, having carried off a sheep, were apprehended, and brought before a Justice of the Peace, who questioned them respecting the fact. The first denied he had taken the sheep, but said he had seen it taken away by a fellow with a red nose and a black wig (this was the Justice's description). 'Don't you think he was like his honor, Tom?' he added, appealing to his comrade. 'By G--, Jack,' answered Tom, 'I believe it was the very man!' Erskine has been busy with these facetious gentlemen, and has sent several to prison, but nothing could have been done without the soldiery. We leave Lerwick at eight o'clock, and sleep on board the yacht. "_9th August, 1814._--Waked at seven, and find the vessel has left Lerwick harbor, and is on the point of entering the sound which divides the small island of Mousa (or Queen's Island) from Coningsburgh, a very wild part of the main island so called. Went ashore, and see the very ancient castle of Mousa, which stands close on the seashore. It is a Pictish fortress, the most entire probably in the world. In form it resembles a dice-box, for the truncated cone is continued only to a certain height, after which it begins to rise perpendicularly, or rather with a tendency to expand outwards. The building is round, and has been surrounded with an outer-wall, of which hardly the slightest vestiges now remain. It is composed of a layer of stones, without cement; they are not of large size, but rather small and thin. To give a vulgar comparison, it resembles an old ruinous pigeon-house. Mr. Stevenson took the dimensions of this curious fort, which are as follows: Outside diameter at the base is fifty-two feet; at the top thirty-eight feet. The diameter of the interior at the base is nineteen feet six inches; at the top twenty-one feet; the curve in the inside being the reverse of the outside, or nearly so. The thickness of the walls at the base seventeen feet; at the top eight feet six inches. The height outside forty-two feet; the inside thirty-four feet. The door or entrance faces the sea, and the interior is partly filled with rubbish. When you enter you see, in the inner wall, a succession of small openings like windows, directly one above another, with broad flat stones, serving for lintels; these are about nine inches thick. The whole resembles a ladder. There were four of these perpendicular rows of windows or apertures, the situation of which corresponds with the cardinal points of the compass. You enter the galleries contained in the thickness of the wall by two of these apertures, which have been broken down. These interior spaces are of two descriptions: one consists of a winding ascent, not quite an inclined plane, yet not by any means a regular stair; but the edges of the stones, being suffered to project irregularly, serve for rude steps--or a kind of assistance. Through this narrow staircase, which winds round the building, you creep up to the top of the castle, which is partly ruinous. But besides the staircase, there branch off at irregular intervals horizontal galleries, which go round the whole building, and receive air from the holes I formerly mentioned. These apertures vary in size, diminishing as they run, from about thirty inches in width by eighteen in height, till they are only about a foot square. The lower galleries are full man height, but narrow. They diminish both in height and width as they ascend, and as the thickness of the wall in which they are enclosed diminishes. The uppermost gallery is so narrow and low, that it was with great difficulty I crept through it. The walls are built very irregularly, the sweep of the cone being different on the different sides. "It is said by Torfæus that this fort was repaired and strengthened by Erlind, who, having forcibly carried off the mother of Harold, Earl of the Orkneys, resolved to defend himself to extremity in this place against the insulted Earl. How a castle could be defended which had no opening to the outside for shooting arrows, and which was of a capacity to be pulled to pieces by the assailants, who could advance without annoyance to the bottom of the wall (unless it were battlemented upon the top), does not easily appear. But to Erlind's operations the castle of Mousa possibly owes the upper and perpendicular, or rather overhanging, part of its elevation, and also its rude staircase. In these two particulars it seems to differ from all other Picts' castles, which are ascended by an inclined plane, and generally, I believe, terminate in a truncated cone, without that strange counterpart of the perpendicular or projecting part of the upper wall. Opposite to the castle of Mousa are the ruins of another Pictish fort: indeed, they all communicate with each other through the isles. The island of Mousa is the property of a Mr. Piper, who has improved it considerably, and values his castle. I advised him to clear out the interior, as he tells us there are three or four galleries beneath those now accessible, and the difference of height between the exterior and interior warrants his assertion. "We get on board, and in time, for the wind freshens, and becomes contrary. We beat down to Sumburgh-head, through rough weather. This is the extreme south-eastern point of Zetland; and as the Atlantic and German oceans unite at this point, a frightful tide runs here, called Sumburgh-rost. The breeze, contending with the tide, flings the breakers in great style upon the high broken cliffs of Sumburgh-head. They are all one white foam, ascending to a great height. We wished to double this point, and lie by in a bay between that and the northern or north-western cape, called Fitful-head, and which seems higher than Sumburgh itself--and tacked repeatedly with this view; but a confounded islet, called _The Horse_, always baffled us, and, after three heats, fairly distanced us. So we run into a roadstead, called Quendal Bay, on the south-eastern side, and there anchor for the night. We go ashore with various purposes,--Stevenson to see the site of a proposed lighthouse on this tremendous cape--Marjoribanks to shoot rabbits--and Duff and I to look about us. "I ascended the head by myself, which is lofty, and commands a wild sea-view. Zetland stretches away, with all its projecting capes and inlets, to the north-eastward. Many of those inlets approach each other very nearly; indeed, the two opposite bays at Sumburgh-head seem on the point of joining, and rendering that cape an island. The two creeks from those east and western seas are only divided by a low isthmus of blowing sand, and similar to that which wastes part of the east coast of Scotland. It has here blown like the deserts of Arabia, and destroyed some houses, formerly the occasional residences of the Earls of Orkney. The steep and rocky side of the cape, which faces the west, does not seem much more durable. These lofty cliffs are all of sand-flag, a very loose and perishable kind of rock, which slides down in immense masses, like avalanches, after every storm. The rest lies so loose, that, on the very brow of the loftiest crag, I had no difficulty in sending down a fragment as large as myself: he thundered down in tremendous style, but splitting upon a projecting cliff, descended into the ocean like a shower of shrapnel shot. The sea beneath rages incessantly among a thousand of the fragments which have fallen from the peaks, and which assume an hundred strange shapes. It would have been a fine situation to compose an ode to the Genius of Sumburgh-head, or an Elegy upon a Cormorant--or to have written and spoken madness of any kind in prose or poetry. But I gave vent to my excited feelings in a more simple way; and sitting gently down on the steep green slope which led to the beach, I e'en slid down a few hundred feet, and found the exercise quite an adequate vent to my enthusiasm. I recommend this exercise (time and place suiting) to all my brother scribblers, and I have no doubt it will save much effusion of Christian ink. Those slopes are covered with beautiful short herbage. At the foot of the ascent, and towards the isthmus, is the old house of Sumburgh, in appearance a most dreary mansion. I found, on my arrival at the beach, that the hospitality of the inhabitants had entrapped my companions. I walked back to meet them, but escaped the gin and water. On board about nine o'clock at night. A little schooner lies between us and the shore, which we had seen all day buffeting the tide and breeze like ourselves. The wind increases, and the ship is made SNUG--a sure sign the passengers will not be so. "_10th August, 1814._--The omen was but too true--a terrible combustion on board, among plates, dishes, glasses, writing-desks, etc., etc.; not a wink of sleep. We weigh and stand out into that delightful current called _Sumburgh-rost_, or _rust_. This tide certainly owes us a grudge, for it drove us to the eastward about thirty miles on the night of the first, and occasioned our missing the Fair Isle, and now it has caught us on our return. All the landsmen sicker than sick, and our Viceroy, Stevenson, qualmish. This is the only time that I have felt more than temporary inconvenience, but this morning I have headache and nausea; these are trifles, and in a well-found vessel, with a good pilot, we have none of that mixture of danger which gives dignity to the traveller. But he must have a stouter heart than mine, who can contemplate without horror the situation of a vessel of an inferior description caught among these headlands and reefs of rocks, in the long and dark winter nights of these regions. Accordingly, wrecks are frequent. It is proposed to have a light on Sumburgh-head, which is the first land made by vessels coming from the eastward; Fitful-head is higher, but is to the west, from which quarter few vessels come. "We are now clear of Zetland, and about ten o'clock reach the Fair Isle;[70] one of their boats comes off, a strange-looking thing without an entire plank in it, excepting one on each side, upon the strength of which the whole depends, the rest being patched and joined. This trumpery skiff the men manage with the most astonishing dexterity, and row with remarkable speed; they have two banks, that is, two rowers on each bench, and use very short paddles. The wildness of their appearance, with long elf-locks, striped worsted caps, and shoes of raw-hide--the fragility of their boat--and their extreme curiosity about us and our cutter, give them a title to be distinguished as _natives_. One of our people told their steersman, by way of jeer, that he must have great confidence in Providence to go to sea in such a vehicle; the man very sensibly replied that without the same confidence he would not go to sea in the best _tool_ in England. We take to our boat, and row for about three miles round the coast, in order to land at the inhabited part of the island. This coast abounds with grand views of rocks and bays. One immense portion of rock is (like the Holm of Noss) separated by a chasm from the mainland. As it is covered with herbage on the top, though a literal precipice all round, the natives contrive to ascend the rock by a place which would make a goat dizzy, and then drag the sheep up by ropes, though they sometimes carry a sheep up on their shoulders. The captain of a sloop of war, being ashore while they were at this work, turned giddy and sick while looking at them. This immense precipice is several hundred feet high, and is perforated below by some extraordinary apertures, through which a boat might pass; the light shines distinctly through these hideous chasms. "After passing a square bay called the North-haven, tenanted by sea-fowl and seals (the first we have yet seen), we come in view of the small harbor. Land, and breakfast, for which, till now, none of us felt inclination. In front of the little harbor is the house of the tacksman, Mr. Strong, and in view are three small assemblages of miserable huts, where the inhabitants of the isle live. There are about thirty families and 250 inhabitants upon the Fair Isle. It merits its name, as the plain upon which the hamlets are situated bears excellent barley, oats, and potatoes, and the rest of the isle is beautiful pasture, excepting to the eastward, where there is a moss, equally essential to the comfort of the inhabitants, since it supplies them with peats for fuel. The Fair Isle is about three miles long and a mile and a half broad. Mr. Strong received us very courteously. He lives here, like Robinson Crusoe, in absolute solitude as to society, unless by a chance visit from the officers of a man-of-war. There is a signal-post maintained on the island by Government, under this gentleman's inspection; when any ship appears that cannot answer his signals, he sends off to Lerwick and Kirkwall to give the alarm. Rogers[71] was off here last year, and nearly cut off one of Mr. Strong's express-boats, but the active islanders outstripped his people by speed of rowing. The inhabitants pay Mr. Strong for the possessions which they occupy under him as sub-tenants, and cultivate the isle in their own way, _i. e._, by digging instead of ploughing (though the ground is quite open and free from rocks, and they have several scores of ponies), and by raising alternate crops of barley, oats, and potatoes; the first and last are admirably good. They rather over-manure their crops; the possessions lie runrig, that is, by alternate ridges, and the outfield or pasture ground is possessed as common to all their cows and ponies. The islanders fish for Mr. Strong at certain fixed rates, and the fish is his property, which he sends to Kirkwall, Lerwick, or elsewhere, in a little schooner, the same which we left in Quendal Bay, and about the arrival of which we found them anxious. An equal space of rich land on the Fair Isle, situated in an inland county of Scotland, would rent for £3000 a year at the very least. To be sure it would not be burdened with the population of 250 souls, whose bodies (fertile as it is) it cannot maintain in bread, they being supplied chiefly from the mainland. Fish they have plenty, and are even nice in their choice. Skate they will not touch; dog-fish they say is only food for Orkney-men, and when they catch them, they make a point of tormenting the poor fish for eating off their baits from the hook, stealing the haddocks from their lines, and other enormities. These people, being about halfway between Shetland and Orkney, have unfrequent connection with either archipelago, and live and marry entirely among themselves. One lad told me, only five persons had left the island since his remembrance, and of those, three were pressed for the navy. They seldom go to Greenland; but this year five or six of their young men were on board the whalers. They seemed extremely solicitous about their return, and repeatedly questioned us about the names of the whalers which were at Lerwick, a point on which we could give little information. "The manners of these islanders seem primitive and simple, and they are sober, good-humored and friendly,--but _jimp_ honest. Their comforts are, of course, much dependent on _their master's_ pleasure; for so they call Mr. Strong. But they gave him the highest character for kindness and liberality, and prayed to God he might long be their ruler. After mounting the signal-post hill, or Malcolm's Head, which is faced by a most tremendous cliff, we separated on our different routes. The Sheriff went to rectify the only enormity on the island, which existed in the person of a drunken schoolmaster; Marchie[72] went to shoot sea-fowl, or rather to frighten them, as his calumniators allege. Stevenson and Duff went to inspect the remains or vestiges of a Danish lighthouse upon a distant hill, called, as usual, the Ward, or Ward-hill, and returned with specimens of copper ore. Hamilton went down to cater fish for our dinner, and see it properly cooked--and I to see two remarkable indentures in the coast called _Rivas_, perhaps from their being rifted or _riven_. They are exactly like the Buller of Buchan, the sea rolling into a large open basin within the land through a natural archway. These places are close to each other; one is oblong, and it is easy to descend into it by a rude path; the other gulf is inaccessible from the land, unless to a _crags-man_, as these venturous climbers call themselves. I sat for about an hour upon the verge, like the cormorants around me, hanging my legs over the precipice; but I could not get free of two or three well-meaning islanders, who held me fast by the skirts all the time--for it must be conceived that our numbers and appointments had drawn out the whole population to admire and attend us. After we separated, each, like the nucleus of a comet, had his own distinct train of attendants.--Visit the capital town, a wretched assemblage of the basest huts, dirty without, and still dirtier within; pigs, fowls, cows, men, women, and children, all living promiscuously under the same roof, and in the same room--the brood-sow making (among the more opulent) a distinguished inhabitant of the mansion. The compost, a liquid mass of utter abomination, is kept in a square pond of seven feet deep; when I censured it, they allowed it might be dangerous to the _bairns_; but appeared unconscious of any other objection. I cannot wonder they want meal, for assuredly they waste it. A great _bowie_ or wooden vessel of porridge is made in the morning; a child comes and sups a few spoonfuls; then Mrs. Sow takes her share; then the rest of the children or the parents, and all at pleasure; then come the poultry when the mess is more cool; the rest is flung upon the dunghill--and the goodwife wonders and complains when she wants meal in winter. They are a long-lived race, notwithstanding utter and inconceivable dirt and sluttery. A man of sixty told me his father died only last year, aged ninety-eight; nor was this considered as very unusual. "The clergyman of Dunrossness, in Zetland, visits these poor people once a year, for a week or two during summer. In winter this is impossible, and even the summer visit is occasionally interrupted for two years. Marriages and baptisms are performed, as one of the Isles-men told me, _by the slump_, and one of the children was old enough to tell the clergyman who sprinkled him with water, 'Deil be in your fingers.' Last time, four couple were married; sixteen children baptized. The schoolmaster reads a portion of Scripture in the church each Sunday, when the clergyman is absent; but the present man is unfit for this part of his duty. The women knit worsted stockings, night-caps, and similar trifles, which they exchange with any merchant vessels that approach their lonely isle. In these respects they greatly regret the American war; and mention with unction the happy days when they could get from an American trader a bottle of peach-brandy or rum in exchange for a pair of worsted stockings or a dozen of eggs. The humanity of their _master_ interferes much with the favorite but dangerous occupation of the islanders, which is _fowling_, that is, taking the young sea-fowl from their nests among these tremendous crags. About a fortnight before we arrived, a fine boy of fourteen had dropped from the cliff, while in prosecution of this amusement, into a roaring surf, by which he was instantly swallowed up. The unfortunate mother was laboring at the peat-moss at a little distance. These accidents do not, however, strike terror into the survivors. They regard the death of an individual engaged in these desperate exploits as we do the fate of a brave relation who falls in battle, when the honor of his death furnishes a balm to our sorrow. It therefore requires all the tacksman's authority to prevent a practice so pregnant with danger. Like all other precarious and dangerous employments, the occupation of the crags-men renders them unwilling to labor at employments of a more steady description. The Fair Isle inhabitants are a good-looking race, more like Zetlanders than Orkney-men. Evenson, and other names of a Norwegian or Danish derivation, attest their Scandinavian descent. Return and dine at Mr. Strong's, having sent our cookery ashore, not to overburthen his hospitality. In this place, and perhaps in the very cottage now inhabited by Mr. Strong, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, Commander-in-Chief of the Invincible Armada, wintered, after losing his vessel to the eastward of the island. It was not till he had spent some weeks in this miserable abode, that he got off to Norway. Independently of the moral consideration, that, from the pitch of power in which he stood a few days before, the proudest peer of the proudest nation in Europe found himself dependent on the jealous and scanty charity of these secluded islanders, it is scarce possible not to reflect with compassion on the change of situation from the palaces of Estremadura to the hamlet of the Fair Isle-- 'Dost thou wish for thy deserts, O Son of Hodeirah? Dost thou long for the gales of Arabia?'[73] "Mr. Strong gave me a curious old chair belonging to Quendale, a former proprietor of the Fair Isle, and which a more zealous antiquary would have dubbed 'the Duke's chair.' I will have it refitted for Abbotsford, however. About eight o'clock we take boat, amid the cheers of the inhabitants, whose minds, subdued by our splendor, had been secured by our munificence, which consisted in a moderate benefaction of whiskey and tobacco, and a few shillings laid out on their staple commodities. They agreed no such day had been seen in the isle. The signal-post displayed its flags, and to recompense these distinguished marks of honor, we hung out our colors, stood into the bay, and saluted with three guns, 'Echoing from a thousand caves." and then bear away for Orkney, leaving, if our vanity does not deceive us, a very favorable impression on the mind of the inhabitants of the Fair Isle. The tradition of the Fair Isle is unfavorable to those shipwrecked strangers, who are said to have committed several acts of violence to extort the supplies of provision, given them sparingly and with reluctance by the islanders, who were probably themselves very far from being well supplied. "I omitted to say we were attended in the morning by two very sportive whales, but of a kind, as some of our crew who had been on board Greenland-men assured us, which it was very dangerous to attack. There were two Gravesend smacks fishing off the isle. Lord, what a long draught London makes! "_11th August, 1814._--After a sound sleep to make amends for last night, we find, at awaking, the vessel off the Start of Sanda, the first land in the Orkneys which we could make. There a lighthouse has been erected lately upon the best construction. Landed and surveyed it. All in excellent order, and the establishment of the keepers in the same style of comfort and respectability as elsewhere, far better than the house of the master of the Fair Isle, and rivalling my own baronial mansion of Abbotsford. Go to the top of the tower and survey the island, which, as the name implies, is level, flat, and sandy, quite the reverse of those in Zetland: it is intersected by creeks and small lakes, and, though it abounds with shell marle, seems barren. There is one dreadful inconvenience of an island life, of which we had here an instance. The keeper's wife had an infant in her arms--her first-born, too, of which the poor woman had been delivered without assistance. Erskine told us of a horrid instance of malice which had been practised in this island of Sanda. A decent tenant, during the course of three or four successive years, lost to the number of twenty-five cattle, stabbed as they lay in their fold by some abominable wretch. What made the matter stranger was, that the poor man could not recollect any reason why he should have had the ill-will of a single being, only that in taking up names for the _militia_, a duty imposed upon him by the Justices, he thought he might possibly have given some unknown offence. The villain was never discovered. "The wrecks on this coast were numerous before the erection of the lighthouse. It was not uncommon to see five or six vessels on shore at once. The goods and chattels of the inhabitants are all said to savor of _Flotsome_ and _Jetsome_, as the floating wreck and that which is driven ashore are severally called. Mr. Stevenson happened to observe that the boat of a Sanda farmer had bad sails--'If it had been His (_i. e._, God's) will that you hadna built sae many lighthouses hereabout'--answered the Orcadian, with great composure--'I would have had new sails last winter.' Thus do they talk and think upon these subjects; and so talking and thinking, I fear the poor mariner has little chance of any very anxious attempt to assist him. There is one wreck, a Danish vessel, now aground under our lee. These Danes are the stupidest seamen, by all accounts, that sail the sea. When this light upon the Start of Sanda was established, the Commissioners, with laudable anxiety to extend its utility, had its description and bearings translated into Danish and sent to Copenhagen. But they never attend to such trifles. The Norwegians are much better liked, as a clever, hardy, sensible people. I forgot to notice there was a Norwegian prize lying in the Sound of Lerwick, sent in by one of our cruisers. This was a queer-looking, half-decked vessel, all tattered and torn, and shaken to pieces, looking like Coleridge's Spectre Ship. It was pitiable to see such a prize. Our servants went aboard, and got one of their loaves, and gave a dreadful account of its composition. I got and cut a crust of it; it was rye-bread, with a slight mixture of pine-fir bark or sawings of deal. It was not good, but (as Charles XII. said) might be eaten. But after all, if the people can be satisfied with such bread as this, it seems hard to interdict it to them. What would a Londoner say if, instead of his roll and muffins, this black bread, relishing of tar and turpentine, were presented for his breakfast? I would to God there could be a Jehovah-jireh, 'a ram caught in the thicket,' to prevent the sacrifice of that people. "The few friends who may see this Journal are much indebted for these pathetic remarks to the situation under which they are recorded; for since we left the lighthouse we have been struggling with adverse wind (pretty high too), and a very strong tide, called the Rost of the Start, which, like Sumburgh Rost, bodes no good to our roast and boiled. The worst is that this struggle carries us past a most curious spectacle, being no less than the carcases of two hundred and sixty-five whales, which have been driven ashore in Taftsness Bay, now lying close under us. With all the inclination in the world, it is impossible to stand in close enough to verify this massacre of Leviathans with our own eyes, as we do not care to run the risk of being drawn ashore ourselves among the party. In fact, this species of spectacle has been of late years very common among the isles. Mr. Stevenson saw upwards of a hundred and fifty whales lying upon the shore in a bay at Unst, in his northward trip. They are not large, but are decided whales, measuring perhaps from fifteen to twenty-five feet. They are easily mastered, for the first that is wounded among the sounds and straits so common in the isles usually runs ashore. The rest follow the blood, and, urged on by the boats behind, run ashore also. A cut with one of the long whaling knives under the back-fin is usually fatal to these huge animals. The two hundred and sixty-five whales, now lying within two or three miles of us, were driven ashore by seven boats only. "_Five o'clock._--We are out of the _Rost_ (I detest that word), and driving fast through a long sound among low green islands, which hardly lift themselves above the sea--not a cliff or hill to be seen--what a contrast to the land we have left! We are standing for some creek or harbor, called Lingholm Bay, to lie to or anchor for the night; for to pursue our course by night, and that a thick one, among these isles, and islets, and sand-banks, is out of the question--clear moonlight might do. Our sea is now moderate. But, oh gods and men! what misfortunes have travellers to record! Just as the quiet of the elements had reconciled us to the thought of dinner, we learn that an unlucky sea has found its way into the galley during the last infernal combustion, when the lee-side and boltsprit were constantly under water; so our soup is poisoned with salt water--our cod and haddocks, which cost ninepence this blessed morning, and would have been worth a couple of guineas in London, are soused in their primitive element--the curry is undone--and all gone to the devil. We all apply ourselves to comfort our Lord High Admiral Hamilton, whose despair for himself and the public might edify a patriot. His good-humor--which has hitherto defied every incident, aggravated even by the gout--supported by a few bad puns, and a great many fair promises on the part of the steward and cook, fortunately restores his equilibrium. "_Eight o'clock._--Our supplemental dinner proved excellent, and we have glided into an admirable roadstead or harbor, called Lingholm Bay, formed by the small island of Lingholm embracing a small basin dividing that islet from the larger isle of Stronsay. Both, as well as Sanda, Eda, and others which we have passed, are low, green, and sandy. I have seen nothing to-day worth marking, except the sporting of a very large whale at some distance, and H.'s face at the news of the disaster in the cook-room. We are to weigh at two in the morning, and hope to reach Kirkwall, the capital of Orkney, by breakfast to-morrow. I trust there are no _rusts_ or _rosts_ in the road. I shall detest that word even when used to signify verd antique or patina in the one sense, or roast venison in the other. Orkney shall begin a new volume of these exquisite memoranda. * * * * * "OMISSION.--At Lerwick the Dutch fishers had again appeared on their old haunts. A very interesting meeting took place between them and the Lerwegians, most of them being old acquaintances. They seemed very poor, and talked of having been pillaged of everything by the French, and expected to have found Lerwick ruined by the war. They have all the careful, quiet, and economical habits of their country, and go on board their busses with the utmost haste so soon as they see the Greenland sailors, who usually insult and pick quarrels with them. The great amusement of the Dutch sailors is to hire the little ponies, and ride up and down upon them. On one occasion, a good many years ago, an English sailor interrupted this cavalcade, frightened the horses, and one or two Dutchmen got tumbles. Incensed at this beyond their usual moderation, they pursued the cause of their overthrow, and wounded him with one of their knives. The wounded man went on board his vessel, the crew of which, about fifty strong, came ashore with their long flinching knives with which they cut up the whales, and falling upon the Dutchmen, though twice their numbers, drove them all into the sea, where such as could not swim were in some risk of being drowned. The instance of aggression, or rather violent retaliation, on their part, is almost solitary. In general they are extremely quiet, and employ themselves in bartering their little merchandise of gin and gingerbread for Zetland hose and night-caps." Footnotes of the Chapter XXVIII. [59: [Robert Stevenson, the eminent civil engineer, for nearly half a century the engineer to the Board of Northern Lights. He inaugurated the present Scottish lighthouse system, and no less than twenty lighthouses were designed and constructed under his superintendence, the most remarkable being the famous Bell Rock tower. He died in 1850. Three of his sons, one of whom became his biographer, greatly distinguished themselves in their father's profession. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his fragment of family history, _Records of a Family of Engineers_, has left a vivid picture of his grandfather, though it be but an unfinished sketch.]] [60: On being requested, while at breakfast, to inscribe his name in the album of the tower, Scott penned immediately the following lines:-- PHAROS LOQUITUR. "Far in the bosom of the deep, O'er these wild shelves my watch I keep; A ruddy gem of changeful light, Bound on the dusky brow of night, The seaman bids my lustre hail, And scorns to strike his timorous sail."] [61: This is, without doubt, an allusion to some happy day's excursion when his _first love_ was of the party.] [62: Erskine--Sheriff of Shetland and Orkney.] [63: Here occurs a rude scratch of drawing.] [64: Lord Dundas was created Earl of Zetland in 1838, and died in February, 1839.] [65: Campbell--_Pleasures of Hope_.] [66: Robert Hamilton, Sheriff of Lanarkshire, and afterwards one of the Clerks of Session, was a particular favorite of Scott--first, among many other good reasons, because he had been a soldier in his youth, had fought gallantly and been wounded severely in the American war, and was a very Uncle Toby in military enthusiasm; secondly, because he was a brother antiquary of the genuine Monkbarns breed; thirdly (last, not least), because he was, in spite of the example of the head of his name and race, a steady Tory. Mr. Hamilton sent for Scott when upon his deathbed in 1831, and desired him to choose and carry off as a parting memorial any article he liked in his collection of arms. Sir Walter (by that time sorely shattered in his own health) selected the sword with which his good friend had been begirt at Bunker's Hill.] [67: During the winter of 1837-38, this worthy clergyman's wife, his daughter, and a servant, perished within sight of the manse, from a flaw in the ice on the loch--which they were crossing as the nearest way home.--(1839.)] [68: In his reviewal of Pitcairn's _Trials_ (1831), Scott says: "In erecting this Earl's Castle of Scalloway, and other expensive edifices, the King's tenants were forced to work in quarries, transport stone, dig, delve, climb, and build, and submit to all possible sorts of servile and painful labor, without either meat, drink, hire, or recompense of any kind. 'My father,' said Earl Patrick, 'built his house at Sumburgh on the sand, and it has given way already; this of mine on the rock shall abide and endure.' He did not or would not understand that the oppression, rapacity, and cruelty, by means of which the house arose, were what the clergyman really pointed to in his recommendation of a motto. Accordingly, the huge tower remains wild and desolate--its chambers filled with sand, and its rifted walls and dismantled battlements giving unrestrained access to the roaring sea blast."--For more of Earl Patrick, see Scott's _Miscellaneous Prose Works_, vol. xxi. pp. 230, 233; vol. xxiii. pp. 327, 329.] [69: Mr. W. S. Rose informs me, that when he was at school at Winchester, the morris-dancers there used to exhibit a sword-dance resembling that described at Camacho's wedding in Don Quixote; and Mr. Morritt adds, that similar dances are even yet performed in the villages about Rokeby every Christmas.] [70: This is a solitary island, lying about halfway between Orkney and Zetland.] [71: An American Commodore.] [72: Mr. Marjoribanks.] [73: _Thalaba_, Book VIII.] CHAPTER XXIX DIARY ON BOARD THE LIGHTHOUSE YACHT CONTINUED. -- THE ORKNEYS. --KIRKWALL. -- HOY. -- THE STANDING STONES OF STENNIS, ETC. 1814 "_12th August, 1814._--With a good breeze and calm sea we weighed at two in the morning, and worked by short tacks up to Kirkwall Bay, and find ourselves in that fine basin upon rising in the morning. The town looks well from the sea, but is chiefly indebted to the huge old cathedral that rises out of the centre. Upon landing we find it but a poor and dirty place, especially towards the harbor. Farther up the town are seen some decent old-fashioned houses, and the Sheriff's interest secures us good lodgings. Marchie goes to hunt for a pointer. The morning, which was rainy, clears up pleasantly, and Hamilton, Erskine, Duff, and I walk to Malcolm Laing's, who has a pleasant house about half a mile from the town. Our old acquaintance, though an invalid, received us kindly; he looks very poorly, and cannot walk without assistance, but seems to retain all the quick, earnest, and vivacious intelligence of his character and manner. After this, visit the antiquities of the place, namely, the Bishop's palace, the Earl of Orkney's castle, and the cathedral, all situated within a stone-cast of each other. The two former are ruinous. The most prominent part of the ruins of the Bishop's palace is a large round tower, similar to that of Bothwell in architecture, but not equal to it in size. This was built by Bishop Reid, _tempore Jacobi V._, and there is a rude statue of him in a niche in the front. At the north-east corner of the building is a square tower of greater antiquity, called the Mense or Mass Tower; but, as well as a second and smaller round tower, it is quite ruinous. A suite of apartments of different sizes fills up the space between these towers, all now ruinous. The building is said to have been of great antiquity, but was certainly in a great measure reëdified in the sixteenth century. "Fronting this castle or palace of the Bishop, and about a gun-shot distant, is that of the Earl of Orkney. The Earl's palace was built by Patrick Stewart, Earl of Orkney, the same who erected that of Scalloway, in Shetland. It is an elegant structure, partaking at once of the character of a palace and castle. The building forms three sides of an oblong square, but one of the sides extends considerably beyond the others. The great hall must have been remarkably handsome, opening into two or three huge rounds or turrets, the lower part of which is divided by stone shafts into three windows. It has two immense chimneys, the arches or lintels of which are formed by a flat arch, as at Crichton Castle. There is another very handsome apartment communicating with the hall like a modern drawing-room, and which has, like the former, its projecting turrets. The hall is lighted by a fine Gothic-shafted window at one end, and by others on the sides. It is approached by a spacious and elegant staircase of three flights of steps. The dimensions may be sixty feet long, twenty broad, and fourteen high, but doubtless an arched roof sprung from the side walls, so that fourteen feet was only the height from the ground to the arches. Any modern architect, wishing to emulate the real Gothic architecture, and apply it to the purposes of modern splendor, might derive excellent hints from this room. The exterior ornaments are also extremely elegant. The ruins, once the residence of this haughty and oppressive Earl, are now so disgustingly nasty, that it required all the zeal of an antiquary to prosecute the above investigation. Architecture seems to have been Earl Patrick's prevailing taste. Besides this castle and that of Scalloway, he added to or enlarged the old castle of Bressay. To accomplish these objects, he oppressed the people with severities unheard of even in that oppressive age, drew down on himself a shameful though deserved punishment, and left these dishonored ruins to hand down to posterity the tale of his crimes and of his fall. We may adopt, though in another sense, his own presumptuous motto--_Sic Fuit, Est, et Erit_. "We visit the cathedral, dedicated to St. Magnus, which greeted the Sheriff's approach with a merry peal. Like that of Glasgow, this church has escaped the blind fury of Reformation. It was founded in 1138, by Ronald, Earl of Orkney, nephew of the Saint. It is of great size, being 260 feet long, or thereabout, and supported by twenty-eight Saxon pillars, of good workmanship. The round arch predominates in the building, but I think not exclusively. The steeple (once a very high spire) rises upon four pillars of great strength, which occupy each angle of the nave. Being destroyed by lightning, it was rebuilt upon a low and curtailed plan. The appearance of the building is rather massive and gloomy than elegant, and many of the exterior ornaments, carving around the doorways, etc., have been injured by time. We entered the cathedral, the whole of which is kept locked, swept, and in good order, although only the eastern end is used for divine worship. We walked some time in the nave and western end, which is left unoccupied, and has a very solemn effect as the avenue to the place of worship. There were many tombstones on the floor and elsewhere; some, doubtless, of high antiquity. One, I remarked, had the shield of arms hung by the corner, with a helmet above it of a large proportion, such as I have seen on the most ancient seals. But we had neither time nor skill to decipher what noble Orcadian lay beneath. The church is as well fitted up as could be expected; much of the old carved oak remains, but with a motley mixture of modern deal pews. All, however, is neat and clean, and does great honor to the kirk-session who maintain its decency. I remarked particularly Earl Patrick's seat, adjoining to that of the magistrates, but surmounting it and every other in the church: it is surrounded with a carved screen of oak, rather elegant, and bears his arms and initials, and the motto I have noticed. He bears the royal arms _without any mark of bastardy_ (his father was a natural son of James V.) quarterly, with a lymphad or galley, the ancient arms of the county. This circumstance was charged against him on his trial.[74] I understand the late Mr. Gilbert Laing Meason left the interest of £1000 to keep up this cathedral. "There are in the street facing the cathedral the ruins of a much more ancient castle; a proper feudal fortress belonging to the Earls of Orkney, but called the King's Castle. It appears to have been very strong, being situated near the harbor, and having, as appears from the fragments, very massive walls. While the wicked Earl Patrick was in confinement, one of his natural sons defended this castle to extremity against the King's troops, and only surrendered when it was nearly a heap of ruins, and then under condition he should not be brought in evidence against his father. "We dine at the inn, and drink the Prince Regent's health, being that of the day--Mr. Baikie of Tankerness dines with us. "_13th August, 1814._--A bad morning, but clears up. No letters from Edinburgh. The country about Kirkwall is flat, and tolerably cultivated. We see oxen generally wrought in the small country carts, though they have a race of ponies, like those of Shetland, but larger. Marchie goes to shoot on a hill called Whiteford, which slopes away about two or three miles from Kirkwall. The grouse is abundant, for the gentleman who chaperons Marchie killed thirteen brace and a half, with a snipe. There are no partridges nor hares. The soil of Orkney is better, and its air more genial than Shetland; but it is far less interesting, and possesses none of the wild and peculiar character of the more northern archipelago. All vegetables grow here freely in the gardens, and there are one or two attempts at trees where they are sheltered by walls. How ill they succeed may be conjectured from our bringing with us a quantity of brushwood, commissioned by Malcolm Laing from Aberbrothock, to be sticks to his pease. This trash we brought two hundred miles. I have little to add, except that the Orkney people have some odd superstitions about a stone on which they take oaths to Odin. Lovers often perform this ceremony in pledge of mutual faith, and are said to account it a sacred engagement.--It is agreed that we go on board after dinner, and sail with the next tide. The magistrates of Kirkwall present us with the freedom of their ancient burgh; and Erskine, instead of being cumbered with drunken sailors, as at Lerwick, or a drunken schoolmaster, as at Fair Isle, is annoyed by his own Substitute. This will occasion his remaining two days at Kirkwall, during which time it is proposed we shall visit the lighthouse upon the dangerous rocks called the Skerries, in the Pentland Frith; and then, returning to the eastern side of Pomona, take up the counsellor at Stromness. It is further settled that we leave Marchie with Erskine to get another day's shooting. On board at ten o'clock, after a little bustle in expediting our domestics, washerwomen, etc. "_14th August, 1814._--Sail about four, and in rounding the mainland of Orkney, called Pomona, encounter a very heavy sea; about ten o'clock, get into the Sound of Holm or Ham, a fine smooth current meandering away between two low green islands, which have little to characterize them. On the right of the Sound is the mainland, and a deep bay called Scalpa Flow indents it up to within two miles of Kirkwall. A canal through this neck of the island would be of great consequence to the burgh. We see the steeple and church of Kirkwall across the island very distinctly. Getting out of the Sound of Holm, we stand in to the harbor or roadstead of Widewall, where we find seven or eight foreign vessels bound for Ireland, and a sloop belonging to the lighthouse service. These roadsteads are common all through the Orkneys, and afford excellent shelter for small vessels. The day is pleasant and sunny, but the breeze is too high to permit landing at the Skerries. Agree, therefore, to stand over for the mainland of Scotland, and visit Thurso. Enter the Pentland Frith, so celebrated for the strength and fury of its tides, which is boiling even in this pleasant weather; we see a large ship battling with this heavy current, and though with all her canvas set and a breeze, getting more and more involved. See the two Capes of Dungsby or Duncansby, and Dunnet-head, between which lies the celebrated John o' Groat's house, on the north-eastern extremity of Scotland. The shores of Caithness rise bold and rocky before us,--a contrast to the Orkneys, which are all low, excepting the Island of Hoy. On Duncansby-head appear some remarkable rocks, like towers, called the Stacks of Duncansby. Near this shore runs the remarkable breaking tide called the _Merry Men of Mey_, whence Mackenzie takes the scenery of a poem-- 'Where the dancing Men of Mey, Speed the current to the land.'[75] Here, according to his locality, the Caithness-man witnessed the vision, in which was introduced the song, translated by Gray, under the title of The Fatal Sisters. On this subject, Mr. Baikie told me the following remarkable circumstance: A clergyman told him, that while some remnants of the Norse were yet spoken in North Ronaldsha, he carried thither the translation of Mr. Gray, then newly published, and read it to some of the old people as referring to the ancient history of their islands. But so soon as he had proceeded a little way, they exclaimed they knew it very well in the original, and had often sung it to himself when he asked them for an old Norse song; they called it The Enchantresses.--The breeze dies away between two wicked little islands called Swona and Stroma,--the latter belonging to Caithness, the former to Orkney.--_Nota Bene_. The inhabitants of the rest of the Orcades despise those of Swona for eating limpets, as being the last of human meannesses. Every land has its fashions. The Fair-Isles-men disdain Orkney-men for eating dog-fish. Both islands have dangerous reefs and whirlpools, where, even in this fine day, the tide rages furiously. Indeed, the large high unbroken billows, which at every swell hide from our deck each distant object, plainly intimate what a dreadful current this must be when vexed by high or adverse winds. Finding ourselves losing ground in the tide, and unwilling to waste time, we give up Thurso--run back into the roadstead or bay of Long-Hope, and anchor under the fort. The bay has four entrances and safe anchorage in most winds, and having become a great rendezvous for shipping (there are nine vessels lying here at present) has been an object of attention with Government. "Went ashore after dinner, and visited the fort, which is only partly completed: it is a _flêche_ to the sea, with eight guns, twenty-four pounders, but without any land defences; the guns are mounted _en barbette_, without embrasures, each upon a kind of movable stage, which stage wheeling upon a pivot in front, and traversing by means of wheels behind, can be pointed in any direction that may be thought necessary. Upon this stage, the gun-carriage moves forward and recoils, and the depth of the parapet shelters the men even better than an embrasure. At a little distance from this battery they are building a Martello tower, which is to cross the fire of the battery, and also that of another projected tower upon the opposite point of the bay. The expedience of these towers seems excessively problematical. Supposing them impregnable, or nearly so, a garrison of fourteen or fifteen men may be always blockaded by a very trifling number, while the enemy dispose of all in the vicinity at their pleasure. In the case of Long-Hope, for instance, a frigate might disembark 100 men, take the fort in the rear, where it is undefended even by a palisade, destroy the magazines, spike and dismount the cannon, carry off or cut out any vessels in the roadstead, and accomplish all the purposes that could bring them to so remote a spot, in spite of a sergeant's party in the Martello tower, and without troubling themselves about them at all. Meanwhile, Long-Hope will one day turn out a flourishing place; there will soon be taverns and slop-shops, where sailors rendezvous in such numbers; then will come quays, docks, and warehouses; and then a thriving town. Amen, so be it. This is the first fine day we have enjoyed to an end since Sunday, 31st ult. Rainy, cold, and hazy, have been our voyages around these wild islands; I hope the weather begins to mend, though Mr. Wilson, our master, threatens a breeze to-morrow. We are to attempt the Skerries, if possible; if not, we will, I believe, go to Stromness. "_15th August, 1814._--Fine morning. We get again into the Pentland Frith, and with the aid of a pilot-boat belonging to the lighthouse service, from South Ronaldsha, we attempt the Skerries. Notwithstanding the fair weather, we have a specimen of the violence of the flood-tide, which forms whirlpools on the shallow sunken rocks by the islands of Swona and Stroma, and in the deep water makes strange, smooth, whirling, and swelling eddies, called by the sailors, _wells_. We run through the _wells of Tuftile_ in particular, which, in the least stress of weather, wheel a large ship round and round, without respect either to helm or sails. Hence the distinction of _wells_ and _waves_ in Old English; the _well_ being that smooth, glassy, oily-looking eddy, the force of which seems to the eye almost resistless. The bursting of the waves in foam around these strange eddies has a bewildering and confused appearance, which it is impossible to describe. Get off the Skerries about ten o'clock, and land easily; it is the first time a boat has got there for several days. The _Skerries_[76] is an island about sixty acres, of fine short herbage, belonging to Lord Dundas; it is surrounded by a reef of precipitous rocks, not very high, but inaccessible, unless where the ocean has made ravines among them, and where stairs have been cut down to the water for the lighthouse service. Those inlets have a romantic appearance, and have been christened by the sailors, the Parliament House, the Seals' Lying-in-Hospital, etc. The last inlet, after rushing through a deep chasm, which is open overhead, is continued under ground, and then again opens to the sky in the middle of the island; in this hole the seals bring out their whelps; when the tide is high, the waves rise up through this aperture in the middle of the isle--like the blowing of a whale in noise and appearance. There is another round cauldron of solid rock, to which the waves have access through a natural arch in the rock, having another and lesser arch rising just above it; in hard weather, the waves rush through both apertures with a horrid noise; the workmen called it the Carron Blast, and, indeed, the variety of noises which issued from the abyss, somewhat reminded me of that engine. Take my rifle, and walk round the cliffs in search of seals, but see none, and only disturb the digestion of certain aldermen-cormorants, who were sitting on the points of the crags after a good fish breakfast; only made one good shot out of four. The lighthouse is too low, and on the old construction, yet it is of the last importance. The keeper is an old man-of-war's-man, of whom Mr. Stevenson observed that he was a great swearer when he first came; but after a year or two's residence in this solitary abode, became a changed man. There are about fifty head of cattle on the island; they must be got in and off with great danger and difficulty. There is no water upon the isle, except what remains after rain in some pools; these sometimes dry in summer, and the cattle are reduced to great straits. Leave the isle about one; and the wind and tide being favorable, crowd all sail, and get on at the rate of fourteen miles an hour. Soon reach our old anchorage at the Long-Hope, and passing, stand to the north-westward, up the Sound of Hoy, for Stromness. "I should have mentioned, that in going down the Pentland Frith this morning, we saw Johnnie Groat's house, or rather the place where it stood, now occupied by a storehouse. Our pilot opines there was no such man as Johnnie Groat, for, he says, he cannot hear that anybody _ever saw him_. This reasoning would put down most facts of antiquity. They gather shells on the shore, called _Johnnie Groat's buckies_, but I cannot procure any at present. I may also add, that the interpretation given to _wells_ may apply to the Wells of Slain, in the fine ballad of Clerk Colvill; such eddies in the romantic vicinity of Slains Castle would be a fine place for a mermaid.[77] "Our wind fails us, and, what is worse, becomes westerly. The Sound has now the appearance of a fine land-locked bay, the passages between the several islands being scarce visible. We have a superb view of Kirkwall Cathedral, with a strong gleam of sunshine upon it. Gloomy weather begins to collect around us, particularly on the island of Hoy, which, covered with gloom and vapor, now assumes a majestic mountainous character. On Pomona we pass the Hill of Orphir, which reminds me of the clergyman of that parish, who was called to account for some of his inaccuracies to the General Assembly; one charge he held particularly cheap, namely, that of drunkenness. 'Reverend Moderator,' said he, in reply, 'I _do_ drink, as other gentlemen do.' This Orphir of the north must not be confounded with the Orphir of the south. From the latter came gold, silver, and precious stones; the former seems to produce little except peats. Yet these are precious commodities, which some of the Orkney Isles altogether want, and lay waste and burn the turf of their land instead of importing coal from Newcastle. The Orcadians seem by no means an alert or active race; they neglect the excellent fisheries which lie under their very noses, and in their mode of managing their boats, as well as in the general tone of urbanity and intelligence, are excelled by the less favored Zetlanders. I observe they always crowd their boat with people in the bows, being the ready way to send her down in any awkward circumstance. There are remains of their Norwegian descent and language in North Ronaldsha, an isle I regret we did not see. A missionary preacher came ashore there a year or two since, but being a very little black-bearded unshaved man, the seniors of the isle suspected him of being an ancient Pecht or Pict, and _no canny_, of course. The schoolmaster came down to entreat our worthy Mr. Stevenson, then about to leave the island, to come up and verify whether the preacher was an ancient Pecht, yea or no. Finding apologies were in vain, he rode up to the house where the unfortunate preacher, after three nights' watching, had got to bed, little conceiving under what odious suspicion he had fallen. As Mr. S. declined disturbing him, his boots were produced, which being a _little_--_little_--_very little_ pair, confirmed, in the opinion of all the bystanders, the suspicion of Pechtism. Mr. S. therefore found it necessary to go into the poor man's sleeping apartment, where he recognized one Campbell, heretofore an ironmonger in Edinburgh, but who had put his hand for some years to the missionary plough; of course he warranted his quondam acquaintance to be no ancient Pecht. Mr. Stevenson carried the same schoolmaster who figured in the adventure of the Pecht, to the mainland of Scotland, to be examined for his office. He was extremely desirous to see a tree; and, on seeing one, desired to know what _girss_ it was that grew at the top on't--the leaves appearing to him to be grass. They still speak a little Norse, and indeed I hear every day words of that language; for instance, _Ja, kul_, for '_Yes, sir_.' We creep slowly up Hoy Sound, working under the Pomona shore; but there is no hope of reaching Stromness till we have the assistance of the evening tide. The channel now seems like a Highland loch; not the least ripple on the waves. The passage is narrowed, and (to the eye) blocked up by the interposition of the green and apparently fertile isle of Græmsay, the property of Lord Armadale.[78] Hoy looks yet grander, from comparing its black and steep mountains with this verdant isle. To add to the beauty of the Sound, it is rendered lively by the successive appearance of seven or eight whaling vessels from Davies' Straits; large strong ships, which pass successively, with all their sails set, enjoying the little wind that is. Many of these vessels display the _garland_; that is, a wreath of ribbons which the young fellows on board have got from their sweethearts, or come by otherwise, and which hangs between the foremast and mainmast, surmounted sometimes by a small model of the vessel. This garland is hung up upon the 1st of May, and remains till they come into port. I believe we shall dodge here till the tide makes about nine, and then get into Stromness: no boatman or sailor in Orkney thinks of the wind in comparison of the tides and currents. We must not complain, though the night gets rainy, and the Hill of Hoy is now completely invested with vapor and mist. In the forepart of the day we executed very cleverly a task of considerable difficulty and even danger. "_16th August, 1814._--Get into Stromness Bay, and anchor before the party are up. A most decided rain all night. The bay is formed by a deep indention in the mainland, or Pomona; on one side of which stands Stromness--a fishing village and harbor of _call_ for the Davies' Straits whalers, as Lerwick is for the Greenlanders. Betwixt the vessels we met yesterday, seven or eight which passed us this morning, and several others still lying in the bay, we have seen between twenty and thirty of these large ships in this remote place. The opposite side of Stromness Bay is protected by Hoy, and Græmsay lies between them; so that the bay seems quite land-locked, and the contrast between the mountains of Hoy, the soft verdure of Græmsay, and the swelling hill of Orphir on the mainland, has a beautiful effect. The day clears up, and Mr. Rae, Lord Armadale's factor, comes off from his house, called Clestrom, upon the shore opposite to Stromness, to breakfast with us. We go ashore with him. His farm is well cultivated, and he has procured an excellent breed of horses from Lanarkshire, of which county he is a native; strong hardy Galloways, fit for labor or hacks. By this we profited, as Mr. Rae mounted us all, and we set off to visit the Standing Stones of Stenhouse or Stennis. "At the upper end of the bay, about halfway between Clestrom and Stromness, there extends a loch of considerable size, of fresh water, but communicating with the sea by apertures left in a long bridge or causeway which divides them. After riding about two miles along this lake, we open another called the Loch of Harray, of about the same dimensions, and communicating with the lower lake, as the former does with the sea, by a stream, over which is constructed a causeway, with openings to suffer the flow and reflux of the water, as both lakes are affected by the tide. Upon the tongues of land which, approaching each other, divide the lakes of Stennis and Harray, are situated the Standing Stones. The isthmus on the eastern side exhibits a semicircle of immensely large upright pillars of unhewn stone, surrounded by a mound of earth. As the mound is discontinued, it does not seem that the circle was ever completed. The flat or open part of the semicircle looks up a plain, where, at a distance, is seen a large tumulus. The highest of these stones may be about sixteen or seventeen feet, and I think there are none so low as twelve feet. At irregular distances are pointed out other unhewn pillars of the same kind. One, a little to the westward, is perforated with a round hole, perhaps to bind a victim; or rather, I conjecture, for the purpose of solemnly attesting the deity, which the Scandinavians did by passing their head through a ring,--_vide_ Eyrbiggia Saga. Several barrows are scattered around this strange monument. Upon the opposite isthmus is a complete circle, of ninety-five paces in diameter, surrounded by standing stones, less in size than the others, being only from ten or twelve to fourteen feet in height, and four in breadth. A deep trench is drawn around this circle on the outside of the pillars, and four tumuli, or mounds of earth, are regularly placed, two on each side. "Stonehenge excels these monuments, but I fancy they are otherwise unparalleled in Britain. The idea that such circles were exclusively Druidical is now justly exploded. The northern nations all used such erections to mark their places of meeting, whether for religious purposes or civil policy; and there is repeated mention of them in the Sagas. See the Eyrbiggia Saga,[79] for the establishment of the Helga-fels, or holy mount, where the people held their Comitia, and where sacrifices were offered to Thor and Woden. About the centre of the semicircle is a broad flat stone, probably once the altar on which human victims were sacrificed.--Mr. Rae seems to think the common people have no tradition of the purpose of these stones, but probably he has not inquired particularly. He admits they look upon them with superstitious reverence; and it is evident that those which have fallen down (about half the original number) have been wasted by time, and not demolished. The materials of these monuments lay near, for the shores and bottom of the lake are of the same kind of rock. How they were raised, transported, and placed upright, is a puzzling question. In our ride back, noticed a round entrenchment, or _tumulus_, called the Hollow of Tongue. "The hospitality of Mrs. Rae detained us to an early dinner at Clestrom. About four o'clock took our long-boat and rowed down the bay to visit the Dwarfie Stone of Hoy. We have all day been pleased with the romantic appearance of that island, for though the Hill of Hoy is not very high, perhaps about 1200 feet, yet rising perpendicularly (almost) from the sea, and being very steep and furrowed with ravines, and catching all the mists from the western ocean, it has a noble and picturesque effect in every point of view. We land upon the island, and proceed up a long and very swampy valley broken into peat-bogs. The one side of this valley is formed by the Mountain of Hoy, the other by another steep hill, having at the top a circular belt of rock; upon the slope of this last hill, and just where the principal mountain opens into a wide and precipitous and circular _corrie_ or hollow, lies the Dwarfie Stone. It is a huge sandstone rock, of one solid stone, being about seven feet high, twenty-two feet long, and seventeen feet broad. The upper end of this stone is hewn into a sort of apartment containing two beds of stone and a passage between them. The uppermost and largest is five feet eight inches long, by two feet broad, and is furnished with a stone pillow. The lower, supposed for the Dwarf's Wife, is shorter, and rounded off, instead of being square at the corners. The entrance may be about three feet and a half square. Before it lies a huge stone, apparently intended to serve the purpose of a door, and shaped accordingly. In the top, over the passage which divides the beds, there is a hole to serve for a window or chimney, which was doubtless originally wrought square with irons, like the rest of the work, but has been broken out by violence into a shapeless hole. Opposite to this stone, and proceeding from it in a line down the valley, are several small barrows, and there is a very large one on the same line, at the spot where we landed. This seems to indicate that the monument is of heathen times, and probably was meant as the temple of some northern edition of the _Dii Manes_. There are no symbols of Christian devotion--and the door is to the westward; it therefore does not seem to have been the abode of a hermit, as Dr. Barry[80] has conjectured. The Orcadians have no tradition on the subject, excepting that they believe it to be the work of a dwarf, to whom, like their ancestors, they attribute supernatural powers and malevolent disposition. They conceive he may be seen sometimes sitting at the door of his abode, but he vanishes on a nearer approach. Whoever inhabited this den certainly enjoyed 'Pillow cold and sheets not warm.' "Duff, Stevenson, and I now walk along the skirts of the Hill of Hoy, to rejoin Robert Hamilton, who in the mean while had rode down to the clergyman's house, the wet and boggy walk not suiting his gout. Arrive at the manse completely wet, and drink tea there. The clergyman (Mr. Hamilton) has procured some curious specimens of natural history for Bullock's Museum, particularly a pair of fine eaglets. He has just got another of the golden, or white kind, which he intends to send him. The eagle, with every other ravenous bird, abounds among the almost inaccessible precipices of Hoy, which afford them shelter, while the moors, abounding with grouse, and the small uninhabited islands and holms, where sheep and lambs are necessarily left unwatched, as well as the all-sustaining ocean, give these birds of prey the means of support. The clergyman told us that a man was very lately alive in the island of ....., who, when an infant, was transported from thence by an eagle over a broad sound, or arm of the sea, to the bird's nest in Hoy. Pursuit being instantly made, and the eagle's nest being known, the infant was found there playing with the young eaglets. A more ludicrous instance of transportation he himself witnessed. Walking in the fields, he heard the squeaking of a pig for some time, without being able to discern whence it proceeded, until looking up, he beheld the unfortunate grunter in the talons of an eagle, who soared away with him towards the summit of Hoy. From this it may be conjectured, that the island is very thinly inhabited; in fact, we only saw two or three little wigwams. After tea we walked a mile farther, to a point where the boat was lying, in order to secure the advantage of the flood-tide. We rowed with toil across one stream of tide, which set strongly up between Græmsay and Hoy; but, on turning the point of Græmsay, the other branch of the same flood-tide carried us with great velocity alongside our yacht, which we reached about nine o'clock. Between riding, walking, and running, we have spent a very active and entertaining day. "_Domestic Memoranda._--The eggs on Zetland and Orkney are very indifferent, having an earthy taste, and being very small. But the hogs are an excellent breed--queer wild-looking creatures, with heads like wild-boars, but making capital bacon." Footnotes of the Chapter XXIX. [74: "This noted oppressor was finally brought to trial, and beheaded at the Cross of Edinburgh (6th February, 1614). It is said that the King's mood was considerably heated against him by some ill-chosen and worse written Latin inscriptions with which his father and himself had been unlucky enough to decorate some of their insular palaces. In one of these, Earl Robert, the father, had given his own designation thus: 'Orcadiæ Comes _Rex_ Jacobi Quinti Filius.' In this case he was not, perhaps, guilty of anything worse than bad Latin. But James VI., who had a keen nose for puzzling out treason, and with whom an assault and battery upon Priscian ranked in nearly the same degree of crime, had little doubt that the use of the nominative _Rex_, instead of the genitive _Regis_, had a treasonable savor."--Scott's _Miscellaneous Prose Works_, vol. xxiii. p. 232.] [75: Henry Mackenzie's Introduction to _The Fatal Sisters_.--_Works_, 1808, vol. viii. p. 63.] [76: "A Skerrie means a flattish rock which the sea does not overflow."--Edmonstone's _View of the Zetlands_.] [77: Clerk Colvill falls a sacrifice to a meeting with "a fair Mermaid," whom he found washing her "Sark of Silk" on this romantic shore. He had been warned by his "gay lady" in these words:-- "O promise me now, Clerk Colvill, Or it will cost ye muckle strife, Ride never by the Wells of Slane, If ye wad live and brook your life."] [78: Sir William Honeyman, Bart.--a Judge of the Court of Session by the title of Lord Armadale.] [79: _Miscellaneous Prose Works_, vol. v. p. 355.] [80: _History of the Orkney Islands_, by the Rev. George Barry, D. D., 4to, Edinburgh, 1805.] CHAPTER XXX DIARY CONTINUED. -- STROMNESS. -- BESSY MILLIE'S CHARM. -- CAPE WRATH. -- CAVE OF SMOWE. -- THE HEBRIDES. -- SCALPA, ETC. 1814 "_Off Stromness, 17th August, 1814._--Went on shore after breakfast, and found W. Erskine and Marjoribanks had been in this town all last night, without our hearing of them or they of us. No letters from Abbotsford or Edinburgh. Stromness is a little dirty straggling town, which cannot be traversed by a cart, or even by a horse, for there are stairs up and down, even in the principal streets. We paraded its whole length like turkeys in a string, I suppose to satisfy ourselves that there was a worse town in the Orkneys than the metropolis, Kirkwall. We clomb, by steep and dirty lanes, an eminence rising above the town, and commanding a fine view. An old hag lives in a wretched cabin on this height, and subsists by selling winds. Each captain of a merchantman, between jest and earnest, gives the old woman sixpence, and she boils her kettle to procure a favorable gale. She was a miserable figure; upwards of ninety, she told us, and dried up like a mummy. A sort of clay-colored cloak, folded over her head, corresponded in color to her corpselike complexion. Fine light-blue eyes, and nose and chin that almost met, and a ghastly expression of cunning, gave her quite the effect of Hecate. She told us she remembered _Gow the pirate_, who was born near the House of Clestrom, and afterwards commenced buccaneer. He came to his native country about 1725, with a _snow_ which he commanded, carried off two women from one of the islands, and committed other enormities. At length, while he was dining in a house in the island of Eda, the islanders, headed by Malcolm Laing's grandfather, made him prisoner, and sent him to London, where he was hanged. While at Stromness, he made love to a Miss Gordon, who pledged her faith to him by shaking hands, an engagement which, in her idea, could not be dissolved without her going to London to seek back again her 'faith and troth,' by shaking hands with him again after execution. We left our Pythoness, who assured us there was nothing evil in the intercession she was to make for us, but that we were only to have a fair wind through the benefit of her prayers. She repeated a sort of rigmarole which I suppose she had ready for such occasions, and seemed greatly delighted and surprised with the amount of our donation, as everybody gave her a trifle, our faithful Captain Wilson making the regular offering on behalf of the ship. So much for buying a wind. Bessy Millie's habitation is airy enough for Æolus himself, but if she is a special favorite with that divinity, he has a strange choice. In her house I remarked a quern, or hand-mill.--A cairn, a little higher, commands a beautiful view of the bay, with its various entrances and islets. Here we found the vestiges of a bonfire, lighted in memory of the battle of Bannockburn, concerning which every part of Scotland has its peculiar traditions. The Orcadians say that a Norwegian prince, then their ruler, called by them Harold, brought 1400 men of Orkney to the assistance of Bruce, and that the King, at a critical period of the engagement, touched him with his scabbard, saying, 'The day is against us.'--'I trust,' returned the Orcadian, 'your Grace will _venture again_;' which has given rise to their motto, and passed into a proverb. On board at half-past three, and find Bessy Millie a woman of her word, for the expected breeze has sprung up, if it but last us till we double Cape Wrath. Weigh anchor (I hope) to bid farewell to Orkney.[81] "The land in Orkney is, generally speaking, excellent, and what is not fitted for the plough is admirably adapted for pasture. But the cultivation is very bad, and the mode of using these extensive commons, where they tear up, without remorse, the turf of the finest pasture, in order to make fuel, is absolutely execrable. The practice has already peeled and exhausted much fine land, and must in the end ruin the country entirely. In other respects, their mode of cultivation is to manure for barley and oats, and then manure again, and this without the least idea of fallow or green crops. Mr. Rae thinks that his example--and he farms very well--has had no effect upon the natives, except in the article of potatoes, which they now cultivate a little more, but crops of turnips are unknown. For this slovenly labor the Orcadians cannot, like the Shetland men, plead the occupation of fishing, which is wholly neglected by them, excepting that about this time of the year all the people turn out for the dogfish, the liver of which affords oil, and the bodies are a food as much valued here by the lower classes as it is contemned in Shetland. We saw nineteen boats out at this work. But cod, tusk, ling, haddocks, etc., which abound round these isles, are totally neglected. Their inferiority in husbandry is therefore to be ascribed to the prejudices of the people, who are all peasants of the lowest order. On Lord Armadale's estate, the number of tenantry amounts to 300, and the average of rent is about seven pounds each. What can be expected from such a distribution? and how is the necessary restriction to take place, without the greatest immediate distress and hardship to these poor creatures? It is the hardest chapter in Economics; and if I were an Orcadian laird, I feel I should shuffle on with the old useless creatures, in contradiction to my better judgment. Stock is improved in these islands, and the horses seem to be better bred than in Shetland; at least, I have seen more clever animals. The good horses find a ready sale; Mr. Rae gets twenty guineas readily for a colt of his rearing--to be sure, they are very good. "_Six o'clock._--Our breeze has carried us through the Mouth of Hoy, and so into the Atlantic. The north-western face of the island forms a ledge of high perpendicular cliffs, which might have surprised us more, had we not already seen the Ord of Bressay, the Noup of Noss, and the precipices of the Fair Isle. But these are formidable enough. One projecting cliff, from the peculiarities of its form, has acquired the name of the Old Man of Hoy, and is well known to mariners as marking the entrance to the Mouth. The other jaw of this mouth is formed by a lower range of crags, called the Burgh of Birsa. The access through this strait would be easy, were it not for the Island of Græmsay, lying in the very throat of the passage, and two other islands covering the entrance to the harbor of Stromness. Græmsay is infamous for shipwrecks, and the chance of these _God-sends_, as they were impiously called, is said sometimes to have doubled the value of the land. In Stromness, I saw many of the sad relics of shipwrecked vessels applied to very odd purposes, and indeed to all sorts of occasions. The gates, or _grinds_, as they are here called, are usually of ship planks and timbers, and so are their bridges, etc. These casualties are now much less common since the lights on the Skerries and the Start have been established. Enough of memoranda for the present.--We have hitherto kept our course pretty well; and a King's ship about eighteen guns or so, two miles upon our lee-boom, has shortened sail, apparently to take us under her wing, which may not be altogether unnecessary in the latitude of Cape Wrath, where several vessels have been taken by Yankee-Doodle. The sloop of war looks as if she could bite hard, and is supposed by our folks to be the Malay. If we can speak the captain, we will invite him to some grouse, or send him some, as he likes best, for Marchie's campaign was very successful. "_18th August, 1814._--Bessy Millie's charm has failed us. After a rainy night, the wind has come round to the north-west, and is getting almost contrary. We have weathered Whitten-head, however, and Cape Wrath, the north-western extremity of Britain, is now in sight. The weather gets rainy and squally. Hamilton and Erskine keep their berths. Duff and I sit upon deck, like two great bears, wrapt in watch-cloaks, the sea flying over us every now and then. At length, after a sound buffeting with the rain, the doubling Cape Wrath with this wind is renounced as impracticable, and we stand away for Loch Eribol, a lake running into the extensive country of Lord Reay. No sickness; we begin to get hardy sailors in that particular. The ground rises upon us very bold and mountainous, especially a very high steep mountain, called Ben-y-Hope, at the head of a lake called Loch Hope. The weather begins to mitigate as we get under the lee of the land. Loch Eribol opens, running up into a wild and barren scene of crags and hills. The proper anchorage is said to be at the head of the lake, but to go eight miles up so narrow an inlet would expose us to be wind-bound. A pilot-boat comes off from Mr. Anderson's house, a principal tacksman of Lord Reay's. After some discussion we anchor within a reef of sunken rocks, nearly opposite to Mr. Anderson's house of Rispan; the situation is not, we are given to understand, altogether without danger if the wind should blow hard, but it is now calm. In front of our anchorage a few shapeless patches of land, not exceeding a few yards in diameter, have been prepared for corn by the spade, and bear wretched crops. All the rest of the view is utter barrenness; the distant hills, we are told, contain plenty of deer, being part of a forest belonging to Lord Reay, who is proprietor of all the extensive range of desolation now under our eye. The water has been kinder than the land, for we hear of plenty of salmon, and haddocks, and lobsters, and send our faithful minister of the interior, John Peters, the steward, to procure some of those good things of this very indifferent land, and to invite Mr. Anderson to dine with us. Four o'clock,--John has just returned, successful in both commissions, and the evening concludes pleasantly. "_19th August, 1814, Loch Eribol, near Cape Wrath._--Went off before eight A. M. to breakfast with our friend Mr. Anderson. His house, invisible from the vessel at her moorings, and indeed from any part of the entrance into Loch Eribol, is a very comfortable one, lying obscured behind a craggy eminence. A little creek, winding up behind the crag, and in front of the house, forms a small harbor, and gives a romantic air of concealment and snugness. There we found a ship upon the stocks, built from the keel by a Highland carpenter, who had magnanimously declined receiving assistance from any of the ship-carpenters who happened to be here occasionally, lest it should be said he could not have finished his task without their aid. An ample Highland breakfast of excellent new-taken herring, equal to those of Lochfine, fresh haddocks, fresh eggs, and fresh butter, not forgetting the bottle of whiskey, and bannocks of barley, and oat-cakes, with the Lowland luxuries of tea and coffee. After breakfast, took the long-boat, and, under Mr. Anderson's pilotage, row to see a remarkable natural curiosity, called Uamh Smowe, or the Largest Cave. Stevenson, Marchie, and Duff go by land. Take the fowling-piece, and shoot some sea-fowl and a large hawk of an uncommon appearance. Fire four shots, and kill three times. After rowing about three miles to the westward of the entrance from the sea to Loch Eribol, we enter a creek, between two ledges of very high rocks, and landing, find ourselves in front of the wonder we came to see. The exterior apartment of the cavern opens under a tremendous rock, facing the creek, and occupies the full space of the ravine where we landed. From the top of the rock to the base of the cavern, as we afterwards discovered by plumb, is eighty feet, of which the height of the arch is fifty-three feet; the rest, being twenty-seven feet, is occupied by the precipitous rock under which it opens; the width is fully in proportion to this great height, being 110 feet. The depth of this exterior cavern is 200 feet, and it is apparently supported by an intermediate column of natural rock. Being open to daylight and the sea-air, the cavern is perfectly clean and dry, and the sides are incrusted with stalactites. This immense cavern is so well proportioned, that I was not aware of its extraordinary height and extent, till I saw our two friends, who had somewhat preceded us, having made the journey by land, appearing like pigmies among its recesses. Afterwards, on entering the cave, I climbed up a sloping rock at its extremity, and was much struck with the prospect, looking outward from this magnificent arched cavern upon our boat and its crew, the view being otherwise bounded by the ledge of rocks which formed each side of the creek. We now propose to investigate the farther wonders of the cave of Smowe. In the right or west side of the cave opens an interior cavern of a different aspect. The height of this second passage may be about twelve or fourteen feet, and its breadth about six or eight, neatly formed into a Gothic portal by the hand of nature. The lower part of this porch is closed by a ledge of rock, rising to the height of between five and six feet, and which I can compare to nothing but the hatch-door of a shop. Beneath this hatch a brook finds its way out, forms a black deep pool before the Gothic archway, and then escapes to the sea, and forms the creek in which we landed. It is somewhat difficult to approach this strange pass, so as to gain a view into the interior of the cavern. By clambering along a broken and dangerous cliff, you can, however, look into it; but only so far as to see a twilight space filled with dark-colored water in great agitation, and representing a subterranean lake, moved by some fearful convulsion of nature. How this pond is supplied with water you cannot see from even this point of vantage, but you are made partly sensible of the truth by a sound like the dashing of a sullen cataract within the bowels of the earth. Here the adventure has usually been abandoned, and Mr. Anderson only mentioned two travellers whose curiosity had led them farther. We were resolved, however, to see the adventures of this new cave of Montesinos to an end. Duff had already secured the use of a fisher's boat and its hands, our own long-boat being too heavy and far too valuable to be ventured upon this Cocytus. Accordingly the skiff was dragged up the brook to the rocky ledge or hatch which barred up the interior cavern, and there, by force of hands, our boat's crew and two or three fishers first raised the boat's bow upon the ledge of rock, then brought her to a level, being poised upon that narrow hatch, and lastly launched her down into the dark and deep subterranean lake within. The entrance was so narrow, and the boat so clumsy, that we, who were all this while clinging to the rock like sea-fowl, and with scarce more secure footing, were greatly alarmed for the safety of our trusty sailors. At the instant when the boat sloped inward to the cave, a Highlander threw himself into it with great boldness and dexterity, and, at the expense of some bruises, shared its precipitate fall into the waters under the earth. This dangerous exploit was to prevent the boat drifting away from us, but a cord at its stern would have been a safer and surer expedient. "When our _enfant perdu_ had recovered breath and legs, he brought the boat back to the entrance, and took us in. We now found ourselves embarked on a deep black pond of an irregular form, the rocks rising like a dome all around us, and high over our heads. The light, a sort of dubious twilight, was derived from two chasms in the roof of the vault, for that offered by the entrance was but trifling. Down one of those rents there poured from the height of eighty feet, in a sheet of foam, the brook, which, after supplying the subterranean pond with water, finds its way out beneath the ledge of rock that blocks its entrance. The other skylight, if I may so term it, looks out at the clear blue sky. It is impossible for description to explain the impression made by so strange a place, to which we had been conveyed with so much difficulty. The cave itself, the pool, the cataract, would have been each separate objects of wonder, but all united together, and affecting at once the ear, the eye, and the imagination, their effect is indescribable. The length of this pond, or loch as the people here call it, is seventy feet over, the breadth about thirty at the narrowest point, and it is of great depth. "As we resolved to proceed, we directed the boat to a natural arch on the right hand, or west side of the cataract. This archway was double, a high arch being placed above a very low one, as in a Roman aqueduct. The ledge of rock which forms this lower arch is not above two feet and a half high above the water, and under this we were to pass in the boat; so that we were fain to pile ourselves flat upon each other like a layer of herrings. By this judicious disposition we were pushed in safety beneath this low-browed rock into a region of utter darkness. For this, however, we were provided, for we had a tinder-box and lights. The view back upon the twilight lake we had crossed, its sullen eddies wheeling round and round, and its echoes resounding to the ceaseless thunder of the waterfall, seemed dismal enough, and was aggravated by temporary darkness, and in some degree by a sense of danger. The lights, however, dispelled the latter sensation, if it prevailed to any extent, and we now found ourselves in a narrow cavern, sloping somewhat upward from the water. We got out of the boat, proceeded along some slippery places upon shelves of the rock, and gained the dry land. I cannot say _dry_, excepting comparatively. We were then in an arched cave, twelve feet high in the roof, and about eight feet in breadth, which went winding into the bowels of the earth for about an hundred feet. The sides, being (like those of the whole cavern) of limestone rock, were covered with stalactites, and with small drops of water like dew, glancing like ten thousand thousand sets of birthday diamonds under the glare of our lights. In some places these stalactites branch out into broad and curious ramifications, resembling coral and the foliage of submarine plants. "When we reached the extremity of this passage, we found it declined suddenly to a horrible ugly gulf, or well, filled with dark water, and of great depth, over which the rock closed. We threw in stones, which indicated great profundity by their sound; and growing more familiar with the horrors of this den, we sounded with an oar, and found about ten feet depth at the entrance, but discovered in the same manner, that the gulf extended under the rock, deepening as it went, God knows how far. Imagination can figure few deaths more horrible than to be sucked under these rocks into some unfathomable abyss, where your corpse could never be found to give intimation of your fate. A water kelpy, or an evil spirit of any aquatic propensities, could not choose a fitter abode; and, to say the truth, I believe at our first entrance, and when all our feelings were afloat at the novelty of the scene, the unexpected plashing of a seal would have routed the whole dozen of us. The mouth of this ugly gulf was all covered with slimy alluvious substances, which led Mr. Stevenson to observe, that it could have no separate source, but must be fed from the waters of the outer lake and brook, as it lay upon the same level, and seemed to rise and fall with them, without having anything to indicate a separate current of its own. Rounding this perilous hole, or gulf, upon the aforesaid alluvious substances, which formed its shores, we reached the extremity of the cavern, which there ascends like a vent, or funnel, directly up a sloping precipice, but hideously black and slippery from wet and sea-weeds. One of our sailors, a Zetlander, climbed up a good way, and by holding up a light, we could plainly perceive that this vent closed after ascending to a considerable height; and here, therefore, closed the adventure of the cave of Smowe, for it appeared utterly impossible to proceed further in any direction whatever. There is a tradition that the first Lord Reay went through various subterranean abysses, and at length returned, after ineffectually endeavoring to penetrate to the extremity of the Smowe cave; but this must be either fabulous, or an exaggerated account of such a journey as we performed. And under the latter supposition, it is a curious instance how little the people in the neighborhood of this curiosity have cared to examine it. "In returning, we endeavored to familiarize ourselves with the objects in detail, which, viewed together, had struck us with so much wonder. The stalactites, or limy incrustations, upon the walls of the cavern, are chiefly of a dark-brown color, and in this respect, Smowe is inferior, according to Mr. Stevenson, to the celebrated cave of Macallister in the Isle of Skye. In returning, the men with the lights, and the various groups and attitudes of the party, gave a good deal of amusement. We now ventured to clamber along the side of the rock above the subterranean water, and thus gained the upper arch, and had the satisfaction to see our admirable and good-humored commodore, Hamilton, floated beneath the lower arch into the second cavern. His goodly countenance being illumined by a single candle, his recumbent posture, and the appearance of a hard-favored fellow guiding the boat, made him the very picture of Bibo, in the catch, when he wakes in Charon's boat:-- 'When Bibo thought fit from this world to retreat, As full of Champagne as an egg's full of meat, He waked in the boat, and to Charon he said, That he would be row'd back, for he was not yet dead.' "Descending from our superior station on the upper arch, we now again embarked, and spent some time in rowing about and examining this second cave. We could see our dusky entrance, into which daylight streamed faint, and at a considerable distance; and under the arch of the outer cavern stood a sailor, with an oar in his hand, looking, in the perspective, like a fairy with his wand. We at length emerged unwillingly from this extraordinary basin, and again enjoyed ourselves in the large exterior cave. Our boat was hoisted with some difficulty over the ledge, which appears the natural barrier of the interior apartments, and restored in safety to the fishers, who were properly gratified for the hazard which their skiff, as well as one of themselves, had endured. After this we resolved to ascend the rocks, and discover the opening by which the cascade was discharged from above into the second cave. Erskine and I, by some chance, took the wrong side of the rocks, and, after some scrambling, got into the face of a dangerous precipice, where Erskine, to my great alarm, turned giddy, and declared he could not go farther. I clambered up without much difficulty, and shouting to the people below, got two of them to assist the Counsellor, who was brought into, by the means which have sent many a good fellow out of, the world--I mean a rope. We easily found the brook, and traced its descent till it precipitates itself down a chasm of the rock into the subterranean apartment, where we first made its acquaintance. Divided by a natural arch of stone from the chasm down which the cascade falls, there is another rent, which serves as a skylight to the cavern, as I already noticed. Standing on a natural foot-bridge, formed by the arch which divides these two gulfs, you have a grand prospect into both. The one is deep, black, and silent, only affording at the bottom a glimpse of the dark and sullen pool which occupies the interior of the cavern. The right-hand rent, down which the stream discharges itself, seems to ring and reel with the unceasing roar of the cataract, which envelops its side in mist and foam. This part of the scene alone is worth a day's journey. After heavy rains, the torrent is discharged into this cavern with astonishing violence; and the size of the chasm being inadequate to the reception of such a volume of water, it is thrown up in spouts like the blowing of a whale. But at such times the entrance of the cavern is inaccessible. "Taking leave of this scene with regret, we rowed back to Loch Eribol. Having yet an hour to spare before dinner, we rowed across the mouth of the lake to its shore on the east side. This rises into a steep and shattered stack of mouldering calcareous rock and stone, called Whitten-head. It is pierced with several caverns, the abode of seals and cormorants. We entered one, where our guide promised to us a grand sight, and so it certainly would have been to any who had not just come from Smowe. In this last cave the sea enters through a lofty arch, and penetrates to a great depth; but the weight of the tide made it dangerous to venture very far, so we did not see the extremity of Friskin's Cavern, as it is called. We shot several cormorants in the cave, the echoes roaring like thunder at every discharge. We received, however, a proper rebuke from Hamilton, our commodore, for killing anything which was not fit for _eating_. It was in vain I assured him that the Zetlanders made excellent hare-soup out of these sea-fowl. He will listen to no subordinate authority, and rules us by the Almanach des Gourmands. Mr. Anderson showed me the spot where the Norwegian monarch, Haco, moored his fleet, after the discomfiture he received at Largs. He caused all the cattle to be driven from the hills, and houghed and slain upon a broad flat rock, for the refreshment of his dispirited army. Mr. Anderson dines with us, and very handsomely presents us with a stock of salmon, haddocks, and so forth, which we requite by a small present of wine from our sea stores. This has been a fine day; the first fair day here for these eight weeks. "_20th August, 1814._--Sail by four in the morning, and by half-past six are off Cape Wrath. All hands ashore by seven, and no time allowed to breakfast, except on beef and biscuit. On this dread Cape, so fatal to mariners, it is proposed to build a lighthouse, and Mr. Stevenson has fixed on an advantageous situation. It is a high promontory, with steep sides that go sheer down to the breakers, which lash its feet. There is no landing, except in a small creek about a mile and a half to the eastward. There the foam of the sea plays at long bowls with a huge collection of large stones, some of them a ton in weight, but which these fearful billows chuck up and down as a child tosses a ball. The walk from thence to the Cape was over rough boggy ground, but good sheep pasture. Mr. ---- Dunlop, brother to the laird of Dunlop, took from Lord Reay, some years since, a large track of sheep-land, including the territories of Cape Wrath, for about £300 a year, for the period of two-nineteen years and a life-rent. It is needless to say that the tenant has an immense profit, for the value of pasture is now understood here. Lord Reay's estate, containing 150,000 square acres, and measuring eighty miles by sixty, was, before commencement of the last leases, rented at £1200 a year. It is now worth £5000, and Mr. Anderson says he may let it this ensuing year (when the leases expire) for about £15,000. But then he must resolve to part with his people, for these rents can only be given upon the supposition that sheep are generally to be introduced on the property. In an economical, and perhaps in a political point of view, it might be best that every part of a country were dedicated to that sort of occupation for which nature has best fitted it. But to effect this reform in the present instance, Lord Reay must turn out several hundred families who have lived under him and his fathers for many generations, and the swords of whose fathers probably won the lands from which he is now expelling them. He is a good-natured man, I suppose, for Mr. A. says he is hesitating whether he shall not take a more moderate rise (£7000 or £8000), and keep his Highland tenantry. This last war (before the short peace), he levied a fine fencible corps (the Reay fencibles), and might have doubled their number. _Wealth_ is no doubt _strength_ in a country, while all is quiet and governed by law, but on any altercation or internal commotion, it ceases to be strength, and is only the means of tempting the strong to plunder the possessors. Much may be said on both sides.[82] "Cape Wrath is a striking point, both from the dignity of its own appearance, and from the mental association of its being the extreme cape of Scotland, with reference to the north-west. There is no land in the direct line between this point and America. I saw a pair of large eagles, and if I had had the rifle-gun might have had a shot, for the birds, when I first saw them, were perched on a rock within about sixty or seventy yards. They are, I suppose, little disturbed here, for they showed no great alarm. After the Commissioners and Mr. Stevenson had examined the headland, with reference to the site of a lighthouse, we strolled to our boat, and came on board between ten and eleven. Get the boat up upon deck, and set sail for the Lewis with light winds and a great swell of tide. Pass a rocky islet called Gousla. Here a fine vessel was lately wrecked; all her crew perished but one, who got upon the rocks from the boltsprit, and was afterwards brought off. In front of Cape Wrath are some angry breakers, called the _Staggs_; the rocks which occasion them are visible at low water. The country behind Cape Wrath swells in high sweeping elevations, but without any picturesque or dignified mountainous scenery. But on sailing westward a few miles, particularly after doubling a headland called the Stour of Assint, the coast assumes the true Highland character, being skirted with a succession of picturesque mountains of every variety of height and outline. These are the hills of Ross-shire--a waste and thinly peopled district at this extremity of the island. We would willingly have learned the names of the most remarkable, but they are only laid down in the charts by the cant names given them by mariners, from their appearance, as the Sugar-loaf, and so forth. Our breeze now increases, and seems steadily favorable, carrying us on with exhilarating rapidity, at the rate of eight knots an hour, with the romantic outline of the mainland under our lee-beam, and the dusky shores of the Long Island beginning to appear ahead. We remain on deck long after it is dark, watching the phosphoric effects occasioned, or made visible, by the rapid motion of the vessel, and enlightening her course with a continued succession of sparks and even flashes of broad light, mingled with the foam which she flings from her bows and head. A rizard haddock and to bed. Charming weather all day. "_21st August, 1814._--Last night went out like a lamb, but this morning came in like a lion, all roar and tumult. The wind shifted and became squally; the mingled and confused tides that run among the Hebrides got us among their eddies, and gave the cutter such concussions, that, besides reeling at every wave, she trembled from head to stern, with a sort of very uncomfortable and ominous vibration. Turned out about three, and went on deck; the prospect dreary enough, as we are beating up a narrow channel between two dark and disconsolate-looking islands, in a gale of wind and rain, guided only by the twinkling glimmer of the light on an island called Ellan Glas.--Go to bed and sleep soundly, notwithstanding the rough rocking. Great bustle about four; the light-keeper having seen our flag, comes off to be our pilot, as in duty bound. Asleep again till eight. When I went on deck, I found we had anchored in the little harbor of Scalpa, upon the coast of Harris, a place dignified by the residence of Charles Edward in his hazardous attempt to escape in 1746. An old man, lately alive here, called Donald Macleod, was his host and temporary protector, and could not, until his dying hour, mention the distresses of the adventurer without tears. From this place, Charles attempted to go to Stornoway; but the people of the Lewis had taken arms to secure him, under an idea that he was coming to plunder the country. And although his faithful attendant, Donald Macleod, induced them by fair words, to lay aside their purpose, yet they insisted upon his leaving the island. So the unfortunate Prince was obliged to return back to Scalpa. He afterwards escaped to South Uist, but was chased in the passage by Captain Fergusson's sloop of war. The harbor seems a little neat secure place of anchorage. Within a small island, there seems more shelter than where we are lying; but it is crowded with vessels, part of those whom we saw in the Long-Hope--so Mr. Wilson chose to remain outside. The ground looks hilly and barren in the extreme; but I can say little for it, as an incessant rain prevents my keeping the deck. Stevenson and Duff, accompanied by Marchie, go to examine the lighthouse on Ellan Glas. Hamilton and Erskine keep their beds, having scarce slept last night--and I bring up my journal. The day continues bad, with little intermission of rain. Our party return with little advantage from their expedition, excepting some fresh butter from the lighthouse. The harbor of Scalpa is composed of a great number of little uninhabited islets. The masts of the vessels at anchor behind them have a good effect. To bed early, to make amends for last night, with the purpose of sailing for Dunvegan in the Isle of Skye with daylight." Footnotes of the Chapter XXX. [81: Lord Teignmouth, in his recent _Sketches of the Coasts and Islands of Scotland_, says: "The publication of _The Pirate_ satisfied the natives of Orkney as to the authorship of the Waverley Novels. It was remarked by those who had accompanied Sir Walter Scott in his excursions in these Islands, that the vivid descriptions which the work contains were confined to those scenes which he visited."--Vol. i. p. 28.] [82: The whole of the immense district called _Lord Reay's country_--the habitation, as far back as history reaches, of the clan Mackay--has passed, since Sir W. Scott's journal was written, into the hands of the noble family of Sutherland.] CHAPTER XXXI DIARY CONTINUED. -- ISLE OF HARRIS. -- MONUMENTS OF THE CHIEFS OF MACLEOD. -- ISLE OF SKYE. -- DUNVEGAN CASTLE. -- LOCH CORRISKIN. --MACALLISTER'S CAVE 1814 "_22d August, 1814._--Sailed early in the morning from Scalpa Harbor, in order to cross the Minch, or Channel, for Dunvegan; but the breeze being contrary, we can only creep along the Harris shore, until we shall gain the advantage of the tide. The east coast of Harris, as we now see it, is of a character which sets human industry at utter defiance, consisting of high sterile hills, covered entirely with stones, with a very slight sprinkling of stunted heather. Within, appear still higher peaks of mountains. I have never seen anything more unpropitious, excepting the southern side of Griban, on the shores of Loch-na-Gaoil, in the Isle of Mull. We sail along this desolate coast (which exhibits no mark of human habitation) with the advantage of a pleasant day, and a brisk, though not a favorable gale. _Two o'clock_--Row ashore to see the little harbor and village of Rowdill, on the coast of Harris. There is a decent three-storied house, belonging to the laird, Mr. Macleod of the Harris,[83] where we were told two of his female relations lived. A large vessel had been stranded last year, and two or three carpenters were about repairing her, but in such a style of Highland laziness that I suppose she may float next century. The harbor is neat enough, but wants a little more cover to the eastward. The ground, on landing, does not seem altogether so desolate as from the sea. In the former point of view, we overlook all the retired glens and crevices, which, by infinite address and labor, are rendered capable of a little cultivation. But few and evil are the patches so cultivated in Harris, as far as we have seen. Above the house is situated the ancient church of Rowdill. This pile was unfortunately burned down by accident some years since, by fire taking to a quantity of wood laid in for fitting it up. It is a building in the form of a cross, with a rude tower at the eastern end, like some old English churches. Upon this tower are certain pieces of sculpture, of a kind the last which one would have expected on a building dedicated to religious purposes. Some have lately fallen in a storm, but enough remains to astonish us at the grossness of the architect and the age. "Within the church are two ancient monuments. The first, on the right hand of the pulpit, presents the effigy of a warrior completely armed in plate armor, with his hand on his two-handed broadsword. His helmet is peaked, with a gorget or upper corselet which seems to be made of mail. His figure lies flat on the monument, and is in bas-relief, of the natural size. The arch which surmounts this monument is curiously carved with the figures of the apostles. In the flat space of the wall beneath the arch, and above the tombstone, are a variety of compartments, exhibiting the arms of the Macleods, being a galley with the sails spread, a rude view of Dunvegan Castle, some saints and religious emblems, and a Latin inscription, of which our time (or skill) was inadequate to decipher the first line; but the others announced the tenant of the monument to be _Alexander, filius Willielmi MacLeod, de Dunvegan, Anno Dni_ M.CCCC.XXVIII. A much older monument (said also to represent a laird of Macleod) lies in the transept, but without any arch over it. It represents the grim figure of a Highland chief, not in feudal armor like the former, but dressed in a plaid--(or perhaps a shirt of mail)--reaching down below the knees, with a broad sort of hem upon its lower extremity. The figure wears a high-peaked open helmet, or skull-cap, with a sort of tippet of mail attached to it, which falls over the breast of the warrior, pretty much as women wear a handkerchief or short shawl. This remarkable figure is bearded most tyrannically, and has one hand on his long two-handed sword, the other on his dirk, both of which hang at a broad belt. Another weapon, probably his knife, seems to have been also attached to the baldric. His feet rest on his two dogs entwined together, and a similar emblem is said to have supported his head, but is now defaced, as indeed the whole monument bears marks of the unfortunate fire. A lion is placed at each end of the stone. Who the hero was, whom this martial monument commemorated, we could not learn. Indeed, our cicerone was but imperfect. He chanced to be a poor devil of an excise-officer who had lately made a seizure of a still upon a neighboring island, after a desperate resistance. Upon seeing our cutter, he mistook it, as has often happened to us, for an armed vessel belonging to the revenue, which the appearance and equipment of the yacht, and the number of men, make her resemble considerably. He was much disappointed when he found we had nothing to do with the tribute to Cæsar, and begged us not to undeceive the natives, who were so much irritated against him that he found it necessary to wear a loaded pair of pistols in each pocket, which he showed to our Master, Wilson, to convince him of the perilous state in which he found himself while exercising so obnoxious a duty in the midst of a fierce-tempered people, and at many miles' distance from any possible countenance or assistance. The village of Rowdill consists of Highland huts of the common construction, _i. e._, a low circular wall of large stones, without mortar, deeply sunk in the ground, surmounted by a thatched roof secured by ropes, without any chimney but a hole in the roof. There may be forty such houses in the village. We heard that the laird was procuring a schoolmaster--he of the parish being ten miles distant--and there was a neatness about the large house which seems to indicate that things are going on well. Adjacent to the churchyard were two eminences, apparently artificial. Upon one was fixed a stone, seemingly the staff of a cross; upon another the head of a cross, with a sculpture of the crucifixion. These monuments (which refer themselves to Catholic times of course) are popularly called _The Croshlets_--crosslets, or little crosses. "Get on board at five, and stand across the Sound for Skye with the ebb-tide in our favor. The sunset being delightful, we enjoy it upon deck, admiring the Sound on each side bounded by islands. That of Skye lies in the east, with some very high mountains in the centre, and a bold rocky coast in front, opening up into several lochs, or arms of the sea;--that of Loch Folliart, near the upper end of which Dunvegan is situated, is opposite to us, but our breeze has failed us, and the flood-tide will soon set in, which is likely to carry us to the northward of this object of our curiosity until next morning. To the west of us lies Harris, with its variegated ridges of mountains, now clear, distinct, and free from clouds. The sun is just setting behind the Island of Bernera, of which we see one conical hill. North Uist and Benbecula continue from Harris to the southerly line of what is called the Long Island. They are as bold and mountainous, and probably as barren as Harris--worse they cannot be. Unnumbered islets and holms, each of which has its name and its history, skirt these larger isles, and are visible in this clear evening as distinct and separate objects, lying lone and quiet upon the face of the undisturbed and scarce rippling sea. To our berths at ten, after admiring the scenery for some time. "_23d August, 1814._--Wake under the Castle of Dunvegan, in the Loch of Folliart. I had sent a card to the Laird of Macleod in the morning, who came off before we were dressed, and carried us to his castle to breakfast. A part of Dunvegan is very old; 'its birth tradition notes not.' Another large tower was built by the same Alaster Macleod whose burial-place and monument we saw yesterday at Rowdill. He had a Gaelic surname, signifying the Hump-backed. Roderick More (knighted by James VI.) erected a long edifice combining these two ancient towers: and other pieces of building, forming a square, were accomplished at different times. The whole castle occupies a precipitous mass of rock overhanging the lake, divided by two or three islands in that place, which form a snug little harbor under the walls. There is a courtyard looking out upon the sea, protected by a battery, at least a succession of embrasures, for only two guns are pointed, and these unfit for service. The ancient entrance rose up a flight of steps cut in the rock, and passed into this courtyard through a portal, but this is now demolished. You land under the castle, and walking round, find yourself in front of it. This was originally inaccessible, for a brook coming down on the one side, a chasm of the rocks on the other, and a ditch in front, made it impervious. But the late Macleod built a bridge over the stream, and the present laird is executing an entrance suitable to the character of this remarkable fortalice, by making a portal between two advanced towers and an outer court, from which he proposes to throw a drawbridge over to the high rock in front of the castle. This, if well executed, cannot fail to have a good and characteristic effect. We were most kindly and hospitably received by the chieftain, his lady, and his sister;[84] the two last are pretty and accomplished young women, a sort of persons whom we have not seen for some time; and I was quite as much pleased with renewing my acquaintance with them as with the sight of a good field of barley just cut (the first harvest we have seen), not to mention an extensive young plantation and some middle-aged trees, though all had been strangers to mine eyes since I left Leith. In the garden--or rather the orchard which was formerly the garden--is a pretty cascade, divided into two branches, and called Rorie More's Nurse, because he loved to be lulled to sleep by the sound of it. The day was rainy, or at least inconstant, so we could not walk far from the castle. Besides the assistance of the laird himself, who was most politely and easily attentive, we had that of an intelligent gentlemanlike clergyman, Mr. Suter, minister of Kilmore, to explain the _carte-de-pays_. Within the castle we saw a remarkable drinking-cup, with an inscription dated A. D. 993, which I have described particularly elsewhere.[85] I saw also a fairy flag, a pennon of silk, with something like round red rowan-berries wrought upon it. We also saw the drinking-horn of Rorie More, holding about three pints English measure--an ox's horn tipped with silver, not nearly so large as Watt of Harden's bugle. The rest of the curiosities in the castle are chiefly Indian, excepting an old dirk and the fragment of a two-handed sword. We learn that most of the Highland superstitions, even that of the second-sight, are still in force. Gruagach, a sort of tutelary divinity, often mentioned by Martin in his history of the Western Islands, has still his place and credit, but is modernized into a tall man, always a Lowlander, with a long coat and white waistcoat. Passed a very pleasant day. I should have said the fairy flag had three properties: produced in battle, it multiplied the numbers of the Macleods--spread on the nuptial bed, it insured fertility--and lastly, it brought herring into the loch.[86] "_24th August, 1814._--This morning resist with difficulty Macleod's kind and pressing entreaty to send round the ship, and go to the cave at Airds by land; but our party is too large to be accommodated without inconvenience, and divisions are always awkward. Walk and see Macleod's farm. The plantations seem to thrive admirably, although I think he hazards planting his trees greatly too tall. Macleod is a spirited and judicious improver, and if he does not hurry too fast, cannot fail to be of service to his people. He seems to think and act much like a chief, without the fanfaronade of the character. See a female school patronized by Mrs. M. There are about twenty girls, who learn reading, writing, and spinning; and being compelled to observe habits of cleanliness and neatness when at school, will probably be the means of introducing them by degrees at home. The roads around the castle are, generally speaking, very good; some are old, some made under the operation of the late act. Macleod says almost all the contractors for these last roads have failed, being tightly looked after by Government, which I confess I think very right. If Government is to give relief where a disadvantageous contract has been engaged in, it is plain it cannot be refused in similar instances, so that all calculations of expenses in such operations are at an end. The day being delightfully fair and warm, we walk up to the Church of Kilmore. In a cottage, at no great distance, we heard the women singing as they _waulked_ the cloth, by rubbing it with their hands and feet, and screaming all the while in a sort of chorus. At a distance, the sound was wild and sweet enough, but rather discordant when you approached too near the performers. In the churchyard (otherwise not remarkable) was a pyramidical monument erected to the father of the celebrated Simon, Lord Lovat, who was fostered at Dunvegan. It is now nearly ruinous, and the inscription has fallen down. Return to the castle, take our luncheon, and go aboard at three--Macleod accompanying us in proper style with his piper. We take leave of the castle, where we have been so kindly entertained, with a salute of seven guns. The chief returns ashore, with his piper playing the Macleod's Gathering, heard to advantage along the calm and placid loch, and dying as it retreated from us. "The towers of Dunvegan, with the banner which floated over them in honor of their guests, now showed to great advantage. On the right were a succession of three remarkable hills, with round flat tops, popularly called Macleod's Dining-Tables. Far behind these, in the interior of the island, arise the much higher and more romantic mountains, called Quillen, or Cuillin, a name which they have been said to owe to no less a person than Cuthullin, or Cuchullin, celebrated by Ossian. I ought, I believe, to notice, that Macleod and Mr. Suter have both heard a tacksman of Macleod's, called Grant, recite the celebrated Address to the Sun; and another person, whom they named, repeat the description of Cuchullin's car. But all agree as to the gross infidelity of Macpherson as a translator and editor. It ends in the explanation of the Adventures in the cave of Montesinos, afforded to the Knight of La Mancha, by the ape of Gines de Passamonte--some are true and some are false. There is little poetical tradition in this country, yet there should be a great deal, considering how lately the bards and genealogists existed as a distinct order. Macleod's _hereditary_ piper is called MacCrimmon, but the present holder of the office has risen above his profession. He is an old man, a lieutenant in the army, and a most capital piper, possessing about 200 tunes and pibrochs, most of which will probably die with him, as he declines to have any of his sons instructed in his art. He plays to Macleod and his lady, but only in the same room, and maintains his minstrel privilege by putting on his bonnet so soon as he begins to play. These MacCrimmons formerly kept a college in Skye for teaching the pipe-music. Macleod's present piper is of the name, but scarcely as yet a deacon of his craft. He played every day at dinner.--After losing sight of the Castle of Dunvegan, we open another branch of the loch on which it is situated, and see a small village upon its distant bank. The mountains of Quillen continue to form a background to the wild landscape with their variegated and peaked outline. We approach Dunvegan-head, a bold bluff cape, where the loch joins the ocean. The weather, hitherto so beautiful that we had dined on deck _en seigneurs_, becomes overcast and hazy, with little or no wind. Laugh and lie down. "_25th August, 1814._--Rise about eight o'clock, the yacht gliding delightfully along the coast of Skye, with a fair wind and excellent day. On the opposite side lie the islands of Canna, Rum, and Muick, popularly Muck. On opening the sound between Rum and Canna, see a steep circular rock, forming one side of the harbor, on the point of which we can discern the remains of a tower of small dimensions, built, it is said, by a King of the Isles to secure a wife of whom he was jealous. But, as we kept the Skye side of the Sound, we saw little of these islands but what our spy-glasses could show us. The coast of Skye is highly romantic, and at the same time displayed a richness of vegetation on the lower grounds, to which we have hitherto been strangers. We passed three salt-water lochs, or deep embayments, called Loch Bracadale, Loch Eynort, and Loch Britta--and about eleven o'clock open Loch Scavig. We were now under the western termination of the high mountains of Quillen, whose weather-beaten and serrated peaks we had admired at a distance from Dunvegan. They sunk here upon the sea, but with the same bold and peremptory aspect which their distant appearance indicated. They seemed to consist of precipitous sheets of naked rock, down which the torrents were leaping in a hundred lines of foam. The tops, apparently inaccessible to human foot, were rent and split into the most tremendous pinnacles; towards the base of these bare and precipitous crags, the ground, enriched by the soil washed away from them, is verdant and productive. Having passed within the small isle of Soa, we enter Loch Scavig under the shoulder of one of these grisly mountains, and observe that the opposite side of the loch is of a milder character softened down into steep green declivities. From the depth of the bay advanced a headland of high rocks which divided the lake into two recesses, from each of which a brook seemed to issue. Here Macleod had intimated we should find a fine romantic loch, but we were uncertain up what inlet we should proceed in search of it. We chose, against our better judgment, the southerly inlet, where we saw a house which might afford us information. On manning our boat and rowing ashore, we observed a hurry among the inhabitants, owing to our being as usual suspected for _king's men_, although, Heaven knows, we have nothing to do with the revenue but to spend the part of it corresponding to our equipment. We find that there is a lake adjoining to each branch of the bay, and foolishly walk a couple of miles to see that next the farmhouse, merely because the honest man seemed jealous of the honor of his own loch, though we were speedily convinced it was not that which we had been recommended to examine. It had no peculiar merit excepting from its neighborhood to a very high cliff or mountain of precipitous granite; otherwise, the sheet of water does not equal even Cauldshiels Loch. Returned and reëmbarked in our boat, for our guide shook his head at our proposal to climb over the peninsula which divides the two bays and the two lakes. In rowing round the headland, surprised at the infinite number of sea-fowl, then busy apparently with a shoal of fish; at the depth of the bay find that the discharge from this second lake forms a sort of waterfall or rather rapid; round this place were assembled hundreds of trout, and salmon struggling to get up into the fresh water; with a net we might have had twenty salmon at a haul, and a sailor, with no better hook than a crooked pin, caught a dish of trouts, during our absence. "Advancing up this huddling and riotous brook, we found ourselves in a most extraordinary scene: we were surrounded by hills of the boldest and most precipitous character, and on the margin of a lake which seemed to have sustained the constant ravages of torrents from these rude neighbors. The shores consisted of huge layers of naked granite, here and there intermixed with bogs, and heaps of gravel and sand marking the course of torrents. Vegetation there was little or none, and the mountains rose so perpendicularly from the water's edge, that Borrowdale is a jest to them. We proceeded about one mile and a half up this deep, dark, and solitary lake, which is about two miles long, half a mile broad, and, as we learned, of extreme depth. The vapor which enveloped the mountain ridges obliged us by assuming a thousand shapes, varying its veils in all sorts of forms, but sometimes clearing off altogether. It is true, it made us pay the penalty by some heavy and downright showers, from the frequency of which, a Highland boy, whom we brought from the farm, told us the lake was popularly called the Water Kettle. The proper name is Loch Corriskin, from the deep _corrie_ or hollow in the mountains of Cuillin, which affords the basin for this wonderful sheet of water. It is as exquisite as a savage scene, as Loch Katrine is as a scene of stern beauty. After having penetrated so far as distinctly to observe the termination of the lake, under an immense mountain which rises abruptly from the head of the waters, we returned, and often stopped to admire the ravages which storms must have made in these recesses when all human witnesses were driven to places of more shelter and security. Stones, or rather large massive fragments of rock of a composite kind, perfectly different from the granite barriers of the lake, lay upon the rocky beach in the strangest and most precarious situations, as if abandoned by the torrents which had borne them down from above; some lay loose and tottering upon the ledges of the natural rock, with so little security that the slightest push moved them, though their weight exceeded many tons. These detached rocks were chiefly what are called plum-pudding stones. Those which formed the shore were granite. The opposite side of the lake seemed quite pathless, as a huge mountain, one of the detached ridges of the Quillen, sinks in a profound and almost perpendicular precipice down to the water. On the left-hand side, which we traversed, rose a higher and equally inaccessible mountain, the top of which seemed to contain the crater of an exhausted volcano. I never saw a spot on which there was less appearance of vegetation of any kind; the eye rested on nothing but brown and naked crags,[87] and the rocks on which we walked by the side of the loch were as bare as the pavement of Cheapside. There are one or two spots of islets in the loch which seem to bear juniper, or some such low bushy shrub. "Returned from our extraordinary walk and went on board. During dinner, our vessel quitted Loch Scavig, and having doubled its southern cape, opened the bay or salt-water Loch of Sleapin. There went again on shore to visit the late discovered and much celebrated cavern, called Macallister's cave. It opens at the end of a deep ravine running upward from the sea, and the proprietor, Mr. Macallister of Strath Aird, finding that visitors injured it, by breaking and carrying away the stalactites with which it abounds, has secured this cavern by an eight or nine feet wall, with a door. Upon inquiring for the key, we found it was three miles up the loch at the laird's house. It was now late, and to stay until a messenger had gone and returned three miles, was not to be thought of, any more than the alternative of going up the loch and lying there all night. We therefore, with regret, resolved to scale the wall, in which attempt, by the assistance of a rope and some ancient acquaintance with orchard breaking, we easily succeeded. The first entrance to this celebrated cave is rude and unpromising, but the light of the torches with which we were provided is soon reflected from roof, floor, and walls, which seem as if they were sheeted with marble, partly smooth, partly rough with frost-work and rustic ornaments, and partly wrought into statuary. The floor forms a steep and difficult ascent, and might be fancifully compared to a sheet of water, which, while it rushed whitening and foaming down a declivity, had been suddenly arrested and consolidated by the spell of an enchanter. Upon attaining the summit of this ascent, the cave descends with equal rapidity to the brink of a pool of the most limpid water, about four or five yards broad. There opens beyond this pool a portal arch, with beautiful white chasing upon the sides, which promises a continuation of the cave. One of our sailors swam across, for there was no other mode of passing, and informed us (as indeed we partly saw by the light he carried), that the enchantment of Macallister's cave terminated with this portal, beyond which there was only a rude ordinary cavern speedily choked with stones and earth. But the pool, on the brink of which we stood, surrounded by the most fanciful mouldings in a substance resembling white marble, and distinguished by the depth and purity of its waters, might be the bathing grotto of a Naiad. I think a statuary might catch beautiful hints from the fanciful and romantic disposition of the stalactites. There is scarce a form or group that an active fancy may not trace among the grotesque ornaments which have been gradually moulded in this cavern by the dropping of the calcareous water, and its hardening into petrifactions; many of these have been destroyed by the senseless rage of appropriation among recent tourists, and the grotto has lost (I am informed), through the smoke of torches, much of that vivid silver tint which was originally one of its chief distinctions. But enough of beauty remains to compensate for all that may be lost. As the easiest mode of return, I slid down the polished sheet of marble which forms the rising ascent, and thereby injured my pantaloons in a way which my jacket is ill calculated to conceal. Our wearables, after a month's hard service, begin to be frail, and there are daily demands for repairs. Our eatables also begin to assume a real nautical appearance--no soft bread--milk a rare commodity--and those gentlemen most in favor with John Peters, the steward, who prefer salt beef to fresh. To make amends, we never hear of sea-sickness, and the good-humor and harmony of the party continue uninterrupted. When we left the cave we carried off two grandsons of Mr. Macallister's, remarkably fine boys; and Erskine, who may be called _L'ami des Enfans_, treated them most kindly, and showed them all the curiosities in the vessel, causing even the guns to be fired for their amusement, besides filling their pockets with almonds and raisins. So that, with a handsome letter of apology, I hope we may erase any evil impression Mr. Macallister may adopt from our storming the exterior defences of his cavern. After having sent them ashore in safety, stand out of the bay with little or no wind, for the opposite island of Egg." Footnotes of the Chapter XXXI. [83: The Harris has recently passed into the possession of the Earl of Dunmore.--(1839.)] [84: Miss Macleod, now Mrs. Spencer Perceval.] [85: See Note, _Lord of the Isles_, Scott's _Poetical Works_, vol. x. p. 294 [Cambridge Ed. p. 558].] [86: The following passage, from the last of Scott's _Letters on Demonology_ (written in 1830), refers to the night of this 23d of August, 1814. He mentions that twice in his life he had experienced the sensation which the Scotch call _eerie_: gives a night-piece of his early youth in the castle of Glammis, which has already been quoted (_ante_, vol. i. p. 197), and proceeds thus: "Amid such tales of ancient tradition, I had from Macleod and his lady the courteous offer of the haunted apartment of the castle, about which, as a stranger, I might be supposed interested. Accordingly I took possession of it about the witching hour. Except, perhaps, some tapestry hangings, and the extreme thickness of the walls, which argued great antiquity, nothing could have been more comfortable than the interior of the apartment; but if you looked from the windows, the view was such as to correspond with the highest tone of superstition. An autumnal blast, sometimes clear, sometimes driving mist before it, swept along the troubled billows of the lake, which it occasionally concealed, and by fits disclosed. The waves rushed in wild disorder on the shore, and covered with foam the steep pile of rocks, which, rising from the sea in forms something resembling the human figure, have obtained the name of Macleod's Maidens, and, in such a night, seemed no bad representative of the Norwegian goddesses, called Choosers of the Slain, or Riders of the Storm. There was something of the dignity of danger in the scene; for, on a platform beneath the windows, lay an ancient battery of cannon, which had sometimes been used against privateers even of late years. The distant scene was a view of that part of the Quillen mountains, which are called, from their form, Macleod's Dining-Tables. The voice of an angry cascade, termed the Nurse of Rorie Mhor, because that chief slept best in its vicinity, was heard from time to time mingling its notes with those of wind and wave. Such was the haunted room at Dunvegan; and, as such, it well deserved a less sleepy inhabitant. In the language of Dr. Johnson, who has stamped his memory on this remote place,--'I looked around me, and wondered that I was not more affected; but the mind is not at all times equally ready to be moved.' In a word, it is necessary to confess that, of all I heard or saw, the most engaging spectacle was the comfortable bed in which I hoped to make amends for some rough nights on shipboard, and where I slept accordingly without thinking of ghost or goblin, till I was called by my servant in the morning."] [87: "Rarely human eye has known A scene so stern as that dread lake, With its dark ledge of barren stone. Seems that primeval earthquake's sway Hath rent a strange and shatter'd way Through the rude bosom of the hill, And that each naked precipice, Sable ravine, and dark abyss, Tells of the outrage still. The wildest glen, but this, can show Some touch of Nature's genial glow; On high Benmore green mosses grow, And heath-bells bud in deep Glencroe, And copse on Cruchan-Ben; But here--above, around, below, On mountain or in glen, Nor tree, nor shrub, nor plant, nor flower, Nor aught of vegetative power, The weary eye may ken; For all is rocks at random thrown, Black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone, As if were here denied The summer's sun, the spring's sweet dew, That clothe with many a varied hue The bleakest mountain-side." _Lord of the Isles_, iii. 14.] CHAPTER XXXII DIARY CONTINUED. -- CAVE OF EGG. -- IONA. -- STAFFA. -- DUNSTAFFNAGE. -- DUNLUCE CASTLE. -- GIANT'S CAUSEWAY. -- ISLE OF ARRAN, ETC. --DIARY CONCLUDED 1814 "_26th August, 1814._--At seven this morning were in the Sound which divides the Isle of Rum from that of Egg. Rum is rude, barren, and mountainous; Egg, although hilly and rocky, and traversed by one remarkable ridge called Scuir-Egg, has, in point of soil, a much more promising appearance. Southward of both lies Muick, or Muck, a low and fertile island, and though the least, yet probably the most valuable of the three. Caverns being still the order of the day, we man the boat and row along the shore of Egg, in quest of that which was the memorable scene of a horrid feudal vengeance. We had rounded more than half the island, admiring the entrance of many a bold natural cave which its rocks exhibit, but without finding that which we sought, until we procured a guide. This noted cave has a very narrow entrance, through which one can hardly creep on knees and hands. It rises steep and lofty within, and runs into the bowels of the rock to the depth of 255 measured feet. The height at the entrance may be about three feet, but rises to eighteen or twenty, and the breadth may vary in the same proportion. The rude and stony bottom of this cave is strewed with the bones of men, women, and children, being the sad relics of the ancient inhabitants of the island, 200 in number, who were slain on the following occasion: The Macdonalds of the Isle of Egg, a people dependent on Clanranald, had done some injury to the Laird of Macleod. The tradition of the isle says, that it was by a personal attack on the chieftain, in which his back was broken; but that of the other isles bears that the injury was offered to two or three of the Macleods, who, landing upon Egg and using some freedom with the young women, were seized by the islanders, bound hand and foot, and turned adrift in a boat, which the winds and waves safely conducted to Skye. To avenge the offence given, Macleod sailed with such a body of men as rendered resistance hopeless. The natives, fearing his vengeance, concealed themselves in this cavern, and after strict search, the Macleods went on board their galleys, after doing what mischief they could, concluding the inhabitants had left the isle. But next morning they espied from their vessel a man upon the island, and, immediately landing again, they traced his retreat, by means of a light snow on the ground, to this cavern. Macleod then summoned the subterraneous garrison, and demanded that the individuals who had offended him should be delivered up. This was peremptorily refused. The chieftain thereupon caused his people to divert the course of a rill of water, which, falling over the mouth of the cave, would have prevented his purposed vengeance. He then kindled at the entrance of the cavern a huge fire, and maintained it until all within were destroyed by suffocation. The date of this dreadful deed must have been recent, if one can judge from the fresh appearance of those relics. I brought off, in spite of the prejudices of our sailors, a skull, which seems that of a young woman. "Before reëmbarking, we visit another cave opening to the sea, but of a character widely different, being a large open vault as high as that of a cathedral, and running back a great way into the rock at the same height; the height and width of the opening give light to the whole. Here, after 1745, when the Catholic priests were scarcely tolerated, the priest of Egg used to perform the Romish service. A huge ledge of rock, almost halfway up one side of the vault, served for altar and pulpit; and the appearance of a priest and Highland congregation in such an extraordinary place of worship might have engaged the pencil of Salvator. Most of the inhabitants of Egg are still Catholics, and laugh at their neighbors of Rum, who, having been converted by the cane of their chieftain, are called _Protestants of the yellow stick_. The Presbyterian minister and Catholic priest live upon this little island on very good terms. The people here were much irritated against the men of a revenue vessel who had seized all the stills, etc., in the neighboring Isle of Muck, with so much severity as to take even the people's bedding. We had been mistaken for some time for this obnoxious vessel. Got on board about two o'clock, and agreed to stand over for Coll, and to be ruled by the wind as to what was next to be done. Bring up my journal. "_27th August, 1814._--The wind, to which we resigned ourselves, proves exceedingly tyrannical, and blows squally the whole night, which, with the swell of the Atlantic, now unbroken by any islands to windward, proves a means of great combustion in the cabin. The dishes and glasses in the steward's cupboards become locomotive--portmanteaus and writing-desks are more active than necessary--it is scarce possible to keep one's self within bed, and impossible to stand upright if you rise. Having crept upon deck about four in the morning, I find we are beating to windward off the Isle of Tyree, with the determination on the part of Mr. Stevenson that his constituents should visit a reef of rocks called Skerry Vhor where he thought it would be essential to have a lighthouse. Loud remonstrances on the part of the Commissioners, who one and all declare they will subscribe to his opinion, whatever it may be, rather than continue this infernal buffeting. Quiet perseverance on the part of Mr. S., and great kicking, bouncing, and squabbling upon that of the Yacht, who seems to like the idea of Skerry Vhor as little as the Commissioners. At length, by dint of exertion, come in sight of this long ridge of rocks (chiefly under water), on which the tide breaks in a most tremendous style. There appear a few low broad rocks at one end of the reef, which is about a mile in length. These are never entirely under water, though the surf dashes over them. To go through all the forms, Hamilton, Duff, and I resolve to land upon these bare rocks in company with Mr. Stevenson. Pull through a very heavy swell with great difficulty, and approach a tremendous surf dashing over black pointed rocks. Our rowers, however, get the boat into a quiet creek between two rocks, where we contrive to land well wetted. I saw nothing remarkable in my way, excepting several seals, which we might have shot, but, in the doubtful circumstances of the landing, we did not care to bring guns. We took possession of the rock in name of the Commissioners, and generously bestowed our own great names on its crags and creeks. The rock was carefully measured by Mr. S. It will be a most desolate position for a lighthouse--the Bell Rock and Eddystone a joke to it, for the nearest land is the wild island of Tyree, at fourteen miles' distance. So much for the Skerry Vhor. "Came on board proud of our achievement; and, to the great delight of all parties, put the ship before the wind, and run swimmingly down for Iona. See a large square-rigged vessel, supposed an American. Reach Iona about five o'clock. The inhabitants of the Isle of Columba, understanding their interest as well as if they had been Deal boatmen, charged two guineas for pilotage, which Captain W. abridged into fifteen shillings, too much for ten minutes' work. We soon got on shore, and landed in the bay of Martyrs, beautiful for its white sandy beach. Here all dead bodies are still landed, and laid for a time upon a small rocky eminence, called the Sweyne, before they are interred. Iona, the last time I saw it, seemed to me to contain the most wretched people I had anywhere seen. But either they have got better since I was here, or my eyes, familiarized with the wretchedness of Zetland and the Harris, are less shocked with that of Iona. Certainly their houses are better than either, and the appearance of the people not worse. This little fertile isle contains upwards of 400 inhabitants, all living upon small farms, which they divide and subdivide as their families increase, so that the country is greatly over-peopled, and in some danger of a famine in case of a year of scarcity. Visit the nunnery and _Reilig Oran_, or burial-place of St. Oran, but the night coming on we return on board. "_28th August, 1814._--Carry our breakfast ashore--take that repast in the house of Mr. Maclean, the schoolmaster and cicerone of the island--and resume our investigation of the ruins of the cathedral and the cemetery. Of these monuments, more than of any other, it may be said with propriety,-- 'You never tread upon them but you set Your feet upon some ancient history.' I do not mean to attempt a description of what is so well known as the ruins of Iona. Yet I think it has been as yet inadequately performed, for the vast number of carved tombs containing the reliques of the great exceeds credibility. In general, even in the most noble churches, the number of the vulgar dead exceed in all proportion the few of eminence who are deposited under monuments. Iona is in all respects the reverse: until lately, the inhabitants of the isle did not presume to mix their vulgar dust with that of chiefs, reguli, and abbots. The number, therefore, of carved and inscribed tombstones is quite marvellous, and I can easily credit the story told by Sacheverell, who assures us that 300 inscriptions had been collected, and were lost in the troubles of the seventeenth century. Even now, many more might be deciphered than have yet been made public, but the rustic step of the peasants and of Sassenach visitants is fast destroying these faint memorials of the valiant of the Isles. A skilful antiquary remaining here a week, and having (or assuming) the power of raising the half-sunk monuments, might make a curious collection. We could only gaze and grieve; yet had the day not been Sunday, we would have brought our seamen ashore, and endeavored to have raised some of these monuments. The celebrated ridges called _Jomaire na'n Righrean_, or Graves of the Kings, can now scarce be said to exist, though their site is still pointed out. Undoubtedly, the thirst of spoil, and the frequent custom of burying treasures with the ancient princes, occasioned their early violation; nor am I any sturdy believer in their being regularly ticketed off by inscriptions into the tombs of the Kings of Scotland, of Ireland, of Norway, and so forth. If such inscriptions ever existed, I should deem them the work of some crafty bishop or abbot, for the credit of his diocese or convent. Macbeth is said to have been the last King of Scotland here buried; sixty preceded him, all doubtless as powerful in their day, but now unknown--_carent quia vate sacro_. A few weeks' labor of Shakespeare, an obscure player, has done more for the memory of Macbeth than all the gifts, wealth, and monuments of this cemetery of princes have been able to secure to the rest of its inhabitants. It also occurred to me in Iona (as it has on many similar occasions) that the traditional recollections concerning the monks themselves are wonderfully faint, contrasted with the beautiful and interesting monuments of architecture which they have left behind them. In Scotland particularly, the people have frequently traditions wonderfully vivid of the persons and achievements of ancient warriors, whose towers have long been levelled with the soil. But of the monks of Melrose, Kelso, Aberbrothock, Iona, etc., etc., etc., they can tell nothing but that such a race existed, and inhabited the stately ruins of these monasteries. The quiet, slow, and uniform life of those recluse beings glided on, it may be, like a dark and silent stream, fed from unknown resources, and vanishing from the eye without leaving any marked trace of its course. The life of the chieftain was a mountain torrent thundering over rock and precipice, which, less deep and profound in itself, leaves on the minds of the terrified spectators those deep impressions of awe and wonder which are most readily handed down to posterity. "Among the various monuments exhibited at Iona is one where a Maclean lies in the same grave with one of the Macfies or Macduffies of Colonsay, with whom he had lived in alternate friendship and enmity during their lives. 'He lies above him during death,' said one of Maclean's followers, as his chief was interred, 'as he was above him during life.' There is a very ancient monument lying among those of the Macleans, but perhaps more ancient than any of them; it has a knight riding on horseback, and behind him a minstrel playing on a harp: this is conjectured to be Reginald Macdonald of the Isles, but there seems no reason for disjoining him from his kindred who sleep in the cathedral. A supposed ancestor of the Stewarts, called Paul Purser, or Paul the Purse-bearer (treasurer to the King of Scotland), is said to lie under a stone near the Lords of the Isles. Most of the monuments engraved by Pennant are still in the same state of preservation, as are the few ancient crosses which are left. What a sight Iona must have been, when 360 crosses, of the same size and beautiful workmanship, were ranked upon the little rocky ridge of eminences which form the background to the cathedral! Part of the tower of the cathedral has fallen since I was here. It would require a better architect than I am, to say anything concerning the antiquity of these ruins, but I conceive those of the nunnery and of the _Reilig nan Oran_, or Oran's chapel, are decidedly the most ancient. Upon the cathedral and buildings attached to it, there are marks of repairs at different times, some of them of a late date being obviously designed not to enlarge the buildings, but to retrench them. We take a reluctant leave of Iona, and go on board. "The haze and dulness of the atmosphere seem to render it dubious if we can proceed, as we intended, to Staffa to-day--for mist among these islands is rather unpleasant. Erskine reads prayers on deck to all hands, and introduces a very apt allusion to our being now in sight of the first Christian Church from which Revelation was diffused over Scotland and all its islands. There is a very good form of prayer for the Lighthouse Service, composed by the Rev. Mr. Brunton.[88] A pleasure vessel lies under our lee from Belfast, with an Irish party related to Macneil of Colonsay. The haze is fast degenerating into downright rain, and that right heavy--verifying the words of Collins:-- 'And thither where beneath the _showery west_ The mighty Kings of three fair realms are laid.'[89] After dinner, the weather being somewhat cleared, sailed for Staffa, and took boat. The surf running heavy up between the island and the adjacent rock, called Booshala, we landed at a creek near the Cormorant's cave. The mist now returned so thick as to hide all view of Iona, which was our land-mark; and although Duff, Stevenson, and I had been formerly on the isle, we could not agree upon the proper road to the cave. I engaged myself, with Duff and Erskine, in a clamber of great toil and danger, and which at length brought me to the _Cannon-ball_, as they call a round granite stone moved by the sea up and down in a groove of rock, which it has worn for itself, with a noise resembling thunder. Here I gave up my research, and returned to my companions, who had not been more fortunate. As night was now falling, we resolved to go aboard and postpone the adventure of the enchanted cavern until next day. The yacht came to an anchor with the purpose of remaining off the island all night, but the hardness of the ground, and the weather becoming squally, obliged us to return to our safer mooring at Y-Columb-Kill. "_29th August, 1814._--Night squally and rainy--morning ditto--we weigh, however, and return toward Staffa, and, very happily, the day clears as we approach the isle. As we ascertained the situation of the cave, I shall only make this memorandum, that when the weather will serve, the best landing is to the lee of Booshala, a little conical islet or rock, composed of basaltic columns placed in an oblique or sloping position. In this way, you land at once on the flat causeway, formed by the heads of truncated pillars, which leads to the cave. But if the state of tide renders it impossible to land under Booshala, then take one of the adjacent creeks; in which case, keeping to the left hand along the top of the ledge of rocks which girdles in the isle, you find a dangerous and precipitous descent to the causeway aforesaid, from the table. Here we were under the necessity of towing our Commodore, Hamilton, whose gallant heart never fails him, whatever the tenderness of his toes may do. He was successfully lowered by a rope down the precipice, and proceeding along the flat terrace or causeway already mentioned, we reached the celebrated cave. I am not sure whether I was not more affected by this second, than by the first view of it. The stupendous columnar side walls--the depth and strength of the ocean with which the cavern is filled--the variety of tints formed by stalactites dropping and petrifying between the pillars, and resembling a sort of chasing of yellow or cream-colored marble filling the interstices of the roof--the corresponding variety below, where the ocean rolls over a red, and in some places a violet-colored rock, the basis of the basaltic pillars--the dreadful noise of those august billows so well corresponding with the grandeur of the scene--are all circumstances elsewhere unparalleled. We have now seen in our voyage the three grandest caverns in Scotland,--Smowe, Macallister's cave, and Staffa; so that, like the Troglodytes of yore, we may be supposed to know something of the matter. It is, however, impossible to compare scenes of natures so different, nor, were I compelled to assign a preference to any of the three, could I do it but with reference to their distinct characters, which might affect different individuals in different degrees. The characteristic of the Smowe cave may in this case be called the terrific, for the difficulties which oppose the stranger are of a nature so uncommonly wild, as, for the first time at least, convey an impression of terror--with which the scenes to which he is introduced fully correspond. On the other hand, the dazzling whiteness of the incrustations in Macallister's cave, the elegance of the entablature, the beauty of its limpid pool, and the graceful dignity of its arch, render its leading features those of severe and chastened beauty. Staffa, the third of these subterraneous wonders, may challenge sublimity as its principal characteristic. Without the savage gloom of the Smowe cave, and investigated with more apparent ease, though, perhaps, with equal real danger, the stately regularity of its columns forms a contrast to the grotesque imagery of Macallister's cave, combining at once the sentiments of grandeur and beauty. The former is, however, predominant, as it must necessarily be in any scene of the kind. "We had scarce left Staffa when the wind and rain returned. It was Erskine's object and mine to dine at Torloisk on Loch Tua, the seat of my valued friend, Mrs. Maclean Clephane, and her accomplished daughters. But in going up Loch Tua between Ulva and Mull with this purpose,-- 'So thick was the mist on the ocean green, Nor cape nor headland could be seen.'[90] It was late before we came to anchor in a small bay presented by the little island of Gometra, which may be regarded as a continuation of Ulva. We therefore dine aboard, and after dinner, Erskine and I take the boat and row across the loch under a heavy rain. We could not see the house of Torloisk, so very thick was the haze, and we were a good deal puzzled how and where to achieve a landing; at length, espying a cartroad, we resolved to trust to its guidance, as we knew we must be near the house. We therefore went ashore with our servants, _à la bonne aventure_, under a drizzling rain. This was soon a matter of little consequence, for the necessity of crossing a swollen brook wetted me considerably, and Erskine, whose foot slipped, most completely. In wet and weary plight we reached the house, after a walk of a mile, in darkness, dirt, and rain, and it is hardly necessary to say, that the pleasure of seeing our friends soon banished all recollection of our unpleasant voyage and journey. "_30th August, 1814._--The rest of our friends come ashore by invitation, and breakfast with the ladies, whose kindness would fain have delayed us for a few days, and at last condescended to ask for one day only--but even this could not be, our time wearing short. Torloisk is finely situated upon the coast of Mull, facing Staffa. It is a good comfortable house, to which Mrs. Clephane has made some additions. The grounds around have been dressed, so as to smooth their ruggedness, without destroying the irregular and wild character peculiar to the scene and country. In this, much taste has been displayed. At Torloisk, as at Dunvegan, trees grow freely and rapidly; and the extensive plantations formed by Mrs. C. serve to show that nothing but a little expense and patience on the part of the proprietors, with attention to planting in proper places at first, and in keeping up fences afterward, are a-wanting to remove the reproach of nakedness, so often thrown upon the Western Isles. With planting comes shelter, and the proper allotment and division of fields. With all this Mrs. Clephane is busied, and, I trust, successfully; I am sure, actively and usefully. Take leave of my fair friends, with regret that I cannot prolong my stay for a day or two. When we come on board, we learn that Staffa-Macdonald is just come to his house of Ulva: this is a sort of unpleasant dilemma, for we cannot now go there without some neglect towards Mrs. Maclean Clephane; and, on the other hand, from his habits with all of us, he may be justly displeased with our quitting his very threshold without asking for him. However, upon the whole matter, and being already under weigh, we judged it best to work out of the loch, and continue our purpose of rounding the northern extremity of Mull, and then running down the Sound between Mull and the mainland. We had not long pursued our voyage before we found it was like to be a very slow one. The wind fell away entirely, and after repeated tacks we could hardly clear the extreme north-western point of Mull by six o'clock--which must have afforded amusement to the ladies whose hospitable entreaties we had resisted, as we were almost all the while visible from Torloisk. A fine evening, but scarce a breath of wind. "_31st August, 1814._--Went on deck between three and four in the morning, and found the vessel almost motionless in a calm sea, scarce three miles advanced on her voyage. We had, however, rounded the north-western side of Mull, and were advancing between the north-eastern side and the rocky and wild shores of Ardnamurchan on the mainland of Scotland. Astern were visible in bright moonlight the distant mountains of Rum; yet nearer, the remarkable ridge in the Isle of Egg, called Scuir-Egg; and nearest of all, the low isle of Muick. After enjoying this prospect for some time, returned to my berth. Rise before eight--a delightful day, but very calm, and the little wind there is, decidedly against us. Creeping on slowly, we observe, upon the shore of Ardnamurchan, a large old castle called Mingary. It appears to be surrounded with a very high wall, forming a kind of polygon, in order to adapt itself to the angles of a precipice overhanging the sea, on which the castle is founded. Within or beyond the wall, and probably forming part of an inner court, I observed a steep roof and windows, probably of the seventeenth century. The whole, as seen with a spy-glass, seems ruinous. As we proceed, we open on the left hand Loch Sunart, running deep into the mainland, crossed by distant ridges of rocks, and terminating apparently among the high mountains above Strontian. On the right hand we open the Sound of Mull, and pass the Bloody Bay, which acquired that name from a desperate battle fought between an ancient Lord of the Isles and his son. The latter was assisted by the Macleans of Mull, then in the plenitude of their power, but was defeated. This was a sea-fight; galleys being employed on each side. It has bequeathed a name to a famous pibroch. "Proceeding southward, we open the beautiful bay of Tobermory, or Mary's Well. The mouth of this fine natural roadstead is closed by an isle called Colvay, having two passages, of which only one, the northerly, is passable for ships. The bay is surrounded by steep hills, covered with copsewood, through which several brooks seek the sea in a succession of beautiful cascades. The village has been established as a fishing station by the Society for British Fisheries. The houses along the quay are two and three stories high, and well built; the feuars paying to the Society sixpence per foot of their line of front. On the top of a steep bank, rising above the first town, runs another line of second-rate cottages, which pay fourpence per foot; and behind are huts, much superior to the ordinary sheds of the country, which pay only twopence per foot. The town is all built upon a regular plan, laid down by the Society. The new part is reasonably clean, and the old not unreasonably dirty. We landed at an excellent quay, which is not yet finished, and found the little place looked thriving and active. The people were getting in their patches of corn; and the shrill voices of the children attending their parents in the field, and loading the little ponies which are used in transporting the grain, formed a chorus not disagreeable to those whom it reminds of similar sounds at home. The praise of comparative cleanliness does not extend to the lanes around Tobermory, in one of which I had nearly been effectually bogged. But the richness of the round steep green knolls, clothed with copse, and glancing with cascades, and a pleasant peep at a small fresh-water loch embosomed among them--the view of the bay, surrounded and guarded by the island of Colvay--the gliding of two or three vessels in the more distant Sound--and the row of the gigantic Ardnamurchan mountains closing the scene to the north, almost justify the eulogium of Sacheverell, who, in 1688, declared the bay of Tobermory might equal any prospect in Italy. It is said that Sacheverell made some money by weighing up the treasures lost in the Florida, a vessel of the Spanish Armada, which was wrecked in the harbor. He himself affirms, that though the use of the diving-bells was at first successful, yet the attempt was afterwards disconcerted by bad weather. "Tobermory takes its name from a spring dedicated to the Virgin, which was graced by a chapel; but no vestiges remain of the chapel, and the spring rises in the middle of a swamp, whose depth and dirt discouraged the nearer approach of Protestant pilgrims. Mr. Stevenson, whose judgment is unquestionable, thinks that the village should have been built on the island called Colvay, and united to the continent by a key, or causeway, built along the southernmost channel, which is very shallow. By this means the people would have been much nearer the fishings, than retired into the depth of the bay. "About three o'clock we get on board, and a brisk and favorable breeze arises, which carries us smoothly down the Sound. We soon pass Arros, with its fragment of a castle, behind which is the house of Mr. Maxwell (an odd name for this country), chamberlain to the Duke of Argyle, which reminds me of much kindness and hospitality received from him and Mr. Stewart, the Sheriff-Substitute, when I was formerly in Mull. On the shore of Morven, on the opposite side, pass the ruins of a small fortalice, called Donagail, situated as usual on a precipice overhanging the sea. The 'woody Morven,' though the quantity of shaggy diminutive copse, which springs up where it obtains any shelter, still shows that it must once have merited the epithet, is now, as visible from the Sound of Mull, a bare country--of which the hills towards the sea have a slope much resembling those in Selkirkshire, and accordingly afford excellent pasture, and around several farmhouses well-cultivated and improved fields. I think I observe considerable improvement in husbandry, even since I was here last: but there is a difference in coming from Oban and Cape Wrath.--Open Loch Alline, a beautiful salt-water lake, with a narrow outlet to the Sound. It is surrounded by round hills, sweetly fringed with green copse below, and one of which exhibits to the spy-glass ruins of a castle. There is great promise of beauty in its interior, but we cannot see everything. The land on the southern bank of the entrance slopes away into a sort of promontory, at the extremity of which are the very imperfect ruins of the castle of Ardtornish, to which the Lords of the Isles summoned parliaments, and from whence one of them dated a treaty with the Crown of England as an independent Prince. These ruins are seen to most advantage from the south, where they are brought into a line with one high fragment towards the west predominating over the rest. The shore of the promontory on the south side becomes rocky, and when it slopes round to the west, rises into a very bold and high precipitous bank, skirting the bay on the western side, partly cliffy, partly covered with brushwood, with various streams dashing over it from a great height. Above the old castle of Ardtornish, and about where the promontory joins the land, stands the present mansion, a neat whitewashed house, with several well-enclosed and well-cultivated fields surrounding it. "The high and dignified character assumed by the shores of Morven, after leaving Ardtornish, continues till we open the Loch Linnhe, the commencement of the great chain of inland lakes running up to Fort William, and which it is proposed to unite with Inverness by means of the Caledonian Canal. The wisdom of the plan adopted in this national measure seems very dubious. Had the canal been of more moderate depth, and the burdens imposed upon passing vessels less expensive, there can be no doubt that the coasters, sloops, and barks would have carried on a great trade by means of it. But the expense and plague of lochs, etc., may prevent these humble vessels from taking this abridged voyage, while ships above twenty or thirty tons will hesitate to engage themselves in the intricacies of a long lake navigation, exposed, without room for manoeuvring, to all the sudden squalls of the mountainous country. Ahead of us, in the mouth of Loch Linnhe, lies the low and fertile isle of Lismore, formerly the appanage of the Bishops of the Isles, who, as usual, knew where to choose church patrimony. The coast of the Mull, on the right hand of the Sound, has a black, rugged, and unimproved character. Above Scallister Bay are symptoms of improvement. Moonlight has risen upon us as we pass Duart Castle, now an indistinct mass upon its projecting promontory. It was garrisoned for Government so late as 1780, but is now ruinous. We see, at about a mile's distance, the fatal shelve on which Duart exposed the daughter of Argyle, on which Miss Baillie's play of The Family Legend is founded, but now,-- 'Without either sign or sound of their shock, The waves flowed over the Lady's rock.'[91] The placid state of the sea is very different from what I have seen it, when six stout rowers could scarce give a boat headway through the conflicting tides. These fits of violence so much surprised and offended a body of the Camerons, who were bound upon some expedition to Mull, and had been accustomed to the quietness of lake-navigation, that they drew their dirks, and began to stab the waves--from which popular tale this run of tide is called _the Men of Lochaber_. The weather being delightfully moderate, we agree to hover hereabout all night, or anchor under the Mull shore, should it be necessary, in order to see Dunstaffnage to-morrow morning. The isle of Kerrera is now in sight, forming the bay of Oban. Beyond lie the varied and magnificent summits of the chain of mountains bordering Loch Linnhe, as well as those between Loch Awe and Loch Etive, over which the summit of Ben Cruachan is proudly prominent. Walk on deck, admiring this romantic prospect, until ten; then below, and turn in. "_1st September, 1814._--Rise betwixt six and seven, and having discreetly secured our breakfast, take boat for the old castle of Dunstaffnage, situated upon a promontory on the side of Loch Linnhe and near to Loch Etive. Nothing could exceed the beauty of the day and of the prospect. We coasted the low, large, and fertile isle of Lismore, where a Catholic Bishop, Chisholm, has established a seminary of young men intended for priests, and what is a better thing, a valuable lime-work. Report speaks well of the lime, but indifferently of the progress of the students. Tacking to the shore of the loch, we land at Dunstaffnage, once, it is said, the seat of the Scottish monarchy, till success over the Picts and Saxons transferred their throne to Scoone, Dunfermline, and at length to Edinburgh. The castle is still the King's (nominally), and the Duke of Argyle (nominally also) is hereditary keeper. But the real right of property is in the family of the depute-keeper, to which it was assigned as an appanage, the first possessor being a natural son of an Earl of Argyle. The shell of the castle, for little more now remains, bears marks of extreme antiquity. It is square in form, with round towers at three of the angles, and is situated upon a lofty precipice, carefully scarped on all sides to render it perpendicular. The entrance is by a staircase, which conducts you to a wooden landing-place in front of the portal-door. This landing-place could formerly be raised at pleasure, being of the nature of a drawbridge. When raised, the place was inaccessible. You pass under an ancient arch, with a low vault (being the porter's lodge) on the right hand, and flanked by loopholes, for firing upon any hostile guest who might force his passage thus far. This admits you into the inner court, which is about eighty feet square. It contains two mean-looking buildings, about sixty or seventy years old; the ancient castle having been consumed by fire in 1715. It is said that the nephew of the proprietor was the incendiary. We went into the apartments, and found they did not exceed the promise of the exterior; but they admitted us to walk upon the battlements of the old castle, which displayed a most splendid prospect. Beneath, and far projected into the loch, were seen the woods and houses of Campbell of Lochnell. A little summer-house, upon an eminence, belonging to this wooded bank, resembles an ancient monument. On the right, Loch Etive, after pouring its waters like a furious cataract over a strait called Connell Ferry, comes between the castle and a round island belonging to its demesne, and nearly insulates the situation. In front is a low rocky eminence on the opposite side of the arm, through which Loch Etive flows into Loch Linnhe. Here was situated _Beregenium_, once, it is said, a British capital city; and, as our informant told us, the largest market town in Scotland. Of this splendor are no remains but a few trenches and excavations, which the distance did not allow us to examine. The ancient masonry of Dunstaffnage is mouldering fast under time and neglect. The foundations are beginning to decay, and exhibit gaps between the rock and the wall; and the battlements are become ruinous. The inner court is encumbered with ruins. A hundred pounds or two would put this very ancient fortress in a state of preservation for ages, but I fear this is not to be expected. The stumps of large trees, which had once shaded the vicinity of the castle, gave symptoms of decay in the family of Dunstaffnage. We were told of some ancient spurs and other curiosities preserved in the castle, but they were locked up. In the vicinity of the castle is a chapel which had once been elegant, but by the building up of windows, etc., is now heavy enough. I have often observed that the means adopted in Scotland for repairing old buildings are generally as destructive of their grace and beauty, as if that had been the express object. Unfortunately most churches, particularly, have gone through both stages of destruction, having been first repaired by the building up of the beautiful shafted windows, and then the roof being suffered to fall in, they became ruins indeed, but without any touch of the picturesque farther than their massive walls and columns may afford. Near the chapel of Dunstaffnage is a remarkable echo. "Reëmbarked, and, rowing about a mile and a half or better along the shore of the lake, again landed under the ruins of the old castle of Dunolly. This fortress, which, like that of Dunstaffnage, forms a marked feature in this exquisite landscape, is situated on a bold and precipitous promontory overhanging the lake. The principal part of the ruins now remaining is a square tower or keep of the ordinary size, which had been the citadel of the castle; but fragments of other buildings, overgrown with ivy, show that Dunolly had once been a place of considerable importance. These had enclosed a courtyard, of which the keep probably formed one side, the entrance being by a very steep ascent from the land side, which had formerly been cut across by a deep moat, and defended doubtless by outworks and a drawbridge. Beneath the castle stands the modern house of Dunolly,--a decent mansion, suited to the reduced state of the MacDougalls of Lorn, who, from being Barons powerful enough to give battle to and defeat Robert Bruce, are now declined into private gentlemen of moderate fortune. "This very ancient family is descended from Somerled, Thane, or rather, under that name, _King_ of Argyle and the Hebrides. He had two sons, to one of whom he left his insular possessions--and he became founder of the dynasty of the Lords of the Isles, who maintained a stirring independence during the Middle Ages. The other was founder of the family of the MacDougalls of Lorn. One of them being married to a niece of the Red Cumming, in revenge of his slaughter at Dumfries, took a vigorous part against Robert Bruce in his struggles to maintain the independence of Scotland. At length the King, turning his whole strength towards MacDougall, encountered him at a pass near Loch Awe; but the Highlanders, being possessed of the strong ground, compelled Bruce to retreat, and again gave him battle at Dalry, near Tynedrum, where he had concentrated his forces. Here he was again defeated; and the tradition of the MacDougall family bears, that in the conflict the Lord of Lorn engaged hand to hand with Bruce, and was struck down by that monarch. As they grappled together on the ground, Bruce being uppermost, a vassal of MacDougall, called MacKeoch, relieved his master by pulling Bruce from him. In this close struggle the King left his mantle and brooch in the hands of his enemies, and the latter trophy was long preserved in the family, until it was lost in an accidental fire. Barbour tells the same story, but I think with circumstances somewhat different. When Bruce had gained the throne for which he fought so long, he displayed his resentment against the MacDougalls of Lorn, by depriving them of the greatest part of their domains, which were bestowed chiefly upon the Steward of Scotland. Sir Colin Campbell, the Knight of Loch Awe, and the Knight of Glenurchy, Sir Dugald Campbell, married daughters of the Steward, and received with them great portion of the forfeiture of MacDougall. Bruce even compelled or persuaded the Lord of the Isles to divorce his wife, who was a daughter of MacDougall, and take in marriage a relation of his own. The son of the divorced lady was not permitted to succeed to the principality of the Isles, on account of his connection with the obnoxious MacDougall. But a large appanage was allowed him upon the Mainland, where he founded the family of Glengarry. "The family of MacDougall suffered farther reduction during the great civil war, in which they adhered to the Stewarts, and in 1715 they forfeited the small estate of Dunolly, which was then all that remained of what had once been a principality. The then representative of the family fled to France, and his son (father of the present proprietor) would have been without any means of education, but for the spirit of clanship, which induced one of the name, in the humble situation of keeper of a public-house at Dumbarton, to take his young chief to reside with him, and be at the expense of his education and maintenance until his fifteenth or sixteenth year. He proved a clever and intelligent man, and made good use of the education he received. When the affair of 1745 was in agitation, it was expected by the south-western clans that Charles Edward would have landed near Oban, instead of which he disembarked at Loch-nan-augh, in Arisaig. Stuart of Appin sent information of his landing to MacDougall, who gave orders to his brother to hold the clan in readiness to rise, and went himself to consult with the chamberlain of the Earl of Breadalbane, who was also in the secret. He found this person indisposed to rise, alleging that Charles had disappointed them both in the place of landing, and the support he had promised. MacDougall then resolved to play cautious, and went to visit the Duke of Argyle, then residing at Roseneath, probably without any determined purpose as to his future proceedings. While he was waiting the Duke's leisure, he saw a horseman arrive at full gallop, and shortly after, the Duke entering the apartment where MacDougall was, with a map in his hand, requested him, after friendly salutations, to point out Loch-nan-augh on that map. MacDougall instantly saw that the secret of Charles's landing had transpired, and resolved to make a merit of being the first who should give details. The persuasions of the Duke determined him to remain quiet, and the reward was the restoration of the little estate of Dunolly, lost by his father in 1715. This gentleman lived to a very advanced stage of life, and was succeeded by Peter MacDougall, Esq., now of Dunolly. I had these particulars respecting the restoration of the estate from a near relation of the family, whom we met at Dunstaffnage. "The modern house of Dunolly is on the neck of land under the old castle, having on the one hand the lake with its islands and mountains; on the other, two romantic eminences tufted with copsewood, of which the higher is called Barmore, and is now planted. I have seldom seen a more romantic and delightful situation, to which the peculiar state of the family gave a sort of moral interest. Mrs. MacDougall, observing strangers surveying the ruins, met us on our return, and most politely insisted upon our accepting fruit and refreshments. This was a compliment meant to absolute strangers, but when our names became known to her, the good lady's entreaties that we would stay till Mr. MacDougall returned from his ride became very pressing. She was in deep mourning for the loss of an eldest son, who had fallen bravely in Spain and under Wellington, a death well becoming the descendant of so famed a race. The second son, a lieutenant in the navy, had, upon this family misfortune, obtained leave to visit his parents for the first time after many years' service, but had now returned to his ship. Mrs. M. spoke with melancholy pride of the death of her eldest son, with hope and animation of the prospects of the survivor. A third is educated for the law. Declining the hospitality offered us, Mrs. M. had the goodness to walk with us along the shore towards Oban, as far as the property of Dunolly extends, and showed us a fine spring, called _Tobar nan Gall_, or the Well of the Stranger, where our sailors supplied themselves with excellent water, which has been rather a scarce article with us, as it soon becomes past a landsman's use on board ship. On the seashore, about a quarter of a mile from the castle, is a huge fragment of the rock called _plum-pudding stone_, which art or nature has formed into a gigantic pillar. Here, it is said, Fion or Fingal tied his dog Bran--here also the celebrated Lord of the Isles tied up his dogs when he came upon a visit to the Lords of Lorn. Hence it is called _Clach nan Con_; _i. e._, the Dog's Stone. A tree grew once on the top of this bare mass of composite stone, but it was cut down by a curious damsel of the family, who was desirous to see a treasure said to be deposited beneath it. Enjoyed a pleasant walk of a mile along the beach to Oban, a town of some consequence, built in a semicircular form, around a good harbor formed by the opposite isle of Kerrera, on which Mrs. M. pointed out the place where Alexander II. died, while, at the head of a powerful armament, he meditated the reduction of the Hebrides. The field is still called Dal-ry--the King's field. "Having taken leave of Mrs. MacDougall, we soon satisfied our curiosity concerning Oban, which owed its principal trade to the industry of two brothers, Messrs. Stevenson, who dealt in ship-building. One is now dead, the other almost retired from business, and trade is dull in the place. Heard of an active and industrious man, who had set up a nursery of young trees, which ought to succeed, since at present, whoever wants plants must send to Glasgow; and how much the plants suffer during a voyage of such length, any one may conceive. Go on board after a day delightful for the serenity and clearness of the weather, as well as for the objects we had visited. I forgot to say, that through Mr. MacDougall's absence we lost an opportunity of seeing a bronze figure of one of his ancestors, called _Bacach_, or the lame, armed and mounted as for a tournament. The hero flourished in the twelfth century. After a grand council of war, we determine, as we are so near the coast of Ulster, that we will stand over and view the celebrated Giant's Causeway; and Captain Wilson receives directions accordingly. _"2d September, 1814._--Another most beautiful day. The heat, for the first time since we sailed from Leith, is somewhat incommodious; so we spread a handsome awning to save our complexions, God wot, and breakfast beneath it in style. The breeze is gentle, and quite favorable. It has conducted us from the extreme cape of Mull, called the Black Head of Mull, into the Sound of Islay. We view in passing that large and fertile island, the property of Campbell of Shawfield, who has introduced an admirable style of farming among his tenants. Still farther behind us retreats the Island of Jura, with the remarkable mountains called the Paps of Jura, which form a landmark at a great distance. They are very high, but in our eyes, so much accustomed of late to immense height, do not excite much surprise. Still farther astern is the small isle of Scarba, which, as we see it, seems to be a single hill. In the passage or sound between Scarba and the extremity of Jura, is a terrible run of tide, which, contending with the sunk rocks and islets of that foul channel, occasions the succession of whirlpools called the Gulf of Corrievreckan. Seen at this distance, we cannot judge of its terrors. The sight of Corrievreckan and of the low rocky isle of Colonsay, betwixt which and Islay we are now passing, strongly recalls to my mind poor John Leyden and his tale of the Mermaid and MacPhail of Colonsay.[92] Probably the name of the hero should have been MacFie, for to the MacDuffies (by abridgment MacFies) Colonsay of old pertained. It is said the last of these MacDuffies was executed as an oppressor by order of the Lord of the Isles, and lies buried in the adjacent small island of Oransay, where there is an old chapel with several curious monuments, which, to avoid losing this favorable breeze, we are compelled to leave unvisited. Colonsay now belongs to a gentleman named MacNeil. On the right beyond it, opens at a distance the western coast of Mull, which we already visited in coming from the northward. We see the promontory of Ross, which is terminated by Y-Columb-kill, also now visible. The shores of Loch Tua and Ulva are in the blue distance, with the little archipelago which lies around Staffa. Still farther, the hills of Rum can just be distinguished from the blue sky. We are now arrived at the extreme point of Islay, termed, from the strong tides, the _Runs of Islay_. We here only feel them as a large but soft swell of the sea, the weather being delightfully clear and serene. In the course of the evening we lose sight of the Hebrides, excepting Islay, having now attained the western side of that island. "_3d September, 1814._--In the morning early, we are off Innistulhan, an islet very like Inchkeith in size and appearance, and, like Inchkeith, displaying a lighthouse. Messrs. Hamilton, Duff, and Stevenson go ashore to visit the Irish lighthouse and compare notes. A fishing-boat comes off with four or five stout lads, without neckerchiefs or hats, and the best of whose joint garments selected would hardly equip an Edinburgh beggar. Buy from this specimen of Paddy in his native land some fine John Dories for threepence each. The mainland of Ireland adjoining to this island (being part of the county of Donegal) resembles Scotland, and, though hilly, seems well cultivated upon the whole. A brisk breeze directly against us. We beat to windward by assistance of a strong tide-stream, in order to weather the head of Innishowen, which covers the entrance of Lough Foyle, with the purpose of running up the loch to see Londonderry, so celebrated for its siege in 1689. But short tacks and long tacks were in vain, and at dinner-time, having lost our tide, we find ourselves at all disadvantage both against wind and sea. Much combustion at our meal, and the manoeuvres by which we attempted to eat and drink remind me of the enchanted drinking-cup in the old ballad,-- 'Some shed it on their shoulder, Some shed it on their thigh; And he that did not hit his mouth Was sure to hit his eye.'[93] In the evening, backgammon and cards are in great request. We have had our guns shotted all this day for fear of the Yankees--a privateer having been seen off Tyree Islands, and taken some vessels--as is reported.--About nine o'clock weather the Innishowen head, and enter the Lough, and fire a gun as a signal for a pilot. The people here are great smugglers, and at the report of the gun, we see several lights on shore disappear.--About the middle of the day, too, our appearance (much resembling a revenue cutter) occasioned a smoke being made in the midst of a very rugged cliff on the shore--a signal probably to any of the smugglers' craft that might be at sea. Come to anchor in eight fathom water, expecting our pilot. _"4th September, 1814._--Waked in the morning with good hope of hearing service in Derry Cathedral, as we had felt ourselves under weigh since daylight; but these expectations vanished when, going on deck, we found ourselves only halfway up Lough Foyle, and at least ten miles from Derry. Very little wind, and that against us; and the navigation both shoally and intricate. Called a council of war; and after considering the difficulty of getting up to Derry, and the chance of being wind-bound when we do get there, we resolve to renounce our intended visit to that town. We had hardly put the ship about, when the Irish Æolus shifted his trumpet, and opposed our exit, as he had formerly been unfavorable to our progress up the lake. At length, we are compelled to betake ourselves to towing, the wind fading into an absolute calm. This gives us time enough to admire the northern, or Donegal, side of Lough Foyle--the other being hidden from us by haze and distance. Nothing can be more favorable than this specimen of Ireland.--A beautiful variety of cultivated slopes, intermixed with banks of wood; rocks skirted with a distant ridge of heathy hills, watered by various brooks; the glens or banks being, in general, planted or covered with copse; and finally, studded by a succession of villas and gentlemen's seats, good farmhouses, and neat white-washed cabins. Some of the last are happily situated upon the verge of the sea, with banks of copse or a rock or two rising behind them, and the white sand in front. The land, in general, seems well cultivated and enclosed--but in some places the enclosures seem too small, and the ridges too crooked, for proper farming. We pass two gentlemen's seats, called White Castle and Red Castle; the last a large good-looking mansion, with trees, and a pretty vale sloping upwards from the sea. As we approach the termination of the Lough, the ground becomes more rocky and barren, and the cultivation interrupted by impracticable patches, which have been necessarily abandoned. Come in view of Green Castle, a large ruinous castle, said to have belonged to the MacWilliams. The remains are romantically situated upon a green bank sloping down to the sea, and are partly covered with ivy. From their extent, the place must have been a chieftain's residence of the very first consequence. Part of the ruins appear to be founded upon a high red rock, which the eye at first blends with the masonry. To the east of the ruins, upon a cliff overhanging the sea, are a modern fortification and barrack-yard, and beneath, a large battery for protection of the shipping which may enter the Lough; the guns are not yet mounted. The Custom-house boat boards us and confirms the account that American cruisers are upon the coast. Drift out of the Lough, and leave behind us this fine country, all of which belongs in property to Lord Donegal; other possessors only having long leases, at sixty years, or so forth. Red Castle, however, before distinguished as a very good-looking house, is upon a perpetual lease. We discharge our pilot--the gentlemen go ashore with him in the boat, in order to put foot on Irish land. I shall defer that pleasure till I can promise myself something to see. When our gentlemen return, we read prayers on deck. After dinner go ashore at the small fishing-village of Port Rush, pleasantly situated upon a peninsula, which forms a little harbor. Here we are received by Dr. Richardson, the inventor of the fiorin-grass (or of some of its excellencies). He cultivates this celebrated vegetable on a very small scale, his whole farm not exceeding four acres. Here I learn, with inexpressible surprise and distress, the death of one of the most valued of the few friends whom these memoranda might interest.[94] She was, indeed, a rare example of the soundest good sense, and the most exquisite purity of moral feeling, united with the utmost grace and elegance of personal beauty, and with manners becoming the most dignified rank in British society. There was a feminine softness in all her deportment, which won universal love, as her firmness of mind and correctness of principle commanded veneration. To her family her loss is inexpressibly great. I know not whether it was the purity of her mind, or the ethereal cast of her features and form, but I could never associate in my mind her idea and that of mortality; so that the shock is the more heavy, as being totally unexpected. God grant comfort to the afflicted survivor and his family! "_5th September, 1814._--Wake, or rather rise at six, for I have waked the whole night, or fallen into broken sleeps only to be hag-ridden by the nightmare. Go ashore with a heavy heart, to see sights which I had much rather leave alone. Land under Dunluce, a ruined castle built by the MacGilligans, or MacQuillens, but afterwards taken from them by a Macdonnell, ancestor of the Earls of Antrim, and destroyed by Sir John Perrot, Lord-Lieutenant in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This Macdonnell came from the Hebrides at the head of a Scottish colony. The site of the castle much resembles Dunnottar, but it is on a smaller scale. The ruins occupy perhaps more than an acre of ground, being the level top of a high rock advanced into the sea, by which it is surrounded on three sides, and divided from the mainland by a deep chasm. The access was by a narrow bridge, of which there now remains but a single rib, or ledge, forming a doubtful and a precarious access to the ruined castle. On the outer side of the bridge are large remains of outworks, probably for securing cattle, and for domestic offices--and the vestiges of a chapel. Beyond the bridge are an outer and inner gateway, with their defences. The large gateway forms one angle of the square enclosure of the fortress, and at the other landward angle is built a large round tower. There are vestiges of similar towers occupying the angles of the precipice overhanging the sea. These towers were connected by a curtain, on which artillery seems to have been mounted. Within this circuit are the ruins of an establishment of feudal grandeur on the large scale. The great hall, forming, it would seem, one side of the inner court, is sixty paces long, lighted by windows which appear to have been shafted with stone, but are now ruined. Adjacent are the great kitchen and ovens, with a variety of other buildings, but no square tower, or keep. The most remarkable part of Dunluce, however, is that the whole mass of plum-pudding rock on which the fort is built is completely perforated by a cave sloping downwards from the inside of the moat or dry-ditch beneath the bridge, and opening to the sea on the other side. It might serve the purpose of a small harbor, especially if they had, as is believed, a descent to the cave from within the castle. It is difficult to conceive the use of the aperture to the land, unless it was in some way enclosed and defended. Above the ruinous castle is a neat farmhouse. Mrs. More, the good-wife, a Scoto-Hibernian, received us with kindness and hospitality which did honor to the nation of her birth, as well as of her origin, in a house whose cleanliness and neatness might have rivalled England. Her churn was put into immediate motion on our behalf, and we were loaded with all manner of courtesy, as well as good things. We heard here of an armed schooner having been seen off the coast yesterday, which fired on a boat that went off to board her, and would seem therefore to be a privateer, or armed smuggler. "Return on board for breakfast, and then again take boat for the Giant's Causeway--having first shotted the guns, and agreed on a signal, in case this alarming stranger should again make his appearance. Visit two caves, both worth seeing, but not equal to those we have seen: one, called Port Coon, opens in a small cove, or bay--the outer reach opens into an inner cave, and that again into the sea. The other, called Down Kerry, is a sea-cave, like that on the eastern side of Loch Eribol--a high arch up which the sea rolls:--the weather being quiet, we sailed in very nearly to the upper end. We then rowed on to the celebrated Causeway, a platform composed of basaltic pillars, projecting into the sea like the pier of a harbor. As I was tired, and had a violent headache, I did not land, but could easily see that the regularity of the columns was the same as at Staffa; but that island contains a much more extensive and curious specimen of this curious phenomenon. "Row along the shores of this celebrated point, which are extremely striking as well as curious. They open into a succession of little bays, each of which has precipitous banks graced with long ranges of the basaltic pillars, sometimes placed above each other, and divided by masses of interweaving strata, or by green sloping banks of earth of extreme steepness. These remarkable ranges of columns are in some places chequered by horizontal strata of a red rock or earth, of the appearance of ochre; so that the green of the grassy banks, the dark-gray or black appearance of the columns, with those red seams and other varieties of the interposed strata, have most uncommon and striking effects. The outline of these cliffs is as singular as their coloring. In several places the earth has wasted away from single columns, and left them standing insulated and erect, like the ruined colonnade of an ancient temple, upon the verge of the precipice. In other places, the disposition of the basaltic ranges presents singular appearances, to which the guides give names agreeable to the images which they are supposed to represent. Each of the little bays or inlets has also its appropriate name. One is called the Spanish Bay, from one of the Spanish Armada having been wrecked there. Thus our voyage has repeatedly traced the memorable remnants of that celebrated squadron. The general name of the cape adjacent to the Causeway is Bengore Head. To those who have seen Staffa, the peculiar appearance of the Causeway itself will lose much of its effect; but the grandeur of the neighboring scenery will still maintain the reputation of Bengore Head. The people ascribe all these wonders to Fin MacCoul, whom they couple with a Scottish giant called Ben-an something or other. The traveller is plied by guides, who make their profit by selling pieces of crystal, agate, or chalcedony, found in the interstices of the rocks. Our party brought off some curious joints of the columns, and, had I been quite as I am wont to be, I would have selected four to be capitals of a rustic porch at Abbotsford. But, alas! alas! I am much out of love with vanity at this moment. From what we hear at the Causeway, we have every reason to think that the pretended privateer has been a gentleman's pleasure-vessel.--Continue our voyage southward, and pass between the Main of Ireland and the Isle of Rachrin, a rude heathy-looking island, once a place of refuge to Robert Bruce. This is said, in ancient times, to have been the abode of banditti, who plundered the neighboring coast. At present it is under a long lease to a Mr. Gage, who is said to maintain excellent order among the islanders. Those of bad character he expels to Ireland, and hence it is a phrase among the people of Rachrin, when they wish ill to any one, '_May Ireland be his hinder end_.' On the Main we see the village of Ballintry, and a number of people collected, the remains of an Irish fair. Close by is a small island, called Sheep Island. We now take leave of the Irish coast, having heard nothing of its popular complaints, excepting that the good lady at Dunluce made a heavy moan against the tithes, which had compelled her husband to throw his whole farm into pasture. Stand over toward Scotland, and see the Mull of Cantyre light. "_6th September, 1814._--Under the lighthouse at the Mull of Cantyre; situated on a desolate spot among rocks, like a Chinese pagoda in Indian drawings. Duff[95] and Stevenson go ashore at six. Hamilton follows, but is unable to land, the sea having got up. The boat brings back letters, and I have the great comfort to learn all are well at Abbotsford. About eight the tide begins to run very strong, and the wind rising at the same time, makes us somewhat apprehensive for our boat, which had returned to attend D. and S. We observe them set off along the hills on foot, to walk, as we understand, to a bay called Carskey, five or six miles off, but the nearest spot at which they can hope to reëmbark in this state of the weather. It now becomes very squally, and one of our jibsails splits. We are rather awkwardly divided into three parties--the pedestrians on shore, with whom we now observe Captain Wilson, mounted upon a pony--the boat with four sailors, which is stealing along in-shore, unable to row, and scarce venturing to carry any sail--and we in the yacht, tossing about most exceedingly. At length we reach Carskey, a quiet-looking bay, where the boat gets into shore, and fetches off our gentlemen.--After this the coast of Cantyre seems cultivated and arable, but bleak and unenclosed, like many other parts of Scotland. We then learn that we have been repeatedly in the route of two American privateers, who have made many captures in the Irish Channel, particularly at Innistruhul, at the back of Islay, and on the Lewis. They are the Peacock, of twenty-two guns, and 165 men, and a schooner of eighteen guns, called the Prince of Neuchatel. These news, added to the increasing inclemency of the weather, induce us to defer a projected visit to the coast of Galloway; and indeed it is time one of us was home on many accounts. We therefore resolve, after visiting the lighthouse at Pladda, to proceed for Greenock. About four drop anchor off Pladda, a small islet lying on the south side of Arran. Go ashore and visit the establishment. When we return on board, the wind being unfavorable for the mouth of Clyde, we resolve to weigh anchor and go into Lamlash Bay. "_7th September, 1814._--We had ample room to repent last night's resolution, for the wind, with its usual caprice, changed so soon as we had weighed anchor, blew very hard, and almost directly against us, so that we were beating up against it by short tacks, which made a most disagreeable night; as, between the noise of the wind and the sea, the clattering of the ropes and sails above, and of the movables below, and the eternal '_ready about_,' which was repeated every ten minutes when the vessel was about to tack, with the lurch and clamor which succeeds, sleep was much out of the question. We are not now in the least sick, but want of sleep is uncomfortable, and I have no agreeable reflections to amuse waking hours, excepting the hope of again rejoining my family. About six o'clock went on deck to see Lamlash Bay, which we have at length reached after a hard struggle. The morning is fine and the wind abated, so that the coast of Arran looks extremely well. It is indented with two deep bays. That called Lamlash, being covered by an island with an entrance at either end, makes a secure roadstead. The other bay, which takes its name from Brodick Castle, a seat of the Duke of Hamilton, is open. The situation of the castle is very fine, among extensive plantations, laid out with perhaps too much formality, but pleasant to the eye, as the first tract of plantation we have seen for a long time. One stripe, however, with singular want of taste, runs straight up a finely rounded hill, and turning by an obtuse angle, cuts down the opposite side with equal lack of remorse. This vile habit of opposing the line of the plantation to the natural line and bearing of the ground is one of the greatest practical errors of early planters. As to the rest, the fields about Brodick, and the lowland of Arran in general, seem rich, well enclosed, and in good cultivation. Behind and around rise an amphitheatre of mountains, the principal a long ridge with fine swelling serrated tops, called Goat-Fell. Our wind now altogether dies away, while we want its assistance to get to the mouth of the Firth of Clyde, now opening between the extremity of the large and fertile Isle of Bute, and the lesser islands called the Cumbrays. The fertile coast of Ayrshire trends away to the south-westward, displaying many villages, and much appearance of beauty and cultivation. On the north-eastward arises the bold and magnificent screen formed by the mountains of Argyleshire and Dumbartonshire, rising above each other in gigantic succession. About noon a favorable breath of wind enables us to enter the mouth of the Clyde, passing between the larger Cumbray and the extremity of Bute. As we advance beyond the Cumbray, and open the opposite coast, see Largs, renowned for the final defeat of the Norwegian invaders by Alexander III. [A. D. 1263]. The ground of battle was a sloping, but rather gentle, ascent from the sea, above the modern Kirk of Largs. Had Haco gained the victory, it would have opened all the south-west of Scotland to his arms. On Bute, a fine and well-improved island, we open the Marquis of Bute's house of Mount Stewart, neither apparently large nor elegant in architecture, but beautifully situated among well-grown trees, with an open and straight avenue to the seashore. The whole isle is prettily varied by the rotation of crops: and the rocky ridges of Goat-Fell and other mountains in Arran are now seen behind Bute as a background. These ridges resemble much the romantic and savage outline of the mountains of Cullin, in Skye. On the southward of Largs is Kelburn, the seat of Lord Glasgow, with extensive plantations; on the northward Skelmorlie, an ancient seat of the Montgomeries. The Firth, closed to appearance by Bute and the Cumbrays, now resembles a long irregular inland lake, bordered on the one side by the low and rich coast of Renfrewshire, studded with villages and seats, and on the other by the Highland mountains. Our breeze dies totally away, and leaves us to admire this prospect till sunset. I learn incidentally, that, in the opinion of honest Captain Wilson, I have been myself the cause of all this contradictory weather. 'It is all,' says the Captain to Stevenson, 'owing to the cave at the Isle of Egg,'--from which I had abstracted a skull. Under this odium I may labor yet longer, for assuredly the weather has been doggedly unfavorable. Night quiet and serene, but dead calm--a fine contrast to the pitching, rolling, and walloping of last night. "_8th September._--Waked very much in the same situation--a dead calm, but the weather very serene. With much difficulty, and by the assistance of the tide, we advanced up the Firth, and, passing the village of Gourock, at length reached Greenock. Took an early dinner, and embarked in the steamboat for Glasgow. We took leave of our little yacht under the repeated cheers of the sailors, who had been much pleased with their erratic mode of travelling about, so different from the tedium of a regular voyage. After we reached Glasgow--a journey which we performed at the rate of about eight miles an hour, and with a smoothness of motion which probably resembles flying--we supped together and prepared to separate.--Erskine and I go to-morrow to the Advocate's at Killermont, and thence to Edinburgh. So closes my journal. But I must not omit to say, that among five or six persons, some of whom were doubtless different in tastes and pursuits, there did not occur, during the close communication of more than six weeks aboard a small vessel, the slightest difference of opinion. Each seemed anxious to submit his own wishes to those of his friends. The consequence was, that by judicious arrangement all were gratified in their turn, and frequently he who made some sacrifices to the views of his companions was rewarded by some unexpected gratification calculated particularly for his own amusement. Thus ends my little excursion, in which, bating one circumstance, which must have made me miserable for the time wherever I had learned it, I have enjoyed as much pleasure as in any six weeks of my life. We had constant exertion, a succession of wild and uncommon scenery, good-humor on board, and objects of animation and interest when we went ashore-- 'Sed fugit interea--fugit irrevocabile tempus.'" Footnotes of the Chapter XXXII. [88: The Rev. Alexander Brunton, D. D., now (1836) Professor of Oriental Languages in the University of Edinburgh.] [89: _Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands._] [90: "So thick a haze o'erspreads the sky, They cannot see the Sun on high." Southey's _Inchcape Rock_.] [91: Southey's _Inchcape Rock_.] [92: See _Minstrelsy of the Border_, vol. iv. pp. 285-306 (Edin. Ed.).] [93: _The Boy and the Mantle_--Percy's _Reliques_, vol. iii. p. 10.] [94: Harriet, Duchess of Buccleuch, died August 24, 1814.] [95: Adam Duff, Esq., afterwards and for many years Sheriff of the county of Edinburgh, died on 17th May, 1840.--(1845.)] CHAPTER XXXIII LETTER IN VERSE FROM ZETLAND AND ORKNEY. -- DEATH OF THE DUCHESS OF BUCCLEUCH. -- CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE DUKE. -- ALTRIVE LAKE. --NEGOTIATION CONCERNING THE LORD OF THE ISLES COMPLETED. -- SUCCESS OF WAVERLEY. -- CONTEMPORANEOUS CRITICISMS ON THE NOVEL. -- LETTERS TO SCOTT FROM MR. MORRITT, MR. LEWIS, AND MISS MACLEAN CLEPHANE. --LETTER FROM JAMES BALLANTYNE TO MISS EDGEWORTH 1814 I question if any man ever drew his own character more fully or more pleasingly than Scott has done in the preceding diary of a six weeks' pleasure voyage. We have before us, according to the scene and occasion, the poet, the antiquary, the magistrate, the planter, and the agriculturist; but everywhere the warm yet sagacious philanthropist--everywhere the courtesy, based on the unselfishness, of the thorough-bred gentleman;--and surely never was the tenderness of a manly heart portrayed more touchingly than in the closing pages. I ought to mention that Erskine received the news of the Duchess of Buccleuch's death on the day when the party landed at Dunstaffnage; but, knowing how it would affect Scott, took means to prevent its reaching him until the expedition should be concluded. He heard the event casually mentioned by a stranger during dinner at Port Rush, and was for the moment quite overpowered. Of the letters which Scott wrote to his friends during those happy six weeks, I have recovered only one, and it is, thanks to the leisure of the yacht, in verse. The strong and easy heroics of the first section prove, I think, that Mr. Canning did not err when he told him that if he chose he might emulate even Dryden's command that noble measure; and the dancing anapæsts of the second show that he could with equal facility have rivalled the gay graces of Cotton, Anstey, or Moore. This epistle did not reach the Duke of Buccleuch till his lovely Duchess was no more; and I shall annex to it some communications relating to that affliction, which afford a contrast, not less interesting than melancholy, to the light-hearted glee reflected in the rhymes from the region of Magnus Troil. TO HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH, ETC., ETC., ETC. LIGHTHOUSE YACHT IN THE SOUND OF LERWICK, ZETLAND, 8th August, 1814. Health to the chieftain from his clansman true! From her true Minstrel, health to fair Buccleuch! Health from the isles, where dewy Morning weaves Her chaplet with the tints that Twilight leaves; Where late the sun scarce vanished from the sight, And his bright pathway graced the short-lived night, Though darker now as autumn's shades extend, The north winds whistle and the mists ascend!-- Health from the land where eddying whirlwinds toss The storm-rocked _cradle_ of the Cape of Noss; On outstretched cords the giddy engine slides, His own strong arm the bold adventurer guides, And he that lists such desperate feat to try, May, like the sea-mew, skim 'twixt surf and sky, And feel the mid-air gales around him blow, And see the billows rage five hundred feet below. Here by each stormy peak and desert shore, The hardy islesman tugs the daring oar, Practised alike his venturous course to keep, Through the white breakers or the pathless deep, By ceaseless peril and by toil to gain A wretched pittance from the niggard main. And when the worn-out drudge old ocean leaves, What comfort greets him, and what hut receives? Lady! the worst your presence ere has cheered (When want and sorrow fled as you appeared) Were to a Zetlander as the high dome Of proud Drumlanrig to my humble home. Here rise no groves, and here no gardens blow, Here even the hardy heath scarce dares to grow; But rocks on rocks, in mist and storm arrayed, Stretch far to sea their giant colonnade, With many a cavern seam'd, the dreary haunt Of the dun seal and swarthy cormorant. Wild round their rifted brows with frequent cry, As of lament, the gulls and gannets fly, And from their sable base, with sullen sound, In sheets of whitening foam the waves rebound. Yet even these coasts a touch of envy gain From those whose land has known oppression's chain; For here the industrious Dutchman comes once more To moor his fishing craft by Bressay's shore; Greets every former mate and brother tar, Marvels how Lerwick 'scaped the rage of war, Tells many a tale of Gallic outrage done, And ends by blessing God and Wellington. Here too the Greenland tar, a fiercer guest, Claims a brief hour of riot, not of rest; Proves each wild frolic that in wine has birth, And wakes the land with brawls and boisterous mirth. A sadder sight on yon poor vessel's prow The captive Norse-man sits in silent woe, And eyes the flags of Britain as they flow. Hard fate of war, which bade her terrors sway His destined course, and seize so mean a prey; A bark with planks so warp'd and seams so riven, She scarce might face the gentlest airs of heaven: Pensive he sits, and questions oft if none Can list his speech and understand his moan; In vain--no islesman now can use the tongue Of the bold Norse, from whom their lineage sprung. Not thus of old the Norse-men hither came, Won by the love of danger or of fame; On every storm-beat cape a shapeless tower Tells of their wars, their conquests, and their power; For ne'er for Grecia's vales, nor Latian land, Was fiercer strife than for this barren strand; A race severe--the isle and ocean lords, Loved for its own delight the strife of swords; With scornful laugh the mortal pang defied, And blest their gods that they in battle died. Such were the sires of Zetland's simple race, And still the eye may faint resemblance trace In the blue eye, tall form, proportion fair, The limbs athletic, and the long light hair-- (Such was the mien, as Scald and Minstrel sings, Of fair-haired Harold, first of Norway's Kings); But their high deeds to scale these crags confined, Their only warfare is with waves and wind. Why should I talk of Mousa's castled coast? Why of the horrors of the Sumburgh Rost? May not these bald disjointed lines suffice, Penn'd while my comrades whirl the rattling dice-- While down the cabin skylight lessening shine The rays, and eve is chased with mirth and wine? Imagined, while down Mousa's desert bay Our well-trimm'd vessel urged her nimble way, While to the freshening breeze she leaned her side, And bade her bowsprit kiss the foamy tide? Such are the lays that Zetland Isles supply; Drenched with the drizzly spray and dropping sky, Weary and wet, a sea-sick minstrel I.----W. SCOTT. POSTSCRIPTUM. KIRKWALL, ORKNEY, August 13, 1814. In respect that your Grace has commissioned a Kraken, You will please be informed that they seldom are taken; It is January two years, the Zetland folks say, Since they saw the last Kraken in Scalloway bay; He lay in the offing a fortnight or more, But the devil a Zetlander put from the shore, Though bold in the seas of the North to assail The morse and the sea-horse, the grampus and whale. If your Grace thinks I'm writing the thing that is not, You may ask at a namesake of ours, Mr. Scott-- (He's not from our clan, though his merits deserve it, But springs, I'm informed, from the Scotts of Scotstarvet;)[96] He questioned the folks who beheld it with eyes, But they differed confoundedly as to its size. For instance, the modest and diffident swore That it seemed like the keel of a ship, and no more-- Those of eyesight more clear, or of fancy more high, Said it rose like an island 'twixt ocean and sky-- But all of the hulk had a steady opinion That 't was sure a _live_ subject of Neptune's dominion-- And I think, my Lord Duke, your Grace hardly would wish, To cumber your house, such a kettle of fish. Had your order related to nightcaps or hose, Or mittens of worsted, there's plenty of those. Or would you be pleased but to fancy a whale? And direct me to send it--by sea or by mail? The season, I'm told, is nigh over, but still I could get you one fit for the lake at Bowhill. Indeed, as to whales, there's no need to be thrifty, Since one day last fortnight two hundred and fifty, Pursued by seven Orkneymen's boats and no more, Betwixt Truffness and Luffness were drawn on the shore! You'll ask if I saw this same wonderful sight; I own that I did not, but easily might-- For this mighty shoal of leviathans lay On our lee-beam a mile, in the loop of the bay, And the islesmen of Sanda were all at the spoil, And _flinching_ (so term it) the blubber to boil; (Ye spirits of lavender, drown the reflection That awakes at the thoughts of this odorous dissection.) To see this huge marvel full fain would we go, But Wilson, the wind, and the current said no. We have now got to Kirkwall, and needs I must stare When I think that in verse I have once called it _fair_; 'Tis a base little borough, both dirty and mean-- There is nothing to hear, and there's nought to be seen, Save a church, where, of old times, a prelate harangued, And a palace that's built by an earl that was hanged. But farewell to Kirkwall--aboard we are going, The anchor's a-peak and the breezes are blowing; Our commodore calls all his band to their places, And 't is time to release you--good-night to your Graces! TO HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH, ETC. GLASGOW, September 8, 1814. MY DEAR LORD DUKE,--I take the earliest opportunity, after landing, to discharge a task so distressing to me, that I find reluctance and fear even in making the attempt, and for the first time address so kind and generous a friend without either comfort and confidence in myself, or the power of offering a single word of consolation to his affliction. I learned the late calamitous news (which indeed no preparation could have greatly mitigated) quite unexpectedly, when upon the Irish coast; nor could the shock of an earthquake have affected me in the same proportion. Since that time I have been detained at sea, thinking of nothing but what has happened, and of the painful duty I am now to perform. If the deepest interest in this inexpressible loss could qualify me for expressing myself upon a subject so distressing, I know few whose attachment and respect for the lamented object of our sorrows can or ought to exceed my own, for never was more attractive kindness and condescension displayed by one of her sphere, or returned with deeper and more heartfelt gratitude by one in my own. But selfish regret and sorrow, while they claim a painful and unavailing ascendance, cannot drown the recollection of the virtues lost to the world, just when their scene of acting had opened wider, and to her family when the prospect of their speedy entry upon life rendered her precept and example peculiarly important. And such an example! for of all whom I have ever seen, in whatever rank, she possessed most the power of rendering virtue lovely--combining purity of feeling and soundness of judgment with a sweetness and affability which won the affections of all who had the happiness of approaching her. And this is the partner of whom it has been God's pleasure to deprive your Grace, and the friend for whom I now sorrow, and shall sorrow while I can remember anything. The recollection of her excellencies can but add bitterness, at least in the first pangs of calamity, yet it is impossible to forbear the topic; it runs to my pen as to my thoughts, till I almost call in question, for an instant, the Eternal Wisdom which has so early summoned her from this wretched world, where pain and grief and sorrow is our portion, to join those to whom her virtues, while upon earth, gave her so strong a resemblance. Would to God I could say, _be comforted_; but I feel every common topic of consolation must be, for the time at least, even an irritation to affliction. Grieve, then, my dear Lord, or I should say my dear and much honored friend,--for sorrow for the time levels the highest distinctions of rank; but do not grieve as those who have no hope. I know the last earthly thoughts of the departed sharer of your joys and sorrows must have been for your Grace and the dear pledges she has left to your care. Do not, for their sake, suffer grief to take that exclusive possession which disclaims care for the living, and is not only useless to the dead, but is what their wishes would have most earnestly deprecated. To time, and to God, whose are both time and eternity, belongs the office of future consolation; it is enough to require from the sufferer under such a dispensation to bear his burthen of sorrow with fortitude, and to resist those feelings which prompt us to believe that that which is galling and grievous is therefore altogether beyond our strength to support. Most bitterly do I regret some levity which I fear must have reached you when your distress was most poignant, and most dearly have I paid for venturing to anticipate the time which is not ours, since I received these deplorable news at the very moment when I was collecting some trifles that I thought might give satisfaction to the person whom I so highly honored, and who, among her numerous excellencies, never failed to seem pleased with what she knew was meant to afford her pleasure. But I must break off, and have perhaps already written too much. I learn by a letter from Mrs. Scott, this day received, that your Grace is at Bowhill--in the beginning of next week I will be in the vicinity; and when your Grace can receive me without additional pain, I shall have the honor of waiting upon you. I remain, with the deepest sympathy, my Lord Duke, your Grace's truly distressed and most grateful servant, WALTER SCOTT. The following letter was addressed to Scott by the Duke of Buccleuch, before he received that which the Poet penned on landing at Glasgow. I present it here, because it will give a more exact notion of what Scott's relations with his noble patron really were, than any other single document which I could produce: and to set that matter in its just light is essential to the business of this narrative. But I am not ashamed to confess that I embrace with satisfaction the opportunity of thus offering to the readers of the present time a most instructive lesson. They will here see what pure and simple virtues and humble piety may be cultivated as the only sources of real comfort in this world and consolation in the prospect of futurity,--among circles which the giddy and envious mob are apt to regard as intoxicated with the pomps and vanities of wealth and rank; which so many of our popular writers represent systematically as sunk in selfish indulgence--as viewing all below them with apathy and indifference--and last, not least, as upholding, when they do uphold, the religious institutions of their country, merely because they have been taught to believe that their own hereditary privileges and possessions derive security from the prevalence of Christian maxims and feelings among the mass of the people. TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., POST OFFICE, GREENOCK. BOWHILL, September 3, 1814. MY DEAR SIR,--It is not with the view of distressing you with my griefs, in order to relieve my own feelings, that I address you at this moment. But knowing your attachment to myself, and more particularly the real affection which you bore to my poor wife, I thought that a few lines from me would be acceptable, both to explain the state of my mind at present, and to mention a few circumstances connected with that melancholy event. I am calm and resigned. The blow was so severe that it stunned me, and I did not feel that agony of mind which might have been expected. I now see the full extent of my misfortune; but that extended view of it has come gradually upon me. I am fully aware how imperative it is upon me to exert myself to the utmost on account of my children. I must not depress their spirits by a display of my own melancholy feelings. I have many new duties to perform,--or rather, perhaps, I now feel more pressingly the obligation of duties which the unceasing exertions of my poor wife rendered less necessary, or induced me to attend to with less than sufficient accuracy. I have been taught a severe lesson; it may and ought to be a useful one. I feel that my lot, though a hard one, is accompanied by many alleviations denied to others. I have a numerous family, thank God, in health, and profiting, according to their different ages, by the admirable lessons they have been taught. My daughter, Anne, worthy of so excellent a mother, exerts herself to the utmost to supply her place, and has displayed a fortitude and strength of mind beyond her years, and (as I had foolishly thought) beyond her powers. I have most kind friends willing and ready to afford me every assistance. These are my worldly comforts, and they are numerous and great. Painful as it may be, I cannot reconcile it to myself to be totally silent as to the last scene of this cruel tragedy. As she had lived, so she died,--an example of every noble feeling--of love, attachment, and the total want of everything selfish. Endeavoring to the last to conceal her suffering, she evinced a fortitude, a resignation, a Christian courage, beyond all power of description. Her last injunction was to attend to her poor people. It was a dreadful but instructive moment. I have learned that the most truly heroic spirit may be lodged in the tenderest and the gentlest breast. Need I tell _you_ that she expired in the full hope and expectation, nay, in the firmest certainty, of passing to a better world, through a steady reliance on her Saviour? If ever there was a proof of the efficacy of our religion in moments of the deepest affliction, and in the hour of death, it was exemplified in her conduct. But I will no longer dwell upon a subject which must be painful to you. Knowing her sincere friendship for you, I have thought it would give you pleasure, though a melancholy one, to hear from me that her last moments were such as to be envied by every lover of virtue, piety, and true and genuine religion. I will endeavor to do in all things what I know she would wish. I have therefore determined to lay myself open to all the comforts my friends can afford me. I shall be most happy to cultivate their society as heretofore. I shall love them more and more, because I know they loved her. Whenever it suits your convenience I shall be happy to see you here. I feel that it is particularly my duty not to make my house the house of mourning to my children; for I know it was _her_ decided opinion that it is most mischievous to give an early impression of gloom to the mind. You will find me tranquil, and capable of going through the common occupations of society. Adieu for the present. Yours very sincerely, BUCCLEUCH, etc. TO HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH, ETC., ETC., ETC. EDINBURGH, 11th September, 1814. MY DEAR LORD DUKE,--I received your letter (which had missed me at Greenock) upon its being returned to this place, and cannot sufficiently express my gratitude for the kindness which, at such a moment, could undertake the task of writing upon such a subject to relieve the feelings of a friend. Depend upon it, I am so far worthy of your Grace's kindness, that, among many proofs of it, this affecting and most distressing one can never be forgotten. It gives me great though melancholy satisfaction to find that your Grace has had the manly and Christian fortitude to adopt that resigned and patient frame of spirit, which can extract from the most bitter calamity a wholesome mental medicine. I trust in God, that, as so many and such high duties are attached to your station, and as He has blessed you with the disposition that draws pleasure from the discharge of them, your Grace will find your first exertions, however painful, rewarded with strength to persevere, and finally with that comfort which attends perseverance in that which is right. The happiness of hundreds depends upon your Grace almost directly, and the effect of your example in the country, and of your constancy in support of a constitution daily undermined by the wicked and designing, is almost incalculable. Justly, then, and well, has your Grace resolved to sacrifice all that is selfish in the indulgence of grief, to the duties of your social and public situation. Long may you have health and strength to be to your dear and hopeful family an example and guide in all that becomes their high rank. It is enough that one light, and alas, what a light that was!--has been recalled by the Divine Will to another and a better sphere. I wrote a hasty and unconnected letter immediately on landing. I am detained for two days in this place, but shall wait upon your Grace immediately on my return to Abbotsford. If my society cannot, in the circumstances, give much pleasure, it will, I trust, impose no restraint. Mrs. Scott desires me to offer her deepest sympathy upon this calamitous occasion. She has much reason, for she has lost the countenance of a friend such as she cannot expect the course of human life again to supply. I am ever, with much and affectionate respect, your Grace's truly faithful humble servant, WALTER SCOTT. TO J. B. S. MORRITT, ESQ., M. P., WORTHING. EDINBURGH, September 14, 1814. MY DEAR MORRITT,--"At the end of my tour on the 22d August"!!! Lord help us!--this comes of going to the Levant and the Hellespont, and your Euxine, and so forth. A poor devil who goes to Nova Zembla and Thule is treated as if he had been only walking as far as Barnard Castle or Cauldshiels Loch.[97] I would have you to know I only returned on the 10th current, and the most agreeable thing I found was your letter. I am sure you must know I had need of something pleasant, for the news of the death of the beautiful, the kind, the affectionate, and generous Duchess of Buccleuch gave me a shock, which, to speak God's truth, could not have been exceeded unless by my own family's sustaining a similar deprivation. She was indeed a light set upon a hill, and had all the grace which the most accomplished manners and the most affable address could give to those virtues by which she was raised still higher than by rank. As she always distinguished me by her regard and confidence, and as I had many opportunities of seeing her in the active discharge of duties in which she rather resembled a descended angel than an earthly being, you will excuse my saying so much about my own feelings on an occasion where sorrow has been universal. But I will drop the subject. The survivor has displayed a strength and firmness of mind seldom equalled, where the affection has been so strong and mutual, and amidst the very high station and commanding fortune which so often render self-control more difficult, because so far from being habitual. I trust, for his own sake, as well as for that of thousands to whom his life is directly essential, and hundreds of thousands to whom his example is important, that God, as He has given him fortitude to bear this inexpressible shock, will add strength of constitution to support him in the struggle. He has written to me on the occasion in a style becoming a man and a Christian, submissive to the will of God, and willing to avail himself of the consolations which remain among his family and friends. I am going to see him, and how we shall meet, God knows; but though "an iron man of iron mould" upon many of the occasions of life in which I see people most affected, and a peculiar contemner of the commonplace sorrow which I see paid to the departed, this is a case in which my stoicism will not serve me. They both gave me reason to think they loved me, and I returned their regard with the most sincere attachment--the distinction of rank being, I think, set apart on all sides. But God's will be done. I will dwell no longer upon this subject. It is much to learn that Mrs. Morritt is so much better, and that if I have sustained a severe wound from a quarter so little expected, I may promise myself the happiness of your dear wife's recovery. I will shortly mention the train of our voyage, reserving particulars till another day. We sailed from Leith, and skirted the Scottish coast, visiting the Buller of Buchan and other remarkable objects--went to Shetland--thence to Orkney--from thence round Cape Wrath to the Hebrides, making descents everywhere, where there was anything to be seen--thence to Lewis and the Long Island--to Skye--to Iona--and so forth, lingering among the Hebrides as long as we could. Then we stood over to the coast of Ireland, and visited the Giant's Causeway and Port Rush, where Dr. Richardson, the inventor (discoverer, I would say) of the celebrated fiorin-grass, resides. By the way, he is a chattering charlatan, and his fiorin a mere humbug. But if he were Cicero, and his invention were potatoes, or anything equally useful, I should detest the recollection of the place and the man, for it was there I learned the death of my friend. Adieu, my dear Morritt; kind compliments to your lady; like poor Tom, "I cannot daub it farther." When I hear where you are, and what you are doing, I will write you a more cheerful epistle. Poor Mackenzie, too, is gone--the brother of our friend Lady Hood--and another Mackenzie, son to the Man of Feeling. So short time have I been absent, and such has been the harvest of mortality among those whom I regarded! I will attend to your corrections in Waverley. My principal employment for the autumn will be reducing the knowledge I have acquired of the localities of the islands into scenery and stage-room for The Lord of the Isles, of which renowned romance I think I have repeated some portions to you. It was elder born than Rokeby, though it gave place to it in publishing. After all, scribbling is an odd propensity. I don't believe there is any ointment, even that of the Edinburgh Review, which can cure the infected. Once more, yours entirely, WALTER SCOTT. Before I pass from the event which made August, 1814, so black a month in Scott's calendar, I may be excused for once more noticing the kind interest which the Duchess of Buccleuch had always taken in the fortunes of the Ettrick Shepherd, and introducing a most characteristic epistle which she received from him a few months before her death. The Duchess--"fearful" (as she said) "of seeing herself in print"--did not answer the Shepherd, but forwarded his letter to Scott, begging him to explain that circumstances did not allow the Duke to concede what he requested, but to assure him that they both retained a strong wish to serve him whenever a suitable opportunity should present itself. Hogg's letter was as follows:-- TO HER GRACE THE DUCHESS OF BUCCLEUCH, DALKEITH PALACE. FAVORED BY MESSRS. GRIEVE AND SCOTT, HATTERS, EDINBURGH.[98] ETTRICKBANK, March 17, 1814. May it please your Grace,--I have often grieved you by my applications for this and that. I am sensible of this, for I have had many instances of your wishes to be of service to me, could you have known what to do for that purpose. But there are some eccentric characters in the world, of whom no person can judge or know what will prove beneficial, or what may prove their bane. I have again and again received of your Grace's private bounty, and though it made me love and respect you the more, I was nevertheless grieved at it. It was never your Grace's money that I wanted, but the honor of your countenance; indeed my heart could never yield to the hope of being patronized by any house save that of Buccleuch, whom I deemed bound to cherish every plant that indicated anything out of the common way on the Braes of Ettrick and Yarrow. I know you will be thinking that this long prelude is to end with a request. No, Madam! I have taken the resolution of never making another request. I will, however, tell you a story, which is, I believe, founded on a fact:-- There is a small farm at the head of a water called *****, possessed by a mean fellow named ****. A third of it has been taken off and laid into another farm--the remainder is as yet unappropriated. Now, there is a certain poor bard, who has two old parents, each of them upwards of eighty-four years of age; and that bard has no house nor home to shelter those poor parents in, or cheer the evening of their lives. A single line from a certain very great and very beautiful lady, to a certain Mr. Riddle,[99] would insure that small pendicle to the bard at once. But she will grant no such thing! I appeal to your Grace if she is not a very bad lady that? I am your Grace's ever obliged and grateful JAMES HOGG, THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD. [Illustration: JAMES HOGG _From the water-color portrait by Denning_] Though the Duke of Buccleuch would not dismiss a poor tenant merely because Hogg called him "a mean fellow," he had told Scott that if he could find an unappropriated "pendicle," such as this letter referred to, he would most willingly bestow it on the Shepherd. It so happened, that when Scott paid his first visit at Bowhill after the death of the Duchess, the Ettrick Shepherd was mentioned: "My friend," said the Duke, "I must now consider this poor man's case as _her_ legacy;" and to this feeling Hogg owed, very soon afterwards, his establishment at Altrive, on his favorite braes of Yarrow. As Scott passed through Edinburgh on his return from his voyage, the negotiation as to The Lord of the Isles, which had been protracted through several months, was completed--Constable agreeing to give fifteen hundred guineas for one half of the copyright, while the other moiety was retained by the author. The sum mentioned had been offered by Constable at an early stage of the affair, but it was not until now accepted, in consequence of the earnest wish of Scott and Ballantyne to saddle the publisher of the new poem with part of their old "quire stock,"--which, however, Constable ultimately persisted in refusing. It may easily be believed that John Ballantyne's management of money matters during Scott's six weeks' absence had been such as to render it doubly convenient for the Poet to have this matter settled on his arrival in Edinburgh--and it may also be supposed that the progress of Waverley during that interval had tended to put the chief parties in good-humor with each other. In returning to Waverley, I must observe most distinctly that nothing can be more unfounded than the statement which has of late years been frequently repeated in memoirs of Scott's life, that the sale of the first edition of this immortal Tale was slow. It appeared on the 7th of July, and the whole impression (1000 copies) had disappeared within five weeks; an occurrence then unprecedented in the case of an anonymous novel, put forth at what is called among publishers _the dead season_. A second edition, of 2000 copies, was at least projected by the 24th of the same month;[100]--that appeared before the end of August, and it, too, had gone off so rapidly, that when Scott passed through Edinburgh, on his way from the Hebrides, he found Constable eager to treat, on the same terms as before, for a third of 1000 copies. This third edition was published in October, and when a fourth of the like extent was called for in November, I find Scott writing to John Ballantyne, "I suppose Constable won't quarrel with a work on which he has netted £612 in four months, with a certainty of making it £1000 before the year is out;" and, in fact, owing to the diminished expense of advertising, the profits of this fourth edition were to each party £440. To avoid recurring to these details, I may as well state at once, that a fifth edition of 1000 copies appeared in January, 1815; a sixth of 1500 in June, 1816; a seventh of 2000 in October, 1817; an eighth of 2000 in April, 1821; that in the collective editions, prior to 1829, 11,000 were disposed of; and that the sale of the current edition, with notes, begun in 1829, has already reached 40,000 copies. Well might Constable regret that he had not ventured to offer £1000 for the whole copyright of Waverley! I must now look back for a moment to the history of the composition.--The letter of September, 1810, was not the only piece of discouragement which Scott had received, during the progress of Waverley, from his first confidant. James Ballantyne, in his deathbed _memorandum_, says: "When Mr. Scott first questioned me as to my hopes of him as a novelist, it somehow or other did chance that they were not very high. He saw this, and said: 'Well, I don't see why I should not succeed as well as other people. At all events, faint heart never won fair lady--'tis only trying.' When the first volume was completed, I still could not get myself to think much of the Waverley-Honor scenes; and in this I afterwards found that I sympathized with many. But, to my utter shame be it spoken, when I reached the exquisite descriptions of scenes and manners at Tully-Veolan, what did I do but pronounce them at once to be utterly vulgar!--When the success of the work so entirely knocked me down as a man of taste, all that the good-natured author said was: 'Well, I really thought you were wrong about the Scotch. Why, Burns, by his poetry, had already attracted universal attention to everything Scottish, and I confess I could n't see why I should not be able to keep the flame alive, merely because I wrote Scotch in prose, and he in rhyme.'"--It is, I think, very agreeable to have this manly avowal to compare with the delicate allusion which Scott makes to the affair in his Preface to the Novel. The only other friends originally entrusted with his secret appear to have been Mr. Erskine and Mr. Morritt. I know not at what stage the former altered the opinion which he formed on seeing the tiny fragment of 1805. The latter did not, as we have seen, receive the book until it was completed; but he anticipated, before he closed the first volume, the station which public opinion would ultimately assign to Waverley. "How the story may continue," Mr. Morritt then wrote, "I am not able to divine; but, as far as I have read, pray let us thank you for the Castle of Tully-Veolan, and the delightful drinking-bout at Lucky Mac-Leary's, for the characters of the Laird of Balmawhapple and the Baron of Bradwardine; and no less for Davie Gelatly, whom I take to be a transcript of William Rose's motley follower, commonly yclept Caliban.[101] If the completion be equal to what we have just devoured, it deserves a place among our standard works far better than its modest appearance and anonymous title-page will at first gain it in these days of prolific story-telling. Your manner of narrating is so different from the slipshod sauntering verbiage of common novels, and from the stiff, precise, and prim sententiousness of some of our female moralists, that I think it can't fail to strike anybody who knows what style means; but, amongst the gentle class, who swallow every blue-backed book in a circulating library for the sake of the story, I should fear half the knowledge of nature it contains, and all the real humor, may be thrown away. Sir Everard, Mrs. Rachael, and the Baron are, I think, in the first rank of portraits for nature and character; and I could depone to their likeness in any court of taste. The ballad of St. Swithin, and scraps of _old songs_, were measures of danger if you meant to continue your concealment; but, in truth, you wear your disguise something after the manner of Bottom the weaver; and in spite of you the truth will soon peep out." And next day he resumes: "We have finished Waverley, and were I to tell you all my admiration, you would accuse me of complimenting. You have quite attained the point which your _postscript-preface_ mentions as your object--the discrimination of Scottish character, which had hitherto been slurred over with clumsy national daubing." He adds, a week or two later: "After all, I need not much thank you for your confidence. How could you have hoped that I should not discover you? I had heard you tell half the anecdotes before--some turns you owe to myself; and no doubt most of your friends must have the same sort of thing to say." Monk Lewis's letter on the subject is so short that I must give it as it stands:-- TO WALTER SCOTT, ESQ., ABBOTSFORD. THE ALBANY, August 17, 1814. MY DEAR SCOTT,--I return some books of yours which you lent me '_sixty years since_'--and I hope they will reach you safe. I write in great haste; and yet I must mention, that hearing Waverley ascribed to you, I bought it, and read it with all impatience. I am now told it is not yours, but William Erskine's. If this is so, pray tell him from me that I think it excellent in every respect, and that I believe every word of it. Ever yours, M. G. LEWIS. Another friend (and he had, I think, none more dear), the late Margaret Maclean Clephane of Torloisk, afterwards Marchioness of Northampton, writes thus from Kirkness, in Kinross-shire, on the 11th October:-- "In this place I feel a sort of pleasure, not unallied to pain, from the many recollections that every venerable tree, and every sunny bank, and every honeysuckle bower, occasions; and I have found something here that speaks to me in the voice of a valued friend--_Waverley_. The question that rises, it is perhaps improper to give utterance to. If so, let it pass as an exclamation.--Is it possible that Mr. Erskine can have written it? The poetry, I think, would prove a different descent in any court in Christendom. The turn of the phrases in many places is so peculiarly yours, that I fancy I hear your voice repeating them; and there wants but verse to make all Waverley an enchanting poem--varying to be sure from grave to gay, but with so deepening an interest as to leave an impression on the mind that few--very few poems--could awaken. But, why did not the author allow me to be his Gaelic Dragoman? Oh! Mr. ----, whoever you are, you might have safely trusted--M. M. C." There was one person with whom it would, of course, have been more than vain to affect any concealment. On the publication of the third edition, I find him writing thus to his brother Thomas, who had by this time gone to Canada as paymaster of the 70th regiment:-- DEAR TOM,--A novel here called Waverley has had enormous success. I sent you a copy, and will send you another, with The Lord of the Isles, which will be out at Christmas. The success which it has had, with some other circumstances, has induced people "To lay the bantling at a certain door, Where lying store of faults, they'd fain heap more."[102] You will guess for yourself how far such a report has credibility; but by no means give the weight of your opinion to the transatlantic public; for you must know there is also a counter-report, that _you_ have written the said Waverley. Send me a novel intermixing your exuberant and natural humor with any incidents and descriptions of scenery you may see--particularly with characters and traits of manners. I will give it all the cobbling that is necessary, and, if you do but exert yourself, I have not the least doubt it will be worth £500; and, to encourage you, you may, when you send the MS., draw on me for £100, at fifty days' sight--so that your labors will at any rate not be quite thrown away. You have more fun and descriptive talent than most people; and all that you want--_i. e._, the mere practice of composition--I can supply, or the devil's in it. Keep this matter a dead secret, and look knowing when Waverley is spoken of. If you are not Sir John Falstaff, you are as good a man as he, and may therefore face Colville of the Dale. You may believe I don't want to make you the author of a book you have never seen; but if people will, upon their own judgment, suppose so, and also on their own judgment give you £500 to try your hand on a novel, I don't see that you are a pin's-point the worse. Mind that your MS. attends the draft. I am perfectly serious and confident that in two or three months you might clear the cobs. I beg my compliments to the hero who is afraid of Jeffrey's scalping-knife. In truth, no one of Scott's intimate friends ever had, or could have had, the slightest doubt as to the parentage of Waverley: nor, although he abstained from communicating the fact formally to most of them, did he ever affect any real concealment in the case of such persons; nor, when any circumstance arose which rendered the withholding of direct confidence on the subject incompatible with perfect freedom of feeling on both sides, did he hesitate to make the avowal. Nor do I believe that the mystification ever answered much purpose, among literary men of eminence beyond the circle of his personal acquaintance. But it would be difficult to suppose that he had ever wished that to be otherwise; it was sufficient for him to set the mob of readers at gaze, and above all, to escape the annoyance of having productions, actually known to be his, made the daily and hourly topics of discussion in his presence.[103] Mr. Jeffrey had known Scott from his youth--and, in reviewing Waverley, he was at no pains to conceal his conviction of its authorship. He quarrelled, as usual, with carelessness of style, and some inartificialities of plot, but rendered justice to the substantial merits of the work, in language which I shall not mar by abridgment. The Quarterly was far less favorable in its verdict. Indeed, the articles on Waverley, and afterwards on Guy Mannering, which appeared in that journal, will bear the test of ultimate opinion as badly as any critical pieces which our time has produced. They are written in a captious, cavilling strain of quibble, which shows as complete blindness to the essential interest of the narrative, as the critic betrays on the subject of the Scottish dialogue, which forms its liveliest ornament, when he pronounces that to be "a dark dialogue of Anglified Erse." With this remarkable exception, the professional critics were, on the whole, not slow to confess their belief, that, under a hackneyed name and trivial form, there had at last appeared a work of original creative genius, worthy of being placed by the side of the very few real masterpieces of prose fiction. Loftier romance was never blended with easier, quainter humor, by Cervantes himself. In his familiar delineations he had combined the strength of Smollett with the native elegance and unaffected pathos of Goldsmith; in his darker scenes he had revived that real tragedy which appeared to have left our stage with the age of Shakespeare; and elements of interest so diverse had been blended and interwoven with that nameless grace, which, more surely perhaps than even the highest perfection in the command of any one strain of sentiment, marks the master-mind cast in Nature's most felicitous mould. Scott, with the consciousness (avowed long afterwards in his General Preface) that he should never in all likelihood have thought of a Scotch novel had he not read Maria Edgeworth's exquisite pieces of Irish character, desired James Ballantyne to send her a copy of Waverley on its first appearance, inscribed "from the author." Miss Edgeworth, whom Scott had never then seen, though some literary correspondence had passed between them, thanked the nameless novelist, under cover to Ballantyne, with the cordial generosity of kindred genius;[104] and the following answer, not from Scott, but from Ballantyne--(who had kept a copy, now before me)--is not to be omitted:-- TO MISS EDGEWORTH, EDGEWORTHSTOWN, IRELAND. EDINBURGH, 11th November, 1814. MADAM,--I am desired by the Author of Waverley to acknowledge, in his name, the honor you have done him by your most flattering approbation of his work--a distinction which he receives as one of the highest that could be paid him, and which he would have been proud to have himself stated his sense of, only that being _impersonal_, he thought it more respectful to require my assistance than to write an anonymous letter. There are very few who have had the opportunities that have been presented to me, of knowing how very elevated is the admiration entertained by the Author of Waverley for the genius of Miss Edgeworth. From the intercourse that took place betwixt us while the work was going through my press, _I know_ that the exquisite truth and power of your characters operated on his mind at once to excite and subdue it. He felt that the success of his book was to depend upon the characters, much more than upon the story; and he entertained so just and so high an opinion of your eminence in the management of both, as to have strong apprehensions of any comparison which might be instituted betwixt his picture and story and yours; besides, that there is a richness and _naïveté_ in Irish character and humor, in which the Scotch are certainly defective, and which could hardly fail, as he thought, to render his delineations cold and tame by the contrast. "If I could but hit Miss Edgeworth's wonderful power of vivifying all her persons, and making them live as _beings_ in your mind, I should not be afraid:"--Often has the Author of Waverley used such language to me; and I knew that I gratified him most when I could say,--"Positively this _is_ equal to Miss Edgeworth." You will thus judge, Madam, how deeply he must feel such praise as you have bestowed upon his efforts. I believe he himself thinks the Baron the best drawn character in his book--I mean the Bailie--honest Bailie Macwheeble. He protests it is the most _true_, though from many causes he did not expect it to be the most popular. It appears to me, that amongst so many splendid portraits, all drawn with such strength and truth, it is more easy to say which is your favorite, than which is best. Mr. Henry Mackenzie agrees with you in your objection to the resemblance to Fielding. He says you should never be forced to recollect, _maugre_ all its internal evidence to the contrary, that such a work is a work of fiction, and all its fine creations but of air. The character of Rose is less finished than the author had at one period intended; but I believe the characters of humor grew upon his liking, to the prejudice, in some degree, of those of a more elevated and sentimental kind. Yet what can surpass Flora, and her gallant brother? I am not authorized to say--but I will not resist my impulse to say to Miss Edgeworth, that another novel, descriptive of more ancient manners still, may be expected erelong from the Author of Waverley. But I request her to observe, that I say this in strict confidence--not certainly meaning to exclude from the knowledge of what will give them pleasure, her respectable family. Mr. Scott's poem, The Lord of the Isles, promises fully to equal the most admired of his productions. It is, I think, equally powerful, and certainly more uniformly polished and sustained. I have seen three cantos. It will consist of six. I have the honor to be, Madam, with the utmost admiration and respect, Your most obedient and most humble servant, JAMES BALLANTYNE. Footnotes of the Chapter XXXIII. [96: The Scotts of Scotstarvet, and other families of the name in Fife and elsewhere, claim no kindred with the great clan of the Border--and their armorial bearings are different.] [97: Lord Byron writes to Mr. Moore, August 3, 1814: "Oh! I have had the most amusing letter from Hogg, the Ettrick Minstrel and Shepherd. I think very highly of him as a poet, but he and half of these Scotch and Lake troubadours are spoilt by living in little circles and petty coteries. London and the world is the only place to take the conceit out of a man--in the milling phrase. Scott, he says, is gone to the Orkneys in a gale of wind, during which wind, he affirms, the said Scott, he is sure, is not at his ease, to say the least of it. Lord! Lord! if these home-keeping minstrels had crossed your Atlantic or my Mediterranean, and tasted a little open boating in a white squall--or a gale in 'the Gut,'--or the Bay of Biscay, with no gale at all--how it would enliven and introduce them to a few of the sensations!--to say nothing of an illicit amour or two upon shore, in the way of Essay upon the Passions, beginning with simple adultery, and compounding it as they went along."--_Life and Works_, vol. iii. p. 102. Lord Byron, by the way, had written on July the 24th to Mr. Murray, "_Waverley_ is the best and most interesting novel I have redde since--I don't know when," etc.--_Ibid._ p. 98.] [98: Mr. Grieve was a man of cultivated mind and generous disposition, and a most kind and zealous friend of the Shepherd.] [99: Major Riddell, the Duke's Chamberlain at Branksome Castle.] [100: See letter to Mr. Morritt, _ante_, p. 120.] [101: This alludes to some mummery in which David Hinves, of merry memory, wore a Caliban-like disguise. He lived more than forty years in the service of Mr. W. S. Rose, and died in it last year. Mr. Rose was of course extremely young when he first picked up Hinves--a bookbinder by trade, and a preacher among the Methodists. A sermon heard casually under a tree in the New Forest had such touches of good feeling and broad humor, that the young gentleman promoted him to be his valet on the spot. He was treated latterly more like a friend than a servant by his master, and by all his master's intimate friends. Scott presented him with a copy of all his works; and Coleridge gave him a corrected (or rather an altered) copy of _Christabel_, with this inscription on the flyleaf: "DEAR HINVES,--Till this book is concluded, and with it '_Gundimore_, a poem, by the same author,' accept of this _corrected_ copy of _Christabel_ as a _small_ token of regard; yet such a testimonial as I would not pay to any one I did not esteem, though he were an emperor. Be assured I shall send you for your private library every work I have published (if there be any to be had) and whatever I shall publish. Keep steady to the FAITH. If the fountain-head be always full, the stream cannot be long empty. Yours sincerely, S. T. COLERIDGE." 11th November, 1816--Muddeford. Mr. Rose imagines that the warning, "keep steady to the faith," was given in allusion to Ugo Foscolo's "supposed license in religious opinions."--_Rhymes_ (Brighton, 1837), p. 92.--(1839.)] [102: Garrick's Epilogue to _Polly Honeycombe_, 1760.] [103: ["Except the first opening of the _Edinburgh Review_, no work that has appeared in my time made such an instant and universal impression. It is curious to remember it. The unexpected newness of the thing, the profusion of original characters, the Scotch language, Scotch scenery, Scotch men and women, the simplicity of the writing, and the graphic force of the descriptions, all struck us with an electric shock of delight. I wish I could again feel the sensations produced by the first year of these two Edinburgh works. If the concealment of the authorship of the novels was intended to make mystery heighten their effect, it completely succeeded. The speculations and conjectures, and nods and winks, and predictions and assertions were endless, and occupied every company, and almost every two men who met and spoke in the street. It was proved by a thousand indications, each refuting the other, and all equally true in fact, that they were written by old Henry Mackenzie, and by George Cranstoun, and William Erskine, and Jeffrey, and above all by Thomas Scott.... But 'the great unknown' as the true author was then called, always took good care, with all his concealment, to supply evidence amply sufficient for the protection of his property and his fame; in so much that the suppression of the name was laughed at as a good joke not merely by his select friends in his presence, but by himself. The change of line, at his age, was a striking proof of intellectual power and richness. But the truth is that these novels were rather the outpourings of old thoughts than new inventions."--Lord Cockburn's _Memorials of His Time_.]] [104: [Miss Edgeworth wrote from Edgeworthstown, October 23, 1814, addressing her letter to the Author of _Waverley_ (see _Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth_, vol. i. pp. 239-244):-- _Aut Scotus, aut Diabolus._ We have this moment finished _Waverley_. It was read aloud to this large family, and I wish the author could have witnessed the impression it made--the strong hold it seized of the feelings both of young and old--the admiration raised by the beautiful description, of nature--by the new and bold delineations of character--the perfect manner in which every character is sustained in every change of situation from first to last, without effort, without the affectation of making the persons speak in character--the ingenuity with which each person introduced in the drama is made useful and necessary to the end--the admirable art with which the story is constructed and with which the author keeps his own secrets till the proper moment when they should be revealed, whilst in the mean time, with the skill of Shakespeare, the mind is prepared by unseen degrees for all the changes of feeling and fortune, so that nothing, however extraordinary, shocks us as improbable; and the interest is kept up to the last moment. We were so possessed with the belief that the whole story and every character in it was real, that we could not endure the occasional addresses from the author to the reader. They are like Fielding; but for that reason we cannot bear them, we cannot bear that an author of such high powers, of such original genius, should for a moment stoop to imitation. This is the only thing we dislike, these are the only passages we wish omitted in the whole work; and let the unqualified manner in which I say this, and the very vehemence of my expression of this disapprobation, be a sure pledge to the author of the sincerity of all the admiration I feel for his genius. I have not yet said half we felt in reading the work. The characters are not only finely drawn as separate figures, but they are grouped with great skill, and contrasted so artfully, and yet so naturally, as to produce the happiest dramatic effect and at the same time to relieve the feelings and attention in the most agreeable manner. The novelty of the Highland world which is discovered to our view excites curiosity and interest powerfully; but though it is all new to us it does not embarrass or perplex, or strain the attention. We never are harassed by doubts of the probability of any of these modes of life; though we did not know them, we are quite certain they did exist exactly as they are represented. We are sensible that there is a peculiar merit in the work which is in a measure lost upon us, the dialects of the Highlanders and Lowlanders, etc. But there is another and a higher merit with which we are as much struck and as much delighted as any true-born Scotchman could be: the various gradations of Scotch feudal character, from the high-born chieftain and the military baron, to the noble-minded lieutenant Evan Dhu, the robber Bean Lean, and the savage Callum Beg. The Pre--the Chevalier is beautifully drawn,-- "A prince: aye, every inch a prince!" His polished manners, his exquisite address, politeness, and generosity, interest the reader irresistibly, and he pleases the more from the contrast between him and those who surround him. I think he is my favorite character; the Baron Bradwardine is my father's. He thinks it required more genius to invent, and more ability uniformly to sustain, this character than any one of the masterly characters with which the book abounds. There is indeed uncommon art in the manner in which his dignity is preserved by his courage and magnanimity, in spite of all his pedantry and his _ridicules_.... I acknowledge that I am not as good a judge as my father and brothers are of his recondite learning and his law Latin, yet I feel the humor, and was touched to the quick by the strokes of generosity, gentleness, and pathos in this old man, who is, by the bye, all in good time worked up into a very dignified father-in-law for the hero.... Jinker, in the battle, pleading the cause of the mare he had sold to Balmawhapple, and which had thrown him for want of the proper bit, is truly comic; my father says that this and some other passages respecting horsemanship could not have been written by any one who was not master both of the great and little horse. I tell you without order the great and little strokes of humor and pathos just as I recollect, or am reminded of them at this moment by my companions.... Judging by our own feeling as authors, we guess that he would rather know our genuine first thoughts, than wait for cool second thoughts, or have a regular eulogium or criticism put in the most lucid manner, and given in the finest sentences that ever were rounded. Is it possible that I have got thus far without having named Flora or Vich Ian Vohr--the last Vich Ian Vohr! Yet our minds were full of them the moment before I began this letter; and could you have seen the tears forced from us by their fate, you would have been satisfied that the pathos went to our hearts. Ian Vohr from the first moment he appears, till the last, is an admirably drawn and finely sustained character--new, perfectly new to the English reader--often entertaining--always heroic--sometimes sublime. The gray spirit, the Bodach Glas, thrills us with horror. _Us!_ What effect must it have upon those under the influence of the superstitions of the Highlands?... Flora we could wish was never called Miss MacIvor, because in this country there are tribes of vulgar Miss Macs, and this association is unfavorable to the sublime and beautiful of your Flora--she is a true heroine.... There is one thing more we could wish changed or omitted in Flora's character.... In the first visit to her, where she is to sing certain verses, there is a walk, in which the description of the place is beautiful, but too long, and we did not like the preparation for a scene--the appearance of Flora and her harp was too like a common heroine; she should be far above all stage effect or novelist's trick. These are, without reserve, the only faults we found or can find in this work of genius. We should scarcely have thought them worth mentioning, except to give you proof positive that we are not flatterers. Believe me, I have not, nor can I convey to you the full idea of the pleasure, the delight we have had in reading _Waverley_, nor of the feeling of sorrow with which we came to the end of the history of persons whose real presence had so filled our minds--we felt that we must return to the flat realities of life, that our stimulus was gone, and we were little disposed to read the "Postscript, which should have been a Preface." "Well, let us hear it," said my father, and Mrs. Edgeworth read on. Oh! my dear sir, how much pleasure would my father, my mother, my whole family as well as myself have lost, if we had not read to the last page! And the pleasure came upon us so unexpectedly--we had been so completely absorbed that every thought of ourselves, of our own authorship, was far, far away. Thank you for the honor you have done us, and for the pleasure you have given us, great in proportion to the opinion we had formed of the work we had just perused--and believe me, every opinion I have in this letter expressed was formed before any individual in the family had peeped to the end of the book or knew how much we owed you. Your obliged and grateful MARIA EDGEWORTH.] END OF VOLUME FOUR [Transcriber's note: Only obvious printer's errors have been corrected (e.g.: 3 s instead of 2, etc.). The author's spelling has been maintained and inconsistencies have not been standardised.] 
31557	----	THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON SWANSTON EDITION VOLUME XVIII _Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies have been printed, of which only Two Thousand Copies are for sale._ _This is No._ ....... [Illustration: A MAP TO ILLUSTRATE R. L. STEVENSON'S LIFE IN THE SOUTH SEAS] THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON VOLUME EIGHTEEN LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN AND COMPANY MDCCCCXII ALL RIGHTS RESERVED CONTENTS IN THE SOUTH SEAS PAGE Editorial Note ix PART I.--THE MARQUESAS CHAPTER I. An Island Landfall 5 II. Making Friends 12 III. The Maroon 21 IV. Death 28 V. Depopulation 36 VI. Chiefs and Tapus 44 VII. Hatiheu 53 VIII. The Port of Entry 61 IX. The House of Temoana 69 X. A Portrait and a Story 77 XI. Long-Pig--a Cannibal High Place 85 XII. The Story of a Plantation 95 XIII. Characters 105 XIV. In a Cannibal Valley 112 XV. The Two Chiefs of Atuona 119 PART II.--THE PAUMOTUS I. The Dangerous Archipelago--Atolls at a Distance 129 II. Fakarava: an Atoll at Hand 137 III. A House To Let in a Low Island 146 IV. Traits and Sects in the Paumotus 155 V. A Paumotuan Funeral 165 VI. Graveyard Stories 170 PART III.--THE EIGHT ISLANDS I. The Kona Coast 187 II. A Ride in the Forest 197 III. The City of Refuge 203 IV. Kaahumanu 209 V. The Lepers of Kona 215 PART IV.--THE GILBERTS I. Butaritari 223 II. The Four Brothers 229 III. Around Our House 237 IV. A Tale of a Tapu 247 V. A Tale of a Tapu (_continued_) 255 VI. The Five Days' Festival 265 VII. Husband and Wife 278 PART V.--THE GILBERTS--APEMAMA I. The King of Apemama: the Royal Trader 289 II. The King of Apemama: Foundation Of Equator Town 298 III. The King of Apemama: the Palace of Many Women 306 IV. The King of Apemama: Equator Town And the Palace 313 V. King and Commons 321 VI. The King of Apemama: Devil-work 330 VII. The King of Apemama 342 LETTERS FROM SAMOA 351 EDITORIAL NOTE _The following chapters are selected from a series which was first published partially in 'Black and White' (February to December 1891), and fully in the New York 'Sun' during the same period. The voyages which supplied the occasion and the material for the work were three in number, viz. one of seven months (June 1888 to January 1889) in the yacht 'Casco' from San Francisco to the Marquesas, the Paumotus, Tahiti, and thence northward to Hawaii; a second (June to December 1889) in the trading schooner 'Equator,' from Honolulu, the Hawaiian capital, where the author had stayed in the intervening five months, to the Gilberts and thence to Samoa; and a third (April to September 1890) in the trading steamer 'Janet Nicoll,' which set out from Sydney and followed a very devious course, extending as far as Penrhyn in the Eastern to the Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific._ _Before setting out on the first of these voyages, the author had contracted to write an account of his adventures in the form of letters for serial publication. The plan by and by changed in his mind into that of a book partly of travel and partly of research, which should combine the results of much careful observation and enquiry upon matters of island history, custom, belief, and tradition, with some account of his own experiences and those of his travelling companions. Under the nominal title of 'Letters' he began to compose the chapters of such a book on board the 'Janet Nicoll,' and continued the task during the first ten months of his residence in Samoa (October 1890 to July 1891). Before the serial publication had gone very far, he realised that the personal and impersonal elements in his work were not very successfully_ _ combined, nor in proportions that contented his readers. Accordingly he abandoned for the time being the idea of republishing the chapters in book form. But when the scheme of the Edinburgh Edition was maturing, he desired that a selection should be made from them and should form one volume of that edition. That desire was carried out. The same selection is here republished, with the addition of a half-section then omitted, describing a visit to the Kona coast of Hawaii and the lepers' port of embarkation for Molokai._ _It must be understood that a considerable portion of the author's voyages above mentioned is not recorded at all in the following pages. Of one of its most attractive episodes, the visit to Tahiti, no account was written; while of his experiences in Hawaii only the visit to the Kona coast is included. Several chapters which did not come out to the writer's satisfaction have been omitted. Of the five sections here given, each is complete in itself, with the exception of Part III. The first deals with the Marquesas, the second with the Paumolus--the former a volcanic and mountainous group, the latter a low group of atolls or coral islands, both in the Eastern Pacific and both under the protectorate of France. The third section is fragmentary, and deals, as has been said, with only one portion of the writer's experiences in Hawaii. The last two describe his residence in the Gilberts, a remote and little-known coral group in the Western Pacific, which at the time of his visit was under independent native government, but has since been annexed by Great Britain. This is the part of his work with which the author himself was best satisfied, and it derives additional interest from describing a state of manners and government which has now passed away._ IN THE SOUTH SEAS BEING AN ACCOUNT OF EXPERIENCES AND OBSERVATIONS IN THE MARQUESAS, PAUMOTUS AND GILBERT ISLANDS IN THE COURSE OF TWO CRUISES, ON THE YACHT _CASCO_ (1888) AND THE SCHOONER _EQUATOR_ (1889) PART I THE MARQUESAS IN THE SOUTH SEAS CHAPTER I AN ISLAND LANDFALL For nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some while before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and undertaker to expect. It was suggested that I should try the South Seas; and I was not unwilling to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a bale, among scenes that had attracted me in youth and health. I chartered accordingly Dr. Merrit's schooner yacht, the _Casco_, seventy-four tons register; sailed from San Francisco towards the end of June 1888, visited the eastern islands, and was left early the next year at Honolulu. Hence, lacking courage to return to my old life of the house and sick-room, I set forth to leeward in a trading schooner, the _Equator_, of a little over seventy tons, spent four months among the atolls (low coral islands) of the Gilbert group, and reached Samoa towards the close of '89. By that time gratitude and habit were beginning to attach me to the islands; I had gained a competency of strength; I had made friends; I had learned new interests; the time of my voyages had passed like days in fairyland; and I decided to remain. I began to prepare these pages at sea, on a third cruise, in the trading steamer _Janet Nicoll_. If more days are granted me, they shall be passed where I have found life most pleasant and man most interesting; the axes of my black boys are already clearing the foundations of my future house; and I must learn to address readers from the uttermost parts of the sea. That I should thus have reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson's hero is less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Cæsars. The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense. On the 28th of July 1888 the moon was an hour down by four in the morning. In the east a radiating centre of brightness told of the day; and beneath, on the skyline, the morning bank was already building, black as ink. We have all read of the swiftness of the day's coming and departure in low latitudes; it is a point on which the scientific and sentimental tourist are at one, and has inspired some tasteful poetry. The period certainly varies with the season; but here is one case exactly noted. Although the dawn was thus preparing by four, the sun was not up till six; and it was half-past five before we could distinguish our expected islands from the clouds on the horizon. Eight degrees south, and the day two hours a-coming. The interval was passed on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary thrill of landfall heightened by the strangeness of the shores that we were then approaching. Slowly they took shape in the attenuating darkness. Ua-huna, piling up to a truncated summit, appeared the first upon the starboard bow; almost abeam arose our destination, Nuka-hiva, whelmed in cloud; and betwixt and to the southward, the first rays of the sun displayed the needles of Ua-pu. These pricked about the line of the horizon; like the pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they stood there, in the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit signboard of a world of wonders. Not one soul aboard the _Casco_ had set foot upon the islands, or knew, except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues; and it was with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as thrilled the bosom of discoverers that we drew near these problematic shores. The land heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds. The suffusion of vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with the articulations of the mountain; and the isle and its unsubstantial canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass. There was no beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot. Somewhere, in that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our haven lay concealed; and somewhere to the east of it--the only sea-mark given--a certain headland, known indifferently as Cape Adam and Eve, or Cape Jack and Jane, and distinguished by two colossal figures, the gross statuary of nature. These we were to find; for these we craned and stared, focussed glasses, and wrangled over charts; and the sun was overhead and the land close ahead before we found them. To a ship approaching, like the _Casco_, from the north, they proved indeed the least conspicuous features of a striking coast; the surf flying high above its base; strange, austere, and feathered mountains rising behind; and Jack and Jane, or Adam and Eve, impending like a pair of warts above the breakers. Thence we bore away along shore. On our port beam we might hear the explosions of the surf; a few birds flew fishing under the prow; there was no other sound or mark of life, whether of man or beast, in all that quarter of the island. Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze, the _Casco_ skimmed under cliffs, opened out a cove, showed us a beach and some green trees, and flitted by again, bowing to the swell. The trees, from our distance, might have been hazel; the beach might have been in Europe; the mountain forms behind modelled in little from the Alps, and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more considerable than our Scottish heath. Again the cliff yawned, but now with a deeper entry; and the _Casco_, hauling her wind, began to slide into the bay of Anaho. The coco-palm, that giraffe of vegetables, so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign, was to be seen crowding on the beach, and climbing and fringing the steep sides of mountains. Rude and bare hills embraced the inlet upon either hand; it was enclosed to the landward by a bulk of shattered mountains. In every crevice of that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nesting there like birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and roughened the razor edges of the summit. Under the eastern shore, our schooner, now bereft of any breeze, continued to creep in: the smart creature, when once under way, appearing motive in herself. From close aboard arose the bleating of young lambs; a bird sang in the hillside; the scent of the land and of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and, presently, a house or two appeared, standing high upon the ankles of the hills, and one of these surrounded with what seemed a garden. These conspicuous habitations, that patch of culture, had we but known it, were a mark of the passage of whites; and we might have approached a hundred islands and not found their parallel. It was longer ere we spied the native village, standing (in the universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach, close under a grove of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc of reef. For the coco-tree and the island man are both lovers and neighbours of the surf. "The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs," says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach. The mark of anchorage was a blow-hole in the rocks, near the south-easterly corner of the bay. Punctually to our use, the blow-hole spouted; the schooner turned upon her heel; the anchor plunged. It was a small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up; and I, and some part of my ship's company, were from that hour the bondslaves of the isles of Vivien. Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the hamlet. It contained two men: one white, one brown and tattooed across the face with bands of blue, both in immaculate white European clothes: the resident trader, Mr. Regler, and the native chief, Taipi-kikino. "Captain, is it permitted to come on board?" were the first words we heard among the islands. Canoe followed canoe, till the ship swarmed with stalwart, six-foot men in every stage of undress; some in a shirt, some in a loin-cloth, one in a handkerchief imperfectly adjusted; some, and these the more considerable, tattooed from head to foot in awful patterns; some barbarous and knived; one, who sticks in my memory as something bestial, squatting on his hams in a canoe, sucking an orange and spitting it out again to alternate sides with ape-like vivacity--all talking, and we could not understand one word; all trying to trade with us who had no thought of trading, or offering us island curios at prices palpably absurd. There was no word of welcome; no show of civility; no hand extended save that of the chief and Mr. Regler. As we still continued to refuse the proffered articles, complaint ran high and rude; and one, the jester of the party, railed upon our meanness amid jeering laughter. Amongst other angry pleasantries--"Here is a mighty fine ship," said he, "to have no money on board!" I own I was inspired with sensible repugnance; even with alarm. The ship was manifestly in their power; we had women on board; I knew nothing of my guests beyond the fact that they were cannibals; the Directory (my only guide) was full of timid cautions; and as for the trader, whose presence might else have reassured me, were not whites in the Pacific the usual instigators and accomplices of native outrage? When he reads this confession, our kind friend, Mr. Regler, can afford to smile. Later in the day, as I sat writing up my journal, the cabin was filled from end to end with Marquesans: three brown-skinned generations, squatted cross-legged upon the floor, and regarding me in silence with embarrassing eyes. The eyes of all Polynesians are large, luminous, and melting; they are like the eyes of animals and some Italians. A kind of despair came over me, to sit there helpless under all these staring orbs, and be thus blocked in a corner of my cabin by this speechless crowd: and a kind of rage to think they were beyond the reach of articulate communication, like furred animals, or folk born deaf, or the dwellers of some alien planet. To cross the Channel is, for a boy of twelve, to change heavens; to cross the Atlantic, for a man of twenty-four, is hardly to modify his diet. But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letters are on every hand of us, constraining and preventing. I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Cæsar, and never been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian. By the same step I had journeyed forth out of that comfortable zone of kindred languages, where the curse of Babel is so easy to be remedied; and my new fellow-creatures sat before me dumb like images. Methought, in my travels, all human relation was to be excluded; and when I returned home (for in those days I still projected my return) I should have but dipped into a picture-book without a text. Nay, and I even questioned if my travels should be much prolonged; perhaps they were destined to a speedy end; perhaps my subsequent friend, Kauanui, whom I remarked there, sitting silent with the rest, for a man of some authority, might leap from his hams with an ear-splitting signal, the ship be carried at a rush, and the ship's company butchered for the table. There could be nothing more natural than these apprehensions, nor anything more groundless. In my experience of the islands, I had never again so menacing a reception; were I to meet with such to-day, I should be more alarmed and tenfold more surprised. The majority of Polynesians are easy folk to get in touch with, frank, fond of notice, greedy of the least affection, like amiable, fawning dogs; and even with the Marquesans, so recently and so imperfectly redeemed from a blood-boltered barbarism, all were to become our intimates, and one, at least, was to mourn sincerely our departure. CHAPTER II MAKING FRIENDS The impediment of tongues was one that I particularly over-estimated. The languages of Polynesia are easy to smatter, though hard to speak with elegance. And they are extremely similar, so that a person who has a tincture of one or two may risk, not without hope, an attempt upon the others. And again, not only is Polynesian easy to smatter, but interpreters abound. Missionaries, traders, and broken white folk living on the bounty of the natives, are to be found in almost every isle and hamlet; and even where these are unserviceable, the natives themselves have often scraped up a little English, and in the French zone (though far less commonly) a little French-English, or an efficient pidgin, what is called to the westward "Beach-la-Mar," comes easy to the Polynesian; it is now taught, besides, in the schools of Hawaii; and from the multiplicity of British ships, and the nearness of the States on the one hand and the colonies on the other, it may be called, and will almost certainly become, the tongue of the Pacific. I will instance a few examples. I met in Majuro a Marshall Island boy who spoke excellent English; this he had learned in the German firm in Jaluit, yet did not speak one word of German. I heard from a gendarme who had taught school in Rapa-iti that while the children had the utmost difficulty or reluctance to learn French, they picked up English on the wayside, and as if by accident. On one of the most out-of-the-way atolls in the Carolines, my friend Mr. Benjamin Hird was amazed to find the lads playing cricket on the beach and talking English; and it was in English that the crew of the _Janet Nicoll_, a set of black boys from different Melanesian islands, communicated with other natives throughout the cruise, transmitted orders, and sometimes jested together on the fore-hatch. But what struck me perhaps most of all was a word I heard on the verandah of the Tribunal at Noumea. A case had just been heard--a trial for infanticide against an ape-like native woman; and the audience were smoking cigarettes as they awaited the verdict. An anxious, amiable French lady, not far from tears, was eager for acquittal, and declared she would engage the prisoner to be her children's nurse. The bystanders exclaimed at the proposal; the woman was a savage, said they, and spoke no language. "_Mais vous savez_," objected the fair sentimentalist; "_ils apprennent si vite l'anglais_!" But to be able to speak to people is not all. And in the first stage of my relations with natives I was helped by two things. To begin with, I was the showman of the _Casco_. She, her fine lines, tall spars, and snowy decks, the crimson fittings of the saloon, and the white, the gilt, and the repeating mirrors of the tiny cabin, brought us a hundred visitors. The men fathomed out her dimensions with their arms, as their fathers fathomed out the ships of Cook; the women declared the cabins more lovely than a church; bouncing Junos were never weary of sitting in the chairs and contemplating in the glass their own bland images; and I have seen one lady strip up her dress, and, with cries of wonder and delight, rub herself bare-breeched upon the velvet cushions. Biscuit, jam, and syrup was the entertainment; and, as in European parlours, the photograph album went the round. This sober gallery, their everyday costumes and physiognomies, had been transformed, in three weeks' sailing, into things wonderful and rich and foreign; alien faces, barbaric dresses, they were now beheld and fingered, in the swerving cabin, with innocent excitement and surprise. Her Majesty was often recognised, and I have seen French subjects kiss her photograph; Captain Speedy--in an Abyssinian war-dress, supposed to be the uniform of the British army--met with much acceptance; and the effigies of Mr. Andrew Lang were admired in the Marquesas. There is the place for him to go when he shall be weary of Middlesex and Homer. It was perhaps yet more important that I had enjoyed in my youth some knowledge of our Scots folk of the Highlands and the Islands. Not much beyond a century has passed since these were in the same convulsive and transitionary state as the Marquesans of to-day. In both cases an alien authority enforced, the clans disarmed, the chiefs deposed, new customs introduced, and chiefly that fashion of regarding money as the means and object of existence. The commercial age, in each, succeeding at a bound to an age of war abroad and patriarchal communism at home. In one the cherished practice of tattooing, in the other a cherished costume, proscribed. In each a main luxury cut off: beef, driven under cloud of night from Lowland pastures, denied to the meat-loving Highlander; long-pig, pirated from the next village, to the man-eating Kanaka. The grumbling, the secret ferment, the fears and resentments, the alarms and sudden councils of Marquesan chiefs, reminded me continually of the days of Lovat and Struan. Hospitality, tact, natural fine manners, and a touchy punctilio, are common to both races: common to both tongues the trick of dropping medial consonants. Here is a table of two widespread Polynesian words:-- House. Love.[1] Tahitian FARE AROHA New Zealand WHARE Samoan FALE TALOFA Manihiki FALE ALOHA Hawaiian HALE ALOHA Marquesan HA'E KAOHA The elision of medial consonants, so marked in these Marquesan instances, is no less common both in Gaelic and the Lowland Scots. Stranger still, that prevalent Polynesian sound, the so-called catch, written with an apostrophe, and often or always the gravestone of a perished consonant, is to be heard in Scotland to this day. When a Scot pronounces water, better, or bottle--_wa'er, be'er_, or _bo'le_--the sound is precisely that of the catch; and I think we may go beyond, and say, that if such a population could be isolated, and this mispronunciation should become the rule, it might prove the first stage of transition from _t_ to _k_, which is the disease of Polynesian languages. The tendency of the Marquesans, however, is to urge against consonants, or at least on the very common letter _l_, a war of mere extermination. A hiatus is agreeable to any Polynesian ear; the ear even of the stranger soon grows used to these barbaric voids; but only in the Marquesan will you find such names as _Haaii_ and _Paaaeua_, when each individual vowel must be separately uttered. These points of similarity between a South Sea people and some of my own folk at home ran much in my head in the islands; and not only inclined me to view my fresh acquaintances with favour, but continually modified my judgment. A polite Englishman comes to-day to the Marquesans and is amazed to find the men tattooed; polite Italians came not long ago to England and found our fathers stained with woad; and when I paid the return visit as a little boy, I was highly diverted with the backwardness of Italy: so insecure, so much a matter of the day and hour, is the pre-eminence of race. It was so that I hit upon a means of communication which I recommend to travellers. When I desired any detail of savage custom, or of superstitious belief, I cast back in the story of my fathers, and fished for what I wanted with some trait of equal barbarism: Michael Scott, Lord Derwentwater's head, the second-sight, the Water Kelpie--each of these I have found to be a killing bait; the black bull's head of Stirling procured me the legend of _Rahero_; and what I knew of the Cluny Macphersons, or the Appin Stewarts, enabled me to learn, and helped me to understand, about the _Tevas_ of Tahiti. The native was no longer ashamed, his sense of kinship grew warmer, and his lips were opened. It is this sense of kinship that the traveller must rouse and share; or he had better content himself with travels from the blue bed to the brown. And the presence of one Cockney titterer will cause a whole party to walk in clouds of darkness. The hamlet of Anaho stands on a margin of flat land between the west of the beach and the spring of the impending mountains. A grove of palms, perpetually ruffling its green fans, carpets it (as for a triumph) with fallen branches, and shades it like an arbour. A road runs from end to end of the covert among beds of flowers, the milliner's shop of the community; and here and there, in the grateful twilight, in an air filled with a diversity of scents, and still within hearing of the surf upon the reef, the native houses stand in scattered neighbourhood. The same word, as we have seen, represents in many tongues of Polynesia, with scarce a shade of difference, the abode of man. But although the word be the same, the structure itself continually varies; and the Marquesan, among the most backward and barbarous of islanders, is yet the most commodiously lodged. The grass huts of Hawaii, the birdcage houses of Tahiti, or the open shed, with the crazy Venetian blinds, of the polite Samoan--none of these can be compared with the Marquesan _paepae-hae_, or dwelling platform. The paepae is an oblong terrace built without cement of black volcanic stone, from twenty to fifty feet in length, raised from four to eight feet from the earth, and accessible by a broad stair. Along the back of this, and coming to about half its width, runs the open front of the house, like a covered gallery: the interior sometimes neat and almost elegant in its bareness, the sleeping space divided off by an endlong coaming, some bright raiment perhaps hanging from a nail, and a lamp and one of White's sewing-machines, the only marks of civilisation. On the outside, at one end of the terrace, burns the cooking-fire under a shed; at the other there is perhaps a pen for pigs; the remainder is the evening lounge and _al fresco_ banquet-hall of the inhabitants. To some houses water is brought down the mountain in bamboo pipes, perforated for the sake of sweetness. With the Highland comparison in my mind, I was struck to remember the sluttish mounds of turf and stone in which I have sat and been entertained in the Hebrides and the North Islands. Two things, I suppose, explain the contrast. In Scotland wood is rare, and with materials so rude as turf and stone the very hope of neatness is excluded. And in Scotland it is cold. Shelter and a hearth are needs so pressing that a man looks not beyond; he is out all day after a bare bellyful, and at night when he saith, "Aha, it is warm!" he has not appetite for more. Or if for something else, then something higher; a fine school of poetry and song arose in these rough shelters, and an air like "Lochaber no more" is an evidence of refinement more convincing, as well as more imperishable, than a palace. To one such dwelling platform a considerable troop of relatives and dependants resort. In the hour of the dusk, when the fire blazes, and the scent of the cooked breadfruit fills the air, and perhaps the lamp glints already between the pillars of the house, you shall behold them silently assemble to this meal, men, women, and children; and the dogs and pigs frisk together up the terrace stairway, switching rival tails. The strangers from the ship were soon equally welcome: welcome to dip their fingers in the wooden dish, to drink cocoa-nuts, to share the circulating pipe, and to hear and hold high debate about the misdeeds of the French, the Panama Canal, or the geographical position of San Francisco and New Yo'ko. In a Highland hamlet, quite out of reach of any tourist, I have met the same plain and dignified hospitality. I have mentioned two facts--the distasteful behaviour of our earliest visitors, and the case of the lady who rubbed herself upon the cushions--which would give a very false opinion of Marquesan manners. The great majority of Polynesians are excellently mannered; but the Marquesan stands apart, annoying and attractive, wild, shy, and refined. If you make him a present he affects to forget it, and it must be offered him again at his going: a pretty formality I have found nowhere else. A hint will get rid of any one or any number; they are so fiercely proud and modest; while many of the more lovable but blunter islanders crowd upon a stranger, and can be no more driven off than flies. A slight or an insult the Marquesan seems never to forget. I was one day talking by the wayside with my friend Hoka, when I perceived his eyes suddenly to flash and his stature to swell. A white horseman was coming down the mountain, and as he passed, and while he paused to exchange salutations with myself, Hoka was still staring and ruffling like a gamecock. It was a Corsican who had years before called him _cochon sauvage_--_coçon chauvage_, as Hoka mispronounced it. With people so nice and so touchy, it was scarce to be supposed that our company of greenhorns should not blunder into offences. Hoka, on one of his visits, fell suddenly in a brooding silence, and presently after left the ship with cold formality. When he took me back into favour, he adroitly and pointedly explained the nature of my offence: I had asked him to sell cocoa-nuts; and in Hoka's view articles of food were things that a gentleman should give, not sell; or at least that he should not sell to any friend. On another occasion I gave my boat's crew a luncheon of chocolate and biscuits. I had sinned, I could never learn how, against some point of observance; and though I was drily thanked, my offerings were left upon the beach. But our worst mistake was a slight we put on Toma, Hoka's adoptive father, and in his own eyes the rightful chief of Anaho. In the first place, we did not call upon him, as perhaps we should, in his fine new European house, the only one in the hamlet. In the second, when we came ashore upon a visit to his rival, Taipi-kikino, it was Toma whom we saw standing at the head of the beach, a magnificent figure of a man, magnificently tattooed; and it was of Toma that we asked our question: "Where is the chief?" "What chief?" cried Toma, and turned his back on the blasphemers. Nor did he forgive us. Hoka came and went with us daily; but, alone I believe of all the countryside, neither Toma nor his wife set foot on board the _Casco_. The temptation resisted it is hard for a European to compute. The flying city of Laputa moored for a fortnight in St. James's Park affords but a pale figure of the _Casco_ anchored before Anaho; for the Londoner has still his change of pleasures, but the Marquesan passes to his grave through an unbroken uniformity of days. On the afternoon before it was intended we should sail, a valedictory party came on board: nine of our particular friends equipped with gifts and dressed as for a festival. Hoka, the chief dancer and singer, the greatest dandy of Anaho, and one of the handsomest young fellows in the world--sullen, showy, dramatic, light as a feather and strong as an ox--it would have been hard, on that occasion, to recognise, as he sat there stooped and silent, his face heavy and grey. It was strange to see the lad so much affected; stranger still to recognise in his last gift one of the curios we had refused on the first day, and to know our friend, so gaily dressed, so plainly moved at our departure, for one of the half-naked crew that had besieged and insulted us on our arrival: strangest of all, perhaps, to find, in that carved handle of a fan, the last of those curiosities of the first day which had now all been given to us by their possessors--their chief merchandise, for which they had sought to ransom us as long as we were strangers, which they pressed on us for nothing as soon as we were friends. The last visit was not long protracted. One after another they shook hands and got down into their canoe; when Hoka turned his back immediately upon the ship, so that we saw his face no more. Taipi, on the other hand, remained standing and facing us with gracious valedictory gestures; and when Captain Otis dipped the ensign, the whole party saluted with their hats. This was the farewell; the episode of our visit to Anaho was held concluded; and though the _Casco_ remained nearly forty hours at her moorings, not one returned on board, and I am inclined to think they avoided appearing on the beach. This reserve and dignity is the finest trait of the Marquesan. FOOTNOTE: [1] Where that word is used as a salutation I give that form. CHAPTER III THE MAROON Of the beauties of Anaho books might be written. I remember waking about three, to find the air temperate and scented. The long swell brimmed into the bay, and seemed to fill it full and then subside. Gently, deeply, and silently the _Casco_ rolled; only at times a block piped like a bird. Oceanward, the heaven was bright with stars and the sea with their reflections. If I looked to that side, I might have sung with the Hawaiian poet: _Ua maomao ka lani, ua kahaea luna_, _Ua pipi ka maka o ka hoku_. (The heavens were fair, they stretched above, Many were the eyes of the stars.) And then I turned shoreward, and high squalls were overhead; the mountains loomed up black; and I could have fancied I had slipped ten thousand miles away and was anchored in a Highland loch; that when the day came, it would show pine, and heather, and green fern, and roofs of turf sending up the smoke of peats; and the alien speech that should next greet my ears must be Gaelic, not Kanaka. And day, when it came, brought other sights and thoughts. I have watched the morning break in many quarters of the world--it has been certainly one of the chief joys of my existence; and the dawn that I saw with most emotion shone upon the bay of Anaho. The mountains abruptly overhang the port with every variety of surface and of inclination, lawn, and cliff, and forest. Not one of these but wore its proper tint of saffron, of sulphur, of the clove, and of the rose. The lustre was like that of satin; on the lighter hues there seemed to float an efflorescence; a solemn bloom appeared on the more dark. The light itself was the ordinary light of morning, colourless and clean; and on this ground of jewels, pencilled out the least detail of drawing. Meanwhile, around the hamlet, under the palms, where the blue shadow lingered, the red coals of cocoa husk and the light trails of smoke betrayed the awakening business of the day; along the beach men and women, lads and lasses, were returning from the bath in bright raiment, red and blue and green, such as we delighted to see in the coloured little pictures of our childhood; and presently the sun had cleared the eastern hill, and the glow of the day was over all. The glow continued and increased, the business, from the main part, ceased before it had begun. Twice in the day there was a certain stir of shepherding along the seaward hills. At times a canoe went out to fish. At times a woman or two languidly filled a basket in the cotton patch. At times a pipe would sound out of the shadow of a house, ringing the changes on its three notes, with an effect like _Que le jour me dure_ repeated endlessly. Or at times, across a corner of the bay, two natives might communicate in the Marquesan manner with conventional whistlings. All else was sleep and silence. The surf broke and shone around the shores; a species of black crane fished in the broken water; the black pigs were continually galloping by on some affair; but the people might never have awaked, or they might all be dead. My favourite haunt was opposite the hamlet, where was a landing in a cove under a lianaed cliff. The beach was lined with palms and a tree called the purao, something between the fig and mulberry in growth, and bearing a flower like a great yellow poppy with a maroon heart. In places rocks encroached upon the sand; the beach would be all submerged; and the surf would bubble warmly as high as to my knees, and play with cocoa-nut husks as our more homely ocean plays with wreck and wrack and bottles. As the reflux drew down, marvels of colour and design streamed between my feet; which I would grasp at, miss, or seize: now to find them what they promised, shells to grace a cabinet or be set in gold upon a lady's finger; now to catch only _maya_ of coloured sand, pounded fragments and pebbles, that, as soon as they were dry, became as dull and homely as the flints upon a garden path. I have toiled at this childish pleasure for hours in the strong sun, conscious of my incurable ignorance; but too keenly pleased to be ashamed. Meanwhile, the blackbird (or his tropical understudy) would be fluting in the thickets overhead. A little further, in the turn of the bay, a streamlet trickled in the bottom of a den, thence spilling down a stair of rock into the sea. The draught of air drew down under the foliage in the very bottom of the den, which was a perfect arbour for coolness. In front it stood open on the blue bay and the _Casco_ lying there under her awning and her cheerful colours. Overhead was a thatch of puraos, and over these again palms brandished their bright fans, as I have seen a conjurer make himself a halo out of naked swords. For in this spot, over a neck of low land at the foot of the mountains, the trade-wind streams into Anaho Bay in a flood of almost constant volume and velocity, and of a heavenly coolness. It chanced one day that I was ashore in the cove with Mrs. Stevenson and the ship's cook. Except for the _Casco_ lying outside, and a crane or two, and the ever-busy wind and sea, the face of the world was of a prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stock-still, and the sense of isolation was profound and refreshing. On a sudden, the trade wind, coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck and scattered the fans of the palms above the den; and, behold! in two of the tops there sat a native, motionless as an idol and watching us, you would have said, without a wink. The next moment the tree closed, and the glimpse was gone. This discovery of human presences latent overhead in a place where we had supposed ourselves alone, the immobility of our tree-top spies, and the thought that perhaps at all hours we were similarly supervised, struck us with a chill. Talk languished on the beach. As for the cook (whose conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set foot on shore, and twice, when the _Casco_ appeared to be driving on the rocks, it was amusing to observe that man's alacrity; death, he was persuaded, awaiting him upon the beach. It was more than a year later, in the Gilberts, that the explanation dawned upon myself. The natives were drawing palm-tree wine, a thing forbidden by law; and when the wind thus suddenly revealed them, they were doubtless more troubled than ourselves. At the top of the den there dwelt an old, melancholy, grizzled man of the name of Tari (Charlie) Coffin. He was a native of Oahu, in the Sandwich Islands; and had gone to sea in his youth in the American whalers; a circumstance to which he owed his name, his English, his down-east twang, and the misfortune of his innocent life. For one captain, sailing out of New Bedford, carried him to Nuka-hiva and marooned him there among the cannibals. The motive for this act was inconceivably small; poor Tari's wages, which were thus economised, would scarce have shook the credit of the New Bedford owners. And the act itself was simply murder. Tari's life must have hung in the beginning by a hair. In the grief and terror of that time, it is not unlikely he went mad, an infirmity to which he was still liable; or perhaps a child may have taken a fancy to him and ordained him to be spared. He escaped at least alive, married in the island, and when I knew him was a widower with a married son and a granddaughter. But the thought of Oahu haunted him; its praise was for ever on his lips; he beheld it, looking back, as a place of ceaseless feasting, song, and dance; and in his dreams I dare say he revisits it with joy. I wonder what he would think if he could be carried there indeed, and see the modern town of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the palace with its guards, and the great hotel, and Mr. Berger's band with their uniforms and outlandish instruments; or what he would think to see the brown faces grown so few and the white so many; and his father's land sold for planting sugar, and his father's house quite perished, or perhaps the last of them struck leprous and immured between the surf and the cliffs on Molokai? So simply, even in South Sea Islands, and so sadly, the changes come. Tari was poor, and poorly lodged. His house was a wooden frame, run up by Europeans; it was indeed his official residence, for Tari was the shepherd of the promontory sheep. I can give a perfect inventory of its contents: three kegs, a tin biscuit-box, an iron sauce-pan, several cocoa-shell cups, a lantern, and three bottles, probably containing oil; while the clothes of the family and a few mats were thrown across the open rafters. Upon my first meeting with this exile he had conceived for me one of the baseless island friendships, had given me nuts to drink, and carried me up the den "to see my house"--the only entertainment that he had to offer. He liked the "Amelican," he said, and the "Inglisman," but the "Flessman" was his abhorrence; and he was careful to explain that if he had thought us "Fless," we should have had none of his nuts, and never a sight of his house. His distaste for the French I can partly understand, but not at all his toleration of the Anglo-Saxon. The next day he brought me a pig, and some days later one of our party going ashore found him in act to bring a second. We were still strange to the islands; we were pained by the poor man's generosity, which he could ill afford, and, by a natural enough but quite unpardonable blunder, we refused the pig. Had Tari been a Marquesan we should have seen him no more; being what he was, the most mild, long-suffering, melancholy man, he took a revenge a hundred times more painful. Scarce had the canoe with the nine villagers put off from their farewell before the _Casco_ was boarded from the other side. It was Tari; coming thus late because he had no canoe of his own, and had found it hard to borrow one; coming thus solitary (as indeed we always saw him), because he was a stranger in the land, and the dreariest of company. The rest of my family basely fled from the encounter. I must receive our injured friend alone; and the interview must have lasted hard upon an hour, for he was loath to tear himself away. "You go 'way. I see you no more--no, sir!" he lamented; and then, looking about him with rueful admiration, "This goodee ship--no, sir!--goodee ship!" he would exclaim; the "no, sir," thrown out sharply through the nose upon a rising inflection, an echo from New Bedford and the fallacious whaler. From these expressions of grief and praise, he would return continually to the case of the rejected pig. "I like give plesent all 'e same you," he complained; "only got pig: you no take him!" He was a poor man; he had no choice of gifts; he had only a pig, he repeated; and I had refused it. I have rarely been more wretched than to see him sitting there, so old, so grey, so poor, so hardly fortuned, of so rueful a countenance, and to appreciate, with growing keenness, the affront which I had so innocently dealt him; but it was one of those cases in which speech is vain. Tari's son was smiling and inert; his daughter-in-law, a girl of sixteen, pretty, gentle, and grave, more intelligent than most Anaho-women, and with a fair share of French; his grandchild, a mite of a creature at the breast. I went up the den one day when Tari was from home, and found the son making a cotton sack, and madame suckling mademoiselle. When I had sat down with them on the floor, the girl began to question me about England; which I tried to describe, piling the pan and the cocoa shells one upon another to represent the houses and explaining, as best I was able, and by word and gesture, the over-population, the hunger, and the perpetual toil. "_Pas de cocotiers? pas de popoi?_" she asked. I told her it was too cold, and went through an elaborate performance, shutting out draughts, and crouching over an imaginary fire, to make sure she understood. But she understood right well; remarked it must be bad for the health, and sat a while gravely reflecting on that picture of unwonted sorrows. I am sure it roused her pity, for it struck in her another thought always uppermost in the Marquesan bosom; and she began with a smiling sadness, and looking on me out of melancholy eyes, to lament the decease of her own people. "_Ici pas de Kanaques_," said she; and taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both her hands. "_Tenez_--a little baby like this; then dead. All the Kanaques die. Then no more." The smile, and this instancing by the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood affected me strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair. Meanwhile the husband smilingly made his sack; and the unconscious babe struggled to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship's offering, which I had just brought up the den; and in a perspective of centuries I saw their case as ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day already numbered when there should be no more Beretani, and no more of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched me) no more literary works and no more readers. CHAPTER IV DEATH The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the Marquesan. It would be strange if it were otherwise. The race is perhaps the handsomest extant. Six feet is about the middle height of males; they are strongly muscled, free from fat, swift in action, graceful in repose; and the women, though fatter and duller, are still comely animals. To judge by the eye, there is no race more viable; and yet death reaps them with both hands. When Bishop Dordillon first came to Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman Melville under the grotesque mis-spelling of Hapar. There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have been neglected: "He shall be able to see," "He shall be able to tell," "He shall be able to charm," said the friendly godmothers; "But he shall not be able to hear," exclaimed the last. The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered some four hundred when the small-pox came and reduced them by one fourth. Six months later a woman developed tubercular consumption; the disease spread like a fire about the valley, and in less than a year two survivors, a man and a woman, fled from that new-created solitude. A similar Adam and Eve may some day wither among new races, the tragic residue of Britain. When I first heard this story the date staggered me; but I am now inclined to think it possible. Early in the year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, a first case of phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen persons, and by the month of August, when the tale was told me, one soul survived, and that was a boy who had been absent at his schooling. And depopulation works both ways, the doors of death being set wide open, and the door of birth almost closed. Thus, in the half-year ending July 1888 there were twelve deaths and but one birth in the district of the Hatiheu. Seven or eight more deaths were to be looked for in the ordinary course; and M. Aussel, the observant gendarme, knew of but one likely birth. At this rate it is no matter of surprise if the population in that part should have declined in forty years from six thousand to less than four hundred; which are, once more on the authority of M. Aussel, the estimated figures. And the rate of decline must have even accelerated towards the end. A good way to appreciate the depopulation is to go by land from Anaho to Hatiheu on the adjacent bay. The road is good travelling, but cruelly steep. We seemed scarce to have passed the deserted house which stands highest in Anaho before we were looking dizzily down upon its roof; the _Casco_ well out in the bay, and rolling for a wager, shrank visibly; and presently through the gap of Tari's isthmus, Ua-huna was seen to hang cloudlike on the horizon. Over the summit, where the wind blew really chill, and whistled in the reed-like grass, and tossed the grassy fell of the pandanus, we stepped suddenly, as through a door, into the next vale and bay of Hatiheu. A bowl of mountains encloses it upon three sides. On the fourth this rampart has been bombarded into ruins, runs down to seaward in imminent and shattered crags, and presents the one practicable breach of the blue bay. The interior of this vessel is crowded with lovely and valuable trees,--orange, breadfruit, mummy-apple, coco, the island chestnut, and for weeds, the pine and the banana. Four perennial streams water and keep it green; and along the dell, first of one, then of another, of these, the road, for a considerable distance, descends into this fortunate valley. The song of the waters and the familiar disarray of boulders gave us a strong sense of home, which the exotic foliage, the daft-like growth of the pandanus, the buttressed trunk of the banyan, the black pigs galloping in the bush, and the architecture of the native houses dissipated ere it could be enjoyed. The houses on the Hatiheu side begin high up; higher yet, the more melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes. When a native habitation is deserted, the superstructure--pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable tropical timber--speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the wind. Only the stones of the terrace endure; nor can any ruin, cairn, or standing stone, or vitrified fort present a more stern appearance of antiquity. We must have passed from six to eight of these now houseless platforms. On the main road of the island, where it crosses the valley of Taipi, Mr. Osbourne tells me they are to be reckoned by the dozen; and as the roads have been made long posterior to their erection, perhaps to their desertion, and must simply be regarded as lines drawn at random through the bush, the forest on either hand must be equally filled with these survivals: the grave-stones of whole families. Such ruins are tapu[2] in the strictest sense; no native must approach them; they have become outposts of the kingdom of the grave. It might appear a natural and pious custom in the hundreds who are left, the rearguard of perished thousands, that their feet should leave untrod these hearthstones of their fathers. I believe, in fact, the custom rests on different and more grim conceptions. But the house, the grave, and even the body of the dead, have been always particularly honoured by Marquesans. Until recently the corpse was sometimes kept in the family and daily oiled and sunned, until, by gradual and revolting stages, it dried into a kind of mummy. Offerings are still laid upon the grave. In Traitor's Bay, Mr. Osbourne saw a man buy a looking-glass to lay upon his son's. And the sentiment against the desecration of tombs, thoughtlessly ruffled in the laying down of the new roads, is a chief ingredient in the native hatred for the French. The Marquesan beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his race. The thought of death sits down with him to meat, and rises with him from his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of mortality awful to support; and he is so inured to the apprehension that he greets the reality with relief. He does not even seek to support a disappointment; at an affront, at a breach of one of his fleeting and communistic love-affairs, he seeks an instant refuge in the grave. Hanging is now the fashion. I heard of three who had hanged themselves in the west end of Hiva-oa during the first half of 1888; but though this be a common form of suicide in other parts of the South Seas, I cannot think it will continue popular in the Marquesas. Far more suitable to Marquesan sentiment is the old form of poisoning with the fruit of the eva, which offers to the native suicide a cruel but deliberate death, and gives time for those decencies of the last hour, to which he attaches such remarkable importance. The coffin can thus be at hand, the pigs killed, the cry of the mourners sounding already through the house; and then it is, and not before, that the Marquesan is conscious of achievement, his life all rounded in, his robes (like Cæsar's) adjusted for the final act. Praise not any man till he is dead, said the ancients; envy not any man till you hear the mourners, might be the Marquesan parody. The coffin, though of late introduction, strangely engages their attention. It is to the mature Marquesan what a watch is to the European schoolboy. For ten years Queen Vaekehu had dunned the fathers; at last, but the other day, they let her have her will, gave her her coffin, and the woman's soul is at rest. I was told a droll instance of the force of this preoccupation. The Polynesians are subject to a disease seemingly rather of the will than of the body. I was told the Tahitians have a word for it, _erimatua_, but cannot find it in my dictionary. A gendarme, M. Nouveau, has seen men beginning to succumb to this insubstantial malady, has routed them from their houses, turned them on to do their trick upon the roads, and in two days has seen them cured. But this other remedy is more original: a Marquesan, dying of this discouragement--perhaps I should rather say this acquiescence--has been known, at the fulfilment of his crowning wish, on the mere sight of that desired hermitage, his coffin--to revive, recover, shake off the hand of death, and be restored for years to his occupations--carving tikis (idols), let us say, or braiding old men's beards. From all this it may be conceived how easily they meet death when it approaches naturally. I heard one example, grim and picturesque. In the time of the small-pox in Hapaa, an old man was seized with the disease; he had no thought of recovery; had his grave dug by a wayside, and lived in it for near a fortnight, eating, drinking, and smoking with the passers-by, talking mostly of his end, and equally unconcerned for himself and careless of the friends whom he infected. This proneness to suicide, and loose seat in life, is not peculiar to the Marquesan. What is peculiar is the widespread depression and acceptance of the national end. Pleasures are neglected, the dance languishes, the songs are forgotten. It is true that some, and perhaps too many, of them are proscribed; but many remain, if there were spirit to support or to revive them. At the last feast of the Bastille, Stanislao Moanatini shed tears when he beheld the inanimate performance of the dancers. When the people sang for us in Anaho, they must apologise for the smallness of their repertory. They were only young folk present, they said, and it was only the old that knew the songs. The whole body of Marquesan poetry and music was being suffered to die out with a single dispirited generation. The full import is apparent only to one acquainted with other Polynesian races; who knows how the Samoan coins a fresh song for every trifling incident, or who has heard (on Penrhyn, for instance) a band of little stripling maids from eight to twelve keep up their minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch, one song following another without pause. In like manner, the Marquesan, never industrious, begins now to cease altogether from production. The exports of the group decline out of all proportion even with the death-rate of the islanders. "The coral waxes, the palm grows, and man departs," says the Marquesan; and he folds his hands. And surely this is nature. Fond as it may appear, we labour and refrain, not for the reward of any single life, but with a timid eye upon the lives and memories of our successors; and where no one is to succeed, of his own family, or his own tongue, I doubt whether Rothschilds would make money or Cato practise virtue. It is natural, also, that a temporary stimulus should sometimes rouse the Marquesan from his lethargy. Over all the landward shore of Anaho cotton runs like a wild weed; man or woman, whoever comes to pick it, may earn a dollar in the day; yet when we arrived, the trader's store-house was entirely empty; and before we left it was nearly full. So long as the circus was there, so long as the _Casco_ was yet anchored in the bay, it behoved every one to make his visit; and to this end every woman must have a new dress, and every man a shirt and trousers. Never before, in Mr. Regler's experience, had they displayed so much activity. In their despondency there is an element of dread. The fear of ghosts and of the dark is very deeply written in the mind of the Polynesian; not least of the Marquesan. Poor Taipi, the chief of Anaho, was condemned to ride to Hatiheu on a moonless night. He borrowed a lantern, sat a long while nerving himself for the adventure, and when he at last departed, wrung the _Cascos_ by the hand as for a final separation. Certain presences, called Vehinehae, frequent and make terrible the nocturnal roadside; I was told by one they were like so much mist, and as the traveller walked into them dispersed and dissipated; another described them as being shaped like men and having eyes like cats; from none could I obtain the smallest clearness as to what they did, or wherefore they were dreaded. We may be sure at least they represent the dead; for the dead, in the minds of the islanders, are all-pervasive. "When a native says that he is a man," writes Dr. Codrington, "he means that he is a man and not a ghost; not that he is a man and not a beast. The intelligent agents of this world are to his mind the men who are alive, and the ghosts the men who are dead." Dr. Codrington speaks of Melanesia; from what I have learned his words are equally true of the Polynesian. And yet more. Among cannibal Polynesians a dreadful suspicion rests generally on the dead; and the Marquesans, the greatest cannibals of all, are scarce likely to be free from similar beliefs. I hazard the guess that the Vehinehae are the hungry spirits of the dead, continuing their life's business of the cannibal ambuscade, and lying everywhere unseen, and eager to devour the living. Another superstition I picked up through the troubled medium of Tari Coffin's English. The dead, he told me, came and danced by night around the paepae of their former family; the family were thereupon overcome by some emotion (but whether of pious sorrow or of fear I could not gather), and must "make a feast," of which fish, pig, and popoi were indispensable ingredients. So far this is clear enough. But here Tari went on to instance the new house of Toma and the house-warming feast which was just then in preparation as instances in point. Dare we indeed string them together, and add the case of the deserted ruin, as though the dead continually besieged the paepaes of the living; were kept at arm's-length, even from the first foundation, only by propitiatory feasts, and, so soon as the fire of life went out upon the hearth, swarmed back into possession of their ancient seat? I speak by guess of these Marquesan superstitions. On the cannibal ghost I shall return elsewhere with certainty. And it is enough, for the present purpose, to remark that the men of the Marquesas, from whatever reason, fear and shrink from the presence of ghosts. Conceive how this must tell upon the nerves in islands where the number of the dead already so far exceeds that of the living, and the dead multiply and the living dwindle at so swift a rate. Conceive how the remnant huddles about the embers of the fire of life; even as old Red Indians, deserted on the march and in the snow, the kindly tribe all gone, the last flame expiring, and the night around populous with wolves. FOOTNOTE: [2] In English usually written "taboo": "tapu" is the correct Tahitian form.--[ED.] CHAPTER V DEPOPULATION Over the whole extent of the South Seas, from one tropic to another, we find traces of a bygone state of over-population, when the resources of even a tropical soil were taxed, and even the improvident Polynesian trembled for the future. We may accept some of the ideas of Mr. Darwin's theory of coral islands, and suppose a rise of the sea, or the subsidence of some former continental area, to have driven into the tops of the mountains multitudes of refugees. Or we may suppose, more soberly, a people of sea-rovers, emigrants from a crowded country, to strike upon and settle island after island, and as time went on to multiply exceedingly in their new seats. In either case the end must be the same; soon or late it must grow apparent that the crew are too numerous, and that famine is at hand. The Polynesians met this emergent danger with various expedients of activity and prevention. A way was found to preserve breadfruit by packing it in artificial pits; pits forty feet in depth and of proportionate bore are still to be seen, I am told, in the Marquesas; and yet even these were insufficient for the teeming people, and the annals of the past are gloomy with famine and cannibalism. Among the Hawaiians--a hardier people, in a more exacting climate--agriculture was carried far; the land was irrigated with canals; and the fish-ponds of Molokai prove the number and diligence of the old inhabitants. Meanwhile, over all the island world, abortion and infanticide prevailed. On coral atolls, where the danger was most plainly obvious, these were enforced by law and sanctioned by punishment. On Vaitupu, in the Ellices, only two children were allowed to a couple; on Nukufetau, but one. On the latter the punishment was by fine; and it is related that the fine was sometimes paid, and the child spared. This is characteristic. For no people in the world are so fond or so long-suffering with children--children make the mirth and the adornment of their homes, serving them for playthings and for picture-galleries. "Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them." The stray bastard is contended for by rival families; and the natural and the adopted children play and grow up together undistinguished. The spoiling, and I may almost say the deification, of the child, is nowhere carried so far as in the eastern islands; and furthest, according to my opportunities of observation, in the Paumotu group, the so-called Low or Dangerous Archipelago. I have seen a Paumotuan native turn from me with embarrassment and disaffection because I suggested that a brat would be the better for a beating. It is a daily matter in some eastern islands to see a child strike or even stone its mother, and the mother, so far from punishing, scarce ventures to resist. In some, when his child was born, a chief was superseded and resigned his name; as though, like a drone, he had then fulfilled the occasion of his being. And in some the lightest words of children had the weight of oracles. Only the other day, in the Marquesas, if a child conceived a distaste to any stranger, I am assured the stranger would be slain. And I shall have to tell in another place an instance of the opposite: how a child in Manihiki having taken a fancy to myself, her adoptive parents at once accepted the situation and loaded me with gifts. With such sentiments the necessity for child destruction would not fail to clash, and I believe we find the trace of divided feeling in the Tahitian brotherhood of Oro. At a certain date a new god was added to the Society-Island Olympus, or an old one refurbished and made popular. Oro was his name, and he may be compared with the Bacchus of the ancients. His zealots sailed from bay to bay, and from island to island; they were everywhere received with feasting; wore fine clothes, sang, danced, acted; gave exhibitions of dexterity and strength; and were the artists, the acrobats, the bards, and the harlots of the group. Their life was public and epicurean; their initiation a mystery; and the highest in the land aspired to join the brotherhood. If a couple stood next in line to a high-chieftaincy, they were suffered, on grounds of policy, to spare one child; all other children, who had a father or a mother in the company of Oro, stood condemned from the moment of conception. A freemasonry, an agnostic sect, a company of artists, its members all under oath to spread unchastity, and all forbidden to leave offspring--I do not know how it may appear to others, but to me the design seems obvious. Famine menacing the islands, and the needful remedy repulsive, it was recommended to the native mind by these trappings of mystery, pleasure, and parade. This is the more probable, and the secret, serious purpose of the institution appears the more plainly, if it be true, that after a certain period of life, the obligation of the votary was changed; at first, bound to be profligate; afterwards, expected to be chaste. Here, then, we have one side of the case. Man-eating among kindly men, child-murder among child-lovers, industry in a race the most idle, invention in a race the least progressive, this grim, pagan salvation-army of the brotherhood of Oro, the report of early voyagers, the widespread vestiges of former habitation, and the universal tradition of the islands, all point to the same fact of former crowding and alarm. And to-day we are face to face with the reverse. To-day in the Marquesas, in the Eight Islands of Hawaii, in Mangareva, in Easter Island, we find the same race perishing like flies. Why this change? Or, grant that the coming of the whites, the change of habits, and the introduction of new maladies and vices, fully explain the depopulation, why is that depopulation not universal? The population of Tahiti, after a period of alarming decrease, has again become stationary. I hear of a similar result among some Maori tribes; in many of the Paumotus a slight increase is to be observed; and the Samoans are to-day as healthy and at least as fruitful as before the change. Grant that the Tahitians, the Maoris, and the Paumotuans have become inured to the new conditions; and what are we to make of the Samoans, who have never suffered? Those who are acquainted only with a single group are apt to be ready with solutions. Thus I have heard the mortality of the Maoris attributed to their change of residence--from fortified hill-tops to the low, marshy vicinity of their plantations. How plausible! And yet the Marquesans are dying out in the same houses where their fathers multiplied. Or take opium. The Marquesas and Hawaii are the two groups the most infected with this vice; the population of the one is the most civilised, that of the other by far the most barbarous, of Polynesians; and they are two of those that perish the most rapidly. Here is a strong case against opium. But let us take unchastity, and we shall find the Marquesas and Hawaii figuring again upon another count. Thus, Samoans are the most chaste of Polynesians, and they are to this day entirely fertile; Marquesans are the most debauched: we have seen how they are perishing; Hawaiians are notoriously lax, and they begin to be dotted among deserts. So here is a case stronger still against chastity; and here also we have a correction to apply. Whatever the virtues of the Tahitian, neither friend nor enemy dares call him chaste; and yet he seems to have outlived the time of danger. One last example: syphilis has been plausibly credited with much of the sterility. But the Samoans are, by all accounts, as fruitful as at first; by some accounts more so; and it is not seriously to be argued that the Samoans have escaped syphilis. These examples show how dangerous it is to reason from any particular cause, or even from many in a single group. I have in my eye an able and amiable pamphlet by the Rev. S.E. Bishop: "Why are the Hawaiians Dying Out?" Any one interested in the subject ought to read this tract, which contains real information; and yet Mr. Bishop's views would have been changed by an acquaintance with other groups. Samoa is, for the moment, the main and the most instructive exception to the rule. The people are the most chaste, and one of the most temperate of island peoples. They have never been tried and depressed with any grave pestilence. Their clothing has scarce been tampered with; at the simple and becoming tabard of the girls, Tartuffe, in many another island, would have cried out; for the cool, healthy, and modest lavalava or kilt, Tartuffe has managed in many another island to substitute stifling and inconvenient trousers. Lastly, and perhaps chiefly, so far from their amusements having been curtailed, I think they have been, upon the whole, extended. The Polynesian falls easily into despondency: bereavement, disappointment, the fear of novel visitations, the decay or proscription of ancient pleasures, easily incline him to be sad; and sadness detaches him from life. The melancholy of the Hawaiian and the emptiness of his new life are striking; and the remark is yet more apposite to the Marquesas. In Samoa, on the other hand, perpetual song and dance, perpetual games, journeys, and pleasures, make an animated and a smiling picture of the island life. And the Samoans are to-day the gayest and the best entertained inhabitants of our planet. The importance of this can scarcely be exaggerated. In a climate and upon a soil where a livelihood can be had for the stooping, entertainment is a prime necessity. It is otherwise with us, where life presents us with a daily problem, and there is a serious interest, and some of the heat of conflict, in the mere continuing to be. So, in certain atolls, where there is no great gaiety, but man must bestir himself with some vigour for his daily bread, public health and the population are maintained; but in the lotos islands, with the decay of pleasures, life itself decays. It is from this point of view that we may instance, among other causes of depression, the decay of war. We have been so long used in Europe to that dreary business of war on the great scale, trailing epidemics and leaving pestilential corpses in its train, that we have almost forgotten its original, the most healthful, if not the most humane, of all field sports--hedge-warfare. From this, as well as from the rest of his amusements and interests, the islander, upon a hundred islands, has been recently cut off. And to this, as well as to so many others, the Samoan still makes good a special title. Upon the whole, the problem seems to me to stand thus:--Where there have been fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there the race survives. Where there have been most, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there it perishes. Each change, however small, augments the sum of new conditions to which the race has to become inured. There may seem, _a priori_, no comparison between the change from "sour toddy" to bad gin, and that from the island kilt to a pair of European trousers. Yet I am far from persuaded that the one is any more hurtful than the other; and the unaccustomed race will sometimes die of pin-pricks. We are here face to face with one of the difficulties of the missionary. In Polynesian islands he easily obtains pre-eminent authority; the king becomes his _maire du palais_; he can proscribe, he can command; and the temptation is ever towards too much. Thus (by all accounts) the Catholics in Mangareva, and thus (to my own knowledge) the Protestants in Hawaii, have rendered life in a more or less degree unliveable to their converts. And the mild, uncomplaining creatures (like children in a prison) yawn and await death. It is easy to blame the missionary. But it is his business to make changes. It is surely his business, for example, to prevent war; and yet I have instanced war itself as one of the elements of health. On the other hand, it were perhaps, easy for the missionary to proceed more gently, and to regard every change as an affair of weight. I take the average missionary; I am sure I do him no more than justice when I suppose that he would hesitate to bombard a village, even in order to convert an archipelago. Experience begins to show us (at least in Polynesian islands) that change of habit is bloodier than a bombardment. There is one point, ere I have done, where I may go to meet criticism. I have said nothing of faulty hygiene, bathing during fevers, mistaken treatment of children, native doctoring, or abortion--all causes frequently adduced. And I have said nothing of them because they are conditions common to both epochs, and even more efficient in the past than in the present. Was it not the same with unchastity, it may be asked? Was not the Polynesian always unchaste? Doubtless he was so always: doubtless he is more so since the coming of his remarkably chaste visitors from Europe. Take the Hawaiian account of Cook: I have no doubt it is entirely fair. Take Krusenstern's candid, almost innocent, description of a Russian man-of-war at the Marquesas; consider the disgraceful history of missions in Hawaii itself, where (in the war of lust) the American missionaries were once shelled by an English adventurer, and once raided and mishandled by the crew of an American warship; add the practice of whaling fleets to call at the Marquesas, and carry off a complement of women for the cruise; consider, besides, how the whites were at first regarded in the light of demi-gods, as appears plainly in the reception of Cook upon Hawaii; and again, in the story of the discovery of Tutuila, when the really decent women of Samoa prostituted themselves in public to the French; and bear in mind how it was the custom of the adventurers, and we may almost say the business of the missionaries, to deride and infract even the most salutary tapus. Here we see every engine of dissolution directed at once against a virtue never and nowhere very strong or popular; and the result, even in the most degraded islands, has been further degradation. Mr. Lawes, the missionary of Savage Island, told me the standard of female chastity had declined there since the coming of the whites. In heathen time, if a girl gave birth to a bastard, her father or brother would dash the infant down the cliffs; and to-day the scandal would be small. Or take the Marquesas. Stanislao Moanatini told me that in his own recollection the young were strictly guarded; they were not suffered so much as to look upon one another in the street, but passed (so my informant put it) like dogs; and the other day the whole school-children of Nuka-hiva and Ua-pu escaped in a body to the woods, and lived there for a fortnight in promiscuous liberty. Readers of travels may perhaps exclaim at my authority, and declare themselves better informed. I should prefer the statement of an intelligent native like Stanislao (even if it stood alone, which it is far from doing) to the report of the most honest traveller. A ship of war comes to a haven, anchors, lands a party, receives and returns a visit, and the captain writes a chapter on the manners of the island. It is not considered what class is mostly seen. Yet we should not be pleased if a Lascar foremast hand were to judge England by the ladies who parade Ratcliffe Highway, and the gentlemen who share with them their hire. Stanislao's opinion of a decay of virtue even in these unvirtuous islands has been supported to me by others; his very example, the progress of dissolution amongst the young, is adduced by Mr. Bishop in Hawaii. And so far as Marquesans are concerned, we might have hazarded a guess of some decline in manners. I do not think that any race could ever have prospered or multiplied with such as now obtain; I am sure they would have been never at the pains to count paternal kinship. It is not possible to give details; suffice it that their manners appear to be imitated from the dreams of ignorant and vicious children, and their debauches persevered in until energy, reason, and almost life itself are in abeyance. CHAPTER VI CHIEFS AND TAPUS We used to admire exceedingly the bland and gallant manners of the chief called Taipi-Kikino. An elegant guest at table, skilled in the use of knife and fork, a brave figure when he shouldered a gun and started for the woods after wild chickens, always serviceable, always ingratiating and gay, I would sometimes wonder where he found his cheerfulness. He had enough to sober him, I thought, in his official budget. His expenses--for he was always seen attired in virgin white--must have by far exceeded his income of six dollars in the year, or say two shillings a month. And he was himself a man of no substance; his house the poorest in the village. It was currently supposed that his elder brother, Kauanui, must have helped him out. But how comes it that the elder brother should succeed to the family estate, and be a wealthy commoner, and the younger be a poor man, and yet rule as chief in Anaho? That the one should be wealthy and the other almost indigent is probably to be explained by some adoption; for comparatively few children are brought up in the house or succeed to the estates of their natural begetters. That the one should be chief instead of the other must be explained (in a very Irish fashion) on the ground that neither of them is a chief at all. Since the return and the wars of the French, many chiefs have been deposed, and many so-called chiefs appointed. We have seen, in the same house, one such upstart drinking in the company of two such extruded island Bourbons, men, whose word a few years ago was life and death, now sunk to be peasants like their neighbours. So when the French overthrew hereditary tyrants, dubbed the commons of the Marquesas freeborn citizens of the republic, and endowed them with a vote for a _conseiller-général_ at Tahiti, they probably conceived themselves upon the path to popularity; and so far from that, they were revolting public sentiment. The deposition of the chiefs was perhaps sometimes needful; the appointment of others may have been needful also; it was at least a delicate business. The Government of George II. exiled many Highland magnates. It never occurred to them to manufacture substitutes; and if the French have been more bold, we have yet to see with what success. Our chief at Anaho was always called, he always called himself, Taipi-Kikino; and yet that was not his name, but only the wand of his false position. As soon as he was appointed chief, his name--which signified, if I remember exactly, _Prince born among flowers_--fell in abeyance, and he was dubbed instead by the expressive byword, Taipi-Kikino--_Highwater man-of-no-account_--or, Englishing more boldly, _Beggar on horseback_--a witty and a wicked cut. A nickname in Polynesia destroys almost the memory of the original name. To-day, if we were Polynesians, Gladstone would be no more heard of. We should speak of and address our Nestor as the Grand Old Man, and it is so that himself would sign his correspondence. Not the prevalence, then, but the significancy of the nickname is to be noted here. The new authority began with small prestige. Taipi has now been some time in office; from all I saw he seemed a person very fit. He is not the least unpopular, and yet his power is nothing. He is a chief to the French, and goes to breakfast with the Resident; but for any practical end of chieftaincy a rag doll were equally efficient. We had been but three days in Anaho when we received the visit of the chief of Hatiheu, a man of weight and fame, late leader of a war upon the French, late prisoner in Tahiti, and the last eater of long-pig in Nuka-hiva. Not many years have elapsed since he was seen striding on the beach of Anaho, a dead man's arm across his shoulder. "So does Kooamua to his enemies!" he roared to the passers-by, and took a bite from the raw flesh. And now behold this gentleman, very wisely replaced in office by the French, paying us a morning visit in European clothes. He was the man of the most character we had yet seen: his manners genial and decisive, his person tall, his face rugged, astute, formidable, and with a certain similarity to Mr. Gladstone's only for the brownness of the skin, and the high-chief's tattooing, all one side and much of the other being of an even blue. Further acquaintance increased our opinion of his sense. He viewed the _Casco_ in a manner then quite new to us, examining her lines and the running of the gear; to a piece of knitting on which one of the party was engaged, he must have devoted ten minutes' patient study; nor did he desist before he had divined the principles; and he was interested even to excitement by a type-writer, which he learned to work. When he departed he carried away with him a list of his family, with his own name printed by his own hand at the bottom. I should add that he was plainly much of a humorist, and not a little of a humbug. He told us, for instance, that he was a person of exact sobriety; such being the obligation of his high estate: the commons might be sots, but the chief could not stoop so low. And not many days after he was to be observed in a state of smiling and lop-sided imbecility, the _Casco_ ribbon upside down on his dishonoured hat. But his business that morning in Anaho is what concerns us here. The devil-fish, it seems, were growing scarce upon the reef; it was judged fit to interpose what we should call a close season; for that end, in Polynesia, a tapu (vulgarly spelt "taboo") has to be declared, and who was to declare it? Taipi might; he ought; it was a chief part of his duty; but would any one regard the inhibition of a Beggar on Horseback? He might plant palm branches: it did not in the least follow that the spot was sacred. He might recite the spell: it was shrewdly supposed the spirits would not hearken. And so the old, legitimate cannibal must ride over the mountains to do it for him; and the respectable official in white clothes could but look on and envy. At about the same time, though in a different manner, Kooamua established a forest law. It was observed the coco-palms were suffering, for the plucking of green nuts impoverishes and at last endangers the tree. Now Kooamua could tapu the reef, which was public property, but he could not tapu other people's palms; and the expedient adopted was interesting. He tapu'd his own trees, and his example was imitated over all Hatiueu and Anaho. I fear Taipi might have tapu'd all that he possessed and found none to follow him. So much for the esteem in which the dignity of an appointed chief is held by others; a single circumstance will show what he thinks of it himself. I never met one, but he took an early opportunity to explain his situation. True, he was only an appointed chief when I beheld him; but somewhere else, perhaps upon some other isle, he was a chieftain by descent: upon which ground, he asked me (so to say it) to excuse his mushroom honours. It will be observed with surprise that both these tapus are for thoroughly sensible ends. With surprise, I say, because the nature of that institution is much misunderstood in Europe. It is taken usually in the sense of a meaningless or wanton prohibition, such as that which to-day prevents women in some countries from smoking, or yesterday prevented any one in Scotland from taking a walk on Sunday. The error is no less natural than it is unjust. The Polynesians have not been trained in the bracing, practical thought of ancient Rome; with them the idea of law has not been disengaged from that of morals or propriety; so that tapu has to cover the whole field, and implies indifferently that an act is criminal, immoral, against sound public policy, unbecoming or (as we say) "not in good form." Many tapus were in consequence absurd enough, such as those which deleted words out of the language, and particularly those which related to women, Tapu encircled women upon all hands. Many things were forbidden to men; to women we may say that few were permitted. They must not sit on the paepae; they must not go up to it by the stair; they must not eat pork; they must not approach a boat; they must not cook at a fire which any male had kindled. The other day, after the roads were made, it was observed the women plunged along the margin through the bush, and when they came to a bridge waded through the water: roads and bridges were the work of men's hands, and tapu for the foot of women. Even a man's saddle, if the man be native, is a thing no self-respecting lady dares to use. Thus on the Anaho side of the island, only two white men, Mr. Regler and the gendarme, M. Aussel, possess saddles: and when a woman has a journey to make she must borrow from one or other. It will be noticed that these prohibitions tend, most of them, to an increased reserve between the sexes. Regard for female chastity is the usual excuse for these disabilities that men delight to lay upon their wives and mothers. Here the regard is absent; and behold the women still bound hand and foot with meaningless proprieties! The women themselves, who are survivors of the old regimen, admit that in those days life was not worth living. And yet even then there were exceptions. There were female chiefs and (I am assured) priestesses besides; nice customs curtseyed to great dames, and in the most sacred enclosure of a High Place, Father Siméon Delmar was shown a stone, and told it was the throne of some well-descended lady. How exactly parallel is this with European practice, when princesses were suffered to penetrate the strictest cloister, and women could rule over a land in which they were denied the control of their own children. But the tapu is more often the instrument of wise and needful restrictions. We have seen it as the organ of paternal government. It serves besides to enforce, in the rare case of some one wishing to enforce them, rights of private property. Thus a man, weary of the coming and going of Marquesan visitors, tapu's his door; and to this day you may see the palm-branch signal, even as our great-grandfathers saw the peeled wand before a Highland inn. Or take another case. Anaho is known as "the country without popoi." The word popoi serves in different islands to indicate the main food of the people; thus, in Hawaii, it implies a preparation of taro; in the Marquesas, of breadfruit. And a Marquesan does not readily conceive life possible without his favourite diet. A few years ago a drought killed the breadfruit trees and the bananas in the district of Anaho; and from this calamity, and the open-handed customs of the island, a singular state of things arose. Well-watered Hatiheu had escaped the drought; every householder of Anaho accordingly crossed the pass, chose some one in Hatiheu, "gave him his name"--an onerous gift, but one not to be rejected--and from this improvised relative proceeded to draw his supplies, for all the world as though he had paid for them. Hence a continued traffic on the road. Some stalwart fellow, in a loin-cloth, and glistening with sweat, may be seen at all hours of the day, a stick across his bare shoulders, tripping nervously under a double burthen of green fruits. And on the far side of the gap a dozen stone posts on the wayside in the shadow of a grove mark the breathing-place of the popoi-carriers. A little back from the breach, and not half a mile from Anaho, I was the more amazed to find a cluster of well-doing breadfruits heavy with their harvest. "Why do you not take these?" I asked. "Tapu," said Hoka; and I thought to myself (after the manner of dull travellers) what children and fools these people were to toil over the mountain and despoil innocent neighbours when the staff of life was thus growing at their door. I was the more in error. In the general destruction these surviving trees were enough only for the family of the proprietor, and by the simple expedient of declaring a tapu he enforced his right. The sanction of the tapu is superstitious; and the punishment of infraction either a wasting or a deadly sickness. A slow disease follows on the eating of tapu fish, and can only be cured with the bones of the same fish burned with the due mysteries. The cocoa-nut and breadfruit tapu works more swiftly. Suppose you have eaten tapu fruit at the evening meal, at night your sleep will be uneasy; in the morning, swelling and a dark discoloration will have attacked your neck, whence they spread upward to the face; and in two days, unless the cure be interjected, you must die. This cure is prepared from the rubbed leaves of the tree from which the patient stole; so that he cannot be saved without confessing to the Tahuku the person whom he wronged. In the experience of my informant, almost no tapu had been put in use, except the two described: he had thus no opportunity to learn the nature and operation of the others; and, as the art of making them was jealously guarded amongst the old men, he believed the mystery would soon die out. I should add that he was no Marquesan, but a Chinaman, a resident in the group from boyhood, and a reverent believer in the spells which he described. White men, amongst whom Ah Fu included himself, were exempt; but he had a tale of a Tahitian woman, who had come to the Marquesas, eaten tapu fish, and, although uninformed of her offence and danger, had been afflicted and cured exactly like a native. Doubtless the belief is strong; doubtless, with this weakly and fanciful race, it is in many cases strong enough to kill; it should be strong indeed in those who tapu their trees secretly, so that they may detect a depredator by his sickness. Or, perhaps, we should understand the idea of the hidden tapu otherwise, as a politic device to spread uneasiness and extort confessions: so that, when a man is ailing, he shall ransack his brain for any possible offence, and send at once for any proprietor whose rights he has invaded. "Had you hidden a tapu?" we may conceive him asking: and I cannot imagine the proprietor gainsaying it; and that is perhaps the strangest feature of the system--that it should be regarded from without with such a mental and implicit awe, and, when examined from within, should present so many apparent evidences of design. We read in Dr. Campbell's "Poenamo" of a New Zealand girl, who was foolishly told that she had eaten a tapu yam, and who instantly sickened, and died in the two days of simple terror. The period is the same as in the Marquesas; doubtless the symptoms were so too. How singular to consider that a superstition of such sway is possibly a manufactured article; and that, even if it were not originally invented, its details have plainly been arranged by the authorities of some Polynesian Scotland Yard. Fitly enough, the belief is to-day--and was probably always--far from universal. Hell at home is a strong deterrent with some; a passing thought with others; with others, again, a theme of public mockery, not always well assured; and so in the Marquesas with the tapu. Mr. Regler has seen the two extremes of scepticism and implicit fear. In the tapu grove he found one fellow stealing breadfruit, cheerful and impudent as a street arab; and it was only on a menace of exposure that he showed himself the least discountenanced. The other case was opposed in every point. Mr. Regler asked a native to accompany him upon a voyage; the man went gladly enough, but suddenly perceiving a dead tapu fish in the bottom of the boat, leaped back with a scream; nor could the promise of a dollar prevail upon him to advance. The Marquesan, it will be observed, adheres to the old idea of the local circumscription of beliefs and duties. Not only are the whites exempt from consequences; but their transgressions seem to be viewed without horror. It was Mr. Regler who had killed the fish; yet the devout native was not shocked at Mr. Regler--only refused to join him in his boat. A white is a white: the servant (so to speak) of other and more liberal gods; and not to be blamed if he profit by his liberty. The Jews were perhaps the first to interrupt this ancient comity of faiths; and the Jewish virus is still strong in Christianity. All the world must respect our tapus, or we gnash our teeth. CHAPTER VII HATIHEU The bays of Anaho and Hatiheu are divided at their roots by the knife-edge of a single hill--the pass so often mentioned; but this isthmus expands to the seaward in a considerable peninsula: very bare and grassy; haunted by sheep, and, at night and morning, by the piercing cries of the shepherds; wandered over by a few wild goats; and on its sea-front indented with long, clamorous caves, and faced with cliffs of the colour and ruinous outline of an old peat-stack. In one of these echoing and sunless gullies we saw, clustered like sea-birds on a splashing ledge, shrill as sea-birds in their salutation to the passing boat, a group of fisherwomen, stripped to their gaudy underclothes. (The clash of the surf and the thin female voices echo in my memory.) We had that day a native crew and steersman, Kauanui; it was our first experience of Polynesian seamanship, which consists in hugging every point of land. There is no thought in this of saving time, for they will pull a long way in to skirt a point that is embayed. It seems that, as they can never get their houses near enough the surf upon the one side, so they can never get their boats near enough upon the other. The practice in bold water is not so dangerous as it looks--the reflex from the rocks sending the boat off. Near beaches with a heavy run of sea, I continue to think it very hazardous, and find the composure of the natives annoying to behold. We took unmingled pleasure, on the way out, to see so near at hand the beach and the wonderful colours of the surf. On the way back, when the sea had risen and was running strong against us, the fineness of the steersman's aim grew more embarrassing. As we came abreast of the sea-front, where the surf broke highest, Kauanui embraced the occasion to light his pipe, which then made the circuit of the boat--each man taking a whiff or two, and, ere he passed it on, filling his lungs and cheeks with smoke. Their faces were all puffed out like apples as we came abreast of the cliff foot, and the bursting surge fell back into the boat in showers. At the next point "cocanetti" was the word, and the stroke borrowed my knife, and desisted from his labours to open nuts. These untimely indulgences may be compared to the tot of grog served out before a ship goes into action. My purpose in this visit led me first to the boys' school, for Hatiheu is the university of the north islands. The hum of the lesson came out to meet us. Close by the door, where the draught blew coolest, sat the lay brother; around him, in a packed half-circle, some sixty high-coloured faces set with staring eyes; and in the background of the barn-like room benches were to be seen, and blackboards with sums on them in chalk. The brother rose to greet us, sensibly humble. Thirty years he had been there, he said, and fingered his white locks as a bashful child pulls out his pinafore. "_Et point de résultats, monsieur, presque pas de résultats._" He pointed to the scholars: "You see, sir, all the youth of Nuka-hiva and Ua-pu. Between the ages of six and fifteen this is all that remains; and it is but a few years since we had a hundred and twenty from Nuka-hiva alone. _Oui, monsieur, cela se dépérit._" Prayers, and reading and writing, prayers again and arithmetic, and more prayers to conclude: such appeared to be the dreary nature of the course. For arithmetic all island people have a natural taste. In Hawaii they make good progress in mathematics. In one of the villages on Majuro, and generally in the Marshall group, the whole population sit about the trader when he is weighing copra, and each on his own slate takes down the figures and computes the total. The trader, finding them so apt, introduced fractions, for which they had been taught no rule. At first they were quite gravelled, but ultimately, by sheer hard thinking, reasoned out the result, and came one after another to assure the trader he was right. Not many people in Europe could have done the like. The course at Hatiheu is therefore less dispiriting to Polynesians than a stranger might have guessed; and yet how bald it is at best! I asked the brother if he did not tell them stories, and he stared at me; if he did not teach them history, and he said, "O yes, they had a little Scripture history--from the New Testament"; and repeated his lamentations over the lack of results. I had not the heart to put more questions; I could but say it must be very discouraging, and resist the impulse to add that it seemed also very natural. He looked up--"My days are far spent," he said; "heaven awaits me." May that heaven forgive me, but I was angry with the old man and his simple consolation. For think of his opportunity! The youth, from six to fifteen, are taken from their homes by Government, centralised at Hatiheu, where they are supported by a weekly tax of food; and, with the exception of one month in every year, surrendered wholly to the direction of the priests. Since the escapade already mentioned the holiday occurs at a different period for the girls and for the boys; so that a Marquesan brother and sister meet again, after their education is complete, a pair of strangers. It is a harsh law, and highly unpopular; but what a power it places in the hands of the instructors, and how languidly and dully is that power employed by the mission! Too much concern to make the natives pious, a design in which they all confess defeat, is, I suppose, the explanation of their miserable system. But they might see in the girls' school at Tai-o-hae, under the brisk, housewifely sisters, a different picture of efficiency, and a scene of neatness, airiness, and spirited and mirthful occupation that should shame them into cheerier methods. The sisters themselves lament their failure. They complain the annual holiday undoes the whole year's work; they complain particularly of the heartless indifference of the girls. Out of so many pretty and apparently affectionate pupils whom they have taught and reared, only two have ever returned to pay a visit of remembrance to their teachers. These, indeed, come regularly, but the rest, so soon as their school-days are over, disappear into the woods like captive insects. It is hard to imagine anything more discouraging; and yet I do not believe these ladies need despair. For a certain interval they keep the girls alive and innocently busy; and if it be at all possible to save the race, this would be the means. No such praise can be given to the boys' school at Hatiheu. The day is numbered already for them all; alike for the teacher and the scholars death is girt; he is afoot upon the march; and in the frequent interval they sit and yawn. But in life there seems a thread of purpose through the least significant; the drowsiest endeavour is not lost, and even the school at Hatiheu may be more useful than it seems. Hatiheu is a place of some pretensions. The end of the bay towards Anaho may be called the civil compound, for it boasts the house of Kooamua, and close on the beach, under a great tree, that of the gendarme, M. Armand Aussel, with his garden, his pictures, his books, and his excellent table, to which strangers are made welcome. No more singular contrast is possible than between the gendarmerie and the priesthood, who are besides in smouldering opposition and full of mutual complaints. A priest's kitchen in the eastern islands is a depressing spot to see; and many, or most of them, make no attempt to keep a garden, sparsely subsisting on their rations. But you will never dine with a gendarme without smacking your lips; and M. Aussel's home-made sausage and the salad from his garden are unforgotten delicacies. Pierre Loti may like to know that he is M. Aussel's favourite author, and that his books are read in the fit scenery of Hatiheu Bay. The other end is all religious. It is here that an overhanging and tip-tilted horn, a good sea-mark for Hatiheu, bursts naked from the verdure of the climbing forest, and breaks down shoreward in steep taluses and cliffs. From the edge of one of the highest, perhaps seven hundred or a thousand feet above the beach, a Virgin looks insignificantly down, like a poor lost doll, forgotten there by a giant child. This laborious symbol of the Catholics is always strange to Protestants; we conceive with wonder that men should think it worth while to toil so many days, and clamber so much about the face of precipices, for an end that makes us smile; and yet I believe it was the wise Bishop Dordillon who chose the place, and I know that those who had a hand in the enterprise look back with pride upon its vanquished dangers. The boys' school is a recent importation; it was at first in Tai-o-hae, beside the girls'; and it was only of late, after their joint escapade, that the width of the island was interposed between the sexes. But Hatiheu must have been a place of missionary importance from before. About midway of the beach no less than three churches stand grouped in a patch of bananas, intermingled with some pine-apples. Two are of wood: the original church, now in disuse; and a second that, for some mysterious reason, has never been used. The new church is of stone, with twin towers, walls flangeing into buttresses, and sculptured front. The design itself is good, simple, and shapely; but the character is all in the detail, where the architect has bloomed into the sculptor. It is impossible to tell in words of the angels (although they are more like winged archbishops) that stand guard upon the door, of the cherubs in the corners, of the scapegoat gargoyles, or the quaint and spirited relief, where St. Michael (the artist's patron) makes short work of a protesting Lucifer. We were never weary of viewing the imagery, so innocent, sometimes so funny, and yet in the best sense--in the sense of inventive gusto and expression--so artistic. I know not whether it was more strange to find a building of such merit in a corner of a barbarous isle, or to see a building so antique still bright with novelty. The architect, a French lay brother, still alive and well, and meditating fresh foundations, must have surely drawn his descent from a master-builder in the age of the cathedrals; and it was in looking on the church of Hatiheu that I seemed to perceive the secret charm of mediæval sculpture; that combination of the childish courage of the amateur, attempting all things, like the schoolboy on his slate, with the manly perseverance of the artist who does not know when he is conquered. I had always afterwards a strong wish to meet the architect, Brother Michel; and one day, when I was talking with the Resident in Tai-o-hae (the chief port of the island), there were shown in to us an old, worn, purblind, ascetic-looking priest, and a lay brother, a type of all that is most sound in France, with a broad, clever, honest, humorous countenance, an eye very large and bright, and a strong and healthy body inclining to obesity. But that his blouse was black and his face shaven clean, you might pick such a man to-day, toiling cheerfully in his own patch of vines, from half a dozen provinces of France; and yet he had always for me a haunting resemblance to an old kind friend of my boyhood, whom I name in case any of my readers should share with me that memory--Dr. Paul, of the West Kirk. Almost at the first word I was sure it was my architect, and in a moment we were deep in a discussion of Hatiheu church. Brother Michel spoke always of his labours with a twinkle of humour, underlying which it was possible to spy a serious pride, and the change from one to another was often very human and diverting. "_Et vos gargouilles moyen-âge_," cried I; "_comme elles sont originales!_" "_N'est-ce pas? Elles sont bien drôles!_" he said, smiling broadly; and the next moment, with a sudden gravity: "_Cependant il y en a une qui a une patte de cassé; il faut que je voie cela_." I asked if he had any model--a point we much discussed. "_Non_," said he simply; "_c'est une église idéale_." The relievo was his favourite performance, and very justly so. The angels at the door, he owned, he would like to destroy and replace. "_Ils n'ont pas de vie, ils manquent de vie. Vous devriez voir mon église à la Dominique; j'ai là une Vierge qui est vraiment gentille_." "Ah," I cried, "they told me you had said you would never build another church, and I wrote in my journal I could not believe it." "_Oui, j'aimerais bien en faire une autre,_" he confessed, and smiled at the confession. An artist will understand how much I was attracted by this conversation. There is no bond so near as a community in that unaffected interest and slightly shamefaced pride which mark the intelligent man enamoured of an art. He sees the limitations of his aim, the defects of his practice; he smiles to be so employed upon the shores of death, yet sees in his own devotion something worthy. Artists, if they had the same sense of humour with the Augurs, would smile like them on meeting, but the smile would not be scornful. I had occasion to see much of this excellent man. He sailed with us from Tai-o-hae to Hiva-oa, a dead beat of ninety miles against a heavy sea. It was what is called a good passage, and a feather in the _Casco's_ cap; but among the most miserable forty hours that any one of us had ever passed. We were swung and tossed together all that time like shot in a stage thunder-box. The mate was thrown down and had his head cut open; the captain was sick on deck; the cook sick in the galley. Of all our party only two sat down to dinner. I was one. I own that I felt wretchedly; and I can only say of the other, who professed to feel quite well, that she fled at an early moment from the table. It was in these circumstances that we skirted the windward shore of that indescribable island of Ua-pu; viewing with dizzy eyes the coves, the capes, the breakers, the climbing forests, and the inaccessible stone needles that surmount the mountains. The place persists, in a dark corner of our memories, like a piece of the scenery of nightmares. The end of this distressful passage, where we were to land our passengers, was in a similar vein of roughness. The surf ran high on the beach at Taahauku; the boat broached-to and capsized; and all hands were submerged. Only the brother himself, who was well used to the experience, skipped ashore, by some miracle of agility, with scarce a sprinkling. Thenceforward, during our stay at Hiva-oa, he was our cicerone and patron; introducing us, taking us excursions, serving us in every way, and making himself daily more beloved. Michel Blanc had been a carpenter by trade; had made money and retired, supposing his active days quite over: and it was only when he found idleness dangerous that he placed his capital and acquirements at the service of the mission. He became their carpenter, mason, architect, and engineer; added sculpture to his accomplishments, and was famous for his skill in gardening. He wore an enviable air of having found a port from life's contentions and lying there strongly anchored; went about his business with a jolly simplicity; complained of no lack of results--perhaps shyly thinking his own statuary result enough; and was altogether a pattern of the missionary layman. CHAPTER VIII THE PORT OF ENTRY The port--the mart, the civil and religious capital of these rude Islands--is called Tai-o-hae, and lies strung along the beach of a precipitous green bay in Nuka-hiva. It was midwinter when we came thither, and the weather was sultry, boisterous, and inconstant. Now the wind blew squally from the land down gaps of splintered precipice; now, between the sentinel islets of the entry, it came in gusts from seaward. Heavy and dark clouds impended on the summits; the rain roared and ceased; the scuppers of the mountain gushed; and the next day we would see the sides of the amphitheatre bearded with white falls. Along the beach the town shows a thin file of houses, mostly white, and all ensconced in the foliage of an avenue of green puraos; a pier gives access from the sea across the belt of breakers; to the eastward there stands, on a projecting bushy hill, the old fort which is now the calaboose, or prison; eastward still, alone in a garden, the Residency flies the colours of France. Just off Calaboose Hill, the tiny Government schooner rides almost permanently at anchor, marks eight bells in the morning (there or thereabout) with the unfurling of her flag, and salutes the setting sun with the report of a musket. Here dwell together, and share the comforts of a club (which may be enumerated as a billiard-board, absinthe, a map of the world on Mercator's projection, and one of the most agreeable verandahs in the tropics), a handful of whites of varying nationality, mostly French officials, German and Scottish merchant clerks, and the agents of the opium monopoly. There are besides three tavern-keepers, the shrewd Scot who runs the cotton gin-mill, two white ladies, and a sprinkling of people "on the beach"--a South Sea expression for which there is no exact equivalent. It is a pleasant society, and a hospitable. But one man, who was often to be seen seated on the logs at the pier-head, merits a word for the singularity of his history and appearance. Long ago, it seems, he fell in love with a native lady, a High Chiefess in Ua-pu. She, on being approached, declared she could never marry a man who was untattooed; it looked so naked; whereupon, with some greatness of soul, our hero put himself in the hands of the Tahukus, and, with still greater, persevered until the process was complete. He had certainly to bear a great expense, for the Tahuku will not work without reward; and certainly exquisite pain. Kooamua, high chief as he was, and one of the old school, was only part tattooed; he could not, he told us with lively pantomime, endure the torture to an end. Our enamoured countryman was more resolved; he was tattooed from head to foot in the most approved methods of the art: and at last presented himself before his mistress a new man. The fickle fair one could never behold him from that day except with laughter. For my part, I could never see the man without a kind of admiration; of him it might be said, if ever of any, that he had loved not wisely, but too well. The Residency stands by itself, Calaboose Hill screening it from the fringe of town along the further bay. The house is commodious, with wide verandahs; all day it stands open, back and front, and the trade blows copiously over its bare floors. On a week-day the garden offers a scene of most untropical animation, half a dozen convicts toiling there cheerfully with spade and barrow, and touching hats and smiling to the visitor like old attached family servants. On Sunday these are gone, and nothing to be seen but dogs of all ranks and sizes peacefully slumbering in the shady grounds; for the dogs of Tai-o-hae are very courtly-minded, and make the seat of Government their promenade and place of siesta. In front and beyond, a strip of green down loses itself in a low wood of many species of acacia; and deep in the wood a ruinous wall encloses the cemetery of the Europeans. English and Scottish sleep there, and Scandinavians, and French _maîtres de manoeuvres_ and _maîtres ouvriers;_ mingling alien dust. Back in the woods perhaps, the blackbird, or (as they call him there) the island nightingale, will be singing home strains; and the ceaseless requiem of the surf hangs on the ear. I have never seen a resting-place more quiet; but it was a long thought how far these sleepers had all travelled, and from what diverse homes they had set forth, to lie here in the end together. On the summit of its promontory hill, the calaboose stands all day with doors and window shutters open to the trade. On my first visit a dog was the only guardian visible. He, indeed, rose with an attitude so menacing that I was glad to lay hands on an old barrel-hoop; and I think the weapon must have been familiar, for the champion instantly retreated, and as I wandered round the court and through the building, I could see him, with a couple of companions, humbly dodging me about the corners. The prisoners' dormitory was a spacious, airy room, devoid of any furniture; its whitewashed walls covered with inscriptions in Marquesan and rude drawings: one of the pier, not badly done; one of a murder; several of French soldiers in uniform. There was one legend in French: "_Je n'est_" (sic) "_pas le sou_." From this noontide quietude it must not be supposed the prison was untenanted; the calaboose at Tai-o-hae does a good business. But some of its occupants were gardening at the Residency, and the rest were probably at work upon the streets, as free as our scavengers at home, although not so industrious. On the approach of evening they would be called in like children from play; and the harbour-master (who is also the gaoler) would go through the form of locking them up until six the next morning. Should a prisoner have any call in town, whether of pleasure or affairs, he has but to unhook the window-shutter; and if he is back again, and the shutter decently replaced, by the hour of call on the morrow, he may have met the harbour-master in the avenue, and there will be no complaint, far less any punishment. But this is not all. The charming French Resident, M. Delaruelle, carried me one day to the calaboose on an official visit. In the green court, a very ragged gentleman, his legs deformed with the island elephantiasis, saluted us smiling. "One of our political prisoners--an insurgent from Raiatea," said the Resident; and then to the gaoler: "I thought I had ordered him a new pair of trousers." Meanwhile no other convict was to be seen--"_Eh bien,_" said the Resident, "_où sont vos prisonniers?_" "_Monsieur le Résident,_" replied the gaoler, saluting with soldierly formality, "_comme c'est jour de fête, je les ai laissé aller à la chasse._" They were all upon the mountains hunting goats! Presently we came to the quarters of the women, likewise deserted--"_Où sont vos bonnes femmes?_" asked the Resident; and the gaoler cheerfully responded: "_Je crois, Monsieur le Résident, qu'elles sont allées quelquepart faire une visite._" It had been the design of M. Delaruelle, who was much in love with the whimsicalities of his small realm, to elicit something comical; but not even he expected anything so perfect as the last. To complete the picture of convict life in Tai-o-hae, it remains to be added that these criminals draw a salary as regularly as the President of the Republic. Ten sous a day is their hire. Thus they have money, food, shelter, clothing, and, I was about to write, their liberty. The French are certainly a good-natured people, and make easy masters. They are besides inclined to view the Marquesans with an eye of humorous indulgence. "They are dying, poor devils!" said M. Delaruelle: "the main thing is to let them die in peace." And it was not only well said, but I believe expressed the general thought. Yet there is another element to be considered; for these convicts are not merely useful, they are almost essential to the French existence. With a people incurably idle, dispirited by what can only be called endemic pestilence, and inflamed with ill-feeling against their new masters, crime and convict labour are a godsend to the Government. Theft is practically the sole crime. Originally petty pilferers, the men of Tai-o-hae now begin to force locks and attack strong-boxes. Hundreds of dollars have been taken at a time; though, with that redeeming moderation so common in Polynesian theft, the Marquesan burglar will always take a part and leave a part, sharing (so to speak) with the proprietor. If it be Chilian coin--the island currency--he will escape; if the sum is in gold, French silver, or bank-notes, the police wait until the money begins to come in circulation, and then easily pick out their man. And now comes the shameful part. In plain English, the prisoner is tortured until he confesses and (if that be possible) restores the money. To keep him alone, day and night, in the black hole, is to inflict on the Marquesan torture inexpressible. Even his robberies are carried on in the plain daylight, under the open sky, with the stimulus of enterprise, and the countenance of an accomplice; his terror of the dark is still insurmountable; conceive, then, what he endures in his solitary dungeon; conceive how he longs to confess, become a full-fledged convict, and be allowed to sleep beside his comrades. While we were in Tai-o-hae a thief was under prevention. He had entered a house about eight in the morning, forced a trunk, and stolen eleven hundred francs; and now, under the horrors of darkness, solitude, and a bedevilled cannibal imagination, he was reluctantly confessing and giving up his spoil. From one cache, which he had already pointed out, three hundred francs had been recovered, and it was expected that he would presently disgorge the rest. This would be ugly enough if it were all; but I am bound to say, because it is a matter the French should set at rest, that worse is continually hinted. I heard that one man was kept six days with his arms bound backward round a barrel; and it is the universal report that every gendarme in the South Seas is equipped with something in the nature of a thumb-screw. I do not know this. I never had the face to ask any of the gendarmes--pleasant, intelligent, and kindly fellows--with whom I have been intimate, and whose hospitality I have enjoyed; and perhaps the tale reposes (as I hope it does) on a misconstruction of that ingenious cat's-cradle with which the French agent of police so readily secures a prisoner. But whether physical or moral, torture is certainly employed; and by a barbarous injustice, the state of accusation (in which a man may very well be innocently placed) is positively painful; the state of conviction (in which all are supposed guilty) is comparatively free, and positively pleasant. Perhaps worse still,--not only the accused, but sometimes his wife, his mistress, or his friend, is subjected to the same hardships. I was admiring, in the tapu system, the ingenuity of native methods of detection; there is not much to admire in those of the French, and to lock up a timid child in a dark room, and, if he prove obstinate, lock up his sister in the next, is neither novel nor humane. The main occasion of these thefts is the new vice of opium-eating. "Here nobody ever works, and all eat opium," said a gendarme; and Ah Fu knew a woman who ate a dollar's worth in a day. The successful thief will give a handful of money to each of his friends, a dress to a woman, pass an evening in one of the taverns of Tai-o-hae, during which he treats all comers, produce a big lump of opium, and retire to the bush to eat and sleep it off. A trader, who did not sell opium, confessed to me that he was at his wit's end. "I do not sell it, but others do," said he. "The natives only work to buy it; if they walk over to me to sell their cotton, they have just to walk over to some one else to buy their opium with my money. And why should they be at the bother of two walks? There is no use talking," he added--"opium is the currency of this country." The man under prevention during my stay at Tai-o-hae lost patience while the Chinese opium-seller was being examined in his presence. "Of course he sold me opium!" he broke out; "all the Chinese here sell opium. It was only to buy opium that I stole; it is only to buy opium that anybody steals. And what you ought to do is to let no opium come here, and no Chinamen." This is precisely what is done in Samoa by a native Government; but the French have bound their own hands, and for forty thousand francs sold native subjects to crime and death. This horrid traffic may be said to have sprung up by accident. It was Captain Hart who had the misfortune to be the means of beginning it, at a time when his plantations flourished in the Marquesas, and he found a difficulty in keeping Chinese coolies. To-day the plantations are practically deserted and the Chinese gone; but in the meanwhile the natives have learned the vice, the patent brings in a round sum, and the needy Government at Papeete shut their eyes and open their pockets. Of course the patentee is supposed to sell to Chinamen alone; equally of course, no one could afford to pay forty thousand francs for the privilege of supplying a scattered handful of Chinese; and every one knows the truth, and all are ashamed of it. French officials shake their heads when opium is mentioned; and the agents of the farmer blush for their employment. Those that live in glass houses should not throw stones; as a subject of the British crown, I am an unwilling shareholder in the largest opium business under heaven. But the British case is highly complicated; it implies the livelihood of millions; and must be reformed, when it can be reformed at all, with prudence. This French business, on the other hand, is a nostrum and a mere excrescence. No native industry was to be encouraged: the poison is solemnly imported. No native habit was to be considered: the vice has been gratuitously introduced. And no creature profits, save the Government at Papeete--the not very enviable gentlemen who pay them, and the Chinese underlings who do the dirty work. CHAPTER IX THE HOUSE OF TEMOANA The history of the Marquesas is, of late years, much confused by the coming and going of the French. At least twice they have seized the archipelago, at least once deserted it; and in the meanwhile the natives pursued almost without interruption their desultory cannibal wars. Through these events and changing dynasties, a single considerable figure may be seen to move: that of the high chief, a king, Temoana. Odds and ends of his history came to my ears: how he was at first a convert of the Protestant mission; how he was kidnapped or exiled from his native land, served as cook aboard a whaler, and was shown, for small charge, in English seaports; how he returned at last to the Marquesas, fell under the strong and benign influence of the late bishop, extended his influence in the group, was for a while joint ruler with the prelate, and died at last the chief supporter of Catholicism and the French. His widow remains in receipt of two pounds a month from the French Government. Queen she is usually called, but in the official almanac she figures as "_Madame Vaekehu, Grande Chefesse_." His son (natural or adoptive, I know not which), Stanislao Moanatini, chief of Akaui, serves in Tai-o-hae as a kind of Minister of Public Works; and the daughter of Stanislao is High Chiefess of the southern island of Tauata. These, then, are the greatest folk of the archipelago; we thought them also the most estimable. This is the rule in Polynesia, with few exceptions; the higher the family, the better the man--better in sense, better in manners, and usually taller and stronger in body. A stranger advances blindfold. He scrapes acquaintance as he can. Save the tattoo in the Marquesas, nothing indicates the difference of rank; and yet almost invariably we found, after we had made them, that our friends were persons of station. I have said "usually taller and stronger." I might have been more absolute,--over all Polynesia, and a part of Micronesia, the rule holds good; the great ones of the isle, and even of the village, are greater of bone and muscle, and often heavier of flesh, than any commoner. The usual explanation--that the high-born child is more industriously shampooed--is probably the true one. In New Caledonia, at least, where the difference does not exist, or has never been remarked, the practice of shampooing seems to be itself unknown. Doctors would be well employed in a study of the point. Vaekehu lives at the other end of the town from the Residency, beyond the buildings of the mission. Her house is on the European plan: a table in the midst of the chief room: photographs and religious pictures on the wall. It commands to either hand a charming vista: through the front door, a peep of green lawn, scurrying pigs, the pendent fans of the coco-palm and the splendour of the bursting surf: through the back, mounting forest glades and coronals of precipice. Here, in the strong thorough-draught, Her Majesty received us in a simple gown of print, and with no mark of royalty but the exquisite finish of her tattooed mittens, the elaboration of her manners, and the gentle falsetto in which all the highly refined among Marquesan ladies (and Vaekehu above all others) delight to sing their language. An adopted daughter interpreted, while we gave the news, and rehearsed by name our friends of Anaho. As we talked, we could see, through the landward door, another lady of the household at her toilet under the green trees; who, presently, when her hair was arranged, and her hat wreathed with flowers, appeared upon the back verandah with gracious salutations. Vaekehu is very deaf; _"merci"_ is her only word of French; and I do not know that she seemed clever. An exquisite, kind refinement, with a shade of quietism, gathered perhaps from the nuns, was what chiefly struck us. Or rather, upon that first occasion, we were conscious of a sense as of district-visiting on our part, and reduced evangelical gentility on the part of our hostess. The other impression followed after she was more at ease, and came with Stanislao and his little girl to dine on board the Casco. She had dressed for the occasion: wore white, which very well became her strong brown face; and sat among us, eating or smoking her cigarette, quite cut off from all society, or only now and then included through the intermediary of her son. It was a position that might have been ridiculous, and she made it ornamental; making believe to hear and to be entertained; her face, whenever she met our eyes, lighting with the smile of good society; her contributions to the talk, when she made any, and that was seldom, always complimentary and pleasing. No attention was paid to the child, for instance, but what she remarked and thanked us for. Her parting with each, when she came to leave, was gracious and pretty, as had been every step of her behaviour. When Mrs. Stevenson held out her hand to say good-bye, Vaekehu took it, held it, and a moment smiled upon her; dropped it, and then, as upon a kindly afterthought, and with a sort of warmth of condescension, held out both hands and kissed my wife upon both cheeks. Given the same relation of years and of rank, the thing would have been so done on the boards of the Comédie Française; just so might Madame Brohan have warmed and condescended to Madame Broisat in the _Marquis de Villemer_. It was my part to accompany our guests ashore: when I kissed the little girl good-bye at the pier steps, Vaekehu gave a cry of gratification--reached down her hand into the boat, took mine, and pressed it with that flattering softness which seems the coquetry of the old lady in every quarter of the earth. The next moment she had taken Stanislao's arm, and they moved off along the pier in the moonlight, leaving me bewildered. This was a queen of cannibals; she was tattooed from hand to foot, and perhaps the greatest masterpiece of that art now extant, so that a while ago, before she was grown prim, her leg was one of the sights of Tai-o-hae; she had been passed from chief to chief; she had been fought for and taken in war; perhaps, being so great a lady, she had sat on the high place, and throned it there, alone of her sex, while the drums were going twenty strong and the priests carried up the blood-stained baskets of long-pig. And now behold her, out of that past of violence and sickening feasts, step forth, in her age, a quiet, smooth, elaborate old lady, such as you might find at home (mittened also, but not often so well-mannered) in a score of country houses. Only Vaekehu's mittens were of dye, not of silk; and they had been paid for, not in money, but the cooked flesh of men. It came in my mind with a clap, what she could think of it herself, and whether at heart, perhaps, she might not regret and aspire after the barbarous and stirring past. But when I asked Stanislao--"Ah!" said he, "she is content; she is religious, she passes all her days with the sisters." Stanislao (Stanislaos, with the final consonant evaded after the Polynesian habit) was sent by Bishop Dordillon to South America, and there educated by the fathers. His French is fluent, his talk sensible and spirited, and in his capacity of ganger-in-chief, he is of excellent service to the French. With the prestige of his name and family, and with the stick when needful, he keeps the natives working and the roads passable. Without Stanislao and the convicts, I am in doubt what would become of the present regimen in Nuka-hiva; whether the highways might not be suffered to close up, the pier to wash away, and the Residency to fall piecemeal about the ears of impotent officials. And yet, though the hereditary favourer, and one of the chief props of French authority, he has always an eye upon the past. He showed me where the old public place had stood, still to be traced by random piles of stone; told me how great and fine it was, and surrounded on all sides by populous houses, whence, at the beating of the drums, the folk crowded to make holiday. The drumbeat of the Polynesian has a strange and gloomy stimulation for the nerves of all. White persons feel it--at these precipitate sounds their hearts beat faster; and, according to old residents, its effect on the natives was extreme. Bishop Dordillon might entreat; Temoana himself command and threaten; at the note of the drum wild instincts triumphed. And now it might beat upon these ruins, and who should assemble? The houses are down, the people dead, their lineage extinct; and the sweepings and fugitives of distant bays and islands encamp upon their graves. The decline of the dance Stanislao especially laments. "_Chaque pays a ses coutumes_," said he; but in the report of any gendarme, perhaps corruptly eager to increase the number of délits and the instruments of his own power, custom after custom is placed on the expurgatorial index. "_Tenez, une danse qui n'est pas permise_," said Stanislao: "_je ne sais pas pourquoi, elle est très jolie, elle va comme ça_," and sticking his umbrella upright in the road, he sketched the steps and gestures. All his criticisms of the present, all his regrets for the past, struck me as temperate and sensible. The short term of office of the Resident he thought the chief defect of the administration; that officer having scarce begun to be efficient ere he was recalled. I thought I gathered, too, that he regarded with some fear the coming change from a naval to a civil governor. I am sure at least that I regard it so myself; for the civil servants of France have never appeared to any foreigner as at all the flower of their country, while her naval officers may challenge competition with the world. In all his talk, Stanislao was particular to speak of his own country as a land of savages; and when he stated an opinion of his own, it was with some apologetic preface, alleging that he was "a savage who had travelled." There was a deal, in this elaborate modesty, of honest pride. Yet there was something in the precaution that saddened me; and I could not but fear he was only forestalling a taunt that he had heard too often. I recall with interest two interviews with Stanislao. The first was a certain afternoon of tropic rain, which we passed together in the verandah of the club; talking at times with heightened voices as the showers redoubled overhead, passing at times into the billiard-room, to consult, in the dim, cloudy daylight, that map of the world which forms its chief adornment. He was naturally ignorant of English history, so that I had much of news to communicate. The story of Gordon I told him in full, and many episodes of the Indian Mutiny, Lucknow, the second battle of Cawnpore, the relief of Arrah, the death of poor Spottiswoode, and Sir Hugh Rose's hotspur, midland campaign. He was intent to hear; his brown face, strongly marked with small-pox, kindled and changed with each vicissitude. His eyes glowed with the reflected light of battle; his questions were many and intelligent, and it was chiefly these that sent us so often to the map. But it is of our parting that I keep the strongest sense. We were to sail on the morrow, and the night had fallen, dark, gusty, and rainy, when we stumbled up the hill to bid farewell to Stanislao. He had already loaded us with gifts; but more were waiting. We sat about the table over cigars and green cocoa-nuts; claps of wind blew through the house and extinguished the lamp, which was always instantly relighted with a single match; and these recurrent intervals of darkness were felt as a relief. For there was something painful and embarrassing in the kindness of that separation. "_Ah, vous devriez rester ici, mon cher ami!_" cried Stanislao. "_Vous êtes les gens qu'il faut pour les Kanaques; vous êtes doux, vous et votre famille; vous seriez obéis dans toutes les îles._" We had been civil; not always that, my conscience told me, and never anything beyond; and all this to-do is a measure, not of our considerateness, but of the want of it in others. The rest of the evening, on to Vaekehu's and back as far as to the pier, Stanislao walked with my arm and sheltered me with his umbrella; and after the boat had put off, we could still distinguish, in the murky darkness, his gestures of farewell. His words, if there were any, were drowned by the rain and the loud surf. I have mentioned presents, a vexed question in the South Seas; and one which well illustrates the common, ignorant habit of regarding races in a lump. In many quarters the Polynesian gives only to receive. I have visited islands where the population mobbed me for all the world like dogs after the waggon of cat's-meat; and where the frequent proposition, "You my pleni (friend)," or (with more of pathos) "You all 'e same my father," must be received with hearty laughter and a shout. And perhaps everywhere, among the greedy and rapacious, a gift is regarded as a sprat to catch a whale. It is the habit to give gifts and to receive returns, and such characters, complying with the custom, will look to it nearly that they do not lose. But for persons of a different stamp the statement must be reversed. The shabby Polynesian is anxious till he has received the return gift; the generous is uneasy until he has made it. The first is disappointed if you have not given more than he; the second is miserable if he thinks he has given less than you. This is my experience; if it clash with that of others, I pity their fortune, and praise mine: the circumstance cannot change what I have seen, nor lessen what I have received. And indeed I find that those who oppose me often argue from a ground of singular presumptions; comparing Polynesians with an ideal person, compact of generosity and gratitude, whom I never had the pleasure of encountering; and forgetting that what is almost poverty to us is wealth almost unthinkable to them. I will give one instance: I chanced to speak with consideration of these gifts of Stanislao's with a certain clever man, a great hater and contemner of Kanakas. "Well! what were they!" he cried. "A pack of old men's beards. Trash!" And the same gentleman, some half an hour later, being upon a different train of thought, dwelt at length on the esteem in which the Marquesans held that sort of property, how they preferred it to all others except land, and what fancy prices it would fetch. Using his own figures, I computed that, in this commodity alone, the gifts of Vaekehu and Stanislao represented between two and three hundred dollars; and the queen's official salary is of two hundred and forty in the year. But generosity on the one hand, and conspicuous meanness on the other, are in the South Seas, as at home, the exception. It is neither with any hope of gain, nor with any lively wish to please, that the ordinary Polynesian chooses and presents his gifts. A plain social duty lies before him, which he performs correctly, but without the least enthusiasm. And we shall best understand his attitude of mind, if we examine our own to the cognate absurdity of marriage presents. There we give without any special thought of a return; yet if the circumstance arise, and the return be withheld, we shall judge ourselves insulted. We give them usually without affection, and almost never with a genuine desire to please; and our gift is rather a mark of our own status than a measure of our love to the recipients. So in a great measure and with the common run of the Polynesians: their gifts are formal; they imply no more than social recognition; and they are made and reciprocated, as we pay and return our morning visits. And the practice of marking and measuring events and sentiments by presents is universal in the island world. A gift plays with them the part of stamp and seal; and has entered profoundly into the mind of islanders. Peace and war, marriage, adoption and naturalisation are celebrated or declared by the acceptance or the refusal of gifts; and it is as natural for the islander to bring a gift as for us to carry a card-case. CHAPTER X A PORTRAIT AND A STORY I have had occasion several times to name the late bishop, Father Dordillon, "Monseigneur," as he is still almost universally called, Vicar-Apostolic of the Marquesas and Bishop of Cambysopolis _in partibus_. Everywhere in the islands, among all classes and races, this fine, old, kindly, cheerful fellow is remembered with affection and respect. His influence with the natives was paramount. They reckoned him the highest of men--higher than an admiral; brought him their money to keep; took his advice upon their purchases; nor would they plant trees upon their own land till they had the approval of the father of the islands. During the time of the French exodus he singly represented Europe, living in the Residency, and ruling by the hand of Temoana. The first roads were made under his auspices and by his persuasion. The old road between Hatiheu and Anaho was got under way from either side on the ground that it would be pleasant for an evening promenade, and brought to completion by working on the rivalry of the two villages. The priest would boast in Hatiheu of the progress made in Anaho, and he would tell the folk of Anaho, "If you don't take care, your neighbours will be over the hill before you are at the top." It could not be so done to-day; it could then; death, opium, and depopulation had not gone so far; and the people of Hatiheu, I was told, still vied with each other in fine attire, and used to go out by families, in the cool of the evening, boat-sailing and racing in the bay. There seems some truth at least in the common view, that this joint reign of Temoana and the bishop was the last and brief golden age of the Marquesas. But the civil power returned, the mission was packed out of the Residency at twenty-four hours' notice, new methods supervened, and the golden age (whatever it quite was) came to an end. It is the strongest proof of Father Dordillon's prestige that it survived, seemingly without loss, this hasty deposition. His method with the natives was extremely mild. Among these barbarous children he still played the part of the smiling father; and he was careful to observe, in all indifferent matters, the Marquesan etiquette. Thus, in the singular system of artificial kinship, the bishop had been adopted by Vaekehu as a grandson; Miss Fisher, of Hatiheu, as a daughter. From that day, Monseigneur never addressed the young lady except as his mother, and closed his letters with the formalities of a dutiful son. With Europeans he could be strict, even to the extent of harshness. He made no distinction against heretics, with whom he was on friendly terms; but the rules of his own Church he would see observed; and once at least he had a white man clapped in gaol for the desecration of a saint's day. But even this rigour, so intolerable to laymen, so irritating to Protestants, could not shake his popularity. We shall best conceive him by examples nearer home; we may all have known some divine of the old school in Scotland, a literal Sabbatarian, a stickler for the letter of the law, who was yet in private modest, innocent, genial, and mirthful. Much such a man, it seems, was Father Dordillon. And his popularity bore a test yet stronger. He had the name, and probably deserved it, of a shrewd man in business and one that made the mission pay. Nothing so much stirs up resentment as the inmixture in commerce of religious bodies; but even rival traders spoke well of Monseigneur. His character is best portrayed in the story of the days of his decline. A time came when, from the failure of sight, he must desist from his literary labours: his Marquesan hymns, grammars, and dictionaries; his scientific papers, lives of saints, and devotional poetry. He cast about for a new interest: pitched on gardening, and was to be seen all day, with spade and water-pot, in his childlike eagerness, actually running between the borders. Another step of decay and he must leave his garden also. Instantly a new occupation was devised, and he sat in the mission cutting paper flowers and wreaths. His diocese was not great enough for his activity; the churches of the Marquesas were papered with his handiwork, and still he must be making more. "Ah," said he, smiling, "when I am dead what a fine time you will have clearing out my trash!" He had been dead about six months; but I was pleased to see some of his trophies still exposed, and looked upon them with a smile: the tribute (if I have read this cheerful character aright) which he would have preferred to any useless tears. Disease continued progressively to disable him; he who had clambered so stalwartly over the rude rocks of the Marquesas, bringing peace to warfaring clans, was for some time carried in a chair between the mission and the church, and at last confined to bed, impotent with dropsy, and tormented with bed-sores and sciatica. Here he lay two months without complaint; and on the 11th January 1888, in the seventy-ninth year of his life, and the thirty-fourth of his labours in the Marquesas, passed away. Those who have a taste for hearing missions, Protestant or Catholic, decried, must seek their pleasure elsewhere than in my pages. Whether Catholic or Protestant, with all their gross blots, with all their deficiency of candour, of humour, and of common sense, the missionaries are the best and the most useful whites in the Pacific. This is a subject which will follow us throughout; but there is one part of it that may conveniently be treated here. The married and the celibate missionary, each has his particular advantage and defect. The married missionary, taking him at the best, may offer to the native what he is much in want of--a higher picture of domestic life; but the woman at his elbow tends to keep him in touch with Europe and out of touch with Polynesia, and to perpetuate, and even to ingrain, parochial decencies far best forgotten. The mind of the female missionary tends, for instance, to be continually busied about dress. She can be taught with extreme difficulty to think any costume decent but that to which she grew accustomed on Clapham Common; and to gratify this prejudice, the native is put to useless expense, his mind is tainted with the morbidities of Europe, and his health is set in danger. The celibate missionary, on the other hand, and whether at best or worst, falls readily into native ways of life; to which he adds too commonly what is either a mark of celibate man at large, or an inheritance from mediæval saints--I mean slovenly habits and an unclean person. There are, of course, degrees in this; and the sister (of course, and all honour to her) is as fresh as a lady at a ball. For the diet there is nothing to be said--it must amaze and shock the Polynesian--but for the adoption of native habits there is much. "_Chaque pays a ses coutumes_," said Stanislao; these it is the missionary's delicate task to modify; and the more he can do so from within, and from a native standpoint, the better he will do his work; and here I think the Catholics have sometimes the advantage; in the Vicariate of Dordillon, I am sure they had it. I have heard the bishop blamed for his indulgence to the natives, and above all because he did not rage with sufficient energy against cannibalism. It was a part of his policy to live among the natives like an elder brother; to follow where he could; to lead where it was necessary; never to drive; and to encourage the growth of new habits, instead of violently rooting up the old. And it might be better, in the long-run, if this policy were always followed. It might be supposed that native missionaries would prove more indulgent, but the reverse is found to be the case. The new broom sweeps clean; and the white missionary of to-day is often embarrassed by the bigotry of his native coadjutor. What else should we expect? On some islands, sorcery, polygamy, human sacrifice, and tobacco-smoking have been prohibited, the dress of the native has been modified, and himself warned in strong terms against rival sects of Christianity; all by the same man, at the same period of time, and with the like authority. By what criterion is the convert to distinguish the essential from the unessential? He swallows the nostrum whole; there has been no play of mind, no instruction, and, except for some brute utility in the prohibitions, no advance. To call things by their proper names, this is teaching superstition. It is unfortunate to use the word; so few people have read history, and so many have dipped into little atheistic manuals, that the majority will rush to a conclusion, and suppose the labour lost. And far from that: These semi-spontaneous superstitions, varying with the sect of the original evangelist and the customs of the island, are found in practice to be highly fructifying; and in particular those who have learned and who go forth again to teach them offer an example to the world. The best specimen of the Christian hero that I ever met was one of these native missionaries. He had saved two lives at the risk of his own; like Nathan, he had bearded a tyrant in his hour of blood; when a whole white population fled, he alone stood to his duty; and his behaviour under domestic sorrow with which the public has no concern filled the beholder with sympathy and admiration. A poor little smiling laborious man he looked; and you would have thought he had nothing in him but that of which indeed he had too much--facile good-nature.[3] It chances that the only rivals of Monseigneur and his mission in the Marquesas were certain of these brown-skinned evangelists, natives from Hawaii. I know not what they thought of Father Dordillon: they are the only class I did not question; but I suspect the prelate to have regarded them askance, for he was eminently human. During my stay at Tai-o-hae, the time of the yearly holiday came round at the girls' school; and a whole fleet of whale-boats came from Ua-pu to take the daughters of that island home. On board of these was Kauwealoha, one of the pastors, a fine, rugged old gentleman, of that leonine type so common in Hawaii. He paid me a visit in the _Casco_, and there entertained me with a tale of one of his colleagues, Kekela, a missionary in the great cannibal isle of Hiva-oa. It appears that shortly after a kidnapping visit from a Peruvian slaver, the boats of an American whaler put into a bay upon that island, were attacked, and made their escape with difficulty, leaving their mate, a Mr. Whalon, in the hands of the natives. The captive, with his arms bound behind his back, was cast into a house; and the chief announced the capture to Kekela. And here I begin to follow the version of Kauwealoha; it is a good specimen of Kanaka English; and the reader is to conceive it delivered with violent emphasis and speaking pantomime. "'I got 'Melican mate,' the chief he say. 'What you go do 'Melican mate?' Kekela he say.' I go make fire, I go kill, I go eat him,' he say; 'you come to-mollow eat piece.' 'I no _want_ eat 'Melican mate!' Kekela he say; 'why you want?' 'This bad shippee, this slave shippee,' the chief he say. 'One time a shippee he come from Pelu, he take away plenty Kanaka, he take away my son. 'Melican mate he bad man. I go eat him; you eat piece.' 'I no _want_ eat 'Melican mate!' Kekela he say; and he _cly_--all night he cly! To-mollow Kekela he get up, he put on blackee coat, he go see chief; he see Missa Whela, him hand tie' like this. (_Pantomime_). Kekela he cly. He say chief:--'Chief, you like things of mine? you like whaleboat?' 'Yes,' he say. 'You like file-a'm?' (fire-arms). 'Yes,' he say. 'You like blackee coat?' 'Yes,' he say. Kekela he take Missa Whela by he shoul'a' (shoulder), he take him light out house; he give chief he whaleboat, he file-a'm, he blackee coat. He take Missa Whela he house, make him sit down with he wife and chil'en. Missa Whela all-the-same pelison (prison); he wife, he chil'en in America; he cly--O, he cly. Kekela he solly. One day Kekela he see ship. (_Pantomime._) He say Missa Whela, 'Ma' Whala?' Missa Whela he say, 'Yes.' Kanaka they begin go down beach. Kekela he get eleven Kanaka, get oa' (oars), get evely thing. He say Missa Whela, 'Now, you go quick.' They jump in whale-boat. 'Now you low!' Kekela he say: 'you low quick, quick!' (_Violent pantomime, and a change indicating that the narrator has left the boat and returned to the beach._) All the Kanaka they say, 'How! 'Melican mate he go away?'--jump in boat; low afta. (_Violent pantomime and change again to boat._) Kekela he say, 'Low quick!'" Here I think Kauwealoha's pantomime had confused me; I have no more of his _ipsissima verba_; and can but add, in my own less spirited manner, that the ship was reached, Mr. Whalon taken aboard, and Kekela returned to his charge among the cannibals. But how unjust it is to repeat the stumblings of a foreigner in a language only partly acquired! A thoughtless reader might conceive Kauwealoha and his colleague to be a species of amicable baboon; but I have here the antidote. In return for his act of gallant charity, Kekela was presented by the American Government with a sum of money, and by President Lincoln personally with a gold watch. From his letter of thanks, written in his own tongue, I give the following extract. I do not envy the man who can read it without emotion. "When I saw one of your countrymen, a citizen of your great nation, ill-treated, and about to be baked and eaten, as a pig is eaten, I ran to save him, full of pity and grief at the evil deed of these benighted people. I gave my boat for the stranger's life This boat came from James Hunnewell, a gift of friendship. It became the ransom of this countryman of yours, that he might not be eaten by the savages who knew not Jehovah. This was Mr. Whalon, and the date, Jan. 14, 1864. "As to this friendly deed of mine in saving Mr. Whalon, its seed came from your great land, and was brought by certain of your countrymen, who had received the love of God. It was planted in Hawaii, and I brought it to plant in this land and in these dark regions, that they might receive the root of all that is good and true, which is _love_. "1. Love to Jehovah. "2. Love to self. "3. Love to our neighbour. "If a man have a sufficiency of these three, he is good and holy, like his God, Jehovah, in His triune character (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), one-three, three-one. If he have two and wants one, it is not well; and if he have one and wants two, this, indeed, is not well; but if he cherishes all three, then is he holy, indeed, after the manner of the Bible. "This is a great thing for your great nation to boast of before all the nations of the earth. From your great land a most precious seed was brought to the land of darkness. It was planted here, not by means of guns and men-of-war and threatenings. It was planted by means of the ignorant, the neglected, the despised. Such was the introduction of the word of the Almighty God into this group of Nuuhiwa. Great is my debt to Americans, who have taught me all things pertaining to this life and to that which is to come. "How shall I repay your great kindness to me? Thus David asked of Jehovah, and thus I ask of you, the President of the United States. This is my only payment--that which I have received of the Lord, love--(aloha)." FOOTNOTE: [3] The reference is to Maka, the Hawaiian missionary, at Butaritari, in the Gilberts. CHAPTER XI LONG-PIG--A CANNIBAL HIGH PLACE Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, nothing so surely unmortars a society; nothing, we might plausibly argue, will so harden and degrade the minds of those that practise it. And yet we ourselves make much the same appearance in the eyes of the Buddhist and the vegetarian. We consume the carcases of creatures of like appetites, passions, and organs with ourselves; we feed on babes, though not our own; and the slaughter-house resounds daily with screams of pain and fear. We distinguish, indeed; but the unwillingness of many nations to eat the dog, an animal with whom we live on terms of the next intimacy, shows how precariously the distinction is grounded. The pig is the main element of animal food among the islands; and I had many occasions, my mind being quickened by my cannibal surroundings, to observe his character and the manner of his death. Many islanders live with their pigs as we do with our dogs; both crowd around the hearth with equal freedom; and the island pig is a fellow of activity, enterprise, and sense. He husks his own cocoa-nuts, and (I am told) rolls them into the sun to burst; he is the terror of the shepherd. Mrs. Stevenson, senior, has seen one fleeing to the woods with a lamb in his mouth; and I saw another come rapidly (and erroneously) to the conclusion that the _Casco_ was going down, and swim through the flush water to the rail in search of an escape. It was told us in childhood that pigs cannot swim; I have known one to leap overboard, swim five hundred yards to shore, and return to the house of his original owner. I was once, at Tautira, a pig-master on a considerable scale; at first, in my pen, the utmost good feeling prevailed; a little sow with a belly-ache came and appealed to us for help in the manner of a child; and there was one shapely black boar, whom we called Catholicus, for he was a particular present from the Catholics of the village, and who early displayed the marks of courage and friendliness; no other animal, whether dog or pig, was suffered to approach him at his food, and for human beings he showed a full measure of that toadying fondness, so common in the lower animals, and possibly their chief title to the name. One day, on visiting my piggery, I was amazed to see Catholicus draw back from my approach with cries of terror; and if I was amazed at the change, I was truly embarrassed when I learnt its reason. One of the pigs had been that morning killed; Catholicus had seen the murder, he had discovered he was dwelling in the shambles, and from that time his confidence and his delight in life were ended. We still reserved him a long while, but he could not endure the sight of any two-legged creature, nor could we, under the circumstances, encounter his eye without confusion. I have assisted besides, by the ear, at the act of butchery itself; the victim's cries of pain I think I could have borne, but the execution was mismanaged, and his expression of terror was contagious: that small heart moved to the same tune with ours. Upon such "dread foundations" the life of the European reposes, and yet the European is among the less cruel of races. The paraphernalia of murder, the preparatory brutalities of his existence, are all hid away; an extreme sensibility reigns upon the surface; and ladies will faint at the recital of one tithe of what they daily expect of their butchers. Some will be even crying out upon me in their hearts for the coarseness of this paragraph. And so with the island cannibals. They were not cruel; apart from this custom, they are a race of the most kindly; rightly speaking, to cut a man's flesh after he is dead is far less hateful than to oppress him whilst he lives; and even the victims of their appetite were gently used in life and suddenly and painlessly despatched at last. In island circles of refinement it was doubtless thought bad taste to expatiate on what was ugly in the practice. Cannibalism is traced from end to end of the Pacific, from the Marquesas to New Guinea, from New Zealand to Hawaii, here in the lively haunt of its exercise, there by scanty but significant survivals. Hawaii is the most doubtful. We find cannibalism chronicled in Hawaii, only in the history of a single war, where it seems to have been thought exceptional, as in the case of mountain outlaws, such as fell by the hand of Theseus. In Tahiti, a single circumstance survived, but that appears conclusive. In historic times, when human oblation was made in the marae, the eyes of the victim were formally offered to the chief: a delicacy to the leading guest. All Melanesia appears tainted. In Micronesia, in the Marshalls, with which my acquaintance is no more than that of a tourist, I could find no trace at all; and even in the Gilbert zone I long looked and asked in vain. I was told tales indeed of men who had been eaten in a famine; but these were nothing to my purpose, for the same thing is done under the same stress by all kindreds and generations of men. At last, in some manuscript notes of Dr. Turner's, which I was allowed to consult at Malua, I came on one damning evidence: on the island of Onoatoa the punishment for theft was to be killed and eaten. How shall we account for the universality of the practice over so vast an area, among people of such varying civilisation, and, with whatever intermixture, of such different blood? What circumstance is common to them all, but that they lived on islands destitute, or very nearly so, of animal food? I can never find it in my appetite that man was meant to live on vegetables only. When our stores ran low among the islands, I grew to weary for the recurrent day when economy allowed us to open another tin of miserable mutton. And in at least one ocean language, a particular word denotes that a man is "hungry for fish," having reached that stage when vegetables can no longer satisfy, and his soul, like those of the Hebrews in the desert, begins to lust after flesh-pots. Add to this the evidences of over-population and imminent famine already adduced, and I think we see some ground of indulgence for the island cannibal. It is right to look at both sides of any question; but I am far from making the apology of this worse than bestial vice. The higher Polynesian races, such as the Tahitians, Hawaiians, and Samoans, had one and all outgrown, and some of them had in part forgot, the practice, before Cook or Bougainville had shown a topsail in their waters. It lingered only in some low islands where life was difficult to maintain, and among inveterate savages like the New Zealanders or the Marquesans. The Marquesans intertwined man-eating with the whole texture of their lives; long-pig was in a sense their currency and sacrament; it formed the hire of the artist, illustrated public events, and was the occasion and attraction of a feast. To-day they are paying the penalty of this bloody commixture. The civil power, in its crusade against man-eating, has had to examine one after another all Marquesan arts and pleasures, has found them one after another tainted with a cannibal element, and one after another has placed them on the proscript list. Their art of tattooing stood by itself, the execution exquisite, the designs most beautiful and intricate; nothing more handsomely sets off a handsome man; it may cost some pain in the beginning, but I doubt if it be near so painful in the long-run, and I am sure it is far more becoming than the ignoble European practice of tight-lacing among women. And now it has been found needful to forbid the art. Their songs and dances were numerous (and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen). They now face empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful days; and who shall pity them? The least rigorous will say that they were justly served. Death alone could not satisfy Marquesan vengeance; the flesh must be eaten. The chief who seized Mr. Whalon preferred to eat him; and he thought he had justified the wish when he explained it was a vengeance. Two or three years ago, the people of a valley seized and slew a wretch who had offended them. His offence, it is to be supposed, was dire; they could not bear to leave their vengeance incomplete, and, under the eyes of the French, they did not dare to hold a public festival. The body was accordingly divided; and every man retired to his own house to consummate the rite in secret, carrying his proportion of the dreadful meat in a Swedish match-box. The barbarous substance of the drama and the European properties employed offer a seizing contrast to the imagination. Yet more striking is another incident of the very year when I was there myself, 1888. In the spring, a man and woman skulked about the school-house in Hiva-oa till they found a particular child alone. Him they approached with honeyed words and carneying manners--"You are So-and-so, son of So-and-so?" they asked; and caressed and beguiled him deeper in the woods. Some instinct woke in the child's bosom, or some look betrayed the horrid purpose of his deceivers. He sought to break from them; he screamed; and they, casting off the mask, seized him the more strongly and began to run. His cries were heard; his schoolmates, playing not far off, came running to the rescue; and the sinister couple fled and vanished in the woods. They were never identified; no prosecution followed; but it was currently supposed they had some grudge against the boy's father, and designed to eat him in revenge. All over the islands, as at home among our own ancestors, it will be observed that the avenger takes no particular heed to strike an individual. A family, a class, a village, a whole valley or island, a whole race of mankind, share equally the guilt of any member. So, in the above story, the son was to pay the penalty for his father; so Mr. Whalon, the mate of an American whaler, was to bleed and be eaten for the misdeeds of a Peruvian slaver. I am reminded of an incident in Jaluit in the Marshall group, which was told me by an eye-witness, and which I tell here again for the strangeness of the scene. Two men had awakened the animosity of the Jaluit chiefs; and it was their wives who were selected to be punished. A single native served as executioner. Early in the morning, in the face of a large concourse of spectators, he waded out upon the reef between his victims. These neither complained nor resisted; accompanied their destroyer patiently; stooped down, when they had waded deep enough, at his command; and he (laying one hand upon the shoulders of each) held them under water till they drowned. Doubtless, although my informant did not tell me so, their families would be lamenting aloud upon the beach. It was from Hatiheu that I paid my first visit to a cannibal high place. The day was sultry and clouded. Drenching tropical showers succeeded bursts of sweltering sunshine. The green pathway of the road wound steeply upward. As we went, our little schoolboy guide a little ahead of us, Father Simeon had his portfolio in his hand, and named the trees for me, and read aloud from his notes the abstract of their virtues. Presently the road, mounting, showed us the vale of Hatiheu on a larger scale; and the priest, with occasional reference to our guide, pointed out the boundaries and told me the names of the larger tribes that lived at perpetual war in the old days: one on the north-east, one along the beach, one behind upon the mountain. With a survivor of this latter clan Father Simeon had spoken; until the pacification he had never been to the sea's edge, nor, if I remember exactly, eaten of sea-fish. Each in its own district, the septs lived cantoned and beleaguered. One step without the boundaries was to affront death. If famine came, the men must out to the woods to gather chestnuts and small fruits; even as to this day, if the parents are backward in their weekly doles, school must be broken up and the scholars sent foraging. But in the old days, when there was trouble in one clan, there would be activity in all its neighbours; the woods would be laid full of ambushes; and he who went after vegetables for himself might remain to be a joint for his hereditary foes. Nor was the pointed occasion needful. A dozen different natural signs and social junctures called this people to the war-path and the cannibal hunt. Let one of chiefly rank have finished his tattooing, the wife of one be near upon her time, two of the debouching streams have deviated nearer on the beach of Hatiheu, a certain bird have been heard to sing, a certain ominous formation of cloud observed above the northern sea; and instantly the arms were oiled, and the man-hunters swarmed into the wood to lay their fratricidal ambuscades. It appears besides that occasionally, perhaps in famine, the priest would shut himself in his house, where he lay for a stated period like a person dead. When he came forth it was to run for three days through the territory of the clan, naked and starving, and to sleep at night alone in the high place. It was now the turn of the others to keep the house, for to encounter the priest upon his rounds was death. On the eve of the fourth day the time of the running was over; the priest returned to his roof, the laymen came forth, and in the morning the number of the victims was announced. I have this tale of the priest on one authority--I think a good one,--but I set it down with diffidence. The particulars are so striking that, had they been true, I almost think I must have heard them oftener referred to. Upon one point there seems to be no question: that the feast was sometimes furnished from within the clan. In times of scarcity, all who were not protected by their family connections--in the Highland expression, all the commons of the clan--had cause to tremble. It was vain to resist, it was useless to flee. They were begirt upon all hands by cannibals; and the oven was ready to smoke for them abroad in the country of their foes, or at home in the valley of their fathers. At a certain corner of the road our scholar-guide struck off to his left into the twilight of the forest. We were now on one of the ancient native roads, plunged in a high vault of wood, and clambering, it seemed, at random over boulders and dead trees; but the lad wound in and out and up and down without a check, for these paths are to the natives as marked as the king's highway is to us; insomuch that, in the days of the man-hunt, it was their labour rather to block and deface than to improve them. In the crypt of the wood the air was clammy and hot and cold; overhead, upon the leaves, the tropical rain uproariously poured, but only here and there, as through holes in a leaky roof, a single drop would fall, and make a spot upon my mackintosh. Presently the huge trunk of a banyan hove in sight, standing upon what seemed the ruins of an ancient fort; and our guide, halting and holding forth his arm, announced that we had reached the _paepae tapu_. _Paepae_ signifies a floor or platform such as a native house is built on; and even such a paepae--a paepae hae--may be called a paepae tapu in a lesser sense when it is deserted and becomes the haunt of spirits; but the public high place, such as I was now treading, was a thing on a great scale. As far as my eyes could pierce through the dark undergrowth, the floor of the forest was all paved. Three tiers of terrace ran on the slope of the hill; in front, a crumbling parapet contained the main arena; and the pavement of that was pierced and parcelled out with several wells and small enclosures. No trace remained of any superstructure, and the scheme of the amphitheatre was difficult to seize. I visited another in Hiva-oa, smaller but more perfect, where it was easy to follow rows of benches, and to distinguish isolated seats of honour for eminent persons; and where, on the upper platform, a single joist of the temple or dead-house still remained, its uprights richly carved. In the old days the high place was sedulously tended. No tree except the sacred banyan was suffered to encroach upon its grades, no dead leaf to rot upon the pavement. The stones were smoothly set, and I am told they were kept bright with oil. On all sides the guardians lay encamped in their subsidiary huts to watch and cleanse it. No other foot of man was suffered to draw near; only the priest, in the days of his running, came there to sleep--perhaps to dream of his ungodly errand; but in the time of the feast, the clan trooped to the high place in a body, and each had his appointed seat. There were places for the chiefs, the drummers, the dancers, the women, and the priests. The drums--perhaps twenty strong, and some of them twelve feet high--continuously throbbed in time. In time the singers kept up their long-drawn, lugubrious, ululating song; in time, too, the dancers, tricked out in singular finery, stepped, leaped, swayed, and gesticulated--their plumed fingers fluttering in the air like butterflies. The sense of time, in all these ocean races, is extremely perfect; and I conceive in such a festival that almost every sound and movement fell in one. So much the more unanimously must have grown the agitation of the feasters; so much the more wild must have been the scene to any European who could have beheld them there, in the strong sun and the strong shadow of the banyan, rubbed with saffron to throw in a more high relief the arabesque of the tattoo; the women bleached by days of confinement to a complexion almost European; the chiefs crowned with silver plumes of old men's beards and girt with kirtles of the hair of dead women. All manner of island food was meanwhile spread for the women and the commons; and, for those who were privileged to eat of it, there were carried up to the dead-house the baskets of long-pig. It is told that the feasts were long kept up; the people came from them brutishly exhausted with debauchery, and the chiefs heavy with their beastly food. There are certain sentiments which we call emphatically human--denying the honour of that name to those who lack them. In such feasts--particularly where the victim had been slain at home, and men banqueting on the poor clay of a comrade with whom they played in infancy, or a woman whose favours they had shared--the whole body of these sentiments is outraged. To consider it too closely is to understand, if not to excuse, these fervours of self-righteous old ship-captains, who would man their guns, and open fire in passing, on a cannibal island. And yet it was strange. There, upon the spot, as I stood under the high, dripping vault of the forest, with the young priest on the one hand, in his kilted gown, and the bright-eyed Marquesan schoolboy on the other, the whole business appeared infinitely distant, and fallen in the cold perspective and dry light of history. The bearing of the priest, perhaps, affected me. He smiled; he jested with the boy, the heir both of these feasters and their meat; he clapped his hands, and gave me a stave of one of the old, ill-omened choruses. Centuries might have come and gone since this slimy theatre was last in operation; and I beheld the place with no more emotion than I might have felt in visiting Stonehenge. In Hiva-oa, as I began to appreciate that the thing was still living and latent about my footsteps, and that it was still within the bounds of possibility that I might hear the cry of the trapped victim, my historic attitude entirely failed, and I was sensible of some repugnance for the natives. But here, too, the priests maintained their jocular attitude: rallying the cannibals as upon an eccentricity rather absurd than horrible; seeking, I should say, to shame them from the practice by good-natured ridicule, as we shame a child from stealing sugar. We may here recognise the temperate and sagacious mind of Bishop Dordillon. CHAPTER XII THE STORY OF A PLANTATION Taahauku, on the south-westerly coast of the island of Hiva-oa--Tahuku, say the slovenly whites--may be called the port of Atuona. It is a narrow and small anchorage, set between low cliffy points, and opening above upon a woody valley: a little French fort, now disused and deserted, overhangs the valley and the inlet. Atuona itself, at the head of the next bay, is framed in a theatre of mountains, which dominate the more immediate settling of Taahauku and give the salient character of the scene. They are reckoned at no higher than four thousand feet; but Tahiti with eight thousand, and Hawaii with fifteen, can offer no such picture of abrupt, melancholy alps. In the morning, when the sun falls directly on their front, they stand like a vast wall: green to the summit, if by any chance the summit should be clear--water-courses here and there delineated on their face, as narrow as cracks. Towards afternoon, the light falls more obliquely, and the sculpture of the range comes in relief, huge gorges sinking into shadow, huge, tortuous buttresses standing edged with sun. At all hours of the day they strike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same menacing gloom. The mountains, dividing and deflecting the endless airy deluge of the Trade, are doubtless answerable for the climate. A strong draught of wind blew day and night over the anchorage. Day and night the same fantastic and attenuated clouds fled across the heavens, the same dusky cap of rain and vapour fell and rose on the mountain. The land-breezes came very strong and chill, and the sea, like the air, was in perpetual bustle. The swell crowded into the narrow anchorage like sheep into a fold; broke all along both sides, high on the one, low on the other; kept a certain blowhole sounding and smoking like a cannon; and spent itself at last upon the beach. On the side away from Atuona, the sheltering promontory was a nursery of coco-trees. Some were mere infants, none had attained to any size, none had yet begun to shoot skyward with that whip-like shaft of the mature palm. In the young trees the colour alters with the age and growth. Now all is of a grass-like hue, infinitely dainty; next the rib grows golden, the fronds remaining green as ferns; and then, as the trunk continues to mount and to assume its final hue of grey, the fans put on manlier and more decided depths of verdure, stand out dark upon the distance, glisten against the sun, and flash like silver fountains in the assault of the wind. In this young wood of Taahauku all these hues and combinations were exampled and repeated by the score. The trees grew pleasantly spaced upon a hilly sward, here and there interspersed with a rack for drying copra, or a tumble-down hut for storing it. Every here and there the stroller had a glimpse of the _Casco_ tossing in the narrow anchorage below; and beyond he had ever before him the dark amphitheatre of the Atuona mountains and the cliffy bluff that closes it to seaward. The trade-wind moving in the fans made a ceaseless noise of summer rain; and from time to time, with the sound of a sudden and distant drum-beat, the surf would burst in a sea-cave. At the upper end of the inlet, its low, cliffy lining sinks, at both sides, into a beach. A copra warehouse stands in the shadow of the shoreside trees, flitted about for ever by a clan of dwarfish swallows; and a line of rails on a high wooden staging bends back into the mouth of the valley. Walking on this, the new-landed traveller becomes aware of a broad fresh-water lagoon (one arm of which he crosses), and beyond, of a grove of noble palms, sheltering the house of the trader, Mr. Keane. Overhead, the cocos join in a continuous and lofty roof; blackbirds are heard lustily singing; the island cock springs his jubilant rattle and airs his golden plumage; cow-bells sound far and near in the grove; and when you sit in the broad verandah, lulled by this symphony, you may say to yourself, if you are able: "Better fifty years of Europe..." Farther on, the floor of the valley is flat and green, and dotted here and there with stripling coco-palms. Through the midst, with many changes of music, the river trots and brawls; and along its course, where we should look for willows, puraos grow in clusters, and make shadowy pools after an angler's heart. A vale more rich and peaceful, sweeter air, a sweeter voice of rural sounds, I have found nowhere. One circumstance alone might strike the experienced: here is a convenient beach, deep soil, good water, and yet nowhere any paepaes, nowhere any trace of island habitation. It is but a few years since this valley was a place choked with jungle, the debatable land and battle-ground of cannibals. Two clans laid claim to it--neither could substantiate the claim, and the roads lay desert, or were only visited by men in arms. It is for this very reason that it wears now so smiling an appearance: cleared, planted, built upon, supplied with railways, boat-houses, and bath-houses. For, being no man's land, it was the more readily ceded to a stranger. The stranger was Captain John Hart: Ima Hati, "Broken-arm," the natives call him, because when he first visited the islands his arm was in a sling. Captain Hart, a man of English birth but an American subject, had conceived the idea of cotton culture in the Marquesas during the American War, and was at first rewarded with success. His plantation at Anaho was highly productive; island cotton fetched a high price, and the natives used to debate which was the stronger power, Ima Hati or the French: deciding in favour of the captain, because, though the French had the most ships, he had the more money. He marked Taahauku for a suitable site, acquired it, and offered the superintendence to Mr. Robert Stewart, a Fifeshire man, already some time in the islands, who had just been ruined by a war on Tauata. Mr. Stewart was somewhat averse to the adventure, having some acquaintance with Atuona and its notorious chieftain, Moipu. He had once landed there, he told me, about dusk, and found the remains of a man and woman partly eaten. On his starting and sickening at the sight, one of Moipu's young men picked up a human foot, and provocatively staring at the stranger, grinned and nibbled at the heel. None need be surprised if Mr. Stewart fled incontinently to the bush, lay there all night in a great horror of mind, and got off to sea again by daylight on the morrow. "It was always a bad place, Atuona," commented Mr. Stewart, in his homely Fifeshire voice. In spite of this dire introduction, he accepted the captain's offer, was landed at Taahauku with three Chinamen, and proceeded to clear the jungle. War was pursued at that time, almost without interval, between the men of Atuona and the men of Haamau; and one day, from the opposite sides of the valley, battle--or I should rather say the noise of battle--raged all the afternoon: the shots and insults of the opposing clans passing from hill to hill over the heads of Mr. Stewart and his Chinamen. There was no genuine fighting; it was like a bicker of schoolboys, only some fool had given the children guns. One man died of his exertions in running, the only casualty. With night the shots and insults ceased; the men of Haamau withdrew, and victory, on some occult principle, was scored to Moipu. Perhaps in consequence, there came a day when Moipu made a feast, and a party from Haamau came under safe-conduct to eat of it. These passed early by Taahauku, and some of Moipu's young men were there to be a guard of honour. They were not long gone before there came down from Haamau a man, his wife, and a girl of twelve, their daughter, bringing fungus. Several Atuona lads were hanging round the store; but the day being one of truce none apprehended danger. The fungus was weighed and paid for; the man of Haamau proposed he should have his axe ground in the bargain; and Mr. Stewart demurring at the trouble, some of the Atuona lads offered to grind it for him, and set it on the wheel. While the axe was grinding, a friendly native whispered Mr. Stewart to have a care of himself, for there was trouble in hand; and, all at once, the man of Haamau was seized, and his head and arm stricken from his body, the head at one sweep of his own newly sharpened axe. In the first alert, the girl escaped among the cotton; and Mr. Stewart, having thrust the wife into the house and locked her in from the outside, supposed the affair was over. But the business had not passed without noise, and it reached the ears of an older girl who had loitered by the way, and who now came hastily down the valley, crying as she came for her father. Her, too, they seized and beheaded; I know not what they had done with the axe, it was a blunt knife that served their butcherly turn upon the girl; and the blood spurted in fountains and painted them from head to foot. Thus horrible from crime, the party returned to Atuona, carrying the heads to Moipu. It may be fancied how the feast broke up; but it is notable that the guests were honourably suffered to retire. These passed back through Taahauku in extreme disorder; a little after the valley began to be overrun with shouting and triumphing braves; and a letter of warning coming at the same time to Mr. Stewart, he and his Chinamen took refuge with the Protestant missionary in Atuona. That night the store was gutted, and the bodies cast in a pit and covered with leaves. Three days later the schooner had come in; and things appearing quieter, Mr. Stewart and the captain landed in Taahauku to compute the damage and to view the grave, which was already indicated by the stench. While they were so employed, a party of Moipu's young men, decked with red flannel to indicate martial sentiments, came over the hills from Atuona, dug up the bodies, washed them in the river, and carried them away on sticks. That night the feast began. Those who knew Mr. Stewart before this experience declare the man to be quite altered. He stuck, however, to his post; and somewhat later, when the plantation was already well established, and gave employment to sixty Chinamen and seventy natives, he found himself once more in dangerous times. The men of Haamau, it was reported, had sworn to plunder and erase the settlement; letters came continually from the Hawaiian missionary, who acted as intelligence department; and for six weeks Mr. Stewart and three other whites slept in the cotton-house at night in a rampart of bales, and (what was their best defence) ostentatiously practised rifle-shooting by day upon the beach. Natives were often there to watch them; the practice was excellent; and the assault was never delivered--if it ever was intended, which I doubt, for the natives are more famous for false rumours than for deeds of energy. I was told the late French war was a case in point; the tribes on the beach accusing those in the mountains of designs which they had never the hardihood to entertain. And the same testimony to their backwardness in open battle reached me from all sides. Captain Hart once landed after an engagement in a certain bay; one man had his hand hurt, an old woman and two children had been slain; and the captain improved the occasion by poulticing the hand, and taunting both sides upon so wretched an affair. It is true these wars were often merely formal--comparable with duels to the first blood. Captain Hart visited a bay where such a war was being carried on between two brothers, one of whom had been thought wanting in civility to the guests of the other. About one-half of the population served day about upon alternate sides, so as to be well with each when the inevitable peace should follow. The forts of the belligerents were over against each other, and close by. Pigs were cooking. Well-oiled braves, with well-oiled muskets, strutted on the paepae or sat down to feast. No business, however needful, could be done, and all thoughts were supposed to be centred in this mockery of war. A few days later, by a regrettable accident, a man was killed; it was felt at once the thing had gone too far, and the quarrel was instantly patched up. But the more serious wars were prosecuted in a similar spirit; a gift of pigs and a feast made their inevitable end; the killing of a single man was a great victory, and the murder of defenceless solitaries counted a heroic deed. The foot of the cliffs about all these islands is the place of fishing. Between Taahauku and Atuona we saw men, but chiefly women, some nearly naked, some in thin white or crimson dresses, perched in little surf-beat promontories--the brown precipice overhanging them, and the convolvulus overhanging that, as if to cut them off the more completely from assistance. There they would angle much of the morning; and as fast as they caught any fish, eat them, raw and living, where they stood. It was such helpless ones that the warriors from the opposite island of Tauata slew, and carried home and ate, and were thereupon accounted mighty men of valour. Of one such exploit I can give the account of an eye-witness. "Portuguese Joe," Mr. Keane's cook, was once pulling an oar in an Atuona boat, when they spied a stranger in a canoe with some fish and a piece of tapu. The Atuona men cried upon him to draw near and have a smoke. He complied, because, I suppose, he had no choice; but he knew, poor devil, what he was coming to, and (as Joe said) "he didn't seem to care about the smoke." A few questions followed, as to where he came from, and what was his business. These he must needs answer, as he must needs draw at the unwelcome pipe, his heart the while drying in his bosom. And then, of a sudden, a big fellow in Joe's boat leaned over, plucked the stranger from his canoe, struck him with a knife in the neck--inward and downward, as Joe showed in pantomime more expressive than his words--and held him under water, like a fowl, until his struggles ceased. Whereupon the long-pig was hauled on board, the boat's head turned about for Atuona, and these Marquesan braves pulled home rejoicing. Moipu was on the beach and rejoiced with them on their arrival. Poor Joe toiled at his oar that day with a white face, yet he had no fear for himself. "They were very good to me--gave me plenty grub: never wished to eat white man," said he. If the most horrible experience was Mr. Stewart's, it was Captain Hart himself who ran the nearest danger. He had bought a piece of land from Timau, chief of a neighbouring bay, and put some Chinese there to work. Visiting the station with one of the Godeffroys, he found his Chinamen trooping to the beach in terror; Timau had driven them out, seized their effects, and was in war attire with his young men. A boat was despatched to Taahauku for reinforcement; as they awaited her return, they could see, from the deck of the schooner, Timau and his young men dancing the war-dance on the hill-top till past twelve at night; and so soon as the boat came (bringing three gendarmes, armed with chassepots, two white men from Taahauku station, and some native warriors) the party set out to seize the chief before he should awake. Day was not come, and it was a very bright moonlight morning, when they reached the hill-top where (in a house of palm-leaves) Timau was sleeping off his debauch. The assailants were fully exposed, the interior of the hut quite dark; the position far from sound. The gendarmes knelt with their pieces ready, and Captain Hart advanced alone. As he drew near the door he heard the snap of a gun cocking from within, and in sheer self-defence--there being no other escape--sprang into the house and grappled Timau. "Timau, come with me!" he cried. But Timau--a great fellow, his eyes blood-red with the abuse of kava, six foot three in stature--cast him on one side; and the captain, instantly expecting to be either shot or brained, discharged his pistol in the dark. When they carried Timau out at the door into the moonlight, he was already dead, and, upon this unlooked-for termination of their sally, the whites appeared to have lost all conduct, and retreated to the boats, fired upon by the natives as they went. Captain Hart, who almost rivals Bishop Dordillon in popularity, shared with him the policy of extreme indulgence to the natives, regarding them as children, making light of their defects, and constantly in favour of mild measures. The death of Timau has thus somewhat weighed upon his mind; the more so, as the chieftain's musket was found in the house unloaded. To a less delicate conscience the matter will seem light. If a drunken savage elects to cock a fire-arm, a gentleman advancing towards him in the open cannot wait to make sure if it be charged. I have touched on the captain's popularity. It is one of the things that most strikes a stranger in the Marquesas. He comes instantly on two names, both new to him, both locally famous, both mentioned by all with affection and respect--the bishop's and the captain's. It gave me a strong desire to meet with the survivor, which was subsequently gratified--to the enrichment of these pages. Long after that again, in the Place Dolorous--Molokai--I came once more on the traces of that affectionate popularity. There was a blind white leper there, an old sailor--an "old tough," he called himself--who had long sailed among the eastern islands. Him I used to visit, and, being fresh from the scenes of his activity, gave him the news. This (in the true island style) was largely a chronicle of wrecks; and it chanced I mentioned the case of one not very successful captain, and how he had lost a vessel for Mr. Hart; thereupon the blind leper broke forth in lamentation. "Did he lose a ship of John Hart's?" he cried; "poor John Hart! Well, I'm sorry it was Hart's," with needless force of epithet, which I neglect to reproduce. Perhaps, if Captain Hart's affairs had continued to prosper, his popularity might have been different. Success wins glory, but it kills affection, which misfortune fosters. And the misfortune which overtook the captain's enterprise was truly singular. He was at the top of his career. Ile Masse belonged to him, given by the French as an indemnity for the robberies at Taahauku. But the Ile Masse was only suitable for cattle; and his two chief stations were Anaho, in Nuka-hiva, facing the north-east, and Taahauku in Hiva-oa, some hundred miles to the southward, and facing the south-west. Both these were on the same day swept by a tidal wave, which was not felt in any other bay or island of the group. The south coast of Hiva-oa was bestrewn with building timber and camphor-wood chests, containing goods; which, on the promise of a reasonable salvage, the natives very honestly brought back, the chests apparently not opened, and some of the wood after it had been built into their houses. But the recovery of jetsam could not affect the result. It was impossible the captain should withstand this partiality of fortune; and with his fall the prosperity of the Marquesas ended. Anaho is truly extinct, Taahauku but a shadow of itself; nor has any new plantation arisen in their stead. CHAPTER XIII CHARACTERS There was a certain traffic in our anchorage at Atuona; different indeed from the dead inertia and quiescence of the sister-island, Nuka-hiva. Sails were seen steering from its mouth; now it would be a whale-boat manned with native rowdies, and heavy with copra for sale; now perhaps a single canoe come after commodities to buy. The anchorage was besides frequented by fishers; not only the lone females perched in niches of the cliff, but whole parties, who would sometimes camp and build a fire upon the beach, and sometimes lie in their canoes in the midst of the haven and jump by turns in the water; which they would cast eight or nine feet high, to drive, as we supposed, the fish into their nets. The goods the purchasers came to buy were sometimes quaint. I remarked one outrigger returning with a single ham swung from a pole in the stern. And one day there came into Mr. Keane's store a charming lad, excellently mannered, speaking French correctly though with a babyish accent; very handsome too, and much of a dandy, as was shown not only in his shining raiment, but by the nature of his purchases. These were five ship-biscuits, a bottle of scent, and two balls of washing blue. He was from Tauata, whither he returned the same night in an outrigger, daring the deep with these young-ladyish treasures. The gross of the native passengers were more ill-favoured: tall, powerful fellows, well tattooed, and with disquieting manners. Something coarse and jeering distinguished them, and I was often reminded of the slums of some great city. One night, as dusk was falling, a whale-boat put in on that part of the beach where I chanced to be alone. Six or seven ruffianly fellows scrambled out; all had enough English to give me "good-bye," which was the ordinary salutation; or "good-morning," which they seemed to regard as an intensitive; jests followed, they surrounded me with harsh laughter and rude looks, and I was glad to move away. I had not yet encountered Mr. Stewart, or I should have been reminded of his first landing at Atuona and the humorist who nibbled at the heel. But their neighbourhood depressed me; and I felt, if I had been there a castaway and out of reach of help, my heart would have been sick. Nor was the traffic altogether native. While we lay in the anchorage there befell a strange coincidence. A schooner was observed at sea and aiming to enter. We knew all the schooners in the group, but this appeared larger than any; she was rigged, besides, after the English manner; and, coming to an anchor some way outside the _Casco_, showed at last the blue ensign. There were at that time, according to rumour, no fewer than four yachts in the Pacific; but it was strange that any two of them should thus lie side by side in that outlandish inlet: stranger still that in the owner of the _Nyanza_, Captain Dewar, I should find a man of the same country and the same county with myself, and one whom I had seen walking as a boy on the shores of the Alpes Maritimes. We had besides a white visitor from shore who came and departed in a crowded whale-boat manned by natives; having read of yachts in the Sunday papers, and being fired with the desire to see one. Captain Chase, as they called him, an old whaler-man, thickset and white-bearded, with a strong Indiana drawl; years old in the country, a good backer in battle, and one of those dead shots whose practice at the target struck terror in the braves of Haamau. Captain Chase dwelt farther east in a bay called Hanamate, with a Mr. M'Callum; or rather they had dwelt together once, and were now amicably separated. The captain is to be found near one end of the bay, in a wreck of a house, and waited on by a Chinese. At the point of the opposing corner another habitation stands on a tall paepae. The surf runs there exceeding heavy, seas of seven and eight feet high bursting under the walls of the house, which is thus continually filled with their clamour, and rendered fit only for solitary, or at least for silent, inmates. Here it is that Mr. M'Callum, with a Shakespeare and a Burns, enjoys the society of the breakers. His name and his Burns testify to Scottish blood; but he is an American born, somewhere far east; followed the trade of a ship-carpenter; and was long employed, the captain of a hundred Indians, breaking up wrecks about Cape Flattery. Many of the whites who are to be found scattered in the South Seas represent the more artistic portion of their class; and not only enjoy the poetry of that new life, but came there on purpose to enjoy it. I have been shipmates with a man, no longer young, who sailed upon that voyage, his first time to sea, for the mere love of Samoa; and it was a few letters in a newspaper that sent him on that pilgrimage. Mr. M'Callum was another instance of the same. He had read of the South Seas; loved to read of them; and let their image fasten in his heart; till at length he could refrain no longer--must set forth, a new Rudel, for that unseen homeland--and has now dwelt for years in Hiva-oa, and will lay his bones there in the end with full content; having no desire to behold again the places of his boyhood, only, perhaps--once, before he dies--the rude and wintry landscape of Cape Flattery. Yet he is an active man, full of schemes; has bought land of the natives; has planted five thousand coco-palms; has a desert island in his eye, which he desires to lease, and a schooner in the stocks, which he has laid and built himself, and even hopes to finish. Mr. M'Callum and I did not meet, but, like gallant troubadours, corresponded in verse. I hope he will not consider it a breach of copyright if I give here a specimen of his muse. He and Bishop Dordillon are the two European bards of the Marquesas. "Sail, ho! Ahoy! _Casco_, First among the pleasure fleet That came around to greet These isles from San Francisco. And first, too; only one Among the literary men That this way has ever been-- Welcome, then, to Stevenson. Please not offended be At this little notice Of the _Casco_, Captain Otis With the novelist's family. _Avoir une voyage magnifical_ Is our wish sincere, That you'll have from here _Allant sur la Grande Pacifical_." But our chief visitor was one Mapiao, a great Tahuku--which seems to mean priest, wizard, tattooer, practiser of any art, or, in a word, esoteric person--and a man famed for his eloquence on public occasions and witty talk in private. His first appearance was typical of the man. He came down clamorous to the eastern landing, where the surf was running very high; scorned all our signals to go round the bay; carried his point, was brought aboard at some hazard to our skiff, and set down in one corner of the cockpit to his appointed task. He had been hired, as one cunning in the art, to make my old men's beards into a wreath: what a wreath for Celia's arbour! His own beard (which he carried, for greater safety, in a sailor's knot) was not merely the adornment of his age, but a substantial piece of property. One hundred dollars was the estimated value; and as Brother Michel never knew a native to deposit a greater sum with Bishop Dordillon, our friend was a rich man in virtue of his chin. He had something of an East Indian cast, but taller and stronger; his nose hooked, his face narrow, his forehead very high, the whole elaborately tattooed. I may say I have never entertained a guest so trying. In the least particular he must be waited on; he would not go to the scuttle-butt for water; it must be given him in his hand; if aid were denied him, he would fold his arms, bow his head, and go without; only the work would suffer. Early the first forenoon he called aloud for biscuit and salmon; biscuit and ham were brought; he looked on them inscrutably, and signed they should be set aside. A number of considerations crowded on my mind; how the sort of work on which he was engaged was probably tapu in a higher degree; should by rights, perhaps, be transacted on a tapu platform which no female might approach; and it was possible that fish might be the essential diet. Some salted fish I therefore brought him, and along with that a glass of rum: at sight of which Mapiao displayed extraordinary animation, pointed to the zenith, made a long speech in which I picked up _umati_--the word for the sun--and signed to me once more to place these dainties out of reach. At last I had understood, and every day the programme was the same. At an early period of the morning his dinner must be set forth on the roof of the house and at a proper distance, full in view but just out of reach; and not until the fit hour, which was the point of noon, would the artificer partake. This solemnity was the cause of an absurd misadventure. He was seated plaiting, as usual, at the beards, his dinner arrayed on the roof, and not far off a glass of water standing. It appears he desired to drink; was of course far too great a gentleman to rise and get the water for himself; and spying Mrs. Stevenson, imperiously signed to her to hand it. The signal was misunderstood; Mrs. Stevenson was, by this time, prepared for any eccentricity on the part of our guest; and instead of passing him the water, flung his dinner overboard. I must do Mapiao justice: all laughed, but his laughter rang the loudest. These troubles of service were at worst occasional; the embarrassment of the man's talk incessant. He was plainly a practised conversationalist; the nicety of his inflections, the elegance of his gestures, and the fine play of his expression, told us that. We, meanwhile, sat like aliens in a playhouse; we could see the actors were upon some material business and performing well, but the plot of the drama remained undiscoverable. Names of places, the name of Captain Hart, occasional disconnected words, tantalised without enlightening us; and the less we understood, the more gallantly, the more copiously, and with still the more explanatory gestures, Mapiao returned to the assault. We could see his vanity was on the rack; being come to a place where that fine jewel of his conversational talent could earn him no respect; and he had times of despair when he desisted from the endeavour, and instants of irritation when he regarded us with unconcealed contempt. Yet for me, as the practitioner of some kindred mystery to his own, he manifested to the last a measure of respect. As we sat under the awning in opposite corners of the cockpit, he braiding hairs from dead men's chins, I forming runes upon a sheet of folio paper, he would nod across to me as one Tahuku to another, or, crossing the cockpit, study for a while my shapeless scrawl and encourage me with a heartfelt "_mitai_!--good!" So might a deaf painter sympathise far off with a musician, as the slave and master of some uncomprehended and yet kindred art. A silly trade he doubtless considered it; but a man must make an allowance for barbarians, _chaque pays a ses coutumes_--and he felt the principle was there. The time came at last when his labours, which resembled those rather of Penelope than Hercules, could be no more spun out, and nothing remained but to pay him and say farewell. After a long, learned argument in Marquesan, I gathered that his mind was set on fish-hooks; with three of which, and a brace of dollars, I thought he was not ill rewarded for passing his forenoons in our cockpit, eating, drinking, delivering his opinions, and pressing the ship's company into his menial service. For all that, he was a man of so high a bearing and so like an uncle of my own who should have gone mad and got tattooed, that I applied to him, when we were both on shore, to know if he were satisfied. "_Mitai ehipe?_" I asked. And he, with rich unction, offering at the same time his hand--"_Mitai ehipe, mitai kaekae; kaoha nui!_"--or, to translate freely: "The ship is good, the victuals are up to the mark, and we part in friendship." Which testimonial uttered, he set off along the beach with his head bowed and the air of one deeply injured. I saw him go, on my side, with relief. It would be more interesting to learn how our relation seemed to Mapiao. His exigence, we may suppose, was merely loyal. He had been hired by the ignorant to do a piece of work; and he was bound that he would do it the right way. Countless obstacles, continual ignorant ridicule, availed not to dissuade him. He had his dinner laid out; watched it, as was fit, the while he worked; ate it at the fit hour; was in all things served and waited on; and could take his hire in the end with a clear conscience, telling himself the mystery was performed duly, the beards rightfully braided, and we (in spite of ourselves) correctly served. His view of our stupidity, even he, the mighty talker, must have lacked language to express. He never interfered with my Tahuku work; civilly praised it, idle as it seemed; civilly supposed that I was competent in my own mystery: such being the attitude of the intelligent and the polite. And we, on the other hand--who had yet the most to gain or lose, since the product was to be ours--who had professed our disability by the very act of hiring him to do it--were never weary of impeding his own more important labours, and sometimes lacked the sense and the civility to refrain from laughter. CHAPTER XIV IN A CANNIBAL VALLEY The road from Taahauku to Atuona skirted the north-westerly side of the anchorage, somewhat high up, edged, and sometimes shaded, by the splendid flowers of the _flamboyant_--its English name I do not know. At the turn of the land, Atuona came in view: a long beach, a heavy and loud breach of surf, a shore-side village scattered among trees, and the guttered mountains drawing near on both sides above a narrow and rich ravine. Its infamous repute perhaps affected me; but I thought it the loveliest, and by far the most ominous and gloomy, spot on earth. Beautiful it surely was; and even more salubrious. The healthfulness of the whole group is amazing; that of Atuona almost in the nature of a miracle. In Atuona, a village planted in a shore-side marsh, the houses standing everywhere intermingled with the pools of a taro-garden, we find every condition of tropical danger and discomfort; and yet there are not even mosquitoes--not even the hateful day-fly of Nuka-hiva--and fever, and its concomitant, the island fe'efe'e,[4] are unknown. This is the chief station of the French on the man-eating isle of Hiva-oa. The sergeant of gendarmerie enjoys the style of the vice-resident, and hoists the French colours over a quite extensive compound. A Chinaman, a waif from the plantation, keeps a restaurant in the rear quarters of the village; and the mission is well represented by the sisters' school and Brother Michel's church. Father Orens, a wonderful octogenarian, his frame scarce bowed, the fire of his eye undimmed, has lived, and trembled, and suffered in this place since 1843. Again and again, when Moipu had made coco-brandy, he has been driven from his house into the woods. "A mouse that dwelt in a cat's ear" had a more easy resting-place; and yet I have never seen a man that bore less mark of years. He must show us the church, still decorated with the bishop's artless ornaments of paper--the last work of industrious old hands, and the last earthly amusement of a man that was much of a hero. In the sacristy we must see his sacred vessels, and, in particular, a vestment which was a "_vraie curiosité_," because it had been given by a gendarme. To the Protestant there is always something embarrassing in the eagerness with which grown and holy men regard these trifles; but it was touching and pretty to see Orens, his aged eyes shining in his head, display his sacred treasures. _August 26._--The vale behind the village, narrowing swiftly to a mere ravine, was choked with profitable trees. A river gushed in the midst. Overhead, the tall coco-palms made a primary covering; above that, from one wall of the mountain to another, the ravine was roofed with cloud; so that we moved below, amid teeming vegetation, in a covered house of heat. On either hand, at every hundred yards, instead of the houseless, disembowelling paepaes of Nuka-hiva, populous houses turned out their inhabitants to cry "Kaoha!" to the passers-by. The road, too, was busy: strings of girls, fair and foul, as in less favoured countries; men bearing breadfruit; the sisters, with a little guard of pupils; a fellow bestriding a horse--passed and greeted us continually; and now it was a Chinaman who came to the gate of his flower-yard, and gave us "Good-day" in excellent English; and a little farther on it would be some natives who set us down by the wayside, made us a feast of mummy-apple, and entertained us as we ate with drumming on a tin case. With all this fine plenty of men and fruit, death is at work here also. The population, according to the highest estimate, does not exceed six hundred in the whole vale of Atuona; and yet, when I once chanced to put the question, Brother Michel counted up ten whom he knew to be sick beyond recovery. It was here, too, that I could at last gratify my curiosity with the sight of a native house in the very article of dissolution. It had fallen flat along the paepae, its poles sprawling ungainly; the rains and the mites contended against it; what remained seemed sound enough, but much was gone already; and it was easy to see how the insects consumed the walls as if they had been bread, and the air and the rain ate into them like vitriol. A little ahead of us, a young gentleman, very well tattooed, and dressed in a pair of white trousers and a flannel shirt, had been marching unconcernedly. Of a sudden, without apparent cause, he turned back, took us in possession and led us undissuadably along a by-path to the river's edge. There, in a nook of the most attractive amenity, he bade us to sit down: the stream splashing at our elbow, a shock of nondescript greenery enshrining us from above; and thither, after a brief absence, he brought us a cocoa-nut, a lump of sandal-wood, and a stick he had begun to carve: the nut for present refreshment, the sandal-wood for a precious gift, and the stick--in the simplicity of his vanity--to harvest premature praise. Only one section was yet carved, although the whole was pencil-marked in lengths; and when I proposed to buy it, Poni (for that was the artist's name) recoiled in horror. But I was not to be moved, and simply refused restitution, for I had long wondered why a people who displayed, in their tattooing, so great a gift of arabesque invention, should display it nowhere else. Here, at last, I had found something of the same talent in another medium; and I held the incompleteness, in these days of world-wide brummagem, for a happy mark of authenticity. Neither my reasons nor my purpose had I the means of making clear to Poni; I could only hold on to the stick, and bid the artist follow me to the gendarmerie, where I should find interpreters and money; but we gave him, in the meanwhile, a boat-call in return for his sandal-wood. As he came behind us down the vale he sounded upon this continually. And continually, from the wayside houses, there poured forth little groups of girls in crimson, or of men in white. And to these must Poni pass the news of who the strangers were, of what they had been doing, of why it was that Poni had a boat-whistle; and of why he was now being haled to the vice-residency, uncertain whether to be punished or rewarded, uncertain whether he had lost a stick or made a bargain, but hopeful on the whole, and in the meanwhile highly consoled by the boat-whistle. Whereupon he would tear himself away from this particular group of inquirers, and once more we would hear the shrill call in our wake. _August 27._--I made a more extended circuit in the vale with Brother Michel. We were mounted on a pair of sober nags, suitable to these rude paths; the weather was exquisite, and the company in which I found myself no less agreeable than the scenes through which I passed. We mounted at first by a steep grade along the summit of one of those twisted spurs that, from a distance, mark out provinces of sun and shade upon the mountain-side. The ground fell away on either hand with an extreme declivity. From either hand, out of profound ravines, mounted the song of falling water and the smoke of household fires. Here and there the hills of foliage would divide, and our eye would plunge down upon one of these deep-nested habitations. And still, high in front, arose the precipitous barrier of the mountain, greened over where it seemed that scarce a harebell could find root, barred with the zigzags of a human road where it seemed that not a goat could scramble. And in truth, for all the labour that it cost, the road is regarded even by the Marquesans as impassable; they will not risk a horse on that, ascent; and those who lie to the westward come and go in their canoes. I never knew a hill to lose so little on a near approach: a consequence, I must suppose, of its surprising steepness. When we turned about, I was amazed to behold so deep a view behind, and so high a shoulder of blue sea, crowned by the whale-like island of Motane. And yet the wall of mountain had not visibly dwindled, and I could even have fancied, as I raised my eyes to measure it, that it loomed higher than before. We struck now into covert paths, crossed and heard more near at hand the bickering of the streams, and tasted the coolness of those recesses where the houses stood. The birds sang about us as we descended. All along our path my guide was being hailed by voices: "Mikaël--Kaoha, Mikaël!" From the doorstep, from the cotton-patch, or out of the deep grove of island-chestnuts, these friendly cries arose, and were cheerily answered as we passed. In a sharp angle of a glen, on a rushing brook and under fathoms of cool foliage, we struck a house upon a well-built paepae, the fire brightly burning under the popoi-shed against the evening meal; and here the cries became a chorus, and the house folk, running out, obliged us to dismount and breathe. It seemed a numerous family: we saw eight at least; and one of these honoured me with a particular attention. This was the mother, a woman naked to the waist, of an aged countenance, but with hair still copious and black, and breasts still erect and youthful. On our arrival I could see she remarked me, but, instead of offering any greeting, disappeared at once into the bush. Thence she returned with two crimson flowers. "Good-bye!" was her salutation, uttered not without coquetry; and as she said it she pressed the flowers into my hand--"Good-bye! I speak Inglis." It was from a whaler-man, who (she informed me) was "a plenty good chap," that she had learned my language; and I could not but think how handsome she must have been in these times of her youth, and could not but guess that some memories of the dandy whaler-man prompted her attentions to myself. Nor could I refrain from wondering what had befallen her lover; in the rain and mire of what sea-ports he had tramped since then; in what close and garish drinking-dens had found his pleasure; and in the ward of what infirmary dreamed his last of the Marquesas. But she, the more fortunate, lived on in her green island. The talk, in this lost house upon the mountains, ran chiefly upon Mapiao and his visits to the _Casco_: the news of which had probably gone abroad by then to all the island, so that there was no paepae in Hiva-oa where they did not make the subject of excited comment. Not much beyond we came upon a high place in the foot of the ravine. Two roads divided it, and met in the midst. Save for this intersection the amphitheatre was strangely perfect, and had a certain ruder air of things Roman. Depths of foliage and the bulk of the mountain kept it in a grateful shadow. On the benches several young folk sat clustered or apart. One of these, a girl perhaps fourteen years of age, buxom and comely, caught the eye of Brother Michel. Why was she not at school?--she was done with school now. What was she doing here?--she lived here now. Why so?--no answer but a deepening blush. There was no severity in Brother Michel's manner; the girl's own confusion told her story. "_Elle a honte_," was the missionary's comment, as we rode away. Near by in the stream, a grown girl was bathing naked in a goyle between two stepping-stones; and it amused me to see with what alacrity and real alarm she bounded on her many-coloured under-clothes. Even in these daughters of cannibals shame was eloquent. It is in Hiva-oa, owing to the inveterate cannibalism of the natives, that local beliefs have been most rudely trodden underfoot. It was here that three religious chiefs were set under a bridge, and the women of the valley made to defile over their heads upon the roadway: the poor, dishonoured fellows sitting there (all observers agree) with streaming tears. Not only was one road driven across the high place, but two roads intersected in its midst. There is no reason to suppose that the last was done of purpose, and perhaps it was impossible entirely to avoid the numerous sacred places of the islands. But these things are not done without result. I have spoken already of the regard of Marquesans for the dead, making (as it does) so strange a contrast with their unconcern for death. Early on this day's ride, for instance, we encountered a petty chief, who inquired (of course) where we were going, and suggested by way of amendment: "Why do you not rather show him the cemetery?" I saw it; it was but newly opened, the third within eight years. They are great builders here in Hiva-oa; I saw in my ride paepaes that no European dry-stone mason could have equalled, the black volcanic stones were laid so justly, the corners were so precise, the levels so true; but the retaining-wall of the new graveyard stood apart, and seemed to be a work of love. The sentiment of honour for the dead is therefore not extinct. And yet observe the consequence of violently countering men's opinions. Of the four prisoners in Atuona gaol, three were of course thieves; the fourth was there for sacrilege. He had levelled up a piece of the graveyard--to give a feast upon, as he informed the court--and declared he had no thought of doing wrong. Why should he? He had been forced at the point of the bayonet to destroy the sacred places of his own piety; when he had recoiled from the task, he had been jeered at for a superstitious fool. And now it is supposed he will respect our European superstitions as by second nature. FOOTNOTE: [4] Elephantiasis. CHAPTER XV THE TWO CHIEFS OF ATUONA It had chanced (as the _Casco_ beat through the Bordelais Straits for Taahauku) she approached on one board very near the land in the opposite isle of Tauata, where houses were to be seen in a grove of tall coco-palms. Brother Michel pointed out the spot. "I am at home now," said he. "I believe I have a large share in these cocoa-nuts; and in that house madame my mother lives with her two husbands!" "With two husbands?" somebody inquired. "_C'est ma honte_," replied the brother drily. A word in passing on the two husbands. I conceive the brother to have expressed himself loosely. It seems common enough to find a native lady with two consorts; but these are not two husbands. The first is still the husband; the wife continues to be referred to by his name; and the position of the coadjutor, or _pikio_, although quite regular, appears undoubtedly subordinate. We had opportunities to observe one household of the sort. The _pikio_ was recognised; appeared openly along with the husband when the lady was thought to be insulted, and the pair made common cause like brothers. At home the inequality was more apparent. The husband sat to receive and entertain visitors; the _pikio_ was running the while to fetch cocoa-nuts like a hired servant, and I remarked he was sent on these errands in preference even to the son. Plainly we have here no second husband; plainly we have the tolerated lover. Only, in the Marquesas, instead of carrying his lady's fan and mantle, he must turn his hand to do the husband's housework. The sight of Brother Michel's family estate led the conversation for some while upon the method and consequence of artificial kinship. Our curiosity became extremely whetted; the brother offered to have the whole of us adopted, and some two days later we became accordingly the children of Paaaeua, appointed chief of Atuona. I was unable to be present at the ceremony, which was primitively simple. The two Mrs. Stevensons and Mr. Osbourne, along with Paaaeua, his wife, and an adopted child of theirs, son of a shipwrecked Austrian, sat down to an excellent island meal, of which the principal and the only necessary dish was pig. A concourse watched them through the apertures of the house; but none, not even Brother Michel, might partake; for the meal was sacramental, and either creative or declaratory of the new relationship. In Tahiti things are not so strictly ordered; when Ori and I "made brothers," both our families sat with us at table, yet only he and I, who had eaten with intention, were supposed to be affected by the ceremony. For the adoption of an infant I believe no formality to be required; the child is handed over by the natural parents, and grows up to inherit the estates of the adoptive. Presents are doubtless exchanged, as at all junctures of island life, social or international; but I never heard of any banquet--the child's presence at the daily board perhaps sufficing. We may find the rationale in the ancient Arabian idea that a common diet makes a common blood, with its derivative axiom that "he is the father who gives the child its morning draught." In the Marquesan practice, the sense would thus be evanescent; from the Tahitian, a mere survival, it will have entirely fled. An interesting parallel will probably occur to many of my readers. What is the nature of the obligation assumed at such a festival? It will vary with the characters of those engaged, and with the circumstances of the case. Thus it would be absurd to take too seriously our adoption at Atuona. On the part of Paaaeua it was an affair of social ambition; when he agreed to receive us in his family the man had not so much as seen us, and knew only that we were inestimably rich and travelled in a floating palace. We, upon our side, ate of his baked meats with no true _animus affiliandi_, but moved by the single sentiment of curiosity. The affair was formal, and a matter of parade, as when in Europe sovereigns call each other cousin. Yet, had we stayed at Atuona, Paaaeua would have held himself bound to establish us upon his land, and to set apart young men for our service, and trees for our support. I have mentioned the Austrian. He sailed in one of two sister ships, which left the Clyde in coal; both rounded the Horn, and both, at several hundred miles of distance, though close on the same point of time, took fire at sea on the Pacific. One was destroyed; the derelict iron frame of the second, after long, aimless cruising, was at length recovered, refitted, and hails to-day from San Francisco. A boat's crew from one of these disasters reached, after great hardships, the isle of Hiva-oa. Some of these men vowed they would never again confront the chances of the sea; but alone of them all the Austrian has been exactly true to his engagement, remains where he landed, and designs to die where he has lived. Now, with such a man, falling and taking root among islanders, the processes described may be compared to a gardener's graft. He passes bodily into the native stock; ceases wholly to be alien; has entered the commune of the blood, shares the prosperity and consideration of his new family, and is expected to impart with the same generosity the fruits of his European skill and knowledge. It is this implied engagement that so frequently offends the ingrafted white. To snatch an immediate advantage--to get (let us say) a station for his store--he will play upon the native custom and become a son or a brother for the day, promising himself to cast down the ladder by which he shall have ascended, and repudiate the kinship so soon as it shall grow burdensome. And he finds there are two parties to the bargain. Perhaps his Polynesian relative is simple, and conceived the blood-bond literally; perhaps he is shrewd, and himself entered the covenant with a view to gain. And either way the store is ravaged, the house littered with lazy natives; and the richer the man grows, the more numerous, the more idle, and the more affectionate he finds his native relatives. Most men thus circumstanced contrive to buy or brutally manage to enforce their independence; but many vegetate without hope, strangled by parasites. We had no cause to blush with Brother Michel. Our new parents were kind, gentle, well-mannered, and generous in gifts; the wife was a most motherly woman, the husband a man who stood justly high with his employers. Enough has been said to show why Moipu should be deposed; and in Paaaeua the French had found a reputable substitute. He went always scrupulously dressed, and looked the picture of propriety, like a dark, handsome, stupid, and probably religious young man hot from a European funeral. In character he seemed the ideal of what is known as the good citizen. He wore gravity like an ornament. None could more nicely represent the desired character as an appointed chief, the outpost of civilisation and reform. And yet, were the French to go and native manners to revive, fancy beholds him crowned with old men's beards and crowding with the first to a man-eating festival. But I must not seem to be unjust to Paaaeua. His respectability went deeper than the skin; his sense of the becoming sometimes nerved him for unexpected rigours. One evening Captain Otis and Mr. Osbourne were on shore in the village. All was agog; dancing had begun; it was plain it was to be a night of festival, and our adventurers were overjoyed at their good fortune. A strong fall of rain drove them for shelter to the house of Paaaeua, where they were made welcome, wiled into a chamber, and shut in. Presently the rain took off, the fun was to begin in earnest, and the young bloods of Atuona came round the house and called to my fellow-travellers through the interstices of the wall. Late into the night the calls were continued and resumed, and sometimes mingled with taunts; late into the night the prisoners, tantalised by the noises of the festival, renewed their efforts to escape. But all was vain; right across the door lay that god-fearing householder, Paaaeua, feigning sleep; and my friends had to forego their junketing. In this incident, so delightfully European, we thought we could detect three strands of sentiment. In the first place, Paaaeua had a charge of souls: these were young men, and he judged it right to withhold them from the primrose path. Secondly, he was a public character, and it was not fitting that his guests should countenance a festival of which he disapproved. So might some strict clergyman at home address a worldly visitor: "Go to the theatre if you like, but, by your leave, not from my house!" Thirdly, Paaaeua was a man jealous and with some cause (as shall be shown) for jealousy; and the feasters were the satellites of his immediate rival, Moipu. For the adoption had caused much excitement in the village; it made the strangers popular. Paaaeua, in his difficult posture of appointed chief, drew strength and dignity from their alliance, and only Moipu and his followers were malcontent. For some reason, nobody (except myself) appears to dislike Moipu. Captain Hart, who has been robbed and threatened by him; Father Orens, whom he has fired at, and repeatedly driven to the woods; my own family, and even the French officials--all seemed smitten with an irrepressible affection for the man. His fall had been made soft; his son, upon his death, was to succeed Paaaeua in the chieftaincy; and he lived, at the time of our visit, in the shoreward part of the village in a good house, and with a strong following of young men, his late braves and pot-hunters. In this society, the coming of the _Casco_, the adoption, the return feast on board, and the presents exchanged between the whites and their new parents, were doubtless eagerly and bitterly canvassed. It was felt that a few years ago the honours would have gone elsewhere. In this unwonted business, in this reception of some hitherto undreamed-of and outlandish potentate--some Prester John or old Assaracus--a few years back it would have been the part of Moipu to play the hero and the host, and his young men would have accompanied and adorned the various celebrations as the acknowledged leaders of society. And now, by a malign vicissitude of fortune, Moipu must sit in his house quite unobserved; and his young men could but look in at the door while their rivals feasted. Perhaps M. Grévy felt a touch of bitterness towards his successor when he beheld him figure on the broad stage of the centenary of eighty-nine; the visit of the _Casco_ which Moipu had missed by so few years was a more unusual occasion in Atuona than a centenary in France; and the dethroned chief determined to reassert himself in the public eye. Mr. Osbourne had gone into Atuona photographing; the population of the village had gathered together for the occasion on the place before the church, and Paaaeua, highly delighted with this new appearance of his family, played the master of ceremonies. The church had been taken, with its jolly architect before the door; the nuns with their pupils; sundry damsels in the ancient and singularly unbecoming robes of tapa; and Father Orens in the midst of a group of his parishioners. I know not what else was in hand, when the photographer became aware of a sensation in the crowd, and, looking around, beheld a very noble figure of a man appear upon the margin of a thicket and stroll nonchalantly near. The nonchalance was visibly affected; it was plain that he came there to arouse attention, and his success was instant. He was introduced; he was civil, he was obliging, he was always ineffably superior and certain of himself; a well-graced actor. It was presently suggested that he should appear in his war costume; he gracefully consented; and returned in that strange, inappropriate, and ill-omened array (which very well became his handsome person) to strut in a circle of admirers, and be thenceforth the centre of photography. Thus had Moipu effected his introduction, as by accident, to the white strangers, made it a favour to display his finery, and reduced his rival to a secondary _rôle_ on the theatre of the disputed village. Paaaeua felt the blow; and, with a spirit we never dreamed he could possess, asserted his priority. It was found impossible that day to get a photograph of Moipu alone; for whenever he stood up before the camera his successor placed himself unbidden by his side, and gently but firmly held to his position. The portraits of the pair, Jacob and Esau, standing shoulder to shoulder, one in his careful European dress, one in his barbaric trappings, figure the past and present of their island. A graveyard with its humble crosses would be the aptest symbol of the future. We are all impressed with the belief that Moipu had planned his campaign from the beginning to the end. It is certain that he lost no time in pushing his advantage. Mr. Osbourne was inveigled to his house; various gifts were fished out of an old sea-chest; Father Orens was called into service as interpreter, and Moipu formally proposed to "make brothers" with Mata-Galahi--Glass-Eyes,--the not very euphonious name under which Mr. Osbourne passed in the Marquesas. The feast of brotherhood took place on board the _Casco_. Paaaeua had arrived with his family, like a plain man; and his presents, which had been numerous, had followed one another, at intervals through several days. Moipu, as if to mark at every point the opposition, came with a certain feudal pomp, attended by retainers bearing gifts of all descriptions, from plumes of old men's beard to little, pious, Catholic engravings. I had met the man before this in the village, and detested him on sight; there was something indescribably raffish in his looks and ways that raised my gorge; and when man-eating was referred to, and he laughed a low, cruel laugh, part boastful, part bashful, like one reminded of some dashing peccadillo, my repugnance was mingled with nausea. This is no very human attitude, nor one at all becoming in a traveller. And, seen more privately, the man improved. Something negroid in character and face was still displeasing; but his ugly mouth became attractive when he smiled, his figure and bearing were certainly noble, and his eyes superb. In his appreciation of jams and pickles, in his delight in the reverberating mirrors of the dining cabin, and consequent endless repetition of Moipus and Mata-Galahis, he showed himself engagingly a child. And yet I am not sure; and what seemed childishness may have been rather courtly art. His manners struck me as beyond the mark; they were refined and caressing to the point of grossness, and when I think of the serene absent-mindedness with which he first strolled in upon our party, and then recall him running on hands and knees along the cabin sofas, pawing the velvet, dipping into the beds, and bleating commendatory "_mitais_" with exaggerated emphasis, like some enormous over-mannered ape, I feel the more sure that both must have been calculated. And I sometimes wonder next, if Moipu were quite alone in this polite duplicity, and ask myself whether the _Casco_ were quite so much admired in the Marquesas as our visitors desired us to suppose. I will complete this sketch of an incurable cannibal grandee with two incongruous traits. His favourite morsel was the human hand, of which he speaks to-day with an ill-favoured lustfulness. And when he said good-bye to Mrs. Stevenson, holding her hand, viewing her with tearful eyes, and chanting his farewell improvisation in the falsetto of Marquesan high society, he wrote upon her mind a sentimental impression which I try in vain to share. PART II THE PAUMOTUS CHAPTER I THE DANGEROUS ARCHIPELAGO--ATOLLS AT A DISTANCE In the early morning of 4th September a whale-boat manned by natives dragged us down the green lane of the anchorage and round the spouting promontory. On the shore level it was a hot, breathless, and yet crystal morning; but high overhead the hills of Atuona were all cowled in cloud, and the ocean-river of the trades streamed without pause. As we crawled from under the immediate shelter of the land, we reached at last the limit of their influence. The wind fell upon our sails in puffs, which strengthened and grew more continuous; presently the _Casco_ heeled down to her day's work; the whale-boat, quite outstripped, clung for a noisy moment to her quarter; the stipulated bread, rum, and tobacco were passed in; a moment more and the boat was in our wake, and our late pilots were cheering our departure. This was the more inspiriting as we were bound for scenes so different, and though on a brief voyage, yet for a new province of creation. That wide field of ocean, called loosely the South Seas, extends from tropic to tropic, and from perhaps 120 degrees W. to 150 degrees E., a parallelogram of one hundred degrees by forty-seven, where degrees are the most spacious. Much of it lies vacant, much is closely sown with isles, and the isles are of two sorts. No distinction is so continually dwelt upon in South Sea talk as that between the "low" and the "high" island, and there is none more broadly marked in nature. The Himalayas are not more different from the Sahara. On the one hand, and chiefly in groups of from eight to a dozen, volcanic islands rise above the sea; few reach an altitude of less than 4,000 feet; one exceeds 13,000; their tops are often obscured in cloud, they are all clothed with various forests, all abound in food, and are all remarkable for picturesque and solemn scenery. On the other hand, we have the atoll; a thing of problematic origin and history, the reputed creature of an insect apparently unidentified; rudely annular in shape; enclosing a lagoon; rarely extending beyond a quarter of a mile at its chief width; often rising at its highest point to less than the stature of a man--man himself, the rat and the land crab, its chief inhabitants; not more variously supplied with plants; and offering to the eye, even when perfect, only a ring of glittering beach and verdant foliage, enclosing and enclosed by the blue sea. In no quarter are the atolls so thickly congregated, in none are they so varied in size from the greatest to the least, and in none is navigation so beset with perils, as in that archipelago that we were now to thread. The huge system of the trades is, for some reason, quite confounded by this multiplicity of reefs; the wind intermits, squalls are frequent from the west and south-west, hurricanes are known. The currents are, besides, inextricably intermixed; dead reckoning becomes a farce; the charts are not to be trusted; and such is the number and similarity of these islands that, even when you have picked one up, you may be none the wiser. The reputation of the place is consequently infamous; insurance offices exclude it from their field, and it was not without misgiving that my captain risked the _Casco_ in such waters. I believe, indeed, it is almost understood that yachts are to avoid this baffling archipelago; and it required all my instances--and all Mr. Otis's private taste for adventure--to deflect our course across its midst. For a few days we sailed with a steady trade, and a steady westerly current setting us to leeward; and toward sundown of the seventh it was supposed we should have sighted Takaroa, one of Cook's so-called King George Islands. The sun set; yet a while longer the old moon--semi-brilliant herself, and with a silver belly, which was her successor--sailed among gathering clouds; she, too, deserted us; stars of every degree of sheen, and clouds of every variety of form, disputed the sub-lustrous night; and still we gazed in vain for Takaroa. The mate stood on the bowsprit, his tall grey figure slashing up and down against the stars, and still "nihil astra præter Vidit et undas." The rest of us were grouped at the port anchor davit, staring with no less assiduity, but with far less hope on the obscure horizon. Islands we beheld in plenty, but they were of "such stuff as dreams are made on," and vanished at a wink, only to appear in other places; and by and by not only islands, but refulgent and revolving lights began to stud the darkness; light-houses of the mind or of the wearied optic nerve, solemnly shining and winking as we passed. At length the mate himself despaired, scrambled on board again from his unrestful perch, and announced that we had missed our destination. He was the only man of practice in these waters, our sole pilot, shipped for that end at Tai-o-hae. If he declared we had missed Takaroa, it was not for us to quarrel with the fact, but, if we could, to explain it. We had certainly run down our southing. Our canted wake upon the sea and our somewhat drunken-looking course upon the chart both testified with no less certainty to an impetuous westward current. We had no choice but to conclude we were again set down to leeward; and the best we could do was to bring the _Casco_ to the wind, keep a good watch, and expect morning. I slept that night, as was then my somewhat dangerous practice, on deck upon the cockpit bench. A stir at last awoke me, to see all the eastern heaven dyed with faint orange, the binnacle lamp already dulled against the brightness of the day, and the steersman leaning eagerly across the wheel. "There it is, sir!" he cried, and pointed in the very eyeball of the dawn. For a while I could see nothing but the bluish ruins of the morning bank, which lay far along the horizon, like melting icebergs. Then the sun rose, pierced a gap in these _débris_ of vapours, and displayed an inconsiderable islet, flat as a plate upon the sea, and spiked with palms of disproportioned altitude. So far, so good. Here was certainly an atoll, and we were certainly got among the archipelago. But which? And where? The isle was too small for either Takaroa: in all our neighbourhood, indeed, there was none so inconsiderable, save only Tikei; and Tikei, one of Roggewein's so-called Pernicious Islands, seemed beside the question. At that rate, instead of drifting to the west, we must have fetched up thirty miles to windward. And how about the current? It had been setting us down, by observation, all these days: by the deflection of our wake, it should be setting us down that moment. When had it stopped? When had it begun again? and what kind of torrent was that which had swept us eastward in the interval? To these questions, so typical of navigation in that range of isles, I have no answer. Such were at least the facts; Tikei our island turned out to be; and it was our first experience of the dangerous archipelago, to make our landfall thirty miles out. The sight of Tikei, thrown direct against the splendour of the morning, robbed of all its colour, and deformed with disproportioned trees like bristles on a broom, had scarce prepared us to be much in love with atolls. Later the same day we saw under more fit conditions the island of Taiaro. "Lost in the Sea" is possibly the meaning of the name. And it was so we saw it; lost in blue sea and sky: a ring of white beach, green underwood, and tossing palms, gem-like in colour; of a fairy, of a heavenly prettiness. The surf ran all around it, white as snow, and broke at one point, far to seaward, on what seemed an uncharted reef. There was no smoke, no sign of man; indeed, the isle is not inhabited, only visited at intervals. And yet a trader (Mr. Narii Salmon) was watching from the shore and wondering at the unexpected ship. I have spent since then long months upon low islands; I know the tedium of their undistinguished days; I know the burden of their diet. With whatever envy we may have looked from the deck on these green coverts, it was with a tenfold greater that Mr. Salmon and his comrades saw us steer, in our trim ship, to seaward. The night fell lovely in the extreme. After the moon went down, the heaven was a thing to wonder at for stars. And as I lay in the cockpit and looked upon the steersman I was haunted by Emerson's verses: "And the lone seaman all the night Sails astonished among stars." By this glittering and imperfect brightness, about four bells in the first watch we made our third atoll, Raraka. The low line of the isle lay straight along the sky; so that I was at first reminded of a towpath, and we seemed to be mounting some engineered and navigable stream. Presently a red star appeared, about the height and brightness of a danger signal, and with that my simile was changed; we seemed rather to skirt the embankment of a railway, and the eye began to look instinctively for the telegraph-posts, and the ear to expect the coming of a train. Here and there, but rarely, faint tree-tops broke the level. And the sound of the surf accompanied us, now in a drowsy monotone, now with a menacing swing. The isle lay nearly east and west, barring our advance on Fakarava. We must, therefore, hug the coast until we gained the western end, where, through a passage eight miles wide, we might sail southward between Raraka and the next isle, Kauehi. We had the wind free, a lightish air; but clouds of an inky blackness were beginning to arise, and at times it lightened--without thunder. Something, I know not what, continually set us up upon the island. We lay more and more to the nor'ard; and you would have thought the shore copied our manoeuvre and outsailed us. Once and twice Raraka headed us again--again, in the sea fashion, the quite innocent steersman was abused--and again the _Casco_ kept away. Had I been called on, with no more light than that of our experience, to draw the configuration of that island, I should have shown a series of bow-window promontories, each overlapping the other to the nor'ard, and the trend of the land from the south-east to the north-west, and behold, on the chart it lay near east and west in a straight line. We had but just repeated our manoeuvre and kept away--for not more than five minutes the railway embankment had been lost to view and the surf to hearing--when I was aware of land again, not only on the weather bow, but dead ahead. I played the part of the judicious landsman, holding my peace till the last moment; and presently my mariners perceived it for themselves. "Land ahead!" said the steersman. "By God, it's Kauehi!" cried the mate. And so it was. And with that I began to be sorry for cartographers. We were scarce doing three and a half; and they asked me to believe that (in five minutes) we had dropped an island, passed eight miles of open water, and run almost high and dry upon the next. But my captain was more sorry for himself to be afloat in such a labyrinth; laid the _Casco_ to, with the log line up and down, and sat on the stern rail and watched it till the morning. He had enough of night in the Paumotus. By daylight on the 9th we began to skirt Kauehi, and had now an opportunity to see near at hand the geography of atolls. Here and there, where it was high, the farther side loomed up; here and there the near side dipped entirely and showed a broad path of water into the lagoon; here and there both sides were equally abased, and we could look right through the discontinuous ring to the sea horizon on the south. Conceive, on a vast scale, the submerged hoop of the duck-hunter, trimmed with green rushes to conceal his head--water within, water without--you have the image of the perfect atoll. Conceive one that has been partly plucked of its rush fringe; you have the atoll of Kauehi. And for either shore of it at closer quarters, conceive the line of some old Roman highway traversing a wet morass, and here sunk out of view and there re-arising, crowned with a green tuft of thicket; only instead of the stagnant waters of a marsh, the live ocean now boiled against, now buried the frail barrier. Last night's impression in the dark was thus confirmed by day, and not corrected. We sailed indeed by a mere causeway in the sea, of nature's handiwork, yet of no greater magnitude than many of the works of man. The isle was uninhabited; it was all green brush and white sand, set in transcendently blue water; even the coco-palms were rare, though some of these completed the bright harmony of colour by hanging out a fan of golden yellow. For long there was no sign of life beyond the vegetable, and no sound but the continuous grumble of the surf. In silence and desertion these fair shores slipped past, and were submerged and rose again with clumps of thicket from the sea. And then a bird or two appeared, hovering and crying; swiftly these became more numerous, and presently, looking ahead, we were aware of a vast effervescence of winged life. In this place the annular isle was mostly under water, carrying here and there on its submerged line a wooded islet. Over one of these the birds hung and flew with an incredible density like that of gnats or hiving bees; the mass flashed white and black, and heaved and quivered, and the screaming of the creatures rose over the voice of the surf in a shrill clattering whirr. As you descend some inland valley, a not dissimilar sound announces the nearness of a mill and pouring river. Some stragglers, as I said, came to meet our approach; a few still hung about the ship as we departed. The crying died away, the last pair of wings was left behind, and once more the low shores of Kauehi streamed past our eyes in silence like a picture. I supposed at the time that the birds lived, like ants or citizens, concentred where we saw them. I have been told since (I know not if correctly) that the whole isle, or much of it, is similarly peopled; and that the effervescence at a single spot would be the mark of a boat's crew of egg-hunters from one of the neighbouring inhabited atolls. So that here at Kauehi, as the day before at Taiaro, the _Casco_ sailed by under the fire of unsuspected eyes. And one thing is surely true, that even on these ribbons of land an army might lie hid and no passing mariner divine its presence. CHAPTER II FAKARAVA: AN ATOLL AT HAND By a little before noon we were running down the coast of our destination, Fakarava: the air very light, the sea near smooth; though still we were accompanied by a continuous murmur from the beach, like the sound of a distant train. The isle is of a huge longitude, the enclosed lagoon thirty miles by ten or twelve, and the coral tow-path, which they call the land, some eighty or ninety miles by (possibly) one furlong. That part by which we sailed was all raised; the underwood excellently green, the topping wood of coco-palms continuous--a mark, if I had known it, of man's intervention. For once more, and once more unconsciously, we were within hail of fellow-creatures, and that vacant beach was but a pistol-shot from the capital city of the archipelago. But the life of an atoll, unless it be enclosed, passes wholly on the shores of the lagoon; it is there the villages are seated, there the canoes ply and are drawn up; and the beach of the ocean is a place accursed and deserted, the fit scene only for wizardry and shipwreck, and in the native belief a haunting ground of murderous spectres. By and by we might perceive a breach in the low barrier; the woods ceased; a glittering point ran into the sea, tipped with an emerald shoal, the mark of entrance. As we drew near we met a little run of sea--the private sea of the lagoon having there its origin and end, and here, in the jaws of the gateway, trying vain conclusions with the more majestic heave of the Pacific. The _Casco_ scarce avowed a shock; but there are times and circumstances when these harbour mouths of inland basins vomit floods, deflecting, burying, and dismasting ships. For, conceive a lagoon perfectly sealed but in the one point, and that of merely navigable width; conceive the tide and wind to have heaped for hours together in that coral fold a superfluity of waters, and the tide to change and the wind fall--the open sluice of some great reservoirs at home will give an image of the unstemmable effluxion. We were scarce well headed for the pass before all heads were craned over the rail. For the water, shoaling under our board, became changed in a moment to surprising hues of blue and grey; and in its transparency the coral branched and blossomed, and the fish of the inland sea cruised visibly below us, stained and stripped, and even beaked like parrots. I have paid in my time to view many curiosities; never one so curious as that first sight over the ship's rail in the lagoon of Fakarava. But let not the reader be deceived with hope. I have since entered, I suppose, some dozen atolls in different parts of the Pacific, and the experience has never been repeated. That exquisite hue and transparency of submarine day, and these shoals of rainbow fish have not enraptured me again. Before we could raise our eyes from that engaging spectacle the schooner had slipped betwixt the pier-heads of the reef, and was already quite committed to the sea within. The containing shores are so little erected, and the lagoon itself is so great, that, for the more part, it seemed to extend without a check to the horizon. Here and there, indeed, where the reef carried an inlet, like a signet-ring upon a finger, there would be a pencilling of palms; here and there, the green wall of wood ran solid for a length of miles; and on the port hand, under the highest grove of trees, a few houses sparkled white--Rotoava, the metropolitan settlement of the Paumotus. Hither we beat in three tacks, and came to an anchor close in shore, in the first smooth water since we had left San Francisco, five fathoms deep, where a man might look overboard all day at the vanishing cable, the coral patches, and the many-coloured fish. Fakarava was chosen to be the seat of Government from nautical considerations only. It is eccentrically situate; the productions, even for a low island, poor; the population neither many nor--for Low Islanders--industrious. But the lagoon has two good passages, one to leeward, one to windward, so that in all states of the wind it can be left and entered, and this advantage, for a government of scattered islands, was decisive. A pier of coral, landing-stairs, a harbour light upon a staff and pillar, and two spacious Government bungalows in a handsome fence, give to the northern end of Rotoava a great air of consequence. This is confirmed on the one hand by an empty prison, on the other by a gendarmerie pasted over with handbills in Tahitian, land-law notices from Papeete, and republican sentiments from Paris, signed (a little after date) "Jules Grévy, _Perihidente_." Quite at the far end a belfried Catholic chapel concludes the town; and between, on a smooth floor of white coral sand and under the breezy canopy of coco-palms, the houses of the natives stand irregularly scattered, now close on the lagoon for the sake of the breeze, now back under the palms for love of shadow. Not a soul was to be seen. But for the thunder of the surf on the far side, it seemed you might have heard a pin drop anywhere about that capital city. There was something thrilling in the unexpected silence, something yet more so in the unexpected sound. Here before us a sea reached to the horizon, rippling like an inland mere; and, behold! close at our back another sea assaulted with assiduous fury the reverse of the position. At night the lantern was run up and lit a vacant pier. In one house lights were seen and voices heard, where the population (I was told) sat playing cards. A little beyond, from deep in the darkness of the palm grove, we saw the glow and smelt the aromatic odour of a coal of cocoa-nut husk, a relic of the evening kitchen. Crickets sang; some shrill thing whistled in a tuft of weeds; and the mosquito hummed and stung. There was no other trace that night of man, bird, or insect in the isle. The moon, now three days old, and as yet but a silver crescent on a still visible sphere, shone through the palm canopy with vigorous and scattered lights. The alleys where we walked were smoothed and weeded like a boulevard; here and there were plants set out; here and there dusky cottages clustered in the shadow, some with verandahs. A public garden by night, a rich and fashionable watering-place in a by-season, offer sights and vistas not dissimilar. And still, on the one side, stretched the lapping mere, and from the other the deep sea still growled in the night. But it was most of all on board, in the dead hours, when I had been better sleeping, that the spell of Fakarava seized and held me. The moon was down. The harbour lantern and two of the greater planets drew vari-coloured wakes on the lagoon. From shore the cheerful watch-cry of cocks rang out at intervals above the organ-point of surf. And the thought of this depopulated capital, this protracted thread of annular island with its crest of coco-palms and fringe of breakers, and that tranquil inland sea that stretched before me till it touched the stars, ran in my head for hours with delight. So long as I stayed upon that isle these thoughts were constant. I lay down to sleep, and woke again with an unblunted sense of my surroundings. I was never weary of calling up the image of that narrow causeway, on which I had my dwelling, lying coiled like a serpent, tail to mouth, in the outrageous ocean, and I was never weary of passing--a mere quarter-deck parade--from the one side to the other, from the shady, habitable shores of the lagoon to the blinding desert and uproarious breakers of the opposite beach. The sense of insecurity in such a thread of residence is more than fanciful. Hurricanes and tidal waves over-leap these humble obstacles; Oceanus remembers his strength, and, where houses stood and palms flourished, shakes his white beard again over the barren coral. Fakarava itself has suffered; the trees immediately beyond my house were all of recent replantation; and Anaa is only now recovered from a heavier stroke. I knew one who was then dwelling in the isle. He told me that he and two ship captains walked to the sea beach. There for a while they viewed the on-coming breakers, till one of the captains clapped suddenly his hand before his eyes and cried aloud that he could endure no longer to behold them. This was in the afternoon; in the dark hours of the night the sea burst upon the island like a flood; the settlement was razed, all but the church and presbytery; and, when day returned, the survivors saw themselves clinging in an abattis of uprooted coco-palms and ruined houses. Danger is but a small consideration. But men are more nicely sensible of a discomfort; and the atoll is a discomfortable home. There are some, and these probably ancient, where a deep soil has formed and the most valuable fruit-trees prosper. I have walked in one, with equal admiration and surprise, through a forest of huge breadfruits, eating bananas and stumbling among taro as I went. This was in the atoll of Namorik in the Marshall group, and stands alone in my experience. To give the opposite extreme, which is yet far more near the average, I will describe the soil and productions of Fakarava. The surface of that narrow strip is for the more part of broken coral limestone, like volcanic clinkers, and excruciating to the naked foot; in some atolls, I believe, not in Fakarava, it gives a fine metallic ring when struck. Here and there you come upon a bank of sand, exceeding fine and white, and these parts are the least productive. The plants (such as they are) spring from and love the broken coral, whence they grow with that wonderful verdancy that makes the beauty of the atoll from the sea. The coco-palm in particular luxuriates in that stern _solum_, striking down his roots to the brackish, percolated water, and bearing his green head in the wind with every evidence of health and pleasure. And yet even the coco-palm must be helped in infancy with some extraneous nutriment, and through much of the low archipelago there is planted with each nut a piece of ship's biscuit and a rusty nail. The pandanus comes next in importance, being also a food tree; and he, too, does bravely. A green bush called _miki_ runs everywhere; occasionally a purao is seen; and there are several useless weeds. According to M. Cuzent, the whole number of plants on an atoll such as Fakarava will scarce exceed, even if it reaches to, one score. Not a blade of grass appears; not a grain of humus, save when a sack or two has been imported to make the semblance of a garden; such gardens as bloom in cities on the window-sill. Insect life is sometimes dense; a cloud of mosquitoes, and, what is far worse, a plague of flies blackening our food, have sometimes driven us from a meal on Apemama; and even in Fakarava the mosquitoes were a pest. The land crab may be seen scuttling to his hole, and at night the rats besiege the houses and the artificial gardens. The crab is good eating; possibly so is the rat; I have not tried. Pandanus fruit is made, in the Gilberts, into an agreeable sweetmeat, such as a man may trifle with at the end of a long dinner; for a substantial meal I have no use for it. The rest of the food-supply, in a destitute atoll such as Fakarava, can be summed up in the favourite jest of the archipelago--cocoa-nut beefsteak. Cocoa-nut green, cocoa-nut ripe, cocoa-nut germinated; cocoa-nut to eat and cocoa-nut to drink; cocoa-nut raw and cooked, cocoa-nut hot and cold--such is the bill of fare. And some of the entrees are no doubt delicious. The germinated nut, cooked in the shell and eaten with a spoon, forms a good pudding; cocoa-nut milk--the expressed juice of a ripe nut, not the water of a green one--goes well in coffee, and is a valuable adjunct in cookery through the South Seas; and cocoa-nut salad, if you be a millionaire, and can afford to eat the value of a field of corn for your dessert, is a dish to be remembered with affection. But when all is done there is a sameness, and the Israelites of the low islands murmur at their manna. The reader may think I have forgot the sea. The two beaches do certainly abound in life, and they are strangely different. In the lagoon the water shallows slowly on a bottom of fine slimy sand, dotted with clumps of growing coral. Then comes a strip of tidal beach on which the ripples lap. In the coral clumps the great holy-water clam (_Tridacna_) grows plentifully; a little deeper lie the beds of the pearl-oyster and sail the resplendent fish that charmed us at our entrance; and these are all more or less vigorously coloured. But the other shells are white like lime, or faintly tinted with a little pink, the palest possible display; many of them dead besides, and badly rolled. On the ocean side, on the mounds of the steep beach, over all the width of the reef right out to where the surf is bursting, in every cranny, under every scattered fragment of the coral, an incredible plenty of marine life displays the most wonderful variety and brilliancy of hues. The reef itself has no passage of colour but is imitated by some shell. Purple and red and white, and green and yellow, pied and striped and clouded, the living shells wear in every combination the livery of the dead reef--if the reef be dead--so that the eye is continually baffled and the collector continually deceived. I have taken shells for stones and stones for shells, the one as often as the other. A prevailing character of the coral is to be dotted with small spots of red, and it is wonderful how many varieties of shell have adopted the same fashion and donned the disguise of the red spot. A shell I had found in plenty in the Marquesas I found here also unchanged in all things else, but there were the red spots. A lively little crab wore the same marking. The case of the hermit or soldier crab was more conclusive, being the result of conscious choice. This nasty little wrecker, scavenger, and squatter has learned the value of a spotted house; so it be of the right colour he will choose the smallest shard, tuck himself in a mere corner of a broken whorl, and go about the world half naked; but I never found him in this imperfect armour unless it was marked with the red spot. Some two hundred yards distant is the beach of the lagoon. Collect the shells from each, set them side by side, and you would suppose they came from different hemispheres; the one so pale, the other so brilliant; the one prevalently white, the other of a score of hues, and infected with the scarlet spot like a disease. This seems the more strange, since the hermit crabs pass and repass the island, and I have met them by the Residency well, which is about central, journeying either way. Without doubt many of the shells in the lagoon are dead. But why are they dead? Without doubt the living shells have a very different background set for imitation. But why are these so different? We are only on the threshold of the mysteries. Either beach, I have said, abounds with life. On the sea-side and in certain atolls this profusion of vitality is even shocking: the rock under foot is mined with it. I have broken oft--notably in Funafuti and Arorai[5]--great lumps of ancient weathered rock that rang under my blows like iron, and the fracture has been full of pendent worms as long as my hand, as thick as a child's finger, of a slightly pinkish white, and set as close as three or even four to the square inch. Even in the lagoon, where certain shell-fish seem to sicken, others (it is notorious) prosper exceedingly and make the riches of these islands. Fish, too, abound; the lagoon is a closed fish-pond, such as might rejoice the fancy of an abbot; sharks swarm there, and chiefly round the passages, to feast upon this plenty, and you would suppose that man had only to prepare his angle. Alas! it is not so. Of these painted fish that came in hordes about the entering _Casco_, some bore poisonous spines, and others were poisonous if eaten. The stranger must refrain, or take his chance of painful and dangerous sickness. The native, on his own isle, is a safe guide; transplant him to the next, and he is as helpless as yourself. For it is a question both of time and place. A fish caught in a lagoon may be deadly; the same fish caught the same day at sea, and only a few hundred yards without the passage, will be wholesome eating: in a neighbouring isle perhaps the case will be reversed; and perhaps a fortnight later you shall be able to eat of them indifferently from within and from without. According to the natives, these bewildering vicissitudes are ruled by the movement of the heavenly bodies. The beautiful planet Venus plays a great part in all island tales and customs; and among other functions, some of them more awful, she regulates the season of good fish. With Venus in one phase, as we had her, certain fish were poisonous in the lagoon: with Venus in another, the same fish was harmless and a valued article of diet. White men explain these changes by the phases of the coral. It adds a last touch of horror to the thought of this precarious annular gangway in the sea, that even what there is of it is not of honest rock, but organic, part alive, part putrescent; even the clean sea and the bright fish about it poisoned, the most stubborn boulder burrowed in by worms, the lightest dust venomous as an apothecary's drugs. FOOTNOTE: [5] Arorai is in the Gilberts, Funafuti in the Ellice Islands.--Ed. CHAPTER III A HOUSE TO LET IN A LOW ISLAND Never populous, it was yet by a chapter of accidents that I found the island so deserted that no sound of human life diversified the hours; that we walked in the trim public garden of a town, among closed houses, without even a lodging-bill in a window to prove some tenancy in the back quarters; and, when we visited the Government bungalow, that Mr. Donat, acting Vice-Resident, greeted us alone, and entertained us with cocoa-nut punches in the Sessions Hall and seat of judgment of that widespread archipelago, our glasses standing arrayed with summonses and census returns. The unpopularity of the late Vice-Resident had begun the movement of exodus, his native employés resigning court appointments and retiring each to his own coco-patch in the remoter districts of the isle. Upon the back of that, the Governor in Papeete issued a decree: All land in the Paumotus must be defined and registered by a certain date. Now, the folk of the archipelago are half nomadic; a man can scarce be said to belong to a particular atoll; he belongs to several, perhaps holds a stake and counts cousinship in half a score; and the inhabitants of Rotoava in particular, man, woman, and child, and from the gendarme to the Mormon prophet and the schoolmaster, owned--I was going to say land--owned at least coral blocks and growing coco-palms in some adjacent isle. Thither--from the gendarme to the babe in arms, the pastor followed by his flock, the schoolmaster carrying along with him his scholars, and the scholars with their books and slates--they had taken ship some two days previous to our arrival, and were all now engaged disputing boundaries. Fancy overhears the shrillness of their disputation mingle with the surf and scatter sea-fowl. It was admirable to observe the completeness of their flight, like that of hibernating birds; nothing left but empty houses, like old nests to be reoccupied in spring; and even the harmless necessary dominie borne with them in their transmigration. Fifty odd set out, and only seven, I was informed, remained. But when I made a feast on board the _Casco_, more than seven, and nearer seven times seven, appeared to be my guests. Whence they appeared, how they were summoned, whither they vanished when the feast was eaten, I have no guess. In view of low island tales, and that awful frequentation which makes men avoid the seaward beaches of an atoll, some two score of those that ate with us may have returned, for the occasion, from the kingdom of the dead. It was this solitude that put it in our minds to hire a house, and become, for the time being, indwellers of the isle--a practice I have ever since, when it was possible, adhered to. Mr. Donat placed us, with that intent, under the convoy of one Taniera Mahinui, who combined the incongruous characters of catechist and convict. The reader may smile, but I affirm he was well qualified for either part. For that of convict, first of all, by a good substantial felony, such as in all lands casts the perpetrator in chains and dungeons. Taniera was a man of birth--the chief a while ago, as he loved to tell, of a district in Anaa of 800 souls. In an evil hour it occurred to the authorities in Papeete to charge the chiefs with the collection of the taxes. It is a question if much were collected; it is certain that nothing was handed on; and Taniera, who had distinguished himself by a visit to Papeete and some high living in restaurants, was chosen for the scapegoat. The reader must understand that not Taniera but the authorities in Papeete were first in fault. The charge imposed was disproportioned. I have not yet heard of any Polynesian capable of such a burden; honest and upright Hawaiians--one in particular, who was admired even by the whites as an inflexible magistrate--have stumbled in the narrow path of the trustee. And Taniera, when the pinch came, scorned to denounce accomplices; others had shared the spoil, he bore the penalty alone. He was condemned in five years. The period, when I had the pleasure of his friendship, was not yet expired; he still drew prison rations, the sole and not unwelcome reminder of his chains, and, I believe, looked forward to the date of his enfranchisement with mere alarm. For he had no sense of shame in the position; complained of nothing but the defective table of his place of exile; regretted nothing but the fowls and eggs and fish of his own more favoured island. And as for his parishioners, they did not think one hair the less of him. A schoolboy, mulcted in ten thousand lines of Greek and dwelling sequestered in the dormitories, enjoys unabated consideration from his fellows. So with Taniera: a marked man, not a dishonoured; having fallen under the lash of the unthinkable gods; a Job, perhaps, or say a Taniera in the den of lions. Songs are likely made and sung about this saintly Robin Hood. On the other hand, he was even highly qualified for his office in the Church; being by nature a grave, considerate, and kindly man; his face rugged and serious, his smile bright; the master of several trades, a builder both of boats and houses; endowed with a fine pulpit voice; endowed besides with such a gift of eloquence that at the grave of the late chief of Fakarava he set all the assistants weeping. I never met a man of a mind more ecclesiastical; he loved to dispute and to inform himself of doctrine and the history of sects; and when I showed him the cuts in a volume of Chambers's "Encyclopædia"--except for one of an ape--reserved his whole enthusiasm for cardinals' hats, censers, candlesticks, and cathedrals. Methought when he looked upon the cardinal's hat a voice said low in his ear: "Your foot is on the ladder." Under the guidance of Taniera we were soon installed in what I believe to have been the best-appointed private house in Fakarava. It stood just beyond the church in an oblong patch of cultivation. More than three hundred sacks of soil were imported from Tahiti for the Residency garden; and this must shortly be renewed, for the earth blows away, sinks in crevices of the coral, and is sought for at last in vain. I know not how much earth had gone to the garden of my villa; some at least, for an alley of prosperous bananas ran to the gate, and over the rest of the enclosure, which was covered with the usual clinker-like fragments of smashed coral, not only coco-palms and mikis but also fig-trees flourished, all of a delicious greenness. Of course there was no blade of grass. In front a picket fence divided us from the white road, the palm-fringed margin of the lagoon, and the lagoon itself, reflecting clouds by day and stars by night. At the back, a bulwark of uncemented coral enclosed us from the narrow belt of bush and the nigh ocean beach where the seas thundered, the roar and wash of them still humming in the chambers of the house. This itself was of one story, verandahed front and back. It contained three rooms, three sewing-machines, three sea-chests, chairs, tables, a pair of beds, a cradle, a double-barrelled gun, a pair of enlarged coloured photographs, a pair of coloured prints after Wilkie and Mulready, and a French lithograph with the legend: "_Le brigade du Général Lepasset brûlant son drapeau devant Metz._" Under the stilts of the house a stove was rusting, till we drew it forth and put it in commission. Not far off was the burrow in the coral whence we supplied ourselves with brackish water. There was live stock, besides, on the estate--cocks and hens and a brace of ill-regulated cats, whom Taniera came every morning with the sun to feed on grated cocoa-nut. His voice was our regular réveille, ringing pleasantly about the garden: "Pooty--pooty--poo--poo--poo!" Far as we were from the public offices, the nearness of the chapel made our situation what is called eligible in advertisements, and gave us a side look on some native life. Every morning, as soon as he had fed the fowls, Taniera set the bell agoing in the small belfry; and the faithful, who were not very numerous, gathered to prayers. I was once present: it was the Lord's day, and seven females and eight males composed the congregation. A woman played precentor, starting with a longish note; the catechist joined in upon the second bar; and then the faithful in a body. Some had printed hymn-books which they followed; some of the rest filled up with "eh--eh--eh," the Paumotuan tol-de-rol. After the hymn, we had an antiphonal prayer or two; and then Taniera rose from the front bench, where he had been sitting in his catechist's robes, passed within the altar-rails, opened his Tahitian Bible, and began to preach from notes. I understood one word--the name of God; but the preacher managed his voice with taste, used rare and expressive gestures, and made a strong impression of sincerity. The plain service, the vernacular Bible, the hymn-tunes mostly on an English pattern--"God save the Queen," I was informed, a special favourite,--all, save some paper flowers upon the altar, seemed not merely but austerely Protestant. It is thus the Catholics have met their low island proselytes half-way. Taniera had the keys of our house; it was with him I made my bargain, if that could be called a bargain in which all was remitted to my generosity; it was he who fed the cats and poultry, he who came to call and pick a meal with us like an acknowledged friend; and we long fondly supposed he was our landlord. This belief was not to bear the test of experience; and, as my chapter has to relate, no certainty succeeded it. We passed some days of airless quiet and great heat; shell-gatherers were warned from the ocean beach, where sunstroke waited them from ten till four; the highest palm hung motionless, there was no voice audible but that of the sea on the far side. At last, about four of a certain afternoon, long cat's-paws flawed the face of the lagoon; and presently in the tree-tops there awoke the grateful bustle of the trades, and all the houses and alleys of the island were fanned out. To more than one enchanted ship, that had lain long becalmed in view of the green shore, the wind brought deliverance; and by daylight on the morrow a schooner and two cutters lay moored in the port of Rotoava. Not only in the outer sea, but in the lagoon itself, a certain traffic woke with the reviving breeze; and among the rest one François, a half-blood, set sail with the first light in his own half-decked cutter. He had held before a court appointment; being, I believe, the Residency sweeper-out. Trouble arising with the unpopular Vice-Resident, he had thrown his honours down, and fled to the far parts of the atoll to plant cabbages--or at least coco-palms. Thence he was now driven by such need as even a Cincinnatus must acknowledge, and fared for the capital city, the seat of his late functions, to exchange half a ton of copra for necessary flour. And here, for a while, the story leaves to tell of his voyaging. It must tell, instead, of our house, where, toward seven at night, the catechist came suddenly in with his pleased air of being welcome; armed besides with a considerable bunch of keys. These he proceeded to try on the sea-chests, drawing each in turn from its place against the wall. Heads of strangers appeared in the doorway and volunteered suggestions. All in vain. Either they were the wrong keys or the wrong boxes, or the wrong man was trying them. For a little Taniera fumed and fretted; then had recourse to the more summary method of the hatchet; one of the chests was broken open, and an armful of clothing, male and female, baled out and handed to the strangers on the verandah. These were François, his wife, and their child. About eight A.M., in the midst of the lagoon, their cutter had capsized in jibbing. They got her righted, and though she was still full of water put the child on board. The mainsail had been carried away, but the jib still drew her sluggishly along, and François and the woman swam astern and worked the rudder with their hands. The cold was cruel; the fatigue, as time went on, became excessive; and in that preserve of sharks, fear haunted them. Again and again, François, the half-breed, would have desisted and gone down; but the woman, whole blood of an amphibious race, still supported him with cheerful words. I am reminded of a woman of Hawaii who swam with her husband, I dare not say how many miles, in a high sea, and came ashore at last with his dead body in her arms. It was about five in the evening, after nine hours' swimming, that François and his wife reached land at Rotoava. The gallant fight was won, and instantly the more childish side of native character appears. They had supped, and told and retold their story, dripping as they came; the flesh of the woman, whom Mrs. Stevenson helped to shift, was cold as stone; and François, having changed to a dry cotton shirt and trousers, passed the remainder of the evening on my floor and between open doorways, in a thorough draught. Yet François, the son of a French father, speaks excellent French himself and seems intelligent. It was our first idea that the catechist, true to his evangelical vocation, was clothing the naked from his superfluity. Then it came out that François was but dealing with his own. The clothes were his, so was the chest, so was the house. François was in fact the landlord. Yet you observe he had hung back on the verandah while Taniera tried his 'prentice hand upon the locks; and even now, when his true character appeared, the only use he made of the estate was to leave the clothes of his family drying on the fence. Taniera was still the friend of the house, still fed the poultry, still came about us on his daily visits; François, during the remainder of his stay, holding bashfully aloof. And there was stranger matter. Since François had lost the whole load of his cutter, the half ton of copra, an axe, bowls, knives, and clothes--since he had in a manner to begin the world again, and his necessary flour was not yet bought or paid for--I proposed to advance him what he needed on the rent. To my enduring amazement he refused, and the reason he gave--if that can be called a reason which but darkens counsel--was that Taniera was his friend. His friend, you observe, not his creditor. I inquired into that, and was assured that Taniera, an exile in a strange isle, might possibly be in debt himself, but certainly was no man's creditor. Very early one morning we were awakened by a bustling presence in the yard, and found our camp had been surprised by a tall, lean, old native lady, dressed in what were obviously widow's weeds. You could see at a glance she was a notable woman, a housewife, sternly practical, alive with energy, and with fine possibilities of temper. Indeed there was nothing native about her but the skin; and the type abounds, and is everywhere respected nearer home. It did us good to see her scour the grounds, examining the plants and chickens; watering, feeding, trimming them; taking angry, purpose-like possession. When she neared the house our sympathy abated; when she came to the broken chest I wished I were elsewhere. We had scarce a word in common; but her whole lean body spoke for her with indignant eloquence. "My chest!" it cried, with a stress on the possessive. "My chest--broken open! This is a fine state of things!" I hastened to lay the blame where it belonged--on François and his wife--and found I had made things worse instead of better. She repeated the names at first with incredulity, then with despair. A while she seemed stunned, next fell to disembowelling the box, piling the goods on the floor, and visibly computing the extent of François's ravages; and presently after she was observed in high speech with Taniera, who seemed to hang an ear like one reproved. Here, then, by all known marks, should be my landlady at last; here was every character of the proprietor fully developed. Should I not approach her on the still depending question of my rent? I carried the point to an adviser. "Nonsense!" he cried. "That's the old woman, the mother. It doesn't belong to her. I believe that's the man the house belongs to," and he pointed to one of the coloured photographs on the wall. On this I gave up all desire of understanding; and when the time came for me to leave, in the judgment-hall of the archipelago, and with the awful countenance of the acting Governor, I duly paid my rent to Taniera. He was satisfied, and so was I. But what had he to do with it? Mr. Donat, acting magistrate and a man of kindred blood, could throw no light upon the mystery; a plain private person, with a taste for letters, cannot be expected to do more. CHAPTER IV TRAITS AND SECTS IN THE PAUMOTUS The most careless reader must have remarked a change of air since the Marquesas. The house, crowded with effects, the bustling housewife counting her possessions, the serious, indoctrinated island pastor, the long fight for life in a lagoon: here are traits of a new world. I read in a pamphlet (I will not give the author's name) that the Marquesan especially resembles the Paumotuan. I should take the two races, though so near in neighbourhood, to be extremes of Polynesian diversity. The Marquesan is certainly the most beautiful of human races, and one of the tallest--the Paumotuan averaging a good inch shorter, and not even handsome; the Marquesan open-handed, inert, insensible to religion, childishly self-indulgent--the Paumotuan greedy, hardy, enterprising, a religious disputant, and with a trace of the ascetic character. Yet a few years ago, and the people of the archipelago were crafty savages. Their isles might be called sirens' isles, not merely from the attraction they exerted on the passing mariner, but from the perils that awaited him on shore. Even to this day, in certain outlying islands, danger lingers: and the civilised Paumotuan dreads to land and hesitates to accost his backward brother. But, except in these, to-day the peril is a memory. When our generation were yet in the cradle and playroom it was still a living fact. Between 1830 and 1840, Hao, for instance, was a place of the most dangerous approach, where ships were seized and crews kidnapped. As late as 1856, the schooner _Sarah Ann_ sailed from Papeete and was seen no more. She had women on board, and children, the captain's wife, a nursemaid, a baby, and the two young sons of a Captain Steven on their way to the mainland for schooling. All were supposed to have perished in a squall. A year later, the captain of the _Julia_, coasting along the island variously called Bligh, Lagoon, and Tematangi, saw armed natives follow the course of his schooner, clad in many coloured stuffs. Suspicion was at once aroused; the mother of the lost children was profuse of money; and one expedition having found the place deserted and returned content with firing a few shots, she raised and herself accompanied another. None appeared to greet or to oppose them; they roamed a while among abandoned huts and empty thickets; then formed two parties and set forth to beat, from end to end, the pandanus jungle of the island. One man remained alone by the landing-place--Teina, a chief of Anaa, leader of the armed natives who made the strength of the expedition. Now that his comrades were departed this way and that, on their laborious exploration, the silence fell profound; and this silence was the ruin of the islanders. A sound of stones rattling caught the ear of Teina. He looked, thinking to perceive a crab, and saw instead the brown hand of a human being issue from a fissure in the ground. A shout recalled the search parties and announced their doom to the buried caitiffs. In the cave below, sixteen were found crouching among human bones and singular and horrid curiosities. One was a head of golden hair, supposed to be a relic of the captain's wife, another was half of the body of a European child, sun-dried and stuck upon a stick, doubtless with some design of wizardry. The Paumotuan is eager to be rich. He saves, grudges, buries money, fears not work. For a dollar each, two natives passed the hours of daylight cleaning our ship's copper. It was strange to see them so indefatigable and so much at ease in the water--working at times with their pipes lighted, the smoker at times submerged and only the glowing bowl above the surface; it was stranger still to think they were next congeners to the incapable Marquesan. But the Paumotuan not only saves, grudges, and works, he steals besides; or, to be more precise, he swindles. He will never deny a debt, he only flees his creditor. He is always keen for an advance; so soon as he has fingered it he disappears. He knows your ship; so soon as it nears one island, he is off to another. You may think you know his name; he has already changed it. Pursuit in that infinity of isles were fruitless. The result can be given in a nutshell. It has been actually proposed in a Government report to secure debts by taking a photograph of the debtor; and the other day in Papeete credits on the Paumotus to the amount of sixteen thousand pounds were sold for less than forty--_quatre cent mille francs pour moins de mille francs_. Even so, the purchase was thought hazardous; and only the man who made it and who had special opportunities could have dared to give so much. The Paumotuan is sincerely attached to those of his own blood and household. A touching affection sometimes unites wife and husband. Their children, while they are alive, completely rule them; after they are dead, their bones or their mummies are often jealously preserved and carried from atoll to atoll in the wanderings of the family. I was told there were many houses in Fakarava with the mummy of a child locked in a sea-chest; after I heard it, I would glance a little jealously at those by my own bed; in that cupboard, also, it was possible there was a tiny skeleton. The race seems in a fair way to survive. From fifteen islands, whose rolls I had occasion to consult, I found a proportion of 59 births to 47 deaths for 1887. Dropping three out of the fifteen, there remained for the other twelve the comfortable ratio of 50 births to 32 deaths. Long habits of hardship and activity doubtless explain the contrast with Marquesan figures. But the Paumotuan displays, besides, a certain concern for health and the rudiments of a sanitary discipline. Public talk with these free-spoken people plays the part of the Contagious Diseases Act; incomers to fresh islands anxiously inquire if all be well; and syphilis, when contracted, is successfully treated with indigenous herbs. Like their neighbours of Tahiti, from whom they have perhaps imbibed the error, they regard leprosy with comparative indifference, elephantiasis with disproportionate fear. But, unlike indeed to the Tahitian, their alarm puts on the guise of self-defence. Any one stricken with this painful and ugly malady is confined to the ends of villages, denied the use of paths and highways, and condemned to transport himself between his house and coco-patch by water only, his very footprint being held infectious. Fe'efe'e, being a creature of marshes and the sequel of malarial fever, is not original in atolls. On the single isle of Makatea, where the lagoon is now a marsh, the disease has made a home. Many suffer: they are excluded (if Mr. Wilmot be right) from much of the comfort of society; and it is believed they take a secret vengeance. The dejections of the sick are considered highly poisonous. Early in the morning, it is narrated, aged and malicious persons creep into the sleeping village, and stealthily make water at the doors of the houses of young men. Thus they propagate disease; thus they breathe on and obliterate comeliness and health, the objects of their envy. Whether horrid fact or more abominable legend, it equally depicts that something bitter and energetic which distinguishes Paumotuan man. The archipelago is divided between two main religions, Catholic and Mormon. They front each other proudly with a false air of permanence; yet are but shapes, their membership in a perpetual flux. The Mormon attends mass with devotion; the Catholic sits attentive at a Mormon sermon, and to-morrow each may have transferred allegiance. One man had been a pillar of the Church of Rome for fifteen years; his wife dying, he decided that must be a poor religion that could not save a man his wife, and turned Mormon. According to one informant, Catholicism was the more fashionable in health, but on the approach of sickness it was judged prudent to secede. As a Mormon, there were five chances out of six you might recover; as a Catholic, your hopes were small; and this opinion is perhaps founded on the comfortable rite of unction. We all know what Catholics are, whether in the Paumotus or at home. But the Paumotuan Mormon seemed a phenomenon apart. He marries but the one wife, uses the Protestant Bible, observes Protestant forms of worship, forbids the use of liquor and tobacco, practises adult baptism by immersion, and after every public sin, rechristens the backslider. I advised with Mahinui, whom I found well informed in the history of the American Mormons, and he declared against the least connection. "_Pour moi_," said he, with a fine charity, "_les Mormons ici un petit Catholiques_." Some months later I had an opportunity to consult an orthodox fellow-countryman, an old dissenting Highlander, long settled in Tahiti, but still breathing of the heather of Tiree. "Why do they call themselves Mormons?" I asked. "My dear, and that is my question!" he exclaimed. "For by all that I can hear of their doctrine, I have nothing to say against it, and their life, it is above reproach." And for all that, Mormons they are, but of the earlier sowing: the so-called Josephites, the followers of Joseph Smith, the opponents of Brigham Young. Grant, then, the Mormons to be Mormons. Fresh points at once arise: "What are the Israelites? and what the Kanitus?" For a long while back the sect had been divided into Mormons proper and so-called Israelites, I never could hear why. A few years since there came a visiting missionary of the name of Williams, who made an excellent collection, and retired, leaving fresh disruption imminent. Something irregular (as I was told) in his way of "opening the service" had raised partisans and enemies; the church was once more rent asunder; and a new sect, the Kanitu, issued from the division. Since then Kanitus and Israelites, like the Cameronians and the United Presbyterians, have made common cause; and the ecclesiastical history of the Paumotus is, for the moment, uneventful. There will be more doing before long, and these isles bid fair to be the Scotland of the South. Two things I could never learn. The nature of the innovations of the Rev. Mr. Williams none would tell me, and of the meaning of the name Kanitu none had a guess. It was not Tahitian, it was not Marquesan; it formed no part of that ancient speech of the Paumotus, now passing swiftly into obsolescence. One man, a priest, God bless him! said it was the Latin for a little dog. I have found it since as the name of a god in New Guinea; it must be a bolder man than I who should hint at a connection. Here, then, is a singular thing: a brand-new sect, arising by popular acclamation, and a nonsense word invented for its name. The design of mystery seems obvious, and according to a very intelligent observer, Mr. Magee of Mangareva, this element of the mysterious is a chief attraction of the Mormon Church. It enjoys some of the status of Freemasonry at home, and there is for the convert some of the exhilaration of adventure. Other attractions are certainly conjoined. Perpetual rebaptism, leading to a succession of baptismal feasts, is found, both from the social and the spiritual side, a pleasing feature. More important is the fact that all the faithful enjoy office; perhaps more important still, the strictness of the discipline. "The veto on liquor," said Mr. Magee, "brings them plenty members." There is no doubt these islanders are fond of drink, and no doubt they refrain from the indulgence; a bout on a feast-day, for instance, may be followed by a week or a month of rigorous sobriety. Mr. Wilmot attributes this to Paumotuan frugality and the love of hoarding; it goes far deeper. I have mentioned that I made a feast on board the _Casco_. To wash down ship's bread and jam, each guest was given the choice of rum or syrup, and out of the whole number only one man voted--in a defiant tone, and amid shouts of mirth--for "Trum"! This was in public. I had the meanness to repeat the experiment, whenever I had a chance, within the four walls of my house; and three at least, who had refused at the festival, greedily drank rum behind a door. But there were others thoroughly consistent. I said the virtues of the race were bourgeois and puritan; and how bourgeois is this! how puritanic! how Scottish! and how Yankee!--the temptation, the resistance, the public hypocritical conformity, the Pharisees, the Holy Willies, and the true disciples. With such a people the popularity of an ascetic Church appears legitimate; in these strict rules, in this perpetual supervision, the weak find their advantage, the strong a certain pleasure; and the doctrine of rebaptism, a clean bill and a fresh start, will comfort many staggering professors. There is yet another sect, or what is called a sect--no doubt improperly--that of the Whistlers. Duncan Cameron, so clear in favour of the Mormons, was no less loud in condemnation of the Whistlers. Yet I do not know; I still fancy there is some connection, perhaps fortuitous, probably disavowed. Here at least are some doings in the house of an Israelite clergyman (or prophet) in the island Anaa, of which I am equally sure that Duncan would disclaim and the Whistlers hail them for an imitation of their own. My informant, a Tahitian and a Catholic, occupied one part of the house; the prophet and his family lived in the other. Night after night the Mormons, in the one end, held their evening sacrifice of song; night after night, in the other, the wife of the Tahitian lay awake and listened to their singing with amazement. At length she could contain herself no longer, woke her husband, and asked him what he heard. "I hear several persons singing hymns," said he. "Yes," she returned, "but listen again! Do you not hear something supernatural?" His attention thus directed, he was aware of a strange buzzing voice--and yet he declared it was beautiful--which justly accompanied the singers. The next day he made inquiries. "It is a spirit," said the prophet, with entire simplicity, "which has lately made a practice of joining us at family worship." It did not appear the thing was visible, and, like other spirits raised nearer home in these degenerate days, it was rudely ignorant, at first could only buzz, and had only learned of late to bear a part correctly in the music. The performances of the Whistlers are more business-like. Their meetings are held publicly with open doors, all being "cordially invited to attend." The faithful sit about the room--according to one informant, singing hymns; according to another, now singing and now whistling; the leader, the wizard--let me rather say, the medium--sits in the midst, enveloped in a sheet and silent; and presently, from just above his head, or sometimes from the midst of the roof, an aerial whistling proceeds, appalling to the inexperienced. This, it appears, is the language of the dead; its purport is taken down progressively by one of the expert, writing, I was told, "as fast as a telegraph operator"; and the communications are at last made public. They are of the baldest triviality; a schooner is perhaps announced, some idle gossip reported of a neighbour, or if the spirit shall have been called to consultation on a case of sickness, a remedy may be suggested. One of these, immersion in scalding water, not long ago proved fatal to the patient. The whole business is very dreary, very silly, and very European; it has none of the picturesque qualities of similar conjurations in New Zealand; it seems to possess no kernel of possible sense, like some that I shall describe among the Gilbert islanders. Yet I was told that many hardy, intelligent natives were inveterate whistlers. "Like Mahinui?" I asked, willing to have a standard; and I was told "Yes." Why should I wonder? Men more enlightened than my convict catechist sit down at home to follies equally sterile and dull. The medium is sometimes female. It was a woman, for instance, who introduced these practices on the north coast of Taiarapu, to the scandal of her own connections, her brother-in-law in particular declaring she was drunk. But what shocked Tahiti might seem fit enough in the Paumotus, the more so as certain women there possess, by the gift of nature, singular and useful powers. They say they are honest, well-intentioned ladies, some of them embarrassed by their weird inheritance. And indeed the trouble caused by this endowment is so great, and the protection afforded so infinitesimally small, that I hesitate whether to call it a gift or a hereditary curse. You may rob this lady's coco-patch, steal her canoes, burn down her house, and slay her family scatheless; but one thing you must not do: you must not lay a hand upon her sleeping-mat, or your belly will swell, and you can only be cured by the lady or her husband. Here is the report of an eyewitness, Tasmanian born, educated, a man who has made money--certainly no fool. In 1886 he was present in a house on Makatea, where two lads began to skylark on the mats, and were (I think) ejected. Instantly after, their bellies began to swell; pains took hold on them; all manner of island remedies were exhibited in vain, and rubbing only magnified their sufferings. The man of the house was called, explained the nature of the visitation, and prepared the cure. A cocoa-nut was husked, filled with herbs, and with all the ceremonies of a launch, and the utterance of spells in the Paumotuan language, committed to the sea. From that moment the pains began to grow more easy and the swelling to subside. The reader may stare. I can assure him, if he moved much among old residents of the archipelago, he would be driven to admit one thing of two--either that there is something in the swollen bellies or nothing in the evidence of man. I have not met these gifted ladies; but I had an experience of my own, for I have played, for one night only, the part of the whistling spirit. It had been blowing wearily all day, but with the fall of night the wind abated, and the moon, which was then full, rolled in a clear sky. We went southward down the island on the side of the lagoon, walking through long-drawn forest aisles of palm, and on a floor of snowy sand. No life was abroad, nor sound of life; till in a clear part of the isle we spied the embers of a fire, and not far off, in a dark house, heard natives talking softly. To sit without a light, even in company, and under cover, is for a Paumotuan a somewhat hazardous extreme. The whole scene--the strong moonlight and crude shadows on the sand, the scattered coals, the sound of the low voices from the house, and the lap of the lagoon along the beach--put me (I know not how) on thoughts of superstition. I was barefoot, I observed my steps were noiseless, and drawing near to the dark house, but keeping well in shadow, began to whistle. "The Heaving of the Lead" was my air--no very tragic piece. With the first note the conversation and all movement ceased; silence accompanied me while I continued; and when I passed that way on my return, I found the lamp was lighted in the house, but the tongues were still mute. All night, as I now think, the wretches shivered and were silent. For indeed, I had no guess at the time at the nature and magnitude of the terrors I inflicted, or with what grisly images the notes of that old song had peopled the dark house. CHAPTER V A PAUMOTUAN FUNERAL No, I had no guess of these men's terrors. Yet I had received ere that a hint, if I had understood; and the occasion was a funeral. A little apart in the main avenue of Rotoava, in a low hut of leaves that opened on a small enclosure, like a pigsty on a pen, an old man dwelt solitary with his aged wife. Perhaps they were too old to migrate with the others; perhaps they were too poor, and had no possessions to dispute. At least they had remained behind; and it thus befell that they were invited to my feast. I dare say it was quite a piece of politics in the pigsty whether to come or not to come, and the husband long swithered between curiosity and age, till curiosity conquered, and they came, and in the midst of that last merry-making death tapped him on the shoulder. For some days, when the sky was bright and the wind cool, his mat would be spread in the main highway of the village, and he was to be seen lying there inert, a mere handful of man, his wife inertly seated by his head. They seemed to have outgrown alike our needs and faculties; they neither spoke nor listened; they suffered us to pass without a glance; the wife did not fan, she seemed not to attend upon her husband, and the two poor antiques sat juxtaposed under the high canopy of palms, the human tragedy reduced to its bare elements, a sight beyond pathos, stirring a thrill of curiosity. And yet there was one touch of the pathetic haunted me: that so much youth and expectation should have run in these starved veins, and the man should have squandered all his lees of life on a pleasure party. On the morning of 17th September the sufferer died, and, time pressing, he was buried the same day at four. The cemetery lies to seaward behind Government House; broken coral, like so much road-metal, forms the surface; a few wooden crosses, a few inconsiderable upright stones, designate graves; a mortared wall, high enough to lean on, rings it about; a clustering shrub surrounds it with pale leaves. Here was the grave dug that morning, doubtless by uneasy diggers, to the sound of the nigh sea and the cries of sea-birds; meanwhile the dead man waited in his house, and the widow and another aged woman leaned on the fence before the door, no speech upon their lips, no speculation in their eyes. Sharp at the hour the procession was in march, the coffin wrapped in white and carried by four bearers; mourners behind--not many, for not many remained in Rotoava, and not many in black, for these were poor; the men in straw hats, white coats, and blue trousers or the gorgeous parti-coloured pariu, the Tahitian kilt; the women, with a few exceptions, brightly habited. Far in the rear came the widow, painfully carrying the dead man's mat; a creature aged beyond humanity, to the likeness of some missing link. The dead man had been a Mormon; but the Mormon clergyman was gone with the rest to wrangle over boundaries in the adjacent isle, and a layman took his office. Standing at the head of the open grave, in a white coat and blue pariu, his Tahitian Bible in his hand and one eye bound with a red handkerchief, he read solemnly that chapter in Job which has been read and heard over the bones of so many of our fathers, and with a good voice offered up two prayers. The wind and the surf bore a burthen. By the cemetery gate a mother in crimson suckled an infant rolled in blue. In the midst the widow sat upon the ground and polished one of the coffin-stretchers with a piece of coral; a little later she had turned her back to the grave and was playing with a leaf. Did she understand? God knows. The officiant paused a moment, stooped, and gathered and threw reverently on the coffin a handful of rattling coral. Dust to dust: but the grains of this dust were gross like cherries, and the true dust that was to follow sat near by, still cohering (as by a miracle) in the tragic resemblance of a female ape. So far, Mormon or not, it was a Christian funeral. The well-known passage had been read from Job, the prayers had been rehearsed, the grave was filled, the mourners straggled homeward. With a little coarser grain of covering earth, a little nearer outcry of the sea, a stronger glare of sunlight on the rude enclosure, and some incongruous colours of attire, the well-remembered form had been observed. By rights it should have been otherwise. The mat should have been buried with its owner; but, the family being poor, it was thriftily reserved for a fresh service. The widow should have flung herself upon the grave and raised the voice of official grief, the neighbours have chimed in, and the narrow isle rung for a space with lamentation. But the widow was old; perhaps she had forgotten, perhaps never understood, and she played like a child with leaves and coffin-stretchers. In all ways my guest was buried with maimed rites. Strange to think that his last conscious pleasure was the _Casco_ and my feast; strange to think that he had limped there, an old child, looking for some new good. And the good thing, rest, had been allotted him. But though the widow had neglected much, there was one part she must not utterly neglect. She came away with the dispersing funeral; but the dead man's mat was left behind upon the grave, and I learned that by set of sun she must return to sleep there. This vigil is imperative. From sundown till the rising of the morning star the Paumotuan must hold his watch above the ashes of his kindred. Many friends, if the dead have been a man of mark, will keep the watchers company; they will be well supplied with coverings against the weather; I believe they bring food, and the rite is persevered in for two weeks. Our poor survivor, if, indeed, she properly survived, had little to cover, and few to sit with her; on the night of the funeral a strong squall chased her from her place of watch; for days the weather held uncertain and outrageous; and ere seven nights were up she had desisted, and returned to sleep in her low roof. That she should be at the pains of returning for so short a visit to a solitary house, that this borderer of the grave should fear a little wind and a wet blanket, filled me at the time with musings. I could not say she was indifferent; she was so far beyond me in experience that the court of my criticism waived jurisdiction; but I forged excuses, telling myself she had perhaps little to lament, perhaps suffered much, perhaps understood nothing. And lo! in the whole affair there was no question whether of tenderness or piety, and the sturdy return of this old remnant was a mark either of uncommon sense or of uncommon fortitude. Yet one thing had occurred that partly set me on the trail. I have said the funeral passed much as at home. But when all was over, when we were trooping in decent silence from the graveyard gate and down the path to the settlement, a sudden inbreak of a different spirit startled and perhaps dismayed us. Two people walked not far apart in our procession: my friend Mr. Donat--Donat-Rimarau--"Donat the much-handed"--acting Vice-Resident, present ruler of the archipelago, by far the man of chief importance on the scene, but known besides for one of an unshakable good temper; and a certain comely, strapping young Paumotuan woman, the comeliest on the isle, not (let us hope) the bravest or the most polite. Of a sudden, ere yet the grave silence of the funeral was broken, she made a leap at the Resident, with pointed finger shrieked a few words and fell back again with a laughter, not a natural mirth. "What did she say to you?" I asked. "She did not speak to _me_," said Donat, a shade perturbed; "she spoke to the ghost of the dead man." And the purport of her speech was this: "See there! Donat will be a fine feast for you to-night." "M. Donat called it a jest," I wrote at the time in my diary. "It seemed to me more in the nature of a terrified conjuration, as though she would divert the ghost's attention from herself. A cannibal race may well have cannibal phantoms." The guesses of the traveller appear foredoomed to be erroneous; yet in these I was precisely right. The woman had stood by in terror at the funeral, being then in a dread spot, the graveyard. She looked on in terror to the coming night, with that ogre, a new spirit, loosed upon the isle. And the words she had cried in Donat's face were indeed a terrified conjuration, basely to shield herself, basely to dedicate another in her stead. One thing is to be said in her excuse. Doubtless she partly chose Donat because he was a man of great good-nature, but partly, too, because he was a man of the half-caste. For I believe all natives regard white blood as a kind of talisman against the powers of hell. In no other way can they explain the unpunished recklessness of Europeans. CHAPTER VI GRAVEYARD STORIES With my superstitious friend, the islander, I fear I am not wholly frank, often leading the way with stories of my own, and being always a grave and sometimes an excited hearer. But the deceit is scarce mortal, since I am as pleased to hear as he to tell, as pleased with the story as he with the belief; and besides, it is entirely needful. For it is scarce possible to exaggerate the extent and empire of his superstitions; they mould his life, they colour his thinking; and when he does not speak to me of ghosts, and gods, and devils, he is playing the dissembler and talking only with his lips. With thoughts so different, one must indulge the other; and I would rather that I should indulge his superstition than he my incredulity. Of one thing, besides, I may be sure: Let me indulge it as I please, I shall not hear the whole; for he is already on his guard with me, and the amount of the lore is boundless. I will give but a few instances at random, chiefly from my own doorstep in Upolu, during the past month (October 1890). One of my workmen was sent the other day to the banana patch, there to dig; this is a hollow of the mountain, buried in woods, out of all sight and cry of mankind; and long before dusk Lafaele was back again beside the cook-house with embarrassed looks; he dared not longer stay alone, he was afraid of "spilits in the bush." It seems these are the souls of the unburied dead, haunting where they fell, and wearing woodland shapes of pig, or bird, or insect; the bush is full of them, they seem to eat nothing, slay solitary wanderers apparently in spite, and at times, in human form, go down the villages and consort with the inhabitants undetected. So much I learned a day or so after, walking in the bush with a very intelligent youth, a native. It was a little before noon; a grey day and squally; and perhaps I had spoken lightly. A dark squall burst on the side of the mountain; the woods shook and cried; the dead leaves rose from the ground in clouds, like butterflies; and my companion came suddenly to a full stop. He was afraid, he said, of the trees falling; but as soon as I had changed the subject of our talk he proceeded with alacrity. A day or two before, a messenger came up the mountain from Apia with a letter; I was in the bush, he must await my return, then wait till I had answered: and before I was done his voice sounded shrill with terror of the coming night and the long forest road. These are the commons. Take the chiefs. There has been a great coming and going of signs and omens in our group. One river ran down blood; red eels were captured in another; an unknown fish was thrown upon the coast, an ominous word found written on its scales. So far we might be reading in a monkish chronicle; now we come on a fresh note, at once modern and Polynesian. The gods of Upolu and Savaii, our two chief islands, contended recently at cricket. Since then they are at war. Sounds of battle are heard to roll along the coast. A woman saw a man swim from the high seas and plunge direct into the bush; he was no man of that neighbourhood; and it was known he was one of the gods, speeding to a council. Most perspicuous of all, a missionary on Savaii, who is also a medical man, was disturbed late in the night by knocking; it was no hour for the dispensary, but at length he woke his servant and sent him to inquire; the servant, looking from a window, beheld crowds of persons, all with grievous wounds, lopped limbs, broken heads, and bleeding bulletholes; but when the door was opened all had disappeared. They were gods from the field of battle. Now, these reports have certainly significance; it is not hard to trace them to political grumblers or to read in them a threat of coming trouble; from that merely human side I found them ominous myself. But it was the spiritual side of their significance that was discussed in secret council by my rulers. I shall best depict this mingled habit of the Polynesian mind by two connected instances. I once lived in a village, the name of which I do not mean to tell. The chief and his sister were persons perfectly intelligent: gentlefolk, apt of speech. The sister was very religious, a great church-goer, one that used to reprove me if I stayed away; I found afterwards that she privately worshipped a shark. The chief himself was somewhat of a freethinker; at the least a latitudinarian: he was a man, besides, filled with European knowledge and accomplishments; of an impassive, ironical habit; and I should as soon have expected superstition in Mr. Herbert Spencer. Hear the sequel. I had discovered by unmistakable signs that they buried too shallow in the village graveyard, and I took my friend, as the responsible authority, to task. "There is something wrong about your graveyard," said I, "which you must attend to, or it may have very bad results." Something wrong? "What is it?" he asked, with an emotion that surprised me. "If you care to go along there any evening about nine o'clock you can see for yourself," said I. He stepped backward. "A ghost!" he cried. In short, in the whole field of the South Seas, there is not one to blame another. Half blood and whole, pious and debauched, intelligent and dull, all men believe in ghosts, all men combine with their recent Christianity fear of and a lingering faith in the old island deities. So, in Europe, the gods of Olympus slowly dwindled into village bogies; so to-day, the theological Highlander sneaks from under the eye of the Free Church divine to lay an offering by a sacred well. I try to deal with the whole matter here because of a particular quality in Paumotuan superstitions. It is true I heard them told by a man with a genius for such narrations. Close about our evening lamp, within sound of the island surf, we hung on his words, thrilling. The reader, in far other scenes, must listen close for the faint echo. This bundle of weird stories sprang from the burial and the woman's selfish conjuration. I was dissatisfied with what I heard, harped upon questions, and struck at last this vein of metal. It is from sundown to about four in the morning that the kinsfolk camp upon the grave; and these are the hours of the spirits' wanderings. At any time of the night--it may be earlier, it may be later--a sound is to be heard below, which is the noise of his liberation; at four sharp, another and louder marks the instant of the re-imprisonment; between-whiles, he goes his malignant rounds. "Did you ever see an evil spirit?" was once asked of a Paumotuan. "Once." "Under what form?" "It was in the form of a crane." "And how did you know that crane to be a spirit?" was asked. "I will tell you," he answered; and this was the purport of his inconclusive narrative. His father had been dead nearly a fortnight; others had wearied of the watch; and as the sun was setting, he found himself by the grave alone. It was not yet dark, rather the hour of the afterglow, when he was aware of a snow-white crane upon the coral mound; presently more cranes came, some white, some black; then the cranes vanished, and he saw in their place a white cat, to which there was silently joined a great company of cats of every hue conceivable; then these also disappeared, and he was left astonished. This was an anodyne appearance. Take instead the experience of Rua-a-mariterangi on the isle of Katiu. He had a need for some pandanus, and crossed the isle to the sea-beach, where it chiefly flourishes. The day was still, and Rua was surprised to hear a crashing sound among the thickets, and then the fall of a considerable tree. Here must be some one building a canoe; and he entered the margin of the wood to find and pass the time of day with this chance neighbour. The crashing sounded more at hand; and then he was aware of something drawing swiftly near among the tree-tops. It swung by its heels downward, like an ape, so that its hands were free for murder; it depended safely by the slightest twigs; the speed of its coming was incredible; and soon Rua recognised it for a corpse, horrible with age, its bowels hanging as it came. Prayer was the weapon of Christian in the Valley of the Shadow, and it is to prayer that Rua-a-mariterangi attributes his escape. No merely human expedition had availed. This demon was plainly from the grave; yet you will observe he was abroad by day. And inconsistent as it may seem with the hours of the night watch and the many references to the rising of the morning star, it is no singular exception. I could never find a case of another who had seen this ghost, diurnal and arboreal in its habits; but others have heard the fall of the tree, which seems the signal of its coming. Mr. Donat was once pearling on the uninhabited isle of Haraiki. It was a day without a breath of wind, such as alternate in the archipelago with days of contumelious breezes. The divers were in the midst of the lagoon upon their employment; the cook, a boy of ten, was over his pots in the camp. Thus were all souls accounted for except a single native who accompanied Donat into the woods in quest of sea-fowls' eggs. In a moment, out of the stillness, came the sound of the fall of a great tree. Donat would have passed on to find the cause. "No," cried his companion, "that was no tree. It was something _not right_. Let us go back to camp." Next Sunday the divers were turned on, all that part of the isle was thoroughly examined, and sure enough no tree had fallen. A little later Mr. Donat saw one of his divers flee from a similar sound, in similar unaffected panic, on the same isle. But neither would explain, and it was not till afterwards, when he met with Rua, that he learned the occasion of their terrors. But whether by day or night, the purpose of the dead in these abhorred activities is still the same. In Samoa, my informant had no idea of the food of the bush spirits; no such ambiguity would exist in the mind of a Paumotuan. In that hungry archipelago, living and dead must alike toil for nutriment; and the race having been cannibal in the past, the spirits are so still. When the living ate the dead, horrified nocturnal imagination drew the shocking inference that the dead might eat the living. Doubtless they slay men, doubtless even mutilate them, in mere malice. Marquesan spirits sometimes tear out the eyes of travellers; but even that may be more practical than appears, for the eye is a cannibal dainty. And certainly the root-idea of the dead, at least in the far eastern islands, is to prowl for food. It was as a dainty morsel for a meal that the woman denounced Donat at the funeral. There are spirits besides who prey in particular not on the bodies but on the souls of the dead. The point is clearly made in a Tahitian story. A child fell sick, grew swiftly worse, and at last showed signs of death. The mother hastened to the house of a sorcerer, who lived hard by. "You are yet in time," said he; "a spirit has just run past my door carrying the soul of your child wrapped in the leaf of a purao; but I have a spirit stronger and swifter who will run him down ere he has time to eat it." Wrapped in a leaf: like other things edible and corruptible. Or take an experience of Mr. Donat's on the island of Anaa. It was a night of a high wind, with violent squalls; his child was very sick, and the father, though he had gone to bed, lay wakeful, hearkening to the gale. All at once a fowl was violently dashed on the house wall. Supposing he had forgot to put it in shelter with the rest, Donat arose, found the bird (a cock) lying on the verandah, and put it in the hen-house, the door of which he securely fastened. Fifteen minutes later the business was repeated, only this time, as it was being dashed against the wall, the bird crew. Again Donat replaced it, examining the hen-house thoroughly and finding it quite perfect; as he was so engaged the wind puffed out his light, and he must grope back to the door a good deal shaken. Yet a third time the bird was dashed upon the wall; a third time Donat set it, now near dead, beside its mates; and he was scarce returned before there came a rush, like that of a furious strong man, against the door, and a whistle as loud as that of a railway engine rang about the house. The sceptical reader may here detect the finger of the tempest; but the women gave up all for lost and clustered on the beds lamenting. Nothing followed, and I must suppose the gale somewhat abated, for presently after a chief came visiting. He was a bold man to be abroad so late, but doubtless carried a bright lantern. And he was certainly a man of counsel, for as soon as he heard the details of these disturbances he was in a position to explain their nature. "Your child," said he, "must certainly die. This is the evil spirit of our island who lies in wait to eat the spirits of the newly dead." And then he went on to expatiate on the strangeness of the spirit's conduct. He was not usually, he explained, so open of assault, but sat silent on the house-top, waiting, in the guise of a bird, while within the people tended the dying and bewailed the dead, and had no thought of peril. But when the day came and the doors were opened and men began to go abroad, blood-stains on the wall betrayed the tragedy. This is the quality I admire in Paumotuan legend. In Tahiti the spirit-eater is said to assume a vesture which has much more of pomp, but how much less of horror. It has been seen by all sorts and conditions, native and foreign; only the last insists it is a meteor. My authority was not so sure. He was riding with his wife about two in the morning; both were near asleep, and the horses not much better. It was a brilliant and still night, and the road wound over a mountain, near by a deserted marae (old Tahitian temple). All at once the appearance passed above them: a form of light; the head round and greenish; the body long, red, and with a focus of yet redder brilliancy about the midst. A buzzing hoot accompanied its passage; it flew direct out of one marae, and direct for another down the mountain-side. And this, as my informant argued, is suggestive. For why should a mere meteor frequent the altars of abominable gods? The horses, I should say, were equally dismayed with their riders. Now I am not dismayed at all--not even agreeably. Give me rather the bird upon the house-top and the morning blood-gouts on the wall. But the dead are not exclusive in their diet. They carry with them to the grave, in particular, the Polynesian taste for fish, and enter at times with the living into a partnership in fishery. Rua-a-mariterangi is again my authority; I feel it diminishes the credit of the fact, but how it builds up the image of this inveterate ghost-seer! He belongs to the miserably poor island of Taenga, yet his father's house was always well supplied. As Rua grew up he was called at last to go a-fishing with this fortunate parent. They rowed into the lagoon at dusk, to an unlikely place, and the boy lay down in the stern, and the father began vainly to cast his line over the bows. It is to be supposed that Rua slept; and when he awoke there was the figure of another beside his father, and his father was pulling in the fish hand over hand. "Who is that man, father?" Rua asked. "It is none of your business," said the father; and Rua supposed the stranger had swum off to them from shore. Night after night they fared into the lagoon, often to the most unlikely places; night after night the stranger would suddenly be seen on board, and as suddenly be missed; and morning after morning the canoe returned laden with fish. "My father is a very lucky man," thought Rua. At last, one fine day, there came first one boat party and then another who must be entertained; father and son put off later than usual into the lagoon; and before the canoe was landed it was four o'clock, and the morning star was close on the horizon. Then the stranger appeared seized with some distress; turned about, showing for the first time his face, which was that of one long dead, with shining eyes; stared into the east, set the tips of his fingers to his mouth like one a-cold, uttered a strange, shuddering sound between a whistle and a moan--a thing to freeze the blood; and, the daystar just rising from the sea, he suddenly was not. Then Rua understood why his father prospered, why his fishes rotted early in the day, and why some were always carried to the cemetery and laid upon the graves. My informant is a man not certainly averse to superstition, but he keeps his head, and takes a certain superior interest, which I may be allowed to call scientific. The last point reminding him of some parallel practice in Tahiti, he asked Rua if the fish were left, or carried home again after a formal dedication. It appears old Mariterangi practised both methods; sometimes treating his shadowy partner to a mere oblation, sometimes honestly leaving his fish to rot upon the grave. It is plain we have in Europe stories of a similar complexion; and the Polynesian _varua ino_ or _aitu o le vao_ is clearly the near kinsman of the Transylvanian vampire. Here is a tale in which the kinship appears broadly marked. On the atoll of Penrhyn, then still partly savage, a certain chief was long the salutary terror of the natives. He died, he was buried; and his late neighbours had scarce tasted the delights of licence ere his ghost appeared about the village. Fear seized upon all; a council was held of the chief men and sorcerers; and with the approval of the Rarotongan missionary, who was as frightened as the rest, and in the presence of several whites--my friend Mr. Ben Hird being one--the grave was opened, deepened until water came, and the body re-interred face down. The still recent staking of suicides in England and the decapitation of vampires in the east of Europe form close parallels. So in Samoa only the spirits of the unburied awake fear. During the late war many fell in the bush; their bodies, sometimes headless, were brought back by native pastors and interred; but this (I know not why) was insufficient, and the spirit still lingered on the theatre of death. When peace returned a singular scene was enacted in many places, and chiefly round the high gorges of Lotoanuu, where the struggle was long centred and the loss had been severe. Kinswomen of the dead came carrying a mat or sheet and guided by survivors of the fight. The place of death was earnestly sought out; the sheet was spread upon the ground; and the women, moved with pious anxiety, sat about and watched it. If any living thing alighted it was twice brushed away; upon the third coming it was known to be the spirit of the dead, was folded in, carried home and buried beside the body; and the aitu rested. The rite was practised beyond doubt in simple piety; the repose of the soul was its object: its motive, reverent affection. The present king disowns indeed all knowledge of a dangerous aitu; he declares the souls of the unburied were only wanderers in limbo, lacking an entrance to the proper country of the dead, unhappy, nowise hurtful. And this severely classic opinion doubtless represents the views of the enlightened. But the flight of my Lafaele marks the grosser terrors of the ignorant. This belief in the exorcising efficacy of funeral rites perhaps explains a fact, otherwise amazing, that no Polynesian seems at all to share our European horror of human bones and mummies. Of the first they made their cherished ornaments; they preserved them in houses or in mortuary caves; and the watchers of royal sepulchres dwelt with their children among the bones of generations. The mummy, even in the making, was as little feared. In the Marquesas, on the extreme coast, it was made by the household with continual unction and exposure to the sun; in the Carolines, upon the farthest west, it is still cured in the smoke of the family hearth. Head-hunting, besides, still lives around my doorstep in Samoa. And not ten years ago, in the Gilberts, the widow must disinter, cleanse, polish, and thenceforth carry about her, by day and night, the head of her dead husband. In all these cases we may suppose the process, whether of cleansing or drying, to have fully exorcised the aitu. But the Paumotuan belief is more obscure. Here the man is duly buried, and he has to be watched. He is duly watched, and the spirit goes abroad in spite of watches. Indeed, it is not the purpose of the vigils to prevent these wanderings; only to mollify by polite attention the inveterate malignity of the dead. Neglect (it is supposed) may irritate and thus invite his visits, and the aged and weakly sometimes balance risks and stay at home. Observe, it is the dead man's kindred and next friends who thus deprecate his fury with nocturnal watchings. Even the placatory vigil is held perilous, except in company, and a boy was pointed out to me in Rotoava, because he had watched alone by his own father. Not the ties of the dead, nor yet their proved character, affect the issue. A late Resident, who died in Fakarava of sunstroke, was beloved in life and is still remembered with affection; none the less his spirit went about the island clothed with terrors, and the neighbourhood of Government House was still avoided after dark. We may sum up the cheerful doctrine thus: All men become vampires, and the vampire spares none. And here we come face to face with a tempting inconsistency. For the whistling spirits are notoriously clannish; I understood them to wait upon and to enlighten kinsfolk only, and that the medium was always of the race of the communicating spirit. Here, then, we have the bonds of the family, on the one hand, severed at the hour of death; on the other, helpfully persisting. The child's soul in the Tahitian tale was wrapped in leaves. It is the spirits of the newly dead that are the dainty. When they are slain, the house is stained with blood. Rua's dead fisherman was decomposed; so--and horribly--was his arboreal demon. The spirit, then, is a thing material; and it is by the material ensigns of corruption that he is distinguished from the living man. This opinion is widespread, adds a gross terror to the more ugly Polynesian tales, and sometimes defaces the more engaging with a painful and incongruous touch. I will give two examples sufficiently wide apart, one from Tahiti, one from Samoa. And first from Tahiti. A man went to visit the husband of his sister, then some time dead. In her life the sister had been dainty in the island fashion, and went always adorned with a coronet of flowers. In the midst of the night the brother awoke and was aware of a heavenly fragrance going to and fro in the dark house. The lamp I must suppose to have burned out; no Tahitian would have lain down without one lighted. A while he lay wondering and delighted; then called upon the rest. "Do none of you smell flowers?" he asked. "O," said his brother-in-law, "we are used to that here." The next morning these two men went walking, and the widower confessed that his dead wife came about the house continually, and that he had even seen her. She was shaped and dressed and crowned with flowers as in her lifetime; only she moved a few inches above the earth with a very easy progress, and flitted dryshod above the surface of the river. And now comes my point: It was always in a back view that she appeared; and these brothers-in-law, debating the affair, agreed that this was to conceal the inroads of corruption. Now for the Samoan story. I owe it to the kindness of Dr. F. Otto Sierich, whose collection of folk-tales I expect with a high degree of interest. A man in Manu'a was married to two wives and had no issue. He went to Savaii, married there a third, and was more fortunate. When his wife was near her time he remembered he was in a strange island, like a poor man; and when his child was born he must be shamed for lack of gifts. It was in vain his wife dissuaded him. He returned to his father in Manu'a seeking help; and with what he could get he set off in the night to re-embark. Now his wives heard of his coming; they were incensed he did not stay to visit them; and on the beach, by his canoe, intercepted and slew him. Now the third wife lay asleep in Savaii; her babe was born and slept by her side; and she was awakened by the spirit of her husband. "Get up," he said, "my father is sick in Manu'a and we must go to visit him." "It is well," said she; "take you the child, while I carry its mats." "I cannot carry the child," said the spirit; "I am too cold from the sea." When they were got on board the canoe the wife smelt carrion. "How is this?" she said. "What have you in the canoe that I should smell carrion?" "It is nothing in the canoe," said the spirit. "It is the land-wind blowing down the mountains, where some beast lies dead." It appears it was still night when they reached Manu'a--the swiftest passage on record--and as they entered the reef the bale-fires burned in the village. Again she asked him to carry the child; but now he need no more dissemble. "I cannot carry your child," said he, "for I am dead, and the fires you see are burning for my funeral." The curious may learn in Dr. Sierich's book the unexpected sequel of the tale. Here is enough for my purpose. Though the man was but new dead, the ghost was already putrefied, as though putrefaction were the mark and of the essence of a spirit. The vigil on the Paumotuan grave does not extend beyond two weeks, and they told me this period was thought to coincide with that of the resolution of the body. The ghost always marked with decay--the danger seemingly ending with the process of dissolution--here is tempting matter for the theorist. But it will not do. The lady of the flowers had been long dead, and her spirit was still supposed to bear the brand of perishability. The Resident had been more than a fortnight buried, and his vampire was still supposed to go the rounds. Of the lost state of the dead, from the lurid Mangaian legend, in which infernal deities hocus and destroy the souls of all, to the various submarine and aerial limbos where the dead feast, float idle, or resume the occupations of their life on earth, it would be wearisome to tell. One story I give, for it is singular in itself, is well known in Tahiti, and has this of interest, that it is post-Christian, dating indeed from but a few years back. A princess of the reigning house died; was transported to the neighbouring isle of Raiatea; fell there under the empire of a spirit who condemned her to climb coco-palms all day and bring him the nuts; was found after some time in this miserable servitude by a second spirit, one of her own house; and by him, upon her lamentations, reconveyed to Tahiti, where she found her body still waked, but already swollen with the approaches of corruption. It is a lively point in the tale that, on the sight of this dishonoured tabernacle, the princess prayed she might continue to be numbered with the dead. But it seems it was too late, her spirit was replaced by the least dignified of entrances, and her startled family beheld the body move. The seemingly purgatorial labours, the helpful kindred spirit, and the horror of the princess at the sight of her tainted body, are all points to be remarked. The truth is, the tales are not necessarily consistent in themselves; and they are further darkened for the stranger by an ambiguity of language. Ghosts, vampires, spirits, and gods are all confounded. And yet I seem to perceive that (with exceptions) those whom we would count gods were less maleficent. Permanent spirits haunt and do murder in corners of Samoa; but those legitimate gods of Upolu and Savaii, whose wars and cricketings of late convulsed society, I did not gather to be dreaded, or not with a like fear. The spirit of Anaa that ate souls is certainly a fearsome inmate; but the high gods, even of the archipelago, seem helpful. Mahinui--from whom our convict-catechist had been named--the spirit of the sea, like a Proteus endowed with endless avatars, came to the assistance of the shipwrecked and carried them ashore in the guise of a ray-fish. The same divinity bore priests from isle to isle about the archipelago, and by his aid, within the century, persons have been seen to fly. The tutelar deity of each isle is likewise helpful, and by a particular form of wedge-shaped cloud on the horizon announces the coming of a ship. To one who conceives of these atolls, so narrow, so barren, so beset with sea, here would seem a superfluity of ghostly denizens. And yet there are more. In the various brackish pools and ponds, beautiful women with long red hair are seen to rise and bathe; only (timid as mice) on the first sound of feet upon the coral they dive again for ever. They are known to be healthy and harmless living people, dwellers of an underworld; and the same fancy is current in Tahiti, where also they have the hair red. _Tetea_ is the Tahitian name; the Paumotuan, _Mokurea_. PART III THE EIGHT ISLANDS CHAPTER I THE KONA COAST Of the island of Hawaii, though I have passed days becalmed under its lee, and spent a week upon its shores, I have never yet beheld the profile. Dense clouds continued to enshroud it far below its midst; not only the zone of snow and fire, but a great part of the forest region, covered or at least veiled by a perpetual rain. And yet even on my first sight, beholding so little and that through a glass from the deck of the _Casco_, the rude plutonic structure of the isle was conspicuous. Here was none of the accustomed glitter of the beach, none of the close shoreside forests of the typical high island. All seemed black and barren, and to slope sheer into the sea. Unexpected movements of the land caught the attention, folds that glittered with a certain vitreosity; black mouths of caves; ranges of low cliffs, vigorously designed awhile in sun and shadow, and that sank again into the general declivity of the island glacis. Under its gigantic cowl of cloud, the coast frowned upon us with a face of desolation. On my return I passed from a humming city, with shops and palaces and busy wharves, plying cabs and tramcars, telephones in operation and a railway in the building; mounted a strong and comfortable local steamer; sailed under desolate shores indeed, but guided in the night by sea and harbour lights; and was set down at last in a village uninhabited by any white, the creature of pure native taste--of which, what am I to say but that I know no such village in Europe? A well-to-do western hamlet in the States would be the closest parallel; and it is a moderate prophecy to call it so already. Hookena is its name. It stands on the same coast which I had wondered at before from the tossing _Casco_; the same coast on which the far voyager Cook ended a noble career not very nobly. That district of Kona where he fell is one illustrious in the history of Hawaii. It was at first the centre of the dominion of the great Kamehameha. There, in an unknown sepulchre, his bones are still hidden; there, too, his reputed treasures, spoils of a buccaneer, lie, and are still vainly sought for, in one of the thousand caverns of the lava. There the tabus were first broken, there the missionaries first received; and but for the new use of ships and the new need of harbours, here might be still the chief city and the organs of the kingdom. Yet a nearer approach confirmed the impression of the distance. It presents to the seaward one immense decline. Streams of lava have followed and submerged each other down this slope, and overflowed into the sea. These cooled and shrank, and were buried under fresh inundations, or dislocated by fresh tremors of the mountain. A multiplicity of caves is the result. The mouths of caves are everywhere; the lava is tunnelled with corridors and halls; under houses high on the mountain, the sea can be heard throbbing in the bowels of the land; and there is one gallery of miles, which has been used by armies as a pass. Streams are thus unknown. The rain falls continually in the highlands: an isle that rises nearly fourteen thousand feet sheer from the sea could never fail of rain; but the treasure is squandered on a sieve; and by sunless conduits returns unseen into the ocean. Corrugated slopes of lava, bristling lava cliffs, spouts of metallic clinkers, miles of coast without a well or rivulet; scarce anywhere a beach, nowhere a harbour: here seems a singular land to be contended for in battle as a seat for courts and princes. Yet it possessed in the eyes of the natives one more than countervailing advantage. The windward shores of the isle are beaten by a monstrous surf; there are places where goods and passengers must be hauled up and lowered by a rope, there are coves which even the daring boatmen of Hamakua dread to enter; and men live isolated in their hamlets or communicate by giddy footpaths in the cliff. Upon the side of Kona, the table-like margin of the lava affords almost everywhere a passage by land; and the waves, reduced by the vast breakwater of the island, allow an almost continual communication by way of sea. Yet even here the surf of the Pacific appears formidable to the stranger as he lands, and daily delights him with its beauty as he walks the shore. It was on a Saturday afternoon that the steamer _Hall_ conveyed me to Hookena. She was charged with tourists on their way to the volcano; and I found it hard to justify my choice of a week in an unheard-of hamlet, rather than a visit to one of the admitted marvels of the world. I do not know that I can justify it now and to a larger audience. I should prefer, indeed, to have seen both; but I was at the time embarrassed with arrears of work; it was imperative that I should choose; and I chose one week in a Kona village and another in the lazaretto, and renounced the craters of Maunaloa and Haleakala. For there are some so constituted as to find a man or a society more curious than the highest mountain; some, in whom the lava foreshores of Kona and Kaú will move as deep a wonder as the fiery vents that made them what they are. The land and sea breezes alternate on the Kona coast with regularity; and the veil of rain draws up and down the talus of the mountain, now retiring to the zone of forests, now descending to the margin of the sea. It was in one of the latter and rarer moments that I was set on board a whale boat full of intermingled barrels, passengers, and oarsmen. The rain fell and blotted the crude and sombre colours of the scene. The coast rose but a little way; it was then intercepted by the cloud: and for all that appeared, we might have been landing on an isle of some two hundred feet of elevation. On the immediate foreshore, under a low cliff, there stood some score of houses, trellised and verandahed, set in narrow gardens, and painted gaudily in green and white; the whole surrounded and shaded by a grove of cocoa-palms and fruit trees, springing (as by miracle) from the bare lava. In front, the population of the neighbourhood were gathered for the weekly incident, the passage of the steamer; sixty to eighty strong, and attended by a disproportionate allowance of horses, mules, and donkeys; for this land of rock is, singular to say, a land of breeding. The green trees, the painted houses, the gay dresses of the women, were everywhere relieved on the uncompromising blackness of the lava; and the rain, which fell unheeded by the sightseers, blended and beautified the contrast. The boat was run in upon a breaker, and we passengers ejected on a flat rock where the next wave submerged us to the knees. There we continued to stand, the rain drenching us from above, the sea from below, like people mesmerised; and as we were all (being travellers) tricked out with the green garlands of departure, we must have offered somewhat the same appearance as a shipwrecked picnic. The purser spied and introduced me to my host, ex-judge Nahinu, who was then deep in business, despatching and receiving goods. He was dressed in pearl-grey tweed like any self-respecting Englishman; only the band of his wide-awake was made of peacock's feather.--"House by and by," said he, his English being limited, and carried me to the shelter of a rather lofty shed. On three sides it was open, on the fourth closed by a house; it was reached from without by five or six wooden steps; on the fourth side, a farther flight of ten conducted to the balcony of the house; a table spread with goods divided it across, so that I knew it for the village store and (according to the laws that rule in country life) the village lounging-place. People sat with dangling feet along the house verandah, they sat on benches on the level of the shed or among the goods upon the counter; they came and went, they talked and waited; they opened, skimmed, and pocketed half-read, their letters; they opened the journal, and found a moment, not for the news, but for the current number of the story: methought, I might have been in France, and the paper the _Petit Journal_ instead of the _Nupepa Eleele_. On other islands I had been the centre of attention; here none observed my presence. One hundred and ten years before, the ancestors of these indifferents had looked in the faces of Cook and his seamen with admiration and alarm, called them gods, called them volcanoes; took their clothes for a loose skin, confounded their hats and their heads, and described their pockets as a "treasure door, through which they plunge their hands into their bodies and bring forth cutlery and necklaces and cloth and nails," and to-day the coming of the most attractive stranger failed (it would appear) to divert them from Miss Porter's _Scottish Chiefs_: for that was the novel of the day. My host returned, and led me round the shore among the mules and donkeys to his house. Like all the houses of the hamlet, it was on the European or, to be more descriptive, on the American plan. The parlour was fitted with the usual furniture and ornamented with the portraits of Kamehameha the third, Lunalilo, Kalakaua, the queen consort of the isles, and Queen Victoria. There was a Bible on the table, other books stood on a shelf. A comfortable bedroom was placed at my service, the welcome afforded me was cordial and unembarrassed, the food good and plentiful. My host, my hostess; his grown daughters, strapping lassies; his young hopefuls, misbehaving at a meal or perfunctorily employed upon their school-books: all that I found in that house, beyond the speech and a few exotic dishes on the table, would have been familiar and exemplary in Europe. I walked that night beside the sea. The steamer with its lights and crowd of tourists was gone by; it had left me alone among these aliens, and I felt no touch of strangeness. The trim, lamp-lit houses shining quietly, like villas, each in its narrow garden; the gentle sound of speech from within; the room that awaited my return, with the lamp, and the books, and the spectacled householder studying his Bible:--there was nothing changed; it was in such conditions I had myself grown up, and played, a child, beside the borders of another sea. And some ten miles from where I walked, Cook was adored as a deity; his bones, when he was dead, were cleansed for worship; his entrails devoured in a mistake by rambling children. A day of session in the Hookena Court-house equally surprised me. The judge, a very intelligent, serious Hawaiian, sat behind a table, taking careful notes; two policemen, with their bright metal badges, standing attention at his back or bustling forth on errands. The plaintiff was a Portuguese. For years, he had kept store and raised cattle in the district, without trouble or dispute. His store stood always open, it was standing so seven miles away at the moment of the case; and when his cattle strayed, they were duly impounded and restored to him on payment of one shilling. But recently a gentleman of great acuteness and a thousand imperfect talents had married into the family of a neighbouring proprietor; consecutively on which event the store-keeper's cattle began to be detained and starved, the fine rose to half a dollar, and lastly a cow had disappeared. The Portuguese may have been right or wrong: he was convinced the new-comer was the main-spring of the change; called a suit in consequence against the father-in-law;--and it was the son-in-law who appeared for the defence. I saw him there, seated at his ease, with spectacles on brow; still young, much of a gentleman in looks, and dressed in faultless European clothes; and presently, for my good fortune, he rose to address the court. It appears he has already stood for the Hawaiian parliament; but the people (I was told) "did not think him honest," and he was defeated. Honesty, to our ways of thought, appears a trifle in a candidate; and I think we have few constituencies to refuse so great a charmer. I understood but a few dozen words, yet I heard the man with delight, followed the junctures of his argument, knew when he was enumerating points in his own favour, when he was admitting those against him, when he was putting a question _per absurdum_, when (after the due pause) he smilingly replied to it. There was no haste, no heat, no prejudice; with a hinted gesture, with a semitone of intonation, the speaker lightly set forth and underlined the processes of reason; he could not shift a foot nor touch his spectacles, but what persuasion radiated in the court--it is impossible to conceive a style of oratory more rational or civilised. The point to which he spoke was pretty in itself. The people, as I had been told, did not think the orator honest; some judge, on a particular occasion, had inclined to the same view, and the man of talent was disbarred. By a clause in a statute, a layman or a disbarred lawyer might conduct a case for himself or for one of "his own family." Is a father-in-law one of a man's own family? "Yes," argued the orator: "No," with less grace and perspicuity, Nahinu, retained by the Portuguese. The laws of the tight little kingdom are conceived in duplicate for the Hawaiian hare and his many white friends. The native text appearing inconclusive, an appeal was made to the English, and I (as _amicus curiæ_) was led out, installed upon the court-house steps, and painfully examined as to its precise significance. The judge heard the orator; he heard Nahinu; he received by the mouth of the schoolmaster my report, for which he thanked me with a bow; and ruled the claimant out. This skirmish decided the fate of the engagement; fortune was faithful to the Portuguese; and late in the afternoon, the capable judge rode off homeward with his portfolio under his arm. No court could have been more equally and decently conducted; judge, parties, lawyers, and police were all decorous and competent; and but for the plaintiff, the business was entirely native. The Portuguese had come seven miles to Hookena, sure of substantial justice, and he left his store open, fearless of being robbed. Another white man, of strong sense and much frugality and choler, thus reckoned up what he had lost by theft in thirty-nine years among the different islands of Hawaii: a pair of shoes, an umbrella, some feet of hose-pipe, and one batch of chickens. It is his continual practice to send Hawaiians by a perilous, solitary path with sums in specie; at any moment the messenger might slip, the money-bag roll down a thousand feet of precipice, and lodge in fissures inaccessible to man: and consider how easy it were to invent such misadventures!--"I should have to know a white man well before I trusted him," he said; "I trust Hawaiians without fear. It would be villainous of me to say less." It should be remembered the Hawaiians of yore were not particular; they were eager to steal from Cook, whom they believed to be a god, and it was a theft that led to the tragedy at Kealakekua Bay; and it must not be forgotten that the Hawaiians of to-day are many of them poor. One residual trait of savage incompetence I have already referred to; they cannot administer a trust--I was told there had never yet been a case known. Even a judge, skilled in the knowledge of the law and upright in its administration, was found insusceptible of those duties and distinctions which appear so natural and come so easy to the European. But the disability stands alone, a single survival in the midst of change; and the faults of the modern Hawaiian incline to the other side. My orator of Hookena court-room may be a gentleman much maligned; I may have received his character from the lips of his political opponents; but the type described is common. The islands begin to fill with lawyers; many of whom, justly or unjustly, are disbarred; and to the age of Kamehameha, the age of Glossin has succeeded. Thus none would rob the store of the Portuguese, but the law was wrested to oppress him. It was of old a warlike and industrious race. They were diggers and builders; the isles are still full of their deserted monuments; the modern word for law, Kanawai, "water rights," still serves to remind us of their ancient irrigation. And the island story is compact of battles. Their courage and goodwill to labour seems now confined to the sea, where they are active sailors and fearless boatmen, pursue the shark in his own element, and make a pastime of their incomparable surf. On shore they flee equally from toil and peril, and are all turned to carpet occupations and to parlous frauds. Nahinu, an ex-judge, was paid but two dollars for a hard day in court, and he is paying a dollar a day to the labourers among his coffee. All Hawaiians envy and are ready to compete with him for this odd chance of an occasional fee for some hours' talking; he cannot find one to earn a certain hire under the sun in his plantation, and the work is all transacted by immigrant Chinese. One cannot but be reminded of the love of the French middle class for office work; but in Hawaii, it is the race in bulk that shrinks from manly occupation. During a late revolution, a lady found a powerful young Hawaiian crouching among the grass in her garden. "What are you doing here?" she cried, for she was a strong partisan. "Do you not know they are murdering your king?" "I know," said the skulker. "Why do you not go to help him?" she asked. "Aflaid," said the poor craven, and crouched again among the grass. Here was a strange grandchild for the warriors that followed or faced Kamehameha. I give the singular instance as the more explicit; but the whole race must have been stricken at the moment with a similar weakness. No man dare say of this revolution that it was unprovoked; but its means were treachery and violence; the numbers and position of those engaged made the design one of the most insolent in history; and a mere modicum of native boldness and cohesion must have brought it to the dust. "My race had one virtue, they were brave," said a typical Hawaiian: "and now they have taken that away." I have named a French example: but the thought that haunts the stranger in Hawaii is that of Italy. The ruggedness of feature which marks out the race among Polynesians is the Italian ruggedness. Countenances of the same eloquent harshness, manners of the same vivacious cordiality, are to be found in Hawaii and amongst Italian fisher-folk or whose people, in the midst of life, retain more charm. I recall faces, both of men and women, with a certain leonine stamp, trusty, sagacious, brave, beautiful in plainness: faces that take the heart captive. The tougher struggle of the race in these hard isles has written history there; energy enlivens the Hawaiian strength--or did so once, and the faces are still eloquent of the lost possession. The stock that has produced a Cæsar, a Kamehameha, a Káa-humanu, retains their signature. CHAPTER II A RIDE IN THE FOREST By the Hawaiian tongue, the slope of these steep islands is parcelled out in zones. As we mount from the seaboard, we pass by the region of Ilima, named for a flowering shrub, and the region of Apaa, named for a wind, to Mau, the place of mist. This has a secondary name, the Au- or Wao-Kanaka, "the place of men" by exclusion, man not dwelling higher. The next, accordingly, is called the Waoakua, region of gods and goblins; other names, some apparently involving thoughts of solitude and danger, follow till the top is reached. The mountain itself might be a god or the seat of a god; it might be a volcano, the home of the dread Pele; and into desert places few would venture but such as were adroit to snare the whispering spirits of the dead. To-day, from the Waoakua or the Waomaukele, the gods have perhaps fled; the descendants of Vancouver's cattle fill them with less questionable terrors. As we mounted the glacis of the island, the horses clattering on the lava, we saw far above us the curtain of the rain exclude the view. The sky was clear, the sun strong overhead; around us, a thin growth of bushes and creepers glittered green in their black setting, like plants upon a ruinous pavement; all else was lava--wastes of lava, some of them enclosed (it seemed in wantonness) with dry-stone walls. But the bushes, when the rain descends often enough from its residential altitudes, flourish extremely; and cattle and asses, walking on these resonant slabs, collect a livelihood. Here and there, a prickly-pear came to the bigness of a standard tree and made a space of shade; under one I saw a donkey--under another no less than three cows huddled from the sun. Thus we had before our eyes the rationale of two of the native distinctions; traversed the zone of flowering shrubs; and saw above us the mist hang perennial in Mau. As we continued to draw nearer to the rain, trees began to be mingled with the shrubs; and we came at last to where a house stood in an orchard of papaias, with their palm-like growth and collar of green gourds. In an out-house stood the water-barrel, that necessity of Kona life. For all the water comes from heaven, and must be caught and stored; and the name of Hookena itself may very well imply a cistern and a cup of water for the traveller along the coast. The house belonged to Nahinu, but was in occupation by an American, seeking to make butter there (if I understood) without success. The butterman was gone, to muse perhaps on fresh expedients; his house was closed; and I was able to observe his three chambers only through the windows. In the first were milk pans and remains of breakfast, in the second a bed; in the third a scanty wardrobe hung from pegs, and two pirated novels lay on the floor. One was reversed and could not be identified; the name of the other I made out. It was _Little Loo_. Happy Mr. Clark Russell, making life pleasant for the exile in his garden of papaias, high over sea, upon the forest edge, and where the breeze comes freely. A little way beyond, we plunged into the forest. It grew at first very sparse and park-like, the trees of a pale verdure, but healthy, the parasites, per contra, often dead. Underfoot, the ground was still a rockery of fractured lava; but now the interstices were filled with soil. A sedge-like grass (buffalo grass?) grew everywhere, and the horses munched it by the way with relish. Candle-nut trees with their white foliage stood in groves. Bread-fruits were here and there, but never well-to-do; Hawaii is no true mother for the bread-fruit or the cocoa-palm. Mangoes, on the other hand, attained a splendid bigness, many of them discoloured on one side with a purplish hue which struck the note of autumn. The same note was repeated by a certain aerial creeper, which drops (you might suppose) from heaven like the wreck of an old kite, and roosts on tree-tops with a pendent raffle of air-roots, the whole of a colour like a wintry beech's. These are clannish plants; five or six may be quartered on a single tree, thirty or forty on a grove; the wood dies under them to skeletons; and they swing there, like things hung out from washing, over the death they have provoked. We had now turned southward towards Kaa, following a shapeless bridle-track which is the high road of Hawaii. The sea was on one hand. Our way was across--the woods we threaded did but cling upon--the vast declivity of the island front. For long, as we still skirted the margin of the forest, we kept an open view of the whole falling seaboard, the white edge of surf now soundless to our ears, and the high blue sea marbled by tide rips, and showing under the clouds of an opalescent milky white. The height, the breeze, the giddy gradient of the isle, delighted me. I observed a spider plant its abhorred St. Andrew's cross against the sea and sky, certainly fifty yards from where I rode, and five feet at least from either tree: so wide was its death-gossamer spread, so huge the ugly vermin. Presently the sea was lost, the forest swallowed us. Ferns joined their fronds above a horseman's head. High over these, the dead and the living rose and were hung with tattered parasites. The breeze no longer reached us; it was steaming hot; and the way went up and down so abruptly, that in one place my saddle-girth was burst and we must halt for repairs. In the midst of this rough wilderness, I was reminded of the aim of our excursion. The schoolmaster and certain others of Hookena had recently bought a tract of land for some four thousand dollars; set out coffee; and hired a Chinaman to mind it. The thing was notable in itself; natives selling land is a thing of daily custom; of natives buying, I have heard no other instance; and it was civil to show interest. "But when," I asked, "shall we come to your coffee plantation?" "This is it," said he, and pointed down. Their bushes grew on the path-side; our horses breasted them as they went by; and the gray wood on every hand enclosed and over-arched that thread of cultivation. A little farther, we strung in single file through the hot crypt, our horses munching grass, their riders chewing unpalatable gum collected from a tree. Next the wood opened, and we issued forth again into the day on the precipitous broadside of the isle. A village was before us: a Catholic church and perhaps a dozen scattered houses, some of grass in the old island fashion, others spick-and-span with outside stair and balcony and trellis, and white paint and green, in the more modern taste. One arrested my attention; it stood on the immediate verge of a deep precipice: two stories high, with double balconies, painted white, and showing by my count fifteen windows. "There is a fine house," said I. "Outside," returned the schoolmaster drily. "That is the way with natives; they spend money on the outside. Let us go there: you will find they live in the verandah and have no furniture." We were made welcome, sure enough, on the verandah; and in the lower room, which I entered, there was not a chair or table; only mats on the floor, and photographs and lithographs upon the wall. The house was an eidolon, designed to gladden the eye and enlarge the heart of the proprietor returning from Hookena; and its fifteen windows were only to be numbered from without. Doubtless that owner had attained his end; for I observed, when we were home again at Hookena, and Nahinu was describing our itinerary to his wife, he mentioned we had baited at Ka-hale-nui--"the great house." The photographs were of the royal family; that goes without saying in Hawaii; of the two lithographs, made in San Francisco, one I knew at the first sight for General Garfield: the second tempted and tantalised me; it could not be, I thought--and yet it must; it was this dubiety which carried me across the threshold; and behold! It was indeed the Duke of Thunder, his name printed under his effigies in the Hawaiianised form of _Nelesona_. I thought it a fine instance of fame that his features and his empty sleeve should have been drawn on stone in San Fransisco, which was a lone Mexican mission while he lived; and lettered for a market in those islands, which were not yet united under Kamehameha when he died. And then I had a cold fit, and wondered after all if these good folk knew anything of the man's world-shaking deeds and gunpowder weaknesses, or if he was to them a "bare appellation" and a face on stone; and turning to the schoolmaster, I asked of him the question. Yes, the Hawaiians knew of Nelesona; there had been a story in the papers where he figured, and the portrait had been given for a supplement. So he was known as a character of Romance! Brave men since Agamemnon, like the brave before, must patiently expect the "inspired author." And nowhere has fiction deeper roots than in the world of Polynesia. They are all tellers and hearers of tales; and the first requisite of any native paper is a story from the English or the French. These are of all sorts, and range from the works of good Miss Porter to _The Lightning Detective_. Miss Porter, I was told, was "drawing" in Hawaii; and Dumas and the _Arabian Nights_ were named as having pleased extremely. Our homeward way was down the hill and by the sea in the black open. We traversed a waste of shattered lava; spires, ravines, well-holes showing the entrance to vast subterranean vaults in whose profundities our horse-hooves doubtless echoed. The whole was clothed with stone _fiorituri_ fantastically fashioned, like débris from the workshop of some brutal sculptor: dog's heads, devils, stone trees, and gargoyles broken in the making. From a distance, so intricate was the detail, the side of a hummock wore the appearance of some coarse and dingy sort of coral, or a scorched growth of heather. Amid this jumbled wreck, naked itself, and the evidence of old disaster, frequent plants found root: rose-apples bore their rosy flowers; and a bush between a cypress and a juniper attained at times a height of twenty feet. The breakneck path had descended almost to the sea, and we were already within sound of its reverberations, when a cliff hove up suddenly on the landward hand, very rugged and broken, streaked with white lichen, laddered with green lianas, and pierced with the apertures of half a hundred caves. Two of these were piously sealed with doors, the wood scarce weathered. For the Hawaiian remembers the repository of the bones of old, and is still jealous of the safety of ancestral relics. Nor without cause. For the white man comes and goes upon the hunt for curiosities; and one (it is rumoured) consults soothsayers and explores the caves of Kona after the fabled treasures of Kamehameha. CHAPTER III THE CITY OF REFUGE Our way was northward on the naked lava of the coast. The schoolmaster led the march on a trumpeting black stallion; not without anxious thought, I followed after on a mare. The sun smote us fair and full; the air streamed from the hot rock, the distant landscape gleamed and trembled through its vortices. On the left, the coast heaved bodily upward to Mau, the zone of mists and forests, where it rains all day, and the clouds creep up and down, and the groves loom and vanish in the margin. The land was still a crust of lava, here and there ramparted with cliffs, and which here and there breaks down and shows the mouths of branching galleries, mines and tombs of nature's making, endlessly vaulted, and ramified below our passage. Wherever a house is, cocoa-palms spring sheer out of the rock; a little shabby in this northern latitude, not visibly the worse for their inclement rooting. Hookena had shone out green under the black lip of the overhanging crag, green as a May orchard; the lava might have been some rich black loam. Everywhere, in the fissures of the rock, green herbs and flowering bushes prospered; donkeys and cattle were everywhere; everywhere, too, their whitened bones, telling of drought. No sound but of the sea pervades this region; and it smells strong of the open water and of aromatic plants. We skirted one cliffy cove, full of bursting surges; and if it had not been for the palms, and the houses, and the canoes that were putting out to fish, and the colour of the cliffs and the bright dresses (lilac, red, and green) of the women that sat about the doors at work, I might have thought myself in Devonshire. A little further, we passed a garden enclosed in dry stone walls from the surrounding blackness; it seemed a wonder of fertility; hard by was the owner, a white man, waiting the turn of the tide by the margin of his well; so soon as the sea flowed, he might begin to irrigate with brackish water. The children hailed my companion from wayside houses. With one little maid, knotting her gown about her in embarrassment so as to define her little person like a suit of tights, we held a conversation more prolonged. "Will you be at school to-morrow?" "Yes, sir." "Do you like school?" "Yes, sir." "Do you like bathing?" "No, ma'am," with a staggering change of sex. Another maiden, of more tender growth and wholly naked, fled into the house at our approach, and appeared again with a corner of a towel. Leaning one hand on the post, and applying her raiment with the other, she stood in the door and watched us haughtily. The white flag of a surveyor and a pound-master's notice on a board told of the reign of law. At length we turned the corner of a point and debouched on a flat of lava. On the landward hand, cliffs made a quadrant of an amphitheatre, melting on either side into the general mountain of the isle. Over these, rivers of living lava had once flowed, had frozen as they fell, and now depended like a sculptured drapery. Here and there the mouth of a cave was seen half blocked, some green lianas beckoning in the entrance. In front, the fissured pavement of the lava stretched into the sea and made a surfy point. A scattered village, two white churches, one Catholic, one Protestant, a grove of tall and scraggy palms, and a long bulk of ruin, occupy the end. Off the point, not a cable's length beyond the breaching surf, a schooner rode; come to discharge house-boards, and presently due at Hookena to load lepers. The village is Honaunau; the ruin, the Hale Keawe, temple and city of refuge. The ruin made a massive figure, rising from the flat lava in ramparts twelve to fifteen feet high, of an equal thickness, and enclosing an area of several acres. The unmortared stones were justly set; in places, the bulwark was still true to the plummet, in places ruinous from the shock of earthquakes. The enclosure was divided in unequal parts--the greater, the city of refuge; the smaller, the _heiau_, or temple, the so-called House of Keawe, or reliquary of his royal bones. Not his alone, but those of many monarchs of Hawaii were treasured here; but whether as the founder of the shrine, or because he had been more renowned in life, Keawe was the reigning and the hallowing saint. And Keawe can produce at least one claim to figure on the canon, for since his death he has wrought miracles. As late as 1829, Kaahumanu sent messengers to bring the relics of the kings from their long repose at Honaunau. First to the keeper's wife, and then to the keeper, the spirit of Keawe appeared in a dream, bidding them prevent the desecration. Upon the second summons, they rose trembling; hasted with a torch into the crypt; exchanged the bones of Keawe with those of some less holy chieftains; and were back in bed but not yet asleep, and the day had not yet dawned, before the messengers arrived. So it comes that to this hour the bones of Keawe, like those of his great descendant, sleep in some unknown crevice of that caverned isle. When Ellis passed in 1823, six years before this intervention of the dead, the temple still preserved some shadow of its ancient credit and presented much of its original appearance. He has sketched it, rudely in a drawing, more effectively in words. "Several rudely carved male and female images of wood were placed on the outside of the enclosure, some on low pedestals under the shade of an adjacent tree, others on high posts on the jutting rocks that hung over the edge of the water. A number stood on the fence at unequal distances all around; but the principal assemblage of these frightful representatives of their former deities was at the south-east end of the enclosed space, where, forming a semi-circle, twelve of them stood in grim array, as if perpetual guardians of 'the mighty dead' reposing in the house adjoining.... Once they had evidently been clothed, but now they appeared in the most indigent nakedness.... The horrid stare of these idols, the tattered garments upon some of them, and the heaps of rotting offerings before them, seemed to us no improper emblems of the system they were designed to support; distinguished alike by its cruelty, folly, and wretchedness. We endeavoured to gain admission to the inside of the house, but were told it was strictly prohibited.... However, by pushing one of the boards across the doorway a little on one side, we looked in and saw many large images, with distended mouths, large rows of sharks' teeth, and pearl-shell eyes. We also saw several bundles, apparently of human bones, cleaned, carefully tied up with sinnet made of cocoa-nut fibre, and placed in different parts of the house, together with some rich shawls and other valuable articles, probably worn by those to whom the bones belonged." Thus the careless eyes of Ellis viewed and passed over the bones of sacrosanct Keawe, in his house which he had builded. Cities of refuge are found not only in Hawaii but in the Gilberts: where their name is now invariably used for a mosquito-net. But the refuge of the Gilberts was only a house in a village, and only offered, like European churches, a sanctuary for the time. The hunted man might harbour there, and live on charity: woe to him if he stepped without. The City of Refuge of Honaunau possessed a larger efficacy. Its gate once passed, an appearance made before the priest on duty, a hasty prayer addressed to the chief idol, and the guilty man was free to go again, relieved from all the consequences of his crime or his misfortune. In time of war, its bulwarks were advertised by pennons of white tapa; and the aged, the children, and the poorer-hearted of the women of the district awaited there the issue of the battle. But the true wives followed their lords into the field, and shared with them their toil and danger. The city had yet another function. There was in Hawaii a class apart, comparable to the doomed families of Tahiti, whose special mission was to supply the altar. It seems the victim fell usually on the holy day, of which there were four in the month; between these, the man was not only safe, but enjoyed, in virtue of his destiny, a singular licence of behaviour. His immunities exceeded those of the mediæval priest and jester rolled in one; he might have donned the King's girdle (the height of sacrilege and treason), and gone abroad with it, unpunished and apparently unblamed; and with a little care and some acquaintance in priests' families, he might prolong this life of licence to old age. But the laws of human nature are implacable; their destiny of privilege and peril turned the men's heads; even at dangerous seasons, they went recklessly abroad upon their pleasures; were often sighted in the open, and must run for the City of Refuge with the priestly murderers at their heels. It is strange to think it was a priest also who stood in the door to welcome and protect them. The enclosure of the sanctuary was all paved with the lava; scattered blocks encumbered it in places; everywhere tall cocoa-palms jutted from the fissures and drew shadows on the floor; a loud continuous sound of the near sea burthened the ear. These rude monumental ruins, and the thought of that life and faith of which they stood memorial, threw me in a muse. There are times and places where the past becomes more vivid than the present, and the memory dominates the ear and eye. I have found it so in the presence of the vestiges of Rome; I found it so again in the City of Refuge at Honaunau; and the strange, busy, and perilous existence of the old Hawaiian, the grinning idols of the Heiau, the priestly murderers and the fleeing victim, rose before and mastered my imagination. Some dozen natives of Honaunau followed me about to show the boundaries; and I was recalled from these scattering thoughts by one of my guides laying his hand on a big block of lava. "This stone is called Kaahumanu," said he. "It is here she lay hid with her dog from Kamehameha." And he told me an anecdote which would not interest the reader as it interested me, till he has learned what manner of woman Kaahumanu was. CHAPTER IV KAAHUMANU Kamehameha the first, founder of the realm of the Eight Islands, was a man properly entitled to the style of great. All chiefs in Polynesia are tall and portly; and Kamehameha owed his life in the battle with the Puna fishers to the vigour of his body. He was skilled in single combat; as a general, he was almost invariably the victor. Yet it is not as a soldier that he remains fixed upon the memory; rather as a kindly and wise monarch, full of sense and shrewdness, like an old plain country farmer. When he had a mind to make a present of fish, he went to the fishing himself. When famine fell on the land, he remitted the tributes, cultivated a garden for his own support with his own hands, and set all his friends to do the like. Their patches of land, each still known by the name of its high-born gardener, were shown to Ellis on his tour. He passed laws against cutting down young sandal-wood trees, and against the killing of the bird from which the feather mantles of the archipelago were made. The yellow feathers were to be plucked, he directed, and the bird dismissed again to freedom. His people were astonished. "You are old," they argued; "soon you will die; what use will it be to you?" "Let the bird go," said the King. "It will be for my children afterwards." Alas, that his laws had not prevailed! Sandal-wood and yellow feathers are now things of yesterday in his dominions. The attitude of this brave old fellow to the native religion was, for some while before his death, ambiguous. A white man (tradition says) had come to Hawaii upon a visit; King Kalakaua assures me he was an Englishman, and a missionary; if that be so, he should be easy to identify. It was this missionary's habit to go walking in the morning ere the sun was up, and before doing so, to kindle a light and make tea. The King, who rose early himself to watch the behaviour of his people, observed the light, made inquiries, learned of and grew curious about these morning walks, threw himself at last in the missionary's path, and drew him into talk. The meeting was repeated; and the missionary began to press the King with Christianity. "If you will throw yourself from that cliff," said Kamehameha, "and come down uninjured, I will accept your religion: not unless." But the missionary was a man of parts; he wrote a deep impression on his hearer's mind, and after he had left for home, Kamehameha called his chief priest, and announced he was about to break the tabus and to change his faith. The Kahuna replied that he was the King's servant, but the step was grave, and it would be wiser to proceed by divination. Kamehameha consented. Each built a new heiau over against the other's; and when both were finished, a game of what we call _French and English_ or _The Tug of War_ was played upon the intervening space. The party of the priest prevailed; the King's men were dragged in a body into the opposite temple; and the tabus were maintained. None employed in this momentous foolery were informed of its significance; the King's misgivings were studiously concealed; but there is little doubt he continued to cherish them in secret. At his death, he had another memorable word, testifying to his old preoccupation for his son's estate: implying besides a weakened confidence in the island deities. His sickness was heavy upon him; the time had manifestly come to offer sacrifice; the people had fled already from the then dangerous vicinity, and lay hid; none but priests and chiefs remained about the King. "A man to your god!" they urged--"a man to your god, that you may recover!" "The man is sacred to (my son) the King," replied Kamehameha. So much appeared in public; but it is believed that he left secret commands upon the high chief Kalanimoku, and on Kaahumanu, the most beautiful and energetic of his wives, to do (as soon as he was dead) that which he had spared to do while living. No time was lost. The very day of his death, May 8th, 1819, the women of the court ate of forbidden food, and some of the men sat down with them to meat. Infidelity must have been deep-seated in the circle of Kamehameha; for no portent followed this defiance of the gods, and none of the transgressors died. But the priests were doubtless informed of what was doing; the blame lay clearly on the shoulders of Kaahumanu, the most conspicuous person in the land, named by the dying Kamehameha for a conditional successor: "If Liholiho do amiss, let Kaahumanu take the kingdom and preserve it." The priests met in council of diviners; and by a natural retort, it was upon Kaahumanu that they laid the fault of the King's death. This conspiracy appears to have been quite in vain. Kaahumanu sat secure. On the day of the coronation, when the young King came forth from the heiau, clad in a red robe and crowned with his English diadem, it was almost as an equal that she met and spoke to him. "(Son of) heaven, I name to you the possessions of your father; here are the chiefs, there are the people of your father; there are your guns, here is your land. But let you and me enjoy that land together." He must have known already she was a free-eater, and there is no doubt he trembled at the thought of that impiety and of its punishment; yet he consented to what seems her bold proposal. The same day he met his own mother, who signed to him privately that he should eat free. But Liholiho (the poor drunkard who died in London) was incapable of so much daring: he hung long apart from the court circle with a clique of the more superstitious; and it was not till five months later, after a drinking bout in a canoe at sea, that he was decoyed to land by stronger spirits, and was seen (perhaps scarce conscious of his acts) to eat of a dog, drink rum, and smoke tobacco, with his servant women. Thus the food tabu fell finally at court. Ere it could be stamped out upon Hawaii, a war must be fought; wherein the chief of the old party fell in battle; his brave wife Manono by his side, mourned even by the missionary Ellis. The fall of one tabu involved the fall of others; the land was plunged in dissolution; morals ceased. When the missionaries came (April 1820), all the wisdom in the kingdom was prepared to embrace the succour of some new idea. Kaahumanu early ranged upon that side, perhaps at first upon a ground of politics. But gradually she fell more and more under the influence of the new teachers; loved them, served them; valorously defended them in dangers, which she shared; and put away at their command her second husband. To the end of a long life, she played an almost sovereign part, so that in the ephemerides of Hawaii, the progresses of Kaahumanu are chronicled along with the deaths and the accessions of kings. For two successive sovereigns and in troublous periods, she held the reins of regency with a fortitude that has not been called in question, with a loyalty beyond reproach; and at last, on 5th June 1832, this Duke of Wellington of a woman made the end of a saint, fifty-seven years after her marriage with the conqueror. The date of her birth, it seems, is lost; we may call her seventy. Kaahumanu was a woman of the chiefly stature and of celebrated beauty; Bingham admits she was "_beautiful for a Polynesian_"; and her husband cherished her exceedingly. He had the indelicacy to frame and publish an especial law declaring death against the man who should approach her, and yet no penalty against herself. And in 1809, after thirty-four years of marriage, and when she must have been nearing fifty, an island Chastelard, of the name of Kanihonui, was found to be her lover, and paid the penalty of life; she cynically surviving. Some twenty years later, one of the missionaries had written home denouncing the misconduct of an English whaler. The whaler got word of the denunciation and, with the complicity of the English consul, sought to make a crime of it against the mission. Party spirit ran very violent in the islands; tears were shed, threats flying; and Kaahumanu called a council of the chiefs. In that day stood forth the native historian, David Malo (though his name should rather have been Nathan), and pressed the regent with historic instances. Who was to be punished?--the whaler guilty of the act, the missionary whose denunciation had provoked the scandal? "O you, the wife of Kamehameha," said he, "Kanihonui came and slept with you Luheluhe declared to Kamehameha the sleeping together of you two. I ask you, which of these two persons was slain by Kamehameha? Was it Luheluhe?" And she answered: "It was Kanihonui!" Shakespeare never imagined such a character; and it would require none less than he to represent her sublimities and contradictions. After this heroine, the stone in the precinct of Honaunau had been named. Here is the reason, and the tale completes her portrait. Kamehameha was, of course, polygamous; the number of his wives rose at last to twenty-five; and out of these no less than two were the sisters of Kaahumanu. The favourite was of a jealous habit; and when it came to a sister for a rival, her jealousy overflowed. She fled by night, plunged in the sea, came swimming to Honaunau, entered the precinct by the sea-gate, and hid herself behind the stone. There she lay naked and refused food. The flight was discovered; as she had come swimming, none had seen her pass; the priests of the temple were bound, it seems, to silence; and Kona was filled with the messengers of the dismayed Kamehameha, vainly seeking the favourite. Now, Kaahumanu had a dog who was much attached to her, who had accompanied her in her long swim, and lay by her side behind the stone; and it chanced, as the messengers ran past the City of Refuge, that the dog (perhaps recognising them) began to bark. "Ah, there is the dog of Kaahumanu!" said the messengers, and returned and told the king she was at the Hale O Keawe. Thence Kamehameha fetched or sent for her, and the breach in their relations was restored. A king preferred this woman out of a kingdom; Kanihonui died for her, when she was fifty; even her dog adored her; even Bingham, who did not see her until 1820, thought her "_beautiful for a Polynesian_," and while she was thus in person an emblem of womanly charm, she made her life illustrious with the manly virtues. There are some who give to Mary Queen of Scots the place of saint and muse in their historic meditations; I recommend to them instead the wife and widow of the island conqueror. The Hawaiian was the nobler woman, with the nobler story; and no disenchanting portrait will be found to shatter an ideal. CHAPTER V THE LEPERS OF KONA A step beyond Hookena, a wooden house with two doors stands isolated in a field of broken lava, like ploughed land. I had approached it on the night of my arrival, and found it black and silent; yet even then it had inmates. A man and a woman sat there captive, and the man had a knife, brought to him in secret by his family. Not long, perhaps, after I was by, the man, silencing by threats his fellow-prisoner, cut through the floor and escaped to the mountain. It was known he had a comrade there, hunted on the same account; and their friends kept them supplied with food and ammunition. Upon the mountains, in most islands of the group, similar outlaws rove in bands or dwell alone, unsightly hermits; and but the other day an officer was wounded while attempting an arrest. Some are desperate fellows; some mournful women--mothers and wives; some stripling girls. A day or two, for instance, after the man had escaped, the police got word of another old offender, made a forced march, and took the quarry sitting: this time with little peril to themselves. For the outlaw was a girl of nineteen, who had been two years under the rains in the high forest, with her mother for comrade and accomplice. How does their own poet sing? In the land of distress My dwelling was on the mountain height, My talking companions were the birds, The decaying leaves of the Ki my clothing. It is for no crime this law-abiding race flee to the woods; it is no fear of the gallows or the dungeon that nerves themselves to resist and their friends to aid and to applaud them. Their liability is for disease; they are lepers; and what they combine to combat is not punishment but segregation. While China, and England, and France, in their tropical possessions, either attempt nothing or effect little, Hawaii has honourably faced the problem of this ancient and apparently reviving malady. Her small extent is an advantage; but the ruggedness of the physical characters, the desert woods and mountains, and the habit of the native mind, oppose success. To the native mind, our medical opinions seem unfounded. We smile to hear of ghosts and gods; they, when they are told to keep warm in fevers or to avoid contagion. Leprosy in particular they cannot be persuaded to avoid. But no mere opinion would exalt them to resist the law and lie in forests did not a question of the family bond embitter and exasperate the opposition. Their family affection is strong, but unerect; it is luxuriously self-indulgent, circumscribed within the passing moment, without providence, without nobility, incapable of healthful rigour. The presence and the approval of the loved one, it matters not how purchased, there is the single demand of the Polynesian. By a natural consequence, when death intervenes, he is consoled the more easily. Against this undignified fervour of attachment, marital and parental, the law of segregation often beats in vain. It is no fear of the lazaretto; they know the dwellers are well used in Molokai; they receive letters from friends already there who praise the place; and could the family be taken in a body, they would go with glee, overjoyed to draw rations from Government. But all cannot become pensioners at once; a proportion of rate-payers must be kept; and the leper must go alone or with a single relative; and the native instinctively resists the separation as a weasel bites. A similar reluctance can be shown in Molokai itself. By a recent law, clean children born within the precinct are taken from their leper parents, sent to an intermediate hospital, and given a chance of life and health and liberty. I have stood by while Mr. Meyer and Mr. Hutchinson, the luna and the sub-luna of the lazaretto, opened the petitions of the settlement. As they sat together on the steps of the guest-house at Kalawao, letter after letter was passed between them with a sneer, and flung upon the ground; till I was at last struck with this cavalier procedure, and inquired the nature of the appeals. They were all the same; all from leper parents, all pleading to have their clean children retained in that abode of sorrow, and all alleging the same reason--_aloha nuinui_--an extreme affection. Such was the extreme affection of Kaahumanu for Kanihonui; by which she indulged her wantonness in safety and he died. But love has a countenance more severe. The scenes I am about to describe, moving as they were to witness, have thus an element of something weak and false. Sympathy may flow freely for the leper girl; it may flow for her mother with reserve; it must not betray us into a shadow of injustice for the government whose laws they had attempted to evade. That which is pathetic is not needfully wrong. I walked in a bright sun, after a grateful rain, upon the shore beyond Hookena. The breeze was of heavenly freshness, the surf was jubilant in all the caves; it was a morning to put a man in thought of the antiquity, the health and cleanness of the earth. And behold! when I came abreast of the little pest-house on the lava, both the doors were open. In front, a circle of some half-a-dozen women and children sat conspicuous in the usual bright raiment; in their midst was a crouching and bowed figure, swathed in a black shawl and motionless; and as I drew more near, I was aware of a continuous and high-pitched drone of song. The figure in the midst was the leper girl; the song was the improvisation of the mother, pouring out her sorrow in the island way. "That was not singing," explained the schoolmaster's wife on my return, "that was crying." And she sketched for me the probable tenor of the lament: "O my daughter, O my child, now you are going away from me, now you are taken away from me at last," and so on without end. The thought of the girl so early separated from her fellows--the look of her lying there covered from eyesight, like an untimely birth--perhaps more than all, the penetrating note of the lament--subdued my courage utterly. With the natural impulse, I began to seek some outlet for my pain. It occurred to me that, after two years in the woods, the family affairs might well have suffered, and in view of the transplantation, clothes, furniture, or money might be needful. I believe it was not done wisely, since it was gone about in ignorance; I dare say it flowed from a sentiment no more erect than that of Polynesians; I am sure there were many in England to whom my superfluity had proved more useful; but the next morning saw me at the pest-house, under convoy of the schoolmaster and the policeman. The doors were again open. A fire was burning and a pot cooking on the lava, under the supervision of an old woman in a grass-green sacque. This dame, who seemed more merry than refined, hailed me, seized me, and tried to seat me in her lap; a jolly and coarse old girl from whom, in my hour of sentiment, I fled with craven shrinking: to whom, upon a retrospect, I do more justice. The two lepers (both women) sat in the midst of their visitors, even the children (to my grief) touching them freely; the elder chatting at intervals--the girl in the same black weed and bowed in the same attitude as yesterday. It was painfully plain she would conceal, if possible, her face. Perhaps she had been beautiful: certainly, poor soul, she had been vain--a gift of equal value. Some consultation followed; I was told that nothing was required for outfit, but a gift in money would be gratefully received; and this (forgetting I was in the South Seas) I was about to make in silence. The confounded expression of the schoolmaster reminded me of where I was. We stood up, accordingly, side by side before the lepers; I made the necessary speech, which the schoolmaster translated sentence by sentence; the money (thus hallowed by oratory) was handed over and received; and the two women each returned a dry "Mahalo," the girl not even then exhibiting her face. Between nine and ten of the same morning, the schooner lay-to off Hookena and a whaleboat came ashore. The village clustered on the rocks for the farewell: a grief perhaps--a performance certainly. We miss in our modern life these operatic consolations of the past. The lepers came singly and unattended; the elder first; the girl a little after, tricked out in a red dress and with a fine red feather in her hat. In this bravery, it was the more affecting to see her move apart on the rocks and crouch in her accustomed attitude. But this time I had seen her face; it was scarce horribly affected, but had a haunting look of an unfinished wooden doll, at once expressionless and disproportioned; doubtless a sore spectacle in the mirror of youth. Next there appeared a woman of the middle life, of a swaggering gait, a gallant figure, and a bold, handsome face. She came, swinging her hat, rolling her eyes and shoulders, visibly working herself up; the crowd stirred and murmured on her passage; and I knew, without being told, this was the mother and protagonist. Close by the sea, in the midst of the spectators, she sat down, and raised immediately the notes of the lament. One after another of her friends approached her. To one after the other she reached out an arm, embraced them down, rocked awhile with them embraced, and passionately kissed them in the island fashion, with the pressed face. The leper girl at last, as at some signal, rose from her seat apart, drew near, was inarmed like the rest, and with a small knot (I suppose of the most intimate) held some while in a general clasp. Through all, the wail continued, rising into words and a sort of passionate declamatory recitation as each friend approached, sinking again, as the pair rocked together, into the tremolo drone. At length the scene was over; the performers rose; the lepers and the mother were helped in silence to their places; the whaleboat was urged between the reefs into a bursting surge, and swung next moment without on the smooth swell. Almost every countenance about me streamed with tears. It was odd, but perhaps natural amongst a ceremonious, oratorical race, that the boat should have waited while a passenger publicly lamented on the beach. It was more odd still that the mother should have been the chief, rather the only, actor. She was leaving indeed; she hoped to be taken as a Kokua, or clean assistant, and thus accompany her daughter to the settlement; but she was far from sure; and it was highly possible she might return to Kona in a month. The lepers, on the other hand, took leave for ever. In so far as regarded their own isle and birthplace, and for their friends and families, it was their day of death. The soldier from the war returns, The sailor from the main: but not the sick from the gray island. Yet they went unheeded; and the chief part, and the whole stage and sympathy, was for their travelling companion. At the time, I was too deeply moved to criticise; mere sympathy oppressed my spirit. It had always been a point with me to visit the station, if I could: on the rocks of Hookena the design was fixed. I had seen the departure of lepers for the place of exile; I must see their arrival, and that place itself.[6] FOOTNOTE: [6] For an account of the writer's visit to the leper settlement, see _Letters_, section x. PART IV THE GILBERTS CHAPTER I BUTARITARI At Honolulu we had said farewell to the _Casco_ and to Captain Otis, and our next adventure was made in changed conditions. Passage was taken for myself, my wife, Mr. Osbourne, and my China boy, Ah Fu, on a pigmy trading schooner, the _Equator_, Captain Dennis Reid; and on a certain bright June day in 1889, adorned in the Hawaiian fashion with the garlands of departure, we drew out of port and bore with a fair wind for Micronesia. The whole extent of the South Seas is desert of ships, more especially that part where we were now to sail. No post runs in these islands; communication is by accident; where you may have designed to go is one thing, where you shall be able to arrive another. It was my hope, for instance, to have reached the Carolines, and returned to the light of day by way of Manila and the China ports; and it was in Samoa that we were destined to re-appear and be once more refreshed with the sight of mountains. Since the sunset faded from the peaks of Oahu six months had intervened, and we had seen no spot of earth so high as an ordinary cottage. Our path had been still on the flat sea, our dwellings upon unerected coral, our diet from the pickle-tub or out of tins; I had learned to welcome shark' flesh for a variety; and a mountain, an onion, an Irish potato or a beef-steak, had been long lost to sense and dear to aspiration. The two chief places of our stay, Butaritari and Apemama, lie near the line; the latter within thirty miles. Both enjoy a superb ocean climate, days of blinding sun and bracing wind, nights of a heavenly brightness. Both are somewhat wider than Fakarava, measuring perhaps (at the widest) a quarter of a mile from beach to beach. In both, a coarse kind of _taro_ thrives; its culture is a chief business of the natives, and the consequent mounds and ditches make miniature scenery and amuse the eye. In all else they show the customary features of an atoll: the low horizon, the expanse of the lagoon, the sedge-like rim of palm-tops, the sameness and smallness of the land, the hugely superior size and interest of sea and sky. Life on such islands is in many points like life on shipboard. The atoll, like the ship, is soon taken for granted; and the islanders, like the ship's crew, become soon the centre of attention. The isles are populous, independent, seats of kinglets, recently civilised, little visited. In the last decade many changes have crept in: women no longer go unclothed till marriage; the widow no longer sleeps at night and goes abroad by day with the skull of her dead husband; and, fire-arms being introduced, the spear and the shark-tooth sword are sold for curiosities. Ten years ago all these things and practices were to be seen in use; yet ten years more, and the old society will have entirely vanished. We came in a happy moment to see its institutions still erect and (in Apemama) scarce decayed. Populous and independent--warrens of men, ruled over with some rustic pomp--such was the first and still the recurring impression of these tiny lands. As we stood across the lagoon for the town of Butaritari, a stretch of the low shore was seen to be crowded with the brown roofs of houses; those of the palace and king's summer parlour (which are of corrugated iron) glittered near one end conspicuously bright; the royal colours flew hard by on a tall flagstaff; in front, on an artificial islet, the gaol played the part of a martello. Even upon this first and distant view, the place had scarce the air of what it truly was, a village; rather of that which it was also, a petty metropolis, a city rustic and yet royal. The lagoon is shoal. The tide being out, we waded for some quarter of a mile in tepid shallows, and stepped ashore at last into a flagrant stagnancy of sun and heat. The lee side of a line island after noon is indeed a breathless place; on the ocean beach the trade will be still blowing, boisterous and cool; out in the lagoon it will be blowing also, speeding the canoes; but the screen of bush completely intercepts it from the shore, and sleep and silence and companies of mosquitoes brood upon the towns. We may thus be said to have taken Butaritari by surprise. A few inhabitants were still abroad in the north end, at which we landed. As we advanced, we were soon done with encounter, and seemed to explore a city of the dead. Only, between the posts of open houses, we could see the townsfolk stretched in the siesta, sometimes a family together veiled in a mosquito net, sometimes a single sleeper on a platform like a corpse on a bier. The houses were of all dimensions, from those of toys to those of churches. Some might hold a battalion, some were so minute they could scarce receive a pair of lovers; only in the playroom, when the toys are mingled, do we meet such incongruities of scale. Many were open sheds; some took the form of roofed stages; others were walled and the walls pierced with little windows. A few were perched on piles in the lagoon; the rest stood at random on a green, through which the roadway made a ribbon of sand, or along the embankments of a sheet of water like a shallow dock. One and all were the creatures of a single tree; palm-tree wood and palm-tree leaf their materials; no nail had been driven, no hammer sounded, in their building, and they were held together by lashings of palm-tree sinnet. In the midst of the thoroughfare, the church stands like an island, a lofty and dim house with rows of windows; a rich tracery of framing sustains the roof; and through the door at either end the street shows in a vista. The proportions of the place, in such surroundings, and built of such materials, appeared august; and we threaded the nave with a sentiment befitting visitors in a cathedral. Benches run along either side. In the midst, on a crazy dais, two chairs stand ready for the king and queen when they shall choose to worship; over their heads a hoop, apparently from a hogshead, depends by a strip of red cotton; and the hoop (which hangs askew) is dressed with streamers of the same material, red and white. This was our first advertisement of the royal dignity, and presently we stood before its seat and centre. The palace is built of imported wood upon a European plan; the roof of corrugated iron, the yard enclosed with walls, the gate surmounted by a sort of lych-house. It cannot be called spacious; a labourer in the States is sometimes more commodiously lodged; but when we had the chance to see it within, we found it was enriched (beyond all island expectation) with coloured advertisements and cuts from the illustrated papers. Even before the gate some of the treasures of the crown stand public: a bell of a good magnitude, two pieces of cannon, and a single shell. The bell cannot be rung nor the guns fired; they are curiosities, proofs of wealth, a part of the parade of the royalty, and stand to be admired like statues in a square. A straight gut of water like a canal runs almost to the palace door; the containing quay-walls excellently built of coral; over against the mouth, by what seems an effect of landscape art, the martello-like islet of the gaol breaks the lagoon. Vassal chiefs with tribute, neighbour monarchs come a-roving, might here sail in, view with surprise these extensive public works, and be awed by these mouths of silent cannon. It was impossible to see the place and not to fancy it designed for pageantry. But the elaborate theatre then stood empty; the royal house deserted, its doors and windows gaping; the whole quarter of the town immersed in silence. On the opposite bank of the canal, on a roofed stage, an ancient gentleman slept publicly, sole visible inhabitant; and beyond on the lagoon a canoe spread a striped lateen, the sole thing moving. The canal is formed on the south by a pier or causeway with a parapet. At the far end the parapet stops, and the quay expands into an oblong peninsula in the lagoon, the breathing-place and summer parlour of the king. The midst is occupied by an open house or permanent marquee--called here a maniapa, or, as the word is now pronounced, a maniap'--at the lowest estimation forty feet by sixty. The iron roof, lofty but exceedingly low-browed, so that a woman must stoop to enter, is supported externally on pillars of coral, within by a frame of wood. The floor is of broken coral, divided in aisles by the uprights of the frame; the house far enough from shore to catch the breeze, which enters freely and disperses the mosquitoes; and under the low eaves the sun is seen to glitter and the waves to dance on the lagoon. It was now some while since we had met any but slumberers; and when we had wandered down the pier and stumbled at last into this bright shed, we were surprised to find it occupied by a society of wakeful people, some twenty souls in all, the court and guardsmen of Butaritari. The court ladies were busy making mats; the guardsmen yawned and sprawled. Half a dozen rifles lay on a rock and a cutlass was leaned against a pillar: the armoury of these drowsy musketeers. At the far end, a little closed house of wood displayed some tinsel curtains, and proved upon examination to be a privy on the European model. In front of this, upon some mats, lolled Teburcimoa, the king; behind him, on the panels of the house, two crossed rifles represented fasces. He wore pyjamas which sorrowfully misbecame his bulk; his nose was hooked and cruel, his body overcome with sodden corpulence, his eye timorous and dull; he seemed at once oppressed with drowsiness and held awake by apprehension: a pepper rajah muddled with opium, and listening for the march of the Dutch army, looks perhaps not otherwise. We were to grow better acquainted, and first and last I had the same impression; he seemed always drowsy, yet always to hearken and start; and, whether from remorse or fear, there is no doubt he seeks a refuge in the abuse of drugs. The rajah displayed no sign of interest in our coming. But the queen, who sat beside him in a purple sacque, was more accessible; and there was present an interpreter so willing that his volubility became at last the cause of our departure. He had greeted us upon our entrance:--"That is the honourable King, and I am his interpreter," he had said, with more stateliness than truth. For he held no appointment in the court, seemed extremely ill-acquainted with the island language, and was present, like ourselves, upon a visit of civility. Mr. Williams was his name: an American darkey, runaway ship's cook, and bar-keeper at "The Land we Live in" tavern, Butaritari. I never knew a man who had more words in his command or less truth to communicate; neither the gloom of the monarch, nor my own efforts to be distant, could in the least abash him; and when the scene closed, the darkey was left talking. The town still slumbered, or had but just begun to turn and stretch itself; it was still plunged in heat and silence. So much the more vivid was the impression that we carried away of the house upon the islet, the Micronesian Saul wakeful amid his guards, and his unmelodious David, Mr. Williams, chattering through the drowsy hours. CHAPTER II THE FOUR BROTHERS The kingdom of Tebureimoa includes two islands, Great and Little Makin; some two thousand subjects pay him tribute, and two semi-independent chieftains do him qualified homage. The importance of the office is measured by the man; he may be a nobody, he may be absolute; and both extremes have been exemplified within the memory of residents. On the death of king Tetimararoa, Tebureimoa's father, Nakaeia, the eldest son, succeeded. He was a fellow of huge physical strength, masterful, violent, with a certain barbaric thrift and some intelligence of men and business. Alone in his islands it was he who dealt and profited; he was the planter and the merchant; and his subjects toiled for his behoof in servitude. When they wrought long and well their task-master declared a holiday, and supplied and shared a general debauch. The scale of his providing was at times magnificent; six hundred dollars' worth of gin and brandy was set forth at once; the narrow land resounded with the noise of revelry; and it was a common thing to see the subjects (staggering themselves) parade their drunken sovereign on the forehatch of a wrecked vessel, king and commons howling and singing as they went. At a word from Nakaeia's mouth the revel ended; Makin became once more an isle of slaves and of teetotalers; and on the morrow all the population must be on the roads or in the taro-patches toiling under his bloodshot eye. The fear of Nakaeia filled the land. No regularity of justice was affected; there was no trial, there were no officers of the law; it seems there was but one penalty, the capital; and daylight assault and midnight murder were the forms of process. The king himself would play the executioner; and his blows were dealt by stealth, and with the help and countenance of none but his own wives. These were his oarswomen; one that caught a crab, he slew incontinently with the tiller; thus disciplined, they pulled him by night to the scene of his vengeance, which he would then execute alone and return well pleased with his connubial crew. The inmates of the harem held a station hard for us to conceive. Beasts of draught, and driven by the fear of death, they were yet implicitly trusted with their sovereign's life; they were still wives and queens, and it was supposed that no man should behold their faces. They killed by the sight like basilisks; a chance view of one of those boatwomen was a crime to be wiped out with blood. In the days of Nakaeia the palace was beset with some tall coco-palms, which commanded the enclosure. It chanced one evening, while Nakaeia sat below at supper with his wives, that the owner of the grove was in a tree-top drawing palm-tree wine; it chanced that he looked down, and the king at the same moment looking up, their eyes encountered. Instant flight preserved the involuntary criminal. But during the remainder of that reign he must lurk and be hid by friends in remote parts of the isle; Nakaeia hunted him without remission, although still in vain; and the palms, accessories to the fact, were ruthlessly cut down. Such was the ideal of wifely purity in an isle where nubile virgins went naked as in paradise. And yet scandal found its way into Nakaeia's well-guarded harem. He was at that time the owner of a schooner, which he used for a pleasure-house, lodging on board as she lay anchored; and thither one day he summoned a new wife. She was one that had been sealed to him; that is to say (I presume), that he was married to her sister, for the husband of an elder sister has the call of the cadets. She would be arrayed for the occasion; she would come scented, garlanded, decked with fine mats and family jewels, for marriage, as her friends supposed; for death, as she well knew. "Tell me the man's name, and I will spare you," said Nakaeia. But the girl was staunch; she held her peace, saved her lover; and the queens strangled her between the mats. Nakaeia was feared; it does not appear that he was hated. Deeds that smell to us of murder wore to his subjects the reverend face of justice; his orgies made him popular; natives to this day recall with respect the firmness of his government; and even the whites, whom he long opposed and kept at arm's-length, give him the name (in the canonical South Sea phrase) of "a perfect gentleman when sober." When he came to lie, without issue, on the bed of death, he summoned his next brother, Nanteitei, made him a discourse on royal policy, and warned him he was too weak to reign. The warning was taken to heart, and for some while the government moved on the model of Nakaeia's. Nanteitei dispensed with guards, and walked abroad alone with a revolver in a leather mail-bag. To conceal his weakness he affected a rude silence; you might talk to him all day; advice, reproof, appeal, and menace alike remained unanswered. The number of his wives was seventeen, many of them heiresses; for the royal house is poor, and marriage was in these days a chief means of buttressing the throne. Nakaeia kept his harem busy for himself; Nanteitei hired it out to others. In his days, for instance, Messrs. Wightman built a pier with a verandah at the north end of the town. The masonry was the work of the seventeen queens, who toiled and waded there like fisher lasses; but the man who was to do the roofing durst not begin till they had finished, lest by chance he should look down and see them. It was perhaps the last appearance of the harem gang. For some time already Hawaiian missionaries had been seated at Butaritari--Maka and Kanoa, two brave child-like men. Nakaeia would none of their doctrine; he was perhaps jealous of their presence; being human, he had some affection for their persons. In the house, before the eyes of Kanoa, he slew with his own hand three sailors of Oahu, crouching on their backs to knife them, and menacing the missionary if he interfered; yet he not only spared him at the moment, but recalled him afterwards (when he had fled) with some expressions of respect. Nanteitei, the weaker man, fell more completely under the spell. Maka, a light-hearted, lovable, yet in his own trade very rigorous man, gained and improved an influence on the king which soon grew paramount. Nanteitei, with the royal house, was publicly converted; and, with a severity which liberal missionaries disavow, the harem was at once reduced. It was a compendious act. The throne was thus impoverished, its influence shaken, the queen's relatives mortified, and sixteen chief women (some of great possessions) cast in a body on the market. I have been shipmates with a Hawaiian sailor who was successively married to two of these _impromptu_ widows, and successively divorced by both for misconduct. That two great and rich ladies (for both of these were rich) should have married "a man from another island" marks the dissolution of society. The laws besides were wholly remodelled, not always for the better. I love Maka as a man; as a legislator he has two defects: weak in the punishment of crime, stern to repress innocent pleasures. War and revolution are the common successors of reform; yet Nanteitei died (of an overdose of chloroform), in quiet possession of the throne, and it was in the reign of the third brother, Nabakatokia, a man brave in body and feeble of character, that the storm burst. The rule of the high chiefs and notables seems to have always underlain and perhaps alternated with monarchy. The Old Men (as they were called) have a right to sit with the king in the Speak House and debate: and the king's chief superiority is a form of closure--"The Speaking is over." After the long monocracy of Nakaeia and the changes of Nanteitei, the Old Men were doubtless grown impatient of obscurity, and they were beyond question jealous of the influence of Maka. Calumny, or rather caricature, was called in use; a spoken cartoon ran round society; Maka was reported to have said in church that the king was the first man in the island and himself the second; and, stung by the supposed affront, the chiefs broke into rebellion and armed gatherings. In the space of one forenoon the throne of Nakaeia was humbled in the dust. The king sat in the maniap' before the palace gate expecting his recruits; Maka by his side, both anxious men; and meanwhile, in the door of a house at the north entry of the town, a chief had taken post and diverted the succours as they came. They came singly or in groups, each with his gun or pistol slung about his neck. "Where are you going?" asked the chief. "The king called us," they would reply. "Here is your place. Sit down," returned the chief. With incredible disloyalty, all obeyed; and sufficient force being thus got together from both sides, Nabakatokia was summoned and surrendered. About this period, in almost every part of the group, the kings were murdered; and on Tapituea, the skeleton of the last hangs to this day in the chief Speak House of the isle, a menace to ambition. Nabakatokia was more fortunate; his life and the royal style were spared to him, but he was stripped of power. The Old Men enjoyed a festival of public speaking; the laws were continually changed, never enforced; the commons had an opportunity to regret the merits of Nakaeia, and the king, denied the resource of rich marriages and the service of a troop of wives, fell not only in disconsideration but in debt. He died some months before my arrival in the islands, and no one regretted him; rather all looked hopefully to his successor. This was by repute the hero of the family. Alone of the four brothers, he had issue, a grown son, Natiata, and a daughter three years old; it was to him, in the hour of the revolution, that Nabakatokia turned too late for help; and in earlier days he had been the right hand of the vigorous Nakaeia. Nantemat', _Mr. Corpse_, was his appalling nickname, and he had earned it well. Again and again, at the command of Nakaeia, he had surrounded houses in the dead of night, cut down the mosquito bars and butchered families. Here was the hand of iron; here was Nakaeia _redux_. He came, summoned from the tributary rule of Little Makin: he was installed, he proved a puppet and a trembler, the unwieldy shuttlecock of orators; and the reader has seen the remains of him in his summer parlour under the name of Tebureimoa. The change in the man's character was much commented on in the island, and variously explained by opium and Christianity. To my eyes, there seemed no change at all, rather an extreme consistency. Mr. Corpse was afraid of his brother: King Tebureimoa is afraid of the Old Men. Terror of the first nerved him for deeds of desperation; fear of the second disables him for the least act of government. He played his part of bravo in the past, following the line of least resistance, butchering others in his own defence: to-day, grown elderly and heavy, a convert, a reader of the Bible, perhaps a penitent, conscious at least of accumulated hatreds, and his memory charged with images of violence and blood, he capitulates to the Old Men, fuddles himself with opium, and sits among his guards in dreadful expectation. The same cowardice that put into his hand the knife of the assassin deprives him of the sceptre of a king. A tale that I was told, a trifling incident that fell in my observation, depict him in his two capacities. A chief in Little Makin asked, in an hour of lightness, "Who is Kaeia?" A bird carried the saying; and Nakaeia placed the matter in the hands of a committee of three. Mr. Corpse was chairman; the second commissioner died before my arrival; the third was yet alive and green, and presented so venerable an appearance that we gave him the name of Abou ben Adhem. Mr. Corpse was troubled with a scruple; the man from Little Makin was his adopted brother; in such a case it was not very delicate to appear at all, to strike the blow (which it seems was otherwise expected of him) would be worse than awkward. "I will strike the blow," said the venerable Abou; and Mr. Corpse (surely with a sigh) accepted the compromise. The quarry was decoyed into the bush; he was set carrying a log; and while his arms were raised Abou ripped up his belly at a blow. Justice being thus done, the commission, in a childish horror, turned to flee. But their victim recalled them to his side. "You need not run away now," he said. "You have done this thing to me. Stay." He was some twenty minutes dying, and his murderers sat with him the while: a scene for Shakespeare. All the stages of a violent death, the blood, the failing voice, the decomposing features, the changed hue, are thus present in the memory of Mr. Corpse; and since he studied them in the brother he betrayed, he has some reason to reflect on the possibilities of treachery. I was never more sure of anything than the tragic quality of the king's thoughts; and yet I had but the one sight of him at unawares. I had once an errand for his ear. It was once more the hour of the siesta; but there were loiterers abroad, and these directed us to a closed house on the bank of the canal where Tebureimoa lay unguarded. We entered without ceremony, being in some haste. He lay on the floor upon a bed of mats, reading in his Gilbert Island Bible with compunction. On our sudden entrance the unwieldy man reared himself half-sitting so that the Bible rolled on the floor, stared on us a moment with blank eyes, and, having recognised his visitors, sank again upon the mats. So Eglon looked on Ehud. The justice of facts is strange, and strangely just: Nakaeia, the author of these deeds, died at peace discoursing on the craft of kings; his tool suffers daily death for his enforced complicity. Not the nature, but the congruity of men's deeds and circumstances damn and save them; and Tebureimoa from the first has been incongruously placed. At home, in a quiet by-street of a village, the man had been a worthy carpenter, and, even bedevilled as he is, he shows some private virtues. He has no lands, only the use of such as are impignorate for fines; he cannot enrich himself in the old way by marriages; thrift is the chief pillar of his future, and he knows and uses it. Eleven foreign traders pay him a patent of a hundred dollars, some two thousand subjects pay capitation at the rate of a dollar for a man, half a dollar for a woman, and a shilling for a child: allowing for the exchange, perhaps a total of three hundred pounds a year. He had been some nine months on the throne: had bought his wife a silk dress and hat, figure unknown, and himself a uniform at three hundred dollars; had sent his brother's photograph to be enlarged in San Francisco at two hundred and fifty dollars; had greatly reduced that brother's legacy of debt; and had still sovereigns in his pocket. An affectionate brother, a good economist; he was besides a handy carpenter, and cobbled occasionally on the woodwork of the palace. It is not wonderful that Mr. Corpse has virtues: that Tebureimoa should have a diversion filled me with surprise. CHAPTER III AROUND OUR HOUSE When we left the palace we were still but seafarers ashore; and within the hour we had installed our goods in one of the six foreign houses of Butaritari, namely, that usually occupied by Maka, the Hawaiian missionary. Two San Francisco firms are here established, Messrs. Crawford and Messrs. Wightman Brothers; the first hard by the palace of the mid town, the second at the north entry; each with a store and bar-room. Our house was in the Wightman compound, betwixt the store and bar, within a fenced enclosure. Across the road a few native houses nestled in the margin of the bush, and the green wall of palms rose solid, shutting out the breeze. A little sandy cove of the lagoon ran in behind, sheltered by a verandah pier, the labour of queens' hands. Here, when the tide was high, sailed boats lay to be loaded; when the tide was low, the boats took ground some half a mile away, and an endless series of natives descended the pier stair, tailed across the sand in strings and clusters, waded to the waist with the bags of copra, and loitered backward to renew their charge. The mystery of the copra trade tormented me, as I sat and watched the profits drip on the stair and the sands. In front, from shortly after four in the morning until nine at night, the folk of the town streamed by us intermittingly along the road: families going up the island to make copra on their lands; women bound for the bush to gather flowers against the evening toilet; and, twice a day, the toddy-cutters, each with his knife and shell. In the first grey of the morning, and again late in the afternoon, these would straggle past about their tree-top business, strike off here and there into the bush, and vanish from the face of the earth. At about the same hour, if the tide be low in the lagoon, you are likely to be bound yourself across the island for a bath, and may enter close at their heels alleys of the palm wood. Right in front, although the sun is not yet risen, the east is already lighted with preparatory fires, and the huge accumulations of the trade-wind cloud glow with and heliograph the coming day. The breeze is in your face; overhead in the tops of the palms, its playthings, it maintains a lively bustle; look where you will, above or below, there is no human presence, only the earth and shaken forest. And right overhead the song of an invisible singer breaks from the thick leaves; from farther on a second tree-top answers; and beyond again, in the bosom of the woods, a still more distant minstrel perches and sways and sings. So, all round the isle, the toddy-cutters sit on high, and are rocked by the trade, and have a view far to seaward, where they keep watch for sails and like huge birds utter their songs in the morning. They sing with a certain lustiness and Bacchic glee; the volume of sound and the articulate melody fall unexpected from the tree-top, whence we anticipate the chattering of fowls. And yet in a sense these songs also are but chatter; the words are ancient, obsolete, and sacred; few comprehend them, perhaps no one perfectly; but it was understood the cutters "prayed to have good toddy, and sang of their old wars." The prayer is at least answered; and when the foaming shell is brought to your door, you have a beverage well "worthy of a grace." All forenoon you may return and taste; it only sparkles, and sharpens, and grows to be a new drink, not less delicious; but with the progress of the day the fermentation quickens and grows acid; in twelve hours it will be yeast for bread, in two days more a devilish intoxicant, the counsellor of crime. The men are of a marked Arabian cast of features, often bearded and moustached, often gaily dressed, some with bracelets and anklets, all stalking hidalgo-like, and accepting salutations with a haughty lip. The hair (with the dandies of either sex) is worn turban-wise in a frizzled bush; and like the daggers of the Japanese, a pointed stick (used for a comb) is thrust gallantly among the curls. The women from this bush of hair look forth enticingly: the race cannot be compared with the Tahitian for female beauty; I doubt even if the average be high, but some of the prettiest girls, and one of the handsomest women I ever saw, were Gilbertines. Butaritari, being the commercial centre of the group, is Europeanised; the coloured sacque or the white shift are common wear, the latter for the evening; the trade hat, loaded with flowers, fruit, and ribbons, is unfortunately not unknown; and the characteristic female dress of the Gilberts no longer universal. The _ridi_ is its name: a cutty petticoat or fringe of the smoked fibre of cocoa-nut leaf, not unlike tarry string; the lower edge not reaching the mid-thigh, the upper adjusted so low upon the haunches that it seems to cling by accident. A sneeze, you think, and the lady must surely be left destitute. "The perilous, hairbreadth ridi" was our word for it; and in the conflict that rages over women's dress it has the misfortune to please neither side, the prudish condemning it as insufficient, the more frivolous finding it unlovely in itself. Yet if a pretty Gilbertine would look her best, that must be her costume. In that, and naked otherwise, she moves with an incomparable liberty and grace and life, that marks the poetry of Micronesia. Bundle her in a gown, the charm is fled, and she wriggles like an Englishwoman. Towards dusk the passers-by became more gorgeous. The men broke out in all the colours of the rainbow--or at least of the trade-room,--and both men and women began to be adorned and scented with new flowers. A small white blossom is the favourite, sometimes sown singly in a woman's hair like little stars, now composed in a thick wreath. With the night, the crowd sometimes thickened in the road, and the padding and brushing of bare feet became continuous; the promenades mostly grave, the silence only interrupted by some giggling and scampering of girls; even the children quiet. At nine, bed-time struck on a bell from the cathedral, and the life of the town ceased. At four the next morning the signal is repeated in the darkness, and the innocent prisoners set free; but for seven hours all must lie--I was about to say within doors, of a place where doors, and even walls, are an exception--housed, at least, under their airy roofs and clustered in the tents of the mosquito-nets. Suppose a necessary errand to occur, suppose it imperative to send abroad, the messenger must then go openly, advertising himself to the police with a huge brand of cocoa-nut, which flares from house to house like a moving bonfire. Only the police themselves go darkling, and grope in the night for misdemeanants. I used to hate their treacherous presence; their captain in particular, a crafty old man in white, lurked nightly about my premises till I could have found it in my heart to beat him. But the rogue was privileged. Not one of the eleven resident traders came to town, no captain cast anchor in the lagoon, but we saw him ere the hour was out. This was owing to our position between the store and the bar--the "Sans Souci," as the last was called. Mr. Rick was not only Messrs. Wightman's manager, but consular agent for the States. Mrs. Rick was the only white woman on the island, and one of the only two in the archipelago; their house besides, with its cool verandahs, its bookshelves, its comfortable furniture, could not be rivalled nearer than Jaluit or Honolulu. Every one called in consequence, save such as might be prosecuting a South Sea quarrel, hingeing on the price of copra and the odd cent, or perhaps a difference about poultry. Even these, if they did not appear upon the north, would be presently visible to the southward, the "Sans Souci" drawing them as with cords. In an island with a total population of twelve white persons, one of the two drinking-shops might seem superfluous; but every bullet has its billet, and the double accommodation of Butaritari is found in practice highly convenient by the captains and the crews of ships: "The Land we Live in" being tacitly resigned to the forecastle, the "Sans Souci" tacitly reserved for the afterguard. So aristocratic were my habits, so commanding was my fear of Mr. Williams, that I have never visited the first; but in the other, which was the club or rather the casino of the island, I regularly passed my evenings. It was small, but neatly fitted, and at night (when the lamp was lit) sparkled with glass and glowed with coloured pictures like a theatre at Christmas. The pictures were advertisements, the glass coarse enough, the carpentry amateur; but the effect, in that incongruous isle, was of unbridled luxury and inestimable expense. Here songs were sung, tales told, tricks performed, games played. The Ricks, ourselves, Norwegian Tom the bar-keeper, a captain or two from the ships, and perhaps three or four traders come down the island in their boats or by the road on foot, made up the usual company. The traders, all bred to the sea, take a humorous pride in their new business; "South Sea Merchants" is the title they prefer. "We are all sailors here"--"Merchants, if you please"--"_South Sea_ Merchants,"--was a piece of conversation endlessly repeated, that never seemed to lose in savour. We found them at all times simple, genial, gay, gallant, and obliging; and, across some interval of time, recall with pleasure the traders of Butaritari. There was one black sheep indeed. I tell of him here where he lived, against my rule; for in this case I have no measure to preserve, and the man is typical of a class of ruffians that once disgraced the whole field of the South Seas, and still linger in the rarely visited isles of Micronesia. He had the name on the beach of "a perfect gentleman when sober," but I never saw him otherwise than drunk. The few shocking and savage traits of the Micronesian he has singled out with the skill of a collector, and planted in the soil of his original baseness. He has been accused and acquitted of a treacherous murder; and has since boastfully owned it, which inclines me to suppose him innocent. His daughter is defaced by his erroneous cruelty, for it was his wife he had intended to disfigure, and, in the darkness of the night and the frenzy of coco-brandy, fastened on the wrong victim. The wife has since fled and harbours in the bush with natives; and the husband still demands from deaf ears her forcible restoration. The best of his business is to make natives drink, and then advance the money for the fine upon a lucrative mortgage. "Respect for whites" is the man's word: "What is the matter with this island is the want of respect for whites." On his way to Butaritari, while I was there, he spied his wife in the bush with certain natives and made a dash to capture her; whereupon one of her companions drew a knife and the husband retreated: "Do you call that proper respect for whites?" he cried. At an early stage of the acquaintance we proved our respect for his kind of white by forbidding him our enclosure under pain of death. Thenceforth he lingered often in the neighbourhood with I knew not what sense of envy or design of mischief; his white, handsome face (which I beheld with loathing) looked in upon us at all hours across the fence; and once, from a safe distance, he avenged himself by shouting a recondite island insult, to us quite inoffensive, on his English lips incredibly incongruous. Our enclosure, round which this composite of degradations wandered, was of some extent. In one corner was a trellis with a long table of rough boards. Here the Fourth of July feast had been held not long before with memorable consequences, yet to be set forth; here we took our meals; here entertained to a dinner the king and notables of Makin. In the midst was the house, with a verandah front and back, and three rooms within. In the verandah we slung our man-of-war hammocks, worked there by day, and slept at night. Within were beds, chairs, a round table, a fine hanging lamp, and portraits of the royal family of Hawaii. Queen Victoria proves nothing; Kalakaua and Mrs. Bishop are diagnostic; and the truth is we were the stealthy tenants of the parsonage. On the day of our arrival Maka was away; faithless trustees unlocked his doors; and the dear rigorous man, the sworn foe of liquor and tobacco, returned to find his verandah littered with cigarettes and his parlour horrible with bottles. He made but one condition--on the round table, which he used in the celebration of the sacraments, he begged us to refrain from setting liquor; in all else he bowed to the accomplished fact, refused rent, retired across the way into a native house, and, plying in his boat, beat the remotest quarters of the isle for provender. He found us pigs--I could not fancy where--no other pigs were visible; he brought us fowls and taro; when we gave our feast to the monarch and gentry, it was he who supplied the wherewithal, he who superintended the cooking, he who asked grace at table, and when the king's health was proposed, he also started the cheering with an English hip-hip-hip. There was never a more fortunate conception; the heart of the fatted king exulted in his bosom at the sound. Take him for all in all, I have never known a more engaging creature than this parson of Butaritari: his mirth, his kindness, his noble, friendly feelings, brimmed from the man in speech and gesture. He loved to exaggerate, to act and overact the momentary part, to exercise his lungs and muscles, and to speak and laugh with his whole body. He had the morning cheerfulness of birds and healthy children; and his humour was infectious. We were next neighbours and met daily, yet our salutations lasted minutes at a stretch--shaking hands, slapping shoulders, capering like a pair of Merry-Andrews, laughing to split our sides upon some pleasantry that would scarce raise a titter in an infant school. It might be five in the morning, the toddy-cutters just gone by, the road empty, the shade of the island lying far on the lagoon: and the ebullition cheered me for the day. Yet I always suspected Maka of a secret melancholy; these jubilant extremes could scarce be constantly maintained. He was besides long, and lean, and lined, and corded, and a trifle grizzled; and his Sabbath countenance was even saturnine. On that day we made a procession to the church, or (as I must always call it) the cathedral: Maka (a blot on the hot landscape) in tall hat, black frock-coat, black trousers; under his arm the hymn-book and the Bible; in his face, a reverent gravity:--beside him Mary his wife, a quiet, wise, and handsome elderly lady, seriously attired:--myself following with singular and moving thoughts. Long before, to the sound of bells and streams and birds, through a green Lothian glen, I had accompanied Sunday by Sunday a minister in whose house I lodged; and the likeness, and the difference, and the series of years and deaths, profoundly touched me. In the great, dusky, palm-tree cathedral the congregation rarely numbered thirty: the men on one side, the women on the other, myself posted (for a privilege) amongst the women, and the small missionary contingent gathered close around the platform, we were lost in that round vault. The lessons were read antiphonally, the flock was catechised, a blind youth repeated weekly a long string of psalms, hymns were sung--I never heard worse singing,--and the sermon followed. To say I understood nothing were untrue; there were points that I learned to expect with certainty; the name of Honolulu, that of Kalakaua, the word Cap'n-man-o'-wa', the word ship, and a description of a storm at sea, infallibly occurred; and I was not seldom rewarded with the name of my own Sovereign in the bargain. The rest was but sound to the ears, silence for the mind; a plain expanse of tedium, rendered unbearable by heat, a hard chair, and the sight through the wide doors of the more happy heathen on the green. Sleep breathed on my joints and eyelids, sleep hummed in my ears; it reigned in the dim cathedral. The congregation stirred and stretched; they moaned, they groaned aloud; they yawned upon a singing note, as you may sometimes hear a dog when he has reached the tragic bitterest of boredom. In vain the preacher thumped the table; in vain he singled and addressed by name particular hearers. I was myself perhaps a more effective excitant; and at least to one old gentleman the spectacle of my successful struggles against sleep--and I hope they were successful--cheered the flight of time. He, when he was not catching flies or playing tricks upon his neighbours, gloated with a fixed, translucent eye upon the stages of my agony; and once when the service was drawing towards a close he winked at me across the church. I write of the service with a smile; yet I was always there--always with respect for Maka, always with admiration for his deep seriousness, his burning energy, the fire of his roused eye, the sincere and various accents of his voice. To see him weekly flogging a dead horse and blowing a cold fire was a lesson in fortitude and constancy. It may be a question whether if the mission were fully supported, and he was set free from business avocations, more might not result; I think otherwise myself; I think not neglect but rigour has reduced his flock, that rigour which has once provoked a revolution, and which to-day, in a man so lively and engaging, amazes the beholder. No song, no dance, no tobacco, no liquor, no alleviative of life--only toil and church-going; so says a voice from his face; and the face is the face of the Polynesian Esau, but the voice is the voice of a Jacob from a different world. And a Polynesian at the best makes a singular missionary in the Gilberts, coming from a country recklessly unchaste to one conspicuously strict; from a race hag-ridden with bogies to one comparatively bold against the terrors of the dark. The thought was stamped one morning in my mind, when I chanced to be abroad by moonlight, and saw all the town lightless, but the lamp faithfully burning by the missionary's bed. It requires no law, no fire, and no scouting police, to withhold Maka and his countrymen from wandering in the night unlighted. CHAPTER IV A TALE OF A TAPU On the morrow of our arrival (Sunday, 14th July 1889) our photographers were early stirring. Once more we traversed a silent town; many were yet abed and asleep; some sat drowsily in their open houses; there was no sound of intercourse or business. In that hour before the shadows, the quarter of the palace and canal seemed like a landing-place in the "Arabian Nights" or from the classic poets; here were the fit destination of some "faery frigot," here some adventurous prince might step ashore among new characters and incidents; and the island prison, where it floated on the luminous face of the lagoon, might have passed for the repository of the Grail. In such a scene, and at such an hour, the impression received was not so much of foreign travel--rather of past ages; it seemed not so much degrees of latitude that we had crossed, as centuries of time that we had re-ascended; leaving, by the same steps, home and to-day. A few children followed us, mostly nude, all silent; in the clear, weedy waters of the canal some silent damsels waded, baring their brown thighs; and to one of the maniap's before the palace gate we were attracted by a low but stirring hum of speech. The oval shed was full of men sitting cross-legged. The king was there in striped pyjamas, his rear protected by four guards with Winchesters, his air and bearing marked by unwonted spirit and decision; tumblers and black bottles went the round; and the talk, throughout loud, was general and animated. I was inclined at first to view this scene with suspicion. But the hour appeared unsuitable for a carouse; drink was besides forbidden equally by the law of the land and the canons of the church; and while I was yet hesitating, the king's rigorous attitude disposed of my last doubt. We had come, thinking to photograph him surrounded by his guards, and at the first word of the design his piety revolted. We were reminded of the day--the Sabbath, in which thou shalt take no photographs--and returned with a flea in our ear, bearing the rejected camera. At church, a little later, I was struck to find the throne unoccupied. So nice a Sabbatarian might have found the means to be present; perhaps my doubts revived; and before I got home they were transformed to certainties. Tom, the bar-keeper of the "Sans Souci," was in conversation with two emissaries from the court. The "keen," they said, wanted "din," failing which "perandi."[7] No din, was Tom's reply, and no perandi; but "pira" if they pleased. It seems they had no use for beer, and departed sorrowing. "Why, what is the meaning of all this?" I asked. "Is the island on the spree?" Such was the fact. On the 4th of July a feast had been made, and the king, at the suggestion of the whites, had raised the tapu against liquor. There is a proverb about horses; it scarce applies to the superior animal, of whom it may be rather said, that any one can start him drinking, not any twenty can prevail on him to stop. The tapu, raised ten days before, was not yet re-imposed; for ten days the town had been passing the bottle or lying (as we had seen it the afternoon before) in hoggish sleep; and the king, moved by the Old Men and his own appetites, continued to maintain the liberty, to squander his savings on liquor, and to join in and lead the debauch. The whites were the authors of this crisis; it was upon their own proposal that the freedom had been granted at the first; and for a while, in the interests of trade, they were doubtless pleased it should continue. That pleasure had now sometime ceased; the bout had been prolonged (it was conceded) unduly; and it now began to be a question how it might conclude. Hence Tom's refusal. Yet that refusal was avowedly only for the moment, and it was avowedly unavailing; the king's foragers, denied by Tom at the "Sans Souci," would be supplied at "The Land we Live in" by the gobbling Mr. Williams. The degree of the peril was not easy to measure at the time, and I am inclined to think now it was easy to exaggerate. Yet the conduct of drunkards even at home is always matter for anxiety; and at home our populations are not armed from the highest to the lowest with revolvers and repeating rifles, neither do we go on a debauch by the whole townful--and I might rather say, by the whole polity--king, magistrates, police, and army joining in one common scene of drunkenness. It must be thought besides that we were here in barbarous islands, rarely visited, lately and partly civilised. First and last, a really considerable number of whites have perished in the Gilberts, chiefly through their own misconduct; and the natives have displayed in at least one instance a disposition to conceal an accident under a butchery, and leave nothing but dumb bones. This last was the chief consideration against a sudden closing of the bars; the bar-keepers stood in the immediate breach and dealt direct with madmen; too surly a refusal might at any moment precipitate a blow, and the blow might prove the signal for a massacre. _Monday, 15th_.--At the same hour we returned to the same maniap'. Kümmel (of all drinks) was served in tumblers; in the midst sat the crown prince, a fatted youth, surrounded by fresh bottles and busily plying the corkscrew; and king, chief, and commons showed the loose mouth, the uncertain joints, and the blurred and animated eye of the early drinker. It was plain we were impatiently expected; the king retired with alacrity to dress, the guards were despatched after their uniforms; and we were left to await the issue of these preparations with a shedful of tipsy natives. The orgie had proceeded further than on Sunday. The day promised to be of great heat; it was already sultry, the courtiers were already fuddled; and still the kümmel continued to go round, and the crown prince to play butler. Flemish freedom followed upon Flemish excess; and a funny dog, a handsome fellow, gaily dressed, and with a full turban of frizzed hair, delighted the company with a humorous courtship of a lady in a manner not to be described. It was our diversion, in this time of waiting, to observe the gathering of the guards. They have European arms, European uniforms, and (to their sorrow) European shoes. We saw one warrior (like Mars) in the article of being armed; two men and a stalwart woman were scarce strong enough to boot him; and after a single appearance on parade the army is crippled for a week. At last, the gates under the king's house opened; the army issued, one behind another, with guns and epaulettes; the colours stooped under the gateway; majesty followed in his uniform bedizened with gold lace; majesty's wife came next in a hat and feathers, and an ample trained silk gown; the royal imps succeeded; there stood the pageantry of Makin marshalled on its chosen theatre. Dickens might have told how serious they were; how tipsy; how the king melted and streamed under his cocked hat; how he took station by the larger of his two cannons--austere, majestic, but not truly vertical; how the troops huddled, and were straightened out, and clubbed again; how they and their firelocks raked at various inclinations like the masts of ships; and how an amateur photographer reviewed, arrayed, and adjusted them, to see his dispositions change before he reached the camera. The business was funny to see; I do not know that it is graceful to laugh at; and our report of these transactions was received on our return with the shaking of grave heads. The day had begun ill; eleven hours divided us from sunset; and at any moment, on the most trifling chance, the trouble might begin. The Wightman compound was in a military sense untenable, commanded on three sides by houses and thick bush; the town was computed to contain over a thousand stand of excellent new arms; and retreat to the ships, in the case of an alert, was a recourse not to be thought of. Our talk that morning must have closely reproduced the talk in English garrisons before the Sepoy mutiny; the sturdy doubt that any mischief was in prospect, the sure belief that (should any come) there was nothing left but to go down fighting, the half-amused, half-anxious attitude of mind in which we were awaiting fresh developments. The kümmel soon ran out; we were scarce returned before the king had followed us in quest of more. Mr. Corpse was now divested of his more awful attitude, the lawless bulk of him again encased in striped pyjamas; a guardsman brought up the rear with his rifle at the trail; and his majesty was further accompanied by a Rarotongan whalerman and the playful courtier with the turban of frizzed hair. There was never a more lively deputation. The whalerman was gapingly, tearfully tipsy; the courtier walked on air; the king himself was even sportive. Seated in a chair in the Ricks' sitting-room, he bore the brunt of our prayers and menaces unmoved. He was even rated, plied with historic instances, threatened with the men-of-war, ordered to restore the tapu on the spot--and nothing in the least affected him. It should be done to-morrow, he said; to-day it was beyond his power, to-day he durst not. "Is that royal?" cried indignant Mr. Rick. No, it was not royal; had the king been of a royal character we should ourselves have held a different language; and royal or not, he had the best of the dispute. The terms indeed were hardly equal; for the king was the only man who could restore the tapu, but the Ricks were not the only people who sold drink. He had but to hold his ground on the first question, and they were sure to weaken on the second. A little struggle they still made for the fashion's sake; and then one exceedingly tipsy deputation departed, greatly rejoicing, a case of brandy wheeling beside them in a barrow. The Rarotongan (whom I had never seen before) wrung me by the hand like a man bound on a far voyage. "My dear frien'!" he cried, "good-bye, my dear frien'!"--tears of kümmel standing in his eyes; the king lurched as he went, the courtier ambled--a strange party of intoxicated children to be entrusted with that barrowful of madness. You could never say the town was quiet; all morning there was a ferment in the air, an aimless movement and congregation of natives in the street. But it was not before half-past one that a sudden hubbub of voices called us from the house, to find the whole white colony already gathered on the spot as by concerted signal. The "Sans Souci" was overrun with rabble, the stair and verandah thronged. From all these throats an inarticulate babbling cry went up incessantly; it sounded like the bleating of young lambs, but angrier. In the road his royal highness (whom I had seen so lately in the part of butler) stood crying upon Tom; on the top step, tossed in the hurly-burly, Tom was shouting to the prince. Yet a while the pack swayed about the bar, vociferous. Then came a brutal impulse; the mob reeled, and returned and was rejected; the stair showed a stream of heads; and there shot into view, through the disbanding ranks, three men violently dragging in their midst a fourth. By his hair and his hands, his head forced as low as his knees, his face concealed, he was wrenched from the verandah and whisked along the road into the village, howling as he disappeared. Had his face been raised, we should have seen it bloodied, and the blood was not his own. The courtier with the turban of frizzed hair had paid the costs of this disturbance with the lower part of one ear. So the brawl passed with no other casualty than might seem comic to the inhumane. Yet we looked round on serious faces, and--a fact that spoke volumes--Tom was putting up the shutters on the bar. Custom might go elsewhither, Mr. Williams might profit as he pleased, but Tom had had enough of bar-keeping for that day. Indeed, the event had hung on a hair. A man had sought to draw a revolver--on what quarrel I could never learn, and perhaps he himself could not have told; one shot, when the room was so crowded, could scarce have failed to take effect; where many were armed and all tipsy, it could scarce have failed to draw others; and the woman who spied the weapon and the man who seized it may very well have saved the white community. The mob insensibly melted from the scene; and for the rest of the day our neighbourhood was left in peace and a good deal in solitude. But the tranquillity was only local; _din_ and _perandi_ still flowed in other quarters: and we had one more sight of Gilbert Island violence. In the church, where we had wandered photographing, we were startled by a sudden piercing outcry. The scene, looking forth from the doors of that great hall of shadow, was unforgettable. The palms, the quaint and scattered houses, the flag of the island streaming from its tall staff, glowed with intolerable sunshine. In the midst two women rolled fighting on the grass. The combatants were the more easy to be distinguished, because the one was stripped to the _ridi_ and the other wore a holoku (sacque) of some lively colour. The first was uppermost, her teeth locked in her adversary's face, shaking her like a dog; the other impotently fought and scratched. So for a moment we saw them wallow and grapple there like vermin; then the mob closed and shut them in. It was a serious question that night if we should sleep ashore. But we were travellers, folk that had come far in quest of the adventurous; on the first sign of an adventure it would have been a singular inconsistency to have withdrawn; and we sent on board instead for our revolvers. Mindful of Taahauku, Mr. Rick, Mr. Osbourne, and Mrs. Stevenson held an assault of arms on the public highway, and fired at bottles to the admiration of the natives. Captain Reid, of the _Equator_, stayed on shore with us to be at hand in case of trouble, and we retired to bed at the accustomed hour, agreeably excited by the day's events. The night was exquisite, the silence enchanting; yet as I lay in my hammock looking on the strong moonshine and the quiescent palms, one ugly picture haunted me of the two women, the naked and the clad, locked in that hostile embrace. The harm done was probably not much, yet I could have looked on death and massacre with less revolt. The return to these primeval weapons, the vision of man's beastliness, of his ferality, shocked in me a deeper sense than that with which we count the cost of battles. There are elements in our state and history which it is a pleasure to forget, which it is perhaps the better wisdom not to dwell on. Crime, pestilence, and death are in the day's work; the imagination readily accepts them. It instinctively rejects, on the contrary, whatever shall call up the image of our race upon its lowest terms, as the partner of beasts, beastly itself, dwelling pell-mell and huggermugger, hairy man with hairy woman, in the caves of old. And yet to be just to barbarous islanders we must not forget the slums and dens of our cities: I must not forget that I have passed dinnerward through Soho, and seen that which cured me of my dinner. FOOTNOTE: [7] Gin and brandy. CHAPTER V A TALE OF A TAPU--_continued_ _Tuesday, July 16_.--It rained in the night, sudden and loud, in Gilbert Island fashion. Before the day, the crowing of a cock aroused me and I wandered in the compound and along the street. The squall was blown by, the moon shone with incomparable lustre, the air lay dead as in a room, and yet all the isle sounded as under a strong shower, the eaves thickly pattering, the lofty palms dripping at larger intervals and with a louder note. In this bold nocturnal light the interior of the houses lay inscrutable, one lump of blackness, save when the moon glinted under the roof, and made a belt of silver, and drew the slanting shadows of the pillars on the floor. Nowhere in all the town was any lamp or ember; not a creature stirred; I thought I was alone to be awake; but the police were faithful to their duty; secretly vigilant, keeping account of time; and a little later, the watchman struck slowly and repeatedly on the cathedral bell; four o'clock, the warning signal. It seemed strange that, in a town resigned to drunkenness and tumult, curfew and réveille should still be sounded and still obeyed. The day came, and brought little change. The place still lay silent; the people slept, the town slept. Even the few who were awake, mostly women and children, held their peace and kept within under the strong shadow of the thatch, where you must stop and peer to see them. Through the deserted streets, and past sleeping houses, a deputation took its way at an early hour to the palace; the king was suddenly awakened, and must listen (probably with a headache) to unpalatable truths. Mrs. Rick, being a sufficient mistress of that difficult tongue, was spokeswoman; she explained to the sick monarch that I was an intimate personal friend of Queen Victoria's; that immediately on my return I should make her a report upon Butaritari; and that if my house should have been again invaded by natives, a man-of-war would be despatched to make reprisals. It was scarce the fact--rather a just and necessary parable of the fact, corrected for latitude; and it certainly told upon the king. He was much affected; he had conceived the notion (he said) that I was a man of some importance, but not dreamed it was as bad as this; and the missionary house was tapu'd under a fine of fifty dollars. So much was announced on the return of the deputation; not any more; and I gathered subsequently that much more had passed. The protection gained was welcome. It had been the most annoying and not the least alarming feature of the day before, that our house was periodically filled with tipsy natives, twenty or thirty at a time, begging drink, fingering our goods, hard to be dislodged, awkward to quarrel with. Queen Victoria's friend (who was soon promoted to be her son) was free from these intrusions. Not only my house, but my neighbourhood as well, was left in peace; even on our walks abroad we were guarded and prepared for; and, like great persons visiting a hospital, saw only the fair side. For the matter of a week we were thus suffered to go out and in and live in a fool's paradise, supposing the king to have kept his word, the tapu to be revived, and the island once more sober. _Tuesday, July 23_.--We dined under a bare trellis erected for the Fourth of July; and here we used to linger by lamplight over coffee and tobacco. In that climate evening approaches without sensible chill; the wind dies out before sunset; heaven glows a while and fades, and darkens into the blueness of the tropical night; swiftly and insensibly the shadows thicken, the stars multiply their number; you look around you and the day is gone. It was then that we would see our Chinaman draw near across the compound in a lurching sphere of light, divided by his shadows; and with the coming of the lamp the night closed about the table. The faces of the company, the spars of the trellis, stood out suddenly bright on a ground of blue and silver, faintly designed with palm-tops and the peaked roofs of houses. Here and there the gloss upon a leaf, or the fracture of a stone, returned an isolated sparkle. All else had vanished. We hung there, illuminated like a galaxy of stars _in vacuo_; we sat, manifest and blind, amid the general ambush of the darkness; and the islanders, passing with light footfalls and low voices in the sand of the road, lingered to observe us, unseen. On Tuesday the dusk had fallen, the lamp had just been brought, when a missile struck the table with a rattling smack and rebounded past my ear. Three inches to one side and this page had never been written; for the thing travelled like a cannon ball. It was supposed at the time to be a nut, though even at the time I thought it seemed a small one and fell strangely. _Wednesday, July 24_.--The dusk had fallen once more, and the lamp been just brought out, when the same business was repeated. And again the missile whistled past my ear. One nut I had been willing to accept; a second, I rejected utterly. A cocoa-nut does not come slinging along on a windless evening, making an angle of about fifteen degrees with the horizon; cocoa-nuts do not fall on successive nights at the same hour and spot; in both cases, besides, a specific moment seemed to have been chosen, that when the lamp was just carried out, a specific person threatened, and that the head of the family. I may have been right or wrong, but I believed I was the mark of some intimidation; believed the missile was a stone, aimed not to hit, but to frighten. No idea makes a man more angry. I ran into the road, where the natives were as usual promenading in the dark; Maka joined me with a lantern; and I ran from one to another, glared in quite innocent faces, put useless questions, and proffered idle threats. Thence I carried my wrath (which was worthy the son of any queen in history) to the Ricks. They heard me with depression, assured me this trick of throwing a stone into a family dinner was not new; that it meant mischief, and was of a piece with the alarming disposition of the natives. And then the truth, so long concealed from us, came out. The king had broken his promise, he had defied the deputation; the tapu was still dormant, "The Land we Live in" still selling drink, and that quarter of the town disturbed and menaced by perpetual broils. But there was worse ahead: a feast was now preparing for the birthday of the little princess; and the tributary chiefs of Kuma and Little Makin were expected daily. Strong in a following of numerous and somewhat savage clansmen, each of these was believed, like a Douglas of old, to be of doubtful loyalty. Kuma (a little pot-bellied fellow) never visited the palace, never entered the town, but sat on the beach on a mat, his gun across his knees, parading his mistrust and scorn; Karaiti of Makin, although he was more bold, was not supposed to be more friendly; and not only were these vassals jealous of the throne, but the followers on either side shared in the animosity. Brawls had already taken place; blows had passed which might at any moment be repaid in blood. Some of the strangers were already here and already drinking; if the debauch continued after the bulk of them had come, a collision, perhaps a revolution, was to be expected. The sale of drink is in this group a measure of the jealousy of traders; one begins, the others are constrained to follow; and to him who has the most gin, and sells it the most recklessly, the lion's share of copra is assured. It is felt by all to be an extreme expedient, neither safe, decent, nor dignified. A trader on Tarawa, heated by an eager rivalry, brought many cases of gin. He told me he sat afterwards day and night in his house till it was finished, not daring to arrest the sale, not venturing to go forth, the bush all round him filled with howling drunkards. At night, above all, when he was afraid to sleep, and heard shots and voices about him in the darkness, his remorse was black. "My God!" he reflected, "if I was to lose my life on such a wretched business!" Often and often, in the story of the Gilberts, this scene has been repeated; and the remorseful trader sat beside his lamp, longing for the day, listening with agony for the sound of murder, registering resolutions for the future. For the business is easy to begin, but hazardous to stop. The natives are in their way a just and law-abiding people, mindful of their debts, docile to the voice of their own institutions; when the tapu is re-enforced they will cease drinking; but the white who seeks to antedate the movement by refusing liquor does so at his peril. Hence, in some degree, the anxiety and helplessness of Mr. Rick. He and Tom, alarmed by the rabblement of the "Sans Souci," had stopped the sale; they had done so without danger, because "The Land we Live in" still continued selling; it was claimed, besides, that they had been the first to begin. What step could be taken? Could Mr. Rick visit Mr. Muller (with whom he was not on terms) and address him thus: "I was getting ahead of you, now you are getting ahead of me, and I ask you to forgo your profit. I got my place closed in safety, thanks to your continuing; but now I think you have continued long enough. I begin to be alarmed; and because I am afraid I ask you to confront a certain danger"? It was not to be thought of. Something else had to be found; and there was one person at one end of the town who was at least not interested in copra. There was little else to be said in favour of myself as an ambassador. I had arrived in the Wightman schooner, I was living in the Wightman compound, I was the daily associate of the Wightman coterie. It was egregious enough that I should now intrude unasked in the private affairs of Crawford's agent, and press upon him the sacrifice of his interests and the venture of his life. But bad as I might be, there was none better; since the affair of the stone I was, besides, sharp-set to be doing, the idea of a delicate interview attracted me, and I thought it policy to show myself abroad. The night was very dark. There was service in the church, and the building glimmered through all its crevices like a dim Kirk Allowa'. I saw few other lights, but was indistinctly aware of many people stirring in the darkness, and a hum and sputter of low talk that sounded stealthy. I believe (in the old phrase) my beard was sometimes on my shoulder as I went. Muller's was but partly lighted, and quite silent, and the gate was fastened. I could by no means manage to undo the latch. No wonder, since I found it afterwards to be four or five feet long--a fortification in itself. As I still fumbled, a dog came on the inside and snuffed suspiciously at my hands, so that I was reduced to calling "House ahoy!" Mr. Muller came down and put his chin across the paling in the dark. "Who is that?" said he, like one who has no mind to welcome strangers. "My name is Stevenson," said I. "O, Mr. Stevens! I didn't know you. Come inside." We stepped into the dark store, when I leaned upon the counter and he against the wall. All the light came from the sleeping-room, where I saw his family being put to bed; it struck full in my face, but Mr. Muller stood in shadow. No doubt he expected what was coming, and sought the advantage of position; but for a man who wished to persuade and had nothing to conceal, mine was the preferable. "Look here," I began, "I hear you are selling to the natives." "Others have done that before me," he returned pointedly. "No doubt," said I, "and I have nothing to do with the past, but the future. I want you to promise you will handle these spirits carefully." "Now what is your motive in this?" he asked, and then, with a sneer, "Are you afraid of your life?" "That is nothing to the purpose," I replied. "I know, and you know, these spirits ought not to be used at all." "Tom and Mr. Rick have sold them before." "I have nothing to do with Tom and Mr. Rick. All I know is I have heard them both refuse." "No, I suppose you have nothing to do with them. Then you are just afraid of your life." "Come now," I cried, being perhaps a little stung, "you know in your heart I am asking a reasonable thing. I don't ask you to lose your profit--though I would prefer to see no spirits brought here, as you would----" "I don't say I wouldn't. I didn't begin this," he interjected. "No, I don't suppose you did," said I. "And I don't ask you to lose; I ask you to give me your word, man to man, that you will make no native drunk." Up to now Mr. Muller had maintained an attitude very trying to my temper; but he had maintained it with difficulty, his sentiment being all upon my side; and here he changed ground for the worse. "It isn't me that sells," said he. "No, it's that nigger," I agreed. "But he's yours to buy and sell; you have your hand on the nape of his neck; and I ask you--I have my wife here--to use the authority you have." He hastily returned to his old word. "I don't deny I could if I wanted," said he. "But there's no danger, the natives are all quiet. You're just afraid of your life." I do not like to be called a coward, even by implication; and here I lost my temper and propounded an untimely ultimatum. "You had better put it plain," I cried. "Do you mean to refuse me what I ask?" "I don't want either to refuse it or grant it," he replied. "You'll find you have to do the one thing or the other, and right now!" I cried, and then, striking into a happier vein, "Come," said I, "you're a better sort than that. I see what's wrong with you--you think I came from the opposite camp. I see the sort of man you are, and you know that what I ask is right." Again he changed ground. "If the natives get any drink, it isn't safe to stop them," he objected. "I'll be answerable for the bar," I said. "We are three men and four revolvers; we'll come at a word, and hold the place against the village." "You don't know what you're talking about; it's too dangerous!" he cried. "Look here," said I, "I don't mind much about losing that life you talk so much of; but I mean to lose it the way I want to, and that is, putting a stop to all this beastliness." He talked a while about his duty to the firm; I minded not at all, I was secure of victory. He was but waiting to capitulate, and looked about for any potent to relieve the strain. In the gush of light from the bedroom door I spied a cigar-holder on the desk. "That is well coloured," said I. "Will you take a cigar?" said he. I took it and held it up unlighted. "Now," said I, "you promise me." "I promise you you won't have any trouble from natives that have drunk at my place," he replied. "That is all I ask," said I, and showed it was not by immediately offering to try his stock. So far as it was anyway critical our interview here ended. Mr. Muller had thenceforth ceased to regard me as an emissary from his rivals, dropped his defensive attitude, and spoke as he believed. I could make out that he would already, had he dared, have stopped the sale himself. Not quite daring, it may be imagined how he resented the idea of interference from those who had (by his own statement) first led him on, then deserted him in the breach, and now (sitting themselves in safety) egged him on to a new peril, which was all gain to them, all loss to him. I asked him what he thought of the danger from the feast. "I think worse of it than any of you," he answered. "They were shooting around here last night, and I heard the balls too. I said to myself, 'That's bad.' What gets me is why you should be making this row up at your end. I should be the first to go." It was a thoughtless wonder. The consolation of being second is not great: the fact, not the order of going--there was our concern. Scott talks moderately of looking forward to a time of fighting "with a feeling that resembled pleasure." The resemblance seems rather an identity. In modern life, contact is ended; man grows impatient of endless manoeuvres; and to approach the fact, to find ourselves where we can push our advantage home, and stand a fair risk, and see at last what we are made of, stirs the blood. It was so at least with all my family, who bubbled with delight at the approach of trouble; and we sat deep into the night like a pack of schoolboys, preparing the revolvers and arranging plans against the morrow. It promised certainly to be a busy and eventful day. The Old Men were to be summoned to confront me on the question of the tapu; Muller might call us at any moment to garrison his bar; and suppose Muller to fail, we decided in a family council to take that matter into our own hands, "The Land we Live in" at the pistol's mouth, and, with the polysyllabic Williams, dance to a new tune. As I recall our humour I think it would have gone hard with the mulatto. _Wednesday, July 24_.--It was as well, and yet it was disappointing that these thunder-clouds rolled off in silence. Whether the Old Men recoiled from an interview with Queen Victoria's son, whether Muller had secretly intervened, or whether the step flowed naturally from the fears of the king and the nearness of the feast, the tapu was early that morning re-enforced; not a day too soon, from the manner the boats began to arrive thickly, and the town was filled with the big rowdy vassals of Karaiti. The effect lingered for some time on the minds of the traders; it was with the approval of all present that I helped to draw up a petition to the United States, praying for a law against the liquor trade in the Gilberts; and it was at this request that I added, under my own name, a brief testimony of what had passed;--useless pains, since the whole repose, probably unread and possibly unopened, in a pigeon-hole at Washington. _Sunday, July 28_.--This day we had the afterpiece of the debauch. The king and queen, in European clothes, and followed by armed guards, attended church for the first time, and sat perched aloft in a precarious dignity under the barrel-hoops. Before sermon his majesty clambered from the dais, stood lopsidedly upon the gravel floor, and in a few words abjured drinking. The queen followed suit with a yet briefer allocution. All the men in church were next addressed in turn; each held up his right hand, and the affair was over--throne and church were reconciled. CHAPTER VI THE FIVE DAYS' FESTIVAL _Thursday, July 25_.--The street was this day much enlivened by the presence of the men from Little Makin; they average taller than Butaritarians, and, being on a holiday, went wreathed with yellow leaves and gorgeous in vivid colours. They are said to be more savage, and to be proud of the distinction. Indeed, it seemed to us they swaggered in the town, like plaided Highlanders upon the streets of Inverness, conscious of barbaric virtues. In the afternoon the summer parlour was observed to be packed with people; others standing outside and stooping to peer under the eaves, like children at home about a circus. It was the Makin company, rehearsing for the day of competition. Karaiti sat in the front row close to the singers, where we were summoned (I suppose in honour of Queen Victoria) to join him. A strong breathless heat reigned under the iron roof, and the air was heavy with the scent of wreaths. The singers, with fine mats about their loins, cocoa-nut feathers set in rings upon their fingers, and their heads crowned with yellow leaves, sat on the floor by companies. A varying number of soloists stood up for different songs; and these bore the chief part in the music. But the full force of the companies, even when not singing, contributed continuously to the effect, and marked the ictus of the measure, mimicking, grimacing, casting up their heads and eyes, fluttering the feathers on their fingers, clapping hands, or beating (loud as a kettledrum) on the left breast; the time was exquisite, the music barbarous, but full of conscious art. I noted some devices constantly employed. A sudden change would be introduced (I think of key) with no break of the measure, but emphasised by a sudden heightening of the voice and a swinging, general gesticulation. The voices of the soloists would begin far apart in a rude discord, and gradually draw together to a unison; which, when they had reached, they were joined and drowned by the full chorus. The ordinary, hurried, barking, unmelodious movement of the voices would at times be broken and glorified by a psalm-like strain of melody, often well constructed, or seeming so by contrast. There was much variety of measure, and towards the end of each piece, when the fun became fast and furious, a recourse to this figure-- [Illustration] It is difficult to conceive what fire and devilry they get into these hammering finales; all go together, voices, hands, eyes, leaves, and fluttering finger-rings; the chorus swings to the eye, the song throbs on the ear; the faces are convulsed with enthusiasm and effort. Presently the troop stood up in a body, the drums forming a half-circle for the soloists, who were sometimes five or even more in number. The songs that followed were highly dramatic; though I had none to give me any explanation, I would at times make out some shadowy but decisive outline of a plot; and I was continually reminded of certain quarrelsome concerted scenes in grand operas at home; just so the single voices issue from and fall again into the general volume; just so do the performers separate and crowd together, brandish the raised hand, and roll the eye to heaven--or the gallery. Already this is beyond the Thespian model; the art of this people is already past the embryo; song, dance, drums, quartette and solo--it is the drama full developed although still in miniature. Of all so-called dancing in the South Seas, that which I saw in Butaritari stands easily the first. The _hula_, as it may be viewed by the speedy globe-trotter in Honolulu, is surely the most dull of man's inventions, and the spectator yawns under its length as at a college lecture or a parliamentary debate. But the Gilbert Island dance leads on the mind; it thrills, rouses, subjugates; it has the essence of all art, an unexplored imminent significance. Where so many are engaged, and where all must make (at a given moment) the same swift, elaborate, and often arbitrary movement, the toil of rehearsal is of course extreme. But they begin as children. A child and a man may often be seen together in a maniap'; the man sings and gesticulates, the child stands before him with streaming tears and tremulously copies him in act and sound; it is the Gilbert Island artist learning (as all artists must) his art in sorrow. I may seem to praise too much; here is a passage from my wife's diary, which proves that I was not alone in being moved, and completes the picture:--"The conductor gave the cue, and all the dancers, waving their arms, swaying their bodies, and clapping their breasts in perfect time, opened with an introductory. The performers remained seated, except two, and once three, and twice a single soloist. These stood in the group, making a slight movement with the feet and rhythmical quiver of the body as they sang. There was a pause after the introductory, and then the real business of the opera--for it was no less--began; an opera where every singer was an accomplished actor. The leading man, in an impassioned ecstasy which possessed him from head to foot, seemed transfigured; once it was as though a strong wind had swept over the stage--their arms, their feathered fingers thrilling with an emotion that shook my nerves as well: heads and bodies followed like a field of grain before a gust. My blood came hot and cold, tears pricked my eyes, my head whirled, I felt an almost irresistible impulse to join the dancers. One drama, I think, I very nearly understood. A fierce and savage old man took the solo part. He sang of the birth of a prince, and how he was tenderly rocked in his mother's arms; of his boyhood, when he excelled his fellows in swimming, climbing, and all athletic sports; of his youth, when he went out to sea in his boat and fished; of his manhood, when he married a wife who cradled a son of his own in her arms. Then came the alarm of war, and a great battle, of which for a time the issue was doubtful; but the hero conquered, as he always does, and with a tremendous burst of the victors the piece closed. There were also comic pieces, which caused great amusement. During one, an old man behind me clutched me by the arm, shook his finger in my face with a roguish smile, and said something with a chuckle, which I took to be the equivalent of 'O, you women, you women; it is true of you all!' I fear it was not complimentary. At no time was there the least sign of the ugly indecency of the eastern islands. All was poetry pure and simple. The music itself was as complex as our own, though constructed on an entirely different basis; once or twice I was startled by a bit of something very like the best English sacred music, but it was only for an instant. At last there was a longer pause, and this time the dancers were all on their feet. As the drama went on the interest grew. The performers appealed to each other, to the audience, to the heaven above; they took counsel with each other, the conspirators drew together in a knot; it was just an opera, the drums coming in at proper intervals, the tenor, baritone, and bass all where they should be--except that the voices were all of the same calibre. A woman once sang from the back row with a very fine contralto voice spoilt by being made artificially nasal; I notice all the women affect that unpleasantness. At one time a boy of angelic beauty was the soloist; and at another a child of six or eight, doubtless an infant phenomenon being trained, was placed in the centre. The little fellow was desperately frightened and embarrassed at first, but towards the close warmed up to his work and showed much dramatic talent. The changing expressions on the faces of the dancers were so speaking that it seemed a great stupidity not to understand them." Our neighbour at this performance, Karaiti, somewhat favours his Butaritarian majesty in shape and feature, being like him portly, bearded, and Oriental. In character he seems the reverse: alert, smiling, jovial, jocular, industrious. At home in his own island, he labours himself like a slave, and makes his people labour like a slave-driver. He takes an interest in ideas. George the trader told him about flying-machines. "Is that true, George?" he asked. "It is in the papers," replied George. "Well," said Karaiti, "if that man can do it with machinery, I can do it without"; and he designed and made a pair of wings, strapped them on his shoulders, went to the end of a pier, launched himself into space, and fell bulkily into the sea. His wives fished him out, for his wings hindered him in swimming. "George," said he, pausing as he went up to change, "George, you lie." He had eight wives, for his small realm still follows ancient customs; but he showed embarrassment when this was mentioned to my wife. "Tell her I have only brought one here," he said anxiously. Altogether the Black Douglas pleased us much; and as we heard fresh details of the king's uneasiness, and saw for ourselves that all the weapons in the summer parlour had been hid, we watched with the more admiration the cause of all this anxiety rolling on his big legs, with his big smiling face, apparently unarmed, and certainly unattended, through the hostile town. The Red Douglas, pot-bellied Kuma, having perhaps heard word of the debauch, remained upon his fief; his vassals thus came uncommanded to the feast, and swelled the following of Karaiti. _Friday, July 26_.--At night in the dark, the singers of Makin paraded in the road before our house and sang the song of the princess. "This is the day; she was born to-day; Nei Kamaunave was born to-day--a beautiful princess, Queen of Butaritari." So I was told it went in endless iteration. The song was of course out of season, and the performance only a rehearsal. But it was a serenade besides; a delicate attention to ourselves from our new friend, Karaiti. _Saturday, July 27_.--We had announced a performance of the magic lantern to-night in church; and this brought the king to visit us. In honour of the Black Douglas (I suppose) his usual two guardsmen were now increased to four; and the squad made an outlandish figure as they straggled after him, in straw hats, kilts and jackets. Three carried their arms reversed, the butts over their shoulders, the muzzles menacing the king's plump back; the fourth had passed his weapon behind his neck, and held it there with arms extended like a backboard. The visit was extraordinarily long. The king, no longer galvanised with gin, said and did nothing. He sat collapsed in a chair and let a cigar go out. It was hot, it was sleepy, it was cruel dull; there was no resource but to spy in the countenance of Tebureimoa for some remaining trait of _Mr. Corpse_ the butcher. His hawk nose, crudely depressed and flattened at the point, did truly seem to us to smell of midnight murder. When he took his leave, Maka bade me observe him going down the stair (or rather ladder) from the verandah. "Old man," said Maka. "Yes," said I, "and yet I suppose not old man." "Young man," returned Maka, "perhaps fo'ty." And I have heard since he is most likely younger. While the magic lantern was showing, I skulked without in the dark. The voice of Maka, excitedly explaining the Scripture slides, seemed to fill not the church only, but the neighbourhood. All else was silent. Presently a distant sound of singing arose and approached; and a procession drew near along the road, the hot clean smell of the men and women striking in my face delightfully. At the corner, arrested by the voice of Maka and the lightening and darkening of the church, they paused. They had no mind to go nearer, that was plain. They were Makin people, I believe, probably staunch heathens, contemners of the missionary and his works. Of a sudden, however, a man broke from their company, took to his heels, and fled into the church; next moment three had followed him; the next it was a covey of near upon a score, all pelting for their lives. So the little band of the heathen paused irresolute at the corner, and melted before the attractions of a magic lantern, like a glacier in spring. The more staunch vainly taunted the deserters; three fled in a guilty silence, but still fled; and when at length the leader found the wit or the authority to get his troop in motion and revive the singing, it was with much diminished forces that they passed musically on up the dark road. Meanwhile inside the luminous pictures brightened and faded. I stood for some while unobserved in the rear of the spectators, when I could hear just in front of me a pair of lovers following the show with interest, the male playing the part of interpreter and (like Adam) mingling caresses with his lecture. The wild animals, a tiger in particular, and that old school-treat favourite, the sleeper and the mouse, were hailed with joy; but the chief marvel and delight was in the gospel series. Maka, in the opinion of his aggrieved wife, did not properly rise to the occasion. "What is the matter with the man? Why can't he talk?" she cried. The matter with the man, I think, was the greatness of the opportunity; he reeled under his good fortune; and whether he did ill or well, the exposure of these pious "phantoms" did as a matter of fact silence in all that part of the island the voice of the scoffer. "Why then," the word went round, "why then, the Bible is true!" And on our return afterwards we were told the impression was yet lively, and those who had seen might be heard telling those who had not, "O yes, it is all true; these things all happened, we have seen the pictures." The argument is not so childish as it seems; for I doubt if these islanders are acquainted with any other mode of representation but photography; so that the picture of an event (on the old melodrama principle that "the camera cannot lie, Joseph"), would appear strong proof of its occurrence. The fact amused us the more because our slides were some of them ludicrously silly, and one (Christ before Pilate) was received with shouts of merriment, in which even Maka was constrained to join. _Sunday, July 28_.--Karaiti came to ask for a repetition of the "phantoms"--this was the accepted word--and, having received a promise, turned and left my humble roof without the shadow of a salutation. I felt it impolite to have the least appearance of pocketing a slight; the times had been too difficult, and were still too doubtful; and Queen Victoria's son was bound to maintain the honour of his house. Karaiti was accordingly summoned that evening to the Ricks, where Mrs. Rick fell foul of him in words, and Queen Victoria's son assailed him with indignant looks. I was the ass with the lion's skin; I could not roar in the language of the Gilbert Islands; but I could stare. Karaiti declared he had meant no offence; apologised in a sound, hearty, gentlemanly manner; and became at once at his ease. He had in a dagger to examine, and announced he would come to price it on the morrow, to-day being Sunday; this nicety in a heathen with eight wives surprised me. The dagger was "good for killing fish," he said roguishly; and was supposed to have his eye upon fish upon two legs. It is at least odd that in Eastern Polynesia fish was the accepted euphemism for the human sacrifice. Asked as to the population of his island, Karaiti called out to his vassals who sat waiting him outside the door, and they put it at four hundred and fifty; but (added Karaiti jovially) there will soon be plenty more, for all the women are in the family way. Long before we separated I had quite forgotten his offence. He, however, still bore it in mind; and with a very courteous inspiration returned early on the next day, paid us a long visit, and punctiliously said farewell when he departed. _Monday, July 29_.--The great day came round at last. In the first hours the night was startled by the sound of clapping hands and the chant of Nei Kamaunava; its melancholy, slow, and somewhat menacing measures broken at intervals by a formidable shout. The little morsel of humanity thus celebrated in the dark hours was observed at midday playing on the green entirely naked, and equally unobserved and unconcerned. The summer parlour on its artificial islet, relieved against the shimmering lagoon, and shimmering itself with sun and tinned iron, was all day crowded about by eager men and women. Within, it was boxed full of islanders, of any age and size, and in every degree of nudity and finery. So close we squatted, that at one time I had a mighty handsome woman on my knees, two little naked urchins having their feet against my back. There might be a dame in full attire of _holoku_ and hat and flowers; and her next neighbour might the next moment strip some little rag of a shift from her fat shoulders and come out a monument of flesh, painted rather than covered by the hairbreadth _ridi_. Little ladies who thought themselves too great to appear undraped upon so high a festival were seen to pause outside in the broad sunshine, their miniature _ridis_ in their hand; a moment more and they were full-dressed and entered the concert-room. At either end stood up to sing, or sat down to rest, the alternate companies of singers; Kuma and Little Makin on the north, Butaritari and its conjunct hamlets to the south; both groups conspicuous in barbaric bravery. In the midst, between these rival camps of troubadours, a bench was placed; and here the king and queen throned it, some two or three feet above the crowded audience on the floor--Tebureimoa as usual in his striped pyjamas with a satchel strapped across one shoulder, doubtless (in the island fashion) to contain his pistols; the queen in a purple _holoku_, her abundant hair let down, a fan in her hand. The bench was turned facing to the strangers, a piece of well-considered civility; and when it was the turn of Butaritari to sing, the pair must twist round on the bench, lean their elbows on the rail, and turn to us the spectacle of their broad backs. The royal couple occasionally solaced themselves with a clay pipe; and the pomp of state was further heightened by the rifles of a picket of the guard. With this kingly countenance, and ourselves squatted on the ground, we heard several songs from one side or the other. Then royalty and its guards withdrew, and Queen Victoria's son and daughter-in-law were summoned by acclamation to the vacant throne. Our pride was perhaps a little modified when we were joined on our high places by a certain thriftless loafer of a white; and yet I was glad too, for the man had a smattering of native, and could give me some idea of the subject of the songs. One was patriotic, and dared Tembinok' of Apemama, the terror of the group, to an invasion. One mixed the planting of taro and the harvest-home. Some were historical, and commemorated kings and the illustrious chances of their time, such as a bout of drinking or a war. One, at least, was a drama of domestic interest, excellently played by the troop from Makin. It told the story of a man who has lost his wife, at first bewails her loss, then seeks another: the earlier strains (or acts) are played exclusively by men; but towards the end a woman appears, who has just lost her husband; and I suppose the pair console each other, for the finale seemed of happy omen. Of some of the songs my informant told me briefly they were "like about the _weemen_"; this I could have guessed myself. Each side (I should have said) was strengthened by one or two women. They were all soloists, did not very often join in the performance, but stood disengaged at the back part of the stage, and looked (in _ridi_, necklace, and dressed hair) for all the world like European ballet-dancers. When the song was anyway broad these ladies came particularly to the front; and it was singular to see that, after each entry, the _première danseuse_ pretended to be overcome by shame, as though led on beyond what she had meant, and her male assistants made a feint of driving her away like one who had disgraced herself. Similar affectations accompany certain truly obscene dances of Samoa, where they are very well in place. Here it was different. The words, perhaps, in this free-spoken world, were gross enough to make a carter blush; and the most suggestive feature was this feint of shame. For such parts the women showed some disposition; they were pert, they were neat, they were acrobatic, they were at times really amusing, and some of them were pretty. But this is not the artist's field; there is the whole width of heaven between such capering and ogling, and the strange rhythmic gestures, and strange, rapturous, frenzied faces with which the best of the male dancers held us spellbound through a Gilbert Island ballet. Almost from the first it was apparent that the people of the city were defeated. I might have thought them even good, only I had the other troop before my eyes to correct my standard, and remind me continually of "the little more, and how much it is." Perceiving themselves worsted, the choir of Butaritari grew confused, blundered, and broke down; amid this hubbub of unfamiliar intervals I should not myself have recognised the slip, but the audience were quick to catch it, and to jeer. To crown all, the Makin company began a dance of truly superlative merit. I know not what it was about, I was too much absorbed to ask. In one act a part of the chorus, squealing in some strange falsetto, produced very much the effect of our orchestra; in another, the dancers, leaping like jumping-jacks, with arms extended, passed through and through each other's ranks with extraordinary speed, neatness, and humour. A more laughable effect I never saw; in any European theatre it would have brought the house down, and the island audience roared with laughter and applause. This filled up the measure for the rival company, and they forgot themselves and decency. After each act or figure of the ballet, the performers pause a moment standing, and the next is introduced by the clapping of hands in triplets. Not until the end of the whole ballet do they sit down, which is the signal for the rivals to stand up. But now all rules were to be broken. During the interval following on this great applause, the company of Butaritari leaped suddenly to their feet and most unhandsomely began a performance of their own. It was strange to see the men of Makin staring; I have seen a tenor in Europe stare with the same blank dignity into a hissing theatre; but presently, to my surprise, they sobered down, gave up the unsung remainder of their ballet, resumed their seats, and suffered their ungallant adversaries to go on and finish. Nothing would suffice. Again, at the first interval, Butaritari unhandsomely cut in; Makin, irritated in turn, followed the example; and the two companies of dancers remained permanently standing, continuously clapping hands, and regularly cutting across each other at each pause. I expected blows to begin with any moment; and our position in the midst was highly unstrategical. But the Makin people had a better thought; and upon a fresh interruption turned and trooped out of the house. We followed them, first because these were the artists, second because they were guests and had been scurvily ill-used. A large population of our neighbours did the same, so that the causeway was filled from end to end by the procession of deserters; and the Butaritari choir was left to sing for its own pleasure in an empty house, having gained the point and lost the audience. It was surely fortunate that there was no one drunk; but, drunk or sober, where else would a scene so irritating have concluded without blows? The last stage and glory of this auspicious day was of our own providing--the second and positively the last appearance of the phantoms. All round the church, groups sat outside, in the night, where they could see nothing; perhaps ashamed to enter, certainly finding some shadowy pleasure in the mere proximity. Within, about one-half of the great shed was densely packed with people. In the midst, on the royal dais, the lantern luminously smoked; chance rays of light struck out the earnest countenance of our Chinaman grinding the hand-organ; a fainter glimmer showed off the rafters and their shadows in the hollow of the roof; the pictures shone and vanished on the screen; and as each appeared, there would run a hush, a whisper, a strong shuddering rustle, and a chorus of small cries among the crowd. There sat by me the mate of a wrecked schooner. "They would think this a strange sight in Europe or the States," said he, "going on in a building like this, all tied with bits of string." CHAPTER VII HUSBAND AND WIFE The trader accustomed to the manners of Eastern Polynesia has a lesson to learn among the Gilberts. The _ridi_ is but a spare attire; as late as thirty years back the women went naked until marriage; within ten years the custom lingered; and these facts, above all when heard in description, conveyed a very false idea of the manners of the group. A very intelligent missionary described it (in its former state) as a "Paradise of naked women" for the resident whites. It was at least a platonic Paradise, where Lothario ventured at his peril. Since 1860, fourteen whites have perished on a single island, all for the same cause, all found where they had no business, and speared by some indignant father of a family; the figure was given me by one of their contemporaries who had been more prudent and survived. The strange persistence of these fourteen martyrs might seem to point to monomania or a series of romantic passions; gin is the more likely key. The poor buzzards sat alone in their houses by an open case; they drank; their brain was fired; they stumbled towards the nearest houses on chance; and the dart went through their liver. In place of a Paradise the trader found an archipelago of fierce husbands and of virtuous women. "Of course if you wish to make love to them, it's the same as anywhere else," observed a trader innocently; but he and his companions rarely so choose. The trader must be credited with a virtue: he often makes a kind and loyal husband. Some of the worst beachcombers in the Pacific, some of the last of the old school, have fallen in my path, and some of them were admirable to their native wives, and one made a despairing widower. The position of a trader's wife in the Gilberts is, besides, unusually enviable. She shares the immunities of her husband. Curfew in Butaritari sounds for her in vain. Long after the bell is rung and the great island ladies are confined for the night to their own roof, this chartered libertine may scamper and giggle through the deserted streets or go down to bathe in the dark. The resources of the store are at her hand; she goes arrayed like a queen, and feasts delicately every day upon tinned meats. And she who was perhaps of no regard or station among natives sits with captains, and is entertained on board of schooners. Five of these privileged dames were some time our neighbours. Four were handsome skittish lasses, gamesome like children, and like children liable to fits of pouting. They wore dresses by day, but there was a tendency after dark to strip these lendings and to career and squall about the compound in the aboriginal _ridi_. Games of cards were continually played, with shells for counters; their course was much marred by cheating; and the end of a round (above all if a man was of the party) resolved itself into a scrimmage for the counters. The fifth was a matron. It was a picture to see her sail to church on a Sunday, a parasol in hand, a nursemaid following, and the baby buried in a trade hat and armed with a patent feeding-bottle. The service was enlivened by her continual supervision and correction of the maid. It was impossible not to fancy the baby was a doll, and the church some European playroom. All these women were legitimately married. It is true that the certificate of one, when she proudly showed it, proved to run thus, that she was "married for one night," and her gracious partner was at liberty to "send her to hell" the next morning; but she was none the wiser or the worse for the dastardly trick. Another, I heard, was married on a work of mine in a pirated edition; it answered the purpose as well as a Hall Bible. Notwithstanding all these allurements of social distinction, rare food and raiment, a comparative vacation from toil, and legitimate marriage contracted on a pirated edition, the trader must sometimes seek long before he can be mated. While I was in the group one had been eight months on the quest, and he was still a bachelor. Within strictly native society the old laws and practices were harsh, but not without a certain stamp of high-mindedness. Stealthy adultery was punished with death; open elopement was properly considered virtue in comparison, and compounded for a fine in land. The male adulterer alone seems to have been punished. It is correct manners for a jealous man to hang himself; a jealous woman has a different remedy--she bites her rival. Ten or twenty years ago it was a capital offence to raise a woman's _ridi_; to this day it is still punished with a heavy fine; and the garment itself is still symbolically sacred. Suppose a piece of land to be disputed in Butaritari, the claimant who shall first hang a _ridi_ on the tapu-post has gained his cause, since no one can remove or touch it but himself. The _ridi_ was the badge not of the woman but the wife, the mark not of her sex but of her station. It was the collar on the slave's neck, the brand on merchandise. The adulterous woman seems to have been spared; were the husband offended, it would be a poor consolation to send his draught cattle to the shambles. Karaiti, to this day, calls his eight wives "his horses," some trader having explained to him the employment of these animals on farms; and Nanteitei hired out his wives to do mason-work. Husbands, at least when of high rank, had the power of life and death; even whites seem to have possessed it; and their wives, when they had transgressed beyond forgiveness, made haste to pronounce the formula of deprecation--_I Kana Kim_. This form of words had so much virtue that a condemned criminal, repeating it on a particular day to the king who had condemned him, must be instantly released. It is an offer of abasement, and, strangely enough, the reverse--the imitation--is a common vulgar insult in Great Britain to this day. I give a scene between a trader and his Gilbert Island wife, as it was told me by the husband, now one of the oldest residents, but then a freshman in the group. "Go and light a fire," said the trader, "and when I have brought this oil I will cook some fish." The woman grunted at him, island fashion. "I am not a pig that you should grunt at me," said he. "I know you are not a pig," said the woman, "neither am I your slave." "To be sure you are not my slave, and if you do not care to stop with me, you had better go home to your people," said he. "But in the meantime go and light the fire; and when I have brought this oil I will cook some fish." She went as if to obey; and presently when the trader looked she had built a fire so big that the cook-house was catching in flames. "_I Kana Kim!_" she cried, as she saw him coming; but he recked not, and hit her with a cooking-pot. The leg pierced her skull, blood spouted, it was thought she was a dead woman, and the natives surrounded the house in a menacing expectation. Another white was present, a man of older experience. "You will have us both killed if you go on like this," he cried. "She had said, _I Kana Kim_!" If she had not said _I Kana Kim_ he might have struck her with a caldron. It was not the blow that made the crime, but the disregard of an accepted formula. Polygamy, the particular sacredness of wives, their semi-servile state, their seclusion in kings' harems, even their privilege of biting, all would seem to indicate a Mohammedan society and the opinion of the soullessness of woman. And not so in the least. It is a mere appearance. After you have studied these extremes in one house, you may go to the next and find all reversed, the woman the mistress, the man only the first of her thralls. The authority is not with the husband as such, nor the wife as such. It resides in the chief or the chief-woman; in him or her who has inherited the lands of the clan, and stands to the clansman in the place of parent, exacting their service, answerable for their fines. There is but the one source of power and the one ground of dignity--rank. The king married a chief-woman; she became his menial, and must work with her hands on Messrs. Wightman's pier. The king divorced her; she regained at once her former state and power. She married the Hawaiian sailor, and behold the man is her flunkey and can be shown the door at pleasure. Nay, and such low-born lords are even corrected physically, and, like grown but dutiful children, must endure the discipline. We were intimate in one such household, that of Nei Takauti and Nan Tok'; I put the lady first of necessity. During one week of fool's paradise, Mrs. Stevenson had gone alone to the sea-side of the island after shells. I am very sure the proceeding was unsafe; and she soon perceived a man and woman watching her. Do what she would, her guardians held her steadily in view; and when the afternoon began to fall, and they thought she had stayed long enough, took her in charge, and by signs and broken English ordered her home. On the way the lady drew from her earring-hole a clay pipe, the husband lighted it, and it was handed to my unfortunate wife, who knew not how to refuse the incommodious favour; and when they were all come to our house, the pair sat down beside her on the floor, and improved the occasion with prayer. From that day they were our family friends; bringing thrice a day the beautiful island garlands of white flowers, visiting us any evening, and frequently carrying us down to their own maniap' in return, the woman leading Mrs. Stevenson by the hand like one child with another. Nan Tok', the husband, was young, extremely handsome, of the most approved good humour, and suffering in his precarious station from suppressed high spirits. Nei Takauti, the wife, was getting old; her grown son by a former marriage had just hanged himself before his mother's eyes in despair at a well-merited rebuke. Perhaps she had never been beautiful, but her face was full of character, her eye of sombre fire. She was a high chief-woman, but by a strange exception for a person of her rank, was small, spare and sinewy, with lean small hands and corded neck. Her full dress of an evening was invariably a white chemise--and for adornment, green leaves (or sometimes white blossoms) stuck in her hair and thrust through her huge earring-holes. The husband on the contrary changed to view like a kaleidoscope. Whatever pretty thing my wife might have given to Nei Takauti--a string of beads, a ribbon, a piece of bright fabric--appeared the next evening on the person of Nan Tok'. It was plain he was a clothes-horse; that he wore livery; that, in a word, he was his wife's wife. They reversed the parts, indeed, down to the least particular; it was the husband who showed himself the ministering angel in the hour of pain, while the wife displayed the apathy and heartlessness of the proverbial man. When Nei Takauti had a headache Nan Tok' was full of attention and concern. When the husband had a cold and a racking toothache the wife heeded not, except to jeer. It is always the woman's part to fill and light the pipe; Nei Takauti handed hers in silence to the wedded page; but she carried it herself, as though the page were not entirely trusted. Thus she kept the money, but it was he who ran the errands, anxiously sedulous. A cloud on her face dimmed instantly his beaming looks; on an early visit to their maniap' my wife saw he had cause to be wary. Nan Tok' had a friend with him, a giddy young thing, of his own age and sex; and they had worked themselves into that stage of jocularity when consequences are too often disregarded. Nei Takauti mentioned her own name. Instantly Nan Tok' held up two fingers, his friend did likewise, both in an ecstasy of slyness. It was plain the lady had two names; and from the nature of their merriment, and the wrath that gathered on her brow, there must be something ticklish in the second. The husband pronounced it; a well-directed cocoa-nut from the hand of his wife caught him on the side of the head, and the voices and the mirth of these indiscreet young gentlemen ceased for the day. The people of Eastern Polynesia are never at a loss; their etiquette is absolute and plenary; in every circumstance it tells them what to do and how to do it. The Gilbertines are seemingly more free, and pay for their freedom (like ourselves) in frequent perplexity. This was often the case with the topsy-turvy couple. We had once supplied them during a visit with a pipe and tobacco; and when they had smoked and were about to leave, they found themselves confronted with a problem: should they take or leave what remained of the tobacco? The piece of plug was taken up, it was laid down again, it was handed back and forth, and argued over, till the wife began to look haggard and the husband elderly. They ended by taking it, and I wager were not yet clear of the compound before they were sure they had decided wrong. Another time they had been given each a liberal cup of coffee, and Nan Tok' with difficulty and disaffection made an end of his. Nei Takauti had taken some, she had no mind for more, plainly conceived it would be a breach of manners to set down the cup unfinished, and ordered her wedded retainer to dispose of what was left. "I have swallowed all I can, I cannot swallow more, it is a physical impossibility," he seemed to say; and his stern officer reiterated her commands with secret imperative signals. Luckless dog! but in mere humanity we came to the rescue and removed the cup. I cannot but smile over this funny household; yet I remember the good souls with affection and respect. Their attention to ourselves was surprising. The garlands are much esteemed, the blossoms must be sought far and wide; and though they had many retainers to call to their aid, we often saw themselves passing afield after the blossoms, and the wife engaged with her own hands in putting them together. It was no want of heart, only that disregard so incident to husbands, that made Nei Takauti despise the sufferings of Nan Tok'. When my wife was unwell she proved a diligent and kindly nurse; and the pair, to the extreme embarrassment of the sufferer, became fixtures in the sick-room. This rugged, capable, imperious old dame, with the wild eyes, had deep and tender qualities; her pride in her young husband it seemed that she dissembled, fearing possibly to spoil him; and when she spoke of her dead son there came something tragic in her face. But I seemed to trace in the Gilbertines a virility of sense and sentiment which distinguishes them (like their harsh and uncouth language) from their brother islanders in the east. PART V THE GILBERTS--APEMAMA CHAPTER I THE KING OF APEMAMA: THE ROYAL TRADER There is one great personage in the Gilberts: Tembinok' of Apemama: solely conspicuous, the hero of song, the butt of gossip. Through the rest of the group the kings are slain or fallen in tutelage: Tembinok' alone remains, the last tyrant, the last erect vestige of a dead society. The white man is everywhere else, building his houses, drinking his gin, getting in and out of trouble with the weak native governments. There is only one white on Apemama, and he on sufferance, living far from court, and hearkening and watching his conduct like a mouse in a cat's ear. Through all the other islands a stream of native visitors comes and goes, travelling by families, spending years on the grand tour. Apemama alone is left upon one side, the tourist dreading to risk himself within the clutch of Tembinok'. And fear of the same Gorgon follows and troubles them at home. Maiana once paid him tribute; he once fell upon and seized Nonuti: first steps to the empire of the archipelago. A British warship coming on the scene, the conqueror was driven to disgorge, his career checked in the outset, his dear-bought armoury sunk in his own lagoon. But the impression had been made: periodical fear of him still shakes the islands; rumour depicts him mustering his canoes for a fresh onfall; rumour can name his destination; and Tembinok' figures in the patriotic war-songs of the Gilberts like Napoleon in those of our grandfathers. We were at sea, bound from Mariki to Nonuti and Tapituea, when the wind came suddenly fair for Apemama. The course was at once changed; all hands were turned-to to clean ship, the decks holy-stoned, the cabin washed, the trade-room overhauled. In all our cruising we never saw the _Equator_ so smart as she was made for Tembinok'. Nor was Captain Reid alone in these coquetries; for, another schooner chancing to arrive during my stay in Apemama, I found that she also was dandified for the occasion. And the two cases stand alone in my experience of South Sea traders. We had on board a family of native tourists, from the grandsire to the babe in arms, trying (against an extraordinary series of ill-luck) to regain their native island of Peru.[8] Five times already they had paid their fare and taken ship; five times they had been disappointed, dropped penniless upon strange islands, or carried back to Butaritari, whence they sailed. This last attempt had been no better-starred; their provisions were exhausted. Peru was beyond hope, and they had cheerfully made up their minds to a fresh stage of exile in Tapituea or Nonuti. With this slant of wind their random destination became once more changed; and like the Calendar's pilot, when the "black mountains" hove in view, they changed colour and beat upon their breasts. Their camp, which was on deck in the ship's waist, resounded with complaint. They would be set to work, they must become slaves, escape was hopeless, they must live and toil and die in Apemama, in the tyrant's den. With this sort of talk they so greatly terrified their children, that one (a big hulking boy) must at last be torn screaming from the schooner's side. And their fears were wholly groundless. I have little doubt they were not suffered to be idle; but I can vouch for it that they were kindly and generously used. For, the matter of a year later, I was once more shipmate with these inconsistent wanderers on board the _Janet Nicoll_. Their fare was paid by Tembinok'; they who had gone ashore from the _Equator_ destitute, reappeared upon the _Janet_ with new clothes, laden with mats and presents, and bringing with them a magazine of food, on which they lived like fighting-cocks throughout the voyage; I saw them at length repatriated, and I must say they showed more concern on quitting Apemama than delight at reaching home. We entered by the north passage (Sunday, September 1st), dodging among shoals. It was a day of fierce equatorial sunshine; but the breeze was strong and chill; and the mate, who conned the schooner from the cross-trees, returned shivering to the deck. The lagoon was thick with many-tinted wavelets; a continuous roaring of the outer sea overhung the anchorage; and the long, hollow crescent of palm ruffled and sparkled in the wind. Opposite our berth the beach was seen to be surmounted for some distance by a terrace of white coral, seven or eight feet high and crowned in turn by the scattered and incongruous buildings of the palace. The village adjoins on the south, a cluster of high-roofed maniap's. And village and palace seemed deserted. We were scarce yet moored, however, before distant and busy figures appeared upon the beach, a boat was launched, and a crew pulled out to us bringing the king's ladder. Tembinok' had once an accident; has feared ever since to intrust his person to the rotten chandlery of South Sea traders; and devised in consequence a frame of wood, which is brought on board a ship as soon as she appears, and remains lashed to her side until she leave. The boat's crew, having applied this engine, returned at once to shore. They might not come on board; neither might we land, or not without danger of offence; the king giving pratique in person. An interval followed, during which dinner was delayed for the great man; the prelude of the ladder giving us some notion of his weighty body and sensible, ingenious character, had highly whetted our curiosity; and it was with something like excitement that we saw the beach and terrace suddenly blacken with attendant vassals, the king and party embark, the boat (a man-of-war gig) come flying towards us dead before the wind, and the royal coxswain lay us cleverly aboard, mount the ladder with a jealous diffidence, and descend heavily on deck. Not long ago he was overgrown with fat, obscured to view, and a burthen to himself. Captains visiting the island advised him to walk; and though it broke the habits of a life and the traditions of his rank, he practised the remedy with benefit. His corpulence is now portable; you would call him lusty rather than fat; but his gait is still dull, stumbling, and elephantine. He neither stops nor hastens, but goes about his business with an implacable deliberation. We could never see him and not be struck with his extraordinary natural means for the theatre: a beaked profile like Dante's in the mask, a mane of long black hair, the eye brilliant, imperious, and inquiring: for certain parts, and to one who could have used it, the face was a fortune. His voice matched it well, being shrill, powerful, and uncanny, with a note like a sea-bird's. Where there are no fashions, none to set them, few to follow them if they were set, and none to criticise, he dresses--as Sir Charles Grandison lived--"to his own heart." Now he wears a woman's frock, now a naval uniform; now (and more usually) figures in a masquerade costume of his own design: trousers and a singular jacket with shirt tails, the cut and fit wonderful for island workmanship, the material always handsome, sometimes green velvet, sometimes cardinal red silk. This masquerade becomes him admirably. In the woman's frock he looks ominous and weird beyond belief. I see him now come pacing towards me in the cruel sun, solitary, a figure out of Hoffmann. A visit on board ship, such as that at which we now assisted, makes a chief part and by far the chief diversion of the life of Tembinok'. He is not only the sole ruler, he is the sole merchant of his triple kingdom, Apemama, Aranuka, and Kuria, well-planted islands. The taro goes to the chiefs, who divide as they please among their immediate adherents; but certain fish, turtles--which abound in Kuria,--and the whole produce of the coco-palm, belong exclusively to Tembinok'. "A' cobra[9] berong me," observed his majesty with, a wave of his hand; and he counts and sells it by the houseful. "You got copra, king?" I have heard a trader ask. "I got two, three outches,"[10] his majesty replied: "I think three." Hence the commercial importance of Apemama, the trade of three islands being centred there in a single hand; hence it is that so many whites have tried in vain to gain or to preserve a footing; hence ships are adorned, cooks have special orders, and captains array themselves in smiles, to greet the king. If he be pleased with his welcome and the fare he may pass days on board, and every day, and sometimes every hour, will be of profit to the ship. He oscillates between the cabin, where he is entertained with strange meats, and the trade-room, where he enjoys the pleasures of shopping on a scale to match his person. A few obsequious attendants squat by the house door, awaiting his least signal. In the boat, which has been suffered to drop astern, one or two of his wives lie covered from the sun under mats, tossed by the short sea of the lagoon, and enduring agonies of heat and tedium. This severity is now and then relaxed and the wives allowed on board. Three or four were thus favoured on the day of our arrival: substantial ladies airily attired in _ridis_. Each had a share of copra, her _peculium_, to dispose of for herself. The display in the trade-room--hats, ribbons, dresses, scents, tins of salmon--the pride of the eye and the lust of the flesh--tempted them in vain. They had but the one idea--tobacco, the island currency, tantamount to minted gold; returned to shore with it, burthened but rejoicing; and late into the night, on the royal terrace, were to be seen counting the sticks by lamplight in the open air. The king is no such economist. He is greedy of things new and foreign. House after house, chest after chest, in the palace precinct, is already crammed with clocks, musical boxes, blue spectacles, umbrellas, knitted waistcoats, bolts of stuff, tools, rifles, fowling-pieces, medicines, European foods, sewing-machines, and, what is more extraordinary, stoves: all that ever caught his eye, tickled his appetite, pleased him for its use, or puzzled him with its apparent inutility. And still his lust is unabated. He is possessed by the seven devils of the collector. He hears a thing spoken of, and a shadow comes on his face. "I think I no got him," he will say; and the treasures he has seem worthless in comparison. If a ship be bound for Apemama, the merchant racks his brain to hit upon some novelty. This he leaves carelessly in the main cabin or partly conceals in his own berth, so that the king shall spy it for himself. "How much you want?" inquires Tembinok', passing and pointing. "No, king; that too dear," returns the trader. "I think I like him," says the king. This was a bowl of gold-fish. On another occasion it was scented soap. "No, king; that cost too much," said the trader; "too good for a Kanaka." "How much you got? I take him all," replied his majesty, and became the lord of seventeen boxes at two dollars a cake. Or again, the merchant feigns the article is not for sale, is private property, an heirloom or a gift; and the trick infallibly succeeds. Thwart the king and you hold him. His autocratic nature rears at the affront of opposition. He accepts it for a challenge; sets his teeth like a hunter going at a fence; and with no mark of emotion, scarce even of interest, stolidly piles up the price. Thus, for our sins, he took a fancy to my wife's dressing-bag, a thing entirely useless to the man, and sadly battered by years of service. Early one forenoon he came to our house, sat down, and abruptly offered to purchase it. I told him I sold nothing, and the bag at any rate was a present from a friend; but he was acquainted with these pretexts from of old, and knew what they were worth and how to meet them. Adopting what I believe is called "the object method," he drew out a bag of English gold, sovereigns and half-sovereigns, and began to lay them one by one in silence on the table; at each fresh piece reading our faces with a look. In vain I continued to protest I was no trader; he deigned not to reply. There must have been twenty pounds on the table, he was still going on, and irritation had begun to mingle with our embarrassment, when a happy idea came to our delivery. Since his majesty thought so much of the bag, we said, we must beg him to accept it as a present. It was the most surprising turn in Tembinok's experience. He perceived too late that his persistence was unmannerly; hung his head a while in silence: then, lifting up a sheepish countenance, "I 'shamed," said the tyrant. It was the first and the last time we heard him own to a flaw in his behaviour. Half an hour after he sent us a camphor-wood chest, worth only a few dollars--but then heaven knows what Tembinok' had paid for it. Cunning by nature, and versed for forty years in the government of men, it must not be supposed that he is cheated blindly, or has resigned himself without resistance to be the milch-cow of the passing trader. His efforts have been even heroic. Like Nakaeia of Makin, he has owned schooners. More fortunate than Nakaeia, he has found captains. Ships of his have sailed as far as to the colonies. He has trafficked direct, in his own bottoms, with New Zealand. And even so, even there, the world-enveloping dishonesty of the white man prevented him; his profit melted, his ship returned in debt, the money for the insurance was embezzled, and when the _Coronet_ came to be lost, he was astonished to find he had lost all. At this he dropped his weapons; owned he might as hopefully wrestle with the winds of heaven; and like an experienced sheep, submitted his fleece thenceforward to the shearers. He is the last man in the world to waste anger on the incurable; accepts it with cynical composure; asks no more in those he deals with than a certain decency of moderation; drives as good a bargain as he can; and when he considers he is more than usually swindled, writes it in his memory against the merchant's name. He once ran over to me a list of captains and supercargoes with whom he had done business, classing them under three heads: "He cheat a litty"--"He cheat plenty"--and "I think he cheat too much." For the first two classes he expressed perfect toleration; sometimes, but not always, for the third. I was present when a certain merchant was turned about his business, and was the means (having a considerable influence ever since the bag) of patching up the dispute. Even on the day of our arrival there was like to have been a hitch with Captain Reid: the ground of which is perhaps worth recital. Among goods exported specially for Tembinok' there is a beverage known (and labelled) as Hennessy's brandy. It is neither Hennessy, nor even brandy; it is about the colour of sherry, but is not sherry; tastes of kirsch, and yet neither is it kirsch. The king, at least, has grown used to this amazing brand, and rather prides himself upon the taste; and any substitution is a double offence, being at once to cheat him and to cast a doubt upon his palate. A similar weakness is to be observed in all connoisseurs. Now, the last case sold by the _Equator_ was found to contain a different and I would fondly fancy a superior distillation; and the conversation opened very black for Captain Reid. But Tembinok' is a moderate man. He was reminded and admitted that all men were liable to error, even himself; accepted the principle that a fault handsomely acknowledged should be condoned; and wound the matter up with this proposal: "Tuppoti[11] I mi'take, you 'peakee me. Tuppoti you mi'take, I 'peakee you. Mo' betta." After dinner and supper in the cabin, a glass or two of "Hennetti"--the genuine article this time, with the kirsch bouquet,--and five hours' lounging on the trade-room counter, royalty embarked for home. Three tacks grounded the boat before the palace; the wives were carried ashore on the backs of vassals; Tembinok' stepped on a railed platform like a steamer's gangway, and was borne shoulder-high through the shallows, up the beach, and by an inclined plane, paved with pebbles, to the glaring terrace where he dwells. FOOTNOTES: [8] In the Gilbert group. [9] Copra: the dried kernel of the cocoa-nut, the chief article of commerce throughout the Pacific Islands. [10] Houses. [11] Suppose. CHAPTER II THE KING OF APEMAMA: FOUNDATION OF EQUATOR TOWN Our first sight of Tembinok' was a matter of concern, almost alarm, to my whole party. We had a favour to seek; we must approach in the proper courtly attitude of a suitor; and must either please him or fail in the main purpose of our voyage. It was our wish to land and live in Apemama, and see more near at hand the odd character of the man and the odd (or rather ancient) condition of his island. In all other isles of the South Seas a white man may land with his chest, and set up house for a lifetime, if he choose, and if he have the money or the trade; no hindrance is conceivable. But Apemama is a close island, lying there in the sea with closed doors; the king himself, like a vigilant officer, ready at the wicket to scrutinise and reject intrenching visitors. Hence the attraction of our enterprise; not merely because it was a little difficult, but because this social quarantine, a curiosity in itself, has been the preservative of others. Tembinok', like most tyrants, is a conservative; like many conservatives, he eagerly welcomes new ideas, and, except in the field of politics, leans to practical reform. When the missionaries came, professing a knowledge of the truth, he readily received them; attended their worship, acquired the accomplishment of public prayer, and made himself a student at their feet. It is thus--it is by the cultivation of similar passing chances--that he has learned to read, to write, to cipher, and to speak his queer, personal English, so different from ordinary "Beach de Mar," so much more obscure, expressive, and condensed. His education attended to, he found time to become critical of the new inmates. Like Nakaeia of Makin, he is an admirer of silence in the island; broods over it like a great ear; has spies who report daily; and had rather his subjects sang than talked. The service, and in particular the sermon, were thus sure to become offences: "Here, in my island, _I_ 'peak," he once observed to me. "My chieps no 'peak--do what I talk." He looked at the missionary, and what did he see? "See Kanaka 'peak in a big outch!" he cried, with a strong ring of sarcasm. Yet he endured the subversive spectacle, and might even have continued to endure it, had not a fresh point arisen. He looked again, to employ his own figure; and the Kanaka was no longer speaking, he was doing worse--he was building a copra-house. The king was touched in his chief interests; revenue and prerogative were threatened. He considered besides (and some think with him) that trade is incompatible with the missionary claims. "Tuppoti mitonary think 'good man': very good. Tuppoti he think 'cobra': no good. I send him away ship." Such was his abrupt history of the evangelist in Apemama. Similar deportations are common: "I send him away ship" is the epitaph of not a few, his majesty paying the exile's fare to the next place of call. For instance, being passionately fond of European food, he has several times added to his household a white cook, and one after another these have been deported. They, on their side, swear they were not paid their wages; he, on his, that they robbed and swindled him beyond endurance: both perhaps justly. A more important case was that of an agent despatched (as I heard the story) by a firm of merchants to worm his way into the king's good graces, become, if possible, premier, and handle the copra in the interests of his employers. He obtained authority to land, practised his fascinations, was patiently listened to by Tembinok', supposed himself on the highway to success; and behold! when the next ship touched at Apemama, the would-be premier was flung into a boat--had on board--his fare paid, and so good-bye. But it is needless to multiply examples; the proof of the pudding is in the eating. When we came to Apemama, of so many white men who have scrambled for a place in that rich market, one remained--a silent, sober, solitary, niggardly recluse, of whom the king remarks, "I think he good; he no 'peak." I was warned at the outset we might very well fail in our design; yet never dreamed of what proved to be the fact, that we should be left four-and-twenty hours in suspense and come within an ace of ultimate rejection. Captain Reid had primed himself; no sooner was the king on board, and the Hennetti question amicably settled, than he proceeded to express my request and give an abstract of my claims and virtues. The gammon about Queen Victoria's son might do for Butaritari; it was out of the question here; and I now figured as "one of the Old Men of England," a person of deep knowledge, come expressly to visit Tembinok's dominion, and eager to report upon it to the no less eager Queen Victoria. The king made no shadow of an answer, and presently began upon a different subject. We might have thought he had not heard, or not understood; only that we found ourselves the subject of a constant study. As we sat at meals, he took us in series and fixed upon each, for near a minute at a time, the same hard and thoughtful stare. As he thus looked he seemed to forget himself, the subject and the company, and to become absorbed in the process of his thought; the look was wholly impersonal: I have seen the same in the eyes of portrait-painters. The counts upon which whites have been deported are mainly four: cheating Tembinok', meddling overmuch with copra, which is the source of his wealth and one of the sinews of his power, _'peaking_, and political intrigue. I felt guiltless upon all; but how to show it? I would not have taken copra in a gift: how to express that quality by my dinner-table bearing? The rest of the party shared my innocence and my embarrassment. They shared also in my mortification when after two whole meal-times and the odd moments of an afternoon devoted to this reconnoitring, Tembinok' took his leave in silence. Next morning, the same undisguised study, the same silence, was resumed; and the second day had come to its maturity before I was informed abruptly that I had stood the ordeal. "I look your eye. You good man. You no lie," said the king: a doubtful compliment to a writer of romance. Later he explained he did not quite judge by the eye only, but the mouth as well. "Tuppoti I see man," he explained. "I no tavvy good man, bad man. I look eye, look mouth. Then I tavvy. Look _eye_, look mouth," he repeated. And indeed in our case the mouth had the most to do with it, and it was by our talk that we gained admission to the island; the king promising himself (and I believe really amassing) a vast amount of useful knowledge ere we left. The terms of our admission were as follows: We were to choose a site, and the king should there build us a town. His people should work for us, but the king only was to give them orders. One of his cooks should come daily to help mine, and to learn of him. In case our stores ran out, he would supply us, and be repaid on the return of the _Equator_. On the other hand, he was to come to meals with us when so inclined; when he stayed at home, a dish was to be sent him from our table; and I solemnly engaged to give his subjects no liquor or money (both of which they are forbidden to possess) and no tobacco, which they were to receive only from the royal hand. I think I remember to have protested against the stringency of this last article; at least, it was relaxed, and when a man worked for me I was allowed to give him a pipe of tobacco on the premises, but none to take away. The site of Equator City--we named our city for the schooner--was soon chosen. The immediate shores of the lagoon are windy and blinding; Tembinok' himself is glad to grope blue-spectacled on his terrace; and we fled the neighbourhood of the red _conjunctiva_, the suppurating eyeball, and the beggar who pursues and beseeches the passing foreigner for eyewash. Behind the town the country is diversified; here open, sandy, uneven, and dotted with dwarfish palms; here cut up with taro trenches, deep and shallow, and, according to the growth of the plants, presenting now the appearance of a sandy tannery, now of an alleyed and green garden. A path leads towards the sea, mounting abruptly to the main level of the island--twenty or even thirty feet, although Findlay gives five; and just hard by the top of the rise, where the coco-palms begin to be well grown, we found a grove of pandanus, and a piece of soil pleasantly covered with green underbush. A well was not far off under a rustic well-house; nearer still, in a sandy cup of the land, a pond where we might wash our clothes. The place was out of the wind, out of the sun, and out of sight of the village. It was shown to the king, and the town promised for the morrow. The morrow came. Mr. Osbourne landed, found nothing done, and carried his complaint to Tembinok'. He heard it, rose, called for a Winchester, stepped without the royal palisade, and fired two shots in the air. A shot in the air is the first Apemama warning; it has the force of a proclamation in more loquacious countries; and his majesty remarked agreeably that it would make his labourers "mo' bright." In less than thirty minutes, accordingly, the men had mustered, the work was begun, and we were told that we might bring our baggage when we pleased. It was two in the afternoon ere the first boat was beached, and the long procession of chests and crates and sacks began to straggle through the sandy desert towards Equator Town. The grove of pandanus was practically a thing of the past. Fire surrounded and smoke rose in the green underbush. In a wide circuit the axes were still crashing. Those very advantages for which the place was chosen, it had been the king's first idea to abolish; and in the midst of this devastation there stood already a good-sized maniap' and a small closed house. A mat was spread near by for Tembinok'; here he sat superintending, in cardinal red, a pith helmet on his head, a meerschaum pipe in his mouth, a wife stretched at his back with custody of the matches and tobacco. Twenty or thirty feet in front of him the bulk of the workers squatted on the ground; some of the bush here survived; and in this the commons sat nearly to their shoulders, and presented only an arc of brown faces, black heads, and attentive eyes fixed on his majesty. Long pauses reigned, during which the subjects stared and the king smoked. Then Tembinok' would raise his voice and speak shrilly and briefly. There was never a response in words; but if the speech were jesting, there came by way of answer discreet, obsequious laughter--such laughter as we hear in schoolrooms; and if it were practical, the sudden uprising and departure of the squad. Twice they so disappeared, and returned with further elements of the city; a second house and a second maniap'. It was singular to spy, far off through the coco-stems, the silent oncoming of the maniap', at first (it seemed) swimming spontaneously in the air--but on a nearer view betraying under the eaves many score of moving naked legs. In all the affair servile obedience was no less remarkable than servile deliberation. The gang had here mustered by the note of a deadly weapon; the man who looked on was the unquestioned master of their lives; and except for civility, they bestirred themselves like so many American hotel clerks. The spectator was aware of an unobtrusive yet invincible inertia, at which the skipper of a trading dandy might have torn his hair. Yet the work was accomplished. By dusk, when his majesty withdrew, the town was founded and complete, a new and ruder Amphion having called it from nothing with three cracks of a rifle. And the next morning the same conjurer obliged us with a further miracle: a mystic rampart fencing us, so that the path which ran by our doors became suddenly impassable, the inhabitants who had business across the isle must fetch a wide circuit, and we sat in the midst in a transparent privacy, seeing, seen, but unapproachable, like bees in a glass hive. The outward and visible sign of this glamour was no more than a few ragged coco-leaf garlands round the stems of the outlying palms; but its significance reposed on the tremendous sanction of the tapu and the guns of Tembinok'. We made our first meal that night in the improvised city, where we were to stay two months, and which--so soon as we had done with it--was to vanish in a day as it appeared, its elements returning whence they came, the tapu raised, the traffic on the path resumed, the sun and the moon peering in vain between the palm-trees for the bygone work, the wind blowing over an empty site. Yet the place, which is now only an episode in some memories, seemed to have been built, and to be destined to endure, for years. It was a busy hamlet. One of the maniap's we made our dining-room, one the kitchen. The houses we reserved for sleeping. They were on the admirable Apemama plan: out and away the best house in the South Seas; standing some three feet above the ground on posts; the sides of woven flaps, which can be raised to admit light and air, or lowered to shut out the wind and the rain: airy, healthy, clean, and watertight. We had a hen of a remarkable kind: almost unique in my experience; being a hen that occasionally laid eggs. Not far off, Mrs. Stevenson tended a garden of salad and shalots. The salad was devoured by the hen--which was her bane. The shalots were served out a leaf at a time, and welcomed and relished like peaches. Toddy and green cocoa-nuts were brought us daily. We once had a present of fish from the king, and once of a turtle. Sometimes we shot so-called plover along on the shore, sometimes wild chicken in the bush. The rest of our diet was from tins. Our occupations were very various. While some of the party would be away sketching, Mr. Osbourne and I hammered away at a novel. We read Gibbon and Carlyle aloud; we blew on flageolets, we strummed on guitars; we took photographs by the light of the sun, the moon, and flash-powder; sometimes we played cards. Pot-hunting engaged a part of our leisure. I have myself passed afternoons in the exciting but innocuous pursuit of winged animals with a revolver; and it was fortunate there were better shots of the party, and fortunate the king could lend us a more suitable weapon, in the form of an excellent fowling-piece, or our spare diet had been sparer still. Night was the time to see our city, after the moon was up, after the lamps were lighted, and so long as the fire sparkled in the cook-house. We suffered from a plague of flies and mosquitoes, comparable to that of Egypt; our dinner-table (lent, like all our furniture, by the king) must be enclosed in a tent of netting, our citadel and refuge; and this became all luminous, and bulged and beaconed under the eaves, like the globe of some monstrous lamp under the margin of its shade. Our cabins, the sides being propped at a variety of inclinations, spelled out strange, angular patterns of brightness. In his roofed and open kitchen, Ah Fu was to be seen by lamp and firelight, dabbling among pots. Over all, there fell in the season an extraordinary splendour of mellow moonshine. The sand sparkled as with the dust of diamonds; the stars had vanished. At intervals, a dusky night-bird, slow and low flying, passed in the colonnade of the tree stems and uttered a hoarse croaking cry. CHAPTER III THE KING OF APEMAMA: THE PALACE OF MANY WOMEN The palace, or rather the ground which it includes, is several acres in extent. A terrace encloses it toward the lagoon; on the side of the land, a palisade with several gates. These are scarce intended for defence; a man, if he were strong, might easily pluck down the palisade; he need not be specially active to leap from the beach upon the terrace. There is no parade of guards, soldiers, or weapons; the armoury is under lock and key; and the only sentinels are certain inconspicuous old women lurking day and night before the gates. By day, these crones were often engaged in boiling syrup or the like household occupation; by night, they lay ambushed in the shadow or crouched along the palisade, filling the office of eunuchs to this harem, sole guards upon a tyrant life. Female wardens made a fit outpost for this palace of many women. Of the number of the king's wives I have no guess; and but a loose idea of their function. He himself displayed embarrassment when they were referred to as his wives, called them himself "my pamily," and explained they were his "cutcheons"--cousins. We distinguished four of the crowd: the king's mother; his sister, a grave, trenchant woman, with much of her brother's intelligence; the queen proper, to whom (and to whom alone) my wife was formally presented; and the favourite of the hour, a pretty, graceful girl, who sat with the king daily, and once (when he shed tears) consoled him with caresses. I am assured that even with her his relations are platonic. In the background figured a multitude of ladies, the lean, the plump, and the elephantine, some in sacque frocks, some in the hairbreadth _ridi_; high-born and low, slave and mistress; from the queen to the scullion, from the favourite to the scraggy sentries at the palisade. Not all of these of course are of "my pamily,"--many are mere attendants; yet a surprising number shared the responsibility of the king's trust. These were key-bearers, treasurers, wardens of the armoury, the napery, and the stores. Each knew and did her part to admiration. Should anything be required--a particular gun, perhaps, or a particular bolt of stuff,--the right queen was summoned; she came bringing the right chest, opened it in the king's presence, and displayed her charge in perfect preservation--the gun cleaned and oiled, the goods duly folded. Without delay or haste, and with the minimum of speech, the whole great establishment turned on wheels like a machine. Nowhere have I seen order more complete and pervasive. And yet I was always reminded of Norse tales of trolls and ogres who kept their hearts buried in the ground for the mere safety, and must confide the secret to their wives. For these weapons are the life of Tembinok'. He does not aim at popularity; but drives and braves his subjects, with a simplicity of domination which it is impossible not to admire, hard not to sympathise with. Should one out of so many prove faithless, should the armoury be secretly unlocked, should the crones have dozed by the palisade and the weapons find their way unseen into the village, revolution would be nearly certain, death the most probable result, and the spirit of the tyrant of Apemama flit to rejoin his predecessors of Mariki and Tapituea. Yet those whom he so trusts are all women, and all rivals. There is indeed a ministry and staff of males: cook, steward, carpenter, and supercargoes: the hierarchy of a schooner. The spies, "his majesty's daily papers," as we called them, come every morning to report, and go again. The cook and steward are concerned with the table only. The supercargoes, whose business it is to keep tally of the copra at three pounds a month and a percentage, are rarely in the palace; and two at least are in the other islands. The carpenter, indeed, shrewd and jolly old Rubam--query, Reuben?--promoted on my last visit to the greater dignity of governor, is daily present, altering, extending, embellishing, pursuing the endless series of the king's inventions; and his majesty will sometimes pass an afternoon watching and talking with Rubam at his work. But the males are still outsiders; none seems to be armed, none is intrusted with a key; by dusk they are all usually departed from the palace; and the weight of the monarchy and of the monarch's life reposes unshared on the women. Here is a household unlike, indeed, to one of ours; more unlike still to the Oriental harem: that of an elderly childless man, his days menaced, dwelling alone amid a bevy of women of all ages, ranks, and relationships,--the mother, the sister, the cousin, the legitimate wife, the concubine, the favourite, the eldest born, and she of yesterday; he, in their midst, the only master, the only male, the sole dispenser of honours, clothes, and luxuries, the sole mark of multitudinous ambitions and desires. I doubt if you could find a man in Europe so bold as to attempt this piece of tact and government. And seemingly Tembinok' himself had trouble in the beginning. I hear of him shooting at a wife for some levity on board a schooner. Another, on some more serious offence, he slew outright; he exposed her body in an open box, and (to make the warning more memorable) suffered it to putrefy before the palace gate. Doubtless his growing years have come to his assistance; for upon so large a scale it is more easy to play the father than the husband. And to-day, at least to the eye of a stranger, all seems to go smoothly, and the wives to be proud of their trust, proud of their rank, and proud of their cunning lord. I conceived they made rather a hero of the man. A popular master in a girls' school might, perhaps, offer a figure of his preponderating station. But then the master does not eat, sleep, live, and wash his dirty linen in the midst of his admirers; he escapes, he has a room of his own, he leads a private life; if he had nothing else, he has the holidays, and the more unhappy Tembinok' is always on the stage and on the stretch. In all my coming and going, I never heard him speak harshly or express the least displeasure. An extreme, rather heavy, benignity--the benignity of one sure to be obeyed--marked his demeanour; so that I was at times reminded of Samuel Richardson in his circle of admiring women. The wives spoke up and seemed to volunteer opinions, like our wives at home--or, say, like doting but respectable aunts. Altogether, I conclude that he rules his seraglio much more by art than terror; and those who give a different account (and who have none of them enjoyed my opportunities of observation) perhaps failed to distinguish between degrees of rank, between "my pamily" and the hangers-on, laundresses, and prostitutes. A notable feature is the evening game of cards; when lamps are set forth upon the terrace, and "I and my pamily" play for tobacco by the hour. It is highly characteristic of Tembinok' that he must invent a game for himself; highly characteristic of his worshipping household that they should swear by the absurd invention. It is founded on poker, played with the honours out of many packs, and inconceivably dreary. But I have a passion for all games, studied it, and am supposed to be the only white who ever fairly grasped its principle: a fact for which the wives (with whom I was not otherwise popular) admired me with acclamation. It was impossible to be deceived; this was a genuine feeling: they were proud of their private game, had been cut to the quick by the want of interest shown in it by others, and expanded under the flattery of my attention. Tembinok' puts up a double stake, and receives in return two hands to choose from: a shallow artifice which the wives (in all these years) have not yet fathomed. He himself, when talking with me privately, made not the least secret that he was secure of winning; and it was thus he explained his recent liberality on board the _Equator_. He let the wives buy their own tobacco, which pleased them at the moment. He won it back at cards, which made him once more, and without fresh expense, that which he ought to be,--the sole fount of all indulgences. And he summed the matter up in that phrase with which he almost always concludes any account of his policy: "Mo' betta." The palace compound is laid with broken coral, excruciating to the eyes and the bare feet, but exquisitely raked and weeded. A score or more of buildings lie in a sort of street along the palisade and scattered on the margin of the terrace; dwelling-houses for the wives and the attendants, storehouses for the king's curios and treasures, spacious maniap's for feast or council, some on pillars of wood, some on piers of masonry. One was still in hand, a new invention, the king's latest born: a European frame-house built for coolness inside a lofty maniap': its roof planked like a ship's deck to be a raised, shady, and yet private promenade. It was here the king spent hours with Rubam; here I would sometimes join them; the place had a most singular appearance; and I must say I was greatly taken with the fancy, and joined with relish in the counsels of the architects. Suppose we had business with his majesty by day: we strolled over the sand and by the dwarfish palms, exchanged a "_Konamaori_" with the crone on duty, and entered the compound. The wide sheet of coral glared before us deserted; all having stowed themselves in dark canvas from the excess of room. I have gone to and fro in that labyrinth of a place, seeking the king; and the only breathing creature I could find was when I peered under the eaves of a maniap', and saw the brawny body of one of the wives stretched on the floor, a naked Amazon plunged in noiseless slumber. If it were still the hour of the "morning papers" the quest would be more easy, the half-dozen obsequious, sly dogs squatting on the ground outside a house, crammed as far as possible in its narrow shadow, and turning to the king a row of leering faces. Tembinok' would be within, the flaps of the cabin raised, the trade blowing through, hearing their report. Like journalists nearer home, when the day's news were scanty, these would make the more of it in words; and I have known one to fill up a barren morning with an imaginary conversation of two dogs. Sometimes the king deigns to laugh, sometimes to question or jest with them, his voice sounding shrilly from the cabin. By his side he may have the heir-apparent, Paul, his nephew and adopted son, six years old, stark naked, and a model of young human beauty. And there will always be the favourite and perhaps two other wives awake; four more lying supine under mats and whelmed in slumber. Or perhaps we came later, fell on a more private hour, and found Tembinok' retired in the house with the favourite, an earthenware spittoon, a leaden inkpot, and a commercial ledger. In the last, lying on his belly, he writes from day to day the uneventful history of his reign; and when thus employed he betrayed a touch of fretfulness on interruption with which I was well able to sympathise. The royal annalist once read me a page or so, translating as he went; but the passage being genealogical, and the author boggling extremely in his version, I own I have been sometimes better entertained. Nor does he confine himself to prose, but touches the lyre too, in his leisure moments, and passes for the chief bard of his kingdom, as he is its sole public character, leading architect, and only merchant. His competence, however, does not reach to music; and his verses, when they are ready, are taught to a professional musician, who sets them and instructs the chorus. Asked what his songs were about, Tembinok' replied, "Sweethearts and trees and the sea. Not all the same true, all the same lie." For a condensed view of lyrical poetry (except that he seems to have forgot the stars and flowers) this would be hard to mend. These multifarious occupations bespeak (in a native and an absolute prince) unusual activity of mind. The palace court at noon is a spot to be remembered with awe, the visitor scrambling there, on the loose stones, through a splendid nightmare of light and heat; but the sweep of the wind delivers it from flies and mosquitoes; and with the set of sun it became heavenly. I remember it best on moonless nights. The air was like a bath of milk. Countless shining stars were overhead, the lagoon paved with them. Herds of wives squatted by companies on the gravel, softly chatting. Tembinok' would doff his jacket, and sit bare and silent, perhaps meditating songs; the favourite usually by him, silent also. Meanwhile in the midst of the court, the palace lanterns were being lit and marshalled in rank upon the ground--six or eight square yards of them; a sight that gave one strange ideas of the number of "my pamily"; such a sight as may be seen about dusk in a corner of some great terminus at home. Presently these fared off into all corners of the precinct, lighting the last labours of the day, lighting one after another to their rest that prodigious company of women. A few lingered in the middle of the court for the card-party, and saw the honours shuffled and dealt, and Tembinok' deliberating between his two hands, and the queens losing their tobacco. Then these also were scattered and extinguished; and their place was taken by a great bonfire, the night-light of the palace. When this was no more, smaller fires burned likewise at the gates. These were tended by the crones, unseen, unsleeping--not always unheard. Should any approach in the dark hours, a guarded alert made the circuit of the palisade; each sentry signalled her neighbour with a stone; the rattle of falling pebbles passed and died away; and the wardens of Tembinok' crouched in their places silent as before. CHAPTER IV THE KING OF APEMAMA: EQUATOR TOWN AND THE PALACE Five persons were detailed to wait upon us. Uncle Parker, who brought us toddy and green nuts, was an elderly, almost an old man, with the spirits, the industry, and the morals of a boy of ten. His face was ancient, droll, and diabolical, the skin stretched over taut sinews, like a sail on the guide-rope; and he smiled with every muscle of his head. His nuts must be counted every day, or he would deceive us in the tale; they must be daily examined, or some would prove to be unhusked; nothing but the king's name, and scarcely that, would hold him to his duty. After his toils were over, he was given a pipe, matches, and tobacco, and sat on the floor in the maniap' to smoke. He would not seem to move from his position, and yet every day, when the things fell to be returned, the plug had disappeared; he had found the means to conceal it in the roof, whence he could radiantly produce it on the morrow. Although this piece of legerdemain was performed regularly before three or four pairs of eyes, we could never catch him in the fact; although we searched after he was gone, we could never find the tobacco. Such were the diversions of Uncle Parker, a man nearing sixty. But he was punished according unto his deeds: Mrs. Stevenson took a fancy to paint him, and the sufferings of the sitter were beyond description. Three lasses came from the palace to do our washing and racket with Ah Fu. They were of the lowest class, hangers-on kept for the convenience of merchant skippers, probably low-born, perhaps out-islanders, with little refinement whether of manner or appearance, but likely and jolly enough wenches in their way. We called one "Guttersnipe," for you may find her image in the slums of any city; the same lean, dark-eyed, eager, vulgar face, the same sudden, hoarse guffaws, the same forward and yet anxious manner, as with a tail of an eye on the policeman: only the policeman here was a live king, and his truncheon a rifle. I doubt if you could find anywhere out of the islands, or often there, the parallel of "Fatty," a mountain of a girl, who must have weighed near as many stones as she counted summers, could have given a good account of a life-guardsman, had the face of a baby, and applied her vast mechanical forces almost exclusively to play. But they were all three of the same merry spirit. Our washing was conducted in a game of romps; and they fled and pursued, and splashed, and pelted, and rolled each other in the sand, and kept up a continuous noise of cries and laughter like holiday children. Indeed, and however strange their own function in that austere establishment, were they not escaped for the day from the largest and strictest Ladies' School in the South Seas? Our fifth attendant was no less a person than the royal cook. He was strikingly handsome both in face and body, lazy as a slave, and insolent as a butcher's boy. He slept and smoked on our premises in various graceful attitudes; but so far from helping Ah Fu, he was not at the pains to watch him. It may be said of him that he came to learn, and remained to teach; and his lessons were at times difficult to stomach. For example, he was sent to fill a bucket from the well. About half-way he found my wife watering her onions, changed buckets with her, and leaving her the empty, returned to the kitchen with the full. On another occasion he was given a dish of dumplings for the king, was told they must be eaten hot, and that he should carry them as fast as possible. The wretch set oft at the rate of about a mile in the hour, head in air, toes turned out. My patience, after a month of trial, failed me at the sight. I pursued, caught him by his two big shoulders, and thrusting him before me, ran with him down the hill, over the sands, and through the applauding village, to the Speak House, where the king was then holding a pow-wow. He had the impudence to pretend he was internally injured by my violence, and to profess serious apprehensions for his life. All this we endured; for the ways of Tembinok' are summary, and I was not yet ripe to take a hand in the man's death. But in the meanwhile, here was my unfortunate China boy slaving for the pair, and presently he fell sick. I was now in the position of Cimondain Lantenac, and indeed all the characters in _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_: to continue to spare the guilty, I must sacrifice the innocent. I took the usual course and tried to save both, with the usual consequence of failure. Well rehearsed, I went down to the palace, found the king alone, and obliged him with a vast amount of rigmarole. The cook was too old to learn; I feared he was not making progress; how if we had a boy instead?--boys were more teachable. It was all in vain; the king pierced through my disguises to the root of the fact; saw that the cook had desperately misbehaved; and sat a while glooming. "I think he tavvy too much," he said at last, with grim concision; and immediately turned the talk to other subjects. The same day another high officer, the steward, appeared in the cook's place, and, I am bound to say, proved civil and industrious. As soon as I left, it seems the king called for a Winchester and strolled outside the palisade, awaiting the defaulter. That day Tembinok' wore the woman's frock; as like as not, his make-up was completed by a pith helmet and blue spectacles. Conceive the glaring stretch of sand-hills, the dwarf palms with their noon-day shadows, the line of the palisade, the crone sentries (each by a small clear fire) cooking syrup on their posts--and this chimæra waiting with his deadly engine. To him, enter at last the cook, strolling down the sandhill from Equator Town, listless, vain and graceful; with no thought of alarm. As soon as he was well within range, the travestied monarch fired the six shots over his head, at his feet, and on either hand of him: the second Apemama warning, startling in itself, fatal in significance, for the next time his majesty will aim to hit. I am told the king is a crack shot; that when he aims to kill, the grave may be got ready; and when he aims misses by so near a margin that the culprit tastes six times the bitterness of death. The effect upon the cook I had an opportunity of seeing for myself. My wife and I were returning from the sea-side of the island, when we spied one coming to meet us at a very quick, disordered pace, between a walk and a run. As we drew nearer we saw it was the cook, beside himself with some emotion, his usual warm, mulatto colour declined into a bluish pallor. He passed us without word or gesture, staring on us with the face of a Satan, and plunged on across the wood for the unpeopled quarter of the island and the long, desert beach, where he might rage to and fro unseen, and froth out the vials of his wrath, fear, and humiliation. Doubtless in the curses that he there uttered to the bursting surf and the tropic birds, the name of the _Kaupoi_--the rich man--was frequently repeated. I had made him the laughing-stock of the village in the affair of the king's dumplings; I had brought him by my machinations into disgrace and the immediate jeopardy of his days; last, and perhaps bitterest, he had found me there by the way to spy upon him in the hour of his disorder. Time passed, and we saw no more of him. The season of the full moon came round, when a man thinks shame to lie sleeping; and I continued until late--perhaps till twelve or one in the morning--to walk on the bright sand and in the tossing shadow of the palms. I played, as I wandered, on a flageolet, which occupied much of my attention; the fans overhead rattled in the wind with a metallic chatter; and a bare foot falls at any rate almost noiseless on that shifting soil. Yet when I got back to Equator Town, where all the lights were out, and my wife (who was still awake, and had been looking forth) asked me who it was that followed me, I thought she spoke in jest. "Not at all," she said. "I saw him twice as you passed, walking close at your heels. He only left you at the corner of the maniap'; he must be still behind the cook-house." Thither I ran--like a fool, without any weapon--and came face to face with the cook. He was within my tapu-line, which was death in itself; he could have no business there at such an hour but either to steal or to kill; guilt made him timorous; and he turned and fled before me in the night in silence. As he went I kicked him in that place where honour lies, and he gave tongue faintly like an injured mouse. At the moment I dare say he supposed it was a deadly instrument that touched him. What had the man been after? I have found my music better qualified to scatter than to collect an audience. Amateur as I was, I could not suppose him interested in my reading of the "Carnival of Venice," or that he would deny himself his natural rest to follow my variations on "The Ploughboy." And whatever his design, it was impossible I should suffer him to prowl by night among the houses. A word to the king, and the man were not, his case being far beyond pardon. But it is one thing to kill a man yourself; quite another to bear tales behind his back and have him shot by a third party; and I determined to deal with the fellow in some method of my own. I told Ah Fu the story, and bade him fetch me the cook whenever he should find him. I had supposed this would be a matter of difficulty; and far from that, he came of his own accord: an act really of desperation, since his life hung by my silence, and the best he could hope was to be forgotten. Yet he came with an assured countenance, volunteered no apology or explanation, complained of injuries received, and pretended he was unable to sit down. I suppose I am the weakest man God made; I had kicked him in the least vulnerable part of his big carcase; my foot was bare, and I had not even hurt my foot. Ah Fu could not control his merriment. On my side, knowing what must be the nature of his apprehensions, I found in so much impudence a kind of gallantry, and secretly admired the man. I told him I should say nothing of his night's adventure to the king; that I should still allow him, when he had an errand, to come within my tapu-line by day; but if ever I found him there after the set of the sun I would shoot him on the spot; and to the proof showed him a revolver. He must have been incredibly relieved; but he showed no sign of it, took himself off with his usual dandy nonchalance, and was scarce seen by us again. These five, then, with the substitution of the steward for the cook, came and went, and were our only visitors. The circle of the tapu held at arm's-length the inhabitants of the village. As for "my pamily," they dwelt like nuns in their enclosure; only once have I met one of them abroad, and she was the king's sister, and the place in which I found her (the island infirmary) was very likely privileged. There remains only the king to be accounted for. He would come strolling over, always alone, a little before a meal-time, take a chair, and talk and eat with us like an old family friend. Gilbertine etiquette appears defective on the point of leave-taking. It may be remembered we had trouble in the matter with Karaiti; and there was something childish and disconcerting in Tembinok's abrupt "I want go home now," accompanied by a kind of ducking rise, and followed by an unadorned retreat. It was the only blot upon his manners, which were otherwise plain, decent, sensible, and dignified. He never stayed long nor drank much, and copied our behaviour where he perceived it to differ from his own. Very early in the day, for instance, he ceased eating with his knife. It was plain he was determined in all things to wring profit from our visit, and chiefly upon etiquette. The quality of his white visitors puzzled and concerned him; he would bring up name after name, and ask if its bearer were a "big chiep," or even a "chiep" at all--which, as some were my excellent good friends, and none were actually born in the purple, became at times embarrassing. He was struck to learn that our classes were distinguishable by their speech, and that certain words (for instance) were tapu on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war; and he begged in consequence that we should watch and correct him on the point. We were able to assure him that he was beyond correction. His vocabulary is apt and ample to an extraordinary degree. God knows where he collected it, but by some instinct or some accident he has avoided all profane or gross expressions. "Obliged," "stabbed," "gnaw," "lodge," "power," "company," "slender," "smooth," and "wonderful," are a few of the unexpected words that enrich his dialect. Perhaps what pleased him most was to hear about saluting the quarter-deck of a man-of-war. In his gratitude for this hint he became fulsome. "Schooner cap'n no tell me," he cried; "I think no tavvy! You tavvy too much; tavvy 'teama', tavvy man-a-wa'. I think you tavvy everything." Yet he gravelled me often enough with his perpetual questions; and the false Mr. Barlow stood frequently exposed before the royal Sandford. I remember once in particular. We were showing the magic-lantern; a slide of Windsor Castle was put in, and I told him there was the "outch" of Victoreea. "How many pathom he high?" he asked, and I was dumb before him. It was the builder, the indefatigable architect of palaces, that spoke; collector though he was, he did not collect useless information; and all his questions had a purpose. After etiquette, government, law, the police, money, and medicine were his chief interests--things vitally important to himself as a king and the father of his people. It was my part not only to supply new information, but to correct the old. "My patha he tell me," or "White man he tell me," would be his constant beginning; "You think he lie?" Sometimes I thought he did. Tembinok' once brought me a difficulty of this kind, which I was long of comprehending. A schooner captain had told him of Captain Cook; the king was much interested in the story; and turned for more information--not to Mr. Stephen's Dictionary, not to the "Britannica," but to the Bible in the Gilbert Island version (which consists chiefly of the New Testament and the Psalms). Here he sought long and earnestly; Paul he found, and Festus, and Alexander the coppersmith: no word of Cook. The inference was obvious: the explorer was a myth. So hard it is, even for a man of great natural parts like Tembinok', to grasp the ideas of a new society and culture. CHAPTER V KING AND COMMONS We saw but little of the commons of the isle. At first we met them at the well, where they washed their linen and we drew water for the table. The combination was distasteful; and, having a tyrant at command, we applied to the king and had the place enclosed in our tapu. It was one of the few favours which Tembinok' visibly boggled about granting, and it may be conceived how little popular it made the strangers. Many villagers passed us daily going afield; but they fetched a wide circuit round our tapu, and seemed to avert their looks. At times we went ourselves into the village--a strange place. Dutch by its canals, Oriental by the height and steepness of the roofs, which looked at dusk like temples; but we were rarely called into a house: no welcome, no friendship, was offered us; and of home life we had but the one view: the waking of a corpse, a frigid, painful scene: the widow holding on her lap the cold, bluish body of her husband, and now partaking of the refreshments which made the round of the company, now weeping and kissing the pale mouth. ("I fear you feel this affliction deeply," said the Scottish minister. "Eh, sir, and that I do!" replied the widow. "I've been greetin' a' nicht; an' noo I'm just gaun to sup this bit parritch, and then I'll begin an' greet again.") In our walks abroad I have always supposed the islanders avoided us, perhaps from distaste, perhaps by order; and those whom we met we took generally by surprise. The surface of the isle is diversified with palm groves, thickets, and romantic dingles four feet deep, relics of old taro plantations, and it is thus possible to stumble unawares on folk resting or hiding from their work. About pistol-shot from our township there lay a pond in the bottom of a jungle; here the maids of the isle came to bathe, and were several times alarmed by our intrusion. Not for them are the bright cold rivers of Tahiti or Upolu, not for them to splash and laugh in the hour of the dusk with a villageful of gay companions; but to steal here solitary, to crouch in a place like a cow-wallow, and wash (if that can be called washing) in lukewarm mud, brown as their own skins. Other, but still rare, encounters occur to my memory. I was several times arrested by a tender sound in the bush of voices talking, soft as flutes and with quiet intonations. Hope told a flattering tale: I put aside the leaves; and behold! in place of the expected dryads, a pair of all too solid ladies squatting over a clay pipe in the ungraceful _ridi_. The beauty of the voice and the eye was all that remained to these vast dames; but that of the voice was exquisite indeed. It is strange I should have never heard a more winning sound of speech, yet the dialect should be one remarkable for violent, ugly, and outlandish vocables; so that Tembinok' himself declared it made him weary, and professed to find repose in talking English. The state of this folk, of whom I saw so little, I can merely guess at. The king himself explains the situation with some art. "No; I no pay them," he once said. "I give them tobacco. They work for me _all the same brothers_." It is true there was a brother once in Arden! But we prefer the shorter word. They bear every servile mark,--levity like a child's, incurable idleness, incurious content. The insolence of the cook was a trait of his own; not so his levity, which he shared with the innocent Uncle Parker. With equal unconcern both gambolled under the shadow of the gallows, and took liberties with death that might have surprised a careless student of man's nature. I wrote of Parker that he behaved like a boy of ten: what was he else, being a slave of sixty? He had passed all his years in school, fed, clad, thought for, commanded; and had grown familiar and coquetted with the fear of punishment. By terror you may drive men long, but not far. Here, in Apemama, they work at the constant and the instant peril of their lives; and are plunged in a kind of lethargy of laziness. It is common to see one go afield in his stiff mat ungirt, so that he walks elbows-in like a trussed fowl; and whatsoever his right hand findeth to do, the other must be off duty holding on his clothes. It is common to see two men carrying between them on a pole a single bucket of water. To make two bites of a cherry is good enough: to make two burthens of a soldier's kit, for a distance of perhaps half a furlong, passes measure. Woman, being the less childish animal, is less relaxed by servile conditions. Even in the king's absence, even when they were alone, I have seen Apemama women work with constancy. But the outside to be hoped for in a man is that he may attack his task in little languid fits, and lounge between-whiles. So I have seen a painter, with his pipe going, and a friend by the studio fireside. You might suppose the race to lack civility, even vitality, until you saw them in the dance. Night after night, and sometimes day after day, they rolled out their choruses in the great Speak House--solemn andantes and adagios, led by the clapped hand, and delivered with an energy that shook the roof. The time was not so slow, though it was slow for the islands; but I have chosen rather to indicate the effect upon the hearer. Their music had a church-like character from near at hand, and seemed to European ears more regular than the run of island music. Twice I have heard a discord regularly solved. From farther off, heard at Equator Town for instance, the measures rose and fell and crepitated like the barking of hounds in a distant kennel. The slaves are certainly not overworked--children of ten do more without fatigue--and the Apemama labourers have holidays, when the singing begins early in the afternoon. The diet is hard; copra and a sweetmeat of pounded pandanus are the only dishes I observed outside the palace; but there seems no defect in quantity, and the king shares with them his turtles. Three came in a boat from Kuria during our stay; one was kept for the palace, one sent to us, one presented to the village. It is the habit of the islanders to cook the turtle in its carapace; we had been promised the shells, and we asked a tapu on this foolish practice. The face of Tembinok' darkened and he answered nothing. Hesitation in the question of the well I could understand, for water is scarce on a low island; that he should refuse to interfere upon a point of cookery was more than I had dreamed of; and I gathered (rightly or wrongly) that he was scrupulous of touching in the least degree the private life and habits of his slaves. So that even here, in full despotism, public opinion has weight; even here, in the midst of slavery, freedom has a corner. Orderly, sober, and innocent, life flows in the isle from day to day as in a model plantation under a model planter. It is impossible to doubt the beneficence of that stern rule. A curious politeness, a soft and gracious manner, something effeminate and courtly, distinguishes the islanders of Apemama; it is talked of by all the traders, it was felt even by residents so little beloved as ourselves, and noticeable even in the cook, and even in that scoundrel's hours of insolence. The king, with his manly and plain bearing, stood out alone; you might say he was the only Gilbert Islander in Apemama. Violence, so common in Butaritari, seems unknown. So are theft and drunkenness. I am assured the experiment has been made of leaving sovereigns on the beach before the village: they lay there untouched. In all our time on the island I was but once asked for drink. This was by a mighty plausible fellow, wearing European clothes and speaking excellent English--Tamaiti his name, or, as the whites have now corrupted it, "Tom White": one of the king's supercargoes at three pounds a month and a percentage, a medical man besides, and in his private hours a wizard. He found me one day in the outskirts of the village, in a secluded place, hot and private, where the taro-pits are deep and the plants high. Here he buttonholed me, and, looking about him like a conspirator, inquired if I had gin. I told him I had. He remarked that gin was forbidden, lauded the prohibition a while, and then went on to explain that he was a doctor, or "dogstar" as he pronounced the word, that gin was necessary to him for his medical infusions, that he was quite out of it, and that he would be obliged to me for some in a bottle. I told him I had passed the king my word on landing; but since his case was so exceptional, I would go down to the palace at once, and had no doubt that Tembinok' would set me free. Tom White was immediately overwhelmed with embarrassment and terror, besought me in the most moving terms not to betray him, and fled my neighbourhood. He had none of the cook's valour; it was weeks before he dared to meet my eye; and then only by the order of the king and on particular business. The more I viewed and admired this triumph of firm rule, the more I was haunted and troubled by a problem, the problem (perhaps) of to-morrow for ourselves. Here was a people protected from all serious misfortune, relieved of all serious anxieties, and deprived of what we call our liberty. Did they like it? and what was their sentiment towards the ruler? The first question I could not of course ask, nor perhaps the natives answer. Even the second was delicate; yet at last, and under charming and strange circumstances, I found my opportunity to put it and a man to reply. It was near the full of the moon, with a delicious breeze; the isle was bright as day--to sleep would have been sacrilege; and I walked in the bush, playing my pipe. It must have been the sound of what I am pleased to call my music that attracted in my direction another wanderer of the night. This was a young man attired in a fine mat, and with a garland on his hair, for he was new come from dancing and singing in the public hall; and his body, his face, and his eyes were all of an enchanting beauty. Every here and there in the Gilberts youth are to be found of this absurd perfection; I have seen five of us pass half an hour in admiration of a boy at Mariki; and Te Kop (my friend in the fine mat and garland) I had already several times remarked, and long ago set down as the loveliest animal in Apemama. The philtre of admiration must be very strong, or these natives specially susceptible to its effects, for I have scarce ever admired a person in the islands but what he has sought my particular acquaintance. So it was with Te Kop. He led me to the ocean side; and for an hour or two we sat smoking and talking on the resplendent sand and under the ineffable brightness of the moon. My friend showed himself very sensible of the beauty and amenity of the hour. "Good night! Good wind!" he kept exclaiming, and as he said the words he seemed to hug myself. I had long before invented such reiterated expressions of delight for a character (Felipe, in the story of "Olalla") intended to be partly bestial. But there was nothing bestial in Te Kop: only a childish pleasure in the moment. He was no less pleased with his companion, or was good enough to say so; honoured me, before he left, by calling me Te Kop; apostrophised me as "My name!" with an intonation exquisitely tender, laying his hand at the same time swiftly on my knee; and after we had risen, and our paths began to separate in the bush, twice cried to me with a sort of gentle ecstasy, "I like you too much!" From the beginning he had made no secret of his terror of the king; would not sit down or speak above a whisper till he had put the whole breadth of the isle between himself and his monarch, then harmlessly asleep; and even there, even within a stone-cast of the outer sea, our talk covered by the sound of the surf and the rattle of the wind among the palms, continued to speak guardedly, softening his silver voice (which rang loud enough in the chorus) and looking about him like a man in fear of spies. The strange thing is that I should have beheld him no more. In any other island in the whole South Seas, if I had advanced half as far with any native, he would have been at my door next morning, bringing and expecting gifts. But Te Kop vanished in the bush for ever. My house, of course, was unapproachable; but he knew where to find me on the open beach, where I went daily. I was the _Kaupoi_, the rich man; my tobacco and trade were known to be endless: he was sure of a present. I am at a loss how to explain his behaviour, unless it be supposed that he recalled with terror and regret a passage in our interview. Here it is: "The king, he good man?" I asked. "Suppose he like you, he good man," replied Te Kop: "no like, no good." That is one way of putting it, of course. Te Kop himself was probably no favourite, for he scarce appealed to my judgment as a type of industry. And there must be many others whom the king (to adhere to the formula) does not like. Do these unfortunates like the king? Or is not rather the repulsion mutual? and the conscientious Tembinok', like the conscientious Braxfield before him, and many other conscientious rulers and judges before either, surrounded by a considerable body of "grumbletonians"? Take the cook, for instance, when he passed us by, blue with rage and terror. He was very wroth with me; I think by all the old principles of human nature he was not very well pleased with his sovereign. It was the rich man he sought to waylay: I think it must have been by the turn of a hair that it was not the king he waylaid instead. And the king gives, or seems to give, plenty of opportunities; day and night he goes abroad alone, whether armed or not I can but guess; and the taro-patches, where his business must so often carry him, seem designed for assassination. The case of the cook was heavy indeed to my conscience. I did not like to kill my enemy at second-hand; but had I a right to conceal from the king, who had trusted me, the dangerous secret character of his attendant? And suppose the king should fall, what would be the fate of the king's friends? It was our opinion at the time that we should pay dear for the closing of the well; that our breath was in the king's nostrils; that if the king should by any chance be bludgeoned in a taro-patch, the philosophical and musical inhabitants of Equator Town might lay aside their pleasant instruments, and betake themselves to what defence they had, with a very dim prospect of success. These speculations were forced upon us by an incident which I am ashamed to betray. The schooner _H.L. Haseltine_ (since capsized at sea, with the loss of eleven lives) put in to Apemama in a good hour for us, who had near exhausted our supplies. The king, after his habit, spent day after day on board; the gin proved unhappily to his taste; he brought a store of it ashore with him; and for some time the sole tyrant of the isle was half-seas-over. He was not drunk--the man is not a drunkard, he has always stores of liquor at hand, which he uses with moderation,--but he was muzzy, dull, and confused. He came one day to lunch with us, and while the cloth was being laid fell asleep in his chair. His confusion, when he awoke and found he had been detected, was equalled by our uneasiness. When he was gone we sat and spoke of his peril, which we thought to be in some degree our own; of how easily the man might be surprised in such a state by _grumbletonians_; of the strange scenes that would follow--the royal treasures and stores at the mercy of the rabble, the palace over-run, the garrison of women turned adrift. And as we talked we were startled by a gun-shot and a sudden, barbaric outcry. I believe we all changed colour; but it was only the king firing at a dog and the chorus striking up in the Speak House. A day or two later I learned the king was very sick; went down, diagnosed the case; and took at once the highest medical degree by the exhibition of bicarbonate of soda. Within the hour Richard was himself again; and I found him at the unfinished house, enjoying the double pleasure of directing Rubam and making a dinner off cocoa-nut dumplings, and all eagerness to have the formula of this new sort of _pain-killer_--for _pain-killer_ in the islands is the generic name of medicine. So ended the king's modest spree and our anxiety. On the face of things, I ought to say, loyalty appeared unshaken. When the schooner at last returned for us, after much experience of baffling winds, she brought a rumour that Tebureimoa had declared war on Apemama. Tembinok' became a new man; his face radiant; his attitude, as I saw him preside over a council of chiefs in one of the palace maniap's, eager as a boy's; his voice sounding abroad shrill and jubilant, over half the compound. War is what he wants, and here was his chance. The English captain, when he flung his arms in the lagoon, had forbidden him (except in one case) all military adventures in the future: here was the case arrived. All morning the council sat; men were drilled, arms were bought, the sound of firing disturbed the afternoon; the king devised and communicated to me his plan of campaign, which was highly elaborate and ingenious, but perhaps a trifle fine-spun for the rough and random vicissitudes of war. And in all this bustle the temper of the people appeared excellent, an unwonted animation in every face, and even Uncle Parker burning with military zeal. Of course it was a false alarm. Tebureimoa had other fish to fry. The ambassador who accompanied us on our return to Butaritari found him retired to a small island on the reef, in a huff with the Old Men, a tiff with the traders, and more fear of insurrection at home than appetite for wars abroad. The plenipotentiary had been placed under my protection; and we solemnly saluted when we met. He proved an excellent fisherman, and caught bonito over the ship's side. He pulled a good oar, and made himself useful for a whole fiery afternoon, towing the becalmed _Equator_ off Mariki. He went to his post and did no good. He returned home again, having done no harm. _O si sic omnes!_ CHAPTER VI THE KING OF APEMAMA: DEVIL-WORK The ocean beach of Apemama was our daily resort. The coast is broken by shallow bays. The reef is detached, elevated, and includes a lagoon about knee-deep, the unrestful spending-basin of the surf. The beach is now of fine sand, now of broken coral. The trend of the coast being convex, scarce a quarter of a mile of it is to be seen at once; the land being so low, the horizon appears within a stone-cast; and the narrow prospect enhances the sense of privacy. Man avoids the place--even his footprints are uncommon; but a great number of birds hover and pipe there fishing, and leave crooked tracks upon the sand. Apart from these, the only sound (and I was going to say the only society) is that of the breakers on the reef. On each projection of the coast, the bank of coral clinkers immediately above the beach has been levelled, and a pillar built, perhaps breast-high. These are not sepulchral; all the dead being buried on the inhabited side of the island, close to men's houses, and (what is worse) to their wells. I was told they were to protect the isle against inroads from the sea--divine or diabolical martellos, probably sacred to Taburik, God of Thunder. The bay immediately opposite Equator Town, which we called Fu Bay, in honour of our cook, was thus fortified on either horn. It was well sheltered by the reef, the enclosed water clear and tranquil, the enclosing beach curved like a horseshoe, and both steep and broad. The path debouched about the midst of the re-entrant angle, the woods stopping some distance inland. In front, between the fringe of the wood and the crown of the beach, there had been designed a regular figure, like the court for some new variety of tennis, with borders of round stones imbedded, and pointed at the angles with low posts, likewise of stone. This was the king's Pray Place. When he prayed, what he prayed for, and to whom he addressed his supplications, I could never learn. The ground was tapu. In the angle, by the mouth of the path, stood a deserted maniap'. Near by there had been a house before our coming, which was now transported and figured for the moment in Equator Town. It had been, and it would be again when we departed, the residence of the guardian and wizard of the spot--Tamaiti. Here, in this lone place, within sound of the sea, he had his dwelling and uncanny duties. I cannot call to mind another case of a man living on the ocean side of any open atoll; and Tamaiti must have had strong nerves, the greater confidence in his own spells, or, what I believe to be the truth, an enviable scepticism. Whether Tamaiti had any guardianship of the Pray Place I never heard. But his own particular chapel stood farther back in the fringe of the wood. It was a tree of respectable growth. Around it there was drawn a circle of stones like those that enclosed the Pray Place; in front, facing towards the sea, a stone of a much greater size, and somewhat hollowed, like a piscina, stood close against the trunk; in front of that again a conical pile of gravel. In the hollow of what I have called the piscina (though it proved to be a magic seat) lay an offering of green cocoa-nuts; and when you looked up you found the boughs of the tree to be laden with strange fruit: palm-branches elaborately plaited, and beautiful models of canoes, finished and rigged to the least detail. The whole had the appearance of a midsummer and sylvan Christmas-tree _al fresco_. Yet we were already well enough acquainted in the Gilberts to recognise it, at the first sight, for a piece of wizardry, or, as they say in the group, of Devil-work. The plaited palms were what we recognised. We had seen them before on Apaiang, the most christianised of all these islands; where excellent Mr. Bingham lived and laboured and has left golden memories; whence all the education in the northern Gilberts traces its descent; and where we were boarded by little native Sunday-school misses in clean frocks, with demure faces, and singing hymns as to the manner born. Our experience of Devil-work at Apaiang had been as follows:--It chanced we were benighted at the house of Captain Tierney. My wife and I lodged with a Chinaman some half a mile away; and thither Captain Reid and a native boy escorted us by torchlight. On the way the torch went out, and we took shelter in a small and lonely Christian chapel to rekindle it. Stuck in the rafters of the chapel was a branch of knotted palm. "What is that?" I asked. "O, that's Devil-work," said the Captain. "And what is Devil-work?" I inquired. "If you like, I'll show you some when we get to Johnnie's," he replied. "Johnnie's" was a quaint little house upon the crest of the beach, raised some three feet on posts, approached by stairs; part walled, part trellised. Trophies of advertisement-photographs were hung up within for decoration. There was a table and a recess-bed, in which Mrs. Stevenson slept; while I camped on the matted floor with Johnnie, Mrs. Johnnie, her sister, and the devil's own regiment of cockroaches. Hither was summoned an old witch, who looked the part to horror. The lamp was set on the floor; the crone squatted on the threshold, a green palm-branch in her hand, the light striking full on her aged features and picking out behind her, from the black night, timorous faces of spectators. Our sorceress began with a chanted incantation; it was in the old tongue, for which I had no interpreter; but ever and again there ran along the crowd outside that laugh which every traveller in the islands learns so soon to recognise,--the laugh of terror. Doubtless these half-Christian folk were shocked, these half-heathen folk alarmed. Chench or Taburik thus invoked, we put our questions; the witch knotted the leaves, here a leaf and there a leaf, plainly on some arithmetical system; studied the result with great apparent contention of mind; and gave the answers. Sidney Colvin was in robust health and gone a journey; and we should have a fair wind upon the morrow: that was the result of our consultation, for which we paid a dollar. The next day dawned cloudless and breathless; but I think Captain Reid placed a secret reliance on the sibyl, for the schooner was got ready for sea. By eight the lagoon was flawed with long cat's-paws, and the palms tossed and rustled; before ten we were clear of the passage and skimming under all plain sail, with bubbling scuppers. So we had the breeze, which was well worth a dollar in itself; but the bulletin about my friend in England proved, some six months later, when I got my mail, to have been groundless. Perhaps London lies beyond the horizon of the island gods. Tembinok', in his first dealings, showed himself sternly averse from superstition: and had not the _Equator_ delayed, we might have left the island and still supposed him to be an agnostic. It chanced one day, however, that he came to our maniap', and found Mrs. Stevenson in the midst of a game of patience. She explained the game as well as she was able, and wound up jocularly by telling him this was her devil-work, and if she won, the _Equator_ would arrive next day. Tembinok' must have drawn a long breath; we were not so high-and-dry after all; he need no longer dissemble, and he plunged at once into confessions. He made devil-work every day, he told us, to know if ships were coming in; and thereafter brought us regular reports of the results. It was surprising how regularly he was wrong; but he had always an explanation ready. There had been some schooner in the offing out of view; but either she was not bound for Apemama, or had changed her course, or lay becalmed. I used to regard the king with veneration as he thus publicly deceived himself. I saw behind him all the fathers of the Church, all the philosophers and men of science of the past; before him, all those that are to come; himself in the midst; the whole visionary series bowed over the same task of welding incongruities. To the end Tembinok' spoke reluctantly of the island gods and their worship, and I learned but little. Taburik is the god of thunder, and deals in wind and weather. A while since there were wizards who could call him down in the form of lightning. "My patha he tell me he see: you think he lie?" Tienti--pronounced something like "Chench," and identified by his majesty with the devil--sends and removes bodily sickness. He is whistled for in the Paumotuan manner, and is said to appear; but the king has never seen him. The doctors treat disease by the aid of Chench: eclectic Tembinok' at the same time administering "pain-killer" from his medicine-chest, so as to give the sufferer both chances. "I think mo' betta," observed his majesty, with more than his usual self-approval. Apparently the gods are not jealous, and placidly enjoy both shrine and priest in common. On Tamaiti's medicine-tree, for instance, the model canoes are hung up _ex voto_ for a prosperous voyage, and must therefore be dedicated to Taburik, god of the weather; but the stone in front is the place of sick folk come to pacify Chench. It chanced, by great good luck, that even as we spoke of these affairs, I found myself threatened with a cold. I do not suppose I was ever glad of a cold before, or shall ever be again; but the opportunity to see the sorcerers at work was priceless, and I called in the faculty of Apemama. They came in a body, all in their Sunday's best and hung with wreaths and shells, the insignia of the devil-worker. Tamaiti I knew already: Terutak' I saw for the first time, a tall, lank, raw-boned, serious North-Sea fisherman turned brown; and there was a third in their company whose name I never heard, and who played to Tamaiti the part of _famulus_. Tamaiti took me in hand first, and led me, conversing agreeably, to the shores of Fu Bay. The _famulus_ climbed a tree for some green cocoa-nuts. Tamaiti himself disappeared a while in the bush and returned with coco tinder, dry leaves, and a spray of waxberry. I was placed on the stone, with my back to the tree and my face to windward; between me and the gravel-heap one of the green nuts was set; and then Tamaiti (having previously bared his feet, for he had come in canvas shoes, which tortured him) joined me within the magic circle, hollowed out the top of the gravel-heap, built his fire in the bottom, and applied a match: it was one of Bryant and May's. The flame was slow to catch, and the irreverent sorcerer filled in the time with talk of foreign places--of London, and "companies," and how much money they had; of San Francisco, and the nefarious fogs, "all the same smoke," which had been so nearly the occasion of his death. I tried vainly to lead him to the matter in hand. "Everybody make medicine," he said lightly. And when I asked him if he were himself a good practitioner--"No savvy," he replied, more lightly still. At length the leaves burst in a flame, which he continued to feed; a thick, light smoke blew in my face, and the flames streamed against and scorched my clothes. He in the meanwhile addressed, or affected to address, the evil spirit, his lips moving fast, but without sound; at the same time he waved in the air and twice struck me on the breast with his green spray. So soon as the leaves were consumed the ashes were buried, the green spray was imbedded in the gravel, and the ceremony was at an end. A reader of the "Arabian Nights" felt quite at home. Here was the suffumigation; here was the muttering wizard; here was the desert place to which Aladdin was decoyed by the false uncle. But they manage these things better in fiction. The effect was marred by the levity of the magician, entertaining his patient with small talk like an affable dentist, and by the incongruous presence of Mr. Osbourne with a camera. As for my cold, it was neither better nor worse. I was now handed over to Terutak', the leading practitioner or medical baronet of Apemama. His place is on the lagoon side of the island, hard by the palace. A rail of light wood, some two feet high, encloses an oblong piece of gravel like the king's Pray Place; in the midst is a green tree: below, a stone table bears a pair of boxes covered with a fine mat; and in front of these an offering of food, a cocoa-nut, a piece of taro or a fish, is placed daily. On two sides the enclosure is lined with maniap's; and one of our party, who had been there to sketch, had remarked a daily concourse of people and an extraordinary number of sick children; for this is in fact the infirmary of Apemama. The doctor and myself entered the sacred place alone; the boxes and the mat were displaced; and I was enthroned in their stead upon the stone, facing once more to the east. For a while the sorcerer remained unseen behind me, making passes in the air with a branch of palm. Then he struck lightly on the brim of my straw hat; and this blow he continued to repeat at intervals, sometimes brushing instead my arm and shoulder. I have had people try to mesmerise me a dozen times, and never with the least result. But at the first tap--on a quarter no more vital than my hat-brim, and from nothing more virtuous than a switch of palm wielded by a man I could not even see--sleep rushed upon me like an armed man. My sinews fainted, my eyes closed, my brain hummed, with drowsiness. I resisted--at first instinctively, then with a certain flurry of despair, in the end successfully; if that were indeed success which enabled me to scramble to my feet, to stumble home somnambulous, to cast myself at once upon my bed, and sink at once into a dreamless stupor. When I awoke my cold was gone. So I leave a matter that I do not understand. Meanwhile my appetite for curiosities (not usually very keen) had been strangely whetted by the sacred boxes. They were of pandanus wood, oblong in shape, with an effect of pillaring along the sides like straw work, lightly fringed with hair or fibre and standing on four legs. The outside was neat as a toy; the inside a mystery I was resolved to penetrate. But there was a lion in the path. I might not approach Terutak', since I had promised to buy nothing in the island; I dared not have recourse to the king, for I had already received from him more gifts than I knew how to repay. In this dilemma (the schooner being at last returned) we hit on a device. Captain Reid came forward in my stead, professed an unbridled passion for the boxes, and asked and obtained leave to bargain for them with the wizard. That same afternoon the captain and I made haste to the infirmary, entered the enclosure, raised the mat, and had begun to examine the boxes at our leisure, when Terutak's wife bounced out of one of the nigh houses, fell upon us, swept up the treasures, and was gone. There was never a more absolute surprise. She came, she took, she vanished, we had not a guess whither; and we remained, with foolish looks and laughter, on the empty field. Such was the fit prologue of our memorable bargaining. Presently Terutak' came, bringing Tamaiti along with him, both smiling; and we four squatted without the rail. In the three maniap's of the infirmary a certain audience was gathered: the family of a sick child under treatment, the king's sister playing cards, a pretty girl, who swore I was the image of her father; in all perhaps a score. Terutak's wife had returned (even as she had vanished) unseen, and now sat, breathless and watchful, by her husband's side. Perhaps some rumour of our quest had gone abroad, or perhaps we had given the alert by our unseemly freedom: certain, at least, that in the faces of all present expectation and alarm were mingled. Captain Reid announced, without preface or disguise, that I was come to purchase; Terutak', with sudden gravity, refused to sell. He was pressed; he persisted. It was explained we only wanted one: no matter, two were necessary for the healing of the sick. He was rallied, he was reasoned with: in vain. He sat there, serious and still, and refused. All this was only a preliminary skirmish; hitherto no sum of money had been mentioned; but now the captain brought his great guns to bear. He named a pound, then two, then three. Out of the maniap's one person after another came to join the group, some with mere excitement, others with consternation in their faces. The pretty girl crept to my side; it was then that--surely with the most artless flattery--she informed me of my likeness to her father. Tamaiti the infidel sat with hanging head and every mark of dejection. Terutak' streamed with sweat, his eye was glazed, his face wore a painful rictus, his chest heaved like that of one spent with running. The man must have been by nature covetous; and I doubt if ever I saw moral agony more tragically displayed. His wife by his side passionately encouraged his resistance. And now came the charge of the old guard. The captain, making a skip, named the surprising figure of five pounds. At the word the maniap's were emptied. The king's sister flung down her cards and came to the front to listen, a cloud on her brow. The pretty girl beat her breast and cried with wearisome iteration that if the box were hers I should have it. Terutak's wife was beside herself with pious fear, her face discomposed, her voice (which scarce ceased from warning and encouragement) shrill as a whistle. Even Terutak' lost that image-like immobility which he had hitherto maintained. He rocked on his mat, threw up his closed knees alternately, and struck himself on the breast after the manner of dancers. But he came gold out of the furnace; and with what voice was left him continued to reject the bribe. And now came a timely interjection. "Money will not heal the sick," observed the king's sister sententiously; and as soon as I heard the remark translated my eyes were unsealed, and I began to blush for my employment. Here was a sick child, and I sought, in the view of its parents, to remove the medicine-box. Here was the priest of a religion, and I (a heathen millionaire) was corrupting him to sacrilege. Here was a greedy man, torn in twain betwixt greed and conscience; and I sat by and relished, and lustfully renewed his torments. _Ave, Cæsar_! Smothered in a corner, dormant but not dead, we have all the one touch of nature: an infant passion for the sand and blood of the arena. So I brought to an end my first and last experience of the joys of the millionaire, and departed amid silent awe. Nowhere else can I expect to stir the depths of human nature by an offer of five pounds; nowhere else, even at the expense of millions, could I hope to see the evil of riches stand so legibly exposed. Of all the bystanders, none but the king's sister retained any memory of the gravity and danger of the thing in hand. Their eyes glowed, the girl beat her breast, in senseless animal excitement. Nothing was offered them; they stood neither to gain nor to lose; at the mere name and wind of these great sums Satan possessed them. From this singular interview I went straight to the palace; found the king; confessed what I had been doing; begged him, in my name, to compliment Terutak' on his virtue, and to have a similar box made for me against the return of the schooner. Tembinok', Rubam, and one of the Daily Papers--him we used to call "the Facetiæ Column"--laboured for a while of some idea, which was at last intelligibly delivered. They feared I thought the box would cure me; whereas, without the wizard, it was useless; and when I was threatened with another cold I should do better to rely on pain-killer. I explained I merely wished to keep it in my "outch" as a thing made in Apemama; and these honest men were much relieved. Late the same evening, my wife, crossing the isle to windward, was aware of singing in the bush. Nothing is more common in that hour and place than the jubilant carol of the toddy-cutter swinging high overhead, beholding below him the narrow ribbon of the isle, the surrounding field of ocean, and the fires of the sunset. But this was of a graver character, and seemed to proceed from the ground-level. Advancing a little in the thicket, Mrs. Stevenson saw a clear space, a fine mat spread in the midst, and on the mat a wreath of white flowers and one of the devil-work boxes. A woman--whom we guess to have been Mrs. Terutak'--sat in front, now drooping over the box like a mother over a cradle, now lifting her face and directing her song to heaven. A passing toddy-cutter told my wife that she was praying. Probably she did not so much pray as deprecate; and perhaps even the ceremony was one of disenchantment. For the box was already doomed; it was to pass from its green medicine-tree, reverend precinct, and devout attendants; to be handled by the profane; to cross three seas; to come to land under the foolscap of St. Paul's; to be domesticated within hail of Lillie Bridge; there to be dusted by the British housemaid, and to take perhaps the roar of London for the voice of the outer sea along the reef. Before even we had finished dinner Chench had begun his journey, and one of the newspapers had already placed the box upon my table as the gift of Tembinok'. I made haste to the palace, thanked the king, but offered to restore the box, for I could not bear that the sick of the island should be made to suffer. I was amazed by his reply. Terutak', it appeared, had still three or four in reserve against an accident; and his reluctance, and the dread painted at first on every face, was not in the least occasioned by the prospect of medical destitution, but by the immediate divinity of Chench. How much more did I respect the king's command, which had been able to extort in a moment and for nothing a sacrilegious favour that I had in vain solicited with millions! But now I had a difficult task in front of me; it was not in my view that Terutak' should suffer by his virtue; and I must persuade the king to share my opinion, to let me enrich one of his subjects, and (what was yet more delicate) to pay for my present. Nothing shows the king in a more becoming light than the fact that I succeeded. He demurred at the principle; he exclaimed, when he heard it, at the sum. "Plenty money!" cried he, with contemptuous displeasure. But his resistance was never serious; and when he had blown off his ill-humour--"A' right," said he. "You give him. Mo' betta." Armed with this permission, I made straight for the infirmary. The night was now come, cool, dark, and starry. On a mat, hard by a clear fire of wood and coco-shell, Terutak' lay beside his wife. Both were smiling; the agony was over, the king's command had reconciled (I must suppose) their agitating scruples; and I was bidden to sit by them and share the circulating pipe. I was a little moved myself when I placed five gold sovereigns in the wizard's hand; but there was no sign of emotion in Terutak' as he returned them, pointed to the palace, and named Tembinok'. It was a changed scene when I had managed to explain. Terutak', long, dour Scots fisherman as he was, expressed his satisfaction within bounds; but the wife beamed; and there was an old gentleman present--her father, I suppose--who seemed nigh translated. His eyes stood out of his head; "_Kaupoi, Kaupoi_--rich, rich!" ran on his lips like a refrain; and he could not meet my eye but what he gurgled into foolish laughter. I might now go home, leaving that fire-lit family party gloating over their new millions, and consider my strange day. I had tried and rewarded the virtue of Terutak'. I had played the millionaire, had behaved abominably, and then in some degree repaired my thoughtlessness. And now I had my box, and could open it and look within. It contained a miniature sleeping-mat and a white shell. Tamaiti, interrogated next day as to the shell, explained it was not exactly Chench, but a cell, or body, which he would at times inhabit. Asked why there was a sleeping-mat, he retorted indignantly, "Why have you mats?" And this was the sceptical Tamaiti! But island scepticism is never deeper than the lips. CHAPTER VII THE KING OF APEMAMA Thus all things on the island, even the priests of the gods, obey the word of Tembinok'. He can give and take, and slay, and allay the scruples of the conscientious, and do all things (apparently) but interfere in the cookery of a turtle. "I got power" is his favourite word; it interlards his conversation; the thought haunts him and is ever fresh; and when he has asked and meditates of foreign countries, he looks up with a smile and reminds you, "_I got power_." Nor is his delight only in the possession, but in the exercise. He rejoices in the crooked and violent paths of kingship like a strong man to run a race, or like an artist in his art. To feel, to use his power, to embellish his island and the picture of the island life after a private ideal, to milk the island vigorously, to extend his singular museum--these employ delightfully the sum of his abilities. I never saw a man more patently in the right trade. It would be natural to suppose this monarchy inherited intact through generations. And so far from that, it is a thing of yesterday. I was already a boy at school while Apemama was yet republican, ruled by a noisy council of Old Men, and torn with incurable feuds. And Tembinok' is no Bourbon; rather the son of a Napoleon. Of course he is well-born. No man need aspire high in the isles of the Pacific unless his pedigree be long and in the upper regions mythical. And our king counts cousinship with most of the high families in the archipelago, and traces his descent to a shark and a heroic woman. Directed by an oracle, she swam beyond sight of land to meet her revolting paramour, and received at sea the seed of a predestined family. "I think lie," is the king's emphatic commentary; yet he is proud of the legend. From this illustrious beginning the fortunes of the race must have declined; and Teñkoruti, the grandfather of Tembinok', was the chief of a village at the north end of the island. Kuria and Aranuka were yet independent; Apemama itself the arena of devastating feuds. Through this perturbed period of history the figure of Teñkoruti stalks memorable. In war he was swift and bloody; several towns fell to his spear, and the inhabitants were butchered to a man. In civil life his arrogance was unheard of. When the council of Old Men was summoned, he went to the Speak House, delivered his mind, and left without waiting to be answered. Wisdom had spoken: let others opine according to their folly. He was feared and hated, and this was his pleasure. He was no poet; he cared not for arts or knowledge. "My gran'patha one thing savvy, savvy pight," observed the king. In some lull of their own disputes the Old Men of Apemama adventured on the conquest of Apemama; and this unlicked Caius Marcius was elected general of the united troops. Success attended him; the islands were reduced, and Teñkoruti returned to his own government, glorious and detested. He died about 1860, in the seventieth year of his age and the full odour of unpopularity. He was tall and lean, says his grandson, looked extremely old, and "walked all the same young man." The same observer gave me a significant detail. The survivors of that rough epoch were all defaced with spearmarks; there was none on the body of this skilful fighter. "I see old man, no got a spear," said the king. Teñkoruti left two sons, Tembaitake and Tembinatake. Tembaitake, our king's father, was short, middling stout, a poet, a good genealogist, and something of a fighter; it seems he took himself seriously, and was perhaps scarce conscious that he was in all things the creature and nursling of his brother. There was no shadow of dispute between the pair: the greater man filled with alacrity and content the second place: held the breach in war, and all the portfolios in the time of peace: and, when his brother rated him, listened in silence, looking on the ground. Like Teñkoruti, he was tall and lean and a swift walker--a rare trait in the islands. He possessed every accomplishment. He knew sorcery, he was the best genealogist of his day, he was a poet, he could dance and make canoes and armour; and the famous mast of Apemama, which ran one joint higher than the mainmast of a full-rigged ship, was of his conception and design. But these were avocations, and the man's trade was war. "When my uncle go make wa', he laugh," said Tembinok'. He forbade the use of field fortification, that protractor of native hostilities; his men must fight in the open, and win or be beaten out of hand; his own activity inspired his followers; and the swiftness of his blows beat down, in one lifetime, the resistance of three islands. He made his brother sovereign, he left his nephew absolute. "My uncle make all smooth," said Tembinok'. "I mo' king than my patha: I got power," he said, with formidable relish. Such is the portrait of the uncle drawn by the nephew. I can set beside it another by a different artist, who has often--I may say always--delighted me with his romantic taste in narrative, but not always--and I may say not often--persuaded me of his exactitude. I have already denied myself the use of so much excellent matter from the same source, that I begin to think it time to reward good resolution; and his account of Tembinatake agrees so well with the king's, that it may very well be (what I hope it is) the record of a fact, and not (what I suspect) the pleasing exercise of an imagination more than sailorly. A., for so I had perhaps better call him, was walking up the island after dusk, when he came on a lighted village of some size, was directed to the chief's house, and asked leave to rest and smoke a pipe. "You will sit down, and smoke a pipe, and wash, and eat, and sleep," replied the chief, "and to-morrow you will go again." Food was brought, prayers were held (for this was in the brief day of Christianity), and the chief himself prayed with eloquence and seeming sincerity. All evening A. sat and admired the man by the firelight. He was six feet high, lean, with the appearance of many years, and an extraordinary air of breeding and command. "He looked like a man who would kill you laughing," said A., in singular echo of one of the king's expressions. And again: "I had been reading the Musketeer books, and he reminded me of Aramis." Such is the portrait of Tembinatake, drawn by an expert romancer. We had heard many tales of "my patha"; never a word of my uncle till two days before we left. As the time approached for our departure Tembinok' became greatly changed; a softer, a more melancholy, and, in particular, a more confidential man appeared in his stead. To my wife he contrived laboriously to explain that though he knew he must lose his father in the course of nature, he had not minded nor realised it till the moment came; and that now he was to lose us he repeated the experience. We showed fireworks one evening on the terrace. It was a heavy business; the sense of separation was in all our minds, and the talk languished. The king was specially affected, sat disconsolate on his mat, and often sighed. Of a sudden one of the wives stepped forth from a cluster, came and kissed him in silence, and silently went again. It was just such a caress as we might give to a disconsolate child, and the king received it with a child's simplicity. Presently after we said good-night and withdrew; but Tembinok' detained Mr. Osbourne, patting the mat by his side and saying: "Sit down. I feel bad, I like talk." Osbourne sat down by him. "You like some beer?" said he; and one of the wives produced a bottle. The king did not partake, but sat sighing and smoking a meerschaum pipe. "I very sorry you go," he said at last. "Miss Stlevens he good man, woman he good man, boy he good man; all good man. Woman he smart all the same man. My woman" (glancing towards his wives) "he good woman, no very smart. I think Miss Stlevens he big chiep all the same cap'n man-o'-wa'. I think Miss Stlevens he rich man all the same me. All go schoona. I very sorry. My patha he go, my uncle he go, my cutcheons he go, Miss Stlevens he go: all go. You no see king cry before. King all the same man: feel bad, he cry. I very sorry." In the morning it was the common topic in the village that the king had wept. To me he said: "Last night I no can 'peak: too much here," laying his hand upon his bosom. "Now you go away all the same my pamily. My brothers, my uncle go away. All the same." This was said with a dejection almost passionate. And it was the first time I had heard him name his uncle, or indeed employ the word. The same day he sent me a present of two corselets, made in the island fashion of plaited fibre, heavy and strong. One had been worn by Teñkoruti, one by Tembaitake; and the gift being gratefully received, he sent me, on the return of his messengers--a third--that of Tembinatake. My curiosity was roused; I begged for information as to the three wearers; and the king entered with gusto into the details already given. Here was a strange thing, that he should have talked so much of his family, and not once mentioned that relative of whom he was plainly the most proud. Nay, more: he had hitherto boasted of his father; thenceforth he had little to say of him; and the qualities for which he had praised him in the past were now attributed where they were due,--to the uncle. A confusion might be natural enough among islanders, who call all the sons of their grandfather by the common name of father. But this was not the case with Tembinok'. Now the ice was broken the word uncle was perpetually in his mouth; he who had been so ready to confound was now careful to distinguish; and the father sank gradually into a self-complacent ordinary man, while the uncle rose to his true stature as the hero and founder of the race. The more I heard and the more I considered, the more this mystery of Tembinok's behaviour puzzled and attracted me. And the explanation, when it came, was one to strike the imagination of a dramatist. Tembinok' had two brothers. One, detected in private trading, was banished, then forgiven, lives to this day in the island, and is the father of the heir-apparent, Paul. The other fell beyond forgiveness. I have heard it was a love-affair with one of the king's wives, and the thing is highly possible in that romantic archipelago. War was attempted to be levied; but Tembinok' was too swift for the rebels, and the guilty brother escaped in a canoe. He did not go alone. Tembinatake had a hand in the rebellion, and the man who had gained a kingdom for a weakling brother was banished by that brother's son. The fugitives came to shore in other islands, but Tembinok' remains to this day ignorant of their fate. So far history. And now a moment for conjecture. Tembinok' confused habitually, not only the attributes and merits of his father and his uncle, but their diverse personal appearance. Before he had even spoken, or thought to speak, of Tembinatake, he had told me often of a tall, lean father, skilled in war, and his own schoolmaster in genealogy and island arts. How if both were fathers, one natural, one adoptive? How if the heir of Tembaitake, like the heir of Tembinok' himself, were not a son, but an adopted nephew? How if the founder of the monarchy, while he worked for his brother, worked at the same time for the child of his loins? How if on the death of Tembaitake, the two stronger natures, father and son, king and kingmaker, clashed, and Tembinok', when he drove out his uncle, drove out the author of his days? Here is at least a tragedy four-square. The king took us on board in his own gig, dressed for the occasion in the naval uniform. He had little to say, he refused refreshments, shook us briefly by the hand, and went ashore again. That night the palm-tops of Apemama had dipped behind the sea, and the schooner sailed solitary under the stars. LETTERS FROM SAMOA LETTERS TO THE "TIMES," "PALL MALL GAZETTE," ETC. I TO THE EDITOR OF THE "TIMES" _Yacht "Casco," Hawaiian Islands, Feb. 10, 1889._ Sir,--News from Polynesia is apt to come piecemeal, and thus fail of its effect, the first step being forgotten before the second comes to hand. For this reason I should like to be allowed to recapitulate a little of the past before I go on to illustrate the present extraordinary state of affairs in the Samoan Islands. It is quite true that this group was largely opened up by German enterprise, and that the port of Apia is much the creation of the Godeffroys. So far the German case extends; no farther. Apia was governed till lately by a tripartite municipality, the American, English, and German Consuls, and one other representative of each of the three nations making up the body. To both America and Germany a harbour had been ceded. England, I believe, had no harbour, but that her position was quite equal to that of her neighbours one fact eloquently displays. Malietoa--then King of Samoa, now a prisoner on the Marshall Islands--offered to accept the supremacy of England. Unhappily for himself, his offer was refused, Her Majesty's Government declaring, I am told, that they would prefer to see him independent. As he now wanders the territory of his island prison, under the guns of an Imperial war-ship, his independence (if it still exist) must be confined entirely to his bosom. Such was the former equal and pacific state of the three nations at Apia. It would be curious to tell at length by what steps of encroachment on the one side and weakness on the other the present reign of terror has been brought about; but my time before the mail departs is very short, your space is limited, and in such a history much must be only matter of conjecture. Briefly and roughly, then, there came a sudden change in the attitude of Germany. Another treaty was proposed to Malietoa and refused; the cause of the rebel Tamasese was invented or espoused; Malietoa was seized and deported, Tamasese installed, the tripartite municipality dissolved, the German Consul seated autocratically in its place, and the Hawaiian Embassy (sent by a Power of the same race to moderate among Samoans) dismissed with threats and insults. In the course of these events villages have been shelled, the German flag has been at least once substituted for the English, and the Stars and Stripes (only the other day) were burned at Matafatatele. On the day of the chase after Malietoa the houses of both English and Americans were violently entered by the Germans. Since the dissolution of the municipality English and Americans have paid their taxes into the hands of their own Consuls, where they accumulate, and the German representative, unrecognised and unsupported, rules single in Apia. I have had through my hands a file of Consular proclamations, the most singular reading--a state of war declared, all other authority but that of the German representative suspended, punishment (and the punishment of death in particular) liberally threatened. It is enough to make a man rub his eyes when he reads Colonel de Coetlogon's protest and the high-handed rejoinder posted alongside of it the next day by Dr. Knappe. Who is Dr. Knappe, thus to make peace and war, deal in life and death, and close with a buffet the mouth of English Consuls? By what process known to diplomacy has he risen from his one-sixth part of municipal authority to be the Bismarck of a Polynesian island? And what spell has been cast on the Cabinets of Washington and St. James's, that Mr. Blacklock should have been so long left unsupported, and that Colonel de Coetlogon must bow his head under a public buffet? I have not said much of the Samoans. I despair, in so short a space, to interest English readers in their wrongs; with the mass of people at home they will pass for some sort of cannibal islanders, with whom faith were superfluous, upon whom kindness might be partly thrown away. And, indeed, I recognise with gladness that (except as regards the captivity of Malietoa) the Samoans have had throughout the honours of the game. Tamasese, the German puppet, has had everywhere the under hand; almost none, except those of his own clan, have ever supported his cause, and even these begin now to desert him. "This is no Samoan war," said one of them, as he transferred his followers and services to the new Malietoa--Mataafa; "this is a German war." Mataafa, if he be cut off from Apia and the sea, lies inexpugnable in the foot-hills immediately behind with 5,000 warriors at his back. And beyond titles to a great deal of land, which they extorted in exchange for rifles and ammunition from the partisans of Tamasese, of all this bloodshed and bullying the Germans behold no profit. I have it by last advices that Dr. Knappe has approached the King privately with fair speeches, assuring him that the state of war, bombardments, and other evils of the day, are not at all directed at Samoans, but against the English and Americans; and that, when these are extruded, peace shall again smile on a German island. It can never be proved, but it is highly possible he may have said so; and, whether he said it or not, there is a sense in which the thing is true. Violence has not been found to succeed with the Samoans; with the two Anglo-Saxon Powers it has been found to work like a charm. I conclude with two instances, one American, one English:-- _First_.--Mr. Klein, an American journalist, was on the beach with Malietoa's men on the night of the recent German defeat. Seeing the boats approach in the darkness, Mr. Klein hailed them and warned them of the Samoan ambush, and, by this innocent and humane step, made public the fact of his presence. Where much else is contested so much appears to be admitted (and, indeed, claimed) upon both sides. Mr. Klein is now accused of firing on the Germans and of advising the Samoans to fire, both of which he denies. He is accused, after the fight, of succouring only the wounded of Malietoa's party; he himself declares that he helped both; and, at any rate, the offence appears a novel one, and the accusation threatens to introduce fresh dangers into Red Cross work. He was on the beach that night in the exercise of his profession. If he was with Malietoa's men, which is the real gist of his offence, we who are not Germans may surely ask, Why not? On what ground is Malietoa a rebel? The Germans have not conquered Samoa that I ever heard of; they are there on treaty like their neighbours, and Dr. Knappe himself (in the eyes of justice) is no more than the one-sixth part of the town council of Apia. Lastly, Mr. Klein's innocence stands very clearly proven by the openness with which he declared his presence. For all that, this gentleman lay for a considerable time, watched day and night by German sailors, a prisoner in the American Consulate; even after he had succeeded in running the gauntlet of the German guards, and making his escape in a canoe to the American warship _Nipsic_, he was imperiously redemanded from under his own flag, and it is probable his extradition is being already called for at Washington. _Secondly_.--An English artist had gone into the bush sketching. I believe he had been to Malietoa's camp, so that his guilt stands on somewhat the same ground as Mr. Klein's. He was forcibly seized on board the British packet _Richmond_, carried half-dressed on board the _Adler_, and detained there, in spite of all protest, until an English war-ship had been cleared for action. This is of notoriety, and only one case (although a strong one) of many. Is it what the English people understand by the sovereignty of the seas?--I am, etc., ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. II TO THE EDITOR OF THE "TIMES" _Vailima, Upolu, Samoa, Oct. 12, 1891._ Sir,--I beg leave to lay before your readers a copy of a correspondence, or (should that have reached you by another channel) to offer a few words of narrative and comment. On Saturday, September 5, Mr. Cedercrantz, the Chief Justice of Samoa, sailed on a visit to Fiji, leaving behind him certain prisoners in the gaol, and Baron Senfft von Pilsach, President of the Municipal Council, master of the field. The prisoners were five chiefs of Manono who had surrendered of their own accord, or at the desire of Mataafa, had been tried by a native magistrate, and received sentence of six months' confinement under "gentlemanly" (_sic_) conditions. As they were marched to prison, certain of their country-folk of Manono ran beside and offered an immediate rescue; but Lieutenant Ulfsparre ordered the men of the escort to load, and the disturbance blew by. How little weight was attached to this incident by the Chief Justice is sufficiently indicated by the fact of his departure. It was unhappily otherwise with those whom he left behind. Panic seems to have marked them for her own; they despaired at once of all lawful defence; and, on Sunday, the day after the Chief Justice's departure, Apia was in consequence startled with strange news. Dynamite bought from the wrecker ship, an electrical machine and a mechanic hired, the prison mined, and a letter despatched to the people of Manono advising them of the fact, and announcing that if any rescue were attempted prison and prisoners should be blown up--such were the voices of rumour; and the design appearing equally feeble, reckless, and wicked, considerable agitation was aroused. Perhaps it had some effect. Our Government at least, which had rushed so hastily to one extreme, now dashed with the same speed into another. Sunday was the day of dynamite, Tuesday dawned the day of deportation. A cutter was hurriedly prepared for sea, and the prisoners, whom the Chief Justice had left three days before under a sentence of "gentlemanly" detention, found themselves under way to exile in the Tokelaus. A Government of this agility escapes criticism: by multiplying surprises it obliterates the very memory of past mistakes. Some, perhaps, forgot the dynamite; some, hearing no more of it, set it down to be a trick of rumour such as we are well used to in the islands. But others were not so sure. Others considered that the rumour (even if unfounded) was of an ill example, might bear deplorable fruit, and, from all points of view of morality and policy, required a public contradiction. Eleven of these last entered accordingly into the annexed correspondence with the President. It will be seen in the crevice of what quibble that gentleman sought refuge and sits inexpugnable. In a question affecting his humanity, his honour, and the wellbeing of the kingdom which he serves, he has preferred to maintain what I can only call a voluble silence. The public must judge of the result; but there is one point to which I may be allowed to draw attention--that passage in the fourth of the appended documents in which he confesses that he was already acquainted with the rumours in question, and that he has been present (and apparently not protesting) when the scandal was discussed and the proposed enormity commended. The correspondence was still passing when the President surprised Apia with a fresh gambado. He has been a long while in trouble as to his disposition of the funds. His intention to build a house for himself--to all appearance with native money--his sending the taxes out of the islands and locking them up in deposits, and his noisy squabbles with the King and native Parliament as to the currency, had all aroused unfavourable comment. On Saturday, the 3rd of October, a correspondence on the last point appeared in the local paper. By this it appeared that our not too resolute King and Parliament had at last and in one particular defied his advice and maintained their own opinion. If vengeance were to be the order of the day, it might have been expected to fall on the King and Parliament; but this would have been too direct a course, and the blow was turned instead against an innocent municipal council. On the 7th the President appeared before that body, informed them that his authority was lessened by the publication, that he had applied to the King for a month's leave of (theatrical) absence, and must now refuse to fulfil his duties. With this he retired to his own house, which is under the same roof, leaving the councillors and the municipality to do what they pleased and drift where they could without him. It is reported he has since declared his life to be in danger, and even applied to his Consul for protection. This seems to pass the bounds of credibility; but the movements of Baron Senfft von Pilsach have been throughout so agitated and so unexpected that we know not what to look for; and the signatories of the annexed addresses, if they were accused to-morrow of a design on the man's days, would scarce have spirit left to be surprised. It must be clearly pointed out that this is no quarrel of German and anti-German. The German officials, consular and naval, have behaved with perfect loyalty. A German wrote the letter to the paper which unchained this thunderbolt; and it was a German who took the chair which the President had just vacated at the table of the municipal board. And though the Baron is himself of German race, his conduct presents no appearance of design, how much less of conspiracy! Doubtless certain journals will so attempt to twist it; but to the candid it will seem no more than the distracted evolutions of a weak man in a series of panics. Such is a rough outline of the events to which I would fain direct the attention of the public at home, in the States, and still more in Germany. It has for me but one essential point. Budgets have been called in question, and officials publicly taken the pet before now. But the dynamite scandal is unique. If it be unfounded, our complaint is already grave. It was the President's duty, as a man and as a responsible official, to have given it instant and direct denial: and since he neither did so of his own motion, nor consented to do so on our repeated instances, he has shown that he neither understands nor yet is willing to be taught the condition of this country. From what I have been able to collect, Samoans are indignant because the thing was decided between the King and President without consultation with the native Parliament. The thing itself, it does not enter in their thoughts to call in question; they receive gratefully a fresh lesson in civilised methods and civilised justice; a day may come when they shall put that lesson in practice for themselves; and if they are then decried for their barbarity--as they will surely be--and punished for it, as is highly probable, I will ask candid people what they are to think? "How?" they will say. "Your own white people intended to do this, and you said nothing. We do it, and you call us treacherous savages!" This is to suppose the story false. Suppose it true, however; still more, suppose the plan had been carried out. Suppose these chiefs to have surrendered to the white man's justice, administered or not by a brown Judge; suppose them tried, condemned, confined in that snare of a gaol, and some fine night their mangled limbs cast in the faces of their countrymen: I leave others to predict the consequences of such an object-lesson in the arts of peace and the administration of the law. The Samoans are a mild race, but their patience is in some points limited. Under Captain Brandeis a single skirmish and the death of a few youths sufficed to kindle an enduring war and bring on the ruin of the Government. The residents have no desire for war, and they deprecate altogether a war embittered from the beginning by atrocities. Nor can they think the stakes at all equal between themselves and Baron Senfft. He has nothing to lose but a situation; he is here in what he stands in; he can swarm to-morrow on board a war-ship and be off. But the residents have some of them sunk capital on these shores; some of them are involved in extended affairs; they are tied to the stake, and they protest against being plunged into war by the violence, and having that war rendered more implacable by the preliminary cruelties, of a white official. I leave entirely upon one side all questions of morality; but there is still one point of expediency on which I must touch. The old native Government (which was at least cheap) failed to enforce the law, and fell, in consequence, into the manifold troubles which have made the name of Samoa famous. The enforcement of the law--that was what was required, that was the salvation looked for. And here we have a Government at a high figure, and it cannot defend its own gaol, and can find no better remedy than to assassinate its prisoners. What we have bought at this enormous increase of expenditure is the change from King Log to King Stork--from the man who failed to punish petty theft to the man who plots the destruction of his own gaol and the death of his own prisoners. On the return of the Chief Justice, the matter will be brought to his attention; but the cure of our troubles must come from home; it is from the Great Powers that we look for deliverance. They sent us the President. Let them either remove the man, or see that he is stringently instructed--instructed to respect public decency, so we be no longer menaced with doings worthy of a revolutionary committee; and instructed to respect the administration of the law, so if I be fined a dollar to-morrow for fast riding in Apia street, I may not awake next morning to find my sentence increased to one of banishment or death by dynamite.--I am, Sir, your obedient servant, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--_October 14_.--I little expected fresh developments before the mail left. But the unresting President still mars the quiet of his neighbours. Even while I was writing the above lines, Apia was looking on in mere amazement on the continuation of his gambols. A white man had written to the King, and the King had answered the letter--crimes against Baron Senfft von Pilsach and (his private reading of) the Berlin Treaty. He offered to resign--I was about to say "accordingly," for the unexpected is here the normal--from the presidency of the municipal board, and to retain his position as the King's adviser. He was instructed that he must resign both, or neither; resigned both; fell out with the Consuls on details; and is now, as we are advised, seeking to resile from his resignations. Such an official I never remember to have read of, though I have seen the like, from across the footlights and the orchestra, evolving in similar figures to the strains of Offenbach. R.L.S. COPIES OF A CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN CERTAIN RESIDENTS OF APIA AND BARON SENFFT VON PILSACH. I _September 28, 1891_. BARON SENFFT VON PILSACH. Sir,--We are requested to lay the enclosed appeal before you, and to express the desire of the signatories to meet your views as to the manner of the answer. Should you prefer to reply by word of mouth, a deputation will be ready to wait upon you on Thursday, at any hour you may please to appoint. Should you prefer to reply in writing, we are asked only to impress upon you the extreme desire of the signatories that no time should be unnecessarily lost. Should you condescend in either of the ways suggested to set at rest our anxiety, we need scarce assure you that the step will be received with gratitude.--We have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servants, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. E. W. GURR. II (_Enclosed in No. I_.) The attention of the President of the Municipal Council is respectfully directed to the following rumours:-- 1. That at his suggestion, or with his authority, dynamite was purchased, or efforts were made to procure dynamite, and the use of an electrical machine was secured, or attempted to be obtained. 2. That this was for the purpose of undermining, or pretending to undermine, the gaol in which the Manono prisoners were confined. 3. That notification of this design was sent to the friends of the prisoners. 4. That a threat of blowing up the gaol and the prisoners, in the event of an attempted rescue, was made. Upon all and upon each of these points severally the white residents anxiously expect and respectfully beg information. It is suggested for the President's consideration that rumours unconnected or unexplained acquire almost the force of admitted truth. That any want of confidence between the governed and the Government must be fruitful in loss to both. That the rumours in their present form tend to damage the white races in the native mind, and to influence for the worse the manners of the Samoans. And that the President alone is in a position to deny, to explain, or to correct these rumours. Upon these grounds the undersigned ask to be excused for any informality in their address, and they hope and humbly pray that the President will accept the occasion here presented, and take early and effectual means to inform and reassure the whites, and to relieve them from possible misjudgment on the part of the Samoans. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. E.W. GURR. [_and nine other signatures_.] III _Apia, Sept. 30, 1891._ ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, ESQ., E.W. GURR, ESQ. Dear Sirs,--Thanking you for your kind letter dated 28th inst., which I received yesterday, together with the address in question, I beg to inform you that I am going to answer the address in writing as soon as possible.--I have the honour to be, dear Sirs, your obedient servant, SENFFT. IV _Apia, Oct. 2, 1891._ ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, ESQ., E. W. GURR, Esq. Gentlemen,--I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of an address without date which has been signed by you and some other foreign residents and handed to me on the 29th of September. In this address my attention is directed to some rumours, specified therein, concerning which I am informed that "upon all and upon each of these points severally the white residents anxiously expect and respectfully beg information." Generally, I beg to state that, with a view of successfully performing my official duties, I believe it is advisable for me to pay no attention to any anonymous rumour. Further, I cannot forbear expressing my astonishment that in speaking to me so seriously in the name of "the white residents" the subscribers of the address have deemed it unnecessary to acquaint me with their authorisation for doing so. This omission is by no means a mere informality. There are white residents who in my presence have commented upon the rumours in question in a manner directly opposed to the meaning of the address. This fact alone will justify me in objecting to the truth of the above-quoted statement so prominently set forth and so positively affirmed in the address. It will also justify me in abstaining from a reply to the further assertions of gentlemen who, in apostrophising me, care so little for the correctness of the facts they deal with. If, in consequence, according to the apprehensions laid down in the address, those unexplained rumours will "damage the white races in the native mind," I think the signing parties will then remember that there are public authorities in Samoa officially and especially charged with the protection of "the white residents." If they present to them their complaints and their wishes I have no doubt by so doing they will get all information they may require. I ask you, gentlemen, to communicate this answer to the parties having signed the address in question.--I have the honour to be, Gentlemen, your obedient servant, FRHR. SENFFT VON PILSACH. V _Oct. 9, 1891_. The signatories of the address are in receipt of the President's favour under date October 2. Much of his answer is occupied in dealing with a point foreign to the matter in hand, and in itself surprising to the signatories. Their address was an appeal for information on specific points and an appeal from specific persons, who correctly described themselves as "white residents," "the undersigned," and in the accompanying letter as the "signatories." They were so far from seeking to collect evidence in private that they applied frankly and directly to the person accused for explanation; and so far from seeking to multiply signatures or promote scandal that they kept the paper strictly to themselves. They see with regret that the President has failed to appreciate this delicacy. They see with sorrow and surprise that, in answer to a communication which they believe to have been temperately and courteously worded, the President has thought fit to make an imputation on their honesty. The trick of which he would seem to accuse them would have been useless, and even silly, if attempted; and on a candid re-examination of the address and the accompanying letter, the President will doubtless see fit to recall the imputation. By way of answer to the questions asked the signatories can find nothing but what seems to be a recommendation to them to apply to their Consuls for "protection." It was not protection they asked, but information. It was not a sense of fear that moved them, but a sense of shame. It is their misfortune that they cannot address the President in his own language, or they would not now require to explain that the words "tend to damage the white races in the native mind," quoted and misapplied by the President, do not express any fear of suffering by the hands of the Samoans, but in their good opinion, and were not the expression of any concern for the duration of peace, but of a sense of shame under what they conceived to be disgraceful imputations. While agreeing generally with the President's expressed sentiment as to "anonymous rumours," they feel that a line has to be drawn. Certain rumours they would not suffer to remain uncontradicted for an hour. It was natural, therefore, that when they heard a man of their own white race accused of conspiring to blow up the gaol and the prisoners who were there under the safeguard of his honour, they should attribute to the accused a similar impatience to be justified; and it is with a sense of painful surprise that they find themselves to have been mistaken. (_Signatures as to Number II_.) VI _Apia, October 9, 1891_. Gentlemen,--Being in receipt of your communication under to-day's date, I have the honour to inform you that I have undertaken the re-examination of your first address, which you believe would induce me to recall the answer I have given on the 2nd inst. From this re-examination I have learned again that your appeal begins with the following statement:-- "Upon all and upon each of these points severally the white residents anxiously expect and respectfully beg information." I have called this statement a seriously speaking to me in the name of the white residents, and I have objected to the truth of that statement. If after a "candid re-examination" of the matter from your part you may refute me in either or both points, I shall be glad, indeed, in recalling my answer. At present I beg to say that I see no reason for your supposing I misunderstood your expression of damaging the white races in the native mind, unless you have no other notion of protection than that applying to the body. Concerning the assertion contained in the last clause of your second address, that five Samoan prisoners having been sentenced by a Samoan Judge for destroying houses were in the gaol of the Samoan Government "under the safeguard of my honour," I ask for your permission to recommend this statement also and especially to your re-examination.--I have the honour to be, Gentlemen, your obedient servant, FRHR. SENFFT VON PILSACH. III TO THE EDITOR OF THE "TIMES" _Samoa, April 9, 1892._ Sir,--A sketch of our latest difficulty in Samoa will be interesting, at least to lawyers. In the Berlin General Act there is one point on which, from the earliest moment, volunteer interpreters have been divided. The revenue arising from the customs was held by one party to belong to the Samoan Government, by another to the municipality; and the dispute was at last decided in favour of the municipality by Mr. Cedercrantz, Chief Justice. The decision was not given in writing; but it was reported by at least one of the Consuls to his Government, it was of public notoriety, it is not denied, and it was at once implicitly acted on by the parties. Before that decision, the revenue from customs was suffered to accumulate; ever since, to the knowledge of the Chief Justice, and with the daily countenance of the President, it has been received, administered, and spent by the municipality. It is the function of the Chief Justice to interpret the Berlin Act; its sense was thus supposed to be established beyond cavil; those who were dissatisfied with the result conceived their only recourse lay in a prayer to the Powers to have the treaty altered; and such a prayer was, but the other day, proposed, supported, and finally negatived, in a public meeting. About a year has gone by since the decision, and the state of the Samoan Government has been daily growing more precarious. Taxes have not been paid, and the Government has not ventured to enforce them. Fresh taxes have fallen due, and the Government has not ventured to call for them. Salaries were running on, and that of the Chief Justice alone amounts to a considerable figure for these islands; the coffers had fallen low, at last it is believed they were quite empty, no resource seemed left, and bystanders waited with a smiling curiosity for the wheels to stop. I should add, to explain the epithet "smiling," that the Government has proved a still-born child; and except for some spasmodic movements which I have already made the subject of remark in your columns, it may be said to have done nothing but pay salaries. In this state of matters, on March 28, the President of the Council, Baron Senfft von Pilsach, was suddenly and privately supplied by Mr. Cedercrantz with a written judgment, reversing the verbal and public decision of a year before. By what powers of law was this result attained? And how was the point brought again before his Honour? I feel I shall here strain the credulity of your readers, but our authority is the President in person. The suit was brought by himself in his capacity (perhaps an imaginary one) of King's adviser; it was defended by himself in his capacity of President of the Council, no notice had been given, the parties were not summoned, they were advised neither of the trial nor the judgment; so far as can be learned two persons only met and parted--the first was the plaintiff and defendant rolled in one, the other was a Judge who had decided black a year ago, and had now intimated a modest willingness to decide white. But it is possible to follow more closely these original proceedings. Baron von Pilsach sat down (he told us) in his capacity of adviser to the King, and wrote to himself, in his capacity of President of the Council, an eloquent letter of reprimand three pages long; an unknown English artist clothed it for him in good language; and nothing remained but to have it signed by King Malietoa, to whom it was attributed. "So long as he knows how to sign!"--a white official is said thus to have summed up, with a shrug, the qualifications necessary in a Samoan king. It was signed accordingly, though whether the King knew what he was signing is matter of debate; and thus regularised, it was forwarded to the Chief Justice enclosed in a letter of adhesion from the President. Such as they were, these letters appear to have been the pleadings on which the Chief Justice proceeded; such as they were, they seem to have been the documents in this unusual case. Suppose an unfortunate error to have been made, suppose a reversal of the Court's finding and the year's policy to have become immediately needful, wisdom would indicate an extreme frankness of demeanour. And our two officials preferred a policy of irritating dissimulation. While the revolution was being prepared behind the curtain, the President was holding night sessions of the municipal council. What was the business? No other than to prepare an ordinance regulating those very customs which he was secretly conspiring to withdraw from their control. And it was a piece of duplicity of a similar nature which first awoke the echoes of Apia by its miscarriage. The council had sent up for the approval of the Consular Board a project of several bridges, one of which, that of the Vaisingano, was of chief importance to the town. To sanction so much fresh expense, at the very moment when, to his secret knowledge, the municipality was to be left bare of funds, appeared to one of the Consuls an unworthy act; and the proposal was accordingly disallowed. The people of Apia are extremely swift to guess. No sooner was the Vaisingano bridge denied them than they leaped within a measurable distance of the truth. It was remembered that the Chief Justice had but recently (this time by a decision regularly obtained) placed the municipal funds at the President's mercy; talk ran high of collusion between the two officials; it was rumoured the safe had been already secretly drawn upon; the newspaper being at this juncture suddenly and rather mysteriously sold, it was rumoured it had been bought for the officials with municipal money, and the Apians crowded in consequence to the municipal meeting on April 1, with minds already heated. The President came on his side armed with the secret judgment; and the hour being now come, he unveiled his work of art to the municipal councillors. On the strength of the Chief Justice's decision, to his knowledge, and with the daily countenance of the President, they had for twelve months received and expended the revenue from customs. They learned now that this was wrong; they learned not only that they were to receive no more, but that they must refund what they had already spent; and the total sum amounting to about $25,000, and there being less than $20,000 in the treasury, they learned that they were bankrupt. And with the next breath the President reassured them; time was to be given to these miserable debtors, and the King in his clemency would even advance them from their own safe--now theirs no longer--a loan of $3,000 against current expenses. If the municipal council of Apia be far from an ideal body, at least it makes roads and builds bridges, at least it does something to justify its existence and reconcile the ratepayer to the rates. This was to cease: all the funds husbanded for this end were to be transferred to the Government at Mulinuu, which has never done anything to mention but pay salaries, and of which men have long ceased to expect anything else but that it shall continue to pay salaries till it die of inanition. Let us suppose this raid on the municipal treasury to have been just and needful. It is plain, even if introduced in the most conciliatory manner, it could never have been welcome. And, as it was, the sting was in the manner--in the secrecy and the surprise, in the dissimulation, the dissonant decisions, the appearance of collusion between the officials, and the offer of a loan too small to help. Bitter words were spoken at the council-table; the public joined with shouts; it was openly proposed to overpower the President and seize the treasury key. Baron von Pilsach possesses the redeeming rudimentary virtue of courage. It required courage to come at all on such an errand to those he had deceived; and amidst violent voices and menacing hands he displayed a constancy worthy of a better cause. The council broke tumultuously up; the inhabitants crowded to a public meeting; the Consuls, acquainted with the alarming effervescency of feeling, communicated their willingness to meet the municipal councillors and arrange a compromise; and the inhabitants renewed by acclamation the mandate of their representatives. The same night these sat in council with the Consular Board, and a _modus vivendi_ was agreed upon, which was rejected the next morning by the President. The representations of the Consuls had, however, their effect; and when the council met again on April 6, Baron von Pilsach was found to have entirely modified his attitude. The bridge over the Vaisingano was conceded, the sum of $3,000 offered to the council was increased to $9,000, about one-half of the existing funds; the Samoan Government, which was to profit by the customs, now agreed to bear the expenses of collection; the President, while refusing to be limited to a specific figure, promised an anxious parsimony in the Government expenditure, admitted his recent conduct had been of a nature to irritate the councillors, and frankly proposed it should be brought under the notice of the Powers. I should not be a fair reporter if I did not praise his bearing. In the midst of men whom he had grossly deceived, and who had recently insulted him in return, he behaved himself with tact and temper. And largely in consequence his _modus vivendi_ was accepted under protest, and the matter in dispute referred without discussion to the Powers. I would like to refer for one moment to my former letter. The Manono prisoners were solemnly sentenced to six months' imprisonment; and, by some unexplained and secret process, the sentence was increased to one of banishment. The fact seems to have rather amused the Governments at home. It did not at all amuse us here on the spot. But we sought consolation by remembering that the President was a layman, and the Chief Justice had left the islands but the day before. Let Mr. Cedercrantz return, we thought, and Arthur would be come again. Well, Arthur is come. And now we begin to think he was perhaps an approving, if an absent, party to the scandal. For do we not find, in the case of the municipal treasury, the same disquieting features? A decision is publicly delivered, it is acted on for a year, and by some secret and inexplicable process we find it suddenly reversed. We are supposed to be governed by English law. Is this English law? Is it a law at all? Does it permit a state of society in which a citizen can live and act with confidence? And when we are asked by natives to explain these peculiarities of white man's government and white man's justice, in what form of words are we to answer? _April_ 12. Fresh news reaches me; I have once again to admire the accuracy of rumour in Apia, and that which I had passed over with a reference becomes the head and front of our contention. The _Samoa Times_ was nominally purchased by a gentleman who, whatever be his other recommendations, was notoriously ill off. There was paid down for it £600 in gold, a huge sum of ready money for Apia, above all in gold, and all men wondered where it came from. It is this which has been discovered. The wrapper of each rouleau was found to be signed by Mr. Martin, collector for the municipality as well as for the Samoan Government, and countersigned by Mr. Savile, his assistant. In other words, the money had left either the municipal or the Government safe. The position of the President is thus extremely exposed. His accounts up to January 1 are in the hands of auditors. The next term of March 31 is already past, and although the natural course has been repeatedly suggested to him, he has never yet permitted the verification of the balance in his safe. The case would appear less strong against the Chief Justice. Yet a month has not elapsed since he placed the funds at the disposal of the President, on the avowed ground that the population of Apia was unfit to be intrusted with its own affairs. And the very week of the purchase he reversed his own previous decision and liberated his colleague from the last remaining vestige of control. Beyond the extent of these judgments, I doubt if this astute personage will be found to have committed himself in black and white; and the more foolhardy President may thus be left in the top of the breach alone. Let it be explained or apportioned as it may, this additional scandal is felt to have overfilled the measure. It may be argued that the President has great tact and the Chief Justice a fund of philosophy. Give us instead a judge who shall proceed according to the forms of justice, and a treasurer who shall permit the verification of his balances. Surely there can be found among the millions of Europe two frank and honest men, one of whom shall be acquainted with English law, and the other possess the ordinary virtues of a clerk, over whose heads, in the exercise of their duties, six months may occasionally pass without painful disclosures and dangerous scandals; who shall not weary us with their surprises and intrigues; who shall not amaze us with their lack of penetration; who shall not, in the hour of their destitution, seem to have diverted £600 of public money for the purchase of an inconsiderable sheet, or at a time when eight provinces of discontented natives threaten at any moment to sweep their ineffective Government into the sea to have sought safety and strength in gagging the local Press of Apia. If it be otherwise--if we cannot be relieved, if the Powers are satisfied with the conduct of Mr. Cedercrantz and Baron Senfft von Pilsach; if these were sent here with the understanding that they should secretly purchase, perhaps privately edit, a little sheet of two pages, issued from a crazy wooden building at the mission gate; if it were, indeed, intended that, for this important end, they should divert (as it seems they have done) public funds and affront all the forms of law--we whites can only bow the head. We are here quite helpless. If we would complain of Baron Pilsach, it can only be to Mr. Cedercrantz; if we would complain of Mr. Cedercrantz, and the Powers will not hear us, the circle is complete. A nightly guard surrounds and protects their place of residence, while the house of the King is cynically left without the pickets. Secure from interference, one utters the voice of the law, the other moves the hands of authority; and now they seem to have sequestered in the course of a single week the only available funds and the only existing paper in the islands. But there is one thing they forget. It is not the whites who menace the duration of their Government, and it is only the whites who read the newspaper. Mataafa sits hard by in his armed camp and sees. He sees the weakness, he counts the scandals of their Government. He sees his rival and "brother" sitting disconsidered at their doors, like Lazarus before the house of Dives, and, if he is not very fond of his "brother," he is very scrupulous of native dignities. He has seen his friends menaced with midnight destruction in the Government gaol, and deported without form of law. He is not himself a talker, and his thoughts are hid from us; but what is said by his more hasty partisans we know. On March 29, the day after the Chief Justice signed the secret judgment, three days before it was made public, and while the purchase of the newspaper was yet in treaty, a native orator stood up in an assembly. "Who asked the Great Powers to make laws for us; to bring strangers here to rule us?" he cried. "We want no white officials to bind us in the bondage of taxation." Here is the changed spirit which these gentlemen have produced by a misgovernment of fifteen months. Here is their peril, which no purchase of newspapers and no subsequent editorial suppressions can avert. It may be asked if it be still time to do anything. It is, indeed, already late; and these gentlemen, arriving in a golden moment, have fatally squandered opportunity and perhaps fatally damaged white prestige. Even the whites themselves they have not only embittered, but corrupted. We were pained the other day when our municipal councillors refused, by a majority, to make the production of invoices obligatory at the Custom-house. Yet who shall blame them, when the Chief Justice, with a smallness of rapacity at which all men wondered, refused to pay, and I believe, still withholds the duties on his imports? He was above the law, being the head of it; and this was how he preached by example. He refused to pay his customs; the white councillors, following in his wake, refuse to take measures to enforce them against others; and the natives, following in his wake, refuse to pay their taxes. These taxes it may, perhaps, be never possible to raise again directly. Taxes have never been popular in Samoa; yet in the golden moment when this Government began its course, a majority of the Samoans paid them. Every province should have seen some part of that money expended in its bounds; every nerve should have been strained to interest and gratify the natives in the manner of its expenditure. It has been spent instead on Mulinuu, to pay four white officials, two of whom came in the suite of the Chief Justice, and to build a so-called Government House, in which the President resides, and the very name of taxes is become abhorrent. What can still be done, and what must be done immediately, is to give us a new Chief Justice--a lawyer, a man of honour, a man who will not commit himself to one side, whether in politics or in private causes, and who shall not have the appearance of trying to coin money at every joint of our affairs. So much the better if he be a man of talent, but we do not ask so much. With an ordinary appreciation of law, an ordinary discretion and ordinary generosity, he may still, in the course of time, and with good fortune, restore confidence and repair the breaches in the prestige of the whites. As for the President there is much discussion. Some think the office is superfluous, still more the salary to be excessive; some regard the present man, who is young and personally pleasing, as a tool and scapegoat for another, and these are tempted to suppose that, with a new and firm Chief Justice, he might yet redeem his character. He would require at least to clear himself of the affair of the rouleaux, or all would be against him.--I am. Sir, your obedient servant, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. IV TO THE EDITOR OF THE "TIMES" _Samoa, June_ 22, 1892. Sir,--I read in a New Zealand paper that you published my last with misgiving. The writer then goes on to remind me that I am a novelist, and to bid me return to my romances and leave the affairs of Samoa to sub-editors in distant quarters of the world. "We, in common with other journals, have correspondents in Samoa," he complains, "and yet we have no news from them of the curious conspiracy which Mr. Stevenson appears to have unearthed, and which, if it had any real existence, would be known to everybody on the island." As this is the only voice which has yet reached me from beyond the seas, I am constrained to make some answer. But it must not be supposed that, though you may perhaps have been alone to publish, I have been alone to write. The same story is now in the hands of the three Governments from their respective Consuls. Not only so, but the complaint of the municipal council, drawn by two able solicitors, has been likewise laid before them. This at least is public, and I may say notorious. The solicitors were authorised to proceed with their task at a public meeting. The President (for I was there and heard him) approved the step, though he refrained from voting. But he seems to have entertained a hope of burking, or, at least, indefinitely postponing, the whole business, and, when the meeting was over, and its proceedings had been approved (as is necessary) by the Consular Board, he neglected to notify the two gentlemen appointed of that approval. In a large city the trick might have succeeded for a time; in a village like Apia, where all news leaks out and the King meets the cobbler daily, it did no more than to advertise his own artfulness. And the next he learned, the case for the municipal council had been prepared, approved by the Consuls, and despatched to the Great Powers. I am accustomed to have my word doubted in this matter, and must here look to have it doubted once again. But the fact is certain. The two solicitors (Messrs. Carruthers and Cooper) were actually cited to appear before the Chief Justice in the Supreme Court. I have seen the summons, and the summons was the first and last of this State trial. The proceeding, instituted in an hour of temper, was, in a moment of reaction, allowed to drop. About the same date a final blow befell the Government of Mulinuu. Let me remind you, sir, of the situation. The funds of the municipality had been suddenly seized, on what appeared a collusive judgment, by the bankrupt Government of Mulinuu. The paper, the organ of opposition, was bought by a man of straw; and it was found the purchase-money had been paid in rouleaux from the Government safes. The Government consisted of two men. One, the President and treasurer, had a ready means to clear himself and dispose for ever of the scandal--that means, apart from any scandal, was his mere, immediate duty,--viz., to have his balance verified. And he has refused to do so, and he still refuses. But the other, though he sits abstruse, must not think to escape his share of blame. He holds a high situation; he is our chief magistrate, he has heard this miserable tale of the rouleaux, at which the Consuls looked so black, and why has he done nothing? When he found that the case against himself and his colleague had gone to the three Powers a little of the suddenest, he could launch summonses (which it seems he was afterwards glad to disavow) against Messrs. Cooper and Carruthers. But then, when the whole island murmured--then, when a large sum which could be traced to the Government treasuries was found figuring in the hands of a man of straw--where were his thunderbolts then? For more than a month the scandal has hung black about his colleague; for more than a month he has sat inert and silent; for more than a month, in consequence, the last spark of trust in him has quite died out. In was in these circumstances that the Government of Mulinuu approached the municipal council with a proposal to levy fresh taxes from the whites. It was in these circumstances that the municipal council answered, No. Public works have ceased, the destination of public moneys is kept secret, and the municipal council resolved to stop supplies. At this, it seems, the Government awoke to a sense of their position. The natives had long ceased to pay them; now the whites had followed suit. Destitution had succeeded to embarrassment. And they made haste to join with themselves another who did not share in their unpopularity. This gentleman, Mr. Thomas Maben, Government surveyor, is himself deservedly popular, and the office created for him, that of Secretary of State, is one in which, under happier auspices, he might accomplish much. He is promised a free hand; he has succeeded to, and is to exercise entirely, those vague functions claimed by the President under his style of adviser to the King. It will be well if it is found to be so in the field of practice. It will be well if Mr. Maben find any funds left for his not exorbitant salary. It would doubtless have been better, in this day of their destitution and in the midst of growing Samoan murmurs against the high salaries of whites, if the Government could have fallen on some expedient which did not imply another. And there is a question one would fain have answered. The President claims to hold two offices--that of adviser to the King, that of President of the Municipal Council. A year ago, in the time of the dynamite affair, he proposed to resign the second and retain his whole emoluments as adviser to the King. He has now practically resigned the first; and we wish to know if he now proposes to retain his entire salary as President of the Council.--I am, etc., ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. V TO THE EDITOR OF THE "TIMES" _Apia, July_ 19, 1892. Sir,--I am at last in receipt of your article upon my letter. It was as I supposed; you had a difficulty in believing the events recorded; and, to my great satisfaction, you suggest an inquiry. You observe the marks of passion in my letter, or so it seems to you. But your summary shows me that I have not failed to communicate with a sufficient clearness the facts alleged. Passion may have seemed to burn in my words: it has not at least impaired my ability to record with precision a plain tale. The "cold language" of Consular reports (which you say you would prefer) is doubtless to be had upon inquiry in the proper quarter; I make bold to say it will be found to bear me out. Of the law case for the municipality I can speak with more assurance; for, since it was sent, I have been shown a copy. Its language is admirably cold, yet it tells (it is possible in a much better dialect) the same remarkable story. But all these corroborations sleep in official keeping; and, thanks to the generosity with which you have admitted me to your columns, I stand alone before the public. It is my prayer that this may cease as soon as possible. There is other evidence gone home; let that be produced. Or let us have (as you propose) an inquiry; give to the Chief Justice and the President an opportunity to clear their characters, and to myself that liberty (which I am so often requested to take) of returning to my private business.--I am, Sir, your obedient servant, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. VI TO THE EDITOR OF THE "TIMES" _Apia, September_ 14, 1892. Sir,--The Peninsula of Mulinuu was claimed by the German firm; and in case their claim should be found good, they had granted to the Samoan Government an option to buy at a certain figure. Hereon stand the houses of our officials, in particular that of the Chief Justice. It has long been a problem here whether this gentleman paid any rent, and the problem is now solved; the Chief Justice of Samoa was a squatter. On the ground that the Government was about to purchase the peninsula, he occupied a house; on the ground that the Germans were about to sell it, he refused to pay them any rent. The firm seemed to have no remedy but to summon the squatter before himself, and hear over again from the official what they had heard already from the disastrous tenant. But even in Samoa an ingenious man, inspired by annoyance, may find means of self-protection. The house was no part of the land, nor included in the option; the firm put it up for sale; and the Government, under pain of seeing the Chief Justice houseless, was obliged to buy it. In the meanwhile the German claim to Mulinuu was passed by the Land Commission and sent on to the Chief Justice on the 17th of May. He ended by confirming the report; but though his judgment bears date the 9th of August, it was not made public till the 15th. So far as we are aware, and certainly so far as Samoa has profited by his labours, his Honour may be said to have had nothing else to do but to attend to this one piece of business; he was being paid to do so at the rate of £100 a month; and it took him ninety days, or about as long as it took Napoleon to recapture and to lose again his empire. But better late than never; and the Germans, rejoicing in the decision, summoned the Government to complete the purchase or to waive their option. There was again a delay in answering, for the policy of all parts of this extraordinary Government is on one model; and when the answer came it was only to announce a fresh deception. The German claim had passed the Land Commission and the Supreme Court, it was good against objections, but it appeared it was not yet good for registration, and must still be resurveyed by a "Government surveyor." The option thus continues to brood over the land of Mulinuu, the Government to squat there without payment, and the German firm to stand helpless and dispossessed. What can they do? Their adversary is their only judge. I hear it calculated that the present state of matters may be yet spun out for months, at the end of which period there must come at last a day of reckoning; and the purchase-money will have to be found or the option to be waived and the Government to flit elsewhere. As for the question of arrears of rent, it will be in judicious hands, and his Honour may be trusted to deal with it in a manner suitable to the previous history of the case. But why (it will be asked) spin out by these excessive methods a thread of such tenuity? Why go to such lengths for four months longer of fallacious solvency? I expect not to be believed, but I think the Government still hopes. A war-ship, under a hot-headed captain, might be decoyed into hostilities; the taxes might begin to come in again; the three Powers might become otherwise engaged and the little stage of Samoa escape observation--indeed, I know not what they hope, but they hope something. There lives on in their breasts a remainder coal of ambition still unquenched. Or it is only so that I can explain a late astonishing sally of his Honour's. In a long and elaborate judgment he has pared the nails, and indeed removed the fingers, of his only rival, the municipal magistrate. For eighteen months he has seen the lower Court crowded with affairs, the while his own stood unfrequented like an obsolete churchyard. He may have remarked with envy many hundred cases passing through his rival's hands, cases of assault, cases of larceny, ranging in the last four months from 2s. up to £1 12s.; or he may have viewed with displeasure that despatch of business which was characteristic of the magistrate, Mr. Cooper. An end, at least, has been made of these abuses. Mr. Cooper is henceforth to draw his salary for the _minimum_ of public service; and all larcenies and assaults, however trivial, must go, according to the nationality of those concerned, before the Consular or the Supreme Courts. To this portentous judgment there are two sides--a practical and legal. And first as to the practical. For every blow struck or shilling stolen the parties must now march out to Mulinuu and place themselves at the mercy of a Court, which if Hamlet had known, he would have referred with more emotion to the law's delays. It is feared they will not do so, and that crime will go on in consequence unpunished, and increase by indulgence. But this is nothing. The Court of the municipal magistrate was a convenient common-ground and clearing-house for our manifold nationalities. It has now been, for all purpose of serious utility, abolished, and the result is distraction. There was a recent trumpery case, heard by Mr. Cooper amid shouts of mirth. It resolved itself (if I remember rightly) into three charges of assault with counter-charges, and three of abusive language with the same; and the parties represented only two nationalities--a small allowance for Apia. Yet in our new world, since the Chief Justice's decision, this vulgar shindy would have split up into six several suits before three different Courts; the charges must have been heard by one Judge, the counter-charges by another; the whole nauseous evidence six times repeated, and the lawyers six times fee'd. Remains the legal argument. His Honour admits the municipality to be invested "with such legislative powers as generally constitute a police jurisdiction"; he does not deny the municipality is empowered to take steps for the protection of the person, and it was argued this implied a jurisdiction in cases of assault. But this argument (observes his Honour) "proves too much, and consequently nothing. For like reasons the municipal council should have power to provide for the punishment of all felonies against the person, and I suppose the property as well." And, filled with a just sense that a merely police jurisdiction should be limited, he limits it with a vengeance by the exclusion of all assaults and all larcenies. A pity he had not looked into the Berlin Act! He would have found it already limited there by the same power which called it into being--limited to fines not exceeding $200 and imprisonment not extending beyond 180 days. Nay, and I think he might have even reasoned from this discovery that he was himself somewhat in error. For, assaults and larcenies being excluded, what kind of enormity is that which is to be visited with a fine of £40 or an imprisonment of half a year? It is perhaps childish to pursue further this childish controversialist. But there is one passage, if he had dipped into the Berlin Act, that well might have arrested his attention: that in which he is himself empowered to deal with "crimes and offences,... subject, however, to the provisions defining the jurisdiction of the municipal magistrate of Apia." I trust, sir, this is the last time I shall have to trouble you with these twopenny concerns. But until some step is taken by the three Powers, or until I have quite exhausted your indulgence, I shall continue to report our scandals as they arise. Once more, one thing or other: Either what I write is false, and I should be chastised as a calumniator; or else it is true, and these officials are unfit for their position.--I am, etc., ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--The mail is already closed when I receive at last decisive confirmation of the purchase of the _Samoa Times_ by the Samoan Government. It has never been denied; it is now admitted. The paper which they bought so recently, they are already trying to sell; and have received and refused an offer of £150 for what they bought for upwards of £600. Surely we may now demand the attention of the three Powers. VII TO THE EDITOR OF THE "PALL MALL GAZETTE" I _September_ 4, 1893. In June it became clear that the King's Government was weary of waiting upon Europe, as it had been clear long before that Europe would do nothing. The last commentary on the Berlin Act was read. Malietoa Laupepa had been put in _ex auctoritate_ by the Powers; the Powers would not support him even by a show of strength, and there was nothing left but to fall back on an "Election according to the Laws and Customs of Samoa"--by arbitrament of rifle-bullets and blackened faces. Instantly heaven was darkened by a brood of rumours, random calumnies, and idle tales. As we rode, late at night, through the hamlet near my house, we saw the fires lighted in the houses, and eager talkers discussing the last report. The King was sick; he was dying; he was perfectly well; he was seen riding furiously by night in the back parts of Apia, and covering his face as he rode. Mataafa was in favour with the Germans; he was to be made a German king; he was secure of the support of all Samoa; he had no following whatsoever. The name of every chief and village (with many that were new to the hearer) came up in turn, to be dubbed Laupepa, or Mataafa, or both at the same time, or neither. Dr. George Brown, the missionary, had just completed a tour of the islands. There are few men in the world with a more mature knowledge of native character, and I applied to him eagerly for an estimate of the relative forces. "When the first shot is fired, and not before," said he, "you will know who is who." The event has shown that he might have gone yet further; for even after shots were fired and men slain, an important province was still hesitating and trimming. Mataafa lay in Malie. He had an armed picket at a ford some two miles from Apia, where they sat in a prodigious state of vigilance and glee; and his whole troop, although not above five hundred strong, appeared animated with the most warlike spirit. For himself, he waited, as he had waited for two years; wrote eloquent letters, the time to answer which was quite gone by; and looked on while his enemies painfully collected their forces. Doubtless to the last he was assured and deceived by vain promises of help. The process of gathering a royal army in Samoa is cumbrous and dilatory in the extreme. There is here none of the expedition of the fiery cross and the bale-fire; but every step is diplomatic. Each village, with a great expense of eloquence, has to be wiled with promises and spurred by threats, and the greater chieftains make stipulations ere they will march. Tamasese, son to the late German puppet, and heir of his ambitions, demanded the vice-kingship as the price of his accession, though I am assured that he demanded it in vain. The various provinces returned various and unsatisfactory answers. Atua was off and on; Tuamasaga was divided; Tutuila recalcitrant; and for long the King sat almost solitary under the windy palms of Mulinuu. It seemed indeed as if the war was off, and the whole archipelago unanimous (in the native phrase) to sit still and plant taro. But at last, in the first days of July, Atua began to come in. Boats arrived, thirty and fifty strong, a drum and a very ill-played bugle giving time to the oarsmen, the whole crew uttering at intervals a savage howl; and on the decked fore-sheets of the boat the village champion, frantically capering and dancing. Parties were to be seen encamped in palm-groves with their rifles stacked. The shops were emptied of red handkerchiefs, the rallying sign, or (as a man might say) the uniform of the Royal army. There was spirit shown; troops of handsome lads marched in a right manly fashion, with their guns on their shoulders, to the music of the drum and the bugle or the tin-whistle. From a hamlet close to my own doors a contingent of six men marched out. Their leader's kit contained one stick of tobacco, four boxes of matches, and the inevitable red handkerchief; in his case it was of silk, for he had come late to the purchasing, and the commoner materials were exhausted. This childish band of braves marched one afternoon to a neighbouring hill, and the same night returned to their houses, on the ground that it was "uncomfortable" in the bush. An excellent old fellow, who had had enough of war in many campaigns, took refuge in my service from the conscription, but in vain. The village had decided no warrior might hang back. One summoner arrived; and then followed some negotiations--I have no authority to say what: enough that the messenger departed and our friend remained. But, alas! a second envoy followed and proved to be of sterner composition; and with a basket full of food, kava, and tobacco, the reluctant hero proceeded to the wars. I am sure they had few handsomer soldiers, if, perhaps, some that were more willing. And he would have been better to be armed. His gun--but in Mr. Kipling's pleasant catchword, that is another story. War, to the Samoan of mature years, is often an unpleasant necessity. To the young boy it is a heaven of immediate pleasures, as well as an opportunity of ultimate glory. Women march with the troops--even the Taupo-sa, or sacred maid of the village, accompanies her father in the field to carry cartridges, and bring him water to drink,--and their bright eyes are ready to "rain influence" and reward valour. To what grim deeds this practice may conduct I shall have to say later on. In the rally of their arms, it is at least wholly pretty; and I have one pleasant picture of a war-party marching out; the men armed and boastful, their heads bound with the red handkerchief, their faces blacked--and two girls marching in their midst under European parasols. On Saturday, July 8th, by the early morning, the troops began to file westward from Apia, and about noon found found themselves face to face with the lines of Mataafa in the German plantation of Vaitele. The armies immediately fraternised; kava was made by the ladies, as who should say tea, at home, and partaken of by the braves with many truculent expressions. One chief on the King's side, revolted by the extent of these familiarities, began to beat his followers with a staff. But both parties were still intermingled between the lines, and the chiefs on either side were conversing, and even embracing, at the moment, when an accidental, or perhaps a treacherous, shot precipitated the engagement. I cannot find there was any decisive difference in the numbers actually under fire; but the Mataafas appear to have been ill posted and ill led. Twice their flank was turned, their line enfiladed, and themselves driven with the loss of about thirty, from two successive cattle walls. A third wall afforded them a more effectual shelter, and night closed on the field of battle without further advantage. All night the Royal troops hailed volleys of bullets at this obstacle. With the earliest light, a charge proved it to be quite deserted, and from further down the coast smoke was seen rising from the houses of Malie. Mataafa had precipitately fled, destroying behind him the village, which, for two years, he had been raising and beautifying. So much was accomplished: what was to follow? Mataafa took refuge in Manono, and cast up forts. His enemies, far from following up this advantage, held _fonos_ and made speeches and found fault. I believe the majority of the King's army had marched in a state of continuous indecision, and maintaining an attitude of impartiality more to be admired in the cabinet of the philosopher than in the field of war. It is certain at least that only one province has as yet fired a shot for Malietoa Laupepa. The valour of the Tuamasaga was sufficient and prevailed. But Atua was in the rear, and has as yet done nothing. As for the men of Crana, so far from carrying out the plan agreed upon, and blocking the men of Malie, on the morning of the 8th, they were entertaining an embassy from Mataafa, and they suffered his fleet of boats to escape without a shot through certain dangerous narrows of the lagoon, and the chief himself to pass on foot and unmolested along the whole foreshore of their province. No adequate excuse has been made for this half-heartedness--or treachery. It was a piece of the whole which was a specimen. There are too many strings in a Samoan intrigue for the merely European mind to follow, and the desire to serve upon both sides, and keep a door open for reconciliation, was manifest almost throughout. A week passed in these divided counsels. Savaii had refused to receive Mataafa--it is said they now hesitated to rise for the King, and demanded instead a _fono_ (or council) of both sides. And it seemed at least possible that the Royal army might proceed no further, and the unstable alliance be dissolved. On Sunday, the 16th, Her British Majesty's ship _Katoomba_, Captain Bickford, C.M.G., arrived in Apia with fresh orders. Had she but come ten days earlier the whole of this miserable business would have been prevented, for the three Powers were determined to maintain Malietoa Laupepa by arms, and had declared finally against Mataafa. Right or wrong, it was at least a decision, and therefore welcome. It may not be best--it was something. No honest friend to Samoa can pretend anything but relief that the three Powers should at last break their vacillating silence. It is of a piece with their whole policy in the islands that they should have hung in stays for upwards of two years--of a piece with their almost uniform ill-fortune that, eight days before their purpose was declared, war should have marked the country with burned houses and severed heads. II There is another side to the medal of Samoan warfare. So soon as an advantage is obtained, a new and (to us) horrible animal appears upon the scene--the Head Hunter. Again and again we have reasoned with our boys against this bestial practice; but reason and (upon this one point) even ridicule are vain. They admit it to be indefensible; they allege its imperative necessity. One young man, who had seen his father take a head in the late war, spoke of the scene with shuddering revolt, and yet said he must go and do likewise himself in the war which was to come. How else could a man prove he was brave? and had not every country its own customs? Accordingly, as occasion offered, these same pleasing children, who had just been drinking kava with their opponents, fell incontinently on the dead and dying, and secured their grisly trophies. It should be said, in fairness, that the Mataafas had no opportunity to take heads, but that their chief, taught by the lesson of Fangalii, had forbidden the practice. It is doubtful if he would have been obeyed, and yet his power over his people was so great that the German plantation, where they lay some time, and were at last defeated, had not to complain of the theft of a single cocoa-nut. Hateful as it must always be to mutilate and murder the disabled, there were in this day's affray in Vaitele circumstances yet more detestable. Fifteen heads were brought in all to Mulinuu. They were carried with parade in front of the fine house which our late President built for himself before he was removed. Here, on the verandah, the King sat to receive them, and utter words of course and compliment to each successful warrior. They were _spolia opima_ in the number. Leaupepe, Mataafa's nephew--or, as Samoans say, his son--had fallen by the first wall, and whether from those sentiments of kindred and friendship that so often unite the combatants in civil strife, or to mark by an unusual formality the importance of the conquest, not only his head but his mutilated body also was brought in. From the mat in which the corpse was enveloped a bloody hand protruded, and struck a chill in white eye-witnesses. It were to attribute to [Malietoa] Laupepa sentiments entirely foreign to his race and training, if we were to suppose him otherwise than gratified. But it was not so throughout. Every country has its customs, say native apologists, and one of the most decisive customs of Samoa ensures the immunity of women. They go to the front, as our women of yore went to a tournament. Bullets are blind; and they must take their risk of bullets, but of nothing else. They serve out cartridges and water; they jeer the faltering and defend the wounded. Even in this skirmish of Vaitele they distinguished themselves on either side. One dragged her skulking husband from a hole, and drove him to the front. Another, seeing her lover fall, snatched up his gun, kept the head-hunters at bay, and drew him unmutilated from the field. Such services they have been accustomed to pay for centuries; and often, in the course of centuries, a bullet or a spear must have despatched one of these warlike angels. Often enough, too, the head-hunter, springing ghoul-like on fallen bodies, must have decapitated a woman for a man. But, the case arising, there was an established etiquette. So soon as the error was discovered the head was buried, and the exploit forgotten. There had never yet, in the history of Samoa, occurred an instance in which a man had taken a woman's head and kept it and laid it at his monarch's feet. Such was the strange and horrid spectacle, which must have immediately shaken the heart of Laupepa, and has since covered the faces of his party with confusion. It is not quite certain if there were three, or only two: a recent attempt to reduce the number to one must be received with caution as an afterthought; the admissions in the beginning were too explicit, the panic of shame and fear had been too sweeping. There is scarce a woman of our native friends in Apia who can speak upon the subject without terror; scarce any man without humiliation. And the shock was increased out of measure by the fact that the head--or one of the heads--was recognised; recognised for the niece of one of the greatest of court ladies; recognised for a Taupo-sa, or sacred maid of a village from Savaii. It seemed incredible that she--who had been chosen for virtue and beauty, who went everywhere attended by the fairest maidens, and watched over by vigilant duennas, whose part it was, in holiday costume, to receive guests, to make kava, and to be the leader of the revels, should become the victim of a brutal rally in a cow-park, and have her face exposed for a trophy to the victorious king. In all this muttering of aversion and alarm, no word has been openly said. No punishment, no disgrace, has been inflicted on the perpetrators of the outrage. King, Consuls, and mission appear to have held their peace alike. I can understand a certain apathy in whites. Head-hunting, they say, is a horrid practice: and will not stop to investigate its finer shades. But the Samoan himself does not hesitate; for him the act is portentous; and if it go unpunished, and set a fashion, its consequences must be damnable. This is not a breach of a Christian virtue, of something half-learned by rote, and from foreigners, in the last thirty years. It is a flying in the face of their own native, instinctive, and traditional standard: tenfold more ominous and degrading. And, taking the matter for all in all, it seems to me that head-hunting itself should be firmly and immediately suppressed. "How else can a man prove himself to be brave?" my friend asked. But often enough these are but fraudulent trophies. On the morrow of the fight at Vaitele, an Atua man discovered a body lying in the bush: he took the head. A day or two ago a party was allowed to visit Manono. The King's troops on shore, observing them put off from the rebel island, leaped to the conclusion that this must be the wounded going to Apia, launched off at once two armed boats and overhauled the others--after heads. The glory of such exploits is not apparent; their power for degradation strikes the eyes. Lieutenant Ulfsparre, our late Swedish Chief of Police and Commander of the forces, told his men that if any of them took a head his own hand should avenge it. That was talking; I should like to see all in the same story--king, consuls, and missionaries--included. III The three Powers have at last taken hold here in Apia. But they came the day after the fair; and the immediate business on hand is very delicate. This morning, 18th, Captain Bickford, followed by two Germans, sailed for Manono. If he shall succeed in persuading Mataafa to surrender, all may be well. If he cannot, this long train of blunders may end in--what is so often the result of blundering in the field of politics--a horrid massacre. Those of us who remember the services of Mataafa, his unfailing generosity and moderation in the past, and his bereavement in the present--as well as those who are only interested in a mass of men and women, many of them our familiar friends, now pent up on an island, and beleaguered by three warships and a Samoan army--await the issue with dreadful expectation. VIII TO THE EDITOR OF THE "TIMES" _Vailima, Apia, April_ 23, 1894. Sir,--I last addressed you on the misconduct of certain officials here, and I was so far happy as to have had my facts confirmed in every particular with but one exception. That exception, the affair of the dynamite, has been secretly smuggled away; you shall look in vain in either Blue-book or White-book for any mention even of the charge; it is gone like the conjurer's orange. I might have been tempted to inquire into the reason of this conspiracy of silence, whether the idea was conceived in the bosoms of the three Powers themselves, or whether in the breasts of the three Consuls, because one of their number was directly implicated. And I might have gone on to consider the moral effect of such suppressions, and to show how very idle they were, and how very undignified, in the face of a small and compact population, where everybody sees and hears, where everybody knows, and talks, and laughs. But only a personal question remained, which I judged of no interest to the public. The essential was accomplished. Baron Senfft was gone already. Mr. Cedercrantz still lingered among us in the character (I may say) of a private citizen, his Court at last closed, only his pocket open for the receipt of his salary, representing the dignity of the Berlin Act by sitting in the wind on Mulinuu Point for several consecutive months--a curious phantom or survival of a past age. The new officials were not as yet, because they had not been created. And we fell into our old estate of government by the three Consuls, as it was in the beginning before the Berlin Act existed; as it seems it will be till the end, after the Berlin Act has been swept away. It was during the time of this triumvirate, and wholly at their instigation and under their conduct, that Mataafa was defeated, driven to Manono, and (three warships coming opportunely to hand) forced to surrender. I have been called a partisan of this chief's, and I accept the term. I thought him, on the whole, the most honest man in Samoa, not excepting white officials. I ventured to think he had been hardly used by the Treaty Powers; I venture to think so still. It was my opinion that he should have been conjoined with Malietoa as Vice-King; and I have seen no reason to change that opinion, except that the time for it is past. Mataafa has played and lost; an exile, and stripped of his titles, he walks the exiguous beach of Jaluit, sees the German flag over his head, and yearns for the land wind of Upolu. In the politics of Samoa he is no longer a factor; and it only remains to speak of the manner in which his rebellion was suppressed and punished. Deportation is, to the Samoan mind, the punishment next to death, and thirteen of the chiefs engaged were deported with their leader. Twenty-seven others were cast into the gaol. There they lie still; the Government makes almost no attempt to feed them, and they must depend on the activity of their families and the charity of pitying whites. In the meantime, these very families are overloaded with fines, the exorbitant sum of more than £6,600 having been laid on the chiefs and villages that took part with Mataafa. So far we can only complain that the punishments have been severe and the prison commissariat absent. But we have, besides, to regret the repeated scandals in connection with the conduct of the war, and we look in vain for any sign of punishment. The Consuls had to employ barbarous hands; we might expect outrages; we did expect them to be punished, or at least disowned. Thus, certain Mataafa chiefs were landed, and landed from a British man-of-war, to be shamefully abused, beaten, and struck with whips along the main street of Mulinuu. There was no punishment, there was even no inquiry; the three Consuls winked. Only one man was found honest and bold enough to open his mouth, and that was my old enemy, Mr. Cedercrantz. Walking in Mulinuu, in his character of disinterested spectator, gracefully desipient, he came across the throng of these rabblers and their victims. He had forgotten that he was an official, he remembered that he was a man. It was his last public appearance in Samoa to interfere; it was certainly his best. Again, the Government troops in the field took the heads of girls, a detestable felony even in Samoan eyes. They carried them in procession to Mulinuu, and made of them an oblation to that melancholy effigy the King, who (sore against his will) sat on the verandah of the Government building, publicly to receive this affront, publicly to utter the words of compliment and thanks which constitute the highest reward known to Samoan bravery, and crowned as heroes those who should have been hanged like dogs. And again the three Consuls unanimously winked. There was no punishment, there was even no inquiry. Lastly, there is the story of Manono. Three hours were given to Mataafa to accept the terms of the ultimatum, and the time had almost elapsed when his boats put forth, and more than elapsed before he came alongside the _Katoomba_ and surrendered formally to Captain Bickford. In the dusk of the evening, when all the ships had sailed, flames were observed to rise from the island. Mataafa flung himself on his knees before Captain Bickford, and implored protection for his women and children left behind, and the captain put back the ship and despatched one of the Consuls to inquire. The _Katoomba_ had been about seventy hours in the islands. Captain Bickford was a stranger; he had to rely on the Consuls implicitly. At the same time, he knew that the Government troops had been suffered to land for the purpose of restoring order, and with the understanding that no reprisals should be committed on the adherents of Mataafa; and he charged the emissary with his emphatic disapproval, threats of punishment on the offenders, and reminders that the war had now passed under the responsibility of the three Powers. I cannot condescend on what this Consul saw during his visit; I can only say what he reported on his return. He reported all well, and the chiefs on the Government side fraternising and making _ava_ with those on Mataafa's. It may have been; at least it is strange. The burning of the island proceeded, fruit-trees were cut down, women stripped naked; a scene of brutal disorder reigned all night, and left behind it, over a quarter of the island, ruin. If they fraternised with Mataafa's chieftains they must have been singularly inconsistent, for, the next we learn of the two parties, they were beating, spitting upon, and insulting them along the highway. The next morning in Apia I asked the same Consul if there had not been some houses burned. He told me no. I repeated the question, alleging the evidence of officers on board the _Katoomba_ who had seen the flames increase and multiply as they steamed away; whereupon he had this remarkable reply--"O! huts, huts, huts! There isn't a house, a frame house, on the island." The case to plain men stands thus:--The people of Manono were insulted, their food-trees cut down, themselves left houseless; not more than ten houses--I beg the Consul's pardon, huts--escaped the rancour of their enemies; and to this day they may be seen to dwell in shanties on the site of their former residences, the pride of the Samoan heart. The ejaculation of the Consul was thus at least prophetic; and the traveller who revisits to-day the shores of the "Garden Island" may well exclaim in his turn, "Huts, huts, huts!" The same measure was served out, in the mere wantonness of clan hatred, to Apolima, a nearly inaccessible islet in the straits of the same name; almost the only property saved there (it is amusing to remember) being a framed portrait of Lady Jersey, which its custodian escaped with into the bush, as it were the palladium and chief treasure of the inhabitants. The solemn promise passed by Consuls and captains in the name of the three Powers was thus broken; the troops employed were allowed their bellyful of barbarous outrage. And again there was no punishment, there was no inquiry, there was no protest, there was not a word said to disown the act or disengage the honour of the three Powers. I do not say the Consuls desired to be disobeyed, though the case looks black against one gentleman, and even he is perhaps only to be accused of levity and divided interest; it was doubtless important for him to be early in Apia, where he combines with his diplomatic functions the management of a thriving business as commission agent and auctioneer. I do say of all of them that they took a very nonchalant view of their duty. I told myself that this was the government of the Consular Triumvirate. When the new officials came it would cease; it would pass away like a dream in the night; and the solid _Pax Romana_, of the Berlin General Act would succeed. After all, what was there to complain of? The Consuls had shown themselves no slovens and no sentimentalists. They had shown themselves not very particular, but in one sense very thorough. Rebellion was to be put down swiftly and rigorously, if need were with the hand of Cromwell; at least it was to be put down. And in these unruly islands I was prepared almost to welcome the face of Rhadamanthine severity. And now it appears it was all a mistake. The government by the Berlin General Act is no more than a mask, and a very expensive one, for government by the Consular Triumvirate. Samoa pays (or tries to pay) £2,200 a year to a couple of helpers; and they dare not call their souls their own. They take their walks abroad with an anxious eye on the three Consuls, like two well-behaved children with three nurses; and the Consuls, smiling superior, allow them to amuse themselves with the routine of business. But let trouble come, and the farce is suspended. At the whistle of a squall these heaven-born mariners seize the tiller, and the £2,200 amateurs are knocked sprawling on the bilge. At the first beat of the drum, the treaty officials are sent below, gently protesting, like a pair of old ladies, and behold! the indomitable Consuls ready to clear the wreck and make the deadly cutlass shine. And their method, studied under the light of a new example, wears another air. They are not so Rhadamanthine as we thought. Something that we can only call a dignified panic presides over their deliberations. They have one idea to lighten the ship. "Overboard with the ballast, the main-mast, and the chronometer!" is the cry. In the last war they got rid (first) of the honour of their respective countries, and (second) of all idea that Samoa was to be governed in a manner consistent with civilisation, or Government troops punished for any conceivable misconduct. In the present war they have sacrificed (first) the prestige of the new Chief Justice, and (second) the very principle for which they had contended so vigorously and so successfully in the war before--that rebellion was a thing to be punished. About the end of last year, that war, a war of the Tupuas under Tamasese the younger, which was a necessary pendant to the crushing of Mataafa, began to make itself heard of in obscure grumblings. It was but a timid business. One half of the Tupua party, the whole province of Atua, never joined the rebellion, but sulked in their villages and spent the time in indecisive eloquence and barren embassies. Tamasese, by a trick eminently Samoan, "went in the high bush and the mountains," carrying a gun like a private soldier--served, in fact, with his own troops _incognito_--and thus, to Samoan eyes, waived his dynastic pretensions. And the war, which was announced in the beginning with a long catalogue of complaints against the King and a distinct and ugly threat to the white population of Apia, degenerated into a war of defence by the province of Aána against the eminently brutal troops of Savaii, in which sympathy was generally and justly with the rebels. Savaii, raging with private clan hatred and the lust of destruction, was put at free quarters in the disaffected province, repeated on a wider scale the outrages of Manono and Apolima, cut down the food-trees, stripped and insulted the women, robbed the children of their little possessions, burned the houses, killed the horses, the pigs, the dogs, the cats, along one half of the seaboard of Aána, and in the prosecution of these manly exploits managed (to the joy of all) to lose some sixty men killed, wounded, and drowned. Government by the Treaty of Berlin was still erect when, one fine morning, in walked the three Consuls, totally uninvited, with a proclamation prepared and signed by themselves, without any mention of anybody else. They had awoke to a sense of the danger of the situation and their own indispensable merits. The two children knew their day was over; the nurses had come for them. Who can blame them for their timidity? The Consuls have the ears of the Governments; they are the authors of those despatches of which, in the ripeness of time, Blue-books and White-books are made up; they had dismissed (with some little assistance from yourself) MM. Cedercrantz and Senfft von Pilsach, and they had strangled, like an illegitimate child, the scandal of the dynamite. The Chief Justice and the President made haste to disappear between decks, and left the ship of the State to the three volunteers. There was no lack of activity. The Consuls went up to Atua, they went down to Aána; the oarsmen toiled, the talking men pleaded; they are said to have met with threats in Atua, and to have yielded to them--at least, in but a few days' time they came home to us with a new treaty of pacification. Of course, and as before, the Government troops were whitewashed; the Savaii ruffians had been stripping women and killing cats in the interests of the Berlin Treaty; there was to be no punishment and no inquiry; let them retire to Savaii with their booty and their dead. Offensive as this cannot fail to be, there is still some slight excuse for it. The King is no more than one out of several chiefs of clans. His strength resides in the willing obedience of the Tuamasaga, and a portion--I have to hope a bad portion--of the island of Savaii. To punish any of these supporters must always be to accept a risk; and the golden opportunity had been allowed to slip at the moment of the Mataafa war. What was more original was the treatment of the rebels. They were under arms that moment against the Government; they had fought and sometimes vanquished; they had taken heads and carried them to Tamasese. And the terms granted were to surrender fifty rifles, to make some twenty miles of road, to pay some old fines--and to be forgiven! The loss of fifty rifles to people destitute of any shadow of a gunsmith to repair them when they are broken, and already notoriously short of ammunition, is a trifle; the number is easy to be made up of those that are out of commission; for there is not the least stipulation as to their value; any synthesis of old iron and smashed wood that can be called a gun is to be taken from its force. The road, as likely as not, will never be made. The fines have nothing to say to this war; in any reasonably governed country they should never have figured in the treaty; they had been inflicted before, and were due before. Before the rebellion began, the beach had rung with I know not what indiscreet bluster; the natives were to be read a lesson; Tamasese (by name) was to be hanged; and after what had been done to Mataafa, I was so innocent as to listen with awe. And now the rebellion has come, and this was the punishment! There might well have been a doubt in the mind of any chief who should have been tempted to follow the example of Mataafa; but who is it that would not dare to follow Tamasese? For some reason--I know not what, unless it be fear--there is a strong prejudice amongst whites against any interference with the bestial practice of head-hunting. They say it would be impossible to identify the criminals--a thing notoriously contrary to fact. A man does not take a head, as he steals an apple, for secret degustation; the essence of the thing is its publicity. After the girls' heads were brought into Mulinuu I pressed Mr. Cusack-Smith to take some action. He proposed a paper of protest, to be signed by the English residents. We made rival drafts; his was preferred, and I have heard no more of it. It has not been offered me to sign; it has not been published; under a paper-weight in the British Consulate I suppose it may yet be found! Meanwhile, his Honour Mr. Ide, the new Chief Justice, came to Samoa and took spirited action. He engineered an ordinance through the House of Faipule, inflicting serious penalties on any who took heads, and the papers at the time applauded his success. The rebellion followed, the troops were passing to the front, and with excellent resolution Mr. Ide harangued the chiefs, reiterated the terms of the new law, and promised unfailing vengeance on offenders. It was boldly done, and he stood committed beyond possibility of retreat to enforce this his first important edict. Great was the commotion, great the division, in the Samoan mind. "O! we have had Chief Justices before," said a visitor to my house; "we know what they are; I will take a head if I can get one." Others were more doubtful, but thought none could be so bold as lay a hand on the peculiar institution of these islands. Yet others were convinced. Savaii took heads; but when they sent one to Mulinuu a messenger met them by the convent gates from the King; he would none of it, and the trophy must be ingloriously buried, Savaii took heads also, and Tamasese accepted the presentation. Tuamasaga, on the other hand, obeyed the Chief Justice and (the occasion being thrust upon them) contented themselves with taking the dead man's ears. On the whole, about one-third of the troops engaged, and our not very firm Monarch himself, kept the letter of the ordinance. And it was upon this scene of partial, but really cheering, success that the Consuls returned with their general pardon! The Chief Justice was not six months old in the islands. He had succeeded to a position complicated by the failure of his predecessor. Personally, speaking face to face with the chiefs, he had put his authority in pledge that the ordinance should be enforced. And he found himself either forgotten or betrayed by the three Consuls. These volunteers had made a liar of him; they had administered to him, before all Samoa, a triple buffet. I must not wonder, though I may still deplore, that Mr. Ide accepted the position thus made for him. There was a deal of alarm in Apia. To refuse the treaty thus hastily and shamefully cobbled up would have increased it tenfold. Already, since the declaration of war and the imminence of the results, one of the papers had ratted, and the white population were girding at the new ordinance. It was feared besides that the native Government, though they had voted, were secretly opposed to it. It was almost certain they would try to prevent its application to the loyalist offenders of Savaii. The three Consuls in the negotiations of the treaty had fully illustrated both their want of sympathy with the ordinance and their want of regard for the position of the Chief Justice. "In short, I am to look for no support, whether physical or moral?" asked Mr. Ide; and I could make but the one answer--"Neither physical nor moral." It was a hard choice; and he elected to accept the terms of the treaty without protest. And the next war (if we are to continue to enjoy the benefits of the Berlin Act) will probably show us the result in an enlarged assortment of heads, and the next difficulty perhaps prove to us the diminished prestige of the Chief Justice. Mr. Ide announces his intention of applying the law in the case of another war; but I very much fear the golden opportunity has again been lost. About one-third of the troops believed him this time; how many will believe him the next? It will doubtless be answered that the Consuls were affected by the alarm in Apia and actuated by the desire to save white lives. I am far from denying that there may be danger; and I believe that the way we are going is the best way to bring it on. In the progressive decivilisation of these islands--evidenced by the female heads taken in the last war and the treatment of white missionaries in this--our methods of pull devil, pull baker, general indecision, and frequent (though always dignified) panic are the best calculated in the world to bring on a massacre of whites. A consistent dignity, a consistent and independent figure of a Chief Justice, the enforcement of the laws, and above all, of the laws against barbarity, a Consular board the same in the presence as in the absence of warships, will be found our best defence. Much as I have already occupied of your space, I would yet ask leave to draw two conclusions. And first, Mataafa and Tamasese both made war. Both wars were presumably dynastic in character, though the Tupua not rallying to Tamasese as he had expected led him to cover his design. That he carried a gun himself, and himself fired, will not seem to European ears a very important alleviation. Tamasese received heads, sitting as a King, under whatever name; Mataafa had forbidden the taking of heads--of his own accord, and before Mr. Ide had taken office. Tamasese began with threats against the white population; Mataafa never ceased to reassure them and to extend an effectual protection to their property. What is the difference between their cases? That Mataafa was an old man, already famous, who had served his country well, had been appointed King of Samoa, had served in the office, and had been set aside--not, indeed, in the text, but in the protocols of the Berlin Act, by name? I do not grudge his good fortune to Tamasese, who is an amiable, spirited, and handsome young man; and who made a barbarous war, indeed, since heads were taken after the old Samoan practice, but who made it without any of the savagery which we have had reason to comment upon in the camp of his adversaries. I do not grudge the invidious fate that has befallen my old friend and his followers. At first I believed these judgments to be the expression of a severe but equal justice. I find them, on further experience, to be mere measures of the degree of panic in the Consuls, varying directly as the distance of the nearest war-ship. The judgments under which they fell have now no sanctity; they form no longer a precedent; they may perfectly well be followed by a pardon, or a partial pardon, as the authorities shall please. The crime of Mataafa is to have read strictly the first article of the Berlin Act, and not to have read at all (as how should he when it has never been translated?) the insidious protocol which contains its significance; the crime of his followers is to have practised clan fidelity, and to have in consequence raised an _imperium in imperio_, and fought against the Government. Their punishment is to be sent to a coral atoll and detained there prisoners. It does not sound much; it is a great deal. Taken from a mountain island, they must inhabit a narrow strip of reef sunk to the gunwale in the ocean. Sand, stone, and cocoa-nuts, stone, sand, and pandanus, make the scenery. There is no grass. Here these men, used to the cool, bright mountain rivers of Samoa, must drink with loathing the brackish water of the coral. The food upon such islands is distressing even to the omnivorous white. To the Samoan, who has that shivering delicacy and ready disgust of the child or the rustic mountaineer, it is intolerable. I remember what our present King looked like, what a phantom he was, when he returned from captivity in the same place. Lastly, these fourteen have been divorced from their families. The daughter of Mataafa somehow broke the _consigne_ and accompanied her father; but she only. To this day one of them, Palepa, the wife of Faamuina, is dunning the authorities in vain to be allowed to join her husband--she a young and handsome woman, he an old man and infirm. I cannot speak with certainty, but I believe they are allowed no communication with the prisoners, nor the prisoners with them. My own open experience is brief and conclusive--I have not been suffered to send my friends one stick of tobacco or one pound of _ava_. So much to show the hardships are genuine. I have to ask a pardon for these unhappy victims of untranslated protocols and inconsistent justice. After the case of Tamasese, I ask it almost as of right. As for the other twenty-seven in the gaol, let the doors be opened at once. They have showed their patience, they have proved their loyalty long enough. On two occasions, when the guards deserted in a body, and again when the Aána prisoners fled, they remained--one may truly say--voluntary prisoners. And at least let them be fed! I have paid taxes to the Samoan Government for some four years, and the most sensible benefit I have received in return has been to be allowed to feed their prisoners. Second, if the farce of the Berlin Act is to be gone on with, it will be really necessary to moderate among our five Sovereigns--six if we are to count poor Malietoa, who represents to the life the character of the Hare and Many Friends. It is to be presumed that Mr. Ide and Herr Schmidt were chosen for their qualities; it is little good we are likely to get by them if, at every wind of rumour, the three Consuls are to intervene. The three Consuls are paid far smaller salaries, they have no right under the treaty to interfere with the government of autonomous Samoa, and they have contrived to make themselves all In all. The King and a majority of the Faipule fear them and look to them alone, while the legitimate adviser occupies a second place, if that. The misconduct of MM. Cedercrantz and Senfft von Pilsach was so extreme that the Consuls were obliged to encroach; and now when these are gone the authority acquired in the contest remains with the encroachers. On their side they have no rights, but a tradition of victory, the ear of the Governments at home, and the _vis viva_ of the war-ships. For the poor treaty officials, what have they but rights very obscurely expressed and very weakly defended by their predecessors? Thus it comes about that people who are scarcely mentioned in the text of the treaty are, to all intents and purposes, our only rulers. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. IX TO THE EDITOR OF THE "TIMES" _Vailima, Samoa, May_ 22, 1894. Sir,--I told you in my last that the Consuls had tinkered up a treaty of peace with the rebels of Aána. A month has gone by, and I would not weary readers your with a story so intricate and purposeless. The Consuls seem to have gone backward and forward, to and fro. To periods of agitated activity, comparable to that of three ants about a broken nest, there succeeded seasons in which they rested from their labours and ruefully considered the result. I believe I am not overstating the case when I say that this treaty was at least twice rehandled, and the date of submission changed, in the interval. And yesterday at length we beheld the first-fruits of the Consular diplomacy. A boat came in from Aána bearing the promised fifty stand of arms--in other words, a talking man, a young chief, and some boatmen in charge of a boat-load of broken ironmongery. The Government (well advised for once) had placed the Embassy under an escort of German blue-jackets, or I think it must have gone ill with the Ambassadors. So much for Aána and the treaty. With Atua, the other disaffected province, we have been and are on the brink of war. The woods have been patrolled, the army sent to the front, blood has been shed. It consists with my knowledge that the loyalist troops marched against the enemy under a hallucination. One and all believed, a majority of them still believe, that the war-ships were to follow and assist them. Who told them so? If I am to credit the rumours of the natives, as well as the gossip of official circles, a promise had been given to this effect by the Consuls, or at least by one of the Consuls. And when I say that a promise had been given, I mean that it had been sold. I mean that the natives had to buy it by submissions. Let me take an example of these submissions. The native Government increased the salary of Mr. Gurr, the natives' advocate. It was not a largesse; it was rather an act of tardy justice, by which Mr. Gurr received at last the same emoluments as his predecessor in the office. At the same time, with a bankrupt treasury, all fresh expenses are and must be regarded askance. The President, acting under a so-called Treasury regulation, refused to honour the King's order. And a friendly suit was brought, which turned on the validity of this Treasury regulation. This was more than doubtful. The President was a treaty official; hence bound by the treaty. The three Consuls had been acting for him in his absence, using his powers and no other powers whatever under the treaty; and the three Consuls so acting had framed a regulation by which the powers of the President were greatly extended. This was a vicious circle with a vengeance. But the Consuls, with the ordinary partiality of parents for reformed offspring, regarded the regulation as the apple of their eye. They made themselves busy in its defence, they held interviews, it is reported they drew pleas; and it seemed to all that the Chief Justice hesitated. It is certain at least that he long delayed sentence. And during this delay the Consuls showed their power. The native Government was repeatedly called together, and at last forced to rescind the order in favour of Mr. Gurr. It was not done voluntarily, for the Government resisted. It was not done by conviction, for the Government had taken the first opportunity to restore it. If the Consuls did not appear personally in the affair--and I do not know that they did not--they made use of the President as a mouthpiece; and the President delayed the deliberations of the Government until he should receive further instructions from the Consuls. Ten pounds is doubtless a considerable affair to a bankrupt Government. But what were the Consuls doing in this matter of inland administration? What was their right to interfere? What were the arguments with which they overcame the resistance of the Government? I am either very much misinformed, or these gentlemen were trafficking in a merchandise which they did not possess, and selling at a high price the assistance of the war-ships over which (as now appears) they have no control. Remark the irony of fate. This affair had no sooner been settled, Mr. Gurr's claims cut at the very root, and the Treasury regulation apparently set beyond cavil, than the Chief Justice pulled himself together, and, taking his life in his right hand, delivered sentence in the case. Great was the surprise. Because the Chief Justice had balked so long, it was supposed he would never have taken the leap. And here, upon a sudden, he came down with a decision flat against the Consuls and their Treasury regulation. The Government have, I understand, restored Mr. Gurr's salary in consequence. The Chief Justice, after giving us all a very severe fright, has reinstated himself in public opinion by this tardy boldness; and the Consuls find their conduct judicially condemned. It was on a personal affront that the Consuls turned on Mr. Cedercrantz. Here is another affront, far more galling and public! I suppose it is but a coincidence that I should find at the same time the clouds beginning to gather about Mr. Ide's head. In a telegram, dated from Auckland, March 30, and copyrighted by the Associated Press, I find the whole blame of the late troubles set down to his account. It is the work of a person worthy of no trust. In one of his charges, and in one only, he is right. The Chief Justice fined and imprisoned certain chiefs of Aána under circumstances far from clear; the act was, to say the least of it, susceptible of misconstruction, and by natives will always be thought of as an act of treachery. But, even for this, it is not possible for me to split the blame justly between Mr. Ide and the three Consuls. In these early days, as now, the three Consuls were always too eager to interfere where they had no business, and the Chief Justice was always too patient or too timid to set them in their place. For the rest of the telegram no qualification is needed. "The Chief Justice was compelled to take steps to disarm the natives." He took no such steps; he never spoke of disarmament except publicly and officially to disown the idea; it was during the days of the Consular triumvirate that the cry began. "The Chief Justice called upon Malietoa to send a strong force," etc.; the Chief Justice "disregarded the menacing attitude assumed by the Samoans," etc.--these are but the delusions of a fever. The Chief Justice has played no such part; he never called for forces; he never disregarded menacing attitudes, not even those of the Consuls. What we have to complain of in Mr. Ide and Mr. Schmidt is strangely different. We complain that they have been here since November, and the three Consuls are still allowed, when they are not invited, to interfere in the least and the greatest; that they have been here for upwards of six months, and government under the Berlin Treaty is still overridden--and I may say overlaid--by the government of the Consular triumvirate. This is the main fountain of our present discontents. This it is that we pray to be relieved from. Out of six Sovereigns, exercising incongruous rights or usurpations on this unhappy island, we pray to be relieved of three. The Berlin Treaty was not our choice; but if we are to have it at all, let us have it plain. Let us have the text, and nothing but the text. Let the three Consuls who have no position under the treaty cease from troubling, cease from raising war and making peace, from passing illegal regulations in the face of day, and from secretly blackmailing the Samoan Government into renunciations of its independence. Afterwards, when we have once seen it in operation, we shall be able to judge whether government under the Berlin Treaty suits or does not suit our case.--I am, Sir, etc., ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. X FROM THE "DAILY CHRONICLE," _March_ 18, 1895. [Subjoined is the full text of the late Robert Louis Stevenson's last letter to Mr. J. F. Hogan, M.P. Apart from its pathetic interest as one of the final compositions of the distinguished novelist, its eloquent terms of pleading for his exiled friend Mataafa, and the light it sheds on Samoan affairs, make it a very noteworthy and instructive document.--ED. _D.C._] _Vailima, Oct._ 7, 1894. J. F. HOGAN, ESQ., M.P. Dear Sir,--My attention was attracted the other day by the thoroughly pertinent questions which you put in the House of Commons, and which the Government failed to answer. It put an idea in my head that you were perhaps the man who might take up a task which I am almost ready to give up. Mataafa is now known to be my hobby. People laugh when they see any mention of his name over my signature, and the _Times_, while it still grants me hospitality, begins to lead the chorus. I know that nothing can be more fatal to Mataafa's cause than that he should be made ridiculous, and I cannot help feeling that a man who makes his bread by writing fiction labours under the disadvantage of suspicion when he touches on matters of fact. If I were even backed up before the world by one other voice, people might continue to listen, and in the end something might be done. But so long as I stand quite alone, telling the same story, which becomes, apparently, not only more tedious, but less credible by repetition, I feel that I am doing nothing good, possibly even some evil. Now, sir, you have shown by your questions in the House, not only that you remember Mataafa, but that you are instructed in his case, and this exposes you to the trouble of reading this letter. Mataafa was made the prisoner of the three Powers. He had been guilty of rebellion; but surely rather formally than really. He was the appointed King of Samoa. The treaty set him aside, and he obeyed the three Powers. His successor--or I should rather say his successor's advisers and surroundings--fell out with him. He was disgusted by the spectacle of their misgovernment. In this humour he fell to the study of the Berlin Act, and was misled by the famous passage, "His successor shall be duly elected according to the laws and customs of Samoa." It is to be noted that what I will venture to call the infamous Protocol--a measure equally of German vanity, English cowardice, and American _incuria_--had not been and _has never yet been_ translated into the Samoan language. They feared light because their works were darkness. For what he did during what I can only call his candidature, I must refer you to the last chapter of my book. It was rebellion to the three Powers; to him it was not rebellion. The troops of the King attacked him first. The sudden arrival and sudden action of Captain Bickford concluded the affair in the very beginning. Mataafa surrendered. He surrendered to Captain Bickford. He was brought back to Apia on Captain Bickford's ship. I shall never forget the Captain pointing to the British ensign and saying, "Tell them they are safe under that." And the next thing we learned, Mataafa and his chiefs were transferred to a German war-ship and carried to the Marshalls. Who was responsible for this? Who is responsible now for the care and good treatment of these political prisoners? I am far from hinting that the Germans actually maltreat him. I know even that many of the Germans regard him with respect. But I can only speak of what I know here. It is impossible to send him or any of his chiefs either a present or a letter. I believe the mission (Catholic) has been allowed some form of communication. On the same occasion I sent down letters and presents. They were refused; and the officer of the deck on the German war-ship had so little reticence as to pass the remark, "O, you see, you like Mataafa; we don't." In short, communication is so completely sundered that for anything we can hear in Samoa, they may all have been hanged at the yard-arm two days out. To take another instance. The high chief Faamoina was recently married to a young and pleasing wife. She desired to follow her husband, an old man, in bad health, and so deservedly popular that he had been given the by-name of "_Papalagi Mativa_," or "Poor White Man," on account of his charities to our countrymen. She was refused. Again and again she has renewed her applications to be allowed to rejoin him, and without the least success. It has been decreed by some one, I know not whom, that Faamoina must have no one to nurse him, and that his wife must be left in the anomalous and dangerous position which the Treaty Powers have made for her. I have wearied myself, and I fear others, by my attempts to get a passage for her or to have her letters sent. Every one sympathises. The German ships now in port are loud in expressions of disapproval and professions of readiness to help her. But to whom can we address ourselves? Who is responsible? Who is the unknown power that sent Mataafa in a German ship to the Marshalls, instead of in an English ship to Fiji? that has decreed since that he shall receive not even inconsiderable gifts and open letters? and that keeps separated Faamoina and his wife? Now, dear sir, these are the facts, and I think that I may be excused for being angry. At the same time, I am well aware that an angry man is a bore. I am a man with a grievance, and my grievance has the misfortune to be very small and very far away. It is very small, for it is only the case of under a score of brown-skinned men who have been dealt with in the dark by I know not whom. And I want to know. I want to know by whose authority Mataafa was given over into German hands. I want to know by whose authority, and for how long a term of years, he is condemned to the miserable exile of a low island. And I want to know how it happens that what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander in Samoa?--that the German enemy Mataafa has been indefinitely exiled for what is after all scarce more than constructive rebellion, and the German friend Tamasese, for a rebellion which has lasted long enough to threaten us with famine, and was disgraced in its beginning by ominous threats against the whites, has been punished by a fine of fifty rifles? True, I could sympathise with the German officers in their embarrassment. Here was the son of the old King whom they had raised, and whom they had deserted. What an unenviable office was theirs when they must make war upon, suppress, and make a feint of punishing, this man to whom they stood bound by a hereditary alliance, and to whose father they had already failed so egregiously! They were loyal all round. They were loyal to their Tamasese, and got him off with his fine. And shall I not be a little loyal to Mataafa? And will you not help me? He is now an old man, very piously inclined, and I believe he would enter at least the lesser orders of the Church if he were suffered to come back. But I do not even ask so much as this, though I hope it. It would be enough if he were brought back to Fiji, back to the food and fresh water of his childhood, back into the daylight from the darkness of the Marshalls, where some of us could see him, where we could write to him and receive answers, where he might pass a tolerable old age. If you can help me to get this done, I am sure that you will never regret it. In its small way, this is another case of Toussaint L'Ouverture, not so monstrous if you like, not on so large a scale, but with circumstances of small perfidy that make it almost as odious. I may tell you in conclusion that, circumstances co-operating with my tedious insistence, the last of the Mataafa chiefs here in Apia has been liberated from gaol. All this time they stayed of their own free will, thinking it might injure Mataafa if they escaped when others did. And you will see by the enclosed paper how these poor fellows spent the first hours of their liberty.[12] You will see also that I am not the firebrand that I am sometimes painted, and that in helping me, if you shall decide to do so, you will be doing nothing against the peace and prosperity of Samoa. With many excuses for having occupied so much of your valuable time, I remain, yours truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--On revisal, I observe some points: in the first place, I do not believe Captain Bickford was to blame; I suspect him to have been a victim. I have been told, but it seems incredible, that he underwent an examination about Mataafa's daughter having been allowed to accompany him. Certainly he liked his job little, and some of his colleagues less. R. L. S. _Oct._ 9. Latest intelligence. We have received at last a letter from Mataafa. He is well treated and has good food; only complains of not hearing from Samoa. This has very much relieved our minds. But why were they previously left in the dark? R. L. S. FOOTNOTE: [12] _i.e._ in building a section of a new road to Mr. Stevenson's house. The paper referred to is a copy of the _Samoa Times_, containing a report of the dinner given by Mr. Stevenson at Vailima to inaugurate this new road. LETTERS TO YOUNG PEOPLE I TO MISS B... _Vailima Plantation [Spring_, 1892]. Dear Friend,[13]--Please salute your pupils in my name, and tell them that a long, lean, elderly man who lives right through on the underside of the world, so that down in your cellar you are nearer him than the people in the street, desires his compliments. This man lives on an island which is not very long and is extremely narrow. The sea beats round it very hard, so that it is difficult to get to shore. There is only one harbour where ships come, and even that is very wild and dangerous; four ships of war were broken there a little while ago, and one of them is still lying on its side on a rock clean above water, where the sea threw it as you might throw your fiddle-bow upon the table. All round the harbour the town is strung out: it is nothing but wooden houses, only there are some churches built of stone. They are not very large, but the people have never seen such fine buildings. Almost all the houses are of one story. Away at one end of the village lives the king of the whole country. His palace has a thatched roof which rests upon posts; there are no walls, but when it blows and rains, they have Venetian blinds which they let down between the posts, making all very snug. There is no furniture, and the king and the queen and the courtiers sit and eat on the floor, which is of gravel: the lamp stands there too, and every now and then it is upset. These good folk wear nothing but a kilt about their waists, unless to go to church or for a dance on the New Year or some great occasion. The children play marbles all along the street; and though they are generally very jolly, yet they get awfully cross over their marbles, and cry and fight just as boys and girls do at home. Another amusement in country places is to shoot fish with a little bow and arrow. All round the beach there is bright shallow water, where the fishes can be seen darting or lying in shoals. The child trots round the shore, and whenever he sees a fish, lets fly an arrow, and misses, and then wades in after his arrow. It is great fun (I have tried it) for the child, and I never heard of it doing any harm to the fishes, so what could be more jolly? The road to this lean man's house is uphill all the way, and through forests; the trees are not so much unlike those at home, only here and there some very queer ones are mixed with them--cocoa-nut palms, and great trees that are covered with bloom like red hawthorn but not near so bright; and from them all thick creepers hang down like ropes, and ugly-looking weeds that they call orchids grow in the forks of the branches; and on the ground many prickly things are dotted, which they call pine-apples. I suppose every one has eaten pine-apple drops. On the way up to the lean man's house you pass a little village, all of houses like the king's house, so that as you ride by you can see everybody sitting at dinner, or, if it is night, lying in their beds by lamplight; because all the people are terribly afraid of ghosts, and would not lie in the dark for anything. After the village, there is only one more house, and that is the lean man's. For the people are not very many, and live all by the sea, and the whole inside of the island is desert woods and mountains. When the lean man goes into the forest, he is very much ashamed to own it, but he is always in a terrible fright. The wood is so great, and empty, and hot, and it is always filled with curious noises: birds cry like children, and bark like dogs; and he can hear people laughing and felling trees; and the other day (when he was far in the woods) he heard a sound like the biggest mill-wheel possible, going with a kind of dot-and-carry-one movement like a dance. That was the noise of an earthquake away down below him in the bowels of the earth; and that is the same thing as to say away up toward you in your cellar in Kilburn. All these noises make him feel lonely and scared, and he doesn't quite know what he is scared of. Once when he was just about to cross a river, a blow struck him on the top of his head, and knocked him head-foremost down the bank and splash into the water. It was a nut, I fancy, that had fallen from a tree, by which accident people are sometimes killed. But at the time he thought it was a Black Boy. "Aha," say you, "and what is a Black Boy?" Well, there are here a lot of poor people who are brought to Samoa from distant islands to labour for the Germans. They are not at all like the king and his people, who are brown and very pretty: for these are black as negroes and as ugly as sin, poor souls, and in their own land they live all the time at war, and cook and eat men's flesh. The Germans make them work; and every now and then some run away into the Bush, as the forest is called, and build little sheds of leaves, and eat nuts and roots and fruits, and dwell there by themselves. Sometimes they are bad, and wild, and people whisper to each other that some of them have gone back to their horrid old habits, and catch men and women in order to eat them. But it is very likely not true; and the most of them are poor, half-starved, pitiful creatures, like frightened dogs. Their life is all very well when the sun shines, as it does eight or nine months in the year. But it is very different the rest of the time. The wind rages then most violently. The great trees thrash about like whips; the air is filled with leaves and branches flying like birds; and the sound of the trees falling shakes the earth. It rains, too, as it never rains at home. You can hear a shower while it is yet half a mile away, hissing like a shower-bath in the forest; and when it comes to you, the water blinds your eyes, and the cold drenching takes your breath away as though some one had struck you. In that kind of weather it must be dreadful indeed to live in the woods, one man alone by himself. And you must know that if the lean man feels afraid to be in the forest, the people of the island and the Black Boys are much more afraid than he; for they believe the woods to be quite filled with spirits; some like pigs, and some like flying things; but others (and these are thought the most dangerous) in the shape of beautiful young women and young men, beautifully dressed in the island manner with fine kilts and fine necklaces, and crosses of scarlet seeds and flowers. Woe betide him or her who gets to speak with one of these! They will be charmed out of their wits, and come home again quite silly, and go mad and die. So that the poor runaway Black Boy must be always trembling, and looking about for the coming of the demons. Sometimes the women-demons go down out of the woods into the villages; and here is a tale the lean man heard last year: One of the islanders was sitting in his house, and he had cooked fish. There came along the road two beautiful young women, dressed as I told you, who came into his house, and asked for some of his fish. It is the fashion in the islands always to give what is asked, and never to ask folks' names. So the man gave them fish, and talked to them in the island jesting way. Presently he asked one of the women for her red necklace; which is good manners and their way: he had given the fish, and he had a right to ask for something back. "I will give it you by and by," said the woman, and she and her companion went away; but he thought they were gone very suddenly, and the truth is they had vanished. The night was nearly come, when the man heard the voice of the woman crying that he should come to her, and she would give the necklace. He looked out, and behold! she was standing calling him from the top of the sea, on which she stood as you might stand on the table. At that, fear came on the man; he fell on his knees and prayed, and the woman disappeared. It was said afterward that this was once a woman, indeed, but she should have died a thousand years ago, and has lived all that while as an evil spirit in the woods beside the spring of a river. Sau-mai-afe[14] is her name, in case you want to write to her. Ever your friend (for whom I thank the stars), TUSITALA (Tale-writer). II TO MISS B... _Vailima Plantation, 14 Aug._ 1892. ... The lean man is exceedingly ashamed of himself, and offers his apologies to the little girls in the cellar just above. If they will be so good as to knock three times upon the floor, he will hear it on the other side of his floor, and will understand that he is forgiven. I left you and the children still on the road to the lean man's house, where a great part of the forest has now been cleared away. It comes back again pretty quick, though not quite so high; but everywhere, except where the weeders have been kept busy, young trees have sprouted up, and the cattle and the horses cannot be seen as they feed. In this clearing there are two or three houses scattered about, and between the two biggest I think the little girls in the cellar would first notice a sort of thing like a gridiron on legs, made of logs of wood. Sometimes it has a flag flying on it, made of rags of old clothes. It is a fort (as I am told) built by the person here who would be much the most interesting to the girls in the cellar. This is a young gentleman of eleven years of age, answering to the name of Austin. It was after reading a book about the Red Indians that he thought it more prudent to create this place of strength. As the Red Indians are in North America, and this fort seems to me a very useless kind of building, I anxiously hope that the two may never be brought together. When Austin is not engaged in building forts, nor on his lessons, which are just as annoying to him as other children's lessons are to them, he walks sometimes in the Bush, and if anybody is with him, talks all the time. When he is alone I don't think he says anything, and I dare say he feels very lonely and frightened, just as the Samoan does, at the queer noises and the endless lines of the trees. He finds the strangest kinds of seeds, some of them bright-coloured like lollipops, or really like precious stones; some of them in odd cases like tobacco-pouches. He finds and collects all kinds of little shells, with which the whole ground is scattered, and that, though they are the shells of land creatures like our snails, are of nearly as many shapes and colours as the shells on our sea-beaches. In the streams that come running down out of our mountains, all as clear and bright as mirror-glass, he sees eels and little bright fish that sometimes jump together out of the surface of the brook in a spray of silver, and fresh-water prawns which lie close under the stones, looking up at him through the water with eyes the colour of a jewel. He sees all kinds of beautiful birds, some of them blue and white, and some of them coloured like our pigeons at home; and these last, the little girls in the cellar may like to know, live almost entirely on wild nutmegs as they fall ripe off the trees. Another little bird he may sometimes see, as the lean man saw him only this morning: a little fellow not so big as a man's hand, exquisitely neat, of a pretty bronzy black like ladies' shoes, who sticks up behind him (much as a peacock does) his little tail, shaped and fluted like a scallop-shell. Here there are a lot of curious and interesting things that Austin sees all round him every day; and when I was a child at home in the old country I used to play and pretend to myself that I saw things of the same kind--that the rooms were full of orange and nutmeg trees, and the cold town gardens outside the windows were alive with parrots and with lions. What do the little girls in the cellar think that Austin does? He makes believe just the other way; he pretends that the strange great trees with their broad leaves and slab-sided roots are European oaks; and the places on the road up (where you and I and the little girls in the cellar have already gone) he calls old-fashioned, far-away European names, just as if you were to call the cellar-stairs and the corner of the next street--if you could only manage to pronounce their names--Upolu and Savaii. And so it is with all of us, with Austin, and the lean man, and the little girls in the cellar; wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different. But you must not suppose that Austin does nothing but build forts, and walk among the woods, and swim in the rivers. On the contrary, he is sometimes a very busy and useful fellow; and I think the little girls in the cellar would have admired him very nearly as much as he admired himself, if they had seen him setting off on horseback, with his hand on his hip, and his pocket full of letters and orders, at the head of quite a procession of huge white cart-horses with pack-saddles, and big, brown native men with nothing on but gaudy kilts. Mighty well he managed all his commissions; and those who saw him ordering and eating his single-handed luncheon in the queer little Chinese restaurant on the beach, declare he looked as if the place, and the town, and the whole archipelago belonged to him. But I am not going to let you suppose that this great gentleman at the head of all his horses and his men, like the king of France in the old rhyme, would be thought much of a dandy on the streets of London. On the contrary, if he could be seen with his dirty white cap and his faded purple shirt, and his little brown breeks that do not reach his knees, and the bare shanks below, and the bare feet stuck in the stirrup-leathers--for he is not quite long enough to reach the irons--I am afraid the little girls and boys in your part of the town might be very much inclined to give him a penny in charity. So you see that a very big man in one place might seem very small potatoes in another, just as the king's palace here (of which I told you in my last) would be thought rather a poor place of residence by a Surrey gipsy. And if you come to that, even the lean man himself, who is no end of an important person, if he were picked up from the chair where he is now sitting, and slung down, feet foremost, in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, would probably have to escape into the nearest shop, or take the risk of being mobbed. And the ladies of his family, who are very pretty ladies, and think themselves uncommon well-dressed for Samoa, would (if the same thing were to be done to them) be extremely glad to get into a cab.... TUSITALA. III UNDER COVER TO MISS B... _Vailima, 4th Sept. 1892._ Dear Children in the Cellar,--I told you before something of the Black Boys who come here to work on the plantations, and some of whom run away and live a wild life in the forests of the island.[15] Now I want to tell you of one who lived in the house of the lean man. Like the rest of them here, he is a little fellow, and when he goes about in old battered cheap European clothes, looks very small and shabby. When first he came he was as lean as a tobacco-pipe, and his smile (like that of almost all the others) was the sort that half makes you wish to smile yourself, and half wish to cry. However, the boys in the kitchen took him in hand and fed him up. They would set him down alone to table, and wait upon him till he had his fill, which was a good long time to wait. The first thing we noticed was that his little stomach began to stick out like a pigeon's breast; and then the food got a little wider spread, and he started little calves to his legs; and last of all, he began to get quite saucy and impudent. He is really what you ought to call a young man, though I suppose nobody in the whole wide world has any idea of his age; and as far as his behaviour goes, you can only think of him as a big little child with a good deal of sense. When Austin built his fort against the Indians, Arick (for that is the Black Boy's name) liked nothing so much as to help him. And this is very funny, when you think that of all the dangerous savages in this island Arick is one of the most dangerous. The other day, besides, he made Austin a musical instrument of the sort they use in his own country--a harp with only one string. He took a stick about three feet long and perhaps four inches round. The under side he hollowed out in a deep trench to serve as sounding-box; the two ends of the upper side he made to curve upward like the ends of a canoe, and between these he stretched the single string. He plays upon it with a match or a little piece of stick, and sings to it songs of his own country, of which no person here can understand a single word, and which are, very likely, all about fighting with his enemies in battle, and killing them, and, I am sorry to say, cooking them in a ground-oven, and eating them for supper when the fight is over. For Arick is really what you call a savage, though a savage is a very different sort of a person, and very much nicer than he is made to appear in little books. He is the kind of person that everybody smiles to, or makes faces at, or gives a smack as he goes by; the sort of person that all the girls on the plantation give the best seat to and help first, and love to decorate with flowers and ribbons, and yet all the while are laughing at him; the sort of person who likes best to play with Austin, and whom Austin, perhaps (when he is allowed), likes best to play with. He is all grins and giggles and little steps out of dances, and little droll ways to attract people's attention and set them laughing. And yet, when you come to look at him closely, you will find that his body is all covered with _scars_! This happened when he was a child. There was war, as is the way in these wild islands, between his village and the next, much as if there were war in London between one street and another; and all the children ran about playing in the middle of the trouble, and, I dare say, took no more notice of the war than you children in London do of a general election. But sometimes, at general elections, English children may get run over by processions in the street; and it chanced that as little Arick was running about in the Bush, and very busy about his playing, he ran into the midst of the warriors on the other side. These speared him with a poisoned spear; and his own people, when they had found him, in order to cure him of the poison scored him with knives that were probably made of fish-bone. This is a very savage piece of child-life; and Arick, for all his good nature, is still a very savage person. I have told you how the Black Boys sometimes run away from the plantations, and live alone in the forest, building little sheds to protect them from the rain, and sometimes planting little gardens for food; but for the most part living the best they can upon the nuts of the trees and the yams that they dig with their hands out of the earth. I do not think there can be anywhere in the world people more wretched than these runaways. They cannot return, for they would only return to be punished; they can never hope to see again their own people--indeed, I do not know what they can hope, but just to find enough yams every day to keep them from starvation. And in the wet season of the year, which is our summer and your winter, when the rain falls day after day far harder and louder than the loudest thunder-plump that ever fell in England, and the room is so dark that the lean man is sometimes glad to light his lamp to write by, I can think of nothing so dreary as the state of these poor runaways in the houseless bush. You are to remember, besides, that the people of the island hate and fear them because they are cannibals; sit and tell tales of them about their lamps at night in their own comfortable houses, and are sometimes afraid to lie down to sleep if they think there is a lurking Black Boy in the neighbourhood. Well, now, Arick is of their own race and language, only he is a little more lucky because he has not run away; and how do you think that he proposed to help them? He asked if he might not have a gun. "What do you want with a gun, Arick?" was asked. He answered quite simply, and with his nice, good-natured smile, that if he had a gun he would go up into the High Bush and shoot Black Boys as men shoot pigeons. He said nothing about eating them, nor do I think he really meant to; I think all he wanted was to clear the plantation of vermin, as gamekeepers at home kill weasels or rats. The other day he was sent on an errand to the German company where many of the Black Boys live. It was very late when he came home. He had a white bandage round his head, his eyes shone, and he could scarcely speak for excitement. It seems some of the Black Boys who were his enemies at home had attacked him, one with a knife. By his own account, he had fought very well; but the odds were heavy. The man with the knife had cut him both in the head and back; he had been struck down; and if some Black Boys of his own side had not come to the rescue, he must certainly have been killed. I am sure no Christmas-box could make any of you children so happy as this fight made Arick. A great part of the next day he neglected his work to play upon the one-stringed harp and sing songs about his great victory. To-day, when he is gone upon his holiday, he has announced that he is going back to the German firm to have another battle and another triumph. I do not think he will go, all the same, or I should be uneasy; for I do not want to have my Arick killed; and there is no doubt that if he begins this fight again, he will be likely to go on with it very far. For I have seen him once when he saw, or thought he saw, an enemy. It was one of those dreadful days of rain, the sound of it like a great waterfall, or like a tempest of wind blowing in the forest; and there came to our door two runaway Black Boys seeking refuge. In such weather as that my enemy's dog (as Shakespeare says) should have had a right to shelter. But when Arick saw the two poor rogues coming with their empty stomachs and drenched clothes, one of them with a stolen cutlass in his hand, through that world of falling water, he had no thought of any pity in his heart. Crouching behind one of the pillars of the verandah, to which he clung with his two hands, his mouth drew back into a strange sort of smile, his eyes grew bigger and bigger, and his whole face was just like the one word MURDER in big capitals. But I have told you a great deal too much about poor Arick's savage nature, and now I must tell you of a great amusement he had the other day. There came an English ship of war into the harbour, and the officers good-naturedly gave an entertainment of songs and dances and a magic lantern, to which Arick and Austin were allowed to go. At the door of the hall there were crowds of Black Boys waiting and trying to peep in, as children at home lie about and peep under the tent of a circus; and you may be sure Arick was a very proud person when he passed them all by, and entered the hall with his ticket. I wish I knew what he thought of the whole performance; but a friend of the lean man, who sat just in front of Arick, tells me what seemed to startle him most. The first thing was when two of the officers came out with blackened faces, like minstrels, and began to dance. Arick was sure that they were really black, and his own people, and he was wonderfully surprised to see them dance in this new European style. But the great affair was the magic lantern. The hall was made quite dark, which was very little to Arick's taste. He sat there behind my friend, nothing to be seen of him but eyes and teeth, and his heart was beating finely in his little scarred breast. And presently there came out of the white sheet that great big eye of light that I am sure all you children must have often seen. It was quite new to Arick; he had no idea what would happen next, and in his fear and excitement he laid hold with his little slim black fingers like a bird's claw on the neck of the friend in front of him. All through the rest of the show, as one picture followed another on the white sheet, he sat there grasping and clutching, and goodness knows whether he were more pleased or frightened. Doubtless it was a very fine thing to see all those bright pictures coming out and dying away again, one after another; but doubtless it was rather alarming also, for how was it done? At last when there appeared upon the screen the head of a black woman (as it might be his own mother or sister), and this black woman of a sudden began to roll her eyes, the fear or the excitement, whichever it was, rung out of him a loud, shuddering sob. I think we all ought to admire his courage when, after an evening spent in looking at such wonderful miracles, he and Austin set out alone through the forest to the lean man's house. It was late at night and pitch dark when some of the party overtook the little white boy and the big black boy, marching among the trees with their lantern. I have told you this wood has an ill name, and all the people of the island believe it to be full of evil spirits; it is a pretty dreadful place to walk in by the moving light of a lantern, with nothing about you but a curious whirl of shadows, and the black night above and beyond. But Arick kept his courage up, and I dare say Austin's too, with a perpetual chatter, so that the people coming after heard his voice long before they saw the shining of the lantern. TUSITALA. IV TO AUSTIN STRONG _Vailima, November_ 2, 1892. My dear Austin,--First and foremost I think you will be sorry to hear that our poor friend Arick has gone back to the German firm. He had not been working very well, and we had talked of sending him off before; but remembering how thin he was when he came here, and seeing what fat little legs and what a comfortable little stomach he had laid on in the meanwhile, we found we had not the heart. The other day, however, he set up chat to Henry, the Samoan overseer, asking him who he was and where he came from, and refusing to obey his orders. I was in bed in the workmen's house, having a fever. Uncle Lloyd came over to me, told me of it, and I had Arick sent up. I told him I would give him another chance. He was taken out and asked to apologise to Henry, but he would do no such thing. He preferred to go back to the German firm. So we hired a couple of Samoans who were up here on a visit to the boys and packed him off in their charge to the firm, where he arrived safely, and a receipt was given for him like a parcel.[16] Sunday last the _Alameda_ returned. Your mother was off bright and early with Palema, for it is a very curious thing, but is certainly the case, that she was very impatient to get news of a young person by the name of Austin. Mr. Gurr lent a horse for the Captain--it was a pretty big horse, but our handsome Captain, as you know, is a very big Captain indeed. Now, do you remember Misifolo--a tall, thin Hovea boy that came shortly before you left? He had been riding up this same horse of Gurr's just the day before, and the horse threw him off at Motootua corner, and cut his hip. So Misifolo called out to the Captain as he rode by that that was a very bad horse, that it ran away and threw people off, and that he had best be careful; and the funny thing is, that the Captain did not like it at all. The foal might as well have tried to run away with Vailima as that horse with Captain Morse, which is poetry, as you see, into the bargain; but the Captain was not at all in that way of thinking, and was never really happy until he had got his foot on ground again. It was just then that the horse began to be happy too, so they parted in one mind. But the horse is still wondering what kind of piece of artillery he had brought up to Vailima last Sunday morning. So far it was all right. The Captain was got safe off the wicked horse, but how was he to get back again to Apia and the _Alameda_? Happy thought--there was Donald, the big pack-horse! The last time Donald was ridden he had upon him a hair-pin and a pea--by which I mean--(once again to drop into poetry) you and me. Now he was to have a rider more suited to his size. He was brought up to the door--he looked a mountain. A step-ladder was put alongside of him. The Captain approached the step-ladder, and he looked an Alp. I wasn't as much afraid for the horse as I was for the step-ladder, but it bore the strain, and with a kind of sickening smash that you might have heard at Monterey, the Captain descended to the saddle. Now don't think that I am exaggerating, but at the moment when that enormous Captain settled down upon Donald, the horse's hind-legs gave visibly under the strain. What the couple looked like, one on top of t'other, no words can tell you, and your mother must here draw a picture. --Your respected Uncle, O TUSITALA. V TO AUSTIN STRONG _Vailima, November_ 15, 1892. My dear Austin,--The new house is begun. It stands out nearly half way over towards Pineapple Cottage--the lower floor is laid and the uprights of the wall are set up; so that the big lower room wants nothing but a roof over its head. When it rains (as it does mostly all the time) you never saw anything look so sorry for itself as that room left outside. Beyond the house there is a work-shed roofed with sheets of iron, and in front, over about half the lawn, the lumber for the house lies piled. It is about the bringing up of this lumber that I want to tell you. For about a fortnight there were at work upon the job two German overseers, about a hundred Black Boys, and from twelve to twenty-four draught-oxen. It rained about half the time, and the road was like lather for shaving. The Black Boys seemed to have had a new rig-out. They had almost all shirts of scarlet flannel, and lavalavas, the Samoan kilt, either of scarlet or light blue. As the day got warm they took off the shirts; and it was a very curious thing, as you went down to Apia on a bright day, to come upon one tree after another in the empty forest with these shirts stuck among the branches like vermilion birds. I observed that many of the boys had a very queer substitute for a pocket. This was nothing more than a string which some of them tied about their upper arms and some about their necks, and in which they stuck their clay pipes; and as I don't suppose they had anything else to carry, it did very well. Some had feathers in their hair, and some long stalks of grass through the holes in their noses. I suppose this was intended to make them look pretty, poor dears; but you know what a Black Boy looks like, and these Black Boys, for all their blue, and their scarlet, and their grass, looked just as shabby, and small, and sad, and sorry for themselves, and like sick monkeys as any of the rest. As you went down the road you came upon them first working in squads of two. Each squad shouldered a couple of planks and carried them up about two hundred feet, gave them to two others, and walked back empty-handed to the places they had started from. It wasn't very hard work, and they didn't go about it at all lively; but of course, when it rained, and the mud was deep, the poor fellows were unhappy enough. This was in the upper part about Trood's. Below, all the way down to Tanugamanono, you met the bullock-carts coming and going, each with ten or twenty men to attend upon it, and often enough with one of the overseers near. Quite a far way off through the forest you could hear the noise of one of these carts approaching. The road was like a bog, and though a good deal wider than it was when you knew it, so narrow that the bullocks reached quite across it with the span of their big horns. To pass by, it was necessary to get into the bush on one side or the other. The bullocks seemed to take no interest in their business; they looked angry and stupid, and sullen beyond belief; and when it came to a heavy bit of the road, as often as not they would stop. As long as they were going, the Black Boys walked in the margin of the bush on each side, pushing the cart-wheels with hands and shoulders, and raising the most extraordinary outcry. It was strangely like some very big kind of bird. Perhaps the great flying creatures that lived upon the earth long before man came, if we could have come near one of their meeting-places, would have given us just such a concert. When one of the bullamacows[17] stopped altogether the fun was highest. The bullamacow stood on the road, his head fixed fast in the yoke, chewing a little, breathing very hard, and showing in his red eye that if he could get rid of the yoke he would show them what a circus was. All the Black Boys tailed on to the wheels and the back of the cart, stood there getting their spirits up, and then of a sudden set to shooing and singing out. It was these outbursts of shrill cries that it was so curious to hear in the distance. One such stuck cart I came up to and asked what was the worry. "Old fool bullamacow stop same place," was the reply. I never saw any of the overseers near any of the stuck carts; you were a very much better overseer than either of these. While this was going on, I had to go down to Apia five or six different times, and each time there were a hundred Black Boys to say "Good-morning" to. This was rather a tedious business; and, as very few of them answered at all, and those who did, only with a grunt like a pig's, it was several times in my mind to give up this piece of politeness. The last time I went down, I was almost decided; but when I came to the first pair of Black Boys, and saw them looking so comic and so melancholy, I began the business over again. This time I thought more of them seemed to answer, and when I got down to the tail-end where the carts were running, I received a very pleasant surprise, for one of the boys, who was pushing at the back of a cart, lifted up his head, and called out to me in wonderfully good English, "You good man--always say 'Good-morning.'" It was sad to think that these poor creatures should think so much of so small a piece of civility, and strange that (thinking so) they should be so dull as not to return it. UNCLE LOUIS. VI TO AUSTIN STRONG _June_ 18, 1893. Respected Hopkins,[18]--This is to inform you that the Jersey cow had an elegant little cow-calf Sunday last. There was a great deal of rejoicing, of course; but I don't know whether or not you remember the Jersey cow. Whatever else she is, the Jersey cow is _not_ good-natured, and Dines, who was up here on some other business, went down to the paddock to get a hood and to milk her. The hood is a little wooden board with two holes in it, by which it is hung from her horns. I don't know how he got it on, and I don't believe _he_ does. Anyway, in the middle of the operation, in came Bull Bazett, with his head down, and roaring like the last trumpet. Dines and all his merry men hid behind trees in the paddock, and skipped. Dines then got upon a horse, plied his spurs, and cleared for Apia. The next time he is asked to meddle with our cows, he will probably want to know the reason why. Meanwhile, there was the cow, with the board over her eyes, left tied by a pretty long rope to a small tree in the paddock, and who was to milk her? She roared,--I was going to say like a bull, but it was Bazett who did that, walking up and down, switching his tail, and the noise of the pair of them was perfectly dreadful. Palema went up to the Bush to call Lloyd; and Lloyd came down in one of his know-all-about-it moods. "It was perfectly simple," he said. "The cow was hooded; anybody could milk her. All you had to do was to draw her up to the tree, and get a hitch about it." So he untied the cow, and drew her up close to the tree, and got a hitch about it right enough. And then the cow brought her intellect to bear on the subject, and proceeded to walk round the tree to get the hitch off. [Illustration] Now, this is geometry, which you'll have to learn some day. The tree is the centre of two circles. The cow had a "radius" of about two feet, and went leisurely round a small circle; the man had a "radius" of about thirty feet, and either he must let the cow get the hitch unwound, or else he must take up his two feet to about the height of his eyes, and race round a big circle. This was racing and chasing. The cow walked quietly round and round the tree to unwind herself; and first Lloyd, and then Palema, and then Lloyd again, scampered round the big circle, and fell, and got up again, and bounded like a deer, to keep her hitched. It was funny to see, but we couldn't laugh with a good heart; for every now and then (when the man who was running tumbled down) the cow would get a bit ahead; and I promise you there was then no sound of any laughter, but we rather edged away toward the gate, looking to see the crazy beast loose, and charging us. To add to her attractions, the board had fallen partly off, and only covered one eye, giving her the look of a crazy old woman in a Sydney slum. Meanwhile, the calf stood looking on, a little perplexed, and seemed to be saying: "Well, now, is this life? It doesn't seem as if it was all it was cracked up to be. And this is my mamma? What a very impulsive lady!" All the time, from the lower paddock, we could hear Bazett roaring like the deep seas, and if we cast our eye that way, we could see him switching his tail, as a very angry gentleman may sometimes switch his cane. And the Jersey would every now and then put up her head, and low like the pu[19] for dinner. And take it for all in all, it was a very striking scene. Poor Uncle Lloyd had plenty of time to regret having been in such a hurry; so had poor Palema, who was let into the business, and ran until he was nearly dead. Afterward Palema went and sat on a gate, where your mother sketched him, and she is going to send you the sketch. And the end of it? Well, we got her tied again, I really don't know how; and came stringing back to the house with our tails between our legs. That night at dinner, the Tamaitai[20] bid us tell the boys to be very careful "not to frighten the cow." It was too much; the cow had frightened us in such fine style that we all broke down and laughed like mad. General Hoskyns, there is no further news, your Excellency, that I am aware of. But it may interest you to know that Mr. Christian held his twenty-fifth birthday yesterday--a quarter of a living century old; think of it, drink of it, innocent youth!--and asked down Lloyd and Daplyn to a feast at one o'clock, and Daplyn went at seven, and got nothing to eat at all. Whether they had anything to drink, I know not--no, not I; but it's to be hoped so. Also, your uncle Lloyd has stopped smoking, and he doesn't like it much. Also, that your mother is most beautifully gotten up to-day, in a pink gown with a topaz stone in front of it; and is really looking like an angel, only that she isn't like an angel at all--only like your mother herself. Also that the Tamaitai has been waxing the floor of the big room, so that it shines in the most ravishing manner; and then we insisted on coming in, and she wouldn't let us, and we came anyway, and have made the vilest mess of it--but still it shines. Also, that I am, your Excellency's obedient servant, UNCLE LOUIS. VII TO AUSTIN STRONG My Dear Hutchinson,--This is not going to be much of a letter, so don't expect what can't be had. Uncle Lloyd and Palema made a malanga[21] to go over the island to Siumu, and Talolo was anxious to go also; but how could we get along without him? Well, Misifolo, the Maypole, set off on Saturday, and walked all that day down the island to beyond Faleasiu with a letter for Iopu; and Iopu and Tali and Misifolo rose very early on the Sunday morning, and walked all that day up the island, and came by seven at night--all pretty tired, and Misifolo most of all--to Tanugamanono.[22] We at Vailima knew nothing at all about the marchings of the Saturday and Sunday, but Uncle Lloyd got his boys and things together and went to bed. A little after five in the morning I awoke and took the lantern, and went out of the front door and round the verandahs. There was never a spark of dawn in the east, only the stars looked a little pale; and I expected to find them all asleep in the workhouse. But no! the stove was roaring, and Talolo and Fono, who was to lead the party, were standing together talking by the stove, and one of Fono's young men was lying asleep on the sofa in the smoking-room, wrapped in his lavalava. I had my breakfast at half-past five that morning, and the bell rang before six, when it was just the grey of dawn. But by seven the feast was spread--there was lopu coming up, with Tali at his heels, and Misifolo bringing up the rear--and Talolo could go the malanga. Off they set, with two guns and three porters, and Fono and Lloyd and Palema and Talolo himself with best Sunday-go-to-meeting lavalava rolled up under his arm, and a very sore foot; but much he cared--he was smiling from ear to ear, and would have gone to Siumu over red-hot coals. Off they set round the corner of the cook-house, and into the bush beside the chicken-house, and so good-bye to them. But you should see how Iopu has taken possession! "Never saw a place in such a state!" is written on his face. "In my time," says he, "we didn't let things go ragging along like this, and I'm going to show you fellows." The first thing he did was to apply for a bar of soap, and then he set to work washing everything (that had all been washed last Friday in the regular course). Then he had the grass cut all round the cook-house, and I tell you but he found scraps, and odds and ends, and grew more angry and indignant at each fresh discovery. "If a white chief came up here and smelt this, how would you feel?" he asked your mother. "It is enough to breed a sickness!" And I dare say you remember this was just what your mother had often said to himself; and did say the day she went out and cried on the kitchen steps in order to make Talolo ashamed. But Iopu gave it all out as little new discoveries of his own. The last thing was the cows, and I tell you he was solemn about the cows. They were all destroyed, he said, nobody knew how to milk except himself--where he is about right. Then came dinner and a delightful little surprise. Perhaps you remember that long ago I used not to eat mashed potatoes, but had always two or three boiled in a plate. This has not been done for months, because Talolo makes such admirable mashed potatoes that I have caved in. But here came dinner, mashed potatoes for your mother and the Tamaitai, and then boiled potatoes in a plate for me! And there is the end of the Tale of the return of Iopu, up to date. What more there may be is in the lap of the gods, and, Sir, I am yours considerably, UNCLE LOUIS. VIII TO AUSTIN STRONG My Dear Hoskyns,--I am kept away in a cupboard because everybody has the influenza; I never see anybody at all, and never do anything whatever except to put ink on paper up here in my room. So what can I find to write to you?--you, who are going to school, and getting up in the morning to go bathing, and having (it seems to me) rather a fine time of it in general? You ask if we have seen Arick? Yes, your mother saw him at the head of a gang of boys, and looking fat, and sleek, and well-to-do. I have an idea that he misbehaved here because he was homesick for the other Black Boys, and didn't know how else to get back to them. Well, he has got them now, and I hope he likes it better than I should. I read the other day something that I thought would interest so great a sea-bather as yourself. You know that the fishes that we see, and catch, go only a certain way down into the sea. Below a certain depth there is no life at all. The water is as empty as the air is above a certain height. Even the shells of dead fishes that come down there are crushed into nothing by the huge weight of the water. Lower still, in the places where the sea is profoundly deep, it appears that life begins again. People fish up in dredging-buckets loose rags and tatters of creatures that hang together all right down there with the great weight holding them in one, but come all to pieces as they are hauled up. Just what they look like, just what they do or feed upon, we shall never find out. Only that we have some flimsy fellow-creatures down in the very bottom of the deep seas, and cannot get them up except in tatters. It must be pretty dark where they live, and there are no plants or weeds, and no fish come down there, or drowned sailors either, from the upper parts, because these are all mashed to pieces by the great weight long before they get so far, or else come to a place where perhaps they float. But I dare say a cannon sometimes comes careering solemnly down, and circling about like a dead leaf or thistle-down; and then the ragged fellows go and play about the cannon and tell themselves all kinds of stories about the fish higher up and their iron houses, and perhaps go inside and sleep, and perhaps dream of it all like their betters. Of course you know a cannon down there would be quite light. Even in shallow water, where men go down with a diving-dress, they grow so light that they have to hang weights about their necks, and have their boots loaded with twenty pounds of lead--as I know to my sorrow. And with all this, and the helmet, which is heavy enough of itself to any one up here in the thin air, they are carried about like gossamers, and have to take every kind of care not to be upset and stood upon their heads. I went down once in the dress, and speak from experience. But if we could get down for a moment near where the fishes are, we should be in a tight place. Suppose the water not to crush us (which it would), we should pitch about in every kind of direction; every step we took would carry us as far as if we had seven-league boots; and we should keep flying head over heels, and top over bottom, like the liveliest clowns in the world. Well, sir, here is a great deal of words put down upon a piece of paper, and if you think that makes a letter, why, very well! And if you don't, I can't help it. For I have nothing under heaven to tell you. So, with kindest wishes to yourself, and Louie, and Aunt Nellie, believe me, your affectionate UNCLE LOUIS. Now here is something more worth telling you. This morning at six o'clock I saw all the horses together in the front paddock, and in a terrible ado about something. Presently I saw a man with two buckets on the march, and knew where the trouble was--the cow! The whole lot cleared to the gate but two--Donald, the big white horse, and my Jack. They stood solitary, one here, one there. I began to get interested, for I thought Jack was off his feed. In came the man with the bucket and all the ruck of curious horses at his tail. Right round he went to where Donald stood (D) and poured out a feed, and the majestic Donald ate it, and the ruck of common horses followed the man. On he went to the second station, Jack's (J. in the plan), and poured out a feed, and the fools of horses went in with him to the next place (A in the plan). And behold as the train swung round, the last of them came curiously too near Jack; and Jack left his feed and rushed upon this fool with a kind of outcry, and the fool fled, and Jack returned to his feed; and he and Donald ate theirs with glory, while the others were still circling round for fresh feeds. [Illustration] Glory be to the name of Donald and to the name of Jack, for they had found out where the foods were poured, and each took his station and waited there, Donald at the first of the course for his, Jack at the second station, while all the impotent fools ran round and round after the man with his buckets! R. L. S. IX TO AUSTIN STRONG Vailima. My Dear Austin,--Now when the overseer is away[23] I think it my duty to report to him anything serious that goes on on the plantation. Early the other afternoon we heard that Sina's foot was very bad, and soon after that we could have heard her cries as far away as the front balcony. I think Sina rather enjoys being ill, and makes as much of it as she possibly can; but all the same it was painful to hear the cries; and there is no doubt she was at least very uncomfortable. I went up twice to the little room behind the stable, and found her lying on the floor, with Tali and Faauma and Talolo all holding on different bits of her. I gave her an opiate; but whenever she was about to go to sleep one of these silly people would be shaking her, or talking in her ear, and then she would begin to kick about again and scream. Palema and Aunt Maggie took horse and went down to Apia after the doctor. Right on their heels off went Mitaele on Musu to fetch Tauilo, Talolo's mother. So here was all the island in a bustle over Sina's foot. No doctor came, but he told us what to put on. When I went up at night to the little room, I found Tauilo there, and the whole plantation boxed into the place like little birds in a nest. They were sitting on the bed, they were sitting on the table, the floor was full of them, and the place as close as the engine-room of a steamer. In the middle lay Sina, about three parts asleep with opium; two able-bodied work-boys were pulling at her arms, and whenever she closed her eyes calling her by name, and talking in her ear. I really didn't know what would become of the girl before morning. Whether or not she had been very ill before, this was the way to make her so, and when one of the work-boys woke her up again, I spoke to him very sharply, and told Tauilo she must put a stop to it. Now I suppose this was what put it into Tauilo's head to do what she did next. You remember Tauilo, and what a fine, tall, strong, Madame Lafarge sort of person she is? And you know how much afraid the natives are of the evil spirits in the wood, and how they think all sickness comes from them? Up stood Tauilo, and addressed the spirit in Sina's foot, and scolded it, and the spirit answered and promised to be a good boy and go away. I do not feel so much afraid of the demons after this. It was Faauma told me about it. I was going out into the pantry after soda-water, and found her with a lantern drawing water from the tank. "Bad spirit he go away," she told me. "That's first-rate," said I. "Do you know what the name of that spirit was? His name was _tautala_ (talking)." "O, no!" she said; "his name is _Tu_." You might have knocked me down with a straw. "How on earth do you know that?" I asked. "Heerd him tell Tauilo," she said. As soon as I heard that I began to suspect Mrs. Tauilo was a little bit of a ventriloquist; and imitating as well as I could the sort of voice they make, asked her if the bad spirit did not talk like that. Faauma was very much surprised, and told me that was just his voice. Well, that was a very good business for the evening. The people all went away because the demon was gone away, and the circus was over, and Sina was allowed to sleep. But the trouble came after. There had been an evil spirit in that room and his name was Tu. No one could say when he might come back again; they all voted it was Tu much; and now Talolo and Sina have had to be lodged in the Soldier Room.[24] As for the little room by the stable, there it stands empty; it is too small to play soldiers in, and I do not see what we can do with it, except to have a nice brass name-plate engraved in Sydney, or in "Frisco," and stuck upon the door of it--_Mr. Tu._ So you see that ventriloquism has its bad side as well as its good sides; and I don't know that I want any more ventriloquists on this plantation. We shall have _Tu_ in the cook-house next, and then _Tu_ in Lafaele's, and _Tu_ in the workman's cottage; and the end of it all will be that we shall have to take the Tamaitai's room for the kitchen, and my room for the boys' sleeping-house, and we shall all have to go out and camp under umbrellas. Well, where you are there may be schoolmasters, but there is no such thing as Mr. _Tu_! Now, it's all very well that these big people should be frightened out of their wits by an old wife talking with her mouth shut; that is one of the things we happen to know about. All the old women in the world might talk with their mouths shut, and not frighten you or me, but there are plenty of other things that frighten us badly. And if we only knew about them, perhaps we should find them no more worthy to be feared than an old woman talking with her mouth shut. And the names of some of these things are Death, and Pain, and Sorrow. UNCLE LOUIS. X TO AUSTIN STRONG _Jan._ 27, 1893. Dear General Hoskyns,--I have the honour to report as usual. Your giddy mother having gone planting a flower-garden, I am obliged to write with my own hand, and, of course, nobody will be able to read it. This has been a very mean kind of a month. Aunt Maggie left with the influenza. We have heard of her from Sydney, and she is all right again; but we have inherited her influenza, and it made a poor place of Vailima. We had Talolo, Mitaele, Sosimo, Iopu, Sina, Misifolo, and myself, all sick in bed at the same time; and was not that a pretty dish to set before the king! The big hall of the new house having no furniture, the sick pitched their tents in it,--I mean their mosquito-nets,--like a military camp. The Tamaitai and your mother went about looking after them, and managed to get us something to eat. Henry, the good boy! though he was getting it himself, did housework, and went round at night from one mosquito-net to another, praying with the sick. Sina, too, was as good as gold, and helped us greatly. We shall always like her better. All the time--I do not know how they managed--your mother found the time to come and write for me; and for three days, as I had my old trouble on, and had to play dumb man, I dictated a novel in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet. But now we are all recovered, and getting to feel quite fit. A new paddock has been made; the wires come right up to the top of the hill, pass within twenty yards of the big clump of flowers (if you remember that) and by the end of the pineapple patch. The Tamaitai and your mother and I all sleep in the upper story of the new house; Uncle Lloyd is alone in the workman's cottage; and there is nobody at all at night in the old house, but ants and cats and mosquitoes. The whole inside of the new house is varnished. It is a beautiful golden-brown by day, and in lamplight all black and sparkle. In the corner of the hall the new safe is built in, and looks as if it had millions of pounds in it; but I do not think there is much more than twenty dollars and a spoon or two; so the man that opens it will have a great deal of trouble for nothing. Our great fear is lest we should forget how to open it; but it will look just as well if we can't. Poor Misifolo--you remember the thin boy, do you not?--had a desperate attack of influenza; and he was in a great taking. You would not like to be very sick in some savage place in the islands, and have only the savages to doctor you? Well, that was just the way he felt. "It is all very well," he thought, "to let these childish white people doctor a sore foot or a toothache, but this is serious--I might die of this! For goodness' sake let me get away into a draughty native house, where I can lie in cold gravel, eat green bananas, and have a real grown-up, tattooed man to raise spirits and say charms over me." A day or two we kept him quiet, and got him much better. Then he said he _must_ go. He had had his back broken in his own islands, he said; it had come broken again, and he must go away to a native house and have it mended. "Confound your back!" said we; "lie down in your bed." At last, one day, his fever was quite gone, and he could give his mind to the broken back entirely. He lay in the hall; I was in the room alone; all morning and noon I heard him roaring like a bull calf, so that the floor shook with it. It was plainly humbug; it had the humbugging sound of a bad child crying; and about two of the afternoon we were worn out, and told him he might go. Off he set. He was in some kind of a white wrapping, with a great white turban on his head, as pale as clay, and walked leaning on a stick. But, O, he was a glad boy to get away from these foolish, savage, childish white people, and get his broken back put right by somebody with some sense. He nearly died that night, and little wonder! but he has now got better again, and long may it last! All the others were quite good, trusted us wholly, and stayed to be cured where they were. But then he was quite right, if you look at it from his point of view; for, though we may be very clever, we do not set up to cure broken backs. If a man has his back broken we white people can do nothing at all but bury him. And was he not wise, since that was his complaint, to go to folks who could do more? Best love to yourself, and Louie, and Aunt Nellie, and apologies for so dull a letter from your respectful and affectionate UNCLE LOUIS. FOOTNOTES: [13] The lady to whom the first three of these letters are addressed "used to hear" (writes Mr. Lloyd Osbourne) "so frequently of the 'boys' in Vailima, that she wrote and asked Mr. Stevenson for news of them, as it would so much interest her little girls. In the tropics, for some reason or other that it is impossible to understand, servants and work-people are always called 'boys,' though the years of Methuselah may have whitened their heads, and great-grandchildren prattle about their knees. Mr. Stevenson was amused to think that his 'boys,' who ranged from eighteen years of age to threescore and ten, should be mistaken for little youngsters; but he was touched to hear of the sick children his friend tried so hard to entertain, and gladly wrote a few letters to them. He would have written more but for the fact that his friend left the home, being transferred elsewhere." [14] Come-a-thousand. [15] The German company, from which we got our black boy Arick, owns and cultivates many thousands of acres in Samoa, and keeps at least a thousand black people to work on its plantations. Two schooners are always busy in bringing fresh batches to Samoa, and in taking home to their own islands the men who have worked out their three years' term of labour. This traffic in human beings is called the "labour trade," and is the life's blood, not only of the great German company, but of all the planters in Fiji, Queensland, New Caledonia, German New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and the New Hebrides. The difference between the labour trade, as it is now carried on under Government supervision, and the slave trade is a great one, but not great enough to please sensitive people. In Samoa the missionaries are not allowed by the company to teach these poor savages religion, or to do anything to civilise them and raise them from their monkey-like ignorance. But in other respects the company is not a bad master, and treats its people pretty well. The system, however, is one that cannot be defended and must sooner or later be suppressed.--[L.O.] [16] When Arick left us and went back to the German company, he had grown so fat and strong and intelligent that they deemed he was made for better things than for cotton-picking or plantation work, and handed him over to their surveyor, who needed a man to help him. I used often to meet him after this, tripping at his master's heels with the theodolite, or scampering about with tapes and chains like a kitten with a spool of thread. He did not look then as though he were destined to die of a broken heart, though that was his end not so many months afterward. The plantation manager told me that Arick and a New Ireland boy went crazy with home-sickness, and died in the hospital together.--[L.O.] [17] "Bullamacow" is a word that always amuses the visitor to Samoa. When the first pair of cattle was brought to the islands and the natives asked the missionaries what they must call these strange creatures, they were told that the English name was a "bull and a cow." But the Samoans thought that "a bull and a cow" was the name of each of the animals, and they soon corrupted the English words into "bullamacow," which has remained the name for beef or cattle ever since.--[L.O.] [18] In the letters that were sent to Austin Strong you will be surprised to see his name change from Austin to Hoskyns, and from Hopkins to Hutchinson. It was the penalty Master Austin had to pay for being the particular and bosom friend of each of the one hundred and eighty bluejackets that made up the crew of the British man-of-war _Curaçoa_; for, whether it was due to some bitter memories of the Revolutionary war, or to some rankling reminiscences of 1812, that even friendship could not altogether stifle (for Austin was a true American boy), they annoyed him by giving him, each one of them, a separate name.--[L.O.] [19] The big conch-shell that was blown at certain hours every day.--[L.O.] [20] Mrs. R. L. S., as she is called in Samoan, "the lady."--[L.O.] [21] A visiting party. [22] Talolo was the Vailima cook; Sina, his wife; Tauilo, his mother; Mitaele and Sosimo, his brothers. Lafaele, who was married to Faauma, was a middle-aged Futuna Islander, and had spent many years of his life on a whale-ship, the captain of which had kidnapped him when a boy. Misifolo was one of the "house-maids." Iopu and Tali, man and wife, had long been in our service, but had left it after they had been married some time; but, according to Samoan ideas, they were none the less members of Tusitala's family, because, though they were no longer working for him, they still owed him allegiance. "Aunt Maggie" is Mr. Stevenson's mother; Palema, Mr. Graham Balfour.--[L.O.] [23] While Austin was in Vailima many little duties about the plantation fell to his share, so that he was often called the "overseer"; and small as he was, he sometimes took charge of a couple of big men, and went into town with the pack-horses. It was not all play, either, for he had to see that the barrels and boxes did not chafe the horses' backs, and that they were not allowed to come home too fast up the steep road.--[L.O.] [24] A room set apart to serve as the theatre for an elaborate war-game, which was one of Mr. Stevenson's favourite recreations. END OF VOL. XVIII PRINTED BY CASSEL & CO., LTD., LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON E.C. 
30714	----	THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON SWANSTON EDITION VOLUME XXV _Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies have been printed, of which only Two Thousand Copies are for sale._ _This is No._ ....... [Illustration: Yours truly Robert Louis Stevenson] THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON VOLUME TWENTY-FIVE LONDON: PUBLISHED BY CHATTO AND WINDUS: IN ASSOCIATION WITH CASSELL AND COMPANY LIMITED: WILLIAM HEINEMANN: AND LONGMANS GREEN AND COMPANY MDCCCCXII _For permission to use the_ LETTERS _in the_ SWANSTON EDITION OF STEVENSON'S WORKS _the Publishers are indebted to the kindness of_ MESSRS. METHUEN & CO., LTD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON EDITED BY SIDNEY COLVIN PARTS XI--XIV CONTENTS XI. LIFE IN SAMOA FIRST YEAR AT VAILIMA PAGE INTRODUCTORY 3 LETTERS-- To Sidney Colvin 9 To E. L. Burlingame 24 To Sidney Colvin 25 To E. L. Burlingame 32 To Sidney Colvin 34 To Henry James 43 To Rudyard Kipling 46 To Sidney Colvin 48 To Marcel Schwob 51 To Charles Baxter 53 To Sidney Colvin 54 To H. B. Baildon 56 To Sidney Colvin 58 To the Same 66 To W. Craibe Angus 69 To Edmund Gosse 71 To Miss Rawlinson 74 To Sidney Colvin 76 To Miss Adelaide Boodle 80 To Charles Baxter 82 To Sidney Colvin 83 To E. L. Burlingame 86 To W. Craibe Angus 87 To H. C. Ide 88 To Sidney Colvin 90 To the Same 94 To the Same 102 To Henry James 108 To E. L. Burlingame 110 To the Same 111 To Sidney Colvin 112 To W. Craibe Angus 118 To Miss Annie H. Ide 118 To Charles Baxter 120 To Sidney Colvin 121 To Fred Orr 127 To E. L. Burlingame 128 To Henry James 130 To Sidney Colvin 132 XII. LIFE IN SAMOA--_continued_ SECOND YEAR AT VAILIMA INTRODUCTORY 144 LETTERS-- To E. L. Burlingame 146 To Miss Adelaide Boodle 147 To Sidney Colvin 152 To J. M. Barrie 154 To Sidney Colvin 156 To William Morris 162 To Mrs. Charles Fairchild 163 To Sidney Colvin 166 To E. L. Burlingame 174 To the Rev. S. J. Whitmee 174 To Charles Baxter 177 To Sidney Colvin 178 To the Same 193 To T. W. Dover 209 To E. L. Burlingame 210 To Sidney Colvin 211 To Charles Baxter 213 To W. E. Henley 214 To E. L. Burlingame 215 To Andrew Lang 216 To Miss Adelaide Boodle 217 To Sidney Colvin 221 To the Countess of Jersey 228 To the Same 229 To Sidney Colvin 230 To Mrs. Charles Fairchild 240 To the Children in the Cellar 243 To Sidney Colvin 249 To Gordon Browne 252 To Miss Morse 253 To Miss Taylor 254 To E. L. Burlingame 257 To Sidney Colvin 258 To J. M. Barrie 264 To E. L. Burlingame 266 To Lieutenant Eeles 267 To Charles Baxter 270 To Sidney Colvin 271 To Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin 273 To Henry James 274 To J. M. Barrie 276 To Charles Baxter 278 XIII. LIFE IN SAMOA--_continued_ THIRD YEAR AT VAILIMA INTRODUCTORY 280 LETTERS-- To Sidney Colvin 282 To Charles Baxter 288 To Sidney Colvin 289 To the Same 291 To Charles Baxter 292 To Sidney Colvin 294 To A. Conan Doyle 299 To Sidney Colvin 299 To S. R. Crockett 305 To Augustus St. Gaudens 308 To Sidney Colvin 310 To Edmund Gosse 317 To Henry James 320 To Sidney Colvin 324 To James S. Stevenson 334 To Henry James 335 To A. Conan Doyle 336 To Charles Baxter 337 To Sidney Colvin 338 To A. Conan Doyle 339 To Augustus St. Gaudens 341 To James S. Stevenson 342 To George Meredith 343 To Charles Baxter 345 To Sidney Colvin 347 To the Same 352 To J. Horne Stevenson 357 To John P----n 358 To Russell P----n 359 To Alison Cunningham 359 To Charles Baxter 360 To J. M. Barrie 362 To R. Le Gallienne 364 To Mrs. A. Baker 366 To Henry James 367 To Sidney Colvin 367 XIV. LIFESAMOA--_concluded_ FOURTH YEAR AT VAILIMA--THE END INTRODUCTORY 373 LETTERS-- To Charles Baxter 376 To H. B. Baildon 377 To W. H. Low 378 To Sidney Colvin 380 To H. B. Baildon 381 To Sidney Colvin 382 To J. H. Bates 384 To William Archer 384 To Sidney Colvin 386 To W. B. Yeats 390 To George Meredith 390 To Charles Baxter 392 To Mrs. Sitwell 393 To Charles Baxter 394 To Sidney Colvin 396 To R. A. M. Stevenson 398 To Sidney Colvin 404 To Henry James 406 To Marcel Schwob 409 To A. St. Gaudens 410 To Miss Adelaide Boodle 410 To Mrs. A. Baker 413 To Sidney Colvin 414 To J. M. Barrie 416 To Sidney Colvin 422 To Dr. Bakewell 424 To James Payn 425 To Miss Middleton 428 To A. Conan Doyle 429 To Sidney Colvin 430 To Charles Baxter 433 To R. A. M. Stevenson 434 To Sir Herbert Maxwell 440 To Sidney Colvin 441 To Alison Cunningham 445 To James Payn 446 To Sidney Colvin 448 To Professor Meiklejohn 450 To Lieutenant Eeles 451 To Sir Herbert Maxwell 453 To Andrew Lang 453 To Edmund Gosse 454 APPENDIX I--Account of the Death and Burial of R. L. Stevenson, by Lloyd Osbourne 457 APPENDIX II--Address of R. L. Stevenson to the Chiefs on the Opening of the Road of Gratitude, October 1894 462 INDEX TO THE LETTERS: VOLUMES XXIII-XXV 469 INDEX TO VOLUMES I-XXII 509 THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 1890--1894 THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON XI LIFE IN SAMOA FIRST YEAR AT VAILIMA NOVEMBER 1890-DECEMBER 1891 Returning from Sydney at the end of October 1890, Stevenson and his wife at once took up their abode in the wooden four-roomed cottage, or "rough barrack," as he calls it, which had been built for them in the clearing at Vailima during the months of their absence at Sydney and on their cruise in the _Equator_. Mr. Lloyd Osbourne in the meantime had started for England to wind up the family affairs at Bournemouth. During the first few months, as will be seen by the following letters, the conditions of life at Vailima were rough to the point of hardship. But matters soon mended; the work of clearing and planting went on under the eye of the master and mistress diligently and in the main successfully, though not of course without complications and misadventures. Ways and means of catering were found, and abundance began to reign in place of the makeshifts and privations of the first days. By April a better house, fit to receive the elder Mrs. Stevenson, had been built; and later in the year plans for further extension were considered, but for the present held over. The attempt made at first to work the establishment by means of white servants and head-men indoors and out proved unsatisfactory, and was gradually superseded by the formation of an efficient native staff, which in course of time developed itself into something like a small, devoted feudal clan. During the earlier months of 1891 Stevenson was not in continuous residence on his new property, but went away on two excursions, the first to Sydney to meet his mother; the second, in company of the American Consul Mr. Sewall, to Tutuila, a neighbouring island of the Samoan group. Of the latter, to him very interesting, trip, the correspondence contains only the beginning of an account abruptly broken off: more, will be found in the extracts from his diary given in Mr. Graham Balfour's _Life_ (ed. 1906, pp. 312 f.). During part of the spring he was fortunate in having the company of two distinguished Americans, the painter Lafarge and the historian Henry Adams, in addition to that of the local planters, traders, and officials, a singular and singularly mixed community. After some half-year's residence he began to realise that the arrangements made for the government of Samoa by treaty between the three powers England, Germany, and America were not working nor promising to work well. Stevenson was no abstracted student or dreamer; the human interests and human duties lying immediately about him were ever the first in his eyes; and he found himself drawn deeply into the complications of local politics, as so active a spirit could not fail to be drawn, however little taste he might have for the work. He kept in the meantime at a fair level of health, and among the multitude of new interests was faithful in the main business of his life--that is, to literature. He did not cease to toil uphill at the heavy task of preparing for serial publication the letters, or more properly chapters, on the South Seas. He planned and began delightedly his happiest tale of South Sea life, _The High Woods of Ulufanua_, afterwards changed to _The Beach of Falesá_; conceived the scheme, which was never carried out, of working two of his old conceptions into one long genealogical novel or fictitious family history to be called _The Shovels of Newton French_; and in the latter part of the year worked hard in continuation of _The Wrecker_. Having completed this during November, he turned at once, from a sense of duty rather than from any literary inspiration, to the _Footnote to History_, a laboriously prepared and minutely conscientious account of recent events in Samoa. From his earliest days at Vailima, determined that our intimacy should suffer no diminution by absence, Stevenson began, to my great pleasure, the practice of writing me a monthly budget containing a full account of his doings and interests. At first the pursuits of the enthusiastic farmer, planter, and overseer filled these letters delightfully, to the exclusion of almost everything else except references to his books projected or in hand. Later these interests began to give place in his letters to those of the local politician, immersed in affairs which seemed to me exasperatingly petty and obscure, however grave the potential European complications which lay behind them. At any rate, they were hard to follow intelligently from the other side of the globe; and it was a relief whenever his correspondence turned to matters literary or domestic, or humours of his own mind and character. These letters, or so much of them as seemed suitable for publication, were originally printed separately, in the year following the writer's death, under the title _Vailima Letters_. They are here placed, with some additions, in chronological order among those addressed to other friends or acquaintances. During this first year at Vailima his general correspondence was not nearly so large as it afterwards became; Mr. Burlingame, as representative of the house of Scribner, receiving the lion's share next to myself. For the love of Stevenson I will ask readers to take the small amount of pains necessary to grasp and remember the main facts of Samoan politics in the ten years 1889-99. At the date when he settled in Vailima the government of the islands had lately been re-ordered between the three powers interested--namely, Germany, England, and the United States--at the Convention of Berlin (July 14, 1889). The rivalries and jealousies of these three powers, complicated with the conflicting claims of various native kings or chiefs, had for some time kept the affairs of the islands dangerously embroiled. Under the Berlin Convention, Malietoa Laupepa, who had previously been deposed and deported by the Germans in favour of a nominee of their own, was reinstated as king, to the exclusion of his kinsman, the powerful and popular Mataafa, whose titles were equally good and abilities certainly greater, but who was especially obnoxious to the Germans owing to his resistance to them during the troubles of the preceding years. In the course of that resistance a small German force had been worsted in a petty skirmish at Fagalii, and resentment at this affront to the national pride was for several years one of the chief obstacles to the reconciliation of contending interests. For a time the two kinsmen, Laupepa and Mataafa, lived on amicable terms, but presently differences arose between them. Mataafa had expected to occupy a position of influence in the government: finding himself ignored, he withdrew to a camp (Malie) a few miles outside the town of Apia, where he lived in semi-royal state as a sort of passive rebel or rival to the recognised king. In the meantime, in the course of the year 1891, the two white officials appointed under the Berlin Convention--namely, the Chief Justice, a Swedish gentleman named Cedercrantz, and the President of the Council, Baron Senfft von Pilsach--had come out to the islands and entered on their duties. These gentlemen soon proved themselves unfitted for their task to a degree both disastrous and grotesque. Almost the entire white community were soon against them; with the native population they had no influence or credit; affairs both political and municipal went from bad to worse; and the consuls of the three powers, acting as an official board of advisers to the king, could do very little to mend them. To the impropriety of some of the official proceedings Stevenson felt compelled to call attention in a series of letters to the Times, the first of which appeared in 1891, the remainder in 1892. He had formed the conviction that for the cure of Samoan troubles two things were necessary: first and above all, the reconciliation of Laupepa and Mataafa; secondly, the supersession of the unlucky Chief Justice and President by men better qualified for their tasks. To effect the former purpose, he made his only practical intromission in local politics, and made it unsuccessfully. The motive of his letters to the Times was the hope to effect the second. In this matter, after undergoing the risk, which was at one moment serious, of deportation, he in the end saw his wishes fulfilled. The first Chief Justice and President were replaced by better qualified persons in the course of 1893. But meantime the muddle had grown to a head. In the autumn of that year war broke out between the partisans of Laupepa and Mataafa: the latter were defeated, and Mataafa exiled to a distant island. At the close of the following year Stevenson died. Three years later followed the death of Laupepa: then came more confused rivalries between various claimants to the kingly title. The Germans, having by this time come round to Stevenson's opinion, backed the claims of Mataafa, which they had before stubbornly disallowed, while the English and Americans stood for another candidate. In 1899 these differences resulted in a calamitous and unjustifiable action, the bombardment of native villages for several successive days by English and American war-ships. As a matter of urgent necessity, to avert worse things, new negotiations were set on foot between the three powers, with the result that England withdrew her claims in Samoa altogether, America was satisfied with the small island of Tutuila with its fine harbour of Pago-pago, while the two larger islands of Upolu and Savaii were ceded to Germany. German officials have governed them well and peacefully ever since, having allowed the restored Mataafa, as long as he lived, a recognised position of headship among the native chiefs. Stevenson during his lifetime was obnoxious to the German official world. But his name and memory are now held in honour by them, his policy to a large extent practically followed, and he would have been the first to acknowledge the merits of the new order had he lived to witness it. These remarks, following the subject down to what remains for the present its historic conclusion, will, I hope, be enough to clear it for the present purpose out of the reader's way and enable him to understand as much as is necessary of the political allusions in this and the following sections of the correspondence. It need only be added that in reading the following pages it must be borne in mind that Mulinuu and Malie, the places respectively of Laupepa's and Mataafa's residence, are also used to signify their respective parties and followings. TO SIDNEY COLVIN During the absence of the Stevensons at Sydney some eight acres of the Vailima property had been cleared of jungle, a cottage roughly built on the clearing, and something done towards making the track up the hill from Apia into a practicable road. They occupied the cottage at once, and the following letters narrate of the sequel. _In the Mountain, Apia, Samoa, Monday, November 2nd, 1890._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--This is a hard and interesting and beautiful life that we lead now. Our place is in a deep cleft of Vaea Mountain, some six hundred feet above the sea, embowered in forest, which is our strangling enemy, and which we combat with axes and dollars. I went crazy over outdoor work, and had at last to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board. _Nothing_ is so interesting as weeding, clearing, and path-making; the oversight of labourers becomes a disease; it is quite an effort not to drop into the farmer; and it does make you feel so well. To come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after some hours in the bush, change, rub down, and take a chair in the verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience. And the strange thing that I mark is this: If I go out and make sixpence, bossing my labourers and plying the cutlass or the spade, idiot conscience applauds me; if I sit in the house and make twenty pounds, idiot conscience wails over my neglect and the day wasted. For near a fortnight I did not go beyond the verandah; then I found my rush of work run out, and went down for the night to Apia; put in Sunday afternoon with our consul, "a nice young man," dined with my friend H. J. Moors in the evening, went to church--no less--at the white and half-white church--I had never been before, and was much interested; the woman I sat next _looked_ a full-blood native, and it was in the prettiest and readiest English that she sang the hymns; back to Moors', where we yarned of the islands, being both wide wanderers, till bedtime; bed, sleep, breakfast, horse saddled; round to the mission, to get Mr. Clarke to be my interpreter; over with him to the King's, whom I have not called on since my return; received by that mild old gentleman; have some interesting talk with him about Samoan superstitions and my land--the scene of a great battle in his (Malietoa Laupepa's) youth--the place which we have cleared the platform of his fort--the gulley of the stream full of dead bodies--the fight rolled off up Vaea mountain-side; back with Clarke to the mission; had a bit of lunch and consulted over a queer point of missionary policy just arisen, about our new Town Hall and the balls there--too long to go into, but a quaint example of the intricate questions which spring up daily in the missionary path.[1] Then off up the hill; Jack very fresh, the sun (close on noon) staring hot, the breeze very strong and pleasant; the ineffable green country all round--gorgeous little birds (I think they are humming-birds, but they say not) skirmishing in the wayside flowers. About a quarter way up I met a native coming down with the trunk of a cocoa palm across his shoulder; his brown breast glittering with sweat and oil: "Talofa"--"Talofa, alii--You see that white man? He speak for you." "White man he gone up here?"--"Ioe" (Yes)--"Tofa, alii"--"Tofa, soifua!" I put on Jack up the steep path, till he is all as white as shaving stick--Brown's euxesis, wish I had some--past Tanugamanono, a bush village--see into the houses as I pass--they are open sheds scattered on a green--see the brown folk sitting there, suckling kids, sleeping on their stiff wooden pillows--then on through the wood path--and here I find the mysterious white man (poor devil!) with his twenty years' certificate of good behaviour as a book-keeper, frozen out by the strikes in the colonies, come up here on a chance, no work to be found, big hotel bill, no ship to leave in--and come up to beg twenty dollars because he heard I was a Scotchman, offering to leave his portmanteau in pledge. Settle this, and on again; and here my house comes in view, and a war whoop fetches my wife and Henry (or Simelé), our Samoan boy, on the front balcony; and I am home again, and only sorry that I shall have to go down again to Apia this day week. I could, and would, dwell here unmoved, but there are things to be attended to. Never say I don't give you details and news. That is a picture of a letter. I have been hard at work since I came; three chapters of _The Wrecker_, and since that, eight of the South Sea book, and, along and about and in between, a hatful of verses. Some day I'll send the verse to you, and you'll say if any of it is any good. I have got in a better vein with the South Sea book, as I think you will see; I think these chapters will do for the volume without much change. Those that I did in the _Janet Nicoll_, under the most ungodly circumstances, I fear will want a lot of suppling and lightening, but I hope to have your remarks in a month or two upon that point. It seems a long while since I have heard from you. I do hope you are well. I am wonderful, but tired from so much work; 'tis really immense what I have done; in the South Sea book I have fifty pages copied fair, some of which has been four times, and all twice written; certainly fifty pages of solid scriving inside a fortnight, but I was at it by seven a.m. till lunch, and from two till four or five every day; between whiles, verse and blowing on the flageolet; never outside. If you could see this place! but I don't want any one to see it till my clearing is done, and my house built. It will be a home for angels. [Illustration: * Point referred to in text. ........ Paths. ======== Our boundary. _a. Garden._ _b. Present house._ _c. Banana Patch._ _d. Waterfall._ _e. Large waterfall into deep gorge where the heat of the fight was._] So far I wrote after my bit of dinner, some cold meat and bananas, on arrival. Then out to see where Henry and some of the men were clearing the garden; for it was plain there was to be no work to-day indoors, and I must set in consequence to farmering. I stuck a good while on the way up, for the path there is largely my own handiwork, and there were a lot of sprouts and saplings and stones to be removed. Then I reached our clearing just where the streams join in one; it had a fine autumn smell of burning, the smoke blew in the woods, and the boys were pretty merry and busy. Now I had a private design:--The Vaita'e I had explored pretty far up; not yet the other stream, the Vaituliga (g=nasal n, as ng in sing); and up that, with my wood knife, I set off alone. It is here quite dry; it went through endless woods; about as broad as a Devonshire lane, here and there crossed by fallen trees; huge trees overhead in the sun, dripping lianas and tufted with orchids, tree ferns, ferns depending with air roots from the steep banks, great arums--I had not skill enough to say if any of them were the edible kind, one of our staples here!--hundreds of bananas--another staple--and alas! I had skill enough to know all of these for the bad kind that bears no fruit. My Henry moralised over this the other day; how hard it was that the bad banana flourished wild, and the good must be weeded and tended; and I had not the heart to tell him how fortunate they were here, and how hungry were other lands by comparison. The ascent of this lovely lane of my dry stream filled me with delight. I could not but be reminded of old Mayne Reid, as I have been more than once since I came to the tropics; and I thought, if Reid had been still living, I would have written to tell him that, for me, _it had come true_; and I thought, forbye, that, if the great powers go on as they are going, and the Chief Justice delays, it would come truer still; and the war-conch will sound in the hills, and my home will be inclosed in camps, before the year is ended. And all at once--mark you, how Mayne Reid is on the spot--a strange thing happened. I saw a liana stretch across the bed of the brook about breast-high, swung up my knife to sever it, and--behold, it was a wire! On either hand it plunged into thick bush; to-morrow I shall see where it goes and get a guess perhaps of what it means. To-day I know no more than--there it is. A little higher the brook began to trickle, then to fill. At last, as I meant to do some work upon the homeward trail, it was time to turn. I did not return by the stream; knife in hand, as long as my endurance lasted, I was to cut a path in the congested bush. At first it went ill with me; I got badly stung as high as the elbows by the stinging plant; I was nearly hung in a tough liana--a rotten trunk giving way under my feet; it was deplorable bad business. And an axe--if I dared swing one--would have been more to the purpose than my cutlass. Of a sudden things began to go strangely easier; I found stumps, bushing out again; my body began to wonder, then my mind; I raised my eyes and looked ahead; and, by George, I was no longer pioneering, I had struck an old track overgrown, and was restoring an old path. So I laboured till I was in such a state that Carolina Wilhelmina Skeggs[2] could scarce have found a name for it. Thereon desisted; returned to the stream; made my way down that stony track to the garden, where the smoke was still hanging and the sun was still in the high tree-tops, and so home. Here, fondly supposing my long day was over, I rubbed down; exquisite agony; water spreads the poison of these weeds; I got it all over my hands, on my chest, in my eyes, and presently, while eating an orange, _à la_ Rarotonga, burned my lip and eye with orange juice. Now all day, our three small pigs had been adrift, to the mortal peril of our corn, lettuce, onions, etc., and as I stood smarting on the back verandah, behold the three piglings issuing from the wood just opposite. Instantly I got together as many boys as I could--three, and got the pigs penned against the rampart of the sty, till the others joined; whereupon we formed a cordon, closed, captured the deserters, and dropped them, squeaking amain, into their strengthened barracks where, please God, they may now stay! Perhaps you may suppose the day now over; you are not the head of a plantation, my juvenile friend. Politics succeeded: Henry got adrift in his English, Bene was too cowardly to tell me what he was after: result, I have lost seven good labourers, and had to sit down and write to you to keep my temper. Let me sketch my lads.--Henry--Henry has gone down to town or I could not be writing to you--this were the hour of his English lesson else, when he learns what he calls "long explessions" or "your chief's language" for the matter of an hour and a half--Henry is a chiefling from Savaii; I once loathed, I now like and--pending fresh discoveries--have a kind of respect for Henry. He does good work for us; goes among the labourers, bossing and watching; helps Fanny; is civil, kindly, thoughtful; _O si sic semper!_ But will he be "his sometime self throughout the year"? Anyway, he has deserved of us, and he must disappoint me sharply ere I give him up.--Bene--or Peni--Ben, in plain English--is supposed to be my ganger; the Lord love him! God made a truckling coward, there is his full history. He cannot tell me what he wants; he dares not tell me what is wrong; he dares not transmit my orders or translate my censures. And with all this, honest, sober, industrious, miserably smiling over the miserable issue of his own unmanliness.--Paul--a German--cook and steward--a glutton of work--a splendid fellow; drawbacks, three: (1) no cook; (2) an inveterate bungler; a man with twenty thumbs, continually falling in the dishes, throwing out the dinner, preserving the garbage; (3) a dr----, well, don't let us say that--but we daren't let him go to town, and he--poor, good soul--is afraid to be let go.--Lafaele (Raphael), a strong, dull, deprecatory man; splendid with an axe, if watched; the better for a rowing, when he calls me "Papa" in the most wheedling tones; desperately afraid of ghosts, so that he dare not walk alone up in the banana patch--see map. The rest are changing labourers; and to-night, owing to the miserable cowardice of Peni, who did not venture to tell me what the men wanted--and which was no more than fair--all are gone--and my weeding in the article of being finished! Pity the sorrows of a planter. I am, Sir, yours, and be jowned to you, The Planter, R. L. S. _Tuesday, 3rd._--I begin to see the whole scheme of letter-writing; you sit down every day and pour out an equable stream of twaddle. This morning all my fears were fled, and all the trouble had fallen to the lot of Peni himself, who deserved it; my field was full of weeders; and I am again able to justify the ways of God. All morning I worked at the _South Seas_, and finished the chapter I had stuck upon on Saturday. Fanny, awfully hove-to with rheumatics and injuries received upon the field of sport and glory, chasing pigs, was unable to go up and down stairs, so she sat upon the back verandah, and my work was chequered by her cries. "Paul, you take a spade to do that--dig a hole first. If you do that, you'll cut your foot off! Here, you boy, what you do there? You no get work? You go find Simelé; he give you work. Peni, you tell this boy he go find Simelé; suppose Simelé no give him work, you tell him go 'way. I no want him here. That boy no good."--_Peni_ (from the distance in reassuring tones), "All right, sir!"--_Fanny_ (after a long pause), "Peni, you tell that boy go find Simelé! I no want him stand here all day. I no pay that boy. I see him all day. He no do nothing."--Luncheon, beef, soda-scones, fried bananas, pine-apple in claret, coffee. Try to write a poem; no go. Play the flageolet. Then sneakingly off to farmering and pioneering. Four gangs at work on our place; a lively scene; axes crashing and smoke blowing; all the knives are out. But I rob the garden party of one without a stock, and you should see my hand--cut to ribbons. Now I want to do my path up the Vaituliga single-handed, and I want it to burst on the public complete. Hence, with devilish ingenuity, I begin it at different places; so that if you stumble on one section, you may not even then suspect the fulness of my labours. Accordingly, I started in a new place, below the wire, and hoping to work up to it. It was perhaps lucky I had so bad a cutlass, and my smarting hand bid me stay before I had got up to the wire, but just in season, so that I was only the better of my activity, not dead beat as yesterday. A strange business it was, and infinitely solitary; away above, the sun was in the high tree-tops; the lianas noosed and sought to hang me; the saplings struggled, and came up with that sob of death that one gets to know so well; great, soft, sappy trees fell at a lick of the cutlass, little tough switches laughed at and dared my best endeavour. Soon, toiling down in that pit of verdure, I heard blows on the far side, and then laughter. I confess a chill settled on my heart. Being so dead alone, in a place where by rights none should be beyond me, I was aware, upon interrogation, if those blows had drawn nearer, I should (of course quite unaffectedly) have executed a strategic movement to the rear; and only the other day I was lamenting my insensibility to superstition! Am I beginning to be sucked in? Shall I become a midnight twitterer like my neighbours? At times I thought the blows were echoes; at times I thought the laughter was from birds. For our birds are strangely human in their calls. Vaea mountain about sundown sometimes rings with shrill cries, like the hails of merry, scattered children. As a matter of fact, I believe stealthy wood-cutters from Tanugamanono were above me in the wood and answerable for the blows; as for the laughter, a woman and two children had come and asked Fanny's leave to go up shrimp-fishing in the burn; beyond doubt, it was these I heard. Just at the right time I returned; to wash down, change, and begin this snatch of letter before dinner was ready, and to finish it afterwards, before Henry has yet put in an appearance for his lesson in "long explessions." Dinner: stewed beef and potatoes, baked bananas, new loaf-bread hot from the oven, pine-apple in claret. These are great days; we have been low in the past; but now are we as belly-gods, enjoying all things. _Wednesday_, (_Hist. Vailima resumed._)--A gorgeous evening of after-glow in the great tree-tops and behind the mountain, and full moon over the lowlands and the sea, inaugurated a night of horrid cold. To you effete denizens of the so-called temperate zone, it had seemed nothing; neither of us could sleep; we were up seeking extra coverings, I know not at what hour--it was as bright as day. The moon right over Vaea--near due west, the birds strangely silent, and the wood of the house tingling with cold; I believe it must have been 60°! Consequence: Fanny has a headache and is wretched, and I could do no work. (I am trying all round for a place to hold my pen; you will hear why later on; this to explain penmanship.) I wrote two pages, very bad, no movement, no life or interest; then I wrote a business letter; then took to tootling on the flageolet, till glory should call me farmering. I took up at the fit time Lafaele and Mauga--Mauga, accent on the first, is a mountain, I don't know what Maugà means--mind what I told you of the value of g--to the garden, and set them digging, then turned my attention to the path. I could not go into my bush path for two reasons: 1st, sore hands; 2nd, had on my trousers and good shoes. Lucky it was. Right in the wild lime hedge which cuts athwart us just homeward of the garden, I found a great bed of kuikui--sensitive plant--our deadliest enemy. A fool brought it to this island in a pot, and used to lecture and sentimentalise over the tender thing. The tender thing has now taken charge of this island, and men fight it, with torn hands, for bread and life. A singular, insidious thing, shrinking and biting like a weasel; clutching by its roots as a limpet clutches to a rock. As I fought him, I bettered some verses in my poem, _The Woodman_;[3] the only thought I gave to letters. Though the kuikui was thick, there was but a small patch of it, and when I was done I attacked the wild lime, and had a hand-to-hand skirmish with its spines and elastic suckers. All this time, close by, in the cleared space of the garden, Lafaele and Maugà were digging. Suddenly quoth Lafaele, "Somebody he sing out."--"Somebody he sing out? All right. I go." And I went and found they had been whistling and "singing out" for long, but the fold of the hill and the uncleared bush shuts in the garden so that no one heard, and I was late for dinner, and Fanny's headache was cross; and when the meal was over, we had to cut up a pineapple which was going bad, to make jelly of; and the next time you have a handful of broken blood-blisters, apply pine-apple juice, and you will give me news of it, and I request a specimen of your hand of write five minutes after--the historic moment when I tackled this history. My day so far. Fanny was to have rested. Blessed Paul began making a duck-house; she let him be; the duck-house fell down, and she had to set her hand to it. He was then to make a drinking-place for the pigs; she let him be again--he made a stair by which the pigs will probably escape this evening, and she was near weeping. Impossible to blame the indefatigable fellow; energy is too rare and goodwill too noble a thing to discourage; but it's trying when she wants a rest. Then she had to cook the dinner; then, of course--like a fool and a woman--must wait dinner for me, and make a flurry of herself. Her day so far. _Cetera adhuc desunt._ _Friday_--_I think._--I have been too tired to add to this chronicle, which will at any rate give you some guess of our employment. All goes well; the kuikui--(think of this mispronunciation having actually infected me to the extent of misspelling! tuitui is the word by rights)--the tuitui is all out of the paddock--a fenced park between the house and boundary; Peni's men start to-day on the road; the garden is part burned, part dug; and Henry, at the head of a troop of underpaid assistants, is hard at work clearing. The part clearing you will see from the map; from the house run down to the stream side, up the stream nearly as high as the garden; then back to the star which I have just added to the map. My long, silent contests in the forest have had a strange effect on me. The unconcealed vitality of these vegetables, their exuberant number and strength, the attempts--I can use no other word--of lianas to enwrap and capture the intruder, the awful silence, the knowledge that all my efforts are only like the performance of an actor, the thing of a moment, and the wood will silently and swiftly heal them up with fresh effervescence; the cunning sense of the tuitui, suffering itself to be touched with wind-swayed grasses and not minding--but let the grass be moved by a man, and it shuts up; the whole silent battle, murder, and slow death of the contending forest; weigh upon the imagination. My poem _The Woodman_ stands; but I have taken refuge in a new story, which just shot through me like a bullet in one of my moments of awe, alone in that tragic jungle:-- _The High Woods of Ulufanua_[4] 1. A South Sea Bridal. 2. Under the Ban. 3. Savao and Faavao. 4. Cries in the High Wood. 5. Rumour full of Tongues. 6. The Hour of Peril. 7. The Day of Vengeance. It is very strange, very extravagant, I dare say; but it's varied, and picturesque, and has a pretty love affair, and ends well. Ulufanua is a lovely Samoan word, ulu = grove; fanua = land; grove-land--"the tops of the high trees." Savao, "sacred to the wood," and Faavao, "wood-ways," are the names of two of the characters, Ulufanua the name of the supposed island. I am very tired, and rest off to-day from all but letters. Fanny is quite done up; she could not sleep last night, something it seemed like asthma--I trust not. I suppose Lloyd will be about, so you can give him the benefit of this long scrawl.[5] Never say that I _can't_ write a letter, say that I don't.--Yours ever, my dearest fellow, R. L. S. _Later on Friday._--The guidwife had bread to bake, and she baked it in a pan, O! But between whiles she was down with me weeding sensitive in the paddock. The men have but now passed over it; I was round in that very place to see the weeding was done thoroughly, and already the reptile springs behind our heels. Tuitui is a truly strange beast, and gives food for thought. I am nearly sure--I cannot yet be quite, I mean to experiment, when I am less on the hot chase of the beast--that, even at the instant he shrivels up his leaves, he strikes his prickles downward so as to catch the uprooting finger; instinctive, say the gabies; but so is man's impulse to strike out. One thing that takes and holds me is to see the strange variation in the propagation of alarm among these rooted beasts; at times it spreads to a radius (I speak by the guess of the eye) of five or six inches; at times only one individual plant appears frightened at a time. We tried how long it took one to recover; 'tis a sanguine creature; it is all abroad again before (I guess again) two minutes. It is odd how difficult in this world it is to be armed. The double armour of this plant betrays it. In a thick tuft, where the leaves disappear, I thrust In my hand, and the bite of the thorns betrays the top-most stem. In the open again, and when I hesitate if it be clover, a touch on the leaves, and its fine sense and retractile action betrays its identity at once. Yet it has one gift incomparable. Rome had virtue and knowledge; Rome perished. The sensitive plant has indigestible seeds--so they say--and it will flourish for ever. I give my advice thus to a young plant--have a strong root, a weak stem, and an indigestible seed; so you will outlast the eternal city, and your progeny will clothe mountains, and the irascible planter will blaspheme in vain. The weak point of tuitui is that its stem is strong. _Supplementary Page._--Here beginneth the third lesson, which is not from the planter but from a less estimable character, the writer of books. I want you to understand about this South Sea Book. The job is immense; I stagger under material. I have seen the first big _tache_. It was necessary to see the smaller ones; the letters were at my hand for the purpose, but I was not going to lose this experience; and, instead of writing mere letters, have poured out a lot of stuff for the book. How this works and fits, time is to show. But I believe, in time, I shall get the whole thing in form. Now, up to date, that is all my design, and I beg to warn you till we have the whole (or much) of the stuff together, you can hardly judge--and I can hardly judge. Such a mass of stuff is to be handled, if possible without repetition--so much foreign matter to be introduced--if possible with perspicuity--and, as much as can be, a spirit of narrative to be preserved. You will find that come stronger as I proceed, and get the explanations worked through. Problems of style are (as yet) dirt under my feet; my problem is architectural, creative--to get this stuff jointed and moving. If I can do that, I will trouble you for style; anybody might write it, and it would be splendid; well-engineered, the masses right, the blooming thing travelling--twig? This I wanted you to understand, for lots of the stuff sent home is, I imagine, rot--and slovenly rot--and some of it pompous rot; and I want you to understand it's a _lay-in_. Soon, if the tide of poeshie continues, I'll send you a whole lot to damn. You never said thank you for the handsome tribute addressed to you from Apemama;[6] such is the gratitude of the world to the God-sent poick. Well, well:--"Vex not thou the poick's mind, With thy coriaceous ingratitude, The P. will be to your faults more than a little blind, And yours is a far from handsome attitude." Having thus dropped into poetry in a spirit of friendship, I have the honour to subscribe myself, Sir, your obedient humble servant, SILAS WEGG. I suppose by this you will have seen the lad--and his feet will have been in the Monument--and his eyes beheld the face of George.[7] Well! There is much eloquence in a well! I am, Sir, Yours The Epigrammatist ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON R N O O B S E N R E T V E L T O S U I S S I U S O T L E V T E R N E S B O O N R FINIS--EXPLICIT TO E. L. BURLINGAME The opening sentences of the following refer of course to _The Wrecker_, and particularly to a suggestion of mine concerning the relation of the main narrative to the prologue:-- _Vailima, Apia, Samoa, Nov. 7, 1890._ I wish you to add to the words at the end of the prologue; they run, I think, thus, "And this is the yarn of Loudon Dodd"; add, "not as he told, but as he wrote it afterwards for his diversion." This becomes the more needful, because, when all is done, I shall probably revert to Tai-o-hae, and give final details about the characters in the way of a conversation between Dodd and Havers. These little snippets of information and _faits-divers_ have always a disjointed, broken-backed appearance; yet, readers like them. In this book we have introduced so many characters, that this kind of epilogue will be looked for; and I rather hope, looking far ahead, that I can lighten it in dialogue. We are well past the middle now. How does it strike you? and can you guess my mystery? It will make a fattish volume! I say, have you ever read the _Highland Widow_? I never had till yesterday: I am half inclined, bar a trip or two, to think it Scott's masterpiece; and it has the name of a failure! Strange things are readers. I expect proofs and revises in duplicate. We have now got into a small barrack at our place. We see the sea six hundred feet below filling the end of two vales of forest. On one hand the mountain runs above us some thousand feet higher; great trees stand round us in our clearing; there is an endless voice of birds; I have never lived in such a heaven; just now, I have fever, which mitigates but not destroys my gusto in my circumstances.--You may envy ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. ... O, I don't know if I mentioned that having seen your new tail to the magazine, I cried off interference, at least for this trip. Did I ask you to send me my books and papers, and all the bound volumes of the mag.? _quorum pars_. I might add that were there a good book or so--new--I don't believe there is--such would be welcome. I desire--I positively begin to awake--to be remembered to Scribner, Low, St. Gaudens, Russell Sullivan. Well, well, you fellows have the feast of reason and the flow of soul; I have a better-looking place and climate: you should hear the birds on the hill now! The day has just wound up with a shower; it is still light without, though I write within here at the cheek of a lamp; my wife and an invaluable German are wrestling about bread on the back verandah; and how the birds and the frogs are rattling, and piping, and hailing from the woods! Here and there a throaty chuckle; here and there, cries like those of jolly children who have lost their way; here and there, the ringing sleigh-bell of the tree frog. Out and away down below me on the sea it is still raining; it will be wet under foot on schooners, and the house will leak; how well I know that! Here the showers only patter on the iron roof, and sometimes roar; and within, the lamp burns steady on the tafa-covered walls, with their dusky tartan patterns, and the book-shelves with their thin array of books; and no squall can rout my house or bring my heart into my mouth.--The well-pleased South Sea Islander, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Vailima, Tuesday, November 25th,1890._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--I wanted to go out bright and early to go on with my survey. You never heard of that. The world has turned, and much water run under bridges, since I stopped my diary. I have written six more chapters of the book, all good I potently believe, and given up, as a deception of the devil's, the _High Woods_. I have been once down to Apia, to a huge native feast at Seumanutafa's, the chief of Apia. There was a vast mass of food, crowds of people, the police charging among them with whips, the whole in high good humour on both sides; infinite noise; and a historic event--Mr. Clarke, the missionary, and his wife, assisted at a native dance. On my return from this function, I found work had stopped; no more _South Seas_ in my belly. Well, Henry had cleared a great deal of our bush on a contract, and it ought to be measured. I set myself to the task with a tape-line; it seemed a dreary business; then I borrowed a prismatic compass, and tackled the task afresh. I have no books; I had not touched an instrument nor given a thought to the business since the year of grace 1871; you can imagine with what interest I sat down yesterday afternoon to reduce my observations; five triangles I had taken; all five came right, to my ineffable joy. Our dinner--the lowest we have ever been--consisted of _one avocado pear_ between Fanny and me, a ship's biscuit for the guidman, white bread for the Missis, and red wine for the twa. No salt horse, even, in all Vailima! After dinner Henry came, and I began to teach him decimals; you wouldn't think I knew them myself after so long desuetude! I could not but wonder how Henry stands his evenings here; the Polynesian loves gaiety--I feed him with decimals, the mariner's compass, derivations, grammar, and the like; delecting myself, after the manner of my race, _moult tristement_. I suck my paws; I live for my dexterities and by my accomplishments; even my clumsinesses are my joy--my woodcuts, my stumbling on the pipe, this surveying even--and even weeding sensitive; anything to do with the mind, with the eye, with the hand--with a part of _me_; diversion flows in these ways for the dreary man. But gaiety is what these children want; to sit in a crowd, tell stories and pass jests, to hear one another laugh and scamper with the girls. It's good fun, too, I believe, but not for R.L.S., _ætat._ 40. Which I am now past forty, Custodian, and not one penny the worse that I can see; as amusable as ever; to be on board ship is reward enough for me; give me the wages of going on--in a schooner! Only, if ever I were gay, which I misremember, I am gay no more. And here is poor Henry passing his evenings on my intellectual husks, which the professors masticated; keeping the accounts of the estate--all wrong I have no doubt--I keep no check, beyond a very rough one; marching in with a cloudy brow, and the day-book under his arm; tackling decimals, coming with cases of conscience--how would an English chief behave in such a case? etc.; and, I am bound to say, on any glimmer of a jest, lapsing into native hilarity as a tree straightens itself after the wind is by. The other night I remembered my old friend--I believe yours also--Scholastikos, and administered the crow and the anchor--they were quite fresh to Samoan ears (this implies a very early severance)--and I thought the anchor would have made away with my Simelé altogether. Fanny's time, in this interval, has been largely occupied in contending publicly with wild swine. We have a black sow; we call her Jack Sheppard; impossible to confine her--impossible also for her to be confined! To my sure knowledge she has been in an interesting condition for longer than any other sow in story; else she had long died the death; as soon as she is brought to bed, she shall count her days. I suppose that sow has cost us in days' labour from thirty to fifty dollars; as many as eight boys (at a dollar a day) have been twelve hours in chase of her. Now it is supposed that Fanny has outwitted her; she grins behind broad planks in what was once the cook-house. She is a wild pig; far handsomer than any tame; and when she found the cook-house was too much for her methods of evasion, she lay down on the floor and refused food and drink for a whole Sunday. On Monday morning she relapsed, and now eats and drinks like a little man. I am reminded of an incident. Two Sundays ago, the sad word was brought that the sow was out again; this time she had carried another in her flight. Moors and I and Fanny were strolling up to the garden, and there by the waterside we saw the black sow, looking guilty. It seemed to me beyond words; but Fanny's _cri du coeur_ was delicious: "G-r-r!" she cried; "nobody loves you!" I would I could tell you the moving story of our cart and cart-horses; the latter are dapple-grey, about sixteen hands, and of enormous substance; the former was a kind of red and green shandrydan with a driving bench; plainly unfit to carry lumber or to face our road. (Remember that the last third of my road, about a mile, is all made out of a bridle-track by my boys--and my dollars.) It was supposed a white man had been found--an ex-German artilleryman--to drive this last; he proved incapable and drunken; the gallant Henry, who had never driven before, and knew nothing about horses--except the rats and weeds that flourish on the islands--volunteered; Moors accepted, proposing to follow and supervise: despatched his work and started after. No cart! he hurried on up the road--no cart. Transfer the scene to Vailima, where on a sudden, to Fanny and me, the cart appears, apparently at a hard gallop, some two hours before it was expected; Henry radiantly ruling chaos from the bench. It stopped: it was long before we had time to remark that the axle was twisted like the letter L. Our first care was the horses. There they stood, black with sweat, the sweat raining from them--literally raining--their heads down, their feet apart--and blood running thick from the nostrils of the mare. We got out Fanny's under-clothes--couldn't find anything else but our blankets--to rub them down, and in about half an hour we had the blessed satisfaction to see one after the other take a bite or two of grass. But it was a toucher; a little more and these steeds would have been foundered. _Monday, 31st(?) November._--Near a week elapsed, and no journal. On Monday afternoon, Moors rode up and I rode down with him, dined, and went over in the evening to the American consulate; present, Consul-General Sewall, Lieut. Parker and Mrs. Parker, Lafarge the American decorator, Adams an American historian; we talked late, and it was arranged I was to write up for Fanny, and we should both dine on the morrow. On the Friday, I was all forenoon in the mission house, lunched at the German consulate, went on board the _Sperber_(German war-ship) in the afternoon, called on my lawyer on my way out to American Consulate, and talked till dinner time with Adams, whom I am supplying with introductions and information for Tahiti and the Marquesas. Fanny arrived a wreck, and had to lie down. The moon rose, one day past full, and we dined in the verandah, a good dinner on the whole; talk with Lafarge about art and the lovely dreams of art students.[8] Remark by Adams, which took me briskly home to the Monument--"I only liked one _young_ woman--and that was Mrs. Procter."[9] Henry James would like that. Back by moonlight in the consulate boat--Fanny being too tired to walk--to Moors's. Saturday, I left Fanny to rest, and was off early to the Mission, where the politics are thrilling just now. The native pastors (to every one's surprise) have moved of themselves in the matter of the native dances, desiring the restrictions to be removed, or rather to be made dependent on the character of the dance. Clarke, who had feared censure and all kinds of trouble, is, of course, rejoicing greatly. A characteristic feature: the argument of the pastors was handed in in the form of a fictitious narrative of the voyage of one Mr. Pye, an English traveller, and his conversation with a chief; there are touches of satire in this educational romance. Mr. Pye, for instance, admits that he knows nothing about the Bible. At the Mission I was sought out by Henry in a devil of an agitation; he has been made the victim of a forgery--a crime hitherto unknown in Samoa. I had to go to Folau, the chief judge here, in the matter. Folau had never heard of the offence, and begged to know what was the punishment; there may be lively times in forgery ahead. It seems the sort of crime to tickle a Polynesian. After lunch--you can see what a busy three days I am describing--we set off to ride home. My Jack was full of the devil of corn and too much grass, and no work. I had to ride ahead and leave Fanny behind. He is a most gallant little rascal is my Jack, and takes the whole way as hard as the rider pleases. Single incident: half-way up, I find my boys upon the road and stop and talk with Henry in his character of ganger, as long as Jack will suffer me. Fanny drones in after; we make a show of eating--or I do--she goes to bed about half-past six! I write some verses, read Irving's _Washington_, and follow about half-past eight. O, one thing more I did, in a prophetic spirit. I had made sure Fanny was not fit to be left alone, and wrote before turning in a letter to Chalmers, telling him I could not meet him in Auckland at this time. By eleven at night, Fanny got me wakened--she had tried twice in vain--and I found her very bad. Thence till three, we laboured with mustard poultices, laudanum, soda and ginger--Heavens! wasn't it cold; the land breeze was as cold as a river; the moon was glorious in the paddock, and the great boughs and the black shadows of our trees were inconceivable. But it was a poor time. Sunday morning found Fanny, of course, a complete wreck, and myself not very brilliant. Paul had to go to Vailele _re_ cocoa-nuts; it was doubtful if he could be back by dinner; never mind, said I, I'll take dinner when you return. Off set Paul. I did an hour's work, and then tackled the house work. I did it beautiful: the house was a picture, it resplended of propriety. Presently Mr. Moors' Andrew rode up; I heard the doctor was at the Forest House and sent a note to him; and when he came, I heard my wife telling him she had been in bed all day, and that was why the house was so dirty! Was it grateful? Was it politic? Was it TRUE?--Enough! In the interval, up marched little L. S., one of my neighbours, all in his Sunday white linens; made a fine salute, and demanded the key of the kitchen in German and English. And he cooked dinner for us, like a little man, and had it on the table and the coffee ready by the hour. Paul had arranged me this surprise. Some time later, Paul returned himself with a fresh surprise on hand; he was almost sober; nothing but a hazy eye distinguished him from Paul of the week days: _vivat!_ On the evening I cannot dwell. All the horses got out of the paddock, went across, and smashed my neighbour's garden into a big hole. How little the amateur conceives a farmer's troubles. I went out at once with a lantern, staked up a gap in the hedge, was kicked at by a chestnut mare, who straightway took to the bush; and came back. A little after, they had found another gap, and the crowd were all abroad again. What has happened to our own garden nobody yet knows. Fanny had a fair night, and we are both tolerable this morning, only the yoke of correspondence lies on me heavy. I beg you will let this go on to my mother. I got such a good start in your letter, that I kept on at it, and I have neither time nor energy for more.--Yours ever, R. L. S. _Something new_.--I was called from my letters by the voice of Mr. ----, who had just come up with a load of wood, roaring, "Henry! Henry! Bring six boys!" I saw there was something wrong, and ran out. The cart, half unloaded, had upset with the mare in the shafts; she was all cramped together and all tangled up in harness and cargo, the off shaft pushing her over, the carter holding her up by main strength, and right along-side of her--where she must fall if she went down--a deadly stick of a tree like a lance. I could not but admire the wisdom and faith of this great brute; I never saw the riding-horse that would not have lost its life in such a situation; but the cart-elephant patiently waited and was saved. It was a stirring three minutes, I can tell you. I forgot in talking of Saturday to tell of one incident which will particularly interest my mother. I met Dr. Davis from Savaii, and had an age-long talk about Edinburgh folk; it was very pleasant. He has been studying in Edinburgh, along with his son; a pretty relation. He told me he knew nobody but college people: "I was altogether a student," he said with glee. He seems full of cheerfulness and thick-set energy. I feel as if I could put him in a novel with effect; and ten to one, if I know more of him, the image will be only blurred. _Tuesday, Dec. 2nd._--I should have told you yesterday that all my boys were got up for their work in moustaches and side-whiskers of some sort of blacking--I suppose wood-ash. It was a sight of joy to see them return at night, axe on shoulder, feigning to march like soldiers, a choragus with a loud voice singing out, "March--step! March--step!" in imperfect recollection of some drill. R. L. S. TO E. L. BURLINGAME The intention here announced was only carried out to the extent of finishing one paper, _My First Book_, and beginning a few others--_Genesis of the Master of Ballantrae, Rosa Quo Locorum_, etc.; see Edinburgh edition, _Miscellanies_, vol. iv. The "long experience of gambling places" is a phrase which must not be misunderstood. Stevenson loved risk to life and limb, but hated gambling for money, and had known the tables only as a looker-on during holiday or invalid travels as a boy and young man. "Tamate" is the native (Rarotongan) word for trader, used especially as a name for the famous missionary pioneer, the Rev. James Chalmers, for whom Stevenson had an unbounded respect. [_Vailima, December 1890._] MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--By some diabolical accident, I have mislaid your last. What was in it? I know not, and here I am caught unexpectedly by the American mail, a week earlier than by computation. The computation, not the mail, is supposed to be in error. The vols. of Scribner's have arrived, and present a noble appearance in my house, which is not a noble structure at present. But by autumn we hope to be sprawling in our verandah, twelve feet, sir, by eighty-eight in front, and seventy-two on the flank; view of the sea and mountains, sunrise, moonrise, and the German fleet at anchor three miles away in Apia harbour. I hope some day to offer you a bowl of kava there, or a slice of a pine-apple, or some lemonade from my own hedge. "I know a hedge where the lemons grow"--_Shakespeare_. My house at this moment smells of them strong; and the rain, which a while ago roared there, now rings in minute drops upon the iron roof. I have no _Wrecker_ for you this mail, other things having engaged me. I was on the whole rather relieved you did not vote for regular papers, as I feared the traces. It is my design from time to time to write a paper of a reminiscential (beastly word) description; some of them I could scarce publish from different considerations; but some of them--for instance, my long experience of gambling places--Homburg, Wiesbaden, Baden-Baden, old Monaco, and new Monte Carlo--would make good magazine padding, if I got the stuff handled the right way. I never could fathom why verse was put in magazines; it has something to do with the making-up, has it not? I am scribbling a lot just now; if you are taken badly that way, apply to the South Seas. I could send you some, I believe, anyway, only none of it is thoroughly ripe. If you have kept back the volume of ballads, I'll soon make it of a respectable size if this fit continue. By the next mail you may expect some more _Wrecker_, or I shall be displeased. Probably no more than a chapter, however, for it is a hard one, and I am denuded of my proofs, my collaborator having walked away with them to England; hence some trouble in catching the just note. I am a mere farmer: my talk, which would scarce interest you on Broadway, is all of fuafua and tuitui and black boys, and planting and weeding, and axes and cutlasses; my hands are covered with blisters and full of thorns; letters are, doubtless, a fine thing, so are beer and skittles, but give me farmering in the tropics for real interest. Life goes in enchantment; I come home to find I am late for dinner; and when I go to bed at night, I could cry for the weariness of my loins and thighs. Do not speak to me of vexation, the life brims with it, but with living interest fairly. Christmas I go to Auckland, to meet Tamate, the New Guinea missionary, a man I love. The rest of my life is a prospect of much rain, much weeding and making of paths, a little letters, and devilish little to eat.--I am, my dear Burlingame, with messages to all whom it may concern, very sincerely yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _[Vailima] Monday, twenty-somethingth of December 1890._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--I do not say my Jack is anything extraordinary; he is only an island horse; and the profane might call him a Punch; and his face is like a donkey's; and natives have ridden him, and he has no mouth in consequence, and occasionally shies. But his merits are equally surprising; and I don't think I should ever have known Jack's merits if I had not been riding up of late on moonless nights. Jack is a bit of a dandy; he loves to misbehave in a gallant manner, above all on Apia Street, and when I stop to speak to people, they say (Dr. Stuebel the German consul said about three days ago), "O what a wild horse! it cannot be safe to ride him." Such a remark is Jack's reward, and represents his ideal of fame. Now when I start out of Apia on a dark night, you should see my changed horse; at a fast steady walk, with his head down, and sometimes his nose to the ground--when he wants to do that, he asks for his head with a little eloquent polite movement indescribable--he climbs the long ascent and threads the darkest of the wood. The first night I came it was starry; and it was singular to see the starlight drip down into the crypt of the wood, and shine in the open end of the road, as bright as moonlight at home; but the crypt itself was proof, blackness lived in it. The next night it was raining. We left the lights of Apia and passed into limbo. Jack finds a way for himself, but he does not calculate for my height above the saddle; and I am directed forward, all braced up for a crouch and holding my switch upright in front of me. It is curiously interesting. In the forest, the dead wood is phosphorescent; some nights the whole ground is strewn with it, so that it seems like a grating over a pale hell; doubtless this is one of the things that feed the night fears of the natives; and I am free to confess that in a night of trackless darkness where all else is void, these pallid _ignes suppositi_ have a fantastic appearance, rather bogey even. One night, when it was very dark, a man had put out a little lantern by the wayside to show the entrance to his ground. I saw the light, as I thought, far ahead, and supposed it was a pedestrian coming to meet me; I was quite taken by surprise when it struck in my face and passed behind me. Jack saw it, and he was appalled; do you think he thought of shying? No, sir, not in the dark; in the dark Jack knows he is on duty; and he went past that lantern steady and swift; only, as he went, he groaned and shuddered. For about 2500 of Jack's steps we only passed one house--that where the lantern was; and about 1500 of these are in the darkness of the pit. But now the moon is on tap again, and the roads lighted. [Illustration: 1. _Three posts._ 5. _Sink of the Tuluiga._ 2. _Leather Bottle._ 6. _Silent Falls._ 3. _Old Walls._ 7. _Garden._ 4. _Wreck Hill._] I have been exploring up the Vaituluiga; see your map. It comes down a wonderful fine glen; at least 200 feet of cliffs on either hand, winding like a corkscrew, great forest trees filling it. At the top there ought to be a fine double fall; but the stream evades it by a fault and passes underground. Above the fall it runs (at this season) full and very gaily in a shallow valley, some hundred yards before the head of the glen. Its course is seen full of grasses, like a flooded meadow; that is the sink! beyond the grave of the grasses, the bed lies dry. Near this upper part there is a great show of ruinous pig-walls; a village must have stood near by. To walk from our house to Wreck Hill (when the path is buried in fallen trees) takes one about half an hour, I think; to return, not more than twenty minutes; I dare say fifteen. Hence I should guess it was three-quarters of a mile. I had meant to join on my explorations passing eastward by the sink; but, Lord! how it rains. _Later._--I went out this morning with a pocket compass and walked in a varying direction, perhaps on an average S. by W., 1754 paces. Then I struck into the bush, N.W. by N., hoping to strike the Vaituluiga above the falls. Now I have it plotted out I see I should have gone W. or even W. by S.; but it is not easy to guess. For 600 weary paces I struggled through the bush, and then came on the stream below the gorge, where it was comparatively easy to get down to it. In the place where I struck it, it made cascades about a little isle, and was running about N.E., 20 to 30 feet wide, as deep as to my knee, and piercing cold. I tried to follow it down, and keep the run of its direction and my paces; but when I was wading to the knees and the waist in mud, poison brush, and rotted wood, bound hand and foot in lianas, shovelled unceremoniously off the one shore and driven to try my luck upon the other--I saw I should have hard enough work to get my body down, if my mind rested. It was a damnable walk; certainly not half a mile as the crow flies, but a real bucketer for hardship. Once I had to pass the stream where it flowed between banks about three feet high. To get the easier down, I swung myself by a wild-cocoanut--(so called, it bears bunches of scarlet nutlets)--which grew upon the brink. As I so swung, I received a crack on the head that knocked me all abroad. Impossible to guess what tree had taken a shy at me. So many towered above, one over the other, and the missile, whatever it was, dropped in the stream and was gone before I had recovered my wits. (I scarce know what I write, so hideous a Niagara of rain roars, shouts, and demonizes on the iron roof--it is pitch dark too--the lamp lit at 5!) It was a blessed thing when I struck my own road; and I got home, neat for lunch time, one of the most wonderful mud statues ever witnessed. In the afternoon I tried again, going up the other path by the garden, but was early drowned out; came home, plotted out what I had done, and then wrote this truck to you. Fanny has been quite ill with ear-ache. She won't go,[10] hating the sea at this wild season; I don't like to leave her; so it drones on, steamer after steamer, and I guess it'll end by no one going at all. She is in a dreadful misfortune at this hour; a case of kerosene having burst in the kitchen. A little while ago it was the carpenter's horse that trod in a nest of fourteen eggs, and made an omelette of our hopes. The farmer's lot is not a happy one. And it looks like some real uncompromising bad weather too. I wish Fanny's ear were well. Think of parties in Monuments! think of me in Skerryvore, and now of this. It don't look like a part of the same universe to me. Work is quite laid aside; I have worked myself right out. _Christmas Eve._--Yesterday, who could write? My wife near crazy with ear-ache; the rain descending in white crystal rods and playing hell's tattoo, like a _tutti_ of battering rams, on our sheet-iron roof; the wind passing high overhead with a strange dumb mutter, or striking us full, so that all the huge trees in the paddock cried aloud, and wrung their hands, and brandished their vast arms. The horses stood in the shed like things stupid. The sea and the flagship lying on the jaws of the bay vanished in sheer rain. All day it lasted; I locked up my papers in the iron box, in case it was a hurricane, and the house might go. We went to bed with mighty uncertain feelings; far more than on shipboard, where you have only drowning ahead--whereas here you have a smash of beams, a shower of sheet-iron, and a blind race in the dark and through a whirlwind for the shelter of an unfinished stable--and my wife with ear-ache! Well, well, this morning, we had word from Apia; a hurricane was looked for, the ships were to leave the bay by 10 A.M.; it is now 3.30, and the flagship is still a fixture, and the wind round in the blessed east, so I suppose the danger is over. But heaven is still laden; the day dim, with frequent rattling bucketfuls of rain; and just this moment (as I write) a squall went overhead, scarce striking us, with that singular, solemn noise of its passage, which is to me dreadful. I have always feared the sound of wind beyond everything. In my hell it would always blow a gale. I have been all day correcting proofs, and making out a new plan for our house. The other was too dear to be built now, and it was a hard task to make a smaller house that would suffice for the present, and not be a mere waste of money in the future. I believe I have succeeded; I have taken care of my study anyway. Two favours I want to ask of you. First, I wish you to get _Pioneering in New Guinea_, by J. Chalmers. It's a missionary book, and has less pretensions to be literature than Spurgeon's sermons. Yet I think even through that, you will see some of the traits of the hero that wrote it; a man that took me fairly by storm for the most attractive, simple, brave, and interesting man in the whole Pacific. He is away now to go up the Fly River; a desperate venture, it is thought; he is quite a Livingstone card. Second, try and keep yourself free next winter; and if my means can be stretched so far, I'll come to Egypt and we'll meet at Shepheard's Hotel, and you'll put me in my place, which I stand in need of badly by this time. Lord, what bully times! I suppose I'll come per British Asia, or whatever you call it, and avoid all cold, and might be in Egypt about November as ever was--eleven months from now or rather less. But do not let us count our chickens. Last night three piglings were stolen from one of our pig-pens. The great Lafaele appeared to my wife uneasy, so she engaged him in conversation on the subject, and played upon him the following engaging trick. You advance your two forefingers towards the sitter's eyes; he closes them, whereupon you substitute (on his eyelids) the fore and middle fingers of the left hand; and with your right (which he supposes engaged) you tap him on the head and back. When you let him open his eyes, he sees you withdrawing the two forefingers. "What that?" asked Lafaele. "My devil," says Fanny. "I wake um, my devil. All right now. He go catch the man that catch my pig." About an hour afterwards, Lafaele came for further particulars. "O, all right," my wife says. "By and by, that man he sleep, devil go sleep same place. By and by, that man plenty sick. I no care. What for he take my pig?" Lafaele cares plenty; I don't think he is the man, though he may be; but he knows him, and most likely will eat some of that pig to-night. He will not eat with relish. _Saturday, 27th._--It cleared up suddenly after dinner, and my wife and I saddled up and off to Apia, whence we did not return till yesterday morning. Christmas Day I wish you could have seen our party at table. H. J. Moors at one end with my wife, I at the other with Mrs. M., between us two native women, Carruthers the lawyer, Moors's two shop-boys--Walters and A. M. the quadroon--and the guests of the evening, Shirley Baker, the defamed and much-accused man of Tonga, and his son, with the artificial joint to his arm--where the assassins shot him in shooting at his father. Baker's appearance is not unlike John Bull on a cartoon; he is highly interesting to speak to, as I had expected; I found he and I had many common interests, and were engaged in puzzling over many of the same difficulties. After dinner it was quite pretty to see our Christmas party, it was so easily pleased and prettily behaved. In the morning I should say I had been to lunch at the German consulate, where I had as usual a very pleasant time. I shall miss Dr. Stuebel[11] much when he leaves, and when Adams and Lafarge go also, it will be a great blow. I am getting spoiled with all this good society. On Friday morning, I had to be at my house affairs before seven; and they kept me in Apia till past ten, disputing, and consulting about brick and stone and native and hydraulic lime, and cement and sand, and all sorts of otiose details about the chimney--just what I fled from in my father's office twenty years ago; I should have made a languid engineer. Rode up with the carpenter. Ah, my wicked Jack! on Christmas Eve, as I was taking the saddle bag off, he kicked at me, and fetched me too, right on the shin. On Friday, being annoyed at the carpenter's horse having a longer trot, he uttered a shrill cry and tried to bite him! Alas, alas, these are like old days; my dear Jack is a Bogue,[12] but I cannot strangle Jack into submission. I have given up the big house for just now; we go ahead right away with a small one, which should be ready in two months, and I suppose will suffice for just now. O I know I haven't told you about our _aitu_, have I? It is a lady, _aitu fafine_: she lives on the mountain-side; her presence is heralded by the sound of a gust of wind; a sound very common in the high woods; when she catches you, I do not know what happens; but in practice she is avoided, so I suppose she does more than pass the time of day. The great _aitu Saumai-afe_ was once a living woman, and became an _aitu_, no one understands how; she lives in a stream at the well-head, her hair is red, she appears as a lovely young lady, her bust particularly admired, to handsome young men; these die, her love being fatal;--as a handsome youth she has been known to court damsels with the like result, but this is very rare; as an old crone she goes about and asks for water, and woe to them who are uncivil! _Saumai-afe_ means literally, "Come here a thousand!" A good name for a lady of her manners. My _aitu fafine_ does not seem to be in the same line of business. It is unsafe to be a handsome youth in Samoa; a young man died from her favours last month--so we said on this side of the island; on the other, where he died, it was not so certain. I, for one, blame it on Madam _Saumai-afe_ without hesitation. Example of the farmer's sorrows. I slipped out on the balcony a moment ago. It is a lovely morning, cloudless, smoking hot, the breeze not yet arisen. Looking west, in front of our new house, I saw two heads of Indian corn wagging, and the rest and all nature stock still. As I looked, one of the stalks subsided and disappeared. I dashed out to the rescue; two small pigs were deep in the grass--quite hid till within a few yards--gently but swiftly demolishing my harvest. Never be a farmer. 12.30 _p.m._--I while away the moments of digestion by drawing you a faithful picture of my morning. When I had done writing as above it was time to clean our house. When I am working, it falls on my wife alone, but to-day we had it between us; she did the bedroom, I the sitting-room, in fifty-seven minutes of really most unpalatable labour. Then I changed every stitch, for I was wet through, and sat down and played on my pipe till dinner was ready, mighty pleased to be in a mildly habitable spot once more. The house had been neglected for near a week, and was a hideous spot; my wife's ear and our visit to Apia being the causes: our Paul we prefer not to see upon that theatre, and God knows he has plenty to do elsewhere. I am glad to look out of my back door and see the boys smoothing the foundations of the new house; this is all very jolly, but six months of it has satisfied me; we have too many things for such close quarters; to work in the midst of all the myriad misfortunes of the planter's life, seated in a Dyonisius' (can't spell him) ear, whence I catch every complaint, mishap and contention, is besides the devil; and the hope of a cave of my own inspires me with lust. O to be able to shut my own door and make my own confusion! O to have the brown paper and the matches and "make a hell of my own" once more! I do not bother you with all my troubles in these outpourings; the troubles of the farmer are inspiriting--they are like difficulties out hunting--a fellow rages at the time and rejoices to recall and to commemorate them. My troubles have been financial. It is hard to arrange wisely interests so distributed. America, England, Samoa, Sydney, everywhere I have an end of liability hanging out and some shelf of credit hard by; and to juggle all these and build a dwelling-place here, and check expense--a thing I am ill fitted for--you can conceive what a nightmare it is at times. Then God knows I have not been idle. But since _The Master_ nothing has come to raise any coins. I believe the springs are dry at home, and now I am worked out, and can no more at all. A holiday is required. _Dec. 28th._--I have got unexpectedly to work again, and feel quite dandy. Good-bye. R. L. S. TO HENRY JAMES Mr. Lafarge the artist and Mr. Henry Adams the historian have been mentioned already. The pinch in the matter of eatables only lasted for a little while, until Mrs. Stevenson had taken her bearings and made her arrangements in the matter of marketing, etc. _Vailima, Apia, Samoa, December 29th, 1890._ MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--It is terrible how little everybody writes, and how much of that little disappears in the capacious maw of the Post Office. Many letters, both from and to me, I now know to have been lost in transit: my eye is on the Sydney Post Office, a large ungainly structure with a tower, as being not a hundred miles from the scene of disappearance; but then I have no proof. The _Tragic Muse_ you announced to me as coming; I had already ordered it from a Sydney bookseller: about two months ago he advised me that his copy was in the post; and I am still tragically museless. News, news, news. What do we know of yours? What do you care for ours? We are in the midst of the rainy season, and dwell among alarms of hurricanes, in a very unsafe little two-storied wooden box 650 feet above and about three miles from the sea-beach. Behind us, till the other slope of the island, desert forest, peaks, and loud torrents; in front green slopes to the sea, some fifty miles of which we dominate. We see the ships as they go out and in to the dangerous roadstead of Apia; and if they lie far out, we can even see their topmasts while they are at anchor. Of sounds of men, beyond those of our own labourers, there reach us, at very long intervals, salutes from the warships in harbour, the bell of the cathedral church, and the low of the conch-shell calling the labour boys on the German plantations. Yesterday, which was Sunday--the _quantième_ is most likely erroneous; you can now correct it--we had a visitor--Baker of Tonga. Heard you ever of him? He is a great man here: he is accused of theft, rape, judicial murder, private poisoning, abortion, misappropriation of public moneys--oddly enough, not forgery, nor arson; you would be amused if you knew how thick the accusations fly in this South Sea world. I make no doubt my own character is something illustrious; or if not yet, there is a good time coming. But all our resources have not of late been Pacific. We have had enlightened society: Lafarge the painter, and your friend Henry Adams: a great privilege--would it might endure. I would go oftener to see them, but the place is awkward to reach on horseback. I had to swim my horse the last time I went to dinner; and as I have not yet returned the clothes I had to borrow, I dare not return in the same plight: it seems inevitable--as soon as the wash comes in, I plump straight into the American consul's shirt or trousers! They, I believe, would come oftener to see me but for the horrid doubt that weighs upon our commissariat department; we have _often_ almost nothing to eat; a guest would simply break the bank; my wife and I have dined on one avocado pear; I have several times dined on hard bread and onions. What would you do with a guest at such narrow seasons?--eat him? or serve up a labour boy fricasseed? Work? work is now arrested, but I have written, I should think, about thirty chapters of the South Sea book; they will all want rehandling, I dare say. Gracious, what a strain is a long book! The time it took me to design this volume, before I could dream of putting pen to paper, was excessive; and then think of writing a book of travels on the spot, when I am continually extending my information, revising my opinions, and seeing the most finely finished portions of my work come part by part in pieces. Very soon I shall have no opinions left. And without an opinion, how to string artistically vast accumulations of fact? Darwin said no one could observe without a theory; I suppose he was right; 'tis a fine point of metaphysic; but I will take my oath, no man can write without one--at least the way he would like to, and my theories melt, melt, melt, and as they melt the thaw-waters wash down my writing, and leave unideal tracts--wastes instead of cultivated farms. Kipling is by far the most promising young man who has appeared since--ahem--I appeared. He amazes me by his precocity and various endowment. But he alarms me by his copiousness and haste. He should shield his fire with both hands "and draw up all his strength and sweetness in one ball." ("Draw all his strength and all His sweetness up into one ball"? I cannot remember Marvell's words.) So the critics have been saying to me: but I was never capable of--and surely never guilty of--such a debauch of production. At this rate his works will soon fill the habitable globe; and surely he was armed for better conflicts than these succinct sketches and flying leaves of verse? I look on, I admire, I rejoice for myself; but in a kind of ambition we all have for our tongue and literature I am wounded. If I had this man's fertility and courage, it seems to me I could heave a pyramid. Well, we begin to be the old fogies now; and it was high time _something_ rose to take our places. Certainly Kipling has the gifts; the fairy godmothers were all tipsy at his christening: what will he do with them? Good-bye, my dear James; find an hour to write to us, and register your letter.--Yours affectionately, R. L. S. TO RUDYARD KIPLING In 1890, on first becoming acquainted with Mr. Kipling's _Soldiers Three_, Stevenson had written off his congratulations red-hot. "Well and indeed, Mr. Mulvaney," so ran the first sentences of his note, "but it's as good as meat to meet in with you, sir. They tell me it was a man of the name of Kipling made ye; but indeed and they can't fool me; it was the Lord God Almighty that made you." Taking the cue thus offered, Mr. Kipling had written back in the character of his own Irishman, Thomas Mulvaney, addressing Stevenson's Highlander, Alan Breck Stewart. In the following letter, which belongs to an uncertain date in 1891, Alan Breck is made to reply. "The gentleman I now serve with" means, of course, R. L. S. himself. [_Vailima, 1891._] SIR,--I cannot call to mind having written you, but I am so throng with occupation this may have fallen aside. I never heard tell I had any friends in Ireland, and I am led to understand you are come of no considerable family. The gentleman I now serve with assures me, however, you are a very pretty fellow and your letter deserves to be remarked. It's true he is himself a man of a very low descent upon the one side; though upon the other he counts cousinship with a gentleman, my very good friend, the late Mr. Balfour of the Shaws, in the Lothian; which I should be wanting in good fellowship to forget. He tells me besides you are a man of your hands; I am not informed of your weapon; but if all be true it sticks in my mind I would be ready to make exception in your favour, and meet you like one gentleman with another. I suppose this'll be your purpose in your favour, which I could very ill make out; it's one I would be sweir to baulk you of. It seems, Mr. McIlvaine, which I take to be your name, you are in the household of a gentleman of the name of Coupling: for whom my friend is very much engaged. The distances being very uncommodious, I think it will be maybe better if we leave it to these two to settle all that's necessary to honour. I would have you to take heed it's a very unusual condescension on my part, that bear a King's name; and for the matter of that I think shame to be mingled with a person of the name of Coupling, which is doubtless a very good house but one I never heard tell of, any more than Stevenson. But your purpose being laudable, I would be sorry (as the word goes) to cut off my nose to spite my face.--I am, Sir, your humble servant, A. STEWART, _Chevalier de St. Louis_. _To Mr. M'Ilvaine, Gentleman Private in a foot regiment, under cover to Mr. Coupling._ He has read me some of your Barrack Room Ballants, which are not of so noble a strain as some of mine in the Gaelic, but I could set some of them to the pipes if this rencounter goes as it's to be desired. Let's first, as I understand you to move, do each other this rational courtesy; and if either will survive, we may grow better acquaint. For your tastes for what's martial and for poetry agree with mine. A. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN This is the first appearance in Stevenson's letters of the Swedish Chief Justice of Samoa, Mr. Conrad Cedercrantz, of whom we shall hear enough and more than enough in the sequel. _S.S. Lübeck, between Apia and Sydney, Jan. 17th, 1891._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--The Faamasino Sili, or Chief Justice, to speak your low language, has arrived. I had ridden down with Henry and Lafaele; the sun was down, the night was close at hand, so we rode fast; just as I came to the corner of the road before Apia, I heard a gun fire; and lo, there was a great crowd at the end of the pier, and the troops out, and a chief or two in the height of Samoa finery, and Seumanu coming in his boat (the oarsmen all in uniform), bringing the Faamasino Sili sure enough. It was lucky he was no longer; the natives would not have waited many weeks. But think of it, as I sat in the saddle at the outside of the crowd (looking, the English consul said, as if I were commanding the manoeuvres), I was nearly knocked down by a stampede of the three consuls; they had been waiting their guest at the Matafele end, and some wretched intrigue among the whites had brought him to Apia, and the consuls had to run all the length of the town and come too late. The next day was a long one; I was at a marriage of Gurr the banker to Fanua, the virgin of Apia. Bride and bridesmaids were all in the old high dress; the ladies were all native; the men, with the exception of Seumanu, all white. It was quite a pleasant party, and while we were writing, we had a bird's-eye view of the public reception of the Chief Justice. The best part of it were some natives in war array; with blacked faces, turbans, tapa kilts, and guns, they looked very manly and purposelike. No, the best part was poor old drunken Joe, the Portuguese boatman, who seemed to think himself specially charged with the reception, and ended by falling on his knees before the Chief Justice on the end of the pier and in full view of the whole town and bay. The natives pelted him with rotten bananas; how the Chief Justice took it I was too far off to see; but it was highly absurd. I have commemorated my genial hopes for the regimen of the Faamasino Sili in the following canine verses, which, if you at all guess how to read them, are very pretty in movement, and (unless he be a mighty good man) too true in sense. We're quarrelling, the villages, we've beaten the wooden drums, Sa femisai o nu'u, sa taia o pate, Is confounded thereby the justice, Ua atuatuvale a le faamasino e, The chief justice, the terrified justice, Le faamasino sili, le faamasino se, Is on the point of running away the justice, O le a solasola le faamasino e, The justice denied any influence, the terrified justice, O le faamasino le ai a, le faamasino se, O le a solasola le faamasino e. Well, after this excursion into tongues that have never been alive--though I assure you we have one capital book in the language, a book of fables by an old missionary of the unpromising name of Pratt, which is simply the best and the most literary version of the fables known to me. I suppose I should except La Fontaine, but L. F. takes a long time; these are brief as the books of our childhood, and full of wit and literary colour; and O, Colvin, what a tongue it would be to write, if one only knew it--and there were only readers. Its curse in common use is an incredible left-handed wordiness; but in the hands of a man like Pratt it is succinct as Latin, compact of long rolling polysyllables and little and often pithy particles, and for beauty of sound a dream. Listen, I quote from Pratt--this is good Samoan, not canine-- 1 2 3 4 1 O le afa, ua taalili ai le ulu vao, ua pa mai le faititili. \__ ___/ \_____ _____/ \____ ___/ \___ ___/ \_____ ____/ V V V V V 1 almost _wa_, 2 the two _a's_ just distinguished, 3 the _ai_ is practically suffixed to the verb, 4 almost _vow_. The excursion has prolonged itself. I started by the _Lübeck_ to meet Lloyd and my mother; there were many reasons for and against; the main reason against was the leaving of Fanny alone in her blessed cabin, which has been somewhat remedied by my carter, Mr. ----, putting up in the stable and messing with her; but perhaps desire of change decided me not well, though I do think I ought to see an oculist, being very blind indeed, and sometimes unable to read. Anyway I left, the only cabin passenger, four and a kid in the second cabin, and a dear voyage it had like to have proved. Close to Fiji (choose a worse place on the map) we broke our shaft early one morning; and when or where we might expect to fetch land or meet with any ship, I would like you to tell me. The Pacific is absolutely desert. I have sailed there now some years; and scarce ever seen a ship except in port or close by; I think twice. It was the hurricane season besides, and hurricane waters. Well, our chief engineer got the shaft--it was the middle crank shaft--mended; thrice it was mended, and twice broke down; but now keeps up--only we dare not stop, for it is almost impossible to start again. The captain in the meanwhile crowded her with sail; fifteen sails in all, every stay being gratified with a stay-sail, a boat-boom sent aloft for a maintop-gallant yard, and the derrick of a crane brought in service as bowsprit. All the time we have had a fine, fair wind and a smooth sea; to-day at noon our run was 203 miles (if you please!), and we are within some 360 miles of Sydney. Probably there has never been a more gallant success; and I can say honestly it was well worked for. No flurry, no high words, no long faces; only hard work and honest thought; a pleasant, manly business to be present at. All the chances were we might have been six weeks--ay, or three months at sea--or never turned up at all, and now it looks as though we should reach our destination some five days too late. TO MARCEL SCHWOB _Sydney, January 19th, 1891._ MY DEAR SIR,--_Sapristi, comme vous y allez!_ Richard III. and Dumas, with all my heart: but not Hamlet. Hamlet is great literature; Richard III. a big, black, gross, sprawling melodrama, writ with infinite spirit but with no refinement or philosophy by a man who had the world, himself, mankind, and his trade still to learn. I prefer the Vicomte de Bragelonne to Richard III.; it is better done of its kind: I simply do not mention the Vicomte in the same part of the building with Hamlet, or Lear, or Othello, or any of those masterpieces that Shakespeare survived to give us. Also, _comme vous y allez_ in my commendation! I fear my _solide éducation classique_ had best be described, like Shakespeare's, as "little Latin and no Greek" and I was educated, let me inform you, for an engineer. I shall tell my bookseller to send you a copy of _Memories and Portraits_, where you will see something of my descent and education, as it was, and hear me at length on my dear Vicomte. I give you permission gladly to take your choice out of my works, and translate what you shall prefer, too much honoured that so clever a young man should think it worth the pains. My own choice would lie between _Kidnapped_ and the _Master of Ballantrae_. Should you choose the latter, pray do not let Mrs. Henry thrust the sword up to the hilt in the frozen ground--one of my inconceivable blunders, an exaggeration to stagger Hugo. Say "she sought to thrust it in the ground." In both these works you should be prepared for Scotticisms used deliberately. I fear my stepson will not have found time to get to Paris; he was overwhelmed with occupation, and is already on his voyage back. We live here in a beautiful land, amid a beautiful and interesting people. The life is still very hard: my wife and I live in a two-roomed cottage, about three miles and six hundred and fifty feet above the sea; we have had to make the road to it; our supplies are very imperfect; in the wild weather of this (the hurricane) season we have much discomfort: one night the wind blew in our house so outrageously that we must sit in the dark; and as the sound of the rain on the roof made speech inaudible, you may imagine we found the evening long. All these things, however, are pleasant to me. You say _l'artiste inconscient_ set off to travel: you do not divide me right. 0.6 of me is artist; 0.4, adventurer. First, I suppose, come letters; then adventure; and since I have indulged the second part, I think the formula begins to change: 0.55 of an artist, 0.45 of the adventurer were nearer true. And if it had not been for my small strength, I might have been a different man in all things. Whatever you do, do not neglect to send me what you publish on Villon: I look forward to that with lively interest. I have no photograph at hand, but I will send one when I can. It would be kind if you would do the like, for I do not see much chance of our meeting in the flesh: and a name, and a handwriting, and an address, and even a style? I know about as much of Tacitus, and more of Horace; it is not enough between contemporaries, such as we still are. I have just remembered another of my books, which I re-read the other day, and thought in places good--_Prince Otto_. It is not as good as either of the others; but it has one recommendation--it has female parts, so it might perhaps please better in France. I will ask Chatto to send you, then--_Prince Otto_, _Memories and Portraits_, _Underwoods_, and _Ballads_, none of which you seem to have seen. They will be too late for the New Year: let them be an Easter present. You must translate me soon; you will soon have better to do than to transvase the work of others.--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, With the worst pen in the South Pacific. TO CHARLES BAXTER Stevenson had been indignant with an old friend at Edinburgh, who had received much kindness from his mother, for neglecting to call on her after her return from her wanderings in the Pacific. _S.S. Lübeck, at sea [on the return voyage from Sydney, February 1891]._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--Perhaps in my old days I do grow irascible; "the old man virulent" has long been my pet name for myself. Well, the temper is at least all gone now; time is good at lowering these distemperatures; far better is a sharp sickness, and I am just (and scarce) afoot again after a smoking hot little malady at Sydney. And the temper being gone, I still think the same.... We have not our parents for ever; we are never very good to them; when they go and we have lost our front-file man we begin to feel all our neglects mighty sensibly. I propose a proposal. My mother is here on board with me; to-day for once I mean to make her as happy as I am able, and to do that which I know she likes. You, on the other hand, go and see your father, and do ditto, and give him a real good hour or two. We shall both be glad hereafter.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Stevenson had been sharply ailing as usual at Sydney, and was now on his way back. Having received proofs of some of his _South Sea_ chapters, he had begun to realise that they were not what he had hoped to make them. [_On Board Ship between Sydney and Apia, February 1891._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--The _Janet Nicoll_ stuff was rather worse than I had looked for; you have picked out all that is fit to stand, bar two others (which I don't dislike)--the Port of Entry and the House of Temoana; that is for a present opinion; I may condemn these also ere I have done. By this time you should have another Marquesan letter, the worst of the lot, I think; and seven Paumotu letters, which are not far out of the vein, as I wish it; I am in hopes the Hawaiian stuff is better yet: time will show, and time will make perfect. Is something of this sort practicable for the dedication? TERRA MARIQUE PER PERICULA PER ARDUA AMICAE COMITI D.D. AMANS VIATOR 'Tis a first shot concocted this morning in my berth: I had always before been trying it in English, which insisted on being either insignificant or fulsome: I cannot think of a better word than _comes_, there being not the shadow of a Latin book on board; yet sure there is some other. Then _viator_ (though it _sounds_ all right) is doubtful; it has too much, perhaps, the sense of wayfarer? Last, will it mark sufficiently that I mean my wife? And first, how about blunders? I scarce wish it longer. Have had a swingeing sharp attack in Sydney; beating the fields[13] for two nights, Saturday and Sunday. Wednesday was brought on board, _tel quel_, a wonderful wreck; and now, Wednesday week, am a good deal picked up, but yet not quite a Samson, being still groggy afoot and vague in the head. My chess, for instance, which is usually a pretty strong game, and defies all rivalry aboard, is vacillating, devoid of resource and observation, and hitherto not covered with customary laurels. As for work, it is impossible. We shall be in the saddle before long, no doubt, and the pen once more couched. You must not expect a letter under these circumstances, but be very thankful for a note. Once at Samoa, I shall try to resume my late excellent habits, and delight you with journals, you unaccustomed, I unaccustomed; but it is never too late to mend. It is vastly annoying that I cannot go even to Sydney without an attack; and heaven knows my life was anodyne. I only once dined with anybody; at the club with Wise; worked all morning--a terrible dead pull; a month only produced the imperfect embryos of two chapters; lunched in the boarding-house, played on my pipe; went out and did some of my messages; dined at a French restaurant, and returned to play draughts, whist, or Van John with my family. This makes a cheery life after Samoa; but it isn't what you call burning the candle at both ends, is it? (It appears to me not one word of this letter will be legible by the time I am done with it, this dreadful ink rubs off.) I have a strange kind of novel under construction; it begins about 1660 and ends 1830, or perhaps I may continue it to 1875 or so, with another life. One, two, three, four, five, six generations, perhaps seven, figure therein; two of my old stories, "Delafield" and "Shovel," are incorporated; it is to be told in the third person, with some of the brevity of history, some of the detail of romance. _The Shovels of Newton French_ will be the name. The idea is an old one; it was brought to birth by an accident; a friend in the islands who picked up F. Jenkin,[14] read a part, and said: "Do you know, that's a strange book? I like it; I don't believe the public will; but I like it." He thought it was a novel! "Very well," said I, "we'll see whether the public will like it or not; they shall have the chance."--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO H. B. BAILDON The late Mr. H. Bellyse Baildon, for some time Lecturer on English Literature at the University of Vienna and afterwards at Dundee, had been an old schoolmate and fellow-aspirant in literature with Stevenson at Edinburgh. "Chalmers," of course, is the Rev. James Chalmers of Rarotonga and New Guinea already referred to above, the admirable missionary, explorer, and administrator, whom Stevenson sometimes expressed a desire to survive, for the sake only of writing his life. _Vailima, Upolu [Spring 1891]._ MY DEAR BAILDON,--This is a real disappointment. It was so long since we had met, I was anxious to see where time had carried and stranded us. Last time we saw each other--it must have been all ten years ago, as we were new to the thirties--it was only for a moment, and now we're in the forties, and before very long we shall be in our graves. Sick and well, I have had a splendid life of it, grudge nothing, regret very little--and then only some little corners of misconduct for which I deserve hanging, and must infallibly be damned--and, take it all over, damnation and all, would hardly change with any man of my time, unless perhaps it were Gordon or our friend Chalmers: a man I admire for his virtues, love for his faults, and envy for the really A1 life he has, with everything heart--my heart, I mean--could wish. It is curious to think you will read this in the grey metropolis; go the first grey, east-windy day into the Caledonian Station, if it looks at all as it did of yore: I met Satan there. And then go and stand by the cross, and remember the other one--him that went down--my brother, Robert Fergusson. It is a pity you had not made me out, and seen me as patriarch and planter. I shall look forward to some record of your time with Chalmers: you can't weary me of that fellow, he is as big as a house and far bigger than any church, where no man warms his hands. Do you know anything of Thomson? Of A----, B----, C----, D----, E----, F----, at all? As I write C.'s name mustard rises in my nose; I have never forgiven that weak, amiable boy a little trick he played me when I could ill afford it: I mean that whenever I think of it, some of the old wrath kindles, not that I would hurt the poor soul, if I got the world with it. And Old X----? Is he still afloat? Harmless bark! I gather you ain't married yet, since your sister, to whom I ask to be remembered, goes with you. Did you see a silly tale, _John Nicholson's Predicament_,[15] or some such name, in which I made free with your home at Murrayfield? There is precious little sense in it, but it might amuse. Cassell's published it in a thing called _Yule-Tide_ years ago, and nobody that ever I heard of read or has ever seen _Yule-Tide_. It is addressed to a class we never met--readers of Cassell's series and that class of conscientious chaff, and my tale was dull, though I don't recall that it was conscientious. Only, there's the house at Murrayfield and a dead body in it. Glad the _Ballads_ amused you. They failed to entertain a coy public, at which I wondered; not that I set much account by my verses, which are the verses of Prosator; but I do know how to tell a yarn, and two of the yarns are great. _Rahero_ is for its length a perfect folk-tale: savage and yet fine, full of tailforemost morality, ancient as the granite rocks; if the historian, not to say the politician, could get that yarn into his head, he would have learned some of his ABC. But the average man at home cannot understand antiquity; he is sunk over the ears in Roman civilisation; and a tale like that of _Rahero_ falls on his ears inarticulate. The Spectator said there was no psychology in it; that interested me much: my grandmother (as I used to call that able paper, and an able paper it is, and a fair one) cannot so much as observe the existence of savage psychology when it is put before it. I am at bottom a psychologist and ashamed of it; the tale seized me one-third because of its picturesque features, two-thirds because of its astonishing psychology, and the Spectator says there's none. I am going on with a lot of island work, exulting in the knowledge of a new world, "a new created world" and new men; and I am sure my income will DECLINE and FALL off; for the effort of comprehension is death to the intelligent public, and sickness to the dull. I do not know why I pester you with all this trash, above all as you deserve nothing. I give you my warm _talofa_ ("my love to you," Samoan salutation). Write me again when the spirit moves you. And some day, if I still live, make out the trip again and let us hob-a-nob with our grey pows on my verandah.--Yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The latter part of this letter was written in the course of an expedition on which Stevenson had been invited by the American Consul, Mr. Sewall, to the neighbouring island of Tutuila. Unluckily the letter breaks off short, and the only record of this trip occurs in the diary partly quoted in Mr. Balfour's _Life_, ch. xiv. _Vailima, Friday, March 19th [1891]._ MY DEAR S. C.,--You probably expect that now I am back at Vailima I shall resume the practice of the diary letter. A good deal is changed. We are more; solitude does not attend me as before; the night is passed playing Van John for shells; and, what is not less important, I have just recovered from a severe illness, and am easily tired. I will give you to-day. I sleep now in one of the lower rooms of the new house, where my wife has recently joined me. We have two beds, an empty case for a table, a chair, a tin basin, a bucket and a jug; next door in the dining-room, the carpenters camp on the floor, which is covered with their mosquito nets. Before the sun rises, at 5.45 or 5.50, Paul brings me tea, bread, and a couple of eggs; and by about six I am at work. I work in bed--my bed is of mats, no mattress, sheets, or filth--mats, a pillow, and a blanket--and put in some three hours. It was 9.5 this morning when I set off to the stream-side to my weeding; where I toiled, manuring the ground with the best enricher, human sweat, till the conch-shell was blown from our verandah at 10.30. At eleven we dine; about half-past twelve I tried (by exception) to work again, could make nothing on't, and by one was on my way to the weeding, where I wrought till three. Half-past five is our next meal, and I read Flaubert's Letters till the hour came round; dined, and then, Fanny having a cold, and I being tired, came over to my den in the unfinished house, where I now write to you, to the tune of the carpenters' voices, and by the light--I crave your pardon--by the twilight of three vile candles filtered through the medium of my mosquito bar. Bad ink being of the party, I write quite blindfold, and can only hope you may be granted to read that which I am unable to see while writing. I said I was tired; it is a mild phrase; my back aches like toothache; when I shut my eyes to sleep, I know I shall see before them--a phenomenon to which both Fanny and I are quite accustomed--endless vivid deeps of grass and weed, each plant particular and distinct, so that I shall lie inert in body, and transact for hours the mental part of my day business, choosing the noxious from the useful. And in my dreams I shall be hauling on recalcitrants, and suffering stings from nettles, stabs from citron thorns, fiery bites from ants, sickening resistances of mud and slime, evasions of slimy roots, dead weight of heat, sudden puffs of air, sudden starts from bird-calls in the contiguous forest--some mimicking my name, some laughter, some the signal of a whistle, and living over again at large the business of my day. Though I write so little, I pass all my hours of field-work in continual converse and imaginary correspondence. I scarce pull up a weed, but I invent a sentence on the matter to yourself; it does not get written; _autant en emportent les vents_; but the intent is there, and for me (in some sort) the companionship. To-day, for instance, we had a great talk. I was toiling, the sweat dripping from my nose, in the hot fit after a squall of rain: methought you asked me--frankly, was I happy. Happy (said I); I was only happy once; that was at Hyères; it came to an end from a variety of reasons, decline of health, change of place, increase of money, age with his stealing steps; since then, as before then, I know not what it means. But I know pleasure still; pleasure with a thousand faces, and none perfect, a thousand tongues all broken, a thousand hands, and all of them with scratching nails. High among these I place this delight of weeding out here alone by the garrulous water, under the silence of the high wood, broken by incongruous sounds of birds. And take my life all through, look at it fore and back, and upside down,--though I would very fain change myself--I would not change my circumstances, unless it were to bring you here. And yet God knows perhaps this intercourse of writing serves as well; and I wonder, were you here indeed, would I commune so continually with the thought of you. I say "I wonder" for a form; I know, and I know I should not. So far, and much further, the conversation went, while I groped in slime after viscous roots, nursing and sparing little spears of grass, and retreating (even with outcry) from the prod of the wild lime. I wonder if any one had ever the same attitude to Nature as I hold, and have held for so long? This business fascinates me like a tune or a passion; yet all the while I thrill with a strong distaste. The horror of the thing, objective and subjective, is always present to my mind; the horror of creeping things, a superstitious horror of the void and the powers about me, the horror of my own devastation and continual murders. The life of the plants comes through my finger-tips, their struggles go to my heart like supplications. I feel myself blood-boltered; then I look back on my cleared grass, and count myself an ally in a fair quarrel, and make stout my heart. It is but a little while since I lay sick in Sydney, beating the fields about the navy and Dean Swift and Dryden's Latin hymns; judge if I love this reinvigorating climate, where I can already toil till my head swims and every string in the poor jumping Jack (as he now lies in bed) aches with a kind of yearning strain, difficult to suffer in quiescence. As for my damned literature,[16] God knows what a business it is, grinding along without a scrap of inspiration or a note of style. But it has to be ground, and the mill grinds exceeding slowly though not particularly small. The last two chapters have taken me considerably over a month, and they are still beneath pity. This I cannot continue, time not sufficing; and the next will just have to be worse. All the good I can express is just this; some day, when style revisits me, they will be excellent matter to rewrite. Of course, my old cure of a change of work would probably answer, but I cannot take it now. The treadmill turns; and, with a kind of desperate cheerfulness, I mount the idle stair. I haven't the least anxiety about the book; unless I die, I shall find the time to make it good; but the Lord deliver me from the thought of the Letters! However, the Lord has other things on hand; and about six to-morrow, I shall resume the consideration practically, and face (as best I may) the fact of my incompetence and disaffection to the task. Toil I do not spare; but fortune refuses me success. We can do more, Whatever-his-name-was, we can deserve it. But my misdesert began long since, by the acceptation of a bargain quite unsuitable to all my methods.[17] To-day I have had a queer experience. My carter has from the first been using my horses for his own ends; when I left for Sydney, I put him on his honour to cease, and my back was scarce turned ere he was forfeit. I have only been waiting to discharge him; and to-day an occasion arose. I am so much _the old man virulent_, so readily stumble into anger, that I gave a deal of consideration to my bearing, and decided at last to imitate that of the late ----. Whatever he might have to say, this eminently effective controversialist maintained a frozen demeanour and a jeering smile. The frozen demeanour is beyond my reach; but I could try the jeering smile; did so, perceived its efficacy, kept in consequence my temper, and got rid of my friend, myself composed and smiling still, he white and shaking like an aspen. He could explain everything; I said it did not interest me. He said he had enemies; I said nothing was more likely. He said he was calumniated; with all my heart, said I, but there are so many liars, that I find it safer to believe them. He said, in justice to himself, he must explain: God forbid I should interfere with you, said I, with the same factitious grin, but it can change nothing. So I kept my temper, rid myself of an unfaithful servant, found a method of conducting similar interviews in the future, and fell in my own liking. One thing more: I learned a fresh tolerance for the dead ----; he too had learned--perhaps had invented--the trick of this manner; God knows what weakness, what instability of feeling, lay beneath. _Ce que c'est que de nous!_ poor human nature; that at past forty I must adjust this hateful mask for the first time, and rejoice to find it effective; that the effort of maintaining an external smile should confuse and embitter a man's soul. To-day I have not weeded; I have written instead from six till eleven, from twelve till two; with the interruption of the interview aforesaid; a damned Letter is written for the third time; I dread to read it, for I dare not give it a fourth chance--unless it be very bad indeed. Now I write you from my mosquito curtain, to the song of saws and planes and hammers, and wood clumping on the floor above; in a day of heavenly brightness; a bird twittering near by; my eye, through the open door, commanding green meads, two or three forest trees casting their boughs against the sky, a forest-clad mountain-side beyond, and close in by the door-jamb a nick of the blue Pacific. It is March in England, bleak March, and I lie here with the great sliding doors wide open in an undershirt and p'jama trousers, and melt in the closure of mosquito bars, and burn to be out in the breeze. A few torn clouds--not white, the sun has tinged them a warm pink--swim in heaven. In which blessed and fair day, I have to make faces and speak bitter words to a man--who has deceived me, it is true--but who is poor, and older than I, and a kind of a gentleman too. On the whole, I prefer the massacre of weeds. _Sunday._--When I had done talking to you yesterday, I played on my pipe till the conch sounded, then went over to the old house for dinner, and had scarce risen from table ere I was submerged with visitors. The first of these despatched, I spent the rest of the evening going over the Samoan translation of my _Bottle Imp_[18] with Claxton the missionary; then to bed, but being upset, I suppose, by these interruptions, and having gone all day without my weeding, not to sleep. For hours I lay awake and heard the rain fall, and saw faint, far-away lightning over the sea, and wrote you long letters which I scorn to reproduce. This morning Paul was unusually early; the dawn had scarce begun when he appeared with the tray and lit my candle; and I had breakfasted and read (with indescribable sinkings) the whole of yesterday's work before the sun had risen. Then I sat and thought, and sat and better thought. It was not good enough, nor good; it was as slack as journalism, but not so inspired; it was excellent stuff misused, and the defects stood gross on it like humps upon a camel. But could I, in my present disposition, do much more with it? in my present pressure for time, were I not better employed doing another one about as ill, than making this some thousandth fraction better? Yes, I thought; and tried the new one, and behold, I could do nothing: my head swims, words do not come to me, nor phrases, and I accepted defeat, packed up my traps, and turned to communicate the failure to my esteemed correspondent. I think it possible I overworked yesterday. Well, we'll see to-morrow--perhaps try again later. It is indeed the hope of trying later that keeps me writing to you. If I take to my pipe, I know myself--all is over for the morning. Hurray, I'll correct proofs! _Pago-Pago, Wednesday._--After I finished on Sunday I passed a miserable day; went out weeding, but could not find peace. I do not like to steal my dinner, unless I have given myself a holiday in a canonical manner; and weeding after all is only fun, the amount of its utility small, and the thing capable of being done faster and nearly as well by a hired boy. In the evening Sewall came up (American consul) and proposed to take me on a malaga,[19] which I accepted. Monday I rode down to Apia, was nearly all day fighting about drafts and money; the silver problem does not touch you, but it is (in a strange and I hope passing phase) making my situation difficult in Apia. About eleven, the flags were all half-masted; it was old Captain Hamilton (Samasoni the natives called him) who had passed away. In the evening I walked round to the U.S. consulate; it was a lovely night with a full moon; and as I got round to the hot corner of Matautu I heard hymns in front. The balcony of the dead man's house was full of women singing; Mary (the widow, a native) sat on a chair by the doorstep, and I was set beside her on a bench, and next to Paul the carpenter; as I sat down I had a glimpse of the old captain, who lay in a sheet on his own table. After the hymn was over, a native pastor made a speech which lasted a long while; the light poured out of the door and windows; the girls were sitting clustered at my feet; it was choking hot. After the speech was ended, Mary carried me within; the captain's hands were folded on his bosom, his face and head were composed; he looked as if he might speak at any moment; I have never seen this kind of waxwork so express or more venerable; and when I went away, I was conscious of a certain envy for the man who was out of the battle. All night it ran in my head, and the next day when we sighted Tutuila, and ran into this beautiful landlocked loch of Pago Pago (whence I write), Captain Hamilton's folded hands and quiet face said a great deal more to me than the scenery. I am living here in a trader's house; we have a good table, Sewall doing things in style; and I hope to benefit by the change, and possibly get more stuff for Letters. In the meanwhile, I am seized quite _mal-à-propos_ with desire to write a story, _The Bloody Wedding_, founded on fact--very possibly true, being an attempt to read a murder case--not yet months old, in this very place and house where I now write. The indiscretion is what stops me; but if I keep on feeling as I feel just now it will have to be written. Three Star Nettison, Kit Nettison, Field the Sailor, these are the main characters: old Nettison, and the captain of the man of war, the secondary. Possible scenario. Chapter I.... TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Saturday, April 18th [1891]._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--I got back on Monday night, after twenty-three hours in an open boat; the keys were lost; the consul (who had promised us a bottle of Burgundy) nobly broke open his storeroom, and we got to bed about midnight. Next morning the blessed consul promised us horses for the daybreak; forgot all about it, worthy man; set us off at last in the heat of the day, and by a short cut which caused infinite trouble, and we were not home till dinner. I was extenuated, and have had a high fever since, or should have been writing before. To-day for the first time, I risk it. Tuesday I was pretty bad; Wednesday had a fever to kill a horse; Thursday I was better, but still out of ability to do aught but read awful trash. This is the time one misses civilisation; I wished to send out for some police novels; Montépin would have about suited my frozen brain. It is a bother when all one's thought turns on one's work in some sense or other; I could not even think yesterday; I took to inventing dishes by way of entertainment. Yesterday, while I lay asleep in the afternoon, a very lucky thing happened; the Chief Justice came to call; met one of our employés on the road; and was shown what I had done to the road. "Is this the road across the island?" he asked. "The only one," said Innes. "And has one man done all this?" "Three times," said the trusty Innes. "It has had to be made three times, and when Mr. Stevenson came, it was a track like what you see beyond." "This must be put right," said the Chief Justice. _Sunday._--The truth is, I broke down yesterday almost as soon as I began, and have been surreptitiously finishing the entry to-day. For all that I was much better, ate all the time, and had no fever. The day was otherwise uneventful. I am reminded; I had another visitor on Friday; and Fanny and Lloyd, as they returned from a forest raid, met in our desert, untrodden road, first Father Didier, Keeper of the conscience of Mataafa, the rising star; and next the Chief Justice, sole stay of Laupepa, the present and unsteady star, and remember, a few days before we were close to the sick bed and entertained by the amateur physician of Tamasese, the late and sunken star. "That is the fun of this place," observed Lloyd; "everybody you meet is so important." Everybody is also so gloomy. It will come to war again, is the opinion of all the well informed--and before that to many bankruptcies; and after that, as usual, to famine. Here, under the microscope, we can see history at work. _Wednesday._--I have been very neglectful. A return to work, perhaps premature, but necessary, has used up all my possible energies, and made me acquainted with the living headache. I just jot down some of the past notabilia. Yesterday B., a carpenter, and K., my (unsuccessful) white man, were absent all morning from their work; I was working myself, where I hear every sound with morbid certainty, and I can testify that not a hammer fell. Upon inquiry I found they had passed the morning making ice with our ice machine and taking the horizon with a spirit level! I had no sooner heard this than--a violent headache set in; I am a real employer of labour now, and have much of the ship captain when aroused; and if I had a headache, I believe both these gentlemen had aching hearts. I promise you, the late ---- was to the front; and K., who was the most guilty, yet (in a sense) the least blameable, having the brains and character of a canary-bird, fared none the better for B.'s repartees. I hear them hard at work this morning, so the menace may be blessed. It was just after my dinner, just before theirs, that I administered my redoubtable tongue--it is really redoubtable--to these skulkers. (Paul used to triumph over Mr. J. for weeks. "I am very sorry for you," he would say; "you're going to have a talk with Mr. Stevenson when he comes home: you don't know what that is!") In fact, none of them do, till they get it. I have known K., for instance, for months; he has never heard me complain, or take notice, unless it were to praise; I have used him always as my guest, and there seems to be something in my appearance which suggests endless, ovine long-suffering! We sat in the upper verandah all evening, and discussed the price of iron roofing, and the state of the draught-horses, with Innes, a new man we have taken, and who seems to promise well. One thing embarrasses me. No one ever seems to understand my attitude about that book; the stuff sent was never meant for other than a first state; I never meant it to appear as a book. Knowing well that I have never had one hour of inspiration since it was begun, and have only beaten out my metal by brute force and patient repetition, I hoped some day to get a "spate of style" and burnish it--fine mixed metaphor. I am now so sick that I intend, when the Letters are done and some more written that will be wanted, simply to make a book of it by the pruning-knife. I cannot fight longer; I am sensible of having done worse than I hoped, worse than I feared; all I can do now is to do the best I can for the future, and clear the book, like a piece of bush, with axe and cutlass. Even to produce the MS. of this will occupy me, at the most favourable opinion, till the middle of next year; really five years were wanting, when I could have made a book; but I have a family, and--perhaps I could not make the book after all. TO W. CRAIBE ANGUS The late Mr. Craibe Angus of Glasgow was one of the chief organisers of the Burns Exhibition in that city, and had proposed to send out to Samoa a precious copy of the _Jolly Beggars_ to receive the autograph of R. L. S. and be returned for the purposes of that Exhibition. The line quoted, "But still our hearts are true," etc., should, it appears, run, "But still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland." The author of the _Canadian Boat Song_ which opens thus was Hugh, twelfth Earl of Eglinton. The first quotation is of course from Burns. _Vailima, Samoa, April_ 1891. DEAR MR. ANGUS,--Surely I remember you! It was W. C. Murray who made us acquainted, and we had a pleasant crack. I see your poet is not yet dead. I remember even our talk--or you would not think of trusting that invaluable _Jolly Beggars_ to the treacherous posts, and the perils of the sea, and the carelessness of authors. I love the idea, but I could not bear the risk. However-- "Hale be your heart, hale be your fiddle--" it was kindly thought upon. My interest in Burns is, as you suppose, perennial. I would I could be present at the exhibition, with the purpose of which I heartily sympathise; but the _Nancy_ has not waited in vain for me, I have followed my chest, the anchor is weighed long ago, I have said my last farewell to the hills and the heather and the lynns: like Leyden, I have gone into far lands to die, not stayed like Burns to mingle in the end with Scottish soil. I shall not even return like Scott for the last scene. Burns Exhibitions are all over. 'Tis a far cry to Lochow from tropical Vailima. "But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides." When your hand is in, will you remember our poor Edinburgh Robin? Burns alone has been just to his promise; follow Burns, he knew best, he knew whence he drew fire--from the poor, white-faced, drunken, vicious boy that raved himself to death in the Edinburgh madhouse. Surely there is more to be gleaned about Fergusson, and surely it is high time the task was set about. I may tell you (because your poet is not dead) something of how I feel: we are three Robins who have touched the Scots lyre this last century. Well, the one is the world's; he did it, he came off, he is for ever; but I and the other--ah! what bonds we have--born in the same city; both sickly, both pestered, one nearly to madness, one to the madhouse, with a damnatory creed; both seeing the stars and the dawn, and wearing shoe-leather on the same ancient stones, under the same pends, down the same closes, where our common ancestors clashed in their armour, rusty or bright. And the old Robin, who was before Burns and the flood, died in his acute, painful youth, and left the models of the great things that were to come; and the new, who came after, outlived his green-sickness, and has faintly tried to parody the finished work. If you will collect the strays of Robin Fergusson, fish for material, collect any last re-echoing of gossip, command me to do what you prefer--to write the preface--to write the whole if you prefer: anything, so that another monument (after Burns's) be set up to my unhappy predecessor on the causey of Auld Reekie. You will never know, nor will any man, how deep this feeling is: I believe Fergusson lives in me. I do, but tell it not in Gath; every man has these fanciful superstitions, coming, going, but yet enduring; only most men are so wise (or the poet in them so dead) that they keep their follies for themselves.--I am, yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO EDMUND GOSSE _Vailima, April 1891._ MY DEAR GOSSE,--I have to thank you and Mrs. Gosse for many mementoes, chiefly for your _Life_ of your father. There is a very delicate task, very delicately done. I noted one or two carelessnesses, which I meant to point out to you for another edition; but I find I lack the time, and you will remark them for yourself against a new edition. There were two, or perhaps three, flabbinesses of style which (in your work) amazed me. Am I right in thinking you were a shade bored over the last chapters? or was it my own fault that made me think them susceptible of a more athletic compression? (The flabbinesses were not there, I think, but in the more admirable part, where they showed the bigger.) Take it all together, the book struck me as if you had been hurried at the last, but particularly hurried over the proofs, and could still spend a very profitable fortnight in earnest revision and (towards the end) heroic compression. The book, in design, subject, and general execution, is well worth the extra trouble. And even if I were wrong in thinking it specially wanted, it will not be lost; for do we not know, in Flaubert's dread confession, that "prose is never done"? What a medium to work in, for a man tired, perplexed among different aims and subjects, and spurred by the immediate need of "siller"! However, it's mine for what it's worth; and it's one of yours, the devil take it; and you know, as well as Flaubert, and as well as me, that it is _never done_; in other words, it is a torment of the pit, usually neglected by the bards who (lucky beggars!) approached the Styx in measure. I speak bitterly at the moment, having just detected in myself the last fatal symptom, three blank verses in succession--and I believe, God help me, a hemistich at the tail of them; hence I have deposed the labourer, come out of hell by my private trap, and now write to you from my little place in purgatory. But I prefer hell: would I could always dig in those red coals--or else be at sea in a schooner, bound for isles unvisited: to be on shore and not to work is emptiness--suicidal vacancy. I was the more interested in your _Life_ of your father, because I meditate one of mine, or rather of my family. I have no such materials as you, and (our objections already made) your attack fills me with despair; it is direct and elegant, and your style is always admirable to me--lenity, lucidity, usually a high strain of breeding, an elegance that has a pleasant air of the accidental. But beware of purple passages. I wonder if you think as well of your purple passages as I do of mine? I wonder if you think as ill of mine as I do of yours? I wonder; I can tell you at least what is wrong with yours--they are treated in the spirit of verse. The spirit--I don't mean the measure, I don't mean you fall into bastard cadences; what I mean is that they seem vacant and smoothed out, ironed, if you like. And in a style which (like yours) aims more and more successfully at the academic, one purple word is already much; three--a whole phrase--is inadmissible. Wed yourself to a clean austerity: that is your force. Wear a linen ephod, splendidly candid. Arrange its folds, but do not fasten it with any brooch. I swear to you, in your talking robes, there should be no patch of adornment; and where the subject forces, let it force you no further than it must; and be ready with a twinkle of your pleasantry. Yours is a fine tool, and I see so well how to hold it; I wonder if you see how to hold mine? But then I am to the neck in prose, and just now in the "dark _interstylar_ cave," all methods and effects wooing me, myself in the midst impotent to follow any. I look for dawn presently, and a full flowing river of expression, running whither it wills. But these useless seasons, above all, when a man _must_ continue to spoil paper, are infinitely weary. We are in our house after a fashion; without furniture, 'tis true, camping there, like the family after a sale. But the bailiff has not yet appeared; he will probably come after. The place is beautiful beyond dreams; some fifty miles of the Pacific spread in front; deep woods all round; a mountain making in the sky a profile of huge trees upon our left; about us, the little island of our clearing, studded with brave old gentlemen (or ladies, or "the twa o' them") whom we have spared. It is a good place to be in; night and morning, we have Theodore Rousseaus (always a new one) hung to amuse us on the walls of the world; and the moon--this is our good season, we have a moon just now--makes the night a piece of heaven. It amazes me how people can live on in the dirty north; yet if you saw our rainy season (which is really a caulker for wind, wet, and darkness--howling showers, roaring winds, pit-blackness at noon) you might marvel how we could endure that. And we can't. But there's a winter everywhere; only ours is in the summer. Mark my words: there will be a winter in heaven--and in hell. _Cela rentre dans les procédés du bon Dieu; et vous verrez!_ There's another very good thing about Vailima, I am away from the little bubble of the literary life. It is not all beer and skittles, is it? By the by, my _Ballads_ seem to have been dam bad; all the crickets sing so in their crickety papers; and I have no ghost of an idea on the point myself: verse is always to me the unknowable. You might tell me how it strikes a professional bard: not that it really matters, for, of course, good or bad, I don't think I shall get into _that_ galley any more. But I should like to know if you join the shrill chorus of the crickets. The crickets are the devil in all to you: 'tis a strange thing, they seem to rejoice like a strong man in their injustice. I trust you got my letter about your Browning book. In case it missed, I wish to say again that your publication of Browning's kind letter, as an illustration of _his_ character, was modest, proper, and in radiant good taste.--In Witness whereof, etc. etc., ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MISS RAWLINSON The next is written to a young friend and visitor of Bournemouth days (see vol. xxiv. p. 227) on the news of her engagement to Mr. Alfred Spender. _Vailima, Apia, Samoa, April 1891._ MY DEAR MAY,--I never think of you by any more ceremonial name, so I will not pretend. There is not much chance that I shall forget you until the time comes for me to forget all this little turmoil in a corner (though indeed I have been in several corners) of an inconsiderable planet. You remain in my mind for a good reason, having given me (in so short a time) the most delightful pleasure. I shall remember, and you must still be beautiful. The truth is, you must grow more so, or you will soon be less. It is not so easy to be a flower, even when you bear a flower's name. And if I admired you so much, and still remember you, it is not because of your face, but because you were then worthy of it, as you must still continue. Will you give my heartiest congratulations to Mr. Spender? He has my admiration; he is a brave man; when I was young, I should have run away from the sight of you, pierced with the sense of my unfitness. He is more wise and manly. What a good husband he will have to be! And you--what a good wife! Carry your love tenderly. I will never forgive him--or you--it is in both your hands--if the face that once gladdened my heart should be changed into one sour or sorrowful. What a person you are to give flowers! It was so I first heard of you; and now you are giving the May flower! Yes, Skerryvore has passed; it was, for us. But I wish you could see us in our new home on the mountain, in the middle of great woods, and looking far out over the Pacific. When Mr. Spender is very rich, he must bring you round the world and let you see it, and see the old gentleman and the old lady. I mean to live quite a long while yet, and my wife must do the same, or else I couldn't manage it; so, you see, you will have plenty of time; and it's a pity not to see the most beautiful places, and the most beautiful people moving there, and the real stars and moon overhead, instead of the tin imitations that preside over London. I do not think my wife very well; but I am in hopes she will now have a little rest. It has been a hard business, above all for her; we lived four months in the hurricane season in a miserable house, overborne with work, ill-fed, continually worried, drowned in perpetual rain, beaten upon by wind, so that we must sit in the dark in the evenings; and then I ran away, and she had a month of it alone. Things go better now; the back of the work is broken; and we are still foolish enough to look forward to a little peace. I am a very different person from the prisoner of Skerryvore. The other day I was three-and-twenty hours in an open boat; it made me pretty ill; but fancy its not killing me half-way! It is like a fairy story that I should have recovered liberty and strength, and should go round again among my fellow-men, boating, riding, bathing, toiling hard with a wood-knife in the forest. I can wish you nothing more delightful than my fortune in life; I wish it you; and better, if the thing be possible. Lloyd is tinkling below me on the typewriter; my wife has just left the room; she asks me to say she would have written had she been well enough, and hopes to do it still.--Accept the best wishes of your admirer, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN This letter announces (1) the arrival of Mrs. Thomas Stevenson from Sydney, to take up her abode in her son's island home now that the conditions of life there had been made fairly comfortable; and (2) the receipt of a letter from me expressing the disappointment felt by Stevenson's friends at home at the impersonal and even tedious character of some portions of the South Sea Letters that had reached us. As a corrective of this opinion, I may perhaps mention here that there is a certain many-voyaged master-mariner as well as master-writer--no less a person than Mr. Joseph Conrad--who does not at all share it, and prefers _In the South Seas_ to _Treasure Island_. _[Vailima] April 29th, '91._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--I begin again. I was awake this morning about half-past four. It was still night, but I made my fire, which is always a delightful employment, and read Lockhart's _Scott_ until the day began to peep. It was a beautiful and sober dawn, a dove-coloured dawn, insensibly brightening to gold. I was looking at it some while over the down-hill profile of our eastern road when I chanced to glance northward, and saw with extraordinary pleasure the sea lying outspread. It seemed as smooth as glass, and yet I knew the surf was roaring all along the reef, and indeed, if I had listened, I could have heard it--and saw the white sweep of it outside Matautu. I am out of condition still, and can do nothing, and toil to be at my pen, and see some ink behind me. I have taken up again _The High Woods of Ulufanua_. I still think the fable too fantastic and far-fetched. But, on a re-reading, fell in love with my first chapter, and for good or evil I must finish it. It is really good, well fed with facts, true to the manners, and (for once in my works) rendered pleasing by the presence of a heroine who is pretty. Miss Uma is pretty; a fact. All my other women have been as ugly as sin, and like Falconet's horse (I have just been reading the anecdote in Lockhart), _mortes_ forbye. News: our old house is now half demolished; it is to be rebuilt on a new site; now we look down upon and through the open posts of it like a bird-cage, to the woods beyond. My poor Paulo has lost his father and succeeded to thirty thousand thalers (I think); he had to go down to the consulate yesterday to send a legal paper; got drunk, of course, and is still this morning in so bemused a condition that our breakfasts all went wrong. Lafaele is absent at the deathbed of his fair spouse; fair she was, but not in deed, acting as harlot to the wreckers at work on the warships, to which society she probably owes her end, having fallen off a cliff, or been thrust off it--_inter pocula_. Henry is the same, our stand-by. In this transition stage he has been living in Apia; but the other night he stayed up, and sat with us about the chimney in my room. It was the first time he had seen a fire in a hearth; he could not look at it without smiles, and was always anxious to put on another stick. We entertained him with the fairy tales of civilisation--theatres, London, blocks in the street, Universities, the Underground, newspapers, etc., and projected once more his visit to Sydney. If we can manage, it will be next Christmas. (I see it will be impossible for me to afford a further journey _this_ winter.) We have spent since we have been here about £2,500, which is not much if you consider we have built on that three houses, one of them of some size, and a considerable stable, made two miles of road some three times, cleared many acres of bush, made some miles of path, planted quantities of food, and enclosed a horse paddock and some acres of pig run; but 'tis a good deal of money regarded simply as money. K. is bosh; I have no use for him; but we must do what we can with the fellow meanwhile; he is good-humoured and honest, but inefficient, idle himself, the cause of idleness in others, grumbling, a self-excuser--all the faults in a bundle. He owes us thirty weeks' service--the wretched Paul about half as much. Henry is almost the only one of our employés who has a credit. _May 17th._--Well, am I ashamed of myself? I do not think so. I have been hammering letters ever since, and got three ready and a fourth about half through; all four will go by the mail, which is what I wish, for so I keep at least my start. Days and days of unprofitable stubbing and digging, and the result still poor as literature, left-handed, heavy, unillumined, but I believe readable and interesting as matter. It has been no joke of a hard time, and when my task was done, I had little taste for anything but blowing on the pipe. A few necessary letters filled the bowl to overflowing. My mother has arrived, young, well, and in good spirits. By desperate exertions, which have wholly floored Fanny, her room was ready for her, and the dining-room fit to eat in. It was a famous victory. Lloyd never told me of your portrait till a few days ago; fortunately, I had no pictures hung yet; and the space over my chimney waits your counterfeit presentment. I have not often heard anything that pleased me more; your severe head shall frown upon me and keep me to the mark. But why has it not come? Have you been as forgetful as Lloyd? _18th._--Miserable comforters are ye all! I read your esteemed pages this morning by lamplight and the glimmer of the dawn, and as soon as breakfast was over, I must turn to and tackle these despised labours! Some courage was necessary, but not wanting. There is one thing at least by which I can avenge myself for my drubbing, for on one point you seem impenetrably stupid. Can I find no form of words which will at last convey to your intelligence the fact that _these letters were never meant, and are not now meant, to be other than a quarry of materials from which the book may be drawn_? There seems something incommunicable in this (to me) simple idea; I know Lloyd failed to comprehend it, I doubt if he has grasped it now; and I despair, after all these efforts, that you should ever be enlightened. Still, oblige me by reading that form of words once more, and see if a light does not break. You may be sure, after the friendly freedoms of your criticism (necessary I am sure, and wholesome I know, but untimely to the poor labourer in his landslip) that mighty little of it will stand. Our Paul has come into a fortune, and wishes to go home to the Hie Germanie. This is a tile on our head, and if a shower, which is now falling, lets up, I must go down to Apia, and see if I can find a substitute of any kind. This is, from any point of view, disgusting; above all, from that of work; for, whatever the result, the mill has to be kept turning; apparently dust, and not flour, is the proceed. Well, there is gold in the dust, which is a fine consolation, since--well, I can't help it; night or morning, I do my darndest, and if I cannot charge for merit, I must e'en charge for toil, of which I have plenty and plenty more ahead before this cup is drained; sweat and hyssop are the ingredients. We are clearing from Carruthers' Road to the pig fence, twenty-eight powerful natives with Catholic medals about their necks, all swiping in like Trojans; long may the sport continue! The invoice to hand. Ere this goes out, I hope to see your expressive, but surely not benignant countenance! Adieu, O culler of offensive expressions--'and a' to be a posy to your ain dear May!'--Fanny seems a little revived again after her spasm of work. Our books and furniture keep slowly draining up the road, in a sad state of scatterment and disrepair; I wish the devil had had K. by his red beard before he had packed my library. Odd leaves and sheets and boards--a thing to make a bibliomaniac shed tears--are fished out of odd corners. But I am no bibliomaniac, praise Heaven, and I bear up, and rejoice when I find anything safe. _19th._--However, I worked five hours on the brute, and finished my Letter all the same, and couldn't sleep last night by consequence. Haven't had a bad night since I don't know when; dreamed a large handsome man (a New Orleans planter) had insulted my wife, and, do what I pleased, I could not make him fight me; and woke to find it was the eleventh anniversary of my marriage. A letter usually takes me from a week to three days; but I'm sometimes two days on a page--I was once three--and then my friends kick me. _C'est-y-bête!_ I wish letters of that charming quality could be so timed as to arrive when a fellow wasn't working at the truck in question; but, of course, that can't be. Did not go down last night. It showered all afternoon, and poured heavy and loud all night. You should have seen our twenty-five popés (the Samoan phrase for a Catholic, lay or cleric) squatting when the day's work was done on the ground outside the verandah, and pouring in the rays of forty-eight eyes through the back and the front door of the dining-room, while Henry and I and the boss pope signed the contract. The second boss (an old man) wore a kilt (as usual) and a Balmoral bonnet with a little tartan edging and the tails pulled off. I told him that hat belong to my country--Sekotia; and he said, yes, that was the place that he belonged to right enough. And then all the Papists laughed till the woods rang; he was slashing away with a cutlass as he spoke. The pictures[20] have decidedly not come; they may probably arrive Sunday. TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE The reference in the first paragraph is to a previous letter concerning private matters, in which Stevenson had remonstrated with his correspondent on what seemed to him her mistaken reasons for a certain course of conduct. [_Vailima, May 1891._] MY DEAR ADELAIDE,--I will own you just did manage to tread on my gouty toe; and I beg to assure you with most people I should simply have turned away and said no more. My cudgelling was therefore in the nature of a caress or testimonial. God forbid, I should seem to judge for you on such a point; it was what you seemed to set forth as your reasons that fluttered my old Presbyterian spirit--for, mind you, I am a child of the Covenanters--whom I do not love, but they are mine after all, my father's and my mother's--and they had their merits too, and their ugly beauties, and grotesque heroisms, that I love them for, the while I laugh at them; but in their name and mine do what you think right, and let the world fall. That is the privilege and the duty of private persons; and I shall think the more of you at the greater distance, because you keep a promise to your fellow-man, your helper and creditor in life, by just so much as I was tempted to think the less of you (O not much, or I would never have been angry) when I thought you were the swallower of a (tinfoil) formula. I must say I was uneasy about my letter, not because it was too strong as an expression of my unregenerate sentiments, but because I knew full well it should be followed by something kinder. And the mischief has been in my health. I fell sharply sick in Sydney, was put aboard the _Lübeck_ pretty bad, got to Vailima, hung on a month there, and didn't pick up as well as my work needed; set off on a journey, gained a great deal, lost it again; and am back at Vailima, still no good at my necessary work. I tell you this for my imperfect excuse that I should not have written you again sooner to remove the bad taste of my last. A road has been called Adelaide Road; it leads from the back of our house to the bridge, and thence to the garden, and by a bifurcation to the pig pen. It is thus much traversed, particularly by Fanny. An oleander, the only one of your seeds that prospered in this climate, grows there; and the name is now some week or ten days applied and published. ADELAIDE ROAD leads also into the bush, to the banana patch and by a second bifurcation over the left branch of the stream to the plateau and the right hand of the gorges. In short, it leads to all sorts of good, and is, besides, in itself a pretty winding path, bound downhill among big woods to the margin of the stream. What a strange idea, to think me a Jew-hater! Isaiah and David and Heine are good enough for me; and I leave more unsaid. Were I of Jew blood, I do not think I could ever forgive the Christians; the ghettos would get in my nostrils like mustard or lit gunpowder. Just so you, as being a child of the Presbytery, I retain--I need not dwell on that. The ascendant hand is what I feel most strongly; I am bound in and in with my forbears; were he one of mine, I should not be struck at all by Mr. Moss of Bevis Marks, I should still see behind him Moses of the Mount and the Tables and the shining face. We are all nobly born; fortunate those who know it; blessed those who remember. I am, my dear Adelaide, most genuinely yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Write by return to say you are better, and I will try to do the same. TO CHARLES BAXTER The following refers again to the project of a long genealogical novel expanded from the original idea of _Henry Shovel_. _[Vailima] Tuesday, 19th May '91._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--I don't know what you think of me, not having written to you at all during your illness. I find two sheets begun with your name, but that is no excuse.... I am keeping bravely; getting about better every day, and hope soon to be in my usual fettle. My books begin to come; and I fell once more on the Old Bailey session papers. I have 1778, 1784, and 1786. Should you be able to lay hands on any other volumes, above all a little later, I should be very glad you should buy them for me. I particularly want _one_ or _two_ during the course of the Peninsular War. Come to think, I ought rather to have communicated this want to Bain. Would it bore you to communicate to that effect with the great man? The sooner I have them, the better for me. 'Tis for _Henry Shovel_. But _Henry Shovel_ has now turned into a work called _The Shovels of Newton French: including Memoirs of Henry Shovel, a Private in the Peninsular War_, which work is to begin in 1664 with the marriage of Skipper, afterwards Alderman Shovel of Bristol, Henry's great-great-grandfather, and end about 1832 with his own second marriage to the daughter of his runaway aunt. Will the public ever stand such an opus? Gude kens, but it tickles me. Two or three historical personages will just appear: Judge Jeffreys, Wellington, Colquhoun, Grant, and I think Townsend the runner. I know the public won't like it; let 'em lump it then; I mean to make it good; it will be more like a saga. Adieu.--Yours ever affectionately, R. L. STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _[Vailima] June 1891._ SIR,--To you, under your portrait, which is, in expression, your true, breathing self, and up to now saddens me; in time, and soon, I shall be glad to have it there; it is still only a reminder of your absence. Fanny wept when we unpacked it, and you know how little she is given to that mood; I was scarce Roman myself, but that does not count--I lift up my voice so readily. These are good compliments to the artist.[21] I write in the midst of a wreck of books, which have just come up, and have for once defied my labours to get straight. The whole floor is filled with them, and (what's worse) most of the shelves forbye; and where they are to go to, and what is to become of the librarian, God knows. It is hot to-night, and has been airless all day, and I am out of sorts, and my work sticks, the devil fly away with it and me. We had an alarm of war since last I wrote my screeds to you, and it blew over, and is to blow on again, and the rumour goes they are to begin by killing all the whites. I have no belief in this, and should be infinitely sorry if it came to pass--I do not mean for us, that were otiose--but for the poor, deluded schoolboys, who should hope to gain by such a step. _Letter resumed, June 20th._--No diary this time. Why? you ask. I have only sent out four Letters, and two chapters of _The Wrecker_. Yes, but to get these I have written 132 pp., 66,000 words in thirty days; 2200 words a day; the labours of an elephant. God knows what it's like, and don't ask me, but nobody shall say I have spared pains. I thought for some time it wouldn't come at all. I was days and days over the first letter of the lot--days and days writing and deleting and making no headway whatever, till I thought I should have gone bust; but it came at last after a fashion, and the rest went a thought more easily, though I am not so fond as to fancy any better. Your opinion as to the Letters as a whole is so damnatory that I put them by. But there is a "hell of a want of" money this year. And these Gilbert Island papers, being the most interesting in matter, and forming a compact whole, and being well illustrated, I did think of as a possible resource. It would be called _Six Months in Melanesia, Two Island Kings, ---- Monarchies, Gilbert Island Kings, ---- Monarchies_, and I dare say I'll think of a better yet--and would divide thus:-- _Butaritari_ I. A Town Asleep. II. The Three Brothers. III. Around our House. IV. A Tale of a Tapu. V. The Five Days' Festival. VI. Domestic Life--(which might be omitted, but not well, better be recast). _The King of Apemama_ VII. The Royal Traders. VIII. Foundation of Equator Town. IX. The Palace of Mary Warren. X. Equator Town and the Palace. XI. King and Commons. XII. The Devil Work Box. XIII. The Three Corslets. XIV. Tail piece; the Court upon a Journey. I wish you to watch these closely, judging them as a whole, and treating them as I have asked you, and favour me with your damnatory advice. I look up at your portrait, and it frowns upon me. You seem to view me with reproach. The expression is excellent; Fanny wept when she saw it, and you know she is not given to the melting mood. She seems really better; I have a touch of fever again, I fancy overwork, and to-day, when I have overtaken my letters, I shall blow on my pipe. Tell Mrs. Sitwell I have been playing _Le Chant d'Amour_ lately, and have arranged it, after awful trouble, rather prettily for two pipes; and it brought her before me with an effect scarce short of hallucination. I could hear her voice in every note; yet I had forgot the air entirely, and began to pipe it from notes as something new, when I was brought up with a round turn by this reminiscence. We are now very much installed; the dining-room is done, and looks lovely. Soon we shall begin to photograph and send you our circumstances. My room is still a howling wilderness. I sleep on a platform in a window, and strike my mosquito bar and roll up my bedclothes every morning, so that the bed becomes by day a divan. A great part of the floor is knee-deep in books, yet nearly all the shelves are filled, alas! It is a place to make a pig recoil, yet here are my interminable labours begun daily by lamp-light, and sometimes not yet done when the lamp has once more to be lighted. The effect of pictures in this place is surprising. They give great pleasure. _June 21st._--A word more. I had my breakfast this morning at 4.30! My new cook has beaten me and (as Lloyd says) revenged all the cooks in the world. I have been hunting them to give me breakfast early since I was twenty; and now here comes Mr. Ratke, and I have to plead for mercy. I cannot stand 4.30; I am a mere fevered wreck; it is now half-past eight, and I can no more, and four hours divide me from lunch, the devil take the man! Yesterday it was about 5.30, which I can stand; day before 5, which is bad enough; to-day, I give out. It is like a London season, and as I do not take a siesta once in a month, and then only five minutes, I am being worn to the bones, and look aged and anxious. We have Rider Haggard's brother here as a Land Commissioner; a nice kind of a fellow; indeed, all the three Land Commissioners are very agreeable. TO E. L. BURLINGAME For the result of the suggestion made in the following, see Scribner's Magazine, October 1893, p. 494. _Vailima [Summer 1891]._ MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--I find among my grandfather's papers his own reminiscences of his voyage round the north with Sir Walter, eighty years ago, _labuntur anni!_ They are not remarkably good, but he was not a bad observer, and several touches seem to me speaking. It has occurred to me you might like them to appear in the Magazine. If you would, kindly let me know, and tell me how you would like it handled. My grandad's MS. runs to between six and seven thousand words, which I could abbreviate of anecdotes that scarce touch Sir W. Would you like this done? Would you like me to introduce the old gentleman? I had something of the sort in my mind, and could fill a few columns rather _à propos_. I give you the first offer of this, according to your request; for though it may forestall one of the interests of my biography, the thing seems to me particularly suited for prior appearance in a magazine. I see the first number of _The Wrecker_; I thought it went lively enough; and by a singular accident, the picture is not unlike Tai-o-hae! Thus we see the age of miracles, etc.--Yours very sincerely, R. L. S. Proofs for next mail. TO W. CRAIBE ANGUS Referring again to the Burns Exhibition and to his correspondent's request for an autograph in a special copy of _The Jolly Beggars_. _[Summer 1891.]_ DEAR MR. ANGUS,--You can use my letter as you will. The parcel has not come; pray Heaven the next post bring it safe. Is it possible for me to write a preface here? I will try if you like, if you think I must: though surely there are Rivers in Assyria. Of course you will send me sheets of the catalogue; I suppose it (the preface) need not be long; perhaps it should be rather very short? Be sure you give me your views upon these points. Also tell me what names to mention among those of your helpers, and do remember to register everything, else it is not safe. The true place (in my view) for a monument to Fergusson were the churchyard of Haddington. But as that would perhaps not carry many votes, I should say one of the two following sites:--First, either as near the site of the old Bedlam as we could get, or, second, beside the Cross, the heart of his city. Upon this I would have a fluttering butterfly, and, I suggest, the citation, Poor butterfly, thy case I mourn. For the case of Fergusson is not one to pretend about. A more miserable tragedy the sun never shone upon, or (in consideration of our climate) I should rather say refused to brighten.--Yours truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Where Burns goes will not matter. He is no local poet, like your Robin the First; he is general as the casing air. Glasgow, as the chief city of Scottish men, would do well; but for God's sake, don't let it be like the Glasgow memorial to Knox; I remember, when I first saw this, laughing for an hour by Shrewsbury clock. R. L. S. TO H. C. IDE The following is written to the American Land Commissioner (later Chief Justice for a term) in Samoa, whose elder daughter, then at home in the States, had been born on a Christmas Day, and consequently regarded herself as defrauded of her natural rights to a private anniversary of her own. _[Vailima, June 19, 1891.]_ DEAR MR. IDE,--Herewith please find the DOCUMENT, which I trust will prove sufficient in law. It seems to me very attractive in its eclecticism; Scots, English, and Roman law phrases are all indifferently introduced, and a quotation from the works of Haynes Bayly can hardly fail to attract the indulgence of the Bench.--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. I, Robert Louis Stevenson, Advocate of the Scots Bar, author of _The Master of Ballantrae_ and _Moral Emblems_, stuck civil engineer, sole owner and patentee of the Palace and Plantation known as Vailima in the island of Upolu, Samoa, a British Subject, being in sound mind, and pretty well, I thank you, in body; In consideration that Miss Annie H. Ide, daughter of H. C. Ide, in the town of Saint Johnsbury, in the county of Caledonia, in the state of Vermont, United States of America, was born, out of all reason, upon Christmas Day, and is therefore out of all justice denied the consolation and profit of a proper birthday; And considering that I, the said Robert Louis Stevenson, have attained an age when O, we never mention it, and that I have now no further use for a birthday of any description; And in consideration that I have met H. C. Ide, the father of the said Annie H. Ide, and found him about as white a land commissioner as I require; _Have transferred_, and _do hereby transfer_, to the said Annie H. Ide, _all and whole_ my rights and privileges in the thirteenth day of November, formerly my birthday, now, hereby, and henceforth, the birthday of the said Annie H. Ide, to have, hold, exercise, and enjoy the same in the customary manner, by the sporting of fine raiment, eating of rich meats, and receipt of gifts, compliments, and copies of verse, according to the manner of our ancestors; _And I direct_ the said Annie H. Ide to add to the said name of Annie H. Ide the name Louisa--at least in private; and I charge her to use my said birthday with moderation and humanity, _et tamquam bona filia familiæ_, the said birthday not being so young as it once was, and having carried me in a very satisfactory manner since I can remember; And in case the said Annie H. Ide shall neglect or contravene either of the above conditions, I hereby revoke the donation and transfer my rights in the said birthday to the President of the United States of America for the time being; In witness whereof I have hereto set my hand and seal this nineteenth day of June in the year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-one. [Illustration: SEAL] ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _Witness_, LLOYD OSBOURNE, _Witness_, HAROLD WATTS. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The misgivings herein expressed about the imminence of a native war were not realised until two years later, and the plans of defence into which Stevenson here enters with characteristic gusto were not put to the test. [_Vailima, June and July 1891._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--I am so hideously in arrears that I know not where to begin. However, here I am a prisoner in my room, unfit for work, incapable of reading with interest, and trying to catch up a bit. We have a guest here: a welcome guest: my Sydney music master, whose health broke down, and who came with his remarkable simplicity, to ask a month's lodging. He is newly married, his wife in the family way: beastly time to fall sick. I have found, by good luck, a job for him here which will pay some of his way: and in the meantime he is a pleasant guest, for he plays the flute with little sentiment but great perfection, and endears himself by his simplicity. To me, especially; I am so weary of finding people approach me with precaution, pick their words, flatter, and twitter; but the muttons of the good God are not at all afraid of the lion. They take him as he comes, and he does not bite--at least not hard. This makes us a party of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, at table; deftly waited on by Mary Carter, a very nice Sydney girl, who served us at a boarding-house and has since come on--how long she will endure this exile is another story; and gauchely waited on by Faauma, the new left-handed wife of the famed Lafaele, a little creature in native dress of course and as beautiful as a bronze candlestick, so fine, clean and dainty in every limb; her arms and her little hips in particular masterpieces. The rest of the crew may be stated briefly: the great Henry Simelé, still to the front; King, of the yellow beard, rather a disappointment--I am inclined on this point to republican opinions: Ratke, a German cook, good--and Germanly bad, he don't make _my_ kitchen; Paul, now working out his debts outdoor; Emma, a strange weird creature--I suspect (from her colour) a quarter white--widow of a white man, ugly, capable, a really good laundress; Java--yes, that is the name--they spell it Siava, but pronounce it, and explain it Java--her assistant, a creature I adore from her plain, wholesome, bread-and-butter beauty. An honest, almost ugly, bright, good-natured face; the rest (to my sense) merely exquisite. She comes steering into my room of a morning, like Mrs. Nickleby, with elaborate precaution; unlike her, noiseless. If I look up from my work, she is ready with an explosive smile. I generally don't, and wait to look at her as she stoops for the bellows, and trips tiptoe off again, a miracle of successful womanhood in every line. I am amused to find plain, healthy Java pass in my fancy so far before pretty young Faauma. I observed Lloyd the other day to say that Java must have been lovely "when she was young"; and I thought it an odd word, of a woman in the height of health, not yet touched with fat, though (to be just) a little slack of bust. Our party you know: Fanny, Lloyd, my mother, Belle, and "the babe"--as we call him--Austin. We have now three instruments; Boehm flageolet, flute, and Bb clarinet; and we expect in a few days our piano. This is a great pleasure to me; the band-mastering, the playing and all. As soon as I am done with this stage of a letter, I shall return, not being allowed to play, to band-master, being engaged in an attempt to arrange an air with effect for the three pipes. And I'll go now, by jabers. [Illustration] _July 3rd._--A long pause: occasioned, first by some days of hard work: next by a vile quinsey--if that be the way to spell it. But to-day I must write. For we have all kinds of larks on hand. The wars and rumours of wars begin to take consistency, insomuch that we have landed the weapons this morning, and inspected the premises with a view to defence. Of course it will come to nothing; but as in all stories of massacres, the one you don't prepare for is the one that comes off. All our natives think ill of the business; none of the whites do. According to our natives the demonstration threatened for to-day or to-morrow is one of vengeance on the whites--small wonder--and if that begins--where will it stop? Anyway I don't mean to go down for nothing, if I can help it; and to amuse you I will tell you our plans. There is the house, upper story. Our weak point is of course the sides AB, AH; so we propose to place half our garrison in the space HGFD and half in the opposite corner, BB'CD. We shall communicate through the interior, there is a water-tank in the angle C, my mother and Austin are to go in the loft. The holding of only these two corners and deserting the corner C' is for economy and communication, two doors being in the sides GF and CD; so that any one in the corner C' could only communicate or be reinforced by exposure. Besides we are short of mattresses. Garrison: R. L. S., Lloyd, Fanny, King, Ratke--doubtful, he may go--Emma, Mary, Belle; weapons: eight revolvers and a shot gun, and swords galore; but we're pretty far gone when we come to the swords. It has been rather a lark arranging; but I find it a bore to write, and I doubt it will be cruel stale to read about, when all's over and done, as it will be ere this goes, I fancy: far more ere it reaches you. _Date unknown._--Well, nothing as yet, though I don't swear by it yet. There has been a lot of trouble, and there still is a lot of doubt as to the future; and those who sit in the chief seats, who are all excellent, pleasant creatures, are not, perhaps, the most wise of mankind. They actually proposed to kidnap and deport Mataafa; a scheme which would have loosed the avalanche at once. But some human being interfered and choked off this pleasing scheme. You ask me in yours just received, what will become of us if it comes to a war? Well, if it is a war of the old sort, nothing. It will mean a little bother, and a great deal of theft, and more amusement. But if it comes to the massacre lark, I can only answer with the Bell of Old Bow. You are to understand that, in my reading of the native character, every day that passes is a solid gain. They put in the time public speaking; so wear out their energy, develop points of difference and exacerbate internal ill-feeling. Consequently, I feel less apprehension of difficulty now, by about a hundredfold. All that I stick to, is that if war begins, there are ten chances to one we shall have it bad. The natives have been scurvily used by all the white powers without exception; and they labour under the belief, of which they can't be cured, that they defeated Germany. This makes an awkward complication. I was extremely vexed to hear you were ill again. I hope you are better. 'Tis a long time we have known each other now, to be sure. Well, well! you say you are sure to catch fever in the bush; so we do continually; but you are to conceive Samoa fever as the least formidable malady under heaven: implying only a day or so of slight headache and languor and ill humour, easily reduced by quinine or antipyrine. The hot fever I had was from over-exertion and blood poisoning, no doubt, and irritation of the bladder; it went of its own accord and with rest. I have had since a bad quinsey which knocked me rather useless for about a week, but I stuck to my work, with great difficulty and small success. _Date unknown._--But it's fast day and July, and the rude inclement depth of winter, and the thermometer was 68 this morning and a few days ago it was 63, and we have all been perishing with cold. All still seems quiet. Your counterfeit presentments are all round us: the pastel over my bed, the Dew-Smith photograph over my door, and the "celebrity" on Fanny's table. My room is now done, and looks very gay, and chromatic with its blue walls and my coloured lines of books. TO SIDNEY COLVIN This is the first letter in which Stevenson expresses the opinion which had been forcing itself upon him, and which he felt it his duty in the following year to express publicly in letters to the Times, of the unwisdom of the government established under the treaty between the Three Powers and the incompetence of the officials appointed to carry it out. _[Vailima] Sunday, Sept. 5(?), 1891._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--Yours from Lochinver has just come. You ask me if I am ever homesick for the Highlands and the Isles. Conceive that for the last month I have been living there between 1786 and 1850, in my grandfather's diaries and letters. I _had_ to take a rest; no use talking; so I put in a month over my _Lives of the Stevensons_ with great pleasure and profit and some advance; one chapter and a part drafted. The whole promises well. Chapter I. Domestic Annals. Chapter II. The Northern Lights. Chapter III. The Bell Rock. Chapter IV. A Family of Boys. Chap. V. The Grandfather. VI. Alan Stevenson. VII. Thomas Stevenson. My materials for my great-grandfather are almost null; for my grandfather copious and excellent. Name, a puzzle. _A Scottish Family_, _A Family of Engineers_, _Northern Lights_, _The Engineers of the Northern Lights: A Family History_. Advise; but it will take long. Now, imagine if I have been homesick for Barrahead and Island Glass, and Kirkwall, and Cape Wrath, and the Wells of the Pentland Firth; I could have wept. Now for politics. I am much less alarmed; I believe the _malo_ (= _raj_, government) will collapse and cease like an overlain infant, without a shot fired. They have now been months here on their big salaries--and Cedercrantz, whom I specially like as a man, has done nearly nothing, and the Baron, who is well-meaning, has done worse. They have these large salaries, and they have all the taxes; they have made scarce a foot of road; they have not given a single native a position--all to white men; they have scarce laid out a penny on Apia, and scarce a penny on the King; they have forgot they were in Samoa, or that such a thing as Samoans existed, and had eyes and some intelligence. The Chief Justice has refused to pay his customs! The President proposed to have an expensive house built for himself, while the King, his master, has none! I had stood aside, and been a loyal, and, above all, a silent subject, up to then; but now I snap my fingers at their _malo_. It is damned, and I'm damned glad of it. And this is not all. Last "_Wainiu_," when I sent Fanny off to Fiji, I hear the wonderful news that the Chief Justice is going to Fiji and the Colonies to improve his mind. I showed my way of thought to his guest, Count Wachtmeister, whom I have sent to you with a letter--he will tell you all the news. Well, the Chief Justice stayed, but they said he was to leave yesterday. I had intended to go down, and see and warn him! But the President's house had come up in the meanwhile, and I let them go to their doom, which I am only anxious to see swiftly and (if it may be) bloodlessly fall. Thus I have in a way withdrawn my unrewarded loyalty. Lloyd is down to-day with Moors to call on Mataafa; the news of the excursion made a considerable row in Apia, and both the German and the English consuls besought Lloyd not to go. But he stuck to his purpose, and with my approval. It's a poor thing if people are to give up a pleasure party for a _malo_ that has never done anything for us but draw taxes, and is going to go pop, and leave us at the mercy of the identical Mataafa, whom I have not visited for more than a year, and who is probably furious. The sense of my helplessness here has been rather bitter; I feel it wretched to see this dance of folly and injustice and unconscious rapacity go forward from day to day, and to be impotent. I was not consulted--or only by one man, and that on particular points; I did not choose to volunteer advice till some pressing occasion; I have not even a vote, for I am not a member of the municipality. What ails you, miserable man, to talk of saving material? I have a whole world in my head, a whole new society to work, but I am in no hurry; you will shortly make the acquaintance of the Island of Ulufanua, on which I mean to lay several stories; the _Bloody Wedding_, possibly the _High Woods_--(O, it's so good, the _High Woods_, but the story is craziness; that's the trouble)--a political story, the _Labour Slave_, etc. Ulufanua is an imaginary island; the name is a beautiful Samoan word for the _top_ of a forest; ulu=leaves or hair, fanua=land. The ground or country of the leaves. "Ulufanua the isle of the sea," read that verse dactylically and you get the beat; the u's are like our double oo; did ever you hear a prettier word? I do not feel inclined to make a volume of Essays,[22] but if I did, and perhaps the idea is good--and any idea is better than the _South Seas_--here would be my choice of the Scribner articles: _Dreams_, _Beggars_, _Lantern-Bearers_, _Random Memories_. There was a paper called the _Old Pacific Capital_ in Fraser, in Tulloch's time, which had merit; there were two on Fontainebleau in the Magazine of Art in Henley's time. I have no idea if they're any good; then there's the _Emigrant Train_. _Pulvis et Umbra_ is in a different key, and wouldn't hang on with the rest. I have just interrupted my letter and read through the chapter of the _High Woods_ that is written, a chapter and a bit, some sixteen pages, really very fetching, but what do you wish? the story is so wilful, so steep, so silly--it's a hallucination I have outlived, and yet I never did a better piece of work, horrid, and pleasing, and extraordinarily _true_; it's sixteen pages of the South Seas; their essence. What am I to do? Lose this little gem--for I'll be bold, and that's what I think it--or go on with the rest, which I don't believe in, and don't like, and which can never make aught but a silly yarn? Make another end to it? Ah, yes, but that's not the way I write; the whole tale is implied; I never use an effect, when I can help it, unless it prepares the effects that are to follow; that's what a story consists in. To make another end, that is to make the beginning all wrong. The dénouement of a long story is nothing; it is just a "full close," which you may approach and accompany as you please--it is a coda, not an essential member in the rhythm; but the body and end of a short story is bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the beginning. Well, I shall end by finishing it against my judgment; that fragment is my Delilah. Golly, it's good. I am not shining by modesty; but I do just love the colour and movement of that piece so far as it goes. I was surprised to hear of your fishing. And you saw the _Pharos_,[23] thrice fortunate man; I wish I dared go home, I would ask the Commissioners to take me round for old sake's sake, and see all my family pictures once more from the Mull of Galloway to Unst. However, all is arranged for our meeting in Ceylon, except the date and the blooming pounds. I have heard of an exquisite hotel in the country, airy, large rooms, good cookery, not dear; we shall have a couple of months there, if we can make it out, and converse or--as my grandfather always said--"commune." "Communings with Mr. Kennedy as to Lighthouse Repairs." He was a fine old fellow, but a droll. _Evening._--Lloyd has returned. Peace and war were played before his eyes at heads or tails. A German was stopped with levelled guns; he raised his whip; had it fallen, we might have been now in war. Excuses were made by Mataafa himself. Doubtless the thing was done--I mean the stopping of the German--a little to show off before Lloyd. Meanwhile ---- was up here, telling how the Chief Justice was really gone for five or eight weeks, and begging me to write to the Times and denounce the state of affairs; many strong reasons he advanced; and Lloyd and I have been since his arrival and ----'s departure, near half an hour, debating what should be done. Cedercrantz is gone; it is not my fault; he knows my views on that point--alone of all points;--he leaves me with my mouth sealed. Yet this is a nice thing that because he is guilty of a fresh offence--his flight--the mouth of the only possible influential witness should be closed? I do not like this argument. I look like a cad, if I do in the man's absence what I could have done in a more manly manner in his presence. True; but why did he go? It is his last sin. And I, who like the man extremely--that is the word--I love his society--he is intelligent, pleasant, even witty, a gentleman--and you know how that attaches--I loathe to seem to play a base part; but the poor natives--who are like other folk, false enough, lazy enough, not heroes, not saints--ordinary men damnably misused--are they to suffer because I like Cedercrantz, and Cedercrantz has cut his lucky? This is a little tragedy, observe well--a tragedy! I may be right, I may be wrong in my judgment, but I am in treaty with my honour. I know not how it will seem to-morrow. Lloyd thought the barrier of honour insurmountable, and it is an ugly obstacle. He (Cedercrantz) will likely meet my wife three days from now, may travel back with her, will be charming if he does; suppose this, and suppose him to arrive and find that I have sprung a mine--or the nearest approach to it I could find--behind his back? My position is pretty. Yes, I am an aristocrat. I have the old petty, personal view of honour? I should blush till I die if I do this; yet it is on the cards that I may do it. So much I have written you in bed, as a man writes or talks, in a _bittre Wahl_. Now I shall sleep, and see if I am more clear. I will consult the missionaries at least--I place some reliance in M. also--or I should if he were not a partisan; but a partisan he is. There's a pity. To sleep! A fund of wisdom in the prostrate body and the fed brain. Kindly observe R. L. S. in the talons of politics! 'Tis funny--'tis sad. Nobody but these cursed idiots could have so driven me; I cannot bear idiots. My dear Colvin, I must go to sleep; it is long past ten--a dreadful hour for me. And here am I lingering (so I feel) in the dining-room at the Monument, talking to you across the table, both on our feet, and only the two stairs to mount, and get to bed, and sleep, and be waked by dear old George--to whom I wish my kindest remembrances--next morning. I look round, and there is my blue room, and my long lines of shelves, and the door gaping on a moonless night, and no word of S. C. but his twa portraits on the wall. Good-bye, my dear fellow, and good-night. Queer place the world! _Monday._--No clearness of mind with the morning; I have no guess what I should do. 'Tis easy to say that the public duty should brush aside these little considerations of personal dignity; so it is that politicians begin, and in a month you find them rat and flatter and intrigue with brows of brass. I am rather of the old view, that a man's first duty is to these little laws; the big he does not, he never will, understand; I may be wrong about the Chief Justice and the Baron and the state of Samoa; I cannot be wrong about the vile attitude I put myself in if I blow the gaff on Cedercrantz behind his back. _Tuesday._--One more word about the _South Seas_, in answer to a question I observed I have forgotten to answer. The Tahiti part has never turned up, because it has never been written. As for telling you where I went or when, or anything about Honolulu, I would rather die; that is fair and plain. How can anybody care when or how I left Honolulu? A man of upwards of forty cannot waste his time in communicating matter of that indifference. The letters, it appears, are tedious; they would be more tedious still if I wasted my time upon such infantile and sucking-bottle details. If ever I put in any such detail, it is because it leads into something or serves as a transition. To tell it for its own sake, never! The mistake is all through that I have told too much; I had not sufficient confidence in the reader, and have overfed him; and here are you anxious to learn how I--O Colvin! Suppose it had made a book, all such information is given to one glance of an eye by a map with a little dotted line upon it. But let us forget this unfortunate affair. _Wednesday._--Yesterday I went down to consult Clarke, who took the view of delay. Has he changed his mind already? I wonder: here at least is the news. Some little while back some men of Manono--what is Manono?--a Samoan rotten borough, a small isle of huge political importance, heaven knows why, where a handful of chiefs make half the trouble in the country. Some men of Manono (which is strong Mataafa) burned down the houses and destroyed the crops of some Malietoa neighbours. The President went there the other day and landed alone on the island, which (to give him his due) was plucky. Moreover, he succeeded in persuading the folks to come up and be judged on a particular day in Apia. That day they did not come; but did come the next, and, to their vast surprise, were given six months' imprisonment and clapped in gaol. Those who had accompanied them cried to them on the streets as they were marched to prison, "Shall we rescue you?" The condemned, marching in the hands of thirty men with loaded rifles, cried out "No"! And the trick was done. But it was ardently believed a rescue would be attempted; the gaol was laid about with armed men day and night; but there was some question of their loyalty, and the commandant of the forces, a very nice young beardless Swede, became nervous, and conceived a plan. How if he should put dynamite under the gaol, and in case of an attempted rescue blow up prison and all? He went to the President, who agreed; he went to the American man-of-war for the dynamite and machine, was refused, and got it at last from the Wreckers. The thing began to leak out, and there arose a muttering in town. People had no fancy for amateur explosions, for one thing. For another, it did not clearly appear that it was legal; the men had been condemned to six months' prison, which they were peaceably undergoing; they had not been condemned to death. And lastly, it seemed a somewhat advanced example of civilisation to set before barbarians. The mutter in short became a storm, and yesterday, while I was down, a cutter was chartered, and the prisoners were suddenly banished to the Tokelaus. Who has changed the sentence? We are going to stir in the dynamite matter; we do not want the natives to fancy us consenting to such an outrage. Fanny has returned from her trip, and on the whole looks better. The _High Woods_ are under way, and their name is now the _Beach of Falesá_, and the yarn is cured. I have about thirty pages of it done; it will be fifty to seventy I suppose. No supernatural trick at all; and escaped out of it quite easily; can't think why I was so stupid for so long. Mighty glad to have Fanny back to this "Hell of the South Seas," as the German Captain called it. What will Cedercrantz think when he comes back? To do him justice, had he been here, this Manono hash would not have been. Here is a pretty thing. When Fanny was in Fiji all the Samoa and Tokelau folks were agog about our "flash" house; but the whites had never heard of it. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, Author of _The Beach of Falesá_. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _[Vailima], Sept. 28, 1891._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--Since I last laid down my pen, I have written and rewritten _The Beach of Falesá_; something like sixty thousand words of sterling domestic fiction (the story, you will understand, is only half that length); and now I don't want to write any more again for ever, or feel so; and I've got to overhaul it once again to my sorrow. I was all yesterday revising, and found a lot of slacknesses and (what is worse in this kind of thing) some literaryisms. One of the puzzles is this: It is a first person story--a trader telling his own adventure in an island. When I began I allowed myself a few liberties, because I was afraid of the end; now the end proved quite easy, and could be done in the pace; so the beginning remains about a quarter tone out (in places); but I have rather decided to let it stay so. The problem is always delicate; it is the only thing that worries me in first person tales, which otherwise (quo' Alan) "set better wi' my genius." There is a vast deal of fact in the story, and some pretty good comedy. It is the first realistic South Sea story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life. Everybody else who has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost--there was no etching, no human grin, consequently no conviction. Now I have got the smell and look of the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library. As to whether any one else will read it, I have no guess. I am in an off time, but there is just the possibility it might make a hit; for the yarn is good and melodramatic, and there is quite a love affair--for me; and Mr. Wiltshire (the narrator) is a huge lark, though I say it. But there is always the exotic question, and everything, the life, the place, the dialects--trader's talk, which is a strange conglomerate of literary expressions and English and American slang, and Beach de Mar, or native English,--the very trades and hopes and fears of the characters, are all novel, and may be found unwelcome to that great, hulking, bullering whale, the public. Since I wrote, I have been likewise drawing up a document to send in to the President; it has been dreadfully delayed, not by me, but to-day they swear it will be sent in. A list of questions about the dynamite report are herein laid before him, and considerations suggested why he should answer. _October 5th._--Ever since my last snatch I have been much chivied about over the President business; his answer has come, and is an evasion accompanied with schoolboy insolence, and we are going to try to answer it. I drew my answer and took it down yesterday; but one of the signatories wants another paragraph added, which I have not yet been able to draw, and as to the wisdom of which I am not yet convinced. _Next day, Oct. 7th the right day._--We are all in rather a muddled state with our President affair. I do loathe politics, but at the same time, I cannot stand by and have the natives blown in the air treacherously with dynamite. They are still quiet; how long this may continue I do not know, though of course by mere prescription the Government is strengthened, and is probably insured till the next taxes fall due. But the unpopularity of the whites is growing. My native overseer, the great Henry Simelé, announced to-day that he was "weary of whites upon the beach. All too proud," said this veracious witness. One of the proud ones had threatened yesterday to cut off his head with a bush knife! These are "native outrages"; honour bright, and setting theft aside, in which the natives are active, this is the main stream of irritation. The natives are generally courtly, far from always civil, but really gentle, and with a strong sense of honour of their own, and certainly quite as much civilised as our dynamiting President. We shall be delighted to see Kipling.[24] I go to bed usually about half-past eight, and my lamp is out before ten; I breakfast at six. We may say roughly we have no soda water on the island, and just now truthfully no whisky. I _have_ heard the chimes at midnight; now no more, I guess. _But_--Fanny and I, as soon as we can get coins for it, are coming to Europe, not to England: I am thinking of Royat. Bar wars. If not, perhaps the Apennines might give us a mountain refuge for two months or three in summer. How is that for high? But the money must be all in hand first. _October 13th._--How am I to describe my life these last few days? I have been wholly swallowed up in politics, a wretched business, with fine elements of farce in it too, which repay a man in passing, involving many dark and many moonlight rides, secret counsels which are at once divulged, sealed letters which are read aloud in confidence to the neighbours, and a mass of fudge and fun, which would have driven me crazy ten years ago, and now makes me smile. On Friday, Henry came and told us he must leave and go to "my poor old family in Savaii"; why? I do not quite know--but, I suspect, to be tattooed--if so, then probably to be married, and we shall see him no more. I told him he must do what he thought his duty; we had him to lunch, drank his health, and he and I rode down about twelve. When I got down, I sent my horse back to help bring down the family later. My own afternoon was cut out for me; my last draft for the President had been objected to by some of the signatories. I stood out, and one of our small number accordingly refused to sign. Him I had to go and persuade, which went off very well after the first hottish moments; you have no idea how stolid my temper is now. By about five the thing was done; and we sat down to dinner at the Chinaman's--the Verrey or Doyen of Apia--Gurr and I at each end as hosts; Gurr's wife--Fanua, late maid of the village; her (adopted) father and mother, Seumanu and Faatulia, Fanny, Belle, Lloyd, Austin, and Henry Simelé, his last appearance. Henry was in a kilt of grey shawl, with a blue jacket, white shirt, and black necktie, and looked like a dark genteel guest in a Highland shooting-box. Seumanu (opposite Fanny, next G.) is chief of Apia, a rather big gun in this place, looking like a large, fatted, military Englishman, bar the colour. Faatulia, next me, is a bigger chief than her husband. Henry is a chief too--his chief name, Iiga (Ee-eeng-a), he has not yet "taken" because of his youth. We were in fine society, and had a pleasant meal-time, with lots of fun. Then to the Opera--I beg your pardon, I mean the Circus. We occupied the first row in the reserved seats, and there in the row behind were all our friends--Captain Foss and his Captain-Lieutenant, three of the American officers, very nice fellows, the Dr., etc., so we made a fine show of what an embittered correspondent of the local paper called "the shoddy aristocracy of Apia"; and you should have seen how we carried on, and how I clapped, and Captain Foss hollered "_wunderschön!_" and threw himself forward in his seat, and how we all in fact enjoyed ourselves like school-children, Austin not a shade more than his neighbours. Then the Circus broke up, and the party went home, but I stayed down, having business on the morrow. Yesterday, October 12th, great news reaches me, and Lloyd and I, with the mail just coming in, must leave all, saddle, and ride down. True enough, the President had resigned! Sought to resign his presidency of the council, and keep his advisership to the King; given way to the consuls' objections and resigned all--then fell out with them about the disposition of the funds, and was now trying to resign from his resignation! Sad little President, so trim to look at, and I believe so kind to his little wife! Not only so, but I meet Dunnet on the beach. Dunnet calls me in consultation, and we make with infinite difficulty a draft of a petition to the King.... Then to dinner at Moors's, a very merry meal, interrupted before it was over by the arrival of the committee. Slight sketch of procedure agreed upon, self appointed spokesman, and the deputation sets off. Walk all through Matafele, all along Mulinuu, come to the King's house; he has verbally refused to see us in answer to our letter, swearing he is gasegase (chief sickness, not common man's) and indeed we see him inside in bed. It is a miserable low house, better houses by the dozen in the little hamlet (Tanugamanono) of bushmen on our way to Vailima; and the President's house in process of erection just opposite! We are told to return to-morrow; I refuse; and at last we are very sourly received, sit on the mats, and I open out, through a very poor interpreter, and sometimes hampered by unacceptable counsels from my backers. I can speak fairly well in a plain way now. C. asked me to write out my harangue for him this morning; I have done so, and couldn't get it near as good. I suppose (talking and interpreting) I was twenty minutes or half an hour on the deck; then his majesty replied in the dying whisper of a big chief; a few words of rejoinder (approving), and the deputation withdrew, rather well satisfied. A few days ago this intervention would have been a deportable offence; not now, I bet; I would like them to try. A little way back along Mulinuu, Mrs. Gurr met us with her husband's horse; and he and she and Lloyd and I rode back in a heavenly moonlight. Here ends a chapter in the life of an island politician! Catch me at it again; 'tis easy to go in, but it is not a pleasant trade. I have had a good team, as good as I could get on the beach; but what trouble even so, and what fresh troubles shaping. But I have on the whole carried all my points; I believe all but one, and on that (which did not concern me) I had no right to interfere. I am sure you would be amazed if you knew what a good hand I am at keeping my temper, talking people over, and giving reasons which are not my reasons, but calculated for the meridian of the particular objection; so soon does falsehood await the politician in his whirling path. TO HENRY JAMES Stevenson had again been reading Mr. James's _Lesson of the Master_; Adela Chart is the heroine of the second story in that collection, called _The Marriages_. [_Vailima, October 1891._] MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--From this perturbed and hunted being expect but a line, and that line shall be but a whoop for Adela. O she's delicious, delicious; I could live and die with Adela--die, rather the better of the two; you never did a straighter thing, and never will. _David Balfour_, second part of _Kidnapped_, is on the stocks at last; and is not bad, I think. As for _The Wrecker_, it's a machine, you know--don't expect aught else--a machine, and a police machine; but I believe the end is one of the most genuine butcheries in literature; and we point to our machine with a modest pride, as the only police machine without a villain. Our criminals are a most pleasing crew, and leave the dock with scarce a stain upon their character. What a different line of country to be trying to draw Adela, and trying to write the last four chapters of _The Wrecker_! Heavens, it's like two centuries; and ours is such rude, transpontine business, aiming only at a certain fervour of conviction and sense of energy and violence in the men; and yours is so neat and bright and of so exquisite a surface! Seems dreadful to send such a book to such an author; but your name is on the list. And we do modestly ask you to consider the chapters on the _Norah Creina_ with the study of Captain Nares, and the forementioned last four, with their brutality of substance and the curious (and perhaps unsound) technical manoeuvre of running the story together to a point as we go along, the narrative becoming more succinct and the details fining off with every page.--Sworn affidavit of R. L. S. _No person now alive has beaten Adela: I adore Adela and her maker. Sic subscrib._ ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. A Sublime Poem to follow. Adela, Adela, Adela Chart, What have you done to my elderly heart? Of all the ladies of paper and ink I count you the paragon, call you the pink. The word of your brother depicts you in part: "You raving maniac!" Adela Chart; But in all the asylums that cumber the ground, So delightful a maniac was ne'er to be found. I pore on you, dote on you, clasp you to heart, I laud, love, and laugh at you, Adela Chart, And thank my dear maker the while I admire That I can be neither your husband nor sire. Your husband's, your sire's were a difficult part; You're a byway to suicide, Adela Chart; But to read of, depicted by exquisite James, O, sure you're the flower and quintessence of dames. R. L. S. _Eructavit cor meum_ My heart was inditing a goodly matter about Adela Chart. Though oft I've been touched by the volatile dart, To none have I grovelled but Adela Chart, There are passable ladies, no question, in art-- But where is the marrow of Adela Chart? I dreamed that to Tyburn I passed in the cart-- I dreamed I was married to Adela Chart: From the first I awoke with a palpable start, The second dumbfoundered me, Adela Chart! Another verse bursts from me, you see; no end to the violence of the Muse. To E. L. BURLINGAME _[Vailima], October 8th, 1891._ MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--All right, you shall have the _Tales of my Grandfather_ soon, but I guess we'll try and finish off _The Wrecker_ first. _A propos_ of whom, please send some advanced sheets to Cassell's--away ahead of you--so that they may get a dummy out. Do you wish to illustrate _My Grandfather_? He mentions as excellent a portrait of Scott by Basil Hall's brother. I don't think I ever saw this engraved; would it not, if you could get track of it, prove a taking embellishment? I suggest this for your consideration and inquiry. A new portrait of Scott strikes me as good. There is a hard, tough, constipated old portrait of my grandfather hanging in my aunt's house, Mrs. Alan Stevenson, 16 St. Leonard's Terrace, Chelsea, which has never been engraved--the better portrait, Joseph's bust, has been reproduced, I believe, twice--and which, I am sure, my aunt would let you have a copy of. The plate could be of use for the book when we get so far, and thus to place it in the Magazine might be an actual saving. I am swallowed up in politics for the first, I hope for the last, time in my sublunary career. It is a painful, thankless trade; but one thing that came up I could not pass in silence. Much drafting, addressing, deputationising has eaten up all my time, and again (to my contrition) I leave you Wreckerless. As soon as the mail leaves I tackle it straight.--Yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO E. L. BURLINGAME [_Vailima, October 1891._] MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--The time draws nigh, the mail is near due, and I snatch a moment of collapse so that you may have at least some sort of a scratch of note along with the \ end \ of \ _The_ \ _Wrecker_. Hurray! which I mean to go herewith. It has taken me a devil of a pull, but I think it's going to be ready. If I did not know you were on the stretch waiting for it and trembling for your illustrations, I would keep it for another finish; but things being as they are, I will let it go the best way I can get it. I am now within two pages of the end of Chapter XXV., which is the last chapter, the end with its gathering up of loose threads, being the dedication to Low, and addressed to him; this is my last and best expedient for the knotting up of these loose cards. 'Tis possible I may not get that finished in time, in which case you'll receive only Chapters XXII. to XXV. by this mail, which is all that can be required for illustration. I wish you would send me _Memoirs of Baron Marbot_ (French); _Introduction to the Study of the History of Language_, Strong, Logeman & Wheeler; _Principles of Psychology_, William James; Morris & Magnusson's _Saga Library_, any volumes that are out; George Meredith's _One of our Conquerors_; _Là Bas_, by Huysmans (French); O'Connor Morris's _Great Commanders of Modern Times_; _Life's Handicap_, by Kipling; of Taine's _Origines de la France Contemporaine_, I have only as far as _la Révolution_, vol. iii.; if another volume is out, please add that. There is for a book-box. I hope you will like the end; I think it is rather strong meat. I have got into such a deliberate, dilatory, expansive turn, that the effort to compress this last yarn was unwelcome; but the longest yarn has to come to an end some time. Please look it over for carelessnesses, and tell me if it had any effect upon your jaded editorial mind. I'll see if ever I have time to add more. I add to my book-box list Adams' _Historical Essays_; the Plays of A. W. Pinero--all that have appeared, and send me the rest in course as they do appear; _Noughts and Crosses_ by Q.; Robertson's _Scotland under her Early Kings_. _Sunday._--The deed is done, didst thou not hear a noise? "The end" has been written to this endless yarn, and I am once more a free man. What will he do with it? TO SIDNEY COLVIN _[Vailima] Monday, October 24th._ MY DEAR CARTHEW,[25]--See what I have written, but it's Colvin I'm after--I have written two chapters, about thirty pages of _Wrecker_ since the mail left, which must be my excuse, and the bother I've had with it is not to be imagined; you might have seen me the day before yesterday weighing British sov.'s and Chili dollars to arrange my treasure chest. And there was such a calculation, not for that only, but for the ship's position and distances when--but I am not going to tell you the yarn--and then, as my arithmetic is particularly lax, Lloyd had to go over all my calculations; and then, as I had changed the amount of money, he had to go over all _his_ as to the amount of the lay; and altogether, a bank could be run with less effusion of figures than it took to shore up a single chapter of a measly yarn. However, it's done, and I have but one more, or at the outside two, to do, and I am Free! and can do any damn thing I like. Before falling on politics, I shall give you my day. Awoke somewhere about the first peep of day, came gradually to, and had a turn on the verandah before 5.55, when "the child" (an enormous Wallis Islander) brings me an orange; at 6, breakfast; 6.10, to work; which lasts till, at 10.30, Austin comes for his history lecture; this is rather dispiriting, but education must be gone about in faith--and charity, both of which pretty nigh failed me to-day about (of all things) Carthage; 11, luncheon; after luncheon in my mother's room, I read Chapter XXIII. of _The Wrecker_, then Belle, Lloyd, and I go up and make music furiously till about 2 (I suppose), when I turn into work again till 4; fool from 4 to half-past, tired out and waiting for the bath hour; 4.30, bath; 4.40, eat two heavenly mangoes on the verandah, and see the boys arrive with the pack-horses; 5, dinner; smoke, chat on verandah, then hand of cards, and at last at 8 come up to my room with a pint of beer and a hard biscuit, which I am now consuming, and as soon as they are consumed I shall turn in. Such are the innocent days of this ancient and outworn sportsman; to-day there was no weeding, usually there is however, edged in somewhere. My books for the moment are a crib to Phædo, and the second book of Montaigne; and a little while back I was reading Frederic Harrison, _Choice of Books_, etc.--very good indeed, a great deal of sense and knowledge in the volume, and some very true stuff, _contra_ Carlyle, about the eighteenth century. A hideous idea came over me that perhaps Harrison is now getting _old_. Perhaps you are. Perhaps I am. Oh, this infidelity must be stared firmly down. I am about twenty-three--say twenty-eight; you about thirty, or, by'r lady, thirty-four; and as Harrison belongs to the same generation, there is no good bothering about him. Here has just been a fine alert; I gave my wife a dose of chlorodyne. "Something wrong," says she. "Nonsense," said I. "Embrocation," said she. I smelt it, and--it smelt very funny. "I think it's just gone bad, and to-morrow will tell." Proved to be so. _Wednesday._--History of Tuesday.--Woke at usual time, very little work, for I was tired, and had a job for the evening--to write parts for a new instrument, a violin. Lunch, chat, and up to my place to practise; but there was no practising for me--my flageolet was gone wrong, and I had to take it all to pieces, clean it, and put it up again. As this is a most intricate job--the thing dissolves into seventeen separate members, most of these have to be fitted on their individual springs as fine as needles, and sometimes two at once with the springs shoving different ways--it took me till two. Then Lloyd and I rode forth on our errands; first to Motootua, where we had a really instructive conversation on weeds and grasses. Thence down to Apia, where we bought a fresh bottle of chlorodyne and conversed on politics. My visit to the King, which I thought at the time a particularly nugatory and even schoolboy step, and only consented to because I had held the reins so tight over my little band before, has raised a deuce of a row--new proclamation, no one is to interview the sacred puppet without consuls' permission, two days' notice, and an approved interpreter--read (I suppose) spy. Then back; I should have said I was trying the new horse; a tallish piebald, bought from the circus; he proved steady and safe, but in very bad condition, and not so much the wild Arab steed of the desert as had been supposed. The height of his back, after commodious Jack, astonished me, and I had a great consciousness of exercise and florid action, as I posted to his long, emphatic trot. We had to ride back easy; even so he was hot and blown; and when we set a boy to lead him to and fro, our last character for sanity perished. We returned just neat for dinner; and in the evening our violinist arrived, a young lady, no great virtuoso truly, but plucky, industrious, and a good reader; and we played five pieces with huge amusement, and broke up at nine. This morning I have read a splendid piece of Montaigne, written this page of letter, and now turn to _The Wrecker_. _Wednesday._--November 16th or 17th--and I am ashamed to say mail day. _The Wrecker_ is finished, that is the best of my news; it goes by this mail to Scribner's; and I honestly think it a good yarn on the whole and of its measly kind. The part that is genuinely good is Nares, the American sailor; that is a genuine figure; had there been more Nares it would have been a better book; but of course it didn't set up to be a book, only a long tough yarn with some pictures of the manners of to-day in the greater world--not the shoddy sham world of cities, clubs, and colleges, but the world where men still live a man's life. The worst of my news is the influenza; Apia is devastate; the shops closed, a ball put off, etc. As yet we have not had it at Vailima, and, who knows? we may escape. None of us go down, but of course the boys come and go. Your letter had the most wonderful "I told you so" I ever heard in the course of my life. Why, you madman, I wouldn't change my present installation for any post, dignity, honour, or advantage conceivable to me. It fills the bill; I have the loveliest time. And as for wars and rumours of wars, you surely know enough of me to be aware that I like that also a thousand times better than decrepit peace in Middlesex? I do not quite like politics; I am too aristocratic, I fear, for that. God knows I don't care who I chum with; perhaps like sailors best; but to go round and sue and sneak to keep a crowd together--never. My imagination, which is not the least damped by the idea of having my head cut off in the bush, recoils aghast from the idea of a life like Gladstone's, and the shadow of the newspaper chills me to the bone. Hence my late eruption was interesting, but not what I like. All else suits me in this (killed a mosquito) A1 abode. About politics. A determination was come to by the President that he had been an idiot; emissaries came to Gurr and me to kiss and be friends. My man proposed I should have a personal interview; I said it was quite useless, I had nothing to say; I had offered him the chance to inform me, had pressed it on him, and had been very unpleasantly received, and now "Time was." Then it was decided that I was to be made a culprit against Germany; the German Captain--a delightful fellow and our constant visitor--wrote to say that as "a German officer" he could not come even to say farewell. We all wrote back in the most friendly spirit, telling him (politely) that some of these days he would be sorry, and we should be delighted to see our friend again. Since then I have seen no German shadow. Mataafa has been proclaimed a rebel; the President did this act, and then resigned. By singular good fortune, Mataafa has not yet moved; no thanks to our idiot governors. They have shot their bolt; they have made a rebel of the only man (_to their own knowledge, on the report of their own spy_) who held the rebel party in check; and having thus called on war to fall, they can do no more, sit equally "expertes" of _vis_ and counsel, regarding their handiwork. It is always a cry with these folks that he (Mataafa) had no ammunition. I always said it would be found; and we know of five boat-loads that have found their way to Malie already. Where there are traders, there will be ammunition; aphorism by R. L. S. Now what am I to do next? Lives of the Stevensons? _Historia Samoae_? A History for Children? Fiction? I have had two hard months at fiction; I want a change. Stevensons? I am expecting some more material; perhaps better wait. Samoa? rather tempting; might be useful to the islands--and to me; for it will be written in admirable temper; I have never agreed with any party, and see merits and excuses in all; should do it (if I did) very slackly and easily, as if half in conversation. History for Children? This flows from my lessons to Austin; no book is any good. The best I have seen is Freeman's _Old English History_; but his style is so rasping, and a child can learn more, if he's clever. I found my sketch of general Aryan history, given in conversation, to have been practically correct--at least what I mean is, Freeman had very much the same stuff in his early chapters, only not so much, and I thought not so well placed; and the child remembered some of it. Now the difficulty is to give this general idea of main place, growth, and movement; it is needful to tack it on a yarn. Now Scotch is the only history I know; it is the only history reasonably represented in my library; it is a very good one for my purpose, owing to two civilisations having been face to face throughout--or rather Roman civilisation face to face with our ancient barbaric life and government, down to yesterday, to 1750 anyway. But the _Tales of a Grandfather_ stand in my way; I am teaching them to Austin now, and they have all Scott's defects and all Scott's hopeless merit. I cannot compete with that; and yet, so far as regards teaching History, how he has missed his chances! I think I'll try; I really have some historic sense, I feel that in my bones. Then there's another thing. Scott never knew the Highlands; he was always a Borderer. He has missed that whole, long, strange, pathetic story of our savages, and, besides, his style is not very perspicuous to childhood. Gad, I think I'll have a flutter. Buridan's Ass! Whither to go, what to attack. Must go to other letters; shall add to this, if I have time. TO W. CRAIBE ANGUS _Vailima, Samoa, November 1891._ MY DEAR MR. ANGUS,--Herewith the invaluable sheets. They came months after your letter, and I trembled; but here they are, and I have scrawled my vile name on them, and "thocht shame" as I did it. I am expecting the sheets of your catalogue, so that I may attack the preface. Please give me all the time you can. The sooner the better; you might even send me early proofs as they are sent out, to give me more incubation. I used to write as slow as judgment; now I write rather fast; but I am still "a slow study," and sit a long while silent on my eggs. Unconscious thought, there is the only method: macerate your subject, let it boil slow, then take the lid off and look in--and there your stuff is, good or bad. But the journalist's method is the way to manufacture lies; it is will-worship--if you know the luminous quaker phrase; and the will is only to be brought in the field for study and again for revision. The essential part of work is not an act, it is a state. I do not know why I write you this trash. Many thanks for your handsome dedication. I have not yet had time to do more than glance at Mrs. Begg; it looks interesting.--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MISS ANNIE H. IDE _Vailima, Samoa [November 1891]._ MY DEAR LOUISA,--Your picture of the church, the photograph of yourself and your sister, and your very witty and pleasing letter, came all in a bundle, and made me feel I had my money's worth for that birthday. I am now, I must be, one of your nearest relatives; exactly what we are to each other, I do not know, I doubt if the case has ever happened before--your papa ought to know, and I don't believe he does; but I think I ought to call you in the meanwhile, and until we get the advice of counsel learned in the law, my name-daughter. Well, I was extremely pleased to see by the church that my name-daughter could draw; by the letter, that she was no fool; and by the photograph, that she was a pretty girl, which hurts nothing. See how virtues are rewarded! My first idea of adopting you was entirely charitable; and here I find that I am quite proud of it, and of you, and that I chose just the kind of name-daughter I wanted. For I can draw too, or rather I mean to say I could before I forgot how; and I am very far from being a fool myself, however much I may look it; and I am as beautiful as the day, or at least I once hoped that perhaps I might be going to be. And so I might. So that you see we are well met, and peers on these important points. I am very glad also that you are older than your sister. So should I have been, if I had had one. So that the number of points and virtues which you have inherited from your name-father is already quite surprising. I wish you would tell your father--not that I like to encourage my rival--that we have had a wonderful time here of late, and that they are having a cold day on Mulinuu, and the consuls are writing reports, and I am writing to the Times, and if we don't get rid of our friends this time I shall begin to despair of everything but my name-daughter. You are quite wrong as to the effect of the birthday on your age. From the moment the deed was registered (as it was in the public press with every solemnity), the 13th of November became your own _and only_ birthday, and you ceased to have been born on Christmas Day. Ask your father: I am sure he will tell you this is sound law. You are thus become a month and twelve days younger than you were, but will go on growing older for the future in the regular and human manner from one 13th November to the next. The effect on me is more doubtful; I may, as you suggest, live for ever; I might, on the other hand, come to pieces like the one-horse shay at a moment's notice; doubtless the step was risky, but I do not the least regret that which enables me to sign myself your revered and delighted name-father, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES BAXTER [_Vailima, November 1891._] DEAR CHARLES,--[After dealing with some matters of business] I believe that's a'. By this time, I suppose you will have heard from McClure, and the _Beach of Falesá_ will be decided on for better for worse. The end of _The Wrecker_ goes by this mail, an awfae relief. I am now free and can do what I please. What do I please? I kenna. I'll bide a wee. There's a child's history in the wind; and there's my grandfather's life begun; and there's a hist^{ry} of Samoa in the last four or five years begun--there's a kind of sense to this book; it may help the Samoans, it may help me, for I am bound on the altar here for anti-Germanism. Then there's _The Pearl Fisher_ about a quarter done; and there's various short stories in various degrees of incompleteness. De'il, there's plenty grist; but the mill's unco slaw! To-morrow or next day, when the mail's through, I'll attack one or other, or maybe something else. All these schemes begin to laugh at me, for the day's far through, and I believe the pen grows heavy. However, I believe _The Wrecker_ is a good yarn of its poor sort, and it is certainly well nourished with facts; no realist can touch me there; for by this time I do begin to know something of life in the XIXth century, which no novelist either in France or England seems to know much of. You must have great larks over masonry. You're away up in the ranks now and (according to works that I have read) doubtless design assassinations. But I am an outsider; and I have a certain liking for a light unto my path which would deter me from joining the rank and file of so vast and dim a confraternity. At your altitude it becomes (of course) amusing and perhaps useful. Yes, I remember the L.J.R.,[26] and the constitution, and my homily on Liberty, and yours on Reverence, which was never written--so I never knew what reverence was. I remember I wanted to write Justice also; but I forget who had the billet. My dear papa was in a devil of a taking; and I had to go and lunch at Ferrier's in a strangely begrutten state, which was _infra dig_. for a homilist on liberty. It was about four, I suppose, that we met in the Lothian Road,--had we the price of two bitters between us? questionable! Your bookseller (I have lost his letter, I mean the maid has, arranging my room, and so have to send by you) wrote me a letter about Old Bailey Papers. Gosh, I near swarfed; dam'd, man, I near had dee'd o't. It's only yin or twa volumes I want; say 500 or 1000 pages of the stuff; and the worthy man (much doubting) proposed to bury me in volumes. Please allay his rage, and apologise that I have not written him direct. His note was civil and purposelike. And please send me a copy of Henley's _Book of Verses_; mine has disappeared. R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Nov. 25th, 1891._ MY DEAR COLVIN, MY DEAR COLVIN,--I wonder how often I'm going to write it. In spite of the loss of three days, as I have to tell, and a lot of weeding and cacao planting, I have finished since the mail left four chapters, forty-eight pages of my Samoa history. It is true that the first three had been a good deal drafted two years ago, but they had all to be written and re-written, and the fourth chapter is all new. Chapter I. Elements of Discord--Native. II. Elements of Discord--Foreign. III. The Success of Laupepa. IV. Brandeis. V. Will probably be called "The Rise of Mataafa." VI. _Furor Consularis_--a devil of a long chapter. VII. Stuebel the Pacificator. VIII. Government under the Treaty of Berlin. IX. Practical Suggestions. Say three-sixths of it are done, maybe more; by this mail five chapters should go, and that should be a good half of it; say sixty pages. And if you consider that I sent by last mail the end of _The Wrecker_, coming on for seventy or eighty pages, and the mail before that the entire tale of the _Beach of Falesá, _ I do not think I can be accused of idleness. This is my season; I often work six and seven, and sometimes eight hours; and the same day I am perhaps weeding or planting for an hour or two more--and I dare say you know what hard work weeding is--and it all agrees with me at this time of the year--like--like idleness, if a man of my years could be idle. My first visit to Apia was a shock to me; every second person the ghost of himself, and the place reeking with infection. But I have not got the thing yet, and hope to escape. This shows how much stronger I am; think of me flitting through a town of influenza patients seemingly unscathed. We are all on the cacao planting. The next day my wife and I rode over to the German plantation, Vailele, whose manager is almost the only German left to speak to us. Seventy labourers down with influenza! It is a lovely ride, half-way down our mountain towards Apia, then turn to the right, ford the river, and three miles of solitary grass and cocoa palms, to where the sea beats and the wild wind blows unceasingly about the plantation house. On the way down Fanny said, "Now what would you do if you saw Colvin coming up?" Next day we rode down to Apia to make calls. Yesterday the mail came, and the fat was in the fire. _Nov. 29th_ (?).--Book.[27] All right. I must say I like your order. And the papers are some of them up to dick, and no mistake. I agree with you the lights seem a little turned down. The truth is, I was far through (if you understand Scots), and came none too soon to the South Seas, where I was to recover peace of body and mind. No man but myself knew all my bitterness in those days. Remember that, the next time you think I regret my exile. And however low the lights are, the stuff is true, and I believe the more effective; after all, what I wish to fight is the best fought by a rather cheerless presentation of the truth. The world must return some day to the word duty, and be done with the word reward. There are no rewards, and plenty duties. And the sooner a man sees that and acts upon it like a gentleman or a fine old barbarian, the better for himself. There is my usual puzzle about publishers. Chatto ought to have it, as he has all the other essays; these all belong to me, and Chatto publishes on terms. Longman has forgotten the terms we are on; let him look up our first correspondence, and he will see I reserved explicitly, as was my habit, the right to republish as I choose. Had the same arrangement with Henley, Magazine of Art, and with Tulloch, Fraser's.--For any necessary note or preface, it would be a real service if you would undertake the duty yourself. I should love a preface by you, as short or as long as you choose, three sentences, thirty pages, the thing I should like is your name. And the excuse of my great distance seems sufficient. I shall return with this the sheets corrected as far as I have them; the rest I will leave, if you will, to you entirely; let it be your book, and disclaim what you dislike in the preface. You can say it was at my eager prayer. I should say I am the less willing to pass Chatto over, because he behaved the other day in a very handsome manner. He asked leave to reprint _Damien_; I gave it to him as a present, explaining I could receive no emolument for a personal attack. And he took out my share of profits, and sent them in my name to the Leper Fund. I could not bear after that to take from him any of that class of books which I have always given him. Tell him the same terms will do. Clark to print, uniform with the others. I have lost all the days since this letter began rehandling Chapter IV. of the Samoa racket. I do not go in for literature; address myself to sensible people rather than to sensitive. And, indeed, it is a kind of journalism, I have no right to dally; if it is to help, it must come soon. In two months from now it shall be done, and should be published in the course of March. I propose Cassell gets it. I am going to call it _A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa_, I believe. I recoil from serious names; they seem so much too pretentious for a pamphlet. It will be about the size of _Treasure Island_, I believe. Of course, as you now know, my case of conscience cleared itself off, and I began my intervention directly to one of the parties. The other, the Chief Justice, I am to inform of my book the first occasion. God knows if the book will do any good--or harm; but I judge it right to try. There is one man's life certainly involved; and it may be all our lives. I must not stand and slouch, but do my best as best I can. But you may conceive the difficulty of a history extending to the present week, at least, and where almost all the actors upon all sides are of my personal acquaintance. The only way is to judge slowly, and write boldly, and leave the issue to fate.... I am far indeed from wishing to confine myself to creative work; that is a loss, the other repairs; the one chance for a man, and, above all, for one who grows elderly, ahem, is to vary drainage and repair. That is the one thing I understand--the cultivation of the shallow solum of my brain. But I would rather, from soon on, be released from the obligation to write. In five or six years this plantation--suppose it and us still to exist--should pretty well support us and pay wages; not before, and already the six years seem long to me. If literature were but a pastime! I have interrupted myself to write the necessary notification to the Chief Justice. I see in looking up Longman's letter that it was as usual the letter of an obliging gentleman; so do not trouble him with my reminder. I wish all my publishers were not so nice. And I have a fourth and a fifth baying at my heels; but for these, of course, they must go wanting. _Dec. 2nd._--No answer from the Chief Justice, which is like him, but surely very wrong in such a case. The lunch bell! I have been off work, playing patience and weeding all morning. Yesterday and the day before I drafted eleven and revised nine pages of Chapter V., and the truth is, I was extinct by lunch-time, and played patience sourly the rest of the day. To-morrow or next day I hope to go in again and win. Lunch 2nd Bell. _Dec. 2nd, afternoon._--I have kept up the idleness; blew on the pipe to Belle's piano; then had a ride in the forest all by my nainsel; back and piped again, and now dinner nearing. Take up this sheet with nothing to say. The weird figure of Faauma is in the room washing my windows, in a black lavalava (kilt) with a red handkerchief hanging from round her neck between her breasts; not another stitch; her hair close cropped and oiled; when she first came here she was an angelic little stripling, but she is now in full flower--or half-flower--and grows buxom. As I write, I hear her wet cloth moving and grunting with some industry; for I had a word this day with her husband on the matter of work and meal-time, when she is always late. And she has a vague reverence for Papa, as she and her enormous husband address me when anything is wrong. Her husband is Lafaele, sometimes called the archangel, of whom I have writ you often. Rest of our household, Talolo, cook; Pulu, kitchen boy, good, steady, industrious lads; Henry, back again from Savaii, where his love affair seems not to have prospered, with what looks like a spear-wound in the back of his head, of which Mr. Reticence says nothing; Simi, Manuele, and two other labourers outdoors. Lafaele is provost of the live-stock, whereof now, three milk-cows, one bull-calf, one heifer, Jack, Macfarlane, the mare, Harold, Tifaga Jack, Donald and Edinburgh--seven horses--O, and the stallion--eight horses; five cattle; total, if my arithmetic be correct, thirteen head of beasts; I don't know how the pigs stand, or the ducks, or the chickens; but we get a good many eggs, and now and again a duckling or a chickling for the table; the pigs are more solemn, and appear only on birthdays and sich. _Monday, Dec. 7._--On Friday morning about eleven 1500 cacao seeds arrived, and we set to and toiled from twelve that day to six, and went to bed pretty tired. Next day I got about an hour and a half at my History, and was at it again by 8.10, and except an hour for lunch kept at it till four P.M. Yesterday, I did some History in the morning, and slept most of the afternoon; and to-day, being still averse from physical labour, and the mail drawing nigh, drew out of the squad, and finished for press the fifth chapter of my History; fifty-nine pages in one month; which (you will allow me to say) is a devil of a large order; it means at least 177 pages of writing; 89,000 words! and hours going to and fro among my notes. However, this is the way it has to be done; the job must be done fast, or it is of no use. And it is a curious yarn. Honestly, I think people should be amused and convinced, if they could be at the pains to look at such a damned outlandish piece of machinery, which of course they won't. And much I care. When I was filling baskets all Saturday, in my dull mulish way, perhaps the slowest worker there, surely the most particular, and the only one that never looked up or knocked off, I could not but think I should have been sent on exhibition as an example to young literary men. Here is how to learn to write, might be the motto. You should have seen us; the verandah was like an Irish bog; our hands and faces were bedaubed with soil; and Faauma was supposed to have struck the right note when she remarked (_à propos_ of nothing), "Too much _eleele_ (soil) for me!" The cacao (you must understand) has to be planted at first in baskets of plaited cocoa-leaf. From four to ten natives were plaiting these in the wood-shed. Four boys were digging up soil and bringing it by the boxful to the verandah. Lloyd and I and Belle, and sometimes S. (who came to bear a hand), were filling the baskets, removing stones and lumps of clay; Austin and Faauma carried them when full to Fanny, who planted a seed in each, and then set them, packed close, in the corners of the verandah. From twelve on Friday till five P.M. on Saturday we planted the first 1500, and more than 700 of a second lot. You cannot dream how filthy we were, and we were all properly tired. They are all at it again to-day, bar Belle and me, not required, and glad to be out of it. The Chief Justice has not yet replied, and I have news that he received my letter. What a man! I have gone crazy over Bourget's _Sensations d'Italie_; hence the enclosed dedication,[28] a mere cry of gratitude for the best fun I've had over a new book this ever so! TO FRED ORR The following is in answer to an application for an autograph from a young gentleman in the United States:-- _Vailima, Upolu, Samoa, November 28th, 1891._ DEAR SIR,--Your obliging communication is to hand. I am glad to find that you have read some of my books, and to see that you spell my name right. This is a point (for some reason) of great difficulty; and I believe that a gentleman who can spell Stevenson with a v at sixteen, should have a show for the Presidency before fifty. By that time I, nearer to the wayside inn, predict that you will have outgrown your taste for autographs, but perhaps your son may have inherited the collection, and on the morning of the great day will recall my prophecy to your mind. And in the papers of 1921 (say) this letter may arouse a smile. Whatever you do, read something else besides novels and newspapers; the first are good enough when they are good; the second, at their best, are worth nothing. Read great books of literature and history; try to understand the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages; be sure you do not understand when you dislike them; condemnation is non-comprehension. And if you know something of these two periods, you will know a little more about to-day, and may be a good President. I send you my best wishes, and am yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, _Author of a vast quantity of little books_. TO E. L. BURLINGAME The next letter announces to his New York publishers the beginning of his volume on the troubles of Samoa, _A Footnote to History_. [_Vailima, December 1891._] MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--The end of _The Wrecker_ having but just come in, you will, I dare say, be appalled to receive three (possibly four) chapters of a new book of the least attractive sort: a history of nowhere in a corner, or no time to mention, running to a volume! Well, it may very likely be an illusion; it is very likely no one could possibly wish to read it, but I wish to publish it. If you don't cotton to the idea, kindly set it up at my expense, and let me know your terms for publishing. The great affair to me is to have per return (if it might be) four or five--better say half a dozen--sets of the roughest proofs that can be drawn. There are a good many men here whom I want to read the blessed thing, and not one would have the energy to read MS. At the same time, if you care to glance at it, and have the time, I should be very glad of your opinion as to whether I have made any step at all towards possibly inducing folk at home to read matter so extraneous and outlandish. I become heavy and owlish; years sit upon me; it begins to seem to me to be a man's business to leave off his damnable faces and say his say. Else I could have made it pungent and light and lively. In considering, kindly forget that I am R. L. S.; think of the four chapters as a book you are reading, by an inhabitant of our "lovely but fatil" islands; and see if it could possibly amuse the hebetated public. I have to publish anyway, you understand; I have a purpose beyond; I am concerned for some of the parties to this quarrel. What I want to hear is from curiosity; what I want you to judge of is what we are to do with the book in a business sense. To me it is not business at all; I had meant originally to lay all the profits to the credit of Samoa; when it comes to the pinch of writing, I judge this unfair--I give too much--and I mean to keep (if there be any profit at all) one-half for the artisan; the rest I shall hold over to give to the Samoans _for that which I choose and against work done_. I think I have never heard of greater insolence than to attempt such a subject; yet the tale is so strange and mixed, and the people so oddly charactered--above all, the whites--and the high note of the hurricane and the warships is so well prepared to take popular interest, and the latter part is so directly in the day's movement, that I am not without hope that some may read it; and if they don't, a murrain on them! Here is, for the first time, a tale of Greeks--Homeric Greeks--mingled with moderns, and all true; Odysseus along-side of Rajah Brooke, _proportion gardée_; and all true. Here is for the first time since the Greeks (that I remember) the history of a handful of men, where all know each other in the eyes, and live close in a few acres, narrated at length, and with the seriousness of history. Talk of the modern novel; here is a modern history. And if I had the misfortune to found a school, the legitimate historian might lie down and die, for he could never overtake his material. Here is a little tale that has not "caret"-ed its "vates"; "sacer" is another point. R. L. S. TO HENRY JAMES Mr. Henry James was in the habit of sending out for Stevenson's reading books that seemed likely to interest him, and among the last had been M. Paul Bourget's _Sensations d'Italie_. _December 7th, 1891._ MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--Thanks for yours; your former letter was lost; so it appears was my long and masterly treatise on the _Tragic Muse_. I remember sending it very well, and there went by the same mail a long and masterly tractate to Gosse about his daddy's life, for which I have been long expecting an acknowledgment, and which is plainly gone to the bottom with the other. If you see Gosse, please mention it. These gems of criticism are now lost literature, like the tomes of Alexandria. I could not do 'em again. And I must ask you to be content with a dull head, a weary hand, and short commons, for to-day, as I am physically tired with hard work of every kind, the labours of the planter and the author both piled upon me mountain deep. I am delighted beyond expression by Bourget's book: he has phrases which affect me almost like Montaigne; I had read ere this a masterly essay of his on Pascal; this book does it; I write for all his essays by this mail, and shall try to meet him when I come to Europe. The proposal is to pass a summer in France, I think in Royat, where the faithful could come and visit me; they are now not many. I expect Henry James to come and break a crust or two with us. I believe it will be only my wife and myself; and she will go over to England, but not I, or possibly incog. to Southampton, and then to Boscombe to see poor Lady Shelley. I am writing--trying to write in a Babel fit for the bottomless pit; my wife, her daughter, her grandson and my mother, all shrieking at each other round the house--not in war, thank God! but the din is ultra martial, and the note of Lloyd joins in occasionally, and the cause of this to-do is simply cacao, whereof chocolate comes. You may drink of our chocolate perhaps in five or six years from now, and not know it. It makes a fine bustle, and gives us some hard work, out of which I have slunk for to-day. I have a story coming out: God knows when or how; it answers to the name of the _Beach of Falesá_, and I think well of it. I was delighted with the _Tragic Muse_; I thought the Muse herself one of your best works; I was delighted also to hear of the success of your piece, as you know I am a dam failure,[29] and might have dined with the dinner club that Daudet and these parties frequented. _Next day._--I have just been breakfasting at Baiae and Brindisi, and the charm of Bourget hag-rides me. I wonder if this exquisite fellow, all made of fiddle-strings and scent and intelligence, could bear any of my bald prose. If you think he could, ask Colvin to send him a copy of these last essays of mine when they appear; and tell Bourget they go to him from a South Sea Island as literal homage. I have read no new book for years that gave me the same literary thrill as his _Sensations d'Italie_. If (as I imagine) my cut-and-dry literature would be death to him, and worse than death--journalism--be silent on the point. For I have a great curiosity to know him, and if he doesn't know my work, I shall have the better chance of making his acquaintance. I read _The Pupil_ the other day with great joy; your little boy is admirable; why is there no little boy like that unless he hails from the Great Republic? Here I broke off, and wrote Bourget a dedication; no use resisting; it's a love affair. O, he's exquisite, I bless you for the gift of him. I have really enjoyed this book as I--almost as I--used to enjoy books when I was going twenty-twenty-three; and these are the years for reading! R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _[Vailima] Tuesday, Dec. 1891._ SIR,--I have the honour to report further explorations of the course of the river Vaea, with accompanying sketch plan. The party under my command consisted of one horse, and was extremely insubordinate and mutinous, owing to not being used to go into the bush, and being half-broken anyway--and that the wrong half. The route indicated for my party was up the bed of the so-called river Vaea, which I accordingly followed to a distance of perhaps two or three furlongs eastward from the house of Vailima, where the stream being quite dry, the bush thick, and the ground very difficult, I decided to leave the main body of the force under my command tied to a tree, and push on myself with the point of the advance guard, consisting of one man. The valley had become very narrow and airless; foliage close shut above; dry bed of the stream much excavated, so that I passed under fallen trees without stooping. Suddenly it turned sharply to the north, at right angles to its former direction; I heard living water, and came in view of a tall face of rock and the stream spraying down it; it might have been climbed, but it would have been dangerous, and I had to make my way up the steep earth banks, where there is nowhere any looting for man, only for trees, which made the rounds of my ladder. I was near the top of this climb, which was very hot and steep, and the pulses were buzzing all over my body, when I made sure there was one external sound in my ears, and paused to listen. No mistake; a sound of a mill-wheel thundering, I thought, close by, yet below me, a huge mill-wheel, yet not going steadily, but with a _schottische_ movement, and at each fresh impetus shaking the mountain. There, where I was, I just put down the sound to the mystery of the bush; where no sound now surprises me--and any sound alarms; I only thought it would give Jack a fine fright, down where he stood tied to a tree by himself, and he was badly enough scared when I left him. The good folks at home identified it; it was a sharp earthquake. [Illustration: 1. _Mepi tree._ 4, 4. _Banana patches_ 2. _Carruthers' Road._ 5. _Waterfall._ 3. _Vailima Plantation House._ 6. _Banyan tree._] At the top of the climb I made my way again to the watercourse; it is here running steady and pretty full; strange these intermittencies--and just a little below the main stream is quite dry, and all the original brook has gone down some lava gallery of the mountain--and just a little further below, it begins picking up from the left hand in little boggy tributaries, and in the inside of a hundred yards has grown a brook again.[30] The general course of the brook was, I guess, S.E.; the valley still very deep and whelmed in wood. It seemed a swindle to have made so sheer a climb and still find yourself at the bottom of a well. But gradually the thing seemed to shallow, the trees to seem poorer and smaller; I could see more and more of the silver sprinkles of sky among the foliage, instead of the sombre piling up of tree behind tree. And here I had two scares--first, away up on my right hand I heard a bull low; I think it was a bull from the quality of the low, which was singularly songful and beautiful; the bulls belong to me, but how did I know that the bull was aware of that? and my advance guard not being at all properly armed, we advanced with great precaution until I was satisfied that I was passing eastward of the enemy. It was during this period that a pool of the river suddenly boiled up in my face in a little fountain. It was in a very dreary, marshy part among dilapidated trees that you see through holes in the trunks of; and if any kind of beast or elf or devil had come out of that sudden silver ebullition, I declare I do not think I should have been surprised. It was perhaps a thing as curious--a fish, with which these head waters of the stream are alive. They are some of them as long as my finger, should be easily caught in these shallows, and some day I'll have a dish of them. Very soon after I came to where the stream collects in another banana swamp, with the bananas bearing well. Beyond, the course is again quite dry; it mounts with a sharp turn a very steep face of the mountain, and then stops abruptly at the lip of a plateau, I suppose the top of Vaea mountain: plainly no more springs here--there was no smallest furrow of a watercourse beyond--and my task might be said to be accomplished. But such is the animated spirit in the service that the whole advance guard expressed a sentiment of disappointment that an exploration, so far successfully conducted, should come to a stop in the most promising view of fresh successes. And though unprovided either with compass or cutlass, it was determined to push some way along the plateau, marking our direction by the laborious process of bending down, sitting upon, and thus breaking the wild cocoanut trees. This was the less regretted by all from a delightful discovery made of a huge banyan growing here in the bush, with flying-buttressed flying buttresses, and huge arcs of trunk hanging high overhead and trailing down new complications of root. I climbed some way up what seemed the original beginning; it was easier to climb than a ship's rigging, even rattled; everywhere there was foot-hold and hand-hold. It was judged wise to return and rally the main body, who had now been left alone for perhaps forty minutes in the bush. The return was effected in good order, but unhappily I only arrived (like so many other explorers) to find my main body or rear-guard in a condition of mutiny; the work, it is to be supposed, of terror. It is right I should tell you the Vaea has a bad name, an _aitu fafine_--female devil of the woods--succubus--haunting it, and doubtless Jack had heard of her; perhaps, during my absence, saw her; lucky Jack! Anyway, he was neither to hold nor to bind, and finally, after nearly smashing me by accident, and from mere scare and insubordination several times, deliberately set in to kill me; but poor Jack! the tree he selected for that purpose was a banana! I jumped off and gave him the heavy end of my whip over the buttocks! Then I took and talked in his ear in various voices; you should have heard my alto--it was a dreadful, devilish note--I _knew_ Jack _knew_ it was an _aitu_. Then I mounted him again, and he carried me fairly steadily. He'll learn yet. He has to learn to trust absolutely to his rider; till he does, the risk is always great in thick bush, where a fellow must try different passages, and put back and forward, and pick his way by hair's-breadths. The expedition returned to Vailima in time to receive the visit of the R. C. Bishop. He is a superior man, much above the average of priests. _Thursday._--Yesterday the same expedition set forth to the southward by what is known as Carruthers' Road. At a fallen tree which completely blocks the way, the main body was as before left behind, and the advance guard of one now proceeded with the exploration. At the great tree known as _Mepi Tree_, after Maben the surveyor, the expedition struck forty yards due west till it struck the top of a steep bank which it descended. The whole bottom of the ravine is filled with sharp lava blocks quite unrolled and very difficult and dangerous to walk among; no water in the course, scarce any sign of water. And yet surely water must have made this bold cutting in the plateau. And if so, why is the lava sharp? My science gave out; but I could not but think it ominous and volcanic. The course of the stream was tortuous, but with a resultant direction a little by west of north; the sides the whole way exceeding steep, the expedition buried under fathoms of foliage. Presently water appeared in the bottom, a good quantity; perhaps thirty or forty cubic feet, with pools and waterfalls. A tree that stands all along the banks here must be very fond of water; its roots lie close-packed down the stream, like hanks of guts, so as to make often a corrugated walk, each root ending in a blunt tuft of filaments, plainly to drink water. Twice there came in small tributaries from the left or western side--the whole plateau having a smartish inclination to the east; one of the tributaries in a handsome little web of silver hanging in the forest. Twice I was startled by birds; one that barked like a dog; another that whistled loud ploughman's signals, so that I vow I was thrilled, and thought I had fallen among runaway blacks, and regretted my cutlass which I had lost and left behind while taking bearings. A good many fishes in the brook, and many crayfish; one of the last with a queer glow-worm head. Like all our brooks, the water is pure as air, and runs over red stones like rubies. The foliage along both banks very thick and high, the place close, the walking exceedingly laborious. By the time the expedition reached the fork, it was felt exceedingly questionable whether the _moral_ of the force were sufficiently good to undertake more extended operations. A halt was called, the men refreshed with water and a bath, and it was decided at a drumhead council of war to continue the descent of the Embassy Water straight for Vailima, whither the expedition returned, in rather poor condition, and wet to the waist, about 4 P.M. Thus in two days the two main watercourses of this country have been pretty thoroughly explored, and I conceive my instructions fully carried out. The main body of the second expedition was brought back by another officer despatched for that purpose from Vailima. Casualties: one horse wounded; one man bruised; no deaths--as yet, but the bruised man feels to-day as if his case was mighty serious. _Dec. 25, '91._--Your note with a very despicable bulletin of health arrived only yesterday, the mail being a day behind. It contained also the excellent Times article, which was a sight for sore eyes. I am still _taboo_; the blessed Germans will have none of me; and I only hope they may enjoy the Times article. 'Tis my revenge! I wish you had sent the letter too, as I have no copy, and do not even know what I wrote the last day, with a bad headache, and the mail going out. However, it must have been about right, for the Times article was in the spirit I wished to arouse. I hope we can get rid of the man before it is too late. He has set the natives to war; but the natives, by God's blessing, do not want to fight, and I think it will fizzle out--no thanks to the man who tried to start it. But I did not mean to drift into these politics; rather to tell you what I have done since I last wrote. Well, I worked away at my _History_ for a while, and only got one chapter done; no doubt this spate of work is pretty low now, and will be soon dry; but, God bless you, what a lot I have accomplished; _Wrecker_ done, _Beach of Falesá_ done, half the _History: c'est étonnant_. (I hear from Burlingame, by the way, that he likes the end of the _Wrecker_; 'tis certainly a violent, dark yarn with interesting, plain turns of human nature), then Lloyd and I went down to live in Haggard's rooms, where Fanny presently joined us. Haggard's rooms are in a strange old building--old for Samoa, and has the effect of the antique like some strange monastery; I would tell you more of it, but I think I'm going to use it in a tale. The annexe close by had its door sealed; poor Dowdney lost at sea in a schooner. The place is haunted. The vast empty sheds, the empty store, the airless, hot, long, low rooms, the claps of wind that set everything flying--a strange uncanny house to spend Christmas in. _Jan. 1st,'92._--For a day or two I have sat close and wrought hard at the _History_, and two more chapters are all but done. About thirty pages should go by this mail, which is not what should be, but all I could overtake. Will any one ever read it? I fancy not; people don't read history for reading, but for education and display--and who desires education in the history of Samoa, with no population, no past, no future, or the exploits of Mataafa, Malietoa, and Consul Knappe? Colkitto and Galasp are a trifle to it. Well, it can't be helped, and it must be done, and, better or worse, it's capital fun. There are two to whom I have not been kind--German Consul Becker and the English Captain Hand, R.N. On Dec. 30th I rode down with Belle to go to (if you please) the Fancy Ball. When I got to the beach, I found the barometer was below 29°, the wind still in the east and steady, but a huge offensive continent of clouds and vapours forming to leeward. It might be a hurricane; I dared not risk getting caught away from my work, and, leaving Belle, returned at once to Vailima. Next day--yesterday--it was a tearer; we had storm shutters up; I sat in my room and wrote by lamplight--ten pages, if you please, seven of them draft, and some of these compiled authorities, so that was a brave day's work. About two a huge tree fell within sixty paces of our house; a little after, a second went; and we sent out boys with axes and cut down a third, which was too near the house, and buckling like a fishing rod. At dinner we had the front door closed and shuttered, the back door open, the lamp lit. The boys in the cook-house were all out at the cook-house door, where we could see them looking in and smiling. Lauilo and Faauma waited on us with smiles. The excitement was delightful. Some very violent squalls came as we sat there, and every one rejoiced; it was impossible to help it; a soul of putty had to sing. All night it blew; the roof was continually sounding under missiles; in the morning the verandahs were half full of branches torn from the forest. There was a last very wild squall about six; the rain, like a thick white smoke, flying past the house in volleys, and as swift, it seemed, as rifle balls; all with a strange, strident hiss, such as I have only heard before at sea, and, indeed, thought to be a marine phenomenon. Since then the wind has been falling with a few squalls, mostly rain. But our road is impassable for horses; we hear a schooner has been wrecked and some native houses blown down in Apia, where Belle is still and must remain a prisoner. Lucky I returned while I could! But the great good is this; much bread-fruit and bananas have been destroyed; if this be general through the islands, famine will be imminent; and _whoever blows the coals, there can be no war_. Do I then prefer a famine to a war? you ask. Not always, but just now. I am sure the natives do not want a war; I am sure a war would benefit no one but the white officials, and I believe we can easily meet the famine--or at least that it can be met. That would give our officials a legitimate opportunity to cover their past errors. _Jan. 2nd._--I woke this morning to find the blow quite ended. The heaven was all a mottled grey; even the east quite colourless; the downward slope of the island veiled in wafts of vapour, blue like smoke; not a leaf stirred on the tallest tree; only, three miles away below me on the barrier reef, I could see the individual breakers curl and fall, and hear their conjunct roaring rise, as it still rises at 1 P.M., like the roar of a thoroughfare close by. I did a good morning's work, correcting and clarifying my draft, and have now finished for press eight chapters, ninety-one pages, of this piece of journalism. Four more chapters, say fifty pages, remain to be done; I should gain my wager and finish this volume in three months, that is to say, the end should leave me per February mail; I cannot receive it back till the mail of April. Yes, it can be out in time; pray God that it be in time to help. How do journalists fetch up their drivel? I aim only at clearness and the most obvious finish, positively at no higher degree of merit, not even at brevity--I am sure it could have been all done, with double the time, in two-thirds of the space. And yet it has taken me two months to write 45,500 words; and, be damned to my wicked prowess, I am proud of the exploit! The real journalist must be a man not of brass only, but bronze. Chapter IX. gapes for me, but I shrink on the margin, and go on chattering to you. This last part will be much less offensive (strange to say) to the Germans. It is Becker they will never forgive me for; Knappe I pity and do not dislike; Becker I scorn and abominate. Here is the tableau. I. Elements of Discord: Native. II. Elements of Discord: Foreign. III. The Sorrows of Laupepa. IV. Brandeis. V. The Battle of Matautu. VI. Last Exploits of Becker. VII. The Samoan Camps. VIII. Affairs of Lautii and Fangalii. IX. "_Furor Consularis_." X. The Hurricane. XI. Stuebel Recluse. XII. The Present Government. I estimate the whole roughly at 70,000 words. Should anybody ever dream of reading it, it would be found amusing. 70000/300 = 233 printed pages; a respectable little five-bob volume, to bloom unread in shop windows. After that, I'll have a spank at fiction. And rest? I shall rest in the grave, or when I come to Italy. If only the public will continue to support me! I lost my chance not dying; there seems blooming little fear of it now. I worked close on five hours this morning; the day before, close on nine; and unless I finish myself off with this letter, I'll have another hour and a half, or _aiblins twa_, before dinner. Poor man, how you must envy me, as you hear of these orgies of work, and you scarce able for a letter. But Lord, Colvin, how lucky the situations are not reversed, for I have no situation, nor am fit for any. Life is a steigh brae. Here, have at Knappe, and no more clavers! _Jan. 3rd._--There was never any man had so many irons in the fire, except Jim Pinkerton.[31] I forgot to mention I have the most gallant suggestion from Lang, with an offer of MS. authorities, which turns my brain. It's all about the throne of Poland and buried treasure in the Mackay country, and Alan Breck can figure there in glory. Yesterday, J. and I set off to Blacklock's (American Consul) who lives not far from that little village I have so often mentioned as lying between us and Apia. I had some questions to ask him for my _History_; thence we must proceed to Vailele, where I had also to cross-examine the plantation manager about the battle there. We went by a track I had never before followed down the hill to Vaisigano, which flows here in a deep valley, and was unusually full, so that the horses trembled in the ford. The whole bottom of the valley is full of various streams posting between strips of forest with a brave sound of waters. In one place we had a glimpse of a fall some way higher up, and then sparkling in sunlight in the midst of the green valley. Then up by a winding path scarce accessible to a horse for steepness, to the other side, and the open cocoanut glades of the plantation. Here we rode fast, did a mighty satisfactory afternoon's work at the plantation house, and still faster back. On the return Jack fell with me, but got up again; when I felt him recovering I gave him his head, and he shoved his foot through the rein; I got him by the bit however, and all was well; he had mud over all his face, but his knees were not broken. We were scarce home when the rain began again; that was luck. It is pouring now in torrents; we are in the height of the bad season. Lloyd leaves along with this letter on a change to San Francisco; he had much need of it, but I think this will brace him up. I am, as you see, a tower of strength. I can remember riding not so far and not near so fast when I first came to Samoa, and being shattered next day with fatigue; now I could not tell I have done anything; have re-handled my battle of Fangalii according to yesterday's information--four pages rewritten; and written already some half-dozen pages of letters. I observe with disgust that while of yore, when I own I was guilty, you never spared me abuse--but now, when I am so virtuous, where is the praise? Do admit that I have become an excellent letter-writer--at least to you, and that your ingratitude is imbecile.--Yours ever, R. L. S. FOOTNOTES: [1] "In the missionary work which is being done among the Samoans, Mr. Stevenson was especially interested. He was an observant, shrewd, yet ever generous critic of all our religious and educational organisations. His knowledge of native character and life enabled him to understand missionary difficulties, while his genial contact with all sorts and conditions of men made him keen to detect deficiencies in men and methods, and apt in useful suggestion." The above is the testimony of the Mr. Clarke here mentioned (Rev. W. E. Clarke of the London Missionary Society). This gentleman was from the first one of the most valued friends of Mr. Stevenson and his family in Samoa, and, when the end came, read the funeral service beside his grave on Mount Vaea. [2] The lady in the _Vicar of Wakefield_ who declares herself "all in a muck of sweat." [3] First published in the New Review, January 1895. [4] Afterwards changed into _The Beach of Falesá_. [5] Mr. Lloyd Osbourne had come to England to pack and wind up affairs at Skerryvore. [6] The lines beginning "I heard the pulse of the besieging sea"; see Vol. xxiv., p. 366. [7] "The Monument" was his name for my house at the British Museum, and George was my old faithful servant, George Went. [8] The late Mr. John Lafarge, long an honoured _doyen_ among New York artists, whose record of his holiday in the South Seas, in the shape of a series of water-colour sketches of the scenery and people (with a catalogue full of interesting notes and observations), was one of the features of the Champ de Mars Salon in 1895. [9] Mrs. B. W. Procter, the stepdaughter of Basil Montagu and widow of Barry Cornwall. The death of this spirited veteran in 1888 snapped one of the last links with the days and memories of Keats and Coleridge. A shrewd and not too indulgent judge of character, she took R. L. S. into warm favour at first sight, and never spoke of or inquired after him but with unwonted tenderness. [10] On a projected expedition to Sydney. [11] See _A Footnote to History_ for more in praise of Dr. Stuebel, and of his exceptional deserts among white officials in Samoa. [12] One of the many aliases of the wicked Skye-terrier of Hyères, Davos, and Bournemouth days, celebrated in the essay _On the Character of Dogs_. [13] _Battre les champs_, to wander in mind. [14] _Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin_, by R. L. S., prefixed to _Papers Literary, Scientific, etc., by the late Fleeming Jenkin, F.R.S., LL.D._; 2 vols. London, Longmans, 1887. The first chapters consist of a genealogical history of the family. This, to my mind one of the best works of R. L. S., has lately been separately reprinted, having long been accessible only in the Edinburgh and Pentland editions. Of _Delafleld_ I never heard; the plan of _Shovel_, which was to be in great part a story of the Peninsular War, had been sketched out and a few chapters written as long ago as the seventies. [15] _The Misadventures of John Nicholson._ [16] The South Sea Letters. [17] The price advanced for these Letters was among the considerations which originally induced the writer to set out on his Pacific voyage. [18] The first serial tale, says Mr. Clarke, ever read by Samoans in their own language was the story of the _Bottle Imp_, "which found its way into print at Samoa, and was read with wonder and delight in many a thatched Samoan hut before it won the admiration of readers at home." In the English form the story was published first in Black and White, and afterwards in the volume called _Island Nights' Entertainments_. [19] Boating expedition: pronounce _malanga_. [20] Portraits of myself for which he had asked. [21] Miss Fanny Macpherson, now Lady Holroyd. [22] In reply to a suggestion which ultimately took effect in the shape of the volume called _Across the Plains_ (Chatto & Windus, 1892). [23] The steam-yacht of the Commissioners of Northern Lights, on which he had been accustomed as a lad to accompany his father on the official trips of inspection round the coast. [24] Mr. Rudyard Kipling was at this time planning a trip to Samoa, but the plan was unfortunately not carried out, and he and Stevenson never met. [25] Readers of _The Wrecker_ will not need to be reminded that this is the name of the personage on whom the mystery in that story hinges. [26] See vol. xxiii. pp. 46, 48. [27] _Across the Plains._ The papers specially referred to in the next lines are those written at Saranac Lake in the winter of 1887-88, including _A Letter to a Young Gentleman_, _Pulvis et Umbra_, _A Christmas Sermon_. [28] For the volume _Across the Plains_. [29] _i.e._ on the stage. [30] As to this peculiar intermittency of the Samoan streams, full in their upper course, but below in many places dry or lost, compare the late Lord Pembroke's _South Sea Bubbles_, p. 212:--"One odd thing connected with these ravines is the fact that the higher you go the more water you find. Unlike the Thames, which begins, I believe, in half a mile of dusty lane, and expands in its brimming breadth as it approaches the sea, a Samoan stream begins in bubbling plenty and ends in utter drought a mile or two from the salt water. Gradually as you ascend you become more and more hopeful; moist patches of sand appear here and there, then tiny pools that a fallen leaf might cover, then larger ones with little thread-like runs of water between them; larger and larger, till at last you reach some hard ledge of trap, over which a glorious stream gurgles and splashes into a pool ample enough for the bath of an elephant." [31] In _The Wrecker_. As to the story thus suggested by Mr. Andrew Lang, see below, pp. 171, 187, etc. XII LIFE IN SAMOA--_Continued_ SECOND YEAR AT VAILIMA JANUARY-DECEMBER 1892 The New Year found Stevenson down with his first attack of the influenza epidemic, then virulent all over the world. But the illness was not sufficient to stop his work, and in the first two months of the year he was busy continuing his conscientious labours on _The Footnote to History_, seeing _The Wrecker_ and _The Beach of Falesá_ through the press, planning the South Sea plantation novel _Sophia Scarlet_, which never got beyond that inchoate stage, and writing the continuation to _Kidnapped_, first intended to bear the name of the hero, David Balfour, and afterwards changed to _Catriona_. With this he proceeded swimmingly, completing it between February and September, in a shorter time than any other of his sustained narratives; and on publication its success was great. By May he had finished the _Footnote_, and then had a dash at the first chapters of _The Young Chevalier_, which stand in their truncated state a piece of work as vivid and telling as he had ever done. Early in the autumn he struck a still fuller note in the draft of the first chapters of _Weir of Hermiston_. During this year the household at Vailima received a new temporary inmate in the person of Mr. Graham Balfour, a cousin whom Stevenson had not previously known, but with whom he soon formed the closest and most confidential friendship of his later life. In the summer and early autumn he was much taken up both with politics and with hospitalities. As hereinafter narrated, he made, and was thwarted in, a serious attempt to effect a reconciliation between the two rival chiefs; and continued his series of letters to the Times showing up the incompetence, and worse, of the responsible Treaty officials. In August he took lively pleasure in a visit paid to the islands by Lady Jersey and some members of her family from Australia. During the course of their stay he conducted the visitors to the rebel camp under aliases, as the needs of the time required, and in a manner that seemed like the realisation of a chapter of a Waverley novel. A month or two later he became aware, with more amusement than alarm, of measures for his deportation set on foot but not carried through by the Treaty officials. For a man of his temper, the political muddle and mismanagement of which the Samoan Islands were the scene--and not only these, however much he might lament them for the sake of the inhabitants, but even the risks he ran of serious personal consequences from his own action,--added to life at least as much of zest and excitement as of annoyance. In October he determined, not without serious financial misgivings and chiefly in deference to his mother's urgency, to enlarge his house at Vailima by putting up a new block adjoining and communicating with that which he had hitherto inhabited. The work was promptly and efficiently carried out by the German Firm and completed by the end of the year. Quite towards the close of December, copies of _The Footnote to History_ reached Samoa, and the book, so far from being a cause of offence to his friends the managers of that firm, as both he and they had feared, was found acceptable and devoid of offence by them: a result celebrated in the convivial manner described in the last letter of this section. On the whole the year had been a prosperous one, full of successful work and eager interests, although darkened in its later months by disquietude on account of his wife's health. He had himself well maintained the improved strength and the renewed capacity both for literary work and outdoor activity which life in the South Seas had brought him from the first. TO E. L. BURLINGAME _[Vailima] Jan, 2nd, '92._ MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--Overjoyed you were pleased with _The Wrecker_, and shall consider your protests. There is perhaps more art than you think for in the peccant chapter, where I have succeeded in packing into one a dedication, an explanation, and a termination. Surely you had not recognised the phrase about boodle? It was a quotation from Jim Pinkerton, and seemed to me agreeably skittish. However, all shall be prayerfully considered. To come to a more painful subject. Herewith go three more chapters of the wretched History; as you see, I approach the climax. I expect the book to be some 70,000 words, of which you have now 45. Can I finish it for next mail? I am going to try! 'Tis a long piece of journalism, and full of difficulties here and there, of this kind and that, and will make me a power of friends to be sure. There is one Becker who will probably put up a window to me in the church where he was baptized; and I expect a testimonial from Captain Hand. Sorry to let the mail go without the Scott; this has been a bad month with me, and I have been below myself. I shall find a way to have it come by next, or know the reason why. The mail after, anyway. A bit of a sketch map appears to me necessary for my History; perhaps two. If I do not have any, 'tis impossible any one should follow; and I, even when not at all interested, demand that I shall be able to follow; even a tourist book without a map is a cross to me; and there must be others of my way of thinking. I inclose the very artless one that I think needful. Vailima, in case you are curious, is about as far again behind Tanugamanono as that is from the sea. M'Clure is publishing a short story of mine, some 50,000 words, I think, _The Beach of Falesá_; when he's done with it, I want you and Cassell to bring it out in a little volume; I shall send you a dedication for it; I believe it good; indeed, to be honest, very good. Good gear that pleases the merchant. The other map that I half threaten is a chart for the hurricane. Get me Kimberley's report of the hurricane: not to be found here. It is of most importance; I _must_ have it with my proofs of that part, if I cannot have it earlier, which now seems impossible.--Yours in hot haste, R. L. STEVENSON. TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE At the news that his correspondent was occupied teaching and entertaining a class of children in a Kilburn basement, Stevenson bethinks himself of helping her by writing an account of Samoa and Samoan life for children. _Vailima, January 4th, 1892._ MY DEAR ADELAIDE,--We were much pleased with your letter and the news of your employment. Admirable, your method. But will you not run dry of fairy stories? Please salute your pupils, and tell them that a long, lean, elderly man who lives right through on the under side of the world, so that down in your cellar you are nearer him than the people in the street, desires his compliments. This man lives in an island which is not very long, and extremely narrow. The sea beats round it very hard, so that it is difficult to get to shore. There is only one harbour where ships come, even that is very wild and dangerous; four ships of war were broken there a little while ago, and one of them is still lying on its side on a rock clean above water, where the sea threw it as you might throw your fiddle bow on the table. All round the harbour the town is strung out, it is nothing but wooden houses, only there are some churches built of stone, not very large, but the people have never seen such fine buildings. Almost all the houses are of one story. Away at one end lives the king of the whole country. His palace has a thatched roof which stands upon posts; it has no walls, but when it blows and rains, they have Venetian blinds which they let down between the posts and make it very snug. There is no furniture, and the king and queen and the courtiers sit and eat on the floor, which is of gravel: the lamp stands there too, and every now and then it is upset. These good folks wear nothing but a kilt about their waists, unless to go to church or for a dance, or the New Year, or some great occasion. The children play marbles all along the street; and though they are generally very jolly, yet they get awfully cross over their marbles, and cry and fight like boys and girls at home. Another amusement in country places is to shoot fish with a bow and arrow. All round the beach there is bright shallow water where fishes can be seen darting or lying in shoals. The child trots round the shore, and wherever he sees a fish, lets fly an arrow and misses, and then wades in after his arrow. It is great fun (I have tried it) for the child, and I never heard of it doing any harm to the fishes: so what could be more jolly? The road up to this lean man's house is uphill all the way and through forests; the forests are of great trees, not so much unlike the trees at home, only here and there are some very queer ones mixed with them, cocoa-nut palms, and great forest trees that are covered with blossom like red hawthorn, but not near so bright; and from all the trees thick creepers hang down like ropes, and nasty-looking weeds that they call orchids grow in the forks of the branches; and on the ground many prickly things are dotted which they call pine-apples: I suppose every one has eaten pineapple drops. On the way up to the lean man's house you pass a little village, all of houses like the king's house, so that as you ride through you can see everybody sitting at dinner, or if it be night, lying in their beds by lamplight; for all these people are terribly afraid of ghosts, and would not lie in the dark for any favour. After the village, there is only one more house, and that is the lean man's. For the people are not very many, and live all by the sea, and the whole inside of the island is desert woods and mountains. When the lean man goes into this forest, he is very much ashamed to say it, but he is always in a terrible fright. The wood is so great and empty and hot, and it is always filled with curious noises; birds cry like children and bark like dogs, and he can hear people laughing and felling trees; and the other day (when he was far in the woods) he heard a great sound like the biggest mill-wheel possible going with a kind of dot-and-carry-one movement like a dance. That was the noise of an earthquake away down below him in the bowels of the earth, and that is the same thing as to say away up towards you in your cellar in Kilburn. All these noises make him feel lonely and scared, and he doesn't quite know what he is scared of. Once when he was just about to cross a river, a blow struck him on the top of his head and knocked him head-foremost down the bank and splash into the water. It was a nut, I fancy, that had fallen from a tree, by which accidents people are sometimes killed. But at the time he thought it was a black boy. Aha, say you, and what is a black boy? Well, there are here a lot of poor people who are brought here from distant islands to labour as slaves for the Germans. They are not at all like the king or his people, who are brown and very pretty; but these are black as negroes and as ugly as sin, poor souls, and in their own lands they live all the time at war and cook and eat men's flesh. The Germans thrash them with whips to make them work, and every now and then some run away into the Bush, as the forest is called, and build little sheds of leaves, and eat nuts and roots and fruit, and dwell there by themselves in the great desert. Sometimes they are bad and wild and come down in the villages and steal and kill; and people whisper to each other that some of them have gone back to their horrid old habits, and catch men and women in order to eat them. But it is very likely not true; and the most of them are only poor, stupid, trembling, half-starved, pitiful creatures like frightened dogs. Their life is all very well when the sun shines, as it does eight or nine months in the year. But it is very different the rest of the time. The wind rages here most violently. The great trees thrash about like whips; the air is filled with leaves and great branches flying about like birds; and the sound of the trees falling shakes the earth. It rains too as it never rains at home. You can hear a shower while it is yet half a mile away, hissing like a shower-bath in the forest; and when it comes to you, the water blinds your eyes, and the cold drenching takes your breath away as though some one had struck you. In that kind of weather it must be dreadful indeed to live in the woods, one man alone by himself. And you must know that, if the lean man feels afraid to be in the forest, the people of the island and the black boys are much more afraid than he. For they believe the woods to be quite filled with spirits; some are like pigs, and some are like flying things; but others (and these are thought the most dangerous) come in the shape of beautiful young women and young men, beautifully dressed in the island manner, with fine kilts and fine necklaces and crowns of scarlet seeds and flowers. Woe betide he or she who gets to speak with one of these! They will be charmed out of their wits, and come home again quite silly, and go mad and die. So that the poor black boy must be always trembling and looking about for the coming of the women-devils. Sometimes the women-devils go down out of the woods into the villages, and here is a tale the lean man heard last year. One of the islanders was sitting in his house, and he had cooked fish. There came along the road two beautiful young women, dressed as I told you, who came into his house and asked for some of his fish. It is the fashion in the islands always to give what is asked, and never to ask folk's names. So the man gave them fish and talked to them in the island jesting way. And presently he asked one of the women for her red necklace, which is good manners and their way; he had given the fish, and he had a right to ask for something back. "I will give it you by and by," said the woman, and she and her companion went away; but he thought they were gone very suddenly, and the truth is they had vanished. The night was nearly come, when the man heard the voice of the woman crying that he should come to her and she would give the necklace. And he looked out, and behold she was standing calling him from the top of the sea, on which she stood as you might on the table. At that, fear came on the man; he fell on his knees and prayed, and the woman disappeared. It was known afterwards that this was once a woman indeed, but should have died a thousand years ago, and has lived all that while as a devil in the woods beside the spring of a river. Saumai-afe (Sow-my-affy) is her name, in case you want to write to her.--Ever your friend Tusitala (tale-writer), _alias_ ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The South Sea novel here mentioned, _Sophia Scarlet_, never got beyond the rough draft of an opening chapter or two. _[Vailima] Jan. 31st, '92._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--No letter at all from you, and this scratch from me! Here is a year that opens ill. Lloyd is off to "the coast" sick--_the coast_ means California over most of the Pacific--I have been down all month with influenza, and am just recovering--I am overlaid with proofs, which I am just about half fit to attend to. One of my horses died this morning, and another is now dying on the front lawn--Lloyd's horse and Fanny's. Such is my quarrel with destiny. But I am mending famously, come and go on the balcony, have perfectly good nights, and though I still cough, have no oppression and no hemorrhage and no fever. So if I can find time and courage to add no more, you will know my news is not altogether of the worst; a year or two ago, and what a state I should have been in now! Your silence, I own, rather alarms me. But I tell myself you have just miscarried; had you been too ill to write, some one would have written me. Understand, I send this brief scratch not because I am unfit to write more, but because I have 58 galleys of _The Wrecker_ and 102 of _The Beach of Falesá_ to get overhauled somehow or other in time for the mail, and for three weeks I have not touched a pen with my finger. _Feb. 1st._--The second horse is still alive, but I still think dying. The first was buried this morning. My proofs are done; it was a rough two days of it, but done. _Consummatum est; ua uma_. I believe _The Wrecker_ ends well; if I know what a good yarn is, the last four chapters make a good yarn--but pretty horrible. _The Beach of Falesá_ I still think well of, but it seems it's immoral and there's a to-do, and financially it may prove a heavy disappointment. The plaintive request sent to me, to make the young folks married properly before "that night," I refused; you will see what would be left of the yarn, had I consented.[32] This is a poison bad world for the romancer, this Anglo-Saxon world; I usually get out of it by not having any women in it at all; but when I remember I had _The Treasure of Franchard_ refused as unfit for a family magazine, I feel despair weigh upon my wrists. As I know you are always interested in novels, I must tell you that a new one is now entirely planned. It is to be called _Sophia Scarlet_, and is in two parts. Part I. The Vanilla Planter. Part II. The Overseers. No chapters, I think; just two dense blocks of narrative, the first of which is purely sentimental, but the second has some rows and quarrels, and winds up with an explosion, if you please! I am just burning to get at _Sophia_, but I _must_ do this Samoan journalism--that's a cursed duty. The first part of _Sophia_, bar the first twenty or thirty pages, writes itself; the second is more difficult, involving a good many characters--about ten, I think--who have to be kept all moving, and give the effect of a society. I have three women to handle, out and well-away! but only Sophia is in full tone. Sophia and two men, Windermere, the Vanilla Planter, who dies at the end of Part I., and Rainsforth, who only appears in the beginning of Part II. The fact is, I blush to own it, but Sophia is a _regular novel_; heroine and hero, and false accusation, and love, and marriage, and all the rest of it--all planted in a big South Sea plantation run by ex-English officers--_à la_ Stewart's plantation in Tahiti.[33] There is a strong undercurrent of labour trade which gives it a kind of Uncle Tom flavour, _absit omen!_ The first start is hard; it is hard to avoid a little tedium here, but I think by beginning with the arrival of the three Miss Scarlets hot from school and society in England, I may manage to slide in the information. The problem is exactly a Balzac one, and I wish I had his fist--for I have already a better method--the kinetic, whereas he continually allowed himself to be led into the static. But then he had the fist, and the most I can hope is to get out of it with a modicum of grace and energy, but for sure without the strong impression, the full, dark brush. Three people have had it, the real creator's brush: Scott, see much of _The Antiquary_ and _The Heart of Midlothian_ (especially all round the trial, before, during, and after)--Balzac--and Thackeray in _Vanity Fair_. Everybody else either paints _thin_, or has to stop to paint, or paints excitedly, so that you see the author skipping before his canvas. Here is a long way from poor Sophia Scarlet! This day is published _Sophia Scarlet_ By ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON To J. M. BARRIE The following is the first of several letters to Mr. J. M. Barrie, for whose work Stevenson had a warm admiration, and with whom he soon established by correspondence a cordial friendship. _Vailima, Samoa, February 1892._ DEAR MR. BARRIE,--This is at least the third letter I have written you, but my correspondence has a bad habit of not getting so far as the post. That which I possess of manhood turns pale before the business of the address and envelope. But I hope to be more fortunate with this: for, besides the usual and often recurrent desire to thank you for your work--you are one of four that have come to the front since I was watching and had a corner of my own to watch, and there is no reason, unless it be in these mysterious tides that ebb and flow, and make and mar and murder the works of poor scribblers, why you should not do work of the best order. The tides have borne away my sentence, of which I was weary at any rate, and between authors I may allow myself so much freedom as to leave it pending. We are both Scots besides, and I suspect both rather Scotty Scots; my own Scotchness tends to intermittency, but is at times erisypelitous--if that be rightly spelt. Lastly, I have gathered we had both made our stages in the metropolis of the winds: our Virgil's "grey metropolis," and I count that a lasting bond. No place so brands a man. Finally, I feel it a sort of duty to you to report progress. This may be an error, but I believed I detected your hand in an article--it may be an illusion, it may have been by one of those industrious insects who catch up and reproduce the handling of each emergent man--but I'll still hope it was yours--and hope it may please you to hear that the continuation of _Kidnapped_ is under way. I have not yet got to Alan, so I do not know if he is still alive, but David seems to have a kick or two in his shanks. I was pleased to see how the Anglo-Saxon theory fell into the trap: I gave my Lowlander a Gaelic name, and even commented on the fact in the text; yet almost all critics recognised in David and Alan a Saxon and a Celt. I know not about England; in Scotland at least, where Gaelic was spoken in Fife little over the century ago, and in Galloway not much earlier, I deny that there exists such a thing as a pure Saxon, and I think it more than questionable if there be such a thing as a pure Celt. But what have you to do with this? and what have I? Let us continue to inscribe our little bits of tales, and let the heathen rage!--Yours, with sincere interest in your career, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _[Vailima] Feb. 1892._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--This has been a busyish month for a sick man. First, Faauma--the bronze candlestick, whom otherwise I called my butler--bolted from the bed and bosom of Lafaele, the Archangel Hercules, prefect of the cattle. There was a deuce to pay, and Hercules was inconsolable, and immediately started out after a new wife, and has had one up on a visit, but says she has "no conversation"; and I think he will take back the erring and possibly repentant candlestick; whom we all devoutly prefer, as she is not only highly decorative, but good-natured, and if she does little work makes no rows. I tell this lightly, but it really was a heavy business; many were accused of complicity, and Rafael was really very sorry. I had to hold beds of justice--literally--seated in my bed and surrounded by lying Samoans seated on the floor; and there were many picturesque and still inexplicable passages. It is hard to reach the truth in these islands. The next incident overlapped with this. S. and Fanny found three strange horses in the paddock: for long now the boys have been forbidden to leave their horses here one hour because our grass is over-grazed. S. came up with the news, and I saw I must now strike a blow. "To the pound with the lot," said I. He proposed taking the three himself, but I thought that too dangerous an experiment, said I should go too, and hurried into my boots so as to show decision taken, in the necessary interviews. They came of course--the interviews--and I explained what I was going to do at huge length, and stuck to my guns. I am glad to say the natives, with their usual (purely speculative) sense of justice, highly approved the step after reflection. Meanwhile off went S. and I with the three _corpora delicti_; and a good job I went! Once, when our circus began to kick, we thought all was up; but we got them down all sound in wind and limb. I judged I was much fallen off from my Elliot forefathers, who managed this class of business with neatness and despatch. As we got down to town, we met the mother and daughter of my friend ----, bathed in tears; they had left the house over a row, which I have not time or spirits to describe. This matter dashed me a good deal, and the first decent-looking day I mounted and set off to see if I could not patch things up. Half-way down it came on to rain tropic style, and I came back from my second outing drenched like a drowned man--I was literally blinded as I came back among these sheets of water; and the consequence was I was laid down with diarrhoea and threatenings of Samoa colic for the inside of another week. Meanwhile up came Laulii,[34] in whose house Mrs. and Miss ---- have taken refuge. One of Mrs. ----'s grievances is that her son has married one of these "pork-eaters and cannibals." (As a matter of fact there is no memory of cannibalism in Samoa.) And a strange thing it was to hear the "cannibal" Laulii describe her sorrows. She is singularly pretty and sweet, her training reflects wonderful credit on her husband; and when she began to describe to us--to act to us, in the tone of an actress walking through a rehearsal--the whole bearing of her angry guests; indicating the really tragic notes when they came in, so that Fanny and I were ashamed to laugh, and touching off the merely ludicrous with infinite tact and sly humour; showing, in fact, in her whole picture of a couple of irate barbarian women, the whole play and sympathy of what we call the civilised mind; the contrast was seizing. I speak with feeling. To-day again, being the first day humanly possible for me, I went down to Apia with Fanny, and between two and three hours did I argue with that old woman--not immovable, would she had been! but with a mechanical mind like a piece of a musical snuff-box, that returned always to the same starting-point; not altogether base, for she was long-suffering with me and professed even gratitude, and was just (in a sense) to her son, and showed here and there moments of genuine and not undignified emotion; but O! on the other side, what lapses--what a mechanical movement of the brain, what occasional trap-door devils of meanness, what a wooden front of pride! I came out damped and saddened and (to say truth) a trifle sick. My wife had better luck with the daughter; but O, it was a weary business! To add to my grief--but that's politics. Before I sleep to-night I have a confession to make. When I was sick I tried to get to work to finish that Samoa thing; wouldn't go; and at last, in the colic time, I slid off into _David Balfour_,[35] some 50 pages of which are drafted, and like me well. Really I think it is spirited; and there's a heroine that (up to now) seems to have attractions: _absit omen!_ David, on the whole, seems excellent. Alan does not come in till the tenth chapter, and I am only at the eighth, so I don't know if I can find him again; but David is on his feet, and doing well, and very much in love, and mixed up with the Lord Advocate and the (untitled) Lord Lovat, and all manner of great folk. And the tale interferes with my eating and sleeping. The join is bad; I have not thought to strain too much for continuity; so this part be alive, I shall be content. But there's no doubt David seems to have changed his style, de'il ha'e him! And much I care, if the tale travel! _Friday, Feb.?? 19th?_--Two incidents to-day which I must narrate. After lunch, it was raining pitilessly; we were sitting in my mother's bedroom, and I was reading aloud Kinglake's Charge of the Light Brigade, and we had just been all seized by the horses aligning with Lord George Paget, when a figure appeared on the verandah; a little, slim, small figure of a lad, with blond (_i.e._ limed) hair, a propitiatory smile, and a nose that alone of all his features grew pale with anxiety. "I come here stop," was about the outside of his English; and I began at once to guess that he was a runaway labourer,[36] and that the bush-knife in his hand was stolen. It proved he had a mate, who had lacked his courage, and was hidden down the road; they had both made up their minds to run away, and had "come here stop." I could not turn out the poor rogues, one of whom showed me marks on his back, into the drenching forest; I could not reason with them, for they had not enough English, and not one of our boys spoke their tongue; so I bade them feed and sleep here to-night, and to-morrow I must do what the Lord shall bid me. Near dinner time, I was told that a friend of Lafaele's had found human remains in my bush. After dinner, a figure was seen skulking across towards the waterfall, which produced from the verandah a shout, in my most stentorian tones: "_O ai le ingoa?_" literally "Who the name?" which serves here for "What's your business?" as well. It proved to be Lafaele's friend; I bade a kitchen boy, Lauilo, go with him to see the spot, for though it had ceased raining, the whole island ran and dripped. Lauilo was willing enough, but the friend of the archangel demurred; he had too much business; he had no time. "All right," I said, "you too much frightened, I go along," which of course produced the usual shout of delight from all those who did not require to go. I got into my Saranac snow boots; Lauilo got a cutlass; Mary Carter, our Sydney maid, joined the party for a lark, and off we set. I tell you our guide kept us moving; for the dusk fell swift. Our woods have an infamous reputation at the best, and our errand (to say the least of it) was grisly. At last they found the remains; they were old, which was all I cared to be sure of; it seemed a strangely small "pickle-banes" to stand for a big, flourishing, buck-islander, and their situation in the darkening and dripping bush was melancholy. All at once, I found there was a second skull, with a bullet-hole I could have stuck my two thumbs in--say anybody else's one thumb. My Samoans said it could not be, there were not enough bones; I put the two pieces of skull together, and at last convinced them. Whereupon, in a flash, they found the not unromantic explanation. This poor brave had succeeded in the height of a Samoan warrior's ambition; he had taken a head, which he was never destined to show to his applauding camp. Wounded himself, he had crept here into the bush to die with his useless trophy by his side. His date would be about fifteen years ago, in the great battle between Laupepa and Talavou, which took place on My Land, Sir. To-morrow we shall bury the bones and fire a salute in honour of unfortunate courage. Do you think I have an empty life? or that a man jogging to his club has so much to interest and amuse him?--touch and try him too, but that goes along with the others: no pain, no pleasure, is the iron law. So here I stop again, and leave, as I left yesterday, my political business untouched. And lo! here comes my pupil, I believe, so I stop in time. _March 2nd._--Since I last wrote, fifteen chapters of _David Balfour_ have been drafted, and five _tirés au clair_. I think it pretty good; there's a blooming maiden that costs anxiety--she is as virginal as billy; but David seems there and alive, and the Lord Advocate is good, and so I think is an episodic appearance of the Master of Lovat. In Chapter XVII. I shall get David abroad--Alan went already in Chapter XII. The book should be about the length of _Kidnapped_; this early part of it, about D.'s evidence in the Appin case, is more of a story than anything in _Kidnapped_, but there is no doubt there comes a break in the middle, and the tale is practically in two divisions. In the first James More and the M'Gregors, and Catriona, only show; in the second, the Appin case being disposed of, and James Stewart hung, they rule the roast and usurp the interest--should there be any left. Why did I take up _David Balfour_? I don't know. A sudden passion. Monday, I went down in the rain with a colic to take the chair at a public meeting; dined with Haggard; sailed off to my meeting, and fought with wild beasts for three anxious hours. All was lost that any sensible man cared for, but the meeting did not break up--thanks a good deal to R. L. S.--and the man who opposed my election, and with whom I was all the time wrangling, proposed the vote of thanks to me with a certain handsomeness; I assure you I had earned it.... Haggard and the great Abdul, his high-caste Indian servant, imported by my wife, were sitting up for me with supper, and I suppose it was twelve before I got to bed. Tuesday raining, my mother rode down, and we went to the Consulate to sign a Factory and Commission. Thence, I to the lawyers, to the printing office, and to the mission. It was dinner time when I returned home. This morning, our cook-boy having suddenly left--injured feelings--the archangel was to cook breakfast. I found him lighting the fire before dawn; his eyes blazed, he had no word of any language left to use, and I saw in him (to my wonder) the strongest workings of gratified ambition. Napoleon was no more pleased to sign his first treaty with Austria than was Lafaele to cook that breakfast. All morning, when I had hoped to be at this letter, I slept like one drugged, and you must take this (which is all I can give you) for what it is worth-- D. B. _Memoirs of his Adventures at Home and Abroad. The Second Part; wherein are set forth the misfortunes in which he was involved upon the Appin Murder; his troubles with Lord Advocate Prestongrange; captivity on the Bass Rock; journey into France and Holland; and singular relations with James More Drummond or Macgregor, a son of the notorious Rob Roy._ Chapters.--I. A Beggar on Horseback. II. The Highland Writer. III. I go to Pilrig. IV. Lord Advocate Prestongrange. V. Butter and Thunder. VI. I make a fault in honour. VII. The Bravo. VIII. The Heather on Fire. IX. I begin to be haunted with a red-headed man. X. The Wood by Silvermills. XI. On the march again with Alan. XII. Gillane Sands. XIII. The Bass Rock. XIV. Black Andie's Tale of Tod Lapraik. XV. I go to Inveraray. That is it, as far as drafted. Chapters IV. V. VII. IX. and XIV. I am specially pleased with; the last being an episodical bogie story about the Bass Rock told there by the Keeper. TO WILLIAM MORRIS The following draft letter addressed to Mr. William Morris was found among Stevenson's papers after his death. It has touches of affectation and constraint not usual with him, and it is no doubt on that account that he did not send it; but though not in his best manner, it seems worth printing as illustrating the variety of his interests and admirations in literature. _Vailima, Samoa, Feb. 1892._ MASTER,--A plea from a place so distant should have some weight, and from a heart so grateful should have some address. I have been long in your debt, Master, and I did not think it could be so much increased as you have now increased it. I was long in your debt and deep in your debt for many poems that I shall never forget, and for _Sigurd_ before all, and now you have plunged me beyond payment by the Saga Library. And so now, true to human nature, being plunged beyond payment, I come and bark at your heels. For surely, Master, that tongue that we write, and that you have illustrated so nobly, is yet alive. She has her rights and laws, and is our mother, our queen, and our instrument. Now in that living tongue _where_ has one sense, _whereas_ another. In the _Heathslayings Story_, p. 241, line 13, it bears one of its ordinary senses. Elsewhere and usually through the two volumes, which is all that has yet reached me of this entrancing publication, _whereas_ is made to figure for _where_. For the love of God, my dear and honoured Morris, use _where_, and let us know _whereas_ we are, wherefore our gratitude shall grow, whereby you shall be the more honoured wherever men love clear language, whereas now, although we honour, we are troubled. Whereunder, please find inscribed to this very impudent but yet very anxious document, the name of one of the most distant but not the youngest or the coldest of those who honour you ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MRS. CHARLES FAIRCHILD The projected visit of Mr. Kipling, with his wife and brother-in-law, to Samoa, which is mentioned towards the close of this letter, never took place, much to the regret of both authors. [_Vailima, March 1892._] MY DEAR MRS. FAIRCHILD,--I am guilty in your sight, but my affairs besiege me. The chief-justiceship of a family of nineteen persons is in itself no sinecure, and sometimes occupies me for days: two weeks ago for four days almost entirely, and for two days entirely. Besides which, I have in the last few months written all but one chapter of a _History of Samoa_ for the last eight or nine years; and while I was unavoidably delayed in the writing of this, awaiting material, put in one-half of _David Balfour_, the sequel to _Kidnapped_. Add the ordinary impediments of life, and admire my busyness. I am now an old, but healthy skeleton, and degenerate much towards the machine. By six at work: stopped at half-past ten to give a history lesson to a step-grandson; eleven, lunch; after lunch we have a musical performance till two; then to work again; bath, 4.40; dinner, five; cards in the evening till eight; and then to bed--only I have no bed, only a chest with a mat and blankets--and read myself to sleep. This is the routine, but often sadly interrupted. Then you may see me sitting on the floor of my verandah haranguing and being harangued by squatting chiefs on a question of a road; or more privately holding an inquiry into some dispute among our familiars, myself on my bed, the boys on the floor--for when it comes to the judicial I play dignity--or else going down to Apia on some more or less unsatisfactory errand. Altogether it is a life that suits me, but it absorbs me like an ocean. That is what I have always envied and admired in Scott; with all that immensity of work and study, his mind kept flexible, glancing to all points of natural interest. But the lean hot spirits, such as mine, become hypnotised with their bit occupations--if I may use Scotch to you--it is so far more scornful than any English idiom. Well, I can't help being a skeleton, and you are to take this devious passage for an apology. I thought _Aladdin_[37] capital fun; but why, in fortune, did he pretend it was moral at the end? The so-called nineteenth century, _où va-t-il se nicher?_ 'Tis a trifle, but Pyle would do well to knock the passage out, and leave his boguey tale a boguey tale, and a good one at that. The arrival of your box was altogether a great success to the castaways. You have no idea where we live. Do you know, in all these islands there are not five hundred whites, and no postal delivery, and only one village--it is no more--and would be a mean enough village in Europe? We were asked the other day if Vailima were the name of our post town, and we laughed. Do you know, though we are but three miles from the village metropolis, we have no road to it, and our goods are brought on the pack-saddle? And do you know--or I should rather say, can you believe--or (in the famous old Tichborne trial phrase) would you be surprised to learn, that all you have read of Vailima--or Subpriorsford, as I call it--is entirely false, and we have no ice-machine, and no electric light, and no water supply but the cistern of the heavens, and but one public room, and scarce a bedroom apiece? But, of course, it is well known that I have made enormous sums by my evanescent literature, and you will smile at my false humility. The point, however, is much on our minds just now. We are expecting an invasion of Kiplings; very glad we shall be to see them; but two of the party are ladies, and I tell you we had to hold a council of war to stow them. You European ladies are so particular; with all of mine, sleeping has long become a public function, as with natives and those who go down much into the sea in ships. Dear Mrs. Fairchild, I must go to my work. I have but two words to say in conclusion. First, civilisation is rot. Second, console a savage with more of the milk of that over-civilised being, your adorable schoolboy. As I wrote these remarkable words, I was called down to eight o'clock prayers, and have just worked through a chapter of Joshua and five verses, with five treble choruses, of a Samoan hymn; but the music was good, our boys and precentress ('tis always a woman that leads) did better than I ever heard them, and to my great pleasure I understood it all except one verse. This gave me the more time to try and identify what the parts were doing, and further convict my dull ear. Beyond the fact that the soprano rose to the tonic above, on one occasion I could recognise nothing. This is sickening, but I mean to teach my ear better before I am done with it or this vile carcase. I think it will amuse you (for a last word) to hear that our precentress--she is the washerwoman--is our shame. She is a good, healthy, comely, strapping young wench, full of energy and seriousness, a splendid workwoman, delighting to train our chorus, delighting in the poetry of the hymns, which she reads aloud (on the least provocation) with a great sentiment of rhythm. Well, then, what is curious? Ah, we did not know! but it was told us in a whisper from the cook-house--she is not of good family. Don't let it get out, please; everybody knows it, of course, here; there is no reason why Europe and the States should have the advantage of me also. And the rest of my house-folk are all chief-people, I assure you. And my late overseer (far the best of his race) is a really serious chief with a good "name." Tina is the name; it is not in the Almanach de Gotha, it must have got dropped at press. The odd thing is, we rather share the prejudice. I have almost always--though not quite always--found the higher the chief the better the man through all the islands; or, at least, that the best man came always from a highish rank. I hope Helen will continue to prove a bright exception. With love to Fairchild and the Huge Schoolboy, I am, my dear Mrs. Fairchild, yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _[Vailima] March 9th [1892]._ MY DEAR S. C.,--Take it not amiss if this is a wretched letter. I am eaten up with business. Every day this week I have had some business impediment--I am even now waiting a deputation of chiefs about the road--and my precious morning was shattered by a polite old scourge of a _faipule_--parliament man--come begging. All the time _David Balfour_ is skelping along. I began it the 13th of last month; I have now 12 chapters, 79 pages ready for press, or within an ace, and, by the time the month is out, one-half should be completed, and I'll be back at drafting the second half. What makes me sick is to think of Scott turning out _Guy Mannering_ in three weeks! What a pull of work: heavens, what thews and sinews! And here am I, my head spinning from having only re-written seven not very difficult pages--and not very good when done. Weakling generation. It makes me sick of myself, to make such a fash and bobbery over a rotten end of an old nursery yarn, not worth spitting on when done. Still, there is no doubt I turn out my work more easily than of yore; and I suppose I should be singly glad of that. And if I got my book done in six weeks, seeing it will be about half as long as a Scott, and I have to write everything twice, it would be about the same rate of industry. It is my fair intention to be done with it in three months, which would make me about one-half the man Sir Walter was for application and driving the dull pen. Of the merit we shall not talk; but I don't think Davie is _without_ merit. _March 12th._--And I have this day triumphantly finished 15 chapters, 100 pages--being exactly one-half (as near as anybody can guess) of _David Balfour_; the book to be about a fifth as long again (altogether) as _Treasure Island:_ could I but do the second half in another month! But I can't, I fear; I shall have some belated material arriving by next mail, and must go again at the History. Is it not characteristic of my broken tenacity of mind, that I should have left Davie Balfour some five years in the British Linen Company's Office, and then follow him at last with such vivacity? But I leave you again; the last (15th) chapter ought to be re-wrote, or part of it, and I want the half completed in the month, and the month is out by midnight; though, to be sure, last month was February, and I might take grace. These notes are only to show I hold you in mind, though I know they can have no interest for man or God or animal. I should have told you about the Club. We have been asked to try and start a sort of weekly ball for the half-castes and natives, ourselves to be the only whites; and we consented, from a very heavy sense of duty, and with not much hope. Two nights ago we had twenty people up, received them in the front verandah, entertained them on cake and lemonade, and I made a speech--embodying our proposals, or conditions, if you like--for I suppose thirty minutes. No joke to speak to such an audience, but it is believed I was thoroughly intelligible. I took the plan of saying everything at least twice in a different form of words, so that if the one escaped my hearers, the other might be seized. One white man came with his wife, and was kept rigorously on the front verandah below! You see what a sea of troubles this is like to prove; but it is the only chance--and when it blows up, it must blow up! I have no more hope in anything than a dead frog; I go into everything with a composed despair, and don't mind--just as I always go to sea with the conviction I am to be drowned, and like it before all other pleasures. But you should have seen the return voyage, when nineteen horses had to be found in the dark, and nineteen bridles, all in a drench of rain, and the club, just constituted as such, sailed away in the wet, under a cloudy moon like a bad shilling, and to descend a road through the forest that was at that moment the image of a respectable mountain brook. My wife, who is president _with power to expel_, had to begin her functions.... _25th March._--Heaven knows what day it is, but I am ashamed, all the more as your letter from Bournemouth of all places--poor old Bournemouth!--is to hand, and contains a statement of pleasure in my letters which I wish I could have rewarded with a long one. What has gone on? A vast of affairs, of a mingled, strenuous, inconclusive, desultory character; much waste of time, much riding to and fro, and little transacted or at least peracted. Let me give you a review of the present state of our live stock.--Six boys in the bush; six souls about the house. Talolo, the cook, returns again to-day, after an absence which has cost me about twelve hours of riding, and I suppose eight hours' solemn sitting in council. "I am sorry indeed for the Chief Justice of Samoa," I said; "it is more than I am fit for to be Chief Justice of Vailima."--Lauilo is steward. Both these are excellent servants; we gave a luncheon party when we buried the Samoan bones, and I assure you all was in good style, yet we never interfered. The food was good, the wine and dishes went round as by mechanism.--Steward's assistant and washman, Arrick, a New Hebridee black boy, hired from the German firm; not so ugly as most, but not pretty neither; not so dull as his sort are, but not quite a Crichton. When he came first, he ate so much of our good food that he got a prominent belly. Kitchen assistant, Tomas (Thomas in English), a Fiji man, very tall and handsome, moving like a marionette with sudden bounds, and rolling his eyes with sudden effort.--Washerwoman and precentor, Helen, Tomas's wife. This is our weak point; we are ashamed of Helen; the cook-house blushes for her; they murmur there at her presence. She seems all right; she is not a bad-looking, strapping wench, seems chaste, is industrious, has an excellent taste in hymns--you should have heard her read one aloud the other day, she marked the rhythm with so much gloating, dissenter sentiment. What is wrong, then? says you. Low in your ear--and don't let the papers get hold of it--she is of no family. None, they say; literally a common woman. Of course, we have out-islanders, who _may_ be villeins; but we give them the benefit of the doubt, which is impossible with Helen of Vailima; our blot, our pitted speck. The pitted speck I have said is our precentor. It is always a woman who starts Samoan song; the men who sing second do not enter for a bar or two. Poor, dear Faauma, the unchaste, the extruded Eve of our Paradise, knew only two hymns; but Helen seems to know the whole repertory, and the morning prayers go far more lively in consequence.--Lafaele, provost of the cattle. The cattle are Jack, my horse, quite converted, my wife rides him now, and he is as steady as a doctor's cob; Tifaga Jack, a circus horse, my mother's piebald, bought from a passing circus; Belle's mare, now in childbed or next door, confound the slut! Musu--amusingly translated the other day "don't want to," literally cross, but always in the sense of stubbornness and resistance--my wife's little dark-brown mare, with a white star on her forehead, whom I have been riding of late to steady her--she has no vices, but is unused, skittish and uneasy, and wants a lot of attention and humouring; lastly (of saddle horses) Luna--not the Latin _moon_, the Hawaiian _overseer_, but it's pronounced the same--a pretty little mare too, but scarce at all broken, a bad bucker, and has to be ridden with a stock-whip and be brought back with her rump criss-crossed like a clan tartan; the two cart horses, now only used with pack-saddles; two cows, one in the straw (I trust) to-morrow, a third cow, the Jersey--whose milk and temper are alike subjects of admiration--she gives good exercise to the farming saunterer, and refreshes him on his return with cream; two calves, a bull, and a cow; God knows how many ducks and chickens, and for a wager not even God knows how many cats; twelve horses, seven horses, five kine: is not this Babylon the Great which I have builded? Call it _Subpriorsford_. Two nights ago the club had its first meeting; only twelve were present, but it went very well. I was not there, I had ridden down the night before after dinner on my endless business, took a cup of tea in the mission like an ass, then took a cup of coffee like a fool at Haggard's, then fell into a discussion with the American Consul.... I went to bed at Haggard's, came suddenly broad awake, and lay sleepless the live night. It felt chill, I had only a sheet, and had to make a light and range the house for a cover--I found one in the hall, a macintosh. So back to my sleepless bed, and to lie there till dawn. In the morning I had a longish ride to take in a day of a blinding, staggering sun, and got home by eleven, our luncheon hour, with my head rather swimmy; the only time I have _feared_ the sun since I was in Samoa. However, I got no harm, but did not go to the club, lay off, lazied, played the pipe, and read a novel by James Payn--sometimes quite interesting, and in one place really very funny with the quaint humour of the man. Much interested the other day. As I rode past a house, I saw where a Samoan had written a word on a board, and there was an [inverted A], perfectly formed, but upside down. You never saw such a thing in Europe; but it is as common as dirt in Polynesia. Men's names are tattooed on the forearm; it is common to find a subverted letter tattooed there. Here is a tempting problem for psychologists. I am now on terms again with the German consulate, I know not for how long; not, of course, with the President, which I find a relief; still, with the Chief Justice and the English consul. For Haggard, I have a genuine affection; he is a loveable man. Wearyful man! "Here is the yarn of Loudon Dodd, _not as he told it, but as it was afterwards written_."[38] These words were left out by some carelessness, and I think I have been thrice tackled about them. Grave them in your mind and wear them on your forehead. The Lang story will have very little about the treasure; the Master[39] will appear; and it is to a great extent a tale of Prince Charlie _after_ the '45, and a love story forbye: the hero is a melancholy exile, and marries a young woman who interests the prince, and there is the devil to pay. I think the Master kills him in a duel, but don't know yet, not having yet seen my second heroine. No--the Master doesn't kill him, they fight, he is wounded, and the Master plays _deus ex machina_. _I think_ just now of calling it _The Tail of the Race_; no--heavens! I never saw till this moment--but of course nobody but myself would ever understand Mill-Race, they would think of a quarter-mile. So--I am nameless again. My melancholy young man is to be quite a Romeo. Yes, I'll name the book from him: _Dyce of Ythan_--pronounce Eethan. Dyce of Ythan by R. L. S. O, Shovel--Shovel waits his turn, he and his ancestors. I would have tackled him before, but my _State Trials_ have never come. So that I have now quite planned:-- Dyce of Ythan. (Historical, 1750.) Sophia Scarlet. (To-day.) The Shovels of Newton French. (Historical, 1650 to 1830.) And quite planned and part written:-- The Pearl Fisher. (To-day.) (With Lloyd: a machine.)[40] David Balfour. (Historical, 1751.) And, by a strange exception for R. L. S., all in the third person except D. B. I don't know what day this is now (the 29th), but I have finished my two chapters, ninth and tenth, of _Samoa_ in time for the mail, and feel almost at peace. The tenth was the hurricane, a difficult problem; it so tempted one to be literary; and I feel sure the less of that there is in my little handbook, the more chance it has of some utility. Then the events are complicated, seven ships to tell of, and sometimes three of them together; O, it was quite a job. But I think I have my facts pretty correct, and for once, in my sickening yarn, they are handsome facts: creditable to all concerned; not to be written of--and I should think, scarce to be read--without a thrill. I doubt I have got no hurricane into it, the intricacies of the yarn absorbing me too much. But there--it's done somehow, and time presses hard on my heels. The book, with my best expedition, may come just too late to be of use. In which case I shall have made a handsome present of some months of my life for nothing and to nobody. Well, through Her the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong.[41] _30th._--After I had written you, I re-read my hurricane, which is very poor; the life of the journalist is hard, another couple of writings and I could make a good thing, I believe, and it must go as it is! But, of course, this book is not written for honour and glory, and the few who will read it may not know the difference. Very little time. I go down with the mail shortly, dine at the Chinese restaurant, and go to the club to dance with islandresses. Think of my going out once a week to dance. Politics are on the full job again, and we don't know what is to come next. I think the whole treaty _raj_ seems quite played out! They have taken to bribing the _faipule_ men (parliament men) to stay in Mulinuu, we hear; but I have not yet sifted the rumour. I must say I shall be scarce surprised if it prove true; these rumours have the knack of being right.--Our weather this last month has been tremendously hot, not by the thermometer, which sticks at 86°, but to the sensation: no rain, no wind, and this the storm month. It looks ominous, and is certainly disagreeable. No time to finish.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO E. L. BURLINGAME The first sentences of the following refer to _A Footnote to History_, Chapter x. of which, relating to the hurricane of 1889, was first published in the Scots Observer, edited by Mr. Henley. [_Vailima, March 1892._] MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--Herewith Chapters IX. and X., and I am left face to face with the horrors and dilemmas of the present regimen: pray for those that go down to the sea in ships. I have promised Henley shall have a chance to publish the hurricane chapter if he like, so please let the slips be sent _quam primum_ to C. Baxter, W.S., 11 S. Charlotte Street, Edinburgh. I got on mighty quick with that chapter--about five days of the toughest kind of work. God forbid I should ever have such another pirn to wind! When I invent a language, there shall be a direct and an indirect pronoun differently declined--then writing would be some fun. DIRECT INDIRECT He Tu Him Tum His Tus Ex.: _He_ seized _tum_ by _tus_ throat; but _tu_ at the same moment caught _him_ by his hair. A fellow could write hurricanes with an inflection like that! Yet there would be difficulties too. Please add to my former orders-- _Le Chevalier Des Touches_ } by Barbey d'Aurevilly. _Les Diabohques_ } _Correspondence de Henri Beyle_ (Stendahl). Yours sincerely, R. L. STEVENSON. TO THE REV. S. J. WHITMEE In this letter the essential points of Stevenson's policy for Samoa are defined more clearly than anywhere else. His correspondent, an experienced missionary who had been absent from the islands and lately returned, and whom Stevenson describes as being of a nature essentially "childlike and candid," had been induced to support the idea of a one-man power as necessary for putting an end to the existing confusion, and to suggest the Chief Justice, Mr. Cedercrantz, as the person to wield such power. In the present letter and a subsequent conversation Stevenson was able to persuade his correspondent to abandon at least that part of his proposal which concerned the Chief Justice. _[Vailima] Sunday. Better Day, Better Deed. April 24th, 1892._ Private and confidential. DEAR MR. WHITMEE,--I have reflected long and fully on your paper, and at your kind request give you the benefit of my last thoughts. I. I cannot bring myself to welcome your idea of one man. I fear we are too far away from any moderative influence; and suppose it to be true that the paper is bought, we should not even have a voice. Could we be sure to get a Gordon or a Lawrence, ah! very well. But in this out-of-the-way place, are these extreme experiments wise? Remember Baker; with much that he has done, I am in full sympathy; and the man, though wholly insincere, is a thousand miles from ill-meaning; and see to what excesses he was forced or led. II. But I willingly admit the idea is possible with the right man, and this brings me with greater conviction to my next point. I cannot endorse, and I would rather beg of you to reconsider, your recommendation of the Chief Justice. I told you the man has always attracted me, yet as I have earnestly reconsidered the points against him, I find objection growing.... But there is yet another argument I have to lay before you. We are both to write upon this subject. Many of our opinions coincide, and, as I said the other day, on these we may reasonably suppose that we are not far wrong. Now here is a point on which we shall directly counter. No doubt but this will lessen the combined weight of our arguments where they coincide. And to avoid this effect, it might seem worth while to you to modify or cancel the last paragraph of your article. III. But I now approach what seems to me by far the most important. White man here, white man there, Samoa is to stand or fall (bar actual seizure) on the Samoan question. And upon this my mind is now really made up. I do not believe in Laupepa alone; I do not believe in Mataafa alone. I know that their conjunction implies peace; I am persuaded that their separation means either war or paralysis. It is the result of the past, which we cannot change, but which we must accept and use or suffer by. I have now made up my mind to do all that I may be able--little as it is--to effect a reconciliation between these two men Laupepa and Mataafa; persuaded as I am that there is the one door of hope. And it is my intention before long to approach both in this sense. Now, from the course of our interview, I was pleased to see that you were, if not equally strong with myself, at least inclined to much the same opinion. And in a carefully weighed paper, such as that you read me, I own I should be pleased to have this cardinal matter touched upon. At home it is not, it cannot be, understood: Mataafa is thought a rebel; the Germans profit by the thought to pursue their career of vengeance for Fagalii; the two men are perpetually offered as alternatives--they are no such thing--they are complementary; authority, supposing them to survive, will be impossible without both. They were once friends, fools and meddlers set them at odds, they must be friends again or have so much wisdom and public virtue as to pretend a friendship. There is my policy for Samoa. And I wish you would at least touch upon that point, I care not how; because, although I am far from supposing you feel it to be necessary in the same sense or to the same degree as I do, I am well aware that no man knows Samoa but must see its huge advantages. Excuse this long and tedious lecture, which I see I have to mark private and confidential, or I might get into deep water, and believe me, yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES BAXTER The maps herein bespoken do not adorn the ordinary editions of _Catriona_, only the Edinburgh edition, for which they were executed by Messrs. Bartholomew in a manner that would have rejoiced the writer's heart. _[Vailima] April 28, 1892._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--I have just written the dedication of _David Balfour_ to you, and haste to put a job in your hands. This is a map of the environs of Edinburgh _circa_ 1750. It must contain Hope Park, Hunter's Bog, Calton Hill, the Mouter Hill, Lang Dykes, Nor' Loch, West Kirk, Village of Dean, pass down the water to Stockbridge, Silver Mills, the two mill lakes there, with a wood on the south side of the south one which I saw marked on a plan in the British Museum, Broughton, Picardy, Leith Walk, Leith, Pilrig, Lochend, Figgate Whins. And I would like a piece in a corner, giving for the same period Figgate Whins, Musselburgh, Inveresk, Prestonpans, battlefield of Gladsmuir, Cockenzie, Gullane--which I spell Gillane--Fidra, Dirleton, North Berwick Law, Whitekirk, Tantallon Castle and Castleton, Scougal and Auldhame, the Bass, the Glenteithy rocks, Satan's Bush, Wildfire rocks, and, if possible, the May. If need were, I would not stick at two maps. If there is but one, say, _Plan to illustrate David Balfour's adventures in the Lothians_. If two, call the first _Plan to illustrate David Balfour's adventures about the city of Edinburgh_, and the second, _Plan to illustrate David Balfour's adventures in East Lothian_. I suppose there must be a map-maker of some taste in Edinburgh; I wish few other names in, but what I have given, as far as possible. As soon as may be I will let you have the text, when you might even find some amusement in seeing that the maps fill the bill. If your map-maker be a poor creature, plainness is best; if he were a fellow of some genuine go, he might give it a little of the bird's-eye quality. I leave this to your good taste. If I have time I will copy the dedication to go herewith; I am pleased with it. The first map (suppose we take two) would go in at the beginning, the second at Chapter XI. The topography is very much worked into the story, and I have alluded in the dedication to our common fancy for exploring Auld Reekie. The list of books came duly, for which many thanks. I am plunged to the nostrils in various business.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _[Vailima] May 1st, 1892._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--As I rode down last night about six, I saw a sight I must try to tell you of. In front of me, right over the top of the forest into which I was descending, was a vast cloud. The front of it accurately represented the somewhat rugged, long-nosed, and beetle-browed profile of a man, crowned by a huge Kalmuck cap; the flesh part was of a heavenly pink, the cap, the moustache, the eyebrows were of a bluish grey; to see this with its childish exactitude of design and colour, and hugeness of scale--it covered at least 25°--held me spell-bound. As I continued to gaze, the expression began to change; he had the exact air of closing one eye, dropping his jaw, and drawing down his nose; had the thing not been so imposing, I could have smiled; and then almost in a moment, a shoulder of leaden-coloured bank drove in front and blotted it. My attention spread to the rest of the cloud, and it was a thing to worship. It rose from the horizon, and its top was within thirty degrees of the zenith; the lower parts were like a glacier in shadow, varying from dark indigo to a clouded white in exquisite gradations. The sky behind, so far as I could see, was all of a blue already enriched and darkened by the night, for the hill had what lingered of the sunset. But the top of my Titanic cloud flamed in broad sunlight, with the most excellent softness and brightness of fire and jewels, enlightening all the world. It must have been far higher than Mount Everest, and its glory, as I gazed up at it out of the night, was beyond wonder. Close by rode the little crescent moon; and right over its western horn, a great planet of about equal lustre with itself. The dark woods below were shrill with that noisy business of the birds' evening worship. When I returned, after eight, the moon was near down; she seemed little brighter than before, but now that the cloud no longer played its part of a nocturnal sun, we could see that sight, so rare with us at home that it was counted a portent, so customary in the tropics, of the dark sphere with its little gilt band upon the belly. The planet had been setting faster, and was now below the crescent. They were still of an equal brightness. I could not resist trying to reproduce this in words, as a specimen of these incredibly beautiful and imposing meteors of the tropic sky that make so much of my pleasure here; though a ship's deck is the place to enjoy them. O what _awful_ scenery, from a ship's deck, in the tropics! People talk about the Alps, but the clouds of the trade wind are alone for sublimity. Now to try and tell you what has been happening. The state of these islands, and of Mataafa and Laupepa (Malietoas _ambo_), had been much on my mind. I went to the priests and sent a message to Mataafa, at a time when it was supposed he was about to act. He did not act, delaying in true native style, and I determined I should go to visit him. I have been very good not to go sooner; to live within a few miles of a rebel camp, to be a novelist, to have all my family forcing me to go, and to refrain all these months, counts for virtue. But hearing that several people had gone and the government done nothing to punish them, and having an errand there which was enough to justify myself in my own eyes, I half determined to go, and spoke of it with the half-caste priest. And here (confound it) up came Laupepa and his guards to call on me; we kept him to lunch, and the old gentleman was very good and amiable. He asked me why I had not been to see him? I reminded him a law had been made, and told him I was not a small boy to go and ask leave of the consuls, and perhaps be refused. He told me to pay no attention to the law but come when I would, and begged me to name a day to lunch. The next day (I think it was) early in the morning, a man appeared; he had metal buttons like a policeman--but he was none of our Apia force; he was a rebel policeman, and had been all night coming round inland through the forest from Malie. He brought a letter addressed _I lana susuga_ To his Excellency _Misi Mea_. Mr. Thingumbob. (So as not to compromise me.) I can read Samoan now, though not speak it. It was to ask me for last Wednesday. My difficulty was great; I had no man here who was fit, or who would have cared, to write for me; and I had to postpone the visit. So I gave up half-a-day with a groan, went down to the priests, arranged for Monday week to go to Malie, and named Thursday as my day to lunch with Laupepa. I was sharply ill on Wednesday, mail day. But on Thursday I had to trail down and go through the dreary business of a feast, in the King's wretched shanty, full in view of the President's fine new house; it made my heart burn. This gave me my chance to arrange a private interview with the king, and I decided to ask Mr. Whitmee to be my interpreter. On Friday, being too much exhausted to go down, I begged him to come up. He did. I told him the heads of what I meant to say; and he not only consented, but said, if we got on well with the king, he would even proceed with me to Malie. Yesterday, in consequence, I rode down to W.'s house by eight in the morning; waited till ten; received a message that the king was stopped by a meeting with the president and _faipule_; made another engagement for seven at night; came up; went down; waited till eight, and came away again, _bredouille_, and a dead body. The poor, weak, enslaved king had not dared to come to me even in secret. Now I have to-day for a rest, and to-morrow to Malie. Shall I be suffered to embark? It is very doubtful; they are on the trail. On Thursday, a policeman came up to me and began that a boy had been to see him, and said I was going to see Mataafa.--"And what did you say?" said I.--"I told him I did not know about where you were going," said he.--"A very good answer," said I, and turned away. It is lashing rain to-day, but to-morrow, rain or shine, I must at least make the attempt; and I am so weary, and the weather looks so bad. I could half wish they would arrest me on the beach. All this bother and pother to try and bring a little chance of peace; all this opposition and obstinacy in people who remain here by the mere forbearance of Mataafa, who has a great force within six miles of their government buildings, which are indeed only the residences of white officials. To understand how I have been occupied, you must know that "Misi Mea" has had another letter, and this time had to answer himself; think of doing so in a language so obscure to me, with the aid of a Bible, concordance, and dictionary! What a wonderful Baboo compilation it must have been! I positively expected to hear news of its arrival in Malie by the sound of laughter. I doubt if you will be able to read this scrawl, but I have managed to scramble somehow up to date; and to-morrow, one way or another, should be interesting. But as for me, I am a wreck, as I have no doubt style and handwriting both testify. 8 P.M.--Wonderfully rested; feel almost fit for to-morrow's dreary excursion--not that it will be dreary if the weather favour, but otherwise it will be death; and a native feast, and I fear I am in for a big one, is a thing I loathe. I wonder if you can really conceive me as a politician in this extra-mundane sphere--presiding at public meetings, drafting proclamations, receiving mis-addressed letters that have been carried all night through tropical forests? It seems strange indeed, and to you, who know me really, must seem stranger. I do not say I am free from the itch of meddling, but God knows this is no tempting job to meddle in; I smile at picturesque circumstances like the Misi Mea (_Monsieur Chose_ is the exact equivalent) correspondence, but the business as a whole bores and revolts me. I do nothing and say nothing; and then a day comes, and I say "this can go on no longer." 9.30 P.M.--The wretched native dilatoriness finds me out. News has just come that we must embark at six to-morrow; I have divided the night in watches, and hope to be called to-morrow at four and get under way by five. It is a great chance if it be managed; but I have given directions and lent my own clock to the boys, and hope the best. If I get called at four we shall do it nicely. Good-night; I must turn in. _May 3rd._--Well, we did get off by about 5.30, or, by'r lady! quarter to six; myself on Donald, the huge grey cart-horse, with a ship-bag across my saddle bow, Fanny on Musu and Belle on Jack. We were all feeling pretty tired and sick, and I looked like heaven knows what on the cart-horse: "death on the pale horse," I suggested--and young Hunt the missionary, who met me to-day on the same charger, squinted up at my perch and remarked, "There's a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft." The boat was ready and we set off down the lagoon about seven, four oars, and Talolo, my cook, steering. _May 9th_ (_Monday anyway_).--And see what good resolutions came to! Here is all this time past, and no speed made. Well, we got to Malie and were received with the most friendly consideration by the rebel chief. Belle and Fanny were obviously thought to be my two wives; they were served their kava together, as were Mataafa and myself. Talolo utterly broke down as interpreter; long speeches were made to me by Mataafa and his orators, of which he could make nothing but they were "very much surprised"--his way of pronouncing obliged--and as he could understand nothing that fell from me except the same form of words, the dialogue languished and all business had to be laid aside. We had kava,[42] and then a dish of arrowroot; one end of the house was screened off for us with a fine tapa, and we lay and slept, the three of us, heads and tails, upon the mats till dinner. After dinner his illegitimate majesty and myself had a walk, and talked as well as my twopenny Samoan would admit. Then there was a dance to amuse the ladies before the house, and we came back by moonlight, the sky piled full of high faint clouds that long preserved some of the radiance of the sunset. The lagoon was very shallow; we continually struck, for the moon was young and the light baffling; and for a long time we were accompanied by, and passed and repassed, a huge whale-boat from Savaii, pulling perhaps twelve oars, and containing perhaps forty people who sang in time as they went. So to the hotel, where we slept, and returned the next Tuesday morning on the three same steeds. Meanwhile my business was still untransacted. And on Saturday morning, I sent down and arranged with Charlie Taylor to go down that afternoon. I had scarce got the saddle-bags fixed and had not yet mounted, when the rain began. But it was no use delaying now; off I went in a wild waterspout to Apia; found Charlie (Salé) Taylor--a sesquipedalian young half-caste--not yet ready, had a snack of bread and cheese at the hotel while waiting him, and then off to Malie. It rained all the way, seven miles; the road, which begins in triumph, dwindles down to a nasty, boggy, rocky footpath with weeds up to a horseman's knees; and there are eight pig fences to jump, nasty beastly jumps--the next morning we found one all messed with blood where a horse had come to grief--but my Jack is a clever fencer; and altogether we made good time, and got to Malie about dark. It is a village of very fine native houses, high, domed, oval buildings, open at the sides, or only closed with slatted Venetians. To be sure, Mataafa's is not the worst. It was already quite dark within, only a little fire of cocoa-shell blazed in the midst and showed us four servants; the chief was in his chapel, whence we heard the sound of chaunting. Presently he returned; Taylor and I had our soaking clothes changed, family worship was held, kava brewed, I was exhibited to the chiefs as a man who had ridden through all that rain and risked deportation to serve their master; they were bidden learn my face, and remember upon all occasions to help and serve me. Then dinner, and politics, and fine speeches until twelve at night--O, and some more kava--when I could sit up no longer; my usual bed-time is eight, you must remember. Then one end of the house was screened off for me alone, and a bed made--you never saw such a couch--I believe of nearly fifty (half at least) fine mats, by Mataafa's daughter, Kalala. Here I reposed alone; and on the other side of the tapa, Majesty and his household. Armed guards and a drummer patrolled about the house all night; they had no shift, poor devils; but stood to arms from sun-down to sun-up. About four in the morning, I was awakened by the sound of a whistle pipe blown outside on the dark, very softly and to a pleasing simple air; I really think I have hit the first phrase: [Illustration: Andante tranquillo] It sounded very peaceful, sweet and strange in the dark; and I found this was a part of the routine of my rebel's night, and it was done (he said) to give good dreams. By a little before six, Taylor and I were in the saddle again fasting. My riding boots were so wet I could not get them on, so I must ride barefoot. The morning was fair but the roads very muddy, the weeds soaked us nearly to the waist, Salé was twice spilt at the fences, and we got to Apia a bedraggled enough pair. All the way along the coast, the paté (small wooden drum) was beating in the villages and the people crowding to the churches in their fine clothes. Thence through the mangrove swamp, among the black mud and the green mangroves, and the black and scarlet crabs, to Mulinuu, to the doctor's, where I had an errand, and so to the inn to breakfast about nine. After breakfast I rode home. Conceive such an outing, remember the pallid brute that lived in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit, and receive the intelligence that I was rather the better for my journey. Twenty miles' ride, sixteen fences taken, ten of the miles in a drenching rain, seven of them fasting and in the morning chill, and six stricken hours' political discussions by an interpreter; to say nothing of sleeping in a native house, at which many of our excellent literati would look askance of itself. You are to understand: if I take all this bother, it is not only from a sense of duty, or a love of meddling--damn the phrase, take your choice--but from a great affection for Mataafa. He is a beautiful, sweet old fellow, and he and I grew quite fulsome on Saturday night about our sentiments. I had a messenger from him to-day with a flannel undershirt which I had left behind like a gibbering idiot; and perpetrated in reply another Baboo letter. It rains again to-day without mercy; blessed, welcome rains, making up for the paucity of the late wet season; and when the showers slacken, I can hear my stream roaring in the hollow, and tell myself that the cacaos are drinking deep. I am desperately hunted to finish my Samoa book before the mail goes; this last chapter is equally delicate and necessary. The prayers of the congregation are requested. Eheu! and it will be ended before this letter leaves and printed in the States ere you can read this scribble. The first dinner gong has sounded; _je vous salue, monsieur et cher confrère. Tofa, soifua!_ Sleep! long life! as our Samoan salutation of farewell runs. _Friday, May_ 13_th._--Well, the last chapter, by far the most difficult and ungrateful, is well under way, I have been from six to seven hours upon it daily since I last wrote; and that is all I have done forbye working at Samoan rather hard, and going down on Wednesday evening to the club. I make some progress now at the language; I am teaching Belle, which clears and exercises myself. I am particularly taken with the _finesse_ of the pronouns. The pronouns are all dual and plural, and the first person, both in the dual and plural, has a special exclusive and inclusive form. You can conceive what fine effects of precision and distinction can be reached in certain cases. Take Ruth, i. _vv._ 8 to 13, and imagine how those pronouns come in; it is exquisitely elegant, and makes the mouth of the _littérateur_ to water. I am going to exercitate my pupil over those verses to-day for pronoun practice. _Tuesday._--Yesterday came yours. Well, well, if the dears prefer a week, why, I'll give them ten days, but the real document, from which I have scarcely varied, ran for one night.[43] I think you seem scarcely fair to Wiltshire, who had surely, under his beast-ignorant ways, right noble qualities. And I think perhaps you scarce do justice to the fact that this is a place of realism _à outrance_; nothing extenuated or coloured. Looked at so, is it not, with all its tragic features, wonderfully idyllic, with great beauty of scene and circumstance? And will you please to observe that almost all that is ugly is in the whites? I'll apologise for Papa Randal if you like; but if I told you the whole truth--for I did extenuate there!--and he seemed to me essential as a figure, and essential as a pawn in the game, Wiltshire's disgust for him being one of the small, efficient motives in the story. Now it would have taken a fairish dose to disgust Wiltshire.--Again, the idea of publishing the _Beach_ substantively is dropped--at once, both on account of expostulation, and because it measured shorter than I had expected. And it was only taken up, when the proposed volume, _Beach de Mar_, petered out. It petered out thus: the chief of the short stories got sucked into _Sophia Scarlet_--and _Sophia_ is a book I am much taken with, and mean to get to, as soon as--but not before--I have done _David Balfour_ and _The Young Chevalier_. So you see you are like to hear no more of the Pacific or the nineteenth century for a while. _The Young Chevalier_ is a story of sentiment and passion, which I mean to write a little differently from what I have been doing--if I can hit the key; rather more of a sentimental tremolo to it. It may thus help to prepare me for _Sophia_, which is to contain three ladies, and a kind of a love affair between the heroine and a dying planter who is a poet! large orders for R. L. S. O the German taboo is quite over; no soul attempts to support the C. J. or the President, they are past hope; the whites have just refused their taxes--I mean the council has refused to call for them, and if the council consented, nobody would pay; 'tis a farce, and the curtain is going to fall briefly. Consequently in my History, I say as little as may be of the two dwindling stars. Poor devils! I liked the one, and the other has a little wife, now lying in! There was no man born with so little animosity as I. When I heard the C. J. was in low spirits and never left his house, I could scarce refrain from going to him. It was a fine feeling to have finished the History; there ought to be a future state to reward that grind! It's not literature, you know; only journalism, and pedantic journalism. I had but the one desire, to get the thing as right as might be, and avoid false concords--even if that! And it was more than there was time for. However, there it is: done. And if Samoa turns up again, my book has to be counted with, being the only narrative extant. Milton and I--if you kindly excuse the juxtaposition--harnessed ourselves to strange waggons, and I at least will be found to have plodded very soberly with my load. There is not even a good sentence in it, but perhaps--I don't know--it may be found an honest, clear volume. _Wednesday._--Never got a word set down, and continues on Thursday, 19th May, his own marriage day as ever was. News; yes. The C. J. came up to call on us! After five months' cessation on my side, and a decidedly painful interchange of letters, I could not go down--_could_ not--to see him. My three ladies received him, however; he was very agreeable as usual, but refused wine, beer, water, lemonade, chocolate, and at last a cigarette. Then my wife asked him, "So you refuse to break bread?" and he waved his hands amiably in answer. All my three ladies received the same impression that he had serious matters in his mind: now we hear he is quite cock-a-hoop since the mail came, and going about as before his troubles darkened. But what did he want with me? 'Tis thought he had received a despatch--and that he misreads it (so we fully believe) to the effect that they are to have war ships at command and can make their little war after all. If it be so, and they do it, it will be the meanest wanton slaughter of poor men for the salaries of two white failures. But what was his errand with me? Perhaps to warn me that unless I behave he now hopes to be able to pack me off in the _Curaçoa_ when she comes. I have celebrated my holiday from _Samoa_ by a plunge at the beginning of _The Young Chevalier_. I am afraid my touch is a little broad in a love story; I can't mean one thing and write another. As for women, I am no more in any fear of them; I can do a sort all right; age makes me less afraid of a petticoat, but I am a little in fear of grossness. However, this David Balfour's love affair, that's all right--might be read out to a mother's meeting--or a daughters' meeting. The difficulty in a love yarn, which dwells at all on love, is the dwelling on one string; it is manifold, I grant, but the root fact is there unchanged, and the sentiment being very intense, and already very much handled in letters, positively calls for a little pawing and gracing. With a writer of my prosaic literalness and pertinency of point of view, this all shoves toward grossness--positively even toward the far more damnable _closeness_. This has kept me off the sentiment hitherto, and now I am to try: Lord! Of course Meredith can do it, and so could Shakespeare; but with all my romance, I am a realist and a prosaist, and a most fanatical lover of plain physical sensations plainly and expressly rendered; hence my perils. To do love in the same spirit as I did (for instance) D. Balfour's fatigue in the heather; my dear sir, there were grossness--ready made! And hence, how to sugar? However, I have nearly done with Marie-Madeleine, and am in good hopes of Marie-Salomé, the real heroine; the other is only a prologuial heroine to introduce the hero. _Friday._--Anyway, the first prologuial episode is done, and Fanny likes it. There are only four characters: Francis Blair of Balmile (Jacobite Lord Gladsmuir) my hero; the Master of Ballantrae; Paradou, a wine-seller of Avignon; Marie-Madeleine his wife. These two last I am now done with, and I think they are successful, and I hope I have Balmile on his feet; and the style seems to be found. It is a little charged and violent; sins on the side of violence; but I think will carry the tale. I think it is a good idea so to introduce my hero, being made love to by an episodic woman. This queer tale--I mean queer for me--has taken a great hold upon me. Where the devil shall I go next? This is simply the tale of a _coup de tête_ of a young man and a young woman; with a nearly, perhaps a wholly, tragic sequel, which I desire to make thinkable right through, and sensible; to make the reader, as far as I shall be able, eat and drink and breathe it. Marie-Salomé des Saintes-Maries is, I think, the heroine's name; she has got to _be_ yet: _sursum corda_! So has the young Chevalier, whom I have not yet touched, and who comes next in order. Characters: Balmile, or Lord Gladsmuir, _comme vous voulez_; Prince Charlie; Earl Marischal; Master of Ballantrae; and a spy, and Dr. Archie Campbell, and a few nondescripts; then, of women, Marie-Salomé and Flora Blair; seven at the outside; really four full lengths, and I suppose a half-dozen episodic profiles. How I must bore you with these ineptitudes! Have patience. I am going to bed; it is (of all hours) eleven. I have been forced in (since I began to write to you) to blatter to Fanny on the subject of my heroine, there being two _cruces_ as to her life and history: how came she alone? and how far did she go with the Chevalier? The second must answer itself when I get near enough to see. The first is a back-breaker. Yet I know there are many reasons why a _fille de famille_, romantic, adventurous, ambitious, innocent of the world, might run from her home in these days; might she not have been threatened with a convent? might there not be some Huguenot business mixed in? Here am I, far from books; if you can help me with a suggestion, I shall say God bless you. She has to be new run away from a strict family, well-justified in her own wild but honest eyes, and meeting these three men, Charles Edward, Marischal, and Balmile, through the accident of a fire at an inn. She must not run from a marriage, I think; it would bring her in the wrong frame of mind. Once I can get her, _sola_, on the highway, all were well with my narrative. Perpend. And help if you can. Lafaele, long (I hope) familiar to you, has this day received the visit of his _son_ from Tonga; and the _son_ proves to be a very pretty, attractive young daughter! I gave all the boys kava in honour of her arrival; along with a lean, side-whiskered Tongan, dimly supposed to be Lafaele's step-father; and they have been having a good time; in the end of my verandah, I hear Simi, my present incapable steward, talking Tongan with the nondescript papa. Simi, our out-door boy, burst a succession of blood-vessels over our work, and I had to make a position for the wreck of one of the noblest figures of a man I ever saw. I believe I may have mentioned the other day how I had to put my horse to the trot, the canter and (at last) the gallop to run him down. In a photograph I hope to send you (perhaps with this) you will see Simi standing in the verandah in profile. As a steward, one of his chief points is to break crystal; he is great on fracture--what do I say?--explosion! He cleans a glass, and the shards scatter like a comet's bowels. _N.B._--If I should by any chance be deported, the first of the rules hung up for that occasion is to communicate with you by telegraph.--Mind, I do not fear it, but it _is_ possible. _Monday, 25th._--We have had a devil of a morning of upset and bustle; the bronze candlestick Faauma has returned to the family, in time to take her position of step-mamma, and it is pretty to see how the child is at once at home, and all her terrors ended. _27th. Mail day._--And I don't know that I have much to report. I may have to leave for Malie as soon as these mail packets are made up. 'Tis a necessity (if it be one) I rather deplore. I think I should have liked to lazy; but I dare say all it means is the delay of a day or so in harking back to David Balfour; that respectable youth chides at being left (where he is now) in Glasgow with the Lord Advocate, and after five years in the British Linen, who shall blame him? I was all forenoon yesterday down in Apia, dictating, and Lloyd typewriting, the conclusion of _Samoa_; and then at home correcting till the dinner bell; and in the evening again till eleven of the clock. This morning I have made up most of my packets, and I think my mail is all ready but two more, and the tag of this. I would never deny (as D. B. might say) that I was rather tired of it. But I have a damned good dose of the devil in my pipe-stem atomy; I have had my little holiday outing in my kick at _The Young Chevalier_, and I guess I can settle to _David Balfour_ to-morrow or Friday like a little man. I wonder if any one had ever more energy upon so little strength?--I know there is a frost; the Samoa book can only increase that--I can't help it, that book is not written for me but for Miss Manners; but I mean to break that frost inside two years, and pull off a big success, and Vanity whispers in my ear that I have the strength. If I haven't, whistle ower the lave o't! I can do without glory and perhaps the time is not far off when I can do without coin. It is a time coming soon enough, anyway; and I have endured some two and forty years without public shame, and had a good time as I did it. If only I could secure a violent death, what a fine success! I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse--ay, to be hanged, rather than pass again through that slow dissolution. I fancy this gloomy ramble is caused by a twinge of age; I put on an under-shirt yesterday (it was the only one I could find) that barely came under my trousers; and just below it, a fine healthy rheumatism has now settled like a fire in my hip. From such small causes do these valuable considerations flow! I shall now say adieu, dear Sir, having ten rugged miles before me and the horrors of a native feast and parliament without an interpreter, for to-day I go alone.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Describing a family expedition to visit Mataafa at Malie. _[Vailima] Sunday, 29th May [1892]._ How am I to overtake events? On Wednesday, as soon as my mail was finished, I had a wild whirl to look forward to. Immediately after dinner, Belle, Lloyd, and I set out on horseback, they to the club, I to Haggard's, thence to the hotel, where I had supper ready for them. All next day we hung round Apia with our whole house-crowd in Sunday array, hoping for the mail steamer with a menagerie on board. No such luck; the ship delayed; and at last, about three, I had to send them home again, a failure of a day's pleasuring that does not bear to be discussed. Lloyd was so sickened that he returned the same night to Vailima, Belle and I held on, sat most of the evening on the hotel verandah stricken silly with fatigue and disappointment, and genuine sorrow for our poor boys and girls, and got to bed with rather dismal appreciations of the morrow. These were more than justified, and yet I never had a jollier day than Friday 27th. By 7.30 Belle and I had breakfast; we had scarce done before my mother was at the door on horseback, and a boy at her heels to take her not very dashing charger home again. By 8.10 we were all on the landing pier, and it was 9.20 before we had got away in a boat with two inches of green wood on the keel of her, no rudder, no mast, no sail, no boat flag, two defective rowlocks, two wretched apologies for oars, and two boys--one a Tongan half-caste, one a white lad, son of the Tonga schoolmaster, and a sailor lad--to pull us. All this was our first taste of the tender mercies of Taylor (the sesquipedalian half-caste introduced two letters back, I believe). We had scarce got round Mulinuu when Salé Taylor's heart misgave him; he thought we had missed the tide; called a halt, and set off ashore to find canoes. Two were found; in one my mother and I were embarked with the two biscuit tins (my present to the feast), and the bag with our dry clothes, on which my mother was perched--and her cap was on the top of it--feminine hearts please sympathise; all under the guidance of Salé. In the other Belle and our guest; Tauilo, a chief-woman, the mother of my cook, were to have followed. And the boys were to have been left with the boat. But Tauilo refused. And the four, Belle, Tauilo, Frank the sailor-boy, and Jimmie the Tongan half-caste, set off in the boat across that rapidly shoaling bay of the lagoon. How long the next scene lasted, I could never tell. Salé was always trying to steal away with our canoe and leave the other four, probably for six hours, in an empty, leaky boat, without so much as an orange or a cocoanut on board, and under the direct rays of the sun. I had at last to stop him by taking the spare paddle off the outrigger and sticking it in the ground--depth, perhaps two feet--width of the bay, say three miles. At last I bid him land me and my mother and go back for the other ladies. "The coast is so rugged," said Salé.--"What?" I said, "all these villages and no landing-place?"--"Such is the nature of Samoans," said he. Well, I'll find a landing-place, I thought; and presently I said, "Now we are going to land there."--"We can but try," said the bland Salé, with resignation. Never saw a better landing-place in my life. Here the boat joined us. My mother and Salé continued in the canoe alone, and Belle and I and Tauilo set off on foot for Malie. Tauilo was about the size of both of us put together and a piece over; she used us like a nurse with children. I had started barefoot; Belle had soon to pull off her gala shoes and stockings; the mud was as deep as to our knees, and so slippery that (moving, as we did, in Indian file, between dense scratching tufts of sensitive) Belle and I had to take hands to support each other, and Tauilo was steadying Belle from the rear. You can conceive we were got up to kill, Belle in an embroidered white dress and white hat, I in a suit of Bedford cords hot from the Sydney tailors; and conceive us, below, ink-black to the knees with adhesive clay, and above, streaming with heat. I suppose it was better than three miles, but at last we made the end of Malie. I asked if we could find no water to wash our feet; and our nursemaid guided us to a pool. We sat down on the pool side, and our nursemaid washed our feet and legs for us--ladies first, I suppose out of a sudden respect to the insane European fancies: such a luxury as you can scarce imagine. I felt a new man after it. But before we got to the King's house we were sadly muddied once more. It was 1 P.M. when we arrived, the canoe having beaten us by about five minutes, so we made fair time over our bog-holes. But the war dances were over, and we came in time to see only the tail end (some two hours) of the food presentation. In Mataafa's house three chairs were set for us covered with fine mats. Of course, a native house without the blinds down is like a verandah. All the green in front was surrounded with sheds, some of flapping canvas, some of green palm boughs, where (in three sides of a huge oblong) the natives sat by villages in a fine glow of many-hued array. There were folks in tapa, and folks in patchwork; there was every colour of the rainbow in a spot or a cluster; there were men with their heads gilded with powdered sandal-wood, others with heads all purple, stuck full of the petals of a flower. In the midst there was a growing field of outspread food, gradually covering acres; the gifts were brought in, now by chanting deputations, now by carriers in a file; they were brandished aloft and reclaimed over, with polite sacramental exaggerations, by the official receiver. He, a stalwart, well-oiled quadragenarian, shone with sweat from his exertions, brandishing cooked pigs. At intervals, from one of the squatted villages, an orator would arise. The field was almost beyond the reach of any human speaking voice; the proceedings besides continued in the midst; yet it was possible to catch snatches of this elaborate and cut-and-dry oratory--it was possible for me, for instance, to catch the description of my gift and myself as the _alii Tusitala, O le alii o malo tetele_--the chief Write Information, the chief of the great Governments. Gay designation? In the house, in our three curule chairs, we sat and looked on. On our left a little group of the family. In front of us, at our feet, an ancient Talking-man, crowned with green leaves, his profile almost exactly Dante's; Popo his name. He had worshipped idols in his youth; he had been full grown before the first missionary came hither from Tahiti; this makes him over eighty. Near by him sat his son and colleague. In the group on our left, his little grandchild sat with her legs crossed and her hands turned, the model already (at some three years old) of Samoan etiquette. Still further off to our right, Mataafa sat on the ground through all the business; and still I saw his lips moving, and the beads of his rosary slip stealthily through his hand. We had kava, and the King's drinking was hailed by the Popos (father and son) with a singular ululation, perfectly new to my ears; it means, to the expert, "Long live Tuiatua"; to the inexpert, is a mere voice of barbarous wolves. We had dinner, retired a bit behind the central pillar of the house; and, when the King was done eating, the ululation was repeated. I had my eyes on Mataafa's face, and I saw pride and gratified ambition spring to life there and be instantly sucked in again. It was the first time, since the difference with Laupepa, that Popo and his son had openly joined him, and given him the due cry as Tuiatua--one of the eight royal names of the islands, as I hope you will know before this reaches you. Not long after we had dined, the food-bringing was over. The gifts (carefully noted and tallied as they came in) were now announced by a humorous orator, who convulsed the audience, introducing singing notes, now on the name of the article, now on the number; six thousand odd heads of taro, three hundred and nineteen cooked pigs; and one thing that particularly caught me (by good luck), a single turtle "for the king"--_le tasi mo le tupu_. Then came one of the strangest sights I have yet witnessed. The two most important persons there (bar Mataafa) were Popo and his son. They rose, holding their long shod rods of talking men, passed forth from the house, broke into a strange dance, the father capering with outstretched arms and rod, the son crouching and gambolling beside him in a manner indescribable, and presently began to extend the circle of this dance among the acres of cooked food. _Whatever they leaped over, whatever they called for, became theirs._ To see mediæval Dante thus demean himself struck a kind of a chill of incongruity into our Philistine souls; but even in a great part of the Samoan concourse, these antique and (I understand) quite local manners awoke laughter. One of my biscuit tins and a live calf were among the spoils he claimed, but the large majority of the cooked food (having once proved his dignity) he re-presented to the king. Then came the turn of _le alii Tusitala_. He would not dance, but he was given--five live hens, four gourds of oil, four fine tapas, a hundred heads of taro, two cooked pigs, a cooked shark, two or three cocoanut branches strung with kava, and the turtle, who soon after breathed his last, I believe, from sunstroke. It was a royal present for "the chief of the great powers." I should say the gifts were, on the proper signal, dragged out of the field of food by a troop of young men, all with their lava-lavas kilted almost into a loin-cloth. The art is to swoop on the food-field, pick up with unerring swiftness the right things and quantities, swoop forth again on the open, and separate, leaving the gifts in a new pile: so you may see a covey of birds in a corn-field. This reminds me of a very inhumane but beautiful passage I had forgotten in its place. The gift-giving was still in full swing, when there came a troop of some ninety men all in tapa lava-lavas of a purplish colour; they paused, and of a sudden there went up from them high into the air a flight of live chickens, which, as they came down again, were sent again into the air, for perhaps a minute, from the midst of a singular turmoil of flying arms and shouting voices; I assure you, it was very beautiful to see, but how many chickens were killed? No sooner was my food set out than I was to be going. I had a little serious talk with Mataafa on the floor, and we went down to the boat, where we got our food aboard, such a cargo--like the Swiss Family Robinson, we said. However, a squall began, Tauilo refused to let us go, and we came back to the house for half an hour or so, when my ladies distinguished themselves by walking through a Fono (council), my mother actually taking up a position between Mataafa and Popo! It was about five when we started--turtle, pigs, taro, etc., my mother, Belle, myself, Tauilo, a portly friend of hers with the voice of an angel, and a pronunciation so delicate and true that you could follow Samoan as she sang, and the two tired boys Frank and Jimmie, with the two bad oars and the two slippery rowlocks to impel the whole. Salé Taylor took the canoe and a strong Samoan to paddle him. Presently after he went inshore, and passed us a little after, with his arms folded, and _two_ strong Samoans impelling him Apia-ward. This was too much for Belle, who hailed, taunted him, and made him return to the boat with one of the Samoans, setting Jimmie instead in the canoe. Then began our torment, Salé and the Samoan took the oars, sat on the same thwart (where they could get no swing on the boat had they tried), and deliberately ladled at the lagoon. We lay enchanted. Night fell; there was a light visible on shore; it did not move. The two women sang, Belle joining them in the hymns she has learned at family worship. Then a squall came up; we sat a while in roaring midnight under rivers of rain, and, when it blew by, there was the light again, immovable. A second squall followed, one of the worst I was ever out in; we could scarce catch our breath in the cold, dashing deluge. When it went, we were so cold that the water in the bottom of the boat (which I was then baling) seemed like a warm footbath in comparison, and Belle and I, who were still barefoot, were quite restored by laving in it. All this time I had kept my temper, and refrained as far as might be from any interference, for I saw (in our friend's mulish humour) he always contrived to twist it to our disadvantage. But now came the acute point. Young Frank now took an oar. He was a little fellow, near as frail as myself, and very short; if he weighed nine stone, it was the outside; but his blood was up. He took stroke, moved the big Samoan forward to bow, and set to work to pull him round in fine style. Instantly, a kind of race competition--almost race hatred--sprang up. We jeered the Samoan. Salé declared it was the trim of the boat; "if this lady was aft" (Tauilo's portly friend) "he would row round Frank." We insisted on her coming aft, and Frank still rowed round the Samoan. When the Samoan caught a crab (the thing was continual with these wretched oars and rowlocks), _we_ shouted and jeered; when Frank caught one, Salé and the Samoan jeered and yelled. But anyway the boat moved, and presently we got up with Mulinuu, where I finally lost my temper, when I found that Salé proposed to go ashore and make a visit--in fact, we all three did. It is not worth while going into, but I must give you one snatch of the subsequent conversation as we pulled round Apia bay. "This Samoan," said Salé, "received seven German bullets in the field of Fangalii." "I am delighted to hear it," said Belle. "His brother was killed there," pursued Salé; and Belle, prompt as an echo, "Then there are no more of the family? how delightful!" Salé was sufficiently surprised to change the subject; he began to praise Frank's rowing with insufferable condescension: "But it is after all not to be wondered at," said he, "because he has been for some time a sailor. My good man, is it three or five years that you have been to sea?" And Frank, in a defiant shout: "Two!" Whereupon, so high did the ill-feeling run, that we three clapped and applauded and shouted, so that the President (whose house we were then passing) doubtless started at the sounds. It was nine when we got to the hotel; at first no food was to be found, but we skirmished up some bread and cheese and beer and brandy; and (having changed our wet clothes for the rather less wet in our bags) supped on the verandah. On Saturday, 28th, I was wakened about 6.30, long past my usual hour, by a benevolent passer-by. My turtle lay on the verandah at my door, and the man woke me to tell me it was dead, as it had been when we put it on board the day before. All morning I ran the gauntlet of men and women coming up to me: "Mr. Stevenson, your turtle is dead." I gave half of it to the hotel keeper, so that his cook should cut it up; and we got a damaged shell, and two splendid meals, beefsteak one day and soup the next. The horses came for us about 9.30. It was waterspouting; we were drenched before we got out of the town; the road was a fine going Highland trout stream; it thundered deep and frequent, and my mother's horse would not better on a walk. At last she took pity on us, and very nobly proposed that Belle and I should ride ahead. We were mighty glad to do so, for we were cold. Presently, I said I should ride back for my mother, but it thundered again; Belle is afraid of thunder, and I decided to see her through the forest before I returned for my other hen--I may say, my other wet hen. About the middle of the wood, where it is roughest and steepest, we met three pack-horses with barrels of lime-juice. I piloted Belle past these--it is not very easy in such a road--and then passed them again myself, to pilot my mother. This effected, it began to thunder again, so I rode on hard after Belle. When I caught up with her, she was singing Samoan hymns to support her terrors! We were all back, changed, and at table by lunch time, 11 A.M. Nor have any of us been the worse for it sin-syne. That is pretty good for a woman of my mother's age and an invalid of my standing; above all, as Tauilo was laid up with a bad cold, probably increased by rage. _Friday, 3rd June._--On Wednesday the club could not be held, and I must ride down town and to and fro all afternoon delivering messages, then dined and rode up by the young moon. I had plenty news when I got back; there is great talk in town of my deportation: it is thought they have written home to Downing Street requesting my removal, which leaves me not much alarmed; what I do rather expect is that H. J. Moors and I may be haled up before the C. J. to stand a trial for _lèse_-majesty. Well, we'll try and live it through. The rest of my history since Monday has been unadulterated _David Balfour_. In season and out of season, night and day, David and his innocent harem--let me be just, he never has more than the two--are on my mind. Think of David Balfour with a pair of fair ladies--very nice ones too--hanging round him. I really believe David is as good a character as anybody has a right to ask for in a novel. I have finished drafting Chapter XX. to-day, and feel it all ready to froth when the spigot is turned. O, I forgot--and do forget. What did I mean? A waft of cloud has fallen on my mind, and I will write no more. _Wednesday, I believe, 8th June._--Lots of David, and lots of David, and the devil any other news. Yesterday we were startled by great guns firing a salute, and to-day Whitmee (missionary) rode up to lunch, and we learned it was the _Curaçoa_ come in, the ship (according to rumour) in which I was to be deported. I went down to meet my fate, and the captain is to dine with me Saturday, so I guess I am not going this voyage. Even with the particularity with which I write to you, how much of my life goes unexpressed; my troubles with a madman by the name of ----, a genuine living lunatic, I believe, and jolly dangerous; my troubles about poor ----, all these have dropped out; yet for moments they were very instant, and one of them is always present with me. I have finished copying Chapter XXI. of David--"_solus cum sola_; we travel together." Chapter XXII., "_Solus cum sola_; we keep house together," is already drafted. To the end of XXI. makes more than 150 pages of my manuscript--damn this hair--and I only designed the book to run to about 200; but when you introduce the female sect, a book does run away with you. I am very curious to see what you will think of my two girls. My own opinion is quite clear; I am in love with both. I foresee a few pleasant years of spiritual flirtations. The creator (if I may name myself, for the sake of argument, by such a name) is essentially unfaithful. For the duration of the two chapters in which I dealt with Miss Grant, I totally forgot my heroine, and even--but this is a flat secret--tried to win away David. I think I must try some day to marry Miss Grant. I'm blest if I don't think I've got that hair out! which seems triumph enough; so I conclude. _Tuesday._--Your infinitesimal correspondence has reached me, and I have the honour to refer to it with scorn. It contains only one statement of conceivable interest, that your health is better; the rest is null, and so far as disquisitory unsound. I am all right, but David Balfour is ailing; this came from my visit to the man-of-war, where I had a cup of tea, and the most of that night walked the verandah with extraordinary convictions of guilt and ruin, many of which (but not all) proved to have fled with the day, taking David along with them; he R.I.P. in Chapter XXII. On Saturday I went down to the town, and fetched up Captain Gibson to dinner; Sunday I was all day at Samoa, and had a pile of visitors. Yesterday got my mail, including your despicable sheet; was fooled with a visit from the high chief Asi, went down at 4 P.M. to my Samoan lesson from Whitmee--I think I shall learn from him, he does not fool me with cockshot rules that are demolished next day, but professes ignorance like a man; the truth is, the grammar has still to be expiscated--dined with Haggard, and got home about nine. _Wednesday._--The excellent Clarke up here almost all day yesterday, a man I esteem and like to the soles of his boots; I prefer him to any one in Samoa, and to most people in the world; a real good missionary, with the inestimable advantage of having grown up a layman. Pity they all can't get that! It recalls my old proposal, which delighted Lady Taylor so much, that every divinity student should be thirty years old at least before he was admitted. Boys switched out of college into a pulpit, what chance have they? That any should do well amazes me, and the most are just what was to be expected. _Saturday._--I must tell you of our feast. It was long promised to the boys, and came off yesterday in one of their new houses. My good Simelé arrived from Savaii that morning asking for political advice; then we had Tauilo; Elena's father, a talking man of Tauilo's family; Talolo's cousin; and a boy of Simelé's family, who attended on his dignity; then Metu, the meat-man--you have never heard of him, but he is a great person in our household--brought a lady and a boy--and there was another infant--eight guests in all. And we sat down thirty strong. You should have seen our procession, going (about two o'clock), all in our best clothes, to the hall of feasting! All in our Sunday's best. The new house had been hurriedly finished; the rafters decorated with flowers; the floor spread, native style, with green leaves; we had given a big porker, twenty-five pounds of fresh beef, a tin of biscuit, cocoanuts, etc. Our places were all arranged with much care; the native ladies of the house facing our party; the sides filled up by the men; the guests, please observe: the two chief people, male and female, were placed with our family, the rest between S. and the native ladies. After the feast was over, we had kava, and the calling of the kava was a very elaborate affair, and I thought had like to have made Simelé very angry; he is really a considerable chief, but he and Tauilo were not called till after all our family, _and the guests_, I suppose the principle being that he was still regarded as one of the household. I forgot to say that our black boy did not turn up when the feast was ready. Off went the two cooks, found him, decorated him with huge red hibiscus flowers--he was in a very dirty undershirt--brought him back between them like a reluctant maid, and thrust him into a place between Faauma and Elena, where he was petted and ministered to. When his turn came in the kava drinking--and you may be sure, in their contemptuous, affectionate kindness for him, as for a good dog, it came rather earlier than it ought--he was cried under a new name. _Aleki_ is what they make of his own name Arrick; but instead of {the cup of / "le ipu a} Aleki!" it was called "le ipu a _Vailima_," and it was explained that he had "taken his chief-name"! a jest at which the plantation still laughs. Kava done, I made a little speech, Henry translating. If I had been well, I should have alluded to all, but I was scarce able to sit up; so only alluded to my guest of all this month, the Tongan, Tomas, and to Simelé, partly for the jest of making him translate compliments to himself. The talking man replied with many handsome compliments to me, in the usual flood of Samoan fluent neatness; and we left them to an afternoon of singing and dancing. Must stop now, as my right hand is very bad again. I am trying to write with my left. _Sunday._--About half-past eight last night, I had gone to my own room, Fanny and Lloyd were in Fanny's, every one else in bed, only two boys on the premises--the two little brown boys Mitaiele (Michael), age I suppose 11 or 12, and the new steward, a Wallis islander, speaking no English and about fifty words of Samoan, recently promoted from the bush work, and a most good, anxious, timid lad of 15 or 16--looks like 17 or 18, of course--they grow fast here. In comes Mitaiele to Lloyd, and told some rigmarole about Paatalise (the steward's name) wanting to go and see his family in the bush.--"But he has no family in the bush," said Lloyd. "No," said Mitaiele. They went to the boy's bed (they sleep in the walled-in compartment of the verandah, once my dressing-room) and called at once for me. He lay like one asleep, talking in drowsy tones but without excitement, and at times "cheeping" like a frightened mouse; he was quite cool to the touch, and his pulse not fast; his breathing seemed wholly ventral; the bust still, the belly moving strongly. Presently he got from his bed, and ran for the door, with his head down not three feet from the floor and his body all on a stretch forward, like a striking snake: I say "ran," but this strange movement was not swift. Lloyd and I mastered him and got him back in bed. Soon there was another and more desperate attempt to escape, in which Lloyd had his ring broken. Then we bound him to the bed humanely with sheets, ropes, boards, and pillows. He lay there and sometimes talked, sometimes whispered, sometimes wept like an angry child; his principal word was "Faamolemole"--"Please"--and he kept telling us at intervals that his family were calling him. During this interval, by the special grace of God, my boys came home; we had already called in Arrick, the black boy; now we had that Hercules, Lafaele, and a man Savea, who comes from Paatalise's own island and can alone communicate with him freely. Lloyd went to bed, I took the first watch, and sat in my room reading, while Lafaele and Arrick watched the madman. Suddenly Arrick called me; I ran into the verandah; there was Paatalise free of all his bonds and Lafaele holding him. To tell what followed is impossible. We were five people at him--Lafaele and Savea, very strong men, Lloyd, I and Arrick, and the struggle lasted until 1 A.M. before we had him bound. One detail for a specimen: Lloyd and I had charge of one leg, we were both sitting on it and lo! we were both tossed into the air--I, I dare say, a couple of feet. At last we had him spread-eagled to the iron bedstead, by his wrists and ankles, with matted rope; a most inhumane business, but what could we do? it was all we could do to manage it even so. The strength of the paroxysms had been steadily increasing, and we trembled for the next. And now I come to pure Rider Haggard. Lafaele announced that the boy was very bad, and he would get "some medicine" which was a family secret of his own. Some leaves were brought mysteriously in; chewed, placed on the boy's eyes, dropped in his ears (see _Hamlet_) and stuck up his nostrils; as he did this, the weird doctor partly smothered the patient with his hand; and by about 2 A.M. he was in a deep sleep, and from that time he showed no symptom of dementia whatever. The medicine (says Lafaele) is principally used for the wholesale slaughter of families; he himself feared last night that his dose was fatal; only one other person, on this island, knows the secret; and she, Lafaele darkly whispers, has abused it. This remarkable tree we must try to identify. The man-of-war doctor came up to-day, gave us a strait-waistcoat, taught us to bandage, examined the boy and saw he was apparently well--he insisted on doing his work all morning, poor lad, and when he first came down kissed all the family at breakfast! The doctor was greatly excited, as may be supposed, about Lafaele's medicine. _Tuesday._--All yesterday writing my mail by the hand of Belle, to save my wrist. This is a great invention, to which I shall stick, if it can be managed. We had some alarm about Paatalise, but he slept well all night for a benediction. This lunatic asylum exercise has no attractions for any of us. I don't know if I remembered to say how much pleased I was with _Across the Plains_ in every way, inside and out, and you and me. The critics seem to taste it, too, as well as could be hoped, and I believe it will continue to bring me in a few shillings a year for a while. But such books pay only indirectly. To understand the full horror of the mad scene, and how well my boys behaved, remember that they _believed P.'s ravings_, they _knew_ that his dead family, thirty strong, crowded the front verandah and called on him to come to the other world. They _knew_ that his dead brother had met him that afternoon in the bush and struck him on both temples. And remember! we are fighting the dead, and they had to go out again in the black night, which is the dead man's empire. Yet last evening, when I thought P. was going to repeat the performance, I sent down for Lafaele, who had leave of absence, and he and his wife came up about eight o'clock with a lighted brand. These are the things for which I have to forgive my old cattle-man his manifold shortcomings; they are heroic--so are the shortcomings, to be sure. It came over me the other day suddenly that this diary of mine to you would make good pickings after I am dead, and a man could make some kind of a book out of it without much trouble. So, for God's sake, don't lose them, and they will prove a piece of provision for my "poor old family," as Simelé calls it. About my coming to Europe, I get more and more doubtful, and rather incline to Ceylon again as place of meeting. I am so absurdly well here in the tropics, that it seems like affectation. Yet remember I have never once stood Sydney. Anyway, I shall have the money for it all ahead, before I think of such a thing. We had a bowl of punch on your birthday, which my incredible mother somehow knew and remembered. By the time you receive this, my Samoan book will I suppose be out and the worst known. If I am burned in effigy for it no more need be said; if on the other hand I get off cheap with the authorities, this is to say that, supposing a vacancy to occur, I would condescend to accept the office of H.B.M.'s consul with parts, pendicles and appurtenances. There is a very little work to do except some little entertaining, to which I am bound to say my family and in particular the amanuensis who now guides the pen look forward with delight; I with manly resignation. The real reasons for the step would be three: 1st, possibility of being able to do some good, or at least certainty of not being obliged to stand always looking on helplessly at what is bad: 2nd, larks for the family: 3rd, and perhaps not altogether least, a house in town and a boat and a boat's crew.[44] But I find I have left out another reason: 4th, growing desire on the part of the old man virulent for anything in the nature of a salary--years seem to invest that idea with new beauty. I sometimes sit and yearn for anything in the nature of an income that would come in--mine has all got to be gone and fished for with the immortal mind of man. What I want is the income that really comes in of itself while all you have to do is just to blossom and exist and sit on chairs. Think how beautiful it would be not to have to mind the critics, and not even the darkest of the crowd--Sidney Colvin. I should probably amuse myself with works that would make your hair curl, if you had any left. R. L. S. TO T. W. DOVER Stevenson's correspondent in this case is an artisan, who had been struck by the truth of a remark in his essay on _Beggars_ that it is only or mainly the poor who habitually give to the poor; and who wrote to ask whether it was from experience that Stevenson knew this. _Vailima Plantation, Upolu, Samoa, June 20th, 1892._ SIR,--In reply to your very interesting letter, I cannot fairly say that I have ever been poor, or known what it was to want a meal. I have been reduced, however, to a very small sum of money, with no apparent prospect of increasing it; and at that time I reduced myself to practically one meal a day, with the most disgusting consequences to my health. At this time I lodged in the house of a working-man, and associated much with others. At the same time, from my youth up, I have always been a good deal and rather intimately thrown among the working-classes, partly as a civil engineer in out-of-the-way places, partly from a strong and, I hope, not ill-favoured sentiment of curiosity. But the place where, perhaps, I was most struck with the fact upon which you comment was the house of a friend, who was exceedingly poor, in fact, I may say destitute, and who lived in the attic of a very tall house entirely inhabited by persons in varying stages of poverty. As he was also in ill-health, I made a habit of passing my afternoon with him, and when there it was my part to answer the door. The steady procession of people begging, and the expectant and confident manner in which they presented themselves, struck me more and more daily; and I could not but remember with surprise that though my father lived but a few streets away in a fine house, beggars scarce came to the door once a fortnight or a month. From that time forward I made it my business to inquire, and in the stories which I am very fond of hearing from all sorts and conditions of men, learned that in the time of their distress it was always from the poor they sought assistance, and almost always from the poor they got it. Trusting I have now satisfactorily answered your question, which I thank you for asking, I remain, with sincere compliments, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO E. L. BURLINGAME _Vailima, Summer 1892._ MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--First of all, _you have all the corrections on The Wrecker_. I found I had made what I meant and forgotten it, and was so careless as not to tell you. Second, of course, and by all means, charge corrections on the Samoa book to me; but there are not near so many as I feared. The Lord hath dealt bountifully with me, and I believe all my advisers were amazed to see how nearly correct I had got the truck, at least I was. With this you will receive the whole revise and a type-written copy of the last chapter. And the thing now is Speed, to catch a possible revision of the treaty. I believe Cassells are to bring it out, but Baxter knows, and the thing has to be crammed through _prestissimo, à la chasseur_. You mention the belated Barbeys; what about the equally belated Pineros? And I hope you will keep your bookshop alive to supplying me continuously with the _Saga Library_. I cannot get enough of _Sagas_; I wish there were nine thousand; talk about realism! All seems to flourish with you; I also prosper; none the less for being quit of that abhorred task, Samoa. I could give a supper party here were there any one to sup. Never was such a disagreeable task, but the thing had to be told.... There, I trust I am done with this cursed chapter of my career, bar the rotten eggs and broken bottles that may follow, of course. Pray remember, speed is now all that can be asked, hoped, or wished. I give up all hope of proofs, revises, proof of the map, or sic like; and you on your side will try to get it out as reasonably seemly as may be. Whole Samoa book herewith. Glory be to God.--Yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The following consists of scraps merely, taken from a letter almost entirely occupied with private family affairs. _[Vailima] Saturday, 2nd July 1892._ The character of my handwriting is explained, alas! by scrivener's cramp. This also explains how long I have let the paper lie plain. 1 P.M.--I was busy copying _David Balfour_ with my left hand--a most laborious task--Fanny was down at the native house superintending the floor, Lloyd down in Apia, and Belle in her own house cleaning, when I heard the latter calling on my name. I ran out on the verandah; and there on the lawn beheld my crazy boy with an axe in his hand and dressed out in green ferns, dancing. I ran downstairs and found all my house boys on the back verandah, watching him through the dining-room. I asked what it meant?--"Dance belong his place," they said.--"I think this no time to dance," said I. "Has he done his work?"--"No," they told me, "away bush all morning." But there they all stayed on the back verandah. I went on alone through the dining-room, and bade him stop. He did so, shouldered the axe, and began to walk away; but I called him back, walked up to him, and took the axe out of his unresisting hands. The boy is in all things so good, that I can scarce say I was afraid; only I felt it had to be stopped ere he could work himself up by dancing to some craziness. Our house boys protested they were not afraid; all I know is they were all watching him round the back door and did not follow me till I had the axe. As for the out boys, who were working with Fanny in the native house, they thought it a very bad business, and made no secret of their fears. _Wednesday, 6th._--I have no account to give of my stewardship these days, and there's a day more to account for than mere arithmetic would tell you. For we have had two Monday Fourths, to bring us at last on the right side of the meridian, having hitherto been an exception in the world and kept our private date. Business has filled my hours sans intermission. _Tuesday, 12th._--I am doing no work and my mind is in abeyance. Fanny and Belle are sewing-machining in the next room; I have been pulling down their hair, and Fanny has been kicking me, and now I am driven out. Austin I have been chasing about the verandah; now he has gone to his lessons, and I make believe to write to you in despair. But there is nothing in my mind; I swim in mere vacancy, my head is like a rotten nut; I shall soon have to begin to work again or I shall carry away some part of the machinery. I have got your insufficient letter, for which I scorn to thank you. I have had no review by Gosse, none by Birrell; another time, if I have a letter in the Times, you might send me the text as well; also please send me a cricket bat and a cake, and when I come home for the holidays, I should like to have a pony.--I am, sir, your obedient servant, JACOB TONSON. _P.S._--I am quite well; I hope you are quite well. The world is too much with us, and my mother bids me bind my hair and lace my bodice blue. TO CHARLES BAXTER _Vailima Plantation, Upolu, Samoan Islands, 18th July 1892._ MY DEAR CHARLES,-- ... I have been now for some time contending with powers and principalities, and I have never once seen one of my own letters to the Times. So when you see something in the papers that you think might interest the exiles of Upolu, do not think twice, out with your saxpence, and send it flying to Vailima. Of what you say of the past, eh, man, it was a queer time, and awful miserable, but there's no sense in denying it was awful fun. Do you mind the youth in highland garb and the tableful of coppers? Do you mind the SIGNAL of Waterloo Place?--Hey, how the blood stands to the heart at such a memory!--Hae ye the notes o't? Gie's them.--Gude's sake, man, gie's the notes o't; I mind ye made a tüne o't an' played it on your pinanny; gie's the notes. Dear Lord, that past. Glad to hear Henley's prospects are fair: his new volume is the work of a real poet. He is one of those who can make a noise of his own with words, and in whom experience strikes an individual note. There is perhaps no more genuine poet living, bar the Big Guns. In case I cannot overtake an acknowledgment to himself by this mail, please let him hear of my pleasure and admiration. How poorly Kipling compares! He is all smart journalism and cleverness: it is all bright and shallow and limpid, like a business paper--a good one, _s'entend_; but there is no blot of heart's blood and the Old Night: there are no harmonics, there is scarce harmony to his music; and in Henley--all of these; a touch, a sense within sense, a sound outside the sound, the shadow of the inscrutable, eloquent beyond all definition. The First London Voluntary knocked me wholly.--Ever yours affectionately, my dear Charles, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Kind memories to your father and all friends. TO W. E. HENLEY _Vailima Plantation, Upolu, Samoa, August 1st, 1892._ MY DEAR HENLEY,--It is impossible to let your new volume pass in silence. I have not received the same thrill of poetry since G. M.'s _Joy of Earth_ volume and _Love in a Valley_; and I do not know that even that was so intimate and deep. Again and again, I take the book down, and read, and my blood is fired as it used to be in youth. _Andante con moto_ in the _Voluntaries_, and the thing about the trees at night (No. XXIV. I think) are up to date my favourites. I did not guess you were so great a magician; these are new tunes, this is an undertone of the true Apollo; these are not verse, they are poetry--inventions, creations, in language. I thank you for the joy you have given me, and remain your old friend and present huge admirer, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. The hand is really the hand of Esau, but under a course of threatened scrivener's cramp. For the next edition of the Book of Verses, pray accept an emendation. Last three lines of Echoes No. XLIV. read-- "But life in act? How should the grave Be victor over these, Mother, a mother of men?" The two vocatives scatter the effect of this inimitable close. If you insist on the longer line, equip "grave" with an epithet. R. L. S. TO E. L. BURLINGAME Accompanying the MS. of the article giving extracts from the record kept by Robert Stevenson the elder of the trip on which Sir Walter Scott sailed in his company on board the Northern Lights yacht: printed in Scribner's Magazine, 1893. _Vailima, Upolu, August 1st, '92._ MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--Herewith _My Grandfather_. I have had rather a bad time suppressing the old gentleman, who was really in a very garrulous stage; as for getting him _in order_, I could do but little towards that; however, there are one or two points of interest which may justify us in printing. The swinging of his stick and not knowing the sailor of Coruiskin, in particular, and the account of how he wrote the lives in the Bell Book particularly please me. I hope my own little introduction is not egoistic; or rather I do not care if it is. It was that old gentleman's blood that brought me to Samoa. By the by, vols. vii., viii., and ix. of Adams's _History_ have never come to hand; no more have the dictionaries. Please send me _Stonehenge on the Horse_, _Stories and Interludes_ by Barry Pain, and _Edinburgh Sketches and Memoirs_ by David Masson. _The Wrecker_ has turned up. So far as I have seen, it is very satisfactory, but on pp. 548, 549, there has been a devil of a miscarriage. The two Latin quotations instead of following each other being separated (doubtless for printing considerations) by a line of prose. My compliments to the printers; there is doubtless such a thing as good printing, but there is such a thing as good sense. The sequel to _Kidnapped_, _David Balfour_ by name, is about three-quarters done and gone to press for serial publication. By what I can find out it ought to be through hand with that and ready for volume form early next spring.--Yours very sincerely, R. L. S. TO ANDREW LANG Mr. Andrew Lang had been supplying Stevenson with some books and historical references for his proposed novel _The Young Chevalier_. [_Vailima, August 1892._] MY DEAR LANG,--I knew you would prove a trusty purveyor. The books you have sent are admirable. I got the name of my hero out of Brown--Blair of Balmyle--Francie Blair. But whether to call the story _Blair of Balmyle_, or whether to call it _The Young Chevalier_, I have not yet decided. The admirable Cameronian tract--perhaps you will think this a cheat--is to be boned into _David Balfour_, where it will fit better, and really furnishes me with a desired foothold over a boggy place. _Later_; no, it won't go in, and I fear I must give up "the idolatrous occupant upon the throne," a phrase that overjoyed me beyond expression. I am in a deuce of a flutter with politics, which I hate, and in which I certainly do not shine; but a fellow cannot stand aside and look on at such an exhibition as our government. 'Tain't decent; no gent can hold a candle to it. But it's a grind to be interrupted by midnight messengers and pass your days writing proclamations (which are never proclaimed) and petitions (which ain't petited) and letters to the Times, which it makes my jaw yawn to re-read, and all your time have your heart with David Balfour; he has just left Glasgow this morning for Edinburgh, James More has escaped from the castle; it is far more real to me than the Behring Sea or the Baring brothers either--he got the news of James More's escape from the Lord Advocate, and started off straight to comfort Catriona. You don't know her; she's James More's daughter, and a respectable young wumman; the Miss Grants think so--the Lord Advocate's daughters--so there can't be anything really wrong. Pretty soon we all go to Holland, and be hanged; thence to Dunkirk, and be damned; and the tale concludes in Paris, and be Poll-parrotted. This is the last authentic news. You are not a real hard-working novelist; not a practical novelist; so you don't know the temptation to let your characters maunder. Dumas did it, and lived. But it is not war; it ain't sportsmanlike, and I have to be stopping their chatter all the time. Brown's appendix is great reading. My only grief is that I can't Use the idolatrous occupant. Yours ever, R. L. S. Blessing and praising you for a useful (though idolatrous) occupant of Kensington. TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE Samoa and the Samoans for children, continued after an eight months' pause. _Vailima Plantation, Samoan Islands, August 14th, 1892._ MY DEAR MISS BOODLE,--The lean man is exceedingly ashamed of himself, and offers his apologies to the little girls in the cellar just above. If they will be so good as to knock three times upon the floor, he will hear it on the other side of his floor, and will understand that he is forgiven. I believe I got you and the children--or rather left you and the children--still on the road to the lean man's house. When you get up there a great part of the forest has been cleared away. It comes back again pretty quick, though not quite so high; but everywhere, except where the weeders have been kept busy, young trees have sprouted up, and the cattle and the horses cannot be seen as they feed. In this clearing there are two or three houses scattered about, and between the two biggest I think the little girls in the cellar would first notice a sort of thing like a gridiron on legs made of logs and wood. Sometimes it has a flag flying on it made of rags of old clothes. It is a fort (so I am told) built by the person here who would be much the most interesting to the girls in the cellar. This is a young gentleman of eleven years of age answering to the name of Austin. It was after reading a book about the Red Indians that he thought it more prudent to create this place of strength. As the Red Indians are in North America, and this fort seems to me a very useless kind of building, I am anxious to hope that the two may never be brought together. When Austin is not engaged in building forts, nor on his lessons, which are just as annoying to him as other children's lessons are to them, he walks sometimes in the bush, and if anybody is with him, talks all the time. When he is alone I don't think he says anything, and I dare say he feels very lonely and frightened, just as the lean man does, at the queer noises and the endless lines of the trees. He finds the strangest kinds of seeds, some of them bright coloured like lollipops, or really like precious stones; some of them in odd cases like tobacco-pouches. He finds and collects all kinds of little shells with which the whole ground is scattered, and which, though they are the shells of land animals like our snails, are nearly of as many shapes and colours as the shells on our sea-beaches. In the streams that come running down out of the mountains, and which are all as clear and bright as mirror glass, he sees eels and little bright fish that sometimes jump together out of the surface of the brook in a little knot of silver, and fresh-water prawns which lie close under the stones, and can be seen looking up at him with eyes of the colour of a jewel. He sees all kinds of beautiful birds, some of them blue and white, some of them blue and white and red, and some of them coloured like our pigeons at home, and these last the little girls in the cellar may like to know live almost entirely on nutmegs as they fall ripe off the trees. Another little bird he may sometimes see, as the lean man saw him only this morning, a little fellow not so big as a man's hand, exquisitely neat, of a pretty bronze black like ladies' shoes, and who sticks up behind him (much as a peacock does) his little tail shaped and fluted like a scallop shell. Here are a lot of curious and interesting things that Austin sees round him every day; and when I was a child at home in the old country I used to play and pretend to myself that I saw things of the same kind. That the rooms were full of orange and nutmeg trees, and the cold town gardens outside the windows were alive with parrots and with lions. What do the little girls in the cellar think that Austin does? He makes believe just the other way: he pretends that the strange great trees with their broad leaves and slab-sided roots are European oaks; and the places on the road up (where you and I and the little girls in the cellar have already gone) he calls by old-fashioned, far-away European names, just as if you were to call the cellar stair and the corner of the next street--if you could only manage to pronounce the names--Upolu and Savaii. And so it is with all of us, with Austin and the lean man and the little girls in the cellar; wherever we are it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different. But you must not suppose that Austin does nothing but build forts and walk among the woods and swim in the rivers. On the contrary, he is sometimes a very busy and useful fellow; and I think the little girls in the cellar would have admired him very nearly as much as he admired himself if they had seen him setting off on horseback with his hand on his hip and his pockets full of letters and orders, at the head of quite a procession of huge white cart-horses with pack-saddles, and big brown native men with nothing on but gaudy kilts. Mighty well he managed all his commissions; and those who saw him ordering and eating his single-handed luncheon in the queer little Chinese restaurant on the beach declare he looked as if the place, and the town, and the whole archipelago belonged to him. But I am not going to let you suppose that this great gentleman at the head of all his horses and his men, like the King of France in the old rhyme, would be thought much of a dandy on the streets of London. On the contrary, if he could be seen there with his dirty white cap, and his faded purple shirt, and his little brown breeks that do not reach his knees, and the bare shanks below, and the bare feet stuck in the stirrup leathers, for he is not quite long enough to reach the irons, I am afraid the little boys and girls in your part of the town might feel very much inclined to give him a penny in charity. So you see that a very, very big man in one place might seem very small potatoes in another, just as the king's palace here (of which I told you in my last) would be thought rather a poor place of residence by a Surrey gipsy. And if you come to that, even the lean man himself, who is no end of an important person, if he were picked up from the chair where he is now sitting, and slung down, feet foremost, in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross, would probably have to escape into the nearest shop, or take the consequences of being mobbed. And the ladies of his family, who are very pretty ladies, and think themselves uncommonly well-dressed for Samoa, would (if the same thing were done to them) be extremely glad to get into a cab. I write to you by the hands of another, because I am threatened again with scrivener's cramp. My health is beyond reproach; I wish I could say as much for my wife's, which is far from the thing. Give us some news of yours, and even when none of us write, do not suppose for a moment that we are forgetful of our old gamekeeper. Our prettiest walk, an alley of really beautiful green sward which leads through Fanny's garden to the river and the bridge and the beginning of the high woods on the mountain-side, where the Tapu a fafine (or spirit of the land) has her dwelling, and the work-boys fear to go alone, is called by a name that I think our gamekeeper has heard before--Adelaide Road. With much love from all of us to yourself, and all good wishes for your future, and the future of the children in the cellar, believe me your affectionate friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Vailima [August 1892]._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--You will have no letter at all this month and it is really not my fault. I have been saving my hand as much as possible for Davy Balfour; only this morning I was getting on first rate with him, when about half-past nine there came a prick in the middle of the ball of my thumb, and I had to take to the left hand and two words a minute. I fear I slightly exaggerate the speed of my left hand; about a word and a half in the minute--which is dispiriting to the last degree. Your last letter with the four excellent reviews and the good news about _The Wrecker_ was particularly welcome. I have already written to Charles Baxter about the volume form appearance of _The Beach of Falesá_. In spite of bad thumbs and other interruptions I hope to send to Baxter by this mail the whole first part (a good deal more than half) of David Balfour ready for press. This is pretty satisfactory, and I think ought to put us beyond the reach of financial catastrophe for the year. A cousin of mine, Graham Balfour, arrived along with your last. It was rather a lark. Fanny, Belle and I stayed down at the hotel two nights expecting the steamer, and we had seven horses down daily for the party and the baggage. These were on one occasion bossed by Austin, age eleven. "I'm afraid I cannot do that now," said he in answer to some communication, "as I am taking charge of the men here." In the course of the forenoon he took "his" men to get their lunch, and had his own by himself at the Chinese restaurant. What a day for a boy. The steamer came in at last on Saturday morning after breakfast. We three were out at the place of anchorage in the hotel boat as she came up, spotting rather anxiously for our guest, whom none of us had ever seen. We chose out some rather awful cads and tried to make up our mind to them; they were the least offensive yet observed among an awful crew of cabin passengers; but when the Simon Pure appeared at last upon the scene he was as nice a young fellow as you would want. Followed a time of giddy glory--one crowded hour of glorious life--when I figured about the deck with attendant shemales in the character of _the_ local celebrity, was introduced to the least unpresentable of the ruffians on board, dogged about the deck by a diminutive Hebrew with a Kodak, the click of which kept time to my progress like a pair of castanets, and filled up in the Captain's room on iced champagne at 8.30 of God's morning. The Captain in question, Cap. Morse, is a great South Sea character, like the side of a house and the green-room of a music-hall, but with all the saving qualities of the seaman. The celebrity was a great success with this untutored observer. He was kind enough to announce that he expected (rather with awe) a much more "thoughtful" person; and I think I pleased him much with my parting salutation, "Well, Captain, I suppose you and I are the two most notorious men in the Pacific." I think it will enable you to see the Captain if I tell you that he recited to us in cold blood the _words_ of a new comic song; doubtless a tribute to my literary character. I had often heard of Captain Morse and always had detested all that I was told, and detested the man in confidence, just as you are doing; but really he has a wonderful charm of strength, loyalty, and simplicity. The whole celebrity business was particularly characteristic; the Captain has certainly never read a word of mine; and as for the Jew with the Kodak, he had never heard of me till he came on board. There was a third admirer who sent messages in to the Captain's cabin asking if the Lion would accept a gift of Webster's _Unabridged_. I went out to him and signified a manly willingness to accept a gift of anything. He stood and bowed before me, his eyes danced with excitement. "Mr. Stevenson," he said and his voice trembled, "your name is very well known to me. I have been in the publishing line in Canada and I have handled many of your works for the trade." "Come," I said, "here's genuine appreciation." From this gaudy scene we descended into the hotel boat with our new second cousin, got to horse and returned to Vailima, passing shot of Kodak once more on the Nulivae bridge, where the little Jew was posted with his little Jew wife, each about three feet six in stature and as vulgar as a lodging house clock. We were just writing this when another passenger from the ship arrived up here at Vailima. This is a nice quiet simple blue-eyed little boy of Pennsylvania Quaker folk. Threatened with consumption of my sort, he has been sent here by his doctor on the strength of my case. I am sure if the case be really parallel he could not have been better done by. As we had a roast pig for dinner we kept him for that meal; and the rain coming on just when the moon should have risen kept him again for the night. So you see it is now to-morrow. Graham Balfour the new cousin and Lloyd are away with Clark the Missionary on a school inspecting _malaga_, really perhaps the prettiest little bit of opera in real life that can be seen, and made all the prettier by the actors being children. I have come to a collapse this morning on D.B.: wrote a chapter one way, half re-copied it in another, and now stand halting between the two like Buridan's donkey. These sorts of cruces always are to me the most insoluble, and I should not wonder if D.B. stuck there for a week or two. This is a bother, for I understand McClure talks of beginning serial publication in December. If this could be managed, what with D.B., the apparent success of _The Wrecker_, _Falesá_, and some little pickings from _Across the Plains_--not to mention, as quite hopeless, _The History of Samoa_--this should be rather a profitable year, as it must be owned it has been rather a busy one. The trouble is, if I miss the December publication, it may take the devil and all of a time to start another syndicate. I am really tempted to curse my conscientiousness. If I hadn't recopied Davie he would now be done and dead and buried; and here I am stuck about the middle, with an immediate publication threatened and the fear before me of having after all to scamp the essential business of the end. At the same time, though I love my Davy, I am a little anxious to get on again on _The Young Chevalier_. I have in nearly all my works been trying one racket: to get out the facts of life as clean and naked and sharp as I could manage it. In this other book I want to try and megilp them together in an atmosphere of sentiment, and I wonder whether twenty-five years of life spent in trying this one thing will not make it impossible for me to succeed in the other. However it is the only way to attempt a love story. You can't tell any of the facts, and the only chance is to paint an atmosphere. It is a very warm morning--the parrot is asleep on the door (she heard her name, and immediately awakened)--and my brains are completely addled by having come to grief over Davy. Hurray! a subject discovered! The parrot is a little white cockatoo of the small variety. It belongs to Belle, whom it guards like a watch dog. It chanced that when she was sick some months ago I came over and administered some medicine. Unnecessary to say Belle bleated, whereupon the parrot bounded upon me and buried his neb in my backside. From that day on the little wretch attacked me on every possible occasion, usually from the rear, though she would also follow me along the verandah and as I went downstairs attack my face. This was far from funny. I am a person of average courage, but I don't think I was ever more cordially afraid of anything than of this miserable atomy, and the deuce of it was that I could not but admire her appalling courage and there was no means of punishing such a thread-paper creature without destroying it entirely. Act II. On Graham's arrival I gave him my room and came out to Lloyd's in the lower floor of Belle's--I beg your pardon--the _parrot's_--house. The first morning I was to wake Belle early so that breakfast should be seen to for our guest. It was a mighty pretty dawn, the birds were singing extraordinary strong, all was peace, and there was the damned parrot hanging to the knob of Belle's door. Courage, my heart! On I went and Cockie buried her bill in the joint of my thumb. I believe that Job would have killed that bird; but I was more happily inspired--I caught it up and flung it over the verandah as far as I could throw. I must say it was violently done, and I looked with some anxiety to see in what state of preservation it would alight. Down it came however on its two feet, uttered a few oaths in a very modified tone of voice, and set forth on the return journey to its mansion. Its wings being cut and its gait in walking having been a circumstance apparently not thoroughly calculated by its maker, it took about twenty-five minutes to get home again. Now here is this remarkable point--that bird has never bitten me since. When I have early breakfast she and the cat come down and join me, and she sits on the back of my chair. When I am at work with the door shut she sits outside and demolishes the door with that same beak which was so recently reddened with my heart's blood--and in the evening she does her business all over my clothes in the most friendly manner in the world. I ought to add a word about the parrot and the cat. Three cats were brought by Belle from Sydney. This one alone remains faithful and domestic. One of the funniest things I have ever seen was Polly and Maud over a piece of bacon. Polly stood on one leg, held the bacon in the other, regarded Maudie with a secret and sinister look and very slowly and quietly--far too quietly for the word I have to use--gnashed her bill at her. Maudie came up quite close; there she stuck--she was afraid to come nearer, to go away she was ashamed; and she assisted at the final and very deliberate consumption of the bacon, making about as poor a figure as a cat can make. _Next day._--Date totally unknown, or rather it is now known but is reserved because it would certainly prove inconsistent with dates previously given. I went down about two o'clock in company with a couple of chance visitors to Apia. It was smoking hot, not a sign of any wind and the sun scorching your face. I found the great Haggard in hourly expectation of Lady Jersey, surrounded by crowds of very indifferent assistants, and I must honestly say--the only time I ever saw him so--cross. He directed my attention to all the new paint, his own handiwork he said, and made me visit the bathroom which he has just fixed up. I think I never saw a man more miserable and happy at the same time. Had some hock and a seltzer, went down town, met Fanny and Belle, and so home in time for a magnificent dinner of prawns and an eel cooked in oil, both from our own river. This morning the overseer--the new overseer Mr. Austin Strong--went down in charge of the pack-horses and a squad of men, himself riding a white horse with extreme dignity and what seemed to onlookers a perhaps somewhat theatrical air of command. He returned triumphantly, all his commissions apparently executed with success, bringing us a mail--not your mail, Colonial ways--and the news of Lady Jersey's arrival and reception among flying flags and banging guns. As soon as I had concluded my flattering description of Polly she bit one of my toes to the blood. But put not your trust in shemales, though to say the truth she looks more like a Russian colonel. _Aug. 15th._--On the Saturday night Fanny and I went down to Haggard's to dine and be introduced to Lady Jersey. She is there with her daughter Lady Margaret and her brother Captain Leigh, a very nice kind of glass-in-his-eye kind of fellow. It is to be presumed I made a good impression; for the meeting has had a most extraordinary sequel. Fanny and I slept in Haggard's billiard room, which happens to be Lloyd's bungalow. In the morning she and I breakfasted in the back parts with Haggard and Captain Leigh, and it was then arranged that the Captain should go with us to Malie on the Tuesday under a false name; so that Government House at Sydney might by no possibility be connected with a rebel camp. On Sunday afternoon up comes Haggard in a state of huge excitement: Lady J. insists on going too, in the character of my cousin; I write her a letter under the name of Miss Amelia Balfour, proposing the excursion; and this morning up comes a copy of verses from Amelia. I wrote to Mataafa announcing that I should bring two cousins instead of one, that the second was a lady, unused to Samoan manners, and it would be a good thing if she could sleep in another house with Ralala. Sent a copy of this to Amelia, and at the same time made all arrangements, dating my letter 1745. We shall go on ahead on the Malie Road; she is to follow with Haggard and Captain Leigh, and overtake us at the ford of the Gasi-gasi, whence Haggard will return and the rest of us pursue our way to the rebeldom. This lark is certainly huge. It is all nonsense that it can be concealed; Miss Amelia Balfour will be at once identified with the Queen of Sydney, as they call her; and I would not in the least wonder if the visit proved the signal of war. With this I have no concern, and the thing wholly suits my book and fits my predilections for Samoa. What a pity the mail leaves, and I must leave this adventure to be continued in our next! But I need scarcely say that all this is deadly private--I expect it all to come out, not without explosion; only it must not be through me or you. We had a visit yesterday from a person by the name of Count Nerli, who is said to be a good painter. Altogether the aristocracy clusters thick about us. In which radiant light, as the mail must now be really put up, I leave myself until next month,--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO THE COUNTESS OF JERSEY Following up the last letter, Stevenson here tells the story of the visit paid to Apia by the Countess of Jersey, who had come over from Sydney with her brother Captain Leigh and her young daughter Lady Margaret Villiers. "A warm friendship," writes Lady Jersey, "was the immediate result; we constantly met, either in the hospitable abode of our host Mr. Bazett Haggard, or in Mr. Stevenson's delightful mountain home, and passed many happy hours in riding, walking, and conversation." The previous letter has shown how it was arranged that the party should pay a visit of curiosity to the "rebel king," or more properly the rival claimant to the kingly power, Mataafa, in his camp at Malie, and how Stevenson at once treated the adventure as a chapter out of a Waverley novel. "The wife of the new Governor of New South Wales," writes Lady Jersey on her part, "could not pay such a visit in her own name, so Mr. Stevenson adopted me as his cousin, 'Amelia Balfour.' This transparent disguise was congenial to his romantic instincts, and he writes concerning the arrangements made for the expedition, carefully dating his letter 'Aug. 14, 1745.'" _August 14, 1745._ To MISS AMELIA BALFOUR--MY DEAR COUSIN,--We are going an expedition to leeward on Tuesday morning. If a lady were perhaps to be encountered on horseback--say, towards the Gasi-gasi river--about six A.M., I think we should have an episode somewhat after the style of the '45. What a misfortune, my dear cousin, that you should have arrived while your cousin Graham was occupying my only guest-chamber--for Osterley Park is not so large in Samoa as it was at home--but happily our friend Haggard has found a corner for you! The King over the Water--the Gasi-gasi water--will be pleased to see the clan of Balfour mustering so thick around his standard. I have (one serious word) been so lucky as to get a really secret interpreter, so all is for the best in our little adventure into the Waverley Novels.--I am, your affectionate cousin, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Observe the stealth with which I have blotted my signature, but we must be political _à outrance_. TO THE COUNTESS OF JERSEY MY DEAR COUSIN,--I send for your information a copy of my last letter to the gentleman in question. 'Tis thought more wise, in consideration of the difficulty and peril of the enterprise, that we should leave the town in the afternoon, and by several detachments. If you would start for a ride with the Master of Haggard and Captain Lockhart of Lee, say at three o'clock of the afternoon, you would make some rencounters by the wayside which might be agreeable to your political opinions. All present will be staunch. The Master of Haggard might extend his ride a little, and return through the marsh and by the nuns' house (I trust that has the proper flavour), so as a little to diminish the effect of separation.--I remain your affectionate cousin to command, O TUSITALA. _P.S._--It is to be thought this present year of grace will be historical. TO SIDNEY COLVIN This letter tells without preface the story of the expedition planned in the preceding. [_Vailima, August 1892._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--This is Friday night, the (I believe) 18th or 20th August or September. I shall probably regret to-morrow having written you with my own hand like the Apostle Paul. But I am alone over here in the workman's house, where I and Belle and Lloyd and Austin are pigging; the rest are at cards in the main residence. I have not joined them because "belly belong me" has been kicking up, and I have just taken 15 drops of laudanum. On Tuesday, the party set out--self in white cap, velvet coat, cords and yellow half boots, Belle in a white kind of suit and white cap to match mine, Lloyd in white clothes and long yellow boots and a straw hat, Graham in khakis and gaiters, Henry (my old overseer) in blue coat and black kilt, and the great Lafaele with a big ship-bag on his saddle-bow. We left the mail at the P.O., had lunch at the hotel, and about 1.50 set out westward to the place of tryst. This was by a little shrunken brook in a deep channel of mud, on the far side of which, in a thicket of low trees, all full of moths of shadow and butterflies of sun, we lay down to await her ladyship. Whisky and water, then a sketch of the encampment for which we all posed to Belle, passed off the time until 3.30. Then I could hold on no longer. 30 minutes late. Had the secret oozed out? Were they arrested? I got my horse, crossed the brook again, and rode hard back to the Vaea cross roads, whence I was aware of white clothes glancing in the other long straight radius of the quadrant. I turned at once to return to the place of tryst; but D. overtook me, and almost bore me down, shouting "Ride, ride!" like a hero in a ballad. Lady Margaret and he were only come to shew the place; they returned, and the rest of our party, reinforced by Captain Leigh and Lady Jersey, set on for Malie. The delay was due to D.'s infinite precautions, leading them up lanes, by back ways, and then down again to the beach road a hundred yards further on. It was agreed that Lady Jersey existed no more; she was now my cousin Amelia Balfour. That relative and I headed the march; she is a charming woman, all of us like her extremely after trial on this somewhat rude and absurd excursion. And we Amelia'd or Miss Balfour'd her with great but intermittent fidelity. When we came to the last village, I sent Henry on ahead to warn the King of our approach and amend his discretion, if that might be. As he left I heard the villagers asking _which was the great lady_? And a little further, at the borders of Malie itself, we found the guard making a music of bugles and conches. Then I knew the game was up and the secret out. A considerable guard of honour, mostly children, accompanied us; but, for our good fortune, we had been looked for earlier, and the crowd was gone. Dinner at the king's; he asked me to say grace, I could think of none--never could; Graham suggested _Benedictus Benedicat_, at which I leaped. We were nearly done, when old Popo inflicted the Atua howl (of which you have heard already) right at Lady Jersey's shoulder. She started in fine style.--"There," I said, "we have been giving you a chapter of Scott, but this goes beyond the Waverley Novels." After dinner, kava. Lady J. was served before me, and the king _drank last_; it was the least formal kava I ever saw in that house,--no names called, no show of ceremony. All my ladies are well trained, and when Belle drained her bowl, the King was pleased to clap his hands. Then he and I must retire for our private interview, to another house. He gave me his own staff and made me pass before him; and in the interview, which was long and delicate, he twice called me _afioga_. Ah, that leaves you cold, but I am Samoan enough to have been moved. _Susuga_ is my accepted rank; to be called _afioga_--Heavens! what an advance--and it leaves Europe cold. But it staggered my Henry. The first time it was complicated "lana susuga _ma_ lana afioga--his excellency _and_ his majesty" the next time plain Majesty. Henry then begged to interrupt the interview and tell who he was--he is a small family chief in Savaii, not very small--"I do not wish the king," says he, "to think me a boy from Apia." On our return to the palace, we separated. I had asked for the ladies to sleep alone--that was understood; but that Tusitala--his afioga Tusitala--should go out with the other young men, and not sleep with the highborn females of his family--was a doctrine received with difficulty. Lloyd and I had one screen, Graham and Leigh another, and we slept well. In the morning I was first abroad before dawn; not very long, already there was a stir of birds. A little after, I heard singing from the King's chapel--exceeding good--and went across in the hour when the east is yellow and the morning bank is breaking up, to hear it nearer. All about the chapel, the guards were posted, and all saluted Tusitala. I could not refrain from smiling: "So there is a place too," I thought, "where sentinels salute me." Mine has been a queer life. [Illustration] Breakfast was rather a protracted business. And that was scarce over when we were called to the great house (now finished--recall your earlier letters) to see a royal kava. This function is of rare use; I know grown Samoans who have never witnessed it. It is, besides, as you are to hear, a piece of prehistoric history, crystallised in figures, and the facts largely forgotten; an acted hieroglyph. The house is really splendid; in the rafters in the midst, two carved and coloured model birds are posted; the only thing of the sort I have ever remarked in Samoa, the Samoans being literal observers of the second commandment. At one side of the egg our party sat. a=Mataafa, b = Lady J., c = Belle, d = Tusitala, e =Graham, f = Lloyd, g = Captain Leigh, h = Henry, i = Popo. The x's round are the high chiefs, each man in his historical position. One side of the house is set apart for the king alone; we were allowed there as his guests and Henry as our interpreter. It was a huge trial to the lad, when a speech was made to me which he must translate, and I made a speech in answer which he had to orate, full-breathed, to that big circle; he blushed through his dark skin, but looked and acted like a gentleman and a young fellow of sense; then the kava came to the king; he poured one drop in libation, drank another, and flung the remainder outside the house behind him. Next came the turn of the old shapeless stone marked T. It stands for one of the king's titles, Tamasoalii; Mataafa is Tamasoalii this day, but cannot drink for it; and the stone must first be washed with water, and then have the bowl emptied on it. Then--the order I cannot recall--came the turn of y and z, two orators of the name of Malietoa; the first took his kava down plain, like an ordinary man; the second must be packed to bed under a big sheet of tapa, and be massaged by anxious assistants and rise on his elbow groaning to drink his cup. W., a great hereditary war man, came next; five times the cup-bearers marched up and down the house and passed the cup on, five times it was filled and the general's name and titles heralded at the bowl, and five times he refused it (after examination) as too small. It is said this commemorates a time when Malietoa at the head of his army suffered much for want of supplies. Then this same military gentleman must _drink_ five cups, one from each of the great names: all which took a precious long time. He acted very well, haughtily and in a society tone _outlining_ the part. The difference was marked when he subsequently made a speech in his own character as a plain God-fearing chief. A few more high chiefs, then Tusitala; one more, and then Lady Jersey; one more, and then Captain Leigh, and so on with the rest of our party--Henry of course excepted. You see in public, Lady Jersey followed me--just so far was the secret kept. Then we came home; Belle, Graham, and Lloyd to the Chinaman's, I with Lady Jersey, to lunch; so, severally home. Thursday I have forgotten: Saturday, I began again on Davie; on Sunday, the Jersey party came up to call and carried me to dinner. As I came out, to ride home, the search-lights of the _Curaçoa_ were lightening on the horizon from many miles away, and next morning she came in. Tuesday was huge fun: a reception at Haggard's. All our party dined there; Lloyd and I, in the absence of Haggard and Leigh, had to play aide-de-camp and host for about twenty minutes, and I presented the population of Apia at random but (luck helping) without one mistake. Wednesday we had two middies to lunch. Thursday we had Eeles and Hoskyn (lieutenant and doctor--very, very nice fellows--simple, good and not the least dull) to dinner. Saturday, Graham and I lunched on board; Graham, Belle, Lloyd dined at the G.'s; and Austin and the _whole_ of our servants went with them to an evening entertainment; the more bold returning by lantern-light. Yesterday, Sunday, Belle and I were off by about half past eight, left our horses at a public house, and went on board the _Curaçoa_, in the wardroom skiff; were entertained in the wardroom; thence on deck to the service, which was a great treat; three fiddles and a harmonium and excellent choir, and the great ship's company joining: on shore in Haggard's big boat to lunch with the party. Thence all together to Vailima, where we read aloud a Ouida Romance we have been secretly writing; in which Haggard was the hero, and each one of the authors had to draw a portrait of him or herself in a Ouida light. Leigh, Lady J., Fanny, R. L. S., Belle and Graham were the authors. In the midst of this gay life, I have finally recopied two chapters, and drafted for the first time three of Davie Balfour. But it is not a life that would continue to suit me, and if I have not continued to write to you, you will scarce wonder. And to-day we all go down again to dinner, and to-morrow they all come up to lunch! The world is too much with us. But it now nears an end, to-day already the _Curaçoa_ has sailed; and on Saturday or Sunday Lady Jersey will follow them in the mail steamer. I am sending you a wire by her hands as far as Sydney, that is to say either you or Cassell, about _Falesá_: I will not allow it to be called _Uma_ in book form, that is not the logical name of the story. Nor can I have the marriage contract omitted; and the thing is full of misprints abominable. In the picture, Uma is rot; so is the old man and the negro; but Wiltshire is splendid, and Case will do. It seems badly illuminated, but this may be printing. How have I seen this first number? Not through your attention, guilty one! Lady Jersey had it, and only mentioned it yesterday.[45] I ought to say how much we all like the Jersey party. Leigh is very amusing in his way. Lady Margaret is a charming girl. And Lady Jersey is in all ways admirable, so unfussy, so plucky, so very kind and gracious. My boy Henry was enraptured with the manners of the _Tamaitai Sili_ (chief lady). Among our other occupations, I did a bit of a supposed epic describing our tryst at the ford of the Gasegase; and Belle and I made a little book of caricatures and verses about incidents on the visit. _Tuesday._--The wild round of gaiety continues. After I had written to you yesterday, the brain being wholly extinct, I played piquet all morning with Graham. After lunch down to call on the U.S. consul, hurt in a steeplechase; thence back to the new girls' school which Lady J. was to open, and where my ladies met me. Lady J. is really an orator, with a voice of gold; the rest of us played our unremarked parts; missionaries, Haggard, myself, a Samoan chief, holding forth in turn; myself with (at least) a golden brevity. Thence, Fanny, Belle, and I to town, to our billiard room in Haggard's back garden, where we found Lloyd and where Graham joined us. The three men first dressed, with the ladies in a corner; and then, to leave them a free field, we went off to Haggard and Leigh's quarters, whereafter all to dinner, where our two parties, a brother of Colonel Kitchener's, a passing globe-trotter, and Clarke the missionary. A very gay evening, with all sorts of chaff and mirth, and a moonlit ride home, and to bed before 12.30. And now to-day, we have the Jersey-Haggard troupe to lunch, and I must pass the morning dressing ship. _Thursday, Sept. 1st._--I sit to write to you now, 7.15, all the world in bed except myself, accounted for, and Belle and Graham, down at Haggard's at dinner. Not a leaf is stirring here; but the moon overhead (now of a good bigness) is obscured and partly revealed in a whirling covey of thin storm-clouds. By Jove, it blows above. From 8 till 11.15 on Tuesday, I dressed ship, and in particular cleaned crystal, my specialty. About 11.30 the guests began to arrive before I was dressed, and between while I had written a parody for Lloyd to sing. Yesterday, Wednesday, I had to start out about 3 for town, had a long interview with the head of the German Firm about some work in my new house, got over to Lloyd's billiard-room about six, on the way whither I met Fanny and Belle coming down with one Kitchener, a brother of the Colonel's. Dined in the billiard-room, discovered we had forgot to order oatmeal; whereupon in the moonlit evening, I set forth in my tropical array, mess jacket and such, to get the oatmeal, and meet a young fellow C.--and not a bad young fellow either, only an idiot--as drunk as Croesus. He wept with me, he wept for me; he talked like a bad character in an impudently bad farce; I could have laughed aloud to hear, and could make you laugh by repeating, but laughter was not uppermost. This morning at about seven, I set off after the lost sheep. I could have no horse; all that could be mounted--we have one girth-sore and one dead-lame in the establishment--were due at a picnic about 10.30. The morning was very wet, and I set off barefoot, with my trousers over my knees, and a macintosh. Presently I had to take a side path in the bush; missed it; came forth in a great oblong patch of taro solemnly surrounded by forest--no soul, no sign, no sound--and as I stood there at a loss, suddenly between the showers out broke the note of a harmonium and a woman's voice singing an air that I know very well, but have (as usual) forgot the name of. 'Twas from a great way off, but seemed to fill the world. It was strongly romantic, and gave me a point which brought me, by all sorts of forest wading, to an open space of palms. These were of all ages, but mostly at that age when the branches arch from the ground level, range themselves, with leaves exquisitely green. The whole interspace was overgrown with convolvulus, purple, yellow and white, often as deep as to my waist, in which I floundered aimlessly. The very mountain was invisible from here. The rain came and went; now in sunlit April showers, now with the proper tramp and rattle of the tropics. All this while I met no sight or sound of man, except the voice which was now silent, and a damned pig-fence that headed me off at every corner. Do you know barbed wire? Think of a fence of it on rotten posts, and you barefoot. But I crossed it at last with my heart in my mouth and no harm done. Thence at last to C.'s.: no C. Next place I came to was in the zone of woods. They offered me a buggy and set a black boy to wash my legs and feet. "Washum legs belong that fellow whiteman" was the command. So at last I ran down my son of a gun in the hotel, sober, and with no story to tell; penitent, I think. As I sat and looked at him, I knew from my inside the biggest truth in life: there is only one thing that we cannot forgive, and that is ugliness--_our_ ugliness. There is no ugliness, no beauty; only that which makes me (_ipse_) sicken or rejoice. And poor C. makes me sicken. Yet, according to canons, he is not amiss. Home, by buggy and my poor feet, up three miles of root, boulder, gravel, and liquid mud, slipping back at every step. _Sunday, Sept. 4th._--Hope you will be able to read a word of the last, no joke writing by a bad lantern with a groggy hand and your glasses mislaid. Not that the hand is not better, as you see by the absence of the amanuensis hitherto. Mail came Friday, and a communication from yourself much more decent than usual, for which I thank you. Glad the _Wrecker_ should so hum; but Lord, what fools these mortals be! So far yesterday, the citation being wrung from me by remembrance of many reviews. I have now received all _Falesá_, and my admiration for that tale rises; I believe it is in some ways my best work; I am pretty sure, at least, I have never done anything better than Wiltshire. _Monday, 13th September 1892._--On Wednesday the Spinsters of Apia gave a ball to a select crowd. Fanny, Belle, Lloyd, and I rode down, met Haggard by the way and joined company with him. Dinner with Haggard, and thence to the ball. The Chief Justice appeared; it was immediately remarked, and whispered from one to another, that he and I had the only red sashes in the room,--and they were both of the hue of blood, sir, blood. He shook hands with myself and all the members of my family. Then the cream came, and I found myself in the same set of a quadrille with his honour. We dance here in Apia a most fearful and wonderful quadrille, I don't know where the devil they fished it from; but it is rackety and prancing and embraceatory beyond words; perhaps it is best defined in Haggard's expression of a gambado. When I and my great enemy found ourselves involved in this gambol, and crossing hands, and kicking up, and being embraced almost in common by large and quite respectable females, we--or I--tried to preserve some rags of dignity, but not for long. The deuce of it is that, personally, I love this man; his eye speaks to me, I am pleased in his society. We exchanged a glance, and then a grin; the man took me in his confidence; and through the remainder of that prance we pranced for each other. Hard to imagine any position more ridiculous; a week before he had been trying to rake up evidence against me by brow-beating and threatening a half-white interpreter; that very morning I had been writing most villainous attacks upon him for the Times; and we meet and smile, and--damn it!--like each other. I do my best to damn the man and drive him from these islands; but the weakness endures--I love him. This is a thing I would despise in anybody else; but he is so jolly insidious and ingratiating! No, sir, I can't dislike him; but if I don't make hay of him, it shall not be for want of trying. Yesterday, we had two Germans and a young American boy at lunch; and in the afternoon, Vailima was in a state of siege; ten white people on the front verandah, at least as many brown in the cook-house, and countless blacks to see the black boy Arrick. Which reminds me, Arrick was sent Friday was a week to the German Firm with a note, and was not home on time. Lloyd and I were going bedward, it was late with a bright moon--ah, poor dog, you know no such moons as these!--when home came Arrick with his head in a white bandage and his eyes shining. He had had a fight with other blacks, Malaita boys; many against one, and one with a knife: "I KNICKED 'EM DOWN, three four!" he cried; and had himself to be taken to the doctor's and bandaged. Next day, he could not work, glory of battle swelled too high in his threadpaper breast; he had made a one-stringed harp for Austin, borrowed it, came to Fanny's room, and sang war-songs and danced a war dance in honour of his victory. And it appears, by subsequent advices, that it was a serious victory enough; four of his assailants went to hospital, and one is thought in danger. All Vailima rejoiced at this news. Five more chapters of David, 22 to 27, go to Baxter. All love affair; seems pretty good to me. Will it do for the young person? I don't know: since the Beach, I know nothing, except that men are fools and hypocrites, and I know less of them than I was fond enough to fancy. TO MRS. CHARLES FAIRCHILD [_Vailima, August 1892._] MY DEAR MRS. FAIRCHILD,--Thank you a thousand times for your letter. You are the Angel of (the sort of) Information (that I care about): I appoint you successor to the newspaper press; and I beg of you, whenever you wish to gird at the age, or think the bugs out of proportion to the roses, or despair, or enjoy any cosmic or epochal emotion, to sit down again and write to the Hermit of Samoa. What do I think of it all? Well, I love the romantic solemnity of youth; and even in this form, although not without laughter, I have to love it still. They are such ducks! But what are they made of? We were just as solemn as that about atheism and the stars and humanity; but we were all for belief anyway--we held atheism and sociology (of which none of us, nor indeed anybody, knew anything) for a gospel and an iron rule of life; and it was lucky enough, or there would have been more windows broken. What is apt to puzzle one at first sight in the New Youth is that, with such rickety and risky problems always at heart, they should not plunge down a Niagara of Dissolution. But let us remember the high practical timidity of youth. I was a particularly brave boy--this I think of myself, looking back--and plunged into adventures and experiments, and ran risks that it still surprises me to recall. But, dear me, what a fear I was in of that strange blind machinery in the midst of which I stood; and with what a compressed heart and what empty lungs I would touch a new crank and await developments! I do not mean to say I do not fear life still; I do; and that terror (for an adventurer like myself) is still one of the chief joys of living. But it was different indeed while I was yet girt with the priceless robes of inexperience; then the fear was exquisite and infinite. And so, when you see all these little Ibsens, who seem at once so dry and so excitable, and faint in swathes over a play (I suppose--for a wager) that would seem to me merely tedious, smile behind your hand, and remember the little dears are all in a blue funk. It must be very funny, and to a spectator like yourself I almost envy it. But never get desperate; human nature is human nature; and the Roman Empire, since the Romans founded it and made our European human nature what it is, bids fair to go on and to be true to itself. These little bodies will all grow up and become men and women, and have heaps of fun; nay, and are having it now; and whatever happens to the fashion of the age, it makes no difference--there are always high and brave and amusing lives to be lived; and a change of key, however exotic, does not exclude melody. Even Chinamen, hard as we find it to believe, enjoy being Chinese. And the Chinaman stands alone to be unthinkable; natural enough, as the representative of the only other great civilisation. Take my people here at my doors; their life is a very good one; it is quite thinkable, quite acceptable to us. And the little dears will be soon skating on the other foot; sooner or later, in each generation, the one-half of them at least begin to remember all the material they had rejected when first they made and nailed up their little theory of life; and these become reactionaries or conservatives, and the ship of man begins to fill upon the other tack. Here is a sermon, by your leave! It is your own fault, you have amused and interested me so much by your breath of the New Youth, which comes to me from so far away, where I live up here in my mountain, and secret messengers bring me letters from rebels, and the government sometimes seizes them, and generally grumbles in its beard that Stevenson should really be deported. O my life is the more lively, never fear! It has recently been most amusingly varied by a visit from Lady Jersey. I took her over mysteriously (under the pseudonym of my cousin, Miss Amelia Balfour) to visit Mataafa, our rebel; and we had great fun, and wrote a Ouida novel on our life here, in which every author had to describe himself in the Ouida glamour, and of which--for the Jerseys intend printing it--I must let you have a copy. My wife's chapter, and my description of myself, should, I think, amuse you. But there were finer touches still; as when Belle and Lady Jersey came out to brush their teeth in front of the rebel King's palace, and the night guard squatted opposite on the grass and watched the process; or when I and my interpreter, and the King with his secretary, mysteriously disappeared to conspire.--Ever yours sincerely, R. L. STEVENSON. TO THE CHILDREN IN THE CELLAR This time the children in the Kilburn cellar are addressed direct, with only a brief word at the end to their instructress. _Vailima Plantation, Samoan Islands, September 4th, 1892._ DEAR CHILDREN IN THE CELLAR,--I told you before something of the black boys who come here for work on the plantations, and some of whom run away and live a wild life in the forests of the islands. Now I want to tell you of one who lived in the house of the lean man. Like the rest of them here, he is a little fellow, and when he goes about in old, battered, cheap European clothes, looks very small and shabby. When first he came he was as lean as a tobacco-pipe, and his smile (like that of almost all the others) was the sort that makes you half wish to smile yourself, and half wish to cry. However, the boys in the kitchen took him in hand and fed him up. They would set him down alone to table and wait upon him till he had his fill, which was a good long time to wait; and the first thing we noticed was that his little stomach began to stick out like a pigeon's breast; and then the food got a little wider spread and he started little calves to his legs; and last of all he began to get quite saucy and impudent, so that we could know what sort of a fellow he really was when he was no longer afraid of being thrashed. He is really what you ought to call a young man, though I suppose nobody in the whole wide world has any idea of his age; and, as far as his behaviour goes, you can only think of him as a big little child with a good deal of sense. When Austin built his fort against the Indians, Arick (for that is the black boy's name) liked nothing so much as to help him. And this is very funny, when you think that of all the dangerous savages in this island Arick is one of the most dangerous. The other day, besides, he made Austin a musical instrument of the sort they use in his own country, a harp with only one string. He took a stick about three feet long, and perhaps four inches round. The under side he hollowed out in a deep trench to serve as sounding box; the two ends of the upper side he made to curve upward like the ends of a canoe, and between these he stretched the single string. He plays upon it with a match or a little piece of stick, and sings to it songs of his own country, of which no person here can understand a single word, and which are very likely all about fighting with his enemies in battle, and killing them, and I am sorry to say cooking them in a ground oven and eating them for supper when the fight is over. For Arick is really what you might call a savage, though a savage is a very different person in reality, and a very much nicer, from what he is made to appear in little books. He is the sort of person that everybody smiles to, or makes faces at, or gives a smack to as he goes by; the sort of person that all the girls on the plantation give the best seat to, and help first, and love to decorate with flowers and ribbons, and yet all the while are laughing at him; the sort of person who likes best to play with Austin, and whom Austin perhaps (when he is allowed) likes best to play with. He is all grins and giggles, and little steps out of dances, and little droll ways, to attract people's attention and set them laughing. And yet when you come to look at him closer, you will find that his body is all covered with scars. This was when he was a child. There was a war, as is the way in these wild islands, between his village and the next, much as if there were war in London between one street and another; and all the children ran about playing in the middle of the trouble, and I dare say took no more notice of the war than you children in London do of a general election. But sometimes, at general elections, English children may get run over by processions in the street; and it chanced that as little Arick was running about in the bush, and very busy about his playing, he ran into the midst of the warriors on the other side. These speared him with a poisoned spear; and his own people, when they had found him lying for dead, and in order to cure him of the poison, cut him up with knives that were probably made of fish-bones. This is a very savage piece of child-life, and Arick, for all his good-nature, is still a very savage person. I have told you how the black boys sometimes run away from the plantations, and live behind alone in the forest, building little sheds to protect them from the rain, and sometimes planting little gardens of food, but for the most part living the best they can upon the nuts of the trees and yams that they dig with their hands out of the earth. I do not think there can be anywhere in the world people more wretched than these runaways. They cannot return, for they would only return to be punished. They can never hope to see again their own land or their own people--indeed, I do not know what they can hope, but just to find enough yams every day to keep them from starvation. And in the wet season of the year, which is our summer and your winter, and the rain falls day after day far harder and louder than the loudest thunder-plump that ever fell in England, and the noon is sometimes so dark that the lean man is glad to light his lamp to write by, I can think of nothing so dreary as the state of these poor runaway slaves in the houseless bush. You are to remember, besides, that the people of this island hate and fear them because they are cannibals, sit and tell tales of them about their lamps at night in their own comfortable houses, and are sometimes afraid to lie down to sleep if they think there is a lurking black boy in the neighbourhood. Well now, Arick is of their own race and language, only he is a little more lucky because he has not run away; and how do you think that he proposed to help them? He asked if he might not have a gun. "What do you want with a gun, Arick?" was asked. And he said quite simply, and with his nice good-natured smile, that if he had a gun he would go up into the high bush and shoot black boys as men shoot pigeons. He said nothing about eating them, nor do I think he really meant to. I think all he wanted was to clear the property of vermin as gamekeepers at home kill weasels, or housewives mice. The other day he was sent down on an errand to the German Firm where many of the black boys live. It was very late when he came home on a bright moonlight night. He had a white bandage round his head, his eyes shone, and he could scarcely speak for excitement. It seems some of the black boys who were his enemies at home had attacked him, and one with a knife. By his own account he had fought very well, but the odds were heavy; the man with the knife had cut him both in the head and back, he had been struck down, and if some of the black boys of his own side had not come to the rescue, he must certainly have been killed. I am sure no Christmas-box could make any of you children so happy as this fight made Arick. A great part of the next day he neglected his work to play upon the one-stringed harp and sing songs about his great victory. And to-day, when he is gone upon his holiday, he has announced that he is going back to the German Firm to have another battle and another triumph. I do not think he will go all the same, or I should be more uneasy, for I do not want to have my Arick killed; and there is no doubt that if he begins to fight again, he will be likely to go on with it very far. For I have seen him once when he saw, or thought he saw, an enemy. It was one of our dreadful days of rain, the sound of it like a great waterfall or like a tempest of wind blowing in the forest; and there came to our door two runaway black boys seeking work. In such weather as that my enemy's dog (as Shakespeare says) should have had a right to shelter. But when Arick saw these two poor rogues coming with their empty bellies and drenched clothes, and one of them with a stolen cutlass in his hand, through that world of falling water, he had no thought of pity in his heart. Crouching behind one of the pillars of the verandah, which he held in his two hands, his mouth drew back into a strange sort of smile, his eyes grew bigger and bigger, and his whole face was just like the one word Murder in big capitals. Now I have told you a great deal too much about poor Arick's savage nature, and now I must tell you about a great amusement he had the other day. There came an English ship of war in the harbour, and the officers very good naturedly gave an entertainment of songs and dances and a magic-lantern, to which Arick and Austin were allowed to go. At the door of the hall there were crowds of black boys waiting and trying to peep in, the way children at home lie about and peep under the tent of a circus; and you may be sure Arick was a very proud person when he passed them all by and entered the hall with his ticket. I wish I knew what he thought of the whole performance; but the housekeeper of the lean man, who sat just in front of him, tells me what seemed to startle him the most. The first thing was when two of the officers came out with blackened faces like Christy minstrel boys and began to dance. Arick was sure that they were really black and his own people, and he was wonderfully surprised to see them dance this new European style of dance. But the great affair was the magic-lantern. The hall was made quite dark, which was very little to Arick's taste. He sat there behind the housekeeper, nothing to be seen of him but eyes and teeth, and his heart beating finely in his little scarred breast. And presently there came out on the white sheet that great bright eye of light that I am sure all you children must have often seen. It was quite new to Arick, he had no idea what would happen next; and in his fear and excitement, he laid hold with his little slim black fingers like a bird's claws on the neck of the housekeeper in front of him. All through the rest of the show, as one picture followed another on the white sheet, he sat there gasping and clutching at the housekeeper's neck, and goodness knows whether he were more pleased or frightened. Doubtless it was a very fine thing to see all these bright pictures coming out and dying away again one after another; but doubtless it was rather alarming also, for how was it done? And at last, when there appeared upon the screen the head of a black woman (as it might be his own mother or sister), and the black woman of a sudden began to roll her eyes, the fear or the excitement, whichever it was, wrung out of him a loud shuddering sob. And I think we all ought to admire his courage when, after an evening spent in looking on at such wonderful miracles, he and Austin set out alone through the forest to the lean man's house. It was late at night and pitch dark when some of the party overtook the little white boy and the big black boy marching among the trees with their lantern. I have told you the wood has an ill name, and all the people of the island believe it to be full of devils; but even if you do not believe in the devils, it is a pretty dreadful place to walk in by the moving light of a lantern, with nothing about you but a curious whirl of shadows and the black night above and beyond. But Arick kept his courage up, and I dare say Austin's too, with a perpetual chatter, so that the people coming after heard his voice long before they saw the shining of the lantern. My dear Miss Boodle,--will I be asking too much that you should send me back my letters to the Children, or copies, if you prefer; I have an idea that they may perhaps help in time to make up a book on the South Seas for children. I have addressed the Cellar so long this time that you must take this note for yourself and excuse, yours most sincerely, R. L. STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Thursday, 15th September [1892]._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--On Tuesday, we had our young adventurer[46] ready, and Fanny, Belle, he and I set out about three of a dark, deadly hot, and deeply unwholesome afternoon. Belle had the lad behind her; I had a pint of champagne in either pocket, a parcel in my hands, and as Jack had a girth sore and I rode without a girth, I might be said to occupy a very unstrategic position. On the way down, a little dreary, beastly drizzle beginning to come out of the darkness, Fanny put up an umbrella, her horse bounded, reared, cannoned into me, cannoned into Belle and the lad, and bolted for home. It really might and ought to have been an A1 catastrophe; but nothing happened beyond Fanny's nerves being a good deal shattered; of course, she could not tell what had happened to us until she got her horse mastered. Next day, Haggard went off to the Commission and left us in charge of his house; all our people came down in wreaths of flowers; we had a boat for them; Haggard had a flag in the Commission boat for us; and when at last the steamer turned up, the young adventurer was carried on board in great style, with a new watch and chain, and about three pound ten of tips, and five big baskets of fruit as free-will offerings to the captain. Captain Morse had us all to lunch; champagne flowed, so did compliments; and I did the affable celebrity life-sized. It made a great send-off for the young adventurer. As the boat drew off, he was standing at the head of the gangway, supported by three handsome ladies--one of them a real full-blown beauty, Madame Green, the singer--and looking very engaging himself, between smiles and tears. Not that he cried in public. My, but we were a tired crowd! However, it is always a blessing to get home, and this time it was a sort of wonder to ourselves that we got back alive. Casualties: Fanny's back jarred, horse incident; Belle, bad headache, tears, and champagne; self, idiocy, champagne, fatigue; Lloyd, ditto, ditto. As for the adventurer, I believe he will have a delightful voyage for his little start in life. But there is always something touching in a mite's first launch. _Date unknown._--I am now well on with the third part of the _Débâcle_.[47] The two first I liked much; the second completely knocking me; so far as it has gone, this third part appears the ramblings of a dull man who has forgotten what he has to say--he reminds me of an M.P. But Sedan was really great, and I will pick no holes. The batteries under fire, the red-cross folk, the county charge--perhaps, above all, Major Bouroche and the operations, all beyond discussion; and every word about the Emperor splendid. _September 30th._--_David Balfour_ done, and its author along with it, or nearly so. Strange to think of even our doctor here repeating his nonsense about debilitating climate. Why, the work I have been doing the last twelve months, in one continuous spate, mostly with annoying interruptions and without any collapse to mention, would be incredible in Norway. But I _have_ broken down now, and will do nothing as long as I possibly can. With _David Balfour_ I am very well pleased; in fact these labours of the last year--I mean _Falesá_ and _D. B._, not Samoa, of course--seem to me to be nearer what I mean than anything I have ever done; nearer what I mean by fiction; the nearest thing before was _Kidnapped_. I am not forgetting the _Master of Ballantrae_, but that lacked all pleasurableness, and hence was imperfect in essence. So you see, if I am a little tired, I do not repent. The third part of the _Débâcle_ may be all very fine; but I cannot read it. It suffers from _impaired vitality_, and _uncertain aim_; two deadly sicknesses. Vital--that's what I am at, first: wholly vital, with a buoyancy of life. Then lyrical, if it may be, and picturesque, always with an epic value of scenes, so that the figures remain in the mind's eye for ever. _October 8th._--Suppose you sent us some of the catalogues of the parties what vends statutes? I don't want colossal Herculeses, but about quarter size and less. If the catalogues were illustrated it would probably be found a help to weak memories. These may be found to alleviate spare moments, when we sometimes amuse ourselves by thinking how fine we shall make the palace if we do not go pop. Perhaps in the same way it might amuse you to send us any pattern of wall paper that might strike you as cheap, pretty, and suitable for a room in a hot and extremely bright climate. It should be borne in mind that our climate can be extremely dark too. Our sitting-room is to be in varnished wood. The room I have particularly in mind is a sort of bed and sitting-room, pretty large, lit on three sides, and the colour in favour of its proprietor at present is a topazy yellow. But then with what colour to relieve it? For a little work-room of my own at the back, I should rather like to see some patterns of unglossy--well, I'll be hanged if I can describe this red--it's not Turkish and it's not Roman and it's not Indian, but it seems to partake of the two last, and yet it can't be either of them, because it ought to be able to go with vermillion. Ah, what a tangled web we weave--anyway, with what brains you have left choose me and send me some--many--patterns of this exact shade. A few days ago it was Haggard's birthday and we had him and his cousin to dinner--bless me if I ever told you of his cousin!--he is here anyway, and a fine, pleasing specimen, so that we have concluded (after our own happy experience) that the climate of Samoa must be favourable to cousins.[48] Then we went out on the verandah in a lovely moonlight, drinking port, hearing the cousin play and sing, till presently we were informed that our boys had got up a siva in Lafaele's house to which we were invited. It was entirely their own idea. The house, you must understand, is one-half floored, and one-half bare earth, and the daïs stands a little over knee high above the level of the soil. The daïs was the stage, with three footlights. We audience sat on mats on the floor, and the cook and three of our work-boys, sometimes assisted by our two ladies, took their places behind the footlights and began a topical Vailima song. The burden was of course that of a Samoan popular song about a white man who objects to all that he sees in Samoa. And there was of course a special verse for each one of the party--Lloyd was called the dancing man (practically the Chief's handsome son) of Vailima; he was also, in his character I suppose of overseer, compared to a policeman--Belle had that day been the almoner in a semi-comic distribution of wedding rings and thimbles (bought cheap at an auction) to the whole plantation company, fitting a ring on every man's finger, and a ring and a thimble on both the women's. This was very much in character with her native name _Teuila_, the adorner of the ugly--so of course this was the point of her verse and at a given moment all the performers displayed the rings upon their fingers. Pelema (the cousin--our cousin) was described as watching from the house and whenever he saw any boy not doing anything, running and doing it himself. Fanny's verse was less intelligible, but it was accompanied in the dance with a pantomime of terror well-fitted to call up her haunting, indefatigable and diminutive presence in a blue gown. TO GORDON BROWNE _Vailima, Samoa [Autumn 1892]._ _To the Artist who did the illustrations to "Uma."_ DEAR SIR,--I only know you under the initials G. B., but you have done some exceedingly spirited and satisfactory illustrations to my story _The Beach of Falesá_, and I wish to write and thank you expressly for the care and talent shown. Such numbers of people can do good black and whites! So few can illustrate a story, or apparently read it. You have shown that you can do both, and your creation of Wiltshire is a real illumination of the text. It was exactly so that Wiltshire dressed and looked, and you have the line of his nose to a nicety. His nose is an inspiration. Nor should I forget to thank you for Case, particularly in his last appearance. It is a singular fact--which seems to point still more directly to inspiration in your case--that your missionary actually resembles the flesh-and-blood person from whom Mr. Tarleton was drawn. The general effect of the islands is all that could be wished; indeed I have but one criticism to make, that in the background of Case taking the dollar from Mr. Tarleton's head--head--not hand, as the fools have printed it--the natives have a little too much the look of Africans. But the great affair is that you have been to the pains to illustrate my story instead of making conscientious black and whites of people sitting talking. I doubt if you have left unrepresented a single pictorial incident. I am writing by this mail to the editor in the hopes that I may buy from him the originals, and I am, dear sir, your very much obliged, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MISS MORSE The next is an answer to an acknowledgment from a lady in the United States, one of many similar which he from time to time received, of help and encouragement derived from his writings. _Vailima, Samoan Islands, October 7th, 1892._ DEAR MADAM,--I have a great diffidence in answering your valued letter. It would be difficult for me to express the feelings with which I read it--and am now trying to re-read it as I dictate this. You ask me to forgive what you say "must seem a liberty," and I find that I cannot thank you sufficiently or even find a word with which to qualify your letter. Dear Madam, such a communication even the vainest man would think a sufficient reward for a lifetime of labour. That I should have been able to give so much help and pleasure to your sister is the subject of my grateful wonder. That she, being dead, and speaking with your pen, should be able to repay the debt with such a liberal interest, is one of those things that reconcile us with the world and make us take hope again. I do not know what I have done to deserve so beautiful and touching a compliment; and I feel there is but one thing fit for me to say here, that I will try with renewed courage to go on in the same path, and to deserve, if not to receive, a similar return from others. You apologise for speaking so much about yourselves. Dear Madam, I thought you did so too little. I should have wished to have known more of those who were so sympathetic as to find a consolation in my work, and so graceful and so tactful as to acknowledge it in such a letter as was yours. Will you offer to your mother the expression of a sympathy which (coming from a stranger) must seem very airy, but which yet is genuine; and accept for yourself my gratitude for the thought which inspired you to write to me and the words which you found to express it. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MISS TAYLOR Lady Taylor had died soon after the settlement of the Stevenson family at Vailima. The second paragraph refers to a test which had been set before an expert in the reading of character by handwriting. _Vailima, Samoan Islands, October 7th, 1892._ MY DEAR IDA,--I feel very much the implied reproof in yours just received; but I assure you there is no fear of our forgetting either Una or yourself, or your dear mother, who was one of the women I have most admired and loved in the whole of my way through life. The truth is that Fanny writes to nobody and that I am on the whole rather overworked. I compose lots of letters to lots of unforgotten friends, but when it comes to taking the pen between my fingers there are many impediments. Hence it comes that I am now writing to you by an amanuensis, at which I know you will be very angry. Well, it was Hobson's choice. A little while ago I had very bad threatenings of scrivener's cramp; and if Belle (Fanny's daughter, of whom you remember to have heard) had not taken up the pen for my correspondence, I doubt you would never have heard from me again except in the way of books. I wish you and Una would be so good as to write to us now and then even without encouragement. An unsolicited letter would be almost certain (sooner or later, depending on the activity of the conscience) to produce some sort of an apology for an answer. All this upon one condition: that you send me your friend's description of my looks, age and character. The character of my work I am not so careful about. But did you ever hear of anything so tantalizing as for you to tell me the story and not send me your notes? I expect it was a device to extract an answer; and, as you see, it has succeeded. Let me suggest (if your friend be handy) that the present letter would be a very delicate test. It is in one person's handwriting, it expresses the ideas of another, of the writer herself you know nothing. I should be very curious to know what the sibyl will make of such a problem. If you carry out your design of settling in London you must be sure and let us have the new address. I swear we shall write some time--and if the interval be long you must just take it on your own head for prophesying horrors. You remember how you always said we were but an encampment of Bedouins, and that you would awake some morning to find us fled for ever. Nothing unsettled me more than these ill-judged remarks. I was doing my best to be a sedentary semi-respectable man in a suburban villa; and you were always shaking your head at me and assuring me (what I knew to be partly true) that it was all a farce. Even here, when I have sunk practically all that I possess, and have good health and my fill of congenial fighting, and could not possibly get away if I wanted ever so--even here and now the recollection of these infidel prophesies rings in my ears like an invitation to the sea. _Tu l'as voulu!_ I know you want some of our news, and it is all so far away that I know not when to begin. We have a big house and we are building another--pray God that we can pay for it. I am just reminded that we have no less than eight several places of habitation in this place, which was a piece of uncleared forest some three years ago. I think there are on my pay rolls at the present moment thirteen human souls, not counting two washerwomen who come and go. In addition to this I am at daggers drawn with the Government, have had my correspondence stopped and opened by the Chief Justice--it was correspondence with the so-called Rebel King,--and have had boys examined and threatened with deportation to betray the secrets of my relations with the same person. In addition to this I might direct attention to those trifling exercises of the fancy, my literary works, and I hope you won't think that I am likely to suffer from ennui. Nor is Fanny any less active. Ill or well, rain or shine, a little blue indefatigable figure is to be observed howking about certain patches of garden. She comes in heated and bemired up to the eyebrows, late for every meal. She has reached a sort of tragic placidity. Whenever she plants anything new the boys weed it up. Whenever she tries to keep anything for seed the house-boys throw it away. And she has reached that pitch of a kind of noble dejection that she would almost say she did not mind. Anyway, her cabbages have succeeded. Talolo (our native cook, and a very good one too) likened them the other day to the head of a German; and even this hyperbolical image was grudging. I remember all the trouble you had with servants at the Roost. The most of them were nothing to the trances that we have to go through here at times, when I have to hold a bed of justice, and take evidence which is never twice the same, and decide, practically blindfold, and after I have decided have the accuser take back the accusation in block and beg for mercy for the culprit. Conceive the annoyance of all this when you are very fond of both.--Your affectionate friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO E. L. BURLINGAME _Vailima Plantation, Samoan Islands, Oct. 10th, 1892._ MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--It is now, as you see, the 10th of October, and there has not reached the Island of Upolu one single copy, or rag of a copy, of the Samoa book. I lie; there has come one, and that in the pocket of a missionary man who is at daggers drawn with me, who lends it to all my enemies, conceals it from all my friends, and is bringing a lawsuit against me on the strength of expressions in the same which I have forgotten, and now cannot see. This is pretty tragic, I think you will allow; and I was inclined to fancy it was the fault of the Post Office. But I hear from my sister-in-law Mrs. Sanchez that she is in the same case, and has received no _Footnote_. I have also to consider that I had no letter from you last mail, although you ought to have received by that time "My Grandfather and Scott," and "Me and my Grandfather." Taking one consideration with another, therefore, I prefer to conceive that No. 743 Broadway has fallen upon gentle and continuous slumber, and is become an enchanted palace among publishing houses. If it be not so, if the _Footnotes_ were really sent, I hope you will fall upon the Post Office with all the vigour you possess. How does _The Wrecker_ go in the States? It seems to be doing exceptionally well in England.--Yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN This letter contains the first announcement of the scheme of _Weir of Hermiston_. _Vailima, October 28th, 1892._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--This is very late to begin the monthly budget, but I have a good excuse this time, for I have had a very annoying fever with symptoms of sore arm, and in the midst of it a very annoying piece of business which suffered no delay or idleness.... The consequence of all this was that my fever got very much worse and your letter has not been hitherto written. But, my dear fellow, do compare these little larky fevers with the fine, healthy, prostrating colds of the dear old dead days at home. Here was I, in the middle of a pretty bad one, and I was able to put it in my pocket, and go down day after day, and attend to and put my strength into this beastly business. Do you see me doing that with a catarrh? And if I had done so, what would have been the result? Last night, about four o'clock, Belle and I set off to Apia, whither my mother had preceded us. She was at the Mission; we went to Haggard's. There we had to wait the most unconscionable time for dinner. I do not wish to speak lightly of the Amanuensis, who is unavoidably present, but I may at least say for myself that I was as cross as two sticks. Dinner came at last, we had the tinned soup which is usually the _pièce de resistance_ in the halls of Haggard, and we pitched into it. Followed an excellent salad of tomatoes and crayfish, a good Indian curry, a tender joint of beef, a dish of pigeons, a pudding, cheese and coffee. I was so over-eaten after this "hunger and burst" that I could scarcely move; and it was my sad fate that night in the character of the local author to eloquute before the public--"Mr. Stevenson will read a selection from his own works"--a degrading picture. I had determined to read them the account of the hurricane; I do not know if I told you that my book has never turned up here, or rather only one copy has, and that in the unfriendly hands of ----. It has therefore only been seen by enemies; and this combination of mystery and evil report has been greatly envenomed by some ill-judged newspaper articles from the States. Altogether this specimen was listened to with a good deal of uncomfortable expectation on the part of the Germans, and when it was over was applauded with unmistakable relief. The public hall where these revels came off seems to be unlucky for me; I never go there but to some stone-breaking job. Last time it was the public meeting of which I must have written you; this time it was this uneasy but not on the whole unsuccessful experiment. Belle, my mother, and I rode home about midnight in a fine display of lightning and witch-fires. My mother is absent, so that I may dare to say that she struck me as voluble. The Amanuensis did not strike me the same way; she was probably thinking, but it was really rather a weird business, and I saw what I have never seen before, the witch-fires gathered into little bright blue points almost as bright as a night-light. _Saturday._--This is the day that should bring your letter; it is gray and cloudy and windless; thunder rolls in the mountain; it is a quarter past six, and I am alone, sir, alone in this workman's house, Belle and Lloyd having been down all yesterday to meet the steamer; they were scarce gone with most of the horses and all the saddles, than there began a perfect picnic of the sick and maim; Iopu with a bad foot, Faauma with a bad shoulder, Fanny with yellow spots. It was at first proposed to carry all these to the doctor, particularly Faauma, whose shoulder bore an appearance of erysipelas, that sent the amateur below. No horses, no saddle. Now I had my horse and I could borrow Lafaele's saddle; and if I went alone I could do a job that had long been waiting; and that was to interview the doctor on another matter. Off I set in a hazy moonlight night; windless, like to-day; the thunder rolling in the mountain, as to-day; in the still groves, these little mushroom lamps glowing blue and steady, singly or in pairs. Well, I had my interview, said everything as I had meant, and with just the result I hoped for. The doctor and I drank beer together and discussed German literature until nine, and we parted the best of friends. I got home to a silent house of sleepers, only Fanny awaiting me; we talked awhile, in whispers, on the interview; then, I got a lantern and went across to the workman's house, now empty and silent, myself sole occupant. So to bed, prodigious tired but mighty content with my night's work, and to-day, with a headache and a chill, have written you this page, while my new novel waits. Of this I will tell you nothing, except the various names under consideration. First, it ought to be called--but of course that is impossible-- _Braxfield._[49] Then it _is_ to be called either _Weir of Hermiston, The Lord-Justice Clerk, The Two Kirsties of the Cauldstaneslap_, or _The Four Black Brothers_. Characters: Adam Weir, Lord-Justice Clerk, called Lord Hermiston. Archie, his son. Aunt Kirstie Elliott, his housekeeper at Hermiston. Elliott of the Cauldstaneslap, her brother. Kirstie Elliott, his daughter. Jim, \ Gib, | Hob > his sons. & | Dandie, / Patrick Innes, a young advocate. The Lord-Justice General. Scene, about Hermiston in the Lammermuirs and in Edinburgh. Temp. 1812. So you see you are to have another holiday from copra! The rain begins softly on the iron roof, and I will do the reverse and--dry up. _Sunday._--Yours with the diplomatic private opinion received. It is just what I should have supposed. _Ça m'est bien égal._--The name is to be _The Lord-Justice Clerk._ None others are genuine. Unless it be _Lord-Justice Clerk Hermiston._ _Nov. 2nd._--On Saturday we expected Captain Morse of the _Alameda_ to come up to lunch, and on Friday with genuine South Sea hospitality had a pig killed. On the Saturday morning no pig. Some of the boys seemed to give a doubtful account of themselves; our next neighbour below in the wood is a bad fellow and very intimate with some of our boys, for whom his confounded house is like a fly-paper for flies. To add to all this, there was on the Saturday a great public presentation of food to the king and parliament men, an occasion on which it is almost dignified for a Samoan to steal anything, and entirely dignified for him to steal a pig. (The Amanuensis went to the _talolo_, as it is called, and saw something so very pleasing she begs to interrupt the letter to tell it. The different villagers came in in bands--led by the maid of the village, followed by the young warriors. It was a very fine sight, for some three thousand people are said to have assembled. The men wore nothing but magnificent head-dresses and a bunch of leaves, and were oiled and glistening in the sunlight. One band had no maid but was led by a tiny child of about five--a serious little creature clad in a ribbon of grass and a fine head-dress, who skipped with elaborate leaps in front of the warriors, like a little kid leading a band of lions. A.M.) The A.M. being done, I go on again. All this made it very possible that even if none of our boys had stolen the pig, some of them might know the thief. Besides, the theft, as it was a theft of meat prepared for a guest, had something of the nature of an insult, and "my face," in native phrase, "was ashamed." Accordingly, we determined to hold a bed of justice. It was done last night after dinner. I sat at the head of the table, Graham on my right hand, Henry Simelé at my left, Lloyd behind him. The house company sat on the floor around the walls--twelve all told. I am described as looking as like Braxfield as I could manage with my appearance; Graham, who is of a severe countenance, looked like Rhadamanthus; Lloyd was hideous to the view; and Simelé had all the fine solemnity of a Samoan chief. The proceedings opened by my delivering a Samoan prayer, which may be translated thus--"Our God, look down upon us and shine into our hearts. Help us to be far from falsehood so that each one of us may stand before Thy Face in his integrity."--Then, beginning with Simelé, every one came up to the table, laid his hand on the Bible, and repeated clause by clause after me the following oath--I fear it may sound even comic in English, but it is a very pretty piece of Samoan, and struck direct at the most lively superstitions of the race. "This is the Holy Bible here that I am touching. Behold me, O God! If I know who it was that took away the pig, or the place to which it was taken, or have heard anything relating to it, and shall not declare the same--be made an end of by God this life of mine!" They all took it with so much seriousness and firmness that (as Graham said) if they were not innocent they would make invaluable witnesses. I was so far impressed by their bearing that I went no further, and the funny and yet strangely solemn scene came to an end. _Sunday, Nov. 6th._--Here is a long story to go back upon, and I wonder if I have either time or patience for the task? Wednesday I had a great idea of match-making, and proposed to Henry that Faalé would make a good wife for him. I wish I had put this down when it was fresher in my mind, it was so interesting an interview. My gentleman would not tell if I were on or not. "I do not know yet; I will tell you next week. May I tell the sister of my father? No, better not, tell her when it is done."--"But will not your family be angry if you marry without asking them?"--"My village? What does my village want? Mats!" I said I thought the girl would grow up to have a great deal of sense, and my gentleman flew out upon me; she had sense now, he said. Thursday, we were startled by the note of guns, and presently after heard it was an English warship. Graham and I set off at once, and as soon as we met any towns-folk they began crying to me that I was to be arrested. It was the _Vossische Zeitung_ article which had been quoted in a paper. Went on board and saw Captain Bourke; he did not even know--not even guess--why he was here; having been sent off by cablegram from Auckland. It is hoped the same ship that takes this off Europewards may bring his orders and our news. But which is it to be? Heads or tails? If it is to be German, I hope they will deport me; I should prefer it so; I do not think that I could bear a German officialdom, and should probably have to leave _sponte mea_, which is only less picturesque and more expensive. _8th._--Mail day. All well, not yet put in prison, whatever may be in store for me. No time even to sign this lame letter. To J. M. BARRIE _Vailima Plantation, Samoan Islands, November 1st, 1892._ DEAR MR. BARRIE,--I can scarce thank you sufficiently for your extremely amusing letter. No, _The Auld Licht Idyls_ never reached me--I wish it had, and I wonder extremely whether it would not be good for me to have a pennyworth of the Auld Licht pulpit. It is a singular thing that I should live here in the South Seas under conditions so new and so striking, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit that cold old huddle of grey hills from which we come. I have just finished _David Balfour_; I have another book on the stocks, _The Young Chevalier_, which is to be part in France and part in Scotland, and to deal with Prince Charlie about the year 1749; and now what have I done but begun a third which is to be all moorland together, and is to have for a centre-piece a figure that I think you will appreciate--that of the immortal Braxfield--Braxfield himself is my _grand premier_, or, since you are so much involved in the British drama, let me say my heavy lead.... Your descriptions of your dealings with Lord Rintoul are frightfully unconscientious. You should never write about anybody until you persuade yourself at least for the moment that you love him, above all anybody on whom your plot revolves. It will always make a hole in the book; and, if he has anything to do with the mechanism, prove a stick in your machinery. But you know all this better than I do, and it is one of your most promising traits that you do not take your powers too seriously. _The Little Minister_ ought to have ended badly; we all know it did; and we are infinitely grateful to you for the grace and good feeling with which you lied about it. If you had told the truth, I for one could never have forgiven you. As you had conceived and written the earlier parts, the truth about the end, though indisputably true to fact, would have been a lie, or what is worse, a discord in art. If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning. Now your book began to end well. You let yourself fall in love with, and fondle, and smile at your puppets. Once you had done that, your honour was committed--at the cost of truth to life you were bound to save them. It is the blot on _Richard Feverel_, for instance, that it begins to end well; and then tricks you and ends ill. But in that case there is worse behind, for the ill-ending does not inherently issue from the plot--the story _had_, in fact, _ended well_ after the great last interview between Richard and Lucy--and the blind, illogical bullet which smashes all has no more to do between the boards than a fly has to do with the room into whose open window it comes buzzing. It _might_ have so happened; it needed not; and unless needs must, we have no right to pain our readers. I have had a heavy case of conscience of the same kind about my Braxfield story. Braxfield--only his name is Hermiston--has a son who is condemned to death; plainly, there is a fine tempting fitness about this; and I meant he was to hang. But now on considering my minor characters, I saw there were five people who would--in a sense who must--break prison and attempt his rescue. They were capable, hardy folks, too, who might very well succeed. Why should they not then? Why should not young Hermiston escape clear out of the country? and be happy, if he could, with his----. But soft! I will not betray my secret or my heroine. Suffice it to breathe in your ear that she was what Hardy calls (and others in their plain way don't) a Pure Woman.[50] Much virtue in a capital letter, such as yours was. Write to me again in my infinite distance. Tell me about your new book. No harm in telling _me_; I am too far off to be indiscreet; there are too few near me who would care to hear. I am rushes by the riverside, and the stream is in Babylon: breathe your secrets to me fearlessly; and if the Trade Wind caught and carried them away, there are none to catch them nearer than Australia, unless it were the Tropic Birds. In the unavoidable absence of my amanuensis, who is buying eels for dinner, I have thus concluded my dispatch, like St. Paul, with my own hand. And in the inimitable words of Lord Kames, Faur ye weel, ye bitch.--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO E. L. BURLINGAME _Vailima Plantation, Nov. 2nd, 1892._ MY DEAR BURLINGAME,--In the first place, I have to acknowledge receipt of your munificent cheque for three hundred and fifty dollars. Glad you liked the Scott voyage; rather more than I did upon the whole. As the proofs have not turned up at all, there can be no question of returning them, and I am therefore very much pleased to think you have arranged not to wait. The volumes of Adams arrived along with yours of October 6th. One of the dictionaries has also blundered home, apparently from the Colonies; the other is still to seek. I note and sympathise with your bewilderment as to _Falesá_. My own direct correspondence with Mr. Baxter is now about three months in abeyance. Altogether you see how well it would be if you could do anything to wake up the Post Office. Not a single copy of the _Footnote_ has yet reached Samoa, but I hear of one having come to its address in Hawaii. Glad to hear good news of Stoddard.--Yours sincerely, R. L. STEVENSON. _P.S._--Since the above was written an aftermath of post matter came in, among which were the proofs of _My Grandfather_. I shall correct and return them, but as I have lost all confidence in the Post Office, I shall mention here: first galley, 4th line from the bottom, for "AS" read "OR." Should I ever again have to use my work without waiting for proofs, bear in mind this golden principle. From a congenital defect, I must suppose, I am unable to write the word OR--wherever I write it the printer unerringly puts AS--and those who read for me had better, wherever it is possible, substitute _or_ for _as_. This the more so since many writers have a habit of using as which is death to my temper and confusion to my face. R. L. S. TO LIEUTENANT EELES The following is addressed to one of Stevenson's best friends among the officers of H.M.S. the Curaçoa, which had been for some time on the South Pacific station. _Vailima Plantation, Upolu, Samoan Islands, November 15th, 1892._ DEAR EELES,--In the first place, excuse me writing to you by another hand, as that is the way in which alone all my correspondence gets effected. Before I took to this method, or rather before I found a victim, it simply didn't get effected. Thank you again and again, first for your kind thought of writing to me, and second for your extremely amusing and interesting letter. You can have no guess how immediately interesting it was to our family. First of all, the poor soul at Nukufetau is an old friend of ours, and we have actually treated him ourselves on a former visit to the island. I don't know if Hoskin would approve of our treatment; it consisted, I believe, mostly in a present of stout and a recommendation to put nails in his watertank. We also (as you seem to have done) recommended him to leave the island; and I remember very well how wise and kind we thought his answer. He had half-caste children (he said) who would suffer and perhaps be despised if he carried them elsewhere; if he left them there alone, they would almost certainly miscarry; and the best thing was that he should stay and die with them. But the cream of the fun was your meeting with Buckland. We not only know him, but (as the French say) we don't know anybody else; he is our intimate and adored original; and--prepare your mind--he was, is, and ever will be, TOMMY HADDON![51] As I don't believe you to be inspired, I suspect you to have suspected this. At least it was a mighty happy suspicion. You are quite right: Tommy is really "a good chap," though about as comic as they make them. I was extremely interested in your Fiji legend, and perhaps even more so in your capital account of the _Curaçoa's_ misadventure. Alas! we have nothing so thrilling to relate. All hangs and fools on in this isle of mis-government, without change, though not without novelty, but wholly without hope, unless perhaps you should consider it hopeful that I am still more immediately threatened with arrest. The confounded thing is, that if it comes off, I shall be sent away in the _Ringarooma_ instead of the _Curaçoa_. The former ship burst upon us by the run--she had been sent off by despatch and without orders--and to make me a little more easy in my mind she brought newspapers clamouring for my incarceration. Since then I have had a conversation with the German Consul. He said he had read a review of my Samoa book, and if the review were fair, must regard it as an insult, and one that would have to be resented. At the same time, I learn that letters addressed to the German squadron lie for them here in the Post Office. Reports are current of other English ships being on the way--I hope to goodness yours will be among the number. And I gather from one thing and another that there must be a holy row going on between the powers at home, and that the issue (like all else connected with Samoa) is on the knees of the gods. One thing, however, is pretty sure--_if_ that issue prove to be a German protectorate, I shall have to tramp. Can you give us any advice as to a fresh field of energy? We have been searching the atlas, and it seems difficult to fill the bill. How would Rarotonga do? I forget if you have been there. The best of it is that my new house is going up like winking, and I am dictating this letter to the accompaniment of saws and hammers. A hundred black boys and about a score draught oxen perished, or at least barely escaped with their lives, from the mud holes on our road, bringing up the materials. It will be a fine legacy to H.I.G.M.'s protectorate, and doubtless the Governor will take it for his country house.[51] The Ringarooma people, by the way, seem very nice. I liked Stansfield particularly. Our middy[53] has gone up to San Francisco in pursuit of the phantom Education. We have good word of him, and I hope he will not be in disgrace again, as he was when the hope of the British Navy--need I say that I refer to Admiral Burney?--honoured us last. The next time you come, as the new house will be finished, we shall be able to offer you a bed. Nares and Meiklejohn may like to hear that our new room is to be big enough to dance in. It will be a very pleasant day for me to see the _Curaçoa_ in port again and at least a proper contingent of her officers "skipping in my 'all." We have just had a feast on my birthday at which we had three of the Ringaroomas, and I wish they had been three Curaçoas--say yourself, Hoskin, and Burney the ever Great. (Consider this an invitation.) Our boys had got the thing up regardless. There were two huge sows--O, brutes of animals that would have broken down a hansom cab--four smaller pigs, two barrels of beef, and a horror of vegetables and fowls. We sat down between forty and fifty in a big new native house behind the kitchen that you have never seen, and ate and public spoke till all was blue. Then we had about half an hour's holiday with some beer and sherry and brandy and soda to restrengthen the European heart, and then out to the old native house to see a siva. Finally, all the guests were packed off in a trackless black night and down a road that was rather fitted for the _Curaçoa_ than any human pedestrian, though to be sure I do not know the draught of the _Curaçoa_. My ladies one and all desire to be particularly remembered to our friends on board, and all look forward, as I do myself, in the hope of your return.--Yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. And let me hear from you again! TO CHARLES BAXTER The following extract gives a hint of Stevenson's intended management of one of the most difficult points in the plot of _Weir of Hermiston_. _1st Dec. '92._ ... I have a novel on the stocks to be called _The Justice-Clerk_. It is pretty Scotch, the Grand Premier is taken from Braxfield--(Oh, by the by, send me Cockburn's _Memorials_)--and some of the story is--well--queer. The heroine is seduced by one man, and finally disappears with the other man who shot him.... Mind you, I expect _The Justice-Clerk_ to be my masterpiece. My Braxfield is already a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, and so far as he has gone _far_ my best character. [_Later._]--Second thought. I wish Pitcairn's _Criminal Trials quam primum_. Also, an absolutely correct text of the Scots judiciary oath. Also, in case Pitcairn does not come down late enough, I wish as full a report as possible of a Scotch murder trial between 1790-1820. Understand, _the fullest possible_. Is there any book which would guide me as to the following facts? The Justice-Clerk tries some people capitally on circuit. Certain evidence cropping up, the charge is transferred to the J.-C.'s own son. Of course, in the next trial the J.-C. is excluded, and the case is called before the Lord-Justice General. Where would this trial have to be? I fear in Edinburgh, which would not suit my view. Could it be again at the circuit town? ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN [_Nov. 30, 1892._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--Another grimy little odd and end of paper, for which you shall be this month repaid in kind, and serve you jolly well right.... This is a strange life I live, always on the brink of deportation, men's lives in the scale--and, well, you know my character: if I were to pretend to you that I was not amused, you would justly scorn me. The new house is roofed; it will be a braw house, and what is better, I have my yearly bill in, and I find I can pay for it. For all which mercies, etc. I must have made close on £4,000 this year all told; but, what is not so pleasant, I seem to have come near to spending them. I have been in great alarm, with this new house on the cards, all summer, and came very near to taking in sail, but I live here so entirely on credit, that I determined to hang on. _Dec. 1st._--I was saying yesterday that my life was strange and did not think how well I spoke. Yesterday evening I was briefed to defend a political prisoner before the Deputy Commissioner. What do you think of that for a vicissitude? _Dec. 3rd._--Now for a confession. When I heard you and Cassells had decided to print _The Bottle Imp_ along with _Falesá_, I was too much disappointed to answer. _The Bottle Imp_ was the _pièce de résistance_ for my volume, _Island Nights' Entertainments_. However, that volume might have never got done; and I send you two others in case they should be in time. First have _The Beach of Falesá_. Then a fresh false title: ISLAND NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS; and then _The Bottle Imp_: a cue from an old melodrama. _The Isle of Voices._ _The Waif Woman_; a cue from a _saga_. Of course these two others are not up to the mark of _The Bottle Imp_; but they each have a certain merit, and they fit in style. By saying "a cue from an old melodrama" after the _B. I._, you can get rid of my note. If this is in time, it will be splendid, and will make quite a volume. Should you and Cassells prefer, you can call the whole volume _I. N. E._--though the _Beach of Falesá_ is the child of a quite different inspiration. They all have a queer realism, even the most extravagant, even the _Isle of Voices_; the manners are exact. Should they come too late, have them type-written and return to me here the type-written copies. _Sunday, Dec 4th._--3rd start,--But now more humbly and with the aid of an Amanuensis. First one word about page 2. My wife protests against _The Waif Woman_ and I am instructed to report the same to you.[54]... _Dec. 5th._--A horrid alarm rises that our October mail was burned crossing the Plains. If so, you lost a beautiful long letter--I am sure it was beautiful though I remember nothing about it--and I must say I think it serves you properly well. That I should continue writing to you at such length is simply a vicious habit for which I blush. At the same time, please communicate at once with Charles Baxter whether you have or have not received a letter posted here Oct. 12th, as he is going to cable me the fate of my mail. Now to conclude my news. The German Firm have taken my book like angels, and the result is that Lloyd and I were down there at dinner on Saturday, where we partook of fifteen several dishes and eight distinct forms of intoxicating drink. To the credit of Germany, I must say there was not a shadow of a headache the next morning. I seem to have done as well as my neighbours, for I hear one of the clerks expressed the next morning a gratified surprise that Mr. Stevenson stood his drink so well. It is a strange thing that any race can still find joy in such athletic exercises. I may remark in passing that the mail is due and you have had far more than you deserve. R. L. S. TO MRS. FLEEMING JENKIN _December 5th, 1892._ MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,--... So much said, I come with guilty speed to what more immediately concerns myself. Spare us a month or two for old sake's sake, and make my wife and me happy and proud. We are only fourteen days from San Francisco, just about a month from Liverpool; we have our new house almost finished. The thing _can_ be done; I believe we can make you almost comfortable. It is the loveliest climate in the world, our political troubles seem near an end. It can be done, _it must_! Do, please, make a virtuous effort, come and take a glimpse of a new world I am sure you do not dream of, and some old friends who do often dream of your arrival. Alas, I was just beginning to get eloquent, and there goes the lunch bell, and after lunch I must make up the mail. Do come. You must not come in February or March--bad months. From April on it is delightful.--Your sincere friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO HENRY JAMES _December 5th, 1892._ MY DEAR JAMES,--How comes it so great a silence has fallen? The still small voice of self-approval whispers me it is not from me. I have looked up my register, and find I have neither written to you nor heard from you since June 22nd, on which day of grace that invaluable work began. This is not as it should be. How to get back? I remember acknowledging with rapture _The Lesson of the Master_, and I remember receiving _Marbot_: was that our last relation? Hey, well! anyway, as you may have probably gathered from the papers, I have been in devilish hot water, and (what may be new to you) devilish hard at work. In twelve calendar months I finished _The Wrecker_, wrote all of _Falesá_ but the first chapter, (well, much of) _The History of Samoa_, did something here and there to my Life of my Grandfather, and began And Finished _David Balfour_. What do you think of it for a year? Since then I may say I have done nothing beyond draft three chapters of another novel, _The Justice-Clerk_, which ought to be a snorter and a blower--at least if it don't make a spoon, it will spoil the horn of an Aurochs (if that's how it should be spelt). On the hot water side it may entertain you to know that I have been actually sentenced to deportation by my friends on Mulinuu, C.J. Cedercrantz, and Baron Senfft von Pilsach. The awful doom, however, declined to fall, owing to Circumstances over Which. I only heard of it (so to speak) last night. I mean officially, but I had walked among rumours. The whole tale will be some day put into my hand, and I shall share it with humorous friends. It is likely, however, by my judgment, that this epoch of gaiety in Samoa will soon cease; and the fierce white light of history will beat no longer on Yours Sincerely and his fellows here on the beach. We ask ourselves whether the reason will more rejoice over the end of a disgraceful business, or the unregenerate man more sorrow over the stoppage of the fun. For, say what you please, it has been a deeply interesting time. You don't know what news is, nor what politics, nor what the life of man, till you see it on so small a scale and with your own liberty on the board for stake. I would not have missed it for much. And anxious friends beg me to stay at home and study human nature in Brompton drawing-rooms! _Farceurs!_ And anyway you know that such is not my talent. I could never be induced to take the faintest interest in Brompton _qua_ Brompton or a drawing-room _qua_ a drawing-room. I am an Epick Writer with a k to it, but without the necessary genius. Hurry up with another book of stories. I am now reduced to two of my contemporaries, you and Barrie--O, and Kipling--you and Barrie and Kipling are now my Muses Three. And with Kipling, as you know, there are reservations to be made. And you and Barrie don't write enough. I should say I also read Anstey when he is serious, and can almost always get a happy day out of Marion Crawford--_ce n'est pas toujours la guerre_, but it's got life to it and guts, and it moves. Did you read the _Witch of Prague_? Nobody could read it twice, of course; and the first time even it was necessary to skip. _E pur si muove._ But Barrie is a beauty, the _Little Minister_ and the _Window in Thrums_, eh? Stuff in that young man; but he must see and not be too funny. Genius in him, but there's a journalist at his elbow--there's the risk. Look, what a page is the glove business in the _Window_! knocks a man flat; that's guts, if you please. Why have I wasted the little time that is left with a sort of naked review article? I don't know, I'm sure. I suppose a mere ebullition of congested literary talk. I am beginning to think a visit from friends would be due. Wish you could come! Let us have your news anyway, and forgive this silly stale effusion.--Yours ever, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. To J. M. BARRIE [_Vailima, December 1892._] DEAR J. M. BARRIE,--You will be sick of me soon; I cannot help it. I have been off my work for some time, and re-read the _Edinburgh Eleven_, and had a great mind to write a parody and give you all your sauce back again, and see how you would like it yourself. And then I read (for the first time--I know not how) the _Window in Thrums_; I don't say that it is better than the _Minister_; it's less of a tale--and there is a beauty, a material beauty, of the tale _ipse_, which clever critics nowadays long and love to forget; it has more real flaws; but somehow it is--well, I read it last anyway, and it's by Barrie. And he's the man for my money. The glove is a great page; it is startlingly original, and as true as death and judgment. Tibbie Birse in the Burial is great, but I think it was a journalist that got in the word "official." The same character plainly had a word to say to Thomas Haggard. Thomas affects me as a lie--I beg your pardon; doubtless he was somebody you knew; that leads people so far astray. The actual is not the true. I am proud to think you are a Scotchman--though to be sure I know nothing of that country, being only an English tourist, quo' Gavin Ogilvy. I commend the hard case of Mr. Gavin Ogilvy to J. M. Barrie, whose work is to me a source of living pleasure and heartfelt national pride. There are two of us now that the Shirra might have patted on the head. And please do not think when I thus seem to bracket myself with you, that I am wholly blinded with vanity. Jess is beyond my frontier line; I could not touch her skirt; I have no such glamour of twilight on my pen. I am a capable artist; but it begins to look to me as if you were a man of genius. Take care of yourself for my sake. It's a devilish hard thing for a man who writes so many novels as I do, that I should get so few to read. And I can read yours, and I love them. A pity for you that my amanuensis is not on stock to-day, and my own hand perceptibly worse than usual.--Yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _December 5th, 1892._ _P.S._--They tell me your health is not strong. Man, come out here and try the Prophet's chamber. There's only one bad point to us--we do rise early. The Amanuensis states that you are a lover of silence--and that ours is a noisy house--and she is a chatterbox--I am not answerable for these statements, though I do think there is a touch of garrulity about my premises. We have so little to talk about, you see. The house is three miles from town, in the midst of great silent forests. There is a burn close by, and when we are not talking you can hear the burn, and the birds, and the sea breaking on the coast three miles away and six hundred feet below us, and about three times a month a bell--I don't know where the bell is, nor who rings it; it may be the bell in Hans Andersen's story for all I know. It is never hot here--86 in the shade is about our hottest--and it is never cold except just in the early mornings. Take it for all in all, I suppose this island climate to be by far the healthiest in the world--even the influenza entirely lost its sting. Only two patients died, and one was a man nearly eighty, and the other a child below four months. I won't tell you if it is beautiful, for I want you to come here and see for yourself. Everybody on the premises except my wife has some Scotch blood in their veins--I beg your pardon--except the natives--and then my wife is a Dutchwoman--and the natives are the next thing conceivable to Highlanders before the forty-five. We would have some grand cracks! R. L. S. Come, it will broaden your mind, and be the making of me. To CHARLES BAXTER This correspondent had lately been on a tour in Sweden. _[Vailima] December 28th, 1892._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--Your really decent letter to hand. And here I am answering it, to the merry note of the carpenter's hammer, in an upper room of the New House. This upper floor is almost done now, but the Grrrrrreat 'All below is still unlined; it is all to be varnished redwood. I paid a big figure but do not repent; the trouble has been so minimised, the work has been so workmanlike, and all the parties have been so obliging. What a pity when you met the Buried Majesty of Sweden--the sovereign of my Cedercrantz--you did not breathe in his ear a word of Samoa! O Sovereign of my Cedercrantz, Conceive how his plump carcase pants To leave the spot he now is tree'd in, And skip with all the dibbs to Sweden. O Sovereign of my Cedercrantz, The lowly plea I now advantz; Remove this man of light and leadin' From us to more congenial Sweden. This kind of thing might be kept up a Lapland night. "Let us bury the great joke"--Shade of Tennyson, forgive! I am glad to say, you can scarce receive the second bill for the house until next mail, which gives more room to turn round in. Yes, my rate of expenditure is hellish. It is funny, it crept up and up; and when we sat upon one vent another exploded. Lloyd and I grew grey over the monthly returns; but every damned month, there is a new extra. However, we always hope the next will prove less recalcitrant; in which faith we advance trembling. The desiderated advertisement, I think I have told you, was mighty near supplied: that is, if deportation would suit your view: the ship was actually sought to be hired. Yes, it would have been an advertisement, and rather a lark, and yet a blooming nuisance. For my part, I shall try to do without. No one has thought fit to send me Atalanta[55]; and I have no proof at all of _D. Balfour_, which is far more serious. How about the _D. B._ map? As soon as there is a proof it were well I should see it to accord the text thereto--or t'other way about if needs must. Remember I had to go much on memory in writing that work. Did you observe the dedication? and how did you like it? If it don't suit you, I am to try my hand again.--Yours ever, R. L. S. FOOTNOTES: [32] Editors and publishers (since those days we have been _déniaisés_ with a vengeance) had actually been inclined to shy at the terms of the fraudulent marriage contract, which is the pivot of the whole story; see below, p. 187. [33] For a lively account of this plantation and its history, see Lord Pembroke's _South Sea Bubbles_, chap. i. [34] The native wife of a carpenter in Apia. [35] The sequel to _Kidnapped_, published in the following year under the title _Catriona_. [36] Most of the work on the plantations in Samoa is done by "black boys," _i.e._ imported labourers from other (Melanesian) islands. [37] By Howard Pyle. [38] In answer to the obvious remark that the length and style of _The Wrecker_, then running in Scribner's Magazine, were out of keeping with what professed at the outset to be a spoken yarn. [39] Of Ballantrae: the story is the unfinished _Young Chevalier_. [40] Afterwards changed into _The Ebb Tide_. [41] Wordsworth's _Ode to Duty_, a shade misquoted. [42] "Kava, properly Ava, is a drink more or less intoxicating, made from the root of the _Piper Methysticum_, a Pepper plant. The root is grated: formerly it was chewed by fair damsels. The root thus broken up is rubbed about in a great pail, with water slowly added. A strainer of bark cloth is plunged into it at times, and wrung out so as to carry away the small fragments of root. The drink is made and used in ceremony. Every detail is regulated by rules, and the manner of the mixture of the water, the straining, the handling of the cup, the drinking out of it and returning, should all be done according to a well-established manner and in certain cadences." I borrow this explanation from the late Mr. Lafarge's notes to his catalogue of South Sea Drawings. It may serve to make clearer several passages in later letters of the present collection. Readers of the late Lord Pembroke's _South Sea Bubbles_ will remember the account of this beverage and its preparation in Chap. viii. of that volume. [43] Referring to the marriage contract in the _Beach of Falesá:_ see above, p. 152. [44] This about the consulship was only a passing notion on the part of R. L. S. No vacancy occurred, and in his correspondence he does not recur to the subject. [45] I had not cared to send him the story as thus docked and rechristened in its serial shape. [46] Austin Strong, on his way to school in California. [47] By Émile Zola. [48] The reference is to the writer's maternal cousin, Mr. Graham Balfour (_Samoicè_, "Pelema"), who during these months and again later was an inmate of the home at Vailima: see above, p. 223. [49] Robert MacQueen, Lord Braxfield, the "Hanging Judge," (1722-1799). This historical personage furnished the conception of the chief character, but by no means the details or incidents of the story, which is indeed dated some years after his death. [50] The allusion is to _Tess_: a book R. L. S. did not like. [51] A character in _The Wrecker_. [52] Exactly what in the end actually happened. [53] Austin Strong. [54] This tale was withheld from the volume accordingly. [55] The magazine in which _Catriona_ first appeared in this country, under the title _David Balfour_. XIII LIFE IN SAMOA--_Continued_ THIRD YEAR AT VAILIMA JANUARY-DECEMBER 1893 By the New Year of 1893 the fine addition to the house at Vailima was finished, and its pleasantness and comfort went far to console Stevenson for the cost. But the year was on the whole a less fortunate one for the inmates than the last. A proclamation concerning penalties for sedition in the Samoan Islands, which from its tenor could have been aimed at no one else but Stevenson, had been issued at the close of 1892 by the High Commissioner at Fiji; and with its modification and practical withdrawal, by order of the Foreign Office at home, the last threat of unpleasant consequences in connection with his political action disappeared. But a sharp second attack of influenza in January lowered his vitality, and from a trip which the family took for the sake of change to Sydney, in the month of February, they returned with health unimproved. In April the illness of Mrs. Stevenson caused her husband some weeks of acute distress and anxiety. In August he suffered the chagrin of witnessing the outbreak of the war which he had vainly striven to prevent between the two rival kings, and the defeat and banishment of Mataafa, whom he knew to be the one man of governing capacity among the native chiefs, and whom, in the interest alike of whites and natives, he had desired to see the Powers not crush, but conciliate. On the other hand, he had the satisfaction of seeing the Chief Justice and President removed from the posts they had so incompetently filled, and superseded by new and better men. The task imposed by the three Powers upon these officials was in truth an impossible one; but their characters and endeavours earned respect, and with the American Chief Justice in particular, Mr. C. J. Ide (whom he had already known as one of the Land Commissioners), and with his family the Vailima household lived on terms of cordial friendship. In September Stevenson took a health-trip to Honolulu, which again turned out unsuccessful. For some weeks he was down with a renewed attack of fever and prostration, and his wife had to come from Samoa to nurse and fetch him home. Later in the autumn he mended again. During no part of the year were Stevenson's working powers up to the mark. In the early summer he finished _The Ebb Tide_, but on a plan much abridged from its original intention, and with an unusual degree of strain and effort. With _St. Ives_ and his own family history he made fair progress, but both of these he regarded as in a manner holiday tasks, not calling for any very serious exercise of his powers. In connection with the latter, he took an eager interest, as his correspondence will show, in the researches which friends and kinsmen undertook for him in Scotland. He fell into arrears in regard to one or two magazine stories for which he had contracted; and with none of his more ambitious schemes of romance, _Sophia Scarlet_, _The Young Chevalier_, _Heathercat_, and _Weir of Hermiston_, did he feel himself well able to cope. This falling-off of his power of production brought with it no small degree of inward strain and anxiety. He had not yet put by any provision for his wife and step-family (the income from the moderate fortune left by his father naturally going to his mother during her life). His earnings had since 1887 been considerable, at the rate of £4,000 a year or thereabouts; but his building expenses and large mode of life at Vailima, together with his habitual generosity, which scarce knew check or limit, towards the less fortunate of his friends and acquaintances in various parts of the world, made his expenditure about equal to his income. The idea originally entertained of turning part of the Vailima estate into a profitable plantation turned out chimerical. The thought began to haunt him, What if his power of earning were soon to cease? And occasional signs of inward depression and life-weariness began to appear in his correspondence. But it was only in writing, and then but rarely, that he let such signs appear: to those about him he retained the old affectionate charm and inspiring gaiety undiminished, fulfilling without failure the words of his own prayer, "Give us to awake with smiles, give us to labour smiling; as the sun lightens the world, so let our loving-kindness make bright this house of our habitation." TO SIDNEY COLVIN _[Vailima] January 1893._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--You are properly paid at last, and it is like you will have but a shadow of a letter. I have been pretty thoroughly out of kilter; first a fever that would neither come on nor go off, then acute dyspepsia, in the weakening grasp of which I get wandering between the waking state and one of nightmare. Why the devil does no one send me Atalanta? And why are there no proofs of _D. Balfour_? Sure I should have had the whole, at least the half, of them by now; and it would be all for the advantage of the Atalantans. I have written to Cassell & Co. (matter of _Falesá_) "you will please arrange with him" (meaning you). "What he may decide I shall abide." So consider your hand free, and act for me without fear or favour. I am greatly pleased with the illustrations. It is very strange to a South-Seayer to see Hawaiian women dressed like Samoans, but I guess that's all one to you in Middlesex. It's about the same as if London city men were shown going to the Stock Exchange as _pifferari_; but no matter, none will sleep worse for it. I have accepted Cassell's proposal as an amendment to one of mine; that _D. B._ is to be brought out first under the title _Catriona_ without pictures; and, when the hour strikes, _Kidnapped_ and _Catriona_ are to form vols. I. and II. of the heavily illustrated _Adventures of David Balfour_ at 7s. 6d. each, sold separately. ----'s letter was vastly sly and dry and shy.[56] I am not afraid now. Two attempts have been made, both have failed, and I imagine these failures strengthen me. Above all this is true of the last, where my weak point was attempted. On every other, I am strong. Only force can dislodge me, for public opinion is wholly on my side. All races and degrees are united in heartfelt opposition to the Men of Mulinuu. The news of the fighting was of no concern to mortal man; it was made much of because men love talk of battles, and because the Government pray God daily for some scandal not their own; but it was only a brisk episode in a clan fight which has grown apparently endemic in the west of Tutuila. At the best it was a twopenny affair, and never occupied my mind five minutes. I am so weary of reports that are without foundation and threats that go without fulfilment, and so much occupied besides by the raging troubles of my own wame, that I have been very slack on politics, as I have been in literature. With incredible labour, I have rewritten the First Chapter of the _Justice-Clerk_; it took me about ten days, and requires another athletic dressing after all. And that is my story for the month. The rest is grunting and grutching. Consideranda for _The Beach_:-- I. Whether to add one or both the tales I sent you? II. Whether to call the whole volume _Island Nights' Entertainments_? III. Whether, having waited so long, it would not be better to give me another mail, in case I could add another member to the volume and a little better justify the name? If I possibly can draw up another story, I will. What annoyed me about the use of _The Bottle Imp_ was that I had always meant it for the centre-piece of a volume of _Märchen_ which I was slowly to elaborate. You always had an idea that I depreciated the _B. I._; I can't think wherefore; I always particularly liked it--one of my best works, and ill to equal; and that was why I loved to keep it in portfolio till I had time to grow up to some other fruit of the same _venue_. However, that is disposed of now, and we must just do the best we can. I am not aware that there is anything to add; the weather is hellish, waterspouts, mists, chills, the foul fiend's own weather, following on a week of expurgated heaven; so it goes at this bewildering season. I write in the upper floor of my new house, of which I will send you some day a plan to measure. 'Tis an elegant structure, surely, and the proid of me oi. Was asked to pay for it just now, and genteelly refused, and then agreed, in view of general good-will, to pay a half of what is still due. _24th January 1893._--This ought to have gone last mail and was forgotten. My best excuse is that I was engaged in starting an influenza, to which class of exploit our household has been since then entirely dedicated. We had eight cases, one of them very bad, and one--mine--complicated with my old friend Bluidy Jack.[57] Luckily neither Fanny, Lloyd, or Belle took the confounded thing, and they were able to run the household and nurse the sick to admiration. Some of our boys behaved like real trumps. Perhaps the prettiest performance was that of our excellent Henry Simelé, or, as we sometimes call him, Davy Balfour. Henry, I maun premeese, is a chief; the humblest Samoan recoils from emptying slops as you would from cheating at cards; now the last nights of our bad time, when we had seven down together, it was enough to have made anybody laugh or cry to see Henry going the rounds with a slop-bucket and going inside the mosquito net of each of the sick, Protestant and Catholic alike, to pray with them. I must tell you that in my sickness I had a huge alleviation and began a new story. This I am writing by dictation, and really think it is an art I can manage to acquire. The relief is beyond description; it is just like a school-treat to me, and the amanuensis bears up extraordinar'. The story is to be called _St. Ives_; I give you your choice whether or not it should bear the sub-title, "Experiences of a French prisoner in England." We were just getting on splendidly with it, when this cursed mail arrived and requires to be attended to. It looks to me very like as if _St. Ives_ would be ready before any of the others, but you know me and how impossible it is I should predict. The Amanuensis has her head quite turned and believes herself to be the author of this novel (and is to some extent)--and as the creature (!) has not been wholly useless in the matter (I told you so! A.M.) I propose to foster her vanity by a little commemoration gift! The name of the hero is Anne de St. Yves--he Englishes his name to St. Ives during his escape. It is my idea to get a ring made which shall either represent _Anne_ or A. S. Y. A., of course, would be Amethyst and S. Sapphire, which is my favourite stone anyway and was my father's before me. But what would the ex-Slade professor do about the letter Y? Or suppose he took the other version, how would he meet the case, the two N.'s? These things are beyond my knowledge, which it would perhaps be more descriptive to call ignorance. But I place the matter in the meanwhile under your consideration and beg to hear your views. I shall tell you on some other occasion and when the A.M. is out of hearing how _very_ much I propose to invest in this testimonial; but I may as well inform you at once that I intend it to be cheap, sir, damned cheap! My idea of running amanuenses is by praise, not pudding, flattery and not coins! I shall send you when the time is ripe a ring to measure by. To resume our sad tale. After the other seven were almost wholly recovered Henry lay down to influenza on his own account. He is but just better and it looks as though Fanny were about to bring up the rear. As for me, I am all right, though I _was_ reduced to dictating _Anne_ in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, which I think you will admit is a _comble_. Politics leave me extraordinary cold. It seems that so much of my purpose has come off, and Cedercrantz and Pilsach are sacked. The rest of it has all gone to water. The triple-headed ass at home, in his plenitude of ignorance, prefers to collect the taxes and scatter the Mataafas by force or the threat of force. It may succeed, and I suppose it will. It is none the less for that expensive, harsh, unpopular and unsettling. I am young enough to have been annoyed, and altogether eject and renegate the whole idea of political affairs. Success in that field appears to be the organisation of failure enlivened with defamation of character; and, much as I love pickles and hot water (in your true phrase) I shall take my pickles in future from Crosse and Blackwell and my hot water with a dose of good Glenlivat. Do not bother at all about the wall-papers. We have had the whole of our new house varnished, and it looks beautiful. I wish you could see the hall; poor room, it had to begin life as an infirmary during our recent visitation; but it is really a handsome comely place, and when we get the furniture, and the pictures, and what is so very much more decorative, the picture frames, will look sublime. _Jan. 30th._--I have written to Charles asking for Rowlandson's _Syntax_ and _Dance of Death_ out of our house, and begging for anything about fashions and manners (fashions particularly) for 1814. Can you help? Both the Justice Clerk and St. Ives fall in that fated year. Indeed I got into St. Ives while going over the Annual Register for the other. There is a kind of fancy list of Chaps. of St. Ives. (It begins in Edin^b Castle.) I. Story of a lion rampant (that was a toy he had made, and given to a girl visitor). II. Story of a pair of scissors. III. St. Ives receives a bundle of money. IV. St. Ives is shown a house. V. The Escape. VI. The Cottage (Swanston Cottage). VII. The Hen-house. VIII. Three is company and four none. IX. The Drovers. X. The Great North Road. XI. Burchell Fenn. XII. The covered cart. XIII. The doctor. XIV. The Luddites. XV. Set a thief to catch a thief. XVI. M. le Comte de Kérouaille (his uncle, the rich _émigré_, whom he finds murdered). XVII. The cousins. XVIII. Mr. Sergeant Garrow. XIX. A meeting at the Ship, Dover. XX. Diane. XXI. The Duke's Prejudices. XXII. The False Messenger. XXIII. The gardener's ladder. XXIV. The officers. XXV. Trouble with the Duke. XXVI. Fouquet again. XXVII. The Aeronaut. XXVIII. The True-Blooded Yankee. XXIX. In France. I don't know where to stop. Apropos, I want a book about Paris, and the _first return_ of the _émigrés_ and all up to the _Cent Jours_: d'ye ken anything in my way? I want in particular to know about them and the Napoleonic functionaries and officers, and to get the colour and some vital details of the business of exchange of departments from one side to the other.[58] Ten chapters are drafted, and VIII. re-copied by me, but will want another dressing for luck. It is merely a story of adventure, rambling along; but that is perhaps the guard that "sets my genius best," as Alan might have said. I wish I could feel as easy about the other! But there, all novels are a heavy burthen while they are doing, and a sensible disappointment when they are done. For God's sake, let me have a copy of the new German Samoa White Book. R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER Telling how the projected tale, _The Pearl Fisher_, had been cut down and in its new form was to be called _The Schooner Farallone_ (afterwards changed to _The Ebb Tide_). [_Vailima, February 1893._] MY DEAR CHARLES,--I have had the influenza, as I believe you know: this has been followed by two goes of my old friend Bloodie Jacke, and I have had fefe--the island complaint--for the second time in two months. All this, and the fact that both my womenkind require to see a doctor: and some wish to see Lord Jersey before he goes home: all send me off on a month's holiday to Sydney. I may get my mail: or I may not: depends on freight, weather, and the captain's good-nature--he is one of those who most religiously fear Apia harbour: it is quite a superstition with American captains. (Odd note: American sailors, who make British hair grey by the way they carry canvas, appear to be actually _more_ nervous when it comes to coast and harbour work.) This is the only holiday I have had for more than 2 years; I dare say it will be as long again before I take another. And I am going to spend a lot of money. Ahem! On the other hand, you can prepare to dispose of the serial rights of the _Schooner Farallone:_ a most grim and gloomy tale. It will run to something between _Jekyll and Hyde_ and _Treasure Island_. I will not commit myself beyond this, but I anticipate from 65 to 70,000 words, could almost pledge myself not shorter than 65,000, but won't. The tale can be sent as soon as you have made arrangements; I hope to finish it in a month; six weeks, bar the worst accidents, for certain. I should say this is the butt end of what was once _The Pearl Fisher_. There is a peculiarity about this tale in its new form: it ends with a conversion! We have been tempted rather to call it _The Schooner Farallone: a tract by R. L. S._ and _L. O._ It would make a boss tract; the three main characters--and there are only four--are barats, insurance frauds, thieves and would-be murderers; so the company's good. Devil a woman there, by good luck; so it's "pure." 'Tis a most--what's the expression?--unconventional work. R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _At Sea, s.s._ Mariposa, _Feb. 19th, '93_. MY DEAR COLVIN,--You will see from this heading that I am not dead yet nor likely to be. I was pretty considerably out of sorts, and that is indeed one reason why Fanny, Belle, and I have started out for a month's lark. To be quite exact, I think it will be about five weeks before we get home. We shall stay between two and three in Sydney. Already, though we only sailed yesterday, I am feeling as fit as a fiddle. Fanny ate a whole fowl for breakfast, to say nothing of a tower of hot cakes. Belle and I floored another hen betwixt the pair of us, and I shall be no sooner done with the present amanuensing racket than I shall put myself outside a pint of Guinness. If you think this looks like dying of consumption in Apia I can only say I differ from you. In the matter of _David_, I have never yet received my proofs at all, but shall certainly wait for your suggestions. Certainly, Chaps. 17 to 20 are the hitch, and I confess I hurried over them with both wings spread. This is doubtless what you complain of. Indeed, I placed my single reliance on Miss Grant. If she couldn't ferry me over, I felt I had to stay there. About _Island Nights' Entertainments_ all you say is highly satisfactory. Go in and win. The extracts from the Times I really cannot trust myself to comment upon. They were infernally satisfactory; so, and perhaps still more so, was a letter I had at the same time from Lord Pembroke. If I have time as I go through Auckland, I am going to see Sir George Grey. Now I really think that's all the business. I have been rather sick and have had two small hemorrhages, but the second I believe to have been accidental. No good denying that this annoys, because it do. However, you must expect influenza to leave some harm, and my spirits, appetite, peace on earth and goodwill to men are all on a rising market. During the last week the amanuensis was otherwise engaged, whereupon I took up, pitched into, and about one half demolished another tale, once intended to be called _The Pearl Fisher_, but now razeed and called _The Schooner Farallone_.[59] We had a capital start, the steamer coming in at sunrise, and just giving us time to get our letters ere she sailed again. The manager of the German Firm (O strange, changed days!) danced attendance upon us all morning; his boat conveyed us to and from the steamer. _Feb. 21st._--All continues well. Amanuensis bowled over for a day, but afoot again and jolly; Fanny enormously bettered by the voyage; I have been as jolly as a sand-boy as usual at sea. The Amanuensis sits opposite to me writing to her offspring. Fanny is on deck. I have just supplied her with the Canadian Pacific Agent, and so left her in good hands. You should hear me at table with the Ulster purser and a little punning microscopist called Davis. Belle does some kind of abstruse Boswell-ising; after the first meal, having gauged the kind of jests that would pay here, I observed, "Boswell is Barred during this cruise." _23rd._--We approach Auckland and I must close my mail. All goes well with the trio. Both the ladies are hanging round a beau--the same--that I unearthed for them: I am general provider, and especially great in the beaux business. I corrected some proofs for Fanny yesterday afternoon, fell asleep over them in the saloon--and the whole ship seems to have been down beholding me. After I woke up, had a hot bath, a whisky punch and a cigarette, and went to bed, and to sleep too, at 8.30; a recrudescence of Vailima hours. Awoke to-day, and had to go to the saloon clock for the hour--no sign of dawn--all heaven grey rainy fog. Have just had breakfast, written up one letter, register and close this. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Bad pen, bad ink, _S.S._ Mariposa, _at Sea_. bad light, bad _Apia due by daybreak to-morrow, blotting-paper. 9 p.m._ [_March 1st, 1893._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--Have had an amusing but tragic holiday, from which we return in disarray. Fanny quite sick, but I think slowly and steadily mending; Belle in a terrific state of dentistry troubles which now seem calmed; and myself with a succession of gentle colds out of which I at last succeeded in cooking up a fine pleurisy. By stopping and stewing in a perfectly airless state-room I seem to have got rid of the pleurisy. Poor Fanny had very little fun of her visit, having been most of the time on a diet of maltine and slops--and this while the rest of us were rioting on oysters and mushrooms. Belle's only devil in the hedge was the dentist. As for me, I was entertained at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, likewise at a sort of artistic club; made speeches at both, and may therefore be said to have been, like Saint Paul, all things to all men. I have an account of the latter racket which I meant to have enclosed in this.... Had some splendid photos taken, likewise a medallion by a French sculptor; met Graham, who returned with us as far as Auckland. Have seen a good deal too of Sir George Grey; what a wonderful old historic figure to be walking on your arm and recalling ancient events and instances! It makes a man small, and yet the extent to which he approved what I had done--or rather have tried to do--encouraged me. Sir George is an expert at least, he knows these races: he is not a small employé with an ink-pot and a Whitaker. Take it for all in all, it was huge fun: even Fanny had some lively sport at the beginning; Belle and I all through. We got Fanny a dress on the sly, gaudy black velvet and Duchesse lace. And alas! she was only able to wear it once. But we'll hope to see more of it at Samoa; it really is lovely. Both dames are royally outfitted in silk stockings, etc. We return, as from a raid, with our spoils and our wounded. I am now very dandy: I announced two years ago that I should change. Slovenly youth, all right--not slovenly age. So really now I am pretty spruce; always a white shirt, white necktie, fresh shave, silk socks, O a great sight!--No more possible. R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER Of the books mentioned below, _Dr. Syntax's Tour_ and Rowlandson's _Dance of Death_ had been for use in furnishing customs and manners in the English part of _St. Ives_; _Pitcairn_ is Pitcairn's _Criminal Trials of Scotland from 1488 to 1624_. As to the name of Stevenson and its adoption by some members of the proscribed clan of Macgregor, Stevenson had been greatly interested by the facts laid before him by his correspondent here mentioned, Mr. Macgregor Stevenson of New York, and had at first delightedly welcomed the idea that his own ancestors might have been fellow-clansmen of Rob Roy. But further correspondence on the subject of his own descent held with a trained genealogist, his namesake Mr. J. Horne Stevenson of Edinburgh, convinced him that the notion must be abandoned. [_April 1893._] ... About _The Justice-Clerk_, I long to go at it, but will first try to get a short story done. Since January I have had two severe illnesses, my boy, and some heartbreaking anxiety over Fanny; and am only now convalescing. I came down to dinner last night for the first time, and that only because the service had broken down, and to relieve an inexperienced servant. Nearly four months now I have rested my brains; and if it be true that rest is good for brains, I ought to be able to pitch in like a giant refreshed. Before the autumn, I hope to send you some _Justice-Clerk_, or _Weir of Hermiston_, as Colvin seems to prefer; I own to indecision. Received _Syntax_, _Dance of Death_, and _Pitcairn_, which last I have read from end to end since its arrival, with vast improvement. What a pity it stops so soon! I wonder is there nothing that seems to prolong the series? Why doesn't some young man take it up? How about my old friend Fountainhall's _Decisions?_ I remember as a boy that there was some good reading there. Perhaps you could borrow me that, and send it on loan; and perhaps Laing's _Memorials_ therewith; and a work I'm ashamed to say I have never read, _Balfour's Letters_.... I have come by accident, through a correspondent, on one very curious and interesting fact--namely, that Stevenson was one of the names adopted by the Macgregors at the proscription. The details supplied by my correspondent are both convincing and amusing; but it would be highly interesting to find out more of this. R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN These notes are in reply to a set of queries and suggestions as to points that seemed to need clearing in the tale of _Catriona_, as first published in Atalanta under the title _David Balfour_. _[Vailima] April 1893._ 1. _Slip_ 3. Davie would be _attracted_ into a similar dialect, as he is later--_e.g._ with Doig, chapter XIX. This is truly Scottish. 4, _to lightly_; correct; "to lightly" is a good regular Scots verb. 15. See Allan Ramsay's works. 15, 16. Ay, and that is one of the pigments with which I am trying to draw the character of Prestongrange. 'Tis a most curious thing to render that kind, insignificant mask. To make anything precise is to risk my effect. And till the day he died, Davie was never sure of what P. was after. Not only so; very often P. didn't know himself. There was an element of mere liking for Davie; there was an element of being determined, in case of accidents, to keep well with him. He hoped his Barbara would bring him to her feet, besides, and make him manageable. That was why he sent him to Hope Park with them. But Davie cannot _know_; I give you the inside of Davie, and my method condemns me to give only the outside both of Prestongrange and his policy. - -I'll give my mind to the technicalities. Yet to me they seem a part of the story, which is historical, after all. - -I think they wanted Alan to escape. But when or where to say so? I will try. - -20, _Dean_. I'll try and make that plainer. _Chap._ XIII., I fear it has to go without blows. If I could get the pair--No, can't be. - -XIV. All right, will abridge. - -XV. I'd have to put a note to every word; and he who can't read Scots can _never_ enjoy Tod Lapraik. - -XVII. Quite right. I _can_ make this plainer, and will. - -XVIII. I know, but I have to hurry here; this is the broken back of my story; some business briefly transacted, I am leaping for Barbara's apron-strings. _Slip_ 57. Quite right again; I shall make it plain. _Chap._ XX. I shall make all these points clear. About Lady Prestongrange (not _Lady_ Grant, only _Miss_ Grant, my dear, though _Lady_ Prestongrange, quoth the dominie) I am taken with your idea of her death, and have a good mind to substitute a featureless aunt. _Slip_ 78. I don't see how to lessen this effect. There is really not much said of it; and I know Catriona did it. But I'll try. - -89. I know. This is an old puzzle of mine. You see C.'s dialect is not wholly a bed of roses. If only I knew the Gaelic. Well, I'll try for another expression. _The end._ I shall try to work it over. James was at Dunkirk ordering post-horses for his own retreat. Catriona did have her suspicions aroused by the letter, and careless gentleman, I told you so--or she did at least.--Yes, the blood money.--I am bothered about the portmanteau; it is the presence of Catriona that bothers me; the rape of the pockmantie is historic.... To me, I own, it seems in the proof a very pretty piece of workmanship. David himself I refuse to discuss; he _is_. The Lord Advocate I think a strong sketch of a very difficult character, James More, sufficient; and the two girls very pleasing creatures. But O dear me, I came near losing my heart to Barbara! I am not quite so constant as David, and even he--well, he didn't know it, anyway! _Tod Lapraik_ is a piece of living Scots: if I had never writ anything but that and _Thrawn Janet_, still I'd have been a writer. The defects of _D. B._ are inherent, I fear. But on the whole, I am far indeed from being displeased with the tailie. One thing is sure, there has been no such drawing of Scots character since Scott; and even he never drew a full length like Davie, with his shrewdness and simplicity, and stockishness and charm. Yet, you'll see, the public won't want it; they want more Alan! Well, they can't get it. And readers of _Tess_ can have no use for my David, and his innocent but real love affairs. I found my fame much grown on this return to civilisation. _Digito monstrari_ is a new experience; people all looked at me in the streets in Sydney; and it was very queer. Here, of course, I am only the white chief in the Great House to the natives; and to the whites, either an ally or a foe. It is a much healthier state of matters. If I lived in an atmosphere of adulation, I should end by kicking against the pricks. O my beautiful forest, O my beautiful shining, windy house, what a joy it was to behold them again! No chance to take myself too seriously here. The difficulty of the end is the mass of matter to be attended to, and the small time left to transact it in. I mean from Alan's danger of arrest. But I have just seen my way out, I do believe. _Easter Sunday._--I have now got as far as slip 28, and finished the chapter of the law technicalities. Well, these seemed to me always of the essence of the story, which is the story of a _cause célèbre_; moreover, they are the justification of my inventions; if these men went so far (granting Davie sprung on them) would they not have gone so much further? But of course I knew they were a difficulty; determined to carry them through in a conversation; approached this (it seems) with cowardly anxiety; and filled it with gabble, sir, gabble. I have left all my facts, but have removed 42 lines. I should not wonder but what I'll end by re-writing it. It is not the technicalities that shocked you, it was my bad art. It is very strange that X. should be so good a chapter and IX. and XI. so uncompromisingly bad. It looks as if XI. also would have to be re-formed. If X. had not cheered me up, I should be in doleful dumps, but X. is alive anyway, and life is all in all. _Thursday, April 5th._--Well, there's no disguise possible; Fanny is not well, and we are miserably anxious.... _Friday, 7th._--I am thankful to say the new medicine relieved her at once. A crape has been removed from the day for all of us. To make things better, the morning is ah! such a morning as you have never seen; heaven upon earth for sweetness, freshness, depth upon depth of unimaginable colour, and a huge silence broken at this moment only by the far-away murmur of the Pacific and the rich piping of a single bird. You can't conceive what a relief this is; it seems a new world. She has such extraordinary recuperative power that I do hope for the best. I am as tired as man can be. This is a great trial to a family, and I thank God it seems as if ours was going to bear it well. And O! if it only lets up, it will be but a pleasant memory. We are all seedy, bar Lloyd: Fanny, as per above; self nearly extinct; Belle, utterly overworked and bad toothache; Cook, down with a bad foot; Butler, prostrate with a bad leg. Eh, what a faim'ly! _Sunday._--Grey heaven, raining torrents of rain; occasional thunder and lightning. Everything to dispirit; but my invalids are really on the mend. The rain roars like the sea; in the sound of it there is a strange and ominous suggestion of an approaching tramp; something nameless and measureless seems to draw near, and strikes me cold, and yet is welcome. I lie quiet in bed to-day, and think of the universe with a good deal of equanimity. I have, at this moment, but the one objection to it; the _fracas_ with which it proceeds. I do not love noise; I am like my grandfather in that; and so many years in these still islands has ingrained the sentiment perhaps. Here are no trains, only men pacing barefoot. No cars or carriages; at worst the rattle of a horse's shoes among the rocks. Beautiful silence; and so soon as this robustious rain takes off, I am to drink of it again by oceanfuls. _April 16th._--Several pages of this letter destroyed as beneath scorn; the wailings of a crushed worm; matter in which neither you nor I can take stock. Fanny is distinctly better, I believe all right now; I too am mending, though I have suffered from crushed wormery, which is not good for the body, and damnation to the soul. I feel to-night a baseless anxiety to write a lovely poem _à propos des bottes de ma grand'mère, qui etaient à revers_. I see I am idiotic. I'll try the poem. _17th._--The poem did not get beyond plovers and lovers. I am still, however, harassed by the unauthentic Muse; if I cared to encourage her--but I have not the time, and anyway we are at the vernal equinox. It is funny enough, but my pottering verses are usually made (like the God-gifted organ voice's) at the autumnal; and this seems to hold at the Antipodes. There is here some odd secret of Nature. I cannot speak of politics; we wait and wonder. It seems (this is partly a guess) Ide won't take the C. J. ship, unless the islands are disarmed; and that England hesitates and holds off. By my own idea, strongly corroborated by Sir George, I am writing no more letters. But I have put as many irons in against this folly of the disarming as I could manage. It did not reach my ears till nearly too late. What a risk to take! What an expense to incur! And for how poor a gain! Apart from the treachery of it. My dear fellow, politics is a vile and a bungling business. I used to think meanly of the plumber; but how he shines beside the politician! _Thursday._--A general, steady advance; Fanny really quite chipper and jolly--self on the rapid mend, and with my eye on _forests_ that are to fall--and my finger on the axe, which wants stoning. _Saturday_, 22.--Still all for the best; but I am having a heartbreaking time over _David_. I have nearly all corrected. But have to consider _The Heather on Fire_, _The Wood by Silvermills_, and the last chapter. They all seem to me off colour; and I am not fit to better them yet. No proof has been sent of the title, contents, or dedication. TO A. CONAN DOYLE The reference in the postscript here is, I believe, to the Journals of the Society for Psychical Research. _Vailima, Apia, Samoa, April 5th, 1893._ DEAR SIR,--You have taken many occasions to make yourself very agreeable to me, for which I might in decency have thanked you earlier. It is now my turn; and I hope you will allow me to offer you my compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. That is the class of literature that I like when I have the toothache. As a matter of fact, it was a pleurisy I was enjoying when I took the volume up; and it will interest you as a medical man to know that the cure was for the moment effectual. Only the one thing troubles me; can this be my old friend Joe Bell?--I am, yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--And lo, here is your address supplied me here in Samoa! But do not take mine, O frolic fellow Spookist, from the same source; mine is wrong. R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The outbreak of hostilities was at this date imminent between Mulinuu (the party of Laupepa, recognised and supported by the Three Powers) and Malie (the party of Mataafa). _[Vailima] 25th April [1893]._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--To-day early I sent down to Maben (Secretary of State) an offer to bring up people from Malie, keep them in my house, and bring them down day by day for so long as the negotiation should last. I have a favourable answer so far. This I would not have tried, had not old Sir George Grey put me on my mettle; "Never despair," was his word; and "I am one of the few people who have lived long enough to see how true that is." Well, thereupon I plunged in; and the thing may do me great harm, but yet I do not think so--for I think jealousy will prevent the trial being made. And at any rate it is another chance for this distracted archipelago of children, sat upon by a clique of fools. If, by the gift of God, I can do--I am allowed to try to do--and succeed: but no, the prospect is too bright to be entertained. To-day we had a ride down to Tanugamanono, and then by the new wood paths. One led us to a beautiful clearing, with four native houses; taro, yams, and the like, excellently planted, and old Folau--"the Samoan Jew"--sitting and whistling there in his new-found and well-deserved well-being. It was a good sight to see a Samoan thus before the world. Further up, on our way home, we saw the world clear, and the wide die of the shadow lying broad; we came but a little further, and found in the borders of the bush a banyan. It must have been 150 feet in height; the trunk, and its acolytes, occupied a great space; above that, in the peaks of the branches, quite a forest of ferns and orchids were set; and over all again the huge spread of the boughs rose against the bright west, and sent their shadow miles to the eastward. I have not often seen anything more satisfying than this vast vegetable. _Sunday._--A heavenly day again! the world all dead silence, save when, from far down below us in the woods, comes up the crepitation of the little wooden drum that beats to church. Scarce a leaf stirs; only now and again a great, cool gush of air that makes my papers fly, and is gone.--The king of Samoa has refused my intercession between him and Mataafa; and I do not deny this is a good riddance to me of a difficult business, in which I might very well have failed. What else is to be done for these silly folks? _May 12th._--And this is where I had got to, before the mail arrives with, I must say, a real gentlemanly letter from yourself. Sir, that is the sort of letter I want! Now, I'll make my little proposal.[60] I will accept _Child's Play_ and _Pan's Pipes_. Then I want _Pastoral_, _The Manse_, _The Islet_, leaving out if you like all the prefacial matter and beginning at I. Then the portrait of Robert Hunter, beginning "Whether he was originally big or little," and ending "fearless and gentle." So much for _Mem. and Portraits_. _Beggars_, sections I. and II., _Random Memories_ II., and _Lantern Bearers_; I'm agreeable. These are my selections. I don't know about _Pulvis et Umbra_ either, but must leave that to you. But just what you please. About _Davie_ I elaborately wrote last time, but still _Davie_ is not done; I am grinding singly at _The Ebb Tide_, as we now call the _Farallone_; the most of it will go this mail. About the following, let there be no mistake: I will not write the abstract of _Kidnapped_; write it who will, I will not. Boccaccio must have been a clever fellow to write both argument and story; I am not, _et je me récuse_. We call it _The Ebb Tide: a Trio and Quartette_; but that secondary name you may strike out if it seems dull to you. The book, however, falls in two halves, when the fourth character appears. I am on p. 82 if you want to know, and expect to finish on I suppose 110 or so; but it goes slowly, as you may judge from the fact that this three weeks past, I have only struggled from p. 58 to p. 82: twenty-four pages, _et encore_ sure to be re-written, in twenty-one days. This is no prize-taker; not much Waverley Novels about this! _May 16th._--I believe it will be ten chapters of _The Ebb Tide_ that go to you; the whole thing should be completed in I fancy twelve; and the end will follow punctually next mail. It is my great wish that this might get into The Illustrated London News for Gordon Browne to illustrate. For whom, in case he should get the job, I give you a few notes. A purao is a tree giving something like a fig with flowers. He will find some photographs of an old marine curiosity shop in my collection, which may help him. Attwater's settlement is to be entirely overshadowed everywhere by tall palms; see photographs of Fakarava: the verandahs of the house are 12 ft. wide. Don't let him forget the Figure Head, for which I have a great use in the last chapter. It stands just clear of the palms on the crest of the beach at the head of the pier; the flag-staff not far off; the pier he will understand is perhaps three feet above high water, not more at any price. The sailors of the _Farallone_ are to be dressed like white sailors of course. For other things, I remit this excellent artist to my photographs. I can't think what to say about the tale, but it seems to me to go off with a considerable bang; in fact, to be an extraordinary work: but whether popular! Attwater is a no end of a courageous attempt, I think you will admit; how far successful is another affair. If my island ain't a thing of beauty, I'll be damned. Please observe Wiseman and Wishart; for incidental grimness, they strike me as in it. Also, kindly observe the Captain and _Adar_; I think that knocks spots. In short, as you see, I'm a trifle vainglorious. But O, it has been such a grind! The devil himself would allow a man to brag a little after such a crucifixion! And indeed I'm only bragging for a change before I return to the darned thing lying waiting for me on p. 88, where I last broke down. I break down at every paragraph, I may observe; and lie here and sweat, till I can get one sentence wrung out after another. Strange doom; after having worked so easily for so long! Did ever anybody see such a story of four characters? _Later, 2.30._--It may interest you to know that I am entirely _tapu_, and live apart in my chambers like a caged beast. Lloyd has a bad cold, and Graham and Belle are getting it. Accordingly, I dwell here without the light of any human countenance or voice, and strap away at _The Ebb Tide_ until (as now) I can no more. Fanny can still come, but is gone to glory now, or to her garden. Page 88 is done, and must be done over again to-morrow, and I confess myself exhausted. Pity a man who can't work on along when he has nothing else on earth to do! But I have ordered Jack, and am going for a ride in the bush presently to refresh the machine; then back to a lonely dinner and durance vile. I acquiesce in this hand of fate; for I think another cold just now would just about do for me. I have scarce yet recovered the two last. _May 18th._--My progress is crabwise, and I fear only IX. chapters will be ready for the mail. I am on p. 88 again, and with half an idea of going back again to 85. We shall see when we come to read: I used to regard reading as a pleasure in my old light days. All the house are down with the iffluenza in a body, except Fanny and me. The Iffluenza appears to become endemic here, but it has always been a scourge in the islands. Witness the beginning of _The Ebb Tide_, which was observed long before the Iffle had distinguished himself at home by such Napoleonic conquests. I am now of course "quite a recluse," and it is very stale, and there is no amanuensis to carry me over my mail, to which I shall have to devote many hours that would have been more usefully devoted to _The Ebb Tide_. For you know you can dictate at all hours of the day and at any odd moment; but to sit down and write with your red right hand is a very different matter. _May 20th._--Well, I believe I've about finished the thing, I mean as far as the mail is to take it. Chapter X. is now in Lloyd's hands for remarks, and extends in its present form to p. 93 incl. On the 12th of May, I see by looking back, I was on p. 82, not for the first time; so that I have made 11 pages in nine livelong days. Well! up a high hill he heaved a huge round stone. But this Flaubert business must be resisted in the premises. Or is it the result of iffluenza God forbid. Fanny is down now, and the last link that bound me to my fellow men is severed. I sit up here, and write, and read Renan's _Origines_, which is certainly devilish interesting; I read his Nero yesterday, it is very good, O, very good! But he is quite a Michelet; the general views, and such a piece of character painting, excellent; but his method sheer lunacy. You can see him take up the block which he had just rejected, and make of it the corner-stone: a maddening way to deal with authorities; and the result so little like history that one almost blames oneself for wasting time. But the time is not wasted; the conspectus is always good, and the blur that remains on the mind is probably just enough. I have been enchanted with the unveiling of Revelations. Grigsby! what a lark! And how picturesque that return of the false Nero! The Apostle John is rather discredited. And to think how one had read the thing so often, and never understood the attacks upon St. Paul! I remember when I was a child, and we came to the Four Beasts that were all over eyes, the sickening terror with which I was filled. If that was Heaven, what, in the name of Davy Jones and the aboriginal night-mare, could Hell be? Take it for all in all, _L'Antéchrist_ is worth reading. The _Histoire d' Israël_ did not surprise me much; I had read those Hebrew sources with more intelligence than the New Testament, and was quite prepared to admire Ahab and Jezebel, etc. Indeed, Ahab has always been rather a hero of mine; I mean since the years of discretion. _May 21st._--And here I am back again on p. 85! the last chapter demanding an entire revision, which accordingly it is to get. And where my mail is to come in, God knows! This forced, violent, alembicated style is most abhorrent to me; it can't be helped; the note was struck years ago on the _Janet Nicoll_, and has to be maintained somehow; and I can only hope the intrinsic horror and pathos, and a kind of fierce glow of colour there is to it, and the surely remarkable wealth of striking incident, may guide our little shallop into port. If Gordon Browne is to get it, he should see the Brassey photographs of Papeete. But mind, the three waifs were never in the town; only on the beach and in the calaboose. By George, but it's a good thing to illustrate for a man like that! Fanny is all right again. False alarm! I was down yesterday afternoon at Papauta, and heard much growling of war, and the delightful news that the C. J. and the President are going to run away from Mulinuu and take refuge in the Tivoli hotel. _23rd. Mail day._--_The Ebb Tide_, all but (I take it) fifteen pages, is now in your hands--possibly only about eleven pp. It is hard to say. But there it is, and you can do your best with it. Personally, I believe I would in this case make even a sacrifice to get Gordon Browne and copious illustration. I guess in ten days I shall have finished with it; then I go next to _D. Balfour_, and get the proofs ready: a nasty job for me, as you know. And then? Well, perhaps I'll take a go at the family history. I think that will be wise, as I am so much off work. And then, I suppose, _Weir of Hermiston_, but it may be anything. I am discontented with _The Ebb Tide_, naturally; there seems such a veil of words over it; and I like more and more naked writing; and yet sometimes one has a longing for full colour and there comes the veil again. _The Young Chevalier_ is in very full colour, and I fear it for that reason.--Ever, R. L. S. TO S. R. CROCKETT Glencorse Church in the Pentlands, mentioned by Stevenson with so much emotion in the course of this letter, served him for the scene of Chapter VI. in _Weir of Hermiston_, where his old associations and feelings in connection with the place have so admirably inspired him. _Vailima, Samoa, May 17th, 1893._ DEAR MR. CROCKETT,--I do not owe you two letters, nor yet nearly one, sir! The last time I heard of you, you wrote about an accident, and I sent you a letter to my lawyer, Charles Baxter, which does not seem to have been presented, as I see nothing of it in his accounts. Query, was that lost? I should not like you to think I had been so unmannerly and so inhuman. If you have written since, your letter also has miscarried, as is much the rule in this part of the world, unless you register. Your book is not yet to hand, but will probably follow next month. I detected you early in the Bookman, which I usually see, and noted you in particular as displaying a monstrous ingratitude about the footnote. Well, mankind is ungrateful; "Man's ingratitude to man makes countless thousands mourn," quo' Rab--or words to that effect. By the way, an anecdote of a cautious sailor: "Bill, Bill," says I to him, "_or words to that effect_." I shall never take that walk by the Fisher's Tryst and Glencorse. I shall never see Auld Reekie. I shall never set my foot again upon the heather. Here I am until I die, and here will I be buried. The word is out and the doom written. Or, if I do come, it will be a voyage to a further goal, and in fact a suicide; which, however, if I could get my family all fixed up in the money way, I might, perhaps, perform, or attempt. But there is a plaguey risk of breaking down by the way; and I believe I shall stay here until the end comes like a good boy, as I am. If I did it, I should put upon my trunks: "Passenger to--Hades." How strangely wrong your information is! In the first place, I should never carry a novel to Sydney; I should post it from here. In the second place, _Weir of Hermiston_ is as yet scarce begun. It's going to be excellent, no doubt; but it consists of about twenty pages. I have a tale, a shortish tale in length, but it has proved long to do, _The Ebb Tide_, some part of which goes home this mail. It is by me and Mr. Osbourne, and is really a singular work. There are only four characters, and three of them are bandits--well, two of them are, and the third is their comrade and accomplice. It sounds cheering, doesn't it? Barratry, and drunkenness, and vitriol, and I cannot tell you all what, are the beams of the roof. And yet--I don't know--I sort of think there's something in it. You'll see (which is more than I ever can) whether Davis and Attwater come off or not. _Weir of Hermiston_ is a much greater undertaking, and the plot is not good, I fear; but Lord Justice-Clerk Hermiston ought to be a plum. Of other schemes, more or less executed, it skills not to speak. I am glad to hear so good an account of your activity and interests, and shall always hear from you with pleasure; though I am, and must continue, a mere sprite of the inkbottle, unseen in the flesh. Please remember me to your wife and to the four-year-old sweetheart, if she be not too engrossed with higher matters. Do you know where the road crosses the burn under Glencorse Church? Go there, and say a prayer for me: _moriturus salutat_. See that it's a sunny day; I would like it to be a Sunday, but that's not possible in the premises; and stand on the right-hand bank just where the road goes down into the water, and shut your eyes, and if I don't appear to you! well, it can't be helped, and will be extremely funny. I have no concern here but to work and to keep an eye on this distracted people. I live just now wholly alone in an upper room of my house, because the whole family are down with influenza, bar my wife and myself. I get my horse up sometimes in the afternoon and have a ride in the woods; and I sit here and smoke and write, and rewrite, and destroy, and rage at my own impotence, from six in the morning till eight at night, with trifling and not always agreeable intervals for meals. I am sure you chose wisely to keep your country charge. There a minister can be something, not in a town. In a town, the most of them are empty houses--and public speakers. Why should you suppose your book will be slated because you have no friends? A new writer, if he is any good, will be acclaimed generally with more noise than he deserves. But by this time you will know for certain.--I am, yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--Be it known to this fluent generation that I, R. L. S., in the forty-third of my age and the twentieth of my professional life, wrote twenty-four pages in twenty-one days, working from six to eleven, and again in the afternoon from two to four or so, without fail or interruption. Such are the gifts the gods have endowed us withal: such was the facility of this prolific writer! R. L. S. TO AUGUSTUS ST. GAUDENS _Vailima, Samoa, May 29th, 1893._ MY DEAR GOD-LIKE SCULPTOR,--I wish in the most delicate manner in the world to insinuate a few commissions:-- No. 1. Is for a couple of copies of my medallion, as gilt-edged and high-toned as it is possible to make them. One is for our house here, and should be addressed as above. The other is for my friend Sidney Colvin, and should be addressed--Sidney Colvin, Esq., Keeper of the Print Room, British Museum, London. No. 2. This is a rather large order, and demands some explanation. Our house is lined with varnished wood of a dark ruddy colour, very beautiful to see; at the same time, it calls very much for gold; there is a limit to picture frames, and really you know there has to be a limit to the pictures you put inside of them. Accordingly, we have had an idea of a certain kind of decoration, which, I think, you might help us to make practical. What we want is an alphabet of gilt letters (very much such as people play with), and all mounted on spikes like drawing-pins; say two spikes to each letter, one at top, and I one at bottom. Say that they were this height, I I and that you chose a model of some really exquisitely fine, clear type from some Roman monument, and that they were made either of metal or some composition gilt--the point is, could not you, in your land of wooden houses, get a manufacturer to take the idea and manufacture them at a venture, so that I could get two or three hundred pieces or so at a moderate figure? You see, suppose you entertain an honoured guest, when he goes he leaves his name in gilt letters on your walls; an infinity of fun and decoration can be got out of hospitable and festive mottoes; and the doors of every room can be beautified by the legend of their names. I really think there is something in the idea, and you might be able to push it with the brutal and licentious manufacturer, using my name if necessary, though I should think the name of the god-like sculptor would be more germane. In case you should get it started, I should tell you that we should require commas in order to write the Samoan language, which is full of words written thus: la'u, ti'e ti'e. As the Samoan language uses but a very small proportion of the consonants, we should require a double or treble stock of all vowels, and of F, G, L, U, N, P, S, T, and V. The other day in Sydney, I think you might be interested to hear, I was sculpt a second time by a man called ----, as well as I can remember and read. I mustn't criticise a present, and he had very little time to do it in. It is thought by my family to be an excellent likeness of Mark Twain. This poor fellow, by the by, met with the devil of an accident. A model of a statue which he had just finished with a desperate effort was smashed to smithereens on its way to exhibition. Please be sure and let me know if anything is likely to come of this letter business, and the exact cost of each letter, so that I may count the cost before ordering.--Yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Relating the toilsome completion of _The Ebb Tide_, and beginning of the account of his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, in _History of a Family of Engineers_. _[Vailima] 29th May [1893]._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--Still grinding at Chap. XI. I began many days ago on p. 93, and am still on p. 93, which is exhilarating, but the thing takes shape all the same and should make a pretty lively chapter for an end of it. For XIII. is only a footnote _ad explicandum_. _June the 1st._--Back on p. 93. I was on 100 yesterday, but read it over and condemned it. _10 a.m._--I have worked up again to 97, but how? The deuce fly away with literature, for the basest sport in creation. But it's got to come straight! and if possible, so that I may finish _D. Balfour_ in time for the same mail. What a getting upstairs! This is Flaubert out-done. Belle, Graham, and Lloyd leave to-day on a malaga down the coast; to be absent a week or so: this leaves Fanny, me, and ----, who seems a nice, kindly fellow. _June 2nd._--I am nearly dead with dyspepsia, over-smoking, and unremunerative overwork. Last night, I went to bed by seven; woke up again about ten for a minute to find myself light-headed and altogether off my legs; went to sleep again, and woke this morning fairly fit. I have crippled on to p. 101, but I haven't read it yet, so do not boast. What kills me is the frame of mind of one of the characters; I cannot get it through. Of course that does not interfere with my total inability to write; so that yesterday I was a living half-hour upon a single clause and have a gallery of variants that would surprise you. And this sort of trouble (which I cannot avoid) unfortunately produces nothing when done but alembication and the far-fetched. Well, read it with mercy! _8 a.m._--Going to bed. Have read it, and believe the chapter practically done at last. But Lord! it has been a business. _June 3rd_, 8.15.--The draft is finished, the end of Chapter XII. and the tale, and I have only eight pages _wiederzuarbeiten_. This is just a cry of joy in passing. 10.30.--Knocked out of time. Did 101 and 102. Alas, no more to-day, as I have to go down town to a meeting. Just as well though, as my thumb is about done up. _Sunday, June 4th._--Now for a little snippet of my life. Yesterday, 12.30, in a heavenly day of sun and trade, I mounted my horse and set off. A boy opens my gate for me. "Sleep and long life! A blessing on your journey," says he. And I reply "Sleep, long life! A blessing on the house!" Then on, down the lime lane, a rugged, narrow, winding way, that seems almost as if it was leading you into Lyonesse, and you might see the head and shoulders of a giant looking in. At the corner of the road I meet the inspector of taxes, and hold a diplomatic interview with him; he wants me to pay taxes on the new house; I am informed I should not till next year; and we part, _re infecta_, he promising to bring me decisions, I assuring him that, if I find any favouritism, he will find me the most recalcitrant tax-payer on the island. Then I have a talk with an old servant by the wayside. A little further I pass two children coming up. "Love!" say I; "are you two chiefly-proceeding inland?" and they say, "Love! yes!" and the interesting ceremony is finished. Down to the post office, where I find Vitrolles and (Heaven reward you!) the White Book, just arrived per _Upolu_, having gone the wrong way round, by Australia; also six copies of _Island Nights' Entertainments_. Some of Weatherall's illustrations are very clever; but O Lord! the lagoon! I did say it was "shallow," but, O dear, not so shallow as that a man could stand up in it! I had still an hour to wait for my meeting, so Postmaster Davis let me sit down in his room and I had a bottle of beer in, and read _A Gentleman of France_. Have you seen it coming out in Longman's? My dear Colvin! 'tis the most exquisite pleasure; a real chivalrous yarn, like the Dumas' and yet unlike. Thereafter to the meeting of the five newspaper proprietors. Business transacted, I have to gallop home and find the boys waiting to be paid at the doorstep. _Monday, 5th._--Yesterday, Sunday, the Rev. Dr. Brown, secretary to the Wesleyan Mission, and the man who made the war in the Western Islands and was tried for his life in Fiji, came up, and we had a long, important talk about Samoa. O, if I could only talk to the home men! But what would it matter? none of them know, none of them care. If we could only have Macgregor here with his schooner, you would hear of no more troubles in Samoa. That is what we want; a man that knows and likes the natives, _qui paye de sa personne_, and is not afraid of hanging when necessary. We don't want bland Swedish humbugs, and fussy, footering German barons. That way the maelstrom lies, and we shall soon be in it. I have to-day written 103 and 104, all perfectly wrong, and shall have to rewrite them. This tale is devilish, and Chapter XI. the worst of the lot. The truth is of course that I am wholly worked out; but it's nearly done, and shall go somehow according to promise. I go against all my gods, and say it is _not worth while_ to massacre yourself over the last few pages of a rancid yarn, that the reviewers will quite justly tear to bits. As for _D. B._, no hope, I fear, this mail, but we'll see what the afternoon does for me. 4.15.--Well, it's done. Those tragic 16 pp. are at last finished, and I have put away thirty-two pages of chips, and have spent thirteen days about as nearly in Hell as a man could expect to live through. It's done, and of course it ain't worth while, and who cares? There it is, and about as grim a tale as was ever written, and as grimy, and as hateful. _______________________________________ | | | SACRED | | | | TO THE MEMORY | | | | OF | | | | J. L. HUISH, | | | | BORN 1856, AT HACKNEY, LONDON | | | | Accidentally killed upon this Island, | | | | 10th September 1889. | |_______________________________________| _Tuesday, 6th._--I am exulting to do nothing. It pours with rain from the westward, very unusual kind of weather; I was standing out on the little verandah in front of my room this morning, and there went through me or over me a wave of extraordinary and apparently baseless emotion. I literally staggered. And then the explanation came, and I knew I had found a frame of mind and body that belonged to Scotland, and particularly to the neighbourhood of Callander. Very odd these identities of sensation, and the world of connotations implied; highland huts, and peat smoke, and the brown, swirling rivers, and wet clothes, and whisky, and the romance of the past, and that indescribable bite of the whole thing at a man's heart, which is--or rather lies at the bottom of--a story. I don't know if you are a Barbey d'Aurévilly-an. I am. I have a great delight in his Norman stories. Do you know the _Chevalier des Touches_ and _L'Ensorcelée_? They are admirable, they reek of the soil and the past. But I was rather thinking just now of _Le Rideau Cramoisi_, and its adorable setting of the stopped coach, the dark street, the home-going in the inn yard, and the red blind illuminated. Without doubt, _there_ was an identity of sensation; one of those conjunctions in life that had filled Barbey full to the brim, and permanently bent his memory. I wonder exceedingly if I have done anything at all good; and who can tell me? and why should I wish to know? In so little a while, I, and the English language, and the bones of my descendants, will have ceased to be a memory! And yet--and yet--one would like to leave an image for a few years upon men's minds--for fun. This is a very dark frame of mind, consequent on overwork and the conclusion of the excruciating _Ebb Tide_. Adieu. What do you suppose should be done with _The Ebb Tide_? It would make a volume of 200 pp.; on the other hand, I might likely have some more stories soon: _The Owl_, _Death in the Pot_, _The Sleeper Awakened_; all these are possible. _The Owl_ might be half as long; _The Sleeper Awakened_, ditto; _Death in the Pot_ a deal shorter, I believe. Then there's the _Go-Between_, which is not impossible altogether. _The Owl_, _The Sleeper Awakened_, and the _Go-Between_ end reasonably well; _Death in the Pot_ is an ungodly massacre. O, well, _The Owl_ only ends well in so far as some lovers come together, and nobody is killed at the moment, but you know they are all doomed, they are Chouan fellows.[61] _Friday, 9th._--Well, the mail is in; no Blue-book, depressing letter from C.; a long, amusing ramble from my mother; vast masses of Romeike; they _are_ going to war now; and what will that lead to? and what has driven them to it but the persistent misconduct of these two officials? I know I ought to rewrite the end of this bloody _Ebb Tide_: well, I can't. _C'est plus fort que moi_; it has to go the way it is, and be jowned to it! From what I make out of the reviews,[62] I think it would be better not to republish _The Ebb Tide_: but keep it for other tales, if they should turn up. Very amusing how the reviews pick out one story and damn the rest! and it is always a different one. Be sure you send me the article from Le Temps. Talking of which, ain't it manners in France to acknowledge a dedication? I have never heard a word from Le Sieur Bourget. _Saturday, 17th._--Since I wrote this last, I have written a whole chapter of my Grandfather, and read it to-night; it was on the whole much appreciated, and I kind of hope it ain't bad myself. 'Tis a third writing, but it wants a fourth. By next mail, I believe I might send you 3 chapters. That is to say _Family Annals_, _The Service of the Northern Lights_, and _The Building of the Bell Rock._ Possibly even 4--_A Houseful of Boys_. I could finish my Grandfather very easy now; my father and Uncle Alan stop the way. I propose to call the book: _Northern Lights: Memoirs of a Family of Engineers_. I tell you, it is going to be a good book. My idea in sending MS. would be to get it set up; two proofs to me, one to Professor Swan, Ardchapel, Helensburgh--mark it private and confidential--one to yourself; and come on with criticisms! But I'll have to see. The total plan of the book is this-- I. Domestic Annals. II. The Service of the Northern Lights. III. The Building of the Bell Rock. IV. A Houseful of Boys (or the Family in Baxter's Place). V. Education of an Engineer. VI. The Grandfather. VII. Alan Stevenson. VIII. Thomas Stevenson. There will be an Introduction 'The Surname of Stevenson' which has proved a mighty queer subject of inquiry. But, Lord! if I were among libraries. _Sunday, 18th._--I shall put in this envelope the end of the ever-to-be-execrated _Ebb Tide_, or Stevenson's Blooming Error. Also, a paper apart for _David Balfour_. The slips must go in another enclosure, I suspect, owing to their beastly bulk. Anyway, there are two pieces of work off my mind, and though I could wish I had rewritten a little more of _David_, yet it was plainly to be seen it was impossible. All the points indicated by you have been brought out; but to rewrite the end, in my present state of over-exhaustion and fiction-phobia, would have been madness; and I let it go as it stood. My grandfather is good enough for me, these days. I do not work any less; on the whole, if anything, a little more. But it is different. The slips go to you in four packets; I hope they are what they should be, but do not think so. I am at a pitch of discontent with fiction in all its form--or _my_ forms--that prevents me being able to be even interested. I have had to stop all drink; smoking I am trying to stop also. It annoys me dreadfully: and yet if I take a glass of claret, I have a headache the next day! O, and a good headache too; none of your trifles. Well, sir, here's to you, and farewell.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO EDMUND GOSSE _June 10th, 1893._ MY DEAR GOSSE,--My mother tells me you never received the very long and careful letter that I sent you more than a year ago; or is it two years? I was indeed so much surprised at your silence that I wrote to Henry James and begged him to inquire if you had received it; his reply was an (if possible) higher power of the same silence; whereupon I bowed my head and acquiesced. But there is no doubt the letter was written and sent; and I am sorry it was lost, for it contained, among other things, an irrecoverable criticism of your father's _Life_, with a number of suggestions for another edition, which struck me at the time as excellent. Well, suppose we call that cried off, and begin as before? It is fortunate indeed that we can do so, being both for a while longer in the day. But, alas! when I see "works of the late J. A. S.,"[63] I can see no help and no reconciliation possible. I wrote him a letter, I think, three years ago, heard in some roundabout way that he had received it, waited in vain for an answer (which had probably miscarried), and in a humour between frowns and smiles wrote to him no more. And now the strange, poignant, pathetic, brilliant creature is gone into the night, and the voice is silent that uttered so much excellent discourse; and I am sorry that I did not write to him again. Yet I am glad for him; light lie the turf! The Saturday is the only obituary I have seen, and I thought it very good upon the whole. I should be half tempted to write an _In Memoriam_, but I am submerged with other work. Are you going to do it? I very much admire your efforts that way; you are our only academician. So you have tried fiction? I will tell you the truth: when I saw it announced, I was so sure you would send it to me, that I did not order it! But the order goes this mail, and I will give you news of it. Yes, honestly, fiction is very difficult; it is a terrible strain to _carry_ your characters all that time. And the difficulty of according the narrative and the dialogue (in a work in the third person) is extreme. That is one reason out of half a dozen why I so often prefer the first. It is much in my mind just now, because of my last work, just off the stocks three days ago, _The Ebb Tide_: a dreadful, grimy business in the third person, where the strain between a vilely realistic dialogue and a narrative style pitched about (in phrase) 'four notes higher' than it should have been, has sown my head with grey hairs; or I believe so--if my head escaped, my heart has them. The truth is, I have a little lost my way, and stand bemused at the cross-roads. A subject? Ay, I have dozens; I have at least four novels begun, they are none good enough; and the mill waits, and I'll have to take second best. _The Ebb Tide_ I make the world a present of; I expect, and, I suppose, deserve to be torn to pieces; but there was all that good work lying useless, and I had to finish it! All your news of your family is pleasant to hear. My wife has been very ill, but is now better; I may say I am ditto, _The Ebb Tide_ having left me high and dry, which is a good example of the mixed metaphor. Our home, and estate, and our boys, and the politics of the island, keep us perpetually amused and busy; and I grind away with an odd, dogged, down sensation--and an idea _in petto_ that the game is about played out. I have got too realistic, and I must break the trammels--I mean I would if I could; but the yoke is heavy. I saw with amusement that Zola says the same thing; and truly the _Débâcle_ was a mighty big book, I have no need for a bigger, though the last part is a mere mistake in my opinion. But the Emperor, and Sedan, and the doctor at the ambulance, and the horses in the field of battle, Lord, how gripped it is! What an epical performance! According to my usual opinion, I believe I could go over that book and leave a masterpiece by blotting and no ulterior art. But that is an old story, ever new with me. Taine gone, and Renan, and Symonds, and Tennyson, and Browning; the suns go swiftly out, and I see no suns to follow, nothing but a universal twilight of the demi-divinities, with parties like you and me and Lang beating on toy drums and playing on penny whistles about glow-worms. But Zola is big anyway; he has plenty in his belly; too much, that is all; he wrote the _Débâcle_ and he wrote _La Bête humaine_, perhaps the most excruciatingly silly book that I ever read to an end. And why did I read it to an end, W. E. G.? Because the animal in me was interested in the lewdness. Not sincerely, of course, my mind refusing to partake in it; but the flesh was slightly pleased. And when it was done, I cast it from me with a peal of laughter, and forgot it, as I would forget a Montépin. Taine is to me perhaps the chief of these losses; I did luxuriate in his _Origines_; it was something beyond literature, not quite so good, if you please, but so much more systematic, and the pages that had to be "written" always so adequate. Robespierre, Napoleon, were both excellent good. _June 18th, '93._--Well, I have left fiction wholly, and gone to my Grandfather, and on the whole found peace. By next month my Grandfather will begin to be quite grown up. I have already three chapters about as good as done; by which, of course, as you know, I mean till further notice or the next discovery. I like biography far better than fiction myself: fiction is too free. In biography you have your little handful of facts, little bits of a puzzle, and you sit and think, and fit 'em together this way and that, and get up and throw 'em down, and say damn, and go out for a walk. And it's real soothing; and when done, gives an idea of finish to the writer that is very peaceful. Of course, it's not really so finished as quite a rotten novel; it always has and always must have the incurable illogicalities of life about it, the fathoms of slack and the miles of tedium. Still, that's where the fun comes in; and when you have at last managed to shut up the castle spectre (dulness), the very outside of his door looks beautiful by contrast. There are pages in these books that may seem nothing to the reader; but you _remember what they were, you know what they might have been_, and they seem to you witty beyond comparison. In my Grandfather I've had (for instance) to give up the temporal order almost entirely; doubtless the temporal order is the great foe of the biographer; it is so tempting, so easy, and lo! there you are in the bog!--Ever yours, R. L. STEVENSON. With all kind messages from self and wife to you and yours. My wife is very much better, having been the early part of this year alarmingly ill. She is now all right, only complaining of trifles, annoying to her, but happily not interesting to her friends. I am in a hideous state, having stopped drink and smoking; yes, both. No wine, no tobacco; and the dreadful part of it is that--looking forward--I have--what shall I say?--nauseating intimations that it ought to be for ever. TO HENRY JAMES _Vailima Plantation, Samoan Islands, June 17th, 1893._ MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--I believe I have neglected a mail in answering yours. You will be very sorry to hear that my wife was exceedingly ill, and very glad to hear that she is better. I cannot say that I feel any more anxiety about her. We shall send you a photograph of her taken in Sydney in her customary island habit as she walks and gardens and shrilly drills her brown assistants. She was very ill when she sat for it, which may a little explain the appearance of the photograph. It reminds me of a friend of my grandmother's who used to say when talking to younger women, "Aweel, when I was young, I wasnae just exactly what ye wad call _bonny_, but I was pale, penetratin', and interestin'." I would not venture to hint that Fanny is "no bonny," but there is no doubt but that in this presentment she is "pale, penetratin', and interestin'." As you are aware, I have been wading deep waters and contending with the great ones of the earth, not wholly without success. It is, you may be interested to hear, a dreary and infuriating business. If you can get the fools to admit one thing, they will always save their face by denying another. If you can induce them to take a step to the right hand, they generally indemnify themselves by cutting a caper to the left. I always held (upon no evidence whatever, from a mere sentiment or intuition) that politics was the dirtiest, the most foolish, and the most random of human employments. I always held, but now I know it! Fortunately, you have nothing to do with anything of the kind, and I may spare you the horror of further details. I received from you a book by a man by the name of Anatole France. Why should I disguise it? I have no use for Anatole. He writes very prettily, and then afterwards? Baron Marbot was a different pair of shoes. So likewise is the Baron de Vitrolles, whom I am now perusing with delight. His escape in 1814 is one of the best pages I remember anywhere to have read. But Marbot and Vitrolles are dead, and what has become of the living? It seems as if literature were coming to a stand. I am sure it is with me; and I am sure everybody will say so when they have the privilege of reading _The Ebb Tide_. My dear man, the grimness of that story is not to be depicted in words. There are only four characters, to be sure, but they are such a troop of swine! And their behaviour is really so deeply beneath any possible standard, that on a retrospect I wonder I have been able to endure them myself until the yarn was finished. Well, there is always one thing; it will serve as a touchstone. If the admirers of Zola admire him for his pertinent ugliness and pessimism, I think they should admire this; but if, as I have long suspected, they neither admire nor understand the man's art, and only wallow in his rancidness like a hound in offal, then they will certainly be disappointed in _The Ebb Tide_. Alas! poor little tale, it is not _even_ rancid. By way of an antidote or febrifuge, I am going on at a great rate with my History of the Stevensons, which I hope may prove rather amusing, in some parts at least. The excess of materials weighs upon me. My grandfather is a delightful comedy part; and I have to treat him besides as a serious and (in his way) a heroic figure, and at times I lose my way, and I fear in the end will blur the effect. However, _à la grâce de Dieu!_ I'll make a spoon or spoil a horn. You see, I have to do the Building of the Bell Rock by cutting down and packing my grand-sire's book, which I rather hope I have done, but do not know. And it makes a huge chunk of a very different style and quality between Chapters II. and IV. And it can't be helped! It is just a delightful and exasperating necessity. You know, the stuff is really excellent narrative: only, perhaps there's too much of it! There is the rub. Well, well, it will be plain to you that my mind is affected; it might be with less. _The Ebb Tide_ and _Northern Lights_ are a full meal for any plain man. I have written and ordered your last book, _The Real Thing_, so be sure and don't send it. What else are you doing or thinking of doing? News I have none, and don't want any. I have had to stop all strong drink and all tobacco, and am now in a transition state between the two, which seems to be near madness. You never smoked, I think, so you can never taste the joys of stopping it. But at least you have drunk, and you can enter perhaps into my annoyance when I suddenly find a glass of claret or a brandy-and-water give me a splitting headache the next morning. No mistake about it; drink anything, and there's your headache. Tobacco just as bad for me. If I live through this breach of habit, I shall be a white-livered puppy indeed. Actually I am so made, or so twisted, that I do not like to think of a life without the red wine on the table and the tobacco with its lovely little coal of fire. It doesn't amuse me from a distance. I may find it the Garden of Eden when I go in, but I don't like the colour of the gate-posts. Suppose somebody said to you, you are to leave your home, and your books, and your clubs, and go out and camp in mid-Africa, and command an expedition, you would howl, and kick, and flee. I think the same of a life without wine and tobacco; and if this goes on, I've got to go and do it, sir, in the living flesh! I thought Bourget was a friend of yours? And I thought the French were a polite race? He has taken my dedication with a stately silence that has surprised me into apoplexy. Did I go and dedicate my book[64] to the nasty alien, and the 'norrid Frenchman, and the Bloody Furrineer? Well, I wouldn't do it again; and unless his case is susceptible of explanation, you might perhaps tell him so over the walnuts and the wine, by way of speeding the gay hours. Sincerely, I thought my dedication worth a letter. If anything be worth anything here below! Do you know the story of the man who found a button in his hash, and called the waiter? "What do you call that?" says he. "Well," said the waiter, "what d'you expect? Expect to find a gold watch and chain?" Heavenly apologue, is it not? I expected (rather) to find a gold watch and chain; I expected to be able to smoke to excess and drink to comfort all the days of my life; and I am still indignantly staring on this button! It's not even a button; it's a teetotal badge!--Ever yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Saturday, 24th (?) June [1893]._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--Yesterday morning, after a day of absolute temperance, I awoke to the worst headache I had had yet. Accordingly, temperance was said farewell to, quinine instituted, and I believe my pains are soon to be over. We wait, with a kind of sighing impatience, for war to be declared, or to blow finally off, living in the meanwhile in a kind of children's hour of firelight and shadow and preposterous tales; the king seen at night galloping up our road upon unknown errands and covering his face as he passes our cook; Mataafa daily surrounded (when he awakes) with fresh "white man's boxes" (query, ammunition?) and professing to be quite ignorant of where they come from; marches of bodies of men across the island; concealment of ditto in the bush; the coming on and off of different chiefs; and such a mass of ravelment and rag-tag as the devil himself could not unwind. _Wednesday, 28 June._--Yesterday it rained with but little intermission, but I was jealous of news. Graham and I got into the saddle about 1 o'clock and off down to town. In town, there was nothing but rumours going; in the night drums had been beat, the men had run to arms on Mulinuu from as far as Vaiala, and the alarm proved false. There were no signs of any gathering in Apia proper, and the Secretary of State had no news to give. I believed him, too, for we are brither Scots. Then the temptation came upon me strong to go on to the ford and see the Mataafa villages, where we heard there was more afoot. Off we rode. When we came to Vaimusu, the houses were very full of men, but all seemingly unarmed. Immediately beyond is that river over which we passed in our scamper with Lady Jersey; it was all solitary. Three hundred yards beyond is a second ford; and there--I came face to face with war. Under the trees on the further bank sat a picket of seven men with Winchesters; their faces bright, their eyes ardent. As we came up, they did not speak or move; only their eyes followed us. The horses drank, and we passed the ford. "Talofa!" I said, and the commandant of the picket said "Talofa"; and then, when we were almost by, remembered himself and asked where we were going. "To Faamuiná," I said, and we rode on. Every house by the wayside was crowded with armed men. There was the European house of a Chinaman on the right-hand side: a flag of truce flying over the gate--indeed we saw three of these in what little way we penetrated into Mataafa's lines--all the foreigners trying to protect their goods; and the Chinaman's verandah overflowed with men and girls and Winchesters. By the way we met a party of about ten or a dozen marching with their guns and cartridge-belts, and the cheerful alacrity and brightness of their looks set my head turning with envy and sympathy. Arrived at Vaiusu, the houses about the _malae_ (village green) were thronged with men, all armed. On the outside of the council-house (which was all full within) there stood an orator; he had his back turned to his audience, and seemed to address the world at large; all the time we were there his strong voice continued unabated, and I heard snatches of political wisdom rising and falling. The house of Faamuiná stands on a knoll in the _malae_. Thither we mounted, a boy ran out and took our horses, and we went in. Faamuiná was there himself, his wife Palepa, three other chiefs, and some attendants; and here again was this exulting spectacle as of people on their marriage day. Faamuiná (when I last saw him) was an elderly, limping gentleman, with much of the debility of age; it was a bright-eyed boy that greeted me; the lady was no less excited; all had cartridge-belts. We stayed but a little while to smoke a selui; I would not have kava made, as I thought my escapade was already dangerous (perhaps even blameworthy) enough. On the way back, we were much greeted, and on coming to the ford, the commandant came and asked me if there were many on the other side. "Very many," said I; not that I knew, but I would not lead them on the ice. "That is well!" said he, and the little picket laughed aloud as we splashed into the river. We returned to Apia, through Apia, and out to windward as far as Vaiala, where the word went that the men of the Vaimauga had assembled. We met two boys carrying pigs, and saw six young men busy cooking in a cook-house; but no sign of an assembly; no arms, no blackened faces. (I forgot! As we turned to leave Faamuiná's, there ran forward a man with his face blackened, and the back of his lava-lava girded up so as to show his tattooed hips naked; he leaped before us, cut a wonderful caper, and flung his knife high in the air, and caught it. It was strangely savage and fantastic and high-spirited. I have seen a child doing the same antics long before in a dance, so that it is plainly an _accepted solemnity_. I should say that for weeks the children have been playing with spears.) Up by the plantation I took a short cut, which shall never be repeated, through grass and weeds over the horses' heads and among rolling stones; I thought we should have left a horse there, but fortune favoured us. So home, a little before six, in a dashing squall of rain, to a bowl of kava and dinner. But the impression on our minds was extraordinary; the sight of that picket at the ford, and those ardent, happy faces whirls in my head; the old aboriginal awoke in both of us and knickered like a stallion. It is dreadful to think that I must sit apart here and do nothing; I do not know if I can stand it out. But you see, I may be of use to these poor people, if I keep quiet, and if I threw myself in, I should have a bad job of it to save myself. There; I have written this to you; and it is still but 7.30 in the day, and the sun only about one hour up; can I go back to my old grandpapa, and men sitting with Winchesters in my mind's eye? No; war is a huge _entraînement_; there is no other temptation to be compared to it, not one. We were all wet, we had been about five hours in the saddle, mostly riding hard; and we came home like schoolboys, with such a lightness of spirits, and I am sure such a brightness of eye, as you could have lit a candle at! Do you appreciate the height and depth of my temptation? that I have about nine miles to ride, and I can become a general officer? and to-night I might seize Mulinuu and have the C. J. under arrest? And yet I stay here! It seems incredible, so huge is the empire of prudence and the second thought. _Thursday, 29th._--I had two priests to luncheon yesterday: the Bishop and Père Rémy. They were very pleasant, and quite clean too, which has been known sometimes not to be--even with bishops. Monseigneur is not unimposing; with his white beard and his violet girdle he looks splendidly episcopal, and when our three waiting lads came up one after another and kneeled before him in the big hall, and kissed his ring, it did me good for a piece of pageantry. Rémy is very engaging; he is a little, nervous, eager man, like a governess, and brimful of laughter and small jokes. So is the bishop indeed, and our luncheon party went off merrily--far more merrily than many a German spread, though with so much less liquor. One trait was delicious. With a complete ignorance of the Protestant that I would scarce have imagined, he related to us (as news) little stories from the gospels, and got the names all wrong! His comments were delicious, and to our ears a thought irreverent. "_Ah! il connaissait son monde, allez!_" "_Il était fin, notre Seigneur!_" etc. _Friday._--Down with Fanny and Belle, to lunch at the International. Heard there about the huge folly of the hour, all the Mulinuu ammunition having been yesterday marched openly to vaults in Matafele; and this morning, on a cry of protest from the whites, openly and humiliatingly disinterred and marched back again. People spoke of it with a kind of shrill note that did not quite satisfy me. They seemed not quite well at ease. Luncheon over, we rode out on the Malie road. All was quiet in Vaiusu, and when we got to the second ford, alas! there was no picket--which was just what Belle had come to sketch. On through quite empty roads; the houses deserted, never a gun to be seen; and at last a drum and a penny whistle playing in Vaiusu, and a cricket match on the _malae_! Went up to Faamuiná's; he is a trifle uneasy, though he gives us kava. I cannot see what ails him, then it appears that he has an engagement with the Chief Justice at half-past two to sell a piece of land. Is this the reason why war has disappeared? We ride back, stopping to sketch here and there the fords, a flag of truce, etc. I ride on to Public Hall Committee and pass an hour with my committees very heavily. To the hotel to dinner, then to the ball, and home by eleven, very tired. At the ball I heard some news, of how the chief of Letonu said that I was the source of all this trouble, and should be punished, and my family as well. This, and the rudeness of the man at the ford of the Gase-gase, looks but ill; I should have said that Faamuiná, as he approached the first ford, was spoken to by a girl, and immediately said good-bye and plunged into the bush; the girl had told him there was a war party out from Mulinuu; and a little further on, as we stopped to sketch a flag of truce, the beating of drums and the sound of a bugle from that direction startled us. But we saw nothing, and I believe Mulinuu is (at least at present) incapable of any act of offence. One good job, these threats to my home and family take away all my childish temptation to go out and fight. Our force must be here, to protect ourselves. I see panic rising among the whites; I hear the shrill note of it in their voices, and they talk already about a refuge on the war ships. There are two here, both German; and the _Orlando_ is expected presently. _Sunday, 9th July._--Well, the war has at last begun. For four or five days, Apia has been filled by these poor children with their faces blacked, and the red handkerchief about their brows, that makes the Malietoa uniform, and the boats have been coming in from the windward, some of them 50 strong, with a drum and a bugle on board--the bugle always ill-played--and a sort of jester leaping and capering on the sparred nose of the boat, and the whole crew uttering from time to time a kind of menacing ululation. Friday they marched out to the bush; and yesterday morning we heard that some had returned to their houses for the night, as they found it "so uncomfortable." After dinner a messenger came up to me with a note, that the wounded were arriving at the Mission House. Fanny, Lloyd and I saddled and rode off with a lantern; it was a fine starry night, though pretty cold. We left the lantern at Tanugamanono, and then down in the starlight. I found Apia, and myself, in a strange state of flusteration; my own excitement was gloomy and (I may say) truculent; others appeared imbecile; some sullen. The best place in the whole town was the hospital. A longish frame-house it was, with a big table in the middle for operations, and ten Samoans, each with an average of four sympathisers, stretched along the walls. Clarke was there, steady as a die; Miss Large, little spectacled angel, showed herself a real trump; the nice, clean, German orderlies in their white uniforms looked and meant business. (I hear a fine story of Miss Large--a cast-iron teetotaller--going to the public-house for a bottle of brandy.) The doctors were not there when I arrived; but presently it was observed that one of the men was going cold. He was a magnificent Samoan, very dark, with a noble aquiline countenance, like an Arab, I suppose, and was surrounded by seven people, fondling his limbs as he lay: he was shot through both lungs. And an orderly was sent to the town for the (German naval) doctors, who were dining there. Meantime I found an errand of my own. Both Clarke and Miss Large expressed a wish to have the public hall, of which I am chairman, and I set off down town, and woke people out of their beds, and got a committee together, and (with a great deal of difficulty from one man, whom we finally overwhelmed) got the public hall for them. Bar the one man, the committee was splendid, and agreed in a moment to share the expense if the shareholders object. Back to the hospital about 11.30; found the German doctors there. Two men were going now, one that was shot in the bowels--he was dying rather hard, in a gloomy stupor of pain and laudanum, silent, with contorted face. The chief, shot through the lungs, was lying on one side, awaiting the last angel; his family held his hands and legs: they were all speechless, only one woman suddenly clasped his knee, and "keened" for the inside of five seconds, and fell silent again. Went home, and to bed about two A.M. What actually passed seems undiscoverable; but the Mataafas were surely driven back out of Vaitele; that is a blow to them, and the resistance was far greater than had been anticipated--which is a blow to the Laupepas. All seems to indicate a long and bloody war. Frank's house in Mulinuu was likewise filled with wounded; many dead bodies were brought in; I hear with certainty of five, wrapped in mats; and a pastor goes to-morrow to the field to bring others. The Laupepas brought in eleven heads to Mulinuu, and to the great horror and consternation of the native mind, one proved to be a girl, and was identified as that of a Taupou--or Maid of the Village--from Savaii. I hear this morning, with great relief, that it has been returned to Malie, wrapped in the most costly silk handkerchiefs, and with an apologetic embassy. This could easily happen. The girl was of course attending on her father with ammunition, and got shot; her hair was cut short to make her father's war head-dress--even as our own Sina's is at this moment; and the decollator was probably, in his red flurry of fight, wholly unconscious of her sex. I am sorry for him in the future; he must make up his mind to many bitter jests--perhaps to vengeance. But what an end to one chosen for her beauty and, in the time of peace, watched over by trusty crones and hunchbacks! _Evening._--Can I write or not? I played lawn tennis in the morning, and after lunch down with Graham to Apia. Ulu, he that was shot in the lungs, still lives; he that was shot in the bowels is gone to his fathers, poor, fierce child! I was able to be of some very small help, and in the way of helping myself to information, to prove myself a mere gazer at meteors. But there seems no doubt the Mataafas for the time are scattered; the most of our friends are involved in this disaster, and Mataafa himself--who might have swept the islands a few months ago--for him to fall so poorly, doubles my regret. They say the Taupou had a gun and fired; probably an excuse manufactured _ex post facto_. I go down to-morrow at 12, to stay the afternoon, and help Miss Large. In the hospital to-day, when I first entered it, there were no attendants; only the wounded and their friends, all equally sleeping and their heads poised upon the wooden pillows. There is a pretty enough boy there, slightly wounded, whose fate is to be envied: two girls, and one of the most beautiful, with beaming eyes, tend him and sleep upon his pillow. In the other corner, another young man, very patient and brave, lies wholly deserted. Yet he seems to me far the better of the two; but not so pretty! Heavens, what a difference that makes; in our not very well proportioned bodies and our finely hideous faces, the 1-32nd--rather the 1-64th--this way or that! Sixteen heads in all at Mulinuu. I am so stiff I can scarce move without a howl. _Monday, 10th._--Some news that Mataafa is gone to Savaii by way of Manono: this may mean a great deal more warfaring, and no great issue. (When Sosimo came in this morning with my breakfast he had to lift me up. It is no joke to play lawn tennis after carrying your right arm in a sling so many years.) What a hard, unjust business this is! On the 28th, if Mataafa had moved, he could have still swept Mulinuu. He waited, and I fear he is now only the stick of a rocket. _Wednesday, 12th._--No more political news; but many rumours. The government troops are off to Manono; no word of Mataafa. O, there is a passage in my mother's letter which puzzles me as to a date. Is it next Christmas you are coming? or the Christmas after? This is most important, and must be understood at once. If it is next Christmas, I could not go to Ceylon, for lack of gold, and you would have to adopt one of the following alternatives: 1st, either come straight on here and pass a month with us; 'tis the rainy season, but we have often lovely weather. Or (2nd) come to Hawaii and I will meet you there. Hawaii is only a week's sail from S. Francisco, making only about sixteen days on the heaving ocean; and the steamers run once a fortnight, so that you could turn round; and you could thus pass a day or two in the States--a fortnight even--and still see me. But I have sworn to take no further excursions till I have money saved to pay for them; and to go to Ceylon and back would be torture unless I had a lot. You must answer this at once, please; so that I may know what to do. We would dearly like you to come on here. I'll tell you how it can be done; I can come up and meet you at Hawaii, and if you had at all got over your sea-sickness, I could just come on board and we could return together to Samoa, and you could have a month of our life here, which I believe you could not help liking. Our horses are the devil, of course, miserable screws, and some of them a little vicious. I had a dreadful fright--the passage in my mother's letter is recrossed and I see it says the end of /94: so much the better, then; but I would like to submit to you my alternative plan. I could meet you at Hawaii, and reconduct you to Hawaii, so that we could have a full six weeks together and I believe a little over, and you would see this place of mine, and have a sniff of native life, native foods, native houses--and perhaps be in time to see the German flag raised, who knows?--and we could generally yarn for all we were worth. I should like you to see Vailima; and I should be curious to know how the climate affected you. It is quite hit or miss; it suits me, it suits Graham, it suits all our family; others it does not suit at all. It is either gold or poison. I rise at six, the rest at seven; lunch is at 12; at five we go to lawn tennis till dinner at six; and to roost early. A man brought in a head to Mulinuu in great glory; they washed the black paint off, and behold! it was his brother. When I last heard he was sitting in his house, with the head upon his lap, and weeping. Barbarous war is an ugly business; but I believe the civilised is fully uglier; but Lord! what fun! I should say we now have definite news that there are _three_ women's heads; it was difficult to get it out of the natives, who are all ashamed, and the women all in terror of reprisals. Nothing has been done to punish or disgrace these hateful innovators. It was a false report that the head had been returned. _Thursday, 13th._--Maatafa driven away from Savaii. I cannot write about this, and do not know what should be the end of it. _Monday, 17th._--Haggard and Ahrens (a German clerk) to lunch yesterday. There is no real certain news yet: I must say, no man could _swear_ to any result; but the sky looks horribly black for Mataafa and so many of our friends along with him. The thing has an abominable, a beastly, nightmare interest. But it's wonderful generally how little one cares about the wounded; hospital sights, etc.; things that used to murder me. I was far more struck with the excellent way in which things were managed; as if it had been a peep-show; I held some of the things at an operation, and did not care a dump. _Tuesday, 18th._--Sunday came the _Katoomba_, Captain Bickford, C.M.G. Yesterday, Graham and I went down to call, and find he has orders to suppress Mataafa at once, and has to go down to-day before daybreak to Manono. He is a very capable, energetic man; if he had only come ten days ago, all this would have gone by; but now the questions are thick and difficult. (1) Will Mataafa surrender? (2) Will his people allow themselves to be disarmed? (3) What will happen to them if they do? (4) What will any of them believe after former deceptions? The three consuls were scampering on horseback to Leulumoega to the king; no Cusack-Smith, without whose accession I could not send a letter to Mataafa. I rode up here, wrote my letter in the sweat of the concordance and with the able-bodied help of Lloyd--and dined. Then down in continual showers and pitchy darkness, and to Cusack-Smith's; not returned. Back to the inn for my horse, and to C.-S.'s, when I find him just returned and he accepts my letter. Thence home, by 12.30, jolly tired and wet. And to-day have been in a crispation of energy and ill-temper, raking my wretched mail together. It is a hateful business, waiting for the news; it may come to a fearful massacre yet.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO JAMES S. STEVENSON This is addressed to a very remote cousin in quest of information about the origins of the family. _Vailima, Samoa, June 19th, 1893._ DEAR MR. STEVENSON,--I am reminded by coming across some record of relations between my grandfather, Robert Stevenson, C.E., Edinburgh, and Robert Stevenson, Esq., Secretary to the Royal Exchange, Glasgow, and I presume a son of Hugh Stevenson who died in Tobago 16th April 1774, that I have not yet consulted my cousins in Glasgow. I am engaged in writing a Life of my grandfather, my uncle Alan, and my father, Thomas, and I find almost inconceivable difficulty in placing and understanding their (and my) descent. Might I ask if you have any material to go upon? The smallest notes would be like found gold to me; and an old letter invaluable. I have not got beyond James Stevenson and Jean Keir his spouse, to whom Robert the First (?) was born in 1675. Could you get me further back? Have you any old notes of the trouble in the West Indian business which took Hugh and Alan to their deaths? How had they acquired so considerable a business at an age so early? You see how the queries pour from me; but I will ask nothing more in words. Suffice it to say that any information, however insignificant, as to our common forbears, will be very gratefully received. In case you should have any original documents, it would be better to have copies sent to me in this outlandish place, for the expense of which I will account to you as soon as you let me know the amount, and it will be wise to register your letter.--Believe me, in the old, honoured Scottish phrase, your affectionate cousin, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO HENRY JAMES _Apia, July 1893._ MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--Yes. _Les Trophées_ is, on the whole, a book.[65] It is excellent; but is it a life's work? I always suspect _you_ of a volume of sonnets up your sleeve; when is it coming down? I am in one of my moods of wholesale impatience with all fiction and all verging on it, reading instead, with rapture, _Fountainhall's Decisions_. You never read it: well, it hasn't much form, and is inexpressibly dreary, I should suppose, to others--and even to me for pages. It's like walking in a mine underground, and with a damned bad lantern, and picking out pieces of ore. This, and war, will be my excuse for not having read your (doubtless) charming work of fiction. The revolving year will bring me round to it; and I know, when fiction shall begin to feel a little _solid_ to me again, that I shall love it, because it's James. Do you know, when I am in this mood, I would rather try to read a bad book? It's not so disappointing, anyway. And _Fountainhall_ is prime, two big folio volumes, and all dreary, and all true, and all as terse as an obituary; and about one interesting fact on an average in twenty pages, and ten of them unintelligible for technicalities. There's literature, if you like! It feeds; it falls about you genuine like rain. Rain: nobody has done justice to rain in literature yet: surely a subject for a Scot. But then you can't do rain in that ledger-book style that I am trying for--or between a ledger-book and an old ballad. How to get over, how to escape from, the besotting _particularity_ of fiction. "Roland approached the house; it had green doors and window blinds; and there was a scraper on the upper step." To hell with Roland and the scraper!--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO A. CONAN DOYLE _Vailima, July 12, 1893._ MY DEAR DR. CONAN DOYLE,--The _White Company_ has not yet turned up; but when it does--which I suppose will be next mail--you shall hear news of me. I have a great talent for compliment, accompanied by a hateful, even a diabolic frankness. Delighted to hear I have a chance of seeing you and Mrs. Doyle; Mrs. Stevenson bids me say (what is too true) that our rations are often spare. Are you Great Eaters? Please reply. As to ways and means, here is what you will have to do. Leave San Francisco by the down mail, get off at Samoa, and twelve days or a fortnight later, you can continue your journey to Auckland per Upolu, which will give you a look at Tonga and possibly Fiji by the way. Make this a _first part of your plans_. A fortnight, even of Vailima diet, could kill nobody. We are in the midst of war here; rather a nasty business, with the head-taking; and there seems signs of other trouble. But I believe you need make no change in your design to visit us. All should be well over; and if it were not, why! you need not leave the steamer.--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES BAXTER _19th July '93._ ... We are in the thick of war--see Illustrated London News--we have only two outside boys left to us. Nothing is doing, and _per contra_ little paying.... My life here is dear; but I can live within my income for a time at least--so long as my prices keep up--and it seems a clear duty to waste none of it on gadding about. ... My Life of my family fills up intervals, and should be an excellent book when it is done, but big, damnably big. My dear old man, I perceive by a thousand signs that we grow old, and are soon to pass away; I hope with dignity; if not, with courage at least. I am myself very ready; or would be--will be--when I have made a little money for my folks. The blows that have fallen upon you are truly terrifying; I wish you strength to bear them. It is strange, I must seem to you to blaze in a Birmingham prosperity and happiness; and to myself I seem a failure. The truth is, I have never got over the last influenza yet, and am miserably out of heart and out of kilter. Lungs pretty right, stomach nowhere, spirits a good deal overshadowed; but we'll come through it yet, and cock our bonnets. (I confess with sorrow that I am not yet quite sure about the _intellects_; but I hope it is only one of my usual periods of non-work. They are more unbearable now, because I cannot rest. _No rest but the grave for Sir Walter!_ O the words ring in a man's head.) R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _[Vailima] August 1893._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--Quite impossible to write. Your letter is due to-day; a nasty, rainy-like morning with huge blue clouds, and a huge indigo shadow on the sea, and my lamp still burning at near 7. Let me humbly give you news. Fanny seems on the whole the most, or the only, powerful member of the family; for some days she has been the Flower of the Flock. Belle is begging for quinine. Lloyd and Graham have both been down with "belly belong him" (Black Boy speech). As for me, I have to lay aside my lawn tennis, having (as was to be expected) had a smart but eminently brief hemorrhage. I am also on the quinine flask. I have been re-casting the beginning of the _Hanging Judge_ or _Weir of Hermiston_; then I have been cobbling on my Grandfather, whose last chapter (there are only to be four) is in the form of pieces of paper, a huge welter of inconsequence, and that glimmer of faith (or hope) which one learns at this trade, that somehow and some time, by perpetual staring and glowering and re-writing, order will emerge. It is indeed a queer hope; there is one piece for instance that I want in--I cannot put it one place for a good reason--I cannot put it another for a better--and every time I look at it, I turn sick and put the MS. away. Well, your letter hasn't come, and a number of others are missing. It looks as if a mail-bag had gone on, so I'll blame nobody, and proceed to business. It looks as if I was going to send you the first three chapters of my Grandfather.... If they were set up, it would be that much anxiety off my mind. I have a strange feeling of responsibility, as if I had my ancestors' _souls_ in my charge, and might miscarry with them. There's a lot of work gone into it, and a lot more is needed. Still Chapter I. seems about right to me, and much of Chapter II. Chapter III. I know nothing of, as I told you. And Chapter IV. is at present all ends and beginnings; but it can be pulled together. This is all I have been able to screw up to you for this month, and I may add that it is not only more than you deserve, but just about more than I was equal to. I have been and am entirely useless; just able to tinker at my Grandfather. The three chapters--perhaps also a little of the fourth--will come home to you next mail by the hand of my cousin Graham Balfour, a very nice fellow whom I recommend to you warmly--and whom I think you will like. This will give you time to consider my various and distracted schemes. All our wars are over in the meantime, to begin again as soon as the war-ships leave. Adieu. R. L. S. TO A. CONAN DOYLE _Vailima, August 23rd, 1893._ MY DEAR DR. CONAN DOYLE,--I am reposing after a somewhat severe experience upon which I think it my duty to report to you. Immediately after dinner this evening it occurred to me to re-narrate to my native overseer Simelé your story of _The Engineer's Thumb_. And, sir, I have done it. It was necessary, I need hardly say, to go somewhat farther afield than you have done. To explain (for instance) what a railway is, what a steam hammer, what a coach and horse, what coining, what a criminal, and what the police. I pass over other and no less necessary explanations. But I did actually succeed; and if you could have seen the drawn, anxious features and the bright, feverish eyes of Simelé, you would have (for the moment at least) tasted glory. You might perhaps think that, were you to come to Samoa, you might be introduced as the Author of _The Engineer's Thumb_. Disabuse yourself. They do not know what it is to make up a story. _The Engineer's Thumb_ (God forgive me) was narrated as a piece of actual and factual history. Nay, and more, I who write to you have had the indiscretion to perpetrate a trifling piece of fiction entitled _The Bottle Imp_. Parties who come up to visit my unpretentious mansion, after having admired the ceilings by Vanderputty and the tapestry by Gobbling, manifest towards the end a certain uneasiness which proves them to be fellows of an infinite delicacy. They may be seen to shrug a brown shoulder, to roll up a speaking eye, and at last secret burst from them: "Where is the bottle?" Alas, my friends (I feel tempted to say), you will find it by the Engineer's Thumb! Talofa-soifua. O a'u, o lau uo moni, O Tusitala. More commonly known as R. L. STEVENSON. Have read the _Refugees_; Condé and old P. Murat very good; Louis xiv. and Louvois with the letter bag very rich. You have reached a trifle wide perhaps; too _many_ celebrities? Though I was delighted to re-encounter my old friend Du Chaylu. Old Murat is perhaps your high-water mark; 'tis excellently human, cheerful and real. Do it again. Madame de Maintenon struck me as quite good. Have you any document for the decapitation? It sounds steepish. The devil of all that first part is that you see old Dumas; yet your Louis XIV. is _distinctly good_. I am much interested with this book, which fulfils a good deal, and promises more. Question: How far a Historical Novel should be wholly episodic? I incline to that view, with trembling. I shake hands with you on old Murat. R. L. S. TO AUGUSTUS ST. GAUDENS Mr. St. Gaudens' large medallion portrait in bronze, executed from sittings given in 1887, had at last found its way to Apia, but not yet to Vailima. _Vailima, September 1893._ MY DEAR ST. GAUDENS,--I had determined not to write to you till I had seen the medallion, but it looks as if that might mean the Greek Kalends or the day after to-morrow. Reassure yourself, your part is done, it is ours that halts--the consideration of conveyance over our sweet little road on boys' backs, for we cannot very well apply the horses to this work; there is only one; you cannot put it in a panier; to put it on the horse's back we have not the heart. Beneath the beauty of R. L. S., to say nothing of his verses, which the publishers find heavy enough, and the genius of the god-like sculptor, the spine would snap and the well-knit limbs of the (ahem) cart-horse would be loosed by death. So you are to conceive me, sitting in my house, dubitative, and the medallion chuckling in the warehouse of the German firm, for some days longer; and hear me meanwhile on the golden letters. Alas! they are all my fancy painted, but the price is prohibitive. I cannot do it. It is another day-dream burst. Another gable of Abbotsford has gone down, fortunately before it was builded, so there's nobody injured--except me. I had a strong conviction that I was a great hand at writing inscriptions, and meant to exhibit and test my genius on the walls of my house; and now I see I can't. It is generally thus. The Battle of the Golden Letters will never be delivered. On making preparation to open the campaign, the King found himself face to face with invincible difficulties, in which the rapacity of a mercenary soldiery and the complaints of an impoverished treasury played an equal part.--Ever yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. I enclose a bill for the medallion; have been trying to find your letter, quite in vain, and therefore must request you to pay for the bronze letters yourself and let me know the damage. R. L. S. TO JAMES S. STEVENSON _Vailima Plantation, Island of Upolu, Samoa, Sept. 4th, 1893._ MY DEAR COUSIN,--I thank you cordially for your kinsmanlike reply to my appeal. Already the notes from the family Bible have spared me one blunder, which I had from some notes in my grandfather's own hand; and now, like the daughters of the horseleech, my voice is raised again to put you to more trouble. "Nether Carsewell, Neilston," I read. My knowledge of Scotland is fairly wide, but it does not include Neilston. However, I find by the (original) Statistical Account, it is a parish in Renfrew. Do you know anything of it? Have you identified Nether Carsewell? Have the Neilston parish registers been searched? I see whole vistas of questions arising, and here am I in Samoa! I shall write by this mail to my lawyer to have the records searched, and to my mother to go and inquire in the parish itself. But perhaps you may have some further information, and if so I should be glad of it. If you have not, pray do not trouble to answer. As to your father's blunder of "Stevenson of Cauldwell," it is now explained: _Carse_well may have been confounded with _Cauldwell_: and it seems likely our man may have been a tenant or retainer of Mure of Cauldwell, a very ancient and honourable family, who seems to have been at least a neighbouring laird to the parish of Neilston. I was just about to close this, when I observed again your obliging offer of service, and I take you promptly at your word. Do you think that you or your son could find a day to visit Neilston and try to identify Nether Carsewell, find what size of a farm it is, to whom it belonged, etc.? I shall be very much obliged. I am pleased indeed to learn some of my books have given pleasure to your family; and with all good wishes, I remain, your affectionate cousin, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. The registers I shall have seen to, through my lawyer. TO GEORGE MEREDITH _Sept. 5th,1893, Vailima Plantation, Upolu, Samoa._ MY DEAR MEREDITH,--I have again and again taken up the pen to write to you, and many beginnings have gone into the waste paper basket (I have one now--for the second time in my life--and feel a big man on the strength of it). And no doubt it requires some decision to break so long a silence. My health is vastly restored, and I am now living patriarchally in this place six hundred feet above the sea on the shoulder of a mountain of 1500. Behind me, the unbroken bush slopes up to the backbone of the island (3 to 4000) without a house, with no inhabitants save a few runaway black boys, wild pigs and cattle, and wild doves and flying foxes, and many parti-coloured birds, and many black, and many white: a very eerie, dim, strange place and hard to travel. I am the head of a household of five whites, and of twelve Samoans, to all of whom I am the chief and father: my cook comes to me and asks leave to marry--and his mother, a fine old chief woman, who has never lived here, does the same. You may be sure I granted the petition. It is a life of great interest, complicated by the Tower of Babel, that old enemy. And I have all the time on my hands for literary work. My house is a great place; we have a hall fifty feet long with a great redwood stair ascending from it, where we dine in state--myself usually dressed in a singlet and a pair of trousers--and attended on by servants in a single garment, a kind of kilt--also flowers and leaves--and their hair often powdered with lime. The European who came upon it suddenly would think it was a dream. We have prayers on Sunday night--I am a perfect pariah in the island not to have them oftener, but the spirit is unwilling and the flesh proud, and I cannot go it more. It is strange to see the long line of the brown folk crouched along the wall with lanterns at intervals before them in the big shadowy hall, with an oak cabinet at one end of it and a group of Rodin's (which native taste regards as _prodigieusement leste_) presiding over all from the top--and to hear the long rambling Samoan hymn rolling up (God bless me, what style)! But I am off business to-day, and this is not meant to be literature. I have asked Colvin to send you a copy of _Catriona_, which I am sometimes tempted to think is about my best work. I hear word occasionally of the _Amazing Marriage_. It will be a brave day for me when I get hold of it. Gower Woodseer is now an ancient, lean, grim, exiled Scot, living and labouring as for a wager in the tropics; still active, still with lots of fire in him, but the youth--ah, the youth where is it? For years after I came here, the critics (those genial gentlemen) used to deplore the relaxation of my fibre and the idleness to which I had succumbed. I hear less of this now; the next thing is they will tell me I am writing myself out! and that my unconscientious conduct is bringing their grey hairs with sorrow to the dust. I do not know--I mean I do know one thing. For fourteen years I have not had a day's real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness; and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been rightly speaking since first I came to the Pacific; and still, few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on--ill or well, is a trifle; so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle. At least I have not failed, but I would have preferred a place of trumpetings and the open air over my head. This is a devilish egotistical yarn. Will you try to imitate me in that if the spirit ever moves you to reply? And meantime be sure that away in the midst of the Pacific there is a house on a wooded island where the name of George Meredith is very dear, and his memory (since it must be no more) is continually honoured.--Ever your friend, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Remember me to Mariette, if you please; and my wife sends her most kind remembrances to yourself. R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER Finished on the way to Honolulu for a health change which turned out unfortunate. With the help of Mr. J.H. Stevenson and other correspondents he had now, as we have seen, been able (regretfully giving up the possibility of a Macgregor lineage) to identify his forbears as having about 1670 been tenant farmers at Nether Carsewell in Renfrewshire. The German government at home had taken his _Footnote to History_ much less kindly than his German neighbours on the spot, and the Tauchnitz edition had been confiscated and destroyed and its publisher fined. [_Vailima, and s.s. Mariposa, September 1893._] MY DEAR CHARLES,--Here is a job for you. It appears that about 1665, or earlier, James Stevenson {in / of} Nether Carsewell, parish of Neilston, flourished. Will you kindly send an able-bodied reader to compulse the parish registers of Neilston, if they exist or go back as far? Also could any trace be found through Nether-Carsewell? I expect it to have belonged to Mure of Cauldwell. If this be so, might not the Cauldwell charter chest contain some references to their Stevenson tenantry? Perpend upon it. But clap me on the judicious, able-bodied reader on the spot. Can I really have found the tap-root of my illustrious ancestry at last? Souls of my fathers! What a giggle-iggle-orious moment! I have drawn on you for £400. Also I have written to Tauchnitz announcing I should bear one-half part of his fines and expenses, amounting to £62, 10s. The £400 includes £160 which I have laid out here in land. Vanu Manutagi--the vale of crying birds (the wild dove)--is now mine: it was Fanny's wish and she is to buy it from me again when she has made that much money. Will you please order for me through your bookseller the _Mabinogion_ of Lady Charlotte Guest--if that be her name--and the original of Cook's voyages lately published? Also, I see announced a map of the Great North Road: you might see what it is like: if it is highly detailed, or has any posting information, I should like it. This is being finished on board the _Mariposa_ going north. I am making the run to Honolulu and back for health's sake. No inclination to write more.--As ever, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN On a first reading of the incomplete MS. of _The Ebb Tide_, without its concluding chapters, which are the strongest, dislike of the three detestable--or rather two detestable and one contemptible--chief characters had made me unjust to the imaginative force and vividness of the treatment. _[Vailima] 23rd August._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--Your pleasing letter _re The Ebb Tide_, to hand. I propose, if it be not too late, to delete Lloyd's name. He has nothing to do with the last half. The first we wrote together, as the beginning of a long yarn. The second is entirely mine; and I think it rather unfair on the young man to couple his name with so infamous a work. Above all, as you had not read the two last chapters, which seem to me the most ugly and cynical of all. You will see that I am not in a good humour; and I am not. It is not because of your letter, but because of the complicated miseries that surround me and that I choose to say nothing of.... Life is not all Beer and Skittles. The inherent tragedy of things works itself out from white to black and blacker, and the poor things of a day look ruefully on. Does it shake my cast-iron faith? I cannot say it does. I believe in an ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I woke in hell, should still believe it! But it is hard walking, and I can see my own share in the missteps, and can bow my head to the result, like an old, stern, unhappy devil of a Norseman, as my ultimate character is.... Well, _il faut cultiver son jardin_. That last expression of poor, unhappy human wisdom I take to my heart and go to _St. Ives_. _24th Aug._--And did, and worked about 2 hours and got to sleep ultimately and "a' the clouds has blawn away." "Be sure we'll have some pleisand weather, When a' the clouds (storms?) has blawn (gone?) away." Verses that have a quite inexplicable attraction for me, and I believe had for Burns. They have no merit, but are somehow good. I am now in a most excellent humour. I am deep in _St. Ives_ which, I believe, will be the next novel done. But it is to be clearly understood that I promise nothing, and may throw in your face the very last thing you expect--or I expect. _St. Ives_ will (to my mind) not be wholly bad. It is written in rather a funny style; a little stilted and left-handed; the style of St. Ives; also, to some extent, the style of R. L. S. dictating. _St. Ives_ is unintellectual, and except as an adventure novel, dull. But the adventures seem to me sound and pretty probable; and it is a love story. Speed his wings! _Sunday night._--_De coeur un peu plus dispos, monsieur et cher confrère, je me remets à vous écrire._ _St. Ives_ is now in the 5th chapter copying; in the 14th chapter of the dictated draft. I do not believe I shall end by disliking it. _Monday._--Well, here goes again for the news. Fanny is _very well_ indeed, and in good spirits; I am in good spirits, but not _very_ well; Lloyd is in good spirits and very well; Belle has a real good fever which has put her pipe out wholly. Graham goes back this mail. He takes with him three chapters of _The Family_, and is to go to you as soon as he can. He cannot be much the master of his movements, but you grip him when you can and get all you can from him, as he has lived about six months with us and he can tell you just what is true and what is not--and not the dreams of dear old Ross.[66] He is a good fellow, is he not? Since you rather revise your views of _The Ebb Tide_, I think Lloyd's name might stick, but I'll leave it to you. I'll tell you just how it stands. Up to the discovery of the champagne, the tale was all planned between us and drafted by Lloyd; from that moment he has had nothing to do with it except talking it over. For we changed our plan, gave up the projected Monte Cristo, and cut it down for a short story. My impression--(I beg your pardon--this is a local joke--a firm here had on its beer labels, "sole importers")--is that it will never be popular, but might make a little _succès de scandale_. However, I'm done with it now, and not sorry, and the crowd may rave and mumble its bones for what I care. Hole essential.[67] I am sorry about the maps; but I want 'em for next edition, so see and have proofs sent. You are quite right about the bottle and the great Huish, I must try to make it clear. No, I will not write a play for Irving nor for the devil. Can you not see that the work of _falsification_ which a play demands is of all tasks the most ungrateful? And I have done it a long while--and nothing ever came of it. Consider my new proposal, I mean Honolulu. You would get the Atlantic and the Rocky Mountains, would you not? for bracing. And so much less sea! And then you could actually see Vailima, which I _would_ like you to, for it's beautiful and my home and tomb that is to be; though it's a wrench not to be planted in Scotland--that I can never deny--if I could only be buried in the hills, under the heather and a table tombstone like the martyrs, where the whaups and plovers are crying! Did you see a man who wrote the _Stickit Minister_,[68] and dedicated it to me, in words that brought the tears to my eyes every time I looked at them. "Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying. _His_ heart remembers how." Ah, by God, it does! Singular that I should fulfil the Scots destiny throughout, and live a voluntary exile, and have my head filled with the blessed, beastly place all the time! And now a word as regards the delusions of the dear Ross, who remembers, I believe, my letters and Fanny's when we were first installed, and were really hoeing a hard row. We have salad, beans, cabbages, tomatoes, asparagus, kohl-rabi, oranges, limes, barbadines, pine-apples, Cape gooseberries--galore; pints of milk and cream; fresh meat five days a week. It is the rarest thing for any of us to touch a tin; and the gnashing of teeth when it has to be done is dreadful--for no one who has not lived on them for six months knows what the Hatred of the Tin is. As for exposure, my weakness is certainly the reverse; I am sometimes a month without leaving the verandah--for my sins, be it said! Doubtless, when I go about and, as the Doctor says, "expose myself to malaria," I am in far better health; and I would do so more too--for I do not mean to be silly--but the difficulties are great. However, you see how much the dear Doctor knows of my diet and habits! Malaria practically does not exist in these islands; it is a negligeable quantity. What really bothers us a little is the mosquito affair--the so-called elephantiasis--ask Ross about it. A real romance of natural history, _quoi_! Hi! stop! you say _The Ebb Tide_ is the "working out of an artistic problem of a kind." Well, I should just bet it was! You don't like Attwater. But look at my three rogues; they're all there, I'll go bail. Three types of the bad man, the weak man, and the strong man with a weakness, that are gone through and lived out. Yes, of course I was sorry for Mataafa, but a good deal sorrier and angrier about the mismanagement of all the white officials. I cannot bear to write about that. Manono all destroyed, one house standing in Apolima, the women stripped, the prisoners beaten with whips--and the women's heads taken--all under white auspices. And for upshot and result of so much shame to the white powers--Tamasese already conspiring! as I knew and preached in vain must be the case! Well, well, it is no fun to meddle in politics! I suppose you're right about Simon.[69] But it is Symon throughout in that blessed little volume my father bought for me in Inverness in the year of grace '81, I believe--the trial of James Stewart, with the Jacobite pamphlet and the dying speech appended--out of which the whole of _Davie_ has already been begotten, and which I felt it a kind of loyalty to follow. I really ought to have it bound in velvet and gold, if I had any gratitude! and the best of the lark is, that the name of David Balfour is not anywhere within the bounds of it. A pretty curious instance of the genesis of a book. I am delighted at your good word for _David_; I believe the two together make up much the best of my work and perhaps of what is in me. I am not ashamed of them, at least. There is one hitch; instead of three hours between the two parts, I fear there have passed three years over Davie's character; but do not tell anybody; see if they can find it out for themselves; and no doubt his experiences in _Kidnapped_ would go far to form him. I would like a copy to go to G. Meredith. _Wednesday._--Well, here is a new move. It is likely I may start with Graham next week and go to Honolulu to meet the other steamer and return: I do believe a fortnight at sea would do me good; yet I am not yet certain. The crowded _up_-steamer sticks in my throat. _Tuesday, 12th Sept._--Yesterday was perhaps the brightest in the annals of Vailima. I got leave from Captain Bickford to have the band of the _Katoomba_ come up, and they came, fourteen of 'em, with drum, fife, cymbals and bugles, blue jackets, white caps, and smiling faces. The house was all decorated with scented greenery above and below. We had not only our own nine out-door workers, but a contract party that we took on in charity to pay their war-fine; the band besides, as it came up the mountain, had collected a following of children by the way, and we had a picking of Samoan ladies to receive them. Chicken, ham, cake and fruits were served out with coffee and lemonade, and all the afternoon we had rounds of claret negus flavoured with rum and limes. They played to us, they danced, they sang, they tumbled. Our boys came in the end of the verandah and gave _them_ a dance for a while. It was anxious work getting this stopped once it had begun, but I knew the band was going on a programme. Finally they gave three cheers for Mr. and Mrs. Stevens, shook hands, formed up and marched off playing--till a kicking horse in the paddock put their pipes out something of the suddenest--we thought the big drum was gone, but Simelé flew to the rescue. And so they wound away down the hill with ever another call of the bugle, leaving us extinct with fatigue, but perhaps the most contented hosts that ever watched the departure of successful guests. Simply impossible to tell how well these blue-jackets behaved; a most interesting lot of men; this education of boys for the navy is making a class, wholly apart--how shall I call them?--a kind of lower-class public school boy, well-mannered, fairly intelligent, sentimental as a sailor. What is more shall be writ on board ship if anywhere. Please send _Catriona_ to G. Meredith. _S.S. Mariposa._--To-morrow I reach Honolulu. Good-morning to your honour. R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN In the interval between the last letter and this, the writer had been down with a sharp and prolonged attack of fever at Honolulu, and Mrs. Stevenson had come from Samoa to nurse and take him home. _Waikiki, Honolulu, H. I., Oct. 23rd, 1893._ DEAR COLVIN,--My wife came up on the steamer and we go home together in 2 days. I am practically all right, only sleepy and tired easily, slept yesterday from 11 to 11.45, from 1 to 2.50, went to bed at 8 P.M., and with an hour's interval slept till 6 A.M., close upon 14 hours out of the 24. We sail to-morrow. I am anxious to get home, though this has been an interesting visit, and politics have been curious indeed to study. We go to P.P.C. on the "Queen" this morning; poor, recluse lady, _abreuvée d'injures qu'elle est_. Had a rather annoying lunch on board the American man-of-war, with a member of the P.G. (provisional government); and a good deal of anti-royalist talk, which I had to sit out--not only for my host's sake, but my fellow guests. At last, I took the lead and changed the conversation. R. L. S. I am being busted here by party named Hutchinson.[70] Seems good. [_Vailima--November._]--Home again, and found all well, thank God. I am perfectly well again and ruddier than the cherry. Please note that 8000 is not bad for a volume of short stories;[71] the _Merry Men_ did a good deal worse; the short story never sells. I hope _Catriona_ will do; that is the important. The reviews seem mixed and perplexed, and one had the peculiar virtue to make me angry. I am in a fair way to expiscate my family history. Fanny and I had a lovely voyage down, with our new C.J. and the American Land Commissioner, and on the whole, and for these disgusting steamers, a pleasant ship's company. I cannot understand why you don't take to the Hawaii scheme. Do you understand? You cross the Atlantic in six days, and go from 'Frisco to Honolulu in seven. Thirteen days at sea _in all_.--I have no wish to publish _The Ebb Tide_ as a book, let it wait. It will look well in the portfolio. I would like a copy, of course, for that end; and to "look upon't again"--which I scarce dare. [_Later._]--This is disgraceful. I have done nothing; neither work nor letters. On the Mé (May) day, we had a great triumph; our Protestant boys, instead of going with their own villages and families, went of their own accord in the Vailima uniform; Belle made coats for them on purpose to complete the uniform, they having bought the stuff; and they were hailed as they marched in as the Tama-ona--the rich man's children. This is really a score; it means that Vailima is publicly taken as a family. Then we had my birthday feast a week late, owing to diarrhoea on the proper occasion. The feast was laid in the Hall, and was a singular mass of food: 15 pigs, 100 lbs. beef, 100 lbs. pork, and the fruit and filigree in a proportion. We had sixty horse-posts driven in the gate paddock; how many guests I cannot guess, perhaps 150. They came between three and four and left about seven. Seumanu gave me one of his names; and when my name was called at the ava drinking, behold, it was _Au mai taua ma manu-vao!_ You would scarce recognise me, if you heard me thus referred to! Two days after, we hired a carriage in Apia, Fanny, Belle, Lloyd and I, and drove in great style, with a native outrider, to the prison; a huge gift of ava and tobacco under the seats. The prison is now under the _pule_ of an Austrian, Captain Wurmbrand, a soldier of fortune in Servia and Turkey, a charming, clever, kindly creature, who is adored "by _his_ chiefs" (as he calls them) meaning _our_ political prisoners. And we came into the yard, walled about with tinned iron, and drank ava with the prisoners and the captain. It may amuse you to hear how it is proper to drink ava. When the cup is handed you, you reach your arm out somewhat behind you, and slowly pour a libation, saying with somewhat the manner of prayer, "_Ia taumafa e le atua. Ua matagofie le fesilafaga nei._" "Be it (high-chief) partaken of by the God. How (high chief) beautiful to view is this (high chief) gathering." This pagan practice is very queer. I should say that the prison ava was of that not very welcome form that we elegantly call spit-ava, but of course there was no escape, and it had to be drunk. Fanny and I rode home, and I moralised by the way. Could we ever stand Europe again? did she appreciate that if we were in London, we should be _actually jostled_ in the street? and there was nobody in the whole of Britain who knew how to take ava like a gentleman? 'Tis funny to be thus of two civilisations--or, if you like, of one civilisation and one barbarism. And, as usual, the barbarism is the more engaging. Colvin, you have to come here and see us in our {native / mortal} spot. I just don't seem to be able to make up my mind to your not coming. By this time, you will have seen Graham, I hope, and he will be able to tell you something about us, and something reliable. I shall feel for the first time as if you knew a little about Samoa after that. Fanny seems to be in the right way now. I must say she is very, very well for her, and complains scarce at all. Yesterday, she went down _sola_(at least accompanied by a groom) to pay a visit; Belle, Lloyd and I went a walk up the mountain road--the great public highway of the island, where you have to go single file. The object was to show Belle that gaudy valley of the Vaisigano which the road follows. If the road is to be made and opened, as our new Chief Justice promises, it will be one of the most beautiful roads in the world. But the point is this: I forgot I had been three months in civilisation, wearing shoes and stockings, and I tell you I suffered on my soft feet; coming home, down hill, on that stairway of loose stones, I could have cried. O yes, another story, I knew I had. The house boys had not been behaving well, so the other night I announced a _fono_, and Lloyd and I went into the boys' quarters, and I talked to them I suppose for half an hour, and Talolo translated; Lloyd was there principally to keep another ear on the interpreter; else there may be dreadful misconceptions. I rubbed all their ears, except two whom I particularly praised; and one man's wages I announced I had cut down by one half. Imagine his taking this smiling! Ever since, he has been specially attentive and greets me with a face of really heavenly brightness. This is another good sign of their really and fairly accepting me as a chief. When I first came here, if I had fined a man a sixpence, he would have quit work that hour, and now I remove half his income, and he is glad to stay on--nay, does not seem to entertain the possibility of leaving. And this in the face of one particular difficulty--I mean our house in the bush, and no society, and no women society within decent reach. I think I must give you our staff in a tabular form. HOUSE KITCHEN OUTSIDE + o _Sosimo_, provost + o _Talolo_, provost + o _Henry Simelé_, and butler, and my and chief cook. provost and overseer valet. of outside + o _Iopu_, second cook. boys. o _Misifolo_, who is Fanny and _Tali_, his wife, no _L[=u]_. Belle's chamberlain. wages. _Tasi Sele_. _Ti'a_, Samoan cook. _Maiele_. _Feiloa'i_, his child, no wages, likewise no _Pulu_, who is also work--Belle's pet. our talking man and cries the ava. + o _Leuelu_, Fanny's boy, gardener, odd jobs. IN APIA + _Eliga_, washman and daily errand man. The crosses mark out the really excellent boys. Ti'a is the man who has just been fined 1/2 his wages; he is a beautiful old man, the living image of "Fighting Gladiator," my favourite statue--but a dreadful humbug. I think we keep him on a little on account of his looks. This sign o marks those who have been two years or upwards in the family. I note all my old boys have the cross of honour, except Misifolo; well, poor dog, he does his best, I suppose. You should see him scour. It is a remark that has often been made by visitors: you never see a Samoan run, except at Vailima. Do you not suppose that makes me proud? I am pleased to see what a success _The Wrecker_ was, having already in little more than a year outstripped _The Master of Ballantrae_. About _David Balfour_ in two volumes, do see that they make it a decent-looking book, and tell me, do you think a little historical appendix would be of service? Lang bleats for one, and I thought I might address it to him as a kind of open letter. _Dec. 4th._--No time after all. Good-bye. R. L. S. TO J. HORNE STEVENSON The following refers again to the introduction to the history of his own family which Stevenson was then preparing under the title _A Family of Engineers_. The correspondent was a specialist in genealogical research. I give this letter as a sample of many which passed between these two namesakes on this subject; omitting the remainder as too technical to be of general interest. _Vailima, Samoa, November 5th, 1893._ MY DEAR STEVENSON,--A thousand thanks for your voluminous and delightful collections. Baxter--so soon as it is ready--will let you see a proof of my introduction, which is only sent out as a sprat to catch whales. And you will find I have a good deal of what you have, only mine in a perfectly desultory manner, as is necessary to an exile. My uncle's pedigree is wrong; there was never a Stevenson of Caldwell, of course, but they were tenants of the Mures; the farm held by them is in my introduction; and I have already written to Charles Baxter to have a search made in the Register House. I hope he will have had the inspiration to put it under your surveillance. Your information as to your own family is intensely interesting, and I should not wonder but what you and we and old John Stevenson, "land labourer in the parish of Dailly," came all of the same stock. Ayrshire--and probably Cunningham--seems to be the home of the race--our part of it. From the distribution of the name--which your collections have so much extended without essentially changing my knowledge of--we seem rather pointed to a British origin. What you say of the Engineers is fresh to me, and must be well thrashed out. This introduction of it will take a long while to walk about!--as perhaps I may be tempted to let it become long; after all, I am writing _this_ for my own pleasure solely. Greetings to you and other Speculatives of our date, long bygone, alas!--Yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--I have a different version of my grandfather's arms--or my father had if I could find it. R. L. S. TO JOHN P----N The next two numbers are in answer to letters of appreciation received from two small boys in England, whose mother desires that they should remain nameless. _Vailima, Samoa, December 3rd, 1893._ DEAR JOHNNIE,--Well, I must say you seem to be a tremendous fellow! Before I was eight I used to write stories--or dictate them at least--and I had produced an excellent history of Moses, for which I got £1 from an uncle; but I had never gone the length of a play, so you have beaten me fairly on my own ground. I hope you may continue to do so, and thanking you heartily for your nice letter, I shall beg you to believe me yours truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO RUSSELL P----N _Vailima, Samoa, December 3rd, 1893._ DEAR RUSSELL,--I have to thank you very much for your capital letter, which came to hand here in Samoa along with your mother's. When you "grow up and write stories like me," you will be able to understand that there is scarce anything more painful than for an author to hold a pen; he has to do it so much that his heart sickens and his fingers ache at the sight or touch of it; so that you will excuse me if I do not write much, but remain (with compliments and greetings from one Scot to another--though I was not born in Ceylon--you're ahead of me there).--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM _Vailima, December 5, 1893._ MY DEAREST CUMMY,--This goes to you with a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. The Happy New Year anyway, for I think it should reach you about _Noor's Day_. I dare say it may be cold and frosty. Do you remember when you used to take me out of bed in the early morning, carry me to the back windows, show me the hills of Fife, and quote to me "A' the hills are covered wi' snaw, An' winter's noo come fairly"? There is not much chance of that here! I wonder how my mother is going to stand the winter. It she can, it will be a very good thing for her. We are in that part of the year which I like the best--the Rainy or Hurricane Season. "When it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is horrid," and our fine days are certainly fine like heaven; such a blue of the sea, such green of the trees, and such crimson of the hibiscus flowers, you never saw; and the air as mild and gentle as a baby's breath, and yet not hot! The mail is on the move, and I must let up.--With much love, I am, your laddie, R. L. S. TO CHARLES BAXTER The following quotes the extract, from Fountainhall's "Decisions of the Lords of Council, etc.," which suggested to Stevenson the romance of Cameronian days and the Darien adventure of which, under the title of _Heathercat_, he only lived to write the first few introductory chapters (see vol. xxi. p. 177, of this edition). _6th December 1893._ "_October 25, 1685._--At Privy Council, George Murray, Lieutenant of the King's Guard, and others, did, on the 21st of September last, obtain a clandestine order of Privy Council to apprehend the person of Janet Pringle, daughter to the late Clifton, and she having retired out of the way upon information, he got an order against Andrew Pringle, her uncle, to produce her.... But she having married Andrew Pringle, her uncle's son (to disappoint all their designs of selling her), a boy of thirteen years old." But my boy is to be fourteen, so I extract no further.--FOUNTAINHALL, i. 320. "_May 6, 1685._--Wappus Pringle of Clifton was still alive after all, and in prison for debt, and transacts with Lieutenant Murray, giving security for 7000 marks."--i. 372. No, it seems to have been _her_ brother who had succeeded. MY DEAR CHARLES.--The above is my story, and I wonder if any light can be thrown on it. I prefer the girl's father dead; and the question is, How in that case could Lieutenant George Murray get his order to "apprehend" and his power to "sell" her in marriage? Or--might Lieutenant G. be her tutor, and she fugitive to the Pringles, and on the discovery of her whereabouts hastily married? A good legal note on these points is very ardently desired by me; it will be the corner-stone of my novel. This is for--I am quite wrong to tell you--for you will tell others--and nothing will teach you that all my schemes are in the air, and vanish and reappear again like shapes in the clouds--it is for _Heathercat_: whereof the first volume will be called _The Killing Time_, and I believe I have authorities ample for that. But the second volume is to be called (I believe) _Darien_, and for that I want, I fear, a good deal of truck:-- _Darien Papers_, _Carstairs Papers_, _Marchmont Papers_, _Jerviswoode Correspondence_, I hope may do me. Some sort of general history of the Darien affair (if there is a decent one, which I misdoubt), it would also be well to have--the one with most details, if possible. It is singular how obscure to me this decade of Scots history remains, 1690-1700--a deuce of a want of light and grouping to it! However, I believe I shall be mostly out of Scotland in my tale; first in Carolina, next in Darien. I want also--I am the daughter of the horseleech truly--"Black's new large map of Scotland," sheets 3, 4, and 5, a 7s. 6d. touch. I believe, if you can get the _Caldwell Papers_, they had better come also; and if there be any reasonable work--but no, I must call a halt.... I fear the song looks doubtful, but I'll consider of it, and I can promise you some reminiscences which it will amuse me to write, whether or not it will amuse the public to read of them. But it's an unco business to supply deid-heid coapy. TO J. M. BARRIE _Vailima, Samoa, December 7th, 1893._ MY DEAR BARRIE,--I have received duly the _magnum opus_, and it really is a _magnum opus_.[72] It is a beautiful specimen of Clark's printing, paper sufficient, and the illustrations all my fancy painted. But the particular flower of the flock to whom I have hopelessly lost my heart is Tibby Birse. I must have known Tibby Birse when she was a servant's mantua-maker in Edinburgh and answered to the name of Miss _Broddie_. She used to come and sew with my nurse, sitting with her legs crossed in a masculine manner; and swinging her foot emphatically, she used to pour forth a perfectly unbroken stream of gossip. I didn't hear it, I was immersed in far more important business with a box of bricks, but the recollection of that thin, perpetual, shrill sound of a voice has echoed in my ears sinsyne. I am bound to say she was younger than Tibbie, but there is no mistaking that and the indescribable and eminently Scottish expression. I have been very much prevented of late, having carried out thoroughly to my own satisfaction two considerable illnesses, had a birthday, and visited Honolulu, where politics are (if possible) a shade more exasperating than they are with us. I am told that it was just when I was on the point of leaving that I received your superlative epistle about the cricket eleven. In that case it is impossible I should have answered it, which is inconsistent with my own recollection of the fact. What _I_ remember is, that I sat down under your immediate inspiration and wrote an answer in every way worthy. If I didn't, as it seems proved that I couldn't, it will never be done now. However, I did the next best thing, I equipped my cousin Graham Balfour with a letter of introduction, and from him, if you know how--for he is rather of the Scottish character--you may elicit all the information you can possibly wish to have as to us and ours. Do not be bluffed off by the somewhat stern and monumental first impression that he may make upon you. He is one of the best fellows in the world, and the same sort of fool that we are, only better-looking, with all the faults of Vailimans and some of his own--I say nothing about virtues. I have lately been returning to my wallowing in the mire. When I was a child, and indeed until I was nearly a man, I consistently read Covenanting books. Now that I am a grey-beard--or would be, if I could raise the beard--I have returned, and for weeks back have read little else but Wodrow, Walker, Shields, etc. Of course this is with an idea of a novel, but in the course of it I made a very curious discovery. I have been accustomed to hear refined and intelligent critics--those who know so much better what we are than we do ourselves,--trace down my literary descent from all sorts of people, including Addison, of whom I could never read a word. Well, laigh i' your lug, sir--the clue was found. My style is from the Covenanting writers. Take a particular case--the fondness for rhymes. I don't know of any English prose-writer who rhymes except by accident, and then a stone had better be tied around his neck and himself cast into the sea. But my Covenanting buckies rhyme all the time--a beautiful example of the unconscious rhyme above referred to. Do you know, and have you really tasted, these delightful works? If not, it should be remedied; there is enough of the Auld Licht in you to be ravished. I suppose you know that success has so far attended my banners--my political banners I mean, and not my literary. In conjunction with the Three Great Powers I have succeeded in getting rid of My President and My Chief-Justice. They've gone home, the one to Germany, the other to Souwegia. I hear little echoes of footfalls of their departing footsteps through the medium of the newspapers.... Whereupon I make you my salute with the firm remark that it is time to be done with trifling and give us a great book, and my ladies fall into line with me to pay you a most respectful courtesy, and we all join in the cry, "Come to Vailima!" My dear sir, your soul's health is in it--you will never do the great book, you will never cease to work in L., etc., till you come to Vailima. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO R. LE GALLIENNE _Vailima, Samoa, December 28th, 1893._ DEAR MR. LE GALLIENNE,--I have received some time ago, through our friend Miss Taylor, a book of yours. But that was by no means my first introduction to your name. The same book had stood already on my shelves; I had read articles of yours in the Academy; and by a piece of constructive criticism (which I trust was sound) had arrived at the conclusion that you were "Log-roller." Since then I have seen your beautiful verses to your wife. You are to conceive me, then, as only too ready to make the acquaintance of a man who loved good literature and could make it. I had to thank you, besides, for a triumphant exposure of a paradox of my own: the literary-prostitute disappeared from view at a phrase of yours--"The essence is not in the pleasure but the sale." True you are right, I was wrong; the author is not the whore but the libertine; and yet I shall let the passage stand. It is an error, but it illustrated the truth for which I was contending, that literature--painting--all art , are no other than pleasures, which we turn into trades. And more than all this, I had, and I have to thank you for the intimate loyalty you have shown to myself; for the eager welcome you give to what is good--for the courtly tenderness with which you touch on my defects. I begin to grow old; I have given my top note, I fancy;--and I have written too many books. The world begins to be weary of the old booth; and if not weary, familiar with the familiarity that breeds contempt. I do not know that I am sensitive to criticism, if it be hostile; I am sensitive indeed, when it is friendly; and when I read such criticism as yours, I am emboldened to go on and praise God. You are still young, and you may live to do much. The little artificial popularity of style in England tends, I think, to die out; the British pig returns to his true love, the love of the styleless, of the shapeless, of the slapdash and the disorderly. There is trouble coming, I think; and you may have to hold the fort for us in evil days. Lastly, let me apologise for the crucifixion that I am inflicting on you (_bien à contre-coeur_) by my bad writing. I was once the best of writers; landladies, puzzled as to my "trade," used to have their honest bosoms set at rest by a sight of a page of manuscript.--"Ah," they would say, "no wonder they pay you for that";--and when I sent it in to the printers, it was given to the boys! I was about thirty-nine, I think, when I had a turn of scrivener's palsy; my hand got worse; and for the first time, I received clean proofs. But it has gone beyond that now. I know I am like my old friend James Payn, a terror to correspondents; and you would not believe the care with which this has been written.--Believe me to be, very sincerely yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MRS. A. BAKER The next is in answer to a request for permission to print some of the writings of R. L. S. in Braille type for the use of the blind. _December 1893._ DEAR MADAM,--There is no trouble, and I wish I could help instead. As it is, I fear I am only going to put you to trouble and vexation. This Braille writing is a kind of consecration, and I would like if I could to have your copy perfect. The two volumes are to be published as Vols. I. and II. of _The Adventures of David Balfour_. 1st, _Kidnapped_; 2nd, _Catriona_. I am just sending home a corrected _Kidnapped_ for this purpose to Messrs. Cassell, and in order that I may if possible be in time, I send it to you first of all. Please, as soon as you have noted the changes, forward the same to Cassell and Co., La Belle Sauvage Yard, Ludgate Hill. I am writing to them by this mail to send you _Catriona_. You say, dear madam, you are good enough to say, it is "a keen pleasure" to you to bring my book within the reach of the blind. Conceive then what it is to me! and believe me, sincerely yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. I was a barren tree before, I blew a quenchèd coal, I could not, on their midnight shore, The lonely blind console. A moment, lend your hand, I bring My sheaf for you to bind, And you can teach my words to sing In the darkness of the blind. R. L. S. TO HENRY JAMES _Apia, December, 1893._ MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--The mail has come upon me like an armed man three days earlier than was expected; and the Lord help me! It is impossible I should answer anybody the way they should be. Your jubilation over _Catriona_ did me good, and still more the subtlety and truth of your remark on the starving of the visual sense in that book. 'Tis true, and unless I make the greater effort--and am, as a step to that, convinced of its necessity--it will be more true I fear in the future. I _hear_ people talking, and I _feel_ them acting, and that seems to me to be fiction. My two aims may be described as-- _1st._ War to the adjective. _2nd._ Death to the optic nerve. Admitted we live in an age of the optic nerve in literature. For how many centuries did literature get along without a sign of it? However, I'll consider your letter. How exquisite is your character of the critic in _Essays in London_! I doubt if you have done any single thing so satisfying as a piece of style and of insight--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Recounting a scene of gratitude for bounty shown by him to the prisoners in Apia gaol. [_Vailima, December 1893._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--One page out of my picture book I must give you. Fine burning day; 1/2 past two P.M. We four begin to rouse up from reparatory slumbers, yawn, and groan, get a cup of tea, and miserably dress: we have had a party the day before, X'mas Day, with all the boys absent but one, and latterly two; we had cooked all day long, a cold dinner, and lo! at two our guests began to arrive, though dinner was not till six; they were sixteen, and fifteen slept the night and breakfasted. Conceive, then, how unwillingly we climb on our horses and start off in the hottest part of the afternoon to ride 4 1/2 miles, attend a native feast in the gaol, and ride four and a half miles back. But there is no help for it. I am a sort of father of the political prisoners, and have _charge d'âmes_ in that riotously absurd establishment, Apia Gaol. The twenty-three (I think it is) chiefs act as under gaolers. The other day they told the Captain of an attempt to escape. One of the lesser political prisoners the other day effected a swift capture, while the Captain was trailing about with the warrant; the man came to see what was wanted; came, too, flanked by the former gaoler; my prisoner offers to show him the dark cell, shoves him in, and locks the door. "Why do you do that?" cries the former gaoler. "A warrant," says he. Finally, the chiefs actually feed the soldiery who watch them! The gaol is a wretched little building, containing a little room, and three cells, on each side of a central passage; it is surrounded by a fence of corrugated iron, and shows, over the top of that, only a gable end with the inscription _O le Fale Puipui_. It is on the edge of the mangrove swamp, and is reached by a sort of causeway of turf. When we drew near, we saw the gates standing open and a prodigious crowd outside--I mean prodigious for Apia, perhaps a hundred and fifty people. The two sentries at the gate stood to arms passively, and there seemed to be a continuous circulation inside and out. The captain came to meet us; our boy, who had been sent ahead was there to take the horses; and we passed inside the court which was full of food, and rang continuously to the voice of the caller of gifts; I had to blush a little later when my own present came, and I heard my one pig and eight miserable pine-apples being counted out like guineas. In the four corners of the yard and along one wall, there are make-shift, dwarfish, Samoan houses or huts, which have been run up since Captain Wurmbrand came to accommodate the chiefs. Before that they were all crammed into the six cells, and locked in for the night, some of them with dysentery. They are wretched constructions enough, but sanctified by the presence of chiefs. We heard a man corrected loudly to-day for saying "_Fale_" of one of them; "_Maota_," roared the highest chief present--"palace." About eighteen chiefs, gorgeously arrayed, stood up to greet us, and led us into one of these _maotas_, where you may be sure we had to crouch, almost to kneel, to enter, and where a row of pretty girls occupied one side to make the ava (kava). The highest chief present was a magnificent man, as high chiefs usually are; I find I cannot describe him; his face is full of shrewdness and authority; his figure like Ajax; his name Auilua. He took the head of the building and put Belle on his right hand. Fanny was called first for the ava (kava). Our names were called in English style, the high-chief wife of Mr. St--(an unpronounceable something); Mrs. Straw, and the like. And when we went into the other house to eat, we found we were seated alternately with chiefs about the--table, I was about to say, but rather floor. Everything was to be done European style with a vengeance! We were the only whites present, except Wurmbrand, and still I had no suspicion of the truth. They began to take off their ulas (necklaces of scarlet seeds) and hang them about our necks; we politely resisted, and were told that the king (who had stopped off their _siva_) had sent down to the prison a message to the effect that he was to give a dinner to-morrow, and wished their second-hand ulas for it. Some of them were content; others not. There was a ring of anger in the boy's voice, as he told us we were to wear them past the king's house. Dinner over, I must say they are moderate eaters at a feast, we returned to the ava house; and then the curtain drew suddenly up upon the set scene. We took our seats, and Auilua began to give me a present, recapitulating each article as he gave it out, with some appropriate comment. He called me several times "their only friend," said they were all in slavery, had no money, and these things were all made by the hands of their families--nothing bought; he had one phrase, in which I heard his voice rise up to a note of triumph: "This is a present from the poor prisoners to the rich man." Thirteen pieces of tapa, some of them surprisingly fine, one I think unique; thirty fans of every shape and colour; a kava cup, etc., etc. At first Auilua conducted the business with weighty gravity; but before the end of the thirty fans, his comments began to be humorous. When it came to a little basket, he said: "Here was a little basket for Tusitala to put sixpence in, when he could get hold of one"--with a delicious grimace. I answered as best as I was able through a miserable interpreter; and all the while, as I went on, I heard the crier outside in the court calling my gift of food, which I perceived was to be Gargantuan. I had brought but three boys with me. It was plain that they were wholly overpowered. We proposed to send for our gifts on the morrow; but no, said the interpreter, that would never do; they must go away to-day, Mulinuu must see my porters taking away the gifts,--"make 'em jella," quoth the interpreter. And I began to see the reason of this really splendid gift; one half, gratitude to me--one half, a wipe at the king. And now, to introduce darker colours, you must know this visit of mine to the gaol was just a little bit risky; we had several causes for anxiety; it _might_ have been put up, to connect with a Tamasese rising. Tusitala and his family would be good hostages. On the other hand, there were the Mulinuu people all about. We could see the anxiety of Captain Wurmbrand, no less anxious to have us go, than he had been to see us come; he was deadly white and plainly had a bad headache, in the noisy scene. Presently, the noise grew uproarious; there was a rush at the gate--a rush _in_, not a rush _out_--where the two sentries still stood passive; Auilua leaped from his place (it was then that I got the name of Ajax for him) and the next moment we heard his voice roaring and saw his mighty figure swaying to and fro in the hurly-burly. As the deuce would have it, we could not understand a word of what was going on. It might be nothing more than the ordinary "grab racket" with which a feast commonly concludes; it might be something worse. We made what arrangements we could for my tapa, fans, etc., as well as for my five pigs, my masses of fish, taro, etc., and with great dignity, and ourselves laden with ulas and other decorations, passed between the sentries among the howling mob to our horses. All's well that ends well. Owing to Fanny and Belle, we had to walk; and, as Lloyd said, "he had at last ridden in a circus." The whole length of Apia we paced our triumphal progress, past the king's palace, past the German firm at Sogi--you can follow it on the map--amidst admiring exclamations of "_Mawaia_"--beautiful--it may be rendered "O my! ain't they dandy"--until we turned up at last into our road as the dusk deepened into night. It was really exciting. And there is one thing sure: no such feast was ever made for a single family, and no such present ever given to a single white man. It is something to have been the hero of it. And whatever other ingredients there were, undoubtedly gratitude was present. As money value I have actually gained on the transaction! Your note arrived; little profit, I must say. Scott has already put his nose in, in _St. Ives_, sir; but his appearance is not yet complete; nothing is in that romance, except the story. I have to announce that I am off work, probably for six months. I must own that I have overworked bitterly--overworked--there, that's legible. My hand is a thing that was, and in the meanwhile so are my brains. And here, in the very midst, comes a plausible scheme to make Vailima pay, which will perhaps let me into considerable expense just when I don't want it. You know the vast cynicism of my view of affairs, and how readily and (as some people say) with how much gusto I take the darker view? Why do you not send me Jerome K. Jerome's paper, and let me see _The Ebb Tide_ as a serial? It is always very important to see a thing in different presentments. I want every number. Politically we begin the new year with every expectation of a bust in 2 or 3 days, a bust which may spell destruction to Samoa. I have written to Baxter about his proposal.[73] FOOTNOTES: [56] The correspondent whose letter I had sent on was a high official at the Foreign Office: the subject, Stevenson and Samoa. [57] Hemorrhage from the lungs. [58] Vitrolle's _Mémoires_ and the "1814" and "1815" of M. Henri Houssaye were sent accordingly. [59] Ultimately _The Ebb Tide_. [60] For a volume of selected _Essays_, containing the pick of _Virginibus Puerisque_, _Memories and Portraits_, and _Across the Plains_. [61] _The Owl_ was to be a Breton story of the Revolution; _Death in the Pot_, a tale of the Sta. Lucia mountains in California; the scene of _The Go-Between_ was laid in the Pacific Islands; of _The Sleeper Awakened_ I know nothing. [62] Of _Island Nights' Entertainments_. [63] John Addington Symonds. [64] _Across the Plains._ [65] Volume of sonnets by José Maria de Hérédia. [66] Dr. Fairfax Ross, a distinguished physician of Sydney, and friend of the Stevenson family, who during a visit to England this summer had conveyed to me no very reassuring impression as to the healthfulness of the island life and climate. [67] W. Hole, R.S.A.: essential for the projected illustrations to _Kidnapped_ and _Catriona_. [68] Mr. S. R. Crockett. The words quoted from this gentleman's dedication were worked by Stevenson into a very moving and metrically original set of verses, addressed to him in acknowledgment (_Songs of Travel_, xlii.). [69] Simon Fraser, the Master of Lovat, in _Catriona_: the spelling of his name. [70] The bust was exhibited in the New Gallery Summer Exhibition, 1895. [71] _Island Nights' Entertainments._ [72] _The Window in Thrums_, with illustrations by W. Hole, R.S.A. Hodder and Stoughton. 1892. [73] The scheme of the Edinburgh Edition. XIV LIFE IN SAMOA--_Concluded_ FOURTH YEAR AT VAILIMA--THE END JANUARY-DECEMBER 1894 This new year began for Stevenson with an illness which seemed to leave none of the usual lowering consequences, and for Samoa with fresh rumours of war, which were not realised until the autumn, and then--at least in the shape of serious hostilities--in the district of Atua only and not in his own. On the whole Stevenson's bodily health and vigour kept at a higher level than during the previous year. But for serious imaginative writing he found himself still unfit, and the sense that his old facility had for the time being failed him caused him much inward misgiving. In his correspondence the misgiving mood was allowed to appear pretty freely; but in personal intercourse his high spirits seemed to his family and visitors as unfailing as ever. Several things happened during the year to give him peculiar pleasure: first, at the beginning of the year, the news of Mr. Baxter's carefully prepared scheme of the Edinburgh Edition, and of its acceptance by the publishers concerned. On this subject much correspondence naturally passed between him and Mr. Baxter and myself, over and above that which is here published; and finally he resolved to leave all the details of the execution to us. By the early autumn the financial success of the scheme was fully assured and made known to him by cable; but he did not seem altogether to realise the full measure of relief from money anxieties which the assurance was meant to convey to him. Other pleasurable circumstances were the return of Mr. Graham Balfour after a prolonged absence; the visit of a spirited and accomplished young English man of business and of letters, Mr. Sidney Lysaght (see below, pp. 385, 388, etc.); and the frequent society of the officers of H.M.S. _Curaçoa_, with whom he was on terms of particular regard and cordiality. Lastly, he was very deeply touched and gratified by the action of the native political prisoners, towards whom he had shown much thoughtful kindness during their months of detention, in volunteering as a testimony of gratitude after their release to re-make with their own hands the branch road leading to his house: "the Road of Loving Hearts," as it came to be christened. Soon afterwards, the anniversaries of his own birthday and of the American Thanks-giving feast brought evidences hardly less welcome, after so much contention and annoyance as the island affairs and politics had involved him in, of the honour and affection in which he was held by all that was best in the white community. By each succeeding mail came stronger proofs from home of the manner in which men of letters of the younger generation had come to regard him as a master, an example, and a friend. But in spite of all these causes of pleasure, his letters showed that his old invincible spirit of inward cheerfulness was beginning not infrequently to give way to moods of depression and overstrained feeling. The importunity of these moods was no doubt due to some physical premonition that his vital powers, so frail from the cradle and always with so cheerful a courage overtaxed, were near exhaustion. During the first months of the year he attempted little writing; in the late spring and early summer his work was chiefly on the annals of his family and on the tale _St. Ives_. The latter he found uphill work: after the first ten or twelve chapters, which are in his happiest vein, the narrative, as he himself was painfully aware, began to flag. Towards the end of October he gave it up for the time being and turned to a more arduous task, the tragic _Weir of Hermiston_. On this theme he felt his inspiration return, and during the month of November and the first days of December wrought once more at the full pitch of his powers and in the conscious delight of their exercise. On the third of December, after a morning of happy work and pleasant correspondence, he was seen gazing long and wistfully toward the forest-clad mountain, on a ledge of which he had desired that he should be buried. In the afternoon he brought his morning's work to his wife, the most exacting of his critics; asked her whether it was not well done; and in her glow of admiring assent found his confirmation and his reward. Nevertheless she could not throw off an oppressive sense of coming calamity. He was reassuring her with gay and laughing talk when the sudden rupture of a blood-vessel in the brain laid him almost in a moment unconscious at her feet; and before two hours were over he had passed away. All the world knows how his body was carried by the loving hands of his native servants to the burial-place of his choice, and rests there with the words of his own requiem engraved on his tomb--the words which we have seen him putting on paper when he was at grips with death fifteen years before in California-- "Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill." TO CHARLES BAXTER Mr. Baxter, after much preliminary consideration and inquiry, had matured and submitted to Stevenson the scheme of the Edinburgh edition, to which this letter is his reply. The paper on _Treasure Island_ appeared in the Idler for August 1889, and was afterwards reprinted in the miscellany _My First Book_ (Chatto and Windus, 1894). See Edinburgh edition, _Miscellanies_, vol. iv. p. 285. _1st January '94._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--I am delighted with your idea, and first, I will here give an amended plan and afterwards give you a note of some of the difficulties. [Plan of the Edinburgh edition--14 vols.] ... It may be a question whether my Times letters might not be appended to the _Footnote_ with a note of the dates of discharge of Cedercrantz and Pilsach. I am particularly pleased with this idea of yours, because I am come to a dead stop. I never can remember how bad I have been before, but at any rate I am bad enough just now, I mean as to literature; in health I am well and strong. I take it I shall be six months before I'm heard of again, and this time I could put in to some advantage in revising the text and (if it were thought desirable) writing prefaces. I do not know how many of them might be thought desirable. I have written a paper on _Treasure Island_, which is to appear shortly. _Master of Ballantrae_--I have one drafted. _The Wrecker_ is quite sufficiently done already with the last chapter, but I suppose an historic introduction to _David Balfour_ is quite unavoidable. _Prince Otto_ I don't think I could say anything about, and _Black Arrow_ don't want to. But it is probable I could say something to the volume of _Travels_. In the verse business I can do just what I like better than anything else, and extend _Underwoods_ with a lot of unpublished stuff. _À propos_, if I were to get printed off a very few poems which are somewhat too intimate for the public, could you get them run up in some luxuous manner, so that fools might be induced to buy them in just a sufficient quantity to pay expenses and the thing remain still in a manner private? We could supply photographs of the illustrations--and the poems are of Vailima and the family--I should much like to get this done as a surprise for Fanny. R. L. S. TO H. B. BAILDON _Vailima, January 15th, 1894._ MY DEAR BAILDON,--Last mail brought your book and its Dedication. "Frederick Street and the gardens, and the short-lived Jack o' Lantern," are again with me--and the note of the east wind, and Froebel's voice, and the smell of soup in Thomson's stair. Truly, you had no need to put yourself under the protection of any other saint, were that saint our Tamate himself! Yourself were enough, and yourself coming with so rich a sheaf. For what is this that you say about the Muses? They have certainly never better inspired you than in "Jael and Sisera," and "Herodias and John the Baptist," good stout poems, fiery and sound. "'Tis but a mask and behind it chuckles the God of the Garden," I shall never forget. By the by, an error of the press, page 49, line 4, "No infant's lesson are the ways of God." _The_ is dropped. And this reminds me you have a bad habit which is to be comminated in my theory of letters. Same page, two lines lower: "But the vulture's track" is surely as fine to the ear as "But vulture's track," and this latter version has a dreadful baldness. The reader goes on with a sense of impoverishment, of unnecessary sacrifice; he has been robbed by footpads, and goes scouting for his lost article! Again, in the second Epode, these fine verses would surely sound much finer if they began, "As a hardy climber who has set his heart," than with the jejune "As hardy climber." I do not know why you permit yourself this licence with grammar; you show, in so many pages, that you are superior to the paltry sense of rhythm which usually dictates it--as though some poetaster had been suffered to correct the poet's text. By the way, I confess to a heartfelt weakness for _Auriculas_.--Believe me the very grateful and characteristic pick-thank, but still sincere and affectionate, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. H. LOW _Vailima, January 15th, 1894._ MY DEAR LOW,-- ... Pray you, stoop your proud head, and sell yourself to some Jew magazine, and make the visit out. I assure you, this is the spot for a sculptor or painter. This, and no other--I don't say to stay there, but to come once and get the living colour into them. I am used to it; I do not notice it; rather prefer my grey, freezing recollections of Scotland; but there it is, and every morning is a thing to give thanks for, and every night another--bar when it rains, of course. About _The Wrecker_--rather late days, and I still suspect I had somehow offended you; however, all's well that ends well, and I am glad I am forgiven--did you not fail to appreciate the attitude of Dodd? He was a fizzle and a stick, he knew it, he knew nothing else, and there is an undercurrent of bitterness in him. And then the problem that Pinkerton laid down: why the artist can _do nothing else_? is one that continually exercises myself. He cannot: granted. But Scott could. And Montaigne. And Julius Caesar. And many more. And why can't R. L. S.? Does it not amaze you? It does me. I think of the Renaissance fellows, and their all-round human sufficiency, and compare it with the ineffable smallness of the field in which we labour and in which we do so little. I think _David Balfour_ a nice little book, and very artistic, and just the thing to occupy the leisure of a busy man; but for the top flower of a man's life it seems to me inadequate. Small is the word; it is a small age, and I am of it. I could have wished to be otherwise busy in this world. I ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write _David Balfours_ too. _Hinc illae lacrymae._ I take my own case as most handy, but it is as illustrative of my quarrel with the age. We take all these pains, and we don't do as well as Michael Angelo or Leonardo, or even Fielding, who was an active magistrate, or Richardson, who was a busy bookseller. _J'ai honte pour nous_; my ears burn. I am amazed at the effect which this Chicago exhibition has produced upon you and others. It set Mrs. Fairchild literally mad--to judge by her letters. And I wish I had seen anything so influential. I suppose there was an aura, a halo, some sort of effulgency about the place; for here I find you louder than the rest. Well, it may be there is a time coming; and I wonder, when it comes, whether it will be a time of little, exclusive, one-eyed rascals like you and me, or parties of the old stamp who can paint and fight, and write and keep books of double entry, and sculp, and scalp. It might be. You have a lot of stuff in the kettle, and a great deal of it Celtic. I have changed my mind progressively about England: practically the whole of Scotland is Celtic, and the western half of England, and all Ireland, and the Celtic blood makes a rare blend for art. If it is stiffened up with Latin blood, you get the French. We were less lucky: we had only Scandinavians, themselves decidedly artistic, and the Low-German lot. However, that is a good starting-point, and with all the other elements in your crucible, it may come to something great very easily. I wish you would hurry up and let me see it. Here is a long while I have been waiting for something _good_ in art; and what have I seen? Zola's _Débâcle_ and a few of Kipling's tales. Are you a reader of Barbey d'Aurévilly? He is a never-failing source of pleasure to me, for my sins, I suppose. What a work is the _Rideau Cramoisi!_ and _L'Ensorcelée!_ and _Le Chevalier Des Touches!_ This is degenerating into mere twaddle. So please remember us all most kindly to Mrs. Low, and believe me ever yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--Were all your privateers voiceless in the war of 1812? Did _no one_ of them write memoirs? I shall have to do my privateer from chic, if you can't help me.[74] My application to Scribner has been quite in vain. See if you can get hold of some historic sharp in the club, and tap him; they must some of them have written memoirs or notes of some sort; perhaps still unprinted; if that be so, get them copied for me. R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Vailima, Jan. 29th, 1894._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--I had fully intended for your education and moral health to fob you off with the meanest possible letter this month, and unfortunately I find I will have to treat you to a good long account of matters here. I believe I have told you before about Tui-ma-le-alii-fano and my taking him down to introduce him to the Chief Justice. Well, Tui came back to Vailima one day in the blackest sort of spirits, saying the war was decided, that he also must join in the fight, and that there was no hope whatever of success. He must fight as a point of honour for his family and country; and in his case, even if he escaped on the field of battle, deportation was the least to be looked for. He said he had a letter of complaint from the Great Council of A'ana which he wished to lay before the Chief Justice; and he asked me to accompany him as if I were his nurse. We went down about dinner time; and by the way received from a lurking native the famous letter in an official blue envelope gummed up to the edges. It proved to be a declaration of war, quite formal, but with some variations that really made you bounce. White residents were directly threatened, bidden to have nothing to do with the King's party, not to receive their goods in their houses, etc., under pain of an accident. However, the Chief Justice took it very wisely and mildly, and between us, he and I and Tui made up a plan which has proved successful--so far. The war is over--fifteen chiefs are this morning undergoing a curious double process of law, comparable to a court martial; in which their complaints are to be considered, and if possible righted, while their conduct is to be criticised, perhaps punished. Up to now, therefore, it has been a most successful policy; but the danger is before us. My own feeling would decidedly be that all would be spoiled by a single execution. The great hope after all lies in the knotless, rather flaccid character of the people. These are no Maoris. All the powers that Cedercrantz let go by disuse the new C. J. is stealthily and boldly taking back again; perhaps some others also. He has shamed the chiefs in Mulinuu into a law against taking heads, with a punishment of six years' imprisonment and, for a chief, degradation. To him has been left the sole conduct of this anxious and decisive inquiry. If the natives stand it, why, well! But I am nervous. TO H. B. BAILDON _Vailima, January 30th, 1894._ MY DEAR BAILDON,--"Call not blessed."--Yes, if I could die just now, or say in half a year, I should have had a splendid time of it on the whole. But it gets a little stale, and my work will begin to senesce; and parties to shy bricks at me; and now it begins to look as if I should survive to see myself impotent and forgotten. It's a pity suicide is not thought the ticket in the best circles. But your letter goes on to congratulate me on having done the one thing I am a little sorry for; a little--not much--for my father himself lived to think that I had been wiser than he. But the cream of the jest is that I have lived to change my mind; and think that he was wiser than I. Had I been an engineer, and literature my amusement, it would have been better perhaps. I pulled it off, of course, I won the wager, and it is pleasant while it lasts; but how long will it last? I don't know, say the Bells of Old Bow. All of which goes to show that nobody is quite sane in judging himself. Truly, had I given way and gone in for engineering, I should be dead by now. Well, the gods know best. ... I hope you got my letter about the _Rescue_.--Adieu. R. L. S. True for you about the benefit: except by kisses, jests, song, _et hoc genus omne_, man _cannot_ convey benefit to another. The universal benefactor has been there before him. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Feb. 1894._ DEAR COLVIN,--By a reaction, when your letter is a little decent, mine is to be naked and unashamed. We have been much exercised. No one can prophesy here, of course, and the balance still hangs trembling, but I _think_ it will go for peace. The mail was very late this time: hence the paltriness of this note. When it came and I had read it, I retired with _The Ebb Tide_ and read it all before I slept. I did not dream it was near as good; I am afraid I think it excellent. A little indecision about Attwater, not much. It gives me great hope, as I see I _can_ work in that constipated, mosaic manner, which is what I have to do just now with _Weir of Hermiston_. We have given a ball; I send you a paper describing the event. We have two guests in the house, Captain-Count Wurmbrand and Monsieur Albert de Lautreppe. Lautreppe is awfully nice--a quiet, gentlemanly fellow, _gonflé de rêves_, as he describes himself--once a sculptor in the atelier of Henry Crosse, he knows something of art, and is really a resource to me. Letter from Meredith very kind. Have you seen no more of Graham? What about my Grandfather? The family history will grow to be quite a chapter. I suppose I am growing sensitive; perhaps, by living among barbarians, I expect more civility. Look at this from the author of a very interesting and laudatory critique. He gives quite a false description of something of mine, and talks about my "insolence." Frankly, I supposed "insolence" to be a tapu word. I do not use it to a gentleman, I would not write it of a gentleman: I may be wrong, but I believe we did not write it of a gentleman in old days, and in my view he (clever fellow as he is) wants to be kicked for applying it to me. By writing a novel--even a bad one--I do not make myself a criminal for anybody to insult. This may amuse you. But either there is a change in journalism, too gradual for you to remark it on the spot, or there is a change in me. I cannot bear these phrases; I long to resent them. My forbears, the tenant farmers of the Mures, would not have suffered such expressions unless it had been from Cauldwell, or Rowallan, or maybe Auchendrane. My Family Pride bristles. I am like the negro, "I just heard last night" who my great, great, great, great grandfather was.--Ever yours, R. L. S. TO J. H. BATES The next is to a correspondent in Cincinnati, who had been the founder of an R. L. S. Society in that city, "originally," he writes me, under date April 7, 1895, "the outcome of a boyish fancy, but it has now grown into something more substantial." _Vailima, Samoa, March 25th, 1894._ MY DEAR MR. JOE H. BATES,--I shall have the greatest pleasure in acceding to your complimentary request. I shall think it an honour to be associated with your chapter, and I need not remind you (for you have said it yourself) how much depends upon your own exertions whether to make it to me a real honour or only a derision. This is to let you know that I accept the position that you have seriously offered to me in a quite serious spirit. I need scarce tell you that I shall always be pleased to receive reports of your proceedings; and if I do not always acknowledge them, you are to remember that I am a man very much occupied otherwise, and not at all to suppose that I have lost interest in my chapter. In this world, which (as you justly say) is so full of sorrow and suffering, it will always please me to remember that my name is connected with some efforts after alleviation, nor less so with purposes of innocent recreation which, after all, are the only certain means at our disposal for bettering human life. With kind regards, to yourself, to Mr. L. C. Congdon, to E. M. G. Bates, and to Mr. Edward Hugh Higlee Bates, and the heartiest wishes for the future success of the chapter, believe me, yours cordially. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO WILLIAM ARCHER _Vailima, Samoa, March 27th, 1894._ MY DEAR ARCHER,--Many thanks for your _Theatrical World_. Do you know, it strikes me as being really very good? I have not yet read much of it, but so far as I have looked, there is not a dull and not an empty page in it. Hazlitt, whom you must often have thought of, would have been pleased. Come to think of it, I shall put this book upon the Hazlitt shelf. You have acquired a manner that I can only call august; otherwise, I should have to call it such amazing impudence. The _Bauble Shop_ and _Becket_ are examples of what I mean. But it "sets you weel." Marjorie Fleming I have known, as you surmise, for long. She was possibly--no, I take back possibly--she was one of the greatest works of God. Your note about the resemblance of her verses to mine gave me great joy, though it only proved me a plagiarist. By the by, was it not over _The Child's Garden of Verses_ that we first scraped acquaintance? I am sorry indeed to hear that my esteemed correspondent Tomarcher has such poor taste in literature.[75] I fear he cannot have inherited this trait from his dear papa. Indeed, I may say I know it, for I remember the energy of papa's disapproval when the work passed through his hands on its way to a second birth, which none regrets more than myself. It is an odd fact, or perhaps a very natural one; I find few greater pleasures than reading my own works, but I never, O I never read _The Black Arrow_. In that country Tomarcher reigns supreme. Well, and after all, if Tomarcher likes it, it has not been written in vain. We have just now a curious breath from Europe. A young fellow just beginning letters, and no fool, turned up here with a letter of introduction in the well-known blue ink and decorative hieroglyphs of George Meredith. His name may be known to you. It is Sidney Lysaght. He is staying with us but a day or two, and it is strange to me and not unpleasant to hear all the names, old and new, come up again. But oddly the new are so much more in number. If I revisited the glimpses of the moon on your side of the ocean, I should know comparatively few of them. My amanuensis deserts me--I should have said you, for yours is the loss, my script having lost all bond with humanity. One touch of nature makes the whole world kin: that nobody can read my hand. It is a humiliating circumstance that thus evens us with printers! You must sometimes think it strange--or perhaps it is only I that should so think it--to be following the old round, in the gas lamps and the crowded theatres, when I am away here in the tropical forest and the vast silences! My dear Archer, my wife joins me in the best wishes to yourself and Mrs. Archer, not forgetting Tom; and I am yours very cordially, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN Partly concerning a fresh rising, this time of the partisans of Tamasese from the district of Atua, which had occurred and was after some time suppressed; partly in reference to the visit of Mr. Sidney Lysaght; partly in reply to a petition that his letters might be less entirely taken up with native affairs, of relatively little meaning to his correspondent. [_Vailima, April 1894._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--This is the very day the mail goes, and I have as yet written you nothing. But it was just as well--as it was all about my "blacks and chocolates," and what of it had relation to whites you will read some of in the Times. It means, as you will see, that I have at one blow quarrelled with _all_ the officials of Samoa, the Foreign Office, and I suppose her Majesty the Queen with milk and honey blest. But you'll see in the Times. I am very well indeed, but just about dead and mighty glad the mail is near here, and I can just give up all hope of contending with my letters, and lie down for the rest of the day. These Times letters are not easy to write. And I dare say the consuls say, "Why, then, does he write them?" I had miserable luck with _St. Ives_; being already half-way through it, a book I had ordered six months ago arrives at last, and I have to change the first half of it from top to bottom! How could I have dreamed the French prisoners were watched over like a female charity school, kept in a grotesque livery, and shaved twice a week? And I had made all my points on the idea that they were unshaved and clothed anyhow. However, this last is better business; if only the book had come when I ordered it! _À propos_, many of the books you announce don't come as a matter of fact. When they are of any value, it is best to register them. Your letter, alas! is not here; I sent it down to the cottage, with all my mail, for Fanny; on Sunday night a boy comes up with a lantern and a note from Fanny, to say the woods are full of Atuas and I must bring a horse down that instant, as the posts are established beyond her on the road, and she does not want to have the fight going on between us. Impossible to get a horse; so I started in the dark on foot, with a revolver, and my spurs on my bare feet, leaving directions that the boy should mount after me with the horse. Try such an experience on Our Road once, and do it, if you please, after you have been down town from nine o'clock till six, on board the ship-of-war lunching, teaching Sunday School (I actually do) and making necessary visits; and the Saturday before, having sat all day from 1/2-past six to 1/2-past four, scriving at my Times letter. About half-way up, just in fact at "point" of the outposts, I met Fanny coming up. Then all night long I was being wakened with scares that really should be looked into, though I _knew_ there was nothing in them and no bottom to the whole story; and the drums and shouts and cries from Tanugamanono and the town keeping up an all-night corybantic chorus in the moonlight--the moon rose late--and the search-light of the war-ship in the harbour making a jewel of brightness as it lit up the bay of Apia in the distance. And then next morning, about eight o'clock, a drum coming out of the woods and a party of patrols who had been in the woods on our left front (which is our true rear) coming up to the house, and meeting there another party who had been in the woods on our right {front / rear} which is Vaea Mountain, and 43 of them being entertained to ava and biscuits on the verandah, and marching off at last in single file for Apia. Briefly, it is not much wonder if your letter and my whole mail was left at the cottage, and I have no means of seeing or answering particulars. The whole thing was nothing but a bottomless scare; it was _obviously_ so; you couldn't make a child believe it was anything else, but it has made the consuls sit up. My own private scares were really abominably annoying; as for instance after I had got to sleep for the ninth time perhaps--and that was no easy matter either, for I had a crick in my neck so agonising that I had to sleep sitting up--I heard noises as of a man being murdered in the boys' house. To be sure, said I, this is nothing again, but if a man's head was being taken, the noises would be the same! So I had to get up, stifle my cries of agony from the crick, get my revolver, and creep out stealthily to the boys' house. And there were two of them sitting up, keeping watch of their own accord like good boys, and whiling the time over a game of Sweepi (Cascino--the whist of our islanders)--and one of them was our champion idiot, Misifolo, and I suppose he was holding bad cards, and losing all the time--and these noises were his humorous protests against Fortune! Well, excuse this excursion into my "blacks and chocolates." It is the last. You will have heard from Lysaght how I failed to write last mail. The said Lysaght seems to me a very nice fellow. We were only sorry he could not stay with us longer. Austin came back from school last week, which made a great time for the Amanuensis, you may be sure. Then on Saturday, the _Curaçoa_ came in--same commission, with all our old friends; and on Sunday, as already mentioned, Austin and I went down to service and had lunch afterwards in the wardroom. The officers were awfully nice to Austin; they are the most amiable ship in the world; and after lunch we had a paper handed round on which we were to guess, and sign our guess, of the number of leaves on the pine-apple; I never saw this game before, but it seems it is much practised in the Queen's Navee. When all have betted, one of the party begins to strip the pine-apple head, and the person whose guess is furthest out has to pay for the sherry. My equanimity was disturbed by shouts of _The American Commodore_, and I found that Austin had entered and lost about a bottle of sherry! He turned with great composure and addressed me. "I am afraid I must look to you, Uncle Louis." The Sunday School racket is only an experiment which I took up at the request of the late American Land Commissioner; I am trying it for a month, and if I do as ill as I believe, and the boys find it only half as tedious as I do, I think it will end in a month. I have _carte blanche_, and say what I like; but does any single soul understand me? Fanny is on the whole very much better. Lloyd has been under the weather, and goes for a month to the South Island of New Zealand for some skating, save the mark! I get all the skating I want among officials. Dear Colvin, please remember that my life passes among my "blacks or chocolates." If I were to do as you propose, in a bit of a tiff, it would cut you off entirely from my life. You must try to exercise a trifle of imagination, and put yourself, perhaps with an effort, into some sort of sympathy with these people, or how am I to write to you? I think you are truly a little too Cockney with me.--Ever yours, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. B. YEATS _Vailima, Samoa, April 14, 1894._ DEAR SIR,--Long since when I was a boy I remember the emotions with which I repeated Swinburne's poems and ballads. Some ten years ago, a similar spell was cast upon me by Meredith's _Love in the Valley_; the stanzas beginning "When her mother tends her" haunted me and made me drunk like wine; and I remember waking with them all the echoes of the hills about Hyères. It may interest you to hear that I have a third time fallen in slavery: this is to your poem called the _Lake Isle of Innisfree_. It is so quaint and airy, simple, artful, and eloquent to the heart--but I seek words in vain. Enough that "always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds on the shore," and am, yours gratefully, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO GEORGE MEREDITH The young lady referred to in the following is Mr. Meredith's daughter, now Mrs. H. Sturgis; the bearer of the introduction, Mr. Sidney Lysaght, author of _The Marplot_ and _One of the Grenvilles._ It is only in the first few chapters of Mr. Meredith's _Amazing Marriage_ that the character of Gower Woodseer has been allowed to retain any likeness to that of R. L. S. _Vailima, Samoa, April 17th, 1894._ MY DEAR MEREDITH,--Many good things have the gods sent to me of late. First of all there was a letter from you by the kind hand of Mariette, if she is not too great a lady to be remembered in such a style; and then there came one Lysaght with a charming note of introduction in the well-known hand itself. We had but a few days of him, and liked him well. There was a sort of geniality and inward fire about him at which I warmed my hands. It is long since I have seen a young man who has left in me such a favourable impression; and I find myself telling myself, "O, I must tell this to Lysaght," or, "This will interest him," in a manner very unusual after so brief an acquaintance. The whole of my family shared in this favourable impression, and my halls have re-echoed ever since, I am sure he will be amused to know, with _Widdicombe Fair_. He will have told you doubtless more of my news than I could tell you myself; he has your European perspective, a thing long lost to me. I heard with a great deal of interest the news of Box Hill. And so I understand it is to be enclosed! Allow me to remark, that seems a far more barbaric trait of manners than the most barbarous of ours. We content ourselves with cutting off an occasional head. I hear we may soon expect _The Amazing Marriage_. You know how long, and with how much curiosity, I have looked forward to the book. Now, in so far as you have adhered to your intention, Gower Woodseer will be a family portrait, age twenty-five, of the highly respectable and slightly influential and fairly aged _Tusitala_. You have not known that gentleman; console yourself, he is not worth knowing. At the same time, my dear Meredith, he is very sincerely yours--for what he is worth, for the memories of old times, and in the expectation of many pleasures still to come. I suppose we shall never see each other again; flitting youths of the Lysaght species may occasionally cover these unconscionable leagues and bear greetings to and fro. But we ourselves must be content to converse on an occasional sheet of notepaper, and I shall never see whether you have grown older, and you shall never deplore that Gower Woodseer should have declined into the pantaloon _Tusitala_. It is perhaps better so. Let us continue to see each other as we were, and accept, my dear Meredith, my love and respect. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--My wife joins me in the kindest messages to yourself and Mariette. TO CHARLES BAXTER _[Vailima], April 17, '94._ MY DEAR CHARLES,--_St. Ives_ is now well on its way into the second volume. There remains no mortal doubt that it will reach the three-volume standard. I am very anxious that you should send me-- 1st. _Tom and Jerry_, a cheap edition. 2nd. The book by Ashton--the _Dawn of the Century_, I think it was called--which Colvin sent me, and which has miscarried, and 3rd. If it is possible, a file of the Edinburgh Courant for the years 1811, 1812, 1813, or 1814. I should not care for a whole year. If it were possible to find me three months, winter months by preference, it would do my business not only for _St. Ives_, but for the _Justice-Clerk_ as well. Suppose this to be impossible, perhaps I could get the loan of it from somebody; or perhaps it would be possible to have some one read a file for me and make notes. This would be extremely bad, as unhappily one man's food is another man's poison, and the reader would probably leave out everything I should choose. But if you are reduced to that, you might mention to the man who is to read for me that balloon ascensions are in the order of the day. 4th. It might be as well to get a book on balloon ascension, particularly in the early part of the century. * * * * * III. At last this book has come from Scribner, and, alas! I have the first six or seven chapters of _St. Ives_ to recast entirely. Who could foresee that they clothed the French prisoners in yellow? But that one fatal fact--and also that they shaved them twice a week--damns the whole beginning. If it had been sent in time, it would have saved me a deal of trouble.... I have had a long letter from Dr. Scott Dalgleish, 25 Mayfield Terrace, asking me to put my name down to the Ballantyne Memorial Committee. I have sent him a pretty sharp answer in favour of cutting down the memorial and giving more to the widow and children. If there is to be any foolery in the way of statues or other trash, please send them a guinea; but if they are going to take my advice and put up a simple tablet with a few heartfelt words, and really devote the bulk of the subscriptions to the wife and family, I will go to the length of twenty pounds, if you will allow me (and if the case of the family be at all urgent), and at least I direct you to send ten pounds. I suppose you had better see Scott Dalgleish himself on the matter. I take the opportunity here to warn you that my head is simply spinning with a multitude of affairs, and I shall probably forget a half of my business at last. R. L. S. TO MRS. SITWELL [_Vailima, April 1894._] MY DEAR FRIEND,--I have at last got some photographs, and hasten to send you, as you asked, a portrait of Tusitala. He is a strange person; not so lean, say experts, but infinitely battered; mighty active again on the whole; going up and down our break-neck road at all hours of the day and night on horseback; holding meetings with all manner of chiefs; quite a political personage--God save the mark!--in a small way, but at heart very conscious of the inevitable flat failure that awaits every one. I shall never do a better book than _Catriona_, that is my high-water mark, and the trouble of production increases on me at a great rate--and mighty anxious about how I am to leave my family: an elderly man, with elderly preoccupations, whom I should be ashamed to show you for your old friend; but not a hope of my dying soon and cleanly, and "winning off the stage." Rather I am daily better in physical health. I shall have to see this business out, after all; and I think, in that case, they should have--they might have--spared me all my ill-health this decade past, if it were not to unbar the doors. I have no taste for old age, and my nose is to be rubbed in it in spite of my face. I was meant to die young, and the gods do not love me. This is very like an epitaph, bar the handwriting, which is anything but monumental, and I dare say I had better stop. Fanny is down at her own cottage planting or deplanting or replanting, I know not which, and she will not be home till dinner, by which time the mail will be all closed, else she would join me in all good messages and remembrances of love. I hope you will congratulate Burne Jones from me on his baronetcy. I cannot make out to be anything but raspingly, harrowingly sad; so I will close, and not affect levity which I cannot feel. Do not altogether forget me; keep a corner of your memory for the exile LOUIS. TO CHARLES BAXTER [_Vailima, May 1894._] MY DEAR CHARLES,--My dear fellow, I wish to assure you of the greatness of the pleasure that this Edinburgh Edition gives me. I suppose it was your idea to give it that name. No other would have affected me in the same manner. Do you remember, how many years ago--I would be afraid to hazard a guess--one night when I communicated to you certain intimations of early death and aspiration after fame? I was particularly maudlin; and my remorse the next morning on a review of my folly has written the matter very deeply in my mind; from yours it may easily have fled. If any one at that moment could have shown me the Edinburgh Edition, I suppose I should have died. It is with gratitude and wonder that I consider "the way in which I have been led." Could a more preposterous idea have occurred to us in those days when we used to search our pockets for coppers, too often in vain, and combine forces to produce the threepence necessary for two glasses of beer, or wander down the Lothian Road without any, than that I should be strong and well at the age of forty-three in the island of Upolu, and that you should be at home bringing out the Edinburgh Edition? If it had been possible, I should almost have preferred the Lothian Road Edition, say, with a picture of the old Dutch smuggler on the covers. I have now something heavy on my mind. I had always a great sense of kinship with poor Robert Fergusson--so clever a boy, so wild, of such a mixed strain, so unfortunate, born in the same town with me, and, as I always felt, rather by express intimation than from evidence, so like myself. Now the injustice with which the one Robert is rewarded and the other left out in the cold sits heavy on me, and I wish you could think of some way in which I could do honour to my unfortunate namesake. Do you think it would look like affectation to dedicate the whole edition to his memory? I think it would. The sentiment which would dictate it to me is too abstruse; and besides, I think my wife is the proper person to receive the dedication of my life's work. At the same time, it is very odd--it really looks like the transmigration of souls--I feel that I must do something for Fergusson; Burns has been before me with the gravestone. It occurs to me you might take a walk down the Canongate and see in what condition the stone is. If it be at all uncared for, we might repair it, and perhaps add a few words of inscription. I must tell you, what I just remembered in a flash as I was walking about dictating this letter--there was in the original plan of the _Master of Ballantrae_ a sort of introduction describing my arrival in Edinburgh on a visit to yourself and your placing in my hands the papers of the story. I actually wrote it, and then condemned the idea--as being a little too like Scott, I suppose. Now I must really find the MS. and try to finish it for the E.E. It will give you, what I should so much like you to have, another corner of your own in that lofty monument. Suppose we do what I have proposed about Fergusson's monument, I wonder if an inscription like this would look arrogant-- This stone originally erected by Robert Burns has been repaired at the charges of Robert Louis Stevenson, and is by him re-dedicated to the memory of Robert Fergusson, as the gift of one Edinburgh lad to another. In spacing this inscription I would detach the names of Fergusson and Burns, but leave mine in the text. Or would that look like sham modesty, and is it better to bring out the three Roberts? TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Vailima, May 18th, 1894._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--Your proposals for the Edinburgh Edition are entirely to my mind. About the _Amateur Emigrant_, it shall go to you by this mail well slashed. If you like to slash some more on your own account, I give you permission. 'Tis not a great work; but since it goes to make up the two first volumes as proposed, I presume it has not been written in vain.[76]--_Miscellanies_. I see with some alarm the proposal to print _Juvenilia_; does it not seem to you taking myself a little too much as Grandfather William? I am certainly not so young as I once was--a lady took occasion to remind me of the fact no later agone than last night. "Why don't you leave that to the young men, Mr. Stevenson?" said she--but when I remember that I felt indignant at even John Ruskin when he did something of the kind I really feel myself blush from head to heel. If you want to make up the first volume, there are a good many works which I took the trouble to prepare for publication and which have never been republished. In addition to _Roads_ and _Dancing Children_, referred to by you, there is _An Autumn Effect_ in the Portfolio, and a paper on Fontainebleau--_Forest Notes_ is the name of it--in Cornhill. I have no objection to any of these being edited, say with a scythe, and reproduced. But I heartily abominate and reject the idea of reprinting _The Pentland Rising_. For God's sake let me get buried first. _Tales and Fantasies._ Vols. I. and II. have my hearty approval. But I think III. and IV. had better be crammed into one as you suggest. I will reprint none of the stories mentioned. They are below the mark. Well, I dare say the beastly _Body-Snatcher_ has merit, and I am unjust to it from my recollections of the Pall Mall. But the other two won't do. For vols. V. and VI., now changed into IV. and V., I propose the common title of _South Sea Yarns_. There! These are all my differences of opinion. I agree with every detail of your arrangement, and, as you see, my objections have turned principally on the question of hawking unripe fruit. I dare say it is all pretty green, but that is no reason for us to fill the barrow with trash. Think of having a new set of type cast, paper especially made, etc., in order to set up rubbish that is not fit for the Saturday Scotsman. It would be the climax of shame. I am sending you a lot of verses, which had best, I think, be called _Underwoods_ Book III., but in what order are they to go? Also, I am going on every day a little, till I get sick of it, with the attempt to get _The Emigrant_ compressed into life; I know I can--or you can after me--do it. It is only a question of time and prayer and ink, and should leave something, no, not good, but not all bad--a very genuine appreciation of these folks. You are to remember besides there is that paper of mine on Bunyan in the Magazine of Art. O, and then there's another thing in Seeley called some spewsome name, I cannot recall it. Well--come, here goes for _Juvenilia_. _Dancing Infants_, _Roads_, _An Autumn Effect_, _Forest Notes_ (but this should come at the end of them, as it's really rather riper), the t'other thing from Seeley, and I'll tell you, you may put in my letter to the Church of Scotland--it's not written amiss, and I dare say _The Philosophy of Umbrellas_ might go in, but there I stick--and remember _that_ was a collaboration with James Walter Ferrier. O, and there was a little skit called _The Charity Bazaar_, which you might see; I don't think it would do. Now, I do not think there are two other words that should be printed.--By the way, there is an article of mine called _The Day after To-morrow_ in the Contemporary which you might find room for somewhere; it's no' bad. Very busy with all these affairs and some native ones also. TO R. A. M. STEVENSON [_Vailima, June 17th, 1894._] MY DEAR BOB,--I must make out a letter this mail or perish in the attempt. All the same, I am deeply stupid, in bed with a cold, deprived of my amanuensis, and conscious of the wish but not the furnished will. You may be interested to hear how the family inquiries go. It is now quite certain that we are a second-rate lot, and came out of Cunningham or Clydesdale, therefore _British_ folk; so that you are Cymry on both sides, and I Cymry and Pict. We may have fought with King Arthur and known Merlin. The first of the family, Stevenson of Stevenson, was quite a great party, and dates back to the wars of Edward First. The last male heir of Stevenson of Stevenson died 1670, £220, 10s. to the bad, from drink. About the same time the Stevensons, who were mostly in Cunningham before, crop up suddenly in the parish of Neilston, over the border in Renfrewshire. Of course, they may have been there before, but there is no word of them in that parish till 1675 in any extracts I have. Our first traceable ancestor was a tenant farmer of Mure of Cauldwell's--James in Nether Carsewell. Presently two families of maltmen are found in Glasgow, both, by re-duplicated proofs, related to James (the son of James) in Nether Carsewell. We descend by his second marriage from Robert; one of these died 1733. It is not very romantic up to now, but has interested me surprisingly to fish out, always hoping for more--and occasionally getting at least a little clearness and confirmation. But the earliest date, 1655, apparently the marriage of James in Nether Carsewell, cannot as yet be pushed back. From which of any number of dozen little families in Cunningham we should derive, God knows! Of course, it doesn't matter a hundred years hence, an argument fatal to all human enterprise, industry, or pleasure. And to me it will be a deadly disappointment if I cannot roll this stone away! One generation further might be nothing, but it is my present object of desire, and we are so near it! There is a man in the same parish called Constantine; if I could only trace to him, I could take you far afield by that one talisman of the strange Christian name of Constantine. But no such luck! And I kind of fear we shall stick at James. I. JAMES, a tenant of the Mures, in Nether-Carsewell, || Neilston, married (1665?) Jean Keir. || | ---------------------------------------------- | II. ROBERT (Maltman in Glasgow), died 1733, | married 1st; married second, | Elizabeth Cumming. | || | ------------------------------ | | WILLIAM (Maltman in Glasgow). III. ROBERT (Maltman in | Glasgow), married -------------------- Margaret Fulton (had | | | a large family). | | | || ROBERT, MARION, ELIZABETH. IV. ALAN, West India merchant, married Jean Lillie. || V. ROBERT, married Jean Smith. | ------- | VI. ALAN.--Margaret Jones. | VII. R. A. M. S. NOTE.--Between 1730-1766 flourished in Glasgow Alan the Coppersmith, who acts as a kind of a pin to the whole Stevenson system there. He was caution to Robert the Second's will, and to William's will, and to the will of a John, another maltman. So much, though all inchoate, I trouble you with, knowing that you, at least, must take an interest in it. So much is certain of that strange Celtic descent, that the past has an interest for it apparently gratuitous, but fiercely strong. I wish to trace my ancestors a thousand years, if I trace them by gallowses. It is not love, not pride, not admiration; it is an expansion of the identity, intimately pleasing, and wholly uncritical; I can expend myself in the person of an inglorious ancestor with perfect comfort; or a disgraced, if I could find one. I suppose, perhaps, it is more to me who am childless, and refrain with a certain shock from looking forwards. But, I am sure, in the solid grounds of race, that you have it also in some degree. Enough genealogy. I do not know if you will be able to read my hand. Unhappily, Belle, who is my amanuensis, is out of the way on other affairs, and I have to make the unwelcome effort. (O this is beautiful, I am quite pleased with myself.) Graham has just arrived last night (my mother is coming by the other steamer in three days), and has told me of your meeting, and he said you looked a little older than I did; so that I suppose we keep step fairly on the downward side of the hill. He thought you looked harassed, and I could imagine that too. I sometimes feel harassed. I have a great family here about me, a great anxiety. The loss (to use my grandfather's expression), the "loss" of our family is that we are disbelievers in the morrow--perhaps I should say, rather, in next year. The future is _always_ black to us; it was to Robert Stevenson; to Thomas; I suspect to Alan; to R. A. M. S. it was so almost to his ruin in youth; to R. L. S., who had a hard hopeful strain in him from his mother, it was not so much so once, but becomes daily more so. Daily so much more so, that I have a painful difficulty in believing I can ever finish another book, or that the public will ever read it. I have so huge a desire to know exactly what you are doing, that I suppose I should tell you what I am doing by way of an example. I have a room now, a part of the twelve-foot verandah sparred in, at the most inaccessible end of the house. Daily I see the sunrise out of my bed, which I still value as a tonic, a perpetual tuning fork, a look of God's face once in the day. At six my breakfast comes up to me here, and I work till eleven. If I am quite well, I sometimes go out and bathe in the river before lunch, twelve. In the afternoon I generally work again, now alone drafting, now with Belle dictating. Dinner is at six, and I am often in bed by eight. This is supposing me to stay at home. But I must often be away, sometimes all day long, sometimes till twelve, one, or two at night, when you might see me coming home to the sleeping house, sometimes in a trackless darkness, sometimes with a glorious tropic moon, everything drenched with dew--unsaddling and creeping to bed; and you would no longer be surprised that I live out in this country, and not in Bournemouth--in bed. My great recent interruptions have (as you know) come from politics; not much in my line, you will say. But it is impossible to live here and not feel very sorely the consequences of the horrid white mismanagement. I tried standing by and looking on, and it became too much for me. They are such illogical fools; a logical fool in an office, with a lot of red tape, is conceivable. Furthermore, he is as much as we have any reason to expect of officials--a thoroughly common-place, unintellectual lot. But these people are wholly on wires; laying their ears down, skimming away, pausing as though shot, and presto! full spread on the other tack. I observe in the official class mostly an insane jealousy of the smallest kind, as compared to which the artist's is of a grave, modest character--the actor's, even; a desire to extend his little authority, and to relish it like a glass of wine, that is _impayable_. Sometimes, when I see one of these little kings strutting over one of his victories--wholly illegal, perhaps, and certain to be reversed to his shame if his superiors ever heard of it--I could weep. The strange thing is that they _have nothing else_. I auscultate them in vain; no real sense of duty, no real comprehension, no real attempt to comprehend, no wish for information--you cannot offend one of them more bitterly than by offering information, though it is certain that you have _more_, and obvious that you have _other_, information than they have; and talking of policy, they could not play a better stroke than by listening to you, and it need by no means influence their action. _Tenez_, you know what a French post office or railway official is? That is the diplomatic card to the life. Dickens is not in it; caricature fails. All this keeps me from my work, and gives me the unpleasant side of the world. When your letters are disbelieved it makes you angry, and that is rot; and I wish I could keep out of it with all my soul. But I have just got into it again, and farewell peace! My work goes along but slowly. I have got to a crossing place, I suppose; the present book, _St. Ives_, is nothing; it is in no style in particular, a tissue of adventures, the central character not very well done, no philosophic pith under the yarn; and, in short, if people will read it, that's all I ask; and if they won't, damn them! I like doing it though; and if you ask me why! After that I am on _Weir of Hermiston_ and _Heathercat_, two Scotch stories, which will either be something different, or I shall have failed. The first is generally designed, and is a private story of two or three characters in a very grim vein. The second--alas! the thought--is an attempt at a real historical novel, to present a whole field of time; the race--our own race--the west land and Clydesdale blue bonnets, under the influence of their last trial, when they got to a pitch of organisation in madness that no other peasantry has ever made an offer at. I was going to call it _The Killing Time_, but this man Crockett has forestalled me in that. Well, it'll be a big smash if I fail in it; but a gallant attempt. All my weary reading as a boy, which you remember well enough, will come to bear on it; and if my mind will keep up to the point it was in a while back, perhaps I can pull it through. For two months past, Fanny, Belle, Austin (her child), and I have been alone; but yesterday, as I mentioned, Graham Balfour arrived, and on Wednesday my mother and Lloyd will make up the party to its full strength. I wish you could drop in for a month or a week, or two hours. That is my chief want. On the whole, it is an unexpectedly pleasant corner I have dropped into for an end of it, which I could scarcely have foreseen from Wilson's shop, or the Princes Street Gardens, or the Portobello Road. Still, I would like to hear what my _alter ego_ thought of it; and I would sometimes like to have my old _maître-ès-arts_ express an opinion on what I do. I put this very tamely, being on the whole a quiet elderly man; but it is a strong passion with me, though intermittent. Now, try to follow my example and tell me something about yourself, Louisa, the Bab, and your work; and kindly send me some specimens of what you're about. I have only seen one thing by you, about Notre Dame in the Westminster or St. James's, since I left England, now I suppose six years ago. I have looked this trash over, and it is not at all the letter I wanted to write--not truck about officials, ancestors, and the like rancidness--but you have to let your pen go in its own broken-down gait, like an old butcher's pony, stop when it pleases, and go on again as it will.--Ever, my dear Bob, your affectionate cousin, R. L. STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Vailima, June 18th, '94._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--You are to please understand that my last letter is withdrawn unconditionally. You and Baxter are having all the trouble of this Edition, and I simply put myself in your hands for you to do what you like with me, and I am sure that will be the best, at any rate. Hence you are to conceive me withdrawing all objections to your printing anything you please. After all, it is a sort of family affair. About the Miscellany Section, both plans seem to me quite good. Toss up. I think the _Old Gardener_ has to stay where I put him last. It would not do to separate John and Robert. In short, I am only sorry I ever uttered a word about the edition, and leave you to be the judge. I have had a vile cold which has prostrated me for more than a fortnight, and even now tears me nightly with spasmodic coughs; but it has been a great victory. I have never borne a cold with so little hurt; wait till the clouds blow by, before you begin to boast! I have had no fever; and though I've been very unhappy, it is nigh over, I think. Of course, _St. Ives_ has paid the penalty. I must not let you be disappointed in _St. I._ It is a mere tissue of adventures; the central figure not very well or very sharply drawn; no philosophy, no destiny, to it; some of the happenings very good in themselves, I believe, but none of them _bildende_, none of them constructive, except in so far perhaps as they make up a kind of sham picture of the time, all in italics and all out of drawing. Here and there, I think, it is well written; and here and there it's not. Some of the episodic characters are amusing, I do believe; others not, I suppose. However, they are the best of the thing such as it is. If it has a merit to it, I should say it was a sort of deliberation and swing to the style, which seems to me to suit the mail-coaches and post-chaises with which it sounds all through. 'Tis my most prosaic book. I called on the two German ships now in port, and we are quite friendly with them, and intensely friendly of course with our own _Curaçoas_. But it is other guess work on the beach. Some one has employed, or subsidised, one of the local editors to attack me once a week. He is pretty scurrilous and pretty false. The first effect of the perusal of the weekly Beast is to make me angry; the second is a kind of deep, golden content and glory, when I seem to say to people: "See! this is my position--I am a plain man dwelling in the bush in a house, and behold they have to get up this kind of truck against me--and I have so much influence that they are obliged to write a weekly article to say I have none." By this time you must have seen Lysaght and forgiven me the letter that came not at all. He was really so nice a fellow--he had so much to tell me of Meredith--and the time was so short--that I gave up the intervening days between mails entirely to entertain him. We go on pretty nicely. Fanny, Belle, and I have had two months alone, and it has been very pleasant. But by to-morrow or next day noon, we shall see the whole clan assembled again about Vailima table, which will be pleasant too; seven persons in all, and the Babel of voices will be heard again in the big hall so long empty and silent. Good-bye. Love to all. Time to close.--Yours ever, R. L. S. TO HENRY JAMES _Vailima, July 7th, 1894._ DEAR HENRY JAMES,--I am going to try and dictate to you a letter or a note, and begin the same without any spark of hope, my mind being entirely in abeyance. This malady is very bitter on the literary man. I have had it now coming on for a month, and it seems to get worse instead of better. If it should prove to be softening of the brain, a melancholy interest will attach to the present document. I heard a great deal about you from my mother and Graham Balfour; the latter declares that you could take a First in any Samoan subject. If that be so, I should like to hear you on the theory of the constitution. Also to consult you on the force of the particles _o lo'o_ and _ua_, which are the subject of a dispute among local pundits. You might, if you ever answer this, give me your opinion on the origin of the Samoan race, just to complete the favour. They both say that you are looking well, and I suppose I may conclude from that that you are feeling passably. I wish I was. Do not suppose from this that I am ill in body; it is the numskull that I complain of. And when that is wrong, as you must be very keenly aware, you begin every day with a smarting disappointment, which is not good for the temper. I am in one of the humours when a man wonders how any one can be such an ass as to embrace the profession of letters, and not get apprenticed to a barber or keep a baked-potato stall. But I have no doubt in the course of a week, or perhaps to-morrow, things will look better. We have at present in port the model warship of Great Britain. She is called the _Curaçoa_, and has the nicest set of officers and men conceivable. They, the officers, are all very intimate with us, and the front verandah is known as the Curaçoa Club, and the road up to Vailima is known as the Curaçoa Track. It was rather a surprise to me; many naval officers have I known, and somehow had not learned to think entirely well of them, and perhaps sometimes ask myself a little uneasily how that kind of men could do great actions? and behold! the answer comes to me, and I see a ship that I would guarantee to go anywhere it was possible for men to go, and accomplish anything it was permitted man to attempt. I had a cruise on board of her not long ago to Manu'a, and was delighted. The goodwill of all on board; the grim playfulness of[77] quarters, with the wounded falling down at the word; the ambulances hastening up and carrying them away; the Captain suddenly crying, "Fire in the ward-room!" and the squad hastening forward with the hose; and, last and most curious spectacle of all, all the men in their dust-coloured fatigue clothes, at a note of the bugle, falling simultaneously flat on deck, and the ship proceeding with its prostrate crew--_quasi_ to ram an enemy; our dinner at night in a wild open anchorage, the ship rolling almost to her gunwales, and showing us alternately her bulwarks up in the sky, and then the wild broken cliffy palm-crested shores of the island with the surf thundering and leaping close aboard. We had the ward-room mess on deck, lit by pink wax tapers, everybody, of course, in uniform but myself, and the first lieutenant (who is a rheumaticky body) wrapped in a boat cloak. Gradually the sunset faded out, the island disappeared from the eye, though it remained menacingly present to the ear with the voice of the surf; and then the captain turned on the searchlight and gave us the coast, the beach, the trees, the native houses, and the cliffs by glimpses of daylight, a kind of deliberate lightning. About which time, I suppose, we must have come as far as the dessert, and were probably drinking our first glass of port to Her Majesty. We stayed two days at the island, and had, in addition, a very picturesque snapshot at the native life. The three islands of Manu'a are independent, and are ruled over by a little slip of a half-caste girl about twenty, who sits all day in a pink gown, in a little white European house with about a quarter of an acre of roses in front of it, looking at the palm-trees on the village street, and listening to the surf. This, so far as I could discover, was all she had to do. "This is a very dull place," she said. It appears she could go to no other village for fear of raising the jealousy of her own people in the capital. And as for going about "tafatafaoing," as we say here, its cost was too enormous. A strong able-bodied native must walk in front of her and blow the conch shell continuously from the moment she leaves one house until the moment she enters another. Did you ever blow the conch shell? I presume not; but the sweat literally hailed off that man, and I expected every moment to see him burst a blood-vessel. We were entertained to kava in the guest-house with some very original features. The young men who run for the _kava_ have a right to misconduct themselves _ad libitum_ on the way back; and though they were told to restrain themselves on the occasion of our visit, there was a strange hurly-burly at their return, when they came beating the trees and the posts of the houses, leaping, shouting, and yelling like Bacchants. I tasted on that occasion what it is to be great. My name was called next after the captain's, and several chiefs (a thing quite new to me, and not at all Samoan practice) drank to me by name. And now, if you are not sick of the _Curaçoa_ and Manu'a, I am, at least on paper. And I decline any longer to give you examples of how not to write. By the by, you sent me long ago a work by Anatole France, which I confess I did not _taste_. Since then I have made the acquaintance of the _Abbé Coignard_, and have become a faithful adorer. I don't think a better book was ever written. And I have no idea what I have said, and I have no idea what I ought to have said, and I am a total ass, but my heart is in the right place, and I am, my dear Henry James, yours, R. L. S. TO MARCEL SCHWOB _Vailima, Upolu, Samoa, July 7, 1894._ DEAR MR. MARCEL SCHWOB,--Thank you for having remembered me in my exile. I have read _Mimes_ twice as a whole; and now, as I write, I am reading it again as it were by accident, and a piece at a time, my eye catching a word and travelling obediently on through the whole number. It is a graceful book, essentially graceful, with its haunting agreeable melancholy, its pleasing savoury of antiquity. At the same time, by its merits, it shows itself rather as the promise of something else to come than a thing final in itself. You have yet to give us--and I am expecting it with impatience--something of a larger gait; something daylit, not twilit; something with the colours of life, not the flat tints of a temple illumination; something that shall be _said_ with all the clearnesses and the trivialities of speech, not _sung_ like a semi-articulate lullaby. It will not please yourself as well, when you come to give it us, but it will please others better. It will be more of a whole, more worldly, more nourished, more commonplace--and not so pretty, perhaps not even so beautiful. No man knows better than I that, as we go on in life, we must part from prettiness and the graces. We but attain qualities to lose them; life is a series of farewells, even in art; even our proficiencies are deciduous and evanescent. So here with these exquisite pieces the XVIIth, XVIIIth, and IVth of the present collection. You will perhaps never excel them; I should think the "Hermes," never. Well, you will do something else, and of that I am in expectation.--Yours cordially, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO A. ST. GAUDENS _Vailima, Samoa, July 8, 1894._ MY DEAR ST. GAUDENS,--This is to tell you that the medallion has been at last triumphantly transported up the hill and placed over my smoking-room mantelpiece. It is considered by everybody a first-rate but flattering portrait. We have it in a very good light, which brings out the artistic merits of the god-like sculptor to great advantage. As for my own opinion, I believe it to be a speaking likeness, and not flattered at all; possibly a little the reverse. The verses (curse the rhyme) look remarkably well. Please do not longer delay, but send me an account for the expense of the gilt letters. I was sorry indeed that they proved beyond the means of a small farmer.--Yours very sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MISS ADELAIDE BOODLE _Vailima, July 14, 1894._ MY DEAR ADELAIDE,--... So, at last, you are going into mission work? where I think your heart always was. You will like it in a way, but remember it is dreary long. Do you know the story of the American tramp who was offered meals and a day's wage to chop with the back of an axe on a fallen trunk. "Damned if I can go on chopping when I can't see the chips fly!" You will never see the chips fly in mission work, never; and be sure you know it beforehand. The work is one long dull disappointment, varied by acute revulsions; and those who are by nature courageous and cheerful, and have grown old in experience, learn to rub their hands over infinitesimal successes. However, as I really believe there is some good done in the long run--_gutta cavat lapidem non vi_ in this business--it is a useful and honourable career in which no one should be ashamed to embark. Always remember the fable of the sun, the storm, and the traveller's cloak. Forget wholly and for ever all small pruderies, and remember that _you cannot change ancestral feelings of right and wrong without what is practically soul-murder_. Barbarous as the customs may seem, always hear them with patience, always judge them with gentleness, always find in them some seed of good; see that you always develop them; remember that all you can do is to civilise the man in the line of his own civilisation, such as it is. And never expect, never believe in, thaumaturgic conversions. They may do very well for St. Paul; in the case of an Andaman islander they mean less than nothing. In fact, what you have to do is to teach the parents in the interests of their great-grandchildren. Now, my dear Adelaide, dismiss from your mind the least idea of fault upon your side; nothing is further from the fact. I cannot forgive you, for I do not know your fault. My own is plain enough, and the name of it is cold-hearted neglect; and you may busy yourself more usefully in trying to forgive me. But ugly as my fault is, you must not suppose it to mean more than it does; it does not mean that we have at all forgotten you, that we have become at all indifferent to the thought of you. See, in my life of Jenkin, a remark of his, very well expressed, on the friendships of men who do not write to each other. I can honestly say that I have not changed to you in any way; though I have behaved thus ill, thus cruelly. Evil is done by want of--well, principally by want of industry. You can imagine what I would say (in a novel) of any one who had behaved as I have done. _Deteriora sequor_. And you must somehow manage to forgive your old friend; and if you will be so very good, continue to give us news of you, and let us share the knowledge of your adventures, sure that it will be always followed with interest--even if it is answered with the silence of ingratitude. For I am not a fool; I know my faults, I know they are ineluctable, I know they are growing on me. I know I may offend again, and I warn you of it. But the next time I offend, tell me so plainly and frankly like a lady, and don't lacerate my heart and bludgeon my vanity with imaginary faults of your own and purely gratuitous penance. I might suspect you of irony! We are all fairly well, though I have been off work and off--as you know very well--letter-writing. Yet I have sometimes more than twenty letters, and sometimes more than thirty, going out each mail. And Fanny has had a most distressing bronchitis for some time, which she is only now beginning to get over. I have just been to see her; she is lying--though she had breakfast an hour ago, about seven--in her big cool, mosquito-proof room, ingloriously asleep. As for me, you see that a doom has come upon me: I cannot make marks with a pen--witness "ingloriously" above; and my amanuensis not appearing so early in the day, for she is then immersed in household affairs, and I can hear her "steering the boys" up and down the verandahs--you must decipher this unhappy letter for yourself and, I fully admit, with everything against you. A letter should be always well written; how much more a letter of apology! Legibility is the politeness of men of letters, as punctuality of kings and beggars. By the punctuality of my replies, and the beauty of my hand-writing, judge what a fine conscience I must have! Now, my dear gamekeeper, I must really draw to a close. For I have much else to write before the mail goes out three days hence. Fanny being asleep, it would not be conscientious to invent a message from her, so you must just imagine her sentiments. I find I have not the heart to speak of your recent loss. You remember perhaps, when my father died, you told me those ugly images of sickness, decline, and impaired reason, which then haunted me day and night, would pass away and be succeeded by things more happily characteristic. I have found it so. He now haunts me, strangely enough, in two guises; as a man of fifty, lying on a hillside and carving mottoes on a stick, strong and well; and as a younger man, running down the sands into the sea near North Berwick, myself--_ætat. 11_--somewhat horrified at finding him so beautiful when stripped! I hand on your own advice to you in case you have forgotten it, as I know one is apt to do in seasons of bereavement.--Ever yours, with much love and sympathy, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MRS. A. BAKER This refers again to the printing of some of his books in Braille type for the blind. _Vailima, Samoa, July 16, 1894._ DEAR MRS. BAKER,--I am very much obliged to you for your letter and the enclosure from Mr. Skinner. Mr. Skinner says he "thinks Mr. Stevenson must be a very kind man"; he little knows me. But I am very sure of one thing, that you are a very kind woman. I envy you--my amanuensis being called away, I continue in my own hand, or what is left of it--unusually legible, I am thankful to see--I envy you your beautiful choice of an employment. There must be no regrets at least for a day so spent; and when the night falls you need ask no blessing on your work. "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these."--Yours truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _July, 1894._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--I have to thank you this time for a very good letter, and will announce for the future, though I cannot now begin to put in practice, good intentions for our correspondence. I will try to return to the old system and write from time to time during the month; but truly you did not much encourage me to continue! However, that is all by-past. I do not know that there is much in your letter that calls for answer. Your questions about _St. Ives_ were practically answered in my last; so were your wails about the edition, _Amateur Emigrant_, etc. By the end of the year _St. I._ will be practically finished, whatever it be worth, and that I know not. When shall I receive proofs of the Magnum Opus? or shall I receive them at all? The return of the Amanuensis feebly lightens my heart. You can see the heavy weather I was making of it with my unaided pen. The last month has been particularly cheery largely owing to the presence of our good friends the Curaçoas. She is really a model ship, charming officers and charming seamen. They gave a ball last month, which was very rackety and joyous and naval.... On the following day, about one o'clock, three horsemen might have been observed approaching Vailima, who gradually resolved themselves into two petty officers and a native guide. Drawing himself up and saluting, the spokesman (a corporal of Marines) addressed me thus. "Me and my shipmates inwites Mr. and Mrs. Stevens, Mrs. Strong, Mr. Austin, and Mr. Balfour to a ball to be given to-night in the self-same 'all." It was of course impossible to refuse, though I contented myself with putting in a very brief appearance. One glance was sufficient; the ball went off like a rocket from the start. I had only time to watch Belle careering around with a gallant bluejacket of exactly her own height--the standard of the British navy--an excellent dancer and conspicuously full of small-talk--and to hear a remark from a beach-comber, "It's a nice sight this some way, to see the officers dancing like this with the men, but I tell you, sir, these are the men that'll fight together!" I tell you, Colvin, the acquaintance of the men--and boys--makes me feel patriotic. Eeles in particular is a man whom I respect. I am half in a mind to give him a letter of introduction to you when he goes home. In case you feel inclined to make a little of him, give him a dinner, ask Henry James to come to meet him, etc.--you might let me know. I don't know that he would show his best, but he is a remarkably fine fellow, in every department of life. We have other visitors in port. A Count Festetics de Tolna, an Austrian officer, a very pleasant, simple, boyish creature, with his young wife, daughter of an American millionaire; he is a friend of our own Captain Wurmbrand, and it is a great pity Wurmbrand is away. Glad you saw and liked Lysaght. He has left in our house a most cheerful and pleasing memory, as a good, pleasant, brisk fellow with good health and brains, and who enjoys himself and makes other people happy. I am glad he gave you a good report of our surroundings and way of life; but I knew he would, for I believe he had a glorious time--and gave one.[78] I am on fair terms with the two Treaty officials, though all such intimacies are precarious; with the consuls, I need not say, my position is deplorable. The President (Herr Emil Schmidt) is a rather dreamy man, whom I like. Lloyd, Graham and I go to breakfast with him to-morrow; the next day the whole party of us lunch on the _Curaçoa_ and go in the evening to a _Bierabend_ at Dr. Funk's. We are getting up a paper-chase for the following week with some of the young German clerks, and have in view a sort of child's party for grown-up persons with kissing games, etc., here at Vailima. Such is the gay scene in which we move. Now I have done something, though not as much as I wanted, to give you an idea of how we are getting on, and I am keenly conscious that there are other letters to do before the mail goes.--Yours ever, R. L. STEVENSON. TO J. M. BARRIE _Vailima, July 13, 1894._ MY DEAR BARRIE,--This is the last effort of an ulcerated conscience. I have been so long owing you a letter, I have heard so much of you, fresh from the press, from my mother and Graham Balfour, that I have to write a letter no later than to-day, or perish in my shame. But the deuce of it is, my dear fellow, that you write such a very good letter that I am ashamed to exhibit myself before my junior (which you are, after all) in the light of the dreary idiot I feel. Understand that there will be nothing funny in the following pages. If I can manage to be rationally coherent, I shall be more than satisfied. In the first place, I have had the extreme satisfaction to be shown that photograph of your mother. It bears evident traces of the hand of an amateur. How is it that amateurs invariably take better photographs than professionals? I must qualify invariably. My own negatives have always represented a province of chaos and old night in which you might dimly perceive fleecy spots of twilight, representing nothing; so that, if I am right in supposing the portrait of your mother to be yours, I must salute you as my superior. Is that your mother's breakfast? Or is it only afternoon tea? If the first, do let me recommend to Mrs. Barrie to add an egg to her ordinary. Which, if you please, I will ask her to eat to the honour of her son, and I am sure she will live much longer for it, to enjoy his fresh successes. I never in my life saw anything more deliciously characteristic. I declare I can hear her speak. I wonder my mother could resist the temptation of your proposed visit to Kirriemuir, which it was like your kindness to propose. By the way, I was twice in Kirriemuir, I believe in the year '71, when I was going on a visit to Glenogil. It was Kirriemuir, was it not? I have a distinct recollection of an inn at the end--I think the upper end--of an irregular open place or square, in which I always see your characters evolve. But, indeed, I did not pay much attention; being all bent upon my visit to a shooting-box, where I should fish a real trout-stream, and I believe preserved. I did, too, and it was a charming stream, clear as crystal, without a trace of peat--a strange thing in Scotland--and alive with trout; the name of it I cannot remember, it was something like the Queen's River, and in some hazy way connected with memories of Mary Queen of Scots. It formed an epoch in my life, being the end of all my trout-fishing. I had always been accustomed to pause and very laboriously to kill every fish as I took it. But in the Queen's River I took so good a basket that I forgot these niceties; and when I sat down, in a hard rain shower, under a bank, to take my sandwiches and sherry, lo! and behold, there was the basketful of trouts still kicking in their agony. I had a very unpleasant conversation with my conscience. All that afternoon I persevered in fishing, brought home my basket in triumph, and sometime that night, "in the wee sma' hours ayont the twal," I finally forswore the gentle craft of fishing. I dare say your local knowledge may identify this historic river; I wish it could go farther and identify also that particular Free kirk in which I sat and groaned on Sunday. While my hand is in I must tell you a story. At that antique epoch you must not fall into the vulgar error that I was myself ancient. I was, on the contrary, very young, very green, and (what you will appreciate, Mr. Barrie) very shy. There came one day to lunch at the house two very formidable old ladies--or one very formidable, and the other what you please--answering to the honoured and historic name of the Miss C---- A----'s of Balnamoon. At table I was exceedingly funny, and entertained the company with tales of geese and bubbly-jocks. I was great in the expression of my terror for these bipeds, and suddenly this horrid, severe, and eminently matronly old lady put up a pair of gold eye-glasses, looked at me awhile in silence, and pronounced in a clangorous voice her verdict. "You give me very much the effect of a coward, Mr. Stevenson!" I had very nearly left two vices behind me at Glenogil--fishing and jesting at table. And of one thing you may be very sure, my lips were no more opened at that meal. _July 29th._--No, Barrie, 'tis in vain they try to alarm me with their bulletins. No doubt, you're ill, and unco ill, I believe; but I have been so often in the same case that I know pleurisy and pneumonia are in vain against Scotsmen who can write. (I once could.) You cannot imagine probably how near me this common calamity brings you. _Ce que j'ai toussé dans ma vie!_ How often and how long have I been on the rack at night and learned to appreciate that noble passage in the Psalms when somebody or other is said to be more set on something than they "who dig for hid treasures--yea, than those who long for the morning"--for all the world, as you have been racked and you have longed. Keep your heart up, and you'll do. Tell that to your mother, if you are still in any danger or suffering. And by the way, if you are at all like me--and I tell myself you are very like me--be sure there is only one thing good for you, and that is the sea in hot climates. Mount, sir, into "a little frigot" of 5000 tons or so, and steer peremptorily for the tropics; and what if the ancient mariner, who guides your frigot, should startle the silence of the ocean with the cry of land ho!--say, when the day is dawning--and you should see the turquoise mountain tops of Upolu coming hand over fist above the horizon? Mr. Barrie, sir, 'tis then there would be larks! And though I cannot be certain that our climate would suit you (for it does not suit some), I am sure as death the voyage would do you good--would do you _Best_--and if Samoa didn't do, you needn't stay beyond the month, and I should have had another pleasure in my life, which is a serious consideration for me. I take this as the hand of the Lord preparing your way to Vailima--in the desert, certainly--in the desert of Cough and by the ghoul-haunted woodland of Fever--but whither that way points there can be no question--and there will be a meeting of the twa Hoasting Scots Makers in spite of fate, fortune and the Devil. _Absit omen!_ My dear Barrie, I am a little in the dark about this new work of yours:[79] what is to become of me afterwards? You say carefully--methought anxiously--that I was no longer me when I grew up? I cannot bear this suspense: what is it? It's no forgery? And AM I HANGIT? These are the elements of a very pretty lawsuit which you had better come to Samoa to compromise. I am enjoying a great pleasure that I had long looked forward to, reading Orme's _History of Indostan_; I had been looking out for it everywhere; but at last, in four volumes, large quarto, beautiful type and page, and with a delectable set of maps and plans, and all the names of the places wrongly spelled--it came to Samoa, little Barrie. I tell you frankly, you had better come soon. I am sair failed a'ready; and what I may be if you continue to dally, I dread to conceive. I may be speechless; already, or at least for a month or so, I'm little better than a teetoller--I beg pardon, a teetotaller. It is not exactly physical, for I am in good health, working four or five hours a day in my plantation, and intending to ride a paper-chase next Sunday--ay, man, that's a fact, and I havena had the hert to breathe it to my mother yet--the obligation's poleetical, for I am trying every means to live well with my German neighbours--and, O Barrie, but it's no easy!... To be sure, there are many exceptions. And the whole of the above must be regarded as private--strictly private. Breathe it not in Kirriemuir: tell it not to the daughters of Dundee! What a nice extract this would make for the daily papers! and how it would facilitate my position here! _August 5th._--This is Sunday, the Lord's Day. "The hour of attack approaches." And it is a singular consideration what I risk; I may yet be the subject of a tract, and a good tract too--such as one which I remember reading with recreant awe and rising hair in my youth, of a boy who was a very good boy, and went to Sunday Schule, and one day kipped from it, and went and actually bathed, and was dashed over a waterfall, and he was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. A dangerous trade, that, and one that I have to practise. I'll put in a word when I get home again, to tell you whether I'm killed or not. "Accident in the (Paper) Hunting Field: death of a notorious author. We deeply regret to announce the death of the most unpopular man in Samoa, who broke his neck, at the descent of Magiagi, from the misconduct of his little raving lunatic of an old beast of a pony. It is proposed to commemorate the incident by the erection of a suitable pile. The design (by our local architect, Mr. Walker) is highly artificial, with a rich and voluminous Crockett at each corner, a small but impervious Barrièer at the entrance, an arch at the top, an Archer of a pleasing but solid character at the bottom; the colour will be genuine William-Black; and Lang, lang may the ladies sit wi' their fans in their hands." Well, well, they may sit as they sat for me, and little they'll reck, the ungrateful jauds! Muckle they cared about Tusitala when they had him! But now ye can see the difference; now leddies, ye can repent, when ower late, o' your former cauldness and what ye'll perhaps allow me to ca' your _tepeedity_! He was beautiful as the day, but his day is done! And perhaps, as he was maybe gettin' a wee thing fly-blown, it's nane too shüne. _Monday, August 6th._--Well, sir, I have escaped the dangerous conjunction of the widow's only son and the Sabbath Day. We had a most enjoyable time, and Lloyd and I were 3 and 4 to arrive; I will not tell here what interval had elapsed between our arrival and the arrival of 1 and 2; the question, sir, is otiose and malign; it deserves, it shall have no answer. And now without further delay to the main purpose of this hasty note. We received and we have already in fact distributed the gorgeous fahbrics of Kirriemuir. Whether from the splendour of the robes themselves, or from the direct nature of the compliments with which you had directed us to accompany the presentations, one young lady blushed as she received the proofs of your munificence.... Bad ink, and the dregs of it at that, but the heart in the right place. Still very cordially interested in my Barrie and wishing him well through his sickness, which is of the body, and long defended from mine, which is of the head, and by the impolite might be described as idiocy. The whole head is useless, and the whole sitting part painful: reason, the recent Paper Chase. There was racing and chasing in Vailele plantation, And vastly we enjoyed it, But, alas! for the state of my foundation, For it wholly has destroyed it. Come, my mind is looking up. The above is wholly impromptu.--On oath, TUSITALA. TO SIDNEY COLVIN The missionary view of the Sunday paper-chase, with an account of Stevenson's apologies to the ladies and gentlemen of the mission, have been printed by Mr. W. E. Clarke in the Chronicle of the London Missionary Society for April and May 1908. _[Vailima] Aug. 7th, 1894._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--This is to inform you, sir, that on Sunday last (and this is Tuesday) I attained my ideal here, and we had a paper-chase in Vailele Plantation, about 15 miles, I take it, from us; and it was all that could be wished. It is really better fun than following the hounds, since you have to be your own hound, and a precious bad hound I was, following every false scent on the whole course to the bitter end; but I came in 3rd at the last on my little Jack, who stuck to it gallantly, and awoke the praises of some discriminating persons. (5 + 7 + 2-1/2 = 14-1/2 miles; yes, that is the count.) We had quite the old sensations of exhilaration, discovery, an appeal to a savage instinct; and I felt myself about 17 again, a pleasant experience. However, it was on the Sabbath Day, and I am now a pariah among the English, as if I needed any increment of unpopularity. I must not go again; it gives so much unnecessary tribulation to poor people, and, sure, we don't want to make tribulation. I have been forbidden to work, and have been instead doing my two or three hours in the plantation every morning. I only wish somebody would pay me £10 a day for taking care of cacao, and I could leave literature to others. Certainly, if I have plenty of exercise, and no work, I feel much better; but there is Biles the butcher! him we have always with us. I do not much like novels, I begin to think, but I am enjoying exceedingly Orme's _History of Hindostan_, a lovely book in its way, in large quarto, with a quantity of maps, and written in a very lively and solid eighteenth century way, never picturesque except by accident and from a kind of conviction, and a fine sense of order. No historian I have ever read is so minute; yet he never gives you a word about the people; his interest is entirely limited in the concatenation of events, into which he goes with a lucid, almost superhuman, and wholly ghostly gusto. "By the ghost of a mathematician" the book might be announced. A very brave, honest book. Your letter to hand. Fact is, I don't like the picter.[80] O, it's a good picture, but if you _ask_ me, you know, I believe, stoutly believe, that mankind, including you, are going mad. I am not in the midst with the other frenzy dancers, so I don't catch it wholly; and when you show me a thing--and ask me, don't you know--Well, well! Glad to get so good an account of the _Amateur Emigrant_. Talking of which, I am strong for making a volume out of selections from the South Sea letters; I read over again the King of Apemama, and it is good in spite of your teeth, and a real curiosity, a thing that can never be seen again, and the group is annexed and Tembinoka dead. I wonder, couldn't you send out to me the _first_ five Butaritari letters and the Low Archipelago ones (both of which I have lost or mislaid) and I can chop out a perfectly fair volume of what I wish to be preserved. It can keep for the last of the series. _Travels and Excursions_, vol. II. Should it not include a paper on S. F. from the Mag. of Art? The A. E., the New Pacific capital, the Old ditto. _Silver._ _Squat._ This would give all my works on the States; and though it ain't very good, it's not so very bad. _Travels and Excursions_, vol. III., to be these resuscitated letters--_Miscellanies_, vol. II.--_comme vous voudrez, cher monsieur!_ _Monday, Aug. 13th._--I have a sudden call to go up the coast and must hurry up with my information. There has suddenly come to our naval commanders the need of action, they're away up the coast bombarding the Atua rebels. All morning on Saturday the sound of the bombardment of Luatuanu'u kept us uneasy. To-day again the big guns have been sounding further along the coast. One delicious circumstance must not be forgotten. Our blessed President of the Council--a kind of hoary-headed urchin, with the dim, timid eyes of extreme childhood and a kind of beautiful simplicity that endears him to me beyond words--has taken the head of the army--honour to him for it, for his place is really there--and gone up the coast in the congenial company of his housekeeper, a woman coming on for sixty with whom he takes his walks abroad in the morning in his shirt-sleeves, whom he reads to at night (in a kind of Popular History of Germany) in the silence of the Presidential mansion, and with whom (and a couple of camp stools) he walked out last Sunday to behold the paper-chase. I cannot tell you how taken I am with this exploit of the President's and the housekeeper's. It is like Don Quixote, but infinitely superior. If I could only do it without offence, what a subject it would make! To-morrow morning early I am off up the coast myself. Therefore you must allow me to break off here without further ceremony.--Yours ever, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO DR. BAKEWELL The following is to a physician in Australia. _Vailima, August 7, 1894._ DEAR DR. BAKEWELL,--I am not more than human. I am more human than is wholly convenient, and your anecdote was welcome. What you say about _unwilling work_, my dear sir, is a consideration always present with me, and yet not easy to give its due weight to. You grow gradually into a certain income; without spending a penny more, with the same sense of restriction as before when you painfully scraped two hundred a year together, you find you have spent, and you cannot well stop spending, a far larger sum; and this expense can only be supported by a certain production. However, I am off work this month, and occupy myself instead in weeding my cacao, paper-chases, and the like. I may tell you, my average of work in favourable circumstances is far greater than you suppose: from six o'clock till eleven at latest,[81] and often till twelve, and again in the afternoon from two to four. My hand is quite destroyed, as you may perceive, to-day to a really unusual extent. I can sometimes write a decent fist still; but I have just returned with my arms all stung from three hours' work in the cacao.--Yours, etc., R. L. S. TO JAMES PAYN _Vailima, Upolu, Samoa [August 11, 1894]._ MY DEAR JAMES PAYN,--I hear from Lang that you are unwell, and it reminds me of two circumstances: First, that it is a very long time since you had the exquisite pleasure of hearing from me; and second, that I have been very often unwell myself and sometimes had to thank you for a grateful anodyne. They are not good, the circumstances, to write an anodyne letter. The hills and my house at less than (boom) a minute's interval quake with thunder; and though I cannot hear that part of it, shells are falling thick into the fort of Luatuanu'u (boom). It is my friends of the _Curaçoa_, the _Falke_, and the _Bussard_ bombarding (after all these--boom--months) the rebels of Atua. (Boom-boom.) It is most distracting in itself; and the thought of the poor devils in their fort (boom) with their bits of rifles far from pleasant. (Boom-boom.) You can see how quick it goes, and I'll say no more about Mr. Bow-wow, only you must understand the perpetual accompaniment of this discomfortable sound, and make allowances for the value of my copy. It is odd, though, I can well remember, when the Franco-Prussian war began, and I was in Eilean Earraid, far enough from the sound of the loudest cannonade, I could _hear_ the shots fired, and I felt the pang in my breast of a man struck. It was sometimes so distressing, so instant, that I lay in the heather on the top of the island, with my face hid, kicking my heels for agony. And now, when I can hear the actual concussion of the air and hills, when I _know_ personally the people who stand exposed to it, I am able to go on _taut bien que mal_ with a letter to James Payn! The blessings of age, though mighty small, are tangible. I have heard a great deal of them since I came into the world, and now that I begin to taste of them--Well! But this is one, that people do get cured of the excess of sensibility; and I had as lief these people were shot at as myself--or almost, for then I should have some of the fun, such as it is. You are to conceive me, then, sitting in my little gallery room, shaken by these continual spasms of cannon, and with my eye more or less singly fixed on the imaginary figure of my dear James Payn. I try to see him in bed; no go. I see him instead jumping up in his room in Waterloo Place (where _ex hypothesi_ he is not), sitting on the table, drawing out a very black briar-root pipe, and beginning to talk to a slim and ill-dressed visitor in a voice that is good to hear and with a smile that is pleasant to see. (After a little more than half an hour, the voice that was ill to hear has ceased, the cannonade is over.) And I am thinking how I can get an answering smile wafted over so many leagues of land and water, and can find no way. I have always been a great visitor of the sick; and one of the sick I visited was W. E. Henley, which did not make very tedious visits, so I'll not get off much purgatory for them. That was in the Edinburgh Infirmary, the old one, the true one, with Georgius Secundus standing and pointing his toe in a niche of the façade; and a mighty fine building it was! And I remember one winter's afternoon, in that place of misery, that Henley and I chanced to fall in talk about James Payn himself. I am wishing you could have heard that talk! I think that would make you smile. We had mixed you up with John Payne, for one thing, and stood amazed at your extraordinary, even painful, versatility; and for another, we found ourselves each students so well prepared for examinations on the novels of the real Mackay. Perhaps, after all, this is worth something in life--to have given so much pleasure to a pair so different in every way as were Henley and I, and to be talked of with so much interest by two such (beg pardon) clever lads! The cheerful Lang has neglected to tell me what is the matter with you; so, I'm sorry to say, I am cut off from all the customary consolations. I can't say, "Think how much worse it would be if you had a broken leg!" when you may have the crushing repartee up your sleeve, "But it is my leg that is broken." This is a pity. But there are consolations. You are an Englishman (I believe); you are a man of letters; you have never been made C.B.; you hair was not red; you have played cribbage and whist; you did not play either the fiddle or the banjo; you were never an æsthete; you never contributed to ----'s Journal; your name is not Jabez Balfour; you are totally unconnected with the Army and Navy departments; I understand you to have lived within your income--why, cheer up! here are many legitimate causes of congratulation. I seem to be writing an obituary notice. _Absit omen!_ But I feel very sure that these considerations will have done you more good than medicine. By the by, did you ever play piquet? I have fallen a victim to this debilitating game. It is supposed to be scientific; God save the mark, what self-deceivers men are! It is distinctly less so than cribbage. But how fascinating! There is such material opulence about it, such vast ambitions may be realised--and are not; it may be called the Monte Cristo of games. And the thrill with which you take five cards partakes of the nature of lust--and you draw four sevens and a nine, and the seven and nine of a suit that you discarded, and O! but the world is a desert! You may see traces of discouragement in my letter: all due to piquet! There has been a disastrous turn of the luck against me; a month or two ago I was two thousand ahead; now, and for a week back, I have been anything from four thousand eight hundred to five thousand two hundred astern. I have a sixième, my beast of a partner has a septième; and if I have three aces, three kings, three queens, and three knaves (excuse the slight exaggeration), the devil holds quatorze of tens!--I remain, my dear James Payn, your sincere and obliged friend--old friend let me say, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO MISS MIDDLETON A letter from the lady to whom this is addressed, and who had been a friend of the Stevenson family in Edinburgh, had called up some memories of a Skye terrier, Jura, of whom readers have heard something already. _Vailima, Samoa, September 9, 1894._ DEAR MISS MIDDLETON,--Your letter has been like the drawing up of a curtain. Of course I remember you very well, and the Skye terrier to which you refer--a heavy, dull, fatted, graceless creature he grew up to be--was my own particular pet. It may amuse you, perhaps, as much as "The Inn" amused me, if I tell you what made this dog particularly mine. My father was the natural god of all the dogs in our house, and poor Jura took to him of course. Jura was stolen, and kept in prison somewhere for more than a week, as I remember. When he came back Smeoroch had come and taken my father's heart from him. He took his stand like a man, and positively never spoke to my father again from that day until the day of his death. It was the only sign of character he ever showed. I took him up to my room and to be my dog in consequence, partly because I was sorry for him, and partly because I admired his dignity in misfortune. With best regards and thanks for having reminded me of so many pleasant days, old acquaintances, dead friends, and--what is perhaps as pathetic as any of them--dead dogs, I remain, yours truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO A. CONAN DOYLE The following refers to the papers originally contributed by various writers to Mr. Jerome's periodical The Idler, under the title _My First Book_, and afterwards republished in a volume. The references towards the end are to the illustrations in the pages of The Idler. _Vailima, Samoa, September 9, 1894._ MY DEAR CONAN DOYLE,--If you found anything to entertain you in my _Treasure Island_ article, it may amuse you to know that you owe it entirely to yourself. _Your_ "First Book" was by some accident read aloud one night in my Baronial 'All. I was consumedly amused by it, so was the whole family, and we proceeded to hunt up back Idlers and read the whole series. It is a rattling good series, even people whom you would not expect came in quite the proper tone--Miss Braddon, for instance, who was really one of the best where all are good--or all but one!... In short, I fell in love with "The First Book" series, and determined that it should be all our first books, and that I could not hold back where the white plume of Conan Doyle waved gallantly in the front. I hope they will republish them, though it's a grievous thought to me that that effigy in the German cap--likewise the other effigy of the noisome old man with the long hair, telling indelicate stories to a couple of deformed negresses in a rancid shanty full of wreckage--should be perpetuated. I may seem to speak in pleasantry--it is only a seeming--that German cap, sir, would be found, when I come to die, imprinted on my heart. Enough--my heart is too full. Adieu.--Yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. (in a German cap, damn 'em!). TO SIDNEY COLVIN [_Vailima, September 1894._] MY DEAR COLVIN,--This must be a very measly letter. I have been trying hard to get along with _St. Ives_. I should now lay it aside for a year and I dare say I should make something of it after all. Instead of that, I have to kick against the pricks, and break myself, and spoil the book, if there were anything to spoil, which I am far from saying. I'm as sick of the thing as ever any one can be; it's a rudderless hulk; it's a pagoda, and you can just feel--or I can feel--that it might have been a pleasant story, if it had been only blessed at baptism. Our politics have gone on fairly well, but the result is still doubtful. _Sept. 10th._--I know I have something else to say to you, but unfortunately I awoke this morning with colly-wobbles, and had to take a small dose of laudanum with the usual consequences of dry throat, intoxicated legs, partial madness and total imbecility; and for the life of me I cannot remember what it is. I have likewise mislaid your letter amongst the accumulations on my table, not that there was anything in it. Altogether I am in a poor state. I forgot to tell Baxter that the dummy had turned up and is a fine, personable-looking volume and very good reading. Please communicate this to him. I have just remembered an incident that I really must not let pass. You have heard a great deal more than you wanted about our political prisoners. Well, one day, about a fortnight ago, the last of them was set free--Old Poè, whom I think I must have mentioned to you, the father-in-law of my cook, was one that I had had a great deal of trouble with. I had taken the doctor to see him, got him out on sick leave, and when he was put back again gave bail for him. I must not forget that my wife ran away with him out of the prison on the doctor's orders and with the complicity of our friend the gaoler, who really and truly got the sack for the exploit. As soon as he was finally liberated, Poè called a meeting of his fellow-prisoners. All Sunday they were debating what they were to do, and on Monday morning I got an obscure hint from Talolo that I must expect visitors during the day who were coming to consult me. These consultations I am now very well used to, and seeing first, that I generally don't know what to advise, and second that they sometimes don't take my advice--though in some notable cases they have taken it, generally to my own wonder with pretty good results--I am not very fond of these calls. They minister to a sense of dignity, but not peace of mind, and consume interminable time, always in the morning too, when I can't afford it. However, this was to be a new sort of consultation. Up came Poè and some eight other chiefs, squatted in a big circle around the old dining-room floor, now the smoking-room. And the family, being represented by Lloyd, Graham, Belle, Austin and myself, proceeded to exchange the necessary courtesies. Then their talking man began. He said that they had been in prison, that I had always taken an interest in them, that they had now been set at liberty without condition, whereas some of the other chiefs who had been liberated before them were still under bond to work upon the roads, and that this had set them considering what they might do to testify their gratitude. They had therefore agreed to work upon my road as a free gift. They went on to explain that it was only to be on my road, on the branch that joins my house with the public way. Now I was very much gratified at this compliment, although (to one used to natives) it seemed rather a hollow one. It meant only that I should have to lay out a good deal of money on tools and food and to give wages under the guise of presents to some workmen who were most of them old and in ill-health. Conceive how much I was surprised and touched when I heard the whole scheme explained to me. They were to return to their provinces, and collect their families; some of the young men were to live in Apia with a boat, and ply up and down the coast to A'ana and Atua (our own Tuamasaga being quite drained of resources) in order to supply the working squad with food. Tools they did ask for, but it was especially mentioned that I was to make no presents. In short, the whole of this little "presentation" to me had been planned with a good deal more consideration than goes usually with a native campaign. [I sat on the opposite side of the circle to the talking man. His face was quite calm and high-bred as he went through the usual Samoan expressions of politeness and compliment, but when he came on to the object of their visit, on their love and gratitude to Tusitala, how his name was always in their prayers, and his goodness to them when they had no other friend, was their most cherished memory, he warmed up to real, burning, genuine feeling. I had never seen the Samoan mask of reserve laid aside before, and it touched me more than anything else. A.M.] This morning as ever was, bright and early up came the whole gang of them, a lot of sturdy, common-looking lads they seemed to be for the most part, and fell to on my new road. Old Poè was in the highest of good spirits, and looked better in health than he has done any time in two years, being positively rejuvenated by the success of his scheme. He jested as he served out the new tools, and I am sorry to say damned the Government up hill and down dale, probably with a view to show off his position as a friend of the family before his workboys. Now, whether or not their impulse will last them through the road does not matter to me one hair. It is the fact that they have attempted it, that they have volunteered and are now really trying to execute a thing that was never before heard of in Samoa. Think of it! It is road-making--the most fruitful cause (after taxes) of all rebellions in Samoa, a thing to which they could not be wiled with money nor driven by punishment. It does give me a sense of having done something in Samoa after all. Now there's one long story for you about "my blacks."--Yours ever, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO CHARLES BAXTER The following was written on hearing of the death of his friend's father. [_Vailima, September 1894._] MY DEAR CHARLES,--... Well, there is no more Edmund Baxter now; and I think I may say I know how you feel. He was one of the best, the kindest, and the most genial men I ever knew. I shall always remember his brisk, cordial ways and the essential goodness which he showed me whenever we met with gratitude. And the always is such a little while now! He is another of the landmarks gone; when it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue; and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honour. It is human at least, if not divine. And these deaths make me think of it with an ever greater readiness. Strange that you should be beginning a new life, when I, who am a little your junior, am thinking of the end of mine. But I have had hard lines; I have been so long waiting for death, I have unwrapped my thoughts from about life so long, that I have not a filament left to hold by; I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius, that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption, and think it long of coming. Literally, no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun. R. L. S. TO R. A. M. STEVENSON Stevenson had received from his cousin a letter announcing, among other things, the birth of a son to the writer, and rambling suggestively, as may be guessed from the following reply, over many disconnected themes: the ethnology of Scotland, paternity and heredity, civilisation _versus_ primitive customs and instincts, the story of their own descent, the method of writing in collaboration, education, Christianity and sex, the religion of conduct, anarchism, etc.; all which matters are here discursively touched on. "Old Skene" is, of course, the distinguished Scottish antiquarian and historian, William Forbes Skene, in whose firm (Skene & Edwards, W.S.) Stevenson had for a time served irregularly enough as an unpaid clerk. [_Vailima, September 1894._] DEAR BOB,--You are in error about the Picts. They were a Gaelic race, spoke a Celtic tongue, and we have no evidence that I know of that they were blacker than other Celts. The Balfours, I take it, were plainly Celts; their name shows it--the "cold croft," it means; so does their country. Where the _black_ Scotch come from nobody knows; but I recognise with you the fact that the whole of Britain is rapidly and progressively becoming more pigmented; already in one man's life I can decidedly trace a difference in the children about a school door. But colour is not an essential part of a man or a race. Take my Polynesians, an Asiatic people probably from the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf. They range through any amount of shades, from the burnt hue of the Low Archipelago islander, which seems half negro, to the "bleached" pretty women of the Marquesas (close by on the map), who come out for a festival no darker than an Italian; their colour seems to vary directly with the degree of exposure to the sun. And, as with negroes, the babes are born white; only it should seem a _little sack_ of pigment at the lower part of the spine, which presently spreads over the whole field. Very puzzling. But to return. The Picts furnish to-day perhaps a third of the population of Scotland, say another third for Scots and Britons, and the third for Norse and Angles is a bad third. Edinburgh was a Pictish place. But the fact is, we don't know their frontiers. Tell some of your journalist friends with a good style to popularise old Skene; or say your prayers, and read him for yourself; he was a Great Historian, and I was his blessed clerk, and did not know it; and you will not be in a state of grace about the Picts till you have studied him. J. Horne Stevenson (do you know him?) is working this up with me, and the fact is--it's not interesting to the public--but it's interesting, and very interesting, in itself, and just now very embarrassing--this rural parish supplied Glasgow with such a quantity of Stevensons in the beginning of last century! There is just a link wanting; and we might be able to go back to the eleventh century, always undistinguished, but clearly traceable. When I say just a link, I guess I may be taken to mean a dozen. What a singular thing is this undistinguished perpetuation of a family throughout the centuries, and the sudden bursting forth of character and capacity that began with our grandfather! But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic--or mænadic--foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me; and "I could wish my days to be bound each to each" by the same open-mouthed wonder. They _are_ anyway, and whether I wish it or not. I remember very well your attitude to life, this conventional surface of it. You had none of that curiosity for the social stage directions, the trivial _ficelles_ of the business; it is simian, but that is how the wild youth of man is captured; you wouldn't imitate, hence you kept free--a wild dog, outside the kennel--and came dam near starving for your pains. The key to the business is of course the belly; difficult as it is to keep that in view in the zone of three miraculous meals a day in which we were brought up. Civilisation has become reflex with us; you might think that hunger was the name of the best sauce; but hunger to the cold solitary under a bush of a rainy night is the name of something quite different. I defend civilisation for the thing it is, for the thing it has _come_ to be, the standpoint of a real old Tory. My ideal would be the Female Clan. But how can you turn these crowding dumb multitudes _back?_ They don't do anything _because_; they do things, write able articles, stitch shoes, dig, from the purely simian impulse. Go and reason with monkeys! No, I am right about Jean Lillie. Jean Lillie, our double great-grandmother, the daughter of David Lillie, sometime Deacon of the Wrights, married, first, Alan Stevenson, who died May 26, 1774, "at Santt Kittes of a fiver," by whom she had Robert Stevenson, born 8th June 1772; and, second, in May or June 1787, Thomas Smith, a widower, and already the father of our grandmother. This improbable double connection always tends to confuse a student of the family, Thomas Smith being doubly our great-grandfather. I looked on the perpetuation of our honoured name with veneration. My mother collared one of the photos, of course; the other is stuck up on my wall as the chief of our sept. Do you know any of the Gaelic-Celtic sharps? you might ask what the name means. It puzzles me. I find a _M'Stein_ and a _MacStephane_; and our own great-grandfather always called himself Steenson, though he wrote it Stevenson. There are at least three _places_ called Stevenson--_Stevenson_ in Cunningham, _Stevenson_ in Peebles, and _Stevenson_ in Haddington. And it was not the Celtic trick, I understand, to call places after people. I am going to write to Sir Herbert Maxwell about the name, but you might find some one. Get the Anglo-Saxon heresy out of your head; they superimposed their language, they scarce modified the race; only in Berwickshire and Roxburgh have they very largely affected the place names. The Scandinavians did much more to Scotland than the Angles. The Saxons didn't come. Enough of this sham antiquarianism. Yes, it is in the matter of the book[82] of course, that collaboration shows; as for the manner, it is superficially all mine in the sense that the last copy is all in my hand. Lloyd did not even put pen to paper in the Paris scenes or the Barbizon scene; it was no good; he wrote and often rewrote all the rest; I had the best service from him on the character of Nares. You see, we had been just meeting the man, and his memory was full of the man's words and ways. And Lloyd is an impressionist, pure and simple. The great difficulty of collaboration is that you can't explain what you mean. I know what kind of effect I mean a character to give--what kind of _tache_ he is to make; but how am I to tell my collaborator in words? Hence it was necessary to say, "Make him So-and-so"; and this was all right for Nares and Pinkerton and Loudon Dodd, whom we both knew, but for Bellairs, for instance--a man with whom I passed ten minutes fifteen years ago--what was I to say? and what could Lloyd do? I, as a personal artist, can begin a character with only a haze in my head, but how if I have to translate the haze into words before I begin? In our manner of collaboration (which I think the only possible--I mean that of one person being responsible, and giving the _coup de pouce_ to every part of the work) I was spared the obviously hopeless business of trying to explain to my collaborator what _style_ I wished a passage to be treated in. These are the times that illustrate to a man the inadequacy of spoken language. Now--to be just to written language--I can (or could) find a language for my every mood, but how could I _tell_ any one beforehand what this effect was to be, which it would take every art that I possessed, and hours and hours of deliberate labour and selection and rejection, to produce? These are the impossibilities of collaboration. Its immediate advantage is to focus two minds together on the stuff, and to produce in consequence an extraordinarily greater richness of purview, consideration, and invention. The hardest chapter of all was "Cross Questions and Crooked Answers." You would not believe what that cost us before it assumed the least unity and colour. Lloyd wrote it at least thrice, and I at least five times--this is from memory. And was that last chapter worth the trouble it cost? Alas, that I should ask the question! Two classes of men--the artist and the educationalist--are sworn, on soul and conscience, not to ask it. You get an ordinary, grinning, red-headed boy, and you have to educate him. Faith supports you; you give your valuable hours, the boy does not seem to profit, but that way your duty lies, for which you are paid, and you must persevere. Education has always seemed to me one of the few possible and dignified ways of life. A sailor, a shepherd, a schoolmaster--to a less degree, a soldier--and (I don't know why, upon my soul, except as a sort of schoolmaster's unofficial assistant, and a kind of acrobat in tights) an artist, almost exhaust the category. If I had to begin again--I know not--_si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait_ ... I know not at all--I believe I should try to honour Sex more religiously. The worst of our education is that Christianity does not recognise and hallow Sex. It looks askance at it, over its shoulder, oppressed as it is by reminiscences of hermits and Asiatic self-tortures. It is a terrible hiatus in our modern religions that they cannot see and make venerable that which they ought to see first and hallow most. Well, it is so; I cannot be wiser than my generation. But no doubt there is something great in the half-success that has attended the effort of turning into an emotional religion, Bald Conduct, without any appeal, or almost none, to the figurative, mysterious, and constitutive facts of life. Not that conduct is not constitutive, but dear! it's dreary! On the whole, conduct is better dealt with on the cast-iron "gentleman" and duty formula, with as little fervour and poetry as possible; stoical and short.... There is a new something or other in the wind, which exercises me hugely: anarchy,--I mean, anarchism. People who (for pity's sake) commit dastardly murders very basely, die like saints, and leave beautiful letters behind 'em (did you see Vaillant to his daughter? it was the New Testament over again); people whose conduct is inexplicable to me, and yet their spiritual life higher than that of most. This is just what the early Christians must have seemed to the Romans. Is this, then, a new _drive_[83] among the monkeys? Mind you, Bob, if they go on being martyred a few years more, the gross, dull, not unkindly bourgeois may get tired or ashamed or afraid of going on martyring; and the anarchists come out at the top just like the early Christians. That is, of course, they will step into power as a _personnel_, but God knows what they may believe when they come to do so; it can't be stranger or more improbable than what Christianity had come to be by the same time. Your letter was easily read, the pagination presented no difficulty, and I read it with much edification and gusto. To look back, and to stereotype one bygone humour--what a hopeless thing! The mind runs ever in a thousand eddies like a river between cliffs. You (the ego) are always spinning round in it, east, west, north, and south. You are twenty years old, and forty, and five, and the next moment you are freezing at an imaginary eighty; you are never the plain forty-four that you should be by dates. (The most philosophical language is the Gaelic, which has _no present tense_--and the most useless.) How, then, to choose some former age, and stick there? R. L. S. TO SIR HERBERT MAXWELL _Vailima, Samoa, September 10, 1894._ DEAR SIR HERBERT MAXWELL,--I am emboldened by reading your very interesting Rhind Lectures to put to you a question: What is my name, Stevenson? I find it in the forms Stevinetoun, Stevensoune, Stevensonne, Stenesone, Stewinsoune, M'Stein, and MacStephane. My family, and (as far as I can gather) the majority of the inglorious clan, hailed from the borders of Cunningham and Renfrew, and the upper waters of the Clyde. In the Barony of Bothwell was the seat of the laird Stevenson of Stevenson; but, as of course you know, there is a parish in Cunningham and places in Peebles and Haddington bearing the same name. If you can at all help me, you will render me a real service which I wish I could think of some manner to repay.--Believe me, yours truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _P.S._--I should have added that I have perfect evidence before me that (for some obscure reason) Stevenson was a favourite alias with the M'Gregors. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _Vailima, Samoa, October 6th, 1894._ MY DEAR COLVIN,--We have had quite an interesting month and mostly in consideration of that road which I think I told you was about to be made. It was made without a hitch, though I confess I was considerably surprised. When they got through, I wrote a speech to them, sent it down to a Missionary to be translated, and invited the lot to a feast. I thought a good deal of this feast. The occasion was really interesting. I wanted to pitch it in hot. And I wished to have as many influential witnesses present as possible. Well, as it drew towards the day I had nothing but refusals. Everybody supposed it was to be a political occasion, that I had made a hive of rebels up here, and was going to push for new hostilities. The Amanuensis has been ill, and after the above trial petered out. I must return to my own, lone Waverley. The captain refused, telling me why; and at last I had to beat up for people almost with prayers. However, I got a good lot, as you will see by the accompanying newspaper report. The road contained this inscription, drawn up by the chiefs themselves: "THE ROAD OF GRATITUDE "Considering the great love of Tusitala in his loving care of us in our distress in the prison, we have therefore prepared a splendid gift. It shall never be muddy, it shall endure for ever, this road that we have dug." This the newspaper reporter could not give, not knowing any Samoan. The same reason explains his references to Seumanutafa's speech, which was not long and _was_ important, for it was a speech of courtesy and forgiveness to his former enemies. It was very much applauded. Secondly, it was not Poè, it was Mataaf[=a] (don't confuse with Mataafa) who spoke for the prisoners. Otherwise it is extremely correct. I beg your pardon for so much upon my aboriginals. Even you must sympathise with me in this unheard-of compliment, and my having been able to deliver so severe a sermon with acceptance. It remains a nice point of conscience what I should wish done in the matter. I think this meeting, its immediate results, and the terms of what I said to them, desirable to be known. It will do a little justice to me, who have not had too much justice done me. At the same time, to send this report to the papers is truly an act of self-advertisement, and I dislike the thought. Query, in a man who has been so much calumniated, is that not justifiable? I do not know; be my judge. Mankind is too complicated for me; even myself. Do I wish to advertise? I think I do, God help me! I have had hard times here, as every man must have who mixes up with public business; and I bemoan myself, knowing that all I have done has been in the interest of peace and good government; and having once delivered my mind, I would like it, I think, to be made public. But the other part of me _regimbs_.[84] I know I am at a climacteric for all men who live by their wits, so I do not despair. But the truth is I am pretty nearly useless at literature, and I will ask you to spare _St. Ives_ when it goes to you; it is a sort of _Count Robert of Paris_. But I hope rather a _Dombey and Son_, to be succeeded by _Our Mutual Friend_ and _Great Expectations_ and _A Tale of Two Cities_. No toil has been spared over the ungrateful canvas; and it _will not_ come together, and I must live, and my family. Were it not for my health, which made it impossible, I could not find it in my heart to forgive myself that I did not stick to an honest, commonplace trade when I was young, which might have now supported me during these ill years. But do not suppose me to be down in anything else; only, for the nonce, my skill deserts me, such as it is, or was. It was a very little dose of inspiration, and a pretty little trick of style, long lost, improved by the most heroic industry. So far, I have managed to please the journalists. But I am a fictitious article and have long known it. I am read by journalists, by my fellow-novelists, and by boys; with these, _incipit et explicit_ my vogue. Good thing anyway! for it seems to have sold the Edition. And I look forward confidently to an aftermath; I do not think my health can be so hugely improved, without some subsequent improvement in my brains. Though, of course, there is the possibility that literature is a morbid secretion, and abhors health! I do not think it is possible to have fewer illusions than I. I sometimes wish I had more. They are amusing. But I cannot take myself seriously as an artist; the limitations are so obvious. I did take myself seriously as a workman of old, but my practice has fallen off. I am now an idler and cumberer of the ground; it may be excused to me perhaps by twenty years of industry and ill-health, which have taken the cream off the milk. As I was writing this last sentence, I heard the strident rain drawing near across the forest, and by the time I was come to the word "cream" it burst upon my roof, and has since redoubled, and roared upon it. A very welcome change. All smells of the good wet earth, sweetly, with a kind of Highland touch; the crystal rods of the shower, as I look up, have drawn their criss-cross over everything; and a gentle and very welcome coolness comes up around me in little draughts, blessed draughts, not chilling, only equalising the temperature. Now the rain is off in this spot, but I hear it roaring still in the nigh neighbourhood--and that moment, I was driven from the verandah by random raindrops, spitting at me through the Japanese blinds. These are not tears with which the page is spotted! Now the windows stream, the roof reverberates. It is good; it answers something which is in my heart; I know not what; old memories of the wet moorland belike. Well, it has blown by again, and I am in my place once more, with an accompaniment of perpetual dripping on the verandah--and very much inclined for a chat. The exact subject I do not know! It will be bitter at least, and that is strange, for my attitude is essentially _not_ bitter, but I have come into these days when a man sees above all the seamy side, and I have dwelt some time in a small place where he has an opportunity of reading little motives that he would miss in the great world, and indeed, to-day, I am almost ready to call the world an error. Because? Because I have not drugged myself with successful work, and there are all kinds of trifles buzzing in my ear, unfriendly trifles, from the least to the--well, to the pretty big. All these that touch me are Pretty Big; and yet none touch me in the least, if rightly looked at, except the one eternal burthen to go on making an income for my family. That is rightly the root and ground of my ill. The jingling, tingling, damned mint sauce is the trouble always; and if I could find a place where I could lie down and give up for (say) two years, and allow the sainted public to support me, if it were a lunatic asylum, wouldn't I go, just! But we can't have both extremes at once, worse luck! I should like to put my savings into a proprietarian investment, and retire in the meanwhile into a communistic retreat, which is double-dealing. But you men with aries don't know how alas family weighs on a fellow's mind. I hear the article in next week's _Herald_ is to be a great affair, and all the officials who came to me the other day are to be attacked! This is the unpleasant side of being (without a salary) in public life; I will leave any one to judge if my speech was well intended, and calculated to do good. It was even daring--I assure you one of the chiefs looked like a fiend at my description of Samoan warfare. Your warning was not needed; we are all determined to _keep the peace_ and to _hold our peace_. I know, my dear fellow, how remote all this sounds! Kindly pardon your friend. I have my life to live here; these interests are for me immediate; and if I do not write of them, I might as soon not write at all. There is the difficulty in a distant correspondence. It is perhaps easy for me to enter into and understand your interests; I own it is difficult for you; but you must just wade through them for friendship's sake, and try to find tolerable what is vital for your friend. I cannot forbear challenging you to it, as to intellectual lists. It is the proof of intelligence, the proof of not being a barbarian, to be able to enter into something outside of oneself, something that does not touch one's next neighbour in the city omnibus. Good-bye, my lord. May your race continue and you flourish.--Yours ever, TUSITALA. TO ALISON CUNNINGHAM For a fuller account of the road-making affair here mentioned, see pp. 431, 462. _[Vailima] October 8th, 1894._ MY DEAR CUMMY,--So I hear you are ailing? Think shame to yoursell! So you think there is nothing better to be done with time than that? and be sure we can all do much ourselves to decide whether we are to be ill or well! like a man on the gymnastic bars. We are all pretty well. As for me, there is nothing the matter with me in the world, beyond the disgusting circumstance that I am not so young as once I was. Lloyd has a gymnastic machine, and practises upon it every morning for an hour: he is beginning to be a kind of young Samson. Austin grows fat and brown, and gets on not so ill with his lessons, and my mother is in great price. We are having knock-me-down weather for heat; I never remember it so hot before, and I fancy it means we are to have a hurricane again this year, I think; since we came here, we have not had a single gale of wind! The Pacific is but a child to the North Sea; but when she does get excited, and gets up and girds herself, she can do something good. We have had a very interesting business here. I helped the chiefs who were in prison; and when they were set free, what should they do but offer to make a part of my road for me out of gratitude? Well, I was ashamed to refuse, and the trumps dug my road for me, and put up this inscription on a board:-- "_Considering the great love of His Excellency Tusitala in his loving care for us in our tribulation in the prison we have made this great gift; it shall never be muddy, it shall go on for ever, this road that we have dug!_" We had a great feast when it was done, and I read them a kind of lecture, which I dare say Auntie will have, and can let you see. Weel, guid bye to ye, and joy be wi' ye! I hae nae time to say mair. They say I'm gettin' _fat_--a fact!--Your laddie, with all love, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO JAMES PAYN _Vailima, Samoa, Nov. 4, 1894._ MY DEAR JAMES PAYN,--I am asked to relate to you a little incident of domestic life at Vailima. I had read your _Gleams of Memory_, No. 1; it then went to my wife, to Osbourne, to the cousin that is within my gates, and to my respected amanuensis, Mrs. Strong. Sunday approached. In the course of the afternoon I was attracted to the great 'all--the winders is by Vanderputty, which upon entering I beheld a memorable scene. The floor was bestrewn with the forms of midshipmen from the _Curaçoa_--"boldly say a wilderness of gunroom"--and in the midst of this sat Mrs. Strong throned on the sofa and reading aloud _Gleams of Memory_. They had just come the length of your immortal definition of boyhood in the concrete, and I had the pleasure to see the whole party dissolve under its influence with inextinguishable laughter. I thought this was not half bad for arthritic gout! Depend upon it, sir, when I go into the arthritic gout business, I shall be done with literature, or at least with the funny business. It is quite true I have my battlefields behind me. I have done perhaps as much work as anybody else under the most deplorable conditions. But two things fall to be noticed: In the first place, I never was in actual pain; and in the second, I was never funny. I'll tell you the worst day that I remember. I had a hemorrhage, and was not allowed to speak; then, induced by the devil, or an errant doctor, I was led to partake of that bowl which neither cheers nor inebriates--the castor-oil bowl. Now, when castor-oil goes right, it is one thing; but when it goes wrong, it is another. And it went wrong with me that day. The waves of faintness and nausea succeeded each other for twelve hours, and I do feel a legitimate pride in thinking that I stuck to my work all through and wrote a good deal of _Admiral Guinea_ (which I might just as well not have written for all the reward it ever brought me) in spite of the barbarous bad conditions. I think that is my great boast; and it seems a little thing alongside of your _Gleams of Memory_ illustrated by spasms of arthritic gout. We really should have an order of merit in the trade of letters. For valour, Scott would have had it; Pope too; myself on the strength of that castor-oil; and James Payn would be a Knight Commander. The worst of it is, though Lang tells me you exhibit the courage of Huish, that not even an order can alleviate the wretched annoyance of the business. I have always said that there is nothing like pain; toothache, dumb-ague, arthritic gout, it does not matter what you call it, if the screw is put upon the nerves sufficiently strong, there is nothing left in heaven or in earth that can interest the sufferer. Still, even to this there is the consolation that it cannot last for ever. Either you will be relieved and have a good hour again before the sun goes down, or else you will be liberated. It is something after all (although not much) to think that you are leaving a brave example; that other literary men love to remember, as I am sure they will love to remember, everything about you--your sweetness, your brightness, your helpfulness to all of us, and in particular those one or two really adequate and noble papers which you have been privileged to write during these last years.--With the heartiest and kindest good-will, I remain, yours ever, R. L. S. TO SIDNEY COLVIN This was the last letter I received from my friend. On the morning of his death the following month he spoke of being behindhand with his December letter and of his intention to write it next day. [_Vailima, November 1894._] DEAR COLVIN,--Saturday there was a ball to the ship, and on Sunday Gurr had a child to be baptized. Belle was to be godmother and had to be got down; which was impossible, as the jester Euclid says. However, we had four men of very different heights take the poles of a sort of bier and carry her shoulder high down the road, till we met a trap. On the return journey on Sunday, they were led by Austin playing (?) on a bugle, and you have no idea how picturesque a business it was; the four half-naked bearers, the cane lounge at that height from the ground, and Belle in black and pretty pale reclining very like a dead warrior of yore. However she wasn't dead yet. All the rest of the afternoon we hung about and had consultations about the baptism. Just as we went in to dinner, I saw the moon rise accurately full, looking five times greater than nature, and the face that we try to decipher in its silver disk wearing an obliterated but benignant expression. The ball followed; bluejackets and officers danced indiscriminately, after their pleasant fashion; and Belle, who lay in the hotel verandah, and held a sort of reception all night, had her longest visit from one of the blue-jackets, her partner in the last ball. About one on the Sunday morning all was over, and we went to bed--I, alas! only to get up again, my room being in the verandah, where a certain solemnly absurd family conclave (all drunk) was being held until (I suppose) three. By six, I was awake, and went out on the verandah. On the east the dawn had broken, cold and pink and rust colour, and the marshes were all smoking whitely and blowing into the bay like smoke, but on the west, all was golden. The street was empty, and right over it hung the setting moon, accurately round, yellow as an apricot, but slumberous, with an effect of afternoon you would not believe if you had not seen it. Then followed a couple of hours on the verandah I would be glad to forget. By seven X. Y. had joined me, as drunk as they make 'em. As he sat and talked to me, he smelt of the charnel house, methought. He looked so old (he is one month my senior); he spoke so silly; his poor leg is again covered with boils, which will spell death to him; and--enough. That interview has made me a teetotaller. O, it is bad to grow old. For me, it is practically hell. I do not like the consolations of age. I was born a young man; I have continued so; and before I end, a pantaloon, a driveller--enough again. But I don't enjoy getting elderly. Belle and I got home about three in the afternoon, she having in the meantime renounced all that makes life worth living in the name of little Miss Gurr, and I seriously reflecting on renouncing the kindly bowl in earnest! Presently after arrived the news of Margery Ide (the C.J.'s daughter) being seriously ill, alarmingly ill. Fanny wanted to go down; it was a difficult choice; she was not fit for it; on the other hand (and by all accounts) the patient would die if she did not get better nursing. So we made up our own minds, and F. and I set out about dusk, came to the C.J.'s in the middle of dinner, and announced our errand. I am glad to say the C.J. received her very willingly; and I came home again, leaving her behind, where she was certainly much wanted. _Nov. 4th._--You ask about _St. Ives_. No, there is no Burford Bridge in it, and no Boney. He is a squire of dames, and there are petticoats in the story, and damned bad ones too, and it is of a tolerable length, a hundred thousand, I believe, at least. Also, since you are curious on the point, St. Ives learned his English from a Mr. Vicary, an English lawyer, a prisoner in France. He must have had a fine gift of languages! Things are going on here in their usual gently disheartening gait. The Treaty Officials are both good fellows whom I can't help liking, but who will never make a hand of Samoa.--Yours ever, R. L. STEVENSON. TO PROFESSOR MEIKLEJOHN Congratulating an old friend of Savile Club days (see vol. xxiii. p. 263) on his sailor son. _Vailima, Samoa, Nov. 6th, 1894._ MY DEAR MEIKLEJOHN,--Greeting! This is but a word to say how much we felicitate ourselves on having made the acquaintance of Hughie. He is having a famous good chance on board the _Curaçoa_, which is the best ship I have ever seen. And as for himself, he is a most engaging boy, of whom you may very well be proud, and I have no mortal manner of doubt but what you are. He comes up here very often, where he is a great favourite with my ladies, and sings me "the melancholy airs of my native land" with much acceptancy. His name has recently become changed in Vailima. Beginning with the courteous "Mr. Meiklejohn," it shaded off into the familiar "Hughie," and finally degenerated into "the Whitrett."[85] I hear good reports of him abroad and ashore, and I scarce need to add my own testimony. Hughie tells me you have gone into the publishing business, whereat I was much shocked. My own affairs with publishers are now in the most flourishing state, owing to my ingenuity in leaving them to be dealt with by a Scotch Writer to the Signet. It has produced revolutions in the book trade and my banking account. I tackled the Whitrett severely on a grammar you had published, which I had not seen and condemned out of hand and in the broadest Lallan. I even condescended on the part of that grammar which I thought to be the worst and condemned your presentation of the English verb unmercifully. It occurs to me, since you are a publisher, that the least thing you could do would be to send me a copy of that grammar to correct my estimate. But I fear I am talking too long to one of the enemy. I begin to hear in fancy the voice of Meiklejohn upraised in the Savile Club: "No quarter to publishers!" So I will ask you to present my compliments to Mrs. Meiklejohn upon her son, and to accept for yourself the warmest reminiscences of auld lang syne.--Yours sincerely, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO LIEUTENANT EELES _Vailima, Samoa, November 24, 1894._ MY DEAR EELES,--The hand, as you will perceive (and also the spelling!), is Teuila's, but the scrannel voice is what remains of Tusitala's. First of all, for business. When you go to London you are to charter a hansom cab and proceed to the Museum. It is particular fun to do this on Sundays when the Monument is shut up. Your cabman expostulates with you, you persist. The cabman drives up in front of the closed gates and says, "I told you so, sir." You breathe in the porter's ears the mystic name of _Colvin_, and he immediately unfolds the iron barrier. You drive in, and doesn't your cabman think you're a swell. A lord mayor is nothing to it. Colvin's door is the only one in the eastern gable of the building. Send in your card to him with "From R. L. S." in the corner, and the machinery will do the rest. Henry James's address is 34 De Vere Mansions West. I cannot remember where the place is; I cannot even remember on which side of the park. But it's one of those big Cromwell Road-looking deserted thoroughfares out west in Kensington or Bayswater, or between the two; and anyway Colvin will be able to put you on the direct track for Henry James. I do not send formal introductions, as I have taken the liberty to prepare both of them for seeing you already. Hoskyn is staying with us. It is raining dismally. The Curaçoa track is hardly passable, but it must be trod to-morrow by the degenerate feet of their successor the Wallaroos. I think it a very good account of these last that we don't think them either deformed or habitual criminals--they seem to be a kindly lot. The doctor will give you all the gossip. I have preferred in this letter to stick to the strictly solid and necessary. With kind messages from all in the house to all in the wardroom, all in the gunroom, and (may we dare to breathe it) to him who walks abaft, believe me, my dear Eeles, yours ever, R. L. STEVENSON. TO SIR HERBERT MAXWELL _Vailima, Samoa, December 1, 1894._ DEAR SIR HERBERT,--Thank you very much for your long and kind letter. I shall certainly take your advice and call my cousin, the Lyon King, into council. It is certainly a very interesting subject, though I don't suppose it can possibly lead to anything, this connection between the Stevensons and M'Gregors. Alas! your invitation is to me a mere derision. My chances of visiting Heaven are about as valid as my chances of visiting Monreith. Though I should like well to see you, shrunken into a cottage, a literary Lord of Ravenscraig. I suppose it is the inevitable doom of all those who dabble in Scotch soil; but really your fate is the more blessed. I cannot conceive anything more grateful to me, or more amusing or more picturesque, than to live in a cottage outside your own park-walls.--With renewed thanks, believe me, dear Sir Herbert, yours very truly, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO ANDREW LANG The following refers of course to _Weir of Hermiston_, the chief character of which was studied from the traditions of Lord Braxfield, and on which Stevenson was working at the full height of his powers when death overtook him two days later. _Vailima, Samoa, December 1, 1894._ MY DEAR LANG,--For the portrait of Braxfield, much thanks! It is engraved from the same Raeburn portrait that I saw in '76 or '77 with so extreme a gusto that I have ever since been Braxfield's humble servant, and am now trying, as you know, to stick him into a novel. Alas! one might as well try to stick in Napoleon. The picture shall be framed and hung up in my study. Not only as a memento of you, but as a perpetual encouragement to do better with his Lordship. I have not yet received the transcripts. They must be very interesting. Do you know I picked up the other day an old Longman's where I found an article of yours that I had missed, about Christie's? I read it with great delight. The year ends with us pretty much as it began, among wars and rumours of wars, and a vast and splendid exhibition of official incompetence.--Yours ever, R. L. STEVENSON. TO EDMUND GOSSE The next, and last, letter is to Mr. Gosse, dated also only two days before the writer's death. It acknowledges the dedication "To Tusitala" of that gentleman's volume of poems, _In Russet and Silver_, just received. _Vailima, Samoa, December 1, 1894._ I AM afraid, my dear Weg, that this must be the result of bribery and corruption! The volume to which the dedication stands as preface seems to me to stand alone in your work; it is so natural, so personal, so sincere, so articulate in substance, and what you always were sure of--so rich in adornment. Let me speak first of the dedication. I thank you for it from the heart. It is beautifully said, beautifully and kindly felt; and I should be a churl indeed if I were not grateful, and an ass if I were not proud. I remember when Symonds dedicated a book to me; I wrote and told him of "the pang of gratified vanity" with which I had read it. The pang was present again, but how much more sober and autumnal--like your volume. Let me tell you a story, or remind you of a story. In the year of grace something or other, anything between '76 and '78, I mentioned to you in my usual autobiographical and inconsiderate manner that I was hard up. You said promptly that you had a balance at your banker's, and could make it convenient to let me have a cheque, and I accepted and got the money--how much was it?--twenty or perhaps thirty pounds? I know not--but it was a great convenience. The same evening, or the next day, I fell in conversation (in my usual autobiographical and ... see above) with a denizen of the Savile Club, name now gone from me, only his figure and a dim three-quarter view of his face remaining. To him I mentioned that you had given me a loan, remarking easily that of course it didn't matter to you. Whereupon he read me a lecture, and told me how it really stood with you financially. He was pretty serious; fearing, as I could not help perceiving, that I should take too light a view of the responsibility and the service (I was always thought too light--the irresponsible jester--you remember. O, _quantum mutatus ab illo_!) If I remember rightly, the money was repaid before the end of the week--or, to be more exact and a trifle pedantic, the se'nnight--but the service has never been forgotten; and I send you back this piece of ancient history, _consule Planco_, as a salute for your dedication, and propose that we should drink the health of the nameless one, who opened my eyes as to the true nature of what you did for me on that occasion. But here comes my Amanuensis, so we'll get on more swimmingly now. You will understand perhaps that what so particularly pleased me in the new volume, what seems to me to have so personal and original a note, are the middle-aged pieces in the beginning. The whole of them, I may say, though I must own an especial liking to-- "I yearn not for the fighting fate, That holds and hath achieved; I live to watch and meditate And dream--and be deceived." You take the change gallantly. Not I, I must confess. It is all very well to talk of renunciation, and of course it has to be done. But, for my part, give me a roaring toothache! I do like to be deceived and to dream, but I have very little use for either watching or meditation. I was not born for age. And, curiously enough, I seem to see a contrary drift in my work from that which is so remarkable in yours. You are going on sedately travelling through your ages, decently changing with the years to the proper tune. And here am I, quite out of my true course, and with nothing in my foolish elderly head but love-stories. This must repose upon some curious distinction of temperaments. I gather from a phrase, boldly autobiographical, that you are--well, not precisely growing thin. Can that be the difference? It is rather funny that this matter should come up just now, as I am at present engaged in treating a severe case of middle age in one of my stories--"The Justice-Clerk." The case is that of a woman, and I think that I am doing her justice. You will be interested, I believe, to see the difference in our treatments. _Secreta Vitæ_ comes nearer to the case of my poor Kirstie. Come to think of it, Gosse, I believe the main distinction is that you have a family growing up around you, and I am a childless, rather bitter, very clear-eyed, blighted youth. I have, in fact, lost the path that makes it easy and natural for you to descend the hill. I am going at it straight. And where I have to go down it is a precipice. I must not forget to give you a word of thanks for _An English Village_. It reminds me strongly of Keats, which is enough to say; and I was particularly pleased with the petulant sincerity of the concluding sentiment. Well, my dear Gosse, here's wishing you all health and prosperity, as well as to the mistress and the bairns. May you live long, since it seems as if you would continue to enjoy life. May you write many more books as good as this one--only there's one thing impossible, you can never write another dedication that can give the same pleasure to the vanished TUSITALA. FOOTNOTES: [74] This question is with a view to the adventures of the hero in _St. Ives_, who according to Stevenson's original plan was to have been picked up from his foundered balloon by an American privateer. [75] As to admire _The Black Arrow_. [76] The suppressed first part of the _Amateur Emigrant_, written in San Francisco in 1879, which it was proposed now to condense and to some extent recast for the Edinburgh Edition. [77] Word omitted in MS. [78] I may be allowed to quote the following sentence from a letter of this gentleman written when the news of our friend's death reached England:--"So great was his power of winning love that though I knew him for less than a week I could have borne the loss of many a more intimate friend with less sorrow than Stevenson's. When I saw him, last Easter, there was no suggestion of failure of strength. After all I had heard of his delicacy I was astonished at his vigour. He was up at five, and at work soon after, and at eleven o'clock at night he was dancing on the floor of the big room while I played Scotch and Irish reels on the rickety piano. He would talk to me for hours of home and old friends, but with a wonderful cheerfulness, knowing himself banished from them for life and yet brought close to them by love. I confidently counted on his living; he took keen interest in my own poor work, and it was one of my ambitions to send him a book some day which would better deserve his attention." [79] _Sentimental Tommy_: whose chief likeness to R. L. S. was meant to be in the literary temperament and passion for the _mot propre_. [80] A proposed frontispiece for one of the volumes of the Edinburgh Edition. [81] _Sic_: query "least"? [82] Of _The Wrecker_. [83] _Trieb_, impulse. [84] It seemed an obvious duty to publish the speech in question through the English press, as the best proof both of Stevenson's wise and understanding methods of dealing with his native friends, and of the affection and authority which he enjoyed among them. I have reprinted it, as a necessary supplement to this letter, in Appendix II. at end of the present volume. [85] Whitrett or Whitrack is Scots for a weasel: why applied to Mr. Meiklejohn I know not. APPENDIX I ACCOUNT OF THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF R. L. STEVENSON, BY LLOYD OSBOURNE He wrote hard all that morning of the last day; his half-finished book, _Hermiston_, he judged the best he had ever written, and the sense of successful effort made him buoyant and happy as nothing else could. In the afternoon the mail fell to be answered; not business correspondence--for this was left till later--but replies to the long, kindly letters of distant friends, received but two days since, and still bright in memory. At sunset he came downstairs; rallied his wife about the forebodings she could not shake off; talked of a lecturing tour to America that he was eager to make, "as he was now so well," and played a game at cards with her to drive away her melancholy. He said he was hungry; begged her assistance to help him make a salad for the evening meal; and to enhance the little feast, he brought up a bottle of old Burgundy from the cellar. He was helping his wife on the verandah, and gaily talking, when suddenly he put both hands to his head, and cried out, "What's that?" Then he asked quickly, "Do I look strange?" Even as he did so he fell on his knees beside her. He was helped into the great hall, between his wife and his body-servant, Sosimo, losing consciousness instantly as he lay back in the arm-chair that had once been his grandfather's. Little time was lost in bringing the doctors--Anderson, of the man-of-war, and his friend Dr. Funk. They looked at him and shook their heads; they laboured strenuously, and left nothing undone; but he had passed the bounds of human skill. The dying man lay back in the chair, breathing heavily, his family about him frenzied with grief, as they realised all hope was past. The dozen and more Samoans that formed part of the little clan of which he was chief sat in a wide semicircle on the floor, their reverent, troubled, sorrow-stricken faces all fixed upon their dying master. Some knelt on one knee, to be instantly ready for any command that might be laid upon them. A narrow bed was brought into the centre of the room, the Master was gently laid upon it, his head supported by a rest, the gift of Shelley's son. Slower and slower grew his respiration, wider the interval between the long, deep breaths. The Rev. Mr. Clarke was now come, an old and valued friend; he knelt and prayed as the life ebbed away. He died at ten minutes past eight on Monday evening the 3rd of December, in the forty-fifth year of his age. The great Union Jack that flew over the house was hauled down, and laid over the body, fit shroud for a loyal Scotsman. He lay in the hall which was ever his pride, where he had passed the gayest and most delightful hours of his life, a noble room with open stairway and mullioned windows. In it were the treasures of his far-off Scottish home: the old carved furniture, the paintings and busts that had been in his father's house before him. The Samoans passed in procession beside his bed, kneeling and kissing his hand, each in turn, before taking their places for the long night watch beside him. No entreaty could induce them to retire, to rest themselves for the painful and arduous duties of the morrow. It would show little love for Tusitala, they said, if they did not spend their last night beside him. Mournful and silent, they sat in deep dejection, poor, simple, loyal folk, fulfilling the duty they owed their chief. A messenger was despatched to the few chiefs connected with the family, to announce the tidings and bid them assemble their men on the morrow for the work there was to do. Sosimo asked on behalf of the Roman Catholics that they might be allowed to recite the prayers for the dead. Till midnight the solemn chants continued, the prolonged, sonorous prayers of the Church of Rome, in commingled Latin and Samoan. Later still, a chief arrived with his retainers, bringing a precious mat to wrap about the dead. He too knelt and kissed the hand of Tusitala, and took his place amid the sleepless watchers. Another arrived with a fine mat, a man of higher rank, whose incipient consumption had often troubled the Master. "Talofa Tusitala!" he said as he drew nigh, and took a long, mournful look at the face he knew so well. When, later on, he was momentarily required on some business of the morrow, he bowed reverently before retiring. "Tofa Tusitala!" he said, "Sleep, Tusitala!" The morning of the 4th of December broke cool and sunny, a beautiful day, rare at this season of the year. More fine mats were brought, until the Union Jack lay nigh concealed beneath them. Among the new-comers was an old Mataafa chief, one of the builders of the "Road of the Loving Hearts," a man who had spent many days in prison for participation in the rebellion. "I am only a poor Samoan, and ignorant," said he, as he crouched beside the body; "others are rich, and can give Tusitala the parting presents of rich fine mats; I am poor, and can give nothing this last day he receives his friends. Yet I am not afraid to come and look the last time in my friend's face, never to see him more till we meet with God. Behold! Tusitala is dead; Mataafa is also dead to us. These two great friends have been taken by God. When Mataafa was taken, who was our support but Tusitala? We were in prison, and he cared for us. We were sick, and he made us well. We were hungry, and he fed us. The day was no longer than his kindness. You are great people and full of love. Yet who among you is so great as Tusitala? What is your love to his love? Our clan was Mataafa's clan, for whom I speak this day; therein was Tusitala also. We mourn them both." A meeting of chiefs was held to apportion the work and divide the men into parties. Forty were sent with knives and axes to cut a path up the steep face of the mountain, and the writer himself led another party to the summit--men chosen from the immediate family--to dig the grave on a spot where it was Mr. Stevenson's wish that he should lie. Nothing more picturesque can be imagined than the narrow ledge that forms the summit of Vaea, a place no wider than a room, and flat as a table. On either side the land descends precipitously; in front lies the vast ocean and the surf-swept reefs; to the right and left green mountains rise, densely covered with the primeval forest. Two hundred years ago the eyes of another man turned towards that same peak of Vaea as the spot that should ultimately receive his war-worn body: Soalu, a famous chief. All the morning, Samoans were arriving with flowers; few of these were white, for they have not learned our foreign custom, and the room glowed with the many colours. There were no strangers on that day, no acquaintances; those only were called who would deeply feel the loss. At one o'clock a body of powerful Samoans bore away the coffin, hid beneath a tattered red ensign that had flown above his vessel in many a corner of the South Seas. A path so steep and rugged taxed their strength to the utmost; for not only was the journey difficult in itself, but extreme care was requisite to carry the coffin shoulder-high. Half an hour later, the rest of his friends followed. It was a formidable ascent, and tried them hard. Nineteen Europeans, and some sixty Samoans, reached the summit. After a short rest, the Rev. W. E. Clarke read the burial service of the Church of England, interposing a prayer that Mr. Stevenson had written and had read aloud to his family only the evening before his death:-- We beseech Thee, Lord, to behold us with favour, folk of many families and nations, gathered together in the peace of this roof; weak men and women, subsisting under the covert of Thy patience. Be patient still; suffer us yet a while longer--with our broken purposes of good, and our idle endeavours against evil--suffer us a while longer to endure, and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day come when these must be taken, have us play the man under affliction. Be with our friends; be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns to us, our sun and comforter, call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts--eager to labour--eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion--and if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it. We thank Thee and praise Thee; and in the words of Him to whom this day is sacred, close our oblation. APPENDIX II ADDRESS OF R. L. STEVENSON TO THE CHIEFS ON THE OPENING OF THE ROAD OF GRATITUDE, OCTOBER 1894 Mr. Stevenson said, "We are met together to-day to celebrate an event and to do honour to certain chiefs, my friends,--Lelei, Mataafa, Salevao, Poè, Teleso, Tupuola Lotofaga, Tupuola Amaile, Muliaiga, Ifopo, and Fatialofa. You are all aware in some degree of what has happened. You know these chiefs to have been prisoners; you perhaps know that during the term of their confinement I had it in my power to do them certain favours. One thing some of you cannot know, that they were immediately repaid by answering attentions. They were liberated by the new administration; by the King, and the Chief Justice, and the Ta'its'ifono, who are here amongst us to-day, and to whom we all desire to tender our renewed and perpetual gratitude for that favour. As soon as they were free men--owing no man anything--instead of going home to their own places and families, they came to me; they offered to do this work for me as a free gift, without hire, without supplies, and I was tempted at first to refuse their offer. I knew the country to be poor, I knew famine threatening; I knew their families long disorganised for want of supervision. Yet I accepted, because I thought the lesson of that road might be more useful to Samoa than a thousand breadfruit trees; and because to myself it was an exquisite pleasure to receive that which was so handsomely offered. It is now done; you have trod it to-day in coming hither. It has been made for me by chiefs; some of them old, some sick, all newly delivered from a harassing confinement, and in spite of weather unusually hot and insalubrious. I have seen these chiefs labour valiantly with their own hands upon the work, and I have set up over it, now that it is finished, the name of 'The Road of Gratitude' (the road of loving hearts) and the names of those that built it. 'In perpetuam memoriam,' we say, and speak idly. At least so long as my own life shall be spared, it shall be here perpetuated; partly for my pleasure and in my gratitude; partly for others; to continually publish the lesson of this road." Addressing himself to the chiefs, Mr. Stevenson then said:-- "I will tell you, Chiefs, that, when I saw you working on that road, my heart grew warm; not with gratitude only, but with hope. It seemed to me that I read the promise of something good for Samoa: it seemed to me, as I looked at you, that you were a company of warriors in a battle, fighting for the defence of our common country against all aggression. For there is a time to fight, and a time to dig. You Samoans may fight, you may conquer twenty times, and thirty times, and all will be in vain. There is but one way to defend Samoa. Hear it before it is too late. It is to make roads, and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their produce wisely, and, in one word, to occupy and use your country. If you do not, others will." The speaker then referred to the Parable of the Talents, Matt. xxv. 14-30, and continuing, impressively asked: "What are you doing with your talent, Samoa? Your three talents, Savaii, Upolu, and Tutuila? Have you buried it in a napkin? Not Upolu at least. You have rather given it out to be trodden under feet of swine: and the swine cut down food trees and burn houses, according to the nature of swine, or of that much worse animal, foolish man, acting according to his folly. 'Thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed.' But God has both sown and strawed for you here in Samoa; He has given you a rich soil, a splendid sun, copious rain; all is ready to your hand, half done. And I repeat to you that thing which is sure: if you do not occupy and use your country, others will. It will not continue to be yours or your children's, if you occupy it for nothing. You and your children will in that case be cast out into outer darkness, where shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth; for that is the law of God which passeth not away. I who speak to you have seen these things. I have seen them with my eyes--these judgments of God. I have seen them in Ireland, and I have seen them in the mountains of my own country--Scotland--and my heart was sad. These were a fine people in the past--brave, gay, faithful, and very much like Samoans, except in one particular, that they were much wiser and better at that business of fighting of which you think so much. But the time came to them as it now comes to you, and it did not find them ready. The messenger came into their villages, and they did not know him; they were told, as you are told, to use and occupy their country, and they would not hear. And now you may go through great tracts of the land and scarce meet a man or a smoking house, and see nothing but sheep feeding. The other people that I tell you of have come upon them like a foe in the night, and these are the other people's sheep who browse upon the foundation of their houses. To come nearer; and I have seen this judgment in Oahu also. I have ridden there the whole day along the coast of an island. Hour after hour went by and I saw the face of no living man except that of the guide who rode with me. All along that desolate coast, in one bay after another, we saw, still standing, the churches that have been built by the Hawaiians of old. There must have been many hundreds, many thousands, dwelling there in old times, and worshipping God in these now empty churches. For to-day they were empty; the doors were closed, the villages had disappeared, the people were dead and gone; only the church stood on like a tombstone over a grave, in the midst of the white men's sugar fields. The other people had come and used that country, and the Hawaiians who occupied it for nothing had been swept away, 'where is weeping and gnashing of teeth.' "I do not speak of this lightly, because I love Samoa and her people. I love the land, I have chosen it to be my home while I live, and my grave after I am dead; and I love the people, and have chosen them to be my people to live and die with. And I see that the day is come now of the great battle; of the great and the last opportunity by which it shall be decided whether you are to pass away like these other races of which I have been speaking, or to stand fast and have your children living on and honouring your memory in the land you received of your fathers. "The Land Commission and the Chief Justice will soon have ended their labours. Much of your land will be restored to you, to do what you can with. Now is the time the messenger is come into your villages to summon you; the man is come with the measuring rod; the fire is lighted in which you shall be tried, whether you are gold or dross. Now is the time for the true champions of Samoa to stand forth. And who is the true champion of Samoa? It is not the man who blackens his face, and cuts down trees, and kills pigs and wounded men. It is the man who makes roads, who plants food trees, who gathers harvests, and is a profitable servant before the Lord, using and improving that great talent that has been given him in trust. That is the brave soldier; that is the true champion; because all things in a country hang together like the links of the anchor cable, one by another: but the anchor itself is industry. "There is a friend of most of us, who is far away; not to be forgotten where I am, where Tupuola is, where Poè Lelei, Mataafa, Solevao, Poè Teleso, Tupuola Lotofaga, Tupuolo Amaile, Muliaiga, Ifopo, Fatialofa, Lemusu are. He knew what I am telling you; no man better. He saw the day was come when Samoa had to walk in a new path, and to be defended not only with guns and blackened faces, and the noise of men shouting, but by digging and planting, reaping and sowing. When he was still here amongst us, he busied himself planting cacao; he was anxious and eager about agriculture and commerce, and spoke and wrote continually; so that when we turn our minds to the same matters, we may tell ourselves that we are still obeying Mataafa. Ua tautala mai pea o ia ua mamao. "I know that I do not speak to idle or foolish hearers. I speak to those who are not too proud to work for gratitude. Chiefs! You have worked for Tusitala, and he thanks you from his heart. In this, I could wish you could be an example to all Samoa--I wish every chief in these islands would turn to, and work, and build roads, and sow fields, and plant food trees, and educate his children and improve his talents--not for love of Tusitala, but for the love of his brothers, and his children, and the whole body of generations yet unborn. "Chiefs! On this road that you have made many feet shall follow. The Romans were the bravest and greatest of people! mighty men of their hands, glorious fighters and conquerors. To this day in Europe you may go through parts of the country where all is marsh and bush, and perhaps after struggling through a thicket, you shall come forth upon an ancient road, solid and useful as the day it was made. You shall see men and women bearing their burdens along that even way, and you may tell yourself that it was built for them perhaps fifteen hundred years before,--perhaps before the coming of Christ,--by the Romans. And the people still remember and bless them for that convenience, and say to one another, that as the Romans were the bravest men to fight, so they were the best at building roads. "Chiefs! Our road is not built to last a thousand years, yet in a sense it is. When a road is once built, it is a strange thing how it collects traffic, how every year, as it goes on, more and more people are found to walk thereon and others are raised up to repair and perpetuate it and keep it alive; so that perhaps even this road of ours may, from reparation to reparation, continue to exist and be useful hundreds and hundreds of years after we are mingled in the dust. And it is my hope that our far-away descendants may remember and bless those who laboured for them to-day." INDEX TO THE LETTERS [_For short Index to VOLS. I.-XXII., see pp. 509-519._] "Abbé Coignard" (France), xxv. 409, 410 _Academy, The_, xxiii. _intro._ xvii., 166; contributions to, xxiii. 184, xxv. 364 "Across the Plains," xxv. 123 & _n._ 1, xxv. 207, 224, 301 _n._ 1; dedication, xxv. 127 & _n._ 1, xxv. 323 & _n._ 1; inception, xxv. 97 & _n._ 1 "Actor's Wife," projected, xxiii. 308 Adams, Henry, historian, xxv. 4, 29, 41, 43, 45 "Address to the Unco Guid" (Burns), xxiii. 225 "Adela Chart" ("The Marriages," H. James), xxv. 108-9, 110 "Adelaïde," song (Beethoven), xxiii. 64 Adirondack Mountains, stay in, xxiv. 234, 306 _et seq._ Admiral Benbow inn (Treasure Island), xxiii. 327 "Admiral Guinea," play (with Henley), xxiii. 327; xxiv. 106, 119, 120, 146, 147; xxv. 447 "Admiral," the (Story of a Lie), xxiii. 248, 249; xxiv. 90 "Adventures of David Balfour," proposed double volume of, xxv. 283, 357, 366 "Æneid," reading of, xxiv. 186, 265, 306 "Æsthetic Letters" (Schiller), xxiv. 71 Ahab, King, xxv. 304 "Ah perfido spergiuro," song, xxiii. 166 _Aitu fafine_, an, xxv. 41, 135 Alabama case, xxiii. 110 "Aladdin" (Pyle), xxv. 164 Alais, visit to, xxiii. 216 "Alan Breck Stewart," ("Catriona" and "Kidnapped"), xxiv. 201, 203, xxv. 46, 142; letter as from, xxv. 46-8 Alexander, J. W., xxiv. 249, 250; drawing by, of R. L. S., xxiv. 199 Allan Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns, essay on, projected, xxiii. 191, 192, 193 Allen, Grant, ballade by, xxiv. 248 "Amateur Emigrant," xxiii. 235, 237, 239, 240, 244, 252, 254, 255, 259, 260, 265, 266, 267, 277, 352; xxv. 396-7 & _n._ 1, 398, 414, 423 "Amazing Marriage" (Meredith), R. L. S. drawn in, xxv. 344, 390-1 "Amelia Balfour," _see_ Jersey, Countess of American politics, xxiii. 112 Anderson, Dr., xxv. 457-8 Andrews, Mrs., xxiii. 113 Angelo, Michael, xxiii. 32 Angus, W. Craibe, letters to, xxv. 69, 87, 118 "Annals of the Persecutions in Scotland" (Aikman), xxiii. 18 Anser, xxiii. 22 Anstey, F., xxv. 275 Anstruther, at, xxiii. 12 "Antichrist, L'" (Renan), xxv. 304 "Antiquary, The" (Scott), xxiv. 91 Antwerp, xxiii. 185 Apemama, Gilbert Islands, xxiv. 358 Apia, at, xxiv. 293, 370, 375; xxv. 226; famous hurricane at, xxiv. 345, 346, 369, 371; xxv. 147, 172-3, 174; prisoners at, gratitude shown by, to R. L. S., xxv. 367 _et seq._ Apiang, Island, xxiv. 358 Apology, difficulty of, xxiii. 133, 134 "Apology for Idlers," xxiii. 203, 204, 205, 207, 210 "Appeal to the Clergy of the Church of Scotland," xxiii. 141, 142 Appin case (Catriona), xxv. 161, 351 Appin country, in, xxiii. 284 Appin Murder, xxiii. 284, 331, 332; xxv. 161, 351 Appleton, Dr., xxiii. _intro._ xvii. 143, 144, 168, 178 "Arblaster" (Black Arrow), xxiii. _intro._ xx. Arbroath, Abbot of, xxiii. 29 Archer, Thomas, letter to, xxiv. 305 Archer, William, xxiv. 105, 161, 214; letters to, xxiv. 147, 156, 161, 163, 247, 270, 272, 273, xxv. 384 Archer, William and Thomas, letter to, xxiv. 300 Areia, chief, xxiv. 315 Arnold, Matthew, xxiii. 15 Arthur's Seat, xxiii. 71 Artist, the, problem of, xxv. 378-9 "Art of Literature," projected, xxiii. 342 "Art of Virtue," xxiii. 265 Asceticism and Christianity, xxiii. 213 Assurance of Faith, xxiii. 299,300 "As You Like It" (Shakespeare), xxiv. 96 _Atalanta_, magazine, contributions to, xxv. 279 & _n._ 1, 283 _Athenæum_, xxiii. 239 "At Last" (Kingsley), xxiv. 101 "Attwater" (Ebb Tide), xxv. 301, 307, 350, 382 Atua, bombardment of, xxv. 424, 426 Auckland, visits to, xxv. 30, 34; xxv. 290, 291, 292 "Auld Licht Idylls" (Barrie), xxv. 264 "Auntie's Skirts" (Child's Garden of Verse), xxiii. 223 Aurévilly, Barbey d', works of, xxiv. 83; xxv. 174, 314, 379 "Ausfürliche Erklarung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche" (Lichtenberg), xxiii. 178 "Autolycus at Court," xxiii. 170 "Autumn Effect, An," xxiii. 155, 166; xxv. 397-8 Autun, xxiii. 216, 219 Avignon, at, xxiii. 77 Ayrshire and Galloway, walking tour in, xxiii. 182, 202 Babington, Mrs. Churchill, xxiii. 54; letter to, xxiii. 30 Babington, Professor Churchill, xxiii. 30, 54; xxiv. 130 Bacon, Sir F., on Time, xxiii. 81 Baildon, H. B., xxv. 56; letters to, xxv. 56, 377, 381 Baker, Mrs. A., letters to, xxv. 366, 413 Baker, Shirley, of Tonga, xxv. 40, 44 Baker, Sir Samuel, xxv. 175 Bakewell, Dr., letter to, xxv. 424 Balfour, Dr. George, xxiii. 330 Balfour, Graham, xxv. 221, 251 & _n._ 1, 292, 339, 348, 351, 355, 363, 406, 416; "Life" of R. L. S., by, xxiii. _intro._ xix.; at Vailima, xxv. 144, 374, 401, 403 Balfour, James, xxiii. 4 Balfour, Miss Jane, letter to, xxiii. 223 Balfour, Mr., of the Shaws, xxv. 47 Balfour, Mrs. Lewis, xxiii. 4, 5 Balfour of Burley (Old Mortality), xxiii. 130 Balfour, Rev. Lewis, xxiii. 4 "Balfour's Letters," xxv. 293 "Ballade in Hot Weather" (Henley), xxiv. 248 "Ballades, Rondeaus, etc." (collected by Gleeson White), xxiv. 248 "Ballads," xxiv. 380; xxv. 34, 53, 57, 73 Ballantyne, R., xxiii. _intro._ xxiii. Balzac, xxv. 154; on literary frenzy, xxiii. 173; style of, xxiv. 60 Bamford, Dr. W., xxiii. 271; letter to, xxiii. 272 "Barbara" (Catriona), xxv. 294-5 Barbizon, visits to, xxiii. 174 _et seq._, 183 Barmouth, visits to, xxiii. 124, 146 "Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities" (Billing), xxiv. 270 "Barrack Room Ballads" (Kipling), xxv. 48 "Barrel Organ," xxiii. 171 Barrie, J. M., appreciation, xxv. 276-7: letters to, xxv. 154, 264, 276, 362, 416 Barrie, Mrs. (Margaret Ogilvie), xxv. 417 Bartholomew, Messrs., xxv. 177 Basin, Thomas, xxiii. 203 & _n._ 1 Basselin, Olivier, poems by, xxiii. 193 Bass Rock, xxiii. 207 Bates, --, xxiii. 89 Bates, Edward Hugh Higlee, xxv. 384 Bates, E. M. G., xxv. 384 Bates, J. H., letter to, xxv. 384 Bathgate, the inn maid at, xxiii. 226, 227 "Bauble Shop," play (H. A. Jones), xxv. 385 Baudelaire, --, xxiii. 160, 195 Baxter, Charles, xxiii. 3, 159, 174, 285, 336, 341, 353, 356; xxiv. 14, 47, 79; xxv. 174, 240, 266, 273, 306, 357; letters to, xxiii. 33, 34, 46, 49, 52, 92, 193, 217, 262, 285, 336, 341; xxiv. 14, 121, 122, 200, 251, 260, 268, 286, 294, 296, 301, 303, 322, 327, 343, 344, 369, 375, 384, 392; xxv. 53, 82, 120, 177. 213, 270, 278, 288, 292, 337, 345, 360, 376, 392, 394, 433; literary agency of, xxiv. 252; scheme of, for "Edinburgh Edition," xxv. 372 & _n._ 1, 373 Baxter, Edmund, xxiv. 394; xxv. 54; death of, xxv. 433 Baynes, Professor Spencer, editor "Encyclopædia Britannica," xxiii, 202 "Beachcombers" (with Lloyd Osbourne), xxiv. 361 "Beach de Mar," projected xxv. 187 "Beach of Falesá," xxv. 5, 20, 25, 76, 97, 102, 103 & _n._ 1, 120, 122, 131, 138, 147, 152, 221, 224, 235-6, & _n._ 1, 239, 240, 250, 266, 272, 274, 284; illustrations to, xxv. 253-4, 288; marriage contract in, xxv. 187 & _n._ 1; publication, xxv. 1. "Beau Austin," play (with Henley), xxiv. 106 Becker, Consul, xxv. 139, 141, 268 "Becket" (Tennyson), xxv. 385 "Bedtime" projected, xxiv. 99 "Beggars" (_Scribner's_), xxiv. 235, 253; xxv. 97, 209, 301 Bell Rock, book on, xxiv. 78; xxv. 322; controversy on, xxiv. 121 Bell, the, in the Vailima woods, xxv. 277 Ben More, xxiii. 318 Bennet, Dr., xxiii. 84, 101 Bentley, publisher, xxiii. 336, 339, 346 Béranger, article on, xxiii. 186, 191, 193 Bereavement, xxiv. 52 Berlin Convention, xxv. 6 Berlioz, paper on (Henley), xxiii. 318 "Bête Humaine" (Zola), xxiv. 396; xxv. 319 "Betteredge" (Moonstone), xxiii. 18 Bickford, Captain, R.N., C.M.G., xxv. 334, 351 Bitter Creek, xxiii. 234 _Black and White_, contributions to, xxiii. 286, 337, 341 "Black Arrow," xxiv. 5, 31, 56, 247, 376, 385 & _n._ 1; serial issue, xxiv. 55; success, xxiv. 68; suggested French version, xxiv. 398 "Black Canyon" (L. Osbourne), xxiii. 347, 348, 349 Blackie, Professor, xxiii. 28, 30, 306 Blacklock, Consul, xxv. 142 "Black Man," xxiii. 308 _Blackwood's Magazine_, xxiv. 370 Blair of Blairmyle (_see_ "Young Chevalier"), xxv. 216 "Blanche Amory" (Thackeray), xxiv. 212 "Bloody Wedding," projected, xxv. 66, 97 Board of Trade Offices, xxiv. 87 Boccaccio, xxv. 301 "Body Snatchers," xxiii. 308, 316, 321; xxiv. 125, 130; xxv. 397 "Bondage of Brandon" (Hemming), xxiii. 333 "Bondman, The" (Hall Caine), xxiv. 396-7 Boodle, Miss Adelaide, xxiv. 375; letters to, xxiv. 231, 259, 267, 284, 297, 339, 401; xxv. 80, 147, 217, 243, 248, 410 "Book, A, of Stories," projected contents, xxiii. 171 "Book of Verses" (Henley), xxv. 121 _Book Reader_, notice of "Prince Otto," xxiv. 195 Books wanted, xxiii. 36, 332; xxiv. 78, 101, 130, 134, 270, 274, 338; xxv. 111, 112, 174, 215, 271, 287, 293, 346, 361, 392 Boswell, James, xxiii. 193, 203, 295 "Bottle Imp," xxiv. 292; xxv. 272, 284, 340; Samoan translation, xxv. 64 & _n._ 1 Bough, Sam, painter, xxiii. 24, 26-30; xxiv. 60 Bourget, Paul, xxv. 130-2, 315, 323 Bourke, Captain, R.N., xxv. 263 Bournemouth, at, xxiv. 104 _et seq._; xxv. 111 "Bouroche, Major" (Débâcle), xxv. 250 Braemar, at, xxiii. 282, 313, 320 Braille, books by R. L. S., to be issued in, xxv. 366, 413 Brandeis, xxv. 141 "Brashiana," burlesque sonnets, xxiii. 283; xxiv. 14, 38, 39 Brash, the publican, xxiii. 336; xxiv. 14 Braxfield (Weir of Hermiston), xxv. 260 & _n._ 1, 264-5; portrait of, xxv. 453 Bridge of Allan, at, xxiii. 33, 174 British Museum, visits to, xxiv. 105, 107, 186-7, 202, 229, 365 Bronson, --, editor, xxiii. 240 Brooke, Rajah, xxv. 129 Brown, --, xxiv. 230 Brown, Dr. John, verses to, xxiii. 296, 297 Brown, Horatio F., xxiii. 303, 304; letters to, xxiii. 303, 304 Brown, Mrs., xxiii. 13 Brown, Rev. Dr., xxv. 312 Brown R. Glasgow (editor of _London_), xxiii. 184, 251; illness, xxiii. 214 & _n._ 1 Browne, Gordon, xxv. 301, 305; letter to, xxv. 252 Browning, Robert, xxiv. 107, 202; book on, by Gosse, xxv. 74 Bruce, Michael, xxiii. 71 Bruno, Father, xxiv. 312, 334 Brussels, at, xxiii. 36 Buckinghamshire, walking tour in, xxiii. 124, 155 Buckle, Mrs., xxiv. 176 "Bucolics" (Virgil), xxiii. 18 "Bummkopf" (typical pedant), xxiii. 225 Bunner, --, xxiv. 64, 154 Bunting, --, xxiv. 227 Bunyan, John, xxiv. 29; essay on, xxiii. 334; xxv. 398 Burford Bridge, visit to, xxiii. 183 Burial customs, Gilbert Islanders', xxiv. 400-1 Burke, Edmund, xxiii. 71 Burlingame, E. L., editor of _Scribner's Magazine_, xxiv. 233; xxv. 6, 138; letters to, xxiv. 253-4, 269, 273-4, 319, 338, 367, 376, 387, 394, xxv. 24, 32, 86, 110, 128, 145, 174, 210, 215, 257, 266 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, xxiii. 224; xxiv. 101, 107, 202; xxv. 394 Burney, "Admiral," R.N., xxv. 394 Burn, Miss, xxiv. 89 Burns Exhibition, Glasgow, xxv. 69, 87 _et seq._ Burns, Robert, xxiii. _intro._ xxiii.; xxv. 69, 70, 88, 395-6; articles and writings on, xxiii. 111, 151, 179, 191, 192, 193, 202, 203, 224, 226, 237, 241, 245, 250, 263, 273, 358, xxiv. 63; house of, Dumfries, xxiii. 66; judgment on, xxiii. 224; poems of, xxiii. 4, xxiv. 256 Burt, xxiii. 298 _Bussard_, the ship, xxv. 425 Butaritari, Gilbert Islands, xxiv. 358 "But still our hearts are true" (Eglinton), xxv. 69, 70 "But yet the Lord that is on high" (Scotch Psalter), xxiii. 23 "By Proxy" (Payn), xxiv. 7 Byron, Lord, xxiii. 132; essay on (Henley), xxiii. 318; xxiv. 7 Caldecott, Randolph, xxiii. 248, 267 California, visit to, xxiii. 228 Calistoga, at, xxiii. 277 Calton Hill (Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh), xxiii. 216 Calvin, John, studies in, xxiii. 126 Cambridge, visits to, xxiii. 219; xxiv. 105 Cameron, Captain, xxiv. 349, 350 Campagne Defli, at, xxiv. 4, 8 _et seq._ Campbell of Glenure, murder of, xxiii. 284, 331, 332 Campbell, Rev. Professor Lewis, xxiii. 278, 316; letter to, xxiv. 113 "Canadian Boat Song" (Earl of Eglinton), xxv. 69, 70 Candlish, Dr., xxiv. 63 "Cannon Mills," projected, xxiv. 403 Canoe Journey in France (_see_ Inland Voyage), xxiii. 204 "Canoe, The, Speaks" (Underwoods), xxiv. 89, 231 "Canterbury Pilgrimage" (Chaucer), illustrated, gift of, xxiv. 149 "Capitaine Fracasse, Le" (Théophile Gautier), xxiii. 75 Cap Martin, xxiii. _intro._ xxxiv., 93, 114 "Captain Singleton" (Defoe), xxiv. 101, 102 Carlyle, Thomas, xxiii. 302; xxiv. 135; appreciation of, xxiii. 301, 302; on Coleridge, xxiii. 220 "Carmosine" (Musset), xxiv. 97 Carrington, C. Howard, letter to, xxiv. 152 Carr, T. Comyns, xxiv. 68 Carruthers, --, xxv. 40 Carson, Mrs., xxiii. 252 "Carthew" (Wrecker), xxv. 112 & _n._ 1 "Casamassima" (H. James), xxiv. 263 _Casco_, schooner, cruise in, xxiv. 234, 287 _et seq._, 290-1, 300, 305, 310, 312-3, 316 _et seq._, 325 _et seq._ "Case Bottle," xxiii. 281 "Cashel Byron's Profession" (Shaw), xxiv. 270-1 "Casparidea," unpublished, xxiii. 283 "Cassandra" (Mrs. R. L. Stevenson), xxiv. 22 Cassell and Co., xxiv. 110, 127; xxv. 57, 110, 124, 272, 283 "Catriona" (at first called "David Balfour," _q.v._), xxiii. _intro._ xxiii., 331; xxiv. 190, 402; xxv. 108, 144, 155, 158 & _n._ 1, 160-1, 163, 166-7, 172, 187, 192, 201-2, 211, 215, 240, 250, 264, 274, 283, 290, 298, 301, 305, 310, 316, 344, 351 & _n._ 1, 352, 378; in Braille, xxv. 366; characters in, xxv. 216; draft of, xxv. 162; maps for, xxv. 177-8; "my high-water mark," xxv. 393 (but _see_ 379); projected illustrations, xxv. 349 _n._ 1; replies to remarks on, xxv. 294 _et seq._; restraint of description in, xxv. 367 Cavalier (de Sonne), xxiii. 307 Cavalier, Jean, xxiii. 306, 307 "Cavalier," The (G. P. R. James), xxiv. 274 Cedercrantz, Conrad, Chief Justice of Samoa, xxv. 7, 13, 48-9, 67, 95-6, 98-100, 102, 124-5, 175, 188, 239, 256, 275, 278, 281, 286, 305, 364, 376, 380-1 Celtic blood in Britain, xxv. 379 _Century Magazine_, xxiv. 26, 30, 55, 90, 171; article in, by H. James, on R. L. S., xxiv. 250-1; contributions to, xxiii. 338, xxiv. 55, 170, 171, 185; critical notice in, of R. L. S., xxiv. 63, 64 Cévennes, the tramp in (_see_ "Travels with a Donkey"), xxiii. 183 Ceylon, projected visit, xxv. 98 Chair of History and Constitutional Law, Edinburgh University, candidature for, xxiii. 282, 309 _et seq._, 331, 335, 336 Chalmers, Rev. J., xxv. 30, 33, 39, 56-7 "Chapter of Artistic History," suggested title for proposed book by Henley, xxiii. 318 "Chapter on Dreams" (_Scribner's_), xxiv. 235; xxv. 97 "Character of Dogs" (_English Illustrated_), xxiv. 67; xxv. 41 _n._ 2 "Charity Bazaar," xxv. 398 Charles of Orleans, paper on, xxiii. 182, 191, 192, 202, 203, 204 "Charlotte" (Sorrows of Werther), xxiii. 60, 61 Charteris, Rev. Dr., xxiv. 276; letters to, xxiv. 276, 279 Chastity, xxiii. 338, 360 Chateaubriand (Sainte-Beuve), xxiii. 78 Chatto, Andrew, letter to, xxiv. 110 Chatto and Windus, publishers, xxiii. 335; xxiv. 110; xxv. 395; letter to, xxiv. 231 Chepmell, Dr., xxiv. 242 Chester visited, xxiii. 145, 146 "Chevalier Des Touches" (d'Aurévilly), xxv. 174, 314, 380 Chicago Exhibition, xxv. 379 Children, feelings towards, xxiii. 99, 101, 147, 171 Children in the [Kilburn] Cellar (_see also_ Boodle), letter to, xxv. 243 "Child's Garden of Verse," xxiii. 282; xxiv. 5, 17 _et seq._, 24, 54, 55, 70, 99 _et seq._, 106, 116, 154; xxv. 385; dedication, xxiv. 16, 19, 27, 92; illustrations, xxiv. 18 _et seq._, 32, 115; publication, xxiv. 138, 140; reviews, xxiv. 147 "Child's Play," xxiv. 70; xxv. 301 Chiltern Hills, visited, xxiii. 155 "Choice of Books" (F. Harrison), xxv. 113 Christianity and Asceticism, xxiii. 213 Christmas Books (Dickens), xxiii. 148 Christmas Day at Vailima, xxv. 40-1 "Christmas Sermon," xxv. 123 _n._ 1 Christ's Hospital, xxiv. 206, 207 Chrystal, Professor, xxiv. 118 "Cimourdain" (Quatre-vingt Treize, by Hugo), xxiii. 130 _n._ 1 "Clarissa Harlowe" (Richardson), xxiii. 210 Clarke, Mrs. W. E., xxv. 26 Clark, R. & R., printers, xxv. 124 Clark, Rev. W. E., missionary, xxiv. 371; xxv. 10, 11 & _n._ 1, 26, 30, 64 _n._ 1, 101; xxv. 203, 236, 329, 330, 422, 458, 460 Clark, Sir Andrew, xxiii. 55, 77, 84 Claxton, missionary, xxv. 64 Clinton, --, xxiii. 332, 333 Clouds, descriptions of, xxv. 178-9 Club, at Vailima, xxv. 168, 170, 176 Clytie, bust of, xxiii. 170 Cockfield Rectory, xxiii. 276; at, xxiii. 54, 56 "Coggie," _see_ Ferrier, Miss Coleridge, S. T., xxiii. 220 Colinton, manse of, xxiii. 5 "Collected Essays" (Huxley), xxiv. 219 Collins, Wilkie, xxiii. 238 "Colonel Jack" (Defoe), xxiv. 101, 103 Colorado, xxiv. 110 _et seq._, 229 _et seq._, 234 Colvin, Lady (_see also_ Sitwell, Mrs.), xxiii. 54 Colvin, Sir Sidney, xxiii. 88, 91, 93, 94 _et seq._, 116, 117, 152; xxiv. 13, 47, 133, 191, 210, 216, 278, 323, 343, 396; choice of, for literary executor, xxiii. _intro._ xviii.; introduction of Eeles to, xxv. 452; letters to (_see_ especially xxv. 5), xxiii. 75, 76, 105, 106, 108, 124, 127, 129, 140, 141, 143, 157, 167, 169, 173, 178, 186, 191, 195, 196, 201, 202, 206, 211, 212, 225, 230, 232, 234, 235, 241, 244, 247, 251, 253, 258, 267, 269, 272, 273, 274, 276, 284, 291, 297, 300, 308, 310, 316, 320, 339, 349; xxiv. 15, 33, 55, 69, 81, 98, 99, 101, 134, 136, 137, 186, 189, 192, 210, 219, 227, 235-6, 238, 264, 265, 275, 283, 285, 293, 295, 298, 316, 329, 336, 353, 357, 362, 385; xxv. 9, 25, 34, 48, 54, 58, 66, 76, 83, 90, 94, 102, 112, 121, 132, 152, 156, 166, 178, 193, 211, 221, 230, 249, 258, 271, 282, 289, 291, 294, 299, 310, 324, 338, 347, 352, 367, 380, 382, 387, 396, 404, 414, 422, 430, 441 (the last), 448; letters to, from Mrs. R. L. Stevenson, xxiv. 308, 347; portraits of, xxv. 78-9, 80 & _n._ 1, 83-5, 94, 100; testimonial from, xxiii. 316 "Come back" (Clough), xxiii. 294 Comines, Philippe de, xxiii. 193 Commissioners of Northern Lights, yacht of, xxv. 98 & _n._ 1 "Comtesse d'Escarbaguas" (Molière), xxiv. 123 "Comtesse de Rudolstadt" (Sand), xxiii. 135 "Confessions" (St. Augustine), xxiv. 82-3 Congdon, L. C., xxv. 384 Conrad, Joseph, xxv. 76 "Consuelo" (Sand), xxiii. 87, 135 Consulship, xxv. 208 & _n._ 1 _Contemporary Review_, contributions to, xxiv. 143, 181, 227; xxv. 398 Cook's "Voyages," xxv. 346 "Coolin," Skye terrier, xxiv. 201 Coquelin, xxiii. 276 _Cornhill Magazine_, xxiii. _intro._ xvii.; xxiv. 355; contributions to, xxiii. 56, 104, 125, 129, 180, 184, 191, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 210, 211, 224, 237, 238, 256, 258, 264, 281, 341, 352, 355; xxiv. 90; xxv. 397; Henley's "Hospital" poems in, xxiii. 174 _n._ 1, 176 Cornwall, Barry, xxv. 29 _n._ 2 Cornwall, impressions of, xxiii. 207 "Correspondence" (Wodrow's), xxiii. 291 Corsica, glimpse of, xxiii. 108 "Country Dance," xxiii. 171, 172 "Country Wife" (Wycherley), Lamb's essay on, xxiv. 87 Covenanters, xxiii. 65, 67; rhyming by, xxv. 363 Craig, --, xxiii. 25 Cramond, xxiii. 61 "Cramond" and other cousins, xxiv. 44 Crane, Walter, xxiii. 212; xxiv. 32 "Crashaw," essay (Gosse), xxiii. 291 "Crime inconnu" (Méry), xxiii. 258 "Crime, Le, et le Châtiment" (Dostoieffsky), xxiv. 182 _n._ 1, 183 "Criminal Trials" (Arnott), xxiii. 332 "Critical Kitcats" (Gosse), xxiv. 235 _Critic, The_, notice in, xxiv. 64 Crockett, S. R., xxv. 349 & _n._ 2, 403; letters to, xxiv. 280; xxv. 305 Crosse, Henry, sculptor, xxv. 383 Cumming, Miss Gordon, xxiv. 308 Cummy (_see_ Cunningham) Cunningham, Alison, xxiii. 5, 69, xxiv. 100; letters to, xxiii. 32, 340; xxiv. 16, 17, 44, 167, 196, 200, 202, 204, 220; xxv. 359, 445 _Curaçoa_, H.M.S., xxv. 189, 202, 234, 267 _et seq._, 416, 425; officers of, xxv. 374, 389, 405-9, 414, 447, 450; petty officers' ball, xxv. 414-5 "Curate of Anstruther's Bottle," xxiii. 108, 109, 170 Curtin, Jeremiah, widow and daughters of, xxiv. 108, 222 Cusack-Smith, Sir Berry, xxv. 334 Dalgleish, Dr. Scott, and the Ballantyne Memorial, xxv. 393 Damien, Father, xxiv. 291-2, 349, 354, 356; letter on, xxiv. 383-4, 391 _n._ 1, 404; xxv. 124 "Damned Ones of the Indies" (Joseph Méry), xxiii. 258 Damon, Rev. F., xxiv. 383 "Dance of Death" (Rowlandson's), xxv. 292-3 Dancing Children (Notes on the Movements of Young Children), xxv. 397-8 "Daniel Deronda" (George Eliot), xxiii. 210 Darien affair, books on, wanted, xxv. 361 Darwin, Charles, xxiii. 57, 122 David Balfour, character, xxv. 155, 189-90 "David Balfour" (title first given both to "Kidnapped" and "Catriona," _q.v._), xxiv. 179, 190-1, 196, 201, 204; xxv. 108, 144, 158 & _n._ 1, 160, 161-2, 163, 167, 172, 177, 279, 283, 313, 316, 351, 366, 379; "Catriona" issued as, in serial form, xxv. 294; historical introduction planned, xxv. 376; unfinished, xxiv. 402 Davis, Dr., of Savaii, xxv. 32 Davos, visits to, xxiii. _intro._ xxxiv., 280 _et seq._, 331 _et seq._; papers on (_Pall Mall Gazette_), xxiii. 281, 347 "Dawn of the Century" (Ashton), xxv. 392 "Day after To-morrow" (_Contemporary_), xxv. 398 "Deacon Brodie," play (with Henley), xxiii. 185, 257; xxiv. 119, 230, 248; production, xxiv. 99, 102, 261 "Dead Man's Letter," projected, xxiii. 249, 308 Deans, Jeanie, xxiii. 65 "Death in the Pot," projected, xxv. 314 & _n._ 1 Death, thoughts on, xxiii. 136, 275, 276; xxiv. 58, 162, 183, 227 "Débâcle" (Zola), xxv. 250 & _n._ 1, 318, 319, 379 Deborah and Barak, fancies on, xxiii. 154, 155 "Decisions of the Lords of Council" (Fountainhall), xxv. 293, 336, 360 "Defence of Idlers" (_see_ "Apology for Idlers") Defoe, Daniel, works of, xxiv. 101, 103 "Delafield," xxiii. 350; xxv. 55-6 _n._ 1 "Delhi," and other cousins, xxiv. 44 de Mattos, Mrs., letters to, xxiii. 199; xxiv. 152, 167 "Demi-Monde" (Dumas _fils_), scene in, xxiv. 273 Depression, xxiii. 199, 200 De Quincey, Thomas, biography of (Japp), xxiii. 321 "Dernière Aldini, La," xxiv. 97 Desborough, Mrs., xxiv. 177 Descamps, Maxime, xxiv. 405 "Descent of Man" (Darwin), xxiii. 57 des Ursins, Juvénal, xxiii. 192 "Devil on Cramond Sands," xxiii. 170, 249, 308 Dew-Smith, A. G., xxiv. 151; letter to, xxiii. 287 Dhu Heartach lighthouse, xxiii. 10 "Diaboliques, Les" (d'Aurévilly), xxv. 174 "Dialogue of Character and Destiny," unfinished, xxiii. 257, 267 "Dialogue on Man, Woman, and 'Clarissa Harlowe,'" projected, xxiii. 211 Diana of the Ephesians, play on, planned, xxiii. 124, 125 "Diary," suggested publication of, xxv. 208 Dick, Mr., xxiv. 135; letter to, xxiv. 83 "Dickon Crookback" (Black Arrow), xxiii. _intro._ xx. "Dictionary of Music" (Grove), xxiii. 151 Didier, Father, xxv. 67 "Die Judin" at Frankfurt, xxiii. 44 Disappointment, xxiii. 295 Dobell, Dr., xxiv. 201, 230 Dobson, Austin, xxiii. 307; xxiv. 205; letter to, xxiv. 126 "Dr. Syntax's Tour," xxv. 292-3 "Dodd" (Wrecker), xxv. 378 "Dogs" (Mayhew), xxiii. 341 "Dolly" (Way of the World), xxiii. 215 Donadieu's restaurant, xxiii. 254 Donat, --, xxiv. 312 "Don Juan" (Byron), xxiii. 354 "Don Juan," unfinished play (with Henley), xxiii. 256, 257, 258 Dorchester, visited, xxiv. 153 Dostoieffsky's works, xxiv. 182-3 Dover, T. W., letter to, xxv. 209 Dowden, Professor, xxiv, 211-12 Dowdney, --, xxv. 138 Dowson, Mr., xxiii. 86, 88 Doyle, Sir A. Conan, letters to, xxv. 298, 336, 429 "Dreams," xxv. 97 Duddingston Loch, xxiii. 75, 164 "Du hast Diamanten und Perlen," song, xxiii. 58 Dumas, Alexandre (_pêre_), xxiii. 347; Henley's book on, xxiv. 54, 257 Dumas, novels of, xxiv. 398 Dumfries, at, xxiii. 64 Dunblane, at, xxiii. 33 Dunnet, --, xxv. 106 Dunoyer, Olympe, xxiii. 307 "Du schönes Fischermädchen," song (Schubert), xxiii. 139 Dutra, Augustin, xxiii. 240 Dutton, Mr., xxiv. 356 "Dyce of Ythan," projected (_see also_ "The Young Chevalier"), xxv. 172 "Dynamiter, The," xxiv. 114, 176 Dynamite, views on, xxiv. 108 Earraid, Isle of, xxiii. 10, 24, 318 "Earthly Paradise" (Morris), xxiii. 36 Easter Island, images from, xxiv. 362, 367 "Ebb Tide" (with Lloyd Osbourne), xxiv. 361, 399 & _n._ 1, 402; xxv. 120, 172 & _n._ 1, 281, 288 _et seq._, 290 & _n._ 1, 301 _et seq._, 307, 310, 314 _et seq._, 318, 321, 325, 350, 353, 372; criticism, xxv. 347 _et seq._; illustrations for, notes on, xxv. 301 "Echoes" (Henley), xxv. 215 Eckenhelm, xxiii. 39 "Eclogues" (Virgil), xxiii. 34 Edinburgh Academy (school), old boys' dinner, xxiii. 168, 169 Edinburgh, at, xxiii. _passim_; homes in, xxiii. 5; life at, 1874-5, xxiii. 123 _et seq._ Edinburgh Castle, xxiii. 69, 71 _Edinburgh Courant_, wanted, xxv. 392 Edinburgh Edition of works, xxv. 372-3, 394, 396, 404, 414; illustrations in, xxv. 423 & _n._ 1; suggested prefaces, xxv. 376 "Edinburgh Eleven" (Barrie), xxv. 276 Edinburgh, influence of, xxv. 155 Edinburgh, "Picturesque Notes on," xxiii. 185, 211, 216, 218 _Edinburgh Review_, article in, on Rembrandt, by Colvin, xxiii. 225 Edinburgh Society of Arts, medal awarded to R. L. S., xxiii. 10 Edinburgh streets, xxiv. 100 Edinburgh University, Speculative Society at, xxiii. 35, 64, 184; xxiii. 312; xxiv. 178 studies at, xxiii. 8 _et seq._ Eeles, Lieutenant, R.N., xxv. 415; letters to, xxv. 267, 451 Effort, uses of, xxiv. 88 Eglinton, Hugh, 12th Earl of, xxv. 69 "Egoist, The" (Meredith), xxiii. 353 Eimeo, storm near, xxiv. 324 "Einst, O Wunder, einst," song, xxiii. 65 "Elements of Style" (_Contemporary Review_), xxiv. 181 Elgin marbles, the, xxiii. 158-60, 163-4 Eliot, George, works of, xxiii. 210 Elstree murder, xxiii. 338 "Emerson" (H. James), xxiv. 278 "Emigrant Train, The," xxv. 97 "Encyclopædia Britannica," contributions to, xxiii. 179, 186, 191, 202-3 "Endymion" (Keats), xxiv. 170 "Engineer's Thumb" (Doyle), xxv. 340 England and Samoa, xxv. 6 _et seq._ England and Scotland, contrasts between, xxiii. 56 _et seq._ _English Illustrated Magazine_, contributions to, xxiv. 68 & _n._ 1 "English Odes," edited by Gosse, xxiii. 292; suggestions concerning, xxiii. 293-4 English, the, mock definition of, xxiii. 225 "English Village, An" (Gosse), xxv. 457 "English Worthies" Series, book for, xxiv. 134 "Ensorcelée, L'" (d'Aurévilly), xxv. 314, 380 "Epilogue to an Inland Voyage," xxiv. 68 Epitaph for himself, by R. L. S., xxiii. 269; xxv. 375 Epitaph (mock) on himself, xxiv. 69 _Equator_, schooner, cruise in, xxiv. 291-2, 340, 343, 347, 357-8, 369, 390; xxv. 3 "Eroica" Symphony (Beethoven), xxiii. 166 "Escape at Bedtime" ("Child's Garden"), xxiv. 55 Essays, xxiii. 143; selected, projected volume and suggested contents, xxv. 301 & _n._ 1 "Essays in Art" (Hamerton), xxiii. 242 "Essays in London" (H. James), xxv. 367 "Essays on the Art of Writing," xxiv. 265 "Essays on Travel," xxiii. 201, 281 "Etherege," essay (Gosse), xxiv. 45 "Evan Harrington" (Meredith), characters in, xxiv. 97 Evictions, Highland, xxiii. 298 "Evictions" (Miller), xxiii. 297 Ewing, Professor, xxiv. 226 Exeter, visited, xxiv. 105, 153 "Expansion of England" (Seeley), xxiv. 55, 56 "Fables in Song," xxiii. 127-8, 132, 141, 142 "Fables" (Lord Lytton), xxiii. 129 Fage, xxiii. 307 Fairchild, Blair, xxiv. 239, 405 Fairchild, Charles, xxiv. 233, 237, 239, 250; letter to, xxiv. 246 Fairchild, Mrs. Charles, xxiv. 233, 237, 239, 250; xxv. 379; letters to, xxiv. 403; xxv. 163, 240 Fair Isle, visit to, xxiii. 24 Fakarava, at, xxiv. 295, 312 "Falconers, The Two, of Cairnstane," xxiii. 170 _Falke_, the, xxv. 425 Fall of Man, the, xxiii. 212 "Familiar Essays," xxiv. 230 "Familiar Studies of Men and Books," xxiii. 149, 224, 229, 351, 355; publication, xxiii. 335. "Family of Engineers" ("History of the Stevensons" or the "Northern Lights"), unfinished; xxv. 120, 310, 315-6, 319-20, 322, 334, 339, 348, 357; germ of, xxiv. 279; xxv. 95 "Family of Love," xxiii. 170 "Fantasio" (de Musset), xxiv. 97 Farehau, xxiv. 310, 315 "F.A.S., In Memoriam" (Underwoods), xxiii. 300 Fast-day, xxiii. 153 "Fastidious Brisk," sobriquet, xxiv. 72 "Faust" (Goethe), xxiv. 71 Faxon, --, xxiv. 390 "Femmes Savantes" (Molière), xxiv. 123 Fenian dynamite outrages, xxiii. 320 Fergusson, Robert, poet, xxiv. 214, 215; xxv. 57, 70-1, 88; monument, xxv. 395-6 Ferrier, James Walter, xxiii. 48, 223; xxiv. 46, 47, 63, 98; appreciation of, xxiv. 46 _et seq._; collaboration with, xxv. 398; death, xxiv. 6, 46 _et seq._, 59, 69, 71-2, 96 _n._ 1; letter to, xxiii. 269 Ferrier, Miss, xxiv. 90; letters to, xxiv. 46, 52, 71, 88, 121, 132, 282 Festetics de Solna, Count, at Apia, xxv. 415 Fielding, Henry, xxiii. 129 Fiji, xxv. 50, 96, 102 Fiji, High Commissioner of, proclamation by, xxv. 280 "Finsbury Tontine, The" (_see_ "Wrong Box") Flaubert, Gustave, on prose, xxv. 71-2 Fleming, Marjorie, xxiv. 245 _n._ 1; verses of, xxv. 385 "Flint, Captain" ("Treasure Island"), xxiii. 326 "Flowers of the Forest," air, xxiii. 113 Folau, --, Chief Judge, xxv. 30 "Folk Lore" (Lang), xxiv. 130 Folleté, M., xxiii. 100 "Fons Bandusiæ" (Macdonald), xxiv. 249 Fontainebleau (_see also_ Barbizon, _and_ "Forest Notes"), visits to, xxiii. 124, 182, 183, 184, 189, 282, 305 "Footnote to History," xxiv. 362 _et seq._, 369 _et seq._, 386; xxv. 5, 41 _n._ 1, 117, 120, 122, 124, 126, 129-30, 138, 140-4, 146, 163, 172, 188, 192, 211, 250, 257, 267, 274; publication of, xxv. 146; German reception of, xxv. 346 "Foreigner, The, at Home," essay, xxiii. 56 "Forester," unfinished paper (J. W. Ferrier), xxiii. 269 "Forest Notes," essay on Fontainebleau (_Magazine of Art_), xxiii. 180, 181, 186, 198, 201, 202; xxiv. 32, 57, 58, 67, 68 _n._ 1; xxv. 397-8 "Forest State, The: A Romance" (_see also_ "Prince Otto"), xxiii. 259, 265, 266 Forfeited Estates, tenants of, xxiii. 298 Forster, --, xxiii. 321 Forth, Firth of, xxiii. 61, 68, 69 _Fortnightly Review_, contributions to, xxiii. 127, 132, 281 "Fortune by Sea and Land" (Heywood), xxiii. 354 Fortune, Mr. and Mrs., xxiii. 15 "Fortunes of Nigel" (Scott), xxiv. 91 Foss, Captain, xxv. 106 "Four Great Scotsmen," project for, xxiii. 111 "Fra Diavolo," at Frankfurt, xxiii. 42 France, Anatole, xxv. 321, 409 Franchise for working men, xxiii. 97 François, a baker, xxiii. 240; xxiv. 42 François Villon, xxiii. 182, 191, 192, 207; xxiv. 397; Schwob's writings on, xxv. 52 Frank, --, xxv. 330 Frankfurt, at, xxiii. 38 Franklin, Benjamin, article on, projected, xxiii. 253, 265, 266, 333 _Fraser's Magazine_, contribution to, xxv. 97, 123 French possessions in the Pacific, xxiv. 293 French translations, _see_ letters to Schwob "Friend," the (S. T. Coleridge), xxiii. 221 Friends, the six, xxiv. 47 "Fruits of Solitude" (Penn), xxiii. 303 Funk, Dr., xxv. 416, 458 Galitzin, Prince Leon, xxiii. 119, 120, 121, 125, 155 Galpin, --, xxiv. 202 "Gamekeeper," sobriquet for Miss Boodle, xxiv. 259, 284 "Game of Bluff," _see_ "Wrong Box" Garschine, Madame, xxiii. 98, 99, 102, 108, 115, 147; letter from, xxiii. 128 "Gauvain" (Quatre-vingt Treize, by Hugo), xxiii. 130 _n._ 1 "Gavin Ogilvy," character (Barrie), xxv. 277 "Gavottes Célèbres" (Litolf's edition), xxiv. 188 "Gebir," line from, quoted (Landor), xxiii. 329 "Genesis of the Master of Ballantrae," xxv. 33 "Gentleman of France" (Weyman), xxv. 312 "George the Pieman" (Deacon Brodie), xxiii. 257 German policy in Samoa, xxiv. 370; xxv. 6 _et seq._, 176 _et passim_ Gévaudan, xxiii. 218 "Giant Bunker," xxiv. 70 Gibson, Captain, xxv. 203 Gilbert Islands, burial customs in, xxiv. 399, 400; papers on, xxv. 84; suggested plan and title, 84; visited, xxiv. 291-2, 356-7 _et seq._, 368 Gilder, R. W., editor _Century Magazine_, xxiii. 338; xxiv. 26, 29, 30, 64, 98, 149, 185, 250 Gilfillan, --, xxiv. 349, 352 Gladstone, Rt. Hon. W. E., xxiii. 113; xxiv. 136-7, 139, 192 Glasgow, Knox memorial at, xxv. 88 "Gleams of Memory" (Payn), xxv. 447 Glencorse Church, xxiii. 180; xxv. 305, 307 "Go Between," xxv. 314-5 & _n._ 1 "Goguclat" (St. Ives), xxiii. _intro._ xx. "Good Boy, A" ("Child's Garden"), xxiv. 55, 170 "Gordon Darnaway" ("Merry Men"), xxiii. _intro._ xx. Gordon, General C. G., xxiv. 107, 137, 139-40, 183; xxv. 57 Gosse, Edmund, xxiii. 311, 316, 328, 329, 341; xxiv. 36, 120, 244; appointment to Clark Readership, xxiv. 99; letters to, xxiii. 219, 224, 226, 236, 243, 245, 260, 271, 292, 293, 306, 311, 313, 324, 325, 332, 338, 350, 359, 360; xxiv. 26, 29, 30, 45, 50, 87, 97, 125, 139, 173, 181, 244, 277; xxv. 71, 317, 454; "Life" by, of his father, xxv. 71, 130, 317 Gosse, Mrs. Edmund, xxiii. 225, 227; letter to, xxiii. 347 Gosse, P. H., "Life" of, by E. Gosse, xxv. 71, 130, 317 "Gossip, A, on Romance," xxiii. 283, 342, 349 Göttingen, xxiii. 118, 122, 125 "Gower Woodseer" ("Amazing Marriage," by Meredith), prototype of, xxv. 344, 390-1 Grange, Lady, xxiii. 298 Grant, --, xxiii. 316 Grant, Geordie, xxiii. 19 Grant, Lady, xxiv. 53, 72 Grant, Mrs., of Laggan, xxiii. 298 Granton, xxiii. 8 Grant, Sir Alexander, xxiv. 53, 72, 132 "Grape from a Thorn" (Payn), xxiv. 7 Graves, home and foreign, xxv. 349 & _n._ 1 "Gray, Thomas" ("English Men of Letters"), by Gosse, xxiii. 350, 351, 360; works of, edited by Gosse, xxiv. 140 "Great Expectations" (Dickens), xxiv. 22-3 "Great North Road," unfinished, xxiii. 328; xxiv. 106, 127, 139, 152, 402 Greenaway, Kate, xxiv. 32 Green, Madame, singer, xxv. 249 Grey, Sir George, xxv. 290, 298-9; visit to, xxv. 292 Grez, at, xxiii. 183, 185, 187; meeting with Mrs. Osbourne at, xxii. 183, 228 Grove, Sir George, xxiii. _intro._ xviii. 151, 178, 204 Guérin, Maurice de, xxiii. 165 Gurr, --, xxv. 48, 105, 116, 448 Gurr, Mrs., xxv. 107 Guthrie, Charles J., letters to, xxiii. 312; xxiv. 178 "Guy Mannering" (Scott), xxiv. 91; xxv. 167 Habakkuk, prophet, xxiii. 211 Haddon, Trevor, letters to, xxiii. 357, 360; xxiv. 10, 39, 93 Haggard, Bazett, xxv. 138, 161, 170-1, 193 _et passim_ Haggard, Rider, xxiv. 257; xxv. 86, 226-7 "Haggis, The" (Burns), xxiv. 256 "Hair Trunk," xxiii. 205-6 Hake, Dr. Gordon, xxiv. 239 Hall, Basil, xxv. 111 Hallé, Sir Charles, xxiii. 169, 198 "Hall, Mr." (Clarissa Harlowe), xxiii. 211 Hamerton, P. G., xxiii. _intro._ xvii., 58, 216, 218, 315 _n._ 1, 316, 336; letters to, xxiii. 242, 314, 335; xxiv. 143 "Hamerton, P. G., An Autobiography," xxiii. 216 Hamilton, Captain, death of, xxv. 65 "Hamlet" (Shakespeare), xxv. 51 Hammond, Basil, xxiv. 13 & _n._ 1 Hampstead, at, xxiii. 124, 133 Hand, Captain, R.N., xxv. 139 Handwriting, tests of, xxv. 254-5 Hansome, Rufe, xxiii. 278 Happiness, xxiv. 183-4 Hardy, Thomas, xxiv. 153; xxv. 266 Hargrove, Mr., xxiii. 25, 26 "Harry Richmond" (Meredith), characters in, xxiv. 97 Harte, Bret, xxiii. 210 "Hastie" (Kidnapped), xxiv. 196 Hawaiian Islands, stay in, xxiv. 291 "Hawthorne" (H. James), xxiii. 273, 277 Hayley, --, xxiii. 252 Hazlitt, William, xxv. 385 "Heart of Midlothian" (Scott), xxiii. 65; xxv. 154 "Heathercat," unfinished, xxv. 281, 360-1, 403 Hebrides, yachting trip in, xxiii. 124, 139, 140 Hecky, a dog, xxiv. 202 Hegel, --, xxiv. 75 Heintz, Dr., xxiii. 244 Henderson, Mr., xxiii. 6, 328; xxiv. 31 Henley, Anthony, xxiii. 238, 240 Henley, E. J., xxiv. 261 Henley, W. E., xxiii. 124, 171, 172, 177, 284, 285, 334, 352; xxiv. 29, 47, 52, 59, 67, 79, 99, 151, 155, 191, 202, 302, 377; xxv. 97, 121, 123, 174; appreciation of, xxv. 213; dramatic collaboration with, xxiii. 185, 256, 257; xxiv. 99, 106, 119, 146; editor of _London_, xxiii. 184; in hospital, xxv. 427; letters to, xxiii. 204, 217, 219, 221, 233, 238, 249, 255, 256, 265, 317, 319, 326, 328, 330, 334, 341, 342, 352, 362; xxiv. 17, 23, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 47, 54, 57, 65, 72, 79, 91, 96, 102, 111, 114, 120, 123, 127, 131, 133, 146, 147, 155, 229, 239, 248, 257; xxv. 214; poems by, xxv. 122, 214 "Henry Shovel," _see_ "Shovels of Newton French" _Herald_, ship, xxv. 444 Herbert, George, poetry of, xxiii. 18 Herrick, Robert, xxiii. _intro._ xx.; xxiv. 36, 82 "Herrick, Robert," essay (Gosse), xxiv. 45 _Hester Noble_, unfinished play (with Henley), xxiii. 256, 257 "Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye waukin' yet?" air, xxiii. 113 Highland History, projected, xxiii. 280, 290-1, 297; xxv. 117 "Highland Widow" (Scott), xxv. 24 "High Woods of Umfanua," _see_ "Beach of Falesá" Hiroshigé, prints by, xxiii. 157 "Histoire d'Israël" (Renan), xxv. 304 "Histoire des Origines de Christianisme" (Renan), xxv. 304 "History of America" (Adams), xxv. 215, 266 "History of England" (Macaulay), xxiii. 70 "History of France" (Martin), xxiii. 193 "History of Indostani" (Orme), xxv. 419, 423 "History of Notorious Pirates" (Johnson), xxiv. 101 "History of the Great Storm" (Defoe), xxiv. 101 "History of the Rebellion" (Clarendon), xxiii. 31 "History of the Stevensons," _see_ "Family of Engineers" "History of the United States" (Bancroft), xxiii. 246 Hogarth, William, xxiii. 69; Cambridge lectures on, by Colvin, xxiii. 178 Hokusai (_Magazine of Art_), xxiv. 32 Hole, W., illustrator, xxiv. 270, 319, 321-2, 346; xxv. 349 & _n._ 1, 362 _n._ 1 "Holy Fair" (Burns), xxiii. 4; xxiv. 265 _n._ 1 Homburg, visit to, xxiii. 182 "Home is the Sailor," lines chosen for epitaph, xxiii. 269; xxv. 375 Home Rule Bill of 1885, xxiv. 192 "Homme, L', qui rit" (Hugo), xxiii. 125 & _n._ 1 Honolulu, visits to, xxiv. 291, 319 _et seq._, 329, 353; xxv. 281, 345, 349, 362 "Horatian Ode" (Marvell), xxiii. 293 Hoskin, Dr., xxv. 268, 270, 452 "House of Eld" Fables, xxiii. 12, 141 Houses, characteristics of, xxiii. 145, 146 Howard Place, 8, Edinburgh, birthplace, xxiii. 5 "Howe, Miss" (Clarissa Harlowe), xxiii. 210 "Huckleberry Finn" (Twain), xxiv. 139 "Huguenots, Les," opera, xxiii. 200 "Huish" (Ebb Tide), xxv. 313 "Human Compromise," xxiii. 267 Humble Apology (Longman's), xxiv. 181 Humble Remonstrance (Longman's), xxiv. 127 Hume, David, xxiii. 4, 72, 111, 145 "Humilies et offensés" (Dostoieffsky), xxiv. 183 Hunter, Robert, "portrait" of, xxv. 301 Hurricane at Apia, the great, xxiv. 345, 346, 369; xxv. 141, 172-4; chapter on, in "Footnote," issued in _Scots Observer_, xxv. 174 Hutchinson, --, bust by, of R. L. S., xxv. 353 & _n._ 1 Hyde, Rev. Dr., and Father Damien, xxiv. 292; controversy with, xxiv. 383-4, 391 & _n._ 1, 402, 404 Hyéres, at, xxiv. 5, 21 _et seq._; xxv. 60 Hyndman, --, xxiv. 141 "Hyperion" (Keats), xxiv. 170 Iceland, book on, by Gosse suggested, xxiii. 333 "Ich unglückselige Atlas," song (Schubert), xxiii. 139 Ide, Annie H., and R. L. S.'s birthday, xxv. 89-90, 118-9; letter to, xxv. 118 Ide, C. J., Land Commissioner and afterwards Chief Justice in Samoa, xxv. 281, 298, 380-1, 450; letter to, xxv. 88 Ide, Margery, xxv. 450 _Idler, The_, xxv. 372, 429; contributions to, xxv. 376 _Illustrated London News_, xxv. 301 Inchcape bell, xxiii. 29 Income-tax, xxiii. 113, 114 Inglis, John, Justice-General, xxiii. 181 Ingram, John H., xxiii. 166 "Inland Voyage," xxiii. 183, 185, 204, 211, 212, 218, 229, 247; xxiv. 103; criticisms on, xxiii. 215-6 "Inn Album" (Robert Browning), review of, xxiii, 198, 199 "Inn, The," xxv. 429 "In Russet and Silver" (Gosse), dedication of, xxv. 454 "In the Garden," projected, xxiv. 99 "In the South Seas," first published as "The South Seas," xxiv. 290, 292, 297, 320-1, 358, 362, 399, 403; xxv. 5, 12, 16, 22, 26, 34, 45, 54, 61 & _nn._ 1 & 2, 68, 69, 77, 78, 80, 97, 100; criticisms, xxiv. 293, 348-9; xxv. 76; dedication proposed, xxiv. 304 Intimate Poems, suggested edition, xxv. 377 _Iona_, vessel, xxiii. 24 Ireland, Alexander, letter to, xxiii. 342 Ireland, plan for life in, xxiv. 108, 222 Irongray, tombs at, xxiii. 65 "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" (Keats), xxiv. 170 Isaiah, prophet, xxiii. 211 "Is it not verse except enchanted groves" (Herbert), xxiii. 18 "Island Nights' Entertainments," xxv. 64, 272, 284, 290; illustrations, xxv. 312; length, xxv. 353 & _n._ 1; reviews xxv. 315 & _n._ 1 "Isle of Voices," xxv. 272 "Islet, The," xxv. 301 "Ivanhoe" (Scott), xxiv. 31 Jack, the island horse, xxv. 35-6, 41, 136, 142 James, G. P. R., novels by, ordered by R. L. S., xxiv. 273 James, Henry, xxiv. 105, 127, 130, 133, 143, 154, 182, 235, 250, 359; xxv. 29, 317, 415, 452; letters to, xxiv. 127, 160, 214, 215, 237, 249, 262, 278, 288, 334, 382, 396; xxv. 43, 108, 130, 274, 320, 335, 367, 406 "James More," xxv. 161, 216, 295 _Janet Nicoll_, ss., cruise in, xxiv. 292-3, 385 _et seq._, 392, 403; xxv. 11, 54, 304 Japan and Japanese art, interest in, xxiii. 157, 158, 159; xxiv. 32, 57 Japp, Dr. Alexander, xxiii. 329; letters to, xxiii. 321, 327, 351 Jeafferson, --, xxiv. 178 "Jedidiah Cleishbotham" (Scott), xxiii. 65 Jenkin family, xxiii. 25, 100 Jenkin, Mrs. Fleeming, xxiii. 10, 25; xxiv. 300; letters to, xxiv. 150, 151, 187, 221, 225, 258; xxv. 273 Jenkin, Professor Fleeming, xxiii. 10, 25, 118, 122, 175, 176, 183, 247, 311, 341, 353; xxiv. 48, 258, 272; death, xxiv. 106, 150, 151; memoir of, by R. L. S. (_see_ "Memoir"); debt to, xxiv. 331 Jerome, Jerome K., xxv. 372, 429 "Jerry Abershaw," projected, xxiii. 328, 329; xxiv. 152 Jersey, Countess of, in Samoa, xxv. 145, 227, 228, 325; letters to, xxv, 228-9; on her visit to R. L. S., xxv. 228 Jersey, Earl of, xxv. 288 "Jess" (Window in Thrums), xxv. 277 Jhering, Professor, xxiii. 118, 122 _J. L. Tiernan_, schooner, xxiv. 359 Joan of Arc, Byron's epithet for, xxiii. 354 "Jock o' Hazeldean," air, xxiii. 113 "John Peel" of the song, xxiii. 28 "John Silver" (Treasure Island), xxiv. 112, 123; genesis of, xxiv. 31 Johnson, --, an American, xxiii. 108, 110, 111, 112 "Johnson," or "Johnstone," pseudonym, xxiv. 14, 121 Johnson, Samuel, xxiii. 298; "Life" of, xxiii. 193, 203 Johnstone, Marie, Mary, or May, xxiii. 94, 95, 98, 99, 101 Johnstone, Mr. and Mrs., xxiii. 96, 99 _John Williams_, missionary barque, xxiv. 387 "Jolly Beggars" (Burns), sent for autograph, xxv. 69, 87, 118 Jones, Henry Arthur (_see also_ "Bauble Shop"), letter to, xxiv. 133 Jonson, Ben, xxiii. 294 Journalistic work, xxiii. 184 "Joy of Earth" (Meredith), xxv. 214 Jura, Skye terrier, xxv. 428-9 "Justice Clerk," _see_ Weir of Hermiston "Juvenilia," xxv. 397-8 Kaiulani, Hawaiian Princess, xxiv. 345, 346 Kalakaua, King, xxiv. 320 Kalaupapa, Molokai, xxiv. 351 _et seq._ Kalawao, Molokai, xxiv. 353-4 _Katoomba_, H.M.S., xxv. 334; band of, xxv. 351 Kava, native beverage, xxv. 183 & _n._ 1 "Keats" ("English Men of Letters," by Colvin), xxiii. 349, 350-1; xxiv. 210, 211 Keir, Jean, xxv. 335 Kelso, xxiii. 156 "Kenilworth" (Scott), xxiv. 91 "Kidnapped," xxiii. 24, 331; xxiv. 106, 146, 147, 179, 190, 195-6, 203, 233, 265, 317, 370, 377; xxv. 108, 160, 215, 250, 283, 301, 351; in Braille, xxv. 366; projected illustrations, xxv. 349 _n._ 1; reception, xxiv. 198; reviews, xxiv. 203; sequel (_see_ "Catriona"), xxv. 144; suggested French translation, xxv. 52 Killigrew, Anne, xxiii. 293 _n._ 1 "King Lear" (Shakespeare), xxv. 51 "King Matthias's Hunting Horn" lost, xxiii. 158, 160, 170 Kinglake, W., xxiii. 70 "King's Horn, The," xxiii. 308 Kingston, W.G., xxiii. _intro._ xxiii. Kingussie, at, xxiii. 284, 357 Kipling, Rudyard, anticipated visit from, xxv. 105 & _n._ 1; xxv. 163, 165; appreciations of, xxiv. 396; xxv. 46, 213, 275; letter to, xxv. 46; writings of, xxv. 379 Kirriemuir, xxv. 417 "Kirstie Elliot" (Weir of Hermiston), xxiii. _intro._ xx.; xxv. 457 Kitchener, Colonel, _ib._ Kitchener, Viscount, xxv. 236-7 Knappe, Consul, xxiv. 370; xxv. 139, 141 "Knox, John, and his Relations with Women," xxiii. 141, 149, 150, 153, 155 Knox, John, "Works" of, xxiii. 117 Knox, John, writings on, xxiii. 55, 61, 111, 141, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 153, 155, 158, 159, 167, 170, 171, 173 Ko-o-amua, ex-cannibal chief, xxiv. 293 "Kubla Khan" (Coleridge), xxiii. 92, 220 Kuniyoshi, prints by, xxiii. 157 Labiche, --, xxiii. 239 Labour, imported, in Samoa, xxv. 159 & _n._ 1 Lacy, Mr., xxiii. 307 "Lady Barberina" (H. James), xxiv. 128 "Lady Carbury" ("Way of the World"), xxiii. 215 Lafarge, John, painter, xxv. 4, 29 & _n._ 1, 41, 43, 45 La Fontaine, "Fables" of, xxv. 49 "Lake Isle of Innisfree" (Yeats), xxv. 390 Lamb, Charles, xxiii. 209 "Lamia" (Keats), illustrated by Low, xxiv. 142, 166; dedication of, xxiv. 169-71 Lampman, Archibald, sonnet by, xxiv. 321 & _n._ 1 Landor, W. S., xxiii. 302, 317, 320-1 "Landscape" (Hamerton), xxiv. 143-4 Land's End, visited, xxiii. 183, 209 Lang, Andrew, xxiii. 115, 117, 222, 311, 316; xxiv. 106, 134, 206, 257, 278, 381, 388; xxv. 357, 427; letters to, xxiv. 399; xxv. 216, 453; story suggested by, xxv. 141 & _n._ 1; on "Treasure Island," xxiv. 67 Lantenac, M. (Victor Hugo), xxiii. 130 _n._ 1 "Lantern Bearers, The" (_Scribner's_), xxiv. 235, 254; xxv. 97, 301 Large, Miss, xxv. 329-31 La Sale, Antoine, projected essay on, xxiii. 207 "Last Sinner, The," xxiii. 171 Laupepa, _see_ Malietoa Lautreppe, Albert de, xxv. 383 Lavenham, xxiii. 56 Law examination passed, xxiii. 182 "Lay Morals," 86, 185; xxiv. 62 _et seq._ "Leading Light, The," projected, xxiii. 329 "Leaves of Grass" (Whitman), xxiii. 70 Le Gallienne, Richard, letter to, xxv. 364 Legal work, xxiii. 182, 184 Leigh, Hon. Capt., xxv. 227-8, 231, 233, 234, 235 Leith, xxiii. 159, 202 Lemon, --, picture by, xxiv. 167 Lenz, --, xxiv. 198 Le Puy, xxiii. 217 "Lesson, The, of the Master" (H. James), xxiv. 382; xxv. 108, 274 "Letter to the Church of Scotland," xxv. 398 "Letter to a Young Gentleman," xxv. 123 _n._ 1 "Letters and Memories of Jane Welsh Carlyle" (Froude), xxiii, 301, 302 Letters, desiderata in, xxiii. 259 "Letters" (Flaubert), xxiv. 405; xxv. 59 "Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to his Friend in London" (Burt), xxiii. 291 "Letters to his Family and Friends," xxiii. _intro._ xix. Leven, xxiii. 61 "Library, The" (Lang), xxiii. 307 "Lieder und Balladen" (Burns), Silbergleit's translation, xxiii. 39 Life, two views on, xxiv. 158, 164, 165 "Life and Death," xxiii. 171 "Life of General Hutchinson" (Mrs. Hutchinson), xxiii. 30, 31, 32 "Life of Hazlitt," projected, xxiii. 283, 336, 339, 345 "Life of P. H. Gosse" (Edmund Gosse), xxv. 71, 130, 317 "Life of R. L. S." (Balfour), xxiii. _intro._ xix.; xxv. 4, 59 "Life of Robertson" (Dugald Stewart), xxiii. 119 "Life of Samuel Johnson" (Boswell), xxiii. 193, 203 "Life of Sir Walter Scott" (Lockhart), xxiv. 75, 84, 170, 171 "Life of Wellington" ("English Worthies"), unfinished, xxiv. 106, 134, 139 "Life on the Lagoons" (H. F. Brown), xxiii. 303 Lillie, Jean and David, connection of, with the Stevensons, xxv. 436 "Lion of the Nile," xxiv. 321 Lions, xxiii. 307 Lippincott, xxiv. 54-5, 90 "Literary Recollections" (Payn), xxiv. 381 "Little Minister" (Barrie), xxv. 265, 276 "Lives of the Admirals" (Southey), xxiii. 70 "Lives of the Stevensons," _see_ "Family of Engineers" "L. J. R.," Essay Club, xxiii. 46, 48; xxv. 121 Llandudno, visited, xxiii. 124, 148 Locker-Lampson, Frederick, letters to, xxiv. 205, 206, 207, 208, 215 "Lodging for the Night," xxiii. 184, 191, 248 Logan, John, xxiii. 71, 72 _London_, contributions to, xxiii. 184 "London Life" (H. James), xxiv. 289 London, visits to (see _also_ British Museum), xxiii. 77, 155, 330; xxiv. 105, 107, 186-7, 189, 202, 209, 229 "London Voluntaries" (Henley), xxv. 214 Longman, --, publisher, xxiv. 30, 66, 111, 134; xxv. 123, 125 _Longman's Magazine_, contributions to, xxiv. 127, 130, 134, 143, 181; xxv. 454 "Lord Nidderdale" (Way of the World), xxiii. 215 "Lord Rintoul" (Little Minister), xxv. 265 "Lost Sir Massingberd" (Payn), xxiv. 7, 177 Loti, Pierre (M. Viaud), xxiv. 308 "Loudon Dodd" (Wrecker), xxv. 24, 172 & _n._1 "Louis XIV. et la Révocation de l'Édit de Nantes" (Michelet), xxiii. 69 "Louse, The" (Burns), xxiv. 256 "Love in the Valley" (Meredith), xxiv. 54; xxv. 214, 390 "Lovelace" (Clarissa Harlowe), xxiii. 210 Love, young, advice on, xxiii. 358 Lowell, John Russell, xxiv. 107 Low, Mrs. W. H., xxiv. 107, 202, 217 Low, W. H., xxiv. 107, 202, 217, 234, 250, 251, 255, 288, 369, 390; xxv. 25, 111; illustrated edition by, of "Lamia," xxiv. 142, 166; dedication of, xxiv. 169-71; letters to, xxiv. 57, 63, 72, 89, 115, 142, 153, 166, 169, 172, 177, 185, 217, 230, 245, 346; xxv. 378 _Lübeck_, s.s., passage on, xxiv. 375 _et seq._; xxv. 48, 50, 53, 81 _Ludgate Hill_, s.s., passage in, xxiv. 110, 230, 232; xxiv. 235 _et seq._ Lully, J.B., gavotte by, xxiv. 188-9 Lysaght, Sidney, xxv. 385-6, 388, 405, 415 & _n._ 1; books by, xxv. 390; visit from, xxv. 374 _Macaire_, play (with Henley), xxiv. 146, 147 _Macbeth_ (Shakespeare), xxiv. 57 M'Carthy, Justin, xxiv. 173 McClure, S. S., publisher, relations with, xxiv. 234, 252, 321, 379; xxv. 120 McCrie, --, xxiii. 117 Macdonald, David, xxiii. 20 Macdonald, Flora, xxiii. 298 Macdonald, George, xxiv. 248 Macdonald, J. H. A., xxiii. 114 Macgregor, clan, xxv. 293, 346 M'Gregor-Stevenson connection, question of, xxv. 440 Mackay, Professor Æneas, xxiii. 282; letters to, xxiii. 309 Mackintosh family, xxiii. 169 M'Laren, Duncan, xxiii. 96, 97, 114 MacMahon, President, xxiii. 116 Macmillan, Alexander, xxiii. 151 _Macmillan's Magazine_, xxiii. _intro._ xvii. 204; contributions to, xxiii. 125, 149, 151 Macpherson, Miss Fanny (Lady Holroyd), xxv. 83 & _n._ 1 Madeira, plan to visit, xxiv. 328 "Mademoiselle Merquem" (Sand), xxiii. 87 _Magazine of Art_, contributions to, xxiii. 333-4; xxiv. 54, 57, 115, 181; xxv. 97, 123, 398, 423 Majendie, Colonel, xxiv. 283 "Malade Imaginaire" (Molière), xxiv. 123 "Malbrook s'en va-t-en guerre," xxiii. 102 Malie, abode and following of Malietoa, xxv. 6, 9 _et seq._ Malietoa Laupepa, xxv. 9, 176, 234, 466; friendliness with, xxv. 10; and Mataafa, troubles concerning, xxv. 6-9 _et seq._ Manasquan, at, xxiv. 234, 286-8 Manchester Ship Canal, xxiv. 135 _Manhattan_, magazine, xxiv. 57, 90 "Manse, The," xxiii. 4; xxv. 301 Manu'a, islands of, "queen" of, xxv. 407-8 Marat, xxiv. 183 Marbot, "Memoires" of, xxv. 274, 321 "Marche funèbre" (Chopin), xxiii. 139 Marcus Aurelius, xxiv. 183 "Marden, Colonel" (Clarissa Harlowe), xxiii. 210 "Margery Bonthron," xxiii. 171 "Marion," xxiii. 307 _Mariposa_, s.s., xxv. 346 "Markheim," xxiii. _intro._ xx., xxiii.; xxiv. 125, 213 "Marmont's Memoirs," xxiv. 134 Marot, Clement, poems by, xxiii. 108 "Marplot, The" (Lysaght), xxv. 390 Marquesas Islands, visited, xxiv. 290, 293, 371 Marryat, Captain, works by, ordered by R. L. S., xxiv. 338 Marseilles, at, xxiv. 5, 12-14, 98 Marshall Islands, visited, xxiv. 292 Martial, xxiv. 82 Martin, A. Patchett, letters to, xxiii. 208, 209 "Martin's Madonna," xxiii. 171 Marvell, Andrew, xxv. 46 Mary, Queen of Scots, xxiii. 62 "Mary Wollstonecraft" (Mrs. Pennell), xxiv. 149 "Master of Ballantrae," xxiii. _intro._ xxiii.; xxiv. 235, 265, 268-70, 274, 276, 278, 279, 291, 314, 317, 328, 338, 339, 346, 349, 360, 369, 370, 377, 398; xxv. 43, 171 & _n._ 2, 250, 357; illustrations, xxiv. 319, 320; original plan of, xxv. 396; paper on, xxv. 376; suggested French translation, xxv. 52 Mataafa, xxiv. 370; xxv. 176, 256; troubles concerning, xxv. 6-9 _et seq._, 93 _et seq._, 280, 332-3, 350; visits to, xxv. 193 _et seq._, 242; with Lady Jersey, xxv. 228 _et seq._ Matlock, visited, xxiv. 105, 189 Maupassant, Guy de, xxiv. 383 Maxwell, Sir Herbert, xxv. 437; letters to, xxv. 440, 453 "Mazeppa" (Byron), xxiii. 132 Medallion portrait by St. Gaudens, xxv. 410 Medea (Ordered South), xxiii. 86 & _n._ 1 Mediterranean, impression of, xxiii. 104, 105 Meiklejohn, Hugh, xxv. 269, 450, 451 Meiklejohn, Professor John, xxiii. 263, 316; compliments on "Burns" article, xxiii. 241; letters to, xxiii. 263; xxv. 450 "Mein Herz ist im Hochland," xxiii. 41 Melford, xxiii. 56 Melville, Herman, xxiv. 295, 348, 381 "Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin," xxiv. 106-7, 150, 169, 174, 187, 225 "Memoirs of a Cavalier" (Defoe), xxiv. 101 "Memoirs of an Islet," essay, xxiii. 23 "Memoirs of Henry Shovel," unfinished, xxiv. 402 "Memorials" (Laing), xxv. 293 "Memorials of a Scottish Family," projected (_see also_ "Family of Engineers"), xxiv. 279 "Memories and Portraits," xxiii. 56, 318 _n._ 1; xxiv. 96 _n._ 1, 214, 215, 230, 231, 257; xxv. 51, 53, 301 & _n._ 1 "Men and Books," xxiii. 86 Menken, Adah, xxiii. 275 Mentone, at, xxiii. 55, 77, 81 _et seq._, 143-4 Meredith, George, xxiii. 183, 311; xxiv. 97, 278 & _n._ 1; xxv. 351-2; letters to, xxv. 343, 390 "Merry Men, The," xxiii. 282, 316, 317, 321; xxiv. 35, 90, 125, 213, 215; xxv. 353; criticisms on, xxiii. 319; dedication, xxiv. 211; germ of, xxiii. 308; places described in, xxiii. 317 Michaels, barber, xxiii. 244 Michelet, --, xxv. 304 Middleton, Miss, letter to, xxv. 428 Millais, Sir John E., xxiv. 139; on R. L. S., as artist, xxiii. _intro._ xxx. Milne, Mrs., letter to, xxiv. 70 Milson, John, xxiv. 130 "Mimes" (Schwob), xxv. 409 "Misadventure in France, A," essay, xxiv. 67-8 "Misadventures of John Nicholson" (_Yule-Tide_), xxiii. 12; xxiv. 211, 214; xxv. 57 & _n._ 1 "Miscellanies" (Edinburgh edition), xxv. 33, 376, 397 & _n._ 1, 424 "Misérables, Les" (V. Hugo), xxiii. 129 _n._ 1 Missions and missionary work, xxv. 10, _n._ 1, 33, 56, 57, 203, 410-11, 422 Möe, Princess, xxiv. 308, 309, 313 "Mobray" (Clarissa Harlowe), xxiii. 210 Mödestine, the donkey of the Cévennes journey, xxiii. 218 Molière, xxiii. 69; plays, xxiv. 96, 123 "Moll Flanders" (Defoe), xxiv. 101 Molokai, visited, xxiv. 291, 345, 349 _et seq._, 356 Monaco, at, xxiii. 93 Monastier, visit to, xxiii. 217 Monkhouse, Cosmo, letters to, xxiv. 85, 95 Monroe, Miss, letters to, xxiv. 191, 193, 261 "Monsieur Auguste" (Méry), xxiii. 257, 258 Montagu, Basil, xxv. 29 _n._ 2 Montaigne, xxiv. 130, 144 Monterey, xxiv. 36; ranche life at, xxiii. 229, 234, 235, 236 "Monterey, California," xxiii. 241, 242 Montpellier, at, xxiv. 4 "Moonstone, The" (Wilkie Collins), xxiii. 18 Moors, H. J., xxiv. 292, 370, 371; xxv. 10, 28, 29, 30, 31, 40, 96, 107 "Morality, the, of the Profession of Letters" (_Fortnightly_), xxiii. 281 "More New Arabian Nights," xxiv. 106, 108, 114, 127, 139, 140, 142 Morley, Charles, of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, xxiv. 125 "Morley Ernstein" (G. P. R. James), xxiv. 75 Morley, John (Viscount Morley), xxiii. 127, 132, 226, 268 _Morning Star_, missionary ship, cruise in, projected, xxiv. 337, 338-9, 340, 343, 384 Morris, William, letter to, xxv. 162 Morse, Captain, xxv. 222 Morse, Miss, letter to, xxv. 253 Mount Chessie, xxiv. 44 Mount Saint Helena, xxiii. 277 Mount Vaea, burial-place of R. L. S., xxv. 9, 10, _n._ 1, 458 _et seq._ Mulinuu, abode and party of Malietoa, xxv. 9 _et seq._, 107, 330, 332, 333, 370 "Mulvaney" (Soldiers Three), letter as from, xxv. 46 "Murder of Red Colin," projected, xxiii. 331 Murders, famous, volume on, projected by Gosse and R. L. S., xxiii. 338, 350 "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (Poe), xxiii. _intro._ xxiii Mures, the, of Caldwell, xxv. 358 Murphy, Tommy, a lost child, story of, xxiii. 161, 162 Murrayfield, xxv. 57 Murray, Grahame, xxiii. 90 Murray, W. C., xxv. 69 Musset, Alfred de, comedies of, xxiii. 212 Mutiny, Indian, novel on, projected, xxiv. 283-4 "My Boy Tammie," air, xxiii. 113 "My First Book," series in _Idler_, xxv. 33, 376, 429 Myers, F. W. H., letter to, xxiv. 184 Napoleon III., xxv. 250, 319 Nares, Captain (The Wrecker), xxv. 269 Navigator Islands, xxiii. 180, 205; xxiv, 405 Navy, British, men of, xxv. 351-2 Nebraska, aspect of, xxiii. 233-4 Nerli, Count, xxv. 228 Neruda, Mme. Norman, xxiii. 169, 198 Nether Carsewell, xxv. 342, 346 "New Arabian Nights," xxiii. 185, 218; xxiv. 7, 256 New Caledonia, visited, xxiv. 293, 385, 392 "New Poems" (Edmund Gosse), xxiii. 245-6 Newport, U.S.A., at, xxiv. 233, 237-8, 255 _New Quarterly_, contributions to, xxiii. 237 _New Review_, contribution to, xxv. 18 _n._ 1 New Year's wish, a, xxiii. 212 New York, at, xxiv. 233-4, 238 _New York Ledger_, contribution to, xxiv. 361 _New York Tribune_, editor of, letter to, xxiv. 7 New Zealand, xxiv. 405 Nice, visits to, xxiii. 84; xxiv. 4, 6, 79, 92 Nile Campaigns, xxiv. 81 Noël-Pardon, M., xxiv. 394 "Noll and Nell," poem (Martin), xxiii. 210 "Norma," opera, xxiii. 252 "Northern Lights" (_see also_ "Family of Engineers"), xxiii. 4, 10; xxv. 322 Norwood, at, xxiii. 57 "Note on Realism" (_Magazine of Art_), xxiv. 59, 62, 181 "Notes on the Movements of Young Children," xxiii. 133, 143 & _n._ 2 "Notre Dame" (Hugo), xxiii. 129 _n._ 1 Noumea, visited, xxiv. 293, 392, 396 Nukahiva Island, at, xxiv. 290, 293 Nulivae Bridge, at, xxv. 223 "Ode to Duty" (Wordsworth), xxv. 173 & _n._ 1 "Ode to the Cuckoo," authorship of, xxiii. 71, 72 O'Donovan Rossa, xxiii. 321 "OEdipus King" (Sophocles), xxiv. 114 "Olalla," xxiv. 106 Old English History (Freeman's), xxv. 117 "Old Gardener," xxv. 404 "Old Mortality" (Scott), xxiii. 129 _n._ 1; essay on, xxiv. 6, 68, 96 "Old Pacific Capital" (_Fraser's Magazine_), xxv. 97 Oliphant, Mrs., xxiv. 370, 382 Omission, art of, xxiv. 60 Omond, --, xxiv. 178 "Omoo" (Melville), xxiv. 348 "One of the Grenvilles" (Lysaght), xxv. 390 "Only Child," projected, xxiv. 99 "On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places," xxiii. 15, 151-3 "On the Principal Causes of Silting in Estuaries" (T. Stevenson), xxiv. 135 "On some Aspects of Burns" (_Cornhill_), xxiii. 224, 227 "On some Ghostly Companions at a Spa," xxiii. 285 "Operations of War" (Hamley), xxiii. _intro._ xxxiv. Orange, at, xxiii. 80 "Ordered South," xxiii. _intro._ xxvii., 56, 77, 83, 86, 87 & _n._ 1, 116, 122, 126, 267; published, xxiii. 125 Organ-grinder episode, xxiii. 155-6 Ori a Ori, chief, xxiv. 291, 302, 304, 306-7, 309-10 _et seq._, 317, 334; letter from, xxiv. 332-3, 337 "Origines de la France Contemporaine" (Taine), xxiv. 258; xxv. 111-2, 319 "Origines" (Renan), xxv. 304 Orkneys and Shetlands, tour of, xxiii. 10, 24 _Orlando_, H.M.S., xxv. 329 Orr, Fred, letter to, xxv. 127 "Orsino" (_Twelfth Night_), R. L. S. as, xxiii. 175, 176 Osbourne, Lloyd, xxiii. _intro._ xvii., 300, 348 _et seq._; xxiv. 28, 139, 178, 198, 199, 201, 290, 309, 323, 330, 341, 366, 392, 396, 399, 402; xxv. 3, 21 & _n._ 2, 50, 52, 67, 78, 96, 98, 99, 390, 445; account by, of death of R. L. S., xxv. 457 _et seq._; collaboration with (_see also_ "Wrecker"), xxiv. 235, 249, 250, 256, 283-4, 328, 361, 367, 379, 380, 389, 399, 402; xxv. 347-9, 437-8; illness, xxv. 152 Osbourne, Mrs., _see_ Stevenson, Mrs. R. L. Ossianic controversy, xxiii. 298 _Othello_ (Shakespeare), xxv. 51 Otis, Captain, xxiv. 234, 290 Otway, essay on (Gosse), xxiv. 45 Our Lady of the Snows, monastery, poem on (Underwoods), xxiii. 221-2 "Owl, The," projected, xxv. 315 & _n._ 1 "Oxford Dictionary of the English Language" (Murray), xxiv. 37 P--N, John, letter to, xxv. 358 P--n, Russell, letter to, xxv. 359 Pacific Ocean, xxiii. 240 Pacific voyages, _see_ "In the South Seas" Page, H. A., pseudonym for Dr. Japp, _q.v._ Pago-pago harbour, xxv. 8, 65 Painters and their art, xxiv. 60-1 "Painters' Camp, in the Highlands" (Hamerton), xxiii. 216 _Pall Mall Gazette_, contributions to, xxiii. 281, 346; xxiv. 120, 125, 130, 131, 227; xxv. 397; Henley's articles in, xxiii. 238 "Pan's Pipes," xxiii. 212; xxv. 301 Papeete (Tahitian Islands), xxiv. 291, 296, 308, 314 Paperchase, Sunday, xxv. 422 Paris Exhibition of 1878, xxiii. 183 Paris, visits to, xxiii. 183, 305; xxiv. 105, 107 Parker, Lieutenant and Mrs., xxv. 29 "Parliament Close" (Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh), xxiii. 216 Parliament House, Edinburgh, verses on, xxiii. 193-4 Parnessiens, proposed paper on, xxiii. 168 "Paston Letters," xxiii. 203 "Pastoral" (Longman's), xxiv. 221; xxv. 301 Paton, John, and Co., xxiv. 252 Paul, C. Kegan, xxiii. 212 Paumotus atolls, visited, xxiv. 290, 293-4 "Pavilion, The, on the Links," xxiii. 229, 238, 249, 256, 259, 262, 267 Payne, John, xxv. 427 Payn, James, xxiv. 355; handwriting of, xxv. 365; letters to, xxiv. 176, 355, 381; xxv. 425, 446; novel by, xxv. 171; works of, xxiv. 7-9 "Pearl Fisher" (with Lloyd Osbourne, _see_ "Ebb Tide"), changes of name for story, xxv. 288 _et seq._ "Pegfurth Bannatyne," xxiii. 361, 362 Pella, letter from, xxiii. 115, 128 Pembroke, Earl of, xxv. 290 "Penn" (H. Dixon), xxiii. 277 Pennell, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph, xxiv. 149; letter to, xxiv. 149 Penn, William, article on, projected, xxiii. 265 "Penny plain and Twopence coloured," essay, xxiv. 93 "Penny Whistles," _see_ "Child's Garden of Verse" "Pentland Hills" (Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh), xxiii. 216 "Pentland Rising," xxv. 397 Penzance, visit to, xxiii. 206 Pepys, Samuel, xxiv. 29, 183; essay on, xxiii. 281 "Petit Jehan de Saintre" (La Sale), essay on projected, xxiii. 267 "Petits Poèmes en Prose," xxiii. 195, 196, 197 "Petronius Arbiter," xxiv. 83 "Pew" (_Admiral Guinea_), xxiv. 119, 120 Peyrat, Napoleon, xxiii. 307 _Pharos_, s.y., xxv. 98 & _n._ 1 "Phasellulus loquitur," xxiv. 116 Pheidias, xxiii. 159 "Philosophy of Umbrellas" (with Ferrier), xxv. 398 Picts, the, xxv. 434-6 "Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh," xxiii. 185, 211, 216, 218 "Pilgrim's Progress" (Bunyan), xxiii. 203; Bagster's edition, essay on cuts in, xxiii. 334 Pilsach, Baron Senfft von, President of the Council, Samoa, xxv. 7, 95 _et seq._, 100-1, 275, 281, 286, 305, 364, 376 "Pinkerton" (Wrecker), xxiv. 368; xxv. 141 & _n._ 1, 146, 378 "Pioneering in New Guinea" (Chalmers), xxv. 39 Piquet, xxv. 428 "Pirate, The" (Marryat), xxiii. 329 "Pirate, The" (Scott), xxiii. 318 "Pirbright Smith," xxiii. 361 "Pitcairn's Criminal Trials of Scotland," xxv. 271, 293 Pitlochry, at, xxiii. 282, 306 "Plain Speaker" (Hazlitt), xxiv. 130 Platz, Herr, xxiv. 194 Poe, Edgar, xxiii. _intro._ xxiii., 166; xxiv. 83 Poems by Baildon, technique discussed, xxv. 377 Poepoe, Joseph, xxiv. 330 Poland, projected visit to, xxiii. 151, 152, 155 Pollington, Lord, xxiv. 260 Pollock, ----, xxiv. 36 Pomaré V., King, xxiv. 309 Poor folk, charity of, xxv. 209-10 "Poor Thing, The," xxiii. 141 Poquelin, ----, xxiv. 123 _Portfolio, The_, xxiii. _intro._ xvii.; contributions to, xxiii. 58, 77, 141, 146, 151, 152, 153, 164, 166, 168, 185, 216; xxv. 397-8; Colvin's work for, xxiii. 178 Portobello, beach incident, xxiii. 73; train incident, xxiii. 63 "Portrait of a Lady" (H. James), xxiv. 263 Positivism, studies in, xxiii. 159 Pratt, ----, fables by, xxv. 49 "Prince de Galles," xxiii., 356 "Prince of Grünewald," _see_ "Prince Otto" "Prince Otto" (Forest State _q.v._), xxiii. 229, 265, 266, 267, 278, 353; xxiv. 5, 23, 24, 34, 35, 36, 54, 66, 68, 73, 81, 106, 110, 142, 154, 173, 181; xxv. 53, 376; criticisms, xxiv. 191; publication, xxiv. 138; reviews, xxiv. 155-6 "Princess Casamassima" (H. James), xxiv. 160 _n._ 1 Princes Street, Edinburgh, xxiii. 72, 74 Pringle, Janet, xxv. 361 "Printemps, Le," group (Rodin), xxiv. 202, 209 Prisoners, Samoan, gratitude of, _see_ "Road of Loving Hearts" Privateers, enquiry on, xxv. 380 & _n._ 1 Proctor, Mr. B. W., xxv. 29 & _n._ 2 "Professor Rensselaer," xxiii. 249 Pronouns, "direct and indirect," quip on, xxv. 174 "Providence and the Guitar," xxiii. _intro._ xx., 185, 219, 248, 268 Publishers, xxv. 123-5 "Pulvis et Umbra" (_Scribner's_), xxiv. 235, 253, 264, 274,284, 384; xxv. 123 & _n._ 1 "Pupil, The" (H. James), xxv. 132 Purcell, Rev. ----, xxiii. 332-3; xxiv. 159 Purple passages in literature, xxv. 72-3 "Pye," ----, xxv. 30 Pyle, Howard, xxv. 164 _n._ 1 _Queen_, ship, xxv. 353 Queensferry, xxiii. 68, 69 Queen's River, xxv. 417 "Quentin Durward" (Scott), xxiii. 129 _n._ 1; xxiv. 91 "RAB and his Friends" (Brown) xxiii. 296 Raiatea, xxiv. 308 _et seq._ Raleigh, Walter, on restrained egoism in literature, xxiii. _intro._ xxvi., xxvii. "Randal" (The Ebb Tide), xxv. 187 "Random Memories: the Coast of Fife" (_Scribner's_), xxiii. 12, 15; xxiv. 235, 387; xxv. 97, 301 Rarotonga, xxv. 269 "Raskolnikoff" (Le Crime et le Châtiment), xxiv. 182 Rawlinson, Miss, letters to, xxiv. 227; xxv. 274; verses to, xxiv. 227 Rawlinson, Mrs., xxiv. 227 Reade, Charles, xxiii. 129 _n._ 1 "Real Thing" (H. James), xxv. 322 "Redgauntlet" (Scott), xxiii. _intro._ xxiii., 287 _n._ 1 Reformation, studies in, xxiii. 159 "Refugees" (Doyle), xxv. 340 Reid, Captain Mayne, works of, xxv. 13 "Reign of Law" (Duke of Argyll), xxiii. 67 & _n._ 1 "Rembrandt," article on, by Colvin (_Edinburgh Review_), xxiii. 225 "Reminiscences" (Carlyle), xxiii. 301 Rémy, Père, xxv. 327 Renaissance story, projected, xxiii. 167, 168 Renan, Ernest, works, xxv. 304 Rennie, John, xxiv. 121 Resignation, xxiv. 62, 76 _et seq._ "Restoration Dramatists," essay on (Lamb), xxiv. 85 Retrospective musings, xxv. 437-8 Revenge, Christian doctrine of, xxiii. 214 Rhone, the, xxiii. 79 "Richard Feverel" (Meredith), xxv. 265 _Richard III._ (Shakespeare), xxiv. 398; xxv. 51 Richardson, Samuel, novelist, xxiii. 129 _n._ 1 Richmond, Sir W. B., xxiv. 107; portrait by, xxiv. 202 _Richmond_, s.s., xxiv. 337, 343 Richmond, stay at, xxiv. 104 "Rideau Cramoisi, Le" (d'Aurévilly), xxv. 314, 380 _Ringarooma_, ship, xxv. 268-9 "Rising Sun," projected, xxiv. 403 "Ritter von dem heiligen Geist" (Heine), xxiii. 88 & _n._ 1 R. L. S. Society, Cincinnati, xxv. 384 "R. L. Stevenson in Wick" (Margaret H. Roberton), xxiii. 15 _n._ 1 "Roads," paper on, xxiii. 55, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 67, 76, 77, 117, 119, 121, 141, 143, 201; xxv. 397-8 "Road, the, of Loving Hearts," xxv. 374, 431 _et seq_., 441, 442, 446, 459 _et seq._; inscription on, xxv. 441, 446; speech by R. L. S. at opening of, xxv. 441, 446, 462 _et seq._ Robert, Louis, xxiv. 28 Roberts, Earl, xxiv. 81 Robertson, --, xxiii. 117 Robertson's Sermons, xxiv, 268 Robinet, --, painter, xxiii. 98, 99 "Robin Run-the-Hedge," unfinished, xxiv. 402 "Robinson Crusoe" (Defoe), xxiv. 101, 103 Rob Roy, xxv. 293 "Rob Roy" (Scott), xxiv. 91 "Rocambole" (Ponson du Terrail), xxiii. 254 Roch, Valentine, xxiv. 110, 238 _et passim_ "Roderick Hudson" (H. James), xxiv. 262-3, 265 Rodin, Auguste, sculptor, xxiv. 107, 202; letters to, xxiv. 209, 216 Rodriguez Albano, xxiii. 244 "Rois en Exil" (Daudet), xxiii. 346 "Romance" (Longman's), xxiv. 181 Roman Law, studies in, xxiii. 126 Rondeaux, xxiii. 188-9 "Rosa Quo Locorum," xxv. 33 "Rose," character of (Meredith), xxiv. 97 "Rosen, Countess von" (Forest State), xxiii. 266 Ross, Dr. Fairfax, xxv. 348 & _n._ 1, 350 Ross family, xxiii. 28 Ross of Mull, used in "The Merry Men," xxiii. 41 Rossetti, D. G., xxiv. 239 Ross, Rev. Alexander and Mrs., xxiii. 27 Rothschild, Baron, xxiii. 195 "Rover," verses (Gosse), xxiv. 27 Rowfant, xxiv. 215 "Rowfant Rhymes" (Locker-Lampson), xxiv. 205 Royal Society of Edinburgh, xxiv. 118, 135 Royat, visits to, actual and projected, xxiv. 39, 98, 99 _et seq._; xxv. 105, 131 Ruedi, Dr., xxiii. 297 Rui = Louis, in Samoan pronunciation, xxiv. 307, 310 _et alibi_ Ruskin, John, xxiii. 117; xxv. 397 Russel family, xxiii. 21, 22 Russel, Miss Sara, xxiii. 21, 22 Russel, Mrs., xxiii. 22 Russel, Sheriff, xxiii. 21, 22 Ruysdael, --, painting by, xxiii. 178 Sachsenhausen, xxiii. 43 Sagas, love of, xxiii. 332; xxiv. 207; xxv. 162, 211 "St. Agnes' Eve" (Keats), xxiv. 170 St. Augustine, xxiii. _intro._ xxiv. St. Gaudens, Augustus, sculptor, xxiv. 170, 234, 238, 390; xxv. 25; letters to, xxv. 308, 341, 410; medallion portrait by, xxiv. 238-9, 250, 255 St. Gaudens, Homer, letters to, xxiv. 287 St. Germain, at, xxiii. 305 "St. Ives," xxv. 281, 347-8, 371, 375, 380 & _n._ 1, 387, 392, 403, 405, 414, 430, 450; inception of, xxv. 285-6; parallel to, xxv. 442; scheme for, xxv. 287 St. John, apostle, and the Revelation (in Renan's book), xxv. 304 St. Paul, xxv. 304; teaching of, xxiii. 214 Saintsbury, Professor G., xxiii. 307 Salvini, T., article on, xxiv. 72 Samoa and the Samoans for children (letters to Miss Boodle on), xxv. 147, 217, 243 Samoa, climate of, xxv. 250, 278, 333, 348 _n._ 1, 350, 419 contrasted with Europe, xxv. 355 exile in, xxv. 349 letters from, xxv. 9 _et seq._ missionary work, in, interest in, xxv. 10 & _n._ 1; xxv. 33, 56, 57 rain in, xxv. 443-4 rivers of, xxv. 132-3 _et seq._ visit to, and settlement in, xxiv. 290 _et seq._ war trouble in, projected work on, xxiv. 370, 379, 380 Samoan character, xxv. 381, 432 chiefs, road made by, _see_ "Road of Loving Hearts" history, _see_ "Footnote to History" language, xxv. 49; study of, xxv. 181, 203 politics, apologies for dwelling on, xxv. 388, 445; interest in. xxv. 4 _et passim_ prisoners (chiefs), _see_ "Road of Loving Hearts" _Samoa Times_, xxiv. 392 "Samuel Pepys," essay (_Cornhill_), xxiii. 281 Sanchez, Adolpho, xxiii. 240 Sanchez, Mrs., xxv. 257 Sand, George, writings of, xxiii. 87 Sandwich Islands, xxiv. 292, 340 "San Francisco," xxiii. 342 San Francisco, stay at, and visits to, xxiii. 229, 230; xxiv. 234, 283, 286, 289, 290 "Sannazzaro," xxiii. 167 Saône and Rhone, projected journey down and book on, xxiv. 98, 99 Saranac Lake, at, xxiv. 233-4, 240 _et seq._; xxv. 123 _n._ 1 Sargent, John S., artist, xxiv. 105, 167; portrait by, xxiv. 117, 155 _Saturday Review_, xxiii. 58, 69, 77 Savage Island, at, xxiv. 387 Savile Club, the, xxiii. 124, 127, 133, 186, 263; xxiv. 187 Schmidt, Emil, President of Council, Samoa, xxv. 416, 424 "Schooner Farallone," _see_ "Ebb Tide" Schopenhauer, studies in, xxiii. 159 Schwob, Marcel, letters to, xxiv. 327, 397; xxv. 51, 409 Sciatica, xxiv. 92 "Scotch Church and Union" (Defoe), xxiv. 101 Scotch labourer and politics, xxiii. 61 Scotch murder trials, books on, asked for, xxv. 271 Scotch songs, Russian pleasure in, xxiii. 113 "Scotland and the Union," projected, xxiii. 297 Scotland, last visit, xxiv. 227 Scotland, whisky, etc., of, xxiii. 41 _Scotsman_, xxv. 398 _Scots Observer_, contribution to, xxv. 174 "Scots wha hae," air, xxiii. 113 Scott, Dr., letter to, xxiv. 374 Scott, Sir Walter (_see also_ Waverley Novels), xxiii. 65 & _n._ 1, 111, 130 _n._ 1, 264, 333; xxiv. 75, 76, 84, 91, 382; xxv. 86, 110, 154, 164, 167,371; love of action, xxiii. _intro._ xxxiv.; nobility of character, xxiii. _intro._ xxxv.; novels, xxv. 24; novels contrasted with R. L. S.'s, xxiii. _intro._ xxiii. Scribner, C., xxiv. 233, 253-4, 390; xxv. 25, 380, 392; letters to, xxiv. 252 Scribner, Messrs., verse published by, xxiv. 395 _Scribner's Magazine_, xxiv. 110, 142, 253, 258; contributions, actual and suggested, xxiv. 233, 235, 239, 240, 247, 252, 268, 277, 287, 367, 377 _et seq._, 387, 393; xxv. 86, 97, 110, 115, 171 _n._ 1 "Sea-Cook, The" (_see also_ "Treasure Island"), xxiii. 326-7 Sedan, xxv. 250, 318 Seed, Hon. J., xxiii. 179; xxiv. 405 Seeley, Professor, style of, xxiv. 55-6 Seeley, Richmond, publisher and editor (_see also_ "Portfolio"), xxiii. _intro._ xvii., 141, 142, 143, 148, 398 Sellar, Mrs., xxiii. 115 "Sensations d'Italie" (Bourget), xxv. 127, 130-1 "Sentimental Journey" (Sterne), xxiii. _intro._ xxiii. "Sentimental Tommy" (Barrie), xxv. 419 & _n._ 1 Seraphina (_see also_ "Prince Otto"), xxiii. _intro._ xx. "Service of Man" (Cotter Morison), xxiv. 219-20 Seumanutafa, Chief, of Apia, xxv. 26, 48-9, 105 "Seventeenth Century Studies" (Gosse), xxiv. 45 Sewall, Mr., American Consul at Samoa, xxv. 4, 29, 58, 65-6 "Shadow, The, on the Bed" (Mrs. R. L. S.), xxiii. 308, 316, 321 Shairp, Professor, xxiii. 191, 263 Shaltigoe, wreck at, xxiii. 22 Shannon, W. J., xxiii. 332-3 Shaw, Bernard, appreciation of, xxiv. 270-1 Shelley, Lady, xxiv. 105, 149, 177, 179, 211; xxv. 131 "Shelley Papers" (Dowden), xxiv. 211, 212 Shelley, P. B., xxiv. 177-8, 212; 372, 373-4; and Keats, xxiv. 211 Shelley, Sir P. B., xxiv. 177-8, 211, 373; xxv. 458 "Sherlock Holmes" (Doyle), xxv. 299 Shetland, visited, xxiii. 10, 24 "Shovels of Newton French," projected, xxv. 5, 55-6, 82-3, 172 Sick child, episode of, xxiii. 230, 269 "Sign of the ship" causerie (Lang), xxiv. 278, 388 "Sigurd" (W. Morris), xxiii. 334; xxv. 162 Silverado, life at, xxiii. 278 "Silverado Squatters," xxiii. 230, 279, 283, 352, 355; xxiv. 5, 26, 27, 30 & _n._ 1, 34, 56, 66, 67, 73, 92; xxv. 423; serial issue of, xxiv. 55 "Silver Ship," _see_ "Casco" Simoneau, Jules, xxiii. 239, 240, 244; xxiv. 423; letters to, xxiv. 36, 41 Simoneau, Mrs., xxiv. 42 "Simon Fraser" (Catriona), xxv. 351 & _n._ 1 Simpson, Sir Walter, xxiii. 36,43, 46, 49, 69, 89, 124, 159, 174, 182, 187, 259, 341, 353; xxiv. 47; letter to, xxiv. 117, 229, 242; yachting trip with, xxiii. 124, 139, 140 Simson, Dr., xxiv. 91 Sinclair, Miss Amy, xxiii. 24, 27-8 Sinclair, Sir Tollemache, xxiii. 27 Sinico, --, singer, xxiii. 166 "Sire de Malétroit's Door," xiii. 184, 206, 207, 211, 248 Siron, aubergiste, Barbizon, xxiii. 187 Sitwell, Mrs. (_see also_ Colvin, Lady), xxiii. 54, 300; xxiv. 335; xxv. 85; letter to, from Mrs. R. L. Stevenson, xxiv. 331; letters to, from R. L. S., xxiii. 57, 58, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71, 74, 77, 83, 86, 91, 93, 101, 103, 104, 110, 115, 121, 125, 127, 131, 133, 137, 139, 140, 144, 148, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156, 158, 161, 164, 166, 168, 171, 174, 175, 177, 180 _bis_, 181, 187, 189, 197, 198, 200, 203, 205, 207, 323; xxiv. 24; xxv. 393 Skelt, xxiv. 57, 93 Skene, William Forbes, xxv. 434-5 Skerryvore, article on (Archer), xxiv. 305 "Skerryvore" (house), xxiv. 105, 109, 141, 196, 252; xxv. 31 _n._ 2, 75 Skinner, Mr., xxv. 413 Slade School, xxiv. 39 "Sleeper Awakened," xxv. 314 & _n._ 1 Smeoroch, Skye terrier, xxiv. 77 & _n._ 1; xxv. 429 Smiles, Samuel, xxiv. 121 Smith, Adam, xxiii. 72 Smith, Captain, xxiii. 235 Smith, Rev. George, xxiii. 4; xxiv. 265 _n._ 1 Soalu, Chief, xxv. 460 Society for Psychical Research, Journals of, xxv. 299 "Soldiers Three" (Kipling), xxv. 46 "Solemn Music" (Milton), xxiii. 294 "Solomon Crabb," xxiii. 343-4 "Solution, The" (Lesson of the Master, H. James), xxiv. 382 "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle" (Wordsworth), xxiii. 315 & _n._ 1 "Song of To-morrow," xxiii. 141 "Songs of Scotland without words, for the Pianoforte" (Surrenne), xxiii. 113 "Songs of Travel," xxiv. 190, 239, 337, 362, 375, 378, 395; xxv. 349 & _n._ 1 "Sonnet to England" (Martin), xxiii. 210 "Sophia Scarlett," proposed, xxv. 144, 152-3, 172, 187, 281 Sophocles, translation (Campbell), xxiv. 113 Sorrow, discipline of, xxiv. 163 Soudan affairs, xxiv. 107 Southey, R., xxiii. 302 "South Sea Ballads," xxiv. 298-9, 317, 321, 380, 395, 399 "South Sea Bubble" (Earl of Pembroke), xxv. 153 _n._ 1; on Kava, xxv. 183 _n._ 1; on Samoan streams, xxiv. 133 _n._ 1 "South Sea Idylls" (Stoddard), xxiv. 180 South Sea Islands, call of, xxiii. 180, 205 "South Sea Letters," published first as "The South Seas," later as "In the South Seas," _q.v._; selection from, projected, xxv. 423 South Seas, cruises in, xxiv. 233 _et seq._, 286 _et seq._ "South Sea Yarns" (with Lloyd Osbourne), projected, xxiv. 361, 367, 379; xxv. 397 Spain, xxiii. 119 _Spectator_, xxiii. 239, 264; xxv. 58 "Spectator" (Addison's), style of, xxiii. 252 Speculative Society, Edinburgh University, xxiii. 35, 64, 184, 312; xxiv. 178 Speed, --, xxv. 210 Spencer, --, xxv. 74-5 Spencer, Herbert, xxiii. 169 _Sperber_, German warship, xxv. 29 Speyside, in, xxiii. 284 "Spring Sorrow" (Henley), xxiii. 186 "Spring time," xxiii. 191, 193, 196, 197, 202 "Squaw Men," projected, xxiii. 329 "Squire" (Story of a Lie), xxiii. 249 "Squire Trelawney" (Treasure Island), xxiii. 326-7 Stansfield, --, xxv. 269 "Stepfather's Story," projected, xxiii. 207 Stephen, Leslie, xxiii. _intro._ xvii., 174, 184, 205, 206, 207, 241, 256, 257, 264, 267, 302, 311; xxiv. 47; letter from with appreciation of "Victor Hugo," xxiii. 129 _et seq._ & _n._ 1; introduction by, of R. L. S. and Henley, xxiii. 172; on "Forest Notes," xxiii. 201, 202; testimonial from, xxiii. 316 Stephenson, --, xxiii. 25 Sterne, Laurence, xxiii. _intro._ xxiii. Stevenson, Alan, xxv. 335, 401, 436 Stevenson family, inquiries concerning, xxv. 293, 335, 342, 357, 399, 435-7 Stevenson, Hugh, xxv. 335 Stevenson, James, xxv. 334 Stevenson, James S., letter to, xxv. 334, 342 Stevenson, J. Horne, xxv. 293, 345, 435; letter to, xxv. 357 Stevenson, John, xxv. 358 Stevenson, Katharine (_see also_ de Mattos), xxiii. 138 Stevenson, Macgregor, xxv. 293 Stevenson, Mrs. Alan, xxv. 110, 436 Stevenson, Mrs. R. L., xxiv. 234, 247-8, 251, 256, 258-9, 275, 282, 291-2, 323, 330-1, 341-2, 390; xxv. 29, 30, 31, 38, 249-50, 371, 377; character, xxiii. 279-80; first meeting, xxiii. 183, 228; marriage, xxiii. 228 _et seq._, 260, 262, 268, 270, 272, 274; xxiv. 105; collaboration with R. L. S., xxiii. 282; letter to, on avoiding the infliction of pain in literary work, xxiii. _intro._ xxvi.; story by (_see_ "Shadow on the Bed"); ill health and illness of, xxiii. 280, 283-4, 320-1,355; xxv. 146, 280, 297 _et seq._, 320-1 _et alibi_; letter to, xxiv. 349; letters from, to S. Colvin, xxiv. 309, 347, to Mrs. Sitwell, xxiv. 331, to J. A. Symonds, xxiv. 11 Stevenson, Mrs. Thomas (_née_ Balfour), xxiii. 4, 6, 148; xxiv. 39, 147, 199, 216, 220, 234, 248, 251, 258, 276, 280, 290, 291, 309, 310, 314, 323, 331, 336, 341, 343, 366, 375, 405; xxv. 3, 31, 50, 53, 193 _et seq._, 259, 282, 403, 406, 416; letters to, xxiii. 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 24, 36, 38, 39, 44, 56, 81, 94, 96, 97, 99, 107, 112, 116, 117, 118, 120, 187, 215, 216, 218, 298, 337, 354; xxiv. 9, 21, 66, 76, 202, 383; settled in Samoa, xxv. 76, 78 Stevenson, Mrs. Thomas, and Thomas Stevenson, letters to (jointly), _see_ Stevenson, Thomas, _infra_ Stevenson, name, query on to Sir H. Maxwell, xxv. 440 Stevenson, Robert, xxiii. 4, 13, 160, 200; xxiv. 359; xxv. 87, 95, 98, 120, 310, 315, 401, and _see_ "Family of Engineers" Stevenson, Robert (the first), xxv. 335 Stevenson, Robert Alan Mowbray (Bob), xxiii. 49, 57, 58, 83, 103, 105, 109, 110, 124, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140, 149, 174, 183, 187, 239, 308, 341; xxiv. 3, 69, 89, 124, 167, 196, 328 & _n._ 1; letters to, xxiii. 356; xxiv. 8, 59, 196, 198, 240, 323; xxv. 398, 401, 434 Stevenson, Robert Louis Balfour ("R. L. S."), ancestry, xxiii. 4, 5; appearance, xxiii. _intro._ xxxviii.; appreciation of, by Lysaght, xxv. 415 _n._ 1; appreciation of his own literary skill, xxv. 443; characteristics and habitudes, xxiii. _intro._ xxii., xxvi. _et seq._, 8-12, 186; xxiv. 296; xxv. 33, 415, _n._ 1; charm, xxiii. _intro._ xxiii., xxvi., xxvii.-ix., xxxi., 55; xxv. 415; conversation, xxiii. _intro._ xxxi., 9. 123; help derived from writings of, xxii., _intro._ xxix., 253-4; interest in missionary work, xxv. 10 & _n._ 1, 33, 56, 57; interest in music, xxiv. 188-9, 196 _et seq._, 285, 302; xxv. 85, 92, 125, 185; literary style and methods, xxiii. _intro._ xix. _et seq._; xxv. 173; political views, xxiv. 107-8; portraits, busts, photographs of, xxiv. 117, 154, 170, 177, 199, 202, 238-9, 250, 255; xxv. 309, 310, 341, 353 & _n._ 1; relations with his father, xxiv. 5, 6 _et alibi_; religious views, xxiii. _intro._ xxxii., 11, 12, 53-4, 67 Life, 1850-57, Birth and Early delicacy, xxiii. 5 1858-67, Education and home life and early travels, xxiii. 6-8 1868-70, Engineering studies, xxiii. 10 1871-4, Law studies, religious differences with parents, xxiii. 10-12 1874-5 (May to June), Law studies, home life, experimental literature, travels, home and foreign, and friendships, xxiii. 123-4 1875-79 (July to July), Bar studies concluded, travels in France and Germany, life at the bar abandoned for literature; Fontainebleau again, xxiii. 182-3; early journalistic and other writing, xxiii. 184-5 1879-1880 (July to July), Californian visit, hardships, illness, marriage, xxiii. 228-30 1880, Aug.-1882, Oct., Home from California, xxiii. 279; summers in Scotland, xxiii. 279-80; winters at Davos, and literary work, xxiii. 280, 283 1882, Oct.-1884, Aug., The Riviera again, Montpellier and Marseilles, Nice, xxiv. 5; Hyères home life, happier relations with parents, illness and literary work, letters, xxiv. 3-5 1874, Sept.-1887, Aug., Bournemouth homes--"Skerryvore," invalid life, friendships, and literary work, xxiv. 104-9; visit to Paris, schemes for life in Ireland, xxiv. 108; death of his father, and departure for Colorado, xxiv. 110 1887, Aug.-1888, June, Voyage to New York and reception there, friends new and old, stay in the Adirondacks, journey to San Francisco, xxiv. 233-4 1888, June-1890, Oct., Voyages in the Pacific, xxiv. 290-3; settlement at Vailima, xxiv. 291-2; controversy about Father Damien, xxiv. 292 1890, Nov.-1891, Dec., First year at Vailima, Samoan politics, letters on, to _The Times_--building of the first Vailima house, xxv. 3-8 1892, Jan. to Dec., Life at Vailima, second year, visitors, enlargement of the house, Samoan politics, threatened deportation, xxv. 144-6 1893, Jan. to Dec., Life at Vailima, third year, the addition to the house completed, Samoan politics, proclamation aimed at him, illness of Mrs. R. L. Stevenson, trips to Sydney, to Honolulu, to New Zealand, outbreak of war, financial anxieties, signs of life-weariness, xxv. 280-2 1894, Jan. to Dec., fourth year at Vailima, illness and recovery, loss of literary facility, financial position, visitors, xxv. 373-5; the making of the Road of Gratitude, xxv. 374, 432 _et seq._, 441, 446; speech and feast to the chiefs, xxv. 441, 446, 462 _et seq._; sudden death and burial, xxv. 8, 10 _n._ 1, 375; account of, by Lloyd Osbourne, xxv. 457 _et seq._; epitaph, xxiii. 268; xxv. 375 Stevenson, Thomas, xxii. 4, 5, 11, 12, 20, 24, 146, 148, 180, 260, 261 & _n._ 1, 279, 285, 298, 328, 347, 353; xxiv. 5, 6, 39, 58, 105, 107, 108, 118, 119, 135, 138, 147, 161, 187, 188, 189, 196, 199, 210, 216, 220, 234, 276, 280, 365, 405; xxv. 335, 382, 401; affection for Mrs. R. L. S., xxiii. 279; gift to her of a Bournemouth house, xxiv. 105; biographical essay on, xxiii. 21; letters to, xxiii. 13, 42, 111, 113, 213, 290, 330; xxiv. 9, 22, 62, 74, 90, 118, 119, 137, 159, 179, 190, 201; Memories of, xxv. 413; misunderstandings with, xxiii. _intro._ xvii., 11, 12, 55, 67; religious views, xxiii. 11, 12, 52, 67; death, xxiii. 5; xxiv. 109, 227 and Mrs. Thomas Stevenson, joint letters to, xxiii. 215, 296, 305; xxiv. 27, 75, 76, 78, 100, 110, 130, 168, 199 "Stewart, Alan Breck," xxv. 46-8 Stewart, James (_see_ Appin murder) Stewart, Miss (Bathgate), xxiii. 227 Stewart, Sir Herbert, xxiv. 81 Stewart's plantation, Tahiti, xxv. 153 & _n._ 1 "Stickit Minister" (Crockett), dedication of, xxv. 349 & _n._ 1 Stobo Manse, at, xxiii. 284, 357 Stockton, F. R., verse to, xxiv. 125 Stoddard, Charles Warren, xxv. 267; letters to, xxiii. 275, 294; xxiv, 180 "Stories and Interludes" (Barry Pain), xxv. 215 "Stories," or "A Story Book," projected, xxiii. 249 Storm, ideas on, xxiii. 150 "Story of a Lie," xxiii. 12, 229, 230, 235, 237, 247, 249; xxiv. 90 "Strange Adventures of Mr. Nehemiah Solny," projected, xxiii. 170 "Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," xxiii. _intro._ xxiii.; xxiv. 106, 169, 171, 182, 233, 253, 398; xxv. 289; publication, xxiv. 166; dedication, xxiv. 167; criticisms, xxiv. 184 Strathpeffer, at, xxiii. 280, 284, 285 Streams, Samoan, peculiarities of, xxv. 36 Strong, Austin, xxiv. 151, 341; xxv. 92, 117, 249 & _n._ 1, 269 & _n._ 1, 389, 403, 446 Strong, Mrs., xxiv. 325 & _n._ 1, 341; xxv. _passim_; letter to, xxiii. 286 Stuebel, Dr., German Consul, xxv. 35, 41 & _n._ 1, 141 Sturgis, Mrs., xxv. 391 "Subpriorsford," nickname for Vailima, xxv. 165, 170 "Such is Life," poem (Martin), xxiii. 209 Sudbury, Suffolk, at, xxiii. 56 Suffering, value of, xxiii. 251 Suffolk, peasantry, xxiii. 61 "Suicide Club," xxiii. _intro._ xx., 356 Sullivan, Russell, xxv. 25 Sunrise, tonic of, xxv. 401 Sutherland, Mr., xxiii. 15 Sutherland, Mrs., xxiii. 22 Swan, Professor, xxiii. 193; xxiv. 143; xxv. 315 Swanston Cottage, Lothianburn, xxiii. 8, 123, 126 _et seq._, 312 "Sweet Girl Graduate, A," and other poems (Martin), xxiii. 208-9 Swift, Dr. and Mrs., of Molokai, xxiv. 351-2 Swinburne, A. C., poems, xxv. 390 Sydney, N.S.W., visits to, and illnesses at, xxiv. 292-3, 325, 375, 382 _et seq._, 394; xxv. 4, 38, _n._ 1, 53 _et seq._, 61, 77, 81, 208, 288-9, 296 Symonds, J. A., xxiii. 281, 304, 311, 317, 334, 341, 351, 361; xxiv. 142; dedication of book by, xxv. 454; epithet of, for R. L. S., xxiii. _intro._ xxvi.; letter to, from Mrs. R. L. Stevenson, xxiv. 11; letters to, xxiv. 182, 254, 304; on Southey, xxiii. 302; death of, xxv. 317 & _n._ 1 "Table Talk" (Hazlitt), xxiv. 130 Tacitus, xxiv. 83 Tahiti, xxiv. 291, 371 Tahitian Islands, xxiv. 293; stay in, xxiv. 291, 296 _et seq._ Tait, Professor, xxiv. 118 "Tales and Fantasies," xxv. 397. "Tales for Winter Nights," projected title, xxiii. 316, 318 "Tales of a Grandfather" (Scott), xxv. 117 "Tales of my Grandfather" (_see also_ "Family of Engineers"), xxv. 110 "Talk and Talkers" (_Cornhill_), xxiii. 283, 341, 349; xxiv. 138 Tamasese, xxiv. 371; xxv. 67, 351 Tamate, _see_ Chalmers Tati, high chief of the Tevas, xxiv. 317 Tauchnitz, Baron, and "Footnote," xxv. 346 Tautira, at, xxiv. 291, 302 _et seq._, 317 Taylor, Ida and Una, xxiv. 105, 372, 374 Taylor, Lady, xxiv. 105, 180; xxv. 203; death of, xxv. 254; letters to, xxiv. 211, 212, 286, 357, 372 Taylor, Miss, xxv. 364; letter to, xxv. 254 Taylor, Sir Henry, xxiv. 145, 180 Tembinoka, King of Apemama, xxiv. 358-9, 368, 400; verses to, xxiv. 378, 380 _Temple Bar_, contributions to, xxiii. 184, 206, 207, 211 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (_see also_ "Becket"), xxiv. 205 "Tentation de St. Antoine" (Flaubert), xxiii. 150 Teriitera, Samoan name of R. L. S., xxiv. 308, 310, 317, 321 "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" (Hardy), xxv. 266 _n._ 1, 296 Thackeray, W. M., xxv. 154 "Theatrical World" (Archer), xxv. 384 "Thérèse Raquin" (Zola), xxiv. 57 "The Tempest" (Shakespeare), xxiv. 96 "Thomas Haggard" (Window in Thrums), xxv. 276 Thomson, Maggie, xxiii. 25 Thomson, Mr., xxiii. 8 "Thomson," pseudonym, letters in character of and as to, xxiv. 14, 121, 122 Thoreau, Henry David, essay on (Familiar Studies), xxiii. 226, 229, 252, 255, 262, 263, 265, 273; xxiv. 149, 158; criticisms on, xxiii. 322 "Thoughts on Literature as an Art," xxiii. 266 "Thrawn Janet" (_Cornhill_), xxiii. 282, 308, 316, 321; xxiv. 90; xxv. 295 "Tibby Birse" (Window in Thrums), xxv. 276, 362 _n._ 1 Time, Archer's criticisms in, xxiv. 156, 159, 160, 161 "Time" (Milton), xxiii. 294 _Times, The_, letters to, on Samoan affairs, xxv. 7, 94, 98, 119, 137, 145, 212, 376, 386, 387 Todd, John, xxiv. 221 Todd, Mrs., xxiv. 221 "Tod Lapraik" (Catriona), xxv. 294-5 "Tommy Haddon" (Wrecker), xxv. 268 & _n._ 1 "Toothache, The" (Burns), xxiv. 256 "Torn Surplice, The," suggested title, xxiii. 321 Torquay, at, xxiv. 109 Torrence, Rev. ----, xxiii. 181 "Touchstone, The," xxiii. 141 Tourgenieff, ----, xxiii. 222 "Tourgue, la" ("Quatre-vingt Treize," Hugo), xxiii. 130 Trades Unions, xxiii. 97 "Tragedies of the Wilderness" (Drake), xxiv. 270 "Tragic Comedians" (Meredith), xxiii. 224 "Tragic Muse, The" (H. James), xxiv. 397; xxv. 44, 130-1 "Transformation of the Scottish Highlands," projected, xxiii. 297 Traquair, Willie, xxiii. 20, xxiv. 70 "Travailleurs de la Mer" (Hugo), xxiii. 129 _n._ 1 Travel-books, cheap edition projected, xxiii. 294 "Travelling Companion, The," projected, xxiii. 321; xxiv. 68, 149 "Travels and Excursions," Vols. II. and III. discussed, xxv. 423 "Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes," xxiii. 183, 184, 185, 216, 217, 219, 225, 229, 248, 250, 257 "Treasure Island," xxiii. _intro._ xxxv., 282, 283, 326, 334, 352, 355; xxiv. 31, 93, 101, 112, 179, 233; xxv. 76, 124, 289, 429; publication as serial, xxiii. 328; in book form, xxiv. 6, 27, 35, 67; criticisms, xxiv. 66; genesis of, xxiv. 101; illustrated edition, xxiv. 159; paper on, xxv. 376 "Treasure of Franchard," xxiv. 4, 398; xxv. 153 "Trial of Joan of Arc," xxiii. 203 "Trials of the Sons of Rob Roy, with Anecdotes," xxiii. 332 "Tricoche et Cacolet," xxiii. 219 "Tristram Shandy" (Sterne), xxiii. 118 Trollope, Anthony, novels of, xxiii. 215 "Trophées, Les" (Hérédia), xxv. 331 & _n._ 1 Trudeau, Dr., xxiv. 234 Tulloch, Principal, xxiii. 280, 290, 297, 316; xxv. 97, 123 Tupper, Martin, xxiii. 348 "Tushery," xxiv. 6, 31, 32 Tusitala, xxv. 196 _et aliter_ Tutuila, visited, xxv. 4, 8, 58, 65 "Twa Dogs" (Burns), xxiii. 225 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), xxiii. 276 _Twelfth Night_ (Shakespeare) at the Jenkins', xxiii. 175, 176, 178 "Two Falconers, The, of Cairnstane," xxiii. 170 "Two St. Michael's Mounts," essay, projected, xxiii. 207 "Two Years before the Mast" (Dana), xxiv. 297 "Typee" (Melville), xxiv. 348 Ulufanua, island, xxv. 97 "Underwoods," collected verses, xxiii. 222, 271, 281, 296, 300; xxiv. 36, 89, 107, 170, 173 _n._ 1, 189-90, 214, 215, 229-30, 231, 395; xxv. 376, 398; dedication of, xxiv. 374; review by Gosse, xxiv. 244; success of, xxiv. 239, 255-6 United States, the, and Samoa, xxv. 6 _et seq._ Upolu and Savaii, xxv. 8 Vacquerie, ----, xxiii. 307 Vaea, Mount, xxv. 9, 135, 388; burial-place, xxv. 10 _n._ 1, 460 Vaea river, xxv. 132 _et seq._ Vailima, home at, xxiv. 291; purchase of, xxiv. 292, 372-3, 374, 377, 390; life at, xxv. 3 _et seq._, 148-51, 156 _et seq._, 280 _et seq._; visitors to, xxv. 228; expenses, xxv. 282; household staff, xxv. 356-7; joy of colour at, xxv. 378; new house, xxv. 145-6, 251, 269, 271, 278-9, 284, 287; decorations for, xxv. 308-9; feeling about, xxv. 349 "Vailima Letters," xxiii. _intro._ xviii., xxix.; xxv. 5 _Vanity Fair_, magazine, contributions to, xxiii. 184, 198, 199 "Vanity Fair" (Thackeray), xxv. 154 Vedder, Elihu, illustrator of "Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám," xxiv. 116 "Velasquez" (R. A. M. Stevenson), xxiii. 57 "Vendetta, in the West," unfinished, xxiii. 229, 238-9, 241, 244, 255, 256, 259, 266 Verses, Miscellaneous and Impromptu-- "Adela, Adela, Adela Chart," xxv. 109 "Bells upon the City are ringing in the night," xxiv. 167 "Blame me not that this Epistle," letter in verse to Baxter, xxiii. 46 "Brave lads in olden musical centuries," xxiii. 304 "Dear Henley, with a pig's snout on," xxiii. 330 "Do you remember--can we e'er forget?--," xxiv. 376 "Far have you come, my lady, from the town," rondel, xxiii. 188 "Feast of Famine" (Ballads, 1890), xxiv. 298-9, 321, 330, 395 "Figure me to yourself, I pray," xxiii. 287 "He may have been this and that," xxiv. 190 "Here's breid an' wine an' kebbuck," xxiii. 257 "Home no more home to me, where must I wander?" (Songs of Travel), xxiv. 303 "I heard the pulse of the besieging sea" (to Colvin), xxiv. 366; xxv. 23 & _n._ 1 "In the beloved hour that ushers day" (Songs of Travel), xxiv. 240 "I was a barren tree before," xxv. 366 "I would shoot you, but I have no bow," xxiii. 360 "Let us who part like brothers part like bards" (Songs of Travel), xxiv. 378, 380 "My Stockton if I failed to like," xxiv. 125 "Noo lyart leaves blaw ower the green," xxiii. 193 "Nor you, O Penny Whistler, grudge," xxiv. 20 "Not roses to the rose, I trow," xxiv. 205 "Not yet, my soul, these friendly fields desert," xxiii. 271 "Nous n'irons plus au bois," rondel, xxiii. 188-9 "Of the many flowers you brought me" (to Miss Rawlinson), xxiv. 227 "Of where or how, I nothing know," xxiii. 232 "O Henley, in my hours of ease," xxiii. 222 "O, how my spirit languishes," xxiv. 299 "O Sovereign of my Cedercrantz," xxv. 278 "Priests' Drought, The," ballad, xxiv. 321 "Song of Rahero," ballad, xxiv. 317, 321, 330, 395; xxv. 58 "Tandem Desino," xxiv. 79 _et seq._ "The pleasant river gushes," xxiv. 32 "There was racing and chasing in Vailima plantation," xxv. 422 "Though I've often been touched with the volatile dart," xxv. 109 "Ticonderoga," ballad, xxiv. 321, 395 "To Felix," xxiv. 189, 190 "We're quarrelling, the villages," xxv. 50 "When from her land to mine she goes" (Songs of Travel), xxiv. 345 "Woodman, The" _(New Review)_, xxv. 18 & _n._ 1, 20 "Youth now flees on feathered foot," xxiv. 172, 181 "Vicar of Wakefield," xxv. 14 _n._ 1 "Vicomte de Bragelonne" (Dumas), xxiv. 398; xxv. 51 Victor Hugo's romances, essay on, xxiii. 56, 124-5, 126, 127, 135 Victoria, Queen, xxiii. 323 Villiers, Lady Margaret, xxv. 228, 236 "Viol and Flute" (Gosse), xxiv. 98 "Virginibus Puerisque," xxiii. 184, 185, 203, 204, 208, 212, 284, 294; xxv. 301 _n._ 1; publication, xxiii. 281; new edition, xxiv. 195, 216; reprint, xxiv. 230 Vitrolles, Baron de, xxv. 288 _n._ 1, 321 Viviani, Emillia, xxiv. 212 Vogelweide, Walther von der (Studies in the Literature of Modern Europe), Gosse's introduction to, xxiii. 221 "Volsungs" (Morris), xxiii. 334 Voltaire, xxiii. 297; on OEdipus, xxiv. 114 _Vossische Zeitung_, xxv. 263 Wachtmeister, Count, xxv. 96 "Waif Woman, The," xxv. 272 & _n._ 1 Walker, Patrick, xxiv. 91 "Walking Tours," xxiii. 202 _Wallaroo_, H.M.S., officers, xxv. 452 Walter, the Skye terrier, and his sobriquets, xxiii. 280, 281, 318; xxv. 41 & _n._ 2, _et alibi_ "Wandering Willie," air, xxiii. 113 "Wandering Willie's Tale" (Redgauntlet), xxiii. 287 "Washington" (Irving), xxv. 30 Watts-Dunton, T., letter to, xxiv. 203 Waverley Novels (Scott), xxiv. 75, 76, 84, 91; xxv. 228 "Waverley" (Scott), xxiii. _intro._ xxiii.; xxiv. 91 "Way of the World" (Trollope), xxiii. 215 Weather and the old woman, xxiii. 175 Webster, essay on (Gosse), xxiv. 45 Week, The, xxiv. 45 "Wegg, Silas," (Our Mutual Friend), xxiii. 226 "Weg," nickname for Gosse, xxiii. 224, 226, 227 "Weir of Hermiston," unfinished, xxiii. _intro._ xx., 12; xxv. 144, 170, 264-5, 274, 281, 284, 287, 293, 306-7, 338, 350, 375, 383, 392, 403, 453, 456-7; scheme for, xxv. 258, 260-1, 270-1 Wellington, Duke of (_see also_ "Life" of), xxiv. 34 _n._ 1; Tennyson's "Ode" on, xxiii. 293 Went, George, xxv. 23 & _n._ 1, 100 "Werther" (Goethe's "Sorrows of Werther"), xxiii. 60 Western Islands, trip among, xxiii. 124 West Highlands, visit to, xxiii. 183 "What was on the Slate," xxiii. 222, 267 "When the Devil was well," xxiii. 167, 168, 186 "Where" and "Whereas," use discussed, xxv. 163 "White Company" (Doyle), xxv. 336 Whitman, Walt, essays on, xxiii. 55, 70, 72, 86, 89, 103, 104, 139, 140; works of, xxiii. 70, 72, 357-8; xxiv. 183 Whitmee, Rev. S. J., missionary xxv. 174, 180, 202, 203; letter to, xxv. 174 Wick, at, xxiii. 12, 15 "Widdicombe Fair," song, xxv. 391 Wiesbaden, visit to, xxiii. 182 "Wild Man of the Woods," xxiii. 249 "Will o' the Mill," xxiii. 184, 207, 248, 268 Williams, Dr., of Nice, xxiv. 59 Williams, Mr. and Mrs., xxiii. 353 "William Wilson" (Poe), xxiii. _intro._ xxiii. "Wiltshire" (Beach of Falesá), xxv. 187 "Window in Thrums" (Barrie), xxv. 276, 362 & _n._ 1 Winslow Reef, xxiv. 362 "Winter and New Year" (Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh), xxiii. 216 "Winter's Walk, The," unfinished, xxiii. 201, 202 Wise, ----, xxv. 55 "Witch of Prague" (Crawford), xxv. 275 "Wogg" (_see_ Walter), other names for, xxiii. 280-1, 318 Wolseley, Viscount, xxiv. 81 "Woman killed with Kindness" (Heywood), xxiii. 354 Women characters, dissatisfaction with, xxiv. 398 Women, thoughts on (_see also_ Elgin marbles), xxiii. 162-4, 358 Wood, Sir Evelyn, xxiv. 81 "Wrecker" (with Lloyd Osbourne), xxiii. 12, 275; xxiv. 362, 367-8, 379, 380, 389, 396, 399, 402; xxv. 5, 11, 24, 33, 84, 87, 108, 110, 115, 128, 138,141, 152, 171, 210, 215, 221, 224, 274, 376, 378; finished, xxv. 111-2 & _n._ 1, 113, 115, 120, 122; comments, xxv. 146; discussed, xxv. 437 & _n._ 1; publication of, xxv. 87, 144; success of, xxv. 238, 258, 357 Wreck of the _Susannah_, xxiii. 308 "Wrong Box, The," or "The Finsbury Tontine," or "The Game of Bluff" (with Lloyd Osbourne), xxiv. 235, 249-50, 256, 258, 282, 291, 320, 322, 328, 360, 370 Wurmbrand, Captain Count, xxv. 354, 369, 370, 383, 415 Wyatt, Mr., xxiii. 6 Yeats, W. B., letter to, xxv. 390 "Yellow Paint," xxiii. 141 Yelverton, ----, xxiii. 275 "Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum" (Treasure Island), xxiii. 326 Yoshida Torajiro, essay on (Familiar Studies), xxiii. 229, 262, 264, 265 "Young Chevalier," unfinished, xxv. 144, 171 _n._ 1, 187-8, 189, 192, 216-7, 264, 281, 305; characters in, xxv. 190-1 _Young Folks_, contributions to, xxiii. 328, 329, 332, 339; xxiv. 31, 55, 148 _Yule-Tide_, contribution to, xxv. 57 Zassetsky, Madame, xxiii. 97, 99, 102, 105, 108, 110, 113, 114, 115, 118, 122 Zassetsky, Nelitchka, xxiii. 98, 102, 104, 107, 108, 112, 114, 115, 116 Zola, Emile, xxiii. 346-7; xxiv. 396; xxv. 250 _n._ 1, 318, 319, 379 INDEX TO VOLUMES I-XXII [_For Index to the_ LETTERS, _see pp. 469-507 of this Volume._] "A birdie with a yellow bill," xiv. 23 "A child should always say what's true," xiv. 5 Additional Memories and Portraits, xvi. 155 Additional Poems, xiv. 259 "Adela, Adela, Adela Chart," xiv. 276 Admiral Guinea, xv. 145 Advertisement of "Moral Emblems," Edition de Luxe, xxii. (end) Advertisement of "Moral Emblems," Second Collection, xxii. (end) Advertisement of "The Graver and the Pen," xxii. (end) Æs Triplex, ii. 358 "All night long, and every night," xiv. 4 "All round the house is the jet-black night," xiv. 28 "All the names I know from nurse," xiv. 46 "A lover of the moorland bare," xiv. 74 Alpine Diversions, xxii. 248 Alps, The Stimulation of the, xxii., 252 Amateur Emigrant, The: Part I., From the Clyde to Sandy Hook: The Second Cabin, ii. 7; Early Impressions, ii. 15; Steerage Scenes, ii. 24; Steerage Types, ii. 32; The Sick Man, ii. 43; The Stowaways, ii. 53; Personal Experiences and Review, ii. 66; New York, ii. 77. Part II., Across the Plains: Notes by the Way to Council Bluffs, ii. 93; The Emigrant Train, ii. 107; The Plain of Nebraska, ii. 115; The Desert of Wyoming, ii. 119; Fellow Passengers, ii. 124; Despised Races, ii. 129; To the Golden Gates, ii. 133 "A mile an' a bittock, a mile or twa," xiv. 110 "_A naked house, a naked moor_," xiv. 71 Antwerp to Boom, i. 7 "A picture-frame for you to fill," xiv. 74 Apology, An, for Idlers, ii. 334 Appeal, An, to the Clergy of the Church of Scotland, xxii. 199 "As from the house your mother sees," xiv. 59 "As the single pang of the blow, when the metal is mingled well," xiv. 254 "At evening when the lamp is lit," xiv. 36 Autumn Effect, An, xxii. 112 Back to the World, i. 120 Bagster's "Pilgrim's Progress," xxii. 186 Balfour, David, xi. 1 Ballads, xiv. 139 Ballantrae, The Master of, xii. 5; its genesis, xvi. 341 Beach, The, of Falesá: A South Sea Bridal, xvii. 193; The Ban, xvii. 206; The Missionary, xvii. 228; Devil-work, xvii. 240; Night in the Bush, xvii. 258; The Bottle Imp, xvii. 277; The Isle of Voices, xvii. 311 Beau Austin, xv. 91 Beggars, xvi. 190 "Berried brake and reedy island," xiv. 226 "Birds all the sunny day," xiv. 44 Black Arrow, The: Prologue, viii. 7; Book I. The Two Lads, viii. 25; Book II. The Moat House, viii. 83; Book III. My Lord Foxham, viii. 123; Book IV. The Disguise, viii. 165; Book V. Crookback, viii. 217 Black Canyon, Advertisement of, xxii. (end) Black Canyon or Wild Adventures in the Far West, xxii. (end) "Blame me not that this epistle," xiv. 261 "Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying," xiv. 257 Boarders, The, i. 195 Body-snatcher, The, iii. 277 Books which have Influenced Me, xvi. 272 Bottle Imp, The, xvii. 275 "Brave lads in olden musical centuries," xiv. 270 "Bright is the ring of words," xiv. 227 "Bring the comb and play upon it," xiv. 15 Builder's Doom, The, xxii. (end) Burns, Robert, Some Aspects of, iii. 43 "By Lyne and Tyne, by Thames and Tees," xiv. 133 Calton Hill, Edinburgh, i. 314 Camisards, The Country of the, i. 211 Camp, A, in the Dark, i. 167 Catriona: Part I. The Lord Advocate, xi. 7; Part II. Father and Daughter, xi. 203 Changed Times, i. 99 Character, A, xxii. 37 Character, The, of Dogs, ix. 105 Charity Bazaar, The, xxii. 213 Charles of Orleans, iii. 171 Cheylard and Luc, i. 177 "_Chief of our aunts_, not only I," xiv. 56 "Children, you are very little," xiv. 18 Child's Garden, A, of Verses, xiv. 1 Child's Play, ii. 394 Christmas at Sea, xiv. 207 Christmas Sermon, A, xvi. 306 Cockermouth and Keswick, xxii. 80 College Magazine, A, ix. 36 College Memories, Some, ix. 19 College Papers: Edinburgh Students in 1824, xxii. 41; The Modern Student considered generally, xxii. 45; Debating Societies, xxii. 53; The Philosophy of Umbrellas, xxii. 58; The Philosophy of Nomenclature, xxii. 63 "Come up here, O dusty feet," xiv. 24 Compiègne, At, i. 94 Crabbed Age and Youth, ii. 321 Criticisms: Lord Lytton's "Fables in Song," xxii. 171; Salvini's "Macbeth," xxii. 180; Bagster's "Pilgrim's Progress," xxii. 186 "Dark brown is the river," xiv. 10 Davos in Winter, xxii. 241 Davos Press, The, xxii. (end) Day, The, after To-morrow, xvi. 279 Deacon Brodie, or the Double Life, xv. 1 "Dear Andrew, with the brindled hair," xiv. 79 "Dear Thamson class, whaure'er I gang," xiv. 121 "Dear Uncle Jim, this garden ground," xiv. 50 Debating Societies, xxii. 53 "Do you remember--can we e'er forget?" xiv. 242 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Strange Case of, v. 227 Donkey, the Pack, and the Pack Saddle, i. 143 "Down by a shining water well," xiv. 32 Dreams, A Chapter on, xvi. 177 Dynamiter, The: Prologue of the Cigar Divan, v. 7; Challoner's Adventure, v. 15; Somerset's Adventure, v. 73; Desborough's Adventure, v. 149; Epilogue of the Cigar Divan, v. 212 Ebb-Tide, The: Note by Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, xix. 3; Part I. The Trio, xix. 7; Part II. The Quartette, xix. 81 Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, i. 269; Introductory, i. 271 Edinburgh Students in 1824, xxii. 41 Education, The, of an Engineer, xvi. 167 El Dorado, ii. 368 Engineers, Records of a Family of, xvi. 3 English Admirals, The, ii. 372 Enjoyment, The, of Unpleasant Places, xxii. 103 Epilogue to An Inland Voyage, i. 122 Episodes in the Story of a Mine, ii. 254 Essays of Travel: Davos in Winter, xxii. 241; Health and Mountains, xxii. 244; Alpine Diversions, xxii. 248; The Stimulation of the Alps, xxii. 252 "Even in the bluest noonday of July," xiv. 77 "Every night my prayers I say," xiv. 13 Fables: The Persons of the Tale, xxi. 269; The Sinking Ship, xxi. 272; The Two Matches, xxi. 274; The Sick Man and the Fireman, xxi. 275; The Devil and the Inn-keeper, xxi. 276; The Penitent, xxi. 277; The Yellow Paint, xxi. 277; The House of Eld, xxi. 280; The Four Reformers, xxi. 286; The Man and His Friend, xxi. 287; The Reader, xxi. 287; The Citizen and the Traveller, xxi. 288; The Distinguished Stranger, xxi. 289; The Cart-horses and the Saddle-horse, xxi. 290; The Tadpole and the Frog, xxi. 291; Something in it, xxi. 291; Faith, Half-faith, and No Faith at all, xxi. 295; The Touchstone, xxi. 297; The Poor Thing, xxi. 304; The Song of the Morrow, xxi. 310 Falling in Love, On, ii. 302 Familiar Studies of Men and Books: Preface by Way of Criticism, iii. 5; Victor Hugo's Romances, iii. 19; Some Aspects of Robert Burns, iii. 43; Walt Whitman, iii. 77; Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions, iii. 101; Yoshida-Torajiro, iii. 129; François Villon, Student, Poet, and Housebreaker, iii. 142; Charles of Orleans, iii. 171; Samuel Pepys, iii. 206; John Knox and his Relations to Women, iii. 230 "Far from the loud sea beaches," xiv. 72 "Far have you come, my lady, from the town," xiv. 263 "Farewell, fair day and fading light," xiv. 233 Farewell, Modestine! i. 253 "Far 'yont amang the years to be," xiv. 105 "Faster than fairies, faster than witches," xiv. 24 Father Apollinaris, i. 183 Father Damien: An Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu, xvi. 315 Feast, The, of Famine; Marquesan Manners, xiv. 167; The Priest's Vigil, xiv. 169; The Lovers, xiv. 172; The Feast, xiv. 176; The Raid, xiv. 182; Notes, xiv. 213 Fife, The Coast of, xvi. 155 "Figure me to yourself, I pray," xiv. 268 Fleeming Jenkin, Memoir of, ix. 165 Florac, i. 234 Fontainebleau: Village Communities of Painters, xvi. 215 Footnote, A, to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa: The Elements of Discord, I. Native, xvii. 5; II. Foreign, xvii. 15; The Sorrows of Laupepa, xvii. 27; Brandeis, xvii. 53; The Battle of Matautu, xvii. 70; Last Exploits of Becker, xvii. 83; The Samoan Camps, xvii. 103; Affairs of Laulii and Fangalii, xvii. 112; "Furor Consularis," xvii. 128; The Hurricane, xvii. 142; Laupepa and Mataafa, xvii. 156 Foreigner, The, at Home, ix. 7 Forest Notes, xxii. 142 "For love of lovely words, and for the sake," xiv. 97 "Forth from her land to mine she goes," xiv. 239 "Frae nirly, nippin', Eas'lan' breeze," xiv. 106 "Friend, in my mountain-side demesne," xiv. 73 "From breakfast on all through the day," xiv. 12 Genesis, The, of "The Master of Ballantrae," xvi. 341 "Give to me the life I love," xiv. 219 "God, if this were enough," xiv. 234 "Go, little book, and wish to all," xiv. 67 Gossip, A, on a Novel of Dumas's, ix. 124 Gossip, A, on Romance, ix. 134 Goulet, Across the, i. 203 Graver, The, and the Pen, xxii. (end) "Great is the sun, and wide he goes," xiv. 46 Great North Road, The, xxi. 203 Green Donkey Driver, The, i. 149 Greyfriars, Edinburgh, i. 298 Health and Mountains, xxii. 244 Heart of the Country, The, i. 7 Heather Ale: A Galloway Legend, xiv. 201; Notes, xiv. 215 Heathercat, xxi. 177 "He hears with gladdened heart the thunder," xiv. 233 "Here all is sunny, and when the truant gull," xiv. 97 "Here, from the forelands of the tideless sea," xiv. 273 "Home no more home to me, whither must I wander?" xiv. 229 "How do you like to go up in a swing?" xiv. 22 Hugo's, Victor, Romances, iii. 19 Human Life, Reflections and Remarks on, xvi. 354 Humble Remonstrance, A, ix. 148 Hunter's Family, The, ii. 230 "I am a kind of farthing dip," xiv. 95 Ideal House, The, xvi. 370 "If I have faltered more or less," xiv. 86 "If two may read aright," xiv. 55 "I have a goad," i. 158 "I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me," xiv. 12 "I have trod the upward and the downward slope," xiv. 233 "I heard the pulse of the besieging sea," xiv. 244 "I knew a silver head was bright beyond compare," xiv. 240 "I knew thee strong and quiet like the hills," xiv. 232 "I know not how it is with you," xiv. 225 "In all the grove, nor stream nor bird," xiv. 249 "In ancient tales, O friend, thy spirit dwelt," xiv. 80 "In dreams unhappy I behold you stand," xiv. 221 Inland Voyage, An, i. 7; Epilogue to, i. 122 "In mony a foreign pairt I've been," xiv. 125 "In rigorous hours, when down the iron lane," xiv. 230 "In the belovèd hour that ushers day," xiv. 231 "In the highlands, in the country places," xiv. 228 "In the other gardens," xiv. 49 Introduction, by Andrew Lang, to the Swanston Edition, i. ix. "In winter I get up at night," xiv. 3 "I read, dear friend, in your dear face," xiv. 85 "I saw you toss the kites on high," xiv. 16 "I should like to rise and go," xiv. 7 "I sit and wait a pair of oars," xiv. 78 Island Nights' Entertainments, xvii. 193 Isle, The, of Voices, xvii. 311 "It is not yours, O mother, to complain," xiv. 90 "It is the season now to go," xiv. 70 "It is very nice to think," xiv. 4 "It's an owercome sooth for age an' youth," xiv. 135 "It's rainin'. Weet's the gairden sod," xiv. 116 "It's strange that God should fash to frame," xiv. 120 "I was a barren tree before," xiv. 276 "I will make you brooches and toys for your delight," xiv. 225 "I woke before the morning, I was happy all the day," xiv. 14 Juvenilia, and other Papers, xxii. 3 Kidnapped, x. 77 Knox, John, and his Relations to Women, iii. 230 La Fère, of Cursed Memory, i. 79 Landrecies, At, i. 46 Lantern-Bearers, The, xvi. 200 Last Day, The, i. 248 "Last, to the chamber where I lie," xiv. 28 "Late in the nicht in bed I lay," xiv. 129 "Late lies the wintry sun a-bed," xiv. 25 Later Essays, xvi. 215 Lay Morals, xvi. 379 Legends, Edinburgh, i. 291 "Let Beauty awake in the morn from beautiful dreams," xiv. 224 "Let now your soul in this substantial world," xiv. 255 Letter to a Young Gentleman who proposes to embrace the Career of Art, xvi. 290 Letters from Samoa, xviii. 351 "Let us, who part like brothers part like bards," xvi. 245 "Light foot and tight foot," xiv. 277 Light-keeper, The, xxii. 217 "Little Indian, Sioux or Crow," xiv. 19 Lodging, A, for the Night, iv. 227 "Long must elapse ere you behold again," xiv. 241 Lord Lytton's "Fables in Song," xxii. 171 Lozère, Across the, i. 213 Macaire, xv. 205 Manse, The, ix. 61 Markheim, viii. 273 Martial Elegy, A, for some Lead Soldiers, xxii. (end) Master, The, of Ballantrae, xii. 5; its genesis, xvi. 341 Maubeuge, At, i. 21 Memoirs of an Islet, ix. 68 Memories and Portraits, ix. 7; Additional Memories and Portraits, xvi. 155 Merry Men, The, xxi. 69 Mimente, In the Valley of the, i. 237 Monks, The, i. 188 Montvert, Pont de, i. 218 Moral Emblems, xxii. (end) Moral Emblems: Second Collection, xxii. (end) Morality, The, of the Profession of Letters, xvi. 260 More New Arabian Nights, v. 7 Mountain Town, A, in France, i. 257 Movements of Young Children, Notes on the, xxii. 97 Moy, Down the Oise to, i. 74 "My bed is like a little boat," xiv. 21 "My body which my dungeon is," xiv. 98 "My bonny man, the warld, it's true," xiv. 118 My First Book, "Treasure Island," xvi. 331 "'_My house_,' I say. But hark to the sunny doves," xiv. 98 "My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky," xiv. 2 New Arabian Nights, iv. 3; More New Arabian Nights, v. 7 New Form of Intermittent Light for Lighthouses, xxii. 220 New Town, Edinburgh: Town and Country, i. 305 Nicholson, John, The Misadventures of, x. 3 Nomenclature, The Philosophy of, xxii. 63 "Noo lyart leaves blaw ower the green," xiv. 265 Note, A, on Realism, xvi. 234 Notes and Essays, chiefly of the Road: A Retrospect, xxii. 71; Cockermouth and Keswick, xxii. 80; Roads, xxii. 90; Notes on the Movements of Young Children, xxii. 97; On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places, xxii. 103; An Autumn Effect, xxii. 112; A Winter's Walk in Carrick and Galloway, xxii. 132; Forest Notes, xxii. 142 Not I, and other Poems, xxii. (end) "Not yet, my soul, these friendly fields desert," xiv. 89 "Nous n'irons plus au bois," xiv. 263 Noyon Cathedral, i. 86 Nuits Blanches, xxii. 27 Nurses, xxii. 34 "Of a' the ills that flesh can fear," xiv. 131 "Of his pitiable transformation," xiv. 263 "Of speckled eggs, the birdie sings," xiv. 9 "Of where or how, I nothing know," xiv. 267 Oise, The, in Flood, i. 55; Down the Oise to Moy, i. 74; Through the Golden Valley, i. 84; To Compiègne, i. 91 Church Interiors, i. 105 "O it's I that am the captain of a tidy little ship," xiv. 32 "O, I wad like to ken--to the beggar-wife says I," xiv. 116 "O mother, lay your hand on my brow," xiv. 92 Olalla, xxi. 127 Old Mortality, ix. 26 Old Scots Gardener, An, ix. 46 Old Town, Edinburgh: The Lands, i. 278 "Once only by the garden gate," xiv. 220 "On the great streams the ships may go," xiv. 68 Ordered South, ii. 345 Origny Sainte-Benoîte: A By-Day, i. 62; The Company at Table, i. 68 Our Lady of the Snows, i. 181 "Out of the sun, out of the blast," xiv. 87 "Over the borders, a sin without pardon," xiv. 17 Pacific Capitals, The Old and New: Monterey, ii. 141; San Francisco, ii. 159 Pan's Pipes, ii. 415 Parliament Close, Edinburgh, i. 285 Pastoral, ix. 53 Pavilion on the Links, The: Tells how I camped in Graden Sea-wood, and beheld a Light in the Pavilion, iv. 167; Tells of the Nocturnal Landing from the Yacht, iv. 174; Tells how I became Acquainted with my Wife, iv. 180; Tells in what a Startling Manner I learned that I was not alone in Graden Sea-wood, iv. 189; Tells of an Interview between Northmour, Clara, and myself, iv. 197; Tells of my Introduction to the Tall Man, iv. 202; Tells how a Word was cried through the Pavilion Window, iv. 208; Tells the last of the Tall Man, iv. 214; Tells how Northmour carried out his Threat, iv. 221 "Peace and her huge invasion to these shores," xiv. 93 Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured, xi. 116 Pentland Hills, To the, Edinburgh, i. 327 Pentland Rising, The: The Causes of the Revolt, xxii. 3; The Beginning, xxii. 6; The March of the Rebels, xxii. 8; Rullion Green, xxii. 13; A Record of Blood, xxii. 17 Pepys, Samuel, iii. 206 Pines, A Night among the, i. 206 "Plain as the glistering planets shine," xiv. 223 Plea, A, for Gas Lamps, ii. 420 Pont-sur-Sambre: We are Pedlars, i. 31; The Travelling Merchant, i. 36 Portraits, Some, by Raeburn, ii. 385 Prayers written for Family Use at Vailima, xvi. 431 Précy and the Marionnettes, i. 111 Prince Otto: Book I. Prince Errant, vii. 7; Book II. Of Love and Politics, vii. 49; Book III. Fortunate Misfortune, vii. 171 Providence and the Guitar, iv. 273 Pulvis et Umbra, xvi. 299 Raeburn, Some Portraits, by, ii. 385 Rajah's Diamond, The: Story of the Bandbox, iv. 86; Story of the Young Man in Holy Orders, iv. 111; The Story of the House with the Green Blinds, iv. 127; The Adventure of Prince Florizel and a Detective, iv. 159 Random Memories: I. The Coast of Fife, xvi. 155; II. The Education of an Engineer, xvi. 167; _Rosa quo Locorum_, xvi. 345 Realism, A Note on, xvi. 234 Records of a Family of Engineers, xvi. 3 Reflections and Remarks on Human Life, xvi. 354 "Resign the rhapsody, the dream," xiv. 236 Retrospect, A, xxii. 71 Roads, xxii. 90 Robin and Ben, or the Pirate and the Apothecary, xxii. (end) _Rosa quo Locorum_, xvi. 345 Royal Sport Nautique, The, i. 16 St. Ives, xx. 3 Salvini's "Macbeth," xxii. 180 Sambre and Oise Canal: Canal Boats, i. 50 Sambre Canalised, On the: To Quartes, i. 26; To Landrecies, i. 41 Satirist, The, xxii. 25 "Say not of me that weakly I declined," xiv. 99 Scots Gardener, An old, ix. 46 Sea-Fogs, The, ii. 239 "She rested by the Broken Brook," xiv. 222 Silverado Squatters, The, ii. 173; In the Valley: 1, Calistoga, ii. 179; 2, The Petrified Forest, ii. 184; 3, Napa Wine, ii. 188; 4, The Scot Abroad, ii. 194. --With the Children of Israel: 1, To Introduce Mr. Kelmar, ii. 201; 2, First Impressions of Silverado, ii. 205; 3, The Return, ii. 215 "Since I am sworn to live my life," xiv. 263 "Since long ago, a child at home," xiv. 237 "Sing clearlier, Muse, or evermore be still," xiv. 96 "Sing me a song of a lad that is gone," xiv. 256 Sire de Malétroit's Door, The, iv. 250 Sketches: The Satirist, xxii. 25; Nuits Blanches, xxii. 27; The Wreath of Immortelles, xxii. 30; Nurses, xxii. 34; A Character, xxii. 37 "Smooth it slides upon its travel," xiv. 23 "Some day soon this rhyming volume, if you learn with proper speed," xiv. 58 Songs of Travel, xiv. 217 Song, The, of Rahéro: A Legend of Tahiti, xiv. 139; The Slaying of Támatéa, xiv. 139; The Venging of Támatéa, xiv. 148; Rahéro, xiv. 159; Notes, xiv. 211 "Son of my woman's body, you go, to the drum and fife," xiv. 227 South Seas, In the: Part I. The Marquesas.--An Island Landfall, xviii. 5; Making Friends, xviii. 12; The Maroon, xviii. 21; Death, xviii. 28; Depopulation, xviii. 36; Chiefs and Tapus, xviii. 44; Hatiheu, xviii. 53; The Port of Entry, xviii. 61; The House of Temoana, xviii. 69; A Portrait and a Story, xviii. 77; Long Pig--A Cannibal High Place, xviii. 85; The Story of a Plantation, xviii. 95; Characters, xviii. 105; In a Cannibal Valley, xviii. 112; The Two Chiefs of Atuona, xviii, 119. Part II. The Paumotus.--The Dangerous Archipelago--Atolls at a Distance, xviii. 129; Fakarava: An Atoll at Hand, xviii. 137; A House to Let in a Low Island, xviii. 146; Traits and Sects in the Paumotus, xviii. 155; A Paumotuan Funeral, xviii. 165; Graveyard Stories, xviii. 170. Part III. The Eight Islands.--The Kona Coast, xviii. 187; A Ride in the Forest, xviii. 197; The City of Refuge, xviii. 203; Koahumanu, xviii. 209; The Lepers of Kona, xviii. 215. Part IV. The Gilberts.--Butaritari, xviii. 223; The Four Brothers, xviii. 229; Around Our House, xviii. 237; A Tale of a Tapu, xviii. 247, 255; The Five Days' Festival, xviii. 265; Husband and Wife, xviii. 278. Part V. The Gilberts--Apemama.--The King of Apemama: The Royal Trader, xviii. 289; Foundation of Equator Town, xviii. 298; The Palace of Many Women, xviii. 306; Equator Town and the Palace, xviii. 313; King and Commons, xviii. 321; Devil-work, xviii. 320; The King of Apemama, xviii. 342 Squatting, The Act of, ii. 221 Starry Drive, A, ii. 250 Stevenson at Play: Introduction by Lloyd Osbourne, xxii. 259; War Correspondence from Stevenson's Note-book, xxii. 263 Stevenson, Thomas, ix. 75 Story, The, of a Lie, xxi. 3 Student, The Modern, considered generally, xxii. 45 Suicide Club, The, iv. 3; Story of the Young Man with the Cream Tarts, iv. 5; The Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk, iv. 37; The Adventure of the Hansom Cabs, iv. 65 "Summer fading, winter comes," xiv. 33 Talk and Talkers: I., ix. 81; II., ix. 94 Tarn, In the Valley of the, i. 224 Technical Elements, Some, of Style in Literature, xvi. 241 "The bed was made, the room was fit," xiv. 96 "The clinkum-clank o' Sabbath bells," xiv. 111 "The coach is at the door at last," xiv. 26 "Thee, Mackintosh, artificer of light," xiv. 273 "The embers of the day are red," xiv. 257 "The friendly cow, all red and white," xiv. 16 "The ganger walked with willing foot," xiv. 67 "The gardener does not love to talk," xiv. 49 "The infinite shining heavens," xiv. 222 "The jolly English Yellowboy," xiv. 274 "The lamps now glitter down the street," xiv. 37 "The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out," xiv. 14 "The Lord Himsel' in former days," xiv. 123 "The moon has a face like the clock in the hall," xiv. 22 "The morning drum-call on my eager ear," xiv. 233 "The pleasant river gushes," xiv. 272 "The rain is raining all around," xiv. 5 "The red room with the giant bed," xiv. 56 Thermal Influence of Forests, xxii. 225 "The Silver Ship, my King--that was her name," xiv. 238 "The stormy evening closes now in vain," xiv. 230 "The sun is not a-bed when I," xiv. 20 "The tropics vanish, and meseems that I," xiv. 243 "The unfathomable sea, and time, and tears," xiv. 75 "These nuts, that I keep in the back of the nest," xiv. 34 "The world is so full of a number of things," xiv. 16 "The year runs through her phases; rain and sun," xiv. 82 Thoreau, Henry David: His Character and Opinions, iii. 101 Thrawn Janet, v. 305 "Three of us afloat in the meadow by the swing," xiv. 6 "Through all the pleasant meadow side," xiv. 26 Ticonderoga: A Legend of the West Islands, xiv. 187; The Saying of the Name, xiv. 189; The Seeking of the Name, xiv. 194; The Place of the Name, xiv. 196; Notes, xiv. 214 Toils and Pleasures, ii. 264 Toll House, The, ii. 245 "To see the infinite pity of this place," xiv. 240 "To the heart of youth the world is a highway side," xiv. 221 "To you, let snow and roses," xiv. 224 Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, i. 141 Treasure Island-- Part I. The Old Buccaneer, vi. 9; Part II. The Sea-Cook, vi. 49; Part III. My Shore Adventure, vi. 87; Part IV. The Stockade, vi. 109; Part V. My Sea Adventure, vi. 145; Part VI. Captain Silver, vi. 185; My First Book, xvi. 331 Treasure, The, of Franchard, vi. 267 "Trusty, dusky, vivid, true," xiv. 235 Truth of Intercourse, ii. 311 Umbrellas, The Philosophy of, xxii. 58 "Under the wide and starry sky," xiv. 86 Underwoods: I. In English, xiv. 67; II. In Scots, xiv. 105 "Up into the cherry-tree," xiv. 6 Upper Gévaudan, i. 165, 201 Velay, i. 141 Villa Quarters, Edinburgh, i. 311 Villon, François: Student, Poet, and Housebreaker, iii. 142 Virginibus Puerisque, I., ii. 281; II., ii. 292; On Falling in Love, ii. 302; Truth of Intercourse, ii. 311; Crabbed Age and Youth, ii. 321; An Apology for Idlers, ii. 334; Ordered South, ii. 345; Æs Triplex, ii. 358; El Dorado, ii. 368; The English Admirals, ii. 372; Some Portraits by Raeburn, ii. 385; Child's Play, ii. 394; Walking Tours, ii. 406; Pan's Pipes, ii. 415; A Plea for Gas Lamps, ii. 420 Walking Tours, ii. 406 Walt Whitman, iii. 77 War Correspondence from Stevenson's Note-book, xxii. 263 "We built a ship upon the stairs," xiv. 9 Weir of Hermiston, xix. 159; Sir Sidney Colvin's Note, xix. 284; Glossary of Scots Words, xix. 297 "We see you as we see a face," xiv. 85 "We travelled in the print of olden wars," xiv. 96 "We uncommiserate pass into the night," xiv. 255 "What are you able to build with your blocks?" xiv. 35 "When aince Aprile has fairly come," xiv. 109 "When at home alone I sit," xiv. 38 "When children are playing alone on the green," xiv. 31 "When chitterin' cauld the day sail daw," xiv. 275 "Whenever Auntie moves around," xiv. 11 "Whenever the moon and stars are set," xiv. 7 "When I am grown to man's estate," xiv. 9 "When I was sick and lay a-bed," xiv. 11 "When the bright lamp is carried in," xiv. 27 "When the golden day is done," xiv. 43 "When the grass was closely mown," xiv. 47 "Where the bells peal far at sea," xiv. 84 "Who comes to-night? We ope the doors in vain," xiv. 83 Willebrock Canal, On the, i. 11 Will o' the Mill, vi. 235 Winter and New Year, Edinburgh, i. 320 Winter's Walk, A, in Carrick and Galloway, xxii. 132 "With half a heart I wander here," xiv. 94 Wreath, The, of Immortelles, xxii. 30 Wrecker, The: Prologue, xiii. 5; The Yarn, xiii. 19; Epilogue, xiii. 427 Wrong Box, The, vii. 219 "Yet, O stricken heart, remember, O remember," xiv. 93 Yoshida-Torajiro, iii. 129 Young Chevalier, The, xxi. 253 "Youth now flees on feathered foot," xiv. 76 "You, too, my mother, read my rhymes," xiv. 55 THE END. PRINTED BY CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON, E.C.